Alastair Forbes
The Independent's marvellous Miles King- ton (Welcome to Kington, Penguin, £7) and the cartoonist pair Alex (Alex III, Penguin, £4.99), have for my money been by far the best chronicles of the recent mirage- marked Thatcher years. I've written at length before in these pages about my devotion to Marcel Pagnol's childhood memories, which I reread often with smiles and tears of recognition (La Gloire de Mon Pere, Nelson, £4.95, and Le Château de Ma Mere, Nelson, £5.10), and this year I've seen with equal delight the splendid films Yves Robert has made of them, which will soon cross the Channel, I trust undubbed and only subtitled. Hardbacks reach me seldom and usually only as gifts. Imagine my pleasure on receiving from Deirdre Levi, gi-devant Connolly, Shade Those Laurels (Bellew Publishing, £12.95), already quite beauti- fully reviewed here by David Pryce-Jones, Cyril's unfinished Faberge-exquisite liter- ary parlour-charade, inherited along with his widow and now brilliantly completed, like Turandot by Alfano, by Peter Levi. I loved his rather Huxleyan house-party's Sunday morning pastime of spotting and scoring points for 'each nonsensical or ridiculous statement in the papers'. Today of course anybody lucky enough to get hold of the vestigial feuilleton insert edited by Peregrine Worsthorne would win that game hands down.
Next, by a curious coincidence arrived from Barbara Skelton, also ci-devant Con- nolly, Alan Judd's superb biography of Ford Madox Ford (Collins, £15) which I read with enormous pleasure twice, after- wards going back to the Penguin edition of The Good Soldier, who so greatly lacks his author's own charm.
Evangeline Bruce lent me A Secohd Self: The Letters of Harriet Granville 1810-1845, faultlessly edited by her remarkable sister Virginia Surtees (Michael Russell, £14.95), and these I have reread with delight and shall do so again. The other aristo letters that have impressed and moved me in quite another way have been those of the Anglo- Prussian Count Helmuth James von Molt- ke, the sans peur et sans reproche patrician who was executed along with so many other aristos after the failure of the plot to kill Hitler in 1944 (Letters to Freya, Collins Harvill, £16). How that Hitler War could have been avoided and its instigator long before disposed of is admirably described by Richard Lamb in The Drift to War 1922-1939 (W. H. Allen, £14.95) which ought to be in every school library as well as in every leader-writer's.
After Moltke's letters one would dismiss Antony Lambton's Pig and Other Stories (Constable, £11.95) as simply beneath notice, let alone criticism, were it not for his statement that its principal villainness, the English-born German Princess 'Pig' was an 'entirely imaginary Englishwoman'. Lambton's long-standing vendetta against the admirable musical Maecenas Her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine (as Buckingham Palace gives her correct style and title), `Peg' to her many friends and relations, is too well known for such a disclaimer to carry the slightest weight. It is fortunate that there are in the world of books plenty of people like Moltke and Fey von Hassel (A Mother's War, John Murray, £16.95) to keep the aristo flag rather more proudly flying.
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