{"id":11544,"date":"2008-10-17T15:35:19","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T19:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/10\/17\/11544.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:49:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:49:20","slug":"book-report-the-perfect-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/10\/17\/book-report-the-perfect-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Perfect Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gentle Readers will by now be aware that Harold Nicolson is my guy. Y’all may be sick of the Nicolson clan. Let me see if I can count up how many books I’ve read by the family. There’s Harold Nicolson’s book on Diplomacy<\/cite>, his biography of Lord Carnock (his father), Some People<\/cite>, two volumes of his collected diaries and letters, and at least one collection of his Spectator columns. There’s his wife, Vita Sackville-West, and the collection of their letters to each other, which is one of my favorite things in the world<\/a>. I’ve also read her novel The Edwardians<\/a>; I’ve never read any significant amount of her poetry. I think I’ve read some of her letters to Virginia Woolf, but I may be making that up.
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I have also read her autobiographical fragment that their son Nigel Nicolson published in Portrait of a Marriage<\/cite>; I can count that for both of them. I’ve also read Nigel’s memoir, Long Life<\/i>.
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In the third generation, I’ve read Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries<\/a> and Sieze the Fire<\/a>. And now Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer<\/a>, which is about Britain in 1911. Both of these third-generation Nicolsons write history that Harold would recognize: sloppy, personal, vivid, with more emphasis on the imaginative insight of the author than on rigorous quantitative analysis. There’s a comment (perhaps in James Lees-Milne’s two-volume biography of Harold Nicolson, which I have also read) that Harold Nicolson’s preferred method of writing non-fiction was to immerse himself utterly in the subject matter until he felt he thoroughly understood it, making massive amounts of notes and building up a formidable library, and then, when he sat down to do the actual writing, working from the notes and books as little as possible. That’s a terrible method for getting things right, and in fact there are enough inaccuracies in his biographies to discourage the average non-fiction writer from adopting his methods, and a good thing too.
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On the other hand, with a good writer and an interesting subject, what can emerge is something not altogether unlike historical fiction, pleasant to read and educational, personal and opinionated, annoying, inaccurate and attractive. Summer<\/i> is a lot like that (as her brother’s books are). I was irritated by the descriptions of the smell of the flowers and that sort of nonsense. On the other hand, she’s trying to evoke a sort of sympathy between the read and a particular time and place, and perhaps that sort of thing is necessary, or at least useful, even if it isn’t provable or rigorous.
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Oh, and there are lots of chatty and catty anecdotes, too. So that’s all right.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger ends up happy to have read it, which I wouldn’t have expected after the first ten pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18542,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11544\/revisions\/18542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}