The Oldie 431 – October 2023

King of Hearts

Richard Harris – Madeline Smith

Features

I ghosted Twiggy's memoir page 29

World's

Books

54 Modern Buildings in London, by Ian Nairn

Jonathan Meades

55 Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard

Daisy Dunn

57 Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire, by Michael Palin

Roger Lewis

59 The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943, by James Holland

Alan Judd

61 Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography, by David Eskerdjian

Alexander Hope

63 The Fraud, by Zadie Smith

David Horspool

Arts

66 Film: The Miracle Club

Pursuits

73 Gardening David Wheeler

73 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

74 Restaurants James Pembroke

75 Drink Bill Knott

76 Sport Jim White

76 Motoring Alan Judd

78 Digital Life Matthew Webster

78 Money Matters

Margaret Dibben

81 Bird of the Month: Redshank John McEwen

Travel

82 High Art in Low Countries William Cook

84 Overlooked Britain: Rossetti’s wombat

Lucinda Lambton

86 On the Road: Annabel Croft

Regulars

Harry Mount

67 Theatre:As You Like It

William Cook

67 Radio Valerie Grove

68 Television Frances Wilson

69 Music Richard Osborne

70 Golden Oldies

Rachel Johnson

Louise Flind

87 Taking a Walk: Blenheim woods

Patrick Barkham

The Oldie literary lunch p35 Reader trip p79

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Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Jonathan Anstee

Supplements editor Jane Mays

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

Oldie subscriptions

71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu Moray

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In Camelot with Richard Harris page

The Old Un’s Notes

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Peter Vaughan, best known for starring in the 1970s TV sitcom Porridge, was born 100 years ago this year.

His character ‘Grouty’ –the criminal Mr Big in the fictional prison HMP Slade who was menacing in an Ealing comedy sort of way –became one of the show’s best-known supporting characters, even though he only appeared in a handful of episodes.

Interviewing the great man – who later played Mr Stevens Sr. in Remains of the Day – had its challenges. So Oldie contributor York Membery discovered when he spoke to him at his home in Sussex for a national newspaper several months before his death in December 2016, aged 93.

‘My editor wanted me to quiz him about all things “Grouty” but Porridge was

the last thing he wanted to discuss,’ recalls Membery.

‘Having worked as a character actor since the late 1950s, he regarded Porridge as a minor episode in his career. He made only passing reference to it in his memoir.

‘So when it became apparent that the two of us were at cross-purposes, I was politely shown the door.’

But Membery has no hard feelings. ‘Porridge just wouldn’t have been the same without Grouty,’ he observes.

Japan’s demographics are posing some acute problems for the nation, not least because it has the world’s second-highest proportion of people aged 65 and over.

Dementia is predicted to affect one in five people there by 2025 – and with this debilitating condition can come acute loneliness and discrimination.

But a recent innovative social experiment has caught the attention of Japan and the world. It’s called the ‘Restaurant of Mistaken Orders’ – a dining spot in Tokyo staffed by waiters and waitresses with some degree of cognitive impairment.

The idea for starting this restaurant came to TV presenter Shiro Oguni when he worked on a story about dementia: ‘Like everybody else, my awareness of it at first tended towards negative images of people who were radically forgetful,’ he says. ‘But, actually,

Grouty, King of Slade Prison: Peter Vaughan (1923-2016)

Important

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they can cook, clean and do other “normal” things for themselves.’

For Oguni, the restaurant is an opportunity to think about how kindness can take root in society. Although orders do sometimes go wildly astray, diners are generally extremely happy with their experience.

‘Dementia is not what a person is, but just part of who they are,’ says Oguni. ‘People are people. The change will not come from them. It must come from society. By cultivating tolerance, almost anything can be solved.’

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Newspaper obituaries of the South African journalist Jani Allan reheated her unsuccessful 1992 libel case against Channel 4, which had accused her of an affair with the Afrikaaner rabblerouser Eugene Terreblanche.

The obits reprised such

details as her flatmate’s claim to have peered through a keyhole and seen Terreblanche’s white bottom bouncing up and down on top of the willowy Allan.

What they did not report was an unlikely friendship Allan later established with one of Fleet Street’s most observant Roman Catholics, David Twiston-Davies, letters editor of the Daily Telegraph.

The late ‘Twisters’ was a short, loud character with a taut pot belly and purple snout. Always ready to listen to an underdog and always open to the forgiveness of sin, he invited Allan to submit letters for publication.

This necessitated long lunches in London’s clubland, or those parts of it that admitted women. Twisters and Jani became an unlikely (Platonic) couple, she still wonderfully glamorous and leggy, with Farah Fawcett hair

and a drawling Sarf African accent, while Twisters, a good foot shorter than her yet twice her circumference, bawled forth in an accent that was part-Downside, partNewfoundland, about saints, monsignors, Lord Longford and the Tridentine mass.

Jani, returning to the Telegraph offices with Twisters after one such lunch, was haloed with smiles. It was almost as if she loved old Twisters. And we can be absolutely certain that he never laid a finger on her.

The Oldie salutes the memory of Sir Robin Day, whose 100th birthday would have fallen on 24th October 2023.

Whatever else you can say about the Grand Inquisitor – the title Day gave his autobiography – he transformed the art of the current-affairs

‘Sod it! The bastards are on strike!’

Lady in red: Jani Allan

‘He doesn’t chase me as much as he used to’

interview. In the pre-Day era, journalists tended to ask questions such as ‘Excuse me, Prime Minister, but might you favour us with your impressions of the recent talks in Washington?’

Afterwards came the attack-dog approach that dominates the airwaves today.

The son of a post-office official, Day served in the Royal Artillery before going up to Oxford, where he was President of the Union.

He joined the staff of ITN in 1955, but it was his long tenure at the BBC, where he presented both Panorama and Question Time, that made him a household name.

Day’s trademark heavyrimmed glasses and bow tie became the stuff of caricature, most of it affectionate.

Some of Day’s interactions with the great and good had an almost ambassadorial dignity compared with the modern breed. But he still had his moments.

In 1982, on Newsnight, Day asked the Secretary of Defence, John Nott: ‘Why should the public believe you on this issue, a transient, here today and gone tomorrow politician, rather than a

senior officer of many years’ experience?’ Nott unclipped his microphone and walked off the set.

Divorced with two sons, Day had a forensic mind, a dry wit, messianic self-belief and great charm, even if the last came with a sensitive on-off switch. He died of a heart condition in August 2000, at the age of 76. Describing his craft, he once said: ‘The interviewer should be firm

and courteous. Questioning should be tenacious and persistent, but civil.

‘I shudder to watch interviewers who think it clever to be snide, supercilious or downright offensive.’

It’s a welcome return to bookshops for Andrew Barrow’s The Tap Dancer, a comic classic, first published in 1992 and now reissued in a new edition by HarperCollins.

When it came out, Alan Bennett

said of the book by Barrow, an Oldie contributor, ‘My favourite novel and one I wish I’d written.’

The story of a son’s irritation at being the butt of his father’s jokes and victim of his brothers’ indifference, it’s a favourite of the regular Oldie contributor Craig Brown. Brown says, ‘Andrew Barrow has the most curious, in both senses, comic ear and, as if by magic, can turn everyday speech into the stuff of sublime comedy.’

‘I know it’s junk food, but sometimes you just can’t say no’

Happy 100th birthday! Sir Robin Day with journalist Sarah Baxter

‘Caroline, is there any truth in these rumours about you and that reman in the upstairs at?’

An everyday story of lesbian lust

Are you into podcasts? I am in a big way, but a lot of other oldies aren’t. I even have friends who pretend not to know what a podcast is.

‘Radio 4 is good enough for me,’ they say. And, yes, Radio 4 is indeed glorious. I have just been recording another couple of episodes of Just a Minute (a Radio 4 staple since 1967), and, with Sue Perkins now happily at the helm, I think the show is as fun and funny as ever. Same goes for The Archers – a radio favourite since 1951.

With The Archers, of course, you get a lot more sex than you do with Just a Minute. From Ambridge the other day, we were treated to the radio soap’s firstever on-air lesbian kiss.

We have had gay girls in Borsetshire before, but this was the programme’s first audible Sapphic encounter.

Pip Archer was none too keen on Stella Pryor at first, but when Stella’s dog Weaver was killed in a farm accident (remember, this is an everyday story of country folk), one thing led to another, and what began as a comforting hug transmogrified into an erotically charged osculatory embrace.

It was nicely done. It felt unforced and authentic.

The Archers regularly credits its agricultural advisers. If there was an intimacy coordinator in the studio on the day of this particular recording, we were not told, but they should take a bow.

BBC Radio can give you lots. Podcasts can give you lots, lots more. Essentially, a podcast is an audio production made available in a digital format for downloading over the internet.

The word ‘podcast’ itself first saw the light of day in an article in the Guardian in February 2004 – so it might be a misprint. But if it isn’t, some say the word is a contraction of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’, while others claim the ‘pod’ part is an acronym for ‘portable on demand’.

Either way, there are at least five million podcasts out there for you to choose from (produced in a multiplicity of languages in countries around the world) and you can access them via your computer or an app on your iPhone or by barking at the device on the kitchen sideboard, ‘Alexa, play The Oldie podcast!’

Politics, pornography, true crime, self-help, gardening, goitres (and how to live with them) – you name it and there’ll be a podcast series (or several) devoted to it.

The production quality varies, but the best of them rival (and sometimes outclass) anything that the BBC has to offer.

For five years, I have been presenting a weekly podcast about words and language with my lexicographer friend Susie Dent. It’s called Something Rhymes With Purple because I thought purple (like orange and silver) was an unrhymable word. I was wrong. To hirple is to walk with a limp.

This month, I’ve launched a new podcast called Rosebud.

Admirers of Citizen Kane won’t need to ask why. It’s all about first memories. What is your very first memory? Not one prompted by an old family photo, but truly your first recollection.

That’s where the conversation starts and then it leads to other firsts. Dame Judi Dench, my first guest, told

me that her first boyfriend was called David Bellchamber.

‘We were six at the time,’ she revealed, ‘and I knew he was serious when one day he said to me, “I think we should start calling each other ‘darling’, don’t you?” ’

I have a different guest every week. Many are old friends, such as Judi Dench or Miriam Margolyes (much of what she told me is podcastable but not necessarily broadcastable – that’s the joy of podcasting: anything goes), but I am meeting new people, too. For example, Nicola Sturgeon.

That was a podcast encounter that took me by surprise: a) because I really liked her; b) because she was so candid about her singular childhood; and c) because she told me how much she liked, admired and felt indebted to our late Queen – which was something I didn’t expect from the firebrand former leader of the Scottish National Party.

‘She was very kind to me,’ she said. Nicola, a Glasgow girl, also told me about her first love. His name was ‘Sparky’. ‘And he was,’ she said, grinning.

My friend Michael Plumbe has died, aged 91. He was a good man with a serious love of language. I knew him through the Queen’s English Society. When Mike last emailed me, days before his death, I thought he was losing it. But once I had given his email the attention it deserved, I realised he wasn’t.

‘I codnul’t blveiee waht I was radnieg,’ he wrote. ‘Aoccdrnig to rsceearh at CmarbgdieUinervitsy, it deons’t mttaer in waht oedrr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. Bcuseae the hamun mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istelf, but the wrod as a wlohe.’

Rset in paece, Mkie. It was fun kowning you.

Gyles’s latest book is Elizabeth – An Intimate Portrait

There’ve been gay girls in Borsetshire before – now we’ve been treated to their first ever on-air kiss on The Archers

First love: Judi Dench

Put the brakes on, Cycling Mikey

This is absolutely the last thing a writer on nodding terms with sanity would admit to in print. If the editor has any residual professional pride, he’ll start the trenchant sacking letter on reading the next sentence.

But I cannot find the words.

I can, not to brag, find some words. However, the adequate words for a certain Mike van Erp remain beyond location.

I’ve been searching fruitlessly for them for about a month, since reading about him in the Sunday Times. Every time I think about him (and I’ve thought about little else), a peasouper of psychotic rage descends to blind whatever bit of the mind’s eye peruses the frontal lobe for mots justes.

What follows, to spell out the preemptive apology, is guaranteed to be even closer to unredeemed gibberish than that old mythological pal ‘the regular reader’ has been schooled to expect from this page.

What I can do is offer some dainty morsels from the article, in which a reporter tracked Cycling Mikey, as he pleases to know himself on social media, going about his business as a vigilante of His Majesty’s thoroughfares.

Now let it be stated that, in the unending battle between driver and cyclist – as asymmetric a contest as those between rifle-toting cowboys and native American archers – all my sympathies lie with the latter.

Drivers tend to be selfish, entitled horrors who merrily ignore the safety of bikers. The Daily Mail-ish, smug, middle-aged-white-male notion that speeding is a matter of personal choice, and not criminality, is an abhorrent perversion of libertarian sentiment.

Cycling on city streets is a wickedly dangerous pursuit. So I doff my cap to Cycling Mikey, and others such as Jeremy Vine, who devote themselves to shaming

and facilitating the punishment of hateful drivers who put their lives in peril.

But… but… but… argh… really, I mean, really… I mean… in the name of all the saints.

Nope, can’t find them. A short break and a swig of Famous Grouse may assist.

All right then. Where Cycling Mikey loses our admiration – and I hope this once I speak for us all – is that he doesn’t content himself with going after the bad guys. He also enjoys grassing up drivers who are no threat to anyone.

Wearing a helmet with a video camera embedded, he looks through windows as he pedals up, filming anyone he catches touching their phone, and forwarding the footage to a police website.

He does this even when the driver… he does this even when… he does this… nah, I need another swig.

OK.

He does this even when that driver is stationary in a traffic jam, with handbrake on and engine off.

Technically, of course, this is a crime carrying a likely penalty of six penalty points (half a ban) and a heavy fine. Even so, and to underline a previous point, what can you say?

In the piece, Cycling Mikey relished a novel experience. ‘I haven’t yet caught a member of the emergency services,’ he said on finally breaking that regrettable duck. When an ambulance driver, stationary in a jam, checked his phone, CM sidled up to film it.

The paramedic’s admission of guilt and courteous apology cut little ice with our Nemesis. ‘I’ll be reporting him,’ he told the reporter. The outcome of another plea for clemency, from a static

motorist with six points on his licence, whose livelihood would vanish if dobbed in, isn’t clear.

‘I felt his pain,’ admitted CM, ‘but nice people still end up killing and seriously injuring others.’

Indeed they do, albeit though seldom, one has to believe, when their vehicles are not in motion.

In his defence, his cyclist father was killed in Zimbabwe, albeit by the drunk driver of a moving car rather than some poor sod glancing momentarily at a message while travelling at an estimated 0.000000mph.

He is evidently a decent chap, earning a portion of his living by caring for a disabled teenage boy. The rest, presumably the bulk, comes from advertising on a bespoke YouTube channel with some 100,000 subscribers.

And, undeniably, the man is brave. As observed by one of the great poets – Lord Byron, perhaps, or possibly Homer (Simpson) – snitches get stitches. One of these days, some gridlocked nebbish facing unemployment for touching a mobile could do something truly awful to him.

Genuinely – forgive the piety –I hope not. Grief does peculiar things to people, while that portion of his hobby that punishes horrific drivers (not exclusively in black Range Rovers; other 4x4s are available), and deters others from imperilling cyclists’ lives, is noble and valuable work.

But God forbid someone caught with engine off lashes out. Presuming that at least a few of the 12 good people and true are London motorists who spend much of their miserable lives in gridlock, I am reminded of the philosopher Bernard Manning’s thought on Ken Dodd’s acquittal for tax evasion.

‘Get a bleedin’ conviction? In Liverpool, they were f****** lucky to get a jury together.’

The two-wheeled vigilante should stop harassing gridlocked drivers matthew norman

‘As one of the great poets observed, snitches get stitches’

what was bicycle face?

The dawn of the modern bicycle age at the end of the 19th century ushered in a moral panic among the guardians of public virtue. Some doctors warned that using the contraption could lead to a medical condition they dubbed ‘bicycle face’.

‘Over-exertion, the upright [and immodest] position on the wheel, and the unconscious effort to maintain one’s balance tend to produce a wearied and exhausted “bicycle face”,’ reported the Literary Digest in 1895.

It went on to describe the condition: ‘usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness'.

Elsewhere, others said the condition was ‘characterised by a hard,

what is micro-cheating?

In our day, you were cheating if you were caught red-handed in bed with the wrong person. Nowadays, cheating is far more nuanced, with layers of tiny betrayals or ‘micro-cheats’.

Young people connect online, often by liking someone’s Instagram photograph or TikTok post, as well as responding to Snapchat messages. Yet if you have declared you are committed to someone, those actions are then deemed microcheats – and you’ll know immediately if it’s happening to you.

If you are following your beloved’s social media profile online – which you are certain to be – you can see instantly if his or her number of followers or friends has increased. You can quickly ascertain who the new friend is – and woe betide your beloved if it’s a good-looking person. That is a micro-cheat.

Today, there are numerous means of meeting people virtually, and a correspondingly large number of ways

clenched jaw and bulging eyes’, which was of course most unfeminine.

In 1895, the New York World published an exhaustive list of don’ts for women riders: ‘Don’t imagine everybody is looking at you’, ‘Don’t use bicycle slang. Leave that to the boys’ and ‘Don’t cultivate a “bicycle face”.’

In an 1897 article in London’s National Review, British doctor A Shadwell claimed to have coined the phrase. He described the dangers of bicycling, especially for women, saying ‘cycling as a fashionable craze has been attempted by people unfit for any exertion’.

So what was really going on?

Threatened by the speed with which cycling was taking off, and what it could mean for society and women’s role in it, the Establishment attempted to ridicule, or even medicalise, a perfectly normal activity.

If women decided to hop on their bikes, what might they do next?

Developing ‘bicycle face’ was the least of the female cyclists’ concerns, especially for America’s

Annie Londonderry, who cycled around the world between 1894 and 1895. She made the move from skirts to bloomers to a man’s suit during the course of her journey, slowly becoming more and more of an affront to those who thought women cycling was uncouth.

The press said, ‘Miss Londonderry expressed the opinion that the advent of the bicycle will create a reform in female dress that will be beneficial. She believes that in the near future all women, whether of high or low degree, will bestride the wheel.’

Although she was a bit of a fabulist when it came to her own adventures, Londonderry wasn’t wrong about both the change in dress – out went the whalebone corsets and in came shorter dresses, split skirts and even bloomers –and women’s push for freedom.

The silent steed has been the choice and symbol of suffragettes and feminists the world over, promising its riders the pleasures and advantages of speed, good health and greater freedoms.

Sonia Zhuravlyova

of tracking people’s activity and catching them out. If your partner has claimed to have blocked an ex, and then that ex’s name pops up in a group comment on a shared post while you’re watching a movie or TikTok video together on your phone, your partner has lied and micro-cheated.

This ability to monitor who’s doing what with whom, has created an atmosphere in which even a minor infidelity is not to be tolerated.

My 19-year-old daughter, approached by three boys on a Greek beach, refused to divulge her ‘Snap’ or allow them to sit down with her, on the basis that she has a boyfriend. In fact, the ‘boyfriend’ was not even ‘officially’ her boyfriend, given there is a whole other set of rules around what constitutes an ‘official’ relationship. Secondly, how her boyfriend was supposed to find out about such an oldfashioned, non-virtual approach, I am not at all sure. But that’s beside the point because today’s generation feels a strong obligation to these draconian rules of amorous engagement.

In the same way, she turned down the

offer of a friendly mum who suggested her son take her out with his group of friends to get to know more people on the island we were holidaying on. Even though it was merely a social, friendly gesture, any kind of one-to-one contact with a member of the opposite sex can be construed as a micro-cheat.

Given most oldies spent their entire youth chatting people up both socially and sexually, most of us forged many good, lasting friendships with the opposite sex. My daughter sees my large cohort of men friends as proof I am a flirt, and flirting is no longer acceptable unless you have made it very plain on every online platform that you are single.

Living via social media means it’s never been easier to track other people’s movements. In our day, you’d have to hire a private detective to discover what young people can find out in a micro-second.

This constant surveillance means we’re moving inexorably into a morally prescriptive age with the growing ability to police and punish every micro-cheat.

Charlotte Metcalf

Pedal power struggle

My invitation to Camelot

In the early Seventies, little girls fresh from stage school were thick on the ground. They were common as daisies in a field and regularly picked off and handed round the studios like sweets.

I was a convent girl and that had an even wider appeal. One in the eye for the nuns – and somehow more challenging.

If this sounds cynical, it also happens to be true.

But among the dross there were some very decent and respectful souls. It was learning how to distinguish them.

The occasional big star would procure girls via their agents or management. Producers would be more direct and could make life unbearable for an actress unless she played footsie. But force was rare and most ingénues knew that complying could lead to fame and fortune – if you were very lucky and had a degree of talent and looks.

My small star was in the ascendant in 1971, when I was 20 – and Richard Harris rang. Or rather, his management contacted me.

I had been seen regularly on television in The Two Ronnies and various other comedy shows. I am guessing that this was why Richard was keen for us to meet.

He was then 40, the mightily successful star of This Sporting Life (1963) and Camelot (1967).

A beautiful Rolls-Royce arrived at my gate in Kew and there were flowers to entice me to the Savoy Hotel where he spent most of his time, ignoring his mansion in Melbury Road, Kensington.

He emerged from his hotel room, wearing caramel leather. A long coat

Richard Harris enchanted Bond Girl Madeline Smith with poems and letters but, to her eternal regret, she spurned him

When Irish eyes are smiling: Richard Harris (1930-2002)

I adored him but had no idea where we’d go in this extraordinary relationship

made him look godlike. He was a very handsome man.

I was treated with the utmost respect. He was delightful company, and even more so when he visited my parents in Kew.

My father, of Scottish and Irish descent, was completely intoxicated by him. They chatted together about Irish poets and music, as they stood together in the garden.

Then Richard leapt on to my bicycle and tore up the lawn. He was on fire. I adored him but had no idea where we would go from here in this extraordinary relationship.

I knew his reputation with drink and was fearful. I was also still virginal, despite appearances created by the ever-eager photographers in 1971. I was always too willing to comply and the images they created on film were very far from my shy and inhibited self.

I had remarkably little to say for myself and genuinely wondered what this fascinating and complex man would see in me.

I do not believe I ever properly read his very touching letters and poems, which appear here for the first time. It really cuts me up to admit this to myself, as I now look at the wonderful poem he sent me in May 1971.

Here is an extract:

Time flies. It flies timelessly Into a page of nothingness.

Strangers touch with touching hands Touchingly.

A deep meeting.

Fleeting time

Disentangles

Gentleness, Pushing fingers into memory. Nothing will remain; Only the warm, planted wildflowers of impression.

A glow in winter.

A love song sung in the palm. Reflections of a distant future Mirrored into today’s yesterday.

Time washes.

Nothing is removed.

It only dries the eyes of the fingertip tears

That smears

The ripe departure.

And how I like another poem he wrote to me from the Savoy Hotel in 1971. Here is an extract:

your

Thought of you while sleeping Thought of you while Thought of you Thought of Thought

I blame my lack of maturity for what happened next.

Richard was filming The Snow Goose (1971) with Jenny Agutter, who was then dating Patrick Garland. The film was Paul Gallico’s masterpiece.

Richard rang me from location late at night. He was well into his cups. He invited me to come down NOW to the location and join him there. It hurts me

to recount that I was terrified, had no idea what my parents would say and – oh foolish girl – I pretended I was seeing somebody else. As I write this, it is with disbelief, as though it had happened to somebody else.

I was later seized with dreadful guilt and regret. I never heard from him again.

The fault was entirely on my side. How very different his and my lives might have been.

For

eyes only: Madeline Smith in 1971

Madeline Smith starred in the Hammer horror films and was Miss Caruso, a Bond Girl, in Live and Let Die (1973)

The Man with the Golden Pen

One chief of British Intelligence described James Bond as ‘the best recruiting sergeant in the world’.

Another former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, agrees that the fictional spy’s impact has been huge: ‘Definitely, it’s had a positive effect. It’s made the Service the most famous intelligence organisation.

‘There is no linking or reality at all, but that’s not really the point. It’s reputational, it’s myth-building, it’s contributed to the brand. In the most distant part of the world, everyone has heard of MI6. There are big espionage cases, not just walk-ins like Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, where people have gone to the British when it would be more logical to approach the Americans, and who particularly like the British because of the Bond culture.’

This is more than borne out by my interview with the former KGB colonel Alexander Lebedev. We meet in the Edition Hotel, off Oxford Street.

Fifteen minutes late, in he strides: a man in black, blond hair cropped short, early sixties, round glasses. He guides me into a back room, curtained off, where a table is reserved. Part philanthropist, part fantasist, part tabloid gangster, Lebedev is surrounded by staff who come up or contact him on the iPhone he monitors on the stool beside him.

He said, ‘In 1982, I first worked for KGB. I went to Libya to tell stories about Lenin in Tajoura. I had studied English. To be or not to be. I read that again the other day. How does it go on?

‘I still need to refresh my memory, but my mother was a teacher of literature and history. When first I became aware of Fleming? Not before 1988, when I arrived in UK. I still watch the movies. I’ve seen all of them. I look at my wife, Elena. I really think she would do a good movie. I show you. This is the

trailer. We’ve finished seven seconds. I’m going to show to John Malkovich and Kevin Spacey.’

He plays me the brief sequence on his phone. In a tight red onesie, gripping two long-barrelled pistols, his wife shoots at various white busts on pedestals which crash to the ground. It appears to copy a Bond movie in every frame.

‘It’s called Banksters. Set in Russia, Ukraine, the US. It’s about bankers, corruption, about global financial fraudulence, apartheid – dramatic, full-scale fiction.’

He puts the phone down. ‘I started reading Ian Fleming when I came here. Smiley, yes.’

‘Smiley is le Carré.’

Ian Fleming was an underrated figure in the Second World War and after – and an influence on John le Carré.

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Fleming: 'in the inner sanctum of covert operations'

He thinks about this. ‘Le Carré is more closer to reality. Bond, it’s an adventure.’

Soon after, he stands up. He has to go. He is joining his son Yevgeny for a party they are throwing for the UK’s new prime minister of a few hours, Boris Johnson.

At John le Carré’s last public appearance, I put it to Fleming’s most obvious successor, whom I had known for more than 30 years as David Cornwell, that he had created George Smiley as a rebuke to James Bond and an embodiment of everything Bond was not – cuckolded, ugly, old, unsporty, cerebral, morally torn.

Yet didn’t the two authors have elements in common – even though le Carré seemed to want to place as much distance as he could between Fleming and himself? Both had left their British private schools early and gone to live in Switzerland and Germany, where they learned to ski well. Both had joined the British Intelligence Service, with Cornwell nearly coming to work for Fleming on the Sunday Times as part of the Mercury team (which recruited a number of intelligence officers).

Both had married an Englishwoman called Ann; both wrote their break-out novels in a matter of weeks. Both received brickbats when they tried to escape their genre. And le Carré, having set up real battles within the soul when his books begin, often ends them with Ian Fleming climaxes.

The parallels did not end there. Le Carré had used Sean Connery and Piers Brosnan as lead actors, and Paul Dehn (Goldfinger) as a screenwriter (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold), and, for his next project, le Carré had told me, he wanted none other than Daniel Craig to play Alec Leamas in his new six-part adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Even if it were merely to recoil from him, le Carré’s denial of any indebtedness to Fleming (‘I have never had much interest in him or his books’) was as impossible to swallow as his shifting stories about how he had come up with his pseudonym – on a shopfront seen from the top of a double-decker bus, being the most common.

But, as his biographer, Adam Sisman, says, ‘He provided several different explanations of why he chose the name John le Carré, and afterwards admitted that none of these was true.’

Ian Fleming told Georges Simenon how he followed Balzac’s method of borrowing his characters’ names from ‘a good name outside a shop’. Then I read

Fleming’s description in Thrilling Cities of the Casino in Monte Carlo, where Ronnie Cornwell had taken the young David to gamble for perilous amounts.

What pulled me up was Fleming’s reference to the call of ‘Carré’ uttered by the croupier amid ‘all the noisy abracadabra of one roulette table’.

At once, I thought of the first Bond villain, Le Chiffre, who meets Bond at the baccarat table a decade before Cornwell chose his pseudonym. I thought of Le Cercle, Fleming’s group who frequented casinos in pre-war France. And I made this extravagant leap: could Cornwell have come up with ‘le Carré’ in subconscious homage to Le Chiffre and Le Cercle and the croupier’s ‘Carré’ calls – to Ian Fleming, in other words? I emailed him. No answer. He had died.

Bond, as ex-Colonel Lebedev astutely observes, is ‘adventure’. But what I discovered after four years in Ian Fleming’s company, uncovering material that because of his secret status has taken its time to be released, is how much Fleming’s life was ‘closer to reality’ and more harrowing than Bond or le Carré put together. Fleming actually lived the seriousness which le Carré’s novel sought to convey. Le Carré, like Bond and Graham Greene, was only a minor player in British Intelligence.

‘The trouble with David,’ said one MI6 colleague, ‘is that he was never involved in a successful operation.’

Fleming, by contrast, was in the inner sanctum of the ‘central inaccessible citadel’, as his naval intelligence chief,

Admiral Godfrey, called it – and a more significant figure in the history of covert operations than Bond, le Carré or Greene ever were.

Ian and his brother Peter formed part of an unbelievably select group who were cleared to know the war’s top secrets, the decrypts from the codecracking centre in Bletchley Park. In April 1940, the list of those with access to this information, known as Ultra, was restricted to less than 30.

Fleming was also one of a trusted few who were charged with trying to bring the United States into the fight, and worked to set up and then coordinate with the foreign intelligence department that developed into the CIA. Following the Allied victory of 1945, he continued to play an undercover role in the Cold War from behind his Sunday Times desk.

When all this is said, Fleming emerges as significant despite Bond and not wholly because of Bond. He was an influential figure in his own right, someone even world leaders wished to consult, who had a fascinating story to tell, but one that security concerns and a strong stripe of diffidence prevented him from writing.

To simplify horribly, there would be no James Bond had Fleming not led the life he did. But if Bond had not existed, Fleming is someone we should still want to know about.

on 5th October

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill, £30) is out

John le Carré wanted Daniel Craig to star in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Jobs for the girls

Women were once confined to typing, cooking – and ironing Mr Right’s shirt. By Ysenda Maxtone Graham

On the last morning of the summer term at the all-girls St Margaret’s School, Bushey, in the 1950s, the deputy headmistress would walk each leaver, one by one, up the aisle of the school chapel at the final assembly.

This was a rehearsal for their fathers walking them up the aisle of a church, which it was expected they soon would.

Marriage was their hoped-for imminent destination. But what did Britain’s daughters do between the final assembly and the day of meeting Mr Right? Did they master any new skills? Did they earn any money?

These were my questions, in writing Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age.

I used to be good at guessing at first glance whether a woman had been to Cheltenham, Heathfield or St Mary’s Ascot. It was partly the shins, partly the timbre of voice.

My new skill is guessing women’s post-school trajectories.

‘Did you leave school at 16, without a maths O-level, then go to a finishing school in Switzerland, perhaps Tah-Dorf or Mon Fertile, and then do the London Season, and then did you go to St James’s Secretarial College, or was it Mrs Hoster’s, and then did you work as a secretary in – well, perhaps not quite 10 Downing Street but somewhere in, say, Mayfair?’

‘How did you guess?’

Or I ask, ‘I think you might have got into Oxford or Cambridge. Was that thanks to a crammer? But I bet you still had to go to a secretarial college, as that was often the only way in for women.’

Or ‘I bet you got into one of the London hospitals to train as a nurse. Did you live at a nurses’ home with a candlewick bedspread?’

‘How did you guess?’

These were the broad brushstrokes of women’s experiences, in those days when life was much more prescribed than it is today. Deprived of maths and science

O-levels by their unambitious schools, many young women were stymied in terms of careers before they even started.

They weren’t qualified to train for medicine or the law, unless they’d put a foot down in their early teens and demanded to be allowed to do the relevant subjects – which only the boldest girls (often seen as ‘stroppy’ or ‘difficult’) did.

The rest peeled off into what I now think of as a lost world: a world of eccentric institutions to keep them occupied and prepare them for adulthood, and a world of a million ‘little jobs’.

One of my favourite photos in Jobs for the Girls is of a gaggle of young women in aprons and bonnets, on the cusp of adulthood, who’d been sent to the Atholl Crescent School of Domestic Science in Edinburgh, to be trained in the art of making sheep’s-head broth and ironing men’s shirts. I was told the fiancé of one of the students broke off their engagement when he found out she’d failed the hygiene exam.

Secretarial college girls found themselves back in yet another strict institution run by severe, snobbish and

(this time) shorthand-obsessed old ladies. The nearest those ladies ever got to a witticism was asking the girls each morning, ‘So, which of you came up on the milk train?’. That meant, ‘Which of you was at an all-night party last night?’

The true test of success at the Whitehall Secretarial College in Eastbourne was answering ‘Yes’ to ‘Do you dream in shorthand?’

When it came to getting a job, there were millions of the things. They dangled like apples from a tree. You could pluck one, taste it, and if you hated it, you could discard it and get another one the next week.

‘We wore our jobs lightly,’ said Perina Braybrooke, among whose first jobs in the early 1950s was working in the watch department at Asprey’s. One of her duties was to take all the valuables out of the shop window before going home. She says, ‘I took them out at 3pm so I could get to my party.’

These young women could rent cheaply, shared ‘digs’ with friends in Knightsbridge and South Kensington. Lunch hours were long, giving them time to get their hair done.

Penny Eyles recalled having her hair washed and set at Hebe’s in Aldwych in her lunch hour, having first booked her snooty advertising bosses into Rules for their much longer lunch.

She re-emerged ‘back-combed, doused in hairspray, and looking like my mother, the whole creation shaking in the wind on Waterloo Bridge’.

I was a university leaver in 1984 who failed to get a job as a sales assistant at Zwemmer’s bookshop, as there were 1,200 applicants.

So that earlier jobs cornucopia sounded like a golden age, in spite of the tyranny of carbon-paper layers and bossy men in charge.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age (Little, Brown) is out on 27 September

Just my type: a class in the 1950s

My interview Hell

Ibroke a self-imposed rule some years back and did an interview with a broadsheet – the Daily Telegraph – to advertise something or other. God knows what. The subsequent article didn’t mention it, but it got publicity all right.

It went to form. The journalist didn’t usually do this sort of interviewing lark. He had been involved with famous people I had once employed. He told me earnestly that he wanted to return to TV.

OK… I had to very gently explain that it was beyond my powers to help him. A minor celebrity press interview is a highwire juggling act. The interviewer is, after all, demeaning themselves. They should be talking to Brad Pitt or the King, or someone more worthy of their attention. So abase yourself.

Be watchful, too. Be bland about the

BBC. Don’t be accused of ‘ranting’ about your employer.

Money? Sidestep that, for God’s sake. Reports of my wealth have been greatly exaggerated, but I am clearly undeserving. To say or even imply that I don’t worry about it, provokes an underlying belief that you are ‘lying’. A big mistake.

Try to be gently humorous, obviously. (The Sunday Times, after a ten-minute phoner about wind farms, reported that I was ‘totally unfunny’ in real life.)

But, whatever you do, no irony, hypotheticals or hyperbolic exaggeration. They will always be taken literally.

So I chattered away. The interviewer hadn’t booked the public room in the Charlotte Street Hotel where we met, but he wanted privacy. He kept slamming the door. The staff kept opening it again.

He got increasingly exercised, not to say unhinged, and I was gradually forgetting my basic rules.

An interview is evidence. There is no part of what you say – no sentence, chance remark, caveat or three-word correction – that may not be taken down and used against you. And it goes on for three hours.

In this case, we came suddenly to the proposed mansion tax – a notion hovering around before a recent election. ‘Ha ha. That. I want to make something clear. I don’t take any political view on this at all. It is entirely up to the government,’ I waffled.

‘But you live in a big house, don’t you?’ ‘Er…’

Now, when somebody says this sort of thing, you can lie.

Never lie! Never lie. If he had said,

When Griff Rhys Jones spoke to a journalist, he didn’t realise every self-righteous ninny on Fleet Street would lacerate him

Head to head: Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, Not the Nine O’Clock News (1985)

‘You have a big todger, don’t you?’, I would have honestly set him right. ‘Huge.’ Don’t joke!

And I did live in a big house. You can possibly see exactly how big online, because a columnist from the Guardian later published my exact address along with the actual floor plans of my house, on the basis that I was stealing land from the people.

But I was stumbling now… I wanted to explain that the valuable house was an accident. We bought it in what was a cheap place, a long time ago, when it was a wreck. We wouldn’t have the ready cash to pay a big annual tax, but it didn’t matter. That was the point.

My family were grown-up, and we were old and probably going to downsize anyway. Phew.

Ponder that incontinent splurge, do, because every single, hurried, get-out excuse caused a fury of contempt, derision and troll violence.

How dare I suggest that I might not want to pay the mansion tax? How dare I imply the house was a wreck? Some people live in real slums. How dare I live there when, just across the road, there was a health centre that served real people, said Bonnie Greer.

Yeah, I didn’t get that last point either. But what triggered a super-geyser of sewage was the observation that it was no longer easy to do what we had done: ‘You wouldn’t find a run-down house in London any more. I would probably have to go to France in search of a big, dilapidated house.’

The interview duly appeared. A mate messaged me early to tell me how funny it was. Good. But then I bought the rag and saw the front page. There was a banner headline: ‘Griff Rhys Jones says he will leave the country if the Labour Party gets in.’

Eh? I froze. Note: there were no quotation marks here. I did not actually say such a thing. Neither ‘off the record’ nor as an aside. Why would I? Such a concept was utterly absurd. It was a sort of wild, speculative surmise, based, somehow, on that last sentence.

The world imploded. A torrent of abuse spouted forth. Every prig, selfrighteous ninny on Fleet Street and social posturing nincompoop online took the opportunity to lacerate me.

Friends rang up, aghast. I have never been on Twitter. I have seen reasonable

and much-loved National Treasure friends destroyed by it. So I was kept abreast of what was happening.

On Saturday morning (and I guess this was because its members had to work as sociology lecturers), Class War arrived, yelling and frothing, in the square outside the house.

After demanding that I come outside to face their wrath, they stuck stickers on my door (and my neighbours’, too) and poured superglue into the locks of nearby BMWs.

I didn’t see this. Well, I was in my house in the country. But, hey, I got their point.

They weren’t as loud as my agent, darling wife and close friends. What was I going to do? I was doomed. This was the end of me.

I went to noted lawyers. They sent me a shopping list of charges. To silence a newspaper – a sizeable sum – per rag. And an exact charge for shutting down each and every online reference. Per reference. It seemed reasonable at £175 plus VAT, until a little mental calculation of what ‘trending’ actually meant in terms of sheer volume.

Should I talk to Rod Liddle, go on Newsnight, appear on LBC, speak to the Mirror and hold a press conference? Reply on Twitter? Sue? All these were instantly on offer.

I did nothing. Nothing at all. I dismissed the lawyers. I ignored everybody. I didn’t even hide under the table. I gave no opinion, justification, response or comment. I just didn’t exist as a mouthy gob for three days.

And the result? By Monday, it was gone – a tumbleweed storm in a doll’shouse teacup. The overheated, ravenous mob of priggish sewage-stirrers poured into another gutter. If I mention this now, even to journalists, they are bemused, because it made such a gigantic low impact. It was meaningless.

Seriously, the press, the internet, the shrill, screaming narcissistic, powerseeking cancel culture is entirely without form or merit or even power, if you are prepared to utterly ignore it.

Respond and you are doomed. If I had answered back or sought the truth, I genuinely believe you would have known about all this already.

Though, of course, now you do. But be reassured: it is effluent under the bridge.

* Books for UK addresses only Europe/Eire:

The press is entirely without power if you are prepared to utterly ignore it

Lodging with Uncle Tony

Lady Antonia Fraser tells Harry Mount about staying with Anthony Powell, her uncle, as he began A Dance to the Music of Time in 1949

On 16th September, the Anthony Powell Society revealed a blue plaque on the writer’s home at 1 Chester Gate, just off Regent’s Park.

My father, the writer Ferdinand Mount, Anthony Powell’s nephew, said a few words. Also there was his elder son, the film director Tristram Powell. His younger son, John Powell, is Patron of the Society.

Powell (1905-2000) and his wife, Lady Violet Powell, lived at the house from 1937 to 1952. There Powell began his 12-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. And it was there in 1949 that the Powells’ niece, Lady Antonia Fraser, then 17, came to lodge.

Antonia, now 91, was also at the ceremony at her old home. She moved there from Hampstead Garden Suburb, where her parents, Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham (later Lord and Lady Longford), lived.

Antonia says, ‘I greatly disliked Hampstead Garden Suburb because it was too far out for a boy to take me home in a taxi as it was outside the limit for a normal London cab.

‘I felt this hampered my social life and Violet, who was a very generous and warm-hearted woman, took pity on me. Tristram and John were still very young and I felt very much at home and at the same time free.’

Antonia remembers Powell embarking on his magnum opus.

