Several careers open to talent

There are two ways of writing a successful book about oneself. The first is to be so successful in life that you command attention regardless of your prose style. The second, adopted by Ferdinand Mount, is to place the author in a self-deprecating way at the centre of a whirling mass of colourful and entertaining characters who dance in and out of his life. In this book Mount remains, by his own account, shy, abrupt, rather lazy, an iceberg in his dealings with women. Of course this negative self-portrait does not convince — there must be something else behind. Where have we met before this particular technique? Of course, in the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. It comes as no surprise to find that Anthony Powell was our author’s uncle. So was Frank Longford, for his mother was a Pakenham, a fact which to the connoisseur is in itself revealing. His father was an army officer and a steeplechase jockey. His parents, and Ferdy Mount himself, accumulated a mass of friends and relations, many famous, some raffish, all entertaining. Siegfried Sassoon, Isaiah Berlin, Philip Toynbee, John le Carré, the Mitfords, Donald Maclean enter the story in turn and make their bow. As a boy and young man Mount lived at the intersection of the Anglo-Irish upper classes with the intellectual elite. The traffic at that crossroads was fast and dangerous, with multiple collisions resulting in divorce or death. For Mount the crossroads, as in a dream, shifts from Ireland to Salisbury Plain with its flavour of soldiers and horses — though in my experience the Highlands of Scotland offered a similar excitement.

The literary editor of this magazine, when asking me to review Cold Cream, suggested that my life and Ferdy Mount’s might from time to time have intertwined.