Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i The Oldie

I have put on three pounds this month and I know why. I have been going to a lot of tea parties and eating slice after slice of Victoria sponge. It’s all in a good cause, of course. I am the founder of a project called Poetry Together, which encourages schoolchildren and old people in care homes to learn a poem by heart and then get together to perform the poem and have tea and cake. Hundreds of schools and care homes across the country (and Commonwealth) take part and the poetry parties happen between National Poetry Day (7th October) and Christmas. You can find out more at the website www.poetrytogether.com. The website will also give you the recipe for the Victoria sponge, kindly supplied by the Duchess of Cornwall.…

Have you been scammed? I have. It knocked the stuffing out of me, mentally and physically. I’ve never experienced such a living nightmare before. Don’t think I am exaggerating. And please don’t think, ‘This will never happen to me.’ It is happening all over, all the time - as much a pandemic as COVID. It has been cold comfort to discover how many other victims there are out there - sensible, professional, responsible people - who have been conned as I was, losing, with their self-respect, considerable sums of money. I reckon I’ve seen the last of some £30,000. When the truth emerges, the first reaction is to hide one’s shame. When my counsellor and friend asked if I had anyone I could talk to, I said I really didn’t…

Prime ministers, archbishops, police chiefs, England football managers: none of them seems quite what they used to be. But what about bankers? Were the City chaps (yes, they were all chaps) of yesteryear wiser and nicer than the thrusters of today? Or does that career path perpetually attract a character type the rest of the world tends to despise? Before I answer, I’ll admit I escaped from a first career in banking 30 years ago – so you might think what I’m about to express is no more than the prejudice of age. But I believe there really is a generational difference. Let me transport you to a party hosted by a banker called Michael von Clemm in Beijing’s Forbidden City in June 1989 – actually on the day of…

In Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow, published in 1921, when its author was 27, a young poet visits a grand country house as the guest of a literary hostess. At the party, he meets various grandees. It’s a satire of Huxley’s real-life experiences – one character was based on Bertrand Russell – and he’s obviously fond of his characters, even though he teases them quite mercilessly. The literary hostess in question was based on Lady Ottoline Morrell, and I was reminded of the book when I heard that Yolanta May had died. Her age was a closely guarded secret. For several decades, she insisted she was 29. Yolanta, or Yola, the wife of the late literary critic and nature writer Derwent May, was, like Ottoline Morrell, a grand literary hostess,…

‘You’re an act-orrhhh, are you? So how much do you earn?’ Ah, here we go. How much do we earn? It’s a question frequently asked of thesps by guileless civilians. It’s little wonder, because actors’ salaries are the last conversational taboo in showbusiness. As a breed, we may be happy to talk endlessly about ourselves (‘But enough of me – what did you think of my performance?’), but ask us how much we’re pulling in and our natural talkativeness exits stage right. The popular perception is that actors earn fabulous sums for doing little more than pulling on a hat and pretending to be someone else for a few hours a week. But the truth is very different. And, remember, you see only the individuals who are working. Some 90…

Round and round and round it goes: coursework or exams? Who benefits from which and why? The last two years have been well out of the ordinary, and lessons were or weren’t learned by teachers and the government. The debacle of Williamson’s algorithm in 2020, followed by the shouts of exam inflation in 2021, have left parents and students confused: what do the results actually mean? And wouldn’t it be better if exams were cancelled and everything was judged on coursework? After all my years in teaching, I am absolutely of the belief that exams are the fairest way to judge a student’s performance. Some students respond well to the adrenalin rush of an exam and others don’t. Some students relish the extra time coursework gives them and some are…

After 18 months of dreary social distancing and recorded singing, a traditional funeral service was held for John Woodcock, former cricket correspondent for the Times for three decades and editor of Wisden. It was held at St Nicholas’s, Longparish, on the banks of the Test near Andover. A choir sang God Be in My Head and hymns included Blake’s Jerusalem and Praise the Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him. John’s father had been the rector at the church for 63 years. John had lived in the curacy nearby since 1947. So the service was led by five clergymen who’d served there: Martin Coppen, Dodie Marsden, David Wippell, David Roche and Terry Hemming. Real hymns, psalms, lessons, prayers and readings were heard for the first time since March 2020. There was a…

