A Badly Foxed Memoir

I have just read James Lees-Milne's memoir, 'Another Self'. It's a well written piece about life before and, in part, during the second world war but I found myself totally at odds with Mr Lees-Milne - either with his characterization of himself in the book, or worse with an accurate picture of himself that the writing reveals.

Lees-Milne had all the advantages and, despite himself, did all the right things - Eton, Oxford, Brigade of Guards - but flopped about enjoying nothing and contributing little. True, he was a virtual founder of the National Trust - that institution where all buildings under its care are reduced to looking and feeling exactly the same no matter from which period of history they derive - and has a few sad things to say about how much of Georgian England was torn up after the war.

But for the rest, I found him an egregious toss-pot, a dropper of names few have heard of now (and I suspect, few had heard of then), a fantasist whose strongest relationship, by his own description, was unrequited telephone sex with a woman who he 'met' via a crossed-line and whose name he never knew (inevitably, he calls her 'Egeria' after an elusive nymph).

Slightly Foxed is a publisher of a quarterly magazine and occasional memoirs many of which (there are currently eight) have proved to be revelatory and excellent. As I said, this book is no exception but I would not have wanted to know the author - one who would have fought for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War to halt the ravages visited on the Roman Catholic church by the republicans.

In the introduction, Lees-Milne is described as a "tall, slightly etiolated young man, diffidently patrician and dandyish". At another point, tocsins sound when he is congratulated on writing this "delicious memoir". I think 'Curate's Egg' rather than 'delicious'.

Consider this (failed) attempt at a Proustian description following a huge raid on Piccadilly in, I think, 1941. Lees-Milne's opening descriptions of the damage wrought on the area are, at the same time, fascinating and horrifying:

"We could not walk up Piccadilly because a stick of bombs having fallen from the Fifty Shilling Tailors to St James's Church had penetrated a gas main. Tongues of flame were belching from craters in the road. We could not walk down Jermyn Street which was blocked by rubble from collapsed houses. Here I noticed the stripped, torn trunk of a man on the pavement. Further on I picked up what looked like the mottled, spread leaf of a plane tree. It was a detached hand with a signet ring on the little finger."

But then we get:

"Tha pale windows of Arthur's Club in St James's Street were aglow with the reflection of yet another fire. For a moment I thought this fine classical building was blazing. Then I realized that the light was not Pepys's 'horrid malicious bloody' sort, but borrowed and deceptive, the sort of light that greets one from the flickering log fire of a hall seen through the crinkled panes of a country house, as one returns before curtains are drawn after a long autumn walk, having crossed the park, about to tread the mossy lawn, late for tea in the Midlands."

Puleeease.

May I commend you, instead, to the works of Hector Bolitho.