Beneath a Waning Moon: Diaries, 1985-1987

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book. Buy all James Lees-Milnes' diaries.
Review: JL-M in top form. In this volume of his diaries the author seems to come out of a several-year funk and returns to a more positive perspective. He's as charming, crankily acerbic, and endearing as ever, still capable of simultaneous intensely personal and detached insights, with superb, eliagic description of the English landscape and life I miss so much. Michael Bloch's editing is unnoticeable (which is the best editing of all). Having known some of the people mentioned in his diaries it's fun to add my own footnotes to MB's often delicately reticent ones. For example, the term "close friend of" in the footnotes often really means "lover" or "mistress." MB no doubt has omitted many of JL-M's more indelicate entries, perhaps because the editor still wants to be able to sit at certain dinner tables without endangering his life. Oh, how I wish that more of the people in JL-M's diaries were unlikely to be offended by seeing in print what everybody already knows anyway, or least were unlikely to go to law, so that MB could give us the "Unexpurgated JL-M Diaries." Now, that would be truly fun to read!