UNLIKELY AS IT seems, senior Tories pondering the problem of how to revive their party's fortunes in the great industrial cities and Celtic outlands could do worse than to read this book about the poet-painter David Jones. His story shows how one individual Briton in the twentieth century was able to re-imagine British history in ways which are culturally diverse and demotic, yet profoundly patriotic and conservative. How many radical artists, I wonder, can be said to have ahred Nevllle Chamberlain?

Jones might be classhed as a modernist, the combination of right-wing politics and revolutionary art being a common modernist trait; but, despite a passing interest in Mein Kampf he rejected the Fuhrer claptrap which did for Pound and Wyndham Lewis, at the same time slurting the nostalgia whlch swallowed his