Front cover: Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold in Anne of the Thousand Days, 1969
Waynetta Slob v Nancy Mitford page 33
Steamy Puccini page 25
The Old Un’s Notes
‘In Memory of Roger Law’ reads a caption at the end of the first episode of the new series of satirical quiztainment show Have I Got News for You.
This was a tribute to the late BBC lawyer Roger Law –but it was certainly news for friends and fans of satirist and Spitting Image co-creator Roger Law.
There followed a flurry of activity on social media enquiring after the radical puppeteer ceramicist’s wellbeing, as well as such heartfelt tributes as ‘Goodnight, Roger Law – I guess God needs someone to put his arm up his arse.’
Law, 83, rings the Old Un to confirm that news of his death is greatly exaggerated.
Still, following a bout of illhealth, he has designed his own gravestone, with final dates to be inserted.
The inscription reads, ‘I left myself today; I couldn’t wait to get away.’
‘Please, sir, I want some more.’
So said poor Oliver in the famous workhouse scene in Oliver Twist (1838).
That workhouse was based by Charles Dickens on the real workhouse in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, London.
Dickens lived just down the road, at 22 Cleveland Street, in his bleak childhood.
Amazingly, the 1778 workhouse building survives. It is now home to a new development, Fitzroy Walk,
described as ‘A collection of gated Georgian buildings set behind landscaped gardens, meticulously restored.’
And, my, how it’s gated! The new gate (pictured) is more forbidding than the old workhouse gate, as imagined in
Among this month’s contributors
John Humphrys (p18) presented the Today programme from 1987 to 2019. He presented the BBC Nine O’Clock News and Mastermind. In 1966, he reported on the Aberfan disaster.
Hugo Vickers (p22) is the biographer of Queen Mary and the Duchess of Windsor. His new book is Clarissa – Muse to Power: The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon
Rev Dr Peter Mullen (p25) was Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London. He has been an Anglican priest for over 50 years and has published more than 40 books of theology and philosophy.
Lucinda Lambton (p80) is our Overlooked Britain correspondent. She is author of Chambers of Delight, Vanishing Victoriana, Old New World and The Queen’s Dolls’ House.
the 1948 film version of Oliver Twist, starring Alec Guinness. Now, though, the gate keeps the street urchins out, not in.
During the Conservative leadership campaign, Robert Jenrick recalled the day David Cameron and Boris campaigned for him at the 2014 Newark by-election. They were visiting a biscuit stall in Newark marketplace and the attendant press pack demanded that they buy something.
Boris duly bought Dave a large Jammie Dodger. Dave retaliated by buying Boris a bag of rocky road. Score draw.
Francis Terry, the architect of so many fine, modern, classical country houses, has embarked on his noblest mission yet. He is trying to persuade developers in Colchester to use the site of a Roman circus from the early-second century AD to form the basis of a new classically inspired urban masterplan. It’s a David-andGoliath battle – and, boy, can this David draw!
This chariot racing arena – probably funded by the Emperor Hadrian himself –was uncovered in 2004, and is the only known example in Britain.
It has two parallel tracks with a semicircular end. Although the walls have disappeared, the site includes the preserved foundations of the starting gates (carceres).
Workhouse gate in Oliver Twist (1948) – and the new version
Important
stories you may have missed
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Trams get a clean-up Sheffield Mercury
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The industrial buildings due to be redeveloped overlap part of the arena’s site, and Terry is calling for a new masterplan that would ‘highlight the lost presence’ of its remains by recognising their form.
This could also mean reconstructing the starting gates on their original foundations, using materials matching those used in Roman Britain.
Architect Quinlan Terry spent the 1980s and ’90s fighting for recognition of the contribution of modern classical architecture. Now his son is fighting for the recognition of our deeper classical past.
Suggesting that housing could be developed around the archaeology – as in the Piazza Navona in Rome, or the Circus in Bath – Francis Terry says he’s been deeply moved by the positive response from people who live and work in the city.
large number of Conservative MPs defeated at the last general election.
John Betjeman has got his revenge on his Oxford college, Magdalen.
Betjeman was sent down for failing his exams. Next September, a century after he matriculated in 1925, the college will host a Betjeman Society symposium.
It seems they want a development, he says, ‘to make Colchester proud of its history’ and ‘the time to make this choice is now’.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the Commons, has reverted to tradition in appointing a Westminster Abbey canon as his new chaplain.
The Speaker’s Chaplaincy was long linked to the abbey but Sir Lindsay’s predecessor, the still unknighted (and un-ennobled) John Bercow, noisily scrapped that.
Sir Lindsay’s new chaplain, the Rev Mark Birch, has a fine singing voice – one acquaintance calls him ‘an Anglican Pavarotti’ – and had a role at the Queen’s funeral.
The Speaker’s Chaplain does more than just say prayers at the start of every day’s sitting. The Rev Mark Birch’s predecessor, Patricia Hillas, was praised for offering a shoulder to cry on for the
Betjeman blamed C S Lewis, his Magdalen tutor. He claimed Lewis said, ‘You’d have only got a third,’ after he was kicked out for failing ‘Divvers’ – slang for Divinity.
Betj embroidered the story. He did fail Divvers twice, but passed on his third try. In fact, he failed the Pass School, his last-chance exams.
How terrific of Magdalen to welcome back one of its most gifted sons with open arms.
‘You were right. Hell is other people!’
Should one defer to bishops? The Green Party’s Lady Jones thinks not. She stood in the House of Lords to complain about the historic convention by which bishops are given priority in debates. Jones found it ‘puzzling that we have to give way to our right reverend friends the bishops. They have loud voices and can speak up – just as we can.’
Lords Leader Angela Smith thought it was down to ‘courtesy’, but that buttered no parsnips for Lady Jones.
The convention may not be about just politeness. There is a suspicion that if bishops did not have precedence, they
Ben Hur in Camulodunum: plan for Colchester’s Roman circus
would never get to speak, because they are so wringing wet they would always let someone else go first.
‘And for my next escape...’
The great classical scholar Peter Green has died, at 99.
He translated Homer and Ovid, which inspired some Bob Dylan lyrics, and wrote a biography of Alexander the Great. With his dashing looks, he is said to have been the model for Guy Perron in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Green, educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, was from the last generation to be rigorously schooled in the Classics. During his first week in the classical sixth at Charterhouse, he said, ‘The form master produced Duff’s text of Juvenal’s third and tenth Satires, accompanied by copies of Samuel Johnson’s imitations, London and The Vanity of Human
Wishes, and set us to translate the Latin at sight, while committing the English to memory, by way of what he termed “a little prep”.’
This paid off in the long run: he took a double first and won the Craven Scholarship. He also said, to an American audience, that an English boarding-school education made ‘war service on the Arakan in Burma a picnic by comparison’.
At Cambridge, he overlapped with fellow Carthusian classicist Simon Raven. ‘Simon,’ he was heard to say, ‘would go to bed with anything on two legs.’
‘That’s rich coming from Peter, who used to boast he’d had a one-legged tart in Westbourne Grove,’ observed another friend.
Neil Innes (1944-2019), the writer and musician dubbed ‘the seventh Python’ after his work with Monty Python, would have been 80 on 9th December.
Innes came up with the dazzling sketch ‘Most Awful Family in Britain’ in the last episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1974.
By then, Innes was the team’s agony aunt. And he was writing with Graham Chapman. Innes said of him, ‘It was impossible to continue after lunchtime, when he was drunk.’
Right royal snap: Colin Glenconner, Roddy Llewellyn and Princess Margaret, Mustique, 1970s. From Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers, a new book by the princess’s lady-in-waiting
A new biography of Innes, Drip My Brain in Joy, has now been written by his widow, garden designer Yvonne. And a show in his memory, How Sweet to Be an Idiot, will be performed by a cast of friends and followers at the Indigo 02 on 28th November.
In other Python news, a
splendid statue of a naked Python, Terry Jones (19422020), in characteristic pose, playing on an organ, gazing out to sea, on Colwyn Bay beachfront, will be unveiled next year. Jones was born in the seaside town.
Michael Palin helped raise the funds for the tribute to his dear old friend.
What an organ! Terry Jones, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1970
There is nothing like Dame Judi
Happy 90th birthday to our greatest living actress
Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Dame Judi Dench has reached 90 years!
Yes, our greatest living actress turns 90 on 9th December, but she does not want us banging on about it, thank you very much.
I know. I am doing a couple of shows in the West End with her in the run-up to Christmas. We are celebrating her extraordinary career on stage and screen, but in the advance publicity material she insisted on all references to her milestone birthday being deleted.
The only upside to the deeply frustrating age-related macular degeneration that has beset her in recent years is that if I manage to sneak a birthday cake onto the stage, she may not notice it.
A couple of years ago, when we were doing an earlier version of our show and I brought on Sir Trevor Nunn as a surprise guest, he was dressed in his trademark black and the audience recognised him instantly – but Judi didn’t.
‘Who is it?’ she hissed to me.
I did my best to call out his name over the applause.
‘A nun?’ she cried. ‘A nun! How wonderful!’
Judi Dench is a powerhouse of positivity. She always has been. When she was a little girl, she went to see her eldest brother, Peter, in a school production of Macbeth.
As Judi tells the story, ‘Peter played Duncan, so his first line was “What bloody man is that?”
‘And I thought, “This is for me! Not only Shakespeare but swearing!”’
She has always had a naughty streak.
In October, we took our show to York, her home city, where her father was a GP and where Judi went to the Mount School.
Before the performance, she went back to revisit her old home and old school. It was a trip down memory lane that brought tears to her eyes. And prompted laughter, too.
She told me about the wet runs at school and how she and a friend would set
out on the run, find a phone box and call Judi’s mum – who would come in the car to collect them and take them home for tea, before returning them to a spot near the run’s finishing line, where Mrs Dench would dowse the girls in water from a watering can.
Today, in the sitting room of her home in Sussex, Dame Judi keeps her father’s desk and swivel chair from his surgery.
Her family is everything to her. Sundry cousins turned up to see our show in York and a raft of Irish relations (from her mother’s side) appeared when we were in Dublin in the summer. Her ever-generous, unfailingly outgoing approach to life stems, I’m sure, from what she describes as ‘a completely happy childhood’.
That, and her lifelong Quaker faith.
She is grateful for her film career – tells funny stories of Billy Connolly and the flatulent horse she rode when they were playing John Brown and Queen Victoria together in Mrs Brown; swoons at the mere mention of Johnny Depp; marvels at her success as M in eight James Bond films – but theatre is her first love.
‘With a film performance,’ she says, ‘you can’t change it once it’s done. On stage, you can always hope to do something different and better the next night.’
Kenneth Branagh is one of her favourite directors, on stage or screen.
I was once sitting in her garden with her, when someone came out of the house to say that Branagh was on the line and wanted to have a word with her. She looked up and said, ‘Tell him I’ll do it –whatever it is.’
And she did. She took on the project, sight (and script) unseen. ‘I trust him.’
Well done, Ken, who once said, ‘My definition of success is control.’
He and Judi are very different creatures. She has often said, ‘An actor with no insecurities would be lost.’
Standing in the wings with her, I marvel at how anxious, self-critical and nervous she is before going on. After all, she is the most garlanded and honoured actress on the planet. Once she’s on, of course, everything changes. Her control is complete. Her timing is matchless.
The palpable emotional engagement she has with her audience is what puts her up there with the likes of Sarah Siddons and Ellen Terry from the 18th and 19th centuries and the greats from her younger days, the formidable Edith Evans and Judi’s mentor, Peggy Ashcroft.
Judi does a fine vocal impression of Edith Evans. She appeared with her in Henry VIII with the Old Vic Company, back in 1958. Judi was simply an attendant gentlewoman. Dame Edith was Queen Katherine and, on tour in Paris one night, she fell back off her chair and lay like an upturned tortoise blinded by the stage lights above her.
‘Fermez la lumière!’ she cried with all the force of Lady Bracknell. Dame Judi does Dame Edith to perfection.
The truth is, Dame Judi does it all to perfection. As she approached her ninetieth, Dame Edith said, ‘I may never have been pretty, but I was jolly larky and that’s what counts in the theatre.’ Judi Dench is jolly larky and beautiful, too.
She speaks Shakespeare with an instinctive understanding that is unrivalled. She is funny, feisty, fabulous. I’ll be dammed: happy birthday, Jude!
Gyles interviews Judi Dench on his Rosebud podcast and at the Sondheim Theatre on 1st and 15th December
Birthday girl: Judi Dench
Welcome to the DIY NHS
If Wes Streeting has his way, we’ll soon be performing surgery on ourselves matthew norman
The Victorian pseudoscience of physiognomy – the analysis of human character from facial features – has long been out of vogue. By and large, this is a good thing.
An erstwhile Turkish baths acquaintance was known and routinely addressed as Derek the Strangler. He had strangled nobody, and as far as anyone knew had no ambition to do so. That it was impossible to glance at that savage boat race without picturing his hands around a throat was plainly and grossly unfair.
This tiresome preamble comes preparatory to exploring the source of my feelings about Wes Streeting.
Does my visceral phobia about the Health Secretary for which an urgent psychiatric appraisal seems indicated stem from distaste for his political identity? Or is it just his face?
At this embryonic stage in his Cabinet career, it is too early to be certain.
On the one hand, unpardonably smug leftie liberals such as me have a natural antipathy to cockily entitled neo-Blairites such as him.
On the other, that visage does bring to mind the shiny-suited late-2000s estate agent carving you up on the A40 in one of those hateful Foxton Minis that make the Buddhist monk known throughout the monastery as Old Softie fantasise about deploying a sidewinder missile from the miniature silo beneath the wing mirror.
It is not an ugly or unpleasant face. In its beamish, shiny-eyed way, it’s actually rather sweet. Yet it remains a face that cordially invites the corrective application of a baseball bat.
Brutal as that will appear, Mr Streeting wouldn’t object to the notion. As one who publicly advocated pushing the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir under a train, he’d actively welcome it as the work of a kindred psychotic.
As for his masterplan to salvage the
NHS, this appears predicated mostly on technology. Or ‘cutting-edge technology’ as his aversion to cliché obliges him to describe it.
He has recently announced a wish to supply the unwell with devices that allow them to monitor their health without bothering medical professionals with any such trivia.
Smart watches will enable the chronically sick to check blood pressure and glucose, apparently, while even smarter rings will let cancer patients monitor their vital signs.
The intent is to relieve pressure on NHS capacity by keeping people out of hospital beds, and you’d need a severe case of Munchausen not to share it.
Nothing screams ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ like the prospect of so much as a single night as an NHS in-patient.
But is Mr Streeting’s technophilic babbling merely the launchpad atop what he, who talks with no ironic self-awareness about ‘traditional values in a modern setting’, would call the slippery slope?
Like any self-respecting Blairite, he is at heart a demi-Thatcherite. Admirably, he surmounted a far more deprived upbringing (free school meals) than hers to get to Cambridge.
He is very much an up-by-thebootstraps kinda guy. As a strong believer in self-reliance, he will soon be pushing autosurgery.
Admittedly, when a CT scan discovered renal cancer by accident (what we pretend doctors call an incidentaloma), he graciously permitted a surgeon to remove the malignant kidney in a hospital.
With his vaunted exponential advances in DIY medicine, however, it can’t be long before he authorises the posting of DIY surgical kits – with easy-to-follow, step-by-step diagrams styled after an IKEA assembly guide –along with the rings and watches.
There are more important, long-term curatives he should consider, such as massively hiked taxes on alcohol, refined sugar products and ultra-processed foods; and making health and nutrition a core curriculum subject from primary school onwards.
Yet the suspicion is that, rather than antagonise industries that profit from creating chronic illness and their useful idiots in the media, he will cleave to cut-price answers to problems that can be resolved only by tens of billions of annual extra investment in doctors, nurses and new-build hospitals.
The creeping privatisation of the health service, via the outsourcing of diagnostics and treatments to American goliaths, will no doubt gather pace, along with the depersonalisation of GP services.
It is already almost impossible to make an appointment over the phone or in person, which wickedly discriminates against the elderly.
Mr Streeting talks with the startling self-confidence and glib plausibility of a war-criminal role model, whose own haunted face has come to make the one in the Munch painting resemble a Renaissance cherub.
He may yet match Mr Blair by achieving the ambition of becoming PM, to which he confesses with unusual brazenness. Already he is a warmish favourite to succeed Keir Starmer.
But since he can realise that dream only by first succeeding as Health Secretary, this presents Wesphobics with a hideously well-balanced dilemma.
Would we rather have an efficient, reliable NHS, as they have in developed countries we read about now and then?
Or would we sacrifice that and die untended in agony to keep Wes Streeting and his cheeky-chappie face out of Downing Street?
who were the Dagenham Girl Pipers?
The Remembrance Sunday celebration in Dagenham will see the final appearance of the Dagenham Girl Pipers after nearly a century. Recently, there has been much less interest among young girls in joining the band.
The pipers were founded in 1930 by the Rev Joseph Waddington Graves, Minister of Dagenham’s Osborne Hall congregational church. The band members were only young girls at school (average age 14), at a time when playing the pipes was a male-dominated pastime.
The first performance was for the girls’ families. But along came the press, local and national, including a film crew, for cinema newsreels. Their fame began to spread.
Within two years, the band were the stars of the Lord Mayor of London’s
show, performing before huge crowds.
By 1935, they were performing in front of the King and Queen of Belgium at the Ghent Flower Show. They went on to play at the Menin Gate. The performance was broadcast on the radio.
In 1937, one of the three constituent bands staged one of their more infamous shows – on a tour of Germany as guests of the Hitler Youth movement. They even performed before Hitler in Berlin. They were so popular in Germany that another of the bands returned in 1939.
At the same time, a second band was in America at the World’s Fair. The first band returned from Germany a month before war broke out.
what is the Red Book?
The Red Book is officially called the Harvard College Class Report, dating back to the mid-19th century. But everyone calls it the Red Book, because of its consistently imposing crimson covers.
It is not to be confused with the Red Books of Georgian landscape designer Humphry Repton, or the posthumously published Red Book of psychoanalyst Carl Jung.
For me, it is essential reading – be that bedside or bathroom. When you start to read, you just can’t stop – and that’s not just because your friends (and maybe even a few of your former enemies) are in it.
It drops on my doormat with a satisfying thud every five, ten, years or so. Although I am British, this happens to me every few ‘big’ years, following my American college graduation.
My latest has just arrived, comprising over 500 fact-filled pages of revelations of ‘Whatever happened to…’ And more.
The way it works is that all of us from our graduating class are asked to contribute a few paragraphs about what
we have been up to since the last report, which in my case was ten years ago. The result is a sort of autobiographical Seven Up! – but, in this case, five, ten, 15, 20, 25 and now 35 years on from graduation.
What happens, what changes, and what people choose to say (or not to disclose) about themselves as the anniversary years unfold is a sociologist’s dream – wherever you choose to read it.
Even in these modern times, the Red Book is reassuringly printed and delivered as hard copy.
Keenly anticipated by the 1,500 of us in our class, it is published by the alumni association and makes its way to mailboxes and doormats across the United States and the world.
Of course, some entries still read like boastful Christmas round robins, but looking back over 35 years of Red Books reveals a progression from best-life braggadocio to a much more reflective tone.
Entries this year include the touching, witty and self-deprecating. One confesses that he ‘sucked’ at being married but is determined to ‘kick ass at being divorced’. Another almost bought a house with a man who ran away with her estate agent.
‘Where did the time go?’ is a common
During the war, many of the older girls did war work, including as land girls. Younger girls were still performing for troops at home and became part of ENSA. Two of the girls spent almost three years touring Africa and the Middle East, entertaining the troops. By the end of the war, the bands had performed in 25 countries. The Reverend Joseph Graves died in 1962. Although he saw his dream become a worldwide success, he did not live to see the pipers gain an even wider audience on television. They were regulars on various variety shows alongside many stars. Eric Morecambe often referred to the pipers on The Morecambe & Wise Show. They even performed at Freddie Mercury’s 40th-birthday party in 1986.
Mike Foley
refrain, along with Covid, divorce, empty nests, grief and aged parents.
‘Are we officially old now?’ asks one former classmate.
More than 60 of us are dead. One who knew that her cancer was terminal died between her writing and her Red Book entry’s being published.
But there is still humour and optimism and, in place of wild-eyed career focus, there is a growing appetite for retirement and an appreciation of values and personal relationships. Contentment is replacing ‘challenge’. There are new opportunities, too. During the pandemic, one of us bought an abandoned church and turned it into a circus school.
Another, who had always suspected that she was adopted, was ‘vindicated’ on discovering that she had been a ‘well-kept secret’ for nearly 55 years.
The last word goes to a creative classmate from my old department who reports that she recently ‘reunited with my college crush … and we are living together in almost paradise’.
For the record, it isn’t me.
Richard Howells (Emeritus Professor of Cultural Sociology at King’s College London and a member of the Harvard Class of 1989)
Pipers in wartime Egypt
Who was the prettiest of Henry VIII’s six wives? Their biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, has the answer
Fairest of them all
When I first had the idea of writing about the six
Harold was unimpressed as he had come to the conclusion (he told me
more time reading the captions than admiring the stuffy little faces squished under caps and crowns. Imagine my delight when I read the caption ‘Anne of The historic hostess of the castle herself. This was closely followed by a picture captioned ‘Anne Boleyn’.
I was studying Anne Boleyn, admiring her neat prettiness, when I heard a young male voice at my elbow.
‘There she is – the ugly one.’
There were other voices – all young males, it seemed, and the word ‘ugly’ seemed to be endlessly repeated.
Ugly? Who was ugly round here? It was the jolting of an elbow and the jostle of a shoulder that gave me the clue.
In other words, there had been a huge error. Anne of Cleves had long been held up as ‘the ugly one’. The boy spectator had mixed up his Annes and wrongly thought Anne Boleyn was the famously
And, curiously enough, as I stood there in the castle I began to see the delightful Anne Boleyn through different eyes. She began to look ugly, and uglier…
Hastily I withdrew. But I had learnt my lesson. Behind the scenes of history, everyone was beautiful and everyone was ugly according to very different standards. I was going to have to find out what these standards were.
‘Cricket is just the same,’ said Harold hospitably when I confided the Ugly Anne problem to him later. I realised that it was a sort of compliment and smiled in what I hoped was a Boleynesque fashion.
Thereafter I spent a great deal of time trying to edit my ideas of beauty in accordance with those of the time. Was Mary, Queen of Scots, really the most beautiful princess, as pronounced by the whole of Europe? The important thing here was that they believed it and acted as if that were true.
Henry VIII by Hans Holbein
Even John Knox had compliments to pay – and no charmer he. ‘Pleasing’ was how he described Mary, Queen of Scots, and he recorded that the people of Edinburgh called out, ‘God bless that sweet face,’ as she went on her way.
The memoirist Pierre de Bourdeille (1540-1614) and the poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85) both praised in particular her sweet voice when she spoke at the opening of Parliament: ‘VOX DIANAE! The voice of a goddess.’
De Bourdeille picked out the exquisite whiteness of her skin and compared it to the whiteness of her veil when she was in mourning. The poet Pierre de Bocosel de Chastelard (1540-63) fell hysterically in love with her. A Venetian ambassador pronounced her ‘personally the most beautiful in Europe’.
Yet when I came to examine her looks, I realised how much of her reputation was based on fame and legend; how comparatively little on actual beauty. Her outstanding feature was her height: she was probably about 5 feet 11 inches –really tall in an age when men were much smaller than today.
She was in no way beefy: she had the delicacy of her mother, Mary of Guise. Her height must have mattered to her – when dancing, for example.
I became quickly convinced that the early love of Mary, Queen of Scots, for her husband, Lord Darnley, was rooted in their matching heights.
As I muttered these thoughts to myself in the British Library, I was aware that I had been a tall teenager. I could remember the embarrassment of dancing with boys shorter than me. At the same time, there was a vivid memory of discovering a tall, handsome, young Scottish baronet. Whatever happened to him?
But I understood Mary’s love for Darnley in a way that was quite different from her reverence for his important position in the Scottish royal succession. Both loves could exist, and exist at the same time; worldly and romantic.
Where Mary, Queen of Scots, was concerned, I must never forget that image of a lily-white princess, towering over most of the nobility of her court. Whereas the image of Ugly Anne had taught me something suddenly and sharply, Mary had an element of a fairy
In history, everyone was beautiful or ugly according to very different standards
Decidedly not the renowned Ugly Anne. Anne Boleyn (1507-1536)
princess. It was up to me to recreate the idea of the beautiful for my readers –whether at the court of Louis XIV, Charles II or later George III.
One of the first people I had to convince was myself – and once I had done so, there was no going back. I throw the name of Anne Boleyn quite happily into the flowery marsh of my imagination and out comes a delightful image.
That goes for the opposite sex too, of course. The appearance of Henry VIII was quite as important in historical terms, if you think about it, as that of the tasty Anne Boleyn. A slim and handsome prince is transformed by age and injury into a hefty disabled lump.
I asked myself exactly how I could know the dimensions of Henry the lump. At this point, there occurred one of those coincidences that make a happy marriage blessed. For Harold was invited to take his beloved cricket team to Leeds (not
Lord’s) and there, by coincidence, were the Royal Armouries, transferred from the Tower of London.
Few tourists, I imagine, arrive there politely asking if they could try on the warlike armour of Henry VIII.
The man in charge – I was about to say the jailer – was possessed of splendid calm. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, ‘but you can try on his horse’s armour if you like.’
Two things happened next. First, I immersed myself in a huge horse’s head – and at the same time a large school party arrived. They greeted the sight of the mythical horse with hoots and shrieks and cries of ‘Me, too!’
I can’t say that I derived much wisdom from peering out of the equine skull but I did get the message: armour made you the centre of attention, which I am sure was just as true in the 16th century as it is in the 21st.
Antonia Fraser is author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Her new book, Patchwork Pieces, is out now
Skinhead hunter
John Ingledew remembers photographing shaven-headed trendsetters in the early eighties
The skinhead revival began in 1978. It was a golden age of youth culture.
Some of the new wave of skinheads, like the original ones of the late 1960s and early 1970s, had an undeniable undercurrent of violence about them. Some sport shiners, missing teeth and scars.
While some look like angels with dirty faces, others looked unapproachable, but I think people who have chosen to stand out are happy to be photographed.
It’s an affirmation of their choice to be outside the usual.
Some were adolescents up West for the night from the suburbs. Others were runaways, spending their days in a Covent Garden drop-in centre, sleeping in hostels.
Looking for Trouble by John Ingledew is out now
Clockwise from top left: Brighton, 1981; Chris in Leicester Square, 1982; couple in Leicester Square, 1982; a kiss on Brighton beach, 1981; Bonner in Leicester Sq, 1981 (cover picture)
When thousands of bees invaded his garden, John Humphrys was terrified –but then he learned to love them
Attack of the thriller bees
This autumn, I was in my kitchen when I heard the noise: a bit like a jet aircraft flying just a little too low for comfort.
So I opened the doors and stepped into the garden – and then very swiftly stepped back into the kitchen. I could barely see to the end of my garden for the great swarm of insects buzzing around. Honey bees. Many thousands of them. They seemed to have no obvious purpose – apart from scaring the pants off me, which they were achieving most efficiently.
Then I realised they weren’t remotely interested in me. The centre of their activity was my tall hawthorn tree. High up on one large branch hung two clusters. Each was about the size of a small bag of potatoes and, I was about to learn, each was a solid mass of bees.
I also learned later there would have been many thousands in each. One cluster was protecting a queen.
So I did what you might expect of anyone who’d worked on the Today programme for as long as I had – and phoned Martha Kearney.
Martha is not just a great radio presenter. She is a great lover of bees.
Sadly she can no longer keep them herself because she developed a dangerous allergy to their stings. But she told me what I needed to know, which was that I had nothing to fear but fear itself. The chances of getting stung by a honey bee are vanishingly small.
That’s the simple bit. Their home was becoming overcrowded. A standard hive can accommodate about 40,000 bees, and once it gets close to that figure, the scouts will go off in search of a new home. Once they’ve found somewhere they fancy, they will do a little dance to attract the worker bees to follow them.
Secondly: why my garden? I suppose I was flattered that they’d chosen me. A tribute to my gardening practices. I’ve never been one for manicured lawns and trimmed hedges. My garden is overgrown and full of weeds and wild flowers. What my neighbours might regard with a little disdain my visitors saw as paradise. What the neighbours see as unsightly weeds the bees saw and smelled as lots and lots of nectar and pollen.
Actually, I needed to know one hell of a lot more. Seasoned beekeepers might regard the arrival in their garden of a mob of footloose and fancy-free bees as manna from heaven. More honey bees equal more honey. Simple. Except that it’s not.
First, though: why the invasion?
Plus my house is old. Immaculate is not a word you’d choose to describe it. Again, perceptions vary. What some might see as unsightly cracks and crevices the bees see as the equivalent of desirable townhouses. Rent-free.
But here’s the big question: did I really want to share my home with tens of thousands of buzzing
On balance, probably not – even though the chance of getting stung is so tiny. Maybe a little greater if I were daft enough to try to catch one, or to swat it away if it came close, or if I smelled like a flower. Warning: if you’re keeping bees, it’s better to smell sweaty than sweet. No aftershave allowed.
Maybe it’s great in the summer when the flowers are in bloom and there’s plenty of honey to be made. Maybe not so fine later when the bees may be feeling a bit irritable.
And, anyway, I suspect I am not one of nature’s natural beekeepers. Martha confirmed that. Beekeeping, she mercilessly informed me, requires patience, gentleness and attention to detail. Hmm.
Happily, a neighbour, Niko, has all of those qualities. And this explains why ‘my’ bees may once have been his.
Sadly, he happened to be in his native Bulgaria, but his brother Stoyan provided the solution: a small, portable hive about half the size of a large suitcase, which we strapped to the top of a long ladder and positioned under the clusters in the hope
Interview King meets Queen Bee: John Humphrys and his garden hive
that the bees would decide to make it their new (if temporary) home.
But they were not impressed. A few of them made a brief inspection, took a few sniffs and decided they preferred hanging out on the tree.
So, the next day, we moved the ladder closer and used an even longer pole with a hook on the top to knock the clusters off the tree and into the box. I must point out that no bees were harmed in this process.
That was a few weeks ago and that’s
where they’ll stay, busily going about their honey-making business, until Niko returns and takes them off to a full-size hive.
That’s unless I decide to keep them. It’s tempting.
There is something remarkably calming about standing beneath the hive (it’s on top of my shed) watching the scouts coming and going through the very small hole in the side.
They are the tough guys in the hive but, in a cruel twist of nature, it’s the low
life – the drones – who get the sexiest job. Literally. They mate with the queen, who will reward them by producing, on a good day, a couple of thousand eggs.
But summer’s gone and it’s all coming to an end for this year. There’s not much nectar and eventually no more honey to be made. The survivors will spend the winter clustered together with the queen in the middle, and the workers will generate heat for her by vibrating their bodies. Until next spring.
And will my garden still be their home? It’s a tricky one. It’s the countryside that needs more bees, not London.
The Woodland Trust warns that the UK’s honey-bee population is in severe decline and it blames the dramatic loss of habitat on pollution by chemicals and climate change. And that matters.
I’m talking, of course, about wild bees. They are not just important – they are a vital part of our ecosystem and our natural world. The Trust goes so far as to say that ‘our way of life simply could not survive without bees. They are crucial to our physical health and to the health of the wider environment.’ About a third of our wild species are extinct and it’s believed there are no viable colonies left.
It is possible for some farmers to pollinate crops manually, but it costs a fortune and is much less efficient.
And, even more importantly, our whole ecosystem needs them. As the Trust says, without bees it would collapse. They pollinate our wild trees and wild flowers, which then support other insects, which then support birds, bats, mammals and everything up the food chain.
But domestic hives won’t solve the problem. Bees need somewhere wild to live. So how’s this for a killer statistic: 97 per cent of wild-flower meadows have been lost since the 1930s to the farmers’ friends: pesticides and herbicides. And they’re still spraying. This country is in the bottom ten per cent in the world for insects, birds and bees.
So maybe I’ll give my bees back to Niko and then hide in a hedge outside Jeremy Clarkson’s farm. When the cameras arrive, I shall leap out with a banner reading ‘SOB!’
Save Our Bees!
John Humphrys presented Radio 4’s Today programme, 1987-2019
Warning! Bore alert
Ever found
yourself bored to death at dinner? Nick Peto has learnt from bitter experience how not to be dull
At a dinner party in Ireland recently, I became concerned for the very attractive woman directly opposite me.
She was next to an old man who was going on and on about himself and his life. He had, he bragged, been a brilliant sportsman; tremendous across country on a horse; one of the finest shots; could put a fly on a sixpence at 50 yards with his 16-foot split cane rod and so on. In fact, he enthused, he had simply excelled at everything he turned his hand to.
As dinner was drawing to a close, he said to the woman, ‘Well, I must drag my Cynthia over there home now. She’s off hunting at dawn. I won’t be, of course; I’ll be in the land of nod until the old girl is almost back.’
As he stood up, the pretty Irish lass put her hand on the man’s forearm and said, ‘Before you leave, sir, I just wondered if there is anything you’d like to know about me.’
‘Good heavens, have I been talking about myself? Naturally, I’d like to know about you. Um, um, er – tell me about your husband.’
It is so important for us older fellows (I am 85) not to become ‘I’ specialists –I, I, I. We are not the centre of the universe.
My mother told me, as many mothers have, that however dull the person next to you appears, it is up to you to find out what makes them tick. Everyone, whatever their appearance, has a tale to tell.
The most enjoyable placements I’ve ever had were the times I drew Lady (Kisty) Hesketh (1929-2006).
No one could sit next to her without coming away feeling better for the experience.
Intelligent, charming and witty,
Kisty was always a giver, not a taker, and, despite many personal sadnesses, she radiated happiness.
At dinner at Easton Neston, the Heskeths’ beautiful Hawksmoor house in Northamptonshire, I once asked her to describe the most difficult person she had ever had to sit next to, and how she had coped.
Kisty thought for a while and then said, ‘Years ago, I was President of the WI in Northamptonshire. We were about to have our bi-annual lunch and I spotted an aggressive-looking, mustachioed lady sitting on her own in a corner. I bet I draw her.’
Older fellows must not become ‘I’ specialists: I, I, I…
And she did.
After a few pleasantries, Kisty said to the lady, ‘I wonder what has been the most extraordinary day so far in your long life.’
The woman looked astonished and, after a pause, said, ‘Well, I have never told anyone this, but I am going to tell you, Lady Hesketh.
‘Back in May 1943, I was 23 years old and a reasonable-looking girl – although that might take some imagination now, I know.
‘I was engaged to a lovely young man who was a rear gunner in a Wellington bomber, and we were to be married that summer. I drove over to pick him up at his base after his squadron had returned from a bombing run over Germany. His plane slowly came to a standstill and the other four crew members climbed down onto the runway – but not my Terry.
‘I said to the pilot, “Where is my boy?” He told me that Terry must have fallen asleep, as they had not encountered any enemy fire during their sortie. He climbed back into the plane, and there he found Terry draped dead over his gun. He had caught a piece of flak in his forehead.’
The old lady told Kisty that she had persuaded the skipper to let her go up with them that evening, on their next trip over Germany. She had donned Terry’s flying kit and, when they were approximately over the spot where he might have ‘caught it’, the skipper shouted, ‘Now’ – and she was the one who pulled the cord to release their stick of bombs.
Only Kisty could have got this extraordinary story out of her lunch neighbour – no one else. That was her gift – and it is something to which we should all aspire.
‘Still, enough about me – let me tell you about you’
The other day, at a dinner near my home in the Cotswolds, I was seated next to a vivacious, wide-eyed woman of about 25. I was in the middle of what I considered to be one of my very finest stories, when I lost my way.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve forgotten the thread – where was I?’ She replied, ‘Well, if you don’t know, I certainly don’t, ’cos I wasn’t listening.’
Will I ever learn?
Clarissa Avon, Anthony Eden’s wife, was the last great witness to the Suez Crisis. By her friend and biographer, Hugo Vickers
The Avon lady on Suez
Clarissa Avon (or Eden) is best remembered for her line about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room.
It is a line she regretted, not least because the phrase ‘drawing room’ made her look remote. There was so much more to her. No other Prime Ministers’ wives knew Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau. In her early life, her friends were some of the most interesting figures of the age – James Pope-Hennessy, Duff Cooper, Isaiah Berlin, Cecil Beaton and Lucian Freud. The list goes on.
My own friendship with her was unlikely. I never knew why it worked, but it did – for over 40 years. I certainly respected her and I believe I understood her.
She was an intellectual: she had studied philosophy with Isaiah Berlin, Tony Peck and others at Oxford. She was a Zionist. She did not madly like the Royal Family, she liked ancient monuments, hated the bright colours of azaleas and rhododendrons, deplored most actors and actresses and denigrated the world of films, despite working for Alexander Korda.
She was intolerant of many things and easily bored. She disliked the discordant sounds in the Beatles’ music.
I was the opposite. My spirits soared when I found a Victorian castle such as Miramare in Trieste; hers fell. I tapped into the unexpected side of her.
She could be very funny, with an impish sense of humour, largely concealed from the outside world. I first saw her amused when I told her about a road near Stonehenge, where you could take a hump quickly in the car and almost take off.
We bonded over a mutual dislike of Lord Mountbatten, she having known him and mistrusted him, I having met him only once, but getting a distinctly bad vibe from him. When I was working on the life of Cecil Beaton, I had access to his unpublished diaries and letters.
Clarissa realised that I knew many of her secrets – so she gave up her normal reticence and spoke freely of her life.
She disliked TV productions such as
Brideshead Revisited, finding it pretentious. But she was hugely entertained by Dallas, in particular those oil barons like J R Ewing and Cliff Barnes, in stetson hats, talking about their daddies. When she returned from China, she said she had been forever eating things that looked like Sue Ellen’s lips.
In 1982, she came to dinner in my flat; the other guests were a generation younger. Nicholas Shakespeare held forth on the subject of how many vibrators were being bought by women in this country.
If I became at all nervous at how my distinguished guest was taking this, I need not have worried: she weighed in with ‘Do you mean to say you can get circumcised ones and un-circumcised ones?’
She could be acerbic. She once left a dinner party in Patmos saying, ‘We’ve rather exhausted the social possibilities of this meal, don’t you think?’
I told her that a friend we both knew, James Fairfax, the Australian philanthropist, heard I was in Canberra, intending to fly to Sydney, and sent a car
Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (1920-2021) in 1936, aged 16
to bring me to lunch with him in Bowral and then on to Sydney. Did she think this supremely kind? Not a bit. Much funnier, she said, ‘He must have been desperate for company.’
She was also devastatingly dismissive of those she did not like. Of a woman we both knew: ‘Everything is cold and calculated. Even when someone is chewing her earlobe, she’s thinking of the next move.’
Clarissa led a unique and extraordinary life and a long one. She lived from 1920 to 2021.
She was born a Spencer-Churchill – in theory, the niece of Winston Churchill. But her descent within the Churchill family proved complicated.
Not only was her father, Jack Churchill, not a Churchill biologically – as has now been proved by DNA testing – but she was not his daughter. Her father was ‘Bluey’ Baker (1877-1960) –Rt Hon Harold Baker, later Warden of Winchester College. A delightful man.
Clarissa was a remote child, adored by her mother, while not especially close to her accepted father. She disdained the normal life of a social girl, despite peregrinations through stately homes, some more interesting than others. She hated Blenheim, but loved Mells and Breccles.