She says, ‘We used to have breakfast and then came the time which I now treasure, when Violet would say, “Buck up, Antonia, and finish your breakfast. I need to clear the table so Tony can write his novel.” And of course this turned out to be A Question of Upbringing, the first volume of Dance.’

She says, ‘I chiefly remember the need to get out and let him work. This was very different to the situation I had grown up in as my father, who was a don at Oxford, left the house each morning to go and work at Christ Church.

‘So Tony settling down to work

every day at the kitchen table made a great impression on me and I remember feeling that this was a pleasant way to work.

‘I appreciated from being with them how much fun being a writer could be and that it would be a wonderful life for someone who was a compulsive reader, as I was and still am.’

Antonia went up to Oxford in 1950. When the first volume of Dance came out a year later, she became addicted to the sequence. Her favourite is The Soldier’s Art (1966).

Critics rushed to identify real-life people who inspired Powell’s characters, chiefly Kenneth Widmerpool, the crass politician-on-the-make. Frank Longford supposedly nominated himself as the inspiration for Widmerpool.

Antonia thinks not: ‘I never heard him say that and I think it more likely that someone else made that comment, which my father then repeated. I don’t think he was like Widmerpool in the slightest. If there is a character who might have been partly inspired by Father, then I think it would be Erridge.’

In the series, Erridge, a socialist peer, is the brother-in-law of the narrator Nick Jenkins, as Lord Longford was Anthony Powell’s brother-in-law. Still, others (including A N Wilson, see page 37) think George Orwell inspired Erridge.

While Antonia was lodging with the Powells, she was plunged into the heart of literary London. She says, ‘I remember seeing Malcolm Muggeridge at Chester Gate, as

he was a really close friend of Tony’s at this period and lived nearby.’

During her stay in Chester Gate, in 1950, Orwell died of TB. Powell and Muggeridge arranged his funeral at nearby Christ Church, Albany Street.

After Antonia left Chester Gate, she remained in close contact with the Powells. In 1961, she went on a Swan Hellenic cruise with them.

Antonia says, ‘There is a scene in Temporary Kings [1973] featuring a Tiepolo ceiling and, on that cruise, I was actually with Tony when we looked at a Tiepolo ceiling in Venice, so this is a proud memory for me.’

Antonia later invited Powell to a performance of Mozart’s Seraglio in her Holland Park garden.

She says, ‘He asked me what people would normally comment on when they were at the opera. Luckily, I had a review from the Financial Times, which said one character was more of a baritone than a bass but this was normally the case with this character. This comment then appeared in Temporary Kings

‘So I did see then how he would adapt life into his fiction, but also his care in getting things right.’

Antonia’s Oxford tutor, Anne Whiteman, inspired Emily Brightman in Dance: ‘Anne was very proud to have been the inspiration behind the character. This always amused me as Dr Brightman is a bit of a nightmare, being terribly bossy – most unlike Anne.’

The Powells also got on well with Antonia Fraser’s late husband, Harold Pinter. Antonia says, ‘Like Tony, Harold loved literature and the English language was everything to him. And then there was red wine, which they both enjoyed.’

Before Antonia married Pinter, Powell asked her, ‘What is Harold? How do we describe him?’

She said, ‘Well, you can call him my companion.’

Powell said, ‘You mean like an old lady?’

There was a pause and Antonia said, ‘Exactly like an old lady’ – and Powell roared with laughter.

Antonia’s room was by the blue plaque, Regent’s Park

The British Atlas

Bellerby & Co, the only bespoke globemaker in existence, has won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise twice.

The founder, Peter Bellerby, began the business in 2010 after failing to find a special globe for his father’s 80th birthday.

Today, his company makes terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes for customers around the world.

And now he’s written a book to celebrate the world of globe-making.

Left: Peter Bellerby and finished globe

Below: painting ‘gores’, sectors of the curved surface between lines of longitude

In his new book, Peter Bellerby, the only bespoke globemaker in the world, reveals his secrets to making the perfect planet

SEBASTIAN BOETTCHER

The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury, £25) by Peter Bellerby is out now

Clockwise from above: prepping a sphere before the map is added; pasting on the glue; sticking on the polar ‘callotte’, the last piece of the map; a colour wash is added

EUAN MYLES

EUAN MYLES

Twig lit

As a Twiggy musical launches, Valerie Grove recalls writing the Neasden icon’s autobiography in 1975

It’s almost 50 years since I became Twiggy’s first ghostwriter. Of course it was Justin who brokered the deal. Justin de Villeneuve (né Nigel John Davies from Edmonton) was no longer her Svengali/boyfriend, but he was still running ‘Twiggy Enterprises’.

Her autobiography would be a slim volume, we joked. All royalties would go to Twiggy Enterprises (sadly for me, as the book, Twiggy by Twiggy, 1975, did rather well).

She was three years younger than me and three stone lighter. We knew the same London suburbs, we’d bought the same black, lace-trimmed frock at Biba in 1964 (for £3), when I was doing A-levels and she was at the Fender Club in Harrow in her Mod gear: Hush Puppies, white lipstick, kohl-rimmed eyes.

One day, Justin took her to Leonard of Mayfair to have her hair cut into that gamine blonde cap. The Daily Express photograph was captioned ‘This is the face of 1966’: an instant icon in an icon-mad decade.

When we met in 1974, Twigs was about to play Cinderella at the Palladium that Christmas, singing her heart out in a small, true voice. And she had a new boyfriend. She’d ditched unfaithful Justin for a hulking American B-movie actor 20 years her senior, Michael Witney, her leading man in a forgotten film from 1971 called W. When I arrived at their gloomy mansion flat in Cornwall Gardens, Witney was usually still in bed.

She told some funny stories, quite artlessly. She’d once been seated at dinner near Princess Margaret, who had asked who she was.

Twiggy: ‘My real name’s Lesley Hornby but most people call me Twiggy.’

HRH: ‘How unfortunate!’

On American TV, Woody Allen asked the teenager, ‘Who’s your favourite philosopher?’ She replied, ‘What’s a philosopher?’ and he was the discomfited one.

And when her mother in Neasden, surrounded by reporters, was asked, ‘Has

your daughter’s success changed your social life, Mrs Hornby?’ she replied, ‘Well, I’ve joined the Conservative Party!’

Twigs had total recall about everything she’d worn, and an infallible instinct for upcoming trends, like catsuits, which she made herself.

Justin fleshed out the racontage. He’d been a likeable Jack-the-lad sort of villain when he spied the waif-like Twiggy and her huge blue eyes. When she was catapulted into the headlines by photographer Barry Lategan and fashion editor Deirdre McSharry, Davies reinvented himself as Justin de Villeneuve, Svengali to her Trilby, guarding her from paparazzi who called him ‘that creep’.

Soho was Justin’s manor, Flash Harry his style. Son of a bricklayer, he’d been a bouncer at a Wardour Street clip joint, ‘Tiger Davies’ the fairground boxer, and ‘Mr Christian’ the shampoo boy at Vidal Sassoon. He’d dealt in bogus wine labels, blue movies, market-stall antiques. He kept quiet about being already married.

The couple were boracic (lint: skint) and at the start had to borrow their bus fares, but Justin had the rabbit (and pork: talk). He knew that if he said Twiggy earned a grand an hour, people would pay that. Ford gave her a Mustang, years before she could drive.

New York and Hollywood went wild to welcome them. When they flew back from Japan in 1967, Justin’s old barrow-

boy friend Teddy the Monk hefted £100,000 through Heathrow in a suitcase. Which kept Justin in multiple Porsches and Tommy Nutter suits –he got his taste for posh stuff when evacuated to J B Priestley’s house during the war – and the pedigree dogs he never managed to housetrain.

Wherever the couple went, stars flocked to meet them – Tony Curtis, Tommy Steele, Lauren Bacall, Sonny and Cher. In Jamaica in 1970, Noël Coward told Twigs she’d be marvellous in his early plays. He said she should definitely do The Boy Friend film with Ken Russell. Which Twiggy did in 1971. She danced her socks off, won two Golden Globes, went to Hollywood for the premiere and met her hero Fred Astaire.

The last words in our book were:

‘I’m 26 now. That means I’ve had a decade of being Twiggy. They’ve been ten amazing years. I don’t think I could ever have envisaged any of it happening. What people never understand is that I come from a sane, ordinary background and I’m sane and ordinary – and lucky.’

So ended Chapter One of her life. In 1977, she did marry Michael Witney, father of her daughter, Carly. But Witney turned out to be an unreformable alcoholic, who died in 1983, aged 52, of a heart attack in McDonald’s.

Almost 50 years on, Twigs is lovable Dame Twiggy. For three generations, Twiggy has been a household nickname.

In 1988, she married her good man, the actor Leigh Lawson, ex-husband of Hayley Mills. Ben Elton has now written up her early life in a new musical. Twiggy turns 74 as the show opens. Justin is 84 – and I’m agog to know who will play him. Twiggy told her second ghostwriter, in 1997, that he was just ‘the lad who got lucky for a time’. Which is true.

On the other hand, without Nigel Davies, her early life story could have been Cinderella without the Prince.

Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical, Menier Chocolate Factory, from 18th September

What a Dame! In The Boy Friend (1971)

Sasha Swire walks the windswept, wave-battered South West Coast Path, home to Butlin’s and solitary bird-watchers

Life on the edge

The journey I describe in my new book is one that is deeply familiar to me: the South West Coast Path.

It is a linear journey, which blows westward and then turns east, following, for 630 miles, the contours of natural borders.

My journey started at Minehead in Somerset, clambering up North Hill to a gorse-tangled plateau, and from there travelled through three counties, finishing in Poole in Dorset.

It passed through big towns, small towns, villages and hamlets; even wilderness. It wove between gone worlds that have risen and dissolved. It offered artistic associations and rocks that are more durable than the gathering of heavens. It gave me freedom on blond beaches under blue skies, and God over saint-wooed ground.

When I started walking, I was not seeking a lucid understanding of an edge world; just eco-therapy, as respite from the stresses of my job in an urban existence. I came where many people come, to the line between land and sea. I just wanted to add my feet to the current of a coastal path looking seaward.

As I sauntered along, on and off over a ten-year period, I became increasingly charmed, even enthralled, by the sheer level of expressive forces at work on the fringes.

What I discovered was the edge is where the action is; not the surface.

Minehead to Porlock

The hills have eyes.

What must they have seen from this protrusion of Exmoor that rises beside a town looking out to sea? The English seaside as its port declines: quay town houses turned to boarding houses, steamships, bathing machines, a steam train, ice-cream parlours run by Italian immigrants.

There are amusement arcades, a theatre, a cinema and concert hall, and

a pier. In the 19th century, polo ponies were exercised on the beach. In 1874, the railway brought even more summer visitors. Hotels were built and more shops opened. Then, in the 20th century, stiff competition from resorts abroad meant a chill wind blew on these seaside resorts.

Poor transport links, an ageing population and low expectations ensured that Minehead will spend the next decades running to stand still. It is another story about the near and the far

away. Of other places and other worlds.

I am on North Hill, at the start of my walk. Rising 900ft from the sea, the hill hovers over the town in a friendly fashion. I am on rare coastal heathland. Among gorse and bracken, bell heather and ling, I have clear views across the Bristol Channel. Somewhere below me, although I cannot see it from here, spread out before the sea, lies that which Minehead is reliant on for its economic health: Butlin’s holiday camp, the largest employer in this small coastal town.

Its founder was a rogue called Billy Butlin. Billy looked like a diminutive Rhett Butler and behaved like one, particularly with women; he was an archetypal edgeland character.

Born of fairground stock, he acquired his business acumen ducking and diving between the gingerbread stalls and toffee-apple barrels, flirting with the punters and learning where and when to use his animal charm.

His first pitch was a hoop-la stall, his prizes cheap rewards, chocolate and dyed wrens passed off as canaries.

From there, he moved on to operate a string of arcades, amusement parks, fairground pitches and zoos all over the country. For one who bobbed and weaved, it is appropriate that his early fortune came from importing dodgem cars. A natural gambler, he borrowed heavily to set up his first holiday camp in Skegness in 1936. Many more would follow as his business boomed after the war. The camp in Minehead opened in 1962, and flooded the area with 30,000 people in its first year alone.

The Minehead camp was built on

former grazing marshes, with a trench around the perimeter to keep the sea out. It is a story of enclosure: enclosing the British holidaying public in their masses. As a painting exists within a frame, the same could be said of a holiday camp.

Billy Butlin became Britain’s seaside ringmaster, the significant performer in his own big tent show, directing the audience’s attention and producing a seamless performance. He was bigger and better than anyone else in the pleasure-dome world.

Billy came to an edge in the natural world and created another artificial one, a cultural one, and in doing so changed the coastal topography of Britain for good.

On this, my first day of walking, I come to Hurlstone Point. There is a birdwatcher with his binoculars raised, standing lonely at the sharpness of the edge. ‘What can you see?’

He reels off a list: falcons and wheatears, stonechats, ring ouzels and black redstart. He tells me a wide array of birds hover over this point and adds that Hi-de-Hi! Butlin’s, Minehead, opened in 1962

it’s an excellent time of year to watch them, because the migrants are flying overhead on their journey to Africa.

He comes to this location because it is where the earth retreats and he has room to move outwards, further and further away from the near space in which he resides.

And it is not an uncommon sight, solitary men obsessed by birds, in this border territory.

I have a theory: that birdwatching in men comes from the dark corners where the conflicts with hunting and hurting reside.

Man’s whole narrative has been of escaping the wild, suppressing his savage and primal instincts: one of moving towards civilisation, away from caveman conditions towards hearth and home. But I wonder if there is still something beating in his heart from that time –some residue?

This intense viewing of species and behaviours, understanding the intricacies of their world, is like any great hunting or military operation; it takes careful planning and thinking.

On 29th October 1942, a long-range bomber was flying low like a big homing pigeon over this swampland, having completed a mission against German U-boats in the Bay of Biscay. It was returning to its base at Holmsley South Airfield in the New Forest and, like the bird itself, was following the grooves and hollows of valleys and seas, flying low to evade hawks and harassers.

Because of heavy rain and poor visibility, it clipped the top of Bossington Hill, which was in low cloud, and swung westward over Porlock, debris falling from the stricken plane.

A wheel and part of the undercarriage plunged on to Sparkhayes Lane before its carcass dropped heavily into the marsh, killing 11 of its 12 American crew. The airmen’s memorial, which has been moved from its original site on to the footpath so more people can see it, is made from the remains of the aircraft.

When people die like this, slipping between different realms, they become ghosts where they fall and that is how they stay alive with all that is already there. After all, what goes on here is otherworldly, ethereal, fluid; those native to the marsh already brave and longing to forget and smouldering through time.

It truly is a land fit for heroes. A place of desperate reaching.

Sasha Swire’s Edgeland – A Slow Walk West (Hachette) is out now

Dad’s Salerno elegy

Eighty years ago, Richard Oldfield’s father wrote a heartbreaking tribute to two comrades, killed in battle

The 9th of September marked the 80th anniversary of Operation Avalanche, the Allied landings in Italy near Salerno.

My father, Christopher Oldfield (1921-81), fought in the Italian Campaign. He had two years at Oxford before joining the Grenadier Guards in 1942. In 1943, he was sent with his battalion, the Sixth, to North Africa and thereafter to Italy. He was wounded twice, once in North Africa and once in Italy.

During lockdown, I found in tin boxes half a dozen exercise books full of the poems, essays and short stories he wrote, all in pencil, while at war, and the letters he sent to his aunt. He was very close to her, both his parents being dead.

He wrote to her, ‘I can tell you nothing of where I am or what I have been doing … I wish I could say something that would make my letters to you a little more interesting, but I’m afraid the censor wouldn’t let the little bit of news that might amuse you through.’

His own internal censor suppressed almost all indication of the beastliness of war. The worst moments in Italy are described dismissively: ‘a bit uncomfortable’, ‘not very pleasant’, ‘not feeling very lively’ and, after being wounded, ‘a slight headache’.

Among the topics to which my father instead resorted, somewhat Pooterishly, are injections for his aunt’s rheumatism and the hope that they will be successful, the fact that his niece can write in block letters, the difficulties of finding someone to mow the lawn and of feeding the hens in the rain. Thanks for socks that his aunt has sent and his search for gloves for her are recurring themes.

The essays were light-hearted and witty, in the style of Max Beerbohm whom he revered. The poems were morbid and cynical.

One of the exercise books was secondhand, still containing at the back some jottings in Italian by a schoolboy who must have been its previous owner. At the front, there were half a dozen

poems written by my father in 1943 in Italy. The last of these poems was entitled In Memoriam:

So, two more gone; different in all else, But similar in this, that both were friends

Of mine. To vilify the fate that bends Us as it wills, whether we will or no, Were useless. Better far to acquiesce In silence stern, and by that silence show We serve with dignity our country’s ends.

’Tis useless to wish back the days that were, And worse still to remember and complain, For memory perpetuates the pain. Two friends of mine –Thank God for them; and yet They’re not the only dead, by any means. Just two more gone; it’s easy to forget –Of course it is – nor think of them again.

What matter two among ten thousand dead?

A hundred friendships vanish in a day. Need they? But what use questions? We obey.

Humane, sane logic is a wondrous thing, Jove’s gift to humans – but of no great use To puppets dancing on Bellona’s string. Accept things as they are, and turn away.

December, 1943

On the first page, like the rest of it in pencil, my father had written and then crossed out ‘Dedicated to IMB and PA’. He replaced this with: ‘Dedicated to two officers of His Majesty’s First or Grenadier Regiment of Foot Guards of whom one was killed in action near Battipaglia and the other died of wounds at Salerno during the month of September 1943.’

It does not take more than a couple of minutes with Nigel Nicolson’s The Grenadier Guards 1939-1945 and with the internet to penetrate the anonymity of this dedication. IMB was Captain Ian Moncrieff-Brown.

His nephew is the journalist Craig Brown, who responded when I sent him a copy of this poem: ‘ That’s so fascinating, and moving, too. Ian was my father’s older brother, and was quite wild and dissolute before the war: he went to Cambridge (I think) and did no work but just had fun, keeping on changing his courses so he could prolong the experience.

‘My grandfather then wouldn’t let my father, who was a much more dutiful character, go to university as he didn’t want to waste any more money

‘At some point after the war had begun, the two brothers had a terrible argument and were on non-speaks.

‘They were in different regiments (my father was in the Cameron Highlanders), so wouldn’t have expected to see each other again. But then, quite by chance, they bumped into each other in a street in Italy (possibly Salerno) and had a good lunch together, parting on very good terms. The next day, Ian was killed. I remember mentioning this in my address at my father’s funeral, and finding it hard to get through.’

The other officer killed was Peter Alington, brother of Lady [Alec] Douglas-Home, and son of an Eton headmaster, Cyril Alington.

RIP, 80 years on.

Richard Oldfield is a banker

The Allies land in Salerno, 1943

London calling

Duncan Campbell was an original presenter for LBC, Britain’s first commercial news station, at its chaotic launch, 50 years ago

Fifty years ago this October, Londoners were woken at 6am by the amiable tones of the journalist David Jessel welcoming them to Britain’s first commercial news station, LBC.

These days, of course, it has a roster of well-known names and claims more than three million weekly listeners. But, in those early weeks and months in 1973, the London Broadcasting Company was wonderfully odd and chaotic.

Jessel was followed on air by Janet Street-Porter and Paul Callan who hosted a chat show called Two in the Morning! – the exclamation mark was included in its title.

Other presenters of the 24-hour operation would include Bel Mooney, Jeremy Beadle, Peter Allen and Carol Barnes. One of the new recruits was a long-haired young chap called Jon Snow.

Panic reigned. Tears flowed. During one broadcast, a cleaner started up the Hoover behind the newsreader.

Phone-ins were a new phenomenon in Britain and since many programmes attracted scarcely any callers, staff were recruited to pose as enthralled listeners. Geoffrey Wansell, now an established true-crime author, was the station’s features editor.

‘It was chaos,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t even call it organised chaos; it was just chaos.’

He recalled arriving at dawn one day and finding exhausted staff fast asleep in the studio.

A weekly hour-long slot in the early days was the Celebrity Interview. I was assigned one week to talk to the esteemed round-the-world yachtsman Robin Knox-Johnston. This meant a trip to the Boat Show in Olympia armed with a tape recorder, which I had been assured was fully charged.

On returning to the studio and playing back the recording, I discovered that, after the first ten minutes or so, Knox-Johnston’s voice becaaaaame verrrry verrrry sloooow and then stopped completely. Dud batteries!

It was impossible to re-interview him, but I was told firmly that I still had to fill the hour.

But how? I re-recorded my questions which were ex-pand-ed and pad-ded out with much geographical waffle.

A sympathetic soul in the studio then pointed out that there was an LP of sea shanties in the library. So, after each lengthy question and a brief snatch of our hero’s answer, there would be a cheery little ditty about life on the ocean wave.

I hoped that our celebrity was far, far away at sea that night or, if he was on dry land, his thoughts would be for those in peril in the studio.

I had a weekly show called This Is London, described by someone at the time as ‘the poor man’s Down Your Way’ – the round-Britain programme that had run on the Home Service since 1946. It involved going to a different part of London every week and interviewing someone from the local paper, a councillor, a publican, a vicar and passers-by.

The first episode had to be about Fleet Street itself as LBC’s offices were close by in Gough Square. I arranged an interview with Milton Shulman, the Evening Standard theatre critic, and Philip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian’s opera critic, to take place in El Vino.

More technology issues. I only had an hour’s worth of tape, and it soon became clear that Philip and Milton had many hours, not to mention days, of great Fleet Street yarns. It was too embarrassing to say I had run out of tape. I ended up having to record on top of the original one, not once but twice, losing many of their magical memories.

There was also a short-lived comedy programme called Punchline, which I presented with the late and much missed Andy Nickolds – who, with Christopher Douglas, would later give us Ed Reardon’s Week on Radio 4.

The LBC-identifying slogan at the time was ‘LBC – Where News Comes First!’, to which Andy would add ‘subject to a stewards’ inquiry’, to our boss’s fury.

I replayed some episodes recently. Amid such items as Brian Clough on the phone to Henry Kissinger, jokes about Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, making him roast lamb with an ‘unimpeachable sauce’ for supper, there was one remarkably prescient sketch.

It was a time of football hooliganism. So what could have been funnier than to imagine cricket hooligans and have interviews with the ‘Middlesex Boot Boys’ – half a century before chaps in egg-and-bacon ties roughed up the Aussies at Lords this summer. Other items included a song to the tune of Eleanor Rigby – ‘Reginald Maudling / Writing the words of a speech that no one will hear / Let’s make him a peer.’

We also had a ‘Nonentity Interview’ –thankfully, it was only two minutes long. By 1975, some presenters had departed, ads had dried up and the station was in dire financial trouble. A third of the staff, including me, were given their notice.

Our pay-off was a week’s money. I suppose they reckoned it would be just enough to recharge our batteries.

Duncan Campbell was the Guardian’s LA correspondent and crime correspondent ROGER JACKSON/CENTRAL PRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Sound check: Janet Street-Porter and Paul Callan present their mid-morning show on LBC’s first day, October 1973

Look back and hanker

Jon Askew has su ered from acute nostalgia since he was a boy

Nostalgia always frightened me. It was something that sounded like an age-related condition, such as myalgia or angina. Sufferers always smelled of Deep Heat, ordered chips by the penn’orth and let the pounds look after themselves. They were full of waste-notwant-not wisdom, and I knew that could never happen to me.

My fear of nostalgia began as a young boy in the 1970s with dreary afternoons enduring the ITV show Looks Familiar, where the likes of Denis Norden and Arthur Askey discussed silent films and music hall acts. All their talk of olden times was irrelevant to me.

And if these were the good old days, why was everything black and white? And can I switch over to Grange Hill?

I recall queueing in the local newsagent to pay for my comic and Cresta while the elderly couple in front lamented the closure of Timothy Whites and moaned that Wagon Wheels were smaller than they used to be. I couldn’t understand their fascination with the past, especially when that week’s issue of Look-in featured The Six Million Dollar Man.

Yet, despite my resolve to avoid the condition, the passing decades gradually revealed signs of early-onset nostalgia.

Visiting that same newsagent, I had momentary visions of Toffos, Spangles and the occasional Texan bar. Then I found myself being strangely attracted to a magazine called The Oldie.

Channel-hopping on TV, I’d linger over Challenge, UK Gold and Talking Pictures, and was soon watching instalments of Tenko and Bullseye. As these symptoms became more frequent, I had to accept them as undeniable proof of ageing.

Is pining for the past such a bad thing? It’s just the brain’s way of coping with getting older, rather than an admission that we’ve been left gasping asthmatically by the march of time. I’ve decided to treat nostalgia as an experience rather than a condition. I’ve rewound the cassette tape of my memories to a less complicated era, when all that mattered was the Radio 1 chart show and the future seemed as bright as the Osmond family’s smiles.

I’ve found myself yearning for a time when the only choices I had to make were between watching Tiswas or Swap Shop

on Saturday mornings; a time when we had a chance of winning Eurovision.

There was nothing greater than settling down to a Saturday night TV schedule that’s never been bettered: Doctor Who, The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, Starsky & Hutch, Match of the Day and Parkinson. YouTube has become my most valuable tool. I love old favourites such as Catweazle and Robinson Crusoe.

My bouts of nostalgia are now so incessant they’ve become incurable, but I’ve learned to live with them. Nostalgia may be the prerogative of the well-preserved, but it’s also the key that unlocks our memories of simpler times.

I’m proud to be sensing a closer affinity with the past than the present, knowing life’s toughest lessons are behind me. Today’s children will learn that, too, as iPhones become their Betamax, and Ant and Dec their Morecambe and Wise.

So I’ll continue with my reminiscences of rose-tinted, pre-metric, full-fat, threechannel, Sunday-closing nostalgia and embrace them as warmly as the sizzling hot summer of ’76.

The strange decline of literary journalism

Oh for the golden age of Orwell, Muggeridge and Powell a n wilson

It’s hard to tell whether my addiction to A Dance to the Music of Time is something to worry about.

Is it a bit like spending too much time at one’s club, when a more adventurous approach to social life might introduce me to ‘new people’? (‘Dread phrase’, as Wallace Arnold might have said.) Probably. But one of the pleasures of old age is that you no longer feel shame at basking in the familiar. Open any volume of Dance and you know you will not be disappointed.

Every now and then I reread a volume of Proust to remind me that Powell is not really in the same league as the long roman fleuve to which Dance is, in a sense, a tribute.

But, in fact, the pleasures of reading the two novelists are quite distinct. The truly great writers, of whom Proust is one, actually change your way of looking at the world. Powell’s cold-fish, English irony holds back from anything as uncool as a world-view.

In September, a plaque was unveiled on the house where Powell was living when he began to write his novelsequence. The period is evoked in Books Do Furnish a Room. It is a personal favourite, perhaps because it evokes a way of life that has now utterly vanished.

That is the way of life which I should like, as an old hack, to have lived myself, but which would not really be possible in today’s economic climate – a world where literature was taken seriously by a sizeable public, and where patrons were willing to subsidise literary loafers.

Powell’s exact Balliol contemporary Peter Quennell once told me he lived entirely, during this period, on his income from book reviews: ‘In those days, if you wrote a review for the New Statesman, it paid you enough to have dinner with a bird at the Savoy Grill and, if you got lucky, to stay the night.’

Generous as some periodicals might

think themselves, today, none would pay enough, for one book review, to buy a few hours in an Airbnb in Scunthorpe.

Powell always resisted the identification of his fictional characters with people in ‘real life’. Nevertheless, it is hard not to see that ‘Books’ Bagshaw, the ex-leftie literary journalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of, and interest in, the abstruser byways of left-wing adherence, owes something to Powell’s friendship with Malcolm Muggeridge.

Similarly, the gangling Erridge – in the sequence, the brother-in-law of the narrator – who dresses like a tramp, goes to Spain to fight for the Republic, and dies young – is clearly in part based on George Orwell.

It was in Albany Street, near Powell’s house, now adorned with the plaque, that his friends organised Orwell’s funeral.

Merely to name Powell, Muggeridge and Orwell is to recall an era of literary and journalistic life which seems in every way more interesting than the present scene.

This was also the time when Cyril Connolly was editing Horizon – between 1939 and 1950. The small-circulation journal was the first to publish Evelyn Waugh’s masterly account of American funerary customs, The Loved One.

Other contributors included André Gide, Rose Macaulay, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, W H Auden and Kenneth Clark. Béla Bartók wrote a piece for it, as did Barbara Hepworth. Distinguished as periodicals might have been in our day, we’ve surely not seen anything to match this?

W B Yeats said, ‘the intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work’.

The circle of Bohemian friends and acquaintances who ‘sat’ for their portraits in Dance are surely to be valued as much for their very imperfect lives as for what they wrote. Barbara Skelton, married to Connolly, once asked him, seeing a smudge on his nose, ‘What’s that on your face?’ – to receive the immediate reply, ‘Hate’.

Their tempestuous relationship undoubtedly helped Powell fashion the unforgettable figure of Pamela Flitton.

Among other memorable scenes in Dance, she throws up after Erridge’s funeral and memorably elopes with X Trapnel, the writer Powell acknowledged as a portrait of Julian MacLaren-Ross. The dark glasses. The shooting stick. The perpetual losing battle against debt.

Someone once went into a London pub and saw two men at the bar. One was Evoe Knox, editor of Punch, and the other was one of his brothers. (Evoe was father of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald.) ‘ What do you do, then?’ asked the man. Knox replied, ‘We live on our wits.’

It was easier to live on your wits in the days of Connolly, Orwell and Muggeridge. The Sunday papers had large spreads of book reviews. Some of Orwell’s best work was for the Tribune. Hard to imagine now.

One of the best scenes in Books Do Furnish a Room is when Widmerpool denounces Trapnel for eloping with his wife. Widmerpool represents enmity to everything which ‘we’ – complicit with the author – believe in: the free life of the mind, and the imagination. It takes time to read as widely as Connolly or to be as promiscuous as Peter Quennell.

None of the above, one suspects, ever had a mortgage or took much trouble to pay a bill. Happy days.

‘A review paid for dinner with a bird at the Savoy Grill – and to stay the night’

Alderney’s inconvenient truth

An inquiry into Nazi atrocities on British soil will be painful david horspool

What happened on Alderney during the war? A government ‘Review into the number of prisoners who died on Alderney during the Nazi occupation’ has been greeted with headlines about ‘Britain’s Holocaust Island’ – allegations of cover-up and conspiracy, and counterarguments that outsiders are making trouble for no good reason.

Eric Pickles, the Conservative peer and former government minister who announced the inquiry, has even been accused of ‘wokeism’, which must be a new one for him. His team of 11 experts, led by Paul Sanders, an academic historian based in France, is due to report in March next year. The inquiry will be taking public submissions of ‘evidence, files, or calculations of the number of the dead’ until November.

We have long known that, when the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans in 1940, Alderney was made a special case. Its residents were mostly evacuated. Camps were set up for slave workers, imported from the Soviet Union, Poland and, in smaller numbers, from North Africa and Spain, as well as some Jewish prisoners from France.

indiscriminately and to have forced prisoners themselves to participate in brutal treatment of their fellows.

Lord Pickles is far from the first British appointee to be tasked with finding out what happened and, if possible, how many people died.

In May 1945, the day after Alderney’s liberation, led by Brigadier Alfred Snow, Majors Haddock and Cotton arrived to investigate the treatment of slave labourers. Haddock’s report went missing, and notes of his investigations, including letters to his superiors in London, only emerged in 1992. From them came not only accounts of murder and maltreatment, but also direct evidence that, contrary to British government statements long after the war, the alleged perpetrators had been in British hands. At least two of the main culprits survived the war and lived to old age in West Germany.

British soil in the last three years’. He gave the names of 46 Germans who were alleged to have ordered or participated in these crimes, 15 of whom were already in British hands. Five were still on the Channel Islands, including Major Carl Hoffmann, ‘senior HQ officer on Alderney during the time of mass deaths’, according to Pantcheff.

None of these men was ever tried for his actions on Alderney. Internal discussions among the British show that they decided any perpetrators would best be tried in the Soviet Union, as the majority of victims were Soviet citizens.

But the Germans in British hands were never handed over to the Soviets, probably because relations deteriorated so rapidly between the former allies.

Liberation day: May 1945

All were put to work constructing the fortifications for Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’, some of whose brutal concrete edifices can still be seen today.

In time, the SS took over the running of the camps, and the regime became more barbaric. The prisoners had from the beginning been woefully undernourished, housed in filthy conditions and subject to dangerous and back-breaking labour. As in other Nazi camps, the SS are alleged to have killed

Haddock’s findings were serious enough that a second investigation was almost immediately ordered. Captain Theodore Pantcheff of MI19 – the section of military intelligence responsible for obtaining information from enemy prisoners of war – arrived with a Russian colleague, Major Gruzdev, at a time when the wartime alliance was already fraying.

They questioned surviving prisoners on Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney, and a report was sent to London and Moscow.

According to the historian Madeleine Bunting, the British copy was later destroyed to ‘make shelf space’, but there is more shelf room in Russia, apparently, and a copy did survive in Moscow, which she was able to consult.

Pantcheff wrote that ‘wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on

Today, it seems extraordinary that, if the British felt they could no longer hand the men over to the Soviets, they still declined to try them themselves. We can only speculate that the instinct to forget the Channel Islands’ time under Nazi rule was the guiding force.

The new inquiry is being conducted under the auspices of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. The number of Jews who were brought to the islands and how many died have never been established. The initial investigators stated that ‘no atrocities were committed against French Jews’, which was untrue: Jews were known to have been murdered.

But while this is a crucial aspect of the investigation, it will not change the fact that the majority of victims on Alderney were Russians, Ukrainians and Poles.

Whether public consultation, new documents or archaeology can provide more detailed answers to questions about Alderney remains to be seen. But it is likely that whatever the numbers turn out to be, the conclusions will bear out Pantcheff. Terrible things were done on British soil, and the British let the people who did them get away with it.

Town Mouse

The old South Bank show – bear-baiting

tom hodgkinson

The bear-baiting arenas were the direct inspiration for the playhouses, built on a similar plan, the wooden O. This led to a strange culture where people would go and see a Shakespeare play one afternoon and attend a bear-baiting the next day. Both entertainments cost a penny

Everyone thought this was all great fun, with the exception of the Puritans, who carried on a campaign against both bear-baiting and the theatres.

They’d taken their lead from St Augustine, who complains in his Confessions about the barbaric gladiator games he witnessed in Carthage.

The Privy Council at first rejected the Puritans’ attempts to ban the practice. In 1583, they defended bear- and bullbaiting as ‘a sweet and comfortable recreation for the solace and comfort of a peaceable people’. In 1642, the Puritans finally managed to close theatres and, in 1656, the High Sheriff of Surrey, Thomas Pride, had the remaining bears of London shot.

This marked the end of it during the Commonwealth but, after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, a new arena was built in 1662 and bear-baiting continued.

It was the government of William IV that finally put its foot down. Bear-baiting was made illegal in 1835 in an Act ‘relating to the cruel and improper Treatment of Animals’.

As a mouse in the city, I have a mixture of pity and admiration for animals used for entertainment and spectacle.

In Shakespeare’s day, it was considered a great day out for all the family to watch bears, bulls and dogs goring each other to death in an arena.

Bear-baiting took place at one of a number of so-called gardens around today’s South Bank, just outside the walls of the city, and therefore outside its jurisdiction. According to historian Matthew Green, this was the most popular spectator sport in London.

In the case of bull-baiting, the crowds would see a bull tethered to a stake driven into the ground in the centre of the arena. The crowd, says Green, would start screaming ‘Go, bull. Go, dog!’

A volley of mastiffs would be released and crawl towards the bull, with the idea of grabbing its nose. The bull would get its horns under a dog and flip it into the air from where it might land on the shoulders of delighted spectators on the fourth-floor gallery. Other dogs might be gored to death by the bull, which would in turn be ripped to shreds by the dogs. The bull never survived.

Then came the turn of a grizzly bear

to be tethered to a stake and attacked by dogs. The bears were never killed –they were valuable properties. The bear would instead kill the dogs by squeezing them to death.

Next up, it was the turn of a blind bear to be tormented. Swiss writer Thomas Platter, who visited London in 1599, said, ‘They brought in an old blind bear which the boys hit with sticks; but he knew how to untie his leash and ran back to his stall.’

Finally, a donkey was led in, with a monkey strapped to its back. The monkey had fireworks attached to it to send it into a frenzy. The fireworks went shooting into the crowd and the dogs attacked the donkey. Erasmus apparently called the show ‘funny’.

Elizabeth I never went to the Globe but she was an enthusiastic audience member at bear baitings. The bears were the lucky ones. They became celebrities.

Sackerson the Bear was mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and other notable bears included Harry Hunks, George Stone and Ned of Canterbury. They’d be paraded through the streets and cheered. People bet on them and wrote ballads about them.

This made ‘Persons keeping Pits for fighting Dogs or baiting Bears, &c. guilty of a Nuisance, and liable to Penalties’.

Of course animals still take part in city spectacles. Over the summer, I went to see the Palio, the crazy horse race in the central square of the medieval city state of Siena.

Ten horses, each representing a different district or ‘contrada’ of the city, race three times round the square. With 15,000 others, I stood in the 35-degree heat of the main square and waited two hours for the race to begin.

After half an hour of faffing about, the ten horses in the race were finally off and the crowd roared. Chaos ensued as riders crashed into walls and fell off their horses. The race was won by a riderless horse (it still counts), and the Oca (Goose) contrada celebrated that evening. All very medieval.

These riotous spectacles may act as a pressure valve and prevent more serious fighting. In today’s London, animal-based spectacles have been replaced by football, cricket and so on.

Still, I thank my lucky stars that no one has yet invented mouse-racing or mouse-baiting.

Country Mouse

Hell is other people at breakfast giles wood

Thanks to the miracle of tech, my wife can send me regular updates of her participation in a house party in a fishing lodge in Scotland.

Amazingly, not just photographs but short film clips are transmitted almost in real time, showing what my father referred to as ‘Piccadilly Highlanders’.

I was instantaneously transported from the dank and silent cottage into a drawing room with tartan sofas, a crackling log fire, and full ashtrays, along with occasional tables with glasses quivering from heavy nearby footfall.

No kilts, but a large mixed gathering of old and young was cavorting, capering, and whooping to the deafening soundtrack of whining bagpipes.

In the past, I might have spotted myself lurking at the back of the room, looking shifty, my lips set in a nervous rictus of a smile. That was in the days before I resigned from house parties on grounds of nothing more than curmudgeonliness.

Was it the Gay Gordons they were dancing? That’s one of the easier ones for Sassenachs.

You could tell the revellers weren’t Scottish from the hesitancy shown, as some less experienced reelers backed up, as if waiting at a junction in a traffic jam. And some were running on the spot, out of breath and uncertain of what moves to make next.

Even just staring at the screen from 500 miles away, I was starting to feel vulnerable. My mouth was dry, and my heart rate seemed to be increasing at the very sight of these jolly folk letting off steam.

Mary has accused me of ‘not liking pleasure’. But my phobia of reeling may be hereditary

According to my mother, my father, when 22, nearly broke off his engagement to her, aged 19, on account

of her forcing him to go to a reeling party in the Potteries, where he had recently inherited a tile factory. He was dismayed by the event and made his feelings clear by voting with his feet.

Rather than treading the boards, they hit the accelerator of his borrowed Alvis, as he sped away from the event with his fiancée in tow.

He had borrowed the Alvis from a friend of his late father in order to keep up appearances at the ‘posh do’, as he was from the wrong side of the tracks.

It really seems a shame that this one phobia prevents me from joining my wife, daughter and compatible companions for a week of otherwise agreeable Scottish sport and excursions, including trawling for salmon – with a spinner, for oiks like myself; not even a fly! – in a clinker-built fishing boat on a sparkling loch.

What could be more agreeable while eagles soar among the crags?

But then I remembered the talking in a house party. And having to talk through

three courses. Talking for talking’s sake requires more than Starmerapproved oracy. You also need O-level comprehension skills. In fact, graduate level, or even postgraduate… skills that take trainee diplomats years to master.

Factor in a house guest who has become out of practice due to the lockdown months and now finds it difficult to coordinate swallowing with talking. This could pose a choking hazard at the table.

Accepting an invitation to a house party funded by someone other than oneself is like agreeing to an unwritten contract. Even if you don’t feel like it and have had a wretched night’s sleep because a bat got into your room and caused a mini-drama, you must at the very least be pleasant at the start of the day. As Sartre might have said, ‘Hell is other people – at breakfast.’

When I reached the age of 60, I said to myself and my wife, ‘No more Mr Nice Guy.’

Mary looked puzzled at the selfascribed epithet and asked me to enlarge.

‘No more kowtowing, toadying, being beholden to mine host or singing for my supper. From now on, I will be in sole charge of my own destiny,’ I pronounced.

‘I don’t remember you ever doing those things,’ rejoined Mary.

I picked up my daughter from the railway station. She returned earlier than Mary. She said that, embarrassingly, one of the house guests her age had been a reeling refusenik.

