Why on earth did Jan Morris, in her long-awaited final testament, devote an entire chapter to the son of a Hungarian refugee who became the royal furrier? Over 70 incomparable years in journalism, the wide-roaming historian covered the trial of Eichmann, the first ascent of Everest, the 1956 Sinai War. So why, in the book she began preparing more than 10 years before her death, in November 2020 at 94, is she holding forth on a “modest, unassertive” man who lived happily with his wife in London for more than half a century?
Well, partly because J. G. Links was perhaps the greatest living authority on the Venetian painter Canaletto, a fashioner of detective stories (with the crime writer Dennis Wheatley), and very possibly a spy. His book Venice for Pleasure sounds like it might have been made for another writer known for her love of both Venice and pleasure. Most of all, Morris writes, her quietly debonair friend was “as kind, merry and generous a person as you could ever hope to meet.” He was, in other words, very much what Jan Morris was and hoped the rest of us might become.
