Product Description

The first two volumes of Alan Clark's were irresistible, irreverent, infamous, outrageous. This last volume is a fitting finale to the work of a man who has been described as 'the best diarist of his century'. The third volume begins in 1991 with Alan Clark contemplating quitting as an MP. Life at Saltwood Castle, his home, hangs heavy; then comes the Scott inquiry and the Matrix Churchill affair. Publication of the first volume of the Diaries leads 'the coven', a family of former girlfriends, to sell their story to the NEWS OF THE WORLD. This volume follows his attempts to return to Westminster, an affair that threatens his marriage, and closes with the tragedy of his final months when he is diagnosed with a brain tumour, but keeps his diary until he can no longer focus on the page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1236242 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 420 pages

Review
This had a press date of 31 July. Jane did an extremely good event at the Winchester Festival with Ion on 10 July and she will also be attending the Folkestone Festival on 24 September. Ion did an interview with one of his local papers THE LYNN NEWS and the EASTERN DAILY PRESS have also said they will do apiece on the book. Ion has also done interviews with BBC RADIO WALES and KLFM. Reviews have been good: 'It's worth reading just for the pleasure of once more being in the company of this strange but mesmerising man.'MAIL ON SUNDAY'Much of the diary is taken up with Al's decision to leave the Commons in 1992, the publication of his earlier diaries and then his return to politics in1997. But Ion Trewin, the editor, has done a terrific job balancing this - it occasionally seems like ancient history - with Al's other concerns, domestic, motoring, romantic and, ultimately, medical as he faces his death with peevish courage'THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 'These journals cover Alan Clark's politicalcomeback as MP for Kensington and Chelsea five years after his retirement in1992 and end with a touching diary of his last illness by his wife Jane.'SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'this chronic hypochondriac proved brave and resilent when he became genuinely ill with the brain cancer that killed him'SUNDAY TIMES On theTV dramatisation of the diaries, John Hurt is being hotly tipped to play Alan Clarke. This will go out on BBC 4 first (most likely November) and then BBC2

About the Author
Alan Clark, educated at Eton and Oxford, read for the Bar but did not practise. Tory MP for Plymouth Sutton 1972-1992; Kensington and Chelsea, 1997-99. Various junior ministerial appointments in the Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments of the 1980s. Best-known for his Diaries (three vols) which The Times placed in the Samuel Pepys class. They were filmed by teh BBC with John Hurt as Clark and Jenny Agutter as Jane Clark. Alan Clark died in 1999. Ion Trewin is a London publisher. Originally a journalist, he was Literary Editor of The Times 1972-79. He was Alan Clark's editor and publisher for the original 'Diaries' and following his death edited two further volumes of the celebrated diaries. In 2008 he edited and introduced THE HUGO YOUNG PAPERS: Thirty Years of British Politics Off the Record (Allen Lane) which won the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year Award 2009. Married with a son who is a literary agent and a daughter who is a teacher, he has since 2006 been literary director of the Man Booker prizes. He was chairman of the Cheltenham Literature Festival 1996-2007.

Customer Reviews

NIGHT MUST FALL
The first volume of Alan Clark's `Diaries' got him a lot of notice and publicity through their candour about his extra-marital affairs and their liberal use of four-letter words and longer words derived from them. He just lapped up publicity. He looked an utter spiv, and he remained to the end of his days, despite the most expensive English education, despite his brains and sensibility and despite his restless and hunted hyperactivity, an out-and-out vulgarian. He had what passed for ideas in the Conservative party of his time, and the second volume of his journal records what seems to have been for him the most significant event of his thwarted career, the downfall of his revered Margaret Thatcher. When it comes to this third and final volume what seemed to most of us a lot more significant than that, namely the apparent downfall of the Conservative party itself, rates barely a mention. Behind his disgusted and semi-despairing withdrawal from politics, and then the late against-the-odds revival of his career with its attendant illusory hopes and voices of encouragement, he was hearing from early in his seventh decade the sound of scything, until the shades of night, for years mocking and teasing, fell on him with one fast swoop. And that closing sequence is what this book is mainly about, not affairs either public or private.

