Finch's Quarterly Review Issue 5

Issue 5: Autumn 2009

£10

Finch’s

uarterly Review

Ecce, mundus est Sophia Loren on “Nine” pg 7

Lady Goldsmith on dogs pg 8

sordidus et olidus, sed etiam habet multas res smashingae

Evgeny Lebedev on the greatest delicacy pg 18

Dana Delany on Wisteria Lane pg 21

Matthew Modine on consumerism pg 23

John Malkovich on serial killers pg 26

Kevin Spacey on freedom of thought pg 26

Back to the Land

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T Finch’s Quarterly Review we usually like to retain a lofty indifference to domestic British politics. We move on an altogether grander stage, busying ourselves with the important things in life: the arts, literature, philanthropy, the correct height of the armhole in a tweed jacket, the optimum depth of a turn-up and so on. However, there are times when we feel the need to give a light nudge to the tiller on the ship of state and, as a new session of parliament commences, there are a few thoughts that we would like to share with our elected servants in the Palace of Westminster.

Forget the expenses row; that is water under the bridge or, more accurately, water in the newly cleaned moat. What we at Finch’s Quarterly Review would like to see is a more patrician style of politics. Although it may sound contrapuntal, I don’t think Gordon Brown is doing such a bad job – true, his remarks about having ended the cycle of boom and bust may have been a little on the premature side, but he is a serious man doing what he can in serious times. Moreover, given the unpopularity of the Labour regime, I reckon that Charles, Tristram and I could cobble together a political party and stand a chance of sweeping into power… I reckon it is about time for a Tweed Revolution.

I think that it falls to the Tories to lead the way in bringing more of a touch of the grouse moor and the stately home into political life. I do not have a stately home, nor do I shoot grouse – they are too small and they move too quickly – but this open-necked, Twitter-twatting, NottingHill-dinner-party-politics style of opposition has gone far enough. I think matters reached a risible nadir when a member of the party once led by Peel, Disraeli and Churchill compared parts of Britain to the television crime drama The Wire.

Should we really be electing a government that would appear to devise policy on the basis of the

autumn 2009

The Velvet Revolution was 20 years ago this winter.

As we return to more traditional values in these straitened times, it’s about time we got back to the land and engineered a 21st-century Tweed Revolution, argues Nick Foulkes American television programmes it watches? At least he could have come up with something more amusing; I might have been tempted if the Tories presented a manifesto based on classic US telly such as The Dukes of Hazzard, The Munsters, The Flintstones, Bewitched, Miami Vice, Moonlighting and, not forgetting the female vote, Desperate Housewives (Tory strategists, take note: we have one resident of Wisteria Lane writing in this number of FQR).

I think instead that we must look for the Tories to cast aside their pop culture and assume their traditional role as the party of the landed interest.

One only has to think back to the great march through central London orchestrated by the Countryside Alliance to know that the country is a powerful and important constituency.

And yet one does not hear so much of the “landed interest” these days. Of course, it was all very different in the 1840s, when Sir Robert Peel’s government was torn apart by rebellion over the Repeal of the Corn Laws led by Lord George Bentinck, and it would be a pity if today’s Tories lost contact with the land while wooing Twitterers and middle-class urban cyclists, even though I myself am among the latter demographic. I was therefore thrilled to learn that at least one Tory was claiming expenses for cleaning his moat; this is exactly the sort of behaviour that I welcome from a Conservative politician. After all, if the world’s bankers had spent more time on the upkeep of their castles and country houses, then we wouldn’t be in the trouble that we are today.

The thing is, I’m a sucker for the old England

of tweedy squires; that blissful prelapsarian world of PG Wodehouse’s immortal creation Blandings Castle: a place of perpetual summer where a prize pig called The Empress of Blandings is the sun around which an entire planetary system of endearing British stereotypes revolves.

I was thinking of PG Wodehouse when I came across an old party political broadcast for Harold Macmillan’s Tory Party. Now there was a Tory politician the nation could be proud of. Sitting in what looked suspiciously like the library of some grandee’s stately home, it was almost as if the camera had stumbled across a group of amiable old codgers mid-conversation at some weekend shooting party. And let us not forget that there was something to be said for the Macmillan way of doing things – it was, after all, the time when Britain had never had it so good.

I must add here that I am not a landowner… unless you count the dozen square metres or so of mock York stone-paved West London back yard, ownership of which I share with Cheltenham & Gloucester. And while I may not wish to participate in hunting, I like the tradition and style of the thing and think there are many worse things in the world than a group of people putting on traditional dress and embarking on a little bit of mounted pest control: I don’t have to live there to know that the countryside is important.

And so this, the autumnal issue, is loosely arranged around the theme of “Back to the Land”.

You know the sort of thing: mists, mellow fruitfulness, fruit filled with ripeness to the core, gourds, nuts and the all the other accoutrements

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that Mr John Keats conjured up in his Ode. And so we citizens of Finchland turn our hands to the soil, growing olives in Medina Sidonia with The Ivy’s Fernando Peire and digging up truffles with Evgeny Lebedev in Italy. And as for livestock, we are brimming with it: Annabel Goldsmith on dogs, Bronwen Astor on fish, Roger Saul on deer…

But, as well as a time of bounty, autumn is also a melancholy time. The year is starting to die and there is an elegiac quality about Keats’s poem that I think we have managed to mirror in this issue of Finch’s Quarterly Review, whether it is Matthew Modine mourning the passing of the drive-in cinemas of his childhood, or me whingeing about the difficulty in finding really heavy tweed.

UT most of all, this sense of a dying world is captured with Dafydd Jones’s vintage images of hunting, hunt balls and point-to-point meetings. I first met Dafydd at some ball or other at Oxford in the winter of 1983, and I have followed him and his work ever since. His eye for the telling and mordant detail is still as sharp as ever and his pictures are a photographic counterpart to the novels of Simon Raven and Evelyn Waugh.

Unfortunately, he would not let us publish his picture of dinner-jacketed hearties leaping over a burning boat in an Oxford quad or of a woman in a ball gown being pushed into an ornamental pond; nevertheless, he gave us the run of the rest of his archive and we have come up with an intriguing selection of snapshots of a world that was vanishing before his eyes…

Well, not all of it has gone. Among the pictures we turned up is an interesting one of a young George Osborne at the Bullingdon Club pointto-point in a group of floppy-haired, tweedy youngsters who look suspiciously like a cabal of treasury-advisers-in-waiting.

Nick Foulkes is the editorial director of FQR and head and director of FQR Group

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The Prologue

As Charles continues to Think Big, and the Finch empire carries on expanding, FQR’s editor in chief Nick Foulkes has been urged to embrace the internet. And now he finds he positively enjoys being hit – on his blog, that is

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WOULD like to say that I spent my summer re-reading Gibbon; however, that would be an untruth. Instead, I admit that I diverted myself with Martin Chuzzlewit, and then followed it up with Piers Brendon’s excellent book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997. Inspired

by Gibbon, Brendon’s book is a rollicking 700odd-page romp through the disintegration of the British Empire, from Yorktown to Hong Kong.

Both books offered me insights into our modern age. In Chuzzlewit my favourite character, pace Pecksniff, is Montague Tigg, the fraudulent financier who operated a Ponzi scheme not unlike our own Mr Madoff, except he did it in more style with a house in St James’s, a flashy carriage, a nattily dressed groom and so forth. But in Dickens, if not in life, financial sleight of hand proves positively fatal – Tigg is murdered by a business associate whom he was blackmailing.

Brendon’s book, with its brisk prose and its cast of eccentrics, reminds me, of course, of an empire builder known and loved by us all: Charles Finch.

I was never quite sure whether to be amused or appalled by the rich and textured cast of rogues, adventurers and mystics served up by Brendon in his wide-ranging panoramic study. The thing is that, as far as I could tell, the British Empire was pretty leaky and ramshackle from the moment it was conceived – if, indeed, it was conceived at all – and the way Brendon tells it, it is little short of a miracle that it struggled on as long as it did, let alone end up covering a quarter of the earth’s surface and encompassing half a billion subjects.

I think I would have fallen into the class of people who would have wondered what on earth we were doing poking our noses into the lives of people culturally and geographically remote from ourselves, and whether such an enterprise was entirely wise. Charles, however, would have been assailed by no such doubts but would have been out there with his pith helmet, his butler and his collapsible bathtub grabbing bits of land here and there for Queen and Country.

Take, for instance, Brendon’s pen portrait of Cecil Rhodes: “A sentimental cynic as soft as the Graces and as hard as Fate, Rhodes believed that the ends justified the means, that philanthropists deserved five per cent, and that every man had his price. As well as manipulating politicians, peers and prime ministers, he proposed to square the Mahdi over the Sudan and to ‘square the Pope’ over Ireland. In his drive to occupy the land that would bear his name, it was even said that Rhodes would ‘find means of squaring the tsetse fly’.” Brendon might have been writing about the eponymous proprietor of Finch’s Quarterly Review.

Rhodes was clearly a can-do spirit that at times was liable to get him a bit carried away, viz the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. But he did not let a little thing like global outrage get him down. The same indomitable spirit infuses our great leader and I have to admit that in my doubt-wracked way I rather admire his cheerful have-a-go mentality, his capacity to think big and his incurable optimism.

Like some gloomy Cassandra, I pointed out that the idea of publishing a high-quality art guide while simultaneously bringing out an awardwinning (well, I am sure it will an award of some sort one day) quarterly newspaper and an awardwinning (see previous parentheses) website

Contents The Quarterly Report: Charles Finch on Cannes and Venice & FQR’s party . . 5 Adam Dawtrey explores the relevance of the film festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Adam Dawtrey’s favourite films that take you back to the land . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Sophia Loren on shooting the musical film Nine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Roger Saul on organic deer farming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Lady Annabel Goldsmith on her collection of canines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Nick Foulkes on the grand crus of tweed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Dafydd Jones shares snaps and stories of a time gone by . . . . . . . . . . . 10 and 11 Simon Costin on founding a museum of British folklore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Lady Liza Campbell shares her Highland heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 and 13 Brownwen Astor on salmon fishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Christian zu Fürstenberg is FQR’s pro bono pin-up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 FQR Casting Couch with Lucy Punch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Evgeny Lebedev on truffles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Maya Even delights with autumnal apples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 and 19 Fernando Peire on grove expectations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 and 19 Simon de Pury’s restaurant review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis on her father’s sense of style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Princess Diaries in print . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Ten Tips on making the most of the Frieze Art Fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Dana Delany on suburbia and satire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Nicolos Bos on California dreaming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Matthew Modine on why consumerism must be a thing of the past . . . . . . . . 23 Harry Herbert’s tips from the racing season . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Tim Jefferies’ tips on being a gentleman in the outdoors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 John Malkovich on opera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Kevin Spacey on theatre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Ion Trewin on the Man Booker Prize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 and 27 FQR Art Exclusive: Mat Collishaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Proprietor’s Spouse: Sydney Ingle-Finch Proprietor: Charles Finch Editor in Chief: Nick Foulkes Art Director: Tristram Fetherstonhaugh Contributing editors: Vicki Reeve, Tom Stubbs, Kevin Spacey, Emma Thompson Liberal at Large: Matthew Modine Literary Editor: John Malkovich Managing Editor: Felicity Harrison Features Editor: Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis Travel Editor: Kate Lenahan Cookery Editor: Maya Even Racing Correspondent: The Hon. Harry Herbert Restaurant Correspondent: Simon de Pury PA to the Proprietor: Tiffany Grayson

Designed and produced by Fetherstonhaugh Associates (www.fetherstonhaugh.com).

Printed in England by CTD. The views expressed in Finch’s Quarterly Review are not necessarily those of the editorial team. The editorial team is not responsible or liable for text, pictures or illustrations, which remain the responsibility of the authors. Finch’s Quarterly Review is fully protected by copyright and nothing may be printed, translated or reproduced wholly or in part without written permission.

Next issue: December 2009. All advertising enquiries should be sent for the attention of Jonathan Sanders: jonathan@finchandpartners.com +44 (0)20 7851 7140.

Da Finchey Ode V Just crumbs…

Thought he, Nursing his brandy…

What had happened to friends, honour, the children’s kitty?

Everything has changed so much?

The order of things and such…

Another one, Squire?

The boy asked.

If I must, he sighed – and on he mused.

Crashed it had – he was, alas, festooned…

The Queen herself perspired – Economists had written to her, it transpired,

But not in time Still, her horse ran Ascot And Chelsea houses don’t go for peanuts.

He rose tipsily toward the marble steps His club a bastion of reprieve Until he saw that banker chap Taking a piss beneath Wellington’s portrait A new member, we regret. An inappropriate mis-step.

He’ll learn, smiled the Squire, A thing or two off Finch’s Quarterly Review.

Whilst the Bastards trot on…

–Unknown Sherpa

suffering millions of hits per day was, perhaps, slightly ambitious. Nevertheless I was full of admiration for the vigour with which he set Elisabeth and Felicity to work on this endeavour.

And, like all empire builders, he has his obsession that will brook no hindrance: Curzon had India, Rhodes “squared” Africa, Lawrence adored Arabia and Charles has the internet. Yes, he is still banging on about the internet and I am still telling him that we/he/I have no business meddling in the province of young people with poor dress sense. And, like the cyberspace imperialist that he is, he has “squared” me over the internet and has actually succeeded in getting me to blog… In the end it was an appeal to my better nature that did it; he gave me another few per cent of that shadowy and notional Montague Tigg-like financial colossus “The Guaranteed, Copper-Bottomed, Safe-asHouses, FQR Group of Publications ”, in which I rather suspect that somewhat more than the usual 100 per cent of shares have been issued… but then, as I said, Charles likes to think big and 100 per cent of anything is simply not enough.

OREOVER, I have nothing against building a little empire of my own on the side. We even made a little foray into internet filmmaking in which the gorgeous Tiffany, long-suffering assistant to the Empire Builder in Chief, filmed me being fitted for a tweed suit – rather cleverly, she held the camera upside down. (Rather churlishly, in my opinion, Tristram refused to post this little cinematic essay on finchsquarterly.com.)

The thing is that I am not sure that anyone really reads the FQR website, or at least I was not sure until I got a call from Tristram one morning (it was unusually early and I was still resting on my day bed in my dressing gown, pondering what tie to wear, so it must have been about 11am) saying that thousands (and this time I am not exaggerating) of people were “hitting”, as I believe the young people say, a piece written by the inimitable Mr Stubbs on “high-water” trousers.

Apparently, The Huffington Post, a real-life internet success story, had picked up the item and, considering it to be of inestimable value to its liberal constituency, had posted it on its website, nobly directing its visitors to “click” on a “link” (I am becoming a dab hand at technobabble) to finchsquarterly.com.

Deluged by visitors, our stoutly designed website did not “crash” but manfully soldiered on in the spirit of Empire. We were all very proud and took the rest of the day off to smoke cigars and otherwise capitalise on this stroke of good fortune.

As it happened, the surge in visitors was not due to the intrinsic news value of Mr Stubbs’s observation that some men favour shorter trousers than others. Instead, there was a more rational explanation: Charles had asked Arianna if she would mind taking a look at our website and seeing what she could do about driving a few visitors our way. And you know what, in an odd way, I felt much more comfortable knowing that Charles had “squared” the situation rather than it being a spontaneous explosion of synchronicity. If ever there was a man who could “square” the entire internet, it is our glorious leader.

And now you must excuse me, I have to get back to my blogging…

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The FQR Group of Publications including: FQR Art; FQR Style; FQR Living Well, FQR Big Game Hunter, Game Shot and Conservation; FQR Equestrian Life; FQR Ocean Wave incorporating Nautical Style; FQR Home and Hearth; FQR Paranormal; FQR Faith (Formerly FQR Monotheism in the Modern Age); www.finchsquarterly.com Chief Executive: Charles Finch Editorial Director: Nick Foulkes Creative Director: Tristram Fetherstonhaugh Advertising Strategy: Jonathan Sanders, Financial Director: Adam Bent

autumn 2009

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Pink gold case. Sapphire back.

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Un-Cannes-ily Peaceful

In the company of various Inglourious Basterds, the gloriously legitimate Charles Finch enjoys a better class of Croisette and a few exclusive shindigs at this year’s film festival

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T was a refreshingly quiet Cannes this year. Subdued by the financial crisis, there was less trash and noise on La Croisette. The filmmakers and players who were at the festival had a purpose -survival. The studios have shut most of their independent divisions, which traditionally are the only outlet for European films, but film people are resilient and used to the impossible task of funding pictures. I spent the first couple of days checking in with distributors and shaking a lot of hands.

My great pal and Finch’s Quarterly correspondent Matthew Modine flew in from New York at the behest of the New York Film Academy to hand out hats and talk up the Big Apple’s leading movie academy. We played a lot of tennis at my home away from home the Hôtel du Cap. And it was on the du Cap’s stunning terrace that Finch’s Quarterly hosted a dinner on the Saturday night. My beautiful wife, Sydney, flew in for the occasion, as did our esteemed Nick Foulkes and Tristram Fetherstonhaugh.

Felicity, our managing editor, even brought our flag, which we flew boldly from the Eden Roc and plan to erect outside our office in Mayfair. The dinner was given to us at a very special rate by Monsieur Perd of the du Cap and was a spectacular success: the weather perfect, the food exquisite and the guests all friends (see pictures).

Another highlight of Cannes was Inglourious Basterds, which screened to rapturous applause – standing ovations of at least five minutes. Even Quentin was taken aback. The after-party was attended by the full cast (Brad, Diane etc) and was relaxed and fun. The next day, Jaeger LeCoultre hosted a very small and exclusive lunch at the Carlton Hotel for Inglourious attended by producers Harvey Weinstein and Lawrence Bender, and Quentin Tarantino and Diane Kruger. Jaeger LeCoultre is sponsoring Venice and has a growing appetite for films, which is good news for all of us.

ks and Charl es Finch

Ciné City

Even in soaring temperatures, the Venice Film Festival is no sweat, says Charles Finch, when you have good films (Bad Lieutenant II), hospitality and company. But where are the investors?

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HE opening night and first few days of Venice were stifling hot this year. The festival crowd, with the exception of a few loyal international producers, seems comprised of Italian socialites and local television execs and film players. Exceptions are, of course, the international jury, which this year is presided over by Ang Lee, with actrees Sandrine Bonnaire, director Liliana Cavani, director Joe Dante, director/screenwriter Anurag Kashyap, singer-song writer and director Luciano Ligabue and filmmaker Sergei Bodrov – plus the star directors and actors. Giuseppe Tornatore’s film Baaria opened the first night with mixed reviews. Many found the film overly complicated and way too long. It’s an epic Sicilian saga. The evening started at 7.30pm and the film was still running at 10.30pm. Long night – and all in Italian.

