Denis Healey's George V. Higgins Book Collection

Every year, the East Sussex village of Alfriston – not far from the East Sussex town of Lewes, where I live and work – holds a Summer Festival. Often as not I'll pop over there on the summer bank holiday, usually on the Monday when there's also a boot sale in the playing field as well as, on the beautiful village green beside the River Cuckmere, a selection of stalls and games and rides. Best of all – and this is something I'd completely forgotten until I got there this year – there's a secondhand book stall; more of a marquee really, with tables arranged in a circle, laden with boxes stuffed with fiction and non-fiction (hardback and paperback).

Rifling through the wares this year I started to notice a number of George V. Higgins books among the selection of hardback fiction. Higgins is an author I've tried once (The Friends of Eddie Coyle, his 1972 debut) and keep meaning to return to – a noted stylist whose novels, many of them of a crime fiction bent, others of a political persuasion, are largely comprised of long stretches of dialogue, with little if any description. The more I looked in the boxes of books, the more Higgins I found. Evidently someone in Alfriston was a fan... but then I started looking inside the books, at the ownership signatures on the front endpapers of one or two of the books and, in some cases, inscriptions on title pages from Higgins himself, and realised who that fan was: former Secretary of State for Defence (1964–70), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1974–79) and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (1980–83) Denis Healey.

Healey, who passed away in 2015, and his wife Edna, who died in 2010, amassed a huge book collection over 40 years at their Alfriston home, much of which was bought by local bookshop Much Ado Books (a shop I've written about more than once on Existential Ennui), and some of which wound up in an Alfriston book sale in September (which, annoyingly, I didn't find out about until well after the fact). The collection ranged across a variety of subjects – art, photography, history, poetry, literature and, it seems, George V. Higgins.

Only a couple of the Higgins books I found on the stall had Healey ownership signatures in them, and just three were signed and inscribed by Higgins, but I bought the whole lot anyway (twelve books at a quid each) as it was almost certain they all belonged to Healey and it seemed right to keep the collection together (or at least as much of it as possible; there may have been other Higgins book bought by other folks before I got to them). According to the dated ownership signature in the earliest book I came across, a 1973 Secker & Warburg first of The Digger's Game (Higgins' second novel), Healey bought that one in 1977, and then at some point his and Higgins' paths must have crossed, judging by the warm author inscriptions in Victories (Henry Holt, 1990), Bomber's Law (Henry Holt/Owl paperback, 1994) and Swan Boats at Four (Little, Brown, 1995).

A couple of the books are association copies: a 1979 Harper & Row edition of A Year or So with Edgar, which is inscribed to Healey by Kit McMahon, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England; and a 1987 Holt edition of Outlaws, which is inscribed by political scientist Graham Allison, with a compliment slip from Libor founder Milos Zombanakis.

And on a separate book stall in the boot fair field I found a 1974 Doubleday edition of Penelope Mortimer's Long Distance, inscribed by Mortimer to Edna Healey, thanking her for "a BBC birthday".

Quite the collection all told.

The Day After

Further Thoughts on Election Day 2015

Offered on Election Day 2015

Ed Miliband's idea of a holiday.

That is all.

(Almost.)

The Mask of Memory by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1974): Birdcage Book #3; Review

NB: Included in Friday's Forgotten Books, 20/2/15 (thanks, Sergio).

When is a series not a series? Or rather, where is the line between a series, and a not-series? If, three books into what one has been reliably informed is a series centring on a nefarious Whitehall department, there have been no recurring characters, no nods to the events of the two prior novels, and the activities of that nefarious Whitehall department – which is variously referred to as "the department" and "the Department" (even in the course of a single book), leading one to doubt whether it's the same department (or Department) at all – range from penny-pinching to blackmail to genuine defence of the realm, does the purported series still qualify as a series?

Answer: possibly. Or rather: yes and no. Thus far I've only read the first three of Victor Canning's Birdcage spy novels – Firecrest (1971), The Rainbird Pattern (1972) and, most recently, The Mask of Memory, which was published by Heinemann in 1974 under a dust jacket bearing a Bill Richmond photo (which, naturally, I've added to the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page) – so I'm not about to quibble with Canning and Birdcage aficionado John Higgins when he asserts that Birdcage is a series; but I do wonder whether Victor Canning himself was aware he was writing a series by the time he got to The Mask of Memory. Because it seems to me it's just as likely, whatever evidence later (unread, by me, as yet) Birdcage books may present to the contrary, that he was simply using the notion of a nefarious Whitehall department as a peg on which to hang explorations of those perennial espionage fiction themes, love and betrayal.

