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Schlesinger can be self-important (the dinners on Martha's Vineyard with movie stars, the lunches at Manhattan's Mortimer's restaurant with the society crowd). He indulges the old New Deal intellectual's habit of bashing business and businessmen in an almost recreational way. (At one point he blithely equates capitalism with sexism and racism.) But even his smugness has a certain hilarious pungency. He records the time in London toward the end of the war when a V-1 bomb fell close by; everyone else in his office fell to the floor, but as a co-worker's journal noted, "Arthur...boldly looked out the window." Mr. Toad was brave.
Now retired from teaching, Schlesinger lives with his wife Alexandra in a Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River. He is just sitting down at his computer to write the second volume of his memoirs, due out in two years. "I try to write about myself as if I were writing about someone else," he says. "But all history is subjective." His memoir is a historian's dance to the music of time.