‘Really?!’ I was delighted to hear I am not alone. Why should a guest in these times of changing social norms do anything they don’t want to do? We have rules for workplace bullying. Office Romeos have had their day –so it seems anomalous that the private sector lags behind.

There should be a freshly drafted accord between house guests and their hosts to outlaw enforced reeling and other pressure activities such as karaoke and conga lines. Referees should be appointed to every house party to see fair play

Non-participation on the dance floor must be allowed and there must be no compulsory talking at the table.

Getting one’s host to sign up to a no-talking deal might take decades to achieve. He might turn round and say, ‘But what’s in it for the host?’

Curmudgeonliness as a condition cannot be treated on the National Health. But, on rare occasions, it can produce FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. By being a reeling refusenik, I might have scored an own goal.

Let’s get back on track

The mad decision to close train ticket offices is very bad news – and not just for oldies, says Mary Kenny

There’s been a countrywide campaign to keep local railway ticket offices staffed by human personnel – after the government recommended widespread automation.

The online petition to retain ticket staff is open until 18th October (petition.parliament.uk/petitions/636542).

If it attracts 100,000 signatures, the matter will be debated in parliament.

Ticket offices with real staff are cherished by oldies, especially if rail journeys are complicated. At Walmer, near Deal, the ticket office is such a model of perfection that it has entered into local legend, along with the lady who runs it, Debbie Brooker.

Debbie, maternal but glamorous, has been running the Walmer ticket office for 34 years. She cleans it, decorates it with flowers and plants, and maintains a small collection of free books and puzzles for travellers.

There’s also an American flag in one corner of the ticket area, along with a display of poppy wreaths, to remember four American servicemen who were killed by an explosion at Walmer station in 1945. Their names are listed on a memorial plaque on the station’s outside wall.

Debbie knows everything there is to know about train schedules, best-value fares, refunds and every imaginable travel query. I’ve been told Debbie can provide train information within two minutes, whereas it might take half an hour to figure out over the internet.

Yes, she agrees that a human presence is generally more appreciated by older people, but it’s not unknown for younger folk to have queries about travel plans and price. And human contact adds welcome, safety and friendly conversation, as well as being helpful to

anyone with disabilities or sight impairment. Removing the staff at railway ticket offices has been compared to the disastrous Beeching cuts of the 1960s. Hopefully, some will be saved from the axe.

It was unsettling to learn that Nigel Farage had been de-banked earlier this year – and suffered from a breach of confidentially when Coutts informed the BBC of the measure. Banking needs confidentiality!

When my brother James worked in a bank near the Irish border that separates North from South, he noticed that the Protestant farmers kept their money in the Catholic bank – then called the Hibernian – and the Catholic farmers kept their revenues in the Protestant bank, then called the Ulster Bank.

Customers believed this ensured more confidentiality, even secrecy: their financial details would be kept from the prying eyes of their own community. Letting slip phrases such as ‘You might be surprised how much old O’Reilly has on deposit’ over a neighbourly pint would be less probable in the circumstances.

The arrangement could even foster some good relationships, as the respective bankers sought to be courteous towards their clients from the other community. The Protestant/Unionist bank flew the Irish tricolour on St Patrick’s Day, and the Catholic/Nationalist bank flew the Ulster Red Hand on occasions – to curry favour with their customer base.

Irish banks are no longer divided along such sectarian lines: they’re big conglomerates, dealing with all transactions impersonally.

I love buses, as well as trains. My idea of a holiday treat is to take bus rides around

Paris; as I duly did this summer. The Paris bus system is brilliant because every bus is clearly marked with its exact route and destination.

There’s an invaluable blue guide, in booklet form, called Paris Bus, which outlines the trajectory of every Parisian bus line, and its interconnections with the Métro and tramlines. Acquire it, and you’ll never need another taxi.

The delightful 39 goes from the Gare du Nord across some of the most scenic parts of the capital – the Palais-Royal, St-Germain-des-Prés, Montparnasse. The lovely 82 travels from Neuilly, through the grands boulevards, across the Seine to the Eiffel Tower and on to the Luxembourg Gardens. The charming 52 travels from the Opéra, across the Étoile, and east towards the Bois de Boulogne.

There are 119 lines to choose from. All you need is a cheap day ticket and you can sit like a Proustian duchess touring all around the City of Light.

The much-mourned Sir Michael Parkinson was recruited as a young man to the Guardian features department by my late husband, Richard West, although the circumstances weren’t entirely edifying. Dick got Parky to fill in for him after a night on the tiles hobbled him with an almighty hangover.

They became buddies and met on various assignments. At the annual Labour Party conference, Parky would suggest, ‘Let’s sit in the front row, so we can see Caroline Benn’s legs.’ Mrs Benn, wife of the renowned Tony, was an American with a pair of shapely pins.

They were the days when a chap could admire a lady’s limbs without it being described as a ‘microaggression’, or an outrageous example of patriarchal oppression.

Sometimes the lady even appreciated the compliment!

Keep an eye out for eyelash extensions

Long eyelashes have been a symbol of beauty since records began.

It’s almost a Golden Ratio thing. Long eyelashes create a contrast between the eye and the eyelid, making eyes visibly larger and thus more attractive. Biologically, eyelashes protect eyes from debris and other air particles. So, the longer ones have a health function, too.

I had never heard about eyelash trimming. Surely everyone wants their eyelashes to be as long and thick as plausibly possible?

Yet it crops up in Love From Venice, a forthcoming mini-masterpiece of a memoir by Gill Johnson (sister of wine writer Hugh), the nonagenarian author. She describes how an impulse visit to Universal Aunts, the upmarket staff bureau, in 1957 landed her a job as governess to two exquisite boys.

Their home was Palazzo Brandolini in Venice. Their parents were exemplars of physical perfection. It was there that Gill learned the art of eyelash-trimming.

Gill’s role was ill-defined but basically consisted of speaking English to the Brandolini boys because English was considered then, as now, the international language of the jet set.

Her chores were minimal, but almost all were enviable. In summer, they involved driving by motoscafo to the Lido at the Excelsior Hotel, lounging through the day in the Brandolini cabaña there, and picnic-lunching on Parma ham and melon served by liveried butlers.

‘It also involved trimming boys’ eyelashes,’ writes Gill. ‘ The idea was that pruned cilia would regrow to greater lengths. Every few days, the Contessa [Brandolini – née Agnelli] would ask, “Have you cut the children’s eyelashes?” ’

Some 66 years on, I asked Gill whether eyelash-trimming worked.

‘Well, it must have done,’ she reflects. ‘Otherwise, they wouldn’t have kept asking me to do it.’

The boy’s father, the Conte himself, also required Gill to trim his lashes, which were ‘a striking part of his appearance. They were baroque bordering on rococo’.

Love From Venice is a deeply enjoyable private view into a year in the life of a privileged and insouciant family engaged in dolce far niente –the sweetness of doing nothing.

But to get back to eyelashes, we all want these to be longer. Some women are more hirsute than others. One of these is Emma Thompson, who has boasted that she likes to go to Scotland each year and ‘see no one and grow a beard’. That’s what happens if you are hirsute and don’t exercise daily vigilance using a magnifying mirror and tweezers.

If you are hirsute and suffer from ‘burst mattress syndrome’ in the most delicate area of the body, at least the compensation will be thicker eyelashes. If you are not hirsute, your eyelashes will be spartan.

Well, there is something you can do. A number of my short-eyelashed friends have bought eyelash growth promoter and it works. But you have to use it every day, and when you stop, they go back to their normal, stunted lengths. I haven’t used it myself for fear that the prostaglandins in the ingredients might

be in some way harmful to my eyesight.

Stubby-lashed women do better to apply mascara with a narrow wand no wider than a dental probe. These give you better access than more bushy brushes.

I was rather sorry when eyelash extensions went out of fashion. I used to enjoy the sessions when our eyelash ‘technician’ would rock up at the cottage with her portable bed. She would hover over me for 90 minutes while she fitted the extensions with surgical precision, gluing one to each individual lash.

At the time, I rather liked the resulting effect, which lasted for about two weeks, although looking back it was perhaps a bit ‘Miss Piggy’.

Now eyelash extensions have had their day. It was partly Covid that finished them off. No one wanted a technician breathing over them at such close quarters after they had already breathed over seven other people that day

But they had anyway become ubiquitous because they were affordable. Everyone had them. Even ‘victims’ on the television news would be sobbing out their stories through thick and absurdly long fake lashes. Moreover, as with breast enhancements, those who had them were never satisfied – and kept having longer and longer extensions until they began to overpower the face.

The ones to go for today are Eylure three-quarter lashes. There is a knack to applying them – it requires a degree of technique similar to when putting in contact lenses – but they give a much more natural-looking enhancement than the full eyelid-length variety

I know they improve my own appearance. Whenever I wear threequarter lashes, people gasp when I come into the room – almost in puzzlement. They cry, ‘Gosh, you’re looking well!’ – clearly in contrast to how I usually look.

They improve your look – as long as you avoid the Miss Piggy effect

Nothing compares to moi: Miss Piggy after a visit to the beautician

Small World Haunted house whodunnit

The chief suspect in the Cleethorpes murder? Mother says it’s me

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

Mother is ill. She is normally a resolutely robust woman – so her sickness resonates through every inch of the house.

Bonkers ‘professors’ of psychical research bang on about how ghosts may simply be projections of the past from energy absorbed into the walls of old buildings. This house is now haunted by the living.

As I have been in the same dwelling for 50-something years, the house speaks directly to me. Each board-creak and pipe-clank can be decoded in seconds, so in synch am I with this crumbling pile.

Now I hear floorboard seven and nine on the upper landing croak after midnight, I know mother is on the move. The timbre tells me her destination is the front bathroom. And the length and rhythm tell me she’s on two sticks –unusual and very slow for this martyr to chronic pain.

Later, I hear the hinge of the lounge door at dawn and the warm fart of the best chair’s leather, moaning at how much a four-foot female can weigh.

Sometimes I hear a sound I can’t decipher – the sudden thunder of something dropped at pace, normally a stick or frame. I gasped at breakfast when mother revealed the grim truth – ‘That was when I fell off a bucket.’

‘Bucket! What bloody bucket?’

‘None of your business, Columbo,’ she said calmly.

I can’t get overly involved with her medical matters. We recently watched the BBC drama The Sixth Commandment, the true story of a lodger poisoning his elderly landlords. Mother, whenever I peek at her prescription slip, refers to the show and warns Father, ‘We should never have let him watch it.’

Father speaks up for the defence: ‘Jem’s not up early enough to commit the perfect crime. He’s too lazy to break any

commandments. He doesn’t even covet his neighbour’s ox any more.’

Mother said, ‘Then God shall have him up on sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. He’s virtually got a degree in that.’

I cried, ‘Sixth-century small print! God’s not going to cart me off to El Inferno for over-using the odd footstool!’

‘He’ll certainly have some words about shouting at the breakfast table. I’m ill, you know.’

That’s when I realised things were a bit real-life and significant. Mother never acknowledges her own poor health. Even though she’s a great fan of other forms of emotional manipulation, she never plays the sick card.

The house had already told me what her eyes now confirmed. She is permanently reduced by rotten, non-specific entropy.

Father slipped out for milk and something else that he refused to write down and would inevitably forget – ham.

Mother settled painfully into the chair she normally kept for best (English for ‘never used’). She looked me up and

down with a strange expression on her face. I later realised it was a smile.

‘While your father’s out and before the morphine starts working, there’s something I need to tell you, in case I don’t get the chance again,’ she said.

I was expecting her to finally admit she had always quite liked me after all.

Instead, she took a good long breath and steadied her voice before saying, ‘There’s a laundrette on Mill Road that does a very respectable service wash. Don’t let your father operate the washing machine, with his one seeing eye and supposed colour-blindness –colour-apathy more like. Let him near it and you’ll be going to work every day in Barbie-pink shirts.’

She collapsed into a catnap, leaving me alone with the truth-telling house.

What message did it have for me now? Only the sound, on this unusually normal, bright, quiet morning, of the grandmother clock’s ominous but inevitable ticking, marking every new minute wasted, every old minute lived.

jem clarke

I believe in miracles – on exam results day

Results day, and I am staying with a friend in Sicily.

I’ve been idling in the baking sun, watching multi-hued butterflies nosedive into the oleanders, and rescuing lizards from the pool.

But always, at the back of my mind, results are looming. My friend has a daughter waiting for her results, too. So, every now and again, we go into a bit of a mini-spin in anticipation of the worst.

We both have nightmares – she of her daughter failing everything, me of my class passing everything but English literature. There is champagne waiting for the evening – we wait to see whether it will be for commiseration or celebration.

Messages come from my department saying who will be going into school on the day, who will be checking results online and who will ignore the whole

thing until the first day of term. I can’t imagine waiting any longer and, after a panic about adaptors (Sicily has different sockets from the rest of Europe) and passwords, I log into the system and wait for it to load.

First in my mind are the human beings. The individuals I have been teaching for two years, whose stories, anxieties and talents I know. The computer can’t factor any of those in, and the school won’t, but I will.

The joys come not just with the high grades, but also with the triumphs over adversity. So one of my joys is a boy who was moved into my class at the beginning of the year with an absolutely shocking reputation. They sent him to me to satisfy some weird edict – my top set did not have enough PP (pupil premium, which means poor) students so they sent him across. The rest of the class groaned

when they heard he was going to join us: ‘He’ll ruin the vibe, Miss. He can’t behave. Sit him on his own.’

But miracles can happen. His behaviour improved from the day he crossed my threshold. Whether it was the challenge of a top set, the behaviour he saw around him or the fact that I treated him as a human being –something made the change. And he came out with an 8, the second-highest grade. Given that the proportion of top grades (7-9) has fallen 17 per cent this year, there is double cause to celebrate.

My musical genius, who for a while was looking at a 4 because of his incessant playing of Chopin on an imaginary piano, managed a 6 (9 in music, however). My Latin genius, an 8 (9 in French).

A girl who I have loved for her quiet intelligence, ironic humour and love of reading was one of my 9s, despite a terrible dip a few months ago.

While the musical genius needed nagging and teasing to get him up to scratch, the Glorious Benefactor came into his own once again with this quiet girl. She has been given books from him before – and received another, just as she was losing faith in herself to reassure her my faith was still strong.

Of course, not all news was joyous. There should not have been a single 4 (pass, but not a good pass) in that set, but there was. And that is when we teachers start scrabbling around in the data. That girl underperformed across the board, and although one should not think ‘Phew’ at such news, one can’t help it.

As I prepare myself for another day of blissful idleness in Sicily, I am still brooding about my class.

It will all start again with the new term, with another set of children, but for now I am remembering the individual triumphs and disappointments.

The part of me that crows over my 9s and 8s retreats again. It’s the children in whom I have invested so much energy and affection, but will soon fade into memory, who absorb me.

‘Are we living in a golden age of anything?’

Smashed gravestones and broken hearts at George Herbert’s church

Criminal damage is one of my least favourite crimes. And, if events in Harlow, Essex, on 13th April of this year are anything to go by, I am not alone.

Carly Burd, an allotment gardener, had been using her plot to grow organic fruit and vegetables to give to neighbours unable to afford ever-rising food prices.

Her garden was salted by vandals, making it unfit for growing anything. Within days, she had received some £250,000 in donations. So a wrong was triumphantly righted.

This horrible salt retribution was used by the ancient Romans where they had conquered to ensure their enemies would not be able to cultivate their land. It is now a war crime.

Recently I spent a week near Salisbury on my annual holiday. As we were about to drive away from the station, my kind friend asked me if there was any particular expedition I would like to make.

I said that if it were convenient, I would love to visit Bemerton Church,

where George Herbert, poet and priest of the Church of England, lived and preached at the beginning of the 17th century. We were only 200 yards away, so we drove straight there.

The church was electronically locked. On looking round, we understood why. The gravestones, whether ancient or modern, had been smashed to pieces. From the look of things and the freshness of the scars, this had happened very recently.

It must have caused heartache to people whose nearest and dearest were buried there: one of the larger crosses, split diagonally, belonged to a gravestone that was only seven years old.

The damage done struck me as irreparable and I can only echo Carly Burd when she said, ‘How could you do that?’

There was no way of telling whether or not the inside of the church had been desecrated in the same way, and I found myself wondering about the altar.

Herbert himself may have given us

Memorial Service

Tom Stacey, writer, foreign correspondent and publisher, was remembered at a service at St John the Baptist church in Holland Road, Kensington.

the answer in his lovely poem The Altar, written in the shape of one:

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart and cemented with tears: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same. A HEART alone

Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut.

Wherefore each part

Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name: That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

He is telling us that stones can be cut or ruined by human hands, but only the heart is so hard as to require the power of God to break it. And only a broken heart can begin to repent of having perpetrated such wickedness.

Tom Stacey (1930-2022)

Nikita Khrushchev, you name it. He made friends with Idi Amin in exile.

In the Daily Telegraph’s obituary, Peregrine Worsthorne, the late Sunday Telegraph editor, called him ‘the very embodiment of that genre of wild-card journalist: at once archaic and conventional; subversive and patriotic; seedy and stylish’.

Xan Smiley, editor-at-large at the Economist, gave the eulogy: ‘His career was quite astonishing in its range and diversity, in the old sense of the word. He roamed the world as a star reporter for top newspapers, interviewing Salvador Allende, Chiang Kai-shek, Indira Ghandi,

‘Politically, Tom was hard to pin down or put in a box: he was right-wing in most ways, arguably left-wing in others. He often rubbed against authority. He hated prisons after he did a short stretch in an Indian one for being a journalist who dug too deep.

‘His pioneering of tags attached to prisoners’ ankles or arms... had critics on both right and left – but has since been widely accepted as more humane and often more effective than incarceration.

‘In fact, Tom was a magnificent maverick, the freest of free spirits. He was exceptionally courageous, both physically and mentally, as well as strikingly handsome. He withdrew his

candidacy for a parliamentary seat, explaining (I quote) that “public life conflicts with the creative will”.’

One of Tom’s novels, Deadline, in which his romantic but down-at-heel hero, played by John Hurt when it became a film in 1988, clearly had echoes of himself. Daughter Emma Stacey read from Don Quixote: ‘It calls to mind our wonderfully manly, contradictory father.’ Daughter Tilly Young and granddaughter Benedicta Bywater gave recollections. Charlotte Breese, Tom’s editor at Stacey International, his publishing company, spoke of her travels with him in Africa.

The hymns were Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, Tell Out, My Soul and Abide with Me.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

The younger you look, the healthier you are

You are as young as you look and as old as you feel. Or is it the other way round?

I can never quite remember. On this question, I am a little like Mrs Disraeli, who could never remember whether the Greeks came before the Romans, or the Romans before the Greeks.

Man is a curious creature: when he is young, he wants to look older than he is, and when he is old, he wants to look younger than he is.

No doubt, in some societies, age is associated with wisdom and respected as such, but (although I am no anthropologist) I doubt that there are many societies in which the old are judged physically more attractive than people in their prime.

No doubt there is an interval in life during which people are perfectly content with their age, wishing neither to look older nor younger than they are.

That interval will vary from person to person and perhaps according to social mores and cultural tastes. But, as life expectancy increases, people must spend more of their lives, even the majority of them, wishing they looked younger than they did.

Naturally, being a rationalist, I say that we should not try to look, and especially try not to act, younger than we are, partly because we are doomed to fail

and thus make ourselves ridiculous. But the desire to look young, it seems, is not entirely irrational.

A study published in the British Journal of Dermatology and performed in Rotterdam recently showed that people who look younger than their age really are better in their health in some respects than those who look their age or, even worse, older than their years.

High-resolution facial photographs of 2,679 people aged between 51.5 and 87.8 years, unadorned by make-up or jewellery, were shown to a panel of men and women who did not know either their age or their medical histories. They were asked to guess the age of the persons in the photographs.

Men more frequently than women looked five years younger than their age (as do I, whenever I look in the glass, which cannot, of course, lie).

More than twice as many women as men were adjudged five years or more older than they were, which will no doubt be used one day against men, even though men (on average) die a few years earlier than women.

Those who were adjudged younger than their years – one wonders whether the judges ever disagreed, like juries that award prizes – were less likely to suffer from osteoporosis, chronic obstructive

airways disease, cataracts and agerelated hearing loss, though not atrial fibrillation (a common and potentially harmful irregularity of heartbeat).

Perhaps most interestingly, those who looked younger were intellectually better-preserved, even when controlled for level of education.

Smoking was heavily correlated with looking older than a person’s years, but I could not help noticing that having a lower Body Mass Index was likewise correlated – possibly because smoking reduces appetite.

A prematurely aged appearance is partly accounted for by changes in collagen metabolism. In Denmark, it was found that men who went bald or who turned grey sooner were more likely to die of heart attacks.

While reading this, a silly question kept running through my mind. Could it be that dyeing your hair or using makeup, to disguise your age, could preserve your life, at least for a little time?

Could it be that those who want to look younger than they are find more in life worth living for than those who don’t take the trouble to deceive?

Perhaps there is an art in finding the mind’s construction in the face, after all. At any rate, whether there is or there isn’t, we all try to do it.

‘Hi, I’m Super Woman’

A new scientific study relates well-preserved looks to less illness dr theodore dalrymple

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk

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Earl pinched Mum’s bum

SIR: My mother, for one, was delighted that Gareth Neame chose Highclere Castle as the location for Downton Abbey (September issue). She was a teacher during the war, and her entire school was evacuated to Highclere.

The awestruck reaction of a bunch of Willesden five-year-olds may be imagined. Naturally they were kept apart from the quality, but she often reminisced about the time she was granted the singular honour of having her bottom pinched by the then Earl of Carnarvon, or Porchy, as she fondly called him.

Mike Petty, Murwillumbah, New South Wales

Shy Gyles Brandreth

SIR: The death of Jane Birkin was a devastating blow to my generation. Many of us listened to her and Serge going through their paces in Je t’aimeunder the bedclothes at school.

There was another grave shock - to read that your columnist Gyles Brandreth never met her. You need to inspect his contract. He is slipping. Hugo

Vickers, London W8

Phantoms of the opera

SIR: What has your music reviewer got against theatrical designers (Music, August issue)?

Neither of the two reviews for this year’s season at Garsington (Mozart’s Mitridate, Re di Pomto, and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia) mentions the designers’ names. The directors – Tim Albery and Christopher Luscombe, respectively – rightly get mentioned.

Richard Osborne was particularly impressed with the design for Il barbiere but appears to give the director full credit when he declares Christopher Luscombe’s production ‘theatrically and scenically… a great success’.

For much of the long planning stage, the designer is the only person working closely with the director. The direction which a production might take – in the

early days – is often inspired by an idea suggested by the designer. Everything that we see on stage, has been designed or sanctioned by the designer.

So, given Mr Osborne’s omission, I would like to name the two designers: Hannah Clark and Simon Higlett, who are two of our country’s leading designers. And while I’m at it, the two lighting designers are Malcolm Heppeth and Howard Hudson, who are even less likely to be remembered in reviews.

Norman Coates, London

Coco coda

SIR: Just as Coco Chanel (September issue) cleverly adapted cheap, warsurplus wool, previously used for the long pants of the French infantry in the First World War, to cut and dye the simple, stylish outfits that liberated women in the 1920s, so Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ imprisoned them again in crinolines.

These were created to get the French fabric industry back on its feet after the Second World War by kidding women they needed hectares of silk and satin over petticoats to be fashionable.

Chanel, perfectly recalled by Philippa Stockley, never said ‘less is more’, even in French, but she demonstrated what that now hackneyed phrase really meant while defining fashion in the 20th century, in much the same way as Worth, originally from Yorkshire, made Paris the capital of couture in the 19th.

Michael Cole, Woodbridge, Suffolk

I once met Ronnie Biggs

SIR: I was reminded of meeting Ronnie Biggs by your article Man on the Run (September issue).

Biggs was being sought high and low. One morning, my doorbell rang.

I answered to a very smartly dressed, handsome, well-spoken man who asked me politely to cash a £5 note. I couldn’t.

Everyone knew that his gang had stolen huge quantities of used fivers that shops would suspect. He had driven past our local petrol station without stopping.

I noticed his car, with female passenger and clutter on the rear seat, including a lampshade. He must have rung other doorbells in my 12-house close situated off the northbound A1 motorway before driving off emptyhanded. As he did so, he glimpsed I had recognised him.

I rang the police when I got to work, in Whitehall, with the make, colour, contents and numberplate of the car. The note-taker sounded uninterested.

Next day, a very bored man rang me to say there was no such vehicle with that number. End of message. Small wonder Biggs made it to happy exile in Brazil.

John Hart, London NW7

Larry Grayson’s grace

SIR: In 1971, Larry Grayson was starring in the summer show at the Festival Theatre in Paignton. My husband was then a curate attached to St John’s, the parish church, and we invited him as that year’s big attraction to open our fête.

Usually the star would say a few words and then disappear, but Larry stayed for hours, signing autographs, visiting the stalls and chatting. A real gentleman!

Beth Allen, Eltham, London

No platform for Mosley

SIR: A N Wilson’s anxieties about free speech (The strange death of tolerance, September) reminded me of my own experience. An 18-year old undergraduate in my first year at Cambridge, I attended a lecture by Sir Oswald Mosley on 31st October 1961. The old fascist’s

‘Run on the Bank of Mum and Dad’

best days were behind him but he was still articulate, eloquent and charming. And clearly talking nonsense. I left the well-attended lecture inoculated for life against charismatic leaders as did my fellow students. Nowadays, I expect he would be no-platformed.

Stephen Halliday, Cambridge

Nazi horrors in Holland

SIR: I do like Mary Killen’s columns, but to read in the September issue that ‘Kersten said his power over the Nazi leader had been instrumental in saving the Dutch Jewry’ (sic) sent a chill down my back.

More than 100,000 Dutch Jews were murdered, most of them in Auschwitz and Sobibor – about three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population. Only about 5,000 of those who were ‘deported’ survived… Lest we forget (or are told lies about it by a Finnish masseur).

Henk Beentje, Winsham, Somerset

Beachcomber’s wisdom

SIR: The article on Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s spoof dictionary The Meaning of Liff (September issue) reminded me of A Dictionary For Today by J B Morton (1893-1979), aka Beachcomber, who wrote for the Daily Express for more than 50 years and is featured in The Works of J B Morton, a collection put together by Richard Ingrams, the founder of The Oldie

Among the entries were:

Arctic conditions: a cold day in England.

Ballet: acrobatics accompanied by pretentious music.

Gesticulation: any movement made by a foreigner.

Neutral: waiting to see which way the wind is going to blow.

Prodigy: a child who plays the piano when he ought to be asleep in bed.

Jack Critchlow, Torquay, Devon

King of Norwich Coutts

SIR: Michael Cole’s article (You’re fired!, September) about the sad decline of Coutts brought back many memories. He mentioned Mr Masters, the wingcollared, frock-coated manager of its Norwich branch.

In the 1990s, the late John Masters was a dear neighbour when he worked in the Strand head office. Once home, he couldn’t wait to get into his cut-down, very frayed jeans and sit with a can of beer and a small cigar in his considerable and immaculately kept garden. His

‘My husband works at home, but he has too many office parties’

vegetables kept the family supplied all year and any excess he would sell at his gate. I heard one buyer say, ‘I suppose he needs the money.’

Another friend, also called John, was a senior bank manager at NatWest, and the two would regularly sit at our kitchen table bemoaning the parlous state of their banks, both saying how they were now being expected to do things that decades of financial experience had taught them should never be done.

They feared for the future of banking and neither could wait to retire. One John worked tirelessly – and hilariously – at being considered for early retirement but not dismissal.

When they did retire, they were replaced by all-knowing new brooms who swept aside their 30 years and more of banking expertise, and handed customer care and much else to computers. The banking crisis that followed shortly after proved the dire predictions of both Johns to have been entirely correct.

I was a customer of NatWest for more than 40 years until I could stand the poor service no longer and moved to Coutts –that didn’t last long either.

I am entirely satisfied with my current bank, which could be described as the Volvo of the banking world. I ring them, they ring me, job done.

Peter Anson, Battle, East Sussex

Samurai shoehorn

SIR: I have a collection of shoehorns of no historical value beyond a record of my declining ability to bend to put my shoes on. With the years I have required ever longer handles, but my arthritic hands still, occasionally, slip from them. Result: shoehorn embedded in shoe. Nightmare!

My dear son recently bought me the ultimate shoehorn. It is 31 inches of heavy moulded metal, not including

a hooked end for avoiding the hand slipping off and inevitable requests for help picking us both up. In appearance it might make a good deterrent if I could carry it far. Perhaps if I suspended it from a belt it would put muggers off –a combo shoehorn Samurai sword!

Margaret E Chappell, Saltash, Cornwall

Brainy Prof Bronowski

SIR: In her television column (August issue), Frances Wilson does Professor Jacob Bronowski a great disservice by claiming that his elegant literary sentences in the ground-breaking series The Ascent of Man were the result of being ‘lifted word by word’ from his book of the same name.

We oldies senior enough to have watched the original broadcast will know that the book puts on paper what was first said on the screen. As the professor explains in his foreword, he followed the spoken word closely ‘to preserve the spontaneity of thought in speech’. People could in them days!

David Lashbrooke, Looe, Cornwall

The real Emma Chizzit

SIR: It was not Kenneth Williams in the 1980s who recorded the first use of ‘Emma Chizzit’, as Gyles Brandreth says in the September issue.

In 1964, Monica Dickens was promoting her books in Australia at a signing session. When she was asked ‘How much is it?’ in a Strine accent, Dickens thought that was the name of the woman buying the book.

It was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and thus was born the phenomenon of Strine.

Michael Darvell, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire

Donald Trelford’s hero

SIR: I was fortunate to meet Donald Trelford through mutual friends in Majorca, where Donald spent his later years. Over dinner one evening I quizzed him about the famous people he had interviewed. I asked him who had impressed him most. Without hesitation, he responded, ‘Stanley Matthews’.

Donald’s respect for Matthews was based not only on his skills with a football but his all-round qualities: a quiet, honest and modest man and a true gentleman. These qualities clearly impressed Donald far more than riches or power.

Graham Cooke, Thames Ditton, Surrey

I Once Met Donald Sinden

In 1992, I was invited to the Chichester Festival Theatre to perform in a production of Venus Observed by Christopher Fry (1907-2005).

It was my first theatre job. Not only was it at Chichester, but it boasted a starry cast led by the late, great Sir Donald Sinden. The actor, who died in 2014 at 90, would have been 100 on 9th October this year.

My part was relatively minor and insignificant, but I had a nice bit towards the end, and I thought I might be able to make something of it. Rehearsals were a pleasure, attended by the author himself and helmed by our director, the sadly recently departed James Roose-Evans.

Donald was immaculate and attended rehearsals every day in suit and tie and highly polished shoes. Nothing of great importance occurred during those three or four weeks but I do remember that the late Denis Quilley had to do a bit of business, which involved him looking straight at the audience through a nonexistent window. Which he didn’t like doing at all. Eventually, having tried it for two days, Denis declared to anyone who happened to be listening – in fact the whole company – that he didn’t want to do it anymore as he ‘felt like a prick’.

Quick as a flash and without pause,

Donald said, ‘You look like one.’ We broke early for lunch.

The play opened that May with Donald giving a magnificent performance as the Duke of Altair. My last bit was with him and then, when he’d dashed off, Kate O’Mara and I finished the scene. Much to my delight and surprise, after about three performances, I found myself being given a round of applause on my final exit.

‘How wonderful,’ I thought.

The audience had followed and understood my rather meagre contribution to the play and had realised

exactly what my character was up to. I tried not to let my head swell but, sure enough, night after night there was the applause. My head swelled enormously.

A member of the company sharply told me the reason for the applause. Donald, having worked out he had about four minutes before he was due onstage again, dashed round to the Vom (a hidden entrance among the audience) and started the applause himself – presumably to give a boost to this young actor Johnny, whose first proper job it was.

I was incredibly touched but also, if honest, slightly disappointed. About halfway through the run, Donald had to leave us for good, plagued by a back problem that required an urgent and delicate operation.

This was a blow to the company, but I spotted a window of opportunity and thought I would try to get the round of applause on my own merits. I tried everything I could think of but, of course, I failed. I never got one again.

Donald and I did work again together but, to my eternal regret, I never thanked him for what he did. It was a wonderful, thoughtful and lion-hearted gesture to do on behalf of someone way down the billing and I have never forgotten it.

Robert Portal

My drag act in a Kuwait jail

dress in Kuwaiti clothes and hide in a mosque, pretending to read the Koran.

factory west of Baghdad as ‘human shields’.

impressed and squeezed my ‘breasts’!

I was working in Kuwait when Iraq invaded the country on 2nd August 1990.

My wife and two young children were bussed out by the British Embassy while I remained in hiding.

I lived in a villa and had some Sri Lankans sheltering in my servants’ quarters as they had been kicked out by their Kuwaiti employers.

One morning, one of them came to warn me Iraqi soldiers were searching houses for resistance fighters. They advised me to

In the mosque, I sat down in an empty room. It was hot but I found the switch for a fan and was dozing off when I was woken by the call to prayer. I was in a room adjacent to the main hall. Nobody came into the room.

In the evening, I cautiously returned home. I repeated this procedure for three days from Tuesday to Thursday.

It later transpired that I had been sitting in the women’s section of the mosque. Imagine the furore if I had been discovered!

I was eventually captured and sent with seven other hostages of mixed nationalities to a munitions

When I was captured, I was told I could pack two suitcases. For some reason, I took some of my wife’s best clothing, including a mohair dress and a pair of gold highheeled shoes.

One day, it was the birthday of an American captive. I put on the mohair dress and the gold shoes (my wife had large feet and I had small ones), covered up my face (I had a moustache) and put in a pair of socks to form breasts.

I then minced into the common room and announced to the American that Saddam Hussein had sent me to him for his birthday. He was suitably

One of our number, a black belt at karate, practised his art by kicking the wall. One of our dimmer captors watched with interest. The following day, he came in with his foot in bandages. He had tried to emulate the karate exercise and had badly damaged his big toe. Although incarceration was an unpleasant experience, there were some hilarious moments.

By Roy Collins, Northamptonshire, who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Lion-hearted: Donald Sinden

Books

architectural legacy of the Festival of Britain was a comfy slough of apologetic timidity and a tribute to Scandinavia.

The reaction to that ethos of untroubling good taste was yet to arrive. The sculpturally aggressive excitements of brutalism were still in embryo, still not ready to say ‘sod you’ to their denigrators or, indeed, any passer-by.

Three or four years later, this book would have been a different proposition. Nairn enjoyed brutalism’s temperature, its uncompromising muscularity and lack of gentility.

He includes as many examples as there existed of what would become one of Britain’s rare espousals of the sublime. Brutalism borrowed from geological formations, cyclopean primitivism, henges, dolmens, cloud formations and caves. It relished the elemental.

Brutalist honesty

JONATHAN MEADES

Modern Buildings in London

By Ian Nairn, with an introduction by Travis Elborough

Notting Hill Editions

£15.99

Modern Buildings in London was published in 1964, just before the general election that brought to power Harold Wilson, the most impressive prime minister of my lifetime: a weak field admittedly.

The date is important. It evidently marks the start of the supposed

technological or scientific revolution (adjective varies) that Wilson promised a year previously.

It is also a reminder that exemplars of the modernism Ian Nairn sought and scrutinised were few because, until 1954, there existed stringent building controls, which inhibited the renewal of blitzed cities and devastated infrastructure.

So the majority of the 260 works included are the product of that ten-year period, from 1954 to 1964, an unfortunate decade when metropolitan architecture had struck one of its many nadirs. The confidence that characterised first-generation modernism of the 1930s had vanished with the war. And the

There are two notable examples here. Eros House in Catford (pictured) is partly misattributed. It was certainly by the Owen Luder Partnership. The designer, however, was not Peter Senior but Rodney Gordon, the most spectacular and least sung of Britain’s brutalists, nearly all of whose work has been destroyed by cretinous local authorities and replaced by garbage.

His magnificent Trinity Square Gateshead car park owes its celebrity to his friend Mike Hodges’s equally magnificent film Get Carter, rather than to its having been a vast louring presence that was architecturally and historically important as a link to Russian constructivism of the 1920s.

It was more than a spectacular location. It would have been just to correct Nairn’s mistake. It would equally have been useful to provide more illustrations.

The second important brutalist work included has fared much better. There is again a question of attribution. The

Towering intelligence: Ian Nairn and Eros House, Catford

Royal College of Art is said to have been designed by Jim Cadbury-Brown, a brilliant architect, and by Hugh Casson, ‘England’s finest after-dinner architect’ as the super-bitch American architect Philip Johnson once introduced him to a New York audience.

Casson’s contribution to this splendid and, once again, sullen fortress is unclear. Nairn’s ‘the exact opposite of complacent’ gets it right. It does not compromise with its neighbours. He was spot on when he predicted, ‘It will inspire affection in 50 years’ time.’

Most of the stuff in Modern Buildings borrowed from Women’s Own. It relished knitting patterns. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nairn struggled to interest himself in, for instance, Loughborough Estate at Brixton or Sceaux Gardens, a mile or so east in Camberwell.

He struggled too to find anything remotely convincing to say about Chelsea Barracks, even though he anoints it as ‘a really good building’ and makes an obvious and lazy comparison with Woolwich.

He claims that Stevenage College of Further Education ‘leaves a fugitive and acrid taste, like a recondite bit of mid-European cooking’. The simile is crude, meaningless, silly: it occludes rather than illumines.

And what is Stevenage doing in a book purportedly about London?

The answer is that it was a presumably well-rewarded, pot-boiling commission by London Transport, whose tentacular and pleasingly mapped bus routes reached Gravesend, Leatherhead, High Wycombe and many more Home Counties destinations.

Roaming with a Red Rover ticket from the front seat of the top deck was an unalloyed pleasure. The caves at Chislehurst, the Harpenden grave of Ferdinand Esterhazy, of whose treason Dreyfus was accused, the madness of Horsley Towers, Ribbentrop’s house at Pinner Hill, the wonders of Kingsbury, the ‘London Alps’ at Tatsfield were all in reach for a few shillings a day.

These varied attractions are more beguiling than all but a dozen or so of the buildings Nairn lists.

The man surely knew it. He wasn’t tricksy or sly. He was touched by artlessness. He was too naive to dissemble his lack of conviction in this exercise’s value.

The mediocrity of the subjects infects the already depressive writer; lessens him. He scratches around in search of material and is often unrewarded.

So the book is bulked out with oddities. Are Eric Lyons’s Span Estates really as good as Nairn believed? He is all but obsessed by them.

He is good on a couple of architects who bypassed fashion – Raymond Erith and Albert Richardson. Erith is remembered today for having launched on the world the young Quinlan Terry.

This is unfortunate, for he was a fine, idiosyncratic architect. Nairn writes of his Regency terrace off Campden Hill, ‘Not a copy or a pastiche but the real thing designed by somebody who is living a century and a half out of phase.’

Richardson was equally in the wrong age. Nairn astutely links his Financial Times building, Bracken House, to the Italian ‘neo-Liberty’ reaction to modernism, which was tainted by fascist association.

What Richardson, a wilfully eccentric Georgian, would have thought of being linked to Paolo Portoghesi and Giorgio Raineri, oddballs of a different order, is anybody’s guess.

Nairn considered himself a poet and if that was what he wanted, we should accede. But the occasional bursts of tense, rigorous description in Modern Buildings don’t make him a good poet –though he sometimes is.

However, anyone who comes upon this book, not having read him previously, will wonder whether the reputation is justified and whether the fuss is too clamorous.

The glut of superlatives he hurls at meek offices and cowering apartment blocks is embarrassing. A school in Putney is commended for its ‘burning humanity’. The Danish Seamen’s Church in Poplar is ‘as honest and thoughtful and friendly as Denmark itself’. His sentimentality about cockneys is not merely mawkish but, as Barry Cryer had it, ‘the full mawk’.

Cockney is used to prefix place, street, character, barmaid, spirit, van driver (‘cheeky and pungent’) –how does he know?

Modern Buildings in London was a rehearsal for the incomparable Nairn’s London, published two years later. Many of the same buildings occur, often described succinctly, which rather proves the point of the writer filling up space to honour his commitment to London Transport.

Modern Buildings is a journalist’s architectural guide, often listless and slack, often failing to hide the author’s boredom.

Nairn’s London is a poet’s tour de force, some kind of masterpiece, a joyous hymn to the city he loved, its grandeur and squalor disguised as an architectural guide.

The difference between the two is the words, the mere words. Words are never mere.

Jonathan Meades made the BBC series, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry

Infamy, infamy

DAISY

DUNN

Emperor of Rome

By Mary Beard Profile £26

In the late 80s AD, Domitian, Emperor of Rome, hosted a most peculiar party.

As guests entered the dining room, the first thing they noticed was that the ceiling and walls, ordinarily frescoed, were black. Taking their places, they realised the couches had also turned black. In came the slaves carrying food worthy of the dead in black dishes. Lo and behold their skin was painted black, too.

Over the course of the evening, the emperor discussed only the darkest of topics, namely death. Guests, relieved to return home at the end of the terrifying ordeal, found themselves haunted by more rituals. Men knocked on their doors and, far from knifing them, as some feared, told them that they had forgotten their party presents: the remains of the food, the slaves who had served it and, to top it all, an imitation tombstone each.

