The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

founded to sell garlic presses on the grounds not just that they were ridiculous but – worse than that – pathetic, she is emphatic at every turn. ‘As I understand it,’ she started her introduction to the book, ‘summer cooking means the extraction of maximum enjoyment out of the produce which grows in the summer season and is appropriate to it.’ She could have stopped right there, the point made.

      You never had to wait long for an opinion. The journalist Katherine Whitehorn once asked her how she felt about those who might not have time to bake all their own bread, as she said they should. What, for example, about women who were at work all day? ‘That’s their problem,’ was the reply. David’s independent spirit was fiery. That first affair in the thirties, the flirtation with artistic Paris and some wild and bohemian corners of Europe, were the clue to someone who was going to go her own way, especially if she was told not to. Maybe it was always likely that she’d suffer in turn, and she did, much later being left by a long-time companion for another woman, and falling out with those who ran her shops and continued trading under her name after she’d severed all ties. Her last years – she died in 1992 – had their difficulties. Life was always a swirl of action and passion.

      David was born in 1913 and her great escape began in her teens, after the unexpected death of her father, a Conservative MP. Her mother wanted to encourage her interest in painting and she was sent to the Sorbonne, then to Germany just before Hitler came to power, before coming back and going through the rituals that had always been expected of her: the debutante balls and a formal introduction into society. But she had already tasted something else, and was in Greece almost before anyone noticed. When she came home, the war was over, but food was still rationed. And maybe it was the austerity itself that egged her on. ‘With whatever I could find, I cooked like one possessed.’

      The consequence was books that made a case for food as a pillar of civilization, without which everything might shrivel and die. At the start of French Provincial Cooking David said that any man or woman capable of cooking a good English roast was a good enough cook to produce something more imaginative. ‘If a dish does not turn out to be quite as it was at the remembered auberge in Normandy, or at the restaurant on the banks of the Loire, is this a matter for despair? Because it is different, as by force of circumstance it must be, it is not necessarily worse.’

      And so she tried to lift everyone up. There were other cooks of her time who played big parts too: Marguerite Patten maybe prime among them, who’d emerged from the Ministry of Food in the war to try to crack the problem of the rationed kitchen and inspired many cooks. The first television equivalent was Fanny Cradock, with her ubiquitous and put-upon husband Johnnie, who rushed from oven to table and back again, turning the kitchen into a place of well-meaning frenzy. But the real legacy of Elizabeth David came later, when Delia Smith decided that it was time to write a book for another lost generation, went on television, and sold millions of copies of her Complete Cookery Course.

      There was none of David’s tales of savage Provence, or whole-sheep-stuffing from the Greek islands, and Delia was a classless cook to Elizabeth’s grande dame. But they were at the same game: reminding people, encouraged to turn bland by fashion and advertising and the marketing of the unimaginative, that there was pleasure to be had in the kitchen. When David was made OBE at Buckingham Palace in 1976, she reported afterwards that when she said she wrote cookery books, the monarch replied simply, ‘How useful.’ Nothing about savage melancholy, nor the passion of a fig, nor the joys of a long day at the pot. But, through it all, Elizabeth David did want to be useful too.

Graham Greene

      Graham Greene’s game was danger. As a novelist he played with characters who were always throwing the dice and gambling with their moral fate. He was a spy, he said he’d played Russian roulette with a loaded gun (though hardly anyone knew whether to believe him), he was fascinated by treachery and claimed kinship with the betrayers, he toyed with women and religion.

      But, through it all, the spine of his life was a high seriousness about writing. When he started to call some of his books ‘entertainments’ he was having fun with people again, for stories like Our Man in Havana didn’t abandon that interest in loyalty and deceit, guilt and shame. This was his territory, a place he made his own, where anxious people dealt with a world beyond their understanding, grappling for handholds and never finding it easy. W.H. Auden spoke of things being Graham Greenish and everyone knew what colour that was. Dark, menacing, strangely inviting. From the thirties on, his output had been growing – novels, film criticism, essays, film scripts – and his lugubrious, rangy, world-weary figure, wreathed in smoke, seemed to beckon his readers to a place that might be dangerous and treacherous, but was somehow familiar.

      By the time he published The End of the Affair in 1951 Greene was established at the top of the tree. Three characters, above all, had put him there: Pinkie the teenage gangster in Brighton Rock, the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory and Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, who were all in some way caught between their instincts and their obligations, and tortured as a result. He could produce moral terror in the blink of an eye, and by the fifties it seemed that he was the contemporary novelist who had the most sensitive, fingertip feel for the confusions and the alarms of the time.

      ‘Greene-land’ – a label that irritated him – was a place where people were alone, bewildered by the dilemmas forced on them by the world and haunted by their inability to reconcile that pain with their sense of something beyond: the divine, or at least the unchanging. Greene always preferred to be called a novelist who was a Catholic rather than a Catholic novelist, but his conversion in the twenties was the event that shaped him as a writer. He called himself an intellectual but not an emotional Catholic, and you don’t have to read much of his fiction to start to understand the tension.

      By the end of his life he was calling himself a ‘Catholic atheist’, and left even his friends to wonder where his journey had taken him. They did know that by the fifties he had staked out territory that he controlled, in which the lies and betrayals of daily life – about love, or country, or personal pride – were played out on a wider, dark stage, where you could never be sure what was waiting in the wings.

      Naturally this irritated some people. When George Orwell reviewed The End of the Affair (based on one of Greene’s own liaisons) he expressed the frustration of someone who found the possible intervention of divine judgment a distraction from the much more important business of human decency. He wrote in the New Yorker: ‘He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.’

      It definitely had a dark allure for Greene, whose characters so often flirted with whatever went on in that nightclub or were drawn to it by some urge that they couldn’t understand. The main character in his first book, The Man Within, is a hunted man, and right through to his later fiction – think of the spy novel The Human Factor, published in the late seventies – he was preoccupied with the figure pursued across the landscape by demons, some of them invisible and some of them deep inside and all too familiar.

      There was another reason for his popularity, of course. He knew how to tell a story, how to play with tension – above all, how to hook a reader. The first sentence of Brighton Rock ensures that you’re bound to read on: ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton for three hours, that they meant to murder him.’ His screenplay for Orson Welles in The Third Man showed that he understood exactly how film too could tell a story: every piece falls into place, the rhythm never falters. It’s classic Greene: a man seeks justice for a friend, killed in the dark streets of post-war Vienna, only to discover that he has faked his death to escape from the consequences of his own crimes.

      For Greene the fifties began with The End of the Affair and ended with Our Man in Havana and A Burnt-out Case. All three were about weakness and deceit. And in between came one of his greatest novels, The Quiet American. He’d worked in Indo-China as a journalist, and the story of Pyle, the American of the title, foreshadowed