Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i The Oldie

At the October Oldie Literary Lunch, we were lucky enough to host Sir Don McCullin, the world's greatest war photographer. Don was talking about his new book, Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor, published with a commentary by Barnaby Rogerson. He says he now prefers landscape photography to war photography – and particularly loved photographing the great Roman ruins of Turkey. He has covered conflicts from Israel to Cyprus to Northern Ireland to Vietnam. But, he told the audience, ‘I'm 88 and I can hardly go up the stairs without fear. The bathroom is terrible. I find the bathroom more dangerous than Vietnam.’ Many oldies will agree – flak jackets required in all bathrooms. At Nigel Lawson's memorial service at St Margaret's, Westminster, his son Dominic recalled that Lawson, in his…

How to enter Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy's wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism. What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 57 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 23rd November 2023. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.…

WHAT WERE railway camping coaches? In the 1930s, rambling was popular -anything to get away from the city smoke and into the clean air of the countryside. The LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) served most of the eastern side of the country. In 1933, it hit on the idea of converting ten elderly railway coaches, due for retirement, into holiday homes and siting them in quiet, country stations. The scheme took off and was quickly followed in 1934 by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) and Great Western Railway (GWR). In 1935, the Southern Railway (SR) followed suit. By the end of the year, there were 215 railway camping coaches, as they became known, in 162 stations up and down the country, providing reasonably priced self-catering accommodation in…

Gordon Brown is a son of the manse. John Major's dad was a circus performer who sold garden gnomes. My own father, R F B ‘Dick’ Letts, was a prepschool headmaster at Oakley Hall, Cirencester, from 1962 to 1992. Having a boarding school for one's home was odd but never dull. We lived with over 100 children and staff. Privacy was rare. One afternoon in my teens, I was taking a bath and a visiting clergyman wandered in. He stayed for a long, amiable chat while my bath water slowly cooled. Family evenings could be interrupted by a knock on the drawing-room door and a dormitory prefect saying, ‘Willoughby's been sick!’ or an under-matron complaining that Kaminski simply would not stop talking after lights out. Seconds later, we'd hear Kaminski…

There's no sugarcoating the awfulness of going bald, especially when you're young. I lost my hair – first slowly, then all at once – when I was in my late twenties. I had it worse than most, but better than some. I've had decades to get used to seeing my fivehead in the mirror. At this point, I probably wouldn't take my hair back even if I could. I have what people tell me is ‘a look’. I would describe this look as ‘prop-scarred manatee in expensive eyewear’. For anyone growing up, as I did, in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were, for sure, bald icons: Telly Savalas, Yul Brynner and Isaac Hayes on the cover of Hot Buttered Soul. Then there was the Hollywood talent agent Swifty Lazar, famous…

Whatever happened to the classic silk headscarf? Ubiquitous for decades, headscarves have lately been lying dormant. Now we are poised for a comeback of sorts. Investors, priced out of the iconic handbag market (the Birkin, the Fendi Baguette etcetera), are stocking up. Sotheby's online Handbags and Accessories emporium and Xupes – the vintage store popularised by Channel 4's documentary Second Hand for Fifty Grand – report brisk business. Cash in the attic for Oldie-readers? As long as you have been organised enough to have stored them correctly – neatly folded between sheets of tissue to prevent any colour transfer, only ever professionally cleaned and most valuable if they have been kept in their original boxes. The Xupes collection of ‘pre-loved’ scarves ranges in price from £199 to £799. You can…

Do you suffer from Plyushkin's disorder? Statistics suggest that five per cent of us do, but my guess is it's more. Stepan Plyushkin is a character in Gogol's novel Dead Souls, who saves everything he finds. He is, in other words, a hoarder, who invests his emotions in the stuff other people throw away. Hoard is from Anglo-Saxon hord, meaning treasure, and hurdis, meaning fence; hoarding is both an accumulation of clutter and a defence against its overflow. The etymology perfectly catches the condition: hoarders like to organise their chaos. I know a hoarder of yoghurt cartons, a lifetime's supply washed and stacked away; a hoarder of newspapers, bundled up and categorised by month and year; a hoarder of hotel shampoos and slippers, unopened and kept in the airing cupboard;…

Country Mouse Quite why my wife gets up so early is a mystery. Is it to avoid me? It's not as if she's milking cows or churning butter, even as the master hulks heavily in his sack. ‘Admin’ is her reason. From dawn till dusk, she's on the phone checking that providers – in the forms of service and utility companies – aren't taking us for a ride. Brisk of tongue, the wife is unafraid to call out frauds – no doubt a lingering trace memory of her Ulster childhood, when her mother made her stand by a window to count the number of sacks the coalman was unloading into the coal house, ‘in case he keeps one for himself’. She was also made to follow the window-cleaner, perched on…

The Doctors Surgery Matthew Perry was famous for two things: first as a comic actor in Friends and latterly as a man who was addicted to drink and drugs. He had, as the current-day cant phrase has it, ‘opened up’ about the latter in a memoir published last year. Famous people these days are always ‘opening up’ about something or other, as if they were tins of sardines. In 2013, poor Mr Perry had a discussion on Newsnight with Peter Hitchens about the nature of addiction. Unlike Mr Hitchens, he held that addiction was a bona-fide disease, one of his arguments being that the American Medical Association has classified it as such for nearly 50 years. When one considers the chequered history of medicine, this is not much of an…

Giles the reluctant guest SIR: Among the things that Giles Wood is so pleased to have avoided, by turning down an invitation to stay for a week on a Scottish island (October issue), is the prospect of chatting through three-course dinners every night. As his putative (and erstwhile) host, can I put his mind at rest: we have a strict no-starters rule (for exactly that reason). Think again next year, Giles! Yours sincerely, Richard Oldfield, Doddington, Kent Inside Byron's dog's tomb SIR: I always enjoy Lucinda Lambton's travel writings, and September's Overlooked Britain with its association with Newstead Abbey and Lord Byron was particularly enjoyable. I was fortunate, as a resident of Newstead Abbey Park, to have the opportunity to enter Boatswain's tomb. Byron wrote to a friend to say…

Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South—East (Pevsner Buildings of England) Revised by Simon Bradley Yale University Press £45 Round the great domed rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera ‘there is a density of monuments of architecture which has not the like in Europe’. So wrote Nikolaus Pevsner in 1974, on completing his daringly ambitious project, begun in 1945, of surveying, volume by volume, the buildings of every county in England, Simon Bradley, the current editor of the series – and of this bigger, better volume about Oxford – goes further by calling that area round the Camera ‘unique in the world’ or ‘if that seems a hazardous statement, it is certainly unparalleled in Cambridge’. The glory of the setting, bounded by the Bodleian Library, All Souls College, St Mary’s Church and Brasenose,…

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine By General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts William Collins £26 Plato reckoned that only the dead have seen the end of war. More recently, a 19th-century jurist, Sir Henry Maine, reflected presciently, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.’ Westerners brought up in the wake of the Second World War can be forgiven for thinking that peace is normal, subject to occasional unwelcome interruptions. However, as this thoughtful and informed survey shows, the world since 1945 has never been without war. In terms of lives lost, the last century was easily the most violent in human history. We in Britain may think of ourselves as having been at peace – more or less —for…

My wife said, ‘Can my mother come down for the weekend?’ So I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Well, she's been up on the roof two weeks already.’ Bob Monkhouse When I played drunks, I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk. Richard Burton Imagine I throw a spear in the dark. That's my intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the spear. That's my intellect. Ingmar Bergman There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before. A P Herbert…

DINING WITH MICKEY MOUSE The most noticeable change since 2021 in the post-Covid world of restaurant service is the rapid ‘turning’ of tables. Before March 2020, the announcement ‘We'll need your table back by 9pm’ was the preserve of the truly smart West End restaurant. Now it's ubiquitous. Recently, I took my son, Leo, out for lunch at Chez Bruce, in Wandsworth. It has long sat on my list of Big Treat restaurants and what bigger event than a farewell to Leo before he set sail to Melbourne for a year. To be fair, they didn't ask for our table back within two hours and 15 minutes – but had we arrived at 6.45pm, we would have been asked to leave by 9pm. It was a sublime lunch. Leo, who…

TAXING CHOICES The Treasury has a problem: how to replace shrinking road taxes in the age of ZEVs (Zero Emission Vehicles). Left unattended, it would blow a significant hole in government finances. We pay about 52.95p in tax on every litre of fuel, netting the Treasury about £24.3 billion. With increased use of electronic vehicles (EVs), that figure will be in freefall – especially once the ZEV mandate kicks in next year, whereby manufacturers have to produce an annually increasing percentage of EVs, rising to 80 per cent by 2030. Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) receipts at present net about another £11 billion on top of the fuel tax. EVs pay no VED but from April 2025 they will, though no one knows how much. There are various proposals to make…

The short-eared owl (Asio flammeus) has a great advantage for birdwatchers. It's a daylight hunter and not as nocturnal as the majority of owls. Its ears are concealed as normal at the sides of its head. The tufts – more visible in its forest-dwelling cousin, the longeared owl – are for display. Winter, on east-coast marshes and wetland nature reserves, is the most likely time to see these birds. This happened on a visit with Carry Akroyd (this column's illustrator) to the Welney WWT reserve, east of Peterborough. Near the entrance, there was a dyke along which a short-eared owl was gradually approaching, from convenient perch to perch, to within 30 yards or so. It silently passed and was later viewable high overhead. It was mobbing or being mobbed –…

Is there something you really miss abroad? I miss banter, irony, rudeness and English humour. Do you travel light? No, I'm a terrible packer. I didn't have a uniform at school and I would take things I might change into. Gawn [her husband] is very good at ‘Which shoes should I wear with this? Do I look fat in this?’ What's your favourite destination? Our cottage in Wiltshire. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Hayling Island and eating apples till I was sick. The first holiday abroad was to the South of France, but Dad [Sam Wanamaker] had to go back to Liverpool because an actor had been in a car accident. He'd opened a theatre there. We were in Mougins and I learnt to speak French. Was it…

Across 7 Bread spread (6) 8 Hillocks, mounds (6) 10 Account for, justify (7) 11 Jewelled headdress (5) 12 Trade in; exchange (4) 13 Andean beast of burden (5) 17 Confuse (issue); sweet (5) 18 So be it! (4) 22 Bags; fires (5) 23 Maintains (values of) (7) 24 DNA row (anag) (6) 25 Arctic plain (6) Down 1 The head of a coin (7) 2 To draw using dots (7) 3 Take it easy (5) 4 Branch of medical science (7) 5 Desolate; offering no hope (5) 6 Try (5) 9 Sauna logo (anag) (9) 14 Student grant (7) 15 Burst inward (7) 16 Rare (7) 19 Berkshire racecourse (5) 20 Frown with displeasure (5) 21 Evil spirit (5) Genius 431 solution Winner: Paul Appelbe, Altrincham, Cheshire Runners-up: Rev…

Ask Virginia Texting etiquette Q My granddaughter brought her boyfriend over to have lunch with us and he spent most of the time, between courses, texting. I felt this was very rude, but does this mean I'm an old fuddy-duddy as it's common behaviour these days? Or was he just being rather bad-mannered? Eleanor G, Edinburgh A While this might be normal behaviour for the young, most people of any age know that this isn't what you should do in the presence of older people, particularly ones you've never met before. I'm amazed your granddaughter didn't pick him up on this. You probably should have saved the situation simply by saying, very kindly and graciously, ‘Unless it's urgent, would you mind putting your phone away just while we're having lunch? You…

Virago, 256pp, £18.99 Natasha Walter is a writer and human rights activist, and this ‘deeply passionate and humane memoir’, wrote Catherine Taylor in the Financial Times, centres on Walter's 75-year-old mother, Ruth. In December 2017, she ordered a drug on the internet, ‘arranged her affairs, wrote farewell letters, got into bed and ended her life. She had not been depressed; she had simply decided, having noticed small memory lapses, that it was time to go,’ explained Lucy Atkins in the Sunday Times. ‘Natasha was overwhelmed with shock and grief,’ wrote Blake Morrison in the Guardian. He went on: ‘The only cure lay in listening to Ruth — in getting to know her as she really was and in understanding why her suicide note asked “Please be happy for me. It…

Picador, 332pp, £16.99 The title of the late Jonathan Raban's last book evokes Edmund Gosse's classic of the same name, though the text never refers to it. One chapter was left unfinished at Raban's death in January, and what remains is essentially two books,‘artfully braided'according to Sara Wheeler in the Spectator, both about homecoming: Raban's from a rehab ward in Seattle, where a stroke had confined him in 2009; and his father Peter's return from the Second World War, hastened by the mental breakdown of his wife, to whom he had sent often passionate letters while away. Wheeler found the book rambled but forgave Raban given ‘his acute description of the foibles and failures of being human’. The meld of these two stories was not so successful for Anthony Quinn…

