As a young man in the 1970s Michael Bloch was the architectural historian and diarist James Lees- Milne’s last (if, we are assured, platonic) attachment, and later became his literary executor.
As a young man in the 1970s Michael Bloch was the architectural historian and diarist James Lees- Milne’s last (if, we are assured, platonic) attachment, and later became his literary executor. Lees-Milne died in 1997, and Bloch has spent much of the last decade editing the remaining diaries and preparing this book. Not only has he had to deal with his own delicate relationship with his admirer and his admirer’s hostile wife, he was faced with the special problems involved in writing about someone who wrote a very great deal, and famously well, but not altogether truthfully, about himself. Bloch’s solution has been to dig deep and tell all about his indiscreet, emotional, wrongheaded, infuriating yet curiously disarming subject.
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