Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2022 i The Oldie

Over the years, I have noticed how courageous and good-humoured people can be in the face of death. Twenty-four hours before he died, aged 45, the actor Simon Cadell – star of Hi-de-Hi and my best friend from school – looked up at me from his bed in the Harley Street Clinic, whispered ‘Cheerio, old chum,’ grinned and gave me a double thumbs-up. Not long before she died of cancer, aged 66, the actress and Oxo-ad mum, Lynda Bellingham, telephoned me to say, ‘It’s all fine. I’m ready to go. Don’t worry, be happy – I am.’ And just recently, a month before he died of cancer on St Patrick’s Day, my wife and I had lunch at a local restaurant with our friend and neighbour, the actor Peter Bowles,…

Cue sheets were the pieces of paper used in broadcasting, with a list of the timings of events and the links between commentators. Now, in my retirement, Friday afternoons are much like any other. But when I was working at the BBC in the 1960s, they were the low point of the week, something to be endured before the lure of the weekend and all that swinging London had to offer. For a production secretary in Outside Broadcasts, the fun side of the job was sharing an office with sports commentators Brian Johnston, Raymond Baxter and Rex Alston, and generally looking after them. But Friday afternoons saw me immersed in preparing cue sheets for weekend sports coverage. I was reminded of this when my granddaughter talked recently about a visit…

What were the happiest days of my life? Working with the Two Ronnies in 1971 would surely be up there. It was an unalloyed joy being the heroine in the spoof classic serial, Hampton Wick, which straddled the entire first series in 1971. I can’t pride myself on having been hired for my talent, but even that realisation does not cloud the memory. At 20, I had a face still relatively unmarked by time. My character, dim heroine Henrietta, was a device to provide the foil and butt of all their jokes. Ronnie Barker had me practise walking up and down with a completely expressionless face. He directed my entire part and nearly all of the rest of the scenes. It may have been comedy but he was deadly serious.…

When was the last time you went out to see a film? I know we all watch them at home and a combo of Netflix and big domestic screens and speakers means we all have our own sort of cinema, in a way. Box-office income has thankfully gradually started to increase, but might 2022 be the year to really tempt you back? And more specifically might Downton Abbey: A New Era be the film to do it? I think it really is rather good – so I do hope so. Total box-office revenues in the UK and Ireland in 2021 rose 85 per cent to £597 million from the nadir of 2020’s £323 million. However, these numbers remain far below pre-pandemic levels, when the annual box office exceeded £1.3 billion…

Not long after I had fastened my seat belt, I heard the voice of our non-binary executive in-flight hospitality technician exhorting us to ‘have a read’ of the air-safety card in the pocket of the seat in front of us. In my case, it was in a receptacle bedside me. When I heard the usage have a read of, I felt, with a kind of rapture, that I was already in Sydney. To most Australians, the sound of an Australian voice on an aeroplane is infinitely reassuring. I was once on a flight to Singapore when, halfway through an excellent Turkish soap opera, things got very bumpy and the hostie, in a tremulous voice, told us to adopt the brace position. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to make my life flash before…

It’s so true, what old Harold Macmillan said: change happens because of ‘events’. And not just in politics either. Among other changes COVID has wrought is the end of the rebel teenager, a stereotype we’ve cherished since James Dean broodily gazed out from the screen in Rebel Without a Cause. Lockdown brought adolescents back to the old days – when children were often educated at home. According to the Education Policy Institute think tank, some became thoroughly comfortable with it. Studies find that, for the most part, youngsters like being with their parents and their parents like being with them. Family harmony! Teenage drunkenness fell, as did teenage pregnancies. So did sexually transmitted disease among teens. Conceptions were declining anyway, and some ascribed that to better sex education. It seems…

● Cows share 80 per cent of their genome with humans. ● Cows can be vain, shy, considerate, bossy and inventive. They have best friends, play hide-and-seek, and enjoy having their coats brushed. ● Cows can detect smells up to six miles away. ● There are fewer cows in America today than at any time since 1952. ● Seven per cent of American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. ● In Alabaman slang, a cow without horns is a butt-head. ● A cow’s stomach holds about as much half-digested food as a bathtub. ● There’s no evidence cows lie down before it rains. ● American scientists are developing heat-resistant cows that can withstand global warming. ● In 2017, a Danish animal-rights activist who had lived in Switzerland for…

