It's a Great Plot: Two Novelists under One Roof

Beginning of article

When writers live together there's a race to plunder the family archive for ideas

A t last week's launch party for Standpoint, the right wing intellectual magazine, I said to Marigold Johnson, wife of Paul Johnson and mother of the magazine's editor Daniel Johnson, that she must be proud of her son (an opening line that works with 99.9 per cent of mothers on this planet). Marigold smiled prettily and referred to a letter her husband had written to Daniel to commemorate the occasion. She had been touched and amused by its Victorian formality and its bashfulness about mentioning the magazine itself.

It made me wonder about dynastic pride. If a family member is …