Strangers in their native land

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly happy marriage, Their Promised Land by Ian Buruma has a deeper purpose. The cache of letters to and from Winifred (‘Win’) and Bernard (‘Bun’) Schlesinger is the pre-email, daily correspondence of two people who could not bear to be apart, yet were separated for years at a time by both world wars. Although his grandparents died in 1984 and 1986, this artful volume reveals a good deal about the world we live in today.

Born and brought up in posh Hampstead comfort, with plenty of servants, before moving to a spacious old vicarage in Berkshire, Win Regensburg and Bernard Schlesinger were ‘educated in the usual manner of the English upper-middle class: public school in his case, and Oxford and Cambridge,’ Buruma writes. ‘They were British and had the perfect right to insist on it, and yet their sense of belonging was never simply to be taken for granted.’