In the case of The Mask of Memory, it's actually a love and betrayal triangle, between Department second-in-command Bernard Tucker; his neglected, depressed, shoplifting wife Margaret, Bernard's marriage to whom – indeed her entire existence – Bernard has kept a secret from the Department for years; and Maxie Dougall, a third-rate artist who ekes a living flogging rubbish paintings to tourists, and who sets his sights on Margaret as a potential sugar momma. But there's an additional form of betrayal too, in the shape of the papers that Bernard has been tasked by his Department boss, Percy Warboys (at the direction of the Prime Minister), with retrieving and assessing – papers that, if they turn out to be genuine, would deal a fatal blow to the credibility of the left wing trade union movement ahead of the looming general election.

It's worth dwelling a moment on that political espionage plot, because at a remove of over forty years it's easy to overlook what a timely, if not prescient, novel The Mask of Memory must have been. 1974 was a tumultuous year for Britain, with the introduction of the Three-Day Week followed by two general elections, so Canning's references to newspaper strikes and trade union unrest, and his scenario of a (presumably) Conservative PM seeking to undermine the unions, have more than a whiff of the then-zeitgeist about them. Where his own sympathies lay I wouldn't care to conjecture, but writing, I would guess, in 1973 he was clearly vexed by events unfolding around him, as evidenced by a monologue from Warboys late in the novel:

"The position is absolutely clear. It is as near a certainty as makes no difference that there will be an election early in the New Year. And this time – and not before time – the lines of battle will be drawn up so that there will only be one choice before the electorate. Is a democratic government going to control this country or is the future of the county going to be in the hands of the trades unions and their ability to impose their will by industrial power? Forget all the nonsense of who controls the trades unions. It is the power of the State against the power of organised labour. Either government by law, or the rule of force by workers' organisations led by militants whose real purpose is plain anarchy – no matter what fancy political name they choose to give it."

Fascinating as all this is, though, what really drives the novel, as with Firecrest and The Rainbird Pattern (and The Finger of Saturn for that matter), are affairs of the heart – or, more accurately, the heartless in the cases of Bernard and Maxie, at least for the majority of the story; there are revelations about the true feelings of both men late in the day (revelations which furnish the novel with a relatively upbeat ending). Perhaps more than that linking Whitehall department – or Department – and certainly more so than Canning's curious preoccupation with the workings of the mind – blackouts and memory loss here, hypnotism and clairvoyance in, respectively, Firecrest and The Rainbird Pattern – it's the author's singular take on those themes of love and betrayal which lends the series its particular character and appeal, and which ultimately makes The Mask of Memory as fine a piece of fiction, in my view, as either of its distinguished forebears.

Denis McLoughlin Designs: The Siamese Coup Affair by Sidney Weintraub (T. V. Boardman Bloodhound Mystery #447, 1963)

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

In the unlikely event that there's anyone out there eagerly awaiting the next instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while longer yet: for some reason I'm finding the fourth book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, heavy going. Nothing to do with the novel itself – at least, I don't think it is; I suspect I'm just a bit burned out with the intensive reading and note-taking those Ripley posts have ended up requiring. Anyway, the net result is that the next essay probably won't appear until the end of next week at the earliest, so you'll just have to make do with some more Denis McLoughlin-designed T. V. Boardman dust jackets in the meantime.

Speaking of which, let's have a look at the third Boardman Bloodhound I bought off book dealer Jamie Sturgeon:

The Siamese Coup Affair by Sidney Weintraub, published in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1963, #447 in Boardman's American Bloodhound Mystery line. So far as I've been able to establish, this is one of only two novels Weintraub published, the other being Mexican Slay Ride, issued by Abelard-Schuman and Robert Hale the year before in 1962. But though Weintraub seems to have written just the two works of fiction, he has, I believe, and if I've got my facts right – so take the following with a pinch of salt – penned a hell of a lot of non-fiction. Indeed, it's for works like* his 1959 debut Price Theory (*like, but actually not; see comments) and a succession of other books on finance and free trade that he's rather better known, as well as for being a former William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a former member of the US Foreign Service.

Of course, that could be an entirely different Weintraub – except for two things. 1) Weintraub the economist is evidently something of an expert on Mexico, so his having also written a thriller titled Mexican Slay Ride isn't entirely outside the realms of possibility; and 2) the 1964 Catalog of Copyright Entries lists both the novel The Siamese Coup Affair and the non-fiction work Intermediate Price Theory under Weintraub's name.

