A long and happy life

Jason Goowin reviews the memoirs of John Julius Norwich

In 1957 John Julius Cooper (later Norwich) was keeping open house in Beirut, ‘the Clapham Junction of the world’s air routes’.Guests were given dinner on the terrace, where the Coopers liked to watch their faces ‘as, promptly at ten minutes past nine, an immense, luminous grapefruit appeared from behind Sannine and climbed slowly up into the eastern sky’.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

JJ’s passions — for history, for Venice, for music — have always been enlivened by a sense of theatre: his books are erudite and entertaining. His mother, Lady Diana, took to the stage at the age of 30; she had some of the instincts of a stage manager, too, never more in demand than when she became the chatelaine of the British embassy in Paris after the war. His father, Duff Cooper, was a diplomat.