The Oldie October 2022 418 by The Oldie

Hugo Vickers, Antonia Fraser, Gyles Brandreth, Barry Cryer, A N Wilson, Nicholas Garland, Robert Hardman, Harry Mount

October 2022 | £4.95 £4.13 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 418

Elizabeth II – 1926-2022

23/31 Great

74 Motoring Alan Judd

28 Last days of Chips Channon

James Hughes-Onslow The Doctor’s Surgery

Features

The Oldie October 2022 3

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76 Digital Life

85 On the Road: Pattie Boyd Louise Flind

13 Modern Life: What is quiet quitting?

16 Farewell, Elizabeth II

35 Small World

David Horspool Commonplace Corner Rant: Bungalows

Richard Osborne Golden Oldies

Mary Kenny

32 A N Wilson, the last great man of letters Roger Lewis

Theodore Dalrymple Readers’ Letters I Once Met… Valerie Hobson

Margaret Dibben

Alan Judd 51 Lessons, by Ian McEwan

79 Bird of the Month: Little Owl John McEwen

24 My springtime in Paris

Liz Hodgkinson Crossword Bridge

Reader Offers Literary Lunch p43 Trip to Crete with Rick Stroud p77 ABC circulation figure January-June 2021: 49,181 Emailqueries?Subshelp@subscribe.theoldie.co.uk

Valerie Grove 66 Television

98 Ask Virginia Ironside Books

Richard Godwin Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips My trouble and strife

64 Film: The Lost King

Annette Page Memory Lane Roger Ley Media Matters

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71 Kitchen Garden

Giles Wood Postcards from the Edge

Stephen Glover History

Mary Kenny 41 School Days

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Jem Clarke 38 Town Mouse

Frances Wilson Music

Moray

Matthew Norman

13 Olden Life: What was Tit-Bits? Michael Barber

Roger Lewis Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk Justin Marozzi Coffee with Hitler, by Charles Spicer Ivo Dawnay 57 Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie Frances Wilson Arts

82 Overlooked Britain: Italian Chapel in the Orkneys Lucinda Lambton

David Wheeler

Hugo Vickers

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76 Money Matters

14 Simple food is best Prue Leith

30 Queen of the oldies Antonia Fraser and Gyles Brandreth

87 Taking a Walk: The valley of the River Sence, Leicestershire Patrick Barkham

72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

74 Sport Jim White

Andrew Robson

11 My crazy days

Simon Courtauld

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36 The Royal Family in Vogue Robin Muir

5 The Old Un’s Notes Gyles Brandreth’s Diary Grumpy Oldie Man

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Travel

Love letter to Paris page 24

John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Memorial Service: Ronald Allison

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Pursuits

80 Ravenna’s heavenly mosaics James Pembroke

or Rafe Thornhill on 020 3859 7093

Front cover Princess Elizabeth of York in 1932, aged six, before she became heir to the throne. Bob Thomas/Popperfoto via Getty Images

Sophia Waugh Quite Interesting Things about ... rain

20 I failed the 11-plus Jenny Bardwell

Sue Tyson

Regulars

Elizabeth the Steadfast page 16

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71 Gardening

Nicky Haslam

Matthew Webster

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73 Drink Bill Knott

48 Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald, by Flora Fraser Roy Foster 51 Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, by Ben Macintyre

Oldie book orders

Tessa Castro

Tom Hodgkinson Country Mouse

Rachel Johnson Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu House, Titchfield

91 Competition

Sir Les Patterson

Street, London W1W www.theoldie.co.uk7PA Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Amelia Milne Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Harry Mount Theatre: Much Ado About Nothing William Cook Radio

72 Restaurants James Pembroke

The Royals in Vogue page 36

Among this month’s contributors

Prue Leith (p14) is a judge on The Great British Bake Off. She set up Leith’s restaurant and Leith’s School of Food and Wine. Her new book, Bliss on Toast, is based on her Oldie column.

Justin Marozzi (p53) is a travel writer and historian. His books include The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus and Islamic Empires: The Cities That Shaped Civilisation: From Mecca to Dubai

The Oldie October 2022 5

The Raymond Briggs retrospective: Father Christmas, 1973

dedicated to the creator of The Snowman,’ says Sir Alistair Spalding, Sadler’s Wells’s Artistic Director. ‘He was a special artist, with a sharp and observant mind.’ Hear hear.

The BBC proposed to move it to FM only, when FM was still often hard to receive. A ‘rolling news service’ would be offered on long wave.

He tore up his TV licence on the 6pm news and recruited Wykehamists to deal with the deluge of letters. Within months, he got a message: ‘Call off the dogs, Mr MacKinnon. You’ve won.’

The Old Un is delighted to learn that his life-enhancingwonderful,workisin no danger of being forgotten.

Mary Kenny (p24) has written for The Oldie since our first issue in 1992. She is author of Germany Calling (Lord HawHaw’s biography) and The Way We Were: Centenary Essays on Catholic Ireland.

We mourn, too, writer and illustrator (and Oldie columnist) Raymond Briggs, who died in August at 88.

Thirty years ago, Radio 4 was in peril.

Fans can also head to London’s Peacock Theatre, for a revival of the stage adaptation of The Snowman, (on from 19th November to 31st‘ThisDecember).year,the season is

Oldie Towers is in deep mourning after the death of Elizabeth II.

‘If the figure is to walk jauntily with its nose in the air, you have to imagine what that feels like,’ he said. ‘You have to be the person and observe the person, and do both these things at once.’

Having selected pupils and coached hundreds into Oxbridge, he recalls one

Up sprang a young maths master at Winchester College, named Nick MacKinnon, offering to spearhead a Save Radio 4 Long Wave campaign.

Roy Foster (p48) was Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford. He’s written biographies of W B Yeats, Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill. He was a Booker Prize judge in 2000.

The Snowman, Father Christmas, Fungus the Bogeyman and, Ethel & Ernest, a portrait of his describedOftenparents.erroneouslyaschildren’s books, Briggs’s graphic novels (as the Old Un’s grandchildren are wont to call them) are actually suitable for readers of all ages.

BRIGGSRAYMOND

A new station, Radio 5 Live, would start on FM instead. David Hendy, in his history of Radio 4, says MacKinnon’s campaign saved theNicknetwork.MacKinnon was our Oldie Campaigner of the Year. He still has the engraved paperweight presented by our founding father, Richard Ingrams. ‘He couldn’t get over how young I was, [29],’ says NickSincetoday.that triumph – which made him feel ‘indestructible’ – MacKinnon has not been idle. He became a ‘legendary’ Winchester housemaster (of Chawker’s), benignly anarchic, but trusted and popular. He kept winning Spectator and New Statesman competitions, and then won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2013.

And, like any great artist, in any genre, he took immense care over every frame.

Readers will find tributes to Her Majesty throughout this issue of the magazine.

The Old Un’s Notes

The first books,pictures26th12thCountyMuseumtransferring(untilDumfriesKirkcudbrightartworkretrospectivemajorofBriggs’siscurrentlyatGalleries,&Galloway30thOctober),totheBowesinBarnardCastle,Durham(fromNovemberuntilFebruary).ThistouringshowfeaturesfromBriggs’sfinestincluding

‘Please don’t stand so near the edge, George. You have no idea of the urges I get’

Do you store your food in a cwtch, a closet or a cupboard? Is that a furze-pig, a prickly-backed urchin or a hedgehog shuffling around your back garden? And what if you need your shoes mended – do you go to a nobby, a stubby or a UniversityResearcherscobbler?attheofLeedshave made their vast collection of English dialects available to the public and they’re collecting more via the Great Big Dialect Hunt.

The Index of Prohibited Books examines this extraordinary pornographic sequel to the‘Inspiredindex. by the Index’s prohibition of Mirabeau’s 18th-century Erotika Biblion, a London-based venture published a whole series of pornographic works between 1888 and 1907. Erotic images includingofnumerouscommissionedweretoadornspecialisededitionsotherbannedworks,Boccaccio’s

In retirement, MacKinnon lives with his poet wife in Brontë country, within skiing distance of the original Wuthering Heights house, Top Withens, where Japanese tourists throng.

Answers at the end of the Old Un’s Notes.

Decameron.’

The early novel and short stories were written between 1956, in Montreal and 1961, when he’d settled on the Greek island of Hydra.

And having just spent a vacation offspringsuper-tutoringofthemega-rich, he might write a book, What We Teach the Billionaire’s Kids. Excellent idea.

• Electrotettix attenboroughi pygmy – – – – – –

Sheriff blasts drunken 999 nuisance caller who said she was a vampire needing a Pot Noodle Press and Journal

FREE SAMPLE COPY

• Platysaurus attenboroughi Attenborough’s flat – – – – – –

‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ cried Michael Palin in the celebrated Monty Python sketch in 1971.

The new BBC Puzzle Book by Ian Smith and Dr Gareth Moore is full of trickyOnebrainteasers.ofthetrickiest is about David Attenborough. He has had several species of animal named after him. Can you fill in the missing word in the English translation of the animals’ Latin names, below?

Long before he became a pop star, Cohen dreamt of being a novelist. His later novels included The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). Only now, 60 years on, is his first novel seeing the light of day.

Anyone who thinks pornography is a miserable modern obsession, take heed.

Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box.

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Toilets to get a spruce up Cornish Times

Rishi Sunak: ‘A good boy. Trouble is, he still is a good boy. He sounds exactly like the head boy addressing the whole school at “Ad Portas” (when Winchester honours a distinguished visitor).’

• Attenborosaurus conybeari marine – – – – – – –

6 The Oldie October 2022 LAMBKATHRYN

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Hallelujah – Cohen rises again

OLDIE BOOKS

Pornographic Inquisition, either – a naughty reaction to the Index 16thBooks,Church’sProhibitorum,LibrorumtheCatholicIndexofProhibitedwhichlastedfromthecenturyuntil1966.RobinVose’snewbook

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46% of men won’t eat out without dog Sunday Mirror

Well, no one expected the

Six years after the death of Leonard Cohen, aged 82, his first novel, A Ballet of Lepers (Canongate), is to be published on 11th October.

So it was with some surprise that the Old Un read this confession by Eliot wearing his Faber publisher’s hat: ‘Writing blurbs always throws me into a fever of scrupulosity and I am never satisfied with any I write. It is a form of composition that seems to me to require more labour and offer less reward than any other…’

Many of them appear in the new book – and he kindly thanks the readers in theSeveralacknowledgements.royalreports are included. Elizabeth I was quite a scholar, educated by Roger Ascham, one of the great intellects and teachers of the era. He said that Elizabeth knew much of Cicero and Livy

The Oldie October 2022 7

Fyshe was known in motorsports circles for his unusual dress sense – a pair of stars-and-stripes trousers went unwashed for years because they were autographed by Grand Prix stars – and for his practical jokes.

And his tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, was even more damning: ‘I do not think he can possibly derive much benefit from attending lectures at Cambridge. He hardly knows the meaning of the words “to read”.’

Did Eliot ever consider the solution offered by Anthony Blond, who published Myra Breckinridge and Small Is Beautiful?

He owned a small plastic sheet which looked just like an oil slick. This he would slip under the front wheels of rival cars – particularly Mercedes

Do you still shudder at memories of your schoolWell,reports?ifyoucan face a reminder, James Thellusson has collected some of the best of them in School’s Out: Truants, Troublemakers and Teachers’ Pets (Sandstone Press).

Poet in residence: T S Eliot (left) and Faber directors, 1944

Is it all right for pet animals to attend funerals?

One hundred years after The Waste Land was published, it’s difficult to imagine that T S Eliot was ever at a loss for words.

lizard;AttenboroughDavidquestions:locust;reptile

‘Dialect is at the heart of our personal identity,’ says project research assistant Dr Rosemary Hall. ‘It’s at the heart of who we are.’

At the start of the funeral, the organist played the BBC’s Formula One theme tune by Fleetwood Mac. The coffin left the church to the strains of Morecambe and Wise’s Bring Me Sunshine

– before telling their drivers, ‘You’ve got a bit of a problem there, old boy.’

‘Blurbs? Best done over a boozy lunch, dear.’

After the death, aged 83, of colourful Herefordshire gent Alexander ‘Chips’ Fyshe, mourners filled St Michael’s, a small rural church in the hamlet of Sollers Hope, near Ross-on-Wye. Fyshe, a gregarious former City insurance broker, was mad about classic cars and a long-standing habitué of motor races.

Fyshe’s elderly terrier Osca attended proceedings, sitting on the chancel floor next to his fallen master’s wicker coffin throughout the service. Osca was named after a 1950s Maserati that Fyshe used to drive in competitions.

The little dog was noticeably subdued during the funeral. It was if he knew exactly what was taking place. Although some may feel the presence of a dog in church is inappropriate, is it not humane (and even Christian) to let animals grieve their departed friends?

Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence – Queen Victoria’s doomed grandson, who died at 28 – didn’t excel. His tutor, the Rev Dr John Dalton, described him as ‘apathetic with an abnormally dormant condition of mind’.

• Answers to

The university’s Survey of English Dialects originally recorded the language of speakers across the country between 1951 and 1961. These voices have now been digitised and collated in the university’s In Your Words project. It’s the place to find out where in the world ‘wommal’ means ‘dog’ or where you might play a game of ‘wallops’.Members of the public are now invited to send in their own words and phrases to bring the collection up to date, either via its interactive website (dialectandheritage. org.uk) or in person at five participating museums.

‘It’s for everything’

‘Have you not considered upgrading to windows?’unleaded

Thellusson wrote a piece about school reports in The Oldie and asked readers for their own reports.

and that ‘French and Italian she speaks like English, Latin with fluency … and GreekShepassably.’alsostudied grammar, theology, history, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, maths, literature and geometry.

No one wants to buy my old books – but they’ll burn beautifully

My father claimed to know her secret. First, bake your telephone directory. Uncooked, the book was nearly impossible to tear apart. Baked gently, it could be ripped in two with a single stroke.

Happily, my library is well organised – so I can burn my books thematically.

Good books make good fuel

Is it time to burn my books?

‘Oh my,’ exclaimed Patrick, ‘the dish has run away with the spoon.’

I shall toast crumpets over the burning Billy Bunter annuals. I shall give my wife a romantic fireside supper as we throw Barbara Cartland and Fanny Cradock onto the flames. (Dame Barbara signed her books for me in pink ink. Fanny Cradock gave me her fictional family saga, The Lormes of Castle Rising, in which she had a hero named Gyles with a y in my honour.)

television called Joan Rhodes. Born in 1921, she was a professional stuntwoman and she caught my eye because she was blonde and beautiful and could tear the inches-thick London telephone directory in half quite effortlessly.

In late August, I took a tumble on a hard pavement in Fife and managed to break my humerus. As you’ll know if you’ve done it, it’s not funny.

page

I found the liquid morphine more to my liking, but it made me pretty woozy.

The plots are all much of a muchness. The dialogue is quite predictable. The pleasure is in recognising actors from yesteryear whom you’d half-forgotten but now recollect with great delight. One such was Patrick Cargill, who turned up the other night playing the butler.

Patrick Cargill in Father, Dear Father

I have not burned books before, but I have baked them. In the 1950s, I had a schoolboy crush on a lady I saw on

the painkillers haven’t helped much. I had to abandon the Ibuprofen because it brought on the hiccups, and every hiccup (there were on average four a minute and each bout lasted at least an hour) prompted a spasm of upper-arm agony.

My wife has already told me she is getting rid of the lot the moment I go. So, given the cost-of-living crisis and the rocketing price of fuel, is this the year for me to clear the grate and set a match to all my treasured tomes?

I loved Cargill’s urbane style made famous in the sitcom Father, Dear Father and was lucky in my twenties to know him. He was discreetly gay and very amusing. Once, when we were lunching with Ray Cooney, the theatrical impresario for whom we were both working, a handsome young waiter mistakenly removed Cargill’s soup spoon.

I never met Joan Rhodes, who had a tough start in life, sleeping rough in Soho as a girl before she joined a travelling fair. She died in 2010. Quentin Crisp told me they had been London neighbours for a while and he used to play Scrabble with‘Becauseher. she was a strongwoman,’ said Quentin, ‘I assumed she would be weak with words. Not so. There is a lesson for us all in that.’

I have at least 10,000 volumes, and they’re worthless. I know because Rick Gekoski – since the 1980s, arguably the world’s leading dealer in literary archives –popped by to tell me so. It seems a signed first edition of one of E M Forster’s major novels might be of interest, but My Life in Music by Edward Heath not so much. (I have none of the former, and three of theAslatter.)forthe Korean and other international editions of my own Victorian murder mysteries, featuring Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle as my protagonists (bestsellers in France, incidentally – ‘You had a superb translator,’ says my wife by way of explanation), even Oxfam won’t be interested. All my books are destined for the flames, and I have so many I could incinerate a shelf a night and get through at least three bleak midwinters.

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

If we had the energy, my wife and I could try some naked wrestling on the hearth rug while my complete D H Lawrence goes up in smoke.

In fact, the morphine is my excuse for the shaming mistake that appeared in my diary last month. I was recommending the novels of Elizabeth Taylor and suggested that readers who didn’t yet know her work might like to start with At Bertram’s Hotel – one of Agatha Christie’s best. The Elizabeth Taylor novel I meant to recommend, also set in a hotel, is called Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. If you want a story that is civilised, beautifully observed and elegantly written, Miss Taylor is your woman.

If you want TV that suits the befuddled mind of the oral-morphine dope fiend, I recommend the old Edgar Wallace Mysteries currently being shown on Talking Pictures TV.

Gyles Brandreth’s tribute to the Queen is on 30

The pain has been excruciating and

The Oldie October 2022 9

I can’t remember whether my father’s technique worked, but I do recall we got through all our own telephone directories and the neighbours’ trying to find out.

In hindsight, I should have taken that option rather than launch the quest for an alternative route. If Odysseus thought he had it tough on the return to Ithaca, Odysseus was a feckless sissy. The Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis were doddles next to this.

matthew norman

After six outings to the orthopaedic department for X-rays and measurements, the seventh for collection passed without incident. It was on the short journey home that the merriment

‘None whatsoever,’ said my mother. ‘Now, for God’s sake, slow down before you plough into the wall and kill us both.’

When finally we limped home, an hour and 47 minutes after being 20 seconds from the front door, I tried to leaven an atmosphere that had weighed us down for too long. ‘Ah, well, they say it’s better to travel than to arrive,’ I said.

Twenty minutes after being 20 feet from her road, we were several miles away. Another 20 minutes on, we were the same distance from home, but at the diametrically opposite compass point. When the hour mark fell, we had no idea where we were.

‘You’re right,’ she said, in a moment of concord all the more precious for its rarity. ‘We might as well be lost in theAccordingSahara.’ to the non-human satnav in the phone – the one adept at measuring distances, but less so at recognising road closures – we were 5.7 miles from her road, heading due west.

We enter London’s seventh circle of roadworks hell

These are presented, as with Eric Morley announcing the Miss World results, in reverse order of importance.

‘Do they?’ said my mother. ‘Is that what they say? Well, then, they are f****** idiots.’ There was, I felt, no disputing that.

‘Turn around,’ commanded my mother.

A penny dropped. ‘You’ve absolutely no intention,’ I eventually managed, ‘of ever wearing these boots, have you?’

‘It’s a road closure,’ my mother expertly observed. ‘Now slow down before you plough though the barrier and kill us both.’

‘Why?’ I ‘Becauseasked.Ihave no desire to spend the night in Plymouth.’

With every week that passes, the unanswerables pile up until the heap threatens to dwarf Everest.

10 The Oldie October 2022

If a segment of the British (let’s be frank – English) electorate regrets Boris Johnson’s passing, for example, why isn’t Albion Straitjackets Plc the fastest-rising blue chip on the Stock Exchange?

She raised her brows sardonically, and stayed silent.

The relationship between this unholy trinity was revealed after a trip to the Royal Free Hospital to collect that footwear, prescribed after she monstrously broke her left ankle some 16 months ago.

‘Go right and first left,’ was the initial order barked out in the siren voice of the human satnav at my side. I duly went right, but could not then turn right owing to, of all viscerally shocking apparitions, a road closure. We drove straight on, went right and right again, left, right, left, left, straight on and right.

The street closure had magically appeared in the hour or so since we’d left the house

‘It now seems certain that we will die

in this car,’ I observed, ‘but not from me driving at a suicidal 16mph. We are going to die from thirst.’

Grumpy Oldie Man

On the road to nowhere with my mother

3) What kind of 16th wit (see below) quotes the old saw that it is better to travel than to arrive?

1) What possessed the NHS, given its funding history, to spend a fortune on making my mother a pair of bespoke soft-leather orthotic boots?

‘What the hell is this?’ I exploded in my best Victor Meldrew.

‘Still,’ I said, flailing for consolation as we rolled gently towards the driveway, ‘at least, after all the hospital trips, you finally have your boots.’

Some mysteries are too familiar to bear too much repetition. So rather than belabour you with such conundrums as ‘What was Alf Ramsey thinking when he substituted Bobby Charlton against the Hun in the 1970 World Cup?’, I will focus on three relative novelties.

I have always regarded Wacky Races, in which the competitors charge around like maniacs without ever getting anywhere, as the finest artistic metaphor for the nihilistic pointlessness of human existence. Becoming half (the canine half) of north London’s very own Dastardly and Muttley was doing little to disabuse me of that.

2) Why, despite the perpetual absence of anyone working on them, is every other street in London currently closed?

ensued. Yet, this once, it was not the oft-repeated injunction ‘For God’s sake, slow down – you’ll kill us both’, issued whenever the speedometer nudges 13mph, that provided the premier test of endurance.Thishonour fell to the street closure, just before the turning to her road, that had magically appeared – to join the other 978 in the vicinity – in the hour or so since we’d left the house.

I won’t dwell on the detail, save to report that the joint now emerges from the leg at an angle of 60 degrees. Her left foot may not quite make her the Christy Nolan of Primrose Hill. But it is an incapacitating nuisance. And so, general anaesthesia being considered too perilous for corrective surgery, these boots were commissioned.

‘Howworse.doyou feel, Susan?’ he asked when we were enclosed in a small square room with comfortless chairs and a window with no visible method of opening.

In the evening, the nurses had a contretemps with her. ‘You’ve been smoking marijuana in the dorm, Joan.’

But‘No-o.’the nurses were adamant, threatening to banish her from the smoking room and putting her under the strictest observation. At last, she capitulated. I heard her say in a cringing voice, ‘Are you going to call the police in, then?’

Next was yoga, followed by relaxation. I was hopeless at yoga – and as for relaxation, I usually just fell asleep on the mat.

She repeated my words, mimicking my accent exactly. It was like looking into a fairground mirror where I saw a dressing-gowned me, twice the size, with wild, black, shoulder-length hair.

‘You would rate your self-esteem as…?’

‘Is your medication making you feel

‘I have no self-esteem.’

And I was still having trouble with Joan. One day, my pillow disappeared and I noticed two on her bed. I pointed this out, but the nurse seemed preoccupied and said there were no more pillows. For one night, I slept without a pillow – and the next day I stole mine back.

I also taught full-time until retirement and have had five books published by reputable houses – which I like to offset against my sojourns in the bin.

him with a look.

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My crazy days

‘No,’ I replied dully. ‘I never hear voices.’

‘Yes, you have. We can smell it. Did your daughter bring it in?’

and conversation! I knew it would be a dead loss. The first time, I had tried to make conversation. I had prided myself on it at sherry parties in my student days. But that was when I was au fait with the news and had opinions, whereas now I was nothing but a dull spool wound up in itself.

I decided to pace the corridors. I looked at the paintings, there to make the ward look homey. Mostly, they were the mildest sort of Manet, with a few commercial gallery studies of bowls of flowers thrown in.

‘Oh, come. You’re a woman who’s achieved a lot.’

But I was as wild and mad as she was. Just like her, I’d been brought to this place; I’d had no say in the matter. And now she was aping me. She enflamed my feelings of shame and self-loathing.

A uniformed nurse appeared at the door. ‘Susan, you’re to see Doctor now.’

‘You don’t mind me smoking?’ She put a fag to her lips and struck a match. We were in the dorm. ‘Yes, I do. It’s against the rules. There’s a smoking room provided.’

‘That was before. I’m not the same person.’

‘I have not!’

‘Can you hear voices?’

‘It‘No.’better?’willin time. That’s all for now. Keep up the occupational therapy.’

That was my day of triumph over Joan.

‘Not on this occasion, no.’

I would have preferred a few Van Goghs at his maddest. I didn’t want the anodyne. I wanted something shocking and visceral to make me feel something other than this awful sense of floating along those hospital corridors on my own little grey cloud. Goya’s drawings of mad people –now there we would have had something.

As for me, I could not wait for the next occasion.

Sue Tyson hated going mad – and particularly loathed one fellow patient

One of those spells was in January 2006. I was one of the elect – I did not have to wear a striped dressing gown, unlike Joan, the hoyden who was approaching me.

This doctor had a gentle manner and was very calm and quietly spoken. But seeing him was an utter waste of time. His brief consultation would only make me feel

As for the games, we usually played Pictogram. This required us to say nothing and was therefore a universal favourite. You had to try to convey what was on a card by pictures alone. I had once prided myself on my drawing as well as my social skills, but now my art looked like a two-year-old’s.

I ‘Worse.’‘Better?shrugged.Worse?’Itoreat my cuticles with my‘Yes.’‘Helpless?’I‘Hopeless?’teeth.nodded.Idefied

Occupational therapy! Social games

I have spent periods of my life going dotty.

The Oldie October 2022 13

Chalfont to print his memoirs, in which he confesses to mass murder.

Tit-Bits had to move with the times. By 1939, pin-ups had attention.wasfrontcover.advertisementsreplacedonitsPerhapsthiswhatbroughtittomyAtanyrate,aged

Quiet quitting is also part of a postpandemic re-evaluation of all aspects of work culture. The lockdowns gave millions of people the time and space to reassess what they want from life.

The term is thought to have evolved from the Chinese phrase tang ping – literally ‘lying flat’. The phrase surfaced on Chinese social media as younger workers began to question the value of the 100-hour weeks that national productivity targets and Western consumers demand of them.

Unable to find a backer, Newnes scraped together enough money for a modest first print run. Two months later, Tit-Bits went on sale; by midday, 5,000 copies had been sold. G K Chesterton proclaimed, ‘Let any honest reader … ask himself whether he would really rather be asked to write the front page of The Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes.’

Then again, note how meek the protest is. Quiet quitting is a far cry from smashing up spinning-jennies – or even common-or-garden strike action. It’s a measure of how imbalanced things have become that just doing your job is seen as tantamount to giving up.

Aged eight, Virginia Woolf submitted a piece that was turned down. She later referred to the magazine in Moments of Being. Other writers who invoked Tit-Bits included George Orwell, C P Snow and James Joyce, who in Ulysses depicts Bloom reading a copy on the loo.

In the final scene of Kind Hearts and Coronets, Arthur Lowe (pictured) plays a Tit-Bits reporter who asks the Duke of

And so, they are learning not to define themselves solely by work.

So slacking is the new hustling: giving it your 78 per cent is the new giving 110 per cent; bringing down capitalism is the new launching a start-up. People who formerly boasted about how much they could get done are now boasting about how little they can get away with. Even the formerly workaholic singer Beyoncé has caught the anti-work mood. Her recent single Break My Soul talks of quitting her job and finding a ‘new foundation’.

Richard Godwin

Arthur Lowe (left) of Tit-Bits

But the sentiment has chimed with youths in Britain and America. Quiet quitting has become a popular topic on the Antiwork forum of the discussion site Reddit and on TikTok, the social media of choice for teens and 20-somethings.

This ‘tit-bit’, he thought, was just the sort of diverting story that would appeal to his customers – clerks, for the most part. So why not start a weekly journal made up of similar pieces from ‘all the most interesting books, periodicals and newspapers in the world’?

11, I was caught by my prep-school headmaster reading a copy. The mildly suggestive title, plus a front-page photo of Sophia Loren in a bathing suit, convinced him it was ‘smut’. Would it have made a difference if I’d told him that Wodehouse, a favourite of his, had been a contributor? Probably not, because he’d already marked my card when I was heard extolling the under-matron’s ‘hourglass figure’.

what is quiet quitting?

In August 1881, George Newnes, an enterprising Mancunian restaurateur, spotted an item called ‘A runaway train’ in the Manchester Evening News

Michael Barber

In 1973, Tit-Bits became Titbits. Six years later, it merged with its rather more vulgar rival Reveille. But in the era of lads’ mags, it must have seemed rather tame. In 1989, after yet another merger, this time with Weekend, it ceased publication.

Quiet quitting is when your mind checks out of a job while your body still goes through the motions.

what was Tit-Bits?

A ‘manifesto for lying down’ posted on the discussion site Douban listed accepting one’s shortcomings, daring not to equate money with happiness, and refusing to worry too much about existential questions as key tenets of the movement. The post has since been censored; one dreads to think what happened to its author.

A son of the manse, Newnes, who also founded the hugely popular Strand

It is not to be confused with slacking. You are sitting at your terminal. You are hitting your quotas. You are doing everything your contract demands of you.But you are doing nothing more. No answering emails at weekends, no fetching the boss’s dry-cleaning – and probably no chipping in for a Colin the Caterpillar cake on Kelly’s birthday, either. The quiet quitter would prefer not to.

Then again, Generation Z have, after all, come of age in an era of side hustles and productivity hacks, of Apprentice contestants promising to give 110 per cent and tech bros boasting about getting up at 4am. A few of the sharper ones have noticed that the promotion of this neo-Stakhanovite capitalist ethos has coincided with the steady erosion of workplace rights, falling wages and ever-more-enraging levels of inequality.

magazine, wanted to ‘improve’ his readers, as well as entertain them. He read every issue from cover to cover and removed anything he considered unduly lurid, sensational or equivocal. By 1891, by which time he’d become a Liberal MP, Newnes was pocketing £30,000 a year from Tit-Bits Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe (subject of The Chief, by Andrew Roberts), who founded the Daily Mail, was an early contributor to Tit-Bits. So was P G Wodehouse, who in 1900 wrote his first freelance piece, ‘Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings’, in the magazine.

Last week, we went to Henne, a tiny restaurant (it seats a maximum of 12) in Moreton-in-Marsh, and every one of the six mouthfuls that made up the tasting menu was gobsmackingly delicious. Not one of them had more than four ingredients; most had only two or three: Salcombe crab in a light mayo with raw fresh peas; a chocolate mousse of nothing but eggs, sugar, chocolate and cream; Oxford Blue cheese with walnuts so fresh they wereNotcreamy.many of us – certainly not I – can combine ingredients and treat them as sublimely as Darren Brown, Henne’s chef-patron. But KISS (keep it simple, stupid) works for every level of competence. Nothing beats ripe, home-grown tomatoes, fresh basil, the best olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt.

implicity is such an obvious virtue in cooking: simple dishes take less time, cost less money and are easier to do.

14 The Oldie October 2022

of a new book based on

Easy-peasy:

Or a meaty pork sausage with Dijon mustard. Or kedgeree made with good kippers and plenty of butter. Or a barbecued lamb steak, charred outside, pink in the middle and flavoured with garlic and Everyonerosemary.hasfond culinary memories; Nana’s fish pie (pictured), Mum’s Victoria sandwich or Dad’s dirty burger. And they are all simple.

Even the classiest food, which makes you shake your head in disbelief and admiration, usually consists of a few simple ingredients neatly – even exquisitely – arranged.

Keep it stupidsimple, Leith – author her Oldie column, Bliss on Toast

The best food is often the easiest to make, says Prue

fish pie

No one pines for fancy restaurant dishes incorporating drizzles and foams,

1 large clove garlic, crushed 1 can chopped tomatoes

1 tbsp oil (any kind)

Salt and pepper

The Oldie October 2022 15

Bubble and squeak Serves 4

Bring a big pan of water to the boil. Add a tablespoon or so of oil to stop the pasta sticking. Add the pasta, stir, then boil for 12 or so minutes until al dente.

If making the sauce, do it while the bubble and squeak is gently frying. In another pan repeat the onion, oil and water process above, cooking the onion until soft and translucent. Then add the garlic, cook for another minute, then tip in the tomatoes and Worcestershire sauce and bubble gently until thick. Season with salt and pepper.

Break up the meringue into rough pieces. Whip the double cream until it will just hold its shape. Gently mix the meringue and cream together, then add half the blackberries, turn again, then spoon into a serving dish. Top with the rest of the berries and sprinkle over the muscovado sugar.

I buy my smoked mackerel online from Catch of the Day, Kingsbridge. I use dried farfalle pasta (the one that looks like little bow ties) and fresh baby spinach from a packet.

When the book was done, we needed a photo for the cover. There were 75 to choose from, from mussels in whitewine sauce with samphire on sourdough to guacamole with pine nuts on rye –but the favourite, by a country mile, was the humble cheese toastie.

Autumn Eton mess Serves 4 Eton mess is classically made with strawberries, but by now they are mostly imported and lack flavour. So I’ve used blackberries. I’ve also added some Muscovado sugar for its treacly taste.

Freshly-ground black pepper

1 small packet fresh baby spinach

For the bubble and squeak, put the onion in a large frying pan with a splash of water and the oil. Simmer slowly until the water has gone and the onions are frying gently in the oil. When they are soft and glassy-looking, add the bacon and fry until onion and bacon are beginning to brown. (If it is leftover bacon, no need to fry it – just chop it up.)Put the potatoes in a large bowl and, if boiled, crush them roughly with a fork. Add the onion, bacon and cabbage and mix well, adding salt and pepper to taste.Meltthe butter in the frying pan. Make flat patties of the potato mix and fry them gently in the butter until the underside is brown. Turn over and brown the second side. Don’t worry if they break up.

For the tomato sauce (optional): 1 large onion, chopped 1 tbsp oil

2 tsps dark muscovado sugar

Prue Leith’s Bliss on Toast: 75 Simple Recipes is out on 29th September (Bloomsbury, £14.99)

1 tbsp oil

4 ready-made meringue nests or 400gshells fresh blackberries ½ pint double cream

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the sand, wrapped in a towel, shivering and watching anxiously as my nanny buttered Marie biscuits (a South African biscuit, much like a Rich Tea) and sprinkled them with hundreds and thousands. My anxiety arose from my greed: Nanny would dish them out to me and my brothers in turn until the packet was empty; I couldn’t bear it if there was an extra one at the end and I didn’t get it.

I don’t really know the difference between bubble and squeak and stovies, but when I produce what I think is the former, my husband’s Edinburgh accent suddenly resurfaces and he cries, ‘Och aye, stovies!’ with delight. The fact that they don’t contain corned beef or swedes or gravy, and the potatoes are mashed rather than boiled, doesn’t seem to matter. It’s the tatty (totty to Glaswegians) that matters. I usually make mine with left-overs and serve them with left-over gravy or, failing that, with the tomato sauce.

While the pasta is cooking, skin the mackerel and break the fillets into chunks.When the pasta is done, tip the spinach into the water with the pasta, stir until it has wilted, then drain through a colander. Toss gently to allow the steam to escape, then tip into a serving bowl and add the mackerel, sea salt, pepper and butter, using a fork gently to distribute everything.

It’s not just everyday cooking that benefits from simplification. We went to a dinner recently where watching our hosts faffing and fussing with multiple courses, sauces and toppings, salads and sides was not a pleasure.

Grated Parmesan (optional)

For plenty of people, giving a dinner party is a nightmare. And yet I know, and deep down they do too, that their friends would rather be served a sausage hotpot or even a soggy pizza from Deliveroo and be able to relax and talk to their hosts.

4 rashers rindless bacon, chopped 200g boiled or mashed potato

I’ve been writing a new cookbook, Bliss on Toast, based on two ideas: what goes with what; and if something tastes good, it will be great on toast. The series began here in The Oldie Many of the recipes are simple combinations of good ingredients, served on great bread, toasted.

1 medium onion, chopped

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

Culinary nostalgia for me means food eaten on Hermanus beach in the Cape in South Africa: my uncle’s just-caught yellowtail steamed in foil over a fire; my aunt’s cheese-and-apricot-jam sarnies grilled on the same fire.

Pasta with Salcombe smokies and spinach

250g farfalle pasta

1 large smoked mackerel

Good pinch sea-salt flakes

Big knob butter

Sunshine on Leith: Prue takes it easy

Serve with grated Parmesan.

Serves 4

2 breakfast cups cooked cabbage Salt and black pepper Butter for frying

blobs and smears, too many flavours and unheard-of ingredients.

16 The Oldie October 2022

RIP Elizabeth II

In 36 meetings with her – from 1968 until this summer – Hugo Vickers was bowled over by Elizabeth the Steadfast

ALAMY/PRESSPICTORIAL

She was as alert and smiling as ever, missing nothing, chatting over a wide range of topics. As I left the room, she was leaning over, looking at the book. There was a hint of vulnerability, but

We are all going to have to come to terms with the end of this reign in our different ways. I have long predicted that the country will have a collective nervous breakdown. The Queen has been a part of all our lives for so very long.

My theory is that until the Queen Mother died in 2002, she was overshadowed. The Queen Mother drew to herself the affection of the nation. She was extrovert where the Queen was quietly executive. Many took her for granted but, with the death of her mother, the mantle of much-loved matriarch fell onto her shoulders.

Her understanding of her role and her fulfilment of that role make her unique, a head of state whom we could all trust –knowing her to be on our side, consistent in an era of massive change.

Opposite page: illustration by Nicholas Garland

The Oldie October 2022 17

here is symmetry and a line of extraordinary continuity between the first iconic image of the Queen at the beginning of her reign and the last one, in which, aged 96, she fulfilled her constitutional duty. In February 1952, a small but assured figure came down the steps, dressed in black, metaphorically claiming her kingdom. She was greeted by her first Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, a man born in 1874. On 6th September, she received her 15th and last Prime Minister, Liz Truss, born in 1975, thus creating a span of over 100 years.Were you to home in on any of the 70 years of this remarkable reign, you would get a similar image – a more or less unchanging Queen, carrying out her duties, serving this country and the Commonwealth, travelling to far ends of the world, talking to heads of state, comforting her people in times of distress from Aberfan to Grenfell Tower.

from Edinburgh in 2021. She began to cancel public appearances. By the time of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, we had become used to her sometimes attending, sometimes not.

presently she would watch a race on the television and have her dinner. Two days later, she was off to Scotland for what proved a very visible few days.

I was lucky to have other meetings, and was always struck by her quiet generosity. She missed nothing,

The girl who would be Queen: Princess Elizabeth in 1945.

Instead she appeared to be leading a very full and active life. She emerged from the seclusion of the pandemic. But then it began to get worrying. The Queen was tired and drawn on her return south

Britain is a very different place from what it was in 1952. She navigated that.

She did not go to the Cenotaph in November 2021, nor attend Commonwealth Observance or even Easter Sunday matins in 2022. She appeared only twice at the Jubilee – after the Trooping and after the Pageant.

The press more or less decided the reign was as good as over – a swansong had been achieved. Fortunately, it wasn’t – not quite. She continued as head of state, even if her public appearances were limited and circumscribed.

I had been interested in the Royal Family since childhood, with vivid memories of the Queen in the state-visit processions with the Shah of Persia in 1959 and President de Gaulle the following year. I later asked the Queen if my memory was right that he stood up and saluted his old wartime office of 4 Carlton Gardens.

We were warned it could not last for ever. After Prince Philip died, the Queen did not retreat into a long period of mourning. She continued with the daily business of monarchy even in the days leading to the funeral. Had she stepped back, at 94, it might have been hard to pick up the reins again.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘with me very much trying to persuade him not to.’

I was so concerned by the outpourings of the media that I feared I would never see the Queen again. But a chance came – in June 2022, when I was allowed to go in a group of three to present her with a book, The Queen and Windsor, in the Oak Room of Windsor Castle.

You could see it happening with the discreet, very polite clapping as she left Westminster Hall as the lying-in-state of the Queen Mother began. It was a transference that touched her deeply.

At the time of that meeting, I worked out I had had 36 meetings with her. The first was in 1968, when she came to St George’s Chapel to look at the King George VI Memorial Chapel. I think of her as she was then, a young woman of 42, with auburn hair, in a dark blue coat, holding four-year-old Prince Edward by the hand.

The thought of a large general over six feet tall, toppling out of an open carriage, would be alarming to say the least.

She should be remembered as Elizabeth the Steadfast.

ALAMY/SECCHIMARCO

James Pope-Hennessy pointed out that you could hold Queen Mary’s attention if you were telling her interesting facts. I always thought the Queen liked factual information, though sometimes she challenged it with her

Etched in my visual memory is the procession of the Royal Family through the Queen’s Gallery. There were seven of them – the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Princess Marina, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon.

Royal chic: at the Windsor Horse Show, 2009

and the best thing was to let her do the running. She could stop and chat to you if the mood took her or she could walk past oblivious without causing offence.

When the Foreign Minister was about to present me in Valletta, she surprised him somewhat by saying, ‘Oh, he pops up all over the place!’

The Duke of Gloucester was of course a solid figure (soon after this retiring from public life altogether). In contrast, Lord Snowdon was a slight figure, with his monkeyish good looks.

More recently, at Prince Philip’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey, the surviving elderly ones looked very old. The disparate grandchildren, many of them bearded and hard to identify, did not have the same allure as that 1966 procession. But then, and observing many of them again on Easter Sunday, it seemed to me that the Cambridges have it in spades, the tall Prince William and Catherine, the charmingly baffled gaze of Prince George and the feisty all-seeing Princess Charlotte. Herein lies a good future for the monarchy.

But it was the ladies of the Royal Family who particularly impressed me with their style and glamour: ‘the mammals’, as the Duchess of Buccleuch referred to them; the royal duchesses

The Duchess of Kent was blonde and pretty. Princess Marina, with her lopsided walk, was style personified. The Duchess of Gloucester had her own quiet elegance. And Princess Margaret was dazzlinglyPrincesslovely.Marina died two years later of a brain tumour. I never met her nor the Duke of Gloucester, but I was lucky to have good conversations over the years with the other five – though, in 1966, when I was but 14, they seemed completely inaccessible.

18 The Oldie October 2022

Once at Windsor on Easter Day, she described a poor woman at the Maundy Service three days before, who had suffered a nosebleed. She indicated how she had held out her hand for the Maundy money, while clutching her nose with the other. ‘I longed to tell her it wasn’t the first time it had happened.’

The Queen and Prince Philip were of course in the state procession later. The missing figures were the Queen Mother and Princess Alexandra. What a Royal Family we had then. Most of them had been public figures during the war and served this country well. Along with the elegance was a certain gravitas. They all commanded considerable respect.

In her life of service, she possessed what a journalist described in 1966 as ‘that firm, level gaze, conscious of duty fulfilled’. Nor did she ever waver.

Now, as a new reign begins, I mourn her loss, I am sad to contemplate the disappearance of the EIIRs that have adorned so many uniforms and banners throughout my life, and that never again can I sing ‘God Save the Queen’.

Hugo Vickers, author of The Queen and Windsor, is a biographer of the Duke of Kent, the Queen Mother and Queen Mary

My most interesting conversation was when I was seated next to her at dinner in Hampshire. I was writing the life of Prince Philip’s mother. I described her illness and how she overcame it, the enigma of Prince Philip’s father and the failed wartime engagement of his aunt Queen Louise of Sweden.

Particularly vivid in my memory is the State Opening of Parliament on 21st April 1966, the Queen’s 40thMybirthday.auntwas an MP and thought I should go to the event with the daughter of one of her fellow lady MPs. This was Carol Thatcher, and I remember Margaret Thatcher asking me, in my aunt’s flat, a number of questions about my interests. This was in the days when lady MPs still wore petal hats.

who had to be addressed as ‘Ma’am’.

daunting question ‘Are you sure?’

But losing the Queen brings the curtain down on a golden age. The Jubilee service at St Paul’s lacked the aura of her presence. Royal Ascot, I thought, was greatly the less for her absence. It was always such an exciting feature when she arrived in the carriage procession. And before the layout was altered, the Queen would walk to the paddock. If she indicated her route with her umbrella, the crowd of racegoers parted like the Red Sea.

I don’t remember an urgent build-up to this critical exam, but it was remarked on after the dress rehearsal that a lot of us had misspelt the name of our school at the top of the page.

No, you idiot – it must be pork. The precious seconds tick away.

He turned over the paper and was stumped by an unfamiliar letter. ‘They wanted me to use the word “quench”, and the only times I’d come across the letter “q” were in “Queen” and “Queen’s Park Rangers”. The word “quenched” was not used in my mining village. The questions might as well have been in Latin or French.’

It’s unlikely I would have got past the fact that the sons were going to do so much better than the daughters.

