Ferdinand Mount
A late and luscious windfall, The Sub- Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue (£18.99), has just been published to mark the 90th birthday of Hubert Butler, Kil- kenny squireen, anecdotal antiquarian, baiter of bishops and the most irresistible essayist of our time. From a farmhouse somewhere in the wilds of Westmeath, the Lilliput Press has already published three volumes of Butler's essays, and Professor Roy Foster's new selection for Allen Lane only whets the appetite for the full trio. Some of the pieces are sad — 'The Eggman and the Fairies' is very sad. Almost all have extremely funny moments. 'The Artuko- vitch File', describing Butler's remorseless tracking down of a Croat war criminal to a Franciscan monastery in Galway, is a thriller. Imagine an impossible combina- tion of Flann O'Brien and Isaiah Berlin. Well, Butler comes close.
Also late, the latest of late Bloomsber- ries, in fact, Hugh and Mirabel Cecil's Clever Hearts (Gollancz, £18.96) is a mar- vellously clear-eyed biography of Des- mond and Molly MacCarthy. Why write a life of people who mostly only talked, some reviewers have grumbled, but it is just because it is not weighed down by solid achievements to record that the book gains its uninsistent charm and leaves the reader with a sense of real lives lived — jerky, planless but kindred.
Previous page
