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Sat 10 Oct 2009A diarist of discrimination
DIARIES: ROBERT O'BYRNEreviews James Lees-Milne: The LifeBy Michael Bloch, John Murray, 400pp. £25
STAYING AT Birr Castle, in May 1948, James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary, “I do not like Ireland . . . The Irish are all eyes and nothing else. No compassion and I doubt whether there is any love, except for the dead. Much hate for the living”. These sentiments, and others he would later express during the years the IRA was engaged in a bombing campaign in Britain (when on one occasion he proposed the repatriation of every Irish citizen), are unlikely to have endeared Lees-Milne to this country, even though he acknowledged that his dislike was “almost intuitive, certainly temperamental and racial”.
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