The problem with medical research is that it’s always finding things for us, whether we be patient or doctor, to worry about – especially in an age of hypochondria like ours. Just as we think that something is nice and safe, research shows that it isn’t, or at least might not be. For example, what could be safer than good old paracetamol – apart from when you take it in overdose, as about 80,000 people do in England and Wales each year. At the last count, 235 of them died – a quarter of all who died by self-poisoning. It has long been suspected that paracetamol might raise the blood pressure, as do non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, but this has not been definitively proved. Raising the blood pressure would be a bad…

Picador £16.99 Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, the story of a boy, the youngest of three children, living in a Glasgow tenement with an alcoholic mother. That novel recalled events in the 1980s, but had a framing device set in 1992: which is roughly where we are with Young Mungo. Mungo is the youngest of three siblings living with an alcoholic mother. Mungo is not Shuggie: and his mother is not Shuggie’s mother, who dies in Shuggie Bain. This is not explicitly Douglas Stuart’s story, but he knows what he’s writing about: the hard, precarious life of the housing schemes, a world of endless sectarian violence and varying degrees of hopelessness; the kind of place where it is bad enough to be gay, as…

When I lived in west London, I used to walk past him on my way to the Tube every day. St Volodymyr, ‘Ruler of Ukraine 980-1015’, as the inscription on Leo Mol’s statue has it. If I had happened to be at this spot in Holland Park in May 1988, I would have seen a gathering of the senior churchmen of Ukraine in all their finery, Orthodox and Catholic, celebrating the unveiling of a statue to a founding father of a nation that was, at the time, still in the unwelcome embrace of the Soviet Union. Though Volodymyr was posthumously canonised, most of his career was not conspicuously saintly. His people were Kyivan Rus’, descended from Swedish Vikings – ‘river kings’, as a recent historian (Cat Jarman) has described them.…

EASTER TREATS The great festival of Easter, the most important feast day of the Orthodox Christian year, is celebrated throughout Eastern Europe at the time of spring planting. With many families no more than a generation away from the land, returning home for the holiday is a chance to exchange news, revisit old memories and provide willing hands to help in the fields. For the Ruthenes of Ludomirova, Ukrainians marooned in the High Tatras on the Slovak-Ukrainian border in the wake of the Second World War, the traditions of Easter now have a particular poignancy. At the time of my visit in 1991 – the year Ukraine declared independence from Soviet Russia – a film crew from Kyiv, to the surprise of the villagers, came looking for their roots. The…

CHELSEA’S RUSSIAN REVOLUTION We can wince at the company he kept. We can be appalled by the way he pillaged the Russian economy. We can wonder how he was ever allowed to seize control of such an important cultural asset. But of this there can be no doubt: Roman Abramovich revolutionised English football. Sure, it is best to wear a nose clip when thinking about the bloodstained source of his money. But wherever it came from, what he did with it was to transform Chelsea FC. So successful was his stewardship – the club accumulated 19 major trophies in his time – that an inescapable conclusion is he knew what he was doing. The usual pattern of football-club ownership before Abramovich arrived in England in 2003 was that the local…

If Kent is Britain’s right foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe. I’d never really touched this toe, and knew it only from the vivid reportage of James Meek who once wrote a brilliant essay about Nigel Farage’s attempts to win a parliamentary seat there. An almost-island, which lost its geographical independence from England when the Wantsum Channel silted up in the Middle Ages, Thanet has long been a magnet for charismatic conquerors, from the legendary Hengist and Horsa, said to have been rewarded with the isle for helping the king of the Britons, to Lord Northcliffe, who launched the Daily Mail and kept alligators in the back garden of his seaside retreat here. A friend recommended Joss Bay, which I reached on a bright early-spring afternoon. My…

Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story by Clover Stroud Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution by Terence Dooley Not Far from Brideshead by Daisy Dunn Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea by Tom de Freston One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick A Class of Their Own by Matt Knott Tales of a Country Parish by Colin Heber-Percy This Mortal Coil: A History of Death by Andrew Doig Constable: A Portrait by James Hamilton Against the Tide by Roger Scruton, ed Mark Dooley Love Marriage by…