The story, told by historian Cassius Dio in the early third century and retold by Mary Beard, says a lot about the Roman sense of humour. Beard has already written a book on that, Laughter in Ancient Rome, but the subject also comes into her latest, Emperor of Rome.

‘It’s a lovely day. I might scroll down to the shops’

The opening pages are dedicated to amusing tales told of Emperor Elagabalus. The third-century emperor allegedly hosted not only colour-themed dinners, but dinners for people who shared in common a particular physical trait, such as obesity or a single eye. He also introduced the whoopee cushion.

You can’t imagine every guest saw the funny side.

For Beard, these anecdotes are interesting because they invite us to question the true extent of a Roman emperor’s domination. Her book is first and foremost a work of historiography, concerned with why emperors were characterised as they were and what we can learn from records such as Pliny’s Panegyricus. These sources detail the nitty-gritty of imperial administration, from coins and other evidence about what these men were really like.

Beard begins with Julius Caesar – not technically an emperor but, as she argues, the paradigm for the men who succeeded him – and ends roughly 300 years later with the assassination of Alexander Severus.

I say ‘begins’ and ‘ends’, but there is nothing chronological about her account, which proceeds thematically under chapters such as ‘Power Dining’, ‘What’s in a Palace?’ and ‘On the Job’.

Beard examines the emperor as a phenomenon rather than emperors as individuals. She essentially puts us in the shoes of a citizen of the wider empire who, she says, would be unlikely to know even the name of the current ruler. This doesn’t make for the paciest narrative, but it does result in an eye-opening book addressed at answering an important question: what did it mean to be Emperor?

Beard writes fascinatingly of the daily strain the emperor faced at the hands of delegations, embassies and private individuals, all eager to get something out of him. Most people had genuine, altruistic reasons for approaching him, but some who entered the court had murder in mind. The ‘maze’, as Beard describes the imperial palace on Rome’s Palatine Hill, ‘imprisoned the emperor almost as much as it confused and controlled his visitors’. Domitian was so paranoid that he had the porticoes lined with a mirror-like stone (for spying purposes), possibly moonstone, from what is now Turkey.

There were established protocols for greeting the emperor. A kiss on the mouth or face was a sign that he held you in high esteem. If you were offered only his hand, you knew you stood some way beneath him.

The best treatment was often reserved for the emperors’ pets. Caligula is famous for threatening to appoint his horse consul, but Beard notes that he also had his beloved steed wrapped in purple blankets and presented with his own house, furniture and slaves. The later emperor, Lucius Verus, was so

enamoured of his own horse that he had him brought to the palace and fed a diet of raisins and nuts.

Even with the careful stripping away of historical propaganda, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the Roman emperors were more than a bit nuts. Beard’s theory that primogeniture was partly to blame for the turmoil endured under certain emperors is clearly right; some firstborns were clearly just not cut out for public life. By patiently unpicking the detail, Beard brings us as close to these emperors as we might ever want to get.

Daisy Dunn is author of In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny

Ripping yarn

ROGER LEWIS

Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire

By Michael Palin Hutchinson Heinemann £22

War is the making (as well as the unmaking – obviously) of millions of people. Sir Michael Palin’s great-uncle, born in 1884, was one such.

Expected to be ‘another fine, respectable, hard-working son of the Empire’, Harry failed to amount to anything. He was, says his greatnephew in this poignant tribute, ‘a drifter, a free, if not always happy, spirit [who went] where the wind blew him’.

His restless nature found a sort of solace or focus in military drill, fatigues, bayonet fighting, trench digging and route marches. This book, compiled from Palin family letters, diaries, and other memorabilia, is the portrait of a man who never once complained about privation, who accepted his lot –crammed troopships, a bad diet, primitive sanitation behind the lines, lice, flies, rats, dysentery: ‘Visiting the

latrines a good deal today’, is the extent of Harry’s comments. When he had pleurisy and was painted with iodine, he made no fuss about it.

War gave Harry direction and purpose. Though ‘Lance Corporal Palin was a very small fry in a very big war’, it is perhaps the insignificance, the stoical ordinariness, that holds the appeal and makes this project ultimately so moving – what Sir Michael calls the ‘overwhelming, intolerable, longcontinued pain’.

Harry was born in Herefordshire, the youngest child of Edward Palin (1825-1903), an Oxford don and, latterly, croquet-playing vicar of the parish of Linton, near Ross-on-Wye, in what is here called a ‘poor and unspectacular farming community’.

His mother was an Irish American named Brita Gallagher. Unlike his brothers, Harry did not excel at Shrewsbury, where the role models were generals, governors, politicians and leaders of industry.

In 1904, he was found aboard a ship heading for India, where Harry became a minor functionary on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, which extended to 30,000 miles of track financed by British capital. This didn’t last, and Harry was next employed on a tea plantation.

Managers found him again unsatisfactory: ‘Mr Palin does not appear to be exerting himself to any great extent.’

Though ‘life in India was a potential crash course in finding out what life could offer beyond the protective walls of home’, Harry’s next stop was New Zealand, as a farm hand.

‘If he’d been lucky,’ says Sir Michael, ‘Harry might have seen whales, as I did, when I travelled on this same road in 1996.’ Padding out the narrative slightly, Sir Michael says, ‘Harry and his fellow workers would surely have taken the odd beer or two.’ It is a sign of the thinness of the author’s documentary resources that many sentences contain

‘would doubtless’, ‘would most likely’, ‘would certainly’, ‘would probably’ and ‘would presumably’.

As with Harry himself, matters perk up when we are told he joined the 14,000 New Zealanders volunteering for the Expeditionary Force in August 1914, ‘answering the call to travel halfway round the world to defend the Empire’.

Harry’s ship weighed anchor in September, with the new recruits accompanied by 3,818 horses.

He was destined to participate in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, where, despite blithe expectations, the Turks were not an easy foe to defeat:

‘We heard for the first time that sickening soft thud of shell fragments and bullets meeting human flesh.’

Retreating from the heat and dust of the Dardanelles, Harry and his regiment were ordered to the Western Front, where they saw action on the Somme –19,240 men were slaughtered on the first morning, almost as many as had been killed in the entire Boer War.

Harry, in the papers Palin has found, never mentioned the bombardments, the ‘sizzling stream of machine-gun fire’ or the rotting unburied corpses. Instead, he simply recorded receiving, ‘Two pairs of socks from mother.’ Carting ammunition about the trenches was merely a ‘really ticklish job as snipers busy’.

Great-Uncle Harry turns into a celebration of British grit, phlegm, spunk and understatement, qualities that Sir Michael, along with the late Terry Jones, used to parody affectionately in Ripping Yarns. Here, however, the mood is serious and the subject, in the end, is nothing less than human waste, when, in the chaos of battle, ‘all normal emotion is numbed utterly’.

On 27th September 1916, Harry, aged 32, was obliterated by a shell burst. There’s no grave, only an inscription on a memorial wall: ‘Known Unto God.’

Sir Michael feels guilty he never paid homage sooner, but ‘along came Life of Brian and A Fish Called Wanda’.

Nonetheless, there are abiding affinities. Harry was 5ft 11in and weighed 12 stone, ‘both numbers being exactly the same as mine at that age’.

Poor Harry also possessed an atrophied testicle, which created difficulties with girls. I assume Sir Michael was spared that inheritance. To quote one of his own sentences, ‘I’m into a tantalising area of supposition here.’

Roger Lewis’s Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is out in October

Italy’s Forgotten Army

ALAN JUDD

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943

By James Holland

Bantam £17.50

During the Second World War, the 14th Army, fighting in Burma, was famously known as the Forgotten Army.

But that title might more fittingly be awarded to the Allied armies fighting in Italy, a brutal, bloody and prolonged campaign overshadowed by D-Day and the conquest of Germany. Many of us know little about it apart from a few place names – Monte Cassino, Salerno, Anzio – renowned for their bloodiness.

With this account by James Holland, we have no excuse for not knowing better. Indeed, we owe it to those who suffered – and remain – there.

In 1943, following Allied successes in North Africa and the invasion of Sicily, Churchill was keen to take on mainland Italy, seeing it as the ‘soft underbelly’ of German-controlled Europe.

Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, agreed. British and American chiefs of staff saw strategic and tactical advantages. Possession of Italian airbases would bring vital German armaments factories within bombing range. The Romanian oilfields on which Germany depended would be vulnerable. Hitler would have to divert troops from the Eastern Front to help his Italian ally, which would leave him with fewer to deploy against D-Day.

A successful mainland invasion might also encourage elements in Italy to make peace. Sceptics were won over by Churchill’s gift for persuasive metaphor – ‘Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest bug from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee.’

Its proponents were bewitched by the benefits, either ignoring or failing to anticipate difficulties. It was, as Holland says, a fudge, a campaign by committee, in which those tasked were denied the means of accomplishment.

It started with the false assumption that Hitler would not waste resources on Italy and would swiftly retreat north of Rome. In fact, he ordered his troops to contest every inch and significantly increased them. The invading forces – the US 5th Army and the British 8th – had too few ships to permit flexibility or reinforcement.

The distances involved in linking forces and thrusting north over

‘You can come out now, Henry. The urge has gone’

mountainous terrain would have been demanding enough without an enemy.

In the event, it was, as Holland puts it, a defender’s dream and an attacker’s nightmare. The few roads and bridges were easily demolished by the Germans, the alternatives heavily mined and the crests and ridges fortified, turning the valleys into death traps.

Attacking troops normally need a 3:1 advantage over defenders. But, within weeks of landing, the 15 Allied divisions were confronting 26 enemy divisions.

And then there was the weather –insufferably hot, malarial summers and bitterly cold, wet winters.

Weather forced the Allies to fight the kinds of battle they didn’t want to fight. Being short of men, they preferred steel to flesh, as Holland puts it – air power, artillery and armour. But, for much of the time, terrain and weather forced them into an attritional infantry war, in which casualty rates were comparable to the trenches of 1914-18.

Granted, they had air superiority and more effective artillery but nonetheless it is hugely to their credit that they eventually managed that long, slow crawl up the leg of Italy

Holland’s account deals only with the critical and costly first three months, from the invasion in September 1943 to Christmas. By this time, it had become clear that what was intended as a short, sharp diversion was actually a long bloody haul with no end in sight (does that have a contemporary ring?), especially with D-Day planning draining resources. He exonerates the three commanders – Harold Alexander, Bernard Montgomery and Mark Clark –from charges of needless caution.

Instead, he blames those who sent them there, the chiefs of staff, for muddled thinking.

He intersperses his narrative with vivid, first-hand accounts from the letters and diaries of individual participants on both sides.

Grippingly grim though these often are, they are matched by his evocations of the sufferings of Italian civilians, whether in the chaos of Naples or in fought-over mountain villages. Peasants saw their homes smashed to pieces, often by Allied shelling and bombing, their livestock killed, their children starved, their women raped or prostituting themselves for cans of bully beef. And all, as many soldiers observed, amid such natural beauty.

Yet it worked. Italy dropped out of the war, the Reich was seriously weakened, and Germany lost many thousands of troops who could have been better deployed elsewhere.

Was it worth it? The answer, as so often in war, has to be yes – and no.

Alan Judd is The Oldie’s motoring correspondent. He served in the Army

Northern powerhaus

ALEXANDER HOPE

Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography

By David Ekserdjian

Reaktion Books £14.45

The latest in Reaktion Books’ excellent series of Renaissance Lives is this insightful, scholarly work by David Ekserdjian.

Although Dürer stands as one of the colossi of Western art, the diversity and extent of his talent can be hard to navigate succinctly, bestriding as they do not only such a variety of pictorial media, but also both Northern and Italian schools. This is particularly the case given the book’s relatively concise format (a demy octavo volume of 200 pages of text), within which Professor Ekserdjian is remarkably successful in covering Dürer’s art without sacrificing his own personal fluency of literary style.

Dürer’s reputation is perhaps unique in Old Masters of the very first rank in that it derives, both in his own lifetime and to this day, as much from his work on paper as his oils. Indeed, of the latter, perhaps only two self-portraits (in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the Prado, Madrid) are likely to be recognised much beyond specialised eyes, and their fame

Herculean: Dürer’s Hercules Killing the Stymphalian Birds (1500), the Germanisches Museum, Nuremberg

is, one suspects, eclipsed by his watercolour Young Hare (in the Albertina, Vienna) or his woodcut Rhinoceros. It is refreshing that this book acknowledges this, devoting individual chapters equally to Dürer’s paintings, drawings and prints.

One feels reassuringly in the hands of a discerning expert rather than a panegyrist, when Ekserdjian is confident enough both of his subject’s genius and his readers’ intelligence to write that it ‘seems crucial to grasp the nettle, and both to acknowledge the unevenness of [Dürer’s] painted oeuvre and to examine why these works are sometimes disappointing’.

Of course some of that unevenness is explained by the vagaries of condition, and even survival, in oil paintings, and, after all, when Dürer is good, he is supremely so.

But he does seem to have been unusually personalised in his artistic focus. This is reflected in the book’s subtitle, Art and Autobiography, and in the rather gnomic back cover description: ‘A new account of the autobiographical elements in Albrecht Dürer’s art.’

Ekserdjian in his opening somewhat elucidates this: ‘no other artist of the day begins to compare … in terms of the almost obsessive interest he displays in himself, his own biography, even including his dreams and his surroundings.’ This is further explored in the rest of the introduction, but while

remaining a thematic current through the subsequent chapters, it never interferes with the preponderant art historical analysis.

That analysis is impressive. The author’s ability to interpret and evaluate highlights of the artist’s oeuvre within the context of his contemporaries but also of earlier and later artists speaks of an exceptional breadth of knowledge –for example, an understanding of the attention to the preservation of their drawings among mid-15th-century Friulian artists.

Admittedly, I wonder whether his linking the bowed head of St Peter from The Four Apostles with Freud’s Frank Auerbach might be optimistic. Equally, I am grateful to his perspicacity in drawing my attention to Coppola’s use of the Munich self-portrait as the model for one of Dracula in his eponymous 1992 film.

It is, perhaps, a shame that the limitations of the series’ physical format restrict the number of illustrations. This does hamper the ability to understand the detail of Professor Ekserdjian’s analyses; for example, that of Dürer’s Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds, necessitating a reference book or an internet search for their full appreciation.

This admittedly slightly querulous point does, however, make one wonder at what level of readership the book is aimed – the design seems intended more for the lay reader, while the content suggests a more advanced art historical knowledge.

But if this book is elevated in style, it is not prohibitive, and never less than enjoyable. At times, particularly when the author’s personal perspective shines through (and he is academically reticent in this), it is delightful.

I was struck by his evident empathy with the late David Carritt’s chance discovery of the St Jerome in the Wilderness now in the National Gallery, London, through the photographic cards in the Witt Library.

There is the occasional slip: for example, anachronistically apologetic evaluation of the artist’s treatment of ‘low-life subjects’ that seems to bow before modern social guilt rather than attempt evenly to contextualize the distant past.

And there is, perhaps, more reference to Dürer’s relationship with Italian art than German and Netherlandish. But these criticisms are few and far between, and in no way impede the enjoyment of an admirable addition to an estimable series.

Alexander Hope was a director in Christie’s Old Masters department

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH Claim to fame

DAVID HORSPOOL

The Fraud

By Zadie Smith

Hamish Hamilton £14

Zadie Smith has chosen a richly rewarding subject for her first historical novel.

The Fraud turns on the case of the Tichborne Claimant, the Victorian chancer who arrived from Australia announcing himself as Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to an ancient estate, long thought to have drowned in South America.

From the start, the Claimant’s case looked doubtful, to put it mildly. As one of Smith’s more sceptical characters remarks ‘drily’, ‘All he has to do… is explain to the Lord Chief Justice why he’s now two hundred pounds the heavier – and a cockney.’

Smith shows how a cause célèbre acquires its celebrity, by following its effects on a single family: the Ainsworths.

The nominal head of the household is the historical novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, now barely remembered but prolific and popular in his day.

‘You will recall Jack Sheppard outsold Oliver Twist, at the time,’ he reminds his

‘Grandpa calls it a dictionary. In the old days, they used it as a back-up in case their computer was down’

second cousin. The last three words are important, containing the unappealable verdict of posterity.

The cousin in question is Eliza Touchet, the heroine of The Fraud and a complex, troubled, sardonic woman who, in the best traditions of recent historical fiction, is both of her time and ahead of it.

Eliza, widowed and bereaved of her only son, has become Ainsworth’s housekeeper by default. Among the many buried secrets with which she contends is her love affair with her cousin’s first wife, who also dies.

Eliza, Smith admits in a note, ‘extends herself far beyond her earthly span’ in the novel. The novelist makes good use of this licence, allowing Eliza to become a conduit for her exploration of truth and lies (of course), but also for Victorian society’s saturation in slavery, even after the abolition of the slave trade.

Eliza is a passionate abolitionist who latches on to the story of Andrew Bogle, the former slave and servant to the Tichbornes, who accompanied the Claimant and always stood by his claim.

Then there is the role of women in Victorian society. A ‘respectable’ woman such as Eliza, barely provided for as a widow, has little autonomy. But she is on firmer ground than the second Mrs Ainsworth, Sarah, formerly the housemaid and now its mistress after bearing Ainsworth’s child and accepting his proposal (in that order).

At first, writing from Eliza’s exasperated perspective, Smith plays Sarah for laughs: ‘Somewhere Sarah had got the idea that “naturally” was the mark of a distinguished speaker.’ Sarah is –naturally – a supporter of the Claimant, which involves a feat of mental gymnastics. She sees him as ‘one of us’

– ‘an honest working man… against the gentry’ – but also, of course, as a member of that oppressive class himself.

But while Smith is very good on the way emotion so often trumps logic in such discussions, she humanises Sarah by showing just how far she has had to climb to escape her squalid origins. No wonder Sarah assumes that the Establishment discriminates against the dispossessed.

There are dark themes here, but Smith works as much with light as with shade. Few contemporary novelists, even fewer with any literary pretensions, have as sure a comic touch as Zadie Smith. Here, her eye falls mainly on Ainsworth himself.

Smith’s Ainsworth is a flawed human being, but an almost unremittingly terrible novelist. A running joke is Eliza’s attempts to read just enough of his latest work to be able to talk about it.

‘The point was to grasp the fundamentals of the story so as not to be caught out in interrogation.’ But it’s hard work. ‘People ejaculated, rejoined, cried out on every page. The many strands of the perplexing plot were resolved either by Fate, the fulfilment of a gypsy’s curse or a thunderstorm.’

Talentless, tactless and pompous, Ainsworth nevertheless becomes, in Smith’s telling, somehow sympathetic. Salieri to Dickens’s Mozart, he is doomed to see his old friend completely eclipse him. Another gag is the family’s repeated failures to avoid reminders of Dickens, which crop up in everything from pub signs to sweet wrappers.

Eliza’s fascination with the Claimant’s case is not so much with the tawdry and depressing central drama, as with the Claimant’s only constant supporter, Andrew Bogle. Smith fills the gap in Bogle’s historical record with the most powerful passages in the novel, tracing him and the origins of the Tichborne fortune back to its heart of darkness in the slave plantations of Jamaica.

Smith has been praised ever since her debut, White Teeth (2000). But perhaps her very facility – no two Smith novels are alike, despite some abiding concerns with race, class and women’s rights – has meant that her reputation isn’t quite as high as it should be.

For wit, emotional intelligence – and sheer entertainment – you are unlikely to find a better recent novel than The Fraud.

David Horspool, history correspondent of The Oldie, is author of More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain, to be published in November

I try to make each day a miniature lifetime, in which I achieve something and I enjoy something.

Leslie Bricusse

I didn’t know we had ever quarrelled. Henry Thoreau on being asked, when dying, if he’d made his peace with God

The how-many-eth dinner did that make this winter? And no end in sight! How could Pauline stand it? Why did she want to stand it?

Edith Wharton on dinner parties, Twilight Sleep

Her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected –whether popular or classical – not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times.

Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children

The requirements for success in the service were not endeavour, nor work, valour or perseverance, but simply the faculty of getting on with those who confer the rewards – and he often marvelled at the celerity of his own advancement and the failure of others to grasp these matters.

Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace

Aubrey Beardsley’s enlightened housemaster at school first encouraged him to draw by the warm light of a

candle rather than the glare of gas, on the principle that, once the eyes had adjusted, submersion in a single pool of light was a powerful aid to concentration. Throughout his career, he preferred to work, even by day, in candlelight with the curtains drawn.

John McEwen

You’re supposed to be showing how clever you are or aren’t, and it’s absolutely suicidal to be modest,

unsure, diffident or muddled. Not only suicidal but out of place for the occasion. If candidates weren’t glib, the examination system would break down. You’ve got to have a fairly simple, fairly plausible, intelligible ‘attitude’ and you’ve got to plug it confidently.

How to do well in exams – by Bruce McFarlane, history don at Magdalen College, Oxford, to undergraduate Michael Wheeler-Booth, 1956

In conversation, she takes it for granted that many people are better than her, which, to my mind, almost guarantees that few are.

Andrew O’Hagan, Be Near Me

The virtue of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth it prevents you from obtaining.

Enoch Powell

The best way to get published is to get a job as a temp at a literary agency, make lots of coffee, move on to becoming receptionist, work your way up to becoming an assistant and then submit your novel under a pseudonym to the agent of choice. Then urge said agent to read it and write a glowing report on it.

ever owned (29 inches wide) and we certainly don’t want anything bigger.

The TV producers clearly believe that we either have one of those huge screens you see in pubs or that we sit awfully close.

Texts on TV

There is a trend in TV dramas which is beyond irritating: we’re expected to read messages on phones to understand the plot. The trouble is that I can’t read the text – it’s just too small.

However, like normal people, we sit on the other side of the room and, before you suggest we live in Downton Abbey, we are only about ten feet away.

beyond

It’s not my fault; my eyesight is ne, we have the largest television we have

I can’t believe I am alone in this. In fact, I know I’m not; I raised it at lunch the other day with half a dozen others of my vintage and was met with vigorous agreement.

It’s not good enough, and at best it shows a lack of courtesy by the producers to the people who watch their stu .

Jonny

Geller, literary agent and head of Curtis Brown, on how to get a novel published

Producer George Martin insisted that the Beatles’ early recordings be played through a cheap little speaker before being nalised, as the public was going to be using a transistor radio or a Dansette record player, not the expensive speakers in the studio.

SMALL DELIGHTS

Ignoring a ‘Road Closed’ sign and then nding the road completely clear.

RICHARD LANGRIDGE, SUFFOLK

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

That would often lead to changing the mix so that it worked better on the modest equipment that real people owned.

In the same way, I would make it a condition of any TV commission that somebody has to watch it on a normal TV, the size that normal people own (not what a football player has in his home cinema) –and make sure the phone messages can be read from ten feet away.

At least then we would know what’s going on in the story.

Or, I suppose, I could only watch dramas set before smartphones were invented. Actually, on re ection, that sounds quite appealing.

MATTHEW WEBSTER

The Peacock Skirt (1893) by Aubrey Beardsley: he drew by candlelight

FILM HARRY MOUNT THE MIRACLE CLUB (12A)

The immortal Alan Partridge once listed the great clichés about Ireland: ‘Leprechauns, shamrock, Guinness, horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons, people with eyebrows on their cheeks… men in platform shoes being arrested for bombings, lots of rocks and Beamish.’

Well, he could have added eccentric, old, devout biddies who mix outspoken truths with doses of charming blarney –viz Mrs Doyle in Father Ted.

There are plenty of Mrs Doyles in The Miracle Club (released on 29th September), even if they are played by actresses as magnificent as Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates.

It’s 1967 in Ballygar, on the outskirts of Dublin, and Lily Fox (Smith) and Eileen Dunne (Bates) are embarking on a coach trip to Lourdes.

It isn’t expressly said but everyone on the bus is in search of a miracle at the holy shrine. The – again unexpressed – schmaltzy message of the film is that they all witness less dramatic, everyday miracles of the sort we should all be grateful for.

So, Lily is seeking some way out of the agony of losing her son, then 19, 40 years earlier, in 1927. That agony is intensified by another passenger on the bus, Chrissie Ahearne (Laura Linney), an American outsider, who had been pregnant with Lily’s son’s child but bolted – for reasons that would give away the plot.

Eileen is looking for some escape from illness and the relentless grind of impoverished domestic life – and her unhelpful husband (a heroically slobbish, self-pitying Stephen Rea).

It’s very nearly the heartwarming film it’s trying to be. Smith is, as ever, a

Arts

natural, her pitch-perfect accent never slipping into Oirish. How unvain she is –as she exposes plenty of naked, wrinkled, 88-year-old flesh when she enters the sacred waters at Lourdes.

At times, Smith resembles the late, great Charles Hawtrey – and she matches his comic gifts in her ability to raise laughs from the slightly pedestrian script (by Joshua D Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne). She deploys her billiard-ball eyes as adeptly for comedy as for heart-stirring tear-jerking at the film’s happy dénouement.

Bates, too, nails the accent and gives an understated picture of the exhausted wife and mother at the end of her tether. And does anyone do quiet sadness better than Linney?

The film is well-structured by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan over its 90 minutes – the ideal length for a proper plot

with zero flabby self-indulgence. The religious aspects are subtly delivered – no mocking jokes; no preaching. The suggestion that Lily’s son is a sort of Jesus – and Lily a 1960s Pietà – is hinted at without heavy-handed exposition.

But, still, the slightly flat script means the film loses tension, as well as humour. You can’t predict the exact ending, but you have a hunch all will be well and all the loose threads neatly tied up.

And there are never as many laughs as you get in Father Ted, or Alan Partridge, for that matter. OK, The Miracle Club isn’t trying to be an out and out comedy. But Father Ted and Alan Partridge are rather better at human observation, too, than this film, which is supposed to be a study in disappointment, loss and redemption.

Do watch it for the fine acting but don’t go along expecting any miracles in the art of film-making.

On the road to Lourdes: Laura Linney, Maggie Smith and Niall Buggy

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK AS YOU LIKE IT

Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 29th October

What would be the most radical way to present As You Like It on the British stage? How about a traditional production in period dress with no newfangled innovations whatsoever? If only. In the current artistic climate, where anachronistic updates of the Bard have become the norm, an oldfashioned rendition of Shakespeare’s wisest, shrewdest comedy would actually be far bolder than this tediously trendy reinterpretation.

Shakespeare’s Globe would be the ideal forum for a gimmick-free As You Like It. Opened in 1997, Sam Wanamaker’s recreation of the ‘Wooden O’, where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, stands on almost the same spot as the original, which stood here from 1599 to 1642 (albeit rebuilt after a 1613 fire).

What could be more fitting than seeing As You Like It played here as Shakespeare would have seen and played it? Instead, this faddish reboot seems determined to go against the grain, and the result is annoying and confusing. In a modern theatre, I might have merely found it irritating. Seeing it in Shakespeare’s spiritual home feels especially frustrating.

For the benefit of anyone who’s unfamiliar with the play (or anyone, like me, who needs reminding of it each time they see it), the plot concerns a pair of aristocratic, star-crossed lovers, Rosalind and Orlando, who fall in love at first sight – as Shakespeare’s characters are wont to do – and have to overcome all sorts of improbable obstacles before they can tie the knot.

For reasons too complicated and long-winded to explain here, both of them have to flee from court and end up wandering around the Forest of Arden, where Rosalind’s father, the rightful Duke, has been banished by her dastardly uncle, Frederick. The main twist is that, to enable her escape from Frederick’s evil clutches, Rosalind disguises herself as a male shepherd.

As a posh young woman pretending to be a poor young man, Rosalind is able to usurp the rigid class and gender restrictions of Elizabethan society. As a man, for a short time, she feels free to speak her mind. The result is a daring drama that challenges the fundamental

conventions of Shakespeare’s era, and still has lots to teach us about the subtler prejudices of our own age.

As You Like It already has plenty to say about Britain’s current preoccupation with gender, with no need to add another layer of cross-dressing to an already complex storyline. Yet the director, Ellen McDougall, disrupts this delicate counterpoint by casting women in several of the male roles.

Most notably, Orlando is played by Isabel Adomakoh Young (in a fake moustache and goatee beard), which dissipates the dramatic tension and undercuts the main premise of the play.

Adomakoh Young does as well as can be expected, but this bizarre, gratuitous experiment reduces Nina Bowers’s skittish Rosalind to just another crossdresser, rather than a newly liberated woman confronting the complacent supremacy of self-entitled men.

Tessa Parr’s androgynous Touchstone is one of the few cross-dressing roles that works. Her boyish characterisation would grace a better production of this timeless play. Alex Austin’s effete Jaques is equally enjoyable, but with so many other camp performances to compete with, his catty portrayal is obscured. In a less flamboyant production, he’d pack a bigger punch.

When the actors are left to get on with it, their professional quality shines through (I especially enjoyed Austin’s understated rendition of ‘All the world’s a stage’) but these subtler moments are overwhelmed by a house style that feels closer to a Gay Pride parade than a Shakespearean comedy.

Yet ultimately the fundamental flaws

in this production have nothing to do with LGBTQ (or whatever the latest initials may be). They’re all to do with trying to impose contemporary attitudes on a play from 400 years ago.

Shakespeare remains profoundly relevant to the world we live in, but that relevance only becomes apparent if you approach the text without preconceptions and let the meaning emerge organically, of its own accord.

Directors need to trust Shakespeare and let him speak, rather than meddling with his unique vision. ‘Additional Text – Travis Alabanza’ reads a credit in the programme. I’d be glad to see a play by Travis Alabanza, but when I go to Shakespeare’s Globe, I expect to see a play written solely by him.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

Jonathan Pie, creation of actor/writer Tom Walker, went viral on YouTube and now gets an 11pm slot on Radio 4, Call Jonathan Pie

Recording a trailer for the programme, Pie is told to say ‘Listen on BBC Sounds’. ‘BBC Sounds! Not even the radio! How depressing is that?’

All the normally bleeped words are not just allowed, bleep-free, but redouble in impact because Pie is in the ranting, expletive-laden tradition of Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker.

There is spoof history here. Parody remains the core of satire ever since Gulliver’s Travels. We love Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge guise (NB Pie’s ‘As a man, I probably understand the ins and outs of a woman’s menstrual cycle

As you don’t like it: Orlando (Isabal Adomakoh Young) and Rosalind (Nina Bowers)

better than most…’ could be Partridge) and The Day Today in the 1990s. I adored the semi-improvised phone-in Down the Line, first broadcast without warning of its spoofery in 2006. People were furious about that.

We can never get enough of spoofs. Even when the political scene is beyond parody

The uncharismatic Norman Fowler told Jim Naughtie on Reflections about his campaign to allow women into the Cambridge Union when he was president but failed (it only happened in 1964). Then he dealt with Aids, which was tough, facing Mrs Thatcher’s scepticism. Now his ongoing plan is to reduce the bloated House of Lords: ‘Totally frustrating, infuriating: got to have everyone working – not just checking in and never being heard of again.’ Well said.

I cheered when Late Junction, that variegated midnight programme on Radio 3, launched a month-long celebration of the audio cassette, invented in 1963. Apparently, cassettes are making a comeback. I’ve jettisoned hundreds. But I kept plenty more. So I picked one at random, Perry Pontac’s Hamlet Part 2

A returning envoy arrives in Elsinore three years later, and everyone he inquires after – dear Hamlet? dear Gertrude? Young Hamlet? and sweet Ophelia? – is ‘Dead, my lord, alas.’ Pontac (now also dead) was a genius who thought in iambic pentameters. Can’t find it on Sounds. Glad to have my cassette.

Vivid soundbites: Paul Conroy, the photographer, talked to Rosamund Pike on One to One about playing the war reporter Marie Colvin. When Conroy first met Colvin, he’d just built a boat. She addressed the room: ‘Who and where is the Boatman? Hey, Boatman – I like your style. Can I buy you a whisky?’

On Saturday Live, Rory CellanJones talked of his own conception, during a stolen weekend his mother Sylvia enjoyed at the Three Crowns in Angmering-on-Sea, with James Cellan-Jones, who directed seven episodes of The Forsyte Saga for BBC television.

‘That was your father,’ she told Rory years later. (Just what Mrs Morpurgo said when her son Michael first glimpsed his real dad, her first husband the actor Tony Van Bridge, playing Magwitch in Great Expectations.)

Justin Webb was similarly told about Peter Woods being his dad. The BBC, hotbed of love-children: so unReithian! Which reminds me: Jenny Kleeman’s BBC

new Radio 4 series The Gift begins: ‘Millions of us have spat into a tube and sent a vial of our DNA to a company like Ancestry…’ You can expect many cans of worms.

Worth seeking out: Melvyn Bragg talking to John Wilson (This Cultural Life) was familiar but riveting. Also, Rachel Johnson’s superb LBC show with Chris Atkins, author of A Bit of a Stretch, whose new book, Time After Time, is about recidivism. First rate.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

‘Fifty years after his death, we need to talk about Picasso.’

Thus begins Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast (BBC2), a ‘fresh look’ at the reputation of the world’s most famous artist.

When did we stop talking about Picasso? He is the only 20th-century painter who most people can name without thinking, and those who don’t care for his Blue Period can still buy themselves a Citroën C4 Picasso with his

signature plastered on the flank. What would a fresh look involve, apart from tut-tutting over his cultural appropriations (African masks in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and treatment of women?

The answer is nothing much, and John O’Rourke, the producer and director of the series, goes no further than wringing his hands for a moment over colonisation before repeating the well-worn tale of Picasso’s domestic life.

It’s hardly new to note that Picasso was a monster. As a teenager, he did portraits of his father, also an artist, as an ancient and ailing old man destroyed by his son’s genius.

‘I am a monster,’ Picasso said when he later drew himself as the Minotaur, savaging women. Should the fact that Picasso was a monster affect our appreciation of his work? The talking heads um and ah.

‘I feel in many ways,’ says someoneor-other whose family knew Picasso, ‘that we have to separate the work from the personality.’

‘When I think of my father,’ says Paloma in a banal reflection, which is

Portrait of a monster: Picasso

then repeated four times, ‘I think of him as both Pablo Picasso the painter – and also my father. You can’t just say he was a monster or a genius, he was a man.’

The only fresh perspective I gained from these three hour-long episodes is that Picasso couldn’t swim. Given the number of photographs there are of him waist-high in the Mediterranean accompanied by his various women and children, this news is certainly arresting. According to Paloma, Picasso would only pretend to swim by keeping one foot on the sand and doing the arm strokes. Why on earth did he not have swimming lessons rather than going through this pantomime?

I wish that the psychotherapist Philippa Perry, one of several commentators with geometrical haircuts and Elton John glasses, had offered her wisdom on this issue rather than explaining, ‘When you’re in love, you surrender to the other person and when that surrender is mutual, it’s a kind of beautiful thing.’

The real question is not whether or not we are allowed to admire Picasso’s paintings of the women he brutalised, but why women are attracted to art monsters.

Marina Picasso wrote in her memoir, Picasso, My Grandfather, that ‘he submitted [women] to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them on to his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.’

Picasso liked to lock his first love, Fernande Olivier, in his studio in Montmartre when he went out for the evening. In footage from the 1950s, Fernande, now a slow old woman, returns to the building and knocks on the door.

‘I wish Picasso were here to let me in,’ she says, which is better than wishing he was there to let her out. Fernande was replaced by Olga Khokhlova, who was herself replaced by Marie-Thérèse Walter, after whom came Dora Maar (Picasso’s Weeping Woman) and then Françoise Gilot – the mother of Paloma and the only woman to have ever left him, which she did with aplomb.

Picasso’s last love was Jacqueline Rocque, the Rottweiler. After Rocque barred Picasso’s grandchildren from attending his funeral, Pablito (whose grandmother was Olga Khokholva) killed himself. Rocque also later committed suicide, as did Marie-Thérèse Walter.

Marie-Thérèse, who was 17 when she became Picasso’s mistress in 1927,

described him as ‘wonderfully terrible’. Françoise Gilot, who died in June aged 101, compared him to Bluebeard, except that, rather than cutting the heads off his women completely, Picasso liked to leave them hanging by a thread so he could hear them make little moans.

When Gilot called him the devil, Picasso pressed a lit cigarette to her cheek, which he removed only because, as he put it, ‘I may still want to look at you.’

‘Art just isn’t worth that much,’ Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell, when he turned Elizabeth Hardwick’s heartbroken letters (written after he left her for Caroline Blackwood) into selfserving poems.

Or is it? Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast only gestures towards exploring whether Picasso’s art was or was not worth the human suffering involved. The series is largely thin gruel, but it’s nice to see the paintings up close.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL: A CHILD OF OUR TIME; THE THREEPENNY OPERA

The middle weekend of this year’s Edinburgh Festival promised an absorbing juxtaposition. First came The Threepenny Opera, the work with which Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill revolutionised musical theatre in Berlin in 1928. Then came a rare opportunity to hear Michael Tippett’s brief but devastating early masterpiece A Child of our Time.

The Tippett was conceived in November 1938, after the shooting in Paris of the

German diplomat and anti-Semite Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan.

The shooting triggered the Third Reich’s most reckless peacetime atrocity: the burning of synagogues and Jewish properties throughout Germany, popularly known as Kristallnacht.

As the 33-year-old Tippett gazed at photographs of the imprisoned youth in Picture Post, the event took on a larger resonance. Pondering the nature and cause of the boy’s act, and his likely fate, he sensed that a second world war was now all but inevitable.

Unlike Brecht, Tippett was no peddler of agitprop, however left-of-centre his beliefs. His was a more universalising art, the work of a pacifist and humanitarian who steered clear of what he called ‘the danger zone’ of ideology.

Not that this entirely explains why the performance of A Child of our Time was the kind of experience which lives in the memory, while Barrie Kosky’s Berliner Ensemble staging of Die Dreigroschenoper (it was played in the original German) was such a bore.

The problem with Kosky, aside from his seemingly unstoppable ubiquity, is his desire to impose on works what he calls ‘bold new imaginings’. In the case of The Threepenny Opera, this meant rewriting Brecht’s text at a similarly tedious length, and sidelining the music. (Was it by chance that neither Brecht nor Weill was mentioned on the title page of the festival’s printed programme?)

The Brecht does need adapting. The play’s best bits are close to the work’s dramatic source, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, rather than those deriving from what was the latest

love of Bertolt’s life, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Much of the latter can be eliminated, as it was on the celebrated 1958 CBS recording, overseen by and starring Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya. Then text and music can exist as coequals.

And what music it is, grafting the language of Gustav Mahler’s song cycles and symphonies on to the sweet, sardonic street-corner music of 1920s Berlin. No wonder the conductor Otto Klemperer, who attended no fewer than 10 performances during the original run, begged to be allowed to make an orchestral suite of the music. His wish was granted and the famous Kleine Dreigroschenmusik was born.

Kosky’s ‘re-imagined’ first act lasted an interminable 90 minutes, during which the set-piece numbers made random appearances, performed, not by ‘actors who can sing’, but by a cast, several of whom could do neither. A seemingly bewildered audience clapped loyally, as it would have done after an aria or duet in the kind of traditional opera this deliberately is not.

The production gobbled up four- and five-star ratings; but whenever do you see fewer stars where this fatuous system for evaluating high-end culture is in use?

Stars alone couldn’t begin to evaluate the blazing and affecting account of A Child of our Time, led by our finest surviving Tippett conductor. Sir Andrew Davis, 79, has not been well of late but, my, how he loves this piece and inspires all who come into contact with it – in this case, a superb quartet of soloists, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

Brecht’s text and Tippett’s have themes in common. You can set Brecht’s lapidary ‘Grub first, then ethics’ alongside Tippett’s ‘Chorus of the Oppressed’, pondering ‘famine in a fruitful land’. The difference is that the Tippett doesn’t need rewriting.

It was T S Eliot who advised Tippett to make his own text: ‘Don’t let a poet loose on your libretto. The music will speak for itself.’ As it did, aided by the Blakelike simplicity of Tippett’s verses and his inspired decision to use Negro spirituals – ‘Steal away, steal away’, ‘Go down, Moses’ – much as Bach uses Lutheran chorales in his Passions and cantatas.

Tippett began work on the oratorio the day war was declared and finished it at the height of the Blitz in 1941. What continues to astonish is the switch, after the Grynszpan narrative, to the work’s third and final section with its mood of abiding hope. ‘The moving waters renew the earth. It is spring.’

As

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON

GRAHAM NASH IN BASINGSTOKE

‘Hello, Basingstoke!’ said Graham Nash, in tidy jeans and a dark, button-down shirt he told us had been emergency M&S buys after an airline lost his bag in Germany.

This was never going to be a wildwater ride, but I was here for the warm walk-in bath, to wallow in the sweetest songs in the Seventies canon from one member of the first folk supergroup that wrote them.

And Nash – once of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – is, as Elton would say, still standing. ‘Have you brought a love of music with you,’ he asked in front of his Turkish-carpeted set, all wood and kilims and strewn with guitars.

The show kicked off at 7.30pm sharp and had a 20-minute interval, which Nash admitted allowed him to have a pee and a breather (he is 81). When he came back after the break, he charmingly thanked us for not leaving.

