The Oldie July 2024

13 Olden Life: Who was Elsa Maxwell? Philippa Stockley

93 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

71 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

10 I’ve been sacked – again!

Hunter Davies

14 Grandpa vs Hitler

Elisabeth Ruge

19 Sleepy theatre critics

Benedict Nightingale

20 Mel Smith’s death threat

Griff Rhys Jones

22 Fighting in Cyprus

Nigel Pullman

24 Joy of theme tunes

Andrew Roberts

26 Please let me go grey

Adam Edwards

28 Bohemia rhapsody

Marianne Faithfull

30 Best-dressed Britons

Candida Crewe

31 Gilt-edged picnics

Kirsty Crawford

34 Life’s lost pleasures

Joseph Connolly

35 Badminton’s flower power

Duchess of Beaufort

38 On Maggie’s battlebus

Elinor Goodman 39 Christmas with Attlee Antonia Fraser

5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

13 Modern Life: What is puppy yoga? Richard Godwin

18 Letter from America

Christopher Sandford

37 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson

40 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

41 Prue’s News

42 Town Mouse

Tom Hodgkinson

43 Country Mouse

Giles Wood

44 Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

45 Small World Jem Clarke

46 School Days Sophia Waugh

48 I Once Met … Victor Lownes

Christopher Sandford

48 Memory Lane

Susan Schwarz

50 God Sister Teresa

50 Memorial Service: Martin

Amis James Hughes-Onslow

51 The Doctor’s Surgery

Dr Theodore Dalrymple

52 Readers’ Letters

62 History David Horspool

63 Commonplace Corner

63 Rant: Air-conditioning

Carolyn Whitehead

91 Crossword

93 Bridge Andrew Robson

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Michael Hardaker

Supplements

editor Charlotte Metcalf

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

54 Christoper Isherwood Inside Out, by Katherine Bucknell Nicky Haslam

56 Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, by Margaret Renn

Peter McKay

57 Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, by Ann Powers Christopher Bray

57 The Buildings of England: Staffordshire, by Christopher Wakeling and Nikolaus Pevsner Jonathan Meades

61 Spectator Low Life: The Final Years, by Jeremy Clarke Harry Mount

64 Film: The Dead Don’t Hurt Harry Mount

65 Theatre: A View from the Bridge William Cook

66 Radio Hunter Davies

66 Television Frances Wilson

67 Music Richard Osborne

68 Golden Oldies Mark Ellen

69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

71 Gardening David Wheeler

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72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

72 Restaurants

James Pembroke

73 Drink Bill Knott

74 Sport Jim White

74 Motoring Alan Judd

76 Digital Life Matthew Webster

76 Money Matters Neil Collins

79 Bird of the Month: Manx shearwater John McEwen Travel

80 Liquid Venice Annabel Barber

82 Overlooked Britain: Newton’s mausoleum in Westminster Abbey Lucinda Lambton

84 The Hanoi Hilton

James Pembroke

86 On the Road: Andy Murray Louise Flind

89 Taking a Walk: Berkshire’s green and pleasant commons Patrick Barkham

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Front cover: Shutterstock

Bohemian Marianne Faithfull page 34

Grandpa tried to kill Hitler page 14

The Old Un’s Notes

Eighty years ago, shortly after D-Day, the sublime artist Rex Whistler died in Normandy, on 18th July 1944, aged 39. He was killed when he heroically left his tank to help his comrades.

Today, he lies in the war grave at Banneville-laCampagne War Cemetery, six miles outside Caen.

Still, 80 years after his death, his reputation lives on, not least in a new book, Rex Whistler: The Artist and His Patrons by Nikki Frater. A companion Whistler show is on at the Salisbury Museum (until September 29).

Among the pictures in this charming book is Ave Silvae Dornii – Latin for ‘Hail Dorney Woods’, painted in 1928 (pictured, right).

It was commissioned for Lord Courtauld-Thomson (1865-1954) the industrialist and arts patron, who lived at Dorneywood. In 1947, Courtauld-Thomson gave the house to the National Trust, as a home for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So the Chancellor after the election can rejoice in this marvellous painting. Whistler painted it on a tricky partition wall. The imaginary Corinthian loggia gives on to a classical garden view. The real Dorneywood gardens can be seen through the windows opposite the picture – so you get a mirrored, trompe-l’oeil ‘reflection’.

Whistler adds a dash of humour. Courtauld-Thomson is depicted on the left as a

Among this month’s contributors

Griff Rhys Jones (p20) was in Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. Their company, Talkback, made Da Ali G Show, I’m Alan Partridge and QI.

Marianne Faithfull (p28) is an actress and singer. Her song As Tears Go By was a top-ten hit in 1964. She is author of Faithfull: An Autobiography. Her latest album is She Walks in Beauty.

Lady Antonia Fraser (p39) is one of our leading historians. Her books include King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1954), Mary Queen of Scots (1969) and Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023).

Mark Ellen (p68) is our Golden Oldies columnist. He co-presented Live Aid, wrote Rock Stars Stole My Life! and edited Q magazine. At Oxford, he played bass in Tony Blair’s band, Ugly Rumours.

bust of a Roman emperor. Whistler appears in the profile medallion on the right.

What a joyful sight to lift the Chancellor’s spirits next time the economy is in trouble!

Shock horror! Paris is about to lose a historic real-tennis court.

The Paris Jeu de Paume Club is due to be sold by its owners by the end of 2024. It is a charming spot, with two skylit courts, built in 1907 by no less a visionary than Gustave Eiffel – as in the Eiffel Tower.

The 300 members of the club are desperately trying to raise 3.8 million euros to buy the club, in the grand 16th arrondissement. If you want to donate, do get in touch with the club manager, Lilian Vimal De Murs (manager@ squashjeudepaume.com).

Jeu de paume literally means ‘palm tennis’, dating from the days when the game was played without rackets. Its descendant is lawn tennis, about to enter the spotlight at Wimbledon (1st-14th July).

The origins of real tennis go back to 12th-century France. In the 17th century, there were over 250 courts in Paris alone. Now there are only 45 left – in the world.

And real tennis led to one of the great sporting scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry V, when the Dauphin gives a present to the English king.

Exeter explains that they’re ‘Tennis-balls, my liege.’

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And Henry V declares:

‘We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us; His present and your pains we thank you for:

When we have march’d our rackets to these balls, We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.

Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler That all the courts of France will be disturb’d With chases.’

The hazard and chases are surviving features in real tennis today. Vive the Paris Jeu de Paume Club!

Westminster Abbey is now a bring-your-mobiles event.

The abbey authorities no longer print paper service sheets for the congregation. The faithful are instead shown a QR code to ping up the order of service on their smartphones.

At the funeral of Labour MP Frank Field at Holy Trinity church, Sloane Square, in May, something similar occurred.

Rare photos of David Hockney can be seen at the Lyndsey Ingram gallery (26th June-16th August) in London.

The Kasmin’s Camera show exhibits pictures by art-dealer John Kasmin, who turns 90 in September.

Together with the late Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (pictured), Kasmin first showed Hockney’s work at their London gallery, the Kasmin Gallery, in 1963.

‘You seem not to appreciate the benefits

of

lying fallow

One of the advantages of going to a church service, you might think, is escaping the tyranny of mobile telephones for an hour.

But even this is no longer true. Evensong at

The Labour MP Sir Stephen Timms, who is a keen churchgoer, flipped open his tablet computer and consulted a Christian website for long parts of the service.

The Oldie generally takes a live-and-let-live approach to such things, but Sir Stephen seemed oblivious to how distracting his iPad was for people in the pews alongside and behind him.

Also pictured in the show are the artists Howard Hodgkin, Anthony Caro and Frank Stella.

The writer Bruce Chatwin and fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell feature – they were the models in Hockney’s celebrated double portrait Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71).

‘Go

on, admit it – we’re lost’

Kasmin, Hockney and Sheridan Dufferin fly to Chicago, 1965

Have you dazzled a dinner party with your bons mots? Captivated a friend or skewered a foe with a neat turn of phrase?

Then the Wilde Wit competition is for you. Run by the Oscar Wilde Society, in partnership with The Oldie, this annual contest is looking for quips, aphorisms and wise sayings that sound like something Oscar Wilde might have said – but didn’t. This is for your witticisms, not his.

Last year’s Wilde Wit winner was ‘Given sufficient notice, one can always be spontaneous.’

Think you can do better? Go to oscarwildesociety.co. uk/wilde-wit to enter.

Three winners will be named, the first prize being a signed copy of the compelling new book Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies by Kate Hext.

You have until 31st July to enter your witty entries. And we beg you not to use AI to compose your entries. Oscar would not have approved.

‘Oooh, how lovely –you’ve got worms!

The price of fame for Jeremy Clarkson has been strangers dropping in on his farm. One even walked into his kitchen. Clarkson says, ‘He was looking at me writing the voiceover for Clarkson’s Farm and said, “Oh is this the new series?”

The late Peter

Mayle, author of A Year in Provence (1989), would have sympathised. He was unwise enough to say where he and his wife lived.

As a result, his Provençal farmhouse became an authentic local attraction, with all the obligations that imposed – like their having to rouse themselves from a siesta to greet busloads of Japanese tourists, and arriving home to find total strangers frolicking in their swimming pool. Eventually, they sold up and moved to a secluded mansion on New York’s Long Island.

At last, a politician who doesn’t want to write any memoirs! Former Labour deputy leader Margaret Beckett, who’s joined the exodus of MPs quitting Parliament, has no plans to write

security fears), Dame Margaret must know where the bodies are buried.

She was at the heart of government during James Callaghan’s minority administration and Tony Blair’s bust-up with Gordon Brown. But the fiercely private politician, who was first elected in October 1974 when Harold Wilson was PM, insists she won’t be spilling the beans. She says, ‘Some of my secrets have actually come out over the years – but not from me.’

What a breath of fresh air.

Any politicians planning their snoozathon memoirs, take note…

‘I need to find a reason to get up in the morning’

‘I just farted’

her political memoirs after nearly half a century in the Commons.

Dame Margaret, 81, who became the first woman to lead her party – albeit briefly – after John Smith’s sudden death in May 1994, says, ‘I’ve always taken the view that if I told the whole truth about my life in politics, it wouldn’t do the Labour Party any good.’

As a former government whip, long-serving cabinet minister and Britain’s first female Foreign Secretary (she had to abandon her caravan holidays because of

In his recent Oldie piece on sportswriters (Spring issue), Michael Henderson praised the late journalist Frank Keating. Who can forget the reaction of Keating, a great rugby fan, to the Lions’ defeat of the All Blacks in 1971: ‘I drop-kicked the cat out of the window.’

You wouldn’t get away with that now!

‘We’ll start with the dessert menu’

Mapp and Lucia, the Queen and I

I love

E

F Benson’s novels – and so does Camilla

Which came first – the good egg or the bad egg?

The bad egg, it seems. The expression, describing a ne’er-do-well, superficially appealing but rotten inside, was coined by Samuel A Hammett in his 1855 novel, The Wonderful Adventures of Captain Priest.

The idiom took off, but it was another 40 years before its converse, the good egg, came on the scene.

There was a time when Camilla Parker-Bowles was seen as a bad egg by some. Today, I’d say, most people reckon Queen Camilla is a good egg and a very good egg, too.

I realised she was definitely my kind of good egg when I discovered we shared a passion for the six Mapp and Lucia novels, written by E F Benson between 1920 and 1939. The books are beautifully observed, wittily waspish social comedies about the aspirations and pretensions of two very different but equally formidable ladies: Miss Elizabeth Mapp and Mrs Emmeline Lucas, characters gloriously brought to life on television in the 1980s by Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan.

E F Benson lived at Lamb House in Rye (once the home of Henry James, now a National Trust property and well worth a visit). Last month, I joined Queen Camilla there to salute the memory of Fred Benson, as he was known, and celebrate his comic creations. The rain pelted down until 2pm, when, on the dot, Her Majesty appeared, the clouds parted and the sun shone.

Umbrellas were furled and tea and cake were served. Prunella Scales, who turned 92 on 22nd June, was there and in happy form. Timothy West and Hayley Mills provided evocative readings.

It was a wonderfully old-school English afternoon. Nil desperandum

Fred Benson, sometime Mayor of Rye (disguised as Tilling in the novels), was one of the six children of E W Benson, the late-Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury –remembered for devising the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols when he was Bishop of Truro.

Benson senior was married to his second cousin, Minnie (he proposed to her when he was 24 and she was 12), and they had six children. Minnie (also known as Ben) was a passionate lesbian as well as a good mother. She called her affairs her ‘swarmings’.

When her husband died, she lived with Lucy Tait, the daughter of her husband’s predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury. Yes, there was much muttering in the cathedral close.

Of the Bensons’ six children, at least five were gay, including Fred, who includes gay characters in his stories, and A C Benson, who wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory

Nellie Benson, a keen cricketer, sadly died in her late twenties, not long after having an affair with one of her mother’s ex-lovers, the composer Ethel Smyth.

Queen Camilla turns 77 on 17th July. Two years ago, we honoured her with an Oldie lunch. This year, I have had the honour of being invited to be on parade at 12 noon on 17th July on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle to preside over the 21-gun salute to mark Her Majesty’s birthday and, alongside the castle’s governor, to inspect the soldiers.

I have done this sort of thing before

and it’s not a doddle. Back in 1993, when I was the MP for the City of Chester, I took the salute at Beating Retreat in Chester’s Castle Square.

‘Where’s your hat?’ enquired Colonel Ropes of the Cheshire Regiment as I arrived.

‘I haven’t got a hat,’ I said.

‘Haven’t got a hat?’ gasped the colonel. ‘You must have a hat. You can’t take the salute without a hat.’

‘I didn’t know one needed a hat. No one said anything about a hat.’

Fortunately, the Lord Lieutenant came to the rescue. He opened the boot of his limousine. It was stuffed with hats: top hats (black and grey), bowlers, berets, hats with plumes. Colonel Ropes selected a brown trilby which made me look at best like a bookie, at worst like a spiv.

‘You’ll be driven to the podium,’ he explained. ‘Climb the steps and stand to attention. I’ll be on the ground beside you and I’ll tell what to do and when to do it. The main thing to remember is that when you salute, you take the hat off your head with your right hand, put it to your chest, and then put it back on your head again.’

I was driven onto the parade ground. I climbed the steps and stood there. Alone. Ropes was six feet away and inaudible. The massed bands marched to and fro and I doffed and donned my trilby with gay abandon.

When the regimental goat came forward and bowed, I glanced towards the colonel and saw him looking at his knees. I decided to salute the goat on the grounds that it was wearing the regimental colours.

The ordeal over, I retired to the mess and drank a great deal, vowing never to wear a hat again. That said, I will raise my hat to Queen Camilla any day.

Happy birthday, Your Majesty!

Gyles Brandreth’s podcast, Rosebud, is available now

Lucia (Geraldine McEwan) and Mapp (Prunella Scales), 1985

Au revoir, Fleet Street

Hunter Davies, 88, has been sacked again. He recalls 40 years of being fired – and firing Jeffrey Bernard and Bruce Chatwin

Ihave just had the push, kicked out, been given the heave-ho, got the sack.

Oh well, when you get to 88 and are still working away down the words mine, you expect things not always to stay the same.

But I did feel sick as a pirate, shocked and rather pissed off when, after an awfully nice lunch, which she paid for, the Editor of the Sunday Times Money section, for which I have done a monthly column for 25 years, suddenly said, out of the blue, ‘That was it.’ My column would be no more.

I came home and moaned to my lady friend Miranda, a young babe of only 78. She comforted me by saying I had had a jolly good run. I should be grateful. Surely it had happened to me before, hadn’t it? And possibly I had sacked people.

Spot on, babe. Let me count the ways.

The first sacking was about 40 years ago, when I was TV critic of the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine. When offered the job. I said, ‘Er, I don’t watch TV.’ (Still don’t,

number – and the videos would be delivered to my door.

In one review, I happened to say I had never watched EastEnders. The overall editor of the Mail on Sunday gave Jocelyn, the mag editor, a bollocking for having such a TV reviewer.

Jocelyn rang me up and said he would like to come and discuss something. ‘Where are you?’

I happened to be in Loweswater, in the Lake District, where my wife and I had a home for 30 years.

There was an intake of breath, and he said, ‘Fine, I will come and see you tomorrow.’

Was I being offered another column, or would I be editor of some section? He arrived in a chauffeur-driven Jaguar. We walked down to the lake. He sacked me. Then got back into his Jag for London.

I learned later he had sacked someone who had found out beforehand what was going to happen. He had stormed into Jocelyn’s office, shouted and roared, saying he might have had the decency to

Beryl Bainbridge, but she was always faffing. She would ring me, saying she did know what to write. It turned out I got the push before she did.

My dear late friend Ian Jack sacked me when he was Editor of the Independent on Sunday. He arrived at my door one Sunday morning, before I had even opened the paper, to say my column was being dropped. The women on the paper wanted a woman columnist.

When these things happen, there is never any point in arguing. You rarely get the real truth, even if they know it.

I sacked two star writers in 1974 when I became Editor of the Sunday Times Magazine. Sacked in the sense that I did not renew their contracts.

They were each on a retainer of £2,000 a year and also got paid again when their stuff appeared.

One was Jeffrey Bernard, famous for the Low Life column in the Spectator He had not written a bleeding word for the mag for two years – yet was getting £2,000. I asked him to come in and discuss it. He said he was too tired –presumably too drunk.

let him know first.

The other was Bruce Chatwin.

I’d been appointed the magazine editor by Harry Evans, the overall Sunday Times editor, who wanted the mag to have shorter, grittier pieces. Anyway, I didn’t like the long, purple-prose travel pieces Bruce had been doing. He came to see me. I told him the truth, and he stormed off.

I later got a telegram from him, saying, ‘In Patagonia.’ Which he used as the title of his next book.

Jocelyn decided that if it happened again, he would do it face to face and let no one know. Alas, the next person was me, 300 miles away.

I also got the sack from the Evening Standard. They had different people doing a personal column each day. One was Valerie Grove – yes, The Oldie’s brilliant wireless woman. Another was still going?),

What now? Well, I still have books and two other regular columns – on football in the New Statesman and one about my love life in Saga magazine.

So don’t weep for me, Patagonia. I have had a very good run.

Matthew Norman is away

Hunter Davies’s next book, Letters to Margaret: Confessions to My Late Wife, is out in August

who was Elsa Maxwell?

Elsa Maxwell, the gossip columnist and socialite, was a byword in Cole Porter’s song I’m Throwing a Ball Tonight (‘I feel … so Elsa Maxwell-ish’). She organised more than 3,000 parties – the Duke of Windsor said that ‘Old battering-ram Elsa always gave the best parties.’

She made Venice’s Lido chic with the 1925 International Motor Boat Races; and never owned a home. She lived in expensive hotels or as a house guest of the famous, including the Windsors.

She appeared in Hollywood films, wrote bestselling books and a syndicated gossip column, hosted a radio show, Elsa Maxwell’s Party Line, and was a fixture on TV chat-show host Jack Paar’s weekly show in the 1950s.

Christened Elsie, she was born in Keokuk, Iowa, a single child, on 24th May 1883, and died in New York on 1st November 1963, of heart failure.

Always fat, she resembled a small, upholstered hippo. She grew up in San Francisco, leaving home in 1905 determined to become somebody. A self-taught

accompanist and published songwriter, she began organising successful society parties and balls, focusing on entertaining and befriending European royalty, aristocracy and attractive celebrities. She invented the popular ‘scavenger hunt’ party and endless others.

No shrinking violet, Maxwell always wanted to be a celebrity and to be befriended by celebrities. She achieved both ambitions. The Getty Archive has 651 photos of her; one from 1916 organising a posh suffragette party. Her books, particularly The Celebrity Circus, analyse the notion of celebrity.

She could be modest. Not everyone knew she held the Légion d’Honneur; nor that she helped many begin their careers, including David Niven; nor that numerous charity balls, including the ultra-swanky April in Paris Ball, which she organised annually, raised staggering sums.

what is puppy yoga?

Puppy yoga is the most compelling evidence yet that humanity has taken a seriously wrong turn as a species and that canine-kind really ought to find a better set of masters to serve.

As the name suggests, puppy yoga is yoga involving puppies – some as young as six weeks old, according to the RSPCA. The puppies are not participants in said yoga; most canines can after all execute a ‘downward dog’ pose with few difficulties. Instead, they are there to serve as playthings, ornaments, obstacles, amusements and comforters for the posing humans. The idea, according to my local studio, is to improve wellbeing via ‘the serenity of yoga with the playful charm of puppies’.

It would appear that there is a high correlation between the people who enjoy vinyasas and the people who find

poor, helpless puppies adorable. For puppy yoga is now a veritable wellness craze thanks in no small part to Instagram and TikTok, where this sort of thing goes down rather well.

A Google search brings up as many as 50 puppy-yoga studios across Britain, charging £30-£40 per class. Typically, the studio-owners borrow the pups from local breeders under the guise of habituating them to humans and their bizarre ways before sale. ‘It benefits the puppies because it contributes to their socialisation process before they go to any homes,’ one class-leader insisted to a reporter. ‘It’s amazing for everyone’s mental health.’

The Italian Ministry of Health would beg to differ. In May, Italy became the first nation to ban puppy yoga. There have been calls for a similar move in Britain, notably since an ITV investigation found puppies in more than one studio kept in inappropriate conditions, denied access to water (on the grounds that ‘it might make them pee more’), deprived of sleep, and passed from

Her inspired strategies to entice society raised the profile not only of Venice’s once dingy Lido, but of the Côte d’Azur and even of Greece – with a two-week cruise of the Greek isles, with 100 hand-picked celebrities, funded by shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. Hardworking and chatty, she had intelligence, energy, a quick wit and a shrewd appraisal of how to get on as a single working woman among the international jet set. She called many of them friends, from Prince Aly Khan to Aristotle Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco, Maria Callas and Marilyn Monroe. She said Monroe had great charm, even if she was always late.

Maxwell followed her own advice to ‘get off the porch’ in search of independence. ‘I realised early that I wasn’t going to be a beauty – so I learned the neglected art of conversation.’ She considered beauty a handicap and many beauties dull, while plainer women such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Evans and Fanny Brice were ‘ugly ducklings’ like her: ‘Their genius had nothing to do with looks.’ She also knew that women attached to handsome men trusted her ‘because I was an ugly duckling’.

Philippa

Stockley

customer to customer with little or no regard for the puppies’ own needs. The RSPCA, the Kennel Club and even various former Love Island stars have expressed horror and dismay at the practice.

But, really, this is the apuptheosis of the dysfunctional turn that humananimal relations have taken in the 21st century. Dogs have for centuries served us as working animals: hunting game, rounding up livestock, guarding property and so on. We still put them to work but, these days, it’s as social-media influencers and four-legged comfort blankets.

Meanwhile, rather too many selfproclaimed dog-lovers are all too willing to treat their pets as extensions of all-too-human fantasies, insecurities and pathologies. These days, you can find doggy Halloween costumes, doggy ice cream, doggy CBD treats, doggy therapists, doggy antidepressants – and, of course, doggies neglected, mistreated and abandoned in record numbers.

Richard Godwin

Marilyn Monroe and Elsa Maxwell, Paris Ball, 1957

Elisabeth Ruge salutes her grandfather, a leading member of the plot to kill the Führer 80 years ago

Grandpa’s war on Hitler

Only through the interaction of the most diverse people and circles was there a real chance of Germany and the rest of the world being liberated from Hitler.

Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg (1902-44), my grandfather, was one of those who brought people together, and was thus, in the judgement of some, the real engine of the conspiracy against Hitler 80 years ago – the 20 July plot.

He had joined the Nazi Party in 1932. As a young man, he was called the Red Count – he mocked the conceit of his peers and liked to quote Marx. The Prussian aristocrat and administrative lawyer’s thinking was ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ in character.

An idealist, as his widow Charlotte later said, he finally broke away from Nazi ideology and supported an attempted coup as early as 1938. It was based mainly on the national conservative resistance circle around Ludwig Beck, who had resigned as Chief of Staff of the Army shortly before, because of Hitler’s warmongering.

Through his father, who had served as a general in the First World War, Schulenburg had good contacts with the military.

Richard von Weizsäcker (President of Germany, 1984-94), then a young soldier, said of Schulenburg’s importance for the younger ones among the conspirators, ‘He was our first contact and had a very clear judgement. It was he who ultimately had the formative and also moral strength to tackle something like this.’ And the youngest conspirator Ewald Heinrich von Kleist (1922-2013), later founder of the Munich Security Conference, described Schulenburg as his mentor.

Above, left to right: Goering, Himmler, Colonel General Bruno Loerzer, Hitler and Mussolini, after the assassination attempt, 20th July 1944. Left: Schulenburg on the Kurische Nehrung on the Baltic Sea in the ’30s.

sentence. They wanted to, as they put it, ‘prepare themselves’.

After the trial, Schulenburg said, ‘You see, one thing we have learned is that one must not admit anything, in any circumstances.’

In May 1944, Kleist and Schulenburg attended the trial of the publisher August Bonnes at the People’s Court, which ended, as expected, with a death

On 10th August, 21 days after the failed assassination attempt, he himself stood before the Nazi executioner-judge Roland Freisler. In his closing words, he said, ‘We have taken this act upon ourselves to save Germany from a nameless misery. I am aware that I will be hanged as a result, but I do not regret

my deed and hope that someone else will carry it out at a happier moment.’ He was executed that same afternoon.

This network of conspirators, which by no means consisted only of military officers, also included members of the Kreisau Circle (a group of intellectual dissidents) and the group around Carl Goerdeler, the former conservative mayor of Leipzig.

The circle around the Bonhoeffer, Schleicher and Dohnanyi families was part of the network, as were diplomats, civil servants, trade unionists and social

democrats. They were united by their opposition to Hitler and also bound together in friendship – such as that between Claus von Stauffenberg (190744), the would-be assassin of 20th July, and the Social Democrat Julius Leber, who was first arrested on 23rd March 1933, when he entered the Reichstag to vote against the Enabling Act, and subsequently spent several years in prison and a concentration camp.

After his release, he went to Berlin,

where he was able to make contact with former friends and comrades-in-arms. In Schöneberg, Leber became a partner in a small coal shop, which served as a place for conspiratorial meetings. Schulenburg sought him out for the first time in November 1943 and brought him together with Stauffenberg.

The coup was carefully planned. The power vacuum after a successful assassination could, it was feared, have led to a civil war. According to these plans, Leber, for example, would have become Minister of the Interior, Beck Head of State and Goerdeler Chancellor.

The pragmatism of the conspirators led to considerations that would have been unthinkable only a short time before. In the summer of 1944, it was Stauffenberg who explicitly advocated contacting the Communists.

The suggestion came primarily from the educationalist and social democrat Adolf Reichwein, a member of the Kreisau Circle. Through an intermediary, a conspiratorial meeting of Reichwein

Above: Hitler and Mussolini inspect the bomb damage. Below: Schulenburg in the People’s Court, Berlin, 10th August 1944. He was hanged that day

and Leber with representatives of the Communist underground network was organised in June 1944. It was not about the formation of a united front, and Walter Ulbricht, the Communist German politician, was by no means the stringpuller in Moscow exile, but it was clear to all involved that the military could not dare attempt a coup without the workers.

There was by now an understanding that the elimination of Hitler was the precondition for the liberation of Germany and that an assassination could be carried out only from the ranks of the army.

After the assassination attempt, the People’s Court conducted two parallel series of trials under Freisler. And the great killing began – in a brutal furore, they wanted to make sure that even the last opponent was wiped out.

Executions were carried out even in the days and hours before the end of the war.

Among the last victims were Hans von Dohnanyi, who was murdered in Sachsenhausen; Georg Elser, one of the few resistance fighters who had attempted an assassination on his own and was killed in Dachau; and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed in Flossenbürg on 9th April. Also his brother Klaus, together with Albrecht Haushofer, Karl Ludwig von und zu Guttenberg and 15 other prisoners, was shot and buried by a Gestapo special squad near Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse prison at the end of April.

Only a few days later, the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller died in

unexplained circumstances. The others responsible for the operation went into hiding and were never caught.

After the war, there was probably no search for them either. The more time went on, the more those old networks gained the upper hand; they now denigrated the resistance fighters as traitors, especially the failed assassin Stauffenberg and his allegedly exclusively military co-conspirators.

The military had broken their oath, they said, while the other soldiers continued to do their duty. This was also an attempt to exonerate all those who had not rebelled against Hitler.

The 20 July plot as a supposed uprising of noble military men was also a grateful subject for Communist propaganda. As early as 1947, SED (the East German ruling party) functionaries disavowed the 1944 coup plans as ‘meat from the flesh of German imperialism’.

The assassination had been planned by officers who were abandoning a sinking ship whose captain they had until then served faithfully. Only when the defeat in the war was so obvious that a ‘blind man with a cane’ could have predicted it did they take action. They had not wanted to eliminate the fascist dictatorship, but only to save the ‘military-imperialist system’.

It was to be a long time before Germany faced up to its own history and its own resistance movement. In November 1946, however, Günter Weisenborn, the early archivist of the resistance, reported that, during the World Women’s Congress in New York, the German representative, later a CDU politician, remarked to the New York Times that there had been no resistance movement in Germany, that this was a fact and that it had to be admitted.

Weisenborn wrote, ‘I am inclined to believe that she was not in the picture, but her statement is in vertical extension the same statement of Hitler, who had always tersely and apodictically denied the existence of the resistance movement in Germany.’

Even Federal President Theodor Heuss refused as late as 1950 to speak on the radio about 20 July. Then, in 1954, on the tenth anniversary of the assassination attempt, as the highest representative of

For decades, most death sentences of the People’s Court were still legally valid

the state, he gave the commemorative speech, careful not to offend the majority of Germans, yet attempting a cautious appreciation of the ‘other Germany’.

Years after the Nazi dictatorship ended, survivors and relatives of the resistance had to fight in often lengthy proceedings for official recognition, compensation or survivors’ pensions.

The widow of a conspirator who had managed to kill herself after the 20 July plot was officially informed that her husband had not suffered any injustice; that he had ‘rather shot himself and did not wait for a National Socialist injustice to be settled’.

And, for decades, most of the death sentences of the People’s Court were still considered legally valid: only with the law on the Annulment of National Socialist Injustice Sentences in 1998 was this finally clarified. The sentences for ‘war treason’ were repealed only in 2009.

The 68ers (the 1968 revolutionaries) also performed strange contortions when it came to resistance. It was feared that attention to those who had resisted the terror would distract from Germany’s great guilt, trivialise it and absolve the wrong people. Sometimes, this attitude, which was perhaps understandable at the time, was mixed with ignorance and conceit. Stauffenberg, for example, had devalued his courageous deed by equally great cowardice, as it were, when he ‘saved himself for a few hours’ after setting off the bomb.

When he returned from emigration in 1947, Willy Brandt, who later became German Chancellor, was also repeatedly subjected to slander and downright

Trial of the 20 July plotters, 1944. Roland Freisler, President of the People’s Court, is in the middle

smear campaigns. He was called a Communist agent, a traitor to the fatherland or a Gestapo informer.

In fact, however, the strength and charisma of this first Social Democratic Federal Chancellor lay primarily in those years of his life that he had spent in the resistance.

In 1933, he went underground as a socialist in Lübeck, also under the influence of his great role model Julius Leber. Today, Willy Brandt is considered one of the greatest politicians in Germany’s postwar history.

A look at all these people who rebelled against the Nazis in the underground, in the state apparatus or in private contexts, shows a different Germany.

Now that ideological encrustations have been broken down and various stages of social reappraisal have been passed, it is important to present the complete picture of the resistance.

And to save from oblivion all those who at that time practised the ‘categorical rejection of despondency’, as the Austro-French writer Manès Sperber aptly put it elsewhere.

The simple message of these people was: you can always do something. There were not many of them, but many more than we have so far wanted to admit.

We should discover them all for our time, for our future.

Elisabeth Ruge is a writer, publisher and agent

Could Idaho be Greater?

For the first time in 63 years, the USA could change shape

Christopher Sandford

Ever since the heady days of the 1972 Local Government Act, changes to the map of Britain have come around like stops on the Circle Line. Constant tinkering with the nation’s ancient county boundaries is the rule, long periods of benign neglect the exception.

It’s different in the USA, where the last detectable change to the nation’s internal borders came as long ago as 1961. Even then, it amounted only to a bit of prudent geological housekeeping: the state of Minnesota agreed to cede two narrow strips of marshland to neighbouring North Dakota after the area had changed shape as a result of flooding.

During the next year, however, American voters will be offered the chance to alter a significant chunk of the north-west part of their country.

If proposals are approved, whole swathes of the states of Washington and Oregon would be annexed by their neighbour to the east, to form a new entity called Greater Idaho.

If everything goes the campaigners’ way, Idaho would become America’s fifth-largest state by size, which isn’t bad for a far-flung outpost full of mountains and best known for its potatoes.

The reason for all this is that most parts of Washington and Oregon, like Idaho, are rural and conservative, while their commercial centres and legislatures

are concentrated in the aggressively woke enclaves around Seattle and Portland respectively.

Perhaps it’s also something to do with the lingering spirit of rugged individualism that settled the American west in the first place, and that doesn’t take kindly to being told what to do by a relatively small number of city slickers.

These days, to drive for just a few minutes out of Seattle is seemingly to pass from a mad world into a sane one. Behind you is the urban inferno and its air of permanent existential crisis. Ahead lie long rows of neat, whitewashed houses, many with a US flag fluttering out front, and spruce little towns with names like Snoqualmie, Walla Walla and Puyallup. It’s the same story down the coast in Oregon. There’s the perennially riotstricken city of Portland in the northwest corner, and everywhere else a chain of bucolic hamlets populated by friendly, well-dressed men and women wishing

That’s what the [Greater Idaho] movement is all about.’

Voters in 12 of Oregon’s 36 counties have already approved a variety of ballot measures in favour of adjusting their state’s boundaries. Washington voters will be given a chance to express their views on the matter in November 2024, at the same time as the national election. The all-important state legislature in Idaho has recorded its support.

The Greater Idaho campaign may yet face a steep bureaucratic hill before its passage into law. On the other hand, as Matt McCaw, the movement’s spokesman, says, ‘Look at how much we’ve all adjusted to things like gay marriage or legalised pot just over the last 20 years. Those are issues our parents’ generation would hardly have thought possible.

‘If we can accept major changes to society like that, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to get our heads around the concept of

the will of the people. It may take a while,

Good night at the theatre

The greatest critics often doze off. After seeing 8,000 plays, Benedict Nightingale knows the feeling

ATimes reader called Jennifer Galton-Fenzi recently gave some helpful advice about how not to fall asleep during boring plays.

Carry into the theatre and hold in your palm a small, round, Japanese flowerarranging kenzan implement. And if you feel like conking out, well, clench your hand.

‘It is studded with pins,’ wrote Ms Galton-Fenzi, ‘and is sufficiently painful to guarantee that you will not nod off.’

As one who has reviewed maybe 8,000 shows in his time, I can’t tell you how useful I would have found those kenzan pins. I only wish the theatre assistants had handed them out with the programmes we critics were given free.

As it was, I relied on three things in my 60-year war with Morpheus: jamming a Biro into my palm, manually keeping an eyelid aloft and, most importantly, chewing. If you chew and chew, even if there’s nothing in your mouth, you cannot sleep.

In Peep Show, Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell) capture the agony of longing for the interval in a sleepinducing play:

Jez: [whispering] ‘When do we get to go out?’

Mark: [whispering] ‘As far as I can make out, we get to go out for a bit in an hour; then we have to come back for two hours.’

Somnolence is the theatre critic’s industrial disease and has affected the very best. James Agate, the Sunday Times chief critic from 1923 to 1947, was a prominent sufferer. His deputy, Alan Dent, said of him, ‘Of course Jimmy will die naturally – peacefully in his sleep at a first night.’

But some welcomed the sight of a flaked-out reviewer who could be scathing about plays he’d actually managed to see. ‘Don’t wake him – he’s always very good when he’s asleep,’ the dramatist J B Fagan said, when Agate was caught slumbering during his The Improper Duchess.

That was certainly the case with the late Clive Barnes, critic for the New York

Post during my stint as the New York Times’s Sunday critic. I first encountered him as a figure slumped and breathing heavily in the seat in front of me at the American premiere of John B Keane’s Big Maggie.

At the end, he got up, blinked and introduced himself, saying in a pleading way ‘That was a funny play, wasn’t it?’ Well, yes, it was and is in both senses,

review, telling prospective audiences how wonderful the play was but how he wasn’t going to spoil their enjoyment by revealing anything about it.

Clive came from London, a city whose theatres haven’t always managed to keep our own critics bright-eyed. The late Sheridan Morley, a fine writer and the most genial of men, was one of the first and few to have spotted the quality of Les Misérables, but he didn’t always see lesser shows through.

At the Jermyn Street Theatre, whose aisle goes from side to side with a few rows of seats banked in front of it, Sheridan was beside me in a back row when he succumbed. Not only that; this plus-sized man plunged forward across the aisle into the back of an equally hefty critic, Mark Shenton, who himself was propelled forward, creating a domino effect which almost ended on the stage.

I hope I’m not boasting when I say that only once in my long career as a theatre critic did I become nearcomatose. That was at the Almeida, during a revival of Shaw’s Heartbreak House, my least-favourite play after Ibsen’s insufferable Peer Gynt. Unfortunately, I was next to Ned Sherrin, who turned to me, began to whisper something, saw I was asleep, and said, ‘Oh sorry’ – which woke me up.

which is why it’s still highly regarded in Keane’s native Ireland.

Clive had originally been the New York Times’s daily critic and, especially when he had been awake, a very lively one. He lost that job after the paper’s formidable editor, Abe Rosenthal, paid a rare visit to the theatre and suddenly noticed someone sagging forward and lost to the world a few seats from him. It was his own chief theatre critic.

I learned to tell from Clive’s writing how alert he had and hadn’t been. I remember walking down a Greenwich Village street and seeing a board the management had proudly placed outside its theatre. It was Clive’s brief but kindly Not-so-live performance

Ned was a delightful man but a famous gossip and I wondered if he might besmirch my proud reputation. Well, if he did, I heard nothing of it.

Actually, there’s a good defence for my and other critics’ somnolence. It was best put by the American poet, biographer and critic Carl Sandburg, who drifted off during a reading of a new play.

‘How could you sleep when you knew how much I value your opinion?’ wailed the aspiring dramatist.

‘Young man, sleep is an opinion,’ Sandburg replied.

There he spoke for Agate, Barnes, Morley and, oh dear, me.

Benedict Nightingale was theatre critic for the Times

A stalker terrified Griff Rhys Jones into believing his great friend and comedy partner wanted him dead

Smith vs Jones

After Baby Reindeer, the recent Netflix hit, it would appear that second-ratecomedian-celebrity stalkers still fascinate the sofa crowd.

Here’s another for you. Before Baby Reindeer was even conceived, I had my own bizarre fixation experience.

Most stalkers seem to be thwarted lovers. Mine was far from that. Can you even have a stalker whom you never encounter? An invisible huntsman who dogs your every tread?

I don’t know. But I once had an invisible and frankly threatening presence in my life.

This took place about a hundred years ago, in the nineties. My agent got in touch with me. (That could be the end of the story – it was a rare enough event.)

In those days, Mel Smith and I had the same agent. We shared everything. Or at least our agent shared out everything. That was her job. We ourselves argued about it daily.

Anyway, my half of my agent told me that Mel had been getting these really disturbing, psychotic letters.

‘I know. I’ll stop writing them.’

‘Not those ones, darling.’

These ones were being sent through the Royal Mail and looked as if they came from a nutter. They were arriving at the office and were addressed to Mel, but they were definitely about me. The office

had decided to let me have a look at them. I held the pages in my trembling fingers.

Handwritten, quite extensive, not green ink, but on the spectrum, they began, ‘Mel, I am writing to you because I can see, from watching the telly, that you hate Griff Rhys Jones nearly as much as I do. He is always at you. The snide bastard.’

An accurate enough assessment of the standard double-act trope, I guess. And an interesting variation. Stalkers usually start besotted and move on to dangerous antipathy, don’t they? This one had jumped straight to stage two.

He went into telling detail. ‘He reminds me of my father, Mel,’ he wrote. ‘He enrages me. I have been away for a bit, but I am back now and I can easily kill him for you, mate.’

It was an endorsement of my acting prowess –this bloke thought the sketches were real. But nobody really wants to be called charmless. I was miffed. This was nearly as bad as Michael Billington in the Guardian – though I am not sure he ever went as far as offering to kill me.

‘When did these start coming?’ I asked.

Stalk TV: Baby Reindeer (2024)

‘Oh, let me see.’ Melanie said. ‘Six months ago now, I guess.’

‘Six months! You can’t routinely hold on to a letter like this. This isn’t a payment for a job, Melanie.’

‘We wanted to make sure they were genuine.’

‘How were you going to do that? Wait

was worried about the terrible effect these messages might be having on Mel.

Now, I have a friend, Simon, who is a dentist. These days dentists like to be called doctors. And he has been plagued by clients turning to him about their bowel ailments. But I thought that, working up the top end, he had probably done a little psychiatry.

I read them more carefully. To my horror, he listed a series of places I had Groucho); my tailors (M&S); Clarence House; 32 Innismore Gardens; home.

And, most disturbingly, he said he had stood right next to me on a bollard in yesterday. He could easily have pushed me in front of a truck. He didn’t know why

I knew that bollard. I almost knew that truck. I looked for a reply from Mel to the stalker, along the lines of ‘What stopped

deranged loony – I mean of course this person experiencing mental unwellness; I am sorry if anyone is affected by this story; ring the BBC action line; don’t bother me – was following me. Even to my own house. And I certainly wasn’t there very often.

He explained that he restrained himself only because he wanted Mel to give him a signal. A signal! Mel had to give a gesture on the telly and he would push me in front of a post-office van, or any other vehicle routinely driven insanely fast through central

Naturally, my concerned. She

Death stare: Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith

So I told him about it. He had a good laugh, just like everybody else, and told me he had a mate in Broadmoor, who was an expert on psychotic murderers. He said we could give the letters to him and

I

get an opinion. I gathered that this wasn’t Hannibal Lecter. He worked there. He wasn’t a janitor, either. He was a doctor who specialised in murderous crackpots. And he was really good. Very helpful. We met up. ‘I have examined these letters carefully,’ he said, ‘and quite honestly inmates very rarely act on these murderous fantasies.’

I said, ‘When you say rarely … surely once is enough, isn’t it? That one time, that would be “rare” – but oddly momentous – and sort of final, wouldn’t it? And here’s another thing. If your inmates so rarely act on these fantasies, why are they currently all banged up in Broadmoor?’

Well, we had no way of tracing these letters. I kept away from kerbs, traffic islands, platform edges and Mel Smith as much as possible.

But, of course, it was unsettling when Mel and I were performing together. I was fairly confident that Mel Smith would never sit alongside me on a stool and give a signal to someone to murder me. But then what sort of signal is a signal to murder someone? It was all a bit subjective.

And Smith did scratch a lot. He was a restless soul. And he gurned at the camera from time to time. Cheap, but now possibly deadly.

If you wonder why, in the last three series of Alas Smith and Jones, I spent a lot of time staring at Smith, that is the reason.

Still, I survived. The letters stopped. And the great virtue of an invisible stalker is that after a while you forget them. Nothing happened.

Mel is dead now, of course, but we mustn’t read anything into that.

Divided island in the sun

Fifty years ago, Captain Nigel Pullman looked out of the British officers’ mess in Cyprus, and saw Turkish paratroopers invading

Exactly 50 years ago, I was a young captain in the Army’s Royal Signals. I received a plum posting: independent command of a troop providing communications to the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus (UNFICYP).

But first I had to get to Nicosia. I chose to do so by car, being the proud owner of the young officer’s car of choice, my ‘Atlantic blue’ BMW 2002.

On 6th June 1974 – the 30th anniversary of D-Day, as it happened –I crossed the channel to Zeebrugge with my girlfriend, Ro, and we spent the next two weeks camping in Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia and Greece, finally arriving in Piraeus in time to catch the ferry to Limassol.

