The Old Un’s Notes

and I can run – and I don’t smoke or drink, though I used to in the early days,’ he says. ‘Mind you, when I perform, I don’t climb on the piano or up the lighting stacks and jump off them no more – that’s all in the past!’

Keep on rockin’, Shaky!

Four hundred years ago, in November 1623, another Shaky made a momentous step.

Happy 75th birthday, Shakin’ Stevens! He was born Michael Barratt in Cardiff on 4th March 1948.

It’s over 40 years since his first number one, This Ole House, in 1981, followed up with Green Door and Merry Christmas Everyone. The Welsh Elvis was born.

Shaky still shows no sign of slowing down. Fresh from guesting on Status Quo’s arena tour last year, he has just released a new single, It All Comes Round, to be followed by a new album, Re-Set, on 28th April.

‘Music’s in my blood and besides, I’m not one to sit around all day – I’m certainly not looking to retire at all,’ Shaky told the Old Un.

He’s planning to go on the road again later in the year. Now living in Marlow, he is still in good shape. ‘I go to the gym every week – I can walk

That was when Mr William Shakespeares [sic] Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies was published – the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, appearing seven years after his death in 1616. It had no reviews or literary prizes. But it was a crucial moment, as Emma Smith writes in a new edition of The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio: ‘Without this

Among this month’s contributors

Anne Robinson (p21) left Countdown ‘to make way for an older woman’. She was on The Weakest Link. She hopes to be a dutiful Cotswolds housewife even though, for obvious reasons, she isn’t married.

Roger Lewis (p34 and p53) is battling with woke publishers over his book about Burton and Taylor, Erotic Vagrancy: ‘the love child of a gang-bang between James Joyce, Alf Garnett and Marilyn Monroe’.

A N Wilson (p50) is one of Britain’s leading writers and journalists. He has written biographies of Tolstoy, Jesus and Hitler. His first memoir, Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises, is out now.

Frances Wilson (p55 and p68) is The Oldie’s TV critic. She is author of Burning Man: the Ascent of DH Lawrence, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey and The Courtesan’s Revenge book, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays would have joined the many hundreds of early modern plays (the vast majority of all those performed) that have not survived; without this book, there would be no Macbeth or Julius Caesar or the Tempest.’

Smith’s book is full of all sorts of nuggets – including the detail that, until the 1830s, members of Plymouth Library could borrow a First Folio and take it home for a week. Today, a First Folio is worth £10 million.

The First Folio also contains the best surviving portrait of Shakespeare in different versions by Martin Droeshout (1601-50), an English engraver of Flemish descent.

His first engraving shows a fresh-faced Shakespeare, with a clean collar. The second (both are above) has more shading, producing more stubble, darker cheeks and a grubby collar –Shakespeare after a night out on the tiles.

Important

Magpie can’t fly after having one too many fermented apples Metro

The news that convicts recruited by the Wagner Group to fight in Ukraine face firing squads if they refuse to take part in suicidal attacks didn’t surprise the Old Un.

Both sides were equally draconian on the Eastern Front – hence the comment by Marshal Zhukov: ‘It takes a very brave man to be a coward in the Red Army.’

In a new book, Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust and Other Literary Forms, writer Perry Anderson compares Anthony Powell with Marcel Proust, and declares Powell the winner.

Anderson, 84, former editor of the New Left Review, defends Powell against the old charges of snobbery.

Bowling green where huge penis was cut into grass is hit again Telegraph & Argus

Banana thrown in chair row

Chester Standard

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An art historian friend of Anderson’s refused to read Powell. Anderson said to him, ‘But you have no difficulty reading and admiring Proust, whose world is much more socially exclusive.’

The art historian replied, ‘Yes, but Proust is over there – his world is not my affair. Powell’s world is here, and I can’t abide it.’

Anderson says this ‘might explain the paradox that critical works about Powell, all admiring, are seven times the number of the single book by an Englishman’.

Anderson had been introduced to the works of Powell at Oxford by playwright Dennis Potter.

