MAX EGREMONT

Lord Egremont (Christ Church, 1967, Modern History) collects me at a side-entrance to the mighty Petworth House, his family seat – his proper title 7th Baron Leconfield, 2nd Baron Egremont. Petworth is situated in West Sussex within the South Downs National Park, and it’s a warm July day.

From his study, which is magnificently draped in portraiture and red décor, one can see out through regal windows across the tall grass of the estate and there is a pervading silence conducive to thought.

While his father gave the main part of the house to the National Trust in 1947, Max still lives in a part of it, running a considerable estate office in the afternoons, after writing in the mornings: ‘two lives’, he says.

The day we meet is the day the new Labour government publish, via the King’s Speech, their plan to remove all but two of the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but it won’t trouble Lord Egremont.

‘I played no part in the House of Lords. I was only 24 [when my father died, in 1972]. I went there for a bit – but I wanted to write books.’

He is best known as a biographer and novelist and rates as his three favourite books his biographies of Great War poet Siegfried Sassoon and Great War military leader Sir Edward Spears, and his novel Painted Lives – but then says actually he’s fond of all his books.

But to put a structure around his career is to admit Germany, which loomed large and late. ‘I was 40,’ he laughs, looking back, ‘and I went and took a Goethe Institute course to learn the language.’

Having never completely gelled with French history despite being taught French like all British school boys of his generation, he admits to being blown away by German history.

‘I became absolutely obsessed by it!’

There are no blood relatives or ancestral cross-overs, no chance encounters to explain the interest. He just says, he became more and more aware of the massive cultural, musical and philosophical achievements of Germany, and Prussia before it; how extraordinary it was, 'how strange'. The day we meet he has forgone writing that morning to listen to German on the radio and iPlayer, to get his ear back, shortly before giving a lecture in German about the Baltic states.

When the Cold War ended he could access Kaliningrad, both the name of the stranded Russian province or ‘oblast’, and the former Prussian city of Koenigsberg, home city of philosophers Immanual Kant and Johann Herder, and Paul von Hindenburg, the man who led the German army in the Great War. Max went there and the resulting book, Forgotten Land, Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, was published in 2011.

My London Library copy of this volume indicates, via its issuance stamps, that it has gone up in demand since 2020 as the security architecture of Europe has darkened and there is a renewed urgency to actually understand why Russia has this geographically stranded oddity, why Poland to the south has recently ordered a thousand main battle tanks from South Korea. Why history is suddenly lapping at our heels, again.

And then there is the remarkable sequel, Max’s latest book, The Glass Wall, Lives on the Baltic Frontier (2021), where he has almost created his own genre.

‘I don’t really like travel writing so I wanted the book to be written as the lives of those who lived in this region, to be historical.’ Yet he does travel there so the writing is enlivened by guides, by interviews with the living, and with stray encounters that illuminate so much, beginning with a waitress in Riga in the early noughties, asking him sharply, if he wanted Kaffee, her assumption being that he was German.

‘I rather felt that no one really knew much about all this,’ says Max, something of a titanic understatement still, I think. Who in Britain really pays attention to the fact that the Germans ruled the Baltics for hundreds of years, and why should it matter?

He is game enough to admit that the book sold poorly. Yet if you persevere with the sheer weight of names and places, to-ings and fro-ings and snatches of often colourful biography, the cumulative impression is simply shattering.

How contingent individual human lives are on the imponderable mechanics of Great Power relations; how quickly the seemingly entrenched Prussian rulers were thrown over, initially shaken in 1905, then by the Bolsheviks and brief years of independence, then by Stalin, then re-patriated (as they saw it) by the Germans in 1941, except that by then most were living on recently stolen Nazi land of the Warthegau in Poland; then the return of the Soviets.

At the end of history in the 1990s some of these ancestral lands were, astonishingly, returned to the original German families, the cue for Max’s inquiry.

How recently all this happened; the fact that if you walk into an average Estonian church there is barely room on the walls for the multi-national roll call of the dead. The fact that Britain (Churchill!) supported Germany fighting the Bolsheviks even though we had just fought them to the death on the Western Front. The fact that Narva, on the Eastern edge of Estonia staring across a slender river at Russia, is likely one of Putin’s next targets if he does well out of the US Presidential election in Ukraine.

We turn to current affairs because the Republican candidate has the same day named J.B. Vance as his running mate. Neither of us has yet read Vance’s Hillbilly Elegies. When I had walked up to Petworth House earlier, I’d noted a poster for Petworth Ukraine Relief, with its mention of the British Legion. On page 262 of Max’s very fine group study of the Great War Poets, Some Desperate Glory (2014), there is a stray quotation from a Captain James Jack, to the effect that it had been necessary to stop the Kaiser; ‘It was the politicians who had put the nation in danger by ‘neglecting its armaments and the training of personnel wanted to handle them.’’

All this at a moment when Britain is, relatively speaking, undefended; when we appear to be sliding towards other catastrophes.

Max says, ‘Suddenly this reassuring notion that America was always there is broken, —that’s the great change. How we’re going to deal with that, I can’t imagine. The Germans are going to have to change. It’s going to be the greatest challenge of the next decade.’

Max flies the Ukrainian flag from his office complex. ‘We try to help, we must!’

The day after my visit, Trump’s former security adviser John Bolton, on the day when European leaders all met at Blenheim Palace to discuss current affairs, noted that Trump really might withdraw American from NATO. He could, and he might. Then the question for Estonia and Latvia, who joined NATO in 2004 will be infiltrated by the worst ghosts of the recent, barbaric past of European history, neglecting the fact that Ukraine’s 1,600 mile frontline is already soaked in fresh blood.

The 1917 poem 'Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau', by Edmund Blunden, who is behind lines in a training billet, ‘poppies by the million; /Such damask! Such Vermilion!/ But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour/ Is scarcely right; this red should have been much duller.’

Back in 1973, Max took part in a Foreign Office exchange program and worked for pro-Civil Rights Republican Senator Hugh Scott, living in Washington DC. As an undergraduate in 1968, he also recalls taking a Greyhound Bus deal - $99 valid for 99 days, travel as much as you want, and remembering the Anglophilia that still presided in America, plus high levels of anger over England’s ‘occupation’ of Ireland, ‘this was the height of the Troubles…’

But the generation that fought World War Two and understood the American stake in Europe, has now all but passed, Max notes. And it is very difficult to explain to a resident of Ohio why their personal security rests to any degree on the outcome of Ukraine’s existential struggle with Russia.

‘In a curious way,’ suggests Max, ‘the outcome of the American Presidential election has come to mean more for us than for Americans.’

Turning to the future he says his next work may be a novel about a place in Germany where the frontiers have changed a lot – such as Silesia. ‘It is strange, yes!’ But it may yet be non-fiction, he hasn’t decided. Underlying it all is a fascination with identity that he admits is not unconnected with his own dynastic inheritance, which he has worn lightly yet which is there.

Schooled at Eton and then at Christ Church, he remembers Oxford as a happy time but ‘not a golden era.’ For being a Baron, he has a son who will inherit; good. But it is not his identity as such. ‘I’m not very comfortable in it [being at the head of a titled, family dynasty] but I am intrigued by it.’

He says that writing keeps him going and ‘If I don’t do it every day, I almost feel ill.’

On that note we stop for photographs and I take in again the piles of books and multiple desks. A citizen of the Republic of Letters and of Europe, with a lick of grandeur yet all the prosaic hard work that writing entails: I think that another volume on Germany will be just the ticket, as the clock ticks on European security and we are all forced to confront the ghosts of recent pasts.