The Hotel Cipriani has one of the great swimming pools, and a clientele this time of year that is comprised of wonderfully aged Americans. I was happy to see an octogenarian Palm Beach couple arrive with their granddaughter, all in matching Worth Avenue finery. It’s grand at Cip, and the service is wonderful.

There is a timeless quality to the place and something very humorous about the mix of movie stars and old NY families thrown together on the small island.

Jaeger LeCoultre and Finch & Partners hosted a dinner for The Bad Lieutenant II directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nic Cage and Eva Mendes. My great friend, Ed Pressman, who also made the original with my client Harvey Keitel, produced the film. We put together a very nice dinner in the garden for the cast and crew at the Cipriani thanks to Jaeger LeCoultre. The film premiered the next night and was very well received. Nic gives a fantastic performance, as does the beautiful Eva and rest of the cast.

It’s a blood bath out there in the independent film world. Fewer and fewer places to go for financing and distribution. We need some bored billionaires to come out of the woodwork and get involved in the greatest business in the world.

Actors are suffering too. Prices have bottomed out for big stars and the great directors are finding it harder than ever to find homes for their work. Films like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans are a breath of fresh air – risky and hard to finance, it’s classic art house with an edge. Herzog is one of the greatest living directors, and he takes plenty of risks.

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autumn 2009

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Welcome to Our World Nick Broomfield Emma Thompson Tim Jefferies Dylan Jones John Malkovich Matthew Modine Kevin Spacey on lying on eggs on living on fashion on books on his bike on theatre

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haven’t. However, from time to time I snatch oddly endearing; it is just that my own personal viewGielgud of life from the terrace restaurant of consoling moments from such a life, whether is fantasy Jamesit Mason and John a part of the jet-set pageant circa a long, sun-drenched lunch; or a great cigar and inthe TheSplendido Shooting as Party cup of tea on a pavement table in Jermyn Street Julie Christie in Darling (a belief I cling to along in the company of the world’s finest cigar with the existence of Santa Claus) took another merchant, Edward Sahakian; or an afternoon dent. But at least the Rooneys are enjoying savouring the rattle of dice as I face art dealer themselves.

There is a life of lotus-eating ease and (a dirty Fabien Fryns over a Max Parker backgammon board at the upper (not the lower) pool of the word, this) luxury to be enjoyed, so why spend the summer thumbing away at the BlackBerry Marbella Club.

I was at a seated dinner the other day (a working out how to leverage your non-share ridiculous term—after all, I tend not to eat dinner capital while spreadsheeting your MBA into yearin places without chairs) when a man told me his on-year core competency? I felt like telling my plans to make a fortune by buying a venerable branded-tat-focused dinner companion to relax a apparel name and turning it into a brand making little. After all, the graveyards are full of Issue 4: Summer people and I have always thought mass-produced tat in China. Just what the world indispensable 2009 Rolf just Sachsasdescends the graveyards of the Mediterranean, with their it did when needs. A little bit of me died, the Cresta Run are better than most. In the meantime, I heard that Association footballer and paragon cypresses, of male elegance Mr Wayne Rooney wed his look at the picture at the top of this page and fiancée in Portofino. I have nothing against the remember that living well is the best revenge.

HOSE who Rooneys—far from it. Their cheerful vulgarity is —Nick know £10 the Foulkes esteemed pages proprietor of Finch’s of Solzhenitsyn Quarterly Review or Grossman one will fierce ideologues know that he is encounters of pretty comfortable Krug. I was never who continue the sound of his with Communist to cleave to the seduced by the own voice and “dream” of a “luxury” apartment system, even a very melodious timbre it has too. personal pantheon though they (whatever happened themselves imprisoned His perorations find of expletives, for 1 to flats?), the have an www.finchsquarterly.com magniloquence cases where within or otherwise all plate glass and batchelor black, orotund marginalised “c” word is simply that is both that looked like not harsh enough. by it. The way a 21st-century balming and invigorating. I could that these characters But back to the money launderer’s seem so odd and flight to quality. listen Sharon Stone’s take on the imperial (Imperial so alien today For too long I just as well as sometimes to him all day, which have been hearing epitomises just is how much Leather, that Nichas Roeg about how the “new” I do. From is) fantasy of Cannes interiors of the changed. time toPostcard he comes up with Johan Eliasch economies Harold Robbins the East will make time on asdying Much a catch era. Which was vassals of us in the just as John our bafflingly 4 which he shortcoming materialism may well as Malkovi garnishes his conversation phrasepgwith Well, it looks less old world. ownshave I could never ch have afforded his own pg likely now. Factories Matthew 9 its anyway,designs s, , much luxury as Modine gewgaws so it down in Chinese Lucy my younger forgivehis son smothers his are shutting are, rainforest me own on the whole, if I amclothes less dangerous not temptedon pommes allumettes pg 14 cities that Liu too many inclusiven than strongly held you and Sydney to shed pgtears.

19 chips in our house) I have neverPicasso (no heard essand the on opinions. Ideas Jeff Koons tsunamicanvas with tomato ketchup. mere are where the danger pg 26 privateofinto of Russian oligarchs But Schadenfreu on meeting lies; after all, if For a time Charles flying Miro on de is one of the Osama bin that Laden had spent Londonpg went through a has28 many luxuries Kirkegaard slowed to a pusillanimou his time more we can no longer pg 28 s mystical quasi TE Lawrence phase, dribble. Don’t forget usefully visiting afford: we are his tailor during which he that as much as pg 29 together, and that all in this mineral was fond of would and his cigar merchant then describing his business we need the includes you, me, wealth of former the world the be in terms of pillars; the butcher, Soviet countries, banker and the the number people a safer place. The problem is that of pillars kept expanding, need to sell it to they market maker. us; and if we suffer when are on haven’t got the And while we often mid conversation the subject of money, economically in money to go shopping he added further Europe, who then , as trinkets, new divisions to I wish people would for stop going is going to buy they turn to his business. Next came his bizniz man ideas – look on about the branded tat churned the cheap happened the markets: suddenly phase, when the out by factories last time the world’s at what everyone everywhere verb “monetize” in the Far East? would be appended Besides, what do is an instant expert economies world’s tanked during the to almost every sentence. the elite of those on the to do 1930s. financial bourses. countries want few months ago Then a when they get And although I he started using Instead their of morning” first bit of spending “Good money? think it is a trifle the term “flight or “How do you quality”, a phrase to the spectres alarmist to see They want to buy do”, we greet each which he optimisticall of fascism and with a terse “The our luxury goods; other want to characterise the y used to from Communism rising Hang Seng closed they send their children behaviour of money the ashes of our up” or the any “The Nikkei is to Eton (or failing burnt-out consumer during such a crisis as the one that taking English that a hit”. Yet had the culture of public school will dreams, these grips us now. At you asked live what Thorstein people six months do); they want the time I wrote this off as another in our cities; eat Veblen called to ago their opinion pecuniary reputability piece of jargon that in our restaurants; Dax they would of the on our he had picked and what you and form that linguistic sunbathe have thought you beaches; tell the call lavish and I might about flea market CNN; were talking time on our watches; vulgar over-expend a venerable British but the more I think about the our tailors; ski on visit iture is in for a reversal. The apparel brand more it is beginning our slopes; drink than the Deutscher world’s economies rather our clubs our wine; join make sense.

Today, it; wherever Instead, we have been busy with the things that because we are a bloodthirsty bunch – far from off an Academy in the early 1970s, when hetocarried are hurtling Aktien Index and so on. Luxury downhill faster you are in the of leading are companies traded than Rolf Sachs world onlywho matter: perfecting our “left and right” technique FQR is with Prince Aki von Schwarzenberg you might Award for a little picture therehave one ideology… on the Frankfurt what make Europe goods and savoir faire (pictured above) is heard on theofCresta Run. consumerism, which stock exchange. strong. They The truth is that natural resource: when shooting woodcock; knowing when we are contributes to this issue and admits that Charles’s he does “flight calledtoThe Godfather, and thenis win again in the where are our none of us, government Anyone quality” comes in. with the exception who has any money included, knows Whether s occurring find yourself too good to double in tournament backgammon; not even need to kill anything when out shooting early 21st century when he produced Million the first thing about you duty left has a moral in Moscow, items like cashmere, of naturally to keep the fact the financial Manhattan, Mayfair markets; and the to themselves rather caviar and diamonds there and perfecting our extempore, off-the-cuff for him to feel it is a day well spent – butManchuria because Dollar a movie that he says nobody wanted only useful thing or bruit you areBaby, than is supplied is no luxury goods in a consumer their wealth about they have done society. us with a bunch speak of that is culture to with Academy Award acceptance speeches. The fact we like the tradition and pageantry of the thing. to make (even though he had his Clint Inold thefriend bottles of whipping boys not European. of ever more ludicrously gigayachts and whom to And on blame that is what Charles that Charles has had to pawn his Purdeys and the However, as one shooting season draws to a close directing and starring in it). Charles Finch, son of I am sure this sorry mess: expensive editions meant by “a flight Charles Finch has now enshrined to quality”.

–Nick Foulkes rest of us could not hit a barn door with a in Europe then another one opens on the other Oscar winner Peter Finch (did I mention that the term “hedge is Editorial Director funder” in his Quarterly Review of Finch’s blunderbuss, that we crash out of backgammon side of the planet, in the New World. www.fincalready?) gives his carefully considered Oscar hsquart tournaments in the first round, and that the head The link between shooting with guns and survival guide.erly.com And completing our survey of that has dropped off the only trophy that any of us has shooting with cameras is little more than a pun apparent oxymoron, Hollywood culture, LA’s 1 recently picked up (my “Havana Man of the Year (and a weak one at that), but film is an important favourite restaurateur Michael Chow writes about 2007” statuette) is beside the point. part of the topography of the realm of the four decades of feeding and befriending the world’s winter 2008 As I may have said before, we try and live life as imagination that is Finchland, both as a means of greatest artists, telling how he has built up one of we feel it ought to be rather than how it is. In escape from the tawdriness of the modern world the world’s most important art collections. Mind recent years, it has been tough but at last we feel and as one of Charles Finch’s passions. (The son of you, I would have to say that if I had to choose that things might be turning our way. In recent an Oscar winner, Charles is, technically speaking, between one of Michael’s ethereally, months a whole new lexicon of euphemism has second-generation Hollywood aristocracy.) The transcendentally, almost mystically delicious green sprung up to describe the financial holocaust; we Academy Awards may only have begun in 1927 prawns and some of the stuff that calls itself art talk of the “current climate”, “weathering the (the first ceremony was in 1928) but, given that these days the prawn begins to look like a seriously storm” and so on. Whatever the result of this film is scarcely a century old itself, the Oscars are good investment. While celebrating legends in and beyond Darwinian and Malthusian winnowing might be, as historic and traditional in their way as the These are the sort of people whom Charles likes Nick their lifetimes, Foulkes we would like to think that there will be a return to orders of nobility of the Old World. to call mavericks and I suppose that inpraises a time of individuality in a sea of homoge the fact that there’s real and lasting value. A little less decadence might And as the Oscars loom, we at FQR set excess, when success was cheap and money neity and never a dull moment not be a bad thing, and as we have never had any Hollywood in our sights – but not the shouted, while talent whispered and could barely at Finch’s Quarter ly Review money at least we won’t miss it now it has gone. here-today-gone-tomorrow evanescence of make itself heard, they ne were But of the the outsiders. things that has Take the picture above; it shows James Mason meretricious crap that is made merely to sate the now, when success is no longer easy and a amazed me than about the so it might be. Plato “current recognised this crisis” – and, and John Gielgud in the 1985 Bafta-nominated bulimic appetites of a society weaned on generation of young hotshots finding that economic they and I iscan’t well enough environmen in his Laws (think tell you John Grisham hearing t than John Thain, film The Shooting Party. There is something eternal disposable popular culture that is not worthy of are not masters of all they it is timehow for sick I am of and a thosesurvey, in sandals Merrill three words chiton) he accepted former CEO of is the unfolding Lynch, who is revelation that some men in the image and we can take consolation that the name. No, that would not be the FQR way. those who, in the words of another of– our of just always be better said to have dropped that it was time for Schiller would $1.2m how many very to shine again. off than others, on sprucing up banal people made huge while things are bad for us the period in which this Instead, even in that most superficial of societies, favourite people, Mariano Rubinacci, “know I have met Larry arriving at the amounts slightly of money.

Orwellian conclusion with Fabien and Thain was probably the office in early 2008. sure I am pretty Back inand film was set was immediately prior to that blood Hollywood, we have searched for and found real how” to take control how things are that each man “by that theshow spending too law of inequality, goodus old days (whenever a looking at much time Maverick both of them would make which will be in they were), his curtains and antiques money men Charles’s bath the First World War and it is to be hoped we value and longevity. done properly. proportion to List. One of were meant to wealth… will receive to spare much attention for the the most individual be individuals, honours and offices people I have don’t have another one of those to look forward to.

In this issue of FQR, the veteran producer Al – Nick Foulkes is Editorial Finch’s sober-sided equally collapsing financial the Director yet to meet is Captain ofMainwaring as possible, and as markets. the mother of he recent period there will be no “risk-averse”, as s It is a pity that the shooting season is over, not Ruddy writes on what it was like to win an Oscar Quarterly Review our of decadence flouted features editor. If you were they say in financialese of life: and disputes”. quarrels German during Plato’s law of the as we say at FQR. – or dull, 1980s and going the relative ratio of It takes a classical They were not to a certain sort affluence chances gods; they were with an almost scholar of the men, and rather of party the are that you would obscene blatancy rigour and it intellect of London unremarkable ones and now Gloria would appear that have bumped Mayor Boris Johnson at that.

One of the very into von Thurn und the gods have decided understand what to few things I remember fully Taxis, tithe the old Greek was is somewhat overdue. a party their sobriquet, studies of our beautiful from my even 1 getting at, but www.finchsquarterly.com an acronymic shortening girl whose One of the lessons I can get the gist language and its can take is a rather we TNT, said of Plato’s notion is Samuel Johnson’s of her name, literature legislator” trite one – that all you needed that “the money definition of a much as we like should determine to know. But then, and stockjobber as “a low wretch the to the things confound basic just unit of wealth it can buy us, we and “permit a man who gets money careful not to let must be internationa us all, this former cynosure to acquire double by buying and selling shares”. it stand in the way of the or triple, or as much as four times l set became une Hardly a noble of our dreams.

Look at Plato; he calling, then. the amount of this”. femme sérieuse… but not too sérieuse, And yet in the may have been however, and he Any more, Athenian past 20 years or born as she into a posh about reveals when she must “give back so these “low family and he wretches” have assumed writes the surplus to the her groupie-like state, and to the a crush on the artist of Fred Goodwin-lik could have pursued a life believe gods who are the society. Take disgraced Nietzschean status in our state”. who I e indulgence, but is called Prince patrons of the In giving up the financier Sir Fred again. chose to hang out instead he excess, “he shall just one of the Goodwin, penalty And on a personal with Socrates. suffer no many pantomime or loss of reputation; note, as a young Together with Theaetetus villains of the financial conflagration but if he disobeys man I our law anyone he started something modelled my hat-wearing on David this called the . I saw a picture who likes may inform Academy (for all Bowie in The of him at a and day’s shooting and Man Who Fell To against him given I know, he might receive he looked so, well, Earth, so I am the first Academy have maker thrilled that the normal. He delinquent half the value of the excess, had none of the of that epoch-defin Awards); and we and the talking flamboyance with shall pay a sum are still explains ing film, Nic about him over which I like to associate shooting. equal to the excess Roeg how 2,000 years later. of his own property, Instead, he evinced out the guy is In short, Apparently, to go about becoming a legend. and the other half a legend. sartorial flair of… all the shall belong of the excess it requires a baffling sorry to be so blunt… to the gods”.

So in this issue death. bank manager. a suburban In fact, this issue we have assembled And yet our society It is worth reflecting of FQR positively our own little pantheon of legends has conspired to reward these very that if Plato were brims with legends. We have and charge whether ordinary men, to of Great Britain in or things, Prince Alfonso people, places heap cash and honours upon them and his wealth Hohenlohe’s legendary medallion 4:1 were enshrined ratio of individuality they represent the triumph until they can be photographed on in law, Sir Fred’s of out at sea in quite forgiven for getting a little a powerboat over conventiona pension pot of £16m front of the legendary l wisdom. bit above their A couple of years Marbella buffet station and receive would mean that the rest of thinking that they with its legendary ago my friend, us would Fabien were superior to chocolate mousse. a minimum of £4m. art dealer waves, Fryns, told me the forces of Sticking to the nature, one of which Or, if it is true New Wave legend about his latest that from 1993 to say Fabien is the old rule that Debbie Harry offers discovery. tips until 2007, Dick has introduced up has a habit of what goes Lehman on pop stardom. vital some of the major Fuld of coming down.

Brothers received We sneak a peek Chinese Verdura’s at Fulco di Of course, we all half a billion dollars, artists to Western collectors, legendary jewellery then the humblest in fact Fabien like money, even something of an hamburger flipper and sup is Even’s legendary we cerebral made individuals who individual himself, would have fish soup, bouillabaisse on Maya inhabit the lofty 125 million bucks but back to face moral and albeit intellectual plane . If you can’t in the same period, his discovery; I was expecting cooking it yourself, of life at FQR. to hear about yet without having another unpronounc next time you In fact, we like to money a lot, as Cannes (about are in ible Chinese painter. running a generations cope with the stress of he it buys us the trinkets which Hollywood Instead, Stone told me the story legend -old multibillion us from pondering that divert business Sharon writes) of Larry Schiller, simply head off -dollar seemed, the futility of existence into the ground. who, it Tétou, to the legendary had photograph the whole, the presence And I would hazard and, on guess and if you have ed the American that the workplace a in its entirety: of the folding stuff trouble getting a 1960s the name the journey from of the average table, drop Kennedy, King, makes cuisine of our very own chef cradle to grave more Newman, de in Monroe in-house Mr McDonald’s Redford, Finch. and, my favourite legend Charles comfortable restaurants That’s quite a eponymous Schiller, the one lotta legends and spends less of Tippi Hedren above enough on his workplace certainly and Hitch himself for one paragraph. in a typical – cameo as the backseat Nick Foulkes is driver. Fabien Editorial Director understood Quarterly of Finch’s summer 2009 Review

hese, rather than copper kettles, woollen mittens, raindrops and whiskers, are a few of my favourite summer things, and the image above reminds me that I should really spend more of my time experiencing them.