Being intelligent and well-read, she met many of the great figures of the age when young. She escaped twice to Paris, where she was soon in the middle of French intellectual society. She put up with unwelcome passes from the likes of Jacques Balsan (Consuelo Vanderbilt’s second husband, whose monkey-gland injections worked all too well) and Prince Antoine Bibesco, erstwhile friend of Proust, and a well-known coureur after any female, whether young and beautiful or a middle-aged bluestocking.
In 1937, her world came to life through a close and devoted friendship with James Pope-Hennessy, who conducted
her round London’s churches, and a host of intelligent and interesting aspiring boyfriends – Trim Oxford, David Wallace, Charlie Lansdowne and others. All this is played out in their letters to one another.
Finding her not in her rooms in John Street, Oxford, one enthusiast, Raymond Carr, even wrote her a note on the envelope of a letter from Trim. At Oxford, she was taught philosophy by the leading dons to the point that Philip Toynbee told her that he considered it ‘sacrilege’ that on a whim she should ‘invade Oxford University’ and get ‘the best philosophers’ to teach her.
She did not marry young, owing to a nine-year clandestine love affair, but eventually, after some resistance on her part, she agreed to marry the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. They married in August 1952 – and at first she felt trapped. However, within a few months, he was at death’s door, having a series of operations. As she put it, years later:
‘The marriage might well not have been a success, but for three things. His extreme niceness, my capacity for devotion & his almost immediate illness. The latter was so appalling that it added ten years onto the marriage immediately & brought out the best characteristics in both of us. In him, this was great courage, a determination to live, & a sweetness of nature under adversity. It also broke the gates for the first time, as he told me many times subsequently, & made the marriage a true & intimate one.’
She was soon caught between her recalcitrant uncle Winston Churchill finding every possible reason to cling on as Prime Minister and Eden waiting as
She was entertained by Dallas, particularly J R Ewing and Cliff Barnes
his anointed successor. Eventually they moved into Downing Street in 1955. Just over a year later came the Suez crisis, the after-effects of which haunted the Edens for the rest of their lives, in the same way as the Abdication haunted the Windsors.
It is generally thought that one of the reasons Suez was such a disaster was that he was ill. Clarissa believed that he was ill only towards the end:
‘I find that people who think that Suez was a monumental hash think it can only have been because he was ill. But I think his judgement wasn’t vitiated. I mean, if it was a hash, it was his hash.
‘It wasn’t because he was ill. I was with him the whole time and it seemed to me
his judgement was perfectly normal until the last three weeks.’
She also believed that Eden was misled by Harold Macmillan, the Foreign Secretary, who gave him to believe that the Americans would support the British.
The outcome was that Eden fell – and who took over? Macmillan. When he in turn fell in 1963, partly as the result of the Profumo Affair, Clarissa wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘I must say I couldn’t have wished a more squalid exit for a man I have always disliked & distrusted!’
She was no shrinking violet, but she was fascinating to write about.
Clarissa: Muse to Power – The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon by Hugo Vickers is out on 21st November
Edens and the Queen, Balmoral, 1955. Right: the Churchills at the Edens’ wedding, 1952. Below: scuba diving in 1989, at 69
Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.
Dorothy Parker
The only place men want depth in a woman is in her cleavage.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Got an enemy (or friend) you want to insult? Look no further. A new book has all the best – and rudest – quips
Take that!
Clive James on Marilyn Monroe
You must come again when you have less time.
Walter Sickert to a departing guest
Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
Katharine Hepburn
There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African developments by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of them at the moment.
Paul Theroux on Bono
I fail to see why not. Everyone else has. Noël Coward on seeing a poster for Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954)
A man who correctly guesses a woman’s age may be smart, but he’s not very bright.
Lucille Ball
When women gossip, it’s called bitchy; but when men do it’s called a podcast.
Comedian Sikisa Bostwick-Barnes
Vote for Guy Fawkes. The only man to enter parliament with honest intent.
A lawyer is a person who writes a 1,000-word document and calls it a brief.
Franz Kafka
The masses’ bad taste is more deeply rooted in reality than the intellectuals’ good taste.
Bertolt Brecht
When I came to the Treasury, they predicted to me that I would become the most unpopular man in Britain. This was the only correct forecast the Treasury made in the several years I was Chancellor.
Norman Lamont
He has not a single redeeming defect. Benjamin Disraeli on William Gladstone
She’s so pure, Moses couldn’t part her knees.
Joan Rivers on singer Marie Osmond
Spotted on a poster during the 1979 general election
There is bad in all good authors; what a pity the converse isn’t true.
Philip Larkin
Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
American film producer Samuel Goldwyn
The only people we think of as normal are those we don’t know very well.
Sigmund Freud
The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce in a review
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that.
American comedian George Carlin
Above: Noël Coward and Lucille Ball
Right: Faye Dunaway
It raises the average IQ of both countries. Robert Muldoon, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, on the exodus of New Zealanders emigrating to Australia
Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.
Mae West
Fan: ‘You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are.’
Bob Dylan: ‘Let’s keep it that way.’
Far too noisy, my dear Mozart. Far too many notes. Archduke Ferdinand on The Marriage of Figaro
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
If Peter O’Toole was any prettier, they’d have to call it Florence of Arabia
Noël Coward on O’Toole’s T E Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia
Faye Dunaway: ‘What’s my motivation in this scene?
Roman Polanski: ‘Your salary.’ Exchange on the set of Chinatown (1974)
Perhaps not, but then you can’t call yourself a great work of nature.
James Whistler, after a sitter complained his portrait was not a
When I read about the lives of celebrities in our newspapers, I sometimes wish we had a Freedom From Information Act.
Theodore Dalrymple
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
The Knowledge Book of Insults (£12.99), edited by Jon Connell, is out now
ISteamy Puccini
A century after his death, Rev Peter Mullen salutes the maestro’s heartbreaking arias – and his tumultuous love life
didn’t just cry. I sobbed. I lay there on the blue rug in the sitting room and stared at the fluffy yellow clouds rushing over the chapel roof. I was 13 and playing my parents’ gramophone record of Webster Booth singing Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen from La Bohème. It was my first time with Puccini Before that, my musical tastes had extended only as far as Bill Haley and the Comets and to the Platters crooning Oh Yes, I’m the Great Pretender! Whereas formerly all my dreams had pulsated with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Jane Russell’s cleavage in The Outlaw, now my nights were enchanted by Mimi’s porcelain complexion and her tiny frozen hand. Before I was 15, I knew all Puccini’s operas off by heart. Then I became a man and put away childish things – or almost, anyway.
I emitted sophisticated chortles at Noël Coward’s ‘Strange how potent cheap music is.’
But Puccini’s music is not cheap: as the most popular opera-composer ever, he left $3m in his will when he died a century ago, aged 65, on 29th November 1924.
He was more than a bit of a lad with the ladies and got himself into scandals galore
How he indulged his taste for fast cars. He owned a De-Dion Bouton in 1901 – even before that great motoring fanatic King Victor Emmanuel III got his. His last ride was in his Lancia Lambda, driving to a throat operation which sadly failed. Puccini once described himself as ‘a mighty hunter of wild food, opera librettos and attractive women’.
We should not be browbeaten by the musical snobs into being ashamed of a liking for Puccini’s music.
Despite the academic critics’ snobby disdain, his music is not all diminished chords and sub-Wagnerian schmaltz. He experimented with leitmotif. His opera The Girl of the Golden West – written for the American audience and starring Enrico Caruso, no less –is as hard-boiled as anything in Raymond Chandler.
He even dallied with the avant-garde verismo stuff we find in Alban Berg’s Lulu – street violence and all.
He was rather more than a bit of a lad with the ladies and got himself into scandals galore. Most luscious among these was his affair with Elvira Gemignani, who craved to be rescued from her philandering husband, the most aptly named Narciso.
Elvira became pregnant by Puccini and the couple eloped and lived together in Monza. Narciso was murdered by a jealous husband and so Puccini and Elvira were able to marry at last.
The couple and their son, Antonio, were in a car crash. Elvira and Antonio sustained only minor injuries, but Puccini was pinned under the vehicle for several hours, with part of it pressing into his chest. It was fortunate that a doctor lived close at hand and, with a helper, he managed to save Puccini from the wreckage. But he never fully recovered and found musical composition difficult ever afterwards.
The excitement never let up… Elvira publicly accused her maid, Doria Manfredi, of having an affair with Puccini. Doria killed herself and the postmortem discovered her to have been a virgin.
So Elvira was sentenced to five months in prison for slander. Puccini spared Elvira from having to serve her sentence by paying compensation to the Manfredi family.
As with a Puccini opera, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There were frequent eruptions of farce – as when the fabulously tetchy Rosina Storchio was singing the lead in Madama Butterfly and her kimono accidentally wafted open.
A voice from the gods called out, ‘Ah, Madame is showing us her little Toscanini!’ – a reference to her very obvious pregnancy for which the celebrated conductor was popularly held responsible.
Puccini was a lifelong chain-smoker of Toscano cigars and cigarettes; he succumbed to throat cancer after radiation treatment had failed.
Just before he died, he said, ‘I lived in art, I lived in love and I never hurt a soul,’ and concluded, ‘Emotional art is a kind of illness.’
When I listen to his often over-rich music, I think that, in those last words, he composed his own epitaph.
Rev Peter Mullen was Rector of St Michael, Cornhill, and St Sepulchrewithout-Newgate, in the City of London
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) in 1904
A poet’s best career move? Die young
Imagine the sadness of Keats and Shelley as pot-bellied Victorians
a n wilson
Authors will stoop to any low trick to promote their own wares.
So, having written a book about Goethe, who completed his Faust when he was well over 80, I shamelessly used this column to suggest that many of the greatest works of art – Goethe’s Faust, Verdi’s Falstaff, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas – were composed by ancients.
My words were used by a relatively juvenile peer, the historian Andrew Roberts, speaking in the Lords, to justify the continued presence there of the superannuated old bores aged 80 and over.
We all know, however, that giants like Goethe and Titian are the exception, and that most of us are past our best by the age of 50.
Maurice Bowra’s advice to undergraduates, ‘Don’t waste your time on the old’ – barked out in that pre-1914 tone which itself suggested the gunfire that had mown down many of his contemporaries on the Western Front – was wise. He was thinking especially of John Betjeman, who loved discovering Golden Oldies – such as Lord Alfred Douglas – who everyone else had assumed was long since dead.
Bosie is a good example of why Adonises are better off dying young. Newspaper editors throughout the 1920s and 1930s assumed that Lord Alfred, that embodiment of the 1890s, must have died young, as did so many of the decadent poets.
Ezra Pound’s lament for Lionel Johnson, who died ‘by falling from a high stool in a pub’, would be neither amusing nor poignant if that attractive poet had been 65, rather than 35.
Thinking, or half-thinking, that Bosie
‘Don’t waste your time on the old’ Maurice Bowra
must have had a similar fate, newspapers cheerfully printed references to Oscar Wilde having gone to prison for being his lover.
In fact, Wilde went down for dalliances with rent boys. So the ageing Bosie was always able to sue for libel when his name was dragged into the matter. It kept him in whisky and spare cash to punt on the gee-gees – his twin delights in old age. Betjeman, with his mania for lost causes, took up Bosie in the same spirit in which he attempted to preserve threatened Victorian railway stations.
But the truth was that the enchanting young Adonis of the 1890s had turned into a terrible old bore, a bottle-nosed bad-breathed Hove resident, still turning out spiteful, antisemitic sonnets deep into the Second World War.
The Romantics are responsible for our belief that the good die young. I had this perception the other day when – for reasons too boring to explain – I was looking up something to do with the origins of Rolls-Royce. Charles Rolls died aged 35 – the first Englishman to die in an aeroplane accident – having formed his famous business alliance with Royce. His sister married a great-nephew of the poet and changed their name to Shelley-Rolls.
The Shelleys were a long-lived family. Had Percy Bysshe Shelley not gone out on that fateful boating trip from Leghorn in 1822, he could have lived well into the 1870s.
It is a terribly sad thought – imagining Shelley in old age. Rather than his being the lanky, screechy-voiced young radical whom teenage girls found so irresistible, you can just see how he would have grown old. Having inherited the baronetcy and his father’s considerable fortune, he would have become a paunchy old reactionary, sitting in the drawing-room at White’s, lamenting the extension of the franchise to the working classes. If you had quoted his own lines, he would have snorted with derision:
Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many – they are few!
The same would probably be true of Keats. Meeting Keats and Shelley as pot-bellied Victorians would be as sad as watching one of those Rolling Stones revival concerts when the creaking forms of Mick Jagger and pals are hoisted on to the stage to writhe their arthritic limbs to the by now undoubtedly accurate assertion that they could never get nor give no satisfaction.
If you are the parent of one who dies young, there is small consolation in these words. I am talking only of youthful idols – such as Shelley and the Sex Pistols.
Astonishingly, fans of Johnny Rotten have been known to call for him to be knighted. This puts one in mind of Muggeridge’s joke that, if Oscar Wilde had lived to be 90, they’d have made him the Chief Scout. Wilde, naturally, is Johnny Rotten’s hero.
Is one allowed nowadays to print his words about Oscar? ‘His stuff was f***ing brilliant. What an attitude to life! He turned out to be the biggest poof on earth at a time when that was completely unacceptable. What a genius.’
The Sex Pistols’ version of God Save the Queen, released in time for the Silver Jubilee, rose to the top of the charts, largely because it was banned by the BBC, HMV record stores and all respectable households. The poet Shelley would have approved, and applauded Rotten’s view, expressed at the time, that the Queen was a ‘moron’.
Since then, Rotten – aka John Lydon – has turned into a mellow old codger like the rest of us. Is it any wonder that while all right-thinking people like him, it is to Sid Vicious, dying at 21, that they revert their memory.
Sophia Waugh: School Days
Harper Lee’s reading lesson
‘Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.’
So says Scout Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, when her teacher, Miss Caroline, tells her to stop reading with her father.
The reasons? He has taught her to read words that Miss Caroline deems too difficult for her age, and he is teaching her in a way that is at odds with Miss Caroline’s own teaching methods.
Why does Miss Caroline not take note of the ‘methods’ Atticus has used to produce one of the most advanced readers in the class? Why is Miss Caroline so against ‘difficult’ words? And what is Miss Caroline hoping to gain by blocking reading?
I wish I had Miss Caroline’s problem. Instead of trying to hold back readers, I am endlessly trying to push them forward.
It appears I am in a minority.
University professors – teaching English literature, mind you – report how little their students read.
The students have not only not read much and do not read much but, worst of all, they are not willing to read much.
If that is the state with university students who have chosen literature as their subject, imagine how rarely others open a book.
Who is to blame? Professor Sir Jonathan Bate called it the Of Mice and Men effect. For years (until Gove kicked American literature out of the exam curriculum), this was the book chosen by schools for GCSE. It’s powerful, accessible – and short. For many pupils, it is the only novel they will ever read.
My old head of department told me with pride how her hairdresser, an ex-pupil, still took Of Mice and Men on holiday every year to reread it. When I asked why she didn’t buy the hairdresser something else for her next holiday – The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps – she looked at me, slightly stunned at the idea.
It is not just Of Mice and Men that has
been chosen for its brevity. The 19th-century novel is nearly always
A Christmas Carol. The Shakespeare text is usually Macbeth. America is worse than us, though: a pupil can go through the whole of high school without ever studying a whole book.
How can we change this trend? We want our students to pass their exams – so we make the easy choices – but shouldn’t we be doing more than that?
I have just finished teaching the ubiquitous Of Mice and Men to my Year 8 class (we still have the copies in the cupboard, after all). We have spent some of the Glorious Benefactor’s money on The Grapes of Wrath for a few of the pupils whose faces lit up every time we opened the novel. In Year 9, we have been studying a brilliant novel about drug cartels in Mexico (Saint Death by Marcus Sedgwick). For the first time ever, nearly the entire class raised their
hands when I asked who had enjoyed the book. So the Glorious Benefactor is about to go shopping again.
But not every teacher – or every school – has a Glorious Benefactor lurking in the shadows.
So this is what we should do. We need to talk about reading. We need to be seen to read. We need to lend our own books and push children towards the library. We need to talk to parents about children’s reading. We need to set aside more time for children to read.
I try to give children a regular halfhour in which to read. While they are doing this, I have a slideshow quietly on. It is made up of paintings and photographs of people reading, over which quotations about reading are superimposed.
It begins with Harper Lee’s quotation. Somehow, we need more children to feel like Scout.
'My dog bit the neighbour who does my homework'
I
Once Met Audrey Hepburn
The most beautiful woman I have ever seen – apart from the present Mrs Winn, of course – smiled at me and asked me to come in and sit down.
Tongue-tied at the best of times in the company of women, I quivered, croaked and fumbled my way through a kind of mist into a chair. She fixed me with big almond eyes – they may have been brown; they may have been green – and uttered seven simple words that I will for ever treasure, ‘I’m Audrey Hepburn – please call me Audrey.’
Only the truly great are humble enough to introduce themselves and not assume that you know who they are.
I can still feel the thrill of her handshake.
Aside from working for the nicest man in television, there were some excellent perks to being Terry Wogan’s assistant on his BBC talk show in the ’80s and ’90s, and the perkiest of them all was the chance to spend time with Audrey Hepburn. It was 1989 and she had just returned from visiting Sudan in her role as UNICEF goodwill ambassador. The show, which normally went out live, was on this occasion being pre-recorded. There was a delay before it started. So Terry asked me to go and see whether
Ms Hepburn needed anything. It was the sort of generous thing Terry would do – he knew I was smitten.
Audrey Hepburn was exquisitely feminine, slender and fragile as a porcelain doll but with that hint of steel required to succeed in Hollywood.
She was natural, warm and full of fun and appeared genuinely interested in our conversation (a rare quality), swiftly putting me at ease.
I had prepared a story for this unlikeliest of moments. I duly trotted out how I had a friend whose grandmother had been in the Ballet Rambert, as had Audrey, and knew Diaghilev. She gently pointed out that Diaghilev founded the Ballets Russes and had died in 1929,the same year that she, Audrey, was born.
I asked if she had had wanted to become a ballerina.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I thought I did when I was at boarding school in Kent.
Hepburn at work for UNICEF, Ethiopia, 1988
Fifty years ago, I worked in a Soho bank, and I fondly recall many things.
There was the bookmaker who drew wads of notes from his underpants when paying in. Pity the poor girl cashier.
The same bookmaker once arrived home to find his wife on her knees, with two men pointing sawn-off shotguns at her head.
‘Open the safe,’ they shouted, ‘or we’ll blow her f***ing head off!’
‘Do what you like,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been wanting to
It was run by these sisters who knew IsadoraDuncan and they taught me to dance. I think I wanted to be like Isadora Duncan.’
I was by now so comfortable that I regaled her with how I had teased my grandfather – a crusty but kindly naval officer known as Poopdeck – by pirouetting in front of him and pretending I wanted to be a ballet dancer. He would rather have faced a broadside. She laughed. Can there ever have been so sweet a sound as Audrey Hepburn laughing at one of my stories?
I hated boarding school, I told her.
‘Oh. I loved it,’ she said. ‘So many friends.’ I asked whether she preferred London or New York.
‘London,’ she replied. ‘It’s so much less frantic – although I love the eccentricity of New York. And that view from the Rockefeller Center is so … exhilarating!’ She sighed. ‘But now, at my age, I prefer the peace and quiet of Switzerland.’
Her call came.
She smiled again and said goodbye.
Ten minutes in heaven. Christopher Winn
A bohemian banker in Soho
do that for f***king years. I’m going to the pub.’
Other memories include staff arriving at our neighbouring branch to find a gentleman nailed through his hands to their back door.
Then there was the Foreign Clerk enjoying reading, fairly loudly, the inventory of various ‘interesting’ items, imported by a customer who was running a chain of sex shops.
One restaurateur had to endure the indignity of having his food-waste bins dragged through his establishment each evening as he could not afford the ‘supplement’ demanded by the council bin men to use his back door.
The cast of West End musicals lined up, still in
costume, on our late-opening nights, to cash their pay cheques, entertaining staff and customers alike with numbers from their show, including the choreography.
I once told a customer – reputed to be in one of the old razor gangs – that I had to stamp his passport to show I had given him the £50 annual allowance of foreign currency he was permitted. He produced eight passports in a variety of names, all with the same photo – and four of them were British!
‘Which one do you want?’ he growled. At least he let me stamp one of them.
I met some of my pop heroes and their management – and tried to sort out
their tax/ customs/ hoteldamage problems.
Then there was the instantly recognisable actor who always played the ‘heavy’ in ATV dramas, crying real tears every time we refused to cash his cheque.
Another famous actor, in similar circumstances, went through his whole repertoire. He ended up appealing to the other customers, demanding they wreck the banking hall. Thank goodness for the security screens. And this happened nearly every month!
By Mike Walsh, Appleton, Oxon
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Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
How U are you?
Clothes remain class giveaways, 70 years after Nancy Mitford’s essay
Of course there is no such thing as snobbery today. But it was rampant 70 years ago, in the winter of 1954.
That’s when Nancy Mitford wrote her article on U and non-U – later expanded into her book Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956).
Mileage was made for decades about her glossary: which verbal expressions (looking glass, scent) indicated a U (for upper class), civilised upbringing; and which (mirror, perfume) were markers of the opposite (non-U).
Mitford allegedly wrote the essay as a joke – but many a true word was spoken in jest. The sales of the book indicated an appetite from a public anxious for these signifiers.
And the 1982 equivalent of Noblesse Oblige, The Sloane Ranger Handbook, stayed at the top of the bestseller list in 1982 and 1983. This new interest in the aristocracy was fuelled by the arrival of Princess Di in our lives; we had all fallen in love with her at her 1981 wedding.
Perhaps Nancy’s whole joke was inspired by the snubbing of her sister Debo Devonshire. With her friend the Duchess of Rutland, she had gone to Paris to check out Dior’s New Look collection in 1947.
The Dior apparatchiks took one look at the English ladies’ tweedy coats and, deeming them too dowdy, turned them away at the door. So, instead, the two duchesses ‘sat on a bench eating their sandwiches to pass the time till they could decently return to the embassy where they were staying’.
Now we are
no longer allowed to be elitist or snobbish. And yet, to mark the 70th anniversary, The Oldie thought it would be fun – not for snobbish reasons, but for anthropological interest – to do a compilation of what Nancy herself might have decreed U and non-U fashion, were she to be sitting alone today on a beach or in a Parisian bar. How would she identify, by their clothing, which if any of the strangers might be ‘sympathetic coves’?
Today, expensive no longer means U. In 2009, the late A A Gill attended the couture shows in Paris. Gill was famed as a food and restaurant critic and was also an astute social observer.
It was his first ever attendance at a show like this and, as he settled into his front-row seat, he knew immediately something was wrong. Historically, couture was identified by its lines, attention to detail and, most of all, subtlety. So why were the models marching down the catwalk in bling?
It dawned on Gill that modern people with enough money to buy couture no longer hailed from historic backgrounds, and subtlety did not speak to such clients.
Your style guru:
Waynetta Slob
U and non-U clothing signifiers are less obvious today: camouflage and irony have to be taken into account. Confusingly, Etonians own sweat pants and hoodies specifically for walking back through Windsor from the train after an exeat. And young toffs often post ironic selfies in ‘wife-beaters’ –sleeveless T-shirts. Baseball caps worn back to front are frequently sported by U men ironically.
Meanwhile the question of anoraks –which used to be a certain signifier of tastelessness – are now worn by both U and non-U alike.
Still, some strong signifiers survive:
MEN NON-U
Hawaiian shirts, indeed any short-sleeved shirts; bright white shirts. Lycra for bicycling. Ready-faded jeans (ie stonewashed rather than naturally faded). White trainers worn by over-40s, dark-coloured Y-fronts, patterned jumpers. Strap-buckled shoes, pale brown shoes, pointy-tipped shoes.
Men can be forgiven for sometimes wearing the wrong things, as they are disorganised. Man bags are not common – just naff. ANY jewellery, apart from wedding or signet rings. Three-piece suits, short overcoats (above the knee).
MEN U
Cream shirts, your own tweed or tartan and no one else’s (mothholes acceptable), 100-per-cent-cashmere plain-coloured jumpers, Guernseys and Aran jumpers. Levis, Nudies, Acme Studio brand, anything from Huntsman, Dege & Skinner, Anderson & Shepherd, Kiton. Three buttons on suit jacket, four on cuffs. Shooting clothes: ideally hand-medowns but, if not, Le Chameau.
Anything bought from Purdey before it was bought by Richemont. Fleeces from Fera (made by Declan Morrison, Nancy Mitford’s great-nephew). Vintage Boden.
WOMEN NON-U
Polyamide white shirts you can see the bra through, white trousers, flip-flops. Tiny bikinis, leopardskin leggings, viewable cleavages in the shape of buttocks. Any handbag you have to go onto a waiting list to get. Over-expensive shooting clothes, unless you are European. Overcoats without dog hairs.
WOMEN U
Plain-coloured cardigans, overcoats with dog hairs. Sweethearts of the Rodeo cowboy boots, Sophie Dundas, vintage Cabbages & Roses. Cashmere polo necks in plain colours.
Town Mouse
Closing time for overpriced pubs
tom hodgkinson
Sharp’s Tribute, for a fiver. That’s about a fifth of the cost of the same amount of beer in a trendy pub. Being a very mean mouse, I find that the low cost somehow adds to the pleasure of drinking.
So I drink away, feeling pleased with myself, enjoying the beer and the extraordinary cost saving at the same time. But Mrs Mouse doesn’t approve. She thinks I drink too much. ‘That’s why you’re fat,’ she says.
‘I’m not actually fat,’ I argue. ‘That’s just a healthy little dad tum – a sign of good cheer and happiness. Like the Buddha’s.’
I then outline the health benefits of heavy drinking.
‘The beer is good for me. It sends me off to sleep like a baby. Anyway, have you seen how much Goethe drank?’
In my youth, we went to the pub the whole time.
Despite having very little money, my mouse friends and I popped in and out of the boozers of Camden Town and Notting Hill non-stop. I don’t remember worrying for a moment about the cost.
Pubs were different then, too. They had pool tables in them, you could smoke and they didn’t sell food except crisps and peanuts.
Now I’m in late middle age, a trip to the pub is an event; a rare treat. It’s slightly scary. How much will a pint cost now? £6, £7, even £8?
It’s true that pubs are a bit nicer than they used to be. They have plants outside them. They serve organic pork pies and smoked trout with kohlrabi and lobster. And they’re painted in muted Farrow and Ball colours.
But they cost an absolute fortune. Pop in for a quick drink and you’ll leave two hours later having spent £40 or £50, when you take into account buying some ethically produced nuts and maybe a round.
The dizzying cost hasn’t affected the popularity of the pub in central London. Cycling through Soho the other night on my way for a drink at the Coach & Horses (pint of Seafarers £5.50 – not bad these days), I noticed that every single tavern was heaving with punters. The drinkers blocked the pavements.
This sight cheered my soul. Not sure how they can all afford it.
My alternative to going to the pub is to sit in my own pub: the backyard, aka The Green Man. I have to sit outside because Mrs Mouse has banned smoking in the house. I still have the pub sign I had painted by comic artist Pete Loveday when, many years ago, I converted the scullery of our rented Devon farmhouse into a primitive taproom.
There’s a bench and a table and that’s enough for me. It’s a beer garden –remember those? Each evening, I sit contentedly on my ‘throne of felicity’, as Dr Johnson called a tavern chair.
It’s much cheaper than the pub. Waitrose sells four cans of decent beer,
According to my fellow Oldie columnist A N Wilson, in his new book on Goethe, the great German Romantic drank three bottles of wine a day.
‘And what about our friends?’ I will then reel off the names of several friends of ours who drink more than me. As long as I manage to get my work done, I argue, and don’t squander my income on gambling, disappear on three-day benders or get arrested for starting fights on the tube, what’s the problem?
My quest to live like an 18th-century Grub Street hack necessarily involves quite a bit of drinking. Still, Dr Johnson would give up drinking for long periods. He said he drank to chase oblivion, and giving up completely was easier for him than moderating. It was all or nothing.
Boswell said, ‘Many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.’
People think the 18th century was a very boozy period. But, in fact, the later-18th century saw a decline in drinking, thanks to rising tax on gin and the rising popularity of tea and coffee.
When Johnson went through one of his teetotal phases, he drank tea instead. Average wine consumption per head didn’t change much between the late-18th century and the early sixties.
But, even with that gin tax, they weren’t dealing with the costs I’m facing outside my backyard. The price will go up even more next year, when graduated tax for strong drink is set to rise.
Tell me, country mice, are rural pubs cheaper than their townie equivalents? Might my columnar neighbour, Giles Wood – a beer man, too – reveal the cost of his ale habit?
Country Mouse
Requiem for my atheist mother
giles wood
I have been charged with organising the order of service for a forthcoming funeral.
It’s a task that has forced me to concentrate the mind – and by so doing has thrown me into confusion. The departed one was a committed atheist and there are so many aspects of conventional religious ceremonies that I have enjoyed in life and instinctively want to include.
As a child and young man, when chapel was compulsory at my boarding schools, I responded to the language, aspects of the liturgy, the psalms, certain hymns, the music and particularly anthems sung by choirs.
We used to be bussed off from my prep school to traditional Welsh male-voice choir performances – you couldn’t help but be moved. I have always been attracted to sacred polyphonic music.
I like the flummery (dread word), the theatricality of the incense and the robes, and, like the late historian Paul Johnson, I would count Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev as my favourite film.
But this obligation to attend chapel served as a form of aversion therapy – just as schoolchildren are turned off Shakespeare at a time when they are unreceptive to the confusing language and far-fetched plots. The schoolorchestra string section makes such terrible cat-screeching noises that it often puts pupils off classical music for life. Consequently, in post-school life, apart from weddings, funerals, and Midnight Mass, I have steered a wide berth away from churches.
Correction: like Philip Larkin, I could never pass a church without going inside to admire the architecture, but would never stay if there was a service on.
In my twenties, I was a serious young man and fascinated by the English
mystical tradition of Christianity, Thomas Traherne etc, and also came across the writings of French Jesuit visionary Teilhard de Chardin.
Richard Jefferies (1848-87) is often described as an English naturalist and mystic. Where Jefferies is unusual is that this mysticism is combined with atheism. He does not believe in creation, design or providence. To him, God is an ‘invisible idol’. And the mind ‘deserves something higher than a god’.
I would describe my own numinous experiences – half a dozen in all: some as a child, some as a teenager and none since – at the entry level of nature mysticism.
I admire others for their simple Christian faith – but why are the bulk of the English population so irreligious? Is it because Christianity is no longer a religion of conquest and so we feel no need to take part in it even if – like Professor Richard Dawkins – we want its beliefs and its churches still to exist for cultural reasons?
The beatified evangelical academic Cardinal Newman (1801-90) noted the widespread lack of enthusiasm for Christianity even in his own time. He wrote ‘I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to this country, were it bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.’
These words were originally brought to my attention in England: An Anthology, a collection of writings on the subject of our country compiled by founding Oldie editor Richard Ingrams. I thought of them when I saw archive footage one recent evening, showing Dr Jonathan Miller expounding on his beliefs – or lack of them.
Up until that moment, I had considered Jonathan Miller to be a huge
talent and genius. But he said he did not believe in an afterlife and the possibility of it could just be ruled out, as there was no scientific proof.
Having seen him uttering those words, I think a lot less of him now. It is arrogant of Miller to rule out the possibility; and almost unscientific, he being a Renaissance man.
It would be like me declaring that a mobile phone could not possibly work because I cannot see with my own eyes the invisible rays that are transmitting to its screen a cricket match in Australia.
And so I find myself, as the designer of and ‘celebrant’ at this forthcoming crematorium service, instinctively wishing to provide some numinous content – despite the atheistic stance of the departed and the assembled ‘mourners’, whom I describe collectively as the Cloud of Unknowing. I want elevated language, and to leave the quotidian world of pay and display behind.
Once again, I find myself in a proper muddle. In the ‘non-religious’ ceremony I have designed for my mother’s funeral, I include the hymn Down Ampney and The Dream of Gerontius. And so I am pick-and-mixing.
But guiltily. The organ music on entry is by Bach. It came about as a result of the composer’s own direct religious experience. Would it be described as ‘cultural appropriation’ to raid someone else’s religious experiences and enjoy them in a Mellow Bird’s coffee moment of reflection?
Whatever – I am convinced these three religious inclusions are preferable to My Way by Frank Sinatra, allegedly the most popular music at most God-free British crematoriums.
‘You’re a centipede? Your profile says millipede’
Christmas Gift Ideas from
Christmas Gift Ideas from
Churchill’s painted lady
Lady Lavery taught Winston to paint – and starred on the Irish £100 note. By Mary Kenny
Fifty of Winston Churchill’s paintings are to be shown in an exhibition in 2026, at London’s Wallace Collection.
I hope the accompanying catalogue for ‘Winston Churchill: The Painter’ will mention Winston’s art teacher, Hazel, Lady Lavery, who instructed him in artwork. This started during the First World War.
Hazel (1880-1935) was an Irish-American beauty, married to the Belfastborn artist Sir John Lavery. She had trained as a painter herself, in Paris, and published a book of etchings. She not only gave Winston painting lessons, but also became a confidante. During the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State, she was a significant political networker. She was madly in love with Michael Collins and donned widow’s weeds when he was killed by a lone sniper in the subsequent Civil War.
But one exceptionally pretty place has remained unspoiled by a plague of visitors. And that is the famous old spa town of Vichy, central France, which I’ve just visited. Its crenellated edifices, Belle Époque architecture and Napoleon III spas and casinos remain untouched by the raucousness of vulgar crowds. There are no drunks, tattooed peoples, bare flesh or graffiti. An air of tranquil elegance pervades over the delightful parks, streets, boutiques, museums, bookshops, riverside promenades and animated but well-behaved crowds at bistros and restaurants.
reconstruction scaffolding. Vichy is to be relaunched, in its fully restored glory, in December 2025.
The town has also been addressing the painful aspect of its wartime past. It has just hosted an exhibition about restoring all personal possessions of Jewish victims of the deportations. The Mayor of Vichy, Frédéric Aguilera, is organising a major conference in Vichy for the end of January 2025, focusing on the Holocaust and its victims, at which they hope to have Serge Klarsfeld, the legendary French Nazi-hunter.
‘The people here are very involved in this question – très engagés,’ the macroniste mayor told me. Facing its past is also a process in Vichy’s rebirth.
In a previous century, the spa town was a centre of diplomatic activity, when the international grands fromages met while taking the waters, and great crowds walked its leafy boulevards.
The late Lady Soames told me she remembered, from her childhood, Hazel visiting the Churchill home in the 1920s. She wore heavy make-up and dyed her hair – a striking sight at the time.
Hazel’s beauty was renowned. From 1928, her portrait appeared – she was adorned as a ‘colleen’ – on the Irish currency notes. It remained on the £100 note until 1996. Those ornate bank notes were eventually replaced by the nondescript euros.
Hazel’s epic life (chronicled in a fine biography by Sinéad McCoole) deserves an appearance in the Winston Churchill art exhibition. He was, Sir John Colville wrote, always grateful for her tuition.
Many of the most beautiful locations in Continental Europe have been overrun by too much tourism.
The town (population 25,000) has laboured for some time under the shadow of its wartime reputation, when it became the headquarters of the collaborationist French state, under Marshal Pétain.
An enduring image of what Vichy came to signify is captured in that great movie Casablanca. Claude Rains, as the police chief Captain Renault, finally bins a bottle of water marked ‘Vichy’ as a gesture of his disgusted rejection of what it stood for.
But it’s now 80 years since the end of Vichy governance in 1944, and the spa town is undergoing a wholesale restoration. UNESCO has designated it as one of the leading historic spas in Europe (along with Bath and several others, in Germany and Austria). Millions of euros are being invested in Vichy’s revival, partly private money and partly from the municipality and the Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne region. Every beautiful old building, from the Opéra to the casino, is covered in
Perhaps it could be again – while remaining just a little off the beaten track.
The King wants all of us to learn basic needlework, so that we can sew on buttons, and repair our clothes. Chucking away clothes is a major contributor to environmental pollution. This is a worthy aspiration and we should all support it. But being an accomplished seamstress (or seamster) is not a talent everyone is given. My own efforts are often lamentable.
In an ideal world, every town should have a haberdashery, which sells and advises on needlework. In Deal we had two but, alas, they have gone, as property developments swallow up small shops. We were also devastated when Margaret, the lady who repaired and altered clothes faultlessly, decided to retire.
Perhaps King Charles could launch some kind of royal charter honouring those who perform this admirable service.
Small World
Don’t carry on, nurse!
The surgeon had just started probing when he realised I was the wrong patient
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…
It’s well-known that older parents become more dependent. Adult children become their carers. And, eventually, they swap identities.
I didn’t know the identity swap would be quite so literal. To book a GP appointment for Mother, I now have to pretend to be her. The online appointment form is now strictly patient-only.
My writerly bent means I have even been adding cheery, characterful old-lady vocab and tone to the form:
‘Oh, Duckie, my lally-pegs are proper aching. Well, would you be so kind as to let the gentleman doctor know, if you have time, my love?’
This gets Mother grumbling. When the Government warned OAPs about their identity being stolen, she didn’t know the culprit would be her son. I told her the version of Mother I’ve created for the GP form wasn’t nearly as unkind as her.
Between Mother, Father and me, we now have a second wall calendar just for medical appointments. Mother says mine don’t count because of my alleged hypochondria.
She has a point. When I visited the hospital for an internal procedure – an operation without the good drugs – I caught a previously unknown condition, Munchausen-by-stupidity.
I signed the release form for exploratory probing. Dressed in nothing but a surgical smock and a pair of hearing aids, I calmed down by Bluetoothing my music playlist to my hearing aids.
Nothing soothes me more than gentle piping of mid-period Billy Joel directly into my earholes.
Suddenly an angry-looking nurse appeared and shouted out a name that I didn’t catch, thanks to the spiky guitar of It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me. I asked the nurse, ‘Jem Clarke? Little Jem Clarke?’
She barely looked over her clipboard, snapping, ‘Let’s be quick!’ in a really loud, mean way.
I jumped up and ran after her with a hearing aid half hanging out.
She accompanied me into a room occupied by a fully green-smocked surgeon. He held his arms up as if he were two glove puppets short of a Sooty Show
The surgeon introduced himself in that modern NHS way: ‘I’m Dr Olson. These are Patricia and Enola, who will be looking after you during the procedure. Please state your name and date of birth.’
I only got as far as announcing proudly, ‘Little Jem Clarke...’
Dr Olson suddenly yelled, ‘Stop-stopstop-stop-stop-stop!’ He turned to my miserable nurse companion and said, ‘You have brought me the wrong patient.’
The nurse glared at me and I glared at the nurse.
The nurse was first off the line, squealing, ‘I called out the patient name and he stood up and came at me like a bullet – he like stampeded me.’
I shot back, ‘She said, “Let’s be quick.” ’
‘I said, “Lesley Quigg.” ’
The nurse and I slowly edged back towards the door.
I confessed to her, ‘In fairness, I was listening to Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits.’
Once we were in the corridor, the nurse said, ‘When I speak, you listen next time, and make sure your little legs don’t go run-run-run until you hear from my mouth the very last part of “Jem Clarke” or else I will remove the very last part of Jem Clarke.’
