Front cover: Napoleon Sarony/Bettmann/Getty Images
Surreal Lucinda Lambton page 78
The priest on the Titanic page18
The Old Un’s Notes
There’s nothing new about fake news. Look at what happened in the curious case of the Zinoviev Letter 100 years ago.
A British general election was scheduled for 29th October 1924. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia seven years earlier, and there was excited talk in the press, pro and anti, about the ongoing worldwide class struggle and the potential for revolution here in the UK.
Four days before the election, the Daily Mail splashed headlines across its front page, claiming, ‘CIVIL WAR PLOT BY SOCIALISTS’ MASTERS: MOSCOW ORDERS TO OUR REDS. GREAT PLOT DISCLOSED YESTERDAY.’
The Mail’s scoop was a letter apparently written by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International (Comintern) to the rather ramshackle offices of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). If the Labour Party were elected, Zinoviev had supposedly written, the CPGB, aided and abetted by the Comintern, would be favourably positioned to bring about a Bolshevikstyle revolution.
All stirring stuff, except that the letter was a complete hoax. To this day, no one knows for sure who wrote it, or how it reached the Daily Mail.
An enquiry commissioned by Tony Blair’s government in 1999 pointed the finger at two
Among this month’s contributors
Robert O’Byrne (p18) is author of A Vanishing World: the Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne. He wrote Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House and The Last Knight
Sophia Waugh (p30) is a teacher and the author of The Oldie’s School Days column. Her nephew Pierre Waugh (p24) writes about her late brother Alexander Waugh, Auberon Waugh and Evelyn Waugh.
Mary Kenny (p36), an Oldie columnist, wrote in our first issue in 1992. Her books include Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw and Crown and Shamrock
Matthew Sturgis (p74) is author of Oscar: A Life, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, Walter Sickert: A Life and When in Rome: 2,000 Years of Roman Sightseeing
MI6 officers with links to Conservative Central Office, although both had stoutly denied any involvement when questioned at the time.
Ramsay MacDonald’s ruling Labour party went on to lose the 1924 election in a landslide to Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives, the polar opposite to the result 100 years later.
It remains debatable how great a role the spectre of Bolshevik revolution played in the outcome, and the author of the official 1999 report could conclude only, ‘The story is incomplete… The Zinoviev Letter remains a most extraordinary and mysterious business.’
Zinoviev himself was one of those ‘old comrades’ to be summarily shot after one of Stalin’s show trials in 1936.
‘So – good news! It’s not curiosity, then’
Oldie-reader James Hepburne Scott, 77, has just been to Salisbury General Hospital for yet more tests. Before he went, he received some sublime, mournful directions from a switchboard operator:
‘Go to car park number 8 and park as near the exit as possible.
Fake news: the front page revealing the Zinoviev Letter
Important stories you may have missed
Man stuck knee-deep in mud by river Brighton Argus
Huge firewood stack stolen from garden
Aberdeen Press and Journal
Council manager who broke wind on colleague guilty of age bias
Daily Telegraph
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‘Go up the road and turn into the lane between Horatio’s Garden and the Bereavement Suite.
‘Follow signs towards Breast Unit and Gynaecology.
‘On your left you will see a Portakabin on the old tennis court.
‘In there you will find Medical and Surgical Outpatients.’
And, whatever you do, avoid the Grim Reaper at all costs.
The Shipwreck Treasure Museum in Cornwall’s Charlestown is, like all the best small museums, less a scholarly institution or tourist attraction than a hobby that got out of hand.
Former Navy diver Richard Larn was forced to stop diving at the age of 80, after 67 years of searching the sea bed – starting with HMS Association, whose sinking off the Isles of Scilly in 1707 led to the competition to determine longitude – and becoming one of the country’s authorities on shipwrecks.
The museum started as his and his wife’s collection, before being bought by Sir Tim Smit, the founder of the Eden Project, as part of
‘It will all be your fault’
his empire of tourist attractions that are not exposed to the weather. (Never a bad business model in Cornwall’s climate.)
But now the museum and Richard Larn’s archives are up for sale. Unless a buyer is found for the museum as a going concern, they will be sold by auction in Penzance in November.
Now that diving on shipwrecks is restricted –and banned within 200 miles of the shore – this could be your last chance to own pieces of eight, a bag of doubloons or a cutlass from a dead man’s chest.
Haile Selassie’s Empire of Ethiopia fell 50 years ago, on 12th September 1974. The emperor died just under a
year later, on 27th August 1975. It’s thought he was suffocated to death in his bed.
Why did the House of Solomon fall? A combination of the terrible Wollo famine, authoritarian administration, war with Eritrean separatists, chronic inflation/economic incompetence and army discontent.
Today, Selassie’s grandson the 71-year-old Emperor-inexile Zera Yacob Amha Selassie, lives not in his ancestral homeland, but in the UK.
According to reports, he holds court in a rather forlorn two-up two-down workman’s cottage in London’s Isle of Dogs, next to a minicab firm and the Lord Nelson pub. The Eton-, Oxford- and Sandhurst-educated prince appears to be holding himself in readiness for the call to take up the Ethiopian throne, if it ever comes.
Although Rastafarians worshipped his grandad as the Second Coming of Jesus and Jah incarnate, Haile Selassie’s offspring and their children are not regarded by them as deities; however, the movement has apparently been supportive of the prince and the Imperial family during their London exile.
Hopes of restoration are unlikely to bear fruit, but the Crown Council of Ethiopia (president: Prince Ermias Sahle Selassie) is more optimistic.
After all, King Juan Carlos headed the restored Bourbon monarchy in Spain after Franco’s death in 1975. And Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
‘Professor! Another Banksy!’
child Tsar of Bulgaria from 1943 to 1946, returned as the country’s prime minister (2001-5), if not as king.
‘Also, I have a Ten Commandments T-shirt for everybody’
Piles and fading eyesight are among old age’s indignities, but they can have their consolations.
One recent evening, the Old Un was stung, on the third toe of his right foot, by a bee. Yikes, it hurt!
Cue a dash upstairs for an emergency rustle through the medicine cabinet amid a vague memory that it contained a tube of antihistamine cream. A tube was duly located at the back of the cupboard and some of the ointment was swiftly applied – with success, offering some rapid relief from the pain.
Only when the Old Un’s wife examined the medicament did it transpire that it was called Germoloids, which promises to shrink piles. A question, perhaps, of not being able to tell one’s a**e from one’s third toe.
But jolly soothing, all the same.
The Old Un noticed a rare omission in A N Wilson’s article on great writers and artists working into their eighties (September issue).
What about those Oldie regulars who have passed their 80th birthday?
Genius octogenarians at Oldie Towers include Prue Leith, Mary Kenny, Richard Osborne, Elisabeth Luard, Lucinda Lambton, John McEwen and Simon Courtauld. And we’re proud
to welcome the oldest novice columnist in Fleet Street, young Antonia Fraser, who’s just turned 92.
Here’s to buckets of fresh ink flowing through their seasoned pens for many years to come.
Incroyable, but the diminutive French crooner, actor and sometime diplomat Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) was born 100 years ago.
Aznavour’s big break came when he appeared alongside Edith Piaf in several warmly received concerts following the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Typically singing about love in all its forms (‘It never goes out of fashion,’ he once sagely observed), he proved to be almost Stakhanovite in his work ethic, recording over 1,200 songs and
releasing 91 albums during a 70-year career.
British readers may remember Aznavour’s warbling ballad She, which topped the singles charts in July 1974. He originally sang the number in French, then went on to record it in half-a-dozen other languages for good measure.
Not long after, the Goodies unfairly dubbed him Charles Aznovoice.
Aznavour’s appeal crossed over the generations. As early as 1948, Frank Sinatra remarked, ‘I dig the little guy.’
More than 50 years later, the rapper Dr Dre sampled Aznavour’s song Parce que tu crois, declaring it to be a pop masterpiece. When Bob Dylan was asked to name some of his favourite musicians he answered, ‘I like Charles Aznavour a lot. I saw him in
the 1960s at Carnegie Hall, and he just blew my mind.’
A tireless champion of human rights, not least in his parents’ homeland of Armenia, Aznavour wasn’t afraid to stray from the romantic tradition to sing about darker subjects. ‘Before him, despair was unpopular in France,’ Jean Cocteau once remarked.
Drily humorous in interviews, Aznavour was always serious when it came to his art. ‘Why should I ever stop?’ he remarked in 2018, at a time when he was planning a 95th-birthday world tour. ‘In order to die at home in an armchair? Non merci.’
Sang with Piaf: Aznavour
I do like to be beside Frinton-on-Sea
Why go abroad on holiday, with such delights at home?
Why does anyone ever go abroad?
The hassle at the airport, the heaving of cases on and off the conveyer belt while you’re struggling through security, forgetting to put your own belt back on afterwards (and in my case almost getting arrested as I strode through Fast Track at Heathrow Terminal 5 with my trousers falling down) … it’s too much for me at my age. I don’t need it any more.
That’s why this summer I stayed at home. Apart from a night in Edinburgh (as the guest of the Governor at Edinburgh Castle – I’m not complaining), a day in Dublin (with Judi Dench and Taylor Swift – I kid you not; I do lead quite the life) and a weekend in Paris for the Olympics (after my day in the Stade de France, I’ve seen enough pole-vaulting to last a lifetime), I did not leave England.
But I did go away – to Bridlington and Broadstairs and Frinton-on-Sea. I do like to be beside the seaside. I went to Stratford-upon-Avon as well, for a touch of Shakespeare. I am here to tell you: our little island has got it all.
And wherever I went, I met interesting people.
In Bridlington, I bumped into Björn Ulvaeus, co-founder of ABBA. He told me that while he had once lived in London (when he was writing the musical Chess with our mutual friend Tim Rice), he had never been north of Watford – though he had heard great things of Yorkshire in general and Bridlington in particular.
We walked around the Bridlington Spa together humming Thank You for the Music, in memory of the spa’s most noted musical alumnus, the great Wallace Hartley, who came to Bridlington in 1903 to play in the Bridlington Municipal Orchestra. Nine years later, he tragically lost his life: he was leading his own eight-piece orchestra playing for the passengers during the sinking of the Titanic, doing his best to help keep them calm as the ship went down.
In Broadstairs in Kent, I had one of the happiest theatrical experiences of my life, when my wife and I went on the St Peter’s Village Tour.
Every Thursday, local folk dress up in period costume and, for two and a half hours, in assorted spots around the village, in a series of cleverly crafted and well-written fiveminute scenes, re-enact the story of their community across a thousand years.
It’s like the Oberammergau Passion Play, but with rather more laughs. You get to throw (fake) fruit and veg at medieval ne’er-do-wells in the stocks, you have an audience with Queen Victoria (and a ghost in the graveyard), and you attend a class in a board school (the stern schoolmistress is alarmingly convincing).
It’s brilliantly done, involves a hundred and more volunteers, and should be emulated in villages across the country.
The actors in Broadstairs were gifted amateurs, mostly of riper years.
In Stratford, I saw some fine young professionals in an RSC outdoor production of As You Like It. I liked it a lot. It was Shakespeare cut down to size (just 80 minutes, with no interval) with the best Rosalind I have seen – and I have seen the best, starting with Vanessa Redgrave back in 1961.
Letty Thomas played the part with wonderful authority and subtle charm – as I hoped she might because I have known her, off and on, all her life.
I went to school with her mother, the actress and director Selina Cadell, best known as the character who wears a
permanent neck brace in the TV series Doc Martin.
It was Selina’s birthday – so I treated her to tea at the Shakespaw Cat Café in Union Street. The tea (sandwiches, cakes, scones) is everything you’d hope for, and you enjoy it surrounded by assorted friendly moggies (lots of them, all rescue cats), which are allowed everywhere (on the tables, on the chairs, on top of the curtain pelmet) except the kitchen. The only trick the management miss is not having a litter tray in the toilet.
There was more theatre in Frinton, whither I went at the invitation of my friend the actress Jane Asher.
She is patron of the Frinton Summer Theatre because that’s where she started her stage career, aged 12, back in 1958. The joy of visiting Frinton in 2024 is that you feel as if you are in 1958 again.
I have known Jane since 1968, when (I must have shared this with you before – it’s possibly my proudest boast) she became the first truly beautiful girl to sleep in my bed. Maddeningly, I was elsewhere at the time. (One day I will tell you the whole story.)
This summer, 56 years on from our first encounter, we shared a stage in a big top on the front at Frinton to help raise funds for this Essex theatre company, which was founded in 1934 and is the oldest surviving ‘weekly’ summer rep in the land. They serve up seven productions each season – and not just predictable potboilers: new plays and a musical, too.
I hope you enjoyed your summer in Ibiza or Corfu or Slovenia, where I’m told all the best people are holidaying these days. All I am saying is that I know I had an even better time than you did.
Do yourself a favour: stay at home next year.
You can listen now to Gyles Brandreth’s podcast, Rosebud
Thank you for the music: Björn Ulvaeus
Don’t rage against the dying of the light
Why do oldies think they can be youthful for ever?
matthew norman
According to a recent report in several medically credible newspapers, as well as in the Daily Mail, the process of human decay is nothing like as random, gradual or unpredictable as you probably assumed.
First at 44 and then again at 60 – so the catchily named Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University contends, after studying a range of biometric markers – we age suddenly and dramatically.
We’ll skip over the fine detail, not least because I understand no part of it. But apparently these two staging posts on the road towards oblivion bring a sharp lurch towards the grave.
I cannot speak from memory of the decline on my reaching 44 because it’s ineffably vulgar to affect to remember anything from that long ago.
But as to that second milestone, I can confirm the study’s findings. I turned 60 less than a year ago, and from the very moment of my blowing out the lone candle on the Tesco own-brand cupcake, it’s been a corkscrew spin towards the geriatric.
For almost the entire last two months, for instance, I’ve been paralysed by the ailment we know by its diminutive – gout. In this case, the over-familiarity is excusable. Gouty arthritis, to use its full name, sounds far too like an Anglo-Cypriot gangster from peak era Martin Amis –‘D’ya run into Keith in the boozer?’ ‘Nah, he’s dahn the ’ospital gettin’ stitched. He never paid Baboon that monkey he owes him, so he had Gouty Arthritis take a blade to his boat race’ –for common usage.
Call it what you will, though, it’s a scream. Every 18 months or so, an ageing dullard such as me will write a column railing about the comical stereotyping of gout as payback for wild over-indulgence at table.
The bore will piously point out that he (it’s always a he) never ate a morsel of grouse or drank a thimble of port in all his puff. And yet here he is being remorselessly ribbed for suffering the excruciating badge of honour of the corpulent 18th-century duke.
To that, we say cobblers. Gout is in truth inescapably hilarious.
At least a dozen times of late, for example, Louis, my son and latterly my carer, has been obliged to hide his face and semi-mute his guffaws while observing me hopping dementedly up the stairs, or swaying on crutches like a sapling in a tornado.
In an admittedly more abstract way, I share his amusement at the absurdity of being crippled by the accretion of uric acid crystals in the blood. This condition literally takes the piss, after all, and moulds it into an instrument of torture.
We needn’t dwell here on other confirmations that the ageing process hits warp speed on the 60th birthday (vastly increased cholesterol, failing kidneys and so forth). The point, should there happen to be one, is that this is what life should be like after 60: absolute indolence peppered with disabling maladies that leave you reclining on the sofa like a Victorian consumptive, watching third-rate movies you’ve seen 11 times before with a tea towel-swaddled bag of frozen peas Sellotaped to the extremities.
When I was a boy, men of 60 knew their place. They had the decency to take to their dressing-gowns and
When I was a boy, men of 60 knew their place
slippers, shuffling aimlessly about in an enveloping fog of obsolescence for a few pleasureless years before departing, and gifting their widows a glorious half-decade of peace before they joined them in the cemetery.
Now it’s nothing but nauseatingly smug old-timers sequestering ageinappropriate leisure pursuits, swimming with hammerhead sharks or bungee jumping down the Angel Falls.
At 117, or however old that invader from the Planet Skaro claims to be, Rupert Murdoch continues to control Fox News from behind the puppet son’s strings. Donald Trump, who admits to 78 but has an estimated biological age of 219, is on the verge of returning to the White House. Mick Jagger, well into his 80s, is still doing his chicken strut across stadium stages.
It turns the stomach. This may not be the ideally chosen publication in which to make the case. But, with the possible exception of a genuinely happy family, there is nothing more disgusting in this world than the ostentatious refusal to accept the limitations of age.
On this basis, gout should be more than an often genetically dictated condition which brings such innocent delight to the children of its victims. It should be a moral imperative, artificially induced if necessary in everyone who turns 60 as a teaching aid to welcoming the approach of old age with dignity and decorum.
I would borrow from Joe Louis, in regard to decay and death, by observing that you can run but you cannot hide. But when you’ve had a kicking from that Blind Beggar habitué Gouty Arthritis, you cannot run.
You can barely move a millimetre –and, as the findings of that study appear to establish beyond doubt, that is in full accord with how human beings are designed.
what was the one-pound note?
Forty years ago, in December 1984, the last one-pound note was printed. It ceased to be legal tender in March 1988.
It seemed as though an old and venerable item had been stripped from our culture. We could, for example, look back to May 1828, when a petition was announced, signed by ‘a numerous body of the most opulent and respectable inhabitants of Cheltenham’, against a bill to withdraw the one-pound note from circulation. A century and a half later, in Putney in February 1978, the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, held up a pound note and, to demonstrate how badly the government had allowed its value to fall, cut it in half with a pair of scissors.
The Cheltenham petitioners failed. The pound note they supported had been introduced in 1797. It was the consequence of a diminishing gold supply, caused by war with revolutionary France, but was withdrawn in the year of their complaint. Not until the next major European conflict did it re-emerge, in the form of notes issued by the Treasury in 1914.
The first green one-pound note was issued by the Bank of England in November 1928. Issues between then and 1960 are referred to by numismatic types as Britannia notes. The design, by architect William Keesey, showed Britannia on one side, and on the reverse the Bank itself, and St George and the dragon as designed by Benedetto Pistrucci for the sovereign that the note replaced. Acanthus leaves swirled about them all. These notes remained in circulation until October 1962. There were 20 billion of them.
During the Second World War, blue ‘emergency issue’ one-pound notes appeared. They were the first to incorporate a metal thread. Some oldies will remember them, as they endured as late as May 1962.
Otherwise, the design remained unchanged until March 1960. Robert Austin, Professor of Engraving at the Royal College of Art, was given permission to portray the young Queen on a new note. He put her on the front, and Britannia was retired to the back. There were geometrical engravings. It wasn’t received with universal delight. One typical correspondent described the design as ‘a jungle of
what is a brat summer?
A brat summer is a summer that you spend being a bit brattish and badly behaved.
It’s the sort of summer when you stay out until 5.32am wearing a lime-green bikini. The sort of summer when you take up smoking again. The sort of summer when you have an ill-advised fling with a Slovakian bartender, forget to water your hydrangeas, don’t put CDs back in the right cases – and dance to the album Brat by Charli XCX, the éminence verte citron of brat culture.
A brat, the British-born Charli XCX, 31, has explained, is ‘that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it’. The album, released to rave reviews
back in June, is ‘me, my flaws, my f***-ups, my ego all rolled into one’.
To say that it has resonated would be an understatement. Brat is the Gen Z social-media phenomenon of 2024, a sure sign that the era of clean eating and virtue-signalling are behind us. Charli XCX hasn’t so much captured the zeitgeist as whipped it up with cream and drizzled it with her own special sauce.
Perhaps the only person having a brattier summer is US presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Soon after Joe Biden announced his intention not to run for president again, Charli XCX tweeted, ‘kamala IS brat’.
I’m not saying that this will come to be seen as the defining moment of 21st-century US political history, but it certainly hasn’t hurt Harris’s popularity with Gen Z voters.
Some clever young person on Harris’s team returned the compliment by switching the Kamala HQ social-media
printer’s clutter’. It remained legal tender until May 1979.
In February 1978, another new note arrived, designed by proud Black Country artist Harry Eccleston. It had shrunk and was perilously close to Monopoly-money size. On the other hand, it did now feature on its reverse the Royal Mint’s most famous Master, Isaac Newton, surrounded by an array of planetary bodies, overlaid by a diagram from the Principia. About six billion were printed.
So why did we revert to coin?
According to the Times (23rd December 1983), inflation was the reason and, ‘with the pound’s loss of value, the notes are already treated as coins and loose change. They no longer repose clean and crisp in wallets, produced for occasional use; instead they are stuffed in pockets, waistcoats and purses, quickly becoming filthy and crumpled.’ And there was also the influence of the vending industry.
It was galling to witness its reduction to primitive coinage, but the venerated green pound note existed for a mere 60 years. We should be grateful that it went before that slippery indignity of polymerisation visited upon higher denominations.
Wynn Wheldon
profile to the same lurid green as the Brat album cover – and soon every American news anchor was discussing Kamala’s claims to brattishness while inadvertently promoting Charli XCX’s album. Now that’s what you call marketing synergy!
Of course, you might question whether a 59-year-old former lawyer running for president on a platform of women’s rights and strengthening democracy really has much in common with a pop star from Cambridge singing about summer flings and cocaine-fuelled club sessions.
Dare I suggest that lines like ‘Who the **** are you? I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that’ and ‘It’s OK to admit that you’re jealous of me’ come over a little more … Trumpy?
Still, Harris does seem to be having fun out there on the campaign trail. And, Lord knows, we’re overdue a bit of that. Richard Godwin
At 80, Anne Robinson tells Harry Mount about facelifts, drinking and Robert Maxwell
Here’s to you, Miss Robinson
What’s the laziest job in the world?
Donald Trump’s personal trainer? Lord Lucan’s diary secretary?
Or teaching Anne Robinson how to ask rude questions on The Weakest Link? That was my job 15 years ago – and it was entirely pointless.
Robinson had an innate gift for examining human character – and tracking down its weak spots. She didn’t need any help from me.
One middle-aged lady on the show gushed, ‘Anne, I’m starting an Open University course.’
Quick as a flash, Robinson said, ‘Oh, have you just got divorced?’
The contestant stared at her, openmouthed. How on earth had she worked it out? Her divorce wasn’t on the CV we’d been given.
Robinson’s witticisms came bubbling up from a bottomless well. ‘What do you do when you’re not eating?’ she asked a fat contestant.
And to a Welsh care worker, whose job was to bathe the elderly, she said, ‘Why don’t you put them in a van, let the windows down and go through a car wash?’
Robinson presented the show from 2000 to 2012 – not so long ago, but the tone was light-years away from current TV mores.
‘You’d never be able to say all that now,’ she says. ‘Half of it would be stamped out.’
The thing about The Weakest Link is that contestants liked her being rude to them.
‘I always thought the contestants would feel short-changed if I were nice,’ she says. ‘When we had a rehearsal with real-life people for the first time, I realised how competitive they were. I’d say, “Why are you voting off Janet?”
‘And they’d say, “Because she has Jesus sandals and quite bad BO.”
‘And I thought, “Great – we can all be ourselves.”’
Robinson doesn’t mind her nickname – the Queen of Mean – in the slightest. ‘I had spent years in a newspaper newsroom where that’s the common banter.’
She can turn on that rude banter at will. But she is rude only to those who want it or deserve it. I once introduced her to a Sloane moron friend of mine, who poured out dim platitudes and errors about the Royal Family. Robinson sat there quietly, politeness itself.
Only when we left the Sloane’s house did Robinson say to me, ‘I decided not to go for her because she’s your friend and we were in her house.’
We went on to a party nearby, where an old friend of hers started telling long-winded anecdotes.
‘Edit! Edit!’ she said to the friend in a world-weary way –but with no malice.
I get the same directness when I ask about the latest gossip. Is she still in a relationship with Andrew Parker Bowles, the Queen’s ex-husband, as she confirmed in a recent interview?
‘I won’t comment on any of my private life,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to ask – and I can tell you to mind your own business.’
She gives this warning with comic topspin. You know she won’t mind being asked anything, even if she won’t answer everything.
So she’s perfectly happy to talk about turning 80 on 26th September.
‘I’m not dreading it – I’m quite surprised by it,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think my generation would ever be old. And 80 is huge. I don’t feel very old. I’m quite fit.’
She’s happy, too, to talk about the facelift she had in 2004.
‘I wrote about it and, for ages afterwards, men would come up to me and have a serious conversation and then at the end say, “My wife wanted to know if I could ask you where you got your facelift.”
‘At a party, Gordon Brown’s female sidekick talked about tax and then said, “How much did your face cost?”’
This complete honesty about saying what she thinks makes her very funny.
In 2017, before the deeply sad funeral of the late Alexander Chancellor, the sainted former editor of The Oldie, we were sitting next to each other in the silent church. Just before the service began, Robinson said, out of the blue and out loud, ‘Why do all posh women have untidy hair bunched in a clip?’
I looked round the church to see clip after clip, bunching untidy hair, and burst into laughter. Her toughness and honesty – and drinking – came from her mother, who turned the family chicken stall in Liverpool into a huge wholesale business, supplying ships, railways and hotels. Her father was a teacher who joined the family business – but, so his wife would say, ‘He’s not learnt anything in 40 years, because he just liked people to like him.’
Despite the success of the business, Robinson’s mother always kept the chicken stall. Robinson says, ‘We used to come home from boarding school and do two weeks with white
coats on, selling chickens. Then we’d go off for six weeks in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. So it was quite schizophrenic, really.
‘She also insisted that we never talk about ourselves. Customers were royalty and they shouldn’t know where we went to school or anything.’
Robinson describes it as ‘new money’: ‘in-and-out drive, lots of cars, mink coats’.
Her mother had the same instinct for the way of the world that made her daughter a natural journalist.
‘My mother would say, in about October, that turkeys were going to be on the floor or sky-high and she was never wrong. There is an instinct in journalism that somehow you know things other people don’t because you’ve been at it that long.’
After Farnborough Hill Convent, a private school in Hampshire, Robinson went into newspapers.
‘I thought I could write and I wanted to be famous,’ she says. ‘My ambitions were very low-level. A rich suburban childhood – you wanted something more interesting.
‘I’ve always been the most underqualified person in any job I’ve done in television. To get into the BBC in those days … they’d all been to Oxbridge. A lot of them are quite stupid, actually.’
The newspaper world half a century
‘I’m from a long line of Irish Catholic alcoholic wolves’
ago was a different planet. When Robinson was 22 and on the Daily Mail, the chief sub would deliberately drop her copy and make her pick it up – so the back bench could see her knickers.
‘I didn’t know it was MeToo behaviour then,’ she says. ‘I remember thinking, “I’m brighter than all this lot and I’ll soon be in charge.”
‘Now it has created a team of women who are victims. If you start protesting, you lose your place on climbing up to a better job – you have a reputation.
‘I’m just a pragmatist. I grew up in a household where my mother was the breadwinner and she thought most men were stupid. I never either got upset or took it too seriously when they behaved in a silly way.’
Robinson got her first Mail scoop in 1967, when she tracked down the details
of Brian Epstein’s suicide. While the other hacks went off to the pub, Robinson stayed outside Epstein’s Mayfair house and saw the family solicitor from Liverpool come out. She gave him a lift to Euston and swiftly got all the details.
She says, ‘It was a bit of luck – and my natural instinct to completely ignore what I’ve been told to do by people who had no right to tell me to do it.’
Robinson had to leave the Mail for the Times on marrying Charlie Wilson, the Mail deputy news editor, in 1968. That was the rule then.
She was also developing a serious drink problem, as laid out in Robinson’s Memoirs of an Unfit Mother (2001).
‘When you finally realise you’ve got a drink problem and that you’ve got to do something about it, you don’t spend much time wondering how it got there,’ she says. ‘I’m from a long line of Irish Catholic alcoholic wolves. I had a childhood with a mother who was a binge drinker – it’s astonishing that you find yourself in the same place.’
She divorced Wilson in 1973, losing custody of their daughter, Emma. (She later married journalist John Penrose).
‘Charlie was furious with me for being unfaithful and fought for custody, and he won it because the judge decided I was more ambitious than he was,’ she says. ‘I should have lost it because my drinking was bad. It meant, for Emma’s early years, she was with him and that was quite hard to overcome.’
At her lowest ebb, Robinson weighed six stone and was given six weeks to live. But she doesn’t blame it on Fleet Street: ‘I’d have had a drink problem being a nun. I didn’t drink well ever.’
By 1980, she was working at the Daily Mirror, bought by Robert Maxwell in 1984.
‘He was easy to deal with,’ says Robinson, who negotiated a pay rise and a Mercedes out of him. ‘He’d had two older sisters and he quite liked clever, sharp women. He just liked me. He didn’t seem worse than anyone else and he just amused me.’
Maxwell’s theft from the Mirror pension fund didn’t surprise her.
Robinson says, ‘He’d put a lot of non-entities – like the number three on the picture desk – on the pension fund. Nobody questioned him. He was just a joke. A really funny joke.’
TV fame began in 1986 with Points of View on BBC1.
She says, ‘Because it came on after Dallas, which was at ten to nine on a Wednesday, if you wanted to watch the news you got me in the middle. I got more famous than I deserved. Ernie Wise
once came from the back of the plane to say hello. I thought, “Gosh, there’s a Mafia of the famous.”’
Robinson thinks of herself as a journalist rather than a famous TV star. ‘I haven’t got any showbiz friends at all. I don’t know anyone famous.’
Her years as a hack mean she knows how to handle the press. One day, the Mail’s showbusiness editor rang up to ask if she had cancer.
‘Not as far as I know,’ said Robinson.
‘We’ve got it on very good authority that you’ve got cancer,’ the journalist said.
‘Can you tell me who told you?’ said Robinson.
‘We can’t reveal sources,’ he said. Robinson said, ‘We’re at a bit of an impasse here. You say I’ve got cancer and I don’t know about it.’
He said, ‘All right, then. You didn’t turn up at Jeremy Clarkson’s birthday party.’
Robinson said, ‘I’m just going to get my medical dictionary to see if that is one of the signs.’
She doesn’t have a high opinion of herself. ‘I’ve just earnt a living being nosy,’ she says. ‘I don’t know that I’m very clever. I’ve got no measuring stick. Some clever people are very stupid. You wouldn’t get them to run your bath.’
She acknowledges she has the crucial element of a good journalist – speed of thought – and the ability to make a piece interesting: ‘Good journalists have a radar, which for me made The Weakest Link easy.’
Robinson returned to TV to present Countdown from 2021 to 2022. ‘It was very great fun,’ she says, but she stopped because the filming schedule was relentless, and for financial reasons.
‘The Channel 4 lawyers said I had to go on the payroll,’ she says. ‘I said I came from this Irish alcoholic tribe. We didn’t go on payrolls. We nicked them.’
So what will she do, now she’s entering her ninth decade?
She says, ‘The Observer asked me what ambitions I had left. I said, “To get to the end of a Melanie Phillips column.”’
Robinson with her daughter, Emma
No sex, please – we’re pals
Harry and Sally were wrong. Liz Hodgkinson has lots of male friends
Thirty-five years ago, When Harry Met Sally asked a question: can men and women be good friends without sex getting in the way?
The answer, after a lot of funny lines, appears to be no. The film couple do eventually have sex and, after 12 years of bumping into each other from time to time, get married.
My own experience, minus the witty one-liners, is quite different. I am lucky enough to have a number of close, even intimate, men friends, but sex doesn’t get in the way and never has. We are content for our relationships to remain platonic, even though we can enjoy close physical affection with each other.
My earliest such man friend is Ivan, whom I have known since I was three, when we lived opposite each other. Our paths diverged when I passed the 11-plus, and Ivan was left behind. He left school at 14 without any qualifications, to become a builder’s apprentice.
Not much was expected of him, yet from my earliest years I sensed there was something special and unusually focused about him – and I was right. Within a decade, Ivan was a millionaire, and rose to become the second-biggest housebuilder in the country. He was also a county tennis, table tennis and badminton champion. Now in his 80s and on his third marriage, he has asked me to write his life story.
Although we have been friends for all these years and even played tennis together as teenagers, we were never childhood sweethearts. It just would not have felt right. Perhaps we knew too much about each other’s difficult home backgrounds for that.
My next male friend is Grahame. We met aged 11 on the school bus and now, in our ninth decade, write to each other almost every day. The relationship is long-distance, because Grahame has lived in Australia since the 1970s, although he does occasionally come to the UK, and usually stays with me.
Once again, our friendship is too close and too long-standing to be complicated by sex. Grahame is also married, to his second wife.
Third on the list is Alex Williams, now a well-known artist but a rebellious art student when we first met. Alex’s artistic talent was apparent from an early age and, at 81, he is still as productive as ever. He is married to his second wife and now lives on the Isle of Wight – and whenever he is on the mainland, we meet up.
We have a professional relationship as well, since I write press releases for his exhibitions and he has designed covers for my books. We exchange big hugs when we meet but that’s as far as it goes. Once again, there has never been any prospect of Alex and me getting together.
Fourth is Pete, whom I met when we were in our 20s and near neighbours in Richmond. At the time, we were both married and for many years we all
same year. We even share a birthday and so a star sign. We are very alike in many ways – perhaps too much alike to want to be hitched. As it is, the level of connection, which has remained stable for more than four decades, suits us both perfectly.
Something I have in common with all my close men friends is that we can talk about anything at all. We can share secrets, joke and laugh and then happily part company until the next time.
We are not lovers and never will be. I present no threat whatever to their current wives; we go back too far for that. If I wouldn’t want to be married to any of them, they can say the same: they certainly would not want to be married to me!
My longstanding men friends are very different from my female friends
Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) in When Harry Met Sally, 1989
When Harry Met Sally argues that men and women can never be ‘friends’ because if there is growing sexual attraction between them, it disrupts the friendship. And if there is no intimacy, the friendship can only ever be distant and casual.
I disagree strongly. When two people are sexually attracted to each other, it is instant – a blinding flash; a spark that ignites at once. It does not grow gradually over the years, as in Harry and Sally’s (fictional) case.
My long-standing men friends are extremely precious to me and provide a welcome ‘bass note’ – a touch of masculinity in my life – as they are very different from my
But it would be a grave
In spring 1912, Francis Browne, a keen young photographer from Cork, studying to become a Jesuit priest, received an unexpected present from a wealthy uncle: the chance to travel on the maiden voyage of a new liner.
He duly boarded the vessel at Southampton and sailed first to Cherbourg, where more passengers were collected, and then to Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, the liner’s last stop before it crossed the Atlantic.
While on board, he grew friendly with an American family, who offered to pay his fare for the remaining part of the voyage. A telegram was sent to the Jesuit Provincial Superior in Ireland asking if this might be allowed. On his arrival at Queenstown, the reply awaited. It read, ‘GET OFF THAT SHIP – PROVINCIAL.’
Father Browne, 59, with camera, 1939
Young Browne obediently disembarked, taking his camera and capturing a handful of last photographs as the ship sailed away. A few days later, the vessel hit an iceberg and sank.
Today, the only surviving images of life on board the Titanic are those taken by the Jesuit trainee.
Had he intended to become a professional photographer, those pictures would have been of enormous help in advancing his career. But Francis Browne remained intent on joining the religious order, which he did in July 1915.
The following February, he became a chaplain to the First Battalion of the Irish Guards, serving on the front line in France and Flanders until November 1918, and then in Germany for a further 18 months. Although gassed once and injured five times (on one occasion needing to have his jaw wired), he survived this gruelling period and continued to take photographs.
Father Browne’s Titanic adventures
Robert O’Byrne on the priest who photographed the Titanic – and Irish country
houses
Like those of the Titanic, they are now of immense historic interest.
Nothing during the second half of his life again brought him to the centre of global events, but it was nevertheless filled with activity, not least photography.
For decades, he was assigned to the
mission and retreat staff of the Jesuit order; this required him to travel throughout Ireland and England, giving parish missions and leading retreats for nuns, other priests and children.
Much of this work took place in the evenings, leaving him time to photograph his immediate surroundings.
Everything was of interest to him, and
everything needed to be recorded. This is what makes the collection he left behind so valuable: it covers all aspects of daily life across half a century. There is one lacuna: there are no pictures of pub interiors.
Before he died, aged 80, in 1960, Browne catalogued his archive of photographs, running to some
Clockwise from above, all taken by Browne: the Titanic; child survivor Douglas Spedden (centre right) on deck; drawing room, Malahide Castle, County Dublin, 1947; the Earl of Dunraven, 92, Adare Manor, Limerick, 1949
42,000 negatives, providing names and dates for them all, documentation that has proved invaluable.
Towards the end of his life, rather unexpectedly, he began to photograph Ireland’s country houses. It says a great deal about the man’s character and personal charm that he was able to gain access to so many properties that at a
accumulated by generations of the family, captured in situ by Browne.
He visited in good time. Three years later, Lord Wicklow was obliged to sell Shelton Abbey’s contents in a spectacular auction, which lasted for 13 days. The great majority of lots went to overseas buyers and left Ireland, making Browne’s pictures priceless as a guide to how the house once looked. Shelton Abbey is today an open prison.
Other houses photographed during this period have been demolished, such as Rockingham and Frenchpark, both in County Roscommon, or left a ruin, like Killeen Castle, County Meath. Some, such as Adare Manor, County Limerick, and Dromoland Castle, County Clare, are now hotels. Many more, the likes of Knocklofty, County Tipperary, and Glananea, County Westmeath, have changed hands on more than one occasion and have long since lost their original pictures and furniture.
As recently as September 2021 the contents of Howth Castle, County Dublin, photographed by Browne in July 1947, were dispersed at auction.
time were still in private hands and not open to the public.
Some images were published in the Irish Tatler & Sketch, beginning with Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow, home for some 200 years to the Earls of Wicklow. Browne photographed the house in 1946 and 1947. The building was then still filled with treasures
Happily, the story of what has happened since his time is not all bad. A few of the houses he photographed remain with the same families and have experienced relatively little change, among them Curraghmore and Lismore Castle, both in County Waterford; Malahide Castle, County Dublin; and Dunsany Castle, County Meath.
Browne’s photographs are a memory of a period when these properties were not the exception but still the rule. As such, they are just as important as the pictures taken when he was young and travelling on the Titanic’s maiden voyage.
A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne by Robert O’Byrne is out on 4th October
Sea lords
Mark Carnall has rediscovered a classic Georgian book on the beauty of shells
n 1811, architect, stonemason and shell obsessive George Perry published a lavishly illustrated volume, his Conchology or the Natural History of Shells
It featured 348 beautifully illustrated mollusc shells, with descriptions of species, many of which were new to science.
Despite the effort that went into producing the work, at a time when conchophilia, or shell-fancying, was at its height, Perry’s Conchology all but disappeared in the scientific literature. It was apparently actively suppressed by the leading conchologists of the day and cruelly mocked for decades afterwards.
From the common limpet and razor clam to the valuable cowry and spectacular divine conch, the wide range of shells form a treasure trove of beauty from our oceans and shores.
Mark Carnall is Collections Manager of human remains and non-insect invertebrate collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Beautiful Shells by Mark Carnall is out on 26th September (Bodleian Library, £25)
Here comes the bride’s mother
A new mother-of-the-bride industry has added to wedding inflation, as Clare Clark discovered when her daughter got married
After my daughter had got engaged, in December, I was asked the same two questions again and again.
The first – ‘Do you like him?’ – was easily answered. ‘Yes – very much.’
The second, hot on its heels, was another thing altogether. ‘So what are you going to wear?’
‘I thought white,’ I said cheerfully. ‘With a veil.’ My daughter would appreciate the moral support.
And if it turned out that she was too self-obsessedly Bridezilla to share the spotlight (this generation!), I was sure I had a dress in my wardrobe that would do nicely.
I might as well have suggested turning up stark-naked. Had I gone mad? This was my only daughter’s big day. My outfit had to be not only new but Special with a capital S. It also had to be elegant, age-appropriate, not the same colour as the dresses of the bridesmaids or the mother of the groom, not to upstage the bride (what?) and not to show too much skin. It was in short going to be A Thing.
The mystery was why. I wondered at first if it was a modern phenomenon, an American import or part of the new celebrity-infused, more-is-more Big Fat British Wedding culture that plays out in reality-TV shows like Say Yes to the Dress and Ultimate Wedding Planner. As long ago as 2017, Country Life was busy condemning the ‘nuptial equivalent of an arms race’.