In our lives that are so full of important jobs to be done, meetings to be taken, targets to be met, earn-outs to be, well, earned out, we often lose track of the things that make our lives what they are. The truth is that often we are so busy chasing the deal that will bring us all we want that we forget to enjoy what we already have (yes, there is a touch of Hallmark greeting-card morality about that, and it is a cliché, but then clichés have a disconcerting habit of being accurate). The Mediterranean sun on your back; the teak deck of

summer 2008

sordidus et olidus, sed etiam habet multas res smashingae

Al Ruddy on the Oscars

Lunch at Lo Scoglio and a fitting with the tailor, The rumble of the engine as I rev up the Riva, The warm, leathery smell of a Bentley Azure, The fragrant blue smoke of my favourite cigar…

a yacht (preferably someone else’s) beneath your feet; a dive into invigorating waters; the comforting bulk of a Girard-Perregaux Sea Hawk II Pro 3000 Metres on your wrist… Not that you really need a watch to tell you if it is time for a long lunch at the Hôtel du Cap, and a large cigar afterwards.

Of course I take it for granted that you are the sort of enlightened individual who knows that true love is the greatest of all these blessings. But while we are waiting for love, summer offers so many compensations—the chance to be fitted for voile shirts and linen suits; the opportunity to wear a pair of Tod’s in an almost ecclesiastical shade of purple; or the excuse, if one were needed, to get the bewitching Shiel Davidson-Lungley at Meyrowitz to make you yet another pair of sunglasses.

The truth is that I would love to have been born with, or even have been able to earn the money to indulge my aesthete tendencies, but I wasn’t and I

Finch’s

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Ecce, mundus est

sordidus et olidus,

sed etiam habet

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A Life Less y

Taking Care of Business Ordinar

Nick Foulkes professes that there has never been a better time to become a citizen of Finchland, a province in which style, manners, taste and talent thrive above fortune

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IKE the past as viewed by LP Hartley, Finchland is another country and they do things differently there, or rather here, because if you are reading this then you too are an inhabitant of Finchland. Finchland is more of an attitude than a geographically specific location, although there are locations in it, of course.

Confused? Well, you’re not the only one, but let me try and explain.

The world according to Finch is a sort of Neverland scripted by F Scott Fitzgerald and Ian Fleming, a world in which gentlemen open doors for ladies, are men of their word and wear properly tailored tweeds (rather than the pantomime, pimped-up, Savile-Row-alike-Richard-Roundtreemeets-Gerald-Harper-as-Hadleigh stuff one sees too much of these days). It is a world of eternal values from which vulgarity is banished and in which talent and good manners are more important than a good bank balance. Indeed, it is a world of balance in which nothing as, well, brash as the recent polychromatic blinged-up boom and ensuing catastrophic bust could have happened. Inhabitants of Finchland simply had too much taste to make loadsamoney in the recent gold rush and, consequently, we have had less to lose in the crash.

spring 2009

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FQR Autumnal Movie Musings

Keep Rolling In these iffy financial times, is there still a role for the fall festival, asks Adam Dawtrey

W

HY are we here? No, I haven’t come over all existential on you. I mean, why are we here, at Venice or Deauville, Telluride or Toronto, San Sebastian or Rome, Tokyo or Montreal, Abu Dhabi or Dubai, or anywhere they tack down a red carpet and throw up an arbitrary selection of films for the pleasure of the local bourgeoisie?

Yes, what Americans call the

Volpi Count Giuseppe fall festival season is upon us again, a curious ritual unwittingly invented back in August 1932 by Benito Mussolini’s henchman Count Giuseppe Volpi, when he founded the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica in the Excelsior Hotel on the Venice Lido.

Volpi was just trying to fill a few rooms, and celebrate the greatness of Italian culture. But the idea caught on, and these days the festival circuit never stops. The autumn is when the major events come thickest and fastest, as the Oscar race gets into gear.

Venice starts a transatlantic cavalcade in which cinematic debutantes, shy or brazen, traipse from city to city, lifting their skirts for the media and batting their lashes at the critics. Reputations are made or destroyed, bad boys stage comebacks, good girls get prizes, and sometimes, just sometimes, a little film like Slumdog Millionaire comes out of nowhere and becomes the story of the year.

But in a global recession, film festivals are under threat. Those who foot the bill – the sponsors, the local politicians and the studios – are increasingly wondering if it’s an indulgence they can no longer afford. After all, the simplest answer to why we are here is, usually, because we were invited. Someone else is paying, whether that’s the city where the festival takes place, the airline that ferries guests to the event, or the company we work for.

Film festivals are the ultimate free breakfast, lunch, cocktails and dinner, with a movie thrown in. So what if the film isn’t very good?

We trot out our evasions to the filmmaker afterwards – “Only you could have made that film!” or the favourite of one veteran British agent, “You bastard, you did it again!” accompanied by a jocular punch on the shoulder – and enjoy tearing it apart at the after-party so graciously funded by the company that made it.

But the big international festivals are ruinous events to stage and to attend. Venice is most egregious. The hotels are fabulous, but their bills even more so. Every short trip requires an expensive boat. The stars love it, because the cost and the canals protect them from vulgar intrusion. They can pose for the paparazzi on the Excelsior dock, and then hide on the exclusive islands of the lagoon.

Universal blew $1m launching Atonement there a couple of years ago. It catapulted Joe Wright’s movie into an early lead in the Oscar race, but studio execs privately doubted that it was money well spent. The film would probably have done just as well without it, and the Italian release – in the one country where a Venice

launch should count for something – was a bit of a washout. Some studios now prefer to take their films around the more modestly priced national festivals for more cost-effective publicity, as Fox did with Juno.

The Hollywood studios have a love-hate relationship with film festivals. They love being able to parade their stars in front of the captive press. But they hate the cost, and the way they can’t control the outcome, the haphazard process by which opinions form, and then set instantly in concrete. The rise of the blogger, and the decline of the traditional critic, has made this even more worryingly random.

Even positive responses can be dangerously misleading. Festival audiences tend to be generous, particularly in the presence of the filmmaker. Many is the director who has come away from the gilded bubble of Venice or Toronto convinced that he’s made a real crowd-pleaser, only to be stunned by the indifference with which his masterwork is greeted in the real world beyond. He then blames the distributor, instead of realising that everyone at the festival who told him they loved his movie was lying.

Each festival draws its personality from its setting. Venice and Toronto, the twin peaks of the fall calendar, are as different as the cities themselves. Venice is a languorous, aristocratic event, with an air of decayed grandeur and a high tolerance for high art. Mussolini may have made the trains run on time, but his festival typically runs hours late.

Toronto, a week and a world away, is the ultimate modern festival – democratic, efficient, and busy busy busy. Deals are done, campaigns are launched.

The Canadians are just so damned nice and grateful that they shower everything with love. In its own way, Toronto’s futuristic Bell Lightbox is just as divorced from harsh reality as the Lido’s crumbling Palazzo del Cinema. Whether they can remain so, with the chill winds of recession blowing, is open to question. Belts are being tightened as sponsors dwindle and studios cut back.

UT there are optimistic signs that paying audiences – at Edinburgh this summer, for example – are actually on the rise.

They come hoping to be among the first to discover something new. If the corporate giants pull back, that might give more chance for the small, the quirky, the independent and the genuinely original to be noticed. After all, if the supposed Oscar favourites hadn’t all avoided Venice and Toronto last year, would The Wrestler and Slumdog Millionaire have grabbed quite so much attention?

Festivals draw their lifeblood from such discoveries. They feed our craving for connection, which is never greater than in times of crisis. Cinema is an art form that is communally manufactured, and communally consumed, and without festivals, those two communities would rarely get a chance to meet and have fun together. In answer to the question of why we’re here, surely that’s a good enough excuse.

Natural-Born Thrillers A scene from A Canterbury Tale

Adam Dawtrey is called to the wild by five of his favourite films THE RAILWAY CHILDREN

Some scenes make you cry once. A rare few make you cry every time you see them. The reunion between Bobbie and her father on the station platform – “Daddy, oh my Daddy!” – is one of those. Even writing it brings a tear to the eye.

Bobbie and her siblings didn’t want to leave the city, where their life was perfect. But when their father disappears, they and their mother are forced into rural exile. The country life takes some getting used to, but in the end it heals all wounds.

CATCH US IF YOU CAN

F

ILM is an industrial medium. It requires technology, and its natural habitat is the city. It is finely tuned to the poetry that lives within machines. Science fiction is the ultimate cinematic genre. Is there a lovelier scene than the death of Rutger Hauer’s android in Blade Runner? Is there a more brutal statement of Hollywood’s mechanistic power than Transformers? Nature simply doesn’t come naturally to cinema. Even the Western, which celebrated the raw American landscape, was really about the coming of urban civilisation to tame the lawless wilderness.

There are exceptions, of course, and some count among my all-time favourite movies. Perhaps that’s because when filmmakers go back to the land, the contradiction between the medium and the message imbues their work with an impossible yearning. Here are five that I love.

lifting their skirts for the media

autumn 2009

In 1964, a young John Boorman hooked up with a group of Beatles wannabes to rip off A Hard Day’s Night. The Dave Clark Five didn’t have the tunes or the personality to carry it off. But by default, something more interesting emerged – a film drenched in disappointment at the hollowness of pop culture, and a yearning for

A CANTERBURY TALE

Emeric Pressburger’s love letter to the English landscape that gave him sanctuary from the Nazis. A land girl, a cynical British soldier and a hick American sergeant are stranded in a tiny village on the way to Canterbury.

Someone is pouring glue in the hair of girls who go out with soldiers. The trio try to solve the mystery, but they learn something far more important – what they are fighting to defend.

A thousand years of history etched into the living and breathing countryside. They don’t know it, but they are on a pilgrimage, and they will receive their blessing.

B

INTO THE WILD

This could be regarded as a cautionary tale – go back to the land, and it will kill you. But the foolish hero of Sean Penn’s under-appreciated masterpiece achieves a lyrical ecstasy in the Alaskan wilderness that almost convinces you this would be a good way to go. Based on a true story, this tale of a college grad who dropped out in the quest for a more authentic life, and ended up taking a suicidal hike into the frozen outback, nags and disturbs.

6

escape to a simpler rural England. Disillusioned by their ersatz life in Swinging London, a model and a stuntman go on the run across the West Country, chased by a cynical advertising executive, and a pack of reporters convinced the girl has been kidnapped. Romance never quite blossoms, but Boorman’s feel for the wintry landscape imbues their picaresque with melancholy beauty. As the pair stumble like innocent children through snowy fields and lanes, it begs the question – when did you last see real snow like this in an English movie?

Odd, yet gorgeous.

TOGETHER

The title of “the happiest Swedish movie ever made” is not one that’s fiercely contested. But before Lukas Moodysson reverted to national stereotype with a series of wilful wrist-slitters, he made two films that could teach Richard Curtis a thing or two. Fucking Amål (aka Show Me Love), about a teen lesbian romance, and Together, about a battered wife who joins a commune, are masterclasses in feelgood filmmaking. Be careful, though. Together, in particular, is so effective in giving hippies a good name that you will find yourself wanting to hug strangers and dress in hemp. At FQR we are all for getting back to nature, but there are limits.

Adam Dawtrey is FQR’s film critic

www.finchsquarterly.com

FQR Autumnal Movie Musings

Neapolitan beauty and Oscarwinning actress Sophia Loren explains her reasons for starring in the screen musical Nine and writes about her experiences on set

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ROWING up in Italy, the dream for all Italian actors was to work in an American musical. Music has always been a force in my life, especially as a little child during the War. So it was really my dream to work in a musical. My mother was a pianist, my son is a classical conductor and I have made about 50 records – not classical ones, though. My biggest hits were the comedy songs I sang with Peter Sellers: Bangers and Mash and Goodness Gracious Me. I love music.

Music makes me happy. And I was particularly happy about being asked to be in the musical movie Nine because it is directed by Rob Marshall.

I had just seen Chicago, which he directed and which I loved, when he called me up one day to tell me about this film he wanted to make – almost the story of Fellini. He said, “If you’re not in this movie, I’m not going to do it.” So, for the sake of his career, I said yes!

The story is taken from the Tony-nominated play of the same name. It is not really the story of Fellini, it’s more about the idea of a director who was like him, his fantasies and his world. Fellini was always in his own world. Daniel Day-Lewis plays the lead role of Guido Contini. I play his mother.

Daniel is great to work with, though it can also be quite difficult to work with him because he is so brilliant, so deep and real that he is almost intimidating. He’s a great actor and you always want to try and raise the bar and challenge him. Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you think you don’t. I really love him and I had a wonderful time filming with him.

But then Daniel is only one member of a truly exceptional cast. I am performing with three of the greatest actresses: Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench and Nicole Kidman. Everybody thought that with all these big-name actresses working together fireworks might happen but really we loved each other because the project was so exciting and we are all so very different.

First of all, Penélope is Spanish and, like me, she just loved the idea of being in the film because it was a musical. Then there is Judi

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Dench – wow, she is a marvellous actress, my God! And Nicole Kidman is also wonderful.

We’re all strong characters but, as we are all so different, rather than clashing we complemented each other – which I suppose was the idea. After all, the women in the film are supposed to represent different parts of Daniel’s character’s life.

So we really looked out for each other.

It was strange working on Nine, as I never worked with Fellini. That is one of my regrets. The closest I got was when I presented an Honorary Academy Award to him in 1993 with Marcello Mastroianni. That was very moving, not

I did my recordings for Nine in the same studio as I did my recording with Peter Sellers least because Italy had won and, of course, the Oscar is the highest prize in our field. It is amazing to be recognised by the American public. And what a public. When you go to the Oscars the whole of American cinema is there. So, it was moving, exhilarating, thrilling and enchanting. Really great. It was also quite funny because, of course, Fellini didn’t speak a word of English and so he tried to say something but the only thing he said that people understood was, “You just look at my wife, I’m sure she’s crying again!” And she was.

I was, however, lucky enough to work with another great Italian director, Vittorio De Sica. He really taught me everything I know – if I know something about acting – because I never went to an acting school. I first met him at Cinecittà and a friend of mine said, “You know who that is?” and I said, “No.” I was 15. De Sica could tell I was Neapolitan from my accent. This was really the beginning of it all for me. He said, “I’m going to do a film called The Gold of Naples, so why don’t you come to the office in the week and we’ll talk.” So I went to see him and he said that he thought I was fine for the role he wanted to give me. The name of the character I was to play was Sofia, and he said that I was so good for the part: “You can leave tomorrow and we will start the film the day after that.” And that is

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how this wonderful relationship with him began. Then I met my husband Carlo, and we three did so many wonderful films together.

E Sica brought the best out of me because he had really high hopes. When he looked at me from behind the camera I could not disappoint him because he believed so much in me and he gave me the courage to rise to the challenge.

We worked together for about 20 years, and all the films I made with De Sica (about 12 or 14 of them) are my favourites. It was a golden time for Italian cinema, and the films went all over the world because we had so many things to tell. If nothing happens in a country, what do you have to tell the public? If the life you’re leading as a country is not interesting, what do you say on screen? But after the War in Italy we had so many stories to tell – and the Italians love cinema.

I was reminded of this when we were shooting Nine in Rome.

There is a scene with Danny and me in an Alfa Romeo near the Piazza del Popolo. There were lots of people around. In Rome they adore movies and they all think they are actors, so as soon as they see a light going on a crowd starts to form. But it was a wonderful and friendly atmosphere because they were cheering and applauding. We had a wonderful time.

But we only shot in Rome for one day. Most of the filming was done in London. I’ve made so many movies there.

I love London, its studios and recording rooms. You know, I did my recordings for Nine in the same studio as I did my recording with Peter Sellers. Of course, the studio is now more modern, cleaner and more up to date but, as I was working on Nine, I was also remembering the fun I had with Peter. So the memories going around in my head then were great. I was so happy.

Legendary screen siren Sophia Loren

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Deer Roger

FQR Animal Magic

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’VE always loved the feel of deerskin, and bought my first pair of Italian deerskin shoes in the early Seventies as a young fashion designer. So when I designed my first men’s shoe collection for Mulberry in the Eighties I found an artisan shoemaker in Florence and I brought with me skins that had been tanned in Scandinavia, home of the reindeer. The hides were soft as butter and stretched really well over the wooden lasts.

If you’d told me then that one day I’d have my own deer park, I would have laughed at you.

However, here I am 25 years later, at Sharpham Park, writing this article just 25 yards from the nearest deer nibbling away at the lush grass.

We’ve lived here, from semi-detached manor house to fully grown park and estate, for 32 years.

Barely a line of stitching in the rich historical tapestry of this place. In 959 King Edwig granted the Theign Aetholwold tenure to Sharpham with a flourish of his bejewelled gauntlet. Over the following centuries it passed back and forth between secular and monastic ownership.

Glastonbury Abbey’s Benedictine monks held it in the 1100s and started to empark the property. In 1356 the park was surrounded by “3 fayre miles of oak and chestnut palings”, some six feet tall, as much to keep villains, or should that be villeins, out as to keep the deer in.

Glastonbury was one of the richest abbeys in the country, and Sharpham Park was the Abbot’s favourite haunt. From here Richard Whiting, the last Abbot, was taken by King Henry VIII’s commissioners to be hanged, drawn and quartered on Glastonbury Tor. The assets noted by the king’s men included 160 deer, of which 20 were raskells (stags). In those days venison was a rich man’s meat, valued for the sport of the kill and its meat and hide, and for its status. But by the 1700s the park was in disrepair and venison no longer the Rolls-Royce of meats.

It was not until 2004, when I bought the fields surrounding our house, that the dream of resuscitating the complete estate of Sharpham Park became a reality. My life had changed dramatically.

After 30 years of building Mulberry from £500 in 1971 to a worldwide brand, I’d been involved in a brutal boardroom battle, which I lost the same year the Park miraculously came up for sale.

I knew I would have to create something very

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From deerskin shoes to organic deer farming, Roger Saul relates his dramatic change of career

special to come anywhere near making a living in the harsh climate of agriculture in the UK. I resolved to create a new brand out of Sharpham Park using the ancient principles of mixedeconomy farming. I can hear the hoots of laughter now – rich man playing at toy farming…

But I couldn’t have a brand if I had no deer?

And what sort of deer?

Research produced an old map that showed an adjoining lane called Stagman’s Lane – and only red deer have stags (fallow deer have bucks). Now on the trail, I found that Woburn Abbey seemed to have the best name for red deer. Callum Thomson at Woburn offered me two fine young stags for bloodline breeding and suggested a Devonian deer farmer for the hinds.

But how to contain them? Old maps of the park showed a wooden paling, rather like a Davy Crockett palisade, so I resolved to build my own.

Oak was expensive but I found a small timber yard in Brittany. The next problem was erecting it; the parkland is part ancient peat, 12ft deep, and rather like dry bog so susceptible to movement. We had to put in six-feet retaining posts, pile-driven into the ground – a laborious and expensive job, surrounding 30 acres of fields.

Five years on we have 67 deer with one main stag, Harold; he has a harem of wives and daughters, an incestuous scenario. His sons are culled at 12-18 months. We shoot them in the park to minimise stress, and they fall where they are shot. The rest of the herd carry on eating, blissfully unaware they’ve just lost one of their brothers.