Now 66, John Godber has just overseen an anniversary revival of his comedy Teechers set in a comprehensive. ‘Thank God I failed,’ he tells me, ‘or today I’d have been a retired surveyor proud of all the tarmac I’d laid up and down the M62.’

Jenny Bardwell in 1970, the year she failed

Fiona, my best friend, had just heard she had passed and would be off to St Anne’s in September. The silence was ominous, and we guessed correctly – that it speltWhatfailure.Ihadn’t realised back then was that most of us failed. There were not enough grammar-school places to go round, and fewer places for girls than for boys.

I took some questions home and

Well, I too am quite chuffed to be a failure, alongside the likes of Delia Smith, Michael Morpurgo and David Bowie.

But I see we’ve been beaten by the exam clock.

All the questions are real 11-plus questions

‘It’s too soon to be concerned, Mrs Bardwell. I don’t think they’ve let everyone know yet.’

Failing ‘selection’ at 11 gave me empathy for adult learners everywhere who were playing catch-up. I took the chance to do an A level at the Working Men’s College, and a degree at UEA which inspired the programmes I made for the BBC Open University.

A clock, which loses half a minute every hour, is put right at 9am on Monday. What time will it show at 9am on Wednesday?

I have little patience for crosswords and don’t have the sort of brain that can rapidly decipher verbal-reasoning questions such as Leaf is to (tree, plant, tea) as bean is to (runner, broad, coffee). Or Rose is to (flower, rise, plant) as sang is to (song, sing, tune). Don’t know and don’tButcare.when we encounter a roadblock up ahead, it can sometimes lead to interesting quantitywouldJohnPlaywrightalternatives.anddirectorGodberinsistshehavebecomeasurveyororasolicitorifhehadmadeittoPontefractGrammar:‘In1967,Iwastakenintoanexamroomwith

A father leaves £3,200 to be shared among 6 sons and 4 daughters. Each son is to receive twice as much as a daughter. What will each son receive?

I’m an 11-plus failure

heep is to mutton as pig is to… What? Bacon? Chops? Sausages? Shall I just hedge my bets and write down all three?

A church bell rings once every 6 seconds and the bell of a nearby church rings once every 8 seconds. If they start ringing together, after how many seconds do they next ring together?

John was convinced he had passed, but then a letter arrived congratulating him on his place at Upton Secondary Modern. His dad, a coal miner, went berserk and John was mortified by the fact that he wouldn’t be getting a racing bike. ‘That’s what you got if you

Fifty years on, Jenny Bardwell recalls the terrifying exam she sat in her doomed attempt to get into grammar school

22 classmates, with no clue as to what was going on.’

I can picture my mother in 1970, standing in the hallway of our house in Purley, talking on the phone about the pending results of the 11-plus.

showed one to my Uncle Brian, who was on a rare visit. It was a rambling question about apples, bananas and pears and he simply roared with laughter and said, ‘The answer’s a lemon.’

I have 80 marbles. I lose 0.3 of them and give away 0.25 of the remainder. How many have I left?

Our headmistress, Mother Mary William, comforted my mother by saying, ‘They’re usually happier when they can just pop next door to Thomas More [the secondary modern].’

The exam had become outdated by the time John Godber taught drama to 12-year-olds. By 1976, it had been abolished by Harold Wilson’s government, to give way to the comprehensive system.

20 The Oldie October 2022

passed. I saw these kids out with their racingJohnbikes.’saidthe exam just didn’t figure at the stage of his life when his main dream was to play for Leeds United or muck around with his mates. ‘I was a fantastically late developer. At that time, I was happy just to have a game of marbles.’

I don’t recall much learning at my primary school in the 1960s, let alone the amount of specific training I would need for the 11-plus. We weren’t even given lined paper to practise our handwriting on – that might hamper expression – and apparently we would just pick up our times tables on the breeze: no chanting aloud for us.

Don’t know, but just hand me the rope and I’ll hang myself.

I arrived at Holly’s studio with no make-up on – so we could take spot-thedifference snaps before and after. I enjoyed 90 minutes on her bar stool with natural light pouring through the window onto my face.

My last makeover made me look like Robert Maxwell. This time, I was much happier with my new look

base to blur fine lines and give a glow underneath. She used two different primers, as I have combination skin, followed by a ‘blurring powder’ and a ‘setting powder’.

Their products – it is convincingly explained – have the power magically to transform us. So convincingly, in fact, that I’ve always assumed the reason they haven’t worked on me must be my own failure to apply them properly.

But fresh hope arose the other night when I heard favourable chat about a make-up artist living near me in Wiltshire. Holly D’Arcy achieves magical transformations with the look spearheaded by make-up giant Charlotte Tilbury, which other brands haveThefollowed.newvibe in make-up is ‘subtle impact’. Just as old-style fake breasts, with the consistency of taut beachballs, have gone right out of fashion in favour of more natural, squidgy-feeling implants, installed at a plausible height on the chest, so the new look in the make-up world is the ‘refreshed’ –

Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips

rather than the overpainted – version of ourselves.Blemishes are still concealed and eyelids darkened, but we want to avoid the theatrical look in favour of giving the impression of being just back from a revitalising holiday.

The Porefessional was also applied to the ‘barcode’ lines I have developed in the philtrum from vaping. (The philtrum is the area between nostril entry point and upper lip. Think John Major, who had a distinctively large one.)

Before The Porefessional was employed, Holly applied a skincare moisturiser containing a primer which ‘stops products falling off’. And then a Trinny London BFF (Best Face Forward) balance-tinted serum. This was used as a

Mary’s makeover: the before and after pictures

‘But you have got thousands of products,’ I complained. ‘How can an ordinary person try all these things out until they can settle on the right brand forHollythem?’explained that she sources her products in an online store, Beauty Pie, where you can buy replicas of all the superbrands at around a third of theItprice.wasin its own way as enjoyable as having a massage, as my face was endlessly tapped by her fingertips and brushed with her clean brushes.

How to put your best face forward

But it backfired when the same product was applied to other areas of my face. Previously unobtrusive lines on my forehead were highlighted: the invisible, peachy down on my chin became a blonde beard and each pore on my nose was newly encircled with a crustyThesetopping.things can be avoided if you use a professional make-up artist – in my case, when being prepared for a book launch in 2017. But I was still dissatisfied with the result. There was the blowdrying of the hair to give it lift, the curling of it with tongs, the products all applied correctly (with clean sponges and brushes), and the shaping and colouring of my threadbare eyebrows to giveStilldefinition.Ijustdidn’t look like myself. I looked like a cross between Grayson Perry and Robert Maxwell.

To define my eyes, she used an eye pencil, curled my lashes and mascaraed them, and although the photos show me with one eye bigger than the other – this happens when I am tired and is not Holly’s fault – I think you can see that all this care and attention paid dividends.

Holly, herself a seemingly natural, unmade-up beauty, could hardly get a word in edgeways.

I explained that my main problem with being made up was the effect of ‘colander nose’. Holly produced a product called The Porefessional from the very affordable high-street brand Benefit. This fills up the nostril pores – a bit like the way Polyfilla fixes small holes on your walls – and then foundation can be applied on top.

I bought a transformative foundation from high-end Clarins and yes, my cheeks went from blotchy to flawless.

Like the Sirens in the Odyssey, the cosmetics counters lure us in.

The Oldie October 2022 21

Her clients are largely brides or people giving big parties. The experience cost £70. I put myself in her hands and did not interfere, although, playing back the tape, I realise I talked far too much.

Yes, perusers, my wife, God bless her, is a BIG SIPPER, to be honest. Some nights, she is as full as a Pommy complaints box and yet she says she could have had a career in TV commercials if she hadn’t been knocked up by

I can’t get enough of it!

I was young, readers, and still a bit religious. Let me put it this way. I always knew there was something up there, and my PAs and research assistants used to confirm

I used to enjoy watching the ads on TV with one of my research team after a spot of after-hours dictation (with an emphasis on the first syllable). That was in the olden days when racism was rife, and the people in the ads looked like us.

My trouble and strife

sleep, I can always hear the empty voddy miniatures clinking under the duvet.

My problem?

It was for a commercial about leakage and a housewife like Gwen getting caught short.

With all this worry, I’ve developed a serious problem with alcohol.

22 The Oldie October 2022

It was a lay-down misère she’d get the job. But Gwennie was late for the audition, owing to an ill-timed leakage incident. If that isn’t ironical, the Pope’s a towelhead.Well,shecopped out, and some diversity sheila from Somalia did the advert instead.

Because I’m always on the road at the service of the Australian taxpayer and in the interests of Anglo-Australian cultural exchange, Gwen and I don’t manage the Dirty Deed much, but we’ve got an Gwen‘arrangement’.doesn’tknow about it, but it’s what I tell every acceptable young lady I bump into, and they usually buy it. I like to think I’m a gentleman.

Oneme.day, to stop her whingeing, I told her to let an agent I knew look at her old show tape. It was only about three minutes’ viewing. The agent owed me a favour; he sent her off for an audition.

hand, even if it was doing the wrong job, if you get my gist.

My wonderful wife, Gwen (the Lord be good to her), Head of the War Office, has kept me in the doghouse ever since she found a smudge of lipstick on myWhatY-fronts.does a happily married senior civil servant say in a situation like that? I invite you, my readers, to write in with plausible suggestions. And ‘This is not what it seems’ isn’t one of them. I don’t like Y-fronts, anyway. They tend to cut off the Somecirculation.ofyoualready know the romantic story of how Gwennie and my good self got together. But, like a decent curry, it bears repeating.

‘Will old Les never stop bursting into print?’ I hear few of you bastards exclaim.

DearThePerusers,editor of this increasingly popular publication, God love him, has begged me to write another composition this month.

I would lie in the fart sack, enjoying a quiet, king-size, post-coital Rothmans. One evening, while Courtney was picking up her gear off the floor, I saw a beautiful commercial for Bowlblush, a Tasmanian dunny-cleaner (sinceTherediscontinued).wasthissheila’s hand, sprinkling Bowlblush into the big white telephone. You could never see higher up than her wrist, but I fell in love with that

‘Les,’ he memoed, ‘keep it up, mate. You help so many people with your inimitable brand of nononsense wisdom.’

‘There’sit. something up there, Les,’ they would whisper flirtatiously.

Sir Les Patterson is Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James

But I’m worried about Gwen. I’m not home much but, when I sneak into the bedroom late and give her a peck on the top of the head and she turns over in her

Sir Les Patterson was in the doghouse when his wife, Gwennie, spotted lipstick on his Y-fronts

With my contacts in the lavatorycleaning industry, I traced the ad agency and, finally, the hand model’s identity: Gwyneth Dolores Dolan.

Then came the day Gwen told me Karen was on the way and the nuns were up her blurter to do the right thing.

Doing the right thing meant going down to our local jeweller, Adorna on the Korner: ‘Pick your ring in our private cubicles.’ I’d reckon that slogan might have given a few blokes the wrong idea, if they happened to be a brick short of a load. Anyway, I lashed out on a pricey marcasite solitaire.

A few sheilas I’ve known, to be honest, reckon it’s a bit of a turn-on when you tell them you’ve got ‘an arrangement’ with the old Head of the War Office. It adds a sprinkle of MSG to an unappetising dish.

In point of established fact, writing these fearless compositions is therapy for me. Just lately, I’ve been as popular as a turd in a jacuzzi.

I had fallen for Gwennie’s hand on the TV, but she wasn’t such a hornbag north of her wrist. In fact, she looked as if she’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down – but, like most of the opposite-sex community, she was all right with the lights off.

The Lord be good to you all, Les

Although’.the Chevalier family lived in a suburb – I had chosen them because they were near Versailles – there were no casual neighbourly relationships. Nobody was invited into the family home who wasn’t part of the family. Social relations were conducted elsewhere, in restaurants, or other meeting-places outside the home.

more socially controlled and formalised culture. There were – and still are, to some degree – hierarchical practices about whom you should address as ‘ vous’ or ‘tu

And it was. Cafés really did smell of

Reports describe frozen train lines, broken communications and people dying from hypothermia, but I didn’t register very much about all that. I just thought it was immensely exciting to be getting to Paris – to be on a journey where at the destination everything would be so different

In my mother’s rambling old Victorian house, in Dublin’s Sandymount, the relaxed Irish way of life was one long bout of hospitality. The side door was forever open, and visitors would just lift the latch and walk in –and come straight into the kitchen. Family friends often invited themselves, sometimes at mealtimes, and no one ever objected.

aromatic Gauloises cigarettes and workmen in blue overalls really did start their early morning with a tot of spirits. I was met at the Gare St Lazare by my new employer, Madame Chevalier, mother of seven children.

And it was during this ‘frostquake’ that I made my way, in January 1963, from Dublin to Holyhead, thence to London Euston and across town to Victoria, from Victoria to Dover for the ferry to Calais – and then on to Paris.

ixty years ago, the winter of 1962-63 was the coldest since the notoriously chilly winter of 1947. It is Juliet Nicolson’s theme, in her book Frostquake, that Britain went into that exceptionally cold spell in the sober and repressive spirit of the 1950s, and emerged, in the thaw of spring 1963, into the swinging Sixties.

Having been a giggling waitress and a terrible secretary in Ireland, I was now in for a period of being a useless au pair, constantly unfavourably compared with my German predecessor, Gisela, who had been a home maker of perfection. Gisela hovered like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in my early independent life: never encountered, but ever present.

As for the difference between Ireland and France in 1963 – what a culture shock! And while Ireland of this time is often described as repressive, backward and overly religious, the paradox is that, in an everyday sense, for me Ireland was a freer, more relaxed and more easygoingThoughsociety.Iloved France, it was a much

I loved Paris in my springtime

Sixty years ago, an 18-year-old Mary Kenny left Dublin to work as a hopeless au pair in a city of continual rebellion

24 The Oldie October 2022

It wasn’t long before my au-pair posting came to an end. The shadow of Gisela marked my total inadequacy.

A maid’s room in a servant’s quarter was in the gift of a delightful IrishAmerican family, for whom I did childcare and school-run duties. Heating was sparse, washing conditions were primitive, and the loo was a hole in the ground over which one would squat. A doctor assured me this was excellent for the intestines.

‘éducation sentimentale’. Through the convent network, I heard of an elderly lady who was looking for a part-time au pair and companion – mornings only, but accommodation and meals provided, besides the usual modest remuneration.MadameleDocteur Miller lived in the 17th arrondissement, just off the Avenue Wagram. She was a spirited old bird – a widow who had been, for a time, a diplomat in her own right to some rather obscure Francophone country.

In the afternoon, it was seamstress time. I unwisely took up a novel after the post-lunch washing-up and clearing-up had been completed, only to be reprimanded with the words ‘Mademoiselle, one does not read novels in the afternoon.’ The practice was considered idle.

There was a gaggle of English girls there, sent to Paris for Easter, and the ambience was high-spirited and lively.

I had felt perfectly free wandering around Dublin at any hour of day and night, but it was borne in on me that I must be very prudent in Paris and its suburbs. I am not conscious of ever having heard the word ‘rape’ in Ireland, but I was constantly warned about it in France.‘

Mademoiselle, vous serez violée!’ was the repeated threat. This warning sometimes carried a racist subtext: be careful of ‘les Arabes’, especially. Avoid ‘les Algériens’.

This is an extract from Mary Kenny’s The Way We Were: Centenary Essays on Catholic Ireland (Columba Books)

The Oldie October 2022 25

She belonged to a social group to which she was much devoted, the International Allied Circle of Intellectuals. I was taken along to her various soirées: usually composed of other old dears, male and female; occasionally composed of former monarchs – ‘Let me present you to the ex-King of Georgia.’ My main anxiety was that I couldn’t afford any decentRatherclothes.likethe worldly old dowagers in Gigi, Madame le Docteur sought to introduce me to the ways of society. As it turned out, many of the values of such a world were about to becomeMadameredundant.leDocteur took some care in instructing me on the proper etiquette when the wife encounters the mistress in public. ‘If they are of the same class,’ she said, ‘they kiss each other. If the mistress is of a lower ranking – let’s say, a little ballet dancer from the corps de ballet, the wife does not acknowledge.’ It was a question of status, or milieu.

Many of her illustrative anecdotes centred around marriage. ‘The chains of marriage are so onerous that it may take three to carry them.’

When Irish eyes aren’t smiling: Mary in Paris, aged 20 (left) and 21 (right)

I soon quit the employ of Madame le Docteur – on quite good terms –and was now occupying a sixth-floor chambre de bonne in the Boulevard Raspail.

My host family arranged for me to leave their employ. Still, they very responsibly also arranged for me to be lodged in a convent, near the Place d’Alma.

movements were gathering momentum against all such social boundaries and definitions.

It was near Montparnasse, and this, I soon discovered, was my natural home – a bohemian neighbourhood, adjacent to old cinemas and bookshops, and replete with café-wine bars. I soon developed a favourite tipple of un ballon de rosé.

I had made a tentative start in journalism, sending articles back to the Dublin Evening Press – and I duly received the welcome sum of three guineas per publication.

In the wake of the Algerian troubles, Paris seemed to be in a continual state of rebellion. It was the crucible of what was to become mainstream political and social change – encompassing feminism, post-colonialism, sexual liberation and the dismantling of traditional education which would eventually lead to the dominant intellectual force of our time: post-modernism.It’sprobablethat everything we regard as ‘woke’ today really derives from Paris in 1962-63. Aged 19, I lapped it up!

Meals chez nous tended to be simple (except for Sunday dinner): you had a boiled egg for your tea, or a fried sausage or two. French cuisine was of course superb – but the cost, in women’s labour! Every meal had to be cooked from scratch; every vegetable peeled and sliced; every sauce prepared. I thought it drudgery. Frenchwomen were free to read Françoise Sagan, but they were still tied to the kitchen sink.

If 1963 was the real beginning of the social (and sexual) revolution of our time, my next posting furthered my own

In 1963, as I was listening to Madame le Docteur’s tutorials on how the mistress greets the wife in polite society, subversive revolutionary

In all these respects, Chips was an 18th-century figure, with sentiment for the douceur de vivre, the leisured-butruling classes, the presumed power and political influence intrinsic to that not-so-far-off time.

28 The Oldie October 2022

Chips writes with such vividness that one feels one is living each day in his exalted – there’s no other word –company. His opinions on those he liked, grandees and royalties and the stylish are acute; on those he disliked, they are searingly succinct. But there is a notable absence of spitefulness. An infectious joie de vivre permeates

Last portion of Chips

The similarity is evident in photographs of the middle-aged Sir Henry Channon (1897-1958) in this third, final and most graphic record of his vivid life. There’s the same stocky figure, quizzing eyes, veiled smile and faint sneer, evident in portraits of the Prussian king.

When they were first published, in 1967, the editor, Robert Rhodes James, censored the diaries, perhaps with good reason, for fear of wounding many of thoseButmentioned.nowtherecan be very few participants left who were involved in the politics and parties of the time, let alone the infidelities, illegitimacies, same-sex liaisons, illicit affairs and messy divorces merely hinted at.

And Channon shared many of Frederick’s traits: a thirst for power, politics, international intrigue and gossip, a passion for rococo palaces and pretty bibelots, a charm-laden pugnaciousness, haphazard generosity, and a fancy for tall, good-looking young men.

E ver since I met Chips Channon when I was still a teenager, I’ve thought there was an uncanny visual likeness between him and Frederick the Great.

It surely must have given Chips a delighted frisson when that stern yet ‘carefree’ king’s five-times-greatgrandson, Prince Friedrich von Preussen, became his brother-in-law. It was the kind of link with anciens régimes that he relished.

The first two volumes of the diaries, also edited by Simon Heffer, were weighted towards a parliamentary career that, with Chips’s canny aptness, prospered largely owing to his admiration of the ‘appeasing’ Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

But his meteoric social rise is more discreet, his rampant sexual urge cloaked as young man’s fancy. In this third, he lets rip.

In his final volume of diaries, the MP really lets rip – and falls for Terence Rattigan and a dashing major.

ESTATECHANNONTHE/PENGUIN

By Nicky Haslam

At the height of the Blitz, people swanned to theatres, parties and nightclubs, the men in tails, the women swathed in diamonds. The food in fashionable restaurants sounds ambrosial in its infinite variety – not the identical plodding menus of today.

Though he dined with them almost nightly, Chips exasperatingly records very few of the former’s fabled gaffes: ‘Such a relief to be on terra cotta again.’ Or the other’s astute social observances: at one dazzling wedding ball, among the young white-tied and rock-laden, Chips says to Lady Cunard, ‘Look, Emerald, this is what we went to war for.’ ‘What?’ she replies. ‘Are they all Poles?’

The entries starring these two have a certain sameness, perhaps even for Chips, who seems almost relieved at their deaths. Similarly there are repetitive references to the brilliance and beauty of Lady Diana Cooper, and the loveliness and chic of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, Chips’s ne plus ultra. But it’s delightful to see that

the duchess was not the grieving widow of general assumption. She attended every lighted candle, often slipping away to less well-lit night spots. And Lady Diana is often, by your leave, arseholed.

First-nightingdoors. with Rattigan introduces Chips to an until-now despised galère – showbusiness. Stars of scrim and celluloid … Douglas Fairbanks! Larry! Vivien! Marlene, darling! They all now mingle in the silver-blue candlelight with queens of Greece and Spain, a brace of Romanian queens, no fewer than three of Yugoslavia (and one of Greece, whose husband, while ‘persuading his fox terrier to pleasure his pet monkey’, was fatally bitten), reshuffling their thrones.

No reader could not be absorbed by his unorthodox depiction of 1940s London and the following decade.

descriptions of people, ceremonies, rooms, gardens, fashions and friends.

The Oldie October 2022 29

He was obsessed with such people not for who they were but what they were

In the following years, there seems to have been a ball or reception or gala almost nightly, tails de rigueur, the ladies dining in tiaras even if they weren’t going to the party afterwards.

And if anyone thinks of Channon as merely frivolous, ask them to read his summary of King George VI after his death. It’s as discerning as the Duc de HenrySaint-Simon.‘Chips’

Below: Nephews Mark, Christopher and Simon Lennox-Boyd, Chips and son, Paul Channon, 1947. Bottom: both pictures in Venice, 1951; left with Peter Coats

It’s too facile to brand Channon with the snob label. He was obsessed with such people not for who they were, but for what they were. You and I may prefer the company of members of White’s, leftwing intellectuals or multimillionaires (surely preference is not snobbism?), whereas he revelled in that of the living relicts of a fast-fading past. Parliamentary discipline and social activity ruled his life. The level of gregariousness and hospitality normal to most people is heightened in him. Chips revelled in the

But soon there were to be three of them in this liaison. Chips fell ecstatically in love with Terence Rattigan, theatre god of the moment. With Coats handily away in Delhi, Viceroy’s-House-training the somewhat lumpen Wavells, Channon, despite some hissy fits from the subcontinent, manages to keep both irons in his fire.

Peter was to become his lifelong companion. Together they created the florid luxe and lush gardens of Kelvedon Hall, Chips’s house in Essex.

Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3) 1943-57 (Penguin, £31.99) is edited by Simon Heffer

And what friends! Having purposefully created a salon, its apogee the blue-and-silver dining room in Belgrave Square, he peopled it with those who were beautiful, clever, funny and influential; politicos, lovers, the throned, the de-throned and re-throned, the princelings and pretenders who had swarmed to England in the interwar period, and spellbound them with mischievous charm and bygone elegance. It’s a rich dish – Chips With Everyone.

This was surely part bravura and part stiff-upper-lipsticked tradition. Both had been given a kick in the pants by the addition of two tireless hostesses, both rich and both from middling America: the malapropping Laura Corrigan and the rapier-witted Emerald Cunard (‘Margaret Sweeny [later the Duchess of Argyll] is the sort of woman one meets in a lift’).

During his marriage to – and hard-won divorce from – the troubled and troubling Honor Guinness (which gave him his adored son, Paul), Chips met Peter Coats, a handsome and level-headed army major.

Even this doesn’t dim his roving eye – one gets the impression he rarely went to bed alone, often sleeping ‘rough’. Ruby studs and sapphire cufflinks, watches and Fabergé boxes whizz between Belgrave Square and various stage

Just as it’s unfair to tar Channon with the snob brush, it’s too easy to put him down as a mere lightweight. He took politics extremely seriously, the more so when he realised his former views were reprehensible. In his social life, he loved both to get pleasure from – and to give it to – those he admired, his rivals, his friends young and old, no doubt abetted by the Benzedrine he’d slip into their cocktails. He brought unparalleled light and gaiety to a depressed era.

parties of prestigious friends, if he wasn’t giving them.

Her Assistant Private Secretary passed on a marvellously witty message from the Queen: ‘Her Majesty believes

She was the first Queen Regnant – note not Consort – to combine a successful political life with a happy, long marriage and family life.

struggle to remember a time when the Queen – first as Princess Elizabeth of York, then as the Princess Elizabeth and then as monarch – wasn’t in the headlines.

30 The Oldie October 2022

none survived. Once again, that meant the succession went to a foreign country – Hanover. She wasn’t much goodQueenpolitically.Victoria had a happy marriage and plenty of children, but she had an early widowhood and retirement. In her later life, she had no public engagement with the people.

When we sounded out the late Duke of Edinburgh in 2011 about the possibility of his accepting an Oldie of the Year award, he replied from Sandringham, ‘I much appreciate your invitation to receive an Oldie of the Year award. There is nothing like it for morale to be reminded that the years are passing – ever more quickly – and that bits are beginning to drop off the ancient frame. But it is nice to be remembered at all.’Last year, at our judging lunch, Maureen Lipman wondered whether the time had come for us to honour Elizabeth II herself, in recognition of our sovereign’s leadership during the pandemic (‘We will meet again’) and in the run-up to her Platinum Jubilee this year.

Mary Tudor had a disastrous marriage to the country’s enemy and no Elizabethchildren. I managed the issue of male dominance by not marrying and featuring herself as the Virgin Queen. And so the succession after her death went to James I – the king of another country. She was a brilliant queen but she failed in that one duty.

he Oldie is blessed in having many readers who areButcentenarians.eventheywould

The Oldie sends our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Her Majesty on the deeply sad news of herBelow,death.Oldie contributors pay tribute to Elizabeth II.

Queen Anne had 17 children, but

Gyles Brandreth remembers the Queen turning down an Oldie of the Year Award in 2021

Our contributors pay tribute to the monarch’s wit, wisdom and constitutional brilliance. By Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie

Lady Antonia Fraser

All her children loved her and were there at her death or shortly afterwards. Every family has its pockets of resistance – Prince Andrew – but Charles, Anne and Edward are all to be proud of. Compare previous Queens Regnant.

Thanks for the memories, Ma’am

So Queen Elizabeth II was unique in this important respect – she had a happy marriage for 73 years, a happy family life, a secure succession and political grace. The female head of the monarchy has to provide these things – and how brilliantly she did exactly that.

ALAMY/COLLECTIONEVERETT/PA/ALLSTAR

For all our readers, the Queen was the background to their lives. Her departure leaves an enormous void. That void is even greater for our older readers. They will have seen so many public figures come and go during their long lives –but only one has remained there, ever present and ever constant.

I took appropriate soundings and received a lovely letter from Balmoral Castle.

Robert Hardman, author of Queen of Our Times

While the Queen was sometimes accused of being slow to act, there has never been a charge of panic. Her default mode in the face of a crisis wasBystillness.thatGolden Jubilee of 2002, she knew she had turned a corner. By the Diamond Jubilee of 2012 – not long after the marriage of the Cambridges and just before the London Olympics – she was at the height of her powers, more confident than ever, and she remained so until her sad death.

Later the stricken mother would Toendeavourbreakthe news to her bewilder’d child.

Above left: her masterly refusal of our Oldie of the Year Award, 2021. Above right: outside Buckingham Palace, the morning after the Queen’s death. Opposite page: in 1960 and 2010

And while the Duchess with her daughter Downstairs,frets,the air is thick with cigarettes.

This isn’t the first time Wilson has tackled the young Princess. In 1984, he published Lilibet, a poem with these poignant lines on the Abdication Crisis:

The Reverend Peter Mullen, Chaplain to the Honourable Company of Air Pilots

The Oldie October 2022 31

The Queen embodied the nation that is beyond the latest round of trade figures, the fluctuations in the value of the pound and the comings and goings of particular PrimeTheMinisters.lawsofthe land were the Queen’s laws, just as the language we speak is the Queen’s English. Yet her role was even more profound.

God bless the Queen and scatter her enemies!

‘Your Uncle David, usually so clever, Has been by an American beguil’d. He must away’. ‘Oh – Mummie, not Bravely,forever?’ and through her tears, the Duchess smil’d.

Over her long life, our gracious Queen served us; and will anyone say she has not suffered? Her service and suffering weren’t merely personal, the service and suffering of one Elizabeth Windsor – though they were that,

The Coronation rite refers back to the anointing of kings in the Old Testament, to Samuel, Saul and David; and to when Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King.

Wilson has an ear for the cadences and jokes of the little Princess Elizabeth, as she compares Wallis Simpson to Olive Oyl. He also makes jokes about how the Princess prefigures her life as Queen. The little girl refers to the Abdication year of 1936, when ‘everything turned rather horribilis’.

This was a holy event. That’s why the Queen never abdicated – she saw her work as a religious duty.

To celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, A N Wilson wrote Lilibet: The Girl Who Would Be Queen about the lateWilsonmonarch.imagined the Queen on the eve of her Jubilee this year, thinking back to her childhood.

Barry Cryer

Shortly before he died this year, aged 86, Barry Cryer, the comedian and great friend of The Oldie, composed Old Queen Lizzie, a version of Old Man River, as a tribute to the Queen. You can watch him sing it on our website.

Buttoo.the sacred monarchy means that she served and suffered for the whole realm and in the whole realm: for she was the whole realm. Queen and country. One and the same. These are awesome and holy things.

Old Queen Lizzie, our Old Queen Lizzie She must know something. She don’t say nothing. She keeps on ruling along

you are as old as you feel. As such, the Queen does not believe she meets the relevant criteria to be able to accept, and hopes you will find a more worthy recipient.’

By the 1970s, she was starting to reign in her own image. Jokes started to appear in her speeches. Prime Ministers began to find her lessThoughbiddable.her confidence took a serious knock during the reverses of the 1990s, notably the ‘annus horribilis’ of 1992 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, she stuck to her guns.

ANSTEEJONATHAN

A N Wilson

One Palace veteran described the Queen’s early years on the throne as ‘the unfinished reign’. Back then, she was determined to do things exactly as her father had done, under the tutelage of avuncular old men such as Tommy Lascelles and Winston Churchill, who would routinely refer to her as a ‘child’ while keeping Prince Philip well away from affairs of state.

His tone is pitch-perfect as he portrays little Lilibet and ‘Grandfather England’ (George V), who hated ‘that damned mouse’ – ie Mickey Mouse.

As Shakespeare put it in Troilus and Cressida, ‘There is a mystery in the soul of state which hath an operation more divine than our mere chroniclers dare meddle with.’

We had hoped that, in the future, we would sound out Her Majesty once more for our award. How deeply sad that it is not to be.

Wilson, it has to be said, describes his parents’ terrible marriage with evident relish – the perpetual bickering, irritability and impatience; the restless house moves from Staffordshire to Worcester to Malvern to Pembrokeshire, then back to Malvern and finally back to South Wales.

You’d need to go back to the 19th century to find an equivalent – George Saintsbury, perhaps, or Quiller-Couch.

A N Wilson, last great man of letters

Wilson’s mother, meanwhile, was one of those bright women, born in the wrong era, who wasn’t allowed an education and never found fulfilment. Jean Dorothy took her revenge by ‘closing down any conversation that was moving in the direction of being interesting’. Sulking in silence, existing in a ‘miasma of resentment’, Wilson’s mother was agoraphobic and ‘thrown into a panic by the idea of going anywhere’, car-sick and in a state of near-hysteria if journeying as far as the shops.

He is proficient equally as a biographer, novelist, historian, essayist, editor and literary journalist. His every utterance is well worth pondering, as he loves to ruffle feathers, especially when it comes to Hitler, Darwin or Queen Victoria.

‘Forcibly retired’ in 1962, Norman amused himself by shooting at neighbours’ children with an airgun. Jean Dorothy was rather relieved when widowed, when Wilson for the first time got on with her.

A cheer goes up from the reader when he tips a bowl of porridge over the sadistic wife of the headmaster – but many of Wilson’s traumatised school pals later became drunks, drug addicts or suicides.Next,New College, Oxford. Wilson has already written a brilliant book about the ‘giggling, stammering imp’ John Bayley, and his wife, Iris Murdoch.

Wilson is always accessible – never esoteric, despite the fact he for many years taught medieval poetry and at Oxford took a Second in German Philology, Icelandic and Old Norse, which are surely intended only as punishments.Wilson’sConfessions describes a rather schizoid, lachrymose figure. There is the A N W people assume they are seeing and meeting – confident, breezy, mischievous; the one who was sacked from the Spectator for improving Bel Mooney’s copy and making a joke about Clive James’s ugliness. Then there is ‘the inner me, and they are obviously very

Mrs Wilson, who sounds like the lost twin of Eva Larkin, was an anorexic, feasting only occasionally on a cream cracker. The family meals she produced were deliberately disgusting – overroasted grey meat and vegetables boiled ‘for bad-tempered hours’.

When he was young, everyone expected Wilson one day to be a bishop; perhaps he still harbours this ambition – or maybe he’d be good as a cardinal.

Wedgwood, ‘a skilled master of the science of glazes’, who became managing director of the firm.

N Wilson is the greatest living man of letters.

At 71, the mischievous biographer, novelist and historian has written his memoirs. Roger Lewis is gripped

His education was conventionally horrific, involving nuns and, at boarding school, the usual paedo crew. Adults, in Little Wilson’s experience, were comic ogres, who’d wank themselves off while caning their pupils. No prosecutions or charges were ever brought, as who’d believe the testimony of a child? And why is it, Wilson wonders, that the victims are the ones filled with shame?

Much of this memoir revolves round Wilson’s parents, who went out of their way to screw him up. His ‘hilarious and disturbing’, chain-smoking father, Norman, was a designer of pottery for

32 The Oldie October 2022

Normantetchiness.wasalways anxious to pass himself off as a gent, ‘which he most certainly wasn’t’. Just about the worst thing anyone could do, when Wilson was growing up, was speak in a northern accent.

‘Don’t make the mistake,’ she advised in old age, ‘of thinking you can live without sex. That’s one of the worst mistakes a person can make.’

She had, says her son, an unwinning capacity ‘to squeeze discontent from the happiest of circumstances’.

FromInteresting.thefirst,Wilson was studious and namby-pambyish. ‘I read constantly,’ he says, ‘and to deprive me of books would be the worst possible torture.’

That material is not repeated here. Instead, we hear about the dons Anne Barton and Michael Gearin-Tosh, who both chased male students round the room, ‘rather than teaching them’.

Unfortunately, he was rather a bore, given to comical recitations and bombast. Wilson recalls with a shudder his father’s ‘pomaded dressiness, his personal vanity’ and his minor-publicschool

Thedifferent’.innerWilson is serious, contemplative, bashed about by early experiences, and spends ‘many hours sitting or kneeling at the back of churches’, believing himself ‘a confused and very disobedient Christian’.

We are also filled in on Wilson’s marriage, when he was 20, and still an undergraduate, to Katherine Duncan-

The Oldie October 2022 33

Secondly, it was but a short step to Fleet Street in its carnivalesque dying days. Wilson at last found a congenial home, especially at the Alexander Chancellor-era Spectator, with its air of

SPENCENEIL

A N Wilson: always accessible and never esoteric

He wasn’t mature enough to face the responsibilities – two daughters by the age of 24. Katherine, he says, the rage still burning, ‘had stolen my youth, my experience of student life, my chance of developing an emotional spectrum’. In consequence, he went down to seven stone with pneumonia and pleurisy.

Several things happened. First, Wilson thought he should be ordained as a clergyman, as if this might be a way of escape. His account of theological college is like the scene backstage at a Carry On film, with the priests, drunk on gin, wafting incense about and addressing each other by their nicknames, Mae West, Pearl, Francesca, Tawdry Audrey, Plum Tart and Ena the Cruel. Even if they were capable of construing the New Testament in Greek, clearly what attracted everyone were the ceremonials, the costumes, the sheer camp theatricality of AngloCatholicism, the smells and bells of the Walsingham Matildas.

Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises by A N Wilson (Bloomsbury, £20)

Though wits said of him, ‘I can imagine tearing off his three-piece suit only to find another three-piece suit underneath,’ Wilson does at last seem to have pleased his mother and had a few collisions. He’s discreet about this, and it ‘filled me with guilt’, but ‘sleeping with people not one’s wife’ was finally feasible, with Katherine left behind in Oxford. Wilson mentions ‘the glow of self-congratulation and physical ecstasy’ with girls in London and another in Edinburgh, a Bardot lookalike ‘but even moreHedonism,beautiful’.it seems, was a spur to

all do at first, loved the literary-London existence, the cheap free booze at launch parties, the gossiping and chattering and lunches with Beryl Bainbridge that lasted until seven in the evening.

Jones, ten years his senior and a Fellow of Somerville. Wilson is appalled he’d allowed it to happen, ‘being the object of a much older woman’s desire’. Today, he’d be viewed as the victim of abuse.

Not a bit of it, I argued. It is a place of surreal fun, with ideas sparking off one another unpredictably – nothing is foreseeable or programmatic; how tedious if things were.

I still believe that. I’d like to think A N Wilson also instinctively believes that.

I am a decade younger than Wilson, and I thought I’d witnessed the last gasp of things – the end of properly-paid print journalism; the end of mass literary; the stamping out of freedom of speech.Wilson really did see everything of value vanishing, and Confessions sustains a Betjemanesque awareness when it comes to the lost England of class and deference (‘I have never taken authority figures seriously’); the environmental and architectural destruction of developers more interested in profits than in people (the fate of the Wedgwood factory).

mischief. Jennifer Paterson, for example, served pork to the Israeli ambassador and called Prince Charles ‘YourWilson,Majesty’.aswe

‘It was all too enjoyable,’ says Wilson, and he freely confesses to ‘an addiction to cheap publicity’ and a ‘hunger to cut a dash’.Atone juncture, he was photographed by Snowdon, ‘an energetic, simian figure’. Wilson even met Princess Margaret a few times, who announced without irony, ‘The Queen is the representative of God in this realm.’

Postscript. Commanding high prices, Norman’s Wedgwood pottery occasionally comes up on eBay, and handsome it is, too.

creativity: ‘Over fifty books published, and probably millions of words in newspapers.’ One of Wilson’s novels was dramatised for television, starring Timothy West.

It’s tragic to learn that Katherine Duncan-Jones is in the grip of dementia, drunk on South African Chardonnay before breakfast. Only recently has Wilson been able to visit her without rancour, though he is very firm in his belief that marriage is ‘an arrangement of life that is utterly destructive to the human soul’. He evidently likes being alone (the second Mrs Wilson, Ruth Guilding, is scarcely mentioned), as relationships – as Philip Larkin maintained – are indeed a nuisance, involving too many entanglements andPossiblydepletions.so,though as I write this, I am about to celebrate my 40th wedding anniversary, and of course it wouldn’t do if we were all the same.

Gone also are palm-court trios in department-store restaurants (where Wilson would meet Jean Dorothy), along with glovers, butlers, coal miners, hatters and bus conductors. Wilson’s Oxford is now a town of chain stores, indistinguishable from Uxbridge.

By the way, Wilson once won the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, as did I. My subject was ‘The world is but a school of enquiry.’

Mother’s fat-shaming was like Demis Roussos having a word with Pavarotti. Still, I searched the internet for a virtual personal trainer/life coach.

Seven pounds a month would get me ‘advice on working out and on working out life from PT-certificated Michael Walkswithoutwings’ as well as ‘toughlove messages’ and ‘self-love messages’ texted from the man himself.

Father had to physically restrain her.

Small World

‘Maybe just a birthday card?’ I asked. I sat in my bedroom, conserving energy and closing curtains during the day. This was the silver lining of the heatwave. It made me feel like a teenage student again, slumping in a chair in a darkened room on a weekday. Not to be sniffed at.

‘Look – all I’m trying to do is keep you and Father away from heat stroke and heat exhaustion.’ I spritzed Father’s bald

The day Mother fat-shamed me

Yes, I’m chubby – but so is she

‘Not softer,’ I explained, ‘just newer… er, less odour-giving. It’s become musty, Mother, to be honest.’

spot with suntan lotion. I don’t think he even(Later,noticed.hefelt the top of his head and looked at the trace white fluid left on his fingers, mumbling, ‘Damn birds.’)

What a strange, overheated summer I had.Ibegan checking the thermometer before determining whether it was worthwhile engaging in conversation with my parents. Despite paying no heed to climate emergencies, they become even more unreasonable at approximately 28°C.

At one moment, though, they were affable. They asked me, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’

‘Well, to be honest, if you had fewer baths, you wouldn’t need a new towel. And look at your fat belly. No wonder you’re going through towels when you’ve got that much new surface area to scrub dry.’ She suddenly reached over and grabbed the top of my elasticated, easy-comfort pants and pinged them against my smallish paunch.

As I aimed at Mother, she began helicoptering her tiny arms to knock my nozzle-aim off, repeating, ‘Thank you but no, thank you but no’ – a strategy she’d perfected when confronted with the man jangling the collection plate at the door of the‘Realcrematorium.collection plates are silent. If it barks, it’s a begging bowl,’ she has explained to many a confused funeral guest over the years.

I went out to confront them, with a suntan spray concealed behind my back. ‘You’re gardening without hats,’ I said.‘It’s not a fashion show,’ Mother said. She walked past me with secateurs – so I kept things polite.

During my childhood, my parents weren’t good in this area. They once gave me a doll when I asked for an eagle-eye Action Man, and a glitter factory when I asked for a chemistry set.

In fact, I had the self-love covered, and Mother was all over the tough love.

Suddenly my phone vibrated to life. It was Michael Walkswithoutwings. Turns out that’s his real birth name and he’s Native American. Unfortunately, his gym is in Doncaster, Maryland, USA, and not Yorkshire. The journey to his gym would lose all the pounds needed to hit my target weight; my knees and my mother wouldMindobject.you, Michael said that it’s only 18°C in Maryland. I can’t say I’m not tempted.

I went downstairs to tell Mother I now had my own personal trainer. Despite the government’s express guidance, both parents were now making merry in the midday sun, gardening during the heat apocalypse!

WAYSTEVE The Oldie October 2022 35

I’ve since learnt to lower my expectations. ‘I’d quite like a towel,’ I said.‘Towel? Towels? What’s wrong with his towel?’ Mother said, nudging father for a reaction. But he was too busy scooping up grapefruit portions from the breakfast table. ‘Everything going on in the world and this one wants a softer towel…’

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 still shares with his parents…

jem clarke

‘They’re not going to get any bigger if you keep kicking them,’ Sheila admonished him.

And she was senior by many years. This was the early eighties and I was a lowly assistant in the Vogue library, wheeling from floor to floor a trolley piled high with newspapers and magazines. I had got to know Sheila well; she reminisced about the Vogue she had known for many years and I was a willing listener.

the Ritz, which was about as fashionable a Mayfair address as you could get.

And no, I told Sheila, I hadn’t met Parks, because he was clearly as dead as the era that shaped him, on the scrap heap like his thirties Italian roadster.

Norman Parkinson (1913-90)

In 1941, Parks had taken his first Vogue photograph, a fashion shot of a wartime cycling outfit, following it with a story, ‘The Freedom of the Farm’. This was the start of an association that would last – with a small break in the sixties –until a copyright dispute ended it in 1978. (It turned out he was in Vogue HQ that day for yet another meeting about it.)

With his impeccable manners and exaggerated style anglais, he radiated a certain glamour, which over the years his Vogue credentials did much to augment, and in 1966 he made his first official royal sitting, a portrait for American Vogue of the Duke of Edinburgh. This took place in Tobago, under a small almond tree, on a royal

id you ever meet Norman Parkinson?’ The voice that boomed out across Vogue’s fashion room belonged to Sheila Wetton, Senior Fashion Editor.

For 60 years, Norman Parkinson photographed the late Queen and her family. Robin Muir salutes an artistic visionary

36 The Oldie October 2022

Age had not diminished him – he was in his seventies – and he stood ramrodbacked like a guardsman; nor had it tamed his fashion sense. It was a bravura display. He wore a sort of long-jacketed safari suit in seersucker, I remember, and beneath it a collarless shirt in bold stripes; and some sort of beret. He looked at once curiously old-fashioned and yet entirely modern.

