The Oldie December 2022 issue 420

My crush on Peter Cook

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Features

12 Modern Life: What is generative artificial intelligence? Richard Godwin 25 Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips 33 My gender-fluid mate Sir Les Patterson 40 History David Horspool 42 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

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Commonplace Corner

56 My Sporting Life: Memories, Moments and Declarations, by Michael Parkinson Jasper Rees 57 Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe, by Caroline Moorehead Annabel Barber 59 The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club, by Christopher de Hamel Christopher Howse 61 Come Back in September, by Darryl Pinckney Frances Wilson 61 A Brief History of Pasta, by Luca Cesari and Johanna Bishop Elisabeth Luard 63 Bournville, by Jonathan Coe Nicholas Lezard 65 Rock Concert: A HighVoltage History, from Elvis to Live Aid, by Marc Myers David Hepworth 66 Just Passing Through, by Milton Gendel and Cullen Murphy Nicky Haslam Arts

70 Film: Triangle of Sadness Harry Mount 71 Theatre: My Neighbour Totoro William Cook

71 Radio Valerie Grove 72 Television Frances Wilson 73 Music Richard Osborne 74 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 75 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

77 Gardening David Wheeler

Supplements editor

Liz Anderson

Amelia Milne

Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 78 Restaurants James Pembroke 79 Drink Bill Knott 80 Sport Jim White 80 Motoring Alan Judd 82 Digital Life Matthew Webster 82 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 85 Bird of the Month: Avocet John McEwen

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The Marbella Club Anne Robinson and Emma Wilson

On the Road: Gary Lineker Louise Flind

Taking a Walk: Cairngorms Two Lochs Trail Patrick Barkham

For display, contact : Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Rafe Thornhill on 020 3859 7093

For classified: Jasper Gibbons 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk

Front cover Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe, 1962. Friedman-Abeles

The Old Un’s Notes

Theatregoers who are keen on Dickens face a joyful December.

Almost wherever one looks, A Christmas Carol is being staged – not least Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, which the show’s star, Robert Bathurst, writes about on page 37 of this issue.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is doing A Christmas Carol in Stratfordupon-Avon. London’s Old Vic is doing a production. And Deborah Warner has scheduled it at the Ustinov Theatre in Bath. Sir Nicholas Hytner has recruited Simon Russell Beale for a version at his Bridge Theatre.

Further adaptations are to be had this year in Kingston upon Thames, Windsor, Bristol, Doncaster, Coventry, Exmouth, Chesterfield, Woking, Portsmouth, Wilmslow, Salisbury, Crewe, Liverpool, Bolton and Buxton and at Sheffield Cathedral.

Until a decade ago, Dickens’s tale of redistribution was seldom

known on stage. Since then, it has become the second-most popular Christmas tale – after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s greatest Christmas story of all.

On the subject of Charles Dickens, few people realise he was a keen punter at betting shops.

He turned against them in June 1852, when he placed half a crown on a well-fancied horse, Tophana, in the Western Handicap, at odds of 2/1. He was ripped off by the welshing bookie, known to him as Mr Cheerful.

The horse won, but when Dickens went to collect his

seven-and-sixpence winnings, he ‘returned to Mr Cheerful’s establishment and found it in great confusion’, with Mr C nowhere to be seen and a minion explaining he had gone ‘to a sale a’ Monday’.

Dickens concluded that ‘Mr Cheerful has been so long detained at the sale, that he has never come back.’

As a result of Dickens, and many others, experiencing such scandalous customer service, towards the end of 1853 – on 1st December –bookmakers were officially and legally outlawed.

It wasn’t until over a century later, in May 1961, that they were legalised.

Among this month’s contributors

Madeline Smith (p13) played Miss Caruso, the Bond Girl in Live and Let Die who has her dress unzipped by Roger Moore with a magnetic watch. A Hammer horror star, she was also in Up Pompeii.

Ronald Blythe (p30) is our greatest living rural writer. He turned 100 on 6th November. He is author of Akenfield and Word from Wormingford: A Parish Year. His new book is Next to Nature.

Anthony Haden-Guest (p34) lives in New York and is the model for Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. He wrote The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night

David Hepworth (p65) presented Live Aid and The Old Grey Whistle Test. He is author of Abbey Road Studios at 90. He presents the Word in Your Ear music podcast with Mark Ellen.

Happy 130th birthday, Bertie Wooster!

Jeeves’s comic genius of a boss, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, is never given a precise birthday by P G Wodehouse.

But he is said to be 24 in Jeeves Takes Charge, first published in November 1916. So it isn’t fanciful to suggest he was born in November 1892, 130 years ago this month.

Bertie went to Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, before embarking on his not-very-arduous grown-up life.

The late Dr Angus Macintyre (1935-94), a much-loved history don at Magdalen and father of the writer Ben Macintyre, tried and failed to get Bertie included in the Magdalen College Record – which lists the achievements of Magdalen undergraduates and graduates.

Surely, on his 130th

Important stories you may have missed

birthday, it’s time to include Bertie, the greatest nonachiever in history, in the Record.

Drunken

Empty canoe retrieved by police Orcadian

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75 years on – royal wedding

20th November would have been the 75th wedding anniversary of the late Queen and the late Prince Philip.

To commemorate the anniversary, Tessa Dunlop has written Elizabeth and Philip: A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy, out now.

In the book, Dunlop writes that 1947, the year of the royal wedding, saw a peacetime record of 401,201 couples tie the knot.

Barbara Weatherill, 97, pre-empted the future

Queen’s November wedding by a matter of months; she married airman Stan in July 1947. She says, ‘Our parents knew each other. That was very common in those days. Stan asked my father’s permission before he asked me!’

Barbara remembers a hit song of the time, People Will Say We’re in Love. Barbara says, ‘And I was! There were a lot of us in love at that time. I don’t think it necessarily was Elizabeth and Philip’s favourite song, but it was played on the radio a lot.’ 100-year-old Philip Jarman began courting Cora, a Bletchley Park veteran, in 1947. He remembers, ‘Us lot who went through the war looked at things differently. We felt lucky to be alive and

we wanted to crack on with life. So, yes, we did get married young.’

The average age of the blushing bride fell to an all-time low of 22. Philip Jarman remembers that, after the war, ‘A girl still belonged to her father. How can I put it? You couldn’t do much unless you were married! We took marriage seriously. It was difficult to get divorced, and considered shameful.’

Philip and Cora were together for 72 years, one year shy of Elizabeth and Philip’s union. ‘I miss Cora very much. She was a great royalist. Back then, monarchy and marriage really meant something.’

On the subject of long marriages, Conversations from a Long Marriage by Jan Etherington was published on 3rd November.

The characters in the book, based on the Radio 4 series of the same name, have been married for over 40 years. Children of the sixties, they’re still free spirits, even if being spontaneous requires rather more planning these days.

Their conversation will be familiar to many oldies. It features dodgy knees, resentment of new glasses and difficulties with stairs: ‘Hey, baby, fire up the Stannah. We’re taking a stairlift to heaven.’

‘Drinking alone is going to be a lot more lonely’

‘They’re known locally as the railway children’

For over 30 years, Jan Etherington has been writing radio and TV comedy series with her husband (of almost 40 years) and writing partner, Gavin Petrie. Conversations from a Long Marriage was her first solo narrative comedy. It has just been commissioned for a fourth radio series.

Joanna Lumley and ‘husband’ Roger Allam act the principal roles. When Joanna Lumley first read the script of the comedy, she told Jan Etherington, ‘It’s as if you’ve been eavesdropping at my window!’

On 5th November 2022, Sir Sydney Kentridge KC celebrated his 100th birthday.

Kentridge is a man who can be talked of only in superlatives: he has been

described by many as the greatest advocate of the 20th century. His friend and colleague Jonathan Sumption described him as ‘the barrister’s barrister, with a moral stature that no amount of forensic technique can impersonate.’

After war service in East Africa and Italy, Kentridge started practice in his native South Africa in 1949. He swiftly became the dominant advocate at the Johannesburg Bar, representing Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu and ANC President Chief Albert Luthuli, among many others.

He achieved international fame in 1977 for his representation of the family of Steve Biko during the inquest into Biko’s death at the hands of the police. Kentridge would be portrayed by Albert Finney in the play that was staged of the inquest.

In the 1980s, Kentridge shifted his practice to London and became the leading QC in England, where he defended P&O in the Herald of Free Enterprise manslaughter prosecution and represented the Countryside Alliance in its challenge to the FoxHunting Bill.

He argued (and won) his last case in the Supreme Court in 2013 at the age of 90. His career as an advocate in full-time practice lasted exactly 64 years, perhaps the longest in legal history.

This year, a new book, Thomas Grant’s The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid, celebrated his most famous trial. It features on page 7 of the Oldie Review of Books in this issue.

As she turns 70, Alexandra Pringle, editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury Publishing for over 20 years, and three pals – all editors and writers – have set up a new company, Silk Road Slippers.

The aim is to sell ‘beautiful pieces from antique lands’,Mandela’s lawyer: Sir Sydney

including kaftans, Indian jewellery, Peruvian silver and Mexican pots, hunted down in market alleyways and souks.

Pringle comes from the Afriats, a family of Berber Jewish traders whose caravans travelled from Timbuktu to Mogador with gum arabic, ostrich feathers and spices. The Silk Road Slippers logo is her family trademark from the 1920s, when the Afriats brought indigo from Pondicherry and cotton from Manchester to make cloth for the Tuareg, the blue men of the Sahara.

‘I feel I’m reverting to my roots!’ Pringle says, ‘All the time I was stuck to my desk at work, doing a job I was passionate about, I promised myself that the moment I

retired, I would take off and travel to my heart’s content.’

The moral is you’re never too old to hit the Silk Road!

The Barbican’s family show for Christmas is My Neighbour Totoro, a charming tale about two little girls who discover a benevolent woodland monster (reviewed on page 71).

The furry beast has a friend who is a cat-bus, which the Barbican’s production depicts with a vast, inflatable puppet. Reviews have been generally positive but none, curiously, mentioned that the blow-up puppet of the cat-bus is decidedly male.

There is no easy way to say this, but it has two prominent testicles. Don’t look, children!

‘It’s the first time the bank has been any help to me’

‘Eddie, take everything out of fear and put it into greed’

‘Of course he’s a good listener. I had his tongue cut out’

My royal appointments diary

For over 50 years, I’ve recorded my gripping meetings with the Queen

‘Keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.’

Whoever said it – Mae West used the line in a film in 1937, but both Margot Asquith and Lillie Langtry were reported as saying it in the 1920s – was bang on the money. I started keeping a diary in 1959 (when I was eleven) and I have been profitably mining it almost ever since.

It’s because I keep a diary that I can tell you that I first met Queen Elizabeth II on the evening of Thursday 2nd May 1968. I was a 20-year-old student at Oxford at the time and Her Majesty, 42, came to visit the university debating society, the Oxford Union.

When she had gone, I reprimanded William Waldegrave (the Union President, now Baron Waldegrave of North Hill and Provost of Eton) for not carrying the monarch’s umbrella for her as he escorted her across the courtyard in the rain.

He told me, ‘The Queen insists on holding her own umbrella – always. If someone else holds it, the rain trickles down her neck.’

Over the years, by chance and by design, I was lucky enough to have scores of encounters with our late Queen. I kept a record of them all in my diary.

She was a very special person (very funny, too) and since her death on 8th September I have been working 15-hour days (literally) using my old diary entries as the basis for what I hope will be a different kind of book about her.

Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait is coming out on 8th December. I am with the same publishing house as Prince Harry, whose book is out in January. I am grateful to them for letting me get ahead of the game.

My wife regularly tells me that what my life has always lacked is ‘career development’. She claims that what I am doing now is exactly what I was doing when we first met – on 6th June 1968, five weeks to the day after that first meeting with Her Majesty. Leafing through my diary, I see she is right.

I have just found my entry for Thursday 31st December 1970: ‘Time for my end-of-year review. It is six months since I left Oxford. What has been achieved?’

Then as now, I was writing a book. It wasn’t about Her Majesty, but about those entertained at her pleasure. It was a serious book about prison reform.

‘Some worthwhile visits,’ I recorded. ‘HM Prison Bristol, HM Prison Grendon, Lowdham Grange Borstal, HM Prison Liverpool, HM Prison Holloway.

‘No easy answers. Indeed, whatever the conditions of the prison, the level of recidivism remains much the same. Horrific conditions aren’t a deterrent: most prisoners are “present dwellers”: when they commit an offence, they are not thinking about the possible outcome.

‘Good conditions are more civilised but don’t, of themselves, improve the inmates’ chances. Only education and training for work and life can do that.’

Half a century on, there’s nothing new there.

Again, then as now, I was working in TV and radio. I had fronted a couple of documentaries and, according to the diary, ‘had meetings galore – Robin Scott (né Scutt, Controller, BBC2), Edward Barnes and Monica Sims (Children’s Department – boy, do we take ourselves seriously!) … All talk, leading to more talk.’

Half a century later, I am still going to meetings that go nowhere. In the interim, I have learnt that if the person you are meeting has the word ‘development’ attached to them, there won’t be any.

My 1970 report on the radio front was more positive. ‘I like Tony Whitby, Controller, Radio 4. I think that meeting will lead somewhere. I like Con Mahoney, Head of Light Entertainment, Radio. I like the people I bump into in his office – eg Ted Ray and Arthur Askey.

‘I like the producer he has given me, Peter Titheradge – full of old-world courtesy AND the son of the great Madge Titheradge. She was a great beauty, a famous Peter Pan – and a childhood friend of Noël Coward.’

Happily, I am still popping up on the radio in the 2020s much as I was in the 1970s, but the days of popping in to pitch ideas to the Controller of Radio 4 and the Head of Light Entertainment are long gone.

BBC executives are now imprisoned by bureaucracy and protocols. It’s not just the money that’s luring the talent away from the Beeb to commercial radio and podcasting.

In 1970, I was doing freelance journalism, too. According to the diary, ‘£15 for the Spectator piece. Punch: £26 5s 0d. Vogue: £25. Guardian: £18. It adds up. I had lunch with Lynn Barber from Penthouse A disappointing experience, given the nature of the magazine: she was completely unsexy and made sex seem completely unsexy. But she has £20 to offer me for an article – so I’m going to give it a go.’

And I’m still giving it a go. (Lynn Barber is, too.)

A new year beckons. If you haven’t before, 1st January is the day to start. Yes, keep a diary and someday it could keep you.

I think it’s all over. It will be soon

After 50 years of dreaming, I know we won’t win the World Cup matthew norman

This question may look deceptively rhetorical, but it begs a starkly literal answer.

Is laughter the best medicine?

No, it is not. If it were, those diagnosed with atrial fibrillation would be prescribed a Seinfeld box set instead of a blood-thinner and beta-blockers.

But imagine for a moment that laughter is a uniquely effective drug. In that event, anyone exposed to John Cleese these past several decades has been in the placebo group.

Mr Cleese’s bitter resentments and ravening sense of entitlement denied have transformed him from arguably the funniest man on the planet to the least amusing life form in this, or any, quadrant of the galaxy.

Yet we cannot damn an aperçu out of contempt for its mouthpiece. So the time comes, as every fourth year, to trot out the Michael Frayn line Mr Cleese’s character speaks in Clockwise:

‘It’s not the despair. I can take the despair. It’s the hope [I can’t stand].’

Writing a few weeks before the World Cup begins in the traditional footballing stronghold of Qatar, the hope for anyone shackled by birth to the compulsion to support England remains minimal.

This is as it should be. Both painful history and dismal recent form preclude optimism.

Yet, once the tournament starts, the primal instinct to hope will trump experience. One adequate performance will strip away the top layer of realism like sulphuric acid on paint.

It is always thus. The team could comprise 11 men randomly chosen from the electoral roll, two amputees among them and not all of them sighted, and a flukey 1-0 win over the plucky little octogenarians from Vatican City would ignite the expectation that Harry Kane will lift the Jules Rimet trophy.

Football is the most wickedly

distorting game known to mankind. It obliterates not only common sense, but moral sensibilities.

Obviously, it will be wrong even to watch the tournament on television, thereby giving tacit approval to an odious regime. Anyone with any respect for human rights should boycott this World Cup.

But there isn’t a football fan alive whose convictions will survive a collision with the desperation for a World Cup victory.

If a reincarnated German Chancellor somehow qualified to represent England, and came on as a late sub to win the trophy with a last-minute pile-driver from 25 yards, the chant of ‘One Adolf Hitler, there’s only one Adolf Hitler’ would echo through every city, town, suburb and village. And yes, Hampstead, that includes you.

Speaking of the Führer brings us seamlessly to the cause of the unbroken football failure on foreign soil that has plagued us since 1950.

Never outside the homeland has England won a tournament knockout match against a major footballing power (Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, Spain, Italy or the Netherlands). Not once.

This record defies the law of averages too completely to be coincidence. It bespeaks the crushing inferiority complex, however flimsily disguised in sequinned robes of conceit, sired by the aftermath of the Second World War.

Winning the war but losing the peace explains almost everything, Brexit included, that has transformed this nation into a global joke far droller, in its

macabre way, than anything Mr Cleese has conjured in 40 years.

So it is that in football, as elsewhere, the English veer between the arrogance born of standing alone against the Hun and the defeatism born of still having to ration bread in 1954, when the German and Japanese economic miracles were in full swing.

The specific frailty was seeded in 1970, when Alf Ramsey’s defending champs contrived to lose a quarter-final to West Germany despite leading 2-0 with barely 20 minutes left.

That was the first game I ever watched. I was six years old. At full time, when the score was 2-2, my parents sent me to bed. This loving bid to spare me the horror to come was futile. I heard the commentary through the wall, and sobbed myself to sleep.

That trauma inculcated the paralysing fearfulness that has seen England lose more major tournament games from in front (the last World Cup semifinal, for example, when Croatia won from behind) than most of their rivals combined.

Prepare to enjoy the latest instalment of this sporting mystery play in a few weeks, more than likely in a quarter-final against the first serious opponents we encounter.

A couple of days later, reports will appear about a precipitous rise in the number of heart attacks recorded immediately after the defeat.

For victims with the outlandish good luck to be collected by an ambulance in time, the advice is mixed.

Those who want to live should know that, while laughter is not the best medicine, it has been shown to boost the immune system and speed recovery. Such patients should watch Fawlty Towers round the clock in intensive care.

Those for whom yet more World Cup heartache proves the final straw, and who deem it the ideal moment to check out, will find John Cleese on GB News.

Outside the homeland, England has never won a match against a major footballing power

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The British Visitor’s Passport (BVP) was a simplified version of the standard passport and was introduced in March 1961. It could be used by any British citizen, British Dependent Territories citizen or British Overseas citizen who had been resident in the UK for more than eight years.

It could be obtained from any post office, as long as the applicant could provide a passport photograph and a birth certificate or valid ID. It could be used for holidays or private visits of no more than three months’ duration to specified European countries – and Bermuda!

The visitor’s passport was valid only for a year. However, if you booked a last-minute break and then discovered that your BVP had expired, there was no need to panic. You had only to pop to your local post office and obtain another on the spot. No messing around with check-and-send or tracking numbers.

Instead, you left the post office with a new visitor’s passport in your pocket.

Another advantage was that you could get a family BVP, which could include your spouse and any children under 16. Photographs of husband and wife were glued to the inside fold, along with their address, dates and places of birth, heights and distinguishing features. Children were listed underneath.

This approach to travel documentation might seem rather cavalier now, but it was the days before large-scale international terrorism, people-smuggling, quarantines and all the other problems with which travel is now beset.

Everything seemed much more straightforward. There was no struggling with automated passport controls and face-scanners. Instead, you took your family across an international border with one light, flimsy, cream-coloured card, folded in three.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the advent of the British Visitor’s Passport heralded a bright future where we could all spend our summers under canvas in the Pyrenees and our winters on the Costa Brava.

Travelling to visit our European neighbours took off. Remember the birth of package holidays? School exchanges? Not to mention booze cruises to France!

How different it all feels today when, even for the most intrepid traveller, crossing international boundaries has become more complicated than ever. The BVP seems like a magical token from a time of insouciance.

Owing to concerns about its easy availability and the inherent security implications, the BVP was withdrawn on 1st January 1996.

But the cardboard documents still have curiosity value. In 2015, a cancelled British Visitor’s Passport, belonging to the artist Damien Hirst, was sold at auction for £875.

Generative artificial intelligence is the next wave of the digital revolution, if we are to believe the soothsayers of Silicon Valley.

Most of us are familiar with commonor-garden artificial intelligence – when machines figure stuff out for themselves, usually by processing enormous amounts of data at a speed no human can match. One practical application is Facebook’s surveillance software combing through your personal information to try to sell you the oven gloves you bought last week.

The thing about this form of AI is that it’s basically a glorified calculator. It can’t make the creative leaps that are a feature of human intelligence.

That’s why generative AI is exciting. It can process all our lovely data and remix it into pictures, songs, poems, novels, programmes, articles and videos that appear to be brand-new.

Take OpenAI’s Dall-E program. You type in whatever you want into a text box and the computer will come up with four convincing pictures of it for you. Say, ‘Manhattan skyline as painted by J M W Turner’. Or ‘A boat that looks like Homer Simpson’. Or ‘Three hagfish devouring Donald J Trump.’

Actually, you can’t do that last one: Dall-E comes with a few in-built ‘guardrails’ – no sex, no violence, no celebrities – to prevent abuse. However, there are plenty of rivals that aren’t as worried about ethical niceties.

People are already using one of them, Stable Diffusion (whose parent company was recently valued at $100 million), to make AI porn. The era of explicit videos starring whomever you please isn’t far away.

In the meantime, those videos are

prone to eerie glitches and limbs sprouting in weird places. Dall-E is great at creating Muppet memes but isn’t so good at human faces. Its musical equivalent, Jukebox, can do a passable Abba pastiche – at least until the vocals come in.

But the quality is improving all the time. This summer, a digital artist named Jason Allen won first prize at the Colorado State Art Fair with an image he created using the programme Midjourney. It prompted a lively online debate about whether computers can, indeed, create art.

I recently put this question to a philosopher of aesthetics. His answer was ‘Yes. But only bad, derivative art.’ Which needn’t be a problem, the professor reasoned. Plenty of people are perfectly happy with bad, derivative art.

Richard Godwin

what is generative artificial intelligence?

what was a BritishVisitor’s Passport?

AI image made by asking for ‘Underwater teddy bears using ’90s tech’

I was Peter Cook’s caddy

The great comedian would have been 85 on 17th November. When he played golf with Madeline Smith, he captured her heart

On Monday 25th August 1980, most people were asleep when Betjeman’s Britain was aired at 10.40pm on ITV.

A selection of John Betjeman’s poems had been set to music by composer Jim Parker, and visually represented by various television heavyweights including Eric Morecambe, Peter Cook and Susannah York.

Peter Cook (1937-95) played the dedicated golfer in Betjeman’s poem Seaside Golf. I was his put-upon caddy, reluctantly trailing behind him on the course. Both of us were dressed to the nines in exquisite Edwardian costumes.

Our poem was brought to Technicolor life on the windswept Sheringham links course in Norfolk.

Australian director Charles Wallace had hawked his project around the TV stations for nearly two years. A half-hour programme of poems had little appeal to the networks.

The idea was heavily influenced by the recent release of an LP, Banana Blush: Betjeman poems, read by the poet himself, set to gentle brass-bandinspired music by composer Jim Parker.

Jim lived in Barnes, a leafy London suburb, but was originally from Hartlepool, and a long-time resident member of the Barrow Poets. This jolly group of musicians and narrators would set up shop and perform in pubs, basements, crypts and any number of small-scale venues all over the land.

Charles Wallace was smitten.

After a slow couple of years, Anglia Television finally bit.

Philip Garner was the highly regarded controller of the station. He realised their arts output had been sorely neglected and decided that a

programme highlighting the works of the Poet Laureate might provide a temporary solution.

A commission appeared. Philip, a member of Sheringham Golf Club, could provide the location. The Links Hotel for Charles, the camera crew, Peter Cook and me was provided free of charge.

What a thrill to act opposite Peter Cook, a teen idol of mine. When I was just 15, in the mid-sixties, a friend whose father was something in PR kindly took me to the BBC Studios in White City. We saw a recording of Not Only… But Also…, one of the most popular light-entertainment shows at the time.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the stars, but I had eyes only for Pete (who would have turned 85 on 17th November).

My idol did not disappoint when we came to make our film in 1980. Peter made me laugh so much – with ‘business’ that was not even in the script – that I actually felt quite ill with hysteria.

Peter could have carved out a successful career as a mime artist. To amuse me, he performed some ridiculous antics with the wing mirror of our ancient prop car, fiddling around with a cloth and copious amounts of spit and polish. Dear, silly Peter.

When I greeted him on our second day of filming, it was obvious that make-up could not hide his pallor. Peter looked ghastly.

He told me he had dreamt of murdering his friend Dudley Moore. He felt that Dud had deserted him with his

ambitions for stardom in America. Pete had himself tried to make it in the USA, but with patchy success. He returned, much chastened, to these shores.

So Peter had now just spent an unholy night wandering the corridors, mostly in conversation with the hotel’s commissionaire.

Then disaster fell. The pre-digital film in the second camera was out of focus and therefore did not match successfully with the film in the first camera.

We returned again to the golf course on a bleak autumn day to recapture the entire poem. Our faces DO look strained, but only I would notice!

Peter’s costume had not been retained – so none of the previous footage could be used. Once more, I was required to wear high-heeled shoes on the green – which, in normal circumstances, would have had us expelled from the club for life. Peter was apopleptic at the breach of custom.

Rightly so. In real life, he was a consummate golfer (in one inspired moment, he campaigned for Hampstead Golf Club to host the US Masters) and knew the etiquette. I walked on tiptoe – not easy on grass already sodden by east-coast October rainstorms.

My hero Peter asked me for my phone number. There being no mobiles in those days, I gave him the direct home line, with a warning that the call might be answered by a man.

Inevitably, I never heard from Peter, and within a matter of a few years he had become a bloated and tragic figure, dying in 1995, aged only 57. He would have been 85 this November.

I often think how different things might have been. For him. For me. Had I not told him truthfully that I had a partner.

A vintage road trip to Brighton

On 2nd November 1952, the main cast of a new Rank Organisation comedy joined the start of the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run.

The management at Pinewood was unenthusiastic about the film’s prospects. None of the four leads was well known.

Who would pay 1/9d to see a film about the owners of two elderly vehicles?

The inspiration for Genevieve was from the expatriate American writer William Rose, who witnessed the 1950 Brighton Veteran Car Run pass his Sussex cottage.

The South African-born director Henry Cornelius finally optioned the script, but his alma mater Ealing Studios turned down the production, claiming lack of space.

Eventually, Rank agreed to provide 70 per cent of the £115,000 budget, with the remainder from the National Film Finance Corporation.

Cornelius’s original choices of leads were Dirk Bogarde and Claire Bloom as Alan and Wendy McKim, but he eventually cast John Gregson and Dinah Sheridan. Bogarde advised her the part was ‘really you’, even if the director unchivalrously informed her that, at 31, she was too old for the role.

As for the McKims’ rivals, Cornelius had been highly impressed by Kenneth More’s stage performance as Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea. He told the actor that the part of Ambrose Claverhouse was written with him in mind. This was not entirely true: it was initially intended for Guy Middleton.

Finally, Kay Kendall, an actress in the tradition of Carole Lombard, was to be the bon viveur and trumpet-player Rosalind Peters.

The 57-day shooting schedule started in September 1952. The Veteran Car

Club of Great Britain suggested a Darracq 10/12 HP Type O and a Spyker 14/18 HP ‘Roi des Belges’ Open Tourer for the leading vehicles.

Gregson took the wheel for a few scenes, despite not having taken a driving test. Sheridan remembered ‘trying not to be seen giving him instructive help out of the side of my mouth’. The actor was so nervous that he hid a glass of milk on the floor so he could quell the symptoms of an ulcer.

A standard 1950s comedy would have extensively featured back projection, but ‘internal accountancy’ ruled out Genevieve’s using Pinewood’s sound stages. Instead, the cinematographer Christopher Challis described how the crew would ‘take advantage of whatever turned up’ on location.

Frequently, dire weather meant that the cast had to drink brandy so their faces wouldn’t look blue with cold.

Cornelius mortgaged his house to fund the completion money, but the production eventually ran out of budget. More remembered ‘little men prowling around the studio, switching off lights that weren’t needed’.

Meanwhile, pressure from the American distributors meant Larry Adler, the composer of the Genevieve Waltz (and later an Oldie columnist), would not be credited in US prints of the film until 1991.

When shooting finished in February 1953, Rank’s head of production, Earl St John, was unimpressed: ‘We may get a few car nuts to go along and see it.’

In fact, Genevieve became the UK’s second-most successful box-office attraction, and the British Film Academy declared it the Best British Film of the Year.

One reason for such acclaim was a cast that was, quite simply, perfect, from

When Genevieve was filmed 70 years ago, no one predicted it would be such a huge hit. By Andrew Roberts

Sheridan’s witty and resigned wife to Gregson’s understated depiction of the keen motorist as a petulant, overgrown schoolboy.

Genevieve’s success also meant the elevation of Kendall and More to the stardom befitting two of British cinema’s finest light comedians.

The sequence of Rosalind miming to Kenny Baker’s trumpet belongs on a BFI list of Top Ten Sublime Screen Moments. Cornelius so liked the actress’s mistaken reference to playing the ‘plumpet’ that he kept it in the final cut. As for More, Claverhouse represented his long-term goal of a film role of ‘real character’.

As with any comedy of note, there was also an impeccable supporting cast: Joyce Grenfell’s hotelier, surrounded by aspidistras; Reginald Beckwith as a hapless Allard owner;

and a cameo from Leslie Mitchell, the voice of Movietone News.

Above all, there is Rose’s script with its affectionate but not uncritical eye for British eccentricities. Penelope Houston wrote in Sight and Sound that Genevieve had ‘a hard urban flavour’; the dialogue between the McKims is remarkably frank. Cornelius had to shoot two versions of their bedroom scene in case Rank decreed the first ‘a shade too French’.

Today, the Darracq and the Spyker are part of the Louwman Collection of vintage cars.

It is difficult to appreciate that the

Clockwise from top left: Kay Kendall, Dinah Sheridan, John Gregson, Kenneth More; Gregson and Sheridan on Genevieve; Sheridan is made up; Susie the dog and Sheridan. All taken in 1952

picture that made them world famous is 70 years old – until you recall that Michael Medwin, who played a young expectant father, died in 2020, aged 96.

Genevieve captures a Ladybird Book vision of the Home Counties, with the London described by Gavin Stamp: ‘shabby and ravaged, full of bomb sites and dereliction, and yet which is somehow authentic’. Much of the traffic looks pre-war, with the occasional Ford Consul as a harbinger of the affluent society.

It is a film that barely dates precisely because is so firmly rooted in time and place – and because, even today, certain old car enthusiasts are prone to ‘hawling like brooligans’.

The final words should go to Dinah Sheridan: ‘Genevieve will be our epitaph.’

Crumbs! Biscuit king turns 200

Mark Palmer salutes his

Silly, really, but whenever someone asked where I grew up, it was with some embarrassment that I’d reply, ‘Reading’.

I always harboured affection for the place, despite being aware of its shortcomings.

Much of the architecture was grim. Progress in the 1960s and ’70s was measured by how many shopping centres and one-way systems the town planners could get away with.

But I was invited back there recently to celebrate ‘Reading – Biscuit Town’ in the company of the Mayor, the ViceChancellor of Reading University and other local dignitaries.

We were marking the 200th anniversary of Huntley & Palmers. The Palmers arrived on the scene in 1841, and in 1822 Joseph Huntley opened his first baker’s shop at 72 London Street, Reading.

There are bicentenary lectures about the company’s former 25-acre site opposite Reading Gaol. You can take a Huntley & Palmers audio trail ‘through the world of biscuits’. Do visit the 300-odd biscuit-tin collection in the town hall – or pay a fiver to join one of Terry Dixon’s ‘Biscuit Crumb’ walks.

founded Huntley & Palmers

Terry’s mother worked in the factory in the 1950s and ’60s, first as a ‘picker’ – removing any damaged or substandard biscuits from the conveyor belt – and then in the firm’s Recreation Club.

‘I’m Berkshire born, Berkshire bred; strong in the arm, thick in the head,’ he says when we meet outside what’s left of the original 1860 railway station, from where you could smell the ginger nuts being roasted in the factory 400 yards or so away.

The factory has long gone. Once Associated Biscuits (Huntley & Palmers, Jacob’s, Peek Freans) was gobbled up in 1982 by Nabisco, the magnificent, late art-deco headquarters of what was once the most famous biscuit company in the world was replaced by a hideous Prudential Insurance building in a savage act of legal vandalism.

‘But the legacy of Huntley & Palmers lives on and its influence on the town cannot be overstated,’ says not-in-theslightest-bit-thick-in-the-head Terry, producing from his rucksack a small H&P tin made for the Queen’s Coronation, with a dozen or so Iced Gems inside. ‘Biscuits put Reading on the map.’

This is not strictly true. It was on the

map in 1121 when Henry I founded Reading Abbey, thought to be bigger than either Winchester Cathedral or Westminster Abbey. The abbey was closed by Henry VIII in 1539 and then almost razed to the ground during the Civil War on the orders of Charles I, who feared it would become a parliamentary stronghold.

Still, by the beginning of the First World War the Huntley & Palmers factory employed more than 6,000 people – over a quarter of the working population of the entire town – and was exporting to 134 countries. It held the Royal Warrant of every royal household in the world.

It was the ‘first name you thought of in biscuits, second to none in cakes’ – at least, that was what the advertising slogan said. ‘Huntley & Palmers make ’em like biscuits ought to be’ was the jaunty television commercial I remember the best.

My father, the last chairman, spent all his working life at Huntley & Palmers –as did my grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather. It was my great-great-uncle, George Palmer, who forged the alliance with his Quaker cousin, Thomas Huntley, in 1841.

Huntley took care of the baking, while Palmer developed the first continuously running machine for biscuit-manufacturing.

In some countries, tins of H&P biscuits achieved an exalted status. In 1890, two were discovered being used as ornaments on an altar in a Catholic church in Ceylon. A Mongolian chieftainess was said to have grown garlic heads in one as an ‘upward and visible sign of her high position’. In Uganda, Bibles were kept safe from destructive white ants in biscuit tins. In 1904, when Sir Francis Younghusband became the first European to visit the holy city of Lhasa, in the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet, he was welcomed by a stack of biscuit tins to assure him the locals were in touch with civilisation.

The biccies may have been good, but they weren’t works of art – unlike the tins, which were fashioned into handbags, binocular cases, suitcases, rows of books, buses and post boxes.

Henry Stanley took some with him on his trek across Africa in search of Dr Livingstone and made peace with a potentially violent tribe in Tanzania by offering them a few smart-looking tins.

Captain Scott took Huntley & Palmers biscuits to the South Pole; a packet was found alongside his frozen body. One of those, wrapped in greaseproof paper, fetched £4,000 at a Christie’s auction in 1999.

In the late 1960s, I used to take friends from school on tours given by a formidable woman called Mary Cottrell. The highlight was when we were shown into a special room where we produced our penknives and hacked away at the massive blocks of chocolate. And I always backed Reading Football Club – the Biscuit Men.

Reading Gaol, designed by George Gilbert Scott, stands between the former site of the factory and the ruins of the abbey. It ceased being a prison in 2014 and is rumoured to cost £250,000 a year to maintain while the Ministry of Justice and Reading Borough Council argue over what should be done with it.

Many people think it should be turned into an arts centre, with a theatre, hotel, restaurants and bars – but the dreaded ‘luxury apartments’ solution inevitably will win the day.

Oscar Wilde visited the factory in September 1892, three years before he took up residency in the prison for two years. Terry thinks the Palmers may have had some influence on how he was treated during his confinement, but there is no evidence of this.

Top: On the Upper Congo River –Huntley & Palmers biscuits by the funnel, 1890

Below: Reading factory, opened in 1846. By 1900, it was the biggest biscuit-maker in the world

Above: Edwardian biscuit tin.

Below: Opera Wafers, 1890

Terry is worried that the younger generation in Reading have little idea about the Huntley & Palmers biscuit legacy. Perhaps, rightly, they are more concerned about the influence of the newly opened Elizabeth Line and how it might affect house prices.

But I doubt there will ever be a bigger benefactor to Reading than Great-GreatUncle George and his family. Much of the site of Reading University was donated by the Palmers, as was 49-acre Palmer Park, handed over to the Mayor of Reading on 4th November 1891.

George was Liberal MP for Reading from 1878 to ’85, but turned down the offer of a baronetcy from the Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury because he regarded it as ostentatious. He was given the freedom of Reading, and a statue of him was unveiled on Broad Street. Designed by George Simmonds, it depicts him holding a top hat and umbrella – the only statue in Britain showing a man holding an unfolded brolly.

The statue has gone now. But I’m thinking of starting a campaign to bring the statue back to Broad Street. That would help keep the biscuit flame burning in a town of which I should never have been embarrassed.

Poetry and emotion

The album was beautiful, made of red leather with gilt-edged pages. My late mother, Linda Kelly, who was a historian and lover of the 18th century, with biographies of Sheridan, Tom Moore and Talleyrand to her name, had been given it by her mother-in-law shortly after she got married in the early 1960s.

She decided it was too precious to fill with anything so prosaic as recipes or addresses. She chose instead to keep it as a commonplace book – filled largely with poetry, and with bits of prose too – and she kept it on and off until the day she died nearly four years ago.

Poetry had always been an enthusiasm of hers, which meant it became an enthusiasm of mine, and is something I’ve been writing about for some time now.

In 2014, I wrote a memoir called Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me – My Journey Through Depression. The book is about how poetry consoled me at the height of my battle with the illness.

Ever since, I’ve been running Healing Words poetry workshops for mentalhealth charities and in prisons.

But my mother’s death changed my attitude to poetry, and has led to a new book. It’s about how poetry can help your emotional wellbeing, which is why I’ve called it You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs.

I was previously drawn to poems for difficult times. But my mother’s passing, counter-intuitively, has prompted me to explore poems about hope and joy, as much as about sadness.

If I’ve learnt anything from losing her, it’s that life is too short not to focus on the happy times.

So my book still includes poems such as Love (III), in which George Herbert brilliantly describes feeling ‘guilty of dust and sin’. But it also has others such as A Blessing by James Wright, in which the poet captures the

joyful moment he meets some wild Indian ponies in Minnesota: ‘Suddenly I realise / That if I stepped out of my body, I would break / Into blossom.’

Through this chance meeting, Wright finds a way to escape his materiality and loneliness.

The matter-of-fact language – notice how the poet imagines ‘stepping’ out of his body – makes the transcendence sound as simple as putting one foot in front of the other.

Both these poems, in different ways, help the reader feel, in the words of F Scott Fitzgerald, that our longings are ‘universal longings’, and that we’re ‘not lonely or isolated from anyone’.

Today, I’m drawn to different poems. My tastes have changed also when it comes to learning poetry by heart.

I now want to be more like my mum, someone who knew hundreds of poems from memory and could summon them at will, no smartphone required. As for many of her generation, it was commonplace at her school to learn a poem a week. She told me that she was also asked to learn poetry as a punishment for any minor transgressions.

One of my last memories of my mother is of her in the hospital dialysis unit – a windowless, airless room –attached to a machine she didn’t want to be attached to, with me desperate to distract her and make light of how miserable things were.

I looked up Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott on my phone. It was one of the first poems I had ever learned by heart, something we had done together, I lying on the beaten-up olive-green sofa in our sitting room, she pacing the room correcting my mistakes.

Of course, she instantly realised I was

reading an inaccurate version online, not the Oxford Book of English Verse one. In that moment, I resolved to learn more poems by heart.

Once upon a time, this was not such an unusual pastime. Richard Ingrams, The Oldie’s founding father, recalls his schooling at Shrewsbury, where an English master, a man called McEachran, didn’t teach according to the curriculum.

‘He taught poetry in what he called “spells” – four- or five-line extracts which you had to learn by heart and recite,’ Ingrams recalls. ‘It was completely unlike anything else that was being taught at school and it made us interested in books and reading poetry.’

We children of the seventies and eighties were different. I don’t remember having to learn a single poem at St Paul’s Girls’ School.

And, more recently, I can’t recall any of my own children learning a poem by heart, unless it was encouraged with a bribe by me for some present or other. We have lost something.

I have found it invaluable to learn the kinds of emotionally companionable poems you will find in my book, in which I also share how best you might try to learn them. Now that I know at least some of my selections by heart, I engage even more closely with the feelings they evoke.

My mother knew all this only too well. Thanks to her, I now know it too. I like to think she is looking down from heaven, knowing her red leather album wasn’t in vain.

Rachel Kelly’s You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs (Yellow Kite) is out now

When her mother died, Rachel Kelly found consolation in joyful poems – and learning them by heart

Virginia Ironside recalls Rose Dugdale – the deb who beat up her parents’ friends, stole Old Masters and built missile-launchers

School days with an IRA terrorist

When someone is in a class above you or below you at school, they might as well not exist. The age gap appears much greater during your childhood.

Rose Dugdale (born in 1941), the notorious IRA terrorist, was two classes above me at Miss Ironside’s day school – my two spinster great-aunts’ dame school in Kensington. Even though she was three years older than me, she made a great impression not only on me but on every girl in the school.

She was a bit gawky and masculinelooking – a big girl with a deep voice –and not conventionally pretty, but she exuded such energy, positivity, intelligence, generosity and, yes, even kindness that she was instantly attractive.

The last thing I would have imagined, at school, was her dropping bombs, constructing missile-launchers, trying to kill people and tying up her parents’ innocent friends to steal their valuable Old Master paintings.

But I sometimes wonder if the ethos of our old school had any part to play in her Marxist tendencies.