Madeline Smith (p14) played Miss Caruso, the Bond Girl in Live and Let Die who has her dress unzipped by Roger Moore with a magnetic watch. A Hammer-horror star, she was also in Up Pompeii. Robert Bathurst (p22) was in Cold Feet and Downton Abbey. He played Ed Howzer-Black in Toast of London. A National Hunt devotee, he wrote, directed and starred in The Fall, a film about racing. A N Wilson (p51) is a leading novelist, biographer and historian. His most recent book is The King and the Christmas Tree. He has written biographies of Tolstoy, C S Lewis, Iris Murdoch and Jesus Christ. Nicky Haslam (p51) is a writer and interior designer. He wrote Redeeming Features and Folly de Grandeur: Romance and Revival in an English Country House.…

You will have seen the distressing news that Neighbours, the Aussie soap that gave us Kylie, Jason and so much more, has been decommissioned. It goes without saying that devoted viewers such as myself, who last saw an episode in 1987, will miss it immeasurably. The one drop of consolation in this melancholic ocean is that the central message of its theme song will eternally outlive the show. ‘Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours’ – and especially of the kind whose proximity and innate goodness destine them to become good friends. And yet, as Nanny almost used to say, ‘I need’ never gets. For the sound of mind in towns, suburbs and above all rural villages, the only good neighbour is on holiday, or dead. Inevitably, Larry David put it best…

Fifty years ago, Sue Coppard, a young secretary living and working in London, formed the Working Weekends on Organic Farms organisation (WWOOF). It has now spread to more than 130 countries around the world, from Costa Rica to Thailand. Coppard loved spending time on a cousin’s farm as a child, but once she was an adult had nowhere to run away to. She wondered if organic farmers would be interested in using willing but unskilled townie labourers. A friend suggested that Michael Allaby, editor of the Soil Association journal, might help. He put her in touch with Emerson College in Forest Row, Sussex, the training college for the application of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical philosophy – including biodynamic agriculture on their 200-acre farm. Several sceptical farm managers were persuaded to give…

Why are some people funny and others aren’t? Or, to be painfully personal, why am I clearly not as funny as I like to think I am? There are plenty of embarrassing moments to try to forget; the worst came many years ago, when I was briefly filling in for Sheridan Morley as the theatre critic of Punch. Alan Coren, father of the authentically funny Giles, was then the editor and invited me to a lunch, over which he presided in his genial and amusing way. I stayed quiet at the end of the table but felt more and more I should contribute to the general merriment. My opportunity came, so I thought, when someone spoke of an author – I forget which one – who apparently couldn’t write except…

The Beano comic has just launched a scheme called Libraries Aloud. The idea is to get device-addicted kids going back to libraries by allowing noisy readings of books out loud. Town Mouse has absolutely nothing against reading out loud to children, or indeed children in libraries. But libraries are not the place for raised voices, tumult and bustle. If I arrived at the Reading Room of the British Library and quietly got out my books, only to be disturbed by a group of small children shouting, ‘Behind you!’, I would be rather annoyed. I’d hope a librarian would stare down the kids and hiss, ‘Shush!’ at them. Libraries and a deathly hush go together like a horse and carriage. When I was a small Town Mouse, my mother would take…

Where have all the frumps gone? In the 1950s and ’60s, they were everywhere, as we were reminded by seeing Judi Dench and Helen Mirren frumped up – or down – in two recent films, Belfast and The Duke. The films, based on true stories, are set in the past – Belfast in 1969 and The Duke in 1961 – when frumps reigned supreme. The retro TV series Call the Midwife has a statutory frump in Miss Higgins, the austere, no-nonsense and terminally dowdy doctor’s receptionist and busybody, brilliantly played by Georgie Glen. We oldies remember those great frumps Margaret Rutherford, Peggy Mount and Irene Handl. Irene Handl, particularly, specialised in frumpy spinsters and charladies. These women were so common in British films between about 1945 and 1965 that a…

I have always had a very soft spot for Fotherington-Thomas. He was the macho and cynical Nigel Molesworth’s ‘girlie’ companion at St Custard’s, from Geoffrey Willans’s Down with Skool (1953), illustrated so brilliantly by Ronald Searle. Fotherington-Thomas is prone to saying, ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky,’ and has a touching little round face with a beaming smile going from ear to ear. I don’t think he is on record as saying, ‘Hullo flowers, hullo sun,’ but he might easily have done. That same enthusiasm is to be found, in a more serious vein, in George Herbert’s Easter: I got me flowers to strew thy way;I got me boughs from many a tree;But thou wast up at break of day,And brought thy sweets along with thee…Can there be any day but this,Though…