But it was not for his Vogue pictures that he was best known. He commanded a far wider audience for his pictures of the Royal Family, every sitting guaranteeing him acres of press

After an apprenticeship with Speaight and Sons, a fashionable court photographer once patronised by royalty but now on the slide, he had opened, in 1934, aged 21, the Norman Parkinson Studio at 1 Dover Street, almost opposite

Hiscoverage.firstbrush with royalty came at Speaight and Sons; he manoeuvred the heavy plate camera into position when in 1932 the Duke and Duchess of York brought in the infant Princess Margaret Rose for her first official pictures.

There he specialised in debutantes, peeresses in ermine and coronets, celebrity and society pictures for the Bystander and the Sketch: Noël Coward, the Sitwells and a young John F Kennedy – and later an even younger Petula Clark.

She had worked with all the great photographers – mostly the difficult ones, for she was a safe pair of hands: Cecil Beaton, who had returned from the war disillusioned; Lee Miller, who came back damaged; John Deakin, brilliant when he hadn’t pawned his cameras for drinking money; and the American Clifford Coffin who on one memorable trip to Stonehenge railed to Sheila that the ancient stones were too small and it just wouldn’t do.

But there was no question about it: Norman Parkinson, known up and down the Vogue corridors simply as Parks, had been her favourite. She may have known him when he was still plain Ronald Smith and starting out.

But, rising up from a low couch at the other end of the room, with his hand outstretched, Norman Parkinson declared himself very much still with us.

The Royal Family in Vogue

A house model for Hartnell before the Second World War, she was a fashion assistant by its end.

However, Cecil Beaton perceived him as ‘disarmingly unsure of himself’ and, perhaps to compensate for his sheer and utter obviousness, he created an outer carapace of irrepressible flamboyance. Throughout his life, he was conspicuous by a strong sense of fashion. Sometimes, like his photographs, this teetered on the edge of good taste.

At six and a half feet tall, with a raffish moustache and a dashing four-seater Mille Miglia OM sports car, he was something of a ‘debs’ delight’.

later in 1969, he took the official photographs of Prince Charles to mark his investiture as Prince of Wales. With a degree of modesty, he assumed he was asked simply because Lord Snowdon, his former Vogue rival, was too involved in the staging of the big day. The results were considered a terrific success.

Vogue apart, Parks’s photographs of Princess Anne at 21 and Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood royalty, at 40, appeared in Life magazine. He was especially proud of persuading the latter into a specially designed wig to match

IMAGESICONIC/PARKINSONNORMAN

Someannounced.considered it an eccentric picture then. With the deeply sad news of the death of the Queen, it now captures a shared happy moment in the lives of three women, whose lives span over 120 years of British history.

People magazine, ‘Royal Shutterbug’. Town & Country’s editor-in-chief, Frank Zachary, was grateful to have chanced on a photographer who ‘makes our lovely American ladies look like duchesses’.Anditwas on location for Zachary’s magazine in the Malaysian jungle that Parks suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. Two weeks later, on 14th February 1990, he died in hospital in Singapore.

In fact, it was a set of photographs of Snowdon and Princess Margaret and their children, made in 1967 – the children clambering over their parents horizontal on the lawns of Kensington Palace, everybody positively beaming about it – that established Parks’s style.

The Royal Blue Trinity: the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in blue satin, 1980

Here he walked the jagged edge between good and bad taste, his starryeyed subjects very much of the era and mostly fabulously rich: Donald and Ivana Trump, Nabila Khashoggi, Mrs Brooke Astor. America loved him.

her favourite pet terrier. This was something of a dry run for his next important set of royal pictures, the now infamous Royal Blue Trinity, a triple portrait marking the 80th birthday of the Queen Mother.

He was fêted as an intriguing exotic, a fixture of diary pages and society columns: he was Town & Country’s ‘Man with the Elegant Eye’; and, for

The Crown in Vogue by Robin Muir and Josephine Ross is published by Conran Octopus on 6th October

He had already written his own obituary. ‘I’ve never had a monumental idea that I’m a great photographer or a brilliant artist … it has pleased me enormously that what I do with this silly gadget – this silent machine-gun of the 20th century – has gleaned me a lot of respect. But if I should give rein to immodesty … I have opinions which are fresh and I am a fountainhead of ideas.

progress of the islands – convenient as Parks and his wife Wenda had built a houseThreethere.years

‘Since 99 per cent of my photographs are taken outside the studios, I shall have recorded the pendulum arc of over 70 years. I hope people will realise when they look through all these hundreds of transparencies and negatives that I recorded a large proportion of the 20th century.’

Parks charmed the Queen, her mother and her sister into three identical bright blue satin capes he had asked royal dressmaker Hardy Amies to run up: ‘I feel it may make a timeless, fashion-free picture which will ensure its place of importance in the future,’ Parks

The Oldie October 2022 37

Parks neatly summed up his relaxed approach thus: ‘The Royal Family is just a family. Of course, one maintains one’s respectful distance – one remembers not to give the Queen a thump of joyful friendliness or bite the Duke of Edinburgh in the calf – but the more you join in, the more they relax.’

When I met Parks, he was enjoying late-flowering success with the American magazine Town & Country

38 The Oldie October 2022

I am not an economically sophisticated mouse, but I would suggest we need a system of rent control, something along the lines of the German approach. There, landlords are not allowed to charge more than ten per cent above a centrally determined rent index.

Michael Gove has produced a report on this issue. The Government has recognised that something is pretty rotten in the state of renting. However, the recommendations are all bluster and verbiage, with very little substance.

When I was 21, I tell them, I came home from university to be told by Granny Mouse: ‘You have one month!’

Now there’s a thought.

among young people in London is all of greedy landlords. According to the Government’s figures, renters are shelling out 31 per cent of their wages on rent and this leads them, quite reasonably, to question the wisdom of a system that has them slaving away at a job they don’t like in order to hand over a third of their salary to a landlord who got lucky in the eighties buying a flat – or flats – for peanuts.

do they hang out? Are they sitting in a lounger by a pool in Spain in a Hawaiian shirt, bellowing commands into an iPhone 13 with a Mai Tai by their side? How can we control them? How do we limit their greed?

One month later, I had got a job and was renting a room in a shared house in Camden Town. No mollycoddling for me.

In British cities such as Bristol, it’s the same story. Landlords are coining it in from students who are forced to take out a year’s lease even though they’re living there for only nine months. These students are paying £150 a week for a room in a shared house – and inevitably, at the end of the term, losing their deposit.

The younger mice in the household are starting to think about whether to leave theFuriousnest. debates have ensued. Mrs Mouse is keen to let them live at home for as long as possible, but Granny Mouse’s advice – unsolicited – is different. She thinks they should stand on their two feet.

Snappily titled ‘A Fairer Private Rented Sector’, the report abandons good grammar entirely and is full of nonsensical statements, such as ‘The role of the Private Rented Sector (PRS) has changed in recent decades, as the sector has doubled in size, with landlords and tenants becoming increasingly diverse.’ YerItswhat?manifesto points are pretty toothless. It makes a big deal out of relaxing laws on pets but says nothing about controlling levels of rent, beyond an ungrammatical note on limiting rent increases to once a year: ‘We will only allow increases to rent once per year, end the use of rent review clauses, and improve tenants’ ability to challenge excessive rent increases through the First Tier Tribunal to support people to manage their costs and to remain in theirAhhomes.’yes,it’s a hard time to be a young mouse in the city. Given that Government is going to do nothing, what can we do on an individual basis? While on a canal holiday recently, we met a number of semi-retired parents who had moved out of the family home so their kids could move in. Meanwhile, the parents live full-time on the waterways, lazily drifting through the day, with a good Wi-Fi connection and a glass of wine.

And why are prices going up? Demand is an obvious answer. When lockdowns began, pundits predicted that rents in cities such as London would fall as people moved out of town and worked remotely.

I have some sympathy with this view. Yes, the young should be independent. When I remonstrate with the younger mice – now in their early twenties – for asking for money or for being generally babylike, I tend to compare them, perhaps unfairly, with Alexander the Great. ‘At 16, Alexander the Great commanded a vast and mighty empire!’

This has turned out to be a fantasy. Instead, the young are flocking back to the capital cities – and who can blameBucolicthem?fantasies are OK for oldies, but the young want to see people and to see life, as Morrissey put it.

But the thing is, neither I nor Alexander the Great was forced to contend with the crazy rental market in cities.Thetalk

It’s not just London. Rents in New York are also shooting upwards, and rents across the US last year went up 11 per cent. Landlords claim they discounted during COVID and must now

The doomed children of Generation Rent tom hodgkinson

return to market levels. This has led to 25-year-old sharers being informed their rent has doubled. The ruthless landlord will not budge because demand is soThefierce.tenant then has to decide: move somewhere cheaper or earn more money.

‘I couldn’t live with my parents – just couldn’t,’ she says. ‘I moved out as quickly as I could.’

I sometimes wonder who these landlords are. Where do they live? Where

Town Mouse

The Oldie October 2022 39

(The word ‘stress’ of course is much over-used. I myself have just informed Mary that I am suffering from stress on finding that Waitrose has run out of cucumbers.)Anotherrecent survey by Legal & General announced that, with the average Briton moving four times in their life, ‘The main driver to up sticks is needing more space or the wish for a change of scenery and lifestyle.’

I digress. The beds had gone to house clearance; the loyal cleaner needed to be supervised during her last hurrah. I had not anticipated the difficulty of covering my own tracks on the final morning as I forensically tried to extract all the crumbs from a full English, without the benefit of a vacuum cleaner or even a dustpan and brush – all of which had gone south with removals.

I quite enjoy packing and made a good job of bubble-wrapping a glass bell from Murano which had miraculously survived other house moves and had therefore won its place in my soul as something sacred and important. It was unsettling to find myself alone in my positive rating of the ‘useless’ bell.

giles wood

Divorce, death of a loved one, being sacked – surely these catastrophes must trump a house move?

And so I was to learn that the housemoving experience is indeed, as the surveys proclaim, up there with life’s most stressful. Sleep deprivation? YES. Emotional turbulence? YES. Surprise at additional costs? YES.

I have always been sceptical about those surveys that maintain that moving house is one of the most stressful ‘life events’.

This proved an emotionally chilling echo of the time I was waved off, aged eight, by my mother, cradling the infant younger brother in her arms, as I was driven away to my first term at prep school in Denbighshire.

Moving house is an inexact science and mistakes are inevitably made. An oval Edwardian mirror, a First World War brass shell case, a sack trolley and a ladies’ wheelbarrow, all of which had been overlooked by four high-functioning adults, became ‘gifts’ to the incoming owner.

Mater took her role as family archivist very seriously. Nothing was too trivial to save – even my wife’s magazine articles.

Country Mouse

Furthermore, the discovery of a whole drawer of Oldie magazines caused mayhem. Multiples of magazines tend to slip and sway from the human grasp and that is why they ended up as a separate layer in my already inadvisedly overloaded Hyundai.

And then there was the supremely stressful discovery that none of us had room, in our own comparatively miniature houses, for the family Broadwood baby grand piano. This instrument, on which my late father played Chopin nocturnes badly during the small hours, emanated its own, near human personality – yet it could neither be sold nor given away.

With each family member having in turn the power of judge and jury over inanimate objects, no wonder ‘emotional turbulence’ is cited as a stressful factor of a house move. These are decisions that no one wants to make.

None of that was true in the case of my 80-something mother who, from her walled garden in Anglesey, could enjoy a magisterial 180-degree view of the Menai Strait, framed by mature Scots pines of cathedral-like proportions, with Snowdonia and the crucible of tortured rock that comprises the Idwal Slabs glinting in the sunset. She would be swapping this for a prospect of larch lap fence from a bungalow in south Oxfordshire.

Richard Mabey in Nature Cure memorably describes his and his sister’s emotional distress during their longoverdue house move (they’d had difficulty fledging). ‘Because it wasn’t the bare shell of the house that held the memory of the place, but its material things, the ordinary currency of living. Things became a kind of external memory, an embodiment of events andOnlyfeelings.’onthe third day was I able to fulfil the final instructions issued to me by my brother. I locked up, turned off all services, put out the recycling bins and handed over the house keys to Daffyd’s office on the high street, in a process called completion, leading to ‘vacant possession’.

‘Do we need to keep fish knives? What about ashtrays? Nobody smokes now!’

But this moment had been widely prophesied in the oft-heard question of recent years ‘Has the garden got on top of her?’Theanswer was no, but safety and trip hazards were plentiful. Jagged stone steps, steep gradients, rabbit holes, matted vegetation, stray hosepipes … everything in her award-winning wildlife garden, lovingly curated over 30 years, seemed to be conspiring towards an inevitable – dread word – fall

We ending up paying a local man £150 to take it away. He couldn’t look me in the eye and my genuine hope is that he was able to make a profit from it, rather than throw it into a disused Welsh quarry.

The Legal & General survey on house-moving made no mention of the stress of ‘decision fatigue’. What to keep and what to throw. My mother, bless, found herself over-questioned.

How could I have anticipated that I

would need to factor in the cost of two nights’ stay in the (delightful) Bishopsgate Hotel in Beaumaris – for the simple reason that muggins would need to stay around for final admin while my kid brother and mother drove south in an overloaded Chelsea tractor, my brother waving triumphantly.

A moving story – my mother’s goodbye to Wales

In old age, the legendary Lady Diana Cooper had a minor driving accident, hitting a bollard by the road. She instantly gave up her car.

replaced the more usual ‘she/her’ for the teenage girl saint.

40 The Oldie October 2022

MORISONTOBY Postcards from the Edge

Still, Joan has been long known as the Maid of Orleans and La Pucelle. I hope that portraying her as gender-neutral is just a passing fad, and this iconic maiden will be restored to her rightful standing: as an inspiring historical leader of the female sex.

The car, was, literally, a vehicle of women’s liberation, as important as the washing machine, the vote or the pill.

My dream of steering a campervan across France is receding – and yet I hope to remain at the wheel for a while yet. It’s not just a mode of transport: it’s a cherished symbol of liberty and emancipation!

The ‘agri’ references are there in the earthy notes about ‘dewsy cattle’; and the savouring of ‘thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart’. Leopold Bloom dreams of buying a farm; and drovers with their cows and sheep are described passing through the city streets.

Philip Joyce, whose essay was published in the Irish Farmers Journal, observes that the theme is a reminder that, in the 1900s, city and country life were much more intertwined.

The fact that we’ve had to import this second-person plural shows there is a lexical need for it. Could we revive the old English ‘ye’?

She loved her little car, but that decided her to renounce it.

There are 26 statues of Joan in France, often in equestrian mode, with some holding a sword. There’s one I like very much at the little bay of Le Crotoy in the Somme département, showing her sitting in a reflective pose; it has a girlish tenderness.

Whenever we read of an older person causing a serious accident involving an innocent victim, many of us ask ourselves if it’s time to quit.

Yet a car means independence. Public transport in big cities is fine, but the countryside is less well served. Even in towns, it is often limited – in Canterbury bus services begin to disappear after 6pm.

Just about every scholar and professor has analysed James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in detail – marking its centenary this year. And a local writer in West Cork, Philip Joyce, has discovered a new angle.

He has trawled through the opus to examine ‘agricultural’ links and allusions to country life – and he has found them in the Telemachus, Calypso and Hades sections.

A farewell to cars

In County Cork, the archaic second-person plural is still used in speech. A group of people is addressed as ‘ye’ – as in ‘I’ll be seeing ye later’. It’s practical and perhaps a more apt form than the Americanism we have otherwise employed – ‘You guys’. I guess that’s functional, if slangy.

I’ve seen contemporaries gradually decide to drive less, and then not to drive at all. Night-time driving becomes a strain, and sometimes an ordeal. Then long distances take their toll, especially when they involve spaghetti-junction motorways with roads criss-crossing bewilderingly, and the gantries flashing in all directions. Other issues, such as the price of fuel, and the cost of insurance, also pile on the pressure.

I dread the day old age stops me from driving, says Mary Kenny

As I notice my peers go carless, I know I too will have to do so, one day. I’ve had eye treatment, and must be sure my vision is good enough for the road. And I do drive less.

Philip, 75, happens to be a great-nephew of J J himself: his grandfather Charlie was Joyce’s youngest brother. Philip Joyce helps voluntarily at a Clonakilty undertaker’s, and at the local Catholic church. James Joyce’s atheism did not transmit to all (collateral) descendants!

Allison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph called it an ‘insult’ to women. There were few enough great women in the history books, and now, St Joan is taken away from us!

Her son, John Julius Norwich, told me that her agonised response was ‘What if that had been a child?’

In truth, Joan has long been claimed by all sorts. She is seen as a saint by religious believers, yet also as a rebel who defied the Church and was tried by the Inquisition. During the German occupation of France, she was an emblem for the Resistance: even Communists extolled France’s patron saint. But she has also been embraced by right-wing political movements, who commend her for expelling the English from the country.

She was canonised in 1920 – nearly five centuries after her martyrdom. She was, in fact, accused of transvestism because she wore male apparel as she rode into battle. So perhaps a little gender-bending is considered appropriate, reflecting the transgender themes of our age.

There were some adverse comments from feminists last month when the Globe Theatre in London staged a ‘gender-neutral’ production of Joan of Arc, in which the pronouns ‘they/them’

It is the stories and students we remember – not the grades.

when he tried to pull the stops out – too little, too late.

There were moments of joy, too. Several students outshone their predicted grades. Solid hard work (if only post-lockdown) and (I hope) good teaching paid off.

A raindrop that falls into the Thames will pass through the bodies of eight people before it reaches the sea.

Half of Earth’s rain falls in the 12 wettest days of the year. It is most likely to be raining at 7am and least likely at 3am. London gets less rain than Rome, Venice or Nice.

Light travels 18 million times faster than rain.

It is time to admit that we have favourites who we pray will pull through, or shine, because they have worked so hard. We have others for whom we have a soft spot, even if they haven’t worked hard. And others who we know haven’t a prayer, but we hope will pull through if only for our own personal results.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

When it rains heavily in the rainforests,Sumatranthere is a 3,700droughtcorrespondinginEastAfrica,milesaway.Arattlesnakethathas been

These students make my heart glad and my results look good. But are they the ones I will remember in five years’ time?

This year – the first after two years of teacher-awarded marks – was bound to be interesting. The headlines fulfilled our expectations: a drop after those two years, but still a rise on the last exam-assessed grades. Then came news that made me sick with fear: my brilliant and hardworking niece had a stack of grades 8 and 9 with just one 5 – and that was English language. What hope did my set two have?

With my results, the oddest news was that, for the first time, my literature results were down on my language results – as were the school’s as a whole.

It takes a million cloud droplets to make one raindrop.

out in the rain will not rattle.

Owls are 70 times less likely to hoot when it’s raining.

Results. You may think it’s terrible for the children, but the final week before the results is pretty tense for us teachers, too.

South East England has lower annual rainfall than Jerusalem or Beirut.

The agony and the ecstasy of exams

At the other end of the scale are two students predicted respectively a 7 and a 6, but who gained a 5 and a 4.

‘Bloody train strikes’

Roman emperors were more likely to be assassinated when it didn’t rain.

For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

The Roman Emperor Augustus was frightened of thunder and lighting and terrified every time it rained.

The school, Ofsted and the Government will look at the broad picture of results. I look at the individuals.

The Burmese sneezing monkey sneezes uncontrollably whenever it rains.

So how does that look on paper for me? If you compare his English result with his other results, it looks bad: his scientific grades were up in the 6s and 7s – even a 9. But if you look at what you call his ‘subject progress index’, it is good – a grade higher than the computer predicted. It is this data they really look at.

Cows lie down when they are cold or tired – not necessarily when it’s about to rain.

Bees know when it’s going to rain, and so they put in extra work the day before.

Quite Interesting Things about … rain

Parts of Antarctica have had no rain or snow for two million years.

Rainwater contains vitamin B12.

JOHN LLOYD

Why did they do so badly? One was phenomenally lazy until the last minute

The Oldie October 2022 41

I despaired. Yet somehow she pulled it off in the exam and managed a pass.

The other student just lost interest. She didn’t come to lessons or even school. When she was in class, her head was on the desk whenever she should have been writing, although her contributions were intelligent and interesting. She began to talk about stress (I wish students did not know there was such a thing) and spend her time elsewhere. She handed in mock papers with nothing written but her name.

maths and sciences, really struggled with English. I prayed that he would swing a 5 in the exam – and he got the 5.

Probably not. I’ll remember the dyslexic boy who worked so hard and smiled so constantly, the boy we lost to the dark side four or five months ago, despite his early promise, and the sulky girl who suddenly laughed with understanding and succeeded despite herself or, in the end, because of herself.

The pleasant smell of soil after rain is caused by bacteria in the soil and is called petrichor, from Greek petros, ‘stone’, and ichor, ‘the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods’.

There were some amazing successes, as well as some deep disappointments. One case concerned the dyslexic boy (predicted 4) who, while very clever at

Unusually for scripture, we are given a physical description of the main character: he is short. He is also a chief tax-collector – so he is presumably middle-aged. And successful.

We are told he said, ‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at yourThishouse.’isvery straightforward and to the point, and one can presume that Jesus knew – or knew of – Zacchaeus.

Wehome.areleft with that reassuring knowledge that we are where we are supposed to be. And, better still, with the guarantee that we really are wanted and will never again be Gonerejected.are the agonies of unrequited love and even the lesser misery of always being the last to be picked for a team in the school playground.

He was already well known as a football reporter, commentatedhavingon the 1966 World Cup Final on telly. He knew about the real world.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Ronald Allison reigned over the Buckingham Palace press office with calm and good humour from 1973 until 1978.

The Rev Canon David Richards and John Dauth, Prince Charles’s press secretary who was later Australian High Commissioner in London, were in the pulpit at St Cross Chapel in Winchester at his thanksgiving service.

Dauth quoted Charles Anson, another Palace press secretary, saying Ron was ‘unflappable and avuncular… The Queen greatly appreciated Ron’s calm and measured way of dealing with press crises, especially those blown up by the tabloids.’

Ronald Allison CVO (1932-2022)

This leads me to think that, as well as being short, he is probably rather well-fed. So we get a glimpse of a plump, fussy little man abandoning all sense of dignity and sprinting to get away from the crowd.

Funeral Service

As a senior tax-collector, Zacchaeus cannot have been a popular figure. In the crowd, he might well have ended up black and blue: making him stumble would have been highly satisfactory and no one would notice who had done it.

The Canon spoke of Allison’s football commentary and his irrational devotion to Southampton FC.

Zacchaeus and the sycamore tree

‘Jesus entered Jericho and was going through the town when a man whose name was Zacchaeus made his appearance; he was one of the senior tax-collectors and a wealthy man. He was anxious to see what kind of man Jesus was, but he was too short and could not see him for the crowd; so he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to catch a glimpse of Jesus who was to pass that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and spoke to him: “Zacchaeus, come down. Hurry, because I must stay at your house today.” ’ (Luke 19:1-6)

‘Everyone knew Sir Jocelyn Stevens, managing director of the Express, was married to a Princess Margaret’s lady-inwaiting, so the story was taken at face value. Ron called me and calmly took in the whole catastrophe. ‘Simple,’ he said, ‘we’ll call the Prince of Wales’ –something that at that stage I really wasn’t up to.

‘Prince Charles told us plainly that he had never even met her and certainly wasn’t going to marry her.’

I consulted several New Testament commentators and found in them no mention of how funny this episode is.

Zacchaeus, lost and found in Jericho

‘He could be quietly diplomatic and discreet – but apparently not when it came to Fulham FC,’ said Canon Richards. ‘His match report on Grandstand said that ‘When you come to Craven Cottage, you expect rubbish –and that’s what we got today.’ It meant he was less popular in some parts of the Royal Borough of Chelsea and Kensington than in others.’

Lost, in this context, does not mean damned or doomed, but being in the wrong place. So, by finding and following Jesus, Zacchaeus, like the rest of us, and like the sheep in the parable, has come

sister teresa

After the comedy comes the marvellous and solemn utterance of Jesus: ‘Today salvation has come to this house. For the Son of Man has come to seek and save what was lost.’

He then climbs a tree. Dignified, middle-aged tax collectors do not climb trees. Tree-climbing is, on the whole, best left to children, who aren’t going to lookGivenridiculous.thefarcical situation of a fat little man leaning out through the greenery to have a good look at Jesus, how exactly was it that Jesus addressed him?

42 The Oldie October 2022

John Dauth said, ‘It was my turn as the early-hours spokesman for the palace. The Daily Express had a banner headline saying Prince Charles, then the most eligible bachelor in the world, was to marry Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg.

Soon, however, a more literal meaning may be ascribed to getting a grip. An increasing – and perhaps an increasingly fashionable – body of research suggests that there is some correlation between loss of muscular strength, particularly that of the hand grip, and the later development of dementia.

The study found that these associations were independent of the known genetic risks for dementia.

Lunch

Craig Brown on his new collection of articles, Hay Wire

At least at the age of outset of the subjects of this study, hand-grip strength is relatively easy to increase by deliberate exercise.

A gripping investigation

The authors therefore hypothesised

The study followed up the records of 190,406 people – with an average age at the outset of the study of 56.8 years – for between ten and 15 years, and found that for each loss of 11 pounds of hand-grip strength, the risk of dementia in the time period studied increased by about 15 per cent. The association was stronger for men than for women and particularly strong for the type of dementia caused by blood-vessel disease.

Therefore my advice to 50-year-olds is to walk fast, practise standing on one leg and get a grip. Fortunately, perhaps, for most readers of The Oldie it is too late for them to do all this – though worryingly, perhaps, future research might prove otherwise.Sponsoredby

Literary

It has also been found that speed of gait and the ability to stand on one leg for ten seconds is predictive of the development of dementia.

Tuesday 13th December 2022 At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE TO BOOK TICKETS (Mon-Frireservations@theoldie.co.ukemailorcallKatherineon012254273119.30am-3pm).Thepriceis £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30pm

The Doctor’s Surgery

New studies suggest a link between weak hand grip and dementia

Simon Heffer on Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 – the third and final volume on her book of simple recipes, Bliss on Toast

Prue Leith

As is so often the case in studies like this, however, it is difficult to work out from the data (which are much clearer on relative than on absolute statistics) how many people must do how much exercise to avoid how many cases – and all this being on the still dubious assumption that the relationship is causative.

The Oldie October 2022 43

‘Get a That’sgrip!’the

I was astonished to learn that, of the 190,406, precisely 38,643 had undergone MRI scans of their brains. (One cannot help but wonder about the ratio between a scan and its clinical benefit to the patient.) It was found that there was a correlation between hand-grip strength and changes in the brain that were themselves associated with cognitive decline.

that there was a causative link between declining hand-grip strength and cognitive decline, the first causing the second. They suggest a mechanism: damage to the lining of small blood vessels, presumably extending to the vessels of the brain; damage that could be reversed by deliberate strengthening of grip, which would have a knock-on effect, so to speak, on the cerebral vessels.

theodore dalrymple

it is important to remember that an unexplained phenomenon remains a phenomenon, even if its cause is unknown.AnAmerican study of British data suggests a decline in hand-grip strength predicts a propensity to develop dementia, as has been found in other studies, but also that it might play some causative role in that development.

line said to those who have overreacted to – or psychologically collapsed altogether in the face of – a disagreeable or unwanted event.

Calling on someone to get a grip is like saying, ‘Pull yourself together.’ Of course, in the current cultural climate, falling to bits is deemed preferable by many as indicative of a more sensitive soul. Vulnerability is the new sanctity.

There is here, of course, the problem of reverse causation – if, indeed, there is any relation of causation at all between the two phenomena, rather than just fortuitous correlation.

It might be that loss of muscle strength is a first or prodromal sign of the developing disease, caused by – rather than a cause of – that disease. Patients with dementia, after all, tend to waste away.

But even if there were a causative relationship between loss of muscle strength and the later development of dementia, the mechanism would have to be explained. At the same time,

Dr Patrick Hoyte, Minehead, Somerset

Of course I am probably wrong, as usual.

Cornwall isn’t a county

John Spivey, Thorverton. Exeter, Devon

The conversations that ensued were without fail totally boring and a waste of valuable time and you never learned anything of value in your telephonic subterfuge.

My princely sports master

SIR: Julia Bueno’s perceptive article on self-criticism (September issue) should help many readers to stop beating themselves up, but I would like to suggest one further point. Remorseless selfcriticism is seductive because it makes people the stars of every scene in the movie of their lives. It might help them to realise that this is not so: sometimes they are extras without any lines.

SIR: Naming his favourite novel, Gyles Brandreth (September issue) implores us to give Elizabeth Taylor’s At Bertram’s Hotel a look. I think he may be getting his lady writers confused: Agatha Christie wrote At Bertram’s. Could Mr B be thinking of Elizabeth Taylor’s wonderful Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont? – a different hotel with far fewer murders! Yours aye, Sarah Myners, Castle Eden, County Durham

I like to imagine that Harris also had his dressing-gown on, but I think I imagined that, as I was in Barry Cryer’s words ‘feeling no pain’.

but I need to take issue with John McEwen when he writes about the chough emblem surmounting the ‘county’s’ coat of arms.

Ben Tisdall, Torquay, Devon

SIR: Sophia Waugh’s piece about non-curriculum culture (September issue) brought to mind my short-sighted headmaster declaring that he would discontinue my previously successful post-exam camping trips for 12-year-olds to the Isles of Scilly, on the grounds that they had no educational merit. These trips included for most pupils first-time camping and cooking for themselves, wildlife education, map-reading, living on an island etc. Much more useful than the average classroom lesson.

Cornwall isn’t English and was never formally annexed or taken over by England. The word county when applied to Cornwall is a – common – misnomer. Marian Prowse, Cornwall

Gyles goes to wrong hotel

SIR: Good to see the chough celebrated in Bird of the Month (September issue),

Guilty party

As a boy of 13, great-nephew of Sultan Mehmed, he was included in the family exodus from Istanbul on HMS Malaya in 1922.Subsequently living in the South of France, unlike the Sultan his side of the family did not lose their capital, and a playboy lifestyle was enjoyed. Not a

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

You felt a sense of guilt at eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation, but couldn’t help yourself.

Drinks with Peter O’Toole

While I do not doubt that he did not imbibe during the run of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, anyone present at the Oldie lunches he attended in the last years of his life can attest that he drank then.

Stephen Simpson, Preston, Lancashire

Beating myself up

Peter was a fabulous companion, but I should stress these were not ‘hellraising sessions’, on the level of those in his youth. He rarely talked about acting – save to tell me that all directors are idiots – and much preferred to talk about rugby, which he was passionate about. Ms Leventon captured perfectly the mesmerising effect he could have on people but, as far as the non-drinking was concerned, I am pretty sure this was an act.

‘Hey, Sergeant! It’s about the copper flashing on our church roof – could you come and remove him, please?’

However, that feeling of doing something underhand was very quickly assuaged.

44 The Oldie October 2022

This may well have been what Northcliffe felt like doing, but it doesn’t sound like it. Is the word ‘extended’ perhaps in the wrong place?

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Lovers on the rack

SIR: I adored Annabel Leventon’s fascinating piece about working with Peter O’Toole (September issue). However, I was puzzled by her suggestion that following having his pancreas removed, the great actor was told that he ‘would die if he touched another drop’ – thereby implying that he never drank again.

Yours sincerely, Richard Heller, London SE1

SIR: Philip Mansel’s detailing the fall of the Ottoman Empire (September issue) reminded me of a sports master at my school in the postwar years, HH Prince Omer Fethi Sami.

In fact, I enjoyed many drinks with him, post-lunch, at Simpson’s in the Strand. On one memorable occasion, we ended up in the nearby Coal Hole pub, on the Strand, where we were joined by Richard Harris, wearing slippers, as he had just popped down from the suite in the Savoy, where he lived.

Carry on camping

SIR: Peter McKay (review of Andrew Roberts’s book The Chief, September issue) tells us that Lord Northcliffe treated his wife’s lovers as ‘extended members of his family’, conjuring up an unlikely image of rivals being ‘stretched’ as part of some sort of medieval torture.

SIR: Your article on party lines (Olden Life, September issue) reminded me of the days when occasionally you got a crossed line on the telephone.

Freud’s immediate reaction was one of frantic PANIC and he exited the studio like a scalded cat, leaving behind him a group of rather bemused students!

SIR: One of the many things I admire about The Oldie is that, unlike many other publications, it can be read without anxiety or indignation caused by However,inaccuracy.as a Northerner, indeed a Northumbrian (albeit exiled to the East Midlands), I must defend the historic power, significance and size of the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. It did not stretch from the Tweed to the Tees, as stated by William Cook in his quite interesting article about Lindisfarne and its Gospels (September issue). This distance is a mere 87 miles. From the

Forth to the Humber is more accurate – a distance of 190 miles.

Abroad by Noël Coward

My mother kept a secret too, and it was only when she died that we discovered my father had gone to prison. It was a shameful secret – but one of which I am now inordinately proud.

Lucian Freud’s trews

The whole kingdom covered what are now the counties of Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Yorkshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, Lothian.

Hero dad in jail

students were concentrating on our respective paintings, with Freud quietly contemplating our efforts while circling behind us ready to offer his advice. The quietness of the studio was suddenly shattered by a massive crashing sound in the quadrangle immediately outside our windows (there was much repairing of Second World War damage at the time).

SIR: While reading Harry Mount’s article on Raymond Briggs (September issue), I was greatly amused by his anecdote regarding his time at the Slade School of Fine Art, as I too remember Lucian Freud as a young visiting lecturer.

I graduated five years earlier than Briggs, in 1952, and as a painting student was fortunate in having the benefit of discussing my work with Freud, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and numerous other established artists.

Raymond Briggs’s recollection of Freud made me smile: I also remember him wearing his rather elegant Black Watch tartan trews and with the collar of his tweed jacket rakishly turned up.

I have tried to find his prison details, but to no avail. Far from his bringing shame on the family, like Ian Dowding I feel that had I known it could have had a positive effect. We lived opposite a section house for policemen, and in those politically incorrect days we had to run the gauntlet of their ribald remarks.

How Northumbria shrank

SIR: In ‘My secret uncle’ (July issue), Ian Dowding relates that his mother never told him his uncle was Ronnie Biggs.

One particular incident regarding Freud also stands out in my memory. On this occasion I and a number of other

As a woman shopper saw my puzzlement at the vast range, she said ‘Ninety years old? Tell her to let them swing, dear.’

My other recollection was, of course, Frankie Howerd’s ‘Titter ye not.’

After then teaching PE and sports at a London prep school, he came to my school in the 1950s. I captained his boxing team in the early 1960s.

When the Blackshirts and Oswald Mosley came to the East End, mounted police tried to keep back the demonstrators. They clubbed down indiscriminately, and an uncle I had never known but who was crippled with arthritis was savagely felled. Immediately my father pulled the policeman off his horse and – a good amateur boxer – knocked him out. For this, he was sent to Wormwood Scrubs.

At the age of 70, my 90-something mother sent me to M & S to buy her a bra.

of a great man, noted on his French diplomatic passport in 1926 as ‘de la famille Imperiale Ottomane’.

member of the Georges Carpentier ‘fast set’, Fethi Sami did however on one occasion spar with that great boxer, who later became an actor in Hollywood.

Memoriestea.

Bra-buying for oldies

Ian Munro, Sutton

SIR: Readers who enjoy – as I always do – David Horspool’s History column may like to know that the ancient Greek foundations of his September 2022 iteration ‘Who is the greatest of them all?’ may be consulted in Sarah Brown Ferrario’s Historical Agency and the ‘Great Man’ in Classical Greece (2014).

However, one should go even further back in time than she does, to Homer’s Achilles and Hector. Modelling himself on Achilles, one Alexander – son of Philip of Macedon – achieved so much in his lifetime that posthumously he acquired the sobriquet ‘the Great’. He has even had greatness thrust upon his very name, in the modern Greek portmanteau Megalexandros. The shades of Pompeius Magnus and Charlemagne must be making the proverbial in-grave revolutions. Professor Paul Cartledge, Clare College, Cambridge

Unfortunately, over the centuries levelling down (southwards) happened. Yours faithfully, Elaine Whitesides, Dingley, Market Harborough, Leicestershire

‘It’s OK – he indentifies as a sheep’

SIR: A N Wilson’s review of Lucy Lethbridge’s book How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves (September issue) can surely be summarised in the words of one of my favourite Noël Coward songs: ‘Why do the wrong people travel, when the right people stay back home?’ Simon Courtauld, Etchilhampton, Wilts

SIR: Reading Mary Killen’s advice on bra-fitting (September issue) I could think of only two things.

The Oldie October 2022 45

He lived to the grand age of 98, playing squash into his 80s. I visited his widow in 2007 – a charming French lady who entertained me to a traditional English

His continued absence for the rest of that day was a source of much merriment. Charles Front (age 92), London N10

Imagine being able to say, ‘My dad could beat you up for that’ – and knowing it to be true.

Yours, Janice Ketley, Englefield Green, Surrey

Barry Hyman, Bushey Heath

With the fall of France, Fethi Samy (now Anglicised surname) escaped to England and took a wartime course at Loughborough College.

Alexander the Mega-Great

My great-uncle Stanley Brisco was their butler/valet, having gone to work for Mr Profumo before his marriage.

We arrived at 4pm and went straight to 3 Chester Terrace, home of War Minister John Profumo and his wife, actress Valerie Hobson (1917-98), star of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

46 The Oldie October 2022

she had not previously given anything to me – just to my sister. This kindness was typical of her.

I Once Met

embarrassed her. I’d only meant it as a joke.

I had been divorced for

Now came a problem – where to put the quarter of a million pounds the sale of my house had raised? The banks were in crisis; there was the smell of the 1920s Weimar Republic in the air. The financial system was teetering on the edge of oblivion – my life savings could disappear.

On 16th October 1960, I was 16 and visiting London on holiday with my parents and younger sister.

There was only one logical place to put the money: Northern Rock. After the run on it in 2007, the Government had nationalised it and guaranteed all deposits. So my money would be as safe as the Bank of England!

She looked down at the open passbook and, smiling, slid it under the glass to me. I left the bank hoping I hadn’t

On coming back down, she said we must choose a show to see as her treat, and she would book it. And so, on 21st October, my family and ‘Brisco’ went to see a musical (The Most Happy Fella). Valerie Hobson also sent me various items from the state visit of the King and Queen of Nepal which had happened that week. She told my uncle that she realised

Valerie Hobson

At this point, Valerie Hobson returned and sat with us, having tea and chatting as if she had always known us.

She looked me in the eye and smiled. ‘Another zero, Mr Ley. Another zero.’

We went in by the mews entrance and Uncle Stan said he would show us round. The stairs led up to the hall, where I was surprised to see black and white floor tiles; everyone I knew was getting fitted carpets then. He proudly showed us the big walkin wardrobe – everything neatly folded, with even the socks ready to slip on.

By Roger Ley, Bruisyard, Suffolk, who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own submissions400-wordaboutthe past

After the Profumo scandal, Uncle Stan went into ‘exile’ with the Profumos and we lost contact.

had a ‘magic cupboard’ upstairs and took my sister to choose a gift from it.

I opened an account and gave my solicitor the sort code and account number. I could start my last year of teaching and begin looking for a bungalow near Southwold.Thepassbook from the Northern Rock arrived soon after I’d opened the account, but as it showed only my initial small deposit, I decided to walk round to the branch during my lunch hour and have it updated.

It was 2008 and I would shortly be retiring from my job teaching at City College in Norwich. I had sold my house, moved into a rented property and planned to buy a bungalow in the country.

The young woman behind the counter in Northern Rock was pleasantly efficient. She was in her thirties and had a soft Geordie accent that brought back memories of Barbara, a girl I’d courted unsuccessfully in my early twenties. She was lovely. As she received my passbook, I heard myself say to her, ‘Come away with me. Come away now. Just leave everything and come away.’

She was an attractive lady with auburn hair, worn loose and quite curly for that time, and lovely skin. She then said she

Several weeks went by before I had to call in again. She smiled as I approached and handed her my passbook. We chatted as she dealt with my transaction and we laughed about my previous visit. As I was about to leave, I asked, ‘As a matter of interest, what would it have taken for you to come away with me?’

I fell for the girl at Northern Rock

On the top floor was the nursery, with nanny sitting by a roaring fire with her foot bandaged up. Then back downstairs to the staff sitting-room to be introduced to the housekeeper and given tea and cakes.

I remember Uncle Stan pointing out Mr Profumo’s office window and saying, ‘He will either be Prime Minister or end up in jail.’ My father often pondered thisUnclestatement!Stanthought the world of ‘Madam’, as he called Mrs Profumo. She had won him round when she married John Profumo. He had intended to leave, saying he preferred to work for a male boss.

Left: Valerie Hobson and Stanley Brisco at her son’s birthday party. Above: with husband, John Profumo, October 1954

decades and, although there had been ‘relationships’ over the years, none had stuck. So, as I approached my 60th birthday, I was footloose and fancy-free.

Annette Page

Roy Foster hails Flora Fraser’s biography of Flora MacDonald, the heroine who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie

clan diplomacy as well as Hebridean topography in the aftermath of Culloden.

They are epitomised by Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Scott’s Waverley and, better still, Redgauntlet – and this reviewer’s childhood favourite, John Keir Cross’s The Man in Moonlight. (I still treasure it, published in 1947 by John Westhouse, London, ‘and decorated in the manner of the period by Robin Jacques’.)

Over the sea to Skye

The complications of the couple’s peregrinations, and the difficulties visited on those who sheltered them, are vividly reconstructed. The author shows an intimate grasp of the twists and turns of

Cumberland’s soldiery, escaping ‘over the sea to Skye’ and eventually to France.

espite all the efforts of spoilsport historians such as John Prebble and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jacobite narratives will always hit the sweet spot for romantic escapism.

48 The Oldie October 2022

This narrative takes up the first half of the book – and is suitably thrilling, while based on intensive archival research as well as local knowledge and tradition. (The author spent much of her youth in a Western Isles house embellished by doors carved by the Sobieski Stuarts, two enterprising 19th-century claimants to theInthrone.)disguise or out of it, the Prince seems to have been a good sport, but kept risking things by over-tipping innkeepers or complaining about the crudeness of drinking vessels.

Returning to Scotland, Flora married a local tacksman (farmer and land agent) and settled down on Skye to raise a family.

Flora Fraser, no spoilsport, is from a Highland clan who fought for Charles Edward Stewart; for his pains, her ancestor Lord Lovat became the last peer to be beheaded on Tower Hill.

No less absorbing, and much less familiar, is the way her heroine coped with life after Bonnie Prince Charlie. Arrested and imprisoned, she (unlike several co-conspirators and against the advice of law officers) evaded a treason

His companion by contrast comes across as sensible, self-disciplined, resourceful and brave. The images, which launched a thousand shortbread tins, usually portray two handsome young people in tartan dress, soulfully gazing at each other while boarding a boat in stormy seas. In fact, their time together was mostly spent cowering on hillsides and in bothies amid the kind of downpours that only a Scottish summer can provide. And, after they’d parted, the Prince still had a fair bit of ‘skulking and lurking’ to do before getting to France.

And, as the accomplished biographer of Emma Hamilton, Queen Caroline, Pauline Bonaparte and Mr and Mrs George Washington, she has a beady eye for the paradoxes of history, the rationalisations of survivors, and the way myths and reputations are made. And that is what makes this book such a riveting read.

Demurelyverdict.attractive and notably self-possessed, she became a social success in London, befriending the family with whom she was lodged during her arrest. She was taken up by Lady Primrose, a rich Stuart sympathiser who endowed her with a substantial fortune, partly through crowdfunding.

Fraser is particularly good on this ‘holy relics’ aspect of Jacobitism and Flora’s manipulation of items such as ‘Betty Burke’s’ brogues, garters and apron strings. Chips from the fabled boat were marketed like fragments of the True

Her fame was now firmly established, rebooted by an admiring visit from Johnson and Boswell on their Highland tour, and she astutely had kept many material relics of her adventure, useful later for raising money.

Her namesake, also from a Highland clan, though a less elevated one, became famous overnight in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion. That’s when she took charge of the fugitive Bonnie Prince Charlie and enabled him, disguised as her Irish maid ‘Betty Burke’, to evade

SuchCross.supplementary sources of

MacEachen, who had accompanied his cousin Flora and the Prince on their sodden journey in 1746, and whose son became a Napoleonic marshal and Duc de Taranto. Making a pilgrimage to his father’s home in 1825, the Duc was struck by how local inhabitants remembered the 1746 events: ‘It seems they just happened yesterday.’ (He nonetheless got many of the details wrong.)

