Portraits and Miniatures(83)

(6) What is the greatest wine feast I have ever had? In 1975 I attended a dinner for eight at which seven different bottles were provided. They were, believe it or not, Lafite 1953, Margaux 1929, Cheval Blanc 1934, Lafite 1961, Margaux 1900, Haut Brion 1929 and Haut Brion 1934. The host was, as the Sunday Times would now call him, Lord Victor Rothschild. He had probably acquired most of them for little more than £2 or £3 a bottle, and the replacement cost, while already considerable, would in 1975 have been barely a tenth of what it is today. The then Governor of the Bank of England, who was also present, might have found the bottles a more appreciating addition to his reserves than gold or dollars, let alone sterling.



(7) What is the most spectacular wine present I have ever received? I have two candidates. In 1966 at a Bristol banquet I paid tribute to a great Bristol wine merchant, with whom I had long had dealings. He responded by sending me a single bottle of Lafite 1897. When we drank it about a decade later I managed what with shrinkage and ullage to get from it only about two-thirds of a decanter. It had a strange, haunting taste.

Then in 1979 I sat next to a French minister at a Council of Ministers lunch. His constituency was centred on Libourne in the Gironde. I expressed some interest in certain areas of his domaine, most notably Pomerol. Two weeks later he sent me a case of Pétrus 1970. Two months after that he committed suicide. I do not know what the moral of that is.



(8) What is my best example of a throwaway wine remark? ‘We always drink the bad years frappé with the fish,’ I was once told at Château Lafite, as the unmistakable label with a little 1968 on it was brought in from the refrigerator.



(9) Can you make too much fuss about wine? Yes certainly, in at least three ways. First by believing that if the wine is sufficiently splendid you do not need enough of it. Excessive reverence to about the equivalent of half an egg-cup is no way of enjoying oneself or of entertaining one’s guests. Second, by putting the bottle in horrible and pointless baskets or silver trolleys, a bogus and inconvenient piece of Edwardian vulgarity which has lingered on. Third, if you get too excited about what wine you drink with what food. I have always found red wine perfectly good with chicken, or with sole or halibut or turbot.



(10) What is the most meaningless wine question? To my mind it makes no more sense to ask what is your favourite wine than to ask what is your favourite thread in a great tapestry that dominates a room, or to suggest that if you like a book you ought to go on reading it over and over again to the exclusion of all others. The occasional drinking of great wines needs a background of ordinary everyday drinking against which to stand out, and even amongst the stars it is the comparison with their peers that provides half the enjoyment.





Should Politicians Know History?



This essay is based on a talk given in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, in June 1988.





The Question to which I address myself today is whether or not a lively awareness of history is going the way of a classical education and becoming a discarded attribute for the leaders of the Western world? And second, if it is does it matter? And third, are there any great differences in this respect between the main states of the Atlantic basin?

First, has there in fact been a significant and secular decline in historical knowledge and interest? Cromwell said when laying down a prescription for the education of his third son Richard: ‘I would have him learn a little history’; and it has been written of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries that compared with modern statesmen ‘they thought more about the future and knew more about the past’. But I am by no means sure how consistent was the historical erudition of nineteenth-century Presidents or Prime Ministers. I would not put Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -or indeed Andrew Johnson in the 1860s - very high in this respect, less so indeed than Lyndon Johnson a hundred years later, even though he would not be thought of as one of the most sophisticated intellectuals amongst American Presidents. British mid-nineteenth-century Prime Ministers were probably somewhat more informed, although I do not think that the historical knowledge of the Duke of Wellington or of Lord Grey or even of William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, was very meticulous.

What is certainly the case, however, is that for nearly twenty-five years from 1940 British governments were led by a series of men whose minds were to an exceptional extent moulded, refreshed and stimulated by their historical knowledge. Churchill (1940-5 and 1951-5) was of course the outstanding example. Although he had no formal training, he wrote history with a verve unequalled by any other British statesman and with a professionalism that could be rivalled in this category only by John Morley or James Bryce. Beyond that, his imagination was constantly seized by the tides of historical events and an epic view of how great men could divert them. He was undoubtedly much motivated by an awareness of his own historical destiny.