E.S. Turner

It calls for a certain robustness of spirit to embark on an escapade which, with ill luck, could create six widows and 27 orphans. Such robustness was possessed by Mademoiselle Henriette d’Angeville, the first lady (repeat, lady) to climb Mont Blanc. She claims to have weighed the human odds beforehand, but it is hard to picture her with her six guides, on that bright September morning in 1838, ticking off the potential casualties on her fingers and then, in the face of tout Chamonix, boldly crying: ‘Excelsior!’

The chronicler of that glorious cad Flashman, last encountered as General Sir Harry Flashman VC, was himself a man at arms. As a one-striper in General Slim’s 14th Army George MacDonald Fraser took part in ‘the last great battle in the last great war’, a showdown which was also ‘the final echo of Kipling’s world’. More specifically, it was the struggle for Meiktila and Pyawbwe on the Rangoon road which settled Japan’s hash in Burma. The author, too young to vote in the 1945 Election, was not too young to lead older men into action (‘the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks’). He was expected to kill Japanese in hand-to-hand fighting, whereas this reviewer, by the luck of the draw, was expected only to kill Germans at five or six miles range in the stratosphere. Fraser’s mates were called on to ponder such ethical problems as: does one instantly shoot Japanese found asleep in a hut, or does one wake them up first? For the record, they took the view that it did not greatly matter, but it wasn’t really right to shoot sleeping men. Along the way they learned that the problem with bayoneting an enemy was that the bayonet often bent and even when it didn’t it could be hard to pull out (a batman explained to his officer that ‘the way to free a bayonet is to fire a shot into the body. The theory is that it lets in air, or releases pressure on the blade, or something’).

David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level. ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts.’

There are rich pickings still to be had in the jungle of literature, where dead authors half-buried in brambles continue to yield abundant fruit. Hardly had the sequel to Gone with the Wind been published than the news came that Galsworthy’s Forsyte family was being given an extended life-span which would take the characters into the television age, for which they were clearly designed Already any number of hands, licensed and otherwise, have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair MacLean (‘Ach, any idiot can write a book’) did not bequeath a hero who became a household name, but he left a clutch of story lines which, for one reason or another, he did not wish to flesh out himself. Four of his plots have now been worked up by the near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily fined at the insistence of Warwickshire trading standards officers. The complaint was that readers of books based on MacLean outlines were being misled by the layout of the jackets into believing that these were the works of the master himself, since his name appeared in the traditional bold condensed type above the title, with that of the real writer in less assertive type below. Now, in the latest of the MacNeill series, Time of the Assassins, the two writers have their names in type of equal height, but MacLean still enjoys star billing above the title and MacNeill’s name is preceded by ‘Written by’. No doubt the implications of this case will be borne in mind by anyone who aspires to supply yet another ending for Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, was born ‘in a somewhat furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris. The party included the Duke’s mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and his four young children, two of them by Lady Elizabeth, whose company Georgiana ‘for reasons best known to herself … loved more than that of any living soul’. Georgiana’s mother, Countess Spencer, was also in the group, for the Devonshire Set was nothing if not close-knit. On the eve of the accouchement Lady Elizabeth very prudently displayed her slim form at the opera, so heading off any rumour of a changeling. In the birth chamber several witnesses testified that the child was Georgiana’s (the event has echoes of the ‘warming-pan affair’ which embarrassed James II’s Queen). Having given her husband a long-wanted male heir, the Duchess naturally expected him to pay off her prodigious gambling debts. This he failed to do. Soon she became pregnant again, this time by a future prime minister, Earl Grey, who in years to come would be happy to present the white wand of a Lord Chamberlain to the sixth Duke.