The Duff Cooper Diaries
edited by John Julius
Norwich Phoenix £10.99
They seem to have stepped from the pages of Wodehouse: Bobbety, Cardie, Chips, Goonie, Loulou and Scatters - aristocrats who danced and dined their way through the heady life of one of the period's most influential political and social figures, handsome, debonair Duff Cooper.
His diaries are fascinating for two things: their testament to an exhilarating century and their witness to a vanished age of power and privilege. It's the certainty of these characters that strikes the reader; they never question their right to wealth and influence, Duff included. When, after Eton, Oxford and a spell at the Foreign Office, he enlists during the Great War, he is appalled at having to share quarters with people below his status, but soon finds 'someone willing to black my boots and shine my buttons'.
Decorated for gallantry, hailed for his scholarship, envied for his charm, this man seemed to have it all and is matter-of-fact about people and events which would have mere mortals goggling. He knows everybody. A friend and confidant of the Prince of Wales, he is there in the thick of the abdication crisis; he serves in successive cabinets under Baldwin, Chamberlain and Churchill and becomes British ambassador in Paris after the liberation in 1944.
His wooing of a famous beauty, Lady Diana Manners, who became his wife in 1919, is chronicled with ardent, touching sincerity, and he remained devoted to her to his death, despite what his son, John Julius Norwich, describes as 'his extremely mouvementé sex life'. Before she died, John Julius asked his mother how she had coped with Duff's legion of lovers. 'Oh,' she replied, 'they were all the flowers. I knew I was the tree.'
Then there was the drinking. When he became First Lord of the Admiralty, Queen Mary let it be known that he must lay off the sauce a bit. Accordingly, he adopts a system based on the division of days into five categories: A: No drink until dinner, then only one sort; B: Either only one sort at luncheon or dinner or nothing until dinner then more sorts than one; C: More sorts both at luncheon and dinner but nothing between; D: No restrictions but no excess; E: Excess.
What a man.