Swagger, colour and dash

A. N. Wilson claims that he can imagine nothing more agreeable than the life of a country parson, ‘born in the 1830s with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth’. The Victorians are still vivid to him: from his 1950s childhood, he can recall the last vestiges of their way of life – gas-lit station waiting-rooms, cream jugs covered with beaded cloths – and memories of actual survivors, too. ‘When I went up to Oxford in 1969,’ he tells us in the introduction, ‘there were at least two pair of spinster sisters, the Misses Butler and Deneke, who could remember tea parties with Lewis Carroll.’ (Even though I’m five years younger than Wilson, I can cap that – Frances Partridge, still happily with us, told me that she could remember Henry James flinging her playfully into the air; and I once met a man whose gardener had been a powder-monkey at the battle of Trafalgar.