Several bowls of cherries

Spectator, The, May 20, 2000 by Wheatcroft, Geoffrey

Several bowls of cherries

TELLING LIVES: FROM W.B YEATS TO BRUCE CHATWIN

edited by Alistair Horne

Macmillan, L20, pp. 390

Even after the Vatican pruned the official calendar of saints on grounds of wimpish ecclesiastical correctness, removing sundry `mythological' figures back in the swinging Sixties, the list still includes six dif ferent Saints Antony. And no one knows to which of them St Antony's College, Oxford, is dedicated. The explanation is almost as murky as some traditional hagiology.

The college is named not for any canonised saint, but after Antonin Besse, a shadowy, elegant and enormously rich French merchant in the Levant, who among other things held the Shell oil concession in Aden, and delighted Evelyn Waugh when he visited the port 70 years ago (he appears as M. Leblanc in Remote People, and inspired Mr Baldwin in Scoop). There are now Wolfson Colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, but `Besse College' might have seemed a little outre in Oxford 50 years ago when his benefaction helped create the new college, and so `St' it was.

Maybe this puzzle about the name is appropriate. St Antony's has always had a faint aura of mystery hanging over it, and not just because of its fabled links with `the intelligence community'. Some crabbed fact-diggers might wonder whether it really exists; I prefer rather to think of the college as one of Oxford's alluring places of the imagination, like Max Beerbohm's Judas College, Compton Mackenzie's St Mary's, or Ronald Knox's St Simon Magus.

There were quite enough fishy characters floating around the college even before the late 1960s. Then 30 years ago Alistair Horne `actually made some money' from a trilogy of history books and, in a gesture of great generosity, endowed a fellowship at St Antony's. It was intended to be held for a year, not by doctoral students, cryptodons or academics who are expected, in the phrase, to know more and more about less and less, but by ordinary working authors like Horne himself. He was aware of how few of them made money from serious books, and how badly they needed a little respite and leisure to write, away from the pressures of getting and spending, surrounded by great libraries and in congenial company.

Since then the Alistair Horne Fellowship (at any rate it wasn't the St Alistair Fellowship) has flourished. It has been held by a notably impressive line of writers - I write from the detached perspective of an unsuccessful applicant many years ago, like `BA Calcutta (failed)' - who have, though doubt there have been failures, had a notably impressive record with the books they went to St Antony's to write: among the biographies to which the fellowship has played fairy godmother have been Roy Foster's Lord Randolph Churchill, Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin, Tim Hilton's Ruskin, John Campbell's RE Smith and John Grigg's Lloyd George.

Now a collection of biographical essays has been assembled from 25 sometime Horne fellows, as well as one, on Axel von dem Bussche, by the benefactor and editor himself. Modesty prevents Horne from presenting this volume as a book in honour of himself, but it is a Festschrift of sorts, a celebration of the fellowship. Inevitably it is a mixed bag, something old, something new, something borrowed from existing books, but it makes a very entertaining anthology, and the perfect bogside book.

Although the literary standard isn't uniformally high, it is higher than it would be with most academic Festchriften just because the authors mostly write for a living, and several of the essays are outstanding. They are certainly wide-ranging, from D.R Thorpe on Alec Douglas-Home to Edward Harrison on Philby (the one nod to St Antonine `intelligence'), from Roland Huntford on Nansen to Christina Hardyment on Marie Stopes and Germaine Green The last, the only double-header and the only contribution by a woman, is subtitled `Enduring Passion and the Stump Cross Crone', which suggests a hatchet job. As it turns out, it isn't that, but a sensitive as well as clever comparative study, which suggests that `the life Greer lived as a young woman was also a brave and necessary experiment; its outcome proof positive of the hollowness of Marie Stopes's promise of never-ending ecstasy. Women today are the wiser for both women's highprofile experiments.'

In fact, with inevitable exceptions like John Whittam on Mussolini, these essays tend towards the appreciative. Or seemingly so: like full-dress biographies, biographical essays sometimes need to be read between the lines, and they can betray an unconscious ambivalence. Duff Hart-Davis is affectionate about Peter Fleming, that great Spectator figure in his day, but doesn't deny that Fleming's life was in some ways a disappointment. And Redmond O'Hanlon's ostensibly admiring essay on Bruce Chatwin confirmed my own view of him, which would not have been the author's intention.

One of the best essays on public men is Grigg on Herbert Gladstone, a characteristically warm and illuminating reassessment of a statesman whom Grigg persuasively calls the most impressive political son of an important British politician in the past century, only and obviously excepting Churchill. In one of the longest 20thcentury stints in the job, Gladstone was a formidable home secretary in the Liberal governments of 1905-10. As Grigg says, it may surprise those who know politics today, when every department of state has an establishment of at least four ministers, that Gladstone ran the home office, whose responsibilties were even wider then than now, with only one junior minister.