Tom driberg autobiography sample

  • The life of Tom Driberg was an individual British example.
  • Tom Driberg paints an and honest picture of a period that will long continue to fascinate —and perhaps shock some— readers.
  • This biography is full of funny stories about Driberg's often outrageous behaviour which sometimes give it a gossipy flavour that, as a former 'gossip king'.

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    The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg, poet, philanderer, legislator and outlaw – His Life and Indiscretions

    Francis Wheen’s brilliantly comic portrait of one of the 20th-century’s great characters, Tom Driberg: wit, parliamentarian, serial cottager, alleged communist spy and friend to the Kray brothers.

    There are few people for whom marriage was so ill-suited yet well attended: at Tom Driberg’s were cabinet ministers and mobsters, Betjeman and Waugh, but it was Osbert Lancaster who commemorated the sheer extraordinariness of the occasion, and with it celebrated the social life of Driberg, and an era of Englishness now passed into history when the Brideshead generation sang the ‘Red Flag’:

    Friends of yours and friends of mine, Friends we always thought were dead
    Friends who toe the party line, Friends we know are off their head
    Labour friends who’re gratified Girl-friends, boy-friends, friends ambiguous
    At being allowed to kiss the bride. Coloured friends from the Antiguas
    Artist

  • tom driberg autobiography sample

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    It Can Always Get Worse

    Tom Driberg was a journalist who served as a British Member of Parliament (MP) almost continuously from 1942 to 1974, with a small gap from 1955 to 1959. For twenty years before being elected to the House of Commons, Driberg had been a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. After leaving the Communist Party, he joined the Labour Party in 1945. From 1956 to 1968, Driberg was a formally recruited KGB agent. Driberg’s life in general elucidates numerous social and political trends in twentieth-century Britain and the wider West, and his treasonous work for the Soviets fryst vatten an interesting window onto the influence the Soviet Union exerted over sections of the Western Left during the long Cold War.

    Thomas Driberg was born on 22 May 1905 in Sussex, the late-life youngest child of a middle-class family. Driberg’s father, a former civil servant and police chief in India, was 65 at the time of Driberg’s birth. In 1920, Driberg joined the newly founded

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    The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg: Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw

    October 12, 2024
    Tom Driberg is fascinating because he inhabited so many different worlds at once. This book could easily have been called The Lives of Tom Driberg. At Oxford in the 1920s he was part of the dandy aesthete circle which included Brian Howard, Harold Acton and Cyril Connolly: bottle-green suits, raspberry crêpe de chine shirts, poetic gibberish recited through megaphones and young men openly in each other’s embrace. All that kind of thing. At the same time he was a member of the British Communist Party, which he joined when he was fifteen and still at his public school, and being arrested for attempting to distribute pamphlets on their behalf during the General Strike of 1926. In the 1930s, as the original William Hickey, he became a famous gossip columnist for the Daily Express. The militant socialist and Lord Beaverbrook’s staunchly conservative newspaper were strange bedfellows indeed, b