Occasionally, I would drive Mother Teresa when she came to London. The Missionaries of Charity had a minibus. I was a volunteer driver for their errands and night run, offering food and help to homeless people. On one occasion, some of the nuns asked me to ask Mother to tell the story about the donkey. There was a pecking order and they couldn’t ask her over the head of a superior. When we had finished the rosary and were heading for the Southall convent, I said, ‘Mother, what is the story you tell about the donkey?’ At this, she became animated and began, ‘There was this businessman and he was out in the country going to an important meeting when his car began giving him trouble.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought, surprised,…

John Murray, £20 Miriam Margolyes is more gifted and more serious than her multifarious roles suggest. Her performance as Mrs Manson Mingott in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, although she’s playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, is the best thing in it. Manson Mingott is kindly and cynical, buried under a mountain of her own flesh. Scorsese was wise to cast Margolyes. I think this is what she is like when she is still and not scheming for attention. But she has filled her career with blockbuster, pratfall and voice-over work. Her cleverness is undeniable, as is her eating disorder, though she rarely alludes to it, saying only that her mother Ruth’s ‘weight ruined all our lives – just as mine does now’. She mostly behaves like an itinerant minstrel wondering…

William Collins £30 The story of coal, Jeremy Paxman says, is the story of Britain. It’s one he tells well, deftly combining the political and the social in a brisk and bracing narrative, with plenty of scope for Paxmanian indignation and scorn. People have been digging for coal since the Middle Ages. But Paxman focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, taking in the industrial revolution, two world wars, the first Labour government, the birth of trade unionism, nationalisation, strikes, smog and pit accidents, with much odd and interesting detail along the way. In the Second World War, miners were not exempted from conscription, which meant a shortage of labour. Bevin Boys (after Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour) were the solution: lay miners. After just four weeks of training,…

According to researchers at Cardiff University, Russian trolls have been inserting propaganda and disinformation in the reader comments of Western news websites. These include Mail Online, the Times, Le Figaro in France, and Der Spiegel and Die Welt in Germany. The pro-Kremlin comments are then fed back to a range of Russian media organisations. One example cited in the report by Cardiff’s Crime and Security Research Institute concerns a story on Mail Online about America’s ‘unwavering’ support for Ukraine, which appeared on 1st April. Many of the comments below the article were supportive of the Biden administration, but a few were strikingly critical. These were taken up by a number of Russian news websites and presented as being characteristic of what Mail Online readers believe. The Russian state media outlet…

Being a historian should be a good preparation for a future political career. Just think of the adage ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ But historians have long been in a tiny minority in the House of Commons when compared with lawyers, journalists, trade-union leaders and business people. There are some honourable exceptions among honourable members. Until he jumped ship in 2017 to become Director of the V&A in London, the best-known MP historian of recent times was Tristram Hunt, former Labour member for Stoke-on-Trent Central. Hunt, who has just published a biography (highly recommended) of the Potteries’ favourite son, Josiah Wedgwood, has a knack for tackling thorny subjects with authority and a light touch, from the ‘frock-coated communist’ Friedrich Engels to the rise and…

In just over a year’s time, the BBC will celebrate its centenary. On 14th November 1922 the first broadcast was aired, carrying into our homes ‘all that is best in human knowledge, endeavour and achievement’. The dwindling cohort of radio hacks will doubtless be recalling the Best of Reithian Moments. But a prime candidate for Worst Radio moment was revealed lately on Feedback. ‘Why?’ chorused the protesters. ‘On prestigious Front Row? What were you thinking of?’ The bone of contention was Fergie, interviewed at pointless length about her new Mills & Boon book. No, of course she didn’t write it. Hence the fatuity of the interview, and the Duchess of York’s self-delusion. ‘I am a director,’ she proudly claimed, ‘not an actual scribe,’ as if setting the words on paper…

ROCKING INTO YOUR 80S Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur – ‘He whom the gods esteem dies young’ – has been the unofficial motto of the music business. If you were a proper rock ’n’ roller, you didn’t remember the Sixties. Real hellraisers were in the 27 Club along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. Plane crashes took Buddy Holly aged 22, Otis Redding aged 26 and Patsy Cline at 31. Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself aged 23. Karen Carpenter died of a heart attack, aged 32. Dennis Wilson drowned at 39. John Lennon was shot dead aged 40. The list is long. But the list is far longer of those who have made smaller headlines and older bones. The Rolling Stones are a case…

