Oldie 451 Spring 2025

I was in Cary Grant’s last film

John Standing on the actor’s genius – and kindness

Mary, Queen of Scots, built my hut – Antonia Fraser

The Ted Hughes murder mystery – John Cornwell

James Bond’s Amazon adventure – Kate Grimond, Ian Fleming’s niece

30 Town Mouse

Tom Hodgkinson

31 Country Mouse

Giles Wood

32 Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

34 Small World Jem Clarke

37 School Days

Sophia Waugh

38 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

39 Prue’s News Prue Leith

40 I Once Met … Winston

22 Requiem for a brother Quentin Letts

24 Devon murder mystery

John Cornwell

28 James Bond’s Amazon adventure Kate Grimond

41 Phrases we don’t use any more Joseph Connolly Regulars

5 The Old Un’s Notes

9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Grumpy Oldie Man

Matthew Norman

Olden Life: What was Spotlight?

Roberts

Modern Life: What is the antisocial century? Richard Godwin

Oldie Man of Letters

Churchill Nick Peto

40 Memory Lane James Runcie

42 God Sister Teresa

42 Memorial Service: General Sir Michael Jackson

James Hughes-Onslow

43 The Doctor’s Surgery

Dr Theodore Dalrymple

44 Readers’ Letters

46 History David Horspool

47 Commonplace Corner

47 Rant: Nursery fees

Justin Cash

83 Crossword

85 Bridge Andrew Robson

85 Competition

Tessa Castro

90 Ask Virginia Ironside

48 Behind the Scenes: The Dramatic Lives of Philip

Burton, by Angela V John

Simon Williams

51 Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood, by Adam Nicolson

John McEwen

51 Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Desire, by Juliet Rosenfeld Anne Sebba

53 A Life in Books

Lady Antonia Fraser

53 When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter Harry Mount

55 Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters with Rock Royalty, by Kate Mossman Nicholas Lezard

57 Lost in the Forest, by Colin Heber-Percy Sister Teresa Arts

58 Film: Black Bag

Harry Mount

59 Theatre: The Last Laugh

William Cook

60 Radio Valerie Grove

60 Television

Frances Wilson

61 Music Richard Osborne

62 Golden Oldies

Mark Ellen

63 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

65 Gardening David Wheeler

65 Kitchen Garden

Simon Courtauld

66 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

66 Restaurants James Pembroke

67 Drink Bill Knott

68 Sport Jim White

68 Motoring Alan Judd

70 Digital Life Matthew Webster

70 Money Matters Neil Collins

73 Bird of the Month: Ruff John McEwen

Travel

74 The ancient caves of Matera, Italy James Pembroke

76 Overlooked Britain: Culzean Castle, Ayrshire Lucinda Lambton

79 On the Road: Edward Stourton Louise Flind

80 Vera Brittain’s Buxton Kathryn Ecclestone

81 Cornish voyage of a Fisherman’s Friend Jon Cleave

Reader Offers

Grayson Perry’s new show page 63

Bond, Amazon Bond page 28

The Old Un’s Notes

The late, great Barry Cryer (1935-2022) would have been 90 on 23rd March.

The comedian, a great friend to The Oldie, is being commemorated at his alma mater, Leeds Grammar School.

On 14th June, a new 350-seat, £4.7m theatre will open at the school – and will be called The Cryer in his honour.

Actor Bob Cryer, Barry’s son, says, ‘The Cryer family are all delighted, if not a little overwhelmed! It’s a great honour that we know Dad would have been very proud to accept. Although he would probably have blushed in the process, adding that he never really liked the term “national treasure”, as it sounded as if he’d just been dug up. He was, in his words, arrogant in his humility.’

a tremendously comforting thought.’

A school spokesman said

the theatre is a tribute to his versatility. Bob says, ‘Dad would have replied, “I’m not versatile – just confused.”’

Among this month’s contributors

Bob Cryer, author of Barry Cryer: Same Time Tomorrow? The Life and Laughs of a Comedy Legend, says his father’s time at the grammar school was crucial to his creativity:

‘You can see the signature playful, fun and silly nature of Dad’s comedy as coming from that time. I’ve always said he was childlike, not childish.

‘The fact that this generous spirit has been captured and rendered in stone to inspire future generations of creative souls, both on and off stage, is

John Standing (p14) is one of our finest actors. He was in The Great Escaper (2023) with Michael Caine. He and his mother-in-law, Nanette Newman, both 90, are our Oldie In-Laws of the Year.

Candida Crewe (p21) has written six novels and one work of non-fiction, as well as articles and columns for the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Spectator and many more, for nearly 50 years.

Simon Williams (p48) played Major Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs. He and his wife, Lucy Fleming, play her parents, Peter Fleming and Celia Johnson, in Posting Letters to the Moon

Lady Antonia Fraser (p53) wrote Mary, Queen of Scots (1969). She published her first book, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, in 1954. She wrote Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit in 2023.

The painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) may have been born in Florence to American parents, but he painted many of his commissions in Britain.

Sargent died in London a century ago, on 14th April 1925. Now two British shows are to celebrate his genius this spring.

In 1885, he painted from a holiday home in Broadway, Worcestershire. There, the writer Edmund Gosse was astonished when he appeared to plant his easel at random and start painting with gusto.

Sargent much enjoyed messing about on the River Avon with fellow AngloAmerican artists.

In that September of 1885, Sargent started painting two little girls in a garden at twilight, lighting paper lanterns among the flowers.

He had to wait until the blooms came again the next year to complete his English nocturne, Carnation Lily Lily Rose (1886).

Rarely-seen sketches and privately owned paintings from this period in Sargent’s life will be on display at the Broadway Museum and Art Gallery in a new exhibition, John Singer Sargent and his Circle (11th April to 19th July). On 6th June, Richard Ormond, art historian and Sargent’s great-nephew, will give a talk.

Another exhibition is at Kenwood House, Hampstead: Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits (16th May to 5th

Barry Cryer (centre), 15, at Leeds Grammar School, 1950; The Cryer, new school theatre

Important stories you may have missed

Man threatened with jail after envelope blows away i

Cat breaks into Premier Inn hotel to spend night on couple’s bed Somerset County Gazette

Classic car show is not set to return this year

East Anglia Daily Times

£15 for published contributions

Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with some of our Oldie friends, such as Stephen Fry, Craig Brown and A N Wilson. And we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter Email SIGN UP

Dollar Princesses: the Countess of Suffolk & Berkshire (1898); Mary Chamberlain, Joseph Chamberlain’s wife (1902)

October). The 18 portraits on show are of women dismissively known as the Dollar Princesses – American women who crossed the Atlantic to marry British aristocrats in an exchange of money for titles.

The pictures include one of Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament. Among the treasures is Kenwood’s own magnificent portrait of Daisy Leiter (1879-1968), a Chicago heiress (above), wife of the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire.

How lucky we are that these splendid ladies crossed the Atlantic – and that Sargent came over here to paint them.

disproportionate to its ends.

‘Eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.’

A platoon commander in the Second World War, Fussell (1924-2012) described himself as a ‘pissed-off infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator’.

He said, ‘People who haven’t come under fire are unfit to write military history

Fifty years on: Paul Fussell’s masterpiece

because what happens in close combat is absolutely unimaginable. The temptation to run away, especially if you’re a leader of troops, almost never gets addressed.’

No wonder, he thought, so many veterans admitted to vomiting or soiling themselves before going into battle – which may explain why the US Quartermaster General stopped supplying white underpants to American troops. They still received five times the ration of loo paper that our lads did.

Like his friend Kingsley Amis, the subject of his affectionate study The Anti-Egotist (1994), Fussell was considered curmudgeonly in later life. To the pleasantry ‘Have a nice day’, he’d respond, ‘Thanks, but I have other plans.’

Literary swashbuckling was his forte. Reviewing Graham Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape (1980), he took the author to task for his ‘inability to master English syntax’.

Asked for his opinion of Saving Private Ryan, Fussell said he would consign ‘all but the very beginning to the purgatory where boys’ bad adventure films end up.’

A letter in the Times shows that Air Chief Marshal Sir Clive Loader KCB, OBE, ADC, FRAeS (retd) these days lives in Rutland, in the village of Wing. What a perfect place for an RAF old boy.

Fifty years ago, American academic Paul Fussell’s study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) changed the way we think about that conflict.

We need, he wrote, ‘the protective screen of irony’ to comprehend a phenomenon whose means were so melodramatically

‘Grandad doesn’t mind talking about the war ... but don’t mention his wedding day’

NEW! Tune into Radio Oldie

Sargent’s

‘I wish I’d brought a book’

During a debate on House of Lords membership, the Earl of Devon supported the idea of royal princes sitting in the upper house.

‘I am sure,’ said the Devon, ‘that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex would appreciate the opportunity to debate the minutiae of produce safety and metrology until the wee small hours with your lordships.’

And the Lords daily attendance payment of £361 might be a welcome new income stream for

And should ballerinas be made peers? Lord Wallace of Saltaire (Lib Dem) confessed that he originally thought not, but that the parliamentary performances of Lady Bull, once of the Royal Ballet, had converted him to the idea.

Lord Lucas (Con) denied

there was any bias against dancers among old-fashioned peers, given ‘a notorious propensity for hereditary peers to marry ballerinas’.

This was reinforced by the 7th Lord Cromwell (crossbencher), who disclosed that ‘my great-great grandmother was in the Ballets Russes’.

With Radio 3 less highbrow than it used to be, choral evensong fans clucked and tutted after one of the station’s announcers declared that an anthem was by Harold Drake. It should, as all Oldie-

P G Wodehouse’s Plum Lines

To salute the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s death in 1975, at the age of 93, The Oldie remembers his great one-liners

‘She’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need’ P G Wodehouse, Mostly Sally (1921)

readers will know, have been Darke.

Facebook evensongers, of whom there are apparently many thousands, swung into action. One suggested that the Creed would mention Pontius Pirate. Another mentioned Tallis’s meaty work Spam in alium. A third thought ‘Drake’ might have adapted ‘In the Beak Midwinter’. This drew the comment that it was ‘not all it’s quacked up to be’.

STOP, STOP!

The new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, appearing at the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee (a not unwindy outfit), announced gaily that it was the 100th time he had given testimony to such a committee.

Sir Chris, 56, was previously Permanent Secretary at the Departments of Education and Health – and is thus known in the business as Permy Wormy. It was hard to know which was more depressing: the fact that he has been part of the Whitehall furniture for so long, or that he had bothered to count his appearances. Maybe he got an underling to do it for him.

‘And this is our research department’

Lady a-leaping: Royal Ballet’s Deborah Bull

Prince Harry.

High times with Bill Nighy

I was intoxicated by the actor’s delicious story about drugs and Samuel Beckett

In 1970, I was writing my first regular column for the Manchester Evening News: ‘Gyles Brandreth for the Young in Heart –Every Tuesday’.

The newspaper’s editor, Brian Redhead, advised me, ‘If you have an interesting name to drop, put it in at the top of your piece. Otherwise, you may find you’ve lost your readers before they get to it.’

So. When I was having lunch with Bill Nighy the other day, he told a theatre story I hadn’t heard before and it made me laugh out loud.

Years ago, at the National Theatre, word got round that the director Michael Rudman was planning a new production of Waiting for Godot. An ambitious young actor, seeing Rudman in the corridor one day, Nighy said to him, ‘Michael, I want Estragon.’

Rudman replied, ‘If it’s drugs you’re after, you can try the Lyttleton lighting box.’

As regular readers will know, I have a weakness for name-dropping. It’s almost pathological.

At the same lunch, the great Sir Ian McKellen mentioned how it was, when he was 13, that seeing Ivor Novello and Olive Gilbert together on stage, in Novello’s musical King’s Rhapsody, engendered his first erection.

I was almost as excited at a similar age when I had my first brief encounter with a British prime minister. Remarkable, you may think, given it was Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Imagine then how I felt the other day when, on the same morning, I found myself face to face with not one prime minister, but two.

I have met Sir Keir Starmer on various occasions (and always liked him), but this was my first moment with Afioga

Fiamē Naomi Mata‘afa, the first female prime minister of Samoa.

We were all three going to the Commonwealth Day Service of Celebration at Westminster Abbey.

As my prime ministerial double bubble made their way to their places at the front of the Abbey to await the arrival of the King, I went in search of the BBC commentary box.

I was there to sit alongside newsreader Reeta Chakrabarti and help out with the television coverage of the event.

I had assumed our BBC team would be in a cramped Portakabin of some kind, behind the building. Not so. We were inside the Abbey itself, stationed in a beautiful side chapel – and not any old side chapel but, by extraordinary coincidence, the side chapel dedicated to – and containing the tomb of – the man who gave me my name.

My full name is Gyles Daubeney Brandreth, because my father claimed family kinship with Sir Gyles Daubeney (1451-1508), first Baron Daubeney, Knight of the Garter, soldier, diplomat, courtier, politician.

It seems this original Gyles-with-a-y also suffered from the family namedropping weakness. He knew Edward IV. He attended the coronation of Richard III. He was Master of the Mint and Lord Chamberlain to Henry VII.

His son, Henry Daubeney, was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the celebrated summit that took place in 1520 between Henry VIII and Francis I of France.

In 1538, Henry Daubeney became first Earl of Bridgewater but, despite having two top-drawer wives (one, Elizabeth Neville, kinswoman to Edward IV; the other, Catherine Howard, daughter of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk), he failed to have any children. His titles died with him.

In my late pre-adolescence (around the age Ian McKellen was when getting his first erotic charge from Ivor Novello), I spent a good deal of time at the local library, poring over copies of Burke’s Dormant Peerage, working out how I might establish my right to reclaim the family titles.

I thought it might be fun to mention some of this during my Commonwealth Day broadcast with Reeta – gently name-dropping my forebear’s association with Edward VI, Richard III and Henry VII, as their descendant, Charles III, processed down the nave to take his place at the front of the Abbey.

‘Sorry, Gyles,’ said our producer, kindly. ‘We’re a bit tight for time today.’

Before I go, I have one more name to drop, and it’s a corker. At the West End première of the documentary telling the life story of his wife, Twiggy, my friend the actor Leigh Lawson introduced me to his friend the film star Dustin Hoffman. Dustin, now 87 but still looking good, was effortlessly charming and handled my effusive gushing with great grace.

Leigh, 80 in July, was on good form, too. Not surprisingly. Flapjack Press have just published Now and Then, a first collection of Leigh’s poetry. The poems are dazzling.

Leigh got to know Dustin when they appeared together in London in The Merchant of Venice in 1989. Dustin’s Shylock was acclaimed, but the Hollywood star was disappointed the audiences never gave his performance a standing ovation.

During the run, Laurence Olivier died and, on the night of his death, the news was broken to the audience at the end of the play – when they all stood to honour and applaud the great man’s memory.

‘God,’ muttered Hoffman. ‘In this country, you’ve got to die to get a standing ovation.’

Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now

Pin-up: Gyles in 1970

Weep crocodile tears for the school fees hike

Who will bail out the poor millionaires, forced to pay VAT?

matthew norman

Even by the bewilderingly inadequate standards of this page, this is a pitiful way to begin – but I am not remotely confident of being able to finish this piece.

Sackably unprofessional though the admission is, some topics are so distressing that contemplating them can induce a form of writerly coma.

But let’s crack on before the paralysis strikes, and ask this. What can be done for Alexander Armstrong?

While this versatile entertainer is revered for his comedic partnership with Ben Miller and the rich bass baritone that gave him two top-ten albums, it’s as the presenter of Pointless, the BBC1 teatime quiz, that he is most familiar these days.

The show’s USP is that contestants must give obscure answers that few of those previously surveyed, and preferably none, came up with.

As host, Mr Armstrong exhibits what the late A A Gill identified as heroic courtesy. Were you asked to name a British monarch, for instance, and replied ‘Elizabeth II’, he’d sympathise with your rotten luck in scoring 100 for such an outstanding answer and tell you what a brilliant contestant you’d been.

He seems, in other words, the very sweetest and most serene of chaps.

So you’ll imagine the ague of shock which left me bedbound when I found him seething with rage in a Daily Telegraph interview.

Its primary purpose was to highlight the extraordinary, possibly unique celebrity path he

has taken. Mr Armstrong has written a children’s book.

Only after plugging that did he succumb to the unwonted fury. ‘I’m feeling really, really angry about that,’ he said of the imposition of VAT on school fees, ‘and extremely poor.’

With four boys in private education, small wonder there. While his Pointless income is unknown, newspaper estimates put it at as little as £20,000, or even less, per show.

Let’s be catastrophists and assume it’s ten thousand a pop. With 98 editions broadcast in 2024 – you do the mathematics. Even if we factor in other sources of income… No, no, it won’t do. Give me a moment to let the diazepam kick in.

All right. Even if we factor other sources of income – assorted Pointful TV work, public speaking, record royalties etc – it’s hard to believe that these additional revenue streams would hoist him close to a million and a half. And that’s before tax.

Small wonder, then, that he’s feeling extremely poor and really, really angry. And the educational VAT isn’t the end of it. He is also incensed – a bit ahead of time, admittedly –by the inheritance-tax raid on dead farmers (he has 26 acres on the OxfordshireGloucestershire border).

This could be an even more pernicious class warfare attack than VAT on school fees. Imposing IHT on farms at 20 per cent (half the normal rate)

is bad enough. Worse, the maximum exemption per married couple of £3m is only thrice the figure for non-farmers.

Worse yet, the Treasury will grant ten years – a paltry decade! – to pay up. Worst of all, the interest rate… Sorry again, but I need more Valium.

OK, I’m back. Interest on the IHT (usually charged at about seven per cent annually, chargeable almost immediately and compounded daily) will be levied at a crushingly punitive 0.00 per cent.

The consolation for farm-owning school-fee-payers is that the Government does at last seem willing to go after properly deserving targets of its rapacity.

Is it too much to expect this radical socialist regime to use the savings made from the sick, disabled and benefitstrapped poor to soften the blow on the television-presenting gentlemen farmers of the Cotswolds?

We can’t rely on that, however – and simply sharing Mr Armstrong’s rage isn’t enough. You can’t pay slightly inflated school fees and massively cushioned IHT bills with empathy.

So what are we to do? I am reminded of Larry David’s manager, Jeff Greene, in Curb Your Enthusiasm. ‘These big-vagina ladies are getting away with murder,’ he tells Larry. ‘Something must be done. I don’t know what, but something…’

Where I diverge from Jeff is in knowing precisely what to do. When they get round to returning my calls, I’ll be staggered if Bob Geldof and Midge Ure don’t decide to organise a mammoth outdoor gig and release a charity single under the catchy banner of SchoolFeesFarmIHTAid –40 years after the original Live Aid.

‘There’s a world outside your window/ And it’s a world of dread and fear/ Where the bills for all those school fees/ Diminish your good cheer.’ Something like that.

I’ll download it and be at Wembley, and trust that you will too.

what was Spotlight?

In 2017, Spotlight printed its final casting directory, ending a 90-year tradition.

These were books not for the public but for Wardour Street film-makers, directors of repertory companies and, latterly, TV producers. By the end of the 1940s, a full-page ad cost an actor or their agent £25 a year. In the early 1960s, Spotlight had records of over 17,800 performers and answered over 200 enquiries a day.

Collecting old copies is not a cheap pastime, and the average volume is the size of a GPO telephone book, but they are irresistible to any devotee of British cinema – I now own 15 issues.

One attraction is how some actors established their personae early on in their screen careers. The May 1949 issue has a beady-eyed Donald Pleasence and Sidney James apparently poised to sell a dubious used car.

Other entries convey an image at odds with an actor’s familiar persona or remind you when a TV presenter once had theatrical aspirations. The Sean Connery of 1958 (‘Under contract to 20th Century Fox’) sported the white tie and black shirt of a

Soho wide boy. Corona Academy of Stage Training showcased a fresh-faced Dennis Waterman in Actresses and Children –Spring 1963.

In 1949, the Juvenile-Character Men pages contained a picture of a menacing Eamonn Andrews, while the Juvenile Men section had a grim-visaged 25-year-old Nicholas Parsons. Any B-film producer needing someone to play a spiv should contact him on HAMpstead 3747.

London telephone exchanges, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, are another appealing aspect of Spotlight before the late 1960s. Several character actors would list their home numbers as well as their agent’s. A 1956 issue has Charles Hawtrey giving his home address of 217 Cromwell Road, Hounslow, as a contact. Either he was between agents or, equally likely, he was saving £sd. Hawtrey also decided, somewhat ambitiously, to bill himself as a Leading Man.

The back pages of a directory had quarter-page entries from such young actors as John Osborne, Liz Fraser or David Baron, aka Harold Pinter.

Many of these smaller advertisements convey a sense of quiet desperation: character actors who hoped a casting director would contact them

what is the antisocial century?

The antisocial century is what we’re living in now.

Humans have passed through the era of the tribe, the kingdom and the nation state. We have moved beyond communities and collectives, parties and unions. Partners, colleagues, friends, lovers … these too are beginning to seem a bit old hat.

What we would rather do now is eat takeaways on our own, looking at our phones, wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘F*** Off’. Welcome to the antisocial century.

The term was coined by Derek Thompson in a cover story for the Atlantic magazine which hit a nerve with readers. ‘Selfimposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America,’ was the depressing conclusion.

The writer visited a formerly buzzing Mexican restaurant and discovered it was

almost empty. Business was still booming – but only a handful of customers actually entered the restaurant. Instead, they paid delivery riders to bring them their food at home. ‘I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it,’ said the restaurant manager, as she surveyed her formerly lively bar, now a transit area of brown-paper delivery bags.

This shift in dining habits accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic – but in-person socialising of all kinds has been declining for decades. The sociologist Robert D Putnam charted this atomisation in his book Bowling Alone (2000), which showed membership of community organisations of all sorts declining precipitously in the 1970s and ’80s.

Britain has seen a similar turn towards solitude. Smartphones and social media haven’t helped matters. According to a recent survey, almost a third of British adults eat alone ‘most or all of the time’.

My grandad was a member of the Lions Club, the Round Table, a regiment,

‘c/o Spotlight’ or call their bedsit on a FLAxman telephone number. One 1964 bit-part actor is available for ‘Town Tour or First-Class Repertory’. Another could perform his ‘Own Straight and Comedy Numbers with Banjetta’.

Nor is this sense of melancholy restricted to minor players ‘just returned from a successful tour of the Isle of Wight’. Rank and Associated British would commission full-page advertisements for their contract artists, many of whom are now forgotten. Among these screen deities was Carole Lesley (1935-74), a blonde bombshell who killed herself. There are lost stars who once opened provincial supermarkets and garden fêtes.

Spotlight began listing performers online in 1997, and two decades later the printed directory was no more. For some collectors – like me – their appeal waned by the 1970s, despite the fascination of middle-aged actors unwisely adopting Jason King hairstyles. Spotlight’s heyday was the postwar era when Roy Plomley was an aspiring Leading Man. And when you could call Charles Hawtrey at home on HOUnslow 0636.

Andrew Roberts, author of Idols of the

plus various associations related to cycling, photography etc. I am a member of a gym. The prevalence of chronic loneliness has risen from 6% in 2020 to 7.1% in 2023, according to the Campaign to End Loneliness.

Solitude is almost a badge of honour among Generation Z, the loneliest generation of them all. Online shops such as Etsy are full of clothing with slogans like ‘I hate people’ and ‘Leave me alone’. We are also experiencing an epidemic of flakiness – people cancelling plans because they’re just not feeling like it. A recent Mumsnet thread on the subject went mega-viral as users complained of last-minute no-shows at weddings, hen parties and birthday parties.

Why invest in real friendships (costly, unreliable and demanding) when you can enjoy a parasocial, free relationship with a podcaster instead? If no one else is having any fun – why should you?

Richard Godwin

Odeons: Post-War British Film Stardom

In 1964, I had a telephone call from the head of Columbia Pictures. Would I be interested in doing a movie with Cary Grant, which was to be shot mainly in Japan, called Walk, Don’t Run?

Well, offers like that tend not to happen twice in a lifetime. But, as I was pretty young and inexperienced, I replied, ‘Of course I’d like to do it, but I’d better read the script first.’

Imagine the arrogance. Cary Grant was a massive movie hero of mine and the prospect of acting with him was, in my eyes, monumental.

Having finally read the screenplay and gone through endless legalese, I set off for Tokyo. We started filming in 1965, 60 years ago.

The flight to Tokyo was terrifying but, as Cary Grant (whom I hadn’t actually met yet) was on the plane, I assumed everything would be OK – which it was.

We landed in Japan and were whisked off to the Okura Hotel – the smartest five-star chambers imaginable.

That evening, I was sitting in the lobby surrounded by Japanese tourists, when the revolving doors spun round, and the Master of Light Comedy made his entrance, with the director, Charles Walters, and various movie acolytes in tow. They had all been on a location scouting trip. The movie was basically about a romance – between Jim Hutton and Samantha Eggar, with Cary as Cupid getting hopelessly involved in the walking race in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Cary was dressed in the simplest of clothes, but wore them as only Cary Grant could – a major movie star to his fingertips.

He came over to me and said, ‘My

Cary suggested I try LSD. ‘It will take you back to the womb,’ he explained

God, you look so young. We’d better put some glasses on you.’

The following day, we had a long scene together and I had most of the dialogue. Cary said, ‘Don’t worry – I’m a REactor.’

He was seriously generous to work with, making sure the scene was divided equally between us both.

Inevitably, as I was on the film for three months and had more than a few scenes with him, I got to know him a lot better. On one occasion, in Yokohama harbour, we were talking about Cole Porter. It was a dawn scene, and we were

In his last film, 60 years ago, Cary Grant charmed his co-star, a young John Standing

Generous Grant

standing on the ferry together in the freezing cold, when I remarked that Cole Porter reputedly ‘went both ways’.

Cary said, ‘I know. I was accused of that too, but I never did. Girls played the major part in Randolph Scott’s and my life at the time and, as you would say, we were just a “couple of blokes” living together. They also accused Mike Wilding and

Every night after shooting, he would clamber into his ancient Rolls, drive himself home and watch the ball game.

Racing and watching baseball were two real passions – along with his deep love for his daughter by actress Dyan Cannon, Jennifer. She was born in 1966, the year our film came out, when Cary was 62.

My wife Jill had arrived in time for the closing scenes of the film. Cary took us both to the Magic Castle – a strange venue, for wandering magicians. Another of Cary’s friends, the owner of the LA Dodgers, was also at this deeply unlikely dinner party.

To see him on screen now is to appreciate the simple brilliance of his acting. No tricks to be seen. It just appears to be completely normal; off-the-cuff, even.

But the sheer graft that went into it was wondrous to be a part of.

Stewart Granger of the same thing.

Cary was amazingly good fun. Surprisingly, though, he suggested that I try LSD. ‘It will take you back to the womb,’ he explained. The womb was unquestionably the last place on earth I would ever want to go back to.

When we returned to Columbia Studios in LA, he admitted to me that the one thing in life he hated was his fame.

‘I’ll never do it again,’ he said of our film, which came out in 1966. ‘I don’t get the girl.’ And he never did.

It was his last film. The great man died 20 years later, in 1986, aged 82.

John Standing was in The Great Escaper (2023) with Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson. He won our Oldie In-Laws of the Year Award in 2024 with his mother-in-law, actress Nanette Newman. They are both 90

Right: Cary Grant with wife Dyan Cannon and daughter, Jennifer, 1966. Below: Cary Grant, 1955

Cary, Jim Hutton, John and Samantha Eggar on the Walk, Don’t Run set, 1965

A gentle man in New York

Harry Cluff salutes Robert Benchley, the funniest, kindest writer at the Algonquin Round Table, 80 years after his death

At the epicentre of 1920s New York stood the revered Algonquin Round Table – a loose group of gifted friends who met at the same hotel for lunch from Monday to Friday for ten years.

New York nursed a heady addiction for newspapers in those days. There were 19 daily papers in Manhattan and each member of the coterie had a readership in the hundreds of thousands.

Planet-size highly combative egos abounded at the Algonquin. But one unassuming member of the group never had a mean word to say about anyone –the gentle genius Robert Benchley (1889-1945), who died 80 years ago, aged 56.

He cut a charismatic, kindly figure in a crowd famed for their cruel jibes and snide put-downs. He was an internationally recognised humorist in his lifetime, but since his untimely death his legacy has sadly fallen into obscurity.

Born into an affluent East Coast family, Benchley attended Harvard, where he edited the Lampoon. Despite his prodigious abilities, he never took his studies seriously. In one law exam on Newfoundland fishing rights, he answered the questions from the point of view of the persecuted fish.

After Harvard, he wrote for Vanity Fair, replacing P G Wodehouse as drama critic, alongside another Algonquin attendee, Dorothy Parker.

The pair formed a close personal and professional partnership while sharing a tiny office and would often act as each other’s confidants.

His loyalty to Parker was so profound that when she was sacked, for writing a searing review of a performance by a media mogul’s actress girlfriend, Benchley resigned in protest and began a stint as a freelance scribbler.

As he said, a ‘freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps’.

Despite the freelancer’s financial difficulties, Benchley never lacked for work. His amusing reviews and essays were the most hotly anticipated articles

in America, always with at least one eminently quotable line. When reviewing an unimpressive Shakespearean play, he said, ‘If there is a streak of ham in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.’

His most famous line was a telegram to a friend on his arrival in Venice: ‘STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.’

Despite his popularity, he was endlessly self-effacing about his literary gifts, saying, ‘It took me 15 years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.’

At the height of the Depression, Benchley moved to Hollywood, where he led a lucrative life as a screenwriter and actor. He collaborated with giants

such as George Gershwin, was the first person to speak in a film for more than five minutes and won two Academy Awards for his short film series The Treasurer’s Report (1928).

By the end of the 1930s, demand for his wit started to dry up. He took to drink. At a supper in New York in 1945, he collapsed and was rushed to hospital, where he succumbed to liver failure. His dining companions rendezvoused at the same place the next day and raised their glasses to their gallant friend.

Benchley preferred self-effacement to sniping and always aimed to make others laugh, even at his own expense. Geniuses are seldom gentle, especially comic ones; Robert Benchley was the gentlest genius of all.

Robert Benchley during a radio broadcast, 1938

After 38 years in the City, Charles Prideaux gave it all up to join the circus

Careers of a clown

of the sound and timing of rolled newspaper thwacks did emerge as part of the curriculum.

My battle was to suppress my Cityshaped urge to assess eurozone productivity based on this desolation – and focus instead on the school’s rather alarming rules.

Not since I was seven and at prep school had I received such stern instruction about indoor and outdoor shoes. What a relief when my trusty Gazelles passed indoor muster.

More modern was the total ban on phones and the promise of a jail term as well as a €50,000 fine should anyone break privacy rules. (They were happy for me to write this article.)

First days at a new school are always tense. I was with complete strangers –mostly at least 25 years younger than me and dressed rather differently.

We’d been asked to wear loose clothing. I’d been shopping in London and really thought I looked the part with my tracksuit and sweatshirt (albeit still collared – old habits die hard). I was bewildered by the fashion sense of the class – wearing shorts outside leggings; like getting dressed in the wrong order.

Still, that was the lure of this course. My classmates came from all corners of the globe. The vast majority were actors or stand-up comedians. They were refreshingly free of ego – several had already had very successful careers. All were there to hone their comic craft and were willing to subject themselves to the school’s very particular ethos.

Every day, we had movement and

The timing of rolled newspaper thwacks was on the

population that remained invisible despite the very efficient train.

curriculum

Above: Charles Prideaux in his City days. Left: Helena Bonham Carter clowning in 2020

clown improvisation classes. They both started with playing games. I played competitive rounds of cat and mouse, grandmother’s footsteps and wall ball.

Initially, my brain and body were very resistant. The Talking Heads refrain –‘This is not my beautiful house! My God, what have I done?’ – wouldn’t leave my head during rounds of human chess.

In that game, I had to force myself to leap lightly, land on both feet and tag an opponent without losing balance – lest I was met with a Germanic cry of ‘You’re out’ from our brilliant teacher, Juri the acrobat.

The goal was to make joyful playing impulsive. I felt this muscle reawaken after years of institutional restraint.

Unfortunately, other muscles were to prove more elusive, as movement class transitioned into acrobatics. I was terrified as I was taught various grips and lifts, while positioned as a human table or flier. Where

‘Locate your core,’ someone shouted optimistically. It sure taught me to be in the comic moment. The – often literal – support I felt was inspiring. The class-ending warm-down massages were somewhat alarming, too. One entailed four classmates lifting and pulling each of my limbs while I was encouraged to arch and twist. As a rack, it was nicer than it sounds – even Guy Fawkes would have liked it.

beginning of his feedback – definitely not of the kind favoured by my old City Human Resources departments.

As the appointed Lord of Misrule, Carlo would observe in his gentle and soft Italian voice, ‘Where is the ha-ha-ha here?’; ‘This is a catastrophe!’; ‘Who wrote this play?’; and, most savagely, ‘Please enter again, and my advice is … change everything!’ We all grew to crave his best compliment: ‘Not horrible.’

Charles Prideaux at his French clown school. the Fool (Ian McKellen) King Lear, 2007

These activities built trust. Otherwise, the afternoons would have been traumatic – particularly when, under the exacting but ultimately kind eye of Carlo, another teacher, we were

We entered in turn at the beat of Carlo’s drum to crazed circus music, wearing masks, speaking only once the music stopped. The fear was total as the next beat of his drum signalled the end of your show, and the

Yet we loved it, not in some masochistic way but, rather, because, along with his cajoling, there was clear direction to ensure your eyes never lost the audience, to maintain a focal point and, above all, to trust your playful impulse. If something went wrong, then the ‘flop’ was to be celebrated, and the vulnerability used. The journey of the clown flopping was one of discovery – something all audiences are complicit with because everyone knows what it’s like to flop. When I managed to make people laugh and earn a ‘Not horrible’, I often didn’t understand why. It felt daring, light and magical – almost, as painters say, ‘a happy

I ascribed it afterwards mostly to eyes, movement and, above all, the absence of much thought – with the freedom then to say what you felt rather than what you ought to say.

The Eurostar home was packed with businesspeople returning after a long week. I watched them do email and write notes while they decompressed with a drink.

I felt properly apart. The school had taught me how to play once more, to shed my institutional skin and the wisdom in clowning.

Clowning is profoundly human. It’s a witness to discovery, to what we don’t fully understand, the futility of too many plans and the inevitability of flops.

I smile now as I think every day about the question ‘Where is the ha-ha-ha here?’

Preposterous presents

Piers Pottinger yearns for the days of useless gifts and the mysterious Corby Trouser Press

The world’s smallest umbrella just got smaller!’ proclaimed the headline in the catalogue.

I read this with excitement back in the late 1980s, when every newspaper seemed to have at least one catalogue of unlikely items inserted among its pages. Why anyone would want to buy a tiny umbrella was puzzling, but it was written in a captivating manner.

Like many readers, I found myself lured into reading these catalogues, and even held a sneaking admiration for the copywriters who promoted so many bizarre items. They loved to pose questions that were never answered, implying an impossible level of research. ‘Is this the world’s most versatile, folding, lightweight wheelbarrow?’ blazed the headline in one edition. I rang up the catalogue company to ask what else it did, to the bafflement of the employee.

reading, was an advert for a shelf.

When all else failed, the copywriters would add preposterous qualities to things that hardly seemed relevant: a tray table that ‘also works at night’.

Anthropomorphic qualities were applied to inanimate objects: ‘The high-performance trainer that thinks it’s a sandal’!

I bought ludicrous items from these catalogues as presents for bemused friends. My favourite was the salt-andpepper set in the shape of a butler (pepper) and maid (salt). The butler sneezed when shaken while the maid

I came home with a brown plastic donkey which ‘emits cigarettes from rear’

replied, ‘Bress you,’ as you poured your salt. They were made in China.

Another obsession of the catalogue writers was storage. Everyone apparently had storage problems, and they were there to offer a plethora of ‘solutions’.

One bold question asked, ‘How would you like to double your under-sink storage space?’ This, it turned out, on

Bless you: butler (pepper) and maid (salt). Below: Ad for Corby Trouser Press, c 1970

I blame my love of these catalogues for leading me to buy other things wiser men would have shunned. After travelling through Dubai Airport one year, I came home with a brown plastic donkey which ‘emits cigarettes from rear’. You pulled its ears back and a cigarette loaded in its belly would then protrude from its bottom. I gave it to my business partner, Tim Bell, a heavy smoker. I’m pleased to say it sat on his desk for the next ten years.

One strange gizmo always fascinated me: the Corby Trouser Press, once popular in private homes and three- and four-star hotel rooms. It was not invented in Corby, but named for its inventor, Peter Corby, who had joined his family’s valet-stand company in 1951. During a chance encounter with an engineer who was developing an electrical heating system for the nose cone of Concorde, it struck Mr Corby that he could adapt the technology. The legendary Corby Trouser Press was born – an instant worldwide success.

You can still buy crazy things online: laser-powered pizza scissors, airconditioned shoes, Bluetooth toasters and electronic nail files.

But the descriptions today are matter-of-fact and not nearly as alluring as the ones in the old catalogues.

On Sunday mornings, when there was a deluge of catalogues inside the newspapers, I used to telephone a like-minded friend to discuss the best finds that week. We’d often buy each other gifts: the welcome mat that said ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ when you trod on it; the vacuum-cleaner cover shaped like a caricature granny. My long-suffering wife drew the line when a set of particularly hideous talking garden gnomes (‘Ideal to warn off intruders’) arrived one afternoon. Sadly, they were doomed to instant disposal. Supermarkets and other retailers love the concept of the impulse purchase. They encourage it by placing stuff you really don’t need in key places inside their shops to tempt you. Special offers, bargains, two for the price of one … these are all techniques used to shift slow-selling stock.

But they don’t have the creativity of the ad-writers for those once ubiquitous catalogues.

I was, perhaps, a little obsessive, yet I defy any Oldie-reader to claim he or she has never succumbed to their allure.

Somewhere in a cupboard there will lurk a product of considerable age that has never been used or consumed; why was it bought in the first place?

When clearing out my late mother’s house after her death in the ’90s we found two curiosities nearly worthy of an appearance on Antiques Roadshow. One was a box of chocolate cup-cake cases with 1961 on the packaging, the other a tin (by then bulging precariously) of Kraft cheese slices with a ration ticket attached.

I wonder what possessed her to keep them … but then I shall never know what the promotional material promised.

Piers Pottinger is a public-affairs consultant

Hell is other people’s houses

There’s no place like home, says Candida Crewe

Kingsley Amis once said how miserable he was on a trip to America. And then, one day, he found a bar with exactly his usual sort of drink, with all the right ingredients. He started enjoying himself at last.

Then he realised why – he was getting as close as he could to being back home.

I recognise the sentiment. The older I get, the more of a homebird I want to be when away. I love going to stay with friends in Britain or abroad – and when I do, I take steps to ensure familiar habits prevail.

I pack all the clobber I need to make my homemade cappuccino just the way I like it, and steel myself at breakfast for the derision I invariably – not unreasonably – face.

The clobber includes a Bialetti stove-top coffee pot; Bialetti hand milk-frother – so infinitely superior to the electric ones people sweetly offer me from their kitchen drawers, which create foam as feeble as bubble bath.

I take my coffee brand of choice; a special (large) mug; and my own jerrycan of organic whole milk.

When did I become so bloody precious?

As a young woman, I never used to take special kit with me – just clothes and a toothbrush. It didn’t even cross my mind. But last June I turned 60 and I have become fussy. I am my own barista and I no longer want to drink coffee that is not precisely to my taste.

When you get to my age, you no longer care that other people think you’re tragically weird.

My peers have all become equally weird after their own fashion. Of late, not only has the derision subsided; it has transitioned into identification, if not outright admiration. Hosts and fellow guests compliment me on my common sense.

They ask for one of my cappuccinos and list their own peculiarities – often over coffee preferences, but also regarding a whole load of other things. Their self-mockery is laced with selfsatisfaction at their own logic; and nonchalance, even pride, about their hard-won, devil-may-care individuality.

It is never quite as nice staying with people as it is being at home, and there are some things we will not compromise over.

My boyfriend’s line in the sand is pillows. He takes his everywhere, silk pillowcase and all. And I don’t blame him. Anti-allergy synthetic ones in hotels are untenable. Even hugely luxurious ones in friends’ houses, packed with the feathers of hand-plucked Hungarian ducklings, are often overstuffed and completely unyielding. He gets a cricked neck which lasts a week.

