Ignoble nobles

Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh. A quotation from the latter’s Put Out More Flags, about some shady manoeuvres by Basil Seal, supplies the epigraph to a chapter of Marcus Scriven’s Splendour & Squalor: ‘From time to time he disappeared … and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence…’

The chapter in question concerns ‘Victor’ — Victor Hervey (1915-85), 6th Marquess of Bristol, whose defining traits, by Scriven’s account, were his ‘tendency to criminality’ and ‘taste for wounding the vulnerable’ — which sounds like Basil Seal, as does Selina Hastings’ recollection that he ‘was very keen on trolleys with booze on’. (It may be worth noting, by the way, that Waugh was not the only writer of his generation to take an interest in alcoholic sadists — Greene and Fleming spring to mind.)

Victor’s criminal debut was a disaster.