French level-crossing signs warn motorists, “Un train peut en cacher un autre”; a train coming one way can conceal another in the opposite direction. David Pryce-Jones’s public hyphen signals that he is of Anglo-Welsh provenance on his father’s side, but it hides at least one other significant coupling: Fould-Springer, his mother’s rich and renowned Austro-French-Jewish family. In an occasional piece in this bristling chrestomathy, “May Day in Piest’any,” he writes, “I crowded into the small entrance of the Hotel Eden.” Can one man crowd anywhere? If anyone, David Pryce-Jones can.

“When the Nazis Stole My Painting: And the Austrians Didn’t Much Care” tells of a protracted legal struggle to retrieve one small stolen painting, Hungarian Shepherd Boy, by Johann Gualbert Raffalt, from a Viennese national gallery, the Belvedere. Though the painting was valued at a mere $3,000, the insolence of the post-war Austrian museum authorities in all but demanding its “permanent loan” provoked determination to have it back. After eleven years of sparring, a court ordered its return. It requires no wild wit to imagine the thieves muttering “Bloody Jew” when forced to do the right thing.

Born in Vienna in 1936, Pryce-Jones is no less implacable in pursuit of that archetypal Austrian opportunist, Kurt Waldheim. Having joined the Nazi student union, and then the Brown Shirts, soon after the German annexation of Austria, Waldheim was wounded, not seriously, in the invasion of Russia and spent the rest of the war in “intelligence” in the occupied Balkans. Post-war, as swiftly reupholstered as any Vicar of Bray, he survived to become secretary-general of the United Nations between 1972 and 1982. What both East and West knew of his wartime activities made sure that he would walk that careful line between impartiality on the one hand and partiality on the other. Later, made president of Austria but no longer useful to either side, he was exposed as a fellow traveler with whoever might offer him a first-class seat.

In Paris in 1940, the all-but-infant Pryce-Jones escaped the oncoming Germans thanks to the resolution of his English nanny and an aunt’s marriage to Eduardo Propper de Calléjon, an accommodating official in Franco’s embassy in Paris. Having reached England via Tangier (its British-style postboxes symbolic of that city’s raffish cosmopolitanism), Little Pryce-Jones survived to become another classy quasi-hyphenate, Eton’n’Oxford, old England’s top educational bracket.

That early fugitive experience, cushioned as it may have been, marked him at least as deeply as his brisk insertion into London’s literary gratin, thanks to his father Alan, bisexual flâneur de classe, sometime editor of the Times Literary Supplement. As this generous collection proves, Pryce-Jones’s enduring pursuit of British and kindred complacencies remains as pointedly expressed as he is uncompromising and cosmopolitan. The latter term of quasi-abuse — a Stalinist synonym for Jew — was applied by the quondam British prime minister Theresa May to those who favored continued adherence to the European Union after she had ceased to be of their number, the better to qualify for the office of prime minister. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the latest pieces in this volume, dated 1997, denounces the delusive idea of such unions. They are held to generate one-sided, unelected bureaucracies and provoke consequent popular, often reactionary, resentments.

The application of consistent intelligence to a wide variety of topics and places — Tashkent to Timbuktu — does not entail lack of surprises. “No Paella Please. We’re British,” an account of the lumpen-Brits on bibulous holiday in Benidorm, on the Spanish Costa Brava, is a small comic masterpiece. “The Dark Lord” turns out to be Lord Byron, whose playboying and wordplay receive no chummy indulgence. His lordship is mocked for leaving England, in a hurry, in a swanky Napoleonic coach said to have cost him 500 pounds (a very fat sum); in fact, Pryce-Jones neglects to mention, he never paid for it. Byron’s morals may have been deplorable, but who will deny that he could set the table on a roar? To rhyme “ladies intellectual” with “hen-pecked you all” may not be great poetry, but is it not, as he would say, “the thing”?

Whether or not Byron was a good thing, he had widespread influence, especially among foreigners who took him for a straight-faced romantic rebel. Bertrand Russell may have had some sense of affinity with his fellow peer (both inherited their titles by the flukish deaths of those directly in line for them) and sexual busybody, but he took him seriously enough, as emblem if not thinker, to grant Byron (a.k.a. “poor dear me”) a chapter to himself in his fat but selective History of Western Philosophy. Neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein made the cut.

The Duke of Wellington is cited as calling him “worthless,” but no note is made in “The Dark Lord” of Byron’s provocative remark when all London was celebrating the victory of Waterloo, “They will cheer any bloody booby who breaks heads.” Byron was childishly proud of acquiring the same initials as Bonaparte when he incorporated his wife’s family name, Noel, with his own. Napoleon was never short of unfoolish English admirers. The great essayist William Hazlitt composed — better, compiled — a lengthy biography of the man that Byron called “my little pagod.” When the ship transporting the deposed Boney to St. Helena called in at Portsmouth, the local dockers gave his appearance on deck such a rousing cheer that he was instantly consigned to his cabin.

