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Fault Lines
Born in Vienna in 1936, David Pryce-Jones is the son of the well-known writer and editor of the Times Literary Supplement Alan Pryce-Jones and Therese “Poppy” Fould-Springer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan mix of industrialists, bankers, soldiers, and playboys on both sides of a family, embodying the fault lines of the “not quite Jewish and not quite Christian, not quite Austrian and not quite French or English, not quite heterosexual and not quite homosexual, socially conventional but not quite secure.”
Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, David Pryce-Jones served as Literary Editor of the Financial Times and the Spectator , a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph , and Senior Editor of National Review . Fault Lines — a memoir that spans Europe, America, and the Middle East and encompasses figures ranging from Somerset Maugham to Svetlana Stalin to Elie de Rothschild — has the storytelling power of Pryce-Jones’s numerous novels and non-fiction books, and is perceptive and poignant testimony to the fortunes and misfortunes of the present age.
Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, David Pryce-Jones served as Literary Editor of the Financial Times and the Spectator , a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph , and Senior Editor of National Review . Fault Lines — a memoir that spans Europe, America, and the Middle East and encompasses figures ranging from Somerset Maugham to Svetlana Stalin to Elie de Rothschild — has the storytelling power of Pryce-Jones’s numerous novels and non-fiction books, and is perceptive and poignant testimony to the fortunes and misfortunes of the present age.
368 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2015
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About the author
David Pryce-Jones
57 books15 followersDavid Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British conservative author, historian and political commentator.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 3, 2018
A sometimes maddeningly paced, but overall melancholy memoir and family-dynasty biography. D. Pryce-Jones' opus is historically relevant and surprisingly full of backroom insights into the motivations and private atmospheres of some famous and infamous historical figures of the last century. Some of the odd pacing comes in the form of the reader getting so many names dropped on them from the pied de terre set of 20th century Europe, that sometimes one wishes a bit more editing was brought to bear; a sensation not unlike being invited to one of those awful L.A. parties with a guide where all one remembers the next morning is the guides' fingers pointing at celebrities without ever having actually met one.
That aside, Fault Lines is overall fascinating reading about a wealthy family of Ashkenazi origin that used money and worldly, nobility prestige as its main tool to willfully try to forget or perhaps reinterpret its irrevocable Jewish heritage. It's not an uncommon theme, played out in so many ways consciously or unconsciously by many "fault lines" flowing out of that diaspora, but this tale in particular makes for an interesting, sometimes deeply affecting, and painful playing out of that theme.
Some professional reviews I think made it seem like David's book was merely about "settling scores" between himself and members of his family as well as various literary or political adversaries. While there are some passages that do indeed read as if David is stoking his own fires, I give him the benefit of the doubt here for the sake of wanting to understand where the author is coming from. What I found was that unlike the majority of most current works dealing with one or more aspects of history of the twentieth century, this one comes from a source who not only lived it, but did so precisely from the best vantage points to observe at least some of the causative springs to what most was at best, mere headline copy. From his experience with the postwar realities throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, to the Middle East in the aftermath of the Six Day War, to the American protest movement at Berkeley (and having to deal with an Allen Ginsberg at his most glorified), David adds flesh, bone, and in some places, blood and tears, to what most of us in the current Western, educational mileu get the frothiest of froth when it comes to insight or context on.
Even though he does a good job of reminiscing on his own personal life with him and his own family, it does seem a bit lamentable that his own life and reflections on that are more fleshed out in the first prologue-ish chapter and perhaps by some of the reviewers of his book than the actual book itself. It's obvious that this was not *that* book. While some might balk at the almost journalistically detached way that he writes of his father's last days, especially in comparison to the sentimentality one finds in a lot of trendier memoirs, this actually made the late Alan Pryce-Jones' passing feel more poignant to me. This forgoing of sentimentality actually gave me a deeper insight to not only his son's inner experience, but maybe Alan's as well. Maybe that's just me.
