Mary Killen
I love reading nostalgically about the days when people had values, and the world of the late Colin Welch, former chief book reviewer for The Spectator and the 'mind' of the old Daily Telegraph is of particular interest to me. Some of the best of his journalism has been collected in The Odd Thing About the Colonel (Telegraph Books, £17.50). The quality of the writing — so seriously considered yet so lightly deliv- ered, densely interesting, yet so moving and funny — stands in stark contrast to the journalism of many of his modern counter- parts wherein quality has often been super- seded by quantity. In a brilliant introduction Peregrine Worsthorne explains how Welch, although 'bohemian to a fault, drawn to wine, women and song,' arrived at his Conservatism. It was because he was so vulnerable that instead of wanting to Epater les bourgeois he wanted nothing more than to defend them . . . his own experiences [in the Normandy cam- paign] of the cruel chaos of war made him even more aware than before of how mistak- en it was to risk cracking the crust of civilisa- tion.
'Is there a sweeter music than the sound of children's laughter?' So, while Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connol- ly were waxing lyrical over the upper class- es, Welch 'waxed not one jot less lyrical over the middle classes'. While his contem- poraries were swooning over Sebastian Flyte he was swooning over Soames Forsyte.
Cyril Connolly by Jeremy Lewis (Cape, £25) had all the things in which I am inter- ested — Eton, Oxford, the literary life, money, greed, romantic love, social climb- ing, jokes and accounts of excessive con- sumption of food and drink. I was constantly amazed at the 'generosity' of the amount of research Lewis had done. He could have got away with much less. Deeply enjoyable.
Many people complain that there are too many Nicolsons in the world of letters. For me there are not enough. My favourite is 80-year-old Nigel who shares many of the qualities of Colin Welch. I stayed up most of one night reading his autobiography Long Life (Weidenfeld, £20). I couldn't stay up all night reading Bridget Jones's Diary (Picador, £5.99) as the laughter would have woken up the whole house. Non-stop pleasure and relief throughout. No twenty-, thirty- or fortysomething woman could fail
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