Head of Zeus, 384pp, £27.99 A controversial and attentionseeking celebrity in Restoration London, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was also a feminist, a philosopher, and a poet. She was later nicknamed ‘Mad Madge’ by a Victorian commentator. Cavendish ‘has been seen as that most tiresome of types, a “character”,’ wrote Lucy HughesHallett in the Spectator. ‘But Francesca Peacock makes a persuasive case for her being, as well, an author whose work is as illuminating as it is unconventional… Her satirical fantasy novel The Blazing World has been described as the first work of science fiction… Margaret is always the star of the show, but Peacock gives her a backing troupe of other female writers of the period, other childless women and other wives for whom marriage, however comfortable or loving,…

The Telegraph's Michael Deacon got his review copy of Chris Bryant's book about parliamentary sleaze two months ahead of publication. In those two months alone, he wrote, there was so much evidence of scandal and misconduct that the book was ‘both blisteringly topical and quickly out of date’. Nevertheless, he thought, ‘we still need ideas on how to clear up sleaze in general’, and Bryant – a Labour MP of two decades, historian of Parliament, chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee and dedicated Erskine May nerd – is well placed to offer them. His book is, further, amiably written and well leavened with amusing anecdotes. That said, its proposals (downsizing the upper chamber, banning most second jobs for MPs, placing cameras in division lobbies to make sure the whips…

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was a vast project, begun in 1879 (and still going) and overseen by the indefatigable Sir James Murray who recruited a network of 3,000 volunteers around the world who were tasked with reading a particular book — James Hogg's narrative poem The Queen's Wake, say, or Horace Greeley's history book The American Conflict — and then filling out a slip for each unusual word which called for further research. Sarah Ogilvie's delightful book follows the stories of some of these people. And what a curious and eccentric crew they turn out to be. Kathryn Hughes, reviewing The Dictionary People in the Guardian, set the scene. ‘Ogilvie worked at the OED for many years, and nine years ago was thrilled to discover an overlooked…

Of the two new biographies of Anne Boleyn and her family, Claire Martin's ‘is the more unorthodox of the pair,’ Daniel Brooks wrote in the Telegraph, ‘a bold study of the Boleyn family which takes us from the first evidence of the name in the village of Salle, Norfolk, in 1283, through to the members of the family who bore witness to Anne's grisly end.’ It charts their steady rise from humble beginnings as sheep farmers to Geoffrey Boleyn, Anne's greatgrandfather, a merchant whose savvy investments brought him Blickling Hall in Norfolk and Hever Castle in Kent. Royal honours were bestowed on him and his son, while Thomas, Anne's father, was an able and trusted diplomat, who secured a place for Anne at the courts of two of Europe's most…

‘We may ask ourselves why we are so concerned with finding and identifying the bones of the distant dead,’ Cat Jarman wrote of her new book. Given the limits of even modern forensic archeology, it is a fair point,’ Dan Jones rejoined in the Times, ‘but Jarman's smart, inventive book shows that the joy of history often lies in posing questions rather than finding answers.’ December 1642. Parliamentary troops burst into Winchester Cathedral, burial place of kings from the 7th to 12th centuries. In an orgy of desecration they break open the chests containing the remains, using the bones as missiles to shatter the stained glass windows. Afterwards the bones are gathered up and returned randomly to the chests. Fast forward to 2012 when the bones arrive at the laboratories…

‘Heffer has been chronicling our island story, since the accession of Queen Victoria, for years,’ wrote A.N. Wilson, a fellow historian of the period, in the Critic. ‘It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to tell the story of the 1920s and 1930s… This is a superb book, and will surely be seen as the definitive history of the pre-war years.’ A key aspect of the book is that it ‘has magnificently set out the case for Chamberlain's rehabilitation,’ wrote Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. ‘Like his previous three volumes,it is a work of epic scholarship, breathtaking range, and piercing originality. His judgement is shrewd and his prose stylish. ‘In its majestic scope, the quartet is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that have…

When, last year, Boris Johnson referred to the UK's ‘proud history’ of welcoming foreigners fleeing persecution, he presumably meant refugees like the Jewish children on the Kindertransport. But all too often, says Paul Dowswell, émigrés have been treated as ‘aliens’, a word that has always had ‘sinister undertones’. Even the Huguenots, supposedly welcomed with open arms, were resented for their industry. 250 years later, as Dowswell relates, many of the Polish ex-servicemen who settled here after the war annoyed union leaders because they worked too hard. Plus ça change … But the Poles were our Allies, which was not the case with the other émigrés, who included the thousands of adult Jews, that Dowswell considers. No sooner had war been declared than newspapers like the Express and the Mail denigrated…

Peter York (p20) invented the Sloane Ranger in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, written with Ann Barr. He is author of Dictators’ Homes and The Blue Riband: the Piccadilly Line. Rachel Johnson (p61) is our Golden Oldies columnist. She edited The Lady and is author of Notting Hell, Shire Hell and A Diary of The Lady: My First Year as Editor. Jasper Rees (p63) is author of Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood. He wrote Bred of Heaven: One Man's Quest to Reclaim his Welsh Roots and I Found My Horn. Roger Lewis (p65) is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He wrote the bestseller Seasonal Suicide Notes and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.…

Gyles Brandreth's Diary I am writing this on a train. Another train. I am on tour. In fact, I am on two tours. Simultaneously. With one tour, I am taking my one-man show (Gyles Brandreth Can't Stop Talking) across the land, from Edinburgh to Eastbourne. There's no rhyme nor reason to where I go. I think my producer just sticks a pin randomly in the map. With the other tour, I am flogging my latest book (Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait), from Ilkley to Belfast. I love Ilkley. Alan Titchmarsh began his career in the municipal gardens there and it's where I used to visit Gillian Baverstock for tea. She was Enid Blyton's elder daughter and served what she called ‘a traditional Big Ears and Noddy tea’. We had jam tarts,…