Wild deer, which are stalked and taken out as the oldest and/or most infirm, produce strong, tasty, but often tough meat. Farmed deer are usually corralled and taken by lorry to the abattoir, causing immense stress. In my view,

We shoot them in the park to minimise stress

Paws For Thought

Lady Annabel Goldsmith is passionate about her four-legged friends. Just don’t introduce her to another cute one – she can’t resist

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CANNOT remember a time when I was not surrounded by dogs. I grew up with a pack of black Aberdeen Terriers, Scotties. My parents, in particular my father, were besotted by them and so was I. No one else liked them. They bit everyone, including the vet, who dreaded the visits to Wynyard Park, our family home.

When, aged 19, I married Mark Birley, my sister gave me a black and tan Dachshund called Noodle, who rapidly became the love of our lives. So humanised did he become that Mark would tell everyone that I had forbidden him to use bad language in front of Noodle.

Noodle was followed by Midge, a small brown Dachshund puppy Mark found in a nightclub in the South of France. Initially furious with him as he staggered in drunk at four in the morning clutching Midge under his arm, I also fell in love with her and she was duly smuggled back to London in a canvas bag tucked underneath Mark’s underwear.

As the years rolled on, Mark acquired a Jack Russell Terrier and a very eccentric mongrel with yellow eyes whom he named Help. Help was arguably the worst-behaved dog in the world and walking him became a living nightmare. It was embarrassing crossing Hyde Park shouting, “Help, Help!” It was even more so when he snatched the sandwiches of some poor workman having his lunch on a bench, and unseated a rider by shoving his nose up the horse’s bottom…

Help was succeeded by a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Blitz. Mark refused to believe that his dogs were ever at fault, so when Blitz bit the ear of a woman walking in the park he insisted that “that bloody woman startled poor Blitz”.

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organic park deer culled at 12-18 months give the tenderest meat and have endured the least stress.

We now produce venison and juniper pies, venison meat cuts, venison burgers and dry cured venison hams – for sale in the Sharpham Park Shop at Kilver Court.

OOKING back on these words, it all seems both ridiculously easy and plain ridiculous, but Mother Nature taught me painful lessons along the way.

Number one: always remember you’re dealing with what is essentially a wild animal, and respect it. At least two human deaths a year in this country are caused by stags. The horror of seeing Harold trample one of his young to death – because a herdsman who wanted his photo taken holding a fawn left too much of his scent on the youngster – still fills me with pain.

Another frustrating and demoralising episode was trying to work out why deer were suddenly dying, only to discover that their immune systems had been depleted because of copper deficiency in our land. We found a way around this by giving the deer a supplement in their feed, and life at Sharpham Park at the moment is calm. Harold has had a good season, producing 29 calves, and is already sporting a fine set of antlers – covered in downy velvet.

Last week I went to see Harold’s new rival, Opium, who is four years old and from one of the finest bloodlines in the country, the Henshaw line. I hope to introduce him to enhance ours. So the rutting season at Sharpham Park looks like it could get even more exciting…

Roger Saul is hosting Feastival at Kilver Court on the 3rd & 4th of October

I mention Mark’s dogs because, although by the time he acquired them we had separated, they were very much a part of my life and most of the time I had to look after them.

I moved to Ormeley Lodge, Ham, in 1976 and have had a series of dogs here, the most famous of whom was Copper, who led such an extraordinary life that I wrote a book about him in 2006 called Copper: A Dog’s Life.

He was a real Heinz mix and spent his early years roaming the area, travelling by bus and visiting pubs as far away as Surbiton. Eventually, his wandering landed me up in court, where he escaped with his life but I had to pay a fine and promise to have him neutered. It took him a long time to settle into domesticity since he was, as my brother put on his tombstone, “a true gentleman of the road”.

He was the leader of my pack of four Norfolk Terriers, whom I acquired in succession, starting with Barney, followed by his wife Bee. Between them they produced four puppies, two of whom I kept – Boris and Bindy. Although I adored them, they were inclined to take the odd nip out of the nearest ankle and, rather like the Scotties of my childhood, they were not very popular, particularly with my children. However, they all lived to a ripe old age and are buried alongside Copper in my pet cemetery, all their headstones having little epitaphs on them. In the past few years I have acquired two Grand Basset Griffon Vendeens, known as the "friendly breed", and a black and tan mongrel called Scruff, half Alsatian and half God knows what.

IX months ago, having sworn that I would never have another dog I acquired Poppy. Poppy is the product of Ben and Kate’s (my son and daughter-in-law’s) mongrel Maggie. Despite Kate’s and my protestations, Ben was determined to get Maggie pregnant and walked her all over Richmond Park begging any owner of a male dog to take Maggie as his bride. Every encounter was a failure and by evening he was so desperate he patrolled around Parsons Green in Fulham hunting for a bridegroom.

Exasperated, I advised him to knock on every door around the Green and enquire whether anyone was interested. I was, of course, joking. But after several abortive attempts, Maggie was finally mated with a Lurcher called Ralph. This resulted in a litter of seven – four black, two brindle and one blonde and cheeky – that last was Poppy, and, as everyone predicted, she ended up with me. Naturally, she has wormed her way into my heart despite the fact that she is a thief, practically a pickpocket. She concentrates particularly on my bathroom and, scattered round the garden, I regularly find my hairbrush, my pants, dental floss and anything else she can reach off the shelves. I have found it unwise to leave shoes around as they end up being chewed and then discarded in the garden as well.

As I write this I am sitting on a Sussex beach with my grandchildren and all the dogs, watching Poppy swimming valiantly after the children in the sea. I am also watching her playing on the sand with the most enchanting dog I have ever seen; blonde, hairy and charming – a Labradoodle, I am told. I have to turn my eyes away because she is irresistible and I do not want any more dogs.

In my will I have stipulated that my ashes should be scattered over the graves of my dogs. What better resting place can there be?

Image: A Dafydd Jone's photograph of dalmations Rose & Tag at Rotherfield Park, 1985. These are not Lady Annabel's dogs: although she loves all dogs, Dalmations are far down on her pecking order. Lady Annabel is releasing her third book No Invitation Required: The Pelham Cottage Years in November.

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The Venerable Tweed

FQR Male Style Special

Whether it’s from Harris, Shetland or Donegal, Nick Foulkes feels practically invincible in a top tweed

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HENEVER I am asked to appear on a television programme I’m seized by the fear that I will look an absolute twerp. I am sure that there are those who might say that I would do well to carry this fear with me into every aspect of my quotidian existence, but I will leave the problem of daily dignity until later and focus on my televisual persona. Although I have not seen it, I am assured that I appeared on a television programme about Savile Row, where I was filmed debating lapped side seams and cavalry-style slant bottoms on a pair of trousers that were being fitted

by Mr Hitchcock of Anderson & Sheppard.

Apparently, this programme was such a success (my contribution notwithstanding) that a sequel was made – not Savile Row II: It’s Big, It’s Back, It’s Braced & This Time It’s Wearing Turn-Ups, but a programme about Harris Tweed. The programme-maker was a charming man called Ian Denyer. What a lovely chap. Charm is an important and underrated quality when making anything these days.

Ian’s charm helped my vanity overcome my reticence and I agreed to talk to his camera about my love of tweed.

I had intended my contribution to be a scholarly disquisition. I saw myself intoning gravely about the birth of tweed in the Highlands of Scotland and how the various district and estate tweeds supplanted the traditional clan tartans as signifiers of a geographical specificity. I had also expected to dazzle the viewer with my insights into early Victorian England and how the love of tweed was part of a collective nostalgia for a time that probably never was, evinced by the soaring Gothic architecture of Barry and Pugin, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the Young England political movement that peddled a neo-feudal idyll in the face of increasing industrialisation.

Instead, within a couple of hours Ian had me capering about in a pair of rust-coloured tweed plus fours with a light overcheck – in short, just the kind of thing that Mr Goldfinger might well have enjoyed wearing for a round of golf. So much for maintaining my dignity in front of the camera. I must add that the plus fours were already ancient when I bought them as a teenager in a wonderful second-hand clothes shop called “Clothes for Gentlemen”, an emporium that also equipped me with a ginger tweed coat with raglan sleeves that helped me to recreate the killer look of Basil Rathbone in the character of Sherlock Holmes. I still wear that coat today, relined and with fraying cuffs and collar now covered in brown velvet.

The thing is that tweed exerts a hold over me that I am powerless to resist; it always has and I daresay it always will. Much as Evelyn Waugh felt about cigars, observing that “the most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana cigar” so I feel about tweed – indeed, smoking a cigar while wearing a violently checked three-piece tweed suit I feel almost invincible.

HIS is rather strange, because I am one of the least rurally inclined people I know and yet I cannot get enough of this hairy fabric: Shetland, Harris, Donegal, Cheviot… bring it on. And the heavier the better. Forget mere 12oz tweeds, give me a 17, a 21 or even a 28oz. These are the sort of impregnable fabrics upon which the Empire was built, cloths that have life-changing, even lifesaving properties. You don’t have to take my word for it. In his book Armageddon: The Battle For Germany 1944-1945, Sir Max Hastings unearthed a fascinating story concerning one Captain “Dim” Robbins who suffered the misfortune of having a Luger emptied into him.

Miraculously, the only injury he sustained was to the tip of a finger.

“Fortunately,” writes Sir Max, “Robbins was wearing a heavy tweed coat, which absorbed most of the bullets.”

As a congenital contrarian, I suppose that tweed occupies pole position in my wardrobe precisely because mine is not a tweedy existence. And yet I have found a tweed that can be worn in town with black shoes (a grey Huntsman tweed with blue and black windowpane overchecks from 1999). And it is my proud boast, as well as a tribute to our island climate, that one year not a month passed without it being sufficiently chilly for me to reach for a stout 21oz, single-breasted, three-button, single-vent, sandstone-coloured tweed coat with a blue and white overcheck made by Terry Haste when he presided over the bespoke tailoring department at Hackett.

I just find it impossible to resist the romance and glamour… yes, glamour… of the stuff. Those wonderful names of tweed mills and merchants past and present – Haggarts of Aberfeldy, Campbell’s of Beauly, Macdougall’s of Inverness, Hunters of Brora, Johnstons of Elgin – summon, for me, at least, a world just as rich as, say, Cheval Blanc and La Tache conjure for the oenophile. These are the grands crus classés of tweed that evoke with Proustian precision the world portrayed in the wonderful wistful Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going.

The Britain of Powell and Pressburger may have vanished, if indeed it ever existed, but at least one can seek consolation in the tweeds.

photo: Fetherstonhaugh

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Bespoke patchwork tweed jacket by Huntsman.

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FQR Country Pursuits

y t i r u c e S l Socia es tells how he on J d d fy a D er h p Society photogra ation clicked with his voc

left to right, top to bottom: Lady Katherine Brudenell-Bruce, Beaufort Hunt Point to Point, 1983; Christchurch and Farley Hill Beagles Ball, 1983; Ghislaine Maxwell, Bullingdon Point to Point, 1984; Prince Charles and the Princess of Wales, Cartier Polo, Windsor; Heythrop Hunt, 1985; Michael Beatson-Clark, Richard Harris-Smith, Chris Beatson-Clark; Christine Alers-Hankey, Beaufort Meet, Gloucestershire, 1987; Peregrine Pollen, Holland and Holland shooting school, 1981; Quorn Hunt, 1983; Nigella Lawson, Bullingdon Point to Point, 1983; James Johnstone, Hugh Chisolm; George Osbourne (circled) Bullingdon Point to Point, 1997; Nick Straker, James Sainsbury and Kate Murray-Phillipson, Bullingdon Point to Point, 1982; opposite: Mrs. David Parker, Beaufort Meet, Gloucestershire, 1987

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STUDIED painting in art school but, when I left, there wasn’t any way for artists to make a living through painting so I set up a photo studio in Oxford doing portraits, as I felt photography was still a creative pursuit. Around the same time I entered a competition and did a set of pictures for a Sunday Times article called “Return of the Bright Young Things”. My photos were, in a way, journalistic pictures of parties in Oxford and it was because of them that I was approached by Tina Brown of Tatler who offered me a job taking social photos.

It was a dream job because I could really carve a niche for myself. At that time, the social scene had been an underrated field for photography, most preferring more serious things. Of those of us who did cover parties, most would only ever arrive at the beginning of a party and stay for an hour. I tended to stay longer to try to get the essence of the event, to get pictures of people dancing and so on.

I found the seasonal parties inspiring, visually. I particularly liked the light. I did a series of pictures of the Cambridge May Balls when the light at dawn is lovely and soft. At a May Ball you could

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work until 2am, taking photos using a flash the whole time and you still wouldn’t really get the feeling of it because the special part, the bit everyone remembers, is when dawn breaks and people are still partying, but (by then) in a calm way. There is that lovely atmosphere of the sun coming through and people go on punts. I wanted to capture that part of the night, so after my first May Ball I decided not to go for the initial part and instead set my alarm for 5am and would head out to take pictures then.

I was asked to cover hunt balls, although the funny thing was that very few were ever used in the magazine. Tina didn’t find them glamorous enough as the attendees weren’t known across the whole country. The first one I went to was in Oxfordshire.

It poured with rain and everyone got stuck in the mud. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get my car out of the field it was in, so I left quite early. My assignment instructions were to look out for people

in the red coats because they were more important.

The refreshing thing about the hunt balls was that they weren’t terribly elitist. Anyone who was part of the hunt could go. Of course, you’d get the master of the hunt and the aristocrats, but you would also get the rest of the pack. They were lovely things to capture. Usually the grandest, most beautiful house of the area would be used. Everyone knew one another and the atmosphere was relaxed, rather than decadent. There was one that I stayed all night at in Gloucestershire that ended with snowball fights and blowing on hunting horns at 3am. It was just about people having a good time.

Time can give new meaning to a moment you capture. I took a photo at a Bullingdon point-topoint of a guy and girl canoodling in the hay, with another man with a bottle in hand overlooking them. Apparently, the girl and the encouraging third party in the trio ended up getting married!

I also took photos of actual hunts. I would run

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around following the hunt and taking photos in the field until, eventually, the hunt would get away from me and I’d be lost. I liked hunt assignments as I liked being out of London instead of at some smoky party, getting some fresh air, and running around in the rain.

Through my work I felt I was being given access to a secret world. I made friends with people in the scene but I wouldn’t say I was “part” of it.

The seasonal stuff has changed completely. The big events are all publicised now and are much more accessible, with corporate sponsors. In a way I witnessed the end of an era. It was a little elite world I captured, a world one was born into. There used to be an official invite list – a debs list – which, if you were on it, meant you had immediate access to all these parties. There were some peripheral people, who didn’t naturally form part of the expected list but they would somehow manage to get invited. I found them the most interesting. Their very survival seemed to be based on going to parties.

Photographer Dafydd Jones's work can be viewed on www.dafjones.com

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FQR Country Pursuits

That’s all folk

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OR as long as I can remember I have been interested in myths and folk stories. For a child, they offer a means of making sense of the world. They represent a series of lessons that work on both a practical and a psychological level. They are fundamental to humanity and have always been with us and we ignore them at our peril.

Quite often over the years, I have tried to find a place where I could learn more about Britain’s rich folk heritage, only to discover that we don’t actually have any such institution. This is strange, really, when we produce so much of it. Over the past 15 years I’ve become increasingly involved with the customs themselves, not only going to witness them but also taking part when invited to do so. They represent a moment out of time, where the norms of existence are bent or forgotten. While we are rooted in the here and now, they help to put us in touch with our past and to build community spirit, foster an interest in where we have come from and the things that are important to us. It was with this in mind that I decided to look into opening the UK’s first ever museum dedicated solely to researching and celebrating our native customs and traditions. As yet the project is in its very early stages and I would hope to start fundraising in the next few months with the idea to open the museum in approximately three years’ time. On April 30 this year I had a large fundraising fête to launch the start of a UK tour. Also, I have taken to the roads of Britain in a converted 1976 Castleton caravan, adapted specially to be a travelling Folk Museum in miniature – a taste of what is to come. I shall be touring the country to attend folk festivals and events countrywide to raise awareness for the project.

During my travels, I will compile a mailing list,

Set designer Simon Costin on the importance of being all folked-up and why he is founding a museum dedicated to Britain’s rich heritage of vernacular culture

discover what visitors to the caravan could donate to the collection, share their oral histories and experiences, and generally promote the future museum via coverage in local and national newspapers, television and radio. I will also be looking to find a permanent home for the collection.

I see the primary focus of the museum being its collection of artefacts, photographs, films, oral histories, manuscripts and assorted ephemera, all drawn from the study of our annual customs themselves, as they exist and have existed. This would form the main body of the archive, which would be made available to the public for study and research.

The way in which these things could be displayed is exciting to me as a designer, as it would be to anyone who has visited a welldesigned museum and been given another insight into material that they had perhaps overlooked before. I imagine that the bulk of visitors to the space may not have come into contact with much of the material displayed, which is exciting in itself.

HE secondary focus would be the way in which I hope to engage the actual makers involved in various forms of folk art – from straw-dolly makers and well dressers to barge painters – and then contemporary artists who make work that deals with folkloric themes.

One idea for showing the wide variety of Morris team outfits is to send a selection of 200 teams a blank doll which they would then dress in their team kit. Eventually, once all of the figures are displayed, they will represent the individual skills of each maker and, as a whole, this will become a piece of folk art in its own right.

I see the museum as filling a yawning gap within the cultural landscape of this country and as a means for people from all walks of life to gain knowledge of and a deeper understanding of our unique folk culture.

Museum director Simon Costin invites readers to become a friend of the museum at http://museumofbritishfolklore.com/friend.html

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GIVE ME MOOR Simon Costin photographed by Tim Walker, © Doc Rowe

Lady Liza Campbell returns to the Highlands

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OBBIE Burns wrote, “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here.”

“Scotland: where the rednecks are titled.”

I wrote that.

Although long exiled, a chunk of my heart still lies there – on the banks of the Findhorn, to be precise, where the surrounding moorland dips down to the river’s edge and suddenly the landscape changes from bleak to beautiful. It feels secluded, sheltered, secret. Entering this valley is like stepping into a Victorian watercolour. The Findhorn snakes sleepily over shallow rapids, a deep coffee-bean brown. Slow corners form shady pools where salmon rest on their journey upstream to spawn, yet in spate, the water can double in volume in a matter of hours, and suddenly looks as though seething milk has been added upstream. The force of water can chew up the banks, tear down the hazel trees that fringe the curves, and carry them away to the sea.

While autumn and winter rush in, Scotland’s warm weather is prone to diva-ish delays. Growing up there, the summer season was dominated by three things: athletics,

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dancing and killing. Nothing has changed.

