Odd Obit: John Kerry's Uncle passed away.

Alastair Forbes
May 2, 1918 - May 19, 2005
Mischievous and well-connected book reviewer whose indiscretions led to many entertaining rows
ALI FORBES was for some years a journalist but he was better known as a man about town (and country houses), and in the latter part of his life as an amusing, gossipy and mischievous book reviewer.

His father, James Grant Forbes, was a lawyer from a well-known Boston family, while his mother was a Boston Winthrop, a strict woman who did not hesitate to use a bamboo cane on her ten children. They were an Anglophile family, often coming across to this side of the Atlantic....

...Reviewing the memoirs of Margaret Duchess of Argyll, for instance, he declared that “her father may have been able to give her some fine earrings, but nothing to put between them”. Reviewing a book on Jackie Kennedy, he revealed how “her much prettier sister Lee” had tried to seduce him: “I stuffily rejected her advances . . . I even telephoned her husband for advice on how to escape from a locked bedroom, her sexual ultimatum.” Literary editors had constantly to decide whether his interesting remarks were not too much in bad taste or, indeed, too libellous to print...

...He was involved in a good deal of litigation and public quarrels over his writing. In 1977, he wrung an apology out of the Evening Standard for a comment that newspaper had made on a review of a biography of Unity Mitford which he had written for the TLS. In 1980, Dame Rebecca West sued The Spectator for libel over a review he had written of her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; she won damages and apologies. In 1985, when The Spectator published a profile of him, he wrote a 20-page letter correcting its alleged errors — the longest letter the magazine has ever printed. In 1988, when a reviewer in The Sunday Times wrote that an unpleasant character in a John Mortimer novel was based on Ali, he won an action against them. On this occasion, it was said by the press (and, without doubt, said by Ali) that Lord Wyatt of Weeford, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, Lord Annan, Nicholas Soames and Clare Asquith were all ready to go into the witness-box on his behalf. Not long afterwards, a comment in poor taste he made in The Spectator diary about Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and his late wife led to a serious breach between Worsthorne and Dominic Lawson, then Editor of The Spectator.

Ali himself considered that when he committed offences like these he was being no more than a tease and he was certainly often able to charm people whom he had upset into forgiving him. (He was also no slouch at keeping his plate warm in the few surviving English great houses like Chatsworth.)

In his later years, his world-weary geniality was strangely invigorating. He was very fond of children, regarding his many nieces as “chums”, and was especially devoted to his granddaughter — in fact, he once said he “felt his manqué vocation had been less that of a writer than of a paediatrician or a nanny”.

He is survived by his son.

Alastair Forbes, writer and reviewer, was born on May 2, 1918. He died on May 19, 2005, aged 87.