WHAT IS leng? He's leng. She's soooo leng. This ice cream is leng. That handbag is leng. What on earth does ‘leng’ mean? If you have regular contact with teenagers, you'll know that ‘leng’ is a superlative term of the highest praise. ‘Lena,’ can be applied to anything from an extremely sexually attractive person to a perfectly mixed cocktail or piece of fashionable clothing. The word is described in the Urban Dictionary as a ‘levelled-up version of peng’. ‘Peng’ used to be the popular word for attractive until superseded by ‘leng’, and the two can now be combined into ‘peng-a-leng’. The origins of both words are disputed. According to Reddit, some say it came from a Cantonese phrase meaning attractive but cheap. However, the Urban Dictionary confirms them as ‘roadman…

Going to the theatre is simple enough. Going backstage afterwards to visit one of the cast is a minefield. In his dressing room, you'll catch the actor with his trousers down, literally and metaphorically. Out of your mouth will flow a torrent of random adjectives. Some of them will get caught on auto-repeat, ‘So, so intriguing … really intriguing. Just, you know – intriguing.’ You can't stop yourself gushing – of course, you weren't ‘overwhelmed‘; quite the opposite. Actors are taught always to favour verbs and nouns, but secretly they prefer adjectives. (I once found an actor googling the word ‘mediocre’ to check it didn't mean what it said in the local paper.) With the sweat still on his brow from the curtain call, the actor is in a postcoital…

I was about 13, on a sofa in front of the television on a wet Saturday afternoon. I was carelessly able to do that once – sigh. I was watching a black-and-white film. Or maybe the TV was black-and-white – probably. It was a story about a nanny caring for children all her life and then having to say farewell to the little treasures. Poor nanny. She ends up all alone, pathetically sad and abandoned – except that, in the final scene, all the children she has ever nannied, dozens of them, come thronging to her lonely room and hug her and tell her how much they all love her. Gawd. Cheap. Predictable. I absolutely adored it. I was left a snotty, emotional, teenage wreck by its trite sentimentality. So…

Look, I know you are far too clever to jump on every passing investment bandwagon, but you will, you know. We all do. The fear of missing out (FOMO) runs through our psyche. If only I had bought Amazon when it seemed like a daring idea and some clever people had noticed. If only I had decided that Apple shares were so cheap that I must have been missing something. So of course I was wide open to the Next Big Thing. It's a comfort that even the smartest make investment howlers. It is unlikely that George Shultz, Larry Ellison, Henry Kissinger or Rupert Murdoch understood the scientific theory behind Theranos, the magical blood-testing machine that turned out to be no such thing. But the clever, rich people were in…

Oldie Man of Letters Growing old, one loses one's capacity to be shocked. But lately I have been shocked by the senior clergy in our neck of the woods. Somers Town is just north of the British Library and Euston Station. It has always been a deprived neighbourhood. It was from here that the infant Dickens set out on his long walk to the Blacking Warehouse in Hungerford Old Stairs. Here, in Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, ‘Father Hilary Cherwell … restores faith in the church’ by his building sanitary housing for his parishioners. When he arrived as a curate after WWI, Father Basil Jellicoe (1899-1935) – the original of Father Hilary; and nephew of the great admiral – found families squeezed into rat-infested lodgings with no sanitation. He rehoused thousands…

Postcards from the Edge I recall nostalgically how London – and Paris – numbers indicated topography: MAY(fair) KEN(sington), HOL(born) – and ELY(sées), TRO(cadéro), PAS(sy). In France, phones had an extra earpiece, so a two-way phone call could include a third party (or even a fourth). How much of our youth we seemed to spend waiting by the phone! Waiting for that yearned-for call from some longforgotten crush. Until the introduction of the answering machine, you had to stay at home if you hoped for some return call – poor, aspiring thespians, always awaiting that audition callback! And then, how long we spent gossiping on the phone, while parents worried about the ensuing bill. Sometimes it was hard to get an interlocutor off the phone. Then, when emails arrived, it was…

‘What a way to run a railroad.’ So began a lecture by a visiting Biblical scholar at our monastery. It was on the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which the landowner pays the same wage to those who arrive at the eleventh hour as to those who have toiled all day (Matthew 20:1-16). The first ten verses are hardly a story at all, and then in verse 11 there is the bombshell: unfair wages. It is a very odd story. Nonetheless, it is firmly rooted in the ordinariness of the Palestinian countryside of 2,000 years ago. In the intervening years, the parable has continued to be a source of controversy and seldom fails to provoke outrage. What is vital, in the sense of being life-giving, is the…

The first time I met Gérard Depardieu, the great French actor was stark bollock naked and about to get into bed with me and my wife in a Paris penthouse. It was not how I had imagined things would turn out on that fateful night some 20 years ago. We had travelled from Italy to stay with a close French friend who had been going out with Depardieu since meeting on a film set in Cambodia. Back in Paris, the actor paid all her bills on the apartment in the upmarket 7th arrondissement and bought her a Mini Cooper to run around the city. Depardieu would show up unannounced on his motorbike, usually late at night. I had long admired his acting in films such as Jean de Florette, Manon…

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing Hilary Mantel John Murray £25 ‘On Sunday last, I had a shock waking up to find that my novel Wolf Hall was 2-1 favourite to win the Man Booker prize.’ So wrote Hilary Mantel in September 2009. ‘It was almost as much of a shock to be described in the press (repeatedly) as “the 57-year-old from Glossop”.’ This was for a piece in the Guardian about the invisibility of women past 50. Any invisibility that clung to her ended the following month when, the bookies being right, Mantel awoke one morning and found herself famous. It so happens that the first journalist she saw that day was me. I had been commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to interview the winner.…

My husband is training for a marathon. This is, in theory, a good thing as it means he is keeping fit. In reality, it means he spends much of his free time running around our neighbourhood in brightly coloured Lycra, stopping only to check his brightly coloured sports watch. After this spectacle, he is encouraged to ‘load up’ on carbs. This involves eating the entire contents of the fridge. After the carbloading, he is required to rest. This mostly takes the form of lying on the sofa, ignoring his family, while studying his route on Strava. Strava is basically an app that tells you how brilliant you are. At running. On Strava, you can become a ‘local hero’ simply by running in a circle. You can also check in on your friends…

‘We live in such horrendous times,’ said Sir András Schiff, the great pianist. ‘There is no escape from the horrors. But perhaps there is some solace and consolation. Maybe in a small way, in two or three hours – my concerts are rather long – we can make the world a little better.’ That was on Music Matters (Radio 3). At the request of Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Schiff then played us some Bach – from The Well-Tempered Clavier. It was divine. But in Gaza things remained much the same – chaos. On Today, Lord Ricketts, former diplomat and crossbench peer, gave a beautifully measured and authoritative, but quite dismaying, prognosis. So much analysis; so many words. Meanwhile, the music plays on. So I refrain from praising some lively stuff on the…