Barely had I settled into my new command, and less than a month after I’d arrived, pandemonium broke out at UN HQ.

First thing that Monday morning, 15th July, Nicos Sampson (a stooge of the generals in Athens, it quickly transpired) launched a briefly successful coup. Gone was the long-serving president Archbishop Makarios, spirited away to safety.

For the next few days, UNFICYP endeavoured to come to terms with this illegal regime. For several years, in a time of relative peace on the island, the force had been steadily run down, to barely 2,000 men from the half-dozen nations supplying troops.

In Ankara, meanwhile, the littleknown London-Zürich Agreement of 1959 was being rapidly dusted off.

This agreement between UK, Greece and Turkey broadly said that should the status quo on the island ever alter, a signatory state could intervene to restore it. Early on Saturday morning, 20th July, just five days after the coup, the Turkish army duly set about doing so.

The north coast of the island, then popular among British visitors and those

Negotiations dragged on. Fifty years later, they’re still unresolved

with holiday homes around the port town of Kyrenia, is just 40 miles from the Turkish mainland.

The beaches along the coast may have had similarities to those in Normandy in 1944, but here they were undefended as the landing craft arrived.

At the officers’ mess on the edge of Nicosia Airport, I looked out of my bedroom window and, to my amazement, saw Turkish paratroopers landing just to the north of the capital city.

The defenders were the locally recruited Greek National Guard; the invading force were the NATO professional soldiers of the Turkish army.

The Turkish hit a snag when trying to take the strategically important airport. Immediately adjacent to the runway was Blue Beret Camp, home to many – predominantly British – troops assigned to the UN Force, and comprising almost entirely the administrative types known disparagingly as ‘cooks and bottle-washers’. Not exactly the crack fighting troops of the British Army who might have deterred the Turkish soldiers from marauding through the undefended camp, helped by their fighter-jet air support.

And this potentially disastrous scenario was unfolding right next door to HQ UNFICYP, the camp where the senior British officers in command were based.

With impressive speed, a squadron of armoured cars was dispatched from the Sovereign Base in Dhekelia and, even more impressively, a squadron of 12 RAF Phantom fighter jets flew in from the UK.

A high degree of diplomatic pressure between London and Ankara must have done the trick. The Turks backed off from taking the airport (which, to this day, remains an abandoned no-man’s-land).

Top: Turkish paratroopers land in Kyrenia.

Above: British troops in Nicosia.

Both July 1974

A few days later, the first ceasefire was negotiated.

This allowed me to be dispatched to the holiday camps on the north coast (many now burnt out) to co-ordinate the evacuation of the many hundreds of holidaymakers stranded around Kyrenia – some still in their beachwear. They were taken by naval helicopters and Royal Navy landing craft to HMS Hermes, lying discreetly offshore, just out of sight from the beaches. After a long day of this, all were saved, and Hermes steamed back to Dhekelia to disgorge her passengers before their onward journey to the safety of home. I returned to Nicosia and a large glass of Demestica.

A couple of weeks later, the Turks restarted their offensive push. By the time a second ceasefire had been agreed, they had taken the northern third of the island – subsequently (and to this day) termed by the Turkish and North Cypriot governments (though recognised by no one else as) the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

After that, things settled down, and I spent a further year in Nicosia reverting to my role providing communications to the UN HQ.

The negotiations in Geneva and New York to settle the disputes of this divided island have, intermittently, dragged on.

Fifty years later, they are still not resolved.

In the

sixties and seventies, TV and film music hit rare heights, from Match

of the Day to The Professionals.

By Andrew Roberts

Golden age of theme tunes

Arecent viewing of No Time to Die led me to two conclusions.

First, it needed a full score from John Barry, who once said, ‘I think if I like it, if it really makes me laugh or makes me cry, if I do that, I think that the audience is going to go for it, too.’

Secondly, the guitar notes announcing the arrival of Sidney James in Carry On Matron should have accompanied the first appearance of Rami Malek’s Safin, making No Time to Die a more entertaining picture.

The gulf between Barry and Eric Rogers, the composer for Matron and many other Carry Ons, may seem vast, but both strove to enhance the mood of a picture rather than swamping the audience.

Connoisseurs of British film soon learned to recognise the great names: Malcolm Arnold, Ron Goodwin, Delia Derbyshire, Edwin Astley and Ron Grainer.

infinitely menacing urban landscape of The Ipcress File. The opening of The Persuaders!, set in the dying embers of swinging London, exemplified his belief:

‘You have to capture that audience within, hopefully, the first four bars.’

With On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Barry aimed to ‘do Bondian beyond Bondian’.

OHMSS is only one example of 1960s and 1970s film and television music that enhances instead of swamps. To imagine The Pumpkin Eater, Anne Bancroft’s finest hour, without Georges Delerue’s score, is as unthinkable as Whistle Down the Wind

Their scores were as much an attraction as the main cast was, especially those of Barry, whose works from Goldfinger to The Knack … and How to Get It, defined an entire decade.

When the heyday of British theme tunes began is the subject of debate, but it arguably started with 1959’s Beat Girl, Barry’s first major cinematic commission.

Barry went on to use ‘a Hungarian instrument, the cimbalom’, to emphasise the

swinging sixties in the last days of kitchen-sink cinema.

A theme may create a vision of despair and abide. Roy Budd’s opening for Get Carter (1971) anticipated the protagonist’s descent into Hades. Tony Hatch’s tune for Man Alive conjures images of provincial deprivation.

Ron Grainer’s upbeat opening of Live Now, Pay Later (1962) highlights the bleak narrative.

A few shows had alternative themes for different markets. US television renamed Danger Man as Secret Agent Man, complete with an irresistible rock-and-roll song from Johnny Rivers.

Danger Man hailed from ITC, the television company specialising in International Men of Mystery fighting fez-wearing villains in the Elstree Studio car park. The input of Edwin Astley was as essential to The Saint as Roger Moore’s quiff and the ‘foreign locations’ that looked just like Rickmansworth. Grainer’s work for Man in a Suitcase was so groovy that TFI Friday revived it in the 1990s.

A change in title music could introduce a new programme format. Early episodes of The Avengers have a Dankworth score redolent of spivs,

Brylcreem and Soho niteries. But, in 1965, the fourth series had a Laurie Johnson tune to herald the use of film rather than videotape and the arrival of Diana Rigg as Mrs Emma Peel. The music historian Jon Burlingame described it as a ‘synthesis of orchestral and jazz textures, very much in tune with the sixties’.

The Professionals (ITV) tended to concern speeding Ford Capris and overacting heavies of no fixed accent bringing terror to Amersham, and the Laurie Johnson theme is one of the finest of the 1970s.

What exerts more Proustian power than theme tunes to children’s programmes – not least ‘Chicken Man’, the 1975 tune by Alan Hawkshaw used for Grange Hill? The only thing that comes close is the music of the most popular sitcoms. The wonderfully elegiac theme tune to Coronation Street is ‘Lancashire Blues’, written by Eric Spear in 1960 for a mere £6.

The EastEnders theme tune was written by Simon May for the sitcom’s first episode in 1985. In 1986, the great Don Black added lyrics to it to make the song Anyone Can Fall in Love – a number-four hit for Anita Dobson, Angie Watts in the show.

Filmgoers of a certain age may recall the Scales of Justice B-films, with music ‘recorded by the Tornados for Decca Records’. ITC’s The Adventurer may have featured villains collapsing in amazement at the leading man’s wardrobe (and toupee), but the involvement of John Barry meant it was watchable for two minutes.

The Capris of Bodie and Doyle illustrate how certain car models will for ever be associated with bygone screen music. To see a Citroën Traction Avant is to hear the opening bars of the BBC adaptation’s credits, just as a Wolseley 6/99 belongs to the Edgar Wallace titles, and a Daimler Sovereign S3 to Dennis Waterman determinedly singing I Could Be So Good for You. There appears to be a law that on the sighting of a Ford Consul GT, someone must hum Harry South’s theme for The Sweeney. As for the Rover P5B, its finest screen moment is its being driven by Roger Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself, accompanied by Michael J Lewis’s score.

Some music even seems inappropriate to its respective film or programme. Mike Vickers’s wonderfully melancholy composition for Press for Time seems better suited to a vehicle for Tony Hancock than to Norman Wisdom’s last mainstream comedy. Farmhouse Kitchen, which began with the irresistibly titled Fruity Flutes, deserved more than daytime 1970s ITV.

The wonderfully elegiac theme tune to Coronation Street is ‘Lancashire Blues’

harmonies,’ he said, ‘give the music a gladiator feel, akin to entering the ancient games arena in Rome with all its expectations.’

The best theme tunes capture the spirit of the sport they hymn. Pop Looks Bach, recorded by Sam Fonteyn in 1970, nails the free-falling thrills shown on Ski Sunday. Even Drag Racer, the 1976 rock instrumental by the Doug Wood Band, chimes with the heavy tension of the BBC’s snooker coverage.

TV news was best caught in the theme to ITV News at Ten The Awakening, composed by Johnny Pearson, has been the theme since 1967.

The golden days of the theme tune are over, though. I agree with John Barry’s 2005 observations on modern themes:

‘What was the producer or director thinking of to allow 45 minutes or an hour of music that doesn’t mean a damn thing?’ Instead, I indulge in the pleasure of discovering alternative versions of familiar songs, such as Anthony Newley’s rendition of Goldfinger – it seems to anticipate David Bowie.

Roger Moore in The Saint (1962-69)

Delia Derbyshire summed up the finest British film and television music. In 1963, she made the electronic version of Ron Grainer’s score for Doctor Who. To her, the Doctor Who theme ‘was sacred and beautiful as it was, and I thought it was very disrespectful to tart it up’. Her work, as with those of many other greats, never required embellishment. They always grabbed your attention in the first four bars and endured long after the film or programme’s first screening.

No Time to could have benefited from Carry On Matron’s incidental music.

I’m in the black –and I hate it

At 73, lucky Adam Edwards has a full head of undyed, black hair, but he’s longing to go grey

Ialways wanted to be a silver fox.

I liked to believe that I’d make a raffish George Clooney who, according to Fox News, ‘embraces his age and lets his natural grey hair shine on the red carpet’.

Unfortunately, I am no George in the charm or looks department. Nor, more importantly, do I have a grey hair in my head. At 73, I have hair the colour of ink.

Most think this doggedly dark thatch a blessing. To me, it is a curse. I want to be grisly. I want to look wise and distinguished. ‘Grey hair is a crown of splendour,’ says Proverbs 16:31.

Old age without a few speckles of salt and pepper suggests someone who has not suffered the usual slings and arrows of life. It indicates a shallow man; a figure of fun who is not to be taken seriously. I am likened to an ageing rock star who can’t let his youth go or a television talk-show host with a stained coiffure. ‘You must dye your hair,’ is the adjunct to any compliment on my ruff.

Earlier this year, Honey, the daughter of the resolutely dark-haired TV talk-show host Jonathan Ross, said she regularly received messages saying, ‘You need to tell your dad to stop dyeing his hair,’ and she had to message, ‘It’s natural.’

It is natural in my case too, and yet nobody believes me. (It doesn’t help that my younger brother’s hair is so white that he’s nicknamed Snowy.) Guests frisk my medicine cabinet for evidence; others peer at my roots. I asked my hairdresser for a note to naysay the doubters. It made not an iota of difference. In fact, many thought the certificate proved not only that I dyed my hair but also that I was so selfconscious about doing so that I had faked the document.

As Paul McCartney’s career travelled the 60 years from moptop Beatle to elder rock statesman, his hair colouring was a constant. And then, suddenly, he went silver. His hair was coal-black when he was 77. At 78, it was ash.

Sir Paul had presumably been dyeing his hair for generations.

Only in his seventh decade did he decide to eschew his Beatle look. He had decided that grey hair, like his knighthood, was what gave him gravitas.

Sir Mick Jagger has yet to learn that lesson. His mane is still a dark conker. It is more than likely that he paints it, or he wears a wig to hide time (his father, Joe, was as bald as a pebble).

Perhaps if you’re Mick, you can get away with keeping your hair the colour it was when you were a rock god. But he is a rare example. Matinée idols Richard Gere, Morgan Freeman, Hugh Grant, Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford have all transitioned to grey.

Furthermore, their blanched look has encouraged rather than hindered their careers.

I had thought that this joyful embrace of grey was unique to our gender. Most women do not wish to be judged by the natural ageing process. They can look

the worse of Joan Collins, Sophia Loren or even – dare I say it – Madonna for refusing to let nature take its course.

However, I have noticed there are early stirrings of women glad to be grey. Thespians Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jane Fonda all boast hair in varying shades of powder.

Helen Mirren, who has a champagne bob, says, ‘Why not just embrace grey hair?’ Gwyneth Paltrow, 48, who sports a few – very few – surreptitious streaks of silver, says, ‘Of course I have grey hair. I genuinely love it. This is who I am.’

Recently, author Nell Frizzell, 39, said that to have grey hair as a woman is to demonstrate you ‘have run at life, full pelt, and not stopped yet’.

These Tiffany vixens make my boyish locks even more embarrassing.

In the sixties, my father, a barrister with a shock of black hair like mine, specialised in getting liquor licences for wine merchants. Angling to get the Tesco supermarket account, he dyed his temples grey to add worth to his CV. It didn’t work.

Still, as he aged, and his hair turned a natural white, he was duly appointed a judge. It is, I fear, too late in the day for me to follow my father’s example and fake the wisdom of old age.

I will never be thought of as homme sérieux. Still, I would like it to be known that, below my callow thatch, there are some things that are just as distinguished as grey hair – my spectacle chain and my National Health walking stick.

Adam Edwards

edited ES , the Evening Standard magazine

Not a grey hair: Adam Edwards

Bohemia rhapsody

Marianne Faithfull misses her wild friends and the heady days of pure art and hot sex

What the hell happened to bohemia?

It took 100 years for poets, painters and talented layabouts to create and just 20 years for slick pseudo-hipsters to f**k it all up. It’s the curse of hollow tinsel bohemia! Everybody’s cool and nobody knows what the hell it means. It’s just prêt-à-porter bohemia ... consumer cool.

I was happier back in the old bohemia. Art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter, too – more repressed! And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today. It was much smaller, much more authentic.

I need a time machine to take me back to when the writer Caroline Blackwood (1931-96) was a dear friend – an inspiration, mentor and role model of the oddest sort. She defied reality, housekeeping and common sense with such hilarious results. But what really held her friends and lovers under her spell was her stinging wit and nihilistic take on life.

uncanny antennae for alcohol and drugs. She inhabited a sort of enchanted space where the oddest, most unlikely things happened.

She was the perfect muse for Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon – who painted her many times. She’d often quote

Her novels are dark fables, and her life was just as extravagant, magical and filled with black humour ... she was clearly an instrument of the sacred god of chaos!

Then there was Henrietta Moraes (1931-99) – the epitome of that bohemian life that’s now gone. Her reckless intensity of spirit magnetically attracted people to her.

Henrietta had friends from the gutter to the aristocracy, whom she both terrorised and enchanted. I thought she was so beautiful – to the point where the Gypsy Faerie Queen in my song is Henrietta, stomping about with a stick.

She was blessed with a thirst for ecstasy and oblivion, a bold eye for a promising sexual encounter and

Marianne Faithfull, 1965. Top right: Henrietta Moraes by Francis Bacon, 1966. Right: Caroline Blackwood by Lucian Freud, later her husband, 1952

Francis Bacon. He was an incredibly important person in her life. She travelled on her own loopy groove, avoiding the straight world entirely. Henrietta was very kind to me when I needed someone to be kind to me. When I was really in a bad way and in deep shit on heroin, Hen would come over and look after me. She loved me.

Francis Bacon became an important person in my life too. Whenever I bumped into him, he treated me as a long-lost friend. I don’t know why –maybe he saw a kindred spirit? The

people who crossed my path when I was a junkie were all gay men.

I was really bad at being a junkie –it was a degrading experience – but apparently not degrading enough! The Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher explained to me that the problem with my life story becoming the basis for a feature film was that it wasn’t bad enough.

I thought I’d degraded myself plenty, but apparently not. I guess I wasn’t thinking of the movie rights. Take me back to the old bohemia!

This article is the foreword to Queens of Bohemia: And Other Miss-Fits by Darren Coffield (History Press)

Dressing down

The well-dressed

man is almost extinct. Candida Crewe praises a rare dandy – her stepfather

In 1978, a few days before she won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch came to lunch. She and her husband, John Bayley, were good friends of my mother and my stepfather, James HowardJohnston, a Byzantine historian at Oxford. I was 14 and Iris was very sweet to me, not at all intimidating, though she did have a commanding look.

She stood by the grand piano in the drawing-room of our house. Her white shirt was hideous; so bright it scorched the eyes, and with a pattern of shocking pink spots like assailants. The material was what I call GBH nylon, the type that, if rubbed up the wrong way, causes sparks.

‘I think if I hadn’t been a writer, I would have really liked to be a dress designer,’ she told me.

An unexpected admission if ever there was one. More often, she used to wear all-encompassing artist’s smocks. I don’t expect many people would have put her down as a fashion icon, but she nonetheless did have a singular style –which is more than can be said for many contemporary academics.

A friend visited his old Oxford college recently and was horrified by the standard of dress.

‘High Table was full of shockers,’ he told me.

Dons’ clothing has tanked of late. Academics used to be naturally welldressed, or at least relatively elegant. But now, when Londoners and cosmopolitan types visit Oxford colleges, they are withering about the ubiquitous dowdiness and lack of style.

The women make one friend of mine, a former fashion editor at Vogue, want to weep. Of course she knows their minds are on higher things and isn’t expecting them to be catwalk-ready, but the desiccated colours and surround-sound frumpiness, she feels, are an insult to their lofty surroundings.

There used to be some sartorial standards, whereas now there is none. And the men are even worse.

It wasn’t ever thus. One of my stepfather’s best friends, a medieval

historian at New College, the late Eric Christiansen, was also at that lunch. He always used to wear the most magnificent three-piece tweed suits with a watchchain draped across his waistcoat. Even then, he cut a sartorial swath among his peers.

Isaiah Berlin, another lunch guest that day, was wearing more of the baggy, old-school style of suit, but his, crucially, had once been elegant – just hadn’t managed to remain so. The same went for John Bayley’s second-hand number; he had never bought a new one in his life. It was crumpled and misshapen but had, without question, been well-made in the first place.

In the 1980s, he and Iris went to visit my father, the writer Quentin Crewe, in Haute-Provence. They were three hours late for lunch and John’s erstwhile smart jacket and trousers were covered in grass.

The pair merrily announced on arrival that they had spotted a likely layby along the bucolic roads and hadn’t been able to resist stopping for a passionate, literal roll in the hay. This spontaneity of theirs was well documented.

Perhaps less well known was that John often spirited food into his

Dapper don: James Howard-Johnston

jacket pockets when having lunch in the dining-room at St Catherine’s, his Oxford college.

‘Sometimes,’ he told me, ‘I put in a baked potato to take home to Iris because she’s very fond of them. I had an unfortunate experience once when I did that. I’d forgotten there was a chocolate biscuit already in there – and baked potatoes do have a habit of staying rather hot.’

No wonder his clothes looked lived-in.

My stepfather, James, 82 and retired now, occasionally still works in the Bodleian and dines in college. He dresses well.

He was walking near the Houses of Parliament last autumn and was stopped by a stranger with a camera. The fellow, a South African photographer called Christopher Ward, very charmingly told him he had been struck by how dapper James looked; how he stood out from the crowd. Christopher was taking photographs on the street of people who had a certain style. Would James mind, he asked, if he took his picture?

James was in a well-cut, striped linen jacket and, with a little time to spare, he laughed and agreed. The resulting pictures and video, posted on the photographer’s very popular Instagram account, modelstrangers, have gone viral. An astonishing 4.3 million people have viewed the post, so taken have they been by James’s appearance and gentlemanly demeanour (pictured, left).

It’s rare to come across this these days, so many of the commentators point out. Such a joy to see a man on a pavement not in bloody surfing gear. Or, like many politicians, such as Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, in too-tight jumpers with zips at the neck: bland, safe and devoid of any imagination or flair whatsoever.

The family and James have been blown away by the overwhelming reaction to his appearance on Christopher’s account.

Something that was in his day pretty normal now looks completely wonderful –precisely because it is so tragically unusual, not just in Oxford among the bluestockings and their male counterparts, but absolutely everywhere.

The Picnic Bible

As

the

mercury rises,

Kirsty

Crawford salutes the finest guide to lunch outdoors

The joy of the picnic has always seemed peculiarly British.

It isn’t simply eating outside – barbecuing in the ‘yard’, as the Americans do – but the act of packing up an entire meal and transporting it to some distant location to eat alfresco.

It gained popularity in the 19th century as a pursuit of the rich, along with fêtes, opera and balls, and became a favoured activity of the upper classes.

In 1983, Anne Tennant (better known as Lady Glenconner, author of Lady in Waiting) and Susanna Johnston (the late sister of the late Alexander Chancellor, the sainted editor of The Oldie) compiled a book in aid of charity called The Picnic Papers, and enlisted their friends and family to write about their favourite picnics, along with recipes.

The result is a fascinating slice of social history – even more so now that it is more than 40 years old.

When you consider who the contributors are, it is no surprise there are picnics of every kind that take place all over the world, some richly eccentric.

Harold Acton writes an elegant account of an outing to the Ming tombs near Peking with a rich American lady, who provides foie gras, smoked eel and six bottles of Pouilly for the two of them, along with a large Thermos of dry martini – all of which come in handy when they are accosted by bandits and trade their safety for the copious food and drink.

Younger contributors include Nicholas Coleridge – now Sir Nicholas after a starry career at Condé Nast and the V&A – and Jonathan Burnham, who conjures up the Piers Gaveston Society picnic of 1981 at Oxford University. Picnicking on the riverbank – the Dispenser renamed the Di-spenser in honour of that summer’s royal wedding – the members wear cricket whites and eat Parma ham, melon, Brie, French bread, peaches and hock for ‘the right note of masculine unfussiness’.

Here is a sense of times very much past. I can hardly imagine any airline permitting a passenger to take a homemade air picnic past security these days, as Arabella Boxer recommends. Penelope Chetwode muses that she drove to India

in a souped-up camper van, when petrol was the equivalent of 20p per gallon. So the journey of 6,000 miles cost £100.

Some things, though, never change. Silvia Combe’s description of a 1920s childhood day on the beach in Norfolk – sand whipping bare legs, the freezing water pronounced ‘boiling’, games in the dunes, and a meal of jam sandwiches, cake and milk – is timeless.

The recipes are an extra helping of culinary history. Josceline Dimbleby’s are the most complicated, with grilled spiced chicken, flatbreads and pigeon pie. Lady Leicester describes a Holkham shooting lunch and the unusual dish of velvet: the skin shed from the antlers of stags, fried and served on toast. Her daughter Anne, brought up at Holkham before she married Colin Tennant, advises taking cold venison chops with chestnut purée on picnics.

Ingredients for the perfect picnic

recipe is for a bomba – an eviscerated watermelon filled with rum, vodka, a dash of Cointreau and however much of the juice will fit in after the booze has been added. Naturally, Princess Margaret is called on for her favourite picnic. She writes, ‘In my opinion, picnics should always be eaten at table and sitting on a chair.’ She also prefers them inside, served by a butler. I suspect she is teasing, but it probably didn’t help her spoilt image.

There is much delicious, easily transportable food, from ‘picnic puffs’ (savoury profiteroles), to omelette-in-along-loaf and potted salmon. There are brandy snaps, scones, melting moments and apple cake. The recipes are oldfashioned: short, to the point and unfussy.

Not everybody makes their own food. Freya Stark pensively unwraps sandwiches ‘made by Cook’ while Lady Diana Cooper’s picnics, held in Chantilly ‘at my little château’, are highly glamorous.

One fête champêtre takes place in a forest inside a circle of classical busts of emperors, all dressed and elaborately hatted. Another time, she fools her guests into thinking they are going on a boring social call, only to take them to a lakeside boathouse, adorned with china, pictures, flowers and silver, where a delicious meal awaits. Lady Diana, not surprisingly, provides no recipes. For others, food is not quite the point.

A young Jasper Guinness throws his picnic things in a wheelbarrow, and his

The Banqueting House at Hampton Court sounds charming, however, and the princess’s recipe is for cold avocado soup – a simple blend of avocados, chicken consommé, Worcester sauce, seasoning, sherry and cream.

Although there is a note of dissent from James Lees-Milne, whose contribution is titled ‘I Loathe Picnics’, there is something nostalgic and completely winning about these glimpses of picnics gone by.

While glamour is enchanting, the picnic I most want to adopt is Tessa Baring’s breakfast picnic.

On a bright, early summer morning, take the ingredients for an excellent cooked breakfast, along with a frying pan and a Thermos of coffee, and trek to a good spot: meadow, forest, beach or mountain. Work up an appetite getting wood for a fire, cook and devour.

This is the kind of picnic that is absolutely timeless and can be enjoyed by anyone.

The Picnic Papers by Susanna Johnston and Anne Tennant is published by Hutchinson

Beyond belief

Remember smoking actors? Foot X-rays in shoe shops? Joseph Connolly longs for the shocking lost pleasures of his youth

Every oldie at some point will play the ‘Do you remember?’ game. Some of them – you’ve met them – never bloody stop.

Well, nothing wrong with that. I rather miss nostalgia – although, of course, it’s not nearly as good as it used to be.

What has changed is that all the new accepted norms of today would have seemed absolutely unthinkable in the recent past.

And, similarly, you can’t believe we took for granted all manner of things that now seem beyond belief. So … here we go, then.

Ask yourself if you remember when:

• Every single electric appliance, from lamp to television, came without a plug. ‘You wanna plug?’ the bored retailer would ask. Well, you did, of course. But, as well as the cost of the thing, he would want payment for attaching it. Far better to take it separately, go home and electrocute yourself at your leisure.

• In the likes of Dolcis, Saxone and Freeman, Hardy & Willis, shoes would be priced at 49/11, 69/11 and 89/11. Go up a peg to Selfridges or Harrods and you would suddenly be in the realm of guineas.

• Good chaps – and certainly the ones in films – smoked a pipe. It was so usual to see them all with a chunk of wood and Vulcanite sticking out of their mouths, toning very nicely with the Harris tweed jacket. There was always that whiff of tobacco (obviously), along with shaving soap, pre-deodorant perspiration and an undertone of Scotch.

• Men’s clothes were made of cotton and wool – with silk for ties and cravats, and leather for shoes. Not canvas, fleece and puffy nylon. And women paid due attention to matching accessories.

• Sweet cigarettes, liquorice pipes and chocolate cigars were much enjoyed by children.

• When in need of new Start-rites,

those same children would constantly X-ray their feet in those extraordinary machines in shoe shops. None turned green or was irremediably irradiated.

• Cash was king.

• All non-British food was classed as foreign muck, with the exception of a Vesta Chow Mein TV dinner (with crispy noodles).

• It was perfectly acceptable to say you were staying in because you were expecting a telephone call – or to watch a TV programme, because if you didn’t, Morecambe and Steptoe and Son, everyone was doing the same. Before they all became brasseries, banks were hushed

temples to Mammon – polished wood panelling, marble floors and a perpetual calendar – where tellers were gentlemen in suits and ties who would happily accept your bags of coppers and silver.

Smoking was an ice-breaker.

at a glance because they were not all identical silver toads recently involved in a head-on collision. There was money back on empty beer and lemonade bottles. Now, for all the mania of green recycling, there isn’t.

Everyone had a fountain pen, inkwell and blotter to write letters which would be delivered twice a day, minimum. Each with a licked stamp.

A garage forecourt had petrol-pump attendants. They would fill the tank, check the oil, top up the radiator, wipe the windscreen and dispense Green Shield stamps – and even a furry tiger tail.

Floral queen

In 1703, the 1st Duchess of Beaufort, a botanist, commissioned a flower album. The current Duchess of Beaufort is now showing it at Badminton

In 1703, Mary Somerset (1630-1715), the 1st Duchess of Beaufort, commissioned Everard Kik, a Dutch botanical artist, to create a series of paintings showing the extraordinary variety of plants she had grown from seeds sent to her from all over the world.

The final collection of 178 botanical paintings, including many by Mary’s footman-turnedartist Daniel Frankcom, were later bound in a two-volume album, a florilegium. It is kept at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, where Mary lived and grew many of her plants.

The florilegium has remained at Badminton for more than 300 years and the paintings have rarely been seen publicly. When my husband and I moved into Badminton six years ago, I was aware of the existence of the florilegium, mainly as a result of a 1983 book that contained a selection of reproductions.

In recent times, the albums themselves have always been stored in the Oak Room, a summer drawing room which was once oak-panelled and is generally kept cool and shuttered. As a result, somewhat by accident, this remarkable collection has been preserved in a perfect environment.

My interest in the paintings and the 1st Duchess was sparked by a PhD student, India Cole. She was working on a thesis, originally about Jacob Bobart the Younger, the superintendent of the Oxford Physic Garden, but was soon drawn to studying Mary herself.

Bobart and Mary would regularly send each other seeds and plant samples. The physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane wrote that the gardens at Badminton ‘come to Perfection, flower and produce their ripe Fruits, even to my Admiration . . . by the Direction of her Grace the Duchess of Beaufort’.

After Mary’s death, Sloane was bequeathed her herbarium – a 14-volume collection of pressed plants.

The exceptionally well-preserved aloes, as well as garden flowers such as

tulips, anemones and geraniums are now stored at the Natural History Museum, alongside the dried botanical specimens collected by Joseph Banks, the naturalist who circumnavigated the globe on Cook’s Endeavour. The 1st Duchess of Beaufort was engaging not in fanciful decorative projects but in serious scientific pursuits.

She was born Mary Capel in 1630, the daughter of Arthur, Lord Capel, the loyal cavalier condemned to death by Parliament and beheaded after escaping from the Tower of London in 1649. She married Henry Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, at 18 and bore him a son and a daughter. He died in 1654, having also been imprisoned in the Tower.

Three years later, Mary married Henry Somerset, Lord Herbert, later the 1st Duke of Beaufort. She bore him seven more children.

As châtelaine of Badminton House and Beaufort House in London, Mary was much occupied by her domestic duties, including attending to her gardens. By the 1690s, however, she was

considered a respected botanist and horticulturalist. Her scientific interests began in the 1670s and were driven by her exploration of the medical uses of plants.

She suffered from ‘melancholy’ and, seeking a treatment for it, she devised a recipe for Melancholy Water, ‘to comfort the heart, to quicken the spirits, to provoke sleepe’.

Over the years, she acquired an understanding of botany that equalled, and sometimes surpassed, that of the men in scientific circles with whom she would exchange plants and seeds.

She was sent seeds from Africa, China, and the West Indies. In 1696, she acquired a shipment of seeds, cuttings and even several large trees – including a mangrove tree – from Barbados.

But it was not until after the death of her second husband that Mary embarked on her artistic project – a painterly but scientifically accurate record of many of the plants in her gardens, stovehouses and conservatories. The plants depicted include pelargoniums, sunflowers, passion flowers and guavas.

She produced the first known specimen of guava to be grown in England, ripened in the early-18th-century orangery at Badminton, where we overwinter our agapanthus (grown by Mary and depicted in the florilegium).

The second album also has paintings of insects. The early-18th-century botanist Richard Bradley commented that Mary ‘bred a greater Variety of English Insects, than were ever rightly observ’d by any one Person in Europe’.

Her botanical legacy continues in the gardens and glasshouses at Badminton today. ‘When I get into storys of plants,’ she wrote, ‘I know not how to get out.’

A Garden of Botanical Art: Paintings from the Collection of Mary Somerset, the 1st Duchess of Beaufort is at Badminton House, Gloucestershire (16th-23rd June and 8th-15th September)

1st Duchess of Beaufort (far right, as a girl) by Cornelius Johnson, 1641. Above: pages from her florilegium

God bless Plum Tart and Tawdry Audrey

The Pope – and his church – would be lost without gay priests a n wilson

The 11th Duke of Devonshire was the only duke I ever knew or am likely ever to know.

He told me that his father, who died as long ago as 1950, had been approached by several peers – hereditary peers the overwhelming majority in those days in the House of Lords – to see if they could not liberalise the law for homosexuals.

‘Throughout my lifetime’, he correctly stated, ‘it has been illegal. You’ll help to make it allowable. By the time your son inherits, it will have become compulsory.’

It is certainly the case, thank God, that no disgrace now attaches to being gay –thanks, quite largely, to the liberalminded peers who widened the debate in the 1960s and allowed the Labour Home Secretary, Woy Jenkins, to act on the Wolfenden Report.

The report recommended removing the criminal status of homosexual acts between consenting adults.

When Wolfenden was being debated in the Lords, one of the peers approached Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and asked him, ‘Michael, what’s your view of homosexuality?’

As often when the mystic, donnish Ramsey was asked anything, there was a longish pause. He said – his bushy brows wiggling over his deep-set eyes –‘I tried it once.’ Another long pause. ‘I didn’t enjoy it. I did not try it again.’

Most boarding-school-educated males are not so honest. It is presumably shame that explains why so many cultures, religious and secular, have been so anti-gay.

The late Paul Johnson – the, I’m afraid, absurd former editor of the New Statesman – labelled Princess Diana ‘the Princess of Sodom’ when she was brave enough to hug a ballet dancer who was dying of AIDS. The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church used to describe ‘the sin of Sodom’ as ‘one of the four sins crying to Heaven for vengeance’.

This was the atmosphere in which the aged Pope grew up, as an immigrant Italian, in Buenos Aires. That’s why, when he was having a bishops’ conference recently, he said they should keep practising gay men out of seminaries. The word he used was frocciagine – translated by some anglophone journalists as ‘faggotry’.

Needless to say, the 87-year-old’s spin doctors got to work at once to apologise ‘to the LGBT+ community’ for any offence caused. More or less any slang word used to describe gay people would now be regarded as offensive, though many of the wittier euphemisms and synonyms were, of course, invented by men who were themselves gay.

I remember long ago a man coming into the office of the Spectator. When he had gone, my colleague Peter Ackroyd asked me, ‘Do you think she’s on the Committee?’

Maurice Bowra coined the brilliant term ‘homintern’, which covered both the homosexual freemasonry in which many dons, art historians, clergy and others moved, and the fact that it included Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead revealed that Bowra was denied the Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford because his predecessor, Gilbert Murray, thought it was inappropriate to award such a prestigious honour to a member of the ‘homintern’. What would the openly gay Plato have thought?

Bowra, slightly absurdly, thought he’d cover his tracks by briefly becoming engaged to marry Audrey Beecham, niece of Sir Thomas the conductor and (I’ve always thought) the model for Connie Sachs in le Carré’s Smiley novels. When

A bishop said of his dress code, ‘Lace by day, leather by night’

asked why he’d chosen this not obviously alluring person, he barked back, ‘Buggers can’t be choosers.’

I wish this retort could become the motto of not only of the Pope, but of all religious organisations that want to wage war against human sexuality in all its inescapable forms. People can’t choose their sexual orientation – so it’s absurd to claim being gay could be a ‘sin’. Sins are a matter of choice.

It is a bit ripe for the Pope to claim he would like, very cautiously, to ‘permit’ gay men to study for the priesthood, when everyone knows that a huge proportion of priests, and especially in the Vatican, openly ignore the anti-gay teaching of the Church.

He can’t have been unaware that in 2019, Frédéric Martel, a brilliant French journalist, wrote an unforgettable exposé, In the Closet of the Vatican. It described the situation in which bishops, cardinals and Swiss Guards were all behaving in a way that made Proust’s Baron de Charlus seem like the strictest model of chastity.

In that book, a bishop said of his dress code, ‘Lace by day, leather by night.’ It reminded me of my own very brief stint at a High Church Anglican seminary, in which the majority of the seminarians had ‘names in religion’ – Tawdry Audrey, Plum Tart, Bobo and the like. They went on to be heroic parish priests, working in grimy city parishes among what Belloc called ‘the poor of Jesus Christ’.

Quite why so many priests, and indeed religious people generally, should be lovers of their own gender is probably a mystery better understood by Plato (see The Symposium) than by Dr Freud.

Tawdry Audrey and Plum Tart, unlike the Vatican hypocrites exposed by Frédéric Martel, never pretended to be anything other than what they gloriously are.

That’s surely much more impressive than the awful humbug of Rome.

Electoral mystery tour

Elinor Goodman watched Maggie cuddle a calf, Peter Mandelson invent the soundbite – and John Prescott mangle his speeches

In 1979, I was a very junior political correspondent for the Financial Times. But, for some reason, possibly because I was one of only about three female lobby journalists, I was admitted to the top table of sketchwriters – or, in this case, the back seat of the bus that trailed Mrs Thatcher’s coach on a kind of magical mystery tour.

We would all go to the morning press conference first, where Mrs T kept both her colleagues and the media in order.

Those who had a season ticket for the bus were then asked to assemble. The only clue to where we were going might be if we were asked to bring special clothes. The morning of the calf photo call, we were told to bring wellingtons.

We disembarked on a field near Eye, Suffolk, where a group of party workers had been assembled. Mrs T was led off in her dainty rubber boots to pose with the calf for over half an hour.

The pictures must have been deemed a success because, in the following election in 1983, at the start of the campaign she did exactly the same thing. This time, the media were more cynical. A rumour, originating in an aside from Denis Thatcher, flew round the bus that the calf had died of fright.

Mrs Thatcher herself enjoyed putting on fancy dress – like a hard hat or, as in the post-Falklands 1983 campaign, army headgear.

At first, we press hacks lapped it up, and on occasion became costume extras. At a Cadbury factory, we all had to put on white overalls to watch her master the production line.

Among her accessories was a shopping bag which she would wave around to make the point that, as a housewife, and grocer’s daughter, she knew the value of balancing the books.

She would refer to the travelling media pack as ‘scribblers and electronics’. If our employers thought

Denis Thatcher did indeed call drinks ‘snifters’

that, by travelling with her, we would develop a degree of intimacy with her, they were wrong. She always referred to any of us as ‘Miss’ or ‘Mr’.

She did develop a mutually advantageous relationship with some of the television journalists, asking whether they were ‘rolling’ before she stepped off the bus, but she exchanged barely a word with the press pack.

Mrs Thatcher poses with a Charolais calf (also called Maggie) in 1979

children’ – only to be totally ignored.

Peter Mandelson took an often reluctant Labour into the television age with a vengeance, not just during elections but in peacetime, too. He introduced soundbites – usually lasting 20 seconds – into the political process, where every politician had to be on message.

Eventually we rebelled – and were asked up to her room for drinks. She was quite nervous making small talk, and really enjoyed herself only when she got on to the Retail Price Index.

Eventually Denis pulled her away to bed. He did indeed call drinks ‘snifters’, as Private Eye maintained – and his wife enjoyed them too.

She was protected by security men, and Denis also protected her back as she ploughed through crowds on her walkabouts. She would chat briefly with shoppers, smiling brightly, and then be swiftly moved on, if necessary by Denis.

Her daughter, Carol, was also on her bus. She rarely mixed with the media, either. Once, in the ladies, I was complaining volubly to the journalist in the next cubicle about how I never wanted to sit through another Thatcher speech. As I left my cubicle, Carol walked out of the one next door.

By 1983, I had become a television journalist myself.

Mrs T had a growing understanding of television. Speeches were timed for the main bulletins, though she was never particularly bothered by Channel 4 News, which Denis, probably reflecting her view, told me once was ‘just for lefties’.

I very occasionally challenged her. When her helicopter landed among a crowd of cheering school children, I asked whether this wasn’t ‘politicising

It didn’t always work. John Prescott would get his words in a twist and sometimes have to try half a dozen times to get his words in the right order, suddenly screeching to a halt with an expletive – which meant his attempt was unbroadcastable.

When this year’s election was announced, the main parties reached for the old playbook, and bussed their leaders round the country, providing pictures for the pursuing cameras.

Where Mrs Thatcher cuddled a calf, Rishi Sunak fed a lamb, just as David Cameron had done before him.

The Tory campaign-managers let Rishi Sunak absent himself from what, in purely cynical terms, could have been the picture of the campaign: standing beside other world leaders for the D-Day celebrations.

His apology, and the subsequent media furore, meant the Tories had the worst few days I’ve seen in almost 45 years of years of covering elections.

It was the failure of judgement that mattered. And the fact that were pictures to illustrate the story made it even worse, completely overshadowing the Conservatives’ attempts to set the agenda with contrived photo calls.

Sometimes, even in an election, pictures do not lie.

Elinor Goodman was political editor of Channel 4 News, 1988-2005

Christmas with Clem the Gem

Lady Antonia Fraser recalls meeting Clement Attlee at a Chequers children’s party in 1945, the year of his first general-election victory

Antonia is too old to go to Chequers,’ said my mother. I was bitterly disappointed.

‘You mean she can’t rule the country at the age of 13?’ said my father, making it clear this was a good joke.

It was Christmas 1945 and the Labour Party had been elected in the summer. Although Frank Pakenham – as he then was, before he became Lord Longford – had failed to be elected for Oxford, most of his friends now filled the government benches.

The question was over the children’s party at Chequers. I was keenly looking forward to it – or rather, I had been until the annoying news came that children in their teens were not admitted.

‘Laborare est orare,’ I muttered to myself – my personal motto, although I was never quite sure what it meant. ‘To work is to pray.’

At this point, I had the brilliant idea of offering to act as nanny to my younger brothers and sisters.

My mother, expecting her seventh child, was only too delighted. All that remained was to tidy up my uniform, from Godolphin School, Salisbury, and set forth for Chequers, with my charges in a large bus, muttering the while, ‘Laborare…’

The first disappointment was the nature of the people actually at the Chequers party. It took place in a large hall centred round a large fireplace. There was no one there at all whom I recognised from my eager public reading of the Daily Herald. and my secret reading of the Daily Mirror. Oh, except Mr Gaitskell, of course, my parents’ best friend.

But the party itself was happily rowdy – until the dramatic moment when the word was passed round: ‘Father Christmas is coming!’

There was a sudden hush. All attention seemed focused on the chimneypiece. There was a bustle and a rush. Down the wide chimney came … to my horror, a Japanese man in a red

Father Christmas coat and the rest of his kit! He was backed up by some kind of pram to support him within the limits of the hearth.

‘A Jap,’ I squawked to my neighbour, who seemed a genuinely motherly woman. We weren’t allowed to use the word ‘Jap’, now the war was over – but of course everyone did, especially in a dramatic situation like this.

‘What do you mean?’ she hissed. And then the shock came. ‘That’s Mr Attlee.’

After that, the drama went on – for me, that is. I was rushed away from the hall, either for using the wicked wartime word ‘Jap’, or for failing to recognise our new Prime Minister – or for both.

I was then fed like a little horse and ushered into another room, where a lively gramophone was self-conducting the dancing.

Every now and then, I peeked over my shoulder to see how Mr Attlee was getting on. Frequent glances showed me of course that he was in no way a ‘Jap’.

It was really the effect of wartime that had persuaded me that a small, dignified man with almond-shaped eyes was in reality Japanese.

My second impression of Mr Attlee in his pram and his red robe was of some kind emperor – even if the inhabitants of his empire were not very tall.

The next time I saw him was at a 10 Downing Street party. Because I was at school with the Prime Minister’s daughter, Alison Attlee, a teenager like me, I was invited.

This proved to be a real party, with a little band and dancing. Better still, a real partner was provided for me – a tall, fair-haired young man who lectured me at some length about the spiritual beauty of the Labour Party.

I shall never know how his story ended, because after about ten minutes we were interrupted quite sharply by a very pretty American girl. ‘Tony Benn!’ It was a command.

My partner gazed at her with glowing eyes. ‘Yes, Caroline.’ And together they wandered off in the direction of Father Christmas.

‘Good party members!’ said the man standing next to me, before grabbing my hand and whirling me away in a dance. Over his shoulder, I could see the man called Tony Benn gazing lovingly into his partner’s eyes.