Rose had been brought up with stultifying conventionality. The two girls in the family – Caroline, her older sister, and Rose – were obliged by their mother to wear only blue frocks with matching ribbons in their hair – the best colour, apparently, for girls. They had to change into formal clothes for dinner and wear long white gloves. They had to curtsey to every visitor to their homes: one consisted of two town houses knocked together in Chelsea; the other was a vast estate in Devon, where Rose learned to ride and practise the piano.

Every hour of every day was

regimented by her parents – her mother was the ex-wife of John Mosley, Oswald’s brother. Rose agreed to ‘come out’ as a debutante – the last time this archaic ritual of young girls being presented to the Queen took place – only on condition that her father would allow her to try for Oxford.

In contrast to this bizarre and outdated home life, my great-aunt’s school was based on exceptionally liberal lines, inspired by Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century German educational pioneer.

All the teachers – a bizarre, brokendown lot, sprinkled with eccentric geniuses – were called by only their Christian names. Rene, my great aunt, was known only as Rene.

Most were spinsters or lesbians. They were oddballs with no formal training –not a requirement at that time.

A teacher who loved Rose, because of her musical talent, was Stella Kelvin, an Austrian refugee working illegally who could fly into tremendous rages. She’d been taught by Theodor Leschetizky, who’d been taught by Carl Czerny, who’d been taught by Beethoven.

There was no staffroom. Loos – there were only two for 140 pupils – were for teachers and pupils alike.

There were no RE lessons. Although we sang a daily hymn at so-called ‘Prayers’ every morning (Rene played the piano), God or Christ was otherwise rarely mentioned.

Bullying was highly disapproved of,

and punishment was non-existent. The idea was for the school to be entirely egalitarian. However, if anyone was caught, say, whispering in class, we risked being ‘sent to Rene’, which involved waiting outside her sitting room before being called in to face her.

‘And why have you been sent to me?’ Rene would ask, in her faintly Scottish accent. When you tremblingly explained, she would fix you with a beady eye and simply say, ‘Well, I hope you never have to be sent to me again!’ And that was that.

Very few people wanted to be sent to Rene more than once.

Like a lot of the girls, I had a secret crush on Rose who, I suspect, had always been bisexual. Every girl wanted

to sit next to Rose at lunchtimes – ‘Oh, Rose, sit here!’ the cry went up.

After leaving school, Rose did indeed ‘come out’ and was presented to the Queen. Afterwards, she even spent a year going to dances and cocktail parties with a view to finding a husband.

Rose hated every minute.

At one ‘debs’ dance’, as they were known, Rose danced with a young ‘debs’ delight’, our editor’s father, the writer Ferdinand Mount.

After the dance, and making polite conversation on the balcony, Ferdy remarked something smarmy about the night and the party; he was rebuffed with a merry chuckle from Rose. She added, ‘It’s a complete and utter waste of money!’

When Rose finally got to Oxford, she had a passionate affair with Iris Murdoch and a tutor called Peter Ady (a woman). She made university history by posing as a man to get into the male-only Oxford Union debating society, which resulted not long after in women being officially allowed in for the first time.

After writing my first book, Chelsea Bird, in 1966, I spent the advance on going to New York. One of my contacts there was James, Rose’s brother, who had attended the kindergarten at Miss Ironside’s.

The only day we could meet was when he had a date with his sister – but that didn’t matter. Rose arrived, energetic and breathless, in an open-top red sports car and drove at great speed to Greenwich Village to take us to see a Greek tragedy.

Afterwards, she drove me back to my hotel – and I was impressed by her spontaneity, generosity and sheer fun. She seemed golden and blessed.

She was, however, becoming increasingly enamoured with the IRA cause. When she returned to England from the States, she became involved with Eddie Gallagher, an IRA sympathiser. Together, they decided to steal those Old Masters from friends of Rose’s parents, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit.

The Beits were immensely rich –Sir Alfred inherited diamond mines in South Africa and owned a huge art collection. They lived at Russborough House, County Wicklow, a wonderful Palladian pile, reputedly the longest house in Ireland.

In 1974, Rose, now a fully fledged IRA sympathiser, went with her partner (and later husband), Gallagher, to Russborough House.

They attacked the poor Beits in the middle of the night, pistol-whipping Alfred and tying him up. They ‘gave him a clattering’, according to Rose.

Among the pictures they stole were Gainsborough’s Madame Baccelli and Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid. They plotted to keep the pictures in exchange for the release of three IRA prisoners.

Like most of their schemes, it didn’t go to plan. In 1974, she took part in a helicopter bombing raid on Strabane Barracks, County Tyrone. Rose was caught and sentenced to nine years in prison.

During her imprisonment, Rose gave birth to Ruairi, her son by Gallagher, also jailed (for kidnapping a Dutch industrialist). Martin McGuinness was one of Ruairi’s godparents.

On leaving prison, she became a weapons expert with her new partner, Jim Monaghan. Together they developed a shoulder-fired missile-launcher, dubbed the ‘biscuit-launcher’ because it used two packets of digestive biscuits to absorb the recoil.

Now aged 81, she lives in a nursing home, the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, in Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb.

So Rose became a monster. And yet, throughout her life, many people fell for her charms. Even now, I can’t think of her without smiling, despite knowing that I should be viewing her with horror.

I often wonder what Rene would have said.

Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale is by Sean O’Driscoll (Penguin £18.99)

The Great British Teeth Problem

More than 70 per cent of people aged 65 and upwards have some form of gum disease. Some of you will feel smug when you have finished reading this. Others will feel guilty and frightened.

But don’t worry – it is never too late to have gum disease halted by a dental hygienist. If you obey his or her orders, you may even have saved your life.

The role of dental hygiene in our health is underrated. Who knew that your risk of heart disease, diabetes and even Alzheimer’s can be considerably increased if you have inflamed gums?

Lesley, a leading Harley Street hygienist, says, ‘Anything that causes inflammation stresses your body out –just as smoking hardens your arteries – and stress makes you more vulnerable to opportunist illnesses.’

So how do your gums become inflamed in the first place?

It starts with bacterial plaque, says Lesley. ‘There are two sorts of gingivitis which make your gums go from being flat and a lovely pink colour to fat and red, and they are both caused by the evil bacteria in your mouth that build up during the day and sit around your gums –because they’re not being dislodged by you!

‘If you remove bacteria with flossing and brushing, ideally twice a day, it will keep things at bay. Tongue-cleaning is also a good idea, to keep bacteria down.’

But if you don’t dislodge the bacteria – aka plaque – that accumulate in your mouth every day, which start off as soft and easy to dislodge, they will go hard. And some of the plaque will set up shop under your gums – so you will be unable to remove it yourself.

She continues, ‘Basically, from the time that you get your adult teeth in your teens, you should be flossing between the gaps – because if you don’t, the gaps will get bigger.’

These gaps become repositories for food and bacteria, which will stagnate there, and the gingivitis will proceed to

periodontitis. The inflammation caused will eventually pull the gum away from the tooth. When this happens, the plaque and their toxins destroy the fibres that surround the tooth before going on to destroy the bone that holds the tooth in place. And that is why people’s teeth become loose.

Everyone is different, Lesley says. Some people have a lot of plaque around and it goes hard very quickly.

It was a dentist who frightened me into a rigorous routine when I developed ‘pregnancy gingivitis’ and was told my gums had started to suffer. Although my teeth themselves were fine, they would all fall out if I had no gums to secure them in place. There is an analogy with an egg and an egg cup holding the egg in place. The gums are the egg cup.

‘Destructive gum disease is very slow,’ says Lesley. ‘But you will be getting signs if your gums start bleeding as you’re cleaning your teeth and also when you look at your gums and you see they are red and inflamed instead of pink. This is your brain telling you “You have an alien invader.” ’

Don’t think you are being good if you just brush your teeth very well. Sometimes that’s not enough. You must brush the margin where the teeth and gums meet. This is where plaque likes to live.

Unfortunately, Lesley recommends using an electric toothbrush – one of

the most non-biodegradable products on earth.

Now how does gum disease affect our beauty potential? Lesley says, ‘Your breath may smell because you’ve got this blood residue hanging around. You probably won’t laugh or smile as much because you will be self-conscious. If your teeth are loose, you can’t eat properly – so your enjoyment in life has pretty much gone.

‘Your teeth may change position, and if you start losing teeth your face will change shape, and not in a perfect Joan-Crawford-cheekbones way –more like Ena Sharples from Coronation Street!

‘You can’t always just have implants, because sometimes the bone has disintegrated so much that there is nothing for the implant to hang on to. You don’t sleep well because breathing is hampered and so you look exhausted.’

Lesley gives a final warning: ‘Everyone’s talking about the gut microbiome at the moment: basically you’ve got one big tube going through you from the mouth to the anus. So it’s no good taking all these probiotics if you don’t sort out the health of your mouth first.’

And how do you do that? Go to a hygienist, spend an hour in the chair having the appalling stuff dislodged by a professional, and then pull yourself together and start following a regime.

Want to look like Joan Crawford rather than Ena Sharples? Then clean your teeth

It isn’t enough to go to the dentist. You must visit a dental hygienist to keep inflamed gums – and heart disease – at bay

Smyrna, joy of Asia

‘D

on’t forget Smyrna!’ shouted Turkish President Recep Erdoğan in a speech this September.

He was referring to Smyrna, the main port on Turkey’s Aegean coast, and what happened to it 100 years ago.

From 13th to 16th September 1922, starting just four days after the flight of Greek forces and the entry of a Turkish army, a fire destroyed the city centre.

Greek and Armenian inhabitants fled to the waterfront, where they formed ‘a shrieking, terrified torrent of humanity’, according to George Ward Price, a British journalist watching from on board HMS Iron Duke (which eventually removed some of them). The fire, organised by Turkish soldiers, was followed by the murder or expulsion of 100,000 or more Greeks and Armenians.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s founding father, denied Turkey’s responsibility, but he was the general in command of the city.

He told his future wife, Latife Hanim, an emancipated Turkish woman from Smyrna, as they watched the city burn, ‘Yes, let it burn! Let it crash down! We can replace everything.’

What Turks commemorate every year as the ‘liberation’ is remembered by Greeks as the ‘catastrophe’ – the elimination of all Greeks from Anatolia.

Britain has reason to remember Smyrna, too. For centuries, it had been a flourishing world city with a powerful British community – hence the presence of British battleships in the harbour in 1922.

Founded by Greek colonists in the seventh century BC, Smyrna was long a centre of Greek culture and was possibly Homer’s birthplace. It is situated at the end of a long, deep gulf where the Aegean projects into the westernmost point of Asia. A natural link between Europe and Asia, it was called by the Romans ‘the joy of Asia’.

After over 1,000 years in the Roman Empire, Smyrna was ruled by Turks, the Genoese, the Knights of Saint John and Venice. By 1480, it was a small market

town in the Ottoman Empire. Its Turkish name, İzmir, came from the Greek phrase ‘eis teen Smyrna’: into Smyrna.

Its location and its harbour soon attracted French, Dutch, English and Venetian merchants, as well as Turks, Greeks, Jews and Armenians.

In 1634, the French jewel merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier could write, ‘Smyrna is today for trade by both sea and land the most famous city of all the Levant and the most famous market for every merchandise going from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe.’

It exported fruit – Smyrna figs are the best – carpets, opium and antiquities. The population rose from 5,000 to around 100,000, periodically reduced by plagues and earthquakes.

Mosques, churches and synagogues flourished side by side. Christians lived in ‘great freedom’ – despite occasional massacres. After Greek independence in the early-19th century, thousands of Greeks moved to Smyrna. They preferred prosperity in the Ottoman Empire to freedom and chaos at home. Turks called the city Gâvur İzmir – ‘Infidel İzmir’.

By the mid-19th century, the city contained more Greeks than Turks – 55,000 Greeks to 45,000 Turks (and 13,000 Jews and 5,000 Armenians). Some 12,000 western Europeans included several thousand English and Maltese.

Helped by the city’s English merchants, Smyrna started the Ottoman Empire’s first newspaper, first railway and first football club: Bournabat Football and Rugby Club, established in a Levantine suburb in 1894. The red-and-yellow Tulipa whittallii is named after a prominent British family of Smyrna. Praising its modern schools and businesses, the Austrian consul-general wrote, ‘Smyrna illuminates like a beacon all the other provinces of the Ottoman Empire.’

The two-mile-long stone quay, known as the Kordon, built by French engineers in 1869-76 (where so many Smyrniots would perish in 1922), was lined with cafés, hotels and warehouses. If Smyrna was ‘the eye of Asia’, it was said, the quay was ‘the pupil of the eye’.

The writer Norman Douglas called Smyrna ‘the most enjoyable place on earth’. One café, where you could ‘pick up a girl or anything else you fancied’, had bedrooms on the upper floors for ‘an hour’s rest’. He asked, ‘Why are such delectable places not commoner?’

The city’s brand of music, called Smyrnaika or rebetiko, mixed western polyphony and eastern monophony.

Songs described the torments of love, and the pleasures of hashish and alcohol: ‘You stay up all night at the cafés, chantant, drinking beer.’

The ancient city bustled with trade and naughty pleasures – until it was destroyed by arson a century ago. By Philip Mansel

A Papazoglu, a musician in one of the cafés on the Kordon, said, ‘We played Jewish and Armenian and Arab music. We were citizens of the world, you see.’ Indeed ‘Gâvur İzmir’ was so cosmopolitan that, to many visitors from the Turkish hinterland, it seemed – as does London or New York today – like a foreign country. Envy and resentment, as well as the Greek occupation in 1919-22

Above left: the Greek Army march in Smyrna, May 1919. Left: the fire in September 1922 prompted a chaotic evacuation. Above right: after the fire. Below: 4th-century BC Agora of Smyrna, ruined in 178 AD by an earthquake

and Greek atrocities in Anatolia, contributed to the 1922 catastrophe.

Since 1922, however, İzmir has reverted to its natural role as a great Turkish and Mediterranean port. Only 40 per cent of the city was destroyed: the Greek and Armenian districts, not the Turkish, Jewish or Levantine ones.

New Turkish inhabitants were often immigrants from Greece and the

Balkans. The remaining Levantines helped restart the export trade.

In 1941-44, Major Noel Rees, the British Vice-Consul from a prominent Smyrna family (whose initial R can still be seen on the ironwork of their former office on the Kordon) and the local head of MI9, made Smyrna and its coast the heart of the escape lines for thousands fleeing German-occupied Greece.

Confirming the power of geography, İzmir and the coasts of Turkey are today bastions of the secular CHP (Republican People’s Party) against the increasingly dictatorial Islamist government in Ankara. There are seven universities.

Turkish friends say that it is the last big city in their country where they ‘feel freedom’. In alcohol consumption, and in the number of unmarried couples, the packed cafés on the Kordon resemble those in other Mediterranean ports more than those in inland Turkish cities.

For a city of four million, İzmir is exceptionally peaceful.

The city is reconnecting to its past. In 2009, it was twinned with Thessaloniki in Greece. Museums founded by the local shipping magnate and wine-producer Lucien Arkas commemorate the glories of Smyrna.

September 2022, like every September, was marked by a military parade – and also by a pop concert on the Kordon by the Turkish singer Tarkan. No one mentioned the fire and massacres of 1922.

Smyrna’s catastrophe in 1922 remains a warning to world cities today. The hinterland always bites back. Nationalism corrupts. Absolute nationalism corrupts absolutely.

Philip Mansel is author of Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2010), a history of Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut

Upwardly mobile

Don’t mock the young for being glued to their phones. Caroline Flint, 81, depends on hers to stay in touch with the best things in life

Ihave friends the same age as me (81) and many much younger –here I include grandchildren. The greatest difference between them is my ability to contact them and communicate with them.

With friends of my own age, I am very restricted in my ability to contact them. I can write a letter – pen to paper, envelope, stamp, shuffle to the post box – and hope that it is picked up by the increasingly depleted Post Office.

On the other hand, I can ring them. Invariably this has to be on a landline because although they own a mobile, it is never switched on. ‘I put it on only when I want to call out.’

This means that the great convenience of the mobile phone – you can answer it by pulling it out of your

pocket; you don’t even have to get out of your chair – is not used.

People are fearful that if they have their phone switched on all the time, they will be called all the time. They should be so lucky! How many of your friends or relatives will be ringing you on a normal day? They are all busy living their lives – they aren’t interested in ringing you every five minutes.

So I ring the landline. It is never answered. I leave a message on the answerphone. Will this be picked up? I am not very confident, but if I am lucky it is answered – sometimes within a week.

I text my younger friends. They text back immediately.

We can have a conversation on text. ‘Did you get that job?’ ‘Where are you on holiday?’ ‘Are you in a hotel or Airbnb?’

Tell me about it.

They send me photos of the beach they are sunning themselves or surfing on. I gain great pleasure from the photos of gorgeous grandchildren living their best life. When they describe what they have seen, I can picture it because they have sent me a photo. I share in their joy.

They send me videos I might like. I see them at the Commonwealth Games, taking a selfie with Clare Balding. I see the meal they are having at that new Algerian restaurant. I feel up to date and part of the world.

My daughter FaceTimes me. I sit and eat my lunch and she sits and eats her lunch and although we are 400 miles apart, we are virtually having lunch together. We can see each other; we

chat and laugh. We compare our lunches. We catch up with family news and gossip. New babies, new jobs, new homes – all grist to the mill.

My older friends do not use FaceTime. Either because whenever they touch their phone they turn it off by mistake, or because they have bought the very cheapest phone and it doesn’t contain FaceTime.

During lockdown, a younger friend sent me a video of a weekly walk around her garden. What a gift that was for a flat-dweller. On television, there was a whole raft of people going for walks with their phones on a photo stick. It was peaceful, interesting, joyous and soothing – slow television. I am often sent a beautiful photo of a rose or a honeysuckle by a friend – I am waiting for smellavision!

An Indian friend sends me, every morning, a photo of the sunrise or sometimes of a cup of coffee with a cheery ‘Have a lovely day’.

These little phones have much more power than my first computer, an Apricot. They are much simpler to use. The older generation miss out on so much fun when they don’t embrace them.

And what about waiting?

Waiting for a hospital appointment, a train or a friend who is always late. Then I play computer solitaire, or I read web pages. I watch TV programmes I have missed, or films.

The whole world is there. I can read the newspaper. I can read a book. I can listen to lovely music. I can see what my family are up to. Modern phones are like magic carpets.

Now I have discovered TikTok. An old midwife wanting to educate women into simpler ways of giving birth, I make 30-second videos which are watched by thousands of people.

Never in my whole career have I been able to influence so many people. I hope they find what I do useful.

People are fearful that they’ll be called all the time. They should be so lucky!

A magic carpet to another world

Ronald Blythe, 100, salutes the joys of Advent, dark afternoons and the change of the seasons

Winter is coming

Iwalk to Advent Matins in a thin, cold drizzle.

Supermarket shoppers zip past. I can hear our church bells getting into their stride. How pleased Widow Sturdy would have been to know that the bell she created in her foundry was in good ringing order all these centuries later.

The footballers are not yet in their stride. Damp, noisy and listless, they trot up and down and keep warm. Their dogs gaze from car windows, telling each other, ‘More fool they!’

In church, strangers take up an entire pew. Well! I light the Advent candle, say the Advent words, sing the Advent tunes: ‘Ring, bells, ring, ring, ring! Sing, choirs, sing, sing, sing!’

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, turned 100 on 6th November.

In 1969, he published Akenfield, his bestseller about a fictional village, based on Charsfield, a real Suffolk village.

Blythe was born in Acton, Suffolk, son of a farmworker and a VAD nurse in the First World War. He knew how backbreakingly tough country life really was.

He inherited Bottengoms Farm, his half-timbered home near Wormingford, from artist John Nash in 1977.

In his youth, Blythe befriended Benjamin Britten and was part of the writing/artistic set at Benton End, the East Anglian School of Painting run by artist-plantsman Cedric Morris and painter Arthur Lett-Haines.

Since 1960, Blythe has written rural studies, novels and memoirs. He was a reader at Wormingford Church and a lay canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds.

He wrote the Word from Wormingford colum in the Church Times and, in 2014, was our Oldie Sage of the Year.

Happy 100th birthday, dear Ronnie!

What a dark day it is. Black, shiny lanes, lightless furrows, horses in their gloomy blankets – but my little white cat illuminates the ebony piano, having knocked all the photos down.

Shall we light a fire? Shall we read all afternoon? Shall we garden? ‘Shall we, heck!’ as my friend Gordon would say.

I listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or some of them and, although it would seem impossible, the day grows darker without it actually falling into night.

Returning via the orchard, I had noticed the reluctance of the leaves to reach the ground. More sticks than foliage had shaken out of the oaks, and the walnut was deathly in its sodden, unshed growth.

There were lots of wrens, tiny, feathery balls with tails cocked and, fast as

lightning, having supper. The vast ivy on the ancient pear rustled with inmates and had become a bird town. Everywhere, inner Advent light and outer darkness.

The late nature writer Roger Deakin (1943-2006) used to come and discuss wood. Wood as a material – ours being a part of the country (on the Essex-Suffolk border) that lacks stone. We have flint, of course: flinty fields, flint mines, even – but little that one could call stone.

So we have done what we could with wood. East Anglia is for wood architects, wood artists, wood saints, woodland poems and wood crafts.

Looking around at the uses we have put it to, you would think there would not be a tree standing – but we remain heavily wooded.

The dark day polishes the beams of Bottengoms, my house (pictured), showing off the adze marks. How many trees were chopped down to make this small farmhouse? Have a guess.

It is Tudor IKEA plus straw stuffing, all the beams slotted into place for eternity, and the brick floors scrubbed hollow.

Visitors coming to it at nightfall, such as the poor vicar, are apt to wander around in a botanical version of outer darkness, shocked by startled pheasants going off like rockets. Or lacerated by yuccas. I comfort them.

Are they not experiencing the genuine 100-per-cent-authentic rural November teatime? They should praise God for it.

Sparks thread their way overhead. Each contains hundreds of folk on their way to New York, Rome, Moscow, those by the windows staring down at my spark.

Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside (John Murray, £25) is out now

In the club

If you like sheep, bondage or pylons, there’s an association for you. By Jonathan Sale

Ifirst came across the Directory of British Associations when I was looking for the contact details of the Chewing Gum Action Group. I was wondering, ‘Do you take the stuff off bus seats or jam it on?’

I’d opened up a treasure trove. I soon stumbled on the Car Park Appreciation Society, which collects ‘interesting data on car parks’.

I found all this in the Directory of British Associations: A4-sized and the best part of two inches thick.

Behind that tedious title lurks a fascinating A-Z of British bodies: 7,200 names, aims and addresses of trade bodies, professional bodies, busybodies; pressure groups, amenity groups, support groups; followers of the arts and throwers of darts.

‘We used to have a tree. This year, we’ve gone for decking'

It is the gateway to everything from abattoirs to zoos, from the Adult Industry Trade Association (‘bondage, condoms, fetish, piercing’) to the Zwartbles Sheep Association (‘a breed to be proud of’).

It is what makes Britain quite so British, despite – or because of – the fact that it is inclusive enough to include the Stalin Society (‘membership data: not stated’).

Sadly, I have to break it to grammarians gently that the Apostrophe Protection Society no longer protects apostrophe’s (‘Don’t you mean ‘apostrophes?’ – Ed).

But the Pylon Appreciation Society is still there. On site visits, they might perhaps stumble across supine figures gazing up at the heavens; that’ll be a committee meeting of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

The bad news is that the British Association of Idiots hasn’t been sending in its entries since 2002. Presumably they had a problem finding the slot in the letter box.

The Association of Professional De-Clutterers and Organisers is still with us, thank God. By chance, my partner has just been in contact with them.

I would pass on the phone number she gave me if I could find the back of the envelope under the pile of newspapers on which it’s jotted down.

Not the retiring type

Andrew Cunningham has just retired after 30 heavenly years as a teacher – and he hates it

The cost of living is rising, heating bills soaring, and more and more older people are going back to work.

It’s been called Britain’s ‘great unretirement’. From April to June 2022, 173,000 over-65s returned to work, as inflation took a toll on their pensions.

No wonder, I’m thinking, as someone who’s just retired after 30 happy years in teaching. Yet financial pressures are just the start of it. What no one ever tells you about are all the other awful things about retirement.

Here are just six of them:

1. Once you’re retired, every time you meet someone you used to work with, even a month or two later, you know deep down they’ll be thinking, ‘Isn’t s/he looking older!’ They’ll be too polite to say it aloud, but that unmistakable look of pity at first sight speaks volumes.

2. Your social life disintegrates overnight. All those work-related drinks and lunches that were such a chore at the time now look positively inviting.

Anyone working in a standard office or school is guaranteed at least one social event a fortnight, and their social circle will include several dozen work-related acquaintances. Suddenly the guest list for parties shrinks to single figures.

Your former colleagues may have been just that: colleagues, not lifelong friends. All the same, they helped create at least the illusion of an active social life, full of potentially exciting possibilities.

3. You’re now surrounded the whole time by old people. This is all the more depressing if you used to be a teacher. Teenage backchat may be irritating late on a Friday afternoon, but teenagers help keep you mentally sharp.

Mixing with (mostly) cheerful and positive young minds is one of the biggest perks of the job.

I lost count of the number of times I went into an early-morning class in a bad mood – the result of a glass or two too many the night before – only to be

cheered up by my youthful charges: ‘Sir, you’re not looking so happy today – are you OK?’ Faced with comments like these at 8.30am, I found it hard not to smile.

Now all I’m left with is the hangover and the only people I meet are septuagenarians. Those few working-age people I do encounter will inevitably and irritatingly exclaim, ‘Retirement? Congratulations! You’re so lucky! Any big trips planned? What are you going to do with all that free time?’

The truth is, very little. No big trips are planned (costs must be kept down) and I’ll be lucky to have an off-peak week in Wales.

4. As for all the free time, that evaporates too, as I’m learning. Once everyone knows you’re retired, people start burdening you with the kind of chores you could so easily sidestep before because of ‘work pressures’.

Partners demand that rooms be redecorated; elderly relatives require regular visits; children assume you’re free for a 24/7 taxi service.

5. It’s not all doom and gloom. Some ex-teachers I know have settled comfortably into retirement via

voluntary work. One particularly loquacious ex-colleague is now proving an excellent National Trust tour guide. Another is hard at work helping to clear up the Wey and Arun Canal.

But voluntary work is all very well if you can afford not to be paid – I can’t. I’m already glancing enviously at the more obviously ancient characters stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s.

Luckiest of all are retired colleagues who taught shortage subjects such as maths and physics. They’re always in demand and are swiftly recalled into comfortable part-time teaching posts.

But no one wants old geezers with English degrees. English, my subject, is never a shortage subject; I’ve been rebuffed from the part-time teaching posts I’ve applied for.

As Roedean School’s HR Department informed me recently, there were ‘simply so many other applicants’. 6. Another retirement shock is no longer having a helpful school IT department on hand when I accidentally delete a document.

I’ve spent days trying to change my DVLA, pension and tax details online –a full-time job in itself.

Only six terrible things about retirement? The list seems neverending. You’re better off working –mentally, physically and financially.

Pretty soon, like all the other over-65s, I too will be desperate for a job. On the rare occasions I go to a pub nowadays, the first thing I’m checking out is not the beer or the wine, but whether it has any bar-staff vacancies.

There’s one particularly pleasant designer pub nearby I’m keeping a very close eye on.

Who knows – I may even get my social life back.

Dr Andrew Cunningham taught English at Radley, Charterhouse, North London Collegiate and Cranleigh. He edited the magazine for HMC schools

Notes on a scandal

doing the dirty deed and his wife, Gwen, is nudging the turps. By the very honourable Sir Les Patterson

Dear Perusers, To be perfectly honest, I’m buggered. Mind you, an elder statesman like my good self can expect a bit of aggro at the festive season – and I’ve had more challenges than our tinted PM, God love him.

The lezzo lynch mob have been up my blurter in no uncertain terms, to be honest. They reckon I’m something called ‘transphobic’. I had to look it up in a publication. Apparently I’m not meant to like blokes who are trapped in the body of a woman.

Bullshit.

One of my best mates in the political spectrum, Desmond Rafferty, had a shithouse experience recently. He was working late one night with his top research assistant, Tiffany (no, better call her Jayden – Tiffany’s her real name). Anyway, he started to feel a bit horny, so they took a break from affairs of state and did the dirty deed on the ministerial desk.

He was just getting to the vinegar strokes, when she shut up shop and the poor bastard really was trapped in the body of a woman. They actually rolled off the desk trying to reach an amicable separation, and they had to call emergency services.

As some of my readers know, it’s not an easy one to explain, let alone hush up, to be perfectly honest. He pretended to be a gynaecologist testing her pelvic floor, but the emergency blokes prising them apart didn’t buy the story.

I guess they’ve heard it all before.

It’s not every day that a gyno does a major exploratory that goes wrong in Parliament House, Canberra.

Luckily, Bernadette Rafferty never got wind of it, by a miracle, though she’s been getting wind of the Honourable Desmond most of their married life.

Meanwhile, my good lady, Gwen, is battling with her demons, the Lord be good to her. Our daughter Karen gives her a few sleepless nights. When Karen

graduated with flying colours from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Ridiculously Slow Learners, we reckoned she was home and dry.

Well … she was home, but not the rest.

Indeed, that’s what Gwennie reckoned after a routine check of Karen’s reading matter. Most of it was pretty unsavoury stuff about young women from broken homes committing acts of immodesty. The sort of stuff I’ve only glimpsed when I’ve accidentally been switching channels.

Unluckily, Dezza’s wife DID get wind of her husband’s desktop accident, via a frontpage headline in the Morning Murdoch

The Honourable Desmond is always in the doghouse over something. His wife is one of those long-suffering types he met yonks ago.

She’s no beauty, to be honest – in fact, she’s got a face like a dropped pie – and she once barged into the bathroom and caught old Dezza hitchhiking under the shower. The incident with young Jayden didn’t exactly cheer her up.

The Honourable Dezza was one of my best mates in the political spectrum,and, until he blotted his copybook, he was running the prestigious Ministry for Apologies.

To be honest, we Australians have got a shitload to be sorry for. First up, there’s our magnificent Aborigines, for instance. As a nation, we have to apologise for our incompetent and racist driving instructors and our draconian drink-driving laws, responsible for a record number of totalled Toyotas in the outback every year.

We’ve also got to make a grovelling apology for the fact that out Australian cities have so appallingly few TFUs (toilets for the undecided). And, last but not least, we’ve got to say a heartfelt ‘sorry’ to the Nips for winning the war.

But none of the above ever stopped old Dezza from porking the odd intern, to be honest.

The lord be good to my wife, Gwen. It

must be a bastard being married to a massive political high-flyer and international diplomat like my good self.

If I get the big Washington job, she’ll want to host those grand diplomatic dinners. She might even serve her signature dish: mince on toast.

She’s been practising the etiquette, saying ‘Hi, you guys!’ – and then ‘Enjoy’ whenever she plonks it on the table.

Next to a suave bastard like me, she won’t pass muster in the international diplomatic community, especially if she’s been nudging the turps*. I might have to appoint a horny sidekick like Kylie or Margot Robbie.

As for poor old Dezza Rafferty, his reputation is so far down the toilet, he’ll probably end up as Australian High Commissioner in London. That’s the job they always give to likeable scallywags and discreet vagina-decliners.

Now I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to tell you.

Love, to be honest, LES

* Nudging the turps (Australian vern., obs.): sipping ardent spirits

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

His mate Dezza was caught

The elephant man

Debbie Dickinson particularly remembers her gig with Peter Beard (1938-2020), the playboy, conservationist, photographer and subject of a new biography. Unsurprisingly so.

She was a model in her early twenties when she met him, already a veteran of Vogue covers and campaigns for alpha brands. The shoot was outside Beard’s place in Montauk, Long Island. Jackie O and Truman Capote had come to dinner there. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street there.

On that day, Beard climbed a ladder, leant into his camera, took out a penknife, sliced his wrist and splattered blood onto the wide-open pages of his current diary below.

Dickinson asked, ‘Uh, why?’

‘Cause and effect,’ Beard said blithely. This was characteristic of the way he worked up his diaries into artefacts.

He got on with the shoot, led her down the vertiginous cliff path to the beach, put a finger to his lips, seated himself on a boulder and sat looking out onto the ocean, wrapped in silence. For a long time, Dickinson said.

None of this was for effect. The Peter Beard I knew was no self-dramatising eccentric. His most ultra actions and most outspoken statements were, to him, the fruit of pure common sense.

One of the world’s best-regarded photographers, he had studied art at Yale. So I once asked which photographers he admired.

‘That’s an interesting question no one has ever asked me,’ he said, ‘because, you know, I never really had much of an interest in photography. Pfft! You just press your finger. It’s not so hard.’

Beard described photography as his ‘hobby’. But, after leaving Yale, he picked up a Vogue contract to shoot fashion – once with the reigning supermodels, Astrid Heeren and

Veruschka. ‘We did 14 pages of Arabian horses,’ he says. ‘I took them on safari.’

He first went to Africa in 1955 with Quentin Keynes, a debonair descendant of Charles Darwin. He returned in 1960 and managed to visit the reclusive Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, on her Kenya property. She became one of the core group whom Beard, in High Victorian fashion, adopted as guiding lights, whose images became part of his vocabulary. He acquired 4,500 acres on a corner of her spread and called it the Hog Ranch.

Kenya was then teeming with wildlife but its doom was impending, visibly. Beard once photographed tens of thousands of dead elephants at Tsavo National Park –‘Starvo,’ to him. The pictures became a book in 1965: The End of the Game.

This wowed Francis Bacon, who painted him many times – including the canvas Beard described as Bacon’s best painting, which Bacon went back to, and ruined by painting over when drunk.

Beard once did a seven-hour interview with Bacon, during which Bacon turned on the Abstract Expressionists, describing Jackson Pollock as ‘the lace-maker’.

Beard and Bacon were once lunching at the Café Royal when they got a note from Henry Moore, who was at another table, suggesting they have a word. Bacon, says Beard, was disparaging about the great Brit sculptor but Bacon was just being Bacon. As when

Bacon said of Lucian Freud, ‘He’s not really a friend. He was just always around.’

They went over to the table anyway and it led to Beard’s shipping Moore an elephant skull from Kenya. Beard told me he discerned its influence in a subsequent sculpture.

Beard liked a Balzac quote about ‘luck, the greatest artist’. The French novelist’s wisdom fitted in 1996. That’s when Beard and two friends were following a herd of elephant in Kenya. Suddenly the sheelephant turned, charged and clobbered him. His shattered pelvis was pieced back together with titanium implants at St Vincent’s Hospital, Greenwich Village.

This was Beard’s breaking and his making. It happened only months before a show in Paris, which he wasn’t even close to being ready to hang. In 35 years, he had put together two million unsorted negatives. Sorting them became occupational therapy.

‘It was either that or stare at the ceiling,’ he told me.

Thus another stroke of Balzac’s luck: Beard was fully engaged when the long-dormant photography market began to take off shortly after.

When Peter Beard and I last spoke, Nejma, his capable wife, was running his business and his archive, and taking care of their daughter, Zara, while he was assembling a collection of images, taken from TV programmes.

‘It’s all connected, like an accordion,’ he said. ‘The images are about nuclear meltdown, the revolutions … every horror you can imagine … the torture! The themes are why we are the most dangerous animal; why we have killed almost all the other animals; why we have suffocated the earth with our ghastly presence.’

I asked, ‘What’s the project called?’

‘Twilight of the Planet of the Apes,’ Peter Beard said, as full of cheer as ever.

Graham Boynton’s Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover (St Martin’s Press) is out now

When Dolly met Dickens

Robert Bathurst, star of a new Dolly Parton musical, salutes the singer’s great gifts for singing, writing and talking

My discovery of Dolly Parton won’t go down in the record books. Like Scott of the Antarctic, I find that other people have got there first. However late to the party, I find I am unabashedly hooked.

Preparing for a role in the stage show Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, I did some research into her career, now in its seventh decade.

She has had 25 number-one hit singles and 41 top-ten albums. Her staggering ability is underpinned by a rare quality identified by music historian Bill Malone: ‘She’s a member of the last generation of performers who had working-class roots or who could remember real rural experience.’

Born in 1946 into an Appalachian farming family, she had a grounding in old-time-music traditions. It is also the foundation for our Christmas Carol project, with her lyrics and music.

There are strict instructions from Dolly at the top of the production script. The musical inspiration of the show, set in 1936, is Appalachian string band: fiddle, banjo and guitar. The banjo is to be played in clawhammer style and nobody is to breathe the word ‘bluegrass’, which came into existence only in the 1940s.

It’s this steely artistic rigour that gives a hint of Dolly Parton’s uncompromising insistence, from a young age, on what she knows is right.

This quality is obvious from the earliest videos of her work. She came to know, through her mother and mountain life, the ballads and reels passed down by immigrants from Britain, Ireland and Africa, together with ragtime and revivalist gospel music.

To modern ears, listening to Appalachian fiddle music from the 1920s and ’30s, you could be at a ceilidh. Its style, with rhythmic, short short bow strokes, is credited to Scottish fiddle-player Niel Gow in the 1740s. And Parton is aware of the

greatest old-time-music players, including Fiddlin’ John Carson, Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Dock Boggs.

In our show, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has been transplanted to the Appalachians, where the Great Depression arrived early and left late.

Via Dickens, Parton is returning to her musical roots, from which she developed her style into country. Aged 10, she appeared on a long-running TV show, broadcast from Knoxville, Tennessee – The Cas Walker Home and Farm Hour. In a scratchy audio recording from the show, Dolly’s performance is startlingly precocious.

There was nothing inevitable about the rise and rise of Dolly Parton. In her later teens, she mixed absolute assurance as a singer/songwriter with a deeply canny instinct for pragmatism and an eye for the main chance. Her writing was prolific and she presented herself in Nashville, pitching songs to producers, in company with thousands of other wannabes.

Her songs in this period were cleareyed narratives of betrayal, jealousy, lost love and suspicion; a lifetime’s experience – and yet she was hardly 20.

She told the Dolly Parton’s America podcast, ‘I like ballads – real strong, pitiful, sad, cryin’ ballads. I write about things that maybe I seen happen or things that have been in the family. Too sad? Remember, that’s how I grew up.’

Before her TV break in 1967, she had a hit record, Dumb Blonde, written by Curly Putman, who went on to write Green Green Grass of Home. To watch Dolly perform the song is to marvel at her nerve and the colours she gives to each phrase; humour and toughness delivered with a punch, somehow both fierce and delicate.

Her TV break became a seven-year association with country-singer Porter Wagoner on his show. He would introduce her as ‘our pretty little lady’ and did much to promote her, ensuring as he did so a stake in her potential success.

Dolly played the long game. She began to overtake Wagoner in popularity as a solo artist and marked her decision to split with him in 1974 by writing I Will Always Love You. This worldwide monster hit echoes her 1967 song about marrying a rich Texan, I Oilwells Love You

Dolly Parton is funny. With her ad-libs to Porter Wagoner, she ran rings around him, undermining his status as the sequinned peacock of the show.

A great singer/songwriter and a great talker too, she is witty, frank and open, as well as being a masterful deflector of unwelcome questions.

The content of her lyrics might indicate a radicalism, but she is beady about not pinning her colours to any political mast.

The audience comes first. ‘I’m an entertainer,’ she says. ‘I can make a good show.’

Robert Bathurst plays Scrooge in Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London South Bank, 8th December to 8th January

Christmas Gift Ideas from

History

2022 and all that – a history of British blunders

From George III to Liz Truss, we’ve made catastrophic mistakes david horspool

It was the worst humiliation since Suez but, somehow, Suez remains the gold standard for fiascoes.

Liz Truss completed her premiership in record time, like a gatecrasher who, after stumbling around drunkenly smashing things for a few minutes, is quietly ushered out by a group of halfway sober guests. Michael Howard popped up on the radio to affirm that Suez had been ‘far worse’, which was oddly comforting.

In chaotic times, it is good to have some certainties to cling to – and Suez as our postwar nadir is one. Anthony Eden’s bungled attempt in 1956 to re-establish imperial clout – comprehensively reverseferreted after the Americans told him to stop being silly – has lasted surprisingly well.

There have been any amount of cock-ups, from Profumo to the Iraq War, from the ERM to the end of the Afghan ‘intervention’ last year. But none of them has, yet, displaced Suez as the shining example of British hubris.

What about before Suez? Did the British have a convenient shorthand for getting it spectacularly wrong, or did the myth and occasional reality of a glorious past preclude that?

At the time of Suez, they did look back for a comparison. Suez was ‘Britain’s Waterloo’, according to Julian Amery, the Conservative MP. That was an odd choice, considering that Waterloo went rather well for the British.

Amery’s father, Leo Amery, was the Conservative MP who quoted Cromwell in his call for Neville Chamberlain’s departure: ‘In the name of God, go!’ David Davis MP repeated the line in January, calling for Boris Johnson’s resignation as PM.

As a wartime nadir, Leo Amery might have suggested the Norway campaign of 1940, when the British and Allies failed dismally to put a dent in the Nazi war machine.

Despite the change of leadership, that

wasn’t the last of Britain’s wartime embarrassments. Churchill called the fall of Singapore in 1942 ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’. Britain may have ended up on the winning side, but the air of imperial invincibility was lost for ever.

One massive error of economic judgement did for Liz Truss; Churchill played a leading part in two British catastrophes and still bounced back. While Singapore was his responsibility as prime minister, but not exactly his fault, the bloody disaster in the First World War that was the Dardanelles campaign was mostly Churchill’s own idea.

Historians have argued that Churchill’s original plan, calling for greater naval participation, might have worked. He took the blame anyway, without resorting to ‘mistakes were made’ nonsense. His ‘wilderness years’ followed.