So, in attempt to discover if Sidney Weintraub the thriller writer and Sidney Weintraub the economist are one and the same, I've taken the fairly radical step of trying to contact Mr. Weintraub. I'm not overly confident that I'll hear anything back, but if I do, I'll be sure to update this post.

UPDATE, 19/3/13: Sidney Weintraub's son, Jeff, kindly emailed me the other day confirming that they are indeed one and the same – and not to be confused with the other Sidney Weintraub. Thanks, Jeff!

Perhaps even more intriguing and curious than all of that, however, is this: while The Siamese Coup Affair was published by T. V. Boardman (apparently its only printing), Weintraub's 1962 (presumed) debut novel, Mexican Slay Ride, was published, as mentioned above, by Abelard-Schuman in the States and Robert Hale in the UK. But in 1961, the year before that, Boardman itself published a novel titled Mexican Slayride (two words rather than three, note), by Boardman mainstay Thomas B. Dewey (actually retitled from its original US Dell appearance as The Golden Hooligan). Moreover, in 1962, the same year as the Weintraub Mexican Slay Ride, Gold Medal in the States published a novel titled – you guessed it – Mexican Slay Ride, this one by Neil MacNeil, alias W. T. Ballard.

Three different novels, all titled Mexican Slay Ride (or Slayride), all appearing in the space of two years: what the hell's that all about? What was the weird fascination with that title? I must admit I'm unfamiliar with either a Mexican slay ride or if it is, as it appears to be, a play on words, a Mexican sleigh ride, although I'm assuming in this context it's nothing to do with any of these practices. Furthermore, whether or not these three novels were an influence on either the American title of this film or the pilot of The A-Team is also beyond my ken, although given that A-Team co-creator and writer Frank Lupo is a keen collector of crime and spy fiction, one never knows. Answers to any of the above on a postcard, please.

Anyway, back to The Siamese Coup Affair. And while Denis McLoughlin's dust jacket for the book isn't one of his more striking efforts, for me it's possessed of a quiet appeal. Certainly it's good enough to join its brethren in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – and I've another couple of McLoughlins waiting to follow in its footsteps. Because while The Siamese Coup Affair is the last of the Boardmans I bought off Jamie Sturgeon, it's not the last of the Boardmans I've acquired of late...

Memo from Macmillan Publisher Alan Maclean to Chairman (and Former Prime Minister) Harold Macmillan Concerning P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil (1974); plus Review of the Novel

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

That mouthful of a title up top should give you a pretty good idea of what we're dealing with in this latest post on signed editions (and ephemera), but further explication is, I suspect, warranted...

This is the British first edition of cult suspense novelist P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil, published by Macmillan in 1974. Now, those of you with reasonable memories might recall my having blogged about this book before, albeit in a different edition: a 1974 US Atheneum first edition, to be precise, signed by P. M. Hubbard and inscribed to his friend, the author Alan Kennington, making it the only signed Hubbard book I've ever seen. That copy of the book came with its own remarkable bit of ephemera: a signed, handwritten letter by Hubbard to Kennington about the novel, which, one might reason, together with the signed edition would be quite enough for any Hubbard enthusiast. But I later spotted this Macmillan edition online and then went to take a look at it at the seller's bookshop, and simply couldn't resist it and the ephemera that was stapled to its front free endpaper.

I'll return to that in a moment, but first, the novel itself. As is often the way with the books I buy, I hadn't read A Thirsty Evil when I originally wrote about it, but I have since, and it is, as the late Wyatt James dryly notes in his annotated bibliography, "a characteristic book by this author". It certainly reminded me of Hubbard's clammy masterpiece A Hive of Glass (1965), although A Thirsty Evil isn't quite of that calibre; overall it's less oppressive, though still with that intensifying aura of dread, the juxtaposition of a rural idyll – in this case centred on a remote pool hiding a submerged, totemic tooth-like stone – with a sense of there being something very wrong in this summer sun-drenched English backwater.