My parents like to remind me that when they got married, in 1961, a wedding reception was a vigilantly timed (and determinedly joyless) afternoon affair. Two hours max.
immediately. I booked for my sister, too; she also has a daughter getting married this summer. Neither of us had a clue what we wanted – or 18 free days to find out.
The sales assistant was a delight. The dresses could not have been more awful. Shiny and aggressively floral, most were knee-length shifts, a style not seen in the wild since the late 1990s.
Trying them on, I looked like a cross between a cheap sofa and Angela Merkel. Plainly mothers of the bride were not permitted to engage with fashion. They were, however, required to part with a terrifying amount of money. The cheapest dress in the shop clocked in at a shade under £600 before alterations. Most were much more.
In the 2020s, it is a struggle to contain the celebrations to a single 24-hour period, with only a photographer, a videographer and synchronised helicopters to document proceedings.
Was the mother-of-the-bride pressure yet another example of wedding inflation spiralling out of control?
As the cold, dead hands of the older generation are prised from proceedings and more couples take control of their own planning, the madness quotient has increased.
The internet has only encouraged the insanity. With forums à gogo, feeding the beast, it’s not long before gold-plated bonkers becomes the baseline, and not just for brides.
According to a 2012 Daily Mail survey of 1,000 women, 14 per cent would spend over £1,000 on an outfit for their child’s wedding. One in ten would consider Botox, a tummy tuck or a boob job. A poll in 2016 found that mothers of the bride took on average a whopping 18 days (that’s two and a half straight shopping weeks) to find the perfect ensemble.
It has not taken long for businesses serving this madness to pop up across the UK. One such establishment operates in my local town (population 20,000).
Plainly thriving, it sells wedding dresses on one floor, and on another, amidst an aviary of feathered hats, outfits for mothers of the bride.
Visits are by appointment only. I booked
That was before the hat, the jacket, the bag and the shoes the shop would dye to match. Four figures did not begin to cover it. We fled.
How much of this is driven by demand and how much by social pressure is anyone’s guess. Even for ordinary mortals, the wedding photographs (or full-length feature film) serve as a lifelong reminder of sartorial missteps.
On the day when your daughter is transformed into a princess, there is, I suppose, the corresponding expectation for her mother to become a queen – and who among us has experience of that?
In the end, it was the internet that saved me. I found a half-price (though still eye-watering) Emilia Wickstead dress, which was queenly enough to pass muster and fun enough to imagine wearing many times again.
Or perhaps the internet will ride to my rescue again and I can sell it to another mother of the bride at the start of her search.
It would be nice to think my suffering has not been entirely in vain. We might even bang another tiny nail into the coffin of the shiny floral shift.
Mamma mia: Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and Donna (Meryl Streep) at her wedding
Absurd Waugh story
Pierre Waugh salutes his uncle Alexander (1963-2024), grandfather Auberon, great-grandfather Evelyn – and their war on seriousness
My late uncle Alexander Waugh’s funeral left those who might describe themselves as ‘bubbly’ with a unique opportunity to simmer down. A great man had died, and no one was in the mood to chatter.
I knew my uncle Alexander, who died in July, aged only 60, by the name Pedro; an affectionate moniker coined by my father – Alexander’s brother, Nat. I can think of no greater honour than to have been asked to serve as a pallbearer at his funeral. Despite the gravity of the occasion, I was surprised to encounter for the first time in my life something unfamiliar, something solemn that went against a generational upbringing of levity and good humour: complete seriousness. It was impossible to laugh; though perhaps not wholly inappropriate.
‘We are all ridiculous,’ said my father in his touching eulogy, ‘and no one understood this better than Pedro. He recognised that even lions, marmosets and butterflies are preposterous.’
philosophy. And humour for its own sake – just as the aesthetes tried with beauty – seems to grate against those hearts that beat for a definitively structured world. For humour is not dogmatic, but demonstrative.
In 1973, my grandfather Auberon Waugh found his daughter Sophia (The Oldie’s School Days correspondent) laughing aloud to P G Wodehouse at the precocious age of ten. Auberon was delighted that his daughter understood the Great English Joke: ‘All seriousness – personal, religious, political – is reduced to absurdity … the best jokes
remove it from the tarmac. He then ran over a green lizard – and in the process fell off his Mobylette.
Perhaps Auberon learnt to distrust authority from his father Evelyn, whose experiences in the army seemed to demystify the aura of pomp that strict regimentation can inspire.
Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘I found myself under the command and in the mess with one man of startling singularity after another.’ This, in turn, allowed him to ‘come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normality’.
Humour has bound not only the Waugh literary legacy but also, more importantly, the clan’s members. One of Pedro’s running concerns was whether this merrymaking trait was hereditary or merely some knee-jerk reaction to parental puppetry.
In Fathers and Sons, his brilliant biography of the Waugh family, Pedro highlights striking atavisms that would favour a congenital explanation:
‘As a small girl, my youngest daughter used to lean her head back and flicker her eyelids as she laughed, a distinctive gesture that I had only ever seen in two people: her great-grandmother and her great-uncle.’
Pedro wasn’t seeking a definitive answer, He once wrote, ‘To say something as a solid statement from a solid concrete plinth is to be rather foolish because there is nothing you can really say that is actually true.’
Humour could be very glibly described as the Waugh family’s
Alexander and Sophia on Auberon Waugh’s knees; Evelyn Waugh, centre, back row; Combe Florey, 1965
completely ignore everything in which men of authority try to interest us.’ He saluted ‘the deeper subversion of totally non-political jokes’.
Auberon had a factious yet playful relationship with authority. My father tells a story in which Auberon acted with the most noble instinct.
While on holiday in France, riding a Mobylette on France’s Rigole canal, he drove past a haughty signpost that commanded, ‘INTERDICTION FORMELLE DE JETER DANS LA RIGOLE ET SUR SES DÉPENDANCES DES ANIMAUX MORTS (volailles comprises) ET DES ORDURES.’
Outraged at this ban on throwing dead animals into the Rigole, my grandfather tried to hurl a dead hedgehog into the water but couldn’t
Pedro deeply loved his father, Auberon, and saw nothing but affection in his manner. He particularly appreciated his putting an end to ‘that otiose propensity to favouritism’ so championed by Evelyn’s fickle magnanimity. If Auberon’s humour was a protest against seriousness, then it should follow that all of its by-products – especially cruelty – should be regarded in the same light of absurdity. Pedro followed this example, and treated his family with the love and dignity they deserved.
I believe I first earned my uncle Pedro’s recognition through humour. I can’t have been older than ten. It was the day of my cousin Beatrice’s wedding.
Callow philistine that I was, I got bored of the church service. It suddenly appeared to me quite clever to delay each ‘amen’ by a split second, and raise the expected response by an octave.
Perhaps I reminded Pedro of the bumptious castratos he had to endure at the opera – I heard a chortle from behind me. Spurred on, I made sure that each delayed ‘amen’ got louder and more seraphic. He always lauded me for this act.
Distracted by grief as I was at his funeral, it did not spring to my mind to repeat this joke. I still wonder if that is what he would have wanted.
Pierre Waugh is a writer, currently finishing his MA dissertation on Aldous Huxley at Durham University
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Beware of the devil dogs
Why can’t owners keep their snarling hounds under control?
By Matthew Phillips
It’s well known that dog ownership went through the roof during the Covid era.
I have nothing against dogs. Many friends and relatives have had nice dogs – nice mainly because of their reliable, sensitive owners.
It’s hard to say that now – most owners seem totally unaware of the effect their pets are having on others. Some recent research has actually proved this. Nor are they particularly aware (or interested) where their dogs are defecating.
When I took my mother out for a quiet drink in a local pub recently, she was startled by a huge, snarling beast (which probably should have had a muzzle) barking loudly at her. Of course its red-faced, unsmiling owner didn’t apologise.
I couldn’t work out whether it wanted to shag me, kill me or both.
One of the most unedifying sights during lockdown was a big group of dog-walkers surrounding a harem of frightened deer in my local park. You can imagine the response this writer got when pointing out the foolishness of their actions.
Ditto when confronting dog-owners letting their little angels run roughshod over some skylark-protection areas in the same park. As for trying to enjoy one of
Did the dog want to shag me, kill me or both?
life’s great little pleasures – a quiet read on a London park bench – forget it.
You’re generally just starting to drift off when a mutt is either careering into your legs or sniffing your private parts.
Then there’s the issue of ‘waste’. It’s pretty weird that in 2024 we still allow dogs to defecate and wee all over pavements, paths, roads and trees. We’re all used to seeing those disgusting poo bags hanging in trees. London councils used to have signs up saying that it was irresponsible for owners to let their dogs defecate in public places –those signs are long gone.
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date: 15th October 2024
Dream on, dreaming spires
The candidates to become Oxford’s Chancellor just aren’t up to it a n wilson
Oxford, the university of which Lewis Carroll was in some ways the most characteristic member, is not just an academic institution. It is a dream.
Very many people respond to this Wonderland, who have never set foot in the much-spoilt market town where the university finds itself. Think of the success not only of Through the Looking Glass but of Brideshead Revisited.
The older I become, the keener is my sense that we all need saving illusions and that the dream of Oxford is not just harmless, but potentially beneficial to the human race.
On 28th October, the MAs of the University will vote for a new Chancellor, to succeed such grandees as Oliver Cromwell (who held the post for seven years and was surprisingly good at his job); the first Duke of Wellington, and Lord Curzon: ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,/ I am a most superior person./ My face is pink, my hair is sleek,/ I dine at Blenheim twice a week.’
As these examples show, a good Chancellor does not have to be a graduate of the University, but they have to suggest there is something special about this strange place. There has to be an element of fantasy in the Chancellor, which is why Harold Macmillan (a largely bogus person, as far as his biographies and published diaries reveal) was so successful in the role.
The candidates for this election no doubt all believe themselves to have many admirable qualities as human beings, but they are not what I am looking for. They might be life peers and they might be famous, but they entirely lack magic. A cricketer (Imran Khan), a famous lawyer (Lady Angiolini) and two has-been politicos – Hague and Mandy.
This reveals as much about me as it does about them. I should like to vote for a ‘most superior person’. Not necessarily
an aristocrat, but someone who carries in their person the stuff of which dreams are made. The Chancellor walks in procession every so often, wearing an academic square with a golden tassel, and bestows honorary degrees on famous people in the Sheldonian Theatre. Gielgud played the role superbly in an episode of Inspector Morse.
Why do we want a most superior person? There are two answers to this question – one positive, one negative.
The positive is in our need for play, for fantasy. I am fully aware, with a part of my brain, that Oxford is just a modern university, which will continue to function perfectly well whoever puts on those strange Gilbert-and-Sullivan clothes and is paraded to the Sheldonian for ceremonies. But in another part of my brain, Oxford is a Platonic condition to which I want its Chancellor and professors to stretch: the city of dreaming spires, the home of lost causes etc etc.
The positive answer to ‘Why?’ is that the good Chancellor lifts our spirits, makes us feel that the university is more than just a collection of academic drudges and is a Court of the Muses.
The negative answer is more serious. Only a small proportion of those voting will be romantic fantasists such as me.
But these others, the proper grownups, will feel, as I do, that ‘the idea of a university’ (to use Newman’s phrase) is a good one – morally, and intellectually. It will lower the tone to elect some pushy, second-rate chancer – and that is what all the available
They might be life peers and they might be famous, but they entirely lack magic
candidates in this election most inescapably are.
Not long ago, I was a guest at an Oxford ‘event’ at which the outgoing Chancellor, Chris Patten, made a speech. It was a majestic occasion, held in one of the most architecturally stupendous of Oxford venues. I do not wish to embarrass my hosts by naming it. But the speech by the Chancellor was an awful let-down. It was a speech of not even a well-educated person – let alone a most superior person. It was cringeworthy, in fact. I wished I wasn’t hearing the clichés and the whingey self-obsession that dribbled from the Chancellor’s mouth.
Chris Patten, a failed politician, on losing his safe Tory seat of Bath was rewarded by being made Governor of Hong King – a job he bungled, with catastrophic circumstances for millions of people. Was he really the best Oxford could come up with as a successor to Roy Jenkins? Old Woy was a pretty secondrate figure, too, but he at least put on a show of being a superior person, and he was a clever man, whose orotund, self-parodying speeches paid us all the compliment of giving the impression he was up to it. He made you believe in ‘the idea of a university’ – a subject on which he delivered an admirable lecture in memory of Newman himself.
The obvious grandees or superior persons, such as the present Lord Salisbury or Lord Spencer, have not been approached to stand, and presumably they would have refused for fear of being defeated by the likes of spin doctor Mandy. But surely we could have found someone better?
If only J K Rowling had stood! A person of deep intellectual integrity, she is also, of all the great public figures of our times, the one who best understands the central part that magic still plays in our lives.
Sophia Waugh: School Days
I thought my work was all over – it isn’t now
The deputy head walks into my class, apologising for interrupting.
She proceeds to tell the pupils all about the car crash she has been involved in, telling them she thinks they should hear about it directly from her. After the first stunned silence, the whispers begin, growing to a roar. Why is she telling them? Is she going to go round
every still class and make the same speech? Has she been arrested? Has she killed someone?
She holds up a warning hand and silence gradually settles. ‘What I really want you to know, though,’ she continues, ‘is that I often bring student teachers in to observe Miss Waugh as part of their training. The reason for this is that I want them to
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see how not to teach. You, my friends, are being taught by a duff.’ And she turns and struts from the room.
As she does so, I wake, sweating and shouting. It’s only a dream. Which is exactly how I tell my pupils not to write their stories. (But note the use of the present tense, class, deliberately creating immediacy in the text while raising questions about unreliable narration.)
This is how the school year begins every August, with me jerking awake in a panic, waking up the house with my shouts. Over 20 years in, and it still happens – lost classes, teaching wrapped only in a sheet, no knowledge of the texts, no knowledge of the building. On and on it goes – even though I never have taught when wrapped in a sheet, or forgotten where my classroom is, or indeed forgotten to come to school at all.
The nightmares usually begin at the same time as the GCSE results are announced. I pore over my class results, look at the data for how the class as a whole has performed and then turn to consider the following year. Hence the nightmares.
But this year – for the first time in my career – I did not have a GSCE class. I spent the year alternately sulking and rejoicing at this. And, on results day, a complicated mixture of sulkiness and relief kept me away from the results, as I pretended to myself that I didn’t care.
I also hoped that without
results my nightmares would forget to come to taunt me. That did not work.
With the nightmares come the New Year resolutions. I will use mini-whiteboards more (but I won’t; I can’t ever find the pens and the children will draw penises and giggle).
I will do more group activities (but I won’t as, although I have got much better at this, there are still going to be children who arse around and do nothing).
I will always, always
The school year begins with me jerking awake in panic
remember to print onto coloured paper for the dyslexic pupils (but I won’t, especially now it is being proved that this has no effect at all, even though it makes the pupils feel cherished, which is worth something).
I will follow school protocol and give everyone I see with an untucked shirt an immediate detention (but I won’t, as it is just too boring and I don’t really care).
And, having gone through that list, I will have the mental tussle about whether I can really see out another year or not.
Which I will, because (a) it’s years till I get my pension and (b) I am already excited about my pupils next year and their results.
And so the cycle will begin again.
I Once Met James Hewitt and Princess Diana
It was Christmas 2004, and my great friend Nick, a party-organiser, invited me to a ball at the Clapham Grand.
The party got off with a swing, full of 25-year-old friends mingling in the old theatre. All evening, standing above the dance floor, in the royal box, stood the lonely figure of Captain James Hewitt, 46, surveying the people below. A year before, he’d been on Larry King Live, threatening to circulate the Diana letters.
As the ball ended, Baz, a friend, said, ‘Amelia, someone wants to meet you.’
There was Hewitt, a lofty, auburn/ ginger-haired man with freckles –rather intimidating and good-looking. I was intrigued.
‘Why don’t you both come back to my flat?’ smirked Hewitt. It was midnight.
We giggled. ‘Why not?’ we thought.
James, Nick and I jumped into a black taxi. We drove across Chelsea Bridge, past rows of white stucco buildings, until we reached James’s flat off the Fulham Road.
Slightly bewildered and star-struck, we entered his flat into a giant sitting room, impersonally furnished like a boarding-school common room.
James fixed us strong gin and tonics and put the giant television on. ‘I went to the Simply Red concert,’ he said proudly as we watched Mick Hucknall crooning.
As soon as James went to the loo, Nick nudged me, saying, ‘Come on, Amelia. Let’s find the Diana love letters!’
Oh hello! James Hewitt
Right: Amelia’s slice of Diana’s wedding cake
It became a game of cat and mouse. Every time James went off, we would rifle through another drawer – but the only thing we found was army memorabilia. No letters!
something more entertaining. When James switched on back-to-back videos of himself being interviewed about the Iraq War, we were shocked. James sat there, mesmerised, watching himself.
Nick and I ended up staying the night in the spare-room twin beds. James Hewitt was the perfect gentleman and let us stay, with no corridor-creeping.
Every time James returned, we would jump onto the sofa, sheepish, red-faced and giggling. We didn’t have bad intentions to sell the letters or anything. It was just a funny game for us. (The letters have recently been valued at $1m in the US.)
By 2am, we decided to ask him openly, ‘James, tell us where the letters are. They must be here.’
James laughed. ‘The letters are with my solicitors!’
We didn’t believe him.
Bored stiff of Simply Red, we asked for
Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, would have been 90 on 19th September. Instead, he tragically died of an overdose at 32, in 1967. Epstein spent three terms at my old school, Clayesmore School, in Dorset, in 1948. He was not a good student. This was one of nine schools he attended before he was 16. When the Beatles broke through in 1963, I was at the school. The English master
We never did find the letters – but I do have some Diana memorabilia of my own to hold on to.
In September 1981, when I was two and a half, I went to Young England pre-school, where Diana had taught. The Princess visited the school that same month, two months after the royal wedding in July.
Her visit was totally unannounced, and she gave us each a piece of her wedding cake in a white presentation box. (Sadly, the wedding-cake-maker, Eddie Spence, died earlier this year, aged 91.)
We lined up outside the school door and each shook Diana’s hand. Squinting in the autumn sunshine, I looked up at Diana in her huge white hat with flowers on it.
She had an aura of softness; it was like a hazy dream and I’ll never forget it.
Amelia Milne
Brian Epstein’s unhappy schooldays
John Appleby proudly put on show three pictures Epstein had painted while there.
Some time later I interviewed, for the school magazine, three men who had been at school with him.
One couldn’t understand why he had left so suddenly. Another felt that Epstein’s listening to Bach, his love of Picasso, lack of interest in sports and desire to be a dress designer meant he was a ‘complete con merchant’.
A third remembered him being under pressure from his father to be good at sports and become an English gentleman. Among his immediate circle, he was so
popular that when someone said something antisemitic, his friends beat the racist up.
Of his time at Clayesmore, in his ghosted autobiography
A Cellarful of Noise, Epstein wrote, ‘Having done badly at various schools and having failed to get into a major public school, I was sent to a benevolent academy, where failures are welcomed although not accepted… I pursued my interest in design, but art and design were not considered worthy occupations of red-blooded Englishmen.’
He eventually left school at 16. He complained that, throughout his student life,
he suffered bullying and antisemitism, made few friends and was actively disliked. In other words, he was a loner.
A last word about the school comes in the Ray Coleman biography The Man Who Made the Beatles:
‘He positively loathed it [Clayesmore] but even at [his next school] Wrekin, he trod a lonely path and was marked out by others as an iconoclast.’
By Hugh Thompson, London SW15
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
Mary
Killen’s Beauty Tips
I’m a cape crusader
As autumn nights draw in, wrap up warm
My favourite coat is in muted turquoise tartan; it was made by Selina Blow 35 years ago.
It has worn better than my second favourite by Selina Blow – a dark purple Nehru jacket in silk matka with 15 silk matka buttons running down the front. All the detail was originally exquisite. Fitted and flattering with a cinched waist and flared below the waist, it reached the top of my thighs. I loved it too much.
When I asked Selina if she could repair it, she quipped, ‘I think you have had enough wear out of that, Mary.’
But are coats and jackets still necessary? These days, with central heating in all buildings and the tube so hot, you need one only for the short dash between your mode of transport and the building.
Moreover, you want to skip the time thief of the cloakroom if you can.
The protective item that has given me the most warmth and physical comfort over the years – and which could be carried lightly into parties – was not a coat. It was a woollen cape with fringing, sometimes called a serape, made by Johnstons of Elgin.
While staying in a fishing lodge on the Findhorn in a 20-strong house party in the 1980s, eight females motored over to what was then called Elgin Mills. We each bought one of the double-ply cashmere
serapes. Mine was navy; the others black or cream.
They were almost a uniform for us for about three years. Then they fell prey to moth or to stupidly being put in a washing machine with the spin cycle not disabled.
Perhaps people never buy scarves any more because, like sunglasses and hats, they can be too easily forgotten and lost or left behind.
To imagine the serape (annoying name, isn’t it?), picture a blanket roughly six feet by three with a slit cut into it so the wearer can throw it over their head. It could hang lightly on your shoulders or you could huddle inside it in bad weather. You could wear it as a head shawl like an Irish peasant woman when it was raining and peek out from the protective helmet.
That’s a wrap!
Taylor Swift
During this holiday on the Findhorn, we found the serapes perfect for sitting on atop the heather during picnics, or for turning into a pillow if we fancied an outdoor power nap – in those days, we drank at lunchtime. Or you could lie on the land directly and have the serape over you as a blanket. The double-ply cashmere was the most luxurious of textures.
We wore them day and night when we went back to London. Double-ply – yet unheavy – cashmere is
They were perfect on a plane to allow discreet breast-feeding
wearable in every season. I found mine useful when staying overnight with rackety people, as it doubled as a towel. When we had babies, we swaddled them in our Johnstons of Elgin serapes. They were the perfect accessory to take on a plane to allow discreet breast-feeding.
There was a time when serapes were quite smart. Then a down-market chain cottoned on and started flogging cheap ones. Then pashminas came in and the ubiquity was off-putting. It’s time for a revival.
I cannot find the same product on the Johnstons of Elgin website of today –although they do offer something similar, now costing £950 in cashmere (though they don’t specify whether it’s doubleply). There’s a double-ply in vicuña – a form of cashmere – which looks entrancing and is the right size, namely six feet by three, but it costs £4,600. ‘Dry clean only,’ it notes.
Kiltane offers a promising, serapestyle product online. Length four feet, width three and a half. ‘Solid cashmere Vicuña’, at only £199.
And if you can’t afford either of these, get an idea of what I am talking about by visiting scarfroom.co.uk. It sells an ‘oversized pashmina shawl wrap’ –three feet by six feet – for only £28 (but in 100-per-cent viscose). It’s machine washable.
Nanny-state alert. I could hardly believe my ears recently when I was on my way to an Oldie event at the National Liberal Club. Since taxis crawl so slowly through London these days, it involved going to Embankment Tube station.
An announcement was blaring out that passengers were advised not to wear scarves or hats on the platform. When I queried it, the attendant told me it’s because the gust of wind preceding the train’s arrival is often so intense that it blows hats and scarves off.
That would never happen to a double-ply cashmere serape.
Town Mouse
We’re
lost without old-fashioned maps tom
hodgkinson
Google has damaged many things. And the saddest is its annihilation of the old maps industry.
Gone are the lovely paper maps, objects of great beauty, as well as utility. In come the ugly and far inferior digital maps of the smartphone.
Google Maps just doesn’t work very well. The idea is that it knows where you are. But it often gets it wrong. That’s why you see so many people walking down the road and then doing a U-turn because they realise belatedly they’re going the wrong way. The tracking system has not caught up with them.
When using Google Maps you have no idea of geography; of north and south, or how one part of the street relates to another. You’re a little serf, meekly obeying the masters, stuck in your tiny world.
It is quite extraordinary how much trust people put in the online map masters. Just the other day, I was driving a rental car through an Italian town. My navigator, looking at her phone, told me to drive straight on.
‘But there is a closed gate and a huge NO ENTRY sign!’ I protested.
‘Just keep going,’ she said. ‘Google Maps says so.’ She trusted Google over the evidence of her own eyes.
Many years ago, I rebelled against the Silicon Valley overlords by chucking out my smartphone in favour of a very basic phone, with no maps feature. So when I cycle off to an appointment in old London Town, I have to plan in advance.
I get the map on my screen in the office or at home, study it and print the relevant section. That way, if I get lost, I merely pull the map from my pocket and consult it. I feel mightily superior to the cyclists who rely on a smartphone, which they have balanced in a custommade holder on their handlebars.
Having no phone leads to human interaction. When I lose my way, I will use the old way: simply ask someone for directions. People are generally happy to help.
I do, though, remember being admonished in New York. I thought I’d memorised the route to my friend’s flat, but I got lost – and asked a slightly astonished woman the way. ‘I’ve come to America without a smartphone,’ I said.
‘Well, that was pretty silly,’ she remarked.
Staring at your phone also marks you out as a dumb, clueless tourist. My family and I were recently in the southern Italian town of Bari. We’d just arrived at the station and needed to find our hotel. I saw a giant piece of graffiti which read ‘TOURIST GO HOME’.
As Mrs Mouse consulted her phone and its confusing map, I worried that the local pickpocket fraternity would spot us and make away with her expensive device. We did find our location using the phone, but only after several wrong turns.
Google Maps is an enormous global ad-sales business. Google sells over $11 billion dollars’ worth of ads a year on it. Apple Maps is also planning to sell billions of dollars’ worth each year. Shops, cafés and museums pay to get listed.
As Google boasts, ‘Advertising on Google Maps is a powerful way to attract nearby customers. If you run a local business, ads on Google Maps make it easy for people to get to your location.’
So you will be directed to the business with the most money – not the best one.
We should all get a real-life, papery, ad-free map of the city we live in or want to visit. I loved A-Z maps, brilliantly designed little books showing every street in the capital. They had their own poetry and beauty. You could stare at them for fun at home, and ponder the street names. There is an A-Z app but it’s not in the same league as the glorious paper version.
The A-Z was developed by Phyllis Pearsall (1906-96), whose dad, Alexander Goss, was a map-maker and -seller. She updated his London maps and in 1936 the A-Z was born. (The story about her walking the streets for days and hours in order to map them was labelled ‘bunk’ by the Head of Maps at the British Library in 2014.)
Despite the attacks from the allconquering Goliaths of Google and Apple, the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company still exists. It’s a small business, turning over around £400,000, a tiny fraction of Google’s gigantic sales. And it produces a far superior product, which is beautiful, useful and requires no batteries.
The problem is that book versions of the London A-Z are very hard to find. I used to love my mini A-Z, but now you can get these only second-hand. The only available one appears to be the spiralbound A4 Big London A-Z (£14.99).
If you’re reading this, Steven Berger, the A-Z boss, please, please publish the mini version again on paper! We town mice need your cartographic wisdom.
Country Mouse
Unhappy ending to my school story
giles wood
I had a pang of recognition on watching The Holdovers, the bittersweet story of a cantankerous classics teacher, an abrasive but bright student and the head cook all forced to remain on campus during a 1970s Christmas break.
Over the pond in Shropshire, in the same decade, I had removed myself from the clamour, chaos and midsummer pomp of the final term at my own school.
Yes, I could now smoke my head off, grow my hair long and put up Che Guevara posters in my bedroom, but also I found myself marooned – not on campus but at home, a villa near Keele service station with only my hapless parents. It was a dangerous and damaging regression.
Mary and I were watching The Holdovers in the blue remembered hills of Shropshire, currently finding favour with aspirational house-buyers in search of the rapidly diminishing stock of still ‘merrie’ English counties. Even Housman adopted it as his own, though wasn’t he born in Bromsgrove?
We were guests at a Tudorbethan rectory, from an upper window of which I could espy a blue prominence with a Mount Fuji outline – namely the Wrekin. It spawned a minor public school, whose alumni include my brother and the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who would have been 90 on 19th September. (See Memory Lane, page 31.)
Smoking caused my early exit from a neighbouring major public school –namely Shrewsbury. For getting caught on a roof with a Benson & Hedges, I was told the privilege of living unsupervised in adult-style sixth-form accommodation was no longer open to me. Since I had broken the trust invested in me, I was given a straight choice: I would have to go back to a dormitory, or I could drop out of school altogether and live at home, continuing my education with tutors.
Having just watched Lindsay Anderson’s film If…, I chose the latter.
It was the worst decision of my life. ‘Get over it,’ I hear the Greek chorus, but despite my discussing the matter endlessly with a Jungian analyst, we never quite nailed it.
Even now, when the school magazine smacks through the letter box, urging me to attend the 90th birthday of Mr Chips, my first instinct is to think, ‘What have I done wrong now?’
By going away to public school, you lose all touch with friends you might have made locally. Meanwhile, you are buying, at great expense, emotional illiteracy and an inability to talk naturally to women. All that has changed with the admission of girls to Shrewsbury.
My school days were not the happiest, and, by Jove, those days stay with you. The friendships forged in adversity were intense, almost on an emotional par with births, deaths and marriages.
Laying ghosts, seeking peace and reconciliation with my alma mater may be the reason Shropshire has such a hold over me. The late-flowering realisation is dawning that it might not have been all the school’s fault. Rules need to be enforced – my speed-awareness instructor taught me that!
Each time I come here, to the Long Mynd, I discuss with mine host the merits of felling two of his most unfortunate trees – a weeping beech and an adjacent weeping birch, both of which obscure the startling outline of the Wrekin from his ground floor.
The garden writer Robin Lane Fox poisoned my mind against the former species, by pointing out that the weeping limbs resemble elephant trunks, which this specimen does in spades. (Very few trees weep convincingly.)
There would be no need to employ expensive tree surgeons. Ring-barking is finding increasing favour among conservationists as a means of retaining ‘standing dead wood’, an increasingly rare habitat.
I suggested an excursion to a wellknown pub next to a suspension bridge in Shrewsbury – pronounced as in ‘shrew’ in these egalitarian times.
My reasons were twofold: first, to fully accept that I am now an adult and therefore legally allowed to enter this historic establishment, barred to me as a schoolboy. This pub was the haunt of housemasters galore owing to its proximity to the school site.
Secondly, it was the site of a chilling school memory.
Two town oiks, no doubt drunk on cheap lager, jumped from the bridge into the River Severn with much applause from the locals in the riparian pub garden. Simultaneously, Chas Newham – my best friend – and I were in singlescull rowing boats, making for a remote island, where we could have a fag.
We didn’t get far because the yobs heaved themselves onto the bows and sank us both. It was a warm day, and luckily that’s all they had in store for us.
But we decided against a visit to the pub after Mary read out some off-putting reviews from Tripadvisor. And so my chance to exorcise these adolescent demons by revisiting the traumatic site of the rite of passage was frustrated.
If you, like me, suffer from arrested development caused by unresolved school-day trauma, you could do worse than watch The Holdovers.
It is superb and, unlike The Winslow Boy, it has a happy ending.
‘Your mother and I just want you to know, son, that you’re the reason for our divorce’
Jan Leeming’s love for a French hero
The broadcaster has fallen for a dashing pilot. By Mary Kenny
Jan Leeming, the broadcaster (and jungle survivor of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!) now lives at St Margaret’s Bay, between Deal and Dover, which is the nearest point in England to France.
Appropriately, she has fallen in love with a Frenchman, even though, alas, he is dead.
Jan – still enchantingly glamorous and spirited at 82 – thinks that a dashing French air ace, René Mouchotte, who was shot down in his RAF Spitfire in 1943, may be a better beau idéal than her five previous husbands – ‘they were all womanisers and left me’.
writer; he left two volumes of flying diaries, which Jan Leeming has read seven times.
She describes them as ‘like a novel’ and ‘an intimate portrayal of a man’s determination to fight for his country, his pain at being an exile … and his horror at watching his best friend die in front of him’.
He was a ‘loving and much-loved individual’. It is to be hoped that Jan will write a book about her devotion to this historic air hero.
How that is decided is not explained, though I am told on good authority that there exists some influential municipal personality ‘with a passion for pastels’. These pastels include, on some edifices, what I can only describe as cat-sick yellow. (Incidentally, two other householders are also in the doghouse for painting their houses blue.)
The issue first arose after an anonymous complaint to the council, which does not divulge complainants’ names. Indeed, anonymous complaints are actively encouraged on the council’s website (Londoners call this ‘snitching’). This cult of anonymity is surely a contradiction of ‘transparency’.
She spent 15 years researching the life of Commandant Mouchotte, made a TV documentary about her quest, and ensured that the French pilot’s war medals, which had been kept at the Yorkshire Air Museum, were presented to his 101-year-old sister, Jacqueline.
Jan is now an expert on the first Frenchman to lead an RAF squadron and she is frequently invited to give public talks about him. She gave a highly acclaimed lecture at the RAF Club in Piccadilly during the summer.
René was indeed a romantic character, dark-eyed and handsome, from an upper-class Catholic family in Paris. He escaped from Vichy France in a stolen plane via Gibraltar and made his way to England to join the Free French.
He was one of just 13 French pilots in the Battle of Britain. Along with a Canadian squadron leader, he shot down the 1,000th German aircraft over Biggin Hill, shortly before his death over the Channel. He had flown 382 missions de guerre and was 29.
And, like Saint-Exupéry, René was a
‘Transparency’ and ‘accountability’ are much-lauded concepts advanced by governments, corporations and bureaucracy. But I do wonder, sometimes, if these are just tick-box platitudes.
In the spring of this year, I was in trouble with Dover District Council for having painted my Deal home a cobalt blue. The council does not approve of this choice and I was told I must repaint by September. The cost would be £4,000.
I’ve been endeavouring to enter a plea of clemency for an old bird who can’t cough up that kind of dosh pronto.
I have also been endeavouring to discover who sets the rules for approving a house’s colour (in an area subject to conservation regulations). And what are the rules, exactly? Is colour approval based on a personal opinion or an objective standard?
Transparency and accountability are not exactly forthcoming. I have had no response to these questions, although the Heritage Officer has conceded ‘there is no definitive colour palette guidance for the painting of façades’ – it’s just a ‘case by case’ judgement.
So la lotta continua, as the Italian anarchists used to say: the struggle goes on. The house remains blue, and I am seeking more clarification and negotiation, although my request for a meeting has been refused.
A Deal friend has suggested putting a fake Banksy mural on the gable end –she knows someone who can do it. Or asking Tracey Emin, from nearby Margate, to allow one of her artworks to be projected on the wall – I’m a fan of My Bed. But this might undermine my current approach based on polite pleadings from a little old lady merely seeking ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ from a secretive local bureaucracy.
According to Eurostat, Ireland is one of the happiest countries in the EU – sixth out of 27 – and the Irish are very satisfied with ‘relationships, family and friends’. They are also drinking alcohol much less. This is disastrous news for Irish writers, who have for so long flourished in narratives of misery. How will novelists replace their cast of cruel nuns, ‘mad Catholic mothers’, drunk and abusive fathers and wretched dystopian visions, if joy and mirth have taken over?
The outlook is bleak indeed.
Small World
I’m the Cleethorpes Beach Boy
My
new look – long hair, beardy stubble and a Hawaiian shirt – didn’t go down well with Mother and Father
jem clarke
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’s ongoing mobility issues mean she has developed two dangerous habits. One is watching too much television and the other is seeing me as something of a project.
After a summer of my watching live rioting as if it were a sport, Mother suggests I get a job closer to home, avoiding going into the city. She said, ‘There’s a man in the bucket-and-spade shop who doesn’t look right either – they probably have a scheme.’
I sigh and explain I am happy in a professional office role. But she says, ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve caused us t his summer’s trouble? Surreptitiously crossing the border and taking their jobs?’
‘Mother, it’s the Yorkshire/ Lincolnshire border and there’s nothing surreptitious about the 8.24 from Cleethorpes – it’s got blue-and-yellow livery, an overly loud chuff-chuff and a horn.’
Once this summer’s Olympics was in full swing, Mother petitioned me to watch it with her: ‘You might find something you want to take up. I mean they’re all amateurs. Say what you like about your life path, but you’ve always been a very good “amateur”.’
As a man with two artificial hips who can’t get horizontal at night without a swig of Gaviscon, I think the only thing I could get into would be helping them with directing the opening and closing ceremonies, which needed a bit of work – a bit less work. Too much spectacle, Paris! Like having sex six days straight.
Mother’s fleeting theory of influencing my athleticism by having me gawp at sweaty thin tall people running through a tunnel under the Seine was based on the success she had earlier in the year. She made father more temperate and kind by increasing his dosage of Songs of Praise.
Mother had decided to give Songs
of Praise ‘another chance’ – having fallen out of love with it after formulating an antipathy for then-new presenter Diane-Louise Jordan, an affable ex-Blue Peter presenter.
Mother relented and has been using BBC 1’s scant religious offering as spiritual salve. Since becoming wheelchair-bound, she has refused to attend the church despite its being in pushing distance.
I thought her reluctance to allow me to push her along was based on some misplaced embarrassment about entering the church in a wheelchair and being seen by other parishioners.
But Father has confirmed it’s actually embarrassment at being seen entering the church with me
She has particularly taken against what I call my Lion in Winter look: longer hair, grey, almost beardy stubble
and a Hawaiian shirt. Father – also not a fan – says I look like a ‘university lecturer with too glad an eye for the ladies on enforced gardening leave’.
Mother describes me as ‘the Beach Boy they put towards the back of the stage at live concerts’.
She did allow me to push her to the awkwardly named but brilliant NHS offering the Assisted Living Centre. It’s where they measure the newly knackered for bespoke mobility devices for the home. I do think they should change the name to something less Dignitas-y.
Mother isn’t normally one for anyone coming near her with yardsticks or scales. But she gamely allowed her unique statistics to be mapped, and merrily acquiesced to trying out a range of seats – from toilet to breakfast-bar. We were out of there with no complaints lodged and no staff assaulted.
Put a little colour in your life
Ever since I met John, my husband, a former dress designer and manufacturer, and my TV ‘how-to-look-good’ stylist, Jane Galpin, I’ve been a lot braver with colour.
They both push me to pile it on. John trawls through his phone in search of fashion bargains. He boasts he never spends more than $20, which is a lie.
And Jane spends my TV clothes budget on glasses, necklaces, shoes and clothes, without ever buying anything in grey or beige.
She knows I hate wishy-washy colour. Why have insipid mauve, when you can have vibrant purple? Why mustard, when you can have daffodil? Or bottomof-the-pond green, when you can have deep emerald?
If your fashion style reflects your personality (which I think it does), I have to confess to having an in-yourface, unsubtle, no-nonsense, attentionseeking one.
I think the purpose of fashion is to get people to look at you. And saturated hues are more likely to achieve that than drab ones.
It’s always puzzled me that women spend so much money on shoes and handbags – which spend most of the time in a cupboard or under the table. Specs, on the other hand, are right where you
see them, at eye-level. So why have boring black or rimless ones?
In recent years, colour has made a bit of a comeback. Style magazines are full of Moroccan blue tiles, floral wallpapers and magenta sofas. Fashion mags have red trouser suits and wide-leg jungle-print trousers. Scrolling through the internet is like digging round in a child’s toy box –all primary colours. It’s wonderful.
But in the shops, the goods are still 90-per-cent beige, white, black and brown, presumably reflecting what sells.
Last week, on a freezing summer day on Paddington Station, every single person was wearing black. Everyone. And then a woman walked in, wearing a bright green coat. And it lifted the whole scene. Like Constable adding a red jacket to a figure in a landscape.
Understatement was not always a sign of good taste or class. The Georgian aristocracy loved deep colour on their walls the better to show off their pictures. And the Adam brothers festooned their ceilings with painted plasterwork in clean, clear colours. The Victorians loved good, strong colour, too – the more decorative the better.
Peter the Great outlawed greige in St Petersburg.