‘That’s Anthony Wedgwood Benn,’ explained my new friend. ‘One of the hopes of the postwar Labour Party. He’s going to do something about the House of Lords.’ I remember thinking that a Labour lord would be a nice combination, particularly one who was rather rich. A darkly handsome lord called Victor tickled my fancy – but my best friend Lucy scoffed at the idea.

‘That’s Lord Rothschild,’ she said. ‘Quite out of your class.’

Rebuffed, I decided to turn my mind to the policies of Mr Attlee, the Socialist Father Christmas. And you could certainly say I was right to admire them, beginning with the National Health Service.

The memory of that dance at 10 Downing Street stayed with me. As the Labour years passed, I began to wonder sort of Father Christmas Tony Benn would make.

Antonia Fraser is author of Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit

Socialist Father Christmas: Clement Attlee, Prime Minister, 1945-51

Mary Killen’s

A shady place for sunny people

As summer approaches,

There are basic rules about formal hat etiquette.

Men always take them off indoors. Women allegedly keep them on. Still, you would have to be an Anglophile American woman to be worried about the niceties – such as not taking your hat off inside a wedding marquee until the mother of the bride has first taken hers off.

In this country, unless we are being advised by courtiers prior to a Royal audience, only about five per cent of guests at any gathering know what the rules on hats are. The etiquette giants are dead –Betty Kenward and Peter Townend. And Charles Kidd has retired. You can only go by the Mitford dictum ‘If it’s me, it’s U.’

by Auberon Waugh 30 years ago. His eldest daughter was getting married the following weekend:

not a man alive who can tell me whether I should wear a top hat or not. Perhaps the only thing to do is to ask John Pilger for his opinion and do the opposite.’

A

wedding last weekend, the only man in a topper was Count Nikolai Tolstoy, 89. It can be a good way of asserting your pre-eminence: the hat gave about nine inches more to his already impressive height, and the other men seemed dwarfed.

should wear hats when they

take shelter under a wide-brimmed hat

are outside this summer. Not only will the shade offered stop you from squinting and scowling, which is not a good look, but also they will protect your face from the sun’s rays and against rapid ageing. When you’re lolling, the shade offered allows you to read your book.

Never mind etiquette – on purely aesthetic grounds, it is wrong for a man to wear a bucket hat, baseball cap or John McCririck-style bloodhound hat.

The bucket hat has a downward sloping brim, is often made of canvas and flatters no man. It becomes a repository of sweat and horrifies when it’s taken off

The baseball cap may be comfortable to wear and protect the eyes from the sun, but it has become associated with yobs. If you asked 100 women whether they fancied men in baseball caps, about two per cent

Men should go for a panama. These have become ubiquitous in recent years owing to their being available in some charity shops at only £8. The National Trust online can sell you a blue ambassador’s hat, with an adjustable band inside to secure it to your head, for only £25. That would make you stand

It is wrong for a man to wear a John McCririck bloodhound hat

available from Lock & Co or La Marqueza, is the one to go for, for those with unlimited spending power.

The top of the range costs £6,995 and takes around nine months to create because there are so few Ecuadorian master craftsmen still alive capable of creating the intricate piece.

It is a long process from harvesting the toquilla straw, which needs to be washed and dried, to the skilful weaving process and the dyeing till it gets to the desired tone.

The bespoke panama will come with an integral sun-protection factor, at UPF50 – the highest achievable rating for any fabric in the world. You will receive an ‘authenticity’ certificate with your bespoke panama which will make it an ‘investment’. And it is foldable.

It is a very discreet way of signalling your discernment, since only those with a practised eye will be able to spot its superiority.

The wide-brimmed straw hat is the most flattering shape for women. At Cannes this year, Anya Taylor-Joy was wearing an enormous, wide-brimmed hat by Jacquemus.

A rigid brim – rather than a floppy one – is essential. Otherwise, you have to hold the brim out of the way while you are trying to talk to someone – or having to peek out while you are trying to see something in the distance.

You can double your straw hats as an art display by fixing them to a wall. I have repurposed my grandfather’s walking stick rack to this end. It has six rows with hooks all along it – I hang the hats there.

People going out to lunch often feel they should bring a present – a bottle of wine or chocolates. Grand hosts don’t want these – they prefer a return of hospitality. But everyone is delighted by the guest who brings a straw hat.

There will never be enough of these in any household to lend out to family and guests who want to sit in the garden.

head for hats: glam Anya Taylor-Joy in Cannes

Please, sir, we don’t want more junk food

The Tories are famously averse to any legislation that would attract the charge of nanny-statism.

But Keir Starmer, announcing his plans for improving child health, says he’s up for a fight over it – and I hope he is.

Teaching toddlers to brush their teeth, and improve their access to dentists, doctors and mental-health professionals is all well and good, but let’s do something to prevent ill health in the first place. How about restricting the sale of the foods that make kids fat and their teeth full of holes?

Politicians like to bang on about the importance of leaving decisions to parents and the public having the freedom of choice. This is bollocks, and an easy way out of making tough, unpopular but essential decisions. Sometimes children need a nanny, and if Mum and Dad can’t provide one, someone must.

No one cries ‘nanny state’ when the Government insists that we send our children to school and learn maths when they get there, or that we wear seat belts and resist the temptation to shoot up heroin.

Government is there, at our behest, to make the decisions that are best for society, at the least expense to the taxpayer. And prevention is cheaper than cure. So, when the Government has the power to ensure children grow up healthy, they should surely use it.

If most ill health is diet-related, and amputations (due to diabetes caused by poor diet) are the fastest-growing surgical procedure, then it’s time to call in Nanny.

We will never eat food we don’t like. As long as ultra-processed junk is soft, delicious and cheap, we will prefer it to good food. So, we need to get children to like their greens. It can be done.

Chefs in Schools is a charity that is now in charge of the kitchens and food education in 118 primary, secondary, all-through, and special educational needs schools. They have trained up school chefseducators, who oversee another 70+ schools nationally.

The chefs eat with the children, encourage them, teach them about nutrition and often organise growing veg.

They make sure the food is varied, interesting, colourful, and delicious. They often teach children to cook. They are brilliant nannies – albeit some are burly men, refugees from underpaid and overworked restaurant kitchens. They love their caring, communicating, nanny roles.

In my dream world, children would learn to cook (and learn to eat) at school. Although all children up to the age of 14 are meant to have cooking lessons at school, in the end few of them do because the requirement didn’t come with any money attached.

Most schools don’t have the kitchens, the equipment, or the teachers to do it. And Ofsted doesn’t bother with food.

My utopia would include schools in deprived areas being used in the holidays to run community clubs to give children somewhere off the street to play games.

We should give families a chance to get a proper healthy lunch and socialise –maybe even have cooking lessons.

I want to be head nanny, in a world where Nanny must be obeyed.

Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off

Literary Lunch

August 2024

by Philippa Forrester on Wild Woman: Empowering Stories from Women Who Work in Nature Helen Lederer on Not That I’m Bitter A genuinely funny memoir with lots of heart and just the right amount of bitterness! Paul Davies on Mr Chelsea: A Life in Rock ’n’ Roll & Architecture from The King’s Road to Tokyo

Bowen on The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History William Dalrymple on The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm).

price is £79 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

Town Mouse

Hell is other people’s children on my sofa

tom hodgkinson

There’s a downside to being a town mouse in a city. Country mice ask to come and stay.

In general, friends stay for one or two nights, they bring booze and food and it’s lovely to catch up.

But things don’t always work out so harmoniously.

A few weeks ago, Young Mouse, now 24 and still living in the nest, asked if he could have some friends to stay.

‘I met these French girls at the Ministry of Sound,’ It’s a nightclub, m’lud. ‘Can they come and stay next month?’

We said, generously, ‘Of course. They can stay in your sister’s room. It’ll be fun!’

Since he speaks in monosyllables, it can be hard to get much info out of Young Mouse. We imagined these French girls would stay for three nights. And when they arrived, we were charm itself.

‘Enchanté!’ I exclaimed. One was from Paris and the other from Montpellier. They were 20 years old. I spoke to one of their mamans on Facetime to assure her everything was OK. She thanked me heartily and invited me to stay in Montpellier should I be passing.

That was Monday. On Tuesday, we had a country-mouse pal staying – so we threw a feast for six people. I lit the barbecue. Our friend enjoyed practising his French and all was harmonious. The next day, we heard the sound of giggling coming from their room.

But then things started to go wrong. First off, they were in the bathroom a lot. I found myself sitting on the bed, waiting, listening for the sound of the door opening.

On Wednesday night at around 2am, we were woken by the sound of giggling and the smell of cigarette smoke.

Mrs Mouse got out of bed and remonstrated gently. ‘Girls, no smoking, please. And please be quiet.’

We woke the next morning feeling a bit grumpy owing to the interrupted sleep. The bathroom was full of black hairs and various unguents.

‘How long are they staying?’ we asked Young Mouse.

‘Er… till Monday.’

‘Monday?’ I shrieked. ‘That’s a week!’

That night I was woken at 2.30am by the sound of doors slamming, giggling,

and people walking up and down the stairs and in and out of the bathroom. And a smell of cannabis smoke.

I remained still and waited for the noise to abate. Then at 4.30am I was woken again by the sounds of the TV downstairs. I brewed up a righteous rage and went downstairs to find Young Mouse and one of the girls – Faustine – watching telly.

‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’ I shouted. Faustine ran away and Young Mouse blinked at me. ‘It’s four in the morning! When are you going to grow up?’

The next morning, I was feeling angry. And guilty for shouting at the poor French girl. When they got up at around 3pm, I apologised. I took a nap but couldn’t get over my tiredness.

We all know the Chinese proverb about guests stinking after three days. These two had been here four days and we had three days to go. The house stank of fags.

That day, Daughter Mouse came home from uni. We instructed the French girls to get out of her room and move into Young Mouse’s room. He would move into his absent brother’s room. Daughter Mouse was dismayed to find their valises in her room. ‘I don’t need this!’ she shouted. It was Friday night. Daughter Mouse had her boyfriend to stay. The French girls were still here. They all went to a gig at a venue nearby. We went to bed at ten, hoping for a good night’s sleep at last.

It was not to be. I was woken by doors slamming at 2am. And then again at 4am by music coming from the French girls’ room. I stormed upstairs and knocked on the door.

Young Mouse opened it a tiny bit.

‘You’re dead,’ I hissed. ‘Dead!’

I went back to bed. Then smelt cigarette smoke and heard more chitchat and giggling. I got back out of bed. One of the French girls was sitting on the stairs on her phone. I lost it completely. I no longer spoke in French or attempted to be charming. ‘What are you doing? This is our house. You’ve woken us three nights in a row.’ I stormed into their room, found an overflowing ashtray and threw the contents out of the window. ‘You’re leaving tomorrow!’

I hissed at Young Mouse in similar fashion.

Mrs Mouse said, ‘Why did you wake me up?’

I was ready to move out for ever and live with Granny Mouse. Adrenalin coursed through my veins. Unable to sleep, I went down to the kitchen and made some herbal tea.

Then I planned to lie down on the sofa so I wouldn’t disturb Mrs Mouse again. I went into the sitting room, and what did I see? A new arrival – a young man –asleep on the sofa.

Country Mouse

Piano music – the food of my love for Mary

giles wood

My late father’s Broadwood baby grand piano entertained my sister and me throughout our early childhood.

The sounds of Chopin mazurkas and Beethoven sonatas lulled us towards the land of nod each night. Towards the end of his life, the quality of my father’s playing went downhill in direct proportion to the amount of Noilly Prat he had imbibed.

Practising the same piece night after night did not in his case make perfect. He was a past master at practising ‘in’ the same mistakes ad nauseam. You dreaded the glitches just as you dreaded the anticipated scratches on well-worn vinyl of the day.

When the time came to vacate my mother’s successfully sold single-storey dwelling on the Isle of Anglesey, we found there were no takers for large brown furniture – very few households have room for a baby grand. And our cottage was no exception.

I simply couldn’t watch as two burly piano-movers, each the spitting image of Desperate Dan, manhandled the family heirloom. I concentrated on deadheading some cosmos as they negotiated the legless, triangular bulk over the uneven bedrock paths sloping down the walled garden, and finally through a stone arch which must have scratched the mahogany. Oddly, these Welshspeakers swore in English – presumably putting two fs in front of the f word as in the two fs in Fflintshire (the second f being silent).

My father would have been turning in his grave – if only he had one. Like a lot of modern Britons, we plumped for a burial involving motorboats and ashes – only to regret this later on, especially as my sister confused ashes with wedding cake and scattered the ashes in more than one seaside resort.

It was a double betrayal as, to add insult to injury, we had to pay the Welshmen to remove the piano.

In any case, I already possessed a nice little upright cottage Bechstein, boasting brass candle-holders and just enough room on top for some hideous framed school photos of our gurning children.

And yet for years I never played it. My own children’s sleep was never interrupted by their father practising Bach preludes or fugues. I made up the excuse to myself that my rejection of the piano was to do with a succession of over-ambitious teachers whom I viewed retrospectively as tyrants who tried to live their unlived lives through my modest talent. To this end, they had metaphorically tied me to the piano stool through break periods, thus robbing me of fresh air and the company of my peers.

Now that I am standing in a room almost cleared of Mary’s heavy, Ulsterbased brown memorial furniture, I can see there would have been room for my father’s baby grand – and that a dedicated piano room is clearly the answer to the riddle of what is the purpose of the now empty Room Number One.

Forget the dinner parties that Mary, in Hyacinth Bucket mode, longs to resurrect. I have become interested in piano-playing again.

Mary was dynamic enough to source a piano-tuner and railroad through his tuning it despite my naysaying.

The tuner took the innards away to his workshop in Bristol and returned them in full working order.

Now that it has sprung back to life as an instrument, rather than a dark, brooding piece of furniture which made the room look smaller, I have found myself playing again in earnest. You know you’ve got the bug when you

can’t pass the piano without sitting down to play.

This great change has happened only recently, thanks to the interest of award-winning impressionist and actor Alistair McGowan. He took up the piano at 48 and became so competent he released a bestselling album at 53.

Like Mary, McGowan is dynamic. In 2023, he staged the first Ludlow Piano Festival, which was a cracking success and was staged again this year. It’s an original, sometimes sublime four-day event – the high point, for me, of 2024 being a performance by rising star Tyler Hay, 30.

I made my own appearance in the so-called celebrity concert on the opening night in Ludlow’s St Laurence’s Church on an exceptional Steinway.

No one expects celebrities to give fully professional performances. The point is to communicate their enthusiasm – but there was a genuinely star turn by the actress Amber Anderson (Diana Mitford in Peaky Blinders), playing a complex Rachmaninov piece.

I myself ‘played through’ Havergal Brian’s barely-known, ravishing prelude John Dowland’s Fancy. I chose this because (a) I have appointed myself an unofficial ambassador for this undercelebrated British composer (1876-1972); and (b) I hoped the audience’s likely unfamiliarity with the music would work in my favour.

I was hopelessly unprepared but there’s a whole year to go until the next ‘celebrity concert’. Perhaps I can get some therapy for my stage fright.

After watching the so-called back stories in the hit Channel 4 show The Piano, I am sick of moaning minnies like myself. I hope that the host of the Ludlow Piano Festival will ask me again in 2025 just to man up and face the music.

Ireland’s knight in shining armour

Tony O’Reilly, the first Irish citizen to be knighted by Elizabeth II, was a victim of Anglophobia. By Mary Kenny

When Tony O’Reilly died in May aged 88 – he had once been the wealthiest Irishman – he was accused by the Irish Times of having ‘Anglophile tendencies’ and holding Winston Churchill in great esteem.

When he became the first Irish citizen to be knighted by Elizabeth II, he ‘attracted some hostility in his homeland by proudly insisting that he should henceforth be addressed as Sir Anthony’. He had, it was claimed, ‘little time for nationalism’.

I knew Tony O’Reilly and had many conversations with him about matters political and cultural. He was a genuinely proud Irishman and had been a glittering rugby star. He made the greatest contribution to his native country by persuading international businesses to invest in the country through the Ireland Funds.

theme, and memories of the Great Famine have been revived by the afflictions of Gaza.

Nostalgia for the past is a natural element of being an oldie. And we are sometimes prone to the syndrome of golden ageism – imagining life was wonderfully rosy in times gone by.

Yes, he enjoyed being dubbed a knight – he was born out of wedlock and had grown up with a sense of being an outsider, and an honour was a symbol of having ‘arrived’. And his very nice second wife, Chryss Goulandris, liked being Lady O’Reilly – horses were her enduring love and she was on friendly terms with the late Queen.

There’s always a strain of hereditary Anglophobia in Ireland (as in Scotland), and scorn towards those who seem overly Anglophile. But it’s among a tiny minority these days; and you still find old Dubliners who refer affectionately to the diminished Anglo-Irish gentry as ‘relics of auld daycency’.

Israelophobia has grown more common, sadly. The Palestinian cause has now become a dominant national

Things were not always rosy but, by heaven, they were often simpler. I certainly entertain nostalgie du passé for those times when I used to travel with my mother (and aunts) across the Channel from Dover to Calais. How straightforward it all seemed! We would buy tickets at Victoria and take the prompt and reliable train to Dover maritime station (no longer in existence), which delivered us straight onto the ferry. Once you had a ticket and a passport, there were no further formalities – it was then, literally, plain sailing. Sometimes we would travel from Folkestone to Boulogne, or from Newhaven to Dieppe. This was in the early 1960s – long before there was a European Union.

Now it’s an absolute palaver organising this journey. And it’s about to get worse: strict new EU border controls are due to be implemented in October. ‘Long delays’ are predicted on the ferries and on travel via Eurostar, and ‘serious operational problems’ anticipated. There may even be ‘civil disorder’.

I realise that Brexit is partly to blame; but it’s also that transactions seem to have become much more complicated, bureaucratic and over-controlled.

And perhaps too many of, as Noël Coward put it, ‘the wrong people travel’. Dispiriting!

The French continue to try to defend their language against being flooded by what they call anglosaxonismes.

The Cité Internationale de la Langue Française has circulated an instructive video of offending words sourced from English, now peppering their tongue – often associated with advertising: ‘Un showroom. Un design exceptionnel. Le make-up. Le Friday wear. Le selfie. Un branding. Le Black Friday. Le multitask. Le start-up. Overbooké [too busy]. Un close-up. Le replay. Le social media. Le Zoom. Les millennials. Le Netflix. Le cool. Le manager.’

The campaign to discourage this linguistic invasion is tagged ‘Stop aux anglicismes’. Shouldn’t that be ‘Mettre fin aux anglicismes’?

Seeking to halt the use of language is a lost cause. Like water, it flows where it will. Language reflects the prevailing – American? – culture. But ‘le fair play’ to those who try!

I do hope that the ladies now permitted to join the Garrick Club will improve the tea service at this esteemed institution.

I’m reluctant to be ungrateful to a friend who invited me to tea there recently but, truth to tell, it was possibly the worst cup of tea I have consumed. It consisted of a teabag dunked in a cup of tepid water, drawn from a long-standing Thermos. I requested a scone – in vain.

At the Reform Club (where women have been members since 1981), tea is served in a china teapot, piping hot from freshly boiled water, along with teacakes, fruitcake and sandwiches, according to choice.

Women usually add to the refinement and culture of a club. I hope to revisit the Garrick after Dame Mary Beard and other luminaries have had the desired effect on the appearance of Assam, Darjeeling or Lapsang. In a pot. With scones, please.

Small World

Adieu to the Cleethorpes Shangri-La

Mother and I make a tearful pilgrimage to our hardware store, paradise of my childhood

jem clarke

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

We live a street away from my town’s main avenue of shops.

It’s uncanny that as various retailers mirror the national trend and blink out of existence, so too do my parents’ various functioning body parts.

So this month I can report we have lost a butcher’s, a newsagent’s, some bowel control, significant hearing in Mother’s better ear and – most tellingly and worryingly – my father’s get-up-and-go.

Father won’t hear of prioritising his own health on the eve of my mother’s spinal surgery. He says, ‘I’d rather die and have your mother out of pain quicker, than hold up this appointment.’

I had to point out that Father isn’t actually performing spinal surgery. His role will be simply that of ‘man in a waiting room, stealing glances at Gallic legs from a three-year-old issue of Paris Match’.

I sat my father down and, in a kind and gentle spirit, negotiated that he will stay at home, contact health professionals and rest. I will replace him as useless, non-speaking spectator at Mother’s side.

We go to a hospital so posh it is located north of the Humber Estuary. On arrival, Mother was unimpressed with the set-up.

She said, ‘So this is private hospitals, then. Dim the lights, put on some daft music and watch the feckless pay twice for something you could probably take out at home with a swig of Taunton’s and some tweezers.’

I said, ‘Calm down. I don’t think your arms could reach your spine – tweezers or not.’

‘Now you DO sound like your father … a defeatist. He had to take his pills to the barber’s every month to get the childproof lids off ’em. When the barber closed after Covid, he had to put ’em in a vice and hack the lids off.’

‘Well, it sounds as if you married an “ideas man”,’ I said.

‘Ideas!’ she scoffed. ‘I wish he had ideas about mending the squeaky bar stool or painting the damned gate.’

‘He’s in a lot of pain. Dangerously so.’

‘When they get my spine sorted, I’ll get to it. A simple brush from the shed and a cheap tin from Wilko.’

‘Wilko has closed down.’

We sat in respectful silence as we remembered all the happiness that hardware-plus-more store that sat on our corner for over 50 years had afforded us.

It was on the five-minute route between home and infant school. In the ’70s, that would mean Mother buying bath salts, firelighters and – for me – something beautifully random from their cheap-toy section: a Flintstones storybook and a bag of rubber dinosaurs were among my favourite possessions. Non-birthday toys were always the best.

I shared the memory with Mother of those school-done, sun-dappled afternoons, when we shuffled into shop after shop lined with shelves of colourful objects still unnamed and unknown in my early learning mind. I saw her smile as she remembered.

And, in that anonymous patientpacked waiting area, we were suddenly alone, in our parallel past.

‘I only took you in there to avoid my half-cousin Carol. She was always collecting her legion of children from that rough school, at the same time of day. The toys were so you didn’t tell your father.’

As she finished speaking, a buxom nurse, with a name badge reading ‘Love’, wheeled my mother out of sight.

Sitting there, newly alone, all I could think of was the last trading day of our local Wilko and the poster in the window: ‘This store is now closed. Your nearest Wilko is … NOWHERE.’

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Class resentment in the classroom

Labour is planning to stop the charity status of public schools and charge them VAT. The money raised – around £1.6 billion – will be spent on state schools.

How could those of us committed to state schools not rejoice? We could have smaller classes, buy more books, be paid more… And yet.

A governor of a local public school told me that, from the very day the general election was called, parents were paying for the rest of their children’s education up front. Three children, say, with years of education yet to get through – all paid for overnight. This is the face of capitalist fear, representing hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of cheques suddenly being written. There is a lot of money slopping about, and why shouldn’t it come to the rest of us?

But will it? Those who are paying up front are avoiding the tax – so no money to us. Those who can’t afford to do this may well not be able to afford the raised fees. They will remove their children from public schools and send them into the state system. So we will suddenly be flooded with disorientated children, our classes will grow and we won’t have more money to equip, seat or teach them.

I am all for taxing luxury (which private education is) and all for a bit of Robin Hood redistribution. But I am also all for freedom of choice. Those sending their children to public schools are paying for the privilege, as well as paying the taxes that fund our state schooling.

I am not convinced this promise will have the desired outcome. You cannot promise not to raise taxes, then just add a tax and hope no one will notice it’s the same thing.

So what is the answer? It is, as ever, money. We all want state education to improve to the point where even the richest parents choose it. Still, many parents openly admit they are sending their children to private schools not so much for educational as for social reasons.

One woman once told me she sent her children to public school because she couldn’t bear the thought of them having to mix with stupid people. I managed to restrain myself from pointing out that they met her at breakfast every day.

Others are frankly snobbish about making friends with shoots and holiday houses. It’s not their money that worries me – they’re welcome to it and to spend it how they choose. It’s our schools’ money that’s the point.

Apart from money, there are other ways public schools could be made to contribute. This is beginning to happen, with some schools sharing or lending their playing fields – but so much more could happen. Offer us not just lacrosse

sticks but subjects we do not have resources for. Offer us Latin lessons and tasters in A-level subjects we don’t teach at GCSE level. Offer us a practical hand of friendship and aid and much will be forgiven.

The Labour Party is right in its instinct to give us more, but VAT on public schools is not going to be the way. Such a policy panders to a divisive class resentment without anyone’s really thinking it through.

The party forgets the many people who already find it hard to pay for their children’s education. It does not take into account how many of those may be the very voters they want to seduce away from the Conservatives.

In 2007, I coaxed the now reclusive Victor Lownes (1928-2017) into meeting me for tea at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. He was the original business partner of the Playboy supremo Hugh Hefner, running Playboy’s lucrative British enterprises from 1964 until 1981.

Then nearing 80, Lownes still had a twinkle in his eye. He was formidably smooth: floppy grey hair, cream flannels, blue blazer, open-necked silk shirt and shiny black shoes. At one time, he’d been Britain’s highest-paid executive, with a lifestyle to match. A book about the Playboy empire described him as the real force behind Hefner’s organisation, a confirmed rake who ‘loved parties, girls and sex, and was never happier than when enjoying all three simultaneously’.

Lownes agreed to meet to give me his views on the director Roman Polanski, about whom I was writing a book. The two men had been friendly in the sixties, but then fell out when Polanski’s 1971 treatment of Macbeth, which Playboy funded, went disastrously over budget.

‘To put it politely, Roman was difficult,’ Lownes sighed. ‘We were shooting in Snowdonia in the middle of winter, and he could drive you mad with his demands.

‘I remember he spent half a day filming a candle because it wouldn’t flicker as he

I Once Met Victor Lownes

wanted it to. Then we shelled out several thousand quid to a farmer to temporarily remove some gates from his field, all for a few seconds of film.’

Lownes went on to tell me of the long, tragicomic saga of the film’s bear-baiting sequence: ‘Roman wanted to show a real fight involving a bear and some wild dogs, because it was “true to the times”.’

After several alarming rehearsals, Polanski settled, instead, on having a stuntman named Reg dress up in a bear suit. According to Lownes, Reg was meant to ‘roll around on the floor, grappling with three slobbering mastiffs’.

At the first run-through, however, the dogs went ‘totally loco’, individually attaching themselves to Reg’s neck, arm, and crotch.

‘“Good, good!” Polanski yelled from behind the camera. “Keep going, Reg!”’

By now, Lownes was rocking with laughter as he imitated the tyrannical Polish director. But it wasn’t so funny at

the time. ‘The shoot went on for ever, and there was a day when Hefner flew in for a crisis meeting. Roman expected the sack, but in the end Hef gave him another $500,000 and told him to get on with it.

‘Roman repaid our generosity by later telling the press that he’d hated being in bed with Playboy, and that our money “smelled”. I thought that showed lousy judgement on his part.’ Lownes looked at me for a moment. ‘Do you know about the golden dong?’ he asked.

‘Pray tell,’ I said.

‘In earlier days, Roman had made me a gift of a solid-gold sculpture of a male appendage. That was his idea of a good joke. After Macbeth finally wrapped, I returned it to him, along with a note, saying, “In view of recent developments, I no longer care to have this portrait of you around the house. I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty finding some other friend you can shove it up.” ’

Before he left that afternoon, Lownes told me that he and Polanski had subsequently reconciled, in the 1980s.

‘He’s really a genius,’ Lownes said, stepping into a large American car waiting for him at the door. ‘Just don’t get into bed with him,’ he added.

With that, the Playboy man was gone. Christopher Sandford

Tea for two hundred on a Jumbo jet

served. She assured me that it was. ‘Would you like some help serving it?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me, ma’am, did you offer to work with me to serve the tea?’

In October 2001, my husband and I took a British Airways flight to London from New York.

It was just after the September 11 attacks on America. Sky marshals were flying on half-full planes. Close to the end of the flight, it got turbulent. My nerves took over. My husband was running out of patience.

I caught the attention of a flight attendant to ask whether tea was about to be

‘Yes,’ I replied enthusiastically.

She responded, ‘No one has ever approached me with that suggestion before; I’ll be right back.’

Back she came with a flight officer in a doublebreasted jacket with gold buttons, epaulettes and a stiff cap with gold braid.

‘Are you the woman who wanted to assist with the tea service?’

‘Yes,’ I nodded.

‘As in “push the trolley”?’ he queried.

‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Follow me,’ the officer said. He guided me to the galley. I was presented with the heavy vehicle housing all the tea necessities and shown which cubby contained cream, which lemon, and where the sugar was.

The GO and STOP pedals were easily accessible. Off I went, the heavy cart bouncing a bit with the action of the atmosphere.

I stopped at each seat on my aisle. Several passengers didn’t even glance up while requesting cake or a beverage. Others noticed my attire and asked whether I was in training.

‘I’m a terrified flyer,’ I confessed.

‘Stanley,’ said one slightly alarmed female traveller, ‘there’s a frightened passenger serving the tea.’

After our arrival and during our London work week, the details of my escapade came up in conversation with some of my husband’s clients at Lloyd’s. They were aghast. One said, ‘Tie Susie to the seat next time to avoid a lawsuit. If she’d spilt the tea on someone, British Airways would not have been insured for her.’

By Susan Schwarz, New York

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

Victor Lownes with Playboy bunnies, 1975

Review of Books

Psychology

Issue 68 Summer 2024

Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell

Paul Foot: A Life in Politics by Margaret Ran

Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers

The Buildings of England: Staffordshire by Christopher Wakeling and Nikolaus Pevsner

Spectator Low Life: The Final Years by Jeremy Clarke

Horace Jones: Architect of Tower Bridge by David Lascelles

The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century by Arianne Bankes

The Missing Thread: A New History of the Women of the World through the Women who Shaped It by Daisy Dunn

In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter by Mark Bostridge

The Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go by Clover Stroud

Long Island by Colm Tóibίn

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

Editorial Panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Charlotte Metcalf, Harry Mount, James Pembroke, Tim Willis

Editor: Charlotte Metcalf

Design: Lawrence Bogle

Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Stephen Cooper, Kate Ehrman, Lucy Lethbridge, Sam Leith, Christopher Silvester, Tim Willis

Publisher: James Pembroke

Advertising: Paul Pryde, Jasper Gibbons, Monty Martin-Zakheim

For advertising enquiries call: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093

For editorial enquiries email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

No way I’d read THAT!

Thank you to so many of you for responding to my hunch that men don’t enjoy fiction. Your many interesting emails made me wonder what draws someone to or puts them off a book in the first place. This autumn, we’ll be looking at those words on a book’s cover that have you throwing it disgustedly aside. For me, it’s ‘magic realism’ – though it didn’t use to be when I was devouring Vargas Llosa and Marquez in my twenties. Thoughts please to charlottemetcalf@theoldie.co.uk.

Aside from the books we eschew, there are many to discover this summer. Biographies range from Pope Francis to Byron. On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there are histories of covert operations during World War II, including Peter Pomerantsev’s book on Sefton Delmer. Then there are some fascinating prison histories, including one on the gruesome private women’s prison in Cambridge.

On the fiction front, David Nicholls’s You Are Here was widely reviewed. Reviewers were sniffy about Lionel Shriver’s Mania and divided on Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road but largely impressed by Rupert Thomson’s How to Make a Bomb and John Boyne’s Earth. Michael Ondaatje published his first poems for 20 years. There are some irresistible books on the countryside, including Derek Gow’s gripping book on wolves. Simon Kuper’s earned praise for his amusing book on Paris and Marilynne Robinson earned rave reviews for Reading Genesis, as did Oliver Smith for This Holy Island

Having been trolled myself, I was intrigued by Arianna Spring’s Among the Trolls. The devastating impact of social media and AI is further explored in The Anxious Generation and Code Dependent

On a happier note, as we head for hours of summer holiday reading, Lucy Lethbridge praises those publishers repackaging classics to deliver books that delight as much for being beautifully made objects as for their content.

Charlotte Metcalf

Memoir & Biography

BYRON A LIFE IN TEN LETTERS

ANDREW STAUFFER

Cambridge University Press, 300pp, £25

Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Byron’s death, Stauffer’s book explores the poet’s life and work through over 3,000 letters, which make for ‘some of the most remarkable missives in the English language,’ according to the Spectator’s Alexander Larman.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker found it a ‘compact biography, elegantly structured…Each letter affords Stauffer a chance for a ruminative riff on…Byron’s history.’

Corin Throsby in the TLS judged it ‘both scholarly and accessible’, resulting in a ‘pleasingly compact book’ that ‘brings to the fore Byron’s fabulous, captivating voice, which is at its most convivial in his letters. Stauffer uses each carefully selected letter to illustrate periods of Byron’s action-packed life…and uses them to show Byron’s evolution as a writer. The emphasis on his poetry – which often gets lost amid the scandal and intrigue – is one of the book’s most satisfying elements.’

‘Ingenious’, applauded the Sunday Times’s John Walsh: ‘this devilishly readable book brings Regency England and Napoleonic Europe to howling life and pulls its disgraceful but irresistible subject into dazzling focus.’ The Guardian’s John Banville called the book ‘a splendid thing, colourful and busy with incident, but always thoughtful and astute in its judgments.’ Rowan Williams in the New Statesman observed how ‘Byron’s personal landscapes are brought alive here with energy and

sureness of touch.’ And Private Eye found ‘considerable charm…in the fact that Stauffer is, for the most part, prepared to let Byron be Byron.’

CLOISTERED

MY YEARS AS A NUN CATHERINE COLDSTREAM

Chatto & Windus, 352pp, £20

This memoir is witness to the necessity of trust within a community.

Following the death of her father, Catherine Coldstream was plunged into spiritual crisis. After a three-year search for deeper meaning and ‘a transcendent source of love’, she joined the Carmelite community of enclosed nuns at the Northumberland Priory she calls Akenside, in the early 1990s. She stayed for 12 years.

After a honeymoon period, discontent crept in. The community became fractured and a breakdown of trust among the Sisters followed.

Cliques and alliances form, power struggles erupt

‘The second half of Cloistered veers into a far darker narrative, uncovering an underbelly of petty feuds and jealousies among the shrouded sisters, all those ordinary human neuroses and complexes they thought they could suppress,’ wrote the Telegraph’s Lamorna Ash. But the memoir is unbalanced. ‘While Coldstream writes with brilliant, seductive detail about the darkness of Akenside, the religious, contemplative parts of her days is underdeveloped.’

Fiona Sturges in the Guardian felt that ‘Coldstream’s litany of slights and wounded self-pity can feel rather relentless,’ reminding her of Animal Farm. ‘Cliques and alliances form, power struggles erupt and some

become more equal than others.’

Lavinia Byrne in the Church Times found the book ‘beautifully written’. Though Coldstream lost her faith in her sisters, she kept her faith in God. Her ‘trust is totally eroded as she experiences withdrawal and alienation. Her judgement is questioned; her suitability is undermined; her integrity is compromised.’ But, finally, Coldstream is able to look back and acknowledge how the charism became part of her.’

THE TRADING GAME A CONFESSION

GARY STEVENSON

Allen Lane, 432pp, £25

‘What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ St Mark must have had someone like the author of this cautionary tale in mind. Humbly born in Ilford, within sight of Canary Wharf, Stevenson’s talent for maths took him to the LSE, where he discovered many ‘rich people expect poor people to be stupid’. Determined to prove them wrong, he landed a job with Citibank, earning a £4,000 bonus within a year. Seven figure bonuses followed as he set out to become the world’s most profitable trader.

Then, with the prize within reach, he had an epiphany. Not only was he profiting from other people’s misfortunes – he made millions from the Japanese tsunami in 2011 – he also had no life away from his desk. So, he quit, but only after a prolonged struggle to get the huge deferred bonus Citibank owed him.

The Literary Review’s Simon Nixon called Stevenson a ‘City outsider’, keen to ‘underline his geezer status’. He dismisses his fellow LSE students as ‘sons and daughters of foreign plutocrats’, describes the Citibank trading floor as ‘a sea of pink shirts’ and mocks central bankers as ‘a bunch of posh mummy’s boys who never left university.’

The Guardian’s Joris Luyendijk found the book ‘well-written and often darkly funny’ and ‘makes a convincing case that high finance is as toxic, reckless and deeply cynical as ever. It is fantastic that Stevenson now uses his understanding of economics and high finance to campaign against inequality.’ But Luyendijk wished he’d said more

Nun turned author Coldstream: ‘plunged into a spiritual crisis’

Richard Westall’s 1813 portrait of Byron

Memoir & Biography

about his healing process: ‘It might have helped others trapped in similar cages of gold.’

A MAN OF TWO FACES

VIET THAN NGUYEN

Corsair, 400pp, £22

Viet Than Nguyen is a literary star in the States. His novel The Sympathizer, wrote Francesca Angelini in the Sunday Times, ‘ripped into America’s involvement and cultural retelling of the Vietnam War: it sold more than a million copies worldwide, earned Nguyen the Pulitzer prize and was hailed as “genuinely unprecedented” by The New Yorker.’

Now, Nguyen’s much-anticipated memoir of his family’s flight from Vietnam in 1975 has been deemed an uneven work. The Telegraph’s Frank Lawton wrote, ‘at its best the book traces how the wounds of the past – and, in particular, the Vietnam War – can be felt in the present. At its worst, it dresses up flabby thought as nuance.’

‘He rarely uses the first person,’ continued Angelini. ‘Instead the book is structured as a fragmented monologue addressed to his younger self that flits between memories of adolescence and his journey to becoming a husband, father, writer and academic, while dishing out polemic on capitalism, colonialism, race and “Great White American Novelists”.’

For Lauren Christensen in the New York Times, ‘The stretches of impersonal polemic are just that — so unspecific they risk banality. About Donald Trump’s nicknames for Covid-19, Nguyen writes, “The Chinese virus or the Kung Flu takes

aim at the Chinese, but to some, all Asians look the same.” On the myth of capitalist meritocracy: “As the model minority, you may have worked hard to get what you have, but so do all the people suddenly deemed essential workers in the age of the global plague. … Slave masters called enslaved people lazy even as they worked them to death.” These revelations offer little we don’t already know about the author, essential workers or slavery.’

‘He tries to cover too much at the expense of insight,’ concluded Angelini. A lifetime of quashing painful feelings isn’t easy to overcome.’

MISSING PERSONS OR MY GRANDMOTHER’S SECRETS

CLAIR WILLS

(Allen Lane, 179pp, £20)

The memoir of Wills, a professor of English Literature at Cambridge, is full of ghostly figures that haunted her childhood. Her personal focus is Mary, born illegitimately in 1954 to her cousin Jackie, and Lily, a local girl deemed unworthy of marriage. Mary was hidden away in a nearby orphanage and at just 19, finding herself pregnant like her mother before her, she killed herself in the face of a an intractably bleak future.

The Literary Review’s Ian Samson found Wills’s family story ‘fascinating’, particularly the way past lives affect subsequent generations. Wills writes about her own sense of being “half-Irish” – of growing up in England but with a sense of “living in the aftermath of a series of catastrophic decisions” –

and of the decaying family farmhouse back in Ireland, visited for holidays, which was both “the centre of a world” and “a ghostly void”.’

In the Guardian, Olivia Laing compared the memor to Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. ‘Like Sage, she is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning. Both women understand how trauma might be inherited, re-duplicating through the generations, leaving a stain you have to work to interpret.’

As John Banville reflected in the Observer, Wills is ‘a powerful witness for the prosecution.’

LIFE

MY STORY THROUGH HISTORY POPE FRANCIS

HarperOne, 240pp, £25

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, Francis is the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, Southern Hemisphere, and first non-European since Pope Gregory III, 1272 years earlier.

‘When Bergoglio was elected, wrote the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse, he named himself Francis, after the Poor Man of Assisi and ‘refused to move into the grand papal apartments or wear special red shoes,’ He set out to transform the Catholic Church into “a Church for the poor, a field-hospital Church, an outgoing, missionary Church”.

The autobiography matches 14 scenes in his life with world events, as told to journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona (not holy ghost-written). The book opens as war breaks out in 1939, with three-year-old Jorge with his mother in Argentina. Howes observed, ‘What comes over ...is how very Argentine Pope Francis is. He has tried to replicate in his humble Vatican rooms the simple life of his childhood in Buenos Aires, with a record-player still playing the tangos of his youth.’

The Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein found the structure and language ‘simple’, aimed at younger readers. For Howse, this ‘brings home the length of his 87-year life, but is not particularly illuminating biographically’ and the ‘little homilies on historic events might be a bit off-putting to the unconverted.’

Viet Than Nguyen

Wills’s grandmother (above, with her daughters) hid dark family secrets

Classics Refreshed

LUCY LETHBRIDGE explores the growing phenomenon of beautifully repackaged past titles

Under the corporate foliage of mainstream book publishing, independent seedlings are flourishing. Reprinting the bestsellers (or even the not-quite-best sellers) of the past can be not only modestly lucrative but there is an appetite for books that feel like books, that offer an old-fashioned, material, reader experience. Think of delicious Slightly Foxed limited edition clothbound hardbacks with gold blocking and a ribbon bookmark; or the lovely reproductions of period textiles on the endpapers of a Persephone volume. The plots of the British Library’s crime classics (Crimson Snow, Calamity in Kent) may not, in the age of Netflix, pack the thrills they once did but their retro covers are irresistible .

Norah Perkins, archive sleuth, says publishers once thought it enough to make their backlist gems available through e-books and print-ondemand. But they have discovered that for relatively little financial layout they can capitalise more profitably. ‘The only way is to treat an older book like a new one,’ says Perkins, ‘with a proper sales and marketing campaign.’ Commission an enthusiastic introduction, find a gorgeously in-period picture to adorn the cover and you may have a freshly-minted book group hit.

It all started in 1973 with Virago and its championing of brilliant female authors whose novels languished forgotten in old-fashioned spare rooms. Green-spined Viragos were the mainstay of the real reader’s bookshelf, particularly of course if she was a woman – and in this market she usually was. Virago was followed in 1999 by Persephone, which added more authors to the roster, sweeping out literary corners of the inter-war

There is an appetite for books that feel like books, that offer an old-fashioned, material, reader experience

years for novels by Dorothy Whipple, Marghanita Laski and Mollie PanterDownes. Nonetheless, the reprint market went quiet for a few years, until Vintage’s 2003 reissue of John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner. Williams, who died in 1994, never saw Stoner become a 21st century bestselling sensation.

Now Perkins and her colleague Becky Brown head a department at literary agency Curtis Brown devoted to scouring back catalogues and authors’ estates and selling reissue ideas to publishers. The Feast by Margaret Kennedy has been a hit for Faber, repackaged with a 1930s travel-poster jacket and the strapline ‘Cornwall, summer 1947, and a buried seaside hotel.’ Kay Dick’s ‘sharp, intellectual, angry, dystopian’ novella They was spotted by Brown in an Oxfam bookshop. This tale of an England in which art is suppressed by an authoritarian regime seemed to have struck the chord in 2022 which it missed in 1977: tens of thousands of copies have sold. Celia Dale’s 1960s domestic noir is another find: Daunt’s is reissuing Spring of Love in September and already, Perkins says, they’ve had ‘more offers of film deals and options,’ than for any other novel on their list.

Indy publishers are rushing into the reissuing excitement. The trick is to find a niche. Rebeka Russell of Manderley Press has a catalogue of

colourful hardbacks of lesser-known novels by Noel Streatfeild, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Rumer Godden. Manderley’s USP, as the name (inspired by Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, a lodestone for lovers of country house gothic) suggests, is that the books all have a ‘strong sense of place.’ She wants them to be ‘jewellike, inside and out’ and is attracted, like many re-issuers, to the period of the Second War: ‘When I discovered the novel Appointment with Venus in a second-hand bookshop in the Durrell Zoo in Jersey I was so transported that I stayed up all night reading Jerrard Tickell’s extraordinary account of wartime adventure on the tiny channel island of Sark.’ Making a financial success of reissues is another story. Kate Macdonald, founder of Handheld Press is winding her business down. ‘We were just too small’ she says. ‘I haven’t taken a salary in seven years. It’s the way the book industry is structured, the way bills are paid. We wracked up charges for warehousing and distribution but booksellers didn’t pay for six months.’ She adds that reprinting excludes you from Arts Council grants which only fund new work and from literary prizes for the same reason. ‘It shoots itself in the foot.’