Blaming Shelley’s sad end on Byron is a bit thick. Unlike the aquatic Byron (never lame in the water), Shelley was a nonswimmer as well as quite a show-off when he set sail, on a risky sea, in his ill-designed yacht Ariel. After he was drowned, the sight of his decaying, sodden corpse laid on the Ligurian sands, before cremation, prompted his friend to say, “Are we all to resemble that?” but also “He was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew.” Whether or not Byron was a great poet, his letters are among the finest, most varied, and most entertaining in the epistolary chatterbox. Shelley’s are ponderous, Jane Austen’s as dull as a wet Sunday afternoon.

For all Byron’s dandyism when it came to costumes and Homeric helmets for that fatal expedition to Missolonghi, that “Greece might yet be free,” he allowed himself to be leeched both metaphorically, for funds, and literally: “Come on, you butchers,” he said to the incompetent English doctors on his unnecessary deathbed. Fervent for the Greeks, he was eager to come to civilized terms with the Turks. Author of Hebrew Melodies, he was also something of a proto-Zionist.

There is an allusion here to “the Communist leader” (Harry Pollitt, wasn’t it?) who in 1936 asked a contemporary poet to go and die for the cause. Stephen Spender, whatever his bisexuality, declined the honor. Auden took up his pen to applaud the “necessary murder” (often, George Orwell discovered, of their allies) by the Spanish reds. Byron had none of Auden’s commissioned ruthlessness. The latter’s Letters from Iceland have not a spark of the wit on show in Don Juan. Pryce-Jones sells Byron even shorter than one of his legs.

“Tale of Two Windsors,” by contrast, is full of insiderish brio. Mrs. Dudley Ward, Edward VIII’s mistress before he happened on Wallis Simpson, is said to have been asked whether she loved H.R.H. “Oh no,” she said, “he was much too abject.” How is that for reticence and revelation sweetly packaged? My friend Simon Raven was commissioned to write a TV series on the Windsors, and as usual, for all his scoundrelly social life and naughty fiction, made a nice, straight job of it. I could wish that, as a good classical scholar, Simon had appended a shameless “satyr play,” as Greek tragedians did to their sonorous trilogies. Decorum might then have yielded to wanton outrageousness.

“Not Their Finest Hour” declares no illusions about the British upper class’s shoulder-to-shoulder defiance and disapproval of Hitler’s Germany. Had it not been for the fluke of Winston Churchill’s return to power, what other Tory grandee could have shamed his peers into fighting to the death? A roster of available quisling toffs is still deep-sixed in Whitehall, long past the date when such material is normally made public. The seemingly crazy flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in May 1941 can now be seen as a good deal more practical than was ever admitted. It quite suits any number of proper parties that the Russians insisted on keeping the Führer’s deputy in Spandau. Typical of Pryce-Jones’s decency (an obsolete English characteristic) is the long and generous account of his visit to Hess’s bravely attendant wife. It has been convenient to tag Hess as a nutter, but he was, we learn, a considerable reader. He once gave Hitler 14 volumes of the works of Frederick the Great. That should have taught him, but what?

Harold Pinter, having graduated from London’s East End to attain the status of cultural grandee, refused to sit down to table with Pryce-Jones on the grounds that he was a Zionist. I recall Harold saying to me, in the wake of the 1967 war, “We’ve given the Arabs a bloody nose,” but his Nobel laurels came to turn the head they encircled. If Pryce-Jones is an unequivocal supporter of Israel, he shows no sign of wishing to live in that country. Nor, I am sure, does he harbor unmitigated approval of all its actions. What country ever deserved that kind of a tick in its margin, except perhaps the Soviet Union from the pen of Eric Hobsbawm, a much-applauded, award-laden academic who maintained all his life that the realization of a 24-carat socialist state would be worth the 20 million lives extinguished in Stalin’s savage attempt to create it? Pryce-Jones sees Hobsbawm off on a swift descent to Avernus.

The tendentious revision of history to suit an author’s parti pris has a star example in Edward Said, self-appointed Christian spokesman for the Palestinians. Like an Ivy League Yasser Arafat, the author of Orientalism appropriated the role of brave contrarian in hostility to Israel. Strident partiality and willful falsification earned Said more prestige than any honest account of the Middle East imbroglio, such as Pryce-Jones’s own The Closed Circle or Elie Kedourie’s The Chatham House Version, here properly saluted. The title “Enough Said” (geddit?) is perhaps the best two-word biography in the language, just as the exposé of Robert Fisk as a tendentious fabricator, not least of the so-called massacre of Palestinians at Jenin, is all that need ever be said about a reporter without a trace of Pryce-Jones’s unflagging sense of decency.