He insisted that every house be
painted in Mediterranean hues. He knew that colour lifts the spirit, and that he was building his capital on a foggy swamp. Why don’t we follow suit? A short row of terraced houses in Wingate Road, Hammersmith, has been given the Petrograd treatment. It’s a delight, singing tenor to the flat tones of surrounding stone and brick. It’s surely natural to love colour. Children reach for it. We all love flowers and sunsets. Who can resist a bowl of Smarties? Avoiding colour is a selfimposed hair shirt – one that this old lady is not up for. I want to be buried in red.
Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off
Literary Lunch
10th December 2024 at the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place
Sam Leith on The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
Lady in red: Prue Leith
Gyles Brandreth on Prose & Cons: The English Language in Just a Minute; The 7
Sponsored by
Vicar’s book of revelations
An acquaintance recently recommended a wonderful book to me – the Reverend Colin Heber-Percy’s Tales of a Country Parish.
Having read the book at a gallop the first time round because I was enjoying it so much, I am now reading it slowly and more sensibly for the third time. It becomes ever more rewarding.
Above all, it is a very useful book. It gives pleasure with its humour, appreciation of the Wiltshire countryside and scholarship.
Best of all, it is a source of inspiration when it comes to living the Christian life to the full. The author is clearly doing this himself, and not just theorising about it. He encourages without ever being bossy.
Heber-Percy writes about the miraculous in less than two pages and, with his thoughtful scholarship, does far more to clarify and convince than many a wordy volume on the same subject.
He quotes from an extensive variety of authors, ranging from the Bible, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Kipling to
John Lennon.
Unlike so many spiritual writers, who quote other writers because it would seem that they don’t have anything original to say themselves, Heber-Percy quotes in order to expand, clarify and explain in such a way that new openings are revealed and throw light on details that fascinate and amaze.
Holy wisdom
His work is full of surprises. On vegetarianism, he quotes Porphyry, a third-century-AD philosopher and dedicated vegetarian, who urges a friend, for several hundred pages, not to start eating meat again because animals can think.
He exposes the callousness of the redevelopment of the East End of London for the Olympic facilities by
Memorial Service
General Sir Richard Vickers
A service was held at the Guards’ Chapel for Sir Richard Vickers, for many years Elizabeth II’s favourite equerry.
The celebrant was Rev Deiniol Morgan, Chaplain to the Household Division. The representative of HRH The Princess Royal was Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles.
Major General Alastair Dennis CB OBE gave the eulogy: ‘Richard was born in Coonoor hill station in southern India, his father being an officer in the 31st Lancers of the Indian army.
‘Tragedy struck in 1938. During a family seaside holiday in Thorpeness, Richard got into difficulties in a dangerous undertow. His mother, Mary, tried to help him but, owing to a weak heart, she died in the attempt.
‘The war took their father back to
Queen’s equerry: Vickers
India and the boys were not reunited with him until six years later, on his return to England in 1944.’ Vickers was head boy at Haileybury.
At Sandhurst, he won the Sword of Honour and the King’s Medal, a unique achievement at the time.
In 1948, Lt Vickers joined the 1st Royal Tank Regiment, spending four happy years in Germany until 1952, when
quoting a protesting local woman who was told that in the future there would be more ‘ecologically managed green space’. She responded, ‘I’m not talking about ecologically managed green space; I’m talking about our park…’
There are wonderful passages about the sky, glaciers, baking, Jesus’s parables and a liberty-taking hair-chewing cat.
There was something terrible about being ordered to lock a church during lockdown. Heber-Percy’s sense of outrage at having to do so is expressed with passionate feeling at the beginning of his book.
The book ends with a gloriously illuminating paradox: ‘We’ve all been standing in the midst of him [Jesus Christ] from the beginning. The whole world is in his hands… When Joy unlocks the doors of All Saints [Church], when the doors open again, they open not for us to enter, but for us to escape, like butterflies, into an infinitely deeper embrace.’
I haven’t begun to do justice toTales of a Country Parish; do get a copy for yourself.
(1928-2024)
the regiment went to Korea. Then he became an equerry to the Queen. He was close to Prince Charles and Princess Anne, and shot and stalked at Balmoral.
In 1957, he married Gaie Roberts, daughter of Major General ‘Pip’ Roberts, CB, DSO (two Bars), MC. They had three daughters Fiona, Pippa and Nichola.
He left the Royal Household in 1959 and became Commanding Officer of the Blues and Royals, Commandant of Sandhurst and Director General of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.
Grandson Hugo Darby read from The Pilgrim’s Progress and Piers Darby read from Rudyard Kipling’s If. Hymns included Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
Medical murder mystery
Lucy Letby case shows how tricky convictions are for hospital deaths dr theodore dalrymple
The case of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering tiny babies, has aroused passions around the world. It has stimulated large numbers of people to become amateur experts in neonatal pathology, a difficult subject at the best of times.
How is it that there are no knockdown arguments about causation of death that settle the matter beyond even the suspicions of conspiracy theorists?
You might have thought that healthcare workers were at a general advantage in the committal of murder. They have the means and the opportunity to hand – and technical knowledge into the bargain – in a way that few people do. And their underlying motives are not very different from the run of mankind’s.
Dr John Bodkin Adams (1899-1983), a GP in Eastbourne, was accused of murdering a patient with morphine (and suspected of having killed many others in the same way) for the most banal of motives, monetary gain. He was the subject of an immortal but anonymous poem on the eve of his trial in 1957:
‘In Eastbourne, it is healthy And the residents are wealthy. It’s a miracle that anybody dies; Yet this pearl of English lidos Is a slaughterhouse of widows –If their bankrolls are above the normal size.
If they’re lucky in addition In their choice of a physician, And remember him when making out their will
And bequeath him their Rolls-Royces, Then they soon hear angel voices And are quickly freed of all their earthly ills.’
Dr Bodkin Adams (what a name for a suspected murderer!) was acquitted and, on the evidence, had to be, even if he was guilty. The fact is that it is not always easy to prove murder by poison, or by other arcane methods of murder.
Medical poisoners were household names in the 19th century: Drs Palmer (‘the Prince of Poisoners’), Smethurst, Lamson and Cream. Dr Smethurst escaped the noose because the forensic evidence against him was mistaken, though he may well have been guilty. Robert Graves argued that even Palmer was innocent.
With the advance of toxicology and all other pathological sciences, one might have hoped that evidence had become unequivocal, but this is not so. It is not enough to prove that a person has been poisoned, either accidentally or deliberately. It has to be proved who has done it.
But even proving that a person has been poisoned is not always easy: the presence of poison is not enough.
In the 19th century, arsenic was a popular poison, but the whole
It is not always easy to prove murder by poison
environment was impregnated with arsenic: the wallpaper, the rat poison, the flypapers and the weedkiller. And it was also a common medicament and drug of abuse. It was the first drug, in fact, whose sale was controlled.
Those accused of murder by arsenic sometimes claimed that the supposed victim took arsenic him- or herself. This defence was raised in the case of Major Armstrong, as late as 1922, and may not have been false, though he was hanged – the only solicitor ever to have been hanged.
To make matters even more difficult, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were similar to those of other illnesses common at the time. In our day, poisoning by insulin presents not dissimilar difficulties. Nurses have been accused of killing with insulin because their patients died with blood-sugar levels so low that it’s been argued that they must have been caused by the administration of insulin.
But some experts argue that on occasion people in the throes of death may have low blood-sugar levels anyway. This may be rare, but just how rare does something have to be before guilt is beyond reasonable doubt?
The judges have declined to define ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ further. It is a matter of common sense, but on this statistical matter common sense is silent.
To add further to the confusion, postmortem concentrations of drugs are often different from in-vivo ones, but no one knows to what extent. Nor are technical problems the only ones.
As Dr John Havard, one time head of the British Medical Association, said, in his book The Detection of Secret Homicide, ‘Careless certification of death, delay in notification of deaths to the coroner, and disposal of the case without autopsy or toxicological examination, are all factors which weigh heavily in favour of the secret poisoner.’
As, of course, does cremation.
Dr Bodkin Adams (1899-1983) in 1960. He was acquitted of murder in 1957
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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Sophocles, oldie egghead
SIR: A N Wilson (Oldie Man of Letters, September issue) rightly praises Titian, Verdi and (subject of his latest book) Goethe for excelling in their 80s.
Pah – as the ancient Greeks might have said. Tragic playwright Sophocles was allegedly prosecuted by his playwright son Iophon for being too doddery to manage his own affairs. His response: Oedipus at Colonus, composed in the author’s 90s. Old age and the passage of time teach all things. Professor Paul Cartledge, Cambridge
You can have two husbands
SIR: While I’m reluctant to disagree with the all-seeing, all-knowing Gyles Brandreth, he is not quite right when he repeats (September issue) what a lady from Bhutan told him – that it’s the only country in the world where women can have more than one husband. Polyandry, as it is known, has also been practised for centuries in Ladakh, a mountainous region in North India.
There are two reasons for this, it seems. One is that in a country of scarce resources polyandry helps to keep the population down. And, secondly, women often marry men who are brothers, and this allows land to remain in the same family. Polyandry is a practical, rather than a promiscuous, solution in countries where sheer survival can be difficult.
Yours faithfully, Liz Hodgkinson, Oxford
‘You
seem to be in a good mood today. Is everything all right?’
‘Be careful with that fork, dear’
Coffee with no trimmings
SIR: Thank you, Anthony Whitehead, for your rant about tea (September issue). I too want only a cup of tea (Camellia sinensis) with a little cow’s milk in it, and have the feeling that this is considered rather odd!
I also want only a cup of coffee! I do not want cappuccino, frappuccino, macchiato, latte, mocha or flat white – and I certainly do NOT want oat milk, coconut milk, almond milk or any other liquid that calls itself milk! I just want a cup of strong coffee with a little milk from a cow. I know it’s peculiar, I know it’s ruining the planet, I know I’m an oddity, but do you know what – I don’t care! I just want a nice cup of coffee. Mrs Chris Gordon, Lincolnshire
Horrocks’s Burmese daze
SIR: Edward Fox’s recollection of Sir Brian Horrocks prompted my father’s slightly painful memory of the famous general.
In the late eighties, after a modest military career as an RAMC major in the Burma campaign, my dad found
himself in a hospital room adjoining that of Sir Brian.
‘Conversation’ was not an accurate description of their encounters –the general discoursed fluently on the war in Europe. When my father tried to introduce the topic of Burma, this was dismissed as ‘sideshow, old boy – sideshow’.
Dr Patrick Bennett, Pyrford, Surrey
General knowledge
SIR: I met General Horrocks in 1953 at Broadcasting House when he was waiting for Archie Gordon, a Home Service talks producer. He was trembling –the aftermath of malaria. He apologised and said, ‘Never marry a general, my dear; they always go odd when they are old.’
(I married an LAC [leading aircraftman]!)
Shirley Fitton, Morpeth, Northumberland
General Horrocks
Casanova’s sex tip
SIR: I wonder where in the London Library Lady Antonia Fraser (A Life in Books, September issue) came across phimosis, the narrowing of the foreskin which precludes sexual congress – on the part of the frustrated man, at least. That the young Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette’s husband, was thus incapacitated must have been well known, as Casanova in his famous memoirs describes the matter and the delivery of the solution by ‘un habile chirurgien’ who severed the impediment.
Perhaps your Dr Dalrymple could elucidate on the frequency of this medical matter.
John Hart, London NW7
Babar censored!
SIR: I very much enjoyed Charlotte Metcalf’s Babar piece (September issue). He has been a favourite in our family for generations. We have all the originals in our house in the country, and so bought a modern omnibus edition to read to our eldest in London.
Aged three, he claimed that something was wrong with the modern version.
‘Don’t be silly,’ we said – until, returning to the country, we discovered the cannibal episode in Babar’s Travels. This had been entirely removed, causing continuity problems and resulting in less jeopardy. Could it not have been replaced with something more in tune with modern attitudes, I wonder?
Yours faithfully, Philip Womack, London NW5
T S Eliot’s Wimpy review
SIR: Wynn Wheldon’s 70th-anniversary salute to the Wimpy Bar (September issue) certainly brought back memories. In the early 1970s, I worked at an architectural practice in Welwyn Garden City. Although we had an excellent ‘in house’ canteen, the local Wimpy Bar, near the railway station, was a welcome lunchtime alternative with a very different ambience, or a reliable eating place on occasions when we worked later into the evening. One visit brought about a noteworthy T S Eliot misquote from a colleague: This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a Wimpy. Dr Andrew Mayes, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire
Silent Shropshire
SIR: I enjoyed reading about Patrick Barkham’s walk in Shropshire (September issue). He was amazed how
‘Not
quiet it was, but this has always been the case – as A E Housman’s poem In Valleys of Springs and Rivers, written nearly 130 years ago, says: ‘Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun/ Are the quietest places/ Under the sun.’ Apparently it is still true.
George Hart, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire
Washing instructions
SIR: David De Saxe’s letter in your September issue reminded me of my mother’s instructions for morning ablutions at a time when showers were not readily available and baths were taken infrequently. I am over 90 now, so I am talking 70 or 80 years ago.
She would say ‘Wash down as far as possible, wash up as far as possible and then wash possible.’
Judith Tilley, Eastbourne, East Sussex
‘Can we talk about something other than the utensil drawer?’
God’s music-hall act
SIR: Sister Teresa writes in the September issue, ‘As adults, we have no business to be treating God like the manager of a department store who doesn’t have the merchandise we are looking for.’ That reminded me of my RI teacher at school, when he addressed the same issue, commenting that the miracles were the biggest obstacle to his own faith, since he could not believe that the Son of God would behave like a music-hall conjuror.
He presumably overcame this obstacle, as on his retirement he took holy orders – but I never saw what the problem was, anyway; the accounts of the miracles, not least the one mentioned by Sister Teresa, are so ambiguous as to be capable of rational interpretation by anyone – even an agnostic like me.
David Culver, London SE9
tonight, Harry…’
History
Napoleon’s lesson for Ukraine
Can Zelenksy succeed where Bonaparte and Hitler failed?
david horspool
‘Rule one on page one of the book of war is: “Do not march on Moscow.” ’
President Zelensky may not be familiar with the words of Bernard Montgomery, but he will surely be well acquainted with his point. Invading Russia has tended to be a mug’s game. That’s why no one’s tried since WWII.
The limited incursion of Ukrainian forces into Russia in August was not, of course, a ‘march on Moscow’. There was a very recent historical example of the folly of that: Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt last year, which simply petered out. Like a British family heading for the West Country, his Wagner Group mercenaries got stuck on the M4, which in Russia leads from Rostov-on-Don to the capital – rather than falling foul of the country’s vast interior or harsh conditions.
Perhaps Zelensky’s limited invasion, as bargaining chip, tactical distraction or political manoeuvre, makes some strategic sense – even if Putin is now expanding his offensive in the Donbas. But, in general, was Montgomery right?
The two biggest invasions of Russia were incontrovertibly two of the greatest disasters in military history, with global historical consequences. As Monty put it, ‘Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good.’
First disaster: Napoleon, 1812. The Emperor made it to Moscow, entering the mostly deserted city on 15th September.
But a day later he had to move out, as the remaining inhabitants set their capital alight, and Napoleon, briefly installed in the Kremlin, was forced to retreat, breathing ‘smoke and ashes’, according to an eyewitness.
The high point of the 1812 campaign had been achieved in balmy weather. Once the fires were out, the Emperor returned to Moscow, writing to the Empress Marie Louise in October that it was ‘as warm as Paris’. Many of his men had thrown away their winter clothing
during a stifling advance. Napoleon lingered too long in the Kremlin, though he certainly feared the effects of the Russian winter. But he was waiting in vain for the Russians, heavily defeated at the Battle of Borodino, to agree a peace.
For their part, the Russians were just waiting. Their whole approach to his invasion had been to delay, retreat and allow the Grande Armée to over-extend itself. It was a tactic at least as old as Fabius, the Roman general who faced Hannibal but refused to fight him until he was ready.
In Russian conditions, it worked even better. Borodino had demonstrated the wisdom of avoiding a direct engagement.
The French retreat from Moscow, beginning as the first snows fell, and continuing in a freezing agony of hunger, disease and death – the temperature dropped as low as -30°C – shattered Napoleon’s reputation and set in motion his fall from power.
The second disaster was even bigger. Hitler’s assault on Russia in 1941 has been called the ‘largest and costliest war in history’. The sheer scale of the surprise attack, along a front of more than 1,000 miles, is mind-boggling. While Stalin’s instincts were more confrontational than those of the generals who fought for Tsar Alexander I, he too discovered the value of retreat and the long-term reliability of the Russian (and Ukrainian) winter.
In the end, even the Germans, so successful up to that point, succumbed to the Soviet war machine, once it finally, overwhelmingly creaked into gear. At Stalingrad, in 1943, the Red Army lost half a million men in comprehensively defeating the Nazis, who lost
147,000 dead and 91,000 captured. The numbers were astonishing, but the reputation of Russia as unconquerable was confirmed.
How could any enemy conquer a nation that was prepared to accept such sacrifices?
Strategists afterwards wondered whether Hitler’s decision to turn away from Moscow was a blunder. Stalin certainly expected him to concentrate his forces on the capital. He had reinforced his centre accordingly, leaving the south, and Stalingrad, correspondingly lightly defended. But Stalin and his marshals, with Zhukov at their head, were more than ruthless enough to follow the example of their predecessors who had faced Napoleon, and abandon Moscow to fight another day if that were required.
Stalin certainly had the history of previous attempts to march on Moscow on his mind. When he was asked to give a name to the counter-offensive operation to drive the Germans out in 1943, he chose Bagration, the name of Napoleon’s wiliest enemy, a general who was, like Stalin, a Georgian.
To find an even half-successful invasion of Russia, you have to go back much further. In 1571, the Crimean Tatars captured and burned Ivan the Terrible’s Moscow, but it was an isolated event. The only extended interruption was the Polish-Lithuanian occupation between 1610 and 1612, which followed an earlier march on Moscow in 1605. But, as always, the invader succumbed eventually.
The lessons of history are clear, and President Zelensky surely knows them: if you invade Russia, you had better have a workable plan of retreat.
Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, 1812
Review of Books
Autumn round-up of the reviews
‘Sheer masochism’ of being a writer – Roger Lewis Book blurbs from Hell – Candida Crewe
Old favourites to treasure – Lucy Lethbridge
Biography & Memoir History Countryside
Current Affairs Crime & Thrillers Fiction Autumn 2024 | www.theoldie.co.uk
Issue 69 Autumn 2024
Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Works of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen
The House of Beckham Money, Sex and Power by Tom Bower
Paris ‘44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop
All His Spies: The Secret Worldof Robert Cecil by Stephen Alford
Good Chaps by Simon Kuper
The Night in Venice by AJ Martin
Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey through Western Lands by Petroc Trelawny
Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages by Sara J Charles
The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism by Terry Kirby
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver
Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief by Ronald Hutton
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA
Editorial Panel: Sam Leith, Charlotte Metcalf, Harry Mount, James Pembroke, Editor: Charlotte Metcalf
Design: Lawrence Bogle
Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Stephen Cooper, Kate Ehrman, Mark Ellen, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Tim Willis
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 email editorial@theoldie.co.uk
The Truth about the Literary World
From the plethora of new books available this autumn, we’d be forgiven for believing that to work in the literary profession is to enjoy a life of abundant rewards. Not so, according to Oldie regular and writer Roger Lewis. On page 25, he describes his disillusionment with the world of books, finding it to be full of ‘horrible people’ who are ‘childish, grasping, disloyal and on the make’. Having achieved zero recognition and less financial reward, Lewis wonders why all the writers who inhabit these pages keep going and finds solace in the suspicion that ‘only mediocrities live long and contented lives’.
Spare a thought too for those in the desperate business of selling and promoting books. In the last edition, I asked readers which book cover blurbs have them hurling aside the book and fleeing the bookshop. I received some very amusing replies. On page nine, Candida Crewe rounds up the blurbs most likely to alienate oldies. She takes comfort in the fact we share our dismay at what we consider unreadable, from dystopias to fantasies about teenage vampires or serial killers, that nowadays tend to take pride of place on bookshop tables.
Given it’s many a discerning Oldie reader’s default position to be grumpy about new books, I am confident that Roger’s audaciously pessimistic rant and Candida’s rejection of so many new titles will strike a chord and raise knowing smiles.
Rest assured that none of those contemporary genres designed to lure in younger readers is featured here. Instead, our editorial team have picked out the best new histories, memoirs, biographies and fiction, alongside reprinted classics, the latest crime novels and books about the countryside and current affairs with which to while away the lengthening autumn evenings. Within these pages, you are spared any futuristic or supernatural universes populated by dragons and wizards.
Charlotte Metcalf
Memoir & Biography
AMNESIAC A MEMOIR
NEIL JORDAN
Apollo, 304pp, £25
When Jordan emerged as a writer he was compared to James Joyce and then went on to become known for directing ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Company of Wolves’, ‘ The Crying Game’, ‘Michael Collins’ and more..
The Sunday Times’s Tom Shone marvelled at a career he called ‘a bridge between two worlds ... the sort of bifocal commitment that is hard to imagine of anyone but an Irishman’.
Even though Amnesiac doesn’t stint on Hollywood gossip – Brando, Tom Cruise, or ‘Stanley Kubrick,
This is a discreet yet revealing memoir that takes us into the mind of a great artist
calling at all hours of the night to needle him about the IRA’s latest atrocities’ – ‘It’s a measure of Jordan’s strengths as a writer [...] that the Hollywood dish feels like an afterthought to the main meat of the book: an account of his upbringing in Ireland that reads like good fiction, mixing briny fabulism with poignant detail culled from a childhood of piers and postcards, the smell of tobacco and old-man tweed.’
The New Statesman’s Finn McRedmond mentions a line in Jordan’s box-office hit, ‘Michael Collins’. Liam Neeson as Collins roars: “Give us the future, we’ve had
enough of your past. Give us our country back.” Since the film’s release ‘these fictional words have been attributed to the real Collins many times [...] an apt anecdote for a book just as much about how to remember the past as it is about simply recording it’. John Boyne, in the Irish Independent, thought it ‘discreet yet revealing’ taking us into ‘the mind of a great artist’.
BROKEN THREADS MY FAMILY FROM EMPIRE TO INDEPENDENCE
MISHAL HUSAIN
4th Estate, 336pp, £18.99
Mishal Husain, a presenter on Radio 4’s Today, has written ‘a sweeping history of Partition through the lens of her grandparents, all four of whom relocated to the new state of Pakistan’, wrote Dina Nayeri in the Guardian Husain was born in England to an NHS surgeon who came here from Pakistan to train. ‘Overall,’ Nayeri confirmed, ‘Broken Threads is a spectacular achievement, and Husain combines the narrative gifts of a storyteller with the far-reaching perspective of a historian.’
The Telegraph’s, Helen Brown agreed that Hussain’s memoir was a ‘clear, balanced and moving account of her family’s experience... In the summer of 1947 an estimated 14 to 18 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs left their homes to relocate to a new country whose official faith corresponded with their own. Many lost almost everything; around one million of them were killed.’
In the Times, Pratinav Anil thought it an arresting memoir about Husain’s grandparents: ‘This isn’t just a work of grandfilial devotion. Broken Threads is the story of two
maverick marriages set against the high political drama of the partition of India and birth of Pakistan. What we have here is a remarkably vivid picture of Forties India, its politics and prejudices, its social and sexual mores.’
In i-News Yasmin Alibhai-Brown hailed the book a ‘triumph’: ‘The book ends with Husain’s musings on the political chaos, religious intolerance and the way India and Pakistan have not, after so long, come closer together through trust, historical bonds or trade. But there is a wisp of hope: perhaps one day.’
THE AFGHANS THREE LIVES THROUGH WAR LOVE AND REVOLT
ÅSNE SEIERSTAD
Virago, 448pp, £25 Åsne Seierstad, author of international bestseller ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’, returns to Afghanistan and to her immersively novelistic form of reportage, in The Afghans, tracking the lives of three Afghans through recent history. Jamila is an activist for human rights and civil society who worked as a government minister in the USbacked administration before fleeing to Norway when the Taliban returned to power; Bashir is a Taliban commander who spent years fighting coalition forces and engaging in terrorist banditry before reaping the fruits of victory and political power; and Ariana is a law student whose future was stolen when Bashir and his mob decided that “there’s no place for educated women in Afghanistan”.
‘Simply persuading the likes of Bashir to talk is a coup for Seierstad,’ thought the Telegraph’s Colin Freeman, ‘Seierstad’s book most vividly conveys is the unfulfilled lives of Afghanistan’s women [...] as an exploration of the social fabric of Afghan life, this book takes some beating.’ The Guardian’s Luke Harding agreed, picking out the ‘heartbreaking account of the first day of school. Senior girls wearing regulation black dresses and white headscarves arrived, keen to learn. They had “expectant faces”. The same morning, the Taliban’s education ministry ordered female secondary schools to remain closed. In some provinces, Taliban fighters stormed classrooms, beating girls with rods and berating them.’
RUTH CRAFER
Jordan: Writer and film-maker
Hussain: presenter and memoirist
Memoir & Biography
THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON CLUB A FAMILY MEMOIR
GRIFFIN DUNNE
Grove Press, 400pp, £20
‘Is it not enough to be a successful actor [....] and producer? Must he also be a first-rate memoirist to boot?’ asked Sarah Ditum of Dunne in the Times. As a debut author of 69, The Friday Afternoon Club (named after an informal gathering of actors started by Dunne’s sister) shows that Dunne can write better than a lot of people who have been doing it their whole lives.’
The Observer’s Rachel Cooke explained that Dunne’s father was the Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, his uncle the writer John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion’s husband, and that Carrie Fisher was his best friend. On the page ‘he’s both adorable and exasperating,’ she wrote, ‘If he’s Tiggerish and easily bored, he’s also nobody’s fool. Always the first to laugh at himself, he is utterly lacking in self-pity.
‘What makes all this the more remarkable is the fact that at the heart of his book lies near-unimaginable pain and suffering. With huge daring, Dunne gives the reader a detailed, highly intimate account of the circumstances surrounding the death in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister, Dominique, who was strangled by her abusive ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, without ever allowing it to derail the picaresque adventures he describes elsewhere.’
The Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson found Dunne’s story to be ‘unsparing but also affectionate, alternately flattering and stark, depending on the scene. What emerges is a novelistic and compelling account of a life, and a selfdeprecating guide to the Dunnes’s many highs and lows. It is a fond yet riveting family portrait.’
The Washington Post’s Leigh Haber found Dunne’s ‘filmmaker’s eye’ and ‘photographic memory’ used ‘with a quip’ to great effect.
NAKED PORTRAIT
A MEMOIR OF LUCIAN FREUD ROSE BOYT
Picador, 416pp £22
The portrait that gives the book its title is of the author at 18 when she first posed naked for her father. He painted her on two other occasions. The three pictures lend this memoir a sort of structure. ‘I confess I hoped that Boyt would focus on the naked portrait of the title,’ wrote Claire Dederer in the Guardian, ‘but Boyt quickly moves past her earliest sitting for her father to tell, in looping anti-chronology, of the poverty and chaos of her childhood, of her father’s rare appearances in her life, of the difficulty and wildness of her coming of age, and of her mother Suzy Boyt’s impulsive pursuit of her own relationships.’ For Dederer, the book ‘suffers from an absolute avalanche of detail about her experiences as a bohemian young woman in 1970s and 80s London. I’m a bit younger than Boyt and have long harboured a fascination with this milieu, but even I got swamped.’
The Telegraph’s Evgenia Siokos most enjoyed the opening chapters, ‘some of the best in the book, detailing Boyt’s teenage adventures through the bohemian scenes of London, Paris and New York in the late 1970s. When Boyt isn’t buying a pound of caviar and four pounds of unshelled peas for the wedding of the art dealer Anthony D’Offay, she’s being complimented on her Vivienne Westwood bondage trousers by Francis Bacon, or hearing Frank Auerbach “delivering
judgements on the late work of Van Gogh”.’
Sue Prideaux in the New Statesman found the memoir unsparing: ‘two stories Lucian tells Rose are the most repulsive things I have ever read.’
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE A PSYCHIATRIST’S LIFE BENJI WATERHOUSE
Jonathan Cape, £18.99, 336pp
It ‘could well be the moment that the NHS mental health crisis explodes into the public consciousness’ wrote the Evening Standard’s Daniel Keane about this memoir of an NHS consultant psychiatrist who’s also a stand-up comedian. The book describes his ‘early experiences of training and working as an NHS psychiatrist at an unnamed hospital in London. Like many NHS doctors, he begins his career full of wide-eyed ambition and idealism before being worn down by a broken system... It is a book that should really prompt a public inquiry but is also, somehow, hilarious.’
The Guardian’s Rachel Clarke found the memoir ‘humane, hilarious, eye-opening – and deserves to be widely read...It has a freshness and verve that sets it apart... What is unwavering and beautifully described is the inspiration Waterhouse continues to find in his patients. He has that essential trait of all good doctors: a sincere and lasting tenderness for his flawed and frail, crude and complicated, broken and brilliant fellow human beings… Ultimately, this is a campaigning work, both brilliantly funny and deadly serious.’
Daily Mail reviewer Max Pemberton thought it ‘funny but also touching and, at times, incredibly sad. A love letter to both psychiatry and the patients we care for, the author’s humanity and devotion shine through.’ For the Sunday Telegraph’ s Helen Brown, Waterhouse ‘repeatedly finds the funny without turning patients into punchlines’. His ‘strangely uplifting’ book is ‘a warm-hearted reminder that the system is still staffed by many people doing their darnedest to connect with and care for people who, at first glance, appear damaged and dangerous beyond hope.’
Dunne: a ‘first-rate memoirist’
Rose, 1978-79 by Lucian Freud
Memoir & Biography
IN MY TIME OF DYING
SEBASTIAN JUNGER
4th Estate, 176pp, £16.99
Junger is the veteran journalist who became a colossal bestseller with ‘The Perfect Storm’. His trademark has been material realism.
He takes an astonishing departure in his new book. Having witnessed a lot of death, and narrowly avoided it as a war reporter, it was a “vascular catastrophe” at home which brought him to the brink of death in a Massachussetts operating theatre.
It was what he saw there – a vision of his late father – that he describes and puzzles over in In My Time of Dying. He applies all his reportorial skills to trying to make sense of what he experienced, exploring everything from quantum physics to shamanic ritual.
‘Many people who admire Junger’s fine and famous writing may think that this articulate testimony to, and meditation upon, afterlife signifies him having lost his marbles,’ said the Observer’s Ed Vulliamy. ‘Well, let them. This is a moving, compact, philosophically ambitious, theological and scientific meditation of raw honesty and a necessary endeavour [...] Junger becomes a literary Charon, on this side of the River Styx, but with a view of the far bank.’
The Guardian’s Simon Usborne also found this a ‘gripping exploration of the liminal space between life and death’, whose first third was ‘a terrifically detailed medical thriller, as suspenseful and pacy as an episode of peak-era ER’, which then moved into ‘an existential quest for understanding’ that was ‘at once reassuring but troubling’.
Stephen Petrow in the Washington Post said ‘Junger takes us on what
may be the wildest and most frightening ride of his career’.
QUESTION 7
RICHARD FLANAGAN
Chatto&Windus, 288pp, £18.99
The Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan’s latest work is a genre-hopping book, blending fiction, history, philosophical rumination and memoir in this anguished exploration of personal and historical guilt.
Central to it is the bombing of Hiroshima - without which the author’s father, a POW in a Japanese slave labour camp, would not have survived the war and Flanagan would never have been born.
A chain of causality is traced back through Leo Szilard, the brilliant physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction, and his inspiration from a novel by H.G. Wells written during his tormented relationship with Rebecca West. But present too are Flanagan’s own childhood, the destruction of Australia’s ecology, that nation’s original sin in the form of the Tasmanian genocide, nonlinear time, and the author’s own near-death experience in his early twenties in a canoeing accident.
‘It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky,’ James McConnachie wrote in the Sunday Times
‘Question 7 did that to me. It is that good. [...] Underpinning the book is the idea that past, present and future coexist. This makes sense of Flanagan’s blending of history and memories, and his evocation of Hiroshima as “the great tragedy of our age from which we continue to
seek understanding and yet can never understand”’. The Guardian’s Tara June Winch had the same reaction: ‘I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat.’ She called it ‘Flanagan’s finest book’. A S H Smyth in the Spectator saluted ‘Flanagan’s hallmark mode of terrible, sad beauty, fuelled by the deep moral anger of his crusading non-fiction.’
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI WRITER AND HUMANIST
MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN
Princeton Uni Press, 400pp, £30
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the Itlian Renaissance’s most prolific, original writers.
His fame was secured as an art theorist and architect by his biographer, Jacob Burckhardt, who named him the original ‘Renaissance man’. McLaughlin sets out to prove Alberti to be still greater than the sum of these parts. Precisely because of the emphasis Burckhardt placed on Alberti’s versatility and artistic achievements, it’s often forgotten that Alberti was also himself a prolific writer of literature and McLaughlin aims to rescue him from this obscurity. Focusing on ten of Alberti’s most significant works, McLaughlin tries ‘to recast him as a pivotal figure in the history of Italian humanism and a writer of quite exceptional sophistication,’ said Alexander Lee in the Literary Review
‘McLaughlin knows his subject inside and out,’ wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, but ‘pedantic discussions of inaccuracies in 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt’s biographical writings’ and ‘the links between Alberti’s architectural theories...and his practice as an architect won’t hold much appeal for readers not already invested in the Italian polymath. This is chiefly for students of the Italian Renaissance.’ Terry Potter, on his website LetterPressProject agreed: ‘If you are a student of Renaissance history and literature this will be an absolute must for you – it’s a genuinely awe-inspiring piece of scholarship and research.
‘Alberti and McLaughlin may be separated by the best part of 800 years but they have clearly found their natural home together.’
Junger: had visions on the brink of death
Booker Prize-winning author Flanagan
Memoir & Biography
MY FAMILY THE MEMOIR
DAVID BADDIEL
4th Estate, 386pp, £22
[his mother] back to life,” It succeeds. Within these pages, Sarah is a firecracker that lights up the entire sky all by herself, a star at last.’
REBEL WITH A CAUSE THE BLACK CEO WHO MADE HITS AND HISTORY
DARCUS BEESE
Nine Eight Books, 320pp, £22
discrimination, industry politics and superstar talents in the process’
‘The incredible tale of an inspirational leader,’ the Voice declared, ‘of a young man raised in musically fertile and politically febrile times when racism was rife, not only on the streets, in schools and on the terraces, but also in the highest institutions of power.
BITTER CROP
THE HEARTACHE AND TRIUMPH OF BILLIE HOLIDAY’S LAST YEAR
The comedian David Baddiel’s 1970s upbringing in London’s Dollis Hill was an unusual one. His father was in a state of perpetual swearing, shouting aggravation; while his mother not only had a passionate decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman, but sought to bind herself closer to her lover by going into the golfing memorabilia trade herself, filling their house with putter-themed tchotchkes the while.
Despite her making no secret of her affair, her husband alone seemed not to notice it was going on at all.
Having told this story in a stand-up show, Baddiel now tells the story in book form – and it is, said the Times’s Victoria Segal ‘often outrageously funny’ but also a ‘profoundly thoughtful and complex meditation on intergenerational trauma, on truth-telling and fantasy, on selfhood and loss.[...] At times, it feels like a Jewish ‘Butterflies’, or ‘Abigail’s Part’y in a Pringle sweater — comic, but deeply melancholy.’
The Jewish Chronicle’s Jennifer Lipman zeroed in on Baddiel’s childhood neglect, where, ‘long before Jews didn’t count, the junior Baddiels were invariably an afterthought in the natural disaster that was Sarah and Colin’s marriage [...]
‘It’s grim, except it’s also incredibly heartfelt, and interesting too as a portrait of postwar Jewry, the thwarted prospects of intelligent women, and a time before parenting became a competitive sport.’
The iPaper’s Nick Duerden thought Baddiel’s heroic lack of discretion ‘jaw-dropping’ and ‘wincingly funny’, but also loving; ‘”This book is an act of bringing her
This gripping autobiography records the ascent of a young Londoner growing up in a Fulham house vibrating with reggae, soul and calypso (his dad from Trinidad, his mum mixed heritage and both members of the black activists’ protest group the Mangrove Nine).
A trainee hairdresser, then a tea boy at Island Records, Beese rose to become its head of A&R where he signed – among many others - Amy Winehouse, Dizzee Rascal, Mumford & Sons and Florence + The Machine.
Transferred to New York by the entertainment giant Universal Music Group, he became President of Island USA and then Vice-President of the even more colossal Warner Music UK. Top jobs, indeed. He landed an OBE along the way.
‘Rebel *Without* A Cause might have been a more apposite title,’ felt the Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan, ‘given the complex dynamic he negotiated: how to be mega-successful in corporate capitalist music*and* the son of left-wing black revolutionary activists. An early chapter begins, “Dad had a propensity for violenceand not just in a revolutionary, anti-police manner.”’
Music Week called it ‘a remarkable story that tracks his path from to the top of the music business, tackling
PAUL ALEXANDER
Canongate, 368pp, £20
The first biography of the jazz singer in 20 years charts her rise from singing in Baltimore brothels to Harlem clubs, but focusing on 1958 and the legal and drug problems that plagued her ‘til her death from cirrhosis of the liver.
The New Yorker praised this ‘ambitious biography’, finding it full of poignant reminders of a cruel fate at the hands of her managers, police and the media’s ‘unwarranted sensationalism’.
The New York Journal of Books’ Joseph Barbato found it ‘engrossing and moving,’ noting how ‘her detractors wanted to portray her as unread, uncouth and unworthy of her fame’ and ‘she often found solace in the loving arms of women’.
The Art Desk’s John Carvill found it fine and clear-eyed, focusing ‘on art instead of scurrilous myths’, adding ‘her voice splashed joyful surprise across the listener’s consciousness like clusters of raindrops in a sudden sunshower.’
There’s plenty of material to break your heart, said the Sunday Times’s Victoria Segal, ‘her husband leaving her bloodied after throwing a phone at her head’, the nurse fingerprinting her on her deathbed, her sexual abuse by a neighbour, the racism that forced her to use freight elevators in hotels.
‘Yet Alexander, whose previous biographies of JD Salinger and Sylvia Plath indicate a fearlessness in taking on US cultural titans, is not another ghoul lurking around hospital corridors with a camera … and is careful to catch Holiday’s resilience, her political clarity, her vivacity. “No matter what the mother****ers do to you,” she once advised “never let them see you cry.”’ Beese: Rebel
Baddiel, front left, and family
with or without a cause?
CANDIDA CREWE on dread book-blurb words that have you fleeing the bookshop
When you pick up a novel in a bookshop and cast your eye over the blurb, or read a review, what are the words and phrases that instantly make your heart sink? Indeed, cause you to put that book straight back on the pile and stop reading without further ado?
Top of my list is ‘dystopian’. The minute the word hoves into view, that author and publisher have lost me. I cannot and will not read any book that has even a whiff of our societal breakdown/climatic/violent/ anarchic/AI/post-apocalyptic destiny. The very thought bores me into a coma. Couldn’t even face that classic, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Not unrelated to my phobia for dystopias are: ‘futuristic’ (even if the novel is set only as little as five years hence); ‘fantasy’; ‘supernatural’; ‘sci-fi’; ‘horror’. Alas, it is almost impossible to find a contemporary novel that doesn’t boast one or more of these adjectives.
I must be the only adult in the world who has never read Harry Potter. Or anything by Philip Pullman. Nothing against these globally-admired authors, only that I cannot stomach magical realism.
When the above questions were put to Oldie readers, their responses made me realise I am far from alone in despairing of surround-sound fictional dystopias.
‘Fantasy definitely has me running for the hills,’ wrote Tony. Vampires were also a bugbear.
Terry despaired of ‘a child goes missing’ and ‘a woman is found dead, often in a forest under a light covering of snow.’
Not
His dislike of these reminded me of another no-no of mine: any mention of serial killers. I do not want to shell out twenty quid on five hundred pages in their company.
Not because I am head-in-thesand about their existence, or have an especially rosy-coloured, Candide outlook on life. Just because multiple murderers turn my stomach and my preference is for something more edifying. I ignored the Japanese bestseller Butter because it is about a female gourmet cook ‘convicted of the
I will never, ever read a novel about a teenage serial killer
serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking.’
