Unfaltering to the end

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• The Milk of Paradise: Diaries 1993-1997

  James Lees-Milne, edited by Michael Bloch

  John Murray, pp. 319

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

As this volume makes encouragingly clear, in advanced old age the death of acquaintances no longer has the same power to unsettle. The entry for 19 December 1993, for example, reads: ‘At tea, Madeau Stewart rang to say that Alice Fairfax-Lucy died this morning .… [She] did not want me get a shock when I saw it in the paper. But it would not have been much of a shock, for I expect all my contemporaries to die.’ Indeed, it is the news of a death that frequently inspires the liveliest recollection: for instance, of the publisher Jock Murray as a jolly schoolboy at Eton; of Peter Quennell, ‘the arch-stylist of English prose … with his coat-hanger shoulders, his blue Homburg and long overcoat, which caused him to resemble … a cross between a rake and a Calvinist minister’; and of the aesthete Harold Acton:

So Harold Acton has now gone. What do I feel? Nothing much … He is another example of a man remarkable not for what he has left behind but what he made himself into … Once during the war we dined together … He persuaded me to stay and go to bed with him. I agreed, but it meant nothing to me. Next morning he rebuked me for icy-cold unresponsiveness, and I don’t think he ever quite forgave me.

This resilience, together with a sharp eye, perfect pitch, and a supremely elegant style, result in some wonderfully quirky character sketches. Among the most rewarding are those of the Mephistophelian Lord Lambton, of the last of the Bloomsberries, Frances Partridge — ‘We were amused to read how much she disliked staying with us’ — and of the decent, well-meaning Prince of Wales, wrinkling his forehead ‘and writhing with intellectual deficiency’, while his unhappy wife has ‘venom visible in every gesture and look’. We meet the novelist, Anthony Powell, ‘very self- centred, like most literary stars … I can see Tony now at the Chantry, running out of the library to greet us in his blue-and- white striped apron, a touch of flour on his black eyebrows, announcing that his curry dish would be ready in five minutes.’ And we witness a curious display of bad manners on the part of ex-prime minister Edward Heath. In December 1995 Lees-Milne is taken by the painter, Derek Hill, to Heath’s house in Salisbury. ‘At 6.15 Heath appears at door wearing blue-and-white striped pullover,’ begins the account. ‘Enormous behind bulging over baggy trousers … Is utterly without charm or grace. Shakes hands perfunctorily. No word of greeting.’ Further detailed note is made of some peculiarly graceless behaviour before the thoughtful summing up: ‘The one thing in his favour is that he is scrupulously clean.’

Fascinated by others’ foibles and failings, Lees-Milne is also extremely candid about his own. He constantly acknowledges his impatience and intolerance, his loathing of the modern world, frankly asserting his admiration for the old-established upper classes:

I have come to the conclusion that the aristocracy have always been shits, and that in my youth I was too beguiled by them. Nevertheless, I still maintain that the decent and educated ones attain a standard of well-being and good-doing which has never been transcended by any other class in the world.

In the train, I thought how curious it was that I, as an old eunuch, am now totally heterosexual … I suppose that, by a tilt of the scales … I would have been wholly ‘normal’ from adolescence onwards. Perhaps it is just as well that this was not the case, as I would probably have been a nasty, intolerant, anti-queer young fogey.

James Lees-Milne is without question one of the finest diarists of the 20th century, and Michael Bloch has been an exemplary editor of the last three volumes. In the interesting position of close personal friend as well as editor, Bloch is also writing Lees-Milne’s biography, a work which promises to be of consuming interest to all the great man’s admirers.