Spy chief who kept a bear in his London flat
M: MAXWELL KNIGHT (Preface £20) AS FAR as young naturalists in the Fifties were concerned, Maxwell Knight was the author of books such as Tortoises And how To Keep Them and — for those made of more ambitious stuff — how To Keep A Gorilla.
But Knight was a man with a secret — from 1931 to 1961, he was in charge of running his own section in MI5. he was the original M, spending his working hours ‘identifying, recruiting and running undercover agents’.
After a day spent spying, Knight would return to a flat overrun with exotic wildlife — a bushbaby, a himalayan monkey, even a brown bear called Bessie.
he was married three times, though none of his marriages appears to have been consummated — at night, he’d sneak out of his bedroom and go fishing, giving rise to rumours he was a werewolf.
one of the things that makes this such a rewarding read is the way in which henry hemming teases out common strands between the spymaster and the naturalist. Both required forensic powers of observation and an enormous amount of patience. As Knight himself once said, at its purest, ‘spying is watching’.
ANTHONY POWELL by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton £25)
ANTHONY POWELL’S A Dance To The Music of Time is regarded by many as one of the funniest — and most brilliantly characterised — sequences of novels ever written.
A sprawling 12-volume epic set in British upperclass and bohemian circles over the first twothirds of the 20th century, its publication finally brought Powell the acclaim he had always desperately sought.
It’s often assumed that he was as well-heeled as many of his characters. But, as hilary Spurling reveals in this sympathetic, racily enjoyable account of Powell’s life, the truth was a lot more complicated.
his father was a hot-tempered Army officer, an
incorrigible sponger who always claimed to be broke, but who turned out to have been sitting on a secret fortune all along.
Powell himself was dogged by money problems, as well as insomnia and crippling bouts of depression. Haughty, snobbish and prone to withering put-downs — he once described Graham Greene, one of his close friends, as ‘absurdly overrated’, while evelyn Waugh was dismissed as ‘undernourishing’ — he may not have been the most likeable of men. But for all his faults he did have — as he said of Shakespeare — ‘an extraordinary grasp of what other people were like’.
THE ENIGMA OF KIDSON by Jamie Blackett (Quiller £25)
FOR 30 years, Michael Kidson taught history at eton, where his brilliance and rudeness became the stuff of legend. Pupils who failed to come up to scratch were lambasted in characteristic fashion. One boy was described as ‘a Hebridean cavedweller’, another as ‘about as lively as an inanimate centenarian’. as for former Prime Minister david Cameron’s a-grade in history a-level, that was ‘one of the most inexplicable events in modern history’.
anyone who answered wrongly in class was likely to have a croquet ball hurled at them. yet, far from being hurt or offended, Kidson’s pupils — who included Justin Welby and Jacob Rees-Mogg — adored him.
Written by a former student, this biography does an excellent job of celebrating Kidson’s many idiosyncrasies. as its title suggests, there was a hidden corner of Kidson that nobody got to see.
He never married, but doesn’t seem to have been gay, and had a number of visits from mysterious lady-friends — one of whom, even more mysteriously, once brought him a cuddly toy as a present.
Perhaps she recognised that, behind his gruff exterior, Kidson was essentially a child at heart — which may explain why he was such a good teacher.
THE GOOD BOHEMIAN: THE LETTERS OF IDA JOHN by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd (Bloomsbury £25)
In 1901, at the age of 24, Ida nettleship — beautiful, talented and unconventional — married fellow artist augustus John, who was already being hailed as the most brilliant portrait painter of his generation.
They settled in rural essex, but John began to spend more and more time in london, and soon told Ida he had a lover — a woman called dorelia Mcneill. ever compliant, Ida raised no objection and, for a time, she and John lived with dorelia in a menage a trois.
Slowly, the rackety lifestyle — and Ida’s constant pregnancies (she had five babies in five years) — took its toll.
The tone of her letters — once optimistic — becomes increasingly tinged with anxiety and doubt. ‘How will it end? By death or escape?’ she asks. The answer, alas, was in death. Physically worn out, if still valiantly determined to look on the bright side, Ida died of puerperal fever aged just 30.