SEA SPINACH I have often admired the glossy, dark green leaves of wild sea spinach when walking along a cliff path or on the shore above the tide line. But I am always reluctant to pick and eat it, as the spinach is also admired and sprayed by passing dogs. Earlier this year, however, I bought a packet of sea-spinach seeds (from Pennard Plants of Somerset) and am having some success. They will grow perfectly well inland on well-drained soil – we are on greensand here – and prefer a site without any shade. This perennial plant, also called sea beet, is the ancestor not only of all our cultivated beetroots but of leaf beet, seakale beet, Swiss chard and garden spinach. In a previous column I commented on the…

WHY I’M A CIDER DRINKER What, do you suppose, are Brown Snout, Woodbine and Sweet Alford? Archaic brands of cigarette? And what links Prince William with the Fair Maid of Taunton? They are all, in fact, cider apples. A good cider apple needs a high level of sugar (that is where the alcohol comes from). Cider-makers also prize bitterness and astringency, and a crafty combination of different varieties will give the finished cider a pleasingly rounded palate. Single-variety ciders are the exception, not the rule. The process of making cider is about as simple as making an alcoholic drink can be, as I discovered, many years ago, during a weekend at a friend’s cottage in Dorset. It was October, his orchard was laden with ripe fruit and the cider man…

Jane Austen measured wealth by income, not capital. It wasn’t just Mr Darcy’s handsome features and noble mien that drew Mrs Bennet’s attention, but also his ten thousand a year. These days, there is an opposite calculation to be made. Lack of wealth (or my lack of it, at any rate) is easily measured by the absurd number of internet-related subscription services I realised I was paying for but no longer used. The trouble is they all seemed like a clever idea at the time. Don’t judge me too harshly. I run a couple of small online ventures – so it’s inevitable that I will have more of these than many readers, but I still had too many. For example, I have a Zoom subscription (£90 pa). I shan’t renew…

The jaunty topknot on the head of the drake tufted (Aythya fuligula) – allied to the species’s jack-in-the-box water antics – makes them the jokers in the duck pack. Those with only a passing interest in birds, such as children, are excited to find some ducks dive and zoom about underwater. The tufted does this incessantly, diving with particular panache – not at a slant, but on the spot. It emerges after as long as a minute, dry as dust, the water droplets, bright as its yellow eyes, slipping off the black (drake) or brown (duck) waterproof plumage like quicksilver. Until the 19th century, they were only winter migrants. The first record of a British nesting was in 1849, in Yorkshire. Today it is our commonest diving duck. The 19,000…

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? My Kindle because I used to pack at least one book per day – so there was never any room for clothes. Is there something you really miss? London water for drinking and making tea. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Corfu and Ibiza were the two places my parents used to go. We’d go for a fortnight and rent a villa. It was the early ’70s: choc ices, Uvistat sun cream if there was any, and buying Disney comics in Spanish, Portuguese or Greek – and my dad pretending to translate them. What are your memories of your dad, Alan Coren, on holiday? My dad loved his holidays, didn’t wear sun cream, always burnt, always wore little Speedos. Were there…

This month’s deal was one of several swings necessary to overturn a deficit of 67 International Match Points in the Vanderbilt Knockout Teams, one the US Majors. Dealer North Both Vulnerable The bidding (1) Best played as 15-19 and forcing to game after a two-over-one response. (2) Quantitative slam try. (3) When you’re accepting a quantitative slam try, it is best to bid naturally. North likes his top cards for suit play and offers Six Diamonds as an alternative slam with his three-card support. West led the knave of clubs; declarer, Eric Rodwell, ducking the trick to East’s king. He won East’s knave of hearts return with dummy’s king, and drew trumps, West discarding a club. He cashed the queen of clubs, crossed to the ace of hearts and cashed…

There seem to be more and more prizes for fiction every year. Good news for authors, then. But are they really so fortunate? Forget the JK Rowlings, Dan Browns and Stephen Kings of this world, and think of the ‘average’ writer – whoever that is. According to a recent survey, the top 10 per cent of writers account for 70 per cent of revenues, with under 14 per cent of authors making their living solely from writing. And apparently the average author income has been dropping over the past 15 years or so. So perhaps it’s better to pause before quitting the day job. This year’s Booker Prize winner will be announced in November but, as Robbie Millen exclaimed in the Times, ‘What a shocker! Fire the Booker judges! How…