Before the First World War, when Britain was reaching its apogee of imperial might, you might have thought our history was rather less of a roll of self-inflicted shame.

Not so. As far as the various peoples conquered, assimilated, co-opted or extinguished by the British Empire were concerned, it was probably all pretty disastrous. Even on its own terms, the British imperial experience was what management types characterise as a steep learning curve with many opportunities for growth – in other words, lots of blunders.

Highlights? The Indian Mutiny (other names are available) of 1857 is one. The

British, who relied on the collaboration of thousands of Indian soldiers, Hindu and Muslim, managed to offend both groups by introducing a cartridge grease that contravened their religious laws. The fact that the grease was in fact probably compliant made this in reality a different sort of cock-up – a communications failure, but no less deadly for that.

Or there’s the Battle of Chillianwala in the Anglo-Sikh wars (1849), which Sir John Hobhouse compared unfavourably to the Kabul massacre. Ah, yes – the retreat from Kabul (1842). This was the 19th-century Suez, a touchstone for tail-between-the-legs slinking away from an exposed and indefensible position.

First, the British political appointee, Sir William McNaghten, was killed in a scuffle as he tried to negotiate a withdrawal. Then, guarantees of safe passage proved useless. The forces who retook Kabul had no authority over the Ghilzai tribesmen who attacked, relentlessly, a column of around 17,000. Of that number (fewer than 700 of whom were British soldiers), only a handful survived.

The roll-call goes back through the centuries. Pollilur and Yorktown happened a year apart, in 1780 and 1781. We recall the prelude to the British loss of America, but have mostly forgotten the triumph of the Mysore sultanate over an East India Company force a year before.

A century before, the humiliation was much closer to home. We have airbrushed away the greatest defeat of the Royal Navy, when the Dutch sank 13 ships and captured two more in the raid on the Medway in 1667. Pepys caught the mood of national panic: ‘The truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone.’

Is there a lesson here? The usual good historian’s answer is ‘No’. But we can agree that Suez isn’t the half of it. We’ve been mucking up and carrying on regardless for centuries.

In 1667, Pepys caught the mood: ‘I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone’

Town Mouse

It’s my funeral – and I want a cheapskate’s send-off

London funerals have a very different quality from country funerals.

They’re more intense, and feel slightly unhealthy. They have something of the quality of a hangover. But they’re also solid and grand.

I recently went to the funeral of a friend, a poet, who died in his fifties. He went to paradise by way of Kensal Green: he was cremated at the General Cemetery of All Souls in London, W10, built in 1833, three years before the publication of The Pickwick Papers. Kensal Green was the first of London’s new ‘garden’ cemeteries, based on Paris’s Père Lachaise.

It’s a gloomy, heavy, Gothic place, faintly oppressive, with ivy everywhere and not an ounce of cheer, which I suppose is how a cemetery should be. It’s also intensely romantic. There are miniature Romanesque temples, Doric columns, statues of angels, wide walkways, plenty of horse chestnuts and low hedges.

Wilkie Collins, Thackeray and Trollope are all buried here. Here is French acrobat Blondin, who in 1859

became the first person to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. He repeated the trick in later years, sometimes pausing to make an omelette on the way. The Blondin Memorial Trust holds annual toasts at his graveside.

The mourners at my friend’s funeral were dressed theatrically in top hats, velvet and black lace. There were a lot of them – too many to fit into the chapel.

The overflow sat next door and watched the ceremony on a TV. There were eulogies, poems, Biblical readings and singing. This mouse, on gloomily walking away from the chapel, and reflecting on the horrible unfairness of death, couldn’t help wondering what sort of funeral he’d like.

Would a good funeral for a mouse be some sort of eco-affair, with a wicker coffin and a burial site in a wood?

Or would I prefer a sombre and romantic Gothic send-off in somewhere like Kensal Green or Highgate, with crows circling about, preferably with added fog? I think the latter, don’t you?

As a child, I always wanted to be buried and have a traditional gravestone. But now I’m middle-aged and have become stingy and mean, I’m worrying about the cost of living – and dying.

You have to be quite rich to get buried at Kensal Green: plots start at £19,000, and that’s not including coffin, burial fee, memorial stone and undertaker’s service. That’s just to buy the plot. Highgate Cemetery, burial place of Karl Marx, has similarly high fees.

Cremations cost more like a grand. That sounds better; any other money can be given to the new generation of mice towards their deposit on a new nest, rather than on a tiny plot of land.

Coffins are not cheap. According to comparethecoffin.com, the cheapest cardboard coffin will set you back £335 and an Autumn Oak Hardwood Casket Coffin goes for £2,500.

There’s one very urban thing I’d like to do with my ashes. My friend Ru Callender is an undertaker based in Totnes. He’s sometimes called a green undertaker or a punk undertaker.

He’s recently written a book about his trade, What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking (Chelsea Green). He is working with former pop stars the KLF on a fantastically eccentric scheme called the People’s Pyramid. The KLF are the pair who burnt a million pounds. That gives you an idea of the regard in which they hold conventional attitudes.

The People’s Pyramid is being built in Toxteth in Liverpool and will require 34,592 bricks. The first brick will be laid on 23rd November. Each brick will contain a small portion of cremated human remains. They call these items ‘bricks of mu’. I quite fancy being a part of this pyramid. The cost is £99, which seems fairly reasonable.

To be part of a pyramid would be a nice add-on to my planned urban death – and a reminder of the 12 BC Roman pyramid tomb of Gaius Cestius near the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. There will also be a sombre, hour-long funeral at Kensal Green (cost £1,150). And ashes to be buried (£540).

As for a memorial stone, I wouldn’t mind one by stonemason Neil Luxton. He has done some really lovely memorials at Highgate and Kensal Green. They start at around £1,400 for a tombstone in black granite with 50 letters. Here lies Town Mouse.

. 1968–????

What about you? How do you want your funeral to go?

My brilliant diet? Buy disgusting food

Will it be this winter? Civil unrest? Will this be the year that, armed only with billhooks, we have to defend our village and its meagre resources from the ravenous zombie hordes?

I haven’t got much to defend – a few winter squash which, like the Mayan farmers, I have already hoarded for months, waiting for winter really to bite.

The relapse into barbarism hasn’t happened yet, and the forces of law and order still exist – or do they? Although they infest the motorway, I haven’t seen a policeman in a Wiltshire town in years. Two members of the Wiltshire force are usually tied up with ‘domestic’ incidents in Melksham or Trowbridge – traditional centres of unrest.

How long could we live off the land? I’m not even sure my air rifle works any more. I used to get the odd stray pheasant that had the temerity to wander into my grounds – but then I checked with a Game Conservancy spokesperson, who told me that although not illegal it was considered ‘unsportsmanlike’ to take a trespassing pheasant for the pot. Etiquette could be forgotten in an emergency, but the telescopic sights have been dented – so I have to aim above the target. The likely hit rate would not be sufficient to feed this family.

As for the rabbit, there is an excellent recipe from Constance Spry which uses English ingredients – green lentils, onions and celery – and the bit I like most is her recommendation that it be served on a base of fried bread. I could legitimately break the ultimate taboo by indulgence in what Mary calls ‘cardiac cuisine’.

We have a surplus of dried food hoarded during lockdowns, some of it now past its sell-by date – I had a plan to purchase a chest freezer. This was shot down by Mrs Wood, who barked, ‘What happens when there’s a power cut?’

We know a highly intelligent local historian who has been ‘prepping’ for civil unrest since Brexit. Once you get into the prepping mindset, I can see it could take you over in a nerdish sort of way.

Even without civil unrest, nationwide anxiety has been spiked by the news that the only foodstuffs going down in price are minced beef, orange juice, sugar and rice, while prices for pasta and olive oil are going through the roof. At what point did our national cuisine get hijacked by that of another European country? You never hear about Italians worrying about price rises for crumpets or Cornish pasties. Yet pasta, pizza and panini now trump eel pie, potted shrimps and Lancashire hotpot in our newly globalised diets.

Here in Wiltshire, Iron Age villagers kept and ate cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and horses. At the risk of causing offence, it seems illogical that those who are prepared to eat ostrich, kangaroo or Canadian lobsters would never be able to bring themselves to eat horse. Perhaps when the civil unrest comes, horse will be sold euphemistically as Pauper’s Steak.

In the Iron Age, the land around the villages was divided into small, rectangular fields in which wheat, barley and oats were grown. Archaeologists surmise that the ground grain was made into a kind of porridge in the shape of flat cakes baked on hot stones. The effort required to grind the meal by hand would ensure that obesity was not a problem.

Fast-forward to 2022 and it is the ubiquity of foreign foodstuffs that has literally spoilt our Anglo-Saxon palates. Waitrose is partly to blame, but we customers should shoulder some of that blame in choosing to shop there.

Last night, Mary returned from the shops with a long face: ‘I’m sorry –they didn’t have Époisses, but the cheesemonger suggested this creamy Taleggio would be a decent substitute.’

I am among those Britons (two-thirds of us) currently losing the battle of the bulge. But as I ate this unsatisfactory Taleggio, I had an epiphany for a foolproof diet:

Buy only things you don’t like. Then you won’t eat too much.

In future, I will shop for pig’s trotters, tripe, tongue and tapioca, Love Hearts, Refreshers, Liquorice Allsorts and Fox’s Glacier Mints. And, for those whose palates have been corrupted to like sugar-rich Heinz tomato soup, try Co-op’s own-brand ‘healthy’ tomato and basil soup. You will find it virtually inedible.

Nature writer Richard Jefferies quotes a gamekeeper who had his own theories on staying healthy:

‘It’s indoors, sir, that kills half the people – and next to that taking too much drink and vitals … People stuffs theirselves.’

That’s it! When I set out on my next sustainable shopping trip, I will bypass Waitrose and walk – not drive – to the Co-op, where I will fill a rucksack with food I consider inedible.

Breastfeeding beats chestfeeding

Nature shows how silly gender-neutral words are, says Mary Kenny

I sat across the table from the late April Ashley at a pre-pandemic Oldie lunch and thought her amazing.

She was a beautiful old lady – she died in 2021 – as she once had been a beautiful young man. She made history as one of the first openly transgender people and she had to struggle against prejudice and mockery to affirm her right to be respected for who she was.

But there’s a difference between accepting and respecting an individual person who has gender dysphoria and rushing headlong into a rigid ideology of transgenderism – in which official organisations and powerful corporations have taken to alluding to women as ‘pregnant people’ and ‘people who menstruate’.

It has been proclaimed that breastfeeding, known to all female mammals, should now be called ‘chestfeeding’ – so as not to offend transgender parents with chests rather than breasts.

Let’s not start on the transgendered males permitted to serve their sentences in female prisons because they ‘identify’ as women, or the alarming numbers of young girls who have somehow been persuaded they are in the wrong body.

The transgender mania was really started by an American academic called Judith Butler. She launched the theory that all sexual difference is ‘socially constructed’: society, rather than biology, has defined male and female categories. It was taken up with alacrity and suddenly the whole woke world embraced it.

The root of this distortion is that we have lost touch with nature. When we lived in agricultural societies, we knew there was a difference between the ram and the ewe, the filly and the stallion.

Yes, there was diversity in nature –farmers observed ‘lesbian cows’ who showed preference for one another – but there was also the prevailing tendency of nature. No one involved in animal husbandry would claim that male and female roles were ‘socially constructed’.

We are not ‘the brute beasts of the fields’, yet we are part of the natural order. We can fully respect individuals like April Ashley – while affirming that such cases are exceptional.

But until nature is acknowledged, the silliness about ‘chest-feeding’ and ‘people who menstruate’ will go on.

I’m sure the Maytime coronation next year will be splendid, whether elaborate or simplified. But at least King Charles won’t face the worry that beset his grandfather, George VI, in 1936: having to get through a four-and-a-half-hour ceremony without the comfort of a cigarette.

The King told the Irish High Commissioner, John Dulanty, that he dreaded the long procedure, with ‘throngs of people … staring at you’, and without even a break for ‘a gasper’.

Alas, as we know, the fags shortened the King’s life considerably, but he was a nervous, shy man and he felt that the ciggies helped him face public ‘ordeals’.

Dulanty wasn’t officially allowed to attend the Coronation, as Eire had declared itself ‘detached’ from the monarchy. But, perhaps because of this slightly outsider status, King George struck up a cordial and relaxed relationship with the Irish envoy. They shared their anxieties, too, about ‘raising children in the modern world’.

The Ascot-loving John Dulanty had also made himself useful to the King’s mother, Queen Mary, by providing her with an encyclopaedic amount of information about antiques, in relation to which she had some addictive tendencies.

The French author awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux, may be said to be extremely French in her candour about her sex life.

She laid bare her exploits in ‘burninghot’ accounts (Simple Passion and Getting Lost) describing her ‘raw and dark’ affair with a Russian diplomat.

She also wrote unsparingly about a secret abortion she had in 1963 – when contraception in France was still illegal – which was made into a film, Happening. Acclaimed at Venice, it’s probably not most people’s idea of a cosy evening’s entertainment.

However, Ernaux’s early books about growing up in a working-class environment in Normandy are brilliantly observed, written with simplicity. La Place, translated as A Man’s Place, has some parallels with Richard Hoggart’s classic The Uses of Literacy.

What mattered hugely to people was respectability. What they feared most was losing their modest status, or being the object of shame. And the respectable husband handed over his wage packet to his wife, while she doled him out his beer money.

A late aunt of mine, childless, devoted herself to her garden – perhaps in place of tending to a brood. She died more than 30 years ago. By chance, I recently encountered a neighbour living next door to her former home, who said, ‘Her roses are still coming up beautifully. The garden is just wonderful to behold.’

I used to dismiss gardening as ‘outdoor housework’, but this touchingly brought home to me what an enduring legacy a gardener may leave behind. How sweet to think that Aunty Dorothy’s roses still bring beauty and joy to others.

My office dress code, courtesy of Mother

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

My delayed knee operation is still somewhere in the log-jammed NHS system. So my employees have kindly let me work from home for most of my working week.

Sadly, this has made the day on which I do commute a festival of celebration and over-fussing at the Clarke residence.

‘You’ll need a coat – and your shoes are a disgrace. You’ll never go far with shoes like that,’ Mother moaned.

I didn’t have the heart to explain that she was confusing me with my successful brother and I was just off to Doncaster, where the only use for a shiny shoe is catching the reflection of the man about to mug you.

She bent down, regardless, and set to my shoes with polish and cloth, without seeking my permission.

‘That’s illegal buffing!’ I shouted, trying to gain my father’s eye.

He looked away, refusing to side with either party.

‘I am withdrawing my feet! I am withdrawing my feet!’ I warned mother, like a jumpy American cop. Then, gymnast-style, I raised my feet off the ground, by supporting myself between the two breakfast-bar stools.

Mother stood up and said, ‘You won’t rest, will you – you’ll have me hunchbacked by Christmas.’ Too late. She’s been a hunchback since last Easter – but no one has dared tell her.

‘I can’t reach down to polish my shoes while my knees are still under the doctor,’ I said.

‘You could take your shoes off and put them on a table,’ said Mother.

As a train commuter with many fields to fly past, I’m already at the mercy of a passing unlucky solo magpie as it is. So I said, ‘Shoes on table? Are you mad? That would bring me bad luck.’

‘Luck!’ scoffed Mother. ‘There’s no man luckier than you – 52 and he’s never seen a utility bill! Once a week, he has to put on a suit and it’s like getting a flighty

horse ready for dressage season, making him look half-decent.’

‘It’s not your job to fiddle around with me,’ I said. ‘You springing at me, combing things that don’t need combing… It’s not part of my work-from-the-office day. I am simply commuting via your kitchen. You are the domestic equivalent of a W H Smith newspaper stand. We should just nod at each other and occasionally comment on any extreme weather. The W H Smith-stand man doesn’t lick my eyebrows down or dress me.’

Last week, I arrived at work with a tie clip attached to the seat of my trousers, like a docked metallic tail. Floor 4 are now calling me Laddy Gaga.

‘Well, if you stopped squirming, and twisting and turning when I’m accessorising,’ said Mother, shrugging.

I live in fear of her ambushing me with a glittery rain poncho as the weather turns.

‘Why don’t you start on that project instead,’ I said. I pointed at Father, who looked like a time traveller from the postwar period, a study in brown colourways.

‘Oh, if I probed and tittle-tattled that one, he’d get the wrong idea,’ she shivered. ‘Your father will explain everything when you’re older.’

‘With these knees, I don’t think getting any older is on the cards,’ I said, as I opened the back door.

‘He’s only on four lots of medication and he’s off to Dignitas!’ Mother said. ‘Where’s your backbone? Where’s your spine? It’s no wonder you look more and more like a bloody jelly baby.’

I slammed the back door and put my travel mac on in the back garden, to avoid poison-tongued Mother.

The door reopened a crack, and an unfussy trilby was thrown at me. From behind the door, Mother said, ‘Why not give everyone on the train a break from your dandruff, while you’re at it?’

As I sat down on my train, I heard a fellow commuter lament to his friend, ‘The thing about commuting is how it eats into your time at home with your family.’

As I waved at a solitary magpie from my window seat, commuting didn’t seem so bad after all.

She still shines my shoes and washes my face before I go to work jem clarke

Sophia Waugh: School Days

I adore my Latin lover

Now that the pandemic is behind us, we are back to normal with our extracurricular school visits.

This means an occasional ‘crash day’, when the timetable is scrapped and educational activities are put into place. My Year-8 tutor group were sent off to the Eden Project. Alas, as an English teacher, I wasn’t allowed to accompany them. We English teachers are important, see. Or that was the message we were meant to take home, although I’m not sure how that made the teachers sent to Eden feel.

In any event, mocks are coming up for Year 11 and so they were given a full day of revision techniques – words that make my heart sink into my boots. I was to teach the same lesson four times to four different sets of students. At least I couldn’t claim it was too arduous a task.

The point was not to give them a revision lesson on Macbeth or Frankenstein, but to tell them how to revise. I started by asking the children to suggest ways of revision. And they all came out pat: flashcards, essay plans etc. No one suggested rereading the book, or even rewatching the play.

Then I got to the last class of the day, my own English set: the crème de la crème of the year – a joy to teach and a

joy to know as pupils and human beings. Some of them had their own very different ways of revising.

One clearly very clever boy has been pretty silent for two years. He has turned in essays which improve on a weekly basis but hasn’t contributed much in class. Suddenly, when we were re-reading Macbeth, I realised he sounds exactly like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

This is not a normal way of sounding in a Somerset comprehensive (or really anywhere in the world). I could not work out whether he was putting on the voice because he was reading Shakespeare, or because he really did have that voice.

He has remained smiling and fairly silent – until we came to this revision session. He has an extraordinary recall of quotations from Macbeth; I asked him how he did it.

His answer sent me reeling. ‘I translate them into Latin,’ he said. ‘And then I translate them back.’

This boy has never been taught Latin – state schools in Somerset have long since given up on anything so esoteric. He’s had to teach himself the language. Now, I’ve had students ‘translate’ Shakespeare into modern English and think that’s good enough, but never one who has brought Latin into the mix.

I asked him what his plans were for the future.

‘Law,’ he answered.

‘Excellent. But promise me you’ll not go into politics. We’ve had enough of Cincinnatus for a while.’

Of course he knew what I was talking about. And of course he deserved a reward. So Our Glorious Benefactor has just bought him a couple of Our Glorious Editor’s works – Et Tu, Brute? and Amo, Amas, Amat and All That

If it’s all looking a bit in-house, I don’t mind. Nothing is better than to be surprised by a student after all these years.

Quite Interesting Things about … the Olympics

The ancient Greek city of Megara held a version of the Olympic Games which included a kissing contest. Only boys were allowed to enter.

The fastest 100 metres run by an eight-year-old today would have won bronze at the 1896 Olympics.

The 1900 Paris Olympics included live pigeon shooting and long jump for horses.

Horses competing in the Olympics today have their own passports and fly business class.

Croquet was dropped as an Olympic sport after 1900

because only one spectator turned up to watch.

Players in Canada’s 1904 Olympic lacrosse team included Rain-in-Face, Snake Eater and Man Afraid Soap.

At the 1908 London Olympic Games, Great Britain won gold, silver and bronze in the Tug-of-War.

In 1924, Jack Yeats, brother of the poet W B Yeats, won Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal – a silver for painting.

At the 1928 Olympics, oarsman Henry Pearce stopped to let a family of

ducks cross his lane and went on to win the gold medal.

At the 1932 Olympics, the 3,000-metre steeplechase was run over 3,400 metres because an official lost count of the number of laps.

Quarantine laws meant that the 1956 Melbourne Olympics equestrian events took place in Stockholm.

Clear round for Anne

The only woman not to be gendertested at the 1976 Montreal Olympics was Princess Anne.

Many of the doves released at the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics were roasted alive when the Olympic flame was lit.

222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions is out now

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

‘So this is Hell – it looks just like my old office’

An old friend told me that he had been hearing about grace, endlessly, in sermons, but never with any specific definition as to what it actually is.

He suggested to a clergyman friend that he should preach to clarify the subject, but nothing has been forthcoming.

I said I would give it a go. Having checked the reference books, I now understand why the clergyman is so reticent. Grace is a minefield of controversy and requires a vast amount of theological and historical scholarship, which I distinctly lack.

In the Old Testament, God gave to his people the capacity to do his will. ‘I shall pour clean water over you and you shall be cleansed.’ (Ezekiel 36:25)

And in the New Testament we find grace shown to the unworthy and ungrateful on account of their needs: ‘What fulfils the promise depends on

Amazing grace

faith, so that it may be a free gift and be available to all… (Romans 4:16) Unfortunately, grace has become increasingly complicated over the centuries. The African church father Tertullian (160-225) saw grace as divine energy working in the soul.

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) argued that humanity, since the Fall, is sinful and can be redeemed only by the grace of God. Cassian (360-430) rejected humanity’s total depravity. Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) added extra subdivisions.

The waters were further muddied during the Reformation in the 16th century by Luther and, in particular, by Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. John Wesley, in the 18th century, took a more moderate and sensible view of grace as necessary to all of Christian life. Mercifully, there is no need for us to

Memorial Service

worry about whether our sense of freedom of will is or isn’t theologically sound. The debate continues.

Christians agree that grace, the gift of God, precedes faith. Most also agree that, without it, whether or not we recognise this, we can do nothing good.

But, at the same time, we are free to co-operate with grace or to refuse it. We have no legal claim on God; the redemptive act of Jesus’s death on the cross is the supreme moment of grace for us all.

John Bradford, a distinguished English Reformer, was known to his 16th-century contemporaries as ‘Holy Bradford’ – not out of sarcasm, but because they admired his altruism and commitment to God.

During the reign of Mary Tudor, he was burnt at the stake for the seemingly trivial crime of trying to stir up a mob.

There is a terrible irony at work here: he had a humble and entirely practical understanding of grace. On seeing a group of prisoners being led to their execution, he allegedly said, ‘There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.’

Lord Sainsbury KG (1927-2022)

Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum, gave a moving eulogy for his friend Lord Sainsbury, head of the family supermarket chain, at St Martin-in-the -Fields in Trafalgar Square, across the road from the National Gallery.

MacGregor stressed Lord Sainsbury’s generosity in giving the money to construct the Sainsbury Wing at the gallery. It was the grandest act of private cultural philanthropy since the war.

MacGregor said, ‘National Service had taken John to Palestine at the unhappy end of the British Mandate – an

experience that left him with an abiding sympathy for the homeless, refugees and asylum-seekers.

‘It’s especially appropriate in this church, St Martin’s, with its long tradition of work with the homeless, to pay tribute to his work in this area as well. Here the Sainsbury Wing played a totally unexpected part. For many years, there had been a habit, for those with no homes, to sleep on a pew at the back of the church – disrupted by lunchtime concerts. ‘When the Sainsbury Wing lecture theatre opened, they migrated across the road and installed themselves in the front rows. It was disconcerting for many lecturers to find the theatre filled by

enthusiastic students but also by others in a deep sleep. John was of course delighted.’

Robin Whitbread, the chairman’s right-hand man for many years, spoke of his assiduous attention to detail. Sainsbury lunched with colleagues in the office every day, sampling Sainsbury’s produce. He once spotted that the soup was not quite up to standard and asked to have a look at the tin. It turned out to be from Tesco.

The Rev Dr Sam Wells gave the welcome and opening prayer. The congregation sang Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. Lucy Butler-Sloss read Idyll by Siegfried Sassoon. Mark Sainsbury read 1 Corinthians 13, 1-13. Melissa Hamilton and Lukas Brændsrød, dancers from the Royal Ballet, performed a prelude.

The Doctor’s Surgery

The healing power of art

My eye was caught recently by a small item in the British Medical Journal – ‘Art improves life.’

It referred to a Canadian study during the COVID lockdown. Elderly people who were socially isolated and living on their own benefited from weekly virtual tours round the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, compared with those who did not go on such tours.

Do we really need the BMJ to inform us that art improves life? Imagine a world in which there was no art and no possibility of there being any art: would anyone not understand that life in such a world would be deeply impoverished?

The study divided 106 isolated elderly people at random into two groups: those who were offered tours of the museum and those who were not.

For ethical reasons, they had to be told that they were taking part in an experiment and to consent to doing so. That considerably vitiated its scientific value, because it was impossible to disguise from them which group they were in, the experimental or the control.

Among the criteria for entry into the study was a certain level of income, used as a surrogate measure of educational attainment and probably of IQ – though of course it would be

impossible to mention, let alone assert, this in polite circles.

The experimental subjects were taken by a guide via Zoom round the collections, interspersed with information provided by curators and art historians. The tours lasted for 45 minutes each, followed by 15 minutes of free discussion, or more if the participants wished.

At the end of three months, the subjects were compared by means of questionnaires, administered at the outset of the experiment and at its end.

Those who had attended the tours

demonstrated an improvement in their scores by comparison with the controls (who, incidentally, had had to promise not to take part in any virtual cultural activities for the duration of the experiment).

There are many possible criticisms of the findings. I have already mentioned that the experimental and control groups could not be blinded as to which arm of the experiment they were in.

It was conducted only among the relatively well-educated, and the initial level of education may well have affected the result.

While the scores on the questionnaires were different, it cannot be assumed that the differences in those scores were significant in any but the statistical sense: in other words, that they represented anything other than a purely notional improvement.

Finally, of course, it might well have been that any social activity via Zoom – for example tours of zoos or learning how to play mah-jong – would have had the same effect. It was not art as such that was beneficial, but social activity in a context in which the possibilities of such social activity were greatly reduced.

For the specific benefits created by art, one would have to repeat the experiment with similar virtual activities devoted to, say, zoology or sport, as controls.

Moreover, a tour of the Montreal Museum might be less beneficial than one of, say, the Louvre or the Prado. More research is needed.

Clearly, the social isolation of elderly people is harmful. It is associated with –and probably causes – increased health problems, including mortality, quite apart from the inherent misery of it. Can anyone be in favour of social isolation, at least when it is involuntary?

But though this study had as many holes as a colander, I confess that I wanted to believe it.

I quite like art myself.

I love pictures, too, but do they really improve your health? theodore dalrymple

The Oldie, 23–31

Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk

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Dr Stuttaford’s full cellar

SIR: We were amused by Dr Dalrymple’s reference (The Doctor’s Surgery, November issue) to his predecessor Dr Stuttaford’s being a keen advocate of drink in moderation.

We bought his house on Elm Hill in Norwich following his death. The sale included his cellar of claret and port –which we are still drinking!

If you come to Norwich, come and enjoy one with us.

Julia Greaves and Jon Rosser, Norwich, Norfolk

Jeffrey Archer vs the truth

SIR: In ‘Dare to be different’ (November issue), Andrew M Brown suggests there was ‘always at least one who affected 1950s Received Pronunciation…’; for those of us who grew up in the ’50s, RP was the way we spoke naturally as we grew up! Nothing affected about it.

And in ‘A time for giving’ (Christmas Gift Guide), Jeffrey Archer suggests that the Cambridge Children’s Hospital ‘will be the first children’s hospital for the east of England … to treat the whole child, mind and body together’; not so.

The Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital was established in Norwich in 1854 and continues as a department in the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital to this day. To suggest that the older hospitals did not cater for the ‘whole’ child is rather insulting, in my view. They did their best, by their lights, and I can certainly vouch for the Jenny Lind in that respect.

Brigid Purcell, Norwich, Norfolk

Drinks with O’Toole

SIR: My friend the actor Dudley Sutton, who was at RADA with O’Toole and played Macduff alongside his Macbeth at the Old Vic, told me how he carried on drinking having been told not to. He glugged a large swig of Gaviscon first. Peter Rankin, London NW3

Joy of driving

SIR: My near namesake Mary Hodges asks (Letters, November issue) why driving is seen as the default way of getting around. The answer is simple. It enables one to travel, in comfort, directly to wherever one wishes to go at a time of one’s choosing.

The lady cites a number of alternatives, and states that she is naming but a few. I can’t actually think of any others.

Walking and cycling are not practical for many, especially some elderly and/or disabled people. The availability of public transport varies considerably depending on locality. In many rural areas, it is virtually non-existent.

Peter Hedges, Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire

The last time I saw Paris

SIR: I totally identify with Barry Humphries’s remarks about the ‘dismal cavalcade of rucksacks and dejected black-clad pedestrians’ in Paris.

My wife and I experienced this a few years ago and, when we arrived home, I seized my French dictionary and

penned these lines. Please forgive any linguistic lapses.

MA VISITE FINALE À PARIS

Il pleuvait sans cesse pendant notre visite récente

Et il y avait des grandes foules partout

On ne pouvait pas visiter la Tour Eiffel Ni les galeries de’art, ni le Louvre ‘Prenez garde des pickpockets,’ disent des avis.

‘Et aussi des mendiants tous.’

Le cathédral, les musées et toutes les églises

Étaient tous pleins de bruits comme un zoo.

Paris a perdu son ton de mystère Disparu est son air de magique.

Je ne retournerai jamais à la ville adorée

Aujourd’hui c’est une ville très tragique Donald Jones, Honiton, Devon

Tennis with the Grim Reaper

SIR: Several things in Tom Hodgkinson’s article ‘Anyone for municipal tennis?’ (November issue) strike a chord with me. I too have played the game since my youth, until COVID enforced a two-year lay-off. I thought it safe to resume on 16th June 2022 and arrived for my ‘COVID returners’ coaching session at my local club.

This was just before my 83rd birthday. I thought I needed to revive my fitness and sharpen up my reflexes before returning to strenuous competition.

The coach gave us a good workout of volleying at the net, and then…

I woke three days later in intensive care. I had severe bruising from neck to hip and a vague memory of somebody rummaging inside my chest like an inept pickpocket. I’d had a cardiac arrest on court; fortunately, another player (a dentist) gave me CPR and somebody else ran to the church hall for a defibrillator. After a couple of attempts this shocked my heart into starting again.

Now I have a defibrillator/pacemaker implant and feel fine. I could play tennis again, but I respect other club members’ reluctance to take on an old geezer they fear they might have to give the kiss of life to.

‘Come on, Norman, you usually smile on Sundays’

I donated a defibrillator to the club and now keep an eye open for them as I go round the neighbourhood. You should too. The chances of surviving cardiac arrest without one are less than five per cent.

I’m a lucky man.

Dr Malcolm Yorke, Newcastle upon Tyne

Long service record

SIR: I recently celebrated my 85th birthday and am very fortunately still able to play tennis and table tennis all year. I can therefore highly recommend Town Mouse’s (November issue) latest activity. It has been medically proven that both games help to combat dementia – those councils must know a thing or two.

Fairly recently at the World Veterans Table Tennis Tournament, one competitor was over 100 years old.

However, do not compare my game with those you see on television.

Very best regards, Graham R McFarlane, Port Erin, Isle of Man

Reasons to grow your own

SIR: Victor Osborne (November issue) is mistaken when he asserts that the BBC sitcom The Good Life was what inspired ‘the aspirational middle class’ to join waiting lists for allotments.

The programme did not make its debut until spring 1975, by which time I had already taken possession of my Brixton allotment and was reporting on my progress to readers of the Times Diary – overwhelmingly middle class and aspirational, as indeed was I.

The trigger for the rush to grow our own was the fear of shortages brought about by the miners’ strikes of the early ’70s, leading to the imposition of a three-day working week and panic buying of such staples as sugar and toilet rolls. Plus ça change

I still have the allotment, although I get help with the digging and stooping. And I am still middle class, even if marginally less aspirational.

Michael Leapman, London SW8

Alan Bennett’s First

SIR: When my mother died, I found among her effects a letter that I had written as a new undergraduate. I wrote, inter alia, ‘There is a bloke here who is so funny that he could easily make a living on the halls. But he won’t, as he is also very clever, and will probably end up as a don.’

This leads me to suggest that Alan Bennett’s description of his First as a

‘fluke result’ (Commonplace Corner, November issue) should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.

David Culver, London SE9

Bond devaluation

SIR: I don’t think Her late Majesty can possibly have been a Bond fan. Had she been, she would never in the famous television encounter have addressed him as ‘Mr Bond’. She should have been saved from such a solecism with the script reading ‘Good evening, Commander Bond’.

Yours etc, Alastair Drew (Lt Col Retd), Sutton Scotney, Winchester

Undervalued Stirling

SIR: Alan Judd, in his review (November issue) of a recent book written by Gavin Mortimer on Colonel Sir David Stirling, appears to support the author’s conclusion that Sir David did not deserve his statue on a windswept hillside near the village of Doune in Perthshire. (Whether or not that conclusion is shared by other military historians is a separate matter.)

But we need to recall the purpose for which the statue was placed there in 2002.

A plaque on the statue reads that it was erected in remembrance of all members of the Special Air Service who died for their country in the Second World War. Nearby, there are further plaques inscribed with the names of the 317 dead. On the same site, there is an equally impressive memorial to the 47 members of the Long Range Desert Group who lost their lives in that conflict.

By way of contrast, Sir David is buried in a small, nondescript cemetery in the village of Morar, close to Mallaig. There is no indication on the face of his headstone of his role in the Second World War; only a small engraving on the reverse side depicting the badge of the Special Air Service.

John Martin, Holt, Norfolk

Boris talks balls

SIR: I enjoyed Harry Mount’s article about Boris Johnson’s use of Latin (Oldie website, 6th September) but one of them got a bit wrong. I hope it was Boris. This was the quote:

‘When describing the location of his old office in City Hall [Boris said] – “I’m on the, er, upper epidermis of the gonad. Somewhere near the seminal vesical, I expect” – the joke depended on using the formal, scientific, Latinate terms for effect.’

To be anatomically correct, he ought to have referred to the ‘epididymis’, which is the squiggly bit in diagrams of the scrotum and testicles. In his analogy, if his office was on the epidermis – skin – he would have been sitting on the roof. As usual Boris was talking bollocks.

Yours truly, Liz Willetts, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

Keep your hats on

SIR: Following on from Jean Buchanan’s recent rant about men’s hats (September issue), may I offer a few remarks about saluting, as seen in modern films and TV programmes?

Can directors of films and programmes with a military background please note: in the British armed forces nobody – officer or other rank – ever salutes when bareheaded. One recent example has been in the film Operation Mincemeat, where the character played by Colin Firth is standing in his office when he is saluted by a subordinate who is taking his leave. In spite of his not wearing a hat, Firth returns the salute.

This is by no means an isolated instance, with hatless salutes popping up quite regularly. We haven’t quite got to the American stage where salutes are returned by a casual flick of the hand, sometimes (horror of horrors) from a seated position, but no doubt that will come.

Sincerely, Alan McLoughlin, Helston, Cornwall

‘That’s how many podcasts there are about my case’

Malcolm X

Arriving in Africa from Australia in 1964, I hooked up with a Peace Corps worker and parlour revolutionary from New York, known to his associates as Johnniethe-Punk. Together we hitchhiked from the Cape to Cairo.

Johnnie-the-Punk was anti-imperialist, anti-American, anti-bourgeoisie and agin most things I held dear. It was therefore with great excitement that he read that Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was in Cairo and staying at Shepheard’s Hotel. (As you do, if you are dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist society, Shepheard’s being at that time the most luxurious and costly hotel in Africa.)

Punk was on the phone to Shepheard’s in a trice. I expected to hear a smooth, disembodied voice repeating a mantra that Mr X was unavailable or had just checked out but, much to my surprise, Punk was put through to his suite.

To my even greater surprise, another disembodied voice said that Malcolm X would be pleased to meet us for a drink that evening.

I gave the Punk a good scrubbing and forced him into an unaccustomed suit before we set out for Shepheard’s. There were several black chaps waiting in the lobby, but none looked dangerous enough to be the leader of the notorious Nation of Islam. Then a somewhat shy,

diffident black man in a very elegant suit and silk tie rose from a chair and identified himself as the architect of armed revolution we were seeking. He ordered orange juice – but did not object to our indulging in something stronger.

Malcolm X explained his aims so rationally and dispassionately that he made murder and insurrection sound really quite constitutional.

The Punk was nodding his head

enthusiastically at all this but looked mildly alarmed when Mr X declared that separation of the races in the United States was a cornerstone of his political philosophy.

So just like apartheid South Africa, then?

Speaking of the violent change he insisted was inevitable, Malcolm X declared, ‘If a house is rotten, what do you do? You don’t try to patch it up. You tear it down and build something better!’

Now of course this was an analogy – not a policy for urban renewal – but, with hindsight, it was an instructive one. At that time, corporations and developers were pulling down historic housing and raising concrete towers in its stead.

Eventually we largely gave up destroying heritage buildings in favour of restoring them. Similarly, the solution to the racial wrongs of the 1960s was not revolution but reform, most notably through the agency of the civil-rights movement.

Our courteous host did not live to see that more peaceful outcome. Exactly six months after our meeting in Cairo, in 1965 he was assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam, in the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

Patrick Hickman-Robertson

My dad, the Japanese POW

cargo ship for the six-week voyage to join her father.

The Japanese started making things unpleasant in China, and ex-pats were advised to leave for Hong Kong.

My father, Frank Hillon, was one of five children born to working-class parents in Liverpool. He joined Tate & Lyle and became the factory superintendent in Hong Kong, living in a grand house.

My mother, Norah Knox, was born in Dumbarton, also one of five. Her father, an engineer, had found work in Shanghai to provide for his family. In 1930, when Norah was 19, her mother died. Norah went from Glasgow to Tilbury, where they boarded a

The authorities asked my father to take in an evacuated family, the Knoxes – and that is how my parents met. My father had joined the Hong Kong Volunteer Regiment –then war broke out.

My parents returned to England in 1946, having been incarcerated by the Japanese for three years and eight months. They received no assistance but they were resolute, and my father acquired a canteen in Gladstone Dock in Liverpool.

From the age of 11, I

attended the canteen after school and at weekends to assist the family effort. One Sunday, woken at 5.30am, we were on our way for a morning’s work. It was deep winter and extremely cold.

Sixty years ago, my first job was to half-toast about 200 rounds of bread. When the dockers came in for breakfast hot, buttered toast could be served quickly.

The canteen was at the top of an avenue surrounded on three sides by deep, freezing water and I was standing at the toaster on a stone floor. I started to shiver.

My father, who never spoke of the prison camp said, ‘Why are you shivering?’

‘Because I’m cold, Dad.’

‘COLD?! You only think you’re cold – I’ll tell you what cold is: standing on a platform, up to your thighs in snow, dressed only in shorts and a singlet, waiting for a train to take you to erect barbed-wire fences with your bare hands. Mind over matter!’

I have rarely felt cold since. Now, during winter, when I’m walking my dogs in a T-shirt and people ask if I am cold, I reply with a secret smile, ‘I don’t think I’m cold!’

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

Parky’s heroes

JASPER REES

My Sporting Life: Memories, Moments and Declarations

Fans of sport are offhand about history.

You can accept the theory that great matches and feats of skill took place before you were born. But because you didn’t experience it, you’re inclined to wonder if any of it matters, or ever truly happened at all. The past is a foreign country known only to your dad and other dinosaurs.

It’s why, if you’re much younger than 75, you can’t get excited about Peter May’s supposedly sumptuous cover drive or Stanley Matthews’s allegedly mesmerising dribble.

As a corrective to short-term memory myopia, Michael Parkinson, 87, has been thrumming through his cuttings file. My Sporting Life anthologises the pieces he once wrote about his heroes.

Arise again, therefore, Harold Larwood and Fred Trueman, Tom Finney and Danny Blanchflower. Those mythic figures grinning on cigarette cards and flickering on antediluvian newsreel are summoned into the here and now like the giants at the climax of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem

Here we read – or read again, if you remember these pieces from the first time round – about what it was like to watch them play, and also what it meant to meet, interview and even befriend them, as Parkinson often did.

The only colossus he never managed to pin down was Donald Bradman, whom he didn’t hugely care for anyway, preferring the larrikin style of his all-round compatriot Keith Miller.

Parkinson’s hall of fame is, forgivably,

a male place. He loves Barnsley FC ‘like my favourite blowsy barmaid’. Aside from the briefest nod to England’s women who triumphed in the Euros this summer, pretty much the only woman whose sporting life is noted is the golfing Mrs Parkinson.

Once upon a time, long before he asked Helen Mirren about her attributes or got assaulted by an emu, Parkinson was a sports journalist, which he still sees as his primary calling. He started as a teenager, pedalling round his patch of South Yorkshire, gathering news for the local paper. Often he’d make mention of his own footballing exploits (‘Another Parkinson Triumph’).

The editor of the Manchester Guardian intoned that ‘fools write about football and dreamers about cricket’.

.

His idol was Neville Cardus, in whose bin he once rummaged to see what inspiration he might find among the discarded typescripts, only to fish out 20 sheets empty but for the words ‘Cardus. Page 1’.

A lot of his reporting is rooted in memories of playing. He was a straight-batted opener playing alongside Dickie Bird and Geoff Boycott, both lifelong muckers who feature here in story after totteringly tall story. The tallest concerns a batter who, noting the opposing bowler’s penchant for pitching it short, walked to the crease bearing two stepladders.

