People

ONCE, during a short season on the staff of the old North British Hotel in Edinburgh, I took up in the lift such notables as Gene Kelly, Kenneth More, and Sir Arthur Bliss. Quite apart from acquiring a lasting appreciation of the patience of those who have to wait on the public, and a tendency, out of a lingering feeling of solidarity, to tip too much, I have been dining out on my days as a lift boy ever since.

Glamour rubs off on those who find themselves close to it but celebrity is a two-way street. This week in Edinburgh, a tourist in my own home town, shuttling about the place as a consumer of culture, I have again seen this truth at work.

NO THEME has preoccupied post-war British writers more than that of betrayal. It is arguable that Le Carre is our major post-war novelist and the figure of the spy is pervasive in the literature of our time. As in Le Carre’s An Honourable Schoolboy, he is a metaphor for more general infidelities in an age that has seen the rapid loosening of marital and familial ties.

The figure of Kim Philby, in particular, continues to haunt the imagination. His extraordinary career has already been thoroughly documented, by the journalist Phillip Knightley and others, and most people are reasonably familiar with it in outline.

A convinced Marxist, he was recruited as a KGB agent while at Cambridge. He entered the British foreign service in 1941 and was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington from 1949 to 1951. After the defection to Moscow of Burgess and Maclean, his friendship with Burgess led to an investigation. Although nothing could be proved against him he was forced to resign. He went to the Middle East as Observer correspondent until he disappeared from Beirut in 1963, surfacing soon afterwards in Moscow as a KGB major-general and confirming that he had been the ”third man” in the Burgess and Maclean case.

IN the hard world of small farming little goes to waste. Nothing is discarded until it has yielded its full economic potential. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the rocky, largely barren lands of Connemara where in the valleys and on the coast there are fertile patches of hayfields and pasture where cattle graze in drowsy ignorance of falling beef prices.

The hay has been mown; some of the old-timers still laboriously cut reeds which they use to give the stacks a waterproof crown. But most people find it handier to cover them with impermeable plastic coalbags, which they secure with stones suspended on twine. Cars are run in to the ground.