The Magician, by Colm

a hospital. Mary accompanied her parents to London, first to a flat in Admiralty House and then to Number 10 when Winston became Prime Minister.

Her diary makes plain her worship of Papa. She sat in the gallery at the House of Commons and listened to him speaking, ‘breathless with pride’. At one point, she wrote, ‘My love of Papa is like a religion.’

In spite of worshipping her father, she managed to remain reassuringly normal. Warm-hearted, direct and full of common sense, she was the only one of Churchill’s children who didn’t divorce. She was bitterly critical of Randolph, her only brother, writing perceptively that the greatest misfortune in his life ‘is that he is Papa’s son’. Randolph was Churchill’s blind spot. He spoilt him and couldn’t see his failings or his lack of ability.

Mary was torn by the war. She felt a duty to stay with her parents– ‘I know I help Mummie by being at home; also, in a queer way, Papa.’

On the other hand, she desperately wanted to do something for the war herself. In August 1941, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the volunteer force that had been formed to allow women to perform men’s tasks, including working on anti-aircraft batteries. To her fury, she was discovered and photographed by the press, but she thrived on her hectic life in khaki – the 6.15 reveille, and the rowdy parties in the sergeants’ mess. Whenever she could, she escaped home on leave, and binged on shopping and huge meals and stayed late in bed.

She had a series of boyfriends, most of them unsuitable. When she became engaged to one of them, her mother, Clementine, insisted that the announcement should be put off for six months, and enlisted Lord Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman to talk her out of it.

These relationships involved a lot of dancing, and very little sex – the nearest she came to that was a single kiss.

Mary’s most valuable war work was accompanying her father as aide-decamp on his visit to Quebec and to Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home in America in 1943. Clementine came too, but she was in a nervous state, fussing over trifles, and Mary’s buoyant cheerfulness and energy helped Churchill to survive the rigours of the trip. Mary was rewarded with the OBE.

Mary considered that her diary would be useless to the would-be biographer of her father. ‘Here I am, the daughter of one of the greatest men & on reading my diary I find it is an account of ME!’

She was too young and too adoring of her father to write a critical account, but what emerges very clearly is Churchill’s affection for her. She describes having lunch with him one day when he was ill in bed, and they ate crab, beef and mince pies with Liebfraumilch to drink.

‘I did so love being alone with him,’ she wrote. ‘Only I’m always afraid of boring him – so I was careful not to stay too long’.

But Churchill needed her. On Victory in Europe Day, Mary was in Antwerp with her battery, walking through the joyful crowds, when she was summoned back to London by Churchill to accompany him on his victory drive through London. After all the cheering, Churchill’s defeat in the election came as a terrible shock. Not until the morning of the count did he realise he had lost.

As Emma Soames, Mary’s daughter, writes, it seems extraordinary today that when the war ended, her highly competent 23-year-old mother never thought of getting a job. But, like most women of her generation, Mary Churchill was intent on finding a husband, and she married Christopher Soames after a whirlwind romance.

Emma Soames provides just the right amount of commentary, and this diary gives a new and valuable perspective on Churchill in wartime.

Not so super Mann

RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN The Magician By Colm Tóibín Viking £18.99

Colm Tóibín has already ambitiously written a novel about a great novelist – The Master, focused on Henry James, published in 2004.

He’s now returned to the peculiar challenge posed by the genre, in telling the story of Thomas Mann. He moves in a fairly straight chronological line from Mann’s birth in mercantile Lübeck through to his final years of exile in California and Switzerland.

The result is frankly disappointing and a bit of a slog. I didn’t feel that Tóibín managed to render Henry James’s mercurial intelligence and fine sensibility in The Master, but he nobly tried. Here he seems positively uninterested in Mann, tracking his 80-year journey in an elegantly fluent prose. There’s not a clunking or pretentious sentence in over 400 pages. But the prose never rises to any pitch of excitement or intensity.

Instead of attempting to imagine or inhabit Mann’s inner life – his mindset or psychology – the novel merely reports events and feelings in a key that seems almost wilfully flat.

The novel that emerges may serve as a competent chronicle, peppered with some invented passages of dialogue, but it certainly doesn’t amount to enthralling fiction. Perhaps Mann really was as outwardly dull as Tóibín suggests – Gustav von Aschenbach of Death in Venice being an ironic self-portrait. But if so, why choose to make him the subject of a lengthy fiction, devoid of any external drama to animate it?

Yet material is there for the picking. Mann’s tremors of lust in the face of naked male pulchritude, his complex relationships with his six very different and variously troubled children, his spats with his more flamboyant brother, Heinrich, his gingerly critique of Nazism, his ambivalent attitude to the USA and his postwar return to Germany … any one of these could have been mined and explored and refracted into something with emotional texture and resonance.

But that doesn’t happen. Instead we get one damn thing after another, moving imperturbably on.

The portrait that emerges seems to me excessively lugubrious for someone whose novels are so rich in ironic humour. Confessions of Felix Krull is high farce. The Magic Mountain is as much a satire as it is allegory. And Buddenbrooks is full of sardonic comedy.

But then it’s a strange aspect of Tóibín’s approach that he seems reluctant to engage with Mann’s writing at all. We never get any sense that authorship impelled or defined him. (Or if it didn’t, what did?)

A few pages are predictably devoted to the experiences that seeded Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, but nothing leads the reader beyond what a decent A-level essay might elucidate. Mann’s fourvolume magnum opus, Joseph and His Brothers, the composition of which consumed him for 16 years, is barely