The collection is a bit of a Russian doll, with Parkinson remembering his memories of meeting men who in turn tell him theirs.

Pieces are organised into such themes as youth, professional influences, politics and the afterlife of retirement, each contextualised with an introduction.

Although the articles are quoted in italics, you don’t remotely need them to tell the difference between Parkinson then and now. The older Parky, assisted by his son and co-author Mike Parkinson, is more of a pulpit grouch and a far windier phrase-maker. He sees himself as custodian ‘of an important memory bank that needs preserving, particularly given that any memory now is not legitimate unless it can be seen in Technicolor glory on whatever device is nearest to hand’.

There’s a lot of this grumpiness to get through, laments for the era when ‘sport had, if you like, a soul’ and columns weren’t ‘ghost-ridden twaddle’.

Parky in his youth is better company, a pub wit who, as he mockingly says of another writer, has ‘crimson phrases’ on tap. When he saw Lindwall bowl Hutton at Bramall Lane just after the war, the Yorkshireman’s stumps ‘rocked in their sockets like drunken sailors… The crowd was so hushed you could hear him take his gloves off.’

On the era when footballers used to be built to fit the position they played, he remembers inside forwards ‘carried with them an air of intellectual superiority, like grammar-school boys playing in a pit team’.

Still, it is a lovely kind of nostalgia, which colourises the black and white of yesteryear without insisting that it was a better place.

Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood Mussolini’s monster

ANNABEL BARBER

Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe

Near the centre of Bolzano in northern Italy stands a triumphal arch erected by Mussolini’s Fascists in 1928. In that largely German-speaking town, it was seen as provocation, and today it is surrounded by a high fence to deter vandals.

One of the fascinating themes to emerge from Caroline Moorehead’s

as a human being, with saving graces as well as manifold faults, and we are forced to understand why the Italy into which he irrupted embraced him so enthusiastically.

His brand of revolution sprang from the left: socialists, anarchists and futurists, many of them proud of their working-class or peasant stock. Their rhetoric had great appeal in a country devastated by the Second World War and with a sense that, as one of the victors in that conflict, it had not received its just rewards.

As Italian Fascism becomes more controlling and more prudish, it gets harder for Edda to find a role. An unruly, defiant, hoydenish child, she grows up entirely unmaternal and undomestic.

new book is the way Italian unity, so triumphantly won in the 19th century, was picked apart in the 20th by the ultranationalism of Mussolini’s regime.

Like so many populist movements, Mussolini’s met with enormous snobbery. When he marched on Rome in October 1922, what, Moorehead wonders, would the privileged Romans have made of the ‘boorish, loud and unsophisticated Fascist men, and their ill-dressed, little-educated wives’?

She then sets herself the formidable task of examining this period in Italy’s history through the fortunes of Mussolini’s daughter Edda (1910-95).

In this, she has outdone Jane Austen, who, in Emma, avowedly chose ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’. Edda Mussolini is not likeable in the slightest. But one thing she learned was ‘never to despise the masses’.

As she rises to inevitable prominence, it seems that no one knows quite what to make of her. Many unkind accusations are flung her way; ominous powers are ascribed to her – the ‘most dangerous’ and ‘most influential’ woman in Europe.

She was neither, but it is difficult to get a sense of who she really was. Another Lucrezia Borgia, a pawn in a series of political games, doomed never to emerge from her father’s hulking shadow?

The first real event of interest that overtakes her is nothing to do with her own abilities but the question of whom she will marry. She chooses the ambitious diplomat Galeazzo Ciano.

Theirs is not a happy union, and ironically this vain, weak, pleasureseeking man is to seal the fates of both his wife and her terrible father.

Moorehead is extremely fair and never grinds an axe. We meet Mussolini

The task of giving birth to stalwart sons and cooking tagliatelle with docile daughters was never going to appeal. She likes high fashion – she scandalises public opinion with her bikinis and her trouser suits; she gambles heavily and always loses.

Selfish and farouche, alternately reckless and peevish, with keen instincts but little obvious intellect, she is sent on ‘diplomatic missions’ in the mid-1930s, to London and Berlin, where she whisks around in vampish gowns and is totally duped by Hitler.

When her husband is made Foreign Minister (the youngest ever, at 33), the couple present an image of corrupt and arbitrary frivolity. ‘We must deprive ourselves of nothing because we know that the guillotine awaits us,’ says Edda glibly.

All through the book, we are longing for her to do something noble but, as Italian Fascism grows ever closer to German Nazism, it is Ciano who wants Italy to stay out of the war. Edda urges her father to fight, insisting that neutrality is for poltroons.

After the famous Gran Consiglio of July 1943, when Mussolini is voted out by his own creatures (including Ciano), we witness the spectacle of Hitler’s victory over the man who once scoffingly dismissed him as a ‘lunatic’.

Does Edda then come into her own? She was always a bad gambler and Hitler proves a terrible bet. Her claim to a place in history is as slim as her famously rake-thin physique. But as a hook from which to hang a looking-glass reflecting Mussolini’s Italy, she is an excellent choice.

Allowing us to view this monstrous man through the eyes of a daughter is a brilliant way of forcing us to make concessions to his monstrosity. And,

‘...And here’s one of us queuing at Gatwick ... And this one of our cancelled plane ... And this is the luggage we lost...’

as an exposé of an eternal truth of human behaviour, how irrationally we create idols and how savagely we bring them down when they weaken, this is a triumph.

Annabel Barber is author, with Alta Macadam, of The Blue Guide to Rome

Book of books

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

One August day in 1854, a man in a dark frock coat, with a black beard and a large head, was waiting in the market town of Broadway, Worcestershire, for a fly carriage to a big Georgian house three or four miles away.

This was Middle Hill, stuffed from floor to ceiling, in corridors and bedrooms, with 60,000 unique manuscripts, obsessively, ruthlessly and ruinously collected by Thomas Phillipps.

His visitor was Constantine Simonides, not yet known as one of the most astonishing forgers in history.

They were made for each other. I’d come across Phillipps, then 62, in connection with his savage feud with his son-in-law James Orchard Halliwell, a collector of obscure lore. After Halliwell eloped with his daughter, Phillipps promoted accusations through the Times that he had stolen manuscript volumes from Trinity College, Cambridge, and sold them to the British Museum. Even the Prime Minister was dragged in.

It blew over, though many remained convinced of the theft. The British Library has kept the Trinity manuscripts to this day.

Simonides, ever mysterious (over his name, his age, his proficiency in English and his time on Mount Athos), had something Phillipps wanted – three books of the Iliad written so small as to fit on both sides of an ancient scroll, 21½ inches by 2¼ inches.

Phillipps was bewitched by it. A fellow guest, Johann Georg Kohl, a historian of maps, described him scrolling and unscrolling it, with reading lamp, spectacles and magnifying glass, comparing it with other manuscripts, deep into the night.

Phillipps showed Kohl a newspaper in German, which the Englishman could not read, detailing accusations of Simonides selling forged manuscripts in Athens. The next morning, Simonides

was gone before breakfast. Kohl congratulated Phillipps on a lucky escape. But Phillipps had bought the scroll, for £50.

It was not the first time. In 1853, he showed Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum manuscripts by Pythagoras bought from Simonides. Madden declared them ‘gross forgeries, and I was grieved but not surprised to hear Sir T P declare that in his opinion they were genuine’.

Simonides crashed in 1863 when a literary committee examined a manuscript of Uranius, printed by Oxford University in good faith seven years earlier, and pronounced it ‘a rank forgery’.

Simonides had two last laughs. First, he declared the stupendous and genuine fourth-century Biblical manuscript, the Codex Siniaticus, was a forgery by him Then, in 1867, he went and died. Even that was a forgery, and he was soon spotted in Corfu. Only in 1890, in Albania, did time’s scythe overtake him.

I thought I wouldn’t like a chapter on a forger in Christopher de Hamel’s book, but he tells the tale well. There are 10 more men and one woman, with secrets of her own, in this shelfful of manuscript-possessed characters.

The author of the admired Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016) takes whimsy too far with his new title, echoing The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Still, I was relieved to find no attempt, after a few chatty remarks taken from letters of St Anselm, to imagine conversations with the dozen strongly sketched figures.

The monk Anselm (c 1033-1109) is a

good starting point, for most books surviving from before his day come from monasteries. De Hamel recounts Anselm’s difficulties in getting a book by Gregory the Great copied by his old friends at Bec Abbey, south of Rouen. (Its name is from the Viking word for the stream running past it – our word beck.) Manuscripts were essential to the spiritual life of any monastery.

One manuscript at Bec in Anselm’s day found its way to the breathtaking library of Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631).

How pleasant to sit in Cotton House by the Thames, beside the House of Lords, in a room with 12 alcoved bookcases, each topped by a bust of a Roman Emperor. They housed more manuscripts than any medieval library. Their shelfmarks remain in use today: Cotton Nero D IV is the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Cotton, richer than his generation of dedicated antiquaries, accumulated the finest manuscripts with British connections. After his death, they all almost perished in a fire at Ashburnham House, part of Westminster School today.

The sole manuscript of the preConquest poem The Battle of Maldon was destroyed; the sole manuscript of Beowulf was saved, its margins charred. An elderly cleric in nightgown and wig hurried from the fire with the fifthcentury Codex Alexandrinus under his arm.

Those in love with painstakinglywritten manuscript books held them close for life, and we are the beneficiaries.

Christopher Howse writes the Sacred Mysteries column in the Daily Telegraph

‘Oh – you’re home early’

New York times

FRANCES WILSON Come Back in September

In England, writing is not particularly respected as a profession, least of all by writers themselves.

We work in bed, keep our own hours, and wear slippers to go the shops. Most writers I know potter along at their own pace and consider themselves drop-outs. None of them noticed lockdown.

In New York, however, writers are glamorous and the most successful are treated as royalty. They get the best tables at the best restaurants and are courted, photographed and gossiped about.

Back in the 1970s, when Darryl Pinckney’s memoir is set, the king and queen of literary Manhattan were Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, editors of the newly formed New York Review of Books, and the duchesses were Susan Sontag (essayist and intellectual, known as the cleverest woman in America), Mary McCarthy (novelist) and the critic Elizabeth Hardwick.

Despite their High Seriousness, the Hardwick coterie traded in gossip, all of which Pinckney – like Johnson’s Boswell – records in the journal that forms the basis of this baggy, oblique and frequently baffling book.

Once, Pinckney writes, when Sontag was spotted dancing in a club in the West Village, ‘the bulletin ran up the street, as if someone had thrown a switch. You could follow the current.’ Darryl phoned Elizabeth, who phoned Barbara, who quickly rounded up her ‘sleuths’ to get ‘the name of the person with whom Susan had been dancing: Fran Lebowitz’.

Should Marina Warner be seen enjoying a mojito with Hilary Mantel at TGI Friday’s, the Evening Standard would not hold the front page.

The New York Review of Books was as exclusive as Andy Warhol’s Factory, and having your name in its pages gave you a free pass to the city. So too did getting an internship in the post room.

Pinckney – young, black, and gay –worked in the post room and wrote for its pages by dint of his friendship with Hardwick, who took him up as her project. So intimate were they that Pinckney’s mum thought this sixty-year-old white professor was her son’s girlfriend.

Someone once said that the least likely title of a book would be My Struggle by Martin Amis. The same would be true of Come Back in September. Pinckney

seems never to have flexed a muscle on his way to the inner sanctum.

But his subject is Hardwick, not himself. It is her character that ignites these pages, and her story that provides the book’s central scene.

Hardwick’s former husband, the poet Robert Lowell, having run off with Lady Caroline Blackwood (formerly married to Lucian Freud), was returning to Hardwick, bringing with him Freud’s portrait of Blackwood, when he died in the taxi outside her apartment.

If Sontag’s dancing threw a switch, this piece of news blew the city’s midtown grid.

The book begins in 1973, when Pinckney enrols in Hardwick’s creative-writing class at Barnard College. ‘Fresh and put together’, her ‘soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier’.

These tough things, not always funny, including telling one student, ‘I’d rather shoot myself than read that again,’ and another that he wrote the worst poetry she had ever read.

Was Hardwick equally cruel to Pinckney? He does not say, which is a shame. By contrast, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, A N Wilson’s account of his friendship with the writer, is a master class in exploring the complex love and hate between mentor and mentee.

Instead of reflecting on his relationship with Hardwick, Pinckney provides a record of tittle-tattle (‘Barbara said Gore told her that when he ran into Norman Podhoretz in California he said…’ etc), interrupted by random quotations from unnamed poems.

Posthumous observations placed in parentheses are set against a backdrop of race, politics and AIDS.

Reading Come Back in September is like being invited to a party where the host refuses to introduce you to any of the guests. People we are assumed to know (who are Arnulf Konradi and Elizabeth Ruge?) appear and just as suddenly disappear.

And because there is no attempt at narrative cohesion, only at the end do we learn that Pinckney was, throughout the period he describes, addicted to drugs and alcohol. Why not let the reader know this information earlier?

The book is less a memoir than a dictionary of quotations, of which my favourite is Barbara Epstein’s version of Oscar Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name: ‘the love that never shut up’. Four hundred pages of name-dropping were worth it for this particular gem.

Frances Wilson is author of Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Brian – as if our gas bill wasn’t high enough aleady’

Pasta master

A Brief History of Pasta: The Italian Food That Shaped the World

Luca Cesari and Johanna Bishop Profile Books £16.99

It might come as a surprise to nonItalians that pasta in all its forms was invented in Italy.

Particularly to anyone – Chinese, French, Ukrainian or whatever – who’s been rolling, scraping or stuffing a basic flour-and-water dough ever since a handful of grain was pounded into flour at the cave mouth.

But this is the message convincingly delivered by culinary historian Luca Cesari in A Brief History of Pasta.

The subtitle, always a giveaway of the author’s real intention, is ‘the Italian food that shaped the world’. The Italians would agree. They are quietly convinced they invented olive oil, tomatoes, garlic – and pasta, the non-negotiable primo piatto on every self-respecting Italian menu.

All Italy eats pasta. Even the Tuscans – mangia-fagioli, bean-eaters – slip a handful of maccheroni into the minestrone. Venetians would rather eat risotto, but bigoli will do. Bologna is known for exquisite tortellini and tagliatelle al ragu

Distrust of others goes way back in the Italian psyche. That explains walled cities with very tall towers suitable for tipping boiling olive oil down from onto disagreeable neighbours, and a strong sense of the importance of what you (and they) eat for dinner.

To understand the depth of Italy’s culinary partisanship, consider a recent row in a small town in a mountainous district to the north of Rome.

Amatrice was brought to the

world’s attention by an earthquake that accounted for some 300 casualties and reduced the town to rubble. In the aftermath, a ferocious row flared over the correct recipe for spaghetti all’amatriciana. On one side was the mayor, anxious to protect a recipe said to have been handed down continually for a thousand years.

On the other were followers of Ada Boni, Mussolini’s favourite author. They argued over what was the vital ingredient: guanciale (salted, dried pork-collar) rather than pancetta (salted, dried pork-belly); and chilli and tomato to the exclusion of Old World garlic and onion.

Cesari’s credentials include contributions to Italy’s gastronomic bible, Gambero Rosso. He is a working journalist not averse to stirring up a hornet’s nest. ‘Legends,’ he announces, ‘should not be confused with historical fact.’

Historical facts, however, prove hard to pin down. Take fettucine Alfredo, an all-egg ribbon pasta dressed with butter and cheese – a combination that’s scarcely innovative – owes its fame to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who shared a bowlful on their Roman honeymoon in 1920 in chef patron Alfredo’s backstreet restaurant.

As a result of a blast of favourable publicity, Alfredo is now a popular dish in Italian restaurants throughout America, while remaining hospital food in its land of origin.

Spaghetti carbonara, on the other hand, is found throughout the boot. There’s general agreement on basic ingredients – cured pork, grated pecorino, black pepper and raw egg – but not on the origin of the name.

Contenders include charcoal-burners, carbonari, said to have been used to prepare the dish in situ; a secret society of the same name; and an improvised sauce made with black-market rations, including cream, available during the Allied occupation of southern Italy after the Second World War.

Lasagne, direct descendant of the luxurious cream-sauced timbales served on aristocratic tables, turns up at plain folks’ weddings and celebrations throughout the boot.

The author’s madeleine moment is preparing potato gnocchi with his grandmother: ‘fun to knead flour into that soft, warm substance’, and even more fun to roll the dough into long, thin snakes and chop them up with a knife.

A paid-up member of the dumpling tribe, gnocchi didn’t reach full potential till the addition of potato at the turn of

the 18th century. This was at more or less the same time as tomatoes – which gave us the splendour of Naples, spaghetti al pomodoro.

Elegant, witty and scholarly on pesto alla genovese – but the nub of this deliciously subversive history is what it means to be Italian.

Soft centre

NICHOLAS LEZARD Bournville

Sometime in the early 1990s, Jonathan Coe decided he had had enough of trying to be the next B S Johnson – this country’s great under-acknowledged experimental novelist, on whom Coe is something of an expert.

Instead, he wrote What a Carve Up!, an angry state-of-the-nation novel that dealt with the horrible behaviour of the Winshaw family, Thatcherite grotesques with a guilty secret in the past. The reviewer for the TLS (me) said that while the prose ‘runs on rails’ – ie is not exactly inventive – the plot was a cracker.

Since then, Coe has produced many more state-of-the-nation novels, with recurring characters, fewer appalling ones and an equitable – or equable –narrative viewpoint.

Bournville is another: it relates the lives and loves of one Midlands family, the Lambs, over precisely 75 years, from VE Day to the anniversary celebrations of 2020.

Bournville, you will learn if you did not know before, was the name Cadbury’s

gave not only to its classier dark chocolate (the name deliberately chosen over a more English-sounding one so as to have sophisticated continental associations), but also to the village attached to its factory where its workforce accumulated.

And that is where the heart of the novel is. We begin, though, in Vienna, where a younger scion of the Lamb family, Lorna, is embarking on a tour playing jazz around Europe.

As the pandemic strikes and venues begin to close down, she is abandoned in Leipzig, which, she is informed over a Zoom call with her grandmother and uncle, happens to be the birthplace of her great-great-grandfather Carl.

At which point, I settled down for a good old family yarn. The prose had been bothering me a bit: very heavy on the exposition, somewhat clunky dialogue. Not quite Dan Brown levels of bad, but enough to suck some of the joy out of the reading experience.

But now we would get a rich and deep story, starting with Carl, who would turn out to have been, ooh, I don’t know, an exiled political radical fleeing Nazism/ Jewish/harbouring a dark secret/a combination of the above.

We do not. Great-great-grandfather Carl has only a couple of cameos in the book. The main attention is given to Mary, based, as Coe says in an afterword, on his own mother, and her children. Through her and their eyes, we see several of this country’s defining moments: the 1966 World Cup, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, his wedding to Lady Di and the latter’s funeral.

Coe has decided, clearly, not to have anything unlikely or outrageous happen to his characters. So don’t go bracing yourself for any shocking revelations (although one character turns out to have been an undercover agent for the security services; and another, part of a militant Welsh independence unit).

To give you an idea of the book’s style, here is how 1992 is described, from a European perspective (we are there because Martin Lamb has gone to Brussels to try to persuade the powers that be that British chocolate can, despite its lower cocoa content, be called ‘chocolate’ across Europe):

‘It was – in Martin’s opinion at any rate – an exciting time to be in Brussels. The different member states of the EEC were hurtling towards ever closer union. Two breathless years would see the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the launch of the single market, and the

‘He was always interested in escapist literature’

creation of the European Economic Area. Next on the horizon was the adoption of a single currency.’

I am afraid that, at this point, I got the giggles. By this stage, I had long abandoned the suspicion that the flatness of Coe’s writing was a deliberate and knowing attempt to mimic the internal monologue of his characters, in the way that Ian McEwan did so cunningly in Atonement. McEwan’s latest, just published novel, Lessons, has a very similar historical sweep to Bournville’s.

How Coe must have groaned when he found that out.

No: this is pretty much how the book is all the way through. I could quote much more in the same vein, but space is tight.

Two things one has to hand to Coe. The first is the almost uncanny timing of this book. Having read this throughout the period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II (and I am writing this on the day of her funeral), I have found it hard, sometimes, to disengage the mood of the book – elegiac, wistful etc – from that of the nation.

A bit of me wonders how deliberate this is; I suspect very much so. After all, the Queen wasn’t going to live for ever.

The other thing is that, despite the meagre characterisation, the clodhopping signalling of its Significant Social Moments (‘You should get one of these,’ a character tells another, brandishing that new invention, the mobile phone), the absolute refusal to write a stylistically interesting sentence, and the way characters pop up and disappear without much apparent reason, it does end up being a rather affecting story.

I am only slightly ashamed to say that I had a little sniffle at the end. Which is, I suppose, the book’s mission.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

A

CHRISTMAS CRACKER

All the world’s a stage

Rock Concert: A High-Voltage History, from Elvis to Live Aid

The key thing about Live Aid, the event in 1985 that provides the full stop on this history of the early days of the live presentation of pop music, was it was a day when the sun shone.

The members of the TV audience, most of whom had never experienced the uncertainties of music in the open air, were suddenly attracted by the idea of it. Any lingering notion that the rock concert represented the alternative died that day, almost 40 years ago, as the Age of Spectacle began.

This survey of how the business of live grew in its first 30 years is presented by Myers, a veteran reporter on music for the Wall Street Journal, as a series of interviews with eyewitnesses.

It begins with DJ Alan Freed’s Cleveland dances in 1951 when teenagers turned up hoping to pay a dollar fifty at the door and were amazed to see that so many others shared their love of this mysterious ‘Moondog music’ that they couldn’t get in.

It ends in the eighties when you needed a credit card and a computer to buy a ticket for anything, which meant you probably weren’t a 15-year-old.

The romantic image of the live business has always been at odds with the financial reality. When Bob Eubanks put his house on the line to pay the $25,000 Brian Epstein demanded for the Beatles to play the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, he was constrained by their insistence he could charge no more than $7 for a ticket, even though he knew the market would happily pay ten.

When Joel Rosenman was putting on Woodstock in 1969, the managers of the Who and the Grateful Dead said they wouldn’t appear before the multitudes unless they got their full fee in cash.

Sixty years later, bands still don’t like to be seen charging what people will pay, and the fans always prefer to believe that it’s the promoters who are lining their pockets and not their beloved acts.

In the late ’60s, concert promotion was still a frontier business and, as it was put to me by pioneering promoter Bill Graham, ‘We were out there with no compass.’

At Altamont in 1969, the Stones were supposed to go on at five but preferred to wait until it was getting dark, which contributed to making a difficult crowd situation more fraught and probably to the mayhem that ensued. Bill Wyman said it was one of the only times he thought they might die. Some did.

In the seventies, as the indoor venues got bigger, there needed to be more emphasis on presentation. As Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull puts it, ‘You couldn’t just stand there and play. The audience needed visual engagement and stimulation.’

Anderson is very good on such mundane practicalities as performing on vast, unfamiliar stages in the dark without falling off, a fate that has befallen more than one artist.

Technician Ken Shaffer talks of the development of the wireless radio microphone – initially for use by church pastors with the urge to roam – without which the current generation of allsinging all-dancing superstars like Beyoncé would be inconceivable.

Presentation king Chip Monck describes the importance of lighting in keeping an audience’s interest from flagging during a long show and also helping to justify escalating ticket prices.

For some bands, live was more than a way of promoting their records or making a buck. For a few, it was almost a sacred obligation. Bruce Springsteen’s drummer, Max Weinberg, talks about the work ethic of the E Street Band, who would climb on the bus after the show to drive through the night to get to the next town. Their leader didn’t want them having any ‘entanglements’, and he also liked the idea of them as a gang who blew into a town, blew the roof off and then lit out, leaving the locals looking at a cloud of dust and wondering, ‘Who were those masked men?’

As might be expected of a scribe from the heavy papers, Myers is a little inclined to mourn the lost Eden of a communitarian past.

The truth is that rock and roll runs on mixed motives. The rock festival was always as much bread and circuses as Age of Aquarius.

Three thousand people turned up to see Country Joe and the Fish at an outdoor show in Seattle in 1968. It turned out what had really drawn them was the promise of hearing the sound a piano would make when dropped from a helicopter.

David Hepworth co-presented Live Aid in 1985 and is author of Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There: How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America

Book of the Month

Milton Gendel’s endless Roman holiday

The American photographer lived la dolce vita in Rome for 70 years nicky haslam

In 1954 the – now perhaps rather corny – film Three Coins in the Fountain revealed the urban splendour of Rome to a still shell-shocked world.

Baroque façades shimmered in chiaroscuro sunlight; flights of staircases rushed to distant obelisks. The fabled fountains leapt and fell from sumptuous heights.

That these location sequences were in fact shot a mere nine years after Monte Cassino and the Allies’ liberation of the capital from Nazi occupation is incomprehensible.

A year later came the heaviest snowfall of the century… ‘Roma era tutta candida, tutta pulita e lucida’, as Mia Martini sang. The snow layered the cities’ seven hills in deep, glistening white. Just as interwar Paris was the lure for Hemingway and the F Scott Fitzgeralds, these romantic images allured American literati, primarily young and recently released from years of combat, to an aesthetic, unfamiliar, Augustan civilisation.

Among the first was Milton Gendel (1918-2018). He arrived in Rome in 1949, with just a camera and his young wife. And, notwithstanding any transience suggested by the title of this book, Milton stayed there, enchanted, until his death, aged just shy of 100.

An intellectual core was soon to follow: authors Gore Vidal, Sybille Bedford and Tennessee Williams; painters Robert Motherwell, Alexander Calder and Rothko; the poet Stephen Spender; photographers John Deakin and John Ross.

Hollywood directors such as Henry Costa (The Robe) mingled with grittier Italian counterparts: Rossellini, Visconti and the fledging Zeffirelli.

Gendel was the core’s diffident, sardonic, discerning and enlightened nucleus. Like a living prism, he somehow received, crystallised and gently refined the opinions and theories, arguments and rants of his ambitious and voluble coterie.

As Cullen Murphy writes in this book’s

illuminating introduction, ‘Milton knew how to listen… he understood how to take a back seat so that others felt important … and think several steps ahead.’

This is not to say Gendel wasn’t mondain. He had an affair with Vittoria Olivetti, resulting in twins. Mingling with the traditional Via Veneto espresso society and with the less conformist members of patrician families, he became close to three of the most remarkable and influential women in Italy: the art collector Peggy Guggenheim in the throes of establishing her collection in Venice; the somewhat bluestocking writer Iris Origo and Mimì PecciBlunt, doyenne of the Black Roman families, sharpwitted as Dorothy Parker and as autocratic as the Pecci popes she descended from. Her American husband, Cecil, né Blumenthal, had a boyfriend also called Cecil. Mimi was known as la reine des deux Céciles. All three women were to become his closest friends.

The Leica he’d picked up while on service in China rarely left his hands. Details of flamboyant sculpture, vast statues in restauro, strange shop windows, urchins kicking about, junk at the Porta Portese flea market, Paul Getty and Babe Paley, Dalí and Marcus Aurelius are among his myriad photographs.

For many years, Milton lived in the surplus wings of fading palaces until finding a house on the island in the Tiber, for ever after known as simply the Isola, and the principal setting for this book.

The fame of the Isola had widened in the 1960s. Frequent flights brought the English beau monde regularly to Rome, and the Isola was their immediate destination.

It is in this decade, in this house, that Gendel’s diaries start. Here he mixed his diverse worlds: Diana Cooper, Evelyn

Waugh, Rosie Rodd, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Cecil Beaton with such established fixtures as the Florentine-villa’d Harold Acton, and young Roman beauties such as Marella Agnelli and Betty di Robilant.

There were clashes. On being told that Waugh didn’t ‘find her a lady’, Rosie Rodd replied, ‘But I’ve never asked Evelyn to find me a lady.’ Gendel also has insights into such subjects as the kidnapping of the young Paul Getty.

Then into this ebullient mélange came Judy Montagu. Survivor of some unsatisfactory love affairs, Judy was, as we’re told, ‘no beauty, and while neither poised nor elegant, her being had a captivating vitality, reckless generosity and flashing intelligence’, and a bewitching wit.

In some way, Judy was the yin to Milton’s yang, and his admiration of these qualities, and her ‘stony, noble features’ led to their marriage.

This union brought with it Judy’s great friendship with Princess Margaret. Milton’s tender description and portraits of both her and her sister show how trustworthy and reticent he was.

It also, providentially, produced a daughter, Anna, who has inherited every sterling trait from both her parents.

It is to be regretted only that these diaries cover merely 20 years of Gendel’s life and work as an architectural historian. Maybe more – earlier or later – lurk. For, as we are told, he never chucked anything.

Still, until then, those seven hills are alive with the soul of Milton.

Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel by Milton Gendel and Cullen Murphy is out now

A new series of sad, funny and intriguing insights from the great and the good

I want to be who I was when I wanted to be who I am now.

As God said, and I think rightly… The opening of a speech by Field Marshal Montgomery

Working is less annoying than amusing yourself.

Charles Baudelaire

O Duty, Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or cutie?

Ogden Nash

I am beginning to see that brain counts for little but that character counts for everything.

Harold Nicolson

You help me lay an egg. I’ll put up the curtains, do the dusting and we’ll live happily ever after. No, thank you.

The classic alcoholic personality, cursed with that fatal combination of big ego and low self-esteem.

Charles Spencer, former Daily Telegraph theatre critic

Commonplace Corner

Cousin Taffy doesn’t want to farm; he just wants to be a farmer. Like poets who just want to be poets.

Kingsley Amis, You Can’t Do Both

Her husband Charles’s ‘ponderous serenity, the very contentment of which she was the cause, got on her nerves’.

Gustave Flaubert on Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary

Reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man and writing an exact man.

Dr Johnson

What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he’s certain he’ll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

Voltaire

Loo-paper dispensers

Over the years, I’ve been to loos in cafés, pubs and public conveniences and often left embarrassed and angry. Why? It hasn’t been the graffiti. It’s simply from trying to get my hands on the toilet tissue.

Take those single-sheet dispensers. The paper is ridiculously flimsy – so I have to yank out one at a time to make a wad thick enough to

‘Nothing is more deceitful,’ said Darcy, ‘than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.’

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

I have often thought of writing a set of playbills for the Vale of Keswick – for every day of the year – announcing each day the performance, by his supreme Majesty’s Servants, Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars etc.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We can enjoy a purely aesthetic sensation for only as long as we can keenly savour the smell of a freshly-cut orange.

Kenneth Clark

… the people who never walked about with Baedekers, who had learned to take a siesta after lunch, who took drives the pension tourists had never heard of and saw by private influence galleries which were closed to them … thus attaining to that intimate knowledge, or rather perception, of Florence which is denied to all who carry in their pockets the coupons of [Thomas] Cook.

E M Forster on the British colony in Florence, A Room with a View (1908)

Few men who feel the pressure of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives.

The Misfit: Marilyn Monroe

George Eliot, Middlemarch

absorb anything. And no – you can’t force open the top of the dispenser to get a handful without the aid of an industrial screwdriver.

Don’t be fooled by those side-byside double-roll models. I’ve pulled from one end and out came the final sheet – so I tried the other roll. Nothing happened. Foiled by a mysterious lever underneath that’s permanently stuck.

I once had to pull the paper from a container with a tiny hole for the tissue. A miserable half-sheet appeared. So I poked about

with my nail file, which then got stuck. I shouted through to next door for help. No one answered. So I rummaged in my handbag to unearth a used paper hanky, before making a hasty, red-faced exit.

My most frustrating

SMALL DELIGHTS

Waiting for ages to pull out from a busy junction and – just when all hope has gone – someone lets you in.

ALAN MORDEY.

LEAMINGTON SPA

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

experience was when I reached out towards the wall to find there was no toilet paper at all. Luckily, there was paper on a shelf behind me and, grasping my knickers round my ankles with one hand, I waved my other arm frantically behind me. Finally a roll fell off – and landed just out of my reach. I managed to drag it towards me it between  my outstretched feet.

I’ve complained often and always been assured that it won’t happen again. And then it does. Surely staff can do better than this. Just check regularly that the dispensers work adequately. It’s not rocket science.

A hack’s best training? The university of life

Ian Jack was one of the last great journalists who weren’t graduates stephen glover

The Left-leaning journalist Ian Jack, whom I once knew well, has died at the age of 77.

He was an excellent editor and a beautiful writer, as his obituarists have noted. What they have generally missed is that he was one of the last of a breed once common in journalism – the autodidact who hasn’t been to university.

For much of the 20th century, some of the greatest journalists were in the same mould. J L Garvin, editor of the Observer from 1908 until 1942, was the son of a labourer who left school aged 13. Not only was he the influential editor of a paper that in those days was broadly of the Right; he was also the biographer of Joseph Chamberlain.

Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC from 1944 until 1952 and subsequently the editor of the Times for 14 years, also never went to university. Wikipedia claims he was educated at Cambridge and Dartmouth in the United States, but that isn’t true. These institutions, along with a couple of others, conferred honorary degrees on him.

When I stumbled into Fleet Street some 40 years ago, there were still some distinguished autodidacts. My friend Frank Johnson’s first job on a newspaper was as a tea boy on the Sunday Express Among his clients was Alan Watkins, later a columnist on the Observer. The two of them later became close friends, though Alan couldn’t recall the 16-yearold Frank.

Frank was in his mid-thirties when I first met him, already a peerless parliamentary sketch writer on the Daily Telegraph. He was toying with the idea of reading history at Oxford as a mature student. Thank God he didn’t. He would have probably read fewer books if he had attended the home of lost causes, and had some of his originality squeezed out of him.

Most of us doubtless benefit from going to university. We need our minds to be trained, and we gain from being steered by people who have read, and thought about, books more than we have.

But there are free spirits who don’t require assistance in this enterprise and are happier carving out a path of their own. Most of them go on voraciously reading books when the universityeducated person may have long since given up.

Nowadays, of course, young people who can read and write have to try very hard not to go to university. A young J L Garvin, William Haley, Frank Johnson or Ian Jack would now be packed off to some institution. One wonders whether they would turn out to be such exceptional journalists.

In a sense, Fleet Street of nearly half a century ago was peopled almost entirely by autodidacts, though mostly of a different stamp from those I have mentioned.

The Daily Telegraph I joined had very few university-educated people. Bill Deedes, the editor, had left Harrow at 17 and joined the Morning Post. Almost all the executives and reporters had learnt their trade on local newspapers before graduating to Fleet Street. Admittedly there were exceptions, particularly among the leader-writers, such as the blind T E Utley, who had a starred first from Cambridge. But degrees were rare.

Is the modern reporter, with a degree in PPE and a diploma in journalism from City University, superior to the hardened

reporter of 40 years ago who had studied at the university of life? I doubt it. My guess is that many of those often bibulous and sometimes cynical, old-fashioned journalists were more resourceful and less hidebound than their modern counterparts.

I don’t expect there is now a young journalist in the country who hasn’t been to university. But it is surely a fallacy that doing so necessarily makes one a better journalist. Almost everything I have learnt about my trade I have picked up from example.

Whether Fleet Street’s autodidacts bumped along in the foothills of knowledge, or occasionally ascended the heights without much guidance, they belonged to a vanishing race. There’s no putting back the clocks, of course. We shan’t see the likes of Ian Jack again.

Most left-wing columnists wrote off Liz Truss in advance without much consideration. Two right-wing columnists appraised her more carefully.

In the Times on 16th July, seven weeks before Truss became Prime Minister, Matthew Parris wrote that she was ‘busy preparing a devil’s brew of bad ideas, bad colleagues and reckless policies’. He described her as ‘a massive ego poised unsteadily on thin soundbites’.

In the Daily Mail on 6th August, my colleague Andrew Neil declared that ‘Truss is vulnerable because she makes too many mistakes, too many U-turns and offers too many hostages to fortune’. He concluded, ‘There is a chance it will all unravel before winter is out and the Tories would be back in yet another leadership context, which will stretch voters’ patience to breaking point. It would also make another Labour government inevitable.’

Sadly, this column has only limited resources, but it offers a figurative gold medal to both clairvoyants.

FILM HARRY MOUNT TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (15)

Oldie-readers will know all about The Admirable Crichton, J M Barrie’s marvellous 1902 play, later made into a film four times.

Crichton is the dutiful butler to the Earl of Loam. But when he and the Loam family are shipwrecked on a desert island, it is Crichton who becomes master of the household because he knows how to find food and cook it.

Exactly the same premise has been copied – in a ham-fisted way – in Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund’s film about the appalling behaviour of today’s rich.

In this new version, the Loams are replaced by the modern aristocracy –chief among them two supermodel influencers, a Russian oligarch and a computing billionaire – aboard a luxury cruise ship touring Greece.

When the ship is blown up by pirates, the rich take refuge on a desert island, where their Crichton is the ship’s lowly toilet manager (the half-sympathetic, half-menacing Dolly de Leon).

For the most part, it’s well-acted – not least by the astonishingly goodlooking Charlbi Dean, playing Yaya the influencer. With the aquiline beauty of a modern Raquel Welch/Sophia Loren, she could have become a stand-out star of the age – had she not tragically died, aged only 32, this summer, of uncertain causes. Her death is thought to have been related to a car crash in 2008, which led to a splenectomy. The splenectomy scar ripples across her navel in the swimsuit scenes aboard ship – an eerie memento mori.

So everything is well-cast for a rich satire on the dreadful behaviour of

Arts

today’s plutocrats, not least the ship itself – the Christina O, which belonged to Aristotle Onassis, and was named after his daughter, Christina Onassis (1950-88), the ultimate poor little rich girl, also doomed to an early death.

But the satire here is on a lowintellect level. The best thing about it is the premise ripped off from J M Barrie: when we’re on the same level playing field – or desert island – the talents that really matter aren’t inherited millions but atavistic attributes like the ability to hunt and make fire.

Ruben Östlund, who wrote and directed the film, never reaches that level of sophistication.

He really plumbs the depths –particularly in a storm scene on the ship, where the rich start vomiting and excreting on an industrial scale, having stuffed themselves with sea urchins, oysters and champagne.

Mr Creosote’s explosion after the wafer-thin mint in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) skewered that sort of excess in a much funnier, more original way.

The scenes mocking the fashioninfluencer world are underpowered, too – not a patch on Sacha Baron Cohen’s inspired gay fashion reporter, Brüno.

At two hours 27 minutes, the film is far too long. It means the sort of jokes that would have been delivered perfectly by Baron Cohen in seconds are stretched and repeated until they lose all their wit.

There are a few witty moments, often delivered by Woody Harrelson, as the ship’s alcoholic captain. The setting of a high-end cruise is also effective in showing the limited pleasure of unlimited food and drink; and the unhealthy results of a large crew working to fulfil the crazy demands of a small number of very rich people.

As the service moves closer to perfection, the clientele must find increasingly pointless things to complain about. At one point, a grand lady bleats about the ship’s sails being dirty, only to discover she’s on a motor yacht with no sails.

The banality of billionaire conversation is accurately captured –but then again it’s easier for a not-verygood scriptwriter to emulate banality than it is to say something genuinely funny and original.

In the same way, the film attacks the dreary self-regard of the rich by being dreary and self-regarding itself.

You’re a lot better off watching The Admirable Crichton.

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK

MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO

RSC, Barbican, London, until 21st January

One of the compensations of lockdown was being able to curl up on the sofa and take a trip round the world by watching foreign movies on TV. And of all the films my family watched during that strange interlude, our favourite was a Japanese cartoon called Tonari no Totoro, aka My Neighbour Totoro

My Neighbour Totoro was made in 1988 by leading Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, under the auspices of Studio Ghibli, Japan’s answer to Walt Disney. It’s a sort of modern fairy tale, about a nerdy academic who moves his family to a remote village in the Japanese countryside, to be near his wife, who’s in a rural hospital suffering from some mysterious, unspecified illness.

The couple have two young daughters, Satsuki and Mei, and the film revolves round their magical adventures with Totoro, a friendly monster who lives in the nearby forest, and is visible only to children. It’s a delightful movie – and one I would have thought virtually impossible to stage. I went to see this RSC adaptation with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.

I needn’t have worried. The Royal Shakespeare Company have done a super job. Tom Morton-Smith’s poetic script preserves the simple beauty of Miyazaki’s story, and he also fleshes out these characters and develops the relationships – in particular, Satsuki’s friendship with Kanta, the awkward boy next door (a fine performance by Nino Furuhata).

All the leading players are superb – above all, Ami Okumara Jones and Mei Mac as the two daughters. For adults to play children is notoriously difficult, but Okumura Jones is completely believable as the sensible elder sister, Satsuki.

Mei Mac has an even tougher task, as Satsuki’s tempestuous kid sister, yet she too is utterly convincing, alternating between happy hysteria and tearful tantrums, as small children are wont to do. Jacqueline Tate is a warm and gentle granny, and Dai Tabuchi and Haruka Abe make a charming mum and dad.

However, the true stars of this enchanting show are Totoro and his furry friends – or rather, the puppeteers who play them. It’s no surprise to find the Jim Henson Creature Shop (founded by the late great puppeteer of Sesame Street and Muppets fame) among the programme credits. In the deft hands of these performers, these puppets come alive,

prompting shrieks of sheer delight from the assorted children in the audience.

My Neighbour Toroto is a terrific treat for children of all ages, and there’s also plenty for us oldies to enjoy. For anyone who’s at all curious about Japan, this surreal drama provides an intriguing insight into the culture of that enigmatic country, opening a window onto a fascinating and unfamiliar world.

Director Phelim McDermott likens it to Alice in Wonderland, and there are some similarities, but whereas Lewis Carroll’s characters are dreamlike distortions of conventional Victorian archetypes, there’s something entirely alien about these creatures. A grinning, ten-legged cat becomes a flying bus, with glowing eyes for headlamps. This dreamscape is something new.

