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COPYRIGHT 2008 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
TRYING TO PLEASE
by John Julius Norwich
Dovecot Press, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 384, ISBN 9781904349587
6 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655
In 1957 John Julius Cooper (later Norwich) was keeping open house in Beirut, 'the Clapham Junction of the world's air routes'. Guests were given dinner on the terrace, where the Coopers liked to watch their faces 'as, promptly at ten minutes past nine, an immense, luminous grapefruit appeared from behind Sannine and climbed slowly up into the eastern sky'.
JJ's passions--for history, for Venice, for music--have always been enlivened by a sense of theatre: his books are erudite and entertaining. His mother, Lady Diana, took to the stage at the age of 30; she had some of the instincts of a...
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