Then my boyfriend told me that, though not a very good book, Butter wasn’t really about a serial killer and was quite insightful on the contemporary female experience in Japan (and, arguably, in general). So, in my local bookshop, I succumbed. Lo and behold, he was spot on in his opinion of the book but, even so, the murderer dominates too much for my taste and is the least interesting
Publishers seem obsessed with promoting psychopaths and peddling surreal genres to the extent that the Deborah Levys,
William Boyds, Karl Ove Knausgårds, and Elizabeth Strouts of this worldwho write startling books set in this world and not some tediously unreal one - are rare gems.
It is becoming increasingly, alarmingly difficult to find modern fiction that is the ‘normal’ stuff of the exploration of the human condition in the recognisably here and now.
Call me narrow-minded, but I want to read books which take place in settings that aren’t pumped up nightmares and the action-packed ‘literary’ equivalent of ultraprocessed foods.
Terry adds to his list. I particularly love him for, ‘Any novel where the characters travel about on dragons.’
And I agree with ‘hilarious’ – a red flag as it’s practically guaranteed to leave one po-faced. He also mentions ‘two teenagers [who] meet and fall in love.’ I am rather with him on this one, to which I might add any stories that are described as ‘coming of age’.
Catcher in the Rye lit the fire of reading in me when I was a child. But now I am sixty, I feel very much of the ‘been there, done that’ school, although I do recognise that that is curmudgeonly of me.
I will keep an open mind about youthful passions, though I do not mind admitting I find a novel about grown-ups more diverting. But I will never, ever read a novel about a teenage serial killer (that is what newspapers are for, alas).
One friend said she avoids ‘South America’. Not in real life, but in fiction. Perhaps it’s her way of referring to the dreaded magical realism which has, apparently, taken a turn for the worse since the glory days of Marquez and Vargas Llosa (with whom I could never get to grips, even then). More hackneyed, perhaps, today? Less imaginative? Devoid of poetry? I can’t say because I manifestly reject the tedium of it altogether. And always will.
Instead, I count the days till the publication date of the next Ann/e (Tyler or Patchett): my kind of down-to-earth realism - intelligent, reflective, thought-provoking, wise, revelatory. I would add ‘beautifullywritten’ but I have a hunch that that might be another of Tony’s or Terry’s verbotens.
for me: queue for release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2005
History
THE ROADS TO ROME A HISTORY
CATHERINE FLETCHER
Bodley Head, 385pp, £25
Western Europe has been shaped and held together by the 100,000km of roads that led to, from and through the imperial capital. Fletcher has traversed many of those remaining, accompanied by tourists and a wealth of literary quotations and historical insights. These super-highways allowed staggering speeds of communication (nine days from Londinium to ancient Rome) requring a commitment to maintenance that would shame today’s Department of Transport. (Modern roads only differ in using a tarmac sealant.)
They’re important symbols too: Napoleon Buonaparte planned to copy Rome’s processional avenues created by the Popes. Hitler and Mussolini’s road-building programmes were intended to seize imaginations. And Kipling wished the British Empire to adopt Rome’s high-viz tabard as well as its mantle.
The Literary Review’s Miles Pattenden was enthused by Fletcher’s achievement: ‘The camaraderie she generates with fellow travellers, dead as well as living, engages and inspires,’ and he praised her love of both ‘the journey [and] that chaotic, quixotic, unbowed city’.
The Guardian’s Tobias Jones found it a ‘nuanced and perceptivebook’ and Fletcher ‘a thoroughly enjoyable narrator, because she peppers her learned prose with wry humour, first-person asides and comparisons between past and present’.
OPERATION BITING
THE 1942 PARACHUTE ASSAULT TO CAPTURE HITLER’S RADAR MAX HASTINGS
William Collins, 384pp, £25
Commandos are legendary but their future was uncertain until Operation Biting’s success in February 1942, the subject of Hastings’s enthralling new account. Biting was a big ask: capture one of the radar sets that helped German Normandy-based night fighters intercept British bombers. This involved a night parachute drop near Le Havre, a successful assault on the radar station, and then retreating in the dark in deep snow to the coast to be picked up by landing craft.
The Mail on Sunday’s Ysenda Maxtone-Graham could not curb her enthusiasm: ‘”Reads like a thriller” is often said about good non-fiction accounts of war adventures – but in this case, it’s true. I couldn’t put Max Hastings’s new book down … You live the whole three terrifying hours in Northern France with all the protagonists: the shots in the dark, the loss of radio contact, the injured comrade given a shot of morphine and carried to a barn …’
The Telegraph’s Laurence Rees shared Maxtone-Graham’s enthusiasm, describing the book as ‘Boy’s Own stuff ... whole sections of which read like Where Eagles Dare’or The Guns of Navarone.’ He quotes Hastings, who says it’s a story that ‘“lifts the spirits because it is that of ordinary people doing fine and difficult things well.”’
Reads like a thriller...I couldn’t put Max Hastings’s new book down
Describing Hastings as ‘a superb military historian with a delightful talent for gossip’, the Times’s Gerard DeGroot applauded his ‘acerbic’ verdicts on two of the brass hats, Mountbatten – ‘an extreme narcissist’ – and General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, a ‘dashing warrior’ who in the bedroom was ’a nervous wreck’.
DeGroot admitted that ‘none of this is relevant to Operation Biting, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.’
THE UMBRELLA MURDER THE HUNT FOR THE COLD WAR’S MOST NOTORIOUS KILLER
ULRIK SKOTTE
W.H. Allen, 336 pp, £25
A lethal umbrella sounds like a device James Bond picks up from Q. But there was nothing make-believe about the brolly that in September 1978 poisoned the Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, as he walked across Waterloo Bridge towards Bush House, where he worked for the BBC World Service. It fired a ricin pellet that killed him within four days, a fate he foresaw: ‘The bastards poisoned me’, he told doctors on his deathbed. Markov was killed because he mocked Bulgaria’s dictator, Todor Zivkov. But who pulled the trigger? The answer is provided by Skotte, a Danish journo who has spent much of his life on the case. What follows, said the Spectator’s Alan Judd ‘is a model for every would-be investigative journalist, a triumph of teamwork, persistence and essential recordkeeping.’
In fact, the identity of the hitman, Francisco Gullino, a seedy Italian neo-Fascist, is not in doubt. But as James O’Brien said in the Times, the value of the book ‘lies in Skotte having known many of those caught up in the killing, its fascination in his psychologically acute portraits of them.’
The Observer’s Tobias Jones also applauded Skotte, comparing it to another mysterious death: ‘Most of us on the Italian true-crime beat have always assumed that the most compelling Italian crime story linked to London was the murder of Roberto Calvi, found on London Bridge in 1982. But Skotte tells the Markov story so crisply that this other bridge killing seems even more poignant, somehow more international, evocative and satisfyingly odd.’
What the Romans did for us: the Pont du Gard, France
A SEDITIOUS AND SINISTER TRIBE
THE CRIMEAN TATARS AND THEIR KHANATE
DONALD RAYFIELD
Reaktion Books, 352pp, £30
The present-day war in Ukraine is mostly perceived as a war between Russians and Ukrainians, but there is a third nation involved.
According to Robert Service, Emeritus Professor of Russian history at Oxford University, Donald Rayfield has written ‘a magisterial history of the Crimean Tatars.’ Rayfield gives a ‘vivid picture of a people who once terrified their neighbours and are now again threatened with extinction in their homeland.’
William Boyd gave his endorsement: it is a ‘remarkable and revelatory work of phenomenal historical scholarship, written with great verve and aplomb’, a ‘classic of its kind’. Rayfield’s book describes the establishment of the Khanate in Crimea in the 1440s, its reign, and eventual fall in 1783, concluding with a vivid portrayal of the ruthless suppression of the Tatars—first by Russia and then the Soviet Union— and the final, effectively genocidal, invasion under Vladimir Putin.
Georgia de Chamberet, on BookBlast, agreed with Boyd, findig it a ‘scholarly historical account...loaded with intricate detail.’ In this first history in English for over 100 years, Rayfield describes the Tatars’ lives, traditions, customs, military campaigns and impact on eastern Europe. Muslim Tatars have suffered
repeated persecution ever since the Ottomans ceded their peninsula to the Russian Empire but have persisted in surving and thriving in their homeland. De Chamberet found the book ‘in-depth exploration of a major Turkic people that has been historically misrepresented and misunderstood’, offering a ‘dizzying array of factual knowledge.’
TO RUN THE WORLD
THE KREMLIN’S COLD WAR BID FOR GLOBAL POWER
SERGEY RADCHENKO
Cambridge University Press, 768 pp, £30
‘Why should we want to read yet another thumping great book about the Soviet empires collapse?’ asked former UK Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite in the Spectator
‘Radchenko attempts an answer in his well-constructed new work. Based on recently opened Soviet archives and on extensive work in the Chinese archives, it places particular weight on China’s role in Soviet policymaking. The details are colourful.
‘It is fun to know that Mao Tse-Tung sent Stalin a present of spices, and that the mouse on which the Russians tested it promptly died. But the new material forces no major revision of previous interpretations.’ Nonetheless, ‘stories about the decline and fall of empires will always find an audience.’
Radchenko shows that ‘Putin’s psychology is very much in keeping with that of his Soviet predecessors,’ wrote the FT’s Edward Luce .
‘This psychology includes injured pride and an unquenchable sense of insecurity.’ Calling the book ‘masterful’ and ‘indispensable’, Luce found Radchenko’s conclusion ‘bleak because it is persuasive. Under Putin, he argues, Russia believes it has another chance via the rubric of multipolarity to destroy the world that the US has made.’
Radchenko examines Soviet foreign policy, wrote Ukraine historian Serhii Plokhy in the New Statesman, ‘with the benefit of hindsight’ and ‘his deep knowledge as a prominent historian of the Cold War... brings to life some of the key participants in the original Cold War, elucidating their beliefs, ideas and positions, as well as the restraints on their ability to implement their desired policies. The book is
exceptionally well-researched, even better argued, and beautifully written.’
HISTORY IN THE HOUSE SOME REMARKABLE DONS AND THE TEACHING OF POLITICS, HISTORY AND STATECRAFT
RICHARD DAVENPORTHINES
William Collins, 423pp, £26
Fan vaults, staircase to hall, Christ Church, Oxford
This is a beautifully written book about a rather niche subject: the teaching of modern history at the grandest of Oxford colleges, Christ Church, commonly known as ‘the House’. For a century or more, undergraduates, many destined for the corridors of power, digested the wisdom of dons like Keith Feiling, J.C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Robert Blake.
Consequently, says DavenportHines, “Men who read modern history at Christ Church were strewn through the stout red reference books that were the quality assayers of twentieth-century England”, from The Directory of Directors, to Who’s Who.
The Literary Review’s William Whyte described the book as ‘in part a meditation on the study of history: how it should be taught and why it should be studied.’
According to William Bentley in the TLS, ‘Davenport-Hines does not know how to write a drab word and his lovingly drawn portraits are charming, captivating and sometimes compelling. [This book] will not attract everyone, including half the human race excluded from its pages.
‘But, for those who know something of this place and revere its mysteries, Rupert Davenport-Hines has constructed a fount, if not always of joy, at least of secret and embarrassed contentment.’
Crimean Tatars and a mullah, c. 1862
History
HEROD THE GREAT JEWISH KING IN A ROMAN WORLD
MARTIN GOODMAN
Yale University Press, 248pp, £16.99
All five Judean kings of Rome’s late republican and early imperial years were called Herod, but this one was the alleged innocent-slaughterer (untrue says Martin Goodman).
Dead by 4BC, he was architect of the Jerusalem that Jesus would later know – the Temple its crowning glory – as well as the port of Caesarea and the frowning fortresses of Masada and Herodium.
Which is the sum of his greatness, writes the author. In all other respects, he was his father’s son. He and Herod Antipater were more Graeco-Arab than Jewish; ruthless operators who owed their thrones to switching sides (sometimes by luck) in Rome’s civil wars. When Herod the Great felt threatened by the popularity of his wife’s family –Maccabees, who’d previously ruled an independent Jewish state – he had her grandfather and brother killed.
After a failed assassination plot, he had his wife strangled, too; and in time, would execute two of their three sons. Still, he had plenty more – in between his affairs with every gender including eunuchs, he married about ten times – and dispatched another heir for emulating his own ambition. ‘Better to be Herod’s pig than his son,’ joked his patron, Augustus.
In The Times, Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote that this book would be ‘enjoyed by those who relish dynastic sagas, but also those who want to know the real history of Jerusalem and the Middle East’. (The dictators, the factions, the
superpowers: all have their parallels.) In the Jewish Chronicle, Colin Shindler called it ‘excellent’: stripping his subject of ‘the Christian mythology that defines him’, Goodman had reclaimed ‘the “kill or be killed” world of ancient rulers and the unstable societies over which they presided’.
THE FALL
LAST DAYS OF THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC
HENRY REECE
Yale Univ Press, 464pp, £35
Reece investigates how and why the English Revolution failed.
As the Telegraph’s Daniel Brooks noted, it was a lot to do with the money: ‘By its closing years, the English Commonwealth, only 12 years removed from civil wars that had left around 200,000 dead, was drowning in debt.’ By the time Oliver Cromwell’s son Richard succeeded to the role of Lord Protector, the state was “a teat with too many mouths jostling for its nourishment”.
Reece’s scholarly and intelligent book, said Brooks, is in competition with Jonathan Healey’s ‘fantastic and remarkably accessible ‘Blazing World’, published last year’.
If you don’t already know what “Pride’s Purge” was, or that Whitelocke Bulstrode and Bulstrode Whitelocke were different people, you may lose the thread: ‘If the English civil wars were more regularly taught in schools, the way that Reece jumps into the midst of things would be no bother. As it stands, I wonder whether many readers won’t flounder.’
Nevertheless this ‘gently revisionist history’ gives welcome and sensible credit to “Tumbledown Dick” Cromwell, who represented the ‘greatest potential of the regimes of 1658 to 1670’, and might have prospered had it not been for losing the support of the New Model Army.
‘The Fall is a deeply studied book about a uniquely thorny period of English history, and makes a successful case for its enduring importance.’
VERTIGO
THE RISE AND FALL OF WEIMAR GERMANY 1918-1933
HARALD JÄHNER, TRANS. SHAUN WHITESIDE
W.H. Allen, 480pp, £25
The Weimar Republic was a study in irreconcilable attitudes, between demi-mondaines, with their restless quest for novelty, in art, architecture and behaviour, and the disaffected, wanting their old country back.
Add to this what Jähner calls ‘the maelstrom of devaluation’, that threatened to ‘drag down with it everything that had once been cherished’, and you can understand why, by 1932, the English writer John Lehmann could compare strife-torn Berlin to ‘a patient about to undergo an operation without an anaesthetic’.
The Telegraph’s Julian Evans began: ‘If you want to know where our polarised, gullible, narcissistic world might end up, I advise you to read this book...
‘Tradition was shaken in every institution and structure ..... And the flash flood of social and artistic change, although inspirational, from Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit art to naked gymnastics and the Charleston, did not deliver stability.’
The Sunday Times’s Dominic Sandbrook was more upbeat. Rather than explaining why Weimar collapsed, ‘Jähner tries to capture the feelings, moods and sensations of the age as expressed in the dance hall, the Bauhaus dwelling, the open plan office, heavy traffic, the photographic studio, the sports hall, the beer tent at election time or the edge of the street when the fighting gangs were marching...the story of Weimar’s failed experiment has rarely been told with such gusto, and I enjoyed it enormously.’
The Massacre of the Innocents: 10th-century illuminated manuscript
Richard Cromwell by by Gerard Soest
History
THE GREAT REVERSAL BRITAIN, CHINA AND THE 400-YEAR CONTEST FOR POWER
KERRY BROWN
Yale University Press, 400pp, £25
This is ‘an empathetic and convincing examination of how the two countries have been entwined over the last four hundred years,’ wrote Rana Mitter in Literary Review. ‘It is also a realistic explanation of why they are unlikely to know each other much better any time soon.’ In the 17th century, relations between the countries were almost equal and confined to trade, but following victory at Waterloo in 1815 Britain aggressively backed the opium trade’s expansion into China.
This first reversal has since been reversed again and today the power balance favours China. ‘Brown reminds us that Britain played an outsized role in the development of post-Opium Wars China.
Not all its contributions were malicious. The establishment of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service by the Ulsterman Robert Hart in 1854 was a turning point in China’s modernisation.’ Indeed, ‘it is perhaps the single most important example of how Britain shaped China’.
In the Asian Review of Books, David Chaffetz noted that Brown ‘enjoys letting the reader draw parallels between the somber side of Britain’s history with China and current clashes, where the boot is decidedly on the other foot. The Chinese do not take kindly to lectures on human rights from the nation that sacked Beijing and Tianjin. Brown notes that India’s tea plantations
originated from “one of the most dramatic acts of intellectual property theft of all time.”’ His ‘thoughtful four century-long narrative is enlivened by thumbnail sketches of the many genial Britons that made their careers in Chinas... Indeed, this is a history where people matter, as the two nations became increasingly interconnected on a personal level.’
THE FIRST COLD WAR ANGLO-RUSSIAN RELATIONS IN THE 19TH CENTURY
BARBARA EMERSON
Hurst, 560pp, £35
‘Emerson covers her ground with exemplary thoroughness, mining a variety of British and Russian archival materials and paying particular attention to the geopolitical competition in central Asia for which Arthur Conolly, an East India Company officer and explorer, is generally credited with inventing the term “the Great Game”’, wrote the FT’s Tony Barber.
‘Perhaps she devotes too much space to the political opinions and matchmaking schemes of Victoria and other royals whose influence over British foreign policy was in truth rather small. On the other hand, she is excellent on how Russian spies broke British diplomatic codes, passing the sensitive correspondence to Alexander III (1881-94) and inspiring him to write “numerous and usually acerbic annotations in Russian on the telegrams”’. Barber praised Emerson’s ‘sharp eye for the unusual or entertaining detail’.
As the Literary Review’s Donald Rayfield explained, ‘Britain and Russia resembled nothing more than
two loudly squabbling packs of hyenas, tearing at the carcasses of dying empires...but coming to terms when they found there was enough meat for everybody,’ although ‘the two empires periodically denounced each other’s brutality.’
The Spectator’s Owen Matthews, found the ‘bizarrely mis-titled’ book ‘has nothing whatever to do with the actual Cold War, nor is it for the most part concerned with the 19th century.
‘Rather, Emerson has written a thorough and often diverting diplomatic history of Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th to the early 20th century,’ in which none of the 14 wars or more was remotely cold.
WHAT REALLY WENT WRONG
THE WEST AND THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
FAWAZ A GERGES
Yale Uni press, 334pp, £20
You couldn’t say it more succinctly than the sub-title. A century-plus of meddling and hypocrisy by America and Europe, in return for cheap oil and a wished-for new world-order, is to blame for the unholy mess out there. And the author illustrated this – an ‘innovation’, wrote the Literary Review’s Rory Mccarthy through two pivotal episodes: the CIAbacked coup against Iran’s elected government in 1953; and the 1956 Suez Crisis. In a ‘blistering… debunking’, Gerges shows how legitimate nationalist aims had been subordinated to Western ambitions. Had the developing nations not been sucked into superpower-politics, their economies would now be healthier, their governments less thuggish and their societies happier.
Plus, a happily-diverse Jewish state could be living harmoniously with its neighbours.
Wishful thinking, perhaps. However, Mccarthy found that the author was deft at unpicking the incredibly complicated manoeuvrings that led to the current dire situation. Gerges ‘convincingly’ demonstrates ‘there is nothing inevitable about conflict and instability in the Middle East’.
And ‘this alone [was] worth noting as Western leaders today struggle to articulate a coherent response to Israel’s war in Gaza’.
Two poor Chinese opium-smokers. Gouache painting on rice-paper, 19th century
History
ASK NOT THE KENNEDYS AND THE WOMEN THEY DESTROYED
MAUREEN CALLAHAN
Mudlark, 336pp, £25
‘The Kennedys, the closest thing America has to royalty, continue to exert their peculiar spell over the collective imagination,’ said Paula Byrne in the Times.
‘Dozens of films and documentaries have been produced and forests felled for the sake of mediocre biographies, such as Callahan’s..., which is now No 1 in the British bestseller charts.’ Ask Not ‘takes the predictable and reductive line by depicting the Kennedy men as predators and the women round them who swam in their wake as downtrodden or martyred.’
Byrne didn’t care for the book’s ‘sensationalist and prurient style’.
‘What does Callahan hope to add to this vale of tears?’ asked New York Times reviewer, Louis Bayard.
‘Only her residual and, yes, partisan and ideological suspicion that despite ample testimony (in many cases from the victims themselves), the Kennedy men have somehow gotten away with it all.’
But Bayard is suspicious of Callahan’s sources, which ‘include The National Enquirer, journalistragpickers like Kitty Kelley and a rotating crew of ax-grinders, including a low-level Senate aide whose claims of rampant cocaine abuse by Ted Kennedy fell apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.’
‘Whatever conspiracy theory has ever been floated about la famiglia — Joe Sr. molested Rosemary, Jack and Bobby killed Marilyn, Aristotle
Onassis killed Bobby — gets to saunter in the daylight.’
This is a ‘lacerating exposé’, said the Guardian’s Peter Conrad. Callahan shows an angry sympathy for the women broken, raped or left for dead by the Kennedys, and this ‘inflames and sometimes envenoms Callahan’s writing.’
CHALLENGER
A TRUE STORY OF HEROISM AND DISASTER ON THE EDGE OF SPACE
ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM
Viking, 576pp, £25
In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off, watched by a horrified global television audience. ‘Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skilful storyteller who takes care to humanize the dozens of major and minor players involved in NASA’s many successful, and occasionally catastrophic, space missions,’ wrote Rachel Slade in the New York Times.
‘For cynical Americans, disaster buffs and engineers, Challenger will be a quick, devastating read. In Higginbotham’s deft hands, the human element – sometimes heroic, sometimes cloaked in doublespeak and bluster – shines through the many technical aspects of.... a universal story that transcends time.’
The Telegraph’s Alex Diggins described this ‘scrupulous history’ having ‘the ripping compulsion of the best reporting... Higginbotham forensically unpicks the cavalcade of cost-cutting and back-covering that preceded Challenger’s destruction.’
largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life...
One Nasa honcho is described as “secretive, inscrutable, and Machiavellian… the Thomas Cromwell of the Johnson Space Center”.’ The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport found this ‘fresh telling fueled by meticulous detail and exacting prose.
While familiar, the story is rendered dreamlike so that readers can’t help but hope, as it unfolds page by page, that somehow the outcome this time will be different.’
THE CIA AN IMPERIAL HISTORY
HUGH WILFORD
Basic Books, 384pp, £25
The subtitle says it all.
When the British could no longer shoulder ‘the white man’s burden’, the USA took it on. America was, in theory, opposed to imperialism, so the newly-established CIA secretly did much of the heavy lifting, becoming ‘a new covert force of empire in an age of decolonisation,’ said the New Yorker’s Daniel Immerwahr, adding, ‘The U.S. lacked the generations-deep, place-based colonial knowledge that Britain had.’
So, no surprise to learn that many of its original staff, including two future bosses, Allen Dulles and William Colby, were devotees of Kipling and T.E. Lawrence and their accounts of the Great Game. Alas, the new Agency’s naïve infiltration tactics were useless behind the Iron Curtain, where, hundreds of agents were sent to their deaths in the 1950’s.’
The Telegraph’s Calder Walton found Wilford ‘casts new light on the CIAs overseas operations, but quoted intelligence guru Christopher Andrew, who warned that ‘books that describe CIA covert operations in faraway lands, but fail to mention the KGB’s corresponding actions, constitute the equivalent of one-hand clapping.’
Guardian reviewer Killian Fox called it a ‘ page-turner tense enough to make your palms sweat... That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking,
The book is ‘entertaining, fact-filled...providing thoughtful context rather than talking points for the minds-made-up brigade, said the Spectator’s Toby Handen, but ‘this is not a comprehensive history ...despite a wealth of documentary sources cited, there is not a single reference to the author having interviewed a serving or former officer.’
The Kennedys at the White House, 1962
Challenger explodes, 73 seconds after lift-off
Old Favourites
LUCY LETHBRIDGE uncovers some more old favourites being reprinted in beautiful editions
I am delighted to see that Canongate has reprinted Climbing Days by Dorothy Pilley, one of the pioneering British mountaineers.
It was first published in 1937 when climbers wore tweeds, woolly scarves and hobnail boots and Pilley’s account of a climbing life is full of adventures in mountain ranges then largely unexplored. She is a splendidly lively, often very funny, writer. I first discovered her when I read that she described the dispiriting tourists’ restaurant that had opened in 1912 at the top of Jungfraujoch as a ‘cross between a cowshed and the Trocadero with flavours of Bakerloo tube and Cheddar Gorge.’
Honeymooning in the Belgian Ardennes in 1914, they are rudely awakened to the reality of another
Honeymooning in the Belgian Ardennes in 1914, they are rudely awakened to the reality of another kind of war by the sound of far-off guns. Hamilton wrote the novel in one rage-filled year while she was volunteering in France in 1918.
This edition comes with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Tove Jansson is of course most famous for her glorious chronicles of the Moomintrolls. But she wrote for adults too and lovers of the enchanting ‘A Summer Book’ and ‘A Winter Book’ will want to get their hands on Fair Play, recently reprinted by Sort Of books in a translation from the Finnish by Thomas Teal and an introduction by Ali Smith. It’s a novel about contentment, drawing heavily on Jansson’s own experiences, centred on two mature women, a writer and an artist, who fall in love and live together, moving between Helsinki and a remote island where they have a cabin. It was first published in 1989 when Jansson was at the height of her Moomin fame and in her 70s.
William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton, first published in 1919, is one of the latest offerings from the marvellous Persephone Books: in fact it comes with an introduction by Persephone founder Nicola Beauman who calls it ‘one of the greatest novels to emerge from World War One.’
It is about a married couple, William and Griselda, who are passionate but also smug, cocksure and intolerant women’s suffrage activists.
endpapers of contemporary prints. Whipple was a reluctant memoirist and completed the book in a few weeks – but it turned out a huge success. Like so many good writers, her recall of childhood was vivid with details – and anyone who loves her novels will spot the origins of her themes of northern middle-class family life.
Joanna Rakoff ’s My Salinger Year was only published in 2014 but Slightly Foxed Editions have rightly realised that this memoir of New York literary life is a little classic. They have now reprinted it in one of their covetable hardbacks with its signature ribbon bookmark. Rakoff went to work for a rackety firm of Manhattan literary agents when she was on her uppers and an aspiring writer. The reclusive JD Salinger was their most important client and Rakoff tells of the eccentric hoops to which the staff were forced in order to keep the great man happy. It’s very funny and very evocativ e.
My Salinger Year: reprinted in ‘one of their covetable hardbacks with its signature ribbon’
Dorothy Whipple fans will be delighted that her archive is not yet exhausted – with the reprinting of One More Day, her delightful 1935 memoir of an Edwardian childhood in the mill town of Blackburn. And not one but two publishers have given it a new airing. Slightly Foxed editions have reprinted it with a preface by Hazel Wood and Persephone have also brought out an edition, with their hallmark
in the mill town of Blackburn. And not one given it a new airing.
have reprinted it with a preface by Hazel Wood and Persephone have also brought out an edition, with their hallmark
Lethbridge loves Manderley Books’ covers’ ‘bold colour and graphics’
I love the covers of Manderley Books’ reprints – no sepia photographs or tasteful midtwentieth-century portraits for them but bold colour and graphics (and accompanying bookmarks with the same). Manderley has just produced a new edition of Florence: Ordeal by Water by Katherine Kressman Taylor – a diary of the 1966 floods which caused havoc in the city, cutting off electricity and stranding people at home for weeks. It comes with an introduction by Vanessa Nicholson, author of a novel set in the period called ‘Angels of Mud’.
with an introduction by Vanessa Nicholson, author
Talking of irresistible covers, Pushkin Press have produced And Time Was No More, a selection of short stories, sketches and thoughts from Nadezhda Teffi (known simply as Teffi), a star writer and humourist in pre-revolutionary Russia and favourite of both Lenin and Tsar Nicholas.
The literary translator Robert Chandler has compiled this selection of Teffi gems, some old favourites and others unfamiliar. Once a Bolshevik supporter, Teffi grew disillusioned with the revolution and escaped from Russia to Istanbul with a travelling theatre troupe.
It won’t be out till November but A Book for Christmas comes in time for yuletide present-shopping. Its Swedish author, Selma Lagerlöf, won the Nobel Prize in 1909 and is revered in Scandinavia but little known here. This one is a collection of Lagerlof’s short stories, full of magic and folklore and dark forests. Penguin is publishing it in a delectable hardback edition adorned with a Karl Larssen painting of festively-dressed children in a snow scene. A fine present for pretty well any reader of any age.
Countryside
UNDERSTORY A YEAR AMONG WEEDS
ANNA CHAPMAN PARKER
Duckworth, 281pp, £18.99
‘Weeds are undergoing a cultural makeover’, pronounced Tome Morrissy-Swan, reviewing Understory in the Observer.
The author, an artist, spent a year observing the so-called weeds that grew around her home in Berwickupon-Tweed. Then inspiration struck while she was looking at Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’ at the National Gallery: “Weeds were everywhere”, she wrote, “dotted all over the dry ochre earth, emerging from cracks in every rock.”
Morrissy-Swan enjoyed the author’s illustrations and sound ecological message of the book – in the UK alone we’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows – but also the fantastic names of weeds, redolent of history, folklore and generations of deep local knowledge.
‘Groundsel is known as old-manin-the-spring and there is also shepherd’s purse and ivy-leaved toadflax. Their names highlight a previous, closer relationship we once had with wild plants: we fed sow thistles to lactating pigs and chickweed to hens. Feverfew was a treatment for fevers and those with the “wort” suffix had medicinal uses.’
In the Daily Mail, gardening writer Constance Craig Martin enjoyed accompanying Chapman Parker on her exploratory weed trails.
‘At first she can barely identify any
of the weeds but as the year goes on she becomes increasingly knowledgeable...this tranquil, meditative book is all about the quiet pleasure of examining something closely in order to fully appreciate it.’
BEHIND THE PRIVET HEDGE
MICHAEL GILSON
Reaktion, 328pp, £16.95
We may sneer at suburban gardens but Michael Gilson reminds us they had visionary, er, roots, courtesy of inter-war pioneers who promoted ‘the empowerment that some level of horticultural knowledge’ could give.
And none more than Richard Sudell, whom the author has saved from obscurity.
A twice-married (discreet bisexual) Quaker socialist, Lancastrian Sudell left school at 14, trained at Kew, was jailed as a conscientious objector in 1916, later fetching up in the estate cottage at Roehampton, whence he formed the first of many campaigning committees and societies. He’d churn out newspaper columns and books, create and landscape gardens under commission – Dolphin Square’s are the best-known – and run countless competitions and events.
As gardening editor of the Herald, Sudell became something of a celebrity in left-leaning circles. But he wasn’t a top-down reformer – no wafty aesthetics or subtleties of design for him – nor a great plantsman.
In the face of intellectuals’ distaste, he embraced his fellow-workingpeople’s enthusiasm for crazy-paving, rose-beds and concrete statuary, even if he abhorred some of their antics. A high point is his account of the 1923 Roehampton Estate Gardening Society’s Wodehousian Whitsun fete.
Considering Gilson to have done ‘an excellent job’, Garden Illustrated’s Tim Richardson focused on Sudell’s activism. To anyone ‘who wants to affect real change in the world… Behind the Privet Hedge could prove to be an inspiration’. The Telegraph’s Adrian Tinniswood found the book ‘much more than a biography’. It’s also the portrait of an age, in which we find 65-year-old Sudell musing about congenial settings for the nuclear powerstations then being planned. And you won’t, ended Tinniswood, ‘find many of those behind a privet hedge’.
A MUDLARKING YEAR FINDING TREASURE IN EVERY SEASON
LARA MAIKLEM
Bloomsbury Circus, 368pp, £22
‘I’m obsessed,’ said Lara Maiklem in an interview in the Guardian on the publication of her first book.
‘Mudlark’ was a huge success, inspiring generations of new mudlarkers to fossick on the foreshore. It may not have made her particularly popular with the small mudlarking community that found its numbers swelled, but it put this small sub-genre of antiquarianism on the map.
Maiklem’s follow-up book should warm the cockles of anyone fascinated by the extraordinary historical fragments that rivers expose at low tide.
It is, wrote an admiring Brian Norton in the Tablet, a ‘calendrical narrative of chilly, slippery sojourns on long reaches of the Thames.’
Morton was fascinated by the obsessive nature (like that of metal detectorists) of an activity that is more a vocation than a hobby.
There is a whiff of melancholy about the enterprise, the unearthing of fragments of lives long gone:
‘Reading Maiklem, often with a vicarious shiver, one isn’t so much surprised by the astonishing things she finds – a 12th century penny, a sixteenth century posy ring with ‘+ ALWAYES engraved inside, a pewter pilgrim badge with St Osmund’s face on it – as by the almost casual way she itemises such finds.’
A Mudlarking Year is ‘historically fascinating, domestic, fugitive, mournful, surreal, comic all by turns.’ The wonders of mud.
Weeds: redolent of history and folklore
Found treasure: the glories of mudlarking
Just Keep Going
Beware of the boredom that creeps in if you take time off between books, warns writer KATIE HICKMAN
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I had just finished writing a book, and before I embarked on the next one, I decided to have a break.
Everyone else was doing it: actor friends ‘rested’. Academic friends took ‘sabbaticals’ (often involving long liquid lunches in the Chelsea Arts Club). Others had even retired altogether, disappearing into sunny, time-rich uplands filled with zumba classes and yoga retreats.
While I had no intention of retiring myself, I could hardly remember a time when I didn’t have either a book or a child on the go – often both at the same time.
My last book, Brave Hearted, about the experiences of women during America’s westward expansion, had been a particularly harrowing one to write. As I ground to the end of a long round of edits, the idea of taking some time off – a year at least, I reckoned - began to take root. Why not some ‘me’ time?
sculpting odd bits of red-hot metal together…..
How I dreamed about it! Those Elysian fields in which I too could indulge in long lunches at the Chelsea Arts Club; time in which I could go to every single exhibition in London, even on a school day….. in fact, particularly on a school day.
No more weekend crowds for me. I would walk further than just to my local park. I would have time for hobbies!
I did not actually have any hobbies, but I was sure, if I had the time, that I would find one. I had a vague idea that knitting was now the rage - but somehow I could not really imagine myself doing that. Our non-smoking home is already crammed with knobbly-looking ‘ashtrays’ gifted to us by our various children who have been on pottery courses – so that was out too.
I flirted with the idea of taking up something really exotic and edgy. I thought of my neighbour, a tiny, elfin-like young woman who can regularly be seen, welding gun in hand, in a halo of fiery sparks,
Happily, a saner frame of mind soon prevailed. Perhaps I would simply lie on a velvet chaise longue all day and eat violet creams.
For the first few weeks, everything went wonderfully. But, as the second, and then third month drew on, a vague feeling of restlessness began to creep over me. A tiny voice whispered in my ear: might this be what boredom feels like?
It was not all that restful either. A writer’s life is logistically simple: one gets up in the morning, goes to the library or a desk, and sits there till it’s time to go home again. Having fun takes enormous amounts of planning. Since no two days are ever the same, it involves diaries and dates. Tickets have to be booked, reservations made and schedules consulted.
What was I going to think about
A tiny voice whispered in my ear: might this be what boredom feels like?
all day in the bits in between? A book is not a nine-to-five undertaking. Whatever the subject matter, its strange shadows and slipstreams are with you all the time, sometimes even in your dreams. Even when writing fiction, my characters, like unruly children, are continually grumbling and jostling for attention (“Pick me!”): annoying sometimes, but never boring. Now, all there was when I woke up in the morning was an eerie silence.
Aristotle said we educate ourselves to make noble use of our leisure. How did this apply to me, and why was I making such a hash of it?
My education was an unusual one. My diplomat father’s many postings abroad meant that, until the age of ten, when I was sent home to boarding school, I was barely educated at all. In Spain, I attended a Catholic convent where – so the family joke went – despite being the only C of E pupil, I regularly came top in catechism and bottom in English.
When I was eight, we went to live in Singapore, where, for two blissful years, the school day ended at lunchtime. It did not occur to anyone to set homework.
Instead, my brothers and I spent the rest of the day swimming, climbing trees, making camps in our garden, and reading books – at least three a week from the local Englishspeaking library.
I realise now that it was the luxurious amount of time I had then that first prompted me to write. It was because of this that I became the inveterate scribbler that I am: stories, plays, circus performances, songs, anything to fill those gloriously long, hot, tropical afternoons.
There’s a moral in this story somewhere. Violet creams and the chaises longues are all very well, but give me a library card any day.
Katie Hickman is author of Brave Hearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West
What shall I write next? Ennui by Walter Sickert (1914)
Fiction
BUTCHER
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Fourth Estate, 352pp, £16.99
Oates’s 64th novel is ‘ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, ‘RedHanded Butcher’ to others,’ wrote Sophie Mackintosh in the Literary Review. ‘At the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, Weir devotes himself to the study and experimental treatment of female maladies that nobody else wants to address. Weir is modelled on actual doctors; his operations based on actual procedures inflicted on women.’
Butcher takes the form of a biography compiled by Weir’s son, in 1898, ten years after his father’s death. For the New York Times’s Daphne Merkin it ‘has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude - sometimes to excess - of much of Oates’s earlier work’ and ‘disgust, particularly regarding the body, permeates the novel.’ ‘The constant stream of revulsion can be hard to stomach, but you do acclimatise, in part because the writing faithfully mimics 19th-century texts.
‘Littered with italics and euphemisms, it gives a sense of both authenticity and distance.’
Fiona Sturges, in Inews, noting Oates’s long interest in ‘themes of class, power and the dark side of human nature’, put Butcher ‘up there among the most brutal. There are moments where the cruelty meted out feels repetitive and remorseless, though Oates would no doubt insist that’s how sadists operate.’
‘Nonetheless,’ Sturges concluded, ‘as a study of a monstrous misogynist operating in the belief that he is a pioneer acting for the greater good and helping to ease female suffering, Butcher is vividly and compellingly drawn, its prose scalpel-sharp. Oates remains a master storyteller with her finger on the pulse of humanity, forever alive to its moral failures and flaws.’
LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE
TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER
Wildfire, 464pp, £20
‘‘The Fleishman is in Trouble’ author returns with an ambitious, funny family drama inspired by a real 1980s abduction,’ wrote Susie Goldsborough in the Times, calling it ‘a bleakly comic vision of Holocaust trauma — how it’s repressed and inherited, how it can warp your perception of reality.’
‘No frills, no padding, a reporter’s attention to detail and a hint of salaciousness. Plus, as the story unfolds, an almost choral narrative voice that seems to rise up of its own accord from avocado-coloured kitchens, dishing the dirt on a family who are “not just rich but extraordinarily, absurdly, kidnappably rich”.’
The TLS’s Mia Levitin considered this second novel, ‘a family saga with Franzen-esque aspirations more ambitious than Fleishman,’ but ‘while we desperately need more comedy in fiction, the humour in Long Island Compromise doesn’t always land.’ She ‘couldn’t shake the feeling that this novel was written primarily with an eye to television.’
‘Brodesser-Akner,’ observed Goldsborough, ‘has created a majestically monstrous, mega-rich and messed-up family and put them through 400 pages of misery without ever quite giving us permission to care. There’s something exhausting about the tone of continuous cataclysm, the relentless, epic disasters that befall each character, one after another… characters are largely disconnected, their inner development arrested.’
The Guardian’s Lucy Atkins agreed, praising ‘a brilliantly orchestrated opening, of calmly narrated shock, chaos and panic’, but concluding, ‘supremely rich
Americans are ghastly and will never change. But despite the engaging style, the brilliant eye for detail, the wit and scope, it is quite hard to be with these people for more than 400 pages.’
