"Daily Telegraph" Fifth Book of Obituaries

by Hugh Massingberd

The lives chosen represent a cross-section of 20th-century experience - from the Raj and the courts and chancelleries of Old Europe to the Jet Age and global mass-media. But the shrewd character sketches tend to be of dowagers rather than dictators, boffins rather than bureaucrats, popinjays rather than philosophers. For this is an essentially sympathetic, and frequently hilarious celebration of individual human diversity, with all its flesh and blood foibles and curious sidelights related in the deadpan, delicately ironic style for which the "Telegraph" obit is famous.

Paperback

First published September 8, 2000

Reviews

[Robert Bagnall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only a quarter of a century since most of these obits were published, yet it seems like another era, when Ascendency Ireland meant something to the average reader and you didn’t have to do a preliminary qualification on the structure of aristocracy. More importantly, some of these are simply not that well written. There’s a barrel-scraping feel to the whole thing - and I have two more volumes to go.