He hated the first in the 12-volume sequence and then, halfway through the second, A Buyer’s Market, ‘I was a captive… It was one of those emotional switches as abrupt and violent as falling in love with someone after a tense initial aversion to them, lurking hostility suddenly capsizing into lasting passion.’

Anderson adds that there are 1,240,000 words in Proust’s magnum opus, and 1,130,000 in Powell’s.

But, he says, ‘Bearing in mind that French is syntactically more prolix than English – translations of the latter into the former typically increase in size by some 15 per cent – the longer work, in strictly comparable terms, may actually be the Dance.’ Powell – 1; Proust – 0.

The Wallace Collection, in London’s Manchester Square, has gone barking mad.

In March, they have not one, but two exhibitions about our canine companions. The Queen and her Corgis launches on 8th March, with each decade of our longest-reigning monarch’s life marked with an image that captures her love of dogs. Pictured, above, is a Landseer portrait of them.

Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney opens on 29th March, with paintings, sculptures, drawings and even taxidermy highlighting the unique bond between we humans and our devoted dogs.

The Wallace says it’s celebrating ‘mankind’s best, faithful and fearless

‘We have to stamp out nepotism in broadcasting. What do you think, Dad?’ friend’, from Queen Victoria’s spaniels to Hockney’s dachshunds. They had plenty to choose from. The British have commissioned and collected more dog portraits than any other nation.

The museum’s director Dr Xavier Bray, proud owner of two pugs – Bluebell and her son Winston – will give a guided tour at the opening.

Sadly, Bluebell and Winston can’t make it. The Collection doesn’t allow dogs.

And if you hope there will be somewhere to tie up your own four-legged friend in front of the Wallace’s oversize distinguished doors, you’d be wrong. Even Dr Bray will have to get a dog-sitter and leave his pugs at home.

Ninety years ago this year, Franklin D Roosevelt moved into the White House and his wife Eleanor became America’s First Lady. Roosevelt was President from 4th March 1933 until 12th April 1945.

Unusually for a First Lady, Eleanor was part-schooled in Britain. Born into a prominent, high-society American family she was orphaned at ten. She became a ward of her maternal grandmother, who in 1899 sent the 15-year-old girl to Allenswood Boarding Academy in Southfields, south-west London, for three years to complete her education.

The exclusive private school was set up by the French teacher Marie Souvestre in 1883.

Its pupils wore long, black skirts, white, ruffled blouses and a striped school tie – and boaters when outside. They were also required to walk on nearby Wimbledon Common every morning after breakfast, whatever the weather, before their lessons.

Madame Souvestre encouraged the young Eleanor’s studies, helped bring her out of her shell and inspired her later social activism.

After leaving the academy (which closed in 1950) and returning to America in 1902, Eleanor remained in touch with her former headmistress, who she regarded as a mentor for the rest of her life.

All great writers have to start somewhere – and that somewhere is often accompanied by a rejection slip. That’s what happened to Virginia Woolf with her first review for the Times Literary Supplement in 1904.

So James Campbell reveals in his new book, NB by JC: A Walk through the Times Literary Supplement Campbell – aka JC – was for many years the planet- brained cousin of the Old Un on the back page of the TLS Woolf was supposed to review Catherine de’ Medici and the French Reformation by Edith Sichel.

But the TLS editor, Sir Bruce Richmond, told Woolf, then 22, that his preferred style for pieces in the Literary Supplement was more ‘academic’ than her effort. He later found another reviewer for the book.

Campbell writes, ‘Given a second try, Virginia Stephen, as she was then, received two guidebooks, to “Thackeray Country” and “Dickens Country.” This time, it was a success. The piece appeared under the heading “Literary Geography” on 10th March 1905, and the Lit Supp had a new, bright, young writer.’

Woolf then went down the familiar path of enthusiastic cub journalist to grumpy old grandee. Once she had made it, she wrote in her diary, that there would be, ‘no more reviewing for me, now that Richmond re-writes my sentences to suit the mealy mouths of Belgravia’.

In fact, like many a grumpy great, she relented and went on to become one of the paper’s most prodigious reviewers.

‘Is

Jeremy Thorpe’s crush on me

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Oxford Union, the debating society at Oxford University.