Quite apart from providing a couple of hours of joyful fun for all the family, this play also performs a valuable diplomatic service, building bridges with a distant land that still feels so far away.

Above all, My Neighbour Totoro is a sensual pleasure – a feast for the ears and eyes, rather than the intellect. McDermott’s graceful staging is closer to ballet than to straight theatre. Tom Pye’s elegant sets slot together like enormous pieces of origami, and Joe Hisaishi’s haunting score occupies a melodic halfway house, midway between east and west.

‘We want to show people that Miyazaki’s world is universal, that this isn’t just a story peculiar to Japan,’ says Hisaishi. ‘Totoro reminds us of something that we have lost, in order to live in the grown-up world.’

In fact, the only thing that spoilt my fun was trying to navigate the Barbican, that brutalist labyrinth of weathered concrete which feels like the dystopian setting for a 1970s sci-fi film. I’ve been

coming here for 40 years, and I still can’t find my way around!

Oh well, never mind – the actual auditorium is wonderful, and if any play could lure me back here again, it’s this one.

VALERIE GROVE

It is quite fun, every 25 years or so, to be reminded of moments from BBC history.

As its centenary (14th November 1922) loomed, I dug out my shiny, gold vinyl double album from 1972, when Auntie was a mere 50. Readers who own a copy will know how priceless this is, starting with ‘Two Emma Toc – Writtle calling!’ and ending with Lord Reith’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey, 1971.

All so familiar: Beatrice Harrison’s cello and the nightingale; Howard Carter relating the drama of discovering, in dead silence (except for the ‘gasp of wonderment that escaped our lips’) the sarcophagus and the golden effigy of Tutankhamun; ‘The fleet’s lit up’ by drunken Wing-Cdr Tommy Woodrooffe; Edward VIII’s abdication, with the immortal words ‘the woman I love’; Chamberlain’s bulletin and its doom-laden ending, ‘this country is at war with Germany’; Ike on D-Day morning; Churchill’s Victory in Europe speech; and the death of Grace Archer.

By 1997, 75 Years of the BBC, on cassette, offered Alistair Cooke at the assassination of Bobby Kennedy; the Berlin Wall coming down; Alan Bennett reading Winnie-the-Pooh

Generations of us have grown up, and grown old, to the BBC’s spoken-word and music soundtrack. An early licence-fee defence, a song, All for Ten Shillings a Year, was played by Barry Humphries on his Radio 2 show Forgotten Musical Masterpieces. Barry stressed how

vital the role of the wireless was in his life – as in so many lives. How else would Laurie Lee have heard serious music in his mother’s humble cottage?

The BBC’s first broadcast aria was Stride la vampa from Il Trovatore. A hundred years on, Radio 3’s recent series Opera, the Art of Emotions was presented by Nadine Benjamin, ‘soprano and empowerment mind coach’. (One’s heart briefly sank at this description, but La Benjamin is brilliant: having transformed herself from an unpromising Brixton childhood, into first a banker and now an opera star, she sings with a voice that does impart an impassioned enthusiasm.)

So what now? Availability is all. ‘Radio previews’ have dwindled to a handful of programmes for Radio 4. Listening is random, picking ’n’ mixing podcasts. Radio 3’s Soundscape of a Century offers an eight-hour trawl through its archives – ‘news events and unforgettable voices, landmarks in BBC history intertwined with music as heard at the time, available to listen to in its entirety on BBC Sounds’.

There was hardly any point in anthologising the whole BBC salmagundi on Radio 3’s The Essay as A Life Refracted: womb noises, babies’ cries, a fierce maths master shouting ‘Come along, you vile boy’ (from the 1980 TV series on Radley College), tales of falling in ‘lunatic’ love. No explanations. Hard to imagine what its audience made of this.

You don’t have to be there at 6.30pm on Wednesday to hear Radio 4’s ‘hilarious new comedy series’, Rob Newman on Air – actually flat, stale and laboured, punctuated by bursts of laughter that sound canned even if they aren’t.

You can catch more useful stuff any time. Dip into art history on Radio 4’s Moving Pictures – ‘zoom in and you can see the pores of the canvas, the sweep of brushstrokes’ if you call up ‘high-res images from Google Arts and Culture’.

It’s not wireless as we knew it, but I must salute it.

In his last published piece, the late journalist Ian Jack hymned BBC wireless, the soundtrack of his life.

Oh, What a Beautiful Morning blared out on Housewives’ Choice, while his mother turned the washday mangle; How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? was piped out every Saturday morning on Children’s Favourites. He recalled Mrs Mopp’s ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ from ITMA, ‘He’s fallen in the water’ from The Goon Show, and ‘Stone me!’ from Hancock.

‘The BBC was 100 last Thursday. Long may it last,’ wrote Jack, 77, in the Guardian piece. Valedictory in every way.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

The Crown has bowed to pressure from Dame Judi Dench.

It now comes with a disclaimer explaining to younger viewers and those overseas that it is not a documentary but a work of imagination based on real events.

This is because Season 5 of the series, argued Dame Judi, ‘blurs the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism’.

In one scene, Prince Charles (Dominic West) arranges a private audience with the Prime Minister in an attempt to oust his increasingly irrelevant mother from the head of the family firm. This, John Major has insisted, is ‘a barrel-load of nonsense’. That may well be the case –but I don’t hear him complain about being portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller, which is stretching the truth even further.

If The Crown has become a soap opera, we can’t entirely blame the showrunner, Peter Morgan. The saga of England’s most dysfunctional family has now reached the nineties, the period of phone-tapping, toe-sucking, tampongate, Andrew Morton and the Queen of Hearts. Apart from lifting the occasional plot line from Succession (where Kendall Roy also tries to defeat his deathless parent), the script adheres to the unbelievable truth.

The irony of Dame Judi’s insistence that we distinguish fact from fiction is that this is precisely the message of Season 5. Episode 1 opens in 1991 with Charles and Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) taking a ‘second honeymoon’ on the Med. The marriage might look back on track but her happiness, Diana insists, is fake, and everyone she meets is told how miserable she is.

By the time she appears on Panorama in 1995, the paranoid, strung-out princess can no longer tell fact from fiction. Having allowed Andrew Morton to tell her ‘true story’ as a version of Cinderella, Diana gets sucked into the lies spun by Martin Bashir (a brilliantly sinister Prasanna Puwanarajah), who uses fake bank statements to prove her staff are being paid by the secret

services to spy on her. The BBC will blanch at Bashir’s insistence that they are ‘the best brand name in the world when it comes to journalistic integrity’.

My quarrel with Season 5 is less about the historical embellishments than about the inconsistencies in the casting. Why go to so much trouble over some likenesses and not bother over others? Debicki is a superbly well-realised Diana whose every outfit, earring and strand of hair is slavishly replicated. Marcia Warren’s Queen Mother, on the other hand, looks like Queen Mary, while Leslie Manville’s Princess Margaret bears no relation not only to the Queen’s sister but to the two actresses who played her in the last four seasons.

Dominic West does a terrific impression of Prince Charles’s voice and mannerisms but is way too handsome for the role. Could they not have given him some sticky-out ears? Imelda Staunton, the ageing Queen, lacks the charm of Olivia Colman or the inwardness of Claire Foy’s young monarch. She’s about as animated as her image on the Royal Mail stamp.

There was no mention of Martin Bashir in The Love Box in Your Living Room (BBC2), Harry Enfield’s centenary tribute to the BBC. Nor did Enfield pay his respects to Jimmy Savile. Aside from these small omissions, this hour-long mockumentary was a trainspotter’s guide to radio and television history. In a parody of Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self, rapidly changing archive footage illustrated random conspiracy theories (we won the war, Enfield suggests, because a German version of The Archers literally bored the enemy to death).

To call this surreal trip a ‘tender love letter’ to the BBC, as Carol Midgley did in the Times, is like calling The Crown a tender love letter to the Windsors. There were some affectionate sketches, it’s true – Blake’s Seven and Howards’ Way were warmly recalled – but the tone throughout was one of rage. It was so angry it might have been written by one of the Angry Young Men parodied in the Play for Today spoof.

Enfield raged against the BBC’s publicschool ethos, the ‘wanker’ interviewers, the rise and rise of Richard ‘Shit, Actually’ Curtis and John Reith’s patronising vision of ‘teaching the working classes to say napkin and lavatory’. John Major, he pointed out in the spooky, toneless voice of Adam Curtis, looks a bit like John Birt, who looks a bit like Syd Little.

Watching this brilliant, baffling and incendiary piece of television was a bit like watching a Nissan Bluebird drive over the white cliffs of Dover.

Which happens to be the image with which The Love Box began.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE BARENBOIM AT 80

It was a strange coming-together of events. Daniel Barenboim used his acceptance speech for a Lifetime of Achievement at this year’s Gramophone Awards to announce that he was temporarily stepping back from active music-making owing to ‘a serious neurological condition’.

A multitasking musician like few others, Barenboim is 80 on 15th November. Being asked to write the cover feature on him for Gramophone’s Awards issue turned out to be both an exploration of an extraordinary career and a trip down memory lane.

1967 was the year this 24-year-old pianist-conductor astonished the musical world with a raft of memorable recordings. It was also the year I was asked to join the reviewing panel of Records and Recording, part of Philip Dosse’s Hansom Book empire. His weird and wonderful ways are memorably chronicled in the Gentleman Hack chapter of the late Hugh Massingberd’s marvellous autobiography, Daydream Believer

An early task was reviewing a still unmissable set of the five Beethoven Piano Concertos which Barenboim made with the 82-year-old Otto Klemperer.

I loved it, which is just as well, given that Barenboim’s memory for just about everything he experiences is one no elephant would try to emulate.

‘And be sure to mention Barenboim’s 2006 Reith Lectures,’ my editor at Gramophone urged. Happily, they’re still available online at BBC Programmes.

The Reith Lectures rarely engage with music. Barenboim’s invitation probably came through his friendship with Edward Said, the Palestinian-born, American-educated academic, whose 1993 lectures had looked at the role of the intellectual in public life.

Aside from music, a Barenboim associate once confided, only two things have obsessed him: backgammon and

Israel, to which his parents emigrated from Argentina when he was ten.

In 1967 – that year again – Israel became embroiled in a war with Nasser’s Egypt and its Arab allies. It took just six days for Israel to prevail but, as Barenboim’s career-long concern for the fate of the Palestinian people confirms, the fallout remains unresolved even now.

This is what brought Barenboim and Said together, inspiring them to found the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which draws on musicians from Israel, Palestine and the rest of the Arab world.

Its base is southern Spain, where Muslims, Jews and Christians once successfully cohabited during more than 500 years of Muslim rule.

‘I understand Wayne’s father works for the Ministry of Defence’

As Barenboim explained, the orchestra was created not as a political vehicle, but as an invitation to listen. ‘Sensitive talking and painful listening’ combined with the dignity that a shared passion for music and music-making can bring.

‘Listening’ was the subject of the second Reith lecture, broadcast from Chicago, where Barenboim was music director of the Chicago Symphony. It was entitled The Neglected Sense and concerned the importance of the ear and its marginalisation in modern society.

Barenboim has long advocated what he calls ‘active listening’. Background music is something we’ve had to get used to, but its advance is remorseless. We hear it even on heavyweight Radio 4 programmes such as File on 4, where private testimonies, often harrowing in their detail, are routinely accompanied by musical underlays that are as weird as they are banal.

Classical music in advertising has always been problematic. Barenboim cited the American company that appeared oblivious of the fact that the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem might not be the best thing with which to promote a newer, cleaner lavatory.

There have been some notable exceptions. I think of the ad for Hamlet cigars, made famous in part by Jacques Loussier’s Bach arrangement, or Hugh Hudson’s dazzling use of Figaro’s entrance aria from Rossini’s Il barbiere for the classic 1979 ad ‘Fiat Strada hand-built by robots’. And there’s that eerily atmospheric seven-note horn call from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony used by a leading patron of cultural life in this country, BP, now one of the arts world’s Great Unmentionables.

In the mid-1980s, Woolworth’s trendy new ad agency chose the Joy theme from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to advertise washing machines. Christopher Fildes, the Spectator’s City man at the time, devoted half his column to the outrage, comparing it with Lloyds Bank’s use of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio to sell credit cards. ‘Sleepers, wake, a voice is calling: this Lloyds Bank ad is quite appalling’ was his own succinct riposte.

The final audience question in Barenboim’s Chicago lecture was posed by Alfred Brendel, who’d been stopped by a fan who had ‘seen’ one of his concerts.

‘Might we change that usage?’ Brendel enquired. ‘And can we hope that some of the people who are coming to our concert tonight might listen to – and even possibly hear – what we are doing?’

Amen to that.

GOLDEN OLDIES

RACHEL JOHNSON ROXY MUSIC ROCKS

On the Tube to the O2, a Glaswegian detained me to tell me about his lifelong love of Roxy Music.

This was the sixth time he’d seen them, he said, recalling the time he’d belted up Sauchiehall Street in 1982 to the hotel the band were staying in, found the lead singer and told him he’d thrown a sickie to see them play the Apollo.

Bryan had ticked him off for slacking and then said, ‘Well, seeing as you’ve taken the day off work, let me buy you a drink.’

The Glaswegian spoke of this evening’s upcoming gig, I noted, as if it had already happened, which maybe – in one way – it had.

Though there are rumours that Bryan Ferry will take it to Worthy Farm for a teatime slot on the Sunday of Glasto, the season finale of the sell-out Roxy Music tour strongly brought to mind another of the world’s recently departed all-time greats.

I went to the O2 twice in October. The first time was to see Roger Federer’s last match as a hitter of balls. The second was for Bryan’s last gig – in this tour, at least – as crooner of hypnotic, heart-tugging songs.

Both men have animal grace, economy of movement and a supple,

feline, fluid style – just compare the way they both wave to the crowd; this is a huge compliment to Bryan Ferry as he is more than three decades Rog’s senior.

Of course, Ferry’s career has been longer, but the comparisons don’t stop there. Both dress immaculately. Both have spent their entire careers at the top of their game. Both have amazing hair and chiselled features – though, at 77, Bryan has the cheekbones that slice my heart open. Both are sublime performers and perfect gentlemen.

But what was the gig like? It was knockout. First he played the old stuff and then, halfway through, broke out the hits and we rose to our feet for Dance Away, More Than This, Avalon, Love Is the Drug and Jealous Guy – a dozen hits on the trot, ending with Do the Strand and Bryan then saluting each corner of the crowd, just the way Djoko does after he’s won Wimbledon.

At the after party, the band came into the bar, and Bryan sat kingly on a sofa and courtiers came to kiss the ring.

His handsome sons, friends and bandmates – among them lead guitarist Phil Manzanera in a floral shirt – came up to tell him he had done great as he sat, swaddled in a scarf, holding a small bottle of Evian.

‘Do I curtsy?’ I asked.

‘If you like,’ he said, giving me a brief smile.

What a beautiful man. Thank you for the music, Bryan Ferry.

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU DUTCH FLOWERS

Compton Verney to 15th January PEASANTS AND PROVERBS: PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER

Barber Institute, Birmingham, to 22nd January

Connoisseurs of 17th-century Flemish and Dutch painting are well catered for in the Midlands this autumn. These comparatively small, well-focused exhibitions can be enjoyed together or severally, being just 30 miles apart.

There is a closer connection between the two, in that Dr Amy Orrock, senior curator at Compton Verney, is an eminent authority on the Bruegel dynasty, with and without the h.

The Dutch flower show is a travelling exhibition of nine splendid examples from the National Gallery, augmented by another from a private collection. They trace the first flowering (sorry) of the genre in the 17th century and brief Indian summer in the later 18th.

Generations of art historians have argued about the meaning of floral still lifes. Some seek morals and meanings in them; others see only painters demonstrating their skills. In his major book on painting, the 17th-century Dutch

not serious art.

In 1950, the art historian Van Gelder wrote that ‘their main preoccupation was that of deceiving the eye by the skill of the hand’, although he conceded that the allegorical significance of flowers should be considered. However, many others have held that vanitas and memento mori messages are the point, since the brief lives of flowers illustrate them so well.

As usual, the truth is probably in between, and the genre was the product of politics and economics. These works were produced for the new bourgeois market for secular paintings in the booming, Protestant Dutch Republic.

Tulip mania may have played a part, but when that crashed in the mid-1630s, there was still a more general interest in botany. Tulips were anyway good to paint.

The earliest work, Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase (1609-10), by the elder Ambrosius Bosschaert, is undoubtedly intended to show wealth and exoticism, while the 18th-century examples, even by Jan van Huysum, are more flowers for their own sake.

As the title Peasants and Proverbs implies, the Brueghel show is more about meanings. The peasant genre invented by the elder Pieter Bruegel (sic) and turned into an industry by his son (1564-1638) was often full of allusions to a treasury of Flemish proverbs.

The show derives from the Barber’s own Two Peasants Binding Firewood, which can be read as Greed and Lechery stealing the faggot. For comparison, there are four other versions and works by contemporaries on similar themes. The opportunity to look at the younger Brueghel’s work so closely allows us to see that he was a master of detail. He shouldn’t be dismissed as just a derivative hack, copying his father.

THE WINTER’S TALE

Winter. Short days. Low temperatures.

Off, then, for a spot of rewarding garden-visiting. Treats aplenty await the intrepid and curious green-fingered adventurer in this unlikely season.

Why? Gardens stripped of their foliage and flowers reveal the creative hand of the skilled designer. Gardens in warmer (usually coastal) locations display a wealth of botanical beauty not seen in kindlier months. And gardens illuminated after dark form unworldly conceptions and hauntingly mysterious innovations.

On Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens – the setting of the recent film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden, starring Colin Firth and Julie Walters –are worth exploring at any time of the year. And their winter strobes endow them with thrilling shadows and unexpected pools of light that outshine any extravagant string of urban Christmas lights.

The garden’s numerous Holm oaks (evergreen Quercus ilex trees) help to insulate an understory of exotica by trapping warmer air which, duvet-like, fend off the worst of winter’s chill.

Early camellias are planted throughout the gardens, and midwinter yellow-flowering mahonias add fragrance. If it’s a mild winter, Abbotsbury’s ‘jewel in the crown’ – an eight-foot-tall Dahlia imperialis ‘Alba’ (the so-called tree dahlia, native to Mexico) will surprise you with a few stems of late, saucer-sized white flowers.

Promoting the winter illuminations at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, an excitable copywriter seems to have made an early call on the festive sherry: ‘Father Christmas’s elves have made their way to the arboretum to decorate the trees in

twinkly lights… This year, we invite you to witness the wonder, hilarity and general commotion that come with playful elves creating Westonbirt’s spectacular illuminated trail. With new light displays to discover and mischievous elves to meet, this is Enchanted Christmas as you’ve never seen it before…’

After-dark garden illuminations can also be found at several National Trust properties: at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire; at Gibside, in Tyne and Wear; at Shugborough in Staffordshire; or ‘to ring in the season in style’, try Stourhead in Wiltshire.

The Royal Horticultural Society is not to be beaten. Visit their flagship garden at Wisley, Surrey, and Kew Gardens – 20 minutes on the tube from central London.

Private gardens lighting up, other than Abbotsbury, include West Green in Hampshire, Heligan in Cornwall and Helmingham Hall in Suffolk.

And in my own (unilluminated) garden in south-west Wales? It’ll be the colourful stems of various dogwoods –Cornus alba ‘Westonbirt’, ‘Baton Rouge’ and ‘Spaethii’ – under a starry sky.

Lofty, skeletal trees will be silhouetted

against 7th December’s full moon –accompanied by the distant baying of excitable sheepdogs on neighbouring but far-off farms.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN

SIMON COURTAULD CELERY

Celery is a vegetable that has not been seen in my kitchen garden, and I rather doubt if there will be a place for it in future. Too much work for not much reward.

The wild celery plant is usually found in damp ground, often close to rivers or the sea, which probably explains why cultivated celery must have plenty of moisture. Germination of the seeds is slow, and during growth the plants are liable to run to seed if they have not been hardened off before going to their final positions, and if the soil temperature is not warm enough.

Trenches must be dug and the plants earthed up to blanch the stems as they grow above 12 inches tall. Regular

watering should be continued during the summer, along with watching for slugs and snails, which are very partial to celery. There are self-blanching varieties, but if they don’t get enough water, the stems will be bitter and tough.

I am inclined to think that the best reason for growing celery would be for the leaves, which are full of flavour.

However, this year I have come across a herb – new to me – called parcel. Also known as leaf celery or Chinese celery, it has more in common with the wild plant.

Its leaves call to mind a cross between the two parsleys – flat-leaved and curled – but they, and the stalks, have a distinct smell and taste of celery.

If parcel is grown from seed in spring, germination will be more successful under cover. Once planted out and, like celery, watered regularly, it can be selectively cut, and will regrow, through the summer. My parcel, started from a plug plant in May, was still looking healthy in late October.

If left in the ground over winter with a mulch round the roots, the plants should produce flowers in spring, and then seeds which can be dried and used in cooking.

Apart from these advantages, one of the most compelling reasons for having a clump of parcel in the garden is that it will – so they say – repel cabbage white butterflies.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD HOMAGE TO CALEDONIA

Top of the new cookbook crop is Jeremy Lee’s no-nonsense Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many.

The author is the chef/proprietor of London’s Quo Vadis. He’s an east-coast Scot who learned to cook at his mother’s elbow. So it’s no surprise that pastry and pies feature strongly, as do offal and smoked fish: haddock, Arbroath smokies, kippers and eel.

The illustrations are sensible and usable. They match the author’s enthusiasm and quality of writing. Brilliant stuff! Tuck a copy in every available Christmas stocking.

Beetroot and barley salad with smoked fish

A simple supper for a winter’s evening, and the perfect dish if you’re thinking ahead to the fasting supper of Christmas Eve. Serves 6.

The fish

Smoked trout, herring, mackerel, sprats (about 750g whole fish)

For the salad

6-8 small beetroots, cooked and skinned 5 soup spoons olive oil

1 tsp red-wine vinegar

200g cooked barley bunch spring onions, thinly sliced large bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped 100g freshly grated (or good-quality jarred) horseradish

Salt and pepper

For the vinaigrette

1 soup spoon red-wine vinegar

1 level tsp sea salt

1 tsp Dijon mustard

4 soup spoons extra virgin olive oil

Prepare the fish (skin and de-bone), or leave whole, as you prefer.

Slice the beetroots in half, dress with the vinegar and a spoonful of oil and set aside. Make the vinaigrette: whisk the vinegar and salt together in a small bowl; then whisk in the mustard and oil.

Tip the cooked barley onto a handsome dish, flatten slightly and top with the beetroot and its juices, vinaigrette, spring onion, parsley and horseradish. Serve alongside the platter of fish. Finger-licking delicious!

Almond tart

Start a day ahead if possible so the filling can rest overnight. Roll your own pastry –ready-made is not a patch on home-made, whatever anyone says. Enough for 6.

The pastry

250g plain flour

150g cold butter

75g icing sugar

1 fresh organic egg

1 tsp cold water

Pinch salt

The filling

250g whole blanched almonds

250g unsalted butter, softened 200g caster sugar

2 fresh organic eggs

Process the butter, flour, sugar and salt to a fine crumb (or use the tips of your fingers to rub the butter into the flour before adding sugar and salt). Add the egg forked with the water and let it come together in a lump. Tip onto a floured surface, knead delicately into a drum shape,

cut in half and gently press each half into a disc. Wrap separately, freeze one disc for keeping, and refrigerate the other for later.

To make the filling, process the almonds to a fine crumb. Beat the butter and sugar together. Beat the eggs, stir into the butter and sugar and fold in the ground almonds. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Roll out the refrigerated pastry on a lightly floured board to fit a 20-25cm tart case, leaving an overhang. Spoon the filling onto the pastry in clumps. Turn down the oven to 150°C and bake the tart for an hour. If the base isn’t quite crisp enough, bake for up to 20 minutes longer at 120°C. Serve with custard, Jersey cream, whipped cream and ice cream – one or all four.

RESTAURANTS

JAMES PEMBROKE

LONDON’S FRENCH QUARTER

Last month, I went to Paris. And, like Barry Humphries in the last issue of The Oldie, I couldn’t help thinking the old girl was in bad need of Botox.

This was brought home to me at my last lunch near the misery that is the Gare du Nord, when I mistakenly settled for a 28-euro menu du jour. I didn’t bother to read the blackboard because The Oldie’s drinks correspondent, Bill Knott, had recommended the gaff.

How Bill must have danced with mirth in the anticipation that I would be served egg mayonnaise, followed by creamy rice with ham. Not even Dotheboys Hall would serve up such detritus.

I would be vowing never to return to Haussmann’s paradise (without a large picnic hamper), were it not for the wonderful dinner I enjoyed at L’Assiette, in the 14th. This was Bill’s other recommendation. Four classic starters and four classic main courses cooked by aubergiste David Rathgeber, the disaffected Michelin-star chef determined to return to the classics: escargots, paté en croûte, velouté, truite confit followed by paleron de boeuf, stuffed red partridge and pappardelle de seiche façon carbonara. AND cassoulet. Oh, and îles flottantes

Yet there was one classic French dish missing: bouillabaisse. As with cassoulet, nine times out of ten, one can expect major disappointment. Yet I have found the best purveyor of the seminal dish: La Petite Poissonnerie, in Marylebone.

I was recommended this fishmonger/ restaurant by a Scottish friend, 24 hours after having the best langoustines ever at The Cabin, in Mallaig, gateway to the Outer Hebrides and her family home in Knoydart. The Cabin is the best fish

restaurant in Britain north of Marylebone. Arlene’s the cook, and bearded Craig, a former bank manager (one of the last of a near-extinct breed), is the waiter. Twenty-four covers and pure joy.

Anyway, assuming you’re too busy to take the West Highland line from Glasgow to Mallaig through terrain so beautiful that there’s little wonder the Scots want it all for themselves and the Japanese, you must head to Marylebone.

Don’t bother with the menu. Order a bottle of Pays d’Oc Chardonnay for £30, and dream of Brittany while you order the starter of four different oysters for £12.

Nick – he’s French but he’s gone native – is the cook/fishmonger. And here’s his recipe. Don’t try this at home.

Take three friends and pay £88 for as much bouillabaisse as you can eat in one lunchtime. Nick will arrive with a huge, glass bowl of familiar-looking thick, brown gloop with mussels and clams. Just as you’re thinking, ‘Where’s the fish?’, Nick will arrive with a huge, flat pan of filleted John Dory, red mullet, prawns, queen scallops and whatever is on the slab, all cooked in a light stock infused with paprika, saffron and star anise.

The idea is that you choose the level of fishiness in your own bowl, adding, as you wish, from the glass bowl of the strong stuff, which is 50:50 lobster bisque and real fish soup.

Plutocratic Nick and I recently went to Bentley’s for twice the price, and not one dish compared to this. Yes, the seafood cocktail was delicious but, at £29.50, it should have been brought to the table by the Nereids – but they’re all busy working for Nick in Marylebone and Arlene in Mallaig.

DRINK

BILL KNOTT

LE BEAUJOLAIS MONDE

Back in 1996, when the mania for Beaujolais nouveau was still at its height, as a stunt for a new food and drink magazine I had the idea of taking a few cases of English wine over to France.

Further research revealed that my startlingly original wheeze had first been staged in 1911, but no matter. On the morning of the third Thursday in November – the official release date for Beaujolais – a Rolls-Royce containing a trio of rosbifs rocked up in the town square of Beaujeu, the capital of Beaujolais.

The car’s capacious boot was filled with wines from Three Choirs and Lamberhurst and we poured them enthusiastically for the town’s residents.

Well, that was the idea. As it turned out, the whole town had been celebrating

the new vintage the night before, not wisely but too well, and the only sign of life was a group of pneumatic-drill-toting road workers. Occasionally, a first-floor jalousie would be flung open, and a forehead-clutching resident would tell them to shut up and get lost, in a torrent of visceral grunts that only a very hungover Frenchman can achieve.

The road workers – and, eventually, a smattering of locals desperate for a hair of the dog – took surprisingly well to our wines, perhaps because they were free.

We had to placate the local café-owner by ordering heavily from his wine list by way of compensation.

It was then I discovered that Beaujolais could be more than merely Ribena for grown-ups. A Morgon and a Chiroubles, both with a few years on the clock, seemed almost Burgundian in their depth and elegance. In fact, as Cyril Chirouze, winemaker at the Louis Jadot-owned Château des Jacques, recently pointed out to me over lunch at St James’s splendid Maison François, Beaujolais has always been part of Burgundy. A century ago, its top wines were just as highly esteemed.

Château des Jacques’s single-vineyard wines are impressive, especially the Moulin-à-Vent Clos des Rochegrès. The best value is to be found at Sainsbury’s (sainsburys.co.uk), who stock the deliciously fruity, spicy, satin-smooth Château des Jacques Moulin-à-Vent 2019 for £18. I found it on a six-bottleminimum promotion for £13.50.

Elsewhere, the Wine Society has a good range of Beaujolais crus (including the 2018 vintage of Château des Jacques’s Morgon Côte du Py, in magnum for £51, a perfect centrepiece for the Christmas table). DBM (dbmwines.co.uk) stock both a Brouilly – the raspberry-scented Château des Tours 2019 (£17.99) – and a wellstructured Côte de Brouilly, Chanrion 2019 (£16.99).

Back in 1996, blizzards swept across Beaujolais’s hills and we were snowbound for two days, forced to seek shelter in some very convivial cellar restaurants. They all seemed to boast long trestle tables peopled with cheerful locals and adorned with copious flagons of Beaujolais and pig served 32 ways.

I have rarely been happier. Join Bill

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three terrific clarets that you might wish to lay in for the festive season, all of which are drinking very nicely now: two from the underrated 2019 vintage and one from the classic 2015 vintage. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Château Cissac, Cru Bourgeois, HautMédoc 2019, offer price £17.99, case price £215.88

Powerful blackberry fruit and fine tannins: delicious now, yet definitely built to last. A wine that needs a roast rib of beef.

Château Daviaud, Bordeaux Rouge 2019, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88

Made in a modern, fruitforward style, but from a thoroughly old-school blend of varieties, with a hefty splash of Malbec in the mix. Ripe and fresh, with a hint of spice.

Château Grand Clapeau Olivier, Cru Bourgeois, HautMédoc 2015, offer price £12.50, case price £150.00

Plenty of plummy fruit from the high proportion of Merlot: fully mature and great value.

Mixed case price £165.92 – a saving of £48.99 (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 www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD

NB Offer closes 3rd January 2023.

SPORT

In this time of division and uncertainty, there is one thing we can all agree on: when it comes to sport and television, Desmond Lynam knows what he is talking about.

The greatest of all broadcasting front men, Des was for a generation there at the heart of everything, making us feel, with his warm twinkle, as if we were right alongside him. He fronted the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics, the Grand National, countless FA Cup Finals and a whole succession of Wimbledons. And he made all of them compelling viewing.

But he reckons the most sizeable and significant event of the lot is the World Cup.

‘No doubt about it,’ he tells me on the phone. ‘Much bigger than the Olympics. I mean, at the Olympics you have the athletics, the swimming, the boxing maybe, but after that the interest wanes. With the World Cup, everything matters.’

And Des should know. His finest hour was at the 1990 World Cup, when he brought us Pavarotti and Puccini, missed penalties and Gazza’s tears, all delivered with an arch of his eyebrow and a knowing quip about how we should all be at work. Channel 4 recently screened a three-part documentary reminiscing about it. With Des – as he should be – at the heart of it all.

There is, however, a caveat to his assessment. For many of us in this country, the World Cup centres itself in the national conversation only when England do well. In 1990 and 2018, when the team progressed to the semifinal, almost the entire country stopped and stared at the television screen.

But in Brazil in 2014, when England were eliminated within the first six days of competition, and in South Africa in 2010, when they stank the place out with their wretchedly inhibited play, not to mention in the USA in 1994, when they didn’t even manage to qualify, it was not like that. Those events we preferred to forget about.

So what are the chances this time round of us all gathering to watch England march through? Well, they are improved by there being no clear and obvious favourite. No one can suggest with certainty who will dominate proceedings in Qatar. France and Germany have problems. Spain are not what they were. It is as open a field as ever.

And England certainly have good players: Harry Kane, Phil Foden and particularly teenage prodigy Jude Bellingham have the potential to set the competition alight.

But there is a hole where the centre backs should be, the goalkeeper is an accident waiting to happen and, for all his intelligence

and quiet personal charm, the manager Gareth Southgate is inclined to caution.

The likelihood that this time around, Gary Lineker, Lynam’s admirable successor at the BBC, will have the kind of story Des had to tell in 1990 seems small (even if Gary thinks differently in his interview in this issue of The Oldie). Not least because, although the draw has gifted them a favourable group stage, thereafter England are bound to encounter France or Spain.

But, still, Des will be watching. Now 80 and living in peaceful retirement, he will be inviting a couple of mates round to enjoy the big games. As to who will win it, he has an inkling the trophy will be heading south when it leaves the desert.

‘I know it’s been 20 years, but I suspect Brazil will do it,’ he tells me. ‘And if not them, then it will be Argentina.’

MOTORING ALAN JUDD LAND OF THE RISING STANDARDS

Although not a doctrinaire VW family, we’ve owned nine over the years. They were mostly Golfs, with a sprinkling of Polos, an Audi A4 estate, a couple of Passat estates and an Up!.

We bought them (all used) because they suited our needs, were affordable and reliable, looked right, felt wellmade and were good to drive. There’s one in the current fleet, a 2018 Polo – an economical one-litre petrol runabout that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Would we buy another? A few years ago, I’d have unhesitatingly said yes; now I’m not so sure.

VW and Audi have not fared well in recent reliability surveys. In 2019, J D Power rated VW 12th out of 24 brands, but put Audi at 22nd. The 2022 What Car? survey didn’t have a single VW product in the top ten but had three – two Audis and the Touran –in the lower half of the bottom ten.

Such surveys are huge generalisations, of course, but now even VW admits it has a problem. Thomas Schäfer, CEO of VW Passenger Cars, recently confessed to

Autocar that VW ‘is on a steep learning curve with the likes of over-the-air software’. He acknowledged that software glitches – that over-used euphemism – are damaging the brand.

Ian Ferguson, founder of Reject My Car, reported that VW cars feature in more than half the software complaints his firm handles. Autocar themselves reported insoluble glitches with three Audi Q4s they tested. They also quoted a reader whose new Golf spawned rashes of warning messages before finally coming to a complete halt, following the software update designed to cure them. Another had so many software crashes in his Audi A3 that he returned it and bought a Kia Niro.

As cars ever more closely resemble computers on wheels, it’s unsurprising that most of their problems are electronic. But why do they happen when in other ways they are so much more reliable than they used to be?

Silencers, brakes, batteries, ignition systems and engines all last longer and work better. Is it that modern cars are too complex; that because their makers can do something, they do – regardless of whether it’s desirable, dependable or even wanted.

Yet some manufacturers seem not to be plagued by such problems. Lexus and Toyota regularly top the reliability surveys and are confident enough to offer an industry-leading ten-year warranty.

Why the difference?

I recently met a German engineer: not a mechanic or fitter (now promoted to ‘technicians’ in main-dealership speak) but a man who makes and tests widgets for, among others, the NASA space program. He described one widget that has to work five times during a mission; he tests it 100,000 times before signing it off.

Is it, I asked, such quality control that accounts for the difference between Japanese and Korean manufacturers and most European and American ones?

Partly, he reckoned, adding that such thoroughness reflects an attitude: an insistence on offering the very best you possibly can rather than making do with the merely acceptable.

He quoted a tiny example: if you ask a Japanese manufacturer to show you a widget, he presents it in traditionally cupped hands, almost as a precious offering, honouring you with the best he can present. In Germany nowadays – he was critical of much of contemporary German industry – they just slide it across the table in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion.

This sounds credible, but I can’t say whether it’s the whole story. I can, however, say that if I were buying new, I’d go for that Toyota warranty. Why pay for less?

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Serious business of computer games

A reader recently asked me for my views on the latest version of a popular computer game, and I had to admit that I had no opinion.

I’m afraid the appeal of computerbased video games has simply passed me by. This is not just a peevish aspect of my growing older; I have never enjoyed them.

I recall that, long ago, in the 1970s, when I was young, that Space Invaders game started appearing in pubs. Such games were undoubtedly an innovation and offered us a golden opportunity, for the first time, to feed 50p coins into a tabletop screen and press buttons to shoot at wave after wave of computerised aliens.

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Webwatch Bomb sites bombsight.org

Mapping the London Second World War bomb census – previously available only at the Reading Room at The National Archives.

BBC Good Food bbcgoodfood.com

Excellent resource for recipes; a bit spoiled by adverts – and this is the BBC.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

I never enjoyed playing Space Invaders. I was no good at it, it was expensive and I badly missed the bar-billiards tables that were removed to make more space for the invaders. I must be lacking a computer-game-playing gene, because many of my friends became obsessed with this new gadget.

That Space Invaders game was, without doubt, very influential and revolutionised the young computer-games industry, demonstrating that people would pay handsomely to play them.

Perhaps you didn’t notice this revolution. I must admit that I didn’t – at least not at first – but it’s hard to ignore now. Modern computer games are not toys; they are very big business. In 2020, worldwide spending on gaming was estimated at about $136 billion, and it’s grown since then.

People play these games on tablets, smartphones, desktops and dedicated machines designed for the for the purpose (PlayStation, Xboxes and the like). Not only that; they are increasingly played online, which allows friends to play together remotely.

This is good news. Your image of a ‘gamer’ (as they are known) may be of a solitary soul hunched over a screen in miserable isolation. That certainly used to be the case, but nowadays not so much.

For example, my son lives in England; his two oldest friends live in Germany and Spain. The three of them regularly get together online to play games. As well as enjoying the entertainment of the game itself, they can see each other and chat while they are playing it (as on a Zoom

call), just as they might have done 20 years ago if they had gathered to play Monopoly.

I see this as progress; it’s healthy and I thoroughly approve. But what are they playing?

There are thousands of games, some of which are harmless and even wholesome, but I’m afraid that the most popular by far are known as shoot-’em-ups. As a player, you are some sort of combatant, trying to destroy your enemies in increasingly difficult and challenging situations.

To give you a flavour, one of the most popular is Grand Theft Auto, in which a player assumes the persona of a criminal trying to commit crimes in a corrupt, fictional American state; there is considerable violence and dangerous driving. Perhaps it’s exciting. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never played it. It certainly sounds distasteful, and I wonder how good it is for the player’s soul.

I am also mystified by the popularity of watching others play these games. YouTube tells us that in 2020 over 100 billion hours of people’s time was spent watching other people play video games on YouTube alone – and there are many other platforms showing them.

It’s not just an online phenomenon; people even pack into arenas to watch video games being played, with live commentary, cheering and chanting, just like at a football match. The difference is that their game-playing heroes are sitting motionless and expressionless in their armchairs, while their games are relayed to huge screens.

I can’t see the appeal; bring back bar billiards, please.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Horrors of hard pawn

A 3,000-year-old industry, regarded as a last resort for people on the breadline, is flourishing in today’s economically pinched times.

Pawnbrokers still lend small sums of money to people needing a top-up till pay day. Now there are also high-end pawnbrokers, who lend on Porsche cars and Rolex watches, yachts and works of art worth tens of thousands of pounds.

Researchers at the University of Bristol

Personal Finance Centre discovered that a quarter of pawnbrokers’ customers own their homes and seven out of eight have standard bank accounts.

The other side of pawnbroking is selling the pledges that have been forfeited – gold, jewellery, watches, designer handbags – through their highstreet shops, supplemented with stock they buy in. Those with websites advertise the items for sale, and some sell online.

Shoppers won’t find rock-bottom bargains, but the prices should be lower than at mainstream jewellers and they are negotiable. The longer a piece has been hanging around, the more likely the pawnbroker is to negotiate.

The fundamental lending operations are busier than ever. Research from the Social Market Foundation found that by midsummer customers were already pawning household goods just to pay for

food and rent. It believes the need for easy loans will only grow as the cost of living rises this winter.

It is an expensive way to borrow, though cheaper than notorious payday loans. A typical interest rate quoted is 10 per cent – that is per month. Someone who borrows £200 for six months will pay 60-per-cent interest (£320) to get the item back. That is the flat rate of interest; the true annual rate (APR) is 150 per cent.

The amount pawnbrokers are prepared to lend depends entirely on their valuation of the asset and will be about 70 per cent of its second-hand value, though sometimes a lot less. Loans can be as small as £5 but are usually between £50 and £300.

There are no credit checks, no personal questions and no impact on your credit file if you fail to redeem the item. Cash is paid straight away.

When customers fail to redeem their

pledges – that is, they fail to repay the loan plus interest within six months –pawnbrokers usually allow them to pay just the interest and renew the loan. If not, the item will be sold to repay the debt. It becomes the pawnbrokers’ property only if the loan was for six months and for less than £75.

Pawnbrokers must obtain the market price for what they sell and give the original owner any money over and above the cost of repaying the debt, after expenses.

Pawnbrokers are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and, two years ago, the FCA found that not all pawnbrokers passed on the entire surplus and that the expenses could be unreasonably high.

Many people use pawnbrokers in a crisis. Some deliberately buy expensive gold jewellery when they have money to spare so that they have an asset to pawn for a quick top-up of cash.

For everyone, credit unions – run for and by their members – are a safer and cheaper source of small loans where the APR usually is just 12.7 per cent. Go to www.findyourcreditunion.co.uk for more information.

