Patricia Beer

I am the man in the pink hat Who catches everybody’s eye And is not really there.

In the preparatory version My hat was dowdy, I was older. Now I am ‘Who is that good-looking man?’ My brim is wide and bumptious.

I am immune, though hemmed in By people working miracles, Waving their arms about In paeans of caring.

I am better dressed Than goody-two-sleeves, Francis Xavier. My...

‘It is obviously the same person.’ The words of Lady Bracknell, one of the wisest characters in English literature, may eventually be echoed by readers when and if they have worked their way through the four, totally diverse, biographies of Graham Greene which originally appeared in the summer and autumn of last year. The biographers are Norman Sherry, Anthony Mockler, Leopoldo Duran and Michael Shelden. The actual information they provide must by now be common knowledge among those who are at all interested in Greene, including those who have simply read the many highly communicative reviews, and in the basic respect of the facts imparted there are relatively few discrepancies.

In memory of Cecil Torr

It is hard to believe that he lived till the rise of the Nazis And the General Strike and nine or ten Armistice Days And that I was a child putting flowers on my grandmother’s grave Three churchyards away on the day that he died.

His forebears had gossiped their hold on the centuries. One of them spotted Napoleon on the Bellerophon, Moored in Torbay, with its...

I was less than fifty pages into this first volume of John Betjeman’s Letters when I felt I must be in for an attack of tinnitus. I kept hearing shrieks of laughter. This condition was caused not by the poet himself but by the editor or Candida Lycett Green, his daughter, who seems to value nothing so much about her father as his ability to make people split their sides. She establishes that this was the way he first got on in the world. In his student days, invited to the august homes of his friends, he confronted hosts who considered him to be ‘not quite a gentleman’; one of them was Lord Rosslyn, but his guest’s ability to make Lady Rosslyn laugh saved the day, and the Rosslyns’ young daughter was won over by the same method. And on and on it goes. Anthony Powell remembers that when they were both staying with the Longfords ‘John made everybody laugh.’ ‘Betch made me laugh,’ attests Pamela Mitford. ‘Throughout our lives, whenever we met, we always burst out laughing,’ corroborates John Summerson.

Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats has set out from its publishers with claims beyond even what one expects of conventional hype. There is much to admire in the book, particularly the industry that must have gone into its compilation: the examination of huge family archives which contain, apart from what one might expect in the way of letters and journals, everything from death certificates to poems. There is much to enjoy too, as there would be in any lively historical novel, past or present. But the eulogy pronounced by the great Simon Schama, author of Citizens, calls for comment: ‘A dazzling achievement,’ he writes, ‘an extraordinary story told by a phenomenally gifted writer’. This strikes me as over-ecstatic.