England before the fall …

… ‘Signatures’ Review: In His Good Books - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 “Signatures” offers 90 portraits, some as brief as a single paragraph, a few as extensive as six pages, of notable men and women, most of them from the England before the fall. Among them are portraits of W.H. Auden, Sybille Bedford, John Betjeman, Robert Conquest, Aldous Huxley and Muriel Spark. Those born elsewhere who shored up in England and whom Mr. Pryce-Jones writes about here include Svetlana Alliluyeva, Elie Kedourie, Arthur Koestler, Walter Laqueur and George Weidenfeld. There are also portraits of various lengths of Saul Bellow, Bernard Berenson, Milovan Djilas, Ernst Jünger, Iris Origo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Albert Speer and others. All are immensely readable.