Biographers From England

"Fear, guilt, despair, and moon-struck frenzy rush On voluntary death: the wise and brave, When the fierce storms of fortune round 'em roar, Combat the billows with redoubled force: Then, if they perish ere the port is gained, They sink with decent pride; and from the deep Honour retrieves them, bright as rising stars."

"No man living better deserves the character of an honest and ingenious man; no one I would sooner depend upon for all the parts of a good writer and good friend—free from the vanities and weaknesses of both; whose honour and trust, I dare say, are as sacred as his writings are blameless in morality, and whose life and conduct are as correct as they."

"Wedded love is founded on esteem."

"Beware of flattery! 'tis a flowery weed, Which oft offends the very idol-vice, Whose shrine it would perfume."

"A while she stood Transformed by grief to marble, and appeared Her own pale monument; but when she breathed The secret anguish of her wounded soul, So moving were the plaints! they would have soothed The stooping falcon to suspend his flight, And spare his morning prey."

"The defects of German philosophy are those of professionalism: a closed atmosphere, books instead of life, inability to communicate discoveries to the world at large, contempt for good style, inbreeding, lack of general culture, gruesome earnestness. The defects of the cultured philosophe are those of amateurism: too many interests, superficiality, the cultivation of good style as an end in itself, the sacrifice of truth to wit, lack of intellectual honesty, philosophizing but no philosophy, inconsistency. Nietzsche achieves a balance between these two types of mind and two styles of expression: he is profound but not obscure; he aims at good style but reconciles it with good thinking; he is serious but not earnest; he is a sensitive critic of the arts and of culture but not an aesthete; he is an aphorist and epigrammist, but his aphorisms and epigrams derive from a consistent philosophy; he is the wittiest of philosophers, but he rarely succumbs to the temptation to sacrifice truth to a witty phrase; he has many interests but never loses sight of his main interests. He achieves, especially in his later works, a conciseness and limpidity notoriously rare in German writing: no modern thinker of a like profundity has had at his command so flexible an instrument of expression."

"The more closely one studies Nietzsche's work, the less inclined one is to look outside it for an elucidation of its meaning or an explanation of its origin."

"Nietzsche's views have always seemed so strikingly different from the background of opinion against which he grew up that they have often been thought to owe their origin to a violent reaction against his upbringing. His entire philosophy even has been seen as no more than a calculated antithesis to the tradition in which he was raised."

"Stoppard's Night and Day was dedicated to his friend Paul Johnson, the historian and polemicist. Of the many funerals I have attended in 2023, Paul's was the one I'd least expected to be at. For 25 years, from the late 1970s on, I mocked him in print whenever he wrote anything that seemed to merit it—which, given his prolific and often intemperate output, was very often. He in turn accused me of "playing Job Trotter to [Christopher] Hitchens's Alfred Jingle Esq", a taunt I still cherish. When he threatened to sue unless I stopped goading him, this merely encouraged me to give him another prod. About 20 years ago, however, the fun went out of this sport—perhaps because Paul was well into his seventies, or perhaps because I'd run out of epithets to hurl. Thanks to an intercession by his saintly wife, Marigold, he turned up at a book launch I was hosting, shook me firmly by the hand and agreed an immediate ceasefire. A few years later, he descended into the abyss of Alzheimer's. "The Gospel today had Jesus enjoining us to make peace with our enemies," one of Paul’s children later wrote to me, "and I am sure that you did the right thing by putting an end to your feud with my father while you could.""

"Well then, who had he had time for, during his 24 years in the Party, if he didn't like collectivists and didn't like moderates? There was a pause. "Well, Benn. I have a high opinion of Wedgwood Benn. He is committed to a form of collectivism, but at least he is honest and original. I'd like to see him leading the Labour Party." You could have knocked me down with a feather. But, I said, would not Benn's leadership of the Labour Party make it still more likely that the country would go collectivist, with the inevitable erosion of our liberties as outlined by Johnson in his "Farewell"? Not necessarily, Johnson replied, because Benn was a genuine democrat, and might, when it came to the crunch between collectivism and liberty, choose liberty. But it would be too late by then! Well, said Johnson, it might be. But at least Benn leading Labour and Thatcher leading the Tories would present the country with "a proper chloice" between collectivism and individualism. This struck me as dotty."

"In a novel called Left of Centre which is now, to the relief of its publisher and author alike, safely out of print, Paul Johnson wrote what is generally agreed to be the most embarrassing spanking scene ever penned. The eclipse of this otherwise unreadable novel did nothing to dim the memory of the cringemaking episode, which was continually called to mind by Johnson's public and social behaviour. This often involved drunken and boorish conduct towards women, including his wife. On a famous occasion in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street in 1973, he struck her across the face for disagreeing with him in public and, when rebuked for this by a colleague of mine, threatened to put him through a plate-glass window. At a lunch given for the Israeli ambassador to Britain in the boardroom of the old New Statesman, I watched Johnson bully and barrack Corinna Adam, then the foreign editor, as she attempted to engage Gideon Raphael in conversation. "Don't listen to her, she's a Communist", he kept bellowing, his face twisted and puce with drink. "Fascist bitch!", he finally managed, before retiring to a sofa on the other side of the room and farting his way through a fitful doze for the rest of the meal. ... Long before he made his much-advertised stagger from left to right, Johnson had come to display all the lineaments of the snob, the racist and the bigot."

