Signed Copies

David Pryce-Jones had a front-row seat from which to observe postwar Europe’s literary and political upheavals. The well-connected son of the TLS editor Alan Pryce-Jones (1948–59), he was the literary editor of the Spectator and a special correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Signatures, which complements his memoir Fault Lines (2015), is a collection of vignettes of certain authors of significance to the twentieth century who had given him signed copies of their books.

There are some vivid pen portraits here. An ageing Rose Macaulay, “plain, skeleton-boned … dressed as if on her way to an Edwardian feminist rally”, witheringly assesses the young David, who claimed to have read her novel The Towers of Trebizond, only to be quickly found out. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, is affectingly portrayed in later life, baffled as to how she had gone from ranging the vastness of the Kremlin to waiting at a bus station in Bristol for the night coach back to her sheltered housing in Cornwall. “She’s a dumpy, grumpy, feisty old thing”, Pryce-Jones reports in his diary, “not sure how or why things have turned out so”. The aesthete William Anderson, one of many characters in this volume to have walked a sunlit path from private school to Oxford to the world of letters, is also finely drawn. “He once complained to me of pain between the shoulders, in his words ‘the stab in the back that all writers have’.”