A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
LAST WEEK the New Statesman published a short letter in which Miss Rose Macaulay. Sir Harold Nicolson, Mr. Isaiah Berlin and Mr. Raymond Mortimer protested, in what struck me as very temperate terms; against the inaccuracies and innuendo contained in a 'profile' of Lady Violet Bonham- Carter which that periodical had recently published. I find the technique of sly denigration employed by the New States- man in its series of potted biographies curiously unattractive. Open criticism of their subjects is carefully avoided by the anonymous writers: they smarm rather than smear, giving credit fulsomely with one hand and quietly taking it away with the other. If they believe the people they write about to be fools or knaves or snobs or cowards, a less feminine method of expressing their conviction would be preferable to this faux intime approach. A good example of the New Statesman's technique in outlining the salient facts of a career occurred in last week's sketch of Sir Walter Monekton. 'It' (his capacity- for making useful friends) 'began at.Balliol, where his charm led him into the intimate circle of the Prinde of Wales and brought him in due course, after the interlude of the First World War and a spccessful beginning at the Bar, the appoint- ment of Attorney-General to the Prince in 1932."Interlude' is a word with several shades of meaning, among *them (according to the dictionary) 'amusing incident'; it would never have occurred to me to use it to describe overseas service in the infantry from 1914 to 1918, in the course of which Monckton was awarded the Military Cross.
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