Hubbard's protagonists are often unpleasant fellows, and the narrator of this one, novelist (and heir to a biscuit empire) Ian Mackellar, is a man who is, at root, as feckless as his nemesis, Charlie, the mentally disturbed brother of Julia, the woman Mackellar is obsessed with; it's evident early on that matters won't end well, and so it proves. But the getting there is grotesquely gripping – the tense scenes where Mackellar encounters Charlie and Julia's other sister, Beth, are especially memorable – and both Wyatt James, who labelled the book "not outstanding", and indeed Hubbard himself, who, in his letter to Kennington about the book, stated, "it's not one I'm very keen on myself", were, I think, doing A Thirsty Evil a disservice: it's a short, taut, unnerving little triumph.

The dust jacket illustration on the Macmillan edition of A Thirsty Evil is by well-known children's illustrator (and onetime tutor at Brighton College of Art) Justin Todd, and it's that image which prompted the writing, on 4 February, 1974, of the piece of paraphernalia stapled to the front free endpaper of this particular copy:

It's an internal Macmillan memo, from the then-publisher, Alan Maclean – brother, incidentally, of Cambridge spy Donald Maclean (who recently made a cameo in spy novelist Jeremy Duns's The Moscow Option) – to Macmillan's then-chairman: one Harold Macmillan, prime minister, from 1957 to 1963, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You see, after retiring from politics in 1964, Macmillan rejoined his family's publishing firm (he'd been a junior partner from 1920–1940), this time as Chairman – and if this document is anything to go by, it seems he was quite an active one...

Maclean's memo is apparently a response to a note from Harold Macmillan, who was evidently far from keen on Justin Todd's Henri Rousseau-esque jacket artwork for A Thirsty Evil. Maclean's defence of the design choice runs thus: "All the jackets for [Macmillan editor] George Hardinge's list are aimed particularly at the 'thriller' market, and this one has been very well received in the trade. The Australian company ordered 250 copies on the strength of the jacket alone!" After reasoning that the illustration "is not entirely irrelevant", Maclean signs off by saying that he's returning Macmillan's own copy of the book – presumably the very copy seen in this post.

And then, at the bottom of the memo, comes something quite extraordinary: a handwritten note by Harold Macmillan, signed "HM", with a "thank you" to Maclean, followed by the exclamation, "Oh God! Oh Montreal!" On first inspection those words might appear slightly baffling – they did to me, anyway – but it's actually a reference to English novelist and satirist Samuel Butler's "A Psalm of Montreal", a commentary on what Butler perceived as the Canadian propensity to embrace financial matters above artistic ones, as embodied by the fate of a plaster cast of the classical Greek sculpture Discobolus (epitome, appropriately enough in the wake of London 2012, of the Olympic spirit) on the premises of the Montreal Natural History Society. Essentially, Macmillan was bewailing the justification of what he thought was a rubbish cover by the book's advance sales.

As remarkable as this document is, there are a couple of things about it which, to my mind, make it even more so. For one, Harold Macmillan clearly read and enjoyed A Thirsty Evil, which strikes me as being, at the very least, notable: a former prime minister was a "fan" of P. M. Hubbard (there's one for the blurbs on the forthcoming Murder Room ebook reissues of Hubbard's novels). For another – and this is priceless – it looks to me as if Macmillan actually corrected Maclean's original note when he acknowledged receipt! Maclean misspelt "douanier" – as in Le Douanier, Henri Rousseau's nickname – as "douanaie", which Macmillan – it appears to be in his hand and his slightly darker blue pen, not Maclean's – has in turn amended, crossing out the additional "a" and adding an "r" at the end!

To be honest, I'm not sure if the bookseller I bought this from quite knew what he had on his hands – I paid a fair amount for it, but not much more than you'd have to pay for a decent Macmillan first edition of A Thirsty Evil anyway (like most of Hubbard's novels, it's become quite quite uncommon in first). In any case, I shall treasure this just as much as my signed Atheneum edition and accompanying Hubbard letter – and as a bonus, you all get to see it as well.

Next: we're leaving the signed editions for the moment for a Westlake Score...

In My Time by Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney (Threshold, 2011): Signed First Edition

Let's crack on with the signed editions from my bookshelves, shall we? And this next signed book was actually sent to me by a friend and fellow blogger, who went above and beyond the call of duty to obtain the John Hancock in question...