I am late to this party. I was only dimly aware of the Taylor Swift phenomenon. I'd managed to tune her out with my internal synthesiser since Swift signed a deal aged 14 with Sony/ATV in 2003. She is now unignorable. The girl next door is now worth a billion dollars. As someone in the Netflix doco called Miss Americana – breathed, ‘Taylor Swift IS the music industry.’ She has 275m followers on Instagram (Madonna has 19.2m) and, on Twitter/X, she has 95m followers. (Her handle is @taylorswift13 as 13 is her favourite number.) Madonna has 2.8m. By 2008, she was already the bestselling artist in the US and became globally famous when Kanye West jumped on stage during an awards ceremony, threw huge amounts of shade on her win…

ANGELICA Christmas in the almost forgotten past of my childhood always included crystallised or glacé fruits and chestnuts. There were also little candied green bits in the Christmas cake, which apparently were called angelica. It was not until this year that I saw, for the first time, a growing angelica plant. There are scores of different species of angelica; the only one suitable for the herb garden is Angelica archangelica. It was once said to have been brought to England by an angel – or archangel? – as a cure for the plague; but it isn't noted for its medicinal properties today. With large leaves and domed, cream or pale green flowerheads, looking not unlike cow parsley, the plants will grow to about eight feet. They should be staked, as…

A TASTE OF AUSTRIA In common with much of the rest of Europe, Austria in 1983 enjoyed a grape harvest that was pretty good. A balmy spring had given way to a long, hot summer. So the grapes were abundant and ripe – in some cases perhaps too ripe, lacking the acidity needed for balance. Two years later, a lack of acidity was the least of the Austrian wine industry's problems. Several bottles from the 1983 vintage turned out to have been adulterated with DEG – diethylene glycol – a toxic industrial chemical sometimes used in antifreeze. DEG is sweet and glycerous. The unscrupulous producers had added it to their wines to give the illusion that they were dessert wines made from grapes shrivelled by ‘noble rot’, a much more…

In October, the slightly improbably named Vinton Cerf spelt out some internet-related home truths when he spoke at the Royal Society. Mr Cerf is one of the creators of the worldwide web, being part of the team who invented the way computers talk to one another. He is widely considered one of the sanest – and is certainly one of the most senior (he's 80) – observers. He's worth listening to. He was there at the start. His talk oozed common sense but must also have been, for a pioneer of the web, a rather disappointing statement of the obvious. His main point was that the ability of any of us to publish anything we want online has had the effect of polluting cyberspace with rubbish, some of it pernicious…

Taking a Walk A sense of foreboding gripped Wigtown as I strolled into its generous market square. The wind was tearing at the fabric of this pretty stone town on a hilltop, overlooking the snaking estuaries of the Solway Firth. Then the rain began, great sheets of it, flash-flooding the pavements and racing down the hill for the swirling brown River Bladnoch below. I was soaked in seconds. A twilight without end took hold, a sinister stormy gauze with a jaundiced yellow horizon. Sodden performance poets, American tourists and other visitors to this far corner of Galloway hunkered down in the cosy bar which had popped up in someone's living room for the duration of the town's book festival. By the following day, we had ridden out the storm: the…

You hit a great drive down the edge of the fairway, but it takes a bad bounce into the heavy rough and your lie is near unplayable. What bad fortune. But there's no point in ruing the unfairness of it all. Hack the ball back onto the fairway and try to salvage your par with an accurate iron onto the green and follow with a one-putt. That's the golfing equivalent of what declarer faced on today's deal from the English Premier League Division Three. No one succeeded. As Paul Gipson of Scotland quipped modestly, ‘That's why we're in Division Three.’ Dealer East North-South Vulnerable 1. Very strong for a pre-empt. I'd have opened One Club. 2. Jumping with a good nine-count, as Three Spades could be bid with nothing. West…

Books are amazing, born of years of research and scholarship or from the creative minds of novelists. We can derive hours of enjoyment, instruction and inspiration, all for the price of a reasonably decent bottle of wine – or two. This season is no exception, with a wealth of books on offer – more than 85 in this issue alone –and a number of authors are turning their minds to the question of how we think and who – or what – might be thinking for us. On page 27, Nigel Summerley considers a cache of new books on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity. While, on page 18, Michael Barber assesses titles on freedom of thought and ponders how alarmed…

Simon and Schuster UK, 688pp, £28 ‘Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,’ writes Walter Isaacson in this biography of the richest man in the world, who created electric car manufacturer Tesla, bought Twitter, and wants to colonise Mars. ‘Isaacson's accounts of rolling crises over rocket engines and car designs are vivid and pacy, and his analysis of his subject's personality is a persuasive mixture of alarm and deep admiration,’ wrote Steven Poole in the Daily Telegraph. However, ‘Isaacson, best known for his 2011 biography of another controversial tech entrepreneur, Apple's Steve Jobs, will win no prizes for his prose. Of Musk's first wife, Justine Wilson, he writes that ‘with flowing hair and a mysterious smile, she managed to be radiant and sultry at the same time’.…

Manchester UP, 944pp, £30 This biography of the British-Asian author Hanif Kureishi was finished just before Kureishi collapsed in Rome last year. He subsequently spent six months in hospital, unable to move arms or legs and is now being treated in a neurological ward in London. So his biographer, Ruvani Ranasinha, an academic at Kings’ College, was able to address this pivotal event only in a one-page postscript. Neither could she make use of the vivid journal Kureishi has, with the help of his son Carlo, maintained for his 81,000 Twitter followers. Among them was a characteristic tweet about sensitivity readers which was reported approvingly by the Daily Mail: ‘I don't want to live in an atmosphere of fear and inhibition where writers are afraid of expressing their true selves…

It was only after the end of the Second World War, wrote a wistful Richard Vinen in the Literary Review that ‘history no longer felt like a Sunday drive through the Home Counties in a Bentley. It was more like a session on the dodgem cars at a fairground – lots of hard bumps and the uncomfortable sense that we were making ourselves look ridiculous.’ The political commentator Steve Richards's book about our postwar history takes its cue from that, looking at decisive moments rather than gradual social or administrative or technological changes. He has picked out, Vinen reports, ten: ‘three elections (those of 1945, 1979 and 1997), two wars (the Suez Crisis and the Iraq War), two economic crises (one produced by the oil price rise of the 1970s,…

