By David Pryce-Jones
Criterion Books, £25
You will love this book if you are of a certain age and remember such grandees of yesteryear as Harold Acton, Maurice Bowra, Cyril Connolly and so on through the alphabet. Bernard Berenson and Isaiah Berlin make guest appearances, as do Svetlana Stalin, Somerset Maugham and Greta Garbo. En route, you will encounter wealthy aristocrats aplenty, take up residence with them in grand hotels and country houses across Europe and become accustomed to the sayings and doings of Mitzi, Bubbles, Poppy, Lily, Elie and Cousin Cuckoo, not to mention their manifold maids, butlers, nannies, grooms and chauffeurs.
This is a memoir of a lost age, a kind of cross-national Downton with passing resonances akin to those of Viennese operetta, Schnitzler, Proust, Stefan Zweig and Noel Coward. It is also a portrait of a part-Jewish family with roots in Vienna and Paris attempting to survive Nazism, the war and the Holocaust.
David Pryce-Jones was born in Vienna in 1936. His father was the writer Alan Pryce-Jones, later the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, while his mother Thérèse (known as "Poppy") was the product of the Paris-based banking family the Foulds and the equally affluent and entrepreneurial Viennese Springers. One of Poppy's sisters married a Rothschild and another a top Spanish diplomat (whose daughter Elena is the mother of the actress, Helena Bonham Carter).
As David Pryce-Jones reconstructs the complex back-story of this wealthy, multinational network, he shows it to have straddled a bewildering variety of "fault lines". Was he - were they - Welsh, English, French, Austrian? Part-German perhaps, with a touch of Hungarian? Catholic, Protestant, Jewish - or not really any of these? Poppy would speak to David in French, sometimes in German and also in English; his father Alan was actively both heterosexual and homosexual.
The book explores these many familial fault lines and how they played out over time while, beneath the surface, there lies an often-moving account of the turmoil that followed the outbreak of war.
Some family members and friends were captured and killed. Others fled to what seemed at first the relative safety of southern France and thence, if they were lucky (like young David), on to Spain and Portugal, perhaps via a brief sojourn in North Africa, and finally to Britain.
Here, David went to Eton, did service in the Guards, read History at Oxford and went on to become a versatile writer and conservative political commentator (and a great admirer of Israel).
Fault Lines is at heart a family history with the "bigger picture" mostly relegated to the background. At times, the close-up detail can overwhelm as Pryce-Jones packs his text with names and places and with over-lengthy quotations from letters or diaries. But do persevere. If you can keep an eye on the forest and not be distracted by the trees or dazzled by the leaves, you will find the book an absorbing and sometimes moving story of a family network which, while riven by "faults", has left its positive mark on the history of our times.
