A painless lesson in political history

This book is not a history, explains Ruth Winstone, who has edited this collection of excerpts from diaries published between 1921 and 2011. It is, she says, ‘an impressionist view of politically changing times’. It is, indeed, a patchwork quilt of a book, no two pieces precisely meshing with each other yet providing in total a remarkably clear and coherent portrait of 90 stressful years.

It is ‘a political diary’, but Winstone admits that the definition of ‘political’ became more and more elastic as the book took shape. It is all the better for it. Some of the most enjoyable passages have only a tenuous link with the world of public affairs but it would have been sad to lose Virginia Woolf on Ulysses — ‘an illiterate under-bred book’ she thought it, which left her ‘puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’.

Or Noel Coward dismissing Waiting for Godot as

pretentious gibberish.