The Conservative MP Danny Kruger has been a vocal backbench advocate of a particular species of social conservatism: deploring the breakdown of the traditional family, the erosion of Christian values, and the fraying of the social fabric. In Covenant, he sets out a vision for Britain in which the economic freedoms some of his colleagues are excited about are rooted in a traditional community of time-tested rights and duties. Charlotte Ivers, writing in the Sunday Times, emitted a ‘guttural grunt of surprise’ when she came across the sentence: ‘Marriage is the safest and best place for sex. It is always rather intriguing to come across a genuine social conservative in British public life,’ she said. ‘Like turning up at King's Cross for your morning commute, only to discover that the…

Poison pen letters were how people stirred unhappiness before the days of anonymous comments online. Emily Cockayne whose books delve into interesting corners of human experience (her last was about waste) has scoured three centuries of local newspapers to gather examples of dripping poison Dinah Birch in the London Review of Books reflected that ‘her earlier work gives a broadly positive view of human interactions, but it's hard to find anything uplifting in these stories.’ In the Literary Review, Stephen Bates listed some gossip: ‘What woman was signalman Edginton with up the Hagley Road one Sunday night near midnight … very fishy.’ Others have been more consequential, such as the letter which did for 42-year-old Ethel Major, a ‘frail, sallow complexioned’ woman whose husband, Arthur, died suddenly after eating a…

‘Given the profound importance of the Hundred Years’ War, it's astounding that its details are so little taught and so little understood.’ Older readers, recalling with pride such victories as Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, may raise an eyebrow at the opening of Simon Heffer's review in the Telegraph. But how many of us have heard of Patay? – the first in a series of French victories that by 1453 had reduced English possessions in France to the port of Calais. Well, thanks to Jonathan Sumption and his monumental chronicle – ‘an enterprise on a truly Victorian scale’ as one reviewer greeted an earlier volume – there is now no excuse for anyone to plead ignorance of this epic feud. Saluting Volume Five in the Spectator, David Crane writes, ‘Here, after…

Professional historian Gerard DeGroot, in his review for the Times, noted that ‘big books on monarchy still get published and still sell’, and that ‘the English have an insatiable hunger for boring kings’. Comedian David Mitchell, panel show guest and Observer columnist, ‘who could render an HMRC manual interesting’, has come up with his own irreverent version of our many monarchs. ‘Mitchell, formerly of Peep Show , is a funny man and (no surprise, really) a skilled historian who studied history at Cambridge in the 1990s.’ In the Observer, Stuart Jeffries described the book as ‘part Horrible Histories, part jolly romp guided by Alan Bennett's view that history has no sense but is “just one fucking thing after another”. But it is mostly, this being a history of England, swearing.’…

This is the fifth volume in Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem post—WWII social history of Britain, which covers such subjects as the rise of the Beatles, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, the Profumo sex scandal, the funeral of Winston Churchill, the election of Harold Wilson, and the anti-establishment TV show That Was The Week That Was. ‘Here is an intricate tapestry that conveys the essence of the time,’ wrote Piers Brendon in the Literary Review. ‘It is not a superficial exercise in heritage history, an attempt to dress up the past… It analyses complexities, teases out nuances and gauges the currents of continuity and change, many of which still flow today.’ This addictive book charts dizzying social change Dominic Sandbrook, in his review for the Sunday Times,…

‘I suppose it would make a pretty good haul if they could get all three of us.’ True enough, Mr President. Roosevelt was referring to Operation Long Jump, the supposed Nazi plot to assassinate him, Churchill and Stalin, at the 1943 Tehran conference. ‘Supposed’, because to this day nobody can be certain that there really was a Nazi plot, or whether, instead, it was a ploy cooked up by the Soviets to make Roosevelt move from the American Legation, which was somewhat isolated – and therefore vulnerable – to the Soviet Embassy —which was, of course, bugged. Sceptical about the launch of a Second Front, Stalin hoped his eavesdropping would reveal whether Britain and America meant business. The authors of two bestselling books about conspiracies, Meltzer and Mensch admit that…

‘Dr.’ John Ackah Blay-Miezah (1941-1992) was a Ghanaian conartist who presided over a bogus offshore trust fund for two decades. ‘Fabulously entertaining,’ declared Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Like all good biographies of artists, Yeebo's book conveys the uniqueness of his personality while also showing how his art was forged in, and fed the requirements of, the times’. It is ‘crisp and well-told, brimming with vivid scenes and colourful writing,’ wrote Aanu Adeoye in the Financial Times, while Martin Vander Weyer, in his review for the Literary Review, admired Yeebo's ‘elegant prose, bringing complex detail, vivid background colour and an extensive cast into her compelling narrative, the Oman Ghana Trust Fund never existed and the tale of Nkrumah's secret offshore fortune was a lie’. Another admiring assessment came from…

Missing vole delays bridge opening Eastern Daily Press Lick of paint needed on public bench Peeblesshire News Shock as Wetherspoon tables and chairs dumped in New Forest car park Southern Daily Echo £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The January issue is on sale on 13th December 2023. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2024 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p & p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

Grumpy Oldie Man ‘Do you reckon,’ I enquired on a visit to my wife in bucolic Dorset, ‘that this is an early sign of frontal-lobe dementia?’ Rebecca, who underscored her high intelligence and flawless judgement by vacating the marital home 13 years ago, pondered this. I had prefaced the question with a report, laden with gasps of disbelieving self-hatred and flashes of the face from the Munch painting, of a recent incident over dinner with a friend, his partner and the latter's twentysomething daughter. On hearing the word ‘pumpkin’ in the context of Halloween, I said, ‘That reminds me of a joke. But I can't tell it. That would be wildly inappropriate.’ The relief was unmistakable. Of course it was. You can't tell vulgar jokes in decent company these days,…

We live in an age of Hibernian popularity with the likes of Graham Norton and Dara Ó Briain helping to create a green-tinged feelgood factor. It is easy to forget that in the seventies and eighties it was not only unfashionable but often unpleasant to be Irish in Britain. The IRA campaign of murder and bombing meant lowered voices and anxiety for innocent Irish communities. Emigrants making a major contribution to their adopted country were frequently treated as fifth columnists, wrongly believed to be sharing the sympathies and aims of the IRA. I was the London correspondent of the Dublin-based Irish Press from 1975 to 1987 and witnessed this unhappy period in Anglo-Irish relations. From my tiny office in Fleet Street's Chronicle House, directly opposite the Daily Telegraph, I reported…