Andrew Roberts on George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch A defence of not-so-mad King George Norman Scott on his memoir An Accidental Icon: How I dodged a bullet… The real story of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal Julia Boyd on A Village in the Third Reich The gripping tale of everyday Bavarian village life under Hitler Tuesday 7th June 2022 At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). The price is £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks ● Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request ● Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm ● Authors speak 2.30…

To enter Michael Winner’s Piccadilly office, I had to negotiate an eight-foot-high shiny steel door with a big wheel to open it. It had once guarded a City safe. He said he bought it from the Bank of England to use as a prop for The Jokers (1967), a Michael Crawford caper he directed about a plot to steal the Crown Jewels. ‘You’d need gelignite to open it,’ he cackled, puffing on one of his eight-a-day Montecristo cigars. ‘No one can get me here. Not even the taxman. Ha, ha!’ The Death Wish director died in 2013, aged 77. I was the last of his friends to visit him on his deathbed. He’d fallen ill eating shellfish at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados, where he spent £100,000 every Christmas.…

Hodder & Stoughton £20 Hanging in the hall of my house is a framed election poster for the Dog Lovers’ Party. My friend Auberon Waugh stood in this interest for the North Devon constituency against the sitting member, Jeremy Thorpe, after the latter’s strange involvement with a plot to shoot a beautiful Great Dane named Rinka. It is Rinka’s friend and owner who writes the present volume. ‘You will now retire and consider your verdict of Not Guilty,’ Peter Cook, in wig and judge’s rig, told the jury in his satirical version of the trial of Jeremy Thorpe and his grotesque band of co-defendants, on trial for conspiracy to murder the author of this book in the incident that ended up with Rinka being shot. Given the fact that the…

Among the signs of my general decrepitude is the increasing untidiness of my handwriting. It was never elegant but it used to be reasonably neat and, I think, easy to read. In the 1980s, I would file handwritten stories from abroad by fax. Now my longhand is messy. The lines stray from the horizontal, the letters are irregular and the words distorted. My writing seems to be reverting to that of early childhood. I could blame alcohol for this, or old age. Either is plausible. But I suspect the keyboard plays a part: I am simply out of practice. Some teenagers I know are yet to get into practice. Their writing is awful. An eminent archivist tells me that learned graduate students summon documents from the stacks but are unable…

CHOIR REFORM AT ST JOHN’S, CAMBRIDGE: ALLEGRI’S MISERERE ‘The Choir of St John’s, Cambridge,’ crowed the college’s newly appointed Master, Heather Hancock, ‘has a stellar reputation for its contribution to the rich choral tradition of the UK.’ How typical of our times, then, that one of Mrs Hancock’s earliest announcements concerned the ending of a key element in the choir’s distinctive contribution to that tradition: its all-male make-up. This, in part, ‘to honour the College’s overarching commitment to [gender] equality’. How much Mrs Hancock knows about the inner workings of the UK choral tradition, I’ve no idea. One person who might is the chair of the committee that appointed her, Professor Emerita Deborah Howard, an architectural historian who made extensive on-site use of the St John’s choir during research for…

BURGER MASTERS Another gastronomic watershed in the West End: a vegan burger bar. V Honest Burgers, with its 100-per-cent plant-based burgers, was launched in January, at 17 Garrick Street, bang next door to the eponymous club. To celebrate, I have sent vouchers to the PM’s three sirloin-loving security guards, who are still in hock to Stephen Glover, their erstwhile host, who was shaking a tin at The Oldie’s 30th-anniversary party last month. Burgers have come a long way since 1953, when J Lyons converted their Coventry Street branch into a Wimpy. Unlike McDonald’s, whose founding brothers, Dick and Mac, had dispensed with cutlery and plates in 1948 in a bid to increase speed and drive down costs, Wimpy clung to a Formica formality. The average time spent at a table…