Perkins is keen to stress that the reprint business is not only about women authors, pointing to the recent reissue of the Biggles books by Canelo. Nonetheless, it feels like a world in which women novelists of the past have a particularly potent appeal for women readers of the present. Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone, calls her publishing choices ‘linked to feminism – even if it’s what we call “gentle feminism”.’

One thousand people came to the Persephone 25th anniversary festival this year in Bath. Although Beauman says she ‘cringes’ when people tell her they have found their ‘tribe’ at a Persephone event, she concedes that a large part of their success (and perhaps this is a secret of reprint appeal) comes down to ‘friendliness’: ‘we are not daunting.’

British Library Crime Classics: increasingly popular

History

STORM’S EDGE LIFE, DEATH AND MAGIC IN THE ISLANDS OF ORKNEY

PETER MARSHALL

Wm Collins, 560pp, £25 Marshall was born in Orkney; his ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the island of Sanday. In 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. Orkney was colonised and later annexed by Norway in 875. In 1472, Scotland’s parliament absorbed the Earldom of Orkney into the Kingdom of Scotland, following failure to pay a dowry promised to James III of Scotland by the family of his bride, Margaret of Denmark.

The Spectator’s Maggie Fergusson called the book ‘an astonishing tour de force’ about, the 70-odd Orkney islands 25 miles north of Scotland, where “the North Sea meets the Atlantic, a place of hidden, treacherous whirlpools, and one of the world’s most powerful tidal currents”....The landscape,’ she continued, ‘is fluent, not mountainous, and with no trees to interrupt the view, Orkney is, as Marshall perfectly describes it, “domed by the sky and belted by the sea”.’

Storm’s Edge ‘is not a broad, pre-history-to-present account, but the study of a surprisingly specific period,’ explained Carl Flyn in the Times. ‘He skips entirely the eras most associated with these islands [neolithic, Viking etc]....so as to focus on the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, a time of great upheaval in Scotland and Britain.’

Flyn continued: ‘At 480 pages, plus another 80 of notes, Storm’s Edge asks a lot of its reader. But it’s a surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details. Inevitably there are slow patches... But more often it zips along, full of

adulterous clergy, foul-mouthed fishwives and self-declared warlocks wandering down off “the hill”, the enchanted home of fairies and trows (trolls).’

John Keay in the Literary Review thought the book ‘engrossing and near-faultless’ and that the author wrote with ‘deep understanding and the deftest turn of phrase.

In Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater and George Mackay Brown, Orkney already boasts a roll call of distinguished writers. The list has just got longer.’

ARISE, ENGLAND

SIX KINGS AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH STATE CAROLINE BURT AND RICHARD PARTINGTON

Faber, £480pp, £25

The Plantagenet dynasty began with Henry II, who saved his country from anarchy before passing it to his largely-absent son Richard.

But between 1199 and 1399, it was their half-dozen successors who –often despite themselves – put bones on the fledging nation.

Hence this account is not only, as the Telegraph’s Daniel Brooks opined, ‘a welcome shelter from the permanent torrent of Tudors’; it’s also a necessary and ‘deeply studied’ book, demonstrating how our history must include the origins of our institutions.

Above all, added Katherine Harvey in the Sunday Times, it ‘makes a persuasive case that Magna Carta, to paraphrase the comedian Tony Hancock, did not die in vain — and that her ghost haunted the country for several centuries’.

However, while Arise, England tracks the development of parliament,

common law and the court circuit –as well the beginnings of a standing army and civil service – it leavens it all, wrote Brooks, with ‘a sensible awareness that expounding on state administration is, while fascinating in a tweedy way, as dry as desert sand’.

Thank goodness, he continued, ‘that the kings remain centre-stage’. In the authors’ view, after bad King John, we had a pretty decent run of them: the amiable if embattled Henry III and his decisive and still-divisive son Edward I; the rum ’un, Edward II; the competent Edward III who pulled it back for the family firm; and Richard II, his over-reaching heir.

Between them, we learn in some detail, they managed an awful lot of plotting, cruelty and killing. But, according to Brooks, Burt and Partington’s achievement has been to balance ‘the high drama of royal life with insight into the evolution of the English state’. The consequence?

‘A work of truly impressive scope,

with a profound sensitivity to the dramatic changes over which the Plantagenets presided.’

HOUSE OF LILIES

JUSTINE FIRNHABER-BAKER

Allen Lane, 448pp, £30

The Capetian dynasty of French kings reigned from Hugh Capet in 987 until the death of Charles IV in 1328, their heraldic symbol being the fleur-delys, hence this book’s title.

‘It’s an epic tale, well known to specialists,’ wrote Levi Roach in Literary Review, ‘but seldom has it been presented in a manner accessible to a wider audience. In Justine Firnhaber-Baker, it has finally

The Orkneys: ‘domed by the sky and belted by the sea’

Henry II, the first Plantagenet king of England

found a worthy narrator. With a supreme command of the source material and an eye for telling detail, she succeeds in bringing the period to life like never before... she lets the sheer human drama of the story carry the narrative forward... Nor is this simply a story of men, militarism and realpolitik. Queens and daughters figure prominently, with considerable space given to important matriarchs.’

Nicholas Morton, in Englesberg Ideas, agreed that Firnhaber-Baker is ‘especially effective when exploring the lives of the many queens, princesses, and noblewomen who shaped the events of this era. Scarcely more virtuous than their conspicuously flawed menfolk, their actions profoundly shaped the evolution of the family, and therefore the country.’

Firnhaber-Baker presents us with ‘a rogues’ gallery of killers, weaklings, fools, tyrants, fanatics and lechers. It is not that she has nothing positive to say about them, at times she does, but she certainly brings them down to earth with a bump.’

Daily Telegraph reviewer Daniel Brooks acknowledged that ‘dynastic histories can often be fawning, or narrative at the expense of historical heft,’ but found that ‘FirnhaberBaker’s writing avoids both traps, while remaining crisp, entertaining and direct.’

Brooks noted the author’s ‘bad habit of introducing sources merely as “a historian” or “a chronicler”, and there are a number of learned asides that could do with some expansion... These quibbles aside, this is a mighty, panoramic history.’

BROKEN ARCHANGEL

THE TEMPESTUOUS LIVES OF ROGER CASEMENT

ROLAND PHILIPPS

Bodley Head, 400pp, £25

This is ‘a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through BritishIrish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916’, wrote Rory Carroll in the Guardian. Roger Casement, described by T.E. Lawrence as having ‘the appeal of a broken archangel’, was born in Dublin in 1864 to an Anglo-Irish family but ‘his parents were dysfunctional, possibly alcoholic and died young,’ continued Carroll. ‘He clerked at a Liverpool shipping company before

History

sailing to Africa where he became a roving consul for the Foreign Office.

‘His exposé of atrocities in the Congo... prompted sweeping reforms. He repeated the feat in South America where he revealed the rubber industry’s horrific abuse of Indigenous people. Casement was knighted in 1911, an Edwardian hero and one-man precursor to Amnesty International. He then quit the Foreign Office and plunged into a new cause — Irish Independence.’

Angus Reilly in the Telegraph explained that: ‘Casement’s reports into the horrors in Belgium’s empire – and later on those in Latin America

– mobilised the pre-First World War human rights movements against imperial excesses. But they also set a deep unease in him about Britain’s own empire.

‘When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, Casement began to wonder why he should work to protect what he saw as a savage nation. He then worked with Germany to foment insurrection among Irish nationalists.

An attempt to land in Ireland in 1916 failed spectacularly, and Casement was tried for high treason.’ Reilly thought Philipps was a worthy chronicler: ‘It is a book of meticulous sensitivity and research, never delving into histrionics or cheap thrills.’

And Caroline Moorehead in the

Casement: an Edwardian hero and one-man precursor to Amnesty International

Literary Review agreed that it was a ‘meticulous and sympathetic portrait’ not of a man ‘seeking to betray his country but of a patriot and a romantic defeated in the end by treachery’.

THE WAITING GAME

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WOMEN WHO SERVED THE TUDOR QUEENS

NICOLA CLARK

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £22 In the royal courts of history, ladies-in-waiting are ever-present but rarely the star of the show. Reviewing Nicola Clark’s new book in the Telegraph, Dan Jones reflected that ‘they are a group well represented in Tudor costume dramas, but poorly understood in history. On television, they’re always there: lace-trimmed extras, scuttling and blushing, whispering and giggling, and eventually weeping when the queens they serve are beheaded.’

Naturally, Clark’s book sets the record straight. According to Jones, ‘Some were spies, power-brokers and gatekeepers to powerful agents at court. The best could shape domestic, dynastic and even international politics without fluffing their needlework.’

The Literary Review’s Suzannah Lipscomb noted that ‘the oversight is a modern one.’ The power of ladiesin-waiting, she wrote ‘was understood by contemporaries. Louis XII of France dismissed one of the servants of his new wife, Henry VIII’s sister Mary, because “she began to take upon her not only to rule the Queen” but also, he evidently feared, him.’

Katherine Howard’s lady-inwaiting, Jane Rochford was executed for facilitating her affair with Thomas Culpepper. ‘Clark is a proper historian’ wrote Lipscomb admiringly, ‘she is collegial and generous in her footnotes and her work is largely characterised by the painstaking labour that is necessary for new finds, although there are a few minor errors.

The discovery of María de Salinas’s letters in the Spanish archives is perhaps the most sparkling example of what such digging can reveal.

Written in a lively, accessible style, The Waiting Game is full of insight. It demonstrates a paradox: that looking at the penumbra and the peripheral brings the centre more sharply into focus.’

Roger Casement by Sarah Purser, 1914

History

WRITING ON THE WALL GRAFFITI, REBELLION AND THE MAKING OF EIGTEENTHCENTURY BRITAIN

MADELEINE PELLING

Profile, 352pp; £25

‘Archaeologists have long acknowledged the power of wall carvings,’ wrote Paula Byrne in the Times, yet ‘cultural historians have been slow on the graffiti uptake.’

This book is ‘not only a history of graffiti, but a history of the 18th century via the lost voices of those who lived through it. Pelling explores “smoke graffiti” in army barracks, made by blackening a surface with a lit candle, a rare opportunity for self-expression in a regimented existence.’ Bog-houses and deathcells provide rich sources, with ‘many latrinalia including lovers’ laments or trite tales of female inconstancy’.

The ‘most moving’ graffiti concerned an unknown suicidal man (named John Doe by the press) found drowned in the Thames. His last words were scrawled on the tenement walls where he lived his final, despairing hours. The wall “manuscript” revealed his struggle with the prospect of eternal damnation: “O HORROR! HORROR! … The time is nearly arrived – may Jesus pilot my distressed soul to his heavenly kingdom.”... Like so many in this engrossing narrative, John Doe felt the irresistible, enduring urge to leave his mark.’

As Literary Review’s Ben Wilson noted, the book shows graffiti’s role in ‘defining Britain and Britons, in shaping history, fighting wars, subverting power and rethinking what it meant to be a citizen of polite society’. In highlighting so clearly its ubiquity in the 18th century, she

makes it impossible to ignore as part of the cacophony of the public sphere.’

FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS

PAUL COOPER

Duckworth, 544pp, £25

Citing his historical novels and wildly popular podcast, the Sunday Times’s Max Hastings declared Cooper ‘a phenomenon’: ‘a gifted collector of historical jigsaw pieces’ unveiling ‘a host of things we never knew about places that once were’, whose ‘mastery of anecdotage and accessible storytelling’ has revived the study of the past.

The Spectator’s David Abulafia found the essays ‘eminently readable’, illustrating how 14 great cultures, or branches thereof, rose to eminence before collapsing; not just old favourites like the Aztecs and Roman Britons, but lesser-known examples like Han China and the Muslim sultanate of Delhi.

Causes varied: plagues, war, natural disasters, hubris and (yes, sometimes) climate change, so Cooper avoids a grand unifying theory. However, in his final chapter – which takes a rather dim look at the future of our own, benighted, global civilisation – we discern shades of the 12th-century Khmers, now best remembered for Angkor Wat.

They were victims of ‘cascading systems failure’. As their infrastructure declined, so did people’s productivity. They were unable to maintain their supply networks; trade and industry suffered; and the Khmers entered an inevitable death-spiral.

‘Alas,’ wrote Abulafia, ‘this sounds all too familiar in our own world, where basic infrastructure breaks down more and more often, as with

the NHS, utilities and transport networks.’

Pondering Cooper’s notion of gradual obsolescence, Hastings exonerated Cooper of ‘mere Armageddonism’: ‘Cooper didn’t counsel us to despair but rather to find leaders who can inspire hope through tangible results. After reading the preceding few-hundred pages, that seems quite a tall order.’

THE EASTERN FRONT A HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

NICK LLOYD

Viking, 642pp, £30

‘For most of us the war is epitomised by Verdun or the Somme,’ said Margaret Macmillan in the FT, and ‘for the most part the eastern front is seen as a sideshow to the main event. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nick Lloyd, Professor of Modern Warfare at King’s College London, shows just how wrong that view is.’ The death toll was staggering: 2 million Russian and 1.2 million Austro-Hungarian soldiers died, not to mention civilians. Serbia lost more men in proportion to its population than France.

Lloyd’s book moves between big strategic issues and those human beings caught up in the catastrophe. ‘The compelling narrative shows massive armies moving across a vast theatre of war, from the Baltic to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, as three great empires – AustriaHungary, Russia, and Germany – and their smaller allies threw themselves against each other... ‘The Eastern Front’ is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of that troubled region up to and including the present.’

The Sunday Times’s Dominic Sandbrook found it ‘an extraordinary saga of incompetence, chaos and utter horror. This is the First World War from a refreshingly unfamiliar angle, with Austrian, German and Russian armies blundering wildly across a vast landscape of marshes and grasslands, in which the front lines ebbed and flowed with dizzying speed.

‘His narrative sometimes feels like the Thirty Years’ War with machineguns and barbed wire..

‘Indeed, for sheer horror, the campaigns in the south and east easily matched anything in France or Flanders.’

Soldier with tropical fantasy graffiti (1944)

15th Century Aztec stone figure

Ireland

RITES OF PASSAGE

VICTORIA FLANDERS

Picador, 352pp, £25

The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke proclaimed this sweeping survey of the 19th-century way of death as ‘masterly, while the Telegraph’s Roger Lewis praised its ‘sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail’, and the Times named it a ‘book of the week’.

Today Britain’s infant survival rates are 50 time higher than the Victorians, with its cult of death, exemplified by their grief-crazy Queen.

Flanders leaves no gravestone unturned, from bodysnatching, suicide and capital punishment to cremation, describing vividly how our forefathers’ monetised mourning: ‘seances and quack-cures; the professional mutes and souvenir shortbread wrapped in black-edged paper; the death-masks and postmortem portraits.’

In funerary emporia, hatbands, armbands and acres of highmaintenance crepe were colourgraded, from bleak blacks to wistful greys and mauves, to signify how much one had recovered since the dear departed’s actual last gasp.

It was all too much for Charles Dickens, who denounced the prevailing ‘undertakerism’. But he was not immune from the cult, witness his depiction of Little Nell’s demise. Some might dispute Flanders’s contention that the theatricality of death was buried in the Great War’s trenches. But none could deny, wrote Rachel Cooke, the ‘compassion’ and ‘droll wit’ that she displays throughout.

FOUR SHOTS IN THE NIGHT

A TRUE STORY OF ESPONIAGE, MURDER AND JUSTICE IN NORTHERN IRELAND

HENRY HEMMING

Quercus, 352pp, £22

In the Literary Review, Malachi O’Doherty thought the book gets to ‘the heart of the Northern Ireland Troubles.’ In May 1986, the body of an undercover British agent, Frank Hegarty, was found by the side of a lane in County Tyrone, with ‘four shots’ in his head, fired by an IRA assassin, rope around his wrists and tape over his eyes.

Hegarty ‘was recruited by a British Army agent handler to infiltrate the IRA...He worked alongside IRA commander Martin McGuinness’ and, according to the widely accepted account, was killed by Freddie Scappaticci (codename ‘Stakeknife’) on McGuinness’s orders.

The Times’s Sean O’Neill explained that Stakeknife ‘was perhaps the most important spy in the IRA’s ranks...having been interned in Long Kesh with Gerry Adams in the early 1970s.’ O’Neill thought this was a ‘compelling story... of how the “dirty war” in Northern Ireland may have led to one British agent murdering another in the dead of night on the Irish borderlands. The ultimate prize in this battle was undermining the IRA’s military capability and steering republicans towards a political path.’

Although the books adds nothing new to the student of Northern Ireland, O’Doherty found it presented ‘in a manner that will fascinate the general reader. Hemming has brilliantly marshalled the material of other writers and raised vital questions about agent-handling.’

And the Observer’s Alexander Larman thought ‘Hemming’s narrative combines the in-depth historical research he has brought to his previous books with a mounting sense of danger and intrigue, reminding the reader that this saga is far from concluded.’ In 2016, the then chief constable of Bedfordshire was asked to investigate more than 50 murders and connections to Stakeknife, who died last year. Operation Kenova’s interim report has just been published — no one has been prosecuted.

CRYPT

ALICE ROBERTS

Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £22

In her latest ‘osteobiography’ to reveal our ancestors through their remains, TV anatomist Alice Roberts digs into the extended medieval period. Poring over people’s bones and the DNA in their tooth-pulp she uses new disciplines like palaeopathology and archaeogenomics to interrogate both the historical record and its modern interpretations.

She proved the occupants of an 11th-century Oxfordshire mass grave ate mainly on fish and that they were nearly all young males, probably Vikings. But the skeletoms were not those of fighting men; and the wounds seem more consistent with execution than battle. If the victims were in fact ethnically-cleansed new settlers, history may need to rewritten.

Syphillis is believed to have been imported from North America. In which case, how did a 15th-century anchoress, who bricked herself into a York church for life, contract it?

The Evening Standard’s Robbie Smith called Roberts ‘a brilliant guide to [a] cutting-edge fusion of archaeology and genetics’. Gripped by the book’s kinship with ‘the addictive, gruesome true-crime genre’, he also

praised Roberts’ attempts to ‘humanise’ the victims.

Over at the TLS, Katherine Harvey pointed out that Crypt relies on sources as much as it disputes them. Nonetheless, she agreed with Smith about the boffinry, judging Roberts ‘a congenial guide’. As for the Spectator’s Tibor Fischer, he feared some might find ‘the huge dollops of science here… a little onerous’, but reported that ‘you certainly get your money’s worth’.

Queen Victoria: ‘a grief-crazy Queen’

Alice Roberts

History

CHRISTOPHER SILVESTER selects the best summer books on prisons

Letters for the Ages Behind Bars: Letters from History’s Most Famous Prisoners (Bloomsbury Continuum, 320pp, £20), edited by James Drake and Edward Smyth, brings together letters from figures as various as St. Paul, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Dostoyevsky, Billy the Kid, Al Capone, and Martin Luther King Jr. Extracts are organized into categories such as confession, injustice, life behind bars, and redemption. Amid ‘raw agony there is gentleness and even humour,’ writes jailbird politician-turned priest Jonathan Aitken in his foreword. ‘The ambush of the unexpected is a common feature of this enthralling book.’

In The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked Up Women in its Private Prison (The History Press, 224pp, £20), Cambridge Resident, Caroline Biggs, has uncovered the history of a peculiar institution. In 1561, Elizabeth I gave the university’s vice-chancellor the power to imprison “all public women, procuresses, vagabonds… found guilty or suspected of evil” to protect male undergraduates from being lured into immoral acts.

‘Between 1823 and 1894 alone, explained the New Statesman’s Pippa Bailey, ‘university proctors and special constables known as “bulldogs” carried out more than 6,000 arrests. No confessions or statements were taken, no proof of drunkenness or solicitation required.’ Biggs focuses on four women held in the“Spinning House” private prison. Elizabeth Howe died 25 days after her arrest, suspected of being a “loose and disorderly person”. The coroner deemed prison conditions to be the cause. Biggs deftly blends research with creative retelling, bringing records to full and chilling life.’

The book ‘reeks of Victorian hypocrisy; of the prejudice, sanctimony, double standards and euphemisms that so enraged social reformers,’ said the TLS’s Jane Robinson. Howe was imprisoned ‘merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Less than a month after arriving at the cold, damp prison she died of rheumatic fever, aged 19.

But this is a tale of revenge as well as horror: in 1894, the Spinning

House was forced to close after Daisy Hopkins, committed for “walking with an undergraduate”, sensationally won her case for wrongful arrest in the Royal Courts of Justice, a hopeful end to an elegant, enlightening study.’

A similar form of imprisonment is recounted in The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation (Oneworld, 352pp, £22) by Sarah Wise. ‘You will have heard about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, in which “fallen women” were incarcerated and put to hard labour between the 18th and late 20th centuries,’ wrote Alicia O’Keefe in the Times. ‘How surprised would you be to discover that a comparable system operated in Britain during the 20th century? A system that has not been acknowledged nor apologised for, let alone compensated for?

If the answer to that is “very surprised” then brace yourself for The Undesirables, Sarah Wise’s sprawling, shocking study.’

But O’Keefe also ‘longed’ for Wise ‘to focus more sharply on, for example, unmarried mothers and bring their stories to life. Instead, she roams far and wide, from eugenics experiments in America to the detention of autistic people today.

Part of the problem seems to have been that the inmates of mental deficiency colonies were detained for so long and were so effectively silenced and marginalised that it has

not been easy for her to access their stories.’

As the Literary Review’s Stephen Bates explained, by 1950 an estimated 5,000 ‘people classed as feebleminded were in institutions’ as a result of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act... many of these inmates were released as attitudes changed from the late 1950s; some had been incarcerated for decades since childhood... Prostitutes or girls and young women who had given birth to illegitimate children were particularly vulnerable (much more than their male partners), as were individuals with physical disabilities, such as deafness, naughty or disruptive children and teenagers found guilty of petty crimes... The Undesirables is a gruelling but important book. Wise has uncovered a forgotten and terrible scandal of the not-so-distant past.’

Also outraged, was the Sunday Telegraph’s Catherine Blyth: ‘Wise’s book bristles with injustices…Local councils employed Mental Deficiency Executive Officers – aka “ratcatchers” – to seek out youngsters.

Those deemed incapable of good behaviour or “socially inefficient” (in the jargon du jour) were reported to a sinister government department, the Board of Control. Defectives included: unmarried mothers; deaf-mutes; homosexuals; shoplifters; hooligans; dyslexics who failed crude intelligence tests, and cheeky kids.’

Famous in the late 1960s for her Afro hairdo and radical Marxist politics, Angela Y. Davis advocates defunding the US prison system in Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1 (Hamish Hamilton, 304pp, £16.99).

(Davis was once among the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives until being acquitted in 1972 of being an accessory to a judge’s kidnapping by black radicals.) She argues that by 2020 the Reagan era’s policy of mass incarceration resulted in the US, comprising 4.25% of the world’s population, contained 22% of the world’s prisoners and that this stems from the incomplete abolition of slavery and the development of the prison industrial complex.

She offers plenty of insights into how Americans became the most incarcerated people on earth.

The only existing photograph of Billy the Kid, 1880

WWII

hugely entertaining book, was remarkable.’

SKY WARRIORS

BRITISH AIRBORNE FORCES IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

SAUL DAVID

William Collins, 576pp, £25

‘They were a wonderful lot,’ according to nurse Cicely Paget-Brown. ‘They were so different from ordinary soldiers.’ On Churchill’s decision, Britain’s Airborne Force was born in June 1940. Parachutists risked life and limb, often killed by landing in the wrong place or the wrong way. Glider troops often suffered serious injury when their wooden gliders mostly crash-landed.

‘The greatest danger,‘ wrote Gerard DeGroot in The Times, ‘the idiocy of senior commanders, who repeatedly squandered valuable troops in poorly planned operations. That’s the way of war: old men blithely waste young lives. In north Africa airborne troops were slaughtered in pointless actions designed mainly for dramatic effect. Brigadier Ted Flavell complained how his fine battalion was “cut to pieces on… a worthless venture”.

David ‘recounts battles with enthralling detail, never from a detached distance. He specialises in a worm’s-eye view of war,’ but Sky Warriors lacks some of the dramatic intensity of his earlier books his earlier books, ‘perhaps because the collection of soldier reminiscences on which he depends is not nearly as rich. Airborne troops, it seems, are not good at self-reflection. We don’t really get to know them.’

Nonetheless, wrote James Holland in the Telegraph, ‘it is very much the men’s characters that form the beating heart of the book – eccentrics, mavericks, ridiculously brave but also very human too.. what what they achieved, as David makes clear in this

ENDGAME 1944 HOW STALIN WON THE WAR

JONATHAN DIMBLEBY

Viking, 640pp, £25

Endgame 1944 tells the story of Operation Bagration, the Russian campaign named after a Russian general, and its consequences. Starting in June 1944, it saw five Soviet armies and one Polish, a million men in all, advance westwards along a 2,000-mile front towards Poland and Germany. ‘Jonathan Dimbleby has written several good books about the second world war,’ said the Guardian’s Neal Ascherson. ‘But this is the most interesting. It is not about “turning points”, those diamonds of interpretation that authors love to dig up, sharpen and mount on alluring book jackets. Instead, it’s about what happened after a turning point, about the gigantic consequences as the inevitable slouched out of the future into the present.... Dimbleby parallels his military story with often devastating extracts from Russian and German diaries and private letters (including pages by Vasily Grossman, surely the most gifted writer of the whole war).’ In Country Life, Alan Mallinson wrote that

Dimbleby ‘paints a vivid picture of the fighting at both the bayonet end and at high command, but rightly probes the complex relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.’ Books about the two wars can be ‘immensely boring and inelegantly written,’ noted Dominic Sandbrook the Sunday Times. ‘Dimbleby’s work is in a different league, told with such skill and judgment that, despite the harrowing subject, it is still a pleasure to read.’

FINAL VERDICT A HOLOCAUST TRIAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

TOBIAS BUCK

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 327pp, £25

Since the war, says FT foreign editor, Tobias Buck, countless German families, including his own, have asked, ‘Was Grandpa a Nazi?’ And answer, in most cases, came there none. The Western allies, particularly the Americans, encouraged this reticence, because once the Iron Curtain came down, they wanted West Germany onside: no question of collective guilt. So all but the most notorious Nazis went unpunished.

Meanwhile, as Adam LeBor noted in the Times, ‘Numerous corporations that supported Hitler and exploited slave and forced labour carried on their dominant positions in the post-war German economy,’ and this ‘legal chicanery’ meant many war criminals got off lightly, claiming to be obeying orders. Then, in 2009, John Demjanuk, former guard at Sobibor death camp, was convicted as an accessory to thousands of murders there. Hence 93-year-old Bruno Dey’s trial and conviction, which Buck examines in what the Telegraph’s James Holland calls ‘this gripping and fascinating book’.

While admitting to being a guard, Dey denied all knowledge of the gas chambers or responsibility for any murders, which as the Guardian’s Rachel Cooke noted, ‘doesn’t just stretch credulity; it seems at once pathetic and obscene.’ Fortunately, the judge persuaded Dey to admit that he deliberately chose not to walk away, succumbing to what another Holocaust survivor called ‘the comfort of obedience’. Cooke says she ‘learned a lot from this brilliant book. On the page, Buck makes complicated things (the law, especially) straightforward.’

Airborne Forces use parachutes to signal to Allied Forces, September 1944

Stalin banner, Budapest, 1949

WWII

MICHAEL BARBER selects books about dirty tricks during the Second World War

Belying our reverence for fair play, the British have always excelled at covert operations. In the last war we trained a small army of gifted amateurs for all the dirtiest tricks, from lying, bugging, forging and embezzlement to necessary murder. In the vanguard

of the information war was Sefton Delmer (1904-1979), a Rabelaisian figure, fluent in German, whose speciality was the blackest of black propaganda. In How to Win an Information War (Faber & Faber, 304pp, £20) Peter Pomerantsev, himself an expert on contemporary propaganda, celebrates Delmer.

Working for the Daily Express, Delmer got to know the Nazi élite, which as Roger Boyes reported in the Times, ‘helped him understand what makes a dictatorship tick.’

He realised it was useless expecting ‘good’ Germans to rise up, so you had to create grievances, and persuade folk that they were missing out. The TLS’s Bryan Karetnyk explained how Delmer assembled ‘an “Empire of Tricks” from a Bedfordshire billiards room, ‘“conjuring up an ersatz Germany run from the English countryside,”’ and beginning with a character known as “der Chef” – a coarse military man who revealed to German listeners corruption among the top Nazi brass. Karetnyk also finds that Pomerantsev ‘acts as our Virgil through the inferno of information warfare, then and now. He punctuates his account of Delmer’s life with critical insight and personal experience of the propaganda war in Russia and the US, all with the aim of answering that most urgent question: how do you win an information war

when a quicksand of untruth, disinformation and alternative reality means that “fact-checking doesn’t stand a chance”?’

Another gifted amateur was circus heir Cyril Bertram Mills (1902-1991), whose exploits are recalled by the intelligence guru, Professor Christopher Andrew, in The Spy who Came in from the Circus (Biteback, 336pp, £25). Officially, Mills only worked for MI6 during the war, becoming case officer for ‘Garbo’, the Double Cross system’s most successful agent, and joining the select few who knew about Ultra. A qualified pilot, he made regular solo flights to pre-war Nazi Germany in search of circus acts – perfect cover for spotting the Luftwaffe’s expansion.

After the war, the mansion he bought opposite the Russian Embassy on ‘Millionaire’s Row’ was used as a surveillance post by British Intelligence, leading eventually to the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence personnel.

The Spectator’s Clare Mulley reminded readers that Andrew had written the best-selling, authorised history of MI5, which ‘armed him with great contextual knowledge and plenty of interesting side stories.’ But she regretted that there was ‘surprisingly little here about Mills’s character, motivations or personal life. His second wife Mimi gets a few sentences; his first wife less than that.’

In The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man who Fooled Hitler (W&N, 384pp, £25) Robert Hutton explores the life of Colonel Dudley Clarke (1899-1974), Wavell’s

‘Chief Deception Officer’, whom the Telegraph’s Simon Heffer describes as ‘the ultimate sophisticate’, with ‘the air of a man for whom things run easily, so that few would have guessed at the capacity for taking infinite pains which lay well-hidden behind an easy-going exterior.’

Hutton examines those ‘infinite pains’, which Clarke took to help to win the North Africa campaign, facilitate the invasion of Sicily and contribute to the ‘bodyguard of lies’ that concealed where the D-Day landings would take place. Clarke was also responsible for creating the Commandos. No wonder Alexander, the CIGS, believed he had done as much to win the war as any other single officer.

Clarke’s forte was smoke and mirrors in the shape of huge assemblies of dummy tanks and guns

Clarke’s forte was ‘smoke and mirrors’, in the shape of huge assemblies of dummy tanks and guns, backed up by double agents’ plausible reports. Believing these units existed tied down thousands of Axis troops.

But Clarke hid more than his light under a bushel. A cross-dresser, he was arrested in Madrid in 1941 for stepping out in drag. Luckily, the Spanish refused to hand him over to the Germans, who were certain he was a spy. Luckier still, the ship taking him back to London to face the music was torpedoed, and he ended up in Gibraltar, by which time the authorities had decided that it had all been a misunderstanding and sent him back to Cairo.

The Observer’s Luke Harding found that ‘Hutton uses valuable new material from the National Archives and witty insight to restore the reputation of the louche, but brilliant, Clarke.’ But Clarke’s slate had already been wiped clean.

You will find no mention of his Spanish misadventure in that valedictory tome, the Oxford DNB.

Sefton Delmer in 1958

‘The Illusionist’, aka Col. Dudley Clarke

RACHEL KELLY

Generalising about poetry is hard, given that it is among the most difficult forms of writing to categorise. Poems in modern collections often fail to share any characteristics, other than being written by the same author.

However, one trend emerges from the latest crop of collections: a difference in subject matter according to sex. While male poets like Michael Ondaatje (known best for his 1992 novel The English Patient, but who began life as a poet 50 years ago) and Will Burns write lyrically and ambiguously about landscapes, countries, maps and atmospheres, women like Hollie McNish and Jackie Kay evoke their personal concerns, whether about political activism, post-partem nightmares, body positivity or parenting.

Such subject matter may also reflect the poets’ stage of life. Ondaatje is 80, and his A Year of Last Things (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) has a valedictory, haunting feel about it, looking back and ruminating on unfulfilled lives and past loves. By contrast McNish, aged 40, is from a younger generation of spoken word poets who reflect on their immediate personal experience in uncompromisingly direct ways.

Ondaatje’s poems are his first to be published for 20 years. The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway notes that he is writing about last – and lost –things. ‘He is not interested in the known quantity, has always been more at home with the unknown, and is extraordinarily attuned to hauntings, to the idea that missing pieces are likely to inform whatever remains.’

He is also a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres, Kellaway writes. ‘This valedictory collection brims with rivers – rivers not so much like Lethe as ones that remember. At their best, his poems take you into an elsewhere, although his taste for the mysterious occasionally seems too much of a default position.’

Publishers Weekly found the collection ‘radiates the joy of a fully realised, literary life,’ while Michael Magras on the BookPage blog found it a ‘beautiful and valuable addition to the world of poetry by one of its most

Poetry

rounds up reviews of the best new poetry anthologies

Michael Ondaatje: his latest poems are the first to be published for 20 years

inspiring writers.’

While Ondjaate writes of his travels across various countries, notably Italy, England and his native Sri Lanka, Will Burns in Natural Burial Ground (Corsair, £10.99) explores the landscapes of the Home Counties and Channel Islands. His poems are alive with seabirds on the wing, the fishermen’s daily catch - but his writing takes us beyond the surface to show landscapes shaped by loss and layered with grief.

The Bookseller’s Caroline Sanderson found Burns ‘explores his deep interest in place and the natural world to excavate the emotional impact of grief and loss’, while Emily Hasler on the Caught by the River website describes the collection as ‘tender, generous’ without sentimentality. ‘These are no shiny tourist brochure images: here is smell and texture; invasive flora and upset ecosystems; dying industries; living in spite of the difficulty in making one.’

A Year of Last Things: a beautiful and valuable addition to the world of poetry

Hollie McNish’s poems in Lobster: and other things I’m learning to love (Fleet, £18.99) are about more personal subjects. They come in simple forms, and her roots as a spoken word performer are as clear as her poem’s messages.

In the dedication she asks her family: “Please, never read the oral sex section of this book”. Squeamish readers might want to follow suit, but the rest of us may enjoy her gynaecological musings.

Like much poetry, McNish’s has been more widely reviewed online than in the broadsheets or magazines. But Kirsty McLuckie in the Scotsman described her work as ‘earthy, angry and very funny’.

Meanwhile Laila Ghaffar on The Skinny website found McNish writes with ‘humour and sensitivity’ and her thoughts on bodies, mothers and relationships traverse ‘memoir and polemic’. However, the collection is ‘far too long’ at 460 pages. ‘McNish’s words, although lovely, could have left a more lasting impression if they had been more focused and succinct.’

May Day (Picador, £10.97) by Jackie Kay casts an eye over several decades of political activism, from the international solidarity of her childhood Glasgow, accompanying her parents’ Socialist campaigns, through the feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racist movements of the 80s and 90s, to the present with the urgency of Black Lives Matter. Woven through the collection are more lyrical poems concerning the recent losses of Kay’s parents.

The Guardian’s Rishi Dastidar was a fan: ‘While her language at times could work harder to dodge cliché (a “gunmetal grey” river “stretching away under a lead sky”), Kay’s impeccable musicality is a delight, as is her Glasgow: a backdrop to hymns of secular solidarity, “a place of welcome / to the citizens of the world”.

Meanwhile Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman opined that if the mark of good poetry is something that rewards re-reading, then are some very good poems in Kay’s new collection. It’s a generalisation about poetry, if not about poetry books, which rings true.

Countryside

Our ‘threatening and rapacious’ wolves are ‘ruthlessly misunderstood’

HUNT FOR THE SHADOW WOLF

DEREK GOW

Chelsea Green, 256pp, £20

‘Terrific, life-lit moments come howling out of Derek Gow’s history of what happened to the wolves of Britain,’ wrote the Telegraph’s Horatio Clare. Helpfully subtitled ‘The Lost History of Wolves in Britain and the Myths and Stories That Surround Them’, this book ‘traces the pawprints wolves left on our language, culture and landscape.’ The author, in the Observer’s view, ‘one of the most remarkable figures in British conservation’, is a farmer and rewilder who, Clare noted, ‘significantly contributed to the reintroduction to Britain of beavers, water voles and white storks.’

‘Gow argues the wolf’s evil nature is a figment of our collective imaginations; his book shows the truth is wilder,’ wrote Clare. ‘The reality of wolves – their shyness, curiosity, affection, resilience and beauty – makes a bright path through his tale, which is often a sad and violent history of extermination. Frightened of wolves and murderously protective of our livestock, the peoples of Britain were remorseless in their eradication. We created a threatening and rapacious “shadow wolf”, brutally caricaturing and persecuting the real creature.’

‘For all the sincerity and cogency of his argument that we have ruthlessly misunderstood wolves, and that place, people and planet all benefit from a sympathetic reassessment of them, and their reintroduction, Gow is never dull or worthy... Reading this

book is like being in the company of a rambunctious descendant of Gerald Durrell.’

Helen Macdonald, for the New Statesman, agreed: ‘it resists the generic conventions of modern nature writing; rambunctious and vivid, at times it feels as uncontrollably wild as its subject.’

‘There have been several books on the fate of British wolves, but this is the best’, praised Mark Cocker in the Spectator, ‘combining the right concern for factual detail with an earthy disregard of romance and a great deal of swashbuckling humour.’

RURAL HOURS

THE COUNTRY LIVES OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER AND ROSAMOND LEHMANN

HARRIET BAKER

Allen Lane, 384pp, £25

Harriet Baker explores the lives of three 20th-century female novelists who at some point retreated to Sussex, Dorset and Berkshire respectively. As Laura Hackett wrote

in the Sunday Times, ‘Woolf was recovering from a suicide attempt, Townsend Warner had ended a long relationship and Lehmann had separated from her husband. Rural England offered rest and retreat.’

Susan Owens in the Literary Review found the ‘original and highly enjoyable’ book ‘immensely readable’. ‘It bristles with evocative detail and she invests each chapter with the narrative drive of a short story.’ Hackett too was swept away. ‘She conjures the sights and sounds of mid-20th-century rural England with vivid lyricism: “The men scything by hand, the magnificence of a tithe barn, the chalky tracks cut into the hillsides by ancient carts.”’

Hackett did however wonder if the book’s thesis was over-stretched. ‘Was it really the countryside that changed these women? Or was it the things that happened to them while they were there?’ And the Observer’s Rachel Cooke also reflected that the delightful details didn’t always add up to a big idea. ‘That isn’t to say that the quotidian, the domestic and the pastoral aren’t interesting or worthy of thought; only that they’re pressed here into the service of an extended argument that feels, rather like one of Warner’s creaking Regency chairs, just a touch wobbly and contingent.’

Nonetheless, Cooke found it was ‘entrancing to read of a huge fungus being sliced “like cheese” (Woolf); of the roast pheasant that marks a solitary birthday (Lehmann, though the bird was cooked by the help, Mrs Wickens); of the “gentle” acquirement of meat-safes (Warner, again). It makes you see your own stuff with new eyes, old familiar things suddenly full of meaning.’

HEDGELANDS A WILD WANDER AROUND BRITAIN’S GREATEST HABITAT CHRISTOPHER HART

Chelsea Green Publishing, 208pp, £20

‘Hedges may be ancient, but we still have a lot to learn from them,’ concluded Adam Weymouth in the Sunday Times, after reading Christopher Hart’s anthem to the common or garden hedge. Not giving much thought to this natural barrier that keeps two areas of space apart is ‘to ignore Britain’s greatest habitat.’ It all began when farmers found a way to contain their animals, but since

Virginia Woolf, 1927

then the hedge has become ‘one of the happiest accidents in human history,’ providing outstanding habitat for over 1,000 plant species and 1,500 invertebrate species. ‘Hart’s passion for the potential that resides here is intoxicating,’ wrote Weymouth. ‘Occasionally an environmental solution comes along that is so breathtakingly simple you can’t believe that not everyone is already doing it. Why do we talk so much about tree-planting, Hart wonders, when we already have this incredible resource that just needs some attention to revitalise it?’ An ancient, human-made boundary, it can be brought to life in a fraction of the time it takes a woodland to grow, and the

benefits would be enormous.

Hart ‘inspires us to see that the hedgerow is a national treasure,’ said Mark Cocker, author and naturalist. And there is nothing we like more! Jim Wright, writing for the RSPB, enjoyed the book, as ‘fast-paced and thoroughly enthralling as any edge-of-your seat thriller.’ He also commended the book’s tone as ‘full of common sense and authority, often playfully written with plentiful splashes of humour.’ Helen Browning, the chief executive of the Soil Association poured praise: ‘With wonderful Hedgelands by your side, any farmer, conservationist or interested layperson will understand so much more about this extraordinary resource and how to appreciate and care for it.’

THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE

OLIVIA LAING Picador, pp336, £20

Olivia Laing is a celebrated proponent of the genre-bending literary mashup: in this case of memoir, landscape history, literary criticism and

Countryside

travelogue. In her latest book, wrote Louis Cammell in The Skinny, ‘their [Laing is non-binary] journey is in search of a common paradise. From their own walled-garden in Suffolk, it stretches back to Milton’s Paradise Lost, a text conceived against the backdrop of the Plague in 1665. “Time is cyclical”, Laing remarks from a Covid-ridden England in 2020.’

The Guardian’s, Kathryn Hughes set the scene. ‘Just as the first lockdown was easing, Laing moved into a Georgian house in Suffolk that came with the tangled remnants of a once-glorious walled garden. She had always been a plant person, having spent her 20s training to be a herbalist, but a lifetime of insecure accommodation had meant making do with borrowed plots and communal corners. Now, in addition to getting a garden to call her own, Laing had also acquired something equally wondrous: a husband.

After two decades of being single, she had recently married the poet Ian Patterson, a man of her parents’ generation […] The garden, then, was going to have to contain an awful lot of hopes and anxieties, not to mention a great deal of radical clearing and imaginative making.’

Certainly, Laing’s seductive prose may have readers reaching for a seed catalogue. ‘The fritillaries and hellebores will be followed by a surge of blossom and then by Iris pallida and the roses falling open to the accompaniment of bees. Soon Ian will prop his doors ajar, so he can sit at his desk and feel as if he’s part of the garden, its observer and recipient. I don’t know how long we have together, but every day he is surrounded with a perpetual bouquet.’

THE RISING DOWN LIVES IN A SUSSEX LANDSCAPE

ALEXANDRA HARRIS

Faber & Faber, 512pp, £25

Harris has taken William Blake’s maxim of seeing ‘the world in a grain of sand,’ and returned to the small patch of West Sussex where she grew up, drilling down into its historical strata to discover, as the Guardian’s Kathryn Hughes wrote, ‘the multitudes that lie within.’

Hughes thought the book ‘wonderful’: ‘Her patch of what T.S.

Eliot called “significant soil” stretches from the foothills of the Weald down to the sea and takes in Chichester, Arundel, Petworth and Pulborough. What this home turf lacks in breadth it gains in depth.’ Harris unearths life stories ‘from the Second World War (Canadian soldiers, Polish resistance workers), the days of the French Revolution (bedraggled refugees arriving on the beach), travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working on the Weald and beyond, to the prehistoric era when Sussex lay under a shallow sea, quietly knitting itself

The Rising Down: a beadily researched loveletter to the spaces of her childhood

together from chalk and fish bones.’