Flora Fraser’s Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald is published by Bloomsbury on 15th September

income were soon necessary, as her husband Allan turned out to be a bad manager and hopeless with money. By 1774, Flora was describing herself as ‘a poor, distressed woman, once known to the world’ and the MacDonalds decided, like many clan members, to emigrate to America.Andhere a whole new adventure begins. Fraser tells us that, though she was raised on the Flora MacDonaldBonnie Prince Charlie epic, it was only when researching in the USA for her Washington biography that she came upon the complications of Flora’s new life in North Carolina.

torrent of emigration from the Highlands across the Atlantic; the widespread linkages of the first British Empire (Flora MacDonald received financial support from her youngest son who, destined for the law in Edinburgh, instead made a successful career as a military engineer in India); and, above all, the complex webs of affinity and loyalty that enabled Scots Jacobites to fight for King George in America.Ontheother hand, some American ex-revolutionaries in 1782 approached Charles Edward about becoming king of an independent America. With uncharacteristic realism, the Prince replied (in proleptically Beckettian mode), ‘I have failed most of my life and have no wish to fail more.’

On her death, Flora was shrouded in a sheet the Prince slept on 44 years before

The Oldie October 2022 49 WINGGARY

Part of the romantic appeal of Jacobitism is indeed that aura of failure, parlayed by Walter Scott and others into an unthreatening nostalgia. Success had to be sought elsewhere.

This projected her heroine straight into the American Revolution – in which this Jacobite icon, as well as her husband and sons, firmly embraced the Loyalist cause and took arms in support of the HanoverianIronically,monarchy.theythus unwittingly signed up to another losing cause, and the last chapter of Flora’s extraordinary life saw her back in the Highlands. Here her reduced circumstances were partly ameliorated by a royal pension – not from her exiled companion Charles Edward, now a boozy wreck, but initiated by a more recent admirer, the future George IV.

Many prominent Irish Jacobites went to the Continent and had distinguished military careers in France and Spain. One Scot who followed a similar path was Neil

Flora Fraser shows that her namesake’s life, though indelibly marked by her great Jacobite adventure, reflects and impacts on other and wider themes. These include the underestimated

Flora Fraser’s closely researched book not only strips away accretions and elisions, to reconstruct an iconic moment of romantic nationalist history. She widens out the canvas to take in the marketing of memory and the creation of factoids, sometimes by MacDonald descendants capitalising on their illustrious ancestress.

It was all part of what Scott called the Jacobites’ ‘little idolatry of locks of hair, pictures, rings, ribands and other memorials of the time in which they still seemed to live’. Sharp for her purposes, and despite her late-in-life Loyalism, when she died in 1790 Flora MacDonald was shrouded in a sheet on which the Prince had slept 44 years before.

She knew that the potency of romantic history depends on memory rather than accuracy, an insight shared by her namesake and demonstrated in this masterly book.

security was Reinhold Eggers, an Anglophile disciplinarian who treated rule-breaking prisoners with the same punctiliousness he applied to ensuring they weren’t maltreated. There were no beatings, summary executions or tortures. It was, in Macintyre’s words, ‘a prison that had always prided itself on being run by gentlemen, for gentlemen’.

There were 32 successful ‘home runs’ by Colditz escapees, with many more attempts. There were also many quiet heroes, among them Julius Green, the Jewish dentist who, with others, facilitated escapes and passed coded intelligence back to MI9, London’s escape organisation. Then there was Rudolf Denzler of the Swiss-based International Red Cross, whose courageous physical interventions saved many lives. Indian Dr Mazumdar was loyal to the last, despite discrimination. And Reinhold Eggers was a loyal, decent soldier, whose diary does much to inform this book.

ALAN JUDD

Colditz Castle was used by the Germans in the Second World War to house officer prisoners who had escaped from other prisons or who, because of their attitude, were designated deutschfeindlich – ‘German unfriendly’.

ROGER LEWIS Lessons

More importantly, the custodians of POW camps were the German armed forces – the Wehrmacht – and not the SS. The army officers who ran Colditz adhered strictly to the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of POWs, in terms of conditions, exercise, provisions, punishmentscommunications,andactivities.Theofficerchieflyresponsible for

One strength of Ben Macintyre’s engaging account is that he gives due credit to these escape attempts for their ingenuity and bravery while never losing sight of the boredom, degradation and squalor of incarceration.

Alan Judd was in the Army and the Foreign Office. His latest novel is Queen & Country (Simon & Schuster)

Somehatched.escaped and, after the war, memoirs were published and films made, with the result that Colditz acquired the sheen of glamour.

Inside story

Another aspect that Macintyre brings out is that, for about half the war, Colditz housed not only Commonwealth and British prisoners but Polish, French, Dutch, Belgian and, latterly, a handful of Americans. POW social structures reflected those of their own countries: British public-school POWs socialised mainly among themselves, with Etonians a class within a class. And so the various nationalities roughly reflected national stereotypes.In1941,the 80-strong French contingent divided not only between supporters of de Gaulle and Vichy collaborationists but also between gentiles and Jews, the former insisting that the latter be segregated. They were moved to a cramped attic known, predictably, as the Ghetto. British officers, to their credit, invited them to dinner.Formuch of the war, Colditz housed a few hundred inmates, but as Germany crumbled, others were moved in. By the end, there were 350 British with a few Poles and Americans, plus a sudden infusion of 1,000 French (an astonishing ten per cent of French adult males were POWs). By then, the prisoners no longer sought freedom but strove to stay safely

Shuffled together in his new big book, therefore, are Nazis, East German Orwellian horrors, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Margaret Thatcher, Chernobyl’s radiation cloud and the attack on New York, when ‘the towers and their human cargoes dissolved into the ground’. Even the coronavirus lockdowns turn up – ‘the race to get vaccines tested’ – and a premonition of Putin: ‘The despot is endlessly disposed to stir up wars.’

Viking Penguin £20

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Those steeped in Colditz literature may find few surprises but, for the rest of us, it’s a well-written and engrossing account with a welcome fresh perspective.

‘What’s the most expensive dish?

War stories are usually about glamour or glory. But, for a prisoner of war (POW), there’s neither. Your war is over, you’ve been defeated and there’s nothing you can do except survive. Or escape.

Yet, compared with many others, Colditz prisoners were fortunate. The castle had, over the centuries, acquired so many walled-up rooms, passages and tunnels that it was impossible to make it completely secure.

Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

Unlike with a civilian prison sentence, there was no end in sight. POWs never knew how or when the war would end and were weakened by hunger nearly all the time; all lost weight. Not to mention the debilitating daily struggle against lice and other infestations.

I’m on a fat-fee diet’

inside, while keeping the SS out. Thanks partly to Eggers, there was a gentlemanly handover of power from guards to guarded, with no reprisals.

We have births, deaths, illegitimacy, enforced adoptions, emotional betrayals, domestic violence, dementia and cancer (‘What’s the matter, Daphne? Tell me’).

By Ben Macintyre

By Ian JonathanMcEwanCape£20

For centuries, it had been used as fortress, prison, lunatic asylum, TB hospital, concentration camp and home for dowagers, unmarried daughters and royal bastards.

As a POW camp, it housed inmates who were young men with time on their hands and had already demonstrated willingness to escape. So there was never a day when tunnels were not being dug, disguises (and even a glider) manufactured, papers forged, guards bribed, secret radios built and plots

McEwan’s soap opera

The ‘onslaught of modern farming’ has wrecked rural beauty. Towns are disfigured with graffiti and traffic congestion. The eastward expansion of NATO has provoked the Russians, with ‘their national inferiority complex’. Basically, people are first-class at destruction.

I don’t like novels – never have. There’s quite enough going on in the real world without making more stuff up. Ian McEwan tries to get around the stricture by putting real stuff in.

It included ‘other rank’ (OR) prisoners who acted as batmen (servants) for officers – a requirement of the Geneva Convention. They were housed separately and played no part in escapes. Most would probably – wisely – have chosen not to because they lived much better in Colditz than in normal POW camps where ORs, unlike officers, were compelled to work hard.

He was seduced at 14 by his (female) piano teacher – ‘It’s time you learned how to take a girl’s bra off.’ Miriam Cornell, in a kinky sequence, hides Roland’s clothes and keeps him prisoner in her Ipswich cottage. She has some mad plan to abduct him to Scotland and get married. All of this quite puts Roland off the idea of furthering his education and going to university.

The Muslim response can be summarised in three words: fear, finger-pointing and fatalism. Allah

Hands up who wants to read a 600-page novel about the plague. No one?

These promising mystery plot twists fizzle out totally. The German woman has simply gone back to Germany and has become a famous German novelist. She had not only dumped Roland, but also walked out on their child. ‘The larger subject,’ we are informed, ‘was the ruthlessness of artists. Do we forgive or ignore their single-mindedness or cruelty in the service of their art?’

The Oldie October 2022 53

McEwan’s conclusion, or anyway Roland’s, will be the reader’s own: ‘Whether cruel behaviour enabled great or execrable poetry made no difference. A cruel act remained just that.’

In one scene, Lawrence, the abandoned baby now in his teens, tracks down his mother in Bavaria and knocks on the door: ‘I’m not asking you in,’ says Alissa, a chain-smoking crone. ‘I took a

The police think this a ruse – and that Roland is a murderer. They also start believing he killed Miriam, the piano teacher, who has vanished. McEwan tells us about Roland’s ‘untidy, unwashed feelings of being a suspect’.

Roland gives tennis lessons, does freelance journalism and seems a bit of a slob. Where his funds come from, how he makes ends meet … his economics are not explained. He copes surprisingly well as a single parent, and Lawrence, a maths prodigy, grows up to be a climate-change scientist. In the final reel, Roland finds contentment with Daphne – and five minutes later Daphne’s ashes are in a jar (‘It’s cancer, grade four’).

This being the sort of novel it is, a parallel has to be drawn. So, Europe and the wider world seemingly on the brink of enlightenment and democracy; the Berlin Wall falling, the USSR breaking up, apartheid ending in South Africa, China opening for business: humankind seems to have reached ‘a new level of maturity and happiness’.

Robert Lowell’s treatment of Elizabeth Hardwick is mentioned. The boring egomania of Susan Sontag or Patricia Highsmith came to my mind.

Think again, because the latest novel from Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author, may just be the best thing you read this year.

The hero, Roland Baines (a great role for, say, Bertie Carvel), is followed from early childhood (a phase when people are ‘too young to know how miserable they are’) to old age, when he is ‘stumbling through the hours, days and weeks’, hips gone, knees gone and memory intermittent.

Somehow he manages to afford a house in Clapham, composes verses for a greetings-card company, and marries a German woman. One day, the German wife, Alissa, leaves a note on the pillow: ‘Don’t try to find me. I’ve been living the wrong life.’

A decade or two later, we are all back in the shit as usual, manipulated by venal politicians.

One of the most popular figures is Sheikh Hamdullah, leader of an influential Muslim sect embraced by the masses. Many of his flock look to him for guidance. He buries his nose in old texts which seek to unravel the mysteries of the plague ‘through the interpretation of omens, the predictive powers of the Abjad numeral system, and the mystical attributes of the alphabet as codified in the Lettrist Sufi doctrine of Hurufism’. You can almost hear Pamuk’s contempt dripping onto the page.

Turkish delights

To say that Nights of Plague, set on the fictitious Ottoman island of Mingheria in 1901, makes COVID seem like a picnic is not to make light of the recent pandemic. It is merely a reminder that the agonies of the far more fatal bubonic plague are altogether more dreadful: fingernail-extracting torturers and poisoning murderers, along with marauding stray dogs devouring corpses on the streets.

Alissa is a thoroughly evil ratbag. I cheered when she lost a foot to arteriosclerosis and ends up ‘cancelled’ after an injudicious remark about the trans mob. Miriam the piano teacher, meanwhile, has all along been giving piano lessons in nearby Balham. Roland goes to meet her, thinks perhaps it might be a good idea to report her to the police for her ‘historic abuse’, and is compelled to listen to a long speech about how she’d once had an abortion and was depressed.

decision many years ago. Too late now to undo it, do you understand? You think I’m rude. No, I’m being firm. Get this straight, I’m not taking you on.’ What perfect television dialogue.

This doesn’t mean Lessons has a panoramic, epic sweep. McEwan is no Tolstoy, capable of marshalling great cycles of war and peace, underpinned by the engines of historic inevitability. The book, highly enjoyable nevertheless, reads more like an episodic soap opera – one excitement after another – and seemed to me a treatment for a television series.

By Orhan Pamuk Faber £20

The story begins with the royal ship Aziziye sailing into Arkaz, the main city of an island located south of Rhodes, described as ‘an emerald built of pink stone’. On board are Bonkowski Pasha, the empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health; Princess Pakize, the newly-wed daughter of the deposed Sultan Murad V; her doctor husband, Prince Consort Nuri Bey; and Major Kamil, the young couple’s dashing bodyguard destined to play an extraordinary role in a time of catastrophe.Itisthebeginning of a discreet mission to advise on fighting an outbreak of plague. Before too long, it becomes an unexpected murder mystery as well.Tothe extent that lockdowns work, they do so only if people observe them, and the strict quarantine measures imposed on Mingheria are no different. But this is an island community divided between Greek Christians and assorted Muslims with very different ideas about how to confront the plague.

JUSTIN MAROZZI Nights of Plague

What’s more, Pamuk has a remarkable ability to summon up an intensely realised, dreamlike world full of natural beauty and tormenting suffering, set against the background of Ottoman imperial decline.

A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris by Gwen John, 1907–9. From This Is ArtistsBritain20th-CenturyTomorrow:andIts

Adolf’s British friends

Charles Spicer’s fascinating debut history – Coffee with Hitler – paints a very different picture. In fact, very few – at most five per cent – of the AGF’s 700-odd members subscribed to National Socialist ideology. Almost all felt that the Treaty of Versailles had dealt Germany an unfair hand. Some admired Hitler’s reconstruction of Germany. All wanted to avoid another war.

The founders – Philip Conwell-Evans, an obscure pacifist historian; Grahame Christie, a First World War air ace; and

Justin Marozzi is author of The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus

Ernest Tennant, an Old Etonian businessman – were all Germanophiles. They were also convinced that the new regime in Berlin could be ushered into the community of civilised nations with a little encouragement from the country the German leadership (at first) most envied and admired.

By Charles OneworldSpicer£20

It was that latter objective that motivated Spicer’s three unsung –indeed, still often castigated – heroes to set up the Fellowship in the first place.

Hindsight is not always a fine thing –especially when it comes to wars.

This is a very knowing novel by an author at the height of his powers, with an attention to detail that goes far beyond obsessive. It is the work of a novelist revelling in his craft.

Fearful of the plague spreading via the steady exodus, the Great Powers take a sudden interest in the tiny island. An international blockade means Mingheria is on its own. The daily death count mounts apocalyptically, stretching the limits of island government to bursting point and beyond.

With a deliberately Hitchcockian flourish, he even manages to throw in a couple of references, in the words of his narrator, to ‘the novelist and history enthusiast Orhan Pamuk’ in the closing pages, when we learn for the first time who is telling us this story.

Who could he possibly be thinking of, Mr Erdoğan?

54 The Oldie October 2022

IVO DAWNAY Coffee with Hitler

It was manic, feverish, obsessive, gripping and utterly exhausting. I suspect he was writing Nights of Plague

by Michael Bird (Thames & Hudson, £30)

They were joined by Philip Kerr, later Lord Lothian, a fervent Liberal initially convinced that the hand of friendship was enough to avert war. They were not alone. When Lloyd George was persuaded in 1936 to meet the Führer, he concluded that he was ‘really a great man … unpretentious, modest and quiteButwell-educated’.iftheirproject was naive, their motives were honourable. Tennant had, after all, lost seven of his male relations and 19 of his schoolfriends by 1916, and was equally determined to avert anotherSpicer’stragedy.story charts how – alas, very late – the scales fell from their eyes, and also, more importantly, how their early proximity to key movers and shakers within the Nazi regime – Ribbentrop, Goering and Hess – turned his protagonists into vital intelligence agents for the British Government in the run up to hostilities in 1939.

Spicer’s account rattles on at pace. And, for the non-expert, there are

Yet unlikely love blossoms amid the carnage. It is a time, too, of nationbuilding from the wreckage of contagion.

A couple of years ago, I found myself on the same overnight flight as Pamuk and watched the great writer at work. It was impossible not to be transfixed. After filming the take-off, he pulled out a notebook teeming with colour-coded spider scrawls, flicked through it again and again, wrote a bit, flicked a bit, wrote again and so on. This continued for hours. Later, he replaced the notebook with an A4 pad and resumed his writing with a different fountain pen, summoning the stewardess repeatedly for more coffee.

Widely-held opinion, aided and abetted by fictions like Julian Fellowes’s Gosford Park and Kasuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, still caricatures the coalition of businessmen and aristocrats that comprised the Anglo-German Fellowship (1935-39) in the run up to the Second World War as a pro-Nazi front.

knows best. Quarantine doesn’t work. The wealthier Greeks meanwhile vote with their feet and sail away illegally at night with people-smuggling boatmen.

Given the story he is telling here, it is both ironic and profoundly concerning that Pamuk is now facing a criminal investigation for allegedly insulting the Turkish flag and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founding father and first president of the Turkish republic, in this book.

It is nonsense, of course. A more perceptive reading of Nights of Plague would conclude that Pamuk is attacking any regime that denies freedom of speech, censors and locks up writers and intellectuals and cynically peddles a discredited brand of political Islam to shore up his position with the masses.

Both are committed to their families but fixated on the West: what they share are Jackie Collins novels, George Michael songs, the promise of girl power. And the fact that neither doubts for one moment that she will not get her due deserts.

The plot pivots on the aftermath of a party hosted by a schoolfriend. Instead of going home, they take a joyride around the city with Maryam’s secret boyfriend, Hammad, and a creep with hairy hands called Jimmy. It is Zahra and not Maryam who insists on getting in the car, because Zahra, for all her diligence, is drawn to sleaze and longing for a sexual thrill.

When we next meet them, it is 2019 and Maryam, a venture capitalist, is listed at number 13 in the Wired UK Tech 100 list. Brown on the outside, as she puts it, and money on the inside, she hangs out with the Tory elite and flirts with the PM. She also has a Nigerian (female) partner and a ten-year-old daughter.

FRANCES WILSON Best of Friends

Her first novel, In the City by the Sea, published when she was at university, was shortlisted for the John Lewellyn Rhys prize, as was her third. Her last novel, Home Fires, won the coveted Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018. All of this means that there is a great deal riding on this one.

Zahra is head of the Centre for Civil Liberties and known as the ‘nation’s conscience’. Her day job involves helping people whose lives are in free fall, but off duty she lives the dream. Annie Lennox invites her onto the stage at concerts; she plays cameos of herself in Riz Ahmed films.

have been kidnapped, and Maryam, disinherited by her outraged grandfather, is sent to boarding school in England. Zahra, meanwhile, who never takes responsibility for her part in the event, remains for the next 30 years emotionally trapped in the front seat of Jimmy’s car.

There are wonderful little asides too, such as Himmler’s belief that the British Empire was grounded in the aristocracy’s fondness for porridge, or the more accurate aperçu by Hitler himself that major events should be timed for weekends when Britain’s ruling class could be relied on to be shooting or fishing on their estates.

The trio’s volte-face came swiftly. By late 1936, Lord Lothian was revising his stance on the German threat. ConwellEvans and Tennant had noted Joachim Ribbentrop’s journey from superAnglophile to bitterness, an inferiority complex derived from being ‘treated like a commercial traveller’ and a ‘figure of fun’ by London society while short-lived Ambassador to the Court of St James.

The terms of a best friendship are as hard to appreciate as those of a marriage, and Shamsie’s skill is to stand back from Maryam and Zahra and observe their actions without judgement or comment. Which one of them is the monster?

And, from a small, ground-floor flat in Cornwall Gardens, they were conspiring with an embryonic German resistance to launch a coup against the regime. (Meanwhile, a junior member of the AGF staff – one Kim Philby – had established his credentials in Moscow as a deep-cover agent.)

What happens that night changes their lives: Jimmy terrorises the girls, their parents assume they

The mutual devotion of Maryam and Zahra, tied at the hip since the age of four, and fourteen when we first meet them, baffles their teachers: what on earth do they have in common? Maryam’s family live in a compound guarded by a burly man with a Kalashnikov, and Zahra’s parents rent a modest flat overlooking the sea. Maryam, driven to school by a chauffeur who sometimes lets her take over the wheel, is too rich to be bothered with her studies, while Zahra, set on Cambridge, is the golden girl.

Frances Wilson is author of The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

It’s New Year’s Eve and they are fighting about the car journey with Jimmy, when ‘Zahra whispered in Maryam’s ear, “A part of me has always hated you.”’

Within months, all three founders of the Anglo-German Fellowship had become the Foreign Office and MI6’s best intelligence sources on Berlin’s plans.

The prose is underwhelming, sometimes appalling (‘She found herself imagining a day – not soon, but eventually – when loneliness would stalk indoors and refuse to be evicted’). But the story is strong and the final, devastating scene brings the threads together to great satisfaction.

Best of Friends is a tale of two cities. The first half of the book is set in Karachi in 1988, when General Zia’s plane crashes and Benazir Bhutto is elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. The second half takes place in North London in the 21st century, when the government is closing its doors on migrants and refugees.

interesting revelations, including the insight that Goering was extremely dubious about Hitler’s Sudetenland plan – German public opinion likewise.

There are times when one can almost sympathise with German irritation at British haughtiness, not least when the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, nearly mistook Hitler for a footman and began to offer him his overcoat when he came to meet him at the Berghof.

Best of Friends is, nonetheless, a troubling book. It also feels like a very personal one, which might be the problem. It is both hard-hitting and soft-focus, culturally relevant and cloyingly sentimental.

The best of friends are Maryam Khan, the entitled daughter of indolent parents who is waiting to inherit her grandfather’s luxury leather-goods empire, and hard-working Zahra Ali, whose father is a much-admired cricket commentator.

By Kamila Shamsie Bloomsbury Circus £16.99

It’s strange how few women writers explore the complexities of lifelong female friendship – what happens when your character has been ‘defined’, as Shamsie puts it, ‘by the other’: the slowly corrosive lies; the closeness of the bond to a jail sentence.

The Karachi kids

Indeed, he reports that the horrors of Kristallnacht were, in part, an effort by Hitler to toughen up a population psychologically unprepared for the bloodletting to come.

As a lesson of history, this excellent book is a sober reminder to policymakers to look at the evidence in plain sight. As NATO ponders its future in the face of Putin’s war in Ukraine, it could do well to ask itself why it did not heed the Russian dictator’s long and publicly announced promises to restore the glories of the SovietLordEmpire.Lothian, a close fellow-traveller of the AGF founders who later became a heroic champion of the British war effort as Ambassador to Washington, decided to read Mein Kampf only in 1939 – just months before the war began.

Despite their ideological differences, the friendship between Zahra and Maryam is stronger than ever because they are now migrants with shared memories of Karachi. When Hammad turns up, dragging Jimmy in his wake, everything implodes.

Ivo Dawnay was Washington Bureau Chief for the Sunday Telegraph

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Kamila Shamsie is a British-Pakistani novelist who structures her fiction around historical and personal turningpoints: partition in 1947, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the nuclear attacks on Japan and 9/11.

Being only human, some journalists are susceptible to flattery. They like being close to power, and feeling they are more than mere observers. Sly politicians will encourage such vanity. Don’t be ensnared! Former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings has described how, when he was being rather rude to John Major while calling him ‘Prime Minister’, Major invited him to address him as ‘John’. Hastings replied that he would go on calling him ‘Prime Minister’ out of respect for his office, not him.

And yet during the Tory leadership contest there was very little reference to the unusual private life of a woman who is now our Prime Minister. I read several profiles that didn’t even mention the affair.

Northcliffe did, in fact, have some political friends, but for the most part he avoided intimacy with politicians because he feared that they would expect favourable treatment in his newspapers and give him very little in return. What is true of press proprietors is equally true of political journalists –not least columnists.

But ministers will pass on information – it may well be damaging gossip about colleagues – only when it suits them to do so. What they want above all is to neutralise future criticism, to charm a political journalist so that if they later run into trouble, they may have allies in the press, or at any rate fewer enemies.

What you undoubtedly do get, though, is an insight into character. I recall one dinner with Gordon Brown at which other journalists were present. As he was Chancellor, and I had drunk a fair bit, I asked him rather aggressively whether he had any notion of the time and trouble self-employed people like me were obliged to spend completing their VAT returns. He looked blank. I might as well have been discussing the finer points of cannibalism with a vegetarian. That taught me a lot about the man.

So politicians can sleep peacefully in their beds – or in anyone else’s.

How times have changed! It seems now to be almost universally accepted by the press, not excluding the red tops, that the private lives of leading politicians are entirelyThereoff-limits.wasquite a hullaballoo when it was revealed in 2006 that Liz Truss had had an affair a couple of years earlier, as a married woman, with a Tory MP called Mark Field. Mr Field’s marriage subsequently collapsed. Even though Ms Truss wasn’t yet an MP, there was a lot of uncharitable coverage.

The News of the World is dead, and the surviving Sunday red tops have become poor, frail things, recycling stories about C-list celebrities.

There’s no harm in journalists’ breaking bread with politicians as long as they don’t forget that they are nearly always being used.

Hacks and politicians don’t mix

There is one passage in Andrew Roberts’s superlative biography of Lord Northcliffe – founder of the Daily Mail and quondam owner of the Times – that has set me Robertsthinking.cites an essay written by Northcliffe in 1903, in which the press baron writes about the dangers of newspaper proprietors getting too close to politicians. The two species were ‘best keptInapart’.another passage, Roberts relates that Northcliffe spurned an invitation from Winston Churchill, then a rising young politician, to join a new dining club called the Other Club. Northcliffe replied that he had come to the conclusion that newspaper owners ‘should not belong to clubs of any kind’. He had given up all his club Therememberships.aren’tmanypress proprietors left, of course. Of those who do remain, some wisely follow Northcliffe’s example. Others don’t. I was astonished to read a recent article by Sarah Vine (former wife of Michael Gove) about a crucial dinner party in early 2016 in Boris Johnson’s house, at which the chief topic of conversation was whether Boris should endorse Brexit.

The Oldie October 2022 59 Media Matters

politicians? Not if you are hoping for state secrets. In the course of countless lunches and dinners with ministers over the years, I can’t remember learning any – though possibly it was because I asked the wrong questions.

Is it worth wining and dining

Politicians seldom reveal to journalists secrets that they aren’t on the brink of telling the world. Occasionally, ministers will offer a titbit to a columnist or political editor whom they know well, and trust. For example, I remember that in 1990 the Independent’s star political columnist, Peter Jenkins, was aware of Michael Heseltine’s machinations against Margaret Thatcher several days before they were made public.

For reasons Vine says she can’t fathom, Lord Lebedev, the controlling shareholder of the Independent and the London Evening Standard, was among the handful of guests.

Sunday Telegraph, the editor advised him to reserve a table at the Connaught Hotel in London – then, as now, outrageously expensive – to lunch Cabinet ministers and the like. The food and wine were excellent, but Perry learnt very little from such people.

Lord Northcliffe was right – journalists and MPs are best kept apart stephen glover

In his enthralling autobiography Tricks of Memory, the late Peregrine Worsthorne recounted how, when he was given a column on the newly launched

Politicians seldom reveal to journalists secrets they aren’t about to tell the world

‘You’ll have heard it said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind – one of those smart, Oscarish squibs that sounds well but is thoroughly fat-headed. Presence of mind, if you like – and countless other things, such as greed and Christianity, decency and villainy, policy and lunacy, deep design and blind chance, pride and trade, blunder and curiosity, passion, ignorance, chivalry and expediency, honest pursuit of right, and determination to keep the bloody Frogs out.’

King of the rogues

Hughes had already muddied the waters by including a real figure in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, who expels Flashman from Rugby for drunkenness.

Graves also foreshadows Fraser’s insistence on the ‘genuineness’ of his discovery, including tricky translation questions in a note (for which he consulted, he writes, ‘Aircraftman T E Shaw’, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, and also a keen classicist who translated the Odyssey).

History

Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is another figure history has ‘got wrong’. In her rebalancing, it is Thomas More who finds himself at the other end of the seesaw.

Robert Graves had done something similar for his view of the Roman Empire in I, Claudius and its sequel. One of Graves’s motivations (along with all the money he made from the books, enough to pay off the mortgage on his house in

The idea of historical reputation as a zero-sum game – if there is a winner, there must be a loser – has been on show most recently in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels.

It’s a nice question whether the roguery or the research made Flashman such a triumph. My money is, just, on the research, if only because a baddie protagonist is not essential to a successful historical novel. The best historical fiction is always anchored in reality, and most historical novelists agree that the trick is not to change the facts, but to imagine a new route between them.

The rehabilitation of Claudius involved dragging his predecessor Caligula’s name even deeper into the mire. The process was completed by a TV adaptation that had John Hurt’s Caligula ripping a baby from the womb and eating it – an atrocity neither Graves nor his ancient sources had invented.

Historians might speculate that Napoleon didn’t give an order for a plausible reason but, without evidence, they won’t go further. Novelists can try to show us Operatingwhy. in the shadowy territory between the known and unknown is standard practice. But what often marks out the really successful historical novelist is something historians do their best to avoid: anachronism.

Like Flashman and Claudius, Mantel’s Cromwell makes us question our historical assumptions. They all remind us that, however much we think we know about a historical figure, we never know what they were thinking.

Take Flashman. One of the reasons we can find the Victorians difficult to stomach

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Harry Flashman VC has been greeted with an outpouring of affection and admiration. You can imagine the old rogue laughing off the adulation, while inwardly relishing it all.

And yes, I know, unlike those allegedly credulous American first reviewers, that Flashman wasn’t real. For all his creator George MacDonald Fraser’s meticulous research and poker-faced footnotes to the Flashman Papers, the novels follow the fortunes of a fictional character of someone else’s invention – Thomas Hughes.

Majorca) was the belief ‘that the story has been mistold by history’. He didn’t choose a villain to retell it but, like Fraser, he chose to recast his history through a memoir.Claudius was an emperor whom Suetonius, Tacitus and Cassius Dio had portrayed as an idiot or a weakling.

Again, creative anachronism is at work. Mantel’s Cromwell – loyal, empathetic and only occasionally ruthless – is not much like the character contemporaries or historians have given us. But he suits our age perfectly – much better than the saintly fanatic Thomas More.

I don’t mean having Mary Queen of Scots book in for a blow-dry, but the more or less subtle introduction of sensibilities from our time into the past. Often, too, these instances are a reaction to the work of straight historians.

Here he is in Flashman and the Mountain of Light (a book named for the diamond the British ‘acquired’ at the same time as the Punjab):

The reference to ‘absence of mind’ is to the 19th-century imperial historian J R Seeley. While Seeley was in part making a case that the British should think a lot harder about their imperial duties, the idea that they had come by them accidentally appealed to a people who didn’t like to think of themselves as too domineering. Flashy lets us know it’s all rot.

The fact that we hardly notice the novelist speaking through his creation here – and giving us a history lesson – is further testimony to Fraser’s genius.

Happy 200th birthday, Flashy!

The Flashman books are a masterclass in historical fiction

is that they were so damned earnest. Bent on improving everything from sewage to schools, they were so steeped in self-belief that they were convinced of their right, or even duty, to export their methods to every part of the globe. Flashman lets us see more plainly than any Lytton Strachey that the whole thing is, if not a façade, then a mostly malign muddle.

david horspool

60 The Oldie October 2022

We agreed that the essence of a bore is that he takes the greatest pleasure in telling you at great lengths what you know already.

Tyrants are always frauds.

Kingsley Amis, You Can’t Do Both

The people we like often respond warmly to ourselves, given half a chance, and those we dislike usually can’t stand us either.

SMALL DELIGHTS

Buses had to stop when hailed until 1913, when the first bus stops came in and queuing developed.

P J Kavanagh on the origin of X as a symbol of the unknown

Commonplace Corner

‘He’s my emotional-support animal. I trained him to sit, stay and mistake me for my daughter’

Life is an excellent length. Long enough to do everything of which one is capable; short enough not to be a burden on others.

Good writers make bad reporters. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former Sunday Telegraph editor

Barry Humphries

‘Like’ is used to introduce a noun not followed by a verb. (He drinks like a fish. He swims as a fish swims.) When giving examples of people or objects, we should use ‘such as’, as in: ‘He said that he admired players such as Jones, Smith and Brown.’ The sense is that he admires those players specifically. If we used ‘like’, it would mean that he admired players with qualities similar to those of Jones, Smith and Brown.

There are very few people before whom one condescends to appear other than happy.

Nigel Nicolson on his 80th birthday, 1997

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

OneBungalowscondition

them in favour of high-density homes, they are coming back.

If I ever moved into an old-style bungalow, or newstyle park home, I would lose what tiny vestiges remain of my street cred, along with the strength in my legs.

The Oldie October 2022 63

Malcolm Muggeridge diary entry, recalling a conversation with Anthony Powell

André Molleret on the conversation of the philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-84)

Gore Vidal

To me, the very word ‘bungalow’ screams ‘naff’, and conjures up an image of a pebbledash sprawl along a ribbon development of similar horrors adorned with lattice windows, fake brick fireplace, Artex ceilings, avocado bathroom, stone flamingos and a lean-to conservatory.

Daily Telegraph Style Book, 2000

She never quite understood why we all insisted on treating life as a contest when to her it was really more like the weather, there to be either discreetly celebrated or mildly regretted.

I live in a top-floor Victorian flat: I have to climb up and down 56 steep stairs several times a day. This is a large part of the reason, I am sure, that at 77 I remain fit and healthy.

In an attempt to shake off their dowdy reputation, some new bungalows have been redefined as park homes. You have to be over 45 – hardly elderly – to buy one. Such developments are going up all over the country, aimed at downsizers.

Built mostly between the 1950s and ’70s, bungalows were marketed as dream homes for retirees and they have never managed to lose their frumpy image. But beware! Just when we thought companiesconstructionhadabandoned

PLANTTOM

This recently identified ailment is where older people lose mobility in their legs because they have downsized to a bungalow and never climb stairs any more.

Getting to the end of a cereal box and finding it fills your bowl to the usual level.

Sheridan Morley on his mother, Joan Buckmaster

I am not in danger of contracting is bungalow legs.

So for the foreseeable future, and even though I’m way over 45, I will continue to climb up and down the five flights of stairs to my eyrie.

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Lady Blessington (1789-1849)

My bedroom began to take on the appearance of all rooms when the owner goes away. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

A good screenwriter allows the audience to ‘add up two plus two’ – and ‘they’ll love you for ever’.

Billy Wilder

Two of my 80-plus friends quickly developed bungalow legs when they moved into a

lift-assisted flat after 35 years in a three-storey house.

Mark Twain

Descartes, in 1637, in his La Géométrie had equations, ABC (constants) = XYZ (variables). The typesetter ran out of Y and Z blocks and asked if X would do. Descartes agreed.

Enlivened by absolute sincerity, subtle without obscurity, varied in its forms, dazzling in its flights of imagination, fertile in its ideas and in its capacity to inspire ideas in others.

But the spectre of bungalow legs isn’t the only reason I wouldn’t want to live in one of those stair-free homes.

SEAN CONRICODE, YORK

Hugo Williams

A new series of sad, funny and intriguing insights from the great and the good

Only very famous people – like me – know what the back of their head looks like.

LIZ HODGKINSON

But, still, that partiality doesn’t matter at all. Not least because the screenplay is suffused with a pleasing, knowing irony about the Ricardians and their obsession with a king who’s been dead for over 500 years.

The discovery of Richard III’s painfully twisted skeleton, a decade ago, in a Leicester car park must be one of the greatest stories of all time.

Arts

The Indiana Jones of Leicester. Left: Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) and estranged husband, John (Steve Coogan). Right: Harry Lloyd as Richard III

What deep feelings the death and funeral of a monarch unearth in our souls, even half a millennium after they’re gone.

Steve Coogan has been so taken over by his alter ego, Alan Partridge, that it’s easy to forget what a good serious actor he is – and what a good writer, too. The Lost King is co-written by him and JeffCooganPope.

64 The Oldie October 2022

Langley’s battles with the academic establishment to find Richard – and the way the establishment marginalises her when she does find him – are the backbone of the film. Even though you know the glorious outcome, it’s still dizzily thrilling when they find the body, with its spine wickedly curved by Inscoliosis.thesame way that Senna (2010)

HARRYFILMMOUNT

In fact, as Sally Hawkins shows in her delicate, diffident, neurotic portrayal of Langley, she was never mad. Langley did extensive research, in conjunction with the Richard III Society. And she risked a lot – she raised the money herself for the dig by Leicester University.

And all this playful wit only increases, by contrast, the serious emotion you feel on seeing the original footage of Richard III’s funeral in Leicester Cathedral.

III’s defenders will

THE LOST KING (12A) (Out on 7th October)

As Christine Langan, the film’s producer, has said, it is a classic ‘underdog story’, too, as well as being the miraculous discovery of a lost king.

was somehow made more heartbreaking because you knew he would die in the end, Langley’s early frustrations and humiliations are heightened by the knowledge she will eventually triumph.

The wittiness is increased by the daring plot device of the apparition of Richard III (played by Harry Lloyd) who follows Langley in her pursuit of his dead body. It could have fallen flat but, as Langley herself said at the preview, even though she didn’t see any such apparition, it’s a clever way of opening up her inner thoughts about her search.

particularly love the film. I’m a former member of the Richard III Society, but still I’m not convinced by the film’s suggestions that the King was really a goodie – even if Shakespeare did overdo the baddie side and, no, he wasn’t a hunchback.

Yes, Philippa Langley had an ‘instinct’ about Richard III’s whereabouts. But it was based on thorough scholarship – and Langley was wise enough never to mention words like ‘instinct’ in her dealings with the dry-as-dust academics.

Director Stephen Frears is selfdeprecating about his gifts as a film director, saying it’s all down to a good cast and a good story. Well, just like A Very English Scandal, his marvellous 2018 mini-series about Jeremy Thorpe, played with tragicomic genius by Hugh Grant, this is a great story with a wonderful cast.

Philippa Langley is the underdog: the marketing operative with ME, now 60, who tracked down the King. She was often portrayed by the press as a loony, driven by weird feelings to find Richard III’s body – right under the letter R in the Leicester Social Services car park.

The tale now assumes an extra layer of haunting, sombre significance with the momentously sad news of the death of Elizabeth II.

plays John Langley, Philippa Langley’s estranged husband, a sardonic, ground-down, middle-aged professional, with understated, deft touches of humour and pathos. When he says to his children, battling over the PlayStation, ‘Boys, your mother’s just found Richard III,’ your heart leaps and the tears aren’t farRichardaway.

How very appropriate that the Queen’s death was announced just after the six-o’clock news bulletin.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Shakespeare’s Globe until 23rd October

VALERIERADIOGROVE

Today, London’s South Bank seems inconceivable without it, but for centuries it was just a memory. Thanks to the vision and perseverance of Sam Wanamaker, Shakespeare’s Globe rose again, 355 years after it was shut down by those po-faced Puritans, and this year it celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Beatrice (Lucy Phelps) and Benedick (Ralph Davis) in Much Ado About Nothing

Although the 1940s setting sometimes jars, it’s wonderful to look at. Caroline

Thankfully, this rendition is relatively conventional by modern standards, but it’s telling that the conservative elements work best while the more radical elements are wobblier.

As Bailey points out, in a refreshingly frank interview in the programme, Much Ado is an unwieldy drama. ‘I struggled with it,’ she says. ‘I found the tone inconsistent. It veers from romantic comedy to tragedy to slapstick.’

Roger Bolton would often open a Feedback item on Radio 4 by saying, ‘Listeners were not pleased when…’ Listeners were not pleased when he was sacked as presenter.TheOldie

Hughes and Joanna Parker create a series of gorgeous Italianate tableaux: a veritable catwalk of sharp suits and flowing dresses. Don John is dressed like a Mafia Godfather; his dark comic sidekicks, Borachio and Conrade, are dressed as a couple of Second World WarBailey’sspivs. boldest innovation is to recast Leonato and his brother, Antonio, as women. Again, this is an interesting idea, but it’s not a perfect fit. As anyone who knows the play will recall, the plot hinges on the slanderous accusation that Leonato’s daughter, Hero, has been unfaithful to her fiancé, Claudio.

In Shakespeare’s Globe, of all places, it’d be good to see Shakespeare’s plays performed in a style he would have recognised. Probably too much to ask for in our brave new world, but a nice idea.

For anyone seeing this Much Ado on a sunny day, its faults pale into insignificance, eclipsed by its exuberant bonhomie.

Despite these inconsistencies, her elegant, graceful staging gives this reading its own momentum. Accompanied by melancholy accordions, the play glides by like the poignant recollection of an idyllic midsummer’s day.

Director Lucy Bailey sets her production in Italy at the end of the Second World War, with Don Pedro and his troops as Italian partisans, returning home from their victories over Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s Nazis. It’s an interesting idea, and by and large it works quite well but, as in any reboot of the Bard, there are bound to be a few bumLikenotes.somany

October 2022 65

low-flying aircraft, he brought the house down with an anachronistic ad-lib.

WILLIAMTHEATRECOOK

As my wife observed, Leonato’s furious reaction to this fake news is intrinsically paternal. ‘A mother wouldn’t react like that,’ she told me. The men in Much Ado are pretty beastly, on the whole, and turning Leonato into a woman gives the character a dignity that he/she doesn’t quite deserve.

But this Much Ado, like every Much Ado, belongs to its reluctant lovers, Beatrice and Benedick. Lucy Phelps and Ralph Davis revel in these complex parts, conjuring up that sexual chemistry that hovers on the edge of hatred. The archetype for every romantic comedy, their sharp repartee has often been imitated, but never bettered.

The star of the show is the theatre itself, that exquisite replica of the venue where many of Shakespeare’s timeless plays were first performed, built on almost the same spot as its Tudor prototype.

SMITHGARY

Mishal Husain’s well-spoken tones made the historic statement, followed by Evan Davis’s reading of the tweet from theOnPalace.thenumber 11 bus, I was listening on my DAB earphones. Other passengers gleaned the news from their devices; the buzz united us. Admittedly long-prepared, the voices leading the Radio 4 tributes – Jim Naughtie, Robert Lacey and Gyles Brandreth – and the brilliantly chosen sound archive reflected the impact of history. It was a triumph for the spoken word.

By 2040, it will have outlived the original, which stood here for only 43 years, from 1599 to 1642.

Shakespearean characters, Don Pedro and his crew are morally ambiguous, and the war they’re engaged in is one of those pointless dynastic feuds which plagued Italy during Shakespeare’s day. Recasting these soldiers as anti-Fascists makes them seem a mite too virtuous for me, detracting from the bracing cynicism of Shakespeare’s play.

‘When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I would live till I were married,’ says Davis’s Benedick. When he finally meets his match in Phelps’s witty, bewitching Beatrice, it’s incredible to think you’re watching a play that’s over 400 years old.

Performing Shakespeare outdoors is a triumph of hope over experience. Goodness knows how Shakespeare managed it. Was the British weather just as capricious in his day? If it’s wet and cold, it can be miserable – and when the sun shines, it feels magical.

Bailey teases out a wealth of fine performances from her talented cast. Olivier Huband is a suitably creepy Don John, and George Fouracres’s Dogberry is a remarkable achievement – a Shakespearean clown who’s actually extremely funny (imagine an Elizabethan Inspector Clouseau). Upstaged by

OK, he’s 76 and has done 23 years at this coalface, after editing Panorama and presenting Right to Reply – hence his well-informed authority.

Ryan, a former radio producer, tells new podcasters, ‘Get an editor! Take out the erms and sos and the repetitions.’ For him (and me), the new Americast beats Maitlis and Sopel’s The News Agents. He says, ‘Speech radio is samey.’ Especially in this year of Tory-leadership groundhog days.

‘I know that guy,’ exclaims Robin (Laurence Rickard), as the digitally recreated skull swirls round on the screen. Robin, the ghost of a caveman, wears furs like Fred Flintstone and speaks with an Albanian accent. The iceman’s name, he remembers, was Hat, and Robin gave him a hammer in exchange for his furs.

While Robin is roundly mocked for pretending to know someone famous, Pat the scout leader (Jim Howick), killed in an archery accident in 1984, gets them all doing a group activity.

From where I’m sitting, it’s a five-star experience – but then everything about this quirky and delightfully daft supernatural BBC1 sitcom is five-star.

The performances are all superb; the prize goes to Lolly Adefope, who plays Kitty, the Georgian debutante who died before she had been to her first ball. Kitty, who sees Alison as her best friend, follows her around by day and sleeps next to her at night.

It’s a wonder that Mike, who can’t see the ghosts, stays sane.