TABLE FOR TWO AMOR TOWLES
Hutchinson Heinemann, 464pp, £18.99
Why the title? Because intimate relationships are the subject-matter. It’s also a book of two halves: six short stories from 20th century Manhattan, plus a novella set in 1930s LA. In all of them, the Times’s Melissa Katsoulis discovered Towles’s ‘genius for immersive scene-setting’.
In Part One, his characters, including a roller-skater, con man, Russian immigrant and stranded Christmas traveller, reap wisdom if nothing else. But Towles really comes into his own in Part Two, the noir-ish ‘Eve in Hollywood’. A dame from one of his previous best-sellers has now teamed up with Charlie, a retired, widowed cop, to bust a lowlife who’s trying to blackmail the actress Olivia de Havilland with nude photos. In the process, Eve works out her revenge on the men in her life who’ve done her down; and Charlie regains a foothold in his fraying world.
In i newspaper, Susie Mesure commended how Towles tackled ‘modern concerns and frustrations in entertaining fashion’. The Observer’s Alexander Larman opined that aficionados and new readers alike would be ‘thrilled’ by this collection. And Katsoulis was in raptures: ‘There is a great deal to relish.. Every story — every page, really — is a delight and an education. The collection is varied, but hangs so well together. If you could take only one book on holiday this summer, you couldn’t ask for a better literary capsule wardrobe.’
19th Century gyno-psychiatry: brutal
De Havilland: blackmailed in the novel
THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY
ELIF SHAFAK
Viking, 496pp, £18.99
Shafak’s 13th novel follows three characters living on riverbanks: Arthur, born in Thames-side poverty in 1840; Zaleekhah, a modern-day hydrologist; and in 2014, Narin, a Yazidi brought up by the Tigris. For the Telegraph’s Katherine Waters, they are all ‘connected principally by water. Unifying Shafak’s three stories is the journey of a single drop, which makes its way through aquifers, atmospheric layers, different vessels and bodies.’ It first falls on ancient Nineveh, and evaporates 2,600 years (and 500 pages) later. In between, wrote the Times’s Claire Allfree are ‘the fall of civilisations, the massacre of peoples and the intertwined stories of three people.’ While ‘her historical research is impressive, its grand themes - colonial theft, environmental destruction, historic trauma - are rarely revealingly interrogated. Her characters are invariably stock.’
For the FT’s Boyd Tonkin, ‘Shafak’s fiction merges history and topicality, into a single stream. It blends saga and romance with a strain of lyrical idealism that celebrates the mingling and doubling of cultures and identities.’ But ‘floating down these intersecting channels, the reader can sometimes feel adrift. The novel’s restless meandering between one story strand and another arouse but also frustrate our curiosity.’
‘The three narrative strands in this novel feel shoehorned in and cobbled together’, observed the Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly.
For Allfree the ‘swollen soggy book bloated with grand themes and faux wisdom’, is ‘meant to impress — but
fails. Still, its themes feel important. Expect it to find a righteous place on a literary shortlist or two.’
However, the Spectator’s Michael Ardittii found that ‘this waterborne tale, crossing cultures, centuries and continents, is a magnificent achievement.’
PARADE
RACHEL CUSK
Faber, 208pp, £16.99
Rachel Cusk is, according to the Sunday Times’s Johanna ThomasCorr one of our truly world-class misérables, a writer capable of upping the ambient misery of any place or subject she alights on (she moved to Paris three years ago), and ‘her move to the French capital — and the influence of writers like Albert Camus and Marguerite Duras — has simply opened up new, continental dimensions to her misery.’
The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway found Parade ‘pursues and deepens [Cusk’s] lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent.’ With her novel ‘Outline,’ Cusk had ‘pioneered a new approach to writing, a way of grafting fiction to autobiography with a fluency that made you wonder why more novels were not written this way. And the answer to that question can only be that she is a one-off, an acquired taste worth acquiring: no one else can do what she does in the way that she does it.’
The New Statesman’s Megan Nolan found Parade ‘selfconsciously literary, insular and ultimately unsatisfying.’ ‘The reader is
left wondering, too often, when the real story will begin.’ And ThomasCorr concluded that reading it is ‘like walking over shards of broken glass, a phrase that is used in the book’s final line...By the final page, I was reminded of that most loathsome of British phrases, one I’ve never had cause to utter until now: Cheer up, love, it might never happen.’
ROSARITA
ANITA DESAI
Picador, 112pp, £12.99
Anita Desai narrates her novella in five parts in the seond person, explained the Literary Review’s Stevie Davies, ‘a device that establishes a kind of intimacy between narrator and reader.’
However, the Telegraph’s George Cochrane was discomfited: ‘It makes you feel seen, scrutinised, observed; it intrudes on your readerly detachment.’
Rosarita opens in Mexico, where an unknown woman accosts ‘You’ (Bonita, an Indian student learning Spanish). ‘The Stranger’, explained the Guardian’s Yagnishsing Dawoor, ‘claims to know Bonita’s dead mother, whom she calls “Rosarita”, and to have befriended her when she came to Mexico to study art. Having no memory of her mother painting or travelling to Mexico, ‘Bonita follows the woman on an emotional tour of Mexico’. Dawoor thought the novel ‘both a testament to Desai’s enduring genius as a writer and a wholly remarkable vindication of literature’s power to illuminate the conundrums of human experience’.
‘Is the stranger merely “the Trickster”? asked Sheena Joughin in the TLS. ‘Has Bonita been “dragged into a fantasy” of her mother’s life? And, if so, whose fantasy is it, and why has it come into being?.... Who was Rosarita? And what future peace can there be for Bonita, who can never really know?’
‘Rosarita is not the Desai of ‘Clear Light of Day’ (1980) or ‘Fasting, Feasting’ (1999), her great, studiously realist and Booker-shortlisted novels of Indian family life,’ George Cochrane concluded.
‘This is a much more ludic tale, as taut and weird and entrancing as a story by Jorge Luis Borges. If it’s to be her swansong – Desai is 87 – then it’s a magnificent way to go out.’
Left: the commercial docks at Rotherhithe on the Thames, 1827 – setting for Shafak’s ‘waterborne tale’
Fiction
THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY
CLAIRE MESSUD
Fleet, 448pp, £20
Shakespeare’s Jaques, from ‘As You Like It’, declared that the ‘strange eventful history’ of human life has seven ages.
Claire Messud gives this as a title to her new novel which follows the Franco-Algerian Cassar family from 1940 to 2010 as four generations journey across continents, briefly settling, then moving on. Their diaspora is tracked and the novel is divided into Shakespeare’s seven parts, concluding with the family members growing old.
bad people, it’s my job to tell you what this horse thief is like.”
ORDINARY TIME
CATHY RENTZENBRINK
Phoenix, 368pp, £20
The novel is both a family saga and an incidental account of French Algeria after the Second World War.
For the Guardian’s Lucy HughesHallett, Messud’s novel has ‘exceptional vitality’. All the family members are depicted as ‘being credibly and engagingly irritating or generous or overbearing or vulnerable....This is a big novel spanning continents and generations, but it also has the essential small virtues of precision and imaginative sympathy.’
This is a big novel ... of exceptional vitality... spanning continents and generations
The New Yorker’s Jennifer Wilson enjoyed this ‘odyssey tale’. Messud lets ‘the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction, as if in defiance of this tendency. The novel brims with details.’
But she sensed that, ‘some readers will bristle at This Strange Eventful History and the pains it takes to account for the lost sense of belonging felt by the ‘pieds noirs’, who treated Algerians like strangers in their own land.’ The reader could accuse Messud of treating her family’s history ‘like a family heirloom, which is to say, over-delicately.’
Messud likes quoting Chekhov, in defining the writer’s role, “It’s not my job to tell you that horse thieves are
Reluctant vicar’s wife, Ann and husband, Tim move with young son, Sam, to a depressing Cornish vicarage. Ann tries her best, but Tim’s only interest is God.
After an urgent call from Stephen, her brother, disillusioned Ann travels to London, where new possibilities open up, including handsome ex-Marine Jamie, ‘part Daniel Craig (muscles everywhere) and part Alan Titchmarsh (unaccountably good at pruning flowers)’ wrote Nick Duerden for inews, ‘but this novel is not a fantasy.’
Rentzenbrink’s second novel, a companion to her ‘Everyone Is Still Alive ‘(2021), in which Stephen also appears, is ‘inspired by childhood memories of her vicar uncle and also ‘Anna Karenina’’, found Sarah Meyrick of the Church Times. ‘Ann’s faith is definitely of the flickering variety, unlike her husband’s, and this is part of what drives the narrative. Tim tends towards joylessness,’
Duerden added: ‘for her book club evenings, Ann recommends Karenina, in which, she points out, “adulterous women tend to end up dead by their own hand”. Not that Ann herself is considering adultery –or suicide, for that matter – but she does crave something: incident, excitement, anything. Rentzenbrink conjures up the humdrum and the everyday not only to show how stifling it can be and how Ann may wish to escape it, but also simply to convey real life as it is lived.’
Meyrick found it ‘a compassionate, thoughtful, and entertaining read,
with forgiveness and redemption at its heart.’
Duerden too judged that ‘she brings her characters into vivid, complicated reality, replete with all the warmth and confusion and sadness that reality invariably entails. But not despair, not quite.
‘Rentzenbrink is a hopeful writer, and this a hopeful book.’
WIFE
CHARLOTTE MENDELSON
Mantle, 368pp, £18.99
The Guardian’s Alex Clarke believed that the author was among the greatest ‘villain creators’ of contemporary fiction. In Mendelson’s previous novel, ‘The Exhibitionist’, she brought us the ‘loathsome and tyrannical artist Ray Hanrahan’ and in her sixth novel, Wife, she ‘provides us with a grotesque to rival Ray in the form of Penny, an expat Australian academic whose younger wife, Zoe, is attempting to escape during the course of a single day....Its portrait of the quotidian disarray of the end of shared lives is horrifying and bathetically funny: surging emotion and regret queasily suppressed as you stare forlornly at a Ponies of the World dishcloth and worry about parking permits.’
The FT’s Catherine Taylor thought the novel ‘a clever, lacerating account of coercive control, if one somewhat leavened by Mendelson’s spiky and mordant humour...There is definitely passion running through its pages in the form of shivery sex and early infatuation, rows and recriminations.’ Taylor described Wife as a ‘dark book’ and ‘finely executed novel’.
Marianne Levy in inews thought Penny was ‘perhaps [Mendelson’s] greatest — and most terrifying — creation yet’ and that this was a book ‘to be wolfed down in a single excruciating sitting.’ The Spectator’s Alex Peake-Tomkinson found the ‘claustrophobic bullying’ so well done that she found it ‘nausea-inducing’.
And Susie Goldsbrough in the Sunday Times concluded that ‘Mendelson is a beautiful craftswoman…Even if you’ve never read another of her novels (do), you can sense the years of whittling behind her, so utterly in control is she of her style.’ She concluded: ‘God, how you want Zoe to get away. Does she? Better read the book.’
Algeria: the setting for Messud’s novel
Fiction
SCAFFOLDING
LAUREN ELKIN
Chatto & Windus, 400pp, £16.99
‘Set in pre-Covid Paris, Elkin’s first novel is a brainy sex comedy narrated by Anna, a Franco-American psychoanalyst on medical leave in the wake of a miscarriage. Her lawyer husband is away from home on a job in London...’ thus the Guardian’s Anthony Cummins sets the scene.
Anna’s home is being renovated, giving the novel its title and ‘also its central metaphor for the support needed when women try to remake the domestic space into something better suited to them,’ explained Jessa Crispin in the Telegraph. Elkin, critic and memoirist, is ‘not the first contemporary novelist to try to merge the personal and the political, and capture the effects that larger feminist progress is having on how women consider what they want,’ she continued. But she didn’t think that Elkin, an American expat who lived in Paris for years, could write about a French character convincingly.
On the other hand, the TLS’s Lucasta Miller thought Anna’s voice, rendered as diaristic reportage, was immersive. ‘The conversations she reports feel authentic, with mundanities jostling up against profundities, and we wonder whether we are reading the text of the journal her therapist encourages her to keep.’
The Observer’s Sarah Moss believed Scaffolding was a novel of ideas. ‘Not much happens and plot development is mostly psychological, interior in both spatial and intellectual ways. The prose is as well-crafted as Elkin’s nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed.
‘She writes beautifully about ennui, literal and metaphorical disorientation, and the love of place. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.’
THE HEART IN WINTER
KEVIN BARRY
Canongate, 224pp, £16.99
‘Barry is back to his thrilling best,’ enthused James Walton in the Times with this
‘violent, extravagant adventure, an Irish Wild Western’ set in 1890s Butte, Montana. Tom Rourke, local poet and opium addict, makes a living writing letters for miners hoping to convince women to journey west to live with a man they’ve never met. ‘His distinctly strange mix of styles is back at the service of the storytelling,’ which is ‘properly exciting, complete with cliff-hanging chapter endings.
‘It also combines unsparing, often violent realism with the extravagantly hallucinatory - the boundary between them not always clear.’
No one writes prose like Barry, a high-wire act
The Telegraph’s Jeremy Wikeley described ’characters driven by a sense of destiny and not a little fantasy. The men are loners, nursing breakdowns, driven towards women. Everyone, and everything, is charismatic. No one writes prose like Barry, a high-wire act, an exercise in sheer nerve. Rhythms build across paragraphs like a drunk’s talk; every choice is extravagant.’ The Observer’s John Self also enjoyed a ‘book where everything springs alive.’
Sandra Newman in the Guardian praised ‘a dazzling tale of lovers on the run, a love story that never seems false or cheap, an adventure where violence is never gloating or desensitised. A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a Western but also the most Irish of novels; tragedy written as farce, inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.’
‘Barry’s books are known for their stylistic brilliance,’ concluded
Newman, ‘terse and acrobatic, this novel effortlessly walks the line between goofy and Gothic. I doubt that anyone will publish a novel this year that is at once so beautiful, so lovable and so much fun.’
A GOOD DELIVERANCE
TOBY CLEMENTS
Faber, 384pp, £18.99
This is the imagined life of Sir Thomas Malory, from his childhood in rural Warwickshire to his final days in prison. ‘The life Clements has divined for Malory,’ wrote the TLS’s Pablo Scheffer ‘is brilliantly entertaining, placing him on the sidelines of some of the fifteenth century’s great events.’
The Spectator’s Christopher Shrimpton explained, ‘The story begins in 1468 with the elderly man’s arrest and imprisonment in Newgate Prison. No charges are forthcoming. Fearing the worst, Malory buttonholes the jailor’s son and sits him down to hear “the true tale of the deeds of arms and gentle acts of valour of Sir Thomas Malory”.
‘The boy raises his eyebrows. There are stories of brave knights, beautiful maidens and just kings; of battles at sea and sieges of fortresses...’ Shrimpton thought it a ‘vivid and amusing bringing to life of an elusive historical figure’.
‘So was Malory a literary hero, a villain, or both?’ asked Pam Norfolk in the Lancashire Post. ‘Clements, a once “warlike child” who was long ago inspired both by reading ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ and by the mysterious reputation of the man who wrote it, set his sights on a novel that would recreate Malory’s extraordinary world and tell his story using what we know of his life, his groundbreaking literary work, and the myths that have grown up around him.’
The result is a suitably ‘thrill-packed and flamboyant adventure’, which offered a ‘thoroughly entertaining insight into an extraordinary man who wrote with flair, fought with valour, and might well have spent as much time incarcerated among the filthy rushes of Newgate as wading through the mud and gore of the battlefield.’
James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, Destry Rides Again (1939)
Fiction
THE SECOND COMING GARTH RISK HALLBERG
Granta Books, 608pp, £20
The protagonist of Risk Hallberg’s second novel is ‘a new iteration of a character who has become as familiar to the fictional New York of the early twenty-first century as the yuppie was to that of the late twentieth’, said Tom Seymour Evans in the TLS. He’s a troubled hipster heading into middle age, a ‘postlapsarian [...] man boy’.
The crisis amid which we meet Ethan is his expulsion from the paradise of New York to a Californian ‘halfway-halfway-house’ as he flees family crisis and addiction. He returns to the city after his 13-yearold daughter, drunk, has narrowly avoided being hit by a subway train.
The story explores their shared, entangled difficulties: ‘whatever else is happening up in the busy treble of the narrative, beneath it all, at the lower threshold of audibility, father is always speaking to daughter, or daughter to father’. He warned that ‘many things about this novel are wrong and should not work’, but was won over by how the words of its prose ‘burn wondrously, banishing irritation at the book’s faults and casting a light that makes even our
The prose burns wondrously, banishing irritation at the book’s faults
man-boy seem fresh and engaging’.
But the New York Times’s Dwight Garner thought this follow-up to the feted ‘City on Fire’ ‘ambitious but uneven and exhausting... Hallberg is an intelligent writer, but he’s a wild
and frequently sloppy one. His narratives don’t click into gear; his curveball only sometimes makes it over the plate.’ The scope is reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen but the style more like a less ‘crisp’ Richard Ford: ‘There is little sense of momentum; the pages never turn themselves. It is so intensely written it gave me a headache. I was glad when it was over.’
RABBITS
HUGO RIFKIND
Polygon, 320pp, £14.99
Tommo, the protagonist of Rifkind’s second novel, moves in the early 1990s from a state day school to an elite Scottish boarding school where the clothes and customs are bizarre, bullying is rife and Tommo’s less aristocratic origins require him to negotiate a whole new field of social and class anxieties.
The Spectator’s Genevieve Gaunt found it ‘reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ and saw Tommo as having‘the wry humour of Holden Caulfield’: ‘The novel captures the awkwardness of boyhood, of fierce friendship, the danger of neglect and navigating girls who treat Tommo like “mould” [...] Rifkind nails the blood-chilling brutality of the upper classes.’ She concluded: ‘Shotguns, drugs, kilts, testosterone and a lonely-boy hero caught up in a murder mystery is a dangerous combination. It is not obvious what is autobiography and what is fiction here, but Rifkind has clearly drawn a world he knows extremely well.’
In the Guardian, Alexander Larman wasn’t alone in comparing Rabbits to ‘Saltburn’, saying,‘Rifkind keeps the outrageous laughs and twists coming in equal measure.’
Bernard Hughes of the artsdesk website also enjoyed it, detecting, as others did, a strong autobiographical strand – Rifkind went to the Scottish boarding school Loreto and, like Tommo, has a famous father – but adding that ‘what could have become a wearying parade of accounts of debauched nights in the Highlands’ was redeemed by its exploration of class dynamics and by a ‘comic tone, combining Adrian Mole, ‘Withnail and I’ and Iain Banks by way of Kingsley Amis, which is engaging, and has a good hit-rate of gags, buffered by a nice line in self-deprecation.’
TIANANMEN SQUARE
LAI WEN Swift, 528pp,
£20
All we know about the author is that she was part of the student protests leading to the Beijing massacre; that she emigrated shortly after; and that she writes under a pseudonym because she still has family in China and fears reprisals. Which only adds to the poignancy of her debut, a semi-autobiographical novel which took her more than 30 years to percolate before pouring out.
Her build-up to those 1989 events comes to the boil slowly, starting with the childhood of the narrator, also called Lai, whose early years are indelibly marked when she and a boy called Gen have a run-in with the law for curfew-busting. Later gaining a scholarship to university, Lai is being very gradually drawn into the pro-democracy movement when another curfew is declared.
By the time the crowds are mustering in the square, she is part of an agitprop theatre group whose self-regarding leader seems only in it for the thrills. And then the tanks roll in, crushing bodies and dreams in a cinematic collage of impressions…
In the Times, Robert Collins noted similarities with the literary superstar Elena Ferrante, discerning ‘the same patience, precision and calm intelligence... as she stitches together her tapestry of female relationships, falling in love and coming into political awareness.’
He called the narrator ‘a fabulous analogue of Ferrante’s narrator, Lenù’. But the critics were unanimously laudatory. The FT’s Lucy Popescu called the book both ‘a compelling coming-of-age tale [and] a powerful act of remembrance’.
And in the Spectator, Leyla Sanai declared: ‘This is an utterly gripping book, and a must for prize shortlists.’
A New York hipster, as seen in The Second Coming
Tiananmen Square protests, 1989
Fiction
THE THRONE
FRANCO BERNINI (TRANS.
OONAGH STRANSKY)
Europa Editions, 416pp, £23.58
Niccolo Machiavelli is sent as an envoy by the Florentine Republic to the court of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI. ‘Hired by Borgia to write the history of his achievements, Machiavelli learns how to write powerfully and incisively about power and how it’s wielded,’ explained Marisa Moss in the New York Journal of Books. ‘The discussions between the two men are the most riveting parts of the book... Bernini presents a multifaceted image of Machiavelli. We see him struggling, we see how writing works for him, shapes his thinking... Well-researched with wonderfully vivid details, Bernini presents Machiavelli in all the complications of a life spent navigating political waters, learning to say the right thing or nothing at all, and more importantly, learning how to write about it all.’
Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Review, said it follows the model of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels or Antonio Scurati’s Mussolini novels which ‘rhetorically rehabilitate history’s storied villains and dress out more intimate versions of their stories in a hurtling present-tense narration.
The reading premise of The Throne is identical to those earlier works, even though the organizing conceit is entirely different, since Machiavelli wasn’t in any sense a villain, that role being reserved here for Cesare Borgia.’
However, Donoghue pronounced
the book a failure. ‘Whereas other historical novelists have against all odds made their monstrous main characters compelling, Bernini manages something even more impressive although less wanted: he makes a Florentine bland.
‘The Throne is billed as the first book of a projected trilogy, and that’s mind-boggling... How on Earth that kind of material can carry 800 more pages when Bernini couldn’t make Cesare Borgia interesting remains to be seen.’
MARY AND THE RABBIT DREAM
NOÉMI KISS-DEÁKI
Coach House Books, 224pp, £10.99
Mary Toft, from Godalming in Surrey, became the subject of great controversy in 1726 when she tricked doctors,including the Surgeon of the Royal Houshold, into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.
She later confessed to the hoax and was imprisoned as a fraud. However, the resultant public mockery of the medical profession’s gullibility led eventually to Toff’s release without charge.
‘Set entirely in the 18th century, documenting the entire deception from start to finish,’ wrote Lucy Scholes in the Telegraph, ‘Kiss-Deáki throws us headlong into the era, but as the narrator of the tale, she keeps one foot firmly on 21st-century ground, which allows her to drift in and out of a tone of hindsight-filled omniscience. Put bluntly, she can have her cake and eat it, using occasional modern idioms without the taint of anachronism.’ Scholes concluded the book to be a ‘delight: cunning, curious, cunicular.’
‘One of Kiss-Deáki’s aims was to lend Mary a voice,’ wrote Melissa Harrison in the Guardian, ‘and she does successfully rehumanise her, making her an individual rather than a case study and, more than that, a suffering body whom we come deeply to pity.’ She thought ‘the hoax, its reasons and its ramifications make for an absolutely fascinating story, but even granted the freedom of fiction Mary remains a cipher: all but silent to the last.’
The TLS’s Norma Clarke reckoned that the novel caught ‘the absurdity of the case and the systemic cruelty of “the state of things” in 18th century England’. She agreed that Mary had been given a voice but ‘the subversive wit she turns on the men is what makes this novel sing’.
And the Spectator’s Francesca Peacock thought the tale invigorated with sympathy and humanity.
INTERPRETATIONS OF LOVE
JANE CAMPBELL
Riverrun, 240pp, £16.99
Campbell’s first story collection, ‘Cat Brushing’, published when she was 80, saw the New York Times compare her to Edna O’Brien or Muriel Spark.
For the Daily Mail’s Sara Lawrence she has now, at 82, delivered a debut novel ‘so beautiful, wise and moving that it can’t fail to become another hit.’
From wartime Liverpool to late 20th century Oxford, it explores the impact of betrayal on relationships in the years that follow. Malcolm has a 50-year-old secret: a letter his sister Sophy gave him before she died.
He never delivered his promise to give it to the young doctor she met during the Blitz. Now, after years of uncertainty, he decides to shares the secret with her daughter Agnes.
Praising a ‘haunting debut’, The Lady’s Lyndsy Spence was ‘reminded of McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ in which a single event alters the lives of everyone involved and only one person has the power to fix it.
‘Human relationships are at the heart of the story, and the author’s prose deftly conveys passion, melancholy and the irresponsible actions that we often call fate.’
‘Written from three different viewpoints, Campbell expands her thoughts about psychoanalysis, drawing on Freud and Jung,’ wrote Telegraph’s Susie Mesure. The Martin Chilton found it had ‘moving things to say about grief’, while Sara Lawrence found this ‘stunning book, profound and full of original takes on old ideas, especially brilliant on confused motives, the ties that bind and love of all kinds - what it means and how it feels. ‘I adored it.’
Machiavelli by Santi de Tito
A Writer’s Life is Not a Happy One
ROGER LEWIS bemoans the realities of writing for a living
The other day, I wrote an article about the Krays, which was so well received in the gangster community, word reached me that, should I have enemies who might usefully be ‘taken care of,’ then I was just to say the word.
This is tempting, though, as my list of enemies is laughably long, my new pals will have their work cut out, putting the likes of a pompous nonagenarian (who took the trouble of getting his agent to instruct my publishers to have his name removed from the acknowledgments section of one of my books), a crippled Oxbridge don (for a nastily stupid review) and a female freelancer (for her condescension) upside down in a rubbish-skip outside a Greek restaurant. I should also like to see everyone past and present who has been involved with the Royal Society of Literature chucked summarily into a cement mixer.
For it has never ceased to amaze me just how horrible people in the literary profession tend to be –childish, grasping, disloyal, on the make. I am not alone here. Frances Partridge, a good judge of character, said of Jack Lambert, a literary editor, that he was ‘evidently seething with violent hatred and frustration, and seemed to me a thoroughly nasty man.’
Indeed, originality and excellence are there to be punished, and I personally am often derided as not possessing ‘a safe pair of hands,’ or told, jeeringly, I am ‘a loose cannon’.
Is this why I was paid more for my Peter Sellers biography in the eighties, as an unknown, than for my Burton and Taylor book, commissioned 20 years later?
If advances generally have shrunk, even modest up-front payments aren’t cleared, once
out? My latest book received vast coverage, rapturous (on the whole) notices, plenty of ballyhoo. I’ve given heaps of (unremunerated) interviews, contributed to podcasts, and did an ‘event’ at Hay with Stephen Fry. Yet none of this has translated into sales. In the entirety of the North American continent, there have been 4,277 sales – one copy per 78,000 people.
Why do authors keep going? It is sheer masochism. (Perhaps we like being lonely.) Interest in me being slight, no university has offered me a sinecure. I can’t make a living wage (thankfully my wife has a proper job), and move to smaller and smaller houses in less and less salubrious spots.
Roger Lewis: ‘increasingly bitter and unhinged’
In my early university days, when I was newly arrived from Wales, and still young and easy under those fabled apple boughs, I think I’d assumed anyone operating in the humanities would be humane, enlightened, thoroughly sympathetic. It took about five minutes in the company of established novelists, reviewers, biographers, and the rest, to realise here was selfishness and pushiness, envy and wariness, aplenty.
I have followed the same trajectory myself, growing increasingly bitter and unhinged. Insecurity and neurosis are at the root of it.
What other profession or trade rewards a person less as they get better at it, as wisdom is acquired?
It has never ceased to amaze me just how horrible people in the literary profession tend to be
everyone takes their cut. Royalties are niggardly. Book reviewing, which used to pay my basic bills, is a mug’s game. With hundreds of button-cute graduates willing to produce pieces for nothing, why should newspapers commission and pay operators like me properly? So they don’t.
How the hell is it meant to happen, breaking through, breaking
Where once, as the coming man, I had a Grade Two-listed Georgian place in Herefordshire, I now live off an overdraft in the Hastings slum district.
After 42 years of doing my own work in my own way, I have received zero recognition (I am disapproved of by committees) – and the big joke is, I’m not qualified to do anything else. I can’t change tack, go into computer science, podiatry, or invent antibiotics. Where my contemporaries who went into law or dentistry or business are now retiring on fat pensions, I at least can say I never once needed to set foot in an office. (Nor on a golf course.) I never had to worry about bosses or colleagues.
But nor in my twilight years will I be going on six river cruises a year.
‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life,’ said Wittgenstein on his deathbed. There’ll be no such uplifting sentiment from me; only a lot of cursing, and I’ve nearly croaked twice. Pancreatitis in 2011 and a myocardial infraction 18 months ago. Insomnia and depression are my frequent afflictions. My solace is the suspicion that only mediocrities live long and contented lives.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
Current Affairs
THE DRUMMOND AFFAIR MURDER AND MYSTERY IN PROVENCE
STEPHANIE MATTHEWS
AND DANIEL SMITH
icon, 288pp, £18.99
Jack Drummond, born in 1891, was a renowned biochemist, a scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food during the war and knighted in 1944.
He produced a plan for food distribution based on ‘sound nutritional principles’ despite rationing. Post-war, he became director of research at Boots.
‘But as [the authors] show in The Drummond Affair,’ wrote Alex Wade in the TLS, ‘if Drummond was a pillar of the establishment, there was
Was this why he, his wife and daughter were killed by the roadside on a sultry Provençal evening?
also something of the éminence grise about him. Was it possible that he was in fact a spy? And was this why he, his wife and daughter were killed by the roadside on a sultry Provençal evening on August 4, 1952?’
The Drummonds had stopped their car near a farmhouse, home of the Dominicis, a family of semiliterate Franco-Italian peasant farmers. The patriarch Gaston’s son claimed to have found the three bodies the following morning.
‘Drawing on an extensive trawl of contemporaneous media coverage, including an account of how, within a week of the murders, a singed diary of
Drummond’s was found on a municipal dump on the outskirts of Nottingham, Matthews and Smith give the lie to the assumed guilt of the usual suspect: Gaston Dominici.... The authors refrain from making judgements,’ Wade continued, ‘but it seems more than likely that [Drummond] co-opted his family in a tour of the Durance Valley that had ulterior motives, connected with his double life as a “gentleman spy” for the British government.’
‘As for Drummond’s killer,’ Wade concluded, ‘The Drummond Affair posits a new theory, but again, in keeping with their fairmindedness, the authors eschew sensationalism in favour of measured conjecture. Their book is an admirable addition to the plentiful media on l’affaire Dominici, as it is known in France.’
THE AFTERLIFE OF DATA
WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR DATA WHEN YOU DIE AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
CARL ÖHMAN
Univ of Chicago Press, 200pp, £17.98
Here’s a thought. What will become of our digital remains? Simon Ings reviewing The Afterlife of Data in the Spectator suggested:
‘There’s something compelling, and undeniably moving, in one teenager’s account of how, ten years after losing his father, he found they could still play together; at least, he could compete against his dad’s last outing on an old XBox racing game.’
But while such a thought might be squeamish for some and comforting for others, ‘Öhman is not spinning ghost stories here. He’s not interested in digital afterlives. He’s interested in remains, and in emerging technologies that, from the digital data we inadvertently leave behind, fashion our artificially intelligent simulacra.’
Ings softened the fear factor that we might feel when confronted with these truths: ‘This rapidly approaching future, Öhman argues, seems uncanny only because death itself is uncanny. Why should a chatty AI simulacrum prove any more transgressive than, say, a photograph of your lost love, given pride of place on the mantelpiece? We got used to the one; in time, we may well get used to the other.’
Scott McLemee, writing on the website InsideHigherEd, was struck by Öhman’s exploration of on-going relationships between the dead and living. He mused on how performance artist Laurie Anderson pursues a continuing collaboration with her late husband Lou Reed, via a chatbot that uses machine learning to extract a kind of doppelgänger from a large pool of the songwriter’s lyrics, interviews and writings. The enormity of the problem is going to get bigger and more inconvenient; both reviewers were struck by Öhman’s observation that, ‘by 2070, Facebook’s dead will outnumber its living.’
MAGIC PILL
THE EXTRAORDINARY BENEFITS
AND DISTURBING RISKS OF THE NEW WEIGHT LOSS DRUGS
JOHANN HARI
Bloomsbury, 336pp, £20
Reviewers tend to take ex-journalist Hari with a pinch of salt. Some years ago, he was caught plagiarising and inventing material. His research can still be sloppy, and his sources suspect. Nonetheless, this investigation into slimming wonderdrugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy was timely and thought-provoking enough for the New Stateman’s Sophie McBain to praise its
‘important insights’. And in the Literary Review, James Le Fanu advised readers to ‘look out for Magic Pill on the bestseller list’. Hari injected himself with Ozempic – describing the journey ‘with considerable verve’, wrote Le Fanu – and losing 10kg boosted his self-confidence no end. And there are
Drummond Family in 1944 - 8 years later they were found murdered in France
Fat boy: Bacchus by Rubens, 1638
plusses beside assuaging one’s vanity (and maintaining a healthy bodyweight), including ‘reduced risk of strokes and heart disease, lower blood pressure and lower risk of diabetes and various cancers. There is even some evidence the drug serves as a prophylactic against dementia.’
However, what’s good for the body may not be for the brain. The jury is out on how these drugs work. Hari reports he lost interest in food, but was that because Ozempic suppressed his appetite, or did it dull all his pleasure-reward responses?
In the first case, he risks ‘addiction transfer’; in the second, succumbing to anhedonia – the inability to enjoy anything – and he’s not sure he hasn’t. Then there’s the whole question of no-pain-all-gain.
And what about the pernicious food industry? How can a ‘cure’ that doesn’t address the psychology driving comfort-eating help to change policy and attitudes at the profound level needed? If Hari’s book can contribute to that, wrote Max Alexander in the TLS, ‘good luck and godspeed’.
TABOO
HOW MAKING RACE SACRED PRODUCED A CULTURAL REVOLUTION
ERIC
KAUFMANN Forum, 400pp, £25
The champion of ‘somewhere people’, David Goodhart, was asked by the Literary Review to appraise Taboo, in which Kaufmann traces the roots of the current political-correctnessgone-psychotic and suggests ways of weeding it out. Goodhart duly proclaimed his fellow-travelling author – ‘cancelled’ last year by Birkbeck University – to be ‘the foremost theorist of what has been called the “great awokening”’.
His book, he continued, was ‘full of arresting facts and observations…. informed by a humane understanding that we are all the descendants of both slaves and conquerors’. And in the Times, even the feminist Kathleen Stock called it ‘stimulating and provocative’, with ‘a lot for openminded parts of the left to absorb’.
Kaufmann’s thesis dismisses the notion of a “cultural Marxist” conspiracy, instead laying the blame on a fuzzier “cultural socialism”. All of today’s wokery, he says, has its
Current Affairs
The revolutionaries will eat themselves and right-thinking people will coalesce in defying them
wellspring in the good intentions of white folks towards the people of colour their countrymen had exploited.
Guilt was the driving force, particularly in post-imperial Britain. And in America, it was manifested in 1964’s Civil Rights Act, which took self-flagellation to new heights by enshrining in policy the notion that equality of outcome – not just of opportunity – was a desirable goal.
Mix in the language-police and intersectionality; add liberal-media coverage that portrayed reasoned concerns – about, say, immigration and trans-gender children – as reactionary last-stands; and you end up with Gays for Palestine.
But what to do? The author claims about 75 per cent of Britons deplore the new victim-culture. He believes the revolutionaries will eat themselves, and right-thinking people will coalesce in defying them.
But what he really hopes for is government to represent the quiet majority. Some hope.
AUTOCRACY, INC. THE DICTATORS WHO WANT TO RUN THE WORLD
ANNE APPLEBAUM
Allen Lane, 240pp, £20
Nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s population lives in some kind of autocracy. So, what would happen if
their rulers all ganged up together against the ‘free world’? Applebaum – who 30 years ago called out NATO’s flaccidity in the face of a resurgent and resentful Russia – believes the rotters want to; and that money (hence the title’s ‘Inc’) is their motive.
Already, they and their inner circles take a cut on every deal done in their own countries; they collaborate both in laundering and sheltering such loot; and through state-controlled companies, they sell each other the weapons and IT systems needed to keep their plundered subjects in line.
In the Literary Review, Michael Ignatieff called Applebaum ‘a formidable authority on dictatorships’ and her ‘inventory of their relationships …thorough and revealing’. But he reserved special praise for her ‘eloquent indictment’ of the Western governments that have enabled the tyrants and their cronies in their outrages. Germany, for example, was at best naïve to think that relying on Russian gas imports would somehow nurture political and economic reform in Putin’s empire. Britain’s planned relationship with Huawei – to name one of our many short-sighted expediencies – was even more venal.
Like Ignatieff, the Guardian’s John Simpson described the author as ‘clear-sighted’. He considered her book ‘a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality’ and highlighted her analysis of how despots have subverted the power of digital technology to spread ideas. (Far from being restrained by the new media, they have co-opted it to rig their own elections and disrupt ours.)
In this disturbing landscape, he wrote, we must know who to trust; and Applebaum was ‘one of those’.
Handsy: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, 2019
Miscellaneous
JOHN SOANE’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
REFLECTIONS ON AN ARCHITECT AND HIS COLLECTION
BRUCE BOUCHER
Yale Uni Press, 224pp, £35
Art historian Bruce Boucher is a former director of the Soane Museum. As the Times’s Laura Freeman put it:
‘He knows its nooks and corners, trick screens, twisting staircases, recesses and secrets.’
Freeman loved the book, pointing out that it isn’t a straightforward biography of the architect and antiquarian but ‘rather a map of Soane’s mind, a history of the acquisition and display of objects in the 18th and early 19th centuries and a fascinating gazetteer to the niche-r niches of Soane’s collection. It is elegantly and engagingly written for the general reader and richly illustrated.’
player, is that he emerges with both his sanity and his compassion intact,’ wrote the Specator’s Mike Jakeman.
professional tennis is more than a strong serve and a powerful forehand.’
RAT CITY OVERCROWDING AND URBAN DERANGEMENT IN THE RODENT UNIVERSES OF JOHN B CALHOUN
JON ADAMS AND EDMUND RAMSDEN
Melville House, 336pp, £30
John B Calhoun was an American ecologist-turned-psychologist, famed for his studies of population density and its effects on behaviour.
He built a series of ‘rodent utopias’, containing dozens or even hundreds of animals to record the rise and fall of entire rodent societies, explained Steven Poole in the Telegraph. His famous results ‘contributed to mid-century panics about global overpopulation and social decline.’
Other reviewers also praised it. Spectator reviewer Tim Newark called the book ‘a treasure house of anecdotes and analysis’ and at the Literary Review, Soane biographer Gillian Darley noted that ‘Despair is a theme that runs through the book. Following the death of his wife Eliza in 1815 and disappointed by missed professional opportunities, Soane sought out objects with mournful associations, including urns and fragments and pictures of ruins.’
The Art Newspaper’s Julius Bryant admired the book for ‘expertise that is exceptional, and went on:
‘Throughout this collection-focused structure Boucher identifies Soane’s many and successive overlapping aims, not only as a collector but also as a creative curator of changing displays....and as a founder of a new kind of private-public museum with multiple roles.’
THE RACKET ON TOUR WITH TENNIS’S GOLDEN GENERATION – AND THE OTHER 99 PER CENT
CONOR NILAND
Sandycover, 320pp, £20
‘The most surprising thing about The Racket, Niland’s bruising account of his career as a good (not great) tennis
Surviving on the lower rungs of the professional circuit ‘isn’t just about being good at tennis. It’s about being able to cope with the strange bedfellows of regular boredom and constant uncertainty. Not many succeed.’
Niland became the first Irish man to compete in a Grand Slam qualifier in years, reaching the 2011 main Wimbledon draw and the US Open.
But he was forced to retire from the sport in 2012, unable to afford to treat a hip injury. Niland is ‘unsparing in his depiction of the drudgery of tennis’ and ‘in a sentence that ought to chill the blood of the game’s administrators, Niland realises that “my day-to-day life genuinely improved when I quit tennis”.’