Other people’s houses are frequently supremely comfortable and aesthetically joyful, with jaw-droppingly good food and craic. But they are not made to my measure – and why should they be? However tasteful and well-thought-out, they never totally cut the mustard.

I’ve used no-expense-spared bathrooms with beautiful high-end basins and taps, towels like clouds and showers as big as my drawing-room. But there’s no surface to lay a sponge bag on except the cistern. Cue all your lotions and dental gear falling into the loo.

I’ve slept in friends’ bedrooms with heavenly antique linen sheets and curtains as thick as duvets. But the lighting is so tastefully dim that reading the books on the bedside table, carefully chosen by the thoughtful host, is completely out of the question.

To see anything at all in spare rooms, one friend takes a high-powered, hideous LED light she uses for stitching tapestry.

Another friend visits his sister in Scotland regularly. She is a total puritan, so he takes a cushion to sit at her kitchen table – she has only wooden benches without a back to lean on, let alone something soft for his skinny bottom.

Her house is also punishingly cold – so he loads his car with hot-water bottles and a large electric blanket. He keeps it at top heat all night. The sheets are steeped in damp. There is a distinct chance he will be electrocuted in his sleep. But it is a risk he is happy to take in pursuit of home comforts.

My brotherly love

Quentin Letts was inspired by his brother’s premature death to write a novel about Simeon, who died after seeing the baby Jesus

Walking down our lane in Herefordshire, I recently found a pheasant that had just been squashed by a car. These things happen, alas.

What made it unusual was that another male pheasant was standing beside the dead bird and did not move as I approached. It just stood there, eyes looking a bit stunned.

Was it guarding the body? Was it in shock? Had the dead pheasant been its best friend? Its brother?

When my own brother, Alexander, died in 2021 at the age of 62, I reacted much like that grieving pheasant.

Four years earlier, we had lost a sister, Penny, also to cancer. She made only 59. I am called Quentin because I was the fifth child, my parents’ first son having died in infancy in 1955. Now there are just two of us left. It’s like some grisly game of musical chairs.

A sibling’s death wallops you. For months, I gawped out from life’s hedgerow with wide, bewildered eyes, half-expecting the Almighty to come roaring back down the lane in His celestial chariot to squash me next.

This disorientation was followed by anger about the indifferent treatment Alexander had received from the lockdown-obsessed NHS.

But rage abates. Embers cool; eventually my mind stopped throbbing. Only then did I see there was a story I could write to put things in context.

When growing up in Gloucestershire in the 1960s, Alexander and I had a Children’s Bible, published by Paul Hamlyn ‘by arrangement with Golden Press, Inc, and Western-PublishingHachette International, Geneva’. It is still on my bookshelves, battered but loved.

My favourite character was the prophet Simeon, who in St Luke’s Gospel is told by an angel to go to Jerusalem and wait until he sees the infant Christ. Simeon will not die until this happens. Finally, the moment arrives. Simeon holds the child and realises that his days are done. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,’ he says, words

out to bat. He was extraordinarily philosophical about it.

now known in their Latin form, Nunc Dimittis, sung at Anglican evensong.

Maybe I was drawn to the story because it was illustrated by a large colour illustration showing a snowybearded Simeon, in red and orange robes, and a Christ Child rather too white to be Judean.

Or maybe I liked the tale because it has a completeness to it: a sense of mission fulfilled; a long wait rewarded. The vigil was over. Home now, good soul.

My brother knew for a year that he was dying. Initially he went on a keep-fit binge helped by one of his four sons, Charlie. He fought for life, observing a rigid diet and pushing himself in the gym. He and Charlie spent hours at it.

Alexander was a handsome chap, an elegant batsman, a fast skier, a cool entrepreneur. He was most unlike the prophet Simeon, except in one regard. Halfway through that year of terminal illness, he was presented with his first grandchild, a son for Fred and Emily.

We were all thrilled. Alexander took little Ludo up into his arms, just as Simeon had held another infant two millennia earlier, and from that day he seemed to accept his fate. He did so in the manner of David Gower strolling

The fitness regime softened. Friends gave him a last round of golf. Two weeks before he died, he held a goodbye party in his Northamptonshire garden. I drank far too much wine (a French rosé called, of all things, Whispering Angel) and burst into tears.

Alexander took me gently into the hall and calmed me down, acting the big brother he had always been. Though he was not particularly churchy, his last words to me were a calm ‘See you on the other side.’ And then he headed back into the garden, wincing a little with the pain, smiling encouragement as he was hailed by the party throng.

Like Simeon, my brother was saying, ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ In that grandchild, his eyes saw their salvation. My novel Nunc! (as in Nunc Dimittis) imagines Simeon and friends in Herod the Great’s Jerusalem.

It is bookended by a modern story of a dying Englishman. The book is dedicated to Alexander and to darling Penny.

One last thing. The publisher is Constable, which is part of the enterprise formerly known as ‘Western-PublishingHachette International, Geneva’.

The circle is complete.

Nunc! by Quentin Letts is out on 3rd April

Quentin, 7, Alexander (d 2021), 11, Penny (d 2017), 13, and Melinda, 14, in 1970

Murder in the Wild West

When John Cornwell investigated the slaughter of three Devon siblings 50 years ago, Ted Hughes tried to stop him

On a Tuesday morning 50 years ago – 23rd September 1975 –the bodies of three unmarried siblings were found on their idyllic farm in North Devon.

They were the last surviving members of an ancient farming clan, the Luxtons of West Chapple Farm, near the village of Winkleigh. For days, the denizens of the West Country were aghast at fresh media revelations of the gruesome violence and strangeness of the case.

Alan Luxton, 55, dressed in pyjamas, was found in the farmyard. The elder brother Robbie, 65, fully dressed, and his sister Frances, 68, wearing nothing but a flimsy nightdress, were found lying amid the windfall apples in the orchard.

Each had his or her head blown off from above the nose. Robbie had deep cuts around the cheeks and mouth; Frances had a freshly broken leg.

Local gossip talked of a long-term family feud, a broken betrothal, sexual ‘funny business’ and mental-health issues. The farm had been tended with methods harking back to the Victorian era.

Over several months, I interviewed neighbours of the ‘tragic trio’, as the locals called them. I traced distant

members of the family, including one who had worked out a family tree dating back to the 16th century. The police, led by the improbably named Chief Inspector Proven Sharpe, were helpful.

The coroner’s inquest at Okehampton issued a verdict of a family suicide pact: Alan shot himself first. Then Robbie killed his sister, probably with her acquiescence, before killing himself.

The Luxtons were reclusive and thrifty to the point of outlandish eccentricity. Who but Frances Luxton would ask for a

Above: Robbie and Frances Luxton with their parents, 1914

Left: Alan Luxton, aged 4

single shoelace in the village shop? Who but Robbie Luxton would dock a labourer’s wages for helping himself to an orchard apple?

Then there was Alan, who would routinely wear nothing but a sack around his middle, secured with binding twine. In the 1950s, Alan had got engaged to a

West Chapple Farm, 1975. Right: Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-98)

local woman. He wanted his share of the family land and savings to start a new life. But the elder two refused to part with his proportion of the farm. The betrothal was called off and Alan fell into a manic-depressive illness.

Economies to the point of excessive meanness had begun with their ancestors in the 1880s, during a farming depression linked with the lifting of tariffs on food products from overseas.

For the three Luxtons, a more recent economic blow fell with the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which encouraged subsidised overproduction, leading to ‘butter mountains’ and ‘milk lakes’.

The surpluses created impossible conditions for many small farmers in the years immediately before the Luxtons’ deaths. As one farmer put it, ‘A calf was worth no more than a Mars bar.’

I wrote an account of the tragedy, Earth to Earth. But, two weeks before publication, in September 1982, the poet Ted Hughes led a campaign to stop the title’s release. Hughes was a neighbour of the Luxtons, owning a small farm next to their land.

Hughes believed that the Luxtons had been pressured to their deaths by what he called the North Devon Troglodyte –the local community – which undermined and oppressed those who failed to fit in. This troglodyte possessed an ‘immunity system’, he speculated, like killer cells, destroying misfits as if they were cancerous growths.

Hughes believed that my book would expose several locals to the same fate as the Luxtons. Their loss of privacy would rob them of immunity to the Troglodyte, forcing them to a nervous breakdown or even suicide. He pursued me with phone calls and letters.

In the meantime, a farm worker accused me of making up my interview with him. The publisher appointed a firm of lawyers to fact-check the book, and it came through clean. It was to win the

Left: 1700 area map. Right: Alan, aged 20, 1941. Below: Frances and Robbie, Bude, 1926

Gold Dagger award for non-fiction.

None of the informants who had appeared in my book ever suffered as a result of publication, I later discovered.

Reviewing the Luxton case half a century on, I question, in an afterword, the suicide-pact version. With the aid of fresh forensic perspectives, I argue that, on that night of horror, the younger brother, Alan, murdered his sister, and the elder brother then murdered Alan. I also review the pressures that led to the night of violence.

In the light of current climate-change anxiety, I am more conscious of the long-term impact of atrocious weather on generations of farming families, and the Luxtons in particular.

The latter decades of the 19th century endured a series of extreme weather events in the West Country.

S G Kendall, a West Country yeoman farmer, kept a detailed diary of typical weather for five years from 1879. The persistent rain was accompanied by ‘a damp, dark, cold atmosphere, which struck a chill almost into one’s bones, bringing ruined crops with widespread devastation in their train’.

for a decade; 700,000 agricultural workers abandoned farming in the 1880s and 1890s, bound for the cities or abroad.

Dependence on climate, subjection to its vagaries and an awareness of its far-reaching repercussions were central to the Luxtons’ lives, as with all farming families. Hit by an accumulation of misfortunes, they stayed on the land rather than leave or risk investment by borrowing to upgrade to ‘higher farming’.

Their story is a saga of stringent adaptation, like a closing fist, for sustainable survival over three generations. Their withdrawal from the community and into subsistence farming, in late-19th-century style, had the power of a curse.

In the original edition Earth to Earth, I tended to blame neighbours for the Luxtons’ isolation. Should they not have offered more assistance to avert the tragedy? It is clearer to me in retrospect that help was available, if only the Luxtons had been prepared to accept it. Ted Hughes’s theory of the local community as a menacing troglodyte was no more than a grotesque fantasy.

Another farmer diarist, George Rope, describes the floods that summer:

Ted Hughes’s theory: the local community was a menacing troglodyte

‘Two-thirds of the hay and clover spoiled … On 22nd July, we had the greatest flood I can ever remember.’ Cows drowned, houses flooded and people travelled by boat from farm to farm.

Bad weather and disease carried away five million sheep in England during that period. The year 1881 brought a blizzard for 48 hours. Disastrous weather continued

How does one assist troubled families when withdrawal and isolation are survival strategies? The seeds of anger, despair and ultimate violence were sown the day Alan announced his engagement – and he became a threat, in the view of Robbie and Frances, to the family’s fragile fortunes. Yet marriage might have meant hope and security for the Luxton family.

Had Frances, Robbie and Alan understood the looming nemesis stalking them down the years, long before Alan’s betrothal, they might well have agreed with the rural writer Richard Jeffries’s sombre reflection in his Story of My Heart (1883):

‘The truth is, we are murdered by our ancestors. Their dead hands stretch forth from the tomb and drag us down.’

Earth to Earth: The Lives and Violent Deaths of a Devon Farming Family: A True Crime Classic Revisited by John Cornwell is out on 10th April

And is the most tremendous tale of all true?

The Easter story is convincing because the details are so humdrum a n wilson

The obliqueness – the sheer, understated character – of the New Testament accounts of the Resurrection makes them powerfully disturbing.

True, Matthew’s Gospel tells us that when Jesus died, the tombs of Jerusalem opened and the holy dead arose, like characters in a canvas by Stanley Spencer (Matthew 27:52). Matthew also has an earthquake occurring at the time of the Resurrection of Christ (Matthew 28:2).

But you would expect the other Gospels to have much more of this sort of thing, especially since they were written decades after the events described. There had been plenty of time for a tall story to grow.

Instead, we watch a tall story shrinking to understatement. The oldest of the Gospels, Mark, ends with women going to the tomb, and finding it empty.

They ‘ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (Mark 16:8).

It is hardly the story you would make up, if you were trying to start a new ‘world religion’ and persuade people that the founder had risen from the dead.

And this is a Gospel, probably written in Rome, whose first audience were friends with Alexander and Rufus (Mark 15:21), the actual sons of the North African man who had helped Jesus carry his cross – Simon of Cyrene.

Paul, on the road to Damascus, did not recognise the risen Jesus when he appeared in his vision. And John’s Gospel, probably written towards the end of the first century, has stories of the Resurrection where the witnesses don’t even recognise the risen Christ.

The first is of Mary Magdalene coming to the garden early in the morning and finding the tomb empty. When she sees Jesus standing there, ‘Supposing him to be the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you

have put him, and I will go and remove him” ’ (John 20:15).

Again, as with the story in Mark of the women running away, is that the sort of story you would invent if you wanted to persuade an audience that the Resurrection was really true? The other detail, lost on modern readers, that makes this account so strange is that, in Jewish courts, women could not give evidence. Their evidence counted for nothing. In Luke’s Gospel, therefore, we find the testimony of the women is dismissed as ‘pure nonsense’ (Luke 24:11), precisely because it comes from women.

In the final Resurrection appearance in John’s Gospel, the disciples are coming to land after fishing and find a mysterious figure on the shore of Lake Galilee, grilling fish on a charcoal fire. Again, they do not recognise him at first.

Only in the second Resurrection story in this Gospel does the story confront the reader unambiguously. The reader is put in the position of the apostle Thomas, Doubting Thomas, who was not present when the Lord first appeared. A week later, when Thomas is now present, Jesus comes again, and invites him to put his hand in the wounded side. It provokes the unforgettable confession by Thomas, ‘My Lord and My God’ (John 20:28).

The reply is equally unforgettable, ‘You believe because you can see me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’

A decade or so before John’s Gospel was written, Luke told the story of two disciples walking in deep dejection, after the death of Jesus, to a village outside

The claims are made more convincing by the fact that they are so quiet

Jerusalem. They are joined by a third.

Only when they reach the village, and ask the stranger to sup with them, does the revelation occur, and they hurry back to Jerusalem to tell the apostles – ‘How they had recognised him at the breaking of bread’ (Luke 24:35).

Christians are committed to the historical truth of their faith. These are not stories that are simply metaphors for the human race having ‘conquered death’ in some airy-fairy, ‘spiritual’ sense.

The claims are made more convincing, and certainly more disturbing, by the fact that they are so quiet.

If you were inventing the story, would you not be tempted to make the risen Christ appear to the High Priest or Pilate to dispel all doubts? Instead, puzzlement, and lingering bereavement, appear to have remained part of the experience.

Every year at Easter, the Orthodox Church expresses these profound experiences in the liturgy of the Fire. The faithful gather in complete darkness. Outside the church, a fire is lit and, from the fire, the Paschal Candle. From the Candle, other candles are lit and then, from the back of the church, forwards to the front, each person lights the candle being held by their neighbour, until the whole building is ablaze with light.

The other Christian churches, in the West, retain some of these ceremonies, and it is hard to imagine any more eloquent way of enacting the Gospel stories written down in the first century.

There is the conviction that an event in history certainly took place. The Resurrection is not just some symbol.

But, more than an event in the past, it continues to be an event in the experience of women and men, as they pass on their flickering candle flame to their neighbour.

‘Christ is risen!’ they say, and the reply is, ‘He is risen indeed!’

A N Wilson is author of Jesus

Bond’s Amazon adventure

As 007 ends up in new hands, Kate Grimond,

Ian Fleming’s niece, salutes the spy who lives for ever

An unpleasant infected toe led me to a small surgery in the British Virgin Islands.

‘We must lance this,’ I was told by the young doctor. As he prepared the vicious implement, we chatted about other islands in the Caribbean, and I mentioned that I had been to Jamaica, to the home of my uncle, Ian Fleming.

‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, ‘I love James Bond,’ and he proceeded to talk for 20 minutes about his favourite James Bond, his best moments in the films, the cars he coveted, waving the lancing dagger around like a conductor’s baton, before, at last, plunging it into the throbbing toe.

As someone with ties to the ‘brand’, I have found that this is a familiar experience, possibly even more so abroad than in Britain.

Mention a connection to James Bond and an animated and knowledgeable conversation follows. Attribute a character to the wrong book or film and you will be corrected forthwith.

In 2003, I attended an academic symposium at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. The Lilly Library there holds the Bond manuscripts.

The three-day event was named ‘The Cultural Politics of Ian Fleming’. It was attended by film buffs, literary critics, a biographer, dedicated Bond fans wearing Bond socks and professors.

Also there was a preacher, whose passion was Ian Fleming’s introduction to The Seven Deadly Sins, a book that had been Fleming’s idea, in which seven distinguished writers each write about one sin. The topics at the symposium

(27) ranged from the predictable via the abstruse to potty-training. It ended, I am sorry to say, in acrimony.

People hold very strong views on James Bond.

It was, therefore, no surprise that since Barbara Broccoli and her halfbrother, Michael Wilson, creators of the films and fierce guardians of the character of James Bond, announced in February that they were handing over the reins to Amazon, the writing on the subject has been voluminous and opinions forceful. ‘Oh no! Not Amazon.’ ‘Bond has to be British.’ ‘The end of an era.’

The Broccolis have received their fair share of criticism over the years – the casting of Daniel Craig was widely derided at the outset. But now, as they

Cubby Broccoli, Sean Connery, Ian Fleming and Harry Saltzman in 1962, the year Dr No, the first Bond film, was released

depart and in the face of Amazon’s hegemony, the thrust of the comments is ‘Nobody does it better’.

Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman bought the film rights for the James Bond novels from Ian Fleming in 1961.

Sir Nicholas Henderson, former Ambassador in Paris and Washington, remembered lunching with Fleming soon after the deal, and Fleming telling him with enormous pride that he had just sold the rights for £100,000.

The price being bandied about for the current transaction is a billion dollars

Dr No (1962), the first film, hotly followed by From Russia with Love (1963), were hugely successful, but it wasn’t long before litigation arose.

Irish film producer Kevin McClory sued Ian Fleming over the film rights in Thunderball (1965).

As the day for the court case approached, Fleming wrote to his friend and mentor William Plomer, ‘I am now winding myself up like a toy soldier for this blasted case with McClory that starts on November 19th and may last for as much as ten days.’

the reins to the mighty corporate Amazon. Barbara will go on to make movies, including another Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and to produce plays of her choice, which she will enjoy. Michael Wilson, over 80 and retired, holds what is probably the pre-eminent collection of photography in the UK, from which he lends widely. Why has it all lasted so long? Who can say? Perhaps Fleming struck a mythological seam, which

‘Bond in Motion’, a celebration of six decades of 007 vehicles, is currently at the International Spy Museum in Washington and ‘007 Science’ is at the Griffin Museum in Chicago. There are two Bond exhibits in the Alps but there is nothing in London.

People often ask that non-question: what would Ian Fleming make of it all? He was always one to look forward – an ‘early adopter’, whether it was of, say, scuba diving, in its infancy in his day, or a beautiful new machine.

Gilt-edged Bond: Dr No (1962) and No Time to Die (2021)

Although the parties settled then, the threat of further legal action from McClory did not entirely disappear until 2008 – not ten days, but 44 years later.

The achievement of Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, and Barbara’s father, Cubby, before them, is quite astonishing – six actors as Agent 007, 25 films, zillions of locations made famous, thousands of products whose sales have swelled as a result of their featuring in the films, unquantifiable general PR for the British Isles.

As the media industry has changed, the Broccolis have avoided other platforms and have stuck to a cinema release every few years. This has worked for them.

When the première of the last film, No Time to Die, scheduled for April 2020, was cancelled because of Covid, there was a ripple of alarm; it was one of the first omens that the pandemic was serious. The eventual showing at the Royal Albert Hall 18 months later, in September 2021, was a euphoric occasion, with cheers and applause when familiar lines and props made their appearance.

The family-minded Broccolis will give

the Broccolis have mined successfully ever since and for which we should thank them wholeheartedly. It has been fun.

And the future with Amazon, the gigantic retailer? Let’s hope it does not all go very downmarket.

Motor enthusiast that he was, he deplored the petrol engine –

‘Obviously a noxious and noisy machine, and I would gradually abolish it and replace it by some form of electric motor’ (1959). He would be fascinated by the sheer tech of Amazon and its ilk.

Fleming wrote 12 novels and several short stories, of which not many have been made faithfully into films. Characters, titles and action sequences have all been used. Could there be period TV or film productions more closely based on the books? This is often asked. Product placement would be sparse, and modern gadgets would go by the board.

There have been many ‘continuation’ Bond books by different writers, including Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd, Raymond Benson and Charlie Higson. None has been adapted for film.

Theme parks are mentioned. A case can certainly be made for an exhibit in the UK relating to the films and to Fleming, as at present there is nothing for a visitor to this country.

At the end of his short life (he died at 56 in 1964), he described himself as ‘the smallest and most profitable one-man factory in the world… Oh it’s all been the most tremendous lark.’ He certainly could never have imagined that when he wrote the following lines in Casino Royale (1953) of the very first meeting between James Bond and Felix Leiter, his American counterpart from the CIA, they still would be so warmly embraced today.

‘“My name’s Felix Leiter,” said the American. “Glad to meet you.”

‘“Mine’s Bond, James Bond.”’ They decide to order a drink, Leiter going for Haig-and-Haig on the rocks.

‘Bond … looked carefully at the barman.

‘“A dry Martini,” he said. “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large slice of thin lemon peel. Got it?”

‘“Certainly, monsieur.”’

As world villains abound, I suspect that James Bond will continue to fight them, with, it is sincerely to be hoped, Felix Leiter coming to his aid.

Kate Grimond is Ian Fleming’s niece

Town Mouse

Joy of stars in my eyes

tom hodgkinson

The sky at night made the news on 28th February, when all the other seven planets were visible at once.

It reminded me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his brutal schooling at Christ’s Hospital in the 1780s. The headmaster, James Bowyer, flogged his pupils mercilessly. He threw a copy of Homer at one boy so hard that it knocked his tooth out.

To escape these miseries, 16-year-old Sam would climb out of a window at night, lie on the lead roof and look upwards. He later wrote:

‘At eve, sky-gazing in “ecstatic fit” (Alas! For cloister’d in a City School, The sky was all I knew of beautiful.)’

We town mice cloister’d in the city know how the poet feels. Life is spent on pavements, on roads and in underpasses. Massive cranes and sinister glass buildings loom over us as we scurry about. To gaze at the stars in the evening would be a truly pleasant

pursuit. So I bought a pair of strong binoculars and a tripod.

Largely, I am afraid to report, my stargazing endeavours have been disappointing, mainly because the sky in London is just too light and cloudy. The starlight rarely penetrates the veil that covers the city.

The only otherworldly thing we get to see regularly with much clarity is the moon. Coleridge clearly enjoyed moongazing too. At Christ’s Hospital, he wrote a sonnet, To the Autumnal Moon. He hailed the moon as ‘Mother of wildlyworking visions’. I, too, gazed at it through my magnifiers for a few happy moments.

Go half an hour outside London, though, and you will be rewarded by a far more spangly sky. By luck I was in a Kentish village on the day when the seven other planets were briefly visible.

There were a lot of stars up there, too. Some of them are so far away that they no longer exist. My friend, an amateur

astrologer, showed us around: ‘You can see Venus clearly up there, and Mercury. The planets don’t twinkle – only stars do that.’ He showed us Orion’s Belt and the Plough.

And, yes, I felt even smaller and more insignificant than I normally do, and for a brief moment longed to be a country mouse again.

I long to learn more about the stars. I feel woefully underinformed. Until fairly recently – the 17th century – education included astronomy. The old Trivium consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric – intellectual skills. Then you would move on to studying the world via the Quadrivium, comprising arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Put them together and you get the seven liberal arts.

Still, there are plenty of brilliant stargazers around, and we’d do well to learn from them. My acquaintance Chris Lintott has an enviable job title: he is Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. He is very much not stuck in an ivory tower, and is evangelical about his subject.

As well as his Oxford job, he is 39th Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. He has recorded several lectures for this excellent institution, available free on the Gresham College website. It’s all part of their mission, ongoing since 1597, to educate the public for nothing.

One of Prof Lintott’s favourite themes is the unimaginable vastness of the universe and man’s relative unimportance. Advances in telescope technology have made astronomers realise that we’re even tinier than we thought we were, in relative terms.

‘The universe is really big,’ the Prof says. ‘We live on an ordinary star in an ordinary universe. When you look up, you should realise you’re looking at a tiny selection of a few hundred billion stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy.’

The stars, planets and moon remind us we are members of the cosmos. Sky-gazing returns us to a consideration of God’s creation and takes us beyond our self-built earthly caves.

The philosophical emperor Marcus Aurelius thought stargazing was good for the soul. He called the stars and planets ‘the hosts of heaven’ and praised ‘their orderly system, and their nakedness, and their purity, for there is no veil before a star’.

Whether you’re lying on a roof in the city or in a field in the country or looking through a telescope, night skies produce the healthy emotions of wonder – and humility.

And who knows? Like Coleridge, you may even experience an ecstatic fit.

Country Mouse

Feelgood romcoms make me feel bad

giles wood

I didn’t mean to go to see a matinée performance of Mad About the Boy, the fourth instalment of the Bridget Jones film series.

It was a misunderstanding. My sister had come to stay and Mary, wanting to give her a treat, had booked three seats in our luxurious local cinema, weirdly assuming I would want to come too.

My sister needed a treat because, like me, she suffers from seasonal affective disorder – in her case, coupled with perennial rhinitis and assorted chesty conditions triggered by living near Didcot in the Thames ‘Basin’. The word Basin says it all.

She is always a welcome guest in the neighbouring county of Wiltshire, where she can breathe some downland air and receive tea and sympathy against a barrage of booming – not from bitterns, but from the big guns of the nearby Salisbury Plain military training area.

Mary usually instigates these visits as we both find my sister’s company to be relaxing – dread word, with its connotations with Classic FM; indeed relaxing to an almost medicinal degree.

Could this be because, during her professional training as a youth counsellor, she learned how to defuse tensions characteristic of troubled teenagers from ‘problem’ families?

It’s as though a switch has turned off my own high-blood-pressure-triggered, Colonel Blimp-style outbursts and Mary’s histrionic tantrums. A soothing conversational balm is metaphorically applied, almost as she walks through the cottage door.

As a Henrietta Kissinger figure, she could do well to extend her services: couples’ conflicting points of view seem to resolve themselves in her presence, thus bypassing the need for mediation or arbitration.

Yet who is to know whether our disputes are just par for the course for married couples, or whether they are the result of our living on top of a ‘negative ley line’?

A local dowser has declared that a hidden water source, running beneath our row of terraced cottages, is a source of bad energy. He said that quarrelling, breaking out at the least provocation, would inevitably characterise the lifestyles of all the occupants in the five cheek-by-jowl dwellings above it.

One of our daughters, a teacher, recently had a ringside seat at one of our spats. She observed, ‘Nought to ten in under five seconds? My six-year-olds have better self-control and emotional intelligence than you guys.’

But what does my daughter really know about emotional intelligence?

I have always maintained that Bridget Jones was a poor role model for daughters. Witness the plumping for serial rotters, the reliance on alcohol to drown sorrows or salve broken hearts and the singing along to banal pop anthems in lonely bedsits.

The Bridget Jones series was not aimed at our daughters’ generation – and neither was Friends. Yet every 20-to-30something woman we know will happily watch both on repeat.

As the womenfolk headed for the car before the film, I told them what was what. ‘You’re all right, mate, as they say in common parlance. The deal is, I will drive you to the Parade Cinema and drop you off, so you don’t need to worry about parking. Then I’ll come back here and cook the chicken. And that will be a victory for common sense.’

‘No, darling!’ Mary said. ‘I’ve purchased the last three tickets. It’s a sell-out. It will be good for you to watch a feelgood film.’

Feelgood romcoms aren’t at all my cuppa. No special effects.

A billboard advertising the film in the cinema’s cocktail lounge confirmed my worst fears: ‘If you have a heart, you will adore this British movie.’ Well, that, in a nutshell, is my problem.

Richard Curtis’s ham-fisted gropes at my heartstrings have failed in the past, but maybe with a fresh director… I should keep an open mind. What I hadn’t reckoned on was being subjected to what felt like an AI-generated, formula-driven, cynically devised tear-jerker with one purpose in mind – to make money.

A clunky tear-jerker, at that – a series of tableaux and set pieces, designed to trigger a range of emotions. I haven’t felt so manipulated since standing in a line-up of small boys being medically inspected by Matron at my Denbighshire prep school on the Coed Coch estate, attendance at which has ensured I don’t have an emotional range.

As for Bridget Jones herself, what’s with the head-wobbling? Unless I missed her being appointed an unofficial ambassador for Parkinson’s, that head was wobbling more than Lady Penelope’s in Thunderbirds. And why was she walking like a penguin?

The film has two saving graces. One, it confirmed we were right to move to the sticks. At least we own a whole cottage.

Were we to have stayed in London, we couldn’t have afforded even a broom cupboard in Bridget’s ravishing but horribly cluttered fictional house on Hampstead Heath.

The second is, that, mercifully, there are no sightings of Leo Woodall’s buttocks. Leo plays Roxster, 29, the ‘boy’ about whom Bridget, 51, is mad.

We saw more than our fill of those buttocks in what Mary calls the ‘trampolining’ scenes of the second series of the (deeply enjoyable) White Lotus.

Verdict: it is a load of tosh. Yet I have to admit a cinema screen does concentrate the mind. You can’t multitask and it’s quite enjoyable to be hypnotised into silence, like a rabbit in headlights.

It would never happen at home.

‘If you’re happy and on antidepressants, clap your hands…’

All aboard for the train’s 200th birthday

The railways are one of Britain’s greatest gifts to the world. So why aren’t we celebrating their bicentenary properly? By Mary Kenny

Shouldn’t we be making more fuss about the 200th anniversary of the railway, which falls in September?

In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington launched the start of rail travel, which brought the world a social revolution – and a transport revolution.

Not everyone welcomed the invention of the train.

Tolstoy thought it the work of the devil – perhaps related to poor Anna Karenina’s suicide. The French historian Jacques Barzun claims the well-known painting by William Frith, The Railway Station (1862), alluded to the ‘promiscuity’ of rail travel, shocking Victorians. And Zola’s The Human Beast showed the tough working conditions of train drivers, when the locomotives were under steam. Monet’s painting Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) displayed the more ethereal aspect of the railway station.

and 2007) make the ‘iron horse’ of the old American railroad the focus of a gripping drama.

In the 2022 film All Quiet on the Western Front, there’s an amazing scene in the luxurious train carriage at Compiègne, where the German generals surrender to the French.

My favourite train flick is the 1932 Shanghai Express. Marlene Dietrich –asked if she’s married yet – smokily delivers the line, ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lil.’

Under the rubric of ‘Railway 200’, Southeastern trains are sponsoring an exhibition at Margate in July, which will later be held at Waterloo station, London.

than 20 clinics all over the country. The treatment, which involves inserting a tube in your derrière, is as yet only available privately – the NHS doesn’t consider haemorrhoids a priority (unkind to sufferers). One person in five has suffered from the affliction.

Graham Bason, eXroid’s 63-year-old founder, says that women are more embarrassed than men about admitting to these pesky piles. So more women are possibly untreated. Because it’s unmentionable in polite society, fewer people know about the treatments available.

A sedentary lifestyle is one of the causes of this malady. Airline pilots are particularly susceptible. Within the airline community, piles are referred to as ‘Nigels’ or ‘mushrooms’, though no one can quite explain the reason why.

Perhaps too embarrassing!

And rail brought about some wonderful architecture in urban railway stations, back in their glory days. It facilitated engineering geniuses such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It prompted a postal revolution, too, by its swift delivery of letters, so well illuminated by Auden’s poem Night Mail (1936).

There have been some terrific movies set on trains, such as the two enjoyable versions of Murder on the Orient Express, Hitchcock’s creepily compelling Strangers on a Train (1951) and his intriguing North by Northwest (1959) with Cary Grant.

Then there’s the fabulous 1938 production of The Lady Vanishes with Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. Even Some Like It Hot (1959) has a hilarious train sequence. And how about the beautifully dingy Carnforth Station in Brief Encounter (1945)?

Two versions of 3:10 to Yuma (1957

There are other events planned, though they look somewhat staid. More could have been made of the glamour of rail travel – and the train’s association with architecture, films and the arts.

Alas, probably the most notable talking-point among train travellers for ‘Railway 200’ will be the painful increase in rail fares.

We do like to converse about our ailments, but some are too embarrassing to air in public. ‘Please,’ begs a friend, ‘bear in mind the severity of the pain, discomfort and embarrassment. Tell people about it.’

He was referring to the condition of haemorrhoids, or piles, described as the second most embarrassing health condition. VD still leads the ‘most embarrassing’ charts.

A company based in Sandwich, eXroid, now offers an innovative electrotherapy treatment for piles. It has won the King’s Award for Enterprise for its endeavours and it runs more

Donald Trump uses the word ‘deal’ so frequently in speech that my Kentish seaside town of Deal should invite him to visit during his forthcoming state visit.

I’m not sure that the nice, liberal Deal residents and artistic gay community would be aligned with Mr Trump’s world view. But, as he’s put the word ‘deal’ on the map, he might as well be shown the map where the concept assumes physical form.

I often change my mind on matters weighty, and on matters trivial, too.

Now I’ve changed my mind again on the issue of hair dye. I pledged, a little while ago, to quit painting my hair purple and allow the natural grey to flourish.

As Jean-Paul Sartre tells us, being modern means being ‘authentic’, and grey hair in an oldie signals sincere authenticity. But then I grew bored with grey and found it dreary.

So I’ve turned myself into a Maureen O’Hara redhead. Inauthentic but cheerful!

Small World Miracle-worker filled a hole in my life

And now Mother needs a medical miracle, too jem clarke

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

Hope for the best; plan for the worst. Or so they say.

In my family, we never plan for the worst. Instead, we’re all just hoping for the best. Trauma is always tomorrow. We brush everything under the carpet.

And so we now have in the Clarke household two signs that Trauma Delayed has turned up, marked ‘Today’.

First trauma. In the early 1960s, a young civilian RAF secretary with Golden Age Hollywood aspirations shared an airbase lift with a Buddy Holly lookalike of a corporal.

I don’t suppose they sussed that, 64 years later, the typing-pool temptress would be declaring, ‘Sunday is panty-liner day.’ Or that she’d be converting her living room into an industrial laundry.

Second trauma. Upstairs, a hole, lurking under a never lifted carpet, has become an impassable chasm. Now, every night, I listen as my beloved old folks jolly each other along as they trudge over the hole.

Mother is now a decrepit

Evel Knievel. A hostage to inertia and luck, she swings and clumps across the canyon under the Axminster. Then she turns her crooked frame round and navigates one-eyed Father around the one inch of remaining board to the hole’s far left side.

‘Left a bit … right a bit,’ she says gently to him.

The hole has become a rich, allenveloping metaphor for the fear that has slowly opened up in my own psychological floor.

There is hope. Some days later, one of Mother’s friends happens on a floor-specialist joiner, in a queue for Casualty.

This genius joiner, with one yank, lifts the literal carpet under which we’ve been brushing our literal decay – and makes good. Within a day, all the

carpentry is completed. Because I made much of the connection between the house and my own structural integrity, I weep a silent tear and feel the reverie of near-spiritual renewal.

How buzzed I am when we get a phone call from a surgeon’s secretary. The surgeon can operate on Mother. But there is a considerable risk of doing more spinal damage to her tiny, misshapen body. But ultimately, he says, the choice lies with the patient.

I suggest to Mother, ‘It’s a bit like the floorboards. If the joiner can roll back the carpet and find that things aren’t so bad underneath…’

She snaps back, ‘I’m not having some

chippy apply his saw to my rectum, you damned fool.’

I say, ‘He won’t do the operation! I’m not being literal!’

The next day, she phones her 100-year-old pal and reports back to Father, ‘I said to her, “It either goes right and I wake up with a working bottom, or it goes wrong and I don’t need a working bottom.” ’

‘What did she say?’ I ask.

‘Nothing. She’s almost completely deaf now. But that’s what makes her a good listener.’

Later, I fall asleep to the sound of my parents shuffling smoothly across working floorboards.

Tune in to Radio Oldie, our new series of recordings

Charles Moore

Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, on her becoming Tory leader 50 years ago.

A N Wilson on Goethe’s genius. Roger McGough on the Liverpool poets and his new collected poems.

Matthew Norman on how he nicknamed Peter Mandelson ‘Mandy’ – and Mandy’s outraged response.

Literary Lunch recordings Victoria Hislop on Greek tomb-robbers.

Hugo Vickers on Lady Avon, Anthony Eden’s widow, and her reaction to the Suez Crisis.

Ben Macintyre the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

You can lead a boy to culture but you can’t make him think

The Scottish Tory party is suggesting lowering the school leaving age to 14.

My reactions are at war with each other. The main, and better, part of me is outraged. As an educator, I find it disgusting – throwing what will inevitably be working-class children back into society before they are anything like prepared for life in the real world.

Oh yes, we are told that they will have to continue in some kind of education or training; that the wee Scots will enjoy a ‘hybrid education that is better suited to their talents’, as Scottish MSP Russell Findlay claims.

But isn’t this just getting rid of the children who cause trouble in the classroom? Many children choose business or media studies as a GCSE option because they think it sounds grown-up and different. In the same way, won’t they choose to leave school – and become as bored and disillusioned as many of those children are by those ‘studies’?

Sending children (for that is what is what they still are) of 14 out to work isn’t far from sending them to Victorian factories or South-East Asian sweatshops.

And yet…

I have, once again, been panicking that I might be in line for a parental complaint. And if I get it, I might very well have to admit I deserve it. Even my colleagues, although they laughed and rolled their eyes, looked frankly nervous when I reported my misdemeanour.

I teach a boy whose laziness is beyond anything I have ever seen. He is not as bright as his mother believes (are they ever?) but, with some effort, he could pass his English and English literature GCSEs.

With only a couple of months to go before the final exams, I have had to admit to myself (and his mother) that there is no chance on earth he will succeed in the literature paper. But I’ve still been making an effort to push him on in language.

Until this week. I was step-bystepping the class through one of the language papers: explain, write an example, explain again, ask them to write their own examples … on and on it goes.

So I asked this young man a question.

The usual shrug; the usual blank stare.

Then more of the usual encouragement. ‘Look at that first paragraph,’ I urged. ‘Look at the first sentence. Find the one word that…’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You don’t want to what?’

‘I don’t want to read it.’

I was honestly stumped. Usually, in those circumstances, the child will make a cursory attempt to read and answer. I began to feel my blood boiling, but I was still under control.

I asked him why he came to school. He said he didn’t want his mother to be fined for his non-attendance.

‘So you love your mother?’ I asked. Yes, he does.

‘Excellent. So why don’t you love her a

little more and, as you’re coming here, make just a bit of effort and get some GCSEs?’

That shrug again.

I lost it. I did not shout and roar. I did not scream. But my voice did the scary (to me, never mind them) thing it does when I am really, really angry and dropped a couple of octaves.

‘Well, that’s fine. You’re right. You can wait for everyone else in this room to pass their GCSEs and go to work and pay their taxes, and you can sit on your arse for the rest of your life while they pay for your benefits.’

The boy stared at me. The class stared at me. I stared at the class.

The important thing when you know you have gone too far is to hold your nerve. Don’t let the enemy know for one moment that you know you’re in danger.

But if, at that moment, some Conservative Scotsman had come in and taken the boy away to work in a factory, I have to admit I would have been profoundly grateful.

‘He’ll grow into them’

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

Geeks shall inherit the earth

Gorgeous girls lose their attraction but Plain Janes are forever gripping

Being a great beauty for three or more decades can have its drawbacks.

Let’s say you start being a beauty at 15 and carry on till 48. By 48, you have got used to being swooned over and getting your way, entirely because of your looks.

No one could blame you for not having put much work into your personality as you went along.

And then you notice you have started to go off – and you wrongly attribute men’s failure to enthuse to the fact that you now have crêpy arms. It’s nothing to do with your arms.

Contrast two current widows from my own network. The first widow is Cynthia, so celebrated a beauty in younger life that jaws would drop open and cars almost crash when she walked along the King’s Road.

At 75, Cynthia is obviously no longer sending out sexual-signalling hormones – which nature turns off when you can’t reproduce – but she is still a classic corker to look at.

Despite being well-connected and moving in milieus with desirable singletons of her own vintage, she’s getting nowhere with her search for a new partner.