Suitably chastened, I didn’t turn Billy back on. Instead, I sat, zombie-like, as everyone else stared at a tiny TV in the corner of the room, playing an Antiques Road Trip with no sound.
After another hour, I finally heard my name from Nurse Ratched. She led me in stony silence to the same room to be re-greeted by Dr Olson. He acted as if he had never met me.
I’m not very good at such ritualised behaviour. When he asked me to state my name, I smiled and said, ‘I think we all know only too well who I am – and even, who I’m not … heh-heh.’
There should be a maxim in the English lexicon – defining how not to anger a man whose sole job over the next hour is inserting tubes into your orifices. When I returned home and Mother explained she’s had enough of my identity theft, it wasn’t my only sore point.
My mother had a marvellous talent for mishandling money – mine.
Judy Garland
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Pablo Picasso
Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.
Marlene Dietrich
Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.
Hilaire Belloc
I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.
Audrey Hepburn
Two of the saddest words in the English language are, ‘What party?’ And LA is the ‘What party?’ capital of the world.
Carrie Fisher
The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.
Thomas Jefferson
You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can’t be entertained – or people who are afraid. You can’t entertain a man who has no food.
Bob Marley
Bl**dy asterisks
When I was growing up in the 1970s, people knew how to use asterisks properly. All swear words were routinely ‘asterisked out’, leaving the reader to search their mental library of obscenities to try and identify the curse that provided the best fit.
Commonplace Corner
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby.
Natalie Wood
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Guessing the missing word often provided a fleeting but fun moment of diversion and could be more challenging than one might imagine, especially if your knowledge of curses and smut was extensive. The reader would then have to choose the best fit for the offending word from a wide range of possibilities. Those of a more innocent nature could remain uncorrupted by the foul language and be unable to fill in the blanks.
There was an honesty to this approach: bad language was deemed unacceptable for everyday use, so it was only reasonable that profanities should not be repeated within newspapers and other printed media.
Scroll forward to today,
What spirit is so empty and blind that it cannot recognise the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo
My favourite animal is steak.
Fran Lebowitz
I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.
Le Corbusier
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
Archimedes
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon
All my possessions for a moment of time. Elizabeth I
When we are old, our friends find it difficult to please us, and they are less concern’d whether we be pleas’d or no.
Jonathan Swift
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.
Dr Seuss
I don’t need the money, dear. I work for art. Maria Callas
where redaction in the printed word or online newspaper is often reduced to a mere one or two asterisks, such as ‘The game was sh*t,’ or ‘He told the police officer to f**k off.’
Recently, the Daily Mail Online accompanied a photograph of the ever ubiquitous Holly Willoughby
SMALL DELIGHTS
When a fly is buzzing at the window, you open the window and it flies straight out.
ORLANDO MURRIN, EXETER
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
with a headline explaining to its readers that the sainted Holly ‘plunges into ‘bl**dy cold’ ice bath’. Why bother? Either ‘asterisk’ the entire word or print the word in full. Do not engage in tokenistic redaction which makes a pretence at censorship, but in reality merely repeats the ‘offensive’ word and leaves the reader in absolutely in no doubt about the language used. While the modern approach to the quoting of swear words is a reflection of the increased acceptance of ‘bad’ language in society, there is a large dose of disingenuity and dishonesty associated with it. In fact, I would go as far as saying, ‘It drives me ******* mad, the *******!’ JOEL HANCOCK
Natalie Wood (1938-81)
Too late to say goodbye
When Richard Britton’s wife died suddenly, he didn’t have time to tell her he loved her
My wife’s sudden death after 43 years of blissfully happy marriage came as a cataclysmic shock.
I was stunned, confused, hurt and left facing an enormous black hole in my life. A year later, I am still finding it difficult to come to terms with being alone instead of being half of a couple.
It has been dramatically brought home to me that, without any notice, relationships can get sundered by illness or accident. It’s not given to many people to know when that might happen.
Few people want to think about this happening to their partner. The experience of my wife’s death makes me challenge you to do so.
During the last few hours of her life, she was heavily sedated and unable to communicate. I can’t begin to describe the desperate frustration of not having been able to talk to her, reassure her, soothe her and pour out my innermost feelings about her and what our life together had meant to me.
I needed desperately to tell her what happiness our marriage had given me – and to hear her say that it had been the same for her.
I wanted to say sorry for any times I’d been short-tempered or neglectful and so very much needed to hear her reassurance that it didn’t matter.
Having been denied that last opportunity, and living now with not having been able to say a proper goodbye, is a dreadful sadness that’s with me every day.
And it’s not only having been unable to say goodbye. We were denied sharing and savouring together for one last time the joys our lives together had brought us.
I wasn’t able to tell her I loved her –and I can’t remember when I last did so. Why did I let that happen? Why didn’t I tell her more often while I could? I took for granted that she knew I loved her.
But, with my last opportunity snatched away, I am left with the burden of guilt and self-condemnation that I didn’t tell her every day what she meant to me.
Ask yourself what you would feel if you were denied for ever the chance to tell a dying partner all the things you should have told them while they could understand and respond.
If you are in a partnership, you have the opportunity to learn from my dreadful experience. Think about all the things you would want to say to them if they were dying in front of you. AND SAY THEM NOW!
I think of the times when I might have spoken harshly and didn’t apologise with a kiss; when I might have seemed brusque or abrasive and never said sorry. I think of times when she wanted – or needed – to be cuddled, and I didn’t respond.
Why didn’t I hug her more often? Why
I wanted to say sorry for any times I’d been short-tempered or neglectful
Don’t delay: express your feelings today
didn’t I touch and stroke her while I told her I loved her?
Now it’s too late. I can’t put those things right. I’m loaded with regret, remorse, guilt and self-criticism. BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE FOR YOU!
When there’s no one to come home to; nobody to share things with; when the house is silent; when I think, ‘I must remember to tell her about that’ – and then realise I can’t – those are the times that bring home just how valuable a loving relationship is, and what it truly means to be a couple.
The great danger is in taking for granted that the happiness, comfort and contentment the relationship provides will last for ever. Then suddenly it’s gone. I want to scream out to everyone in a partnership, ‘Don’t take your loving relationship for granted. Make your partner aware that you value and appreciate it. Constantly make efforts to nurture it.’
My daily life is still undermined by thoughts of ‘If only I had been more patient and listened more carefully to her’; ‘I hope she knew how much she meant to me – I should have told her more often.’
You can still say these things. I can’t. So if you are in a loving relationship, recognise that it can be brought to a traumatic close at any time. Say and do the things I can no longer say and do and desperately wish I had.
I would expand an oft-quoted saying: ‘Treat every day of your partnership as if it was the last.’ For me, it was. For you, it’s not too late.
The bloody truth of country life
Before Covid, lots of us had begun to think too much cleanliness was bad.
We needed a few germs to stimulate our immune systems. Children were becoming more allergic because they’d not built up any defences. And all those sprays and potions were killing every living organism.
So we bought eco-friendly products –which didn’t work. But never mind; we were doing the right thing.
And then the pandemic reversed all that. Suddenly we were washing our hands every hour, keeping our distance, sterilising everything within sight, and consuming tons and tons of plastic in the
When my first husband, then a journalist, went to French Equatorial Africa in the late ’40s to see the saintly Dr Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Lambaréné, he was puzzled by Schweitzer’s rule: mosquitoes should be caught and gently released outside –even though they were responsible for the malaria the hospital was trying to cure. Even worse, Schweitzer’s ‘reverence for life’ meant that the rats, their populations uncontrolled, could eat the lepers’ senseless feet with impunity.
I don’t have anything like Schweitzer’s affection for all God’s creatures. I want to kill the giant wasps that are threatening our bees. And I’d like the ban on shooting crows lifted – there are now so many that a whole field can be black with the critters. They occupy our bird boxes meant for owls, and keep us awake attacking their reflections in the windows. I thought crows were supposed to be clever. But they don’t learn. They fly full-tilt at the glass, fall, stunned, onto the
Chris Patten on The Hong Kong Diaries Patten’s personal experience as the last governor in Hong Kong, 1991 to 1997
Hugh Johnson on Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2025 A thorough guide to just about everything
terrace, fly away and promptly come back for more.
So whose side are you on? Foxes kill chickens, cats kill birds and blue tits hog the bird feeders – so they thrive at the expense of other small birds.
I’ve been following the ‘no dig’ debate. The idea is that if you don’t plough the land, you don’t disturb the sophisticated network of insect and fungal life under the soil. All well and good, but you don’t loosen or aerate it either and if you live in the Cotswolds, the clay sets like concrete.
Now we are trying to breed worms, which will do the aerating without the damage. But worms are as fussy as children. They don’t like onions, citrus, coffee grounds or tea bags. I ask you!
Finally, I don’t know what to think about veggies and vegans. I’m full of admiration for what looks to me like huge self-sacrifice. And there’s no doubt the planet requires us to eat less meat.
But, to state the bleeding obvious, if no one ate meat, we’d have no sheep or cows at all.
No one is going to keep cattle to decorate the landscape. Their survival depends on their being someone’s dinner.
Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now
Sponsored by
Tim Marshall on Prisoners of Geography: The Quiz Book – How Much Do You Really Know About the World?
Inside job
A tantalising view of the lost interiors of London’s greatest houses
david horspool
Today, interior decoration is a national obsession and a mainstay of our perpetual-motion economy.
You can date the democratisation of décor to the appearance of Habitat, the arrival of IKEA or the popularity of the TV show Changing Rooms and its offspring. The original had its final broadcast 20 years ago.
A new book, London’s Lost Interiors by Steven Brindle, reminds us that interior design was once a more rarefied art, open mainly to the very rich. The book beautifully reproduces dozens of photographs from around the 1880s till shortly after the Second World War.
There is a fascination and melancholy to all these vanished schemes. The book is in the same genre as the great Gavin Stamp volumes Britain’s Lost Cities and Lost Victorian Britain, as well as Philip Davies’s unforgettable Lost London 1870-1945. Brindle’s has if anything an even greater sense of a vanished world about it. As he points out:
‘Interior design is one of the most fugitive and fragile of art forms. You can update your wardrobe while hanging on to favoured old clothes, if you have the space and the inclination, but this is not so true of interiors … For most of the interiors in this book, photographs are the only record.’
And what a record it is. Brindle imposes a chronological and social order on his selection, dividing the royals and aristocrats from the plutocrats and the middle classes. Sometimes the distinctions are not particularly clear, as people often straddle categories.
Anyway, in interior design, imitation was more than a form of flattery. It was the only way of establishing your bona fides – particularly if you had made your own money or had the misfortune to be a foreigner.
Some interiors give an impression of the personalities and whims of their
owners. Brindle’s diligent research does the rest. Here is the Indian Museum of railway heir Lord Brassey, bought as a job lot from the India and Colonial Exhibition in 1886 and installed at 24 Park Lane.
We can still see it, though not in London. Brassey’s son gave it to the Borough of Hastings, and it was installed as the Hastings Museum’s Durbar Hall.
There are a few glimpses of the march of history. Lord Leighton’s Flaming June and others stand in a row on their easels, framed and ready for his final Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1895. Round the corner, at Holland House, Brindle includes the famous photograph of overcoated men browsing the shelves of the bombed-out library during the Blitz.
The Nazis, of course, put paid to many of the buildings housing these interiors, though planners were equally culpable. The indebtedness of our aristocracy also led them to pull down some of the grandest addresses in London.
The bombing of one of the houses photographed here, 145 Piccadilly, drove a former occupant to a rare outburst:
‘It really makes one wild with rage to see all the insane destruction of beautiful & often dearly loved buildings,’ the (future) Queen Mother wrote in 1940 of the house where the late Queen Elizabeth II was brought up until 1936, when her father became George VI.
She wished the bombs had fallen round the corner on 7 Carlton House Terrace, which Ribbentrop had commissioned Albert Speer to Nazify. Brindle has photos of that too, after the building had been repossessed by the British, but
‘Interior design is one of the most fugitive and fragile of art forms’
before removal of the swastika designs on the stair carpets and fireplace frieze.
The grandest of designs are on show – over-the-top rococo, faux-medieval, austerely neoclassical – together with some frankly weird choices. The gilded leather panelling in the billiard room of the Queen Mother’s neighbours in Piccadilly has something of the fetish room about it.
To modern eyes, the regular appearance of blackamoors – sculpted black figures, usually holding something up, such as a table or a lamp – makes for uncomfortable viewing which Brindle passes over. I suppose you can’t point out Eric Gill’s disgusting private life every time one of his artworks is seen, but the sexy, submissive nudes at Cliveden Place are hard to look at dispassionately.
As time goes by, the rise of the interior decorator, Sibyl Colefax and Syrie Maugham to the fore, imposes a certain uniformity. The profusion of Rex Whistler and Whistler-like decorative touches dial up the whimsy. But personality still breaks through. The only person photographed in her own room is the actress Fay Wray, seen seated in an armchair beside a bizarre wrought-iron gate that King Kong might have trouble breeching.
If there is a discernible trend here, it is of a gradual decluttering. Very few mod cons are on show. Those that are include a toilet-roll-holder in the bathroom at Moray Lodge in 1904 – to hold an invention that was then only 14 years old.
The only television is in the humblest home here, a postwar terrace in Highbury, which Brindle suspects would have been too luxurious an item to belong to any prospective owners.
Perhaps – but soon it would be the dominant piece of furniture in our homes. In time, it would even dictate the way we decorate them.
London’s Lost Interiors by Steven Brindle is out now
Winter round-up of the reviews
Christmas classics – Sam Leith
Beautiful reprints – Lucy Lethbridge
Books to thrill – Michael Barber
Biography & Memoir History Countryside
Current A airs Fiction Miscellaneous
Winter 2024 | www.theoldie.co.uk
Issue 70 Winter 2024
Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie
A Voyage Around the Queen, by Craig Brown
The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama, by Ben Macintyre
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, by Sam Leith
The Women Behind the Door, by Roddy Doyle
Lower than Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Precipice, by Robert Harris
Goethe: His Faustian Life, by A N Wilson
Harold Wilson, by Alan Johnson
A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories, by Simon Russell Beale
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux
Jeremy Catto: A Portrait of the Quintessential Oxford Don, by David Vaiani
Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd
Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA
Editorial Team: Michael Barber, Sam Leith, Charlotte Metcalf, Harry Mount, James Pembroke, Tim Willis
Editor: Charlotte Metcalf
Design: Christina Richmond
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:Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093. For editorial enquiries editorial@theoldie.co.uk
A Festive Miscellany
The word ‘miscellany’ conjures up a random mixture or tantalising lucky dip we associate with festive hampers or Christmas stockings. So how apt that our Winter Review has four pages of ‘miscellaneous’, crammed with new books impossible to pigeon-hole – pity the independent bookseller deciding on which shelf to display them.
They include the lyrical new book from literary shepherd James Rebanks and an intriguing book by Robert McCrum about the penalty kick, Virago’s heart-warming book about friendship and Dr Rachel Clarke’s lauded The Story of a Heart
Elsewhere, Sam Leith chooses those trusted Christmas favourites that never fail to delight and Michael Barber picks the best crime and thrillers, including those from Kate Atkinson, Susie Dent and John le Carré’s son, Nick Harkaway.
In our fiction pages you’ll find the latest from Will Self, Richard Powers and the prodigious Sally Rooney, among much else. Other treats include Al Pacino’s autobiography, John Suchet writing about Beethoven, a memoir of Pamela Churchill Harriman and one of Frank Zappa by his daughter, Moon.
There’s history, from William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road to books on Arnhem, Henry V and the notorious Wagner Group. More currently, Anthony Seldon brutally dissects Liz Truss’s short premiership. Anupreeta Das questions Bill Gates’s power, while the legendary American reporter, Bob Woodward, has a new book simply called War.
We have Gillian Anderson’s collection of sexual fantasies, Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus, a book on mothers who abandon their children, a traditional thatcher’s memoir, James Stourton’s account of life among the ‘rogues and scholars’ of the art world and Josh Cohen’s book on rage.
It really is a gloriously mixed bag, a festive miscellany of books, to keep you going right into the New Year and beyond. Happy Christmas.
Charlotte Metcalf
Memoir & Biography
KINGMAKER
SONIA PURNELL
Virago, 528pp, £25
Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997 while US Ambassador to France. Her name combines her first husband, Randolph, dissolute son of Winston, and her third, American Averell Harriman, director of Lend-Lease and Democratic party eminence grise.
Obituaries were scathing, often sexist. Dismissed as a social climber, her glamorous life and erotic adventures overshadowed what she did behind the scenes to shape the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic.
Subtitled ‘Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power’, Kingmaker is ‘supremely enjoyable’, found Clemency BurtonHill in the FT. ‘With a historian’s eye for rigour, a journalist’s for detail and a storyteller’s for drama, Purnell is extremely persuasive. Pamela blossoms into a fascinating subject.’
Lisa Hilton, in the TLS, called her ‘mesmerically charismatic. Throughout, Kingmaker is as compelling as its subject.’
In the Guardian, Amanda Foreman said Purnell ‘makes the case for Pamela as a woman of substance. Kingmaker is onto something important. Successful women are judged differently than men. A monster like Picasso gets a free pass, but woe betide the unlikable woman.’
For the Telegraph’s Sarah Watling too, ‘Kingmaker becomes a study of the limited means of
influence available to ambitious women of Harriman’s generation.’
In the Observer, Anthony Quinn was more ambivalent: ‘this sympathetic, well-researched, busily peopled but faintly exhausting biography will test even the keenest appetite for stories of ambition and the will to power… While the end of the war brought relief, it also put the wind up her: she was 25, lonely and jobless. It also leaves her biographer with another 300 pages and 50 years to fill, none of them nearly as compelling as 1939-45.’
THE ISLAND
W H AUDEN AND THE LAST OF ENGLISHNESS
NICHOLAS JENKINS
Faber & Faber, 768pp, £25
Nicholas Jenkins’s monumental study of the first three decades of Auden’s life – in which he argues that Auden was a writer deeply shaped by the Great War and preoccupied with what it would mean to be an English national poet – was blurbed by the great Auden scholar Edward Mendelson as representing a ‘Copernican revolution’ in our understanding of the poet.
Some reviewers found more in it to admire than enjoy. In the Times, James Marriott found it ‘intimidatingly conscientious’ – and complained that the ‘boyish Auden — charismatic, whimsical, selfdelightingly virtuosic — is too little in evidence’. Jenkins’s revisionism was ‘meticulous’ but ‘unconvincing’. ‘Jenkins’s conception of Auden as “a traumatised poet haunted by war and suffering” is at odds with the poetry and the man’.
In the Observer, Rachel Cooke compared the experience of reading Jenkins’s huge book to going caving in the mineshafts that were so important to his subject’s early poetry: ‘“Headlamp at the ready”, I thought, whenever I opened it.’ The book’s ‘lovely moments’, she said, are ‘hard won’ but the book is ‘at its best, a richly striated landscape, not
only in complexity of mood but also courtesy of its cast of strange, dazzling and sometimes highly dubious characters’.
In the Spectator, Sam Leith liked it better, saying that though ‘in the academic direction’, Jenkins’s study was ‘rich and ingenious’ and called Jenkins a hugely able guide through the thickets’ of Auden’s riddling early verse. ‘I hope this is the first book in a sequence,’ he said. ‘I would love to see Jenkins go to town on the extraordinary poems that, as he bids farewell to his subject, still lie in the future.’
CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SERPENT QUEEN
MARY HOLLINGSWORTH
Apollo, £30, 480pp
Catherine was queen consort of France for 12 years, queen mother during the brief reigns of her sons Francis II and Charles IX, and royal counsellor during the reign of her son Henry III. ‘Hollingsworth brings to this study of Catherine de’ Medici her characteristic combination of scholarship and narrative verve’, wrote Glenn Richardson in Literary Review. ‘The story bowls along at a lively pace.’
Hollingsworth, wrote Jessica Wärnberg in History Today, ‘presents Catherine as an astute figure who promoted tolerance and compromise in the face of zealotry and fear. In doing so, she adds her voice to those who have already defended Catherine from the ‘Black Legend’ that has long surrounded her name...’
In the Telegraph, Frances Wilson dismissed the notion that Catherine was essentially a negotiator of peace during France’s wars of religion. The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants across France in August 1572 was started by Charles IX, ‘after which the mob took over. And just as quickly rumours spread that Catherine was, as in all other aspects of government, puppet
Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589)
Harriman: ‘mesmerically charismatic’
Memoir & Biography
master... This is not the first book to present Catherine as a maligned figure, and Mary Hollingsworth is no prose stylist.
What distinguishes Catherine de’ Medici is its close attention to detail, not only in its reconstruction of the lavish and itinerant life of the court with its “truly villainous cast of arrogant, ruthless, devious and self-serving characters” – the dramatis personae is 11 pages long – and careful analysis of the never-ending wars and plots and machinations, but in showing us what Catherine was wearing and eating and thinking on what seems to have been every day of her life.’
MY BATTLE OF HASTINGS
CHRONICLE OF A YEAR BY THE SEA
XIALOU GUO
Chatto & Windus, 256pp, £18.99
Arriving in the West 20 years ago, Guo established herself with a series of semi-autobiographical novels. But more recently, wrote Alice O’Keeffe in the Times, she has discovered ‘a distinct voice’ in straightforward memoirs and ‘revealed herself as something much more than a novelty Chinese-British act’.
The reviewer called Guo ‘uniquely determined’ in ‘documenting her quest to live life on her own terms’. Which means we now find the author in the title’s East Sussex enclave, where she has bought a dilapidated little flat. Her London-based partner and nine-year-old daughter visit at weekends but her solitude “is something I have to protect and pursue, even if at the same time I suffer the disapproving gaze of other mothers”.
After a preface on Hastings’s significance in our island story – she imagines the famous battle’s dead lying in their thousands beneath fields
where she walks – the book divides into four parts, one for each season.
‘Guo brings a fresh eye to the strangeness of British seaside towns. The wind never stops blowing rain through her leaky window frames; gaunt men deal drugs and the locals “drag themselves along the treeless streets, a shopping bag in hand”.’
Such grimness, though, is leavened by detours on the reliability of our builders, our dyspeptic diet and the seemingly-mystical entwinement of our charity shops with the late Queen.
In the FT, Oonagh Devitt Tremblay found it ‘a meditation not only on how history has shaped Hastings, but also on what it means to locate oneself within history’.
And of Guo’s attempt, O’Keeffe concluded: ‘Let’s hope it has worked; we want this clear-eyed writer to stick around.’
SONNY BOY: A MEMOIR
AL PACINO
CENTURY, £25, 384pp
Hollywood legend Pacino is three when this memoir begins. With an absentee father and an alcoholic mother who required electro-therapy and eventually died of an overdose, his early years were bleak.
‘Pacino’s account of New York’s postwar mean streets is startlingly cinematic,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian. ‘He introduces us to his gang of little toughs, kids called Cliffy, Bruce and Petey who bunk off
school to play in the derelict allotments or fish in open sewers for anything shiny’ to sell for a dime’.
Later, he ‘learns his trade in off-off-off Broadway, sometimes earning a favourable mention, but just as often a stinker. He is both a fish out of water and an absolute star’, although in the book’s second half he ‘spends more time on the films that didn’t work than the ones that did.’
In the Observer Abhrajyoti Chakraborty wanted to know how ‘a delinquent school dropout from the South Bronx end[ed] up as arguably the most persuasive actor to ever grace a movie screen?... Nothing in the latter half of the book matches up to Pacino’s vivid rendering of his hardscrabble years. What we get instead are anecdotes and career highlights Pacino has covered for decades in interviews and talkshows... What redeems these pages are the parts where Pacino reveals his single-minded commitment to his craft.’
In the Sunday Times, Ed Potton said that this ‘readably eccentric memoir really preserves his Bronxreared turn of phrase’, while Caryn James, in the New York Times, found that Pacino tells anecdotes ‘with modesty and a bit of a shrug... in an uneven memoir that is sometimes a heartfelt consideration of art, and often a perfunctory cradle-to-age-84 overview of his life and career... Pacino doesn’t dish gossip or give much detail about his personal life, but he is passionate about acting.’
Hastings: Guo’s East Sussex home
Al Pacino in Brian de Palma’s Scarface, 1983
Music Memoir
IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN A PERSONAL JOURNEY
JOHN SUCHET
Elliott & Thompson, 272pp, £20
Journalist, John Suchet, reported from warzones around the world, becoming ITN’s news anchor in 1987. Today he’s a presenter on Classic FM and this, his eighth book about Beethoven, is as much about the author’s obsession with the subject as about the composer himself.
‘Beethoven is the model of the self-fashioning yet misunderstood genius,’ said Ivan Hewett in the Telegraph, ‘doomed for romantic rejection by women unable to tolerate his less-than-savoury habits. Early biographers vied to honour him; nowadays the tendency is not so much to debunk Beethoven as to reveal him as a deeply flawed and troubled person sorely in need of the psychoanalyst’s couch. This lands somewhere in the middle, wavering between a genius and an all-toofallible human being … Suchet attempts to visit every bakery, apartment and theatre ever associated with Beethoven, from Bonn to Vienna, and interweaves this nerdy completism with a chronological narrative of the composer’s life.’
‘It’s Suchet’s personal approach that’s so engaging,’ found Henrietta Bredin in Country Life. ‘He is a journalist, not a musicologist, and plunges in enthusiastically where angels – or academics – might fear to tread … making numerous trips to places where Beethoven is known to have walked, composed, performed, visited, eaten and drunk, rejoiced and despaired. In he goes, terrier-like, pursuing unpromising leads,’ among them ‘a marvellously funny’ account of ‘dinner cooked by Beethoven, “the
beef fit to be eaten only by an ostrich”. But however much Suchet admires – “even worships”– Beethoven as a composer, he finds it “difficult to like him as a human being”.’
TCHAIKOVSKY’S EMPIRE
A NEW LIFE OF RUSSIA’S GREATEST COMPOSER
SIMON
MORRISON
Yale, 384pp, £25
American cultural historian Simon Morrison is an inveterate scrutineer of archives, and has published re-evaluations of Sergei Prokofiev’s wife, Lina, and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. This book challenges the conventional view of ‘Russia’s Greatest Composer’, presenting him in a wholly new light and debunking the conspiracy theorists.
‘Tchaikovsky has long been portrayed as a melancholic and tragic figure tormented by his homosexuality,’ Dalya Alberge reminds us in the Guardian, ‘but Morrison said many of the letters to his siblings are “extremely funny and graphic, a kind of Monty Python sense of humour, talking about everything from his sexual adventures to his terrible intestinal troubles.”’
In the Times, Richard Morrison found it ‘sane, well-grounded and lucid’, marvelling at its attention to detail, as when Swan Lake ‘was greeted with incredulity at its premiere.
‘An unconventional, work-based study,’ found David Gutman in Gramophone, aiming to ‘eliminate the stockpile of distorting lenses. With Tchaikovsky’s immediate social milieu rethought as tolerant of discreet homosexuality, there’s less temptation to portray him as a frail neurasthenic with only one vein of authentic self-expression, the neuroticism of the outcast.’
In Literary Review, Stephen Walsh thought it ‘readable, personable, consistently absorbing... with a few mildly irritating shortcomings, the most notable being the almost complete omission of a few important works.’
‘Morrison is right and bold to build his counter-narrative,’ felt Paul Kildea in the
Spectator, ‘yet he is determined to unfold this narrative against the backdrop of imperial Russia. And this is where his stall looks a little understocked.’
CELLO
A JOURNEY THROUGH SILENCE TO SOUND KATE KENNEDY
Head of Zeus, 480pp, £30
‘The cello is the most obviously carnal of musical instruments,’ said Kathryn Hughes in the Times. ‘It is the cello’s capacity to live materially and biographically that Kate Kennedy explores in this strikingly original book. She organises her account around four European cellists in the 19th and 20th centuries whose difficult and dangerous lives extended far beyond the good manners of the concert hall.’
They were Lise Cristiani – ‘the Jacqueline du Pré of the Victorian period’; ‘the Hungarian Pál Hermann, a brilliant performer and composer’ , sent to Drancy in 1944; and Amedeo Baldovino, ‘owner of the “Mara” Stradivarius that was shattered when the musicians were shipwrecked in 1963 during a tour of South America’. ‘Kennedy’s most harrowing account concerns Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a talented young cellist who was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and drafted into the camp orchestra.’ This group biography, not only takes in some of the darkest episodes of the 20th century but explores the meaning and the materiality of these extraordinary instruments as well as their owners’ lives.
‘Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17thcentury craftsman and a 20thcentury genocide,’ marvelled the Spectator’s Alexandra Coghlan.
‘Playing an extended narrative game... Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly.’
John Suchet: ‘obsessed’ with Beethoven
Music Memoir
STREET-LEVEL SUPERSTAR A YEAR WITH LAWRENCE WILL HODGKINSON
Nine Eight Books, 368pp, £22
Lawrence (no surname) selfsabotaged the career of his left-field 80s pop band Felt and his next group, Denim, collapsed when their possible breakthrough single, Summer Smash, was cancelled after Princess Diana died. Now 62, Lawrence lives alone in a council flat on a diet of crackers, milky tea and a particular kind of liquorice he fears Poundland has discontinued. The Times’s music critic Will Hodgkinson spent a year wandering round London with him to try and fathom his deathless thirst for fame.
The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick found it ‘mesmerising – a warped, confounding and sometimes perversely amusing tale littered with incidents in which Lawrence effectively plucks defeat from the jaws of victory, then recontextualises it as victory after all, a forensic case-study of our culture’s pathological fascination with fame – and the damage it can wreak.’
On Tortoise Media, Stephen Armstrong felt it ‘skilfully carves a fascinating tale around the subject’s constant failure and incomprehensible thinking. You can find a critique of fame in here or a sad tale of a confused man. What you can’t quite find, because Hodgkinson himself admits defeat, is any understanding of what drives a 62-year-old semi-homeless man to live in a fantasy he constantly destroys.’
‘Hodgkinson is fascinated,’ Nick Duerden found in the Guardian, ‘by
what makes an artist, ‘particularly an overlooked one. What kind of mindset? How much belligerence? Street-Level Superstar is essentially a pop version of Withnail And I after ‘I’ has gone off to become famous. But then navigation of failure is far more interesting than... of success...easier to relate to, too.’
EARTH TO MOON
MOON UNIT ZAPPA
White Rabbit, 368pp, £22
Moon Unit Zappa – as she was challengingly named when born in 1967 – is the daughter of the famously moustachioed, ‘pagan absurdist’, oddball rock star Frank Zappa and his former groupie wife, Gail. She became a stand-up comic and actor after her hit single Valley Girl, recorded by her father, lampooning the irksome, ‘grody to the max’ teen-speak of upscale LA at the time. She’s finally written a riotous account of life in their impossibly bohemian and experimental family home.
This book ‘frequently takes the breath from the lungs,’ felt Nick Duerden in the Guardian, ‘leaving you ‘with the conviction that Zappa’s complicated clan must have been among America’s most dysfunctional. But for such a thoroughly dispiriting saga it’s somehow an unconscionably entertaining read with Moon a sublime writer who dips her pen in Nora Ephron’s ink. Funny, waspish and arch.’
‘The view is of an irregular family in which the emotional incontinence of strait-laced America combines with freewheeling individualism to produce the worst of both worlds,’ found the Telegraph’s Ian Winwood. ‘“Our backyard is full of ivy, crabgrass, dog shit and old milk cartons … I don’t love seeing strangers cavorting or making candles, or in the nude, near my toys.”’
‘Much of this is a familiar, Mommie Dearest-style tale of childhood horror at the hands of Hollywood parents,’ thought the Times’s Will Hodgkinson, ‘but it’s beyond therapy-speak and very funny. “I had two invisible camels for playmates and daydreamed about following in Frank’s footsteps dressed like a nun.” ‘The lesson is a simple one: don’t become famous and have children.’
AND THE ROOTS OF RHYTHM REMAIN A JOURNEY THROUGH GLOBAL MUSIC
JOE
BOYD
Faber & Faber, 994pp, £30
Joe Boyd produced the early Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, R.E.M and the Incredible String Band among many others, going on to launch the Hannibal label, specialising in world music. In 2007 he wrote White Bicycles about his pioneering days in the 60s. This epic work is the refreshingly lightly written story of how centuries-old global music is fundamental to how today’s world sounds, and comes with an illuminating Spotify playlist.
‘Inasmuch as music is an expression of the human world – our aspirations, tribulations and celebrations – this is a history of that world, told through music,’ thought Ed Vulliamy in the Guardian. ‘Music is, by definition, ‘sans frontières’ and the book explores how rhythms, scales and melodies flowed across the globe, constantly altering what the world danced and listened to. It’s the Proust of music history – ‘à la recherche’ of much music lost, here regained and affirmed in our present.’
‘One minute you can be reading about how that arch-kleptocrat President Mobutu helped to bankroll the career of the great Congolese guitarist Franco,’ noted Clive DAvis in the Times, ‘the next Boyd is hanging out in a New Orleans studio, trekking to a festival in the Sahara or quoting the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin...his enthusiasm proves infectious; he is teacher, storyteller and, sometimes, provocateur.’
Musicologist and former Roxy Music member, Brian Eno, said ‘I’ll never read a better account of the history and sociology of popular music.’
Lawrence, in the band Felt, 1987
Frank Zappa with his family in the 90s
History
THE GOLDEN ROAD HOW ANCIENT INDIA TRANSFORMED THE WORLD
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Bloomsbury, 496pp, £30
The subject of historian William Dalrymple’s latest book is the story, largely overlooked amid our obsession with Greco-Roman antiquity, of how ancient India exerted a vast cultural influence.
Indian mathematics, astronomy, textiles, livestock, art and precious stones flooded far to east and west throughout the ancient and early medieval eras – to say nothing of its spirituality, with Buddhism taking root and flourishing in distant south-east Asia.
‘Dalrymple is enthralled by the postcard monuments of ancient India’s ‘“soft power”: the magnificent Borobudur Buddhist temple in Indonesia; the Hindu temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia,’ wrote Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in the Observer, who also noted a lively maritime trade with the Italian mainland in ‘exotic spices, gemstones, Indian cotton, elephant tusks, tortoise shells and even substantial numbers of caged wild animals (meant to fight in the Colosseum)’.
Pratinav Anil in the Times opened his review with, ‘As a university lecturer, I have the Muslim world to thank for my line of work [...] “But where did the Arabs get the idea from?” the historian Dalrymple asks. Why, of course, from south Asia.’
Here, Anil thought, was a ‘largely forgotten history’ of the time ‘from 250BC to AD1200, when India was number one’: ‘From Kandahar to Singapore, Dalrymple tells us, Indian
culture reigned supreme in that period. It was, moreover, a hegemony that turned not so much on state power as soft power.’
In Literary Review John Keay said: ‘A more masterful and accessible survey of a “worldchanging” traffic in commodities, creeds, scientific insights and artistic conventions than The Golden Road would be hard to find. The only surprise is that it has taken Dalrymple so long to address the subject. No one is better qualified to do so.’
HENRY V
THE ASTONISHING RISE OF ENGLAND’S GREATEST KING
DAN JONES
Apollo, 464pp, £25
Shakespeare got it wrong. As a youth, Henry was no wastrel, but a diligent student, soldier and player of court politics. As triumphant monarch against the French, he had less faith in English exceptionalism than in Almighty God. Such myth-busting, along with Jones’s ‘brio and wit’, led the Guardian’s Alexander Larman to call this new biography ‘as splendidly readable as ever, full of diverting incident and considered judgment’.
Like the king himself – who could be both exceptionally cruel and exceedingly pious – the book divides into two halves: before and after coronation. Raised in the chaotic reign of Richard II, Henry had an uncertain childhood, much of it spent as a hostage against the good behaviour of his father Bolingbroke. When the latter usurped the crown, he was 13; a year later, he was already putting down rebellions. And after assuming the throne aged 26, he displayed the same ruthless determination as legislator, diplomat and warmaker.
Happily, Jones takes his time arriving at Agincourt, giving himself space to demonstrate the cool intelligence needed to win. The king recouped the punitive taxes raised for his campaigns – had he not died of ‘intestinal flux’ a mere nine years into the job, we might still be ruling France – and the author is a fan.
As were reviewers of his account. The Telegraph’s Daniel Brooks found Jones’s prose to ‘hum with energy’ and his ability to marry realm-scale intrigue with family drama marks
this out as narrative history at its best’. And on the Aspects of History website, Richard Foreman declared: ‘Read this book. Jones has created a masterclass in narrative and argument, told with pace and scholarship.’
THE EAGLE AND THE HART
THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD II AND HENRY IV
HELEN CASTOR
AllenLane, £35, 688pp
Richard II was just ten when he ascended to the throne in 1377. ‘A child king comes to power without the apprenticeship of a king-inwaiting,’ explained Jonathan Sumption in Literary Review.
‘He is surrounded from his earliest years by the incense of monarchy, which can turn even the most level of heads. Confronted by the challenges of ruling over experienced older men, he depends on intimates and favourites to give him reassurance and support. It’s hardly surprising that Richard grew up a neurotic and unstable narcissist with exalted ideas of his own status and powers.’ He alienated many of his most powerful nobles, several of whom ‘were executed or exiled and their estates forfeited’.
Henry IV’s problem was different. He returned from exile to usurp the throne, but because his title ‘was based on a military coup’ he ‘was never secure.’ Castor’s book ‘conveys the complexities of politics in this fascinating time in exemplary style, with a sharp eye for personality and a profound understanding of the period.’
Richard and Henry were cousins whose characters were ‘reflected by the animals on their heraldic badges: a delicate white hart for Richard and an imposing black eagle for Henry.’
The latter was far ‘better suited to kingship. For one thing, this skilled jouster and successful crusader was a proven warrior; he also had four sons. Above all, he was willing to take advice... Nevertheless, being a usurper was hard.’ This ‘exhaustively researched and beautifully written’ book ‘reads not just as a political epic but as a timely reflection on both the dangers of egomaniacal rulers and the challenges facing those who replace them.’
Borobudur Buddhist temple, Java
THE WAGNER GROUP INSIDE RUSSIA’S MERCENARY ARMY
JACK MARGOLIN
Reaktion Books, 328pp, £15.99
The Wagner Group was created by Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose ‘implausible journey from street hot-dog seller to secretive international warlord to a social media-addicted insurrectionist’, wrote Miles Johnson in the FT, is the subject of this ‘deeply reported history’ by Jack Margolin, an independent researcher and expert on modern mercenaries.
Prigozhin moved on from selling hot dogs to running fancy restaurants where members of the Russian underworld mingled with the political elite, and by 2012 his companies controlled 90 per cent of Russia’s military catering, worth $2.9bn at historical exchange rates’.
When Putin’s ‘little green men’ invaded Crimea in 2014 and ‘bands of pro-Russian volunteers declared a breakaway republic’ in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Prigozhin saw an ‘opportunity to offer up a more organised, but still unofficial military solution... Margolin expertly chronicles the evolution of this fledgling outfit into what he calls “the ‘second’ Wagner, a sprawling network of companies born from Prigozhin’s earlier illicit endeavours”.
Moving beyond Ukraine, Prigozhin began offering his services to embattled and kleptocratic dictators such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Sudan’s Omar alBashir, trading security and propaganda services from his burgeoning troll farms, in return for natural resources concessions... Unburdened by the rules that govern state armies, Wagner fighters inflicted horrific atrocities on local populations including summary executions, torture and rape.’