C S Lewis died 60 years ago, on 22nd November 1963 – the same day Aldous Huxley died of cancer and President Kennedy was assassinated. The death of arguably the greatest Christian communicator of the 20th century was overshadowed by the murder of a world leader. Many people were even unaware that Lewis had died. Six decades later, Huxley is quoted more than read, and John F Kennedy's vision of liberal America seems as distant as the Gettysburg address. But Lewis is more popular than ever, his books sell all over the world in countless languages, and films are made about his life and his books. There's yet another movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the works. There have been numerous attempts to discredit or…

History ‘And if you know your history’ sounds like the sort of thing a politician might say, or a pub bore. To hear several thousand people say those words together, you would need to be at the football. Fans as far apart as Glasgow, Liverpool and London can be heard singing them (after a fashion) in the chant that Celtic, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur all claim as their own, ‘It's a grand old team to play for’. When over the past few years I have told people that I'm writing a book about sport and British history, the reactions have been mixed. Most are in no doubt that the subject is popular, but is it serious? Previously I've written about the doings of kings, generals and statesmen, and popular and…

Town Mouse I was quite a young mouse. It was in the early nineties. I was lying in bed one morning, staring at the ceiling, and decided I'd like to start a magazine. It would be called the Idler and would celebrate the fine art of doing nothing, which I took to be an undervalued element of a life well lived. To make this idea happen, though, I had to get out of bed and engage in purposeful activity, going against my own magazine's philosophy. There were plenty of historical figures who combined idling with creative work. My hero, Dr Johnson, stayed in bed till lunchtime every day and complained about his own sluggishness and indolence. Yet he compiled a dictionary and wrote countless poems and essays, while managing to…

Sophia Waugh: School Days In general, schoolchildren are litterbugs. Some of them even enjoy the habit. I've been sitting marking in my classroom, or even teaching a class, and seen cheese strings hurled through an open window or half-eaten sandwiches tossed through my doorway. While I understand anyone's desire to throw away cheese strings, I don't see why I should be on the receiving end. While those food-throwers are in the minority, children's lack of interest in their surroundings is shocking, especially from a generation that is meant to be so environmentally aware. They'll ask why they can't take days off school like Greta Thunberg to protest about the way the world is being treated. But they can't make the link between single-use plastics left on the playing field and…

Alexander Cameron, one of Britain's leading KCs at the criminal bar and the elder brother of David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, was remembered at a thanksgiving service at St Luke's Church, Chelsea. The first address was by Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell, who was at Eton with him. Alex Cameron played the lead in school plays and at Bristol University, and could well have become a professional actor. Wilmot-Sitwell said, ‘Tania, David and Clare [his siblings] always turned to Alex on many of the big decisions. ‘Only Dave and the Downing Street cat know how many times Big Al sneaked in the tradesman's entrance for the sort of gloves-off honesty and sanity check that only an older sibling can give. ‘In his 20s, Alex developed an unlikely love of bullfighting and was,…

Tackle! By Jilly Cooper Bantam £22 When Tackle! with its saucy cover shot of a buff bloke in tightie whities thudded onto my mat, I thought I could predict the plot without even having to gallop through the 424 pages. For her new book, the first since Mount! in 2016, our greatest living Englishwoman novelist is balls-deep into the beautiful game. It is set in Rutshire. It stars Rupert Campbell-Black and would include all the traditional tropes – Taggie (CampbellBlack's wife), sex, racing, horses, dogs, ghastly crashers who say ‘noggin’ and ‘partake’ – the things that led to Rishi's describing Riders as one of his all-time novels. There would be sex, scandal, sabotage and thrilling descriptions of knife-edge matches and all manner of jiggery-pokery and romping rumpy-pumpy – but this…

Pru & Me: A Love Story By Timothy West Michael Joseph £22 Until relatively recently, Timothy West and Prunella Scales were middle-ranking mimes. They had to put up with members of the public saying things like (to Pru) ‘I've seen you in that comedy with that awful tall fellow. I've never liked him, a shame as you're quite good’; or (to Tim) ‘What was that show you were in back in the 1980s?’ – ‘I was in quite a few. Did I play a northern gentleman? Could it be Brass?’ – ‘No, it wasn't that. I wasn't keen on that.’ Then, in 2014, came the gentle documentary series Great Canal Journeys, and the husband-and-wife team were propelled to National Treasure status. Like cookery for the Two Fat Ladies, narrow-boating was…

ITV's pre-Christmas treat is a cheery little number called Platform 7, adapted from the psycho thriller by Louise Doughty. Doughty also wrote Apple Tree Yard, turned into a popular BBC series starring Emily Watson as a 50-something scientist sleeping with a man she knows nothing about. In Platform 7, Lisa Evans (Jasmine Jobson) is a 30-year-old ghost with amnesia brought on by PTSD. Haunting her local railway station in the pyjamas she was wearing when, a year earlier, she went under a train, she wonders how she ended up dead. The coroner says it was suicide due to ‘mental-health issues’ – but why would she end her own life when, as her dad puts it, she had ‘everything going for her’? If you die in the station, you stay in…

CONSTANCE SPRY'S XMAS PUD Whatever's happening elsewhere in the world, keep the home fires burning with a luscious, sticky-fingered Christmas pudding. It's best made with butcher's beef-suet. But it's fiddly to prepare, as you have to separate the creamy little globules of fat from the membrane (dust your fingers with flour to stop it sticking). If not, packet suet will do. If you have vegetarians in the family, use butter or the equivalent weight of seed or nut oil. What follows is Constance Spry's recipe from the 1960s adapted to the raw materials available in the wilds of Andalusia, where I lived at the time with my young family. Happily for me, the children were still young enough to enjoy the messy business of de-pipping raisins, stoning prunes and separating…

NOT SO GRAND NATIONAL Several months ahead of the event, the organisers of the Grand National announced that, from next April, there will be significant alteration in the way the greatest of all horse races is run. This is the beginning of the end, isn't it? Altogether, eight changes have been made to the rules, all designed to reduce the catalogue of equine destruction. The number of entrants has been reduced from 40 to 34, in a bid to alleviate the serious bunching over the jumps. The first fence has been brought 60 yards closer to the start. That prevents horses from building up the over-excited head of steam that saw Hill Sixteen break his neck at this year's race in a pile-up at that very first obstacle. For those…