Philip, 75, would have fitted the bill. The top singleton widower in one of her circles, he lusted after Cynthia when they were young. But, 50 years later, when she made it clear she would now welcome an overture, he seemed disinclined to make one. He wasn’t ageist. So why?

The second widow, Bertha, 70, has never been considered attractive. The size of an upright fridge freezer – in both height and width – she has always been badly dressed. She’s always had unflattering hairstyles and glasses with cheap, plastic frames, which take up most of her face and magnify her eyes to an unnerving size.

But she’s always been a marvellous empathetic ‘sort’. Bertha has been snapped up by Philip. Why?

It’s a cautionary tale for current beauties such as Cynthia. Don’t get used to resting on the laurels of your looks. You need a few extra dimensions

to yourself, once the hormones stop signalling.

What seemed mysterious and enigmatic, when Cynthia was younger, in later life seemed more like vacuity.

And the expectation of being treated like a piece of Sèvres porcelain is no longer realistic when oldie suitors need to be heaved out of cars or chairs.

Bertha, by contrast, was so used to men not fancying her that, once she had arrived at an age where she was certain she was definitely past it, she found herself in a marvellous position.

how considerate the other is towards fellow guests. And having the other guests as shared references for discussion. A house party is the perfect hothouse to ‘force’ a relationship.

In these casual conditions, as Philip went to bed each night, he started to feel he could hardly wait to see Bertha at breakfast the next morning. By the end of the week, it had dawned on Philip that Bertha was his absolute soul mate.

She could just get on with straightforward conversations with Cynthia is lovely.

Bertha was horrified when Philip declared his suit. She couldn’t believe it and thought perhaps he had suddenonset dementia. Moreover, she dreaded his seeing her in the nude.

But Bertha is the full package

Cynthia would have also dreaded this, but only because of her crêpy arms, whereas Bertha’s entire body was problematic. But progress was obviously made, and at Bertha and Philip’s wedding their seven combined children sobbed with happiness.

Cynthia has been discombobulated by the surprise development. She’s fretting and wondering how she can develop a late-onset interesting personality. Might a book club do it?

attractive men. No eyelash-batting or saucy innuendos. Just lots of selfdeprecating honesty and well-considered talk about reading matter. And she had always been exceptionally kind.

It helped that Philip and Bertha were spending a week together as guests of a friend who had rented a sporting estate.

A standard getting-to-know-each-other courtship, with three-hour dinners at most once a week, would take four months to notch up 48 hours of exposure.

Yet, as guests under the same roof, you can notch up 48 hours of exposure in four days: sitting side by side on sofas; walking along riverbanks looking straight ahead, instead of at each other; eating three meals a day at the same table; observing each other’s table manners and

It’s not about Cynthia having an interesting personality. It’s about her developing the non-narcissistic skill of finding the interesting personality inside the possible new suitor – and learning how to communicate her appreciation of this personality. She can forget about pouting now.

For every thing, there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven; the meek shall inherit the earth. And the hideous will carry off the prize of the handsome heart-throb.

After a certain age, men worth their salt will not be looking for great beauties tilting about on high shoes and paying constant visits to hairdressers.

They will have much more fun and feel more of a bond with the capable and kind, jolly-hockey-sticks woman.

The Wizard Hookers of Oz

Western Australia is heaven: perfect weather, glorious countryside, white beaches and great restaurants.

But when we announced a trip to the mining town of Kalgoorlie, everyone expressed bafflement, even horror. Why? It’s miles. It’s Outback. You’re mad.

No, we weren’t. The skies, gum forests, vast wheatfields, cattle ranches, bush, silent and empty, were beautiful.

Kalgoorlie’s open mine – a vast hole in the ground half a mile deep, a mile wide and two miles long – was fascinating. From above, the diggers look like ants, diligently servicing super-ants (dump trucks), each taking three loads to fill.

Close up, both trucks and diggers prove to be the biggest in the world, four times the height – and width – of a man, with a truck tyre weighing five tons and costing £40K. They run 24/7, driven largely by women, with one driver jumping off as the next jumps on.

Every year, 15 million tons of dirt yield 25 tons of gold. All that human effort, suffering and expense to get hold of gold – an inessential metal, useful in dentistry, which glitters.

The Australian Gold Rush, set off by Paddy Hannan’s finding a nugget on the ground in 1893, engendered plenty of hopes, dreams, misery, madness and a

few fortunes. In ten years, Boulder, Kalgoorlie and surrounding towns had sprung up, with civic buildings, grand hotels, pubs and music halls.

Kalgoorlie is known for gold and brothels. Gold is still going strong, but today there is only one remaining brothel, Casa Questa, and that’s a museum.

Thirty years ago, its madam employed ten girls in two houses. Three years ago, she had two girls; today she has none. The combination of internet dating and miners now flying in and out, returning to wives and girlfriends, has killed the business.

Now she gives talks about the good old days and shows tourists two remaining bedrooms, with bondage gear laid out on the beds.

She told us brothels

out on their own. If they weren’t on hire to a man, she had to accompany them, or they stayed home. But they, and she, made serious money.

The ghost town of Broad Arrow once had a population of 15,000. It boasted schools, churches, a golf course, a library, eight hotels, two breweries, a hospital and a stock exchange. It now has a single inn, famous for its murderous past and obscene graffiti on every inch of the walls.

Today’s community of precisely eight people is held together by the publican, a delightful woman whose body is as covered in tattoos as her pub walls are with graffiti. She makes a great burger.

Kalgoorlie Goldfield, dug by monster trucks

She puts up with the licensing authorities’ insistence on her painting out the more obscene messages in the loos, she tells us with a shrug. Both she and her daughter work shifts on the super-pit dump trucks.

Prue Leith wrote Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom

Literary Lunch

15th July 2025 At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE

Lucy Moore on Christopher Gibbs: His World The antiques dealer’s life story from Chelsea in the 1960s to Tangier in the 2010s

David Hepworth on Hope I Get Old Before I Die Why rock stars never retire, from the bestselling author of Abbey Road

Philippa Langley on The Princes in the Tower The sleuth who tracked down the body of Richard III tackles another mystery TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). The price is £85 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30pm

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I Once Met Winston Churchill

In the last weekend of June 1959, I was an officer cadet at RMA Sandhurst, when I received a call from a close friend, Charles Spencer-Churchill.

He asked if I would like to come for lunch on Saturday and stay the night with his parents at Blenheim Palace. I duly set off from Camberley in my beautiful, rather ancient, Triumph two-seater sports car, with the roof down on this sunny day.

As I drove through the splendid wrought-iron gates in Woodstock, there was a crowd milling about on either side, and on seeing me they started cheering and waving their hats. Well, I thought, I’ve never been to a palace before – so maybe this is normal. I took off my cap and waved back enthusiastically, feeling a bit like Toad of Toad Hall.

There was a smattering of people all the way up the long drive, and they continued applauding me as I went slowly by. This is the life, I thought. Eventually I drew alongside the vast steps leading up to the palace. An elegant lady leaned over the passenger door.

She said, ‘Good morning. I am The Duchess of Marlborough. You must be Charles’s friend Nick Peto.’

Churchill’s signed photo for Nick Peto’s MP father

My mother, Lindy Runcie, liked clarity, even if her own stories proved to be all detail and no narrative.

She might launch into an anecdote featuring a man called Bert but then jazzimprovise her account so that it featured two or three other people called Bert, and it was only when she got to the end that you realised one of these Berts was a dog. Attending cultural events often involved going through the plot in advance so that she could be clear about the narrative and concentrate on the performance. This was particularly important

I had not looked in my mirror the whole way up the drive, and now I felt very small indeed. The great man got out of his car, and he put his arm round my shoulder as we went up the steps together. ‘You rather stole my thunder,’ he murmured, smiling. What a tremendous man he was. That whole weekend, Sir Winston, then 84, went out of his way to be kind to the young idiot who had waved back at his supporters. At lunch, he said, ‘I remember your grandfather Sir Basil and, more recently your father in the

backbenchers. Your father was one of only seven Conservative when he won North Devon off the Liberals. A fine achievement

That afternoon, Sir Winston

In the dining room are four enormous tapestries depicting the great battles of the War of

Oudenarde and the very bloody battle of Malplaquet.

He pointed out the First Duke of Marlborough, the battle formations and the topography, and explained how Louis XIV’s armies were defeated.

At one point, Sir Winston said, ‘Did either of you boys know that the first duke’s father was actually Sir Winston Churchill MP?’

We didn’t know that – but what a history lesson from the master – and what an unforgettable weekend. Nick Peto

Rude wit of Archbishop’s wife

when visiting the Royal Ballet because, as George Balanchine observed, there is no dance move that says, ‘This is my mother-in-law.’

Modern interpretations could confuse her (‘Why are they all dressed the same? You can’t tell them apart’). In her later years, she liked to provide her own comments and clarifications before, during and after a performance. At Barrie Kosky’s challenging production of Poppea at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, after some ghastly murders, the surviving characters expressed their relief.

In a dramatic pause, my mother, seated alarmingly near the conductor/ director, exclaimed in exasperation, ‘Why are they all masturbating?’

This is not the kind of observation you might expect

from the wife of Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I was embarrassed then, but now I look back with great fondness on my mother’s curiosity, enthusiasm and attack; her desire to embrace the new and to extract every ounce of enjoyment.

She was an enthusiast, which made her stand out from her more jaded, seen-it-all-before friends. Nothing ever passed her by.

This was a mixed blessing. As a musician, she had a gift for timing. Just before a performance of Hugo Wolf’s Lieder at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, as the audience went quiet before Simon Keenlyside sang Denk es, O Seele, my mother looked up from studying the programme. She had just discovered the composer’s unfortunate fate

after he had lost his virginity in a brothel.

‘What is tertiary syphilis?’ she asked.

The hall remained silent.

‘Mum, this is not really the time.’

‘Yes, I know, but what is it?’

‘I think it’s the final stage of syphilis. Heart problems, memory loss, personality changes, blindness, insanity...’

The accompanist’s hands were poised over the piano keys.

‘Well,’ she replied, just before the first notes were struck. ‘I only hope you don’t get it.’

By James Runcie,

London NW1, author of The Grantchester Mysteries, who receives £50

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

You can’t say that!

Joseph Connolly on the shocking quips of his youth, now gone for ever

Language never stands still. Sometimes, it shifts imperceptibly, though innovation can be quite abrupt – as with Americanisms which quietly sneak in, and then take over absolutely: ‘Can I get a coffee?’; ‘You guys’; ‘I’m good’ – all ghastly, of course.

Rather more interesting are the British phrases, utterances, idioms and expressions that used to be ubiquitous –now utterly gone.

• Penny for the guy! No children beg in the street any more – if they did, it would be for a tenner, minimum. Just as no scout will be in a hurry to offer his services for a…

• Bob a job.

• A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play. This wouldn’t have a hope. Nor would…

• Guinness is good for you! As for…

• Oxo gives a man man appeal. Well, I ask you. This slogan was said to be the source of Diana Rigg’s name, Emma Peel.

• I’m saving up for it. The young especially will find this intensely amusing. As they would the notion of maintaining…

• A stiff upper lip, opting instead for the loose flabby chin.

• The cheque is in the post. Usually a lie, though it did afford a bit of breathing space: impossible now. Continuing the money theme, no one now needs to…

Nowadays, alas, a phone is wedded to our souls. And so…

• I’m waiting in for a call will no longer wash.

• What’s on the other channel? From the days when you felt obliged to endure the less awful of the two programmes on offer. Now technology allows you to scroll through a few seconds’ worth of a thousand awful programmes.

• Any old iron? A street call from Harold Steptoe and chums, with their horses and carts, who paid you for junk. Now you pay the council to remove it.

• Star, News and Standard! A choice of three London evening papers on sale at every street corner … and now there’s none.

• Oh drat (!) – I’ve run out of ink. Ink, yes. For a fountain pen – from the days when people wrote letters, sealed in an envelope, which was then stamped – both procedures requiring copious licking. Then they would rush to…

• Spend a penny. Just as they no longer will be cadging…

• Pennies for the phone

• A shilling for the meter so they don’t have to…

• Break a note

• My watch has stopped – to explain lateness. Now you’ll be texted to warn you of lateness well in advance.

• I couldn’t find a phone that was working.

Catch the afternoon

. Ho bloody ho. Room for one more on top. So said the bus conductor, with his coin and ticket dispensers. He would then ask if you’d got anything

please. Gone the way of…

• Port and lemon. And…

• Gin and It. After a few drinks, he would tell her she was… Looking lovely tonight. Or something more direct. Any variant of this now occasions a call to the police.

• 20 Players, please. Quite apart from the health thing, the few bob for a pack of fags is now not much shy of £20. Which is why you no longer hear…

• Got a light?

• A photo never lies. Dear God – what with deepfakes and all the rest of the technological jiggery-pokery, it now does little else.

• Short back and sides. Although this is what the young constantly go for, they call it something else. And the barber won’t offer…

• Something for the weekend, sir? It’s just not like that any more.

• Innit marvellous? An expression of mock outrage, much loved by the hard-done-by. As was…

• Stone the crows! Also…

• Do me a favour! And…

• Stroll on! Not forgetting…

• I should cocoa! Because what you must never ever do is take a…

Old bean. Or… Old fruit or (mercifully)… Squire. Only ‘Mate’ lives on. And the Lord help you if you call anyone…

• Love or…

• My dear chap. In fact, I use this all the time. As I do… Pip pip!

Joseph Connolly owned the Flask Bookshop in Hampstead

Stone the crows! Tony Hancock

sister teresa

The Resurrection of Jesus – and Lazarus

The Gospel reading for Sunday 6th April is the story of the raising of Lazarus in its entirety.

It is, theologically speaking, highly complex, and neither do I have the scholarship nor is there the space here to explain it in full.

There is, however, a detail worth looking at closely: ‘[Jesus] cried in a loud voice, “Lazarus, here! Come out!” The dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with bands of stuff and a cloth round his face. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, let him go free.” ’ John 11:43-44

This is Christ speaking – indeed ordering – with authority.

Elsewhere in the Gospel (Matthew 7:28), he imparts knowledge with authority: ‘Jesus had now finished what he wanted to say, and his teaching made a deep impression on the people because he taught them with authority.’

His words are a comprehensive promise that the power of God reaches us all. And Christ’s power is divine power.

There is an obvious contrast between the raising of Lazarus (who will in due course die) and the Resurrection of Jesus. It is to be found in the differences between what happens to their grave clothes.

On the third day after Jesus’s crucifixion, ‘Simon Peter who was following now came up, went right into the tomb, saw the linen cloths on the ground, and also the cloth that had been over his head.’

The Raising of Lazarus by Jacob Epstein, 1948

With the Resurrection, Jesus is freed from death once and for all; the grave clothes are discarded and become irrelevant – whereas Lazarus, once he has been brought back to life, remains fully bound.

Jacob Epstein’s sculpture The Raising of Lazarus, in the chapel of New College, Oxford, has Lazarus tightly secured with linen bands. It is imposing not only because of its size (nearly seven and a half feet tall – slightly larger than

Memorial Service

life-size) but also because of its sense of strain: a life bound is no life at all.

There is a very strong sense of uncertainty and suspense while Lazarus waits to be cut loose.

He needs to be released, as though he were a prisoner. He is not in a position to free himself – he is swaddled as though he were a baby, and his arms are pinioned behind his back. It will be the work of those around him to untie and liberate him: a community act.

Epstein has followed the Gospel description to the letter, with one exception: St John tells us that Lazarus has a cloth over his head.

Epstein deviates from this to striking effect. A cloth over the head of his statue would have resulted in an unpleasant appearance of spookiness, whereas the uncovered head gives a strong sense not only of great tension, but also of dignity.

General Sir Michael Jackson, GCB, CBE, DSO, DL (1944-2024)

The King attended the memorial service for General Sir Michael Jackson, former Chief of the General Staff, at the Royal Memorial Chapel, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The Duke of Kent and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester also attended.

The Chaplain General, the Rev Canon Michael D Parker KHC CF, took the service.

A tribute from the King, Colonel-inChief of the Parachute Regiment, Jackson’s regiment, was read by Lieutenant General Sir Hew Pike: ‘How much he was respected by the whole Army and indeed the whole nation. He was a true “soldiers’ soldier”, of indomitable spirit.’

The address was given by Rev Dr Colin Heber-Percy (whose new book is reviewed on page 57), who gave Holy Communion to Sir Mike in his hospice.

Quoting Rousseau, Dr Heber-Percy said, ‘“What makes our species prosper is not so much peace, as liberty.” Easy to say, but it falls to men like Mike to make that calculation between peace and liberty – on the ground and in the moment. Over and over again. What price liberty?’

Sir Hew Pike paid tribute to Jackson’s time in Bosnia in 1995: ‘The “bulldog” general also earned the respect of the “bad guys” – many of them de facto war criminals – with whom he was

obliged to share vodka over many long hours of “jaw-jaw”.’

Sir Hew saluted Jackson’s service as Commander of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in the Kosovo War, 1998-99. In 1999, Jackson heroically refused to obey an order from American General Wesley Clark to isolate the Russians at Prishtina Airport. Jackson reportedly told him, ‘I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.’

The Choir of the Royal Memorial Chapel sang Introitus from Mozart’s Requiem. The Band of the Coldstream Guards played Elgar’s ‘Nobilmente’ – the Slow March of the Parachute Regiment.

The hymn was ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’. The service closed with the Last Post, Reveille and the Airborne Forces Prayer.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

A handy tip for arthritic fingers

Might heated mittens heal my deformed digits?

dr theodore dalrymple

Natural reticence or modesty discourages me from bringing public attention to my own ailments.

But it is only human to find papers in medical journals that are of personal interest. So my eye was caught by a trial of heated gloves in the alleviation of osteoarthritis of the hands, reported recently in the British Medical Journal

Such osteoarthritis is prevalent. According to the introduction of the article in the BMJ, 16 per cent of women between the ages of 40 and 84 suffer from it, and 8 per cent of men. Since the prevalence rises greatly with age, we may assume the figure for the old is greatly in excess of these figures.

In my case, the proximal joints of my index and middle fingers are deformed. Both pain (or, not to dramatise, discomfort) and weakness impede my grip, such that opening bottle tops is now much more difficult for me.

My handwriting suffers also and begins to look like that of an old man –I hasten to add this is due only to my weakened grip of my pen, not to any wavering of the mind or loss of co-ordination.

A rheumatologist colleague once achieved fame by demonstrating that the ring finger was often spared osteoarthritis, if adorned by a wedding ring. I don’t suppose that this will be enough, though, to make marriage fashionable once more among the young. Various remedies or palliatives have been suggested. Some swear by turmeric, some by ginger and yet others by galactosamine. The scientific evidence in their favour is weak, but low average benefit may hide some cases of great benefit.

Mudpacks and anti-inflammatories have been tried, but whatever benefit they bring, they are no panacea. Heat treatment has also been advocated, on the reasonable grounds that most people report a worsening of symptoms

in the cold: but, again, scientific evidence is lacking.

Researchers in Copenhagen tried electrically heated mittens in a controlled experiment. Patients with osteoarthritis – of some severity – of the hands were assigned such mittens, or similar mittens that appeared to be electrically heated but were not. This was not entirely satisfactory, because it is difficult to disguise whether or not mittens are actually electrically heated.

Participants in the experiment were asked to wear such mittens for at least 15 minutes a day for six weeks.

The results were a little disappointing. Pain was somewhat – and statistically significantly – reduced in those who wore the electrically heated mittens. Whether the reduction was significant in any other way than statistical was not clear. Hand grip was not improved.

The authors thought that those who had worn the heated mittens might have benefited from the placebo effect,

whereas those who wore the unheated mittens had not.

But it was interesting that the former kept their mittens on longer each day than the latter, which suggested that they felt some benefit from them, psychological or not.

And, in a condition that is chronic, a treatment lasting only six weeks is not much. Heated mittens worn over many months might yet provide much relief and even slow the progression of the condition. Further research is required, though whether it will ever be carried out is questionable.

Prevention is better than cure. But, given that a propensity to osteoarthritis is significantly genetic – including which joints are likely to be affected by it – and that one cannot choose which genome one is born to, what is desirable may not be possible.

It raises an interesting philosophical question. Can the impossible be desirable?

‘It’s your first holiday in 20 years. Relax, Henry’

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

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Very good Latin, Jeeves

SIR: A N Wilson makes the point in his piece on P G Wodehouse (Oldie Man of Letters, March issue) that clergy, like all his other characters, are ciphers in his plan to take nothing seriously. This is famously borne out in ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’, in which Bertie and his pals, during a weekend in a country house, open a book on which local parson will preach the longest sermon.

So popular was this short story that it was translated into eight different languages in one volume. My father, a Classics lecturer, supplied the Latin version. Sadly, he was not required to translate ‘What ho’.

He rendered ‘Shift-ho, Jeeves’ as ‘Nonne abeundum, Jaevius.’ Tom Stubbs, Surbiton, Surrey

My Victorian Dad

SIR: I join Mary Kenny (Postcards from the Edge, February issue) in celebrating a father born into Victorian England. A succession of two generations of elderly fathers has given rise to something I believe to be quite unusual.

My father was born in the 19th century (1898), I was born in the 20th century (1944) and our daughter was born in the 21st century (2002). Dr Colin Lea, Hampton, Middlesex

Joy of string pants

SIR: Mary Killen (February issue) extols the possibility of string pants. I attach two versions of those extant from Brynje, for her to adjudicate on sex appeal.

Sincerely, Peggy Frith, Oxford

Draughty?

String pants

‘They’re not Poohsticks – they’re poos’

Uncle made Beatle’s garden

SIR: Re Neil Titley’s piece about George Harrison’s garden (April issue): my great uncle Sir Frank Crisp designed this garden! It includes a grotto and a sized-down copy of the Matterhorn –among other peculiar Edwardian things, such as a grotto.

My aunt once knocked on the door and was invited to tour the garden; this was about 20 years ago.

It is apparently an enormous and very beautiful garden and we are lucky it’s kept up by George Harrison’s widow.

I would love to see it, but don’t have the bravery of my aunt. However, my father, Sir Edward Crisp Bullard, did –and in my family we have a wonderful book of early photos of this garden.

Yours, Polly Hill, Grantchester, Cambridge

Fleming’s Amazon search

SIR: Apropos the reference in The Old Un’s Notes (April issue) to the centenary of Percy Fawcett’s ill-fated expedition to

the Amazon rainforest, readers may be unaware of a subsequent expedition, one of whose objectives was to establish what had happened to the erstwhile explorer. Peter Fleming, older brother of Ian, replied to an agony-column advertisement in the Times seeking members to join the follow-up

expedition. Fleming senior’s application was successful, and he was appointed by the newspaper to report on the expedition’s exploits.

In 1933, he published Brazilian Adventure (a new edition by Eland was published in 2023), his account of the hair-raising journey.

Peter Hill, Woking Surrey

‘You looked a lot bigger on your dating profile’

How to be interesting

SIR: Rachel Johnson (‘How to be interesting’, April issue) is spot-on about subjects for an interesting conversation. For some years now, I have opened proceedings with people I don’t know, at social events, with ‘So now. Tell me your story.’

And they invariably do. I hear surprising, shocking, tragic and amusing anecdotes, and go home with enough material for about four short stories, a couple of novellas and an acerbic poem or two.

Yours etc, Liz Wicken (aka Hattie Brantwood), Foxton, Cambridgeshire

Spy’s address book

SIR: I salute Penny Hancock and her random, analogue address book (‘Farewell, my lovely address

‘I wish we still carried coins’

book’, April issue), and her decision to retain it. My address book is similarly casual; GCHQ would be impressed.

My good lady once flipped through it, to discover entries such as ‘Ambulance Dave’, ‘B&Q Dave’, ‘Biker Dave’ and ‘Dave’. ‘Who’s Dave?’ she asked.

‘No idea’, I replied. Works for me… Regards,

Vivian James Wigley, Mackworth, Derby

Blasted Heath

SIR: Matthew Norman is jolly unfair to Allister Heath (Grumpy Oldie Man,

Not for nothing did Private Eye call him Mystic Mogg.

Neil Collins, former Daily Telegraph City Editor, London SW10

‘At the party, dear, remember the aim is social intercourse’ April issue). He provides endless entertainment and reminds me of the great William Rees-Mogg’s prognostications, which we followed avidly as a guide to the future.

All aboard modern trams

SIR: If Tom Hodgkinson (Town Mouse, April issue) wishes to celebrate the success of a modern tram system, he should visit Manchester, where they run along the streets very happily alongside cars, bicycles and pedestrians.

Clive Whittington, Bollington, Cheshire

History

The British Way of Death

A new book reveals how we handled the Grim Reaper in the Middle Ages david horspool

Historians see dead people.

Most of the time, history isn’t about death. It’s about past lives. But death, being even more common than taxes, makes a good subject for history.

How did our predecessors approach death? How did their attitudes change – to everything from funeral rites to mourning, memorialising and medicalising death – or not change, over time?

No Ordinary Deaths, a new book by Molly Conisbee, a fellow at the Centre for Death and Society (a new one on me) at the University of Bath, illuminates British experiences of death since medieval times.

The book sets itself the difficult task of pursuing the last days of those who died as they had lived, in obscurity.

We might think of Thomas Gray’s vision of ‘some mute, inglorious Milton’ or George Eliot’s ‘number who lived a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs’ – except that most of Conisbee’s subjects didn’t get anything as fancy as a tomb.

She writes about the 19th-century Southwark nurse who also worked as a ‘watcher’ – a ‘comforter for the dying’. In Britain, up until the later-20th century, death was – and in other countries it still is – what the French historian Philippe Ariès called a ‘public ceremony’.

He quoted a late-18th-century French doctor who complained that, as death approached, ‘Tout le monde s’assemble autour du malade’ (‘Everyone gathers around the sick person’).

One of the watcher’s duties, Conisbee says, might have been ‘gathering relevant neighbours or religious advisers to ease death’. Rather alarmingly, she connects this with a story her grandmother told her from the 1930s, of a woman in Ireland who took this ‘easing’ role rather literally, and ‘expedited an [apparently lengthy] dying with a smothering’.

Don’t tell Kim Leadbeater, the MP behind the Assisted Dying Bill.

Jessica Mitford, Sunset View Cemetery, California, 1963

If our own hangups with death centre around shying away from it, or wondering whether to hasten it, did our ancestors cope any better?

In the Middle Ages, when life was much more precarious, there was no prospect of hiving the dying off into hospitals, hospices and nursing homes, and ‘easing’ death ran the risk of mortal sin.

bodies than our ancestors were, which isn’t wholly a bad thing.

Some of Conisbee’s examples remind us of the past relish for public execution and, after the passing of the Murder Act in 1752, for public dissection.

Under the Act, the bodies of those condemned and hanged for murder could be turned over to anatomical study – both as a practical measure for scientific purposes (though the demand far outstripped the supply) and as an additional punishment, extended even beyond death itself.

But the consolations of religion didn’t necessarily get the balance right either. The medieval church has been described as ‘a cult of the living in service of the dead’ – all those chantry chapels and masses for the souls of the departed.

But the reverse is true, too. Bequests, mostly in property, to the medieval church were its lifeblood, and such things as church ales or collections were ‘pin money by comparison’. The dead paid for the living.

In her example of a medieval ‘ordinary’ death, based on the work of Eamon Duffy on the Devon parish of Morebath during the Reformation, she speculates about the last rites.

The miller’s wife Luce Scely – thought to have died at the same time as Queen Mary, who had reintroduced Catholic observance – could have been buried under the new rituals or the old.

Touchingly, her name associates her with the feast of St Lucy and candlelight – a December day still observed in Scandinavia as a winter light festival.

Protestant reforms had come down hard on such fripperies as candles. So if Luce had gone to her grave under the newer dispensation, none would have lit her way.

We are more squeamish about dead

In The American Way of Death (1963), Jessica Mitford compared the rampant commercialism of the funeral industry in the United States with its comparatively modest version in Britain.

She interviewed a no-nonsense British undertaker (not a funeral director), who thought lavish ‘caskets’ ‘perfectly awful-looking things’. He said, ‘I honestly don’t think I could keep a straight face’ if he had to describe the deceased as ‘your loved one’.

Mitford was reassured that American funerary excess wouldn’t catch on in Britain. To some extent, her confidence has been vindicated, though Americanstyle caskets are pretty common these days, and you can’t move for ‘loved ones’.

But the origins of the American consumerist death can be traced to Victorian England, where ‘Jay’s London Mourning Warehouse’ in Regent Street advertised itself as providing ‘the very best goods … made up in the best taste and the latest fashion’.

Jay’s biggest rival, also on Regent Street, was Peter Robinson’s Mourning Warehouse, where a young John Lewis cut his teeth.

Dying never goes out of style.

No Ordinary Deaths by Molly Conisbee is out on 1st May

Review of Books

Spring round-up of the reviews

Spring has sprung

Do we need self-help books? Lucy Lethbridge RIP the lavish book launch – John Walsh Joy of audio books – Charlotte Metcalf

Biography & Memoir History Politics & Current Affairs Art & Architecture Music & Poetry Fiction Reprints Crime & Thrillers

Spring 2025 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Issue 71 Spring 205

Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson, by Paul French

Spring is the Only Season: How It Works, What It Does and Why It Matters, by Simon Barnes

Constellations and Consolations, by Sarah Sands

Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words, by Michael Owen

Our Evenings, by Alan Hollinghurst

Dickens the Enchanter, by Peter Conrad

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration, by Stephen Malin

Get Carmen: In Court with George Carmen QC, Britain’s Most Feared Lawyer, by Karen Phillipps

Hope: The Autobiography, by Pope Francis

The Madness of Courage: The Exceptional Achievements of Gilbert Insall, by Tony Insall

Story of a Murder, by Hallie Rubenhold Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

Editorial Team: Sam Leith, Harry Mount, James Pembroke, Tim Willis

Editor: Charlotte Metcalf

Design: Jo Goodby

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

New Books for New Beginnings

As our delightful cover by Bob Wilson declares, spring, with its joyful romantic essence, is upon us. Sparkly, balmy days have drawn many of us out of hibernation into the sunshine, often with a book in hand.

Accordingly, our Spring Edition is packed with irresistible new books to savour under a tree as the days lengthen and warm.

Memoirs include those by Angela Merkel reflecting on her premiership, Cher giving us glimpses of her gloriously rackety life and Bill Gates delivering a ‘lament for a bygone America’. There are biographies of a rich assortment of people from Dorothy Parker and Marie Curie to the Brothers Grimm, while history books range from Nazi Germany and Hungary to Leningrad, the Vatican and Ancient Rome.

Anne Tyler fans can find her new Baltimore novel featured in our fiction pages, alongside the eagerly awaited new book from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the latest from Jonathan Coe, Giles Foden, Bernard Schlink, A L Kennedy and more.

As well as Simon Jenkins’s Short History of Architecture, we have the sumptuous London’s Lost Interiors and Jewish Country Houses, while art books cover Fuseli, Mondrian and Gilbert & George.

Philip Marsden’s clever and unsual Under a Metal Sky lands on our Miscellaneous pages, amongst book on eclectic subjects from loyal dogs and the Dead Sea to Hollywood’s worst movies and how the wireless changed Britain.

John Walsh laments the passing of an era when authors were feted with glamorous book launches, while Lucy Lethbridge wonders if self-help books aimed at oldies are hitting their mark.

Michael Barber picks the best crime books and thrillers while our round-up of reprinted classics is always a reminder that beautifully repackaged books can be keepsakes for booklovers to treasure.

Charlotte Metcalf

Lethbridge asks if

FREEDOM

MEMOIRS 1954-2021

ANGELA MERKEL

Macmillan, 720pp, £35

Once described as the ‘chancellor of the free world’, Merkel’s reputation has suffered since leaving office.

The Times’s Oliver Moody found Freedom ‘has two central purposes in tension with each other. The first is a desire to set the record straight.’

Memoir & Biography

CHER

THE MEMOIR PART 1 CHER

HarperCollins, 432pp, £25

Merkel is frustrated by distortions of her time in office. But the memoir’s more interesting mission is an apparently ‘sincere effort to fashion a self-critical coherence out of a life that stretches from singing state-approved Marxist anthems round the campfire as a teenager in East Germany to inviting George W Bush round for a spit-roasted wild boar... Freedom is quite unlike any other political autobiography I’ve read ... closer in spirit to the 19thcentury Catholic theologian John Henry Newman’s Sua, a solemn and searching defence of his integrity on his conversion from Catholicism to Anglicanism.’

The London Review of Books Christopher Clark noted that in 16 years Merkel worked with four American and French presidents, two Chinese and Russian ones and five British prime ministers. Her ‘low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe.’

Another admirer, Jacob Heilbrunn, said in the LA Times ‘the only modern German chancellor to depart office voluntarily, she exemplifies restraint and sobriety ... at a moment when authoritarianism is on the rise, her memoir could not be timelier.’

This long-awaited memoir’s first part survived seven years of rewrites and fired ghostwriters.

It tracks Cher’s story from her greatgrandfather railroad worker, via a grandmother 13 years older than Cher’s mother, her spell in an orphanage, extreme poverty (shoes held together with elastic bands), mid-60s chart success and up to the break-up with her abusive, controlling husband Sonny Bono –Part 2 expected in November.

Young Cher is ‘bouncy, guileless, sardonic and flip,’ thought the Guardian’s Emma Brockes, ‘as keenly sensitive to her own absurdity as to that of others … a fun companion on a journey that, beneath the jolly exterior, contains a lot of dark and frightening episodes.’

The Telegraph’s Neil

spousal abuse, alcoholism, gambling and larceny.’

In the Independent, Adam White thought the ghostwriter (‘oddly stilted, no suspense, no silliness’) flattened a promising tale about Salvadori Dali, an orgy and fishshaped vibrator.

‘The anecdotes come at you so fast they verge on the almost parodic,’ Hadley Freeman delighted in the Times, from her drug-addled father burning down the family home to a teenage Cher singing backing vocals for Phil Spector. ‘Is there enough paper in the world to contain a life this jaw-dropping? Judging from this, the answer is no.’

SOURCE CODE MY BEGINNINGS BILL GATES

Allen Lane, 336pp, £25

Today the multibillionaire philanthropist is a ‘mellow figure’, wrote Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. ‘But in his teens and early twenties, he was, history records, an obnoxious brat.

‘Troubled, perhaps, both by his own memories and by the popular image of his younger self, Gates has produced a highly readable account of his “beginnings”, from birth up to Microsoft’s first flourishing win 1978.’ It is ‘more self-critical than boastful’ and ‘contains revealing vignettes of the titans of tech’ before fame hit.

Source Code is ‘refreshingly frank’, wrote the Guardian’s Steve Poole, expressing ‘genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout’. He tries to ‘redeem the past through understanding it better, a thing that one has yet seen Elon Musk or Zuckerberg attempt in public. That alone makes Bill Gates a more human tech titan than most of his rivals, past and present.’

s Richard Waters found the book ‘unusually personal and laced with self-awareness... replete with cliffhanger moments and revealing new details.’

Telegraph’s Tom Knowles found the book ‘a lament to a bygone America: it’s as filled with nostalgia as Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie... It immerses us fully in how it felt to be a middle-class child in the 1960s Seattle suburbs, and a decade on what it was like to be at the forefront

Merkel: walking away in 2021, after 16 years

Cher at the 1973 première of Last Tango in Paris

Memoir & Biography

THE BROTHERS GRIMM

A BIOGRAPHY, ANN SCHMIESING

Yale, 360pp, £25

The Grimm Brothers’ Kinder und Hausmarchen is one of the most widely translated titles in human history.

But as this new biography tells us, the Spectator’s Philip Hensher found the fairytales weren’t the half of it: ‘The brothers were primarily philologists, concerned with the meaning and history of words, and their investigation of German folk culture, narratives, myths and legends was rooted in an austere examination of language.’

Despite rackety careers dependent on the whims of various princepatrons, the Grimms ‘achieved a colossal amount in setting cultural and linguistic analysis on a solid footing’, and the book is ‘a reliable account’ of their careers, ‘admirably knowledgeable about the intricate world of the princely states the pair negotiated, and the intellectual milieu of idealistic German nationalism that is now so hard to disentangle from its barbaric subsequent developments.’

The Telegraph’s, Camilla Cassidy found Schmiesing had ‘fleshed out’ ‘Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm as individuals with different temperaments and scholarly enthusiasms.’ Cassidy judged it a success ‘energised by her enthusiasm and affection for her subjects.’

There was a very faint note of disappointment in Michael Dirda’s Washington Post review: for all her admirable scholarship, he found Schmiesing facing an ‘immense challenge’ as, though the br0thers ‘lived through tumultuous times, their own lives were remarkably dull and relatively void of incident.’

I’LL NEVER CALL HIM DAD AGAIN

CAROLINE DARIAN TRANS.

STEPHEN BROWN Leap, 224pp, £16.99

Darian is the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot, the woman drugged by her husband and filmed being abused by more than 50 men. Gisèle’s druginduced memory losses, made her children suspect she had Alzheimer’s.

When Dominique Pelicot was arrested in a supermarket for secretly filming up women’s skirts, police found thousands of images and videos of his wife being abused.

In the Guardian Agnès Poirier found the book offered ‘a compelling perspective on what sexual abuse does to a family ... and how victims cope and can fight back. It is a story of resilience, lucidity and courage, told with force.’

Darian relates the facts ‘plainly and gradually’ in a ‘factual, legalistic tone’ found the New Statesman’s Anna Leszkiewicz, weaving in ‘memories of her father barbecuing, driving, hugging his grandson, cuddling the dog.’

Darian found the discovery was like being ‘hit by a bus, getting blown up by a mine, peering down a well, stumbling through a maze.’

‘Her book is written in hot rage,’ adds Leszkiewicz, ‘at her father for dehumanising her mother, for leaving the family in ruins, for refusing to admit what Darian believes ... that she is also a victim.’

ELEMENTS OF MARIE CURIE

HOW

THE GLOW OF RADIUM LIT THE PATH FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE

DAVA SOBEL

Fourth Estate, 336pp, £22

Sobel observes that Marie Curie is the only female scientist most people can name. Biographies abound.

To shed new light on such an iconic figure, Sobel, a bestselling writer of science histories, has interwoven her account of Curie’s life with those of 45 female scientists who passed through her lab.

Sobel ‘sets herself a monumental task,’ wrote Sophie McBain in the Guardian. A twice-Nobel-prize winner for research into radioactivity, friend of Einstein, mother of a Nobel-prize winning daughter, heart-broken widow, ‘there is much to cover before you even consider the women whose paths briefly crossed with Curie’s.’

Sobel ‘does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand the historical importance and context of Curie’s work, but her interior life remains largely mysterious.’

Kate Zernicke in the NY Times felt, heartbreakingly, ‘just how narrow and gloomy the path was,’ for women scientists. ‘With rare exceptions, the 45 women appear in Sobel’s book only as emanations. Sobel names her chapters for them but tells little of their stories. One, Irén Götz, is mentioned in only one sentence in a chapter named for her.’

The Guardian’s Laura Spinney liked how this ‘short and well-paced book’ allowed the reader to grasp how one experiment led thrillingly to the next, and to feel the sense of joy or dismay at the scientists’ results.

‘Their thirst for knowledge might have come close to an addiction, because even after they knew how toxic their workspace was, they were drawn ineluctably back into it.’

Caroline Darian (centre) at the trial with brother Florian and mother, Gisèle Pelicot

Memoir & Biography

DOROTHY PARKER IN HOLLYWOOD

GAIL CROWTHER

Gallery Books, 304pp, £20

Dorothy Parker, purveyor of the 20th century’s best known acid wit, is remembered as the queen of literary life in 1920s New York.

In fact, as Gail Crowther points out, she lived for three decades in California writing scores of Hollywood screenplays, some celebrated, many forgotten, several of them with her second (and third) husband Alan Campbell. Parker’s life in the sun was lucrative (she earned $1,000 a week) and unhappy. ‘Booze pickled her career and her marriages’, wrote Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Times

But, ‘Parker, this archetype of archness persists into the 21st century ... because of her pith, eerily well suited to the slicing and dicing of contemporary online cuture.’

The TLS’s Violet Hudson reflected that Parker belongs ‘with a young Ernest Hemingway, prohibition, short fringes and cigarette holders. It’s astonishing that she didn’t die until 1967 … the older Parker feels all wrong.’

Parker’s extravagance ($628.45 on lingerie in one week) was as reckless as her drinking and Hudson found her later decline ‘a sorry spectacle’.