DIGITAL ARTHUR DALEYS ‘Clocking’ cars – turning back the odometer so that it shows fewer miles – should have been nullified by the arrival of computers; these record mileage electronically and can secrete that record deep within a car’s systems. Not so: electronic manipulation of odometers not only is rife but has reportedly increased by 45 per cent in the past five years. Car-checkers HPI reckon that a practice previously confined to dishonest traders now involves dishonest private sellers who download clocking techniques from the internet. There are even companies that advertise ‘mileage correction services’. Owners of leased cars under mileage-limited deals are especially tempted – as apparently are some unscrupulous cab-drivers who plug a data-blocker into the dashboard circuits. Research by Autocar and HPI on ten popular makes registered…

13th-20th September 2022 In 2016, Robert Fox led an Oldie trip in the north of Italy, whose towns read like a list of Shakespearean locations: Padua, Mantua and Verona. And, this time, our small group will have the joy of staying in the wonderful Villa Albrizzi (www.villaalbrizzi.it), which is located on the edge of Este, a small town south of Padua, 30 miles from Venice Airport. The villa, set in eight acres and with its own pool, has been owned by the Albrizzi family for three centuries. Limited to 12 guests (3 doubles, 3 twins) Tuesday 13th September Depart Heathrow at 1330 with BA; arrive Venice at 1645 Transfer to the villa; dinner there Wednesday 14th September – Padua Morning and lunch in Padua followed by free afternoon at the…

Spring has not started well: news from Ukraine continues to be overwhelming and utterly heartbreaking… In a recent article in the Times, AN Wilson wrote that ‘some of the greatest salvoes fired against the Soviet system were not fired from guns but from the pens of novelists’. He went on to describe how by their fiction Boris Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn did ‘more damage to the Soviet system than any amount of non-fictional argument’. Wilson concluded: ‘Napoleon, like Putin, subscribed to the “Great Man” view of history. Tolstoy [in War and Peace] showed that the mysterious Fate which moves events and human beings is bigger than a tyrant’s vanity, and it always wins in the end.’ Others, of course, have written about the power of the pen: George Whetstone in his…

‘It was not long after dawn that Captain Hornblower came up on the quarterdeck…’ So begins one of the finest series of historical novels in the English language, a series I devoured as a teenager then put aside for 40 years. More fool me. It’s only now that I realise what CS Forester’s wiser fans have always known: that his seafaring yarns aren’t just escapist entertainments – they’re also great works of literature. You can see why they were beloved by so many great writers, from Raymond Chandler to Ernest Hemingway. Has Forester been forgotten? Not quite. Most of his books are still in print and he’s still familiar to readers of a certain age, but for one of the most widely read authors of his generation he’s endured a…

Somerset Maugham’s stock in trade was the vanity of human wishes, so it’s somehow appropriate that instead of the Order of Merit, which he believed he deserved, he had to make do with the Companion of Honour: ‘It means, Very well done, but …’ Was he ‘second-rate’, as his detractors alleged? Perhaps. But writers as different as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and John le Carré said they learnt from him. And Maugham himself wondered ‘why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people’. One answer might be that he dealt with fundamental issues like greed, lust, love, courage, betrayal and death. He was also easy to read. ‘Too easy,’ sniffed some critics. But as Maugham noted, with characteristic pith, ‘To write simply…

Woman guilty in lettuce rowi Football club picks up keys to changing roomsWalden Local Police in Leicestershire offered gifts including posters of Jamie Vardy and three bags of doughnutsHinckley Times £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The May issue is on sale on 4th May 2022. 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 Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2022 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.…

Nadine Dorries may not be my favourite politician, but my heart warmed to her when she recently shed a tear in the Commons while expressing her ‘heartfelt thanks and admiration’ to BBC, ITV and other journalists who are risking their lives in Ukraine. The question I want to ask is: why do they do it? Most of them don’t win fame, and none earns great riches. I imagine that many of us can’t remember more than a handful of their names. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, perhaps, and a few others. Can you recall the bylines of correspondents in your daily newspaper (if you still read one) who are risking their lives to bring you the news? That it is dangerous can hardly be doubted. As I write, at least five…

Half an hour into my first Evgeny Lebedev Christmas drinks party, it occurred that the only person in the room I didn’t recognise was me. His central London flat had been magically transformed that 2015 evening into a kind of animatronic Madame Tussauds, thronging with scores and scores of the globally famed jostling for space. David Cameron, Judi Dench, Eddie Redmayne, Mick Jagger, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Nigel Farage, Monica Lewinsky, Ian McKellen and on, and on, and on. The corridor to the main reception room was too rammed to penetrate – so I nipped for Dutch courage into a side room with a bar. As the tender poured, I glanced nervily around. Alone on a sofa in the corner, so still she might have been in cryogenic stasis, was Shirley Bassey.…