If his voice on its own doesn’t – how could it – have the plangent rich blend of CSNY in its harmonied heyday, Nash’s determination to keep the flame alive

is brave and touching. He gave us the greatest hits and their genesis – Love the One You’re With, Marrakesh Express, Our House – and sang A Case of You in tribute to his ex, Joni Mitchell.

In fact it should be said that Nash had a very bad case of mentionitis when it came to one Miss Joan Mitchell. Almost every song had a Joni connection.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart was, we were told, written by Neil Young for Graham when he was going through a rough patch with Joni.

This was also his first tour since the death of David Crosby. ‘Cros and I talked about death a lot and the truth is we expected him to go ages ago,’ he said. ‘I choose to remember the good times and the music we made together. I will think of David Crosby every day of my life till the end of my life.’

This was the Graham Nash show. It was about his love of music as well as our love of his music. He did covers of Joni, the Beatles, Buddy Holly (pre CSNY, of course, Blackpool-born Nash was a founder member of the Hollies).

I could have survived without some of his new works – A Better Life, a new track, tried and failed to match the pedagogical Desert Island Discs perennial, Teach Your Children – but basically, he came across as a decent, talented bloke.

In the end, I thought – as he closed out the show to a standing ovation and ‘Goodnight, Basingstoke!’ – is that what survives of us is love, yes, yes.

But what survives of rock dinosaurs is even more – it’s their songs.

MATTHEW WILLIAMS-ELLIS

It’s an extraordinary thing to have been written, with so much mayhem going on all around, and no end in sight. But, then, Tippett was an extraordinary human being.

Sir Andrew’s remarkable performance reminded us, the work persists; the vision remains.

Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone: Graham Nash still adores Joni Mitchell

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU RENOIR IN GUERNSEY, 1883

Guernsey Museum and elsewhere 30th September to 15th December

Some articles about Renoir’s life wrongly suggest he donated several paintings to the Royal Collection. But Renoir did have one very important contact with Britain.

In the early 1880s, he felt that he had come to a dead end with Impressionism and could ‘neither paint nor draw’. But he found inspiration and a new direction during five weeks spent on Guernsey, where he produced 15 landscape paintings. In subsequent years, up to 40 more works derived from that visit.

The driving force behind this exhibition, in partnership with the Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny (where it has just been seen), is David Ummels, the Belgian founder of the charity Art Guernsey. He has gathered 11 of the landscapes, mostly around the bay and beach of Le Moulin Huet on the south coast. A highlight is Rochers de Guernesey avec personnages, bought by Art Guernsey in 2020 for £443,250 at auction.

One more would have been included, had it not just been restituted to the heirs of the dealer Ambroise Vollard by the Musée d’Orsay, but others have come from museums and private collections around the world.

Mr Ummels has said: ‘When Renoir came here, it was at the end of a dry period when he was questioning his creativity. In Guernsey, instead of Victorian puritanism, he was surprised to find people swimming, undressing behind rocks, and behaving in a very liberal manner.’

As well as the landscapes, after Guernsey, nude female bathers had an even greater place in Renoir’s repertoire than before.

Since 2019, there has been a Renoir Walk around Le Moulin Huet, with frames through which to see his views.

Other exhibitions and activities have been planned at the Priaulx Library, and the Art for Guernsey Gallery on Mansell Street in the Old Quarter of St Peter Port.

Renoir’s Rochers de Guernesey avec personnages; a framed view of Guernsey; the Renoir Walk

COAST MEDIACHRIS GEORGE

Pursuits

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER MY BULB MOMENT

Ours was a modest bulb order this year: 500 Camassia quamash, 50 Erythronium ‘Pagoda’, 50 ‘Discovery’ Dutch iris and 100 Narcissi ‘Pueblo’. Wholesale cost £180.

Now the planting. It’s backbreaking work, especially if the ground is dry and hard. Thankfully, some bulbs have a reasonable shelf life, but don’t put off planting until Boxing Day.

Erythroniums in particular hate delay. ‘Pagoda’ is a beauty; in our previous garden, it quickly multiplied in turf, gracing open sunlit spaces in the arboretum with, as one supplier puts it, ‘elegant downward facing flowers, wing-like recurved petals and a hint of Oriental charm… over tall, upright stems [of] up to ten nodding blooms, all over a neat clump of lush green mottled foliage’.

And those flowers are of an alluring sulphur-yellow hue. They’re going under the skirts of a venerable sweet chestnut to cavort with well-established drifts of primroses, snake’s head fritillaries, and a scattering of chalky-white wood anemones.

Camassias proliferate at nearby Aberglasney. They give a long-lasting show of tall stems bearing an abundance of cerulean-blue flowers from mid-April onwards. Let them set and scatter seed before mowing off the withered foliage; new flowering-sized plants will spring up as if by magic within a couple of years.

Bulbs of an appealing creamy-white camassia (C.leichtlinii ‘Alba’) cost just a few pennies more – but it’s the blue that wins my favour, fabulously illuminating the season’s wealth of assorted yellows. Narcissi ‘Pueblo’ was another goody that tugged at my heart strings at Aberglasney earlier this year. They, jonquillas, similarly fashioned like ‘Ice Wings’,

made 15-inch-tall stands, shouldering elongated ivory-white trumpets. Scented? Can’t say – this old back of mine refused to bend. ‘Pueblo’ is said to be rabbit-proof – a gain indeed, as our ageing terriers now seldom race after such critters, preferring instead to bark boo from a comfortable nook.

Bulbs of the Dutch iris brigade come cheap as chips, cheaper still from a wholesaler. ‘Discovery’ is a discovery for me, having been seduced by internet photos of its ‘ornate flower form and upright habit … with flouncy standards and eye-catching slick of gold on the falls’.

Discovery is going into four new beds named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, where I’m building up a collection of perennial (non-bulbous) Iris sibirica varieties. Flowering a little later than the sibiricas, the Dutch will prolong the iris display into June, by which time the beds’ other occupants – mostly salvias, violas and tobacco plants – will be poised for action.

Iris sibirica loves moist ground, as happy in boggy poolside conditions as in moisture-retentive beds and borders. Although May and June blasted us with unseasonal daylong sunshine and high temperatures (I had umbrellas over newly planted Japanese maples to prevent leaf scorch), I remind myself that this is south-west Wales, reputedly one of

the UK’s best-irrigated regions. So next year will be all right. Yes?

I’m also partial to bulbs in pots. I treasure a clutch of autumn-flowering Sternbergia lutea – bulbs given to me by a former gardens editor of Country Life magazine who, in turn, had them from artist-plantsman Sir Cedric Morris who, I was told, dug them up in Andalusia sometime in the 1960s.

Known provenance enriches them and it pleases me when I too can pass on their occasional offspring to other ‘worthy’ recipients.

Containerised bulbs are a pleasure to deal with on the potting-shed bench. But when it’s a sackful destined for the outdoors I happily hand the spade to younger folk – Daniel (Man Friday) or John (Man Monday).

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD BEETROOT

Sea spinach has been recognised as the wild ancestor of beetroot. The history is recorded in an early 20th-century book by a member of the French Vilmorin family, who contributed greatly to agriculture over the course of more than two centuries. The family also established sugar beet as a commercial crop.

While the beetroot which we eat today is generally deep red, a deliciously sweet yellow variety is available, as is a white, and one with pink and white rings, known as chioggia. I was surprised to learn that in the 17th century white beetroot was more common than red.

This year, I sowed red, yellow and white beetroot, all from one packet of seed. Around 70 per cent grew red.

Tall-stemmed Camassialeichtlinii ‘Alba’

Of the rest, my first experience of the white was a great success. Beetroot can be lifted and stored in sand from this month or kept in the fridge for several weeks. But I have found that yellow beets, having been harvested, are inclined to go soft sooner than red and are best left in the ground until needed.

The seed is large enough to be spaced when sown directly into the ground in spring. When the young plants are thinned, to about four inches apart, the beet leaves are well worth cooking like spinach. Indeed, I have been combining the mature leaves this summer with spinach beet and Swiss chard.

The days of boiling and eating slices of beetroot which have been swimming in malt vinegar are fortunately long gone. There are now so many better ways of preparing and using beetroot –a purée with cucumber and dill from the garden and crumbled feta cheese is a current favourite.

The health benefits of beetroot are widely recognised. It can help to control blood sugar and should benefit Type 2 diabetics. With its content of nitrates, which are said to reduce blood pressure, there is evidence that beetroot juice can be effective in treating angina patients. It is easily made by blending raw beetroot with apple in a juicer.

However, as the days shorten, the prospect of roasted beetroot with horseradish or a sustaining bowl of borscht is very appealing.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD THE GREEN BIBLE

Culinary bibles, cookbooks that change the way people eat, have a way of popping up when the time is right.

One such is San Francisco chef Deborah Madison’s The Greens Cookbook. First published in the US in 1987 as the bible of California’s health and wellness brigade, it’s now back in print in the UK as a sturdy hardback.

It’s perfect for our gastronomically challenged times – no glossy pictures, just well-crafted honest recipes that happen not to include meat (dairy and eggs permitted). Sprinkled among the sunny, California-style main-course dishes are the basics – stocks, relishes and flavourings that make all the difference to a meat-free kitchen.

Just in time for the last lifting of this year’s main-crop potatoes, everyone needs a reliable recipe for potato bread (sourdough is so last year).

Deborah Madison’s Potato Bread

This is a basic white, says Madison, that stays moist and tender in the breadbin, and makes good toast and excellent sandwiches. Note: the proportion of flour to potato is dictated by the wateriness of the potato.

Save a hunk of dough for a pizza base. Makes two loaves

250ml full-cream milk, warmed to finger-heat

250ml warm water

3½ level tsp active dry yeast

2 tbsp honey or sugar

675-800g unbleached white bread flour

225g potatoes (small reds, for preference)

3 tbsp sunflower or vegetable oil

1 tbsp salt

To finish

1 egg forked with a tbsp milk or water

Combine the yeast with the milk and water in a large bowl. As soon as the yeast-grains dissolve, add the honey or sugar. Beat in 350g flour, working out the lumps to form a smooth batter. Cover and leave to rise in a warm place till doubled in size – about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, boil or steam the potatoes, peeled or not as you please, till perfectly tender. Mash well and leave aside to cool to finger-heat. Add the mash to the batter as soon as it’s risen, along with the oil and salt. Fold in about 225g flour a tablespoon at a time, giving the bowl a quarter-turn each time to mimic the action of kneading. When the dough is too thick to add any more flour, tip it out on to a floured board, and knead it by hand for 6-7 minutes, till perfectly smooth, adding only enough extra flour to keep it from sticking.

Place the doughball in an oiled bowl, turn it to oil the other side, cover and leave to double in size as before. Punch it down and leave to rise again for another 35-40 minutes. Cut dough in half, knead each into a loaf-shape, place in a couple

of oiled baking tins and leave to rise again till doubled – about 25 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Brush the loaf-tops with the finishing egg-wash and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, till golden-brown on all sides.

Home-dried chilli flakes

Take advantage of the bread-baking oven to prepare your own chilli seasoning –there’s a world of difference in colour and flavour. Choose thin-fleshed pods that have ripened to red, spread them on a baking tray, and allow 3-4 minutes in the oven to dry and crisp – longer, if necessary, but don’t let them burn. Leave to cool before removing the stalks and discarding the seeds. Grind or crush to the texture you prefer.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE

RIP LE GAVROCHE

Le Gavroche, which opened in 1967, will close its doors this autumn. And there’s no chance of getting a table before it goes.

So ends an era of excessive gratification – my favourite kind. No one will ever replicate its womb-like indulgence and seemingly effortless service. It was the ultimate Big Treat.

That said, there will be gaggles of geese across the Dordogne honking at the news their livers have had a reprieve.

Given that one famous restaurateur told me recently that restaurants have the life expectancy of dogs, 56 years is a miraculous tenure. Rules will live on for ever in Maiden Lane, but it’s more of a theme park than a dining room. So, what joy to hear the name Manzi’s again.

The original, which opened in 1928 along with the Ivy and Quaglino’s, was based behind Leicester Square. It closed in 2006 but, in April 2019, Corbin & King got planning permission to convert two glass-walled floors in 1-8 Bateman Buildings (the alley between Greek Street and Frith Street) into a 240-cover fish restaurant, which they felt compelled to call Manzi’s.

Sadly, Jeremy King won’t be there to greet you, after parting company with the Wolseley Group, but it has his stamp running through it: fin-de-siècle, blue and white décor with huge mermen and mermaids leaping off the walls, great cocktails and a two-course menu of clam chowder and grilled mackerel for £28.

We shared an enormous portion of monkfish Wellington, and a bottle of Macabeo for £29.75.

I hope it can deliver on Jeremy King’s typically bold intentions because east Soho could do with a vast, raucous venue. If it doesn’t, he’s just taken the lease on the Caprice site, complete with Jesus, the former maître d’, and he’s opening The Park on the Bayswater Road in the spring.

Giles Coren raved about Mountain, the new kid on Beak Street. So, after finding no room at the inn on its website, I asked my son, Leo, a chef de partie at nearby Polpo, to pop in and get me a table. Thus, I used up my one Filial Favour in 2023. In 2022, I think he carried my suitcase upstairs.

The atmosphere at Mountain would raise Signor Manzi from the dead. The staff gallivant with you to your table and won’t stop enthusing about every dish coming from the kitchen, which is so open, you’ll feel guilty about not donning an apron.

I’m all for sharing plates when they’re small and multitudinous, and redolent of tapas, a Greek mezze or the antipasti of southern Italy but, at Mountain, the portion-control calculus has slipped its moorings. The waitress insisted we could easily share fresh cheese with prawn, spider crab omelette and a plate of girolles with egg yolk, while still leaving room for our main course of seven lamb cutlets, four langoustines, huge bowls of both lettuce and anchovies, and late-summer vegetables.

Oh, and a copper bowl of wood-fired rice, the size of a paella for two. Anyone for pudding? Fat chance.

This is a restaurant for gangs of six, happy to share plates with gallons of the very adequate house wine. The food is not out of this world – bring salt – but I will be returning with some rowdies.

Best lunch of the summer? Shell Bay, overlooking Brownsea Island and Poole Harbour, on my daughter’s birthday –even during a downpour which would have overwhelmed the mermen and mermaids of Manzi’s.

DRINK BILL KNOTT

TOUR OF KEITH FLOYD'S CELLAR

I write from the Luberon, awaiting the start of a blissful jaunt with an intrepid bunch of Oldie readers. I’m looking forward to beakers constantly replenished with the warm south, as Keats would have it.

Although, for ‘warm’, read ‘hot’. The temperatures in early September –around 30C – are mercifully ten degrees lower than they were in August, but reds,

as well as whites and rosés, still demand an ice bucket (un seau à glace, since you ask: a more practical request, I think, than Keats’s ‘draught of vintage… Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth’).

Sitting in the dappled shade of the Café du Cours in Vacqueyras, idly flicking through Le Monde and relishing that holiday scent of sun-scorched newsprint, my thoughts turn to my old friend Keith Floyd, who first introduced me to the village’s charms, and to whom our southern French sojourn is dedicated.

He was someone for whom ‘career’ was more verb than noun. His CV –although I suspect he never wrote one –could have included soldier (briefly), journalist and author, antique dealer, chef/restaurateur and, of course, television presenter.

He was a very genial host, too, especially at his house in Montfrin, a village a few miles south of the Pont du Gard. I had the pleasure of helping him stock its cellar: we visited many of the region’s wineries. We never returned empty-handed.

Vacqueyras became one of our favourite haunts. Twenty-five years ago, it was very much in the shadow of neighbouring Gigondas – both of them overshadowed by nearby Châteauneufdu-Pape – and its wines were benignly priced. Domaine Coucourlu, the Provençal word for curlew, the bird handsomely pictured on each bottle, was a great favourite, although I cannot find a UK stockist. I fear the Americans have discovered it. The wines from Le Sang des Cailloux, another favourite domaine, are easier to find: the brooding, powerful Cuvée Lopy, for example: £31.30 from christopherpiperwines.co.uk.

Its name – ‘blood from stones’ –comes from the cailloux, otherwise known as galets roulés, the big, smooth stones deposited in Vacqueyras’s vineyards by the mighty Rhône. Made mostly of quartzite, they absorb the heat of the day and release it at night, a property that Grenache appreciates.

The sang, of course, is the intense, purple wine that the grapes produce. A healthy dash of Syrah – 25 per cent or so is common – adds spice and structure, and splashes of Carignan and Mourvèdre are often part of the mix.

For Floyd and me, over a long and lazy lunch (pâté de campagne and a daube of beef, maybe) a bottle of Vacqueyras was the perfect partner. Should you find yourself in the southern Rhône, there is no better place than Vacqueyras for a languid lunch, and no better place to fill your beaker than the Café du Cours.

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a savoury and versatile white from Galicia; a fruity, lively red from Sicily; and a classic, grown-up claret with a few years under its belt. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Albariño 'Pionero', Viña Almirante, Rias Baixas, Spain 2022, o er price £12.99, case price £155.88

Delicious, apricotscented dry white from one of the Rias Baixas’ best producers. Perfect as an apéritif or with seafood.

Frappato 'Incanto del Sud', Baglio Gibellina, Sicily 2022, o er price £9.99, case price £119.88

Lively, generous red from the west of Sicily: soft tannins, so it will take a little chill. A summer pudding of a wine.

Château de la Cour, Cuvée Jean-Jules, Saint-Émilion 2016, o er price £15.99, case price £191.88 Classic right-bank claret with wellintegrated tannins and bags of black cherry Merlot fruit.

Mixed case price £155.88 – a saving of £34.99 (including free delivery)

For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD

NB O er closes 19th November 2023.

SPORT JIM WHITE

NOT SO FUN RUNS

I turned 65 the other day, and I’m still running, which is not a boast. Actually, I think it might be a cry for help.

I started running more than 30 years ago. I have a friend who in those days lived on the route of the London Marathon and invited me along to follow the race from her front window.

The house was situated on about mile 20 and, watching the ordinary runners labour past, I unleashed my inner Yosser Hughes from Boys from the Blackstuff and thought: I could do that.

What a mistake. Because soon I was embroiled in the growing craze for mass participation events, signing up for 10Ks, half marathons, the occasional marathon, ticking them off with the same enthusiasm as I did locomotives when I was a teenage trainspotter.

Back then, going out for a jog was not like it is now. You didn’t have apps keeping tabs on your performance. You wore any old trainers rather than state-of-the-art techno-shoes. You just chucked on a faded rugby shirt rather than something crafted from the latest in moisture-absorbing, temperaturecontrolled wicking fabric that costs the equivalent of the national debt of Chile.

Now you’re told you can’t go out without first stocking up on electrolytes and every step being monitored by a tracking device on your mobile. Well, you can’t if you’re a mug like me, buying into the ludicrous idea that technology can make your run easier.

Still, I kept going, participating in half a dozen events a year. The Hackney Half, the Tresco Marathon, the Forest of Dean Trail Run: they all sounded wonderful, until I actually had to, you know, run them. And, as I did my quota every year, I never really noticed I was getting on, ticking a different age group box on the application form, my times getting slower even as the kit I wore became more expensively insistent it could make me quicker.

The other day, I was participating in my local Park Run when I was overtaken close to the finish line by a ten-year-old. As he swished past me, I thought, ‘I’m not having that.’

So, I accelerated after him, determined to pass him before the end. Needless to say, I didn’t. He was long gone. But that is the oddity of running: you think you can still do it. You think you still cut a lean, athletic, youthful figure when actually, the moment they

see you staggering past, the neighbours are concerned for your safety.

I should have taken heed five years ago, at a mere 60, when I was at the World Cup in Russia. I was out running round the stadium in Kazan on match day. It was about eight hours before kick-off, but already the security was in full sway. Groups of heavily armed soldiers were everywhere.

I passed a couple of troops as I came to the end of my run. So, I accelerated past them, giving them sight of my heels as I belted by. About 50 yards on, where I had stopped and was bent over, hands on knees catching my breath, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I looked up and one of the soldiers was asking me something in Russian. I shrugged and said I didn’t speak the language. So, he got out his phone and keyed his inquiry into Google Translate.

I assumed he wanted to ask about my pacing. Perhaps he wanted to compare notes about my cadence. He showed me the screen. And there was final proof of my pathetic self-delusion. ‘Do you require medical assistance?’ it read.

Another five years on, it probably is time to read the runes and give up.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD BEWARE OF THE CON

Watch out for online car scams. I still remember the friend who paid for a car he hadn’t seen (priced well below market price) and drove to Norfolk to pick it up only to find an empty ruined house.

The car was real but in Devon, advertised at market price by a genuine seller whose advert the scammers had cloned, altering price and contact details.

Now there’s a website designed to alert you to such frauds. It’s the free-to-use Brego advert check (brego.io), which compares the advertised price with estimated dealer and auction prices.

If the difference is implausible, it recommends caution and – crucially –not to buy without seeing. Most such scams have the car somewhere inaccessible – in one case, a warehouse in Germany – but promise delivery by an allegedly reputable company on receipt of deposit or full payment.

In the German case, the delivery company turned out to be a bloke on a housing estate advertising himself with photos of someone else’s lorries.

To use Brego, which is teamed with CarDealer magazine, simply enter the registration number, mileage, price and

– if possible – the website address of the advertised vehicle. Brego instantly checks the details and shows any previous advertising listings.

I tested it on a suspiciously cheap 2022 Land Rover Defender advertised on Facebook Marketplace for £18,600, with a mileage of 4,200. Brego recommended caution. The vehicle is genuine, having been sold by a reputable dealer last December for £74,950 with 1,850 miles, but was £40,149 under the estimated auction price and £49,713 under the dealer price. Posing as an interested punter, I learned that it is allegedly located on an industrial site near Newcastle, ready for shipping by a delivery company. It is being sold on behalf of a friend by someone calling himself a ‘representative dealer’ and is cheap because it was ‘bought at auction’. Tell that to the marines.

Even without the help of Brego, there are enough warning signs to alert all but the least wary. To start with, the price – if it sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is. Second, beware if it’s difficult or impossible for you to view it. Third, watch out if it’s being sold by someone on behalf of the owner. They’ll have a reason why they can’t scan you the V5/C and why the owner isn’t available to speak to you. Fourth, beware if you’re being asked to part with money upfront, even if to an alleged third party (which won’t be PayPal) that says they won’t pay the seller until you’re happy with the vehicle. Finally, see what they say when you offer to pay by credit card – they usually don’t like that because you can easily cancel it.

Despite all this, they get away with it so often, not only because of human gullibility but because we are easily mesmerised by the tempting morsel on offer – that Defender looked and sounded so good (as it doubtless is) that it fills your imagination and elbows your judgment aside.

If, despite all these warnings, you ever get that far, talk to someone else –anyone but the seller – before pressing the button.

But not all scams are new. Remember how we used to read about the ‘clocking’ of cars – disconnecting the speedo cable to manually turn back the mileage reading? Electronic systems were supposed to do away with that because you can’t manually alter them. True enough, but they can be clocked electronically by anyone with the right kit.

The best defence is to go to the DVLA website and check the MOT history of the vehicle, which records annual mileages. If in doubt, walk away.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Internet control? An impossible dream

Ofcom is the quango that tries to regulate broadband, phone services and the post, as well as, in its own words, ‘keeping an eye on TV and radio’. It has an annual budget heading towards £200m and employs more than 1,000 souls.

That sounds fine, and I’d be glad if someone were keeping broadcasters in line. But, as it’s an impossible task, I rather question the point of Ofcom, at least as a regulator of content. It was established in 2003, so I doubt it expected streaming services to become so dominant. Very few of us did.

As a consequence, Ofcom’s reach into the online world is pretty modest. It does not regulate Netflix (because its European headquarters is based in the Netherlands) despite 17 million UK households subscribing to it and ‘Netflix’ being what many children think you mean when you say ‘TV’.

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

historicengland.org.uk

New collection of aerial photos of UK, taken in the Second World War by the USAAF, on this excellent archive site. ofcom.org.uk/complaints

How to make a complaint to Ofcom. Vent your spleen.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

The trouble is, what do we mean by ‘TV’? In the old days, it was easy. You put an aerial on your roof, connected it to your TV and received whatever few channels were broadcast from a government-licensed local transmitter.

Those with permission to transmit were a comfortable, regulated monopoly. It was not for nothing that Lord Thomson of Fleet is quoted as saying that permission to broadcast commercial TV was ‘a licence to print money’.

Each regional commercial TV station revelled in its domination, and the money poured in, as there was nowhere else for it to go.

But nowadays it is quite different, and the monopoly is gone. The old stations (BBC, ITV) still exist of course and still, for the moment, transmit via aerial. However, thousands of other stations have been born, tunnelling into our houses by various means, including satellite and broadband.

It is perfectly possible nowadays to buy a television that has no capacity to receive programmes from an aerial.

Using broadband in particular allows an almost unlimited number of channels from all over the world and makes it easy for the providers to charge a subscription, if they want to.

Consequently, the sheer scale of it effectively renders any attempt at regulation of content close to futile. And that’s before you consider the avalanche of TV-style product that spews out of our phones and computers.

Even if you don’t use them yourself, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and the like are continuously pumping out thousands

of hours of programmes. While Ofcom has some power to force these platforms to protect us from harmful material, it is such a vast undertaking that the labours of Hercules would have been an easier assignment. About 34 million videos are uploaded to TikTok every single day and that’s just one of many similar services. I don’t see how anyone could police that.

To be fair to Ofcom, it is aware of the problem. But its solution, a major increase in its powers to encompass all video-delivery services (outlined in a White Paper in 2022), does nothing to solve the magnitude of the problem.

You can enact all the laws you like but it’s enforcement that’s important. I just can’t see how that is possible unless it can be reliably automated somehow, which at present is impossible.

Unless that happens, Ofcom’s rather feeble ‘keeping an eye on TV’ ambition will be the most we can expect. I wonder if there is any point to Ofcom, at least as a regulator of content.

It will shortly be about as relevant as whoever still regulates hansom-cabs.

‘I'm sorry, Miss, but "selling seashells on the seashore" is the worst business plan I've ever heard’

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Your digital backseat driver

The drastic rise in motor premiums this year is shocking everyone when they come to renew their insurance policies.

Renewal quotes are so high that even the most dilatory among us are comparing prices. But only a few people will be looking at telematics insurance.

These policies involve installing trackers in the car to monitor how well it is driven. The safer the driving, the less

is paid. Though originally devised for youngsters, and some insurers still sell only to the inexperienced, older motorists can also benefit from proving they are good drivers.

The different insurers use a variety of methods to track driving, including black boxes installed in the car, small plug-in ones, mobile phone apps, and a device, or ‘tag’, that sticks on the windscreen.

Sensors then track speed, acceleration, braking and cornering. They know the location, whether you are on city or country roads, the mileage and whether you sit at the wheel for long periods, which might make you tired. They even know whether you are using your mobile phone while driving. The monetary reward might be given as refunds through the year or a discount

on next year’s premiums. As well as reducing the cost of a policy, there are other advantages to telematics insurance.

Your driving record could prove an accident wasn’t your fault. The black box can help locate your car if it’s stolen. With feedback from the insurer, you can monitor your driving skills yourself and perhaps make improvements.

But there are probably more downsides. The recording might indicate you were, in fact, responsible for the accident. If you are shown to be a dangerous driver, you could be fined, pay higher premiums next year or even have the policy withdrawn – for example, if you’re frequently logged as speeding.

If you buy a new car part way through the year, there might be a charge, as black boxes must be deactivated and another installed in your next car.

The driving score is valid with the specific insurer. Each one grades driving differently – so you cannot transfer a good record to a different company.

If you aren’t rewarded until renewal, you’ll need to stay with the same insurer to benefit. Black boxes monitor whoever is driving the car, adding their experience to your history. But, because app-based policies use your mobile phone, they know how well only you are driving.

Naturally, be wary of any insurance company tracking your every driving

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move and keeping a log of the data. Dataprotection law governs how information is stored, which must be properly and fairly, and we must be told who can access it and where it’s being used.

Since January 2022, insurers haven’t been allowed to quote higher prices to existing customers than they do to attract new ones. But, this year, motor premiums have rocketed for everyone.

More than ever, do not automatically renew your car insurance. Put in the effort to compare quotes and check carefully what is included and what is not.

And beware: though the price has gone up, some policies now cover less.

A Taste of Northern & Central Portugal

9th to 16th October 2024

GFollowing the great response to Insider’s Travel’s trip to northern Spain, we have devised a bespoke tour of Portugal, using its great local knowledge and contacts. We will be based in Braga and Coimbra.

We start in Braga, exploring the north, including the original capital of Guimarães, the coastal Viana do Castelo and Ponte de Lima. After a day in the Douro Valley, we change our base to the old university town of Coimbra. From here, it’s leitão suckling pig, a medieval arboretum and some of the world’s largest waves, not to mention treasures of the Romanesque. All accompanied by excellent Portuguese cuisine and wines.

Wednesday 9th October

Arrival in Porto

Fly to Porto. Check in at the 4* Vila Gale Porto (www.vilagale.com) in Braga. We take in the Archbishop’s Palace, the 14th-century cathedral and the striking Santa Barbara Gardens.

Thursday 10th October

Guimarães

We visit the world heritage city, Guimarães, the Portuguese capital in the 12th century. En route back to Braga, we admire the views from the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus del Monte with its baroque staircase.

Friday 11th October

Ponte de Lima

We head north to Ponte de Lima, known for its splendid part-Roman, part-medieval bridge. Then on to Viana do Castelo, an important fishing and sailing port for 700 years, renowned for its baroque and Manueline architecture.

Saturday 12th October

Douro Valley

We visit Quinta da Pacheca, one of the Douro’s oldest wineries. After a tasting and lunch, we drive along the riverbank to Pinhão for a short boat ride before travelling to Coimbra. Check in at the 5* Quinta das Lagrimas hotel (quintadaslagrimas.pt) for a light dinner.

Sunday 13th October

Coimbra

We explore Coimbra and visit the Old University, the baroque Joanina Library and the 12th-century Old Cathedral. Local lunch and a free afternoon before dinner at Casas do Braga.

Monday 14th October

Bussaco Forest and Bairrada

We visit the ancient, walled arboretum of the Bussaco Forest, home to more than 700 species. We take in the neoManueline jewel, the Bussaco Palace. This is Bairrada appellation territory, which means suckling pig and Bairrada wines for lunch.

Tuesday 15th October

Nazaré

We head to the coast to visit Nazaré, a mecca for giant-wave surfers, for lunch and a visit to the local market.

Wednesday 16th October

Transfer to Porto Airport for return flight home.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £2,950, which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £500. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st July 2024.

The Romanesque cathedral, Braga; basilica of Santa Luzia Church, Viana do Castelo; the Douro Valley; Nazaré

The Redshank

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Among colloquial names for the common redshank (Tringa totanus) are ‘watchdog’, ‘yelper’ and ‘warden of the marshes’. The first bird to fly off piping your presence, as conspicuous as it is noisy with its white rump and whiteedged wings, will be a redshank:

With strong smooth strokes deliberate, Flicker along the low wet meads… Beneath skies coldly blue

As their sweet ‘Tiew-heu!’

From Redshanks by Anthony Rye

Such innate anxiety is evident from the carefully designed nest. Normally this is in a grass tuft with the taller stems bent to form a delicately concealing roof. Both parents incubate and, when one leaves, the protective grasses veil the entrance.

Often a prepared corridor ensures the bird does not break cover until a safe distance from the eggs or chicks. Despite this, a nest seen with Carry at Elmley Marsh, Kent, was not many yards from a road, albeit a quiet one.

Although the redshank is regarded as the spirit of coastal marshes, the coast in its many forms – tidal estuaries, sand and shingle beaches, rocky shores – is equally its domain. While redshanks breed there too, many, along with other wader species, travel inland to breed in the safer seclusion of the moors and uplands; in their case, as high as 3,000ft above sea level in the Cairngorms. That the bird also favours lakes, streams, lowland pasture and gravel pits shows nesting sites are as varied as the habitat.

References to redshanks date from the 16th century. James V of Scotland (1512-42) bought them, with other waders, for the dining table.

The name refers to their legs, from old English read (red) and scanca (legbone). The legs are most visible when the redshank exhibits another of its tendencies, using a prominent perch to utter a more staccato alarm call.

In 2023, the resident UK population is 22,000 pairs – which grows to 100,000 birds through winter migrants, about half of them from Iceland. Over the past 60 years, there has been a 44 per cent contraction of the breeding range across the UK and Ireland, for the usual reason – the increasing human population reducing habitat in the remorseless demand for food and timber.

With regard to timber, it is astonishing to learn – for those old enough to remember Bronco toilet paper as a disincentive – that six million trees are pulped annually to service the average need of each UK person for soft toilet paper a year. It places

us fourth in the world’s consumption league, after the United States, Portugal and Germany in that order.

As with other waders in winter, redshanks flock. Highest winter densities are found on major estuaries and in the Northern Isles.

And come again, and, deftly with light feet

Running upon the mud-banks, all depart; But on that delicate substance leave the print

Of visitation, as they leave some part Of lonely and lost beauty of the heart

Remembering anew Their ghostly ‘Tiew-heu!’

Travel

High Art in the Low Countries

As shows on Rubens and Frans Hals open in London, William Cook is dazzled by the artists’ works in their native lands

When I was at primary school, half a century ago, my mum and dad used to drag me round London’s National Gallery, trying to teach me about fine art.

Their tastes were pretty broad, but there were two artists they had no time for – Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Hals.

They were not alone. Hals and Rubens weren’t fashionable then –too flamboyant, too theatrical – but gradually I grew to love them. When I left school and started travelling, the thing I loved most of all was looking at their artworks in their native lands.

Seeing a Rubens in Flanders or a Frans Hals in the Netherlands, you understand the context: who it was painted for, and why. Finally, the whole thing makes sense.

This autumn, these misunderstood Old Masters are both coming to London. There’s a Rubens show at Dulwich Picture Gallery, and a Hals show at the National Gallery, where my parents used to take me all those years ago.

Ahead of these two shows, I wanted to revisit their works in situ. So I set off on an arty odyssey to the Low Countries.

In Amsterdam, I first dropped into the Rijksmuseum. You could easily spend several days here, but it pays to be selective. I’ve come to see their Hals this time, and their best ones are in the

Eregalerij (Gallery of Honour), alongside the museum’s other greatest hits: Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride

Seeing Hals in this museum, alongside Vermeer and Rembrandt, his great 17th-century Dutch contemporaries, I’m reminded of why I’m so fond of him. Vermeer is more realistic and Rembrandt is more perceptive, but Hals paints with such freedom and, above all, with a terrific sense of fun.

From Amsterdam, it’s only 15 miles

to Haarlem, where Hals lived and worked. Resist the temptation to take a cab – the traffic can be terrible. It’s a mere 20 minutes by train, and a ticket only costs a few euros.

Haarlem is a delightful little city –all the nicest bits of Amsterdam, but without the sleaze and grime. The antique old town is encircled by canals (a boat trip is a good way to get your bearings) and the narrow streets within are flanked by handsome old town houses, relics of a time when Haarlem

The Raising of the Cross (1610) by Rubens in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp

was one of the largest and richest cities in the Netherlands.

I spend the night at the Lion d’Or, Haarlem’s oldest hotel. The building dates back to 1839, but the décor is contemporary. It’s cosy and welcoming, a comfy blend of old and new.

I eat dinner at a trendy modern restaurant called Locael Centraal. It looks a bit too groovy for my tastes, but the food is delicious, classic European staples with a spicy Asian twist.

Next morning, I’m up bright and early to explore the Frans Hals Museum. The building is an early 17th-century almshouse, an intensely atmospheric setting to see some of his finest work. The highlights are his group portraits of various civic guards – local militias which doubled as social clubs. Each person is a real individual. We feel we really know them.

Hals spent almost all his life in Haarlem, but we know relatively little about him. It seems he made a decent living, without setting the art world on fire. His gravestone is in the Grote Kerk, Haarlem’s robust cathedral. We know which street he lived on, but the house is no longer there.

Rather than ticking off specific sights,

the best way to get a sense of Hals’s Haarlem is to wander round. The old town is beautifully preserved, and easily walkable. You can imagine him strolling along these cobbled alleyways. His view of the city would have been much the same.

On my third day, I leave Haarlem and travel to Antwerp, Belgium’s liveliest, most stylish city. The train journey takes about two hours, with one easy change in Amsterdam.

Hals was born in Antwerp but the artist it’s famous for is Rubens. His paintings are all over town, and a walking tour of these historic sites is an ideal way to discover this compact metropolis.

Rubens’s palatial home, the Rubenshuis, is currently closed for renovation, but there are lots of other places where you can marvel at his work.

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts has an astounding selection, but his religious paintings pack an even bigger punch in Antwerp’s ornate churches.

His greatest triptychs, The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, stand side by side in Antwerp’s majestic Gothic cathedral – the former so full of energy, the latter so bereft of life.

Remarkably, you can also see his

work in several of Antwerp’s parish churches. I’m particularly moved by his Flagellation of Christ in Sint Paulus Kirk and his Holy Family in the Carolus Borromeus Kirk, but there are many more to choose from.

I check into Hotel Franq, an elegant hideaway in an old bank, and go for dinner at Grand Café Horta, around the corner from the Rubenshuis. Named after the pioneering art nouveau architect Vincent Horta, it incorporates the salvaged metal frame of his influential Maison du Peuple, which he built in Brussels in 1899, and which was demolished in 1965. I feast on shrimp croquettes and moules frites, washed down with a couple of potent Belgian beers.

On my last day, I revisit one of my favourite sites in Antwerp, the 17thcentury Rockox house, home of Nicolaas Rockox, mayor of Antwerp, one of Rubens’s closest friends.

Tucked away down a shabby side street, from the outside it doesn’t look like much, but inside it’s a Tardis –a meticulous reconstruction of a grand house which Rubens would have visited many times.

There are some wonderful Rubens paintings here, but it’s the location that makes them so special. In this intimate domestic setting, they seem more personal and alive. In big galleries, you tend to see his bigger, bombastic works, commissioned by kings and emperors. In Rockox House you see another side of him – the family man, not the businessman.

Time to go. I walk to Antwerp’s spectacular Centraal Station and catch a train to Brussels, an hour away, and then board the Eurostar to St Pancras. Two hours later, I’m back in London and Hals’s Haarlem and Rubens’s Antwerp are already fading, like fleeting memories of a tipsy dream.

The National Gallery exhibition will show us there’s more to Hals than The Laughing Cavalier. Dulwich Picture Gallery will show us that there’s more to Rubens than portly nudes.

I imagine these twin exhibitions will inspire a few more people to visit Haarlem and Antwerp. Seeing Hals and Rubens in their hometowns was like seeing them for the first time.

I hope you’ll feel the same way, too.

Frans Hals is at the National Gallery, 30th September to 21st January 2024. Rubens & Women is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, 27th September to 28th January 2024

Clockwise from top: The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company by Frans Hals (1616); his museum in Haarlem and the Rockox house in Antwerp

The lost tail of a sweet, fat wombat

lucinda lambton

After the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife died of an overdose, he found solace in owls, kangaroos – and a wombat without a tail

Here is a delightful discovery.

The famed artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) kept, of all creatures, a wombat as a pet, which he loved with all his heart and soul. He wrote, with considerable feeling:

I never reared a young Wombat

To glad me with his pin-hole eye, But when he was most sweet and fat And, tail-less, he was sure to die!

So lamented the great man, to go with a drawing (now held by the British museum) commemorating the death of his pet Top, his little marsupial pal, who died in 1869.

After his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died in 1862 of a laudanum overdose, Rossetti moved to 16 Cheyne Walk, where he was to live for the rest of his life, keeping company with a menagerie of creatures great and small.

He had almost an acre of overgrown garden, which was allowed to get ever more so by the day. It was here that

the animals all roamed together. There were owls, two kangaroos (the mother was killed by her son) and wombats (one had its tail stamped off by a deer). He had green lizards, too, as well as dormice, hedgehogs and a mole.

His Brahmin bull – whose eyes he likened to the eyes of William Morris’s wife, Jane – caused many a rumpus. It chased Rossetti at speed through the house and out into the garden.

At one point. Rossetti conceived of an excellent plan to buy an elephant to clean the windows. He said that the

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, left, with sister Christina, brother William and their mother, photographed by Lewis Carroll. Carroll is said to have been inspired by a sleeping wombat to place the Dormouse in a teapot in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

passing public was sure to be interested, stop and ask who lived there, and then be enticed to buy his pictures.

Wombats, though, were always his favourite animals; he would often spend hours alone with them at what he called the ‘Wombat’s Lair’ in London Zoo.

When the first one – he was eventually to have two – arrived in Cheyne Walk, he was whipped into a pitch of anticipatory excitement, penning a laudatory poem:

Oh! How the family affections combat

Within this heart, and each hour flings a bomb at My burning soul; neither from owl nor from bat Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat!

He wrote in ecstasy to his brother, William, that the wombat was ‘a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness’.

In an earlier letter, he gave us a tantalising glimpse of architecture for animals, praising ‘a shrine in the Italian taste for the wombat’, which he thanks his sister Christina for rearing. She too had been enraptured by the creatures, calling them ‘agil, giocondo’ (nimble, cheerful) as well as ‘irsuto e tondo’ (hairy and round).