Calling it ‘a visceral, melancholy and often self-lacerating book,’ Andrew Lynch, in the Dublinbased Business Post, said ‘this intelligent, unvarnished, emotionally draining memoir shows why an also-ran’s perspective can be just as valuable’. However, Norma Clarke, in Literary Review found Niland ‘has very little to say of anybody that’s good. About himself he is defensive, tight-lipped. You glimpse a fragile personality... Clearly he had ability. To reach a ranking of 129 in the world is no small achievement. But what you need to flourish, or even just to survive, in the competitive world of
As the rat cities grew, the animals became more stressed and ‘as Calhoun discovered, the reason for the rats’ distress wasn’t the lack of physical space for each animal, but rather the constant unwanted social contact... Once the rat colonies had reached this threshold of overcrowding, the social fabric unravelled completely....Eventually, the entire colony died.’
...the rat cities grew, the animals became more stressed
Adams and Ramsden collaborated at the LSE on the history and influence of Calhoun’s experiments. In their introduction they write that the book was ‘not an attempt to evaluate the merit of his work, but simply to set the rat cities in their scientific and historical context.’
The Literary Review’s Will Wiles believed that the ‘great strength’ of this ‘vivid and enthralling book’ was the authors’ ‘broad view.’
‘They look not just at Calhoun but also at his social and scientific milieu, pithily examining such subjects as stress, personal space, homeostasis, evolutionary psychology and the use of rats in experiments.’ The New York Times found it ‘entertaining’ and ‘phenomenally weird’ with some ‘very sharp science writing’, while Kirkus deemed it ‘largely fascinating.’
John Soane’s ‘extraordinary collection’
Crime
MICHAEL BARBER on the delicious mystery of crime novels
How do you define a crime story?
One answer might be any novel subject to the tyranny of plot, including spy stories and thrillers –both genres examined in Martin Edwards’s magisterial survey, The Life of Crime (Collins Crime Club, 736pp, £14.99), the first of its kind since ‘Bloody Murder’ by Julian Symons. Edwards quotes Raymond Chandler, who said ‘the form .... is too various for easy classification.’ A bit like Chandler’s plots, in fact. So, let’s leave it at that.
But there’s nothing mystifying about the reception Edwards’s book received in the press. ‘Edwards,’ said the Spectator’s Andrew Taylor, ‘combines wide reading with a good memory, meticulous control over his unruly material, critical acumen and sheer bloody persistence.’
While Sarah Weinman in the New York Times found there to be ‘few others who could be persuaded to write a cradle-to-grave (so to speak) compendium of the genre.’
In a typically savvy aside, Edwards reveals that Conan Doyle was consulted over Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926.
Shortly after this Christie created her elderly sleuth Miss Marple, the subject of an exhaustive study by Mark Aldridge, Marple: Expert on Wickedness (HarperCollins, 383pp, £25). This has an appreciative foreword by crime writer Lucy Foley, whose latest book, The Midnight Feast (HarperCollins, 420pp, £18.99), is an eerie cautionary tale about entitlement and comeuppance.
Foley’s protagonist, Francesca Meadows, has inherited an idyllic
stretch of Dorset coastline that she’s converted into a luxury eco retreat.
A solipsistic control freak who’s used to getting her own way, she’s determined to ride roughshod over local protests about the enclosure of an ancient forest.
Will she come a cropper? The Guardian’s Laura Wilson applauded: ‘Foley keeps all the plates – old resentments, terrible secrets, new age woo-woo, and folk horror – spinning for a tense, atmospheric read.’
Closed societies are a gift to crime writers as I’m sure Sally Smith would attest. A retired KC, Smith has set her assured first novel, A Case of Mice and Murder (Raven, 352pp, £14.99) in that judicial holy of holies, the Inner Temple, which in 1901 was still literally a law unto itself.
So, when the Lord Chief Justice is murdered within its portals, it is not the police who investigate but Sir Gabriel Ward KC, a brilliant but buttoned up brief who is also engaged in a legal battle over the authorship of a bestselling children’s book, ‘Millie, The Temple Church Mouse’.
How ‘deftly’ Sally Smith weaves these two cases together was noted by Catherine Baksi in the Times
Describing Smith’s debut as ‘a charming mix between Agatha Christie and Rumpole of the Bailey’, Baksi, a legal journalist, acknowledged that Smith ‘opens the door’ on The Temple’s arcana, ‘a mystery to most outsiders today.’ Her praise was echoed by Natasha Cooper in the Literary Review, who said, ‘This irresistible novel is written with wit and elegance, as well as deep knowledge of the law and its practice since the Middle Ages.’
Natasha Cooper was also impressed by Charlotte Philby’s latest, The End of Summer (Borough, 368pp, £16.99), describing it as ‘the ideal summer holiday novel: ingenious, intriguing, colourful and very entertaining.’ Philby’s protagonist, Judy McVee, the illegitimate daughter of a posh MP, has this in common with Philby’s grandfather Kim: she has always lived a double life. Eventually this catches up with her, but not before we have followed her from London to Cape Cod, New York to the South of France. James Dugdale in the Sunday Times chose it as his ‘Thriller of the Month’, and said the ‘incorrigibly
criminal, possibly sociopathic’ Judy reminded him of a female version of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley.
‘Joseph Kanon’s novels of wartime crime and espionage,’ said James Owen in the Sunday Times, ‘inhabit a perfectly observed intersection between noir and Greeneland.’
His latest, Shanghai (Simon and Schuster, 292pp, £20) is set in pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai, a city noted for the variety of its sexual wares. It was also the last chance saloon for refugees of every race, colour and creed. One such is Daniel Lohr, a callow young German Jew who fetches up there after Kristallnacht.
Daniel’s destiny hinges on three people: his crooked uncle Nathan, a casino owner involved with Chinese gangsters; Leah, a beguiling fellow fugitive, and Colonel Yamada, boss of the Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo.
After Nathan is wounded in an ambush, Daniel grows up quickly, but his obsession with Leah and hatred for Yamada set the scene for a violent reckoning.
‘Here’s a novel to make the great and good quake: it posits that MI5 keeps a “shame archive” of the sensitive secrets it has accumulated about our senior politicians, business leaders, and so on.’ This is how the Telegraph’s Jake Kerridge introduces The Shame Archive (Abacus, 336pp, £20), the third story to feature Oliver Harris’s tough retired spook, Elliot Kane (spoiler alert: Kane himself contributed to the archive) ‘The spy with a conscience is not a new notion,’ said James Owen in the Times, ‘yet the skill with which Oliver Harris structures and paces The Shame Archive shows he has all the tools a thriller writer needs.’
Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple in the 1960s
Jiujiang Road, Shanghai, late 1920s
Commonplace Corner
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.
Audrey Hepburn
I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor.
Joan Rivers
Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dalí
I wonder why it is that young men are always cautioned against bad girls. Anyone can handle a bad girl. It’s the good girls men should be warned against.
David Niven
I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.
George Burns
I’m not well-read but when I read, I read well.
Kurt Cobain
One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.
Malcolm Muggeridge
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell
Hair-raising: Salvador Dalí
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
Helen Keller
Nothing recedes like progress. e e cummings
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
Emily Dickinson
chilled white wine hits the system and courses through the veins is unequalled by any other sensation I have ever experienced.
Non-alcoholic drinks
The high point of my day is that first glass of wine at precisely 5.45pm, swiftly followed by another.
The sheer bliss experienced when that
So it is with sinking heart that I see ever more supermarket drink shelves being devoted to nonalcoholic beers, wines and spirits. What’s the point? Surely the whole purpose of an alcoholic drink is the alcohol.
There are plenty of soft drinks available, without taking all, or most, of the alcohol out of our favourite tipples at the same time as removing the taste – alongside the kick that put you into a pleasurable state of slightly altered consciousness.
De-alcoholised beverages are just ultra-expensive soft
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age.
Lucille Ball
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
Orson Welles
Which form of proverb do you prefer: ‘Better late than never’ or ‘Better never than late’?
Lewis Carroll
Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
David Mamet
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Walter Scott
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C S Lewis
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf
drinks. The flavour and complexity that make an alcoholic drink what it is are missing, but one thing – the cost – is not. Nonalcohol gins can cost £25 a bottle. What’s wrong with water or lemonade if you want to stay sober?
We’re heading back to the grim Victorian temperance
SMALL DELIGHTS
Being in Cornwall and finding a purveyor of non-awardwinning pasties.
ELLIANNE MUMFORD, STEVENAGE
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
era, when all alcohol was considered wicked and drinks such as dandelion and burdock, ginger beer, root beer and sarsaparilla were invented as substitute beers, sold in temperance pubs.
Now leading drinks manufacturers, such as Heineken, Tanqueray and Guinness, are jumping on the bandwagon and producing non-alcohol versions of their traditional beverages.
Removing all the alcohol even goes against Holy Writ. Communion wine in Catholic and C of E churches is alcoholic – and when Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana, he put the alcohol back in.
I’ll drink to that.
LIZ HODGKINSON
Right royal biography
MARY KILLEN
A Voyage Around the Queen
By Craig Brown Fourth Estate £25
I was quietly dreading Craig Brown’s study of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
I had enjoyed his hilarious biography of Princess Margaret (Ma’am Darling), a prismatic portrait harvested, like this one, from a multiplicity of personal diaries, biographies, letters and newsprint covering her whole existence. But in no way did I want him to debunk my Queen for me.
Why not – if she deserved to be debunked? No. I wanted to believe there could be, as a representative of my country, an almost perfect person. In the book, Mary Whitehouse is quoted as saying she wanted to emulate the Queen in her own small way. I was keen to do the same.
We all had our reasons for revering her. For Jeanette Winterson, ‘as an adopted person, [the Queen] was the one and only stable female in my life’.
For Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, an unashamed monarchist, she represented ‘a sacred myth’. Virginia Woolf was too sophisticated to be a fan but conceded that ‘we need a monarchy to help us cope with the drudgery of being ourselves’.
Or maybe it was because, as Craig Brown suggests, ‘In Freudian terms, she is our superego. In Christian terms, she is our conscience.’
Brown has absorbed millions of words written and spoken about his subject over the course of her 96 years. He deftly weaves his fact-findings into around 655 pages of entertaining reading. While he certainly does not use the genuflective style of most royal biographers, you can envisage royals themselves turning to
this roughly chronological tome as an enjoyable aide-mémoire.
She certainly ‘served’ us as she promised on her 21st birthday to do –‘whether my life be long or short’.
Imagine the horror of being photographed every single day of your life. Even Adolf Hitler, as the author notes, was photographed only between his early forties and the age of 56. Imagine having to entertain the likes of Idi Amin and Nicolae Ceaușescu on state visits (both chapters are hilarious).
She conferred 404,500 honours during her reign, received 3.75 million items of correspondence and was patron of 5,999 charities, organisations and
military regiments. All this while being simultaneously inoffensive and enthusiastic and putting up with the immense boredom of meeting most members of the public.
‘The self-possessed became gauche in her company,’ noted Hilary Mantel at a Buckingham Palace reception for the book trade. When Kingsley Amis was to receive his knighthood, his doctor ‘laid down a firewall of immodium’, so convinced was Amis that nerves would cause him to go to the loo in his trousers.
At the theatre for a 1952 performance
Queen of the animal kingdom: she used bagpipes to disperse the corgis
of Aren’t We All? by Frederick Lonsdale, designer Cecil Beaton was frustrated to observe that half the audience paid scant attention to the production as their eyes were glued to the royal box.
As Prince Harry was later to observe, being a royal is like ‘a mixture between The Truman Show and being in a zoo’ and entails having to smile almost continuously (‘If I stop, people start saying that I look unhappy’).
And then there were the refuseniks – but she often outwitted them. Tony Benn was determined to take her head off the stamps when he was Postmaster General. But she outmanoeuvred him.
John Prescott was determined not to bow when he was presented to her, but our tiny Queen said something to him in such a whispering voice that Prescott had to lower his head to hear it. And the photographers snapped him.
The only time in her life when a large contingent of her public disapproved of her was in 1989 with the dismissal, then reappointment, of her trainer Major Dick Hern, who – already in a wheelchair – suffered a massive heart attack. Lord Carnarvon, the Queen’s racing manager, and proxy, perceived Hern, wrongly, not to be up to the job. The racing community almost turned against her.
But, as the author observes, the only chance she ever had in life to be competitive was in her ownership of
racehorses. In every other competition, she was already the winner.
The only other way she could be ‘judged’ was by dogs. ‘Being followed everywhere by ten corgis would have marked anyone else out as eccentric,’ writes Brown, but dogs were essential to the Queen. Unlike humans, they were unmotivated by snobbery and not inclined to obsequiousness – the only sentient beings to be so. The corgis, as she was to learn, were also useful because, being neutral territory, they served as conversational prompts.
And who knew that she used bagpipes to disperse them when they went into attack mode? They hated the sound.
I wanted to continue to believe that there was such a thing as a perfect person and, although this is no hagiography, phew, I still can. Or I choose to.
Half the world’s population watched her royal funeral. I imagine that – for whatever irrational reasons – they were as proud, and as mournful, as I was.
Mary Killen is author of How the Queen Can Make You Happy
Who dared won ALAN JUDD
The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama
By Ben Macintyre
Viking £25
Remember where you were when six terrorists stormed London’s Iranian Embassy in 1980, taking 26 hostages and provoking a six-day siege – which was brought to a sudden end by the SAS?
Ben Macintyre, author of this gripping and well-researched account, reckons everyone does, just as everyone remembers where they were when they heard about 9/11 or the murder of President Kennedy.
Well, I do remember hearing of those two events but curiously not the siege, despite eagerly following it as it became the world’s first protracted terrorist event played out from beginning to end on camera.
Its consequences included launching Mrs Thatcher’s reputation as the Iron Lady, giving worldwide publicity to the little-known SAS, deterring terrorists from staging such events in the UK and stimulating other governments into establishing their own special-forces units.
The terrorists were from an oppressed minority of Iranian Arabs, sponsored by Saddam Hussein. The context was over a
decade of more or less successful international terrorist events, such as the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the 1975 OPEC siege, when the Austrian government freed the terrorists.
Between 1971 and 1980, there were 48 attacks on embassies, while in 1980 the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran were being held hostage.
The UK was seen as a soft touch, partly because of Edward Heath’s 1970 release of the Palestinian aircraft hijacker, Leila Khaled, in exchange for hostages elsewhere.
But, in planning what they believed would be a 24-hour operation, the gunmen reckoned without Mrs Thatcher and Britain’s decade of Irish terrorism.
She decreed that the priority was to release the hostages, if possible without bloodshed – but if not, with it. There would be no deal; the gunmen were here to stay as prisoners or corpses. She and William Whitelaw, Home Secretary, gave operational independence to the police and military and would take personal responsibility for whatever ensued.
PC Trevor Lock was drinking coffee inside the embassy when gunmen burst in, automatic gunfire showering glass over his face and temporarily blinding him with blood. He had a revolver beneath his jacket but no time to reach for it. He did – just – have time to press the alarm button on his lapel radio before it was yanked off him.
Believing British police to be unarmed, the gunmen did not search him thoroughly and he kept his revolver hidden for the entire siege. Knowing he could not out-gun six terrorists armed with grenades and submachine-guns, he determined to keep it as a last resort.
This involved not removing his jacket despite the heat, eating almost no food and enduring four days of constipation; if they’d found the gun they’d probably have killed him.
Over the six days, he played a leading role in maintaining the morale of the hostages, and in negotiating with the kidnappers and unobtrusively manipulating their leader, with whom he formed a relationship of trust.
Almost: it culminated in their lifeand-death struggle on the floor during the chaos and violence of the SAS attack, a struggle that ended with the gunman riddled with SAS bullets. Although he has never to this day acknowledged it, Lock was one of the heroes of the siege.
Another was Roya Kaghachi, the Iranian head secretary who played a pivotal role in courageously standing up to the gunmen and persuading them
to moderate their demands while she maintained cohesion among the other women captives. She too never sought praise for what she did, nor to benefit from it.
Nor did Ron Morris, the embassy caretaker who cheerfully made tea and distributed food and cigarettes, twice unblocking the only loo and generally making himself so useful that terrorists and captives alike came to depend on him. He was back at work two days after it ended.
And that end, when it came, was dramatic. The concussing violence of stun grenades and other explosives, the unintended fire that ensued, the choking miasma of CS gas (tear gas) and the eruption into the building of masked hooded figures looking for terrorists to kill. And kill them they did, bar one – the most likeable – who disguised himself as a hostage and was imprisoned.
There are other accounts of the siege, but probably none that brings together so many telling details of participants and events, showing why people did what they did and, above all, the part played by Lady Luck whose favour, as an SAS officer said, has to be earned. Fortunately, it was.
Alan Judd is a former soldier and diplomat
Kid lit
EMILY BEARN
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
By Sam Leith Oneworld £30
Children’s fiction is a salve for troubled times – which may explain why there are so many books appearing on the subject.
Fierce Bad Rabbits by Clare Pollard; Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan; and Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell, to name a few.
Most are personal reminiscences, exploring how the author was shaped by the books they read as a child.
But The Haunted Wood is different – and readers wanting to know how Leith’s adult life was informed by his early encounters with Noddy and Biggles will be disappointed.
For this is not a memoir. It is a huge and highly entertaining work of scholarship, which charts the history of children’s literature from the oral
traditions of the ancient world to the turn of the millennium.
Leith apologises to readers who might find a favourite author left out. But the scope of reference is vast – including everyone from the 18th-century moralists Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer to postwar celebrities such as Enid Blyton.
The book’s format is chronological, starting with Aesop and arriving, 600 pages later, at Harry Potter. But what makes the information so readable is the way Leith constantly links the work of previous generations to our own.
In Aesop, for example, we find forward echoes of Julia Donaldson, whose picture book The Gruffalo tells the story of a monster amazed to see predators scattering in terror of a mouse.
‘It’s a riff, you could say, on the Aesopic fable of the fly perching on a chariot wheel and marvelling at what a lot of dust it’s kicking up.’
And in George MacDonald’s 1872 masterpiece The Princess and the Goblin, in which malign creatures burrow up from the underworld, we find the generic furniture of the fairy tale being twisted into ‘fantasy, as we now recognise it’, offering a precursor for everything from Bilbo’s adventures in The Hobbit to Roald Dahl’s witches.
Leith does not go in for modish reinterpretations. He quotes the late Judith Kerr who, when asked whether The Tiger Who Came to Tea was an allegory of Nazi Germany, replied, ‘It’s about a tiger who came to tea.’
But when he reads between the lines, it is always rewarding. In The Wind in the Willows, he wonders whether ‘a little of Grahame’s father’s alcoholism, just by osmosis, seeps somehow into the book. Toad’s behaviour looks from at least one angle very much like an account of the psychology of addiction.’
And when Mary Poppins descends on the Darlings’ home in Bloomsbury, there is more going on than mere magical cosmology: ‘Travers seems to me to dramatise the social anxiety of an interwar period in which – class barriers having been eroded in the trenches and traditional gender roles too having been disrupted – traditional structures are feared to be crumbling.’
There is plenty here for the serious historian – including a section exploring how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke shaped society’s notions of childhood, and how legislative interest in child labour in the early-19th century enforced the notion that the child was ‘more than just an adult-in-training’.
But much of the pleasure lies in Leith’s ability to flit between scholarship and gossip. A section on Enid Blyton and Alison Uttley, author of the Little Grey Rabbit books, recalls an unseemly squabble when they met at lunch in Beaconsfield.
‘Smith’s window is full of my books. You can see a few titles if you care to look,’ Blyton said gloatingly – knowing that Uttley’s work was not stocked there.
Uttley later called Blyton a ‘vulgar, curled woman’. And, in a splendidly succinct footnote on Barbauld, we learn that her husband was prone to fits of fury ‘and tried to stab her to death. She jumped out of a window to escape. In 1808 he drowned himself.’
Leith reserves his judgement on the state of children’s fiction today. Many critics have lamented the number of second-rate children’s books being written by celebrities, and there have been concerns that the industry has become too politicised, driving home its messages about feminism, diversity and the environment.
But Leith holds his punches, arguing that the 21st-century canon has yet
‘I’ve invented the short back and sides…’
A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser Harold Pinter’s cricket tour of English history
When I told my accountant recently that I was busy with optical research, I spoke nothing but the truth.
It would, of course, have been possible to phrase it somewhat differently. I could have described myself as going places – Stirling Castle comes to mind, where Mary Queen of Scots was born – and looking at them. Not so glamorous, perhaps, but frankly the essence of optical research.
Ever since reading H E Marshall’s Our Island Story as a child, I have always wanted to visit historic places. It so happened that it was the harsh winter of 1940 when I reached one particular chapter in Marshall’s book.
All of Oxford, where I lived, seemed shrouded in ice and snow. At this point, I read about the escape of Queen Matilda across the ice that surrounded Oxford Castle.
It took no feat of the imagination to recreate her flight: I, Antonia Pakenham, in my gym shoes and dungarees, might not have resembled Queen Matilda but my internal spirit was just the same.
to take shape, and will be judged by time. Let’s hope that, in 20 years, he returns to The Haunted Wood to write a final chapter. But for the meanwhile this book is one that no one interested in the world of children’s fiction should be without.
Emily Bearn is author of Tumtum and Nutmeg
Irish eyes aren’t smiling
JASPER REES
The Women Behind the Door
By Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape £20
In 1997, I visited Dublin to interview Roddy Doyle and, anecdotally, found the city in his thrall. ‘I’ve read three now,’ reported my taxi driver.
Doyle’s reputation first rested on a cheerful, demotic trilogy about workingclass Dubliners, which he helped adapt for the screen. Alan Parker filmed The Commitments; Stephen Frears did the others.
The tone darkened in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, in which a ten-year-old
Of course optical research became of maximum importance when it was a question of a battlefield.
My second book, following the unexpected success of Mary Queen of Scots, was about Oliver Cromwell – Cromwell, Our Chief of Men. The quotation was taken from Milton: ‘Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detraction rude Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, To peace and truth thy glorious way have ploughed.’
Quoting Milton was all very well, but immediately I encountered the problem of warfare and tactics in general – a real problem for a girl who had not been old enough in the war (unlike our beloved late queen) to drive an army vehicle.
Luckily, in a happy contrast of characters, my two marriages, 25 years apart, each produced some valuable information essential to the plot.
It was very important to me that my first husband, the MP Hugh Fraser, had fought in the war. He was able to apply his intelligence to the whole question of
watches cracks widen in his parents’ marriage. It won the Booker Prize in 1993 and promoted its author to the list of celebrities who open supermarkets. Not an accolade conferred on, say, Penelope Lively.
Doyle then deepened his commitment to scriptwriting. Each episode of Family, a savagely honest and whimsy-free drama about a violent marriage directed by Michael Winterbottom, was told from a different character’s perspective: wife, wife-beater and their two teenagers.
Perhaps it is the ex-teacher in Doyle who, once he’s spent formative time with a character, is invested in their future. Feeling he hadn’t finished with Family’s Paula Spencer, he went back to her in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, a novel about a recovering alcoholic shellshocked by 18 years of an abusive marriage.
Narrated by Paula, who blamed her bruises on accidental collisions with doors, it was a remarkable book that kicked doors down. Doyle told me of meeting women undergoing methadone treatment who’d read it as part of their English studies.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘that a lot of people who ordinarily don’t read
optical research from the point of view of the 20th century.
Hugh’s family came from Beaufort Castle in Scotland. Scottish castles – in fact, castles in general – provided some lovely glimpses of how history had come to be made. There was something about a turret, and its twisting staircase, that I found infinitely exciting. This feeling rose to its heights with Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary had finally been executed at the orders of her cousin Queen Elizabeth, at the age of 44.
I had plenty of good optical advice available because my second husband, Harold Pinter, was cricket-mad and, in my opinion, if not his own, frequently applied the rules of 21st-century cricket to the rules of 17th-century warfare.
Harold also had a healthy appreciation of Midlands landscapes and frequently stopped the car to admire some vast green field, only to discover to his delight that it contained an active cricket match.
Antonia Fraser is author of Mary Queen of Scots
literature, at the risk of sounding pompous, do read my books, eventually.’
A decade on, Doyle checked in on Paula in a second novel and now, all these years on, here is The Women Behind the Door. The women are not only Paula, still living behind the same door through which she once found the courage to expel her husband Charlo with a blow from a frying pan, but also her daughter Nicola.
Capable and worldly-wise, Nicola was always her mother’s mother in those black-and-blue years. Now the menopause is upon her and she suddenly returns, having walked away from the safe space of her marriage, refusing like a spiky teen to reveal why.
She stays for over a year and a half while Paula grapples with a new reality: that at 66 she must become her daughter’s mother again. It doesn’t come naturally. One day, she witnesses a migrant Deliveroo cyclist falling off his bike near a statue of James Joyce. It’s as if she is training herself to offer sympathy rather than receive it.
Self-sufficiency turns out to be within her. She’s been having an off-on thing with a septuagenarian who knows long words – but, when she thinks about
it, so does she. She is no technophobe and reads Marian Keyes – in the first novel it was Danielle Steel – and approves of her friend Mary’s mantra for happiness: ‘I don’t give a shite.’
Doyle has his reasons for taking the narration away from Paula – this is not just her story, after all – but I do miss the wry spark of her younger writerly voice coming at the reader directly off the page, embattled, seductive, wise.
That said, she’s still funny. She compares a hulking pair of herring gulls to central defenders. ‘She liked herself when she thought up things like that.’ At other times, reckoning on her legacy as a mother, she thinks ‘she should have killed herself years ago’.
The dark shadow is Charlo, shot dead by the Guards 30 years back. He still chats away in her head – ‘but she’s the one in charge. He only says what she wants him to.’ Later we learn that ‘if she could open her head and burn him out, she’d do it’.
Doyle shapes the novel as a fractured mystery. Its first half drops in on Paula throughout the period of her daughter’s long stay. Paula gets her Covid vaccine, then gets Covid and, finally, learns that Charlo’s abuses were not confined to wife-beating.
The second half spools back to the day of Nicola’s arrival and a mother’s tender campaign to prise her open. It resolves into a study of delayed trauma, triggered in Nicola’s case by the sight of a male relative perving over her 15-year-old daughter.
No details are vouchsafed, but the memory of whatever it is Nicola experienced at that same age returns as a present threat, unleashing in her a long-suppressed primal howl which shakes an ambling, garrulous novel to its merry bones.
Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood
‘You have something very rare … an appointment’
Cardinal sins
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE
Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity
By Diarmaid MacCulloch Allen Lane £35
The cover of Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch’s chatty ramble round 2,000 years of sex through Christian eyes shows the lower parts of Eve (by Lucas Cranach, but reversed right to left), made respectable by the placing of her hand. This is the general area of interest, though the angels get a look-in too.
Do angels’ names, such as Michael and Gabriel, the author asks, imply that they can be categorised by sex or gender?
The tendency to see them as male was ‘expressed in colonial South America by Peruvian painters, who revelled in depicting arcabuceros: angels in splendid dress shouldering a rifle’.
I don’t want to quibble for the sake of it, but a 17th-century arquebus is not, as Professor MacCulloch must know, a rifle, though it has a long barrel. The Cuzco angels bear the arms of their time, as Michael in the Middle Ages bore a spear; and their clothes are so flamboyant – all brocades, silk stockings and feathers – as almost to satirise human fashions.
MacCulloch has one more question: ‘If we had been indecorous enough to investigate under their fine Cuzco robes, what would we have found?’
Here the author takes chattiness to the brink of tee-hee archness. Yet the Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford never abandons a central chronological narrative of the history of Christianity based on his wide learning. It is more or less the story he told 15 years ago in a television series.
On this branching Christmas tree, he hangs baubles of interest, the more bizarre the merrier.
So, 360 pages in, up pops Domenico Mustafà, chapel master of the Sistine Chapel and a castrato. The chapel did not perform the operation itself; the poor boys were delivered, chorus-ready:
‘The last castrato of the Pope’s choral foundation survived long enough into the 20th century for a perhaps underwhelming recording of their voice to be made for the gramophone.’
That is a surprising use of ‘their’; a choral castrato might have been neutered but he did not acquire a grammatically neuter status. He was also a Christian by right of baptism, as affirmed by the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible that fortunately told of the baptism by the
Apostle Philip of ‘a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority’.
MacCulloch himself never proceeded to ordination as an Anglican priest because he fell out with the C of E over sex. ‘More than half a century ago, as a young graduate student I was exhilarated at my radicalism in being open about homosexuality,’ MacCulloch reflects.
‘Then I found that my assumptions had been completely outflanked by proclamation of trans identities hardly ever discussed in my youth.’
Lower than the Angels is far from all about homosexuality, and the author declares the importance in ‘demolishing myths from the past not to create new ones to justify the present’.
An object lesson he gives is of the ‘quixotic’ historian John Boswell who in 1994 suggested that in the past ‘the Church tolerated gay people and indeed created a liturgy of gay marriage’. Boswell had become ‘over-excited’ by the monastic ceremony of adelphopoiesis or brother-making. It took later historians, MacCulloch notes, ‘to restore a stillsignificant context to adelphopoiesis, while gently detaching it from Boswell’s wishful thinking’. In a tragic twist, in the year of his fame, Boswell died of AIDSrelated complications, aged 47.
Every page of Lower than the Angels has something of interest and something to take issue with. So we are told that Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘ventriloquised advice to an undergraduate: “Beware the AngloCatholics: they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.” ’ He does not mention that this is advice to the quasi-hero of Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder, from his cousin Jasper, a figure of fun.
The revolutionary 20th-century themes of contraception and homosexuality (a word first used in English in 1892) are brought together for MacCulloch by Bishop Charles Gore (1853-1932), who declared that to use contraception ‘to separate sexual pleasure from procreation “justifies the philosophy of homosexuality”. Gore was of course perfectly correct.’
After nearly 500 pages, the author admits, ‘This is not the first of my books to lack a conclusion.’ Yet that is a conclusion of a kind. He does not believe that Church history displays a plain pattern of God’s providence.
Perhaps his own methodology of examining each bright object along the way inevitably means that the Christmas tree cannot be seen for the baubles.
Christopher Howse is author of AD: 2,000 Years of Christianity
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Downing Street sex addict
ROGER LEWIS
Precipice
By Robert Harris Hutchinson £22
Many and various were the origins of the First World War, as postulated by historians: the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; anti-Serbian feelings in Austria, which led to a general mobilisation; Germany mobilising to meet a (pro-Serbian) Russian threat; France finding itself bound by treaty to stand with Russia – and as France was Britain’s ally, we couldn’t with any honour remain neutral. Not that anyone wanted to remain that. It was as if people were fed up with Edwardian tranquillity and prosperity, and spoiled for a fight.
So in August 1914, leave was cancelled, officers returned to base, and ‘all across Europe – everyone moving into position, everything tending in the same direction, towards the precipice … There’s an instinct for destruction in these tribal conflicts.’
All too true and factually verifiable. Yet Robert Harris now adds another dimension to the causes of chaos: shagging. Prime Minister Asquith, 61, was besotted with Venetia Stanley, the 27-year-old daughter of Lord Sheffield.
He wrote to her at least three times a day – and there were postal deliveries every two hours in the London of the pre-war world.
Asquith was either arranging trysts, or thanking Venetia for enjoying them: ‘My darling – I feel as if I have had a most heavenly dream…’
Sex took place in the back of the government limousine: ‘The commodious rear compartment had an interior of leather and walnut, like an old-fashioned carriage.’ Asquith and Venetia imagined they were in a gondola or a Paris flat, rather than circulating Hampstead or driving out to Roehampton.
Married to the strait-laced Margot Tennant, with whom he had ceased to have ‘conjugal relations’, Asquith, in Harris’s characterisation, is an embodiment of insouciance.
‘Beneath the impassive mask of authority, he had a romantic, ardent nature,’ like a hairy-wristed surgeon or smouldering airline pilot in Barbara Cartland. As for Venetia, ‘Was she in love with him? She didn’t know.’
Actually, she gets to find him an
increasing nuisance. ‘The further she tried to draw away from him, the closer he crowded into her life.’
Thoroughly obsessed, Asquith starts to include official documents and top-secret telegrams in the correspondence, as if what he enjoys is the risk, the transgression.
After a shag in the back of the car, ‘He screwed the telegram into a ball and threw it out of the window’ (it is retrieved by Special Branch).
Harris’s skill is to have mastered the page-turning, cliff-hanging tricks of a down-market operator, seducing the general reader, who is keen to know what happens next.
In this novel, Paul Deemer, ‘goodlooking in a common sort of way’, working undercover for MI5, intercepts the mail and carries out surveillance. Disguised as a gardener, Paul spies on Venetia at Penrhos Castle, ‘a sprawling grey-stoned, bay-windowed mansion’, which her family owns in Anglesey. It is exciting, reading about his operation, sneaking into bedrooms, unpicking locks, photographing evidence. But, unfortunately, despite elements of a thriller, nothing happens. There are no saboteurs or double agents. Intelligence is not leaked to the enemy. The threat to national security comes to zero.
Venetia goes off to train as a nurse, dealing with trench foot and gangrene. Paul resigns from the security services, enlists in the army, and presumably becomes a casualty of the industrialised slaughter.
Meanwhile, Asquith’s passion for Venetia has meant ‘he’s no longer functioning properly’, when it comes to
making decisions. To chase after his beloved, he avoids crucial meetings with Sir John French and Lord Kitchener.
He’s never in Downing Street when he needs to be. During Cabinet meetings, Asquith ignores the discussions and writes Venetia long letters.
His mind distracted, losing focus, Asquith fails to challenge Churchill over the Dardanelles catastrophe. Harris enjoys conjuring the youngish, bellicose, slightly mad Winston Churchill, mentioning ‘the gleam that comes into those blue eyes whenever the talk turns to war’. Asquith is also to blame for not addressing the munitions shortage. ‘Men I can replace,’ Kitchener admonishes him. ‘Artillery shells I cannot.’
What’s impressive about the book is the evocation of the lingering 19thcentury world – gaslit streets, picnics beneath trees, the upper classes drifting from one stately home to the next, accompanied by a mass of servants. Breakfast at Penrhos is set out on a dozen silver dishes. All these pre-war luxuries and ways, which will come to a finish.
It wasn’t until Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, among others, published their poems that the mood changed. Instead of the glories of the battlefield, people saw atrocities and waste, a disregard for human life and grief – this mass suicide, with millions of men under arms, which Asquith, mawkish and maudlin in his love life, professionally negligent, had done nothing to lessen and had perhaps exacerbated.
Roger Lewis’s Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is to become a TV series
‘I preferred you when you were a bastard’
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
LEE (15)
How do you make a film about your mum? Particularly if she was one of the greatest war photographers of the 20th century, a wild spirit – and not the greatest mother of all time.
That’s the problem with this film and its screenplay, based on Antony Penrose’s 1985 biography of his mother, Lee Miller (1907-77). How do you squeeze her astonishing chequered life, with complete honesty, into an hour and 57 minutes?
Miller is best known for her agonising pictures of Buchenwald and Dachau, and for being the subject of David Scherman’s masterly picture of her (and her dirty boots) in Hitler’s bath on the day the Führer killed himself (below). She was
Arts
a model, an apprentice to Man Ray and a pioneer in artistic photography, rediscovering the effect of solarisation.
She was also an alcoholic, an all-round tricky customer and not much of a mother to Antony, her son by the surrealist collector and writer Sir Roland Penrose.
Kate Winslet is marvellous as Miller. Her American accent is spot-on. She captures her bolshie toughness, which allowed Miller to accompany the US Army into war zones no other women photographers reached. Over and over again, she took daring, technically perfect pictures beyond the limits of other photographers.
It’s extraordinary that she was taking these harrowing photographs for Vogue of all places. The film captures her horror when the British edition of Vogue then refused to publish the concentrationcamp images – although American Vogue did see the light and publish them in 1945.
The film is split into Miller in youth and in old, Martini-soaked age, confronting her shortcomings as a mother. The oldie make-up looks a bit fake but Winslet’s cigaretteroughened, geriatric voice is masterly.
But … but… Somehow the film just doesn’t hang together. Despite all these plus points – and despite nailing all the historical
details, which war films so often play fast and loose with, it doesn’t gel.
It’s not that Antony Penrose is too reverent towards his mother. Her horrible side is on full show. As is her wild side – Winslet whips her top off at the drop of a hat.
But – because of the need to shove so much of such a full life into the film – it becomes a worthy list of her greatest achievements: her time with Man Ray, particularly her 1937 photograph of his picnic with topless ladies; and her matchless photos of the Blitz, the siege of St Malo, the liberation of Paris and the heart-wrenching concentration-camp scenes (very sensitively handled).
You can see the joins between the photos – the long build-up before each iconic shot is taken. And the build-ups aren’t really very interesting, particularly since you know what’s coming. The moment she and Scherman step into Hitler’s flat, you know the bathtub will lurch into view pretty soon.
It means there’s no tension or jeopardy to pull you along. Even if you don’t know about Miller’s life, you know she’ll survive the war because the film keeps on jumping forward to her old age.
So you end up with an earnest, slightly boring film. For all her packed life, that hour and 57 minutes passes pretty slowly.
Miller’s photographs are peerless. They’re what you want to see, not filmed imitations of them.
So Kate Winslet gets the pose in Hitler’s bath just right, having shaken off the contaminated mud of the concentration camps on Hitler’s bathmat. All beautifully done – but not a patch on the real photo of Miller in the tub.
When Miller’s photos are shown over the closing credits, they leap out of the screen and utterly steal the show. A picture is worth a thousand words – and a two-hour film.
Rubbing it in: Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath, 1945
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
THE REAL THING
Old Vic, London, until 26th October
Still going strong at 87, Sir Tom Stoppard is one of the greatest playwrights of any era. Critics rave about his wit and insight, and the most remarkable thing about him is the eternal quality of his writing. As Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, he’s not of an age but for all time.
This silky-smooth revival is a perfect case in point. You’d never guess Stoppard wrote this play back in 1982. It could have been written yesterday –or back in 1882, for that matter. With a few superficial cuts and tweaks, you could set it in almost any epoch, in virtually any locale.
The universal appeal of The Real Thing is especially surprising. On the surface, it seems terribly parochial and self-referential. Henry is a successful playwright. His wife is a successful actress. They live an affluent life in a leafy London suburb. They’re archetypal luvvies, awfully self-absorbed and self-indulgent. I hated both of them at first sight.
The only thing that could possibly disrupt their self-entitled equilibrium is a little light adultery, and sure enough it turns out that both of them are playing away from home. What should be just another bedroom farce or a conventional comedy of bourgeois manners becomes a profound, illuminating treatise on the meaning of romantic love.
What does it really mean to fall in love? Is sex the most important thing? Is fidelity always crucial? How do you remain in love after the initial thrill has gone? Wisely, Stoppard doesn’t try to nail this jelly to the wall. Rather, by exploring these conundrums in an erudite and entertaining way, he leaves us pondering the romantic riddles of our own lives.
For most playwrights, these enormous, timeless questions would be quite enough to chew on, but that’s clearly insufficient fodder for Stoppard’s ravenous intellectual appetite. The Real Thing is also a play about what it really means to be a writer. Is it enough to create brilliant philosophical puzzles (like a lot of Stoppard’s plays) or should a writer put heart and soul into their work, even to the detriment of their own writing?
This is the problem Henry wrestles with when he leaves his wife for another woman, who turns out to be an activist. She regards writing as a form of agitprop, which is something Henry can’t abide.
His plays, like Stoppard’s, are renowned for their eloquence, their reluctance to take sides.
This is all very interesting if you’re a Stoppard nerd. ‘He does speak for me in quite a few respects,’ Stoppard once said of Henry. But, for me, this is the one point where his near-perfect play breaks down. I can just about stomach a play about a playwright; even a play about a playwright writing plays. But when a playwright starts talking about playwriting, I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Stoppard’s dramas have often been likened to Russian dolls: one inside another inside another. That’s a big part of their appeal, but even for him this feels like one Russian doll too far.
When he’s not scrutinising the writing process (a writer sitting at a typewriter is surely the most tedious sight in film or theatre), Stoppard’s play within a play within a play works very well. Bel Powley is riveting as Annie, Henry’s feisty, alluring lover, and James McArdle transforms Henry (quite possibly the most unappealing Romeo in modern drama) into a fragile, sympathetic figure.
