E.S. Turner

Who prizes objectivity? Not Piers Brendon, who has had enough of long ‘photographic’ biographies and is all for ‘the irradiation of an epoch by means of sharp biographical vignettes’ in the Lytton Strachey tradition. ‘The camera’s lens reflects verisimilitude,’ he writes, ‘whereas the prism of the artist’s imagination refracts truth.’

What does it cost these days to buy a knighthood or a life peerage? Henry Root, who claims to have made a fortune out of wet fish, applied to the Conservative Board of Finance to find out. ‘I read recently,’ he wrote, ‘that a “drop” of as little as £25,000 to one of our leading politicians was enough to obtain a seat in the Lords for the donor. Has inflation bumped up the price? Let me know. I’m waiting with my cheque-book ready.’ In reply, he received a cordial and unoffended letter from a major-general, addressing him as ‘Dear Mr Root’, explaining, ‘I think I must make it absolutely clear that there is no question of buying Honours from the Conservative Party,’ and saying he was ‘most grateful’ for the support extended to the Party by Root.

We are now well into the Great Vegetable Revolution. ‘For the majority of the population,’ writes Jane Grigson, ‘vegetables as a delight, to be eaten on their own, belong to this century, even to the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her.

‘It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill in My Early Life. In America this need was famously recognised by the publishers of the Elbert Hubbard Scrap Book, containing the 2,500 greatest thoughts. Hubbard went down in the Lusitania, but his book was advertised with great vigour for the benefit of tongue-tied partygoers who found their fellow guests talking about Nietzsche. ‘Elbert Hubbard did all your reading for you,’ the publishers said. ‘His book will make you so well informed – you’ll never need to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable in company again.’ Of late, the uneducated, and even the educated, have been well served, for the familiar thick tomes of Hoyt, Benham, Bartlett, Stevenson, the Oxford (recently revised) and the Penguin have been joined by works like the Wintle/Kenin Dictionary of Biographical Quotations and numerous slimmer, more specialised, often racy volumes; and now, in paperback, comes a curiously titled blockbuster from Macmillan.

As the Duke of Wellington was stung to complain, the British officers in the Peninsular War were ‘the most indefatigable writers of letters that exist in the world’. Even at this late hour their correspondence is still being discovered and published. In 1979 appeared the spirited letters of George Hennell, a young volunteer who presented himself to General Picton at the siege of Badajoz and was commissioned within six weeks into the 43rd Light Infantry. Now we have the high-minded and contentious letters of an ensign in the Guards, John Aitchison, who soldiered on after the war to become General Sir John Aitchison GCB, with a baton in his reach when he died at 87.