‘Christmas without Ian,’ wrote my mother, ‘was a bleak affair. He was always there at Christmas.’ My mother was Ann Fleming and Ian the man the centennial of whose birth we have so markedly been celebrating this past year.
There was another man who was always there at Christmas: Peter Quennell, of whom Paul Johnson wrote in these pages, ‘There has never been another bruiser like Behan or writing toff like Quennell’ (‘And Another Thing’, 6 September 2008). Peter Quennell, or P. Q. as his fourth wife, Spider, called him, was not born a toff. (Spider was christened Sonia, but on account of the length of her elegant limbs Peter named her Spider Monkey; and so she remains.) P. Q.’s father had been an architect. His mother was an artist. Later, both parents became well known as the authors of A History of Everyday Things in England. In his first volume of autobiography, The Marble Foot, Peter writes of his father:
Snobbery was not among his failings.
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