Lord Cranfield as he wasn't
Sir: Professor Trevor-Roper says that Harold Nicolson's account of his failure to get a peer- age is 'never . . . enlivened by a trace of humour' (6 September). In his next paragraph he quotes him as dreading 'the thought of the cook saying, "His Lordship is weeding in the nuttery." ' This, which seems to me quite funny, is typical of Harold Nicolson's habit of laugh- ing at himself. The professor misses another joke when he takes quite literally Harold Nicol- son's self-mocking resolution to make his diary 'an expression of deep internal thoughts and emotions.'
I do not know if Professor Trevor-Roper ever met Harold Nicolson : during the thirty-seven years that I knew Harold Nicolson I never heard him mention the Professor. Lady Colefax may have been a lion-hunter but she was a dashed good judge of a lion : perhaps that was what soured the uninvited Professor. Certainly the portrait which emerges from his distorting mirror bears even less resemblance to the friend we knew and loved than the photograph of him, taken the year before he died and after he had had several strokes. 1 hope this final piece of bitchiness was the choice of the reviewer and not yours, sir, as editor of a paper to which Harold Nicolson contributed
The photograph was reprinted from the book under review.—Editor, SPEC I A I UR.
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