The arrival of parachutes from a cloudy sky marks the launch of the Highland Games in our local town. Canisters attached to the parachutists’ heels belch red smoke as they spiral down to a canvas target in the main arena, while a regimental pipe band marches around the perimeter playing Scottish standards. The bagpipes make the tunes blurry and subaquatic, but when the snare drum rolls come in, they sharpen up the sound, just as a pair of goggles clears your vision underwater.

Throughout the afternoon there are displays of the Highland Fling in which overdressed children in waistcoats, lace jabots and leather pumps prance like nimble but enraged pixies in a complex hopscotch around two swords lying crossed on the floor. Finally, as the audience drifts towards a collective nap, a cup will be awarded to some grandchild of Rumpelstiltskin.

Far more exciting are the sweating, topless men – mostly itinerant New Zealanders – competing in shearing races. Huge, docile sheep are held between the men’s legs as they peel away the fleeces to reveal skimpier, balder models.

There are high-jump and pole-vaulting events too, then the sudden appearance on the running track of scrawny men who, unbeknown to the crowds, have been racing towards us in a bobbing filament from some anonymous field on the other side of the county. Burly men in kilts heft cabers into their cupped hands and balance them vertically with the help of a bulging shoulder. A few steps and then, if they can produce sufficient momentum, the pole is flipped onto its opposite end and into a lumbering somersault. Novices are easy to spot: they stagger about like a drunk making off with a keepsake from a sawmill.

Partytime is also steeped in formaldehyde. When the young men come off the moor, they change into their kilts and sporrans to dance with their hands in the air in imitation of the antlers on the stags they’ve just been stalking. Held in chandelierlit rooms, there are specially sprung floors so that the whole room bounces gently with the thud of 600 feet stepping in time.

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FQR Country Pursuits

She Looks Great In (the River) Tweed Looking fabulous on Tweed, Bronwen Astor explains why she has fallen for salmon fishing hook, line and sinker

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T’S mid-October, and there is only one place to be: in a boat on the River Tweed fishing for salmon. I am sitting on a swivel stool in the rear of a small rowing boat, casting a long line towards the opposite bank and letting the fly drift slowly round to the middle of the river before pulling it in in short tugs, lifting the rod (15ft carbon fibre) and casting again.

Silence. Just the slap, slap of the water against the boat and a quiet splash of the oars as the ghillie keeps our drifting boat in the middle of the river. A couple of ducks fly past and a mink runs up the wall opposite. I must be careful not to hook that swan floating majestically downstream with my next cast.

The sun is warm on my back; we no longer speak. In the silence I meditate, contemplate, pray, thinking only of the next cast and the beauty of my surroundings. Minutes pass. I am relaxed.

Suddenly, there is a tug on the line. At once I am alert and hold the rod still. No striking; that way the hook would come instantly out of the fish’s mouth. With the rod still and slowly lifting it, I let the line run out. What a wonderful sound, that first run of the reel. The line, held firmly in my fingers, quivers. Yes, it is a fish, I’m not just caught on the bottom. Now begins the contest: the fish versus me.

The ghillie also has jumped into action. He asks “Is it a big one?” “I don’t know,” I answer through gritted teeth and concentration. Suddenly from way downriver a fish leaps into the air. Heavens, it’s the one on the end of my line – so we get a glimpse of its size.

“Eighteen and fresh,” mutters my ghillie and I dip the rod hurriedly, although I feel nothing and it may be off the hook by now. We are rowing back to our shore and I am letting the line run out again. “Stop!”

I shout, as the fish pulls strongly from a long way away.

Goodness, this is exciting. It jumps again. Surely I’ve lost it this time? By now we are anchored on our bank and the ghillie is out of the boat and wading thigh deep in the water holding an enormous net. I reel in rapidly as the fish comes up towards us, my actions jerky with panic and tension. I’m standing up too but sit down again immediately, remembering the time when, losing my balance, I fell into the bottom of the boat and the ghillie grabbed not me but the rod to save the fish. Now comes the tricky bit – to play cat and mouse so that the fish is tired and will roll over into the waiting net. But no, it is not yet ready.

With enormous strength it has swum again into the middle of the river and I, in despair at the thought of losing it, let the line run out until it is slack and I can hurriedly reel in again, lifting the rod perpendicular and bending it to the left and then to the right to tire it and guide it towards us.

HOOPS! It’s in the net. The ghillie has demonstrated his skill by scooping it up from behind. We have it and we congratulate each other on our joint effort. I let out a big sigh. Have I been holding my breath that long?

If it were a female fish it would be put back into the river immediately. But no, this is male and, with a quick tap on the head, it lies motionless in the bottom of the boat, his big eye staring dolefully up at me. Oh, can I, should I, kill these wonderful creatures? But this is why I have come here. This beautiful, muscular body will be expertly smoked and vacuum-packed and sent south for the family for Christmas. Take… eat… it is a gift for you.

The glamorous Bronwen Lady Astor is a trained psychotherapist and Spiritual Director

Is it a big one?

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F you gaze around any ballroom, you can see the distinctive livery of each clan and make the connections between brothers and sons and cousins and uncles and fathers by matching up the tartans of their flying kilts, and the women by the sashes tied across their bodies.

For a beginner, Highland reeling can look like esoteric prancing, but with a little concentration, you can soon understand the pattern repeats, as people weave themselves down the line, like a crochet thread with a brain.

When I was a teenager, some of the bigger parties had an unspoken etiquette to follow: no dresses above the ankle; men may not remove their jackets, and while they could clap and leap and holler, a girl doing the same was viewed askance – she must move smoothly and avoid hearty skipping; newcomers who couldn’t do the dances were quietly frowned upon for cocking up the flow. The most old-fashioned of all the old-fashioned aspects was that you had to pick up a numbered dance card. It came with a printed running order of reels and an attached tasselled pencil. When a boy came up, you both noted down the booking and then sought each other out when the programme reached your booking. I lived in terror of having an unmarked card and would scribble – Cornish Pasty, Tooth Cavity, Arc Welder – anything not to look like a wallflower. Writing such nonsense had an advantage when it came to the opposite end of the problem: you couldn’t easily rebuff people you didn’t like unless your card clearly looked full. For a crash course in a reel’s erotic possibilities: the Reel of the 51st is the most flirtatious with full-frontal touch, while Hamilton House gives the least physical contact – good for dealing with the mossy-handed. Speed the Plough is in a category of its own as it’s so difficult it makes a man not only lose the will to flirt, but to live – in Scotland at any rate.

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After August 12, we children would be slung into the back of ancient Land Rovers alongside the gundogs to go out shooting. It was usually cold and often drizzling, and my main task was to keep out of sight.

I would crouch in the bottom of a butt, hands clamped over my ears as my father fired overhead and was shushed all afternoon, while he kept up a monologue with his dog. From wellie-boot level there was not much to see other than damp dogs, and nothing to do except collect spent cartridges and sniff deeply on the warm cordite before popping them on my fingers as witch’s gloves.

The highlight of the day would be getting home and clambering out of sodden clothes and into one of the gigantic Victorian baths surrounded by glass decanters etched with grapevines and full of soupy pine essence. There were long copper plungers instead of plugs, and the scalding water was a soft peaty brown. The baths were so long that if I lay down I had to hang on to the sides or float, and when I sat up the water lapped my shoulders. The bath towels were the size of spinnakers.

If it had been a good day on the moor, with a big bag, it meant one thing: grouse for dinner. Our cook liked to make it so rare the meat might as well have been left on a radiator for 10 minutes. But my childhood took place in pre-fussy eating days and we ate what we were given. The only relief from the musky tang of game blood was when my teeth clattered against a pellet. This was very auspicious. On my privately calibrated scale of luck, it was one up from winning “pull a wishbone” and two down from seeing a shooting star.

Even for someone as fey as I was, Scotland still managed to put the heart into hearty.

Liza Campbell is part- time explorer, full-time writer and tea time siren and blogs on lizaclizaclizac@blogspot.com

For a crash course in a reel’s erotic possibilities: the Reel of the 51st is the most flirtatious with full-frontal touch

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Soul train FQR Pro Bono Pinup

the

Christian zu Fürstenberg explains the appeal of his annual pilgrimage by rail to Lourdes to Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis EVERY YEAR A TRAIN WITH 35-40 SEVERELY

DISABLED CHILDREN GOES ON A PILGRIMAGE TO

LOURDES UNDER THE FLAG OF THE ORDER OF MALTA. SINCE WHEN HAVE YOU BEEN LEADING THIS TRAIN? This is my fifth year leading the train. My mother led one for over 20 years, and I accompanied the children’s train for several years before I became leader. My predecessor and friend, Franz Erwein Nostitz, told me I didn’t have much choice because I’d been called upon. It is an honour.

WERE YOU A LITTLE SCARED? Terrified! The responsibility of leading 35 severely handicapped kids is immense, but leading 70-80 young people aged 18-30 (who accompany the train as carers) was the biggest challenge. Would they accept me and listen to me? We are entrusted with responsibility for them. If something doesn’t work, you have to improvise and it’s scary, especially the first time. It’s still scary but the more experience you have, the more fun you have.

I REMEMBER WHEN YOU TOOK OVER IT WAS A BIG CHANGE BECAUSE FRANZ ERWEIN WAS OLDER AND YOU WERE MORE MY GENERATION. HOW DO YOU THINK THE TRAIN HAS CHANGED? Well, I’m a big believer in teamwork, a value shared by Franz Erwein. However, he and his team leaders grew older and the gap between them and the younger members looking after the children grew. I think the understanding of what was going on in the team itself fell apart a little bit. For me it is important that everybody is seen as equal.

We’re all there for one cause, and it may sound cheesy but team spirit makes it easier for me to lead as everybody feels responsible for each other.

My co-leader and I are also more laissez-faire, a little less strict and allow for more improvisation.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ABOUT THE MIRACLE ASPECT OF LOURDES? What happens there is always some form of miracle. Miracles are subjective. It’s about the way you approach things. For us, to have a wonderful, safe time with the children is what is most important. The biggest miracle is the power and strength we all gain. The strength of the sick people’s belief can bring you closer to life’s purpose and can strengthen your faith. It is not about the disabled jumping out of their wheelchairs and walking – for us, it’s the tiny miracles we see in the children’s eyes, the way they accept their sickness and talk about it, and the way the team bonds with them.

WHAT MAKES THE EXPERIENCE SO SPECIAL TO YOU? You learn so much from these kids. I learn about acceptance and understand how precious life is.

There may be a child who cries all day long then at the end of the week you suddenly see them smiling. There is nothing more rewarding.

WHEN DID YOU FIRST EXPERIENCE LOURDES AND WHAT WAS IT LIKE? When I was 15 I went on the train my mother led. I looked after a handicapped child and an old handicapped man. What touched me most was the team spirit of people from different

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backgrounds all helping in a wonderfully religious and passionate way. Working with a handicapped person was new – to lift, wash and clean them, change their diapers. I didn’t want to leave the child – I wanted to give him everything I had, to hold his hand and make him feel good. It was the first time I felt I could do something really meaningful and actually help someone. Then there’s the religious experience; it’s powerful and sucks you in. You come home exhausted yet you can’t wait for next year.

HOW DOES THIS HANDS-ON CHARITABLE WORK IMPACT YOUR “ORDINARY ” LIFE? It opens my eyes as to what you can do to help others. It makes you realise how much you can do with very little. In a way it’s selfish, too, because I take away so much from the experience. All year I think about the kids, write to them and collect money for the pilgrimage. Every year team members ask me how else they can help. It makes me more aware of the challenges we face in this world.

THE MAIN CHALLENGE FOR YOU IS RAISING FUNDS. HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THIS? It costs about €100,000. I approach my friends and write asking for donations but there are so many charities asking for money so we have to be more creative. We organise fundraisers that are fun, like the treasure hunt last year in St Moritz and other parties, exhibitions and concerts. The children make paintings on the train and we auction these.

WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES FOR THE TRAIN AND HOW LONG ARE YOU GOING TO BE AN ACTIVE PART OF IT?

It’s becoming more difficult because the French train system is now a high-speed system – so the special trains from Germany and Austria have to go on different routes and it takes us so long. I don’t know how long we can continue. It’s sad because the train is a romantic way to travel and a special part of the pilgrimage. The cost is much higher than for a plane but many of our children can’t fly because of their disabilities. My hope is that we can keep going by train and lower the cost by working with the train networks. I’d like to do this for as long as possible but I don’t want to get too old. This particular train is for young people. I’m 32 now. In five years I may become a little out of touch with the team members. So in the next three years or so I’ll be looking for the next person.

WHEN YOU ARE NOT LEADING THE PILGRIMAGE WHAT DO YOU GET UP TO? I run my family business. I’m in charge of real estate. I’m on the board of the Fürstenberg group, which keeps me busy. I’ve started playing polo, which I’m addicted to. I enjoy working hard, playing polo and country life – hunting etc. I’m a country bumpkin, really…

DO YOU HAVE LIFE ADVICE OR MOTTO? Always see the positive in life and look for the good in everything.

Prince Christian zu Fürstenberg leads the German Order of Malta’s children’s train to Lourdes every year

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D A I S Y FA I R Y R A T T L E

A S P R E Y, W I T H L O V E A S P R E Y. C O M

Felicity Harrison finds out why the smart and gorgeous actress Lucy Punch is back in London and sees at first hand why it’s so easy to get Punch drunk portrait by Fetherstonhaugh SO, YOU HAVE MOVED FROM LONDON TO LA. WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT LA LIFE? Well, the sun shines there, which you can’t complain about. It’s an easy life, and you have a lot more space. Plus I have a cool group of friends there now, finally. It takes a while to meet people but, through work, I’ve become friends with a bunch of writers, producers and actors.

HOW ARE YOU ENJOYING BEING BACK IN LONDON TO FILM WOODY ALLEN’S LATEST PROJECT? I love it! I’m staying in Mayfair so I’m delighted.

CAN YOU SPILL THE BEANS ON WHAT GOES ON IN ONE OF YOUR LATEST PROJECTS, THE GOOD OLD FASHIONED ORGY? It’s about a group of 30 friends who throw a July

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4th party every year. When the house where the party is held is about to be sold, they decide to have an orgy as the ultimate send-off. I’m playing a square character who has a baby and doesn’t take part in the orgy.

A BIT BORING? Yes, but I was really happy when I saw the rest of the cast worrying about dieting and getting a tan.

AS A TALL, BLONDE FEMALE, DO YOU FIND YOU GET TYPECAST IN LA? I get a lot of variety. More so than in London, where I was often cast as the snooty bitch. The role Woody has me in is great and later this year I’m in a film with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, which I’m really excited about. A remake of Le Dîner de Cons, it’s directed by Jay Roach, an amazing comedy director.

WHO ARE SOME OF THE DIRECTORS YOU ASPIRE TO WORK WITH? There are so many: Tim Burton; David Lynch; Paul Thomas Anderson; Joel and Ethan Coen. I like people with a unique vision who put an imaginative, creative stamp on their work. In London I’d like to work with Shane Meadows and Lynne Ramsay.

WHO WOULD YOUR DREAM ON-SCREEN ROMANCE BE WITH?My absolute dream person – and he hasn’t done a film for a while, so here’s an invitation to bring him back – is Gene Wilder.

I’m obsessed with him. I grew up watching all his movies. He’s a brilliant actor and comedian.

He’s not just funny – his characters are real and he is always honest, true and utterly charming. I adore him. I’d also like to play opposite Benicio Del Toro. I’ll have an off-set romance with Benicio and I’m already madly in love with Gene, so I’ll marry him.

SO WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A MAN? Someone I’d date must be kind, funny, adventurous – the usual stuff. If I’m going to be superficial: broad shoulders with that slightly evil kiss-you-or-kill-you look in their eyes.

WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKES WOMEN DYNAMIC ON SCREEN? The women I admire are actresses rather than movie stars and who play a range of parts. Ninety per cent of very successful women in this business are drop-dead gorgeous. It’s not the same for men.

I find it boring to watch people who are selfconscious. Intelligence translates on screen. I look

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for that, as well as real charisma and intensity. It is mesmerising and draws an audience in.

DO YOU HAVE ANY VICES? Chocolate. Heroin. I’m joking… I mean caffeine.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT ONSCREEN NUDITY? I’ve never done it but I don’t have a problem with it. You have to be judicious. I’d feel more comfortable if the scene was not sexual or titillating, or I wasn’t supposed to look good. If I was naked, covered in mud and being stabbed to death I’d say “absolutely”. Drowning in a vat of honey totally naked – why not?

DO YOU FEEL PRESSURE FOR BODY IMAGE? I don’t really play those sort of parts. I like to look nice for myself ANOTHER FILM YOU’RE IN – YOUNG AMERICANS – SOUNDS PRETTY HEDONISTIC. DID YOU ENJOY IT? That was fun, with Topher Grace and Anna Faris.

I play a crazy Eighties Madonna wannabe.

Crimped hair and bad costumes… And I snog about 87 guys! It all takes place at a party so, in a way, the continuous night shoots felt like one long party too!

Lucy Punch will star in Woody Allen's 2009 London Project

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Ta t

FQR A Taste of Autumn

Fungi To Be With T

HE apple is a remarkable fruit. Consider its singular status in any national pecking order of popular desserts: apple strudel, apple crumble, apple pie – puddings that seem to embody all that is good, wholesome and somehow reassuring about their respective countries. The pastries are the national costumes but the apple is the shared heart.

The apple is what unites us.

The French also love this fruit. But the French, being French, resist simplification. Turn to the dessert chapters of any of the classic French cookbooks and you will find at least 25 apple puddings, half a dozen of which can claim a place in a gastronomic hall of fame. There are flans and soufflés, tarts and cakes, charlottes, crêpes, clafoutis…

It all somehow makes the culinary improvisation of the demoiselles Tatin just over a century ago even more of a miracle. If you consider that the skills of two modest provincial sisters could triumph over several hundred years of cooking virtuosity – over Escoffier, Vatel, Carême, Dunand – to produce a dessert that has become one of, if not the representative of, all that is good and luscious and French about patisserie, what else is it but miraculous? Or perhaps not. Perhaps, like genetics, those hundreds of years of French culinary evolution were necessary before they could culminate in the creation of a dessert as perfect as Tarte Tatin.

Whatever the explanation, Tatin is it.

EQUIPMENT Tarte Tatin pan or equivalent, baking or greaseproof paper, paring knife, spatula, rolling pin INGREDIENTS 200g unsalted cold butter, diced into little cubes, 125g unsalted butter (room temperature), 125g caster sugar, 89 small Granny Smith apples, 225g plain flour, pinch of salt, 3 tbsp caster sugar, 1 large egg

Evgeny Lebedev asks why the truffle is in such good odour

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OR true gourmets, a truffle is never a mere trifle. It is, after all, precious enough to be measured only in painstakingly thin, shaved slices or condensed into tiny droplets of oil. It costs more than any other living plant. Remember the gourmet’s eternal riddle: why does an unseemly-looking root hidden in the ground, sometimes unearthed by truffle-hunters using smelly pigs, make some men willing to pay a price comparable to gold? Truffles defy logic as they enthrall bons viveurs and make restaurateurs lose their perspective, but they offer the most desirably pungent, sensual aroma and taste, making them arguably the greatest delicacies on earth, The year after my father and I bought Palazzo Terranova, an idyllic hotel in a wooded valley in Umbria, we instantly saw the madness at play as our chef turned up with a ragged root for which he had blown the entire week’s food budget, trumpeting something about it being a bargain.