Bill Knott writes, ‘Based at the palatial Château Beychevelle (www. beychevelle.com), often called the “Versailles of Bordeaux”, our jaunt around Bordeaux will take in a clutch of the Left Bank’s finest estates, including the hard-to-visit Château Pontet-Canet and the delightful Château Pichon-Baron. We have also lined up trips to Château Smith Haut Lafitte in Pessac-Léognan, awarded 100 Parker points for their 2009 vintage, and an exclusive visit to Château Canon,

Come and stay at Château Beychevelle, in Bordeaux with

Bill Knott 5th-9th June 2023

the beautiful Saint-Émilion estate owned by Chanel, home of one of the appellation’s very best wines. Expect plenty of delicious gastronomie bordelaise, too.’

The château has 13 bedrooms: two suites; nine large doubles and two small doubles for single use.

ITINERARY

Monday 5th June – Cité du Vin Depart Gatwick with EasyJet at 0800; arrive Bordeaux at 1050. Tour of La Cité du Vin for an overview of the region, followed by lunch. Afternoon at leisure at the château; dinner at the château.

Tuesday 6th June – Tastings at châteaux Beychevelle and Kirwan Tour of Château Beychevelle with the winemaker, followed by a tasting. Lunch at Le Lion d’Or, Arcins. Afternoon visit and tasting at Château Kirwan. Dinner at La Table du Médoc, at Gaillan-en-Médoc.

Wednesday 7th June – St-Émilion Tour of the town followed by tour and tasting at Château Soutard; 1.30pm lunch in St Émilion followed by visit and tasting at Château Canon. Early supper at Familia, Brasserie Les Halles, in Bordeaux.

Thursday 8th June – Tastings at châteaux Pichon-Baron and Pontet-Canet

Visit and tasting at Château Pichon-Baron for lunch at Café Lavinal followed by a tour and tasting of Pontet-Canet. Dinner at the château.

Friday 9th June – Château Smith

Haut Lafitte

Morning visit and tasting at Château Smith Haut Lafitte, followed by lunch in La Table du Lavoir, their brasserie. Depart Bordeaux at 1635; arrive Gatwick at 1720.

Full itinerary at www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours

HOW TO BOOK: Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call 01225 427311. Price per person: £2,450 which includes all meals, great wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Suite supplement: £500; single supplement: £400. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st March 2023.

The Avocet

Before the arrival of the collared dove, rose-ringed parakeet, little egret and red kite, the most exciting addition to the British bird list was the avocet (Recurvirostra avosetta).

To appreciate how exciting it is, one must see a living avocet up close, as at Paradise Park near St Ives or, by appointment, at Deepdale Farm, north Norfolk.

Lovelier there could not be –O that slim upcurving bill, The ivory and ebony Feathers! She sees them still.

Not one other plumaged thing

In that room her senses met, Nor sound, nor flicker of a wing, Sweet blue-legg’d avocet.

River, no, nor breasted seas, Nor the once-shared star of dawn, Nor alley’s linden-scented breeze. Nor emerald flash of lawn…

As that shadow of a bird, Vision on a plateless leaf, From childhood’s memory bestirred To cast a gleam on grief.

E H W Meyerstein, from The Avocet, Bewick remembered

Like the red kite, the avocet was once common in England, notably in the fenlands, but human interference hastened decline. The last breeding for a century was recorded on Romney Marsh in 1843.

Then, in 1938, two pairs nested on the Wexford Slobs, south-east Ireland. Nesting pairs in Norfolk and Essex during the war were talked of but not officially recorded because of the defensive isolation of East Anglia’s coastal belt.

Isolated marshes proved a paradise for birds. Breeding avocets at Havergate and Minsmere in Suffolk were the

bridgehead for postwar colonisation. Secrecy further safeguarded the earliest Suffolk breeding pairs. Even a 1950 Times article, entitled ‘The Return of the Avocet’, censored the location.

It was not until 1955 that the avocet was adopted as the emblem of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds –Minsmere being the RSPB’s premier reserve. Black-and-white plumage was ideal for a logo. Simplified to head and shoulder, it remains the ultimate symbol of British conservation. It was designed by Robert Gillmor, who sadly died in May.

Today, a thousand pairs are resident, from the Humber to Dorset, their number increased by a winter migration approaching 10,000. One reason avocets

have thrived is their fierce defence of their nests and offspring.

‘There is no wader which will sit so devotedly through floods and gales … so wary or so heroic when breeding, dashing off with its shrill cry into the blue to attack a heron, or a crow or marauding gull,’ wrote J K Stanford in 1950.

Lieutenant Colonel Stanford knew the avocet as well as anyone. He was one of the volunteers who night and day guarded the first pairs officially to breed on the sand and shingle island of Havergate.

The 2023 calendar with illustrations from this column is available at www.carryakroyd.co.uk

Swish Family Robinson

love luxury

Here’s what I know: never be the indulgent granny providing the holiday villa for two grandsons, a son-in-law (faultless except for being an Everton supporter) plus a daughter whose ability to be on full-time quality control is as exhausting as it is a scientific phenomenon.

This year, I knew better. ‘We are not,’ I announced, ‘having a month in someone else’s hot house, where the brochure might not have conveyed the wobbly steps to the faraway pool, or the cook’s limited repertoire.

‘We are having six days of hotel luxury, with two significant advantages: all complaints can go directly to reception; and the trip will appreciably reduce the inheritance tax that might otherwise be an inconvenience after I’ve gone.’

To this end, I booked us in to the Marbella Club – famed in the glitzy Spanish resort favoured by fugitive British bank robbers.

Along the way was promised a series of carers to treat us like the Kardashians. What’s more, the flights were from London City – more fun than two nights sleeping on the floor of Heathrow.

The limo sweeps up the gang of four, then me. Three asleep.

Guess which one isn’t? ‘I can’t believe,’ shrieks Emma, ‘you’re dressed in a top

that is showing your midriff. Your midriff is showing, Mummy.’

Dear reader, I am in my Sweaty Betty yoga outfit. Only a bit of a gap between the top and my waist. I haven’t purposely dressed to look like a 77-year-old Britney Spears.

Never mind; kerbside at City, guardian angel number one, Alan, is on cue to take our luggage. Not only does he push the overloaded trolley but, by waving his badge, has us miraculously first in line at the check-in desk. Given the lengths and breadths of the lines behind us, it is thoughtful of my son-in-law, who in his youth marched for the miners with

Michael Foot, not to look embarrassed.

Malaga – and another guardian angel whisks us through immigration, passport control and vaccine-doc inspection and into another air-conditioned limo with goody bags.

The Marbella Club, built in 1954 by Prince Alfonso of HohenloheLangenburg, is an ice-white series of single-storey villas, with a glitteringly luxurious reception and a vast number of uniformed staff shaking my hand.

There are beautiful views of grass and sea – and, in our rooms, huge television screens, fluffy white robes, airconditioning and full-to-bursting fridges.

I hesitate to sound a note of regret, but does anyone else sometimes wonder if there could not be hotels for very thin, permanently suntanned, overdressed but somehow underdressed women – and then others for those of us who hate sunbathing, are not underweight and – if we wear fake tan – never quite manage to avoid the blotchy look?

In anticipation, I went to Bicester Village and bought the boys (one just a teenager, one about to be) Ralph Lauren swimming trunks and matching T-shirts in every colour.

I needn’t have bothered. The youngest grandson resolutely wears an old pair of woolly, holey, green shorts at every turn.

I never once see my planned chic co-ordinated look.

Later I spot some of the far-too-thin beauties reading the FT, or the German equivalent – so, even more annoyingly, they are clever trophy wives.

‘Why not assume they are the breadwinner?’ demands Emma.

Either way, it is the husband of one of these who is unfortunate enough to be at the water’s edge when the daughter realises we need to be photographed in the pedalo. But it’s too late to save him. She is already bossily instructing the man to turn my phone horizontally, then move further forward, then further back…

So, for all I know, the snaps of us on the water were taken by the chairman of Blackstone Inc or the CFO of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Emma, for whom parsimony is another full-time hobby, finds two branches of H&M to explore, replacing the youngest grandson’s shorts and T-shirts with material he prefers.

I lose my prize special-edition Polo baseball cap. Grandson number two finds a plastic fan. All this keeps her busy with regular visits to reception to check if one has been found and the other claimed.

We eat at one of the beach restaurants at night, and each night I silently wonder, does my family hold the world record for the time it takes to decide on four starters and four main courses?

After I’ve handed over my credit card for one such meal, Hudson, the eldest grandson, is caught picking it up while asking his mother, ‘Does this need to go in HER phone wallet or just HER handbag?’

The plastic fan came home. My baseball cap turned up in my suitcase. The various guardian angels reappeared to guide us to and from the aircraft.

Did the experiment work? We adored every minute of it.

Emma Wilson

My opening image of Holiday à la Robinson was my 70+ mother choosing to travel in ‘active wear’ with an exposed tummy. Had she lost a bet?

But I’m told to say nothing. For we’re heading to a classic hotel in Spain, abandoning her private-French-villa preference. There’s going to be a stream of warm Spanish bodies to swoon, jump and pirouette to her every whim.

Endless towel boys and girls to position umbrellas in the shade. More to the right. No, the other right.

Plentiful restaurants with gracious managers providing dishes without ‘spicy goop’ or ‘foreign muck’. Guest relations to embrace her daily calls – fixing her Wi-Fi, her telly, her Kindle, figuring out her daily Wordle? A stream of porters and bellboys to summon golf carts and taxis.

The only job I’d have left would be to shoo the impertinent Spanish sparrows from her breakfast table.

The hotel was luxurious beyond my memory of pre-COVID travel. The turn-down service, the individual bedside mat and slippers with the wafer-thin chocolate in the Tiffany-blue wrapper.

Hudson and Parker are too old and too cool for Kids Club. So I’m pathetically grateful they tolerate sunbeds in the same postcode as us and humour us with the occasional game of Bananagrams.

The pedalo ‘fun’ – with a built-in slide – was six minutes in when Herself demanded to be deposited on the shore so she could stomp back to the hotel. But hot sand denied her this pleasure. She was forced to tiptoe swiftly, cat-on-a-hottin-roof style, aiming for any shade.

This left H and P to test-ride the pedalo slide and take their chances with unhospitable jellyfish.

Parker didn’t escape unmarked. Raw, red welts exploded on his thighs. Naturally, to annoy his brother, he declared this a badge of honour.

I did manage finally to wear my new strapless summer top I liked so much that I went online to buy another. Except, when I scanned the barcode, I discovered it was a skirt. How to feel old?

The largest holiday challenge was people. I’ve never been a big fan. They are everywhere. They smoke. Talk loudly. Their children scream. Breakfast is teeming with fabulously euro-rich toddlers and multiple Filipino nannies – one per child. Each child with an iPad. Each nanny on an iPhone. Not a parent in sight. Yes, I’m sounding old again.

The exception – and my favourite to spot (it’s a bit like birdwatching: no

sudden movements; don’t scare them away) – was the ageing bad-ass English rocker, with eye-watering wardrobe … possibly Def Leppard’s drummer. Or a hairdresser from Basingstoke. Hard to tell.

Any drama? That missing blue cap, a sentimental favourite of Hers. Now listen – my mother forgets everything. She still calls one of my children the Other One.

I did make an effort to find the stupid hat. I spent two days retracing her steps to the boutique (where she bought another sombrero) and back to the variety of sun loungers – too hot or too shady, so she’d abandoned them. Eventually, I bought her a replacement.

At the end of the week, when her suitcases were lifted down – naturally not by her – it turned out the cap never actually left the case.

Why should this surprise me? Over the years, I’ve lost count of how often I’ve been sent back to hotels she’s checked out of, to locate keys, rings, phones and bank cards. Anne Robinson bank cards are a kind of global confetti. Move over, Match Attax.

And guess who was lumbered with the onus of securing photographic evidence of our six days packed with ‘family joy’?

Cameras are an immediate instigator of tension and resentment. And that’s just the children. Her behaviour is far worse. You’ve barely tapped the camera icon before she yells, ‘THAT’S ENOUGH NOW!’ Might you think, when I managed to rope a stranger into taking shots of the five of us, she was grateful? Hardly.

The real dilemma? Her phone has the best camera. Hudson, the favourite (yes, yes, I’m still working through the hypnotism therapy to deal with this), is the only one who can extract it from her grip.

Somewhere on that device are the few offerings we have for The Oldie, nestled between shots of the inside of her handbag.

On the last day, I managed to squeeze in a pedicure. What colour? That Tiffanyblue, of course. A holiday keepsake she loathed. I’m the disappointing daughter who keeps on giving.

After our last breakfast, Hudson indulged my wish for a final, quick dip. With the pool all to ourselves, he floated over, and announced, ‘You know, Mum, I can see you’re going to be just as tricky as Her in 30 years’ time.’

More so, me thinks.

Overlooked Britain

My glorious dog days

Flint was a grey-brindle, rough-haired whiskered lurcher. He died when he was only two years old, after a much too short but happy life. He was killed at the thundering gallop chasing a muntjac, after being pierced straight through his lungs by a long thin spear of a stick which barely left a mark.

He did not die immediately. We found him walking with an odd staggering gait through the woods. Subsequently no human could have had better medical treatment and few as good.

He survived an operation lasting several hours (paid for by our insurance – woe betide not being covered), and then his heart gave out.

I was at the time making a film about memorials to animals. What could have been a more soothing salve or a more than suitable tribute than commissioning a monument to a dog? Who, though, could pay for it? I am in constant touch with Harriet Frazer whose entirely excellent organisation, Memorials by Artists, was founded to put the bereaved in touch with the most suitable local craftsmen for a loved one’s memorial.

Thanks to her advice and tireless slogging through diocesan boards and local councils in pursuit of planning permissions, there are now many hundreds of contemporary memorials beautifying Britain today.

Eureka! She told me of Martin Cook, a local fourth-generation master mason, whose father, grandfather and greatgrandfather were responsible for some of the finest sepulchral artistic works in England, including at Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

He had just finished a Falklands War memorial in High Wycombe and had some stone left over. He would be delighted to make it into an obelisk for a mere song, for Flint and for the film.

The letters FLINT were inscribed from the top to the bottom of the stone.

It stands at the bottom of the garden of the 1846 Gothic and diaper-brick Old Rectory at Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, where I have lived for many years.

We had a small funeral ceremony, reading the lines of Ecclesiastes 3:19: ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts: even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea they have all one breath; so that a man has no pre-eminence above a beast for all is vanity.’

The misery of missing Flint remained raw. Weeks later, I was working in the Caribbean with Auberon Waugh – his last job before he died in 2001, aged only 61. We had been together on his first job, writing about sex in the Midlands,

40 years before. That king of cynics, without a shade of his renowned cynicism, knowing that we were mourning a dog, sympathised in a quiet voice: ‘I know. I am so sorry. Bereavement is sheer hell.’

We were in good company. In 1881, Matthew Arnold wrote a 20-verse poem, Geist’s Grave, on his grief at his dachshund’s death.

A few verses are reproduced here: Four years! – and didst thou stay above The ground, which hides thee now, but four?

And all that life, and all that love,

At my Buckinghamshire rectory, I’ve raised worthy monuments to my faithful hounds

Left: Alan Dodd’s design for Prickle’s monument, inspired by (right) the tomb of St Peter Martyr in the Portinari Chapel at Milan’s Basilica of Sant’Eustorgio

and on proud display. This, maybe, is how it will have to remain – after all, many an important architectural scheme has suffered the same fate.

Prickle was bought in Shepherd’s Bush Market for ten shillings, and never was any money better spent. She was only six weeks old.

Were crowded, Geist!, into no more?…

We stroke thy broad brown paws again,

We bid thee to thy vacant chair, We greet thee by the window-pane We hear thy scuffle on the stair. We see the flaps of the large ears Quick rais’d to ask which way we go;

Crossing the frozen lake, appears Thy small black figure on the snow!… We lay thee, close within our reach, Here, where the grass is smooth and warm,

Between the holly and the beech, Where oft we watch’d thy couchant form,

Asleep yet lending half an ear

To travellers on the Portsmouth road; –

There build we thee, O guardian dear,

Mark’d with a stone, thy last abode!

I have also planned a monument for a grand old dog called Prickle, a beloved creature who died aged 16.

One day, Prickle’s monument will stand at the bottom of the garden here at Hedgerley, where she lived for many years of her life. The memorial will stand nine and a half feet high, four feet wide and two feet deep, made of reconstituted Bath stone. Along with crockets and pinnacles – in sympathy with her name – there will be four gargoyles of canine weepers cast in bronze-finished resin.

Prickle herself, also cast in bronze resin, will sit on a tasselled cushion, prepared to meet her master on Judgement Day. So schemes my friend Alan Dodd, who designed the monument (inspired by the tomb of St Peter Martyr

We had no idea where she had come from. It must have been from circus stock. Every day, many times a day, she would ‘canter’ round in a circus-size circle, stopping to pirouette on her hind legs at four opposite points of the ‘ring’. Who was the ringmaster whose ghost was still cracking his whip over Prickle?

Other departed dogs are honoured in my front hall, on a wooden tablet, surrounded by a ten-foot-high Gothic wooden frame, emblazoned with a palm-bearing, gilded angel.

Under the gilded words,‘JOYFULLY BARKING IN THE HEAVENLY CHORUS’ are all their names: Clover and Thistle, Violet and Florence, Hops of Hereford and Flint.

Prickle and Thistle are also commemorated over the door, with their names on a painted banner, with the words ‘HE WHO SOWS THISTLES SHALL REAP PRICKLES’.

The dachshunds Violet and Florence have their coats of arms painted on the walls – gilded and quartered with rabbits and bones.

All their paw prints are embedded and named, Hollywood-style, in the floor – a feature that gives me huge pleasure to this day.

Their names lie under the gilded words, ‘Joyfully barking in the heavenly chorus’

On the Road

We have a chance of winning

What’s your favourite destination?

Barcelona because I lived there for three years. Ibiza – having really long lunches on the beach. And LA because I’ve got a lot of mates there.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Probably a couple of day trips to Skegness when I lived in Leicester. I remember my grandparents taking us away to Majorca, which was the first time we went on a sunshine holiday abroad. I was about eight or nine.

Is there something you really miss when you’re on holiday?

Probably cooking, which is a new passion. Having been single now for about seven years, I got sick of eating out on my own and takeaways. I said, ‘Come on, Gary. Learn to cook.’ I cook all the time and if I do go away, I genuinely miss not cooking for myself, my boys and friends.

Was football your favourite sport when you were little?

Football in the winter and cricket in the summer – I just loved whichever one I was playing at the time.

Do you still support Leicester City?

Oh God, yeah. How we do still affects my weekend.

What team did you most enjoy playing for? Was playing for England the most exciting?

The dream for me was to play for Leicester – and when I played at Barcelona. I loved my time at Tottenham and Everton as well. Playing for your country is obviously an absolute ambition and it’s always very special.

What skills were needed to be so lethal in the penalty area?

It’s mathematics really and gambling on where you think the ball might go. You’ve got to be cool-headed and able to finish – and pace helps – but most of the

ability to score goals is between the ears, and I’ve got big ears.

You never received a yellow or red card during your playing career – are you still so even-tempered?

I’m very calm.

Do you miss playing?

I really don’t. For the last two years in Japan I was permanently injured. I’ve found something else that I really love, in television. I work out in a gym three times a week, have a personal trainer, and do regular Pilates.

When did you realise Gazza had lost it?

I don’t know. We played together, and he was great. We’re still in touch.

Would you have wanted one of your boys to become a footballer?

Only if they’d been really unbelievably good, because it would have been very difficult for them otherwise.

Could you have played cricket for England? Are the skills very different from footballing skills?

I was pretty good at cricket, and captained Leicestershire through my school years. Totally different – but it is a moving ball.

Do you mind the attacks on you for making political statements, particularly about having dark skin? No, because they generally come from

extreme positions. I was called the P word consistently at school and was a tiny, geeky kid with sticky-out teeth and big ears, but I was good at sport, which bailed me out. That was the point I was trying to make.

Are you paid too much?

I don’t think I’m paid enough!

Will England win this year’s World Cup? We have a fantastic group of young talent. So we will have a chance.

What did you think of the victory of the Lionesses?

It was wonderful. They did brilliantly, and showed lots of character and resilience.

Can you tell me about your joke ‘Chloe Kelly is England’s heroine, bra none’?

I’ve got eight and a half million Twitter followers, and a few took it out of context. I should have said, ‘It’s Wonderbra, playing against Germany.’

Where did you go on your honeymoons? The Caribbean with Michelle and Italy with Danielle.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

A live octopus when I was in Japan, which was gross, still wriggling when they put it in my mouth.

Do you have a go at the local language? I speak Spanish, and a little bit of Japanese.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away? Why would I sleep somewhere strange?

What are your top travelling tips? Don’t eat plane food – I generally take on a salad.

50 Times Football Changed the World by Gary Lineker and Ivor Baddiel is out now

Taking a Walk

On the bonnie banks of Loch Garten

patrick barkham

My children have been raised in a very flat place. So, rather than daunt them with a Cairngorms mountain walk, I took them for a stroll at Loch Garten, which is the Highlands – and nature –for beginners.

This RSPB reserve offers a walk between the woods and the water, Caledonian pine forest and scenic loch.

We spilled out of the car and headed to the visitor centre. An RSPB helper greeted us and grilled the kids on their nature knowledge. ‘What do golden eagles eat?’

To my dismay, my wild children were tongue-tied. ‘Badger?’ tried one. Oh, the shame.

Visitor centre patronised, eco-friendly beeswax sandwich wraps bought, keen to sample local nature we began the Two Lochs Trail, a circular two-mile stroll from Loch Garten to Loch Mallachie and back.

The osprey pairs who breed here in the summer had departed for Africa but, like most visitors, we’d happily settle for a golden eagle, a brace of red squirrels and half a pound of crested tits.

It was a still day; grey, soft and quiet,

and it took a few minutes to realise that the forest was full of small birds. The trees peeped with great tits, coal tits and blue tits, and the occasional siskin – but no crested tits.

Some of Abernethy’s pine woods may be truly ancient but they didn’t feel very wild, because there was also a forest of signs and interpretation boards. A conscientious person could spend half a day reading them.

Loch Garten shone silver through the pinky trunks of the pines and when we reached its sandy shores, most of my walking companions fell at the first hurdle. My wife, Lisa, and two children set up camp on the little beach. So now it was just me and Esme.

At ten, Esme has the eyes of a hawk, the ears of a bat and the enthusiasm of a puppy. So she enlarges the perimeters of any walk.

The dry forest floor sounded hollow as she ran ahead, marvelling at the dazzling pink and yellow boletus, and the miniature forests of bright green moss that marched across the ground.

Like many small people, she is particularly adept at spying tiny things. She soon found ‘a weird hoverfly that looks like a hornet and makes a noise like a machine when it lands’, she explained, with characteristic precision. Her next forest discoveries were a black beetle, as shiny as a new car, and an unused lip balm.

Unlike many wildlife-idealising adults, Esme grasps that the natural world isn’t a land of peace and love, and is mildly obsessed with its peril –pondering whether fungi might be deadly death caps and on constant alert for a bloodsucking horsefly.

So when she declared she had found a tick, I was sure she was mistaken. A tiny beetle thing was crouched on a grass stem waiting to slip onto the leg of an unsuspecting walker or dog. Ah. Ahem, it was a tick. ‘I knew it,’ crowed Esme. ‘I recognised its flat little body.’

Tick avoided, we continued to the far loch, where green lily pads floated on dark water. A rising breeze sent miniature waves against the grey roots of the pines that formed the loch shore with a gentle sluice, sluice.

On our return, we admired fungi the size of a tea plate, breathed the damp woody scent, and all was good with the world. We were probably too noisy to see crested tits or red squirrels. But Esme didn’t mind.

On the car journey home, she spied an eagle. She knows her buzzards (called ‘the tourist eagle’ in these parts) and this big bird with frayed wing tips wasn’t one of those.

Eyes on the road, I couldn’t confirm her sighting but my confirmation wasn’t needed. Esme is no beginner in nature now. Like that eagle, she’s soaring – past the capabilities of her parents, for the first of what I hope will be many times in her life.

Loch Garten Nature Centre, Abernethy National Nature Reserve, Nethy Bridge PH25 3EF

Genius crossword 420

el sereno

X stands for the same word wherever it appears

Across

7 Singer like this professional must keep a number (7)

8 Massage men lacking in enthusiasm, possibly (7) 10 Could Kierkegaard be one of man’s best friends? (5,4) 11 Abandon holiday (5) 12 Trick person who’s averse to cold? (5) 13 Conservative getting on train (3,6)

15 Ignorant article in Paris about a struggle (7)

17 Root giving flavour in drinks (English) (7)

18 Cheat is an awful x (4,5)

20 European surrounded by worst attack on all sides (5)

21 Wants rapid growth, with leader going east (5)

23 Barbie redesigned in tin for x? (9)

24 Bored, having lost case after European agreement for blot on the landscape (7)

25 Provided protection, being cautious (7)

Down

1 Traffic measures may be serious about small roles going north? The other way round (5,5)

2 Indian caught x (6)

3 Excited, as to come out (8)

4 A broadcast covering centigrade scale (6)

5 William is able to heat water in this (8)

6 Smoker invested in inhalant expected to rise (4)

7 Familiar number from x unit eg, turn out (9,4)

9 Knowing nothing about thin needle gun (13)

14 Finished dispatches admitting pressure - exceeds budget (10)

16 Distant relation involved in romance stories (8)

17 Jokes about boy and right things to wear for best (4,4)

19 Heading off Darwin’s birds for these islands (6)

20 Lynx, pre-Christian, aboard ark perhaps (6)

22 Departs suffering, wife having left for good (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 14th December 2022 We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15. NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Genius

Foe (5)

Possess (3)

Teaching, instruction (7)

Divided by two (6)

Loft room (5)

Dry tea -yes! (anag) (9)

Lorry driver (7)

Talk of the past (9)

Practical type (7) 15 Ancient Egyptian tomb (7) 16 Dale (6) 18 Slight mistake (5) 20 Sexually attractive (5) 22 Pinch (3)

Winner: James Bibby, Preston, Lancashire Runners-up: Brigid Gunn, Sparkford, Somerset; William Moore, Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear

418 solution Moron 418 solution: Across: 1 Forty, 4 Chewed (Fortitude), 9 Retinue, 10 Cruel, 11 Eddy, 12 Dreaded, 13 Ray, 14 Acne, 16 Dupe, 18 Boa, 20 Episode, 21 Scar, 24 Issue, 25 Outrage, 26 Honest, 27 Happy. Down: 1 Ferret, 2 Rated, 3 Yank, 5 Hacienda, 6 Wound up, 7 Delude, 8 Ready, 13 Recovers, 15 Crimson, 17 Relish, 18 Below, 19 Artery, 22 Clamp, 23 Etch.

When a professional bridge-playing friend of mine plays with a student, he has a code as dummy after his student has made a contract. ‘Well done’ means ‘You were successful but played it wrongly.’ ‘Well played’ means what it says: ‘You played it correctly.’

(1) Fourth Suit Forcing, ‘We’re going to game, partner. More information, please.’ (2) Implying his six-four shape.

(3) Roman Key Card Blackwood.

(4) Showing zero or (clearly) three of the ‘five aces’ (including the king of clubs).

(5) Asking for the queen of clubs (logically with a grand slam in mind as the partnership are forced to Six).

(6) Showing the queen of clubs and the king of hearts – perfection for South. On this month’s 7♣ from an online tournament, the declarer at Table One won West’s queenof-spades lead and drew trumps in three rounds. He tested hearts and they were four-two. Somewhat desperate, he crossed to the ace of diamonds and ruffed a diamond. He then ran his clubs.

Miraculously, on the last club, West had to discard from the jack-ten of spades and jack of hearts. If he discarded his heart, declarer’s remaining heart would be promoted. However, when he let go of his penultimate spade, dummy’s ♠ A 6 won the last two tricks, the six tantalizingly beating East’s five at trick 13. ‘Well done.’

Thomas Bessis from France, declarer at Table Two, showed the way. Winning the queenof-spades lead with the king, he crossed to the ace of diamonds and ruffed a diamond. He ruffed to the ten of clubs and ruffed a third diamond (high – as West discarded). He crossed to the queen of clubs (West discarding) and ruffed a fourth diamond. He then crossed to the ace of spades and ruffed dummy’s third spade (with his last club).

All that remained was to cross to the king of hearts, draw East’s last trump and lead to his ace-queen of hearts. ‘Well played’ – a perfect dummy reversal, ruffing four times in hand to land a seventh club trick.

Competition TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION NO 286 you were invited to write a poem with the title Pudding. I White was told by his gran not to call it ‘afters’. Con Connell’s narrator remembered ‘The day that “pudding” changed into “dessert” ’. For Vic Cole, the war was between Yorkshire and Bakewell puddings. Of the former, Mary Hodges remarked, ‘You need only eggs, milk and flour/ And a strong arm to beat it and beat it./ It won’t take you more than an hour.’

Fiona Clarke wrote of a saintly hermit, Asphodel, for whom ‘When Christmas church bells chimed, from snowy skies, / Strange puddings floated down, to her surprise.’ Commiserations to them, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to D A Prince.

I understand. You’re trying to talk about That Once-a-Year, that highlight heavyweight

Which you insist Tradition must bring out And lay a hearty slice on every plate.

That solid, densely dark and fruity one, Basin-ed and swaddled, tied up on the gas, Boiled for so many hours the windows run, Our steamed-up kitchen weeping down the glass.

The one your mother made. You’re mistyeyed

About those childhood Christmases, the snow (Pristine, of course), the crackling fireside, Et cetera. And then that pudding. No: We’re scared of swallowing the sixpence piece, Too full/polite to crack the surface cheer And whisper it’s too much – the stodge, the grease.

Give up: we’re having something else this year.

D A Prince

Puddings are vital to round off a meal; Pile on the calories – that’s how I feel! I pine for their sweetness; my mum’s were a dream

With sponge cake and jelly and custard and cream.

I know it’s quite certain which one I like best, Here’s a puzzle to name it in case you’ve not guessed:

My first in in tartlet and pastry and toast, My second in frying and grilling and roast. My third is more personal, thinking of me, My fourth is in toffee and muffins for tea.

My fifth is in apples and lettuce and salad, My sixth is in breakfast – and so ends my ballad.

I’ve put in an order – I hope it comes soon. Ah! Here is my trifle. Now where is my spoon? Daphne Lester

I am a little overweight –I’m only twelve, but ten stone eight; The extra pounds affect my gait And no one wants to be my mate.

At break times they all call me names: ‘Fatso’, ‘pudding’ – never James; I’m just a bit too fat for games –The others have much smaller frames.

My mum and dad see nothing wrong In handing snacks out all day long, They say that I’ll be big and strong, But all I want is to belong.

I’m calm now, lying on my bed: I’ve cut my arms until they bled. Tomorrow brings no sense of dread; Tomorrow they will find me Anthony Young

Marriage may at times be good, Though Oscar says it’s like a long Dull meal that always starts with pud, And witty Oscar’s seldom wrong.

Pudding for starters? Oh, what bliss! Fuelling youthful loins and hearts, Love and lust sealed with a kiss And chocs and cakes and jam-filled tarts.

Then suddenly we’re in reverse Faced with spuds and peas and fish; Next comes soup and, what’s worse, Hunger’s dying, dish by dish.

Finally, once we’ve had our fill And reached the point that really hurts, A tiny mint comes with the bill, Symbolic of our just desserts.

Rob Salamon

COMPETITION No 288 The drought seems a long time ago; the transport authorities tell us to carry water at all times. You are invited to write a poem with the title Always Carry Water 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 288’, by Thursday 15th December.

PETITE

UNDERSTANDING

Motoring

Exhibitions

Am I a lesbian?

QI’m sure you’ll think I’m ridiculous: I’m a 70-year-oldwoman and I’m starting to wonder if I might not be gay. I did get married and had two children whom I adore, but I’ve always felt an outsider. I’ve always had very close friendships with women and felt happier with them than I have with men. My husband and I no longer have sex – it was always fine at the time but, watching TV the other day, I saw a woman and suddenly found her very attractive. I am so confused. Should I follow up on these sexual urges – or just let sleeping dogs lie?

Name and address supplied

ABecause it’s rare for older women to discuss this kind of thing, when such thoughts enter our heads we think we’re special. Or odd. But surely we’ve all felt as if we’re outsiders much of the time – I certainly have. And what woman hasn’t occasionally felt a flaring-up of sexual desire for another woman? Even one that lasts only a few seconds – it’s not that weird. If you really feel tormented by this thought and spend your life craving to be in the arms of someone of the same sex, I’d say just accept it and carry on with life.

The sandwich generation

QI’m one of that unfortunate lot caught between two generations. I have young children – from three to 16 – who need my care. But I also have two elderly parents in their eighties who are constantly in need of my help. My husband complains he never sees me and I’m going frantic. How do others cope in this situation?

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

AMy feeling is that your children come first. They are completely dependent on you and, unlike your parents, they have no ability to tap into other resources because they’re too small. Failing your husband’s helping you a bit, can’t you organise some kind of help for your parents? Neighbours? A local handyman who might be able to look in on them once a week, for a small fee, to sort out minor problems? Local charities who could help with shopping? They may not think of asking anyone else because you always jump to it. Explain to them how stressed you are and encourage them to find other help. You should be the last resort. You just can’t do it all.

Daughter’s slob boyfriend

QI know I sound like a snob but, although he seems perfectly nice and has been very helpful to me from time to time, I am getting increasingly irritated by my daughter’s boyfriend, who spends a lot of time here. He comes down to breakfast in just his underpants and a vest, he holds his knife like a pen, he often swears quite badly and he eats crisps in front of the TV with his mouth open. My daughter, however, adores him – and he treats her, I must admit, like a princess. Am I just a snob?

AAs I suspect he wouldn’t behave like that in a hotel, I imagine he feels inferior and is all too aware of your being irritated by him and perhaps looking down on him. He’s just doing all this to make a statement and hold on to his own fragile identity – particularly in front of your daughter. Before buying him a dressing-gown for Christmas (and get him to choose one he’d like), try hard to cultivate your own friendship with

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him. Flatter him. Tell him how lovely it is to see your daughter so happy with him. Ask him to sort out trivial problems and then go into raptures about how clever he is to solve them. Even when we know it’s exaggerated, we all love being told how marvellous we are. And it might lessen his desire to behave like a lout.

Should I see my half-sister?

QI’ve been contacted on Facebook by someone from Canada, who claims to be my half-sister. The dates fit – my father was in Canada at the time she says she was conceived –and her existence would fit with his odd trips abroad, when my mother would become very depressed. Both my parents died last year – so I can’t ask them. I’m in two minds about whether to reply. Do you have any advice? I’m perfectly happy as I am, by the way – married with two lovely boys – and don’t want to rock the boat. But of course I’m curious! Fred O, Axminster

AI wouldn’t be able to resist! And, at best, you’d be giving your boys an extra Canadian family to get to know. But be wary. A lot of longlost siblings – particularly of the opposite sex – can almost fall in love when they meet up with some total stranger who reminds them of family. This usually fades but it can be awkward. Why not seek help from the big adoption charity corambaaf.org.uk? They might be able to provide a counsellor specialising in this area who could point out the pitfalls and even act as a third party before the first meeting.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Issue 62 Winter 2022

Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis by Max Hastings

Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown by Craig Brown

Darling by India Knight

The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome by Harry Sidebottom

After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport

Siena: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval City by Jane Stevenson

David Stirling: The Phoney Major by Gavin Mortimer

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald by Flora Fraser

Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle by Ben Macintyre

Lessons by Ian McEwan

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk

Coffee with Hitler by Charles Spicer

Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

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

Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke

Editor: Liz Anderson

Design: Lawrence Bogle

Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller

Publisher: James Pembroke

Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jasper Gibbons

For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

Burning bright

A recent article in the Times asserted that ‘Mediocrities are among the most promising people in the world.’ James Mariott went on to explain that those who have achieved only moderate success still burn with the energies necessary for serious achievement. He wrote that ‘because the media makes artists into brands, modern reputations are durable. The best work of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan is decades in the past. But they will be famous until they die.’

I thought of this when the Booker Prize winner was announced last month. The winning title, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was only the second published novel by the Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka (born 1975), while the shortlisted 88-year-old Alan Garner (Treacle Walker) has written more than 25 books (see review on page 25). Philip Pullman has called Garner the ‘most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien… Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance… Our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires.’ Let’s hope Sri Lanka appreciates its writers more than we do and that both Karunatilaka and Garner, despite their success, are still burning with the necessary energies to write more great books.

The other shortlisted writers included the 65-year-old American Percival Everett (The Trees), about whom Paul Bailey writes on page 18; and NoViolet Bulawayo (born in Zimbabwe in 1981), who was shortlisted in 2013 for her debut novel We Need New Names and this year for only her second novel Glory. So seemingly neither age nor quantity matter: talent will out.

And there is certainly much talent in the following pages. Take fiction, for example: 84-year-old Joyce Carol Oates’s Babysitter is her 59th novel and reviewers were impressed by its rattling pace and thrilling twists. Lawrence Osborne was born in 1958, and his latest book, On Java Road, is his most compulsive yet, according to a reviewer. And the hugely successful 51-yearold Richard Osman continues to charm with his third novel, The Bullet That Missed. Get reading – and enjoy.

DEVIL DOGS

FIRST IN LAST OUT – KING COMPANY FROM GUADALCANAL TO THE SHORES OF JAPAN SAUL DAVID William Collins, 604pp, £25

For Gerard DeGroot, reviewer for the Times, Saul David understands the ugliness of war. ‘The gruesome detail is brutally accurate, never gratuitous. David is obviously fascinated by war, held in its seductive grip, yet his passion for the topic never causes him to whitewash war’s loathsome nature. David examines the Pacific War from August 1942, when the first American combat troops arrived, to the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima three years later.’ David has rendered the Pacific War ‘in painful and poignant detail’.

The Devil Dogs ‘included an extraordinary number of talented writers who recorded their experiences in diaries, letters and memoirs. Yet the real credit must go to the author who knits together this vast collection of material into a narrative that reads like war in real time. It’s war unplugged: cruelty, destruction, pain, but also love, kindness and camaraderie. I cried for these men and then thanked God that I will never have to send my son to war,’ wrote DeGroot.

In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer pointed out that ‘a parade of cheerful, courageous and heroic young Americans from one-horse towns all over the country marches through the pages of this book, the

History

officers mainly men the other ranks would follow anywhere, the other ranks mainly tough-as-hell streetfighters who want to blast what they invariably call “the Japs”. It is like all those films you have seen of the Pacific war; but this is a scholarly work, and the copious footnotes refer the reader to the accounts showing that these remarkable events really happened.’

The jungle conditions were appalling, but the paramount danger was the enemy’s code of death before dishonour. ‘Although David superbly recreates every aspect of the atmosphere of this war short of exposing his readers to the actual physical danger, some readers may find the extensive recreations of American banter rather tedious: but that is a small price to pay for so superb a history.’

12th and 13th centuries, their stories irrevocably intertwined by familial feuding, war, intermarrying and attempting peace.

Katherine Harvey in the Sunday Times described it as ‘an era of dysfunctional family politics … it reads like the plot of a soap opera peopled by larger-than-life characters’. While praising ‘Hanley’s fluent storytelling and deep knowledge of the period’, she admitted that ‘it is sometimes hard to keep track of a vast cast’. However, she added, ‘the lives of these men and women are very entertaining and politically significant: their births, marriages and deaths shaped the fate of entire nations and chance events could change the course of history’.

‘In staying close to her characters, Hanley fails to bring in the wider social, economic and cultural history of the period,’ Claudia Gold complained in the Literary Review ‘She delivers on the “Two Houses” part of her title, but not on the “Two Kingdoms”.’ She conceded that ‘Hanley’s book is enormous fun, but it’s only half a book. If you’re looking for a royal medieval Dynasty or Dallas, read it. If you want to know more about Capetian France or Plantagenet England, you might be advised to read something else.’

A HISTORY OF WATER BEING AN ACCOUNT OF A MURDER, AN EPIC AND TWO VISIONS OF GLOBAL HISTORY

EDWARD WILSON-LEE

William Collins, 352pp, £25

This is a book about Portugal’s maritime empire seen through the eyes of two very different Renaissance figures, diplomat and archivist

‘Written with verve and based on impeccable scholarship, Two Houses, Two Kingdoms is peppered with human stories about the struggle to maintain a dynasty,’ Helen Carr wrote in the TLS. Everything depended on the smooth succession of one king to the next. Without it, there was anarchy. Nothing illustrates this better than the capricious shifting of power between the rival royal houses of France and England during the

Epic poet: Luís de Camões 1524-80

History

Damiao de Gois, and epic poet Luís de Camões. ‘At the heart of Edward Wilson-Lee’s erudite and engrossing dual biography, A History of Water, is the stark contrast between the curious, questioning world view of Damiao and that of his more famous contemporary, Luís de Camões, the author of the Portuguese national epic poem The Lusiads, an Odyssey full of seafaring heroics,’ wrote Paul Lay in his review for the Times

‘As Wilson-Lee argues Damiao in his writings wanted to “temper the triumphalism of Portuguese and European narratives of history”; Camões flattered and celebrated his royal master’s imperial dreams.’ Wilson-Lee’s book ‘combines literary flair with deep historical insight. One of its many strengths is its vivid characterisation of people and places, not least those of Lisbon life high and low.’

Jessie Childs, in the Sunday Times, called the book ‘exhilarating’ and ‘whip-smart’. Wilson-Lee ‘presents two competing visions of global history through the lives of two Portuguese travellers: a one-eyed exiled poet with a blinkered mind and a freethinking archivist who was thrilled by new voices. The two might have passed each other on the streets of Lisbon in the 1540s, but are unlikely to have met.’

Childs thought ‘the alternating biographies give the book form and flow, allowing Wilson-Lee to cast off into the Tagus, Ganges and Mekong, probing the depths of human knowledge and revealing many wondrous things. This book is itself something of a wonder: beautifully written and utterly mesmerising. I loved every page.’

