I have finished As I Was Going To St. Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson by Simon Courtauld. Who, you may well ask, is Derek Jackson. Well, he was a brilliant atomic physicist whose field was spectroscopy. During WWII he was in the RAF and worked on the radar system. He actually logged over 1000 flying hours as a navigator so he could test his theories. He rode in the Grand National three times and was independently wealthy thanks to controlling interest in the News of the World. In fact, as a research/lecturer at the Claranden Laboratory Oxford he didn't accept a salary and financed the lab equipment. He got the OBE and many flying decorations. Also got the Legionne of Honour and a bunch of scientific honors. Okay, interesting if you are someone like my husband who loves physics and show-jumped. But why me???

I was trying to find out more about the invisible Mitford, Pamela. It turns out that Jackson was her husband and Courtauld had written a slim biography of him which obviously contained references to the Mitfords. So I found a copy (with difficulty. Apparently there are only seven copies in the US listed in the World Library catalogue. My loan came from West Point.)

Though the author discussed Jackson's scientific achievements, he spent much more time on Jackson's sensational personal life. Jackson was married to Pamela, his second wife, for 15 years. He was also married five more times and slept with most of the interesting young men of the thirties, forties, and fifties. His first wife was Poppet John, Augustus John's daughter. Then on to Pamela. Third wife was Janetta Kee who was great friends with Gerald Brenan and the Partridges. This got Derek into the Bloomsburies and their tangled relationships. He left Janetta for her half-sister whom he did not marry, although he lived with her for three years. Then it was Princess Ratibor zu Hohenlohe Schillingsfurst....heaven knows why....before he hooked up with Barbara Skelton, ex-lover of King Faruk, Peter Quennell, Poppet John (Derek's first wife), ex-wife of Cyril Connelly and of George Weidenfeld of publishing fame. Those of you reading Dance to the Music of Time might be interested to know that Powell used Barbara as the model for Pamela Flitton. Finally, his last wife was a French widow who was always being mistaken for one of his previous wives.

He paid generous alimony to all of his wives, even after some remarried, and he bought them the most fantastic homes which they kept. (Pamela got the Irish stud farm.) Oh, and he was great friends with the Mosleys; Jackson was a fascist in his thinking though a patriot during the war. He moved permanently to France because he couldn't stand the thought of living under a Labor government. He kept his liquid assets in Switzerland and amassed a first rate Impressionist and Expressionest art collection.

He treated the working classes like the dirt on his shoes, always yelling at waiters and clerks. He hated authority and would have been court-martialed for his insubordination in the RAF except for the fact that he was always right and they needed his brains. Coulter tries to minimize his abrasive personaility by passing off, as did his friends, his most offensive character traits. When he constantly sang the Horst-Wessell song, it was just Derek joking. And he wasn't really antisemitic, even though he told brutal antisemitic jokes in the presence of Jews. He counted the wealth of an individual as more important than character. He disliked the royal family, condemning them as middle-class, but enjoyed hob-nobbing with the Windsors and the Mosleys after the war.

Jackson was brilliant and had the money to indulge his passion for physics. His professional career deserved all the honours and accolades he received. As a man, he was entitled, arrogant, and generous to a select few. What a fascinating and unlikeable individual he was.

(Just to add, this is not a tell-all biography. It is strictly the facts with very little conjecture on the author's part. He may mention a threesome with Francis Bacon and Anne Dunn because other memoirs mention it, but Courtauld does not go into any details. No titillating descriptions or purple prose). ( )