These Precious Days, by Ann

‘I just hope you’re not using fossil fuels down here’

Winston Churchill on screen, Cox saw other actors go on to win Oscars in the same roles.

But Cox also records his wonderment at going from star-struck Dundee filmgoer to pivotal Hollywood player.

And he writes illuminatingly about Succession – ‘It’s about Logan Roy trying to teach his spoiled, entitled children the value of hard work’ – in a way that explains his rare ability to find the humanity in bullying patriarchs.

Snoopy loopy

MAUREEN FREELY These Precious Days By Ann Patchett Bloomsbury £16.99

Ann Patchett was between novels when the pandemic hit. With death and its shadows gathering all around her, she knew better than to retreat into an imagined world and embark on a new novel.

She decided it might be safer and saner to spend the lockdowns in the realm of facts. Her years as a jobbing journalist on Seventeen and Bridal magazine had taught her not to take herself too seriously. When the likes of the New Yorker and the New York Times opened their doors to her, she took full advantage of the new freedoms they offered, but without ever losing the witty, breezy, self-deprecating voice she’d made her own. Her first essay collection – This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013) – gave a good sense of her range and red lines.

When she went back to dust off the pieces she’d written since that first collection, she could have just coasted.

Instead, she did the most difficult thing, which was to assemble a collection in which every essay, be it new or revised, is a different sort of meditation on death, or rather, on where death dwells in our lives, and what it leaves us.

She begins with a photograph that captures the spirit of the exercise perfectly. There she is, looking rather splendid with her ‘three fathers’ at her sister’s second wedding.

Her family has never been good at marriage, she explains. But not for want of trying. Her parents divorced when she was four, and after that she saw her father for a only week a year, but they found ways to stay close.

Her first stepfather was a madman, but he adored her and paid for her to go to college. Her second stepfather was kind and calm. He arrived on the scene after Ann had left home, but they, too, became close. She saw all three fathers to the end, and this essay is a testament to their lasting presence.

It is, for all that, a light and charming read. So, too, is her piece about her doctor husband’s many brushes with death, while he pilots the small planes he is always buying. More than once, she is up there with him, taking courage from her lifelong idol Snoopy. It was Snoopy who gave her the courage to write – and her passion for dogs. They are hugely welcome in the bookshop she co-owns in Nashville. Children are, too, though she has never wanted her own. But for years she couldn’t take two steps without someone telling her that she must.

The space that might have been taken up by children is taken up by friends of whom, after reading this book, I am insanely jealous. The very long piece that carries its title tells of a very new friend who comes to stay while taking part in a medical trial for pancreatic cancer. Her name is Sookie and she works for Tom Hanks. It is thanks to Ann’s husband that she has this last chance.

Sookie arrives in late February 2020 with a very small suitcase. The pandemic locks her in place. For three