THE AUTHORITY GAP WHY WOMEN ARE STILL TAKEN LESS SERIOUSLY THAN MEN, AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT MARY ANN SIEGHART Doubleday, 384pp, £16.99 Sieghart opens her book with the story of Mary McAleese, president of Ireland, on an official delegation to the Vatican in 1999. The Pope (John Paul II) walked past her outstretched hand and instead held out a hand to her husband, standing beside her, and asked: ‘Would you not prefer to be President of Ireland rather than married to the President of Ireland?’ It is the first of many such anecdotes in a book which argues that the wrong attribution of expertise and power is wasteful of available resources and harms men as well as women. It seems not to have occurred either to Sieghart…

SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO LIONEL SHRIVER Borough, 266pp, £18.99 Lionel Shriver, a writer of strong opinions, known for her pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown journalism, once again challenges our views in this novel about a suicide pact. Kay and Cyril Wilkinson have witnessed the slow dementia of Kay’s father. When they turn 80 they plan to take back control and drink of the hemlock to spare themselves, their children and the NHS the burden of their old age. ‘That’s when the fun starts,’ said Louise R Brown in the Spectator. David Grylls in the Sunday Times agreed. He enjoyed the ‘mingling of comedy and horror’, as Shriver ‘gleefully’ constructs 12 possible outcomes of the central situation. ‘Through the potent spell of Shriver’s language, horror gets alchemised into amusement. Fiery phrases…

Fans of Elena Ferrante (author of the Neapolitan Quartet) can cheer: she has written a stand-alone novel also set in Naples, The Lying Life of Adults (Europa Editions, trans Ann Goldstein, 322pp, £8.99). Kathryn Bromwich in the Observer explained that the narrator, Giovanna, tells her coming of age story, ‘charting her development from the sweet girl who adores her parents to a sulking, aggressive teenager who finds pleasure in self-abasement and making those around her uncomfortable’. She continued: ‘What immediately distinguishes this book from its predecessors is its focus on the upper echelons of Neapolitan society in the early 1990s.’ Alex O’Connell in the Times had a few reservations: ‘The story is compulsive, but the characters are more cartoonish than in the Neapolitan Quartet...The writing can be overcooked – characters…

David Bailey took our front-cover picture of the Kray twins in 1965. Bailey says, ‘I quite liked Reg even though, when he was 19, he slashed my father’s face with a razor. Ron was a basket full of rattlesnakes.’ Mary Beard (p18) is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Newnham College. Her latest book is Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. Nemone Lethbridge (p14) is one of Britain’s earliest female barristers, called to the Bar in 1956. She is author of Nemone: A young woman barrister’s battle against prejudice, class and misogyny. Henry Blofeld (p16) began writing about cricket, for the Times, in 1962. In 1972, he first appeared on Test Match Special. His new book is Ten to Win…

Doubts persist as to whether my father’s last words will join those of Oscar Wilde (that wallpaper) and Bognor-buggerer George V among the most memorable yet uttered. For one thing, my dad’s last words weren’t uttered. For another, they were not, in fact, his last words. Nonetheless, he was absolutely convinced that the words he committed to paper one early-July afternoon, some seven weeks before he did die, would be his last. And they deserve, I feel, to be remembered. My son Louis and I didn’t realise this at the time, when we were stricken by disbelief at their apparent incongruity in the context. On reflection, I realise how remarkably perfect they were. My dad was a most unusual man with a most unusual working history meandering over six and…

WHAT IS A bookhotel? Bookhotels cater for compulsive readers. They have libraries and literary attractions, from writers in residence to rooms dedicated to authors. For some hotels, it’s an appealing additional service; others were conceived from an idiosyncratic passion. Hotel Sonnenburg in the Austrian Alps has wooden boxes of selected titles in each room. Berlin’s Hotel Friedenau focuses on local writers. Le Pavillon des Lettres in Paris has 26 rooms, featuring authors from Andersen to Zola. We first heard about bookhotels in Germany in 2018. Our friend Gerd had moved his second-hand bookshop, Mephisto, online and to a village where he hoped to turn the Schloss into a bookhotel furnished from his huge stock, following the example of others in Europe (and America) that began to blossom in the previous…

