This is volume 3 in the diary extracts of the politician who died in 1999 of a brain tumour. I didn't enjoy the book, although I liked volume 2, partly because of the looming knowledge of what would happen to him by the end and partly because it starts off where he is having an affair with a woman known only as 'x' despite always telling us how lovely his wife Jane is. He throws the whole thing in her face for quite a while as well as being maudlin and self-pitying when the affair stutters to an end. He is also miserable at having left the House of Commons, which he did in the belief that the Conservatives would lose the election (in fact, it was the next one they lost). While working on a history of the party, which was published in 1998, he makes various attempts to get back into politics and is eventually selected for a safe seat, Kensington & Chelsea where he is happy (he was always dissatisfied with his previous constituency). But he suffers from various symptoms of ill-health throughout and has tests which come back negative. It is late on when his wife works out what is wrong and takes him for a brain scan. An immediate operation is carried out followed by radiotherapy, but it seems it was too late as he continues to decline and the final section of the diary describing his demise is written by Jane. So a sad book overall and therefore I can only give it a 2 star rating. ( )

Alan Clark was too witty, clever and independent for his own good - at least in politics. Rich, landowning, financially secure (though like many rich men he worried about money) he had no need to suck up to influential Tory grandees to rise in the party, and as a consequence he didn't reach its top level. Never one to resist making a joke (though like thise of Jarrell's Dr Rosenbaum, these often turned out to be the truth), this tendency lost him allies and opportunities, for which he berated himself in the journals he had kept for decades. He was noted for his sympathy with and love of animals and birds, and his keen appreciation of the natural world, especially in his Scottish home, is one of the most endearing features of the ultimately sad story of his last decade. ( )