I have been writing about finance for 45 years – and am reminding myself how much has changed in that time. When I began in 1978, credit cards and cash machines had arrived only a decade before. Until 1971, just before decimalisation, you paid two old pennies in stamp duty on every cheque you wrote, and banks stopped business at 3pm. Bank managers really knew their customers – and vice versa. In the 1970s, only building societies sold home loans (banks entered the market in the early 1980s). They all charged the same rate. Rarely was a single woman granted a loan. Mortgage rates touched 17 per cent in 1979 – but there was at least tax relief on the interest you paid, abolished in 2000. The first financial ombudsman,…

IN COMPETITION No 299 you were invited to write a poem called My Prime. Rob McMahon found it hard to unsubscribe to Amazon Prime: ‘Infected now like some unwelcome affliction / I cannot escape this new monthly subscription,’ and Hugh Cartwright told a tale of prime beef. Basil Ransome-Davies's narrator's life ‘went straight from naïf to decadent’. Christine Acres ran through prime years in her life: 23, 37, 43, 59, 61, 67, 73, while D A Prince reflected, ‘I was not one for whom the numbers danced.’ John Walsh remained optimistically mathematical: ‘Next year there's a tiny hope / That life may be less starchy, / For that's when I reach 89, / A prime and Fibonacci.’ Commiserations to them and to Frank McDonald, Mike Morrison and Jeremy Morris, and…

John Murray, 323pp,£25 It's fair to say self-defined ‘national trinket’ Miriam Margoyles is critical Marmite. According to the blurbs on her second volume of memoirs, some in fluorescent pink, the actress and chat-show-guest embarrasser is‘wonderful’ (Stephen Fry), ‘a riotous joy’ (Daily Telegraph),‘gloriously larger than life’ (Observer). Other views were available. Rhik Samadder in the Guardian largely welcomed her ‘almost heroic’ unruly humour and her showbiz tittle-tattle, though found the sections on her early years with her Belarusian emigré family and her adolescence in Oxford the freshest. He enjoyed her attacks on Boris and the Bullingdon Club and said the book demonstrated ‘the loose-cannon plain talk that has endeared her to millions, while pushing back against her caricature’. don't think we need to be separated.’. In the Times,on the other hand,…

OUP, 464pp, £25 Wilfred Owen was one of the leading poets of the first world war who was killed in action at the age of 25 a week before the war's end. In his review for the Spectator, Daniel Swift explained that in a 1967 edition of his letters, edited by Wilfred's brother Harold and John Bell, Harold admitted in his preface that he had taken the decision years earlier to censor the letters by painting over them in thick lines of India ink, and now he couldn't work out what he had crossed out. ‘The intention was to remove trivial passages of domestic news,’ he claimed. A further, select edition was published in 1985, edited by Bell, cutting the majority of Owen's teenage letters but restoring where possible some…

It was formed not in 1922, when Lloyd George's coalition government was brought down by a rebellion of Tory backbenchers, but in early 1923 by a handful of the new intake of Tory MPs, some 20 to start with. Conservative peer Philip Norton, also a professor of politics at the University of Hull and a constitutional expert, has produced ‘a wonderfully clear and authoritative account of a central, but little studied, element of the Conservative Party,’ wrote Lord Lexden, a fellow Conservative peer, in the House Magazine. ‘After a century of having its origins misrepresented, the 1922 Committee today faces a new danger: that it will be seen primarily as an assassination bureau’, whereas ‘in reality only a fraction of the committee's time has ever been devoted to such high…

This not an autobiography or a political memoir, explained Tim Dale in the Literary Review, but ‘a series of case studies of scandals’ which May was ‘able to use her position in order to bring to light’. As a result, it ‘risks being seen… as an extended humble-brag by a politician who feels both underestimated and under-appreciated’. May blames ‘the systemic abuse of power by politicians, civil servants, and the police’, without apportioning even a part of the blame to her beloved Conservative Party. ‘I honestly wouldn't waste your time with it,’ Dale concluded. Robert Shrimsley, in the Financial Times, was more generous. ‘The book will reinforce the view that May was a politician of conviction and compassion… Across a number of shameful episodes, including the Grenfell Tower fire, the…

David Ellis, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent, has written a book, drawing on many decades of deep reading, that should have been more widely reviewed, given its universal theme – which is the consolations of literature in old age. Allan Massie in the Literary Review found Blasted with Antiquity ‘never dull, always intelligent and often moving.’ Massie mused that ‘Old age may bring serenity. Ellis draws attention more than once to Eliot's Four Quartets. There is wisdom there indeed. Then one reflects that Eliot was only middleaged when he wrote these poems. ‘As I was reading Ellis's book, I was rereading W Somerset Maugham's A Writer's Notebook, published in 1949, when he was seventy-five. The concluding pages are comforting, revealing a man at peace with…

‘This book is at once an education and a joy to read,’ Sarah Gristwood proclaimed in theLiterary Review. There have been a plethora of biographies of Anne Boleyn, but Guy and Fox take a different approach – ‘something more interesting’. Leanda de Lisle in the Times praised ‘a book that moves and informs, improving our understanding of “the marriage that convulsed a continent”.’ ‘You get the feeling that the authors, being a married couple, understand the dynamics of the Henry-Anne relationship better than any of the many historians who have speculated about it’, Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Daily Mail. Gavanndra Hodge in the Sunday Times agreed: ‘The Guy/Fox approach is fresh partly because they are a married couple writing about a marriage, but more because they reframe the story…

‘Gareth Russell's scintillating hybrid of a book … is partly a biography of place and partly something stranger: an episodic history of England from Tudor times to the present, illustrated by lightning flashes of gossip and politics, set against the handsome backdrop of Hampton Court,’ Thomas W. Hodgkinson wrote in the Spectator: ‘The Palace is closely associated with the Tudor monarchy. ‘That, however, is only part of the story,’ the Tudor Times explained. ‘Russell's panoramic work places the eighty-odd years of Tudor residence in the much longer context of Hampton Court's life-span, weaving the palace into an overview of public life in a remarkable fashion, mixing architecture, social commentary, politics, diplomacy, and scandal over five centuries.’ ‘Hampton Court emerges as an enduring architectural symbol of royal lust,’ Hodgkinson noted. It…