Alastair Forbes
Let me very seriously urge everyone to buy or borrow a book I hope soon to review at the length it deserves, The Berlin Diaries (1940-1945) of Marie Missie' Vassiltchi- kov. This is an utterly absorbing account of a beautiful and irresistibly adorable young Russian aristo, brought up to speak and think in both English and French and forced to earn her living in the wartime Berlin where she found herself stranded. Her linguistic abilities secured her a job in the foreign ministry where she was soon heart, body and soul bravely involved in the plotting against Hitler that ended so catastrophically in July 1944. Her life then became in even greater hourly danger than it had been day after day, night after night under the phosphorous-fiery Allied carpet- bombing, an ordeal a thousandfold worse than any that ever came Britain's way. Prince Charles may well ask 'What's wrong with an elite?' if an elite, yes even one of Almanach de Gotha-listed swells, can pro- duce girls like the late Princess Missie Vassiltchikov. Perhaps Truslove and Han- son at one end of Sloane Street and the General Trading Company at the other could lay in a stock of this book and mark their window displays of it 'Must Reading' for the rangers passing to and from Coutts's convenient little branch on the halfway corner. Midway on the Waves was a welcome offering from that superbly sui generis diarist James Lees-Milne. Unexplained Laughter was a jolly reminder that Alice Thomas Ellis remains far and away our most enjoyably readable nouvelliste. After the stupefyingly boring and fashionably fecklessly edited letters Tiny Trelford has been running in ditto Row- land's Observer, it was a relief to turn back to Combe Florey whose climate was once so conducive to good letter-writing. I refer, of course, to those from the late Sydney Smith (OUP, £2.50), admirably edited by Nowell C. Smith with an unexceptionable foreword by Auberon Waugh. The OUP has also enabled me, by reissuing in another paperback The Man Who Was Greenmantle, to enjoy a second time the excellent biography of the latter's maternal grandfather (whose widow Mary and son Auberon were so long my dear friends) by Margaret FitzHerbert, an author I was surprised to see that the admittedly only semi-literate trade weekly, the Bookseller, lately confessed to having never heard of.
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