Mixing the perfect cricketer cocktail quickly becomes a barman’s nightmare. This human pick-me-up would have to be able to bat and bowl right-handed and left-handed with equal facility, which would not be easy. But even trickier would be the need for this team of one to develop jack-in-the-box qualities that would enable it to keep wicket to its own bowling. This composite player would also have to be the captain, and placing the field would mean he or she would need to be in 11 different places at the same time without spilling a drop - or, it must be hoped, a catch. This imaginary, liquid figure would be, for a start, distinctly Bradmanesque. Don Bradman was the most successful batter ever, averaging 99.94 in his 52 Test Matches. He…

The scrotum is very forgiving. These comforting words were recently uttered by a distinguished surgeon before he deracinated a nasty excrescence in a dark part of my anatomy. I had the very rare extramammary Paget’s disease, first noticed under the shower – so it was a general anaesthetic and the knife. Ladies sometimes get Paget’s on their breasts but it rarely, if ever, assails a man’s front botty*. I haven’t been in hospital for ages. Not since a burst appendix which was undiagnosed for ten days because my appendix was hiding on the wrong side. Most of my life-threatening ills are, it seems, unique. On that occasion, a funny thing happened to me on the way to the operating theatre. Fear had made me rather chatty. As we trundled down…

As the mighty Colorado River has been reduced to a mere trickle, so my marriage is now measured in small acts of mutual kindness. I bring the wife meals on a tray and drive at 20mph. In return, she mends my expanding man-trouser buttons and thoughtfully fillets the tsunami of news media to present me with articles of ecological interest to read while I’m soaking in the tub. The other day, Mary, who is overworked, had mistaken a guide to weekend retreats in the West Country for something of eco-relevance. Nevertheless it seemed to await my urgent attention. The words ‘bolthole’ and ‘escape’ jumped out at me as I leafed through page after glossy page of immaculately presented chocolate-box retreats. As I reflected that Suffolk pink has been somewhat overused…

Have you noticed that, as a group, prophets tend to be a grumpy lot? From Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, right down to Carlyle, Ruskin, Spengler and beyond: gloominess and bad weather as far as the eye can see. There are many reasons for this, beginning perhaps with what Kant called ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. The sun might be shining, but evil lurks in the heart of man and besides – haven’t you noticed? – standards are plummeting, evidence of maladies real and fabricated (racism, climate change and trans-, Islamo- and homophobia) are rife, and intolerance, ‘whiteness’ and a lack of ‘diversity’ are ubiquitous and need to be stamped out, hard, right now. At The New Criterion, the American cultural review I have been editing since about the time John…

During the three-month breeding season starting in October, the greatest density of wildlife per square metre in the world occurs on the island of South Georgia. A survey of 1.8 million office projects and 28 million individual tasks found that the most productive time of the year is 11am on a Monday in October. In October 2008, inflation in Zimbabwe reached 231,000,000 per cent. The First World War officially ended on 3rd October 2010. 8th October is World Octopus Day. On 9th October 2013, NASA’s Juno spacecraft travelled round the Earth at 50 times the speed of a bullet. On 12th October 2017, Austrian police arrested a man in a shark costume for breaking a newly enacted ban on wearing facecoverings in public. On the evening of 13th October 1947,…

My first car had a design fault. It had a distributor cap immediately behind the radiator grille. Whenever I drove in heavy rain, water would enter the cap and bring the engine to a stuttering halt, often in the most inconvenient of places. When that happened, I would get out of the car and give the radiator grille a good kick, first to punish the car and second in the hope that it might work. It did – once. I always felt that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was about as sophisticated as my mechanics. It was like giving the skull a good kick to give the brain within a jolt. But, oddly enough, I became convinced that it worked – in the right cases, of course. Early in my career, there…

At the age of nine, I was given by Mr Oliver, the school caretaker, a soprano cornet. It was battered and beaten, had seen far better days and I instantly fell in love with it. I drove everyone mad playing it but, against all odds, I became quite decent, and by the time I was ten, I was first cornet in the school’s brass band. Living in South Yorkshire meant that coal-mining was everywhere and, along with that, most pits had their own brass band. Grimethorpe, Carlton Main, Frickley and many others played, marched, raised funds for local causes and competed in competitions. My local pit was Yorkshire Main in Edlington. On a dark and rainy Tuesday night in 1972, I and four others from our little brass band piled…