There are quite a few insightful quotes I could pick out, but I think this one hit this reader with particular force. It comes from his time in the Middle East as correspondent for The Telegraph(?), during his tour of a military museum in Cairo where the disastrous (for the UAR/Egypt, Jordan, and Syria) 1967 war against Israel was being commemorated propaganda style in amazing incongruity to the actual reality of the outcome, ie. Israel having won the ill-advised campaign decisively. I found the quote apt, and especially relevant to the current geo-political realities still present in the Middle East and other areas, as well as to the groupthink neurosis's all the rage in America.
“In their culture, the dread of shame is so strong that it enforces denial of reality. Mistakes are inadmissible, and repetition therefore takes the place of correction.”
That aside, Fault Lines is overall fascinating reading about a wealthy family of Ashkenazi origin that used money and worldly, nobility prestige as its main tool to willfully try to forget or perhaps reinterpret its irrevocable Jewish heritage. It's not an uncommon theme, played out in so many ways consciously or unconsciously by many "fault lines" flowing out of that diaspora, but this tale in particular makes for an interesting, sometimes deeply affecting, and painful playing out of that theme.
Some professional reviews I think made it seem like David's book was merely about "settling scores" between himself and members of his family as well as various literary or political adversaries. While there are some passages that do indeed read as if David is stoking his own fires, I give him the benefit of the doubt here for the sake of wanting to understand where the author is coming from. What I found was that unlike the majority of most current works dealing with one or more aspects of history of the twentieth century, this one comes from a source who not only lived it, but did so precisely from the best vantage points to observe at least some of the causative springs to what most was at best, mere headline copy. From his experience with the postwar realities throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, to the Middle East in the aftermath of the Six Day War, to the American protest movement at Berkeley (and having to deal with an Allen Ginsberg at his most glorified), David adds flesh, bone, and in some places, blood and tears, to what most of us in the current Western, educational mileu get the frothiest of froth when it comes to insight or context on.
Even though he does a good job of reminiscing on his own personal life with him and his own family, it does seem a bit lamentable that his own life and reflections on that are more fleshed out in the first prologue-ish chapter and perhaps by some of the reviewers of his book than the actual book itself. It's obvious that this was not *that* book. While some might balk at the almost journalistically detached way that he writes of his father's last days, especially in comparison to the sentimentality one finds in a lot of trendier memoirs, this actually made the late Alan Pryce-Jones' passing feel more poignant to me. This forgoing of sentimentality actually gave me a deeper insight to not only his son's inner experience, but maybe Alan's as well. Maybe that's just me.
There are quite a few insightful quotes I could pick out, but I think this one hit this reader with particular force. It comes from his time in the Middle East as correspondent for The Telegraph(?), during his tour of a military museum in Cairo where the disastrous (for the UAR/Egypt, Jordan, and Syria) 1967 war against Israel was being commemorated propaganda style in amazing incongruity to the actual reality of the outcome, ie. Israel having won the ill-advised campaign decisively. I found the quote apt, and especially relevant to the current geo-political realities still present in the Middle East and other areas, as well as to the groupthink neurosis's all the rage in America.
“In their culture, the dread of shame is so strong that it enforces denial of reality. Mistakes are inadmissible, and repetition therefore takes the place of correction.”
January 3, 2019
Noted British author and journalist David Pryce-Jones has written a memoir unlike almost any other memoir I've ever read. Maybe that because he has lived a life unlike most others. "Fault Lines", originally published in 2016, is the story of two families and the son produced by those families.
David Pryce-Jones spends much of the book talking about his ancestors. The Pryce-Jones family was Christian and thoroughly English and Welsh. His mother's family - the Fould-Springers - were Austrian, French, nominally Jewish, and fairly neurotic. They had intermarried with the Rothschild and owned several grand houses in Austria, France, and Hungary. They were high livers; money seemed to come from their many investments. David's mother was one of four children of Mitzi Fould - who ran her family with an iron fist. No marriages took place without her approval, though she married two men who were bisexual, as was David's father.
