Jeremy Lewis
Life in the Footnotes
As I Was Going to St Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson
By Simon Courtauld
Michael Russell 192pp £17.50 order from our bookshop
Biographies may be more popular than ever, but finding the right subject is never an easy business. Publishers prefer old favourites, and are reluctant to invest in unfamiliar names; biographers who struggle to earn a living are easily seduced into writing another unnecessary life of Churchill or Conan Doyle. Simon Courtauld has bucked the trend: his subject is one of those characters who flit through the footnotes of the memoirs, lives and letters of his better-known contemporaries, and is almost entirely unremembered by the world at large. An Oxford Professor of Spectroscopy, a war hero and a courageous amateur jockey, Derek Jackson was married to some of the most beautiful women of his generation: whether he can sustain even the briefest of lives – and this is very brief – is open to doubt.
Derek Jackson’s father was a Welsh barrister and an authority on antique silver; he was also the chairman of the News of the World, and because he owned a sizeable chunk of the equity at a time when the circulation was rising from 40,000 a week to 4.4 million, he
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