As regards dalliances, there is only the tail-end (so to speak) of his final fling at the start of this book, his paramour's name disguised this time as `x'. The politics is largely a matter of selection-meetings and House of Commons small talk - as I've said the real tectonic shift (apparently, so far) in British politics represented by the landslide Labour victory in 1997 is passed over in a summary fashion. Clark himself had foreseen it. He even wished for it, seduced in the familiar way with the ambitious notion that the Tory edifice had to be rased in order to be raised again, and that he might be the man of the hour. The hour was already too late and he wasn't the man. His most attractive trait (for me anyway) as a public figure was his iconoclastic tendency to open his big mouth and say what might come into it in a fit of annoyance or just for the sake of seeing what might happen if he said it. At one point he said on the airwaves that the way to deal with insurrection in Ulster was to kill a few hundred people in one night, and that would put paid to the matter for 20 years, let the US or the UN say what they liked. I would not wish to be understood as thinking this opinion attractive in any way: Clark himself quietly refers later to its utter stupidity. However it gives some sort of idea of what made him an appealing figure to many, including those like myself whose opinions had little in common with his, who shared his frustration and disgust with machine politics and with mechanised thoughts and utterances on the part of politicians of any stripe.

To this extent the third volume of his journal would be unlikely to attract much notice, and indeed it is already obtainable at remaindered rates. It is a diary quite simply, not memoirs. However a real writer of real quality would write better than Clark does even under such restrictions. There are very few phrases that are particularly memorable. And there are some clangers too - he uses `passim' in what seems to be the sense of `pace' (sc `with the greatest respect to' or simply `despite'), and he uses it passim, sc repeatedly: the so-called second half of a pentameter has a syllable too many; and `coup royal' does not have a final `e'. What gives this book its fascination is the honest and touching account of a man's dying, recorded first by himself and later by his wife when he could no longer write over the final few days of his transition. In the earlier chapters he passes through the age I am now, and nobody will be surprised to learn that I compared notes to some extent, although I do not inflict the irrelevant details of my own status on readers of this notice. What I do suggest however is that younger purchasers of this book should retain it and reread it when they reach in their own lives the age it records.

As for the man himself, it was hard not to like him from a distance, although I suspect I might have found him a bore at close quarters. He only seemed radical or individualistic in the context of the dreary party he belonged to. His views were pretty run-of-the-mill among those of his economic background - no patience with issues such as education or hospitals, exasperation at maundering sermons on social conditions (I'll go along with him on that), grandiose perceptions about Britain's role, opposition to the European Union as being a `betrayal of our nationhood', a routine fascination with Churchill - I sense nothing much of interest or illumination in any of it. I also have no sympathy whatsoever for his feeble-minded moaning about a tide of scum rising, the law being structured against his like, and `class loathing'. This is just whinging, and not very percipient whinging either. The class loathing actually comes from his own side and the `class' he and his parvenu like don't really belong to. They represent indeed something that can coherently be called a `class', but what he is complaining about doesn't. On the one hand it is a culture of playing the system to obtain benefits; on the other it is a panem-et-circenses culture of football, unhealthy diets and binge-drinking; on neither showing do the participants have any interest in Clark's sidelined and passé class. The `modish sympathisers' may be modish and may indeed be a pain in the neck or elsewhere, but they are not really sympathisers, only a loose coalition of anti-conservatives. What I treasure his memory for is his large and occasionally over-active mouth, and far and away the most entertaining snippet in this book comes when he defends English yobs abroad taking up broken bottles and half-bricks in defence of the honour of the nation's football team and other aspects of our upstanding Britishness against the forces of European darkness represented by the police who try to keep them under control. He was a bit different, but the nation's destiny lost nothing through our failing to turn to him.