The anonymous reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly found that ‘Margolin paints a surreal picture of the group’s self-mythologizing, which had a half-corporate, halfmafioso flair.’ He portrays ‘a global order in which violence easily permeates civil society by posing as mere business. It’s a vital window onto the weird world of secretive, privatised modern warfare.’
HITLER’S PEOPLE
THE FACES OF THE THIRD REICH
RICHARD J. EVANS
Allen Lane, 598pp, £35
The eminent historian Richard Evans has spent much of his working life examining Hitler’s rise and fall. Were it not so long, it would be tempting to describe this book as a footnote, since much of its appeal is anecdotal. As Mary Fulbrook noted in the TLS, ‘Hitler’s People is coloured by fascinating details, such as Göring’s proclivity for dressing up and painting his fingernails and toenails red.’
According to Evans, Göring, together with Himmler and Goebbels, was one of Hitler’s ‘Paladins’. His ‘Enforcers’ included two promoters of ‘the Final Solution’, Heydrich and Eichmann, and among his ‘Instruments’ were the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and the brasshat, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who was, says Evans, typical of the many generals who turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by their troops. Despite his complicity, von Leeb, as Simon Heffer reminded readers in the Telegraph, ‘was one of several characters whose relatively short prison sentence (three years) will leave many aghast.’
In the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai quoted approvingly the caution with which Evans concludes his study. ‘It is only by understanding “how Nazism exerted its baleful influence that we can perhaps start to recognise the threats that democracy and the assertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter them.” With Hitler’s People, Evans has provided us with just that kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.’
ARNHEM BLACK TUESDAY AL MURRAY
Bantam, 432pp, £25
Operation Market Garden, or the Battle of Arnhem, twice immortalised in film as Theirs is the Glory and A Bridge too Far, was a daring attempt to secure a Rhine
bridgehead and end the war before Christmas 1944. Arnhem, spawning myriad books, notably Antony Beevor’s, invariably written with unerring hindsight, was destined to fail. But the men fighting didn’t know that that was their fate.
For comedian Al Murray it has become a personal obsession. His book offers a ‘very different perspective on the battle, by writing as if without the benefit of hindsight,’ heralded Caroline Sanderson in the Bookseller. It chronicles a single day – Tuesday 19 September, the “most catastrophic 24 hours faced by the British military during the Second World War”.
Best known for his alter ego, The Pub Landlord, Murray is well qualified: an airborne father, Oxford history graduate and podcaster, descendant of Thackeray, he has authored books including ‘Command’, analysing allied military leaders.
Murray ‘worried whether anything was left to be said,’ wrote Gerald DeGroot in the Times ‘Eventually he concentrated on that fateful Tuesday and the men of 1st Airborne stuck in and around Arnhem, executing a plan devoid of logic. He wanted to examine these men in isolation because that’s what they were – isolated. He captures that pandemonium perfectly.’
DeGroot applauded ‘a revelation, not in facts delivered, but rather in the mood evoked. This is Arnhem unplugged, without cleansing filters or rigorous clarification. It’s war in dark, crowded streets, amid heaps of rubble, messy, confusing, brutal and ugly. The fog of war hangs heavily.’
Laura Skitt for Forces News praised ‘something fresh’ while DeGroot concluded: ‘Murray achieves something special.’
Al Murray’s alter ego; The Pub Landlord
Literary magic for Christmas
SAM LEITH on the books that delighted him as a child
When I was young, my parents had an old record of Dylan Thomas reading A Journey by Charabanc to Porthcawl and A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
Is there any piece of prose like it for evoking the glorious post-prandial carbohydrate slump, ‘the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending’? I think there is not.
Christmas – with its ability to make children of adults – is a season festooned with literary magic. And if you manage to hold back a bit on the sherry, there are few greater pleasures than settling down in an armchair on Christmas afternoon with a good Christmassy book. No, not the new Sally Rooney you found in your stocking: one of the classics.
Top of the list is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the closest thing Dickens wrote to a children’s book.
Dickens shadows the Victorian sections of my own new book on childhood reading, The Haunted Wood, but isn’t discussed directly, for that reason. He’s an adult preoccupied with childhood rather than a children’s writer. It’s a perfect little fable, immaculately structured, funny, touching, and can be read through in the time it takes to eat one too many Bendick’s chocolate mints.
Nor should we forget Arthur Conan Doyle’s ingenious Yuletide Holmes story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, in which a stolen gemstone shows up in a very unlikely place. Or, still as sprightly as ever, the jingling verse of Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas: ‘Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!/ On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!’
That short poem – 1823 – is credited with not only naming the reindeer, but with crystallising the iconography of Father Christmas as we now know him. There’s always room for revision, though.
If you’ve read or watched The Snowman one too many times, why
Perennial favourites:
A Christmas Carol and Stick Man
not seek a more vinegary entry in the great Raymond Briggs’s oeuvre with his 1973 Father Christmas. ‘Happy blooming Christmas!’ says his grumpy St Nick.
The Jolly Christmas Postman, Shirley Hughes’s Dogger’s Christmas, Michael Bond’s Paddington’s Christmas, David McKee’s Elmer’s Christmas or Emma Chichester Clark’s Melrose & Croc: Together at Christmas. Julia Donaldson, meanwhile, didn’t produce a specific Gruffalo Christmas special, but there’s a wintry feel to The Gruffalo’s Child – and her Odyssean Stick Man has a protagonist who is delivered home to his family just in time for Christmas day.
I don’t know whether The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe can be considered a Christmas story given that it’s ‘always winter but never Christmas’ in the White Witch’s Narnia – but I’m counting it in. A little less well known but equally compelling, is the title novel in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, as Twelfth Night brings a sinister snowfall and a ‘cloaked rider on a midnight horse’.
Which leads into the rich and un- acountably extensive tradition of spooky Christmas stories. W W Jacobs had Jerry Bundler and E Nesbit offers The Shadow, while M R James had The Story of an Appearance and a Disappearance There’s even an H P Lovecraft story, The Festival: ‘I shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.’ We’re some way, at this point, from those rumbling uncles.
A palate cleanser after all that horror might be a run of those classic children’s picture books that enjoyed seasonal specials: the Ahlbergs’
And if you manage to hold back a bit on the sherry, there are few greater pleasures than settling down in an armchair on Christmas afternoon with a good Christmassy book
First among equals is Judith Kerr’s magnificent Mog’s Christmas, in which the famously forgetful cat greets the arrival of the Christmas tree with no less horror than a character in John Wyndham might greet the arrival of a triffid. All those of us – and that’s surely all of us – who feel a little Christmas-sceptical from time to time will feel for Kerr’s discombobulated feline protagonist. Speaking of Christmas-sceptical, no round-up of Christmas classics is complete without mention of the Christmas sceptic of all Christmas sceptics. Ebenezer Scrooge has nothing on the antihero of Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Are Christmas stories still being written these days? Yes indeed. Less feted than either her Harry Potter books or her grown up Cormoran Strike thrillers is J K Rowling’s standalone fairytale The Christmas Pig – but it’s a little gem. After losing a beloved toy, and scorning its replacement, Jack travels to The Land of the Lost in search of his vanished toy – and brings back something different than he expected.
What’s more, I’ve just returned from promoting my own book (The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading: did I mention it? Available now in all good etc) at the Booksellers Association conference. My goody-bag contained a copy of Ingvild Rishøi’s new children’s novel about a Christmas tree seller, Brightly Shining, praised by Douglas Stuart and Claire Messud. I think I’ll save that one for Christmas afternoon.
Sam Leith wrote The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
Politics & Current Affairs
BILLIONAIRE, NERD, SAVIOUR, KING THE HIDDEN TRUTH ABOUT BILL GATES AND HIS POWER TO SHAPE OUR WORLD
ANUPREETA DAS
Simon & Schuster, 336 pp, £22
Bill Gates ‘is the archetype of the computer nerd-turned-master of the universe, the forerunner of the generation of tech founders who now dominate the business world, said Richard Walters in the FT. Furthermore, ‘the foundation he set up with his former wife Melinda has reshaped the philanthropic landscape, matching some big governments in its spending on global health and development.’
So what’s not to like? Well, says Anupreeta Das, ‘a large tear in Gates’s public image has forced us to reassess the man we knew.’ He was chummy with Jason Epstein and intimate with a Microsoft staffer, a liaison that led to his divorce from Melinda and a cooling of his friendship with Warren Buffett.
So powerful is the Gates foundation that few dare to challenge its goals, even when these are questionable. Little wonder, then, says Das, that ‘Americans appear to be growing increasingly uneasy about billionaires.’
Support for Gates came from an unexpected quarter: the Guardian Having revealed that the Foundation has supported his paper’s ‘global development coverage for many years’, Charlie English said that following the Guardian’s tradition of editorial independence, he ‘was primed to put the boot in.’ But the Epstein connection aside, ‘Das has
found no new smoking gun ... The penultimate chapter is titled ‘Cancel Bill’, and that’s what the whole book feels like ... As yet, and in the context of what other American billionaires do and get away with, it seems a little unfair.’
TRUSS AT 10 HOW NOT TO BE PRIME MINISTER
ANTHONY SELDON, WITH JONATHAN MEAKIN
Atlantic Books, £22, 384pp
In his Observer review, former Tory MP Dominic Grieve noted that ‘49 days [in Number 10] provides rather thin material for a book, as does any account of the steps that got her there. Truss’s personal background and prior political career are covered quickly, in about 12 pages out of 330.
Seldon identifies her core belief as being ‘free market liberalism with a deep suspicion of entrenched vested interests.’ Her ‘downfall was the result of the big policy failure of her mini budget, the resulting loss of any reputation for economic competence, a humiliating U-turn in having to appoint Jeremy Hunt chancellor and ditch her plans for growth, and the resulting collapse in confidence – such as it was – among her MPs.’
‘Seldon writes very well on this. His research has been extensive and the commentary is fleshed out with dialogue and quotations, which he assures us have been checked for accuracy and make for compelling reading.’
The ‘presentation of Truss here,’ said Alexander Larman in the Daily Telegraph, is ‘astonishing in its vitriol.’ She comes across as ‘a
thin-skinned, foul-mouthed, robotic horror, someone who automatically reaches for a large glass of Sauvignon Blanc whenever she’s under pressure, and who’s comically unsuited to the job into which she has schemed her way – a scheme partly inspired by a personal loathing of Sunak, her rival.’ Larman asked ‘who in 2024, apart from political obsessives, would feel the slightest need to buy’ this book.
Tom Peck in the Times, had a pithy answer: ‘Anyone who buys this book will surely do so to feast on the schadenfreude of it all. The menu is well known, but is deliciously seasoned all the same.’
WAR
BOB WOODWARD
Simon & Schuster UK, £25, 448pp
This latest in the Watergate reporter’s series of behind-thescenes narratives about occupants of the US White House concentrates on the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
‘At its core, Woodward’s book is about diplomacy,’ wrote Franklin Foer in the Atlantic. ‘Just past the sundry tidbits about Trump – most horrifying, the former president’s ongoing chumminess with Vladimir Putin, a charge that Trump’s campaign denies – there lies a serious history of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza... One of the most stunning sections of the book captures Putin mulling the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine – and all the quiet diplomacy that pushed him back from the brink.
Newspapers hinted at this threat at the time, but Woodward reveals the backstory in robust and chilling
Truss: ‘thin-skinned, foul-mouthed, robotic’ Above: resigning in October 2022
Bill Gates: shaping our world?
Politics & Current Affairs
detail.’ He ‘pores over the president’s conversations with Netanyahu and Putin with genuine fascination’ and ‘exudes an almost atavistic obsession with the gritty details of foreign policy. Woodward is the most gifted sensationalist of his generation, but it’s his abiding desire to be known as a serious person that yields his most meaningful reporting.’
In the Slate, Fred Kaplan found Woodward’s ‘style of storytelling... more episodic than structural’. Nonetheless, ‘the stories here hang together, more than they usually do, because of their underlying thread [the wars in Ukraine and Gaza]... Woodward uncovers intriguing new facts about the conflicts or, at times, adds color and dimension to stories that others have reported in mere bits and pieces’.
‘One message of this book is that the world, especially the Middle East, is a messy place, and no countries – not even former superpowers – have a lot of leverage over its flailings.’
THE ABANDONERS OF MOTHERS AND MONSTERS
BEGOÑA GÓMEZ URZAIZ
The Borough Press, 320pp, £16.99
‘Can you honestly say, if you are a mother, that you’ve never even thought about it?’ asked Gaby Hinsliff in the Observer, ‘How it would feel to just walk out of the door and leave all the chaos behind, on one of those long, scratchy afternoons when it seems as if bedtime will never come? If you haven’t, then perhaps this book isn’t for you.’
Gómez Urzaiz compiled this collection of wayward mothers trapped during lockdown, a time that pushed many mothers close to breaking point. Some of Gómez Urzaiz’s monsters are ‘jaw-dropping stories in themselves’.
They include Muriel Spark, a Youtube influencer, Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, Gala Dalí and, the most ironic of all, Maria Montessori, the Italian doctor who made a career and a fortune out of early years education. All these women broke the taboo and put themselves before their offspring.
While there may be a grudging admiration for these mothers, beware: ‘the monsters that live
longest in the imagination are the ones in whom we catch, however exaggerated and distorted, a glimpse of ourselves.’
While Hinsliff was impressed by this ‘beautifully translated’ version, not so Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, who thought the text is not ‘particularly well served by what reads as a clunky translation, ultimately giving this unusual book a disjointed and unlocated feel.’
Hughes found that ‘by far the most interesting part of the book is the section in which Gómez Urzaiz interviews another very different kind of absent mother: economic migrants who are obliged to work abroad in order to send money to their children back home.’
MOTHER STATE A POLITICAL HISTORY OF MOTHERHOOD
HELEN CHARMAN
Allen Lane, 512pp, £30
In Mother State, Helen Charman takes the concept of motherhood and levels it up. Motherhood is no longer about the individual, nor is it simply about her rights and struggles as a mother to be perceived as equal.
For Charman, the time has come to view motherhood as a political state. She makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s.
In her ‘provocative and wideranging study of “motherhood” in all its iterations’, wrote Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian, Charman studies motherhood’s relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years.
“Nurture, care, the creation of human life… have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources, both by mothers and for them, than we like to admit,” wrote the author, and Merritt applauded her: ‘Mother State is a lively, engaging and significant overview of recent history, scholarly in tone, though not forbiddingly so (Charman references Buffy the Vampire Slayer alongside Judith Butler).’
But Merritt regretted that Charman’s conclusions remain –by her own admission – somewhat vague, and commented that, ‘So many of the issues covered were subjects of fierce debate when I became a mother 22 years ago. The fact that women are still fighting the same battles is a wearying reminder of how contingent any victories have been, and how essential it is to keep expanding these conversations because, as all the writers point out, finding better solutions should not be the sole responsibility of women.’
Charman ‘writes with intelligence and generosity, and sprinkles her history with details that are enraging, provocative and, frequently, amusing,’ wrote Megan Gibson in the New Statesman, though she found herself, ‘mentally chafing at times’ against some of the points of view.
ALL THE RAGE WHY ANGER DRIVES THE WORLD
JOSH COHEN
Granta Books, 272pp, £16.99
Trump: being endorsed as presidential candidate, Fort Worth, Texas, 2016
Cohen, practising psychoanalyst and professor of literary theory, investigates why rage increasingly drives the world, and what can be done.
‘For the past decade,’ wrote the Daily Mail’s Glenda Cooper, ‘anger has been the defining colour and tone of our daily lives. Cohen
Monster? Joni Mitchell, London, 1968
Politics & Current Affairs
cleverly taps into this feeling that, all around us, people are on the brink of losing their rag.’
Praising ‘a fascinating read, unsettling but compelling’,Lucy Denyer added in the Telegraph, ‘you’ll almost definitely recognise yourself among its pages, whatever your irritation. Like Cohen, you may find yourself reflecting on why a childhood slight still rankles; like his own patients, you may struggle with rage towards colleagues, friends or family.’
Cohen offers a ‘prurient peek into the tangles of other peoples’ feelings to make us feel better about our own, and leaves us to wonder whether we, too, might still be carrying around some unrealised resentment.’
Denyer found Cohen ‘clear, engaging and largely jargon-free. Illustrations range from Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare and Trollope, Freud and The Incredible Hulk –occasionally mashed together, with mixed results. But halfway through I found myself wondering: if it’s bad both to suppress and express one’s anger, what does one do with it? I could have done with some bulletpoints – a user’s guide to useful rage.’
For Cooper, ‘the main target of Cohen’s own wrath is politicians –he thinks they have exploited popular anger and mass rage for their own benefit. Both Trump and Putin get a pasting. Cohen wants us to acknowledge that anger exists, that it can be exploited by those who want power, and that both expressing it wildly or repressing it have their dangers.’
MONEY
A STORY OF HUMANITY
DAVID MCWILLIAMS
Simon & Schuster UK, 416pp, £25
‘Money is so fundamental a part of our conceptual furniture,’ wrote Felix Martin in the FT, ‘that it’s hard to get an objective view: misleading metaphors, conventional misunderstandings and the surreptitious special pleading of vested interests abound. Any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity. In the wrong hands, it can degenerate into a conceptually confused and unmanageably expansive mess. McWilliams dodges
Any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity
these elephant traps.’
Martin attributed this ‘enjoyable and insightful addition to the bulging canon of books (on money’s mysteries) partly to ‘McWilliams’s unusual background. The classicallytrained economist has worked both as a central banker and on the financial markets, and is founder of Kilkenomics – the world’s first festival of economics and stand-up comedy.’
By contrast, in the Literary Review, Howard Davies could ‘not begin to describe what the author’s argument might be, or indeed why this book exists at all. The chapters are written in a down-home, chatty style. Money features in most of them, though in some cases tangentially. The theme seems to be “mess with money and you mess with far more than the price system, inflation and economics – you mess with people’s heads.” If that is the sort of demotic prose you like, you will like this sort of thing.’
Martin, however, applauded an ‘exceptional global history, hugely ambitious and very readable, whose appeal will run well beyond just monetary cranks like me.
McWilliams identifies money as a specific, but constantly evolving, collection of ideas and institutions. This clear conceptual map enables him to spin a coherent global history of money out of an exceptionally colourful and wide-ranging set of yarns.’
MAKING THE WEATHER SIX POLITICIANS WHO CHANGED MODERN BRITAIN
VERNON BOGDANOR Haus Publishing, 368pp, £22
The contention of these collected essays? That without achieving highest office, Bevan, Jenkins, Benn, Joseph, Powell and Farage transformed Britain more than most prime ministers.
In the Sunday Times, Max Hastings applauded Bogdanor’s
‘devastating judgment’ on his old friend ‘Woy’ [Roy Jenkins], ‘he was perhaps the last really literate and civilised member the House has seen’, while also commending the author’s ‘cool objectivity about his chosen subjects, which some of us, who knew the monsters among them, could not match’.
Two are best remembered for legislation. (Nye Bevan created the NHS – ‘much of the developed world provides better healthcare’ – and Jenkins was ‘a great liberalising home secretary’.) Three got into Cabinet, but were strongest in debate and forming policy. (Powell and Joseph were architects of Thatcherism.) And Nigel Farage? A ‘brilliant snake-oil salesman’.
Simon Heffer in the Telegraph thought this ‘intelligent and thoughtful’ analysis ‘revelatory’ and ‘authoritative’. ‘Hypocrite’ Bevan bequeathed us the ‘religion’ of the NHS. Jenkins ‘invented the society in which, for better or worse, we live’. But the sea-change was Brexit, when Jenkins’s dream of a united Europe was defeated by a Powellist espousal of national sovereignty and Bennite critique of the EU’s ‘profoundly undemocratic’ constitution, ‘which left Farage to carry their flame’.
Heffer thought Bogdanor ‘right’ about Farage’s achievements being ‘beyond those of anyone who had never entered parliament’; and Hastings contribution ‘towers, alas, over those of the others in this thought-provoking book’. But, concluded Heffer, the book’s ‘beauty’ lay in that it left ‘much still to be considered and discussed’.
Tony Benn: Labour Party Conference, Brighton, 1981
INTERMEZZO SALLY ROONEY
Faber & Faber, 448pp, £20 ‘Is there a better novelist at work right now?’ asked Anthony Cummins in the Guardian. Once again Rooney has ‘created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage.’ There are ‘tenderly emotional scenes’, ‘comic touches that persuade you utterly of Rooney’s understanding of people and the world’, ‘the delicate dance of talk between two people’. Cummins swooned, ‘Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.’
In the NY Times, Dwight Garner admired Intermezzo ‘almost without reservation...Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading.’ No novelist can hope for more.
Cal Revely-Calder, in the Telegraph found Intermezzo to be ‘a deeply millennial novel, in that it’s suffused not just with the concerns of her previous books, but also with an elegiac awareness of how we eventually stop being young.’ It’s about the ‘desire to look in the rear-view mirror before the years without consequence are gone.’ But he concluded, ‘For all the griefs and regrets in this novel, all the misreadings and mistakes, as the characters try to figure out what they feel, we never lose sight of their capacity for love. If Rooney’s work has a guiding belief, I think it’s something such as this: no one is ever truly alone.’
Rooney is ‘the great portraitist of the age,’ said Sam Jennings in Unherd which is precisely what depresses him: ‘Ours is an age so dreadfully and myopically concerned
It’s about the desire to look in the rear-view mirror before the years without consequence are gone
with its own psychology, often at the expense of everything else.’
ELAINE WILL SELF
Grove Press, 304pp, £18.99
Based on intimate diaries his mother kept over 40 years, Elaine attempts to explore her interior life prior to Self’s own existence. It is ‘not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life,’ wrote Mia Letvin in the Spectator, ‘but Self is no stranger to outrageousness. We have already met versions of his mother in his fiction, but here we have a detailed portrait – her rages, frustrations, fantasies, panic attacks and extramarital affairs.’
In the mid-1950s, before Self’s birth, Jewish-American housewife Elaine, married to a Cornell academic (“a milquetoast man who doesn’t know how to make love properly”), lives ‘a densely frustrated life the reader intimately, even claustrophobically shares,’ wrote Sandra Newman in the Guardian ‘The narration is close third person, infused with Elaine’s scabrous, wailing, unsparingly filthy, energetically misanthropic, casually brilliant voice. Self as author/son has the insubstantial, jarring presence of a child who has not yet been born. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about Elaine.’
The Telegraph’s Lucy Scholes, delighted ‘in her vernacular,’ but was ‘never able to fully divorce her voice from Self’s trademark prose style: fractured, mordant, funny, filthy.’ She deemed it ‘deeply strange but brilliant, a remarkable period piece borne out of current preoccupations with dismantling the patriarchy.’
For Levitin, his ‘maxi-malism has not aged well, his unwavering adoration of the thesaurus fails to elevate his prose.’
Judging it ‘not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity,’ Newman praised an ‘extraordinary portrait of the female soul under the conditions of 20thcentury misogyny. In exposing the dirtiest laundry of his mother’s psyche, Self has perversely elevated and honoured her.’
PLAYGROUND
RICHARD POWERS
Hutchinson Heinemann, 400pp, £20
The American’s Booker-longlisted, 14th novel ‘travels across time and space, covering AI, human drama and scuba-diving in typically fitful style,’ wrote the Telegraph’s Susie Mesure. Classic Powers, the ideas are ‘big, the writing overdone,’ combining the ‘wonder of an Attenborough series with the imagination of a J J Abrams drama – even if from a craft perspective, it’s imperfect.’
After a brief creation myth, Powers fast-forwards to 2027 and three interlocking narratives: Todd, billionaire inventor of social-media platform Playground; Evie an oceanographer; Ina and husband Rafi, raising adopted children on Polynesian Makatea.
In the Guardian, Xan Brooks identified ‘themes of transformation, loss and regeneration’ in this ‘deep dive of a novel that almost caves under the weight of its ambitions.’
For the Washington Post’s Ron Charles Playground ‘delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence. Like The Overstory it follows a similarly fragmented structure. But any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment.’ For Brooks, however, ‘the story’s a trickster, sloshing between time frames and switching from first and third person to the point where the drama becomes clouded and borderline hazardous. Playground works best as a fabulous exploration. It points out the sights, provides background and asks open-ended questions.
‘Flaws aside,’ judged Mesure, it’s ‘a work of imaginative skill that opens doors into an undersea future where human exceptionalism isn’t taken for granted, and finds hope where other writers, and thinkers, would dwell in despair.’
Will Self: ‘no stranger to outrageousness’
Fiction
MUNICHS
DAVID PEACE
Faber, 480pp, £20
For football fans of a certain age, ‘Munich’ does not mean Appeasement. Instead, it refers to what Houman Barekat in the FT calls ‘a defining moment in English Football history’ – the 1958 plane crash that decimated Manchester United Manager Matt Busby’s precocious ‘Babes’. Among the dead were centre-forward Tommy Taylor, scorer of 16 goals for England in 19 games, and left-half Duncan Edwards, destined, many thought, to be the greatest English player of all time.
Rather than simply document what happened, David Peace chose to fictionalise the tragedy, the approach he used for Damned United and Red or Dead. The result, said David Annand in the TLS, is often intensely moving – ‘in the disaster he has found a perfect subject for his elegiac prose.’ Peace also suggests, ‘that the fallout of the tragedy might signal wider shifts, the old hard-headed English reserve giving way to a new era of celebrity idolization and outpourings of public emotion.’
In the Observer, Alex Clark also admired Peace’s versatile technique: ‘He can train an eye on a rain-sodden cortège – the weather is almost another character throughout – and then put himself in the mind of a player wondering whether he will ever kick a ball again, or want to.’ And Clark also detected the shape of things to come: ‘Implicit in Peace’s
account is the knowledge of where we are now: spectators in a global industry of extraordinary, obscene wealth, run by television companies and governing bodies with what frequently seems like contempt for the spirit and history of the game.’
THE ECHOES
EVIE WYLD
Vintage, 240pp, £18.99
‘There are themes and motifs that keep on washing up in Wyld’s novels,’ wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in in the Sunday Times.
‘Dismembered sharks and rotting vegetables. Hard-drinking grandmothers and troublesome sisters. Sexual predators and shameful pregnancies.
Intergenerational trauma and the long shadow of violence on families.’
As Melissa Harrison described in the Guardian: ‘Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London’s Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve.’ This is not going to be ‘a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld’s precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take us.’
The narrative jumps largely between Max’s sections as a ghost trapped in the flat, Hannah’s
chapters, set in the run-up to Max’s death, and flashbacks to Hannah’s childhood in rural Australia, Harrison explained.
In the Observer, Anthony Cummins wrote: ‘Wyld’s novels are always structurally intricate, with jumbled timelines and perspectival switches, and this is no different.’
He thought the novel a ‘feat of compression’ that ends up ‘a kind of stretchy vessel flooded with life’.
‘What begins as a quirky love story soon darkens,’ wrote ThomasCorr. ‘Hannah, who is estranged from her family in Australia, is a woman with secrets.’ We discover that she has had an abortion that she kept to herself, that she refused to talk to Max about her childhood...
‘The Echoes is a masterly achievement, a work of skill and subtle empathy that really earns our attention. It will linger with me for a very long time.’
MR GEOGRAPHY TIM PARKS
Harvill Secker, 224pp, £14.99
The author was born in Manchester but has lived in Italy since 1981. He has written some 20 novels, including Europa, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1997. He has also published many non-fiction works including The Hero’s Way, Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna in 2021.
In the Telegraph, Susie Mesure set the scene: ‘“Mr Geography” is Daniel Burrow, a geography teacher
‘Mr Geography’ at Lake Como
Man U’s Tommy Taylor in training
who’s newly retired and embarking on a 220-mile walk from Konstanz, in the German-Swiss borderlands, to Como, in Italy.’ Daniel is retracing a route he started with Julia Ingram, a married professor with whom he had been having an affair, and who is now dead: ‘I decided to complete the walk we only began.’ Mesure thought that Parks wrote with ‘engrossing immediacy and specificity’.
In the TLS, Daniel Clarke described the novel as ‘a sustained exploration of the extraordinary grip that the defining sexual and romantic moments from our past can continue to have on us’. In a previous work, Parks’s main character, continued Clarke, ‘writes in a note to his ex-wife, after a long time with no significant contact, that “the past is always present, which is why life sometimes feels like a dream”. Mr Geography is another interior monologue that braids the past and present in luminous, slippery ways, the former almost always getting the upper hand.’
In the FT, John Self called the novel an example of ‘how a good book can do two things at once. We want to know how we got here, but also what happens next... Parks walks a nice line between internal reflection and external action — doing two things at once again. This blend is so effect that in the last 40 pages... I almost wished the book hadn’t become such a page-turner. Almost.’
SHY CREATURES
CLARE CHAMBERS
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £20
Clare Chambers’s fictional worlds feel safe and cosy, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, ‘conjuring up a lost England of Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin, of candlewick counterpanes and
Her touch is deft but delicate, her compassion strong... Wise, beautifully measured and as compelling as you want fiction to be
Fiction
church spires poking through the mist. But from behind the pruned hedgerows and mock-Tudor houses emerge stories of the uncanny.’ She continued: ‘But if the book foregrounds the lives of women trying to establish their roles in a changing society, it eventually gives way to ideas about mental health and the care of children. As in Small Pleasures’[published in 2021], Chambers explores not only the damage of abuse but also of the silence and secrecy that surrounds it. Her touch is deft but delicate, her compassion strong.’ Thomas-Corr thought the writing of the highest quality: ‘Wise, beautifully measured and as compelling as you want fiction to be.’
Joanna Briscoe in the Guardian agreed that Chambers is one of ‘our most talented writers’ and believed the novel just as ‘quirky, acutely observed and beautifully written’ as Small Pleasures. She thought Chambers’s observational skills could be almost uncanny, especially her descriptions of human emotions, and the ending subtle but complete, and infinitely moving.
In inews, Holly Williams told readers to ‘expect almost Gothically eccentric spinster aunts, a creepy derelict house, stiff upper lips amid the privations of wartime, and a brutal boarding school, all cloaked in a musty layer of British repression and obsession with respectability’.
However, Benjamin Markovits in the Telegraph wasn’t wholly won over: ‘In Shy Creatures, sweetness prevails over the darkness: the adultery, the mental illness, the sexual abuse. In fact, it all starts to feel a little too nice. You get the sense, as the plot unfolds, that even Chambers’s skilful, modest realism can’t quite digest the strange, lumpy and dark story it has somehow managed to swallow.’
PEGGY
REBECCA GODFREY WITH LESLIE JAMISON
John Murray, 384pp, £18.99.
Peggy Guggenheim was ‘born famous’, said Erica Wagner in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘The heir to a mining fortune second only to the Rockefellers’, Peggy’s father died on the Titanic in 1913 and his daughter went on to be one of the most
important 20th-century art collectors, a player in all the important artistic movements of the time.
Wagner found her friends and lovers to be a roll-call of those who would break the boundaries of tradition in both their work and lives.
The Canadian writer Rebecca Godfrey had started this novelisation of Guggenheim’s extraordinary life and after her death at the age of 54, the baton was passed to her friend Leslie Jamison who completed it. And Wagner thought that on the whole the result was pretty seamless. In the Observer, Hepzibah Anderson praised ‘a narrative rich in selfawareness, shifting enticingly from New York to London and Paris, with cameos by famous friends and lovers including Man Ray, Emma Goldman and Samuel Beckett.’ Peggy, thought Antonia Senior in the Sunday Times, was a ‘fascinating portrait of a woman who was wry and brave and determined to be different.’
Novelist Michael Arditti in the FT noted that in life Peggy Guggenheim was often dismissed by commentators as a ‘sex-starved dilettante.’ He therefore praised the strong voice that Godfrey and Jamison have mustered here for Peggy herself – ‘intimate, urgent, imagistic.’
It is a ‘wonder’, he went on that Guggenheim’s life has ‘so far escaped adaptation into a Hollywood blockbuster or Netflix series.’ It can surely only be a matter of time.
Peggy Guggenheim in the center hall of her palazzo, 1978.
Fiction
SMALL RAIN
GARTH GREENWELL
Picador, 320pp, £18.99
Garth Greenwell’s third book, explained Andrew van der Vlies in the TLS, ‘is a work of autofiction that reflects on moments of crisis in the life of an artist’. The crises centre ‘on a life-changing medical emergency that strikes the narrator, a poet living in a small city in the American Midwest, during the early months of Covid, precipitating an extended stay in hospital’. ‘Isolated and scared,’ ‘[the narrator] is at the mercy of the professional kindness of strangers.’
In the Times, Johanna ThomasCorr thought the novel a particularly interesting ‘example of pain lit because it marks the moment a writer known for novels about gay sex turns his attention to serious illness.’ She continued: ‘In the same meditative way that Greenwell’s first two novels explore the fault lines of shame, fear, intimacy and vulnerability through sex, this one explores them through the prism of illness.’
She concluded: ‘It’s a tough book and I suspect not all readers will make it to the very moving closing chapters, when the narrator, still full of uncertainty about his condition, gets to step outside of the hospital complex. He is desperate to experience the life of the living even if the air outside is filled with car exhaust. But as he says: “it smelled of the world”.’
In the Atlantic, Walt Hunter found: ‘Greenwell shows through the novel that pain, no matter how severe, needn’t shut out the possibilities of language. Even the unpleasant, often ugly experience of physical anguish can elevate and transform human forms of expression.’
RARE SINGLES
BENJAMIN MYERS
Bloomsbury, 224pp, £18.99
Myers’s ‘ninth novel takes place over a single weekend in Scarborough,’ wrote Nick Duerden in the Observer ‘Bucky Bronco is a forgotten singer from Chicago who, 40 years ago, had the merest glimpse of success, but things ever since have been disappointing.’ He’s unexpectedly invited to headline a soul festival in Yorkshire, having never been to England before, where he meets Dinah, a supermarket worker.
‘Myers is a former music journalist,’ explained James Smart in the Guardian, ‘and his descriptions of the northern soul scene, in which soul music has enjoyed a second life in the dancehalls and secondhand record shops of the north and Midlands, carry the passion of a true believer.’ The book ‘hits some fine notes’ and he writes with vivid ease, but the ‘expository dialogue about music, Yorkshire or the way chimps mourn their dead sometimes feels as naturalistic as a Wikipedia entry.’
In the Telegraph, Leaf Arbuthnot found the turning points delivered ‘over a background hum of humour: not laugh-out-loud jokes, exactly, just lively turns of phrase,’ but also thought some of the messages ‘land with rather a thud’.
The real problem was the novel’s dialogue, ‘heavily composed of clichés and platitudes’ thought Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times. She was disappointed, given Myers’s background, not to get more sense of northern soul: ‘The book catches none of its energy...as anyone in music will tell you, there is a lot more to creating a hit than simply assembling the right elements.’
Stuart Kelly was more positive in
the Spectator, calling the novel ‘deep-fried battered candyfloss, a slightly guilty and queasy pleasure. But a pleasure nonetheless.
ANNIHILATION
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE
Picador, 544ppp, £22
The author is a satirist and provocateur, whose work can be darkly humorous and often offensive with a thoroughly misanthropic view. His latest novel (which he’s said will be his last) is ‘an excoriation of contemporary France as a terminally ill society’, according to Bartolomeo Sala in the Literary Review, bearing all his trademark features: ‘a depressed white middle-aged anti-hero, sociological musings about the sorry state of his sex life, his marriage and heterosexual coupledom more generally; disquisitions on the spiritual hollowness brought about by consumerism, neoliberalism...and a few genuinely funny sordid bits.’
Annihilation is lengthy ‘and Houellebecq labours to make it feel longer,’ wrote Sam Byers in the Guardian. ‘The colour palette is overwhelmingly grey; tension is almost superstitiously avoided... Like most of Houellebecq’s work, though, the book sharpens as it advances.’
The Telegraph’s Camilla Grudova thought it was fundamentally ‘the many ways to die: cancer, terrorist attacks, drowning on a migrant boat. What is a good death, and what is it in relation to a good life?’
Houellebecq tells ‘uncomfortable but enlightening truths about the heterosexual male mind.’
Michael Gove in the Times thought the novel ‘a post-liberal requiem mass in which grief is the price we pay for love. Houellebecq wants us to recognise, in the words of that other laureate of bleakness Philip Larkin, that what will survive of us is love.’
And David Sexton enthused in the Spectator that although far from faultless, it was a ‘novel of massive ambition, worthy of Balzac, deeply embedded in the reality of France, telling truths that come, in the end, straight from Pascal. We can only hope that it is not Houellebecq’s swansong, after all.’
Above: scenes from Covid times, the setting for Small Rain
Rare Singles takes place over a single night in Scarborough (above) in Yorkshire
Short Stories
SAFE ENOUGH
LEE CHILD
Bantam, £22, 336pp
The creator of the hugely successful series of Jack Reacher thriller novels here turns to the short story format. ‘Child has assembled for the first time 20 previously written short stories that do not feature Reacher anywhere, allowing him to explore different characters and themes,’ wrote Ray Palen in Bookreporter. com. ‘The individuals in these tales come from both sides of the law, as well as the moral spectrum. This is definitely new for Lee Child as his Reacher novels feature a protagonist with a strict moral code and sense of justice. It’s nice to see him spread his wings by stepping inside these many different characters and working his literary magic.’
Child ‘has sold more than 200 million books’ wrote Honor Clerk in the Spectator, and ‘reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. “Fabergé eggs they ain’t,” he says, in the introduction...but they are real gems nonetheless.’
Child’s ‘trademark economy of style is faultless, each cop, hitman, fixer or judge fully fleshed out in just a few words; the scaffolding for each narrative constructed with the absolute minimum of material... There is always a twist and always a different one. Sometimes the bad get their comeuppance, sometimes they don’t, though the good are rarely rewarded or even recognised. The protagonist is never what he – they are all men – appears to be at the
outset... There are potentially 20 full-length novels here, or 40 hours of screenplays, but you’ll romp through them in a happy afternoon.’
MODERATE TO POOR, OCCASIONALLY GOOD
ELEY WILLIAMS
4th Estate, 208pp, £16.99
Williams was named a 2023 Granta best young British novelist and, according to James Riding in the Times, has a theme: words for words’ sake. ‘She writes for people who as children read the ingredients on the cereal box, enamoured by the emulsifiers,’ and here ‘uses the short story format to toy with the obscure vocabulary of all kinds of specialisms, from sound editors to courtroom artists.’ But he found nearly all her narrators have the same voice: ‘Despite becoming variable for a time, as the shipping forecast might put it, the selfdeprecating title is self-fulfilling. It’s all a little precious, a little slight. I like my stories with a bit more heft.’
The Telegraph’s Sophie Dickinson agreed the collection sometimes ‘feels more like a linguistic exercise than an escape into the imaginary; but it’s undeniably a skilful book’. She found the eponymous short story, a love story about a Shipping Forecast announcer who knows “nothing about shipping or, really, the sea”, to be ‘brief but delightful: an experiment in compulsion.’
‘These are stories that work from the inside out,’ wrote Sarah Crown in the Guardian. Williams ‘begins each of her brief, odd tales – none more than a handful of pages long –
inside a new character’s head, and allows us to see only what they themselves see, in precisely the way they see it. There is no sense here, as so often in short-story collections, of universe-building...The experience of reading them one after the other is discombobulating, and you get the feeling that this is just the way Williams likes it.’
THE HOTEL
DAISY JOHNSON
Jonathan Cape, 160pp, £14.99
The author, in her early thirties, was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize for her first novel Everything Under, a year after Fen, a set of linked stories. Johnson has revealed that when stressed out she reads Stephen King, ‘particularly The Shining. Give me a scary book and a long evening any day.’