This unashamedly pro-age column pricks up its ears when a well-informed, mature voice breaks into the babble, eg Bridget Kendall on Gorbachev or Isabel Hilton on China. Joan Bakewell (89) and A N Wilson (71) popped up together on Times Radio with their opinions. Wilson said, ‘We have no business getting involved in the Ukraine, a corrupt country.’ He complained, too, of the sliminess of a microwaved baked potato. Not that Andrew has ever possessed a microwave.

‘It is exciting, though, isn’t it, meeting someone off the telly?’ says Pat, who has a joke-shop arrow through his neck and

Lady Fanny Button (Martha HoweDouglas), thrown from an upstairs window by her husband, once met the Elephant Man, who was a bore.

66 The Oldie October 2022

Julian, a trouserless Tory MP (Simon Farnaby) who died of a heart attack during a champagne-fuelled bout of rumpy-pumpy, once met the Queen, but Humphrey (Yani Xander), the head of a Tudor nobleman, trumps them all when he reveals that he met Henry VIII.

FRANCESTELEVISIONWILSON

‘It claims to be our BBC. It belongs to the people who pay for it, not to those who are paid by it. It’s vulnerable because it faces an unsupportive government, which makes the BBC defensive.

While Alison is settling the guests into the gatehouse, the sitting tenants are up in the Hall, watching a television programme about the recently discovered remains of an Ice Age man.

In season one, Alison inherited the crumbling pile from an aunt she never knew she had. In seasons two and three, she and Mike tried, with multiple setbacks, to turn it into a hotel. The setbacks were due to Button Hall’s sitting tenants, who did their best to get rid of the new owners before concluding that co-operation is better than conflict.

He will be replaced – please, not by two giggly young women with baby voices and rising inflections – from ‘outside London’. His last broadcast underlined the BBC’s smugness:

When, in season one, Alison plonks them all down in front of a DVD of Friends, Kitty decides that ‘I’m Phoebe, and Lady Button’s Monica!’ Which is

Charmingly bonkers: Ghosts

In season four of Ghosts, Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) welcome their first B&B guests to the newly refurbished gatehouse at Button Hall. How many stars will they get on Tripadvisor?

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, based on her original 2004 novel, These Foolish Things. Do read!

Remember the John Birt era? Radio was “on its last legs”. Today, radio has never been more Podcastspopular.’havebeen liberating, Bolton concedes, but – as he told me from Devon – ‘Only a small number will stand the test of time.’ Looking for a critical podcast on podcasts, I found John Ryan’s Pod Roast: succinct and scathing. His verdict on Desert Island Discs? ‘So old-fashioned it’s printed in sepia… Why the Bible and Shakespeare? Fresh formatics needed.’

They were gripped by Moggach’s lover Mel Calman’s dying of a heart attack beside her in a Leicester Square cinema during Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way She’d come to plug her play of The

The ghosts of Button Hall are a harmless bunch. Alison treats them like squabbling children, which is why she turns the telly on whenever she has something important to do. It’s boring being dead, and how they deal with eternity is one of the running gags.

Saturday Live is curate’s-eggy, as someone said recently. But when Deborah Moggach, 74, breezed in on her bike, bringing many tales and a lively, candid manner of telling them, she was the best of guests. The hosts, accustomed to guests’ self-referential solipsisms about their ‘journeys’, were silenced, agog to hear about Moggach’s writer mother, Charlotte Hough – a Samaritan – imprisoned at 60 for abetting a euthanasia suicide.

It is the Captain’s role to boost the troops, while Lady Fanny, who considers the house still hers, monitors the noise level. In the afternoons, there is Food Club, where Mary (Katy Wix), a guileless peasant burned as a witch in the 17th century, has a lot to say about potatoes.

is doomed to wear his scout uniform until the end of time. Pat once met Bobby Davro in the changing rooms of the Thimblebee Leisure Centre. Thomas the Romantic poet (Matthew Baynton), shot in a duel, once met Byron (‘a tosspot’), while the Captain (Ben Willbond), a closeted homosexual killed in the Second World War, once met his hero, Field Marshal Harold Alexander.

The audience appeared to enjoy every one of Gilbert’s barbs and jests. But, then, politicians don’t change, any more than a nation’s social preoccupations do.

The Oldie October 2022 67

pillories in a number of his operas, and none more so than HMS Pinafore.

Pinafore still brings me out in goose bumps. It’s why Cal McCrystal’s ENO’s revival last autumn was such a let-down and why this summer’s staging at London’s elegantly tented Opera Holland Park gave so much pleasure.

Ed McLachlan

Part of the joy of Pinafore is the sheer zing of the thing. Like Oklahoma! or Verdi’s Il trovatore – whose babyswapping plot Gilbert joyously pillories – it doesn’t have a dull note. I got to know Pinafore at the time I was becoming addicted to those very same 19th-century Italian operas that Gilbert and Sullivan send up with so beguiling a mix of laughter and love.

Gag-wise, it’s as good as Blackadder, but the programme Ghosts reminds me of most is Escape to the Chateau, where Dick Strawbridge and Angel Adoree renovate their French pile.

HMS PINAFORE

‘The lads are wondering if we couldn’t turn round and go in the other direction as we’re all getting dizzy?

Our neighbour, a real-life Hyacinth Bucket, was standing in the hallway, regaling my mother with tales of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan evening at the local operatic society.

THE YEOMEN OF THE GUARD

I was nonplussed. That very morning, I’d been playing an LP of G&S overtures – conducting them, in fact: a habit that had already led my father to suspect that I was ‘ripe for the madhouse’, as Weber said of Hyacinth,Beethoven.itseems, had been told that this rather taciturn 15-year-old was ‘musical’: played the piano, listened to Wagner on the gramophone. That sort of thing.

RICHARDMUSICOSBORNE

The reason the television scenes in Ghosts are so good is that Ghosts is about television. With the characters sitting on the sofa talking about the telly, Ghosts is a homage to Gogglebox, The Royle Family or Friends itself, which, as Thomas complains, ‘just appears to be five people sitting around on a sofa’.

This charmingly bonkers and goodhearted show, a celebration of British television, is alone worth the licence fee.

‘You needn’t sneer, Richard.’

No wonder she imagined she detected a sneer. In postwar Britain, followers of G&S were thought of as members of a suburban cult unmentionable in ‘informed’ musical circles. It was English snobbery at its worst: the very thing Gilbert

absolutely right. Thomas the Romantic poet, prone to love at first sight, falls for Rachel. ‘There is something about her hair,’ he muses. ‘Could that BE any more vexing?’ says the Captain, who sees himself as Chandler, when he discovers that there isn’t a second disc.

In terms of format, it is a mash-up of Downton Abbey (the basement is occupied by the ghosts of pustulating plague victims) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), where only Randall can see Hopkirk in his bright white suit.

The Holland Park theatre is an ideal location for G&S. The comfortably seated audience – individual chairs, indeed! – is a pleasingly visible presence, while English surtitles allow us to relish Gilbert’s extremely clever text on the page, as it were.

Only one thing jarred. Gilbert said that Point’s end should be left to the audience’s imagination. Grossmith played his collapse either for laughs or as an essay in comic pathos. Here Point simply puts a rope round his neck and pulls a lever marked ‘the drop’. Even Gilbert, who was fascinated by executions, might have blenched at that.

He can still taste his abuser – ‘and I hate it’, he tells his listeners. He rages against the fact that none of what happened was his choice – ‘and you knew it’ – and he felt ripped apart as if by a cannibal.Asthecamera pans away, and he acknowledges the pain of realising ‘There’s still some sick part of it that thrills me’, we are engulfed by his awareness of the destructive power of his own body’s unwilling reaction.

The first time I heard Cannibal, I had to press pause on the track as I couldn’t believe how raw and explicit it was. The rest of the album – out on 18th September – explores the experience of talking about it for the first time, and the possibilities of forgiveness towards his abusers.

It’s intense. But he’s OK, and we’re OK.

Sullivan thought this one of his best

SAD SONGS SAY SO MUCH

And then, at three minutes into the four, the song breaks open, we get to the bridge, the energy spills and surges into the silent school gym, and the camera zooms into close-up. Marcus has been released. His truth has set him free.

Writers are urged to write what they know. Self-Titled proves that singersongwriters of the extraordinary calibre of Marcus Mumford can only succeed if they sing what they feel.

You need the right singer-actors, which Holland Park certainly had. Llio Evans even managed to bring off that spoof aria of indecision where Sullivan has Josephine quote Leonore’s ‘Abscheulicher!’ from Beethoven’s Fidelio. Is nothing sacred, one asks? Happily not.

‘Can I ask what it is about?’ she said.

It’s unlikely nowadays that a Prime Minster, even Boris Johnson, would appoint a media man to oversee the Admiralty. Though wasn’t there that ex-BBC fellow, Grayling, who ended up as Lord Chancellor, and later managed to oversee the payment of £13.8m for the hire of ferries from a ferry company that had none? No wonder the Holland Park audience chuckled and guffawed.

At the beginning, I found this album a hard listen. But it’s beautiful. It’s catchy. And very of the moment.

68 The Oldie October 2022 ANNANDSIMON

The text hasn’t dated; nor has the musical method. Pinafore doesn’t need a tap-dancing cabin boy (McCrystal’s big idea) to freshen it up. As Holland Park’s singer-director John Savournin, knows only too well, it was created, musically and verbally, in a spirit of comic hyperbole. Master the stage choreography Pinafore’s music-hall conventions demand, and the thing plays itself.

Listen to the audio and then watch the video, which is directed by Steven Spielberg. Mumford sits in an empty school gym and sings the unflinching words that made my flesh crawl.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON

What redeems Yeomen is the character of the itinerant jester Jack Point, who’s left in the lurch when his longtime lady friend goes off with a handsome young colonel.

But let’s start with Cannibal

scores. For me, it’s one of his dullest. He hankered after seriousness, but it rarely worked: witness his opera Ivanhoe

The Yeomen of the Guard

Captain Corcoran (John Savournin) (left) and Jack Point Haverson)(Nickin

Disraeli’s First Lord of the Admiralty was Tory placeman and millionaire newsagent W H Smith. As Gilbert’s own First Lord, Sir Joseph Porter KCB, advises, ‘Stick close your desk and never go to sea/And you all may be Rulers of the Queen’s Navee’.

In fact, this album is what chaps like Marcus were put on this earth to do. I loathe it when people say ‘everything happens for a reason’ – but what happened to a boy aged six has led to an album that will be listened to and will bring joy – and pain – long after both he and his abusers are pushing up daisies.

Mumford & Sons. Folksy fiddle band almost as big as Coldplay, all whiskers andThewaistcoats.bignews is that lead singer and big dog – Marcus Mumford, you know, married to actress Carey Mulligan – has gone solo pro tem, and … crumbs. Well. His album, Self-Titled, is about the child abuse he suffered as a boy of six, and – trigger warning – he doesn’t hold back.

The great George Grossmith created the role – and casting is key. Where ENO blundered by having former Family Fortunes presenter Les Dennis as Sir Joseph Porter (another Grossmith creation), the theatrically savvy Luscombe struck gold with experienced comic hand Nick Haverson playing Point as a kind of hyperactive Max Wall. A glorious performance.

Marcus Mumford performing with Mumford & Sons at the Roundhouse, 2015

‘Levelling up’ (or not, if it affects important people) is Pinafore’s hottest topic. Another is patriotism – or, rather the jingoism (the word dates from 1878) triggered by Disraeli’s dispatch of the Royal Navy to the Black Sea to deter a Russian-led annexation of Turkish territories, as Europe teetered on the edge of war in the winter of 1877-78.

Grace is about telling his folks about it all. Background: his parents moved in during lockdown. Mumford’s mum overheard Cannibal’s melody as he noodled in his studio. Then he played her the song.

The ubiquitous Mr Savournin played Captain Corcoran, his role in McCrystal’s ENO show. Meanwhile, he’d been seen at the Grange Festival as Sir Richard Cholmondeley in Christopher Luscombe’s staging of The Yeomen of the Guard.

subject has to be given up and every obvious hold on it sacrificed in order for it to be remade, with all the uncertainty of whether it will be retrieved, whether it will re-emerge or re-emerge in any adequate way in the materials and rhythms of the medium.’

Horrid rhyme, but still.

FRANK AUERBACH, THE SITTERS Piano Nobile, 23rd September to 16th December

reconstitutes a subject was best put by the art historian Michael Podro, a good friend since they taught at Camberwell in the early 1960s:

Above left: Head of EOW, oil on board, 1972.

The Oldie October 2022 69 BENSLEYNICOLA

The 40 paintings and drawings from 1956 to 2020, many from private collections, are accompanied by six previously unpublished photographs of Auerbach in his studio, taken by Nicola Bensley in 2015.

Above Recliningright:Head of Julia, acrylic on board, 2020. Left: Head of LampertCatherineII , charcoal and chalk, 1978-9.

To me, Art’s subject is the human clay And landscape but a background to a Alltorso;Cezanne’s apples I would give away For one small Goya or a Daumier.

At 91, Frank Auerbach must be the last of the group to be painting. Although their styles and practices are very different, Auerbach and Ivon Hitchens share a middle position between figurative and abstract painting. The more one looks at an ‘abstract’ Hitchens landscape or an Auerbach portrait, the more a figurative structure emerges.

In his introduction, Kitaj termed his chosen artists the School of London, and the name stuck. Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow were –like Kitaj – all more or less figurative artists, working at a time when abstraction was all. These artists have come to be recognised as among the most significant of their British generation.

Below: Auberbach in his studio, 2015

Auerbach’s labour-intensive technique has often been described – the piling-on, scraping-off and repiling that may require months to reach a resolution. The way he transforms and

‘For the artist who does not simply try to mirror, mimic or map, the initial

HUONEXHIBITIONSMALLALIEU

This show at Piano Nobile claims to be the most comprehensive retrospective of Auerbach’s portraits ever organised, and it coincides with new books published by Rizzoli and the Paul Mellon Centre. The gallery’s own lavishly illustrated publication will be an essential reference for all interested in the artist. It includes the first comprehensive list of his sitters, along with essays by William Feaver, Martin Gayford and Natasha Podro.

In 1976, R B Kitaj curated an Arts Council exhibition, The Human Clay, taking its title from Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron:

They’re planting tulip bulbs in Istanbul. Hundreds of thousands of them –millions, more likely … billions, perhaps.

Subsequently, several times a year, until COVID stepped in, I haunted Istanbul’s parks and gardens and its city-wide April tulip festivals. In a large hall overlooking the Golden Horn, in November 2013 I sat in on the fifth World Tulip Summit. I was among an international flock of tulip aficionados from as far afield as Kew, mainland Europe, the United States and the wild tulip’s native terrain: eastern Anatolia and Central Asia’s arid steppe.

Plumper in all their parts, the still elegant April- and May-flowering liliiflora (lily-flowered) tulips partly resemble the acuminata, and might well have a dash of the Ottoman in their bloodline.

Regrettably, few of us grow Tulipa acuminata, the so-called horned or needle tulip. It is immortalised on Iznik ceramics and pictured everywhere throughout modern Istanbul in stylised form adorning public transport and advertising billboards. Its bulbs are not hard to source in this country; nor are they tricky to grow, although, because of their delicate appearance, I rear them indoors in pots. They age gracefully, like nonagenarian Hollywood divas.

My first attempt at growing onions has met with qualified success. I chose

My seasonal reward after a fatiguing day’s bulb-planting is a few bedtime pages of Anna Pavord’s The Tulip (1999). The tulip’s origins, intriguing history, influence, turns of fortune and overriding beauty are nowhere else better told.

I was bewitched by zigzagging ferries, merchant vessels bearing alien registrations and countless flotillas of private craft navigating the choppy waves that swish around Topkapı Palace and the Galata Bridge, where the waters of Europe fuse with the two-directional Bosphorus. (Bosphorus currents flow simultaneously in both directions – southwards on the surface, from the Black Sea down the strait towards the Sea of Marmara and on to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, above a deeper undercurrent of heavier, saltier water flowing north from the Med. Don’t even think of swimming there.)

Tulipa acuminata, the horned tulip

But their colour range is seductively varied, unlike the latter’s constant redand yellow-petalled striations. ‘White Triumphator’ is probably the best known of the lily-flowered group. ‘Red Shine’, ‘Burgundy’, ‘Purple Dream’ and apricotcoloured ‘Ballerina’ are among the best single-coloured varieties; while ‘Green Star’ (white with a prominent green stripe) and ‘Fire Wings’ (like a well-fed acuminata on speed) are two of the loveliest bicolours.

And I, in common with many a Turkish bahçıvan (gardener), can be found trowel-wielding right now on hands and knees, cursing our stony ground as I struggle to bury the little onion-like globes several inches deep.

Following the late Christopher Lloyd’s advice, I should of course be sinking the blighters to a depth of about ten inches if I want them to repeat their flamboyant flowering for several years to come. But that’s too deep for this old back.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

SIMON COURTAULD ONIONS

July and August are the months for runner beans but, for the first time in my memory, thanks to drought conditions this summer, none grew in my garden. The flowers appeared but were not followed by beans. Other growers had the same experience.

The Oldie October 2022 71

Still new to this garden, I’m unsure about the possible longevity of any species tulips that I’m planting. In drier parts of the country – and as a youngster in the old family garden on the gravelly Hampshire coast – I’d previously built up colonies of these wildings. We might be a tad too wet for them now. Still, in August we were officially classified as being in drought, with a hosepipe ban slapped on the whole of Pembrokeshire and nearby westWetCarmarthenshire.Wales,indeed!

TULIP FEVER

DAVIDGARDENINGWHEELER

Istanbul became a favoured destination ever since my first stop-over there on a small cruise ship returning from Crimea with Oldie readers and fellow contributors in 2011. An early-morning porthole view of its bustling maritime traffic ensured an almost immediate return visit.

KITCHEN GARDEN

Farmers were said also to be struggling with their crops of peas, potatoes and onions. On this small plot, I haven’t grown peas this year, but several varieties of potato have done well, including the Pink Fir Apple which we have been enjoying since August.

1 tbsp orange-flower water ½ tsp salt

Beat the curd and the cream cheese till smooth. Beat in the rest of the ingredients and smooth into a buttered 23cm springform tin lined with butter paper. Bake at 160°C/gas 3 for 35-40 minutes till set but still with a little wobble in the middle. Leave for 15 minutes before unmoulding to serve.

3-4 garlic cloves, very finely chopped 2 tsps salt

Having sown the seed directly into the ground in early spring, I thinned the infant plants to about four inches apart and did little else apart from weeding and watering. The advice is to stop watering once the onions have swollen in midsummer but, since we had no rain for weeks, I continued to give them some water.

The pastry

Every one of you has a restaurant home. It’s a hearth away from the drudgery and tedium of your own kitchen – where the prospect of washing-up and the memory of heated family arguments loom large.

topped with a lard-and-butter pie crust prepared with 380g plain flour, 110g cold butter and 100g cold lard – rubbed together, gathered into a firmish dough with 120ml ice-cold water … yes!

As I write, I’m sitting on the tarmac at Bari Airport, in Puglia, with 200 other disillusioned souls and a choir of babies. We are all guests of WizzAir, and victims of the shortage of baggage-handlers at Gatwick.YetallIcan really think about is my last lunch at La Rotonda da Rosa, by the sea near Savelletri, not 40 minutes from Bari Airport. We’ve been coming to Puglia every summer for 17 years, and we were introduced to Rosa’s that first summer, two years before Rick Stein was filmed cooking spaghetti alle vongole withBackher.then, it was more of a beach shack of maybe 40 covers, with its own tiny and inexpensive lido. It is slightly

The result is happy memories of a well-rounded life with recipes to match – just the ticket for armchair travellers. Excursions include Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, Houston in the 1980s, southern France later and now – just as exotic – the Turkish end of Ridley Road market in Dalston, East London.

However, seed-sown onions are less likely to bolt, and have the additional advantage that the thinnings can be used as spring onions. I shall probably try onion sets next year, hoping for the same success I have had with shallots grown from sets.

JAMESRESTAURANTSPEMBROKE

NOTES FROM A KITCHEN ISLAND

Makes 8-12 rolls.

½ tsp grated unwaxed orange zest 40g melted butter

20g semolina

500g curd cheese

2 eggs, lightly beaten 120ml sour cream

1 packet (usually 320g) ready-rolled all-butter puff pastry

Cut the pastry sheet in half lengthways and brush with mustard, leaving an edge. Brush the edge with some egg forked with its own volume of water. Arrange the sausage meat along the middle of each sheet; fold the pastry over to enclose. Place on a baking sheet, seam side down. Paint the top with the rest of the egg (with water) and dust with freshly-ground pepper. Cut each roll into 4-6 pieces.

Gatherings from Provence include hotpickled black grapes to eat with Roquefort, and a gorgeously rustic pear-andhazelnut galette with Calvados. Sunday’s roast lamb – thoroughly garlicked, buttered, Marmited and cooked with finely sliced potatoes and leeks – comes with a Durham salad: vinegar-dressed shredded mint and lettuce leaves, spring onion and a pinch of sugar.

Toulouse sausage meat

ELISABETHCOOKERYLUARD

My own favourite is Auntie Louie’s nostalgic corned-beef-and-potato pie,

Debora’s Toulouse sausage rolls

I’m not expecting any 300-gram onions, but a few were tennis-ball size at the end of August. As the green parts start fading, the onions will be lifted, dried in the sun or greenhouse and stored on strips of wire netting.

A pastry-less baked cheesecake as served on the breakfast buffet of Moscow’s posher hotels when the world was a safer place. It’s an adaptable recipe: feel free to change the flavouring, omit the raisins, replace the semolina with bread flour or wholewheat flour or ground almonds.

1 tbsp Dijon mustard

500g roughly minced pork (not too 50mlsmooth)red wine

There’s a place each of us yearns for – a place where we are at our best, where we know we will receive the warmest welcome, and the anticipation of which starts the moment we book a table.

Serves 6-8.

Red wine, garlic and cloves make the difference to this all-meat mix. Double the recipe and freeze a batch unbaked, ready for Bonfire Night. Although ready-rolled puff pastry is suggested as a shortcut, your own lard-and-butter piecrust would double the pleasure.

I am aware that onions are more usually – and more easily – grown from sets (immature bulbs). The plants will produce an earlier crop than those grown from seed, and are less likely to be affected by disease such as onion white rot. This produces a white, fluffy fungus on the base of the onions and rots the roots. As there is apparently no known cure, it is essential that the soil be kept free from dirty tools and boots.

I’ve shortened the recipes that follow for reasons of space, but here’s a taste.

LUARDELISABETH

This Shangri-La might be a greasy spoon, a pub, a club, a simple trattoria or the Wolseley back when Jeremy King sauntered from table to table.

72 The Oldie October 2022

Bake for 20-25 minutes, till the meat is cooked and the pastry crisp and prettily browned.

½ tsp herbes de Provence or dried thyme ¼ tsp grated nutmeg

Debora Robertson’s Notes from a Small Kitchen Island is dedicated to a feminist mother. By avoiding contact with the pots and pans, she inspired her daughter to do it herself and write it all down.

Mix all the sausage ingredients in a bowl till thoroughly combined. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight to develop thePreheatflavours.the oven to 220°C/Gas 7.

20g caster sugar

BY THE ADRIATIC WATERS

1 small egg for Freshly-groundglazingblack pepper

to grow them from seed, with a variety called Golden Bear F1, which, according to the catalogue, produces onions weighing 300 grams.

Debora’s Russian cheesecake

180g cream cheese

Within two minutes, the cider-like wine arrives; within a further ten minutes, the antipasti arrive: mussels in three varieties (stuffed, in white wine and tomatoes and in breadcrumbs); polpo in oil and also in red wine and onions; provolone cheese; tiny little moscardini; and anchovies. The selection never changes. We also order two portions of grilled octopus – the sweetest you’ve ever tasted.

Bright, fruity Barbera with gentle tannins and the variety’s trademark acidity. Try it with roast lamb.

Then, after their sorbetti, out come the home-made liquori: lauro (bay leaf), amaro and the lethal limoncello, beloved of teenagers. As if for a final curtain, Rosa, a devout monarchist, will sit down for a catch-up about il Principe Carlo e Camilla. ‘Forza, la Reina Elizabetta!’

Rosa is the ultimate hostess: she dashes around like a dislodged Catherine wheel, screaming with delight at the arrival of every regular, of whom there are many. She has watched my children grow up and hugs them, while her dog, Rocky, snaps at the gorgeous anarchy.

You might try the same trick with a classic Americano: equal parts Campari and sweet red vermouth (Martini Rosso is fine; Carpano Antica Formula is better – I told you I was fickle), poured over soda and ice and garnished with orange or lemon.Swapthe gin for bourbon in the classic Negroni recipe (equal parts gin, sweet red vermouth and Campari, stirred over ice in an old-fashioned or rocks glass with a strip of orange zest) and you have a boulevardier. It is often served in a martini glass, straight up, and is a powerful pick-me-up.

BILLDRINKKNOTT

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a delightful, hedgerow-scented white from Romania; a great-value white Burgundy in the classic style; and a Barbera that oozes with ripe red fruits. Or you can buy cases of each individual

Barbera Agostino‘Casareggio’,d’AstiPavia & Figli, Piemonte 2019, offer price £11.99, case price £143.88

However, Campari is made to different formulas and at different strengths for various markets around the world. So it is possible that cochineal is still used in some of them. Campari is oddly reticent on the subject.

Then I stare out over the uninterrupted view of the Adriatic –which won’t be Homerically wine-dark until we totter home after swimming to the red buoy around six o’clock.

Fresh, elegant and engaging dry white from an byRomanianindigenousvariety,madeBristolianPhilCox.

Cracking Burgundywhitefrom a top négociant and a great vintage. Stock up now for Christmas.

Mixed case price £155.88 – a saving of £22.99 (including free delivery)

Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk

Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit co.uk/promo_OLDwww.dbmwines.

Pietro clears the antipasti and demands an order for our primo. Last week, they had a special: spaghetti with local fish. So we went for that to appease him, while ordering Rosa’s unmissable vongole. Pietro always knows we have room for a secondo: my daughter will want us all to share a sea bass; my son a plate of fritto misto. ‘Patatine fritte, Pietro.’ ‘Due, Gems [Pugliese for James]?’ ‘Certamente.’

And, should you overdo it a little on the boulevardiers, there is another miraculous purpose to which Campari can be put. Mixed judiciously with fresh orange juice, soda and ice, it is the perfect hair of the dog, stiffening the sinews and refreshing the palate.

Feteasca Regala, Solevari pricepriceRomaniaReserve,2018,offer£9.99,case£119.88

I will happily swap between gins and vermouths in my Negroni, but Campari is a fixed red beacon in the fickle firmament of my cocktail cabinet.

Signor Campari, I salute you.

Nothing else quite hits the spot. I find Aperol, its most obvious rival and also a Campari Group product, too weedy, at a mere 11 per cent ABV (Campari is 25 per cent ABV in the UK), and other red amari (bitters) too assertive.

CARRY ON CAMPARI

NB Offer closes 7th November 2022.

smarter now, but the menu (or the absence of it) has never changed. Pietro takes the order at full speed. I always order antipasti, a litre of the house white wine (8 euros) and ‘una e una’ (one bottle of still water, one of sparkling).

At the moment, its members include some fig-leaf firewater that I found in Corsica; the remnants of some dodgy grappa that gives me a headache if I just look at it; a bottle of ‘artisanal’ gin whose artisan clearly forgot that juniper is an important ingredient in the gin-making process; and some Guatemalan rum that a PR sent me and I suspect is best used for flambéing bananas.

The Oldie October 2022 73

Its herbal, bittersweet character is most noticeable when it’s simply diluted with soda and served over ice with a twist of orange zest. Since Campari is denser than water, I find it best to pour it in after the soda, which avoids unnecessary, fizz-wrecking swizzling.

My cocktail cabinet is not a thing of permanence. For a start, it is not a cabinet – just a wooden, bottle-crowded tray that sits on the floor next to a wine rack, and its constituents get shuffled more often than the Downing Street cabinet.

Mâcon-Bussières ‘Les Clos’, Joseph Drouhin, Burgundy 2020, offer price £16.99, case price £203.88

Next month, the cast may have changed completely. Apart, that is, from one ever-present bottle: Campari.

It was invented by Gaspare Campari in 1860. Its colour used to derive from carmine, made from crushed cochineal insects (a dye much favoured by the Aztecs), but in 2006 this was replaced with artificial colouring.

HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930

Wine

Nothing changes. Not even the price, randomly set at around 25 to 30 euros, depending on the day. And this is why it’s my favourite restaurant in the firmament.

Cue much harrumphing from those who insist women can never match men in sporting achievement. But, for anyone spluttering their corn flakes across the kitchen table, it was worth paying attention to the footnote at the end of the article. ‘David Miller,’ it read, ‘has reported from 14 World Cups.’

Anyone who has driven one of those beautiful beasts will think of them as a man’s car, in which everything – braking, gear-changing and, above all, cornering – calls for a very definite muscular input. Handling one at speed, as Moss did for hours on end, took guts, endurance and skill – and then some.

But not for a moment does he cleave to the past. Far from it. He reckons that – thanks to the introduction of disciplines such as skateboarding, speed climbing and surfing – the Games have never been a more compelling sporting offering.

Now in his eighties and still observing with gimlet attention, Miller is a font of sporting knowledge. His latest book, Igniting the Games, is a fascinating analysis of where the Olympic movement stands and where it goes from here.

Hélène Delangle, best known as Hellé Nice, was an artist’s model, dancer and stripper who, between the wars, discovered an aptitude for fast driving.

But fast-driving ladies have been around for almost as long as cars. Most will recall the late Pat Moss, not only for her famous brother, Stirling, but as an international championship-winning rally driver who just happened, on her way to stardom, to represent Britain in show jumping. For me, her stand-out achievement was winning the Liège-Rome-Liège rally in an Austin Healey 3000.

Yet even a film would struggle to capture the sheer guts and grittiness of those early drivers of cars that frequently killed them. This book goes some way towards doing so.

Taken up by Ettore Bugatti via her Rothschild lover, she became known as

the Bugatti Queen, competing in over 30 major races including Grand Prix and rallies. Her rise from obscurity to fame and subsequent decline into an impoverished death are vividly charted by Miranda Seymour in her biography, Bugatti Queen. You don’t have to be a Bugattist – or even a car nut – to enjoy it.

Sure, with issues such as how properly to integrate transgender athletes and how to attract a youthful audience, there are plenty of things to wrestle with beyond ensuring the Games do not become again – as they have too often in Olympic history – the plaything of tyrants.

FAST LADIES

Just after the final of the Women’s Euros, David Miller wrote a piece suggesting that the victory by England’s female players at Wembley may well prove to be more significant than England’s men winning the World Cup at the same stadium in 1966.

It is easy to imagine the enigmas of Dorothy’s life being filled out in film – the details of her relationship with Edge, her chorus-girl years, her family estrangement and the causes and stages of her decline.

In Russia’s case, he suggests a ban on any participation must remain in force for as long as Vladimir Putin is in power. Nothing can change while that crook poisons the planet. And he should know about Putin. After the World Cup was staged in Russia in 2018, Miller conducted the only interview with the Russian leader about his ambitions to stage a future Olympics.

Far from wallowing in nostalgia and trawling his memory banks for historic moments and anecdotes, here he writes about what his grandchildren might expect from the Brisbane Games in 2032. For him, it is the future that fascinates.

As Miller gives his advice to Thomas Bach and his putative successor as head of the Olympic movement about the best way to proceed, he remains optimistic.

And there is much to consider. What does the Olympic movement do, for instance, about Russia? This is the country that not only undermined every principle of international sport with its institutionalised doping, but has also now embarked on the unprovoked destruction of a fellow Olympic nation. And then China. What if it decided to follow the Russian imperialist lead and launch a Ukraine-style invasion of Taiwan?

Hellé Nice, Autodrome de Montlhéry, 1929

MOTORINGALANJUDD

Time was when fast ladies were associated with slow horses as the quickest way for a gentleman to dispose of his fortune. Nowadays the phrase is more likely to refer to up-and-coming female drivers in Formula racing.

KING OF SPORTS REPORTERS

Indeed he has: now, sadly, almost alone among those still writing about our national game, he was there in July 1966 to watch Bobby Moore raise the Jules Rimet trophy.

74 The Oldie October 2022

He could have had no idea, when demonstrating the difference between clutch and throttle, that those legs and eyes would help her become the first woman in Britain to win a motor race. They would take her to two women’s land-speed records and enable her to compete against male drivers and win the 400-mile two-day Glasgow-LeedsLondon reliability trial.

Yet after a period of decline –including a stint as a chorus girl – she too died in obscurity, succumbing to drink andMuchmorphine.ofher life remains mysterious. What can be known is sympathetically researched and analysed, with family help, by Michael Barton in his new book, Fast Lady (Butterfield Press, £40). Barton, as proprietor of Butterfield, has overseen a series of beautifully produced car books for collectors and this, although a tad expensive and about a person rather than a car, deservedly ranks among them.

JIMSPORTWHITE

2032 in Brisbane, he says, has every possibility of being a glorious sporting exhibition. And, knowing David Miller, you wouldn’t put it past him being there, reporting on the fun.

She also – by the by, as it were – won motor-yacht races, flew early aeroplanes, wrote The Woman and the Car as an explanatory handbook for women drivers, designed her own racing coat, became a journalist and a competitive cyclist and effectively invented the rear-view mirror.

There was an article recently in the Daily Telegraph that created quite a stir online.

Having covered as many Olympic Games as he has World Cups, he can put modern things into proper historical perspective.

Yet, in a sense, Hélène’s life had been lived a generation before by a woman who packed even more into it, dying at 40, a century ago. Elizabeth Levi was one of the most successful female racers ever. Born humbly in Hackney, she changed her name to Dorothy Levitt and in 1900 was employed as temporary secretary by SelwynAustralian-bornEdge.

Edge was a prominent motor-industry figure, owner of Napier and AC, and a successful racing driver. According to one account, he saw in Dorothy’s ‘long legs and eyes like pools’ a promotion opportunity for his car business; he taught her to drive.

There are few things as transient as ‘the next big thing’. Look at the uncertain world of social media – the likes of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and

Typically, the British have resisted this sort of fast, fairly high-pressure selling, but I imagine we will succumb. The platforms love it. Not only do they get a slice of the money that you fork out to buy things, but also your purchase allows the platform to gather more data on you – and hence decide what advertising to show you. They thus avoid the problems of the demise of tracking cookies.

sludge when you wait so long for customer services to answer that you give up, or no one answers your emails, or you face multiple hurdles and have to repeat your request numerous times.

likely that sales of this kind will top £350bn this year in China alone.

Not even the biggest beasts get it right. Google launched Google+ (a copy of Facebook). Apple tried with iTunes Ping (a cross between Facebook and Twitter). Almost nobody used either of them and they were quickly shut down.

So, what of the future? At the moment, in social-media land, TikTok is leading the pack and forcing others to adapt in its image. For the moment, anyway. TikTok is certainly the current big thing, but we don’t know if it makes money; the rather cloudy Chinese ownership prevents us from finding out. If you want to see what the fuss is about, maybe you should look at TikTok, while it’s still around.

The biggest player in this field, at the moment, is the Chinese-owned TikTok, which allows anyone to upload short videos of any kind and, if they want to, sell you stuff. The chef Gordon Ramsay produces lots of very slick little films of thisTikToksort. is astonishingly popular. By one measure, in 2021 the TikTok website was visited more often than Google, even though it is blocked in some countries such as India and Pakistan.

If you suspect that companies deliberately make it so time-consuming and confusing that you give up trying to get your money back, you are right.

Why do they fail? As ever, it all comes down to money; if a site can generate cash, it will survive. If it can’t, it won’t.

The next big thing on the internet

76 The Oldie October 2022

It should not be so darned difficult to claim refunds for flights and train tickets, or to cancel subscriptions for magazines and gym memberships.

The FCA had already told firms to make it quicker and easier to file complaints about mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI). Its new wide-ranging rules, called Consumer Duty, encompass far more.

How to claw your money back

for 20 years, you may recall Friends Reunited. At its peak, it had over 20 million users, but it’s gone now, overtaken by Bebo (also gone) and Facebook, the one great survivor.

companies use sludge as much as other industries, to the extent that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has issued rules to clamp down on theSludgepractice.tricks don’t just target refunds. They can mislead you to the extent that you pay more than you need or end up making a decision that is irrational and against your own best interests. You know you are being bogged down by

There are only really three ways these sites can earn: charge the viewers a subscription; accept advertising; or take a slice of the money third parties make from using the platform.

The tactics are called ‘sludge’, and sludge economics are even the subject of academic research. Financial-services

The subscription model is dead in the water. People just won’t pay. Advertising does work (look at Facebook) but it’s very irritating. On top of that, in the name of privacy, Apple and Google are planning to switch off tracking cookies, which allow the same adverts to chase you around the internet. So it’s going to become less effective anyway.

Or you might prefer just to wait for the next big thing. It won’t be long now, I assure you.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

YouFacebook.mayhave tried some of them but if you haven’t, I wouldn’t worry. Most will probably be gone soon.

If you’ve been using the internet

Or perhaps you recall the more recent site Vine, on which you shared video clips. It was once very popular – over 200 million users – but it’s gone now.

The Fascinatinghttps://workhouses.org.uk/Workhouseanddetailedhistory of workhouses in Britain, with many links to documents, records, museums and more. All one man’s emailGocomputerIanhistoricGooglecategory/eventhttps://artsandculture.google.com/Historicwork.eventsArts&Cultureproject–pickaeventbynameortimetoseeexhibitwithtextanddocuments.willhappilytrytosolveyourbasicandinternetproblems.towww.askwebster.co.ukormeatwebster@theoldie.co.uk

That may sound rather doom-laden but if the past is any guide, I’m right. Wikipedia has a list of over 150 defunct social-media platforms, and I bet it’s far from comprehensive.

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Platforms need to find other ways of generating income. One method is to allow others to use your platform to make money for themselves and take a slice. In other words, turn themselves into a sort of shopping channel. This is known as livestream ecommerce, and it’s

Webwatch

• appreciate the real needs of customers, including the vulnerable ones, for the whole time they have a relationship and not just at point of sale.

The Oldie October 2022 77

Sunday 14th May – Rethymnon

Crete: Land of Heroes, with Rick Stroud 11th to 18th May 2023

Cretan wine country

For the first three nights, we will stay at the Palazzo Duca and Ionas boutique hotels in Chania, Crete’s historic former capital – steeped in Minoan, Venetian, Ottoman and Greek history. Then we move to Heraklion’s Lato boutique hotel.

• not bury details in pages of terms and conditions but give clear, easily understandable information, so customers can make informed financial •decisionsdesignproducts and services that meet customers’ needs

Tuesday 16th May – Heraklion

Friday 12th May – Maleme airfield

not make people wait so long for an answer that they give up

Wednesday 17th May – Lunch at Elounda

We drive down to Elounda to lunch in this picturesque fishing village on the lovely Mirabello Bay. In the afternoon a boat trip and walk around Spinalonga island, the setting of Victoria Hislop’s The Island

From the top down, people will be expected to take reasonable steps to avoid causing foreseeable harm to their customers; always to act in good faith; and to enable customers to pursue their financialConsumerobjectives.Dutyrequires firms to:

Flights to be confirmed. Welcome drink and talk by Rick Stroud before dinner.

Monday 15th May – Knossos and

The overriding aim is to improve consumer protection, and all financial firms have been instructed to change their culture to put customers’ needs first. Until now, they have been told to treat customers ‘fairly’. In future, they must treat us ‘well’ – and prove that they’re doing so.

Rick Stroud, author of Kidnap in Crete, his tale of the wartime kidnap of General Kreipe, writes, ‘Crete is a wonderful destination – a land of heroes, mountain ranges and fertile plains where sheep graze among olive trees and the air is filled with the scent of thyme. Nearly 2,000 years ago the island was home to the Minoans, whose legendary king, Minos, built the palace at Knossos. Fought over and occupied throughout its history, Crete has a rich architectural and artistic heritage. The Cretans are patriots who will die fighting for their island and were last called on to do so in the Second World War.’

• end rip-off charges and fees

A chance to relax and explore Rethymnon en route to Heraklion, before coming together for lunch. In the afternoon, we’ll visit the meticulously restored Sultan Bin Ibrahim Mosque.

Firms have been given until 31st July next year to comply. Then, if you believe a company has not treated you well, you can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Within Consumer Duty, a new principle says firms must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers. The FCA will be monitoring their success by the Ombudsman Service’s decisions.

An early start to visit the 4,000-year-old Minoan palace of Knossos followed by lunch in Elia and Diosmos’s Olive Mint restaurant at Skalani. After lunch we will have a gentle afternoon in Archanes for a tasting of the impressive Cretan wines.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 Price per person: £2,250 which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £200. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st February 2023. Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk

the public. They include everyone working in the business.

• provide helpful customer support and

The rules encompass every financialservice sector – banking, life insurance and pensions, investments, general insurance and financial advice – and companies that do not deal directly with

May – Arrive at Chania

First a visit to Maleme airfield, where German parachutists landed in history’s first airborne attack, in May 1941; then on to Gonia Monastery. Lunch and time to explore Chania.

ITINERARYThursday11th

There are eight twin/double rooms and six singles.

Visit to the incredible treasure troves of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, including the famed bull-leaping fresco, the recently discovered signet ‘ring of Minos’. We’ll see the amazing Venetian city walls, including the Chania Gate.

Sludge is not always designed to dupe customers: slowing down the buying process can ensure customers take time to think through big financial decisions such as buying a pension. Unfortunately, though, it more often is designed that way, particularly when you’re shopping online.

Thursday 18th May – Depart for home Flights to be confirmed.

Saturday 13th May – Souda Bay and Aptera

• make it as easy to switch or cancel products as it was to buy them in the first place

Visit the Souda Bay War Cemetery and the grave of John Pendlebury, who organised the Cretan Resistance before the war. Lunch followed by guided tour of the archaeological site of Aptera.

Florence Nightingale had a pet little owl, Athena. ‘It was odd how much I loved you,’ she lamented when it died. It is an exhibit in the Florence Nightingale Museum in St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Picasso’s pet little owl was called Ubu. When Ubu snorted its dislike, Picasso would shout ‘Cochon! Merde!’, to be even ruder.

You clench your claws

The Little Owl

The little owl was soon condemned by gamekeepers. It was not until 1950 that the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries officially exonerated it when its diet was found to comprise mostly insects and rodents.

Noctua means ‘owl’. The nocturnal association is as applicable to the little owl as to other owls, although they are notably diurnal. Despite a vast Eurasian and North African range, they became resident in England only after substantial releases of imported birds were made in the late-19th century by landowners such as Lord Lilford at Lilford Hall, Northamptonshire.

It found an uncontested niche in England and flourished, but in the

Being daylight hunters, they are a more familiar sight than might be expected. They’re preyed on themselves by other birds of prey, so their preference for sheltering in old buildings and walls provides useful camouflage.

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Their pocket size was illustrated in Country Life this year by a photograph of an adult fitting inside the mouth of a drainpipe, its blackrimmed eyes like targets. They can also put on too much weight when feast follows famine. One rendered flightless by obesity was brought to the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary in 2020. A monitored diet allowed it to fly off after a fortnight.Theyare creatures of habit, returning to the same nesting sites and perches. A friend writes from Oxfordshire that a local pair annually nest in an ancient oak. They will allow a car to draw alongside when they are perched on their favourite stump. They’re sometimes accompanied by their owlets – ‘adorable micro-owls’.

The Oldie October 2022 79 AKROYDCARRY

Pansy-faced owl: We too would see you as her Blunt-browed familiar. Susanne Knowles from City Owl –Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Athena is one of the greatest divinities of ancient Greece. Her father was Zeus, mightiest of the gods. Her mother was Metis, the wisest. As Athens’s patron, she has her shrine in the Parthenon.

As upon Wisdom’s shoulder, Where once the Athenians perched you By that helmeted head.

last 30 years has declined by threequarters, owing to manifold changes in the countryside. This column’s illustrator, Carry Akroyd, knows of one killed by a red kite – near Lilford. Dr Emily Joachim’s Little Owl Project is a vitalTheremonitor.arecurrently 5,000 little owls in Britain. Most of them are in England, with some even in London, as Susanne Knowles’s poem indicates. Richmond Park is their London headquarters. In 2021, they bred in Regent’s Park and Kensington Gardens.

Her sacred bird is the little owl (Athena noctua) – hence the origin of the ‘wise owl’. Athenian coins bearing the bird’s image were called owls. The current Greek one-euro coin depicts an owl; its image of Athena noctua is copied from a 500 BC drachma piece.

In 540 AD, Ravenna duly fell to his general, Belisarius, and in 568 AD authority in the Western Empire was delegated to an exarch, who remained subordinate to Constantinople.