This is the American first edition/first impression of former US Vice President Dick Cheney's memoir, In My Time, published by Threshold in 2011. It was a gift from Book Glutton, who, having read my series of posts on political diaries in September of last year, knew I had an interest in political autobiographies (and who probably wondered if I'd ever get round to blogging about the book, ingrate that I am; he sent it to me in November). Even given that my politics and the Vice President's are poles apart (on most things, at least – although that hasn't stopped me reading and enjoying political tomes in the past), I was still dead chuffed to receive this copy of In My Time, especially so in light of this:

Dick Cheney's signature on the title page (with Book Glutton's accompanying post-it note on the blank verso). There aren't that many signed copies of the memoir available: AbeBooks currently has fewer than ten, all of them in the States, and the majority of them being the Threshold limited-to-5,000-copies cased edition. My copy isn't one of those, however; it's the standard first edition, and was signed by the Vice President at Book Glutton's place of work.

BG, you see, works with, and is friendly with, Liz Cheney, the VP's daughter, and co-writer of In My Time. In the wake of the VP's book tour, BG spent quite a while trying to coordinate handing over a signed copy or two, but the stars never aligned. So eventually Liz frogmarched her father over to hers and BG's office to sign the books there, which BG was as astonished by as I was: as he told me, "One does not summon a Vice President to have him sign a book". The kicker being, BG wasn't in the office when the VP visited, and so missed meeting him. Gah!

Still, at least both he and I now have signed firsts, and it was very kind of BG, Liz and indeed the Vice President to make that happen; I'll certainly treasure my copy. And Book Glutton may well be interested in the next signed edition I'll be showcasing, as it's a novel by an author he's a big fan of...

William Haggard and the Colonel Charles Russell Spy Thriller Series: an Introduction to the Author and a Bibliography

Returning to my somewhat sporadic series of posts on spy fiction series (which was interrupted by nearly a week's worth of blogging on Richard Stark's Butcher's Moon), next we have a series by a British author who, despite having penned thirty-three thrillers over thirty-plus years, has slipped quietly into semi-obscurity.

As is the way with a lot of thriller writers, William Haggard – real name Richard Henry Michael Clayton, "Haggard" being his mother's maiden name, not to mention the surname of his fifth cousin, H. Rider Haggard (many thanks to Garen Ewing for those nuggets of info) – came to writing relatively late in life. Born in Croydon (not far from Beckenham, where I grew up) to Henry James and Mabel Sarah Clayton in 1907, Haggard was educated at Lancing College and Christ Church, Oxford, after which he embarked on a career as a civil servant, in the first instance in India, where he eventually became a judge. He served in the Indian Army from 1939 to 1946 – undergoing a course at the Staff College, Quetta – and after the war returned to Britain to join the British Civil Service, taking up a position at the Board of Trade, where he worked until 1969 (for a time as Controller of Enemy Property). But parallel to his day job Haggard had begun writing fiction; his debut novel, Slow Burner, was published in 1958 when Haggard was fifty-one, and introduced a character who would go on to appear in a further twenty-four adventures: Colonel Charles Russell.

Colonel Russell is the head of a branch of British Intelligence known as the Security Executive, tasked with defending the realm from any and all foreign threats – many verging on the science fictional in nature. Initially working behind the scenes, by the time Russell is introduced in Slow Burner he has already been serving with the Executive for twenty years, and is in his late fifties and close to retirement. (He would actually retire midway through the series, but would continue to assist the Executive thereafter.) 

Russell is very much a part of the Establishment, and a product of Haggard's own political views, which were firmly to the right of centre; in many ways the series was a precursor to Anthony Price's later David Audley spy novels: both series are set in Whitehall, and are as much political or detective thrillers as they are espionage fiction, although Haggard's books are characterized by an underlying preoccupation with decorum, with the correct way of doing things, whether it be in action or in conversation. Mind you, even compared to the avowedly conservative Price, Haggard was pretty far to the right; as Price himself put it during my interview with the writer in July, "he was more right wing than even me! He made me look like a liberal!"

Haggard's own view of his books, which he shared in a letter to Donald McCormick for McCormick's 1977 survey Who's Who in Spy Fiction, was that they were "basically political novels with more action than in the straight novel". Even so, much of the "action" takes place in offices and consists of clever types reasoning out sticky dilemmas (again, see Anthony Price). McCormick also notes in Haggard's entry in Who's Who in Spy Fiction that Haggard was "associated with Intelligence work during his career", so it seems that, in common with many spy novelists, Haggard knew of what he "spoke".