This new collection, conceived as a Radio 4 serial, is a ‘series of 15 vivid interlinked stories voiced by multiple narrators’, explained Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times. ‘We hear from guests, cleaners, porters and owners who shed light on the spooky goings-on over the best part of a century.’
‘It might seem strange,’ continued Thomas-Corr, ‘that anyone would choose to stay here (I mean, can you imagine the TripAdvisor reviews?), but it turns out that most of the guests and employees are aware of the mythology surrounding this grey gothic house near Cambridge.’
The stories run from the medieval era to the present and the prologue ‘tells us of “the curse that follows the Hotel”, which counts among its victims a drowned poet, a lost group of schoolchildren and “solitary, troubled” guests,’ wrote Sophie Dickinson in the Telegraph.
Johnson’s prose is contained and clear, and while her denouements may not be unexpected, they’re still engaging in their particulars... Johnson’s style... has its virtues, though it can leave the horror seeming underpowered... But overall The Hotel wears its simplicity well. In its way, it’s as haunting as many a British ghost story.’
Thomas-Corr concluded: ‘Many readers will simply enjoy the experience of being spooked — and much like The Hotel, you bring your own demons to each story.’
Tom Cruise playing the title role in Jack Reacher (2012)
Beautiful editions as gifts for book lovers
LUCY LETHBRIDGE seeks out the best new editions of loved classics in time for Christmas
The irresistible founding story of Elizabeth Romer’s Beppina and the Kitchens of Arezzo could be a novel in itself. ‘One day, while walking down Arezzo’s ancient Via Madonna del Prato, I noticed a small antique shop – the window was full of pretty oddments, china, Venetian glass, small pieces of silver. The owner showed me a copy of the 5th edition of La Scienza in Cucina e L’Arte di Mangiar Bene by Pellegrino Artusi. Between the Index and the back cover lay a bundle of papers covered in copperplate handwriting; recipes which had been collected by the book’s original owner, a woman called Beppina. Here, was a microcosm of the culinary taste of the Aretine upper middle-class during the Belle Époque.’
The result, re-published by the indefatigable food-book-foragers at Prospect Press (£17.99), is a delightful portrait of life, food and history in a Tuscan city.
Elaine Dundy’s autobiographical novel
The Dud Avocado, first published in 1958, is the one for which she will be remembered. It’s a classic tale of feckless, enchanted youth, beginning with an epic hangover in a Paris bedsit. The disarmingly flaky pink-haired heroine, Sally Jay Gorce, is supposed to be on some educational course but wants to be a Euro-boho while her parents hope she might be a librarian. It’s Americans among the fleshpots (and ruinations) of post-war Europe. The cover of this Virago edition (£9.99) is adorned with martini glasses, reflecting the alcohol running theme but not perhaps the cheap-red rackety flavour of Sally’s adventures.
after 30 years to find it changed utterly. It’s a moving meditation on home, exile and the rootless life of a refugee – always a visitor, never quite a host.
I Saw Ramallah by Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021) was published in 1997 (translated by Ahdaf Soueif) and is now available in a timely reprint by Daunt Books (£9.99) with the original foreword by the late Edward Said. Forced to leave his birthplace in the West Bank during the 1967 six-day war, Barghouti returned to Ramallah
Adrian Bell, author, ruralist and crossword compiler is most famous for Corduroy, his bestselling 1930 account of farming in Suffolk. A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook is a selection of 30 years of his writings for his local Eastern Daily Press, and completes the quartet of seasonal notebooks published by Slightly Foxed Editions (£18). ‘You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside,’ Bell writes. Never sentimental or nostalgic, this is a paeon (nowadays more of an elegy) for the long, deep, enduring nature of traditional agricultural practices in the face of industrial short-termism and factory farming.
Folio Books are always delicious to look at, with their boxed casing and illustrations. Although £49.95 might seem steep even for an Enid Blyton diehard, Folio’s new edition of The Magic Faraway Tree, here illustrated by Jonathan Burton, is the second volume in their Faraway Tree series.
nature of traditional
Full of colour and magic, it’s best read with gloves rather than sticky fingers.
Chiltern Books, established in 2018, is a relative newcomer on the reprints block. Their books are charming to look at, decorated with repeating patterns like expensive, discreetly old-fashioned wallpaper. Inside, the typeface is beautifully readerfriendly and this edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence seems a snip for £20.
the face of industrial short-termism and factory farming.
1965, Lydia Chukovskaya’s
£14.99) is another unusual gem on Persephone’s bookshelf of (mostly) forgotten
First published in 1965, Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna (Persephone, £14.99) is another unusual gem on Persephone’s bookshelf of (mostly) forgotten twentieth-century women writers. The novella is an account, scribbled secretly in an exercise book, of Stalin’s purges. Sofia, a widow with an adored son and enviable job in publishing, starts, at first in incredulous glimpses and finally with terrified certainty, to see that the Russian state to which she has given all her patriotic loyalty, is a violently murderous and despotic sham. ‘I expressly meant to write a book about a society which had gone mad’, Chukovskaya wrote in 1979, ‘Poor, mad Sofia Petrovna is … for me a personification of those who seriously believed that what took place was rational and just.’
In The Pornographer by John McGahern, with an introduction by Anne Enright, (NYRB classics, £14.99) a 30-year-old almost-writer, down at heel and living between drinks in Dublin, starts penning erotic tales for pin money. As this is written in 1979, long before internet porn spoiled the trade, the stories, which revolve around ‘the delicious, unending revel’ of Colonel Grimshaw and the typist Mavis Carmichael, are a poignant counterpoint to their author’s own self-contained existence.
Worth checking out in NYRB classics’ new list is Dino Buzzati’s 1960 sci-fi novel The Singularity (£14.99). In the middle of the Cold War, a quiet university professor is summoned to a secret mission in a mysterious research centre deep within remote mountains.
But what is the nature of his work there? Is it a nuclear project? He doesn’t find out until he gets there where it turns out the truth is both very strange and very much more important than anything he could possibly have imagined.
Countryside & Environment
THE BURNING EARTH AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE LAST 400 YEARS
SUNIL AMRITH
Allen Lane, £30, 432pp
‘A professor of history at Yale University, Amrith recounts countless episodes of human greed, including the imperialism of Spain, Russia, China, Britain and others; the growth of South Africa’s gold mines, where the suffering of African miners helped to forge London as a financial centre; and the murders of modern-day environmentalists,’ wrote Henry Mance in the FT. His book is ‘mainly one episode of destruction after another, with only rare tidbits about ideas...’ Nature’s Josie Glausiusz considered that Amrith ‘narrates this sorry (and sometimes inspiring) saga with flair’. But ‘if there’s cause for hope, it comes from those who continue to fight for environmental justice, often from the margins. In 2006, in West Timor, Indonesia, 150 women surrounded a marble mine on Mount Mutis, protesting against the destruction of eucalyptus forests and waterways on which they depended. A few years later, mining there ceased.’
For Kathleen Jamie in the New Statesman, ‘what sets Amrith’s history apart is that he gives himself no fixed place to stand. He refuses to occupy a Eurocentric viewpoint, or any other, developing instead a planetary awareness... Some of his most awful passages on violence or environmental harm concern the fate of buffalo in America or sparrows in China.’
However, Felipe FernándezArmesto gave the book a blistering notice in Literary Review. Amrith ‘has commendable gifts: a lively eye
for evidence, fluency in narrative and knowledge of surprising sidelines, such as didactic cinema and video games,’ but ‘he is more interested in issuing ponderous and sententious judgements on a past he disapproves of than trying to understand what really happened or what it felt like to be there.’
THE POWER AND THE GLORY THE COUNTRY HOUSE BEFORE THE WAR
ADRIAN TINNISWOOD
Viking, £25, 432pp
Tinniswood published his history of the country house between the wars, The Long Weekend, in 2016 and covered the post-war period in Noble Ambitions, which was published in 2021. Now he has turned to the period leading up to 1914, in which, as Ysenda Maxtone Graham noted in her review for the Times, ‘new country houses – about 270 of them – were being built from scratch by uninhibitedly wealthy people, British and American’.
But it was also the era in which inheritance tax was introduced (1894), thus undermining the security of landed wealth. ‘One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is the palpable excitement felt by late 19th-century owners about their houses’ newfangled features. The Earl of Ellesmere at Worsely New Hall outside Manchester was thrilled by his half-timbered electricitygenerating plant providing power to 1,100 electric lights. The house also had an automatic passenger lift.’
While books on Victorian country houses ‘are mainly about architecture’, wrote Jane Ridley in Literary Review, the newly built houses and their owners ‘are at the core of this entertaining book’. Shooting and hunting had a transformative effect on country house life. ‘Tinniswood is illuminating on the connection between country houses and ghosts’, and there is ‘a fascinating chapter on servant crime... [servants] were always blamed for robberies and other misdemeanours that occurred’.
Yet ‘Edwardian excess and indulgence was made possible because of servants’. For Ridley, ‘the breadth of Tinniswood’s interests makes this book a pleasure to read.
No one knows more than he does about the upper classes before 1914 – a world swept away by the wars of the 20th century.’
ON THE ROOF A THATCHER’S JOURNEY
TOM ALLAN
Profile Books, 304pp, £18.99
Tom Allan left a job in publishing for an unknown but determinedly rural future. His money had almost run out and he was living in a caravan with a compost lavatory, when he heard that a local thatcher was looking for an apprentice. He got the job and Allan found his calling. The resulting book, On The Roof, a combination of travelogue, history and paeon to practical skills, is, said the book blogger Exiled Soul Library, ‘written with so much empathy, wisdom and passion.’
‘Thatching is depicted as a way of life that allows a sense of connection to the past’, the blogger went on. And Patrick Galbraith, in the Sunday Times was also enthralled. ‘It is a thoughtful appreciation of a British craft that will leave readers with a fairly comprehensive understanding of the thatching process, from “dressing” reed, to “yealming” (gathering wheat into a bundle), to fixing “spars”.
However, it is so much more than that. It is really a travel book that uses thatching and the challenges thatchers face, from Norfolk to Holland to Romania and even Japan, to understand rural culture.’
In the Daily Mail, Christopher Hart praised ‘a rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and the traditional.’ Kate Green in Country Life found it ‘beguiling.’ But The Exiled Soul Library perhaps sums the book up most succinctly: ‘It is a profoundly moving ode to the beauty of a quiet life.’
Some of Amrith’s most awful passages on violence or environmental harm concern the fate of buffalo in America
A thatcher fastens a straw at seam
Crime & Thrillers
MICHAEL BARBER rounds up thrillers and crime fiction to keep you gripped this winter
For a thriller to get top billing in the highbrow New York Review of Books is unusual, so Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake (Cape, 416pp, £18.99), can take a bow. The reviewer, Anahid Nersessian, describes her book as ‘a dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and, unexpectedly, piercingly moral.’
Kushner’s narrator, Sadie Smith, is a feisty American freelance snoop who infiltrates left-wing activists on behalf of governments and corporations. A hard-drinker –“I’m a better driver after a few drinks” – her latest target is a radical commune in south-west France who oppose corporate agri-business projects that threaten local farmers.
The cast is huge, the plot complicated and with long meditations on, for example, prehistoric caves and their Neanderthal inhabitants. But according to Anthony Cummins in
Nowadays we tend to forget that, before the war, almost everybody smoked, dry cleaning was primitive, people didn’t bathe much, and ladies really did ‘powder their noses’
the Observer, it’s Sadie herself who steals the show: ‘she’s excellent company on the page – boastful, vituperative, wild, telling us about her breasts, her contempt for Italian food, why graffiti is more heinous than murder, and what “the real Europe” is: not “a posh café on the rue de Rivoli ... but a borderless network of supply and transport ...”’
Nowadays we tend to forget that before the war almost everybody smoked, dry cleaning was primitive, people didn’t bathe much, and ladies really did ‘powder their noses’. Jane Thynne is an atmospheric writer who reminds us of this: there’s an authentic whiff off her pages. Her latest novel, Midnight in Vienna (Quercus, 421pp, £20), is set in London during the Munich crisis, when Britain woke at last from what Orwell called its ‘deep, deep sleep’. Unlike so many of her compatriots, Thynne’s heroine, Stella, has already had a wake-up call. She leaves Vienna, where she’s been teaching English, when the Nazis take over. Back in London, she lands a job typing ‘Midnight in Vienna’, the latest manuscript from a famous crime writer. Soon he dies mysteriously and Stella is caught up in the fall-out from his death.
This involves her with a disgraced Special Branch officer and dignitaries like Dorothy L Sayers and Churchill’s notoriously prickly scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann. It also puts her at risk from deeply embedded Soviet moles and Mosley’s Blackshirt thugs.
Would Agatha Christie (above) have been delighted with Kate Atkinson’s latest, Murder at the Sign of the Rook?
In the Spectator, Amanda Craig said Thynne was ‘one of the handful of women novelists to have absorbed the lessons of John le Carré: a spy story can also be a love story, a quest for institutional integrity and an exploration of inconvenient truths ... Thynne has pulled off a new kind of spy novel: feminist, literary, morally challenging and thrilling. Le Carré would have been delighted.’
Would Agatha Christie have been delighted with Kate Atkinson’s latest, Murder at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday, 319pp, £22)? I ask, because according to Atkinson, it’s intended as a tribute to her. The story opens with a shambolic bunch of travelling players laboriously enacting a murder mystery in Burton Makepeace House, a decrepit stately home in deepest Yorkshire. Among the audience is Atkinson’s tarnished but still valid copper, Jackson Brodie, who says that if the play goes on much longer, he’ll murder them all himself.
Brodie is there to investigate the theft of a valuable painting. But as more than one reviewer noted, the mystery takes second place to the ‘zesty characters’, whose life histories, said Katherine Powers in the Washington Post, ‘sparkle with inspired bon mots and acerbic asides.’ They include a Major who lost a leg in Afghanistan, a vicar who is struck dumb and Lady Milton, the eccentric chatelaine of Burton Makepeace, who had to wait 25 years before Atkinson could give her the chance to strut her stuff.
So repulsive are Lady Milton’s
Midnight in Vienna, set in London
children that it’s no wonder she prefers her dogs. But the dowager herself is a hoot, and I sincerely hope Atkinson will give her an encore.
But would Dame Agatha have approved? Well, we learn that Brodie refuses to read “old fashioned, so-called ‘cosy crime’ ... He’d seen too much of the real stuff and it wasn’t the least bit cosy.” Against that, is this nuanced verdict from Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph: ‘Atkinson has given us a novel of Horlicks-level cosiness that nonetheless offers fine writing, wit, originality and eccentricity – even as it induces a warm glow.’
Crime & Thrillers
The White Lotus and Succession.’ Susie Dent will be known to some of you as the resident lexicographer on C4’s Countdown Guilty by Definition (Zaffre, 387pp, £16.99), her stylish and erudite first novel, combines retrospective with mystery, suspense and scholarship. Set in Oxford, it focuses on a cold case: the disappearance, ten years before, of Charlie Thornhill, a brilliant and beautiful PhD student who may have been a little too sly for her own good.
mythical about his quests,’ said Sanderson, quoting this apercu: “It is a mistake to say that when someone dies or disappears you have lost them. The truth is their absence remains with you ....”
Even though she went missing nine years before, there are plenty of people who remember Alice, the Sevenoaks schoolgirl who is Talib’s quarry. Was she murdered, like another Sevenoaks schoolgirl whose killer hints at this? The police think so, and so does Alice’s belligerent father. But Talib is not known as “Finder” for nothing. Designed to be read in an afternoon, like Simenon’s novels, this is, as Mick Herron says, a ‘brilliantly constructed mystery’.
However appallingly Lady Milton’s offspring behave you can’t help smiling at the way Kate Atkinson describes them. But the only possible response to the toxic Wisten family in Bella Mackie’s What a Way to Go (The Borough Press, 374pp, £20), is a wince. Used to the best of everything thanks to Ant Wistern, a fabulously wealthy financier, his four entitled children and Olivia, his expensively preserved trophy wife, suffer a double whammy when Ant meets a grisly end on his sixtieth birthday and is then outed as a mega fraudster whose huge fortune is forfeit.
The recriminations that follow are described from a variety of perspectives, including that of Ant, who is stuck in a purgatorial “processing centre” from which he can only move on if he recalls exactly how he died.
Bella Mackie has a choice turn of phrase: the Cotswolds is described as “Disneyland for posh people”; someone is said to be “as haughty as Princess Margaret on a hangover”, and there’s a brilliantly observed spoof Tatler profile of Clara, the Wistern’s pert youngest daughter.
In the Guardian, Jenny Colgan said Mackie’s ‘class-bound barbs’ reminded her of Jilly Cooper. In the Observer, Alison Flood described the book as ‘a dark, funny story of a very dysfunctional family’, while in the Times John Dugdale said it was ‘a gleeful satirising of the awfulness of the 1 per cent in TV shows such as
Charlie’s younger sister Martha, a Senior Editor at The Clarendon Press, who publish the last word in Dictionaries, has never got over Charlie’s disappearance. So when a series of cryptic letters, hinting at foul play, arrive at her office, she and her team of wordsmiths try to decipher them.
In the Times, Mark Sanderson applauded this ‘quirky first novel ... which should delight anyone who appreciates fine crime writing as well as logophiles and lovers of Inspector Morse.’
Mark Sanderson was also impressed by Simon Mason’s Missing Person: Alice (Riverrun, 229 pp, £12), the first in a series featuring Talib, an exiled Iraqi who the British police employ to find missing people. ‘There is something
‘I grew up with George. His presence, in various forms, was a friendly ghost at my table.’ So says John le Carré’s son, Nicholas Cornwell, alias Nick Harkaway, in his Author’s Note to Karla’s Choice (Viking, 298pp, £22), in which Smiley is resurrected. Set in 1963, between The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this tense and evocative thriller provides the missing first chapter of Smiley’s battle with his would-be nemesis, Karla. According to Publishing News, ‘Longtime Smiley fans will delight in the enormous cast of familiar characters, the thoughtful meditations on the morality of espionage and the lived in tradecraft. Harkaway brilliantly channels his late father’s voice, and in the process delivers an essential new chapter for Smiley and Karla.’
So the Circus returns to town. Just in time for Christmas!
Gary Oldman as George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Susie Dent
Lexicography to crime
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WANT
ANONYMOUS SEXUAL FANTASIES
COLLECTED BY
GILLIAN ANDERSON
Bloomsbury, 400pp, £18.99
Gillian Anderson read thousands of submissions for this collection of anonymous women’s sexual fantasies and even contributed her own. Kitty Drake in the Guardian thought part of the pleasure of reading the book was that the scenarios were often ‘strikingly odd’. ‘One contributor dreams of being fed chocolate by the Hogwarts potion master,’ she wrote. ‘Another longs to have sex with her office door knob. At its best, Want gives privileged access into the most painful, truthful corners of these women’s lives.’
Anderson told Hannah Jackson in Vogue that she felt vulnerable writing down one of her own fantasies. ‘I wouldn’t have expected that at all because I think of myself as being open and non-judgemental and able to hear and see anything. So I was surprised that I found it so challenging to put mine down on a page.’ Nevertheless she did — but which one?
In the Spectator, Rowan Pelling offered some advice: ‘First, don’t read it in one sitting unless you want the fantasy equivalent of feeling you’ve eaten an entire gâteau. Even the most skilled editor can’t help the fact that a mass of torrid daydreams gets quite samey after a while. There’s also no accounting for taste; women variously lusted after the Weasley twins from Harry Potter, Harry Styles, their brother-in-law, a 5ft empress, female pirates, a
dentist, a vampire, strangers on trains and, tellingly, themselves.’
‘The main critique to level against Want, though,’ wrote Sarah Ditum in the Sunday Times, ‘is not that it’s disgusting. It’s that it’s boring. The internet opened the floodgates for filth; now everyone swims in the same smutty water.’
However, Kimberly Harrington in the Washington Post disagreed: she thought there was plenty of ‘humour, light and spark’.
NEXUS
A BRIEF
HISTORY OF INFORMATION NETWORKS FROM THE STONE AGE TO AI
YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Fern Press, 528pp, £28
As our troglodyte ancestors discovered, information is empowering. Foolhardy then, to hand its management to machines of unimaginable speed and scope – and too complex for their programmers fully to understand their workings. AI, writes Harari, stands for “alien intelligence”, and could do for us all. A familiar cry; but as the Guardian’s Killian Fox explained, the bestselling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus now provides a ‘long view. By applying his lens to previous information revolutions and showing how different forms of government have reacted to them, he believes we can prepare ourselves for the earthquakes to come’.
Focusing on the networks, Harari starts millennia back, as usual – the printing-press’ stoking of witchburning is almost breaking news –but this time, he devotes extra space to contemporary examples. As Stuart Jeffries reflected in Literary Review, the science-fiction Minority Report is already fact, with ‘several countries using algorithmic risk-assessments’; and in this ‘always rewarding, often alarming book’, that’s ‘the tip of the AI iceberg. Harari balefully notes the rise of social-credit algorithms, by means of which monopolistic corporations and authoritarian governments can decide whether you should receive a loan, housing or employment’.
Apart from the medium, there’s the messaging. AI can now invent its own. (Take the ‘creative’ role Facebook’s bots played in the Rohinga massacres.) So, the robots
may not actually need to exterminate us; just encourage us to do it ourselves. Jeffries worryingly joked that both Nexus and his review could have been ‘written by ChatGPT while Harari and I binged on Netflix’. Fox hoped the book would make us ‘that bit better equipped as a species to deal with the rise of the machines’.
ROGUES AND SCHOLARS BOOM AND BUST IN THE LONDON ART MARKET 1945-2000
JAMES STOURTON Apollo, 432pp, £30
In 1958, Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an ‘event sale’ of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt. The seven lots went for £781,000 – at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world centre of the art market and Sotheby’s as an international auction house. Starting more than a decade earlier, James Stourton traces the history of the London art world with a study of the characters who built it along the way.
In 2000, a profound transformation began; Tate Modern opened and a new contemporary art scene was in the ascension. While Sotheby’s is the starting point of this story, Stourton narrates a rogue’s gallery of eccentric scholars, clever amateurs, brilliant emigrés, and stylish grandees, who are all in pursuit of the ultimate deal.
For Georgina Adam, in the Literary Review, the book is ‘studded with amusing anecdotes.’
Gillian Anderson: collector of fantasies
One of the lots: Garçon au gilet rouge by Paul Cézanne, 1888-90
As an overview of the London art market, Stourton’s book ‘cannot be bettered.’ She concluded, ‘Above all, he shows how the same person can be both a scholar with extraordinary depths of knowledge and, when there is a really good deal to be done, a rogue.’
AN ATLAS OF ENDANGERED ALPHABETS
WRITING SYSTEMS ON THE VERGE OF VANISHING
TIM BROOKES
Quercus, 256pp, £30
Never mind the thousands of dying languages. What about the hundreds of scripts that represent them? Nine-tenths are destined to disappear from use, if not record; and for preserving the latter, wrote Harry Ritchie in the Specator, we must thank the ‘gallant’ Brookes –founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project – who offers here ‘a splendid sampling’.
Too late now, Ritchie observed; but in the West, we were ill-served by the Romans. Their paucity of vowel-signs and accents led to wildly inconsistent spelling conventions, particularly in English. As for our bizarre consonant-rules – say, the three pronunciations of ‘gh’ – that’s what happens when you crowbar Germanic and Norse words into an already-deficient rendering. What’s more, ‘some of the scripts Brookes presents here carry a spiritual significance quite lacking in our resolutely mundane ABC’, even if they’re the sole preserve of religion. (The reviewer was smitten by the Austronesian Cham system, ‘taught in a four-day funereal crash course by priests to the dead so they can read and write in the afterlife’.)
But hold the obituaries. Ritchie gave out ‘a loud shout’ to ‘Prasanna Sree from Andhra Pradesh who has come up with bespoke alphabets for 19 of her region’s minority languages’; and he reserved praise for Sequoyah, who invented the
‘Accompanied by lots of examples, often one squiggle to a page’
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Cherokee alphabet some 200 years ago. Once it had been typeset – vital for survival in this department –90 per cent of his tribesmen became literate: ‘a much higher rate than their white oppressors’.
‘Accompanied by lots of examples, often one squiggle to a page’, Ritchie recommended the ‘enlightening text… not only to calligraphy and language nerds but anyone looking to get an unusual, beautiful and quite possibly sacred tattoo’.
THE PLACE OF TIDES
JAMES REBANKS
Allen Lane, 304pp, £22
Shepherd and bestselling writer James Rebanks’s is best-known for his passionate championing of farming and landscape of his native Cumbria. In his most recent book, he leaves England to spend an extraordinary spring on a remote Norwegian island, learning the slow craft of gathering the down of the wild eider duck from Anna Måsøy, the last practitioner of an ancient skill.
In the Observer, Eileen PeirsonHagger noted that ‘Rebanks is in awe of Måsøy, in her 70s and less than 5ft tall, yet seemingly “unbreakable”, used to living alone in remote conditions, doing such tender work. She gives him a sense that it is “possible to step outside history” –to continue a traditional way of life even while oil-rich, modern Norway considers it “archaic”.’
James Holland, in the Sunday Telegraph, loved Rebanks’ depiction of Anna: ‘Slowly but surely– and you sense this is the book’s real pursuit – Rebanks draws Anna’s story from her. There’s her childhood, mythical tales of giant women – the Huldra – and her deep love of the island of Masøy, from which she mysteriously appears estranged, though she will not say why. Then there’s the island of Vjærøy itself, the islets around it and the ever-changing sky-and seascape of flora and fauna that surround them.’
For Cal Flyn in the TLS, The Place of Tides was a ‘strange, enchanting book’, a meditation, among other things, on women’s work and feeling – though she pronounced herself surprised that he hadn’t noticed much of this before. And in the Sunday Times, Helen
Davies picked up on the synchronicity which had brought author and subject together: ‘In a twist of fate Anna and Rebanks had found each other in a time of joint need … Anna wanted to make sure her mission was captured in words and Rebanks needed to find a way back to himself.’
But Peirson-Hagger was less sure of the book’s ‘personal journey’ aspect, which she found cliched. ‘The Place of Tides is not served better by it. Rebanks’s telling of the skilled work and cultural history that he learns from Anna Måsøy is all this otherwise enlightening book needs.’
THE GENETIC BOOK OF THE DEAD A DARWINIAN REVERIE RICHARD DAWKINS
Head of Zeus, £25, 360pp
Richard Dawkins: ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer
This ‘lovely new book is an oldfashioned miscellany of... zoological surprises, lightly structured by the titular conjecture: that one day it may be possible for scientists to read off details about an animal’s ancestral environments from its DNA’ wrote Steven Poole in the Telegraph. ‘Surprising phenomena emerge as we romp through fascinating tales of cats, fish and prawns. Dawkins has by now eased comfortably into the role of elder scientific statesman. As if from a lightly distressed wing-chair, nursing a metaphorical brandy, he’s engaged here, in part, in a retrospective accounting of his career, limning the arguments of his own greatest hits... Dawkins’s style is gentler than before.
There’s little of the hieratic proselytising of his new-atheist period (The God Delusion, 2006)’ and his ‘true aim, the literary evocation of wonder at the vast and improbable grandeur of nature, is consistently achieved’.
Although the book covers familiar ground, Clive Cookson in the FT found that Dawkins ‘explains – and celebrates – evolution so joyfully that devotees will forgive some repetition of ideas. His clear prose is enhanced further by Jana Lenzová’s gorgeous illustrations which run through the book, supplementing photos of the wonderful animals (and a few plants) chosen to exemplify evolutionary science.’
Adrian Woolfson, in the Wall Street Journal, described it as ‘intellectually sparkling and beautifully crafted’. The book argues that ‘the human genome is an unfinished work, its current state representing a snapshot, a moment of transience and transition that lacks the completeness of a destination’. It is ‘a project of continuous revision, locked in a Nietzschean state of perpetual becoming’.
THE VIRAGO BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP
ED. RACHEL COOKE
Virago 320p, £18.99
Human beings may be ‘divided, roughly speaking, into drains and radiators,’ said the Guardian’s Rachel Cooke. People may be ‘warm and encouraging’ in friendship or ‘more prone both to complaining and to offering “honest” criticism.’ Friendship is complex, and in this anthology, where Cooke has limited herself to exploring the vicissitudes of female friendship, she has uncovered a spectrum of emotion, sentiment, motive, intensity. Loneliness is increasing in our society and friendship is becoming a matter of urgent inquiry to therapists, scientists and sociologists. So, an anthology of female friendships is a timely arrival.
Ceci Browning in the Times, said she took a number of lessons from the book. ‘Forget love affairs, it’s the bonds of friendship between women that endure.’ She found many contortions of female friendship: ‘eternal slipperiness’, bonds between
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‘Forget love affairs; it’s the bonds of friendship between women that endure’
women that ‘evade explanation’, ‘the giggles of teenage girls discovering what sex is’, bonds of ‘immediate intensity and overwhelming comfort of having the same needs or feeling the same way.’ Browning was encouraging of the collection; ‘the breadth of Cooke’s research is obvious in this immaculately organised anthology and she has created a treasure chest of styles and sentiments beyond just ransacking her own bookshelves. Put simply, it’s a light lunch of a book: easy to digest and best enjoyed opposite friends.’
THE STORY OF A HEART
RACHEL CLARKE
Abacus, 322pp, £22
The fourth, Baillie Gifford longlisted, book by the palliative care doctor and writer Rachel Clarke starts with the wrenching story of Keira, a nine-year-old girl who was left brain dead after a catastrophic car accident. Keira became the heart donor who saved the life of nineyear-old Max, whose body was ravaged by a virus. ‘The Story of a Heart is a tender exploration of the UK’s organ donation process, and the two children whose cases were a catalyst for the change from an opt-in to an opt-out system,’ wrote Marianne Levy in the iPaper, calling the book ‘beautifully written and utterly vital’: ‘Clarke has an eye for details that are both necessary and painful; the teddy that has been tucked next to Keira’s unconscious body; the Mickey Mouse pyjamas she wears as she is wheeled away.’
Fiona Sturges in the said: ‘Clarke has made her name telling tough medical stories in a way that is accessible and humane. As well as a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances, and the transfer of a human organ from one body to another, The Story of a Heart provides a
detailed map of the surgical innovations, people and logistics that allowed that transplant to happen.’
The Times’s Helen Rumbelow said Clarke ‘could not have rendered this story more tenderly’ but admitted: ‘I support organ donation, yet the reality of what Clarke describes is also hard to know.’
The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman said: ‘Clarke is a doctor and also a stylist, so the book is a particularly potent combination of vivid and informative. It isn’t unputdownable for the simple reason that you have to lay it down reasonably often just to compose yourself.’
LIFE, DEATH AND GETTING DRESSED
REBECCA WILLIS
New River Books, 208pp, £14.99
In her book, tellingly subtitled ‘How to love your clothes… and yourself’, former Independent journalist and ex-Vogue writer Willis unpicks our love-hate relationship with clothes, exploring the factors that make us such easy prey for the fashion industry. She examines why clothes matter and define us – and why caring about them doesn’t make us vain or materialistic –drawing upon theories of evolution, neuroscience, psychology, the patriarchy and body image, as well as sustainability and the history of fashion.
For Willis, clothes are a potent projection of our inner selves, tapping into our deepest hopes and fears; only by confronting our conflicted feelings and understanding how the fashion industry is able to exploit our very survival instincts, can we silence the inner critic and panic – that feeling of ‘I have nothing to wear’, or what she terms ‘wardrobe dysmorphia’and actually enjoy getting dressed.
Clothes: a potent projection of our inner selves
my wardrobe... It’s funny, charming and brilliantly explained.’
Stephen Bayley pointed to its stylish subversion – part polemic, part appreciation. Rebecca Willis confirms Coco Chanel’s belief that “fashion is what goes out-offashion”. Yet there’s no hint of joyless puritanism here: instead, an unmissable invitation to get dressed more thoughtfully and enjoy the unavoidable act of putting on clothes.’
Lisa Armstrong in the Telegraph welcomed this ‘fascinating deep dive that will make you think differently about the clothes you wear and why you bought them.’ For Alexandra Shulman Life, Death and Getting Dressed ‘considers clothes and our attitudes to them from a wildly original and truly kaleidoscopic range of angles.’
OCEAN
A HISTORY OF THE ATLANTIC BEFORE COLUMBUS
JOHN HAYWOOD
Head of Zeus, 560pp, £30
The story of the Atlantic Ocean is normally told as if Columbus’s discovery of the New World were the point at which that body of water properly opened for business. But as John Haywood’s meticulous and deeply researched book sets out to show, it has a much longer history as a place of human navigation than that – and even before publication was lauded by Michael Wood as a ‘dazzling narrative full of new archaeological discoveries and packed with profound insights’ and by Jerry Brotton as a ‘superb achievement... not just a history of the Atlantic: it is also a history of a sizeable part of humanity, and how it was shaped by this most forbidding of the oceans.’
In the Spectator, David Abulafia compared it to a standard history that ‘said absolutely nothing about what happened before Columbus’, and whose author was not unusual in seeing earlier centuries as ‘the fishing-ground of fantasists who looked for ancient Egyptians or Irish monks credited with implausible journeys across the ocean’.
Haywood, he said, disentangles history from wishful thinking to show us ancient Phoenicians breaching the Straits of Gibraltar and
Miscellaneous
being blown to Madeira and the Azores, or the North African king described by Pliny who sent ships to the Canaries, while ‘along the flank of Europe, as far back in time as the Neolithic era and the Bronze Age, sea routes linked Orkney to the Irish Sea and southern Britain to France.’
He describes Norsemen striking west to the edge of the known world, yet also ‘one great strength of this book is that Haywood looks at the peoples in the Americas and West Africa who engaged with the sea, even if they did not strike out on long journeys across it.’ Haywood, he concluded, ‘has succeeded triumphantly in providing a highly readable account of an important and neglected area of history.’
THE PENALTY KICK
THE STORY OF A GAMECHANGER
ROBERT MCCRUM
Notting Hill Editions, £15.99, 168pp
The penalty kick was invented in 1891 by the author’s greatgrandfather, Willie McCrum, who was goalkeeper for the amateur
football team of Milford, a village outside Armagh. Robert is a former literary editor of the Observer, his father a headmaster of Eton, but the family wealth stemmed from Willie’s father, Robert ‘R G’ McCrum, an Ulster linen manufacturer.
Robert McCrum is ‘a metaphorist to his fingertips, and the penalty kick is a particularly rich source of material,’ explained Terence Blacker in the Spectator. ‘For Freudians, we learn from his book, a penalty represents desire and penetration. For philosophers, it embodies alienation. For a literary chap like McCrum himself, the penalty-taker is actually a writer.’
But this book is also ‘an extraordinary family history – one of luck, love, disappointment, and the tyranny of class and generational expectation’. McCrum ‘writes about football with a quiet, urbane wit. The trouble is that urbanity tends to fit uneasily with the ferocious, joyous, partisan mess of the game’. There is occasionally ‘a whiff of hauteur, a hint that its distinguished author may be feeling that he is slumming it in the terraces.’
In the first half, noted Barney Horner in the New Statesman, McCrum ‘entwines the development of the penalty with his family’s tragic history... The second half, about how the penalty kick has come to be defined culturally, is more fluent. It begins by examining the psychological literature that has developed around the stresses of penalty kicks, then meanders off into the redemption arc of Gareth Southgate. But McCrum doesn’t seem to know how to draw these disparate threads together. And by the final whistle, it’s the reader who pays the real penalty.’
Christopher Columbus: posthumous portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo, 1519
The Penalty Kick: invented in 1891 by the author’s great-grandfather
sister teresa
My Orcadian Arcadia
The prophet Isaiah is wonderful.
For years, my favourite passage has been ‘Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.’ (Isaiah 40:15)
My over-imaginative and – strictly speaking – inaccurate vision of this fine dust is not the orthodox interpretation, where fine dust means something minute to the point of insignificance, so insignificant that it won’t cause even the slightest trembling of the scales.
I have in mind the finest – that is to say, the very best-quality – dust. The islands of Orkney illustrate this perfectly. Seen from an aeroplane coming into land on a sunny day, they look like tiny jewels set in a Homeric wine-dark sea.
This idiosyncratic version is, of course, not right at all. Isaiah is writing of God the all-powerful creator. The prophet’s intention is to revive Israel from its many woes. God’s chosen people no longer see him as their own indescribable and overwhelming deity, and have gone over to other gods of no significance, who are never going to be able to help them in any
way. The Israelites need encouragement and rejuvenation.
Without their own and unique God, they are nothing: they desperately need to return to him. One of the ways of achieving this return is via the revival of their praise of God – not because God needs praising but because the Israelites (and we too) need to praise him.
God’s greatness is overpowering. As lord of the universe and lord of history, he is just too incomprehensible and inaccessible to me. I know, of course, that the creation of the universe is an
Memorial Service
Julia Rausing, philanthropist and Christie’s art expert, was remembered at St James’s, Piccadilly.
The Rev Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James’s, presided.
The Countess of Derby read from Ecclesiastes 3:1-11: ‘For everything there is a season.’
astonishing achievement and was realised by a being of unimaginable intelligence but, as a concept, this fails to take me very far.
It is too big. It omits the vital idea of God not only as a person, but as a personal companion in all that we are and do.
My praise is of a much gentler and less grandiose quality. It is also intimate.
There is nothing trivial about a walk on a deserted Orcadian beach in the sunshine, in the company of a very old and dear friend, with the tide gently on the turn and a little troupe of ringed plovers fussing around in the sand and rocks. The only other person there was a tiny boy expertly flying his rainbowcoloured kite.
When we stopped to admire and congratulate him on his skill, he replied, in the broadest of Scots accents, ‘Aye, it’s a pleasure!’
It certainly is. And a memory for which to thank God, and to be lovingly recalled and brought out on rainy days.
Julia Rausing (1961- 2024)
Lucy HerveyBathurst read 1 Corinthians: 13: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels.’
Nick White recalled working alongside
her in the Old Masters Department at Christie’s.
Orlando Fraser KC, Chairman of the Charity Commission, saluted Julia’s work with the Julia Rausing Trust, set up by Julia and her husband, Hans Rausing, an heir to the Tetra Pak fortune. The Grinling Gibbons organ case at St James’s was restored by the trust.
In his address, Lord Reay quoted from William Blake, in describing the love between Hans and Julia Rausing:
‘Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’
Lord Reay saluted Julia’s sister, the late Isabella Blow, a fashion journalist. Both daughters of Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, they were devoted to ‘supporting, defending, sheltering, looking out for, looking after, helping out, nurturing’.
Lord Reay praised Julia’s subversive side, on prominent display in hospital:
‘She liked to greet her surgeon with a jolly “Here comes the executioner!”.’
Jools Holland accompanied Ruby Turner on Precious Lord, take my hand. Music included Peace in the Valley by Thomas Dorsey, Amazing Grace and Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Orkneys: Teresa’s destination
The Doctor’s Surgery
Pros and cons of prostate treatment
Many more men die with prostate cancer rather than of it dr theodore dalrymple
These days, people – that is to say, politicians – have some difficulty in defining women, though not, I think, in recognising them.
How long will it be before the same difficulties attach to the definition of men? How about ‘people with prostates’? I make this as my contribution to intellectual clarity.
For most of their lives, men don’t think about their prostates, as no one thinks about his appendix until he or she gets appendicitis. But there comes a time of life when Englishmen’s first talk is not of the weather, but of the prostate, with such interesting (and important) questions as ‘How many times do you have to get up at night?’
