French level-crossing signs warn motorists, “Un train peut en cacher un autre”; a train coming one way can conceal another in the opposite direction. David Pryce-Jones’s public hyphen signals that he is of Anglo-Welsh provenance on his father’s side, but it hides at least one other significant coupling: Fould-Springer, his mother’s rich and renowned Austro-French-Jewish family. In an occasional piece in this bristling chrestomathy, “May Day in Piest’any,” he writes, “I crowded into the small entrance of the Hotel Eden.” Can one man crowd anywhere? If anyone, David Pryce-Jones can.