ALL THE KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORLD

THE EXTRAORDINARY HISTORY OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

SIMON GARFIELD

Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 400pp, £18.99

A Russian émigré writing in E & T recalled that when he escaped to the West the first thing he did was buy the latest edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, so desperate was he to assuage ‘the information hunger I had been experiencing all my life in the Soviet Union’. Yet more recently Simon Garfield, when compiling this

history of the encyclopaedia, was offered a pristine set of Britannica on eBay for a penny. What happened?

‘Wikipedia is now the way of all knowledge and the printed encyclopaedia is doomed by its very structure,’ Rose George wrote in the Spectator. And yet, ‘Garfield’s love for Wikipedia, dismissed by snobs but used by us all, is surprising but heartfelt. He believes in the democracy of input.’ ‘Garfield is really asking: what is knowledge?’ JohnPaul Davies observed in Buzz. ‘And what is our understanding of permanence in the digital age?’

‘As Garfield shows in this witty and geekily eclectic book, the encyclopaedias of this golden age were more than stores of knowledge, they were half knowledge, half prevailing wisdom,’ Ethan Croft wrote in the Times. ‘The spiky flawed bit of encyclopaedias is what makes them such an interesting read decades and even centuries after the raw information within is disproved.’

‘Sometimes the book drags, weighed down by the encyclopaedic bounty . Perhaps, then, this is a book to be used like an encyclopaedia: to be put down but always picked up again. To be read with pleasure, but not all at once,’ George opined. ‘Because it is a pleasure. Garfield writes fluidly, cheerily and charmingly, even while breeziness does not detract from the scale of his ambition: to understand nothing less than humans’ need for knowledge and how to convey and preserve it.’ ‘The encyclopaedia may have had its day in print,’ Davies concluded, ‘but this is a book that deserves to be on the shelf of every knowledge geek in the western world.’

THE REAL SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

THE TRUE STORY OF HOW THE BRITISH AND US SECRET SERVICES WORK TOGETHER

MICHAEL SMITH

Simon & Schuster, 576pp, £25

Covering the more than 80 years of uniquely close cooperation between British and American intelligence, starting with Bletchley Park and the Enigma code machine, Smith’s book is ‘frank in describing periods of tension and mistrust’, wrote Nick Fishwick in The Cipher Brief, the daily national security bulletin. ‘This book should be read by anyone who

wants to understand what this cooperation has done for each country. There is more detail on the early than the later stages of the relationship: nearly 400 pages on the period 1941-1974, but less than a hundred on 1974 to the present. Smith might have written a little more about the 5 Eyes relationships. But on the whole, he has done us a great service. He is right that the real special relationship should be celebrated: but it must not be mythologised, and never taken for granted.’

Max Hastings, in his review for the Sunday Times, concluded that ‘this is a thoroughly responsible, unsensational account of the interservice relationship, which eschews harsh judgments about personalities’. However, John Paul Rathbone, in the Financial Times, emphasised Smith’s central thesis that because ‘UK and US decision makers receive the same intelligence and often share a similar worldview... they are likely to adopt a similar attitude to world events’, and that this is the real special relationship. ‘However much politicians come and go, or make bad use of good intelligence, the spies’ ties endure.’

Rathbone concluded that the history of this relationship ‘makes for an engrossing, even thrilling, read’ and that “Michael Smith, a former military intelligence officer and author of several books about spying,

The special relationship should never be taken for granted

History

handles the material judiciously and writes with élan.’

THE MANDELA BRIEF SYDNEY KENTRIDGE AND THE TRIALS OF APARTHEID THOMAS GRANT

John Murray, 335pp, £25

From a secular Jewish family and the son of a British MP, Sydney Kentridge practised law in South Africa for 30 years before pursuing a successful career back in the UK. He represented Nelson Mandela at the 1958 Treason Trial in Pretoria and represented the family of murdered activist Steve Biko at the inquest into his death.

R W Johnson, in the Times, found that ‘the book’s strength lies in its close exposition of his brilliant gifts in cross-examination, his command of voluminous evidence, his often sinuous irony and sarcasm and the way in which he led many of the champions of the apartheid state to destroy their credibility in court. Grant rightly emphasises that these extraordinary courtroom performances rested on herculean amounts of labour and an utter perfectionism about getting every detail right.’

However, Johnson felt that Grant ‘doesn’t know South Africa, and it occasionally shows’. He also betrays a ‘lack of awareness of the complicated political context’. For example, Mandela lied when he denied being a Communist (he was actually on its central committee at the time) and the decision not to impose the death penalty on Mandela was not the result of brilliant liberal advocacy but of a behind-the-scenes deal between the British and South African governments.

In the estimation of Spectator reviewer Alexander Larman, Grant’s book is ‘well-written, deeply

researched and wholly gripping... full of human interest and justifiable passion for the injustice that a determined man spent his life fighting. Would that we had more Sydney Kentridges today.’

THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST A PERSONAL HISTORY JEREMY BOWEN Picador,

368pp, £20

As befits its title, wrote Justin Marozzi in the Times, this is a ‘very personal story, covering the period from Bowen’s arrival as a 29-year-old correspondent reporting on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 to today’. Ian Birrell in the Spectator described Bowen as necessarily ‘drenched in the blood and misery’ that soils the Middle East, a view shared by Marozzi, who described the book as covering ‘an awful lot of bloody wars, taking in everywhere from Tunis and Tripoli to Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, the occupied Palestinian territories, Baghdad, Beirut and beyond’.

solutions, but his Personal History is ‘a solid footing for anyone stepping into a complex and compelling region’ – into those lands famously described by Amos Oz as ‘pregnant with suppressed violence’.

CHINA AFTER MAO THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER FRANK DIKÖTTER

Bloomsbury, 375pp, £25

Birrell thought it was to Bowen’s credit that this work is not a ‘selfglorifying ego trip’, adding that a bit more of the personal might have been welcome. Colin Freeman in the Telegraph commended Bowen for ‘wearing his knowledge lightly’, going on to describe how ‘Over what must have been gallons of tea and coffee, we meet everyone from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah through to Colonel Gaddafi and President Assad. Like an erudite dinner guest, Bowen knows when to provide context and detail, and crucially, when to stop.’

NJ McGarrigle in the Irish Times said we should be thankful for Bowen’s work ‘with its rich historical detail, its composure and balance, and its readability’. Marozzi recorded that Bowen ends with a ‘clarion call to powerful states looking at the region. “Do no more harm. Then try to make things better.” But such is the force of everything that has come before, it is difficult to muster much optimism.’

‘For an understanding of the getting, exercising and holding of power in the People’s Republic of China, historian Frank Dikötter has few rivals,’ wrote Isabel Hilton in the Observer. ‘His latest volume, China After Mao, is a clear-eyed and detailed account of the period between Mao’s death in 1976 and 2012, the year of Xi’s arrival in the top job.’

In his review for the Financial Times, Jonathan Fenby wrote that Dikötter is able to offer ‘a blow-byblow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies with a wealth of detail about their impact as the leadership veered between hectic growth and retrenchment... The basic lesson to be drawn... is that Chinese economic policy is a function of politics whose core concern is to maintain Communist rule. If necessary, this is by force, as in the 1989 crackdown and the continuing repressive machinery, but also in implementing policies seen to buttress the regime, however ineffective or inefficient.’

Sunday Times reviewer Michael Sheridan agreed with this judgement. ‘Breaking with the bland orthodoxy peddled in some of our finest universities, Dikötter says that China today is a Leviathan where a party, fascist in all but name, controls society using “capitalist tools in socialist hands” to enrich its elites while “financial repression” keeps the countryside down and the workersApartheid had an impact on all areas of life

In the end, wrote McGarrigle, Bowen makes no predictions and offers no

It is to Bowen’s credit that this is not an ego trip

History

poor.’ For Dikötter, ‘the creation of falsehood is the governing principle of the Communist Party, and he has written a revolutionary book to prove it’.

DÜNKIRKEN 1940

THE GERMAN VIEW OF DUNKIRK

Osprey Publishing, 352pp, £20

‘The noise, my dear, and the people!’ This, allegedly, was how an equivocal Guardee recalled Dunkirk. What German troops made of it is harder to gauge because, as Robert Kershaw reveals in his ground-breaking book, almost all of those involved were later killed on the Eastern Front. Their superiors saw it as a missed opportunity to capture men as well as matériel, while acknowledging that the battle for France took precedence. But the battle-weary Wehrmacht landsers, rightly proud of their historic victory, seem to have been too eager to grab their share of the loot left behind by the BEF to engage in retrospection. Nobody, including Hitler, was aware quite how many British troops would live to fight another day.

Was Hitler’s famous ‘Halt Order’ to the Panzers an own goal? In the Telegraph, Richard Overy said this is ‘one of the main myths Kershaw sets out to assail’. The order actually came from the German commander, von Runstedt, who knew his troops were suffering from chronic battle fatigue. Furthermore, ‘the network of canals around Dunkirk, and the deliberately flooded terrain, would have been costly for armour’. But Hitler was wary. He thought ‘the French must have something up their sleeve, as in 1914’. Anxious to reinforce his armies elsewhere he believed Goering’s vainglorious boast that the Luftwaffe could administer the coup de grâce at Dunkirk, when in fact they couldn’t.

In the Times, Roger Moorhouse stressed that the swift German advance to the coast was no joyride, ‘something that the traditional British narrative – so often strangely admiring of Blitzkrieg – tends to omit’. Casualties were high, particularly among officers and NCOs. Moorhouse described Kershaw’s book as ‘a welcome rebalancing, a thoughtful, wellresearched and well-written

contribution to a narrative that has long been too one sided and too mired in national mythology’.

SCOTLAND

THE GLOBAL HISTORY – 1603 TO THE PRESENT MURRAY PITTOCK Yale, 512pp, £25

A Californian who has lived in Scotland since 1980, Gerard DeGroot was an interesting choice to review this compendious history for the Times: the Scots were once a ‘global people’, he noted, which ‘might explain why foreigners regard them more highly than they regard themselves’.

The Scots, she noted, have been usefully able to choose when to be British. Alex Massie in the Spectator also picked up on a conundrum: for today’s nationalists, to be authentically Scottish the country must be ‘truly British’ in its desire to recreate the consensus Britain of the mid 20th century.

MAGNIFICENT REBELS

THE FIRST ROMANTICS AND THE INVENTION OF THE SELF ANDREA WULF

John Murray, 494pp, £25

‘This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparkling ideas,’ Adam Sisman wrote rapturously in the Guardian. Andrea Wulf tells the story of ‘the Jena set’, a group of writers, philosophers, poets and translators who, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris in the 1790s, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. One of the most prominent of their group was the young professor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who declared that ‘the source of all reality is the Ich’, placing the self at the centre of everything.

DeGroot found Pittock’s listing of eminent Scots through the ages a dull start, but urged sticking with it for the ‘forgotten multitude’ who represented Scottish soft power abroad (doctors, botanists, law students et al) after Culloden fuelled a diaspora. There is, he noted, a Yak and Yeti Burns Night in Nepal. Pittock’s discussion of the 18th and 19th centuries was the high point, tracing the origin of both ‘military’ Scotland and the ‘romantic’ brand.

Allan Massie in the Scotsman sourced Pittock’s intellectual skills to Aberdeen grammar school (‘200 years older than Eton’). He found the book’s wealth of detail ‘dizzying’ and vowed to dip into it for ‘thoughtprovoking’ morsels, though wanted Pittock to be less ambivalent about the Scots who have dominated England’s main institutions.

In the Guardian, Anna Keay was similarly engaged by a writer who could move from historical analysis to the cultural significance of Tutti Frutti, but found Pittock guilty of the ‘jingoistic exceptionalism’ he decried.

‘For all their progressive politics, it was the male self that the Jena Romantics mostly wanted to liberate,’ Ben Hutchinson noted in the TLS, a woman had to submit her own ‘Ich’ to her husband’s. The group’s clever and charismatic Caroline BöhmerSchlegel-Schelling was having none of that, changing her husband three times.

‘Magnificent Rebels is a thrilling intellectual history that reads more like a racy but intelligent novel or even a very superior soap opera where characters are almost all oddballs, but geniuses,’ Christopher Hart enthused in the Sunday Times. In the New York Times Jennifer Szalai noted ‘the book’s exuberant narrative happens to recount plenty of unmagnificent squabbling among a coterie of extremely fallible humans.’

‘The secret of Wulf’s achievement is in the “notes” at the end, a great wedge of a section,’ James Marriott

An intellectual history that reads like a racy novel

noted in the Times, ‘the book is a triumph of unseen toil … the reader is simply presented with the bright jewels of anecdote.’

‘Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book,’ Frances Wilson concluded in the Spectator. ‘The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all … Jena was the birthplace of self-consciousness, selfishness and selfies — the whole business of me, me, me and me too.’

A PIPELINE RUNS THROUGH IT THE STORY OF OIL FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Once it became apparent that oil was a better fuel for battleships than coal and that motor vehicles were here to stay, no prisoners were taken by those determined to exploit this gilt-edged resource. For instance Royal Dutch Shell literally exterminated the unfortunate Sumatrans below whose land there was a huge oil field. A similar fate had already befallen the native American tribes of New York and Pennsylvania, the fiefdom of Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller. And when, in 1885, oil was discovered in Upper Burma, oil-less Britain promptly invaded.

In the Times, Max Hastings said that ‘one of the many fascinating conclusions’ reached by Keith Fisher was that when we lost the American

History

War of Independence, we had no inkling that we were forfeiting ‘not merely a continent, but also energy sources that a century and a half later would enable the US to eclipse the British Empire’. Hailing this ‘wonderfully detailed and colourful book’ in the Telegraph, Stephen Poole contrasted the optimism that greeted the Oil Age and its supposed benefits, e.g. ‘Cities without steaming mountains of equine dung’, with ‘the creeping disaster of global warming overshadowing us now’.

But according to the Literary Review’s Barnaby Crowcroft, Fisher’s sombre account endorsed the ‘anti-humanism of modern-day apocalyptic environmentalism … Modern industry ... has delivered global improvements in life expectancy, nutrition and literacy and reductions in poverty, infant mortality and the need for backbreaking manual labour unknown in all previous human history, making possible unprecedented gains in personal freedom. A river runs through that too.’

PERSONALITY AND POWER BUILDERS AND DESTROYERS OF MODERN EUROPE

IAN KERSHAW

Allen Lane, 490pp, £30

This book contains 12 essays about 20th-century European leaders, ‘who for good, and most strikingly ill, succeeded in bending the arc of

history’, wrote Philip Stephens in his review for the Financial Times. ‘Organised around a series of individual portraits, the book is more than the sum of its parts. We learn that [Thomas] Carlyle was right. To chart the place of Hitler and Stalin or Churchill and De Gaulle is to appreciate the profound impact of individuals. But Marx, we see, also had a point. Churchill and De Gaulle were among the consequential leaders made by the moment.’

Robert Service, writing in Literary Review, considered the chapter on Hitler ‘a wonderful distillation of a lifetime’s research’ and said that ‘another sparling chapter is about Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s dour first chancellor, who frequently used subterfuge to impose decisions on his ministers while pursuing the goal of postwar Franco-German rapprochement’.

Orlando Figes, in the Guardian, noted that Kershaw ‘fills his lively profiles with revealing details of the leaders’ characters, their working style and relations with the ruling

structures that supported them...’

Franco wore down the resistance of his ministers by not allowing toilet breaks in meetings that could last all day and night. His bladder control was “extraordinary”, Kershaw informs us. He also highlights the mistakes that leaders made to bring about their fall, analysing how far these can be explained by their own stubborn personalities, ideological blinkers, or by the hubris that affects so many leaders, especially dictators, when they’ve been in power for too long.’

However, Figes thought that each of the seven countries represented here were too different for ‘any general lessons to be learned’.

Forgotten authors

LUCY LETHBRIDGE on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1920s novel Lolly Willowes

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes is a tale of witchery, devilment and transformation. What starts as a beady, satirical comedy of manners about a poor and eccentric middle-aged spinster dependent on her relations takes a sudden turn into chaos and surreality. Miss Laura ‘Lolly’ Willowes, odd but very much her own person, loses her beloved father and is moved (because she is not expected to make decisions for herself) from her beloved childhood home in Dorset to London to live with her pompous brother and his family. In their stifling household, the years unfold with unremittingly timetabled dreariness, Lolly enduring stoically the dutiful care of a family which regards her as pet oddity and useful appendage.

Then, halfway through the book, when Lolly is 47 and the reader is wondering how she is ever going to escape (can she summon up the energy after a life so sapped?), she makes a decision to leap into her own nature. And, like many a yearning fictional woman before her, she takes a cottage. Lolly’s is in the Chilterns, in a village called Great Mop. Now, the novel stirs into new life with its heroine: it becomes wild, strange and full of faerie.

The inhabitants of Great Mop, thoroughly conventional countryfolk on the outside, turn out to be joyful pagans, devil-worshippers given to midnight dances on the witches’ sabbath. The seductive figure of Satan, so appealing to Lolly’s naturally wild and primeval nature, is the figure behind the book’s alternative title, ‘The Loving Huntsman’. Warner’s Satan has a particular affinity for women who have rejected marriage and domestic conformity: he arouses a kind of loving pity in them, and she depicts him as a nocturnal gamekeeper roaming the beechwoods of the Chilterns hunting for souls to assuage his loneliness. It is only at the end of the book that he reveals himself in his true ambiguity to Lolly and she is freed for the second time by the mastery of his indifference …. Into

exactly what, however, the reader never finds out.

Witchy women are a prevailing theme in feminist fiction – but in Lolly Willowes, although it contains all the familiar ingredients (herbal potions, cats, spinsters, old wives, antiquarians and naked dancing), Townsend Warner gives her witches a wittier, spicier, stranger take: they are the world’s true innocents. In the novel, the occult lurks just below the surface of everyday life making ordinary activities, to those who know how to really see, seem suddenly very peculiar. She is very good on these sudden moments of peculiarity. Lolly is a singular person whose ‘secret country’ of the imagination is given form by her memories of the real country of her rural childhood.

We come to expect Lolly to be peculiar, but seeing the world through her eyes we also come to see how peculiar almost everyone and all life is. Take Lolly’s sister-in-law Caroline who is constantly alluding to how much she has to do: changing library books, reading the Times, embroidering cushions. ‘In her house-keeping and her scrupulous account books she expressed an almost mystical sense of the validity of small things.’ Warner’s prose is delightfully spare and telling. When Lolly marvels at the tidiness of the linen cupboard, we are told: ‘We have our example,’ said Caroline. ‘The graveclothes were folded in the tomb.’ Caroline is pinned to the page.

Among the many enchanting aspects of Lolly Willowes is Lolly’s

imperviousness to received wisdoms. Even when her life is crushed by ‘small things’, she retains the integrity of her own inner gaze. She sees the silliness of conventions with an unexpected steeliness.

Townsend Warner’s portrait of witchiness is both extraordinary and very ordinary – it really exists only in a kind of ‘seeing’ – that below the washing up and the linen-cupboard tidying and the piety expected of women, there lies in witches a deep knowledge of how things really are and a demonic refusal to toe the line. Witches in Great Mop are embodiments of the secret passions simmering beneath everyday routine.

Townsend Warner thought if witches were to be found they would be among the apparently unremarkable. ‘When I think of witches,’ she once wrote, ‘I seem to see them all over England, women growing old, as common as blackberries, and as un-regarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members and blacksmiths and small farmers and puritans …. Doing, doing, doing till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife.’ Or as Lolly herself remarks to Satan: ‘Women have such vivid imaginations and lead such dull lives.’

Lolly Willowes was published (to critical acclaim and high sales) in 1926, in the age of the single woman. ‘I was born to be a spinster and by God, I’m going to spin,’ wrote Townsend Warner’s contemporary Winifred Holtby. The novel made witches all the rage and it was fashionable in literary circles to wonder how Sylvia (redoubtably unmarried though from 1931 in a lifetime’s relationship with Valentine Ackland) knew so much about witchcraft. At a dinner, Virginia Woolf asked her straight out and Sylvia answered, ‘Because I am one.’

Lolly Willowes is now the novel by which she is best remembered. A lone woman, a cat and a cottage – and the sly but winning blandishments of devilry: it’s a tale for all time.

Lolly Willowes is published by Penguin Classics and Virago Classics.

Lolly Willowes made witches all the rage

Biography & memoir

even thousands. All, including her younger sister Kaitlyn, share a father, a male-model-beautiful Californian called Jeffrey Harrison – ‘Donor 150’ – who supplemented his small income as a strippergram with twice-weekly deposits at a sperm bank.

As Marianne Power noted in her Times review, the characters in Bilton’s account of her upbringing deserve a book each. Some already have one, as they include Warren Beatty and Jeff Bridges, early boyfriends of Bilton’s mother Debra, before she came out as a lesbian. Harrison is a conspiracy theorist, convinced aliens will come to harvest women’s eggs. The real star of the book was Debra, who paid him for his sperm (he reneged on his promise to keep his donations exclusive to her) and to show up on the girls’ birthdays.

DIAGHILEV’S EMPIRE HOW THE BALLETS RUSSES ENTHRALLED THE WORLD RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN

Faber, 374pp, £25

‘Part biography, part history of ballet in the 20th century, the book looks at how the larger-than-life impresario was able to take what was at the end of the 19th century the “childish business” of ballet and not only drag it, often through sheer force of will, into artistic maturity, but also establish it as “a crucial piece in the jigsaw of western culture”.’ So wrote Bryan Karetnyk in the Spectator

In the later chapters, Christiansen takes ‘a wide-angle view of Diaghilev’s many rivals, survivors and successors, marshalling an impressive range of memoir, private correspondence and journalism to provide a convincing and genuinely illuminating sense of the many fields – ballet, art, literature and film – in which his legacy ebbs and flows today.’ Not only is it ‘written with sympathy and wit’ and ‘judiciously researched’, but ‘more crucially, it draws on a lifetime of balletomania, giving readers the benefit of exceptional range. It is also a delicious read into the bargain.’

Kathryn Hughes, in the Observer, noted that Christiansen ‘comes to his subject with a head stuffed full not just of pas de deux and grands jetés but also all the gossip and scandal that trailed in Diaghilev’s choppy wake’. Furthermore, he ‘is not an

author who feels the need to spare the feelings of his subjects and one of the great joys of this compulsively readable book is his ability to skewer people in a few choice words. So, he informs us that sex with Diaghilev, who was happily gay and went in for “gentlemen’s mischief” with the boys from the ballet, was like having a cuddle “with a nice fat old lady”. In return the ageing lothario liked to give his young friends presents of plus fours. You could always spot who was the current favourite by the width of his trousers.’

In her review for the British Theatre Guide, Vera Liber was delighted ‘to spend time vicariously in Diaghilev’s dazzling, constantly evolving company, rub shoulders with its dramatis personae, eavesdrop on their petty volatile squabbles... Scandalous, riotous behaviour there is galore, Satie sentenced to a week in gaol for sending abusive postcards…’

A

CHRYSTA BILTON

Monoray, 320pp, £16.99

Chrysta Bilton’s far from normal life story has generated many column inches. She has not just 35 new siblings (strictly speaking, halfsiblings) but potentially hundreds,

Debra, for Power, was ‘one of the great characters of the Western world’: ‘Men loved Debra, women loved Debra, and Debra loved a good adventure.’ Bilton’s love letter to her was ‘beautiful, warm, funny’, a testament to human resilience, forgiveness and humour.

In the Washington Post, Janet Manley compared Debra to Forrest Gump, in ‘bridging social eras in a changing US’. Facing down the conservative thinking that saw lesbianism as a mental illness, she willed her children into being, ‘doing her best to create a sense of family, despite her hardships and addictions’. Manley noted that all the other Harrison offspring owed her a huge debt too.

AGATHA CHRISTIE A VERY ELUSIVE WOMAN LUCY WORSLEY

Hodder & Stoughton, 432pp, £25

Lucy Worsley’s new biography of Agatha Christie is, as viewers of

NORMAL FAMILY THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT MY CRAZY CHILDHOOD (AND HOW I DISCOVERED 35 NEW SIBLINGS)

Biography & memoir

Worsley’s television documentaries would expect, accessible, readable and page-turning. In the Times Literary Supplement, Kathryn Hughes admired a ‘kind, lucid biography’. The mystery of Christie’s famous ‘disappearance’ is here treated as Christie wanted it to be: not as a stunt or a revenge trick on her adulterous husband but, wrote Hughes, ‘Worsley asks us to do something “radical”, which is simply to take Agatha Christie’s behaviour and her explanations for it at face value. These “lost” days of confusion and despair were nothing more or less than a mental health crisis.’

However, reviewers were for the most part in agreement that claims that Worsley’s Life was ‘groundbreaking’ fell short of the mark. In the Observer, Alex Clark noted one particularly ‘eyebrow-raising’ passage in which Worsley argued that Christie’s work had ‘common ground with the modernists whose defining moment came as her first novels were published’. Clark wrote wryly: ‘If you are going to rescue one writer from misunderstanding, it’s as well not to visit the same ignominy on another. And as much as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ingenuity relies on the disruption of accepted narrative convention, I don’t think it has a lot in common with Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.’

The inevitable whiff of a future television series hung over the book for many. In the New York Review of Books, Frances Wilson found ‘It reads as though it were being spoken to a camera: ideas are expressed as simply as possible; there is no argumentative rigor; the tone is upbeat until, at the end of each chapter, it becomes ominous; the lexicon is limited (“dark” and “darkness” are her refrain); and there are goofy asides to the audience.’ And in the Literary Review, Lucy Lethbridge thought some of the jolly asides frustrating: ‘Worsley says, for example, that Christie’s thrillers are “rather tiresome”. Why?’

REVENGE

MEGHAN, HARRY AND THE WAR BETWEEN THE WINDSORS

TOM BOWER Blink, 452pp, £22

Tom Bower’s evisceration of the Duchess of Sussex received so much coverage that it can hardly have

mattered to his sales that actual reviews of the book tended to be either lofty or lukewarm. It was, wrote Melanie Reid in the Times (which had serialised long extracts of the juiciest morsels) an ‘eye-popping demolition job’. Anita Singh in the Daily Telegraph thought the takedown ‘so relentless that getting to the end feels like a slog’. But Singh still detailed the ‘best and most convincing’ accounts from ‘the little people in Meghan’s line of fire’. Stories of her bullying behaviour are apparently legion: a British literary agent called Meghan ‘one of the most unpleasant people we’ve ever dealt with’.

In the Observer, Catherine Bennett dismissed the book as ‘tawdry gossip’ but as Reid noted, Tom Bower (author of a bookshelf of unauthorised biographies skewering the rich and powerful) ‘didn’t get where he is by being nice’. Too right. According to Reid, ‘Meghan’s burnished image doesn’t survive beyond page 5.’ As Bower’s sales (nearly three months after publication, Revenge is still in Amazon’s top 100 list) testify, tales of Meghan’s monstrous behaviour are catnip for royalists – and sales must have had a boost at a time when royalty is getting unprecedented attention.

‘His book depicts Meghan as a merciless opportunist,’ wrote Reid, ‘who found in Harry the perfect vehicle for personal advancement, and in doing so caused irreversible damage to a thousand-year-old monarchy. It’s an undeniably gripping read, but it’s also brutal and ultimately sad.’

CHARLIE’S GOOD TONIGHT THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLIE WATTS

PAUL SEXTON

Mudlark, 344pp, £25

Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times found this generous portrait of the Rolling Stones’ drummer frustrating: ‘There was clearly a turbulence behind [Watts’s] pristine façade and Sexton describes his eccentricities without ever quite unpicking them. His fastidiousness extended far beyond a preference for handmade shoes and suits that once belonged to Edward VIII... He sketched every hotel bed he ever slept in.’

‘Watts was borderline OCD,’ explained Mick Brown in the Telegraph, and remarkably

contradictory, ‘an essential part of the group, yet at the same time curiously apart from it. He described playing with the band not as a vocation but “a job”, for which he dutifully turned up for work, drummed brilliantly and largely kept to himself.’ A frustration for Brown was that ‘the book largely skates over his dabbling with drugs in the 1970s and 1980s (tactfully avoiding the word heroin)’.

Neil Spencer in the Guardian also picked up on the drummer’s contradictions: ‘Watts’s ambiguity was there from the outset. He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed, cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes saxophonist Charlie Parker and drummer Chico Hamilton.’

And he refers to Watts saying,

Stories of Meghan’s bullying behaviour are apparently legion

Biography & memoir

‘In the Beatle period, when people used to scream at you, girls running down the road, I hated that, used to hide. But there’s nothing like walking on a stage and the place is full of screaming girls’ – a perfect example of the drummer’s sometimes perverse duality.

GROWING UP GETTY THE STORY OF AMERICA’S MOST UNCONVENTIONAL DYNASTY

Gallery, 336pp, £20

she was 14. Creepy, or what? Nevertheless, divulged Kathryn Hughes in the Sunday Times, he ‘managed to stay friends with all his exes, even sending them roses on their birthdays’. Several children and grandchildren died of substance abuse but ‘many of the current crop are living fine upstanding lives’. By this point, complained Hughes, the narrative ‘is beginning to sound like a Christmas round robin, the tone coolingly banal, like a family retainer terrified of giving offence’. Reginato may have fulfilled his brief but, she concluded, the Gettys are nevertheless ‘hardly an advertisement for the life styles of the rich and famous either’.

HAROLD WILSON THE WINNER

NICK THOMAS-SYMONDS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 544pp, £25

services to undermine him. He didn’t have to. It existed.’

The Literary Review’s Anne Perkins said Thomas-Symonds had set out to remind ‘today’s Labour movement of the virtues of subordinating differences to the cause of winning power … But political parties also need to agree on what power is for. Wilson’s Labour party rarely agreed on anything. It was only his capacity for political sleight of hand that sometimes made it seem as though it did.’

KIKI MAN RAY ART, LOVE AND RIVALRY IN 1920S PARIS

MARK BRAUDE

Two Roads, 304pp, £20

‘How cheap was the oil tycoon J Paul Getty?’ asked Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Times, before listing the legendary examples of his meanness, such as installing a pay phone for visitors to his Tudor mansion and refusing to pay the ransom for his kidnapped grandson John Paul Getty III. These myths are debunked in this ‘brisk and sympathetic chronicle of the man and his many descendants’ by Reginato, writer at large for Vanity Fair. His aim, Jacobs told us, is to ‘shake the dust from the name and show us that the majority are not drug-addled wastrels but productive citizens’.

The problem though, wrote Constance Craig Smith in the Daily Mail, is that the younger generation of Gettys are ‘not as interesting as the monstrous paterfamilias and, sensibly, wouldn’t speak to Reginato’. Craig Smith related how in 1914 J Paul Getty’s father gave him $10,000 to invest in the oil business and within a year he had made his first million. By his sixties, he was the richest man in the world. Aged 30 he married his first wife, who was 19. Then came two 17-year-olds, followed by a woman he had first spied when

According to Nick Thomas-Symonds, whoever said that the Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx must have had Harold Wilson in mind. Wilson believed that the Party was ‘a moral crusade or it was nothing’. So although, as a staunch Congregationalist, he was wary of what he called ‘too many “Guardianisms”’ when speechmaking, he presided over a series of enlightened social measures like the Sexual Offences Act that liberalised Britain.

Wilson was also, to quote ThomasSymonds again, ‘a winner’: the only person in the past 120 years to have been returned to Downing Street four times. Yet despite this, as Vernon Bogdanor argued in the Telegraph, ‘Wilson has never been admitted to Labour’s pantheon of heroes.’ Mistrusted by the Right, derided by the Left, he did himself no favours with a tainted resignation honours list that set a dubious precedent. Thomas-Symonds acknowledges this, but as Francis Becket said in the Spectator, he also ‘demolishes a few myths put about by Wilson’s many enemies. He never claimed to have gone to school barefoot. He never had an affair with Marcia Williams. And he didn’t invent a plot by the security

Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Prin in 1901, was one of the queens of the rackety, seedy, riotously creative artistic scene in Paris in the Twenties. A chanteuse and artists’ model, she is most famous now for providing the gorgeously curved, cello-shaped nude back in her lover Man Ray’s famous photograph. But was Kiki also an artist in her own right? Mark Braude seems to think so and Joanna Scutts in the New York Times seemed to agree: ‘This exuberantly entertaining

biography sets out to rebalance the much-told story of Left Bank Paris, in which Kiki – model, memoirist and muse – is usually cast as a bit player. He brings that milieu to life in all its grit and energy – but also the larger sociopolitical pressures that myopic mythmaking leaves out.’

Kirkus Reviews relished Braude’s portrait of Man Ray’s muse and ‘her physical presence, her erotic charms, her joyfulness, and her mental quickness’. Only Roger Lewis in the Times begged to differ. He enjoyed Braude’s ‘ lively study’ of Kiki but didn’t buy his argument as to her superior talents. ‘I think Kiki seemed

Political parties need to agree what power is for

Biography & memoir

a self-indulgent ratbag, as depressing as Dada’s atonal music, gibberish poems and meaningless films. She died in 1953, a “ruined romantic figure”, “a reproachful shadow”, in the words of Ronald Searle. Clearly, Kiki didn’t belong to the modern world for a single minute — she was a leftover from the lithographs of ToulouseLautrec.’

MISS WILLMOTT’S GHOSTS

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND GARDENS OF A FORGOTTEN GENIUS SANDRA LAWRENCE Blink,

352pp, £25

In 1897, Ellen Willmott was due to receive the RHS’s Victoria Medal but never turned up. Willmott, famous for her alpines, her bulbs and her talent for growing the ungrowable, was an ill-tempered eccentric who boobytrapped her bulb beds with shot guns and whose habit of sprinkling her rivals’ gardens with the seeds of an invasive sea holly gave rise to the plant’s common name ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’.

Reviewing Sandra Lawrence’s biography in the Spectator, Anne de Courcy observed: ‘She had a happy childhood in an affluent family of the rising Victorian middle class; from the age of seven she would come downstairs on her birthday morning to find on her plate a cheque for £1,000 (today worth £126,588) from her rich godmother. Unsurprisingly, she never learned the value of money and thereafter simply bought what she wanted.’ By the end of her life, Ellen had run out of cash and slept on benches when visiting London, carrying her tiara in a paper bag.

In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin enjoyed Lawrence’s approach to a prickly subject. ‘Every chapter is triggered by an object – the gold medal, the fur-lined sabots, a silver key – that Lawrence uncovered during her excavations of the Willmott archive.’ Gardening blogger Paddy Tobin adored a ‘brilliant story, fabulously researched and presented with insight, understanding, a beautiful turn of phrase, and good humour’. And de Courcy concluded: ‘Lawrence calls her “a genius as a plantswoman, a nightmare as an individual”. Both verdicts are undoubtedly correct.’

TERRY PRATCHETT A LIFE WITH FOOTNOTES

ROB WILKINS

Doubleday, 448pp, £25

By the time Terry Pratchett died, of a rare form of Alzheimer’s (he called it ‘the embuggerance’), in 2015, he was a storytelling phenomenon. As Laura Freeman said in the Times: ‘He wrote more than 50 books – 41 set on the Discworld – and sold more than 100 million copies in 37 languages. He kept a picture in his office of WH Smith’s book-pulping machine as a warning against too much writerly pride. The man with no degree to his name was given so many honorary doctorates he ended up Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Pratchett, not forgetting the professorship (2010) and the knighthood (2009).’ Pratchett started the book and it has been finished by Rob Wilkins, his devoted assistant and amanuensis.

In the Observer, Frank Cottrell Boyce was impressed by this account of an author he compared to Swift and Chesterton – ‘he has that Chestertonian quality of merriment, of intellectual play’. This is not a hagiography, however: ‘the Pratchett who emerges can be curmudgeonly, vain and infuriated and puzzled by the way the world has underestimated him’. In the Daily Telegraph, Tristram Fane Saunders also admired Pratchett’s world: ‘What matters is what he called “headology” – the commonsensical psychology behind the petty acts of cruelty and kindness that comprise most human behaviour. What matters are the uncomfortable woollen socks his hero Sam Vimes wears, uncomplainingly, because his wife Sibyl knitted them.’

Freeman thought Wilkins ‘Pooterish and pedantic’ but was moved to tears by his account of Pratchett’s final months. For Saunders, he ‘waffles on a bit, and his jokes are sometimes effortful, but crucially he understands the difference between humour and wit. In Pratchett’s words, humour “needs deep soil. You can grow wit on a damp flannel”.’

WITHOUT WARNING AND ONLY SOMETIMES SCENES FROM AN UNPREDICTABLE CHILDHOOD

KIT DE WAAL

Tinder Press, 394pp, £16.99

‘If you want to find out how the sweet, clever, uncertain Mandy grew up to be Kit de Waal, bestselling author and tireless amplifier of working-class voices in literature, then read this book,’ wrote Lynsey Hanley in the Observer. ‘She grew up in 1960s Moseley, where her parents, a little woman from Wexford and a bus driver from St Kitts, raised five children without ever really growing up themselves.’

Despite their financial struggles, described Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, Dad Arthur would blow his earnings on a pair of Chelsea boots or a fancy suit, while the children were hungry – always. In an effort to make sense of her life, mother Sheila becomes a Jehovah’s Witness, which for the kids involved ‘interminable hours spent at weekly meetings where they nearly die of boredom’.

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman pondered the serendipity of this being the third memoir he had read recently of growing up a Jehovah’s Witness. For him, ‘Neither creed nor colour determines the book: it is far stronger, far angrier on poverty, with margarine a luxury and the logistics of choosing bus stops to minimise the fare.’ For Sturges, the working-class upbringing depicted was ‘entirely of its time: children shoved outdoors from breakfast to teatime; men returning from work to find dinner on the table...’ The memoir takes her up to early adulthood and the moment her boss gives her a list of his favourite books. ‘In doing so,’ wrote Sturges, ‘he sparks in De Waal a love of literature, and, with it, a new life begins.’

ABOMINATIONS

LIONEL SHRIVER

Borough Press, 304pp, £20

The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver has become one of the most dauntless combatants in a culture war so vicious that fainter hearts have left the field altogether. Reviewing this collection of essays in the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon noted that Shriver’s ‘ornery observations’ have ‘brought upon her the full flaming rage of the Twittersphere. Unhappily for her enemies, she is not on social media, and her professional associates have stood by her, so the conflagrations have left her unsinged.’

‘Abominations is organised thematically rather than chronologically, so the act of reading it means toggling in time. Before 2015, as one is reminded, it was possible to participate in cultural debate and literary comment without thinking about identity politics, freedom of expression or gender ideology. Since 2015, these topics have become inescapable […]

‘Ms Shriver’s roving curiosity, her libertarian inclinations and her trans-Atlantic orientation [...] make her a rare voice, someone who challenges orthodoxies in the way that many journalists and public intellectuals claim to do but don’t.’

The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke found Shriver’s journalism bracing even where she found herself in disagreement. ‘Among the subjects Shriver tackles in Abominations are free speech, identity politics and the language of gender ideology, though if this sounds hard going – another culture wars slog – the mix is leavened with pieces about her addiction to exercise, what it feels like to break up with a friend and a droll skit on all the things she didn’t do during the first lockdown (learn

Essays

Russian, read Proust, take a virtual tour of the British Museum).

Looking back to Shriver’s first ‘cancellation’ – when she jokily brandished a sombrero at a speech to the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016 – Cooke marvelled: ‘Even five years ago I would have mocked the idea that a writer in a country such as Britain could be considered “brave”; save your tears for those living under totalitarian regimes, I would have said, waving my PEN membership. No longer.’

ALLEGORIZINGS

JAN

Faber, 207pp, £14.99

The late Jan Morris was writing right up to the end of her life, and the posthumously published Allegorizings collects a final grab-bag of her whimsical and upbeat essays. Her guiding principles, says Morris in an Introduction, are the importance of kindness and the notion that everything, read right, is allegorical.

The essays collected here are ‘vivid’, ‘funny’ and ‘cheerful’, full of ‘pleasure and sensuality’, thought Prospect’s Sarah Moss, though she cautioned that to a younger generation Morris’s flippant view of Empire might be ‘problematic’: ‘Readers who love Morris’s work do so not because she is a professional historian or because she moves with the times, but because she celebrates her intellectual and aesthetic pleasures in deeply considered and grammatically gorgeous prose.’

Writing in the New York Times, Sarah Moss (for it was she) shared Sarah Moss’s high opinion of the book: ‘Some fine writers, granted the luck of long lives and clear minds, go on publishing after it would have been kind for someone to tell them to stop, but a precious few report with wisdom, kindness and intelligence from the end to which we shall all come — travel of a different kind. This is such a book.’

The Guardian’s ‘Alex Clark’, who may or may not be a pseudonym for Sarah Moss, declared: ‘Among the several pleasures of Allegorizings are its shifts in tone and mood; alongside ideological and philosophical argument come Morris’s self-conscious indulgence of her own idiosyncrasies, and her

airing of private passions’… for example, ‘marmalade, which sparks a revelation that Morris eats the stuff with apples when she is being austere, and sausages when seeking hedonism’.

OPPOSITIONS

MARY GAITSKILL

Profile, 224pp, £16.99

Mary Gaitskill is the American novelist and short story writer whose novella This Is Pleasure supplied perhaps the most morally subtle and shocking response to the MeToo movement. Her new collection of essays is no less searching and spiky. Taking in music, films, the Bible, American sex scandals, and Nabokov’s Lolita, among other things, it amounts to ‘a shadow autobiography’, thought the Guardian’s Abhrajyoti Chakraborty.

‘Gaitskill skips over nothing on the page. Her sentences are leavened

by a novelist’s spirited discontent with mere facts, a distrust of transparent surfaces.’ ‘With Gaitskill, you scarcely get or sometimes even expect popular opinions, regardless of whether she is riffing on Chekhov or the Clintons,’ Chakraborty added. ‘Gaitskill is gloriously trenchant, but never gimmicky.’