Città di Castello, we quickly discovered, was classic truffle country, with the bianchetto in spring/early summer, the nero estivo in summer and then the famously alluring white truffle in autumn. Whether with scrambled eggs or simple pasta, truffles transport food up the epicurean scale. And truffle snufflers will go to any lengths to snaffle this strange fungus, with some cooks even keeping their prized trophy in a locked safe.

HE search is almost mythic, with the most likely truffle troves deep among the roots of oak, poplar, linden, hazel and willow – the different trees bringing different flavours to the individual truffles. Dogs with a seeming sixth sense wander through ancient woods in the early-morning mist of summer, or the chill of autumn, waiting for their truffle radar to kick in and then start digging and lead the way to the next black gold nugget.

Truffle hunting is a tradition that demands patience. Farmers have tried – with some success recently – to cultivate these valuable root fungi. Truffles, however, tend to remain stubborn and prefer to grace us with their presence in their own place and time. Traditionally, a sow was the animal of choice to point her nose at the right spot.

But pigs being, well, piggish, they would eat as many truffles as they found and so valuable truffles almost literally became pearls cast before swine.

Just why are truffles a gourmand’s idea of food plucked from heaven? The musky taste hooked Lord Byron, who kept one on his desk, perhaps to stimulate the imagination. Do they have aphrodisiac qualities? Did Byron’s truffle add to his reputation for being mad, bad and dangerous? Do truffles boost the immune system?

Do they have a low GI? All these questions are completely irrelevant at the end of the day, as one crunches into a bruschetta with virgin olive oil, salt and freshly grated truffle. No investigation or analysis quite gets it. These sacred roots are just what they are: the ultimate measure of eating for pleasure.

Evgeny Lebedev is a Russian entrepreneur and international socialite

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The Nature of Things He wanted his own private olive grove, and it wasn’t in Fernando Peire’s nature to give up – not even on Mother Nature

I

REMEMBER that what first drew me to the little town in the deep south-west of Andalucia was simply its name; just two words sitting side by side on a map of the province of Cadiz: Medina Sidonia. These words instantly evoked images of medieval El Andalus. I had to visit.

What I discovered was a hilltop town that thought it was still living in the Fifties. White-walled houses connected by steep and narrow cobbled streets and alleyways, a central square and lively market, old men in hats huddled on every corner in their shirtsleeves, hunchbacked old women lugging bags home from the market, young children playing unsupervised, not a single traffic light nor parking restriction... This was the Old Spain. And from the ruined castle at the town’s highest point you got to see the most incredible panorama: the grey-green outline of the mountains of Sierra Morena to the east; the meandering, orderly crisscross of olive groves planted much closer to home; the bull-breeding farms dotted with livestock predestined to afternoon death; lonely, ruined Moorish castles atop tiny hills; the Atlantic sunset beaches close to the Cape of Trafalgar, where 200 years ago Nelson led the English to victory over the Duke of Medina Sidonia and his Armada.

The view must surely have thrilled the first Phoenician to climb the hill of Medina some 2,000 years before me.

I set my heart on buying a property on the outskirts of this town and bought four acres of land with water but no electricity, some stables and sheds but no house. The place had not been cultivated for decades. I had months of arduous clearing to do before I could even begin terracing the hillside that sloped steeply away from the outbuildings

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that would eventually form the basis of my new Spanish home.

Upon removing a pigsty the size of a small air-raid shelter I accidentally uncovered five beautiful 19th-century Muscat grapevines. These survivors of a long-abandoned vineyard now provide enough intensely sweet, perfectly round green grapes for me, my neighbours and regular summer guests.

Another success story was my decision to invite a grizzly old fruit farmer to follow me and a local farmhand around my land with a chainsaw and a container of petrol. The old man would sit on his improvised shooting stick and tell us which branches to cut and which to leave. We spent an afternoon in this fashion, pruning all the fruit trees we could find: plum, pear, quince, lemon, pomegranate, almond, apricot, orange and fig. The old man spoke loudly: “The tree must be hungry to give you fruit; your trees are spoilt, young man – they do what they want to do, like lazy teenagers. You need to educate them and knock them into shape!” Like many of the rural locals, he only seemed to

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w o N r

FQR A Taste of Autumn

The perfect Maya Even presents the perfect dessert and her recipe for it RECIPE This recipe is so famous that it has its own pan. Not

many individual recipes do. The Tatin pan is round, copper and comes in a number of sizes (most typically a diameter of about 23cm with sides 4cm high). If you do not have this, you can unscrew the handle of a similarly sized round cast-iron pan or heavy skillet. If it does not unscrew and looks wooden or flimsy, wrap the handle well in some tin foil just before it goes in the oven, checking first that the whole thing fits.

METHOD Start by making the pastry. This will be a sweet pâte brisée. There are chefs who insist on pâte feuilleté. This is bad advice that will lead you down a ruinous road to soggy pastry and disaster. Believe me, you don’t want to go there.

So, on a large piece of baking paper, make a mound with the flour, salt and sugar, and mix it up with your fingers.

Add the 200g of diced, cold butter.

With an ordinary eating knife, chop the butter into the flour till the mix looks like rough crumbs. You can do this with your fingertips too, but keep the pressure light, the movement brisk and the time to a minimum. Refrigerate the crumbs for a few minutes if they start to get oily and warm.

Dig a shallow hole in the middle of your crumbly mix and break the egg into this. Gather the crumbs over the egg and bring the mix together, kneading lightly and quickly till you have a relatively smooth dough. Again, try to keep handling and time to a minimum. Wrap the dough in a piece of clingfilm and refrigerate while you prepare the apples.

The choice of apples in this recipe is important. They have to hold their shape through some fairly fierce cooking and many apples simply collapse, leaving you with apple sauce. Granny Smiths are up to the job, so are hard Cox’s.

Stick to these. The others will let you down.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F. Peel the apples. Cut each in half and dig out the core.

Leave the apple shape as intact as possible. Smear the bottom of the pan with 100g of the soft butter. Sprinkle over 75g of sugar. Arrange the apple halves on top of this so that they are sitting on their ends upright, the rounded side

of each half snuggling against the cored part of its neighbour. Form a tight outer circle in the pan, and then an inner one. The pan should be tightly packed. Sprinkle over the remaining sugar and dot the rest of the butter on top. Place the pan on a stove over high heat for about 20 minutes, moving the pan around to ensure that the sugar under the apples is caramelising to a medium brown colour. Turn off the heat.

Ensure the apples are not sticking to the bottom by wiggling a spatula under each one gently.

Take the dough out of the fridge and, on a lightly floured piece of baking paper, roll it out quickly to a diameter a bit larger than your pan. The French like their dough thin; I prefer it a bit thicker. Set the pan of apples close to the dough, carefully lift the paper and dough and quickly flip the whole lot, dough side down, onto the pan of apples.

This takes quite steady nerves, but it is easier than any other method I’ve tried. Peel off the paper. Take your rolling pin and roll it across the top of the pan. The dough will settle into the pan to form a blanket on the apples. It should cover them completely – use extra scraps of dough to achieve this, if necessary.

AKE in the oven for approximately 35 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown. Remove from oven. If you have made this several hours in advance, then you can wait to invert till an hour before you are sitting down, first reheating for a couple of minutes over hot stove heat, and then, after waiting five minutes, loosening the edges and covering with a large serving plate. Invert quickly but carefully with a towel to protect you from burns. Tap the bottom of the pan to release the Tarte, lift and then rearrange any apples that may be stuck to the bottom.

Serve warm with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream.

Maya Even is FQR's gastronome

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speak in metaphor.

So knock them into shape we did. One old pear tree ended up looking like a scarecrow struck by a massive thunderbolt; all that was left was the main trunk and a couple of stumpy branches. But this tree now produces an unbelievable number of sweet miniature pears every July.

And the huge limonero lunar, which never bore a fruit in more than two years, now produces fist-sized lemons all year round following a lunar cycle.

On a driving trip to Granada one day I stopped to admire the patchwork of olive trees that laboriously followed every contour of almost every hill for miles around and I became convinced that I needed to overlook my own private olive grove in Medina Sidonia. I looked around garden centres at the sort of olive trees I fancied owning: huge fat trunks, a plethora of healthy branches and olives galore. “How much for that tree?” I would enquire: “€450, plus delivery – and you’ll need a crane to plant it.” At these prices, my instant olive grove was going to cost the price of a small house. I had time to wait for trees to grow.

A year or two later and totally by chance, I stumbled upon a kind of wholesale garden centre run by gypsies on the scruffy outskirts south of Seville. As far as I could tell, it sold trees that had been removed from their original location due to redevelopment. After some negotiation, I decided to buy 40 trees, about 12 years old, five feet high with a diameter of maybe 10in. It seemed a fair price. My only question now concerned water. How much would they need? “Water?”

The older man looked surprised. “Olive trees don’t need water, my friend – anyone can tell you that. Naturally, if you give them water, they give you better olives but they don’t need watering, if that’s what you mean...”

I was not entirely convinced by the gypsy’s thoughts on the subject of irrigation but the fact that his trousers were held up with a long piece of string convinced me even more that I was getting a good price, which in retrospect I did.

I planted the trees with the help of two friends and a rented excavator on a bright, sunny day in January 2008.

Everything seemed to go to plan. When it started to rain next day and didn’t stop for a week I felt that the God of Olives must have been mightily pleased by our Herculean efforts. I told practically everyone I saw in London about what a great job I had done planting my own olive groves in neatly laid-out lines just like I had seen on the hillsides of the Alpujarra. I felt more Spanish than ever. The rest of spring was rainy and sunny in equal measure and all augured well for my new project.

But the long, dry summer started very early that year. The last raindrop fell on my land in April and it would not rain again on the famously arid Guadalquivir basin until late September. I was busy working in London and did not have time to notice how much time was going by… weeks and weeks with no chance to get back to the land. By the time I returned it was almost too late to do anything. In a panic, I started having the trees watered by hand, two or three times a week. I would telephone anxiously from London: “How are they doing? Have you scraped the bark lower down? Is it green or brown? Are there really no new shoots anywhere?” I was only able to save about 10 trees. I had got it all horribly wrong.

I remember that miserable, grey afternoon I walked up and down my fields and caught sight of the pitiful lines of snail-encrusted skeletal olive trees dotting my land like the dying remnants of a crushed army. I had finally understood the nature of man and the power of nature and would have to learn from this; I was the one who needed to grow.

Fernando Peire is director of The Ivy Restaurant and The Club at The Ivy

One old pear tree ended up looking like a scarecrow struck by a massive thunderbolt

autumn 2009

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Cipriani’s With Everything He just can’t get enough…

Simon de Pury confesses he obsesses about Cipriani – from its Bellinis to its bel mondo

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FEW lifetimes ago, as a very young man, I had my first experience of Cipriani. At the time, I was curator of Baron H H Thyssen-Bornemisza’s collection when it was still based in Lugano, Switzerland. It was without question the best job to be had in the art world in those days. Heini Thyssen, the most important and active art collector of his generation, was a generous man, blessed with a great sense of humour, who fully lived by his motto, “Work hard and play hard.”

One very hot summer morning in Lugano he called to ask if I would like to accompany him and some friends to Venice to see an exhibition devoted to Canaletto at the Cini Foundation and then go for lunch at Cipriani’s Harry’s Bar. We took his private jet – not at all a common thing to do then – and were in Venice just half an hour later. While I was at the time fairly familiar with Canaletto, I did not know what Cipriani was. The second we entered the low-ceilinged room with its low chairs and tables it was the start of what became a life-long love story with Cipriani.

The place was totally electric. It was packed with a crowd of very elegant and handsome people. The noise level was extremely high with everyone speaking as loudly as possible. We were instantly whisked past the dense crowd and seated. The

I was familiar with Canaletto but did not know what Cipriani was first question the head waiter asked was: “A Bellini for everyone?” As everyone around me enthusiastically acquiesced, I did the same, not knowing what I was ordering.

Up to that moment the word Bellini stood for one of my favourite Venetian artists.

I then discovered that, in the painter’s honour, it also stood for what I thought was an utterly delicious fresh fruit juice that tasted of peach. It was so good, and also so warm that day, that I drank one after the other.

The conversation at our table was very merry and I felt more and more jolly. By the time Heini Thyssen asked for the bill I must have run up a total of about 10 Bellinis. I just about managed to avoid the humiliation of having to be carried out of the place, but it was that day when I discovered that it must be a secret mix of champagne and peach juice. I say “secret” as nowhere else in the world, except the other Ciprianis in New York and London, has ever been capable of concocting anything vaguely resembling the divine drink I discovered that day.

OT much later I began going to Cipriani on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Meanwhile, my addiction to Bellinis extended to Cipriani’s beef Carpaccios, named after yet another one of my artistic heroes. It comes covered by a special sauce that is too sparingly applied over the beef in a pattern à la Jackson Pollock. I always have to ask for an extra helping of the irresistible sauce on the side. As a main course, I usually ask for the tagliolini verdi gratinati. As pudding I always take one big scoop of vanilla and one big scoop of coffee ice cream. I have developed my own technique of eating it so that both flavours melt simultaneously around my tongue.

In the early years I had to wait endlessly at the bar, regardless of the time I had booked a table for. Being shoved around by people with better and sharper elbows was not particularly prone to impress the dates I would bring along, even if the waiting time was sweetened by a Bellini. To overcome that unpleasant predicament, I started going there for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Ultimately, satisfaction came when I was able to walk in without having booked and was instantly whisked to a strategically well-placed table past the crowd standing at the bar waiting to be seated.

This continued until the very sad day when, for a reason unknown (but rumoured to be a labour union dispute), it closed down. I did not know where else to go and eat. The reopening kept being postponed month after month. Luckily, there was the alternative of going to Cipriani Downtown on West Broadway and, meanwhile, the London Cipriani had opened on Davies Street. In the latter, in particular, the energy that I loved so much on my first visit to the venetian branch, is present in abundance.

I enjoy lunch there, when you can witness an odd segregation of sexes, with large tables occupied by ladies’ lunches high on sex appeal and Botox and neighbouring tables with groups of men high on testosterone seemingly casting for a new episode of The Sopranos. To my great relief, New York’s uptown Cipriani has now reopened, though it has not yet managed to recapture the electricity of its predecessor, nor of its London counterpart. Feng shui might have something to do with it, as the entrance that was originally smack in the centre of it all has, oddly, been moved to the side – as if in a theatre the stage had been shifted to the side.

Simon de Pury is the chairman of Phillips de Pury & Company and FQR’s restaurant critic

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Daddy knows best FQR Women’s Page

You can’t buy it, learn it or copy it… Style is innate, says Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis. Just look at her classy, classic and genteel late father

Johannes von Thurn und Taxis in Area, New York in the Eighties

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HE best-dressed man ever was my father. My conviction might in part be due to the fact that he died when I was a child. My image of him was therefore never tainted by reality or adult scepticism but, rather, remains a patchwork of visual perfection formed from my own faded memories, people’s nostalgic stories and from seeing many pictures. Nevertheless, he was a man of impeccable style and that is a fact.

I would occasionally meet my father walking along the corridor on his way to his office. “Men don’t have to have taste,” he once said, “because what we wear are uniforms. A man should never put too much thought into his clothes and certainly never think of himself as having taste.” My father wore his clothes rather than them wearing him. You noticed him first and then you noticed his perfectly tailored flannel suit. A gentleman through and through, he opted for the classic without needing to express himself through his clothes. Each morning the butler would bring him a freshly picked carnation from the garden on a silver tray. Some days he wore a red carnation in his button hole and other days he wore a white one. Appropriate attire was his staple. Shooting parties would require a green velvet smoking jacket, although you could get away with burgundy. In the countryside he wore perfectly worn-out and battered Lederhosen paired with a traditional grey

and green flannel jacket. In the city he wore a formal grey or navyblue suit and he always changed for dinner and expected my mother and their guests to do the same. Short sleeves and Bermuda shorts were only ever worn in the Tropics, while evenings on the Côte d’Azur or Marbella would require either a blazer or a white dinner jacket. Although he definitely did have a soft spot for

clothes (I gather that much from the rooms of clothes he left us), there was something sublimely nonchalant about his attitude towards them. Clothes served a purpose.

My father was one of the few individuals who managed to pull off the outrageous because there was something so painfully immaculate about his person. He famously wore a huge chunky gold chain

around his neck similar to the ones otherwise found only around the necks of pimps and rappers, none of whom is really known to be pillars of taste. On my father it merely blended into his far-tootanned Mediterranean complexion. He wore it with such an attitude the chain was barely even noticed. Incidentally, the chain was later snapped up by a local pimp and harmless stalker who used to visit our riding stables daily to watch us ride. He wore it religiously – and let me tell you, it was not a pretty sight. Gone was the coolness that had made it so characteristic around my dad’s neck.

NE of my favourite pictures of my father was taken at Area, a hot New York City nightclub in the Eighties. It shows him in his usual flannel suit, carnation and all, standing opposite a bare-chested gimp, whose torso was strapped up in heavy chains. Both observe each other. Their perceptions of each other seem to be equally exotic. My father did not succumb to the pressure of trying to dress the part for one of the most celebrated clubs ever.

He was neither a crazy club kid nor a New York dandy, so why should he dress that way? Rather, he wore what he would have worn to a dinner party on any other given evening. To me, it is exactly this attitude that summarises great style. My father never looked like he was trying too hard.

Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis is FQR’s features editor

gain a life of its own; what I do know is that somehow he believed it would work. I, however, had my reservations. I simply felt very insecure about being “labelled” a princess. For many people this might sound a little odd – after all, why should I mind being known to be a princess?

OR the past few months I have been happily typing away, My self-diagnosis was the following: I suffer from a chronic disorder, noting down my whims and thoughts, and posting them on the a Princess Complex. I examined this a little closer in my first blog, so if FQR website. “The Princess Diaries” were the euphoric idea of you would like to know more, please refer to our website. Poor Nick had our esteemed editorial director, Nick. I am not sure whether he no idea that he had opened Pandora’s box. Here I was at my first anticipated quite how this blog would metamorphose and “proper” job, expected to write under my most dreaded label of all.

