David Pryce-Jones is well known to readers of National Review for his pungent writings, but I suspect that few are fully aware of the complex and cosmopolitan background of this distinguished English man of letters. He was born in Vienna in 1936; his maternal ancestor was a Jewish banker, his paternal one a Welsh mail-order magnate. As a refugee from the Nazis, he had lived through more adventures by the age of six than most of us have in a lifetime. And he has continued to throw himself into the thick of global events ever since. All this he recounts in Fault Lines, which must surely rank among the liveliest, wittiest, and most colorful World War II memoirs ever written.
It may also be among the last. Now 79, Pryce-Jones belongs to a generation that was just old enough to be aware of the world-historical catastrophe unfolding around it. Nobody younger will have any firsthand knowledge of the earthquake that reshaped our world. The book’s title ingeniously evokes both the tectonic shifts that provide the background to the narrative and the author’s lifelong need to take principled positions on political issues.
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