29
- Bowra wrote of him: ‘Talk was his supreme gift, and he applied it to enrich-
ing the life of those around him.’ Bowra, Memories, 273. At some time in
his private life, Bishop seems to have committed at least one potentially
scandalous indiscretion, serious enough to have prompted rumours.
However, the aggregate impression of his recklessness has been conflated
among authors, who assert variously that Bishop was banished in turn from
Dublin, from Eton, from Cambridge, and from APOC for disgracing him-
self in ways never described but assumed to have been homosexual. Where
the truth lies, who knows; however, as far as I can tell, no scandals were
ever officially recorded in connection with Bishop’s military or monastic
life. He seems to have remained devout and disciplined after leaving
Nashdom up to the time of his tragic death at the age of 44; yet Geniesse,
Passionate Nomad, 294–5, vaguely mentions a wartime ‘sexual scandal’
without offering any details. In this regard, see also: Izzard, Freya Stark,
247; Bowra, Memories, 273. The eminent archaeologist Seton Lloyd, a
heterosexual who shared living quarters in Jerusalem and Baghdad with
Bishop and knew him well, makes no mention of any such scandals. See
Seton Lloyd, The Interval: A Life in Near Eastern Archaeology (Faringdon:
Lloyd Collon, 1986), 80, 83–4, 87–8. - Ibid. See also Peter Edgerley Firchow, Strange Meetings: Anglo-German
Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960 (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2008), 112n12. - Mitchell, Maurice Bowra, 129.
- Was Bishop’s religious conversion genuine or contrived, at least in part?
Was there perhaps an operational reason for him to be sequestered on his
return to Britain in 1935? (My own surprise encounter with John Vassall,
another charming conversationalist, safehoused in an English monastery
after his release from prison in 1972, prompts such speculation on my
part). On the other hand, Seton Lloyd actually thought of Bishop more as
a refugee from Isherwood’s Berlin than as a Berlin habitué, which suggests
that Bishop’s epiphany was genuine. See Izzard, Freya Stark, 248. - Supplement to the London Gazette, 12 December 1939, 8245.
- HS 7/215, HS 7/218, HS 7/220, HS 7/229, HS 7/230, HS 7/234 (file
heavily redacted re. Iraq), HS 7/266, HS 7/267, TNA. - See Chap. 5.
- ‘The Death of Mr. Bishop’, Al-Akhbar, 16 October 1942, quoted in HS
9/157/8, TNA. - Stark, Dust in the Lion’s Paw, 160.
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER