Diary – 5 June 2004

I was once naive enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked Eastbourne, and he replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it. The same was true of Heywood Hill, the Bookshop for the Quality. He owned that too, and was generous enough to endow a special prize, presented each year during a jolly garden party at Chatsworth, to a writer not just for one book but for a lifetime’s achievement. This year the prize goes to Dame Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl’s achievements are so many that she really deserves ten prizes, but this will do very nicely to be going on with. Like almost all really good prose writers in our language, she is primarily a comic creator. Even her brilliant historical reconstructions of the Titanic disaster or the death of Dr Johnson are riven with comic anarchy.