Haggard came to my attention thanks to Existential Ennui reader Richard, who left a comment on my review of Anthony Price's The Labyrinth Makers directing me to Haggard's work. Haggard died in 1993 and all of his books are long out of print (some have become quite scarce in any edition). There's scant information about him online either; the best resource for the Charles Russell series is this dedicated page on the Spy Guys & Gals site, while The Independent has a decent obituary of the author and an additional entry in the paper's Forgotten Authors series. For my part, I have another couple of posts planned on Haggard and Charles Russell: a review of Slow Burner, which will be up next, and a gallery of some of the Haggard/Russell first editions I've found on my travels. Hopefully all three of these posts will go some way towards raising the profile of William Haggard, a fine writer who's long overdue a reappraisal. 

WILLIAM HAGGARD BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Colonel Charles Russell Series

1. Slow Burner (1958)
2. Venetian Blind (1959)
3. The Arena (1961)
4. The Unquiet Sleep (1962)
5. The High Wire (1963)
6. The Antagonists (1964)
7. The Hard Sell (1965)
8. The Powder Barrel (1965)
9. The Power House (1966)
10. The Conspirators (1967)
11. A Cool Day for Killing (1968)
12. The Doubtful Disciple (1969); features Russell's replacement as head of the Security Executive, Richard Laver
13. The Hardliners (1970)
14. The Bitter Harvest (1971), a.k.a. Too Many Enemies
15. The Old Masters (1973), a.k.a. The Notch on the Knife
16. The Scorpion's Tail (1975)
17. Yesterday's Enemy (1976)
18. The Poison People (1977)
19. Visa to Limbo (1978)
20. The Median Line (1979)
21. The Money Men (1981)
22. The Mischief Makers (1982); features fellow Security Executive operative William Wilberforce Smith
23.  The Heirloom (1983)
24. The Meritocrats (1985)
25. The Vendettists (1990)

Paul Martiny Novels

The Protectors (1972)
The Kinsmen (1974)

William Wilberforce Smith Novels

The Martello Tower (1986)
The Diplomatist (1987) 

Other Novels

The Telemann Touch (1958)
Closed Circuit (1960)
Need To Know (1984); this one may or may not be a part of the Charles Russell series – opinions vary
The Expatriots (1989)

Lewes Book Bargain: The Second World War Volume 1: The Gathering Storm by Winston S. Churchill (Cassell, 1948)

Continuing this short series of World War II-themed posts, we move on from Len Deighton's 1941-set alternate history, to an account of that period's actual history – albeit a highly personal one – written by a man who had a better vantage point than almost anyone else on those momentous events:

Winston Churchill's The Second World War Volume 1: The Gathering Storm was first published in hardback in the UK by Cassell in 1948. I spotted this first edition/first impression in a Lewes charity shop on Monday, and since this week's posts are largely WWII-focused, it seemed a serendipitous Lewes Book Bargain indeed. Mind you, it's a weighty old tome, clocking in at 640 pages, so Lord knows when I'll get round to reading it.

There's a fascinating critique of The Gathering Storm on the BBC website by Professor John Charmley, which begins with one of Churchill's oft-quoted utterances. "History will judge us kindly," the then-Prime Minister told Roosevelt and Stalin in 1943, "because I shall write the history." And so he did, continuing his mammoth endeavour across a further five volumes, as projected on the dustjacket front flap of the Cassell first of The Gathering Storm, although the eventual number was at that point TBC. "It is planned," runs the blurb, "that the complete memoirs should occupy five or six volumes... though the final total depends on how the work unfolds under Mr. Churchill's hand". Any more than six of these doorstops and Britain's bombed-out homeless could've built houses out of the buggers to "occupy".

Quite apart from the issues of accuracy Professor Charmley raises in his BBC article, it seems even Churchill's deathless prose wasn't immune to those rather more mundane mistakes which bedevil every writer, namely the odd typo – some of them very odd indeed. There's a tipped-in "Author's Note" at the start of the book:

directing readers to the "Errata and Corrigenda" at the back, which corrects various dates, punctuation and what have you. But that page of corrections also has a tipped-in sheet attached with additional errata, and one of those in particular is a real howler:

"Page 56, line 13: For 'poop' read 'prop'." Ouch. Now there's a typo to give copyeditors the heebie-jeebies...

Moving on, and next we travel to 1946, for a Ross Thomas postwar Germany-set tale of unhinged assassination, diminutive espionage and insouciant skullduggery...

