Simply too exhausted

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 16 · 29 August 1991

From Peter Lamarque

Christopher Hitchens in a sour, mean-spirited review (LRB, 25 July) rails against Janet Morgan’s biography of Edwina Mountbatten for being cliché-ridden from start to finish. It turns out his gripe, though, is more against the book’s subject-matter than its style. What he can’t stand are all those ‘powerful’ well-connected types, with ‘wealthy debs’ in tow, frolicking from party to party, whose contribution to public life consists only of ‘gruesome … fiascos’, ‘vile betrayals’, ‘shame-making interludes’, and being ‘scabs’ in the General Strike. His repeated references to the author as ‘Dame Janet’, with the snide tag that she ‘used rather to dominate in that fast set that revolved between Nuffield and Whitehall’, manage to suggest that she too is somehow part of the whole rotten set-up. What a distorted view of things! How dreary and dog-eared the thinking behind it! Dr Morgan, thank heavens, gives us none of this po-faced moralising; she just has a story to tell, which she does with notable wit, humanity and objectivity.

Peter Lamarque
Edinburgh

From Lucretia Stewart

Some years ago I had lunch with the distinguished writer Norman Lewis. As we left the restaurant and I steered the elderly Lewis across the road, I asked him where he was heading. ‘I am going back to my flat,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you had a flat in London. Where is it?’ I said. ‘I live, my dear, in what is grotesquely known as Little Venice,’ he answered. Later that afternoon, I returned home to my flat where Christopher Hitchens was staying for some weeks. He asked how lunch with Norman had gone and I told him all about it. He was very amused. I am glad to see that he still is, for he has adapted the phrase – somewhat inelegantly – to ‘the grotesquely-named Little Venice’ and used it in his review of Janet Morgan’s biography.

Lucretia Stewart
Oxford