The creature slept a good deal, either in the bowls of the hanging lamps or in the epergne on the dining-room table. The painter James McNeill Whistler wrote of having dinner with Rossetti in Cheyne Walk with the novelist George Meredith and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. The somnolent wombat curled up in the epergne throughout the evening.

Ford Madox Brown claimed the sight of the sleeping wombat inspired Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) to write of the Dormouse in the teapot in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Rossetti often took his friends to see the two wombats that lived at the zoo. He wrote, they ‘not only admit to closest inspection but may be handled and scratched by all those who chose to make so intimate an acquaintance with them’.

There were many stories. John Ruskin’s dignity was somewhat disordered during a lengthy monologue by one of the wombats persistently and patiently burrowing between his jacket and waistcoat. Then when a solicitor’s wife called Mrs Virtue

Tebbs came to be painted, she was less charmed by the creature when it ate her straw hat.

‘Oh, poor Wombat,’ wailed Rossetti. ‘It is so indigestible!’

Lamentably, this wombat died within two months. Seeing that he spent so much time in the dining room, Whistler wrote a satire on his demise – that, when munching his way through a box of cigars, the lid closed, the wombat perished inside, and Rossetti later found it in the empty box.

The great artist applied himself forthwith. He drew a mournful scene, with Rossetti kneeling over his little dead pal by a handsome memorial,carved with an angel and topped by an urn.

Sadly, this was never to materialise, as the creature was stuffed and put on display in the front hall at Cheyne Walk.

A second wombat was soon on its way. The artist Val Prinsep summed

up life in Cheyne Walk: ‘Rossetti was the planet round which we revolved; we copied his way of speaking. All beautiful women were “stunners” with us. Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures.’

Above: Rossetti’s sketches of a wombat. Right: Whistler’s drawing of Rossetti mourning his wombat

On the Road

Game, set and love match

Top tennis player Annabel Croft tells Louise Flind about appearing on Strictly – and her husband’s heartbreaking death

How do you feel about going on Strictly Come Dancing?

I am so looking forward to Strictly

Your husband, the yachtsman Mel Coleman, tragically died of cancer, aged 60, this year. What memories do you have of him?

My husband was a great support to my career.

What are your childhood holiday memories?

Spain, near Marbella. That’s where I first picked up a tennis racket.

Were you a sporty family?

When I was at school, I’d gaze out of the window at the hockey pitches and netball courts and never wanted to be doing schoolwork.

I did ballet from the age of four to about 12, quite seriously. At one point, I wanted to be a ballerina and then at nine I picked up that racket in Spain. My mum played tennis and waterskied. My dad played rugby, cricket, with a bit of tennis and running.

Can you explain Emma Raducanu’s staggering success and then difficulty following that up?

Most people go on the tour and spend ten years trying to win a Grand Slam and she’s done it in reverse.

It’s normal to have struggles after that – it’s the pressure.

What couldn’t you do that stopped you becoming a Wimbledon champion?

I was too hard on myself and I realise in hindsight that I was an absolute perfectionist.

What was your first big break?

When I was 12, I won the Nationals. Then this letter came through from the Lawn Tennis Association, inviting me to national training and that’s when life took off. Suddenly I was representing Great Britain against Israel, France, Germany, Holland and Sweden. We were travelling every weekend and

going on ferries across to Holland. I remember all the players being sick on the boat.

Then I went to live in Houston with my coach, Owen Davidson. He was Billie Jean King’s mixed-doubles partner. As a British female, you’re a bit pasty and white and suddenly you’re in 80 per cent humidity and hot sunshine. Normally you’d wilt in a tournament but training in it makes a huge difference. I made great strides with him and then we travelled on the tour together more or less till I finished playing.

How did you cope with the press attention when you were playing?

That first year when I played at Wimbledon, at the age of 15, I was plastered all over the front pages and magazine covers. It overwhelmed me. I think I got quite scared.

When I was playing, I felt enormous pressure in Britain. I preferred being away in Houston.

And how hard was it to stop playing professionally?

It took quite a while to come to the decision, but I’d travelled the world and wanted a bit more from life that didn’t depend on winning tennis matches. I’ve never really looked back. My parents were very supportive.

What’s your number-one tennis tip to amateurs?

Get your racket back early and prepare.

How did you get into broadcasting?

Channel 4 rang asking me to be on Janet Street-Porter’s programme Survival. It was me and three blokes dumped on an island in Sri Lanka trying to survive. It got a lot of publicity, and the makers of Treasure Hunt approached me as

Anneka Rice was pregnant. And then I did five years’ worth of pantomimes with Lionel Blair, Una Stubbs, Michael Barrymore and Roland Rat, and a murder mystery touring play, Something’s Afoot

What’s more fun, broadcasting or playing? Definitely broadcasting.

How do you keep in such good shape now?

I eat a keto diet which is meat and fish-based, but not high in carbohydrates. I also run with my girlfriends, play tennis and do yoga.

What are your top travelling tips? Wrap things like eye make-up remover in cellophane so they don’t burst open during the flight.

Do you travel light?

I have become a complete expert, having travelled since playing international matches aged 12. I plan outfits: how many evening outfits or day outfits. What do I need sports-wise? Then shoes, and then sport shoes, and bags for the sport shoes. I’ve never put hundreds of creams on my face, but I love to scrub my face – so I take my flannel. My mum was an air stewardess and always taught me to pack flat; if you don’t fold things up, you get more layers in.

What’s your favourite destination?

We have a tennis academy in Portugal at the Pine Cliffs Resort, and we’ve been running that for more than ten years. Portugal is like a second home.

I love the ambience, the people… and the food is amazing. I like to do a bit of sport in the morning and then go to the beach in the afternoon with a book, and then maybe dinner out later. Portugal ticks every box.

Taking a Walk

Blenheim’s Anglo-Saxon

patrick barkham

oak

The night before this stroll, I stayed in an ancient Woodstock coaching inn, busy with foreign tourists whose presence gave me an outsider’s view of the strangeness and wonder of England.

Church bells pealed shortly before 11am on a late-summer Sunday as an old market town idyll played out: immaculate but modest Georgian houses opening on to pavements where locals and their dogs chatted beneath old lamps and walls of honeyed stone.

Even so, entering Blenheim Palace by the back door – a triumphal arch built by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1723 at the request of the 1st Duke of Marlborough’s widow who, according to a hint of admonishment in the inscription, took charge of ‘the many things that remained unfinished’ after his death – was a jawdropping experience.

Woodstock is an affluent and well-proportioned Oxfordshire town, yet suddenly it seemed a cramped hovel. For here was a vast sweep of space, a landscape arranged by Capability Brown: green lawns the size of farms, a huge lake in the valley bottom and a house as big as a large council estate with as much ornamentation as a wedding cake.

It is, apparently, the only nonecclesiastical English country house that is a palace. I marvelled at the quaintness of the Establishment for turning whatever it decides to be the case into an immutable rule. I skirted around the front of the house and out along its great vista, across the grand bridge over Queen Pool beside a phalanx of joggers, tattooed trippers in Leeds United shirts and children on scooters.

We really were the little people, rendered tiny by the grandeur of this landscape, and tinier still, if gazed upon from the windows of the great house. And yet, although we had never revolted, and all this power survived intact, perhaps it was because there had been this accommodation: the little people let in, swarming over the palace gardens.

I looped around one of Blenheim’s elegant drives past stately Atlas cedars,

copper beeches and other parkland trees, and climbed the hill into High Park, where lives the greatest concentration of ancient oaks in Europe. The wood was originally created as a deer park by Henry I in the 12th century, although at least one of the 220 ancient oaks still growing here predates the Norman Conquest.

The cool, green, bracken-filled forest looked much like any other, until some of the oaks loomed into view, each as distinctive as a person, dead branches waving like fantastic arms.

It is said that oaks grow for 300 years, mature for 300 and then decay for 300 but, like a handsome, happy old person, even these decaying oaks looked good when decrepit. Approaching senescence, they remained full of life, hosting more than 2,000 other species, from fungi to the false click beetle.

One oak called me over. Like many, it had been torn apart at a height of about four yards but was still very alive. It possessed an arched door into its hollow trunk: a small wooden chapel. I entered. This trunk room was scented by fresh sprigs of bracken growing in the floor, which sounded a hollow note as if there

was a cellar beneath. Gorgeous acoustics softened all noise although I still heard everything: a green woodpecker cackled, a buzzard mewed and a passing toddler shouted ‘I want my...’

The world slowed to oak time. I felt held. The living wood was unexpectedly cool to touch and damp with rivulets from last night’s rain, but the oak chapel was also somehow warm.

When I stepped out again, it could have been into another century. The rest of the walk passed in a daze, down the hill from High Park, across the river where white willows shook their leaves in the breeze, and back alongside the busy side of the palace – the Sunday bustle of the car park, a miniature train and tour-groups of toddlers.

What a walk in the presence of greatness! And guaranteed not simply to pass on an understanding of a thousand years of English history, but also to help us see and feel our present state, too.

Park in Woodstock and enter Blenheim through the gate at the end of Park Street. Cross the grand bridge and loop south-west for a four-mile circuit

Across

1 Notice chap’s working on international attachment (8)

5 R conifer perhaps from the east covering Britain (6)

10 Coat – new one that gets very hot! (7)

11 R may be backing favourites with layer (7)

12 Impressive success sees the French occupying English court (5)

13 Current conductor’s chosen staff with energy (9)

14 West perhaps finding objective on range (7,5)

18 Lack of courage may be cause of death (5,7)

21 Soldier and revolutionary ringleader left out (9)

23 Lovely day – and given penalty (5)

24 Controversial European cause (7)

25 Insult a naturopath, pinching eastern leader’s wife (7)

26 Work on body producing military display (6)

27 Mixed trades so represented (8)

Genius crossword 431 el sereno

Down

1 & 16 R – he left rag trade in chaos (6,3,5)

2 &17 Half a rood – or the wrong R! (6,8)

3 Begins journey seeing tail of comet in clear night sky? (6,3)

4 Unduly stressed adviser hopes reforming keeps me on the up (14)

6 Visitor had a shot at broadcast (5)

7 One opiate developed across hot country (8)

8 Touching lines from bronze chaps (8)

9 This will affect bones so close-set – or is otherwise fixed (14)

15 Wine, fine mixture must be ministerial responsibility (9)

16 See 1 down (8)

17 See 2 down (8)

19 Youngster actually needing name for cold (6)

20 R Murphy? (6)

22 Mate from Paris shot friend (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 18th October 2023. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 431

Across

1 Bear, sustain (5)

4 Baseball fielder (7)

8 Crazy (3)

9 Employ (3)

10 Inert gas (5)

11 The length of (5)

12 Shake with fear (7)

15 Simplicity (4)

17 In the direction of (6)

19 State firmly (6)

22 Move suddenly and quickly (4)

24 Serving no purpose (7)

26 Grey or pale of face (5)

28 Escort to seat (5)

30 Objective (3)

31 Badger, annoy (3)

32 Belgian diamond centre (7)

33 Leavening agent (5)

1 Small and neat (7)

2 Cowboy show (5)

3 Not as old (7)

4 Swindles (6)

5 Exchange, barter (5)

6 Male pig (3)

7 Reach, cooking stove (5)

13 Stern, backside (4)

14 Honey producer (3)

16 Contributes, gives more (4)

18 Misery (3)

20 Be loyal to (5,2)

21 This evening (7)

23 Dead to the world (6)

24 Dangly bit in throat (5)

25 Eagle’s nest (5)

27 Hair dye (5)

29 Strike (3)

Genius 429 solution

Winner: Mrs M James, Rustington, West Sussex

Runners-up: Phillip Wickens, Horsham, West Sussex Len Watts, Stockport, Cheshire

Moron 429 answers: Across: 1 Withers, 5 Mile (with a smile), 7 Links, 8 Finite, 10 Hoax, 11 Sedately, 13 Endure, 14 Minted, 17 Evacuate, 19 Talc, 21 Helium, 22 Depot, 23 Star, 24 Coyness. Down: 1 Well-heeled, 2 Tankard, 3 Easy, 4 Soften, 5 Mandarin, 6 Lithe, 9 Syndicates, 12 Croupier, 15 Trample, 16 Atomic, 18 Alert, 20 Edgy.

In 50 years of play, I can’t recall a deal to beat this month’s – randomly dealt for one of my Advanced BridgeCasts.

Competition

TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 297 you were invited to write a poem called Bells. Gail White concluded with a firm couplet: ‘We keep that memory with us like a shield /Against despair: the bells of Finchingfield.’ Other Essex bells inspired Christine Ratcliff. Bob Morrow had ‘one regret: no one to tell / I’ve heard the Callart Bell’. Martin Brown was resolutely downbeat: ‘No ambulance bell, a siren instead, / Fast but late; he was already dead.’ Commiserations to them and to Anne Bond, Rosemary Lindsay, G M Southgate, Greta Newton, Katie Mallett and D A Prince. Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom win £25, with The Chambers Dictionary going to Ann Hilton.

Six Clubs would make easily on the knave of spades lead round to the ace-queen. It cannot be made on a trump or unlikely heart lead. But West’s natural lead is the king of diamonds and here is where it gets really fascinating.

Win dummy’s ace of diamonds (throwing the seven of spades) and ruff a diamond, exhausting East of diamonds. Now run all your clubs. Extraordinarily, you must keep dummy’s four of hearts, so that West’s last four cards are ♠ K J and ♦ Q J, while dummy’s last four cards are ♥ K Q 4 and ♦10. East, still to discard, holds ♠ 9 8 and ♥ A 7 5; if East discards a spade, you cash the ace of spades (throwing dummy’s diamond) and lead the eight of hearts, East making only the ace; East therefore discards a heart. Your last four cards are ♠ A Q and ♥ 8 2.

At trick ten, you lead the two of hearts to dummy’s queen, West discarding a diamond. If East ducks, you lead dummy’s diamond and discard your remaining heart, which endplays West to lead from ♠ K J round to your ♠ A Q. East therefore wins the ace of hearts. If he returns a spade, you win the ace (throwing dummy’s diamond) then score the last two tricks with dummy’s ♥ K 4. East therefore returns a heart.

You play the eight of hearts and West is caught in an Overtaking Suicide Squeeze. If he discards his last diamond, you overtake with dummy’s king and dummy is good. If he discards the jack of spades, you cash the ace (felling his king) and enjoy the queen. Isn’t that simply wonderful.

ANDREW ROBSON

She woke to the day’s importance, expectant of the sound of the bell. She ate her breakfast in silence, anticipating the bell. She dressed carefully, praying for the ring of the bell.

She relinquished her daily walk, for fear of missing the bell.

She tested the button and gladly heard the jingle of the bell. She dusted and polished the furniture, wondering when she would hear the bell. She swept the carpet, not vacuumed, so as not to miss the bell. She set the tea table carefully, listening hard for the bell.

She sat, waiting impatiently, hoping for the dinging of the bell. She discarded her crochet to give all her attention to the bell. She paced the floorboards absently, imagining the pressing of the bell. She worked through the scenarios for the absence of the bell.

She felt panic rising at the continued quietness from the bell.

She then heard the clang of the gate, finally sure of the bell.

She resisted hurrying to the door and waited for the bell.

All of her conjecture ended with the answering of the bell.

Ann Hilton

Is that ringing in my head? Or does some monk-tolled distant tocsin Summon me from my bed?

A peal of bells can make the spirits soar, Proclaiming forth the start of a marriage

Or the end of a war. So why does my poor skull now rattle With that pitiless clang? What is the cause? Ah, that’ll Be the Bells I drank last night, The whole damn bottle.

Christopher Wilkins

In the grey twilight, willows lean towards the lake.

Purple dusk, a ghostly heron cranks its wings,

From shadowy depths, plunges skyward Where a single star hangs in its silence. Then the ringing begins: the tintinnabulation of

A thousand bells, in hidden temples, Or well-tended gardens, where white lilies gleam,

Shaken by the small breeze, which stirs the leaves, Shakes the silver bells, shakes the bells, Effortless prayers, wordless prayers, we do not strain, Our souls, or plead, or cry with guilt. The prayers, The bells, the silver shaken bells, Spill from the silence, the grey woods, The still lake, the gliding heron.

Fiona Clark

Ring out, slow bongs, your dreary toll, And with each miserable note

Flick grapes down some Iberian throat And open doors to lumps of coal.

Light the touchpaper on the rockets And send them skywards. Don’t remark That fewer of them rip the dark Now more of us have lighter pockets.

Bongs are, by nature, melancholy A hollow, sorrowful complaint That things that should’ve been, still ain’t. Let’s make an effort to be jolly;

As one dud year recedes from sight

Let us resolve to fix our eyes on A better one on the horizon. We know it won’t be. But it might.

Ann Drysdale

COMPETITION No 299 This number, 299, is 23 years of baker’s dozens – both 23 and 13 being prime numbers. So a celebratory poem, please, called My Prime. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept entries by post. Send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – with a postal address), marked ‘Competition No 299’, by Thursday 19th October.

To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk

scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 2nd October 2023

UK Travel Genealogy

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80th birthday girl

QI shall be 80 next year and I keep dithering about what to do to celebrate it.

My daughter suggests having a giant party for everyone I know – while my son is suggesting a quiet dinner at a local restaurant with just our close family. My younger sister suggests a sit-down meal for 50 at a local restaurant, and my brother says I shouldn’t do anything – just forget about it. Do you have any ideas?

‘Veryoldie’, by email

AObviously if you’re happy to forget it, then don’t bother. But it sounds as if you’d like some acknowledgement of such a big anniversary

My own plan, just to confuse you further, is to have three parties. One for all my relations. Name tags compulsory. Since they live far and wide, I’d provide a simple supper – but buffet, not sit-down. It’s ghastly when you get trapped by two people who may not be the ones you have anything in common with.

Next would be a drinks party with extra-delish nibbles, for neighbours and any favourite people who work nearby. I can’t resist my dentist’s receptionists, the woman who works in the hardware shop and the street-cleaner and the postman.

Finally, if you’re still up for it, a party for friends. Chairs available but no long-term sitting down, and a well-insulated room so that everyone can hear.

A final stricture: there must be no sit-down meals and no presents (except of course a subscription to The Oldie, if they’re not already signed up).

We’re in the business of downsizing,

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

not getting ourselves lumbered with more ‘stuff’.

Should I burn my diary?

QI am a 51-year-old, unmarried woman with no children. I have two nephews, aged 16 and 14. I write every day and keep various journals and have done since 1996 with a few journals that I wrote when I was a teenager. My problem is: to whom do I leave them? Do I burden a nephew with what might be hundreds of A5 notebooks? Do I burn them in 50 years time (assuming I live to be 101)?

Jess, Bath

AI’m told by the historian David Kynaston, who researches diaries continually for his great works on the social history of England, that the place to contact is The Great Diary Project. It’s an enormous depository for all kinds of diaries, and it’s worth contacting the founding director, Dr Polly North, on pollynorth@hotmail. com. Ask her for details.

And good luck. And keep writing. Your nephew may not be interested – unless he ends up being a social history researcher himself – but maybe someone will read them and be fascinated at some time in the future. I would also either copy them or get them transferred to disk, so your family still has a record.

Tea set for two?

QOur two children both want an old tea set that we’ve had since our marriage 57 years ago. We said that to save them having the problem of who got it when we shuffled off, we’d ask them both for sealed bids, then get it valued. The one who got

closest to the valuation would win the tea set, and the loser would get the equivalent in cash. Is this a good idea?

David Whiteside, by email

AI’m very sorry to disagree with you, but, unless the set is worth a fortune, like an antique Japanese Meiji solid-silver tea set by Murakami, how can mere money compare with the memory of your mum pouring out tea for you when you’re a child, perhaps around a roaring fire. I may be pulling on the heart-strings, but if I were you, and it’s not valuable, I’d give one the teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl, and the other the cups. It’s the memory they want, not the money.

My poisonous wine

QYour correspondent (Château Paintstripper, July issue) asked how to get rid of appalling wines given by visiting friends. Can I recommend local raffles? You can give anonymously, the winners enjoy temporary pleasure and it won’t kill anyone.

Anonymous

AAn excellent idea, but remember that the enjoyment the winners get will indeed be temporary. I can’t be the only winner of a bottle of wine in a raffle to be, at first, smugly delighted, until I’ve taken a sip, choked it down, thrown the bottle away and spent the next day nursing an unspeakable headache.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk. I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

Review of Books

Autumn round-up of the Reviews in the National Press

Lucy Lethbridge loves Ladybird Books

Victor Sebestyen tackles the Russian bear

The NHS - Michael Barber takes the temperature

Biography & Memoir History Arts Sport

Issue 65 Autumn 2023

Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Big Caesars and Little Caesars How They Rise and How They Fall from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson by

Ferdinand Mount

Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit

A Life of Dorothy Wellesley by

Jane Wellesley

Homer and his Illiad by

Robin Lane Fox

Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World by Benedict King

Be

Mine

by Richard Ford

Capote’s Women by

Laurence Leamer

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing by

Thomas Harding

The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic by

Jean-Manuel Roubineau

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad:A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival

by Daniel Finkelstein

Last Post by

Frederic Raphael

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

Editorial Panel: Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Jane Mays, Harry Mount, James Pembroke

Editor: Jane Mays

Design: Lawrence Bogle

Cover: Bob Wilson

Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller

Publisher: James Pembroke

Advertising: Paul Pryde, Jasper Gibbons, Monty Martin-Zakheim

For advertising enquiries call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093

For editorial enquiries, e-mail: editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Reasons to be cheerful?

From the war in Ukraine to wildfires around the world and a summer of industrial strife at home, reasons to be cheerful have not been much in evidence. In an effort to make sense of some of our woes and to lift our spirits, we’ve assessed the literature on offer and its potential to help us understand what is happening in our world.

Russia expert Victor Sebestyen has considered some of the best titles to emerge from the tragedy of Ukraine. From the musings of historians to the plight of the country’s civilians and the soldiers on the frontline, we can better understand what life is like for Ukrainians - and even for the Russian soldiers, many of whom would prefer not to be fighting this war.

On the home front, Michael Barber looks at a slew of books about the NHS from the point of view of those who work in it and those who seek to be cured. There can be no doubt that the patient is ailing – but can our health service be saved in its present form?

Perhaps the best panacea for our collective anxiety is to be found in books, of which there are many to choose from in this season’s Oldie Review. Whether your taste runs to history, biography, arts, nature, fiction or books for children and grandchildren, there are treasures to be mined on every page. And for the ultimate comfort read, don’t miss Lucy Lethbridge on the glory of Ladybirds. The books we all grew up on and whose appeal never fades.

We wish you rich and rewarding reading as the nights draw in.

Jane Mays

A THREAD OF VIOLENCE A STORY OF TRUTH, INVENTION AND MURDER MARK O’CONNELL

Granta, 288pp, £16.99

Reviewers were unanimous: this true-crime book was outstanding, surpassing its genre limits. Rob Doyle in the Guardian called it something new and dizzying, Borgesian’. O’Connell, he was delighted to discover, had not settled for being a reporter but had become an artist.

The key term all said readers had to understand was ‘gubu’, coined when the Irish Prme Minister, Charles Haughey described Malcom Macarthur’s two murders in 1982 as ‘grotesque, unbelievable’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘unprecedented’.

Haughey’s government would eventually be brought down by his association with Macarthur, an extravagant Dublin flaneur who had planned a bank raid to prop up his ailing finances during which he brutally murdered two young people.

BEE GEES BOB STANLEY

Nine Eight Books, 392pp, £22

singles, outstripped only by the Beatles and the Supremes.’

Craig Campbell of online music magazine Louder Than War said, ‘You don’t get the feeling of the Bee Gees becoming a band because they had to, rather that they were following some cursed family tradition. They almost seem resigned to failure.’

But when they were down, they always came back up. ‘What the book really relays is the band’s steel in the face of adversity,’ said Campbell. ‘The Gibbs were no manufactured patsies. They didn’t come bearing pop gifts from the end of some Svengali’s production line. That’s the reason they were able to carry on past their crisis Eighties, into the Nineties, the new millennium and beyond.’

TURNING OVER THE PEBBLES  A LIFE IN CRICKET AND IN THE MIND

MIKE BREARLEY

Constable, 296pp, £22

He was arrested at the penthouse flat of Ireland’s attorney general.

O’Connell won Macarthur’s trust on his release from jail 30 years later and based his book on their conversations. Ronan Macdonald, The Guardian’s true crime editor, saw the murderer as an avatar from whom the author extracted his under-standing of ‘the darkness and violence that run beneath the surface of many lives’.

For Christopher Benfey in the New York Times, Macarthur was a mash-up of Tom Ripley and Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing he said was either true or untrue.

In analysing him, O’Connell had over-relied on Borgesian labyrinths, but it was a ‘rigorously honest book’ that gave no pat answers.

For James McConnachie in the Sunday Times, the book read like something by a French literary theorist, and overall he found its literariness ‘perhaps overplayed’. But it was exceptional storytelling, ‘utterly, compellingly gubu’.

‘The Bee Gees remain,’ as Stanley writes, “othered”, rarely accorded the respect they deserve,’ said Andrew Martin in the Guardian. ‘And he suggests that such praise as they do receive tends to be conditional: “It’s the Bee Gees… but it’s really good”.’

‘They were born in the Isle of Man, Barry (the only surviving one) in 1946, the twins, Robin and Maurice, in 1949. Their father, an itinerant fading band leader, moved the family to Manchester, where in 1957 the three sang Wake Up Little Susie at the Gaumont picture house in Chorlton. The following year, the Gibbs moved to Australia, where the brothers became child stars and Barry started writing songs. ‘”We were like the Brontë sisters,” said Robin, meaning they created their own world.’

‘Normality doesn’t have much of a part to play in the story of the Bee Gees, the band formed by three recovering juvenile delinquents fond of the Everly Brothers and low-level arson,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘There was nothing normal about an adolescence spent singing alongside dancing dogs and jugglers... There was nothing normal about their turbulent international career, either, with nine US No 1

As Ollie Randall warned in the TLS, ‘Brearley’s surprising autobiographical work runs the risk of being marketed as a cricket memoir. It isn’t. Such a label would do a disservice both to readers, who will find limited cricket content, and to Brearley, who has written a thoughtful and challenging book.’

One could certainly have little interest in the sport and still be drawn into this meandering meditation, since the emphasis is much more on the other half of Brearley’s life – studying philosophy and practising psychoanalysis.

Back in his cricketing days, said Donald McRae in the Guardian, ‘one of his predictable nicknames was Egghead. [Geoff] Boycott would stress his disdain more bluntly: “I want none of your intellectual stuff!”.’

‘A similar uncertainty stalked Brearley in the very different world of psychoanalysis. ‘I felt self-conscious,’ he says, ‘as I didn’t want to be known as “the cricketer”. But now I’m completely relaxed and more interested in the overlaps and continuities between these worlds.’

‘The structure of this book has something of the messiness and unpredictability of an hour on the couch,’ said Nikhil Krishnan in the Telegraph, ‘but with a decent, fallible

Comeback kids: the Bee Gees

‘He was a mash-up of Tom Ripley and Jeffrey Epstein’

Biography & memoir

man whose psychoanalytic training hasn’t shorn him of his capacity for irony and scepticism.’

Randall’s view was: ‘There is a sense of productive thinking out loud. Brearley ponders a range of topics that have informed his view of the world, articulating his opinions on, for example, mortality and ancient Greek literature. He does not pontificate and his insights are compelling. This is a questing, uncertain book that makes a virtue of uncertainty, requiring the reader to engage deeply in order to keep up.’

FRANCE ON TRIAL THE CASE OF MARSHAL PÉTAIN

JULIAN JACKSON

Allen Lane, 480pp, £25

Pétain led the French Army to victory against the Germans in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, but in June 1940 Pétain became head of the French

meticulous account of the trial is the hopeless mediocrity of almost all people involved in it: from judges and jurors (résistants and parliamentarians) to lawyers prosecutors and witnesses. Everybody seemed animated by petty or self-serving feelings; they were either out of their depth or spineless, but above all most were morally ambivalent.’

As Munro Price wrote in the Literary Review, the trial ‘was about much more than the fate of one extremely elderly man. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to confront the traumas it had endured from May 1940 to August 1944... The central narrative of the trial grips like a thriller and the history of Vichy itself, which inevitably involves much retrospective explanation, is seamlessly woven into it without ever slowing the story’s momentum.

Jackson’s vivid prose is leavened by wit and sharpened by telling details, often drawn from his rich knowledge of the French culture of the period.’

NICK DRAKE

RICHARD MORTON JACK

John Murray, 562pp, £30

eventually, get up, wash or speak. Admittedly, the later abjurations were the fault of his still undiagnosed mental illness, but he’d had a lot of practice by then.’

Keiron Pim in the Guardian noted that the book ‘has been written with the blessing of Nick’s sister, [the actor] Gabrielle Drake, which is both a strength and a weakness. In her foreword, Gabrielle pays tribute to their parents, Molly and Rodney. The book closes with a psychiatrist’s letter reassuring them they could have done no more to prevent his death.

government and signed an armistice with the occupying enemy. In this ‘brilliantly researched and vividly narrated’ book, wrote Daniel Snowman in the Jewish Chronicle, Jackson ‘manages to engage the reader, adopting a rich literary style with which to communicate not only the data and opinions expressed but also the atmosphere in and outside the court and something of the personality of a variety of characters, from prime ministers such as the Jewish socialist Léon Blum or the vain and dapper Paul Renaud to writers such as the scruffy, antisemitic Céline or Pétain’s passionate young defence lawyer Jacques Isorni.’

For Agnès Poirier, in her Observer review, what she found ‘chilling in Jackson’s beautifully researched and

‘Understanding Drake has become a full-scale industry since his death [by suicide] in 1974, aged 26,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘The creator of three inscrutably beautiful records — Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1971) and Pink Moon (1972) — Drake had almost no public profile in his lifetime. He has since moved through the stations of the cult hero — reappraisal, rediscovery, a song on a car advert — to occupy a canonical place in British music.’

This phenomenally detailed biography reveals how much those who knew Drake loved, admired and puzzled over him. As Segal said, ‘Morton Jack does everything he can to honour Drake as a human being, not an unknowable cloud of myth and mental illness.’

Suzi Feay in the Spectator called the musician ‘an undoubted genius’ but said: ‘Like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Drake would “prefer not to”, and the list is long: do any academic work, develop his sporting talent, have sex, pursue relationships, go on tour, turn up on time for meetings, find a job, fill the car with petrol and,

But by then it’s clear that Drake’s relationship with them was fundamental to his distress. He was consumed by rage at feeling misunderstood, monitored and controlled, especially by Rodney, who tried to steer him towards a “proper” career.’

Ultimately, Drake’s is an almost unbearably tragic story.

PARACHUTE WOMEN THE WOMEN BEHIND THE ROLLING STONES

ELIZABETH WINDER

Hachette, 288 pp, £25

Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg. ‘These women behind the Rolling Stones were even cooler than the band’ gushed Raquel Laneri in the New York Post, describing how before the boys met Pallenberg in 1965, Brian Jones ‘still wore pants bought by his Mom’, Mick and Keith had ‘barely slept with anyone’ and none of them had ever done drugs. Pallenberg, meanwhile, had ‘modelled in Italy, hung out with Andy Warhol, and bedded loads of both men and women’.

A conflicted genius: Nick Drake

Hero or traitor? Marshal Pétain

Faithfull, number two in this four-muse hierarchy, has ‘always credited Pallenberg with creating the Stones’, wrote Helen Brown in the Spectator. ‘She brought them swashbuckling, gender-bending flair and the confidence to flout the rules.’

Incestuous havoc ensued, ‘Richards with Pallenberg; Pallenberg cheating with Jagger; stately homes turned into grimy, gothic opium dens with their chatelaines enjoying sexy high jinks before sinking into druggy domestic drudgery.’

And there we have the crux of it: while Jagger et al progressed to ever greater glamour and glitz, the women descended into addiction, domesticity and serial failure.

Victoria Segal in the Times thought the stories of Winder’s other two subjects ‘undertold’: Marsha Hunt, the ‘Berkeley-educated singer and Hair star, gave birth to Jagger’s daughter Karis, a rush of free-love idealism that ended in a less than cosmic paternity suit,’ while Jagger’s first wife, Bianca, ‘soon found herself ‘holding a literal baby while the Stones’ decadent caravan rolled on’.

Segal thought Winder’s style could ‘tip into breathless teen-romance, a kind of psychedelic Pills & Boon’, while Jessica Hopper in the Washington Post thought it was ‘a step toward’ according the women their ‘rightful place’ but felt it lacked context and detail. Ultimately, it served best to stoke ‘a hunger for a deeper dive’ into the lives of this fab four.

ONE BOY, TWO BILLS AND A FRY UP WES STREETING

Hodder & Stoughton, 311pp, £20

The Shadow Health Secretary’s memoir was universally marked down for its prose style — written in a hurry, over-reliant on clichés — but

the man himself won admirers. For the Observer’s Rachel Cooke the book was both ‘unexpectedly fascinating’ and ‘a little bit boring’. ‘No one wants to read this much about the road to NUS president, not even Wes’s mum’. Yet this story of a conflicted gay working-class lad becoming a power player at Westminster intrigued her. She also sounded a warning to Keir Starmer: this was Streeting lining up his tanks on the future PM’s lawn.

In the Daily Telegraph Ella Whelan wasn’t impressed. She was on the marches protesting against student tuition charges in 2010, demos the NUS under Streeting had decided not to back two years earlier, favouring a candlelit vigil. She saw the book as an ‘election flyer’ aimed at potential Labour voters — ‘a misery memoir for the middle classes, without the miser’.

The facts of Streeting’s upbringing — his grandads the Bills, one who did time, one devoutly religious; the breakfast his teenage mother ate while pregnant with him, to forestall a termination — led Ian Leslie in Prospect to call it ‘barely a political memoir at all, which makes it human, endearing and a little unsatisfying. He looked forward to Streeting’s next book, when he had more achievements to write about.

Robert Colls in the Literary Review typified the split stance of the reviews: although reading the book was ‘like bingeing on EastEnders’, he saw Streeting as a rare breed of leader, with emotional intelligence and first-hand experience of the ills his party sought to address.

Similarly, for Jason Cowley in the Sunday Times the book was nothing less than a ‘personal manifesto for a new era of Labour government.’

WINKLE

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF BRITAIN’S GREATEST TEST PILOT

PAUL BEAVER

Penguin Books, 544pp, £25

Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, a record-breaking naval test and fighter pilot of exceptional skill and dedication whose feats proved crucial to winning the war, was awarded so many medals that King George VI was heard to say as he presented another: ‘What, you again?’

‘Eric “Winkle” Brown may not be a household name,’ opined Roger Alton in the Daily Mail, ‘but he certainly should be, and this thumping great biography by Britain’s leading aviation historian deserves to put that right.’

‘Beaver recounts the story of a man he regarded as a mentor in un-showy but fascinating details, and restores a British hero to his rightful place,’ Alexander Larman agreed in the Guardian. Patrick Bishop in the Telegraph praised Beaver’s ‘excellent new biography’.

Beaver already knew his subject,

but the 20 chests of documents, flight records and letters Brown entrusted to him for a book to be written after his death, not only shone ‘a light on feats of heroism and derring-do,’ according the Herald, but also revealed some surprises.

Brown, whose Scottishness was so much part of his identity, was born in Hackney to an unmarried mother, and adopted as a baby by an Edinburgh couple.

‘Brown’s tendency towards embellishment hardly matters, given the range of his certified achievements,’ Bishop argued, ‘Winkle’s life, after all, had enough incident for several books.’

There was his interrogation of Herman Goering in 1945, for which his expertise and fluent German qualified him. Goering opened up to a fellow fighter pilot, even though he did proclaim the Battle of Britain ‘a draw’.

Brown’s knowledge and contacts in Germany enabled him to identify and track down German scientists and their technologies: how to break the sound barrier? His findings proved vital in revolutionising the British and US aviation industries for the next 50 years.

Sexual politics: Jagger and Faithfull

Derring-do and medals: ‘Winkle’ Brown

RURAL

THE LIVES OF THE WORKING CLASS COUNTRYSIDE  REBECCA SMITH

William Collins, 256pp, £18.99

Rebecca Smith spent her early childhood in a tied cottage on the Cumbrian estate where her father worked as a forester; now that cottage is an expensive holiday let. In Rural, she examines the social upheavals that have changed the British landscape and those who work in it over the last half century. As Mathew Lyons, praising a ‘thoughtful’ study in the Literary Review puts it, she asks big questions of modern rural life: ‘Who is the countryside for? What do we mean when we talk about ownership of land? Who gets to decide what is best for the land and those whose livings are tied up in it? For whose benefit is the landscape worked?’

James MacConnachie in the Sunday Times found it ‘both eye-opening and persuasive’ and the Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly, himself the grandchild of estate workers, was delighted by how Smith was unafraid of difficult questions. ‘Her analysis is acute and dislodging and revelatory. It is also very self-aware, in a good way, the author constantly crossexamining herself on the ambiguities and paradoxes of what the rural life really means. I do not know if un-polemic is a word, but I admire that Smith has written something which does not reduce the world to easy answers but revels in its difficulty.’

THE INVENTION OF ESSEX

TIM BURROWS

Profile Books, 336pp, £16.99

Episodic and digressive, it would have benefited from a tighter structure... Burrows travels, but is not on tour, in the style of Priestley or Sebald. A lucid and erudite guide, he is good company but ultimately defeated in his self-appointed task to reinvent Essex.’

Simon Heffer, who wrote a famous Sunday Telegraph article in 1990 in which he identified ‘Essex Man’ as the quintessence of Thatcherism, reviewed the book for the New Statesman. ‘This is a thoughtful, atmospheric book of genuine insight and erudition,’ he wrote. ‘I have lived in Essex most of my life, but I nevertheless learned things from it, partly because it deals so thoroughly with the part of the county I know least. Essex really is special, because of its refusal to indulge in conformity, and Burrows’s book conveys the reality of the place in a way that amplifies its uniqueness. If you are interested in this remarkable microcosm of England, the book will grip you; if you aren’t, it will make you realise that you jolly well should be.’

HOW THE COUNTRY HOUSE BECAME ENGLISH  STEPHANIE BARCZEWSKI

ReaktionBooks, 392pp, £25

In the Guardian, Richard Benson, another writer with rural workingclass roots, found ‘its strength is Smith’s sharp eye for new examples of urban money breaking up the relationship between local people and their landscapes. Corporations who offset their pollution by planting thousands of trees in inappropriate locations where the saplings will die off anyway; absentee landlords who shorten tenancy agreements so farmers can’t plan long-term improvement of the land; the gentry sacking estate workers and hawking their heritage to the leisure industry.’

The Invention of Essex is ‘partmemoir, part-travelogue and part-political tract’, wrote Jason Cowley, who grew up in an Essex new town, in his review for the Sunday Times. For Burrows ‘the caricature of Essex is an irritation and an opportunity. He knows his home county has been misunderstood and therefore demands to be reimagined or “invented” or even reinvented.’

The book ‘begins with the author and his family relocating to Southend... The area where Burrows settles is familiar to him from childhood, yet it remains mysterious, with its marshy villages, sudden sea fogs and remote coastal fringes. As the book deepens you understand that what you are reading is less a social history of the whole county than a study in place: south Essex...

‘People have been assigning meanings to country houses ever since Ben Jonson [1572-1637] eulogised Penshurst Place, with its long lineage and its ancient pedigree,’ wrote Adrian Tinniswood in the Literary Review. ‘In the mid-20th century,’ he continued, ‘politicians on both sides of the House of Commons declared that the English country house was an anachronistic relic of an undemocratic age. The Lords, on the other hand, argued that they were

Penshurst: home of the Sidneys from 1552

The big question: who is the countryside for?

Country childhood: Rebecca Smith

Country matters

a vital part of the nation’s heritage and that their guardians deserved handouts from whatever government was in power. Meanwhile, the public began handing over their half-crowns for a glimpse of … the stately home industry,’

The country house came to embody Englishness. Country houses were symbols of England’s stability before they became, as now, symbols of ‘all that is best and all that is worst about Britain and its empire.’

Tinniswood was not entirely convinced by Stephanie Barczewski’s search for a one-size-fits-all theory that brackets the immense variety of country houses together, but, ‘I found myself having to defend or revise plenty of my assumptions about the country house.’ He conceded that Barczewski’s book was ‘well worth reading for that alone.’

SHAPING THE WILD WISDOM FROM A WELSH HILL FARM  DAVID ELIAS

Calon, 232pp, £18.99

Farmers and conservationists often seem in conflict with each other — protection of wildlife versus making a livelihood from the land. In Shaping the Wild David Elias, who is a retired warden and conservationist, explores a farm in the Snowdonia National Park (where he has lived for some 35 years) and explains the reality of trying to reconcile hill farming with caring for nature.

He visits the farm throughout the different seasons, forming a relationship with the people who work the land and learning about their way of life and their everchanging farming practices along with their concerns about the future.

