A lost world of perfect diction

I can’t claim to be the greatest fan of the novels of Virginia Woolf – though they have their moments – but I found A Night’s Darkness, A Day’s Sail, a 1970 documentary about her life and work, utterly compelling, not least because of the extraordinary array of talking heads assembled. Along with archive footage of her husband Leonard Woolf, there are interviews with her nephew Quentin Bell, David Cecil, George Rylands and, most deliciously, the great Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (who claimed Woolf to be a genius, despite her superiority as a writer, in my opinion), all filmed in the shabby chic setting of High Tory postwar Bohemia. Yet something nagged at me throughout; then I realised I didn’t for once need subtitles, as the diction was impeccable. The world we have lost.

Lili Boulanger’s daydreams

The young French coloratura soprano Julie Roset built her already considerable reputation on early music repertoire, so her latest recording comes as something of a revelation. M’a dit Amour, on which Roset is accompanied by the pianist Susan Manoff, is a brilliantly curated collection of 20th-century French chansons, some of which will be familiar, others not. Debussy and Poulenc feature alongside Reynaldo Hahn, but it is the female composers that stand out, especially the tragically short-lived Lili Boulanger, whose ‘Elle était descendue au bas de la prairie’, from her collection Clairières dans le ciel, epitomises the theme, outlined by Roset, of ‘love, deceit, absence, infidelity, daydreams and princesses’. A sensuous soundtrack to summer.

King Juan Carlos: flawed, duplicitous, heroic

Paul Preston, the biographer of Franco and historian of the Spanish Civil War, has turned his attention for the second time to Spain’s King Juan Carlos, the ‘flawed hero’ – very flawed indeed – of Downfall of a King. For, despite the unflinching accounts of the serial adulteries, an addiction to big game hunting, and forced exile in the United Arab Emirates, Preston credits him with a – perhaps the – leading role in Spain’s transition to democracy following the Generalissimo’s death in 1975. Ironically, it is the young Bourbon’s duplicity, which so spectacularly failed him in later life, that allowed him to outwit the dying dictator with his cynical promise to maintain his one-party movimento, while appealing for patience from those eager for a transition to a liberal democracy. Whether that achievement mitigates the buckets of sleaze is for the reader to judge.