Geoffrey Madan and the joy of ‘unusual articles’
In 1924 Geoffrey Madan retired, aged 29, and devoted himself to books. ‘A genius for friendship, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty – he would not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead,’ said an obituary never published. Published 34 years posthumously, however, in 1981, were Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, a commonplace book edited by J.A. Gere and John Sparrow, with a foreword by his friend Harold Macmillan. One entry lists 17 lives in the Dictionary of National Biography ‘of interest and not usually read’, such as John Selby Watson (1804-84), ‘author and murderer’;
