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. Her best work is her funniest. I have read Injury Time and The Bottle Factory Outing any number of times and find them to be books, like Waugh’s Decline and Fall, which always make me laugh aloud.

Aristocratic hauteur and bullying manners such as Palmerston’s make Jacobins of us all. But the politesse of a true nobleman — call me a creep — spreads happiness like nothing else. When I was a very young man at Oxford I remember an English faculty party in which the retiring Goldsmiths’ professor, David Cecil, unobtrusively spoke to every person present. Afterwards everyone felt happier. His nephew Andrew Devonshire had this gift. One of his more absurd ways of spreading happiness was to come up to you at a party and say, ‘What a relief! I don’t know anyone else here.’ Even when he said this to me, a mere friendly acquaintance, at a party given by himself at Pratt’s Club (which he owned), surrounded by members of his family and friends, it gave me pleasure.