Lewes Book Bargain: a First Edition of Piers Morgan's The Insider (Ebury Press, 2005), a Review Thereof, and an Alan Clark Connection

This final post in a series on politically-themed diaries – a series that, judging by the paltry number of hits thus far registered on each of the two previous posts, has been as indifferently received as the political party conference season which inspired it – concerns a volume which has more to do with tabloid journalism than with the inner workings of state or government. But newspapers and politics are inextricably intertwined, and the author of these diaries enjoyed almost unparalleled access to the men and women at the top of Britain's governmental tree, among them the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Plus, the ostensible subject of the last two posts, Tory politician Alan Clark, crops up in the diaries too...

Piers Morgan's The Insider was first published in hardback in the UK in 2005 by Ebury Press, under a dustjacket designed by Two Associates, featuring photographs of Morgan with the great, the good, the not-so-good, and, er, the Queen. I bought this copy just the other day in a Lewes charity shop, but I read it a few years ago in paperback, and it is, you'll doubtless be surprised to learn, a thoroughly revealing account of what it's like to be a tabloid newspaper editor in Britain.

These days Morgan is best known – especially to Americans – as a judge on America's Got Talent and the host of Piers Morgan Tonight, but from 1994 to 2004 he was editor of the (now defunct) News of the World and then the Daily Mirror. The Insider comprises his diaries from this period, and it's an extraordinary account. Morgan isn't the most stylish of writers, and his tendency to name drop can become wearisome, but as an insight into what a tabloid editor does, The Insider takes some beating. Morgan reports the countless conversations he had with Tony Blair (and Cherie Blair) and many other senior political figures, all of whom courted him and solicited his opinion on a variety of matters. New Labour's (understandable) obsession with the press permeates the book, while Blair alone warrants a column-and-a-half's worth of entries in the index.

It's all fascinating stuff, and even the celebrity side of Morgan's job has taken on an extra significance in the wake of the phone hacking scandal. I must admit I haven't read Morgan's follow-up, Don't You Know Who I Am?, as his post-newspaper career is of rather less interest to me, but The Insider is a cracking read and no mistake.

I mentioned in the previous post that I'd be returning to "the Coven", the mother and her two daughters Alan Clark had an affair with, because that particular extramarital dalliance also crops up in The Insider. The News of the World had been trying to establish the identities of the Coven ever since Clark's first volume of Diaries had been published in 1993, and on Sunday 29 May, 1994, under Morgan's editorship, the newspaper finally exposed them, naming judge's wife Valerie Harkness and her two daughters. Far from becoming enemies, however, Morgan and Clark subsequently became fairly friendly. Later that same year the two met at the Conservative Party Conference (which rolls around again next week, bringing us full circle) and retired to the bar, where Clark demanded tens of thousands of pounds for the "distress" the NOTW's story had caused him and his wife.

"Look, Alan," replied Morgan, "that's a bit on the pricey side to be honest. I've got a better idea. You give me fifty thousand and we won't disclose the other nine women who've come forward to say they had affairs with you."

Clark snorted, then leaned closer: "Nine women . . . God – what were their names?"

And on that disgraceful note, it's time to move on from the political diaries (cue ecstatic cheering...), and return to the crime fiction, with a Westlake Score...

A Review of a First Edition of Alan Clark's Diaries: In Power 1983–1991 and Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993)

Continuing this short run of posts tying in with Britain's party political conference season, we move on from the second volume – or, chronologically speaking, first – of Alan Clark's Diaries, to the first volume – or rather, second:

Alan Clark's Diaries were first published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1993. I can't actually recall where I bought this first edition/first impression, but the UK hardback went through umpteen printings, so while first editions litter the likes of AbeBooks and charity and secondhand bookshops up and down the land, first impressions aren't so common. This volume, which covers the years 1983–1991, has picked up a subtitle since its original publication, and is now known as Diaries: In Power. It caused quite the sensation when it first appeared, for all manner of reasons, but primarily for the light it shed on the Arms to Iraq/Matrix Churchill affair – with which Clark, as Minister of State for Trade in the Conservative Government, was intimately involved – and for the infamous affair Clark was embroiled in with a mother and both of her daughters (together nicknamed "the Coven").

I'll be returning to that disgraceful multiple dalliance in the third and final political diaries post, but it's worth reiterating here how exceptional Clark's Diaries in general – and this volume in particular – are, almost in direct proportion to how objectionable he himself was. His political views are pretty much the polar opposite of mine, and certainly to the right of even the most foaming of true-blue Tories, while he was an absolute shit to his wife and the most horrendous snob. But his near-fascistic leanings, his fawning appreciation of Margaret Thatcher (whom he called "the Lady"), his rampant libido and his attempts to cast himself as a Lord in all but name – forever bemoaning the state of Saltwood (his inherited Kent castle home) and his need to sell off its treasures in order to fund his mania for classic cars and his high stakes gambling – are what make this initial offering of his Diaries so compulsively readable – that and the fact they're beautifully written.