Max Webster’s direction is sleek and understated, servicing his actors rather than trying to override them. Quite right, too – there are enough tricks and stunts in Stoppard’s script without his adding any of his own.
‘For Stoppard, art is a game within a game,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan, in 1977, five years before Stoppard wrote The Real Thing. What makes this play so important in his evolution is that it’s more than just a hall of mirrors.
‘My characters are all mouthpieces for points of view, rather than explorations of individual psychology,’ he told Tynan. ‘They aren’t realistic in any sense. I write plays of ideas uneasily married to comedy or farce.’
The Real Thing refutes this. At the start of this astounding play, Henry (arguably Stoppard’s alter ego) is a pompous know-all. By the end, he has learnt not just how to think, but above all how to feel. As Henry’s ex-wife tells him (or as Stoppard might have told himself), ‘You may have all the words, but having all the words isn’t what life’s about.’
The Real Thing: Bel Powley, James McArdle, Susan Wokoma, Oliver Johnstone
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
Readers will remember Stop the Week – a ‘major irritant’ until 1992, with Robert Robinson and guests including Milton Shulman.
Every week, Milton told a Goldbergand-Cohen joke. Sample: Goldberg and Cohen are together in the jungle. Suddenly a large wild animal appears and bounds swiftly past them. ‘What was that?’ cries Cohen. ‘How should I know?’ replies Goldberg. ‘I’m not a furrier.’
I still find that hilarious. And so did all the Jewish people I repeated it to later – including Rabbi Jackie Mason. But now a joke like that induces glares from some young people – such effrontery.
The future of humour on radio looks precarious. My son said the last funny new show on Radio 4 was Ed Reardon’s Week and nothing has replaced him. So they’ve been repeating episodes from 2023. Like when Ed wrestles with a robotic self-service checkout: how can he redeem his vouchers?
‘You’ll have to go to Customer Services for that, sir,’ says the sole human assistant.
Ed: ‘But there isn’t anyone there.’
She sighs. ‘Tell me about it. There’s no eggs either. Or blueberries.’
Ed has a job, though: ‘assistant deputy head of development for made content’.
Both the human-free store and people whose job is to ‘create content’ are typical Reardon targets. Recognisable. And no bursts of manic laughter from a studio audience.
Whenever a new sitcom is sprung on us, I listen dutifully in an attitude of prayer. Please let it be funny, I say to no one in particular. Tom Machell and Lauren Pattison in Tom and Lauren Are Going Oot, about two millennial professionals from the North East, plus the bonus of Julian Clary as their neighbour: better than most post-11pm stuff, but not for everyone.
Now comes a new late-night show: The Many Wrongs of Lord Christian Brighty, by Christian Brighty and Amy Greaves – ‘award-winning comedians’, whose ‘viral sketches based on Bridgerton, Poldark and Jane Austen have catapulted them to viral [again] stardom, securing Christian’s place as the internet’s answer to Mr Darcy and amassing 150m views across TikTok and Instagram,’ according to the BBC notes.
So I went on TikTok for the first time and watched Brighty falling into a river in a Mr Darcy shirt. I then heard the show about posh people who form ‘le ton’ of
society. Brighty boasts that ‘My relations bring a certain je ne sais quoi to situations otherwise devoid of quoi.’ Roars of studio laughter. Even more when the maid Babs speaks in her thick Hull accent. Hm.
Time to get away. So here I am enjoying breakfast figs in the garden of a rustic house near Madrid, and what do I hear? Today on fuel poverty, loud and clear – on my husband’s phone. In the kitchen, on the phones of others: podcasts. ‘The Rest Is History’, on Henry V at Harfleur. And ‘The Week’, and ‘Sven-Goran Eriksson RIP’, and ‘Americast’, Tom Holland’s Harfleur tale was gripping, vivid and fluent.
But there’s a touch of TL;DR (Catherine Bohart’s programme title –‘Too long; didn’t read’) about most podcasts. Didn’t ‘The Missing Madonna’ in Olivia Graham’s Scouse – about how Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder vanished from Drumlanrig Castle and was retrieved after a worldwide search –go on a bit? But the 1969 story of Muriel McKay was terrific: the telephone politeness of Mrs McKay’s daughter and the kidnapper was remarkable.
Back home just in time for Harry Christophers’s The Sixteen on Proms Choral Day. I take back previous offhand remarks about programmes like All in the Mind. John Lloyd said his mental crisis at 42 resulted in the wonderful QI. And I’ve just heard a professor saying neophobic oldies must not anguish about the young overusing smart phones. The same alarm was once voiced about our transistor radios!
TELEVISION
FRANCES WILSON
None of the three astronauts on board the Saturn V spacecraft that launched from the Kennedy Space Centre on 11th April 1970 was superstitious about the lunar mission being called Apollo 13.
Not even when Charles Duke had to drop out seven days earlier – because he had been in contact with the rubella virus – did they think their trip might be jinxed. Nor was their optimism dented when a vital engine shut down soon after lift-off.
Two days into the voyage, an oxygen tank ruptured, causing an explosion and knocking out the life-support systems.
Aborting the moon landing, the crew had to abandon the command module for the ‘lifeboat’ lunar module, and they limped back to Earth with a severely limited water supply in the freezing, dripping, battered command module, which looks like something from an early Doctor Who set.
The tale of their survival, made into a movie in 1995 starring Tom Hanks as commander Jim Lovell, is now the subject of Apollo 13. It’s a white-knuckleride Netflix documentary, combining footage from the capsule and command centre with commentary by Lovell, his wife, Marilyn, and their two daughters, who were children when the entire planet became obsessed with the fate of the Americans floating somewhere above the atmosphere.
Three aspects of the film are extraordinary. First, while it was touch and go whether the command module would splash down in the Indian Ocean or miss Earth altogether, the parachutes that ensured their smooth landing worked perfectly.
Secondly, at the same time as the Pope held a mass for 10,000 in the Vatican, prayers were said in St Petersburg, and 100,000 prayed for the crew at a religious festival in India. The Brylcreemed, chain-smoking men in the Houston control room didn’t so much as break into a sweat.
The third, and most striking, aspect is the failure of expression to rise to the occasion. Lovell is a man of few words, none of them remarkable. In a press
Dark side of the moon: Jim Lovell (centre) before the Apollo 13 flight
conference in advance of the mission, he explains that a guy needs to get away from the wife and kids, while Marilyn, sitting next to him with a beehive hairdo and a haunted look, clearly wonders why he can’t shoot some hoops like other dads.
Radios known as squat boxes, through which everything said in the spacecraft could be heard back home, meant that – for good or ill – the Lovell children had a running commentary on the strangest experience known to humankind.
‘Everything looks small from up here,’ says Lovell, looking down on Earth while a tape recorder playing the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey floats in mid-air. There are no cities to be seen, he observes, nor borders. Makes him wonder why people can’t ‘just get along’.
He now believes in Father Christmas, and notes that Earth looks like a bauble on a Christmas tree. Never before has such sublime footage been accompanied by such staggering banalities.
When things become critical, Marilyn, wondering whether her husband will be suspended in outer space for the rest of time, reflects that ‘it makes you appreciate life a bit’, while Jim explains that Earth ‘was the only place on Earth we had to go to’. Looking back on the six days from Hell, he reflects that ‘if you don’t look forward, you lose some of the meaning of life’.
What’s missing from the film are the meanings of the afterlives. Lovell, now aged 96, did not return to outer space, but did he ever settle back into civvy street? Where did he go now when he wanted a break from the wife and kids?
What was it like to look at the night sky? Did he hang out with the other astronauts, or had they had their fill of one another’s company? Most importantly, did Marilyn – who died last year, aged 93 – ever feel she wasn’t enough for Jim?
Meanwhile, Colin from Accounts is back for a second season. In season one, Gordon and Ashley (husband-and-wife duo Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer) were brought together when Gordon ran over a dog (Colin) because Ashley flashed her boob while crossing the road. As a result of the accident, Colin has wheels for back legs.
In season two, Gordon and Ashley, who have moved in together, have given Colin away and now have to persuade his new owners to give him back. It’s hard to explain the charm of this slightly dark, largely plot-free, rom-com-styled sitcom, except that everyone behaves badly and it’s happily down-to-earth.
Schwadron
‘I hope our investors realise it was the window-cleaner who fell’
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE ANTON BRUCKNER
‘Surely we have a right to be bored by Bruckner,’ mused the Daily Telegraph’s distinguished Viennese-born music critic Peter Stadlen half a century ago.
It was a kind thought, an olive branch offered to those who find themselves unable to get beyond the foothills of this grandest, and some would say greatest, of Austro-German symphonists, whose bicentenary we’re celebrating this month.
I’ve made similar gestures to friends who claim to be bored by Test cricket.
Duration is one problem with both Test cricket and Anton Bruckner (1824-96). Another is that neither has ‘travelled’ especially well. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Bruckner’s symphonies began to gain any kind of reputational purchase beyond Austro-Germany. And it’s only now that cricket is beginning to emerge from the confines of its old imperial boundaries.
It was the advent of the long-playing gramophone record that did the trick for Bruckner. The gramophone’s impersonality is perfect for him. More so than the concert hall, which tends to secularise the music, denying it its own particular sense of space and time.
The gramophone’s effect was first experienced back in 1929, when a still
recommendable recording of the glorious Seventh Symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic directed by the young Jascha Horenstein turned up in a specialist import shop in London’s Leicester Square.
‘If you do not agree with me that this is great music,’ wrote a freelance contributor to The Gramophone, ‘I shall be tempted to be dogmatic and declare that you do not know what music is.’
The paper’s editor, Compton Mackenzie, later remarked, ‘There’s no doubt that if people grow fond of Bruckner, they grow very fond of him.’
As I know from half a lifetime of reviewing Bruckner recordings, devotees of his music are a race apart. Knowledgeable and enthusiastic, of course – and also willing to spend large sums of money acquiring multiple interpretations of individual symphonies and choral works.
To mangle a line from W B Yeats, Bruckner is not a country for young men – though it probably helps to know his music from an early age. As a teenager, Simon Rattle was seen rushing round the canteen of the Royal Academy of Music shouting, ‘I’ve got the Duke’s Hall for an hour, does anyone want to play Bruckner Seven?’
That was certainly true of the great German conductor and Mahler protégé Bruno Walter, who said that
Bruckner’s music made no sense to him until he was 50, after which he wouldn’t live without it.
The composer Jan Sibelius was 49 when he heard Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony in Berlin in 1914. It was an experience that moved him to tears. ‘What an original and profound spirit,’ he wrote. Yet here was a man, Sibelius added, steeped in religious feeling, writing at a time when such feeling was being dismissed as ‘no longer relevant to our time’.
This was something Bruckner himself confronted in his final years. Now in declining health, he failed to complete his Ninth Symphony, originally intended as a second symphonic paean to the glory of God. (The Fifth Symphony was his first.)
There are scholars who’ve attempted to complete the Ninth’s unfinished finale, using the available draft material. Yet anyone with half a mind knows that Bruckner didn’t finish the symphony because he couldn’t.
The terrifying discord, minutes before the slow movement’s end, says it all. Like many artists of the time – Sibelius and Mahler among them – Bruckner sensed deep within that the world in which he’d grown and matured his life and art was heading for the precipice.
In the aftermath of the First World War, his music was taken up by the leaders of the Third Reich – another subject latter-day (mainly American) Bruckner scholars love to bang on about. But this, too, is a non-subject.
Bruckner’s music was as much a part of Austro-Germany’s cultural identity as Elgar’s or Vaughan Williams’s was of ours. The Führer can be blamed for many things, but promoting the music of Bruckner is hardly one of them.
Yet Bruckner’s psychopathology, like
Elgar’s, was complex. Listen to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s devastating October 1944 Vienna studio performance of the first movement of the Eighth Symphony and you hear in full measure Bruckner’s sense of humanity’s tragic potential.
With a world at war and the Third Reich slowly imploding, it was Bruckner’s music that seemed to define a deeper need, and offer a more complex kind of hope, than anything we find in Beethoven’s Enlightenment-fuelled optimism about the brotherhood of man, or the bourgeois charms of Brahms – the devastating close of the Fourth Symphony notwithstanding.
Whenever I hear any of Bruckner’s most commanding pieces, I’m reminded of the philosopher Karl Popper’s dictum. ‘A great work of music, like a great scientific theory, is a cosmos imposed on chaos – in its tensions and harmonies inexhaustible even for its creator.’
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN
TOGETHER AGAIN
The rock band reunion is the eternal fans’ fantasy and a stadium-filling holy grail, but there’s only one band who could carry it off.
It’s a perilously risky business. I realised this with the return of the Velvet Underground in 1993.
When the most attractively urban and nocturnal act on the planet – natural habitat the pitch-black nightclub – burst into blistering sunlight on the dairy fields of Glastonbury in hot pursuit of a pension-fund top-up – and worse, tried to be friendly – the damage done to their legacy was irreparable.
The Sex Pistols, supposedly a streetlevel political art statement, did much the same in 1996 but at least their Filthy Lucre tour acknowledged it. There are now only five big acts with original line-ups intact who could re-form, four of whom shouldn’t even consider it.
All of ABBA are still with us; most of them nearly 80, they have cunningly created 3D
avatars that perform for them. Thus, like the Beatles, they have allowed no ageing mental image to tarnish the eternal youth of their soundtrack. REM could reboot old hits such as Losing My Religion, but they rather nobly declared recently that a reunion would look ‘tacky and moneygrabbing’ and thus, if they staged one, would shred their hard-won integrity.
Talking Heads’ shows crackled with a physical vigour they’d be hard pressed to replicate now (and they clearly don’t want to try).
And punk heroes the Jam, still above ground and vertical, broke up in their mid-20s but – as Robert Plant said at the Led Zeppelin reunion in 2007 about having to perform songs he wrote when he was 21 – Paul Weller would have to ‘get back into character’ (he’s now 66) to make it convincing. Best left alone.
No, the only act who could make it work have announced that they’re playing a series of huge shows next summer. The warring brothers who front Oasis, Noel and Liam Gallagher, famously came to blows 15 years ago, split up and have traded entertainingly vicious insults ever since.
Both have lucrative careers – though Noel is now saddled with a bank-sapping divorce. They’re still in their 50s, and look even younger, and their almost motionless stage act – Liam occasionally sitting on the drum riser to drain cans of lager while Noel rattles off a guitar solo – can hardly be challenged by middle age. And both the band’s rhythm sections are still available to back them.
And they’re the perfect stadium act, required merely to trot out their hits while colossal, moist-eyed crowds teleport themselves back to their teens via a mass communal singalong. All their audience wants is to see the two boys back together in some semblance of
There may, of course, be one other reason for this extension of the olive branch, bigger than ego, the roar of the crowd or a lust for cash: their mum. The no-nonsense 81-yearold Peggy Gallagher had made it clear they should bury the hatchet. Enough is enough. And what sensible son would dare to disagree?
Oasis’s Noel and Liam Gallagher at the 1996 MTV Awards
Anton Bruckner, 1895
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
VAN GOGH: POETS AND LOVERS
National Gallery, to 19th January MONET AND LONDON: VIEWS OF THE THAMES
Courtauld Gallery, 27th September to 19th January 2025
There is an unusual link between these shows – other than the Strand. They are both to an extent curated by their artists, and for once the modish word is justified. The National Gallery brings together three long-separated paintings that Van Gogh had planned as a triptych, while the Monet is largely an impression of the 1904 exhibition he himself organised in Paris. With over 60 paintings and drawings, the National Gallery show is the biggest of the many devoted to Van Gogh in recent years. I hope that is a good thing; at half the size, the 2008-9 Colours of the Night had extraordinary power. I remember rotating on one spot at the
he envisaged as a triptych. Now, if only temporarily, the National Gallery’s Sunflowers at last hangs with its fellow from Philadelphia, flanking Mme Roulin from Boston. The 14 drawings on show are a reminder of just what a superb draughtsman Van Gogh was.
New York showing, to see the two great Starry Nights and The Night Café. This time, the focus is on the final years at Arles and St Rémy. So The Yellow House (or The Street, as he called it) is there – the building in which he and Gauguin lived in 1888. There he painted the two Sunflowers and the version of La Berceuse, a portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin rocking an unseen cradle, which
Monet paid two-month visits to London in 1899 and the following two years, staying on the fifth and sixth floors of the Savoy Hotel. He produced 94 views of the river, 37 of which were in his Paris show. He then began to organise a larger exhibition for 1905 in London, but he feared the paintings were not good enough and cancelled. One summer morning, when Eurostar was still at Waterloo, I was crossing the bridge on the top deck of a bus as the sun rose. The up-river view of the Houses of Parliament was perfect Monet. Two hours later, I was at the Beaux Arts, Lille, standing before one of the Westminster paintings. That one is not at the Courtauld, but 19 others are. And one must hope that the old perfectionist would approve. In 1904, he wrote, ‘I have always wanted to show my Londons here, for my own satisfaction.’
At any rate, it is a feast for the rest of us.
The Oldie
Clockwise from left: Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh, 1888; Self-Portrait, Van Gogh, 1889; Le Parlement, soleil couchant, Claude Monet, 1903
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
PREPARE FOR BLUEBELLS
This might sound bonkers and forgive me if it strikes you as boastful: we’re making two woodland gardens.
The pair of us have clocked up 142 years (one is 16 years younger than the other). In between our now all-toofrequent hospital visits and the inconvenience of sundry disabilities (we’ve both had double hernia operations and are no strangers to several oncology teams), we’ve been spending recent daylight hours mowing grass, strimming brambles, felling dead, dying and unwanted seedling trees – with the help of our two indispensables: Man Monday and Man Friday.
encouraged. Pure treasure lurks unseen beneath them. Is there anything more gladsome than swathes of English bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)?
And it is largely for the bluebells’ sake that all this work has been going on for the past three months.
Illuminated by shafts of bright sunlight, bluebell shoots appear in March and must not be trodden.
Only where I’m making paths do I dig the bulbs and transplant them elsewhere – some going to friends with similar growing conditions or a shared adoration of Britain’s best-loved wildling.
Siberian irises, ajugas, brunneras and gentians. The late Beth Chatto’s few books about shade gardening are all you need.
Bulbs (plentiful in the shops right now) bring colour and scent to woodland gardens or any shady patch. Dog’s-tooth violets (erythroniums), muscari, snowdrops, crocuses, fritillaries – too many to mention. Most, also, will naturalise, spreading gently within a few years from a mere splash to pleasing drifts.
And don’t overlook ferns in such planting schemes. I should know them better. Many are native to this country or will settle in comfortably from other climes. Once established, they become firm friends.
I’ll be pestering specialist growers and collectors (the pteridologists) very soon.
Woodland Garden One comprises an acre of south-west-facing open pasture – a former orchard, where only four venerable fruit trees stood when we came here three years ago.
Woodland Garden Two extends over two undulating acres and is deeply shaded by mature sycamore, holly, chestnut, hawthorn, beech and their myriad offspring. The brambles are at their most fecund hereabouts, as are nettles, thistles, the so-called creeping (more like galloping) buttercup, dock and the all-too-vigorous perennial giant hogweed.
Enchanter’s nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) pulls out easily but its soft, threadlike roots also break easily, lingering on below ground to foretell another not-so-enchanting explosion next year. Where the ground is soft, we can pull the bramble roots. Any regrowth (mea culpa) necessitates a noxious spray – used sparingly.
Lush, verdant ferns proliferate and are
Woodland Two has humus-rich soil, built up over several centuries of fallen leaves and decaying vegetation. Its deep tilth and patches of cool shade are vital for the kind of cultivated plants I’m sourcing. Shade in Woodland One has to be made. It’s coming on well – sorbus, 20 different Japanese maples, a scattering of tall hybrid Canadian acers (‘October Glory’, ‘Brandywine’, ‘Morgan’, ‘Autumn Blaze’), liquidambar, parrotia, nyssa, flowering cherry and, supremely, a dozen Olympic-speed paulownias. These magical, large-leafed foxglove trees have grown more than six feet tall from six-inch seedlings planted 18 months ago.
There is nothing as exciting as woodland plants and a bowery setting for them – best, perhaps, realised over large tracts of ground, yet possible to replicate on a smaller scale. Think miniature paintings v murals – Hilliard, say, rather than Banksy.
In a previous suburban garden, many years ago, I created such a diminutive woodland landscape beneath a single, delightfully gnarled Bramley apple tree which bestowed just 15 square yards of dappled sunlight. Under its boughs, I grew hellebores, disporums, primulas,
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTUALD HAMBURG PARSLEY
Keats’s season of mellow fruitfulness may be upon us, but for me it is more a time of ‘rootfulness’, of the root vegetables now coming into their own in the kitchen.
We have been enjoying carrots and beetroot from the garden for some weeks, but the turnips did not swell – and I have resorted to buying one of my favourite roots, celeriac, which I confess I have never grown successfully.
The seedlings of our kohlrabi, which looks like a root but is in fact a cabbage with a swollen stem, were nibbled and effectively killed off by slugs, which have been rampant this year. But I gave protection to a second sowing under a cloche and am expecting a few of edible size later this month.
The parsnips should soon be ready to be dug after the first frosts, which has
English bluebells
led me to think about growing next year an unusual vegetable with a parsnip-like root: Hamburg parsley, which is said to have a taste of celeriac.
It came to England from the Netherlands in the 18th century, though obviously associated with northern Germany. The only variety I have found in a few seed catalogues is called Berliner.
Hamburg parsley appears occasionally in old English recipes for pottage, and it is supposed to have diuretic properties. Its popularity in this country is limited, but demand may be increasing in East European communities.
This root vegetable is, of course, to be recommended as a dual-purpose plant. The leaves have a stronger flavour than those of ordinary flat-leaved parsley, and they will remain evergreen in all but the coldest winters.
If the seeds are sown in early spring in shallow drills, the long, tapering roots should be ready for harvesting in October. However, they are hardy enough to be left in the ground until required.
From Flanders comes a vegetable soup called waterzooi, often made with finely chopped Hamburg parsley root, onion, celery stalks, double cream and the parsley leaves.
Pieces of chicken and cheesy croûtons can be added for a hearty autumnal dish as the nights start drawing in.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD MAGIC OF MUSHROOMS
Autumn is in the air. The mushroom season is upon us. And our unreliable summer weather might well have delivered a generous harvest of edible fungi to the shadier corners of our green and pleasant land.
For the novice forager, what pops up in the woods can look like a lethal pick-and-mix, when you’re deciding what’s edible and what’s not.
As a general rule, it’s fair to assume that mushrooms in the wild are reliably seasonal and place-specific. Avoid anything that’s out of order or time. A single chanterelle, alone in a meadow in spring, is unlikely to be the same as one of the sunny yellow beauties that appear all together in woodland in autumn.
Mushroom preferences are extraordinarily regional. In Catalonia, top of the class is Lactarius deliciosus – orange tear, also known as saffron milkcap, a pinewood mushroom that bruises blue, a warning sign everywhere else.
In the markets of Tuscany, truffle territory, the second-most-highly prized (after Tuber magnato, the rich man’s truffle) is Amanita caesarea.
It’s a Technicolor beauty in scarlet and gold that’s the spitting image of Alice’s hallucinogenic toadstool, A muscaria –a red-capped mushroom with white freckles, common in Scotland and Scandinavia, which is irresistible to sheep, reindeer and Vikings on the warpath.
In Britain, it’s useful to know your destroying angel from your common-orgarden field mushroom – A campestri, related to the cultivated mushroom first domesticated in caves in Paris in the 1650s.
In the immortal words of the great Terry Pratchett, all fungi are edible, but some fungi are edible only once
That’s a good reason to welcome a sturdy new hardback edition of Peter Jordan’s The Mushroom Guide and Identifier, updated by mycologist Neville Kilkenny. Forty-six of the edible-andgood mushrooms, common in Britain’s fields and woodlands, are photographed in situ and identified in double-page spreads. They include colour variations, possible lookalikes and basic information on preparation and cooking.
Cèpes à la Bordelaise
If in doubt, stick to the classics. Any and all of the robust, firm-fleshed fungi –bolets, bluits, parasol, hedgehog fungi, puffball, chicken of the woods, beefsteak – are delicious when cooked, as they like them in Bordeaux, in olive oil with garlic and parsley and a handful of breadcrumbs to absorb the juices.
Simple. Save the more delicate, thin-fleshed fungi – chanterelles, horn of plenty, oyster mushrooms – to fry in butter and finish with cream. Pick from the wild on a dry day; don’t rinse; just brush off any unwanted guests.
Serves 2-3.
About 500g cèpes (aka porcini, steinpilz, penny bun, bolet) or open-cap cultivated mushrooms
4-5 tbsps olive oil
Generous handful of parsley, finely chopped
1-2 fat, fresh garlic cloves
2-3 tbsps fresh breadcrumbs
Trim, wipe and slice the mushrooms (keeping the pieces quite chunky). Heat the oil in a sauté pan (a frying-pan, but deeper). As soon as the oil is warm but not yet smoking, add the mushrooms and toss them over the heat for 2-3 minutes till the juices begin to run.
Add the garlic and parsley, and allow all to cook together gently till the moisture is almost evaporated. Season with salt and pepper, then stir in enough fresh, soft breadcrumbs to absorb all the juices. Turn the heat up for a moment to crisp the crumbs a little.
Serve with freshly baked baguette or toasted sourdough. That’s it.
RESTAURANTS
JAMES PEMBROKE A TASTE OF CHILDHOOD
We all remember putting our elbows on the table as children and being told, ‘All joints on the table will be carved.’
But what about joints under the table? The tables on the terrace outside the revived Julie’s in Holland Park are so close that you sit literally cheek by jowl. Just like at a café on the Left Bank. We sat next to two girls who displayed the longest bare thighs I’ve ever seen.
They were then replaced by three semi-drunk girls who were reeling from an office do. The benign tramp sitting on the bench opposite took a real shine to them and kept winking at them as if an invitation to join was all but inevitable. I would have eavesdropped, but they were hardly Dorothy Parker.
Tara MacBain, at just 33, has resurrected Julie’s, a favourite longSunday-lunch venue of mine back in the eighties, when they still had that long parlour with its skylights at the back.
Her predecessors, Timothy and Cathy Herring, who bought the wine bar from the eponymous Julie Hodgess in 1972, had the back bit converted into flats. They would have done the same with the rest of the building, had a local campaign not delayed them enough to give Tara and chef-patron Owen Kenworthy (formerly of Brawn and the Pelican) the chance to buy the place.
Tara describes it in its heyday as a ‘fun cocoon’. Well, it is again. The basement where Tina Turner danced on the tables is as sexy as ever. Its setting at the triangle of Clarendon Cross is unbeatable. The menu is Owen’s interpretation of brasserie. So, you can get an onglet Bordelaise for £22 or indulge in a lobster soufflé for £39.
I grew up in the restaurants of Queensway. After the closure of Café Anglais and the Royal China, there was little to draw me back, apart from a mawkish return to vanished restaurants from the seventies: the Wimpy, the Halepi, the French patisserie, Pizzaland, Bistro Bistingo, Dayvilles Ice Cream and Bertorelli. Oh, and the first McDonald’s I ever visited, which was almost opposite Jeremy King’s new restaurant, The Park.
If I had grandchildren, this would be my wholly self-indulgent morning with them: meet at G F Watts’s statue Physical Energy, which was cast in bronze within a year or two of Peter Pan’s first flight.
Then on to the Round Pond to feed the ducks and talk about the Lost Boys. Then to the playground, again opened in J M Barrie’s era, which in 2000 was transformed into the Diana Memorial playground. Then, with tears rolling down my cheeks, I would show them the Elfin Oak and its 74 elves and fairies, twice rescued by Spike Milligan.
Only then would I head for The Park. It really is a triumph: a sleek mixture of American diner and Harry’s Bar. And the menu is for children, young and old. Treat them to a hot dog, while you share an enormous chicken Milanese with their mum or dad. When I went the other night, I couldn’t resist the caramelised banana split. Neither could the Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen, whose date, fellow nonagenarian and Oldie columnist Antonia Fraser, tucked into a sundae, while birthday girl Victoria Gray chewed away at her candy floss. Peter Pan would definitely approve. You’ll believe in fairies again.
DRINK BILL KNOTT
COCKTAIL THAT WON THE WAR
The Canon de 75 modèle 1897 is widely regarded as the first piece of modern artillery.
It passed into legend as the gun that allowed the French to win the First World War. Combining great accuracy, portability and a rate of fire of up to 15 rounds per minute, it was still in use in WWIIf, not just by the French – who
still had 4,500 of them, until the Germans marched in and nabbed them – but by a host of other nations, including the USA, Poland, Portugal, Greece and Ireland.
Why, you may well ask, is this of interest to your drinks columnist? Because this trailblazing gun, known, informally, as the French 75, lent its name to a cocktail of gin, lemon juice, sugar syrup and champagne.
But, when it comes to cocktails, and to quote Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple’. Their origins are often lost in the Scotch mists of time, and the original recipes for the French 75 called, variously, for Calvados, grenadine and absinthe.
It was the American cocktail aficionado Judge Jr, in the 1927 second edition of his book Here’s How, who gave us the French 75 recipe that we know today – a blend of ‘Gordon water’ (gin), powdered sugar, lemon juice and champagne – noting that ‘this drink is really what won the War for the Allies’.
It has been my cocktail of the summer. The sweetened lemon base for the drink keeps well in the fridge for a week or so. Make a simple syrup by heating together equal volumes of white sugar and water, let it cool, then stir in twice as much freshly squeezed lemon juice.
Pour 25ml of the lemon syrup into a collins glass, add 40ml or so of gin, fill the glass with ice and top up with champagne. Give it a gentle stir, garnish with a lemon slice and serve.
You can also serve it in a champagne flute, without ice and ungarnished. You can economise with a decent cava or crémant (Tesco’s Finest 1531 Blanquette de Limoux, £10, is a good choice). Or you could substitute the fizz for soda water, in which case you have a classic Tom Collins.
You could even take out the gin as well, and just have fresh, fizzy lemonade – I am assured it is delicious.
After WWII, the Canon de 75 modèle 1897 did not merely become a museum piece: among the granite crags of the Alta ski area in Utah, it performed a much more benign function.
Alta has a reputation not just for some of the best skiing in North America, but also for avalanches; until it was finally retired last November, the French 75 was regularly fired to stop them gathering pace.
A noble end for a doubly famous gun.
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Godello, Bodegas y Viñedos Merayo, Bierzo 2023, offer price £13.95, case price £167.40
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Dry, pale and interesting rosé, with a tang of redcurrants giving freshness on the palate.
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SPORT
JIM WHITE
AU REVOIR, GARETH
Gareth Southgate has a new job. Sadly it is not in English football.
When he resigned as England boss after the Euros, the man who steered the national side to two finals, a semifinal and a quarter final across four international competitions took up a position with UEFA. He is to be a technical adviser, watching and analysing games across Europe, reporting back to the organisation’s headquarters in Switzerland on what he sees. Which is good news for UEFA. And wretched news for anyone with an interest in improving the game in this country.
Quite how it is that we have allowed the man who transformed the England team to take his skills elsewhere is baffling. Because this is a talent we should be doing everything in our power to retain.
Southgate’s intelligence, charm and diplomatic nous are qualities that could be profitably exploited for the good of the game in this country.
At 52, he has years of influence ahead of him. It is not too late. In fact, this is what we should do: make him the first government football tsar. Put him in charge of the governance of the game. Get him to impose some sort of purposeful strategy into a system, which appears now to be structured solely to enrich the owners of the 20 Premier League clubs.
This is his strength: delivering revolutionary change in the smoothest, least ostentatious manner. In his time at the Football Association, Southgate completely transformed the way things were organised. First as technical director, borrowing an idea from successful nations like Spain, he imposed a single playing style across all the age-group teams, so that as players progressed they would quickly fit in.
Then, as manager of the England team, he created an environment of positivity and uplift, support and collegiate feeling. Where once players hated international call-up for fear of the consequence of failure, he made something they enjoyed. It meant that, in competition, instead of hoping for an early exit as many of their predecessors had done, his lads wanted to stay together for as long as possible. And while his tactical approach may not have been enough to take them to ultimate victory, the result of his leadership is a record better than any since Alf Ramsey.
But the chance of another similarly gifted pool of young English players emerging for any of his successors to
work with diminishes by the moment – as the number of those eligible for selection to the national side grows ever smaller.
Take Wolverhampton Wanderers, who played their first two games of the new league season without a single Englishman in the starting line-up. That is becoming the norm, partly as the result of freshly imposed profit and sustainability rules, which encourage clubs to sell their home-grown assets often before they have reached their full potential.
It will not make economic sense for top operations like Manchester City or United to give the next Phil Foden or Kobbie Mainoo the opportunity to complete their education in the first team. They need to sell them off long before that in order to buy in oven-ready talent from abroad. If this carries on much longer, how quickly the England side’s wellspring will run dry.
Southgate is the man who not only would spot such unintended consequences but has the tact, guile and charm to prevent their happening. Not least if he were backed by the possibility of legislation. There is so much wrong with English football –from long-term fans being priced out of watching matches to the pyramid that sustains it all being constantly undermined – that it needs a singular personality to right the wrongs. That man is there.
But to our collective shame he has been allowed to take his abilities elsewhere.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD
DREAM CLASSIC CARS
‘There are few ways in which a man may be more innocently employed than in getting money,’ said Dr Johnson.
He presumably meant there’s no pretence about it. Like much of what the great man said, there’s enough in it to make it memorable but it’s not the whole truth. Another area of innocent endeavour was on display recently at my favourite classic-car show, at Hooe in Sussex.
The innocence involved here was in that owning classic cars is not just another way of getting money – you might if you’re lucky, but mostly you’ll be spending it. Rather, it’s the innocence of ornithologists or numismatists: enthusiasts interested in the thing itself, not in what it might be worth.
Thus the 1899 Benz Velo, one of the first cars in Wales, powered by a single horizontal cylinder offering 3.5hp and a cruising speed of 11mph. It may be worth a lot but restoring it to pristine condition and keeping it in full working order is
more a labour of love than a profitable investment. Not to mention providing period dress and bonnet for its elegant driver, Miss Helen Smith.
But they don’t have to be that ancient or rare for the innocent enthusiasm of owners to be evident. No one, for example, lovingly maintains a 1966 Austin A60 Cambridge for future profit.
Remember them – staid, upright, four-door, fin-tailed saloons? They were part of our street furniture, so completely forgotten now that it’s a jolt to see one and be reminded of how familiar they were.
Along with their Wolseley, Riley, Morris and MG siblings – and 99 per cent of all cars of that era – they succumbed to rust and banger racing. If you want an even rarer example, look for an estate version.
Before Volvo estates became ubiquitous, they were used and abused by antiquedealers and farmers. My father, a farmer, would cram his with hay bales, crates of day-old chicks and jerry cans of tractor diesel. In the end the floor fell out.
At the show, there were squadrons of 1920s/30s Austin 7s and Morris Cowleys in varied forms – all so narrow it must have been difficult to drive one without intimacy with your passenger, wanted or unwanted. There was even a handsome 1936 Brough Superior, described as a Dual Purpose car, something to melt the crankshaft seals of any enthusiast’s heart. You just want to save it and preserve it. The passion is as innocent as that.
In another life, I could have bought them all, of course, but I particularly fancied the 1966 Alvis TF21 – a stylish twodoor three-litre saloon, a rival in its day to Bristols. The late Duke of Edinburgh drove a convertible version; you can buy them now fully restored from Red Triangle.
But the question I always come to at such events is: which one would I like to drive home in? Competitors for the Alvis included a 1953 Aston Martin DB2/4 and a 1958 Jaguar XK150. I’ve driven modern Astons but the rounded lines of the DB2/4 appeal more; it wouldn’t perform like the moderns but it would be plenty good enough for me.
As for Jaguar, there were several E-Types but they’re cars I admire without desire, preferring the classically balanced swooping of boot and bonnet of their XK predecessors. Especially this one – the fixed-head coupe version which somehow looks more complete than the convertibles.
Or the wild card: the beautifully restored Bedford TJ, a small lorry with the nose of a friendly Labrador. A safe, reliable plodder; you could sleep in the back and save money on hotels.
I think the Bedford has it.
Matthew Webster: Digital Life Beware of fake internet news
You may have been baffled by people claiming that they heard the news ‘on social media’.
You would be right; social-media platforms do not provide news – at least not directly. Generally, they are just noticeboards on which almost anyone can post anything they want without validation or justification. Or they can post a link to an item on another website – and then call it ‘news’.
That’s bad enough but, human nature being what it is, things quickly get worse. The more sensational posts inevitably attract attention and lots of other people pass them on to their followers.
It’s like a chain letter. Those followers then pass it on to their own followers, and so on. No matter that the
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk
A site from Lancaster University offering alerts of when you might see the aurora borealis from the UK.
stellarium-web.org
Online planetarium – learn about the heavens; identify the stars.
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
information may be hopelessly wrong – it multiplies and spreads, regardless.
This took a nasty turn recently when people were sent to prison for this sort of online activity, following riots in the UK.
So why does this happen? Some people just like the sound of their own voice too much. But in many cases, the driving force is a very old-fashioned one: money.
Most of the posts that might catch your eye will eventually lead you to one of a huge number of websites that purport to be reliable news sources. They look convincing, and will often describe themselves as ‘unbiased’, ‘trusted’ or ‘truthful’.
Almost all of them exist only to reproduce intriguing news items pinched from other websites, because the more viewers they can generate, the more they can charge advertisers.
What might look like a busy news website – and may even claim to have a team of journalists – is probably run by a couple of chaps operating from an attic somewhere.
A news item is picked for inclusion only because it’s been so frequently looked at on other websites, or on account of the prevalence of provoking trigger words (‘murder’, say, or ‘tragedy’).
The site-owners are not journalists, but they are good at coding – the magic formulae that make websites work. They have little or no interest in the content that appears on their site, beyond how effective it is at attracting views.
So how do we avoid this nonsense?
The best way to guess the truth of a
story is ask who is telling it. If it is the BBC, ITV, a mainstream news service such as Reuters or a proper newspaper, you have a better-than-evens chance that it’s true. They have a reputation to protect.
If it comes from an unknown source – and especially if that source offers no clue as to its nationality or ownership or even an address – then beware.
There are some independent news sites that are genuinely respectable and deserve our support, but they are hard to distinguish from the dross and often struggle to survive.
So, please, if you do use social media, think hard before passing on any items, however salacious, exciting or dramatic, until you are satisfied about the source. If you can’t satisfy yourself, don’t pass it on. As my English teacher used to say, ‘If in doubt, cut it out.’
That way, we can all help to avoid fanning the fires of disinformation that burn, unregulated, throughout the internet.
There is no tax quite like inheritance tax to get people arguing.
Even though it raises less than one per cent of the total we pay each year – and fewer than four per cent of estates actually pay it; and then at only about four per cent of the total assets passed on – there seems to be a visceral feeling that it’s confiscating what you’ve got left after paying tax all your life.
In the desperate last days of the Tories, the government floated the idea
of scrapping it altogether, apparently believing it was a vote-winner. Well, perhaps, but the first question about IHT is: would you rather pay tax now, or when you’re dead? Governments are always looking for revenue, and this one has a particularly urgent need.
It would be easy to raise the rate. But at some point people will try to avoid, or even evade, paying, and today’s 40 per cent might already be beyond that point. There are already ways of reducing the
bill – it’s often said that IHT is paid by those who trust the taxman more than they trust their relatives.
Give your fortune away early enough, and there’s no tax to pay. Leave it too late, and your grateful relatives may find themselves with a tax bill after they’ve sent you off.
But the real problem with IHT is its Byzantine complexity. Your executors cannot distribute anything much until probate is granted, and the Probate
Office is as hopelessly slow as most other government departments. To get probate, you need details of the assets; then you can argue about which ones avoid IHT – even if it’s likely that the estate will have no liability.
The left-wing think tank Demos points out that estates in the UK worth over £10m paid a smaller percentage than those worth over £2m – so it recommends raising the rate with size and imposing capital gains tax on death.