The Telegraph’s Jasper Rees found it a ‘fascinating, evocative ramble’ and a ‘beadily researched love-letter to the spaces of her childhood’. Harris’s home was a 1970s house in a 1920s lane in the Sussex Weald, ‘where the Downs commanded her horizon, “a solid green wave that never comes to shore”. Her spur to go back and write about it was a weighty gift from a friend: the annual records, from 1847 onwards, of the Sussex Archaeological Collections. Harris falls on this and other archives as if it were cocaine.’

The TLS’s Alice Albinia found it a ‘male-dominated account’ but waxed lyrical about a ‘beehive of voices and aspirations, ahum with busyness; all those people, sometimes centuries apart from each other, often treading the same soil, through the same trees, by the same sea.’ And the Sunday Times’s John Walsh relished finding it ‘stuffed with stories of nature’s transcendent power to move, comfort and inspire.’

Hedges: ‘an incredible resource’

Weald of Kent 1904 by Benjamin Haughton

Crime

MICHAEL BARBER rounds up the latest thrillers and crime novels

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown was about the politics of water in pre-war Los Angeles, then a small city in a large desert. I was reminded of this when reading Cover the Bones (Wildlife, 512 pp, £20) by Chris Hammer, whose scary outback thriller Scrublands was televised last year. In the 1920s, a consortium of Australian families, calling themselves the Seven, create Yuwonderie, a lush oasis in the parched outback that relies on a system of irrigation canals.

Treating the town like a demesne, the Seven and their descendants prosper. But suppose their gains were ill-gotten from the start? Two detectives, investigating the murder of a Seven family member, uncover a century of corrupt feudal oppression.

The Sunday Times’s Mark Sanderson said that ‘a tide of blood – bad, mixed, stirred and spilled –surges through this epic tale.’ He concluded by echoing Balzac: ‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime.’

Balzac also wrote about ambitious young men and the corners they cut to get on, so he would have recognised the dilemma faced by Adam Sealey, anti-hero of The Actor by Chris Macdonald (Michael Joseph, 384pp, £16.99). A graduate, like Macdonald himself, of a Method acting drama school that in the pre ‘MeToo’ era took egregious liberties with its students, Sealey has been tipped for an Oscar. But there’s a skeleton in his cupboard that someone is threatening to rattle.

How far will he go to prevent this?

An unidentified New York Times reviewer, quoted in the Mail Online, reckoned there was ‘an almost universal unpleasantness about the characters that is both repellent and

totally compelling … But Macdonald has a real understanding of the actor’s mind. And perhaps more importantly, the moral ambivalence of us, the audience.’

Midway through The Last Word by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, 338pp, £22), a successor to The Postscript Murders, a character casually leans on a ‘pile of Richard Osmans’ at his local library. Nice touch, I thought, because you could be forgiven for comparing the partners of Griffiths’ Shoreham-based K and F detective

A tide of blood –bad, mixed, stirred and spilled – surges through this epic tale

agency, one aged 85, to Osman’s band of oldie sleuths a few miles inland.

Like Osman, Griffiths writes in the present tense. And her style, like his, could be described as ‘cosy’. But she’s no copycat. This is her 30th crime novel, many of which take place along the coast in Brighton, where she lives. Long before Osman, she set out her stall.

Griffiths’ plot kicks off with the suspicious death of a female novelist which may be linked to that of other writers. The common factor is a rather creepy writers’ retreat in a gothic mansion near Battle Abbey, to investigate which two of the partners must pose as aspirants and attend a writing course. ‘It’s an enjoyably literary novel,’ said Joan Smith in the Sunday Times, ‘enlivened by Griffiths’s trademark irony and brought up to date by references to the war in Ukraine, where one of the protagonist’s brothers is fighting on the front line.’

Jay Ryan, Luke Arnold and Sarah Roberts in the TV series Shrublands

Another war, that between the sexes, informs One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall (Macmillan, 322pp, £16.99).

The Literary Review’s Natasha Cooper began like this: ‘Germaine Greer famously said she thought women have very little idea how much men hate them. One of the Good Guys is a demonstration of just how much some women hate men.’ The participants in this war are Cole, the ‘good guy’, Mel, his thrusting wife, Lennie, an artist Cole fancies, and Molly and Phoebe, two ardent young feminists on a sponsored south coast walk to protest against male violence. Cole and Mel split up because she puts her career before yet another gruelling and expensive course of IVF treatment. Demoralised house husband Cole decamps to an isolated coastal warden’s cottage on the south coast, which is where he meets Lennie and also has a run in with Molly and Phoebe. When they go missing Cole becomes a suspect.

The story is told from three contrasting perspectives, that of Cole, Mel and Lennie, prompting the Guardian’s Alison Flood to confess that she likes ‘a good unreliable narrator story and this is among the best I’ve read in ages.’ But, asked Kirkusreviews, ‘Could this novel exist without the male voice – or should it? Hard to say, but it’s a fascinating read.’

Finally, To The Dogs by Louise Welsh (Canongate, 336pp, £16.99), another meditation on causality. The swotty son of a deceased Glasgow hard man, Professor Jim Brennan has amassed a score of glittering prizes. But just as the top of the ladder seems within reach, his son is busted for drugs and his antecedents reassert themselves. In The Big Issue, Doug Johnstone applauded: ‘The author, herself a Glasgow professor, casts a cold eye over her native city, juxtaposing the worlds of academe and criminality with a sly wink that asks: which is really worse?’

Cover of The Actor

LIZ

ANDERSON rounds

It’s been a good year for fiction and popular authors like Sally Rooney, Huruki Murakami, Ian Rankin, Robert Harris, Ali Smith and Elizabeth Strout all have new novels coming out later in the year.

You Are Here by David Nicholls (Sceptre, 368pp, £20) was widely reviewed and mostly praised.

Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times found it ‘a triumph’ and ‘a real gift of a novel’, with many of the ‘winning ingredients from Nicholls’s best-selling novels here: turbulent holidays, marital troubles, witty conversation, a friendship that might become love, plus fear of the wasted life.’ She believed there was ‘something special about a past-theirprime romance’ with Nicholls’s two would-be lovers ‘tramping across the Lake District, the Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors’.

Fiction

up some of this summer’s

fiction reviews

hyper-contemporary status, referencing TikTok, NFTs, Covid, Russian oligarchs and more.’ The huge cast of characters includes people traffickers, drill rappers, international playboys and, the main one, art historian and ‘celebrity academic’ Campbell Flynn. Self concluded that at its best it was a Bonfire of the Vanities for the 21st century.

The Guardian’s Lucy Atkins applauded Nicholls’s ‘extraordinary ability to capture the absurdity of modern life in pithy textural details’.

While she didn’t find the book challenging, it was ‘a comforting antidote to the grimness of our grim world, a crowd-pleaser and, surely, a TV hit-to-be’. But the Telegraph’s Claire Allfree wondered if we had reached ‘peak David Nicholls’. The difficulty for the reader, she wrote, ‘is that there’s barely any dramatic predicament in which to invest. Before long, it all becomes dull.’

The controversial Lionel Shriver’s Mania (Borough, 280pp, £22) opens in an alternative America of 2011 where ‘the last great civil rights fight’ is under way. In the Times, James Walton wrote that the novelist ‘has described Mania as set in “a reality exactly one millimetre from where we are now” and the book certainly works as an exhilarating satire — half-playful, half-vicious — on today’s America. But, maybe more importantly (including to itself), it’s also a thoughtful — if still quite cross — parable of the culture wars more generally.’

However, the Guardian’s Anthony Cummins found the novel lacked verve or sass: ‘stretching thinly dramatised ideas — political correctness has gone mad; we should worry about Putin, not pronouns —

over nearly 300 pages.’ The Telegraph’s John Self explained that Mania is the memoir of Pearson Converse, a university tutor in Pennsylvania, in danger of losing her job. However, he thought the prose ‘plain and functional’ and reckoned that ‘to keep the reader interested, a book needs to surprise. Shriver makes a few feints in this direction... but, for the most part, Mania feels mechanical and, worse, predictable....

‘Throughout Mania, what we see is what we’ve learned from the culture wars: that everyone involved is angry most of the time.’

Or, as Nick Duerden wrote in inews, it read like ‘an outburst on GB News’. The Spectator’s Brian Martin agreed there were ‘occasional longueurs’ when Shriver indulged in polemical debate, but overall thought it ‘provocative, stimulating and outrageous’.

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber, 656pp, £20). The Guardian’s Xan Brooks called it an ‘addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider’s grasp on the nuances of high culture’.

The novel, the Times’s John Self wrote, ‘stares right into the world, diving down “the mineshaft of human experience” via the residents of a road in north London. It covers a year starting in May 2021, the opening pages acting as a manifesto for its

You Are Here: a comforting antidote to the grimness of our grim world

‘With such a vast cast,’ wrote Emily Rhodes in the Spectator, ‘it would be near impossible not to find someone who at least partly reflects oneself, thereby making us all complicit. O’Hagan writes with warmth and empathy and humour abounds; but this unflattering mirror makes for discomfortable reading.’

And lastly, the much-admired Stefan Zweig: opening her TLS review of Six Stories (Penguin, 304pp, £9.99), Stefanie Hundehege wrote, ‘Households struggling with inflation; closed borders dividing families; Russian soldiers forced to fight in a war beyond their comprehension for a tsar they have never seen: in many way Stefan Zweig’s short stories, some of which were first printed more than 100 years ago, can hit a little too close to home today. With a cost-of-living crisis, numerous deadly wars, rising nationalism and global surges in antisemitism, Zweig is proving lamentably contemporary.’

She thought ‘Jonathan Katz’s elegantly translated selection.. offers a timely introduction to the Austrian author’s work for the uninitiated, while offering a new constellation to experienced readers.’

John Self in the Times confirmed that ‘You can’t keep a good writer down.’ In the 1930s, ‘Stefan Zweig was an international bestseller, one of the most widely translated writers in Europe.His death in 1942 made the front page of the New York Times, but then he drifted out of print. Over the past two decades, there has been a slow resurgence of interest in his work as independent publishers have put out modern editions, winning him new admirers.

‘Now Penguin gives us six of his best stories, essential reading for anyone interested in modern fiction.’

North Yorkshire: setting for You Are Here

Fiction

HOW TO MAKE A BOMB

RUPERT THOMSON

Apollo, 432pp, £20

In Thomson’s 14th novel, a historian at a Bergen conference Bergen leaves his family ‘after the beep on a tram’s card reader lands him with a nauseating hypersensitivity to the modern world. It’s a Kafkaesque moment - random, life-changingfrom a novelist who has arguably been better loved by fans (including David Bowie) and fellow writers than critics and literary prize panels,’ wrote the Times’s Robert Collins.

The Telegraph’s Lucy Scholes called it ‘magnetic, disturbing and all too fitting to our uncertain age. A compelling if uneasy portrait of one middle-aged, middle-class man having an existential crisis. The thriller-like propulsion of Thomson’s narrative is assisted by the fragmentation of his prose’, as all full stops have been replaced by line breaks. So each paragraph looks ‘like a list of short almost-sentences... to cut through the attention disorder of itchy iPhone brain.’

The FT’s Miranda Seymour praised ‘an exceptional, frightening and curiously persuasive novel,’ while Samantha Morton in the Observer called it ‘a riot and very compelling - quite dark, as usual, but funny too.’

‘Some readers will revel in its abstruseness,’ thought Scholes, ‘others might find the opacity a disappointment. Personally, I think Thomson gets away with it, and the equivocation heightens the power of everything that’s come before. Either way, it feels fitting for this novel – a book that strikes to the core of our age of uncertainty.’

As for Collins: ‘On the final page, Thomson pulls off one of his brilliant,

circular, last-minute twists. Is it enough to turn everything round? Probably not. But he remains something of an undiscovered gem.’

EARTH

JOHN BOYNE

Doubleday, 176pp, £12.99

Earth is the second in the quartet The Elements and comes a year after the first Water by John Boyne, perhaps best-known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006).

‘Earth opens on a defining day for its 22-year-old protagonist,’ explained the Irish Examiner’s Brendan Daly. A sensational court case opens in which a woman has accused Evan Keogh’s international football team-mate of rape, and alleged that Keogh has recorded the crime on his phone.

‘Writing in the first person and in a confessional tone’ in ‘tense, episodic chapters’, Boyne ‘crafts an unsettling atmosphere and injects the narrative with absorbing twists.’

Katy Hayes in the Irish Independent found Boyne to have ‘immense technical skill with plot development. The courtroom drama unfolds compellingly... There is, however, a major research flaw: the crown prosecutor refers to the alleged victim as “his client”.

‘It’s a controversial and muchtalked-about feature of rape cases that the prosecution is taken on behalf of the state and the victim is merely a witness. I’m surprised this irritating mistake was not caught; factual errors in fiction collapse the delicate fabric of believability.’

But she also thought that Boyne ‘writes brilliantly about the problems of contemporary young men, and the tragic furnace of machismo that is actively poisoning them; a bewildering world where the lads are so out of touch with themselves that they do not know how to be.’

The courtyard drama unfolds compellingly

The Observer’s Ben East believed that ‘Boyne tells what is a slightly workaday story with real pace, while attempting to add some pop psychology; it works, just, but Evan’s redemption of sorts is certainly hard-won.’

HELP WANTED ADELE WALDMAN

Serpent’s Tail, 288pp, £16.99

Waldman’s novel is set in Town Square, a mega retailer modelled on the desolate, strip-lit warehouses of Amazon, Target or Walmart (where Waldman once worked).

Help wanted: contemporary American ‘serfs’ work for mega retailers

The Guardian’s, Kevin Power described the set-up: ‘Luxury at the top, fear in the middle, serfdom at the bottom, and nobody going anywhere: this is the reality with which the novelist of contemporary American life must wrestle. Help Wanted is an acidic comedy about contemporary American serfs. It’s a kind of communal novel about the people clinging to the bottom of the social cliff: the two-jobbers, the drop-outs, the working poor.’

Power thought the novel ‘a superb, empathic comedy of manners’ and the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman (no relation) founder herself immersed ‘in their world...a cycle of dimly lit shifts that start before 4a.m. and end at 8a.m., at which point the employees scatter, earning the nickname “roaches.”

‘The label indicates their disposability in management’s eyes and their shamefulness in their own, but the book takes a different perspective, striving to demonstrate the importance of their work.’

Throughout, ‘Waldman maintains a kind of steady presence, attentive but not intrusive.’

In the Telegraph, Philippa Malicka thought Waldman’s writing ‘is richest and most humane as she traces each worker’s private ambitions. Amid the dross of the warehouse, a new sense of potential dawns on each character while they dream of a higher role….

‘For those who find themselves reaching too easily for Amazon Prime, this scathing, albeit often humorous novel, will make for a confrontational read.’

Rupert Thomson: loved by David Bowie

Books about Books

SAM LEITH discovers a growing appetite for books about books and rounds up the latest reviews

The vigorous academic specialism of book history is having a bit of a moment in trade publishing.

Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History 0f the became an unlikely bestseller a couple of years ago, and now Duncan’s sometime collaborator, the Balliol academic Adam Smyth, has produced The Book Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (Bodley Head, £25). Smyth’s biographical study of 18 important moments in book history takes the reader from the excellently named Wynkyn de Worde, who set up shop in ‘fleete strete at the sygne of the sone’ in the early 16th century, up the underground ‘zines of the 1960s.

It is, reported Literary Review’s Adrian Tinniswood, a ‘passionate paean to the book, in all its different forms, as an object: ‘Smyth explores binders and papermakers, small presses and big lending libraries, taking in Shakespeare’s First Folio and William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer along the way’.

The Telegraph’s Tim Smith-Laing said the things he really liked were the ones that suffered ‘a brutal procedure of spine-breaking, page-folding, underlining and annotating’, and that Smyth’s was one such: by the time he was ready to write his review it had been ‘enjoyed beyond repair’.

He praised its ‘idiosyncratic cast’, emphasis on ‘the human aspect in all its chaotic truth’, and Smyth’s ‘combination of precision and practical delight’. The Spectator’s John Sutherland shared his enthusiasm for this ‘sparklingly learned book’: ‘I cannot recommend it enough.’

A book-historical detective story was the subject of Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Shocked the World (Chatto, 336pp, £22).

Thomas James (TJ) Wise was an

entrepreneurial lad of low birth who found a self-taught niche among the bustling book dealers of late-19thcentury London. His knack for finding rare first editions and pre-prints soon made him invaluable to monied bibliophiles from the highest echelons of society on both sides of the Atlantic, and in due course he had ‘assembled what was widely regarded as the greatest private library in the Englishspeaking world’. ‘But his ambition was boundless,’ said the Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen: ‘from overseeing the publication of above-board facsimiles of the lesser works of Shelley, Keats and Browning to meticulously fabricating rarities with false dates and provenance was only a short step’. Wise’s downfall came when two aristocratic young bookdealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, started to investigate Wise’s provenances, considering typography, hyphenation and even pioneering chemical analysis of paper. Eventually they published a bibliographic j’accuse whose fusty title, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets, belied its explosive contents. It was ‘as if the Bank of England had been caught issuing counterfeit money’.

short snappy sentences and chapters ending on cliffhangers. Building on several existing studies, his research has evidently been extensive and the evidence is analysed with a forensic precision worthy of the legendary sleuths.’ He wondered, though, how much the somewhat ‘bloodless’ story would appeal to those not already ‘ardently interested in the field’.

Shelley, Keats and Browning to meticulously fabricating provenance was only a short step’. Wise’s downfall came when two

The Spectator’s Ian Sansom observed that under the bibliographical shenanigans was a ‘seething story about class and envy in early 20th-century London’, noting too that Hone’s ‘delightfully and unapologetically bookish’ account of the story contained some ‘nice little novelistic flourishes’. It also, he added gratefully, ‘contained a useful short guide’ on how to set up as a book forger yourself.

Fakery of another sort was the subject of the latest book by celebrated literary theorist Terry Eagleton, whose The Real Thing: Reflections on a Literary Form (Yale, 176pp, £16.99) discusses arguably the dominant mode of fiction-writing. Marxists like Eagleton, of course, have always found realism problematic – whose version of reality is being presented? How is culture being passed off as nature? -- but the author is a sinuous enough thinker to look at the question in the round. Indeed, said the Telegraph’s Stuart Jeffries of this ‘delightful’ book, ‘Eagleton does something unexpected: he comes to praise what you might expect him to bury’. For all its hypocrisies, Eagleton thinks, realism ‘feels free to take the status quo to task’.

‘An academic specializing in bibliography, Hone is a lively and fluent writer,’ thought Christiansen, ‘ratcheting up the temperature with

The Book Forger: a seething story about class and envy in early 20th-century London

‘In typically skittish and bracing style,’ said the TLS’s Jonathan Keates, ‘The Real Thing portrays literary realism as the trickiest of customers. We are in the presence, it seems, of “a family of concepts and like many a family they do not always see eye to eye”.’ Even Thomas Hardy’s vaunted fidelity to the grim truths of country life, Eagleton points out, were ‘made more difficult by the writer’s ambiguous awareness of his own role as interpreter and entertainer’.

Keates added: ‘The protean nature of realism, its irrepressible shapeshifting, is what Eagleton’s sprightly book rallies us to enjoy.’

Music and film

CHRISTOPHER SILVESTER rounds up the best new books on music and film

The 1959 album A Kind of Blue was the biggest selling album in jazz history. 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool (Canongate, 496pp, £25) by James Kaplan is ‘a conventionally readable portrait of jazz musicians’, wrote Richard Williams in Literary Review ‘Instead of concentrating on Davis, or on the album and its lasting influence, he constructs a triple portrait of Davis, Coltrane and Evans

before and during the years they worked together, then follows them through their subsequent careers.’

However, ‘the occasional freshminted coinage shines through. “Like Charlie Parker, like Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon,” he writes, “Adderley was a jazz magpie, fond of inserting bits and scraps of familiar melodies into his solos; Coltrane seemed to quote only from God.”’

The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (New York Review of Books, 144pp, £16.99}, edited by Sam V. H. Reese ‘contains a lot of filler and close-to-meaningless verbiage, stuff that was probably meant for Rollins’s consumption alone,’ wrote the New York Times’s Dwight Garner. ‘But let’s stick with the material that works. Rollins meditates on the nature of the saxophone (the “horn of horns”) and the nature of his own ambitions.

“I want critics to knock me,” he writes, “so that I come back and make them look like fools”… Elsewhere he writes, “I like to play and let the crowd settle and then lull and then wake

them up with something outrageous.” He stares at his psyche as if in front of a full-length mirror. He fills the pages with lists – of books to read, of favorite songs, of possible titles for his own books. He deplores his impatience, and his lusting after women. He wants to be more punctual. He writes about jazz as “the embodiment of the American Ideal.”’

In Pulp’s This is Hardcore (Bloomsbury, 168pp, £9.99), Jane Savidge examines the 1998 13-track album. The band led by Sheffield native Jarvis Cocker had shot to fame in 1995 with their No. 2 hit Common People (since voted favourite Britpop song in an online poll). ‘Pulp had been lumped in with Britpop, a mediamanufactured movement with which they felt little sympathy,’ wrote Literary Review’s John Savage.

‘Britpop’s emergence, from 1994 onwards, coincided with the rise of the New Lad stereotype fostered by magazines like Loaded. Several songs on This is Hardcore address the restrictive definition of masculinity in that culture.’ Savidge’s book ‘provides an excellent survey of a record that has only gained in stature since its release: an unflinching examination of fame, notoriety and what it is to be a man.’

Suzi Fussey was 21 in 1970 when she became David Bowie’s hairdresser, make-up artist and creator of his androgynous Ziggy Stardust look. She later married Bowie’s bandmate, Mick Ronson. Me and Mr Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars (Faber & Faber, 304pp, £20) is an ‘honest and troubling memoir’, wrote the Guardian’s Anthony Quinn, though ‘not quite a cautionary tale, for the author lived the madness and emerged on the other side’. But it s hows how casually a pop celebrity can discard a oncevalued collaborator. Bowie shed the Ziggy persona at a surprise farewell concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 and moved to LA, after which ‘some of the heat goes out of the book.’ Bowie died in 2016 and it ‘comes as a shock to learn’ that the author ‘hadn’t seen David or Angie since that farewell night.’ Deborah Levy, in Literary Review, agreed that the book is ‘at its most dynamic in the

first half, set in the suburbs of 1970s London. I guess that’s because Suzi Ronson, the glam-rock girl who styled our favourite alien’s hair, was making herself up too.’

Ackroyd and Belushi: ‘an epic friendship’

The Blues Brothers starred John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as ‘the anarchic trilby and shades-wearing siblings reforming their crack blues band to rescue their Catholic orphanage from closure,’ wrote Ed Potton in the Times.

Daniel de Visé’s ‘droll and rigorous’ The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic (White Rabbit, 400pp, £25). describes ‘how it began as an SNL [Saturday Night Live] sketch, grew into a live musical revue and became one of the biggest movies of 1980, grossing more than $100 million.’ Charlie Campbell, in Literary Review, called it an ‘absolute blast of a book, full of incredible research and fascinating details... Hampered at every turn by bureaucracy and a wayward cast, ‘The Blues Brothers’ might have become “a cinematic Vietnam”. That it didn’t is a miracle as surprising as anything that happens in the film.’

Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (Oxford University Press, 304pp, £25) by Kate Hext is a true curiosity. Hext’s thesis that Wilde’s subversive writings somehow inspired 1930s gangster movies ‘invites scoffing before one reads it.

But Hext is a subtle, observant, lively and persuasive writer. She knows her stuff and never takes it too solemnly. Her book, though smallformat, is a winner.’

Miles Davis in his New York home, 1955

Politics / Current affairs

VULTURE CAPITALISM

GRACE BLAKELEY

(Bloomsbury, 416pp, £20)

The starting point for Corbynite economist Grace Blakeley’s book is an unexpected one: to ask whether it’s worth taking Hayek – high priest of laissez-faire economics – seriously.

Capitalism, she says, promises to maximise human freedom and avoids the fool’s project of attempting to plan something so complex as an economy. But she argues that ‘actually existing capitalism’ does no such things: it makes ordinary workers less free, and sees economies planned to benefit the very wealthy. The Guardian, in a pre-publication interview, dubbed her ‘a Tony Benn for the Tik Tok age’.

The Sunday Times’s John Arlidge wasn’t convinced: ‘This book is supposed to make you rush out and become an anti-capitalist campaigner...My guess is it will do the opposite.’ He found her arguments about the evils of neoliberalism ‘cartoonishly black and white’ and found ‘gaping holes in her analysis’.

He concluded: ‘Many western nations face deep economic and social problems [...] Blakeley is right that we need fresh thinking — but there is nothing fresh about poundshop Marxism.’

Blakeley gets into the grimy plumbing of the capitalist system warts and all

The Spectator’s Matthew Lynn was a little more positive: ‘To her credit, she engages with capitalism as it actually is, warts and all [...] From bank bail-outs, to fee-grubbing private equity firms, to the ruthless data trading of the web giants, and the rigged markets of the City and Wall Street, she gets into the grimy plumbing of the capitalist system.

And, like so much plumbing, while we can defend it as necessary, even its champions have to admit that it often doesn’t smell very sweet.’

Nevertheless, he said, ‘In reality, the problem is growth, not capitalism. And if you were to address that, it might - quelle horreur! - involve admitting that the state was too large. It might even make you a neoliberal.’

Black Lives Matter: ‘lowermiddleclass revolt?’

BLACK SUCCESS THE SURPRISING TRUTH

TONY SEWELL

Swift Press, 288pp, £20

Dr Tony Sewell knows what it’s like to swim against the tide. As Chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities he concluded that much of the supposed evidence of institutional racism in the UK was ‘consistently flimsy.’ He also described Black Lives Matter demos as ‘lower-middle-class revolt.’ In his new book, he not only celebrates black achievements, but insists that they occurred because of, rather than in spite of, the obstacles in their way. He invokes the poet Derek Walcott: ‘We did get “shat on”, but we were smart enough to use it as fertiliser for the imagination.’

But there is one obstacle Dr Sewell, a committed Christian, does deplore: ‘the collapse of the family’, brought about by absentee black fathers and the introduction of ‘priority council housing, which incentivised single motherhood.’

In Parliament’s The House, Tory peer Michael Dobbs says Black Success ‘will irritate some but inspire many more … Dr Sewell’s pursuit of evidence to change the patronising and confused narrative of “white privilege” is remorseless. He claims our imaginations are too clearly rooted in the past …and hopes this book will be a game-changer.’

This seems unlikely for two reasons. First, no reviews in the national press, not even in the Mail and the Telegraph, probably share the author’s disbelief in institutional racism. Secondly, however sincere Dr Sewell may be, he’s up against the persuasive rhetoric of an iconic agitator like the Cambridge-educated rapper, George Mpanga, aka George the Poet, whose new memoir Track

Record: Me, Music and the War on Blackness is more likely to strike a chord with the generation whose attention Dr Sewell seeks.

NO JUDGMENT ON BEING CRITICAL LAUREN OYLER

(Virago, 288pp, £20)

Lauren Oyler is one of the most prominent of a generation of “very online” millennial women critics. She became literary-internet famous for a 2020 review of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror so enjoyably savage that it crashed the London Review of Books’s website.

So her first essay collection comes with irony embedded in the title. Its subjects roam from the pleasures and sorrows of gossip, via the noxious world of online book reviewing, to the value of autofiction, the cult of ‘vulnerability’, her experience as an American living in Berlin, and her own anxiety.

The Observer’s Rachel Cooke thought Oyler’s essays occupied an ‘airless’ ‘rarefied niche’:ending on cliffhangers. Building on ‘Oyler’s territory is at once vast (the internet) and minute (her part of the internet).

The very online – I would say the very, very online – may know all about her slightly defensive, periodically anxious and (at moments) hugely self-congratulatory style: an ironic, somewhat callow tone born of her addiction to what used to be known as Twitter.’ She confessed to enjoying some of Oyler’s aphorisms and laughing aloud at the odd joke, but thought its ‘modishness’ left it ‘rather cold and blank and small’: ‘Literature – novels, criticism, all of it – seems to be draining away before our very eyes, and it makes me feel very sad and depressed.’

The Guardian’s Houman Barekat was much more on Oyler’s wavelength. Oyler has a talent for cutting through hype and getting to the nub of things, he thought, and found her essays showed an ‘agile and discerning mind’ with a ‘disarmingly chatty prose style’. The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfeld, another essayist of Oyler’s generation, wasn’t so impressed. ‘Her essays contain not arguments or judgments so much as a dvertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality,’ she thought.

‘This is not criticism as a practice; it is criticism as a lifestyle brand.’

Psychology

THE

ANXIOUS

GENERATION

HOW THE GREAT REWIRING OF CHILDREN IS CAUSING AN EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS

JONATHAN HAIDT

Allen Lane, 400pp, £25

‘Forget horror; this is one of the most terrifying books I have read,’ said Anna Davis in the Evening Standard

We know Smartphones are addictive, disrupt sleep, fragment attention and deprive people of real-world interaction. Haidt argues that between 2010 and 2015 childhood and adolescence were subjected to the largest uncontrolled experiment ever performed on our children. When the front-facing camera was released with the iPhone 4 in June 2010 and with the Samsung Galaxy soon after, there appeared to follow a sharp upward turn in teenage mental illness. Users, and adolescents particularly, could record their lives online in photographic detail.

Simon Ings in the Spectator wrote, ‘Maintaining an online self is a 24/7 job.’ Tech companies were rewiring childhood and changing human development by designing a ‘firehose of addictive content’ that has displaced physical play and in-person socialising. ‘Parents everywhere will be nodding their heads,’ agreed Davis, ‘but it’s not much help for those whose teenagers are already down the rabbit hole and who may feel utterly disheartened by the stream of evidence he puts forward showing the

damage that has been caused.’

The Guaridan’s Sophie McBain found Haidt’s evidence ‘urgent and essential’, reinforcing his call to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media.

‘Maybe we ought to start thinking more about all the things we didn’t look at,’ she said, ‘all the people we didn’t speak to, all the thoughts we didn’t allow ourselves to finish, because we were glued to our stupid smartphones.’ Paraphrasing the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, Haidt warned, ‘there’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.’

BAD THERAPY

WHY THE KIDS AREN’T GROWING UP

ABIGAIL SHRIER

Swift Press, 320pp, £20

Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and there is a proliferation of mental health diagnoses. What has gone wrong with our youth? Shrier argues that the problem is not with the children, it’s with the mental health experts who leap forward to mend something that

The problem is not with our children but with the mental health experts

isn’t really broken; normal pangs of adolescence don’t require therapy, they require old-fashioned lessons in resilience and courage. By treating the well, we are making them sick. Shrier argues against medicalisation and pathologising of children. She argues for parents exercising judgement, enforcing boundaries, and stepping up.

Camilla Cavendish in the FT had reservations: Shier ‘is too harsh, in my view, on therapy. But she is unequivocally on the side of parents and teenagers: which makes this a thought-provoking, though uncomfortable, read.’

Matthew Loftus, writing on mereorthodoxy.com was enthusiastic for the book, until he read it. ‘I’m disappointed to report that Bad Therapy isn’t a great book. It describes real problems that parents, teachers, health professionals, and pastors in America ought to be paying attention to. It marshals a significant host of experts to counter certain prevailing trends. However, it does so in a way that is sloppy, uneven, and (at points) downright annoying to read. As someone who agrees with the general gist of Shrier’s arguments, I wish there was a better spokesperson for her ideas.’

Jonathan Coppin on Medium.com was reminded of a ‘funny, interesting, independent British movie, touching on mental health, called Burn, Burn, Burn in which the protagonists find a code that allows them to change, to develop, to be happier, and it is: “Just stop being a dick”. That’s right: mental illness has its roots in self-hatred; if you hate yourself too much, behave better and you won’t.’

BODY MADE OF GLASS A HISTORY OF HYPOCHONDRIA CAROLINE CRAMPTON

Granta, 336pp, £16.99

Caroline Crampton was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare type of blood cancer, at 17. After years of treatment, she was given the all-clear. However, ‘It was then that another illness took hold,’ wrote Pippa Bailey in the New Statesman: Crampton became fixated on the idea that she might be sick.

‘In the second century, the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon wrote of a strange condition in which a “melancholic” person becomes convinced that he is made of pottery

Smartphones: ‘the largest uncontrolled experiment ever performed on our children’

and begins avoiding others for risk of being broken,’ explained Sophie McBain in the Sunday Times. ‘By the late 14th century this same delusion had assumed a slightly different form and sufferers became convinced that their bodies were made of glass and were liable to shatter....The glass delusion is not the same as hypochondria, but they share a similar preoccupation with human fragility.’

In the Guardian, doctor and academic Kate Womersley found Crampton perfectly placed ‘to write this fascinating and intelligent cultural history of health anxiety, suffused with the intensity of feeling that hypochondria ignites, as well as the insight that it often precludes.’

‘This is a Covid-19 book of sorts, bearing the hallmark of a time when illness became everyone’s preoccupation and the stigma of health anxiety eased.’ In fact, Crampton found relative calm and companionship in the pandemic.

Bailey concluded: ‘A definitive summation of hypochondria proves impossible.’ This is ‘wide-ranging work, moving from personal story to literary analysis to the history of medicine and back again. At times, this renders it meandering and hard to follow... It is a hypochondriacal book: a committed search for answers that may or may not exist.’

NOSTALGIA

A HISTORY OF A DANGEROUS EMOTION

AGNES ARNOLD-FOSTER

Picador, 272pp, £22

Is nostalgia a harmless, inevitable feature of the human condition or a corrupting distraction from real life?

In the Sunday Times, Johanna Thomas Corr laid it on the line:

Psychology

‘Arnold-Forster has news for you. Nostalgia is not just a benign, sentimental longing for a bygone era or even a fad that makes you lust after mid-century modern furniture. It was once a very dangerous condition. Not the kind that could make you vote for Brexit or wear a Nirvana T-shirt, but a physical disease that could kill you.’

Kieran Setiya in the TLS praised a ‘beautifully compact, wide-ranging and enjoyable’ account of a slippery subject, noting that in the mid-20thcentury, ‘Psychoanalysts such as Nandor Fodor embraced this idea of temporal anxiety, re-pathologising nostalgia as “the manifestation of a latent desire to return to the womb”. But by the 1970s it had been normalized and made popular, a fad. In 1970-71, articles on American nostalgia ran in Newsweek, Life and Time, as collectibles, fashion, film and theatre commercialized a longing for the past. In the UK Hovis and others ran famously nostalgic television ads.’ Nostalgia ‘isn’t quite the piece of scintillating scholarship’ ThomasCorr hoped for, ‘but it is in an intelligent recapitulation of how the emotion became a “condition of modern life”, a feeling that emerged in the 19th century as a response to broad social and political forces like capitalism, migration, colonialism, industrialisation, global warfare and the professionalisation of science.’

And the Telegraph’s Felipe Fernandez Arnesto was blown away: ‘Arnold-Forster is a shrewd critic and delightful guide. Her prose is fluent but not flashy, demotic without being dumb. She carries weighty learning lightly – embracing everything relevant, from dubious neuroscience to cod sociology. She turns specialists’ pedantry into perceptive anecdotes.’

EVERYTHING MUST GO

DORIAN LYNSKEY

Pan Macmillan, 512pp, £25

We respond to our concerns by telling ourselves stories; and there’s never been a time like the present for imagining the end of the world - except that there has.

In this all-embracing cultural overview, the author acknowledges that apocalyptic angst is increasingly founded on plausible scientific forecasts of how the human race will be sent to perdition – or at least, back to the Stone Age – by its own

‘The

irresponsibility. But as he demonstrates, the prophesied cause was ever thus.

Look how the Israelites interpreted the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (which were probably real-life settlements in Jordan). Or better yet, look at the Christian Book of Revelations, which still haunts even the secular Western mind.

The only difference between a vengeful God sitting in judgement and the climate-change, ecomeltdown, AI and A-bombs now threatening us is that – to quote J Robert Oppenheimer, himself quoting the Bhagavad Gita –we ‘have become Death’. And with this thesis setting his parameters, Lynskey takes the reader on an exhaustive tour of the texts, music, movies and movements that have pictured the end-times, from mediaeval millennialism to Y2K, from Noah’s Flood to Don’t Look Up.

In particular, wrote the Literary Review’s Mark Blacklock, the book is ‘a rich guide to an important subset of science fiction’, gilded by ‘a journalist’s eye for a great story and a killer quotation’. (The epigraphs alone were ‘worth the price of entry’.)

The author ‘maintains his good humour throughout’; a view seconded by the Guardian’s Mat Osman, who applauded ‘a curiously entertaining read’, sustained by Lynskey’s ‘encyclopaedic knowledge…and his glee at the sheer inventiveness of the doomsayers’ creations’. However, the big takeaway of this ‘unlikely page-turner’ for Osman was the fact that – whatever their past predictions – ‘people woke, hungover and faintly embarrassed, to a brand new day’.

The much-loved nostalgic Hovis TV ad, directed by Ridley Scott in the 1970s

Apocalpyse now?

Great Day of his Wrath’ 1851, by John Martin

AI and Technology

SAM LEITH rounds up the reviews on books about trolls, Silicon Valley and the dangers of AI

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent – tasked with investigating the murky world of fake news, online conspiracies and trolls. It’s thankless work.

As John Naughten, reviewing her first book in the Guardian, described it, her job is ‘best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of extremely sharp nails’: ‘of the 14,488 social media posts targeting staff that the BBC logged between January and June 2023, for example, 11,771 related to her.’ Among The Trolls: My Journey through Conspiracyland (Atlantic, 352pp, £18.99) tells the reader what it’s like on the sharp end.

Among the Trolls: ‘a compelling guided tour of a dystopian underworld’

‘This is a compelling guided tour of a dystopian underworld that most sensible people would prefer to ignore,’ said Naughten. ‘It also suggests why such wilful blindness would be terminally unwise.

‘The number of avoidable deaths resulting from misinformation and anti-vaccination campaigning, for example, is uncountable, but it’s significant. Misinformation costs lives.’ He added: What’s striking about Spring’s approach is her empathic capacity to try to understand what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein disdainfully called the “crippled epistemology” of conspiracy theorists’.

The Telegraph’s Julia Ebner said the book ‘investigates both what conspiracy theorists believe and why, and it offers a powerful account of the connections between online and offline harms.

‘Spring also goes outdoors to mingle with conspiracy theorists at demonstrations, to confront propagandists and to interview victims of disinformation. Not only is her book an excellent piece of investigative journalism, but it may be the first extensive ethnography of trolls.’ Spring describes how conspiracy theories are ‘an industry’ that sucks people in – both as ‘true believers’ and cynical ‘non-believers’, ‘driven by a desire to feel intellectual superiority, to achieve fame and

power, or to benefit financially’. She writes too, about how patient human connection can rescue people from the grip of these dangerous ideas. ‘Among the Trolls is worth your time,’ said Ebner, ‘whether someone you love is a permanent resident in Conspiracyland or you’ve never heard of the place but feel courageous enough to visit.’

Kara Swisher is a former tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal who became known as much for her stellar inside sources as for her spiky prose. In Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Piatkus, 320pp,£25), Swisher looks back on a career over three decades which has seen her chronicle the utopian rhetoric of the Silicon Valley honchos and the far from utopian results. The book is billed as a righteous roast of the evils of the modern-day tech monopolists.

Yet, oddly, it feels ‘ultimately underwhelming’, thought the New York Times’s Adrian Chen: ‘The problem is that Swisher tells two conflicting stories that are never convincingly woven together. One details her disillusionment with the industry. [...] The book’s other thread involves Swisher self-actualizing — by becoming more like the Silicon Valley

Not only is Spring’s book an excellent piece of investigative journalism, but it may be the first extensive ethnography of trolls

elite she covers. [...] Even as Swisher is rising into “Silicon Valley royalty,” Silicon Valley is, in her telling, descending into the gutter. This tension is scarcely acknowledged in chapters detailing her relationship with various leading Tech figures. [...]

‘If Swisher is such a great journalist with so much freedom, how did she miss the larger story for so long even as it unfolded under her nose?’

The FT’s Richard Waters was similarly disappointed. ‘Burn Book, which is billed as part memoir, part score-settling after more than a quarter of a century of tech reporting,’ he said, ‘is short of scorching new material. True, Swisher doesn’t stint in her evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

‘But these days taking a lash to the twin bad boys of Silicon Valley hardly counts as radical. That said, this brief, breezy canter through a reporting life and impressions of the tech moguls Swisher has crossed swords with over the years is a lively read.’

The biggest story in tech now, of course, is AI – and it has set off a torrent of books either hymning its possibilities or warning of its dangers.

One of the latter is Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI (Picador, 320pp, £20). It is the ‘Kafkaesque absurdities’ generated by our unthinking reliance on algorithms we don’t understand, ‘and how they play out on a human level, that interest Murgia, the FT’s first artificial intelligence editor’. So said the Guardian’s Will Dean of a book describing ‘a new data-colonialism’ in which AI systems ‘benefit many of us [...] at the expense of some – usually individuals and communities that are already marginalised’.

‘The bass note here is pessimistic,’ said Dean. ‘We are way past the techno-boosterism of the early 00s, and, for every government official wondering how AI can help them streamline health and welfare services, there are thousands of people asking whether it will allow them to continue making a living.’

Miscellaneous

IMPOSSIBLE CITY

PARIS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

SIMON KUPER

Profile Books, 272pp, £18.99

‘Those of us who romanticise France are familiar with books in which a British person attempts to “live the dream” there,’ wrote Andre Martin in Literary Review. ‘They’re essentially travel books, evocations of sunsets and cosy bistros offset with the social comedy of dealing with the less cosy French. Impossible City is almost that sort of book, but perhaps a bit more like a portrait of Parisian society with autobiographical elements. The style is elegant and flinty, the humour dry.’

Kuper has lived in Paris with his American wife since 2002.

‘Neighbourliness, he found, is less important than adherence to abstruse rules of behaviour... These codes are distilled from the behaviour of the tiny French ruling class, and Kuper enjoys watching their “status dance”, relieved at being ineligible, as a foreigner, to join in.’

The Evening Standard’s, Dylan Jones welcomed Kuper’s ‘affectionate take on Paris, by turns amusing and quaint’ with ‘some great vignettes... He describes regularly drinking affordable wine that was so good it was, in the French phrase, “like Jesus pissing in your mouth”; he writes at length about the “bobos”, those bourgeois bohos with bohemian tastes; and reminds us that a French person never needs to apologise if they are less than 15 minutes late.’

In this ‘entertaining mix of memoir

and anthropology,’ wrote the Times’s Peter Conradi, Kuper shows that his ‘time in the city, although pleasurable, has often seemed a never-ending struggle to be accepted into what, as the book’s title suggests, is one of the most closed societies in the world...

The style is dry, understated and very British, as if to emphasise the contrast with the society of which Kuper is such a shrewd observer.’

ON THIS HOLY ISLAND

OLIVER SMITH

Bloomsbury, 256 pp, £18

When the pandemic struck, rather than treading the well-worn camino to Santiago de Compostela, Smith opted instead to find meaning in Britain’s places and paths of pilgrimage. Another enraptured lone male on a voyage of self-discovery?

‘Thankfully,’ wrote the Rev Philip Welsh in the Church Times, Smith had made clear that ’this is not a memoir of a troubled soul hoping to be fixed by the road’.

Fascinated and fascinating, nonetheless: whether walking the Ridgeway or abseiling into a Welsh cave to bivouac in the burial chamber of the 28,000-year-old ‘Red Lady of Paviland’; bobbing on a pack-raft round Iona or huddling in a storm shelter on the Lindisfarne causeway.

Also on his itinerary were Avebury, Stonehenge and their devotees; Christian destinations like Canterbury and Walsingham; and more surprisingly, the UK’s most remote pub – on the Knoydart Peninsula – and the Liverpool FC stadium (one week in 1989, a million came to pay their respects to the victims of the Hillsborough disaster).

This is ‘an extraordinary picture of British faith at its most eccentric’,

wrote Patrick Galbraith in the Times: among its great joys ‘a tremendous sense of the energy and time that the author has put into it’. The book is‘immensely well-researched and playful’ and ‘Smith has written something special.’

