There are few good stories that don’t have a secret somewhere. In this book the admirable Juliet Nicolson takes the view that women in particular are the repositories for secrets and, ultimately, the channels for their release. I’m not sure this is true. Men have their mysteries too, though these are more often heavily invested in treachery, ruin and disease. Women’s secrets tend to evolve in the domestic and bodily spheres. Things women do not (and then do) speak about here are rape and other abuse, identity, sexuality, abortion, motherhood and, within all of these, the anger and shame that breed in an enforced silence. 

The book is arranged in three sections – My Mother’s Generation (1950–70), My Generation (1970–2000) and My Daughter’s Generation (2000–25) – to show how the different ages have negotiated their secrets. But because the silences of the mother affect the daughter, and so on, the divisions aren’t so much discrete areas as a kind of map in which the adjoining counties share geological features, are crossed by the same rivers and linked by the same roads. Nicolson herself was raised in a family nest built of the broken Victorian taboos that her father – whose own parents were the convention-busting homosexuals Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson – had tried to put back together despite his unsuitability for the task. For her mother, Philippa, ‘secrecy was [her] go-to protection’. Married young to a man who despised her lack of education (her parents had set no store by that kind of thing, for a girl) and found the sex act ‘repugnant’ (see ‘unsuitability’ above), she tried to scrape a little status and self-respect by attaching herself to the shibboleths and priorities of the upper class, which was struggling to re-establish itself after the depredations of the recent war. All this nonsense of fish-knives-bad and titles-good annoyed the young Juliet, who drew away from her mother, an act she now regrets and finds lacking in imagination. But which of us were imaginative teenagers, where our parents were concerned?  

Philippa was a member of the aptly named ‘silent generation’, too young for the war, too old for the Sixties. The fact that its women were good at keeping secrets was, as Nicolson illustrates, put to use by the postwar Security Service, where, by 1992, as many as 40 per