Cancer of the prostate is a dreaded disease. At least three of my acquaintances have died of it, one at an age I now consider young. How should it be detected and how, once detected, should it be treated?
The PSA (the prostate-specific antigen) test was long used for detection. Between 1999 and 2009, 82,429 men aged between 50 and 69 – that is to say, with a life expectancy of more than ten years – underwent the test in a very large trial of various kinds of treatment.
The King, incidentally, was treated for an enlarged prostate earlier this year, but his cancer isn’t prostate cancer. Sir Chris Hoy, the Olympic cyclist, has terminal prostate cancer, as Jim White writes on page 72.
Of those men, 2,664 were found to have localised cancer. Then 1,643 of them were entered into the trial, in which they were allocated at random to active monitoring of their condition, prostatectomy or radiotherapy.
They were followed up for a median length of time of 15 years. The investigators managed to follow up 98 per cent of those who entered the trial – a triumph of organisation in itself.
The trial was carried out in
Britain. We are good at clinical trials and coronations.
During the follow-up period, 356 patients died, but in only 47 was their death attributed to prostate cancer.
There was no significant difference in the rate of death between any of the three approaches, either in all-cause death or death from prostate cancer.
Is one entitled to conclude from this in a straightforward way that prostatectomy is either useless or harmful. It often has very unfortunate side-effects such as urinary incontinence.
It is not quite so simple. Those who underwent prostatectomy had half the rate of metastasis of those who underwent active monitoring. This did not affect the eventual death rate from prostate cancer, and most of the metastases were in the local lymph nodes, but what I would really have liked to know was whether they caused much suffering. After all, it is not only death but suffering that one wishes to avoid.
Another problem was that a much higher proportion – 25 per cent versus 11 per cent – of patients who were actively monitored rather than operated
on or given radiotherapy required androgen (male sex hormone) deprivation therapy, which is usually given by injection.
This therapy has a list of side effects that competes with those of steroids for unpleasantness: hot flushes, fatigue, erectile failure, testicular atrophy, cognitive decline, increased likelihood of diabetes, and osteoporosis.
Since the many forms of human suffering, as of pleasure, are incommensurable, there is no correct answer to the conundrum as to what treatment is best; at least not until a vastly superior treatment comes along. And, in a disease which kills only about 3 per cent of the people who have it after 15 years, it will not be easy to prove that one treatment is vastly the superior of another.
It is an old medical adage that many more men (as defined above) die with rather than of cancer of the prostate.
About 80 per cent of men aged 80 have evidence of prostate cancer. But, though it is far from a sentence of death, still about 12,000 men a year died of it in this country alone.
The Oldie, 23-31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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I haven’t met Gyles
SIR: Once every month, you remind me how glad I am not to be famous. The thought of Gyles Brandreth claiming to have met me would be too much.
Martyn Davies, Arzal, France
Safe in taxis
SIR: Alan Judd mentions how narrow some 1930s cars were (Motoring, October issue). This reminded me of the story told me in the mid-1960s by a friend, then in her 20s.
She was given a lift to some event by a young man with an elderly sports car with a short and stubby gear lever. He said to her, ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but I can’t be a gentleman and change gear.’
Needless to say, the remark was taken without offence and the journey proceeded with due decorum.
Yours faithfully, George Hart, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire
‘I never said anything. That was yesterday’
RIP Ed McLachlan
SIR: There are certain cartoonists in The Oldie I make a beeline for in each issue. The late Ed McLachlan was always top of my list.
I loved his dense, scratchy lines and his absurd and often surreal set piece gags. You certainly got a lot of detail for your square inch with McLachlan – he clearly enjoyed drawing crowd scenes that involved a multitude of gormless onlookers. You could spend serious time scrutinising the fine detail of his work. I especially enjoyed anything that involved a historical setting with
‘Violently attacking the canvas like that – he could have been a brilliant climate activist’
costumes and props – he was a master of minutiae.
Yours sincerely, John Rattigan, Doveridge, Derbyshire
A breath of fresh Ayres
SIR: I was delighted to read William Cook’s article about Pam Ayres, ‘The people’s poet’, in the November issue and to recollect that as an RAF serviceman I was posted to RAF Seletar in Singapore c 1967, a few days after Pam had left to return to the UK.
She had appeared in the unit’s production of Boeing-Boeing and posters advertising the play were still visible. When I arrived, the echoes of her outstanding performance were still being bandied about in her absence.
Having watched Pam’s performances on TV back here over the years, I have become a fan.
Last Saturday saw me in Waterstones searching for a book of poetry by W H Auden for a creative-writing project that I have a deadline for.
No Auden on the bookshelves, but a single copy of Doggedly Onward by Pam
– and the bonus of a signed copy. A must-have.
Auden out of the window and Pam definitely in, via a treasured copy.
Last Saturday was also the day my wife had planned a lunch for the family – nine of us, at a restaurant in the wilds of Somerset. Lunch was timed for 12.30pm.
As we entered the restaurant, a familiar face was recognised by three of us as she came up the stairs, out of the restaurant.
A gasp from my step daughter-in-law: ‘It’s Pam Ayres!’
She turned and said, ‘It is!’
I then recounted to her, in a gabble, the coincidence of our non-meeting in Singapore, my purchase of her book that morning and the joy of actually meeting her at lunchtime.
A lovely lady very high on my list of special celebrities. So good fleetingly to meet you, Pam, should you read this.
Paul Kite, Glastonbury, Somerset
Irish Sea dog
SIR: As one who made many, many crossings on the Holyhead-Dun Laoghaire
mail boats (and the more comfortable Liverpool-Dublin B&Is) throughout the 1950s, I found Harriet Rix’s article (‘Irish sea shanty’, November issue) brought memories. However, I had forgotten the convention and was thrown by the italicising of Irish Mail, since that was the name not of a boat, but of the mail train from Euston to Holyhead.
The mail boats in my day were the Hibernia, the Cambria and the Princess Maud, the last famous as the final ship to leave Dunkirk during the evacuation. In bad weather, she was merciless to weak stomachs.
O Kwells! O mores, Huon Mallalieu, London N4
I didn’t help Lucan
SIR: Algy Cluff’s account (November issue) of being visited in Kent by officers from Gerald Road police station in London searching for Lord Lucan has reminded me of my own experience 50 years ago.
No doubt to the great frustration of the police, Lucan kept an address book that must have contained details of almost everyone he had ever met. I had met him only a couple of times, but I was summoned by telephone one day to appear at Gerald Road. I was in my office and told the caller that I was too busy for jokes – which didn’t go down very well.
At Gerald Road, I sat at a table under a strip light, facing a detective who asked, threateningly, ‘Where is Lord Lucan?’
Unfortunately, I couldn’t help him. Simon Courtauld, All Cannings, Wiltshire
He sank the Bismarck
SIR: Entertaining as Algy Cluff’s recollections of Lord Lucan (November issue) are, he cannot be allowed to get away with a serious historical error.
He includes amongst the coterie who gambled at the St James’s Club in Piccadilly one ‘Jerry Gurney, the naval officer who pressed the button that fired the torpedo that sank the Bismarck’.
That is simply wrong. The man who fired the torpedo was the great John (‘Jock’) Moffat, who piloted the Fairey Swordfish plane – otherwise known as the Stringbag, a biplane that had not changed much since the First
World War – and took off from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal with two other planes in a force 9 gale.
I know about this because I interviewed Jock at his home in Dunkeld before his death in 2016 and heard the story from his own lips. It is a great tale.
The Bismarck had been spotted as it was trying to make port at Brest, and the three planes, carrying one torpedo each, were ordered to attack it. Moffat and his observer ‘Dusty’ Miller, and telegraphist/ air gunner A J Hayman spotted the shape of a huge ship ahead of them and flew towards it, dipping low over the sea, to get under the Bismarck’s guns, which began firing towards them.
Moffat recalls that visibility was poor because of the spray breaking over the windscreen of his Stringbag. His navigator was hanging out of the plane trying to keep it on course, and held back from giving the order to fire the torpedo until the last moment. Finally they were within range, and the torpedo was released. Moffat had to make a ‘surface turn’ – that is, turning the plane without making height – an incredible manoeuvre, with shells breaking all around them.
All three planes made it back to the Ark Royal, but no one knew whether any of the torpedoes had struck. Then, on the radar, officers saw the Bismarck turning in circles; her rudder had been disabled. Next day, Royal Navy ships closed in for the kill.
Moffat was in his plane flying over the Bismarck as it rolled over and sank. It was, he recalled, one of the most terrible sights he had ever seen.
Only later was it confirmed that it was his torpedo that had hit.
He carried on flying well into his eighties. One day on a flight to the Hebrides he crashed his plane, and an RAF helicopter was sent to pick him up. When the crew discovered who he was, they broke out the champagne to toast his health.
Magnus Linklater, Dunkeld, Perthshire
‘Wait! Not yet! I’ve still got 37 sick days left!’
‘The best time to call is email’
Map-reading lesson
SIR: Like Town Mouse, I am a fan of ‘old-fashioned maps’ (October issue). My geography teacher in the late 1950s would tell us that a good map ‘gives all the information you need – except instructions on how to fold it up again!’.
William Freeman, East Molesey, Surrey
Sir Les’s ghost in Adelaide
SIR: Sophie Waugh’s account (School Days, August issue) of her Freudian slip of writing PENIS instead of PENS on the class whiteboard brought back a memory of a mid-1960s Prosh Day procession.
This parade was held annually by University of Adelaide students keen to raise eyebrows with (for the time) risqué floats and placards. Police were tasked to keep an eye out for anything that might ‘tend to corrupt public decency’ and remove the potentially offensive material.
That year, among the various floats and presentations (many of a mildly anarchic or politically satirical nature), one group of seven young ladies each holding a large one-worded poster paraded equidistant across Adelaide’s main shopping street bearing the slogan ‘THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD.’
After passing the inquisitional eye of any police on the sidelines, the third placard-holder moved closer to the second – separating again when another policeman was spied further down the street.
Noel Schoff, Adelaide, South Australia
See it, say it....
SIR: How could you allow Ysenda Maxtone Graham (November issue) to irritate me even more by highlighting British Transport Police’s intensely annoying slogan ‘See it, say it, sorted’? Let’s settle it once and for all: see it, say it, SOD IT.
Sincerely yours, Peter Baker, Leicester
Bennett’s swansong?
JASPER REES
Killing Time
by Alan Bennett Faber £10
At the age of 90, Alan Bennett has entered an old people’s home – in his new novel.
Hill Topp is an Edwardian mansion which, buttressed by that proud
double p, presides over an unspecified corner of Bennettland.
It has seen better days, much like its residents, who while away the ‘long and phlegm-flecked afternoon’, not particularly pondering the inevitable. Some smoke; some watch the box. Miss Rathbone does jigsaws. Phyllis knits. Mr Peckover talks keenly about spurious archaeological finds. Mr Woodruff is a conscientious flasher, though the ladies shut their eyes.
‘It doesn’t count if you don’t look,’ he protests peevishly.
The clientele have been chosen mainly for their Christian names. Mrs McBryde, who’s in charge, lets the Charlenes and Kevins slum it down the hill in Low Moor. She prefers applicants who sound classier, with bibelots and trinkets to filch once their owners have no further use for them. Mrs Foss, the newest arrival, leapfrogs the queue by dint of being redolently called Amalia.
Alan Bennett at 90: the Grim Reaper meets the Flasher at Hill Topp Old People’s Home
The membrane dividing geriatric reality from a hallucinatory otherworld is thin. On page one, a resident takes a phone call. ‘Before putting it down, Audrey looked at the receiver, which is what characters do in films but seldom in life.’
Like all at Hill Topp, she is a relic from a past that is half-forgotten or wholly misremembered. Mr Woodruff, who can’t recall whether or not he was abused in the cubs, was only five in 1940 but often asserts he was at Dunkirk, likening it to Morecambe – ‘Only you don’t get a medal for going to Morecambe. You should.’
Of course Bennett has been to Morecambe before, in Sunset Across the Bay. Other characters too seem to have stumbled in from elsewhere in Bennettland. The Queen, seen in A Question of Attribution and The Uncommon Reader, is mentioned in dispatches.
Items collected for a fundraising sale include the Leeds Civic Yearbook for Victory Year 1945, which evokes Bennett’s Mam and Dad and his play Enjoy. Also collected are the yellowing autographs of Churchill, Eden and, for some reason, Molotov.
Bennett visited the USSR in An Englishman Abroad and now, intriguingly, he flits back there in the locked memory of one of his residents.
Not much happens at Hill Topp, or not at first. There are outings to see the lone flamingo at a local farm and whenever anyone snuffs it, they pile into the coach for a jaunt to the crem.
From outside come routine visits by a non-camp hairdresser or a chiropodist whose specialist banter focuses on the resale value of nail clippings. The window cleaner, whom no one would mistake for an oil painting, moonlights as a sex worker operating out of the bike shed. ‘It’s such a nice change from humbugs,’ says Mrs Porteous. His clients consist of four ladies and Mr Dalrymple, who knows an oil painting when he sees one.
As in most such culs-de-sac, there is little by way of event. Then, on page 57 –more than halfway through this swift novella – Covid is mentioned and the Grim Reaper rolls up his sleeves. Mrs McBryde, supposing it ‘to single out old people and the occasional Asian’, is dauntless. Fatally so.
For others, the rules and regs of the pandemic are more a source of confusion. ‘No singing, no praying, no sex.’ ‘You can have sex if you’re in a bubble.’ ‘Where do you get them?’ What?’ ‘These bubbles.’
Phyllis knits woollen face masks, and
then switches to more efficacious velvet snipped from a Fortuny frock. Mr Peckover, remembering the Fire of London that succeeded the Plague, thinks a bonfire of vanities should stave off danger. Into the flames go, among other necessaries, a refectory table and Mr Donovan’s hearing aids.
The book’s jacket design depicts a perfume bottle with a hammer-andsickle label. You have to wait until the closing pages to find out why, before Bennett concludes with an apology, insisting that Comrade Molotov’s wife really was something big in the field of Soviet cosmetics. He read it in the Guardian. ‘It seemed a pity to leave this sweet-smelling incongruity unexploited.’
There is only so much more from Alan Bennett to come. The diary will appear each January in the London Review of Books until one year it won’t. So we must cherish every fresh production.
Killing Time, with its ruthless double entendre, is possibly not vintage Bennett, and more by way of a tart winter fruit.
But it’s beady, fleet and inimitable as it hovers on death’s threshold, laughing at whatever awaits beyond.
Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood
Kings of the forest
DAVID WHEELER
The Tree Hunters: How the Cult of the Arboretum Transformed Our Landscape
By Thomas Pakenham
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30
No one acquainted with his Meeting with Remarkable Trees (1996), an enduring bestseller, can fail to have twigged (pun intended) Thomas Pakenham’s love of trees.
Memorably, the book opened on his Irish estate in Westmeath on the eve of a great storm in January 1991, when he went to contemplate his score of beeches, reckoned to be 200 years old and about 100 feet tall.
He slipped a tape measure round their ‘smooth, silver-green, lichen-encrusted bellies’. None was a champion, but ‘all had been good friends to five generations of our family. As I taped each tree, I gave it a hug, as if to say “Good luck tonight”.’ Dawn revealed devastation: 12 had been ripped from the ground. My eyes dampen with each rereading. Pakenham has travelled the world to
look and wonder at trees. He knows them intimately. I doubt he’d want to live without them.
In this latest book, he considers the men (mostly men) who, for centuries, have combed the old and new worlds in search of arboreal treasures to decorate and transform our temperate land.
None of these ‘scholars and daredevils’ would have succeeded without the sponsors, collectors and patrons with the means and the acres to bankroll, procure, foster and accommodate such bounty.
My, they’re a colourful lot.
Chronologically, the sweep begins in the 17th century with John Evelyn, whose Sylva (1664) is the foundation stone of our arboreal knowledge. At around the same time, there was Henry Compton (1632-1713), Bishop of London (several times pipped to the post for the top –Canterbury – job), in whose Fulham Palace can still be seen remnants of his woody exotics.
What a time it was. The 16th- and 17th-century father and son Tradescants brought to our shores, among much else, apricot trees from the Barbary Coast and firs from Arctic Russia. From Virginia, they gathered such present-day indispensables as the red maple, the swamp cypress (Taxodium distichum) and the resplendent tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera).
Pakenham’s leading female protagonist is the young, widowed Princess Augusta, mother of George III.
Living at Kew with her husband Prince Frederick, she perceived his passion for gardening and his penchant for ‘many curious & forain trees’. When Frederick died in his early forties, Augusta chose one of his closest friends, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, as her mentor, supporter and – perhaps – more.
Within half a dozen years of Frederick’s death, she began to create at Kew the kind of garden he had in mind.
Pakenham’s diversity of arborealists – from acquisitive royals to ambitious commoners – is impressive. Along his forest path we meet the likes of botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), who, after accompanying Cook on his circumnavigation of the globe on Endeavour, donated seeds and much else to Kew.
Working-class Scotsman David Douglas (1799-1834) left school aged just 12, soon finding himself a job at Glasgow’s newly created botanic garden.
He’s remembered principally for two things: as seed-distributor of the now widely planted Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii); and for his terrifying
supposedly accidental death in Hawaii at the age of 35, after he’d been gorged by a bull, the only other occupant of a cattle pit into which he had fallen. Or was he pushed? Pakenham ponders.
The Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire and their horticulturally rich Woburn and Chatsworth estates bring into focus such luminaries as Capability Brown, John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton.
While each of the aforementioned are familiar in the arboreal annals of this country, Pakenham animates them triumphantly by bringing to their many-faceted achievements and adventures a wealth of incidental detail that takes the reader into the midst of their fabulously eventful lives.
The sinuous, woody trail concludes with a summing up of the last ‘great’ plant-hunters: George Forrest combing the uplands of Tibet and western China; Arthur Bulley of Bees Seeds; Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson, who introduced to Western gardens a staggering 2,000 new plants; Frank Kingdon-Ward, who gave us seeds of the blue poppy, first discovered by French missionary Père Delavay; and Reginald Farrer, whose book The Rainbow Bridge is just one of many he wrote in his all-too-few 40 years.
Might Pakenham consider a follow-up volume? Who better to chronicle the travels and discoveries of such living though less active plant-hunters as Roy Lancaster in Hampshire, Maurice Foster in Kent, Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones at Crûg Farm in North Wales and Dan Hinkley on Puget Sound?
And there’s a battalion of unsung young Turks beavering away on unchartered hillsides for the benefit of home gardeners. But Pakenham has served us well already and we mustn’t be greedy.
David Wheeler is The Oldie’s gardening correspondent
Top trainspotter
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE
Bradley’s Railway Guide
By Simon Bradley Profile £30
In the 1980s, the half-mile railway bridge across the scenic estuary at Barmouth was being eaten. The culprit was Teredo navalis, the shipworm that in the 18th century forced the Royal Navy to copper-bottom the fleet.
Built in 1867, Barmouth Bridge, now restored, saves travellers to Aberystwyth a detour of miles upriver via Dolgellau and is the biggest and most surprising survival of Victorian timber viaducts.
Railway engineers were versatile. In the 1870s, the challenge of building a line across the clay, silt and loose rock left by glaciers high up in the Pennines called for foundations 50ft deep for the Arten Gill Viaduct on the Settle-to-Carlisle route. Of the 22 major viaducts across those moors, it is as spectacular as the more famous Ribblehead Viaduct.
In 1983, British Rail wanted to close the 73-mile Settle-to-Carlisle line, publishing unreliable figures for the cost of mending the Ribblehead Viaduct (between £5 million and £15 million), and cutting services to the small stations on the route. But the railway bosses had not reckoned with local and national strength of feeling for the threatened line.
A local manager restored the stopping service and boosted annual passenger numbers from 93,000 to almost 500,000. A charitable trust began restoring its historic buildings. BR reversed its policy and the Ribblehead Viaduct was repaired for a fraction of the estimates.
Simon Bradley, a leading architectural historian and railway enthusiast, takes a journey through two centuries of British railway history since the opening of the Stockton and Darlington line in 1825. He achieves a difficult thing that sounds simple: alighting at stations each year and taking snapshots that build up into a picture of the whole.
This is not a picture book, but the page for each year is illustrated with a striking photograph, such as the 361ft-high girder towers of the Forth Bridge standing half-completed in 1889.
For 1873, there’s a fashionable lady painted by James Tissot waiting on the platform with two trunks, a holdall and a hatbox, her arms already full with a parasol, a rug and a bouquet. She is at Willesden Junction – nicknamed Bewildering Junction because of the complexities of its train connections. It is where the
baddy, Ferdinand Lopez, in The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876) ends his life in the path of the Inverness express, ‘knocked into bloody atoms’.
An immense elephants’ graveyard of 7ft gauge locomotives is caught by an 1892 photographer on the 16 miles of sidings built at Swindon by the Great Western Railway for the day when it adopted the 4ft 8½in width, still in use.
The nation’s immense reservoir of buildings, bridges and viaducts of beauty and interest is explained by ‘underinvestment, happenstance and deliberate preservation’. There is a narrow line between benign neglect and ruination.
There’s a lovely footbridge at Nairn on the Aberdeen-Inverness line, built by the Highland Railway in 1885. The main span curves upwards elegantly and the sides are enclosed in white-painted diagonal-latticed ironwork.
The stylish fixtures gave a sense of identity to the Highland Railway’s far-flung territory. But last year plans were announced for the replacement of Nairn’s footbridge with a plain modern structure with integral lifts.
Surprisingly early, railways brought in more technologies than the all-transforming steam. In 1838, two years before the Penny Post, an Act of Parliament obliged railway companies to carry mail. At first, mail coaches were transferred from the roads where they’d been briskly pulled by horses at 12mph and secured on flatbed trucks at the back of trains.
In 1838 too, the first travelling post office was added to a train, enabling mail to be sorted as it dashed through the night. Mail was picked up and dropped off at high speed by the use of a frameand-net apparatus (as seen in Night Mail, the 1936 documentary with Auden’s poetry), a method that lasted until 1971.
Next time the on-board buffet is closed, think of the poor passengers on the nine-hour Edinburgh-to-London service in 1872, before lavatories were fitted in trains. There was a 15-minute break at York before 3am to buy provender – or to make yourself comfortable. The choice was yours.
In the 1850s, a rival to Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, which gave so many a headache with its baffling timetables, was published under the name Intelligible Railway Guide. Now Bradley’s Railway Guide comes intelligibly stuffed with facts and entertaining morsels at every station.
Christopher Howse is author of The Train in Spain
An American tragedy
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir
Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
Macmillan
£25
Can there really be anything new left to say about Elvis Presley?
I’m not talking just about the inevitable biopics and dodgy stage tributes. Since Elvis terminally left the building in 1977, we’ve also had the written thoughts of his ex-wife Priscilla, a shelfful of gossipy books by former girlfriends and bodyguards, and the growing number of highbrow studies attempting to place the King in his proper historical context.
The latest entrant to the overcrowded field of Elivis biographies is this memoir by Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley. It’s tainted by a certain amount of grief from the start. The author herself died in January 2023, aged 54, owing to weightloss-surgery complications.
She left behind three daughters. One of them, Riley Keough, completed this book from tapes her mother bequeathed her. Lisa Marie’s son, Benjamin, had predeceased his mother, killing himself in 2020 at the age of 27. He bore a striking resemblance to his famous grandfather and, like him, wanted to be a recording star.
Among the more startling revelations is that Lisa Marie chose to keep Benjamin’s body preserved on ice in her spare bedroom for two months following his death:
‘I felt fortunate that there was a way I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become OK with laying him to rest,’ she writes.
I’m afraid that From Here to the Great Unknown is rather that kind of book. Lisa Marie was born to be tabloid fodder. The first photos of her showed the proud parents carrying her home amidst a scrum of reporters following her birth in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.
She spent her early years at Elvis’s mansion Graceland, before moving with her mother to Los Angeles when the Presleys divorced in 1973.
The little girl was Elvis’s ‘princess’. Before she was in school, he gave her a customised Harley-Davidson golf cart. He also named his private jet (with a king-size bed and a washbasin with gold taps) after her.
Nine-year-old Lisa Marie was visiting Graceland when her father succumbed to a fatal heart attack, precipitated by an extensive drug habit, at the age of 42, an event she recalls movingly here.
Somehow it fails to come as a shock
that Lisa Marie’s adolescence and early adulthood were a merry-go-round of opioids and sex, from which she periodically alighted only for another stay at a rehab facility.
In 1994, she went to the Dominican Republic to obtain a quickie divorce from her first husband, the father of this book’s co-author, and as an alternative married Michael Jackson.
When accusations emerged of child abuse at Jackson’s estate Neverland, his own private Graceland, Lisa Marie loyally stood by him. Even so, she admits that, ‘after about a year, things started to go downhill’, largely due to Jacko’s drug use, another strange parallel to the Elvis story.
In August 2002, she in turn married actor Nicolas Cage, a union that lasted three months. Lisa Marie later said Cage considered her just another Elvis souvenir.
Amid the litany of drink, drugs and ill-advised marriages (a fourth followed to Michael Lockwood, a hirsute young guitarist, again triggering her season ticket to the divorce court), Lisa Marie found the time to release three wellreceived pop albums, as well as several duets with her late father, patched together using archival recordings.
Like Elvis, she was notably generous to charities, despite once filing papers in which she claimed to be $16 million in debt.
At one stage Lisa Marie abandoned her life in the gilded neighbourhoods of Beverly Hills to take up residence in Rotherfield, East Sussex, apparently chosen for its proximity to the headquarters of the Scientology Church she then patronised.
‘They became my tribe,’ she explains, although by 2013 she was describing the church as a ‘big sinister situation, where there was, like, kind of intel and covert ops going on, and a whole effort to control me that I didn’t know about’.
Americans do this kind of self-analytical (or, if you prefer, narcissistic) story-telling rather well, because they believe their inner lives are intrinsically interesting.
We Britons, on the other hand, find navel-gazing rather vulgar and embarrassing – though there is a growing number of exceptions to the rule.
Your reaction to From Here to the Great Unknown will depend on which side of this particular line you happen to fall. It’s a compelling enough tale in its way, but the inescapably sad conclusion is that, for all her restless globetrotting, Lisa Marie’s most enduring residence was Heartbreak Hotel.
Christopher Sandford is author of 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began
‘The
boss hates firing people’
Tipping Point II
IVO DAWNAY
Revenge of the Tipping Point
By Malcolm Gladwell
Abacus £25
Malcolm Gladwell is a classic example of the modern US public intellectual: a more user-friendly, populist version of our own Dominic Cummings, with an Afro in place of the beanie hat.
Though he was born in England of British and Jamaican parentage, his approach is thoroughly North American: latch on to a half viable idea, Big It Up and then market it to death.
Gladwell sprang to fame in 2000 with his first book, The Tipping Point. After endorsement from Bill Clinton, the book spent the usual aeon on the New York Times bestseller list and earned him several TED talks – an influencer’s Medal of Honor.
The thesis was simple: political trends, ideas, fashions, fads and other sociological detritus of the zeitgeist behave like epidemics. Once they reach a certain critical mass – a tipping point –‘Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.’
It was not a profound observation but, turbocharged by the internet, it took off, leading politicians and business to harness this magic power for their own ends.
In the UK and on a smaller scale, David Halpern’s Behavioural Insights Team (the so-called Nudge Unit) at 10 Downing Street sprinkled it around Whitehall departments.
Gladwell’s new book returns to the theme with a series of fresh examples and some sometimes astute, sometimes amusing observations about how deliberate social engineering has doubled down on the phenomenon.
Nonetheless, one increasingly suspects that he draws universal truths from a thesis that might not always survive the light of day in territories beyond the US’s borders.
Among them are, for example, claims that the Holocaust gained widespread
acknowledgement in the 1970s only after a US TV series drew it to the attention of the Great American Public.
Likewise, he attributes the surprisingly rapid and full acceptance of gay marriage to a single Hollywood movie sympathetic to the plight of closeted homosexuals and a popular TV sitcom – Will and Grace – that, for the first time, treated a gay man as a ‘normal’ human being, capable of being the ‘lead’ character.
Possibly partly true, but surely not the whole story?
Behavioural trends, he also contends, can be localised too. A rash of bank robberies in California went viral largely because just one criminal’s successes inspired imitators. And widespread Medicare welfare fraud occurred in Miami (but not the Midwest) because the crime wave in the Florida city that followed an influx of Latino narcos collectively disinhibited local medics from applying their usual ethical standards.
Elsewhere, he claims that a clutch of copycat suicides at an elite white school was a direct consequence of the highly charged aspirational values of its overly homogenous affluent students. Without a diversity of ideas and backgrounds, he argues, social viruses take hold easily.
One can’t help notice that this suicide fad has mercifully yet to infect the deeply uni-class British public-school system – but then again being overtly ambitious is not too cool for schools like Eton.
Yet there are genuine insights too. For example, plenty of evidence suggests that putting women on corporate boards really works only if they amount to at least one third of the membership. Then a cultural change takes place. Below that, they will be marginalised and patronised.
More entertaining, if mildly shocking, is the evidence of social engineering going back generations to shore up the Ivy League colleges’ WASP establishments.
Harvard grants athletic scholarships for the less academic in sports that favour Anglo-Saxon applicants. Coaches are sent at considerable expense to places such as New Zealand to seek out women rugby players, a sport rare in the US, to fill the quotas. Less so to the basketball courts of South Central Los Angeles.
The origins of this approach date back to the 1920s, as a clandestine way of limiting the Jewish intake (thereby preventing a ‘tipping point’), which would have overwhelmed the university had entry been on academic merit alone. Caltech, the Pasadena technology powerhouse, eschewed this
policy and is now 45-per-cent Asian in composition.
In his conclusion, Gladwell tells the story of Oxycontin, the now notorious product of the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma company. The case, he says, is a vivid example of both how business uses what he calls the ‘overstory’ – most would say political context – and how regulation can counter it.
The opioid crisis was markedly worse in US states with lax rules on prescribing. Several, like New York, required doctors to inform the authorities in triplicate of all opioid prescriptions issued. Not so in Appalachian states such as West Virginia and Tennessee, where a tipping point was quickly passed: addiction and deaths doubled in the mountains.
It is not hard to tell then where Purdue Pharma’s marketing teams concentrated their efforts.
Ivo Dawnay was Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph
Sea changes
ALAN JUDD
The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1814-1945
By N A M Rodger Allen Lane £40
This is the final volume of N A M Rodger’s magisterial naval history of Britain.
The first appeared 30 years ago and, if Rodger had written nothing else – he has in fact written much else – completion of this trilogy would justify any historian’s claim to a worthwhile life’s work.
The point about a naval history of Britain – as opposed to a history of the Royal Navy, a relatively recent institution – is that it is fundamental to the creation and existence of the country called Britain. Had the peoples of these islands not been such enterprising seafarers, our society and culture would have been very different. We would not have fed ourselves, traded or survived as an independent entity.
This volume covers the period 1814-1945. Although necessarily much concerned with the Royal Navy, it is far more than a recitation of wars and battles. Indeed, these episodes occupy little of the book. Other factors – such as industrial growth, ship design, naval education, personalities, exploration and scientific endeavour (much of the world was uncharted in 1814) – were not only more continuous than warfare but more formative.
Hydrography, for instance, was – like the study of weather – just one part of the Royal Navy’s decades-long scientific attempt to understand; to learn what was where. This resulted in an intellectual ordering of the world we now take for granted – what Rodger calls an ‘empire of the mind that still endures’.
Establishing standard sea level for the purposes of triangulation involved new instruments and an international network of observers, which included a large number of ‘computers’ – skilled mathematicians, many of them women. Between 1816 and 1855, no fewer than 85 naval officers were elected Fellows of the Royal Society.
Naval developments reflected not only the values but also the divisions of wider society, political and cultural. The Royal Navy led the suppression of the slave trade, although this conflicted with the other great liberal moral cause of the time, free trade. Stopping and sometimes seizing other nations’ ships on the high seas flouted international law and custom, making for difficult relations with major slave-trading powers such as France, Portugal, America and North African states.
Political considerations even influenced ship design, when Whig principle triumphed over Tory pragmatism to produce mid-19th-century warships based on yacht designs which proved unstable in all but the calmest seas. The 1879 abolition of flogging, widely popular throughout society, resulted in many more courts-martial and a less flexible disciplinary system.
Meanwhile, there were naval developments in nursing. Early in the 19th century, naval nurses were men, many of them drunkards. Later, the Navy recruited unmarried, educated middleclass women who needed to earn a living. By the time of the Crimean War, Eliza Mackenzie – little-known naval equivalent of Florence Nightingale – ran a hospital in Istanbul famed for its cleanliness
‘He looks as if he’s been in the Waughs’
and order, in which convalescent patients helped with the ironing. She led the way in being granted honorary officer status, although it was another 30 years before ‘ladies of character and culture’ were offered similar privileges with permanent peacetime careers.
Naval accounts of the First World War usually focus on Jutland, but Rodger rightly draws attention to the near-success of German U-boats in sinking so many merchant ships that for a period Britain was threatened with bankruptcy. His summary of Jutland is as good an account as could be given in a few pages of that confused and confusing encounter. He makes the useful point that the battleship/ battle-cruiser distinction assumed by later historians was irrelevant to contemporaries. They viewed them all as ‘large, armoured ships’ which were variously slower, faster, lighter, heavier.
Another feature of the First World War was the 1917 creation of the WRNS, the Women’s Royal Naval Service – or Wrens. In the Second World War, they provided many of the staff of Bletchley Park, the secret cryptology centre.
Rodger’s account of the wide-ranging naval aspects of that war is succinct and authoritative. While emphasising the contribution of cryptology, he also points to German successes against some British naval ciphers. Improvements in depth charges, torpedoes and convoy tactics contributed as much to victory in the U-boat battles as cryptography, albeit they are much less well-known.
The price of victory? The nearimpoverishment of Britain, due partly to almost punitive American loan conditions, consequences of which may arguably be with us still.
One should perhaps always be wary of claiming accounts as definitive. Suffice it to say that no future historian of this subject can afford to ignore Rodger’s great three-decker trilogy.
Alan Judd, The Oldie’s motoring correspondent, served in the Army and the Foreign Office
‘You shouldn’t have. No, really –you shouldn’t have’
Bertie Wooster of No 10
QUENTIN LETTS
Unleashed
By Boris Johnson William Collins £30
History might have been different had Boris Johnson, in the late 1980s, joined us on the Daily Telegraph’s diary column rather than joining the leader-writers.
At the paper’s new offices on the Isle of Dogs, the leader-writing department was separated from the diary by a few rubber plants. Boris arrived after his expulsion from the Times. Sackings being commonplace in those days, little shame was attached to that.
Yet, through the pot-plant jungle, I would see Boris at his keyboard looking forlorn, gripping his head like some beachball. Attempts to lure him to the pub for lunch were never successful, for he was not much of a boozer.
Leader-writers are solipsists. They fall prey to theories and a belief that intractable problems can be solved. Diarists are more sceptical and soon learn to spot frauds and greasers. Diary hacks had to be team players, too.
Unleashed – all 772 pages of it (might a diarist have submitted tighter copy?) –is a readable, droll, only partly revealing account by Johnson of his political career so far. He clearly longs to return. Sixty chapters cover his time as Mayor of London, Foreign Secretary and PM. The style is chatty, the humour a mixture of slapstick, bathos and the mock heroic.
For one with so many enemies, the writing is free of bitterness. Perhaps he calculated that this would only wind them up even more. Our former editor at the Telegraph, who has often written about Boris with itchy asperity, is called ‘dear old Max Hastings’. Sir Simon (now Lord) McDonald, a mandarin who seethed at Brexit, is wafted aside as ‘a tall, pale fellow who always looked, for some reason, as though he was wearing mascara’. Sir Alan Duncan, Boris’s Minister of State and arch critic at the Foreign Office, is not even mentioned. Not once. He’ll be furious!
The name Johnson can transform Theresa May from spongy Anglican into something more akin to a Borgia who has hammered her thumb. Boris merely describes the curve of her nostrils and notes that she can be gluey company at dinner.
President Santos of Colombia was being fêted at No 10. With PM May saying little, conversation became tricky. Santos started to describe his country’s richness in amphibians and boasted, ‘We
have 40 frogs.’ Boris, keeping the ball in the air, said, ‘That’s nothing. When I was Mayor of London, we had 400,000 frogs, more than the whole city of Bordeaux.’ Santos, initially bemused, quite liked the joke. Mrs May just ‘goggled at her plate’. That Wodehousian ‘goggle’ is used a lot. ‘Emetic’, ‘crackers’ and ‘cheesed off’ make multiple appearances. Johnson hopes to depict high politics as comedy.
This cannot be the whole truth. Much of the era covered was a time of rancid tension. Senior players at Westminster went through a psychological and physical mangle, and the toil of reading, debating, travel and team management must have demanded more stamina than we are shown here.
Does Johnson really remain so detached from the anger and neuralgia of the Brexit stalemate? Or is his jollity a front? His book could show a little more vulnerability without hurting the political brand he is obviously still projecting.
I did not know Sir John Redwood gave him near daily economic advice. The Thatcherite Redwood did not instil much fiscal discipline into his pupil. Johnson is amazingly blasé about the economic damage done by his Covid measures and he repeatedly complains about ‘Treasury resistance’ to his plans.
I expected more of an inner tussle, too, about his theft of our freedoms during lockdown, particularly with those damn masks. Maybe his famed libertarianism was never terribly deep-rooted. He lays out his belief in environmentalism but the defence of net zero is done pretty skimpily, more by assertion than by argument.
It is interesting that the National Security Council tried to stymie his early support for Ukraine. Of the ‘here today, gone tomorrow glow-worms’ of statecraft, Emmanuel Macron, in ‘Cuban-heeled bootees’, is teased to good effect. Angela Merkel sounds to have been better fun.
For all the verve of its prose and its attractive optimism, the tale steams towards disaster. He was undone by the ‘motiveless malignity’ of Dominic Cummings and, as he concedes, by his own naivety.
It was all pretty much doomed after he skived off to the Garrick Club in November 2021 for a reunion dinner with, hah, the leader-writers of the Telegraph. If he had never got mixed up with those lunatics in the first place, he might still be PM.
Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail’s political sketchwriter. He worked with Boris Johnson at the Daily Telegraph
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY (12A)
Marvel superhero films are now everywhere. So it’s easy to forget what an original smash hit Superman (1978) was.
It was then the most expensive film ever ($55m), with Marlon Brando picking up $2m for playing Superman’s dad. The film made so much money ($300m) that greedy old Marlon tried to sue for $50m for his share of the profits.
It spawned three sequels – and lodged Christopher Reeve (1952-2004) in the public mind as Superman for ever. At the time, he was an unknown 26-year-old from New Jersey – a classical actor fresh out of Juilliard and Cornell, a Mayflower descendant, a cousin of Jackie O’s and the preppy son of a scholarly writer.
Preposterously good-looking – and spookily similar to the original 1938 DC Comics Superman – Reeve was a perfect fit. His natural, innocent, naive manner also suited him to playing bespectacled nerd journalist Clark Kent.
Grateful as he was for the role that changed his life, Reeve tired of the franchise, which lasted until Superman IV in 1987. His search for more serious acting led him to fine roles in The Bostonians (1984) and The Remains of the Day (1993). But he really always remained Superman.
