My great-grandmother was of the generation of Anglo-Irish aristocrats who delved uncomfortably into the world of fascism in the 1930s. I dug out pictures of he

My great-grandmother was of the generation of Anglo-Irish aristocrats who delved uncomfortably into the world of fascism in the 1930s. I dug out pictures of her in front of her country estate with a cadre of Irish Blueshirts (the Irish Blackshirts). She had nothing in common with the fascists; she just enjoyed the strange reverence that the Irish suddenly gave her after independence. She was also friends with the Guiness family, who had their fair share of fascists too. I dated Nancy Mitford’s great-granddaughter for a while, and she gave me her Nazi memorabilia as a sick joke as my father is Jewish. A memory of my great-grandmother is her describing my father as “a bit Spanish”. It is only today that i realised that was an Arctic’s anti-Semitic slur (since the Spanish became all to happy to accuse one another of being crypto Jews, and incidentally made ‘Spanish’ synonymous with Jewish).