The Times’s, Sarah Ditum was also sadddened by how ‘the carousing that fed her legend demolished her talent.’

She was unsure of Crowther’s take on her subject: ‘She tries to smooth the chaos of Parker into something compatible with recent tastes: in a

footnote she fantasises about how happy Parker might have been to see Vogue or Vanity Fair supporting Black Lives Matter. Woke Dorothy Parker? More likely she’d have bitterly mocked her fellow liberals’ vacuous pretensions.’

DIDION AND BABITZ

LILIAN ANOLIK

Atlantic books, 352pp, £20

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were, Rachel Cooke wrote in the Observer chroniclers of California and ‘two uncommonly fascinating American writers’. Both died in 2021, but while Didion is still lauded as a great writer, Babitz remains largely forgotten.

When Anolik, who knew Babitz, found a cache of correspondence between the two, she thought she’d found a hook on which to string a story and revive Babitz’s reputation.

Cooke, like other reviewers, was entranced by the prospect but then let down. ‘The letter offered as bait... in which Babitz says mean things to Didion (“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”), had, it turned out, never been posted. At which point, my disappointment was severe. I wanted to bust right out of the airless room in which I’d been kept for 190-odd pages, listening to Anolik’s annoying, digressive, smart-alecky prose.’

In the Guardian, Rebecca Nicholson found Anolik biased. ‘Didion is portrayed as ice-cold, ruthless and parasitic, as unromantic as she is ambitious... Her work is all of the above, without apology, and even her most quotable of quotes –

the infamous “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – cautions against believing a word she or any other writer commits to the page.’

And Maria Meltzer in the New York Times found the idea of the women as ‘soul mates’ implausible. ‘You end up wondering’, concluded Meltzer, ‘whether Didion thought of Babitz at all.’

IN THE BLOOD ON MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS AND ADDICTION

ARABELLA BYRNE AND JULIA HAMILTON

HQ, 340pp, £14.99

In the Blood tells of how alcohol ‘wound its tentacular grip around and into and through a family,’ wrote the Telegraph’s Lucy Denyer. ‘But it’s also about mothers and daughters, how they interact, how they tell the same story, in different words.’

Julia Hamilton and her daughter, the journalist Arabella Byrne, each tell their story in alternating chapters but the overlaps and repeats bind the stories into a single memoir with two voices.

Reading their journey made Denyer think about her own relationships and family history, ‘even if alcohol plays no part in them. It has stayed in my mind since the moment I put it down.’

For Ceci Browning in the Times, the book sometimes read ‘like a posh East Enders. The women’s shared addiction is set against all manner of impressive backgrounds: members’ clubs, the House of Lords, Scottish estates, fancy Kensington townhouses. Between chapters I spent hours on thepeerage.com working out who was related to whom and how.’

Denyer found the same: ‘This is aristocratic alcoholism – no less destructive or desolate than the commoner kind, but hedged around with the trappings of respectable society, it is powerfully compelling.’

This story of a journey to recovery is neither mawkish nor about self-forgiveness. According to Denyer, ‘the underlying vibe of stiff upper lip means that, thank goodness, the book avoids – just about – a descent into that ghastly “self-healing journey” sort of nonsense.’ Denyer is relieved ‘there’s not a “blessed” to be seen.’

Dorothy Parker, Literary Queen, 1948

Memoir & Biography

THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS A LIFE OF LEIBNIZ IN SEVEN PIVOTAL DAYS

MIHAEL KEMPE, TRANS. MARSHALL YARBROUGH

Pushkin Press, 304pp, £20

LEIBNIZ IN HIS WORLD THE MAKING OF A SAVANT AUDREY BOROWSKI

Princeton Univ. Press, 320pp, £30

Writing about these two new books in the TLS, Steven Nadler warned that ‘it is a courageous soul’ indeed who embarks on even a partial biography of the man.

‘Leibniz was a great polymath,’ wrote Nadler, ‘arguably the most eclectically brilliant and intense mind in a century filled with intense brilliance.

His works range over philosophy, mathematics, logic, linguistics, physics, history, theology, jurisprudence, engineering and politics. What is truly amazing is that he excelled in all these fields.’

What’s more, he lived a long life, corresponding with more than 1,000 individuals, and wrote, and wrote and wrote. (He constructed a chair that would allow him to fall asleep in the middle of writing and immediately get back to work on waking up.)’

He applauded both books for dodging the doomed attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, both dived ‘deeply into just a few consequential years, months and sometimes days and hours of this extraordinarily busy and prolific thinker’.

Borowoski, zeroes in on the ‘short but important period’ of 1672-1679, setting out to debunk the idea of Leibniz as an unworldly rationalist and return him to his intellectual and courtly milieu.

noses out of joint with his ‘inept etiquette and exaggerated selfesteem.’

Michael Kempe’s book, by contrast, ranges more widely over Leibniz’s career – but focuses its attention through ‘the prism of seven significant dates and locales’.

This allows Kempe, more thoroughly than Borowoski, ‘to introduce the reader to Leibniz’s philosophical projects and their development over the decades’; not to mention plunging us into the great man’s study, ‘as we monitor the weather outside, share his meals and keep track of his unfashionable clothes and evolving wigs’.

‘Michael Kempe has done a fine job,’ he concluded, of introducing the lay reader to this ‘second Leonardo’.

The Guardian’s Joe Moshenska, reviewing Kempe’s book, opened with the wry observation that Leibniz has been immortalised through Voltaire’s parody of him in Candide as Dr Pangloss, insisting that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.

Kempe, he said, ‘sets out to complicate this sense of Leibniz as a cheery but deluded soul out of step with melancholy modernity’.

He sees Leibniz rather as ‘the great philosopher of the possible; the thinker who sees the surface of reality as rippling with possibilities’.

‘Kempe’s affinity and admiration for his subject, his determination to celebrate his restless effusiveness, is winning.’

In another New Yorker double-review, Anthony Gottleib was also won over by Leibniz’s optimism and energy.

THE LOVES OF MY LIFE EDMUND WHITE

Bloomsbury Circus, 256pp, £16.99

This memoir celebrates a mere fraction of the gay novelists 3,000 sexual encounters. It’s ‘not for prudish readers,’ declared Charles Green in the Washington Blade.

‘White describes his encounters in lovingly explicit detail, fondly recalling his partners’ equipment and their skills.

Some were shockingly creative: one partner belonged to a “fisting colony” where another member once inserted a football into a man, requiring surgery.’

The TLS’s Kevin Brazil found the book so ‘loosely structured’ that ‘it’s an act of charity to say it has any structure at all. Some chapters are about favourite lovers: Stan, the recovered drug addict; Pedro, the chubby chaser; Jim, the great love of White’s life’.

‘Her Leibniz is a man never at rest, “butterflying from one intellectual niche to another … a man of multiple identities” ’, an enthusiastic but imperfect self-promoter, prone to put

‘Leibniz lived at a splendid time to do plenty of good, or so he thought,’ said Gottleib, ‘advances in knowledge and technology ... could soon make people “incomparably happier”. He believed his role was to spread news of useful discoveries, to make some discoveries himself, and to persuade rulers to exploit them for the benefit of mankind.’

And these two books between them ‘show that Leibniz never stopped trying to improve the world, albeit mostly from his desk’.

Other chapters jump around with subjects ‘like “Sadomasochism” or “Fuck Buddies”, before petering out into rambling answers to questions like “Why do novelists write so much about love?”’ Yet the book remains intelligent, stylish, entertaining and funny.’

For the Times’s Charles Arrowsmith, it was ‘like a scrappily spliced greatest hits’ with ‘non sequiturs, repetitions, a murky chronology, some bewildering poetry’. Nevertheless, at best White ‘remains a superior anatomist of erotic obsession and there are many beautifully written passages here, no pun intended.’

The Observer’s Peter Conrad found ‘this coital anthology’ was ‘about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risqué and often risky rutting.’ The writing is ‘as juicy, ebullient and ecstatic as in his best novels’.

GETTY, WIKIMEDIA

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, circa 1710

Edmund White, 1988

THE BOOKSHOP, THE DRAPER, THE CANDLESTICK MAKER A HISTORY OF THE HIGH STREET

ANNIE GRAY

Profile, 416pp, £22

Gillian Tindall enthused in the Literary Review about Gray’s book:

‘Her account of the gradual rise of consumption from the later Middle Ages to the present day is masterly’ – though she thought that perhaps too many cities were included.

‘The first real shophouses,’ she went on, ‘with the front downstairs room intended for selling, seem to have been built in Bath. With them

came the first purpose-made display windows. Yet well into the 18th century, buildings in cities had no street numbers. Places of purchase were identified by a multitude of hanging signs — finally banned as a nuisance in London in 1762.’

In the Times, Melanie Reid believed this ‘rich, lively history’ demonstrated time and time again that ‘there is nothing new under the sun. [Gray] rejects our modern doominess about our town centres, with their vape sellers and charity shops (which have been around since the suffragettes). The high street is about us, she says. It’s always changing.’

Roger Lewis in the Mail thought Gray’s book searingly nostalgic: ‘a history of shopping before everything vanished online; before hateful self-scan tills came in; before out-of-town malls (frightful sheds) arrived with easier parking; before self-service supermarkets destroyed small-scale shopkeeping.’

Although some department stores

and emporiums survive, he wrote, most have been demolished or redeveloped. He added that people now don’t seem to want graciousness or grandeur, wanting bargains instead. But according to Gray, this hunt for a bargain is nothing new... ‘And if the malls are in trouble because, since Covid, we click on Amazon orders instead,’ Lewis was optimistic that we will always need shops of one kind or another: ‘no one is self-sufficient,’ he confirmed.

THE FORBIDDEN GARDEN OF LENINGRAD

A TRUE STORY OF SCIENCE AND SACRIFICE IN A CITY UNDER SIEGE

SIMON PARKIN

Sceptre, 384pp, £25

In 1921, Nikolai Vavilov arrived in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) to take charge of the bureau of applied botany and plant breeding. He found a city of starving people. The brilliant Russian botanist began the seed bank project, amassing new breeds of hybrid ‘supercrops’ that, cultivated correctly, would end famine for the whole of the USSR.

In 1940 Vavilov disappeared. Stalin had called his work ‘botanical nonsense’. Accused of being a foreign spy and an anti-Soviet militant he died in the Gulag in 1943. During his disappearance, and in spite of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, the Plant Institute’s employees continued to safeguard their precious seed collection.

‘The heroism of the institute’s scientists and workers is beyond doubt,’ wrote the Guardian’s Simon English. Parkin depicts the horror of the Nazi siege through the lives, and deaths, of the Plant Institute’s staff, many of whom stayed behind to care for its collection during the seige.

‘It’s a compelling account,’ wrote the Telegraph’s Alex Diggins. ‘I’ve read histories of the siege before, but few with such disarming immediacy.’ ‘There’s nothing like the siege of Leningrad to put our current woes (and winter) into perspective,’ said Henry Mance in the FT. ‘Thousands of heroic sacrifices must have taken place in those years.’ One of the ‘most striking’ was Plant Institute staff refusing to eat the tonnes of nuts and seeds in their collection, ‘instead saving them to grow food for future

generations.’ Remarkably, by 1979, nearly one-third of Russia’s arable land was planted with seeds derived from Vavilov’s seed bank.

THE SOUND OF UTOPIA MUSICIANS IN THE TIME OF STALIN

MICHAEL KRIELAARS TRANS JONATHAN REEDER

Pushkin Press, 336pp, £24.98

Dutch journalist and classical music evangelist Michael Krielaars uncovers the chilling story of how, in the depths of the German siege of Leningrad in which around 1.5 million people died, Stalin airlifted composers and musicians into the starving city to raise morale.

If their new compositions weren’t sufficiently ‘patriotic’, they could be persecuted, shipped to labour camps or executed, and their works banned or destroyed. ‘They lived in fear of their tin-eared critics in the Kremlin,’ noted the Guardian’s Stephen Smith producing ‘uplifting works while Stalin’s goons quivered like tuning forks for anything that smacked of western decadence. There are stories here to freeze the veins and stir the heart – and even a little gallows humour: the head of the death squad heard one condemned composer playing and freed him the next day.’

‘A superficial but very readable survey that covers morally murky terrain,’ thought the Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen. ‘Few outright heroes or villains emerge here, most are cowards, opportunists or slippery time-servers, or simply want to keep their families from persecution or obliteration. There’s much material lurking here that awaits a far more thorough excavation.’

Matthew Janney in the FT wrote, ‘I wanted him to take us closer to the music; how did this turmoil manifest in the notes on the stave? But this highly readable book transports us into the heart of the Soviet machine through a rich mix of anecdotal and historical material.’

‘It didn’t help that Stalin fancied himself a connoisseur,’ Pratinav Anil said in the Times, ‘laconically recording his verdict on record sleeves: “good”, “average”, “rubbish” … The book serves up ten cradle-tograve pen-portraits of Stalin’s musicians told with bantering brio.’

Bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road

UNFORTUNATELY, SHE WAS A NYMPHOMANIAC A NEW HISTORY OF ROME’S IMPERIAL WOMEN

JOAN SMITH

William Collins, 304pp, £22

In her latest book, novelist columnist and campaigner, Joan Smith, reinterprets the violent story of 23 women closely associated with the Roman imperial family. From the time of Augustus to that of Nero fewer than half a dozen noble women probably died of natural causes.

‘‘‘As we try to get to the truth about Rome’s imperial women”, says Smith, “we have to contend with the misogyny of ancient historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius and influential modern writers such as Robert Graves,”’ wrote Bijan Omrani in the Literary Review. Women, ‘with little evidential justification, are presented as wilful, flighty, rebellious, scheming and sexually unrestrained – all things that serve to excuse the violence they suffered at male hands.’

The Times’s Patrick Kidd thought Smith made a ‘diligent attempt to correct the record’: ‘no one can deny after reading it that the life of a woman in ancient Rome, even a very wealthy and well-connected one, was based on control by men and was often very dangerous.’

The Telegraph’s Edith Hall found Smith a polished, exhilarating writer. ‘There are meaty details of ancient life, most notably the use of spiders in contraception.

The book makes for accessible and compulsive reading. But I hesitate to describe it as enjoyable, because the terror and torment suffered by its subjects are harrowing.’ Smith ‘wants us to continue studying antiquity, but in a way that shows how toxic ideas are recirculated over centuries and have become ever harder to disperse’.

MAN-DEVIL

THE MIND AND TIMES OF BERNARD MANDEVILLE, THE WICKEDEST MAN IN EUROPE

JOHN CALLANAN

Princeton University Press, 328pp, £30

Little is known of Bernard Mandeville’s life – though Benjamin Franklin called the Dutch-born, London-based, proto-psychiatrist ‘a

most facetious, entertaining companion’.

However, rippling through the ages has been Mandeville’s diagnosis of human nature, whereby ego and greed triumph over man-made morality; co-operation and kindness are rooted in self-interest; and the masses must be kept as poor and ignorant and possible.

Later, Rousseau and Marx, Hayek and Darwin, Hume, Kant and Dr Johnson would pay tribute to him – as would Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes – but at the time, he scandalised smug society.

In his best-known work, The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville demonstrated in spirited prose and dreadful doggerel how an efficient hive would collapse if exposed to social justice.

Other publications included a proposal for public brothels and an attack on charity schools.

Was he entirely serious? Yes and no.

History Today’s Joseph Hone was relieved Callanan was ‘no fool and, unlike some of his predecessors in the field of Mandeville studies,’ had an ‘ear finely tuned to his subject’s sense of humour’.

One lesson of this ‘superb book’ was ‘that satire when properly done … can be – should be – profound, thought-provoking, a spur to action’.

In the Spectator Bryan Appleyard concurred, finding Mandeville ‘a provocateur, an intellectual prankster,’ who ‘also spoke truth to power.’ Callanan had ‘somehow … made sense of all this’; and this tremendous’ book needed ‘to be read slowly’.

In the Literary Review, Howard Davies declared himself convinced that ‘exposing Mandeville and his writings to a new generation of readers [was] indeed worthwhile’.

VATICAN SPIES FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR TO POPE FRANCIS YVONNICK DENOËL TRANS. ALAN MCKAY

C Hurst & Co, 384pp, £25

A better title, wrote John Foot in the Literary Review, ‘might have been “Vatican Scandals”’.

However, beyond dubious dealings, the book takes in everything – for good or ill – that the papal state has kept under wraps since its foundation in 1929.

It includes the Nazi ‘ratlines’; but also Pius XI’s letter rebuking Hitler, clandestinely delivered to German bishops in 1937. (Hundreds of priests who read it from their pulpits were sent to Dachau.)

In the Guardian, Tobias Jones remarked that the Church’s ‘covert operations were most efficient with regards to money’: during World War Two, the Vatican’s banking arm was useful for those requiring discretion, but it later ended up laundering money for the mafia (whom it even dared to defraud).

In the Sunday Times Theo Zenou was amazed by The Entity, the ‘papal equivalent of MI6’, so secret, it doesn’t officially exist. Its agents are trained as if ‘James Bond [had taken] a vow of celibacy and swapped the bow tie for the dog collar’.

Ultimately, Foot felt Denoël had ‘simply thrown everything … at the wall to see if anything will stick’ and that the narrative ended in a ‘blur’.

While lamenting the ‘turgid’ style, Jones concluded ‘if you can muster the holy spirit to plough through it’ it will satsify anyone who, after watching Conclave, wants to learn more about intrigue in the Holy See.

Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia (1788) by Angelica Kauffman

THE LAST DAYS OF BUDAPEST

SPIES, NAZIS, RESCUERS AND RESISTANCE, 1940-45

ADAM LEBOR

Head of Zeus, 512pp, £27.99

Seldom are plaudits so fulsome.

In the Times, Gerard DeGroot pronounced himself ‘frankly, in awe’ of LeBor’s achievement.

All human life appeared in this ‘parable of what happens when a city learns to hate’; the result ‘a pointillist painting, tiny dots of experience drawn together into a great canvas of war’, whose creator had juggled ‘numerous stories with astounding agility, constructing an engrossing narrative without ever losing his way’.

Artists, aristocrats, boy-soldiers, nightclub-dancers, psychotic sadists from the Arrow Cross party: all were enlisted into explaining the moral decline of Hungary and its fun-loving capital between Horthy’s assumption of power in the 1920s and the Nazis’ takeover and subsequent annihilation in 1944.

Once a haven for Jews, it became their living hell; starting with pale and unpopular copies of Germany’s anti-Semitic laws, and ending with indigenous soldiers using forced labourers for target practice. Quoting the author, DeGroot reported that ‘a favourite amusement … in winter was to hose Jewish men down with water until they froze and became ice-statues’.

Nazi History

catastrophe that would befall’ the Magyars and the ‘horrifying clarity’ with which it was documented.

But DeGroot found the portraits so vivid that it could not ‘be read dispassionately’ and, indeed, deserved ‘to be read twice, first to appreciate Budapest’s complicated story and then to immerse oneself in the prose’.

THE NAZI MIND

12 WARNINGS FROM HISTORY

LAURENCE REES

Penguin Viking, 428pp, £25

This book is a reminder that absolute power corrupts absolutely. As such it should be read by all those people deluded enough to believe that we ought to have a dictatorship because ‘it’s the only way to get things done’.

A former Head of BBC TV History programmes, Laurence Rees, has spent much of his working life trying to understand how Germany, the nation that gave us Goethe and Beethoven, could also have been responsible for the Holocaust.

Here, in stark detail, he explains why the Nazi message of ‘Them and Us’ – the idea that ordinary people were being victimised by dark external forces – proved so seductive.

Both Max Hastings in the Sunday Times and James Holland in the Telegraph agree with Rees when he says that we should heed the warnings this history asserts.

Notwithstanding transportations and ghettos, the public killings were the greatest in number and most prolonged in all Europe. By 1944, the police commissioner was complaining: ‘The bodies must be made to disappear, not put out in the streets.’

The Mail’s Ysenda MaxtoneGraham was similarly gripped by this ‘powerful, haunting’ account of ‘the

Indeed Sir Max writes, ‘There is a name missing from Rees’s text, which will nevertheless be in the mind of every reader, Trump. No responsible person will directly compare modern political leaders to Hitler or his peers in evil, Stalin or Mao Zedong. But Trump has indeed threatened to make himself an absolute ruler, with his promise that Americans will not need to vote again.’

James Holland does not name names. But he writes, ‘A decade ago, it seemed ludicrous to imagine that another Hitler, or such a grotesque regime, could rise again in the West. But we suddenly live in different times. What becomes clear in The Nazi Mind is that democracy is a mighty fragile entity.

SECRETS OF A SUITCASE THE COUNTESS, THE NAZIS AND MIDDLE EUROPE’S LOST NOBILITY

PAULINE TERREEHORST

Hurst, 304pp, £25

When Dutch fashion historian Pauline Terreehorst successfully bid for a vintage Gucci suitcase at a Sotheby’s auction, she unwittingly obtained a time capsule that would transport her back to the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ominous epoch that preceded the Anschluss.

For within this ‘cabinet of curiosities’ were mementos belonging to the Silesian Countess Margarethe – ‘Margit’ –Henckel von Donnersmarck (1871-1943), a survivor of the ancien régime who refused to suck up to the Nazis.

Widowed after just two years marriage to her noble husband, Count Sándor Szapáry, an unappeasable huntsman, Margit found herself chatelaine of Burg Finstergrün, a vast mock baronial pile full of genuine period furniture that would later be coveted by that rapacious ‘collector’, Hermann Göering. That Finstergrün had only one bathroom was an authentic touch that must have been a handicap when, in the 1930’s, Margit took in paying guests.

In the Literary Review, Caroline Moorehead said : ‘It is as a portrait of a vanished world, with its vast imposing castles, hunting parties and German craftsmanship that Secrets of a Suitcase works best.’

According to Jane Yeager in the TLS, ‘Terreehorst strikes an admirable balance between the texture of the characters’ immediate surroundings and the broader arcs of social and political change.’ But what’s missing, said Yeager, is some idea of ‘who the Countess – who was rumoured to wear Lederhosen concealed beneath her long skirts –really was ... But far from disappointing the reader, this sliver of unresolved mystery feels fitting for a tale of lost worlds and dark woods.’

Decline & Fall

JOHN WALSH bemoans the death of the book launch

Every publisher faces the conundrum of how to promote a good book’s problematic author.

Earlier this year, John Hatt, veteran founder of Eland Books, had a whole bunch of problems with A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis

The book, which Hatt conceived and edited, is a 500-page anthology of travel features, from Burma to Guatemala, by the man whom Auberon Waugh once described as ‘outstandingly the best travel writer of our age, if not since Marco Polo.’

But Lewis’s name lacked public recognition and his stock was so low that world language rights to even his best books could be bought for a pittance. And when A Quiet Evening was published in January, Lewis was unavailable for interviews. He had, after all, been dead since 2003.

Undaunted, Hatt, acquired a freelance publicist called Stephanie Allen; together they employed the strategy called the Long Run-Up. In both November and December, well before the big day, they threw a sprauncy lunch for 12 distinguished travel writers and friends in Soho’s raffish Quo Vadis restaurant.

Guests included Michael Palin, Colin Thubron, Sarah Wheeler, Rory Stewart, Mary Killen, Lewis’s widow Lesley (now 95), Henry Porter, Jason Goodwin, Harry Mount, Nicholas Shakespeare, Nicola Shulman and the BBC’s awesomely titled ‘Head of Content’, Charlotte Moore.

Vadis, the Ognisko thrash and Hatt’s profligacy in alerting the newspapers (‘I must have sent out 60 or 70 books’), the results were gratifying.

Glowing reviews abounded. ‘The finest travel writer of his generation … a wonderful book’, Nicholas Rankin, Literary Review. ‘This superb travel writer’s best articles. What observation! What majesty of style!’ Matthew Parris, Best Books of the Year, the Spectator. There was an Oldie extract. James Daunt, MD of Waterstones, ordered 750 copies.

This attention given to a single title is notable for its loving quality –but also for its rarity. The London book-launch circuit in the 21st century has seen such a decline in quality and spending that today it hardly exists.

Guests are seldom regaled with anything beyond white wine and mixed nuts

At the first lunch, an attendee had to leave before pudding for a dental appointment, but he’d been having so much fun that he rejoined the company after his ordeal.

In January, the launch party was held at Ognisko, the Polish Hearth Club, where Hatt first met Lewis. The 100 chattering guests consumed lemon vodka and copious finger food, and were serenaded for two hours by a player of the Kora, a Malian instrument that looks like a longnecked banjo and sounds like a harp.

After the brace of lunches at Quo

The tiny handful of authors guaranteed to hit the bestseller lists – Robert Harris, Jojo Moyes, Sebastian Faulks, Ben Macintyre –rate a proper do. Faulks’s last book, The Seventh Son, was launched at Lambeth Palace. Lesser scribes are likely to be feted in a church crypt or the annexe of a Tube station.

Daunts’s Marylebone branch has become the default launch venue for authors whose publishers are too poor (or mean) to shell out. Writers themselves buy the drink and guests are seldom regaled with anything beyond white wine and mixed nuts.

It’s a far cry from the 1980s, when imaginative writing (including travel) was feted and publishers threw Gatsby-esque parties every week.

From Holland Park’s Orangery to the Ritz’s Palm Court, from the Arts

Faber poets in 1960: Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, T S Eliot, W H Auden, Stephen Spender

Club ballroom to the V&A’s Raphael Room, from L’Etoile to L’Escargot, from Bedford to Berkeley Square, those of a literary persuasion flickered and swooned, up marble staircases and down Soho basement steps, greeting, flirting and talking about everything but the book.

The dernier cris in book-launch glamour were the thrashes given by George Weidenfeld in his apartment on Chelsea Embankment. Guests would typically include a gregarious royal, a transatlantic film star, some bookish MPs, Lady Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter.

You couldn’t believe some of the conversations. When the Iran-Contra affair was raging during Ronald Reagan’s second presidency, I witnessed Martin Amis and Shirley MacLaine heatedly discussing whether US Colonel Oliver North or General Noriega of Nicaragua would emerge the winner in a fist-fight.

In today’s publishing doldrums, some shoots of promise are visible –though at a price.

Last autumn, Faber launched Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, a ticket-only event at the South Bank Centre. Fans of the unsmiling colleen could also attend Faber’s Hatton Garden HQ to watch a live stream of Rooney being interviewed.

In October, 4th Estate launched Lucy Hughes-Hallet’s The Scapegoat, about Charles Villiers, courtier and bedmate of James I, with an oldfashioned party at Exmouth Market. And there was a ticketed 90-minute ‘abridged reading’ of the book at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle, starring Alex Jennings and Juliet Stevenson.

Nowadays the London party landscape seems starkly divided between publishers who can afford a ‘do’ and others who tell their scribes, ‘Do it yourself.’

MARRK GERSON

Politics & Current Affairs

GET IN THE INSIDE STORY OF LABOUR UNDER STARMER

PATRICK MAGUIRE AND GABRIEL POGRUND

Bodley Head, 480pp, £25

OUT

HOW BREXIT GOT DONE AND THE TORIES WERE UNDONE

TIM SHIPMAN

William Collins, 944pp, £30

Two deeply reported new books about recent politics served Westminster watchers a series of toothsome little scoops. Get In charts Starmer’s rise to Number 10, thrusting his strategist Morgan McSweeney into the spotlight.

The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley, found it the ‘compelling story’ of how ‘one intensely motivated man grabbed control of a broken party, eviscerated its left and ruthlessly reforged Labour into a power-hungry machine’.

as low as her chutzpah was high’, she thought, was ‘a line which could have applied here to scores of men’) but overall it was ‘a wild ride through the rapids of Britain’s unforgettable, disturbing Brexit years’.

In the Times, Sam Freedman applauded Shipman’s scrupulousness but thought he ‘has more time for these characters than many readers will ... he does his best to avoid caricature, explain the tricky trade-offs faced by everyone involved and highlight politicians’ talents as well as their flaws. This is not easy when you’re writing about Liz Truss.’

McSweeney emerges as ‘one of the most consequential figures in contemporary politics’, Starmer as an unwitting ‘pawn in a chess game’: ‘McSweeney should try to keep this book away from the Labour leader, because he will surely loathe it.’

The Times’s Jason Cowley found it ‘gripping, exhaustively researched and fast-paced’. Starmer’s lack of background in the Labour movement meant he needed McSweeney to get him to the top. ‘An insider close to McSweeney is reported as saying: “Keir’s not driving the train.” He thinks he is “but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”’

It was the Tories who were the focus of the final volume of Tim Shipman’s ‘Brexit Quartet’, Out. The Standard’s Anne McElvoy suggested that this account of the period from Boris’s premiership to the Tories’ loss of power was akin ‘to Boccaccio’s Decameron, an account of life under a 14th-century plague’.

Shipman’s method is ‘a lively mix of high politics, low gossip and a grab-bag of metaphors’. McElvoy took issue with his occasional sexism (his judgment that Liz Truss’s ‘IQ was

The Literary Review’s Howard Davies found that Münchau ‘spices up what could be a dull tract’ by describing the close, personal relationships between German politicians and key families, some containing ‘deeply unpleasant people with dubious pasts.’

Kaput describes systemic faults: ‘a rusty banking system, technology aversion, energy dependence on Russia, a dysfunctional, deferential relationship with China, rigid economic orthodoxies and a hostile environment for foreign talent,’ found Katja Hoyer in the Times. Münchau provides detailed insights ... and dry humour lends his economic analysis levity and accessibility.’

KAPUT THE END OF THE GERMAN MIRACLE

WOLFGANG MUNCHAU

Swift, 256pp, £20

For years we’ve gazed with awe on Germany’s economic achievements and industrial output, but former FT columnist, Münchau, sees Germany as an analogue economy in a digital world and is critical of its ‘neomercantilism’ with the goal of creating large export surpluses.

‘It is the 21st-century pursuit of 18th-century French trade policies, with 19th-century companies, using the technologies of the 20th century.’

The FT’s Harold James found Münchau ‘paints a picture of an economy, political system, and society dysfunctional to the point of being terminally broken, ie kaput,’ but countered that ‘most of Germany is still a civilised and decent place to live’ with areas of scientific excellence and ‘areas where immigrants play a transformative role.’ It’s hard to think of a large industrial country that might serve as a better model.’

V13

CHRONICLE OF A TRIAL EMMANUEL CARRÈRE

Fern Press, 320pp, £20

On 13 November 2015 Islamic State terrorists mounted a series of attacks, killing 130 and injuring 350 Parisian civilians. Carrère covered the ten-month trial that followed in 2021 for the magazine, Le Nouvel Obs.

In the Observer Henriette Korthals Altes found Carrère achieves a ‘fine balancing act between ordering facts and spinning them into a narrative, between empathy and critical thinking’. His ‘elegant prose’ brought ‘back to life those who died, often through an unexpected detail.’ When writing of victims’ suffering, ‘the strength and humanity Carrère brings out makes for a reading experience that is at once humbling and invigorating.’

Only one terrorist, Salah Abdeslam, survived to face trial but the court heard testimony from 1,800 plaintiffs. Carrère’s challenge was traversing V13’s ‘morass of detail and sometimes contradictory defence testimony,’ wrote the Guardian’s Chris Power, and he does it with ‘extraordinary’ skill.

Testimony from the Bataclan theatre made ‘grim, queasy reading,’ but the NY Times’s Jennifer Szalai found the book ‘hopeful’, the trial yielding a ‘sacred’ sense of ‘shared understanding’.

Strategist Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmer

THREE DAYS IN JUNE

ANNE TYLER

Chatto & Windus, 176pp, £14.99

A divorced couple, Gail and Max, reunite for their daughter’s wedding in Baltimore for three days in June, the title of Tyler’s 25th novel.

‘For more than 60 years,’ wrote James Walton in the Times, Tyler’s ‘clear-eyed but kindly approach to people moving through recognisable daily life has enabled her to serve up a wholly convincing combination of sharpness, tenderness, mild satire and rueful comedy, not just in a single book, but sometimes in a single sentence.’

The Guardian’s Tom Shone found the book returning ‘to the more attenuated form of Tyler’s early novels, before she unfurled those big, capacious 400-pagers about Baltimore families ... that proved Tyler’s mastery’.

‘The sprawl and spread of family life appears to have undergone the abbreviation of form that comes with the empty nest, but Tyler’s powers of observation, empathy, wit and depth of insight have suffered no attendant diminution.’

Heller McAlpin in the Christian Science Monitor found Tyler a deeply humane writer, ‘abounding in wit and wisdom’.

The TLS’s Rohan Maitzen thought Tyler can be underestimated because she’s been writing for so long and works in ‘such a minor key. Her stories always include conflict and loss, tension and heartbreak, but never melodrama; they are gentle, but with an undercurrent of astringency that wards off sentimentality.’

THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE

JONATHAN COE

Viking, 368pp, £20

This ‘satire on radical economic libertarianism combined with a Cotswold murder mystery ... spans the Truss administration from its heady dawn to its decline and fall 49 days later,’ said Tom Payne in the Spectator.

At a conference organised by British TrueCon in a collapsing Cotswolds castle, blogger Christopher Swann is murdered, ‘having annoyed enough people to turn Coe’s novel

into cosy crime fiction.’

Aspirant novelist Phyl investigates through three kinds of fiction: crime, dark academia and autofiction. ‘We read them as satires, while also realising that Coe is asking straightfaced questions about the best means of establishing the truth,’ wrote Andrew Motion in the TLS, praising Coe’s ‘skill in organising a large cast of characters, whose activities can sound congested in summary but never on the page.’

For the Guardian’s Justine Jordan, ‘the real target is the amoral individualism and free-market greed of those with power and privilege, first excoriated in 1994’s What a Carve Up! Coe, the laureate of Britishness, marshals it with ingenious ease.’

trials of four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic who are connected by blood, friendship and employment’, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times

‘It reads as a compendium of every hardship women and girls can endure: agonising menstruation, genital mutilation, lonely childbirth and sexual assault.’

Thomas-Corr found it a magnificent novel, suffused with truth, wit and compassion.

Also in the Guardian, Alex Clark found the book to be a more serious examination of literature’s power and limitations than the mixture of whodunit and political chronicle in which it is wrapped initially suggests.

DREAM COUNT

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI

ADICHIE

Fourth Estate, 416pp, £20

This is the Nigerian author’s longawaited novel, her first since the award-winning Americanah (2013). It is a ‘scintillating account of the

In the New Statesman Nicola Sturgeon called the book a ‘complex, multi-layered beauty’, ‘deeply and richly feminist’.

In the Observer Anthony Cummins thought the book worth the wait. Her ‘storytelling proceeds with stately virtuosity, regularly detonating chain reactions of understanding as illuminating anecdotes rise to the surface seemingly randomly. A baggy book of backstory could lack momentum but Dream Count doesn’t flag or sag...’

In the Literary Review, Maria Margaronis found the book ‘unexpectedly personal and experimental ... darker and more inward’ than previous work.’

In the Guardian, Sara Collins found the book ‘quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight’.

Baltimore: Tyler’s setting for her new novel

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

THE GRANDDAUGHTER

BERNHARD SCHLINK TRANS. CHARLOTTE COLLINS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 336pp, £20

In this novel, one of Germany’s most distinguished legal academics reflects not on Nazi war crimes, the theme of his earlier very successful novel The Reader, but on the reunification of Germany.

As Dinah Birch in the TLS explained: ‘Kaspar is an elderly bookseller in Berlin, mourning the death of Birgit, his alcoholic wife. The couple had met at a GDR propaganda event, the Pentecost Meeting of German Youth of 1964... He was from West Berlin, she from East, from where she fled in order to join him.’

‘The strength of The Granddaughter,’ continued Birch, ‘lies in its exploration of the legacies

language less than fresh. Key scenes feel rushed and under-developed,’ but overall it was ‘rewarding and wonderfully readable.’

THIRST

GILES FODEN

Weidnfeld &Nicolson, 304pp, £25

Environmental scientist Cat Brosnan, the latest of Foden’s idealistic young Celts going back to his 1988 novel, The Last King of Scotland, travels to Namibia in search of a hidden aquifer.

Thirst is set 15 years in the future; climate catastrophe has worsened. The aquifer could supply drought-struck locals but is coveted by mining corporations and foreign governments extracting uranium ore, who don’t care if the locals die.

of a divided Germany and its thoughtful acknowledgement of aspirations that were finally defeated when the Wall came down ... Schlink, who is a deeply serious writer, is drawn to the culturally conservative ideals of East Germany’s discredited model of socialism, though he is clear-eyed about the cruelties of its ruling regime.’

The Times’s Johanna ThomasCorr loved the idea of a great novel of reunification, but wasn’t sure she was any closer to understanding modern Germany after reading it.

The book ‘asks many important questions, including one that feels very pertinent right now: “Was society failing to provide young people with a positive experience of community?” But the novel fails to embody this question in convincing characters and scenarios.’

The Guardian’s Alice Jolly found ‘dialogue is sometimes contrived, the

It’s ‘actionpacked’ and ‘reads like a movie pitch’, wrote the Guardian’s Adam Roberts, with ‘a strong quest hook, much incident, plenty of African colour and flavour ... it also reads like an unrevised first draft.’

The Telegraph’s Sophie Dickinson agreed: ‘its adventure narrative and characterisation wilt amid flabby writing. Foden’s research is evidently deep but reads as expository. Thirst intends to be a novel about something pressing and real: the risk of dwindling natural resources, and the violence that this shortage implies. Unfortunately, Foden’s writing is too slow for pure adventure, too shlocky to be anything more serious.’

For Stevie Davies in the Literary Review, ‘the final scenes, which involve skulls, man-eating lions, near drowning, helicopter attacks, exploded aquifers and twist upon twist, are as preposterous as anything in the thriller genre. But if you like tall tales, there’s plenty to enjoy.’

THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS

HARUKI MURAKAMI TRANS. PHILIP GABRIEL

Havill & Secker, 464pp, £25

Murakami’s 15th novel ‘doesn’t feel that new,’ found Junot Diaz in the NY Times. In ‘his singular voice’ and ‘in a story he has told before’, readers will recognise the imagined town at its centre from another 1985 novel, as the narrator searches for a lost childhood sweetheart, a reader of dreams.

‘Little here passes for plot’, wrote the Guardian’s Alex Preston, and the TLS’s Michael LaPointe concurred: ‘Ghosts, unicorns, hidden realms might sound like heady, fantastical stuff, but ... are just colourful touches, applied to add contrast to a minimalist story... The novel feels serene in the same bloodless way that life does in the imaginary town ... the effect can be drowsy.’

Preston found the dreamscapes so ‘unmoored from reality that nothing seems to matter; meaning is endlessly deferred. It feels as if his work, with its talking cats, mystical landscapes and drifting, nameless, middle-aged protagonists obsessed with their teenage years, has never moved on from a magical realism that was just about bearable in his short early novels. His books have not evolved – they have just got longer. At 75, there is something almost pathological in the way his writing refuses to move on.’

East German guards at the Berlin Wall, 1989

Fantasy City landscape illustration

Namibia: the setting for Thirst

Fiction

ALIVE IN THE MERCIFUL COUNTRY

A L KENNEDY

Saraband/Contraband, 384pp, £18.99

In the TLS, Susie Mesure found ‘precious little is merciful about the country in which Anna McCormick, the first-person narrator of A L Kennedy’s latest novel, finds herself.’

The interplay ‘between doom and hope, which encapsulates Kennedy in a nutshell – her previous novels have tackled alcoholism, depression and suicide – sets the tone.’

The Spectator’s Lee Langley thought fans would love the novel. ‘Her trademark features are reassuringly present –reality and fantasy, sweetness and horror; a good soul struggling to survive in a bad world... For Anna, wickedness is typified by the villain of a fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin... To drive home her point, she names all wrongdoers Stiltskins... Kennedy paints a diptych: a woman reaching out for a belated chance of happiness, contrasted with an atrocious villain.’

Holocaust survivor and slum landlord; romantically involved Ruth; and wife Lorna, abandoned in St Kitts.

From his 1985 debut ‘Phillips has steadfastly focused on the precarious lives of migrants,’ wrote the Guardian’s Colin Grant. ‘His books have stood out against other accounts of the Windrush generation’s stoicism, exploring the emotional cost of leaving home and being met by hatred and rejection.’ Here his ‘refreshing approach is to ask the question rarely posed: what happened to these pioneers over the decades to come?’

Rumpelstiltskin, from an illustrated Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 1931

‘Phillips sets himself a huge challenge by creating a protagonist who has neither the skill nor the inclination to reflect on his interior life, a man whose physical migration to Britain triggers an inner emigration. He meets it by amplifying the colourlessness of Victor’s character in prose that mimics his ordinariness. Phillips’s writing is blunt, paredback and intentionally plain.’

by human beings on their journeys through the world.’