And that’s what deepened the poignancy and tragedy of his riding accident in 1995, when his horse refused a simple three-foot jump at a crosscountry event in Virginia. Reeve was flung, headfirst, to the ground, his hands caught in the bridle. And so Superman became a paraplegic, paralysed from the neck down.
This moving film deftly jumps
Arts
from his pre-accident superstardom to his paralysis. Blissfully free of any commentary, it relies on interviews with him, before and after the fall, his family and superstar friends – including Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close and John Kerry.
Reeve was a fitness fanatic before the accident – forever pushed by his ambitious, superior father, who was surprisingly pleased at the news of his son’s Superman role but only because he thought he’d got a part in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903). So Reeve fought and fought to return movement to his limbs and get off his ventilator, with some very limited success.
The agony is dialled up by the optimism of Reeve and his wife, Dana. How valiantly they work to revive his once-mighty limbs – and what efforts they make to push the American government to boost investment in spinal-injury medicine and stem-cell
Up, up and away: Christopher Reeve, Superman (1978)
research. But all was to little avail for Reeve personally – though there have been medical advances since his death. Despite his round-the-clock care (costing $400,000 a year, which he could only just afford), he slipped into a coma in 2004, dying aged only 52.
Reeve’s three charming children –who’ve inherited his million-dollar bone structure – have continued his work to improve spinal medicine. They all exude his admirable strain of American optimism – of the idea that catastrophes only bring fresh challenges.
But, still, a deep sadness underpins the whole film. What happens when the American Dream becomes an American Nightmare? That nightmare deepens when Reeve’s widow dies of lung cancer (she never smoked) only 18 months after his death, at only 44. Their son, Will Reeve, now a TV correspondent on Good Morning America, is the spitting image of his dad – Superson. But, for all his gleaming, film-star looks and white-teeth grin, and for all the support of his half-siblings, he admits, on the verge of tears, that since his parents’ deaths 20 years ago he has always been alone.
Even the touches of Hollywood schmaltz – such as Reeve’s get-well-soon cards from Paul McCartney and Katharine Hepburn – are moving.
And the directors, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, wisely let the interviews speak for themselves. Their only artistic addition – showing the emerald crystals of kryptonite, Superman’s hated poison, creeping over a vulnerable body – works well.
You may choose to share their optimistic message: the film’s poster declares, ‘Once you choose hope, anything is possible.’ But that isn’t true – Superman never walked again.
Still, it’s heartbreakingly gripping to watch him try.
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
DR STRANGELOVE
Noël Coward Theatre, London, until 25th January
‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here – this is the War Room!’ Stanley Kubrick’s dark, delicious Cold War satire turns 60 this year. This assured, imaginative stage version brings his apocalyptic film bang up to date.
Sean Foley’s production doesn’t tamper with the 1960s setting. We’re still in 1964, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ten years ago, it might have seemed like a quaint period piece. With Russia on the warpath again, it now feels horribly topical. Sixty years on, Kubrick’s terrifying question still resonates: could a single madman trigger a nuclear war?
Before I saw this play, I’d assumed that Dr Strangelove was simply too big for the stage. It features a bloody battle between the US Army and the US Air Force. Much of the action takes place aboard a B-52 bomber.
Yet Foley is a director renowned for his bold, creative staging. In his hands, the most unwieldy parts of Kubrick’s film become the most thrilling.
The script is co-written by Foley and Armando Iannucci (whose numerous credits include The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin). It follows Kubrick’s screenplay pretty closely, though there are a lot of new jokes.
I feared these might jar, but they fit into his story almost seamlessly. This Dr Strangelove is more overtly comic, but it remains faithful to his vision.
The shining star of Kubrick’s movie was Peter Sellers, giving his greatest film performance in three contrasting comic roles. I used to think it’d be impossible for anyone to fill his shoes, but when I heard Steve Coogan had been cast in the title role, I felt sure he’d be a perfect fit.
There’s always been something about Coogan that’s reminded me of Sellers, ever since I first saw him on the comedy circuit, more than 30 years ago: his chameleon-like capacity to inhabit multiple personalities; the distant, slightly dislocated quality of some of his finest acting.
Coogan is a brilliant mimic, and he surely could have done an immaculate imitation of Sellers if he’d wanted to.
Instead, he dares to do something quite different. His Dr Strangelove is delightfully, hilariously camp, which somehow makes him even more sinister than Sellers’s colder villain. The role that impressed me most was Coogan’s hapless
Dr Strangelove (Steve Coogan)
Captain Mandrake. In a story severely short of sympathetic characters, he infuses this RAF officer with fragility and humanity, giving us someone to root for.
Sellers plays three parts in the film. In the play, Coogan plays four: not just Dr Strangelove, Captain Mandrake and the US President, but also Major Kong, the gung-ho pilot who drops the bomb. Unlike Sellers in the movie, Coogan has to switch between these roles at lightning pace. The costume changes are incredibly quick. What’s even more impressive is the way he morphs so smoothly between four entirely different characters.
There are only a few occasions when Coogan isn’t onstage. In such a virtuoso vehicle, it would be easy to reduce the other characters to comic feeds, merely providing set-ups for his punchlines. It’s to Coogan’s immense credit (and Foley’s and Iannucci’s) that the other characters have room to breathe.
John Hopkins is a wonderfully demented General Ripper, and Giles Terera is an intensely charismatic General Turgidson. He almost convinced
me that a pre-emptive strike on Russia might actually be a good idea.
Are there any flaws? A few, but they’re all endemic to Kubrick’s movie. Apart from Penny Ashmore’s Vera Lynn, who sings We’ll Meet Again as the bomb goes off, there are no female characters. Foley and Iannucci have eliminated Kubrick’s only woman, General Turgidson’s secretary/mistress, who spends most of her working hours in her bikini.
This inevitably makes the script feel somewhat dry. The US President is rather thinly drawn, and some of the War Room scenes are a bit static, but these are minute blemishes. The show’s a joy.
Even though Dr Strangelove is full of laughter, its central message is profound, as in all the best comedies.
‘As fewer and fewer people find solace in religion as a buffer between themselves and the terminal moment, I actually believe that they unconsciously derive a kind of perverse solace from the idea that, in the event of a nuclear war, the world dies with them,’ said Kubrick. ‘God is dead, but the bomb endures.’
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
We oldies know we’re back in our time whenever programmes begin ‘It was 50 years ago today…’ And they bring on old rockers such as Mark Knopfler and Bryan Ferry, old folkie Shirley Collins or brainbox Dr Jacob Bronowski. Déjà vu guaranteed.
Knopfler said he’d listened so intently to Listen with Mother and Children’s Favourites that he could sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer ‘all the way through’ at 18 months. Bryan Ferry, 79, grew up (with a paper round) near Knopfler in County Durham.
Then we had The Lucan Obsession, a true-crime series by Alex von Tunzelmann about Lucan’s frenzied attack on the nanny, Sandra Rivett, in 1974. It was witnessed by his wife, who apparently said, ‘Don’t you dare touch my pearls.’ And more déjà vu: the Profumo affair in the voice of Mandy Rice-Davies in some unheard tapes on The Archive Hour
Mandy was ‘very into Scott Fitzgerald at age 14’, she said. Her pert looks whisked her from selling china at Birmingham’s Marshall & Snelgrove to the Motor Show, unveiling the Mini Countryman. At Murray’s dance place –on the playlist, Guy Mitchell’s ‘She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt’ –she met Christine Keeler. They shared a flat; Bill Astor paid. Mandy spoke unabashedly of Rachman.
When I met Mandy in 1988 – still a sharp cookie, wearing Dior, happy with husband number three, quoting from Macbeth – she was delighted to find herself in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations with her ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ (on being told that Astor denied everything). It remains the best courtroom riposte of all time.
We were back in 1964 again for a poignant episode of Soul Music on Joan Baez’s song Diamonds and Rust – ‘Well, I’ll be damned/ Here comes your ghost again’. It was obviously about Dylan – ‘eyes … bluer than robins’ eggs’ –whom she loved dearly. I remember meeting Joan, too, in 1997. When the audience yelled, ‘Play something by Bobby!’ she cleverly shouted back, ‘Bobby who?’ – before launching without demur into Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Back to the present century. Will Self was talking on Illuminated about reclusion. Diagnosed with several multisyllabic afflictions in recent years, he’s become a recluse – no longer ‘a man
of the crowd’, evading ‘sociality’. Even neologisms are freighted with ponderous significance. Planes overhead? ‘I think of the gussets of hundreds of pairs of pants and the human fundaments they contain.’ (Ugh!) ‘I once flew to Scotland, climbed Ben Lomond, and flew back to London the same day. Now the thought of it makes me want to vomit.’ He wakes at dawn, hearing birdsong. Then his suburb wakes, and everyone else in the street is wearing earbuds – ‘listening to the soundtrack of their lives’, he says with withering scorn. ‘I’ve never sent a tweet or … posted a dollop of my doings on Insta.’
In his robes, 62 and bearded, Will is mistaken for an Old Testament prophet or the Messiah. ‘I walked from London to Canterbury and met a priest.’ She adjured him to read Julian of Norwich. I listened twice, savouring its sesquipedalian impenetrability.
Trump/Harris: alas, you already know the result. I don’t yet, but will have been tuned to Jim Naughtie that night. We make do, meanwhile, politically, with the unmistakable ‘Hellew. I’m Michael Goeve.’ He mischievously disarmed listeners with ‘If politics is showbusiness for ugly people, I was made for it.’ While Johnnie Walker, 79, hung up his ear cans, 79-year-old Michael Buerk expostulated to Amol Rajan, ‘Is this really the BBC’s most important story today?’ (The death of Liam Payne.) A remark often echoed chez nous, about some backstage spat on Strictly
And Parky is coming back on a podcast, interviewing today’s A-listers, courtesy of AI. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
TELEVISION
FRANCES WILSON
Few film or television adaptations succeed in being as good as the books themselves.
A standout exception is the 1973 Fred Zinnemann film of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, in which the elusive hit man is played by Edward Fox.
In the flashy new Sky adaptation, written by Ronan Bennett with Forsyth as consultant producer, the Jackal is played by Eddie Redmayne. The ten-part series maintains the DNA of its precursors, while adding depth to the characters and hairpin bends to the plot and giving us glossy locations in Germany, Croatia and Spain.
Redmayne is well-cast, having the same slim frame and fine cheekbones as Fox himself. Both actors play the killer as
though he were both a ghost and the average product of English public-school repression. Both Jackals have a genius for disguise, and a good working relationship with the armourer who builds their weapons.
Redmayne’s Jackal also, however, has a wife called Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and a baby son, who wait, in their magnificent Spanish villa, for him to come home.
The political contexts are brought up to date and so too is the technology, with the Jackal’s bespoke weapons now made by 3-D printing, and his commissions agreed on the dark web.
The credit sequence, intense faces in split screen and red lettering on a black background, is in the style of James Bond but the opening scene, set in Munich, is closer to Spider-Man. The Jackal, disguised as an elderly janitor, takes out the employees of the Fest Organisation before scaling down the building to the blasting soundtrack of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place
We next see him on the 16th floor of an apartment block, unscrewing the handles of his wheelie suitcase and fitting them together to make the sniper rifle with which he will assassinate the next German Chancellor. His bullet, travelling a distance of 3,850 metres –apparently the world record for a kill with a sniper rifle – goes through the revolving door of a hospital to land in the target’s skull. Turning the rifle back into a suitcase, the Jackal puts on his hoodie and leaves the building.
The Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) in the new adaptation of The Day of the Jackal
So impressed is Timothy Winthrop (Charles Dance) by the Jackal’s professionalism that he employs him to take out the entrepreneur Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), a megalomaniac in the manner of Elon Musk. Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch) is the robust MI6 arms specialist who chases the Jackal all over Europe, while having no idea who he is or what he looks like.
Everyone, however, knows what she looks like because, being black, she’s not what they expect. Magnificently ill-suited to family life, Bianca is more excited by firearms than by her decent-seeming husband and schoolgirl daughter. So we inevitably watch the breakdown of her marriage as she tries to save the world.
Meanwhile, Nuria, who has until now assumed that her husband was a businessman, discovers the secret room where he hides his guns, passports and make-up and wig collections. So the poor Jackal has to carry out his next hit being pursued by Bianca at the same time as trying to prevent having a domestic with his wife.
Season Four of My Brilliant Friend, also on Sky, is the adaptation of the last book in Elena Ferrante’s best-selling quartet. We have reached the 1980s, and Elena Greco (Alba Rohrwacher) and Lila Cerullo (Irene Maiorino), childhood friends from a poor suburb in Naples, have children of their own. Elena, now a well-known writer, has left her husband for the inadequate Nino (who is showing no signs of leaving his wife), and Lila, still living in ‘the neighbourhood’, has become an entrepreneur.
The performances are mesmerising:
every look is loaded with significance; every line contains another dozen that are unsaid. As with the books themselves, we feel that we are in a world of Jamesian depth and complexity when we are actually watching a soap opera.
The reason the series has the hypnotic effect of the novels is that Ferrante herself (or himself: the novelist’s identity has yet to be disclosed) has served as script adviser throughout. Working with the mysterious Ferrante, said the director of the first season of My Brilliant Friend, was like ‘working with a ghost’.
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE GABRIEL FAURÉ
The late Michael Wharton, prime mover of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, once said his psychiatrist prescribed a course of music by Gabriel Fauré. That most quietly civilised of composers died a century ago, on 4th November 1924, aged 79.
Whether this was true, or merely an inspired piece of wish-fulfilment by Wharton, isn’t clear. His relationship with the profession was a complex one – witness Peter Simple’s resident psychiatrists, Dr Heinz Kiosk and Dr F Gestaltvogel, the senior consultant at Nerdley General Hospital for whom euthanasia remained an option of last resort.
For most of Gabriel Fauré’s life (1845-1924), as for most of Michael Wharton’s, the times were out of joint politically and culturally. Wharton (1913-2006) assuaged his misgivings by
creating his own brand of fantastical satire. By contrast, the naturally sociable yet also intensely private Fauré spent a lifetime plying his trade as an organist and teacher (Ravel his most gifted pupil) while continuing to bring his craft as a composer to an ever-finer tilth.
In a memorable 150th-birthday tribute in 1995, the composer Robin Holloway summarised Fauré’s art as ‘a still small voice of truth from the bottom of the well’.
For much of Fauré’s lifetime it was a voice that was a bit too still, even in France.
‘Deafened by a century of Romantic cannon-fire and democratic uproar,’ wrote Joseph de Marliave, husband of the celebrated pianist and Fauré pupil Marguerite Long, ‘people were touched neither by the purity of Fauré’s art, nor by the charm of its incomparable gentleness, nor by the secret force it possesses to perfection.’
The true underpinnings of Fauré’s art, according to his first and best biographer, the composer Charles Koechlin, were the moral certainties and private freedoms of the man himself –freedom from the dictates of fashion, freedom from the persistent urge to have ‘something to say’, freedom from any desire for self-promotion.
None of this can be said of many of the self-promoting oddballs who peopled the Peter Simple column for more than 40 years. How we laughed at the time, and how we’ve pretty well ceased laughing, now that satire has slowly turned to reality.
In an ever more anxious world, to which states of ‘wellbeing’ are thought to be key, the idea of Fauré the therapist might well find its time has come again.
His most obviously therapeutic
Fauré playing a duet with family friend Mlle Lombard, Trevano, 1913
work is the Requiem, not sung in England until 1936 but now, by some distance, his best-known piece. Typically, Fauré wrote it for no better reason than that, as an organist entrusted with playing for numerous funerals, he thought it might be useful to write some music of his own.
It’s been said that the Requiem’s concluding ‘In Paradisum’ casts its spell because it makes us all feel ‘momentarily immortal’. For the composer himself, it was no more than a vision of eternal rest after departure from a world he’d known, endured and loved.
There’s a wonderful recording of the Requiem by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, which conjures up a sense of time standing still, as we attend to sounds that appear to be coming from another place.
The conductor of that 1967 recording was David Willcocks, who spoke movingly of the Requiem in a 2010 episode of Radio 4’s Soul Music. The context was the famous defence of Hill 112 in the wake of the 1944 Normandy landings – a defence in which his own courage and quickness amid so much carnage won him the Military Cross.
Like Fauré, who fought in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war at much the same young age, Willcocks was what we might call a Christian agnostic. Whenever he reflected on the defence of Hill 112, and the many lives lost there, it was the music of Fauré’s Requiem that settled his mind.
Many of us first absorbed Fauré’s music intravenously through the ‘Berceuse’ from his Dolly suite which concluded the BBC’s Listen with Mother ‘Before him,’ wrote Marguerite Long, ‘only Robert Schumann had been able to penetrate the mystery of the child’s soul.’
Aside from the Requiem, the chief glories of Fauré’s output include the wonderfully vibrant early First Piano Quartet, his many songs and the 13 Barcarolles and 13 Nocturnes for solo piano.
Never intended for the concert hall, and too taxing for most amateurs, the piano music has been especially wellserved by the gramophone, from Marguerite Long herself to such latterday masters as Marc-André Hamelin.
‘But who was this Gabriel Fauré?’ the minister enquired when a state funeral was proposed (and eventually granted) in Paris in 1924.
Did Michael Wharton know the story? If so, he’d probably have rejoiced in the fact that it’s not only British governments that have a habit of putting dunderheads in charge of the arts.
‘I heard the beer here is to die for’
GOLDEN OLDIES
MARK ELLEN
RIP AUTOGRAPHS
Van Morrison used to have a house in leafy west London. Some locals called him ‘the hermit of Holland Park’.
On the rare occasions he ventured out alone, he always had a mobile clamped to his ear to avoid having to talk to anyone and, more importantly, to sidestep the scourge of celebrity at the time: the loitering and over-persistent autograph-hunter.
Rod Stewart’s ruse was to wear shades when he set foot outdoors so he never made eye contact and so couldn’t be accused of ignoring people. Paul McCartney devised his famous thumbs-up, so he could walk at a brisk, purposeful clip as if desperately late for something – without stopping, lest a scrum might form – while leaving any onlooker with a warm sense of digitally dispensed goodwill.
Dallas Hagman was the past master. Extending an arm towards would-be well-wishers, he’d say, ‘I’m just shakin’ hands today!’ –implying that had you met him yesterday, who knows, he might have asked you out for dinner.
There’s always the suspicion, too, that signatureseekers might not care for you personally anyway. They could be after
quantity, not quality. Some of the folk milling around Radio 1 in the ’80s seemed to be collecting the set, thrilled to land a household name such as Tony Blackburn while squinting quizzically at their drying ink to identify a rising star like Janice Long.
But Tracey Thorn, singer with electronic pop pioneers Everything but the Girl, misses the days of the humble autograph immensely – a personalised memento which speaks well of the signatory and which a fan can frame and stick on a wall. For, as she recently remarked, it’s been replaced by something infinitely more burdensome and intrusive – the selfie.
You can be returning from the gym, she says – un-made-up, dishevelled, a bit shiny – and a man (and it mostly is men) will loom into view and ask to take a picture. If you politely say you’d rather not, some take one anyway or moan on social media about what a ‘bitch’ you are, while suggesting this spot is one of your favourite haunts. A photo you didn’t want taken in the first place will live for ever on the internet – and often just to ramp up the profile of the photo-taker’s trophy-hunting Instagram feed, at your bedraggled expense.
Imagine how it feels going to watch some much-loved act in a stadium if you’re press-ganged into summoning a rictus grin every two minutes as a queue of phone-clutching space-invaders lines up beside you – some of whom haven’t the faintest idea who you are.
Write stuff: Rod Stewart and Bob Dylan
All this makes the autograph seem vastly preferable. And it’s a useful index of your popularity; a way of calibrating your worth. Bob Dylan was being interviewed once in the shadowy corner of a New York restaurant when a fellow diner pushed in and got him to sign something. A friend joining Bob’s table later said he’d just seen the same man outside trying to sell it to passersDylan wasn’t surprised; just curious.
‘How much is he asking?’
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
LEIGHTON AND LANDSCAPE
Leighton House, 16th November to 27th April
Earlier this year, the restoration and extension of Leighton House in Kensington won the RIBA London Award. The Moorish palace built for Lord Leighton (1830-96) is more than ever worth a visit. As the citation said, ‘From the helical stair adorned with a hand-painted mural to the refurbishment of the Winter Studio, every aspect of the intervention reflects a deep understanding of Leighton House’s historical significance and a dedication to honouring its legacy.’
Frederic Leighton was one of the most celebrated British artists of his time, as his house – the most splendid of the artists’ residences around Campden Hill and Holland Park –testifies. However, artistic fashion always rotates. When young, we despise what our parents revered, and often we rediscover the idols of our grandparents.
Leighton, already a knight and a baronet, a day before his death was the first artist to be ennobled, the shortestlived creation in the peerage, as he had no heirs. His great reputation took only a little longer to fade, and even now he is remembered principally for just two things, Leighton House and Flaming June
That painting was originally owned by the Graphic, which made a Christmas edition of reproductions from it. Then it went on loan to the Ashmolean, before disappearing from view in 1932. It was rediscovered in the 1960s, in part by the great Victorian specialist Jeremy Maas. Since then, it has been owned by the Museo de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Famous once more, it has been loaned to galleries around the world, including Leighton House in 2017, and is now on display at the Royal Academy (to 12th January).
The exhibition at Leighton House shows a completely different side of his work, little known in his lifetime and not at all since. He was an inveterate traveller in Europe and the Near East,
and from 1856 onwards his habit was to record snatches of landscapes and intriguing details of towns in small, dashing oil sketches. As is the case with many artists, these are much more immediate and indeed modern in feel than his formally composed finished paintings. Among them are many of Capri, and the newly discovered Bay of Cadiz – Moonlight, bought at Christie’s in June with the help of grants for nearly £33,000. It could almost be by Lavery, across the Straits in Tangier. Shown with these are works by contemporaries from his collection.
The Oldie December
Worldly Frederic Leighton. Above, clockwise from top: View of Maqam al-Arba’in, Mount Qasioun, Damascus, 1873; At Biskra, 1895; Bay of Cadiz – Moonlight, 1866. Below: Flaming June, 1895
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
JOY OF HOUSE PLANTS
Ruth Bramley is not an oldie. Nor – yet – is either of her parents.
She is, however, among a growing number of late-teens and earlytwentysomethings who have become obsessed with plants.
And what Ruth does at her tender age is ideal for true oldies, involving as it does the human being’s two overriding obsessions: shopping and nurturing.
Few in Ruth’s age group have their own accommodation. So I hear tales of millennials and Gen Zs filling their bedrooms at their parents’ houses and flats with jungle plants to call their own.
Do they lend a hand in Mum and Dad’s gardens as well? I doubt it. Understandably, they want to express their own interests, indulge their own creativity and fashion their own Edens.
Cacti and succulents, ‘looking much the same, dead or alive’, says Ruth, are natives of arid terrain, prospering on almost total neglect – perfect for anyone frequently away from home or whose caring instincts are prone to spasmodic lapses. Ruth, though, is fully devoted to her treasures – confirmed by the floral and foliar tattoos that decorate her arms.
Pre-Covid Ruth was a rough-andtumble athlete, competitively wild-water kayaking on the nearby River Teifi, tumbling down through Carmarthenshire’s wooded hills. At home, her parents run Farmyard Nurseries, a cornucopia of perennials, shrubs, climbers and trees.
But, until recently (and her serious and ongoing bout of long Covid), there were no house plants – that group of mostly evergreen exotics, many thriving in low light levels, centrally heated rooms and, yes, partial neglect.
Spending time with Ruth would
persuade anyone to bring their garden indoors, or make an indoor garden from scratch. Forget the supermarkets’ samey range of plants; a phenomenal range is offered by Farmyard and other specialist nurseries. Choose what you like: foliage plants, flowering plants or a combination of both which might also include a surprisingly high number of scented ones.
Most so-called indoor or house plants emanate from South America, Africa or the warmer, wetter parts of east Asia.
Most, too, are trouble-free, needing minimal attention to prevent that most potent of all killers: an excess of intended kindness. And at this time of year, assuming their quarters are not uncomfortably unsuitable, a splash of water to keep the soil moist is all they need.
Selecting them from her well-stocked shop at the nursery, Ruth led me towards some undemanding plants with a range of forms and colours that triggered covetousness. Devil’s ivy (an Epipremnum species) has a trailing habit that’s happy on a moss pole. Others in that family show a dizzying display of leaf variegation, tolerant of low or bright light. She recommends Tradescantia ‘Nanouk’, with vivid leaf striations of acid pink and sage green. And I was spoiled for choice when she unveiled her selection of multi-coloured and -patterned varieties of Begonia rex.
Orchids are less fussy than many an aficionado would dare to admit. Phalaenopsis (moth orchids) are among the easiest to cultivate on a windowsill – benefiting from a rotation of their pots to treat all parts of the
Oxalis triangularis (purple shamrock) and Dracaena fragrans ‘Lemon Lime’
plants to some occasional sunshine. Philodendrons, whether trailing or climbing, need a bit more care, rewarding their keeper with funky variegations. Flowering kinds –streptocarpus and scentedleafed pelargoniums – need only be kept just moist and, like numerous other house plants, they prefer an ‘open’ growing medium of multipurpose compost, Perlite and chipped bark. Ruth’s best advice is to choose plants of similar needs for individual locations, be they warm, cool, sunny, dark, arid, humid… I’ve started my collection. What better way to brighten winter’s dreary months?
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD MACE
I was rather confused when I bought a small plant of mace in the local market. It had thin, serrated leaves and small, creamy, daisy-like flowers. Surely this could not produce the spice called mace which, when ground, is available in a jar?
Perhaps it was naive of me to think this pungent spice could be grown in my kitchen garden. But I’m looking forward to enjoying, next year, a new herb – which I now learn is known as English mace (not to be confused with the marigold called sweet mace).
It is still in the pot in which I bought it and, though a hardy
perennial, will be over-wintered in the unheated greenhouse.
In spring, I intend to plant it outside in well-drained soil; I expect the foliage to spread and reach a height of about 12 inches. Planting in a border will show the mace’s flowers to advantage; they have strong stems and should last well into autumn.
The leaves have a slightly astringent taste and could be used in soups, stuffings and rice dishes. English mace is particularly recommended for adding to potato salads.
A member of the sunflower family, mace was originally native to Switzerland. Its leaves used to be scattered on the floors of houses to repel insects and unpleasant smells. The spice mace was used for the same purpose in the Middle Ages, but otherwise the two maces have nothing in common.
The spice mace is the reddish-brown covering of the nutmeg seed, stringy in appearance before it is ground. Nutmeg trees were first found in the Molucca Islands of Indonesia and from the 17th century were traded by the Dutch, who planted trees elsewhere in the tropics. It is said to be the only tree that has two spices derived from its fruit.
Apart from in Asian dishes, mace is an essential ingredient when shrimps are potted with melted butter. As the festive season approaches, it is often used as part of a glaze on a Christmas ham. I shall wait until next year to experiment with the milder flavour of English mace.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD
STIR-UP SUNDAY
Fast before feast, as my Edinburgh granny used to say. She wouldn’t let me have cake until I’d eaten up the bread and butter. Christmas is coming – but not quite yet. Stir-up Sunday is 26th November. Time to prepare the pudding.
Plum pudding
There is no extra sugar in the mix as there is plenty of natural sweetness in the dried fruits. The inclusion of a dark sherry gives a fine, rich flavour and helps the colour. Serves 8-10.
1kg dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, prunes, apricots, figs)
1 large glass dark sherry (oloroso or Pedro Ximénez)
1 tbsp blanched almonds, left whole 1 tbsp shelled walnuts, roughly chopped 1 cooking apple, grated (including the skin)
1 large carrot, scrubbed and grated
1 orange, zest and juice
1 lemon, zest and juice
3 large eggs, lightly beaten to blend 250g fresh brown breadcrumbs
125g grated suet or diced cold butter or sunflower oil
De-pip or stone and chop the dried fruits into raisin-size pieces. Soak in a bowl with the sherry for an hour or two to swell and absorb the flavour. Fold in the rest of the ingredients until well-blended. Butter a 3lb (1.5 litre) pudding basin and tip in the mixture. Cover with a circle of greaseproof paper. Top with a clean linen cloth, making a pleat in the middle to allow for expansion (minimal, as there’s no flour in the mix) and tie it in place with string, allowing enough to make a handle over the top for lifting the basin in and out.
Set the basin on the upturned lid of a jam jar, pour in enough hot water to come halfway up the basin and bring back to the boil. Turn down the heat, cover with a lid and simmer gently for 3 hours (4 if using suet). Top up with boiling water regularly.
To store, replace the greaseproofpaper circle with a new one dipped in brandy. Store in a tin in a cool place and leave to mature. On the day, reheat by the same method for 2 hours. Tip onto a hot plate and tuck in little tokens wrapped in foil (a button for a bachelor, £1 coin for riches, thimble for a spinster, ring for a wedding). Bring to the table topped with a holly sprig and flame with warm brandy.
Almond and honey ice cream
Tuck a supply of home-made ice cream in the freezer to serve with the pudding (piping hot and freezing cold – very Christmassy). As a simple dessert, serve with a plain biscuit and an extra trickle of hot honey. Makes about a litre.
4 egg yolks (save the whites for meringues)
2 generous tbsps honey
300ml full-cream milk
1-2 tbsps toasted almonds, roughly chopped
300ml double cream (lightly whipped)
Whisk the honey with the egg yolks till well-blended, then set over hot water in a bowl. Set over a saucepan, add enough boiling water to come halfway up the sides, bring the water back to simmering point and cook the egg-and-milk custard gently, stirring throughout, until it coats the back of a wooden spoon. Taste for sweetness – cold food needs extra-strong flavours. Allow to cool, fold in the whipped cream and toasted almonds, and pour into a freezer-friendly container. Remove after a couple of hours and beat with a fork (or in the mixer) to dissolve the ice crystals. Refreeze. Beat it again before it freezes hard.
RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE LUNCH ON THE PRODIGAL SON
‘You may be wondering why I’m not giving you a present today,’ my 25-year-old son, Leo, told me at my birthday lunch.
I have to admit I wasn’t wondering that much. In previous years, my present has been ‘on order’ or he has piggybacked his sister’s present and asked where we’re going for dinner.
‘I am going to give you an experience.’ My heart sank; my stomach imploded. All I could think about was hot-air ballooning. I suffer from vertigo, or rather I have the common sense to know that the balloon will definitely burst and I will crash to earth in an Aldi car park. Panic set in. Where was my will?
‘I am taking you out to lunch at Trinity, in Clapham.’
How had this happened? How had the nation’s most spoilt, selfish and entitled child become my hero? Lunch at Michelin-starred Trinity is the best present I have ever been given. Better even than the combination of my first Swiss Army knife and that enormous box of Scalextric in 1974.
I had lunched downstairs at Adam Byatt’s paradise in Clapham Old Town once before. So I knew exactly what I would be getting. Upstairs is all small plates but downstairs is the real deal. Four perfect courses for £70. But not my £70; my favourite ever £70 – my son’s.
I say ‘four perfect courses’, but when I next go, I will just order the warm semi-smoked salmon, beurre blanc, dulse and cucumber four times. It’s the best starter in London. Note the ‘semismoked’ – it’s not smoked all the way through. And it is beautifully presented.
It will be the last thing I see before I crash to the ground in that Aldi car park. The little tranche of salmon, with a blanket of pickled cucumber, set in a buttery lake of dill, chives, dulse and –here’s the genius – perfect pink balls of trout roe. Sing, choirs of angels.
And the service is the best in London – effortlessly friendly and encouraging. We were lucky to have Adriano, who used to work for Leo’s boss, Jeremy King, but they’re all charming. Alex, the very young sommelier, was the opposite of condescending as he guided Leo to the can’t-go-wrong Kumeu River Estate Chardonnay for our cold and warm starters.
But then they both pulled the stops out for the mallard: Château CoutelinMerville, Saint-Estèphe 2006. Heaven. Please make this your Christmas treat. They offer a three-course lunch on Sundays for £40.
Up along the overground from Clapham to Kensal Rise. We were taken to the best neighbourhood restaurant in London by David and Alex, who have just moved from Chester to Kilburn Lane.
And what a good idea. They are 60 yards from Ida, the corner-shop Italian restaurant quixotically opened by novelist Simonetta Wenkert and her IT husband Avi in 2007 – but it feels far more like a kitchen bistro from 1974.
As if in a junk shop, the walls are rammed with glorious amateur oils, and the tables have movable partitions to enable romantic dalliances. They make the pasta fresh, and the ragu with hearts and gizzards. I had a T-bone veal steak for just £22, washed down with a 12% Sangiovese (£26 a bottle).
There were two birthday parties on our night: Oliver’s and Sarah’s. The waitress gave us their names on little bits of paper so that every table could join in singing ‘Happy birthday’.
I know where I’m taking Leo on my next birthday.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
HOLIDAY HOOCH
The strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, grows happily in many parts of Europe. It graces gardens and hillsides from Ireland to Turkey, it is prominently portrayed in
the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and its spiky red fruits make jolly good jam.
In the Algarve, those same fruits also make a particularly potent firewater. Called medronho, it weighs in at around 50% ABV and is best served very cold in a small shot glass. It has both a faintly floral whiff of pear and a bittersweet flavour that lingers happily on the palate, especially after dinner with a viscous little black coffee: uma bica, as they say in Lisbon.
That is exactly how I tried it at Marisqueira Rui, a fabulous seafood restaurant in the historic town of Silves, after devouring plate after garlic-andparsley-smothered plate of clams, prawns and baby squid. For lovers of molluscs and crustaceans who resent spending an arm and a tentacle to indulge their passion, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Indulging a taste for holiday hooch is fraught with danger. I have written before of the perils of Goan cashew apple spirit and Ethiopian honey wine. And I had already been laid low that week by a Portuguese grappa of dubious provenance.
But medronho was a delight; so much so that I made a pilgrimage into the hills above Silves to the town of Monchique, the spirit’s spiritual home. After a simple lunch in the main square – grilled sardines and tomato salad, then Azeitão, a divinely buttery sheep’s-milk cheese – I tottered round the corner to the Loja do Mel e do Medronho. It’s a tiny shop with a vast range of medronho, local honey, jams and a liqueur – medromel – made from medronho and honey.
I stuck to the hard stuff, sampling a few before settling on a bottle of Farelo, made by José Joaquim Nunes from fruit harvested on the northern slopes of the Serra de Monchique. Traditionally picked in the wild, and now also cultivated, the berries ripen in autumn, turning from yellow to red. After picking, they are fermented in wooden barrels, and then distilled in copper alembics before bottling.
In theory, every producer needs a licence to distil medronho. In practice, the authorities have often turned a blind eye in the interests of keeping a timehonoured tradition alive. How civilised.
The lady in the shop, while agreeing that medronho makes a lovely digestif, also told me that local farmers often filled their hip flasks with it, as a kind of central heating on a chilly day – which, in the Algarve, is when the mercury plunges below 20°C. Whether it can cope with the ravages of the British winter remains to be seen. But, at 53.4% ABV, the Farelo has my money on it.
Pushing out the boat a little, this month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a festive 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a fizz that would be perfect as an apéritif or in a Champagne cocktail, a venerable white from Australia, and a classic claret that would grace any Christmas table. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Aimery Grande Cuvée 1531, Crémant de Limoux NV, offer price £16.95, case price £203.40
Pleasantly rounded fizz from the south of France, delicious on its own or with a canapé or two: a perfect seasonal standby.
Tahbilk ‘Museum Release’ Marsanne, Victoria, Australia 2017, offer price £17.95, case price £215.40
One of Australia’s classic white wines: dry and long, with bags of complexity from its years in bottle.
Château La Pervenche, Lalande de Pomerol 2019, offer price £15.95, case price £191.40
100% Merlot, aged in barrel for ten months: perfumed and plummy, with rounded tannins. Rewards an hour in a decanter.
Mixed case price £203.40 – a saving of £35.99 (including free delivery)
HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930 Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 7th January 2025
SPORT
JIM WHITE
HOY – THE REAL MCCOY
Sir Mark Cavendish got it right when he talked about his fellow cycling knight Sir Chris Hoy’s recent revelation that his cancer is terminal. This really is a hero of a human being.
It is not just the six Olympic gold medals that make the great sprint rider stand out. Nor is it the records he stacked up the way the rest of us accumulate parking tickets. Nor is it the astonishing speeds he could engender from thighs so muscular they were apparently cast from an amalgam of granite and bronze.
Rather it is that, when he was still competing, Hoy absolutely epitomised what sport should be about. The manner in which he has faced his imminent death at the ridiculously premature age of 48 demonstrates he is a sportsman of the most unusual sort: utterly determined, ferociously competitive and yet able to confront defeat with extraordinary dignity and calm.
Not for him the strop, the whinge or the whine. On the rare occasions when he was beaten, his prevailing instinct was first to congratulate his vanquisher with a deep and genuine warmth. Only then would he get on with analysing what had gone wrong and how he could correct it next time. Complaining, moaning or feeling sorry for themselves was something other people did.
Even when he was competing at the highest level, Hoy really was the nicest bloke in sport. Anyone who has ever met him would say he was invariably polite, kind, attentive and genuinely interested in other people.
This bloke, who when waiting on the start line exuded such single-minded intensity, when you talked to him was keen to chat about anything other than himself.
It meant an interview with him could be something of a challenge: actually, Chris, rather than about the state of the economy, what Scottish independence would mean for the future of British cycling, or the brilliance of that stand-up comedian you saw at the Edinburgh Festival, could we talk about your chances in the World Championships?
His answer was always: ‘You don’t want to talk about me – I’m boring.’ Actually, he is fascinating company, full of the most acute observations about sporting life. In a recent podcast, he talked about his pre-race nerves. They were so extreme that, on his way to the velodrome for a championship final, he wished he could be involved in an
accident just so he didn’t have to go out and compete. And yet when he got there, such was his gimlet-eyed focus that nobody could match his ability to deliver. It was as revealing a window into the self-doubt that plagues every sportsperson as you could ever hear. Intelligent, thoughtful, decent –some combination.
It’s no surprise that he has been so open about his diagnosis. Painful as it must be, what he wants is for his case to be an example. This is not out of selfaggrandisement, bigging himself up as the bravest of the brave, a role model of how to do it.
Rather, he wants every bloke under threat of contracting prostate cancer to get himself checked out.
He wants us to recognise what can happen if we don’t. He understands his achievement has given him a platform available to few others. And, even as he faces his own departure, he wishes to put it to good, practical use.
At the 2012 Olympics, after he won his second gold in the London velodrome, David Hoy, his proud father, stood in the crowd flourishing a banner, reading ‘The Real McHoy’. He was not exaggerating.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD
BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO EVS
I’m a bit of a bluffer.
That’s what I thought when I heard myself pontificate about electric vehicles (EVs). I was deploying jargon I didn’t understand in the hope that my interlocutor didn’t either.
So I sought to make an honest man of myself by asking a non-bluffer friend to explain the EV technology I waffle on about with such fake authority.
Electric motors, mechanically simple with few moving parts, generate great power and torque in relation to their size. They use magnetic fields to spin so powerfully that they in turn spin your transmission, your differential and eventually your wheels (there are no gearboxes).
EVs accelerate rapidly because, unlike a combustion engine, they don’t have to build up revs – maximum power and torque are instantly available on tap. Most use rotating rare-earth magnets and static coils to generate, via alternating current, a rotating magnetic field in which rotor and field are perfectly synchronised. If you want to impress people with jargon, these motors are known as PSMs –permanently excited synchronous motors. However, some manufacturers avoid
expensive rare-earth materials by opting for asynchronous induction motors or externally excited synchronous motors (EESMs). The latter use brushes – which can wear out and need replacing – to transmit the current.