The Irish Times’s Huda Awan found Gaitskill’s crosspatch, searching approach to the world ‘mentally invigorating’.

‘Gaitskill did not choose the title of her latest book, Oppositions, a collection of essays first published in the US in 2017 as Somebody with a Little Hammer,’ noted Ellen Peirson-Hagger in the New Statesman. ‘But she sees why her publisher thought it appropriate... In neither her writing nor her conversation does Gaitskill bend to meet expectations.’

ONE KENSINGTON TALES FROM THE FRONTLINE OF THE MOST UNEQUAL BOROUGH IN BRITAIN

EMMA DENT COAD Quercus, 256pp, £20

Four days after Emma Dent Coad was elected MP for Kensington in 2017 she awoke to the Grenfell Tower disaster. The blame, she argued, lay firmly with Conservativerun Kensington and Chelsea council, so that by her own admission the book is written ‘with unremitting anger and frustration’. Interviewing Dent Coad in the Guardian, Zoe Williams agreed ‘there is a lot of controlled fury’ in the book.

‘I admire Dent Coad’s passion,’ Harriet Sergeant wrote in the Telegraph, ‘but query her partisanship and conclusions.’ Sergeant argued that ‘she is right about the shocking levels of inequality in this tiny borough’, but never speculates as to the reasons. While the global super-rich compete to buy trophy homes in the borough, migrants of every nationality, many illegal and undocumented, cram into former council flats sold to private landlords. ‘It is disingenuous of Dent Coad to make out this scandal is unique to Kensington and Chelsea. It is going on throughout London,’ she added.

Hugo Gye in the Spectator pointed out that ‘questions have arisen about her part in the refurbishment of the tower’. Dent Coad, a Labour councillor for 16 years sitting on committees where plans for the work on Grenfell were discussed, denies any responsibility.

‘Large swathes of the book are dedicated to Dent Coad’s time as an opposition councillor,’ Charlotte Ivers noted in the Sunday Times. ‘Her documentation of the council’s failings is extensive, perhaps too extensive for a general audience … [this] is not an attempt to use the borough as a microcosm through which to understand the wider social issues our country faces,’ she concluded.

‘Dent Coad’s inside story of a rotten borough is the breath-taking indictment of the divisions that rend this country,’ thundered the Morning Star. It ‘provides a unique, evidence-based critique of the profound flaws in UK local

Current affairs

government … it should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the pressing case for meaningful local democracy — and how far Britain falls short of it.’

OF BOYS AND MEN

WHY THE MODERN MALE IS STRUGGLING, WHY IT MATTERS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

RICHARD V REEVES

Swift Press, 352pp, £20

educational progress should be slowed accordingly – the current system effectively discriminates against males. Writing in the Times, David Aaronovitch, who found the book in turn ‘fascinating, irritating and eccentric’, thought this explanation ‘problematic and his remedy impossible’. Statistics should come with a health warning, wrote Aaronovitch. ‘We’re talking averages not individuals.’

ORDERLY BRITAIN HOW BRITAIN HAS RESOLVED EVERYDAY PROBLEMS, FROM DOG FOULING TO DOUBLE PARKING

TIM NEWBURN AND ANDREW WARD

Robinson, 360pp, £18.99

Gloomy statistics show that male violence is increasing and academic attainment decreasing. In his warm review of Richard Reeves’s Of Boys and Men in the Guardian, Andrew Anthony laid it out: ‘Males are much more likely to feel socially excluded, and far less likely to thrive after divorce (if they don’t remarry). At the same time, girls are outperforming boys in most academic disciplines, and rapidly closing the gap in those in which boys lead, not just in schools but in universities across the western world. In the US, 57 per cent of bachelor degrees are now awarded to women.’

In the opinion of Nina Power in the Literary Review, ‘The great strength of Reeves’s book, apart from his extensive use of contemporary data, is the way he treats the multiple difficulties facing boys and men as problems in their own right. The question of how sexual differences play out is often enmeshed with our personal experiences and political commitments. We don’t see “men” or “boys”; we see “my obnoxious male boss” or “the boyfriend that treated me poorly” and generalise from there.’ The Left tend to take too little account of biological determinism in male behaviour and the Right takes too much.

Reeves argues that because boys mature later than girls, their

It wasn’t all that long ago that office workers regularly put back a couple of pints at lunchtime and dog-owners left their pets’ poo on the pavement without a second thought. Now, as Orderly Britain points out, we have almost imperceptibly altered habits that once seemed set in stone.

The book’s authors, Tim Newburn, professor of criminology and social policy at the London School of Economics, and Andrew Ward, cover the contentious subjects of dog-fouling, queues and alcohol because, as Emma Duncan in the Times put it, although these issues ‘seem trivial, but because they are so close to home, they matter more to people than many higher-level political issues. They are therefore of interest to anybody who studies society – or indeed lives in it.’

Duncan applauded behavioural progress. ‘Notwithstanding the general tendency to believe that it is hurrying to hell in a handcart, society has, by and large, become more orderly in recent decades. Dog poo has been, if not removed from public places, at least concealed in little bags that some peasants fail to throw away. Smoking in public has basically been abolished. Drinking is on the decline. Drivers grudgingly accept the need for, and the authority of, traffic wardens.’

But in the Daily Mail, Mark Mason wasn’t sure that we hadn’t lost more than we’d gained. ‘The opposite of order is mess, and without mess you wouldn’t have creativity of innovation or fun.’

Crime

‘To accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it,’ Percival Everett once observed in a rare interview. His extraordinary novels and stories are brimming over with the everyday absurdities of life, alongside unfunny matters like terminal illness and casual cruelty. His most recent comic masterpiece, The Trees, which was short-listed for this year’s Booker prize, is as fine a literary balancing act between outrageous farce and deep seriousness as can be imagined.

It opens in Money, Mississippi, the town in which the 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched and murdered in August 1955, after a young white woman named Carolyn Bryant accused the boy of ogling and touching her in her father’s grocery store. (She would retract the accusation decades later by admitting that he never made contact with her.) Her brother Roy and their half-brother JW Milam were put on trial and subsequently found not guilty by an all-white jury. That doleful episode of American history is at the core of this truly remarkable book.

The Trees is a crime novel of sorts, with a plot that accommodates a series of gruesome killings, the first being that of Junior Junior Milam, a descendant of JW. Second in line is Wheat Bryant, the good-for-nothing grandson of the infamous Roy. The mutilated victims are discovered with the beaten-up corpse of a black man in close proximity, his hands clutching their severed testicles. A pair of Mississippi state detectives, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, arrive in Money to question the locals and that’s when the fun really begins.

Their conversations with the likes of Sheriff Red Jetty and his sidekicks in uniform Delmore Digby and Braden Brady; the Reverend Doctor Fondle and the mortician Otis Easy (‘Easy sat behind his massive oak desk and smiled with all the teeth a person is supposed to have and then some’) deliver a shock of recognition as well as laughter. When the sleuths are hungry, they visit the Dinah, which was opened by a woman called Delores, who ‘could fry a hell of a catfish. Couldn’t spell worth a damn,’ according to the waitress, who sports

the name tag Dixie, but was christened Gertrude. Dixie/Gertrude will turn out to be a more dynamic presence in the pages that follow her initial wisecracking appearance in the increasingly helter-skelter narrative. The murders proliferate, spreading from the South to the Northern and mid-Western states. Sometimes the accompanying corpses are of Asiatic origin.

safe to assume, from the incomparable wordsmith who added ‘covfefe’ to the English language.

Percival Everett is in his midsixties. His first novel, Suder, was published in 1983 and he has barely stopped writing since. I have read seven of his many books, three of which I rate very highly. Wounded (2005) is not a funny book by any means, even though humour is not entirely absent. It’s set in Wyoming and might be described as a western. The protagonist is John Hunt who lives with his uncle Gus on the ranch where he trains and breeds horses. Hunt is as far from the conventional rancher as it’s possible to be. He owns a small painting by Paul Klee and a watercolour by Kandinsky. He and Gus are black, a fact that’s established on page 52, before which it hasn’t even been alluded to. Hunt is a widower, who continues to feel guilty about his wife Susie’s death in a riding accident.

I have no wish to spoil the crazy pleasure future readers will experience as they read The Trees, so I will only reveal that each revelation – each twist, as it were – is completely unpredictable and yet wholly convincing. There’s method in the madness Everett accounts for with such keen attentiveness to its every manifestation – the way in which a character will stop himself from using the word ‘nigger’ by hesitating after ‘ni-‘ and then substituting a term that’s almost equally racist, for example. He is a recorder of what he sees and hears and never comments self-righteously on his findings. If he has a message, it’s deeply imbedded in the story, waiting to be discovered. This exemplary novelist has no patience with fiction that openly displays its moral purpose, preferring rather to give his often-monstrous creations the free rein they have in the real world. He draws inspiration, it is

The prose beautifully encompasses the steady pace of life in the great outdoors, which is disrupted by the arrival of three rednecks who lynch and fake the suicide of a young gay farmhand and return to leave another gay man, the son of Hunt’s best friend in college, on the verge of death in a cave. Wounded contains information on subjects of which most authors are ignorant, like horse training and carpentry, but it’s also a subtly reflective study of the nature of love. It’s a world away from the ferocious brilliance of Erasure (2001), in which Thelonious Ellison, a writer of unsaleable experimental fiction, finds himself penning at great haste a novel in ghetto speak under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh that’s snapped up by a major publisher.

Just as hilarious is I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) about a man christened Not Sidney Poitier by his mother Portia. She dies when her son is still very young, and the boy is adopted by her friend Ted Turner, although his wife Jane Fonda is too busy exercising in and out of her leotard to notice him. It’s hard not to love Not Sidney Poitier and to laugh at the people he meets as he tells them he’s not who he seems to be.

Each revelation is completely unpredictable

THE LAST COLONY

A TALE OF EXILE, JUSTICE AND BRITAIN’S COLONIAL LEGACY PHILIPPE SANDS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 208pp, £16.99

The Chagos Islands are an archipelago that was formerly part of the British colony of Mauritius. When Mauritius was granted independence in 1965 the Chagos Islands were separated from the rest of the territory and forcibly depopulated, because one island, Diego Garcia, was leased to the United States as a military base.

This ‘powerful and elegantly written book’, wrote Tomiwa Owolade in the Sunday Times, ‘uses the story of one Chagossian woman in particular, Liseby Elysé, to tell a broader story about colonialism and international human rights from the 20th century to today... To this day, despite the international court rulings, the UK government insists that it retains sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.’ Sands has ‘provided an essential account of a continuing and little-known area of injustice’.

According to Tim Adams in the Observer, the book ‘highlights the post-colonial hypocrisy that continues to use UN human rights conventions as a basis for sovereign selfdetermination of the people of the Falkland Islands, or Gibraltar, but which for decades has wholly disregarded the application of those conventions in the case of the Chagossians’. Sands ‘makes a steely and forensic case, laced with human empathy, against successive British foreign ministers’. He ‘also sketches out the history of the international court of justice in The Hague, and its incremental role in dismantling colonial structures around the world, the inching forward of freedoms’.

However, argued James Goss in Literary Review, while Sands ‘writes about the ideas and legal principles relating to self-determination and decolonization’, he does not ‘balance this with a proper discussion of sovereignty, the fundamental doctrine in both international law and international politics. That core concept is about the exercise of absolute rights over a polity. Under the doctrine, a state rightfully exercising sovereignty cannot be told – or advised – what to do (though, in practice, politics inevitably shapes

this).’ Although it is ‘beyond contest’ that the forcible removals were ‘shameful and wrong’, the book is ‘a bit of propaganda’ and ‘readers should approach it with caution’.

INTO IRAQ

simply marvelled. ‘Go to Italy, you mad old fool. Visit a nice museum. But nope, there he is up a mountain in Akre, while locals celebrate spring by shooting tracer bullets into the sky and running about with giant torches. “Getting a bit warm,” he says, mildly. The real wonder of his being in Iraq is that he is, indeed, full of wonder. Like all the best travel presenters, Palin is a hell of a journalist who never quite lets on that he’s doing journalism. In the rubble of Mosul he speaks to children who survived life under Islamic State occupation. He’s shocked enough to swear, but he’s Michael Palin, so even his horror is genial.’

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

THE SECRET LIFE OF LONDON PRIVATE MEMBERS’ CLUBS

SETH ALEXANDER THÉVOZ

Robinson, 375pp, £25

Sir Michael Palin, now aged 80, went to Iraq for his most recent travel series (and book). This is the moment when the reviewer reaches for the words ‘National Treasure’. Patrick West in the Spectator wasn’t having any of it: Palin he said is ‘more than this. He is one of this country’s most distinguished men of letters.’ The dreaded NT is ‘patronising, twee and demeaning’, thundered West, and ‘distracts from the fact that he’s one of the finest writers of our time, whose elegant and erudite prose is known for its rich, mellifluous yet uncluttered style’.

In the Daily Telegraph, Jasper Rees noted among a touchingly surprising aspect of Palin’s writing, ‘an appealingly vulnerable habit of noting down others’ compliments to him’. Any journey with Palin, thought Rees, is ‘to some extent a portrait of the man. You’d get a harder-nosed narrative from a different reporter. While Palin doesn’t altogether shy away from these subjects, there would probably be more on corruption, torture and endemic sexism. But you wouldn’t get the warmth, the self-mockery, the granddad jokes, or the conversation with a donkey, which was no more talkative than that parrot he once sold to John Cleese.’

And Hugo Rifkind in the Times, reviewing Channel 5’s Into Iraq,

This ‘compendious and entertaining’ account of the history of London’s clubland is, wrote Sue Gaisford in the Financial Times, ‘the result of thorough research, lightly worn. Thévoz writes with energy, conviction and amusement at the ever-changing variety of human congregation and its foibles. Virtually everything you might think you know about these clubs proves to be false. There were women’s clubs by the 1860s and mixed clubs soon afterwards; strict dress codes only came halfway through the 20th century and these days membership of the olderestablished clubs consists of 10 per cent regulars and the rest “show-offs”, who pop in occasionally to impress their friends.’

Alexander Larman in the Observer was also diverted, noting that in fact this is a story of decline. ‘Seth Alexander Thévoz offers a barrage of statistics that may suggest that their heyday has long since passed. We discover that nine out of ten “traditional” establishments have gone bankrupt over the past century and that the 40 or so clubs that survive today do so because they tend to boast a distinctive culture or identity, whether their appeal is to actors (the Garrick), the armed forces (the In and Out Club) or, of course, Conservative MPs.’

The blog BuzzMag hailed a ‘wonderful, impressively wellinformed tour guide’ but wished the

book had been more indiscreet: ‘there’s often the frustrating sense that the juiciest secrets remain untold’. However, Jonathan Parry, reviewing the book in the London Review of Books, took the opposite view: ‘What lies behind Thévoz’s closed doors isn’t power but lowgrade sleaze. His book is a fairminded overview of three hundred years of club history, neatly researched and quite fact-heavy, but overwhelmingly preoccupied with carnal and financial appetites.’

REWILDING THE SEA HOW TO SAVE OUR OCEANS

£22

Veteran environmental journalist Charles Clover is the founder of Blue, a marine conservation charity which, according to Callum Roberts in the Telegraph, ‘champions small-scale, low impact, community-based fishing and also, at the other end of the spectrum, of enormous protected areas where wildlife can thrive, free from interference and harm’. Reviewing Clover’s ‘powerful’ new book, Roberts reflected on how the history of our relationship with the sea is packed with accounts of sea creatures both real and imaginary. Now, the teeming life of the oceans is under threat from industrialised fishing and urgently needs protection.

In the Times, Christopher Hart praised a ‘fabulously well-informed survey’ and a ‘rollercoaster of a read’. He went on: ‘It’s exhilarating to learn how easily the seas can recover their natural richness if only we step back and let nature do her thing — which, from the plentiful evidence here, seems to be essentially to produce life and more life in endless abundance.’

David Profumo in the Spectator also admired Clover’s optimism – and wished he could completely share it. But the challenge is daunting. ‘The vast long-range fishing fleets of China and the EU are among Clover’s “Enemies of Progress”, as they shamelessly exceed their catch limits, especially around the African coasts. Trawlers release as much CO2 as the global aviation industry, and their detrimental impact on the ability of the seabed and its denizens to soak up carbon is one of the book’s abiding themes.’

Can we reverse the damage? The

Literary Review’s Peter Coates was cautiously optimistic: ‘Clover is an ardent believer in a revamped version of laissez faire: leave nature unfettered and wondrous things will happen quickly. These achievements are examples of marine rewilding. Using an elastic definition of rewilding (he’s at pains to keep on board fisherfolk who would never describe themselves as rewilders), Clover presents several case studies of inspirational undertakings.’

THE CAPTAIN’S APPRENTICE

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE STORY OF A FOLK SONG

CAROLINE DAVISON

Chatto & Windus, 400pp, £20

‘Davison’s book circles round The Captain’s Apprentice, a narrative ballad about the torture [and death] of a teenage cabin boy that Vaughan Williams first heard in 1905, sung by a fisherman in a rough quarter of the port at King’s Lynn,’ explained Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph, ‘subsequently he would incorporate its modal melody into his first Norfolk Rhapsody.’

Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times said the song ‘depicts, in modern terms, child abuse and then

account in a newspaper of a cabin boy called Robert Eastick from King’s Lynn, who was badly treated, “fell overboard” and drowned in 1856.’

Christiansen said Davison’s ‘animated, entertaining essay rambles in fashionable style between personal memoir, topographical wandering, archival research, semi-fictional speculation and rigorous musicology. At times it seems to lose its focus.’

Simon Heffer in the Spectator agreed: ‘Davison is to be commended on the detail she produces about the composer’s visit to Norfolk, the people he met there and the songs they sang to him…But then the book diverts into a biography of the composer’s early years, much of which is familiar, and into ruminations on the effect on the author herself of the song that gives her book its title.’

Heffer was scathing about Davison’s insertion of herself into the story: ‘[She] appears to have benefited (if that is the word) from a “creative non-fiction” course at a university. The effects of this are, I fear, seen in other diversions, where she amplifies contemporary reports of court cases about cruel sea captains with her own imagination of aspects of what else happened. There will be some who think this is a good idea. I am not one.’

The Two Cultures

MICHAEL BARBER revisits the great debate between FR Leavis and CP Snow

Mention ‘culture wars’ today and people assume you’re talking about ‘woke’ issues like race or sexuality. This was not the case 60 years ago when the messianic Cambridge don, FR Leavis, denounced the novelist and former physicist CP Snow, who in 1959 gave a lecture called ‘The Two Cultures’ in which he deplored the ignorance and suspicion towards science shown by leading men of letters, whom he called ‘Luddites’. Scientists, said Snow, had ‘the future in their bones’. Rubbish, said Dr Leavis. An abrasive figure who lectured in an open-necked shirt, Leavis saw literature as a guide to conduct. Would science, he asked, teach you how to behave?

Although his days as a boffin were long behind him, Snow retained the belief, common to scientists before the war, that science alone could guarantee economic prosperity. This utilitarian approach infuriated Leavis. He did not equate ‘the good life’ with material wealth, insisting instead that the study of, and response to, great literature was the only worthwhile pursuit for an intelligent young person, many of whom not only took him at his word but also contrived to spread it. Armed with copies of Scrutiny, the magazine their magus founded, Leavisites not only infiltrated the country’s classrooms and common rooms, they also, said Peter Hall, had a huge influence on the English stage.

But Leavis was not content simply to refute Snow, whom he called ‘a public relations man for science’. He set out to prove that far from being ‘a genius’ and a ‘master-mind’ who could speak with authority on both science and literature, Snow was ‘intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be’. He then asserted that as a novelist, Snow ‘didn’t exist’ – this despite the reverential treatment accorded to Strangers and Brothers, Snow’s ponderous, semi-autobiographical roman fleuve No wonder a modern critic would later write: ‘A malevolent deity, setting out to design a single figure in whom the largest number of Leavis’s deepest antipathies would find themselves embodied, could not have done better than to create Charles Percy Snow.’

And yet, as Leavis must have known, he and Snow had much in common, being clever boys from modest provincial homes who had to make their own way. Both won scholarships to Cambridge, where Leavis remained for most of his working life. Both loathed Bloomsbury and its snooty ‘coterie culture’. And both rejected the ‘experimental’ literature of the Modern Movement, which Snow, wearing his boffin’s hat, compared to indiscriminately mixing up all the bottles in a school chemistry laboratory. (Though determined to become a novelist, Snow read Science at Cambridge because it was the only subject his grammar school taught for university entrance.)

When war came Snow swapped the Cavendish laboratory for the corridors of power, a phrase he himself coined. Tasked with recruiting scientists for the defence industry he later became a Civil Service Commissioner and in 1957 was knighted. Rotund and avuncular, with a large shiny cranium and a measured delivery, he was many people’s idea of a pundit – hence the trouble Leavis took to disabuse them.

But why did Leavis wait three years before putting the boot in? Well, for one thing he subsequently found that copies of Snow’s lecture enjoyed a far wider circulation than he’d imagined possible. People were taking it seriously enough to recommend that sixth form English scholarship candidates read it. Even worse, these youngsters were also encouraged to read Snow’s novels. Leavis would certainly have regarded all this as trespass. The best and brightest were his turf.

Leavis was not alone in thinking Snow overrated as a novelist. But the consensus was that he had gone too far. His tone, said the distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling, was ‘impermissible’. To his credit Snow did not object when copies of Leavis’s lecture went on sale, this despite his belief that it probably cost him a Nobel prize. He may have been consoled by the award of a peerage in 1964 and a brief spell in Government as 2 i/c of Harold Wilson’s short-lived Ministry of Technology.

It’s now realised that what the debate should really have been about was the curriculum, which required pupils to choose between science and the humanities at the age of 16, or even earlier. This is no longer the case: A Level candidates can mix and match. But meanwhile the goal posts have shifted. An Oxford English graduate recently complained that while graduates in science and technology were walking into well-paid jobs, ‘English graduates were faced with the prospect of fighting a thousand other applicants for a six-week unpaid internship at a home appliance catalogue in Slough.’

The government seems to have taken note of this, not least because it wants as many graduates as possible to pay off their loans. ‘Stem’ subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – are to be encouraged, while the Humanities must prove their worth to employers or be starved of funds. So the hard-nosed approach recommended by Snow is now common practice, but I doubt whether he would have welcomed it unreservedly. However scathing he was about Luddites, he thought the two cultures could and should co-exist.

Both loathed Bloomsbury and its snooty ‘coterie culture’

Russia

Books on the country’s history, rulers and ruled are reviewed

Understanding Russian history ‘and how Russians see it is crucial to shaping any western response’ to Putin’s aggression, wrote Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. In Rodric Braithwaite’s Russia: Myths and Realities: The History of a Country with an Unpredictable Past (Profile, 288pp, £16.99), ‘the author quotes the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1782, which described Russia as ‘very large governed by a complete despotism and inhabited by vicious and drunken savages’.

Readers seeking a more nuanced view will find Braithwaite’s brisk and readable account very valuable. The book covers more than 1,000 years of history, culminating in what Putin termed the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the collapse of the Soviet Union.’

As Roger Boyes argued in his review for the Times, ‘Russia’s capacity to overestimate its virtues, to demand unearned applause, is one of the threads that runs through Rodric Braithwaite’s elegant portrait of the country that he has followed for so long, as an ambassador, prime ministerial adviser and writer. This short book, a masterpiece of compression, extracts lessons about the present invasion by trawling through Russia’s extraordinary history.’

Another concise study is Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia (Bloomsbury, 368pp, £20). ‘Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted,’ wrote Bridget Kendall in the Guardian. But the purpose is ‘not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present... The idea that Russia has a sacred spiritual destiny sits uneasily with its sense of where it fits into the world. As Figes meticulously charts, throughout its history there has been a running debate about how the country relates to foreigners and, above all, to Europeans... The question we are left with is whether Putin is still able to control the narrative, or if he has become a victim of his own myths about the “Russian world”.’

For Gregory Feifer in the New York Times, Figes ‘makes a key point about how the challenges of geography and climate have reinforced a long-held perception about the need for collective responsibility and strong autocratic leadership’. In the early development of the Muscovite state, the czar had a central role as arbiter between ruling clans. ‘In an important distinction from Western practice, the boyars –Moscow’s version of nobility – held status and property solely at the czar’s pleasure, with no rights of private ownership. “It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day,” Figes writes. “Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.”’

One such oligarch, briefly Russia’s richest man, then her most famous political prisoner, and now an exile living in London, is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose life has been ‘a dramatic story, one that might make an enthralling autobiography’, wrote Neil Buckley in the Financial Times. The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin’s Power Gambit – and How to Fix It (WH Allen, 352pp, £20) is ‘not, quite, the book that he has written. Instead, with co-author Martin Sixsmith, Khodorkovsky weaves together a pared-back account of his life with an astute dissection of the Putin system. It is part polemic, part selfjustification, and part manifesto for a different, post-Putin Russia. It is an intriguing mix, if a sometimes unsatisfying one.’

While he ‘writes confidently of how to secure freedom in post-Putin Russia... his brief depiction of life in

the camps of Russia’s modern-day gulag, largely confined to a single chapter, left this reader wanting more. Perhaps one day Khodorkovsky will tell the full, warts-and-all tale – worthy of a Russian novel – of how he built a business empire, lost it all, then found a form of redemption in the camps of Siberia and in exile.’ In his review for the Times, Marc Bennetts said that ‘despite his experiences and insider knowledge, this is not a gripping book’ and his ‘caution means that he glosses over, or simply ignores, some of the most intriguing episodes of his eventful life’.

John Sweeney’s Killer in the Kremlin: The Explosive Account of Putin’s Reign of Terror (Bantam Press, 304pp, £16.99) is ‘not a disinterested biography of Vladimir Putin’, wrote Seamus Martin in the Irish Times. ‘It is, instead, a polemic relating not only to Russia’s president but to many other aspects of the politics of Russia and Ukraine. At its best it points to some of Putin’s most execrable traits and at its worst elevates the author to the position of the book’s leading character.’

It ‘largely consists of digging up everything possible that shows Putin in a bad light, which admittedly is not a difficult task, but suggestions that he was simultaneously a paedophile and a womaniser, a supplier of arms to the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a hypochondriac and the richest man in the world are all open to question’. Times reviewer Roger Boyes called it ‘swashbuckling... a parade of adventures, told at breakneck pace, full of righteous indignation and an eye for the absurd’.

TREACLE WALKER

ALAN GARNER

4th Estate, 152pp, £8.99

At 160 pages and only 15,000 words, Treacle Walker is a slip of a novel but lovers of Alan Garner’s half century of story-telling magic will recognise the landscape – fairy story, fable and a touch of medieval morality tale –which awarded him a place (at 88) on the Booker Prize shortlist. In the Times Literary Supplement, medieval literature scholar Carolyne Larrington thought it a ‘remarkable achievement, somehow encapsulating a long lifetime’s work’.

A young boy, Joe Coppock, lives alone and when the pedlar Treacle Walker calls by with his horse and cart, it sets off, wrote Larrington, ‘a chain of mysterious happenings that seem both inexplicable and inevitable’. Susie Goldsbrough in the Times wasn’t sure who it was actually for. ‘The story slips into that particular, snug pocket of children’s literature about sick or lonely children who stumble into magical worlds.’ But the language, she thought, was ‘tricky (if delicious –flustifaction, Clanjandering) and the plot scattergun’.

THE LAST WHITE MAN MOHSIN HAMID,

Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £12.99

‘One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.’ This is the opening sentence of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel. In the Washington Post, Ron Charles was impressed by a ‘discomfiting little book’: ‘The novel’s existential absurdity quickly gives way to a parable of what might be called racial mourning. The darkening that befalls Anders is happening all over this unnamed town. Everywhere, formerly White people are waking up with skin “a deep and undeniable brown”... It’s too sincere for dystopian satire, too earnest for cultural parody. It describes the apocalypse long feared by white supremacists by subjecting that paranoia to blistering attention.’

summed up by Mia Levitin in the Spectator as ‘paragraphs often made up of one long sentence, the narrative propelled by a cadence of commas’. Hamilton Cain in Oprah Daily loved it. ‘Most (not all) of his paragraphs are single beautiful sentences that purl and flow over punctuation scattered like pebbles, with repetitions and cadences that tow the reader forward, gently.’ But it didn’t work for Sameer Rahim in the Telegraph who just found it ‘tedious’.

But in the Daily Telegraph, Sam Leith simply loved it. ‘Garner knots together a whole range of mythological and fairy-story motifs, and tropes from children’s stories – double vision, looking-glass worlds, wise fools, monsters that can’t cross a threshold unless invited in, obscurely understood magical objects – to create a small universe absolutely charged with meaning. It’s a glimpse of a world suffused with magic, of which our own day-to-day experience seems to be a flickering instantiation.’

As Guy Gunaratne in the Guardian put it: ‘The loss of privilege that comes from being perceived as white, and no longer being able to view the world from within whiteness, are some of the anxieties examined here.’

Several reviewers remarked on Hamid’s distinctive prose style,

Levitin thought The Last White Man ‘can be savoured in one long, thought-provoking sitting’ but Namwali Serpell in Atlantic Monthly just found it provoking: ‘What Hamid’s novel actually offers isn’t education but recognition, a selfcongratulatory reconfirmation of ideas like “migration is a death” and “race is a construct”, which are true enough but also truisms by now.’ And for Rahim, ‘Hamid’s moralising tone leaves the novel dead in the water.’

BABYSITTER

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Fourth Estate, 432pp, £18.99

This is 84-year-old Joyce Carol Oates’s 59th novel, but reviewers agreed that she shows no sign of running out of writerly puff. Her thriller about a serial killer on the loose in Detroit in 1977, where a rich socialite has embarked on an affair, impressed Kate Saunders in the Times with its rattling pace, thrilling twists and surprising ending. Oates

It can be savoured in one long, thought-provoking sitting

had an ‘extraordinary grip’ on her story and characters. It was ‘never quite the novel we think it’s going to be’ and she cleverly used our prejudices and assumptions to confound our expectations.

Kimberley Long in the Financial Times praised in particular the social dimension to the novel, its depiction of the paranoia of white middle-class America of that period and the racial and class tensions simmering beneath its glamorous surface. It was a ‘compelling study in the most ugly aspects of human desire’, though its true horror, she claimed, lay in ‘the torture endured in the futile search for connection’.

For Julie Myerson in the Guardian, this torture was both appalling — ‘one of the most harrowing descriptions of a prolonged sexual assault I can remember reading’ — and yet impressive for the sheer ‘astuteness’ of the writing. Oates’s prose style she saw as ‘insolently alive’ and rulebreaking, and the result was ‘magical’.

THE UNFOLDING

AM HOMES

Granta, 416pp, £20

AM Homes’s latest opens on 4th November, 2008, and the confirmation of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president. The Republican party’s high command are in a state of outrage and confusion. It is Republican bigwig Hitchens, known as Big Guy who is the novel’s chief protagonist and he is

Fiction

determined to launch a campaign to bring the conservative faction back into power.

Homes, opined Alex Clark in the Spectator, is a ‘funny, funny writer’. In the Guardian, Xan Brooks enjoyed the comic tone: ‘veering between barbed satire and nuanced domestic drama like a train clattering over the points as it homes in on DC’. In the Observer, Jonathan Myerson found himself getting bogged down: ‘At first this oblique, metaphorical banter has a seductive silliness: these conspirators know what they’re talking about and the reader is invited to eavesdrop, even if we don’t yet possess the codebook. But by the third or fourth conclave, you can’t help but feel such doggedly nonspecific language is militating against the narrative: what exactly are they planning and when and how?’

John Self found it hard going. ‘It is all delivered in long scenes of trivial, roundabout dialogue that never go anywhere. It goes on and on and on for an eye-watering 400 pages,’ he wrote in the Times. ‘Above my head a presiding spirit kind of admired Homes’s boldness with all this conversational minutiae, and nodded at the hidden literary nuggets of goodness. Yet down on the sofa, my bum was getting numb waiting for something to happen.’

THE NIGHT SHIP

JESS KIDD

Canongate, 348pp, £16.99

There are two intersecting narratives, separated by three and a half centuries and united by two motherless children. The first concerns the 1628 shipwreck of the Batavia bound for the Dutch East Indies but which founders on an island off the coast of western Australia, after which an adult Lord of the Flies scenario develops with one of the passengers seizing women

as sex slaves and massacring children. The main protagonist here is Mayken, daughter of a merchant whom she is to join after the death of her mother; hero of the second narrative is Gil, who after the death of his young mother is sent to live – on the same island – with his grandfather.

Stephanie Merritt described in the Observer how the two stories ‘unfold in alternate chapters, linked by repeated phrases and talismans’. AK Blakemore in the Guardian found this ‘bifurcated architecture’ frustrating; Christian Edwards, in the Times, agreed, adding that, ‘Part of the reason the narrative feels lukewarm is to do with the novel’s form.’ He considered the overlaps between the two characters ‘more biographical than temperamental, so the attempts to force them into ever closer alignment are strained’.

Marinka Swain in the Telegraph enjoyed the fact that the novel was ‘strong on body horror, from pus-filled boils to a skull found beneath a washing line’.

Nevertheless, she felt the reader was ‘ultimately overwhelmed by a sort of soggy morality: straightforward goodies and baddies instead of the lurking dark side of human nature’.

ON JAVA ROAD

LAWRENCE OSBORNE

Hogarth, 231pp, £16.99

Sailing into trouble

Fans of Lawrence Osborne’s thrillers will be delighted to know that Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times thought On Java Road, his ‘most compulsive yet’. Tom Williams in the Spectator was also full of praise for this story of British journalist Adrian Gyle, his rich Chinese friend Jimmy and the mysterious disappearance of Jimmy’s mistress Rebecca. ‘Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their backdrops, from Macau to Greece, are often glamorous and exotic. Like any British novelist who deals with morality in foreign places, he gets

The two stories unfold in alternate chapters, linked by repeated phrases

compared with Graham Greene, but On Java Road, his sixth novel, owes much to Patricia Highsmith too. At its heart is a crime – the disappearance of a young woman in contemporary Hong Kong – but this, as much as anything, is a structural device on which to hang an examination of moral courage. What, Osborne asks, is required to protect democracy when doing so comes with great risk?’

For the New York Times reviewer Chris Bohjalian it was ‘the palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum that kept me turning the pages’. As Kemp put it: ‘Shades of Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith fall across his colourful pages. Like both, he has a nomadic imagination strongly responsive to the lure of the foreign and enthralled by duplicity, mistrust and betrayal.’

THE BULLET THAT MISSED RICHARD OSMAN Viking,

413pp, £20

The Bullet That Missed is the third novel in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, which features four retirement-home amateur detectives. His first two each sold more than a million copies. As Alison Flood wrote in the Guardian, ‘it is hard not to be charmed by the eccentricities and the resourcefulness of [Osman’s] creations’. She continued: ‘Writing genuinely funny prose is not at all easy; it is rare that I find a book that has me actually laughing out loud, but I snickered so much reading this one that it was remarked upon by my family.’

The unsolved murder this time is that of a television reporter who was researching a VAT fraud when her car was driven off a cliff. Suicide was ruled out when her body wasn’t found. So the Thursday Murder Club’s four intrepid pensioners set out to investigate.

Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph was also charmed by Osman’s books: they ‘are obviously intended to be crowd-pleasers but never seem confected, with a genuine warmth that readers clearly respond to. Every bookshop will be as crowded as the post office on pension day when this one is released, and Osman deserves

Fiction

that success.’ However, a dissenting voice came from Joan Smith in the Sunday Times, who thought that although there was ‘nothing wrong with cosy crime, which has a distinguished pedigree going back to the 1920s’, there were more accomplished modern exponents… ‘Cosy crime is, anyway, a misnomer,’ she wrote; ‘the best examples are deadly serious, as [Agatha] Christie indicated when she characterised murder as the worst crime imaginable. Nothing could be further from the whimsical musings of the Thursday Murder Club.’

EDEN

Picador, 272pp, £16.99

Jim Crace has won numerous awards for his fiction and, as Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman put it, his novels are ‘wonderful enigmas. They are fables without evident moral apothegms, or allegories that refuse to reveal their key… His latest, eden, is in his signature limpid style and prompts the same delightful befuddlement in the reader.’

The inhabitants of Crace’s eden live in a ‘kind of horticultural detention camp’, wrote Peter Kemp in the Times. They tend to the garden, overseen by angels (large, blue-feathered birds) but one of the gardeners has disappeared...

As Max Liu in the Financial Times explained: ‘Crace’s eden is no paradise for most of its inhabitants who belong to a rigidly hierarchical society in which an under-class of human labourers serve the “winged nobility” of brutal angel overseers. The “gardeners of eden” have sacrificed their freedom in exchange for eternal life. They have escaped the mortal world outside the garden which is said to be full of hardship and death.’

‘Despite describing himself as a “North Korean style atheist”’, Jon Day wrote in the Spectator, ‘religious themes are nothing new for Crace. Nor is the ambiguity with which he treats them here, which is likely to infuriate believers and unbelievers equally.

‘His real interest, however, isn’t theological but moral, and eden isn’t about God at all. Instead, it’s about how stories are a direct result of our mortality, endlessly recyclable and reinterpretable.’

Kemp concluded: ‘eden suffers –ironically – from the main drawback Crace sees in eternal life: it goes on too long in the same way.’

Religious themes are nothing new for Crace

Children’s books

EMILY BEARN on Christmas books for all ages

Princesses and pirates are facing stiff competition from grandparents who are the current stars of children’s fiction, with ever more picture books focusing on the transformative bond between old and young. Found by Sam Usher (Templar, 40pp, £12.99) is a charming example, telling the simple story of a boy and his grandfather as they discover the wonder of the natural world during a day beside the sea. (‘It was the best sandcastle I’d ever seen! Grandad said, “I think we deserve an ice cream, don’t you?”’) And young readers will love peeking under the flaps in Cat Family Christmas by Lucy Brownridge (Frances Lincoln, 24pp, £24.99), in which we join three kittens as they help their grandparents tackle a raft of cosily familiar Christmas chores. (‘So little time left and so much cooking still to do!’)

And it wouldn’t be Christmas without Julia Donaldson’s beloved Stick Man, whose Homeric journey home to the family tree has now been translatit intae Scots by James Robertson. In Stick Mannie (Itchy Coo, 32pp, £6.99) our beleaguered hero ‘bides in the faimly tree / Wi his Stick Wifie Love and their stick bairnies three’. But ‘wan day, when Stick Mannie is oot for a jog, he has so many adventures he begins tae wonder if he’ll ever get hame again …’

In board books, The Twelve Days of Christmas by Rachel Piercey, illustrated by Freya Hartas (Magic Cat Publishing, 10pp, £7.99), is an engaging reinvention of the traditional song, in which we follow Bear on a festive present hunt. ‘On the tenth day of Christmas, Santa gave to me: ten snowballs flying …’ And for a gentle lesson in road awareness, A Practical Present for Philippa Pheasant (Walker, 32pp, £12.99) by Briony May Smith is the skilfully suspenseful story of a warm-hearted pheasant who dreams of becoming a lollipop lady and making her forest safer. Can our plucky protagonist source a yellow jacket, and help her friends to cross the road?

For chapter book readers, feminist retellings of fairy tales are still coming thick and fast – and The Little Match Girl Strikes Back (Simon &

From top: A Practical Present for Philippa Pheasant, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Stick Mannie, Be Kind

Schuster, 208pp, £12.99), in which the historical novelist Emma Carroll reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a matchgirl who dies on the city streets, stands out from the rest. In Carroll’s version (illustrated by Lauren Child), the heroine leads her fellow match factory workers on strike, marches on Parliament – and lives to tell the tale.

Fantasy lovers meanwhile will find plenty of inventive high jinx in The Spectaculars (Usborne, 368pp, £12.99) – a new trilogy by the debut author Jodie Garnish. In the first instalment we meet our heroine Harper, whose special powers lead her to a mysterious theatre school in which she is plunged into magical adventures. Meanwhile in Spooked: The Theatre Ghosts (Simon & Schuster, 272pp, £6.99), the first in a new series by Steven Butler, a young girl stumbles into a haunted theatre and finds that she and its ghosts have more in common than she could have supposed. (‘For the

first time in her life she had a whole gaggle of exciting friends to love, both living and not-soliving.’)

The Accidental Stowaway (Faber and Faber, 288pp, £7.99) is an historical adventure by Judith Eagle, telling the story of a girl in Edwardian Liverpool who accidentally stows away on the RMS Glorious. (‘A giant boom split the air: Surely the ship wasn’t about to set sail?’) Can Patch remain hidden and solve the ship’s intrigues before she arrives in New York? And fans of detective fiction should not miss Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire, an ebullient new series by Sarah Todd Taylor about a young girl who works in a bakery by day, and spies by night. In the first instalment, A Recipe for Trouble (Nosy Crow, 272pp, £7.99), our inexhaustible heroine sneaks onboard a French train dressed as a pastry chef.

For slightly older readers, The Chestnut Roaster by Eve McDonnell (Everything with Words, 324pp, £7.99) is an historical thriller set in the catacombs of 19th-century Paris, which tells the story of a girl burdened by a supernatural memory. (‘Starting on All Fools Day, twelve years ago, I remember everything. EVERYTHING. That was a Tuesday, and that was the day I was born.’)

Children’s self-help remains one of the fastest growing genres – and for a Christmas message of peace and goodwill, look no further than the Mr Men, who are the subject of a new series of books intended to help young readers manage their emotions. Toddlers feeling fractious on Boxing Day might take inspiration from Be Kind (Farshore, 32pp, £4.99), in which Mr Mean discovers that being nice can have unexpected consequences: ‘Mr Mean felt a strange sensation. A warm glow which started in his chest and spread outwards. A small act of kindness really had made him feel happier too.’