Two Roads £20 Mary Churchill (later Soames) was just 17 when the Second World War broke out. She began to keep what she described as a ‘diary of an ordinary person’s life in wartime’. In fact, she wasn’t an ordinary person at all. She was Winston Churchill’s daughter, and her account of Churchill family life is what makes this diary historically significant. The war uprooted Mary from her life as a priggish, horse-mad teenager at Chartwell, where she was brought up almost as an only child – the nearest sibling to her in age was Sarah, who was eight years older. Chartwell became a hospital. Mary accompanied her parents to London, first to a flat in Admiralty House and then to Number 10 when Winston became Prime Minister. Her diary…

Pythagoras thought maths was the language of music. It was an ambitious claim, though not altogether absurd: modern musicologists delight in discerning mathematical patterns in the works of Bach and Mozart. Nowadays, though, the language of music is surely Italian. How on earth has this come about? Music has, from the first grunts of mankind, been made by everybody everywhere, and Italy might seem an improbable country to lead the world in musical influence. It has been a single independent country for scarcely 150 years, with little political power to impose any language on anyone far beyond its borders. So is Italy’s musical dominance a fiction? Just look at ‘bebop’, ‘fado’, ‘lieder’, you may say, or ‘mazurka’, ‘polonaise’ or ‘tango’. Remember, too, that French has provided ‘plié’, ‘entrechat’, ‘arabesque’ and…

KENT’S W G GRACE At this time of year, we start thinking of the most appropriate recipient of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. Who gave us the most pleasure in sporting competition? Who best represented our values and ideals? And this year, never mind Adam Peaty and Max Whitlock; forget Lewis Hamilton and Dame Sarah Storey; stand aside, Joe Root and Harry Kane. For us oldies, there can be only one candidate. Step forward the remarkable, age-defying and apparently unbreakable Darren Stevens. This last season, the Kent cricketer became the oldest player since Norman Armstrong in 1938 to score three centuries in a Championship season. And he didn’t hang about achieving that record: playing for Kent against Leicestershire at the end of August, he scored 107 off…

The vast lake snaked onwards – a collage of headlands, forest and silver water that appeared without end. The scene at Roadford Lake looked, to my uneducated eye at least, as ancient, natural and unchanging as any ‘wild’ part of Britain. So it was disorientating to read on my pink-jacketed OS map, which I still considered more or less contemporary, that this vast Devonian lake did not exist when the map was printed in 1986. The map marked open fields, farms, the valley of the River Wolf and, in blue script, ‘Roadford Reservoir (under construction)’. This landscape of lake, forest, footpaths and distant wind turbines had been assembled in the 30 years since the dam was completed in 1990 to supply Devon towns with water. The drive to the lakeside…

IN COMPETITION No 271, you were invited to write a poem with the title Convenience. It was an inconvenient match between so many good entries and so little space to print the winners. Katie Mallett gave a recognisable account of stopping in for a delivery: ‘And so you pick the time, the week, the day / When this will happen, though deep down you know / From your experience it won’t be so.’ Anthony Young observed that the savings of convenience are always of their time and equipment: ‘The ticket for my flight’s online, / The printer that I need is mine.’ Adrian Fry had a quirkier conceit: ‘Mama can’t use the convenience store, / Convenience being a Sin.’ D A Prince, contemplating the difficulty of preserving valuable architectural details…

Issue 57 Autumn 2021 Churchill’s Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft The Sins of GK Chesterton by Richard Ingrams Family Business: An Intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership by Victoria Glendinning Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure by Dennis Duncan Turning Point: A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Being a Human by Charles Foster Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead The Sea Is Not Made of Water by Adam Nicolson Hogarth: Life in Progress by Jacqueline Riding Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy by Anne Sebba Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair by Lucy Kellaway Reading Walter de la Mare, edited by William Wootten…

VAXXERS THE INSIDE STORY OF THE OXFORD ASTRAZENECA VACCINE AND THE RACE AGAINST THE VIRUS SARAH GILBERT AND CATHERINE GREEN, WITH DEBORAH CREWE Hodder, 352pp, £20 Laboratory scientists make unlikely public heroes and heroines; but in the age of Covid that’s just what has happened to some of them. Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – two eminent but unassuming vaccinologists – found themselves the objects of a standing ovation at Centre Court on the first day of Wimbledon. They were two of the key figures in the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine – and their book on the subject, delivered in almost comparably record time – reads like a ‘biomedical thriller’, thought the Guardian’s Mark Honigsbaum. They tell their story in alternating chapters, and ‘are at pains to point out…

