Saturday, July 31, 2010

A sighting of Moura Budberg

Nick Clegg's scandalous great great aunt gets a mention into today's Guardian.

In review of his review of Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family by Jeremy Lewis, Ian Thomson writes:
Of [Graham] Greene's female cousins, Barbara Greene emerges as the most intriguing. Berkhamsted-educated, she was friendly with Baroness Moura Budberg, a Russo-Estonian exile living in London (and mistress, among others, of HG Wells).
Another interesting character is Raymond Greene, one of Graham's elder brothers. Thomson claims that he conquered Everest in 1933, which would have been news to Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tenzing.

But Stefan Collini, reviewing the same book in the London Review of Books, may be on firmer ground when he quotes Lewis as saying of Raymond:
he enjoyed obstetrics and, years later, took a retrospective pride in having delivered Antonia Fraser.

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