The author of Nibble the Squirrel is dead. John Elliott's first book, somewhat in the anthropomorphic tradition of Beatrix Potter, appeared when he was barely 16 years old, in 1946. The illustrator was his school friend, Julian Slade, who later achieved fame as the composer of Salad Days. John used to joke that Nibble earned him more money than all his academic books put together. On the surface, at least, it hardly betokened his future greatness as a historian of what he called “Spain and its world”; but neither did hardly anything in his life up to that time.
His father, who was employed as headmaster of a small private school in Surrey, had entered him for a King's Scholarship at Eton College, much as he might have with any exceptionally gifted boy. So began John's life in a series of academic hothouses: the scholars' house at Eton, where...
