There is a generation of writers who were schooled by the war and the more egalitarian freedoms of its aftermath, and who borrowed intellectual and moral authority from both. A great capacity for friendship helped, and the porosity of an establishment that for the first time allowed state-educated – mostly grammar school – boys and girls a more equal voice with the fee-paying class. Michael Frayn, now 89, was – and is – a shining star in that firmament. This book, a collection of short essays on some of the other fixed points in his constellation, becomes a thoughtful and often moving portrait of a disappearing world in which a generous kind of bookish rigour and worldly wit created fleeting incandescence at the heart of British cultural life.
Frayn did his national service alongside Alan Bennett, studying Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, a cold war initiative to steep the brightest undergraduates in military intelligence (it proved to be a kind of theatrical fame academy – Peter Hall and Dennis Potter were also alumni). The Cambridge branch of that school was presided over by Prof Elizabeth Hill, one of the few women who gets a look in here – the absence, Frayn notes in his introduction, is both circumstantial (he grew up in single-sex schools, and almost entirely male barrack rooms and university colleges and newspaper offices) and mannerly (lovers’ secrets should remain intact). Hill acted as a kind of formidable Slavic matriarch for Frayn’s cohort; she addressed them “Gospoda!” (“gentlemen!”), “coaxing the Russian out of you by the sheer brightness of her eyes”, and they duly grew into the role.