What was I scared of, you might wonder? I was scared of being found out. I was scared of other people’s prejudices, since being a princess comes with so many 1. Head to the fair in the morning before the official opening. attachments. “Oh, she must be very 2. Take your time while walking around; you don’t want to OD too quickly. spoilt/boring/ arrogant/sheltered”, 3. Go back to the fair another morning after the official opening to see whatever you missed [surely not, ed.] I imagined first time round. people presuming. These adjectives 4. If you want to socialise or get a last-minute invite to a party that has “forgotten about you”, are just a few examples – and so hang out during VIP viewing in the afternoon before the official opening. very far from what I want people 5. Don’t become a BlackBerry-punching “art adviser”. That’s just lame and has no credibility. to think of me.

Relax and enjoy it – it’s supposed to be fun.

After my thoughts had travelled 6. Stack up on free magazines from the fair. Flash Art is a good read and decorates your through my head, up and down, and round and round, a glimpse coffee table. of reason illuminated my madness.

7. Try and see as many of the museum/gallery shows round London as you can. Many are I realised that it didn’t really exhibiting more interesting works than you will see at the fair (the VIP booklet lists the matter what other people thought best exhibitions). and what their prejudices were.

8. Be selective over the parties and dinners you attend, and pace yourself. It’s a long week.

The fact is I am a princess whether 9. Don’t feel obliged to stay through a dinner, even if it’s seated – this is a ridiculous thing to ask I like it or not. It doesn’t really from anyone during Frieze. After all, dinner- and party-hopping are the norm and the only imply much at all other than that way you get to see it all. the branches of my genealogical 10.Be on every guest list, then decide which parties you actually want to attend spontaneously. tree shoot off in different directions The last-minute invites are always the best anyway. from others’. Rather like a scar, I can cover it up or I can wear it

with pride. I have finally decided on the latter (at least when blogging).

After all, it does take some getting used to, coming out of the closet.

A few months in and I have come to really enjoy writing “The Princess Diaries”. Whether I blog about my thoughts, my memories, my daily excitements, as well as banalities, I enjoy writing about life. In fact, I feel much more comfortable writing about myself than I feel talking about myself. A very pleasant by-product is the fact that people seem to enjoy reading my blog. I have even gathered a little following. It fills me with pride when my readers compliment or comment on my writing. Whether they are friends or not, it baffles me when other people seem to “get it”.

Before I met Nick and entered into the world of The Finch, I met with Jefferson Hack, founder and editor in chief of über-cool Dazed and Confused and Another Magazine. At the time I wanted to work at the latter. After a few very formal questions about my writing etc, Mr Hack looked at me and, somewhat apprehensively, asked: “What makes your writing any different from all the other shit already out there?” “Well…” I stumbled and went into a lengthy monologue of BS. As much as the question threw me at the time, it has remained very much in my consciousness ever since. Asking myself whether something I do will really add to the world is a useful filter.

So what makes “The Princess Diaries” any different from all the other shit already out there? I suppose it’s an honest and personal observation of the flora and fauna scattered along my Yellow Brick Road.

On top of that, these observations and thoughts are not anyone’s observations and thoughts but a princess’s – and how many blogs can claim that?

The Princess Diaries can be read weekly on www.finchsquarterly.com

Each morning the butler would bring him a freshly picked carnation

Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis explains why she had reservations about coming out as a princess in her writings

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autumn 2009

WHAT DOESN’T KILL US... BECOMES ART

Faking It

FQR Women’s Page

Dana Delany, aka Katherine Mayfair from Desperate Housewives, writes about her artificial life on Wisteria Lane

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GREW up on Wisteria Lane. More precisely, Brookhollow Lane, Connecticut – but it was the same thing. Even as a child, I knew there was something wrong. It was all just a little too perfect.

Behind each manicured lawn and sunny yellow house there was deceit and heartache. I didn’t really know what kind until I began stealing my parents’ copies of the two Johns – Mssrs Cheever and Updike. And I didn’t really know the reality of it until my own family life began to resemble a short story. I think now that one of my biggest fears in life is to live in the suburbs in a loveless marriage with a man who would rather be, well, with another man.

And, of course, now I am in a show about the suburbs written by a gay man who loves living there and gets the joke. But it’s as fake as it ever was. This is what you need to know about the “real” Wisteria Lane: it is the sum total of every street in television history. The new housewife of Season Six (played by the delightful Drea de Matteo of The Sopranos fame) lives in the old Leave it to Beaver house. The gay neighbours of Season Four (Bob and Lee) live in the former Munsters manse but, of course, it’s now painted lavender. I hope that some day maybe Freddie Highmore (since America will never get over its love affair with English actors) will star in a series about mutant suburbanites and live in what’s known as the “Katherine Mayfair” house, where she buried her child in the back yard.

ND what a yard it is. Fake. Which brings us to my second greatest fear sprung from suburbia: the existential futility of raking leaves. I think I spent most of my childhood picking up sticks and stuffing leaves into bushel baskets. On Wisteria Lane it’s not a problem. I have actually bent down to smell a flower or marvelled over the hanging blossoms only to realise that I look like an idiot! Have you ever noticed that the women rarely wear coats? It’s not just to show off their amazingly fit bodies – we don’t have seasons! It’s always sunny in Fairview (the name of the town, in case you were wondering). When a tornado hit the lane in Season Four, it took 4ft 10in turbo fans and a wrecking crew of 50 union men to destroy the street. I admit, I had a moment of glee when I remembered it was no longer my job to keep up appearances.

Or is it? In the 1950s, America’s housewives were obsessed with being perfect. That meant having a home out of House & Garden, dinner from Gourmet and 2.5 darling children. Perhaps John Cheever was prescient – that’s now many gay men’s dream. So what are the women focusing on now? Looking young and perfect. When I joined the already successful Desperate Housewives a couple of years ago, I had just finished a Neil LaBute play Off-Off Broadway in New York. I did my own hair and make-up and took the subway to work. Two weeks later I walked into the hair and make-up trailer (literally the biggest one ever made) on the set at Universal Studios. My mouth dropped open. It was a beauty factory and they quickly went to work on me like Dorothy in the Emerald City.

What began as wicked homage to female lives of quiet desperation has become a Technicolor phenomenon. Our neighbours all over the world – every gender, age and persuasion – are watching.

It is not just satirising America, it is creating an alternate pop back-lot universe where people actually want to live! And actresses of a certain age feel the need to keep up with the younger Joneses. How is that any different than my mother worrying about what the neighbours would think? I left suburbia at the age of 16, vowing never to live a false life again. And here I am living in the land of sunshine and Botox, playing an unhappy housewife with dark secrets. And loving every minute of it! I see the irony, but what doesn’t kill us… becomes art.

Actress Dana Delany plays Katherine Mayfair in the award-winning series Desperate Housewives

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Wish They All Could Be California Pearls Dana Delany, © Andrew Eccles/JBG Photo

Nicolas Bos, vice-president and creative director at Van Cleef & Arpels, explains how a new collection of jewellery has been inspired by the flora, fauna and landscape of The Golden State

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ALIFORNIA… It’s a mythical name that each of us associates with vivid images of open spaces, wild nature, scenic routes, impressive seaside landscapes. Seen from Europe, the Californian coast seems like the end of the world, the ultimate destination of a westward journey started centuries ago. From the cliffs of Big Sur, south of Monterey, one can look for hours at the infinity of the Pacific Ocean, the deep blue shades of water underneath a permanent line of distant clouds.

Beneath you, the rocks and sand of wild beaches appearing between the delicate leaves of cypress trees.

Nature in California must have been designed with a vision of wide angle, of

autumn 2009

cinemascope – not just the seaside but also the great national parks and trees that seem out of scale, as if preserved from prehistoric times, providing shelter for unlimited variations of hummingbirds, like multicolour vibrations, always in motion, delicately feeding on rare flowers. For Californian nature, however impressive and majestic, is home to delicate and fragile inhabitants: hummingbirds, of course, but also unique species of butterflies, whose wings seem to be coloured with the pale blue shades of turquoise, the deep black reflection of onyx and the iridescent orange of Ethiopian opals – butterflies that sparkle in the late afternoon light like diamonds or colourful sapphires, butterflies that bear evocative names such as West Coast Lady or California Painted Lady.

Back to the bigger picture and to the landscapes: the shores of Lake Tahoe, with its dramatic background of mountains and endless forests, or the Mojave desert, a vision of rocks and dunes where the only forms of life are those giant cactus trees, which miraculously blossom with the most colourful flowers.

Californian landscapes are an inspiration for artists, and a setting for a unique lifestyle. Of course, there are the iconic photographs of Ansel Adams, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore and Robert Adams, plus the cinematographic paintings

of Ed Ruscha and David Hockney’s homages to Californian light. Then there are the beautiful pages written by Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, who both found in Big Sur, in the Fifties and early Sixties, a shelter, a place to rest from a chaotic urban life and to rediscover the true values associated with a simple life in Nature, which Walt Whitman had described in his time for the generations to come.

Picture an elegant cocktail party in the late Sixties, taking place in the elegant private garden of a Malibu villa: beautiful ladies wearing long, fluid, colourful dresses with precious long necklaces made of coral beads and wide yellow-gold cuff bracelets, enjoying the simple yet overwhelming beauty of a flamboyant sunset, with the soft sounds of West Coast jazz or the complex harmonies of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in the background.

They gaze at the delicate shadows of palm trees, like sketches painted in black ink over the flamboyant colours of the evening sun.

Back then, Van Cleef & Arpels – who had been present in America since the late Thirties when they opened their first boutique and workshop in New York – had completed their journey to the West Coast and had become the jewellers of choice for sophisticated Californians with a taste for big, bold, substantial pieces: wide, heavy bracelets, very long

Californian nature is home to delicate and fragile inhabitants

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sautoirs and large pendants. There were unusual and daring colour combinations: turquoise with coral or amethyst, peridot alternated with onyx. Diamonds and rubies were also, of course, set onto links made of hammered gold. And there were joyful, figurative designs, evocative of happy moments, of a benevolent nature and symbols of luck. That special combination defined Van Cleef & Arpels’ style in America in the Sixties and Seventies, a style so popular at the time that it became a reference in the history of jewellery.

HIS is why, when the House decided to celebrate 70 years of American history this year, we chose to revisit this specific period and explore the richness of inspirations taken from Californian landscapes, like a half-real, halfimaginary trip down the West Coast, where memories or dreams of these fascinating visions of nature would give birth to unique colourful jewels.

It’s a tribute to America, to nature, to true emotions and to good vibrations… our California Reverie.

Nicolas Bos is vice-president and creative director at Van Cleef & Arpels

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Born in Saxony.

At home around the world.

Meticulously finished by hand, the LANGE 1 TIME ZONE is a global ambassador of the legendary perfection of Lange watchmaking artistry. Apart from the main dial, this watch features a smaller dial that can be synchronised with any of the world’s

24 time zones. The position of the rotating city ring reveals the current time-zone setting. Additionally, both dials have separate day/night indicators. This masterpiece is available exclusively from the world’s finest jewellery and watch dealers.

The LANGE 1 TIME ZONE. Available at:

Matthew and his wife Cari in 1981 at a drive-in in Nassau, Bahamas photo: Kiyoshi Tatsukawa

FQR Liberal at Large

Consumed With Guilt

As values alter and we finally bid farewell to über-consumer culture, Matthew Modine argues that, to secure our future on earth, not only is change gonna come, it must

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HE current financial crisis has taught us many things about our consumer behaviour – the most important lesson might just be the one that could save our planet.

The lesson is this: the world cannot support a consumer-based economy. With the human population continuing to explode, we are quickly running out of the raw earthly materials needed to manufacture consumer goods. Not to mention the fact that there is almost no place left to dispose of all our “things” once they wear out or become redundant. The cycle continues when advertisers cleverly produce ads that create grief holes in our psyches, cunning spots that convince the consumer that these empty feelings can only be filled by purchasing what they are selling. The question is: can we break the cycle and learn to live with less and be happy? I think we can.

I grew up surrounded by farms. My father was a drive-in movie theatre manager. Drive-ins were built far away from city streetlights and neighbourhoods because they needed space and darkness. Drive-ins were a romantic part of rural America. In the Sixties and Seventies cars were built big – a physical expression of the liberty to which Americans believed they held the copyright. They could drive their big cars to the movies that glorified their independence and dominance of the West: cowboy films that showed white men defeating “Savage Indians”; pioneers crossing the Great Plains, fulfilling their manifest destiny over nature and the lowly animals God had put on earth for their consumption; World War II movies that depicted the US Army and the American military as the most powerful force on earth; Good triumphing over Evil.

Hollywood’s version of the American history.

I lived in Utah from the age of five until my 15th year. Sensuous years. The drive-ins were slow and

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cold during the Rocky Mountain winters. In the spring there was the sweet smell of turned soil and fertilised fields. In the fall, there was the smell of harvest and wet fallen leaves melting back into the earth. My walks to school would be through groves of apples and pears. It was during those walks in the fall and winter months that I would try and recall the wonder and strange magic of hot summer nights at my father’s drive-in. The crowds of people and the nights when the drive-in reached capacity, filled with almost 700 cars. And the smells from the snack bar, hot popcorn and fresh-baked hot dog buns. That’s all gone now. Where once there were some 4,000 drive-ins, there are now fewer than 400 left throughout the US. In Utah there is one. The others were torn down to develop the land. Houses, malls and department stores now stand where I spent my youth. The orchards and farmland are gone too.

Utah, a state that was once self-sufficient, a state that grew all its own food, raised its own poultry and livestock, now imports almost everything it consumes. It has become a consumer economy. The simple pleasures of life disappeared at the speed that the open farmland was disappearing.

I was a witness to this change, not just in Utah, but across America. As the United States has moved from a self-sufficient, producing culture to a culture of consumers, its citizens have become more irritable, obese and, ironically, found the need to consume ever more. We are caught in a vicious cycle of buying to fill up the everincreasing hole which is lined with unreasonable fears and spells of panic and nervousness. This is all bad news for the consumer, but great news for the people who manufacture and sell what we are consuming. This has to stop.

Forty years ago, man walked on the moon. For me, the image of our home from its surface was overwhelming. From more than a quarter of a million miles away, I saw how fragile and far away from everything in the universe the earth really is.

It’s believed that the universe is between 13.5bn and 14bn years old – give or take a few million. Our little blue ball in the sea of ever-expanding (or contracting) universe is around 4.5bn years old, unless you hold steadfast to certain religious beliefs and, if so, you’ll argue that the world is an infant of only 8,000 years or so, carbon dating be damned.

Around 8000BCE, man began to understand how to grow crops. We lived harmoniously with the seasons of the earth for thousands of years; our religions were centred on the growing seasons. The earliest agriculturists worshipped the sun and the elements, nature and all the forms of life with which we shared the world.

About 200 years ago – at the start of the Industrial Revolution – our machines made us

more powerful and we no longer needed to follow or obey the rules of nature. We began to understand how to alter life by genetically engineering crops and the animals we consume. Along the way, we have always behaved as though the resources of the world were created for us to use and exploit. We have behaved as if those resources were infinite.

Today we understand that those resources are finite.

We are killing our planet with dirty fuels that we burn to power our consumption.

It was from the moon that some people imagined our earth’s history and its place in the universe. Environmentalists began to see the impact of human behaviour and a glimpse of our future. We saw a beautiful blue ball. Land masses separated by seas, but connected by a very thin atmosphere. From the moon’s surface we saw no borders. The atmosphere, the air, and the seas knew no boundaries. No political parties. No religious beliefs. We saw how precious and important our atmosphere is; a delicate layer of gases that protects us from the powerful rays of the sun and also separates us from the vastness of space. From the moon we saw the blackness and emptiness of space in a way we couldn’t from earth. We saw how far away from other planets and distant stars we really are. We saw our home and realised, really understood, that it is the only home we have and the only place we will ever know.

HIS earthly miracle has taken care of an immeasurable number of species for an unimaginable number of centuries. To the emerging and eroding mountains and the vast seas and oceans, the human lifespan is but a moment. It is during this brief moment of human history that we have created what the Hopi Indians call Koyaanisqatsi, their word that means “life out of balance”. The film by the same title, directed by Godfrey Reggio with a haunting musical score by composer Philip Glass, illustrates mankind’s devastation and destruction.

The film illustrates how the human population, swelling as fast as a dead animal’s belly lying in the hot sun on a dirt road alongside one of the developing world’s many cardboard house slums, can be contrasted to the imbalance of Western wealth. The film exposes humans as slaves of their own manufactured material desires. We see how wealthy, well-fed and well-clothed humans suffer from a different kind of poverty. Since the film has no dialogue, it allows the viewer to interpret the story through powerful images and music. For some, the film is hopelessly negative because it offers no solution to the problems it presents. For others, it is a call to action. Koyaanisqatsi can make you wonder if humankind is simply instinct driven.

Where once there were some 4,000 drive-ins, there are now fewer than 400 left throughout the US

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It questions our ability to conserve, live altruistically and to take steps to protect the environment for future generations. It can make you wonder if taking real steps to protecting the environment is antithetical to human behaviour.

Would that help explain human selfishness? Are our lives just a more excessive display of pride and appearance? Arrogance and self-importance? The answer is yes. And no.

We have created weapons and industries, machines and tools capable of destroying everything on this planet. We have, in so many ways, become the stewards of life on this earth.

Together, man and science have become God. Not mythical, but actual. We can now recreate life as easily as we can destroy it. So the question is: can we be more than slaves of our past behaviour and current desires? Can we transform from a society of consumers to a culture of sustainability? I think we can because history has shown that the human spirit is capable of so many things. Like going to the moon. Yes, we can.

F the great Mike Nichols and Buck Henry got together to make a new version of The Graduate, “plastics” would be replaced with the word “sustainability”. The consumer economy we have grown up with is going the way of the dodo.

Evolution teaches that everything is in flux and continually evolving to the ever-changing world we share. The new economy is going to be difficult to accept for those unwilling to adapt, and profitable for those willing to alter the paradigm of consumerism. Values will change.

Creativity and intelligence will rise to the surface as indolence and leisure sink into the mud and become fossilised reminders of the past.

Communities will become stronger as they begin to contract, reversing urban sprawl. Neighbours will become neighbours again. Fences will be removed and communal gardens will be grown.

Sharing and helping each other will bring out the best in individuals and our old will become assets instead of burdens.

We will again realise that life is like the web of a spider: that what an individual does to a strand, he or she does to the entire web. The soil, the air and the water will be the new valued commodities and sustainability will become the new way forward. The newest and coolest thing to give a friend or family member will no longer be a “thing”. Listening and paying attention, giving your love, support and encouragement… Being there, being present will now be the greatest gift.

And it doesn’t cost a penny.

Evolution has taught us many things. Life that does not adapt and transform to the ever-changing environment runs the risk of extinction. Adapt, change, or disappear. It’s our choice. It is exciting to think that my children’s children will be able to have the sensuous experience of walking to school through an orchard of fruit. I’m going to do everything I can to make that future possible.