I was successively Secretary, Librarian and President of the Union, when I was a student, back in the late 1960s.

We were called ‘undergraduates’ in those days. And all the colleges were single sex. And the gates to the colleges were closed at 11pm. If you wanted to get into your own or out of somebody else’s, you had to climb over the college walls. It was a long time ago.

I am going back to the Union this month to take part in a commemorative debate – speaking alongside Michael Heseltine (President in 1954), who’s interviewed in this issue as he turns 90, and Michael Gove (President in 1988).

Over the years, I have bonded with some interesting chaps because of the shared experience of being President of the Union: Michael Foot (1933), Ted Heath (1939), Jeremy Thorpe (1951) and Boris Johnson (1986), to name just four.

I met Thorpe first at the Union when he was leader of the Liberal Party and had come back as a guest speaker. He bounded across the debating chamber, literally jumping over the benches in his apparent eagerness to greet me.

Well, I was a boyish 20 and he was a boyish 39. It was a long time ago.

I loved my time at the Union and made some unlikely friendships among my contemporaries.

Christopher Hitchens (socialist cultural commentator whom I always picture cigarette in his hand, in a combat jacket with a hard drinker’s bloodshot eyes) was a good chum. I also had a soft spot for Tariq Ali (President in 1965), who was a bit older than us and regarded as a serious revolutionary.

I remember that Tariq and I had tea together at the Union shortly after he had joined the International Marxist Group in 1968 and I thought, ‘He can’t be that bad – he’s ordered tea and anchovy toast.’

How I loved tea and anchovy toast as they served it in the Oxford Union!

I loved the Union’s High Victorian buildings, the oak panelling, the leather sofas, the high-ceilinged rooms and especially the galleried library, with its murals by Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

One night when I was Secretary, I was charged with looking after one of the Union’s more challenging guests: Dominic Behan, Irish songwriter and Republican, younger brother of the more-famous Brendan, and son (so he told me) of one of the leading IRA men responsible for killing any number of British soldiers during the Irish ‘war of independence’.

When I met Dominic, he was already wild with drink and impossible to control. He ranted, rambled and lurched around the President’s office, alternately breaking into song and demanding more drink.

He asked me to show him where the lavatories were. I said I’d take him down to them. He stumbled down the stairs and – on the landing – proceeded to undo his flies and produce his member for me to admire.

‘I’m bursting!’ he declared and then, turning sideways, he walked quite sedately down the corridor peeing profusely against the wall as he went.

‘Don’t!’ I bleated. ‘That’s William Morris wallpaper! It’s original!’

‘F*** William Morris!’ he cried, warming to his task and spraying the precious wall with ever greater gusto.

‘He was a Socialist like you!’ I called out desperately.

‘Fuck Socialism!’ he declared, turning to me triumphantly and shaking the final drips in my direction.

The year 2023 also marks the centenary of Dominic’s older and justifiably more celebrated brother, Brendan Behan. He was born, according to Ulick

O’Connor’s biography of the great man, on 23rd February 1923, though Wikipedia (and most other sources) give his birthday as 9th February.

Either way, everyone agrees he died of drink and diabetes on 20th March 1964, aged only 41.

‘I drink on only two occasions,’ he liked to say, ‘when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.’

I loved Behan’s plays when I first saw them as a boy and bought copies of The Hostage and The Quare Fellow in the early 1960s. I’ve still got them.

On 8th February (the eve of what might have been his birthday – who knows?), I went to London’s Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith to a fittingly uproarious reading of a bewitching new show about Behan’s turbulent life.

He loved his drink to the point of extinction and, curiously, his public displays of inebriation seemed at the time to endear him to the public.

‘There is no such thing as bad publicity,’ he quipped, ‘except your own obituary.’

At his funeral, he was given a full IRA guard of honour and mourned by thousands. It was reckoned the biggest Irish funeral of all time, after those of Michael John Collins and Charles Stewart Parnell.

Behan was mordantly funny: ‘Ah, bless you, Sister; may all your sons be bishops.’ But wise as well as witty: ‘It’s a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with.’

An exhibition of Gyles’s knitwear is at the Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery until 23rd December