In the Literary Review, Mathew Lyons wrote that the book offers an ‘unsentimental, clear-sighted account of the realities of rural life’ and how often qualities such as deep knowledge, resourcefulness and intelligence that are required to work the natural world are ignored by those making decisions.

Elias, though, is still regarded as something of an outsider, despite marrying a Welsh woman and bringing up their children to speak Welsh. ‘It is typical of his generosity of mind,’ explained Lyons, ‘that he understands this. “If your family have worked a piece of land for

generations, then I have only just arrived,” he notes.’

On the Nation Cymru website, Myfanwy Alexander thought the book a ‘thoughtful, at times elegiac, insight into the natural world of a Welsh hill farm’. She continued: ‘Elias clearly loves the landscape he describes and his nature writing is shot through with integrity: he admires blanket bogs but is truthful about the low number of species they support in comparison, say, with broad-leaved woodlands.’ She thought Shaping the Wild was not just a good book but an important one too that would quickly become ‘a classic of Welsh nature writing, a loving yet challenging evocation of a unique environment’.

COURSES FOR HORSES NICHOLAS CLEE

W&N, 272pp, £22

A day at the races has long signified a grand day out. There are 59 racecourses in Britain and 26 in

Ireland, and Clee writes up most in search of the magic that is the thrill of a trip to the races. On his journey he shares stories of horses, jockeys, trainers; he discusses the history of the race as well as spotlighting the best place to watch the spectacle.

‘This is a book for racing enthusiasts,’ wrote Anne de Courcy in the Spectator, ‘whether course-goers or chairbound, of whom our late queen was the paramount exemplar.’

Robin Oakley, in the Literary Review, was an enthusiast for what he called ‘essentially a diary of visits.’ He recognised the author to be ‘a true member of the racing tribe, a man who, with a betting ticket on the favourite in his pocket, will still cheer home a winning outsider because it is a once-famous horse recovered from injury or is ridden by a bashed-up jockey down on his luck.’

Oakley was critical too; ‘Clee gives his verdict on their welcomes, their loos, the quality of their burgers and the best vantage points for watching the racing. All this is handy but highly subjective. Far more valuable than his Tripadvisor-style rundowns are his delightful digressions into the histories of the tracks and into every aspect of racing, from whip regulation to speed ratings.’ Oakley found the book ‘Fun, quirky and informative.’

Laura Thompson, reviewing in the TLS welcomed this ‘authoritative’ book which celebrated the sport and the industry without shying away from the problems faced by racing: financial, reputational and ethical. Racing’s greatest asset, Queen Elizabeth II, is no longer a presence, and ‘horse racing is rather like monarchy: obsessed with modernization, but fundamentally impossible to modernize.’

A leap of faith – and courage: steeplechasers navigate a water jump

Baa humbug: a Welsh badger-face ewe

After 35 years, in Snowdonia, I have only just arrived

The NHS at 75 - still fit for purpose?

MICHAEL BARBER investigates

The NHS was founded with the very best of intentions. To ensure, as Aneurin Bevan put it, ‘that the rich and the poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability and wealth is not an advantage.’

Seventy-five years on, is this still the case? No, says Henry Marsh, the celebrated brain surgeon. Writing in the Lancet, he insisted that ‘without major extra investment in the NHS, the open sore of profound inequalities in health outcomes between the social classes will become even worse, despite the NHS’s avowed intention of free and equal treatment for all.’

Referencing strikes by healthcare staff, March said this proved that there were ‘limits to how far vocation can be exploited.’ He blamed successive Tory governments for running down health and social welfare rather than raising taxes on those who could afford them.

Consequently, ‘since World War II, with the exception of New Labour years, this country has consistently spent less on health care per capita than our European peers.’ And yet, according to a poll conducted last year, the NHS – ‘our NHS’ – topped

the list of things people thought were best about Britain.

Marsh had no quarrel with the slogan ‘Our NHS’, which reflected ‘the widely held belief that it is a crucial part of British national identity and politics.’

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, another distinguished specialist, the oncologist Professor Karol Sikora, disagreed. He once described the NHS as ‘the last bastion of Communism’, so no surprise that he should reject the notion that this ‘bureaucratic monster’ is still ‘Britain’s best-loved institution.’

Both Henry Marsh and Professor Sikora were reviewing Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best-Loved Institution by Andrew Seaton (Yale, 320pp, £20), one of several books published recently to mark the 75th birthday of the NHS. The professor is unusual in refusing to cheer – perhaps I should say ‘clap’. For while all the other reviews that I’ve read acknowledge what the

Do we really need a medicine to combat loneliness?

Financial Times calls ‘the glaring mismatch between demand and resources’ identified by Seaton, none of them share Sikora’s scorn for ‘the cult of the NHS’.

How to explain this cult? –exemplified by the dancing NHS patients, nurses and doctors who enlivened the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

The short answer is provided by David Haslam in Side Effects (Atlantic Books, 304pp, £10.99). A past president of the BMA, Sir David was diagnosed with aggressive head and neck cancer in 2018. After his first bout of radiotherapy, he thought ‘how lucky I was to be living in a country with a health service that meant I didn’t have to think about the cost of the treatment, let alone pay for it … Cancer was quite worrying enough, without the added fear of bankruptcy.’

If this sounds smug, I should add that Sir David shares many of Henry Marsh’s worries. The NHS, he says, ‘has suffered a double whammy in recent years.’ First there was the austerity politics embraced by Cameron and Osborne after the

NHS founder Aneurin Bevan visits the first ever NHS patient in Manchester

global financial crisis of 2008. Then there was Covid-19, ‘which tested the NHS to its absolute limits.’

The NHS at 75 Scrambling to prolong our lives is no way to live

Sir David says there are no quick fixes, but he does caution against what he calls ‘the gradual medicalisation of everyday life.’ Do we really need a medicine to combat loneliness? he asks. ‘Kindness, compassion and community get better results than focusing only on the medical model.’

He also criticises ‘defensive medicine‘, in which clinicians feel ‘it is better to be criticised for doing something than for not doing something.’ Hence a lot of ‘unnecessary medical tests, diagnoses and therapies that can lead to waste – not just of money but of time and expertise.’

Waste also preoccupies Dr Phil Whitaker, a GP who doubles as the medical editor of the New Statesman. In What is a Doctor (Canongate, 320pp, £16.99), a chatty personal retrospective, he distinguishes between evidencebased medicine (EBM), ‘a force for good’, and evidence-dictated medicine (EDM), ‘altogether more problematic’. EBM leaves it up to the doctor to decide what’s best for his patient. EDM is more like an order, which can result in unnecessary and expensive procedures. Fear of litigation leads many doctors to subscribe to EDM, even though they suspect their patient would be better off without a further ‘cocktail’ of potent – and expensive – medicines.

In Our NHS, Andrew Seaton applauds the NHS for successfully resisting ‘the tsunami of attempts to marketise it’.

Patients

Millions of people live with infirmity. Very few of them have the skill to write cogently about how they cope. Andrew Leland fits this bill. So too does Sylvia Patterson. Both are distinguished journalists. And both face an uncertain future.

I think Dr Julia Patterson would dispute this. In 2019 she founded EveryDoctor, a medical pressure group designed to halt the ‘creeping privatisation of the NHS.’

In Critical (Mudlark, 224pp, £16.99), a passionate manifesto for change, she accuses both parties, with an election looming up, of placing political ambition above the safety of the public. This may explain why Alan Johnson, a former Labour Minister of Health, describes her book as ‘a dreary polemic’.

Johnson says the NHS ‘has always been a public-private partnership’. Tongue in cheek – I presume – he concludes, ‘For those like her who can’t accept the use of the private sector to provide additional capacity in a health service free at the point of need, there is only one piece of advice –should have gone to Specsavers.’

By common consent the pithiest book on this divisive subject is Fighting for Life: The Twelve Battles that Made Our NHS and the Struggle for Its Future (Viking, 384pp £20) by Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of the Spectator. ‘Beautifully balanced, cogent and human’ was how Melanie Reid described it in the Times, while the Financial Times said Hardman’s book was ‘breezily accessible, deeply -researched and full of colourful vignettes and an enjoyable spice of gossip as befits a political journalist.’

She devotes a chapter to Enoch Powell, who as Minister of Health ‘presided over a great deal of useful immigration of doctors and nurses.’ Consequently, she says, the history of the NHS is not only ‘one of immigration’ but also ‘the history of British society’.

Living well, it’s been said, is the best revenge. But surely there’s also a case to be made for dying well. ‘Scrambling for new things that might possibly prolong our life is no way to live.’ Exactly. I am 81, so not too far from ‘the departure lounge’. When I reach it I hope the doctor I’m under heeds these lines by the Victorian poet, Arthur Clough: ‘Thou shalt not kill/But need’st not strive/ Officiously to keep alive.’

Leland has retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary condition that eventually results in total blindness.

Patterson is in remission from an aggressive type of breast cancer that required months of chemotherapy, one of the side effects of which is acute constipation, described by her in excruciating detail.

Most of Leland and Patterson’s readers will, I imagine, thank their lucky stars. But that’s hardly a reason to buy books like these. At the very least, you hope to learn something. For instance in The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (Penguin, £25.99), Leland explains that blindness is not as black as it’s painted, ‘but an efflorescence of blind varietals’, with different kinds of lights, shadings and colours.

Again, as Alexandra Jacobs noted in the New York Times, ‘Leland invites readers to consider whether vision deserves “the privileged position it holds at the top of the hierarchy of senses.”’ Covid-19 reminded us of the preciousness, even primacy, of smell and taste.’

Covid is the least of the hurdles 58-year-old Sylvia Patterson had to surmount. Hailed in The Face as ‘a titan among pop music journalists’, she began to hear the sombre notes of a death march as the severity of her cancer became apparent.

Luckily, she had a very supportive partner and, as Same Old Girl (Fleet, 304pp, £20) shows, no expense was spared by the NHS to help her get better:

‘I’m seriously fortunate: the treatment, called Kadcyla, was not only not available until recently, but cost £51,000. So, if I lived in America, I would be doomed.’

Not surprisingly, Patterson’s book is dedicated to ‘The Miracle of the NHS’ and it’s a compelling, if slightly breathless, read. I stopped keeping up with pop music long before she started writing about it, so I’m probably not her ideal reader. But early on she won me over by her use of the word ‘swizz’, to describe her predicament. I’m sure that others who don’t know their Bono from their Bowie, will also be persuaded by this mettlesome memoir.

In theatre: the drama of the operation

SHADOWS AT NOON THE SOUTH ASIAN TWENTIETH CENTURY

JOYA CHATTERJI

Bodley Head, 849pp, £30

Married to Anil Seal, Chatterji is ‘one half of the power couple that has led the study of South Asian history at Cambridge for fifty years,’ wrote Oxford historian Zareer Masani in the Literary Review, and is therefore ‘well placed’ to meet the challenge of ‘writing a history of South Asia covering a period of a century and addressing everything from politics and the family to food and Bollywood films.’

Masani found Chatterji to be ‘most entertaining in the candid autobiographical vignettes she offers us of life in the upper middle-class Delhi home where she grew up, with a Brahmin Bengali father and an English mother... Although occasionally verbose and repetitive, this is a book which both scholars and the general public can dip into, enjoy and learn from.’

Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook found that ‘the shadow of religious and ethnic hatred hangs over much of the book... and yet there is plenty of light amid the darkness.’ For example, Chatterji ‘writes with infectious relish about the baazigars – “magicians, tumblers and acrobats” – who wandered across India in the final decades of the Raj, leaping through rings laced with daggers or lifting heavy weights with their teeth.’

While it is ‘long and dense, and concentrates on Bengal and the Punjab at the expense of the south’ and while the author ‘comes across as being immensely pleased with herself’, nonetheless Sandbrook thought it was refreshing ‘to read a history of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that rises above the

usual national and chronological divisions, and that ends on a surprisingly upbeat note.’

Writing in the Guardian, William Dalrymple called it ‘wide-angled and hugely ambitious, but also highly personal and pleasingly discursive... Throughout, Chatterji’s tone is non-academic and conversational, at times even chatty.’ The result is ‘a wonderfully original, genre-defying work that is sure to become a classic.’

ASSYRIA

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WORLD’S FIRST EMPIRE

ECKHART FRAHM

Bloomsbury, 528pp, £30

This is ‘a sweeping, delightfully readable effort to remind us of Assyria’s place in history,’ wrote Pratinav Anil in the Times. ‘The range of its sources is truly extraordinary: tablets and stele, of course, but also faunal and floral analysis, advanced forms of pottery studies and satellite images. Frahm’s prose has a light, aphoristic touch, although there are occasional tonal lapses. In one of his fustier passages, for example, when relating how fiercely protective kings could be of their concubines, cutting the feet of those who so much as mistakenly trespassed into the carnal sanctums, he writes, “The harems

with empathetic portraits of everyday life. Ashurbanipal was a sadist, but he also established what was the most magnificent library in the world up to that time. The cuneiform sources allow vivid insights into the experience of ordinary men and women, whose fears about their children’s health or partners’ faithfulness humanize this distant civilization.

We know that, at one point, the chief scribe in Nineveh, a pre-eminent but underpaid intellectual, complained of his ‘tiny’ house, ‘so squalid that even a donkey would not want to enter it. Plus ça change.’

Soon after the reign of Ashurbanipal, ‘the Assyrian imperial experiment came suddenly, completely and permanently to an end. Mr. Frahm is a judicious guide to the various explanations, including the possibility of climate change as a contributing factor. But, not surprisingly, a mystery remains.’

VIRTUOUS BANKERS

ANNE L. MURPHY

Princeton University Press, 288pp, £30

Founded in 1694 to pay for William III’s wars, the Bank of England presided over an expansion of credit markets that was not matched in France. In 1783, rather than face regulation by the government, it created its own Committee of Inspection. ‘The brilliant premise of Murphy’s book is to use the copious materials thereby generated... to tell the micro-story of the Bank as an institution through a single representative day of operation,’ wrote Jesse Norman in the Spectator.

represented the correlate in sexualibus of the kings’ political and military power”...

It’s a high style that is happily counterbalanced by the brusque, almost comic tone of official chronicles, which he quotes at length. Sample the boast of a 7th-century ruler, a remarkable piece of six-word flash fiction: ‘Before me, cities; behind me, ruins.’ Move over, Hemingway.’

For Kyle Harper, in the Wall Street Journal, Frahm ‘balances a clear-eyed account of Assyria’s gruesome politics

‘We see the early rituals, the clerks in their offices, morning couriers or ‘out-tellers’ heading out across the City, the working practices, the grandeur of the buildings, the markets in operation, the clients, the division of labour, the pay and perks, the personal troubles, the moments of incompetence and fraud and deception and the often underappreciated threat of fire and violence, right through to the ancient wardens locking up for the night. It is the deepest of deep dives, literally quotidian and yet strangely gripping.’

Murphy takes us on a guided tour ‘with conviction and clarity’, wrote Perry Gauci in the Literary Review. ‘The bulk of the book flows very well,

Assyrian lama: half-human, half-deity

Nehru: India’s first Prime Minister

Xavier University in Ohio, ‘has dedicated her latest work entirely to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 – not because it provides the starting point of “a direct line to the FrancoGerman conflict at the heart of the Great War,” a causality she rejects, but because, she argues, it made the atrocities of the World Wars “more thinkable.” The core of this important distinction and one of the many strengths of Chrastil’s book is her focus on the human experience of conflict.’

with the Bank’s employees sequentially introduced to us as their daily tasks unfold hour by hour. Only in the final sections does the narrative pace drop a little as the author tackles the eclectic range of activities to be found at the end of the working day. This structure also helps Murphy to connect the Bank’s human denizens with its physical environment, one of the most fascinating themes of the book. ‘ The result is ‘compelling and lively and will please both academic and general readers’.

For James Taylor, in History Today, Murphy has turned ‘what could have been a dry bureaucratic history into a fascinating and engaging read’.

BISMARCK’S WAR THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE MAKING OF MODERN EUROPE RACHEL CHRASTIL

Allen Lane, 512pp, £30

In her review for EngelsbergIdeas. com, Katja Hoyer wrote that Chrastil, a historian of modern Europe at

This is an ‘engrossing narrative history that offers a great overview... and includes many well-selected and surprising details that have the potential to diversify and change perceptions of this important conflict even in readers who know the era well.’

Pratinav Anil, in the Times, thought the book ‘reads like Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad,’ which is to say Chrastil is ‘superb on the human consequences of war. It is ravishing in its evocations of wartime life... But description is one thing, interpretation another... Michael Howard in his 1961 volume The Franco-Prussian War, devoted far fewer pages to the fighting and many more to exploring the two national cultures at the heart of the FrancoPrussian War. Chrastil, by contrast, is rather more fascinated by individual battles, many of which take up whole chapters.’

Her book suffers from ‘an unwillingness to spell out broader implications’. Robert Gerwarth, in the Literary Review, said ‘it is precisely that human dimension of the war, the suffering of civilians and soldiers alike, that takes centre stage in Chrastil’s account. Chrastil brings these events to life in a vivid way... What remains somewhat unclear, and could have been made more explicit, is how exactly she sees the “place” of the Franco-Prussian War in the broader context of modern European history.’

GERMANY IN THE WORLD A GLOBAL HISTORY, 1500-2000

DAVID BLACKBOURN

Liveright, 832pp, £40

‘Any history of the industrialised world’s culture – scientific, technical, literary, military, philosophical, global-entertainment – has to accept the multiple creative impact of German emigration over the two previous centuries,’ declared Neal Ascherson in the Observer. ‘The whole world, not only America and Britain, was fertilised by the torrent of intellectual brilliance that fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s.

Less well known is the earlier outflow of refugee liberals and socialists, politicians, writers or barricade fighters, after the counterrevolutions that followed the great uprisings of 1848... These German currents, and especially their Jewish element, were intellectual and entrepreneurial.’ In sheer numbers, America was the principal beneficiary of this outflow. This is a ‘rich and full-throated book’, said Ascherson.

Of course, the ‘Germany in the world’ of 1900 ‘soon narrowed to mean only world war, genocide, destruction and then partition between Germany’s conquerors.’ But Germany’s response to the war in Ukraine has been to ‘replace total dependence on Russian energy and

Prussians on Parade: troops mustering in 1871 - precursor to the Great War?

1848: cheering revolutionaries in Berlin

The Bank of England by Rowlandson

A focus on the human experience of conflict

storm ahead towards ambitious climate targets. All done in months, by a sudden mobilisation of democratic vigour. Germany, at last, gives the world a leadership that threatens nobody.’ Indeed, a reunited Germany today is ‘Europe’s largest economy and an admired citizen of the world’ wrote Josef Joffe in his review for the Wall Street Journal Blackbourn ‘bids us to look through a “wider lens,” which reveals that Germany was not Europe’s odd-manout’. Germany, Italy, Japan, and America ‘went on a nationalist binge in the 1890s’. Why did Germany’s regime turn to genocide?

In spite of the growing literature on the Holocaust, the cosmic riddle remains unsolved.’ Joffe praised the book’s research, but suggested that ‘the central idea is often submerged beneath a torrent of names, details and digressions. That said, the book is superbly written, and even Germany buffs will find a surfeit of riches.’

THE LION AND THE DRAGON BRITAIN AND CHINA, A HISTORY OF CONFLICT LAWRENCE JAMES

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 256pp, £22

‘Countless histories of modern China, and Sino-British relations, have traced this narrative arc [from the First Opium War, 1839-42 to the present day], wrote Christopher Harding in the Daily Telegraph ‘What helps The Lion and the Dragon to stand out is its brevity and brisk pace.

‘A master of distillation, James covers just under 200 years of history in approximately the same number of pages. He does so while keeping his account broad and generally balanced, leaving it to readers to reach their own conclusions about the history itself and what it might mean for the future of Sino-British ties.’

By leaving out any possible prognostications about this relationship he keeps the book to ‘a manageable length’. His survey ‘moves, for the most part, to the rhythms of diplomacy and war. But he provides some wonderful thumbnail character sketches along the way, memorable and instructive in equal measure... The Chinese

warlord Zhang Zongchang was a dogmeat-eating ‘bull of a man, an opium smoker who succumbed to spasms of fury and crushed the skulls of prisoners with his sword, which he likened to ‘smashing melons’. He boasted of having the largest penis in China.’

Yuan Yi Zhu, who reviewed the book for the Times, found that James ‘writes with energy and flair, although readers unfamiliar with the topic may wish that the pace of his narrative would be slacker at times .

‘He is at his best when writing about Victorian imperial adventurers, the bread and butter of his earlier works. His few Chinese characters are much less well defined, no doubt because he writes almost entirely from English-language secondary sources, some of which are dated... James has written an entertaining and accessible introduction to the topic, but readers with a passing familiarity with modern Chinese history may prefer to look elsewhere.’

LOVE IN A TIME OF HATE FLORIAN ILLIES, TRANSLATED BY SIMON PARE

Profile Books, 336pp, £20

“Writing in a hectic, almost impromptu present tense while darting to and fro between dozens of parallel stories,’ explained Peter Conrad in the Observer, Illies ‘has pieced together the emotional history of a doomed generation.’ Conrad found that ‘the structure of Illies’s book, apparently haphazard in its quick cuts between people and

places, matches the creed of its characters’, and he asserted that ‘what Illies calls “the age of hate” has returned today, which gives his book a disturbing relevance’.

For Sebastian Faulks, in the Sunday Times, ‘this unusual book is a record of the love lives of 46 European artists, writers and public figures in the ten years leading up to the Second World War. Because although the subtitle is Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, there is almost nothing about art or war. There is in fact little about anything beyond sex.’ Faulks said that Illies ‘can write with gusto’ but ‘isn’t helped... by a style that tends to the novelettish...

The lapses of style are not really the issue, however. After the absence

Latin lovers: Sartre and de Beauvoir

The Boxer Rebellion, Peking 1900

‘There is little about anything –beyond sex’

of analysis, the chief problem lies in numbers. The 46 share less than 300 pages of narrative, which, with some space given to lesser figures, allows them only about six pages each... You end up not only feeling dizzy but also knowing slightly less than when you started.’

John Maeir, in the Times, accused the author of taking ‘a Sgt Pepper approach to history’ in which ‘the past becomes a motley group photograph of improbably acquainted famous faces. Partly as a result of the book’s organising conceit, and Illies’s often arch prose style, Love in a Time of Hate achieves something that is really rather impressive – turning the great moral dramas of the 20th century into breathless melodrama.’

PAX WAR AND PEACE IN ROME’S GOLDEN AGE TOM HOLLAND

Abacus, 414pp, £30

Tom Holland’s storytelling skills are familiar to his readers but also to the millions of fans who tune in to the wildly popular podcast The Rest is History. Pax is his characteristically vivid account of the period which began with the suicide of Nero and ended with the ascension of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Reviewers were impressed by the scope and the brio of Pax. For Gavanndra Hodge in the Sunday Times, ‘It provides context for some of the most famous moments and monuments in Roman history – the Colosseum, the razing of Jerusalem, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Trajan’s column, Hadrian’s wall, the growth of Christianity – and follows the rise and frequently gory fall of ten emperors, covering AD68 to AD138.’

Pax is a ‘subtle and often solemn book,’ opined Daisy Dunn in the Times, ‘concerned with the mechanics of ruling an empire and the consequences of that process for places such as Judaea. There’s a real extravagance to his prose, a love of concessive clauses and dramatic yet unpretentious words – “gawped”, “nagged”, “stupefied” – that will delight his long-term readers.’

Hodge loved the rich details of how to run an empire. ‘It is about the process of deciding what the edges of

that empire were, whether the resources of Rome should be poured into pushing further out, to conquer, plunder, pacify (Trajan’s approach); or whether it should be that of his successor Hadrian, who pulled back and built walls that delineated Rome’s reach, creating, for those lucky enough to be part of it, a pleasant “garden” — temples, libraries, baths, central heating, luxury goods. Pax Romana.’

In the Literary Review, Allan Massie was among the many who thought Holland had produced another corker. ‘He has written a magnificent, richly detailed and always fluently readable book. I have read nothing which gives such a detailed and compelling account of the political and administrative life of the provinces and their relations with the imperial government. A better history for the general reader could not have been written.’

THE WAGER A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER

DAVID GRANN

Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £20

In January 1742, a small boat was washed ashore in Brazil. Those aboard were survivors of the H.M.S. Wager, a British man-of-war which had run aground off the coast of Patagonia. Six months later another boat was washed ashore, this

time in Chile, containing three more survivors from the Wager, who claimed that the earlier group were mutineers. There was a court-martial back home in England which ended with a cover-up.

The New Yorker writer David Grann is one of those authors ‘whose books of history are so diverting that they almost seem implausible,’ said James Snell in his review for the U.S. edition of the Spectator. ‘Their narrative constrictions are so effective, the dialogue so apposite, that jaded readers might think everything has been made up or twisted to give the books life, in novelistic fashion. And yet... that’s not true at all. It’s all there in the notes: everything between quotation marks was actually said or written. It’s a remarkable skill.’

For Simon Caterson, in the Sydney Morning Herald, there were ‘echoes of the Bounty, Batavia and Medusa – the story is packed with powerful vignettes of skill, loyalty and courage as well as incompetence, misconduct and cruelty... The sheer audacity and brutality of the age of European imperial expansion is on full display.’

As Killian Fox put it in the Observer, ‘the story of survival warps into a tale of mutiny. But even the more sympathetic figures, he notes, were complicit in a far greater crime than mutiny: upholding the structures of empire as Britain expanded itself across the world, murdering, looting and dehumanising as it went... The Wager provides a valuable corrective, then, but not at the expense of a cracking yarn, with no shortage of jeopardy to bedevil its characters.’

The wreck of the Wager: shipwrecked in the fog to a wild island off Patagonia

‘In Pax, Holland has produced another corker’

THUNDERCLAP  LAURA CUMMING

Chatto, 272pp, £25

In 1654, a gunpowder explosion destroyed central Delft and the painter Carel Fabritius died in the rubble of his studio. Only 12 known paintings by Fabritius survive, the best known of them his depiction of a goldfinch. But art critic Laura Cumming, in a book acclaimed across the board, takes his intriguing ‘View of Delft’, with its bendy perspectives, as the starting point for a study encompassing not only Fabritius himself but her late father, James Cumming, an artist who loved Netherlandish painting, and the art and culture of the Dutch golden age.

In the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes loved the way that although ‘Cumming cannot in truth show us new definitive facts about Fabritius, she brings him out of the shadows, making us see why he is so much more than the missing link in someone else’s story.’

The Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly was also impressed. ‘Where Cumming truly excels is in the defence of Dutch art. As she notes, it was often disparaged as being “low” or merely representative, a notion she skewers with glee. The memoir aspects are neatly choreographed. That her first foreign holiday was to Holland, with her father teaching her to see Dutch art rather than merely look at it, is another piece of connective tissue between the 17th century and the now.’

In the Times, Ysenda Maxtone Graham ended on a tantalising cliffhanger: ‘This book ends with a small miracle of a Fabritius-related artistic discovery, made recently by a Danish conservator who was giving The Goldfinch a CT scan. It caused such a frisson down my spine

tthat I won’t spoil the reading of this excellent book by divulging it.’

And in the Literary Review, Norma Clarke concluded that ‘Thunderclap in its very title is a provocation to those who continue to think of Dutch painting as an art of quiet and peace, of timeless stillness. Reading it, we learn to look for the life in still life while remembering that life can end at any moment.’

ART MONSTERS: UNRULY BODIES IN FEMINIST ART LAUREN ELKIN

Chatto, 368pp, £25

Women’s bodies are so often the subject of men’s art but American writer Lauren Elkin is interested in how many women artists have put their own bodies at the centre of their work. She calls these women ‘art monsters’ (after a line in a Jenny Offill novel) for refusing the plans traditionally made for women’s bodies and instead looking at how female embodiment can be ‘relevant to all humankind.’

In the Guardian, Eliza

Goodpasture was impressed. ‘Her book is written in a series of short and long snippets, separated by slashes. Some are critical engagements with works of art, others are fragments of memoir about existing in a female body or the process of writing the book itself; still others are more general art historical criticism of reflection.’

And in the Spectator, Chloe Ashby praised a ‘superb book’ and prose which is ‘chatty and at times enjoyably blunt.’

Over at inews, Florence Hallett found it ‘compulsively readable.’

Other reviewers were not so sure all Elkin’s ideas and innovations came off. Both Tess Little in the Literary Review and Lucy Ellman in the Telegraph took issue with the number of dictionary definitions. ‘That old undergraduate trick,’ sniffed Ellman who also disliked Elkin’s tendency to tell us which artists ‘she thinks are beautiful or (bafflingly) “tiny”.’ Talk about ‘perpetuating the male gaze.’ And Little, though she found much to enjoy, wondered if Elkin’s non-linear style (‘a favoured form for the non-fiction nonconformist’) was as new as she thought it was or if the word associations ‘aren’t as revelatory as Elkin seems to want them to be.’

Rachel Cook in the Observer thought the theme (and the women) just didn’t hang together. ‘the only real connection I could see between them as I was reading was the fact that they were female.’

METROPOLITAIN AN ODE TO THE PARIS METRO ANDREW MARTIN

Corsair, 256pp, £16.99

‘Andrew Martin is in love,’ proclaimed Christian Wolmar in the Spectator, the object of his affection being the Paris Métro ‘While this may seem an irrational attachment, it becomes easier to understand as his account of the origins, history and, most importantly, design of the system unfolds.’

In what he described in the Oldie as an ‘utterly enjoyable voyage under Paris’, Christopher Howse enthused: ‘The Métro as an expression of Parisian culture became lovable in every detail, starting with the Art Nouveau entrances by Hector Guimard.’

David Mills in the Sunday Times

Delft: a city of ‘bendy’ perspectives

Frida Kahlo: ‘I am the subject I know best.’

noted how the Métro was an inspiration to French film makers. ‘Martin is good at weaving this cultural stuff into the more historical and technical side of his study, and on everything that makes the Métro so different from the London Underground.’

The latter was built earlier with 250 miles of track stretching out to expensive houses in the countryside. Paris has 140 miles of track, but many more stations — the primary purpose being to move people round the city rather than out of it.

‘Stations are class markers,’ Jonathan Meades claimed in the Telegraph — the further from the centre, the more likely you are to vote for Marine Le Pen.

‘Martin is the most unpretentious and companionable of guides; the book is great fun,’ Rupert Christiansen wrote in the Literary Review, while regretting that ‘the publisher didn’t grace it with a few illustrations and a map.’

Agnes Poirier in the Guardian claimed you don’t have to be a ‘rail fanatic’ in order ‘to enjoy the eclectic information and funny anecdotes of this charming book — but it would sometimes help.’ Yet it will ‘give Paris and Métro lovers what they are looking for: the infectious enthusiasm of a passionate fan with a clear eye for details.’

Mills conceded that when the book ‘turns to consider in detail each line in turn … the general reader will probably want to alight,’ while ‘any self-respecting Francophile will want to travel with him to the end.’

NATURAL LIGHT

JULIAN BELL

Thames & Hudson, 256pp, £25

Adam Elsheimer, born in Frankfurt, died in poverty in Rome in 1610. His tiny paintings (about the size, Julian Bell observes, of an i-pad screen) are jewel-like masterpieces but his name is little known. Only about 50 survive.

Art historian Bell has produced a fascinating, meticulous book about a painter of whom a contemporary once said ‘grasped Nature’s spirit and essence.’ In Rome, according to the novelist John Banville, reviewing the book in the Guardian, Elsheimer was known as the diavolo per gli cose piccole, the devil for little things.

Banville, who found the book

‘marvellous, engrossing and illuminating’ learned from Bell that ‘Aurora’, a landscape ‘over which a cloud-flecked gold and azure dawn is breaking’, just 225mm wide, was painted on a copper sheet, ‘prepared by being sanded and then rubbed with garlic juice.’ It is ‘a painting attentive to a state of mind, and how that mood is tied up with certain conditions of time, light and space’.

In the Literary Review, Michael Prodger was equally enthralled by ‘diminutive pictures that contain multitudes’ and praised Bell as ‘one of the most subtle writers on art currently at work.’ Elsheimer’s pictures ‘are a mental distillation of the external world that can display a “spiritual awkwardness” (Elsheimer was born a Lutheran but converted to Catholicism in Rome) as well as profound originality,’ wrote Prodger. ‘Rubens, in a eulogy to his friend, felt Elsheimer’s death to be a loss at which “our whole profession should clothe itself in mourning”, and this impressively scholarly and sympathetically intuitive book shows that he was not exaggerating. Bell has brought him back into the light.’

THE ART THIEF

A TRUE STORY OF LOVE, CRIME AND DANGEROUS OBSESSION

MICHAEL FINKEL

Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £16.99

‘If you’re unfamiliar with Stephane Breitwieser, then Michael Finkel’s gripping and often hilarious book will provide an invaluable insight into the man who was, for around a decade, the most dedicated and prolific art thief in the world,’ Alexander Larman enthused in the Observer. ‘Some may

quibble at Finkel’s generous treatment of him here, but this beguiling account earns sympathy for the devil.’

Over what Brandon Hensley described in the Washington Post as some ‘200 snackable pages’, Finkel details how the most prolific art thief in history, using only a Swiss army knife and his girlfriend as lookout, insouciantly ‘liberated’ over 300 works of art from museums and cathedrals, amassing a collection worth over $1billion.

‘This ultra-lucrative, odds-defying crime streak is wonderfully narrated by Finkel,’ Kathryn Schulz wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in a tale whose trajectory is less rise and fall than crazy and crazier.’

As Geoffrey Gagnon noted in GQ, Breitwieser ‘was motivated by beauty, not cash,’ secreting the treasures into the attic of his mother’s house.

‘Finkel portrays Breitwieser as a pure aesthete motivated solely by aesthetic passion,’ Alex MarzanoLesnevich observed in the New York Times, while in the Sunday Times Kathryn Hughes noted he was ‘an art obsessive’ who didn’t think the normal rules applied to him. The Economist pronounced Breitwieser ‘selfish in the pursuit of beauty’, while allowing that ‘the author’s account of the skulduggery is thrilling’.

‘Finkel’s narrative thrills and electrifies, until it all barrels toward inevitable capture, two shocking betrayals, and an astonishing conclusion,’ wrote Adrienne Westenfeld in Esquire

For once the thief was caught, his mother, ostensibly to protect her son, but more likely to punish him, threw his treasures into the canal or onto the bonfire.

Apollo and Coronis (1608), by Adam Elsheimer

Playing with words: writers on sport by MICHAEL BARBER

In the 5th century BC, Pindar, a Theban poet, immortalised the victors in the original Olympic games. If his Odes have lasted it’s because Pindar handled words with the same skill as his subjects drove a chariot or threw a punch.

The poet and cricket writer Alan Ross brought this analogy up to date: ‘The development of a style in prose and poetry and the perfecting of a stroke at cricket or rackets have much in common. They are the result of a desire for excellence, for the gesture that contrives an exact equivalent, and which can only be achieved by self-discipline and practice.’

Ross himself hit the mark with Watching Benaud Bowl, which opens like this:

Leg spinners pose problems much like love, Requiring commitment, the taking of a chance.

Half-way deludes; the bold advance.

Does this explain where Mike Gatting went wrong when facing Shane Warne for the first time? Pass.

But when compiling The Cricketer’s Companion, still the best anthology of its kind, Ross admitted that while cricket crops up in writers as different as Dickens and Pinter, there have been no decent novels about the game.

Could it be, he asked, because professional cricket ‘offers more drama, year in, year out, than fiction ever could?’ You have only to recall Stuart Broad’s farewell to Test cricket at the Oval – a six off his last ball at the crease and then taking the winning wicket – to see Ross’s point.

But how about soccer, which even MCC members must now concede has replaced cricket as our national game? More’s the pity, Frederic Raphael once wrote. But he also described The Rise of Gerry Logan, by his fellow Old Carthusian Brian Glanville, as ‘the best novel about professional footballers ever written.’

First published in 1963, this was reissued some years ago in the Faber Finds series. Supposedly based on Denis Law, and set in Italy as well as

Britain, it anticipates the sort of conflicts – personal as well as professional – that arose when players, rather than clubs, began to call the shots.

Though not as lethal as the contests Pindar hymned, but every bit as epic, prizefighting has been written about for more than two hundred years. One of its earliest celebrants was Pierce Egan, ‘the Plutarch’ of the Prize Ring, and of its followers, the Fancy.

Set in the depressed Californian city of Stockton, it’s the story of two semi-professional boxers, Billy and Ernie, who will never be contenders, but who cherish the forlorn hope that they may one day earn a living in the ring.

Greeted rapturously when it appeared in 1969 – one critic compared Garner’s ‘tough prose’ to ‘a jolting left jab’ – Fat City was a one-off.

Gardner went on to write short stories and screenplays, including one for John Huston’s acclaimed film of Fat City, but has never finished another novel.

Interviewed a few years ago he admitted this bothered him, but said that despite his great age – he was born in 1933 – he was still ‘sustained by illusion’, just like Billy and Ernie.

Many years ago the Folio Society published Boxiana, a collection of his writings, which transports the reader back to that gaudy era, the Regency, when the Old Adam briefly held sway and ‘bottom’ was the quality most admired by bucks and dandies. There were no gloves and no rounds. Fights went on until one party failed to ‘come up to scratch’.

The Victorians did their best to suppress Boxing, as it became known, but were thwarted by Lord Queensberry, who gave his name to the rules which obtain today. Enthusiasts call it ‘the noble art’, but there’s nothing noble about the two boxers depicted in Leonard Gardner’s tour de force, Fat City, the antithesis to sentimental twaddle like Rocky.

Swimming is both a sport and a pastime. But for Charles Sprawson, the author of Haunts of the Black Masseur, it was a passion that he spent much of his life trying to gratify, emulating Byron by swimming the Hellespont, somehow avoiding piranhas and alligators in the Amazon, and leaping, like Horatius, into the Tiber, the polluted waters of which made him very sick. Described by J.G. Ballard as ‘part social history, and part personal credo’, Sprawson’s book, published in 1992, not only anticipated the craze for open water swimming, but also launched a tidal wave of similar volumes.

Summing up Haunts in the New Yorker, the reviewer concluded, ‘For all the cascade of comic, eccentric, sometimes touching detail, it is the submarine presence of Sprawson’s own personality which creates the book’s mesmeric quality.’

By chance, the book was commissioned thanks to a piece Sprawson wrote for the London Magazine, then edited by Alan Ross, who deserves to be quoted once more: ‘the challenge for a writer is to convey the music of the game, a sweetly-timed cover drive by David Gower or a long, defence-splitting pass by Glenn Hoddle, without neglecting its nuts and bolts.’

June 1959: Ingemar Johansson floors Floyd Patterson in Yankee Stadium

‘Year in, year out, cricket offers more drama than fiction ever could’

The Russia-Ukraine War Making sense of the first European war of the century

by VICTOR SEBESTYEN

The present war between Russia and Ukraine – a 19th Century war, fought with 20th century tactics and 21st Century weaponry – is a reminder of the simplicities of the Cold War. It is the first ‘good war’ since the victory over Nazism; as we read daily news despatches from Kyiv, Bucha, Mariupol or Odesa, there are few shades of grey. Apart from a smattering of voices from the extreme Right and the extreme Left (as usual they have merged to meet at almost exactly the same place, two sides of the same coin) it has been entirely clear to almost everyone outside Russia who is the aggressor and who is the ‘victim’.

A similar point is made by most of the new books in the vast library already written about this war, with many more volumes on the way. This may be excellent for morale in the US and Europe, who are paying the bills for the defence of Ukraine. We need to know Our Side is on top and our supplies of money and arms are making the difference. But the longer the war goes on and the conflict resembles a stalemate, the harder it will be for the West to maintain optimistic about the outcome when it looks uncertain. Most of the new books on the war, though committed to Ukrainian freedom, are not necessarily, and not in the long term, helping the cause, principally because they can see only one outcome: Ukrainian victory.

There has been some brilliant journalism in this war – much of it resembling old-fashioned reporting, with journos living for long periods amongst the civilian victims and defending soldiers. In more recent wars, for example in the Middle East, where reporters were specific targets for death or kidnap, most had to remain embedded with Western armies or away from front lines.

While the story of the war so far is being told well by reporters, it is far too early to write a proper history of the war as some recent books are attempting to do. Or so it seems to me, a journalist turned historian. It’s not just that we don’t know the end. We don’t even know the middle, or the beginning of the end.

The best of them, Serheii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War (AllenLane, 400pp, £25) is, as one

would expect from a formidable Harvard scholar – though Ukrainian born and educated – brilliant about the roots of the war. He can also tell a vivid story, as he did in his masterly study of the Chernobyl disaster and his history of Ukraine. As Lindsey Hilsum wrote about his book ‘for those trying to understand the roots of the war, there is no finer guide than Plokhy. It is impossible to make sense of the Russian invasion of Ukraine without knowing something of the history – recent and less recent – of the struggle for Ukrainian national identity.’

John Simpson in the Guardian thought the book ‘a clear, reliable (and under the circumstances) remarkably calm account of how we got here.’ Gideon Rachman, The FT’s foreign affairs columnist, admired how Plokhy shows in fine detail ‘how Russia’s invasion is an act of oldfashioned imperialism.’

