Deep Romantic Chasm: Diaries, 1979-1981

In this, the eighth volume of James Lees-Milne's diaries, he is engaging and readable as ever, mixing candour and an often malicious wit with generosity of spirit and sympathy for human frailty.
These diaries are unlike their predecessors in that they show Lees-Milne developing an overwhelming tendresse for a much younger man. As candid in writing about himself as about others, he records the doubt, happiness, guilt and other turbulence that accompany an emotion he did not expect to feel again. This is the first volume to be edited not by the diarist himself but his literary executor, the friend in question.
But it deals with much else besides love and its difficulties. He writes the biography of his friend Harold Nicolson, sometimes in the process worsting his publisher, the formidable Norah Smallwood of Chatto & Windus. With Derek Hill (but without an importunate Bruce Chatwin) he twice visits Mount Athos, recording the delights and discomforts of a spiritual journey to the Holy Mountain. Both the man and his period are irresistably present in these pages, as one minute he is exasperated by Labour's 'winter of discontent', or predicts incineration by Soviet attack, and in the next recreates the values and friendships of an earlier, gentler age.

Also available by James Lees-Milne, new in paperback: "A Mingled Measure: Diaries, 1953-1972" (ISBN: 0719556090) 22.95 and "Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973-1974" (ISBN: 0719562007) 22.95.