‘I’m sorry for the trouble, but it can’t be helped!” 

This was probably the most common line in emails I received from David Pryce-Jones over the years at National Review. It was in reference to his Corner blog posts. He wasn’t able to post them directly, you see, and he felt bad about asking editors to get them up. “My wife has a nickname for me,” he explained in his mellifluous Old Etonian accent the first time we met: “Techno No-Go.”  

In reality, the “trouble” was anything but. David, a longtime senior editor of NR who passed away last month, was a joy to read and edit. If anything, he would leave you wishing he wrote more, but his judgment about what merited his pen was discerning. He once poked a hole in the balloon of hype surrounding a fat anthology by the late Christopher Hitchens. For a writer of Hitchens’s contrarian reputation, he dared to venture, weren’t many of these pieces a bit pedestrian, even unnecessary? “It seems out of character to be reading encomiums to historic figures who don’t need it,” he wrote.  

That attitude helped explain David’s own output, which to an uninitiated eye might appear ever so slightly eccentric. There was never a perfunctory homage to Edmund Burke or a slapdash review of the latest warmed-over Reagan-Thatcher book. (There was nothing perfunctory or slapdash in anything David wrote.) Those subjects, he seemed to think, didn’t need his attention.  

Instead, David focused his writing on fascinating topics that he felt had not gotten their due. To consider only the long-form work, David’s books included a prescient volume on the Arab world’s politics and culture written at the end of the Cold War; a biography of Unity Mitford, one of 1930s Britain’s most notorious Nazi enthusiasts; and an investigative, interview-driven study of the Soviet Union’s surprising — and surprisingly bloodless — collapse, written as the geopolitical dust was only just settling.  

But the most fascinating subject in all of David’s writing, one could argue, was his own life and family history. For those readers who haven’t yet taken up David’s memoir Fault Lines, all I can say is that you’re in for a wonderful read. David’s portrait of parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts — particularly the Austrian Jewish aristocrats on his mother’s side whose lives were inextricably bound up in Europe’s collapse in the world wars — reads like a nonfiction version of a Joseph Roth (the subject of David’s last-ever NR piece) or Thomas Mann novel.  

Fault Lines is worth reading for the anecdotes alone. Take just those concerning writers, of whom the family saw many thanks to David’s father’s role as editor of the Times Literary Supplement. On one page, we encounter his mother trapped with a pervy H. G. Wells on a rowboat, stoically throwing the author’s galleys into the water after warning him to keep his hands off her. On another, his father is making ham-fisted compliments to T. S. Eliot as young David looks on, with Old Possum having none of it. Tidbits like these pepper the work and leave the reader in awe that one family could have been so connected to so many persons of consequence in the 20th century. 

And then there were the magnificent essays, which are too rich a body of work to be explored in detail here. All I will say is that everyone seems to have a favorite. Jack Fowler, in his own moving remembrance, picked the arresting account of David’s family’s decades-long quest to recover a painting stolen from them by the Nazis.  

My own pick is David’s obituary of Eric Hobsbawm, the prolific Marxist British historian and unrepentant Stalin apologist. Too intelligent to be dismissed as a mere useful idiot, Hobsbawm was something more nefarious. David let him know that in person, as he recalls in the essay: 

London being what it is, I could not help running into him. At a dinner to which we were both invited, he first glorified Castro’s Cuba to another guest, the British ambassador there at the time, and then went on to say that a nuclear bomb ought to be dropped on Israel, because it was better to kill 5 million Jews now than 200 million innocent people in a world war later. The last person who had reduced genocide to mathematics was Joseph Goebbels, I replied, whereupon Hobsbawm got up from the meal and left the house.

(Another recommendation: Once you’ve read David’s piece on “Eric the Red,” pair it with his remembrance of his good friend Robert Conquest, who did more than anyone to make known in the West the extent of Stalin’s brutality.) 

David’s last book was Signatures, a collection of short essays about the many famous friends and acquaintances who’d inscribed books to him. I thought of Signatures as I picked up my copy of Fault Lines on hearing of David’s passing, opening the cover to see scrawled on the title page in blue ink: 

To Nat,  

With every good wish . . .

NR has lost one of its greatest-ever writers. R.I.P.