Once upon a time, there was a woman with plaits in her hair who worked as an editor in book publishing. For 35 years, she worked chiefly in adult non-fiction (at Bloomsbury, Piatkus, André Deutsch, then Bloomsbury again) across a range of genres, from political memoir, celebrity biography and cookbooks to popular science, miscarriage-of-justice exposés (remember the Guildford Four?) and military history. Those titles were usually illustrated – and finding the illustrations was a job in itself. A gardening guide might need a diagram showing how to prune a pear tree. Film director Fred Zinnemann’s autobiography called for a film still of Burt Lancaster in a clinch with Deborah Kerr. A memoir by an ex-SAS soldier needed photos of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. In the pre-internet era, picture libraries…

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… ‘I’ve got COVID,’ I gloomily declared with all the phlegmy fanfare I could muster. I was speaking through a crack in the door to the kitchen, where my at-risk patients were sitting, hitherto blissfully unaware, at the breakfast bar, swinging their tiny legs like young things without a care in the world. ‘Oh, he’d have to have it, wouldn’t he?’ Mum said mockingly, as if I’d just turned up with a hula hoop or a faddish grilling machine. Their hatred of the modish, or simply new, is a bit rich: Mother has been having ‘bottomless brunches’ since the ’80s…

There had not been so much agonising since the Gang of Four left the Labour Party to form the Social Democrats in 1981. The impasse in family talks was over which European city to take a break in. Not for the first time, Mary’s PA saved the day (just as Polly often does in Fawlty Towers). ‘Just because you can’t all agree on the same destination is no reason to end up going nowhere,’ observed our Polly. ‘Quite,’ I gulped – not realising that my elder daughter had already booked the trip to Paris and even booked a table at the 137-year-old Brasserie Lipp to help realise my ambition to sample hareng Bismarck. I haven’t been master of my own house for many years. Wondering at what point in time…

We have no library. There can obviously be sadder sentences in the English language than that, and indeed more shocking ones, but within the context of a school this is pretty bad. You might ask how we have come to such a state of affairs – and I have done exactly that. Often. When I arrived at the school, there was a well-stocked library, and a librarian who was on long-term sick leave. In her absence, teaching assistants stepped forward and manned the desk at lunchtime, so children could borrow books. Later, keen prefects were trained to issue and re-shelve books, and some semblance of order was kept. But then the librarian left and the one we hired also left, hoping to make her name in reality television. That didn’t…

SIR: I read with interest David Wood’s article on Burton and Taylor (February issue). At the time, I was a 20-year-old undergraduate at Merton College, when I and a colleague, Alan Watson, got wind of the two stars coming to lunch with the Fellows. We parked ourselves in Fellows quadrangle early on to catch a glimpse. They were some two hours late but Alan and I stuck it out and were duly rewarded. The most striking memory I have of their visit was the appearance of Elizabeth Taylor. She had wonderful looks and features which, in the flesh, outdid her splendid screen and photographic images. It was really exciting to be so close to a megastar. We took photos of her (pictured) which display a pensive and wistful demeanour. Could…

The present appalling plight of Ukraine reminds me of the early 1960s, when I was chairman of the London branch of the Anglo-Ukrainian Society. Its founder was the admirable maverick politician Auberon Herbert (1922-74), who never made it to the House of Commons. Standing as a Conservative in the hopeless seat of Aberavon, he won a few votes by learning to propel a coracle on a local river. (He later came closer to success in Sunderland East.) The Society’s aim was to be a rallying point for the 30,000 Ukrainians granted British citizenship after 1945. Many had settled in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where there were flourishing branches, not least in Halifax, where the Conservative Maurice Macmillan, Harold’s son, owed a large portion of his tiny majority to the Ukrainian vote.…

Jonathan Cape £35 In the dusk of an evening in the late 1950s, we were drinking vin blanc cassis on the terrace of the Hotel Nord Pinus. It was late summer, and we had come to Arles for the last of the season’s corridas, to see the gloried and glamorous matador Luis Miguel Dominguín fight the bulls. Before us, waves of Provençal aficionados streamed through the square towards the arena, its Roman arches rising floodlit beyond. Then, off to our right, we heard staccato applause. The crowd parted and, down into the light, their arms interlocked, came a trio of figures; the furthest, a handsome young man; then Dominguín’s wife, the beautiful actress Lucia Bosè and … Picasso. They passed, quite close – Picasso’s outline indelible, his aura tangible, dazzling…