"This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched."

"With Lenin he shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer crankiness he had much more in common with Hitler (…) One of his favourite books was Constipation and Our Civilization, which he constantly reread. (…) His eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India’s problems. (…) His food policy would have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi’s own ashram (…) had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. And Gandhi was expensive in human life as well as money. The events of 1920–21 indicated that though he could bring a mass-movement into existence, he could not control it. Yet he continued to play the sorcerer's apprentice, while the casualty bill mounted into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and the risks of a gigantic sectarian and racial explosion accumulated. This blindness to the law of probability in a bitterly divided subcontinent made nonsense of Gandhi’s professions that he would not take life in any circumstances."

"I must confess I have not as yet found a permanent replacement for Mr Johnson. His catty jokes about politicians take some matching. But I had had enough of spanking for Britain."

"It was part of Rousseau's vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. 'I feel too superior to hate.' 'I love myself too much to hate anybody.' 'Never have I known the hateful passions, never did jealousy, wickedness, vengeance enter my heart … anger occasionally but I am never crafty and never bear a grudge.' In fact he frequently bore grudges and was crafty in pursuing them."

"The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very, long time. Indeed 1 cannot recall anything like it ... As a rule, in a civilised country like Britain, those who hate the Israelis, or the Jews in general, are careful to mask their views behind a screen of anti-Zionism, thus in theory giving their collective condemnation a political rather than a racial rationale. Dahl is a different case. He is too reckless, or too angry, or too confident in getting away with it, to take such precautions."

"This kind of racial abuse is, thank God, rare in British journalism nowadays. The present case is serious, however, because Dahl is a well-known and successful author who, among other things, writes books for children and whose work is frequently used on TV. I ant not suggesting he be hauled before the Race Relations Board, a body which, I suspect, provokes rather than reduces racial antagonism, or indeed the Press Council, a tribunal which is falling in- to contempt. The most effective action the civilised community can take is for reputable writers to refuse to be associated with a journal which publishes such filth."

"A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason."

"But violence is an evil continuum which begins with the inflammatory verbal pursuit of class war, continues with Grunwick and the lawless use of union power, progresses to knives, clubs and acid-bombs of Lewisham and Ladywood and then—as we may well fear—rapidly accelerates into full-blooded terrorism with firearms, explosives and an utter contempt for human life. This where the Labour Party is heading. It has already embraced corporatism, which ultimately must mean the end of parliamentary democracy. But corporatism plus violence is infinitely worse. It is fascism; Left-wing fascism maybe, marxist-fascism if you like, but still fascism all the same."

"Many of my contemporaries have vivid memories of visits to our home in Iver. There my father presided over idyllic Sunday lunches, improvising quizzes for us children and entertaining the Worsthornes, Frasers, Howards, Stoppards, Amises, Gales and countless others with conversation and jokes that flowed and gurgled like a bubbling stream. When the talk turned to politics, he could be combative. We children didn’t like that. Aged about six, I tackled him: "Daddy, why do you go on and on about Mr Wilson?" "Why do you go on about the Daleks?" he replied. "The Daleks are important," I said. After lunch there were walks in Langley Park, culminating in the hunt for sixpences, hidden in a giant hollow tree where (he claimed) the Great Train Robbers had stashed their loot. My recollection of him taking me to London on my seventh birthday is a joy: riding in a taxi, visiting the New Statesman office as the editor's son, and then to Bertorelli’s for lunch, where he introduced me to Vicky, the great cartoonist, who was not much taller than I was. He seemed to know everyone. When I was puzzled by my part in a school play by J.B. Priestley, he suddenly said: "Let’s ring old Jack up and ask him." Next minute, I heard an aged voice with a Yorkshire accent saying: "Oh yes, Time and the Conways. Damn good play, that. What’s the problem?""

"Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."

"It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity."

"Intellectuals is a caricature of the bad faith it itself denounces. Were we to judge it by Johnson's own standards, the result would be clear. We would not give a fig for Mr Johnson's private life. He might be an excellent husband, an admirable father, a good colleague, and even in his other work a decent historian. None of this would redeem the shallowness of his arguments."

"I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance. There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ... Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming's poison. ..."

"[I]t is about time we destroyed the British class system"

"I would therefore abolish the monarchy and House of Lords, dispossess ... the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge; end the regimental system in the army ... disestablish the Church; replace the Inns of Court ... abolish the Honours List. What is more, we should take the offensive on all these fronts simultaneously: for if the apostles of social change eschew violence, they must embrace speed. Our society is a many-headed hydra: it is no use chopping off the heads singly, for while you are dealing with the second or third, the first will grow again."

