Philip Ziegler

Kenneth Rose was gossip columnist by appointment to the aristocracy and gentry. He was, of course, a snob — nobody could write a social column in the Sunday Telegraph for more than 50 years without some snobbish instincts — but he was an intelligent one, singularly well-informed, and capable from time to time of administering a sharp bite to the noble hands that fed him his material. It might reasonably be said that his contribution to social history is limited in its parameters, but it is a real contribution for all that. It is also great fun to read. Certain themes recur constantly in the course of his narrative. One of these is Eton.

Churchill must be the most written-about figure in public life since Napoleon Bonaparte (a subject, incidentally, to which Andrew Roberts has already contributed a substantial and prize-winning biography). As the publisher obligingly warns us, there have been over 1,000 previous studies of Churchill’s life, including some dross, but many works of serious importance. To add anything worthwhile to this mountain requires that the author should be determined, courageous and have something new to say. No one has ever doubted Roberts’s determination and courage; the question remains whether he has anything new to say. Rather to my surprise, the answer has to be ‘yes’. Roberts has been assiduous in his research.

Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four upper-class European ladies who abandoned their natural habitat to seek and find romance in the Middle East. If one had to pick only one of Blanch’s books to read there could be no better choice than this; but, as this exotic potpourri reminds one, she was incapable of writing boringly or badly. The most substantial part of Lesley Blanch: On the Wilder Shores of Love (a title which seems designed to deceive putative readers into thinking that they have read it all before) is Blanch’s record of her youth — the opening chapters of a book which she did not live to complete.

This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an excellent biography of the Victorian newspaperman W.T. Stead. How best to follow this? No attractive subject for another full-scale biography suggested itself. Why not therefore fill in time by writing long essays on four worthies from the generation that followed Stead? And so we have: ‘A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics: Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Dean Inge, Lord Reith and Sir Arthur Bryant.’ The only trouble is that the reassessment is not particularly daring and the characters hardly at all eccentric.

In any list of the-best-prime-ministers-we never-had, the name of Roy Jenkins is likely to be prominent. He was intelligent, moderate, courteous, thoughtful: he was exactly the sort of man whom any civil servant would wish to see installed in No.10. That, no doubt, is why he never got there. John Campbell makes no bones about the fact that he is a fan of Jenkins. He was, writes Campbell, ‘the first public figure I was aware of and always the one I most admired’. Campbell is far too sensible a man and good a biographer, however, to allow his book to degenerate into a paean of praise. Jenkins’s frailties are unsparingly exposed, his occasional failures recorded, his more extravagant pretensions ridiculed.

This is an odd book: interesting, informative, intelligent, but still decidedly odd. It is a history of the Victorian era which almost entirely eschews wars and imperial adventures and concentrates instead on the social, political and intellectual climate of the times.  This is still a vast spectrum. Simon Heffer concludes that he must decide which facets deserve attention and picks out those which interest and entertain him most; hence the occasional oddity. Can the building of the Albert Memorial really be worth 30 pages? Or the conflict over the style of architecture to be adopted for the new government buildings in Whitehall be worth 20?

Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, was briefly and, on the whole, ingloriously Prime Minister at the beginning of the nineteenth century and then spent nearly ten years as Home Secretary at a time when Britain seemed as close as it had ever been to violent revolution. In both capacities he displayed an unwavering conservatism which seemed inexcusable to his political opponents and sometimes even caused disquiet among his supporters. He was a relic of the eighteenth century who signally failed to adjust to the realities of the nineteenth: when the Great Reform Bill was passed in 1832 it seemed to him bound to lead within a few years to the collapse of civilised society. 'I hope,' he told Lord Grey, 'God will forgive you on account of this Bill. I don't think I can.

The photograph on the jacket, reproduced above, says it all — or at least all of what most of us think we know about Sir Edward Grey. Patrician, reflective, dignified, he stares into the future with the uncompromising honesty of one who has never even contemplated straying from the paths of rectitude. In fact, he was more interesting than that, but Michael Waterhouse’s thoughtful biography reveals that the image and the reality were not so very different. Grey’s private life was a little more chequered than might have been expected.  Though properly cautious about what can be no more than surmise, Waterhouse credits Grey with several extramarital affairs and at least two probable bastard children.

Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is different. At one point he refers to himself as ‘a struggling actor approaching middle age’. (His wife somewhat brutally agreed: ‘Let’s be honest, you’ve had your chance as an actor, and at 40 you still haven’t made it.

This book is not a history, explains Ruth Winstone, who has edited this collection of excerpts from diaries published between 1921 and 2011. It is, she says, ‘an impressionist view of politically changing times’. It is, indeed, a patchwork quilt of a book, no two pieces precisely meshing with each other yet providing in total a remarkably clear and coherent portrait of 90 stressful years. It is ‘a political diary’, but Winstone admits that the definition of ‘political’ became more and more elastic as the book took shape. It is all the better for it.

‘Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love.’ The ballad has many variant versions but the denouement is always the same; he was her man and he did her wrong. Rooty-toot-toot three times she shoot, and Johnny ended up in a coffin. Thatcher and Reagan were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love. But Reagan did her wrong: over Grenada, over nuclear disarmament, as near as nothing over the Falklands. The relationship was to end in ostentatious affection, but if Mrs Thatcher had had a gun in that celebrated handbag, it might have been a case of rooty-toot-toot all over again.

To be the daughter of an enormously powerful man must always be an enthralling if sometimes daunting experience. To be close to that father when, almost single-handed, he is shaping the destinies of the nation, if not the world, is to be uniquely privileged. Mary Soames took no part in the decision-making that was happening above her head, but she was singularly well placed to sense what was going on and to understand the man who was riding the storm with such courage and aplomb. She was much younger than her siblings, her father was absorbed in his Herculean task, her mother knew that her first responsibility must be to her husband.  Mary Soames was therefore a solitary child, but she never felt neglected and was incapable of self-pity.