It’s a ‘fable-like, enigmatic tale,’ concluded Grant. ‘Phillips’s outlook may appear bleak, but it’s a depiction of the unvarnished truth about his subject and the jeopardy of migration, the fickle nature of failure and success, and a portrayal of the self-protectiveness that comes from answering to no one but yourself.’

THE LAND IN WINTER ANDREW MILLER

Sceptre, 384pp, £20

Kennedy succeeds in spinning ‘pain into poetry and its glitter is authentic.’

The Guardian’s Alex Clark wrote, ‘Key to this provocative, thoughtful and mysterious novel is the location of the title’s “merciful country”. For Anna, it is not to be found in the wonky bricks and mortar of her London house, but in the stable mental landscape she has eventually reached, in which her belief in cooperation and collective action still survive.’

In the Washington Post Bilal Qureshi praised ‘a remarkable achievement of mood and emotional insight, infused with an air of melancholy and wisdom’, deeming it ‘a novel of regrets, not migration’s triumphs, that

The ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962–3 was the coldest, longest winter since 1739 and ‘an unwitting crucible of social and cultural change,’ wrote Jude Cook in the TLS, begetting the Beatles and sexual intercourse, according to Larkin.

The two couples at the centre of Miller’s tenth novel ‘have already discovered sex, though they are still hamstrung by social etiquettes that will soon vanish once the Sixties start to swing. This tension – between old strictures and a permissive new generation – drives the novel’s action.’

In ‘a trough between the Second World War and the Sixties,’ wrote the Literary Review’s Stevie Davies, Miller’s characters are ‘caught between the class-bound, misogynist past and a new age of liberation. The men both aspire to more but hardly know where to focus their ambitions. As for their pregnant wives, what are they but breeding stock? Condemned to coupledom, the women are reduced to ladylike conformity’.

ANOTHER MAN IN THE STREET

CARYL PHILLIPS

Bloomsbury, 240pp, £16.99

Phillips’s elegiac novel follows 1960s Caribbean immigrant Victor’s life over decades, alongside three key secondary characters: Peter,

West Indian immigrants coming to the UK, June 1962

unfolds from the vantage point of one man’s final years.’

The FT’s Franklin Nelson praised ‘a moving, accomplished study of the vulnerabilities carried and concealed

‘Like the ubiquitous freezing fog and cigarette smoke, Miller’s narration encloses each person, revealing their inner worlds. Set in the West Country, its snowy, isolated location is a mirror for mental landscapes. For 200 impeccable pages, Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives; John Updike’s Couples transported to Somerset develops into something more devastating and uniquely English.’

This is Miller’s parents’ generation, ‘which may be why his sharpness is accompanied by a fundamental sympathy,’ observed the Times’s James Walton, giving a ‘gently persuasive reminder that every age gets some things right and plenty wrong – and that at the time it’s not always clear which is which.’

BARROWBECK

ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY

John Murray, 304pp, £16.99

‘The chill of the supernatural pervades these unsettling tales, following a settlement’s history from the deep past to the near future,’ wrote Nina Allan in the Guardian

Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, ‘like the haunted land of Hurley’s previous novels, is a natural spot saturated by storytelling,’ wrote Suzi Feay in the TLS

Thirteen stories span two millennia and ‘his fiction operates in the realm where the five senses, like officious border guards, let in only certain pieces of information, leaving imagination to make up the shortfall. Hurley shows how legends accrue over time from virgin ground. The marsh-folk bury their dead in barrows; a beck is a north-country word for a stream. As stories begin to interlock, shadowy themes emerge; the water that nourishes unusual growth in several stories also has a malevolent aspect.’

For Allan Barrowbeck is distinguished by its sense of place. ‘The damp cellars, decaying outhouses, teeming rain, the mossy roots of ancient trees, grimly mouldering parlours and back rooms and hallways of houses in thrall to the past lend the village itself a sense of inexorable decline.’

Feay detected, ‘perhaps inevitably, some unevenness, though the shifts in time are well-handled and the unsettling atmosphere is maintained. Hurley conjures up marvels and impossibilities, then leaves halfexplanations and purposely loose ends.’

Allan praised his ‘use of modern themes – social isolation, poverty and unemployment, the climate crisis – alongside the rural eeriness that has become his trademark.’

THE GHOSTS OF ROME

JOSEPH O’CONNOR

Harvill Secker, 384pp, £20

The second in O’Connor’s Rome Escape Line trilogy, continues the story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and fellow conspirators, known as The Choir, operating from a Vatican left alone by occupying Nazis in

exchange for papal neutrality, risking their lives to help allied soldiers and other fugitives evade capture.

‘The Choir’s attempts to rescue a wounded Polish airman right under the nose of Gestapo commander Hauptmann have a nail-bitingly tense real-time feel,’ praised the Guardian’s Laura Wilson.

‘BBC interviews and fragments of an unpublished memoir give historical perspective and added pathos to this vivid and moving story, with O’Connor seamlessly combining real characters with imagined ones.’

LAZARUS MAN

RICHARD PRICE

‘O’Connor has done his research with care,’ wrote Caroline Moorehead in the TLS. With his real people in place, he spins a new tale of derring-do.’

Her touch is deft but delicate, her compassion strong... Wise, beautifully measured and as compelling as you want fiction to be

‘O’Connor paints a lively picture of a city filled with Fascist police and German soldiers, everyone watchful and hungry, streets filthy, blackmarket prices rising daily.

‘Rome is also a subterranean city of sewers, caverns, burial pits and basements, full of feral cats as O’Flaherty’s men and women set out on terrifying night missions. The Escape Line is known to the Gestapo, but its members, disguised as priests, street cleaners, workmen and tourists, remain elusive.’

On reaching Rome in June 1944, the Allies found 6,425 escapees alive; O’Flaherty had cared for about 4,000 from 25 nations.

For Moorehead, the book is a ‘tribute to the imagination and courage of his remarkable team and a riveting thriller.’

Corsair, 352pp, £22

Price’s latest New York chronicle is ‘a resurrection story clever enough to interrogate its own genre while retaining a genuinely open heart,’ wrote the TLS’s Julia Lloyd George.

The Washington Post’s Ron Charles found ‘the strangest of urban thrillers – a thoughtful, even peaceful story about stumbling into new life,’ as ‘grimly comic and macabre.’

After a Harlem building explosion, Anthony, unemployed ex-teacher, recovering from cocaine addiction and divorce, is discovered alive in the rubble and becomes an overnight celebrity with ‘a gift for moving people with his speeches about gratitude and overcoming hardship.’

‘Price puts us in the thick of it, charting a community trauma that might also offer its characters a new start,’ wrote the Guardian’s James Smart. ‘He follows the action with a roving gaze of his own, moving from one short scene to another as he charts the days that follow. It’s a shifting, dialogue-led approach that’s characterised much of the New Yorker’s gritty work’.

‘Price weaves his four main plot strands with masterful skill. Yet while circumstances shift and revelations emerge, the book rarely moves beyond a simmer, instead shuffling to a close with some heartfelt but slightly bland philosophising. This lack of a grand resolution is part of the point: that real-world tragedies cannot be neatly packaged, and redemption is rarely clear cut.’

St Peter’s and the Vatican, 1940

Growing Old Gracefully

LUCY LETHBRIDGE on self-help books about ageing

‘And death shall have no dominion.’

Dylan Thomas was not musing on his daily protein goals when he wrote this but he was right on the money if recent publications currently sagging the ‘wellbeing’ end of the bookshelf are to be believed.

These happiness-craving, mental-health-nurturing, sleepinducing (in the wellbeing meaning of the idea) and digestion-ramping books are nothing if not attempts to stave off the universally inevitable.

Take Ian Smith’s Eat Your Age: Feel Younger, Be Happier, Live Longer (Harvest, £16.99). Dr Smith takes his readers’ lives, decade by decade, and tells them what they should eat to fight decrepitude.

At my age I should be tucking into more ‘bromelain’, a term which covers pineapple, sauerkraut and yoghurt. I should also stock up on turmeric and carrots. That doesn’t sound too bad.

In my next decade, however, I have a diet of clams, flaxseed and pinto beans to look forward to – which is a less appealing prospect. Why bother to make it through the next ten years? Apparently, it’s ‘never too late to start battling the ageing process’, though that makes it sound as though it is a battle which one can win. ‘Eat your greens’ is the ageless underlying message here.

More intriguing (particularly given that its author is aged 102) is Dr Gladys McGarry’s The Well-Lived Life: Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age (Penguin, £10.99). Dr McGarry was a popular podcaster, broadcaster and campaigner for holistic medicine. And she was still at work by the time she died last year at 103. So, when she says that the most important of her six secrets is not to retire and shrivel, she knows what she’s talking about. Live in the moment, get out in nature, eat nutritiously (but don’t boringly overthink it) and exercise regularly. None of these are revolutionary ideas but Dr McGarry, who was in

bouncing mental and physical good health into her 100s, is the proof of the nutritious pudding. But even she had to die in the end.

Michael Greger thinks it’s possible drastically to slow down the onset of creaks and wrinkles. In How Not to Age (Bluebird, £12.99), he offers top tips gleaned from ‘anti-ageing research’. In a reassuringly Michael Mosley-ish manner, he looks into the various claims of what is good for us and finds (sometimes) that the obvious answer is the best one. I, for one, was mightily relieved to learn that it is infinitely preferable to eat a handful of nuts twice a week than go jogging for four hours.

I don’t know exactly when publishers decided that the Scandinavians had a solution for almost all the agonies of modern life.

The Scandis have taught us to get hygge, paint our walls in Gustavian grey and glow with the brain-boosting effects of oily fish. Now, they tell us about ageing and death. Margareta Magnusson (bestselling author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning) brings us The Swedish Art of Ageing Well: Life Wisdom from Someone who Will (probably)

Die Before You (Canongate, £14.99). Swedish top tips for oldies include eating chocolate and wearing stripes – which sound excitingly do-able.

For readers more interested in (very) ancient wisdom, Merjin van de Laar’s How to Sleep like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest (William Collins, £20) might be the ticket. It does not quite live up to the promise of its title.

After all, we don’t know that cavemen always slept well. Plenty of petty worries (being the next meal of some roving sabre-toothed tiger being just one) would surely have kept the everyday caveperson from their slumbers. But apparently, according to Radio 4, the book ‘is causing a great stir among the legions of people who don’t sleep.’

Sleep therapist Dr van de Laar suggests we stop worrying about sleeping for eight hours and instead follow our own patterns, as our ancestors did, sleeping and waking at shorter intervals in tune with our own body clocks and natural light. The book offers interesting theories – for example, when we suddenly jerk awake, is it a relic of tree-sleeping when our bodies were ever alert to, literally, dropping off?

Did cavemen age well? I don’t think they gave it much thought – but they always woke up refreshed.

Did cavemen age well? Le Moustier Homo neanderthalensis by Charles R Knight, 1920 AMERICAN

Architecture & Interiors

LONDON’S LOST INTERIORS

STEVEN BRINDLE

Atlantic Publishing, 415pp, 650 Illustrations, £50

In his classic study, Taste, the design guru Stephen Bayley proposed that ‘interior design is a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers – the rich.’

This was certainly true of the Edwardian plutocrats whose ‘stately pleasure domes’ provide Brindle with his material. As Maeve Kennedy noted in The Art Newspaper, ‘Rooms are showcases for opulence, but in most cases they are less about individual taste than the means to hire the most expensive and fashionable interior decorators of the day.’

Presented with a blank cheque – expense was no object for people who’d made their pile from commodities like gold and coal, or industries like railways – Edwardian interior designers ensured that

every room was as ‘fully dressed’ as its buttoned-up owners. Eventually, the human and financial cost of four years of trench warfare put a stop to this florid philistinism and the droves of servants it took to maintain it. Mansions gave way to mansion flats

Edwardian interior designers ensured that ‘every room was as fully dressed as its buttoned-up owners’

and function took the place of frippery.

By the 1930s, said David Lipton in World of Interiors, ‘the glossy cocktail bar at 65a Chester Square was a sign of the changing times.’

In the Literary Review, Thomas Blaikie cautioned that ‘the photographs need to be looked at carefully, although you might struggle to keep the weighty tome on your knee. The accompanying text is rigorous and scholarly, pointing out for instance the dust on the piano at Stanmore Hall in Harrow ... “The family must have been away,” Brindle remarks, adding that ‘the photos testify to a way of life and a kind of art which now belong to an unreachable distant past.’

The drawing room at 145 Piccadilly, the late Queen’s childhood home, as seen in 1927

The Saloon at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion

Architecture & Interiors

A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH ARCHITECTURE FROM STONEHENGE TO THE SHARD

SIMON JENKINS

Viking, 320pp, £26.99

As the Observer’s Rowan Moore observed, this is ‘two books in one’: two-thirds covering 3000 BC to the inter-war years and conservatively skewed towards the imposing; the

remainder a polemic against the last century’s depredations. And though the latter excited most comment, the former was still applauded.

In the TLS, architectural historian Robert Bevan admired Jenkins’ mission ‘to demystify something that surrounds us every day’, judging he’d done ‘rather well’. If some facts were ‘plain wrong’, the reviewer had still been educated; for example, in the Normans’ ‘cultural genocide’ of Saxon churches.

Similarly, the Times’s chief art critic Laura Freeman noted the author’s ‘characteristic ease and authority’ in guiding ‘the intelligent layman who knows a bit about… Elizabethan prospect houses, Palladianism, the gothic revival and the garden city movement and would like to know more about how they fit together’.

But in the second part ‘the book comes flamingly to life. Jenkins is no longer the country clergymen reading the lesson, but a fire-andbrimstone preacher’, denouncing the sins of modernist architects and pig-headed planners. This sermon ‘should be required reading for the Labour government as it pledges to build 1.5 million homes,’ she wrote.

‘It should certainly be thrust under the nose of Angela Rayner, who last summer questioned whether there was any such thing as a “beautiful” home”’.

Jenkins was ‘very good indeed’ on the Establishment snobbery and

indifference that has blighted so many city-dwellers’ lives. He was also right to warn about ‘the despoliation of the countryside by solar panel arrays and processions of pylons’ in the race for net zero. Call him a ‘Cassandra’, Freeman concluded. But remember, ‘she wasn’t wrong’.

JEWISH COUNTRY HOUSES

EDITED BY JULIET CAREY AND ABIGAIL GREEN

PHOTOS BY HÉLÈNE

BINET

Profile Books, 352pp, £45

‘The words “country houses” immediately make one think of England,’ wrote Anne de Courcy in the Spectator, ‘yet only five of the 15 featured in this hefty, impressively illustrated book are in Britain.

It is a compilation of essays: part histories of various Jewish families, part architectural descriptions and part stories of the chateaux, mansions, villas and, of course, country houses all over Europe, owned and sometimes built by these families. Each chapter is by a different author.’

Timothy Mowl, in Country Life, called it ‘a triumph of sensitive

editing and an expression of compelling intellectual collaboration.’

In the TLS, Adam Sutcliffe noted that the editors have sidestepped culture war sensitivities and guided our attention from ‘economic matters to a more traditional focus on the cultural lives and aesthetic choices of these homes’ former owners’.

The Literary Review’s Adrian Tinniswood found that many of the essays ‘deal with the desire to become part of elite society without being assimilated into it. Along with that went anti-Semitism, the mixture of envy and contempt that was sometimes a whisper and sometimes a shout, but which was part and parcel of attitudes towards European Jewry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.’

While praising it is ‘a fascinating and thought-provoking book, filled with new ideas and unfamiliar houses’, Tinniswood also found it ‘a pioneering work of scholarship’ and ‘of beauty, elegantly designed and lavishly illustrated... Recognising the role played by Jews in the history of the country house does not displace other perspectives. It adds to them, illuminates and enriches them.’

Waddesdon Manor, built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1874

Stonehenge at sunset

Music & Poetry

THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF MUSIC

ANDREW FORD

Old Street Publishing, 256pp, £14.99

Composer and writer Andrew Ford is best known for his wide-ranging broadcasts on ABC National Radio’s The Music Show

In just 256 pages he now sets out to understand what music is and why we’re irresistibly drawn to making it, and ranges across the millennia: symphony and opera, blues, jazz, folk singers, the oral traditions of chain gangs and the lives of the greats such as Bach, Schoenberg, Charlie Parker and Nina Simone.

‘Impressively engaging given the highly compressed format,’ Katy Hamilton felt in BBC Music Magazine. ‘A refreshingly nonEuropean starting point … and pithy, thought-provoking statements’ driving ‘his energetic prose.’

‘Ford’s historical and technical knowledge is vast,’ thought Prospect’s Lucy Hicks Beach. ‘The depth of his research astounding, but the book is cursed by its own definition and the reader left feeling as if they’ve been hurried through a museum.’

The TLS’s Flora Willson found ‘his desire to make connections sing across different cultures impressive’ and the fact ‘this “shortest history” is far from comprehensive is neither surprising nor necessarily a problem. But the fact that “music” gradually turns out to mean a limited view of “Western music” really is.’

‘David Attenborough’s introduction to Life On Earth assumed the reader knew little of the topic matter,’ wrote Ash Brom in the ArtsHub, and ‘Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time did the same. But Ford’s book assumes the reader has a degree in classical music history

with a major in ethnomusicology, an encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz and fluency in music scales and so much musical reference and vocabulary that they probably don’t need to read it in the first place.’

EVERY VALLEY THE STORY OF HANDEL’S MESSIAH

CHARLES KING

Bodley Head, 352pp, £25

The best-selling New York historian explores the Messiah’s backdrop, a time of war, political, conspiracy, enslavement and social polarisation. Created amid royal intrigue, theatre scandals and outrageous satire, its librettist a depressive

dissenter and its composer in ill health and straining to keep an audience’s attention while installed at the English court and spying for his patrons at home in Germany.

‘The original contralto was trafficked by her husband to defray his debts,’ noted Peter Conrad in the Observer. ‘Librettist Charles Jennens is a miserable hypochondriac haunted by his brother’s suicide … and Handel once silenced an uncooperative soprano by telling her “I am Beelzebub, the chief of the devils!” and threatening to toss her out of the window. What moves King is the oratorio’s prescription for overcoming personal misery.’

‘Anyone who has ever written a historical narrative will know how hard it must have been for King to keep all the strands so expertly in play,’ said the FT’s Lucasta Miller. ‘The result is a truly informative,

imaginative and engaging work.’

The Times’s Richard Morrison found the book ‘much closer to the teeming panorama of a novel like War And Peace than the narrow focus of most books about music history. It takes a rare blend of scholarship, ingenuity and empathy to weave together the stories of the mostly distressed souls connected with Messiah’s creation.’

WHAT IN ME IS DARK THE REVOLUTIONARY LIFE OF PARADISE LOST

ORLANDO READE

Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £22

Reade argues that Milton is ‘a touchstone for moments of radical political and social change from 1667 to the present,’ judged Andrea Brady in the TLS. His book ‘maps the unfolding of Milton’s great epic alongside a chronology of readings, misreadings and extrapolations,’ examining how ‘it has been used to illuminate different political systems, and how the figure of Satan has been variously interpreted as tempting demagogue, totalitarian leader and freedom fighter.’

For the Telegraph’s Brendan Gillott this ‘eminently readable account’ examines ‘how a selfconsciously unpopular poem ... drew a multitude of later readers who found in Milton’s epic a mirror for the hells of their own times.’

‘Milton became a key thinker in discourses of political liberty, not just for his poetry, but also for his prose tracts defending republicanism and advocating the overthrow of monarchy,’ observed Brady.

Reade ‘unearths Paradise Lost in unexpected places’: in Malcolm X’s development of his political philosophy in prison; in self-help advice dispensed by Jordan Peterson; even in Philip K. Dick’s science fiction – declaring Blade Runner “the most influential cinematic version of Paradise Lost.”

Applauding Reade’s ‘dramatic retelling’ of Milton’s corpse being exhumed and crowds trying to snatch relics from his body’ as ‘brilliantly done’, Brady reflected that at different times ‘everyone has wanted a piece of Milton for themselves’.

George Frideric Handel, by Thomas Hudson, circa 1747

The Ezra Collective, the British jazz quintet, 2023

Listen Up

CHARLOTTE METCALF on the joys of audio books

‘Buy a radio,’ said a friend, helping me move into a furnished, rented London flat. I was working from home while my daughter was at school and the silence was initially oppressive and depressing. I bought a transistor to keep me company.

I grew up with Radio Four, able to tell the time by the tumpety-tump of The Archers theme tune. Today, like many oldies, I feel the BBC has deserted us in pursuit of younger listeners. The comedy is mostly baffling (I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue aside), I’m infuriated by the cosy chattiness or rudeness of some of Today’s presenters, Melvyn Bragg is sounding increasingly frail and fractious and, after nearly 60 years, Johnny Walker sadly died soon after hanging up his headphones.

So, thank heaven for Audible, as I began weaning myself off the radio. I’d always enjoyed listening to tapes on car journeys and one summer in Greece, I started listening to John Fowles’s The Magus on my walks.

I’d read it twice as a young woman but, narrated by Nicholas Boulton, I came to the strange, troubling novel utterly afresh. Devouring it within days, I then listened agog to The Collector with two narrators, Daniel Rigby for the ‘collector’ and Hannah Murray for the helpless, doomed ‘collected’.

And a plethora of affordable and good portable speakers make wearing headphones unnecessary.

Audio books present us with so much more than the occasional tale at bedtime

Now, whether walking, ironing, gardening, bathing, cooking or cleaning, I’m absorbing a book. Audible membership is just £7.99 a month, including one narrated book.

‘But I prefer actually reading,’ remonstrated a friend, who insisted Audible was not for him. I’m not suggesting anyone replaces reading with listening but do both. As a result, my annual consumption of books has doubled.

Too long with a screen, Kindle or book, our eyes can tire – even with all the fancy reading lights oldies are urged to buy nowadays. We’ll start to stiffen or fidget and decide we want a cup of tea. Not so with Audible. Make the tea, pour a stiff drink, go for a walk – and carry on listening.

How comforting it is on a winter Sunday afternoon to make soup while immersed in Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles read by the incomparable Timothy West. No one can recreate a countess’s misguided grotesque hauteur quite like him, nor invest an apparently mousey, insignificant ‘brown’ girl with the brilliance and fiery integrity that transform her to her rightful status as heroine, fully deserving of the true love that follows.

Apart from the joy of rediscovering books I haven’t read since my teens or early twenties, I’ve been tempted by new ones I might not otherwise have read. I discovered all volumes of Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiograhy and Charlotte Mendelsson’s The Exhibitionist, because they were read superbly by Juliet Stevenson.

Long Island made the heroine’s solitary Irish journey all the more wistful. I also enjoyed listening to Rory Stewart reading his own Politics on the Edge for the energetic contempt he inadvertently displayed about various politicians. Ever a Martin Amis fan, I judged his final autobiographical novel Inside Story (the last book before his death in 2023) too much of a hefty physical brick to tackle and carry around, but was propelled forward, despite the book’s flaws, by Alex Jenning’s narration.

Not long ago I asked Oldie readers what books they enjoyed. I was delighted by how many emails I received. The list was eclectic but there was near universal approval for male masters like Dickens, Trollope, Greene and Orwell. Revisiting both Orwell and Greene on Audible has been particularly satisfying. Andrew Sachs rendering the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory added an extra dimension of pathos and I discovered A Clergyman’s Daughter for the first time via Sophie Ward’s narration. I was equally delighted by Sissy Spaceck reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Meryl Streep’s rendition of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Geoffrey Palmer’s Diary of a Nobody

Eager, as always, to read Ian McEwan, Lessons was rendered all the more harrowing by Simon McBurney’s narration and Jessie Buckley reading Colm Toíbín’s

Recently my daughter said how fondly she remembered me reading her Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, so as we age it’s perhaps only natural that we return to the simple childhood pleasure of listening to a story. Yet audio books present us with so much more than the occasional tale at bedtime.

Undoubtedly many of you will already have subscribed but, for novices, audio books open our ears to a vast, wide-ranging library read by some of the world’s finest actors. I’ll be interested to hear from any booklover who doesn’t regard them, once tried, as an additional delight.

The late Timothy West (above) and (right) holding his wife Prunella Scales’s hand at an Oldie literary lunch

CREATOR OF NIGHTMARES

HENRY FUSELI’S ART AND LIFE

CHRISTOPHER BAKER

Reaktion Books, 224pp, £30

Some artists are so well known for a single masterpiece that the image eclipses their whole reputation.

Such is the case with Fuseli’s The Nightmare, argues Christopher Baker, art historian, editor and author of Creator of Nightmares: “Many people would be able to summon up in their mind’s eye an image of the painting ... but few could plot the life and career of its extraordinary creator.”

Fuseli was original, learned and well-connected, wrote Wall Street Journal’s Maxwell Carter, and his commentary on Rousseau was praised in an unsigned review as the work of as ‘a gentleman, a scholar, a philosopher, a genius and a man of wit... Naturally, the reviewer was Fuseli.’

It was Joshua Reynolds who encouraged Fuseli to channel his energy into painting, spending the 1770s honing his style in Italy. His work was full of ‘doom and literary drama from the start... The debut of the first version of The Nightmare, at the Royal Academy in 1782, was the seismic before-and-after event in Fuseli’s life.’

Carter found the book ‘lean and engaging, in many ways an ideal introduction to the painter’, though he grumbled about its being sparsely illustrated and pedestrian in style.

In the Literary Review Peter Davidson thought the book ‘the ideal guide to Fuseli’s strange career’, which straddled the 19th-century divide between the ‘daylight restraint of neoclassicism and the wild night-time riot of devils, witches, dreams and fire’.

MONDRIAN

HIS LIFE, HIS ART, HIS QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE

NICHOLAS FOX WEBER

Knopf, 656pp, £32.78

The Telegraph’s Evgenia Siokos found that Fox Weber, ‘highly regarded for his contributions to the public’s understanding of Le Corbusier and Balthus’, had produced an extremely long but ‘extremely thorough’ book with ‘fanatical attention to detail’.

Literary Review’s Stephen Smith called the author ‘assiduous and sensitive’. But in many appraisals, there were doubts about his biographical – somewhat florid –approach to the artist’s work.

Mondrian was an odd fish, living on lentils in poky flats and owning very little. Crazy about jazz-hall dancing, he was nonetheless remote and private, unwilling to make connections between life and work.

Fox Weber had no such inhibitions, and the TLS’s Charles Darwent teased him for his sitespecific allusions to every picture: Amersfoort’s railway lines ‘prefiguring the painter’s grid-patterns; mullioned windows in Winterswijk inspiring one of his Compositions and representing “life without boundaries…” And so on.’

For Smith, the author’s increasingly purple commentaries – one of the sparing canvases evoked trumpets and orgasms – were ‘an unintended pleasure’.

Nevertheless Smith found the

‘exhaustive survey’ reaped ‘great rewards’: a cache of revealing letters and diaries written by an amanuensis; the dealer who bought Mondrian’s work while serving in the Somme offensive; some reluctant dabbling in stage design.

And Siokos revelled in a tale of Nazi storm-troopers dismissing a Mondrian as worthless while seizing a leftist’s ‘decadent’ collection.

Several reviewers observed that one Mondrian abstract, sold for a few hundred dollars in the 1930s, fetched $51 million at auction in 2022.

GILBERT AND GEORGE AND THE COMMUNISTS

JAMES BIRCH AND MICHAEL HODGES

Cheerio Publishing, 208pp, £19.99

In 1990 Soho gallerist James Birch took an exhibition of works by Gilbert and George to Moscow. Their visit is ‘deftly narrated here as an account of the last days of the USSR cast as a comedy of manners,’ wrote New Statesman’s Michael Prodger.

‘Helping Birch’s recollections on to the page is the journalist Michael Hodges, who endows them with breezy vivacity and a sotto voce sense of the absurd.’

Despite perestroika there was ‘more than enough strangeness about to enliven the narrative –secret servicemen in the hotel, a KGB fixer who half threatens to torture Birch with “heated-up nails to put through your fingers”, British Council men in suits, and an assortment of interested parties – as well as G&G, of course, studiedly enigmatic throughout.’

The book is a sequel to Birch’s Bacon in Moscow and FT’ s Christian House noted that ‘while Bacon’s character – caustic, brilliant, masochistic – was all on the surface, Gilbert & George remain a mercurial subject. This makes for a more interesting book.’

Much comedy is created out of these two gay conceptual artists floundering around the Soviet Union. Birch has ‘a winning and wry delivery ... that balances his genuine love of art and artists with a frank takedown of the outrageous egos that pepper his days.’ He is ‘particularly funny in his dissection of officialdom, both Russian and British.’

Composition by Piet Mondrian, 1916

The Nightmare by Fuseli, 1781

COLLARED HOW WE MADE THE MODERN DOG

CHRIS PEARSON

Profile, 272pp, £18.99

The author is a specialist in humananimal history and professor of environmental history at the University of Liverpool, and owns a Bedlington-whippet dog.

The book, explained Gavin Plumley in the Literary Review, ‘is a history of humanity’s changing relationship with its most favoured pet. There are good dogs and bad dogs, loyal dogs – especially in war – and rabid dogs, though the ones who don’t live up to expectations are almost entirely the products of

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‘insights and enthusiasm’. He confessed: ‘Last month I bought a bigger car to accommodate my two keeshonds. This week I bought a super king-size bed for all of us. When I tell my dog-loving friends about these purchases, they just nod in complete understanding of my helpless devotion.’

LETTERS

OLIVER SACKS ED. KATE EDGAR

Picador 726pp, £30

The well-known British neurologist Oliver Sacks is ‘an endearing and entertaining prose stylist –inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse,’ wrote Ralf Webb in the Guardian, ‘and the organisation of Letters, separated into broadly thematic, chronological chapters with concise editorial introductions, provides narrative momentum.’

misplaced human interventions.’ He continued: ‘It charts the dutiful worker and the beloved domestic alike, from the dogs in the rock art at Shuwaymis to the tripe-fed hounds of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, touching along the way on the dubious claims on packets of dog biscuits and the Nazification of the German shepherd.’

In the Telegraph Tanya Gold liked the theory that ‘homo sapiens outcompeted neanderthals because we had dogs, where they did not –but for the most part, dogs have traditionally been outdoor workers: hunters, herders and guard dogs.’

In the TLS Simone Gubler thought Collared contained ‘plenty of fascinating dinner-party fare (though stories of the political battles against dog excrement fought by 20thcentury figures such as Harvey Milk and Jacques Chirac might have to wait until after dessert).’

In the Times Gerard DeGroot’s only complaint related to the book’s length: he would have welcomed another 100 pages of Pearson’s

Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime assistant and friend, has distilled 700 pages of absorbing, illuminating, moving and entertaining letters for publication.

‘They range,’ said Gavin Francis in the Observer, ‘from August 1960 (when Sacks moved from England to North America), through to a few days before his death in New York, from melanoma, 55 years later.’

Lynn Barber explained in the Telegraph that Sacks wrote to scientists and fellow neurologists but also to children, prisoners and nuns and writer friends like Jonathan Miller and W H Auden. ‘These well-edited letters ... will only add to his lustre,’ she wrote.

‘Although they sometimes show the rhetoric, extravagance and self-pity ... they also show the extraordinary breadth of his scholarship and his real genius for describing people and natural phenomena.’

The New Statesman’s Erica Wagner thought it ‘a work of endeavour, of hope, of pain, of the richness of a truly remarkable life that also reminds us that all our lives

are remarkable, all are extraordinary, if we allow them to be. It is a blessing as much as a book. How lucky we were – and are – to know him.’

LISTEN IN  HOW RADIO CHANGED THE HOME

BEATY RUBENS

Bodleian Library, 272pp, £30

‘This joyous, richly illustrated book about the early years of radio from the listeners’ point of view by BBC radio producer Beaty Rubens’ is ‘full of gems’, wrote Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Spectator.

In 1922, a little under 150,000 people had access to a radio; by 1939 the number had grown to almost 34 million. The results impacted every aspect of daily life from family dynamics (who controlled the dial?) to party politics, interior design and the role of the Royal Family.In Country Life Timothy Mowl enjoyed the nostalgia, ‘the author’s engrossing narrative is supported by a rich archival resource mined in the Bodleian Library in Oxford,’ adding, that while ‘scholarly it most certainly is ... it is wonderfully readable’.

Signalling one of the most rapid technological shifts, the radio was to become ‘a ubiquitous presence in the home, just as the television set would be after the 1953 coronation and computers and tablets are today.’

Kathryn Hughes in the Daily Mail delighted in this ‘brilliantly researched book’ and was amused by a satirical cartoon from 1923 which shows a dinner party of guests wearing headphones through which they are listening to the radio.

Fast forward a hundred years, and ‘we have a very similiar bugbear in which family meals are conducted in silence as each member scrolls ofuriously on their phone.’

Requiescat by Briton Rivière, 1888

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)

THE DEAD SEA A 10,000-YEAR HISTORY

NIR ARIELLI

Yale University Press, 304pp, £25

Maritime historian, David Abulafia, in the Literary Review, called this book a ‘fascinating, pioneering and wide-ranging history of this supersalty lake and the basin of land that surrounds it’.

Its original settlers were the Natufians, who cultivated cereals, peas and lentils. Since 1948 the Dead Sea has shrunk because water has been diverted from the River Jordan. Today it is exploited for its enormous mineral resources, so much so that it is at risk of permanently contracting into a series of separate pools.’

‘Arielli rightly insists on the need for the peoples living around the Dead Sea – Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians – to work together to ensure that, however dead it may be, the Dead Sea has a future. Arielli has written an excellent history of one of the world’s most mysterious seas and produced a powerful warning of what is to come.’

Nonetheless, it is ‘not an evocative book,’ wrote Violet Moller in the Telegraph. ‘There’s hardly any description of the natural environment, no hint of the otherworldly beauty of the coastline; the dazzling aquamarine on white. With 10,000 years to get through, the narrative has to move at quite a pace, leaving little time for description or detail about the characters as they flash by. What is lacking in detail and lyricism, though, is made up for by rigour, readability and remarkable anecdotes.’

WE WHO WRESTLE WITH GOD

JORDAN

B PETERSON

Allen Lane, 576pp, £30

The academic psychologist turned alt-right provocateur Jordan B Peterson’s excursus into Biblical criticism divided opinion dramatically.

It is, said former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in the Guardian, ‘a sprawling, repetitive text that could have done with some ruthless editing. Ostensibly a step-by-step guide through the

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biblical narratives of Genesis and Exodus (and, for some reason, Jonah), with the goal of uncovering wisdom to help meet present-day moral challenges, it in fact returns persistently to some of Peterson’s favourite tropes about modern culture, its flabbiness and confusion.’

Williams found Peterson to be unsure of what he meant by God; and that he tended to flatten the individuality of the Bible stories in order to yoke them to his own preoccupations: ‘every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals.’

In the Times James Marriott found the book ‘unreadable ... repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad’ and ‘repels the reader’s attention ... Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about “the intrinsic nature of being” in the most banal and improbable places. This is biblical scholarship as conspiracy theory.’

Yet Rupert Shortt in the Spectator found it ‘studded with penetrating glances at science as well as philosophy’ and offering ‘fresh, detailed and often gripping expositions of the Torah or Pentateuch’.

A SECOND ACT WHAT NEARLY DYING TEACHES US ABOUT REALLY LIVING

MATT MORGAN

Simon & Schuster, 272pp, £20

The intensive care doctor and author of Critical, has spent his career working on the margins of life and death. In his new book he looks at ten case studies of people who have suffered near-death experiences.

‘Ed, now 47, was “fatally” struck by lightning at 17; Luca, 30, lost a battle with Covid; Summer took her own life at 25, and regretted it even as her breathing petered out; Roberto was frozen solid on a mountain ledge in the Dolomites and did not register a heartbeat for eight hours and 42 minutes’, said Tim Adams in the Observer.

Nearly dying can cause you to reevaluate your priorities.

‘Whether in your eyes the author ranks as prophet or provocateur, you should read this outstanding study.’

‘Morgan,’ Adams said, ‘tries to inhabit some of this carpe diem wisdom’ and ‘impart it to his reader’.

In the New Statesman Sophie McBain thought Morgan a ‘thoughtful and sensitive’ writer, but ‘given the importance he places on listening to these deathdefying patients, it is disappointing we don’t hear more from them directly.’ Its lessons about how to make the most of life, she observed, are ‘commonplaces’.

The Dead Sea

Jordan B Peterson

BOX OFFICE POISON

HOLLYWOOD’S STORY IN A SERIES OF FLOPS

TIM ROBEY

Faber & Faber, 352pp, £16.99

Ranging from D W Griffiths Intolerance (1916) to Tom Hooper’s Cats (2019), this is an ‘exhilarating whistlestop tour of some of the biggest financial disasters in Hollywood history,’ wrote Thomas W Hodgkinson in Literary Review.

His ‘main criticism of this generally enjoyable book is that, despite the experience the author has accrued in a quarter-century of reviewing films for the Daily Telegraph, he offers little in the way of an overarching thesis.’

Some of his 26 picks sound terrible but others are presented as

‘undervalued masterpieces’.

Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Guardian found the book had profound things to say about the changing nature of cinema. ‘Yes, it’s a colourful catalogue of disaster, chock-full of clashing egos, runaway budgets and acts of God. But what makes this a five-star book is the way Robey weaves in the wider context so deftly that you barely notice.

A chapter on nautical thriller Speed 2: Cruise Control, for example, (a “clattering shambles” that its own star, Sandra Bullock, disowned as making “no sense”...) illustrates the bruising process of blockbusters transitioning to CGI during the late 1990s.’

Sarah Ditum, in the Times, summed it up: ‘To find out what makes the business tick, don’t look at what goes right. Look at the films where it all goes wrong ... at the “the medium’s weirdos, outcasts, misfits, freaks”...

‘There’s a transcendence in the profoundly atrocious. And without films so bad that make you question everything you thought you knew about art, how will we be able to appreciate the genuinely great?’

Miscellaneous

UNDER A METAL SKY A JOURNEY THROUGH MINERALS, GREED AND WONDER

PHILIP MARSDEN

Granta Books, 352pp, £20

The title refers to an ancient belief about the heavens’ composition but the subject matter is underground.

Marsden, a ‘rockie’ since childhood, devotes a chapter each to 11 minerals that made the world –and hence humanity – taking a European tour from his home in tin-riddled Cornwall to mercurymining Slovenia. He assembles what the Telegraph’s Harriet Rix called ‘a Wunderkammer’ of facts: gold filigree’s stretchability; a one-time fad for radium-based toothpaste; 7Up’s original, added-lithium recipe.’

In the Literary Review Nigel Andrew, found it ‘no “believe it or not” compendium’ but ‘deeply thoughtful, well-written and illuminating’.

‘Our connection with the mineral world is bone deep,’ wrote Charlie Gilmour in the Guardian. The first artist probably used a rock; likewise, the first murderer.

From axe-heads to warheads, added Andrew, metals have ‘lethalised disagreement to the point where we now speak of “conflict minerals”’. And in their extraction, humanity had shown unbridled rapacity: shattering lives and bestowing a ‘“resource curse” which turns heavily mined areas into impoverished and poisoned wastelands’.

Andrew concluded: ‘I urge you to read this eye-opening, mindexpanding book.’

THE SIREN’S CALL HOW ATTENTION BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST ENDANGERED RESOURCE

CHRIS HAYES

Scribe UK, 336pp, £20

Anchorman on an American rolling-news channel, Hayes once wanted recognition himself but only ever got ‘attention’. And now, observed Simon Ings in the Telegraph, most people are the same: thanks to social media, they’re ‘stars of their own reality TV shows’ and about as real.

Hayes delineates three kinds of attention: ‘conscious’,‘involuntary’ and ‘social’ attention’, which humans need – and the last two have been ruthlessly exploited by coders. By seeking strangers’ acclaim, ‘we’ve ‘created synthetic versions of our most fundamental desires’.

Ings found Hayes ‘the very picture of an intelligent, engaged commentator’; his book ‘so engaging that it earns the user’s conscious focus over several hours.’

For Rix, ‘the charm and the genius’ of the book was in its ‘ability not to pigeonhole itself. There was no forced framework... The author’s journey wasn’t contiguous, and he avoided such clichéd conceits as following Bronze Age trading routes.’

This allowed him ‘to display a quiet depth of knowledge, and a truly impressive network of friends, acquaintances and correspondents among mining and metalenthusiasts’.

In the Independent Andrew Demillo found his ‘unique approach’ avoided ‘feeling like a retread of already mined material.’

Still, on potential remedies for our brave new world, the reviewers weren’t quite as unanimous.

Some proposals ‘at least offered hope’– but not to Ings. ‘I came away admiring Hayes,’ he concluded, ‘but if I were an investor, I’d show him the door.’

Jason Patric in Speed 2: Cruise Control, 1997

Ulysses and the Sirens, 1909 by Herbert James Draper

LUCY

LETHBRIDGE recommends the latest freshly packaged classics

FEARLESS AND FREE JOSEPHINE BAKER

Vintage Classics, 288pp, £18.99

Translated into English for the first time by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis, Fearless and Free is drawn from conversations that Baker had with French writer Marcel Sauvage.

They started in 1926, at the wild height of her celebrity in Paris’s nightclubs and revue bars and ended 20 years later when she was both an esteemed civil rights campaigner and a holder of the Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur for her wartime work with the Resistance.

Baker talked about everything, from her dirt-poor childhood in Missouri to her manifestation as the very embodiment of the Jazz Age.

‘She exudes love and life on the page. And that voice!’ raved a reviewer in the Guardian. ‘Her younger one, bright, witty, effervescent, and her older one, wiser, angrier, and still so funny.’

HIGH WAGES

DOROTHY WHIPPLE

Persephone, 316pp, £12

Persephone Books has championed Dorothy Whipple’s novels for years, bringing new readers to her witty, closely observed dramas of middle-class women’s lives in northern provincial towns.

THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE

ELIZABETH JENKINS

Virago, 288pp, £9.99

Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1953 novel about a marriage under sly attack is one of my favourites of all the Virago classics. It is now in a brand new edition and updated with a new cover picture. It’s curious that no Virago edition has had, to my mind anyway, the right cover – and I’m not at all sure that the jazzy, angular 1920s flappers on this new one are right either. But one’s view of that would depend on how the reader imagines smoothie barrister Evelyn, his wife Imogen and the flat-footed but sinister neighbour Blanche.

tale of elves and men and worlds that can and cannot co-exist, will therefore be delighted by the plushy new Folio boxed and limited edition. It comes with strikingly swirling artwork by Julie Dillon and an introduction by Neil Gaiman (though nowadays one might not want to flag that up too much).

THE ELIZABETH DAVID COLLECTION

Grub Street, 4x36pp, £25

THE STRANGE HOUSE

RAYMOND BRIGGS

Manderley, 176pp, £19.99

First published in 1930, High Wages is an adventure in retail, set in a small Lancashire town in 1912. Whipple’s spirited heroine Jane works her way up from working in a draper’s shop to owning her own store.

The book is full of characteristic Whipple details about working women who are making ends meet and learning new skills; of friendships and of the terrible working conditions behind the scenes of glittering retail emporiums.

Reprinted with its original illustrations by Oldie favourite, Briggs, this magical 1961 book for children now comes with an introduction by Chris Riddell. The book is set in 1935 in Wimbledon, where Briggs was born. Two children trespassing on a golf course discover a secret tunnel to a strange house, inspired, according to a Wimbledon Society blogger, by Park House built by Henry Holland in 1802, but demolished in 1949. Briggs captures the bricky suburbs of his childhood and their secrets brilliantly.

THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER

LORD DUNSANY

Folio Society, 240pp, £65

For fans of fantasy lit in all its varieties and media, Lord Dunsany is a key figure. Devotees of his influential 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter, a

Grub Street has created a gorgeously petite boxed collection of some of the little booklets that Elizabeth David wrote and sold in her Pimlico shop. Potted Meats and Fish Pastes, How to Bake an English Loaf, Dried Herbs Aromatics and Condiments, Syllabubs and Fruit Fools. All with attractive geometric covers like tasteful wallpaper.

MY BRILLIANT CAREER MILES FRANKLIN

Penguin Classics, 272pp, £16.99

With a tantalising cover illustrated by what looks like stylised railway tracks, part Escher, part Heath Robinson, this new edition of Franklin’s autobiographical novel of Edwardian Australia, is irrepressibly enchanting. Teenage girls will thrill to the adventures of 16-year-old aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn as she fights to escape life on her parents’ outback farm in the boondocks.

But Sybylla, imaginative, furious, frustrated, delightful, is irresistible to readers of all ages.

Crime & Thriller

MICHAEL BARBER rounds up the latest thrillers and crime novels

Those who feel that hi-tech overcomplicates thrillers should welcome Dominic Nolan’s White City (Headline, 464pp, £20), voted ‘the best crime novel of 2024’ by Mark Sanderson in Times.

The setting is pre-gentrified Notting Dale in 1952, a festering rookery of ‘peeling paint, crumbling plaster, and broken windows fixed with board’, where black and Irish immigrants rub shoulders with spivs and teddy boys.

It’s also the site of what was then Britain’s biggest ever heist: from a Post Office van containing £287,000 in notes, worth over £10 million now.

The brutal fall out from this robbery, which extends to the race riots of 1958, involves three contrasting characters: Dave Lander, an undercover cop who’s been undercover so long ‘he’s more gangster than cop’, Teddy ‘Mother’ Nunn, ‘a particularly chilling villain’ according to John Williams in the Mail on Sunday, and the young mixed-race Addie, whom Williams describes as ‘an unusually convincing child heroine’.

When the action shifts to Soho, where crime boss Billy Hill lords it, there are also walk-on parts for Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Princess Margaret, all of whom had a taste for the low life that Nolan depicts so convincingly.

According to Henry Porter, a loose cannon has no place in today’s MI5, even when fired in self-defence against a corrupt and predatory oligarch who resembles Mohamed Al-Fayed.

But because she has done the State some service, Porter’s heroine, Slim Parsons, is given the chance to redeem herself by infiltrating a supposedly subversive news agency based near Bletchley Park, site of the Enigma codebreaking unit where Slim’s Polish forebears worked.

Reviewing The Enigma Girl (Quercus, 489pp, £22) in the Observer, Alexander Larman said that fans of Porter’s Paul Samson thrillers are in for a fresh treat: ‘Slim Parsons is every bit as dynamic and charismatic as Samson.

She takes centre stage in this superbly twist-laden novel and

swiftly establishes herself as a heroine for ages.’

Kirkus Reviews was equally keen on Slim, saying that ‘with her freewheeling rejection of authority, she could have leapt from one of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels.’

After retiring as the head of MI5 in 1996, Stella Rimington began writing thrillers, the 13th of which, The Hidden Hand (Bloomsbury, 304pp, £20), deals with the threat

Red-haired single mum Kate, Blake’s heroine, wins a plush, all-expenses paid week in Paris learning about perfume-making. This coincides with the news that a serial killer who decapitates red-haired women like her is active. To make matters worse, Kate also suspects that her abusive ex-partner is on her tail.

We share not only Kate’s thoughts, but also those of others involved, including a disabled veteran of Helmand Province whom she meets on Eurostar and the serial killer himself. To quote Natasha Cooper again: ‘Fast-moving and full of charming descriptions of Paris, this is popular serial-killer fiction of the most effective kind.’

posed by Chinese infiltration of British universities. The likeable protagonist, Li Min, a pioneer of deep fake videos, is forced to transfer from Harvard to a fictional Oxford College, St Felix’s, with strong financial ties to Beijing.

Interviewed in the Times, which described her book as ‘a brisk and enjoyable tale’, Dame Stella agreed that it could also be read as ‘a warning to those who still don’t see China as an enemy’, particularly the ‘useful idiots’ in universities who regard claims of Chinese subversion as ‘racist or irrelevant.’ How Li Min, with some help from an undercover CIA agent, does battle with her thuggish enforcer Mr Chen, will keep readers turning the pages. Should readers open The Killing Sense by Sam Blake (Corvus, 512pp, £14.99), then according to Natasha Cooper in the Literary Review they will encounter ‘such topics as coercive control, domestic abuse, serial killing, schoolgirl friendship and romance.’

Reviewers of The Last Truths We Told (Raven, 368pp, £16.99), Holly Watts’s new book about a fateful reunion of nine Trinity College, Cambridge alumni, have compared it to Donna Tartt’s epic debut, The Secret History

I mean no disservice when I say it’s not nearly so cerebral. Indeed, most of the book consists of dialogue, as the characters chew over predictions they made about each other 20 years before. It’s soon clear that the ties that bind them have begun to fray, and that one of them may be a killer.

‘A romantic tale of detection and disillusion, it is very well written and genuinely creepy,’ said Robert Sanderson in the Times.

Sanderson was also impressed by Karsten Dusse’s ‘brutal but hilarious tale of German gangsterism’, Murder Mindfully (Faber, 408pp, £9.99), in which a put-upon criminal lawyer is ‘minded’ to become his own judge, jury and executioner thanks to a course in Mindfulness.

Fans of this trendy panacea for stress may be offended, but sceptics will surely endorse Sanderson’s verdict that ‘watching a worm turn –into a vengeful monster – has never been such fun.’

John Thaw (right) as Inspector Morse, Wadham College, Oxford, 1987

Commonplace Corner

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.

F Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, published 100 years ago, on 10th April 1925

Thousands have lived without love; not one without water.

W H Auden

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

Helen Keller

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’

Aldous Huxley

Eros will have naked bodies; friendship naked personalities.

C S Lewis

There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness.

Maggie Smith

There is in true beauty, as in courage, something which narrow souls cannot dare to admire.

William Congreve

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Until I got married, when I used to go out, my mother said goodbye to me as though I was emigrating.

Thora Hird

Whenever I am out of luck, I use a word that ends in uck.

I’m sorry I can’t be more definite But here’s a hint: it has an f in it.

Robert Conquest

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Graham Greene

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

Patrick Kavanagh

Nursery fees

The kind-looking woman hands me a piece of paper.

‘Thanks very much,’ I say. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

My heavily pregnant wife waddles out of the nursery ahead of me. We look at each other dumbfounded.

£1,800 a month. That’s what the piece of paper says. £1,800 to send our as-yet-unborn child there full-time.

We initially thought we were insane, looking for somewhere for a baby that wasn’t even a baby yet. The kindlooking woman assured us we weren’t. She could offer us a spot in January 2026 at the earliest.

The nursery must be no bigger than most hairdressers, with a similar-size garden area out the back. I’ve seen wedding spaces go cheaper. And we don’t even live in London.

Honestly, my early thirties have been filled with unbridled joys. Like buying a house with my wife. Like finding out she was pregnant. Like our mortgage

Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.

Dorothy Day

To my ear, the term ‘comic novelist’ is as redundant and off-putting as the term ‘literary novelist’.

Howard Jacobson

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments or publicity.

Thomas Wolfe

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

James Herriot

There’s no workman, whatsoever he be, That may both work well and hastily.

Geoffrey Chaucer

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

Anthony Bourdain

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

going up by £500 each. Like impending nursery fees.

We felt bad for declining the £1,800 offer. The nursery was on the way to our train station. It was open when we needed it to be. They did lots of stuff we thought was good, such as taking the children out on excursions.

The woman who showed

SMALL DELIGHTS

Standing on one leg in the shower and successfully washing the other foot.

MARTIN RISPIN, EAST YORKSHIRE

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

us round had somehow maintained her pep, despite the chaos of the children. The place was about as hygienic as one could hope for, given its proximity to so many infants. But we didn’t feel that bad for not bankrupting ourselves.

Until a few weeks ago, I scoffed at such stories. They always tended to come from positions of privilege, from people who were somehow shocked that having children had financial ramifications. I’m not scoffing any more.

I can also see why increasing numbers of young people are putting off having kids entirely. I don’t have any of the answers, either. But perhaps someone less tired than me – now a new parent – does.

JUSTIN CASH

Great Gatsby at 100: F Scott Fitzgerald

Valley boys

SIMON WILLIAMS

Behind the Scenes:

The Dramatic

Lives of Philip Burton

By Angela V John Parthian Books £25

The clue to Angela V John’s intriguing odyssey is in its catchy subtitle, The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton Lives – not life; each of them distinct and intriguing.

Philip Burton’s childhood was a triumph over poverty in South Wales. Then there’s a glittering career in the theatre and at the BBC (the golden age of radio drama). Later, Burton (1904-95) had success in America as a performer, writer, director and lecturer.

Throughout the narrative runs an affinity with his protégé and legal ward, Richard Burton, né Jenkins, prophetically nicknamed Rich. Richard admitted, ‘He didn’t adopt me – I adopted him.’

There is no one better qualified than Angela V John to give us this loving insight into these two extraordinary Burtons. It’s a love rooted in her knowledge of and affection for South Wales – and its history as a breeding ground for struggling actors.

The Burtons’ path out of the valleys is one well-trodden by Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Sheen et al. (Let’s spare a thought for the Old Etonian actors Eddie Redmayne, Hugh Laurie and Dominic West, who struggled against class bias from the other end.)

It was Port Talbot Secondary School that brought the stage-struck Burtons together – Richard, the pupil with his raw talent, and Philip, the inspirational teacher who became his mentor, his Svengali, his Professor Higgins. Interestingly, the Welsh word ysgol has

two meanings: school and ladder. A ladder the père et fils climbed in tandem.

Philip later wrote that a teacher knows his worth only when he has ‘taught somebody else to be better than he is’. Perhaps that was his life’s mission. Apocryphally, it was Philip who taught Richard to act, and Elizabeth Taylor who taught him how to be a star.

Some think Richard could have succeeded Laurence Olivier as actormanager of the National Theatre, but he admitted to a lack of discipline: ‘I’ve done some awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.’ The

two Burtons shared the usual Welshness, which brought with it ‘the heightened awareness that comes with savouring a second language’. Richard had to Anglicise his voice – and not roll his Rs. Philip urged economy in his acting: ‘You don’t have to use a sledgehammer when a gentle tap will do the trick.’ His bywords for acting were ‘power, pitch and pace’.

Philip’s childhood in Mountain Ash, Glamorgan, he says, was ‘almost a

The story of Richard Burton and Philip Burton, his guardian and teacher, is told in Mr Burton, a new film out on April 4

I once met Richard Burton

My father was the actor Hugh Williams (1904-69), a pre-war matinée idol in David Copperfield (1935) and Wuthering Heights (1939).

After the war, he was declared bankrupt. When this was printed in the Daily Express, the clipping was pinned on the school noticeboard. Underneath, someone had scribbled, ‘So Williams minor will be leaving at Easter!’

One of the first actors to slip some money into our family coffers was the up-and-coming Richard Burton.

My father’s fortunes recovered, he took to writing and starring in drawingroom comedies. He and RB were not close friends, but my father never forgot the kindness and would go misty-eyed watching his subsequent success.

I grew up understanding that actors

complete blank’ in his memory, except that he became hungry for drama and music. There may not have been a bath in his home but there was a piano, and ‘the hypnotic narrative gift’ of his local priest became part of his ‘theatre addiction’. He was a plump, unappealing child, ‘permanently crippled in more ways than one’. Despite his subsequent international success, Philip was sadly

were a close-knit fraternity, with its HQ at the Garrick Club.

I met Richard Burton only once, in 1978, in a restaurant in Vienna, nine years after Dad had died. I was filming a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda with Peter Sellers, a joyful shoot but a flop.

RB was in town, about to film The Wild Geese. One evening, when we were having a cast-and-crew dinner party, he walked into our restaurant. The room went quiet – even Peter Sellers faltered, mid-Goon anecdote.

Burton was all in white – polo neck, slacks, moccasins all as white as his teeth. His face was brown as a berry: the man from Del Monte.

He surveyed the room, smiling the smile that had launched as many ships as his wife Elizabeth Taylor, and he

slow in coming out of the closet. I was so relieved when he finally found a life partner, Christian Alderson, to share the glory of his final years in Key West.

With his star rising in England, Philip went to the US and had much success in creating and troubleshooting Broadway shows, notably turning round the fortunes of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He was never

fixed me in his sights. Perhaps he had a box of oranges for me.

Ignoring everyone, he slowly ambled down to my end of the table and squatted beside me. ‘You are so like your father,’ he said in his dark chocolate voice.

How did he know me from Adam? I was speechless.

‘He was a hell of an actor,’ he went on, ‘I loved him.’

‘Oh good,’ I spluttered. ‘Thank you … um.’

And, with a pat on my shoulder, he was gone.

It was a treasured moment and typically sweet of the wonderful man.

‘What did he want?’ everyone asked.

I said, ‘He wanted to join us, but I told him it was a private party.’

Laughter all round.

SIMON WILLIAMS

credited with or paid for salvaging Moss Hart’s blockbuster musical Camelot, starring Richard, from disaster.

It wasn’t the first time that his ward had called him to the rescue. In Stratford, Philip had stepped in to get Richard’s debut as Prince Hal on track. Philip became known in NY as ‘the backstage brains of Broadway’. He was often caught in the crossfire between Richard and his directors – and between his wives, ‘when journalistic hell broke out’.

The biography is a little heavy on the listing of his many credits, but it’s a fascinating read, with glittery names gently dropped along the way: Emlyn Williams, Dylan Thomas (wickedly funny), Louis MacNeice, Sean O’Casey – and plenty of Liz Taylor, of course.

Some people, like me, may find that the glimpses of his ward Richard are the prime pickings.

Still, considering the rich catalogue of Philip’s achievements, it’s surprising that his name is not more widely known. Notwithstanding Richard’s version of their symbiosis being frequently embellished or drunkenly misremembered, it was a loving and fertile co-dependency.

Richard inscribed a book of Belloc poems, ‘To Phil, from his other half, Richie.’ Of his protégé, Philip wrote, ‘To whom I owe as much as he owes me.’

Still, later on, Philip conceded, ‘One does like to be known in one’s own right.’ John has done just that – she’s moved him from behind the scenes to centre stage.

Simon Williams played Major Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs

Bird brains

JOHN MCEWEN

Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood

By Adam Nicolson William Collins £22

The polymath author Adam Nicolson has a special love of birds.

Bird School is a woodland-bird counterpart to his prizewinning The Seabird’s Cry, about the ten oceanic species that breed on the Hebridean Shiant Isles.

This book is broader in scope, to match its subject and audience, and similarly combines vivid eyewitness accounts with facts and figures – there are one billion fewer birds in Europe now than in 1970. It is full of manifold erudition and, like his previous bird book, avian vulnerability, which increases globally and relentlessly.

In Nicolson’s experience, ‘the modern combination – over-managed fields and under-managed or abandoned woods –has delivered a double blow.’

‘The multiple form of life’ he knew as a child, treasured since time immemorial, he sees dying from indifference. ‘It is the indifference that led me finally to build a birdhouse and to write this book [about] the landscape of a general carelessness and ignorance, made knowable, ironically, only through the years of close attention and record-keeping by those who knew something was wrong.’

‘On the run’ from London to the Nicolson family house – Sissinghurst in Kent, transferred to the National Trust when he was boy – he and his second wife, Sarah Raven, kept a look out for ‘a refuge’; somewhere they felt they ‘could be happy’.

They have found it at Perch Hill Farm, ‘buried in a wood’ in the ‘damp and tree-thick’ Sussex Weald. This is testified already by two of his books and, for Sarah Raven, a former doctor, by her renown as a gardener.

Over 30 years, she has made ‘a large and wonderful garden round the farmhouse’, with due attention to seeds specific to bird species and seasons.

The opportunity to build a birdhouse that ‘might be accommodating and receptive to birds’ and teach Nicolson about them, finally materialised when a bottom field, Hollow Flemings, suffered a landslip beyond repair.

It was left to ‘reculture’. A chapter on ‘reculturing’ cites his debt to the scientist Dr Richard Broughton at Monks Wood, Cambridgeshire; the late Hugh White, who took his Strawberry Hill farm in

Bedfordshire, out of production in 1987; and his friends Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell’s ‘inspirational rewilding project’ at Knepp, West Sussex. Twenty years ago, the three of them visited Holland to meet Frans Vera, ‘controversial apostle of rewilding in Europe’.

In Hollow Flemings, shrub land and trees grew. Two nightingale pairs made it a home. A couple of years ago, the birdhouse was built – ‘an absorbatory, a place to dissolve, if such a thing is possible, the boundary between self and world’. It was stilted to reach the branches, with a wood-burner, gas ring, makeshift bed and nest-boxed walls – ‘a room in a wood’.

Nicolson ‘had never known’ the magic there is ‘before daylight’. One dawn chorus opened by a song thrush at 3.51am, 43 minutes before sunrise, was completed by a blackcap 16 minutes later.

His ‘first co-occupant was a wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, the cavedweller’, which entered by a louvre. Its talent for messiness was happily tolerated. He discovered the birdhouse stood where two robins’ territories met.

One robin stood stock-still. The other’s ‘red breast was a hot, red, bulbous display of testosterone, so intense that the bird seemed almost agonised with it’.

Robins can fight to the death. The passive claimant fled.

Nicolson’s search for truth knows no birdhouse bounds. He climbs Raven Crag in the Lake District to empathise with Wordsworth, who, of all English poets ‘had the most raven-like of souls’.

He goes to the pianist Sylvia Bowden in Hampshire and to Beethoven’s Bonn to verify that the blackbird’s song inspired themes in the late quartets. He travels to Italy to stand where St Francis preached to the birds.

The book includes an illustrated roll-call of the 45 birds now seen at Perch Hill Farm. Each illustration has a QR code which, when scanned into your phone, connects with the xeno-canto website, with free-to-use recordings of wildlife sounds from across the world.

There are 13 chapters, with six individually devoted to wrens, robins, tawny owls, ravens, buzzards and blackbirds. The raven, which has returned to Sussex after a century, is Nicolson’s favourite bird: if humans were birds, ‘we would be ravens’.

A nearby raven croaked as he and Sarah left for her brother’s funeral.

John McEwen is The Oldie’s Bird of the Month correspondent and author of Swoop Sing Perch Paddle, with illustrations by Carry Akroyd

Playing away

ANNE SEBBA

Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Desire

By Juliet Rosenfeld

Bluebird £20

Reading a bright red book with the title AFFAIRS blazoned on the cover brought me some quizzical stares on the London Underground this week.

However, this book, gripping though it is, is not a salacious account of the excitement on the one hand, or devastation on the other, involved in having an affair. Instead, it’s a deeply examined and insightful account, from a clinical psychotherapist, of the secrets, lies and motivations involved in affairs.

One in five people will have an affair at some point in their lives. Juliet Rosenfeld, who specialises in couples therapy, understands the difficulties so many people encounter in long-term relationships. She believes it is important to try to understand such a common aspect of human behaviour with neither shame nor any moral judgement, while accepting that an affair is a form of rule-breaking or transgressive behaviour.

Her aim is, not surprisingly, to show the value of psychotherapy, as she reveals that our early lives – our infantile passion for, or resentment of, a parent – almost always reappear in unexpected ways later on in life.

The book opens with an account of a client who slowly came to understand how her lover had unconsciously been put in the role of the missing father (both had long silky hair) who had abandoned her as a child.

In the end, writes Rosenfeld, once the affair was over, she came to think her lover had probably done her a service by revealing this truth and allowing her to move on. But not every affair has an ending as relatively settled as this.

A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser

Mary,

I can’t help writing my last Oldie column on the – to me – ever-exciting topic of Myself and History.

Naturally, the way we write and what we write are heavily influenced by our personal circumstances. You try to suppress those feelings but, as with any work of art, you find it impossible.

The political situation in early 1970s England, when I was writing a certain chapter in Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973) – Oliver Cromwell’s life – was such that inevitably it got reflected in my book. I remember throwing the Daily Telegraph across the room and shouting, ‘Take that, Old Noll [Cromwell’s nickname],’ before calmer counsels prevailed.

The whole question of personal involvement and how much it warps historical judgements is a fascinating one. I fell in love with Scotland at the first moment I was introduced to the house that was to be mine.

The core of the book comprises five case studies. Rosenfeld discovered them by advertising for people who had had an affair and were willing to share their stories with her; she offered strict anonymity but not treatment.

Within days, she was overwhelmed by the number of those who wanted to tell her about their affairs. She rejected those who appeared to want revenge, or whom she considered vulnerable, or where the ethical issues were too great. There was a woman who told her of a two-decadelong love affair that apparently sustained both parties, as each of their partners succumbed to degenerative disease.

‘It was extremely moving, as both remained dedicated to their increasingly uncommunicative spouses and nursed them until death. It seemed to me to have been a brave and selfless solution to a desperate situation, although I know others will disagree,’ she explained, but did not use it as a case study.

The remaining five, which form the core of the book, comprise a variety of scenarios. The first concerns a man who leaves his wife for the evening, just after she has given birth to their first child, to have a few hours’ sex with a beautiful and much younger woman from Poland, who is ‘otherwise alone in the world’.

He believes he is looking after her extremely well, but his behaviour both to

Queen

of

Scots, built my hut

Mary, Queen of Scots – and Huts

Eilean Aigas, as its name (eilean = island) indicates, lies placidly in the middle of the rushing River Beauly. I lived there with my first husband, the politician Hugh Fraser. Thanks to the success of Mary, Queen of Scots (1969), I introduced Highland delights, such as a tennis court and swimming pool. And, on the banks of the river, I introduced My Hut.

How did I choose where to build the Hut? In 1971, I invited my son Damian, then seven, to answer the telephone. He then travelled as far as he could be reasonably bothered, the coiled lead of

her and to his wife is abusive and cruel.

‘Neal was abandoned very early on and his anger with his mother remains on tap,’ Rosenfeld writes.

It may seem easy with hindsight to understand the roots of his cruelty, but it takes hours of listening to a patient to access those early memories. And even when the root of the behaviour is clear, there is no automatic cure.

Other stories concern a previously straight woman who, after an affair with a female colleague, leaves the marital home, with painful consequences for the children. But what started as an affair will become, Rosenfeld believes, a lasting and fulfilling partnership.

The five are very different stories. She concludes that when you train to be a couples therapist, almost the first thing you learn is that an affair is a cry for help, when no other signal of unhappiness works. This is not to condone that act, she adds, especially because the book is written from the perspective of those who did the betraying, not those who were betrayed.

If you read this insightful and challenging book, you may just feel differently about infidelity.

Anne Sebba’s The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is out now

the phone stretching out behind him. This was long before the days of portable phones. Eilean Aigas had a single battered instrument.

He lolloped for what seemed like him to be miles and then planted a wooden stick, next to an imitation book, bearing the title The Winner, at the end of the telephone line. There, I built My Hut.

Several years later, Eilean Aigas was sold to cover debts; presumably the Hut added to its value. I can only hope that it did. I did not want those hours sitting on the banks of the river in my highly personal hut to be entirely wasted.

I wrote the whole of King James VI of Scotland and I of England (1974) sitting in My Hut, over one weekend.

In fact, I think if I could live my life again, I would find myself in My Hut, writing history.

Antonia Fraser is author of My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

Magna Carter HARRY MOUNT

When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines By

Graydon Carter Grove Press

£20

Graydon Carter’s memoir is required reading for any aspiring editor –or journalist.

Now 75, Carter has been an editor for most of the last 52 years – surely some kind of record. In 1973, he founded and edited the Canadian Review in his native Canada. He went on to edit Spy and the New York Observer before the Big One – editing Vanity Fair for 25 years, from 1992 to 2017. He now edits the deliciously compelling weekly online newsletter, Air Mail.

The joy – and the rules – of editing have stayed much the same for him, whether it’s on a shoestring at the Canadian Review, or with the millions lavished by the Newhouse family on Vanity Fair and the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

So here are the rules of editing and writing, aka Carter’s Magna Carta: 1. Don’t let big names phone it in Soon after taking over at Vanity Fair,

Carter inherited a piece by Norman Mailer on the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Carter happened to see Mailer at the Convention on TV, chatting to his neighbours in the expensive seats, rather than going down on the floor, where the news was being made.

In the piece Mailer filed, there was almost no reporting; just simple observation of what had transpired, with no detail from the floor or the back rooms. Carter spiked the piece.

Dominick Dunne had once been a terrific Vanity Fair writer, particularly with the O J Simpson trials. But he got too big for his boots, too.

Carter writes, ‘He had become printand social-famous, but he wanted that ultimate level of American fame: television-famous, the sort of fame that gets you noticed in airports and affords you upgrades and the best tables in restaurants.’

As Dunne’s fame addiction increased, he became imperious and overbearing, his face turning red as he barked at magazine assistants who didn’t recognise him, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Dominick – f**king – Dunne!’

Surprise, surprise: the ruder Dunne got, the fewer commissions he got.

2. Don’t be pretentious

At Vanity Fair, Carter got rid of baroque English. A restaurant was a restaurant, not a ‘boîte’. A book must never be a ‘tome’. Carter’s banned words included: abode, opine, plethora and passed away (for died). Out went glitzy, wannabe, celebrity, donned, coiffed and eatery.

3. Don’t be pompous

Unlike all the other Condé Nast editors, Carter called himself ‘editor’, not ‘editor in chief” – ‘a faintly ridiculous title’.

4. Don’t be a bully

Take care of the talent, as long as they are genuinely talented. If you look after the writers, photographers and illustrators, you’ll get better work out of them than if you threaten them.

5. The ingredients of the perfect magazine piece

‘If there is a scoop in a newspaper story, it’s often in the first sentence,’ Carter writes. ‘If there is a scoop in a weekly magazine story, it’s generally in the first paragraph. But, in a long-form magazine piece, the scoop could be in the 17th paragraph.’

Carter lays out the crucial elements of a magazine story: narrative (a beginning, a middle and an end); access to the principals, or those close to them; conflict; and disclosure.

The perfect Vanity Fair piece – like

the 2005 story that identified Mark Felt, former FBI Deputy Director, as Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal – was somewhere between a news report and the inevitable book that followed such a megascoop.

6. Always think of the reader It sounds obvious but readers have got to read a piece for it to work.

Intellectual showing-off is pointless when it’s intentionally obscure and therefore boring.

Carter’s ideal combination of features to keep the reader interested was: an arresting cover you can leave on a coffee table without embarrassment; stories about current history, feuds, scoops and scandals from literature, art, fashion, showbusiness, politics, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And, always, a dispatch from foreign trouble spots.

7. Get the facts right

In 1998, Stephen Glass, a star-writer at the New Republic, was disgraced for making up stories.

At the time, Carter’s star writer, Christopher Hitchens, told him he shouldn’t worry too much.

‘Why?’ said Carter.

‘Because, unlike the New Republic,’ Hitchens said, ‘you run photographs of your subjects.’

Yes, photographs were some protection, but only up to a point. Vigilance against lying and fiction in a non-fiction piece remained paramount.

8. Stay open for business Never shut yourself completely down to writing commissions – or to life itself. Always be open to new adventures. In Carter’s case, that meant opening New York restaurants and producing documentaries.

And retain an insatiable curiosity for new, beautifully written stories – the lifeblood of the editor and writer.

Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie

Rock gods’ table talk

NICHOLAS

LEZARD

Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters with Rock Royalty

By Kate Mossman

Nine Eight Books £22

It isn’t unfair to say there is something eccentric about Kate Mossman.

It would have escaped my notice, were it not that, a few years ago, she wrote a piece for the New Statesman about how she refused to cook. Instead, she survived on various kinds of junk food she

bracketed under the general term ‘hot items’.

‘When I say I don’t know how to cook,’ she wrote, ‘I mean I don’t know how to warm things up either.’

The article went a bit viral, and I recall it vividly, even though it was written nearly 13 years ago. Once you get over the shock of its premise, it’s a delight.

It turns out she was always a bit unusual, at least in respect of her musical taste; passionate and obsessive to a surprising degree.

As a child, she made her parents play the band Queen for every car journey she was involved in for seven years, between 1991 and 1998.

‘It was a fraught and stressful obsession,’ she writes here, but her parents, who must have had the patience of saints, indulged her.

She describes the family driving round Cornwall, following the itinerary of Queen’s 1973 tour. Cornwall is significant for the band because their drummer was born in Truro.

Mossman writes, ‘It’s no accident that the Mossman family holiday takes place in Cornwall every year, the magical world of Merlin and the Arthurian legends, Daphne du Maurier, pixies and Roger Taylor.’

They’re not the only band she likes, as you’ll discover in this book, a collection of interviews she has written in the Word and the New Statesman. Her interviewees are all, as the title implies, men of a certain age, whose careers are either over or enjoying an extended, autumnal life.

There is a rather obvious thing going on here, glancingly acknowledged but not made too much of: a desire to please her father, or feel close to him, or something.

She admits that whenever she listens to music, she does so through her father’s ears as well as her own; in quadraphonic, as she puts it.

This gives her pieces enough of a theme to justify putting them together in a book. The other thing that justifies this (along with the newly written intros and outros to the pieces, which add depth, nuance and context a magazine piece can’t always include) is the sheer quality of the prose.

This is very important. Her musical taste is not, as mine is, bound by the kind of Leavisite post-punk strictness I was weaned on when I read the NME in the 1970s. So there are quite a few artists she writes about, of whose work I have not heard a single note except by accident. There are a couple I had never hitherto heard of, even as rumour.

And there are singers and performers whom I have dismissed as being too famous, too successful. If hoi polloi liked them, they couldn’t be that good, right? And who are Glen Campbell, Bruce Hornsby and Dave Gahan anyway?

My ignorance now shames me. Mossman writes about music I wouldn’t give the time of day to with a feeling and an instinctive musical knowledge that make me realise I have been an awful snob for decades now.

It’s too late for me to change, but at least I now know a lot more about the internal and cultural pressures that worked for and against the musicians interviewed here.

More familiar names to me here are Tom Jones, Shaun Ryder, Sting, Gene Simmons – a particularly fascinating piece, that. And Terence Trent d’Arby, who is I think the youngest person interviewed, and also as mad as a box of frogs.

And there is always a smile beneath the surface, sometimes held back, sometimes breaking out gloriously.

As she meets Jon Bon Jovi, she says, ‘To my dismay, it becomes apparent that this will be a sunglasses interview.’

There are others more accommodating, and she gets more than many interviewers do during the 40-minute snatched pocket of time in the windowless hotel conference room. She suspects it is because she is a woman much younger than they are. Sometimes, she gets more attention than she wants, but on the whole, the interviewees behave themselves, thank goodness.

It’s the writing that gets you, and it’s not showing off either. It’s a way of getting an honest picture – of her, as well. I know music critics who are, in a good way, seething with envy at how well she writes.

And they are right to do so.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

Modern Kilvert’s diary

SISTER TERESA Lost in the Forest

By Colin Heber-Percy

Gaia £18.99

Lost in the Forest by the Rev Colin Heber-Percy defies classification.

It consists of many parts: a form of diary, a searching for the unknown, a woodland journey of discovery and a personal exploration

‘Your lab results look suspicious. I’m going to recommend an autopsy’

of not belonging. All the parts are good.

He is the vicar of Burbage, Ham, Shalbourne and Buttermere in the Savernake Forest. This is not a sequel to his book, Tales of a Country Parish, but a development.

It’s a more serious and pensive book, though it has in common with its predecessor good humour and the understated fact of Heber-Percy’s remarkable pastoral qualities.

They come from his being, as he tells us, woven into the fabric of the rural communities that he serves.

That he is something of a maverick in the Church of England can be seen by his reaction to a large formal gathering of the clergy in Salisbury Cathedral in which he takes part.

Despite their being immaculately turned out, their gung-ho singing of a triumphalist hymn, and their appearance of massed traditionalism, he detects in them his own evaluation of the early Church (and of himself): that they are fundamentally ‘brokenhearted, foolish, full of love’. A church of insurgents, in other words.

Heber-Percy spent two years exploring the Savernake Forest: most of it very ancient indeed, some of it modernised by Capability Brown in the 18th century.

His reason for going into the forest is to find a way out. Most of the chapter headings are his favourite oaks, each one highly distinctive, leading him through various trains of thought. He takes us through his own varied experiences of disorientation, danger and rootlessness.

In fact, he is at all times very far from being rootless. He admits this when he expresses his love for his family, his parish and the forest (both old and new). To be rootless is ultimately to wither; Heber-Percy’s life-giving qualities are too precious for that.

In the forest, there is a bear – the bear of Shakespeare’s best-known stage direction – which quietly introduces an element of menace; this comes and goes.

In the final pages, the bear fades away as the author realises that the bear is himself. The reader is left with the hope that he has reached the sense of purpose and the rootedness for which, in spite of himself, he seems to long for – and that the thoroughly unpleasant occurrence of feeling, in so many situations, like a new boy at school, will no longer matter, even if it happens again.

From very early school days, he has had a strong desire not to lose his freedom by being boxed in. Hopeless at arithmetic, his performance was made worse by the compulsory grid in which he was supposed to write his answers. To this day, he abhors the grid.

He prefers order to disorder, introducing us to his grandmother who led a life of overwhelming adversity, spurning conventions and tidiness in favour of being kind. He sees this as unconditional love and takes a view that Christ was care-less: he was no respecter of persons as he poured out his love on all those he met.

Heber-Percy examines Christian culture and its trappings, many of which are undesirable and therefore misleading. He concludes that there is no such thing as Christian culture or even a Christian creed. Christianity is a command: ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you.’

(John 13: 34)

The incidents Heber-Percy describes are unforgettable. One is an account of his very early childhood, when he was wheeled past the window of a clothes shop where the mannequins had been dismembered. His fear was such that his grandmother only just managed to rescue him from the passing traffic.

There are plenty of jokes. He asks a friend, ‘What would happen if vicars went on strike?’ He follows this with reflections on value, as opposed to usefulness, ending with ‘Think of your friend as useful and you’ve effectively taken him hostage.’

Heber-Percy wears his erudition lightly. One of the joys of the book is his quoting authors of whom many of us will never have heard, elucidating and explaining their ideas through his own original observations.

We badly need what this writer has to offer: profound spirituality, expressed in prose of great clarity, enjoyable, enhanced by humour, and never boring. His is the voice of sanity in the midst of our daily modern cacophony.

Sister Teresa is our God columnist

FILM HARRY MOUNT

BLACK BAG (15)

‘When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?’

That’s the central line at the heart of this spy thriller.

Screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way and Mission Impossible) came up with that line after meeting a CIA spy.

The spy told him it was ‘impossible for intelligence agents to sustain a relationship because it’s too easy to have an affair and cover your tracks’.

And so Black Bag was born – the complex story of British government agents, whose relationships are jeopardised by their constant spying and lying.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) of the National Cyber Security Centre knows that, among his closest associates, there’s a mole who’s jeopardising British national security.

The prime suspect is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). But the double agent could be any one of four dashing spies who spend most of their time lying to one another – when they’re not sleeping with one another.

And so there ensues a pleasingly complex plot, as Woodhouse tries to expose the rat – and prevent a piece of government software, that can melt down nuclear-power stations, from getting into Russian hands.

The problem is you can’t suspend disbelief, because everything is so studied and clever-clever. That nuclear software is called Severus, after the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. The film is full of touches like that: not very sophisticated ideas of what sophistication looks like.

Of course, espionage films, like all fictional films, don’t have to be accurate.

Arts

Has there ever been a real-life spy quite like James Bond? They can be dashing flights of fancy – like the Bond films – or they can be close to the truth, like the grey, dreary spy world of John le Carré.

But Black Bag falls between the two options. The cast and crew may have consulted real-life spies at the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, but none of it rings true.

David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies and Videotape and Ocean’s Eleven) have ended up making a film that’s neither close to life nor dashing.

Yes, the senior spies live in enormous London houses – the sort the spies I’ve met could never afford to live in. But there is no glamour to their vast bankers’ kitchens, with dull, plutocratic, domestic branding. Instead of Aston Martins with in-built machine-guns, these spies are equipped with Tom Dixon glassware and David Mellor cutlery.

And the conversations the spies have at the film’s opening dinner party –where Woodhouse is trying to work out who the baddie is – are as boring as real-life bankers’ dinner parties.

Cate Blanchett can make any line seem convincing, but even she can’t

resuscitate Koepp’s dead quips. She ends up being a very convincing version of a boringly empty-headed glamourpuss.

And Michael Fassbender is under the illusion that putting no expression into your lines makes you look convincing.

In a recent Times piece attacking the film celebs who dominate the London stage, The Oldie’s A N Wilson wrote, ‘However hard the actors (famed in Game of Thrones or similar) were showing off, they were not acting.’

Showing off isn’t acting. Nor is being consciously unshowy – Fassbender-style – to the point of being stultifyingly dull.

The spy film certainly isn’t dead. In fact, it’s such a well-known, protean genre that scriptwriters are in the fortunate position of being able to make jokes in line with and against the form’s many clichés.

Mike Myers spoofed James Bond and The Ipcress File with comic genius in the Austin Powers films.

