What to read? So many books that have been praised to the skies by each man's or woman's buddy - (John's another Thackeray, Jane's another Chaucer; Jennifer is clearly a Trollope only coarser) - that one does not know where to begin. The current number of The New York Review of Books is helpful, praising "A Book of Secrets" by Michael Holroyd.
It tells the story of a man called 'Becket' who was born at the end of the nineteenth century, inherited money, inherited even more money (this time from an uncle whom he hardly knew) and went off to live, very comfortably, in Italy. There he seduced a girl who called the daughter of this liaison 'Violet' before becoming in later life Mrs Alice Keppel - the mistress of Edward VII. Violet is chiefly known for her affaire with Vita Sackville-West now so well recorded. And there they all there! Isn't that Lytton? And Virginia? And Duncan and Carrington and the whole Bloomsbury lot who were so influential in the inter-war years? Those years which were one long cocktail party between World Wars; nobody knew how the first one began but everyone knew that it never properly ended and that a second one was bound to follow in spite of Morgan saying that he would choose to lay down his life for his friend rather than his country. (What did he mean by saying "Only connect"? Perhaps he was thinking of the gay friendships which they all indulged and extoling homosexual love. I shall never understand how it was that once they had put themselves outside the law for one "crime" they thought that everything was available. And here come Burgess and McLean and all the Cambridge spies. No wonder Hitler was convinced that the young men of England would not fight for King and Country. Part biography part fiiction it is all here in "A Book of Secrets". Read it with pleasure.
What is more it is all done in 285 easy to hold pages.
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