The Fault Lines of Pryce-Jones life ran along religious, economic, and sexual lines. His mother's family were Jewish by birth, but most seemed to flee their faith by intermarriage. Of course, we're talking about Europe in the first half of the 20th century, when being Jewish was often a cause for worry about their very lives. Pryce-Jones writes about members of the family and others associated with them who were murdered in the camps.
Pryce-Jones' writes about being trapped in France after the "Phoney War" was replaced by the German sweep through the Low Lands and France. He was tended to by his nanny; his parents were in other places, safer places. Somehow young David and the nanny make it out of Vichy France with the help from others. The rest of his life seems to be one of relative normality, compared to what (and who) had came before.
I'm glad I was reading the eversion of Pryce-Jones' memoir because I kept flipping between Wikipedia and my Kindle app. His book is a juicy and fun read, if you're even somewhat familiar with the times.
David Pryce-Jones spends much of the book talking about his ancestors. The Pryce-Jones family was Christian and thoroughly English and Welsh. His mother's family - the Fould-Springers - were Austrian, French, nominally Jewish, and fairly neurotic. They had intermarried with the Rothschild and owned several grand houses in Austria, France, and Hungary. They were high livers; money seemed to come from their many investments. David's mother was one of four children of Mitzi Fould - who ran her family with an iron fist. No marriages took place without her approval, though she married two men who were bisexual, as was David's father.
The Fault Lines of Pryce-Jones life ran along religious, economic, and sexual lines. His mother's family were Jewish by birth, but most seemed to flee their faith by intermarriage. Of course, we're talking about Europe in the first half of the 20th century, when being Jewish was often a cause for worry about their very lives. Pryce-Jones writes about members of the family and others associated with them who were murdered in the camps.
Pryce-Jones' writes about being trapped in France after the "Phoney War" was replaced by the German sweep through the Low Lands and France. He was tended to by his nanny; his parents were in other places, safer places. Somehow young David and the nanny make it out of Vichy France with the help from others. The rest of his life seems to be one of relative normality, compared to what (and who) had came before.
I'm glad I was reading the eversion of Pryce-Jones' memoir because I kept flipping between Wikipedia and my Kindle app. His book is a juicy and fun read, if you're even somewhat familiar with the times.
September 11, 2024
Probably the best of this eccentric freak's freesh pile of curiously strange books over the decades
......
The Spectator
David Pryce-Jones settles old scores
Pryce-Jones’s memoir, Fault Lines, depicts an unhappy, complex family riven by snobbishness and materialism
The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David Pryce-Jones’s extended family. Emotionally and financially competitive but interdependent, benefactors and beneficiaries, Jews and gentiles of various sexual proclivities are depicted grinding away against each other like so many incompatible tectonic plates.
Pryce-Jones offers a candid expression of filial impiety for which Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards surely cannot be entirely to blame, although it is true that education far from home, from an early age, has been known to piss children off, as they say.
Young boys banished to boarding school may feel tormented by Oedipal yearnings and resentment of paternal indifference.
David portrays his father, the late Alan Pryce-Jones, as a distinguished litterateur, a handsome, charming, talented, sociable, parasitical homosexual who, from time to time, played the part of a heterosexual for the sake of domestic convenience.
David’s first novel, Owls and Satyrs, simultaneously disguises and reveals his perception of his father’s nature. ‘In this comedy of manners,’ he explains, ‘the main character is Alan, represented as a woman too preoccupied to pay attention to others. I did not want to hurt his feelings, and this fiction was the way to come to terms.’
The Fould-Springer family tree, the genealogy since the mid-19th century of a European Jewish family of great wealth and influence, diagrams the framework of the society that David shows riven by materialism and snobbishness. The grandest of its dames was Mitzi Springer (1886–1978), who dominated, or attempted to dominate, her children and grandchildren by awarding or withholding large sums of money. Presumably, love and loyalty were sometimes motivating factors, but David writes best when writing of behaviour at its worst.
Mitzi lived by her motto, ‘Unite the Impossible’. Having married Eugene Fould, she declared that ‘Homosexuals make the best husbands,’ and welcomed his English lover, Frank Wooster, into a ménage à trois. He told her he was attracted to her by a spiritual affinity so strong that when Eugene died she was encouraged to become Mrs Wooster, assume British nationality and convert to Christianity.