Fish found dead at beauty spot West Sussex Gazette Carnivorous plant being grown in secret location Congleton Chronicle New landlords relaunch pub with three-course dog menu Eastern Daily Press £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The November issue is on sale on 20th October 2021. FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Best of The Oldie Cartoons 1992-2018, The Oldie Annual 2020 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.…

We are still surrounded by Roman emperors. It is almost two millennia since the ancient city of Rome ceased to be capital of an empire. But even now – in the West, at least – almost everyone recognises the name, and sometimes even the look, of Julius Caesar or Nero. Their faces not only stare at us from museum shelves or gallery walls. They feature in films, advertisements and newspaper cartoons. It takes very little (a laurel wreath, toga, lyre and some background flames) for a satirist to turn a modern politician into a ‘Nero fiddling while Rome burns’, and most of us get the point. Over the last 500 years or so, these emperors and some of their wives and mothers, sons and daughters have been recreated countless times…

It used to be easy to define the Gothic. A castle on a precipice, silhouetted against a gibbous moon. Next door, a ruined church with arched windows, the gravestones at crazy angles. Something unholy and transgressive stirring in the shadows under the twisted yew tree. The mist would be optional, but the bats and screech owl compulsory. This makes the Gothic a product of northern European climes: the Alpine heights where Frankenstein’s monster roams; the wild forests of Scandinavia; the bleak cemeteries of London or Edinburgh, where bodysnatchers lurk. But if these are some of its places of origin, it has since exploded across the planet. The Gothic now speaks in many languages. In a single evening, one might play a level of a Japanese survival horror game while plugged…

To be blonde, beautiful, brainy, acquainted with the Mafia and a member of the Italian Communist Party – what more could a girl have wanted back in those golden 1960s? Gaia Servadio, who’s just died at 82, seemed to me to be the Zuleika Dobson of Fleet Street, appearing in the offices of the London Evening Standard swathed in fox furs and wafting in subtle but expensive scent. Charles Wintour (father of the more famous Dame Anna) was utterly smitten with the glamorous Gaia, and instructions would be issued to ensure her reportage was given splash treatment. She was divine: the quintessence of ‘radical chic’. I couldn’t understand a word she wrote about the dastardly Mafia – it seemed to be translated from the Sicilian – but the ace page-designer…

With Jesus, there is no longer a sharp distinction between acting and speaking. Attention is not to be focused on ourselves and on our striving to be beyond reproach, but on other people and how our conduct or speech can whittle away their wellbeing, their sense of security and their happiness. Very specifically, this is done by our rudeness. ‘Whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says “you fool” shall be liable to the fire of hell’ (Matthew 5:22). Jesus’s condemnation of abusive language is not to be taken lightly: he sees it as being contrary to the will of God because of its lack of love. In that most famous passage in of all St Paul’s writing – 1 Corinthians 13 – we find…

Viking £18.99 Colm Tóibín has already ambitiously written a novel about a great novelist – The Master, focused on Henry James, published in 2004. He’s now returned to the peculiar challenge posed by the genre, in telling the story of Thomas Mann. He moves in a fairly straight chronological line from Mann’s birth in mercantile Lübeck through to his final years of exile in California and Switzerland. The result is frankly disappointing and a bit of a slog. I didn’t feel that Tóibín managed to render Henry James’s mercurial intelligence and fine sensibility in The Master, but he nobly tried. Here he seems positively uninterested in Mann, tracking his 80-year journey in an elegantly fluent prose. There’s not a clunking or pretentious sentence in over 400 pages. But the prose…

The Fairmont Hotel in Azerbaijan is a 500-foot monument to Central Asian bling done out in oligarch-chic. It does, however, boast fantastic views over the Caspian Sea. So on a recent stay, the first thing I did was open the curtains of my huge window on the 12th floor. Or rather, I tried. The curtains were operable only via an electronic control panel that, like the hotel itself, ignored the maxim that less is sometimes more. There were five options – none of which seemed to include the basic command of ‘Please, just open the bloody curtains.’ After half an hour in darkness, I had to call the concierge for help. It isn’t just the curtains, where the simple act of drawing them by hand is no longer an option.…

