The Rothschilds, the Spenders, the Queen…

The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and came to London half a century ago when still an avid young man. For 38 years he lived there with the late Nikos Stangos, a cosmopolitan of the Greek diaspora, whose father had been expelled from Bulgaria and his mother from Istanbul. Displacement and asylum were so much part of Stangos’s imagination that whenever he saw an old person in the street carrying a suitcase, tears came to his eyes. Stangos’s sensibility, zest and physical grace provide many of the richest moments in his lover’s diaries.

Plante began keeping this diary in 1959. He seems to reckon it as a London counterpart to the journals of the Goncourt brothers or those of the incomparable Count Harry Kessler: ‘A repository of what one day will be considered more than a personal diary, but an account of a certain time.