And yet it boasts the greatest collection of mosaics in Christendom. Only those created seven hundred years later in Monreale Cathedral, in Sicily, can rival them. Even they lack the scale of Ravenna’s 5th- and 6th-century mosaics spread throughout its churches and mausoleums, most of which are in the pedestrianised centre.

In 489 AD, Zeno, the Emperor of the East, encouraged Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, to invade Italy and claim Odoacer’s throne, mainly in a bid to distract him from menacing the borders of his own Eastern Empire.

goldenRavenna’smoment Travel

In 401 AD, the Emperor Honorius moved the imperial court and the civil administration of the Western Empire from Milan to Ravenna, mainly to escape the Germanic hordes. Remote in its salt

Ravenna’s importance began with the construction of its port at Classe, south of the city, as one of two bases for Augustus’s Adriatic fleet. It became another thriving Roman town, but no one would have prophesied its future glory.

Within a year, Theodoric had taken most of the peninsula. In 493 AD, Ravenna surrendered. As if out of a scene from Asterix and the Goths, Theodoric invited Odoacer to a reconciliation banquet at which he promptly murdered him.

James Pembroke loves the city’s Byzantine mosaics – and its pasta

In 751 AD, it was all over: Ravenna fell to the Lombards and, with that, its connection with the Byzantine was preserved only in its mosaics.

Start your tour at the tiny mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Honorius’s half-sister and the regent of the Western Empire for ten years during the first half of the fifth century. (You can buy a pass for all the sites for €12.50 at www.ravennamosaici.it).

uspended in the salt marshes halfway between Venice and Rimini, Ravenna, having been the capital of the Western world, has become something of a backwater for tourists even in the peak of summer.

Its break came after the governance of the vast Roman Empire was divided, in 286 AD, into two courts: the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire.

Lucky for us that they survived: their inspirational counterparts back in Constantinople were erased in the eighth century by iconoclasts.

marshes, it was easily defensible and became the capital of the Western Empire until 476, when the last of the Western Emperors, Romulus Augustulus, was defeated and deposed in a revolt by the German-born Odoacer. Odoacer was then recognised by the Roman Senate as the first King of Italy, over which he ruledGibbonautonomously.mythologised the year as the demarcation point between antiquity and the Middle Ages, but the empire had a much longer tail.

Built in the mid-fifth century, it’s the earliest surviving setting for mosaics in the city. The most memorable scene is the martyrdom of St Thomas, complete with gridiron and flames. Blue is the dominant colour of the tesserae, which crowd every inch of the interior, giving it a mystical, otherworldly sense.

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Theodoric upheld the Roman administration, encouraged the arts and expanded his mini-empire into Spain and Burgundy. He died in 526 AD and was buried in the mausoleum whose stone

structure still survives. His death encouraged Justinian, the Eastern Emperor, to regain the Western Empire.

the Arian belief in the physical rather than divine nature of Christ.

PEMBROKELEO/ALAMY/MORANDIBRUNOANDTUUL

Blue was made by the addition of cobalt; green with copper oxide and red with copper. Gold and silver were created by the overlaying of the tesserae with a thick layer of glazed metal. In Ravenna, mother-of-pearl as well as white and grey marble created the atmosphere of Eastern opulence. The tesserae were often set into the plaster at different depths and angles to create that dazzling display of seemingly permanent motion.

Left: Baptism of Christ with 12 disciples, at the Neon,Baptisteryfifth-centuryofRavenna

Below: Martyrdom of St Lawrence on a burning gridiron, next to a cabinet with the (425-50MausoleumPlacidiaGospels,fourGallaAD)

In common with other cities of the plain like Ferrara and Bologna, Ravenna is a town becalmed by the heat bouncing off its ancient brickwork. Its inhabitants are remarkably welcoming, happily matching Bryon’s description that ‘they make love a great deal – and assassinate a little’.

Dante spent the last four years of his life here in exile from Florence, finishing the Divine Comedy. Ravenna has claimed him for the city, successfully rejecting Florentine overtures to return the remains encased in his tomb.

Theodoric continued the tradition of copying Byzantine architectural design and mosaics in Ravenna, rather than maintaining the early-Christian basilica

For somewhere more modern, have dinner at L’Acciuga Osteria, a seafood restaurant on the edge of town, and order a plate of anchovies. For lunch, exit the city gate for the Antica Trattoria al Gallo, run by the same family since 1909.

In its art and iconography, Western Christianity increasingly built on the ideal of redemption through the suffering of Christ.Byzantine art is somewhat jollier, concentrating on the salvation offered by Christ and God. Benign Theodoric was happy for orthodox Christians to worship in his churches.

The Oldie October 2022 81

The other delight is the city’s restaurants. They are much better value than those in Bologna and aren’t overflowing with stressed tourists desperate for a table. Order a stinco of pork between two at Ca’ de Ven, a medieval enoteca with vaulted, frescoed ceilings and an excellent wine list.

As The Oldie’s Country Mouse, a trained mosaicist, will tell you, these tiny cubes of coloured glass, enamel and stone are set in a plaster bed, following a design that has been etched beforehand.

We stayed bang opposite the excellent covered market at Il Albergo Cappello Ravello, a 15th-century palazzo, complete with yet more frescoes. Doubles from 140 euros

style. In common with all Goths, Theodoric’s preferred form of Christianity was Arianism. It differs from the Nicene Creed in the belief that Christ is not of one substance with the Father but a later creation who is subordinate to Him.

Ask for a table overlooking their pretty garden, where you can finish your bottle after lunch while contemplating poor Odoacer’s last dinner.

The centre of the restaurant is taken up with huge, Liberty-style, green statues of fin-de-siècle ladies, and the walls are covered with family portraits. The pasta was the best we had during our week in Emilia Romagna.

In Theodoric’s Arian baptistery, the survivor of a group of Arian churches built in the late-fifth century, there is an empty throne with a large purple cushion and, above it, a jewelled cross, symbolising

Justinian’s men were quick to erase any trace of Theodoric. They installed a huge processional frieze of Justinian and his sexy dancer wife, Theodora, in the sanctuary of San Vitale, Ravenna’s masterpiece and the largest of the churches, with a huge dome. Humility was never an option for a Byzantine emperor keen to identify himself as Christ’s appointed ruler, especially one who never visited Ravenna.

Theodoric’s most magnificent achievement is his palace chapel, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Its nave walls, over 50 yards long, bear two vast processional friezes. On either side are processions of martyrs, above which are the 16 Fathers of the Church. Even higher are the first known depictions of 13 scenes from the life of Christ.

ALAMY/DAGNALLIAN

Among them was Gaetano Celestra, who created them in gratitude for the happy times he spent working on a farm in this Somerset countryside.

The POW Sistine Chapel: the Italian Chapel, Orkney, built out of two Nissen huts

Here, sandwiched in the midst of a dual carriageway, it is an oddly intoxicating sight. The land was owned by Mr Wilstead Wright, delighted that the Italians were so happy to be here. They had been treated so poorly in other counties that they were

During the War, Italian prisoners of war built an enchanting chapel on Lamb Holm in the Orkney Islands

lucinda lambton

Overlooked Britain

Perched high on a podium are Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, suckling the she-wolf who mythically reared them.

Only when you peer at them closely and spot corroding iron protruding from their partly collapsed cement do you realise they are in fact relatively new –sculpted by Italian prisoners in the Second World War.

The Renaissance comes to Orkney

Just north of Wells, in Somerset, by the road to Midsomer Norton, you spot a most curious neoclassical monument.

82 The Oldie October 2022

In 1797, it was the first in the world to be purpose-built for the ever-increasing number of European captives (mostly French) from the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1946, no fewer than 127 German generals and field marshals were dispatched to Bridgend. Most notable among them were Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Chief of the German Army in the West, and General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s Chief of Staff.

Most imaginatively, Cadw – the Welsh historic monuments agency – has listed the hut as a Grade-II building, along with the Fragmentstunnel.of walls from other Island Farm huts on which pin-ups were painted have also been saved, as haunting reminders of camp life and the glamorous companions which they created to cheer them on each day.

The Governor’s House is still intact to this day, as is the short stretch of the perimeter wall.

There is one more glory, and it is one that takes you on a happy stroll down memory lane. The existence of Jane of the Daily Mirror is still safe and sound at Bridgend.Herewehave the aluminium cigarette case with one side showing her clothed, the other naked – as it was promised she would be when the war was won!

Cathedral is flawless, with every nuance of light and shade dancing through its Gothic detailing. What glories!

The prisoners also made little guillotines out of their mutton bones. Fantastically complex in their

With its statue of St George nearby, this modest building is the last reminder of the men who lived there. They were in a particularly grim collection of huts, known as Camp 60.

When one group of German officers arrived at the local station, they refused to carry their cases the two miles to the local camp. It was only with the appearance of Mr Hill the stationmaster, resplendent in his uniform of long frock coat and gold braid, that the officers –thinking that they had been given orders by a general – finally obliged!

A preservation order has been put on an escape tunnel. On 11th March 1945, dozens of men got away. The 67th escapee was spotted with white kitbag and was shot in the shoulder. Working behind a false wall in the hut, the men dug a tunnel under the perimeter fence and, wonder of wonders, the tunnel is still there today. Some 45 feet long, it was excavated with hands, cans and knives. The prisoners were always naked as they dug, so as not to have telltale earth on theirAllclothes.werecaught: the first ones out were the last to be recaptured – rugbytackled to the ground by a Welsh farmer. In the absence of a police station, they were marched off to the local post office for a genial tea with the postmistress.

Jane of the Daily Mirror at Island Farm German POW camp, Bridgend, Wales

Domenicogalore.Chiocchetti, a prisoner described as having ‘great artistic sensibility’, painted imaginative works on the sanctuary vault, with a whopping and elaborately conceived ‘stone’ dado on the curved ceiling. A tabernacle was carved from wood taken from a wrecked ship.The interior was painted to imitate carved stone. Another prisoner fashioned an intricate Gothic screen and gate from wrought iron.

BRIDGEMAN/ALAMY/MITCHELLLEWIS

construction, manned by armies of uniformed soldiers, these were all gruesomely workable, with the heads of the aristocrats made of putty so that they could be used over and over again.

Within the haven of the Peterborough Museum is the camp’s shining white castle, made from bones from the cookhouse, polished and painted to seem likeThereivory.are 600 similar artefacts. Soldiers made from bones can be turned on a wheel so as to march on the ramparts. There is a ballroom filled with revellers who can be made to dance. A carpenter planes his wood, and a lady plies her pestle and mortar.

A theatre was created, complete with painted scenery, and there was an area reserved for recreation for which they built a concrete billiard table. The top-notch centrepiece was and still is their chapel, built for the Catholic occupants of Camp 60. Here it stands, bold as brass, surrounded by a wealth of handmade masterpieces of frescoes and paintwork

The workmanship is of the highest quality; the French prisoners produced such refinements as ‘Neptune’s Kingdom’ – an intricately carved assembly of creatures which also seem to be fashioned from the finest ivory.

An escritoire of straw marquetry is as stylish as if inlaid with the richest woods. A straw picture of Peterborough

Most of the First and Second World War camps have disappeared – with few regrets – but the Island Farm German POW camp, near Bridgend, South Wales, survives. Here, in 30 somewhat grim buildings, German prisoners of war were housed between 1944 and 1948.

The Oldie October 2022 83

pleased to be thought of as human beings again.

A bronze eagle has been restored, to perch on a pillar. This was stolen but now – hurray! – has been replaced, with all the pomp of a priestly gathering.

At Norman Cross, near Peterborough, hard by the A1, there was – and still is –another prisoner-of-war camp.

At Lamb Holm on Orkney, several hundred Italian prisoners were imprisoned after being captured during the North African Campaign in the Second World War. Here they created a chapel, while they also built the concrete causeways to defend Scapa Flow.

If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there – is that true?

Were George and Eric similar, besides being rock stars?

How did you meet George Harrison?

Not really – they were very different people.

Photographer and model Pattie Boyd, ex-wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, CAN remember the sixties. By Louise Flind

What was Twiggy like?

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

What’s your biggest headache?

What are your top travelling tips?

Rolling your clothes is better than packing them flat.

Don’t marry a pop star!

Was it while you were modelling that you became interested in photography?

Yes, we did.

I had an exhibition in Beijing and they promised they were taking us to a wonderful restaurant – I did tell them quite firmly that I don’t eat dogs. There was a huge version of a lazy Susan with plates of things and there was a chicken head covered in a sort of gelatinous substance. You could see the shape of the chicken’s head and the beak, but cut off at the neck – I resisted that delicacy.

I think that’s rubbish – I mean, I remember the ’60s.

David Bailey, because his photographs were amazing – but the photographer who was the nicest and kindest was Barry Lategan.

Did George forgive Eric Clapton over your leaving him and marrying Eric [they were married from 1979 to 1989]? Their relationship was guitars and playing guitars, and music was something that never broke them as friends. It didn’t really involve me, whether I was with Eric or with George.

Do you have a go at the local language? I’ve still got a bit of schoolgirl French.

Going to my grandfather’s farm in Cornwall with my brother, which I loved. I grew up in Kenya till I was ten.

My lipstick and my dog, Freddie, an Irish terrier.

There’s an island off Bali called Lombok. About 15 years ago, we were sleeping in a bedroom on stilts with a wooden structure on three sides and the other was open to the sea – it was glorious and a bit scary.

Which photographer did you most enjoy working with?

My agent sent me to an interview and there were lots of girls sitting around waiting. When I went into the room, I recognised one of the guys, Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away?

Do you still play the dilruba? No [she laughs]. Far too difficult…

Where did you go on your honeymoons? George and I went to Barbados, and Eric and I went to Jamaica.

You were married to George from 1966 until 1977. Did you remain friends after splitting up?

What was it like modelling in the ’60s? Were you asked to do things you didn’t want to do?

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

Don’t. I will say one thing – you have to have your own passion that you’re following, so that you don’t follow him.

Are you still a vegetarian? No [she laughs again]. George and I were vegetarian for about four years.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept – while being away?

On the Road

How did your modelling career come about?

What are your tips for marrying a rock star?

My agent always said I didn’t do nudes or underwear – so there was no stepping over the line.

My Life in Pictures (Reel Art Press, £39.95) by Pattie Boyd is out on 18th October

Do a little meditation, put on some sunscreen and then greet the day.

Adorable, so sweet. We became friends and Justin [de Villeneuve] did really good photos for Italian Vogue of the two of us. By then, we were copying how each other did make-up, the way girlfriends do.

I thought it was great fun and I loved meeting all the different girls. Sometimes the clothes were ghastly and other times they were really gorgeous.

I was working and a woman asked me if I’d ever thought about modelling and I said, ‘No,’ but in fact it was a secret dream. She said come and see me on Monday and she had photographera in the studio. He photographed me and very sweetly introduced me to my agent – and it was hard work from then on.

Yes, and I started dating a photographer and he encouraged me to buy a camera.

Queues: for getting onto a plane, for your suitcase – waiting around, wasting time and there’s nothing you can do. You want to throw a tantrum.

Later my agent phoned to say I’d got a part in a Beatles film.

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By the time I returned to the Sence Forest Park, it was pelting down. The trees dripped and I danced in the road with several baby toads.

patrick barkham

pine. And yet there was a sense that something had happened here and the land was just settling down again.

I see Sence in Leicestershire

An alluring name on the map is as good a reason for a walk as any. As my eyes prospected over the charted wilds of Leicestershire, they alighted on the River Sence. Here, surely, was a gift for The Oldie’s headline-writers.

I headed north, crossing the little Sence, twinkling attractively in its bed of soft green weed, and crossed open fields before reaching the Diamond Jubilee Wood. Here was an even newer wood, dominated by fast-growing silver birches, as elegantly lanky as teenagers.

The speed of recovery in nature matches our own rooting up of it. I took a wiggly path down the side of the former open-cast mine, where green woodpeckers cackled and dragonflies whizzed. The path was fringed by an attractively shaggy mix of dogwood, hazel, sallow and hawthorn, skilfully arranged to conceal a less comely Forestry England conifer plantation beyond.Along a woodland track were the best blackberries I’d ever seen. It was a stuffy, muggy day, and Horseshoe Lake, where the eight millionth tonne of coal was dug up from the mine, was brimming with bulrushes and ducklings and tantalising blue-green water. The temptation was intensified by the ‘No swimming’ notices and additional signs warning that the lake was under investigation by the Environment Agency for imperilling the lives of innocent dogs.

My primary-school headmaster, Mr V K Bale, grew up in Leicestershire and, exiled to bleak Norfolk, waxed lyrical in morning assembly about the overlooked rolling hills and meadows of his home county. It has taken me 40 years to heed his advice and take a walk there.

This was torture. I was desperate for a swim. Oh, to feel some cooling water on my brow. You know those comic characters who walk around with a little black rain-cloud hovering over their

Ecstatic, I sat in the car, writing this, as the rain tapped out the most glorious melodies on the roof. I gave thanks for the rejuvenating, restorative forces of our planet – and a wet walk in Leicestershire.

heads? Who hum Travis’s Why Does It Always Rain on Me? For the previous three months, I’d had a personal sun shining above my head. I’d travelled the length and breadth of Britain – and wherever I wasn’t received cool precipitation. Even parched Norfolk, my home, received its summer entitlement of 2 mm of rain on a day I wasn’t there.

WINGGARY The Oldie October 2022 87

My hazy maths put the wood at 20 years old before I realised it was barely ten. This was staggering! This place was exploding with life, artfully messy (we’ve got better at naturalistic planting) and already gaining some self-willed chaos, as self-sown oaks, sallow and birch roared up to compete with the rowan and hawthorn.Suddenly, something weird happened. The summer of no rain began to deliver a light mizzle from the darkening sky. By the time I reached Heather Church – where the Heather Hut community larder offered free food to the cashstrapped (I knew it was a nice village) – it was raining properly.

I considered the valley’s Forest Park, wooded and full of paths to the east of the stream and, to the west, the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood. This was the largest wood in the National Forest, a new treescape which has taken shape across the Midlands over the last 27 years. And nestled in between was the village of Heather – what a pretty name!

Sence Valley Forest Park (parking £1.50) LE67 6NW. Head north, take footpath north-west to Heather Lane. First right up Bowers Brook to the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood, follow easterly edge and footpath along Normanton Lane into Heather and back up into the Forest Park (3 miles)

His county may have been bucolic during his 1920s childhood but, by the time of my boyhood, this bit of the Sence was a vast, open-cast mine. I tried to picture the barren scene that was the former life of Sence Valley Forest Park, but my vision was overwhelmed by the present – an immutable-looking deep green woodland of tall birch and Scots

Taking a Walk

20 21occasionInstalment;(7)Markofinjury

13(5)

12 Duck down following this

6 Intercity flights brigadier organised (3,6)

Across

17 I married one - a vet - it turns out to be not the real thing (9)

Popular cult food for 9, maybe (6)

12(4)

1 Noted German wit never forgetting victory in Europe (6)

11 Vehicle carrying Zulu leader once (4)

Down Rummage; polecat

24(6)

Valued, assessed Jerk (4) S.American ranch house (8) Like a coiled spring (5,2) Deceive (6) Prepared, willing Gets better (8) Bright red (7) Enjoy; chutney (6) Beneath (5) Blood vessel (6) Wheel immobiliser Engrave (4)

Down

Runners-up: Nic Orchard, Deal, Kent; Richard Hillier, Lewannick, Launceston, Cornwall

8 Study those people keeping nothing on record (8)

23(5)

10 Love to annoy, welcoming old singer from America (6)

28 Person who believes he must replace women in dance

4 Church’s one sound of satisfaction lifted noise from 9 perhaps (7)

Singer with passion has audience (8)

Winner: Gib Fitzgibbon, West Kilbride, North Ayrshire

2 Finished rough plan getting help from bank (9)

25 Half of each beer served up in lobster claw (5)

29(6)

7 Girl raising Independent complaint (5)

4 Masticated

26(5)

One might call for a sharp note (9)

3(5)

27 Mephistopheles, full of wrath returned dressed in uniform (8)

20 Greeting disheartenedGoth,andout of it (4)

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. score (5) (6) callous (5) Small whirlpool

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 19th October 2022 We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

Feared greatly (7) Beam; fish (3) Skin condition (4) Fool, hoodwink (4) Large snake (3) (4) Contentious topic Scandal (7) Straight, reliable Cheerful (5)

5 Girl in fast car will be a greedy type (6)

25(5)

Moron 416 solution: Across: 1 Garda, 4 Nurse (Gardeners), 8 Low, 9 Innumerable, 10 Embargo, 12 Least, 13 Saddle, 14 Chatty, 17 Eager, 19 Annoyed, 21 Advertising, 23 Air, 24 Dated, 25 Guest. Down: 1 Guile, 2 Ran, 3 Admiral, 4 Narrow, 5 Rebel, 6 Elegantly, 7 Swiftly, 11 Bodyguard, 13 Special, 15 Hunting, 16 Sacred, 18 Rivet, 20 Digit, 22 Ice.

9 Entourage (7) 10 Vicious,

Moron crossword 418 The Oldie October 2022 89 Across 1 Two

1 Taking driver, for example, prepare to shoot birdie! (8)

2(6)

21 Shed tears over heart of city flyer (6)

22 Put in a bid being sensitive

The girl to go to court about silicon implant (5)

3 Two queens supply what is needed (5)

el sereno

27(6)

Genius crossword 418

13(5)

14 Extremely pleased to be dressed for the part (4,2)

9 European singer’s fantastic time with Italian (5,3)

23 Sigh, and feel a different sort of creature (4,5)

21 Sort of mottled food container? (3,4)

16 High flyer from faction on the extreme left (7)

19 Bird found by ring road with loads of money (7)

15 Provides proof that vices need to be regulated (9)

Geniussolution416

18 Disagreement sees prisoner, female, soundly beaten (8)

25 Long for Conservative party

Sue Smalley

Katie Mallett

ANDREWpromoted.ROBSON The Oldie October 2022 91 North ♠ A 6 3 ♥ K Q 4 3 ♦ A Q 8 ♣ K 6 3 West ♠ 10 8 5 2 ♥ 7 ♦ J 7 5 ♣ Q J 10 9 2 East ♠ Q 9 7 4 ♥ 10 5 ♦ K 10 9 3 ♣ 8 7 5South ♠ K J ♥ A J 9 8 6 2 ♦ 6 4 2 ♣ A 4 The Southbidding West North East 1 ♥ Pass 2NT(1) Pass 3 ♥ (2) Pass 6 ♥ (3) end

Competition TESSA CASTRO

only telling you how it is –No reason for getting on your high horse; You’ll do the same to some little sucker, In due course.

difficult delivery

(1) Showing a game-forcing heart raise – the excellent Jacoby convention.

Versus ‘social players’, a better line is available. Win the club, draw trumps and eliminate the black suits (king of spades, jack of spades to the ace, ruff a spade – then similar in clubs). Now lead a diamond towards dummy. West is likely to play second hand low (as players are wont to do in ‘second hand plays low autopilot mode’). You insert dummy’s eight and are guaranteed success. Here, East wins the nine but must lead either a second diamond round to dummy’s ace-queen, or a black card giving you ruff-and-discard, enabling you to ruff in one hand and shed a diamond from the other.

Good evening, mate – is this the right Youraddress?parcel’s here – it’s really quite a mess! Inside the box, something has been scratching –As if a clutch of demon eggs were hatching; Then silence, then a tinkling of soft bells –And then a load of gently wafting smells, Like lilies, roses, honey, frankincense –When I’m trying to drive – it made no Andsense!all at once (I’ll tell you, it threw me!)

This second line is technically inferior, as the expert West hops up with the jack of diamonds in second chair, ruining your plans – East beats the queen with the king and returns the ten. Gauging the quality of your opposition – more specifically how often West will rise to the occasion on the first diamond – is a real skill.

(2) Above minimum opener with (normally) six hearts (holding a minimum, South jumps to 4♥). I do think South is too strong for 4♥ – give partner, say, ♠ AQxx, ♥Kxxx, ♦Ax, ♣Kxx, and there are 13 top tricks (assuming hearts are not 3-0 the wrong way).

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable

Five years after posting it arrived: Postcard from America to say, ‘Having lovely time here.’ How I strived To find a post box. I recall that day, Hot as an oven, as I tried to send My message, as the sun lashed in my face, Blinding me, when someone, as a friend, Said, ‘Use the hotel desk. It’s not a race –It will get there soon.’ And so I did –Tounknownmethe devious path that it would take. Markings on it show that it had flown Down to Australia’s Perth, from there to make A U-turn back to Europe. Time went on, And now it’s here – but sadly you have gone.

There is no doubt – you should declare differently according to the quality of the defence. Plan the play in 6♥ on ♣Q lead versus (a) good quality opposition, and (b) ‘weakies’.

IN COMPETITION No 284 you were invited to write a poem with the title Difficult Delivery. Speeches, babies and post each had their advocates, while David Shields focused on a cricket ball. Father Christmas in Peter Hollindale’s entry complained, ‘My clients expect just-intime delivery,/But global outreach makes the day a misery.’ Sylvia Sellers’s narrator escapes from a cave and then ‘a noise he’s never heard before startles him./His first cry.’ Hilary Caine’s birthday parcel from abroad was held captive by customs officials. From Con Connell came memories of how one of the students ‘working on the post’ gained the nickname Dog Lewis. Commiserations to them, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom win £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to I White.

Sorry,Newborn!forthe

A film star’s face, a sportsman’s build, and Charismacharm;oozed from every single pore. My tact hides hidden cruelty, thoughtless Andharmwounded friends enduring scars they bore.

John Clark

Versus quality defence, your best bet is to take two finesses – a 75-per-cent chance. Win the club, draw trumps finishing in dummy and play a spade to the jack. Here, the spade finesse succeeds and you are taking the diamond finesse for the overtrick. Making six.

The family have asked me so I must Attempt this daunting task and do my best. Perceived as friend, I’m humbled by their Itrust.only hope my words lay him to rest.

A proverbial twinkle in your daddy’s eyes, No doubt (although quite conceivably not), A spurt of lust and there you were, my pet –

I White

But so glad you’ve now caught your baby Readybreath,for the next stage of life’s journey –To Shhhh!death!I’m

I, too, have been controlled and made to Completelyfeel worthless. God-like, he reigned to guide Inferior beings, like dogs, to stay at heel. How difficult to satisfy the truth and family Deliveredpride.ofmy burden, I relax. The few who mourn him slowly turn their backs.

(3) Practical leap.

AndBegot!now

COMPETITION No 286 Like the swifts, summer pudding came and went. Now it’s the turn of the Christmas cannonball. You are invited to write a poem called Pudding, in any sense. 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 286’, by Thursday 20th October.

Note: change dummy’s diamonds to A Q 9 (swapping the nine and the eight with East) and now the elimination line is 100 per cent. If West hops up with the jack this time, you can cover with dummy’s queen. East may win the king, but a second diamond will not help this time, as dummy’s ace-nine will be

Sweet voices calling, sirens in the sea: ‘Colin, Colin!’ (That’s my first name, you ‘Pullknow?)over, Colin – let my spirits go! Open the parcel!’ Fevered visions whirled –Of sherbet fountains, silken dancing girls –‘More than my job’s worth!’ (Now I’m riled, a Anyway,bit.)mate – you’ll need to sign for it.

– at last! – here you palpably are, Sweet, purple, pulsing little people-spawn, Wrinkled as an old plum, plucked from my womb –

‘It wouldn’t bother me – I can sleep anywhere’

Kipper Williams

‘Apart from that, what else did you get out of three years at university?’

‘I can’t discuss individual cases’

92 The Oldie October 2022

The Oldie October 2022 93 UK Travel

Overseas Travel

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Free at last, worse luck

five per cent. I now wish I’d never had my cataract removed – I certainly didn’t need the operation. I’m afraid cataract surgery is becoming big business these days. And if you do decide to go ahead, don’t necessarily go to the clinic your optician recommends. She may well get a cut of the fee. And try another optometrist who may give you different advice.

My travelphobic husband

Have you tried your local WhatsApp group? There might be some nice locals around who feel like you – and that would mean you had something else in common. There are, too, lots of websites for people in your position. So you should be able easily to find someone online. Or why not go on a cruise? Or a package holiday? You’d meet lots of people … and there’d almost certainly be the odd single you could team up with. Even if this would be your idea of hell (as it is mine), these are two good hunting grounds for likeminded singles, and for your next holiday you could go à deux. However, I suspect that once you started talking about going off on your own, your husband might get a bit more interested. As long as you did all the arranging, might his phobia lessen, do you think?

Should I go under the knife?

I’m 80 and I have been told by my optician that I should have cataract surgery. I have argued that I can read, I don’t drive and it’s pointless, but she is pretty insistent. She says it’s completely safe and she even recommended a clinic where I could get them done. What do you think?

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To order a print subscription, go to subscribe@theoldie.co.uk or call 0330 333 0195

Surely the correspondent seeking a gigolo (August issue) would be better advised to buy a vibrator? Much easier to find than a ‘very nice, kind, single man’ and very effective. She should learn the art of self-pleasuring before it’s too late! C R, by email

Brenda, Bexhill

I know just what you mean. But remember she was only trying to be helpful and kind and thinking she was helping you to look on the bright side. She has yet to learn that one person’s ‘bright side’ may not be so bright for another person. It’s virtually impossible to imagine being old if you’ve never experienced it. Try, if you can, to be pleased that your granddaughter, even if misguided, has her heart in the right place – and it may be partly your loving influence in her life that has helped her to be the positive and caring person she is.

I feel so angry. I was complaining to my granddaughter about being old – with all my aches and pains – and encouraging her to do what she wanted when she was young, and she said that she envied me because now I was free to do what I wanted and no longer had to cook, look after children or work at a gruelling job. What she couldn’t understand was that I liked looking after my children and grandchildren and working! Now all that’s over, I feel bereft.

All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.

My husband suffers from quite severe anxiety, which makes it impossible for him to travel beyond a radius of about 60 minutes’ drive from home, or to sleep away from home. He is content, having travelled widely in his working life. I would love to go away and spend time by the sea, but I am not good with my own company – and everyone I know has either a partner or a travel companion. I belong to a book group and also do voluntary work, so I do meet people. I would love to meet someone in a similar situation. Do you have any suggestions, please? Is there something like a dating site where people like me can get to know someone with a view to going on holiday with them? Perhaps have day trips out together before committing to sharing a room? Name and address supplied

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.

ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk

98 The Oldie October 2022

I’m not a doctor and I have always felt that the maxim ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is sometimes a good one to apply to medical matters. What does she mean – that the operation is completely safe? It’s not. True, only about five per cent of subjects have any problems after cataract surgery, but that’s still one in 20. The eyes are very sensitive, and why risk losing vision or, even worse, going blind? I have to say I speak from experience as one of those

To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or a single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet or mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.

Sex with someone I love

It’s certainly worth a try, but many people find that a huge part of the pleasure of sex is not just the act itself, but the foreplay and sheer warmth and friendliness of feeling skin on skin and having a real human partner’s arms around them. But it’s certainly worth a go. And vibrators come in all shapes and sizes – apparently these days you can buy some that actually ejaculate!

Ask Virginia virginia ironside

Paul Bailey admires the Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro Has William Cook outgrown Hermann Hesse’s work? Biography & Memoir History Nature Current Affairs Fiction Music Autumn 2022 | www.theoldie.co.uk Autumn round-up of the reviews Review of Books

A Reading Agency’s survey earlier this year found that more than a quarter of adults read more during lockdown and that they kept up this practice once it was over. (What the charity also discovered, however, was that more than 11 per cent of adults never read at all. Depressing.)

Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Henrietta Maria: Conspirator Warrior and Phoenix Queen by Leanda de Lisle

Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jasper Gibbons

12 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

SHORT STORIES

WILSONBOBILLUSTRATION:COVER

Issue 61 Autumn 2022

I was rather jealous of the winner of the Reading Agency’s World Book Night’s competition – apart from a bundle of books they also won a year’s supply of Magnum ice cream. That would have been very welcome during the recent heat waves. World Book Night, held on Shakespeare’s birthday, was started a decade ago to promote the enjoyment of books – the adult equivalent of World Book Day, which encourages children to read. The Reading Agency’s ‘vision is for a world where everyone is reading their way to a better life’. The charity works with public libraries, care homes, colleges and prisons (one cringes at the memory of the – fortunately short-lived – ban on books in prisons during the coalition government. What were they thinking?).

The Celts: A Sceptical History by Simon Jenkins

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 3 18 NATURE 21 AUTHORSFORGOTTEN William Cook on Hermann Hesse 22 MISCELLANEOUS26FICTION30MUSIC

Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen

Elizabeth Taylor’s Kiss and Other Brushes with Hollywood by David Wood and Charles Elton

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

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

Review of Books

For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

British Traitors: Betrayal and Treachery in the Twentieth Century by Gordon Kerr

Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray by Paul Thompson and John Watterson

Carry on Regardless by Caroline Frost

And there’s more good news for publishers and book shops. I don’t know how many – if any – Oldie readers use TikTok (the video-sharing app loved by teenagers and young adults) but the section of the app devoted to novels since 2020, BookTok, has spurred huge rises in physical sales. A recent article in the Guardian quoted Simon & Schuster senior editor Molly Crawford: ‘BookTok’s influence on the book industry is one of the most hopeful things I’ve seen,’ she said. ‘TikTok should be seen as the modern distilling of the purest form of bookselling.’

Publisher:Waller James Pembroke

But if you don’t want to turn to BookTok for advice on what books to read, I suggest you look inside this supplement – there are sections on history, biography, nature, fiction... I am sure you will find something of interest.

Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected by Matthew Dennison

Read on ...

Design: Lawrence Bogle

Liz Anderson

Paul Bailey on Alice Monro

4 HISTORY CURRENT AFFAIRS

Survey of London: Whitechapel, Volumes 54 and 55 by Peter Guillery

Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Editor:PembrokeLiz Anderson

The Shortest History of Greece by James Heneage

Beryl: In Search of Britain’s Greatest Athlete by Jeremy Wilson

History

CONSPIRACY ON CATO STREET

What is the significance of the word ‘femina’? When precious manuscripts were being destroyed by iconoclastic mobs or, more chillingly, by the purging of libraries during the English Reformation, those marked ‘femina’ indicated a woman’s authorship, ie, not worth keeping.

Margery Kempe, may be familiar, others less so. ‘She isn’t the first to describe the reappearance of Kempe’s manuscript, but she tells the story well, among many other catchy and varied‘Oneexamples.’ofFemina’s great strengths,’ Katherine Harvey wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘is that it is not just a collection of medieval heroines, although there are inspirational stories aplenty in its pages, but also a readable and wide-ranging account of the Middle Ages — with the women put back in — that forces us to look at familiar stories in new ways.’

‘In many instances Ramirez retells episodes that, within a specialist field, are already well studied,’ Myerson concluded, yet ‘with such a range of characters there will be something new here for everyone. And it’s about time these stories had a wider audience. They’ve been waiting long enough.’

In 1820, 13 impoverished radicals were arrested in Cato Street before they could enact their plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, and his entire Cabinet. They had been betrayed by a government spy. Some were hanged and beheaded, others were transported for life. ‘Gatrell’s intense study of the men’s lives – and what brought them to believe that violently overthrowing the government could solve their problems – is forensic and vivid in its detail,’ wrote Stephen Bates in BBC History Magazine, while for DH Robinson, in the Critic, ‘this is micro-history at its richest and its most penetrating. More than giving us a social history in a few lives, Gatrell has told us a human story with the depth of a novel.’

Ramirez recounts the forgotten lives of some of these medieval women and the scholars’ rediscovery of their records. She ‘takes a broad scope’, Eleanor Myerson noted in the Spectator, ‘both in time and geography, ranging from the 7th to the 15th centuries and crossing from East Anglia to the Rhineland to Krakow’. Some of these, such as

A TALE OF LIBERTY AND REVOLUTION IN LONDONREGENCY

FEMINA

A NEW HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES, THROUGH THE WOMEN WRITTEN OUT OF IT

JANINA RAMIREZ

VIC GATRELL Cambridge University Press, 485pp, £25

Another fan was Ferdinand Mount, in the London Review of Books: ‘Vic Gatrell tells this sorry story with zest and sympathy’ and the book follows the trail of his Hanging Tree (1994), City of Laughter (2006) and The First Bohemians (2013) in its capturing Regency London ‘in all its gaiety, violence, sexual sprawl and, above all, searing poverty. His trigger finger trembles with passion as he takes aim at the romantic curriclesand-crinolines view of the period… Gatrell says at the beginning of his salutary and often startling account that “a book of this kind cannot help speaking to the present”.’

Little, Brown, 549pp, £25

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE

4 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022

The despotic rulers of ancient Egypt’s 18th Dynasty (c.1550-1295 BC), who included Nefertiti and the boy king Tutankhamun, considered themselves a master race – and with good reason. Thanks, first, to their armies’ mastery of the war chariot and the composite bow – a combination de la Bédoyère compares to the tanks and dive bombers that spearheaded Hitler’s blitzkrieg – and secondly, to their ultra-efficient bureaucracy, they lorded it over millions of oppressed subjects who regarded them as gods. Much of their wealth was squandered on the sort of

Master race: the ancient Egyptians

For Robert Poole, in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘there is no better guide to metropolitan high and low life than Gatrell’. Poole called the book ‘an enthralling classic of London history’ in which Gatrell ‘eschews what he sees as the stifling pieties of labour history in favour of individual character and lived detail, professing a Dickensian empathy for the “muddled attitudes, slogans and resentments” of ordinary Londoners … Cato Street is underdog history at its purest.’

Establishment figures dance round a maypole, referencing the conspirators’ execution

WH Allen, 464pp, £22

PHARAOHS OF THE SUN HOW EGYPT’S DESPOTS AND DREAMERS DROVE THE RISE AND FALL OFDYNASTYTUTANKHAMUN’S

TOBY WILKINSON Picador, 476pp, £25

TUTANKHAMUN’STRUMPET

bring him [Vrba] to prominence as a name to rank with Levi, Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler.’

John Murray, 400pp, £20

THE ESCAPE ARTIST

Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook noted that while at Auschwitz, Rosenberg ‘got a job as an assistant registrar, then as camp clerk, which meant he saw almost everything. As a result Freedland’s book is rich in the kind of details that haunt you long after you have turned the last page.’ Rosenberg later testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and was interviewed for the cinema documentary Shoah. ‘His life makes for an enormously moving story. Now, thanks to Freedland’s impeccable research and immersive storytelling, he has the biography that he deserves.’Inhisreview for the Guardian, Blake Morrison declared that Freedland’s gripping book sets out to

On April 7, 1944, a young Slovak called Walter Rosenberg, who later took the name of Rudolf Vrba, and his friend Fred Wetzler became the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz.

‘Rule, Nostalgia announces Woods as one of the most interesting new historians of her generation, whose best days lie (thankfully) before her,’ wrote Dan Jones in his Sunday Times review. ‘Smartly she writes her story in reverse, revealing a longing for the good old days –misapprehendedmostly–asan imaginative seam running all the way from the culture wars of the 2020s to the Reformation in the 1530s... While she often seems exasperated by nostalgia as a brake on reason and progress, she has a sympathetic ear for her sources.’Lesseffusive was Richard Vinen, in the Literary Review, who thought Woods can be ‘subtle’ despite having ‘a taste for sweeping generalisation’, and that her book contains ‘some padding, repetition and stating the bleedingHistorianobvious’.andformer politician

Tristram Hunt reviewed the book for the Financial Times, finding that ‘among the book’s most accomplished sections’ are those dissecting the late Victorian fears of urban degeneration and a widespread ‘anxiety about anxiety’, which a nascent advertising industry ruthlessly played on. ‘“Is the Fall of England’s Greatness Near At Hand?” asked the makers of Eno’s Fruit Salt, linking a sluggish gut to the end of Empire.’ Although there is ‘precious little comparative analysis’ – what about Trump’s Make America Great Again? – ‘the framing is consistently interesting and, with it, a clear-sighted warning about the dangers posed to democracy from a culture of perpetual nostalgia.’

THE MAN WHO BROKE OUT OF AUSCHWITZ TO WARN THE WORLD

vainglorious monuments Shelley mocked in his sonnet Ozymandias, heedless of the custom by which such follies were promptly looted by their successors.DelaBédoyère is acknowledged as an authority on ancient Rome and her army, for which there is an abundance of primary sources. No such material exists for ancient Egypt. Consequently, as Gerard DeGroot noted in the Times, ‘it’s not an easy story to tell, given the impossibility of probing deeply the personalities of the pharaohs. The appeal of this book rests instead on those temples, but that’s not enough to sustain interest. Unfortunately, de la Bédoyère’s determination to chart the reign of each pharaoh results in a book that is longer than it needs to be. This is basically the story of “a fabulously wealthy absolute monarchy that ruled without restraint”. The impact of that simple but important point is diluted by the author’s insistence on bombarding the reader with unnecessary ephemera.’

JONATHAN FREEDLAND

THE STORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT IN 100 OBJECTS

WH Allen, 400pp, £20

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 5

A story of Britain told in reverse

let this cavil stop you buying the book.’The Sunday Times’s James McConnachie reckoned that ‘What ties everything together is a feeling of vibrant presence. This book thrums with life … To the ancient Egyptians, a pharaoh’s tomb was a “resurrection machine” [and] through the artefacts they used we can sense the lives they lived. I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people.’

RULE, NOSTALGIA A BACKWARD HISTORY OF BRITAIN HANNAH ROSE WOODS

History

A hundred years ago the archaeologist Howard Carter, in a scene you couldn’t make up, experienced a miracle. By the flickering light of a candle he glimpsed a treasure trove that had lain undisturbed for three millennia. The ‘wonderful things’ he saw would ensure that the insignificant boy king Tutankhamun would become the pharaoh that everyone knows. Indeed it was probably insignificanceTutankhamun’sthatsavedhis tomb from grave Recognisedrobbers.asone of the world’s leading Egyptologists, Professor Toby Wilkinson believes that we can learn more from the artefacts buried with the boy king than from Tutankhamun himself. In the Times, David Aaronovitch reminded readers that objects, like pictures, ‘tell a story … Yet I do wonder whether anyone pointed out that 100 is an awful lot of objects [and] the need to break up the narrative to fit in another object means that some of his arguments never really develop. Even so, don’t

‘Drawing on Vrba’s memoirs, and on conversations with his first wife and his widow, Jonathan Freedland has put together both the story of Vrba’s two years in Auschwitz and – perhaps most interestingly – the long saga of the aftermath of his escape,’ wrote Caroline Moorehead in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘It is written almost as fiction and moves at a great pace. The teenage Vrba, strong, fit, clever, resourceful and at various moments extremely lucky, endured every bleak aspect of the camp, from the selection ramps to the mortuary, the construction sites to the storehouse for the possessions taken from the Jews as they arrived.’

BURIED AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM IN BRITAIN

BERLIN

Bodley Head, 318pp, £25

studying ancient bones, and gushing, TV-style, about her personal reaction to skeletons that often bear marks of abuse and physical – even lethal –violence,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Unsurprisingly, Buried is written like a TV series. Eight episodic chapters look at different types of burial practice in Roman and early medieval Britain, each beginning with a single unusual case study before spinning out a broader story.’ Her book ‘is both accessible and expert, wears deep learning lightly, and provides a solid introduction to an often murky age in Britain’s early medieval past.’

‘Capturing the history, people and spirit of Berlin, arguably the beating heart of Europe, can be a tricky proposition,’ wrote Ian MacGregor in the Spectator. ‘McKay has wisely kept to analysing the city through the prism of the last century – or at least from the end of the Great War to the end of the Cold War... The cataclysm befalling Berliners in 1945 plays in sharp contrast to McKay’s vivid descriptions of the decadence of the Weimar years, and the multi-layered approach gives us fresh understanding. To have uncovered so many previously unknown characters and fascinating anecdotes is especially admirable when research trips to archives at home and abroad were a rarity during lockdown... the haunting accounts of Berlin up to 1945 left me thirsting for a similar rich treatment of the Cold War era.’ MacGregor wondered whether there is a chance of a sequel. ‘With the zeal he brings to his research, McKay would be my first choice to write it.’

Sunday Times reviewer Emma Duncan was not overwhelmed. ‘On television, Roberts’s fetching countenance and eager manner, along with liberal helpings of skeletons and jewellery, make this material digestible,’ she wrote. ‘In book form it is harder to swallow.’ She ‘questions the idea, embedded in our national consciousness by Dark Age historians, of an invasion by northern Europeans from which the English nation emerged... It’s a shame, then, that there’s no connection between this interesting thesis and the bulk of the book. The reason seems to be that the digs in which Roberts was personally involved had no bearing on it. If so, a book with less of her and more of others’ research might have been a more interesting one.’

