Michael Vestey
For me it has been a year of diaries and Memoirs, beginning with Another Self by James Lees-Milne (John Murray, £16.99), a reissue of the 1970 autobiography of his early years. At the beginning of the war, the short-sighted Lees-Milne, unsuited to soldiering, sends a company of the Irish Guards marching off the cliffs at Dover during drilling exercises; the men were retrieved clinging to tufts of grass and ledges. He found his metier saving decay- ing country houses for the new National Trust and observing waspishly their eccen- tric inhabitants. Wonderful also is Ancestral Voices and Prophesying War (John Murray, £25), his wartime diaries reprinted in one volume.
I am also enjoying The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt (Macmillan, £25) in which the great and the good are mercilessly mocked. Very Pepysian. Praise too for Frank Muir's sparkling and funny A Kentish Lad, which I read in paperback (Corgi, £7.99). Also Round the Home, The Com- plete and Utter History (Boxtree, £14.99) by another fine radio comedy writer, Barry Took. Fans of J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock ,and Dame Celia Molestrangler will love it.
Previous page