Matthew Modine is FQR's Liberal-at-Large

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FQR Finchs World

Take It from Tim TIM JEFFERIES’ DISCOVERY

On the Hoof Always a nose ahead, racing expert Harry Herbert is on form, has high hopes for Highclere’s horses – and confesses to one hell of an error

OF AND SUBSEQUENT PASSION FOR SHOOTING HAVE ADDED TO HIS PERFECT-GENTLEMANIN-THE-OUTDOORS CREDENTIALS:

1. Guns. A pair of Boss 12 bore, side by sides, if you’ve just won the lottery (www.bossguns.co.uk). If not, a pair of Beretta 12 bore, over and unders are an excellent, acceptable and more reasonable alternative (www.beretta.com).

2. A Range Rover is de rigueur and the new 2010 model is a beauty (www.landrover.com).

3. Clothing. People seem to shoot nowadays in all manner of kit from jeans to natty tweeds. The trick is to look distinctive without looking too “put together”. I shoot in leather plus fours.

4. If one is lucky enough to know Edward Spencer-Churchill (Blenheim), the Earl and Countess of Derby (Knowsley), the Bamfords (Wootton) or Arki Busson (Mulgrave), you might be treated to a weekend that is more fun and more addictive than crack.

5. Invitations to shoot come many months before the event. Once you have accepted, it is really bad form to cancel. Putting a man on the moon involves fewer people than a great shooting weekend, so one must respect the effort made.

6. Some women will find the sight of their man killing birds left and right an aphrodisiac; if you suspect that yours is not one of those, then have her join your group just for dinner. Seeing you resplendent in your velvet smoking jacket is sure to set her heart racing.

7. Shooting can be extremely competitive and whilst it is generally frowned upon to shoot the birds headed for your fellow shooter to your left or right, it can really add to the fun.

8. Never point your gun at anything other than game, and never shoot a bird unless you can see clear sky behind it.

Contravening this rule will result in your being asked to leave the shoot and probably not being invited back.

9. It is customary to tip the head keeper at the end of your shooting day. Your host will tell you the appropriate amount, which you will then neatly fold into the palm of your hand and pass to the keeper in an appreciative handshake.

Do not forget to take some cash when you go shooting.

10. Remember, you’re a long time dead…

Tim Jefferies is the principal of Hamiltons Gallery in London

Mavericks

Werner Herzog, HRH Prince Michael of Kent, César Ritz, Lord Attenborough, Lord Carrington, Muhammad Ali, Sir John Pringle, Ringo Starr

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ITH the principal classic races of the summer now behind us, the true picture of the three-year-old generation is much clearer. One in particular, Sea The Stars, has emerged as a potential superstar and possibly one of the best horses we have seen in the past decade. This magnificent-looking son of Cape Cross is a half-brother to Europe’s most prepotent sire, Galileo, and so boasts a pedigree that now values him at over £40m. Here is a horse who is blessed with enough speed to win the 2000 Guineas and the stamina also to win the Investec Derby, thereby creating a truly remarkable double.

Indeed, he is the first horse to win both of these classics since Nashwan in 1989. He has already proved himself, but I still believe there is much more to come from this horse, a natural athlete and thrilling to watch.

The Derby form was franked in no uncertain manner when Fame And Glory, who finished second to Sea The Stars at Epsom, stormed to a five-length victory in the Irish equivalent at the Curragh. This improving son of Montjeu looks a real force to be reckoned with over middle distances. In the miler division, the impressive 1000 Guineas winner, Ghanaati, followed up in great style in the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot and this very talented filly will take all the beating against her sex over this distance. The Irish 2000 Guineas winner, Mastercraftsman, proved what a tough and resilient racehorse he is when battling to victory in the St James’s Palace Stakes at the Royal Meeting. But the biggest cheer of Royal Ascot week came when the remarkable stayer Yeats won his fourth consecutive Gold Cup – a feat unrivalled in the history of this two-and-a-halfmile race. Ascot’s new unsaddling enclosure was packed to the gunnels as thousands cheered him back into the winner’s enclosure.

It is also at this stage of the flat racing season that the better two-year-olds have started to emerge, and the star at the moment is without doubt Canford Cliffs. Trained by Richard Hannon, this handsome son of Tagula was offered to me by Richard back in February. Against a

backdrop of gently falling snow I remember watching him being lunged around a small ring. I liked him – he was athletic and well balanced, but 50,000 guineas was plenty of money for his pedigree and at the time I wasn’t particularly looking to add another two-year-old to Highclere’s string. I thanked Richard and turned the offer down – big error!

The first time I saw Canford Cliffs work I couldn’t believe my eyes as he effortlessly strode clear of his working companions. At Newbury I asked his jockey Richard Hughes to compare him to one of our own two-year-olds (who we thought was something a bit special). The jockey smiled and said: “Harry, this is the best two-year-old I’ve ever sat on and, right now, he would be 10 to 15 lengths ahead of your colt!” The following day I watched him win at Newbury and then again at Royal Ascot, where he was quite simply awesome, showing blistering natural speed to win the Coventry Stakes unchallenged by six lengths. He can now be valued at well over £1m and I fully admit to finding it difficult to bury the memory of that snowy February morning. That, as they say, is racing.

From late August to October, my brother-in-law John Warren and I head off for the Yearling Sales, where we look at over 2,000 yearlings across Europe and the US, choosing just 17 to make up

H A M I LT O N S

our 2,010 syndicates.

Hopefully we’ll make the right choices. Our current crop of two-year-olds looks to be an exciting group and, who knows, by the end of September one of these could just emerge as a serious challenger to Canford Cliffs. Yes, you do have to be an optimist to be a racehorse owner!

The Hon. Harry Herbert is FQR's racing columnist

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The Perfect Knickers

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Mind the dagger.

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autumn 2009

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FQR Arts et Lettres

Go Slay ’Em John Malkovich knocks ’em dead in his role as the murderer Jack Unterweger

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ACK Unterweger, the real-life Austrian serial killer and writer, has always interested me.

Long before I read about him in John Leake’s Entering Hades, I knew this was a story I wanted to tell – although the book made me more resolute.

I vaguely pursued an idea of producing the story as a film but that dissolved. So when the chance came to collaborate on the opera The Infernal Comedy about Unterweger’s life, I jumped at it.

My fascination began when I happened to see Unterweger on TV a few years ago. I asked myself how his followers could not see that he was such a liar. Unterweger was sentenced to jail after

The Russian Evolution

Kevin Spacey on how and why he came to stage Inherit The Wind with his old comrade in arms Trevor Nunn

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T was one of those miraculous moments: Trevor Nunn and I had the same idea in the very same week to put on Inherit The Wind at The Old Vic. I had travelled with Charles Finch to Moscow and we had asked Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, John Malkovich and Trevor Nunn to come with us. Everyone came, except for Trevor, who was in the midst of rehearsing a play. Malkovich and I were asked if we would perform Chekhov while we were there. The more I thought about it the more I thought, “Jeez, they sure see a lot of Chekhov in Moscow…

Perhaps I’ll do something else and let John do the Chekhov”. Little did I know that John had the same thought, so we both went to Moscow and neither of us performed Chekhov. When I started to think about what I could do instead, I thought a lot about what has been happening in Russia and places around it and the kind of human rights

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murdering a woman in 1974. In prison he took writing classes – writing letters and poems, many of which were published while he was incarcerated.

Consequently, after just under 15 years, a movement joined by Austrian and German glitterati and literati petitioned to have him released, believing he’d been rehabilitated. When Unterweger was released he began working as a journalist and writer, becoming a sort of celebrity.

Eventually, he was suspected of killing a growing number of prostitutes in Vienna, Graz, Prague and Los Angeles. The opera recounts his true journey.

Unterweger was somehow likeable, yet never really told the truth about anything, which is the basic premise of our opera. You get a good idea of his hold over people, especially women, and of his brutality and the size of his wounds in terms of his mental and emotional state. He managed to charm and engage so many people, regardless of his mental state. He was also a lying and manipulating schemer who made things up to suit his purpose.

Most of Unterweger’s contact was with women. I never really understood what it was about him that attracted so many. As he says, he had one woman who paid for his car when he left prison, another who paid for his apartment and another who made sure he didn’t miss any relevant news from the Vienna arts scene. Another wanted to live with him and even earned him money working as a bartender. He says that other women simply wanted to fuck a murderer, and I think that’s pretty accurate. A lot of killers get female attention.

Of course, he was cute. Arguably, being cute is the most important thing after being powerful or rich. Unterweger got tons of fan letters. People don’t

want to hear that but it’s true. I don’t write to serial killers or make them marriage proposals, but some women do. Maybe they think they are going to change them or maybe they just like the danger factor, I don’t know. Ted Bundy probably got thousands of marriage proposals.

The Unterweger case was hugely politicised. One side wanted to believe that murderers could be reintegrated into society, the other side did not or, at least, did not believe that Unterweger could. I think the reason why people so adamantly believed in his innocence was because they wanted to. Often you don’t know whether someone is lying until it’s too late. He may have been innocent… You can find evidence for any theory if you look hard enough. The notion of redemption is important to all of us. Most of our judicial system and our religions are founded on the notion of redemption. In the end, of course, Unterweger was charged with murder, hanged himself before the conviction and that way remained “innocent”. The conceit of the evening’s performance is that Unterweger wrote this book after he was dead because now he can tell you what really happened. Death allows him to be honest for the first time.

Originally, I was meant to direct The Infernal Comedy but, as a result of a series of gaffes and confusions, I ended up playing Unterweger instead.

The plot is narrated by Unterweger who’s on a book tour for his book recounting the truth about his life (which he wrote after his death). The opera is accompanied by a baroque orchestra and two sopranos. Throughout the performance the orchestra, as well as the two singers, are on stage

issues that people have been grappling with. I thought of the attorney Clarence Darrow and wove together a monologue from a one-man play called Darrow. That, of course, lead me to Inherit The Wind, which is based on the 1925 Monkey trials in which Darrow appeared as defence attorney.

When I got back from that week-long sojourn there was a letter on my desk from Trevor. He told me that over the summer he’d decided to challenge himself and pick up a book he had always wanted to read, Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

Hardly a holiday page turner! Nonetheless, it got Trevor thinking about evolution and the argument and debate that has gone on for so long. This also led him to Inherit The Wind and he asked whether I would be interested in doing it with him. Trevor and I had been talking about what we could do together since Richard II, so I read this letter gobsmacked and immediately picked up the phone.

Of course, the timing is relevant too: not only is it the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, it’s the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. From The Old Vic’s perspective, it is a thrill to be bringing an almost unknown yet classic play to British audiences as it hasn’t been performed in London since 1960. It is often performed in America and I saw it three seasons ago on Broadway with Brian Dennehy and Christopher Plummer playing the two titan lawyers and at that time I thought again that it was a play I’d like to tackle.

The issues the play deals with are so important.

Even if you set aside the argument of evolution vs Genesis, the play is really an argument about whether we have freedom of thought. At one point in the play the judge says to my character (Henry Drummond), “The right to think is not on trial here” and Drummond says, “I hold the right to think is very much on trial here”. The play was written in 1955, at the height of McCarthyism in the US, and the writers, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, were doing what Arthur Miller had done in The Crucible by using this case to illustrate the threat freedom of thought was under - that if you think a certain idea, then that idea makes you unfaithful, unholy or un-American. This kind of censorship goes way back in history. Just think of Galileo or Copernicus. There will always be a

conflict between faith and science, and scientific evidence will always challenge some theories and beliefs. Take stem-cell research – this is a sensitive area where people’s viewpoints come head to head.

This is the first season that we’re doing Sunday matinees. I’ve initiated that as I want to encourage many more students and young people to come and see a play on Sunday with their family, which they might not have the time to do during the week.

I’ve played Darrow before, in 1992, in a television show that took him from his early days in Chicago as a labour attorney right through to the Leopold and Loeb trials. I’m pleased to get a chance to tackle his later life. He was a remarkable figure. Drummond’s character and the climax of the play are based primarily on transcripts of the actual confrontation between the two attorneys.

As we open our sixth season here at The Old Vic I feel less pressured and less that I am keeping so many balls in the air. Maybe it’s because if you do something long enough you get better at it, but I also think the company has grown and we are very much together regarding how we approach a season and the responsibilities we each have. I love it. I love being a member of a company. I love the ritual of coming to rehearsal every day. You become a sort of family and there is something about that closeness and trust that I find very appealing.

The Old Vic artistic director Kevin Spacey will star in Inherit The Wind from 1 October to 20 December

The notion of redemption is important to all of us

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with me and very much part of the narrative.

The production opened last year in LA, and I’ve just finished this year’s productions. We opened in Vienna in July and after that we performed in Barcelona. Next year we’ll take the opera to Hamburg, Paris, Madrid, Bilbao, London, Toronto, Tarragona and maybe end up back in Vienna.

I keep very close to the script. I look nothing like Unterweger; he was much younger. He was cute, small and light and I’m none of those things. Even though it’s a bleak story, there are definitely a few laughs in our production, written by Michael Sturminger, who also directed it. I think it is also very apt and well observed and, if the audience is any indication, it makes for a good night of theatre.

I try to convey Unterweger’s two-faced personality by talking directly at the audience, sometimes softly, sometimes harshly, and at other times wandering directly into the audience.

ORKING in an opera production is particularly enjoyable to me as classical music is a field I know nothing about.

I’ve always acted in and directed films and theatre, and continue to do so. Last year I directed a play in Mexico. But what I haven’t done in a while is act on stage. I feel that acting in theatre is more my genre because theatre is a living organism and film isn’t.

When acting in front of the camera, you’re much more limited; you don’t get the benefit of flowing through the entire piece every evening because you work on isolated scenes. On Monday you might be doing scene 35. The next day it might be scene 93 and onThursday scene three.Then you leave them behind.

Unlike theatre, you are not living and rehearsing the production for weeks on end. So theatre and film are very different. One is like riding a wave and one is like pushing a boulder up the hill: they’re both exercise but they come in very different forms.

John Malkovich is FQR’s literary editor and stars in the opera The Infernal Comedy

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A Novel Approach

The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize will be announced on 6 October. Ion Trewin leafs through the annals and reveals a few secrets about the literary award

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INNING the Man Booker Prize changes your life. The Irish writer Anne Enright, who won for her novel The Gathering in 2007, spent the best part of the following year touring the world. Publishers in some 35 countries had bought the book and insisted that she come and promote. If she had sold 20,000 copies of her previous novels, now, with The Gathering, her sales were measured in hundreds of thousands, certainly 0.75m copies in English-language editions.

Nor is it a case of winner takes all (and “all” also includes a cheque for £50,000). Last year’s winner, Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger, had similar commercial success to Anne Enright’s, but one of the shortlisted titles, The Secret Scripture by another Irish writer Sebastian Barry, became a bestseller too. And the judges’ first sifting to produce this year’s longlist of 13 contenders – known as “The Man Booker Dozen” – has outsold any previous longlist.

When the Booker Prize – as it was then called – was set up in 1969 it was with the avowedly commercial intent of encouraging the sales of literary fiction. British publishers looked enviously across the Channel at the French Prix Goncourt, which rewarded each winner with several hundred thousand extra copies sold. The Booker company had among its business interests the ownership of literary copyrights including Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer. Financing a literary prize was a way of putting something back.

The early years had a modest effect, even though winners included V S Naipaul, J G Farrell, Nadine Gordimer and Iris Murdoch. But the prize took off in 1980 when the shortlist included two literary heavyweights, William Golding (for Rites of Passage) and Anthony Burgess (for Earthly Powers). The press

autumn 2009

FQR Arts et Lettres

drew on the boxing analogy and speculation reached the front pages. By then the judges were ensuring advance secrecy by selecting the winner late in the afternoon of the prize dinner. Burgess told Martyn Goff, the Booker administrator, that he would only attend the dinner if he was told beforehand that he had won. Goff refused to be bullied and Burgess stayed away, sulking, it was said, in his Savoy suite.

Golding proved to be the winner.

Controversy and the Booker have been regular bedfellows. John Berger, the 1972 winner for G, announced that he would give half his £5,000 winnings to the rebel African-American Black Panther movement because he viewed Booker, with its Caribbean business interests, as imperialist. A decade later when the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally won for Schindler’s Ark, there were many who shouted “foul” on the basis that Keneally’s telling of the story of a good German who saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust was actually non-fiction.

But the more the press reported the fulminations of literary critics, the more copies Schindler’s Ark sold.

autumn 2009

Helped in the 1990s by Steven Spielberg’s enthralling film adaptation, Schindler’s List (1993), the novel has gone on to sell considerably in excess of 2m copies in its British editions alone, making it the bestselling Booker winner ever.

From the beginning it was decided that judges would be expected to read every book submitted.

Some other prizes employ literary hacks to sift through the entries and provide the named judges with a shortlist on which to adjudicate. But the Booker Prize Foundation, which administers the prize, has steadfastly refused to take that route. As literary director, I appoint the judges. One year I rang up a well-known and highly regarded poet and asked him if he would be a judge. Silence greeted my question and then he responded: “How many books would I have to read?”

“Probably 110-120.” “And how much time would I have?” “Four months.” I could almost hear his mental calculation. Four months means roughly 120 days. That’s a book a day. “Absolutely no way,” he responded. No pleasantries. I heard the

phone click back into its cradle.

I have to say I was pleased by his rejection. It sounded to me as if this potential judge would be starting from scratch, whereas the best judges read new fiction for pleasure. It is rare that they haven’t already read some of the entries even before the publishers’ submission lists start rolling in during the spring.

The 2009 judges, chaired by the broadcaster and author James Naughtie, soon realised that this would be a vintage year. Eight former winners had new novels, as did a dozen writers previously shortlisted. But fiction is also about renewal. The English language continues to generate creativity that is the envy of other nations. This year’s entry list included a score of first novels or fiction by those who had yet to make their mark. As past winners Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Keri Hulme (The Bone People), DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little) – to name but three – have shown, being a first-timer is no bar to winning.

Ion Trewin is literary director of the Man Booker Prize

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M

AT Collishaw’s Insecticides are disturbing and alluring. “I find violence makes interesting art,” he says. At first glance the image appears beautiful, the colours striking and intense. However, their beauty is deceptive, luring the viewer into a world of disfigurement and violence. Closer examination reveals the butterfly to be meticulously fractured and distorted, artificially reassembled, transformed and reborn. In this, his latest series of Insecticides, the images have been enlarged and a sombre darkness cast around them.

He studied at Goldsmiths in London, alongside Damien Hirst and other artists who together formed the influential Young British Art (YBA) movement of the Nineties. Collishaw was also part of Freeze, the infamous 1988 exhibition curated by Hirst, at which Charles Saatchi famously bought Collishaw’s Bullet Hole.

Mat Collishaw is currently exhibiting at The Haunch of Venison in Berlin www.haunchofvenison.com

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