Paul Johnson

James Stourton is not only a successful auctioneer and chairman of Sotheby’s but also an accomplished writer, the author of the delightful Art Collectors of Our Time (2007). He has now produced a book about how the English, and subsequently the British, set about acquiring and presenting works of art. He has been helped by Charles Sebag-Montefiore, another successful businessman, who has assembled a magnificent art library on which the research for this volume has been based. It is a hefty tome which has the merit of showing, in most cases, what these private collections looked like in their original shape before their dispersal among public national or American collections. This is as it should be, for architecture is the basis of all English collecting.

This life of the 11th Lord Lovat, executed on Tower Hill in 1747, in the aftermath of the ‘Forty-Five’ Rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, is primarily a work of pietas. Its author is the daughter-in-law of the last Lord Lovat, who landed with the first fighting troops of the D-Day invasion of Europe, striding ahead of them accompanied only by his piper. But Sarah Fraser deserves to be acclaimed as a notable biographer, too, for she tells a complex and sometimes bewildering story which she has amassed from a vast quantity of often intractable material. This is a brave and meaty book. The years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the accession of George III in 1760 constituted the great age of double-dealing in British politics.

Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is a complex story and he tells it, on the whole, very well. Though the first world war took the lives of more uniformed young men, in the useless slaughter of the Flanders trenches, many more people, chiefly civilians, died in 1939-45. Soviet casualties were the greatest: 23 million killed, of whom two million came from Belarus and seven million from Ukraine. Next came the Poles, with losses of 6,028,000, the largest percentage of the population in any country. The Germans also lost six million, and the Yugoslavs over a million.

Sarah Raven comes of a botanising family. Her father John, a Cambridge classics don, travelled all over the British Isles studying wildflowers. Like his own father, Charles Raven, he was a gifted watercolourist, and between them they drew almost every plant in the British flora. Sarah still possesses 18 volumes of their watercolours. Nevertheless, to illustrate her huge, learned and comprehensive book of 500 wildflowers, she chose a photographer, Jonathan Buckley. This was partly because she had written with him before on other books, but mainly because they could travel and work together. They visited over 100 sites to track down the specimens, often 20 or 30 in one favoured place, where he would ‘lie on his stomach for hours at a stretch photographing them’.

The acute emotional pain caused by his first wife’s infidelity was of priceless service to Evelyn Waugh as a novelist, says Paul Johnson Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, in 1966, and his reputation has risen steadily ever since. His status as the finest English prose-writer of the 20th century is now being marked by an annotated complete edition of his works, sumptuously published by the Oxford University Press. As a prolegomenon, Penguin is issuing another complete edition in hardback, the first eight volumes of which are now available, priced £20 each. They include his life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four novels, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust.

The trouble about writing a history of the popes is that there are so many of them. Usually elderly when elected, most of them have only lasted a few years. The longest reign was that of the mid-19th-century pope, Pius IX, Pio Nono, who clung on for 31 years. In our own times, Pius XII did 19 years, Paul VI 15 and John Paul II 18. But all were unusual. Closer to the average was poor John Paul I, who lasted 34 days. As a result there have been 264 popes. About some we know nothing and one or two may have been fictitious. ‘Pope Joan’ certainly was. So taking on the task of a comprehensive survey requires courage. Lord Norwich is a battle-hardened veteran of many popular histories. The Hon.

Lord Palmerston poses severe quantitative problems to biographers. His public life covered a huge span. Born in 1784, the year Dr Johnson died, he was nine years younger than Jane Austen and four years Byron’s senior. He died in 1865, the year Kipling, Yeats and Northcliffe were born. To put it another way, when he was a baby Reynolds was painting Mrs Siddons; when he died Manet was showing his ‘Olympia’, and Tolstoy had just published War and Peace. His long life was crowded with incessant political activity. He was on the Board of Admiralty in 1807, aged 23, even before he had a seat in parliament.

Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd George’s early life up to his emergence as a major figure in parliament. Thereafter, however, he tends to lose his way in the trackless jungle of endless political crises during Lloyd George’s 16 years in office, festooned as they are with the undergrowth of his financial fecundity and the florid canopy of his love affairs.

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it. Since then, landscape history has become a major subject. So has media and political interest in what we are doing to it. In addition, another subject has come up in the shape of ‘man-made climate change’.