David Pryce-Jones weaves a vivid life story through vignettes of the many famous authors—friends, acquaintances, interview subjects—who gave him personally inscribed books. In Signatures he offers a window onto the lives and work of these extraordinary people.
As a child, Pryce-Jones spent time at Isaiah Berlin's house. As a teenager, lunching with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, he prompted an outburst about Parisian anti-Semitism. W. H. Auden found him at Oxford to praise his competition poem, and he later visited Auden in his loft studio in Austria. Svetlana Alliluyeva reminisced about her father, Joseph Stalin, while staying at the Pryce-Jones house in Wales.
A highbrow salon gathered in the home of Arthur Koestler, who strove to be an English gentleman and who was with Pryce-Jones in Reykjavik covering the Fischer-Spassky chess match. Saul Bellow spoke of an old friend, now a capo famiglia, promising to deal with student rioters in 1968 Chicago. After swapping houses with Pryce-Jones one summer, Jessica Mitford insisted that he would have been a Communist in the 1930s. Robert Graves challenged a quotation from Virgil, and told the Queen that she was a descendant of Muhammad.
We meet V. S. Naipaul, a free spirit who understood that "the world is what it is." Muriel Spark would come round for lunch with the Pryce-Joneses in Florence, enjoying conspiratorial stories about Italian politics. At his sepulchral home in Heidelberg, Albert Speer demonstrated his way of "admitting a little to deny a great deal." In Isaac Singer we see generosity, candor, and mischievous humor.This is only a small sampling of the remarkable personalities who have left their signatures on a fascinating life.
Industry Reviews
"Vivid sketches from a master of a vanished age, set in the brightest lights and darkest shadows of the twentieth century." -Peter Stothard, author of Alexandria and The Last Assassin
"This is an extraordinary work, unlike any other I can think of. Prompted by the books in his library, with their many personal associations, David Pryce-Jones considers a huge range of writers he has known. They include some of the most distinguished of the twentieth century: poets, novelists, critics, historians - plus Hitler's sculptor and Stalin's daughter. Some will say that Pryce-Jones has been a lucky man, leading a charmed life. But luck itself does not supply the sharp eye, fine memory, delicious humour and strong moral judgement that make this such a memorable book." -Noel Malcolm, Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford
"In the course of his long life David Pryce-Jones has dined at many an exotic table and lingered in many a high-powered drawing room. Signatures is an ingenious amalgam of personal reminiscence and literary criticism. I was gripped from beginning to end." -D.J. Taylor
"Students of history, book lovers and conoisseurs of literary gossip have such a treat in store with David Pryce-Jones's 'Signatures'. It was bibliophilic cat-nip for me. I envy everyone now getting to read this funny, moving, unforgettable book for the first time." -Douglas Murray, Bestselling author of The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds.
