Prologue: Solicitude

I occasionally sleep in my American grandmother's very comfortable bed, a useful (and unusual) width of four foot across. It was just large enough to accommodate her plump body together with the last of a succession of the poodles she adored, a miniature called Spice, in a series starting with Penny, her first big dog.

Florence Conradi and Penny, 1950s

I also possess - among much else that was hers - the low wicker nursing-chair on which she breast-fed my father in Coleherne Court a century ago in 1916, her sketching stool - still serviceable for weeding in the garden - her fire-screen, foot-stool and cushions all embroidered in her petit point, a magnificent blue Isfahan rug, and the elegant, round copper tray she used for her letters to sit upon.

Things often outlive their owners. She died aged ninety-one, in 1983, but all her diaries of annual trips to Europe before World War I survive, stuffed with picture post-cards of sights and cities visited, together with many home-made Alice-in-Wonderland cards from a surprise birthday party around 1898 that gave her joy to remember.

Granma also kept a fat scrapbook from the winter of 1909-10, when her elder sister Beatrice - of whom she was all her life passionately jealous - married a clothier called Leo Sulzberger, whose family co-owned the New York Times. Jealousy was probably one spur to her first idly but compulsively collecting, and then later conserving, mementoes. The cutand-glued frippery that fills this packed-to-overflowing scrap-book includes humorous cartoons of beautiful and supercilious swan-necked Gibson Girls and dried flowers. From this collection I learn that in one short season, among many other engagements (including much Vaudeville), she watched Princeton beat Yale at ice-hockey in the St Nicholas rink in New York City on 26 January 1910, saw Lionel Monckton's musical comedy The Arcadians and Conan Doyle's new play The Fires of Fate, heard Sergei Rachmaninoff perform, partook of a ten-course banquet in Atlantic City on 5 January, sent and received Valentine cards, went to the races on 23 March in New Haven, Connecticut and saved the race-cards, watched Coppelia with Pavlova as lead-dancer, Massenet's opera Thais at the Met, and at the Manhattan Opera House Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande and Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann on 19 March. Then there was Barnum and Bailey's circus - 'Greatest Show on Earth' - in Madison Square Garden. A busy winter.

Mementos of her elder sister's New York wedding reception at the new St Regis Hotel that she taped into this scrap-book include a maraschino liqueur chocolate that - over a period of over a century - has dissolved, leaving a brown stain that soaks through many pages, sticking them together. Her dried flowers have long since faded, their perfume lost and - brittle now - their petals rapidly turned to powder. The clear scent of young Florence's personality nonetheless lingers: a seventeen year-old American girl on the brink of grown-up adventures, a budding aesthete hungry for culture, eager for travel and for attention, spoiled, charming, headstrong and missish. She was to be, while I was growing up, my closest friend.

Dying relatives often bequeath me trunk-loads of papers which I treat with superstitious reverence and have no idea what to do with and so stuff into cupboards, lacking the courage or resolution to burn or discard. Pride of ownership is also hard to surrender. Living relatives off-load papers and objects too.

I've inherited Florence's mother's sizeable library, which includes her

Studio portrait of Florence, c 1909

Warne's Model Cookery (1900) and her various 'guides to modern opera' from 1909. A Hebrew Bar-Mitzvah prayer book published in Sulzbach in Germany and dated 1833, and a pen-and-ink drawing and also a framed daguerreotype of my great-great grandmother from the same period. Father's wooden darning mushroom and needle from Normandy in 1940 and his solar topee from Nigeria in 1945; the violin of my Uncle John, shot down with the RAF and killed, aged 19, in 1941; and the essays he wrote at Clifton College, calf-bound by his grief-stricken mother, my other Granny. My mother's egg-preserving pail from World War Two, in which she dunked eggs in isinglass extracted from the air-bladders of fish. (Where did you buy fish air-bladders to get isinglass? It was evidently both universally available and presumably cheap. The chemist maybe.) The deed-box of my great-great-grandfather George Cohen, who founded in 1834 what became the biggest scrap metal merchant in the UK, George Cohen & Sons, which demolished the Crystal Palace in 1936. He died in 1890, having started a dynasty as well as a big firm. My Franco-German great-grandparents' papers survive from 1870, when they escaped from Paris and its attacking Prussians. There are also some fine pictures and good furniture.

No doubt because the dead no longer exist, their bygones come charged with an extra freight of responsibility and piety, suggesting other customs, other times - 'Alas, poor ghost(s)'. We seem partly made up out of stories concerning dead people we never chose to be kin to and scarcely know. And if the oft-repeated truism that we suffer two deaths is accurate, the first when our hearts stop, the second at the point when nobody is left alive on earth who remembers us, then the act of burning old boxes of papers foreshadows final extinction or - more fancifully - slaughter.

Is it feeble-minded to feel sorry for and to want to stay loyal to the past? To worry and want to look after it? God has gone - together with his careful databases chronicling each human existence. Biographers alone now measure the weight of an individual life, and may feel that every human soul has a story worth safeguarding. Since I was a child I've felt an abstract pity for the lost and speechless generations fading silently into nothingness with no one to mourn or celebrate them.

A tipping point in later life comes when your address book contains more dead than living and many of the friends you talk to in your head cannot reply. We commune with spirits. 'As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth./ For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more', as Psalm 103 thrillingly has it. I feel sorry for the past, for the detritus of trivia its successive waves leave beached behind.

The task of looking after the possessions of the dead is a familiar one, for I was born to time-consuming, heavy responsibilities, my role as knight-errant defined early. Schooled to protect, from age six, my warring and unhappy parents from each other, and myself from them, I eventually graduated to rescuing wives-in-general from their husbands, regardless of their own wishes. This quixotic training had other long-term consequences. I volunteered during the Six Day War in 1967 to go to Israel to protect the Jews there for a lengthy thirteen months of kibbutz life, helped pioneer the UK's first gay-lib magazine around 1972 and moved to Poland after the Berlin Wall fell to help save the Poles from their history. That took two years.

PC, Kibbutz Alonim, 1967

Then, in 1996-99 I and my partner spent an aggregate of eight months caring for the ailing Dame Iris Murdoch in our house in Wales, at the same time that I was starting to try to write her biography. I recently found in Wales a random cache of stones she had collected and taken into her own protective care. The history of my solicitude for her - which has dominated the last three decades - forms the substance of the last, very different, third of this narrative.

***

But it seems to me that my final solicitude, which might also have been my first, might be towards myself. Who was I? is a real question, albeit a teasing one, with no correct answer, and in my case a question comically complicated by my having a name-sake who is a writer on the Sunday Times. We two Peter Conradis have never met but share an optician who once offered me his new spectacles instead of my own, so the world was out-of-focus. In 2004 during the same week we both gave talks at the Savile Club and at the end of my evening an elderly man rose to his feet to say he had driven all the way from Doncaster (an ominous beginning) to hear me talk about being Hitler's piano player and I had to tell him that that particular Peter Conradi's talk had happened four days earlier. In 1987 his mother rang me out of the blue to suggest that as everyone confused us, and as her son was the better-known, it would behove me to change my name. 'What name do you think might suit me?' I should have asked. Her Conradis were Dutch Protestants, I learnt, while mine were German Jews, on which topic more, later.

How do you recapture your childhood self ? When I try, it feels like introjecting my present self into a faraway scene, rather like Scrooge guided by the Ghost of Christmas Past, or the ancient Professor Borg in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, who similarly haunts scenes from his own childhood as a silent and sometimes invisible interloper. (Surely Bergman's film feeds off A Christmas Carol, both concerned with how apprehending the past might trigger a change-of-heart? Both configure remembering as an act of...