And Slow Horses – in Mick Herron’s books and the Will Smith TV adaptation – reconstructed the form to sublime effect, playing beautifully with the idea of disgraced spies and the washed-out dreariness of le Carré’s world.

Le Carré’s books themselves were so rich that they, too, can be constantly reinvented. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy hit the spot three times: in the 1974 book, the 1979 TV version and the 2011 film version. The Night Manager metamorphosed seamlessly from Le Carré’s 1993 book into the 2016 TV version, starring Hugh Laurie –returning soon for a second and third series. And Matthew Macfadyen is soon to play George Smiley in A Legacy of Spies

Still, given that the genre is so well-known, for new spy films to work they have to play with the form’s expectations at a highly original level.

Black Bag fails to do so.

Double agents: Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) and George (Michael Fassbender)

THEATRE

WILLIAM COOK

THE LAST LAUGH

Touring nationwide, until 23rd August

‘Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog,’ said the late, great comedian (and great friend of The Oldie) Barry Cryer, who would have been 90 on 23rd March. ‘Nobody laughs and the frog dies.’

This funny, poignant play refutes Cryer’s shrewd maxim. It’s full of laughs and its analysis of comedy is profound.

We’re backstage at a West End theatre, in a typically shabby dressing room – hat tip to designer Lee Newby for his meticulously realistic set. Tommy Cooper is in his vest and pants – not a pretty sight – preparing for tonight’s show and downing a few stiff whiskies while he’s at it.

He’s joined by Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse, who’ll be sharing the bill with him this evening. There’s lots of showbiz banter – all very amusing, but nothing memorable. Then the three men start discussing comedy, and this show takes a darker and far more interesting turn.

‘Tears of a clown’ may be a cliché but, as with a lot of clichés, there’s some truth in it. A lot of the best comedy springs from a deep well of unhappiness, and quite a lot of comics live unhappy lives. Even if they don’t start off miserable, the lifestyle often makes them so – the endless touring, the lonely hotels, the constant estrangement from friends and family.

This applies to anyone in showbusiness, and for comedians it’s especially acute. Comedy is a zero-sum game. Either the punters laugh or they don’t, and if they don’t there’s nowhere to hide. Comics are the gladiators of showbiz, going naked into the arena. No wonder they talk about ‘killing’ when they triumph and ‘dying’ when they fail. Why do they put themselves through it, night after night? Partly because they crave the laughter, but mainly because it’s a way out. For working-class blokes like Cooper or Morecambe, comedy was a great escape, like boxing, and like boxers they paid a heavy price.

Both men (literally) died onstage, Cooper at 63, Morecambe at just 58.

Monkhouse was different. A nice middle-class boy at Dulwich College, an accountant’s son from suburban Beckenham, he studied comedy like a science and approached it like a business.

His jokes were honed and crafted, but the public never fell in love with him. They found him oily and insincere.

(Bob Golding)

This was terribly unfair. In fact, Monkhouse had more than his fair share of hardship. His first double-act partner killed himself (like quite a few comics). Two of his three children predeceased him. His elder son was severely disabled. His younger son died of an overdose. Cooper and Morecambe were a lot less slick. Their humour was natural, instinctive. Unlike Monkhouse, they had funny bones. Unlike Monkhouse, they hardly ever wrote a decent gag. They relied on scriptwriters, or hand-me-down one-liners – they even pinched a few from Monkhouse. And yet the public adored them.

As Paul Hendy’s perceptive script reveals, Cooper and Morecambe weren’t nearly as breezy as they made out.

Cooper was an alcoholic with a stormy private life. Morecambe was happily married, a family man with no vices, but he was nervous, anxious and highly strung. Cooper’s heart attacks were brought on by drink. Morecambe’s were brought on, it seemed to me, by the

lifelong stress and strain of making strangers laugh.

Simon Cartwright, Bob Golding and Damian Williams are all excellent as the three comics. Golding’s Morecambe and Williams’s Cooper are uncannily accurate, Cartwright’s Monkhouse rather less so –but his was the performance I enjoyed the most. It’s the most complex character, and he brings something new to the role – a tenderness and vulnerability. Is this the real Monkhouse, the man we never saw on TV? I guess we’ll never know.

The only shortcoming is the absence of Ernie Wise. If Hendy had included him, it would have given his script more depth and bite. In The Last Laugh, Eric speaks warmly about Ernie but, as Hendy must surely know – he’s developing a movie about them – their relationship was extremely complex.

In the course of researching a book about Eric and Ernie, I found a letter from Eric to Ronnie Barker that was very scathing about his other half.

Yet it’s a rare play that leaves you

Heard the one about the three comedians? Tommy Cooper (Damian Williams), Bob Monkhouse (Simon Cartwright) and Eric Morecambe

wanting more, and Hendy’s script packs an awful lot into 80 compact minutes. What a shame Barry Cryer didn’t live to see it. It would have made him laugh a lot.

William Cook wrote Morecambe and Wise Untold (HarperCollins)

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

What is my bedside radio tuned to Radio 4 for? To induce gloom and rage, first thing in the morning? It often seems that way.

Number of neurodivergent people on PIPs increased by 50 per cent; self-diagnosed sickness benefits ‘unsustainable’, prisons overflowing. I vividly recall Norma Major saying, ‘We have a radio next to the Teasmade in the bedroom, and switch on Today when we have our tea’. So cosy. Now so masochistic.

No wonder we are propelled – daily invited by Radio 4 – to Radio 3, with Petroc Trelawney and Georgia Mann, to be soothed – or diverted into a bit of unlikely bopping by The King’s Music Room, on Apple, where Al Bowlly meets My Boy Lollipop. Playlists are the thing, with lots of meditation and soundscapes on offer, day and night.

Sound Waves on Radio 3 Unwind is ‘an immersive sonic voyage that lulls you

Last word: Bill Dare (1960-2025)

into tranquillity’ – and so is The Sleeping Forecast. Dream Time on BBC 6 Music invites you to ‘send in tales of your sleepy adventures to dreamtime@bbc.co.uk. We want to hear your dreams!’ Zzzzzz. As part of the ‘Lockdown Lookback’, five years after Covid, there was a wonderful parody play: Waiting for Waiting for Godot by Adrian Edmondson. The actors in Beckett’s play – starring Edmondson and Simon Callow, both excellent – are suddenly halted in the middle of a sell-out Manchester run (‘I wonder why? I

wouldn’t come to this’). So they ruminate on life.

Everyone gets spoofed – Beckett, actors (‘If I only did things I liked, I’d never work again’), theatregoers (‘Coughing – it’s what people come to the theatre to do’) and Boris (‘Fwahfwah-fwah’) and his gibberish announcements. Lovely.

‘It’s time to stop this madness; it’s time to halt the killing; it’s time to end this senseless war … on The Muppet Show tonight.’ On The Naked Week, Jon Holmes replayed the President’s State of the Union message with bathos – the surest way to deal with Trumperies.

The historian Prof Margaret MacMillan, on Broadcasting House, was almost speechless – ‘Yes, the Canadian border is just a line drawn on a map, many years ago’ but if he were to grab some nice piece of real estate from Canada, he’d find the new Americans would vote Democrat.

Last Word mourned one of its own, dead at 64: Bill Dare, or ‘B-i-i-ll … DARE!’, uttered with menace by Jon Culshaw in Tom Baker’s Doctor Who voice, in the credits for Dead Ringers

He seemed the self-effacing type. But his father, actor Peter Jones, mainstay of Just a Minute in the era of Kenneth Williams, had told him that Ian Messiter, JAM’s creator, got a mention at the end of every programme, plus a royalty, in perpetuity. Invent a format, as Roy Plomley did, and your name is made. Dare duly created Dead Ringers

Ahem: I once proposed an obit programme, in August 2003, in the Times. And got a high-five in a Telegraph editorial that week. Last Word launched three years later. But no name-check. Sigh.

The Dead Ringers man also devised, inter alia, The Now Show and I’ve Never Seen Star Wars and produced Spitting Image. We heard Ringers examples from Jan Ravens and Culshaw. (‘Mr President, it’s Sir Keir Starmer here, Prime Minister of Great Britain, you know, the place where Downton Abbey’s set.’)

A podcast called The Offcuts Drawer revealed that it was the stick-thin Dare – hypnotised by Paul McKenna to eat only when hungry – who mentored the fabulous ventriloquist Nina Conti and her wicked friend Monkey. The pilot they made never morphed into a show, and it was Dare who daringly suggested that Nina should jettison scripts and improvise with her audience.

‘It was my Rubicon,’ she says.

His last text to Nina said, ‘Looks like you’ve got the hang of that improv lark.’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

Hannah Fry, Cambridge Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics, is back for series three of The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC2).

Zany camera angles, brightly coloured jumpers, hilarious graphics, a continuous soundtrack of speeded-up band music… What better way to have the mechanics of our household appliances explained to us than as a screwball comedy?

The subject of episode one is the air fryer – one in every four households now has such a thing.

‘I’m Hannah Fry, right? I was literally born to do this!’ Fry enjoys puns. Electric plugs, she says, can ‘drive you the up the wall!’. In episode two, she’s taking apart a fridge – so ‘let’s stay chilled!’. Fridges work because of a ‘nifty trick, all thanks to a hot bit, a cold bit and a pump. It’s as simple as that – bish bash Bosch!’

The self-styled ‘hammer-wielding, tech-curious tour guide’, who is even more irritating than Lucy Worsley, might have been invented by Diane Morgan, aka comedian Philomena Cunk, best known for presenting the mockumentaries Cunk on Earth and Cunk on Life

Professor Fry’s explanation of the vapour compression cooling cycle ‘basically moves heat energy in the opposite direction to which it wants to go’. That recalls Cunk on the invention of the wheel: ‘The pressure rolls the entire planet back and away from you, giving the impression that you’re moving

forward. Which, incredibly, you are actually are.’

Why do the presenters of otherwise interesting television programmes feel they have to perform like children’s party entertainers? Judith Hann didn’t goon around on Tomorrow’s World, and Jacob Bronowski managed to explain The Ascent of Man with the gravity it deserved.

When Hannah Fry suggested, while hacking away at the back insulation of a broken fridge, that she felt ‘like an ancient Greek sculptor’, I reached for the remote control. I’ll never know how a fridge works.

In With Love, Meghan (Netflix), Meghan Markle demonstrates the lengths she is prepared to go to instil joy into the life of her loved ones. To show her guests that she cares how they sleep, she makes tea bags of Himalayan bath salts for their bedside tables.

One way of making sense of this bafflingly vacuous series is to see it as a satire on 21st-century feminism, with Meghan – apparently a feminist – as the millennial version of Germaine Greer. What the fight for gender equality boils down to, for the Duchess of Sussex, is the slicing of a blueberry in half and serving it in a colour-coded fruit rainbow.

Meghan’s barely watchable celebration of her own hospitality landed on our screens in the same week as Trump’s barely watchable celebration of his own inhospitality.

‘It’ll make great television,’ Trump said of the Oval Office horror show, which is how Meghan also sees her life. There isn’t much to distinguish between the ditsy world of Montecito and the current White House.

Meghan votes Democrat, but she belongs firmly in Trump’s America, where truth, or what she calls ‘authenticity’, is indistinguishable from lies. The ‘authentic’ life she presents to us is a fiction. The kitchen she filmed in wasn’t even her own. Her devotion to family excludes her father and her sister.

And she has done her level best to alienate her husband from his relatives, depriving her children of cousins, aunts, uncles and paternal grandparents.

I wonder if she has sent Zelensky one of her balloon arches, to show she feels his pain.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

STEPHEN HOUGH

Stephen Hough was in his late 40s when the Economist listed him among the top 20 living polymaths – a word now generally used to describe dazzling displays of knowledge, rather than deep learning across several disciplines. More Stephen Fry, you might say, than William Herschel.

Back in 2009, when the Economist published its article, Stephen Hough’s reputation was that of a prodigiously gifted pianist with wide-ranging tastes both in and around music. The books, the paintings and most of the compositions (beyond those wittily contrived concert encores) were yet to come.

Now they’ve begun to arrive, they’re very much of a piece with one another, as we can hear in Sir Stephen’s new 20-minute Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday

One element in the success of Hough’s now legendary 2001 set of the five Saint-Saëns piano concertos was his ability to re-energise popular pieces, while reclaiming others that had been more or less lost to view.

His equally remarkable set of the four Rachmaninov piano concertos was of a rather different nature: rooted in the music, but mindful of Rachmaninov’s own recordings, and the changing shape of the world in which the concertos were conceived.

Hough’s interest in Rachmaninov came early. He was ten, and already marked out as something of a prodigy – ‘Could this be the new Mozart?’ was one tabloid headline – when his father fished out of the racks of Dawson’s music shop, in Warrington, volume two of RCA’s Keyboard Giants of the Past. It included Rachmaninov playing his own transcription of Kreisler’s Liebesleid (‘Love’s Sorrow’). It had a profound effect on the young boy’s life – much as his encounter with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius would do after a short-lived infatuation with Led Zeppelin and the like at the start of a troubled early adolescence.

Sir Stephen now warns students against listening to too many recordings. But, as he explains in his 2023 memoir, Enough: Scenes from Childhood, this was different. The LP opened doors to a time closer to the composer’s own, as well as to playing styles that it’s impossible to write down, such are the limitations

Polymath pianist: Stephen Hough

The Oldie Spring 2025

Hannah Fry, professor of maths and queen of puns

of musical notation. That was one safeguard. Another is that no one can effectively copy what a Rachmaninov or a Cortot – another Hough hero –actually did.

Rachmaninov was a particular model because he was a pianist who composed. He was also a man whose late works reflected an era between the two world wars when society ceased simply to accept change, but actively began seeking it out and applauding it.

It’s one of the subjects touched on in Rough Ideas, Hough’s unputdownable 400-page anthology of 200 short essays on music, music-making and more besides.

He quotes L P Hartley’s raising the problem of the ‘expectation of change’ in the preface to his novel The Go-Between. For Hough, Rachmaninov addresses this new ‘dis-ease’ in art in his fourth and final piano concerto. He attempts to keep up with fashion, while expressing a deep discomfort at the disappearance of a world he loved.

The cue for Sir Stephen’s own new concerto was music imagined for an unfulfilled film commission – the story of the relationship between an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer, set in 1930s Austria.

We hear this in the brief middle movement, where Hough marries what he calls a waltz of ‘Korngoldian decadence’ with ‘the bright white notes of inter-war Americana’.

It also explains the concerto’s subtitle, The World of Yesterday – with its reference to Stefan Zweig’s epic account of the disintegration of imperial Austria in the wake of that ‘golden age of security’ that preceded the First World War.

There’s no copyright in titles. But I did find this vaguely irritating, given that there’s no real comparison between Zweig’s epic work and what is in effect an exquisitely crafted 20-minute divertimento for piano and orchestra.

That said, it would be churlish not to admit that Hough’s scintillating concluding Tarantella appassionata does perhaps suggest a world determined to glitter and be gay, whatever the odds.

With Hough himself as soloist, and Mark Elder and the Hallé in pristine form, the Hyperion recording does the piece proud.

The disc also includes Hough’s 2017 Partita for solo piano. It, too, has a brilliant finale, following a pair of finely turned movements that pay homage to another Hough favourite, the Catalan pianist and composer Federico Mompou.

The tiny Sonatina nostalgica, evoking

places in the village of Lymm in Cheshire where Hough partly grew up, is of no real consequence.

Better read about the people and place itself in Enough, a revealing and immensely engaging childhood memoir which is to the concert room what Nigel Slater’s Toast is to the kitchen.

GOLDEN OLDIES

MARK ELLEN

POP’S PETER PANS

My interview with Michael Jackson was the last he ever did. The 1982 album he was promoting, Thriller, was so successful he never needed the press again. He was 24, an international star since the age of six.

And what did he want to talk about? The record, the songs, the videos? Not so much. Front of mind was his Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara, a cross between a fairground and a petting zoo, where he watched ET repeatedly in his private cinema and had a giant mechanical Pirates of the Caribbean display, complete with puffing cannons.

If you’d given a six-year-old unlimited cash, this is what they might have spent it on, a childhood fantasy full of llamas, dodgems, chimpanzees, carousels and endless machines making candyfloss.

Fame can have that effect. You can be part-frozen at the emotional age when you first became famous. From then on, an army of tireless lackeys handles all the dull, practical aspects of life – tickets, passports, cooking, bills, travel, putting the bins out –creating a cotton-wool cocoon in which you can goof around suspended in eternal youth.

famous when he was 19, and his grumpy, occasionally back-to-theaudience stage presence and fusillades against ‘the Establishment’ still have the ring of the petulant teenager.

In a recent recording session, Elton John had another of his little tantrums.

Ozzy Osbourne, now 76 and about to retire, never seems to grow any older, still dressed as if bunking off from college while loafing about on lawns strewn with quad bikes. If a foolish band member left their trainers unattended on a Black Sabbath tour, they’d find them filled with mayonnaise.

Even John Lennon found real life after the Beatles impossibly challenging and was cushioned by his second wife, Yoko Ono, who managed everything from properties and record deals to investments in art and real estate. Tellingly, his nickname for her was Mother.

You might think the modern world better provides for teenage stars to stay grounded, but I’m not convinced. In 2012, I was one of the 150-strong press corps on pop superstar Rihanna’s 777 Tour, where she performed in seven countries in seven days, travelling in a customised Boeing 777.

So concerned were her management that nothing should affect her performance or her desire to embrace the on-board media that they provided her with a personal chef and dietician, a massage therapist doubling as a Buddhist philosopher, and a ‘hospitality liaison manager’, flying ahead to each city to ‘Rihanna-ise’ her backstage area.

So the Queen Bee felt instantly secure in an identically styled private boudoir, filled with diva-approved fur rugs, soft furnishings and her favourite pink

She was famous aged 17 and still like a spoilt child, with anxious, hovering parents waiting for her to eat, poop or sleep. And did she talk to the press? She stumbled out of First Class on day one, dispensed a few bons mots, posed for pictures and then never spoke to Why not? ‘She doesn’t feel like it.’ Someone tell her there’s no supper ’til she’s tidied her room.

Michael Jackson with Bubbles, 1983, and Rihanna on her 777 Tour

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

DAVID REMFRY: RETROSPECTIVE

Beverley Art Gallery, 25th March to 21st June

GRAYSON PERRY: DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

Wallace Collection, 28th March to 26th October

What a retrospective this is for David Remfry, with more than 60 works.

Remfry, born in Worthing in 1942, grew up in Hull, where he never returned after leaving for London in 1964. In 1979, he contracted the lung condition sarcoidosis, which made oil paint impossible, and so turned to watercolour. He still used oil-painting techniques and successfully worked on a scale generally thought unfeasible for watercolour.

There was an important 20-year residence, literally, at New York’s Chelsea Hotel during its glory days. Together with

those of the city’s nightclubs, its habitués inspired two of his favourite themes: dancers and the relationships between people and their dogs.

In fact, his enthusiasm for dance and dancers had germinated earlier, at the Locarno Club during his time at Hull School of Art. Student drawings in the retrospective show his early mastery.

His MBE, awarded in 2001, was for ‘services to British art in America’. Since his return, he has continued to build his reputation here, and it fully deserves to equal that of his fellow Yorkshire migrant David Hockney.

Ros Savill (1951-2024), the respected director of the Wallace Collection, who died just after Christmas, invited Lucian Freud to be the first contemporary artist to exhibit there, because she recognised the affinity of his work to the Old Masters nearby. Now her successor, Xavier Bray, has set Grayson Perry to make an exhibition of his reactions to the collection.

Perry is an erudite and insightful

Clockwise from above: untitled drawing, Grayson Perry, 2024; Tea Party, David Remfry, 1970s; Late Night Dancing, David Remfry, 2010

commentator on art, as those who remember his weekly column in the Times will agree.

His response is not surprising: ‘I was captivated by the craftsmanship seen in the collection but I struggled with the opulent aesthetic, which I found cloying at times.’ His typical solution was to deploy a new alter ego, Shirley Smith, who loved elements that Perry did not.

As an artist, he is equally inventive, especially in his exploration of mediums and materials. More than 40 new works include ceramics, embroideries, works on paper and intricate handcrafted objects.

I particularly like the brass St Millicent Upon her Beast, which presents a Margaret Thatcher-like figure à la Joan of Arc, on the back of an aquamanile lion.

The Oldie Spring

GARDENING

DAVID WHEELER

TALL PLANTS FOR BAD BACKS

Ronnie Corbett once said, ‘I’m going to tie my shoelaces. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do while I’m down there.’

At 5ft 1in, he didn’t have far to go. If he were a gardener, he’d have had the advantage over us six-footers to appreciate more closely many of spring’s lowgrowing and ground-hugging delights.

Recently, as I was leaving a plantsman’s undulating garden just north of the Brechfa Forest in Carmarthenshire, my aching back (but not the rest of me) was complaining about all the bending it had to do over the previous few hours.

It had been a stimulating afternoon of treading carefully among a lower storey of plants that seldom exceeded six inches in height – crocuses, snowdrops, cyclamen, miniature daffs and an assortment of rarities.

My host and his wife began making this garden, from sloping, scrubby, brambleblighted rough pasture 25 years ago. And, like those of all gardeners over time, their passions and interests have waxed and waned. Snowdrops have preoccupied them these past few years. While a casual glance at these early flowerers might find little but sameness among the myriad cultivars now available, close inspection reveals a rewarding diversity of habit and markings that render them distinct and sometimes extremely valuable.

I learned from these two obsessive gardeners about one of their simple planting methods, based on the what3words navigation app.

Here, it’s what3plants. The trick is to find a trio of plants that don’t upstage one another, are complementary in size and colour and, supremely, timing. One such assembly intermingled a sprinkling

of snowdrops (taller-than-most Galanthus ‘Atkinsii’), Chrysoplenium macrophylla (giant golden saxifrage, easily mistaken for a small bergenia) and the ephemeral Cardamine quinquefolia, the fiveleaved cuckoo flower.

They grew huggermugger beneath a canopy of both evergreen and deciduous shrubs, and appeared repeatedly here and there in patches of about six feet across.

Narrow paths guided us through the terrain between the informal beds, each given their own identification number – I counted more than 20.

Outstanding among the evergreen shrubs was a narrow-leafed viburnum from Crûg Farm Plants, a plantaholic’s retail Shangri-La overlooking the Menai Strait in North Wales. The plump skimmias – especially the pale-berrying S japonica ‘Kew White’, with aromatic foliage, and the red-berried S x confusa ‘Kew Green’– were heavy with off-white clusters of fragrant flowers.

Fragrance. Yes, it’s so much more valued in these early months. Sadly, Covid has partly impaired my sense of smell. But such was the wafting strength of numerous daphnes that proliferate in this garden that I didn’t need to be told about their sweetness.

To my joy, they had suckered, forming groves and thickets reaching 8 to 10 feet tall. Such plenty is rare.

Elsewhere we marvelled at the hellebores, especially those on rising ground close to paths, which meant we could ogle their many downturned faces with ease. Eye-to-eye for Mr Corbett.

As the sun sank over the hills towards Ireland and the vast Atlantic, I climbed the garden’s steepest hill to sit and

marvel at panoramic eastward views towards the Brecon Beacons and distant England. I’ve planned a return visit.

It’s a garden soon to busy itself with apple blossom, lilies, roses and summer perennials – each striving to erase potent memories of clement spring days abuzz with foraging insects, among a cornucopia of covetable herbage.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD LEMONS

‘Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet…’ So sang Trini Lopez, and others, in the 1960s. The trees are indeed pretty, with glossy, dark evergreen leaves and white flowers which have a heady scent. Lemons are associated in most minds with the southern Mediterranean, but with care and patience it is possible to grow them in Britain.

Frost-free conditions are essential, and the trees are best-grown in a large terracotta pot or wooden tub, which can be moved from the garden into an unheated greenhouse or conservatory in winter.

As the trees need humidity to thrive, regular misting is advisable, but they should not be placed in a centrally heated space. Of the citrus fruit, lemons are the most tolerant of cold.

Cuckoo flower, Cardamine quinquefolia

During summer months, the plants must have plenty of sunlight; good drainage, regular watering and feeding are also important. Meyer’s lemon, which is a lemon-mandarin hybrid, is a variety I have seen recommended. If supplied in a five-litre container, it may take a year to bear any fruit.

Lemon trees are self-fertile, so that no more than one is required for a crop. The fruit will ripen slowly, and when it is turning from green to yellow, the following season’s flowers will be opening their petals to give off that sweet scent.

The best time to pick the fruit is between late autumn and spring; no regular pruning is needed.

I have read of estimated yields of 20-30 fruit from a three-year-old tree, which sounds highly optimistic. Even with that number, our lemon needs could not possibly be met for more than a few weeks. However, the tree is decorative, the scent of the flowers is long-lasting, and it would look well in a sunny, sheltered spot.

For a supply of lemons throughout the year, a supermarket will always provide, and if they’re available, I favour those grown in Sicily.

The island has an ideal climate and, more importantly, a volcanic soil around Mount Etna which produces sweeter lemons – as well as some of the best and healthiest olive oil.

COOKERY

ELISABETH LUARD SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM

Hooray for spring and a chance of ice-cream weather!

Anyone for a Knickerbocker Glory, a Dusty Road or a Banana Split? When I was a teenager way back when, an outing for tea at Fortnum & Mason’s soda fountain was my reward for accompanying my very thin, very elegant maternal grandmother on a morning’s shopping in Bond Street to places involving tape measures, pins and plackets.

The wait was worth it. On my release from my boarding school after months of mince and toast, my idea of heaven was a perch high on a tall stool set at the long counter while ice-cream-scooping, strawberry-layering and chocolatesaucing took place in front of my nose.

Here are the basics.

Classic ice-cream sundaes

Knickerbocker Glory: choose a tall sundae glass, narrow at the bottom and wide at the top. In any order, add layers of vanilla ice cream, strawberries or raspberries and crushed meringue, topped

with whipped cream, strawberry syrup and a maraschino cherry (obligatory).

Dusty Road: choose an oval dish of suitable size. In a line, arrange three single scoops of different ice creams (coffee, chocolate, vanilla), top with whipped cream, trickle with butterscotch sauce and finish with a dusting of cocoa and/or powdered cinnamon.

Banana Split: choose an oval dish as above, slice a peeled banana in two lengthwise, sandwich the halves together with three scoops of ice cream (just vanilla, or vanilla, chocolate and strawberry). Finish with whipped cream, chocolate syrup and a sprinkle of toasted nuts.

Plain vanilla ice cream

This is a basic custard-based freezer mix. Add any other flavourings as the custard cools. Makes half a litre.

300ml milk

1 vanilla pod

4 egg yolks, forked to blend

4 tbsps sugar

300ml double cream

Bring the milk and vanilla pod to the boil in a roomy pan, remove from heat, cover and leave to infuse for 30 minutes, then split the vanilla pod and scrape in the little sticky seeds. In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together till light and pale. Whisk in the vanilla-infused milk. Set the bowl over a pan of simmering water and stir over a gentle heat until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Remove to a bowl, fold in the whipped cream, and freeze. When it’s half-frozen, beat thoroughly to break up the ice crystals.

Butterscotch sauce

Don’t over-boil the sauce – it will thicken as it cools – or you will end up with chewy, unpourable caramel. Makes half a litre.

60g unsalted butter

120g dark brown sugar

120ml double cream

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan (not non-stick), stir in the sugar and cream, bring gently to the boil and bubble up, stirring throughout, for 4 to 5 minutes as it melts and thickens a little. Remove from the heat, transfer to a jug, and allow to cool.

Chocolate syrup

The syrup will be thin and runny when still hot, but thickens quite a bit as it cools. Makes about a pint.

100g unsweetened cocoa powder

200g sugar pinch salt

In a cold saucepan, mix the cocoa and the sugar to avoid lumps. Whisk in half a mugful (about 120ml) cold water, bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer for 3 to 4 minutes, whisking throughout, and allow to cool.

Fresh strawberry syrup

Liquidise a couple of handfuls (about 350g) ripe strawberries, hulled and rinsed, with 2 or 3 tablespoons caster sugar melted in a splash of boiling water and a tablespoonful of lemon juice. Add enough just-warm water to produce a runny sauce.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE SILENT NIGHTS

I have been battling with the temptation to write about this since the reopening of restaurants in May 2021.

The blight gets worse and worse, and it’s assuming pandemic proportions. I am not talking about the ludicrously inflated price of wine, nor the rising prevalence of round-backed chairs from which all jackets are bound to plummet to the ground.

I could forgive the rogues for both if they allowed me sanctuary from the clamour of the world – but they won’t.

Last Saturday, I took the Midwich Cuckoo – don’t look at the eyes! – out for her birthday dinner at her favourite local restaurant, Ploussard, in Clapham.

Their website was full of their love of authentic French food and the romance of the venue. What they didn’t mention was that they are actually a drum ’n’ bass club and that, instead of holding hands, you will have to lock heads and shout in each other’s ears.

Years ago, another restaurateur triumphantly explained, ‘We play loud, fast music, so that you feel you are in a rush and we can flip the tables quickly.’

I truly couldn’t hear a word the waiter

said until he was close enough to kiss. I implored him to turn the music down three times – to no avail.

So, despite wanting to enjoy their chanterelle, hazelnut, egg yolk and Comté, followed by pollack en croûte, I couldn’t. My sense of hearing was struggling so hard that all the gremlins in my brain fled the taste department, to block out the noise in my ears.

So we left early, without paying the service charge. And, in that moment, I launched CALM, the Campaign Against Loud Music.

As we walked down Northcote Road, I opened the doors of three restaurants, two Italian and one Thai, all of which had the hum of conversation, laughter and glasses tinkling. All three will be sent CALM’s ‘You can hear in here’ poster.

The next day, with the zeal St Augustine must have felt when he landed on this pagan isle in 597AD, I took my Singaporean accountant, Gladys, out for lunch at Fallow, in Haymarket. I had been assured of amazing food and service but, of course, they were holding a Led Zeppelin celebration. We scuffled into the covered heated terrace, hoping for peace.

But the clamour didn’t just numb me throughout their excellent £42-for-threecourses menu. The staff too became completely disorientated. Clearly, no one could hear a thing in the open kitchen, which provided about as much volume as a pre-Christian mead hall.

One waitress kept bringing us puddings instead of our starters (venison tartare and burrata with spicy onions), which we fell upon when they arrived after 45 minutes. There was another long wait for our duck confit, interrupted by the delivery of a mushroom pâté as compensation. The floor manager was signing to us – so we weren’t sure.

After dinner with my accountant, I am not 100-per-cent sure whether I owe HMRC or they owe me. No matter. We’ll find another CALM-approved restaurant to iron out that minor problem.

DRINK BILL KNOTT

DIFFICULT DRINKS

Winemakers do not have an easy life, especially those in regions with unpredictable climates. A late frost can wipe out a vineyard overnight. A hailstorm can do the same in a couple of minutes. And there are countless diseases to which grapes are prone.

Assuming, though, that they end up with plenty of healthy fruit in the winery,

the process is relatively simple. Turning grape juice into wine simply requires sugar and yeast. Ripe grapes are bursting with the former and covered in the latter. Cider-makers are similarly fortunate.

Some alcoholic drinks require rather more ingenuity. I was reminded of this recently at a toddy shop in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Toddy is made from the sap of various palm trees and requires a nimble ‘toddy-tapper’ to climb each tree with a bucket.

The result is a sweet, milky liquid which immediately starts to ferment. After a few hours, it reaches around 4% ABV and goes rather well with the fiercely-spiced local cuisine for which toddy shops are famous.

In Mexico’s central highlands, the traditional drink is pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey, a species of agave. It is a laborious process. The plant needs to flower, which happens only after about 12 years. And its sap (aguamiel, ‘honey water’) needs to be sucked or scooped from the heart of the maguey twice a day, a few litres at a time.

The sap then ferments naturally and is sold in rustic, colourful bars – pulquerias – scooped into glasses from barrels sitting on ice to slow down the fermentation. Pulquerias are highly convivial: I was once taught some filthy Nahuatl swear words in a pulqueria near the farmers’ market in Puebla.

Like toddy, pulque is milky, rather gloopy and slightly fizzy, with a sour aroma from wild yeasts and lactic-acid bacteria. Rough cider has a similar smell.

The Korean cousin of toddy and pulque is called makgeolli, a raw rice ‘wine’ that has been brewed for at least 2,000 years. Similarly milky, fizzy and viscous, it goes especially well with pajeon, the Korean spring-onion pancake that is fried to order at roadside stalls and cafés.

It is fermented using nuruk, a starter often made from wheat. Like toddy and pulque, makgeolli is best drunk soon after it has been made, although it will last for a couple of weeks before turning to vinegar.

Even if you can find versions of toddy, pulque or makgeolli in the UK, they will have been pasteurised and will have lost their character and complexity. Should you find yourself in Cochin, Puebla or Seoul, however, I strongly suggest you seek them out.

In a world now drowning in industrially produced lager, they are ancient testaments to the ingenuity and tenacity of our species. Especially when there’s a drink at the end of it.

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: an archetypal Californian Chardonnay, a sweet Australian red that goes surprisingly well with charcuterie as well as desserts, and a delicious Rioja from the familyowned Bodegas Navajas. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

The Path Chardonnay, California 2022, offer price £11.95, case price £143.40

Lightly oaked Chardonnay with lemony acidity and plenty of structure.

De Bortoli ‘Chill Bill’ Dessert Wine, Riverina, Australia NV, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00

Sweet, spritzy red, bursting with bramble-like fruit and perfect with apple crumble.

Gustales Crianza Rioja, Bodegas Navajas, Spain 2019, offer price £11.95, case price £143.40

Classic Rioja from an excellent producer; silky tannins and plenty of fruit.

Mixed case price £137.60 – a saving of £26.19 (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 27th May 2025

JIM WHITE

ENGLAND’S OLDIE XI

The new England manager Thomas Tuchel’s first squad selection was less of a team line-up than the invitation list for a Dad’s Army reunion – said one reporter.

Tuchel went old school: it is oldie experience that counts. So back into the England set-up came the 34-year-old veteran Jordan Henderson, whose international career had long been assumed over.

Even one of the debutants, making his first international appearance, Newcastle United’s Dan Burn, is hardly one for the future. At 32, he’s one whose peak has, so conventional wisdom has it, long since passed. And then, up front, as his talisman and captain, Tuchel chose Harry Kane. By the time the World Cup Finals are staged in America next summer, he'll be 33. A pensioner, in footballing terms.

The online criticism was immediate. When he was England boss, Gareth Southgate noted that everybody in the country thinks they can do the job better than the incumbent. And the socialmedia experts duly railed against Tuchel’s choices. What was up he to? Why had he gone backwards rather than embrace the future?

And yet it is obvious what the wily German coach is doing. He has taken the England job with one goal in mind: to win the World Cup. He is not there to build for the future, improve the lot of the English game or leave a fine legacy for his successor. He is there to lift the silverware in 18 months’ time.

And Tuchel thinks he can win it. An ambitious, much decorated coach, he accepted the role only because he believed he could grab the game’s ultimate prize. He had studied the significant pool of youthful English talent available to him and reckoned he could corral them to victory. But he recognised he needed some wise old heads to guide them through.

He had seen his predecessor, the interim England coach Lee Carsely, select the young, spritely, attacking line-up that every social-media expert was rooting for.

And then we all watched, as Phil Foden, Cole Palmer, Bukayo Saka

Thomas Tuchel

and Jude Bellingham kept getting in one another’s way as they succumbed to defeat against Greece.

What Tuchel appreciates is that to get the best out of the glittering array of flair and skill at his disposal needs someone to do the selfless work – to win the ball before giving it to the speedy young blades.

Football is a team game. A wellbalanced side needs workers as well as artists, drones as well as craftsmen. It requires experience as much as potential. Never mind Dad’s Army; his selection is a masterpiece of pragmatism.

This is not to say that, even with this lot, Tuchel will win the thing. There are still a few minor obstacles to overcome. Such as Spain, Brazil and Argentina.

But, with his choices, the German has demonstrated he has a real understanding of what is needed. With him in charge, in 18 months, we might see the King wielding a sword in his direction and declaring, ‘Arise, Sir Thomas, the oldies’ friend.’

MOTORING ALAN JUDD EV OR NOT EV?

A friend is considering taking the plunge into EV (electric vehicle) ownership. Actually, she thinks more of a toe in the water than total immersion, wanting a cheap used EV to see how she likes it before more serious investment. What should she buy?

First, she should buy something whose real-world range is about a fifth greater than her normal daily driving. Like most private car owners, she averages 20-30 miles a day or fewer.

Secondly, she should check battery life, either from the dashboard read-out, which not all EVs have, or by buying from a dealer who provides a battery

Thirdly, she should look at everything she would normally look at when buying an ICE (internal combustion engine) car –body, paintwork, panel gaps, interior state, MOT history and mileage (check via the DVLA website) and service history. It’s worth also running an HPI check to confirm it hasn’t been stolen, written off, or is subject to a finance claim.

She should check brakes and suspension. Regenerative braking

means that EVs wear out brake pads less often but that can lead to rusting or pitting of the discs, which cost more to replace. EVs are heavier than ICEs and are therefore harder on suspensions –listen for knocks or vibrations.

Also, she should check heating and aircon, since fitting new aircon pumps to EVs can easily run into four figures. Finally, she should look for the unglamorous ordinary with a reputation for reliability.

That brings us to the Nissan Leaf of 2011-18. Unglamorous it certainly is –and so ordinary it’s hard to notice. But it’s comfortable and roomy, with four doors, a hard-wearing interior and a solid reputation for reliability. The front seats are slightly raised, which is good. The back seats are reportedly less good on long journeys, but my friend is unlikely to do many of those and anyway she drives from the front. Earlier models had a 24kWh battery but, budget permitting, she should go for a post-September 2015 car with the 30kWh battery.

Depending on the car’s mileage and how frequently it’s been rapid-charged (which wears out batteries more quickly), she should reckon on a real-world range of 50-90 miles. This should be no problem with her daily mileage, and a decent going concern could be had for £2,000-£7,000, depending on age and battery type. Leaf batteries are lasting longer than predicted, degrading by at most two per cent per year. A new 30kWh one would cost £5,000-£6,000.

If she can’t bear to be seen in something so determinedly unglamorous, she might find a little more zip and chic in a 2012-18 Renault Zoe. These are good-looking, well-equipped and nice to drive, if not as roomy and reliable as the Leaf. Models from 2016 should have a real-world range of 186 miles, for an average price of £5,117. I found a dealersupplied 10,250-mile one for £6,199.

But you have to pay to lease the battery, the cost of which depends on car and usage. With later Zoes, it ranges from £49 per month, for an annual mileage up to 4,500, to £110 for unlimited mileage.

But – second but – you never have to worry about replacing the battery.

You’ll pay no road tax – yet – for these EVs and they’re all ULEZ-free. But you’ll pay more to insure them, because the possibility of accident damage to a battery makes them more likely to be written off than ICEs.

I suspect that my friend, whose journeys are almost all local, will stick with EVs, once she’s sampled them.

Anyway, older Leafs and Zoes are not expensive – and she can always sell.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Hard facts about rubbish software

Software is getting worse, just as computers are getting better.

The paradox is that hardware, the tangible stuff, has undoubtedly improved. It’s faster, more reliable and cheaper. But software has become less easy to use, and more expensive.

I was expecting the opposite – surely that would be the natural development. I thought software would go the way of the kettle; we buy one and it does its job until it dies.

I was wrong. Certainly, the hardware doesn’t alter. But the software that makes it work changes all the time. What sits on your desk now is a very different beast from the thing you

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bought, even if superficially it is identical. Your kettle, on the other hand, remains stubbornly unchanged.

While software used to stay the same for years, with only occasional changes, nowadays updates happen frequently. Software companies muck about with the layout, remove the buttons and attributes you want, introducing new features you don’t want.

I am irritated daily by a ridiculously small example of this. I have the latest version of Windows. On all previous versions, if you clicked on the date in the bottom right-hand corner, a little calendar would pop up. I’ve found it very useful for years. In Windows 11, this has vanished, and I’ve been forced to buy a paper calendar to sit by my screen.

It’s a trivial change – but exasperating and completely unnecessary.

Meanwhile, Windows 11 has been overloaded with countless new features, most of which I will never use or even discover.

The problem is not confined to software that lives on your computer. It’s worse with online services, which are even more prone to this sort of tinkering. Buttons are getting smaller, and menus are harder to find.

If you use your bank’s online service, I bet you’ve seen it change several times in recent years, forcing you to relearn how to achieve the simplest of tasks.

