"In fact, the piece of wood had belonged to a Portuguese galleon, the Cinco Chagas (Five Wounds) and after seeking it high and low, it was found as a sitting bench at the entrance to the refectory of the poor and it was also on this odd beam that the poor would sit to have their meals. The king's coffin was then built using this wood." - Alfonso Davila in his 1900 biography of Don Cristobal de Moura, commenting on the origin of the coffin of Philip II of Spain.

Philip II of Spain died a slow and agonizing death which gave him ample time to plan a series of symbolic acts of to be performed on his dying hours and on

his funeral. These were to be a culmination of the pious life of a man who seemingly thought

his purpose on earth was to eradicate protestantism or, at the very least, protect the Catholic

faith from contamination. The testimonial accounts of his last hours compiled by the contempor

ary historian Luis Cabrera de Cordoba show a dying man obsessed with acquiring salvation, desperate to have communion against his doctors advice and kissing crucifixes with devoted passion.

It comes as no surprise then, that in between giving instructions regarding his shroud and praying, he may have concocted how his coffin could also achieve a symbolic value. Philip II is a social iconographer's dream: hardly any step in this complex and prolonged funerary rite is meaningless.

The wood his coffin was built from belonged to the wreckage of a Portuguese galleon whose captain and crew had fought valiantly against the so-called English Corsairs - the Earl of Cumberland's squadron to be more precise - off the coast of the Azores islands of Corvo and Faial. What was in fact an act of piracy - the Portuguese galleon was full to the brim with the riches of India and loaded with slaves - had been turned into an event of religious significance. According to the rather exciting accounts of the battle which read like Victorian adventure books for boys, the brave Portuguese Catholics would rather let the boat sink and perish with it than surrender it to the devilish Luterans. After twenty four hours of fighting against three English ships, the Cinco Chagas went up in flames and exploded when the fire reached the gunpowder storage area. Only thirteen of the presumed six hundred people on board survived. Thus, the sailors were transfigured into martyrs and the remains of the galleon into an unofficial holy relic. How the keel of the ship surfaced in Lisbon it is not known. The accounts that proclaim that the keel of the ship had been in Lisbon for 20 years before being reclaimed for funerary material is at odds with the date of the sinking - 1594 - but symbolism doesn't depend on authenticity as most saint's relics attest.

Not only was Philip II to be buried in a symbol of resistance to the Protestants, the wood used to build the ship - and the coffin - was said to be from the aptly named Tree of Paradise, a tree from the East Indies whose wood was rather durable, everlasting even. The name of the galleon, Five Wounds, alluded to the sufferings of Christ and, fittingly, to the wounds that covered the body of the disease ridden Philip. Considering salvation was a substantial point of discord between Catholics and Protestants, Philip seems to have tried to cover each theological possibility minutely in a last paroxysm of devotion. The rest of the wood beam that was not used in the coffin ended its days as crucifixes for the Monastery of San Lorenzo's church.

Even before the Reformation ships were seen as relics - either of the missionary efforts or of explorations of the world God created and which human engineering and cunning allowed. When the navigator Americo Vespucci died in 1512 - and as described by Bandini in Vita e Lettere - King Manuel I of Portugal ordered that pieces of the ship Vespucci captained should be hanging from the ceiling of Lisbon's Cathedral as a monument to his exploits.

If you walk into the Science Museum in London and admire the piece of Moon rock brought to Earth by an Apollo 15 astronaut, it begs the question. Is it the modern equivalent of Vespucci's hanging pieces of wood or is it more akin to Philip II as a symbol of the American eforts in the Space Race over the USSR?

For accounts of the sea battle that sank the Cinco Chagas see Southey's Lives of the British Admirals (in English) and Brito's História Trágico-Marítima (in Portuguese). For the last pious days of Philip II see Jose de Siguenza's Como vivió y murió Felipe II (in Spanish). For a modern take in English see Carlos Eire's From Madrid to Purgatory.

"He spoke in roughly the style in which Horace Walpole wrote his letters."

- Elias Canetti on Bertrand Russell

The most extraordinary feeling left after reading Party in the Blitz is this rekindling of the necessity to reflect on how to approach and reconstitute the past and especially past lives and social settings. What constitutes an historical fact versus what constitutes a narrative better dissected by an etnographer? Is historical truth verifiable or should we look to the past as a narrative with several narrators and points of view? You wouldn't expect a highbrow gossip based memoir to raise such philosophical questions. Just as Aubrey's sketches are deemed historically inaccurate, so Canetti's unreliable memoir is full of factual mistakes which certainly have disappointed biographers looking for new angles on their subjects.

Canetti, when in doubt about a particular claim, acknowledges he didn't research the accuracy of his statements but seems to nudge the reader into believing that, somehow, the memoir will be closer to the truth this way. At least closer to Canetti's truth who was not writing biographies of people he met but documenting what he remembered of them and what he heard others say about them. His impressions are a more faithful image of the zeitgeist of an era than if he had picked up the Oxford Dictionary of Biography to edit the text. Bertrand Russell's fame for otherworldliness is well illustrated by Canetti's description of how the philosopher chose to forego the title of Duke of Bedford and how he also spent six months in prison during World War I for being a pacifist, for example. It's the merging of rumor, fact and personal opinion that turns Party in the Blitz into a window into Canetti's venturings into the London salons, so to speak.

A considerable portion of the chapters have a feeling of ephemera; those are the ones about the minor celebrities who will never get a volume of their own biography published and yet deserve a - as a rule very opinionated - few lines like a play which has been performed only once and all there's left of it is a short, damning review in the morning paper.

Some of the more memorable characters - for they become characters with a sweep of an indirect autofictional broom - are the very sociable Mrs. Phillimore to whom Canetti attributed the writing of a best-seller but failed to name the right title for it; Geoffrey Pyke, the inventor, whose depression Canetti heard was caused by a terrible romantic experience; Lord David Stewart and his cross-dressing butler. And then there's Iris Murdoch and her chapter written in bile - "Everything I despise in English life is in her" -, herself reduced to a successful literary poser. Lover's, professional resentment or both: we'll never know.