The Spectator’s Guy Stagg agreed. ‘Hiking to a healing well or sacred stone teaches people to see the familiar with fresh appreciation,’ he reflected. ‘Post-pandemic, it makes even more sense to look locally before setting off for Rome [or] Jerusalem.’ And Smith’s travelogue, he concluded, ‘shows us just where to start’.

READING GENESIS

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Virago, 352pp, £25

Of the Book of Genesis’s opening sentence, Robinson writes, ‘When I think there was a day when a human hand first wrote those words, I am filled with awe.’ Robinson takes the reader through the foundational text of western culture, urging us ‘to look again at Genesis’ said former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries in the Guardian. ‘To read Robinson’s careful analysis is to have one’s understanding of the text profoundly enriched and changed.’ Genesis relates some dark, difficult stories which trouble the idea of a merciful God, and Robinson addresses these with a novelist’s humanity.

Readers from the critical tradition might be ‘startled by how many very traditional ideas are, however delicately, still affirmed’ said the Times’s John Barton. Robinson’s ‘gently persuasive presentation’ opens up ‘even the less attractive stories from ancient Israel’s primeval history,’ showing how often they deal with what it means to be human in the presence of God.’

Though ‘not an easy or quick read,’ wrote Rowan Williams in the Telegraph, ‘this work of exceptional wisdom and imagination’ is a ‘model of how to read the biblical text with the eyes of an adult faith...First, stop and look together at what is being shown you; then digest and respond as best you can, not so much to the one showing you as to the landscape shown.’ It’s an opportunity to revisit Genesis ‘in the company of an exceptionally wise and perceptive storyteller,one of our foremost novelists.

Impossible City: ‘an affectionate take on Paris’

Stonehenge, painted by Constable in 1840: a magnet for pilgrims

sister teresa

I am my brother’s keeper

I used to query the accuracy of ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ (Matthew 5:4)

When we are young, grief feels incomprehensible and wrong. When we get old, the truth of this Beatitude comes into its own: we realise that grief can be right and fitting because it enables us to grasp the extent to which someone was lovable.

My brother Chips Keswick (19402024) died a few weeks ago, leaving an unbridgeable gap in many people’s lives, not least my own. He was, among other things, a distinguished figure in the City and a supporter of Arsenal from the age of nine – he became the club’s chairman.

All this was extensively covered by the press obituary notices. But I became exasperated by their lack of warmth, their want of giving credit where credit was due, and their failure to mention his generosity, particularly to the young.

No man is loved for his acuity in the

The Rev Richard Carter introduced the memorial service for Martin Amis at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

It opened with chamber music by Bach and Handel and ended with jazz – and recordings of Amis talking about his love of words.

boardroom. He is loved for his basic Christian qualities: kindness, generosity, honesty, a sense of fairness and a humorous modesty which doesn’t draw attention to these things.

Chips would have been startled and perhaps not best pleased to be told he had one of the great gifts of the Holy Spirit – fortitude, the courage that endures in adverse circumstances until the very end.

He was a countryman at heart. ‘I’m going fishing,’ he would frequently say. Not being a great Bible reader, he was presumably unaware that is a quote from the Gospel of John 21:3.

Kindness (charity) is remembered for decades and in eternity. My brother’s manifested itself early on, when he was a very young man going to fashionable dances. Often, he would drive home disconsolate girls who were ‘spare’ and having a less than enjoyable time. Once there were six waiting in the doorway of a big London ballroom.

Memorial Service

‘Would any of you like a lift?’ he asked. ‘Yes, please,’ they said, and they all squeezed into his Mini.

The doorman remarked, ‘You’re doing very well this evening, sir.’

He drove right round London for them. Two of those girls of long ago have just told me the lift home was by far the happiest part of the evening.

His consideration for others became evident much later, when we were standing in the marbled hall of Hambros, the merchant bank of which he was chairman. He suddenly said that the wellbeing of the man who looked after the lift was just as important as the bank’s financial transactions.

‘He is survived by his wife and three sons…’ etc does little to inspire. But when I met one of my nephews with his pretty, sparkling children, I had a wonderful sense of continuity: my brother lives on in them.

Yippee and alleluia.

Martin Amis (1949-2023)

Ian McEwan listed his favourite Amis quotations, including the noise of a man in a lavatory cubicle – like ‘emptying a sack of melons into a deep well’. Amis once described Michael Crichton’s prose as ‘herds of clichés, roaming free’.

Magazine supremo Tina Brown, an old flame, said of commissioning Amis: ‘ Whenever his copy arrived, it was Christmas Day in the office: so eagerly awaited, never a disappointment.’

When Brown asked Amis to write about a new play by David Hare, his first question was ‘Do I have to see it?’

All that Kingsley Amis, Martin’s father, said about Brown was ‘Nice tits.’

Amis’s son, Louis Amis, revealed his father was a ‘glory-hunter’, frantically switching allegiances between top football teams. He loved players’ celebrations: ‘Witnessing exuberance in other people was one of his favourite things.’

Delilah Jeary said, ‘I was 18 when I found out he was my father. I entered a world of outrageous novelty. He felt we had a duty to be cheerful. We should cultivate our paranoia. Love flowed.’

Fernanda Amis said, ‘He was less a dad type and more of a cool guy who lived in our house. He was suspicious of the humourless and religious.’

He was dictatorial only in his choice of the films: the first quarter of Airplane; the last third of Pulp Fiction.

Novelist Zadie Smith said, ‘Talking with Martin was like reading Martin but more so. It was funnier, more vituperative, more outrageous, but also far kinder.’

Poet James Fenton recalled meeting Amis in 1968 in his Oxford rooms with Christopher Hitchens.

Amis’s widow Isabel Fonseca spoke about his last few months. Having never gone for country life – ‘I like to see a shop’ – he became ‘a regular outdoorsy guy’ in Florida. He kept his first and only New Year’s resolution, to resume smoking.

‘He did everything he wanted to do and almost none of what he didn’t. He had a nuclear family with no animosities. It was a happy ending.’

Bill Nighy read from The Information and Inside Story. Nick Laird read from William Blake’s Songs of Experience JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Fear the heat of the sun

The sad death of Dr Michael Mosley is a warning to us all this summer dr theodore dalrymple

It is easier, said La Rochefoucauld, to give good advice than to take it. If this were not so, doctors, who spend so much of their time advising others about how to live longer, would live longer themselves – which they do not, when education and social class are taken into account.

I myself have several times put my life at risk by doing what I should never have advised other people to do – at least for the sake of their health.

The tragic death of Dr Michael Mosley at 67 on the Greek island of Symi reminds us, if we needed to be reminded, that we are not immune to the effects of climate.

Excessive heat can kill. It has been estimated that the rate of heart attack rises by 18 per cent when the temperature is between 28°C and 36°C for two days. When it is between 34°C and 43°C for four days or more, the rate rises by 74 per cent.

Statistics revealed that, during an unusual heatwave in France in 2003, there were 15,000 more deaths than expected, chiefly among the elderly. For obvious reasons, those who lived alone were particularly vulnerable.

Excessive heat kills by more than one means. The body tries to keep its temperature constant. So when it is warm, blood is diverted to the skin in an attempt to cool the body by radiation.

Sweating leads to cooling by evaporation, but if the fluid and minerals are not replaced, dehydration can result. This places a strain on the heart, particularly on those hearts that

Do not wait until you are dehydrated to drink more than usual

already have less reserve than others –usually, but of course not exclusively, those of the elderly.

Moreover, heat can confuse. Heat exhaustion is characterised by, among other things, tiredness and headache, which are not usually aids to wise conduct. If it goes further, and becomes heatstroke, outright confusion and inco-ordination may supervene, and then fits and unconsciousness. Untreated, heatstroke leads to death.

Precautions to be taken are quite commonsensical. You should stay out of direct sunlight. Of course, not all hot weather is in the sunlight, and in very humid climates sweating fails to cool as much as in dry ones, because the sweat does not evaporate.

Find the coolest place possible and avoid strenuous exercise. A cool, damp towel will help if you are overheating or help to prevent you from overheating in the first place.

Both alcohol and drinks containing caffeine should be avoided, because they tend to dehydrate further: not all liquids are created equal in their capacity to rehydrate. Personally, I have always found soluble oral rehydration salts undrinkable. But, true to La Rochefoucauld, I suppose I should recommend them for others. I don’t much care for diluted fruit juice either.

People taking diuretics (likely, if they have high blood pressure) should be extra-careful. Non-steroidal antiinflammatories should be avoided, for they can interfere with kidney function. Do not wait until you are dehydrated to drink more than usual. The old and frail should not venture out alone in a heatwave unless it is strictly necessary. If a breeze is not accessible, a fan will promote evaporation of sweat.

Shakespeare tells us (so it must be right) that we should ‘Fear no more the

heat o’ the sun.’ But of course, he was addressing the dead rather than the living. When it is excessively hot, you should strive to be neither a mad dog nor an Englishman who goes out in the heat of the midday sun.

Let me put in a word about excessive cold. A paper in the Lancet not so very long ago estimated that 17 times as many people in the world die of excessive cold as of excessive heat.

This put me in mind of an old lady I encountered at a bus stop in Miami. She had a Brooklyn accent and was dabbing her forehead with a handkerchief, moaning, ‘I can’t stand the heat, I can’t stand the heat, I just can’t stand the heat…’

‘Why don’t you live somewhere else, then?’ I asked.

She looked at me in an old-fashioned way. ‘I can’t stand the cold,’ she said, after a pause.

RIP

Dr Michael Mosley, 1957-2024

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

To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

Third Man’s money man

SIR: Like Harry Mount (June issue), I have long been a devotee of The Third Man. As to why it was filmed in Vienna rather than London, the story I heard was that Alexander Korda had money in Austria from pre-war days.

Unfortunately, owing to currency restrictions, he could not get it out, even when the war was over. So he decided to use it to make a film set in Vienna. That seems entirely plausible – to me, at least. David Culver, London SE9

Rockin’ Nanette Newman

SIR: I read with interest your piece on Nanette Newman in Old Un’s Notes recently (May Issue), and it is wonderful that she is still with us. I have always been curious as to why she received a credit on the Rolling Stones track You Can’t Always Get What You Want on the Let It Bleed album in 1969. There must be an interesting story there. Perhaps you could persuade her to tell us more. Regards, Stephen Forster, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh

‘Patience, gentlemen – it’s still breathing’

Miracle cure

SIR: I have been completely free of asthma symptoms since receiving my first dose of a biologic antibody six months ago – a miraculous relief after 40 years of progressively worse wheezing. So I was delighted to see this breakthrough in asthma treatment getting publicity in Theodore Dalrymple’s column (June issue). I am lucky to live in an age when such breakthroughs occur.

But, to avoid raising false hopes, Dr Dalrymple should have pointed out that the treatment is applicable only to about half of all patients with severe asthma: those with raised levels of eosinophils (a type of white blood cell that protects your body from parasites, allergens, foreign bacteria, and outside organisms but can also cause inflammation).

In telling fellow sufferers of my wonderful good fortune, I am careful to make it clear that unless a simple blood test shows that they have a raised eosinophil count, they cannot look to these biologics for relief from their symptoms.

Mark Baker, Fyfield, Oxfordshire

‘I’m glad you haven’t got nine lives’

German lesson

SIR: May I be the 994th subscriber to point out that in Alexander Armstrong’s article on page 28 of your June 2024 issue, in the opening paragraph the spelling of the German phrase quoted should be das Land ohne Musik, as in German all nouns begin with a capital letter.

Regards,

Peter McGregor, Sheffield

Nanette Newman on song

Latin lesson

SIR: I will not be the only reader, I’m sure, to be dismayed by the suggestion in the Modern Life piece What is a vertiport? (June issue) that because the single-person aircraft being developed in California has eight propellers, it should technically be called an octocopter.

I can still remember my Latin mistress at school being deeply offended at the description of a helicopter’s landing area as a ‘heliport’. It is true that the word ‘helicopter’ is composed of two parts, but these are not ‘heli’ and ‘copter’ – which would seem logical – but rather helico (from the Latin meaning ‘spiral’) and pter (Greek, meaning ‘with wings’), an apt description of the original aircraft.

If all that sounds rather too pedantic, rest assured that I love your magazine, which always makes me smile and almost believe that being in my eighties isn’t so bad after all.

D Thompson, Malmesbury, Wiltshire

‘Well, I do and I don’t. Sometimes he can be quite irritating’

A cat writes...

SIR: As soon as Kathy’s The Oldie arrives, I turn straight to Readers’ Letters, without much hope of finding anything at all relevant to any of my nine lives. Imagine my delight to see in the June issue a letter featuring another feline Oldie-reader, Theo. I have to say he is a splendid beast; in fact a mirror image of me! Maybe we are long-lost brothers. Theo and Leo. You never know!

Leo West, Mountfitchet, Essex

Beware self-service

SIR: The Rant by Kathryn Cave (in the June issue) about self-service bagging areas has prompted my own rant against her motives for using the self-service option in the first place.

First, avoiding human interaction is both selfish and self-defeating, as it is pretty much acknowledged that such interaction is important for health and wellbeing.

Secondly, by using self-service she is conniving in the capitalistic strategy of taking away jobs from the people who need them.

Thirdly, it is well-documented that the use of self-service is, either through user frustration or by the granting of opportunity, one of the main drivers in the recent surge in shoplifting. One of the main impacts of shoplifting is that it drives up prices, which greatly affects us all.

Perhaps, with a little careful reflection, she might in future eschew the self-service option and brave the queues at the staffed tills.

Regards, Verne Sanderson, Tenterden, Kent

O tempora, o mores

SIR: I am very surprised to read that there is a rise in teaching Latin at primary schools (‘It was all Greek to Gladstone’, June issue). On the contrary,

in fact, I hear that many schools, such as the King’s School, Macclesfield, are dropping the subject, despite the number of pupils who wish to continue. Is it, in fact, in danger of becoming a ‘dead language’?

Clive Whittington, Bollington, Cheshire

‘Yes, he was a very, very good boy’

Country matters

SIR: After reading Frances Wilson’s television column (Spring issue) on the rock band Fanny, I was reminded of their appearance on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test in the early seventies.

After the show credits, the continuity announcer said, ‘After that first glimpse of Fanny...’ Kind regards,

Brian Faulds, Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire

Pacific rim

NICKY HASLAM

Christopher Isherwood – Inside Out

By Katherine Bucknell Chatto & Windus £35

In the early 1960s, as art editor of a prestigious US magazine, I commissioned Diane Arbus to fly to Hollywood and photograph that long-ago number-one box-office movie sex symbol Mae West.

The resulting portraits – in one, Miss West is in bed with two chimpanzees – were jaw-dropping when published. They eventually became the cover of Arbus’s book Magazine Work

With her eye for freaks, Arbus also ferreted out leaders of the many bizarre religious cults, then – as now – rife on that fetid Californian coast.

These subjects were a shade too weird to print at the time. Among the mildest was a terrifying old crone, ‘Bishop’ Ethel Predonzan, who believed Christ – in fact, her son – was locked in her basement.

There were other, less violent sects. Edith Maida Lessing presided, until she was sent to prison, over her love cult of the sun directed from a ramshackle compound she renamed Mount Helios.

Though the glamorous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (my father said she was one of the most seductive women he had ever met) was dead, her vast Angelus Temple still looms on Glendale Boulevard.

But, for Christopher Isherwood (1904-86), there were to be no such occult rituals or hysterical hosannas. Having said goodbye to snooty Europe, in particular to an increasingly savage Berlin, he found it difficult to write in New York (‘this hard, cruel town’).

So he and Wystan Auden, both ‘notorious for same-sex love’, headed

even further west, fetching up on the more tolerant shores of Santa Monica. Here in the Hollywood hills was the Vedanta Society’s gleaming temple, and Ramakrishna’s ancient Hindu teachings.

Introduced to the presiding Swami, Prabhavananda, Isherwood experienced powerful contact. Because the holy man was so small, he immediately loved him, ‘as I loved little Annie Avis, my nanny’.

It was to be a lifetime’s ascetic devotion to Vedanta, but, as another author has written, there could be likelier converts than a ‘sceptical sybaritic, egotistical and morally confused homosexual atheist’.

This is the second vast biography of

California Dreamin’: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

Isherwood in the last decade. Peter Parker’s 2004 Isherwood: A Life Revealed was already exhaustive, and Katherine Bucknell herself has previously published Isherwood’s letters to Don Bachardy, his last and longtime lover, still with us at 90. As Bachardy had previously given Parker carte blanche with all related material, one might think that in his 900 pages the ground had been pretty exhaustively raked over.

But no. Bachardy yet again ‘opened up his life without reserve’ to Bucknell. Clearly obsessed by her subject, she leaves no infinitesimal stone unturned in this new 729-pager. She has perforce found some heretofore unpublished details. But, as both Isherwood and Bachardy have always adored seeing their names in print, there is really not much to be found in Inside Out that could be classed as revelatory.

The author rehearses Isherwood’s comme il faut upbringing as minor landed gentry, the family’s descent into a genteel poverty and the strained relationship with his father and a disliked, forceful, doting mother.

Then follows Cambridge, the realisation of his strong sexual leanings and the pursuit of their fulfilment, decamping to Berlin and the welltrodden tracks of Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), the liaisons with blond Aryan godlets and other exotically homosexual foreign inhabitants.

Among them was the criminally inclined Gerald (‘Mr Norris’) Hamilton, and the captivatingly beautiful, opiumfed youth Denham Fouts, who was kept simultaneously by, among others, the ascetic millionaire Peter Watson, Lord Tredegar and a king of Greece.

Fouts, too, would years later tip up at the Vedanta temple, where the Swami harshly told him what he needed was ‘not meditation but hard work’.

These ancient Eastern philosophies and the West Coast’s phalanx of possible male partners made Isherwood decide to remain there permanently. Having re-encountered his idol from Berlin years, Berthold Brecht, now a force in The Industry, Isherwood worked on screenplays for major movie studios.

While engaged in – or agonising over

– many random affairs, he wrote the biography of Ramakrishna and romanà-clef (often with himself disguised as the clef) books, for which he soon became justly renowned and lauded.

The book’s second half concentrates on these latter Californian years. But the day-to-day minutiae somehow blunt Isherwood’s vaunted incisiveness. His affected remoteness and blandness become tedious, and through the continuing influence of Prabhavananda, he and his similarly minded circle become, willy-nilly, bores of perception.

He also seems totally humourless. None of the famous (and surely witty?) friends ever says anything funny. He seldom adds colour to meetings with illustrious figures such as Garbo. More irritating is the constant selfcongratulation on being gay.

The narrative comes to life when Isherwood sees two well-buffed 18-yearold brothers on the beach. By chance, a few nights later the boys and he meet at a party. Christopher kisses the younger of them, Don Bachardy.

It was a kiss that would last, through both rough patches and sexual fluidity, for both their lifetimes.

In time, the young artist becomes his permanent lover, and they build their determined homosexuality into a cult rivalling, for the reader, the tedium of gurudom. As the years pass, Bachardy and Isherwood meld into one person, even to the extent of growing to visually and mentally resemble each other.

Sometimes, at dusk, I drove out to the house on Adelaide Drive to see the Animals, as Isherwood and Bachardy had christened themselves. Christopher would smile enigmatically, though there was the steely glint of evaluation in his eyes. Don worked on his slickly beautiful portrait drawings. Past and perhaps future loves would pour the wine and start the music, as the sun dipped into the Pacific.

One evening – having been asked by director Vincente Minnelli to a party after the initial screening of Cabaret, based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) – I took a first edition of the book, asking Christopher to sign it for Lisa. He did, without much enthusiasm.

I had not realised till now that, pace his many admired books, he somehow knew that Cabaret was what he would largely be remembered for – and he hated Lisa Minelli’s performance.

Nicky Haslam is author of Redeeming Features: A Memoir

Lefty Footie

PETER MCKAY

Paul Foot: A Life In Politics

By Margaret Renn Verso £30

As his nephew, Paul, lay in a simple wicker coffin, the Hon Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader, read a tribute from Wordsworth:

‘Ye die not; do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live and take comfort! Thou has left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies.

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee.’

Three months later, at a sold-out Hackney Empire celebration of Paul’s life, a visibly ailing Michael Foot, then 91, whose nephew had died aged 66, told the crowd, ‘It’s terrible to think of waking up in a world where there’s no Paul Foot.’

This book is written by Margaret Renn, who worked with Foot at the Daily Mirror and Socialist Worker. Although she seems fond of him, Margaret doesn’t shy away from addressing the personal struggles of this privileged, uppermiddle-class man to navigate the left-wing world he chose to join.

The most famous and effective investigative journalist of his time was the son of diplomat Hugh Foot, Colonial Secretary of pre-independence Jamaica. Paul’s home there was a mansion in the island’s capital. His sister, Sarah, said, ‘We had a wonderful Jamaican nanny, who spoilt us both, sang songs to us, and gave us mangos in the bath.’

He was sent to Ludgrove, chosen by Charles and Diana for their sons William and Harry, ‘a ludicrously snobbish school’, he wrote later. Afterwards, he went to Shrewsbury, where he met Richard Ingrams, The Oldie’s founding editor, and Christopher Booker, later to become colleagues on Private Eye magazine.

At Shrewsbury, he became a victim of Anthony Chenevix-Trench, a serious classical scholar fond of disciplining boys who fell short of the high academic standards he sought by beating their bare bottoms with a strap.

Paul recalled, ‘He became extremely cheerful and excited. Clapping his hands in joyful anticipation, he would lead me

out of the study to his upstairs sitting room, where he locked the door, pulled down my trousers and pants, lowered me onto his sofa and laid into me with his belt. The blows hardly hurt at all, though the humiliation was excruciating.’

But his cousin Lily recalled, ‘He hated Chevenix-Trench. He thought he was a monster. I think this was the beginning of his sense of injustice.’

After Chenevix-Trench left to become headmaster of Eton, Paul became head of house, or praepostor. His regime was markedly less punitive than those of his predecessors.

He wrote a short story that illustrated his growing political sentiments, imagining ‘a large mountain, treacherous and steep. The plain below was a pleasant one, full of people who could become your friends… The mountain was Authority, and its twin peaks were Discipline and Leadership. The boys who tried to make it up the mountain became bitter and cruel in pursuit of power.’

‘I hate them,’ he wrote, preferring the plain, ‘where the boys were cheerful, helping each other and being helped.’

After National Service, Paul and Richard Ingrams – the former an officer, the latter an enlisted man – were reunited at Oxford.

‘I worshipped Richard and wanted to be near him,’ Paul later confessed. ‘I was in a position of total hero worship to him.’

On leaving Oxford, he admitted thinking that he’d been a great star. ‘I thought it was the same in life – you tried to be a star,’ he later told an interviewer.

His father knew Hugh Cudlipp, who ran the Daily Mirror, the Labour paper then selling four million copies a day. An interview with the great newspaperman was arranged. Possibly Paul imagined an editorial perch where he might regularly address the Mirror’s huge largely Labour-supporting readership. Cudlipp instead offered him a job at the company’s Daily Record in Glasgow, the

‘No Mean City’ city, famous for razor slashing gangs and striking, Communistinspired shipyard workers.

His first bylined article appeared in November 1961 as he celebrated his 24th birthday. It was about the shameful government treatment endured by blind people in Scotland, which provoked a big reader response.

He enjoyed less success, initially, as a public speaker in Glasgow. Orating about Communism in the city’s Sauchiehall Street, he explained that the Berlin Wall was built to keep out ‘bourgeois elements’, who sought to sabotage the East German socialist experiment. To which a heckler roared, ‘It’s there, you bampot, to keep the workers in.’

Our author Margaret Renn observes, ‘Paul had no idea what bampot was (“A foolish person”, Collins) but accepted that such crude common sense had something to it.’

I first met Footie, as he was called, at Private Eye’s chaotic offices in Greek Street, Soho, across the road from the Coach & Horses pub. There, fortnightly steak-and-chips lunches were held for around a dozen trouble-making journalists, politicians and others with tasty tales to tell.

He shared a tiny office with the ‘boilingly right-wing’ columnist Auberon Waugh. Despite their polar opposite political views, they were happy together. Gales of laughter came from their scruffy room, which Waugh had decorated with fancy William Morris wallpaper.

Footie however deplored much of the Eye’s material, particularly the Grovel gossip column, except when it contained abusive material about those he considered his political enemies. I remember him being furious over an Eye cover featuring a photograph of Irish Republican politician Bernadette Devlin which showed her knickers.

He left the Eye for the Socialist Worker, where he was paid less. But he was later lured by then Editor Mike Molloy to join the Daily Mirror and write a full-page weekly column. He initially refused the bumper salary offered before being talked into it but refused an office car.

What was he really like? Kind, funny, a great sense of humour, attractive to women – he was married twice. But class-sensitive souls often recoiled from his la-di-da accent. He sounded more like the major in Fawlty Towers than his ‘Dave Spart’ colleagues at the Socialist Worker.

Peter McKay wrote the Grovel column in Private Eye with Nigel Dempster. He is the author of Inside Private Eye

Joni by a phoney

CHRISTOPHER BRAY

Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

By Ann Powers Harper Collins £25.00

What did Joni Mitchell ever do to deserve Ann Powers?

The singer-songwriter has a scything soprano that can go from to harmony to hysteria in a breath. Along with her fresh-minted chords, she produces almost gratuitously clear ruminations on what in one song she mockingly calls ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous romance’.

But here she is transformed into a pre-feminist automaton, forever fighting shy of her complicity in her own repression.

This is weird because Mitchell is an object lesson in Conran-style Superwomanhood. She writes, she sings, she plays, she produces, she dances –and all the while she looks like Lizabeth Scott playing Joan Crawford in an Ingmar Bergman movie. This isn’t girl power. It’s girl to the power of infinity and a whole lot else to boot.

Still, in spite of all the agitprop ramblings, not to mention Powers’s wish to avoid ‘trudging along the timeline of [Mitchell’s] life’, the book gets the story told. The birth of one Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta in 1943. The lonely childhood in Saskatoon. The unhappily married parents: the mum who never took to motherhood. Nor did Mitchell herself. She fled the nest while pregnant

with a baby she would give up for adoption – the subject of her delicately tortured song Little Green.

Then we’re on to the string of musicians she’s bedded: Don Alias, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, John Guerin, Larry Klein, Graham Nash, Jaco Pastorius, Sam Shepard. This is a partial list of Joni’s lovers, culled from a quick trawl through Powers’s index.

At one point in the book, Warren Beatty hoves into view (for some reason, the affair isn’t itemised in the index) –‘an unusual flirtation’ for Joni, writes Powers, since Beatty was a ‘notorious Lothario’. Indeed he was, though since Lenny Cohen and Sam Shepard were no less known for, ahem, putting it about a bit, it can hardly have been that unusual a flirtation.

And, anyway, on the evidence amassed here, Joni wasn’t far behind any of those Lotharios in the bedpost-notch department. Just about the only chap mentioned in the book with whom Joni didn’t hit the sack is Bob Dylan.

Powers never thinks to ask, but any real Joni Mitchell devotee (which Powers admits she isn’t; as she announces with disarming candour in the book’s opening pages, Travelling wasn’t her idea but her editor’s) has spent at least a little time wondering if Mitchell didn’t occasionally chase after an unsuitable man to get another despairing ballad out of the affair.

Then again, Powers is adamant she’s not a biographer. Something in her ‘instinctively opposes the idea that one person can sort through all the facts of

another’s life and come up with anything close to that stranger’s true story’.

Fair enough. Still, beneath its loose, eggs-over-easy discursiveness and its emphasis on lumpen ideological posturing over the psychological truths of fantasy and love that have made Mitchell famous, Travelling is in many ways a standard-issue life of an artist.

The self flows out through the work, and the biographer completes the circuit by plugging the work back into the life. So it is that every song Mitchell has ever written and every album she’s recorded is dutifully mapped on to the lineaments of her gratified desires.

This is all very well, but the point of properly critical biography is to analyse how, in talking about themselves, great artists help illuminate your own existence.

‘If you see me in my songs and wonder about my life,’ Mitchell once said, ‘then I’m not doing a good job. If you see yourself, then I’m doing what I was meant to do.’

The irony is that Powers’s futile efforts to abstract from Mitchell’s art a feminism it has always disparaged only leaves you wanting to hear Mitchell absolve you of your hungers and heartaches one more time.

Never mind what Joni Mitchell did to deserve Ann Powers. Whatever did we do to deserve the genius of Joni Mitchell?

Christopher Bray is the author of Michael Caine: A Class Act

Pevsner’s Potteries

JONATHAN MEADES

The Buildings of England: Staffordshire

By Christopher Wakeling and Nikolaus Pevsner

Yale £45

Holy Trinity, Newcastle-under-Lyme, is an oddity designed by the Rev James Egan. Egan was not, according to Nikolaus Pevsner in the first edition of Staffordshire, ‘a connoisseur of the Gothic style, but he had the right ideas’.

His only building, relentlessly faced in blue vitrified brick, will always be remembered ‘with an affectionate smile’.

It is homely, cheerfully amateurtheatrical and no preparation for what was, but is no longer, to come just a mile or so east. There, from the top of ‘the bank’, one could see the Potteries laid out in fiery sublimity: hundreds of bottle kilns which recalled Puglian trulli,

‘Ever since Covid, I have no taste’

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Dogon grain stores, the nightmare of Nibelheim, John Martin’s apocalypses. This was epic. Was – no more.

Stoke-on-Trent was already, according to Pevsner in 1974, ‘an urban tragedy’. That was before the destruction of the kilns, which was, equally, the destruction of the genius loci

The subsequent half-century has witnessed the energetic trashing of the six towns (Arnold Bennett miscounted).

Where there were kilns, there are now big sheds, roads to nowhere, sites of failing light industry, delivery centres, call centres, many gauges of wire mesh, caravan parks, distribution facilities, fly-tipping, malls of no hope – an ever-mutating townscape of postindustrial mediocrity.

The one thing that doesn’t change is the Trent, whose source is just north of Stoke on Biddulph Moor, the subject of many ecstatically gloomy paintings by Jack Simcock. The river is massively polluted; the CEO of Severn Trent Water is massively overpaid. The inanely grinning Liv Garfield ‘earns’ a richly deserved £3.2 million a year. Her grubby stream produced 60,000 sewage spills last year, a third more than in 2022.

Next stop downstream: Burton. Once the brewery of the empire; now a car park. Most of the architecture of beer –the ale stores, the cooperages, the maltings – have gone, along with the private narrow-gauge railway which dominated the town centre. The magnificent and massive buildings gave the town its quiddity. They were the

town. It was unlike anywhere else, until it elected to self-harm.

Pevsner’s faint praise was condescendingly wrongheaded: ‘not without interest from the point of view of industrial archaeology and even of architecture’. Even though he was the leading architectural writer of his day, this opinion was an expression of the pack’s absolute orthodoxy.

It is small wonder then that muttonheaded councillors and arse-licking planners should adhere to the Pevsnerian hierarchy which privileges purpose over art, which values dreary churches over jolly bartons and has a puritanical bias that confuses solemnity with seriousness.

Today, Burton and Stoke are frail museums of themselves, amputees showing off the spaces where their limbs once were. The destruction of Staffordshire’s two defining townscapes is, or ought to be, a matter of national rather than parochial obloquy.

Still, man up! There are plenty of remaining buildings to abuse. And a few structures that might have extended the meaning of building.

‘Alton Towers is now the location of a huge entertainments complex.’ That offhand sentence is the sole acknowledgment of the congregation of rollercoasters, ten at the last count: Julijonas Urbonas’s Euthanasia Coaster is yet to be installed – it will do the job through cerebral hypoxia, ie starving the brain of oxygen.

Presumably rollercoasters aren’t reckoned to be buildings, even though

their tracks are evidently works of high-performance engineering. Rather similarly, the recent revision of the Buildings of England Dorset volume excised the previous edition’s mention of strip lynchets.

Staffordshire is as incoherent and unresolved as the ruins of Stoke and Burton. Nonetheless, picking through the rubble reveals a few jewels and more costume jewels.

The architect George Robinson was also art critic of the Manchester Guardian. He was pressganged by the editor to report on the Franco-Prussian war and thus became the only British journalist trapped in the two-month siege of Metz in 1870 – subject of Verlaine’s bitter Ode à Metz. For the rest of his life, the architect of Burslem’s spectacularly baroque town hall was nicknamed Metz Robinson.

John Lockwood Kipling – co-author of the kindredly eccentric Wedgwood Institute, a few minutes’ walk from the town hall – named his son Rudyard after the pretty reservoir where he and his sweetheart did a-courting go.

It was an inland resort: tea houses, boats for hire, modest chalets of a plotlands demeanour and the Lady of the Lake Boathouse by Larner Sugden.

Keeping up with metropolitan fashion was not a concern of these regional virtuosi. Of course, big names did build in the county – most obviously Pugin: ‘Nowhere can one study and understand Pugin better than Staffordshire.’ And George Gilbert Scott at Lichfield

Cathedral: ‘To the observant visitor, it is largely a Victorian cathedral, whose restoration may according to the visitor be regarded as a gain or a loss.’

The removal of the screen during Scott’s restoration of Salisbury Cathedral had prompted Pevsner to write in 1963 that ‘though it was a crime against the tenets of the Victorian Society, the need of the 13th-century cathedral was indeed greater than theirs’. Cathedrals are stones and so are incapable of having needs.

He had come to his senses by the time the first edition of Staffordshire was published a decade later: ‘Let Salisbury and Hereford be vandals and remove their Scott-Skidmore screen.’ He was right to have made that volte-face: aesthetics before liturgy.

Nonetheless, the ecclesiastical partiality of this revision is unbalancing. Half of the plates show churches, monuments, stained glass etc. This is a bias of convenience: the history of a misericord is far more readily traced than that of an inn sign: there was every chance that mine host was illiterate whereas the clergy were just wrongheaded.

Still, ‘the manic-depressive rugby footballer in the sky’ (the epithet for God is Peter Nichols’s) has the final word: the only important work of architecture made during the halfcentury since the first edition is George Pace’s massive chapel at Keele University – tough, uncompromising and, a priori, an industrial building full of bludgeoning wrath.

Jonathan Meades’s Empty Wigs will be published in February 2025

Low Life – and death

HARRY MOUNT

Spectator Low Life: The Final Years

By Jeremy Clarke Quartet Books £21.99

The qualifications to become the Spectator’s Low Life correspondent are pretty daunting.

The two incumbents so far – Jeffrey Bernard and Jeremy Clarke – had a prodigious appetite for drink. They died young – at 65 and 66 respectively.

But the thing that really set them apart was their pitch-perfect syntax and the ability to turn the disastrous pitfalls of their chaotic lives into comic gold.

Most journalism dates, but not the collections of their columns: they rise

above mere magazine articles to become perfect, 800-word mini-essays. It’s like gorging on sweets and never feeling sick.

This last collection from Clarke is as funny as ever. But the laughs are given a tragicomic edge by the discovery of his cancer, its remission and its rampant comeback, over a ten-year period from 2013 until his death last year.

Even though you know he’s going to die – and even though I’d read these pieces when they came out – the approach of death remains horrifying.

And funny. As Clarke lies dying, he spends his last precious hours tapping ‘the TikTok app and there’s Bernard Manning saying, “A man walks into a pub with a crocodile under his arms.” ’

The writing seems very relaxed but, in fact, Clarke worked incredibly hard on it.

The columns have a subtle structure, where he might start with Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory – ‘A very welcome touch on the brakes of the Enlightenment juggernaut,’ as Clarke puts it in his provocative way – and end with his brother’s doom-laden cancer test.

Writing about sex would be boring if it was all relentless excess and grotesque details. But Clarke made sex funny –‘She is the only woman to have poured syrup over me and coated me with Special K for breakfast.’

He described drinking in cool, objective, unflattering terms. His curiosity and observatory powers add piquancy to his depiction of the low table in front of him and two Glaswegian friends at the beginning of a ‘wee night’:

‘Three gin and tonics, two packets of fags, a souvenir ashtray from Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, a packet of transparent French cigarette papers, a

plastic syringe with hash oil rammed up one end, a disposable lighter, a portable Bluetooth speaker, and an open laptop.’

He was too modest to say it or even think it, but Clarke – for all the Jack the Lad persona he could adopt – was super-sensitive. As he writes about dining in restaurants near the Provence cave home he shared with his adored and adoring wife, Catriona, ‘How is it that people can sit so closely packed together eating and talking and not be overwhelmed by the hundreds of visual signals and impressions being given and received by and from 150 other diners each and every second?’

Clarke was never gratuitously cruel, but those powers of perception were so great that he couldn’t let idiocy pass by.

He is astonished by the efforts of his fellow ex-pats to move to France – only for them to end up sitting ‘on their fat arses in front of the telly and they watch sodding box sets… And they think they deserve a medal.’

The observation of others didn’t fade as death got closer. Even when he’s being tied up with wires to machines, he concentrates on his nurses:

‘Whereas the older nurse was effortlessly capable of subjectivity, objectivity, sympathy and imagination, the younger woman was limited to the first category only.’

Clarke is brutally frank about the horrors of cancer, too: ‘As I kissed her goodbye on the step, everything hurt and I’d just shit myself.’

He was incapable of writing a cliché. No sentence is wasted. His spare phrases are spot on: ‘that forbidding, peculiar aura of new wealth’; ‘the egotism turned right down to a manageable level that in musicians passes for humility’; the oncologist ‘with his new, possibly long-haul suntan’.

Clarke had a low opinion of his talents. He once said that the writers who rated themselves weren’t the good ones. How pleasing to discover that, in his final weeks, he came round to the realisation that he was actually pretty good.

In an email to me not long before he died, he wrote, ‘I agree with Graham Greene about Evelyn Waugh. He was our commanding officer.’ Then came his usual blast of self-deprecation: ‘That’s a hack – me – saying that.’

He added, heartbreakingly, ‘I feel I’m on the way out this morning. Watched Arena triple [the BBC documentary] on Waugh only last week as a finale.’

Clarke’s pieces were always brilliant and, in their final, black-comedy instalments, they surpassed Evelyn Waugh, his hero.

Jeremy Clarke by his wife, Catriona, in the Var, Provence, where they lived

History

Siege of Gaza – by Alexander the Great

In 332 BC, Alexander used tunnels and siege engines to defeat a Persian eunuch

david horspool

The man in charge of Gaza was confident that ‘it could never be taken by assault’.

He had prepared for a long siege and, in the face of overwhelming odds and an army that was used to victory, he and his Arab mercenaries dug in.

The besieging force had the latest technology to draw on, and knew that tunnels would play a crucial role. Both sides trusted to their gods, and fought in their names.

The besieger was Alexander the Great. The man holding out against him was a Persian eunuch, variously named as Batis, Betis or Babēmēsis, and the year was 332 BC. Alexander had triumphed at the Battle of Granicus and at Issus in Asia Minor against the great Persian empire of Darius III. He then turned south, towards Egypt, his empire’s furthest extent, which would eventually welcome him without resistance.

But Alexander’s progress along the coast of Syria had not been so smooth. First, the city of Tyre held out against him, in a siege that lasted seven months and cost thousands of lives. Then Batis defied him at Gaza.

The clash of Alexander’s Macedonians and Darius’s Persians looks mostly like a strategic conflict, a rising power led by a military virtuoso taking advantage of the relative weakness of his bloated neighbour. But political calculation is rarely the whole story. In the case of Alexander and his enemies, other things were going on too.

One of the most important was religion. Alexander was driven by a sense of divine destiny, which he traced to a mythical ancestry that impressively included Achilles, Herakles and Zeus. When he got to Egypt, he made for the temple of Amun at Siwa, which he viewed as housing the oracle of a deity who was another manifestation of Zeus.

When you look at Alexander’s journey on a map, it is striking how far west he went, almost as far as his starting point,

Pella in Macedonia, his homeland. It was religion that made him go the extra miles.

mercenaries makes it sound as if the people of Gaza were not necessarily naturally inclined to fight for the distant (and defeated) Persian emperor.

Incidentally, in Arrian’s 2nd-century-AD description of the battle, in Greek, the Arabs are called Arabes and Gaza is called Gaza. Gaza – from the Hebrew Azzah, meaning ‘strong city’ – has been inhabited since at least the 15th century BC.

Alexander the Great mosaic, Pompeii

The people he encountered were no less observant. At Tyre, the citizens had tried to declare a form of neutrality, but drew the line when Alexander insisted on performing a sacrifice in their most sacred temple at a particularly auspicious time.

The Tyrians were willing to pay an enormous price to withhold such an honour. Though they resisted for months and had their own successes, eventually the city fell. As many as 8,000 Tyrians were killed in cold blood, 2,000 of them by crucifixion. Alexander held his sacrifice, and a victory games to go with it, before moving on to Gaza.

There are barely any surviving contemporary literary records of Alexander. He had a court historian, Callisthenes, but only a dozen fragments of his work remain. The ancient historians we can read about Alexander’s exploits all come from at least three centuries later.

But there is enough overlap between them to allow us to be fairly confident that writers such as Arrian, Curtius and Plutarch had seen the earlier works. They might have embellished, but they probably weren’t making it all up.

None of them, though, tells us why Batis decided to tough it out in Gaza. The fact that his name, if in various forms, appears so regularly suggests that he may have commanded a personal loyalty. He was probably a Persian himself, but the mention of Arab

It is impossible to read about Alexander’s siege – his sappers tunnelling under the walls, his use of massive siege engines to overpower the city, the street fighting, the mounting casualties – without thinking of Gaza’s contemporary fate.

These are ancient echoes, though, not lessons. The people who fought over Gaza in 332 BC are in no sense ancestors of those who fight over it now.

When Alexander triumphed, after a two-month struggle, one historian says he had Batis ritually slaughtered, another that all the Gazans died in the fight. But they agree that the city was emptied of its population, the women and children sold into slavery.

Gaza was repopulated from the surrounding area, but found itself besieged again in the time of Alexander’s successors. A historian of that war, Polybius, paid tribute to Gazans ‘acting in unison and keeping their faith’.

They had done so against the Persians as well as the Greeks, but the result was always the same: defeat, death, enslavement. Empires and faiths rise and fall, peoples migrate, technological mastery grows, but we end up no further away from the human costs levied on both sides in the same place.

True believers, from Alexander onwards, are persuaded that it is all worth it. Everyone else, surely, wishes there was another way. Violence is never the solution, but if Gaza’s long, bloody history is anything to go by, it is all too frequently the answer.

Booze, broads or a bible … whatever helps me make it through the night.

Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s line inspired Kris Kristofferson’s song Help Me Make It Through the Night (1970)

It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture.

Ian Fleming, Thunderball

Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went.

Edith Piaf

A great change in life is like a cold bath in winter — we all hesitate at the first plunge.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1831)

The song you write that deserves to be heard, the brilliant piece of work, [people] don’t realise how brilliant it is, and it sits in a drawer.

Ivor Novello

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

C S Lewis

If anyone asks you what kind of music you play, tell him ‘pop’. Don’t tell him ‘rock ’n’ roll’ or they won’t even let you in the hotel.

Buddy Holly

Commonplace Corner

Booze and broads: Frank Sinatra

The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

Ronald Firbank, Vainglory (1915)

Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely.

Mrs Beeton

Keep engaged in the all new popular and fancy, positive side of things!

Captain Scott

We must eat, drink, sleep, be idle, love, touch the sweetest things of life and yet

asked in disbelief. ‘It’s July and it’s hot.’

‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but their air-conditioning will be on.’

not succumb to them. It is necessary that, in doing all this, the higher thoughts to which one is dedicated remain dominant and continue their unmoved course in our poor heads. It is necessary to make a dream of life, and to make of a dream a reality.

Pierre Curie

Better are the blows of a friend than the false kisses of an enemy.

Thomas Becket

It’s impossible to direct yourself in a movie.

Stanley Baker

The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood.

Daniel O’Connell

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

Robert Smith Surtees

I don’t think Ripley is gay. He appreciates good looks in other men, that’s true. But he’s married in later books. I’m not saying he’s very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.

Patricia Highsmith

Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?

Keith Waterhouse

in the lounge. I heard a vent rumbling but when I waved my hand under it, there was nothing coming out.