The former would see more of the
wealthy go to die somewhere else, while the latter would add more complexity. Exactly how much did the old man pay for that house/Old Master/shareholding all those years ago?
The tax-avoidance industry would love the Demos proposals, since avoidance advice becomes more worthwhile as tax rates rise. So if Labour is going to have a go, simplicity should be the aim.
Here’s a proposal: turn the seven-year rule into a ten-year rule. Then levy IHT at a flat rate of ten per cent on all estates.
The
No exceptions for charitable donations, wives, civil partners, farmland, family businesses, unquoted shares, heirlooms, family homes or anything else. Probate would be simple and quick.
The tithe is a fine, long-established way of taxing, and the lawyers living off avoidance would have to find something more productive to do. I can’t be sure, but I’ll bet that such a system would raise much more revenue than from today’s dog’s breakfast of rules.
The rich might stay here and pay it, too.
Oldie invites you to
A Taste of Porto and the Douro Valley
With Simon Berry 10th to 16th September 2025
We are delighted that Simon Berry, former chairman of Berry Bros and Rudd, with Porto’s best address book, has offered to create his dream six-day tour of his favourite wine region. For fans of Portugal’s most famous drink, this is an unmissable opportunity:
Simon will open doors otherwise closed to the public – not least for dinner at the Factory House, the private club of winemakers. A chance finally to tread grapes, too.
Simon writes, ‘I first came to the Douro in 1978, the guest of Alistair Robertson of Taylor Fladgate. I instantly fell in love with the place: with the vine-covered hillsides above the slow flowing river, with the slightly faded grandeur of the city of Oporto, with the generous hospitality of the winemaking families. I’ve returned many times since, whenever the opportunity arose, often with the delightful Symington family. Some things have changed in the intervening years: the city is far from faded nowadays, for example. But the best aspects, the most magical, have stayed exactly the same.’
We will be staying at the prestigious Yeatman Hotel in Porto and the delightful Quinta de la Rosa, which is right on the bank of the magnificent Duoro river.
Wednesday 10th September – arrival
Saturday 13th September
– Pinhão and Quinta de la Rosa
Morning tour of Graham’s museum and tasting at the lodge; lunch at Vinum, Graham’s restaurant. Collect bags from hotel and head to station for a truly magical train journey to Pinhão. Transfer to Quinta de la Rosa; barbecue plus reserve wines.
Fly from Gatwick to Porto; times to be confirmed; transfer to Yeatman Hotel. Talk by Simon Berry followed by dinner at Orangerie restaurant in the hotel.
Thursday 11th September – Porto (Taylor’s cellars and tasting, and tour of the city)
Morning tour and classic premium tasting at Taylor’s, followed by lunch at Baron Fladgate. City tour in the afternoon, followed by light dinner at Clérigos Tasting Room.
Friday 12th September – World of Wine and the Factory House
Morning visit to World of Wine; lunch at the traditional T&C restaurant; free afternoon, followed by dinner at the Factory House.
Sunday 14th September – boat trip down the Douro valley
Boat trip down the Douro river with lunch on board. Dinner and grapetreading at Quinta da Ruêda.
Monday 15th September – Quinta dos Malvedos (Graham’s Quinta)
Lunch and private tour of Malvedos, at Castedo; dinner at Cozinha da Clara at Quinta de la Rosa.
Tuesday 16th September – depart for Blighty
En route to Porto airport, visit Casal de Loivos miradouro, which has beautiful views through the valley, before leaving for Porto airport.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £3,495, which includes all accommodation, meals, drinks with meals and entrances. Single supplement: £500. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st June 2025.
Above: Porto. Right: Douro Valley
Marsh harrier
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
There are three harrier hawk species that breed in Britain: marsh, hen and Montagu’s.
The rare summer migrant Montagu’s (eight breeding pairs) can be discounted. In Britain, the hen harrier is predominantly a moorland bird; the marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus) favours reedbeds. The marsh harrier is the largest and most numerous (up to 695 pairs) and the most readily seen, marshy nature reserves a favourite haunt.
Harriers survey their terrain on the wing, not from a perch, cruising and quartering the ground; in the case of the marsh harrier, often at reed height, dropping suddenly when it sees its quarry – voles, rats, eggs, chicks and sometimes adult birds such as coots.
They are designed for gliding flight, usually at less than 15ft, with light bodies, large broad wings and long legs designed to penetrate the deepest reedbed. Like other harriers, they are capable of an aerobatic courting display, in which the male passes what it has caught to the female as a climactic gesture.
The rise in numbers is a recent phenomenon. Immemorially it must have enjoyed a boom period in the extensive fens and marshes. Land drainage since the 17th century has been the main cause of its British decline. At the outset of the 19th century it was still widespread, but by 1900 it was extinct. Ever more efficient drainage, prompted by the food demands of a rapidly expanding industrial population, was the explanation, along with its side effects.
A fashion for stuffed birds and egg collections took its toll, compounded by the invention of the double-barrel cartridge-loaded shotgun, which introduced the golden age of sporting estates. Vermin control by over-zealous gamekeepers outlawed even birds of prey once prized by kings.
Reedbeds, in Norfolk particularly, attracted a few marsh harriers to return – the hawk is globally widespread where water and well-vegetated margins are found. But intensive farming not only destroyed reedbeds, which declined by 90 per cent in the 20th century, but brought destructive organochlorine pesticides, notably DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-trichlorothane).
DDT, introduced in the 1940s to protect the military and civilian population from insect-borne diseases such as malaria and typhus, was soon applied to benefit crops, livestock and gardens. It was easily stored through fats within the food chain of raptors. One of its most damaging effects
was that it thinned their eggshells, causing easy breakage.
By 1971, there was only one marsh harrier pair in Britain. A complete DDT ban by the 1980s was dramatically beneficial. In 2024 they are more numerous than at any time in 150 years.
For birdwatchers, autumn and winter is the prime season to visit coastal reserves; waders and wildfowl are returning from their moorland breeding grounds or the glacial north for warmer weather. The sight of a marsh harrier, often an ominously dark female or a juvenile male, spreads the alarm and sets the air alight with needlessly anxious, glimmering flocks.
Born to be Wilde
Oscar
Wilde
was
born in Dublin
170 years ago. His first 20 years in Ireland sparked his daring, licence and genius. By Matthew Sturgis
Merrion Square is a handsome enclave in the heart of Dublin, with large-windowed, red-brick Georgian houses set round a verdant central garden.
It was in a house (Number 1, pictured) on the north-west corner of the square that Oscar Wilde grew up. He was born 170 years ago, on 16th October 1854, in nearby Westland Row. The family moved to Merrion Square the following year.
When I first sought out the Merrion Square house some dozen years ago, while researching my biography of Oscar, I was struck by the scale and grandeur of the property. A bourgeois palace, it seemed quite the equal of anything that Bloomsbury or Edinburgh’s New Town might offer.
An oval plaque adorned the façade. I assumed it must be for the creator of the Happy Prince, Dorian Gray and Lady Bracknell. But no: it commemorated instead ‘Sir William Robert Wills Wilde. 1815-1876’, Oscar’s father – lauded, in elegant lettering, as an ‘aural and ophthalmic surgeon, archaeologist, ethnologist, antiquarian, biographer, statistician, naturalist, topographer, historian, [and] folklorist’.
Here was a reminder of both the extraordinary practical energy of the Victorian middle classes and the prominence, indeed the fame, of Oscar’s
father. The small, bustling, bewhiskered Sir William (knighted in 1864, for his work on the statistical analysis of the Irish census returns) was, in his wife’s words, ‘a Dublin celebrity’, renowned for his medical skill, his public philanthropy, his rackety sex life and his painstaking cataloguing of the collection of the Royal Irish Academy.
And Lady Wilde was quite his equal: as a young woman, she had achieved fame writing impassioned nationalistic poetry under the pseudonym Speranza. (She has recently been honoured with a plaque at Merrion Square – as, belatedly, has Oscar.)
Tall, imposing, grandiloquent, she had the air of a Celtic priestess or a Roman heroine. Together, she and Sir William
stood at the heart of the intellectual life of the city.
In the high-ceilinged rooms at 1 Merrion Square, they hosted a neverending succession of intimate dinners and crowded receptions.
Their neighbours from the square, and friends from further afield, included medical and legal men, political figures, religious leaders (from both sides of Catholic/Church of Ireland divide), scientists and writers. Trinity College was literally just round the corner, and many of the university’s brightest dons gathered at the Wildes’ hospitable board. Prominent among them was the irrepressible young Professor of Ancient History J P Mahaffy, a scholar and wit, among whose aperçus was the observation that ‘In Ireland, the inevitable never happens, and the unexpected constantly occurs.’
From earliest childhood, Oscar and his older brother, Willie, were part of this stimulating social life, allowed to stay up to meet the dinner guests, tasked with fetching books from the library, indulged with opportunities to perform. And as they grew into their teens, they were invited to join the throng.
Dublin, Wilde’s childhood home
The conditions for growth were ideal. And, in thinking about Oscar Wilde’s later achievements – literary, dramatic and social – it is important to keep in mind that he lived for the first 20 years of his life in this scintillating world of Dublin talk.
One overseas visitor recalled the conversation at Merrion Square as something exceptional: ‘easy and humorous’ in a way that was quite novel to them. There was an abhorrence of pedantry and over-assertion. William Stokes, the doctor who was Sir William’s great mentor and friend, considered it ‘the golden rule of conversation to know nothing accurately’. And the rule was closely observed at 1 Merrion Square. Lightness was all. Stories were told.
The young Bram Stoker – future author of Dracula – gathered tales from around the Merrion Square table. Ideas were sported with. ‘Every creed’ was both ‘defended and demolished’.
There was an air of daring, licence and fun. It was among Lady Wilde’s jests that she wanted to found an evangelical
society ‘for the suppression of virtue’.
For Oscar, this was a key part of his Irish inheritance – to set alongside the fine classical training he received at the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (where, unlike – a later attendee – Samuel Beckett, he failed to master the game of cricket, but did master the mysteries of Greek grammar); the intellectual stimulation of three years at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied under Mahaffy and the no-less-brilliant R Y Tyrrell; and the love of the heather-clad hills of Connemara, in the far west, where the family had a holiday home.
Another key element was the enjoyment of country pursuits. Oscar, in his youth, was a keen fisherman and tolerable shot. When asked to declare his ‘favourite game’ in a country-house album, he set down ‘snipe’ alongside ‘lawn tennis’.
Although the Wildes belonged to the Anglo-Irish elite, although they were attached to the established church (two of Sir William’s brothers were Church of Ireland clergymen), although they spoke without any hint of an Irish brogue, although they owned land, they were all romantic nationalists, with a deep understanding of Ireland’s ancient culture, with a firm belief in Home Rule and with a clear recognition of the need for land reform.
These were among the items of intellectual baggage that Oscar brought with him when he came to England at the age of 20. He arrived to study at Oxford
His Irishness, though not pronounced, was always distinct
University, and he remained to make his name in the literary and artistic worlds of London. After leaving Oxford, he barely returned to Ireland during the remaining 20-plus years of his life.
His Irishness, though not overtly pronounced, was always distinct. He would obscure it sometimes, and emphasise it at others, enjoying the sense of otherness that it could confer.
The brilliance of his Dublin-learnt talk brought him a great many dinner invitations and a certain amount of social success. It became his jest that ‘If only one could teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen, [London] society would be quite civilised.’
His nationalist sympathies gave him a place on one side of the great Brexit-like fault line running through the politics of the day: he was with Gladstone and the Liberals against the Tories and the Unionists. His views on land reform drew him towards the exciting new creed of socialism (even if his essay on the subject extended the theory into an idiosyncratic ‘individualism’ – which seemed intent on directing the resources of the state towards making life simpler and more pleasant for artists in general and Oscar Wilde in particular).
During his early years in England, he was helped by London’s expatriate Irish community – writers, journalists and politicians. They mentioned him in their articles, put him up for their clubs and had him to their parties. He enjoyed a first glimpse of society glamour when invited to Lady Olive Guinness’s ball at Carlton House Terrace.
With his Dublin-born contemporary George Bernard Shaw, he endured a slightly awkward rapport. There was genuine admiration between them, yet – as Shaw recalled it – ‘we put each other out frightfully’. The lower-middleclass, self-educated Shaw insisted on viewing the Merrion-Square-raised Wilde as a slightly unapproachable ‘Dublin snob’.
Nevertheless, they recognised they had brilliance in common, and jestingly referred to their successful comic plays, written during the 1890s, as Ops 1 to 5 in the new Hibernian School.
It was a ‘school’ founded on verbal wit and paradoxical argument. And, as such, it carried, in Wilde’s case, the distinct echo of those spirited evenings of talk and laughter under the high ceilings of 1 Merrion Square. Oscar’s success, like his genius, was made in Ireland.
Matthew Sturgis is author of Oscar: A Life
Oscar Wilde in 1882. Opposite: 1 Merrion Square,
Ambling along the public footpath that runs from Manningtree to Flatford, hiking through lush green meadows flanked by gnarled old oaks, I feel as if I’m home at last. Yet I’ve been here only a few times.
Why does this pastoral setting feel so familiar, even to a lifelong Londoner like me? Because this pretty patchwork of fields and hedgerows was the favourite subject of Britain’s greatest landscape painter, John Constable. Two hundred years since he painted it, the view has hardly changed.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have grown up with Constable’s paintings of this gentle, fertile terrain – the flood plain of the River Stour, which forms the ancient boundary between Essex and Suffolk. For me, and millions like me, this scene is the epitome of Englishness. When I shut my eyes and think of England, I see his subtle pictures of the Stour.
The most famous of these paintings is The Hay Wain, the focus of a new exhibition at London’s National Gallery.
I’ve marvelled at this picture, and others like it, ever since I was a child. What I didn’t know until a few years ago was that the scenery he painted has been beautifully preserved. A visit to this bucolic enclave, Dedham Vale, is an ideal introduction to Constable’s life and work. It’s also a wonderful weekend away.
Getting here is easy. Despite its relative seclusion, Dedham Vale is only about ten miles by road from either Ipswich or Colchester. If you’re feeling energetic, an even better way is to take a train to Manningtree (on the London-to-Norwich
main line) and do the rest on foot. Walking through the land he painted is the best way to get inside his head.
Following the footpath from the station, it’s two miles to Flatford Mill, where Constable painted The Hay Wain The site is run by the National Trust. In the gift shop, I meet one of their guides, a retired teacher called Pat Hodgkins. She’s kindly offered to show me round.
As Pat explains, the River Stour is the heart and soul of Constable Country. Constable’s father was a miller, and this stretch of the river was the source of all
A walk round Constable Country
As a National Gallery show opens, William Cook visits the artist’s favourite haunts
his wealth. As well as milling grain here, he also ran a fleet of barges, carrying all sorts of goods up and down the river. You can still make out the dry dock where his boats were built and repaired.
In Constable’s day, this site would have been a lot busier, crowded with people hard at work, rather than sightseers taking snapshots. Yet despite today’s tourist traffic, Flatford Mill remains remarkably authentic. There’s hardly anything that wasn’t here 200 years ago.
‘The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten banks, slimy posts and brickwork – I love such things,’ declared Constable. ‘As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places.’ Indeed, he painted them throughout his life.
The highlight is Willy Lott’s house, the backdrop to The Hay Wain. The entire scene is still the same. Just up the road is East Bergholt, the village where Constable was born and brought up. His house is long gone, but the parish church, where his parents are buried, is well worth a look.
From East Bergholt, it’s about a mile to Dedham, where Constable went to school. I follow his route across water meadows, where cows and sheep are grazing. His old grammar school is still there – now a private house. The church tower is a landmark in many of his pictures; inside the church is one of his rare religious paintings (The Ascension).
Dedham is a lovely village, with an elegant high street more befitting a prosperous market town. The façades of the houses are Georgian, the interiors Elizabethan. It’s serene and understated, without a single eyesore. As Pevsner observed, there’s nothing here to hurt the eye.
I stop off for high tea at the Essex Rose, a delightfully old-fashioned tearoom in a medieval house on the high street. It’s owned by Tiptree, the Essex
Opposite: The Hay Wain (1821) by John Constable. Left: the Munnings Art Museum, Dedham. Below: Constable’s The Ascension (1821-22), St Michael’s Church, Manningtree
but hardly setting the art world alight. He didn’t become a Royal Academician until he was 52 – in stark contrast to Turner, his contemporary, who became an RA at 24.
Constable exhibited The Hay Wain at the RA, but no one wanted to buy it. In several subsequent exhibitions, it also failed to find a buyer. In 1824, he sent it to Paris, where it was showered with accolades. It inspired Delacroix, the Barbizon school and the Impressionists. Far from being purely English, it kickstarted Continental modern art.
jam-makers – you can buy jars of their classic preserves in a quaint little pantry out the back. I come away full of cake and scones and sandwiches, and with a pot of Tiptree lemon curd, a present for my wife.
I spend the night at Milsom, a handsome old hotel in leafy grounds on the green edge of the village. The bedrooms are supremely comfy and the house style is refreshingly informal. In the smart house restaurant, I feast on steak and chips and strawberries and cream, washed down with a pint of Adnams (brewed in Suffolk), and then shuffle upstairs to bed.
Next morning, after a full English breakfast, I walk across to Castle House, on the other side of the village. This graceful country house, now an atmospheric museum, was the home and studio of Sir Alfred Munnings.
The best equestrian artist since Stubbs, he is ripe for a revival. Here you see another side of him, more intimate and impressionistic. His paintings of the Stour Valley, which he knew so well, are enchanting.
A miller’s son, like Constable, Munnings was one of the few artists of recent times who really understood country life. Like Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (written a mere 30 miles away, in Suffolk), his work is a poignant testament to a traditional way of life which has almost disappeared.
Blythe died last year, aged 100. A biography by Ian Collins, Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe, is out on 7th November.
Over a scrumptious lunch in the Sun Inn, a historic coaching inn on the high street, I read up about The Hay Wain; how it came to be Britain’s most iconic painting, the picture that encapsulates our idea of rural England. The real story is a lot more interesting than the myth.
When Constable painted The Hay Wain, in 1821, he was already in his mid-forties, making a living as an artist
What the French liked so much about the painting was its truthfulness; its unsentimental attitude to nature. Like Munnings, Constable had grown up in this unassuming corner of the country. He was familiar with the people who lived and worked here. He knew the rhythms of their daily lives.
He captured the essence of the English countryside. Constable Country isn’t spectacular. It’s modest and discreet.
‘I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour,’ he reflected. ‘These scenes made me a painter.’
Time to go. The walk back to Manningtree station takes me an hour. I’m in no hurry to get there. I dawdle along the way, admiring oaks that Constable would have seen and painted.
There’s nothing dramatic about this landscape, and that’s why it’s so appealing. A lot of places used to look a lot like this.
Maybe that’s why it feels so much like home.
Discover Constable and The Hay Wain is at the National Gallery, London, 17th October to 2nd February, admission free
Doubles at Milsom (milsomhotels.com) from £220, including breakfast
Overlooked Britain Surreal Sussex
Edward James turned a Lutyens villa into a crazy gem, electrified by the works of Salvador Dalí
lucinda lambton
Was Monkton House in Sussex a glorious surrealist conceit, or a hideous nightmare of a house?
Both! It was as peculiar as can be, yet at the same time it was beautifully ugly!
Forty years ago, battles were fought to save it and open it to the public. But, in the bitter end, in 1986, the house –along with many of its wildly odd, surrealist contents – was sold. The house remains, but its magical collection has gone.
Whatever you might have thought of the surrealist movement, this was the lone example of the style in this country and should have survived, for either our delight or our derision.
It once held the greatest assembly of surrealist art in the country – in fact, the
Above and right: Monkton House, designed in 1902 by Edwin Lutyens. Alterations were made in the 1930s for Edward James by Kit Nicholson and Hugh Casson, with help from Salvador Dalí
only one. And, of all miracles, it was in the home counties.
At the height of the battle to save it, the notable architectural historian Gavin Stamp wrote, ‘Had this ensemble not been broken up, Britain could now boast the finest collection of surrealist art in the world.’
Oh woe! A thousand woes!
Monkton had a chequered history. It had been originally built and elaborately clad in brick by Sir Edwin Lutyens for the Americans Mr and Mrs
Willie James in 1902, as a retreat from the grandeur of West Dean, their imposing house some five miles away. West Dean is now the West Dean College of Art and Conservation, a registered charity which teaches courses in historic crafts and preservation.
Monkton was then to be transformed into a startling surrealist conceit by their son Edward James (1907-84), 30 years later.
Edward was a surprising figure. When alone at Monkton, he would stride starknaked about the place, most particularly about the woods, with Radio 3 blasting loudly from loudspeakers from the roof of the house. As often as not, the music might change to roaring philosophical talks or anything else equally unsuitable for his woodland walks!
Edward had led a lively life. One of his earliest memories was of seeing his parents’ butler present Edward VII with a box tied up with a giant pink ribbon, in which his mother was lying, smothered with wax and with a key attached to her chest labelled ‘Wind here’.
When this was obeyed, Mrs James would dance ‘mechanically’ around the room.
‘That sort of thing,’ he was told, ‘kept the King amused.’
The James
family was immensely rich and Edward spent lavishly throughout his life, either as a serious patron of the arts – most particularly of the surrealists; he was the first to support Salvador Dalí – or on the development of his own wild ideas.
He had had dramatic tastes all his life; as an undergraduate at Oxford, he had painted his ceiling a singular shade of bright purple, with a two-foot-deep quotation from Seneca, in gold, along a mauve frieze.
Dalí often came to Monkton. With the architect Christopher Nicholson, assisted by Sir Hugh Casson, and with Norris Wakefield in charge of the decoration, the whole house was brilliantly transformed.
The outside walls were painted purple over peacock blue and the front door the most luscious sugar-pink. Pretend linen, made of plaster, was hung out of the windows as if to dry, also coloured the same somewhat curious blue.
At Monkton, the outside walls had been built of brick – designed for the house to appear as a hunting lodge –but now they were to be most dramatically exoticised.
The whole house was, if you please, to be painted Edward’s favourite purple, with lofty, blue, painted palm trees supporting the roof on either side of the front door. The drainpipes were also blue, yet fashioned to look like bamboo. Plaster
folds, the same blue, were draped round the windows, apparently tied with a decorative knot.
Inside, the grand master Lutyens vanished without a trace. The staircase was now designed to sweep up in an Odeon cinema-like curve, past a fish tank set into the wall. Full of fish, the tank gave an oblique view of the guest bathroom and the guest in the bath!
The wallpaper was printed as the exact match (including the stitching) of the Italian material that lines the corridors of the house. The carpets were woven with the footprints of Edward’s Irish wolfhound – a somewhat sad symbol of his failed marriage to Tilly Losch, whose footprints had been woven into the stair carpet at West Dean.
Then there was the drawing room, originally to be decorated like the lining
The footprints were a somewhat sad symbol of his failed marriage
of a sickly dog’s stomach, with dramatically flapping and ‘breathing’ walls! And Mae West’s gorgeous red lips were the inspiration of the two sofas in the dining room. Stars shone brilliantly on the illuminated glass ceiling of the spare bedroom, which were positioned as they had been on the day of Edward’s birth.
Edward’s bed was inspired by Nelson’s hearse and stood in a room entirely covered with shimmering chicken wire. Most glorious of all was the circular bathroom, with a dome of Styrian jade and walls of pink alabaster, through which shone a gold and a silver moon. It was not loved by all; one critic described it as ‘A mad potentate’s private brothel’.
Above: the drawing room, with a pair of Mae West Lips sofas and Champagne standard lamps (1938) designed by Salvador Dalí and Edward James
Above: the hall, with La Comédie du Soir by Paul Delvaux (1936). Below left: footprint carpet at West Dean, 1950
On the Road
Cello traveller
Julian Lloyd Webber tells Louise Flind about his musical family, the genius of Rostropovich and playing with Yehudi Menuhin
What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?
My father (the composer William Lloyd Webber) used to rent cottages in locations chosen because of my brother’s love of ancient monuments. We’d usually end up going down ridiculous unpaved roads, getting flat tyres, with my father effing and blinding.
What was it like growing up in such a musical house? Was it inevitable you’d become a musician?
It seemed completely normal to me – all this racket going on in every room. It might have been slightly more assumed for my life than for Andrew’s, because Andrew was really into all these monuments.
Were your parents terrific music teachers to you and Andrew?
My father was a brilliant musician, but it was arm’s length, and my mother was a really good piano teacher for young children. But it was a disaster with me because I found it very odd learning with someone I called Mum.
How old were you when you first picked up a cello?
Four. Mum took me to the Festival Hall to hear an orchestral children’s concert and I just loved the look of the cello and asked to play one. It was a tenth-size cello and when it arrived I was very disappointed.
What other instruments did you play? I tried the trumpet, which was even worse in a London flat with neighbours.
Did you play in the school orchestra? I went to University College School and tried not to play in the orchestra because it wasn’t very good.
When did you decide to become a soloist? Rostropovich gave a huge series of nine concerts in London and I went to every single one aged 11.
What was your first big break?
In my final concert at the Royal College in 1972, I played the immense Prokofiev
Symphony Concerto and Sir Arthur Bliss was there. After the concert, he left me his own cello concerto. I learnt it, and played it to him. I was unbelievably nervous. And he arranged for me to give the first London performance of it at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
What was your first engagement abroad?
It was a European young musicians’ TV show in Holland in 1973; I played two movements of the Haydn D Major Concerto. The last one’s very difficult – I thought it had gone really well, and everybody went off to the bar for loads of drinks. Then the producer said we had to retake as there were problems with the lighting.
How many cellos do you have?
I don’t have any, because I had to retire from playing after a herniated disc in my neck reduced my bowing-arm power in 2014.
How did you travel with your cello? You have to have a seat for the cello, but they never know how to check a cello in.
What’s your favourite concert hall? The Usher Hall [in Edinburgh] acoustically is terrific, and the Albert Hall for its sense of history is unbeatable.
What was Yehudi Menuhin like? I loved working with Yehudi. He’s one of the great string players – so I always felt he would watch my bow and I could be as free as I liked.
What do you think about British music education, which you’ve been a great supporter of?
At one time it was probably the best in the world. I think the system is very unfair on children, a lot of whom get no
access to music – but the new government have promised to reintroduce music to schools.
Is Britain still the land without music?
For a lot of children, it is.
How did the Paganini variation composed by your brother, Andrew, become the South Bank Show theme tune?
Andrew had written this piece for me, as the result of a bet on a Leyton Orient match. We made the album, and Melvyn Bragg was looking for new things for his South Bank Show…
Have you worked a lot with Andrew? That was it, except for his film score for The Odessa File (1974), and we sometimes played in concert together.
You retired in 2014 – do you miss performing in public?
I miss that live connection with the audience, but I conduct a bit and then it’s immediately back.
Do you have a go at the local language when you’re abroad?
I would rather learn a new concerto.
What’s your biggest headache when travelling?
Airport, cello, security, fiddling around with liquid…
What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept while being away?
For two weeks, I did a tour with the Moscow Soloists, on a coach around the US, and they fixed up this bed and I just drew the curtain between me and the other members of the orchestra and slept as a rock ’n’ roller…
Classic FM’s Rising Stars with Julian Lloyd Webber is on Sky Arts TV this autumn
Taking a Swim
In the swim on Hampstead Heath
patrick barkham
Stuck on a train to London in an August heatwave, passengers were taking emergency measures: fans, cold drinks pressed to cheeks, quiet expiration.
As I journeyed, I realised I was an hour early for a journalistic assignation at a pub close to Hampstead Heath. I hadn’t set foot in this pub since I lived close to the Heath a quarter of a century ago, when I was new to London and swam in the ponds.
I had a sudden, nostalgic brainwave: could I swim in the ponds before my meeting?
I’d heard dark tales about pre-booked admission only, but when I checked online, miraculously, the hour-long slot before my interview was still available. I booked and changed trains for the Heatwave Express, the North London Line, which takes swimmers to the Heath.
The mixed pond is a brown lozenge of water set in a cleft in the rolling greenery, surrounded by thickets of sallow and oak. The set-up appeared unchanged in a quarter-century (apart from the iPad check-in): retro black-painted corrugated iron separated the open-air men’s and women’s changing areas; no lockers (trusting swimmers); towels discarded on the grass; no mobile phones or music allowed in the swimming zone.
The men’s changing area, a vast empty space shaded by a huge beech, was empty, except for one man, talking loudly to Otis on his phone.
When I stepped onto the sunny jetty, the most remarkable thing was the sound rising from the water. It was a babble of human voices, and each one was joyful.
The swimmers were mostly in twos or fours, friends and couples, and they were talking, talking, talking. They hung off floating rings and chatted. They swam breaststroke and chatted.
‘He has a boat?’
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything useful with AI.’
‘What year is he in?’
Why do we love to converse in water? Somehow, it lightens our load, and encourages us to unburden ourselves. You can’t have a truly private conversation in water, though. Most people are oblivious to how easily speech slides across the surface.
The voices were Brummie, Scottish, Spanish and Gen Alpha: young newcomers to the capital, just as I had been in 1997. I admired these fresh versions of me: full of enthusiasm for London, life and themselves. Ah, to be young, in Hampstead Ponds, in the heatwave of 2024!
Actually, it was just as lovely to be a middle-aged or well-aged swimmer. The brown water was refreshingly cool and soft, and surprisingly sweet to taste. (I didn’t mean to sup from the Hampstead springs, but some water seeped into my mouth after I jumped in.)
I swam underwater, and the
temperature rapidly cooled. When I touched the bottom, London clay squidged appealingly between my toes.
I spent a lot of time floating, gazing upwards, admiring how the sunlight bounced off the water and fired shards of gold into the darkening oaks. Their strong limbs stretched over the pond. A squirrel thrashed about on one branch over the water. I hoped it would somersault into the water like Tom Daley, but it failed to medal.
Above the squirrel, an emperor dragonfly whizzed around, plucking mosquitos from the sky. Higher still, the hazy blue was punctuated by planes, glinting in the sunshine as they curved over the city.
If you’ve not lingered in cool water outdoors for an hour for a while, or ever, try it – it transforms your day.
I stayed in for every allotted minute and then hauled out, chilled and smelling faintly of mud water, a scent I proudly sported until evening.
When I returned to the changing area, the man on the phone appeared not to have moved. Had he really spent his whole swimming hour on the phone to Otis? It’s London – so I didn’t ask, and I’ll never know. And on we both went.
I tingled with pleasure as I breasted Parliament Hill and floated down the other side, to the pub.
Book tickets (£4.70 per hour slot) via Eventbrite.co.uk
9 Name of chap with savings account? (5)
10 Accountant chasing obscure returns for day in June? (9)
11 Time invested in people who dislike milliners (7)
12 Keep it in the family (7)
13 See 28
14 Sleuth may be flawed, needing time for force (9)
16 10,25. One of 27’s now outside a lake, sadly and 10,25 (2,1,6,3,3)
28, 1 and 13 Novel drink accompanying tea in the East End (5,4,5)
Down
Genius crossword 444 EL SERENO
1 See 28
2 Conservative legislation on American plant (6)
3 Put one’s foot down seeing expert covering Electra complex (10)
4 Mother’s back employed and happily occupied (6)
5 Owned up and afforded entry (8)
6 Day university doctor becomes speechless (4)
7 Condition of work supporting setter’s favourite island (8)
8 Positional advantage gained from game of cards with the boss (10)
13 ‘About a Boy’, competent and logical (10)
15 Take measures against law regarding shop trading? (10)
17 Arouse curiosity in love affair (8)
18 No barriers on air for these wise guys (4-4)
20 Uplifting study about politician and fire control (6)
22 Eccentric party under waterfall (6)
24 God revealing good intentions (4)
26 Dress made of over 50% rubbish (4)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 16th October 2024. 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.
Runners-up: Martin Kay, Prenton, Merseyside; Annie Davies, St Asaph, Denbighshire
1
Smug South was rather pleased with his result on this month’s deal from the Australian Gold Coast Congress. Wisely gambling a one opener on a hand that was palpably game-forcing (so worth two clubs) in order to bid out his shape, he reached the decent-ish (but not great) six spades.
(1) Showing his fifth spade and therefore, because he bid clubs first, a sixth club (he would open one spade with five-five). (2) Needs so little opposite. West led the nine of his partner’s hearts, declarer beating East’s queen with the ace. Declarer now cashed the ace-king of spades and was delighted to observe East’s queen fall (if four low spades had appeared, he had planned to play ace-king of clubs, ruff a club – with the ten – and drop his heart on the ace of diamonds, conceding only to the queen of spades).
At trick four, declarer crossed to the promoted ten of spades, then bagged the ace of diamonds, dropping his ten of hearts. He now led a club to the knave and was relaxed to lose the trick to West’s queen. Twelve tricks and slam made.
Smug later discovered that his was not the best result. Self-Effacing South (who had naturally kept quiet about it) had reached seven spades. After winning the ace of hearts and cashing the ace-king of spades (felling the queen), S-ES had cashed the ace-king of clubs and ruffed a club with the ten of spades. S-ES dropped his ten of hearts on the ace of diamonds, ruffed back to hand, cashed the knave of spades –drawing West’s nine – and claimed the grand slam.
ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 310 you were invited to write a poem called Autumn Feeling. I enjoyed the refrain of Sylvia Smith’s apocopated villanelle: ‘Let’s face it, Keats – the weather’s up the spout.’ Richard Spencer wrote a sort of autumn carol with the chorus ‘That umami of Roquefort and nuts…’ Ian Nalder remembered the days when one might expect at the end of autumn a Christmas card depicting ‘deer clad in scarlet hats, to avoid them, I suppose, from feeling chilly’. G M Southgate began with two lines that made me want to read on: ‘It isn’t that I don’t care for the leaves / That swirl around, tired out, barely alive’. Bill Holloway’s opening couplet was surprising too: ‘Bare buttocks now no longer burn,/ And “noble rot” becomes Sauternes.’ Commiserations to them and to Jenny Wilks, Alastair Carmichael, Veronica Colin, Robert Morrow, Ann Beckett, John Drake, Matt Brookwell, David Cunningham, Stefan Badham, Martin Elster and Graham Rumney, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Christine Christopher.
The close awakes again
To school-run parking, squealing, swearing, banging doors.
Silence. Then swish of brush on leaves, the last mow drone, The coo of pigeons, hum of bees, planes rumbling home.
Slip on smooth rubber, rough tweed and ridge of cord
And crackle the musty debris underfoot To tongue the bobble of berries.
Sup sweet caramel of un-gleaned fruit, Breath in, yeast sweat of corn.
Though every year these thoughts banal, Though spring’s bright youth is spent and summer’s verve is burnt, Stay warm, the lush embers of my years, As child of my child scuffs home from class
Thumbing the keys of killer game. Then new day, new screen, the dead men rise.
So, winter, do your worst with me –I have found the replay key!
Christine Christopher
The bittersweet – a vibe that rings a bell
When hope collides with actuality
And there’s no medicine to make it well, No rescue party out to set you free
From the convulsions of your private Hell, Only the Brief Encounter recipe –
A fictive proxy to rehearse the plot. If art can lull Weltschmerz, why ever not?
That sentiment suffuses Les feuilles mortes, A torch song for the ages, sad but true, In which conflicting memories cavort, Astringent and Utopian, high and blue, Strange arabesques of intermingled thought.
The fall means death must happen to renew A life in spring. Leaves wilt to save the tree: The cycle of Samsara, naturally.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Another one ticked off, vacation over: From Machu Picchu, Margate or Moldova Wistfully, unwillingly we slouch
To Bradford, Birkenhead, Burnham-onCrouch,
Resume the cliché nine-to-five, the grind
Of British Standard Living and remind Ourselves that summer holidays, in essence,
Are valued by their very evanescence… Hot on their tail, the ‘-ber’ months Sept and Oct,
After which, intrinsically interlocked, Nobody’s friend November, drear December,
The year’s sunset a dimly dying ember. Our years fade too; we lived them to the hilt,
But now, like the rosebay willowherb, we wilt.
Mike Morrison
Once we stopped beside an estuary, Autumn it was, a melancholy day. Five ghost swans winged Across a charcoal sky.
Land shifted into water. Grey all grey.
Sir Heron and his Lady scanned Their realm, jetsam, a bleached bone, Marsh grass. Gulls bickered And a thin wind keened.
Desolate, desolate.
But all their own.
Judith Tremaine Drazin
COMPETITION No 312 Some books are left half-read, some left half-written, some overtaken by events. So a poem, please, called An Unfinished Book. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 312’, by Thursday 17th October.
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I’m allergic to people
QI have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and a particular difficulty I have is that I get extremely irritated by other people’s mannerisms. I have been like this since childhood, with parents, partners and professionally, and am finally accepting that this is something I have to live with.
I have isolated myself from people, because I don’t want to cause offence when someone I’m with makes small unconscious movements or sounds that I find excruciating. As I can’t avoid all human contact, I was wondering what you considered to be the best thing for me to do in such a situation – make an excuse to leave, grin and bear it or ask the person to stop doing whatever it is that irritates.
I’m not sure whether the last option is acceptable and would appreciate your views. Name and address supplied
AI can identify with this only to a very minor degree, but having had to spend a long train journey with a compulsive sniffer until I felt irrational and unreasonable rage, I can sympathise. (I eventually handed him a tissue, but it didn’t make much difference!) This is a situation where you need someone else to help – either a close family member or a friend who can speak on your behalf – or contact the National Autistic Society, which can issue a card to explain your situation and even personalise it (autism.org.uk/shop/ products/merchandise/alert-card).
Another source of help might be the online community, where you can speak to other sufferers and share experiences and offer advice (autism.org.uk/whatwe-do/community).
I do hope you get some help.
ISSN 0965-2507.
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
Neglectful nephew
QI’m 75, widowed and have a large house in London. I have recently started letting out one room to a very pretty girl. She is kind and helpful; so it is good having her around.
The problem is I have a 25-year-old nephew who comes to stay once a month and in the past we always had great fun and I looked forward to him coming.
I know he enjoyed our suppers too, because his mother told me that he’d said coming to stay was the highlight of his month. But now this girl has arrived, it’s all changed. He can’t wait to fly off upstairs to talk to her once we’ve finished eating and I’m left feeling, frankly, upset and jealous, doing the washing-up on my own. I feel so utterly stupid and humiliated admitting this. Is there any way I can communicate this to him without making myself seem like a desperate, needy, mad old aunt?
(By the way, I don’t get the impression she’s remotely interested in him.)
Name and address supplied
AThis is really a case of extreme bad manners, isn’t it? Try to put your feelings of rejection to one side and concentrate on your nephew’s rudeness – which I’m sure he doesn’t perceive as rudeness. He has no idea how much his visits mean to you. Like most young people – and lots of old people, come to that – he can’t conceive that his presence makes much difference to anyone. Next time he arrives, sit him down as if you’re a schoolmistress and say, ‘I need to explain something to you. When you get to my age, you can feel very lonely and unwanted. And I look forward to your visits. So when you rush off to hobnob with my lodger after supper, I feel very
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rejected. If you want to meet her, make a date to see her another day. This day is our time together and I feel hurt and taken for granted if you abandon me for her.’
Said in a firm, confident and somewhat admonitory voice without a trace of ‘poor me’, this might make him feel ghastly –but I hope it will have the desired effect.
Get him to the loo on time
QMy father suffers from a very bad knee but refuses to have an operation – probably because he’s frightened. This wouldn’t be so bad, but he also refuses to have a stairlift – it seems to be pride, rather than anything else – and I caught him the other day going upstairs on his bottom. As the toilet is on the next floor, there have been some nasty crises when he hasn’t been able to get to the lavatory in time. Naturally other people have to clear up after him. What can we do?
Name and address supplied
AYou have a bargaining chip: your presence. Presumably you’ve begged and pleaded, and I know that threatening your temporary withdrawal is cruel – but it could be effective. Tell him that unless he buys a lift or installs a very sanitary and smellfree portable loo on the ground floor, of the kind that strong men use on sailing boats (all this is simply pride, I’m afraid), you’ll have to limit your visits. Say you want him just to try it for three months. No more. If you have brothers or sisters, get them to put the pressure on, too.
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.
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