The other Life of Brian

In 1968 I was introduced to Gerald Hamilton, the figure of comic evil on whom Christopher Isherwood based the title character of his 1935 novel Mr Norris Changes Trains. When he died in 1970, I rang the obituaries editor of the Times to ask if he would like me to write about the old rogue. He replied that he thought Hamilton too minor a figure. The following morning the Daily Telegraph published a long obituary of Hamilton which revealed that he had once been on the staff of the Times. The obits editor telephoned me and said he would like a piece after all. In it, I suggested that Hamilton, like Alice Liddell, had gained almost all his réclame not from any achievement, but from being turned into fiction.

The same is even more true of Brian Howard. As D. J. Taylor writes in an acute introduction to this book, ‘he ended up as a tragi-comic turn in works by other people’.