Air-conditioning

Have you ever shivered indoors in a heatwave in this country? I have – too many times – and I blame air-conditioning.

Last year, I took my granddaughter to a restaurant. ‘Why are you taking a cardigan?’ she

I explained that, after several visits, I’d realised it doesn’t work properly. Their system belts out icy cold gusts everywhere. There is no escape from the six large slatted squares in the ceiling. I asked a member of staff if she could turn it down, but nothing happened. So I put on my extra warmth.

Even more annoying is when the air-con doesn’t work at all. Last September, in yet another hot spell in Britain, I paid through the nose to sit in an airport lounge, as the main departure hall was stifling. Guess what? It was just as hot

‘Excuse me – why isn’t this working?’ I shouted to an assistant, pointing upwards.

‘It must be, because I can hear it,’ she growled, before rushing off. So, sweating buckets, I stripped off two

SMALL DELIGHTS

Dropping a pill or earring on the floor and immediately locating it.

DIANE REID, AVERTON, CHESTER

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

clothing layers, as many other travellers had done. What makes me angriest of all is that many small shops have either one small fan in a corner, or nothing at all. ‘We don’t need anything for just a few days each year,’ explained my hairdresser, opening a door and letting in deafening traffic noise and fumes. Really? What about last year, when we had weeks of increasingly hot weather across Britain?

I do realise that, in spite of these infuriating examples, there are some places with cooling systems that work really well. But, for Pete’s sake, other owners, think more about your poor customers’ comfort.

CAROLYN WHITEHEAD

FILM

HARRY MOUNT

THE DEAD DON’T HURT (PG)

To paraphrase that wise critic Homer Simpson: actors – is there anything they don’t know?

Never let an actor direct himself and write his own script. And yet that’s exactly what Viggo Mortensen has done in this catastrophically boring Western, The Dead Don’t Hurt

As usual, Mortensen is an extremely good, understated actor, playing Holger Olsen, a grizzled Dane farming the western American frontier in the 1860s. There he falls for scrumptious French barmaid, Vivienne Le Coudy (played beautifully by low-key Vicky Krieps).

When he goes off to fight for the Union Army in the Civil War, Le Coudy is raped by local bad boy Weston Jeffries (an agreeably wicked Solly McLeod).

Cue classic revenge movie – when Olsen comes back from the war to avenge his girl.

Arts

But then Mortensen had to go and direct and write it – and turn a good old, straightforward Western into a snoozefest.

How strange it is that veteran actors (Mortensen is 65) haven’t picked up some tips from the thrilling films they’ve been in. In Mortensen’s case, that includes Witness (1985) and Carlito’s Way (1993), both edge-of-yourseat movies.

Instead, the actor/director/writer must respond to some higher artistic calling. So they jettison all those crucial thriller elements: brilliant dialogue; every scene must have a point, advancing the plot; and that plot must grip you with constant urgency.

And the actor/director/writer must import all the crucial elements of the Boring Worthy Film. So Mortensen inflicts on us long, lingering shots of a waterfall, some barn-building and Vivienne Le Coudy whitewashing her ranch. So we actually watch paint dry. Why on earth do we have to endure

these endless, dialogue-free, plot-free moments? Well, they’re a useful way of taking a very simple story and stretching it out to two hours and nine minutes. The number one rule of Boring, Worthy Films is that they MUST be over two hours long – ideally, over three hours.

And of course Boring, Worthy Films aren’t allowed to have funny, sad or interesting dialogue. Instead, the lines must be flat and bland, to denote that the writer/actor/director is rising above the lowbrow, tawdry demand to catch the viewer’s attention.

So you end up with lines that are no more than ultra-plain exchanges of information – like when Olsen comes back from the Civil War to find Le Coudy with a new, unknown-to-him child, the result of her rape.

This should be a tears-in-your-eyes moment of loving reunion, crossed with a heart-stopping vengeance scene.

But the Boring, Worthy Film must remove any trace of sentimentality. Without an iota of emotion, Le Coudy asks Olsen – as if she’s talking to him about the route he took to the drinks party – ‘How was your war?’

‘Wrong,’ he replies, with zero expression. ‘Not what I’d expected.’

And when Olsen makes it to the coast with his little adopted son, having completed all his avenging, the boy asks him, moronically, ‘What is out there?’

‘The sea,’ says Olsen. ‘Water and more water.’

Mortensen also has to comply with another modern film rule: Westerns must be navel-gazing rather than exciting. We have to deal with tormented souls dealing with their PTSD rather than yee-haw, wild-at-heart cowboys.

So out goes sultry Marlene Dietrich belting out The Boys in the Back Room in Destry Rides Again (1939). Out go Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen

Watching paint dry: Vivienne (Vicky Krieps) and Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen)

gunning down Mexican bandits in The Magnificent Seven (1960). There are a few hookers in Vivienne Le Coudy’s saloon – but they’re sombre, soberly dressed mutes. No whip-smart flirting and low-cut, frilly outfits for them.

Mortensen could learn a lot from the dialogue between Joan Sims (luscious saloon-owner Belle Armitage) and Sid James (dashing baddie the Rumpo Kid) in Carry On Cowboy (1965):

Belle Armitage: But, Johnny, have you forgotten? I’m your little ding dong. The Rumpo Kid: I hate to have to say it, but your ding has lost its dong!

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 3rd August

Going to the theatre is often a maddening experience.

The seats are cramped, the tickets are expensive and fashionable productions are often spoiled by wokery and gimmickry. Sometimes, I’m sorely tempted simply to stay in and watch TV. And then, every so often, along comes a show that restores my faith and makes me fall in love with live drama again.

A View from the Bridge is such a show. What’s most notable about it is all the things it doesn’t do. It doesn’t try to reinvent a period piece for a modern audience. It doesn’t cast against type or take liberties with the text. This Theatre Royal Bath production plays it straight, and it’s all the better for it. It confirms the old adage: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge in 1955. Nearly 70 years later, its subject is more relevant than ever.

Immigration has become a political hot potato in Britain – never more so than during this summer’s general election. Miller reminds us it was ever thus – in the US as much as in the UK.

Yet, rather than writing a preachy diatribe about this contentious issue, he examines the experience of one immigrant family in 1950s Brooklyn, creating a timeless classic which transcends its era and its locale.

Eddie and Beatrice are a hard-up Italian-American couple heading down the long, lonely road of middle age. Eddie works at the docks, loading and unloading the big ships that steam in and out of New York. He’s a decent bloke, but he’s too uptight. You can tell there’s trouble ahead.

Eddie and Beatrice are childless. They live with their orphaned niece, a pretty, precocious girl called Catherine, who’s about to turn 18.

Eddie loves Catherine like a daughter – maybe a bit more than a daughter –and he’s terrified of losing her. Then he takes in two cousins from the old country, called Marco and Rodolpho, and his world comes crashing down.

Marco is a devout family man, here to make money for his wife and kids in Italy. Rodolpho is young, free and single, with no dependants back home. You can see what’s coming, but you have no idea how it’ll play out. Eddie’s love for Catherine isn’t overtly sexual – nor is it purely paternal. The resultant crisis is unavoidable. We watch it unfurl with gritted teeth.

Dominic West is magnificent as Eddie, flailing around like a wounded lion. Like all tragic heroes, he’s a moral man corrupted by a passion he can’t control or comprehend. West achieves this alchemy with immense skill and honesty. It takes a lot of guts to lay yourself bare like this. This is a fiery, fearless performance

which I would gladly pay good money to see again.

Eddie is such an overwhelming role that the other characters can easily shrink into the background. Full marks to all the other actors for fleshing out these supporting parts and turning them into proper people. Nia Towle is a feisty, fragile Catherine – part woman, part little girl. Pierro Niel-Mee is a mesmeric Marco – the moody peasant who becomes Eddie’s nemesis.

Kate Fleetwood breaks your heart as Beatrice, Eddie’s dutiful, defeated wife. Martin Marquez oozes gravitas as the sad, wise lawyer who narrates the play.

Callum Scott Howells’s Rodolpho is rather too nice (I would have liked a bit more ambiguity about whether he’s really as innocent as he makes out), but that’s my only gripe. Lindsay Posner has directed this play before and he clearly knows it inside out. As with all the best directors, you hardly know he’s there.

And, like all the best plays, A View from the Bridge gets better each time you see it. The first time I saw it, as a teenager, I identified entirely with

An Englishman in New York: Dominic West as Eddie Carbone

Rodolpho, and Eddie’s agonies left me completely cold. Now, with a teenage daughter of my own, I have a much better understanding of how he feels.

Letting go of someone you love is one of life’s most painful lessons, and it’s a lesson we must learn, or we’ll tear ourselves apart like Eddie. When it comes to confronting these profound matters, there’s no better forum than the stage. Theatre-going is full of frustrations and disappointments but at its best, as it is here, there’s nothing quite like it in all the world.

RADIO

HUNTER DAVIES

I never watch TV, except for football. But I have Radio 4 on all day, with radios in most rooms, in case I might miss anything – or want to turn it off for a few minutes. It is so annoying whenever I hear the dreaded words, ‘And now Thought for Today.’

Strange that I can’t face anything vaguely religious and yet probably my fave prog every week is Sunday Worship. Oh I do love it, singing along in my bath. I can’t sing for toffee, but in my head I can.

When my lady friend Miranda, a fab singer, is with me, she sings along as well. We are not in the same bath. Do you mind! How rude. She gets in first then I get in after her – singing the while.

I hated going to church as a child, forced by my mother, and have never gone since, but those hymns you learned when young, just like the poetry, stay with you for ever.

I listen to a lot of documentaries – until the rubbish background music starts. R4 has gone mad, adding tinkling, pointless, tuneless music to a taped interview regardless of the topic –another Covid special, Post Office horrors, D-Day,

blood-bank scandals. Someone just has to start on a harrowing account and tinkle tinkle, plonk plonk and a backing track begins. It’s as if we can’t concentrate on serious talk without silly music.

On Today, I always laugh when junior ministers address Nick Robinson as Nick, all the way through, as if they are best buddies, while not answering the questions. The election has perked them all up, trying to get the boot in, or make headlines. I am not sure yet about Emma Barnett. She tries to be bossy but has not got the well-bred tones of Sarah Montague on PM. Every guest is greeted with ‘Good Efternoon…”

Sarah is clearly R4’s headmistress, which I don’t think Emma Barnett is ever going to manage. Mishal Hussein has the nicest voice and manner, but I sense she is being eased out.

Start the Week usually avoids guests’ laughing. Tom Sutcliffe is so unctuous he has no time for jokes. At one time, Start the Week was known for being very noisy and argumentative, with loads of rows, and people falling out. It is now wall-towall book-plugging. I was a guest presenter once, back in the 1980s, when I was a regular R4 presenter. You must remember Bookshelf

I asked a famous actress why on earth she had sent her son to Eton. She was most upset and I never got asked back

In Our Time? Well, that is a legend –394 million programmes so far; so civilised and informative. And no taped music or forced laughter. Melvyn Bragg is an icon of our time. How can one small brain absorb so much new knowledge every week – and

including a poem read out in Old Norse. I can’t wait for them to justify their title and really get to our time, and cover stuff like women’s football or the Beatles.

But Melv is a treasure. Long may he flourish.

Valerie Grove is away

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens (BBC3) is another outing for spook-explorer and Radio 1 DJ Sian Eleri.

Her first go was in Paranormal: The Girl, The Ghost and the Gravestone, where she investigated Penyffordd Farm, Britain’s most haunted house.

Sian now visits the Pembrokeshire village of Broadhaven, where, in February 1977, 14 schoolboys reported a spaceship hovering above their playground. ‘Suddenly this silver, cigar-shaped object popped up from behind the bushes,’ said ten-year-old David Davies, interviewed at the time.

Instructed by their headmaster, the Broadhaven Fourteen drew pictures of what they saw and each produced a spaceship of the kind you get free in a box of Frosties.

Fifty years on, Sian tracks down the boys and discovers that everyone in the village saw some sort of extraterrestrial activity in 1977.

academics in line with a simple ‘Can you just tell me?’ I know he sticks to his framework, but it is still a miracle of broadcasting. did fewer classical subjects. Still, last week, they reached more modern times – well, the 12th century, with the Vikings in the Orkneys. It was fascinating,

Pauline Holmes had her car chased by an orange orb, Mrs Tibbs saw a saucerlike object in the sky and Mr and Mrs Davies saw a cigar-shaped light moving at high speed.

Rosa Granville, who owned the local hotel, was in bed listening to Spanish music when the signal went fuzzy and the cigar-shaped object landed in her field.

Out came two ‘monsters’ with ‘very long arms and very long legs’, wearing silver boilersuits and with no facial features. Within days, another local hotel was advertising UFO weekends.

‘Whatever this is,’ Sian says, ‘it’s spreading’. By episode three, she is able to report that ‘a big chunk of South Wales’ witnessed phenomena that it couldn’t explain.

In 1983, for example, Natalie in Swansea, then aged 13, saw a spaceship above her house and now believes she was abducted by aliens who wiped her memory.

Government files in the National Archive show that dozens of people in Swansea reported the same sighting.

66 The Oldie July 2024

Old boy & new girl: Melvyn Bragg and Emma Barnett

There has to be a rational explanation, says Sian, channelling The X-Files’ sceptical Agent Scully. In a lab in Oxford University, she learns how the UFO plasma effect can be made at home if one puts grapes in a microwave. That doesn’t of course explain the spaceship.

Aside from being drawn-out and repetitive, with more atmosphere than analysis, The Village That Saw Aliens might have been scripted by Orson Welles, who terrified America on Halloween 1938 with a spoof radio programme reporting an invasion by aliens.

Is what happened in Wales an outbreak of mass hysteria or the War of the Worlds? Even if you don’t believe in life on Mars, there’s nowt as strange as folk.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

GARSINGTON’S NEW CHAPTER

In June 1989, a small touring company performed Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro on the terrace of Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. The event had been arranged as a fundraiser for the Oxford Playhouse by Garsington’s new owner, the banker and musician Leonard Ingrams (brother of The Oldie’s founding editor, Richard Ingrams).

Leonard Ingrams had no intention of starting a festival, though that same year the Arts Council drove a coach and horses through southern England’s operatic landscape by axing its premier touring company, Kent Opera. It was partly because of this that Garsington was founded, with more country-house operas following in its slipstream.

Nowadays, Garsington’s home is a bespoke theatre on the Getty family’s Wormsley estate in Buckinghamshire, a stone’s throw from Junction 5 of the M40.

As a festival, Garsington has long been second only to Glyndebourne. And, nowadays, not necessarily ‘second’. Its 2024 programme is by some distance the more enterprising. What’s more, like Glyndebourne, it’s here to stay, thanks to the opening within the estate of the new £14.5 million Garsington Studios.

The company already has close links

with schools, arts communities and production companies in the area. Now a new chapter is opening.

The 2024 season launched with a production of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s rarely seen theatrical masterpiece Platée (ends on 30th June). Last year, it would have taken up all the Wormsley rehearsal space, while the season’s other productions rehearsed in east London.

Yet here we were on a studio tour with children streaming past from a rehearsal of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (performances until 23rd July, then a semi-staging at the BBC Proms on 10th September). Meanwhile, in an adjacent studio, the lead tenor was being put through his paces for Garsington’s much anticipated revival of Verdi’s early comic opera Un giorno di regno (performances 29th June to 22nd July).

The Verdi cast will include Robert Murray and Henry Waddington, whose playing of the drunken theatrical entrepreneur Thespis and his harassed sidekick were the glue that held together Louisa Muller’s staging of Platée. How good for them to be on site all summer, rather than commuting back and forth to London.

The eponymous Platée is a hopelessly vain marsh nymph who’s wooed by the god Jupiter in a comic sting designed to stop the ever-watchful Juno cramping her husband’s style where women are concerned.

Platée (Samuel Boden) and Jupiter (Ossian Huskinson) in Rameau’s Platée

Sian Elery, The Village That Saw Aliens

It’s a role Garsington’s conductor, Paul Agnew, has sung many times. These days, he works with William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, whose 2-CD Harmonia Mundi set of Platée is the one to have. That said, avoid at all costs the DVD of that same 2020 production, where director Robert Carsen turns this classically-inspired, anti-establishment rural romp into a critique of the French fashion industry: Karl Lagerfeld, Coco Chanel and the like. It’s a disaster.

Muller’s Garsington production was also updated, turning the Platée-Jupiter story into a reality-TV dating show, modelled on a phenomenon called Love Island. In as much as such shows deal in delusional people who can’t see beyond their own self-image, there’s a connection with the denizens of Louis XV’s Versailles court, which author Jacques Autreau was satirising in the novel whose rights Rameau acquired.

A colourful and spirited show, the Muller came closest to the original in the Prologue, and in the scene in Act 2 where Jupiter appears to Platée, first as a donkey, then as an owl. The latter created a cacophony of terrified local birds in which Rameau’s typically ingenious orchestrations anticipate the world of the bird-obsessed Oliver Messiaen.

Conversely, Folly’s showpiece aria fell flat, largely because the glitzy disco setting promised the kind of rockconcert hullabaloo neither the singer nor Rameau’s orchestrations could hope to deliver.

Garsington has billed Platée as an opera, which it is, albeit designated by Rameau as a comédie-ballet. True, the dance element was an addition to set it apart from the endless ‘lyric tragedies’ with which the long-dead Jean-Baptiste Lully continued to bore French audiences. But it needs to be fully choreographed. The Garsington production wasn’t, leaving quite a lot of the dance music high and dry.

Platée was tenor Samuel Boden. It was a charming performance that caught well the character’s mixture of petulance and gullibility. Too charming really, given that Platée is an elderly harridan who’s humiliated by a bunch of absurdly entitled toffs without a sympathetic bone in their body.

‘Let’s wage war on all that’s ridiculous’ is Thespis’s (and Rameau’s) battle-cry. The French do this very well – Platée is, after all, proto-Offenbach. So can we. But not necessarily in the narcissistic world of celebrity TV, where camp is in, and it’s de rigueur to love a queen.

GOLDEN OLDIES

MARK ELLEN BLONDIE MOMENTS

It’s the summer of 1975 and Chris Stein and his girlfriend Debbie Harry are on the Staten Island ferry.

The guitarist and singer with the little-known local art-pop group Blondie live in a cat-filled, bohemian Manhattan loft space and hang out with the kind of people who carry gold-plated bullwhips and have their own tattooing equipment.

Some of these exotic creatures are on the boat today, where they’re shooting photos for a self-written fantasy called Mutant Monster Beach Party, in which a tribe of surfers duke it out with a platoon of Nazi bikers.

Later that day, the band will play a ramped-up version of the disco hit Lady Marmalade at Max’s or the Mushroom, Debbie in a miniskirt and platforms (or a wedding dress from a thrift store), the audience awash with proto-punk rockers, leather-clad scene-makers, gangsters and drag queens with bejewelled headdresses.

Such is life – apparently one long, gloriously self-indulgent performance art project recorded in electrifying detail in the 74-year-old Stein’s new memoir, Under a Rock. When the band adopted their Mod Rat Pack look two years later and honed their music into blistering commercial pop hits such as Picture This and Hanging on the Telephone, we had no idea – and possibly haven’t till now – of the extent of the extravagantly outlandish, Fellini-like world they’d inhabited.

Stein’s life seems charmed from the start. Growing up in the tree-lined avenues of Brooklyn, he’s expelled from high school for his long hair and

accommodated at a freewheeling progressive alternative, where he loafs about, smoking bales of weed, attends war protests and Human Be-Ins and joins a band who support the Velvet Underground (Andy Warhol declares them ‘amazing’). His only brief paid employment in a sculpture studio has ‘a Kafkaesque futility’ about it.

Debbie, when he meets her, is a bikini-clad waitress in a Wall Street cocktail bar – loathed by the rest of the staff as she gets all the tips – and he joins her cabaret act, the Stilettos, who evolve into Blondie.

Their ascent soon after is a wonderfully described and rapid transformation from tiny, sticky-floored clubs to a level of celebrity where Jane Fonda, Mick Jagger and David Bowie drop by their apartment, and they make videos in the home of a billionaire member of the Saudi Royal Family.

And it’s full of fascinating insights into how it feels when your other half is an international sex symbol and the band are incensed that the press seem interested only in the member at the front in the thigh-high boots.

As if in some sort of divine punishment for having too good a time, the brief final act changes gear when Stein and Harry stumble though various drug problems and amicably separate.

I found myself flicking back to the days when they wrote songs such as The Attack of the Giant Ants, their riotous Australian tour, meetings with a guntoting Phil Spector and warehouse parties on the Bowery featuring members of the Ramones.

No matter how colourful you thought your life had been, Blondie World will make it feel a little prosaic. Very entertainingly.

Pretty baby: Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, New York, 1980

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 28th June to 8th September

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 6th July to 6th October

Horace Walpole’s Tribune room at Strawberry Hill was where he kept his favourite treasures. It has rightly been called ‘a chapel for the worship of the very best in art’.

It is the perfect place for the house to show focused displays or small exhibitions, and this one could not have a more fitting setting. Walpole’s own catalogue and correspondence make his little Gothic castle and its contents among the bestdocumented of the 18th century, although the collections were mostly dispersed in 1842. In 2018, an exhibition briefly reunited 150 objects, and now this focus is on one remarkable rediscovery.

Last year, Strawberry Hill showed a selection of silver and works of art from the Schroder Collection and, as a result of that collaboration, the curator Dr Silvia Davoli discovered something she had long been looking for.

It was a 4½in-high bronze head of the Emperor Caligula – he of the consular horse – which she had known only from a drawing by Walpole’s draughtsman John Carter. In the Schroder Collection, it was suspected of being a Renaissance copy, despite characteristic Roman silver eyes.

Now scholarly examination and scientific analysis have shown that it is indeed Roman, and a very rare likeness of Caligula, most of whose images were destroyed after his assassination.

Now almost the entire provenance has been established: from the Prince d’Elbeuf, a sponsor of the first excavation at Herculaneum in 1709; sold to Horace Mann; given to Walpole; and bought in 1842 by the dealer William Boore, who probably sold to Schroders.

The fascinating display in its former home conveys some of the excitement of art historical and scientific research.

Arachnophobes should not be deterred from visiting the celebration of Louise Bourgeois’s work in the galleries and grounds of Compton Verney. There are giant bronze spiders, of course.

Clockwise from above: Bronze head of Caligula Louise Bourgeois: Untitled 2004; Fleurs Topiary

But the Franco-American sculptor (1911-2010) was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She worked on many other themes and in other materials. The human body was as much her subject as was the insect, and she saw it as a form of landscape:

‘Our own body could be considered, from a topographical point of view, a landscape with mounds and valleys and caves and holes. So it seems rather evident to me that our body is a figuration that appears in Mother Earth.’

How interesting to see how it relates to the Capability Brown park at Compton Verney.

The Oldie

GARDENING

DAVID WHEELER

SUMMER READING

I treasure a few indulgent hours in the conservatory on a weekend morning.

I’m fussing over my new pelargoniums, small plugs bought through the post from Allwoods in Sussex at the end of April.

I’ve ground freshly roasted beans from the Gower Coffee Company at Britain’s last surviving Kardomah Café (in Swansea). There’s a stack of gardening books by the sofa with diversions by Sybille Bedford (Jigsaw) and Jan Morris – I’m enjoying a headlong rush through the final pages of A Writer’s House in Wales. Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is on the turntable, augmented by birdsong seeping into the room from the old sweet chestnut tree that proffers welcome midday shade.

the day for this evening’s seafood repast. There’s enough basil to fill the freezer with tubs of pesto to sweeten the coming winter’s bitter months.

The hydrangeas flourish. My 150 or so different varieties are the bones of a previous larger collection regrettably abandoned when we moved house three years ago. It was August, an impossible month to attempt the successful transplanting of mature shrubs. I brought instead as many cuttings as I could handle.

The soil type varies across our few acres, but I haven’t so far hit a patch of aluminium-rich acidic loam, the kind needed for the bluest hydrangea flowers. Annoyingly, several are an unsatisfactory shade of pink. Given time, I can remedy this, hoping again to see, within another year or two, mopheads and lacecaps of glorious lapis, azure, navy, sapphire and the deepest indigo.

flowers until the baton passes to the Michaelmas daisies, but to think now of such September lovelies is to wish summer away all too soon.

In the closing pages of her book, Jan Morris steps outside her beloved house, Trefan Morys, to give us a peep at the garden. It’s in near-coastal North Wales, near Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion (he was a friend and occasional visitor), where the climate can be unforgiving.

There, she says, ‘blackberry brambles show signs of aggression. Ferns proliferate not in the domesticated way the Victorians loved, but with an almost drunken abundance… Ivy and Virginia creeper threaten to smother the house.

‘If I were a poet or philosopher,’ she continues, ‘exiled here for my convictions, like Virgil in Constantia, I would be happy enough for the rest of my life.’ Perhaps she was, dying there aged 94, just three years ago.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN

Grey-leafed, white-flowered stock, Matthiola incana – the most welcome of all our self-seeders – fills these warm indoor cubic yards with a whole Jermyn Street of perfume.

My partner’s nearby herbaceous flower-beds are themselves a refulgent jigsaw – of blues and yellows: irises, aquilegias, agapanthus, salvias, euphorbias, the lovely rugosa rose ‘Agnes’…

Midst election fever, I was pondering which way to vote. July begs an X in the box for roses, but should I go instead for the herb garden’s summer plenty?

Thyme and marjoram proliferate in full sun. Tall fronds of green and bronze fennel await the trawlerman’s catch of

Meanwhile, I relish the intense monkshood blues. Easily sourced Aconitum nepellus or A carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’ are pleasing enough, but covetable duskier shades can be winkled out from specialist nurseries. Pale blue ‘Stainless Steel’ is on my wants list. Beware, though: these beauties are dangerous, containing a strong, fastacting poison. If mistakenly ingested, they can induce nausea, vomiting, breathing, heart problems and … worse. And if such nefarious thoughts appeal, better instead Marta McDowell’s latest, Gardening Can Be Murder – a deliciously entertaining dark read for the afternoon hammock.

Aconitums keep us going in blue

SIMON COURTAULD CARDOONS

The cardoon plant is named from chardon, the French word for thistle.

At the time of writing, my plant has lots of lush, silvery-grey leaves, with stems rising from the centre to a height of probably six feet next month, topped by globe artichoke-shaped thistle heads.

Cardoons have long been popular in Mediterranean countries, especially in Italy, where they are grown for their edible stems. A Still Life with Flowers and Fruit by my favourite Italian artist, Caravaggio, shows not the flowers but the stalks of two cardoons, one apparently lit and the other in shadow.

Shady deeds in sunny places

In Britain, however, cardoons have not been generally grown as a vegetable since the 19th century. They are often seen at the back of a flower border –the foliage of our plant looks well alongside a young birch tree – but I have never got round to trimming and cooking the stems.

The time for this is late summer, when the stems should be blanched for at least a month: wrap the midribs in cardboard or newspaper and tie string round the leaves. As with celery, cardoons will also need to be earthed up from the base to exclude the light.

If all this sounds a bit like hard work, it is still worth growing cardoons for their handsome appearance and especially their foliage. They can be grown from seed or from small plants, which are available from some nurseries, and should be placed three feet apart.

Bianco Avorio and Gobbo di Nizza are recommended Italian varieties.

A sunny site and plenty of water are necessary in the early stages of growth, and blackfly may attack once the artichoke heads appear. Otherwise, this semi-hardy perennial requires little attention, unless and until it is treated as an edible plant.

When the stems have been cut, they should be immersed in water with lemon juice to remove any bitterness, simmered to soften them and sautéed with butter and garlic, or fried with a coating of breadcrumbs and cheese. But I think I may continue to enjoy our cardoons while they are in the ground.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD PUFF, THE MAGIC PASTRY

Make the most of summer’s fruits and home-grown vegetables with your own buttery, flaky, light-as-a-feather pastry.

I know, I know – why bother when it’s so much more convenient to buy ready-made? This is all about to change.

Nicola Lamb’s Sift – an in-depth, no-holds-barred, gorgeously illustrated how-to from a professional pastry chef writing for enthusiastic amateurs – is the baking book that will change your life.

A newcomer to print, Nicola made her name and gained her followers – loads, including Yottam, Nigel, Jamie and Nigella – through her on-line discussion forum on Substack, Kitchen Projects (it’s free to join).

The buzzword in the book is ‘galette’ – a free-form puff-pastry tart (rough or otherwise) without a lip. Toppings are no

more than an inch deep, to allow the pastry to crisp and brown.

Choice of fruit or veg is whatever floats your boat. Possible combinations are apricots with almonds, peaches with raspberries, rhubarb with walnuts. Vegetables – well, slicing is essential, since everything goes on raw. Suitable candidates – young beetroot, courgettes, rutabaga, slivered potato – are even more delicious on a bed of herby, garlicky ricotta with grated Parmesan and an egg yolk to bind.

Apologies for the need to shorten the instructions – for the full glory, you’ll have to buy the book.

Nicola Lamb’s rough puff pastry

This is the classic English flaky pastry: perfect for a summer galette, sweet or savoury. Precision is everything. You’ll need the kitchen scales. This is serious. The result is 500g ready-to-roll pastry. For a galette to serve 4-6, allow 250g.

1) Mix 95g ice-cold water with 10g white-wine vinegar. Chop 165g cold butter into 2cm cubes. Weigh out 160g plain flour with 75g bread flour and 5g flaky sea salt. Put all the ingredients in the freezer for 20 minutes or in the fridge for an hour.

2) Combine the flour and salt in a mixer bowl and process with the paddle till well blended. Add the chilled butter and mix till lumpy (half breadcrumb-like, the rest still in 1.5cm chunks). Immediately add the water and vinegar and mix for about 20 seconds, till it looks hydrated (there will still be dry bits at the bottom).

3) Tip the mixture onto a clean, dry surface sprinkled with a little flour to stop it sticking. Roll the pastry out to make a rectangle 40cm long. Now make a double fold: fold both edges into the middle to make a three-layer package, then fold it again.

4) Roll the package out again to a 40cm rectangle, and repeat the double fold. Roll out again and repeat the operation, adding a sprinkle of flour when necessary to avoid sticking. Chill for an hour in the fridge before using. It’ll

keep well-wrapped in the fridge for three days, a month in the freezer.

5) When you’re ready to cook, preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F. Roll out dough to 3mm thick and place it on a baking tray. Spread the pastry with the filling in a single layer, leaving a 3.5cm border. Fold the border over the filling to make an edge so the juices don’t run out. If using fruit, sprinkle with demerara sugar and brush the pastry edge with milk and egg just before baking.

6) Bake for 40-60 minutes, till golden and bubbling. Check that the base is fully cooked – if not, cover the filling with foil and slip the galette back into oven for 10 minutes or so, till the base is crisp and brown. Serve warm.

RESTAURANTS

JAMES PEMBROKE

SOHO'S KITSCH KITCHEN

Dear Jackie is the talk of Soho.

So it should be. At last, some postlockdown joie de vivre. This superbly kitsch restaurant in the basement of the Broadwick Soho hotel, on Broadwick Street, is a paean to owner Noel Hayden’s mum, Jackie. It screams its arrival from the carnival-decorated front entrance.

It has been designed by Martin Brudnizki, who transformed Annabel’s into an impossibly lavish brothel, but its roots lie firmly in joyous seventies Bournemouth, when the English Riviera was peaking.

In 1973, during the last hurrah of the Anglo-Jewish Riviera, Jackie and Noel senior thought they’d open the Hotel Mon Ami, in Bournemouth, whose epicentre was the Green Park Hotel. Opened in 1943, it quickly became a glamorous kosher hotel for the AngloJewish aristocracy.

And why Bournemouth? Because it has a synagogue; Torquay doesn’t. My shy friend Steve told me that when he was a boy in the sixties, the Clores, Cohens and Wolfsons and the entire Jewish aristocracy would descend on the hotel at Passover, dressing for dinner and dancing.

Here they could relax and indulge, away from the disapproving eyes of the still anti-Semitic British. Michael Grade said of the Green Park, ‘You spent 50 weeks a year trying to assimilate and two weeks going back to your roots.’

Noel and Jackie wanted some of that ostentatious glamour. After careers in the circus, they brought their showbiz chutzpah right into the dining room. Twice a week, Noel would saw Jackie in half, with young Noel in glorious

attendance, complete with flared trousers and shoulder-width lapels.

They were incredibly successful, driving Noel junior, who was head of toast at breakfast, to school in a RollsRoyce, the mandatory carriage of the Bournemouth elite.

In his time off, Noel discovered the addictive joys of Space Invaders in the local arcades. They stood him in good stead when the hotel collapsed in the ’80s, thanks to the takeover by the Med.

The door to a lost world was closed. Noel junior went on to make a fortune in bingo and gaming sites, and is now having a lot of fun, righting the wrongs of his parents’ financial collapse.

It’s the warmth of the ground-floor bar and basement restaurant that engulfs you. Noel loves nothing more than taking his dear old mum there for dinner, surrounded by the green ceilings and red silk wallpaper, embossed with myriad plates. It’s not open for lunch. Speakeasies weren’t, either.

Dear Jackie rejoices in its absurdity – and the real surprise is that the food is absolutely wonderful. As is the service. We had the best scallops ever, shared with a very fresh sea bass crudo. We then skipped the pasta, which I’ll be trying out next time, and shared some tuna, which had barely seen a flame, and cod with borlotti beans.

It’s not cheap: a 175 ml glass of wine comes in at £12. I rarely order a pudding, preferring to eat everyone else’s. But the Campari and grapefruit semifreddo with almonds and white chocolate was irresistible.

The table next to us was made up of three generations of a large family who might have travelled by time machine from seventies Bournemouth. They were happy, unreserved and unrepentantly silly. Celebrate a big birthday there soon.

Fun is back in fashion.

DRINK

BILL KNOTT

A PINT WITH RISHI SUNAK

Thirty years ago this year, the splendidly named Mabel Mudge retired, aged 99. She had been landlady of the Drewe Arms in Drewsteignton, a pretty village in north Dartmoor, for the previous 75 years.

Standing on the north side of the village square, in the shadow of the handsome Holy Trinity church, the Drewe Arms is, as CAMRA describes it, ‘a legend in the annals of historic rural pubs’; as, indeed, was Mabel, whose record tenure behind the bar may never be surpassed.

The phrase ‘behind the bar’ is, though, metaphorical, as I realised when I dropped in for a pint in the middle of May. There is no bar, nor are there any hand pumps. I suspect that, some time in the 1920s, Mabel considered them newfangled nonsense. Instead, beer – in my case, a particularly fine pint of malty, mahogany-hued Otter Ale – is poured straight from the cask, and served through a hatch. Mabel herself, by all accounts, never touched a drop.

But had I visited just a couple of months earlier, the pub would have been closed, as it had been for the previous two years. Whitbread, who had owned the pub in Mabel’s day, had sold it to Enterprise Inns. They were then swallowed up in a multibillion-pound deal by Stonegate, who promptly put the freehold up for sale, content to concentrate on their other 4,800 pubs.

In the shark-infested waters of the giant pub companies, what hope was there for a Devon minnow?

Happily, the minnow is not just surviving, but thriving. A group of philanthropic (and no doubt thirsty) villagers started a campaign to save the pub, raised £550,000 in just six weeks, and turned the Drewe Arms into a community pub. There are great plans for its future, including offering accommodation, hosting events and souping up the kitchen.

They are not alone. It is more than 50 years since the first ‘community pub’, the Red Lion, in Preston, Hertfordshire, opened its doors. Over the following 44 years, according to CAMRA’s statistics, a modest 55 more opened, and the trickle has become a flood – there are now 192 community pubs in the UK.

A handful of them, their viability restored, have returned to private hands, but the remainder are all going strong. Among the wasteland of pub closures, community pubs offer a beacon of hope, many of them aided in their endeavours by the admirable Plunkett Foundation.

Just a few days after I savoured that magnificent pint of Otter, the Drewe Arms had a distinguished visitor. Rishi Sunak, our Prime Minister (at the time of writing), posed with a pint for photos with the pub committee, an assortment of locals and Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride, the local MP who had helped with the villagers’ campaign.

His beer mug was, however, filled with lemonade. Sunak, you might say, puts the teetotalling TT into Otter, quite possibly the only characteristic he shares with the late, great Mabel Mudge.

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, all of which should happily slake a summer thirst: a good-value Chilean alternative to ever-pricier Mâcon; a classic rosé from an excellent winemaker; and an easy-drinking Beaujolais packed with ripe fruit. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Rio Alto Chardonnay, Aconagua, Chile 2022, offer price £9.95, case price £119.40

Generous tropical fruit, kept in check by a twist of citrus. Perfect with smoked salmon.

Moulin de Gassac Rosé, Guilhem, Pays d’Hérault 2023, offer price £9.95, case price £119.40

50/50 Grenache and Carignan, from France’s deep south; pleasingly pale and floral.

Beaujolais-Villages Rouge, Cave de Fleurie 2022, offer price

£10.95, case price £131.40

Fruity, well-made Beaujolais with supple tannins. At its most refreshing when slightly chilled.

Mixed case price £123.60 – a saving of £31.99 (including free delivery)

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Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 20th August 2024

SPORT

JIM WHITE

MINI-GRANDMASTERS

Next time you play your grandson at chess, don’t be surprised if he unleashes the French Defence Advance Variation 1, beating you with a subtle, decisive attack on your king. Just like policemen, Premier League footballers and French Prime Ministers, chess champions are getting ever younger.

The leading young light is a ten-year-old from Argentina, called Faustino Oro.

grandmaster in a classic match, when he saw off Milko Popchev in the Belgrade Open. At 59, Popchev was more than seven times older than his vanquisher. It must have been a chastening moment.

He has already finished ahead of the world’s top three ranked players in an online quick-fire competition. The three of them had assumed their experience, knowledge and collective wisdom would see off youthful enthusiasm. But Oro’s speed of thought and ability to change strategy in an instant completely outflanked them. Forget about the attention span of the young lasting less than two minutes.

And in Britain we have plenty of under-tens hurtling round the board. There’s Bodhana Sivanandan, a nineyear-old from Harrow, who has performed well against the best women in Europe.

Then there is the Westminster Under School pupil Ethan Pang, who, at nine, is England’s fastest improving player, unbeaten in his last 16 competitive matches. He recently made it to the last round of the East Anglian Open in Newmarket, but was obliged to miss out on the final set of games because – wait for it – he had to do his homework.

So there is a get-out the next time you are about to be cornered by your grandchild’s Queen – even if ‘Haven’t you got some maths to do?’ is a pretty desperate gambit.

They will be fined for every vehicle they sell below those limits.

This is the mandate that Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis (14 brands, including Citroën, Peugeot, Vauxhall and Chrysler) and Jim Farley, head of Ford, are warning about.

Farley put it succinctly: ‘Even the most radical, decarbonising politician can’t afford to be on the wrong side of the customers.’ In the face of weakening demand for EVs (electric vehicles) on grounds of practicality and cost, he speculates that the long-term solution will be hydrogen or some sustainable fuel, and that government attempts to compel mass adoption of electric will meanwhile fail. A lower level of adoption is achievable, but basically you can’t buck the market.

Tavares has the same message, albeit with slightly different reasoning. Like Farley, he supports ramping up EV sales but calculates that ‘the natural demand of the market today in the UK for EVs is half of the mandate’. If the Government insists on more and fines for failure, profits will disappear and so will the companies.

He can cheerfully sit at the board for up to eight hours a time – without the kind of lavatory breaks we require.

Mind, he has had plenty of practice. Encouraged by his parents, the lad has been playing chess since he was three.

His parents moved the entire family to Barcelona when he was eight, so he could be at the centre of European competition (and be geographically closer to the best coaches). He trains for hour upon hour every day, honing his craft, learning, determined to become the best player in the world before his teens. Along the way, he has absorbed the clichés of professional sportspeak.

‘It’s an effort,’ he said of his daily routine in an interview with chess.com.

‘You always have to make an effort in any sport. You strive a little more each day, and you can reach your goal. Nothing is impossible in life.’

Such is the similarity in his trajectory (including a childhood move from Buenos Aires to Barcelona) that he has been christened the Messi of chess. His King’s Indian Defence is the chess equivalent of his compatriot Lionel’s mazy dribble.

But Oro is by no means an outlier. One unexpected consequence of pandemic lockdowns was children’s taking up chess. And everywhere they are proving rather good at it.

Earlier this year, eight-year-old Leonid Ivanovic from Serbia became the youngest person ever to defeat a

MOTORING ALAN JUDD

END OF THE ROAD FOR UK CARS

For some years after the Second World War, Britain was the world’s leading car-exporter.

But the Attlee government’s policy of low investment and low growth, followed by decades of botched mergers, myopic management, self-destructive unions and poor labour relations ensured there is no longer a British-owned car industry of any scale.

Although we’re now a minnow internationally, there is still a significant UK motor industry – largely foreignowned. In the year to April, it produced 678,822 cars and 118,701 vans and light trucks, plus over 1.5 million engines.

The industry employs about 182,000 people directly and over 600,000 in allied jobs, and exports 80 per cent of its products. But now two leaders of that industry have warned the Government, ‘You have a mandate that is going to kill your industry.’

When the Prime Minister moved the targeted date of UK’s ban on new ICE (internal combustion engine) sales from 2030 to the EU’s 2035 (formerly the UK position too), he got stick from the environmental lobby. This was despite the fact he kept in place the ratchet requiring motor manufacturers to ensure at least 22% of their sales are electric this year, rising to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035.

What then, he asks, is the benefit of manufacturing in the UK? International companies such as his will cut jobs, close factories and go elsewhere. In a recent meeting with Transport Secretary Mark Harper, he suggested ameliorating measures such as including light commercials and exported models in the mandate.

Although not directly addressed by either CEO, a major additional threat is worldwide overproduction of EVs, especially in China. According to one estimate, there could be 20 million EVs surplus to demand within three years.

China, faced with declining home sales, will increase its already formidable export drive. They will offer muchimproved cars, such as those now produced by BYD and MG, at prices European manufacturers could not possibly match. Combined with mandates such as the UK’s, this could destroy the home industry. Robert Lea, industrial editor at the Times, reckons it would be a collapse on a par with the dotcom boom.

Most things, wrote Philip Larkin in Aubade, his late, great poem about death, may never happen. Maybe this won’t. I suspect either this government or the next will be forced to water down the mandate. Indeed, Rishi Sunak may feel he has no more votes to lose – maybe even a few to gain – by acting boldly now.

If he doesn’t, it’s hard to imagine Keir Starmer hymning a better Britain with the motor industry crashing about his ears.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Lost art of map-reading

One of the sensations of our brave new digital world is the Global Positioning System (GPS).

It tells you where you are, and the easiest way to get to somewhere else. It is invaluable when you’re trying to negotiate an unfamiliar town. No more A-Z on your knee – GPS will guide you.

As with all silver linings, there are clouds attached. As a result of the ease of GPS, almost nobody under the age of 40 can read a paper map. What’s worse is that they can’t see the point of learning;

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Wills https://tinyurl.com/webster411 National Archives: wills before 1858 can be downloaded for free.

Elections commonslibrary.parliament.uk/tag/ elections-data/ Historic election data from the Commons Library (in case you haven’t had enough).

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

they trust GPS implicitly. It’s a shame. They are missing so much.

It’s true that there are some benefits to maps that can be brought up on your phone. They are updated all the time (no need to buy a new map, ever). You can’t get lost, as GPS will insert a little ‘You are here’ arrow. But sometimes there is no signal. Sometimes your phone runs out of juice.

I’ve just come back from Devon, with good walks every day, and I determined to try out digital map-reading methods. My wife, the brains of the outfit, bought the relevant, hard-copy Ordnance Survey maps – the classic Landranger editions, full of footpaths, bridleways, churches and rivers.

As the digital enthusiast, I initially scoffed at this old-fashioned approach. I insisted that using online maps on our phones was the way forward, and set about proving just how right I was. Or, as it turned out, how right I wasn’t.

In the event, we were both right, to some extent. The secret is to use the best of both.

