When I was up at Oxford, a satirical fellow student rewrote the words of One More River To Cross as “The Pakenhams came in two by two, Vive la Bourgeoisie.” This was little short of lèse-majesté. Anglo-Irish aristocrats and Catholics, the Pakenhams were obviously very different from the highly regarded Bloomsbury coterie of highbrow insiders but nonetheless were potentially the next wave in the cultural life of Britain.

Frank Pakenham, the seventh Earl of Longford, was an Oxford don, a conservative turned socialist out of determination to love anyone who didn’t love him. “Frank Pakenham: mental age twelve” was the verdict of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who nonetheless had him in the cabinet. In a book with the title Humility, he devoted a chapter to the fact that he had been voted fifth in an Italian radio contest for “Man of the Year.” Campaigning on behalf of a woman condemned to life imprisonment for torturing children to death, and committing himself a little too eagerly to the banning of pornography, he forfeited the respect necessary to have the exemplary role of a Maynard Keynes. Elizabeth Longford, his wife, was the biographer of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, whose enthusiasm for Arab nationalism made him the mortal enemy of the British Empire. Lady Margaret, Lady Mary, Lady Julia, and Lady Violet— Lord Longford’s sisters—all wrote books. Longford’s children include Thomas and Lady Antonia (Fraser), both historians, and Lady Rachel and Lady Judith, the one a novelist and the