Diners-out

E.S. Turner

  • Augustus Hare: Victorian Gentleman by Malcolm Barnes
    Allen and Unwin, 240 pp, £20.00, May 1986, ISBN 0 04 920100 X
  • Midway on the Waves by James Lees-Milne
    Faber, 248 pp, £10.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 571 13723 7

After his first novel was published, Somerset Maugham was a frequent guest at Holmhurst, in Sussex, of that indiscreet memoirist, Augustus Hare, then in his sixties. At morning worship, with the servants, Maugham noticed that the wording of the prayers was unfamiliar. ‘I’ve crossed out all the passages in glorification of God,’ explained Hare. ‘God is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face. It is tactless, impertinent and vulgar. I think all that fulsome adulation must be highly offensive to him.’

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