I was delighted to discover that the OS maps came with a secret code that allows you to download a full copy of the map onto your phone or tablet, at no extra cost. It’s a brilliant idea; once it’s downloaded, you don’t need a phone signal to view it. So now you have two copies.

I then hunted around for digital alternatives. There are hundreds, most of

them awful, but one I liked: mapmywalk. com. The free version is all I needed. Once set up, it keeps track of where I’ve walked, laying a trail of digital breadcrumbs, as it were.

This was especially helpful in a National Trust forest we were exploring. We were encouraged to wander wherever we wanted, on and off paths. So the opportunities for getting in a muddle were considerable.

With MapMyWalk, we were able to see not only where we had been, but how to get back to the car. It gives you a crosssection of hills you’ve climbed. It tells you how far you’ve walked and even how many calories you’ve expended, if that matters to you.

Despite my enthusiasm for things digital, I challenge anyone, of any generation, not to enjoy unfolding and studying the real, paper OS map. Paper maps are dependable, and of course much bigger than your phone’s screen. They give you a far better chance of getting a feel for the whole area.

Paper maps also offer a blessed relief from the digital world of alerts, advertising and online notifications. If you want to feel closer to nature, a paper map is the way to go. But don’t ignore the digital options.

Never forget that OS maps, on- or offline, seem to be the only ones that will show you the nearest PH (public house) – that vital finishing point for any good walk. Worth the price of any map.

Neil Collins: Money Matters

Wall Street Covid Crash

Do you remember Covid? Of course you do – you’re still here.

You survived lockdown, the thought police, WFH and learning to use your computer. You also (I hope) decided not to buy shares in Peleton, Zoom or some hotshot Japanese pharma company whose name you couldn’t pronounce. If so, congratulations. The stocks that glittered during those dark days have fizzled out. Indeed, the FT and Bloomberg calculate that they have lost

a combined $1.5 trillion in market value – that’s twice the UK’s economic output for 2023. The money hasn’t exactly gone, since it was there only on paper in the first place, but looking at the worst falls may help you avoid the next bubble.

We were going to get fit – so, while we couldn’t get out much, what better than a stationary bicycle with a telly so you could spin along virtual roads?

This wizard wheeze was worth $45 billion at the beginning of 2021.

Since then, Peleton shares have joined the 90 per cent club, of shares which have lost nine-tenths of their value. It seems we decided not to pay for a bicycle to nowhere, after all.

Slightly less of a ski jump is the price of Zoom – something we have been forced onto for those surreal (‘You’re on mute!’) meetings. They may be here to stay, but that has not stopped 80 per cent of the share value evaporating.

As for those heroic developers of

vaccines, given that they’d achieved something close to a biological miracle, their shareholders hoped that profits, high ratings for the shares and general prosperity would follow.

Pfizer, one of the vaccine pioneers, has only (only!) halved since its peak, and the shares are now so lowly rated that they yield a distinctly non-glamorous 5.9 per cent. Moderna, another vaccine-maker, is down 70 per cent. AstraZeneca has actually stopped making Covid vaccine altogether.

You get the picture, and it’s not pretty. That the fallen are mostly US shares is of some comfort, although the way British investors have deserted UK stocks suggests that some expensive lessons are being learned at home.

Today, you might fancy buying shares in Nvidia. Had you bought them a year ago, you would have tripled your investment, thanks to its incomprehensibly clever microchips

invites

you on a

which are underpinning the rush into artificial intelligence.

You can buy the shares on 75 times last year’s earnings per share, and receive a dividend of $2 for every $10,000 you invest. It does seem a little late to join the party, given the speed with which technology continues to advance, and the way those deep-pocketed players such as Microsoft, Google and Apple feel rather miffed at missing the AI party.

Just saying.

tour of the châteaux, gardens and gastronomy of the Loire Valley

With Huon Mallalieu 8th to 15th May 2025

Come and enjoy la douce France. It’s ten years since we last went to the Loire and we are still keen to ring the changes with some new destinations. So, with the help of Oldie-reader Rose Angas, we have devised this itinerary of the region which she has known for 35 years. She has unveiled some hidden gems for you, and has also chosen all the fabulous restaurants for our lunches.

Huon Mallalieu (pictured above), a veteran of Oldie trips, and Oldie Publisher James Pembroke will be leading the trip.

We have booked the entire Château de Perreux near Amboise. We will have dinner there most evenings.

Better by rail

Weary of airports? You’ll be delighted that we will be travelling to Tours by train, with G7 taxis taking us from Gare du Nord to Montparnasse. The total journey time is just five hours, during which you can stretch your legs and take in the view. You can even bring back a few bottles of delicious Loire wine.

Thursday 8th May – arrival 11.31 depart St Pancras for Gard du Nord; 2.47pm arrive and take pre-booked G7 taxis to Montparnasse; 4.15pm depart Montparnasse; 5.30pm arrive at Tours

station, which is 20 minutes from the château. Talk by Huon and dinner.

Friday 9th May – Tours

L’Auberge de Montpoupon at Céré-laRonde, followed by a visit to Chaumont’s international garden festival.

Monday 12th May – Plantagenet Day

Visit to the magnificent fortress of Chinon; wine-tasting and lunch at Ververt restaurant, in Montsoreau, followed by a visit to Fontevraud-l’Abbaye to see the tombs of Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Tuesday 13th May –Saumur and Villandry

Visit to the 12th-century Cathédrale St-Gatien, the Château de Tours and 17th-century Musée de Beaux Arts. Lunch at Le Chien Jaune, followed by a stroll around the picturesque Place Plumereau.

Saturday 10th May – Loches and Montrésor Tour of the town on market day including the Lansyer art museum; lunch at Arbore & Sens; afternoon visit to the pretty château of Montrésor.

Sunday 11th May – Montpoupon and Chaumont garden festival

Morning visit to the hidden gem of Château de Montpoupon; lunch at

Morning tour of the town, including a crémant winetasting at Cave Bouvet Ladubay; lunch at Brasserie la Bourse des Gourmets and visit to the château and worldfamous gardens of Villandry.

Wednesday 14th May – Azay-le-Rideau and Villaines-les-Rochers

Morning visit to Azay; lunch at Pom’Poire; then on to Villaines, a delightful troglodyte village with local artisans’ willow work in their museum – livingwillow sculptures as well as baskets etc.

Thursday 15th May – and home

12pm depart from Tours station; 1.15pm arrive Montparnasse; taxis to Gare du Nord to catch the 3.07pm train, which arrives at 4.40pm at St Pancras.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £3,495, which includes return train fares to Tours, which we at The Oldie will book, all meals, wine with meals, all transport and entrances. Single supplement: £500. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st February 2024.

Above: Château de Perreux. Right: Tomb of Richard the Lionheart, Fontevraud-l’Abbaye

Manx shearwater

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

The Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus) spends most of its life at sea. It is largely invisible on land by day, despite the dense colonies that exist on certain British islands, where it migrates from the south Atlantic to breed in summer.

The world’s largest colony (300,000) is on Skomer off the Pembrokeshire coast. For a daytime visitor, puffins and guillemots are the avian attraction. Only burrow-riddled ground hints at the hidden presence of shearwaters.

Ronald Lockley (1903-2000) took a 21-year lease of the neighbouring island of Skokholm in 1927. He established the first British bird observatory there in 1933 for his pioneering research on breeding colonies of Manx shearwaters (‘cocklollies’), puffins and storm petrels.

In The Island, he described the shearwater’s predatory-gull-avoiding nocturnal arrival. ‘By midnight, thousands of cocklollies arrived from the ocean. Their crowing vibrated into a crescendo from every quarter of the island, above and below ground.’

At times, it was ‘a long-drawn sob of human agony; at others, a deafening concert of witches, burning at the stake’.

Every step after midnight had to be taken with care to avoid treading on the long-winged, pigeon-sized birds. They ‘seemed helpless on land, waddling a few steps then vanishing into a burrow. Presently a duet issued, as the mated birds discussed their affairs under the earth with unearthly cackles.’

Shearwaters share incubation of the single egg and nursing of the chick, one parent starving for up to six days while its mate replenishes itself at sea. Its chick or ‘puffin’ – hence Puffinus; the puffin (Fratercula arctica) is an auk – is fed by regurgitation. Fledged and grossly fat, peaking in September, it makes the hazardous journey to the sea alone.

The shearwater’s sharp beak and nails enable burrowing, although rabbit burrows are often used. Lockley

concluded, from severe pecks he received from nesting shearwaters and puffins, that rabbits yielded to both ‘in the peck-order of dominance below ground’. His book The Private Life of the Rabbit inspired his friend Richard Adams’s Watership Down.

Today, the technology that landed a man on the moon is dwarfed by the likes of the global navigational satellite device GPS (Global Positioning System), containable in a wristwatch. Tracking technology – miniature geolocators, immersion logs etc – has transformed modern ornithology.

Tim Guilford, a leading seabirdtracking researcher, has updated Lockley’s Skokholm research on Skomer.

Lockley released a Skokholm shearwater in Venice, which arrived back home in two weeks via the Alps. Today, the shearwater’s sea journeys are an open book.

In his Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture ‘The Shearwater’s World’, Guilford reported Atlantic resting and foraging ‘stopovers’. A notable hot spot for marine pelagic species prior to breeding is the central North Atlantic. Shearwater dives average under 9m –but one was 55m.

Other revelations are that an egg can be left unincubated for up to ten days; and frequent local fishing to feed the chick contrasts with 1,500-mile refuelling trips to more plentiful waters.

Travel

Drinks with the Queen of the Adriatic

Drink & Think Venice: The Story of Venice in TwentySix Bars and Cafés or A Counterblast Against Too Sober an Inspection of Monuments is a new book, published by Blue Guides. I took it on a walk around Venice, in the style of the great J G Links. His Venice for Pleasure (1966) was written in much the same spirit. He refused to take sightseeing too seriously – habitually opting for coffee instead of more Canova, tea instead of yet another Tiepolo – yet

he somehow imparted a wealth of erudition, knowledge and good advice.

San Marco to Santo Stefano Before setting out on our walk, let’s visit Harry’s Bar.

This mighty establishment suffers from its own celebrity, because there is a type of international tourist who seems to imagine the chief reason to go there is to sit down to a meal, despite the fact that the chief reason to visit Venice can never be to sit down to a meal: the city is not for epicures.

Go there for a vodka martini while the crowds are still thin. Robin Saikia, author of Drink & Think Venice, recommends late morning. This is an admirable way to begin an excursion, especially when the vodka is ice-cold and when the addition of vermouth is no more than nominal.

At 11am – or half past ten, if we can realistically be done with our coffee and breakfast brioches by that hour – Harry’s will not be crowded. Sit in that impeccably simple room, savouring your vodka and musing on those who have done so before you: Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Coco Chanel…

It is a few steps to the first stop on our walk, the church of San Moisè.

It lies along the enfilade of calli, always thronged by people bent on spending their holidays in queues, first at the Accademia and then at St Mark’s. But breathe freely; we shall spend no time in either. Churches, one might object, were not built for giving pleasure. But in Venice we cannot possibly avoid them all.

We will do no more than examine the exterior of this one. It was deplored by Ruskin for its ugliness; we will contemplate instead its dedication: to Moses. Churches are not generally dedicated to Old Testament figures, but in Venice we find a church to Job, another to Jeremiah, two to Simeon, and this one to Moses. In its dealings with

Annabel Barber tours Venice with the barfly’s dream guide book

Note the glass of rosé: Tintoretto’s Last Supper, San Trovaso Church, 1566

central authority, be it temporal or spiritual, Venice has always been original.

Having examined the mess of sculpture on the façade, particularly the pair of distorted camels, walk straight on.

Cross a bridge with a pretty iron railing into a campiello, where on the right we will find the shop of the Poli grappa distillers.

You might follow Mr Saikia’s lead and take a measure of grappa in a hip flask to Torcello, because unless one is armed with Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice – in which case one will never leave – there is little to do there but stand in the kind of queue one has hoped to avoid, being barked at by cathedral custodians: ‘No foto!’

From here, we cross another bridge with a matching iron railing (or nearly matching; no two sets of railings in Venice are exactly alike), across the Rio di San Maurizio.

At the Bar Redentore, partake in the delightful Venetian custom of the pallina. It’s sadly on the wane as tourists do not know about it. And café proprietors are loath to serve this humble workman’s pick-me-up for a Euro 50.

The pallina is akin to the spritz: the ingredients are white wine (never Prosecco), soda water and a liqueur of your choice. This could be Aperol, which would be unwise; it could also be Campari, which would be better.

And best of all, according to our cicerone, is Select, a truly Venetian liqueur, invented in the sestiere (district) of Castello in 1920, made from the extracts of various plants whose identities the manufacturers make a great parade about keeping secret.

Your pallina will be served in a very small, round glass (pallina means a little ball) and you should take it standing up.

Our second church opens off the vast Campo Santo Stefano. It is notable for its leaning campanile, which Venetians call a campanile storto. It is the tallest in the old city. Although the authorities have decided at last to take steps to stop it falling down, the restoration will retain the celebrated leaning profile.

There are some paintings in the sacristy of Santo Stefano, which one may see on payment of a fee to Chorus, the organisation that does such splendid work in keeping Venetian churches open.

The sacristy is very small and the paintings are by Tintoretto, a painter we ought to like, because Ruskin did, but I am afraid I have never been able to.

One of them is a Last Supper, a scene to which Tintoretto was rather addicted, with a large dog in the foreground. We come to this church to honour a man who loved not dogs but cats. Francesco Morosini, the great naval captain, has gone down in history in Byron’s phrase as ‘the blundering Venetian, who blew up the Acropolis at Athens with a bomb’.

Morosini’s embalmed cat, Nini, is on display in the nearby Civic Museum of Natural History. Morosini’s vast sepulchral seal, a brass disc let into the floor of the nave and an emblem of the Venetian love of her great men, is the most remarkable thing about the church.

Stroll to the other end of the campo and peer behind the thick curtain that hangs at the door of San Vidal. This church, deconsecrated now, is used for nightly concerts of music by Vivaldi.

Its high altarpiece is by Carpaccio, a painter we like enormously for his genius at producing painting as reportage in an age before any of us really knew what that meant. The saint is portrayed as a portly gentleman without much hair but with plenty of beard – precisely the kind of honest realism for which we love this artist.

Perhaps Carpaccio also suspected what we now know: that San Vidal was a figment of an overwrought hagiographer’s imagination. He never existed and his cult was suppressed in 1969. Yet here he still sits, astride a muscular horse with hooves like a set of doorstops.

In fact, the horse’s proportions are almost as odd as the camels on San Moisè or as those of the animal that passes for a giraffe in Gentile Bellini’s rendition of Alexandria (which hangs in Milan).

Not that Carpaccio would have lacked material from which to study equine anatomy. The ancient horses from the Hippodrome at Constantinople, now in the museum of St Mark’s Basilica, are perhaps the finest sculpted horses in the world.

We will probably have to take this on trust, because the queue to see them will almost certainly be too long, and an ice cream at Al Todaro might have to suffice while we content ourselves with admiring the copies of the horses on the Basilica façade.

Do return to San Vidal for an evening concert. These concerts are always well done, though the programme is never known not to include something from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Saikia notes that it also always includes something less expected. The last time I was there, they played the Grosso mogul and the cadenza in the final movement was virtuosic.

Vivaldi was known during his lifetime as the Prete Rosso, the Red Priest, because he had taken orders (though he never said Mass) and because he had auburn hair. In his honour, Mr Saikia has devised the Red Priest cocktail.

You may be lucky enough to get one at Palazzetto Pisani, which we approach down a tenebrous corridor past the music conservatory. Its upstairs bar looks out at the palazzo where Peggy Guggenheim set up her art collection and at another palazzo once owned by the Prince and Princess of Polignac. Here, Fauré played the piano. Can there be a better vantage point from which to enjoy the spectacle of the Grand Canal?

Drink & Think Venice (Blue Guides) by Robin Saikia is out now

Right: Trattoria San Basilio. Below: painting depicting Michelangelo’s David in Despar Teatro Italia supermarket

Gondoliers in Al Todaro bar

Overlooked Britain

Holy shrine to the King of Science

Sir Isaac Newton is buried under a splendid statue in Westminster Abbey – but an even bigger monument was planned

lucinda lambton

In 1834, a mausoleum was designed that defied – still defies – any hope of anyone’s being able adequately to describe its glory.

It honoured Sir Isaac Newton (16431727), the great scientist, physicist, alchemist, mathematician, theologian, author and astronomer. He’d died over 100 years earlier and been buried in Westminster Abbey. It was suggested that he might also be posthumously remembered at his home in St Martin’s Street, Westminster, but with a most startlingly remarkable monument.

It could not have been any stranger: a 40-foot-high stepped stone pyramid, sliced off two thirds of the way up with a colossal stone globe and, if you please, it was to encase Newton’s whole house.

The neoclassical architect ÉtienneLouis Boullée drew designs for it for our interest and pleasure. It was to be created 50 years after Newton’s death, when he

Above: Newton’s mausoleum, left, in Westminister Abbey, designed by William Kent and scuplted by Michael Rysbrack.

Below: proposals for a mausoleum for Newton’s house, by Étienne-Louis Boullée

had become a most potent symbol of the Enlightenment. Prepare yourselves for this wonder: a vast sphere, 500 feet high, stipulated to be taller than the great Pyramids of Giza and encompassed by two large barriers circled by many hundreds of cypress trees.

Its design was intended to reflect the day and the night. The night effect appears when the sarcophagus is illuminated by the sunlight shining through the holes, occurring when the sunlight pours through the massive and spheric shape of the building.

Born a tiny baby who could fit into a two-quart jug, Newton was to die a king of men. Godlike with his discoveries, he

formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that became the dominant scientific viewpoint and continued being so for centuries.

He built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed the theory of colour. He lectured on optics and investigated the refraction of light.

He showed that the multicoloured

light produced by a prism – which he called a spectrum – could be recomposed into a white light by a lens and a second prism. In 1704, he published Opticks, in which he plunged into his corpuscular theory of light.

He had been developing the theory of gravitation from as early as – if you please – 1665. He was then to apply himself to celestial mechanics by studying gravitation and its effect on the orbits of the planets. And so he thundered on.

His great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was to give him international fame.

Then, of course, there was the famous story of the apple falling out of a tree allowing him to untangle the laws of gravity.

A highly decorated monument honoured him in Westminster Abbey, inscribed with the words (in Latin):

‘Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced.

‘Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race!’

The poet Alexander Pope had written an epitaph for Newton, but lamentably this was not allowed to be put on the monument in the Abbey. It read, ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.’

The monument stands in the nave against the choir screen, to the north of the entrance to the choir, and was executed by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770) to the designs of the architect William Kent (1685-1748); it was finished in August 1730.

It is made of white and grey marble. Atop its base, which sports an inscription in Latin, is a sarcophagus with large scroll feet and a relief panel; this portrays boys using instruments associated with Newton’s mathematical and optical work – a telescope, a prism and a steel yard. Other figures reflect his activities as Master of the Mint: they carry pots full of coins while a metal ingot is fed into a furnace.

Above the sarcophagus lies Newton, draped in a toga, reclining against a small pile of books representing his great works.

Above: Newton using a prism to separate white light into the colours of the spectrum. Below: Newton leans on his books

These are labelled ‘Divinity’, ‘Chronology’ and ‘Philo Prin Math’ [Philosophiae

Naturalis Principia Mathematica].

Behind his left hand stand two winged boys, holding a scroll showing a mathematical design. The image on this scroll, somehow obliterated in the early19th century, was repainted in 1977 from particulars in Newton’s manuscripts.

The monument’s background is a pyramid, which bears a celestial globe depicting the signs of the zodiac, the

constellations and the path of the comet of 1680. On top of the globe sits Urania (the muse of astronomy) leaning on a book.

Newton was a humble fellow. He wrote, ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’

And ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

There are two more footnotes well worth relating. The last £1 note ever produced was designed with an elegant representation of Newton.

And there is the renowned story of the great man’s dog – I fear a Pomeranian – which, by knocking over a candle, burnt most of his papers. ‘Oh Diamond, Diamond,’ Newton lamented. ‘Thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done.’

In December 1960, the papers’ remains were sold for £380,000.

Good morning, Vietnam

James Pembroke visits the capital of Vietnam and the Hanoi Hilton – where John McCain was a POW

Maureen Lipman recently said that to make geography more appealing to schoolchildren, they should rename it ‘travel’.

I think ‘shopping’ would be more apt. In the shopping malls of India, the Far East and Morocco, fortunes can be spent on ill-fitting suits, carpets and enough cushion covers to restock the Brighton Pavilion.

Once, after a spree in Rajasthan, I came back with a three-piece suite, only to discover that customs wanted to charge me as much in duty as I had paid the animated shopkeeper in Jodhpur.

So, this spring, when I took my adult children for a tour of North Vietnam, Laos and Angkor Wat, I was keen for any distraction to avoid the inevitable excitement of buying brash ceramics and spices for the same price as at Tesco.

I last visited South Vietnam 20 years ago. I stayed in Saigon with friends who had a business making my kind of knick-knacks for a UK market. They used a former American air base as a factory, where their 400 employees shaped bamboo into chessboards and drinks coasters. They had arrived in the early nineties, when the economic Asian Tiger was still reluctant to lift Vietnam from its postwar nadir.

Lucy told me, ‘We were two of 30 foreigners in the whole of Saigon; we had a dedicated secret policeman who conspicuously followed us. Everyone wore black. Food was still so scarce that it was understood that before leaving one of the – very few – restaurants, we should ask for our leftovers to be chucked into a carrier bag, so we could give them to the desperate crowd waiting outside.’

As for anyone schooled in the cinema

of Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and the rest, Vietnam has a massive draw for me. I was keen to return, only this time to the North and the centre, where the action had taken place in that war to end all wars.

Vietnam should twin with Poland in its choice of appalling invaders. And Hanoi, close to the Chinese border, had always had it really bad: they came every year, like border raiders, raping and pillaging. Then, in 1887, came the French, who demolished the imperial citadel, built in the 11th century. Then the Americans flattened the city over 11 days in December 1972, during Operation Linebacker II when they conducted the largest bombing campaign since 1945, dropping 20,000 tons of ordnance. Unsurprisingly, the Paris Peace Accords were signed a month later.

I knew Hanoi only as the Northern

Hanoi’s Old Quarter, where motorbikes have overtaken bicycles as the most popular transport

capital, which Jane Fonda had visited during the war. In my dreams, it was a city of French boulevards, but I also knew of the infamous so-called Hanoi Hilton where American pilots were incarcerated. I’m squeamish by nature, avoiding any film or TV programme with more than a 12 rating. So in my guide book the former prison had a massive red line through it.

Yet unless you’re mad about North Vietnamese cuisine, as my son is, there’s very little to do in Hanoi after a cookery

course and the water-puppet theatre. We were led around by two delightful student guides, keen to practise their English, but they struggled to find anything for us to see beyond the two sacred turtles which lived in the Great Lake. And still do, if you count being stuffed and immortalised in a glass case. There’s very little French colonial architecture left in the old town. So, inevitably, the shopping genie released himself from the lamp.

Any distraction would save us a fortune. So we agreed to head for Hỏa Lò prison, aka the Hanoi Hilton. The French seem to have a penchant for building prisons, whether in French Guiana or on their own turf. They erected Hỏa Lò (‘Hell’s Hole’ in Vietnamese) within months of invading, justifiably predicting that an independence movement would soon emerge. By becoming a symbol of French persecution, the prison fulfilled the imperialists’ own prophecy.

And, needless to say, the decision to chuck ‘all the rotten eggs in one basket’ created a finishing school for the communist cause. Being chained to one another on concrete benches for long nights gave leaders the ideal conditions in which to indoctrinate their fellow inmates.

Many future leaders were held there, some of whom took part in a grisly escape through the sewers. Even the

mobile guillotine, which is still on display, didn’t deter them. Men and women were held there; babies were born there.

Only a small section of the prison still survives, now as a popular museum. Originally built for 600 inmates, mainly independence fighters, it was soon overcrowded. By 1954, when the French pulled out, it housed 2,000 prisoners. And what sweet revenge on Western imperialism to hold American pilots there.

The first US prisoner of war to be sent to Hỏa Lò was Lieutenant Alvarez, who was there for nine miserable years from 1964. The coverage of this new era is where the museum’s commentary becomes a pastiche of patently mendacious Nineteen Eighty-Four-style propaganda. One caption reads, ‘How fortunate the Americans were to be captured by North Vietnam rather than other deplorable countries, who mistreat their prisoners of war. They even nicknamed the prison the Hilton because it was so comfortable.’

It was pilot Bob Shumaker who was the first to write down the famous nickname, carving ‘Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton’ on the handle of a pail to greet the arrival of Lieutenant Robert Peel.

In 1966, the Vietnamese authorities forced the pilots to take part in a Japanese news feature, which shows the American pilots happily playing table tennis and basketball and even enjoying a Christmas dinner. At the museum the film is played on a continuous loop.

Clockwise from below: John McCain’s flight suit worn when he was shot down over Hanoi; in Hoa Lò prison; Republican presidential nominee McCain in 2008

Commander Jeremiah Denton can apparently be seen blinking TORTURE to the camera in Morse code. And this was the appalling reality, as recorded in many postwar memoirs.

Future presidential candidate John McCain’s experience of capture and imprisonment was horrifically typical. After his plane was hit and he was forcibly ejected into Trúc Bach Lake, in 1967, he broke both arms. The mob, who were only too keen to rescue him and claim their bounty, smashed his left shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted him in his left foot and left groin area. This was to be the beginning of five and a half years of systematic torture and twice-weekly beatings.

In 1968, when McCain’s father was appointed Commander of all US forces in Vietnam, his captors saw their opportunity for a publicity coup by offering the pilot early release. But McCain refused on the grounds that, as a US POW, he could ‘not accept parole nor any special favours from the enemy’. Like many other POWs, he in desperation succumbed to take part in a televised anti-American broadcast.

By the time of their release in 1973, there were 652 American POWs held in the jail. As late as 2008, Tran Trong Duyet, the prison commandant for the last three years of the war, still maintained that no prisoners of war were tortured. To be fair, the Americans have never confessed to the maltreatment and torture they enacted in their own POW camps in Vietnam.

The museum’s final room has huge displays of pilots returning to the Maison Centrale, McCain included.

But wounds have healed. Former pilot Peter Peterson, who arrived at Hỏa Lò in 1966, became the first ambassador to Vietnam in 1997.

One of the famed 36 streets of Old Hanoi

Hanoi Hilton, where US pilots were jailed

On the Road

Ace tips for Wimbledon

Andy

Murray tells Louise Flind about winning the world’s greatest tournament – and the one shot all amateurs should practise

What was the highlight of your career?

My first Wimbledon, in 2013. It was what I’d always dreamed of. And winning my first Slam in the US, winning my gold medal against Roger during the London 2012 Olympics, and winning the Davis Cup – but I think winning my first Wimbledon is difficult to beat.

And the lowlight?

The injuries. It’s tough to keep going when you’re injured and you don’t know when you’re going to get back to what you love.

What’s your number-one tennis tip to amateurs?

Practise your drop shot and use it as your secret weapon.

What makes a world number 1? What helps them do what a number 10 can’t? Focus and determination.

How do you control your mind during games?

It’s quite tough when you’re under pressure. I’ve learnt to deal with it better over the years. When I was younger, I found it really hard. I work with a psychologist and that’s made a big difference.

How have you kept going through injuries and operations?

There’ve been some dark days. I’ve been lucky to have a very supportive family and team. And I always wanted to get back on court – so that has helped me keep going even when my body was struggling.

In the busiest years of your career, how many weeks of

the year were you away from home?

About 40 weeks. There’s a lot of training time around the tournaments.

Who’s been your best coach?

Ivan Lendl has been by my side during the biggest moments in my career. He was coaching me when I won the US Open in 2012, and Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016.

Do you travel light?

Jamie. We compete over everything –golf, fantasy football, Uno. I usually win, though.

How old were you when you first picked up a racket?

I was three when I first started playing tennis, and competing by the time I was five.

What was your first big break?

I won the Orange Bowl when I was 12. That’s one of the biggest international junior competitions.

I would like to travel light, but tennis players come with quite a bit of kit. There’s my racket bag; and my match kit and clothing take up another bag. If I’m away for a while, I also have a nutrition bag – and sometimes we take equipment I need for training and recovery. That’s quite a lot of bags.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

Going to France with my mum and dad to La Rochelle. We went camping. I think

Do you come from a sporty family?

My brother and my mum are pretty wellknown for their sport, and my dad is also a good sportsman – he plays a lot of golf. My grandfather was a good footballer and played for Hibs – Jamie and I support them still now.

Were you always competitive with your brother? Are you still?

I’ve always been super-competitive with

Andy Murray wins at Wimbledon, 2013

Do you ever stay in your hotel near Dunblane?

I stay at Cromlix whenever I can. The whole hotel was refurbished last year by my wife, Kim, so I went up a few times to see it – and I did a cookery show at Christmas with Mary Berry in the hotel kitchen, which was fun. It’s an absolutely beautiful spot, and while it’s really luxurious, it’s also very relaxed, so you feel as if you’re staying in a country home rather than a country house.

Do you like being/working away from home?

I do enjoy travelling, but I really miss my family. It’s getting harder and harder as my kids get older.

Do you go on holiday?

I didn’t use to take much holiday, but now I understand how important time off is. Earlier this year, we went to Dubai, and last year to Marbella.

What are your top travelling tips?

Leave as late as possible for the airport. I always cut it fine. It drives my team and my family mad, but it works for me.

Andy and Kim Murray own Cromlix hotel, Dunblane. Cromlix.com

Wimbledon is from 1st to 14th July

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Taking a Walk

Peace breaks out at Greenham Common

patrick barkham

If this is what the apocalypse looks like, we can all relax. The end of civilisation will be very green and smell of coconut and willow warblers will call.

I was walking across Greenham Common. For much of the 20th century, it was an important RAF base. Famously, in the 1980s, its nuclear weapons were opposed by a long-running women’s protest camp. Old photographs show a bleak scene: a vast runway, fencing, bunkers and concrete. Today, 32 years after its closure, it’s rewilded. There’s still a whisper of runway but everything is swaddled in vegetation.

Show me a place as intense as southern England. It is a landscape absolutely stuffed with history, stories and strangeness. No wonder visitors from big countries adore it. This twohour walk encompassed the former nuclear air base, a bluebell wood, a rural idyll, a humungous racecourse, a canal path and light-industrial grit.

I began on Crookham Common at the eastern end of the old runway, surrounded by rough grassland and gorse bushes flinging their coconut scent everywhere on a bright, breezy day. A small bird rose on a brief song flight: a Dartford warbler.

Cows grazed along the ex-runway, and a pretty white calf supped from one of several little reed-fringed wet flushes.

Despite this tranquillity, there remained an echo of unease: odd hummocks and scrubby thickets of sallow that hid secret bunkers. Nine red kites circled low over something tasty. Berkshire’s blue downs shimmered in the distance.

Plenty of joggers were exercising their historic right to enjoy the common. I turned past the old control tower – now a strategically important café – into birch woods. A robin eyed me, delighted with its beakful of worms.

I crossed the road and followed a sunken track downhill and open plains became intimate woods. Yellow turned purple; the fresh smell of gorse was supplanted by the sweet scent of bluebells.

The woods gave way to an immaculately renovated farmhouse surrounded by paddocks: England’s equestrian belt.

Two horses made me jump because when they turned to stare at me, I saw they were wearing face masks, like fencers.

I followed a lush tunnel of hornbeam and oak. An adjacent golf course roared with mowers and smelt of freshly-cut grass. A garden warbler called from the undergrowth.

And then, reaching the Kennet Valley bottom, I heard my first reed warbler of the year, chuntering from a reedbed.

Now the track passed the end of Newbury Racecourse, an enormous grandstand towering like a wedding cake in the distance, and ducked beneath the railway. I reached Bull’s Lock, on the towpath of the Kennet and Avon Canal.

‘Danger – collapsed bank’, said a sign, warning that this section of the path was closed. How bad could it be? I ignored the sign and strode on.

It was sunny on the towpath; peacocks, commas and small whites whizzed about beside luxuriant banks of nettles.

Ahead of me, I spied a strange shape, bent double. I drew closer and saw it was a woman approaching me, almost on all fours, trying to cross a raging torrent. The collapsed bank. She straightened up and we met.

‘You made it, then,’ I said.

‘I went in nearly up to my knees,’ she replied, displaying the waterline on her wellies. ‘Are you going to go through?’ She looked doubtfully at my shoes.

And so to this walk’s thrillingly unexpected climax. I grabbed the sallow branches above and swung like a weedy Tarzan, wobbling along sticks laid across the collapsed bank for adventurers like me. Water poured from canal breach into the ponds below. A wiggle, a splash and I made it.

I reached civilisation again – the capacious Paddocks Trade Estate behind the racecourse – before facing a final challenge: how to traverse the dual carriageway between Sainsbury’s and Newbury Station? Whizzing cars; no crossing – of course not, why would anyone want to take that walk?

Ah, England, in all its bizarre glory.

Parking/start at What3Words: pulled. upgrading.humans. Walk west to control tower (now a handy café). Turn north into Bowdon Woods and follow public footpath to Bull’s Lock. Turn west along towpath back to Newbury

1 Food that’s good after whisky perhaps (6,3)

6 Awkward employees need one for answer (5)

9 In France she never ever lost her name (5)

10 Eager to put cheese back on the shelf for sale (5-4)

11 One may apply pressure if there’s dough (7,3)

12 Consequence of injury that’s almost frightening (4)

14 Prescribed act over English credit (7)

15 Old form of capital managed by thug (7)

17 Defer pay out after American flipped (7)

19 Work out saying nothing about pressure by firm (7)

20 Parrot’s speech organ, essentially (4)

22 Reach people primarily through achievement (10)

25 The Wirral perhaps gets a nine plus for development (9)

26 Do something about part of London (3,2)

27 A poet’s race for place, for example (5)

28 Tumbler’s trip with whiskeydrinking doctor (4,5)

Down

Genius crossword 441 EL SERENO

1 Unadulterated and, according to reports, cut (5)

2 Smooth touch in case of serious pollutants (3,6)

3 May I not celebrate over support? (10)

4 Furious, but agreed to differ about name (7)

5 One’s work is often framed (7)

6 The way they finally cross river (4)

7 Name of chap with savings account? (5)

8 Unleash anger, upset to see such farming practice (4-5)

13 Call number up and ring musician (3-3,4)

14 Sort of paint that should be avoided in kennels? (9)

16 Richly dressed, yet no pull (9)

18 Diversions of French town? (7)

19 Bread man with a note (7)

21 The sound of a horse throwing wife getting cross (5)

23 Meaning to get toe in door without regulars (5)

24 Joint requirement mainly supporting king (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 24th July 2024. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 441

1 Peter ___ and Dudley Moore (4) 4 Peter Pan’s Captain (4)

8 Gaelic for Lake (4)

9 Optic liar (anag.) (9)

11 The C of C02 (6)

13 Soaps (Coronation Street etc) (7)

15 Upset, aggrieved (6)

16 Artist’s stands (6)

18 Goad, provoke (6)

20 Tiny cuts; edges off bat in cricket (6)

22 Serious, sincere (7)

23 Straight; blunt (6)

25 Chemistry lab items (4,5)

26 Desire, urge, yen (4)

27 Fable (4) 28 Silly (4)

(4)

Young cat (6)

Nasty (6)

Prophet, augur (6)

6 Duo as performers (e.g. Morecambe and Wise) (6,3)

7 The tibia (4)

10 Layered pasta dish (7)

12 Spread of time or distance (4)

13 Wander from a straight course (9)

14 Vote in again (7)

17 Sort of window; band (4)

19 Any small restaurant, cafe etc (6)

20 Grab (6)

21 Published (6)

23 Intravenous solution (Med.) (4)

24 Red meat; complaint (4)

Moron 439 answers: Across: Across: 7 Follow, 8 Vaunts (Vol-au-vents), 10 Embargo, 11 Taker, 12 Cues, 13 Amour, 17 Stale, 18 Kiwi, 22 Stoic, 23 Sweater, 24 United, 25 Recess. Down: 1 Offence, 2 Blubber, 3 Hoard, 4 Tantrum, 5 Snake, 6 Astra, 9 Normalise, 14 Sticker, 15 Sixteen, 16 Diarist, 19 Issue, 20 Sofia, 21 Revel.

Winner: Ray Foxell, Lapford, Devon Runners-up: John Gullidge, Brighton, East Sussex; Marianne Croll, Allestree, Derbyshire

Last year’s World Championships took place in the 40° heat of Marrakech –actually a great venue. I’ve always loved Morocco, having run the late Stuart Wheeler’s high-stake bridge week in Tangier for 30-odd years. My team Lawrenzo lost in the round of 32 in the 13th World Transnational Open Teams, where we drew another English team captained by Maggie Knottenbelt (a former student of mine). The student beat the teacher as her team won a tight match – and went on to claim the bronze medal. This board from the match was a body blow to Lawrenzo. Plan the play in four spades on the queen-of-clubs lead.

Competition TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 307 you were invited to write a poem called A Funny Smell. Competitors seem to live a rich dog’s life of the nose. Richard Spencer’s heroine, faced with a smelly-cheese hater, dreamt of ‘modes of curd-based killing:/ Like Death-by-Fondue, Boursin Brick…’. Rob McMahon’s narrator, after a heart attack, hears a voice: ‘If you detect a funny smell,/ It’s sulphur from the fires of Hell!’ Sue Smalley found garden scents rather feeble: ‘We’ve sacrificed plants’ natural scents / To feed our eyes, not nose.’

Commiserations to them and to Ann Beckett, Denise Norman, D A Prince, Con Connell, Bill Webster, Miriam Heyburn, Dorothy Woolley, Iris Bull, Dorothy Pope, Frank McDonald, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Jim C Wilson.

Smells in others’ homes

Spread in silent billows; Others’ rugs and rooms And others’ sheets and pillows. Oh, I like my smells, My dear old rags and tatters. My fondest fluffy jumper: A simple smell that matters. Safe smells spread warm love, The same from year to year. A funny smell is alien

But home-grown smells are dear. Keep funny smells away, No laughing gas for me!

But fond old scents can stay

To sniff eternally.

Jenny Jones

The bidding South West North East 1

Our declarer won the ace and played a spade to the king and a spade to the ace. He then cashed the king of clubs and ruffed a third club. No good – East overruffed and switched to the queen of hearts. Declarer tried the king, but West cashed the ace-jack and the fourth club. One down.

After mature reflection, we think the safest line for ten tricks is not to draw any trumps; rather to cash the king of clubs and ruff a third club low. Let East overruff and switch to the queen of hearts, West enjoying the ace-jack, for you can then ruff a fourth club with the king of spades to make the game.

You can actually make six spades. Win the club and try a diamond to see if anything interesting happens. It does – West’s bare king makes an appearance. Now cross to the ace-queen of spades (removing West’s spades), cash the other top club, ruff a third club (with the king), cash the queen-jack of diamonds shedding hearts, ruff a red card back to hand, draw East’s third spade and give up the fourth club to West, establishing your fifth. Slam made.

We seemed to get on pretty well –I was her beau and she my belle. I went to her flat, she played Purcell But I nodded off, preferring Ravel. In a bistro called La Chanterelle We finely dined on fish quenelles Washed down with copious Zinfandel –Till I began to feel like Hell. We spent the night in a cheap hotel Somewhere in darkest Camberwell. The room reeled round, a carousel, Then cold white tiles, a funny smell, Like pilchards mixed with caramel. Then she woke up, began to yell And through the pong I could foretell We’d come at last to a sad farewell.

Jim C Wilson

You left us, cold. No more to grieve, No permanent mañana: Perhaps you really did achieve Your personal nirvana –You took your time to go, to leave, By which time no mens sana In corpore… No, no reprieve, Each pupil a sultana Inside the eye, a semibreve… You vicious old piranha, You left an odour! Some believe You’d smoked some marijuana, But when I searched the stripy sleeves Of these, your last pyjamas, You’d tucked away (it made me heave)

An overripe banana.

Dealer South Neither Vulnerable ‘You

In London’s darkest haunts I sniff

The odour of illicit piss, The stench of vomit and the whiff Of drowsy, airborne cannabis.

These are the customary smells Of urban night-time revelry. So far, so good, but what the hell’s The single one unknown to me?

This oddity enchants my nose: The magical ambivalence Of intermingling rot and rose Is transformational, intense.

A paradox, both scent and stink, It mirrors the whole universe. ‘Phantosmia,’ declares my shrink. ‘You’re out to lunch and getting worse.’ Basil Ransome-Davies

COMPETITION No 309 Please write a poem called An Ill Wind. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 309’, by Thursday 25th July.

ANDREW ROBSON

Bill Greenwell

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My son’s got the blues

QAfter a difficult divorce, my 50-year-old son has fallen into a deep depression. He’s seen his doctor but the pills he’s been given don’t work. He’s bought a lot of ‘helpful’ books to read while he’s staying with me temporarily, and it breaks my heart when I hear him in the bedroom next to me making all these positive affirmations like ‘I am complete and happy today and tomorrow’ and then breaking down in tears. Is there any way I can help him? Name and address supplied

AIf he’s into books, I hope he’ll chuck all the positive-thinking ones into the dustbin – in my experience, they only make people more depressed – and try to accept his unhappiness with compassion, and then start moving on. The truth is, after all, that he’s NOT complete and happy – that ‘affirmation’ is a lie.

I’ve read hundreds of self-help books in my time and there are two that stand out for me. First, Derren Brown’s Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine. Brown (yes, the magician) is an excellent writer who’s written many helpful and amusing books and Happy is no exception.

It outlines the entire history of happiness and how it’s been perceived and sought, from Plato and Aristotle to Seneca and Epictetus. The first chapter is thoroughly sensible and puts the boot into the whole pernicious idea of positive thinking while recommending other far more original and useful strategies.

The other book is The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr Bessel van

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

der Kolk. It’s full of perceptive tips on how to deal with the overpowering and ongoing horror of trauma, which can keep a grip on your life even till death.

This book offers wonderful insights into how to stop traumas like your son’s taking over his life, and how to tackle overcoming it if it already has.

Morbid, moi?

QIt’s a bit ageist, isn’t it (Spring issue), to ask someone of 80 to pal up with death? It would spoil my day if I spent my time worrying about it! Age has nothing to do with popping one’s clogs.

I wear a mask all the time, even indoors, to protect me, I do yoga once a week and I spend a lot of my time walking to keep fit. You’re being very morbid, if I may say so!

JI, by email

ANot at all. By asking people to make friends with death, I’m suggesting the precise opposite to worrying about it.

It’s inevitable – and, despite what you say, it’s far more likely to come sooner for us oldies than for younger people. You appear to be very frightened of it –wearing a mask even though the jury’s out as to whether they do more harm than good – and you’re exercising and walking to keep it at bay. If you were friends with death, you wouldn’t mind when it came for you – and if you spent a bit more time thinking about it, when it arrived you’d be more likely to welcome it with a familiar ‘Hi’ rather than cowering indoors.

As Montaigne said, ‘We do not know where death awaits us; so let us wait for

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it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.’

To make friends with the possibility of having a disabling car crash all the time – now that would indeed be stupid. A car crash isn’t inevitable. But death, of course, comes to us all.

Dirty drawers

QI’ve offered to stay with my elderly mother for a week while her carer goes on holiday, and while I’m very happy to do this, I do find cooking very difficult in her kitchen. The saucepans are ancient and filthy and the drawers are starting to smell. I’ve suggested buying her new saucepans, but she refuses and says hers are old friends. I dread using them to cook with. Valerie H, by email

AI’ve often found this in elderly people’s houses. Answer your mother’s protestations with ‘Well, they might be YOUR old friends but they’re not mine!’

Bring a few saucepans and frying pans of your own to cook in while you’re staying. You might even buy her an entirely new set, and give it to her, whether she likes it or not.

I bet she’ll make bosom friends with the new kitchenware sooner than you imagine, and those old food-encrusted horrors will be out in the rubbish in a jiffy.

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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