I have, again, delved into The Assassin’s Cloak: an anthology of the world’s greatest diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor.
11 February, 1938
All the women in the region are excised. ‘This,’ we are told, ‘is to calm their lust and ensure their conjugal fidelity’.
Immediately afterward we are told: ‘You understand: since these women feel nothing, they give themselves to anyone whatever; nothing stops them . . . Oh, of course, they never give themselves for nothing!’
Obviously the two statements seem contradictory. One is forced to admit that if the aim were conjugal fidelity . . . But no (it seems); rather this: keep the wife from making love for pleasure. For money, it’s all right! And the husband congratulates himself on having a (or more than one) wife who produces income.
This is one of the rare points on which all the Frenchmen, when questioned, agree. One among them, who has a great experience of the ‘moussos’ of Guinea, asserts that he has never met a native woman who sought pleasure in the sexual act; he even went so far as to say, not one who knew voluptuous pleasure.
André Gide
11 February, 1975
Everyone agog at the news that Margaret Thatcher has been elected Tory leader with a huge majority. Surely no working man or woman north of the Wash is ever going to vote for her? I fear a lurch to the right by the Tories and a corresponding lurch to the left by Labour.
To Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s reception for the media, at least I suppose that’s what we were. Newspaper editors; television controllers; journalists and commentators; Heath looking like a tanned waxwork; Wilson; MacMillan a revered side-show, an undoubted star; a few actors (Guinness, Ustinov, Finney); and all the chaps like me. – John Tooley, George Christie, Trevor Nunn. And Morecambe and Wise.
It was two and a half hours of tramping round the great reception rooms, eating bits of Lyons pâtė, drinking over-sweet warm white wine, everyone looking at everyone else, and that atmosphere of jocular ruthlessness which characterises the Establishment on its nights out. Wonderful paintings, of course, and I was shown the bullet that killed Nelson.
As we were presented, the Queen asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Duke asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. The Prince of Wales asked me when the National Theatre would open. I said I didn’t know. At least they all knew I was running the National Theatre.
Home by 2 am with very aching feet. Who’d be a courtier?
Peter Hall