Saved by comic relief

There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’.

I knew things were pretty bizarre in Berlin towards the end, with the Nazis legalising nudism and stores holding spring sales as the Russian tanks rolled in, but for Cyril Connolly to have had a cultural correspondent in the enemy capital at the end of a world war would have been the supernova of aestheticism. And a very catastrophic one for Lady Eden.

Alas, it was probably just the busy authors not having time to read their proofs. As Mrs Blair writes in her foreword, she only started this book when she found herself ‘unexpectedly pregnant again’ in 2002, and thought she might have time on her hands.