As an undergraduate, David disapproved of Oxford as disturbingly left-wing. He dismisses Maurice Bowra’s ‘salacious’ light verse as ‘excruciating drivel’. A.J.P. Taylor, David’s tutor, invited him, years afterwards, to dinner at the Ritz with Sir Oswald Mosley:
Mosley was even more conceited and unrepentant than Taylor,’ David recalls. ‘The more Mosley defended his Hitlerite past, the more Taylor fawned on him. So frustrated was his love of power that if Mosley in 1940 had become Hitler’s British Gauleiter, Taylor would have been a natural collaborator.
Maugham, Beerbohm and Berenson were all right, but Greta Garbo was disappointing. She played tennis topless and was flat-chested. David presents a more upbeat portrait of Mitzi’s only son, Max, ‘the second and last Baron Fould-Springer, nominally the head of the family,’ who presided for a while over Royaumont, a splendid château near Chantilly. He also served as the host of shooting parties at Kapuvar, an estate inherited in Hungary.
His game book records a red-letter day there in August 1935 when he and his guests, the Duc d’Ayen, Comte de Beaumont, Comte de Maille, Comte de Montsaulnier, Prince Achille Murat and Jean de Vaugelas, shot an astonishing 6,009 partridges.
This is a book to inspire political thought.
David was born in Vienna in 1936. In his early childhood his parents delegated his care to servants. In the second world war it was his devoted nanny who guided him from France via Morocco and Portugal to safety. He inherited his father’s shrewd grasp of the literary and journalistic establishments and the social hierarchies of England and the continent. Their Welsh heritage seemed to fade.
/////
Most definately an Grade A Bastard of questionable views and intellect, with a totally interesting family and social circle which is depressing most of the time.
Pryce-Jones is a fat little freak, who endlessly angers all he meets, so it's no surprise he's like the right-wing version of Christopher Hitchens being one of the big-time editors at National Review who welcomes his curious nutbaggery of gifts.
I will say this much Pryce-Jones' review of Hitch-22, seems more like a love letter of a snake giving a psychological x-ray of a fellow snake, and it's a shame they weren't bottled together and bit each other to death, only to be pickled in brandy and put on the shelf with the Baby Mouse wine in some Tokyo apothecary.
Pryce-Jones is like the high-brown version
[oops spell-czech]
Pryce-Jones is like the high-brow version of Dinesh D'Souza meets Christopher Hitchens
no, not unpleasant at all
in any shape or form
And for a dollar in the a used bookstore, the Pryce is Right
......
The Spectator
David Pryce-Jones settles old scores
Pryce-Jones’s memoir, Fault Lines, depicts an unhappy, complex family riven by snobbishness and materialism
The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David Pryce-Jones’s extended family. Emotionally and financially competitive but interdependent, benefactors and beneficiaries, Jews and gentiles of various sexual proclivities are depicted grinding away against each other like so many incompatible tectonic plates.
Pryce-Jones offers a candid expression of filial impiety for which Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards surely cannot be entirely to blame, although it is true that education far from home, from an early age, has been known to piss children off, as they say.
Young boys banished to boarding school may feel tormented by Oedipal yearnings and resentment of paternal indifference.
David portrays his father, the late Alan Pryce-Jones, as a distinguished litterateur, a handsome, charming, talented, sociable, parasitical homosexual who, from time to time, played the part of a heterosexual for the sake of domestic convenience.
David’s first novel, Owls and Satyrs, simultaneously disguises and reveals his perception of his father’s nature. ‘In this comedy of manners,’ he explains, ‘the main character is Alan, represented as a woman too preoccupied to pay attention to others. I did not want to hurt his feelings, and this fiction was the way to come to terms.’
The Fould-Springer family tree, the genealogy since the mid-19th century of a European Jewish family of great wealth and influence, diagrams the framework of the society that David shows riven by materialism and snobbishness. The grandest of its dames was Mitzi Springer (1886–1978), who dominated, or attempted to dominate, her children and grandchildren by awarding or withholding large sums of money. Presumably, love and loyalty were sometimes motivating factors, but David writes best when writing of behaviour at its worst.