However, when it comes to predicting how the war will proceed, are historians – especially those committed to one side – the most reliable guides? A few reviewers, such as Mark Galleotti in the TLS, mention how ‘deeply personal’ the book is, while ‘his evident sympathy for his homeland never overpowers his scholarly instincts.’ This is true as far as it goes. All his claims are strictly sourced; he is a rigorous academic.

His book is an excellent and informative read. But one can’t help thinking that in places he writes as though the wish is father to the thought.

The road to Russia’s war is the subject of another excellent book that examines the thousand-year intertwined history of the two nations and the deep-rooted myths both have maintained about each other. Mikhail Zygar’s War and Punishment: The Story of Russia’s Aggression and Ukrainian Resistance (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 424pp, £22) traces in detail how Tsars, Bolsheviks and now ultra-nationalist dictators have re-written history, distorting the past, to condition Russians into believing that Ukraine has never really existed as a country but has always been part of Russia.

As Luke Harding wrote in the Observer ‘it is a sorry tale of big brother chauvinism and oppression. Zygar seeks to demolish, myth by myth, the imperial mindset that led to the present conflict….colonial ideas that continue to shape how most Russians see Moscow cast not as the aggressor but as the victim.’

Zygar was the founding editor of Drohzd, the only independent TV news station in Russia until Vladimir Putin closed it down when his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine began. Three days after the invasion Zygar signed a Facebook petition against the war and immediately left Moscow, for Berlin. ‘Nationalist history,’ he writes, in a line noted by a few reviewers, ‘is a disease many places are suffering

Invasion is an act of old-fashioned Imperialism

Cometh the hour: President Zelensky, valiant defender of his beloved Ukraine

Despatches from the Russia-Ukraine War

from…but in my homeland the disease is destroying us.’

Few of the recent books about Ukraine mention a significant feature of the country since the collapse of the USSR, because it seems so politically incorrect to do so while we are rightly backing Ukrainian freedom.

Zygar, interestingly, unlike so many others, never shies away from the epic scale of corruption in Ukraine over most of the last 30 years. He describes how for much of its independence Ukraine has been very close to becoming a failed state. It is a pity so few others discuss this at all. If rewriting history is a bad thing – as so many of the new wave of Ukraine/ Russia books correctly arguerewriting Ukraine’s recent history seems, at best, counterproductive.

Sergei Medvedev’s A War Made in Russia (Polity, 192pp, £14.95) is a searing, deeply disturbing book that shows how violent the country has become domestically as well as externally. Putin’s state threatens and abuses Russians and Ukrainians alike, with a cult of violence deep in

Russia’s roots. A Moscow-based academic who exiled himself some years ago, Medvedev argues that the war ‘is not an aberration but represents the norm.’ He describes the routine tortures in domestic jails, press gangs roaming the streets of towns and villages ‘recruiting’ young men into the forces and to mercenary armies like the Wagner Group, to the deification of Stalin in new school textbooks as ‘a great Russian’.

Along with the broad brush ‘whither the war and whither Russia’ books, come several works that tell a specific story offering a microcosm of the conflict and the state of Putin’s Russia. One has a particular British angle so is worth a mention, if for few other reasons. The other has a universal theme and is a minor masterpiece.

Putin’s Prisoner, My Time as a Prisoner of War in Ukraine (Transworld 212pp, £20) tells a terrifying story –Aiden Aslin’s – but is so poorly put together (by the journalist John Sweeney) that the point of the tale is nearly lost in the telling. Aslin was a British citizen, who went to live with his fiancé near Kyiv. He joined the Ukrainian marines in 2018 and at the start of the Russian invasion was sent by his unit to defend the Mariupol steelworks.

After a month-long siege his 1,000-strong unit surrendered en masse, but Aslin’s British passport singled him out for special treatment and was separated from the other prisoners. He was interrogated, tortured, appeared as propaganda on Russian TV, was tried by a kangaroo court and sentenced to death. Eventually, after an appalling few months, he was released following a prisoner exchange. It’s a shocking read, yet worth it if you can ignore the cliché on almost every page.

The former BBC journalist Andrew Harding’s A Small Stubborn Town: Life and Defiance in Ukraine, (Bonnier Books, 160pp, £12.99) is an extraordinary book that explains why the Ukrainians –expected by most military strategists in the East and West to be easily beaten – have fought so bravely to defend their independence. It is a short, beautifully written, humorous, and moving story of the conflict in Voznesensk in south-central Ukraine, inhabited by a few farmers and pensioners. The sleepy little town seemed of little importance until the war, but its bridge was on the route taken by a Russian tank regiment on the way to bigger and strategically important targets. The tiny populace was determined to stop them.

As Justin Marozzi wrote in the Spectator, ‘the cracking story…never loses sight of the murderous absurdity of Russia’s War’. Sinclair Mackay in the Mail on Sunday was awed by how ‘in the face of a mighty army, a mighty army of ordinary people can sometimes turn and just say “No”.’

Luke Harding in the Guardian (no relation to Andrew) calls it ‘the literary equivalent of a superb miniature painting’. I agree. If I were to choose one of book to explain why the Ukrainians are unlikely ever to give up their struggle – and why this war is likely continue for a very long time, this would be the one.

Top: the smouldering ruins of the maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol Bottom: in the debris of her house in Voznesensk, a woman saves her family album

Victor Sebestyen is author of Revolution 1989 : The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Phoenix, 40pp, £12.99) and Lenin the Dictator (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 592pp, £14.99)

WHAT ABOUT MEN? CAITLIN MORAN

Ebury Press, 320pp, £22

Two weeks before her book came out, Caitlin Moran had to close down her ‘mentions’ on her Twitter account because it was becoming ‘genuinely unpleasant’. ‘Men, it seemed,’ she wrote in her Times column, ‘were very, very angry about the whole idea of the book.’

The Observer’s Rhik Samadder, however, thought it ‘screamingly funny, boldly against the grain and socially urgent’. He posed the question: ‘Is it harder to be a man than a woman these days?’

He found Moran’s answer of yes surprising. ‘Her chapters take in men’s bodies, conversational style, sexual imagination, quest for status, models for ageing. She runs fearlessly towards contemporary male pressures....She takes them seriously, in place of ridicule or disgust. The effect is liberating, clearing the air for a genuinely progressive conversation.’.

Toby Young first met Moran in the early 1990s and thought it was obvious ‘that she was going to have a brilliant career’, he wrote in the Spectator. But he was disappointed by her book: ‘Caitlin purports to be in earnest about helping men with their problems but cannot resist scoring points at their expense. Anything for a laugh.... Maybe I’m a bitter old man, but I expected more from that witty teenager who so impressed me 30 years ago.’

Will Lloyd in the New Statesman was also dismissive and thought Moran ‘lived for groaning. As a style, Moran-ese is aggressively demotic, creatively sweary, swift and glib.’

But the Times’s Stuart Heritage was a fan and thought the time (12 years after Moran’s How to Be a

People and Work

Woman) had come for her to tell us how to be a (good) man: a noble intention and ‘when it worked it really did work’. He concluded: ‘If you want to know what women talk about when they are talking about you, or what they want in a partner, or what bizarre abstract thoughts turn them on...you should rush out and buy a copy immediately.’

GENERATIONS

JEAN M TWENGE

Atria, 560pp, £22

‘Twenge is a professor of psychology and consultant whose life’s work is devoted to characterizing generational differences,’ wrote Casey Schwartz in the Washington Post And she thinks it’s ‘lame to name generations with letters’. She has devised her own nomenclature (from the ‘Silents’, born 1925-45, to the ‘Polars’, born after 2012), along with others in common usage, such as Boomers and Millennials.

Will Lloyd in the Times could barely hide his contempt, describing the book as a ‘graph-choked, dataaddled investigation’ that is ‘not for the average reader’. Even after all the graphs he wasn’t convinced that ‘generations’ really existed, other than as ‘useful shorthand for advertisers, politicians and pundits’.

Schwartz, and Delia Cai in Vanity Fair, agreed Twenge’s central thesis was that technology above all has defined the differences between the generations. This was further endorsed by Katherine Dee in the Washington Examiner, who described how in Twenge’s model, ‘technological progress’ didn’t just go ‘hand in hand with individualism’ but also ‘extends the human lifespan, so people take longer to grow up and longer to grow older’.

Lloyd rejected this thesis, arguing that it wasn’t smartphones that

defined millennials like himself but simple economics. ‘We British millennials, he concluded somewhat bitterly, ‘have no idea how we’re going to afford the benefits we are being promised later in life, and which are being handed out to our grandparents.’ Would any self-respecting baby boomer dare argue with that?

AFTER WORK

HELEN HESTER & NICK SRNICEK

Verso, 288pp, £16.99

‘Is our free time really so free?’ Becca Rothfeld asked in the Washington Post. In spite of the proliferation of white goods in our homes, the authors contend that the time spent on domestic labour has, perversely, increased since the 1870s. Standards of cleanliness have escalated, for as Andy Beckett noted in the Guardian, ‘the manufacturers have a vested interest in housekeeping remaining a job that never feels finished.’

‘Roughly half of our labour time today is spent doing unpaid work,’ Decca Aikenhead bemoaned in the Sunday Times. The authors aim to address the problem of ‘unwaged housework’, or domestic drudgery, in order to expand ‘the availability of free time that is the prerequisite for any meaningful … freedom.’

While conceding ‘the writing style is semi-academic, a little stern,’ Beckett praised it for being ‘clear and concise. ‘It’s a pity this rather dry book isn’t animated by any human stories to leaven the academic jargon,’ Aikenhead suggested. ‘I also wanted to read more about how technology has not only failed to take housework off our hands, but landed us with new digital housework.’

‘However, their proposals for how we could liberate ourselves from the time poverty trap of modern life are so ambitiously radical as to leave the reader unsure if they are inspired or quite mad,’ Aikenhead continued. ‘They suggest that Russia’s 20thcentury experiments with collectivised childcare could be worth revisiting. The Marxist idea of abolishing the family is, they concede, controversial, so they propose a rebrand — “communal care”.’

‘The authors’ focus on a postcapitalist world may deter some readers,’ the FT allowed. ‘But their focus on this topic is important.’

Baby boomers: have they had all the luck?

Moran: socially urgent news about men

RIVER OF THE GODS GENIUS, COURAGE AND BETRAYAL IN THE SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE OF THE NILE CANDICE MILLARD

Swift,349pp,£18.99

Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, the rival Victorian explorers who sought the origin of the Nile, were both intensely driven characters. Burton disguised himself as a Muslim, even getting circumcised, in order to be the first Englishman to enter Mecca, while Speke had a thing for shooting pregnant animals and eating their foetuses.

Their first expedition ended with both men being attacked by Somalis and sustaining terrible injuries. The success of their second expedition depended on Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a freed African slave who accompanied them. Burton claimed that Lake Tanganyika was the source, but Speke said it was Lake Victoria.

He ‘was eventually proved right,’ wrote Gerard DeGroot in his review for the Times, ‘but the ugly argument that followed would destroy both men. With consummate skill Millard describes how a Victorian adventure morphed into a grotesque contest of egos.

This complex, compelling tale is told with simplicity and grace. Burton comes across as endlessly fascinating but frequently annoying. Speke is the perfect villain who, because of his conformity to Victorian social mores, managed to fool almost everyone about what he had achieved. In the background stands Bombay –smiling, solid, courageous and almost forgotten. Until now.’

Millard’s book is ‘a lean, fast-paced account’ of ‘an almost absurdly dangerous quest’, wrote Edward Dolmick in the New York Times. The author is ‘a graceful writer and a careful researcher, and she knows how to navigate a tangled tale.’

The Wall Street Journal’s reviewer, Howard Schneider, felt that ‘ultimately, the identity of the person who first discovered the source of the White Nile may be a trivial matter. Ms. Millard conscientiously investigates the issue, of course, but River of the Gods is compelling because she does justice to the psyches and behavior of Burton and Speke – keenly flawed but enthralling, sometimes marvellous people.’

EMPRESS OF THE NILE LYNNE OLSON

Scribe UK,448pp,£25

‘If a director or producer were ever tempted to make a female version of the Indiana Jones story,’ wrote Robin McKie in the Observer, ‘they need look no further than the life of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt for inspiration.

This was a daredevil whose real-life antics put Hollywood fiction to shame.’ During World War II, as a young curator at the Louvre, she helped protect France’s national treasures from being plundered by the Nazis, and later helped save Nubian temples from flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

While Olson presents her heroine as ‘an almost perfect individual, an over-adulation that grates after a while, DesrochesNoblecourt ‘drops out of sight for much of Olson’s narrative as background becomes foreground. Nevertheless this is a vivid reminder of a remarkable individual and an intriguing recreation of the strange times in which she lived.’

Egyptology was traditionally a male-dominated branch of knowledge, explained Joshua Hammer in his New York Times review, and Desroches-Noblecourt was ‘the most accomplished woman ever to break into that men’s club’.

In meticulous detail, Olson lays out the effort, carried out by hundreds, to extricate the great temple [of Abu Simbel] from the cliff into which it had been built three

millenniums ago. A welcome and needed work of both rescue and reclamation’.

THE FUTURE OF GEOGRAPHY POWER AND POLITICS IN SPACE WILL CHANGE OUR WORLD TIM MARSHALL

Elliott&Thompson,256pp,£20

The subtitle is the important one here – the title simply ties in with the ‘brand’ of the author’s previous two big sellers: The Power of Geography and Prisoners of Geography.

‘Tim Marshall demonstrates a refreshing understanding of the new space age – one in which humanity will go into space and stay there,’ said Brandon J Weicher in the TLS. ‘[But] his is not the kindly utopian vision of Star Trek. Nations will voyage into the cosmos for the same reasons they once sought to travel to, and subdue, distant lands: to gain power and prestige, and to ensure prosperity.’

Bryan Appleyard wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘Marshall says, far from being astral explorers, we are just looking for new ways to wage war in space. Nobody owns space, but the idea that it is a “global commons” is disappearing: the stakes are high. We need a new set of rules and a better understanding of rules and a better understanding of the space they govern. Without this we may end up fighting over the geography of space just as we have done over the geography of Earth.’

The Irish Independent’s Kim Bielenberg picked up on a disturbing aspect of the book: ‘Of more immediate concern in space are the thousands of satellites that orbit the Earth – and the threat from space debris flying around. [And] satellites are such valuable resources for navigation and communication on Earth that major military powers — the US, Russia and China — have developed weapons to destroy them.’

It gets scarier as Marshall shows that the peaceful use of space for the benefit of all has long since fallen into a black hole. He quotes a US ‘planning guidance document: “Space Force is called to organise, train, equip and present forces capable of preserving America’s freedom of action in space; enabling Joint Force lethality and effectiveness”.’

Moving day for Ramesses the Great

ONE MIDSUMMER’S DAY  MARK COCKER

Cape, 352pp, £20

Mark Cocker is one of the most acclaimed of British nature writers. In One Midsummer’s Day, he takes a single day in his English garden to take the reader back to the origins of the world and the vast interconnectedness of everything. He uses as his messenger for this huge theme the remarkable swift which darts and skirls above us from April to August.

In the Guardian, Katy Guest marvelled at just how extraordinary swifts are. ‘They have been recorded at altitudes of 4,400m, and travel so far in a single trip that a nesting pair feeding their chicks in southern England could be scooping up insects above Germany. They weigh just 40g but have a wingspan of 42-49cm; a human would need arms 800 metres long to match the weight to width ratio.’

In the Spectator, Philip Marsden, also wondered at them. ‘Swifts sit atop one of the high peaks of evolution, creatures of extraordinary physical prowess. They can spend two years on the wing with only the briefest of landings. When migrating they cover up to 1,000 kilometres per day. During their lifetime they might fly two million kilometres.’

But Swifts are in rapid decline. India Bourke in the New Statesman observed that Cocker’s ‘sweeping, swift’s-eye approach to the world is not purely a stylistic or philosophical preference; it is an existential imperative.’

Marsden hailed a call to arms. ‘Cocker is one of our greatest living naturalists, with decades of writing, research and campaigning behind him – and he brings to this vast subject a scientist’s rigour and a poet’s expansive vision.’

MANY THINGS UNDER A ROCK THE MYSTERIES OF OCTOPUSES  DAVID SCHEEL

Hodder, 296pp, £25

David Scheel is professor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific University and has researched the behaviour and ecology of octopuses for more than 25 years. Before that he lived in the Serengeti, researching lion hunting behaviour.

Scheel’s primary study here is the giant octopus. As Jonathan Guthrie explained in the Financial Times, ‘These animals live in the northern Pacific and can weigh more than 150 pounds. …The giant octopus is probably the only member of its tribe large enough to drag a person under water in the way old sailors’ yarns describe. Scheel recounts one genuinely hostile encounter. But his broader portrayal is of a shy vulnerable creature.’

‘Octopuses are remarkably intelligent for distant molluscan relatives of humble garden slugs,’ Guthrie continued. ‘Their problemsolving abilities mark them out as animals that live or die on their wits.’

‘Many things under a rock’ is a translation of a native Alaskan name for the octopus, wrote Kathleen Jamie in the New Statesman. ‘Nonetheless, they are difficult to research, being “flexible, boneless, slippery and elusive”. They are both hunters and hunted. They are emotional, and inquisitive. They sleep and dream. Occasionally, they’ll eat each other.’

Jamie added: ‘It is the elegance of an octopus’s movement, the shapeshifting and colouration of the creatures, that Scheel finds so beguiling, He spends a lot of time scuba diving, observing their coloured flows and flushes, which, he says, remind him of the Northern Lights.’

‘The author’s passion for

octopuses, combined with his accessible language and vivid descriptions of his encounters,’ said Kirkus, ‘creates a memorable book that is sure to appeal to fans of underwater adventures … Laurel Scheel’s simple yet elegant illustrations complement the text.’

And Guthrie concluded: ‘When one encounters a wild animal it is intriguing to wonder “what is it thinking?”. This engaging book takes us closer to an answer for these aliens from inner space.’

FOOTPRINTS IN THE WOODS

JOHN LISTER-KAY Canongate, 208pp, £16.99

Sir John Lister-Kaye, now 77, is one of the country’s foremost environmentalists and in the remote Scottish Highlands he founded the Aigas Field Centre. Lister-Kaye, who has a talent for writing both evocatively and informatively about the natural world, has turned in Footprints in the, his eleventh book, to the ruthless predators which stalk our woodlands.

He has been studying this bloodthirsty category of creatures known as Mustelidae for years at Aigas and now opens up his detailed diary of observations. Don’t let the cosily old-fashioned cover of the book lull you into thinking that it’s all Wind in the Willows in the woods. Behind these elusive furry creatures, as Mark Monahan in the Telegraph discovered ‘lurk all manner of ultraviolence.’

Monahan found the book ‘completely mesmerising.’ Mustelids are the family of predatory mammals that includes weasels, badgers, pine martens and otters and ‘they are, as it turns out, not to be messed with.’ Monahan marvelled at ‘the ruthless efficiency’ of their predation.

Lister-Kaye writes that ‘a crunching bite to the neck’, will finish off a small animal. A badger attacks a baby pine-marten in front of appalled human onlookers; an otter dispatches a duck. Lister-Kaye never anthropomorphises: as Monahan observes admiringly, this book is ‘gleaned from thousands of hours of painstaking, superhumanly silent observation,’ and has ‘both the un-sentimentality of a lifelong naturalist and the eloquent punch of a superior thriller-writer.’

Swift by name - and by nature

The octopus: living and dying by its wits

Fiction Nature

WHAT AN OWL KNOWS JENNIFER ACKERMAN

Oneworld, 352pp, £16.99

What an owl knows, and what we now know an owl knows, is thanks to technological progress: cameras, drones, DNA analysis, satellite transmitters. These innovations have revealed much of their mystery. We know that they see ultra-violet light at night. Their flight is below the threshold of human hearing; they glide and swoop without flapping.

Reviewing in the NY Times, Jennifer Szalai was gripped ‘with a mix of astonishment and pleasure’ at Ackerman’s ‘warm and companionable guide’, where ‘each species seems like a marvel.’

Following the announcement of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist (just too late, alas, for this edition of the Oldie) we fearlessly predict that Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry, (Faber, 272pp, £16.99) the story of a retired policeman looking back at his life, will make the cut. ‘’Nobody writes like, nobody takes risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry.’ writes Ali Smith.

We’re equally optimistic for Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo whose A Spell of Good Things (Canongate, 352pp, £18.99) is described by the judges as ‘a powerful and staggering read about class and desire in modern day Nigeria’.

But as we all know the Booker has ways of confounding our expectations. Remember The Bone People, Keri Hulme’s 1985 winner which astounded the literary world. And with four debut authors in the running this year all bets must be off. The winner be revealed at this year’s prize dinner on 26th November.

The shortlist is swiftly followed by Super Thursday on 12th October - the publishing industry’s biggest day of the year when some 1,300 new titles will be published including the major novels of the season.

an intriguing death in Cahokia Jazz (Faber, 496pp, £20)

For Simon Worrall in the Guardian, one of the most fascinating chapters was on ‘the cultural significance of owls, from their first representation in France’s Chauvet cave to ancient Indian folklore, where they feature as symbols of wisdom.’

Florence Nightingale carried a little owl in her pocket. The global popularity of Harry Potter’s owl, Hedwig, posed an unexpected threat to owls that were bought as pets. But it is ‘enchantment that is at the core of this charming book.’

The Inquisitive Biologist wrote in his blog that, ‘Ackerman reveals the creature that hides under that puffy exterior, peeling back the feathers to show our current scientific understanding of owls.

She has interviewed scores of experts making this not just a book about owls but as much about the people who study and love them. A captivating and in places touching science narrative, this book is a hoot from beginning to end.’

Leading the pack is Zadie Smith with an ambitious departure into historical fiction in The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton, 466pp, £20) reviewed on page 63 of this month’s Oldie and based on the Tichborne Trial of 1873.

Crime afficionados will find plenty to please them. Cormoran Strike and Robin are back with another weighty (960 page) adventure, The Running Grave, (Sphere, £25) their seventh in the series by Robin Galbraith (aka JK Rowling). Nicola Upson has resurrected Josephine Tey in Shot With Crimson (Faber, 352pp, £16.99) a 1939 mystery on the set of Alfred Hitchock’s Rebecca and Sophie Hannah - in her fifth iterationinhabits the mind of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective in Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night (HarperCollins, 384pp, £22). Meanwhile, runaway best-selling author Richard Osman returns with his Thursday Murder Club of oldies investigating a heroin deal gone wrong and running rings around the police in The Last Devil to Die (Viking, 448pp, £22).

Other highlights include The Seventh Son (Hutchinson, 368pp, £22) by Sebastian Faulks, a tale of surrogacy and experiments in fertility; while Absolutely and Forever (Chatto, 192pp, £16.99) by Rose Tremain brings us a young woman’s first in love in Swinging Sixties London and Paris; Night Side of the River (Cape, 322pp, £18.99) by Jeanette Winterson updates ghost stories for a digital age; and Light Over Liskeard by Louis de Bernieres, imagines a dystopian end-of-days scene in a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall. Golden Hill author, Francis Spufford takes us to an alternative Jazz Age America for

Popular fiction is well-served with a new blockbuster from Jilly Cooper. Tackle (Bantam, 448pp, £22) takes on the world of football with Cooper’s hero Rupert Campbell Black investing in a football club and some lusty players; and perennial favourite Bernard Cornwell is back with Sharpe’s Command (HarperCollins, 320pp, £22) where our hero must thwart not one, but two of Napoleon’s armies.

Finally, from left field, we await A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett - twenty early short stories written under a pseudonym in the 1970s and 80s; and Julia by Sandra Newman, a feminist take on Nineteen Eighty Four with a heroine hard at work in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth.

Something for everyone?

Adebayo: shining a light on Nigeria

Symbol of wisdom: a tawny owl

Nobody pushes the language like Sebastian Barry

THIS IS EUROPE THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

BEN JUDAH Picador, 512pp, £22

The author of the ‘prize-nominated epic feat of reportage’ that was This is London (2016), Judah has here ‘widened his angle of vision to take in Europe itself,’ wrote Rabbi Howard Cooper in the Jewish Chronicle. ‘His latest book is a hallucinatory tour de force written with a discerning and compassionate eye, and an ear attuned to the pain, the drama, the sheer relentless unpredictability of everyday life for vast swathes of the continent’s 748 million people... These are stories freighted with hardship, dislocation and loss, and yet the author’s capacity to listen with empathy, tact and fine-tuned attention renders them life-affirming.’

Yuan Yuang, in the Financial Times, noted that Judah is ‘known for telling tales of the unexpected, and in particular stories outside of the middle-class milieu most familiar to elite journalism: a cross-continental truck driver, a Lidl supermarket shelf stacker, an olive-packer, a housewife who joins the army.’

‘Each of his 23 stories is told in intimate detail, displaying the internal monologues of his interviewees. The writing happens at breakneck pace, in disjointed and incomplete sentences, in snatches of dialogues and thoughts. This creates the effect of trying to hurriedly follow someone racing through alleyways towards an unknown destination –which is indeed the psychological state of many of his subjects.’

The stories he tells ‘are all compelling thrillers, and you could easily read half a dozen in a sitting, although doing so left me feeling

overdosed on adrenaline. The narrative pace never stops galloping.’

Judah’s Europe, wrote Melanie MacDonagh in the Evening Standard is one ‘seen from the margins, geographical, ethnic and social’, and ‘there is infinite compassion in the collating and editing of these stories... It may be that not all human life is here, but enough to make you expand the boundaries of your sympathies and your understanding. It’s an astonishing achievement.’

THE OTHER PANDEMIC HOW QANON CONTAMINATED THE WORLD

JAMES BALL

Bloomsbury, 288pp, £20

The QAnon movement began in 2017 on the 4chan message board when an anonymous user who claimed to have ‘Q clearance’ in US intelligence circles started predicting how Hilary Clinton would be arrested and Trump vindicated.

Part of its outlandish message was that a satanic paedophile ring connected with Clinton was imprisoning and murdering children at a Washington DC pizzeria. Notwithstanding the absurdity of this claim, QAnon gained an enormous following among ‘the deplorables’ as well as the support of the Donald himself (‘I love QAnon,’ he said.)

Investigative journalist James Ball ‘teases out the global network of people who have essentially given up on the notion of objective reality, from bored teenage trolls to duplicitous politicians and crazed billionaires,’ wrote Ethan Croft in the Times. ‘Sketching the rise of QAnon, Ball takes to his task with a convert’s zealotry. He confesses early on that, in

his university days, he whiled away many hours on 4chan, the online forum-cum-cesspit. Now he returns as avenger, lamenting QAnon as the significant mudflow in a larger landslide of accepted standards of truth over the past few years.’

Yet ‘while his elucidation of QAnon’s roots skips along with vim... the book begins to seize up’ when he widens his argument and proposes a Digital Health Service to ‘vaccinate’ our minds against deranged conspiracy theorists. Croft did not ‘look forward to being sectioned under a Digital Health Act along with anyone else who strays from strict orthodoxy. In all pandemics, there is a chance that the cure will be worse than the disease.’

Daily Telegraph reviewer Nina Power agreed that the book ‘is informative enough for those who know nothing about 4Chan, QAnon and other recent theories. But politically and philosophically, it leaves something to be desired. Ball seems strangely unable to see how he, too, is hardly immune to ‘the desire to believe.’

DIFFERENT TIMES A HISTORY OF BRITISH COMEDY SINCE 1917

DAVID STUBBS

Faber, 416pp, £20

A notable biographer of Peter Sellers could be expected to have strong opinions about a history of British comedy since 1917 that declared it the expression of ‹the privileges of the grumbling white cisgendered male heteronormative hegemony’. And so

Malaise: a pensions protest in France

Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe , 1962

it proved. Roger Lewis in the Times thought at first that David Stubbs’s book was a ‘brilliant satire’ about the sensitivity awareness industry. But no. Stubbs sees the ‘different times’ of our older comedy as no excuse for its politics.

The comedians who cross-dressed were ‘wrong’; Little Britain, insensitive to trans people’s rights. And why didn’t the ‘drunken’ Peter Cook challenge the ‘everyday absurdities of colonialism?’

Lewis sees the book as an equivalent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a ‘purging of relics and artifacts’, whose author didn’t realise comedy has nothing to do with good taste or niceness. “It gives voice to the forbidden.”

Only marginally less harsh was Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph, its comedy critic. He doesn’t believe wokedom has ‘liberated’ comedy from the grip of the white male racists and sexists. What worried him was Stubbs’s odd contention that an over-emphasis on humour explained Boris and his ‘harmful licensed buffoonery’.

Comedy writer Joel Morris in the Spectator seemed more forgiving, finding the book, in a nod to Stubbs’s work as a pop music critic, ‘as bracingly political as any study of punk or Two-Tone’ with an ‘invigorating focus on class’ and the depiction of immigrants. But he parted company with Stubbs’s claim, ‘if you wouldn’t do it now, you shouldn’t have done it then.’

Comedy, he asserted, requires a map shared with the audience, ‘not the one they hope their children might one day use’. Most of all he disagreed with Stubbs that music and comedy are in direct opposition. ‘Music pulses inside comedy,’ he said, and if you can’t hear it, maybe you start obsessing about its lyrics’. Touché.

HOW TO BE ADAM NICOLSON

William Collins, 384pp, £25

Adam Nicolson’s new book, a reflection on the pre-Socratic philosophers, aroused interestingly mixed feelings in reviewers.

He invites the reader to consider alternatives: ‘Is the essence of life a Heraclitan blaze? Or a pool of Orphic calm? Or both?’

In the Guardian, ever-enthusiastic Alex Preston adored it. ‘The book even ends with a staple of the self-help genre: a list of takeaways that can be deployed in modern life for the time-pressed executive wanting key learnings.

‘I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun.’

For Noonie Minogue in the Tablet, ‘This immersion in the “wonderful cavalcade of thought” that surfaced in Archaic Greece between 800 and 480 BC comes here in the dubious wrappings of a self-help manual.

‘But don’t be put off. Nicolson does not invite you to quarry the ancient philosophers for life tips, but what they have to say will refresh your way of seeing the world.’

The Times’s John Maier, however, wasn’t refreshed. ‘Nicolson’s diversions into local colour, such as the oddness of Pythagoras, constitute by far the better part of his book, but they also suggest the enormous strangeness of the pre-Socratic people that makes the direct relevance of their thought to today such an unlikely proposition.’

Jane O’Grady in Prospect thought he’d missed the point. ‘He is surely guilty of “presentism”: subsuming exploration of the past to the vocabulary, concepts and sensibilities of the present.

‘In an era when we all insist on diversity, it seems odd to try to assimilate non-Western, non-modern theories into a digestible pabulum

that can easily be grasped and absorbed and approved here and now. Surely a historian, especially, should avoid this temptation.’

MONSTERS A FAN’S DILEMMA CLARE DEDERER

Sceptre, 288pp, £20

American film critic Claire Dederer wonders how we should approach great art made by badly behaved people (mostly men). Her book received glowing reviews in the States and slightly more muted ones here.

In the Guardian, however, Kathryn Hughes was impressed: ‘She shows us her own monstrosity as a way of beginning to breakdown the imaginary cordon sanitaire we draw around artists whose behaviour repels us. We can decide, in a panic of self-righteousness, to cast all their work aside and consign it to a cultural deep freeze.

‘Or we can choose instead to keep it in full view, with gratitude that such saving beauty is still possible .’

And for Kathleen Stock in the Times: ‘After wandering about pleasantly for most of the book, there is a jarringly neat attempt to tie up loose ends in the final section,’ she wrote. ‘Generally, the message of the book is a helpful one: if you love a piece of art, set it free from your inner moral critic, and just enjoy it.’

But Stock, among JK Rowling’s most vocal supporters, was dismayed to find that Dederer bottled out of an engagement with the views on transgenderism which have made of Rowling a modern monster.

In the Observer Rachel Cooke thought it self-serving: ‘But oh, how quickly her courage fails her! Though she never fully articulates it, the reader senses her particular anxiety: an apprehension that has to do with what people – young people, woke people, the kind of people who might in future commission her (or not) – are going to think of her now. She wants so badly to be liked. How else to explain all her equivocations?’

Stock thought Dederer ‘pacified the reader’s inner dogmatism’. But Cooke wasn’t having it: ‘Look! the book says, a little smugly, we’re not closing down debate. Here are a thousand questions, and we’ll get back to you some other time (like, never) about the answers.’

The Victorious Youth: circa 310 BC

Small Treasures LUCY LETHBRIDGE marvels at the loveliness of Ladybird Books

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, before the internet, when children watched television for one hour a day, the defining images of the world and all its everyday wonders were found in Ladybird books. Their colourful illustrations instantly recognisable, they dispensed captivating information and ‘amaze your friends’ skills to master. Ladybirds were the background to post-war growing up. It would be hard to find anyone born before 1980 who wouldn’t pounce delightedly on a battered Ladybird.

The books are irresistible (and reliable) sources on everything from mothers to pond life to astronauts to birds eggs, rockpools and steam engines; from what to look for in churches and streams and gardens to how to work tractors and make crystal radio sets. But it’s the pictures which make them so addictively memorable. Ladybird art has the magic of detail: it’s not just the old-fashioned, figurative scenes, beautifully composed and executed, but the background painting.

A Ladybird book transports you to Hadrian’s Wall, to the Amazon rainforest and the Pyramids of Gaza, but most evocatively of all deep into the middle-class home of the 1660s. To the start-rite sandals, short trousers and ankle socks of the chief protagonists and to the kitchen where Jane learns to cook with aproned Mummy, to the sitting room, with its TV cabinet, where goodhumoured Daddy smokes his pipe after a hard day at the office and to the garage where Peter learns from Daddy (now in casual slacks) how the car engine works.

The Ladybird imprint emerged in Loughborough, from Wills & Hepworth, a printing company which turned to publishing children’s books during the war, capitalising on a market for reassuring stories that chimed with Children’s Hour on the wireless. It was the appointment of Douglas Keen as editorial director in 1952 that heralded the golden age of illustrated Ladybirds.

Keen commissioned the Ladybird world in pictures from artists most of whom had backgrounds in commercial art, who were trained to conjure figurative images to tell

stories with immediacy and impact.

The first of Keen’s illustrators, Allan W Seaby, already in his 80s when his British Birds and their Nests was published in 1953, was well known for his lino and woodcuts, bringing a clean line influenced by Japanese art with its images of herons and cherry blossom. Keen had a flair for matching artist with text.

Who would have thought of commissioning Frank Hampson, creator of Sci-fi hero Dan Dare to illustrate nursery rhymes? Robert Lumley, who provided the pictures for ‘well-loved tales’ such as The Gingerbread Boy and The Elves and the Shoemaker ran a business making wallposters and greetings

cards. Peter and Jane, titular heroes of the early readers series (Shopping with Mother, Helping at Home) were first the creation of Harry Wingfield who had been an in-house artist for an electrical fittings business in Walsall.

John Berry who illustrated many of the ‘work’ series of Ladybirds was a war artist of distinction and later created the famous tiger for Esso’s ‘put a tiger in your tank’ campaign.

created the famous tiger for Esso’s ‘put a tiger in your tank’ campaign. (the

Abbey National and John TE Kenney (stirring historical figures such as Nelson, Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth and centres, car parks and housing

Eric Winter (the ‘How To’ series) designed the umbrella logo of the Abbey National and John TE Kenney (stirring historical figures such as Nelson, Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth and Stone Age Man ) was the first illustrator of the Revd Audry’s Thomas the Tank Engine. Modernity (because Ladybirds with their depictions of shopping centres, car parks and housing estates never ducked the changing decades) was vividly conveyedby Bernard Herbert Robinson in the 1960s and 70s in the series How it Works which included volumes on the hovercraft and the transistor radio; his ‘How it Works: the Computer’ was reputedly issued for use as a primer to Ministry of Defence employees in 1968.

The most immediately distinctive of the artists was Ronald Lampitt (Birds and How they Live and What to Look for Inside a Church among many others). His Ladybirds, with their more stylised landscapes and Lowry-esque figures, have a style and atmosphere quite different from the others – and yet they share the same attention to tiny detail and the same rewarding ‘busyness.’

Helen Day, Ladybird expert, dealer and collector is a champion of these often forgotten artists. Her travelling exhibition of Ladybird art has been touring the country for over two years and is worth catching.

It’s currently in Alnwick and Day will be updating her website regularly after that. There aren’t many art movements that can be said to have produced a representation for almost everything in the known universe: but the Ladybird artists can. Hats off to them – and our gratitude for over half a century of inspiration.

For information, go to:

www.ladybirdflyawayhome.com

It’s the pictures which make the books memorable

No stone unturned: Ladybirds cover topics on every subject with brilliant illustrations to match

Children’s books

EMILY BEARN recommends

Picture books are getting shorter. While older readers will recall the languid suspense of stories such as Dogger and Mr Bear SquashYou-All-Flat, most contemporary picture books are a fraction of the length, to cater for the assumed shorter attention span of the modern child. The Quickest Bedtime Story Ever! by Louise Fitzgerald, illustrated by Kate Hindley (Nosy Crow, £12.99) trumps the pack with a story only ten words long – but beware the loquacious narrator, who is intent on spinning out the tale: ‘Great news! This book contains the quickest bedtime story EVER! … BUT before we begin, listen up …’

Brevity is also the theme of Ten-Word Tiny Tales (Walker, £14.99) in which the Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho presents a collection of tenword stories - and encourages his readers to expand them. ‘Don’t worry about the spelling, don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense,’ he advises budding young authors. ‘The only rule is … DON’T STOP!’

There is certainly no stopping our 85 year-old national treasure Allan Ahlberg, whose latest book Under the Table (£12.99, Walker) is another gem. “There’s an egg in my egg cup!” shouts Elsie, as her brother Banjo helps their father wash the car. “And a great big grey thing … UNDER THE TABLE!”

For readers of seven plus, Oscar’s Lion by Adam Baron (Harper Collins, £12.99) is the enchanting tale of a boy spending his first night away from his parents, in the care of a lion who can change into different animals. Oscar doesn’t want the lion to leave - but will the magical creature surprise us with his final transformation?

And after keeping us in suspense for more than 20 years, Dame Jacqueline Wilson has finally produced the sequel to her 2001 hit Sleepovers. In The Best Sleepover in the World (Puffin, £14.99) our ever-young heroines have discovered Tik Tok and social media – and Chloe has become even more insufferable: ‘”My dad’s got this mega promotion

at work and he’s going to make heaps more money.”’

For more confident readers of nine plus, autumn’s big event is Impossible Creatures (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by the darling of upper brow children’s fiction Katherine Rundell - hailed on the book’s cover as the new Tolkien. In another beautifully imagined fantasy, she tells the story of a young boy on a quest to save a magical Archipelago

Jones, recounting the gothic adventures of a young girl who can see the dead. But when her father dies in mysterious circumstances, his is the one ghost who refuses to appear. (‘If I’m honest, Autumn thought, I’d quite like to be the same as everybody else.’)

Pony fans should not miss Finding Wonder (Faber, £7.99) by Lauren St John, in which our orphaned heroine Roo must turn detective when her beloved showjumper Wonder Boy vanishes without trace. In City of Horses (£7.99, Pushkin), Frances Moloney tells the touching story of a 13 year-old girl whose life in a new town is transformed when she discovers ponies running free on land nearby. When the animals come under threat, Misty and her new friend Dylan must summon all their courage to intervene.

From top: The Quickest Bedtime Story Ever!; Under the Table; Impossible Creatures

inhabited by mythical creatures. (‘It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.’)

Code Name Kingfisher (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) is the uplifting new novel by Liz Kessler, author of When the World Was Ours. This time, the setting is Holland during WW2, where two Jewish sisters are swept into the Dutch resistance. ‘I think the kingfisher was telling us to be true to ourselves, to shine bright even when the world seems dark and dangerous and full of shadows.’

The Witchstone Ghosts (Chicken House, £7.99), meanwhile, is a thrilling debut by Emily Randall-

delight in Tower

the latest YA title from Sally

observation through the highs and lows of the last century. This time, we are transported to 1896, when Tirzah, Sophia from

Fans of historical fiction will delight in Yours from the Tower (Andersen, £14.99), the latest YA title from Sally Nichols, whose previous novels have raced us with eagle-eyed observation through the highs and lows of the last century. This time, we are transported to 1896, when Tirzah, Sophia and Polly - best friends from boarding school – embark on adult life in very different circumstances.

In non-fiction, books about our Kings and Queens still dominate in the wake of the Coronation, with titles such as

with titles such as

Amazing Facts: Charles III

new king has a tropical tree frog named after him. For those seeking a broader historical sweep,

Amazing Facts: Charles III informing us that the new king has a tropical tree frog named after him. For those seeking a broader historical sweep, Kings and Queens by Marcia Williams (Walker, £12.99) is a deceptively informative volume, covering Alfred the Great to Charles III ‘and everyone in-between!’. As with all the best reference books, Williams provides us with just enough dates and facts – and plenty of unforgettable details. William the Conqueror, for example, was ‘terrifying, unjust, uncaring – and unloved!’; and when he eventually came to be buried in France ‘his coffin was too small and his body exploded!’