EDINBURGH’S FALSTAFF In the late 1960s, as I waited for the curtain to go up on a matinée performance in Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, I confided to one of the city’s fabled Morningside ladies that I was tempted to move to Edinburgh, so addicted had I become to the city and its festivals. ‘Och, no,’ she counselled, ‘it’s vairy quiet in the winter.’ This year, it was ‘vairy quiet’ in the summer, too. And not before time, some would say. It’s estimated that, in 2019, 4.4 million people arrived in the city to witness 25,000 performers in some 5,000 events. Whatever your point of view, it’s a situation that had become unsustainable. Has 2020-21 provided a welcome firebreak to the expansion, here and elsewhere? I suspect so, though it may also…

DORSET VS CHELSEA There’s a saying that for every ten miles out of London, one retreats a year in gastronomic terms. Not so in Dorset, one of only eight English counties without a motorway. Daily rail commuters were a rare species before the pandemic. They are now all but extinct and ready to fill a display case in the recently reopened Dorset Museum in Dorchester, complete with a halffinished crossword and empty miniature Bell’s whisky bottle(s). The best entry point to the county is via the extortionate Sandbanks Ferry with its fabulous views of Poole Harbour, the second-largest natural harbour in the world. A couple of miles after disembarking, you will follow the sandy beachline to Studland, the home of the Pig on the Beach. In 2014, Robin Hutson’s Pig…

THE BENTLEY BOYS – AND GIRLS In 1903 Mary Anderson, a real-estate developer from Alabama, patented a window-cleaning device. There were few cars then and no one wanted her invention but, after 1920, when the patent had expired, her design was widely adopted by the motor industry. By the time she died in 1953, it was ubiquitous. We call her invention windscreen wipers. She never made a cent from it. In 1910, a 15-year-old girl became the first woman in Britain to be fined for speeding. She stood five feet two and rode a Matchless motorbike. In 1926, as the Hon Mrs Victor Bruce, she won the inaugural Monte Carlo rally, Coupe des Dames, in an AC, driving the whole way from John o’Groats. She next persuaded W O Bentley…

What should a woman priest wear? The first Anglican women priests were ordained in Britain in 1994. There were just 32 of them then; there are now 1,380 in the Anglican communion around the world. They often choose traditional cassocks for services. But there are no strict rules for their civvies. A woman priest is caught in a bit of a bind: she can’t dress too sexily, flamboyantly, expensively, cheaply or drably. No wonder the Reverend Catherine Llewelyn-Evans has found herself thinking that perhaps the original sin of Adam and Eve was just getting dressed. ‘Once you have to put on clothes, you differentiate yourself – and, in my case anyway, you go through years of self-consciousness. Had we all remained naked, none of this would have happened.’ Catherine, as…

The Guest from Hell Q Just before we were locked up, an old artist friend of my husband’s occasionally stayed with us – always telling us at the last minute – as we live near to where he has an occasional job. We didn’t enjoy having him to stay as he invariably arrived drunk, and insisted on smoking – albeit outside – and left a mess. He always made my husbandfeel bad because he’d say, ‘Don’t go to any trouble! Just a rough blanket and I’ll sleep on the floor!’ This is not how we operate at all and we were relieved when his work was curtailed by COVID. But now he’s started asking to stay again. How can we tactfully say we don’t like this arrangement? S J, Hastings A…

THE KING’S PAINTER THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANS HOLBEIN FRANNY MOYLE Head of Zeus, 575pp, £35 Hans Holbein created our image of Henry VIII: the ruthless, swaggering, cod-piece-thrusting symbol of kingly authority. But, despite his gloriously vivid portraits of the Tudor court, very little is known about the artist himself. In the Times, Laura Freeman was delighted by the sheer gorgeousness of Franny Moyle’s new biography of Holbein: ‘I take my feathered cap off to Moyle and her publishers. It is an expensive and difficult business getting permissions for reproductions. There is hardly a painting mentioned in the text that isn’t printed in colour and across a whole page. You can count the hairs on Holbein’s beard, peer at every pearl. This is a triumph of bookmaking as well…