Mitzi lived by her motto, ‘Unite the Impossible’. Having married Eugene Fould, she declared that ‘Homosexuals make the best husbands,’ and welcomed his English lover, Frank Wooster, into a ménage à trois. He told her he was attracted to her by a spiritual affinity so strong that when Eugene died she was encouraged to become Mrs Wooster, assume British nationality and convert to Christianity.
As an undergraduate, David disapproved of Oxford as disturbingly left-wing. He dismisses Maurice Bowra’s ‘salacious’ light verse as ‘excruciating drivel’. A.J.P. Taylor, David’s tutor, invited him, years afterwards, to dinner at the Ritz with Sir Oswald Mosley:
Mosley was even more conceited and unrepentant than Taylor,’ David recalls. ‘The more Mosley defended his Hitlerite past, the more Taylor fawned on him. So frustrated was his love of power that if Mosley in 1940 had become Hitler’s British Gauleiter, Taylor would have been a natural collaborator.
Maugham, Beerbohm and Berenson were all right, but Greta Garbo was disappointing. She played tennis topless and was flat-chested. David presents a more upbeat portrait of Mitzi’s only son, Max, ‘the second and last Baron Fould-Springer, nominally the head of the family,’ who presided for a while over Royaumont, a splendid château near Chantilly. He also served as the host of shooting parties at Kapuvar, an estate inherited in Hungary.
His game book records a red-letter day there in August 1935 when he and his guests, the Duc d’Ayen, Comte de Beaumont, Comte de Maille, Comte de Montsaulnier, Prince Achille Murat and Jean de Vaugelas, shot an astonishing 6,009 partridges.
This is a book to inspire political thought.
David was born in Vienna in 1936. In his early childhood his parents delegated his care to servants. In the second world war it was his devoted nanny who guided him from France via Morocco and Portugal to safety. He inherited his father’s shrewd grasp of the literary and journalistic establishments and the social hierarchies of England and the continent. Their Welsh heritage seemed to fade.
/////
Most definately an Grade A Bastard of questionable views and intellect, with a totally interesting family and social circle which is depressing most of the time.
Pryce-Jones is a fat little freak, who endlessly angers all he meets, so it's no surprise he's like the right-wing version of Christopher Hitchens being one of the big-time editors at National Review who welcomes his curious nutbaggery of gifts.
I will say this much Pryce-Jones' review of Hitch-22, seems more like a love letter of a snake giving a psychological x-ray of a fellow snake, and it's a shame they weren't bottled together and bit each other to death, only to be pickled in brandy and put on the shelf with the Baby Mouse wine in some Tokyo apothecary.
Pryce-Jones is like the high-brown version
[oops spell-czech]
Pryce-Jones is like the high-brow version of Dinesh D'Souza meets Christopher Hitchens
no, not unpleasant at all
in any shape or form
And for a dollar in the a used bookstore, the Pryce is Right
July 22, 2025
I got this book from a random bookclub subscription I am in and this is the first dud I have recieved. Not another book about rich toffs, I thought. But ... I have never heard of the guy, I got through the last book on toffs and you can find hidden gems in unexpected places.
This is so dry and dull and unengaging and hopping about bleating about that big house or this privileged person they knew or that he went straight back to a football match at Eton after he found out his mother was dead. I didn't get very far before I dropped to skim reading and it was snobbery about speaking French, lengthy details about their chateau, racehorses.... God, I really don't care. Life is too short so I am giving up with this one.
This is so dry and dull and unengaging and hopping about bleating about that big house or this privileged person they knew or that he went straight back to a football match at Eton after he found out his mother was dead. I didn't get very far before I dropped to skim reading and it was snobbery about speaking French, lengthy details about their chateau, racehorses.... God, I really don't care. Life is too short so I am giving up with this one.