Gathering his thoughts at the end of Princess Elizabeth’s international debut, one of the great courtiers of the 20th century offered his verdict on the future Queen. Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, who would serve four monarchs, wrote home to his wife that the heir presumptive was made of the right stuff. ‘She has come on in the most surprising way,’ noted the King’s Private Secretary. ‘Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun… For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.’ Lascelles had just spent the early part of 1947 travelling around southern Africa with the King and Queen, plus the two Princesses who were making their first…

Engineer abuse Why does every list of professions include doctors, solicitors, teachers, dentists and many others, but never engineers? I don’t mean the technicians who come to fix washing machines or dishwashers. I mean proper chartered engineers with degrees or even doctorates. They are members of the Institutions of Civil Engineers – or Structural, Electrical or Mechanical Engineers – or any of a number of institutions with Royal Charters. I concluded some time ago that engineers are rarely mentioned because people never think, ‘I need an engineer,’ the way they think they need a doctor, or a dentist, or a solicitor. They notice civil engineers only when, for instance, highway or railway projects are delayed, or a job goes wrong and it affects people going to work. Never mind that…

My COVID sickbed was an ideal, martyrish place from which to hear news bulletins, I found: trapped and miserable, vaguely hallucinating. Hoping, every hour, that someone might have dealt the coup de mort to the little madman always referred to by our Ukrainian lodger (who was with us ten years, waiting for his visa) as ‘Putler’. Of course it’s the pictures that ‘show, not tell’ about atrocities of war, as Sarah Dunant said in A Point of View. But the power of radio – today, as in 1940 – comes through the words, speculation, analysis and straightforward truths emanating from the sainted and trustworthy Lyse Doucet, Jeremy Bowen and co. There was much to tell about the strutting, dead-eyed homunculus in the series Putin (BBC Sounds) from the well-informed voices…

SONGS IN WARTIME So far, nothing from Bob Geldof, and nothing from those celebrities who came together to warble Imagine on Zoom during the lowest point of the pandemic, but it can’t be long now. The first Rock 4 Ukraine gig has been announced (in Bournemouth, headline act, the tribute band Meetloaf) and dealers in NFTs (please don’t ask me to explain) are selling one-off digital images of Artists for Ukraine such as Tina Turner. Turns out that where there’s trucks in muck, there’s brass. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has blotted out everything else and, in the five clear minutes between the end of the pandemic and the beginning of the Third World War, I keep having this thought: my father was born during the Second World War. He…

WILD GARLIC I may have mentioned before that I have not had much success with keeping garlic grown at home – certainly not for the several months claimed by some gardeners. Garlic cloves should be planted in late autumn and lifted in summer, but another member of the allium family is ready to be picked in spring. This is wild garlic, a hardy perennial also known as ramsons. Adapting, and misquoting, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I know a bank near here whereon the wild garlic grows. At this time of year, the plant has white, star-shaped flowers and leaves resembling those of lily-of-the-valley. It grows so abundantly, with its carpet of flowers, that I felt I would do no harm by lifting a clump and replanting it in…

THE ART OF THE APERITIVO The barman at the Pino Azzurro in Linguaglossa, a small town north-east of Mount Etna, looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Negroni?’ Frowning, he rolled the word around his mouth a few times, and then tapped it into his phone. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, reaching for bottles of gin, Campari and Martini Rosso, before combining equal measures of each in a small wine glass with no ice. I should have stuck to beer. I thought the Negroni had conquered the world, but there is at least one corner of Sicily it has yet to penetrate. The island’s reluctance to embrace the concept of the aperitivo – drinks and a few snacks before dinner, something of an art form in Turin and Milan – may simply be because Sicilians…

When reading The Oldie, I often think of the great Michael Flanders, who, with Donald Swann, entertained us so elegantly in the white heat of the 1960s satire boom. He would sometimes open their shows with these encouraging words: ‘The purpose of satire is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth; our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.’ I can’t help thinking that The Oldie still carries that torch, to some extent. Consequently, I hesitate to address an indelicate subject in pages that most of us regard as something of a sanctuary. However, we must face facts. The invention of the internet, like all innovations, has had good and bad consequences. One of the vilest is that it enables what is…