Of course, like many diarists, Alan Clark didn't write his Diaries in a vacuum. Committed diarists are usually well aware of their journal-writing forebears, and one diarist in particular exerted a profound influence on Clark:

Chips: The Diaries of Henry Channon was first published in hardback in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1967; the edition seen here is a more recent paperback edition from 1993, re-edited and with a new introduction by Robert Rhodes James, and presumably issued to tie in with the publication of Clark's Diaries. Like Clark, Channon was a relatively minor political figure in the period his diaries cover – 1934–1958 – but, also like Clark's, Channon's diaries afford an outsider's clear-eyed viewpoint on momentous events, including the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII and the fall of the Chamberlain Government in 1939–40.

Channon was as much of a snob as Clark, and equally as distasteful in his own way, but his diaries are elegantly written and endlessly fascinating. Clark frequently mentions Chips in his own Diaries; according to Alan Clark's editor, Ion Trewin, Clark kept Channon's diaries close to hand, and "rarely failed to dip [into them] with his early morning tea". Unlike Clark's Diaries, however, Channon's have fallen out of print; the last edition was a 1996 paperback, and AbeBooks currently lists just thirteen copies of Chips in any edition, the cheapest being about forty quid. (I bought my copy in Brighton Books years ago, for much less than that.)

No such problem with the final volume of diaries I'll be looking at, however: those are in cheap and plentiful supply, in first or any edition, a consequence, perhaps, of the low esteem in which their author is held these days...

A Review of a First Edition of Alan Clark's Diaries: Into Politics 1972–1982 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)

We're in the midst of the political party conference season here in the UK; this week it's the turn of the Labour Party, who have descended en masse on Liverpool to debate how they can make Ed Miliband seem dynamic and purposeful – or at the very least mildly interesting – while last week the Lib Dems invaded Birmingham and next week the Tories will take Manchester, all to the overwhelming indifference of the British populace. (All three main parties have forsaken their traditional seaside conference locales this year for some reason.) So, in a slight change of tack from Existential Ennui's regular course, I thought I'd take a look at a few politically themed books this week – a mixture of recent and older acquisitions, all of which take the form of diaries, and all of which are connected in some way to this man:

Alan Clark, for those who don't know, was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Plymouth Sutton from 1974–1992 and for Kensington and Chelsea from 1997 until his death in 1999. He held various junior governmental posts, including Minister of Trade at the DTI and Minister for Defence Procurement at the MOD, and became a privy councillor in 1991. He was a historian (and son of another famous historian, Kenneth Clark, the man behind the television series Civilisation), an author, a serial philanderer, a collector of classic cars, an inveterate snob and a frequent gambler who lived in an inherited castle in Kent (whose treasures he occasionally flogged off in order to sustain his extravagant lifestyle), skied regularly in Switzerland and held political views only marginally to the left of those espoused by Germany's National Socialists (he was an admirer of Enoch Powell, and once called himself a Nazi in a letter to The Guardian). But above all he was a committed diarist, and it's in this capacity that he's best remembered today.

Published in three volumes, Clark's Diaries are by turns revealing, insightful, hilarious, hypochondriacal, vain, narcissistic and utterly disgraceful, and rank among the best political diaries ever committed to paper, rivalled only by those of Samuel Pepys and especially Henry "Chips" Channon, on whose diaries Clark modelled his own. They are, quite simply, brilliant, characterized by an elegant and fluid style, and shedding light on the life of an MP – albeit a highly unusual and idiosyncratic one – and the inner workings of government. (John Hurt – who was so magnificent recently in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – played Clark in a 2004 BBC adaptation of the Diaries.)

The volume seen in this post was the second to be issued, but chronologically is the first in the series, covering the years 1972–1982, and was published posthumously in 2000. I picked up this hardback first edition/first impression for a couple of quid (which is about what you'd pay for it online, except without the additional postage) in a Chichester charity shop (having already read it in paperback) during my summer hols, partly because Clark's Diaries are among my favourite books ever, but also because it makes for a nice companion to one of the books I'll be blogging about in the next post, which will encompass both another volume of Clark's Diaries, and the diaries which exerted the biggest influence on Clark's...