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 7

THE SIEGE OF LOYALTY HOUSE

A CIVIL WAR STORY

JESSIE CHILDS

For three years from 1643 to 1645, the occupants of Basing House, a Tudor castle near Basingstoke which was owned by the Catholic marquess of Winchester, held out against Cromwell’s roundheads. ‘Sheltered within the massive earthwork fortifications were Roman Catholics and Anglicans, soldiers and architects, actors and apothecaries, people who burned with righteous anger at what was happening to their beloved country, and those who couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over,’ explained Kathryn Hughes in her review for the Guardian. ‘The one thing they all had in common was that they were nominally king’s men, on the side of Charles I in his bloody and seemingly endless struggle against his own parliament.’ Hughes praised Childs for ‘her ability to deliver first-rate scholarship in really luscious prose, uses Basing as a microcosm through which to view the civil war in all its fog and mess’.

David Aaronovitch, reviewing it for the Times, said that ‘from its early pages it feels as though Sinclair McKay was born to write this book’. His writing is ‘vivid and sometimes even beautiful. Although he is helped by his access to contemporary records or first-hand recollections, his own observations and summaries seem always apposite and wise. The sense of the city and its people is conveyed. To anyone who knows Berlin a little and is fascinated by it, but would like to understand it better, this is a wonderful aid.’

Alice Roberts is a professor at Birmingham University known for the BBC archaeology programme Digging For Britain. ‘She treads a skilful line between basic historical scene-setting, detailed discussion of the scientific techniques used in

‘Raising a Flag over the Reichstag’, photo taken during the Battle of Berlin, 2 May 1945

Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £20

LIFE AND LOSS IN THE CITY THAT SHAPED A CENTURY SINCLAIR MCKAY Viking, 437pp, £20

ALICE ROBERTS

Historian John Adamson, writing in the Catholic Herald, was enthralled by the book, describing it as the ‘sort of coup de théâtre that only the most brilliant archival research can pull off ... Few books on the Civil War convey so powerfully the human cost ... Rarely has such fine-grained focus on a single event been used so effectively to open up wider perspectives on that fractious age. And as an account of what it was like to live through the bloodiest and most traumatic decade

History

The book provides a solid introduction to an murkyoftenage

Ebury, 316pp, £20

NOMADS

THE STORY OF ELIZABETH I AND CATHERINE DE MEDICI ESTELLE PARANQUE

DeGroot found the book to be ‘an unashamedly impressionistic paean to nomadic life, a bit of history interwoven with travelogue and memoir. His prose mirrors the nomadic life: it wanders across a landscape of 12,000 years, occasionally stopping to graze, constantly changing direction. Dates and precise places are seldom provided because they are unimportant to those of no fixed abode.’

Nomads is ‘a recovered history’, wrote Hugh Thompson in the Spectator, in which Sattin attempts ‘to retrieve their considerable contribution to our past and, sometimes, present, even though their numbers are much reduced... It does not claim to be comprehensive, and is all the better for it; instead, Sattin weaves a deft path through only those elements that interest him... This is a book that does not labour in the fields but gallops full stretch towards the horizon.’

JAMES VINCENT Faber, 418pp, £18.99

With the French Revolution, the quest for conformity concluded with the creation of the kilogram. Whatever is being measured, ‘it is Le Grand K that sits, invisible, on the other side of the scales’, Vincent explained. Except in 1988 scientists discovered that a fingerprint has a weight, meaning the kilogram was a fingerprint’s-weight out: 50 micrograms. The requisite adjustment was made. ‘This is an erudite and elegant read, challenging in parts but highly accessible,’ Simon Humphreys concluded in the Mail on Sunday. ‘Delightful.’

in England’s history, it has few rivals.’ In the Literary Review, Linda Porter wrote that ‘this heroic story has not been told before in such detail and with such an eye for the tragedies of civil war. Childs handles a remarkable amount of source material with masterly skill.’

‘Darnley Portrait’ (detail) of Elizabeth I

In Literary Review, Bijan Omrani described this book as ‘a sweeping history of nomadism from prehistory to the modern age, but in spirit it is more than this. It is also a poetic reminder that humans should not be seduced into the slothful ease of passing all of their lives within four walls, rejoicing in the accumulation of material wealth.’ Gerard DeGroot made a similar point in his review for the Times. ‘Nomadic cultures are most vibrant when mobile and decline when the temptation to settle becomes irresistible,’ he wrote. ‘The lessons of struggle, of surviving on the

BLOOD, FIRE AND GOLD

Sattin’s nomadicmirrorsprosethelife

This is ‘a marvellous story of a relationship between two powerful women in an age when females were believed to be unsuited to the exercise of government,’ wrote Linda Porter in the Times. ‘For many readers its interest will lie in its unfamiliarity, and it certainly does fill a gap in a neglected area of 16th-century history.’ While most historians focus on the relationship between Elizabeth and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, Paranque ‘in a story written with verve and passion... shows us the other woman in Elizabeth’s life’. Catherine’s ‘attempts to forge a marriage between one of her sons and the English queen form the backbone of Paranque’s book.’

Daily Telegraph reviewer Paul Lay found it compelling: ‘Childs reveals brilliantly the world of the Civil War in the grain of sand that is Basing House. She captures the horror, the courage, the sheer humanity of those, both besiegers and besieged, who endured the long, desperate lulls punctuated by intense episodes of visceral violence.’ Not only is the book ‘deeply researched’, wrote Leanda de Lisle in the Times, but ‘Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic. The story ends with Winchester’s son, Charles, who built a lodge overlooking the ruins, boozing his nights away under the reign of the restored Charles II and running hounds in torchlit hunts over the “bone-riddled ground”.’

Metrology ‘is a uniquely human invention that has evolved considerably over time’, Chris Allnutt explained in the Financial Times.‘As an account of the lengths humanity has gone to in the name of measurement, this quirky history is inch-perfect,’ he declared. ‘Vincent is a nimble storyteller, and a sympathetic one,’ Madoc Cairns wrote in the Guardian, while Tom Whipple in the Times described it as ‘a superb history of measurement’. Chris Stokel-Walker in New Scientist described it as ‘gripping … a pacy romp through time and space’.

no accident that ‘dead pharaohs would be buried with measure-sticks in hand’, Cairns noted. ‘Early on, the right to assess — and enforce — measurement became a concomitant of authority. We call them rulers for a reason.’ Today, food chains could not function without scientific, standardised measurements.

hoof, are forgotten when possessions anchor them to place.’

Why did it matter that in earlier centuries man used his own body as a tool of measurement, or that land was measured by the area that could be ploughed in a day? Survival, and the key to that was standardisation. It was

History

BEYOND MEASURE THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF MEASUREMENT

No fixed abode: surviving on the hoof

THE WANDERERS WHO SHAPED OUR WORLD ANTHONY SATTIN John Murray, 368pp, £25

8 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022

Allen Lane, 368pp, £25

Walter Yeo, injured at Jutland, was the first man to receive plastic surgery, 1917

History

For Matthew Dennison, in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Paranque’s account of Elizabeth and Catherine’s alternately fond and feisty interaction – a relationship at times overtly hostile, at others apparently affectionate, especially during Catherine’s protracted attempts to marry Elizabeth to each of her three eldest surviving sons in turn – offers readers an alternative and engaging biography of the great Tudor queen... As Paranque shows, both women faced similar challenges, largely based on gender; both would prove themselves as adroit as the most able male rulers of the period.’ Dennison’s main complaint was that the author’s prose style ‘repeatedly... suggests TV documentary voiceovers’, while at other times it ‘suggests a historical novelette’, and ‘sometimes the tone is syrupy’, though ‘for some, Paranque’s style will be accessible and unpretentious’.

Disaster, 1946: the Wilson cloud, in the second nuclear test at Bikini Atoll

The Guardian’s Wendy Moore said that Gillies ‘helped thousands of men to literally face the world again’. She

ATOMS AND ASHES FROM BIKINI ATOLL TO FUKUSHIMA SERHII PLOKHY

Imagine a world where electricity is so cheap and plentiful, it is free. That’s what the physicists who devised nuclear energy dreamed of. ‘The boundless enthusiasm of the physicists is rather endearing if one ignores the perils that came with their dreams,’ Gerard DeGroot wrote in the Times. ‘Yet as Serhii Plokhy demonstrates in this superbly crafted but enormously frightening book, those perils cannot be ignored.’

Plokhy, a Ukrainian professor at Harvard and author of Chernobyl, examines six nuclear disasters that together expose the dangerous naivety of nuclear ambition. ‘His case studies are exquisitely rendered with just the right level of technical information to explain the problems,’ DeGroot continued. ‘The suspense of reactor crews struggling to find a solution to meltdown makes this book weirdly entertaining … until it dawns on the reader that these are real

‘Nor are we likely to have experienced our last nuclear disaster,’ Robin McKee noted in the Guardian, ‘in this grim but expertly concise account of what happens when atom plants go bad’. Richard Lea in the TLS argued that ‘Plokhy offers little context to the tens of thousands of people who died as a result of these six disasters … 1.3 million deaths each year are caused by road traffic and 8.7 million can be attributed to the air pollution from fossil fuels.’

Philip Thomas made a similar point in the Literary Review, citing a study showing that after Chernobyl the worst affected would have lost only three months’ life expectancy by staying put. ‘By way of comparison, Londoners are currently giving up four and a half months of their lives to air pollution.’ And far from being free, Lea added, ‘UK citizens will be paying a premium for electricity generated by the £23 billion white elephant at Hinkley Point for years to come.’

THE FACEMAKER ONE SURGEON’S BATTLE TO MEND THE DISFIGURED SOLDIERS OF WORLD WAR 1 LINDSEY FITZHARRIS

But is nuclear power and the proliferation of reactors the solution? The author categorically thinks not. ‘For all the confident pronouncements and safety guarantees, the awesome power of nuclear energy doesn’t always behave in ways that are predicted,’ Jennifer Szalai cautioned in the New York Times

Allen Lane, 315pp, £20

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 9

incidents, real people and real deaths.’‘Plokhy excels in unpacking the human and systemic factors that contribute to nuclear disasters,’ Alexandra Witze wrote in Nature, describing it as ‘a cautionary tale … with plenty of opportunities for bad decisions’. Lawrence Freedman in the Financial Times described it as ‘an enthralling study of the atomic age and its perils’. Ray Monk in the New Statesman praised it as a ‘captivating and extremely timely book … facing as we are devastating and catastrophic climate change’.

In the New Statesman the brain surgeon Henry Marsh, recalling how reluctant some surgeons are to share their expertise, wrote that what was most praiseworthy about Gillies was ‘his skill as a leader in building a multidisciplinary team – a quality that is quite rare in surgeons, who are often intensely egotistic. He was very much ahead of his time in this respect.’

thought he was not better known because his work had been ‘overshadowed by the more familiar story of his cousin, Archibald McIndoe’, founder of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’ for burnt pilots in World War Two.In the Sunday Times Sebastian Faulks reminded readers that when Gillies began work, ‘plastic surgery was a new skill and had nothing to do with cosmetics. It was about giving a man back a jaw, a nose, cheeks, eye sockets and enough self-confidence to carry on living.’ He thought we could have done with fewer historical ‘digressions’ and more about Gillies himself, but conceded that Fitzharris’s ‘warmly engaged book will be part of any larger picture’.

On the Western Front British soldiers prayed for a ‘Blighty One’, a wound serious enough to ensure that they were sent home to receive treatment. ‘Serious’, but not disfiguring. Better to lose a limb than your face, and so become, as one victim put it, ‘an unlovely object’ – even to your nearest and dearest. Fortunately the cause of those whose faces had been ripped apart by modern weaponry was taken up by a visionary New Zealand-born surgeon called Harold Gillies, whose pioneering approach to plastic surgery before the days of antibiotics is the subject of Lindsey Fitzharris’s book, parts of which may leave some readers swallowing hard.

THE SOCIAL BETWEENDISTANCEUS

Wm Collins, 308pp, £20

HOW REMOTE POLITICS WRECKED BRITAIN

How many MPs have done jobs where their toilet breaks were timed, was a typical McGarvey jibe noted by Louise Perry in the Times. She praised his eloquence and wit, his novelistic eye for detail, but also his understanding of the way the poor he meets today are unlike Orwell’s: they don’t necessarily go short of food, they have too much of the wrong kind; they aren’t overworked, they don’t have enough work.

Perry still found McGarvey’s division of the world overly binary, either rich or poor — an objection echoed by John Harris in the Guardian, faced with the text’s ‘working class angels and toffeenosed villains’. He also found the SNP’s dire track record in handling inequalities, drug addiction and high death rates given a pass. But he welcomed the ‘potent’ and ‘discomfiting’ questions McGarvey raised and the ‘astute points’ he made about the way inequalities are perpetuated by people who do well out of them or perhaps are too

Knowles is a professor of sociology at Goldsmith’s, but instead of studying life on impoverished housing estates she has written up a walking tour

Symbol of London’s wealth: the Shard

SERIOUS MONEY WALKINGLONDONPLUTOCRATIC

mattress. The staff responded, wrote Segal, ‘with dogged good sense, dispensing Easter eggs, birthday cakes and second and third chances to people who hadn’t had them before’.Jasper Rees in the Telegraph was moved and elated by the book. ‘Don’t wait for the movie. There will be an avalanche of books about the pandemic. None will be as eyeopening or humane or moving as Lamb’s latest dispatch from the front line.’ Oh and, ‘miraculously, no one gets Covid’.

institutionalised even to recognise them. Much that goes wrong can be traced to lack of ‘proximity’, Harris argued, landing the poor in an ‘opaque administrative maze populated by faceless desk-killers’; the further away the desks, the crueller their Passionatedecisions.aboutthe book, Joyce McMillan of the Scotsman found it difficult to overstate the ‘eloquence and even the tenderness’ with which McGarvey describes the situation of some of those he met in Glasgow. She noted some of his solutions — ban private education, revive grass-roots unionism, achieve Scottish independence — while worrying that the speed of change is leaving some of his ideas behind. But the book was still timely, ‘vital and indispensable’, and she was roused to an angry eloquence of her own, describing our current ruling class, with their ‘complacency, lack of engagement, their blinkered ideology and deadhand managerialism’, as ‘the source of the social problems they so confidently locate elsewhere’.

Journalist Christina Lamb, veteran reporter of war worldwide, learning of the new residents of the Prince Rupert, asked to spend a year with them. As, Hephzibah Anderson wrote in the Guardian, ‘This humane, humble book is the result – a work of scrupulous reportage that offers no easy fixes, dispensing with sentimentality as it chronicles brutal backstories, tender dreams and profoundly disheartening patterns of behaviour while somehow finding grounds for real if slender hope.’

Reviewers were united in sensing the anger Darren McGarvey brings to this analysis of poverty, a sequel to his 2018 Orwell Prize-winning Poverty Safari, and in comparing it to The Road to Wigan Pier. But they also saw it as unique in being written by one who had experienced at first hand the poverty he was describing and, since becoming successful as a writer, broadcaster and rapper, had a different way of life to compare his old one to.

THE PRINCE RUPERT HOTEL FOR CHRISTINAHOMELESSTHELAMB

Allen Lane, 304pp, £25

Before Covid struck, the Prince Rupert hotel in Shrewsbury was a sumptuous, timber-framed four-star hostelry, 900 years old. But then it was forced to close and its management responded to the government’s ‘everyone in’ initiative – in which hotels were asked to take in rough sleepers during the pandemic. Before long, they had 100 rough sleepers living in their four-postered ensuite bedrooms.

Many of the rough sleepers were drug or alcohol addicts. Others were suffering from untreated mental illness. Many had not slept in a bed for decades. In the Sunday Times, Victoria Segal found, ‘The closequarters story Lamb tells in The Prince Rupert Hotel for the Homeless is messy, complicated and resistant to being tucked and smoothed away by housekeeping. Like the residents’ constantly overflowing baths, it leaks through the neat limits of feelgood “human interest” into something much darker and more resonant.’ The hotel lost more than 150 spoons after they were requisitioned for heating heroin, and a machete was found under a

10 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022

Current affairs

DARREN MCGARVEY Ebury, 400pp, £20

Shrewsbury’s Prince Rupert Hotel

CAROLINE KNOWLES

Veteran second-waver Joan Smith agreed. In her review in the Literary Review she laid it out: ‘A combination of the pill, challenges to conventional morality and the rapid expansion of higher education promised exciting change but produced a model of sexual relations that favoured men just as much as the old ‘Second-waveone.feminists spotted this a long time ago, but the case for the prosecution has seldom been expressed as clearly as it is in this invigorating book. Whether men and women differ in their expectations for cultural or biological reasons is a matter of fierce debate (Perry comes down on the side of the latter). But there is no doubt that telling women they have to prioritise men’s desires, shaped by an avalanche of misogynist porn, has had catastrophic effects.’

Konstantin Kisin was born in Moscow in 1982 and moved to the UK with his family at 13. Today he is a stand-up comedian and co-host of the popular online talk-show Triggernometry ‘The purpose of this book,’ he writes, ‘is to describe and diagnose the malaise afflicting western society and to offer solutions.’ Because of our guilt about colonialism and slavery, we have become reluctant to defend values such as capitalism and freedom of speech.

In his review for the Sunday Times, Tomiwa Owolade found Kisin’s ‘use of casual language and internet-speak... grating – there is an “FYI” in one passage; elsewhere he writes about how Einstein “slid into Freud’s DM”.’ But the stories he tells about the perils of journalism under Putin’s regime ‘vividly emphasise how lucky we are to live in a free and democratic society, and give Kisin’s book a powerful moral quality that ultimately makes it worth reading’.

Lucas, in his review for the Times, thought the book ‘helps readers to see [London’s super-rich] as less secretive, more troubling and a great deal sadder ... Serious Money has a serious mission. These vast fortunes, Knowles argues, do not just make people miserable. They are rotting the ties that hold our society together.’IntheCritic, Alex Diggins praised the book as ‘startling’ and ‘spirited’. The author ‘tramps through London like a later-day Charles Booth to examine the tidemarks wealth has left on the city and its surroundings. Walking, she believes, “exposes politics, like a sediment in the landscape”.’ She is ‘alert to arresting details. Night managers at Mayfair’s most prestigious hotels keep a sharp eye out for single women ordering green tea – the favoured drink of sex workers, one tells her... One manager tells her he was dispatched to fetch a patch of lawn for a suite as the guest’s Pekingese only shat on realHowever,grass.’

THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

Vast fortunes are rotting the ties that hold our togethersociety

As Gaby Hinsliff put it in her review for the New Statesman, it promoted the idea that: ‘Women should be able to have sex like men do. That’s the premise, at least, of much millennial feminism: that women should be free to do whatever they like with their bodies, without being shamed or judged or held to some hypocritical double standard. But is all this freedom really as liberating as it sounds?’

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 11

A NEW GUIDE TO SEX IN THE 21ST CENTURY

AN IMMIGRANT’S LOVE LETTER TO THE WEST

Current affairs

Polity, 200pp, £14.99

LOUISE PERRY

KONSTANTIN KISIN Constable, 210pp, £18.99

Douglas Murray reviewed the book for the Daily Telegraph and said that Kisin ‘organises his book around a number of key themes, including chapters on the ways in which language can be used to conceal truth and on why we need journalists, not activists... Kisin gives examples of the heroes of modern journalism, not least Anna Politkovskaya...[he] is right to feel a certain sickness of stomach at the way in which so much journalism in the West has ended up wasting the opportunities of freedom... [he] has written a lively and spirited book defending the society he is grateful to have found himself in... we are lucky to have him.’

through the global capital of the super-rich. ‘Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe,’ wrote Iain Sinclair, author of London Orbital, in the London Review of Books. ‘The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent ... Among the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan.’Edward

Diggins was troubled by ‘the voicelessness of her subjects... Knowles’s approach feels curiously like that of an archaeologist, or a safari guide: the rich appear as some long-vanished civilisation, an exotic species’. Nat Segnit, in the Times Literary Supplement, placed Knowles ‘in the tradition of the great literary walkers, from Walter Benjamin to Will Self’ and said that ‘her insistence on crossing the city on foot is, in an important sense, an act of resistance, an embrace of urban realities in defiance of the sad confinement of extreme wealth, its smoked-glass segregation’.

As Rachel Cooke noted in the Observer, Louise Perry’s book ‘in this cultural moment, could hardly be more radical’. Perry’s reexamination of the sexual revolution of the last half century (chiefly the freedom to have sex without the fear of pregnancy) finds that it is men who have benefited more than women.

Cooke hailed Perry’s book not as prudish or conservative but ‘daring and brave’, as ‘an act of insurrection, its seditiousness born not only of the pieties it is determined to explode but of the fact that it is also diligently researched and written in plain English’. It may, thought Cooke, ‘turn out to be one of the most important feminist books of its time’.

IMAGINE A CITY A PILOT SEES THE WORLD MARK VANHOENACKER

Mark Vanhoenacker is both a commercial airline pilot and an acclaimed writer. His latest book is, wrote Melanie Reid in the Times, ‘a memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book, at its heart a moving account of personal unbelonging’.

Vanhoenacker had a deeply religious Catholic upbringing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, his father a former priest and his mother a lay missionary. Woven between his memories of childhood are meditations on the cities he has visited in his long journeys as a 747 pilot. Reid admired the way these strands, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, come together in the book: ‘Yet in middle age he finds that Pittsfield, the place he was desperate to leave, is increasingly becoming home to him again, a circle nearing completion. He ends the book with a pilgrimage to his old house, accompanied by his husband (also Mark) and the owners allow him to visit his bedroom, “so tiny that I can hardly believe it, or understand how it could hold all the memories that lift now like startled birds, and bank and part around where Mark and I stand in the narrow doorway”.’

Yale, 422pp, £25

Chatto & Windus, 404pp, £16.99

giving a proper sense of a woman with striking gifts and talents identifiably hers’.

ADVENTURER THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GIACOMO CASANOVA

LEO DAMROSCH

Jane Morris, with her wavy cloud of black hair, pouting lips and silently mysterious expression, became the embodiment of the mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal. Married to the bouncy polymath William but inamorata of the sultry philanderer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane, daughter of an Oxford ostler, is seen but rarely heard. Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s new book examines the Morris domestic set-up and attempts to plumb the depths of the woman described by Henry James as ‘a figure cut out of a missal – an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity’.

HOW WE MIGHT LIVE AT HOME WITH JANE AND WILLIAM MORRIS SUZANNECOOPERFAGENCE

In the Literary Review, art historian Tanya Harrod thought that the author had done very well, against the odds, ‘in restoring some reality to our view of Jane Morris,

In the Times Literary Supplement, Jonathan Buckley hailed an ‘exceptionally curious and widely read observer’ and found that in the end, the human city for Vanhoenacker is more present as an imaginative archetype than a real place. ‘to an extent Imagine a City is a record of the multifarious ways in which the real world has substantiated the fictional’.

In the Times, Laura Freeman thought she’d done a good job given the constraints of pinning down a legend. ‘This is a book of guesses and whispers. Fagence Cooper asks many open-ended questions. “Was

In the Times Literary Supplement, Lisa Hilton noted that ‘this latest biography places Casanova in a particular 18-century subculture, Jane embodied Pre-Raphaelitemid-Victorianthefeminineideal

Jane Morris, photographed in 1865

12 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Biography & memoir

But the author of the fannycornforthblogspot ‘absolutely loved’ the book: ‘Jane was not just the passive observer of her own life [but] I was still surprised by her laughter, which was “unforgettable”, and exactly how active she was in the creation and management of her life, art and legacy.’ This after all is the woman who, when she gave a young poet a jar of her quince jam, was told by him that it was like ‘receiving it from the hands of Helen of Troy’.

Quercus, 536pp, £30

Jane flattered by the approach of the two London artists?” “How did she become so accomplished?” “What was Jane doing and feeling during this distressing time?”’

of personal freedom... Damrosch’s biography condenses a vast trove of Casanoviana into a well-researched, 400-page narrative that is most engaging on its subject’s catholic interests as an intellectual and on the milieus he traversed as an itinerant charlatan. But this is a life for a #MeToo-era readership, and the book’s first paragraph posts a trigger warning: Casanova’s “career as a seducer... is often disturbing and sometimes very dark”.’

that of the “adventurer”: chancers who tumbled across Europe living on their wits, exploiting the rigid social hierarchies of their times to their own advantage. Not all adventurers were libertines, but a growing belief in the rationality of pleasure and the right to resist conventional mores provided justification for a new kind of individuality, which Casanova superlatively embodied.’

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Any life of Casanova has to compete with his memoirs

Biography & memoir

Laura Freeman, in the Times, said that the book gave her mixed feelings. ‘Reading Damrosch’s stern but measured book, I went from fancying Casanova, to hating him, to pitying him. There’s no fool like an old fool and no man so lonely as the Priapus who can’t get it up. Good, bad, in flight or in flagrante, Giacomo Casanova, scourge of 18th-century husbands, is never less than compelling.’

So how will this supersonic entrepreneur fare now? In the Irish Times Frank Dillon recalled that ‘his empire almost crashed in the 2008 financial crisis, saved by a major Government contract for Space X, his rocket company’. He seems uncharacteristically hesitant about Twitter. Perhaps he’s taken his foot off the pedal at last.

Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour has been the reigning queen of fashion for decades, famous the world over for her terrifyingly exacting standards and for wearing sunglasses, inside and outside, at all times. Reviewing Amy Odell’s biography of Wintour, Hadley Freeman wondered in the Guardian what it was all about: what lay behind the giant shades? ‘No other magazine editor has ever held such fascination for the public. But why?’ Odell puts it down to sexism. ‘If a man did her job as well and with similar affectations, his discipline and commitment would

In the New Statesman, Will Dunn offered this assessment of the world’s richest man: ‘More than anyone else on earth, Musk is a creature of the great boom in equities. Through calculation or conviction, he offered the most exuberant promises in a market that already brimmed with confidence.’ Repeatedly referring to Musk as a ‘genius’ and a ‘visionary’, Vlismas, said Dunn, ‘contributes to the myth of the exceptional individual, a figure that is useful to the narratives that drive markets in good times’.

Casanova by his brother Francesco

ANNA THE BIOGRAPHY AMY ODELL

‘There could hardly be a better time for a new biography of Musk,’ said Tom Knowles in the Times. ‘Sadly, Risking It All fails to deliver anything new or insightful about its subject.’ Maybe this is a bit unfair, because Knowles conceded that sports-writer Michael Vlismas, at school in Pretoria with Musk, does explain how out of place his nerdy

Private Eye’s reviewer thought Vlismas had spent ‘too much time on bonkers research’, hence his inability to decide whether Musk was a genius ‘to compare with da Vinci and Columbus’ or ‘little more than a monomaniac chancer’.

Jonathan Ball Publishers, 244pp, £14.99

ELON MUSK RISKING IT ALL MICHAEL VLISMAS

little class-mate must have felt in apartheid era South Africa, where boys were schooled in manliness. No wonder he wanted to live in America, the home of innovation and technical advancement, a goal he achieved aged 17 thanks to qualifying for a Canadian passport as the son of a Canadian mother. Thereafter he never looked back.

Allen & Unwin, 447pp, £20

Elon Musk: genius or chancer?

Damrosch seems ‘cautious about appearing to defend a character whose behaviour might trouble or offend some contemporary readers’, she wrote, and ‘this exposes him to a degree of historical provincialism in which a certain strain of modern moral judgment is retroactively applied. Thus Casanova’s “behaviour was abusive in ways that are not just disturbing today but would have seemed disturbing to many people in his own day”. Indeed, but the 18th century was disturbed by quite different things – the usurping of sumptuary laws, for instance, or the false assumption of aristocratic birth.’AsJudith Thurman pointed out in her New Yorker review, ‘any life of Casanova has to compete with his memoirs, a masterpiece of reportage. His prose has the freshness of a live transmission. He was writing from the front lines of a secular revolution... for the principle

This inconclusiveness also perplexed Charles Lysaght in the Irish Times, ‘The author holds back from a verdict on whether it was altruistic idealism or pent-up anger against her own that motivated Rose Dugdale.’ To Dugdale’s son Ruairí it seemed simple – she had a compulsion to rebel against rules. Lysaght described the book as a ‘well-researched, balanced, somewhat diffuse biography’. O’Driscoll interviewed Dugdale, now aged 81, and living in care at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, as well as members of her family, friends of

‘Save Anna’ logo, created in response to retirement rumours

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ROSE DUGDALE SEAN O’DRISCOLL Sandycove, 368pp, £18.99

long. ‘The reader is left wondering whether the answer is as simple as Wintour having recognised early on that power is often most effective when it’s a caricature of itself, and that cultivating a Cruella de Vil persona would do her no harm at all.’

In the Telegraph, Lisa Armstrong mused on how she had survived so

her early life and IRA collaborators. Lysaght sought an answer to her motives: ‘Was it all, I wonder, her regimenting mother’s doing?’

Biography & memoir

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 15

HEIRESS, REBEL, VIGILANTE, BOMBER

THE STARMER PROJECT A JOURNEY TO THE RIGHT OLIVER EAGLETON

Verso, 240pp, £12.99

‘There’s a lot of dirt on Keir Starmer’ in this new biography, wrote Nick Clark in Socialist Worker. But Eagleton, the son of the Marxist philosopher Terry and a journalist at the New Left Review, ‘wants to do more than reel off Starmer’s crimes for the gratification of a defeated and desperate Labour left. He wants to discover the meaning of Starmer – what his leadership represents for the direction of the Labour Party and British politics.’ He concludes that ‘Starmer’s “pro-police, pro-army, anti-protester” agenda is “not merely a sop to Red Wall conservatives, but a consistent feature of his politics, born out of longstanding service to Britain’s deep

women who must not want to be writers and whose job it is to make sure that her full-fat latte and blueberry muffin (an item usually left uneaten) are waiting on her big, white desk every morning – are comprehensive to the point of tediousness.’Odell’sadmiring interviewees tell her that Wintour has exquisite taste and a ‘brilliant sense of humour’ but her reputation for coldness and for terrifying her underlings is glossed over. As is the ‘grimly hagiographic’ interview with Asma Al-Assad that her staff begged her not to run. Wintour eventually pulled the piece and pushed its author under the bus, her own reputation surviving miraculously intact.

Maguire, in the Times, ‘Eagleton writes elegantly –save for the occasional lapse into theoretical jargon. However, it’s when he turns reporter, searching through Starmer’s legal career, that he is most convincing... By the time of the 2011 riots, the lawyer who once defended the rights of acid house ravers to tune in and drop out oversaw [as Director of Public Prosecutions] 24-hour court sittings that tried teenagers at 3am and deported one rioter for stealing a single scoop of ice cream. Eagleton

Odell doesn’t seem to see the funny side of fashion

Forstate”.’Patrick

Keir Starmer: what does he stand for?

‘One of the frustrating aspects of Dugdale’s life is the unsolved mystery of when, how, or for that matter quite why, she made her violent lurch to the left,’ wrote Ben MacIntyre, in the Times. But O’Driscoll is candid: ‘I have been able to find no event or specific family dynamic that explains why Rose took such a different path.’

At the age of 17 in 1958, Rose Dugdale was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, one of the last of the debutantes. She read PPE at Oxford, where she shocked fellow students by breaking into the then gentlemen-only Student Union, dressed as a man. She obtained a PhD in economics and became increasingly radicalised, finding herself drawn to the IRA’s version of socialism. She drove a Lotus sports car collecting weapons to send across the water, and Special Branch began to take an interest in her. She moved to Ireland, to join the ‘armed struggle’ and together with bombmaker Jim Monaghan developed the Ballycroy 3-4 bomb which was used to blow up a barracks in Armagh in 1991 and exploded in front of the Baltic Exchange in London in 1992.

likely be celebrated.’ Freeman wasn’t so sure. ‘This is a very zeitgeisty point to make, but is it actually true?’Most British reviewers felt the question wasn’t really answered by a book which felt more like a defence of its subject than a deep exploration. Was Wintour simply a beautifully-dressed sphinx without a secret? Certainly Odell doesn’t seem to see the funny side of fashion. In the Observer, Rachel Cooke thought the author’s ‘utmost seriousness’ made it difficult not to laugh. ‘The author’s refusal to poke fun at anything, however ludicrous, is also the only reason I enjoyed her book. If the pages (and pages) she devotes to Wintour’s assistants – young

This is an account of eventfulZelensky’sthreeyearsinoffice

Short is ‘a fine wordsmith’, acknowledged Edward Lucas in the Times, and ‘as a chronicle of Putin’s public doings, the book is near faultless’. But the author’s ‘search for balance makes him oddly incurious

Putin is given the benefit of the doubt on many questions

and what is he really about?’ wondered Andrew Anthony in his review for the Guardian. ‘Those looking for answers to the Zelensky enigma will be disappointed by this hastily written and translated book, which bills itself as “A Biography”. Written by Serhii Rudenko, a Ukrainian political commentator, it’s not really a life story, but an account of his eventful three years in office.’ Its gossipy and sardonic style, he said, relied a lot on jabs and asides that only those already familiar with Ukraine’s political scene would be able to make sense of.

Volodomyr Zelensky: extraordinary man

Writing in the Times, Tom Ball agreed: ‘The stitches of this hurriedly fashioned book are glaringly on show. Translators Michael Naydan and Alla Parminova worked “around the clock” to get the book finished on deadline, say the publishers. I can believe it, given how syntactically and tonally alien much of the book is to standard English.’ He also faulted its meandering structure. ‘This is all the more frustrating because Zelensky is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary life tale.’

PUTIN HIS LIFE AND TIMES PHILIP SHORT Bodley Head, 864pp, £30

Washington Post reviewer Angela Stent (who is writing her own book about Putin) was more damning. ‘In his [Short’s] telling, the United States bears much of the blame for what Russia and Putin have become’, and he gives Putin ‘the benefit of the doubt on many questions where we may never know the answer’. However, ‘Short’s pointing the finger at the United States hardly excuses Putin’s aggression toward his neighbors, nor his increasingly draconian crackdown on his own population.’

16 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022

Nevertheless, some welcome details emerged – above all that Zelensky is not the ‘stainless paragon of Western fantasies’. Though he rode to power on a wave of disaffection with cronyish establishment politics, Zelensky has cronies of his own – and is indebted to a Ukranian-Cypriot-Israeli media billionaire who is banned from the US on suspicion of ‘significant corruption’. ‘The takeaways from this uneven book are that Ukraine is a flawed democracy and that Zelensky, despite his reformist rhetoric, is a product of the system.’

Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject.’ But he lets Putin ‘escape true responsibility, not for individual crimes, but for failing to transform Russia, instead reaching back to an arthritic mythical past, not forward to a different future’.

Biography & memoir

Vladimir Putin: aggressive

SERHII RUDENKO

ZELENSKY A BIOGRAPHY

describes him as the Cameron government’s “punisher-in-chief”. Starmer, who has a shorter temper and thinner skin than his unflappable public persona implies, is bound to resent this revisionist history of his long legal career... Left-wingers who have abandoned Labour will feel vindicated by the battering Eagleton gives his subject,’ while ‘his depiction of Starmer as a hard-nosed, ruthless, calculating careerist will cheer even the wildest Blairites’.

The Observer’s reviewer Angus McQueen found it ‘refreshing’ that Short, ‘in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union... There is a blank evenness to

about the darkest side of Putin’s life. Worse, he draws false equivalences: between Putin and his critics, and more fundamentally between Russia and its justifiably nervous neighbours.’

This new book – originally published in Ukraine last year as Zelensky Without Make-Up – seeks to fill in some gaps. ‘Who is Zelensky

Polity, 200pp, £20

It has been a wonder and delight to many in the West that the man now leading Ukraine’s spirited resistance to the Russian invasion – President Volodomyr Zelensky, rugged in combat fatigues – was a television comedian before he entered politics and, what’s more, was the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian version of the movie. Not since Ronald Reagan’s has the transformation from showbiz to statesmanship been so deftly and effectively navigated.

In 1961, 21 years after the tragic

death of Steve Gauley, the narrator and her husband Andrew set off from their home in Vancouver in his brandnew Morris Oxford, a small car big enough to accommodate them and their two daughters, Cynthia, who is six, and the three-and-a-half-year-old Meg. The family is heading for the small town in rural Ontario where Andrew’s mother and his wife’s father still live. To make the journey more interesting, they are travelling via the northwest of America, a circuitous route as they are well aware.

There’s a key scene sandwichespeanut-butter-and-marmaladewhenareproducedforthe girls. Andrew complains to his wife that the salmon-and-mayonnaise sandwich she hands him doesn’t contain any lettuce. He tells her he is disappointed. She has, in fact, forgotten to buy a lettuce, but hears herself coming up with a white lie instead. Andrew sulks. She asks him not to be mad with her, to which he replies ‘I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.’ Cynthia, aware of this domestic tiff, starts singing from the back seat, and the parents are united again, for the time being.

– Open Secrets, The Moons of Jupiter, The Love of a Good Woman – and encounter works of genius. I feel happy at the thought of having lived for so long in her wise and wonderful literary company.

PAUL BAILEY admires the skill of the Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 17

The story ‘Miles City, Montana’ from the collection The Progress of Love (1987), displays her artistry at its most authoritative. It opens with the narrator remembering her father carrying the dead body of a very young boy who has just been drowned in ‘the little nameless river that flows into the Saugeen in southern Ontario’:Theboy’s name was Steve Gauley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-coloured now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that has been left out all winter. His face was turned into my father’s chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud.

Short stories

Alice Monro: wise and wonderful

The very next paragraph begins with the narrator, who was six at the time of the drowning and whose name is not revealed, writing ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I really saw all this.’ She goes on to reveal that perhaps she saw her father carrying the boy, and the men following him, and the dogs, but that she wasn’t close enough to the dead Steve to notice something like mud in his nostril. The astute reader is thus given the indication that events of the past frequently receive embellishments in the memories of those who have witnessed them. This is the first of the many surprises in a story that goes back and forth in time.

These seemingly banal details fulfil a wider purpose. What happens, or rather what is almost miraculously prevented from happening in the swimming-pool of a hotel in Miles City, Montana, will affect the entire family for years afterwards. The story is one of Alice Munro’s incontestable masterpieces, of which there are more than a Munro’sfew. stories, which are often as long as novellas, are set mainly in Huron County, Ontario, the district in which she was born in 1931. She could be accounted a regional writer, in the way that William Faulkner is. The brilliant novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick has described her, with justification, as ‘our Chekhov’. Her obsession with small town life, with the inevitable passing of time, with the revelations that come in the midst of despair or sudden, inexplicable happiness, are much like his. It is possible to open any of her collections

I have loved Alice Munro’s stories for almost as long as she has been writing them. I reread them constantly and invariably with a renewed sense of the intricate skill that has gone into their composition. They always have the capacity to take me by surprise. Her prose is notable for its transparency and the fact that the words she chooses with such scrupulous attention to detail are all in common usage. But that hardearned simplicity is, of course, deceptive, encompassing as it does any number of subtly differentiated human beings, each of whom is recognisable in his or her complex individuality.Yetthereis often a catch in that state of recognition, because Munro is a shrewd storyteller who understands that certain people are essentially unknowable. They keep their depths, if they are in possession of them, to themselves. She respects unknowability in its various manifestations – in a tell-tale scrap of conversation, or in a casual, witty aside. She honours her readers’ intelligence to reach their own conclusions, make their own judgments. She puts judgmental observations in the minds and mouths of her characters, which is where they properly belong.

Monro’s stories always have the capacity to take me by surprise

Alice Munro’s luminous writing career spans more than 60 years of her long life. She is the author of a solitary novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which is really a collection of interconnected stories, but otherwise she has devoted herself to the art of the short and usually not-so-short story. Her friends and publishers know her as a perfectionist, sometimes to their admiring irritation. She would concur with the weary wisdom of the French poet Paul Valéry, who once declared that ‘a poem is never finished, only abandoned’.Sheissimilar to Jean Rhys, who was reported to spend hours worrying about whether to use a comma or a semi-colon, in this one respect. That perfectionism, thankfully, never hindered the astonishing productivity Munro sustained at the peak of her powers, from the early 1980s until her official retirement just over a decade ago, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

JAKE FIENNES

Two lives on earth: Barbary macaques

midsection of a much larger cockroach prey. This injection briefly paralyses the victim’s locomotion centre, but a second sting fired into the roach’s brain tranquillises it for the rest of its short life. In the state of a “submissive zombie”, the roach will attend the wasp’s lair to serve as fresh protein for the jewel wasp’s progeny. Such is the wasp’s control of its victim that it can use its antennae to lead the roach along, much as a human might walk a dog.’ Yong’s book is, wrote Cocker, ‘a masterpiece’.

It’s a pity that no-one reviewing Jake Fiennes’s book forbore to mention that he is the brother of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes. It must be annoying for him. However, there was praise for Fiennes’s account of trying to heal the damage done to the Norfolk estate where he is conservation manager by decades of industrialised agriculture or what he calls the ‘Taliban approach’ to farming.

STORIES OF LIFE, LAND AND A FARMING REVOLUTION

SARAH LANGFORD Viking, 336pp, £16.99

18 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Nature

In the Financial Times, Laura Battle admired much about Rooted but found it at times ‘gratingly solipsistic’, a view not shared by the Spectator’s Juliet Nicolson who thought Langford a good listener. ‘She listens to the cacophony of

LAND HEALER

Telegraph and he gave her a tour of his patch of north Norfolk. ‘He believes fervently in nature’s power to recover,’ she wrote, ‘but his mission is not about rewilding, it’s about getting rid of the old ways – monocultures, intensive farming, chemicals, butchered hedgerows – and improving soil health, creating pasture for livestock and turning land over to plants that will benefit insects and birds. “We just need to end the apartheid between economic growth and protecting and enhancing the environment.”’

ROOTED

In the New Scientist, nature writer Mark Cocker was dazzled by the story of the emerald jewel wasp. ‘It possesses a sting with a touchsensitive tip that it can insert into the

In the Guardian, Alex Preston thought it a ‘hopeful, intelligent, important book’ about the possibility of a wildlife-friendly farming future. ‘The “small tweaks” Fiennes recommends as part of the mantra of regenerative farming are not on their own immediately thrilling – letting hedges grow out, not ploughing to the edge of a field, disturbing the soil as little as possible, using “cover crops” in winter. In combination, though, they are revolutionary, because they can start to reverse the terrible damage done to the countryside by industrialFiennesagriculture.’wasinterviewed by Jessamy Calkin for the Daily

Witness, 261pp, £20

Sarah Langford followed her well received 2020 account of life as a criminal barrister with a chronicle of her new life managing her husband’s family’s arable farm in Suffolk. In the Guardian, nature writer Amy Liptrot was entranced. ‘They replant hedges, reclaim old field names, go organic, introduce new crop rotations, plant trees and wildflowers, extend field margins and bring in grazing animals. They see the land begin to flourish and meet other farmers doing similar things. This kind of “regenerative agriculture”, Langford writes, “is more than just growing food … it is a movement which can cure not just ecological ills but social ones too”. Here, grazing livestock can be beneficial to soil health and biodiversity – and to communities.’

In the Times, John Lewis Stempel, prolific writer and fellow farmer, spelt out the task ahead of him, as Fiennes advocates ‘land use that ploughs a course between rewilding (which, when push comes to shovel, is mass reforestation) and intensive agriculture’. But Fiennes, LewisStempel thought, was a ‘fine, sound voice in the post-Brexit, post-Covid world, where food security, climate change, nature adoration, veganism, rewilding and narked livestock farmers like myself are clashing’.

ED YONG

Science writer Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his brilliantly researched articles on Covid, and An Immense World, his study of animal perception, has been rapturously received. It is ‘magnificent’ wrote Kilian Fox in the Guardian, observing that Yong shows that the reality of life on earth is ‘more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange’ than we can ever haveInimagined.the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai thought Yong’s revelations ‘thrilling’, praising his gifts as both scientific researcher and storyteller. ‘A dolphin that echo-locates a human in water’, she learned, ‘can perceive not only the human’s outer shape but also what’s inside, including skeleton and lungs.’ And ‘tree frog embryos –ensconced inside their unhatched eggs – can detect the vibrations of an attacking predator and release an enzyme from their faces that dissolves the casings that house them, allowing them to escape.’ For Rhys Blakely in the Times, it was ‘fantastic, and he noted how recent our knowledge is. ‘We only realised that humpback whales sang in 1960. Mice may be one of the most studied animals in laboratories across the world, but it was not until the 1970s that we worked out that they were secretly speaking to each other, using high-pitched squeaks beyond the range of human ears.’