Batteries are easier to conceptualise. EVs have two systems: a high-voltage battery to drive the motor and an ordinary one to work lights, screen etc. An AA patrolman told me that most EV breakdowns are due to failure of the latter. The former use various combinations of lithium-ion battery chemistry to produce about 400 volts, or 800 in some new cars capable of ultra-rapid charging.
Batteries comprise modules packed with individual cells and are mostly air-cooled, though newer ones are often liquid. Ambient temperature, air-con, wipers, ancillary controls and driving manner affect range. They should last 10-20 years before they’re reduced to 70-80-per-cent capacity, when they’re considered worn out, although they’ll still function, as long as you accept reduced range. The average cost of replacement is £7,235, plus labour and disposal. New ones are warranted for five to eight years, or 100,000 miles.
It’s cheapest to charge at home, either slowly via a domestic socket using about 3kW (similar to a kettle) or at 7kW, via a wallbox, which you have to buy. You can of course charge during off-peak-tariff time or via solar panels, if you have them. Public chargers cost more, according to the rate – some EVs on ultra-rapid charge are said to cost as much as petrol or diesel. Longer-term, the government will have to find ways of taxing EV-charging.
Something they won’t tax is regenerative braking: when you ease off an EV throttle, the motor becomes a generator, topping up the battery and significantly slowing the car. It makes one-pedal driving so easy that you should deliberately use your brakes occasionally to remove rust from the discs which will otherwise need expensive replacement.
There’s much more to waffle on about with EVs – phone apps for remote switching of climate control and charging, the spread of the CCS (Combined Charging System) plug, the Public Charge Points Regulations to ensure contactless payments and the extent to which Tesla Supercharger sites are now open to others. If you’re thinking of buying a used one, bone up on the jargon yourself and ask the sales person to explain it. In particular, ask if the battery has a state-of-health check.
If he or she can’t answer, you’ll know you’re dealing with another bluffer.
Matthew Webster: Digital Life Beware of Radio Musk
A cause rarely unites countries and encourages international co-operation.
When it does, it’s usually because of a practical need. Take electricity – it’s the same the world over. TV receivers work the same way everywhere, and so on.
So it is with radio telecommunications. Out of necessity, rather than politics, these are managed by an unlikely union of about 190 countries called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The union dates from 1865, when it regulated international telegraph cables.
Nowadays, the United Nations runs the ITU. It convenes every few years to decide how the available wireless frequencies should be divided up between operators worldwide.
It avoids chaos. Imagine that the spectrum of radio waves is a motorway with many lanes, and the users of radio waves are cars travelling in those lanes. That’s fine if it’s organised, but if two cars try to use the same lane going in different directions, disaster ensues.
Add to that the problem that the width of this imaginary motorway is fixed, and
Two of the richest men in the world might end up in control
you’ll understand the need for international co-operation.
There is, however, a row brewing within the ranks of the ITU, as it struggles to keep up with the use of satellites to connect us to the internet.
Satellites are currently a trivial part of the world’s internet use. Some 99 per cent of customers still use wires. But satellites are increasing and, as they use radio waves to connect to the earth, their need for a greater share of the finite radio-wave capacity is also growing.
The main catalyst in this arena is the omnipresent, slightly bizarre figure of Elon Musk. He owns Starlink, which already has almost 7,000 satellites above our heads, with more going up every week. Any of us (for £75 per month) can use it to connect to the internet. It is
especially useful in remote areas without wired links.
Musk is not the only one to see the opportunity, but he is certainly the one who is moving fastest. Even though Starlink started only five years ago, it already generates almost all satellitecommunications traffic worldwide.
There are competitors. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon is working on something similar, called Project Kuiper. And a Canadian company, Telesat, has raised
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about £1.4 billion to do the same. They will all need radio-wave capacity that is currently used elsewhere.
The problem is that the ITU rules, written years ago, never envisaged thousands of satellites orbiting the earth.
Musk says that the ITU needs urgent reform, to reflect the rapid changes in technology. But the ITU meets only every few years and has indicated that the earliest change in the regulations would be 2031.
So there is a fight going on for access to radio waves. Does it matter? Not very much, for the time being, as so few people use Starlink or any of its competitors. If Musk and others are forced to take matters a little more slowly than they might ideally like, it won’t be a bad thing.
But I suppose technological advance will not be denied for ever. Certainly, providing internet access free of government control (though not free of Musk control, I suppose) is attractive. That’s why Starlink is illegal in China and North Korea. China can see the attraction and is building its own version, so as to control what the Chinese see – as it already does for land-based connections.
I’m bothered that two of the richest men in the world might end up controlling almost all satellite communications. It’s distinctly reminiscent of the ambitions of James Bond villains.
So if you see Elon Musk stroking a white cat, beware.
Spirit in the sky: Elon Musk owns Starlink, with its 7,000 satellites
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Patrick Sergeant, King of the City pages
I once described Patrick Sergeant as the man who invented financial journalism as entertainment.
Before he started his column as City Editor of the Daily Mail, financial reporting was dry, specialist stuff. He noticed that a majority of the Mail readers were female, and they would respond to a column that had personality, mixed with a little gossip, while telling them what was going on in the City.
It was a formula that served him well for 24 years. He died on 18th September, aged 100.
I was fortunate enough to work for him for five of those years, the last two as his deputy, writing a second-rate pastiche while he was schmoozing the world’s central bankers and finance ministers in exotic locations. The formula he invented for Euromoney – essentially their house magazine – made a fortune for him and the Mail’s owners. In return for their taking advertisements promoting their country (and them), he would commission friendly editorial copy to keep the ads apart.
Most of the time, though, he was at his
desk (minus long lunches with senior bankers or politicians, at the best London restaurants), having subcontracted the column to one of us hapless hacks. We would sweat at it all day (minus a longish lunch at some City hostelry) before presenting our opus to the master.
He would make (mostly) appreciative noises, and then reach for a plainpaper pad, on which he would start writing with a felt-tip pen. Before your very eyes, your worthy prose would be transformed into something like poetry.
Of course, he knew more about the story you had tried to write than he had earlier let on – so it was rather more than just stardust he was sprinkling.
After each paragraph, he would call in his long-suffering, chain-smoking secretary, Yvonne, who would type out his scrawl, double-spaced, whereupon he would have another go at the text with
his felt-tip. The process would repeat until he was happy with the result. His only real competition was Kenneth Fleet, the City Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and, on the rare days Fleet wrote a better column than he did, we were promised a sticky morning. When I became City Editor of the Telegraph in 1986, I understood how much I owed Patrick in my attempts to learn from the master. To say he taught me all I knew would be an exaggeration, but not much of one.
The City is much more important today, but financial journalism is somehow back in its ghetto, with much economic comment taken over by political writers talking about ‘headroom for tax giveaways’ and similar nonsense.
Patrick would definitely not approve.
Tree sparrow
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
The tree sparrow (Passer montanus) was a legendary victim of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward plan for China, 1958-62.
Among the plan’s impositions was an Eight Elements Constitution to increase the annual grain harvest. One of its elements was ‘pest control’, which meant the mass mobilisation of the population to wage war on sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes.
Tree sparrows are more rural birds than house sparrows, as their name indicates. In China, this proved their undoing. Mao associated them with agriculture and saw them chiefly responsible for lowering the grain supply. His slogan ‘Man must conquer nature’ (‘Ren ding sheng tian’) became the campaign’s war cry.
All Chinese over the age of five were enlisted. With regard to children, schools would go on the rampage with drums, firecrackers etc till the sparrows were so exhausted they could be caught by hand.
The result was the extermination of one billion of the birds, which in turn caused the Great Chinese Famine (1958-61). Tree sparrows do not principally eat grain. In their absence, insect numbers – especially locusts – boomed, and 30 million Chinese starved to death.
The two species of sparrow can be seen together and are near enough in appearance, song and gregarious behaviour to be thought the same. Closer inspection will reveal a marked difference.
In general, the tree sparrow is a smaller, slimmer, more dapper and milk-chocolate-coloured version of the darker, bigger, less tidy house sparrow.
The difference is accentuated by both genders of the tree sparrow’s having the same plumage, winter and summer, whereas the seasonal difference in the house sparrow is marked in both genders.
The milk-chocolate aspect is made conspicuous by the tree sparrow’s crown,
as opposed to the grey crown of the house sparrow. And the tree sparrow’s white cheek with a black spot also contrasts with the house sparrow’s grey.
The tree sparrow gets its name from its preference for nesting in tree holes, particularly those of waterside trees. It is a more retiring bird, inhabiting open country rather than towns and villages, but is not averse to nest boxes or humans.
The most I have seen together was on one winter day at the entrance to Welney Wetlands Centre, in the Fens. There were about 30, as chirpy as only sparrows can be.
They are notably local in distribution – and have been since records began; but winter brings additional migrants, which
broadens their range. Nevertheless, they favour the east, be it England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland, north or south. They are also in worrying decline – deemed red on the conservation list at just 200,000 territories.
As for Mao’s ignorance, we cannot talk. In the Second World War, the Ministry of Agriculture ordered the destruction of all sparrow nests. This encouraged other species’ nests to be randomly destroyed. It was before modern farming – so numbers recovered.
Health and safety can make Maoists of us all.
You can buy Swoop Sing Perch Paddle by Carry Akroyd and John McEwen at www. theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop
Travel
The Wild West
When bestselling novelist Lulu Taylor was looking for an island setting for her new book, she made for her first love – Pembrokeshire
When my children were very young, I knew exactly what kind of summer holidays I wanted for them. I didn’t see the point in going abroad, with all the faff and stress.
It had to be a traditional British seaside holiday, with sandy plimsolls, stiff breezes, card games on rainy afternoons and beach cricket.
Ideally, there would be freezing seas, crashing waves, banks of slimy seaweed and that salty smell, as well as the careful inspection of rock pools, wet sand squishing through toes, and the feeling of barnacles under bare feet. Sunshine would, of course, be lovely, as would cheery blue skies and the occasional hot day, but you can’t be too greedy.
When I was young, at Easter we used to go to Snowdonia. I associated Wales with slate, mountains, cold streams and cowpats, stiff walks, grey skies and beaches covered in stones. So when a family friend generously suggested we use their holiday home in Pembrokeshire, I wasn’t sure it was exactly right.
As it turned out, it was exactly right, and could not have been righter.
It took no time at all to fall in love with the particular magic of this part of Wales, and we have been back every year since. The children are now adults and still want to go back every summer. After 15 years, it’s woven into them.
Our destination is just beyond St David’s. We follow the M4 to the end, past Cardiff, through the industrial seascape of Port Talbot, skirting Swansea, and keep going.
As we approach Newgale, the first one to see the sea always shouts – it’s usually me these days; the children are too grown-up for such things. And it’s a sign that we really are nearly there. Solva is a sweet ribbon of bright houses – gift shops and inns – and the road grows
narrower and twistier as we approach the country’s smallest city.
St David’s would be a pretty but ordinary seaside town if it weren’t for its magnificent cathedral, begun in the 12th century, extended and enhanced in the 14th, including the addition of the spectacular Bishop’s Palace.
I used to wonder why people bothered to build such a place so far from anywhere (London arrogance), until I understood it is on the pilgrimage
Lulu Taylor on Porthselau Beach, Pembrokeshire
route from Ireland, an embodiment of the grand, mystical, religious spirit of this place.
The Reformation did its work: St David’s shrine was destroyed, the treasury, relics and library scattered, the bishops sent to live in lesser splendour near Carmarthen.
The Civil War wrought more havoc, with stained-glass windows smashed, lead stripped off, the bells stolen and the organ destroyed. As the palace decayed into ruin, the cathedral followed slowly, collapsing owing to lack of a roof while the river seeped into its walls.
After repairs in the 18th century, there was a concerted rescue mission in the 19th, with George Gilbert Scott brought in to help with the restoration, and the cathedral was saved.
We pass through the town, following the single-track road out towards St Justinian’s, past the turn-off to Whitesands Bay (voted one of Britain’s National Treasures by Country Life a few years ago) and out towards our little bit of the coast. It’s a scramble down the hill to the path, where we can see St David’s Head to the right and the edge of Ramsey Island to the left.
Straight on, across St George’s Channel, lies Ireland – and beyond that the next stop is North America.
At last, we are back, breathing in the rich air, feeling happy again.
What is the lure of Pembrokeshire?
It’s the colour: the palette of blues, greens and greys, with top notes of lavender and pink. Bright flowers – white sea campion, pale pink thrift, vivid yellow gorse – line the coastal path while the sea turns all shades from petrol through turquoise to briny green. It is the sheer beauty of the coast: beaches of soft gold sand edged with craggy rocks, black cliffs streaked with copper and white, the grand partnership of sky and sea.
It is even that temperamental climate. It can lash everything with grey rain in the morning, bathe the afternoon in balmy sunshine and then, for its evening show, deliver an apricot-gold sunset with gilded clouds, like a Renaissance painting of heaven. The sea can be whipped into foamy, roaring fury, or lie angelically still, barely a ripple for miles.
We have frozen to bits on our summer
perfect marriage’, as the charming guide on our Skomer boat put it.
holidays, and endured days of rain; we’ve woken to endless blue skies, walking the cliffs in scorching heat to the sound of crickets. The rule seems to be that there is always one good day at the very least.
It felt entirely natural to set my latest novel, The Last Song of Winter, in Pembrokeshire. Inspired by Ramsey Island, I invented St Elfwy Island, also a bird sanctuary with a religious past.
It has seal nurseries, caves (including one where disobedient monks were stranded on a rock to pray for deliverance as the tide rose) and the same geology: rock strata with the earliest layers at the top, showing that the island was upended in a seismic event.
To create an authentic island, I studied Pembrokeshire’s incredibly rich bird life of guillemots, shearwaters, razorbills, choughs and gulls, to name a few. Wanting St Elfwy to have puffins, I took a trip to Skomer Island and was charmed by these goofy little birds, with their orange paddle feet. Their pufflings are spoilt only children, fattened in burrows with daily deposits of sea eels until one day their parents disappear. Each hungry puffling emerges at night to avoid gulls, waddles to the cliff and throws itself over, swimming away, learning to fly on the water.
After five years, it returns to the same island to start its own family. Puffins mate for life, but they spend eight months of the year apart in the frozen North Atlantic –‘the secret of the
Setting some of the story in the Second World War meant that I also learnt how the Royal Netherlands Naval Air Service flew from Nazi invasion to Pembrokeshire to join the RAF as Squadron 320 (Netherlands) and take part in defences under Coastal Command. Airfields were set up as bases to provide escorts for the merchant navy. Brave local fisherman continued to set out in ancient craft not requisitioned for the Admiralty, navigating mines and the U-boats that apparently could not be bothered to waste a torpedo on creaky Welsh fishing boats, and shot them down instead.
In 1940, the oil tanks at Pembroke Docks were hit by a bomb and burned for 18 days. My heroine Veronica watches how that night the sky itself seems to be on fire.
The strangeness of writing fiction means that St Elfwy now seems almost as real to me as any place I know.
I feel I can walk from its jetty up to the white house, and on to the highest point to see the guano-streaked guillemot stacks, while gulls wheel overhead, looking for prey, and flocks of shearwaters bank in from the sea for the night.
The story may be invented – with its mysterious island and the long-held secrets, love stories and griefs which echo from wartime to the present day – but the magic and beauty of Pembrokeshire is not.
The Last Song of Winter (Pan) by Lulu Taylor is out on 21st November
Above: Treasured island: puffins on Skomer Island. Below: St David’s Head and Lulu Taylor’s new book
Overlooked Britain
Feed the birds, Rothschild-style
Birds at Waddesdon Manor Aviary are hand-fed every hour in their delightful, gilded cage
lucinda lambton
Here is a giant treat, a giant glory and in every way a giant delight.
The enormous aviary at Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, is open for all to see (thanks to the National Trust) and of a most marvellous splendour.
It was built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (pictured) in 1869 and ever since then has remained a great star in this filled-with-stars estate.
The splendour was arranged by Rothschild in 1874, when he bought a great swathe of land. He immediately set to work on preparing it for his grand arrangements, all to be ruled over by a thumping great ‘Renaissance’ stately palace.
It was built of stones that, if you please, were hauled from Bath – first by a train and then by teams of Percheron horses imported from Normandy for the job!
Buckinghamshire had been the chosen spot for his dwelling, as the Rothschilds had already been so wildly active in building a multitude of splendid houses in this part of England.
It was fast becoming known as Rothschildshire and, my goodness me, what wonders were created. Old photographs show it all in progress, with the countryside thronged with men transforming the landscape.
‘The difficulty of building a house,’
wrote Rothschild, ‘is insignificant compared to transforming a wilderness into a park.’
What he did to transform his wilderness and in only six years! The first major work had been the levelling of Lodge Hill, which changed the landscape of the whole area. Upon it was perched his great kingdom.
He’d been brought up in Frankfurt, where his mother had built a great aviary. So it was that he created the same delight
Left: Waddesdon Manor, built in 1874. Below: the Aviary, built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1889
Blue-crowned laughing thrush. Right: ibis and Ferdinand Rothschild at the aviary, 1890
in England – as indeed did his sister, Baroness Adolphe, at Pregny, near Geneva.
The family eventually built a multitude of aviaries.
Ruling the roost was the great and grand house, built by the Frenchman Hippolyte Alexandre Gabriel Walter Destailleur.
Baron Ferdinand planned a great garden on the estate; it was laid out by the renowned landscape architect Elie Laine, famed for creating the gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte in France. Everything was designed by Frenchmen and so too was its delicately grand pavilion for birds. Constantly being restored, it is in excellent working order. It can house 340 birds of 80 different species – macaws, toucans, toucanettes, aracaris, glossy starlings and Rothschild’s grackles.
At the back of the flight cage, built into the wall, is a glass-fronted ‘internal
shelter’. In most aviaries, the public can peer in on all sides, but the keeper at Waddesdon is sure this causes some strain to the birds and inhibits their breeding potential. The water flowing from the fountain in each aviary is gravity-fed from a tank on a small hill nearby.
The birds enjoy the most sensational living quarters in the land – like Versailles
The central grotto, of rocks and draping greenery, has a fountain with an 18th-century Italian marble figure of Minerva, military trophies and two marble tritons.
On either side are, in one arched bay, a 17th-century Italian triton and, in the
other, his companion, a young nereid. In other words – perfection.
The exotic birds are marvellous and varied, not least the painted bunting, with feathers of a multitude of colours, from the southern states of America.
Then there is the blue-crowned laughingthrush from north Jiangxi, in East China. And what about the Sumatran laughingthrush which hails from the mountains of that Indonesian island or the blue-crowned laughingthrush from north-east Jiangxi?
Then there is the not particularly interesting-looking but agreeably named plain brown Rothschild peacock pheasant found in Malaysia and Thailand.
There are conservation projects on the go for all these rare songsters.
Waddesdon is particularly proud of its work with the chicks, hand-fed every hour from 6am until 11pm.
Walter Rothschild, the 2nd Lord Rothschild, was a renowned zoologist and was always ready to give the birds his professional attention.
All in all, this is the largest collection of rare and endangered species of birds in private hands in the world. And they are enjoying the most sensational living quarters in the land, similar to those designed for the birds of Versailles.
Around a third of the species at Waddesdon are at risk of extinction to some degree, and this Buckinghamshire spot participates in highly successful captive breeding programmes.
From the English home counties to, say, the mountains of Indonesia, who would have thought that there would be such an important link between these two far-flung spots?
Taking a Walk
Housman’s ode to unwrecked Shropshire
patrick barkham
I knew nothing of Titterstone Clee Hill when I realised I was passing, on a long drive.
On the map, this capacious common displayed plenty of dotted green lines denoting footpaths. So it seemed like a good place to pause for a walk.
As I approached, the beautifully modulated Shropshire countryside abruptly ended and I drove up a huge, unruly hill that appeared to have been splatted onto orderly English fields.
Fields gave way to open moor and a lumpy, formerly quarried landscape which, at a great height, contained a rutted and miraculously free car park.
Five white campervans were parked amid the puddles and gravel after a sneaky all-nighter. An empty beer bottle rolled in the breeze; wispy low cloud gathered around. The whole place was, unusually, untouched by commerce: no café, no kiosk, no fancy interpretation boards telling me that A E Housman may have stood here for inspiration:
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain…
Looking south on a cool, grey day, I felt as if the entirety of the southern shires was laid out below: a timeless patchwork of green pasture, bordered by dark hedgerows and dotted with oaken copses and modest farms. Ludlow nestled in a valley bottom to the west.
Up here, everything was wilder, with the scruffy, yellowing turf grazed by battalions of slit-eyed sheep.
I set out for the summit and the Giant’s Chair, which seemed like a good place to aim for.
At my feet, each seedhead of Yorkshire fog grass glittered with droplets dispensed by the clouds. Plump black slugs savoured the moisture. As I looked up, a kestrel hovered in the wind above the ridge. Usually kestrels flick their wings to hold their position; with the wind sweeping up the hill, this one simply twitched, almost motionless, its eyes scouring the tussocks for voles. Soon there were four kestrels assembled above the ridge, a kite-flying club to find voles.
Amid the relics of quarrying for
everything from ironstone to coal –labours that once employed 2,000 people on the hill – were fragments of tarmac road and concrete pads from RAF days.
Steel towers of our national air-traffic control still rose from the hill, each one holding an oversize white ball, as if ready for a giants’ cricket match.
Somehow, this huge common was both neglected and over-exploited. A common is such a strange idea in today’s privatised world. We don’t quite know what to do with such a chunk of communal chaos, surrounded by our mostly prim, privately owned countryside.
This one had been mined and squatted on by the military and was now packed with commoners’ sheep. I met just one dog-walker and another sole walker speaking loudly into his phone, but encountered scores of proprietorial sheep. One was so relaxed – so deeply asleep – that I thought it was dead until I saw its grass-filled stomach heave upwards.
Only the occasional spiky clump of gorse, thistle or poisonous foxglove had evaded the flock’s hungry mouths. But
higher up, sprigs of bonsai bilberry somehow defied the sheep.
The hill’s flat top delivered an aerial joyride of views in all directions.
I walked over the Giant’s Chair, a pile of rectangular stones casually dropped into place by geological movements many thousands of years ago. To the north were more fields and farms, baas rising on the wind.
On my return to the car, a fight broke out: a raven, croaking with annoyance, flew claws-first at a kestrel who had the temerity to hunt in its quarry-bowl realm. The kestrel swerved and flapped hard to escape, and then continued its business as if nothing had happened.
I admired the way these birds handled disagreements – their coolness under fire, their enforcing of personal codes without apology and then carrying on with their life above this strange, spectacular hill which seemed to survey the whole of southern England.
Titterstone Clee Hill; park at what3words: introduce.survived.scouted
Clues marked with an asterisk have a solution extended by the addition of a 3-letter word. Wordplay leads to solution to be entered in the grid
1 Butcher trims duck and a bit of chicken (9)
6 Children may be a bone of contention (5)
9 Golfer’s row about golf (5)
10 *Band from church delayed by cold feeding ducks (9)
11 Staying out longer than intended? (12)
14 Old Testament greeting and play (7)
16 Hate knocking back drinks, sitting in river (7)
17 *Party needing good food (3)
18 Unable to decide, laid low regularly getting wind (7)
20 Drug and flower name from Japan perhaps (7)
22 Adjusting remote can cut accessory (12)
26 Cleaner strip given to the French (9)
27 Self-respect is free during exercises (5)
28 *Trouble women had with Romeo (5)
29 Fancy cute mate, perversely (9)
Down
1 Fruit that has a sell-by, for example (4)
2 Desire Labour generally suppresses (4)
3 Outside hospital, treated livers dry up and shrink (7)
4 Suffer at home with endless wind (5)
5 Learning to understand projection (9)
6 American tax service detains a few in compounds (7)
7 Ladies bits (if wobbly) must be firmed up (10)
8 Standards always good on tennis regularly (10)
12 Actor flown out as result of road repairs (10)
13 Pastry showing low carbon decay (10)
15 Unscented old roses growing wild outside university (9)
19 Some of Christmas, understandably is apart (7)
21 Star’s cooler patch on a tropical beach? (7)
23 Shot in frame during Christmas season (5)
24 *Story about new high-level link between leaders (4)
25 *Group covering a difficult situation (4)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 11th December 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.
(4)
(7)
(6)
(5)
(6)
(5)
a sulky face (4)
Runners-up: Diana Devison, Coseley, West Midlands; Anthony Hayde, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire
One of the most exciting young bridgeplayers today is Zach Grossack from Boston, Massachusetts. He combines brilliant card play with a bidding style that skates very close to the bold/reckless line. Watch him bid and make six clubs on this deal from the US Mixed Trials earlier in the year.
Dealer South North Vunerable
The bidding South West North East
1 ♣ Pass (1) 1
2 ♥ (3) Pass 3
(2) Pass
(4) Pass
3 ♦ (5) Pass 3 ♠ (6) Pass
4 ♣ Pass 4 ♠ (7) Pass
4 NT(8) Pass 5
6 ♣ end
(9) Pass
(1) Would overcall 1♠ if non-vulnerable. (2) Partner’s 1♣ could have been short, so supporting would be precipitate. (3) Gameforcing, so a stretch. Yes, the hand has been improved by partner’s 1♦, but most would settle for 1♥. (4) Might jump to 4♣ to show the fine support for what is now known to be a real club suit opposite.
(5) Showing the five-four-three shape. (6) A bit unclear and I confess I’d have bid 4♣ here to stress the support. (7) Control bid. (8) Roman Key Card Blackwood. (9) Two of ‘five aces’ (including ♣K), plus ♣Q (note, North pretends to hold her majesty because there’s a ten-card fit).
Our Boston hero won West’s king of spades lead with the ace, and ruffed a spade. He played three rounds of trumps, then led a diamond to his king. He now led his last club to dummy, forcing East to discard her last spade in order to retain ♥ Q 9 8 2 and ♦A 6. Then, at trick eight, declarer called for dummy’s final club.
What could East discard? If she let go of a heart, declarer could make all four hearts in hand (via a finesse of the knave). East therefore discarded the six of diamonds. Reading the position, declarer led a low diamond from dummy. East’s ace ‘beat air’ and declarer could win the heart return, cross to dummy’s queen-nine of diamonds and claim his slam. ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 312 you were invited to write a poem called An Unfinished Book. Ian D Morrison summed up his disillusionment with one hyped volume: ‘Unlike Charlie Dickens’ Drood/ Or Frankie Schubert’s catchy score/ That left consumers wanting more/ This tale is just a thorough bore.’ Paul Holland began intriguingly: ‘I read The Hunting of the Snark when I don’t know what to do.’ Quite a few competitors took the volume to be life’s book. No harm in that.
As for poetic form, I must say that I welcome rhyme – which may make composition harder, perhaps, but achieves rewards if done successfully. Certainly if a poem lacks metre, it can be a bit of a puddle.
Commiserations to Jenny Lumley, John Mattock, Bob Morrow, G M Southgate, Mike Morrison, Con Connell, A Milne, Vivien Brown, Robert Best, David Dixon and Christine Acres, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Bill Webster.
So this is where she fell (‘I did not trip’) –Too sharp a turn, perhaps, beside the bed, Not quite awake; and then the stricken hip; This cupboard’s where she banged her head…
In time the neck alarm, a neighbour’s key, The paramedics ‘very, very kind’. Eventually, the op that proved to be The cause-of-death certificate pre-signed. A Penguin Middlemarch lies neatly placed Beneath her lamp, one page dog-eared, since books
She saw as nothing more than thoughts encased:
What stuff it was to care about their looks. Thick-leaded strokes beside the author’s view
Of hidden lives make plain her wish to show How little – or how much – respect was due To these ideas: but which now who’s to know?
Bill Webster
Take up thy pen again, O spirit of Isaiah, Jerusalem hath need of thee.
The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Show us the way in this maze of horror, Teach us to care.
Cry unto Jerusalem that her warfare is accomplished.
But Jerusalem is gone to war. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, And all flesh shall see it together.
Complete thy book, O spirit of Isaiah, Renew our hope.
Charles Leedham-Green
Once upon a time…
The doorbell did chime!
Long, long ago… I’d better go!
In a universe so fair…
And see who’s there!
In a land far away...
A friend: Come to stay!
There lived a man
Hello, Stan!
Who never, ever… You’re under the weather?
Despite all his efforts…
You look out of sorts!
Got to finish any book…
You’re hungry? I’ll cook!
Stefan Badham
I’ll tell you what occurred… You’ll think, Yeah, right!
But you can take my word. This was last night:
A copper stopped me. ‘Sir, I’m going to book You.’ Things became a blur. ‘But, wait, please look,
I’m panicking! My wife is giving birth!
The first time in my life, I thought, It’s worth
The risk. I did the ton. I’ve had a drink, It’s true, but now the baby’s coming. Think How you would act…’ A scream! No time to lose –
We then became a team. No blues and twos; The back seat of my car became a bed. The whole thing was bizarre. ‘Here comes the head!’
Our son was born. The cop said, ‘I’ll be f*cked. I only meant to stop and get you booked For speeding! We’ve unfinished business here.’
He winked. ‘I’ll make that booking disappear.’
Jayne Osborn
COMPETITION No 314 Letters used to be the kind of thing to be sorted. Then on EastEnders people began to shout, ‘Get it sorted!’ Now, no train journey is complete without advice on getting something sorted. So a poem, please, called Sorted. 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 314’, by Thursday 5th December.
On the Road
Cuba’s Lord of the Dance
Carlos Acosta tells Louise Flind about growing up in
Havana, dancing with the Royal Ballet and living
Is there something you really miss?
My girls. I miss them terribly: twin girls of eight, and our eldest, who’s nearly 13.
What are your earliest childhood holiday memories in Cuba?
We didn’t have holidays. We were really poor. But I do remember beach excursions with my father. He used to drive a lorry and invited all the neighbours. Everybody cooked – tamales, black beans and rice – and we played dominoes, with everybody sharing what they’d prepared.
Did you dance as a child?
Everyone in Cuba used to dance: the Latin dances, Cuban dances, the son montuno. And also in the ’80s, when the breakdancing movement started, there was Michael Jackson. I was into that too, aged about eight.
How did you discover classical ballet?
My father decided that I was going to be a ballet dancer. I was heading into a life of petty crime. I didn’t like the school. I was into gangs. And ballet was shown on TV, where people had a different life. Later I saw the National Ballet of Cuba perform and this man jumping very high – he was suspended in the air, lifting the girls with one hand. I was 13.
What’s the hardest move in dancing?
The barrel turn, where you go up and up and up around the stage.
What was it like growing up in Communist Cuba?
There was a very powerful sense of community. You could rely on your neighbours, and knew them all by name. We used to have parties and there were competitions of who had the tidiest house and garden, and dancing and singing competitions.
Is it less restrictive now?
There’s more economic freedom. Now you’re allowed to have your own restaurant or your business. In the ’80s, everything was state-run.
What was your first big break?
In Lausanne, which was a competition like the Olympics for youngsters in ballet. We were 127 competitors from more than 30 countries –and I won.
Which company did you most enjoy being with?
Communist
in Somerset
I learned a lot with the Houston Ballet from 20 to 25. Then I joined the Royal Ballet and spent 17 years there and it became my home.
Who was your favourite dance partner?
All of my partners: Darcey Bussell, Tamara Rojo, who was my regular partner, Leanne Benjamin… Marianela Núñez was brilliant and also Zenaida Yanowsky. I enjoy them all.
What was your favourite role?
One day, you’re the prince; the next day, Romeo; then, the next day, an abstract being – you keep changing and that’s what’s fun about it. There are some roles that are easier for me to interpret because they’re closer to my persona.
Don Quixote is a barber, and I knew how to project a barber. Being a prince? I knew nothing about it.
Do you miss dancing? A lot.
Do you still have close ties with Cuba? I go to Cuba a lot. I still have my sister, my nephews, my house, and my academy of dance there. So I go three or four times a year.
Where is home?
In Somerset with my family – my girls.
Do your children dance?
They’re only little but they do ballet
classes every week. My eldest is a little bit more advanced and more serious about it and sometimes I teach her here at home. She likes to be on stage…
What are you most proud of?
The achievement that I have had by working and how far I’ve got from my origins. I’m now transplanting these morals to my kids, whom I’m immensely proud of.
Where did you go on your honeymoon? Varadero Beach in Cuba.
Do you have a go at the local language? I can speak Spanish, Italian and English. And you can understand Portuguese if you speak Spanish.
What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept in while being away?
We recently went to Norfolk where we slept in a tree house – quite high.
What are your plans for the Birmingham Royal Ballet?
I’m trying to bring awareness to the world of how great they are. This year, we went to Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Hamburg, New York and Iceland. We also made a presentation at the Pyramid in Glastonbury last June. We keep performing Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty at a high level but we also innovate with new ballets, such as Black Sabbath, which was a great merge between ballet and heavy metal.
The Nutcracker by Birmingham Royal Ballet is at the Birmingham Hippodrome (22nd November to 14th December) and the Royal Albert Hall (29th to 31st December)
My Polish Renaissance
In Communist Poland, 40 years
ago, Helen de Borchgrave was saved from a miserable marriage by Leonardo da Vinci
An unconscious desire to escape a controlling, abusive husband propelled me to Poland in March 1984.
In the Heathrow departure lounge for Gate 15 for the flight to Warsaw, a bird-like woman, with a strong Polish accent, said to me tearfully, ‘They charged me £30 for a sack of tinned food I am taking to my mother-in-law. She’s dying.’
Around me, relatives, friends and those with a sense of social responsibility were bringing vital supplies in their overweight luggage.
As the plane descended, grey concrete blocks of postwar Warsaw jutted out of the plain, like rectangular rocks. The squat, square airport building loomed nearer, resembling a cage.
Young soldiers clad in pre-war khaki greatcoats and top boots stood at the foot of the steps, gripping rifles as the passengers descended, laden like tramps with their fat plastic bags. Some held bunches of flowers. We were escorted from the plane by armed police.
In 1983, I had met the Marchioness of Salisbury, known as Mollie to her friends. Châtelaine of Hatfield House, mother of six children and an international garden designer, Mollie had taken Poland to her heart. No one could resist Mollie’s entreaties for money, and each year – for a decade – she raised money for medical supplies which she drove to Poland.
Mollie had set up a foundation in Kraków with a friend, Professor Zofia Włodek, to enable less privileged children to attend university. She suggested I call on a friend:
Janusz Wałek, Curator of European Art at the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków.
The next morning, I stepped out of my hotel and crossed the road to the museum with no expectations.
powder horn that had belonged to Henry VIII and some miniatures painted by Richard Cosway.
In 1801, Izabela opened the first public museum in Poland in the grounds of Puławy, her country estate east of Warsaw.
The art treasures laid out for me included Rembrandt’s Good Samaritan and, in pride of place, a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.
Footsteps hurried along the passage and a tall, thin figure with flowing grey hair and a wide smile appeared. Janusz Wałek welcomed me profusely and led me up the stairs.
He stopped at a mahogany door. He bowed me into a room with a flourish. He told me how Countess Izabela Czartoryska, during an extended stay in England in 1790, caught her hosts’ collecting bug and bought objects belonging to famous people.
Among the works of art Janusz had removed from storage were some of these souvenirs. They included part of Shakespeare’s stool, Captain Cook’s sword, an exquisite ivory
Gripping the heavy frame, I lifted from the easel his Lady with an Ermine Anxiety and excitement mingled as I drew the portrait close and examined this masterpiece with a conservator’s eye. The subtleties of Leonardo’s painting were diminished by a varnish yellowed by age, and the background, originally a harmonious shade of grey-blue, had later been over-painted in black.
Over coffee in his office, I asked Janusz, ‘Why has the Leonardo not been cleaned?’
He suggested he took me to Wawel Royal Castle to meet the conservators there. I was again welcomed profusely.
Without access to Western currency, the conservators were unable to buy much-needed materials. Over coffee, the Chief Conservator Jan Błyskosz invited me to come back and work with them.
The courage of the Poles enabled me to separate from my husband on my return to London.
During a three-year-long contested divorce, I returned to Poland each year with equipment for the conservators and shared their lives.
Their courage, kindness and generosity gave me strength. And I restored some interesting paintings.
Helen de Borchgrave is author of Restoration: An Art Restorer’s Journey through Communist Poland
Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, 1489–1491
Helen & Leonardo, Kraków, 1984
Overseas Travel
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Money’s a boring present
QHow long do I have to go on giving my grandchildren presents at Christmas and for their birthdays? They are 20 and 21 and one of them even has a Saturday job. I used to give them £100 each year. It now seems rather unnecessary. I love them so much, but just doling out money to them every year seems a bit mad. What do you think is the answer?
Ann Denton, Edinburgh
AIf I were you, I’d change the scenario. I’d ask them (and their partners, if they have them) for a simple local supper. Now it may well be that if you took them out, with wine and all, the supper might cost more than £100 each, in which case make supper yourself – or ask them to tea instead. Or make a cake. If you want, you can explain that things are a bit tight at the moment – and unless they’re grasping monsters they’ll understand.
‘And where do you see yourself in the next 7-8 billion years?’
ISSN 0965-2507.
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
Alternatively, give them each a little memory. It might be time to start passing those mementoes down the family (and clearing your cluttered shelves!).
Ignore the pervy scammers
QMy grandfather has been getting very depressed recently and I’ve found out from my cousin that he’s near breaking point, because he’s received several emails claiming to know he’s been looking at pornography ‘through [his] screen’. The sender claims to have seen him watching and jerking off. This dreadful man has threatened to send the film to all his friends unless he sends a lot of money to him.
He doesn’t know what to do and has asked me what I think. I feel so sorry for him because I don’t think for a minute he’d do anything like that. He isn’t eating and he’s crying a lot. My cousin is the other person he confides in, and he’s equally worried. I’m frightened he’s thinking of killing himself, it’s that bad. Jo, Norwich
AI’ve heard about this repulsive scam – and was very surprised, about six months ago, to receive such an email myself. An elderly upright single lady of 80! It was extremely threatening. To make you feel happier, you should get your grandfather to change his password. The best thing is simply to delete the emails – and above all don’t click on any links or anything. Find out more about firewalls and upload the best for your grandfather.
And don’t worry. Nothing will happen to him. If he gets too worried, go with him to the police, but my own feeling is that for now you should just ignore it.
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How not to lose a friend
QRecently, I rang a friend in tears, wanting some consolation or reassurance. For some reason, although she’s usually very sympathetic, she tried to explain to me why I wasn’t really unhappy and pointed out all the good things in my life. She even said I was one of the luckiest people she knew.
I’m afraid that at the end of the conversation I got a bit upset because I felt she didn’t understand at all. We ended up on rather bad terms – she felt I was refusing to be consoled and I felt far worse than when I’d picked up the receiver in the first place.
What can I do?
Name and address supplied
AGalling as it is, because you were the unhappy one originally, the only way out of this is to apologise. Say that all you wanted was some sympathy, not advice, and you were so unhappy you became irritable.
Try to remember that she may feel that she’s failed if she couldn’t help – and this makes her see herself as hopeless and useless. She might have been feeling that way when you rang.
In order to deal with people’s problems, particularly those of our close friends, we often need a bit of backbone which, if we’re low ourselves, sometimes we don’t have.
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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