Unfaltering to the end

While staying at Chatsworth for Christmas 1994, James Lees-Milne records an exchange with his old friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, on the subject of keeping a diary. Leigh Fermor regrets not having done so: ‘It might have helped him pick up the threads … so difficult for horny old fingers to feel. Yes, I said, a diary does keep the fingers flexed.’ So it would seem. This is the 12th and final volume of Lees-Milne’s incomparable journal, which he continued to write until a few weeks before his death in December 1997. He was in his 90th year when he died, and in this latest instalment, The Milk of Paradise, one might expect to find a slacking off, a blunting of the sharp observation and highly critical views: one might expect it, but one would be wrong. The fingers remain fully flexed, with the author as alert and idiosyncratic, as intolerant, kind-hearted and passionately engaged as ever.