In a recent post, More Chronicles of War, I mentioned Diana Cooper’s letters to her son, Darling Monster. This week I had lunch with the darling monster, better known as John Julius Norwich.
Viscount Norwich is a sprightly eighty-six year old. He could play Gally Threepwood to perfection. Our lunch was not especially intimate as there were three hundred at the Hurlingham Club to hear him speak, which he did with no notes for about forty-five minutes before answering questions for half an hour. His wife was not with him. They had forty dinner guests that evening after the annual Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize had been awarded. He knew the winner but properly kept it secret. It’s not a secret any longer that Ian Bostridge won with Schubert’s Winter Journey; Anatomy of an Obsession. I bet Ian had a good time at dinner last night. The sponsor’s wine and the Norwichs’ company make an intoxicating combination.
John Julius’s love affair with Venice is well-known. He sat beside one of his co-founders of Venice in Peril at lunch yesterday: Nathalie Brooke. My first visit was in 1972 on another family holiday with my mother, uncle, aunt and cousin. We stayed on the Lido, swam and sunbathed in the mornings and went sightseeing in the afternoons. One evening we crossed the lagoon to see Venice at night. St. Mark’s was in darkness as there was a black and white silent film being screened. It was a Charlie Chaplin film and we stayed to watch. At the end a spotlight illuminated a balcony and a small, elderly man stood up to considerable applause – the only time I ever saw Charlie Chaplin.
I have been back many times. On one occasion, the Prince and Princess of Wales were there on Britannia. There was a party on board at the end of which the band of the Royal Marines performed Beating Retreat on deck. Conveniently there was a bar on the quay where we sat enjoying the show while drinking coffee and brandy. On my last visit we stayed on the Giudecca in a self-catering flat in the Molino Stucky. The views were excellent but, for the first time, I was aware of the cruise ships that now cause so much controversy. Tourism is both a blessing and a curse. On the other side of Italy the villages of the Cinque Terre are trying to reduce visitor numbers to make it habitable for locals.
John Julius’s latest book is Sicily, A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra. It is written with his usual light touch. How can you resist a passage like this?
” – and philosophers such as the great Empedocles of Acragas, who did much valuable work on the transmigration of souls and, having already served a long and tedious apprenticeship as a shrub, suddenly relinquished his mortal clay for higher things one morning in 440 BC, when another branch of scientific enquiry led him too far into the crater of Mount Etna.”
It’s giving me itchy feet to get back to that most beautiful island.
Talking about books, I have a paperback published by Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly; fascinating wartime diaries, particularly relating to her husband and Whitaker was their butler, as I recall.
The ancestral seat of the Knoxes, Earls of Ranfurly, was Northland House, Dungannon, County Tyrone.
I have read it and remember enjoying it. I’ve just spent an hour looking for my copy and it has vanished, as so often happens.