This is an unsettling book. On the face of it a memoir by the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, it veers from social history to intimate confessional, from objective understanding to subjective contempt, with strong elements of hatefulness.
In the summer of 1959 the author’s father, a prominent journalist and son of Arthur Christiansen, Beaverbrook’s great editor of the Daily Express, left the family to live with (and eventually to marry and have a family with) his secretary. What Christiansen describes in his book is the fall out from this act of betrayal. The subtitle includes ‘love’, which must refer to the son’s love for his mother.
Time’s arrow, travelling in the one direction, means that sons have the advantage over their fathers (when was the last no-holds-barred memoir by a father of his son?) and, as a rule, generally being dead, fathers have no right to reply.
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