September 2, 2017
Too much name dropping! Hard to read for all the famous people that he had contact with
September 28, 2022
Biographies and memoirs are not my usual genre, but this book looked interesting, so I bought it on a whim. Then it sat unopened on a shelf at home for a couple of years.
When I finally got around to reading it, I was surprised at how interesting it ended up being, especially the part covering the middle years, in the lead-up to WWII and during the war. Ironically, it’s during the more contemporary period, when Pryce-Jones is writing largely from his own recollection rather than historical artifacts, that the story seems to lag.
Oddly enough, a few months after finishing this tome, I took on “The Ratline,” by Philippe Sands, without knowing much about it. As it happens, Sands recounts the story of a similarly wealthy and entitled family during much of the same period as in “Fault Lines,” living in the same geographic area (around Austria), but illustrating the opposite point of view: that of an ardent Nazi family instead of a Jewish one.
Bookending the two experiences was quite revealing. For instance, in “Fault Lines,” Pryce-Jones writes about his great grandmother’s anguish at losing the home her father had built, along with all her personal possessions in it. Meanwhile, in “The Ratline,” Sands tells of Frau Wächter cavalierly moving into just such a home that was appropriated for her. A few years later, as the war is winding down and she finds herself on the losing side, she’s forced to abandon this manse herself, along with all its contents. She’s incensed! How dare they take all “her” property? To me, this small incident seems to encapsualte volumes. (But that’s for a different review.)
Despite “Fault Lines” dragging in parts, particularly toward the end, it was a well-written and fascinating read.
When I finally got around to reading it, I was surprised at how interesting it ended up being, especially the part covering the middle years, in the lead-up to WWII and during the war. Ironically, it’s during the more contemporary period, when Pryce-Jones is writing largely from his own recollection rather than historical artifacts, that the story seems to lag.
Oddly enough, a few months after finishing this tome, I took on “The Ratline,” by Philippe Sands, without knowing much about it. As it happens, Sands recounts the story of a similarly wealthy and entitled family during much of the same period as in “Fault Lines,” living in the same geographic area (around Austria), but illustrating the opposite point of view: that of an ardent Nazi family instead of a Jewish one.
Bookending the two experiences was quite revealing. For instance, in “Fault Lines,” Pryce-Jones writes about his great grandmother’s anguish at losing the home her father had built, along with all her personal possessions in it. Meanwhile, in “The Ratline,” Sands tells of Frau Wächter cavalierly moving into just such a home that was appropriated for her. A few years later, as the war is winding down and she finds herself on the losing side, she’s forced to abandon this manse herself, along with all its contents. She’s incensed! How dare they take all “her” property? To me, this small incident seems to encapsualte volumes. (But that’s for a different review.)
Despite “Fault Lines” dragging in parts, particularly toward the end, it was a well-written and fascinating read.
August 9, 2016
Coming from a very rich and well-connected European Jewish family, David Pryce-Jones has met just anyone with English literary credibility over the last 60 years (his father was editor of the Times Literary Supplement). And being Jewish, he has harrowing tales of narrowly escaping the Holocaust as well (he was born in 1936). This, his memoir, is easy to read, perhaps lighter than one might think considering the topics just mentioned (not to mention his father's odd sexuality, his uncle's abusiveness, his daughter's early death, his mother's mental instability, and son). And yet, it is riveting. It would be easy to accuse him of name-dropping or being blinded by privilege, but he avoids those charges by being honest and humble.
His most famous works address the instability of the Arab world, and the infamous Nazi-loving Unity Mitford of the obnoxious Mitford sisters. I would have appreciated hearing more on these issues, but I guess I should just read the original works!
His most famous works address the instability of the Arab world, and the infamous Nazi-loving Unity Mitford of the obnoxious Mitford sisters. I would have appreciated hearing more on these issues, but I guess I should just read the original works!
May 21, 2016
Of English and Welsh heritage and French and Austrian too,
He pilfered food in Vichy during World War II.
His life experience colored the writer he'd become,
And in the process he met... nearly everyone
He pilfered food in Vichy during World War II.
His life experience colored the writer he'd become,
And in the process he met... nearly everyone
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews