REVIEW OF THE WEEK: Thatcher, Murdoch, Charles and Jagger... they all 直面する The 酸性の 実験（する）

By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail

Published: 22:00 BST, 8 September 2012 | Updated: 18:03 BST, 10 September 2012

EMINENT ELIZABETHANS by Piers Brendon

Cape, £17.99 ? £15.99 inc p&p

率ing:

< noscript>

風刺漫画 犠牲者s: Margaret Thatcher, Mick Jagger, Rupert Murdoch and Prince Charles all feature in the 調書をとる／予約する

Six months before the end of the First World War, Lytton Strachey published 著名な Victorians: four elegant, witty and at times grossly 不公平な pen-portraits of Victorian heroes. These satirical 強襲，強姦s 大いに upset the 設立 of the time, just as their author had ーするつもりであるd.

‘Lytton’s essays were designed to 土台を崩す the 創立／基礎 on which the age that brought war about had been built,’ 観察するd David Garnett, Strachey’s friend and fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group.

Strachey’s vivid caricatures of Florence Nightingale, 枢機けい／主要な Manning, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon of Khartoum pulled the rug from under the feet of the older 世代. With his magical pen, he retouched philanthropy to make it look like sanctimony, and courage to make it look like vanity.

He introduced lightness and bias into a genre 以前 支配するd by gravity and detachment. For this, he was attacked on all 味方するs, not least for making things up. ‘His 脚s, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been,’ he wrote of the 広大な／多数の／重要な educationalist Dr Arnold, yet, when challenged, he could come up with no proof for this, beyond wishful thinking.

The waspish historian Piers Brendon published his homage to Strachey, 著名な Edwardians, 支援する in 1979. In his introduction to his new 調書をとる／予約する, he 見積（る）s that 1979 was ‘nearly 30 years ago’, which at least shows that, like his 助言者, he is himself no slave to 正確.

Brendon now gives us 著名な Elizabethans, portraits of four grandees of our own age ? Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher and Mick Jagger ? each essay composed in the manner of Strachey, or, as he puts it, ‘遂行する／発効させるd by 酸性の etching rather than pastel shading’.

All the portraits are, first and 真っ先の, wonderfully entertaining. There are three or four juicy 詳細（に述べる）s on every page. I didn’t know, for instance, that as a boy, Rupert Murdoch earned money selling 捕らえる、獲得するs of horse manure and catching ネズミs (‘企業s curiously akin to journalism’, as Brendon points out in one of his many witty asides).

Nor did I know that, after going to bed with Mick Jagger, one groupie had complained, ‘He’s no Mick Jagger’, or that Anthony Blunt once 観察するd that the 王室の Family’s idea of a cultural evening was ‘playing ゴルフ with a piece of coal on the Aubusson carpets’.

Brendon has a jackdaw’s beady 注目する，もくろむ for other people’s gems. He 引用するs Matthew Parris’s description of Mrs Thatcher walking with ‘small steps, like a partridge conscious of 追跡 but unwilling to break into an undignified flap’, and Auberon Waugh 説 Thatcher preached a gospel of ‘救済 through greed’. I also love George Melly’s description of the 会合 between The Rolling 石／投石するs’s first 経営者／支配人, Andrew Loog Oldham, and Mick Jagger: ‘Oldham looked at Jagger as Sylvester looks at Tweety Pie.’

The 調書をとる／予約する abounds with funny stories. We hear this, of one of Murdoch’s henchmen on The New York 地位，任命する: ‘After a snowplough ran over Dunleavy’s foot while he was having sex in a New York alley, a 同僚 発言／述べるd, “I hope it was his 令状ing foot.”?’ It is Dunleavy, incidentally, who （人命などを）奪う，主張するd credit for the 地位，任命する’s famous headline: Headless 団体／死体 in topless 妨げる／法廷，弁護士業.

But, even 許すing for the distortion permitted by caricature, Brendon’s sense of what is fact and what is fiction is いつかs a little too bendy. Was Margaret Thatcher really ‘the 長，指導者 反対する of erotic fantasy in the 武装した 軍隊s during the Falklands War’? Did Princess Diana really run after Prince Charles’s Land Rover shrieking ‘Yes, 捨てる me like a piece of garbage. Leave me on my own again. Run off and have lunch with your precious Mummy’?

Many, although far from all, of Brendon’s more outlandish （人命などを）奪う，主張するs come with 言及／関連 numbers, so that one can look up his source 構成要素 in the 支援する of? the 調書をとる／予約する. But いつかs we would be better not knowing. It turns out, for instance, that he took his story about Princess Diana from a 調書をとる／予約する by the absurd Lady Colin Campbell, which is a bit like relying on an Ugly Sister for a story about Cinderella.

Two pages on, Brendon （人命などを）奪う，主張するs that Prince Charles once 叫び声をあげるd, ‘How dare you talk to me like that? Do you realise who I am?’ at Princess Diana. In small type at the 支援する of the 調書をとる／予約する, the source is 名簿（に載せる）／表（にあげる）d as ? wait for it ? ‘News Of The World’.

One of the 落し穴s in 令状ing short portraits of four such famous 人物／姿／数字s is that their Greatest 攻撃する，衝突するs will already be 井戸／弁護士席-known to most readers. This means, for instance, that for Thatcher we are 強いるd to hear all the old 基準s ? may we bring harmony, no such thing as society, the lady’s not for turning, etc, etc ? that must already be familiar to anyone even remotely 利益／興味d? in politics.

?にもかかわらず, with his talent for sprightly phrases (‘争い was the medium of her 存在, her Salamander’s 解雇する／砲火／射撃’) Brendon 一般に manages to 注入する fresh life into tired tunes, even if his 結論, that ‘Thatcher’s most 著名な 業績／成就 was to divide the nation against itself’, remains old hat, and only half-true: Brit ain was hardly Camberwick Green under ヒース／荒れ地 or Callaghan.

A major difference between 著名な Victorians and 著名な Elizabethans is that Strachey’s four Victorians were still 反対するs of veneration when the 調書をとる／予約する was published, 反して Brendon’s four Elizabethans have already been roundly vilified by every Tom, 刑事 and Harry.

Might he have been better off 選ぶing いっそう少なく obvious 的s? It has long been Open Day on Mick Jagger and Prince Charles but, thanks to their premature deaths, John Lennon and Princess Diana remain sacred cows.

No sane person will be able to read 著名な Elizabethans without flinging up his 手渡すs in horror every few pages. That is the point of a 調書をとる／予約する like this. Unfairness, contradiction and inconsistency are all part of the fun.

So one shouldn’t get too upset when Brendon 令状s of Prince Charles on one page that ‘No Prince of むちの跡s 充てるd himself more assiduously to good 作品’ and on another that ‘his philanthropic endeavours were patently ham-握りこぶしd. They were a messy 広範囲にわたる of crumbs from the rich man’s （米）棚上げする／（英）提議する’.

But ? and here I go, 落ちるing into his 罠（にかける） ? I feel that his essay on Mick Jagger 欠如（する）s a degree not of empathy, because that’s 明確に not on the menu, but of understanding. He portrays Jagger as a former 過激な who, over the course of time, became a 資本主義者 実業家 and ‘a しっかり掴むing social 登山者’.

But this is to 誇張する both the Before and the After. Without Jagger’s entrepreneurial 技術s, The Rolling 石／投石するs would nowadays be doomed to play on Sixties 復活 小旅行するs と一緒に The Troggs and The 捜査員s. And which 十代の少年少女 at the LSE in the 早期に Sixties didn’t live in a filthy flat and rant on about 革命?

激しく揺する music seems to be the one area in which Brendon is out of his depth. He misquotes Little Richard’s Awopbopaloobop as ‘awopaloobop’: this might seem niggling, but it 示唆するs that he doesn’t have the song in his 長，率いる. 取引，協定ing with Jagger, his トン becomes bluff and headmasterly: Jagger’s lyrics are, he says, ‘incoherent at best’ although his 単独の albums are ‘not without 長所’.

Earlier, he 令状s pithily of Murdoch that ‘he professed prudery but peddled prurience’. But look who’s talking! 令状ing of Jagger, he priggishly 非難するs him as ‘a raddled roue 追求するing girls young enough to be his grandchildren’, yet he still can’t resist 推測するing about the size of Jagger’s penis, or the number of his conquests, or 正確に／まさに what he got up to in bed with Marianne Faithfull. The historian and the 激しく揺する 星／主役にする: which of us would elect to be the former if we had a chance to be the latter?

CARTOON VICTIMS: Clockwise from 最高の，を越す left, former 総理大臣 Margaret Thatcher, Rolling 石／投石する Mick Jagger, マスコミ mogul Rupert Murdoch and Prince Charles