What amazed me about the school week- end was how
decorum is no longer. Teach- ers allow themselves to be interrupted, students look like clochards — especially when out of class, and everybody, but everybody, wears baseball caps backwards and trainers. The accents are not to be believed. The American language hasn't changed that much since the 40 years I was in school, yet what these modernists are doing with it I wouldn't do to Fidel Castro. Oh well, so J.T. will not sound like this ludicrous Norman St John of Fawlty Tow- ers, born Panayotis incidentally, but I guess the Taki family can live with it. We've gone through worse. We once had an old Gor- donstoun boy stay the summer with us: Anthony Haden-Guest.
AUTUMN '94
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Low life
Left on the shelf
Jeffrey Bernard
The historian, Christopher Hibbert, has very kindly sent me a copy of his latest book, a biography called Nelson: A Personal History and it now takes pride of place in my collection of books about that man who was brave, vain, humane, and petulant with a ruthless streak that lay beneath his humanity.
He didn't just want to beat the French, he wanted to blow them out of the water. Reading yet again about Lady Hamilton's life after Trafalgar makes me feel less devoted to England even as they go out to take the field against Australia this coming month. But what worries me about Hib- bert's book is that when I told John Cold- stream of the Telegraph that I might pick it as my Book of the Year he said, 'You do realise, I suppose, that Christopher Hibbert is Barbara Cartland's favourite historian?' I was not only a little astounded at this but also I suddenly loathed the idea of being in company with Barbara Cartland in any way at all. And I would challenge Jaspistos to ask well-known people like Barbara Gart- land their interpretation of why Nelson wrote to Emma Hamilton from the West Indies asking her not to wash until he got home. But if the choice is between Nelson and the winner of the Booker Prize then, for me, Nelson wins every time. I don t believe that I have ever read a Booker Prize winner although I do possess a very good Sunday Express Book of the Year' Restoration by Rose Tremain. At the moment, I am unloading as many books as I can on to Irma Kurtz who takes them off my hands and to a charity. The woman there receives them with slight astonishment at the mixture. If it is true that you can tell a lot about a man by the enemies he has, then it would be quite interesting to know what a psychologist would make of the books on my shelves: They denote a somewhat paranoid an obsessive person to me. Experts tell me that my obsession with biographies of great men is paranoid on nlY part and I have never questioned it but, looking up from where I am sitting, I must say that seeing The Bible squeezed betweefl, Adrian Mole and The Unquiet Grave . is slightly bizarre. The presence of The Bible on my bookshelves is a reminder of awful schooldays and, oddly enough, of the strange fact that I was usually top of inY various forms in what we called Scripture.
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