New ways of farming with Jersey cattle

HOW FARMING CAN SAVE BRITAIN’S COUNTRYSIDE

Bodley Head, 464pp, £20

AN IMMENSE WORLD HOW ANIMAL SENSES REVEAL THE HIDDEN AROUNDREALMSUS

Though dinosaurs are ‘amazing’ wrote Blakely, they are not us. ‘This is a book that plots our ancestry, all the way back to the steamy Carboniferous coal swamp where our lineage first split from that of the reptiles. It is saga on the grandest scale: the tale of how our forebears survived an apocalypse and how their progeny rose up to rule the world. There is a wonderful subplot: the story of how humans became the only species capable of considering their origins.’

William Collins, 384pp, £20

Simon Ings called the book ‘exuberant and authoritative’ in the New Scientist while Constance Craig Smith in the Daily Mail thought Sumner might ‘persuade you not to whack the next one you find in your kitchen’. As Sumner writes: ‘A world without wasps would be just as devastating as a world without bees, or beetles, or butterflies.’

No sign of a mammoth for 4,000 years

functions against the backdrop of catastrophic and gentle climate change, including the shifting of the continents and major extinctions driven by volcanic eruptions, meteor, sea level rises and ice ages. These adaptations include milk production, temperature regulation, hair, bigger brains and stable locomotion, among others.’Inthe Times, Rhys Blakely was blown away. ‘Over the past 20 years or so, the study of how mammals came to be has progressed at breakneck pace. Fossils have been unearthed at an unprecedented rate; new technologies for analysing them have yielded remarkable new insights. We have learnt that the mammals that shared the world with the dinosaurs were far more diverse than Buckland could have known. The idea that they were unspectacular little creatures that cowered in the shadows of the giant lizards has been upended.’

Our attitudeantipathetictowaspsisunfair

ENDLESS FORMS THE SECRET WORLD OF WASPS SEIRIAN SUMNER

HG Wells’s novel The Food of the Gods featured giant wasps with three-inch-long stings and Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory was a dark and terrifying tale. As John LewisStempel said in his Times review:

Steve Brusatte is a professor of paleontology and evolutionary biology at Edinburgh University. He is also a gripping storyteller. In his latest book, he looks at the mammals that co-existed with dinosaurs and survived the huge asteroid collision that killed the giant lizards. It thrillingly covers the 320 million years of evolution that produced the first humans. As Hannah Beckerman pointed out in the Observer, ‘Brusatte is an impassioned guide and the result is a highly engaging work of popular science.’

revisionists, experimentalists, economists, catastrophistsnutritionists,andfaddists, to views that are variously suggested, accepted, rejected and imposed on families for whom a tie to the land has been their pride for centuries. She treads with care and respect, acutely conscious of her own “outsiderness”. And as her confidence grows, she gradually earns the esteem and trust of a community in which she has become rooted.’ For the blogger MoreAboutBooks, ‘She leaves the reader feeling uplifted and energised and, ultimately, hopeful, not least because of the good people who are trying to make a difference.’

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 19 Nature

A NEW HISTORY FROM THE SHADOW OF THE DINOSAURS TO US STEVE BRUSATTE Picador, 528pp, £20 (350)

Nicolson also felt Langford was a clarion call of hope. ‘There is no one answer to overcoming resistance to change, to reacting when change overreaches itself and demands reversal, or to how regeneration sits beside scientific advance; no single solution to how we square the needs of a billowing world population with the ecological survival of the planet. But Langford hopes that, while acknowledging the groundswell of imaginative theory and technological invention, a trust placed in farming methods rooted in the distant past might provide solutions for our future mental and physical health and to world sustainability.’

THE RISE AND REIGN OF THE MAMMALS

The science blogger Wavefunction loved it. ‘Much of the book is focused on how mammals evolved different anatomical and physiological

‘Who likes wasps?’ He continued: ‘Our dislike of wasps is ancient and damning. It’s there in the Old Testament, Joshua 24:12. God used wasps to terrify — “And I sent the hornet before you”.’

He went on: ‘Sumner, a professor of behavioural ecology at University College London, feels our antipathetic attitude to wasps, as opposed to bees, is unfair’ – far from wasps (of which there are at least 100,000 known species) being a ‘pointless pest’ they are ‘one of nature’s most secret and neglected gems’, according to the author. But Lewis-Stempel thought bees had the edge as they ‘provided humanity with perhaps the only sweet stuff in our diet, honey’.

Steven Poole in the Telegraph pointed out that ‘Wasps might not be quite as clever as bees – Sumner admits that they have nothing comparable to the famous “waggle dance” with which bees tell their comrades where food is – but they can (scarily) recognise human faces as well as one another’s. From the point of view of evolutionary history, she observes, “bees are just wasps who

have forgotten how to hunt”.’ He summed up: ‘You might not positively love wasps by the end of Endless Forms, then, but it would be a tetchy soul who did not grudgingly admire them a bit more.’

from 1931 to 1943. It’s no coincidence that this period roughly coincided with the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Hesse detested Hitler, but as a devout pacifist his opposition to the Nazis was oblique. A book about a monastic order devoted to an abstract intellectual pastime, The Glass Bead Game mirrored this retreat into his ownHesseworld.wrote relatively little during the last 20 years of his life, and when he died, in 1962, it seemed he’d be remembered (if at all) as a writer of the 1920s. But then an odd thing happened: Henry Miller championed his writing in America, and during the Sixties he was adopted by the hippies as an unlikely guru. What Hesse would have made of this God only knows. Bookish and reclusive, he was an improbable figurehead for the Woodstock generation. Yet what attracted these dropouts wasn’t his lifestyle but his ideas.

However rereading him today, I reckon he’s ripe for a revival. His greatest novels were written against the backdrop of the First World War and the rise of Fascism; the hippies read his greatest novels against the backdrop of the Cold War and Vietnam. Like a lot of philosophical writers, his books read better in bad times than good times. With a new war in Eastern Europe, and new worries about the Energy Crisis and Climate Change, this enigmatic German author suddenly seems horribly topical again.

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 21

Hesse tried to join the German army but was rejected on account of

During the Sixties Hesse was adopted by the hippies as an unlikely guru

his weak eyesight, and as the casualties mounted up, he became a committed pacifist. His pacifistic essays enraged mainstream opinion in Germany, and in 1919 he left his wife – who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia – and their three sons and fled to Montagnola, where he rented a few rooms in a rundown villa called Casa Camuzzi (the Hesse Museum is right next door).

Hesse’s best stories are akin to parables, lessons in how to live your life. Know yourself, be yourself – this is his core philosophy. Wealth, status, family, fidelity – none of these things is important. The only thing that matters is to follow your own path. Naturally, this was just what the hippies wanted to hear, and so for countless long-haired layabouts, his stories became sacred texts (the fact that Hesse’s heroes invariably pay a heavy price for their freedom largely seemed to pass them by). Hesse’s books sold over 150 million copies, but when hippiedom fell out of fashion, so did Hesse.

The book that won him the Nobel Prize was The Glass Bead Game, which he spent 12 years writing,

Forgotten authors

WILLIAM COOK last read Hermann Hesse as a teenager. Would the writer still appeal some 40 years later?

Hermann Hesse: devout pacifist

Forty years ago, Hermann Hesse was everywhere. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated into 60 languages, his timeless stories were popular all around the world. And then he disappeared. I read him avidly in my teens and then forgot all about him, but now I’m in my late fifties I find myself rereading him with the same old adolescent fervour. How come?Imust admit it was mere coincidence which brought me back to Hesse. On a recent train journey through Switzerland, I spent a lonely night in Lugano, and discovered that Montagnola, where Hesse spent the second half of his long life, was only a few miles away. I trekked up to this hilltop village, to visit the quaint museum devoted to Hesse’s life and work, and as I wandered round my teenage memories came flooding back. I hadn’t read him for 40 years! How would he read today? The short answer is very well indeed. He was born in 1877, in Calw, a small town in southern Germany. His parents were pious Protestants: his father ran a religious publishing house. A bright but rebellious boy, Hermann was sent to an elite boarding school to train as a Lutheran minister, but he ran away and was subsequently committed to a lunatic asylum (by his parents). Released after several months, he became an apprentice bookseller, until the success of his first novel, Peter Camenzind, published in 1904, enabled him to quit the day job and write full time.

Peter Camenzind was a classic Bildungsroman (coming-of-age saga), the story of an idealistic young man searching for a role. It was told in a fresh and lively voice, but it didn’t break much new ground. Hesse’s next few novels were well-written and well-received, fairly conventional and fairly forgettable (Gertrude and Rosshalde are among the better ones). And then along came the First World War, and Hesse’s writing was transformed.

For Hesse, bourgeois stories about bourgeois problems seemed meaningless after the carnage of the trenches. During the war he’d written a series of elemental stories, more like ancient myths than modern fiction: Knulp; Demian; Strange News from Another Star In Montagnola he continued this migration from modernity. During the 1920s he wrote his finest novels: Steppenwolf (a disturbing fable about a misanthropic loner), Siddhartha (a mystical tale about man’s search for enlightenment) and Narcissus & Goldmund, about the relationship between an ascetic monk and his vivacious pupil.

What linked these anthropologists was their interest in using the study of exotic cultures to illuminate the peculiarities of the ‘civilised’ world. ‘Anthropology thus became a means of showing what humans had in common, rather than what separated

22 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Miscellaneous

‘First came the missionaries, then the explorers and finally the anthropologists. The missionaries wanted to impose something, the explorers mostly wanted to take it away, but the anthropologists were there to meet as equals,’ Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Sunday Times, describing the book as a ‘skilful summary of the early years of anthropology between 1880 and 1939’.Hitherto, ‘primitive’ cultures across Africa, Asia and the Americas had been studied from the comfort of libraries in Europe and America, but a new generation of scholars revolutionised their discipline by living with their subjects for extended periods of time. ‘Moore’s fast-paced book tells the stories of 12 of these men and women,’ Fara Dabhoiwala enthused in the Guardian, it is ‘packed with vignettes’. Hughes noted that the stories of some of them, particularly women such as Margaret Mead, had been ‘told quite recently in a string of excellent books’. ‘Nonetheless, Moore’s fluent accounts confirm that there is always room for a new view, especially when it is as well done as this one.’

Growing up: it’s good to talk

fit it into one of the patterns stored in ourTommemories.’Calverin the Times was also intrigued. Take romance and the extraordinary algorithmic world of online dating. ‘The world’s online daters have given researchers billions of data points that can tell us who are the most desired love matches. Looks, money and sexy jobs – lawyers, firefighters and soldiers – all make for success in dating. And height really matters: researchers found that a 6ft man earning £50,000 a year is, on average, as desirable as a similar 5ft 6in man earning £190,000 – a costly six inches.’

In the Guardian, Salley Vickers

Atlantic, 320pp, £17.99

IN SEARCH OF US ADVENTURES ANTHROPOLOGYIN

Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20

DON’T TRUST YOUR GUT SETHDAVIDOWITZSTEPHENS-

Scribe, 304pp, £16.99

That feeling in our bones, the one that Americans get in their gut, is called intuition – and we like to believe that when it comes to decisions intuition is on our side. However, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz thinks we give our gut feelings too much credit: they are very often plain wrong. In Don’t Trust Your Gut, he argues that we should put our faith instead in the empirical evidence of hardIndata.theHarvard Business Review, Eric Bonabeau was in agreement with this thesis. ‘Our desire to believe in the wisdom of intuition blinds us to the less romantic realities of business decision making. We remember the examples of hunches that pay off but conveniently forget all the ones that turn out badly.’ It all stems, wrote Bonabeau, from ‘our deep-seated need to see patterns’. But the patterns that we make stem from what we already know and so when confronted by a new phenomenon, ‘our brains try to categorise it based on our own previous experiences, to

WHEN I GROW UP CONVERSATIONS WITH ADULTS IN SEARCH OF ADULTHOOD MOYA SARNER

LUCY MOORE

them,’ Dabhoiwala wrote. ‘Moore doesn’t sugar-coat her protagonists’ many prejudices, their cavalier treatment of their indigenous subjects, or the problematic history of their discipline,’ Dabhoiwala concluded. ‘But though she summarises their scholarly views, the main pleasure of her book lies in its celebration of a dozen colourful, unconventional, free-thinking lives.’

Moya Sarner’s quest for insight into what makes us ‘adults’ led her to interview a range of people, using her experience as a journalist to winkle out candour from her subjects. For James McConnachie in the Sunday Times it was a ‘thoughtful and painfully open book’. Sarner suggests we go through phases of development, which she calls ‘grow-ups’, and that being an adult comes down to undergoing this process: it’s an attitude, not something we ever acquire.

Daisy Bates, one of anthropology’s founding mothers, in Ooldea, Australia, 1932

What McConnachie missed in Sarner’s account were contributions from non-Western interviewees, any literary examples of investigations into adulthood (Kipling, Auden?) and a sound grasp of how babies affect grown-ups, possibly because Sarner doesn’t have children.

unmarinated by his pungent literary alter-ego: not the lively musings of a dreamy or cartoonishly agitated writer playing hooky, but the plainer reflections of a diligent author contentedly at work.’

What is more, Eccles noted, we needn’t beat ourselves up about methane emissions from cow burps. ‘According to 2019 government data,

Thames & Hudson, 384pp, £35

‘Of course, one of the main things that has always caught Dyer’s attention is Geoff Dyer, and he now attempts to bring his trademark freshness, bounce and humour to an examination of the decidedly un-youthful spheres of “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out”. This is his moment. While Dyer may still be young at heart, he is also now in his mid 60s, had a mini-stroke in his mid 50s and his tennis habit has left him with “multiple permutations of trouble: rotator cuff, hip flexor, wrist, cricked neck, lower back, and bad kneesBen(both)”.’Hutchinson in the Literary Review wondered, however, if Dyer’s customary tone of ‘amateurism and uncertainty’ had begun to pall: ‘Self-deprecation, pushed to an extreme, risks becoming selfappreciation.’Andinthe New Statesman, Lola Seaton agreed. ‘Why, then, are Dyer’s ruminations less consistently engaging here?’ She missed his usual avatar of the slacker who can’t get down to writing. ‘They are presented as emanating directly from Dyer,

‘She unravels the complexities of English art in this period with clarity and confidence, moving back and forth in time, and between artists, writers, critics, curators and collectors.’ Furthermore, Spalding introduces readers to little-known women artists without a hint, as Freeman put it, of ‘polemic, tickingsoff and grindings of axes’.

THE GREAT PLANTBASED CON WHY EATING A PLANTS-ONLY DIET WON’T IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH OR SAVE THE PLANET JAYNE BUXTON

ENGLISH ART BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS FRANCES SPALDING

Former management consultant Jayne Buxton got fed up with being told that it was better for health and for the planet to eat less meat. She decided to investigate the extravagant claims of the plant-based diet and found them seriously overrated. Even the hallowed five-a-day gets a pasting.Inthe

THE LAST DAYS OF ROGER FEDERER AND OTHER ENDINGS

GEOFF DYER

By the Hills, 1939, by Gerald Brockhurst

Literary Review, David Boyd Haycock, was also admiring.

Times, Louise Eccles was stimulated by commonsensicalBuxton’sapproach. ‘The Great Plant-Based Con is persuasive, entertaining and well researched. I certainly feel better armed for a dinner table debate on the pros and cons of plant-based diets. And the book will help to alleviate the guilt many of us feel about our diets. Buxton says there is no environmentally perfect way to eat, so we should not dive into plantbased food in a blind panic.’

Piatkus, 54pp, £25

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 23 Miscellaneous

English art in the 20 years between the wars is the subject of Frances Spalding’s new book and it is, as she writes in her introduction, ‘richly contrary. Staunch conservatism jostles with energetic revivalism; allusions to the classical past or the early Italian Renaissance become aligned with the pulse of the new; the pursuit of the modern and international is suddenly trumped by a return to native traditions, the local and the Lauravernacular.’Freemanin the Times was delighted by the book. ‘Spalding’s canvas is panoramic, her brushwork precise. This period of relative peace gave rise to the skirmish of the isms: modernism, constructivism, surrealism, neo-romanticism. Were you Team Abstract or Team Representation? Hampstead or Bloomsbury? East End or Chelsea? Spalding makes the case that the lines aren’t so strictly drawn. The real and the romantic weren’t opposing tendencies, but threads that often intertwined.’MichaelProdger in the Sunday Times was equally full of praise. He thought the book ‘superb’ and loved the way Spalding illuminated the great variety of different styles and approaches in this time. ‘Traditionally, the period has been held to represent a “return to order” — a retreat to the safety of pre- first world war conventions and paintings of solid figures, landscapes, interiors and still-lifes. What Spalding highlights, however, is that this was just one of many routes taken by English artists and that modernism, despite being inescapably tainted in the public mind by its association with the war, did not disappear but took new, albeit less threatening forms.’Inthe

Geoff Dyer’s many fans go wild when a new Dyer appears. Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian pondered his gifts. ‘Dyer has always been an essentially youthful literary presence. Across a career that has blended novels, biography, essays, criticism, memoir and journalism there has been a consistently wide-eyed curiosity about the disparate things that catch his attention: DH Lawrence; jazz; Burning Man; Russian cinema; drugs; the Somme …

THE REAL AND ROMANTICTHE

Canongate, 304pp, £20

found it a ‘noble if not wholly successful enterprise’. She was impressed by Sarner’s interview technique, but found the theoretical additions — Sarner is in analysis herself and interviewed a range of psychologists for her book — ‘undigested gobbets’. She did, though, agree with Sarner’s eventual vision of an adult as one nourished by an inner child, but feared too many adults were ‘stranded’ in childhood, with nowhere to go.

WENDY JOSEPH Doubleday, 336pp, £20

Wind? Sarah Churchwell’s new book argues that its romanticising of slavery and the Old South, though subtler, may have been more pervasive still. After all, the book still sells 300,000 copies a year and, adjusted for inflation, the 1939 movie remains the highest grossing film of all time. ‘Churchwell has written about American mythology before,’ wrote Alex von Tunzelmann in Literary Review. ‘This time it feels like she has hit the motherlode […] For Churchwell, “Gone with the Wind provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself”.’ She continued: ‘Churchwell swiftly begins to pile up startling evidence in short, pithy chapters. Race, gender, the Lost Cause, the American Dream, blood-and-soil fascism, the prison-industrial complex, a Trumpist mob storming the Capitol in 2021: it’s all here.’

The Spectator’s Greg Garrett agreed: ‘Stylish and thoughtful, Churchwell’s book is an exemplary exploration of how Gone with the Wind reflects, and continues to affect, American culture.’

Love of the film has obscured some of the greatest cruelties in American history

UNLAWFUL KILLINGS LIFE, LOVE AND MURDER; TRIALS AT THE OLD BAILEY

Sign of the times: plant-based burgers

A similarly admiring assessment was given by Kathryn Hughes in her Sunday Times review. ‘None of these cases is simple and all have hinterlands of unfathomable sadness,’ she wrote. ‘Still, Judge Wendy is not here to wring her hands. Rather, she wants to walk us through the arcane legal framework within which she must try these very different defendants, pointing out the places where the law is a “dull-edged tool designed for nothing but the careful application of itself” as well as those other, better moments where it tries to protect the innocent and pursue the guilty. It is these latter places, where the world is briefly set right, that make you want to cheer...

emissions from UK livestock constitute just 5 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions; transport and energy supply account for more than half of all emissions.’IntheTelegraph, Boudicca Fox-Leonard interviewed Buxton in the aisles of the local supermarket where she pointed out that so-called healthy plant options have some horrible things in them. ‘Canola oil, yeast, acidity methylcellulose,regulator,cornoil thickener, starch, gelling agent.’ It was, she said, ‘a wasteland of chemicals and oils where nutritious protein should be’.

In the Times, Gareth Russell said Churchwell’s attention to how the 1939 film toned down the book’s overt racism ‘show that it is not true — as some of the critics’ critics suggest — that decrying Gone with the Wind is about projecting modern values on the past […] Churchwell is persuasive in arguing that the popularity of this love story, wrapped in the Lost Cause myth, has obscured or sanitised some of the greatest cruelties in American history.’

‘During her decade as an Old Bailey judge, Wendy Joseph presided over a great number of homicide trials,’ explained Jonathan Buckley in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘but the cases she discusses in Unlawful Killings are not true crime stories in the literal sense – they are synthesised crimes or alleged crimes, distilled from all those real-life calamities in order to illustrate not just the complexities of investigative and judicial procedure, but the wider problems from which each case arises. As one would expect, her writing is characterised by analytical precision, but this is also a book of great empathy and urgency...

THE WRATH TO COME GONE WITH THE WIND AND THE LIES AMERICA TELLS SARAH CHURCHWELL Apollo, 464pp, £27.99

‘In the hands of a less-skilled writer, all this job-speak might start to drag, like the sound of a dentist droning on about root canals. Yet Joseph is such a deft deployer of suspense and nuance that she turns even the Sentencing Act 2020 schedule 21 into a cliffhanger... She is funny too, with a keen eye for the absurdities of the human condition.’

24 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Miscellaneous

Everyone knows about the notorious role that Birth of a Nation has had in nourishing the historical myths of white supremacists in the US. But what about a seemingly more innocuous classic, Gone With The

‘The first case, the stabbing of a teenage boy, is followed by a woman accused of suffocating her infant daughter, then a death apparently caused by dangerous driving, the strangulation of a young woman by one or both parents and the brutal killing of a woman by her exserviceman husband. Every episode is artfully constructed, with new questions being raised with every twist of the narrative.’

Henry Kissinger (100 next year) served as Secretary of State to two American presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and in his latest book he profiles the careers of six key post-war political figures: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher. ‘The world,’ wrote Andrew Anthony in the Guardian, ‘viewed through Kissinger’s eyes, is not so very different from the kinds of interhouse machinations dramatised in Game of Thrones, and you could picture him as the Hand of the King, forever whispering fiendish plots and dark truths to a paranoid master.’

Foster told Killian Fox in the Observer that stress and anxiety are the enemies of sleep, so we should find ways of destressing – and ideally get rid of all the stuff that will distract us, making sure that the bedroom is dark and cool, while investing in a decent mattress and pillows. Whipple summed up his thoughts: ‘Foster’s book is an odd but compelling mix. At times it is very entertaining; at others a practical self-help guide. Sometimes it is a scientific Q&A. It is rigorous without being academic, fun without being facile.’

Well, said Appleyard, almost everyone. The problem, he reckoned, is that humanity’s ‘woes are largely of humanity’s making; even the inhuman virus spread because of globalisation, world travel and the perversity of politics…’ It would be impossible to get everybody to agree to Gates’s plans.

Aztecs dying of smallpox, 16th century

RUSSELL FOSTER Penguin Life 480pp, £16.99

LIFE TIME

and views divide opinion deeply but he is rarely ignored.’ She concluded her review: ‘Elder statesman is an overused term but Kissinger is the genuine article, and worth listening to — even if you choose to disagree with him.’

Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft, philanthropist and the author of the well-received How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021). He has now turned his attention to pandemic prevention. ‘In summary,’ wrote Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, ‘[Gates] comes up with four recommendations – make better tools to deal with infectious diseases; develop his pandemic fire brigade [Germ, the Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation Team]; help poor countries to develop disease surveillance; and strengthen primary health care systems, especially in low and middle-income countries. Who could argue?’

LEADERSHIP

SIX STUDIES IN STRATEGYWORLD

Anthony reckoned that De Gaulle was the most finely drawn portrait of the six: ‘You sense that Kissinger, who has never undersold himself, admires De Gaulle’s gall, but it’s his statecraft that most commands his respect: “On every major strategic question facing France and Europe over no fewer than three decades, and against an overwhelming consensus, De Gaulle judged correctly.” That’s a large claim, but then Kissinger prides himself on being able to see the grand sweep of history, undistracted by minor diversions.’However, Phillips O’Brien in the Times thought the start of the book, including the chapters on De Gaulle and Adenauer, a slow burn: ‘They come across as rather onedimensional heroes of the type that can be fashioned in the essays of clever undergraduates who rely on a small number of secondary works to support their work… If one were to sum up this book, it would be to let great leaders get on with the task of ruling, and not complicate their lives too much with ideals or advanced notions of Margaretfreedom.’MacMillan in the Financial Times asked whether individuals matter in shaping the course of events. ‘Henry Kissinger thinks they do,’ she wrote… ‘Of course, it helps if they are surrounded by the best advisers.’ She said that although he has not held office since 1977, he has advised virtually every US president since Nixon. ‘His record

HOW TO PREVENT THE NEXTBILLPANDEMICGATES

Adam Vaughan in the New Scientist quoted Gates: ‘We’re all eager to return to the way things were before but there is one thing we cannot afford to go back to – our complacency about pandemics.’ Vaughan thought Gates was good ‘at guiding readers through his blueprint for the technological, economic and regulatory fixes to stop the next pathogen from causing global havoc, never assuming too much knowledge.’

HENRY KISSINGER Allen Lane, 528pp, £25

THE NEW SCIENCE OF THE BODY CLOCK, AND HOW IT CAN REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR SLEEP AND HEALTH

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 25 Miscellaneous

Mark Honigsbaum in the

Allen Lane, 304pp, £25

As Tom Whipple wrote in the Times, ‘When it comes to sleep most of us get too little of it; some of us spend a lot of time obsessing about it; all of us suspect we could do it better.’ Who better to advise us, then, than Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University. In the FT, Anjana Ahuja explained: ‘Pitched somewhere between science book and lifestyle manual, this is a comprehensive manifesto for living in harmony with our body clocks, penned by someone who has devoted his career to studying them. Chasing perfect synchronicity not only increases happiness and mental sharpness, he argues, but potentially reduces the risk of diseases such as obesity and diabetes.’

Guardian was surprised that Gates didn’t seem interested in ‘addressing the role of information technology in spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines or misinformation about the effectiveness of lockdowns and mask mandates’. Gates was confident that ‘the truth will outlive the lies’ –optimism that Honigsbaum did not share.Harry de Quetteville in the Telegraph thought ‘it a strangely bloodless book about blood and tears on a vast scale. Such capacity for cool calculation has of course made Gates’s fortune. And, through his foundation, saves countless lives. But in focusing relentlessly on the big picture, he seems oddly detached from the experience of individuals.’

26 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Fiction

Reviews don’t come more deliciously vitriolic than John Maier’s in the Times, who found Jessie Burton’s sequel to The Miniaturist, her 2014 bestseller about 17th-century Amsterdam, a ‘disaster zone of overwriting’. When the novel’s narrator announced that its heroine, 17-year-old Thea, grappling with the new sensation of sexual desire, found ‘there are no words for it’, his response was pure relief. For Maier the book represented the worst kind of ‘drivel’ that people reserve for their summer holiday reading, clichéd in every department.

Godmersham Park, Kent, was inherited by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight

Picador, 416pp, £16.99

GILL HORNBY Century, 432pp, £14.99

THE HOUSE OF FORTUNE JESSIE BURTON

GODMERSHAM PARK

ear for Austenian language. ‘The plot is readable enough but it’s Hornby’s clever way with homage that keeps the reader entertained, be it her tongue-in-cheek aping of the conventions of the genre or her tone-perfect encapsulation of the author’s own amused view of human life.’

Anne Sharpe, forced by straitened circumstances into taking up work as a governess to young Fanny Knight, is a classic Austen heroine, a protagonist, said John Mullan in the Times, ‘usually only glimpsed among the busy minutiae of some of Austen’s surviving letters’. Professor Mullan, an Austen expert, said Hornby’s ‘research is impeccable’. He wrote: ‘Most of the crucial scenes in the novel are imagined directly from entries in Fanny’s diary.’

An epic debut novel, spanning some 50 years, The Whalebone Theatre tells the story of imagination, anchored in the World War years, and with a large cast including the landed family of Chilcombe, their servants and their many visitors. The Whalebone theatre, not a metaphor, is the stage created by the young child/heroine out of a whale washed up on her Dorset beach. Play becomes play within a play.

In the Telegraph, Claire Allfree also found it ‘overworked’ in style, so that the trapped women of late 17th-century Amsterdam it depicts are also trapped by its ‘heavily lacquered prose’. She also compared Burton’s sentences to brickwork, all neatly laid out.

Fig Tree, 560pp, £14.99

In her 2020 bestselling novel Miss Austen, Gill Hornby examined the world of Jane Austen through the voice of her sister Cassandra. Now in her latest novel she turns to Austen again and makes her central figure Jane’s great friend Anne Sharpe, a governess in the household of her brother Edward Knight at Godmersham Park.

Alexander Larman in the Observer was delighted by Godmersham Park which he thought ‘generous-spirited’ and ‘thoroughly enjoyable’. It succeeds, thought Larman, ‘as a page-turning romp on its own terms, but also manages once again to give agency and interest to a minor figure in Austen’s life who has otherwise been ignored by biographers and scholars’.

fails to dare in her writing where tension ‘dissolves into nothing’ and a relationship fails to ‘attain its perilous intensity’.IndiaKnight in the Sunday Times was reminded of the Elizabeth Jane Howard Cazalet novels; The Whalebone Theatre ‘comes with an unexpected 21st-century sensibility so that it feels modern rather than homage-like and is bursting with energy and zip’. An ‘absolute treat of a book’, she affirmed, a book ‘that has you hooting with laughter one minute and feeling absolutely floored the next, not just because of the meanderings of the plot or Quinn’s acute emotional intelligence, but because she is one of those writers who has her finger on humanity’s pulse’.

As if reading a totally different book, Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times found it ‘more satisfying’ than its predecessor, ‘a moving celebration of the possibilities for change and regeneration’. The Guardian’s Alex Preston went further, calling it a ‘bold and thrilling sequel’ with a warmer heart and ‘superior in both style and substance’. Preston found a ‘peculiar austerity’ in Burton’s writing, which had the ability to illuminate details and reanimate the physical and emotional landscape of early modern

THEJOANNATHEATREWHALEBONEQUINN

Jasmina Svenne was charmed by this ‘moving’ novel by a ‘talented’ writer, and admired the ‘idiosyncratic but always believable’ characters of the three central protagonists. Reviewing for the Historical Novel Society, she was troubled by a few anachronisms but found much to admire. Carrie O’Grady in the Guardian enjoyed a ‘cosy, teatime feeling: delightful to indulge in, but denying us the thrill of fear that comes when characters are really up against it’. For her, Quinn somehow

In Metro, Claire Allfree, in her review of an ‘invigorating riff’, particularly enjoyed Hornby’s acute

Bloomsbury, 256pp, £16.99

Corsair, 288pp, £16.99

and unlikeable, a truly believable creation. ‘His narrow and indulgent narrative voice is a great strength of the book.’ Markovits, thought Owen, ‘fashions an interior consciousness defined by self-deception, a character inhabiting a slowly shrinking world of inferiority and sadness’. And the anonymous blogger alifeinbooks agreed, finding poor Brian ‘engaging, self-deprecating and often funny’.

Julie Myerson’s nonfiction account of her 17-year-old son’s cannabis addiction, published in 2009, met with much controversy. Thirteen years later, the author has published a novel about a teenage girl’s addiction to heroin and called it, Nonfiction, a title which, said Hephzibah Anderson in the Observer, sounds ‘overly meta’. Myerson is teasing her critics by making fiction and nonfiction indeterminable. Her novel, Anderson observed, ‘blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love’.

Anderson enjoyed ‘its bareknuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted’. The mother in the novel observes that for a writer ‘nothing stops them chronicling even the most devastating experiences’. Anderson admired Myerson’s courage not to spare herself nor the reader: ‘here is a book that instantly sucks the reader down into a swirling vortex of grief, trauma and powerlessness’.

But in the Literary Review, Joseph Owen thought Brian, lonely

The Perfect Golden Circle,’ explained Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, ‘is a fictional account of the [two] outsider artists behind these mammoth works… Intrinsic to their work is the ethos of never harming the land. They are careful not to break any stalks when they bend them down, are passionately upset about river pollution, fly-tipping, unnecessary road building and the newly discovered hole in the ozone layer.’ It’s a ‘parable of the ecological and artistic affairs of man that never disappears up its own circle’ and ‘deserves top ranking in any list of the best books about rural England’, Katsoulis

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 27 Fiction

Amsterdam — a claim about 180 degrees away from Allfree’s sense that the novel fatally lacked any ‘animating spirit’.

In the Guardian, Hephzibah Anderson set the scene: ‘It’s 1989, and over the course of a blazing Wiltshire summer, a series of mysterious and increasingly complex crop circles appear in the county’s ripening wheat fields….They’re soon attracting international attention from the media, UFO enthusiasts, dowsers, exorcists and tourists.’

This, for Stuart Evers in the Spectator, was ‘the novel’s principal strength, but also its weakness’. Evers thought Blum, a lonely bachelor, just too male and stale to be compelling company. The Sidekick, he thought, ‘has the distinctive topography of a classic American story: sports as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations; the innocence of pick-up games in schoolyards vs the cynicism of the big leagues. To a greater or lesser extent, these themes are present in The Sidekick. The trouble is that the reader must go through Blum to find them.’ In the Times, Houman Barekat also found Brian heavy going. ‘You don’t have to be boring to be an elite sportsperson, but it helps — and therein lies the problem… Blum’s dull resentment at living in his friend’s shadow makes for a rather meagre psychodrama.’

A golden age: aerial view of crop circles

Claire Allfree, in the Telegraph, found the revisitation of the subject, this time disguised as a novel, unappealing, ‘while Nonfiction reads on one level as a writer defending the right to write what she likes in whichever way she pleases, its knowing proximity to real life is also unavoidable’. She concluded, ‘What I couldn’t get over was how little I actually cared about the novel’s blood and guts; the unfolding tragedy at its centre.’ Alex Peake-Tomkinson in the Spectator agreed, ‘I did feel it might now be time for Myerson to look beyond her own life.’

Faber, £18.99 368pp

THE BENJAMINGOLDENPERFECTCIRCLEMYERS

Margieconcluded.Orford,however, was not so enthusiastic in the Spectator: ‘It all reads a bit like a lockdown fever dream,’ she wrote… ‘Why the men hang out together, or what has set them traipsing around fields on moonlit nights, is not made clear because neither is articulate… and so the result for this reader was one of intenseStuartirritation.’Kellyinthe Scotsman said he could use many adjectives to describe the novel: ‘fascinating,

Benjamin Markovits has plundered his past life as a professional basketball player in The Sidekick, a tale of childhood friendship. Brian Blum, white and middle-class, doesn’t make the grade in basketball and ends up as a sportswriter and his friend Marcus Hayes, black and from a single-parent home, ends up a star NBA player. The novel is narrated by Brian who, decades later, is researching a biography of Marcus.

‘

clever, angry, poignant, beautifully constructed but the one I shall plump for is: it is lovely. I do not use that word lightly. It is a work of love, and a work about works of love, and a work that evokes a sense of love in the reader… It is, as well as lovely, a deeply serious book.’

THE BENJAMINSIDEKICKMARKOVITS

NONFICTION A NOVEL JULIE MYERSON

‘Meanwhile, on Holloway Road in north London,’ she continued, ‘news of the case drags up long-suppressed horrors for Isobel, a librarian whose mysterious childhood “accident” –somehow linked to the experimental school [The Schoolhouse of the title] chosen by her hippy parents – has left her solitary, self-loathing and deaf.’ Goldsbrough thought the story ‘dark, really dark’ and ‘would make a brilliant Scandi-style television drama, with its creepy suburban landscape of marshland, canal and empty newsagent-lit streets’.

GHOST LOVER

‘For all its hilarious incoherence,’ Thomas-Corr concluded, ‘Ghost Lover ultimately inspires depression. When will publishers stop throwing money at women just because they are writing about sex? If a male author imagined pan-frying his penis, there’s no way he would be acclaimed as a fearless chronicler of desire. Ghost Lover doesn’t feel like progress.

As one woman in Taddeo’s final story tells another: “You’re full of poisonous energy. I’m going to need to do a juice cleanse when I get home.”’

In the Guardian Dina Nayeri thought the novel was a ‘triumph of devotion and imagination’ and ‘rooted in the understanding that we keep our loved ones close with every strange, shameful, hilarious detail we commit to memory, recording device or paper; that the dead leave the world altered, that life is continually renewed, and that we are made to survive the most unbearable losses’.

As a whole, this collection of stories ‘is a mixed bag’, wrote Sarah Gilmartin in the Irish Times. ‘The primary issue is one of repetition, in style, theme, character and authorial voice. Some stories – the poignant Maid Marian, the powerful A Suburban Weekend – come close to greatness, tautly written tales of loss and unlikely redemption. Others are pale imitations, ghostly approximations of superiorStephaniebedfellows.’Merritt in the Observer thought the book’s biggest weakness was ‘Taddeo’s fondness for overblown similes that strive so hard for originality they become completely unmoored from meaning’. But on a positive note she believed Taddeo forced ‘the reader to acknowledge the grey areas and ambiguities around sexual power play’.

‘Fight Night is mostly a formless stream of consciousness in which jokes and feelings are given priority,’ explained Melissa Katsoulis in the Times. ‘Toews uses comedy to make sense of trauma, arranging the comic one-liners and slapstick right up against overtly serious conversations and thoughts. Packaging psychological complexity into beguiling, moreish, easygoing prose is an unusual skill’. Although Max Liu in iCulture did not think Fight Night was Toews’s best novel, he thought it ‘entertaining and affecting, fiction written in and about the teeth of life’. He felt bereft when he finished it and shaken by its power.

LISA TADDEO Bloomsbury, 240pp, £16.99

Sophie Ward’s first novel was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize. Her latest one, The Schoolhouse, is set between the past and present. It’s December 1990, and a 10-year-old schoolgirl, Caitlin, vanishes, and DS Emma Carter ‘suspects there’s weirdness afoot at the local primary school’, according to Susie Goldsbrough in the Times.

A suburban ‘dark, really dark story’

Clare Clark in the Guardian, however, believed the novel ‘accelerates towards an improbably overcooked conclusion’. She thought it a pity because the novel ‘has much to say about childhood and, in particular, the failures by adults in authority to protect the children in their care… A child betrayed by the adults in her life may survive, is [Ward’s] fierce message, but the damage lasts a lifetime.’

Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph considered it a ‘largely conventional crime novel’, and believed Ward has a gift for ‘bringing characters to life’ and that her writing ‘always delivers a

FIGHT MIRIAMNIGHTTOEWS

Faber, 251pp, £14.99

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including Women Talking, a chilling tale of systematic subjugation in a rural religious colony. She grew up in Manitoba, the daughter of Mennonite parents; her father and only sister both committed suicide. ‘Fight Night is an exuberant celebration of female resilience,’ wrote Stephanie Merritt in her review for the Observer, ‘though it too is shot through with grief and pain, and its power is in showing how these are not merely inseparable but interdependent.

‘The plot is spare and focuses on the relationship between three generations of women in one Canadian family, most particularly on the bond between the narrator, Swiv, and her grandmother, Elvira.’ Merritt thought Toews had ‘created a gem of a book, sharp edged and shining, a paean to the strength of women that posits humour and hope as a choice in the face of suffering’.

28 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Fiction

This collection of stories is a mixed bag

‘Ghost Lover,’ wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, ‘is a nine-course tasting menu that is all spice and no flavour. It picks up on the sex-and-trauma scenarios from Taddeo’s debut novel, Animal (2021), a blood-soaked revenge thriller set in Los Angeles… Yet the main dish is always the same facile serving of female jealousy. In every effortfully flippant tale, self-conscious women compete to be the most desirable female in the room.’

Corsair, 289pp, £16.99

THESOPHIESCHOOLHOUSEWARD

real emotional impact’. Stephanie Cross in the Daily Mail, however, was dismissive: ‘Ward is an interesting writer,’ she wrote, ‘but sadly here her themes — institutional failures; the slipperiness of the truth — all feel well-worn, even as the drama becomes increasingly outlandish.’

Books & Publishing To advertise, contact Jasper Gibbons on 0203 859 7096 or via email Jaspergibbons@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 3rd October 2022 To hereyouradvertisebusinesscontactJasper on: 0203 859 7093 or via email: Jaspergibbons@theoldie.co.uk

‘Davies portrays his fractious relationship with his brother as an ocean of unknowable currents. Ray’s decision to move to New York in 1976 is mentioned with a shrug and the words: “Putting space – the entire Atlantic ocean – between us was not the worst thing that could happen”,’ said Winwood. ‘Davies’s curious decision to recuperate at his sibling’s north London home after a ministroke 38 years later provides a new seam of complaint. “I sometimes feel he’s like a vampire the way he draws so much energy from people” was the verdict after a fortnight’s board and lodgings.’

A turning point was a disastrous fall while showing off

This is an ‘authorised biography’ of Doherty, stated Declan Ryan in the Observer, ‘put together by writer Simon Spence from more than 60 hours of conversations during lockdown. As the singer notes in the foreword, he’d been clean of drugs for more than a year when they began the process and he’s a lucid, honest presence.’That’smore than can be said for much of the singer’s career. ‘In 2003, shortly after he realised that he had become a full-blown heroin addict,’ explained Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times, ‘Doherty was playing the Coachella festival in California with his band the Libertines... he was lying in a bush with a bottle of whiskey when Iggy Pop ran past sipping water. “He stopped and said something like, ‘I’ve been there, but now I’m into jogging,’” Doherty recalls forlornly. “Even Iggy Pop had abandoned me.” ’

‘ “I insisted she get on a bus with

me,” writes Doherty,’ said Kate Hind in the Mail on Sunday: ‘“She went everywhere in a limo usually. We got dressed up in disguise, put on wigs, and jumped on the bus around London. We used to have a bit of a laugh.”’ But it wasn’t all so amusing: ‘Doherty claims Moss “covered this teddy bear of mine, called Pandy, in petrol and set him alight”.’ Segal called the book ‘chatty, intractably charming, yet mottled with darkness’.

Headline, 288pp, £20

Segal said: ‘Received wisdom suggests it was Doherty’s drug problems that scuppered the band... His spin here is that his estrangement came from being a true renegade, railing against “the industrialisation” of the Libertines as they increasingly left him behind...’ Then ‘Doherty threw himself into his addictions to heroin and crack, his second band, Babyshambles, and a relationship with model Kate Moss.’

Kate Mossman in the New Statesman said: ‘A picture emerges of a young punk formed not by rage and alienation but by pop dreams and a predilection for jumble sales. Jarvis has, I think, spent his whole life being much more enthusiastic and loving of things than he appeared to be. He

LIVING ON A THIN LINE THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY DAVE DAVIES

30 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2022 Music

‘The book is poignant in a subtle, understated way; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for the age of the Ford Cortina,’ wrote Will Hodgkinson in the Times. A turning point was a disastrous fall while showing off. ‘The ensuing broken bones in his feet, legs, wrists and pelvis meant the 22-year-old was trapped in hospital for months, surrounded by proper men who had done far more terrible things to themselves in mines and on building sites. That’s when the revelation came: instead of trying to be a lofty artist, he should write about the world around him.’

Jonathan Cape, 368pp, £20

Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian said the book ‘ambles through 25 years, tracking Cocker’s worldview as it takes shape in his home city of Sheffield. It opens in the present day, as he’s clearing out the loft of his London house. There is a lot of stuff in there, and each item has a story. His task is to decide whether to keep each thing or “cob” it (throw it out). Mulling over these ancient treasures puts him in philosophical mood, and the book soon expands into both an autobiography and a treatise on pop.’

always withheld something, and perhaps that made him look cold. In turning out the contents of the loft, he has let the warmth back in.’

Chatty and charming: Doherty, 2012

Empire added: ‘Davies is at pains to detail how awfully he behaved. The evidence is here, in the baiting of [his brother] Ray (Ray baits back), the volatile relationship with drummer Mick Avory (Avory attacked Davies onstage once)... He’s in no way contrite enough, however, about his habit of ditching wives and small children willy-nilly when a better offer came along.’

The Kinks co-founder was not always so endearing. In the Times Ian Winwood said: ‘John Lennon described him as a “cynical, obnoxious bastard”. “To be fair, he had a point,” Davies concedes.’

A LIKELY LAD PETE DOHERTY WITH SIMON SPENCE Constable, 336pp, £20

GOOD POP, BAD POP AN INVENTORY JARVIS COCKER

‘This updated memoir – a previous account, Kink, was published in 1997 – has its origins in a period of intense rehabilitation and re-evaluation prompted by a stroke the guitarist suffered in 2013,’ wrote Kitty Empire in the Guardian. ‘After his stroke, he had to relearn how to play guitar. His enthusiasm for neuroplasticity – the way the brain lays down new pathways – is one of the book’s more endearing aspects.’

The Oldie October 2022 418

Articles inside

Taking a Walk: The valley of the River Sence, Leicestershire

Bird of the Month: Little Owl

Ravenna’s heavenly mosaics

Drink Bill Knott

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

On the Road: Pattie Boyd

Kitchen Garden

Overlooked Britain: Italian Chapel in the Orkneys

Golden Oldies