Sissinghurst

Vita Sackville-West would have inherited Knole were it not for a "technical accident": the fact that she had been born a woman, a piece of bad luck that she tried hard to compensate for. Both she and her husband, Harold Nicolson, were homosexual.  Vita was a novelist, great friend of Virginia Wolf, the inspiration for her novel Orlando, but her passion was gardening. Harold was a minor diplomat, a minor politician and a minor writer but he survives, thanks to his discipline. Every day, before adjourning, no matter how late it was or how much he had had to drink, he sat at his typewriter and accounted for his day. His diaries, spanning decades, are a priceless record of english history, disguised as gossip. Together they bought Sissinghurst, an old Tudor Castle and made it their home. Nigel Nicolson, their son, disclosed their secrets in "Portrait of a Marriage".

Literary families

I am sitting at Gatwick airport, waiting to catch my flight to Dublin, reading "The Hated Wife", a short biography of Rudyard Kipling's wife. I picked it up, on a whim, at the end of a visit to Bateman's house, Kipling's residence, in the village of Burwash, in Sussex, at the end of a week roaming the english countryside. The weather had been glorious, but today it had been raining, steadily. The house was gloomy and sad: perhaps a reflection of Kipling's plunge from the height of fame to a sort of crepuscular existence as the discredited, quaint champion of British imperialism. Add to that his sorry domestic circumstances: the death of his favorite daughter, and then his son, sacrificial victim to his patriotism, whom he had enlisted, by force of connections, in the Irish Regiment, to see him predictably perish and disappear in the battle of the Somme. And his dour wife, watching over him, crushed by sorrow and by the burdens of running his grand household. I have no interest in Kipling, but I was attracted by the book. I liked the first sentence, and I was interested in the author, Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock, son of Nigel Nicolson and grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. So I read on, carried forward by Nicolson's tight, knowing prose. Is he, perhaps, the best writer of that literary family?

English queens

After Cecil Beaton, Rupert Everett. His outrageous memoirs, searing and bitchy, witty and sad, knowing and camp, full of sex, drugs and .... no, not rock'n roll, theatre, pasty make up dripping with sweat, Hollywood wannabee, all of this with a posh upper class accent. Throw in a bit of catholic perversion, some travelogue, famous friends - and you just keep on reading, Vanished Years - yours too, because he is a boy of my generation - goes to the top of the pile and gets read, to the bitter, uproarious, moving end.

The artist is present

Marina Abramovic sits and stares for three full months at the MOMA. At the end of the show the lines form the previous evening. People spend the whole night queuing to have the privilege of staring at, and being stared at by the artist. In the middle of the run, the little table separating the artist from the starer is removed. Nakedness is enhanced. Vulnerability and emotion run high. 

West Cork

Cecil Beaton

Place: Time Traveller's bookshop in Skibereen, West Cork
Time: Easter friday, 2013, around noon time, a beautiful grey winter day
Arriving in Skibereen, we stop on our way to Vivian's to look at the immaculate new bookshop, worthy of Munich or Milan, that has recently opened. On my right I stumble upon a row of Cecil Beaton's diaries. Idly, I pick up "Self Portrait with Friends, The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton 1926-1974". I know Cecil Beaton as the famous royal photographer and socialite but have no idea Cecil Beaton has written such extensive diaries, beginning in the roaring 20's. I open the book at random. I am instantly smitten: what grace, wit, levity, immediacy in the descriptions, how fast and brilliantly everything passes before your eyes. You are there with Beaton, partying in London, discovering Hollywood, meeting Greta Garbo, taking the portrait of the Queen, gingerly photographing Winston Churchill, going out in Marrakesh with Mick Jagger. And the photos: dozens, hundreds, thousands, portraits, fashion, war reportage. And he could also draw. What an excess of talent. Cecil Beaton: a coup de foudre.

The Wicklow mountains - up close

Wicklow in winter

The Wicklow Mountains seen from Dalkey

Ernest Junger

Germany again. Storm of Steel, the classic account of trench warfare by Ernest Junger, in a new translation by Michael Hoffman. Better than any comment, a transcript will give the flavor and the power of the descriptions. This from the first stages of the battle of the Somme:
"Occasionally my ears were utterly deafened by a single fiendish crashing burst of flame. Then incessant hissing gave me the sense of hundreds of pound weights  rushing down at incredible speed, one after the other. Or a dud shell landed with a short , heavy ground-shaking thump. Shrapnels burst by the dozen, like dainty crackers, shook loose their little balls in a dense cloud, , and the empty casings rasped after they were gone. Each time a shell  landed anywhere close the land flew up and down, and metal shards drove themselves into it".
Or this description of the first dead man seen upon arriving at the battlefield:
"A giant form with red blood-spattered beard stared fixedly at the sky, his fingers clutching the spongy ground"
Images, sounds, sensations are conjured in your head, vivid as in a film which you might or might not have seen.

Albert Speer's Battle with the Truth

Just spent 10 days frantically reading, at every opportunity, the 700 plus pages of Gitta Seveny's book, Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth, which I stumbled upon browsing in a second hand bookstore in Foxrock, Dublin. This biography, based on hours of interviews with Speer, his family and friends, and unparelled access to his documents, traces Speer's life from his unhappy youth as the second of three sons of an upper middle class couple, stern, cold and snobbish germans, his swift rise to become Hitler's architect, his deep bond with Hitler, his spell as Minister of Armaments, when he became one of the top figures of the Third Reich, his gradual disillusionment with Hitler, his acceptance of his share of responsibility for Hitler's crimes, his twenty years imprisonment in Spandau, his liberation in 1966, the enormous success of his memoir "Inside the Third Reich", his partial rehabilitation as a living memory of the Third Reich, his loneliness, his improbable love affair at the end of his life, and finally his death in a hotel room in London, hours after taping a long BBC interview, in 1981. The book hinges on Speer's overwhelming feeling of guilt for the genocide of the jews and, finally, his incapacity to acknowledge that he knew. Part morality tale, part intimate portrait of Hitler's circle, part psychological investigation, it helps us to grasp the collective madness that gripped Germany in the 1930's and the way post war Germany tried  to come terms with it - perhaps an impossible task given the enormity of the crimes.

Francis Bacon's studio

Squalor is the word that comes immediately to mind at the sight of Francis Bacon's studio, painfully reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The photographs do not convey the feeling of the place: a suffocating atmosphere of confinement — the studio was located in a small attic — the accumulated layers of dirt and débris, the single forlorn electric lamp hanging limply from a cord, a recurrent motif in Bacon's paintings, the familiar books of Velazquez eviscerated on the floor convey an impression of unbearable loneliness, anguish and despair. It is truly the alchemist's cove, where dross is turned into gold.