Good morrow to thy sable beak, And glossy plumage, dark and sleek, Thy crimson moon and azure eye, Cock of the heath, so wildly shy!Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), from The Black Cock To see the lek or communal display of the lyre-tailed male black grouse (Lyrurus tetrix) or blackcock is increasingly rare in Britain. Seventy years ago, black grouse were widespread, except in uninhabited Ireland. Now their stronghold is the Angus glens, with a smattering in the Borders and northern England and barely any in Wales. The UK population is 4,850 (2016). Last September, Carry Akroyd and I were privileged to see a lek on one of Angus’s best and largest grouse moors. I associated leks with spring – that is when the females, aptly called greyhens, attend to mate with…

What is your favourite royal palace? Windsor Castle by a long shot. I was there as a presenter at the Sussex wedding. Was the Charles-and-Diana marriage doomed? Yes. Diana’s crumpled taffeta train was the signifier of all the crushed hopes to come. Does Diana still haunt the Royal Family? Through Harry’s recent actions, yes, but in Kate there’s a new female icon. Diana’s ghost is less potent than it was. What do you think of Meghan? You have to wait for my book The Palace Papers, about the years since Diana. What was it like editing the New Yorker? Intellectually exhilarating, fulfilling, life-changing. What was it like working with Harvey Weinstein on Talk magazine? The greatest mistake of my life. He never sexually harassed me, but he was a terrifying…

I’m too fat for him Q Over lockdown, I have put on an enormous amount of weight. This has made me less attractive to my partner, or so he says. He’s quite apologetic about it, but he says he’s always only fancied slim women and there’s nothing he can do about it. But surely this can’t be true. If he loved me, wouldn’t he want to make love to me whatever shape I was? We always used to have a very good sex life. Fiona B, Wantage A You can love someone without fancying them sexually. I don’t think you know how men’s minds work when it comes to sex. Some men can put physical attractiveness to one side; some fancy anything with breasts and a skirt. And, honestly, if your…

HIDDEN HANDS MARY WELLESLEY THE LIVES OF MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR MAKERS riverrun, 370pp, £25 ‘This rather short book is packed with wonderful stories beautifully told,’ Gerard DeGroot wrote in the Times. ‘Her love of medieval manuscripts shines through her elegant and charming book,’ Linda Porter commented in the Literary Review. ‘Manuscripts do more than convey information. Their creation calls for imagination, physical effort, a love of meaning and beauty. They are works of art in their own right,’ Jonathan Sumption enthused in the Spectator. ‘Mary Wellesley is a serious scholar, with years of experience of handling these fragile artefacts. Her achievement in this book is to convey something of these sensations…. Few people have described the experience so eloquently.’ She ‘attempts to dispel the widely held belief that all medieval…

THE LYRICS PAUL MCCARTNEY 1956 TO THE PRESENT Allen Lane, 874pp, £75 This boxed collection of Sir Paul McCartney’s lyrics, edited and introduced by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, comes with an epic price tag as befits its coffee-table gloss and bulk. In the Observer, David Hepworth found it revealing of McCartney’s ambitions. ‘Each song has a commentary drawn from chats with Muldoon, who was presumably the one introducing words such as “epistolary” and “intertextual” into the conversation. Macca rarely resists an upmarket comparison. If one Paul is keen to point out that the intermediary of She Loves You is like the hero of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, the other Paul is quite happy to agree he may have been influenced by it.’ Like Hepworth, Blake Morrison in the Guardian,…

‘It’s bold of Edward St Aubyn to write a novel [Double Blind, Vintage, £8.99] that’s so much about science and about so much science: physics, genetics, epigenetics, botany, soil science, quantum mechanics, psychiatry, microbiology, neuroscience, immunotherapy and evolutionary theory (theology, too, if it counts),’ wrote Blake Morrison in the Guardian. St Aubyn’s previous ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical, but this, his tenth, has a ‘rich cast of characters’, according to Alex Preston in the Spectator, including Francis, an unworldly young botanist, and his girlfriend Olivia. It is ‘a novel with a heart’, in which ‘we learn what ”the corrupting exposure to the habits of the very rich” does to people, and what it takes to resist that corruption’. But, said John Self in the Times, it has a ‘maddening…