Why? Sometimes, improving security is the driving force, but this will usually complicate matters. It is well-meant. The goal is to keep your information or

money safe. But the new burdens –receiving texts or phone calls to identify yourself, or having to remember your first dog’s name – make simple online tasks feel overwhelming.

The designers are no doubt very bright, but I wonder how hard they seek the views of actual users to avoid obvious mistakes. A famous failure is the Natural History Museum. Its great architect, Alfred Waterhouse, designed wonderful cathedral-like spaces but forgot to include any offices for staff.

That’s why you can still see triangular offices created by partitions placed in the corners of the grand exhibition halls. If only he’d talked to the potential users.

So it is with much ‘improved’ software; brilliant technical design, no doubt, but difficult to use and so, ultimately, no good.

One phone-based bank I use recently moved the ‘Log off’ button so that it’s impossible to find in a hurry. So you leave it switched on in frustration. It logs itself off after a while, but it can’t be secure.

There is not much that you and I can do about this, except to stop using the offending software, but that’s not always practical.

Don’t be shy about asking for help. Many websites and YouTube channels offer step-by-step tutorials that explain new features.

Finally – complain. The better companies do listen to user comments. If you are annoyed by changes forced on you, send a polite but firm email or review. They can’t ignore us for ever.

Neil Collins: Money Matters

Chancellor wants your piggy bank

Politicians, as all the world knows, cannot resist the urge to fiddle, if only for the sake of the next day’s headline.

Nearly 40 years ago, Nigel Lawson invented the Personal Equity Plan, allowing savers to put a limited amount of their savings into a wrapper that would escape income tax on the dividends and capital-gains tax on sales.

It was such a good idea that Gordon Brown nicked it. Of course he had to fiddle – so he changed the name to

Individual Savings Account. In the ISA’s 25 years, some £700bn has been invested and, under today’s vicious taxation of direct investment into shares, it’s a godsend.

After the inevitable fiddling from subsequent chancellors, there is now a veritable litter of ISA piglets, all of which look ripe for the chop.

The fattest is the cash ISA. Last year, savers poured £50bn into this baby, and it’s not hard to see why. In a plain deposit

account, interest is taxable. In an ISA, it isn’t. As we have come to expect from every Chancellor since Lawson, the rules are not simple. Today, the first £1,000 of interest is tax-free, unless you pay 40 percent income tax, when it falls to £500.

At today’s rates, interest on £20,000, the maximum annual subscription into an ISA, is just below the £1,000 threshold. But as inflation turns us all into higher-rate taxpayers, the nation’s

cash savings will run for shelter. That £50bn is likely to be exceeded this year and, as we know, our dear Chancellor is desperate. If even a tenth of that could be caught in the tax net, well, every little helps. Incidentally, whatever you decide, I hope you put in as much as you could (up to £20,000) before 5th April.

ISAs were never designed to be piggy banks, but build up enough savings in your old-style stocks-and-shares ISA,

and you can use it that way. You are not allowed simply to put the money into (effectively) an interest-bearing bank account, but if you have £50,000 invested (less than three years’ maximum subscription), you can buy Treasury bills. These return about the same as Bank Rate and can instantly be turned into cash. You can take the money out and, provided you put it back in the same tax year, HMRC is not interested.

Rachel Reeves is, though. The cash ISA is essentially a crude taxavoidance device. She needs the money, and the stock market needs investors. She could also claim to be following the Lawson doctrine and simplifying the tax system. Brace yourselves.

Neil Collins was the Daily Telegraph’s City Editor

Join Harry Mount on a walking tour of

the Inns of Court & Wren’s City Churches

17th June 2025

The four Inns of Court, home to London’s barristers, have a unique combination of buildings – from the 12th-century Temple Church, built for the Knights Templar, to the 17th-century chapel of Lincoln’s Inn by Inigo Jones.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 gave Sir Christopher Wren his greatest commission – 52 City Churches and St Paul’s Cathedral.

Above: Middle Temple Hall

Left: Lincoln’s Inn Hall and Library

Right: Sir Christopher Wren, 1680

On our walk, you’ll see how Wren used his ingenious magic to create his own new style, in the classical and Gothic medium.

And enjoy a twocourse lunch, with wine, in Middle Temple Hall, London’s finest Elizabethan hall.

ITINERARY

11am – Meet outside Chancery Lane Tube Station

11am-12.30pm – Explore Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, Inner Temple and Middle Temple, including Temple Church

12.30pm-2pm – Lunch in Middle Temple Hall

2pm-3.30pm – Tour of Christopher Wren’s City Churches

Ruff

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

The ruff (Calidris pugnax) is named after the male’s dramatically coloured collar in the breeding season.

The name dates from 1634, when detachable ruffs were still being worn by men and women as a mark of nobility. Previously, the species had been called reeve, perhaps with reference to the flamboyant attire of the shire-reeve (sheriff). Reeve survives as the female ruff’s name.

The ruff is a summer migrant from Africa, its main breeding ground Western Siberia. There are at least two million. For centuries in England, it was considered ‘the most delicious of all morsels’. In feastings to mark the 1495 enthronement of George Neville as Archbishop of York, 2,400 were served.

Since then, drained marshes have resulted in its bordering on extinction as a UK breeding bird for the past 100 years. However, some 1,000 passage migrants – the majority juveniles in autumn – do briefly appear, most reliably at the Ouse Washes and in north Norfolk.

Renewing a UK breeding population remains a dream. Since 2007, Andrew Crean, in north Norfolk, near Brancaster, has returned arable land to its natural state as Deepdale Marsh.

One of the birds he hoped to breed there was the ruff. To this end, he brought ruffs from Germany to breed in aviaries on the marsh, so that, when they were released to migrate, they would return to create a British colony.

Mark Andrew, who manages the programme, invited The Oldie’s illustrator Carry Akroyd and me to see the males in mating plumage.

To mate, ruffs gather in leks – at Deepdale Marsh, they take place in aviaries. Males are promiscuous and pugnacious. Fighting and mating are their sole social preoccupation.

The feathered ruff can be black, purple, russet and white. It is raised as a challenge, completed by erect ear tufts.

Females favour the darker, most boldly ruffed males.

To appreciate the spectacular effect requires scrutiny – the larger male bird is only slightly bigger than a starling – and it is glorious.

In the non-breeding winter plumage, ruffs are, as Aristotle generally categorised waders, Calidris, or greyish. The only one I’ve seen in the wild was a single bird among various other waders at Oare Marshes nature reserve in Kent. It was identifiable – as a birder spotted – by the colour of its legs, which, to add complexity, can change according to age and season.

The wildlife artist Nik Pollard witnessed two crows hunting a ruff at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire: ‘My

experience of crow predation has always been opportunist. The ruff seemed fit and healthy and was evading the pursuing crows with low flight, jinking from left to right.’

The crows briefly downed and damaged the ruff, but it escaped into sedge. One crow perched nearby and then entered the sedge. Twitching stalks ‘indicated the inevitable’. The crow emerged with its ‘trophy’, and flew off ‘to enjoy it’.

The Zoological Society of London has ended the Deepdale project for fear of its contaminating wild ruffs via pathogens. Now renamed the Deepdale Conservation Trust, a charity, it seeks to introduce corncrakes and curlew.

Travel

Italy’s favourite film set

Matera’s ancient caves and churches have played host to Mel Gibson, James Bond – and James Pembroke

Eboli is where, in 1935, the exiled writer Carlo Levi (1902-75) took the branch line from the fertile coast of Campania into the badlands of Basilicata.

After the sophistication of Turin, he was appalled by this timeless lawless region, which even Christ had abandoned to malaria (the disease lingered until 1969) and la Vecchia Religione of witchcraft.

Although Levi lived in the village of Grassano for two years, Francesco Rosi’s 1979 film of Levi’s book Cristo si è fermato a Eboli was filmed 25 miles away, in ancient Matera.

Images of Christ adorned the walls of Matera’s numerous medieval cave churches, as well as the duomo and the church of St John the Baptist, built in 1215.

Matera can boast of being the world’s third-oldest city after Aleppo and Jericho. Neolithic pottery dating to 7,500BC has been found in the centre.

The city thrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the centre (the civita) was enriched with churches and palaces.

The city was divided into two areas: Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, perhaps named because it faces Bari,

with the civita in the middle. Levi’s 1945 book highlighted the almost genocidal nature of the ‘southern problem’, which Mussolini had allowed to fester, viewing everyone south of Rome as ‘Africanesi’ It was said that the shepherds communed with the wolves.

Levi singled out the Sassi, the caves in which 15,000 people lived, for their ‘tragic beauty’ and hallucinogenic aura of

Matera at sunrise

decay, ‘like a schoolboy’s idea of Dante’s Inferno’.

The Sassi had by then become ‘dark holes’ riddled with disease, where barnyard animals were kept in dank corners, chickens ran across the diningroom tables, and infant mortality rates were horrendous, thanks to rampant malaria, trachoma and dysentery

The Sassi grew out of a settlement by Palaeolithic troglodytes. They developed an advanced system of storing rainwater in cisterns dug out of the soft limestone (tufo). After the slow decline of the Roman Empire, the Sassi were the perfect refuge from attack. In the medieval period, they attracted exiles from the Eastern Orthodox Church, from Cappadocia, Armenia and Syria. These people carved and decorated cave churches out of the rock, not just in Matera but throughout the Murgian plain, especially in Massafra and Castellaneta, birthplace of Rudolph Valentino.

Life was diabolically hard. The average family of around 11 lived together in a cave of 650 square feet, sleeping next to their pig and donkey.

Nothing was thrown out. Even manure was mixed with straw – it fermented and created heat. There are remains of neviere, for storing snow and ice throughout the year. But life was lived outside in the courtyard – the vicinato – surrounded by a group of caves where families forged deep loyalties to one another.

The Prime Minister from 1945 to 1953, Alcide De Gasperi, visited Matera in July 1950. Affronted by this embarrassing wart on the new Italy, he ignored its history and concentrated on sterilising the city instead of recognising that the real problem was poverty – not hygiene.

Even in the early 1950s, Matera had much to be proud of. The largest cistern, the Palombaro Lungo, containing five million litres of water, was commissioned in 1846 – hardly a sign of a despairing city with no future. With its solid pillars carved from the rock and a vault height of over 50 feet, it is dubbed ‘the Water Cathedral’ and is navigable by boat.

Like other cisterns in the town, it

collected rainwater that was filtered and flowed in a controlled way to the Sassi.

They have been described as a Swiss cheese, riddled with tunnels and caverns, only 30 per cent of which we can see.

After his visit in July 1950, the Prime Minister set about cleaning up an area where child mortality rates stood at 50 per cent. The headline ‘La Vergogna Nazionale’ (national disgrace) bellowed from the front page of La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, the newspaper of the south.

Only 35 per cent of the cave dwellings were ever declared dangerous, but the whole lot were evacuated, and the 15,000 inhabitants were forcibly rehoused from 1953 to 1968 by government decree.

American experts including Friedrich Friedmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas, arrived with Italian academics who had studied the mass rural relocation programmes of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s.

The design and building of the La Martella suburb was entrusted to a group of well-intentioned Northern Italian architects. In common with the claustrophobic tower blocks of English cities, it created a sense of isolation.

Realising the evacuation of the Sassi would wipe away their history for good, Levi revised his opinion and proposed an anthropological museum to study and preserve these sophisticated settlements.

The abandoned architectural treasures included many rupestrian – or rock-hewn – churches, covered with priceless Byzantine frescoes.

Over the years, the group identified more than 150 cave churches, some of which had been turned by shepherds into shelters for their flocks.

They included one majestic, Byzantine-era cavern, now known as the Crypt of Original Sin – dubbed the Sistine Chapel of Rupestrian Art.

In 1986, another decree allowed for the preservation and recovery of the Sassi. Caves were turned into homes,

Matera is the world’s third-oldest city after Aleppo and Jericho

hotels and restaurants. In 1993, they were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city was made European Capital of Culture in 2019.

Two years later came Bond.

Most film producers like a lot of space for a car chase – such as the broad boulevards of San Francisco (Bullitt) or even the colonnades of Turin (The Italian Job). To choose the tiny, cobbled walkways of Matera around which James Bond could spin his Aston Martin DB5 in No Time to Die (2021) must have troubled the insurance company a little.

They used a pair of originals and eight replicas of the Goldfinger car, complete with machine-guns.

In one of the troglodyte caves, there was a crib when I visited on Christmas Eve. At Easter, three crosses were placed on the same site. Little wonder that Mel Gibson chose Matera as the location for his 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ.

We stayed in the cave hotel, Le Grotte della Civita, which has 18 candle-lit cave rooms, the only modern touch being a bath – undoubtedly the most romantic hotel I have ever known.

The hotel is part of the Sextantio group, who have bought nine of Italy’s 2,000 semi-abandoned villages ‘to preserve their architectural and cultural integrity’, rather than modernise them.

A further 1,500 Italian villages are almost totally abandoned. Houses are being offered for just one euro to anyone willing to restore them.

Sextantio is the brainchild of Daniele Elow Kihlgren, who grew up in Milan. His other hotel, designed by David Chipperfield, is in the village of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, in the mountainous part of the Abruzzi.

Again, the theme is ‘back to the medieval peasant past’, without the knights and also without the Black Death. Exactly the sort of place a Bond villain could hide a nuclear warhead.

Matera is a 45-minute drive from Bari Airport

Left: James Pembroke in the Church of the Madonna delle Virtu. Below: a sasso cave dwelling

Overlooked Britain

Fit for a king – and a monkey

Robert Adam’s Culzean Castle is a dream home for all primates

lucinda lambton

Culzean Castle in Ayrshire is the queen of architectural endeavour.

It gazes out to sea while hollering distinction of the highest order – from the enchanting Gothic duck house to the Monkey Pagoda. The magnificent house was built between 1777 and 1792 by the renowned architect Robert Adam. Where else could you find a richer assembly of buildings?

The Oyster Pool was created by the 9th Earl of Cassilis, a famed English ‘connoisseur’, who lived for years at a time in Italy, from where he sent home crates of statuary, as well as works by such artists as Piranesi.

He was always on the go. In 1773, he planted his oyster bed below Culzean. To create this private affair, great flagstones were embedded into the rocks. They still survive, along with traces of the iron posts that had a metal mesh attached to them to prevent the matured oysters from being swept away by the tide.

When he died in 1775, the estate was inherited by his brother David, another pleasingly cultivated figure, who was to spend well and prodigiously on the place.

Robert Adam’s Culzean Castle and (right) Home Farm, 1792

Robert Adam’s design for the Home Farm was of striking originality. Built in local sandstone of various hues, four crowstepped buildings, surmounted by stone crosses, stand at right angles to four arched and turreted ranges, which together form a hexagon enclosing a large central yard.

Adam’s plans survive – with buildings symmetrically shooting forth like a cartwheel. They show a long ‘Ox House’ and ‘Stables’ as well as a ‘Stable for Cattle’, flanked by the ‘Tool House’ and quarters for ‘Swine’. Even four buildings labelled ‘Privy’ were marked as essential and carefully drawn by Adam.

A local minister wrote charmingly of the cows’ contentment. They were fed with fine-cut red clover.

Cassilis then gave Adam the job of both classicising and castellating this medieval stronghold a few hundred yards north along the cliff top.

The 12th Earl of Cassilis, later the 1st Marquess of Ailsa – a handsome-as-hell

American – took over the estate in 1794, aged 24, only two years after his father, New Yorker Captain Archibald Kennedy, had inherited the Earldom.

Both of them had to grapple with their forebears’ alarming debts, as well as doing battle with a rival Kennedy cousin claimant. As a result, the affairs of the estate became frozen.

So it was years before the 12th Earl was able to realise his schemes for the place. When he did, he did so with a vengeance – landscaping, building and beautifying on a grand scale, diverting public roads and levelling lands.

With the damming of the Hogston

Burn, Culzean’s only natural stream, a 13-acre pond was formed. An island was created, planted with trees and given the added charm of an octagonal, Gothic duck house as a nesting place from which eggs could be collected. The pond could, and still can be, waded through with ease.

The Monkey House was built in the early-19th century to look like – of all things – a Chinese pagoda, with little roofs flicking up at the edges in everdecreasing tiers, in the Chinese style. It was built in 1814, along with other sweeping additions – the pond, the duck house, an aviary and three Gothic lodges.

The 3rd Marquess of Ailsa hunted

The Monkey House, restored in 1997. Below: in 1985, before its restoration throughout the winter, yachted throughout the summer and drained Culzean’s coffers. By the 1930s, the Monkey Pagoda had become roofless.

The Cassilis family took their tea, while creatures were given their quarters below

When I photographed it in 1985, it appeared for all the world to be, of all things, a Gothic ruin. The accounts of it having been a Chinese pagoda for monkeys seemed too fantastical, or so I thought.

In 1997, it was restored in full measure to its original idiosyncratic form. So it was that a tall tower with multiple eaves was revealed, where the Cassilis family would have taken their tea, while various creatures were given their quarters below.

At one time, it was an aviary. At others, it was lived in by swans – but its most exotic tenant by far was unquestionably a monkey. The new balustrades of the outer stairs were designed with monkey’s tails. The weathervane, too, is a monkey cavorting in the sky.

In 1945, Culzean was given to the National Trust of Scotland. In 1969, the grounds were declared Scotland’s first country park.

The Home Farm was rebuilt as the Park Centre. Salt-laced wind had eroded the stones and all the slates were in ruins. But with a 75-per-cent grant from the Countryside Commission and a good deal of skill, the buildings were saved and beautifully restored in 1973.

All in all, a considerable triumph.

On the Road

Travels with Auntie

Edward

Stourton tells Louise Flind about life as a BBC correspondent and working with unscary John Humphrys on the Today programme

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

A book. And a sarong, which I wear at home in the evening.

Is there something you really miss?

I miss my wife and just being at home, but mostly I find I’m absorbed in the story when I’m away.

What are your memories of Nigeria?

I started life in Nigeria, where my father worked; then Sierra Leone, Malta, which I do remember, Switzerland and then Ghana. I’ve been back to Nigeria, and the BBC driver asked if I’d been there before and I said, ‘I was born here.’ He was so excited he rang up his girlfriend and said, ‘I’ve got a whitey in the car born in Lagos.’

What was it like coming to school in England?

Completely miserable for about a week, and then I’d decide nothing was going to change and I loved it – once I got over that first bump.

Did you write as a child?

My father was terribly good about keeping records and I found in an old box file a story I wrote about a pillow fight.

Did you set out to become a journalist?

Friends and I had done a magazine at university, and I was President of the Cambridge Union. So I enjoyed sounding off on my opinions. It seemed the thing that would probably let me enjoy the things I had been enjoying.

Who have you most enjoyed working for?

Channel 4 News, ITN and the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

Who have you most enjoyed working with?

When I started broadcasting, you’d have a cameraman and radio producers, and you do become very good friends. And Today with John Humphrys and Sarah Montague.

Have you had many overseas postings?

Washington Correspondent for Channel 4; Paris Correspondent for the BBC.

Are you angry with the BBC for sidelining you from the Today programme?

I was very upset about it, but you just make yourself miserable and become a bore if you continue to be in a rage.

Have they increasingly got rid of posh voices at the BBC?

I think all of us have become less posh as the years have gone by. When I hear old archive bits of myself, I sound like the Queen…

Was John Humphrys a scary colleague? I didn’t find him so. We got on very well. So I think he thought I wasn’t too bad.

What were the highlights of the Today programme?

The nice thing about Today is that it’s such a rich mixture. Broadcasting live from Kabul, two days after the Taliban had fallen; being there when history is happening. Equally in the studio, when you get a really good interview.

And the lowlights?

When I made some cataclysmic mistake. But they could be fun, too.

Once with the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who didn’t speak English, I asked longer and longer questions and he replied ‘Oui’ or ‘Non’ and finally I said, ‘There’s a lot of sex in your book and people will say it’s just pornographic.’

And he said, ‘Yes, it’s just pornography.’ That’s when I gave up and went to the sport.

Could you have discovered your prostate cancer earlier?

It’s now ten years since my diagnosis,

and that’s because it a relatively diagnosis.

What advice do you give to potential sufferers?

Get tested, because it does make a huge difference when you’re diagnosed.

Are you a traveller?

My first journey was from Lagos to Carnot to Barcelona and then to Britain, when I was about a year old, in 1958. You joined the Junior Jet Club and the captain would sign your little book, which I’ve still got.

Are you brave with trying different food abroad?

A neighbour in France gave us ‘a great delicacy’, a duck’s neck stuffed with foie gras, and I’m having to wind up courage to try that…

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Sheep’s brain in Lebanon.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept in?

In a guest house in Afghanistan, in Jalalabad, when the Taliban fled in 2001. I settled down in my little cubbyhole, and put on my sarong.

I got out my whisky and was reading an Ian McEwan novel, and John Sweeney, the journalist, came in. He’d made friends with the Northern Alliance commander, and thought it would be amusing to show him an Englishman in bed. The door bursts open, and this enormous man with a machine gun around his neck comes in, finds me hilarious and invites all his friends in…

What’s your main travelling tip?

Don’t be frightened. Just plunge in.

Confessions: Life Re-examined by Edward Stourton is out now

Remember great Brittain

Why doesn’t Buxton honour Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth?

By her biographer Kathryn Ecclestone

Ask anyone in Buxton who the town’s most significant resident is.

A few will know that Vera Brittain lived in the once-booming spa resort from 1905 to 1915. And they usually know just one thing about her.

Not that she was a feminist pioneer, an acclaimed chronicler of her age or a controversial peace campaigner. Or that she has admirers around the world, that her bestselling First World War memoir, Testament of Youth (1933), has been translated into seven languages, made into a popular film and an award-winning BBC drama series, and is on the school curriculum.

What they know is that she hated Buxton. That’s it. And, over a hundred years since she left the town, that’s where its interest in Vera Brittain has stopped.

There’s no public commemoration; just a plaque on the gatepost of her former home, and a photograph montage in … not the museum, the town hall or Pavilion Gardens but the Buxton branch of Wetherspoons. Individual admirers paid for both.

Other places do celebrate Vera Brittain. Hamburg and Berlin have streets named after her, to acknowledge her high-profile campaigns against the mass bombing of German cities. English Heritage plaques adorn the London houses where she lived. A statue in her birthplace, Newcastle-under-Lyme, commemorates her 18-month residence.

Vera certainly didn’t celebrate Buxton, proclaiming in Testament of Youth that she ‘hated’ and ‘detested’ the narrow-minded, stifling town. Her remorseless criticism was a recurring theme in her journalism and two autobiographical novels.

But Vera’s portrayal of her early life was one-sided, unjustified and not always truthful.

Created, owned and controlled by the Dukes of Devonshire, the booming

‘estate resort’ of Buxton gave aspirational families such as Vera’s a more privileged lifestyle and sense of social superiority than they would have had elsewhere.

Today, it’s hard to imagine just how lively, elegant and socially exclusive Edwardian Buxton was.

Vera’s cosseted life in Buxton laid the foundations for her later success. An enlightened education, some inspiring Buxton figures and University of Oxford lectures at the town hall inspired her enthusiasms and ideas. In place of obdurate parents and censorious provincial ‘matrons’, Vera had a great deal of support for her university ambitions.

Most productively of all, Vera’s early life inspired the compelling feminist narrative in her memoir of fighting a ‘battle royal’ to escape from an oppressive Edwardian town for university and a more meaningful life.

This was already a popular theme in a burgeoning market for middle-class women’s novels, including those written by Vera and her contemporaries.

My Testament of Lost Youth shows just how much of herself she lost in the First World War. It’s also a testament to the vibrant heyday of a unique town that never recovered after 1918.

Over a century after Vera Brittain left Buxton, the town’s neglect of its most important resident now extends to some of the beautiful landmark buildings she knew.

Millions of pounds of public money contributed to the restoration of the

Devonshires’ magnificent Georgian crescent as a high-class spa hotel. Just three years after opening, it is up for sale.

More public funding enabled the University of Derby to convert the stunning Devonshire Royal Hospital into its Buxton campus. Opened to great fanfare by the then Prince of Wales, this wonderful building, with the largest unsupported dome in Europe, was where Vera began serving as a voluntary nurse in 1915.

Until it closed in 2000, the Devonshire was Britain’s last hydropathic hospital. Four years before the end of the 25-year term for which grants were given, the university has declared the Devonshire Dome surplus to requirements. There is no plan for its future.

Also on the market is the splendid town hall, where Vera attended Oxford’s ‘extension’ lectures in social history, sparking her ambition to study at Somerville.

Down the hill from the War Memorial, where her brother Edward’s name is inscribed, is the Old Hall Hotel. Once the gilded prison in which Mary, Queen of Scots was confined by Elizabeth I, it is also up for sale.

And, in a supreme irony for a story about selling off a town’s history, ‘For Sale’ boards adorn Buxton’s awardwinning museum. For decades, it was housed in a once-luxurious Victorian hydro where Vera enjoyed one of Buxton’s many society balls.

There is a resounding public silence about all this from the Conservative-run county council and Labour-run borough council.

While financial problems beset both councils, more taxpayer millions are earmarked for regenerating Buxton’s characterless 1980s shopping precinct.

Vera Brittain having been neglected for far too long, neglect now threatens Buxton’s wonderful built heritage.

Testament of Lost Youth: The Early Life and Loves of Vera Brittain by Kathryn Ecclestone is out now

Pavilion and promenade, Buxton, 1904. Left: Vera Brittain (1893-1970)

Catch of the day

Jon Cleave was singing sea shanties in a Cornish harbour with his friends when a music producer turned them

into a pop and film sensation

It was early doors on a Friday evening in early summer 2009. We’d gone out for a few pints and a sing-up on the Platt at Port Isaac.

We used to pass the bucket around – unsuspecting tourists will forgive anything if you tell them it’s for charity. Then we’d run through our saucy, fruity, bawdy, jollyrogering repertoire of shanties and songs of the sea.

Between songs, we’d regale the audiences of 50 or 60 or so with salty tales of sea-doggery and other nautical nonsense, all delivered with rustic charm and unintelligible Cornish accents. It was proper local colour.

Not all of the Fisherman’s Friends were fishermen. Four out of ten us were, but the rest had been either lifeboat crew or coastguard – or had taken the ferry from Rock to Padstow, or been on a boating lake.

We had all grown up together in the village and now reached various points of middle age with a good degree of contentment, in the pretty firm belief that our life’s patterns were well set.

Unbeknownst to us, that evening an independent music producer was in the audience. After a pint or two of Cornish beer too many, he believed he could see ‘potential’. We had been discovered.

The following Sunday morning, he rang me at home, interrupting a weekly ritual of mine and my wife’s (clearly the luckiest girl in north Cornwall), which we call ‘tea and reflection’. I make the tea and take it up to bed and, as we drink it, she gets to reflect on my overall performance during the previous seven days.

Generally, there are things I could improve upon. That day, I was able to reflect right back to her, someone had heard us singing and, unbelievably, wanted us to make a record with a major label.

My friends in the group were all keen. But it wasn’t until a chance meeting with the late Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker, who happened to be holidaying in Port Isaac,

that the next stage really unfolded.

When appraised of our good fortune, he shook his head pitifully when I said we hadn’t got a manager or an agent. He texted a manager friend of his, who took a peep at us on YouTube, liked what he saw and, a few days later, paid us a visit.

Jon Cleave (front row, second right) and the Fisherman’s Friends.

Below: the cast of the film Fisherman’s Friends (2019)

Island Records, launchpad for Bob Marley, U2, Amy Winehouse et al. We committed to our manager, each with a handshake which sustains our relationship to this day.

We were well-prepared for his coming. We actually practised in expectation of something like an audition.

On the night, we sat outside a local hotel and watched as he pulled up in the back of a nice Mercedes. His driver, a craggy, raw-boned man in a suit who looked ex-Special Forces, was wearing black leather gloves – what an old friend called murdering gloves. He went round and opened the rear door for his passenger. We were impressed.

The jovial and garrulous man destined to become our manager jumped out and talked at us for an hour without taking breath.

We were convinced – but didn’t he want to hear us sing? He rolled his eyes but listened. We sang Never Known a Night Like It, Heave Away, Haul Away and other scurvaceous swashbucklers.

He got back into the Merc with the driver with the murdering gloves, and disappeared off into the night.

In a few days, he came down again and, remarkably, we were presented with three recording contracts to choose from.

Still not really knowing how many beans make five, we happily opted for

A couple of weeks later, it all hit home. We had a message to be down by the harbour in Port Isaac at 6.30 the following morning for some ‘press stuff’. We were told to wear tarry jumpers, pea coats, stripy shirts and caps – anything proper fishermen wouldn’t be seen dead in. We duly obliged.

On a bad news day, when it seemed all the world had gone quiet for a few hours, we were the number-one news story for the day. The Sun headline was ‘Fishermen Net One Million Record Deal’. Port Isaac was rammed with TV vans with dishes and antennae on their roofs, reporters from all over thrusting fluffy mics at us.

There were the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, TV, international press and, of course, dear ole Radio Cornwall. Luckily, with ten Fisherman’s Friends in the group, there were more than enough of us to go round and keep them all happy.

And so this most unexpected and curious chapter of my life has gone on and on, up to the present day.

At 65, and in the spirit of ‘tea and reflection’, I reflect on the consequences such fame might have held for us all, had we been younger – and of an inclination to live out the worst excesses of the wildly bohemian life of sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll to the full.

As it is, socks’n’rugs’n’sausage rolls will do just fine.

Genius crossword 451 EL SERENO

Clues marked * share an unstated definition

Across

1 Row seeing Conservative involved in change (11)

7 Monster that’s a firebrand if naked (3)

9 * Open ground in catastrophe at Halifax (5)

10 Preventing old boy replacing leader of aircraft industry (9)

11 What might save clutch from failure? (9)

12 * Exploded, seeing left replaced by right (5)

13 Shake doctor left on board plane, perhaps (7)

15 * Dead keen – occasionally! (4)

18 Two articles – one about debut of Chuck Berry (4)

20 Leave date with story about king seeming divine (7)

23 * Faith mostly comes at the end (5)

24 Blows up hearing of person eating small children (9)

26 Explain and edit a clue cryptically (9)

27 In Paris I must keep point for Spanish chap (5)

28 * Contrary girl lacking resistance (3)

Down

1 Attending crime scenes, such people refuse to believe (8)

2 * Which American diva? (8)

3 What stops setting up legal profession treatment centre (5)

4 Early Christian job in sales discovered (7)

5 How McGonagall wrote? Quite the opposite (7)

6 Granny eats starter of antipasti, with money for side order (4,5)

7 Supplication from old jail with no roof (6)

8 Stick around at home for the dog (6)

14 Relapse as learner crashes into rear end (9)

16 Local area detective demanding adherence to rules (8)

17 Support for one who may be lying (8)

19 State in North America welcomes assistance turning up (7)

20 Drinks served with English herb (7)

21 Group of students play on the internet in real time (6)

22 Sign of saint erased from grand rectory’s walls (6)

25 * Key successor to 2? (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 2nd May 2025. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 451

1 Gorse (5) 4

Convey: delight (9)

Pitch, black stuff (3)

North American deer (3)

In due course (5)

Take a chair (3)

Child; measure of whisky (3)

Imminent (9)

Aggressively quarrelsome (9)

Enjoyment (3)

Turn down (6)

Golf course; connections (5)

The press (6,6)

Search, making a mess! (7)

Roof overhang (5)

gentleman’s form of

(3)

decree (5)

Spies (6,6)

(2,3)

Time off work? (7)

Tighten up, nervously (7)

Temporary break in hostilities (5)

Former South African province (5)

Consume (3)

Moron 449 answers: Across: 1 Juicy, 4 Wart, 7 Amin (Do you see what I mean?), 8 Chivalry, 9 Lifestyle, 10 Ali, 12 Bandit, 14 Repent, 16 Asp, 18 Etiquette, 21 Broccoli, 22 Slim, 23 Veto, 24 Sting. Down: 1 Jamaica, 2 Innuendo, 3 Yacht, 4 Weak, 5 Rural, 6 Killer,

Winner: Peter Henham, Gillingham, Dorset

Runners-up: R J Green, Guildford, Surrey; David MacDonnell, Dublin, Eire

Gabriel Chagas from Rio de Janeiro is now in his ninth decade, and his bridge remains as sparking as it ever was. Tony Forrester and I used to spar against him and the late Marcelo Branco back in the early 1990s – the key back then (as now) was not to let his quick tempo jostle us out of our comfort zone; nor to let his jovial manner lure us into a false sense of security.

Chagas was a member of the winning Brazilian team at the World Bridge Games (formerly the Olympiad) back in 1976, and last autumn was trying to win it again (as a Senior) in Buenos Aires. He didn’t quite manage it – but out-techniqued most declarers on this month’s deal from the event. Plan the play in 6♥ on ♠ J lead.

Dealer South Both Vunerable

The bidding

South West North East

2 ♥ (1) Pass 2NT (2) Pass

3 ♣ ( 3) Pass 6 ♥ end

(1) Weak two. (2) Strong asking bid. (3) Non-minimum with a Club feature. The Polish declarer (at the other table) won the king of spades and crossed to the ace of hearts, East discarding. Needing to come to hand to pick up West’s hearts, at trick three he tried the knave of clubs. East won the king and promptly gave his partner a club ruff – one down.

Chagas immediately (everything is immediate with our diminutive Rio hero) called for dummy’s ace of spades (key play). He cashed the ace of hearts, exposing the bad split, but had retained the king of spades as an entry to his hand – to which he now crossed to run the ten of hearts. He returned to the king of hearts, then ruffed a third spade to cash the queen of hearts, felling West’s knave. He could now lead a club to the knave, not minding that the finesse lost, as his queen was promoted and his losing diamond disappeared on dummy’s queen of spades. Slam made. ANDREW ROBSON

Competition TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 317 you were invited to write a poem called Teeth. You chomped away with a will. Michael Turner questioned the going rate for the Tooth Fairy, concluding, ‘Grit your teeth and pay it./ Best not to make a fuss./ We soon will pay our dentists more/ To take our teeth from us.’ Finlay Campbell, praising the edentulous earthworm, suggested that ‘Perhaps mankind, in a charitable social venture,/ Could help earthworms in their subterranean mission,/ Assist evolution by fitting earthworms with dentition.’ Con Connell contemplated the cogs of the mind. Anna Meanock was good on the violence of dental surgery. Peter Jarvis celebrated the teeth of a saw. Commiserations to them and to Louise Buckley, Allan Clews, Ann Hilton, David Dixon, Peter Sheldon, John S Highnam, Ian Nalder, Anthony Young, Charles Leedham-Green and Robert Best, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to David Thompson.

That’s me, leaning like a lost racing yacht Along the slopes of the nature reserve. It’s all I can do in this freezing cross Between hail and gale. If I can preserve

My balance, my Border collie, lower To the ground, will drag me through biting rain, Imagining obstinate clumps of sheep To be herded off the downs, up the lane

To the pens and into the dry. She’s not Even wet, her thick wire fur and ruff white With studded droplets coughed up and spat out

Through the teeth of the storm and raging night.

David Thompson

I stroll through the park as the day’s growing dark

In search of a maiden to nibble, For biting their necks is much nicer than sex –

At the thought, I’m beginning to dribble.

The neighbouring village has plenty to pillage, With virgins (or near) by the dozen. The first was too frail, anaemic and pale; Instead, I abducted her cousin.

My sweet señorita’s now short of two litres, Yet strangely, I still feel disjointment;

My teeth are all aching, and so I am making

A last-minute dental appointment.

A vampire, you’d think, needing only to drink,

Would be safe from the cavity racket,

But biting the girlies makes hell of our pearlies,

And dentists are making a packet.

Brian Allgar

On doldrums days of silky seas when life became a bore,

A tar escaped monotony by fashioning scrimshaw.

Some scratched away on bits of bone for scenes of derring-do;

But such a substrate master crafters tended to eschew.

For them the only worthy base to keep their art aloof?

That hard-won spoil of victory – a fearsome sperm whale’s tooth.

Think images of Moby-Dick – leviathan pursued;

Think shattered craft on stormy seas and, frequently, dead crew.

Carved teeth of mighty whales like these are sombre souvenirs

Of whaling days now fading with the passage of the years.

Albert Caton

Inside my head, I’ve smiley fangs

Which cope with crunchy hunger pangs. They’re shiny bright and sparkling white; The sight of them’s a dog’s delight! Then once my meal has settled down I have my evening bally game.

I rush around ferociously, Though really I’m quite sweet and tame! And then my grooming time begins With Master, brush and poultry paste.

I love the flavour and I savour

That special enzymatic taste! Though I’m now eleven years old My teeth are youngsters, so I’m told. So all you puppies, listen, do: Toothbrushing’s very good for you!

Jenny Jones

COMPETITION No 319 The Loch Ness Monster was spotted early this year, long before the so-called silly season. So please write a poem under the title The Monster Replies. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept 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 319’, by Thursday 1st May.

To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 14th April 2025

To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 14th April 2025

Conjugal rights and wrongs

QMy wife and I have been together for more than 30 years and have always been close. I can’t imagine anyone better for me and she feels the same about me. The problem is that she has never been interested in sex.

At the same time, if she knew I went elsewhere (like her first husband), she would end the marriage. I have endured it by various means, eg alcohol (I’m a recovering alcoholic now) and secret massage visits. Not what I want. I have always been attractive to women, but never found the right one for an affair.

Please can you advise?

S G, by email

AGolly – it’s taken you a while to address this, hasn’t it. Have you ever had a sex life together?

Do you have children? What I’m trying to find out is: is this a case of a woman going off sex in later life? This is very common and can sometimes be helped by a doctor and a sex therapist. Or have you always had an entirely sexless marriage? If so, do you ever show affection physically – kissing, saying ‘I love you’ etc? Or are you really ‘just good friends’?

Let’s look on the bright side. After 30 years, you clearly still love each other, which is more than a lot of couples do.

It’s not worth risking the end of this close relationship, even for sex. But if it’s causing you unbearable pain, I can’t help thinking it might be a case of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ I know a lot of people would disapprove but, if a bit of (ahem) ‘massage’ stops you from breaking up, why not continue as discreetly as before?

Maybe you can simply thank God for what you have got, rather than despairing over what you haven’t. I doubt if any number of pills or hours of therapy will change

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

your wife, after all these years. So it sounds as if, for the moment, you have the perfect solution. But let this remain a secret. I’m even worrying about your confiding in me. From now on, not a word to another soul. It’s not worth the risk.

A broke friend in need

QI’m a divorced woman and I’m very lucky to have enough money, I hope, to ‘see me out’. I have no children and I’m pretty frugal. So I have enough for my needs. I have a very old and dear friend who has been very kind to me, though we are not romantically involved at all. I’ve known him for about 30 years. Now I’m getting on, he does a lot of errands and helps me around the house when I need it. The problem is he is absolutely hopeless with money. He’s now left his job, and though he has a flat to stay in – it belongs to him – he picks up only odd bits of work and I know he’s really worried about his future. I’m tempted to lend him a lump sum until he gets back on his feet. What do you think? Name and address supplied

ATricky one. But does he really have any feet to get back on? I really wouldn’t lend him any money. It’s unlikely you’d ever get it back and then you’d feel resentful. Why not offer to pay the occasional bill? And maybe chuck him the odd cheque here and there on the understanding that this is a gift, not a loan. He’d almost certainly squander a lump sum or be overly generous, insisting on taking you out to supper and so on (galling when you know he’s paying the bill with your money). Give yourself an idea of how much you’re prepared to spend on him per year – £5,000? £10,000? £15,000? – and keep a score of what you’ve spent on him

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every 12 months. At the end of the year, make a reckoning and then start again, if you can afford it.

He keeps me a secret

QI’ve been going out with my boyfriend for five years and we are very close, though we live in separate houses. We are both in our late fifties, both married before, with children. His are 15 and 16. I’ve told my son about my partner, and he seems happy with the situation, but my partner refuses to tell his children about me. I find this so hurtful. I’m tempted to threaten to break up unless he tells them. But then I think how much I’d miss him. I’m in torment. Do you have any ideas?

P F G, by email

AChildren are almost invariably harmed by the loss of a parent – whether it’s through divorce, death or illness. They look for someone to blame and naturally alight on the person they see in their absent parent’s place – in this case, you. No matter how hard you might try to make his children like you, at some visceral, irrational level they may always resent you. Your son might feel the same about your partner, though he may not admit it to himself. If your relationship lasts, eventually the situation will become clear to the children. And they’ll be grateful that their father didn’t hit them with the news at a time they’re least able to cope – when they need all their emotional strength to step out into the world without feelings of betrayal or instability.

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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