"Before I am denounced as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, let us pause an instant and see exactly what we mean by this "youth". Both TV channels now run weekly programmes in which popular records are played to teenagers and judged. While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! The huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store makeup, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the broken stiletto heels: here is a generation enslaved by a commercial machine. ... Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures: their existence, in such large numbers, far from being a cause for ministerial congratulation, is a fearful indictment of our education system, which in 10 years of schooling can scarcely raise them to literacy."

"Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one."

"History repeats itself: historians repeat each other."

"Autobiography—that unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people."

"Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we'll hope for the best."

"THOUGH the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred to cover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on her own brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly that her husband had ordered to meet her."

"The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other"

"Devoted victim of the crimes accurst, By hatred cherish’d, and by av’rice nurs'd; Crimes that with Europe’s sordid sons began, The rude barbarian’s gift from polished man."

"All human archives in this truth accord, That feeble man is Ruin’s mighty lord; States rise and fall as ages roll away, But vice survives, the passions ne’er decay; New tyrants start, where conquest once has been, The drama constant, tho’ transposed the scene."

"On the same sod, where (Rapine’s helpless prey,) The plumed Indian, pin’d his life away, Enslav’d, degraded, doom’d to vile employ, Deploring still the rifled hive of joy, There the poor Negro, shackled with the chain, Rears, by his sweltering toil, the nectar’d cane; And, wretched exile from his brighter skies, Breathes o’er the native’s grave complaining sighs, Unconscious on what dust he treads, nor knows Whose place he takes, whose heritage of woes."

"To him the heavens a fearful aspect wear, Strange are the accents murmur’d in his ear. He steals no balm from pity’s lenient breath Hope sheds no gleam, but through the vale of death: An alien, far from nature’s bosom cast, He broods on wrongs, the present and the past; And asks what vengeance shall the wretches wait, Who bade him mourn within the stranger’s gate."

"He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either."

"There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics."

"The frame of mind, however, is everything. Given that, one can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself."

"Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure, short of total abstention."

"Rhythm includes metre, but metre is a relatively small part of rhythm."

"Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty."

"At the dinner table, the talk turned to politics. It was in the days before the 'Gang of Four' had allied themselves to the Liberal Party [early 1981]. Queen Elizabeth [The Queen Mother]: I dislike this new socialist party of Woy's [sic]. Host: They're called the Social Democrats, ma'am. Queen Elizabeth: Yes. Well, you don't change socialist just by leaving ist off the end. I say, it's a cheat to start something called the Social Party. I liked the old Labour Party. The best thing is a good old Tory government with a strong Labour opposition."

"Queen Elizabeth: I thought the girls . . . you see, they were marooned in Windsor Castle for most of the war, and I was not sure that they were having a very good education and kind Sachie and Osbert [Sitwell] said they would arrange a poetry evening for us. Such an embarrassment. Osbert was wonderful, as you would expect, and Edith, of course, but then we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem . . . I think it was called "The Desert". And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King. Self: "The Desert", ma'am? Are you sure it wasn't called "The Waste Land? Queen Elizabeth: That's it. I'm afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn't understand a word. Self: I believe he did once work in a bank."

"No creature, animal or human, emerges with much dignity from Animal Farm and it reminds us that there is no political system in the history of the world that is innocent. I remember conversations about Animal Farm with Orwell's great friend Malcolm Muggeridge who had personally witnessed Stalin's show trials in the Soviet Union. "Yes," he would say when I clumsily likened these to the pigs' behaviour in Animal Farm. "But, you know, I have come to see that Eleanor Roosevelt" — ie the embodiment of western smug liberalism — "did more damage to the world than Hitler and Stalin combined." I thought of those words when I finished my umpteenth reread of Orwell's masterpiece, and realised he would certainly have agreed."

"In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity — or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity — by being opinionated rather than by being learned."

"The trouble with Thatcherism could be summed up in the words of the Duke of Norfolk when...he offered some reflections on the ‘rhythm’ method of birth control: it doesn't bloody work. ... The trouble is that none of these public services can actually be paid for by private individuals. ... The Government knows this really, and is therefore incapable of living up to its supposed convictions. It has therefore increased public expenditure in most areas, but done so in a mean-spirited way which has resulted in a decline in quality in almost every area of public life. ... They have not been prepared to make the necessary capital outlay to overhaul the railways. Speak to any librarian, museum curator, keeper of an art gallery or of a building in public ownership. Rather than allowing adequate funds to these bodies, the Government has relentlessly refused to increase the money as required. ... Unless we all decide to vote Labour — we the majority who are not committed to Conservatism come what may — we face a future with dud trains, dud libraries, dud museums, dud hospitals, and the poor getting poorer — sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything."

"As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems."

"‘In my business,’ she said, ‘I don’t think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.’"