Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2022 i The Oldie

Forty years ago this month – absurdly, because it was against the backdrop of the Falklands conflict – I made my way into the Guinness Book of World Records by making the world’s longest-ever after-dinner speech. While our gallant forces were retrieving the Falkland Islands from the invading Argentinians in the South Atlantic, in a west London hotel, at a fundraising dinner sponsored by Cockburn’s Special Reserve Port (‘ideal for everyday drinking’), in aid of the National Playing Fields Association (President: HRH The Duke of Edinburgh), in a white tuxedo (generously provided by Aquascutum), I got to my feet at 9.30pm and talked non-stop – without hesitation or repetition, but with a good deal of deviation – for 12½ hours. The challenge wasn’t the talking, to be honest: it was…

In the late ’50s, charity football teams were all the rage. They were started in 1957 by DJ and song-plugger Jimmy Henney and his Show Biz XI. By 1959, there were three serious outfits based in London: the Show Biz team, Mike and Bernie Winters’ TV All Stars and Brad Ashton’s Comedy Writers. They all played weekly at venues up and down the country against film stars, jockeys, ex-boxers, speedway stars, servicemen and old famous footballers. They also took on factory and works teams, local village XIs and miners’ teams. They drew crowds of up to 50,000. They raised tens of thousands of pounds for a variety of charities. Henney’s team was the more serious outfit, including players who had performed semi-professionally – such as Des O’Connor and ‘Skiffle King’…

How do modern Luddites survive? Now that 96 per cent of us are on the internet, and 80 per cent are on social media, who can survive without tweets and Facebook and the risk of succumbing to nomophobia*? Very few. The worldwide web ensnares almost everyone. Thus the increasing inability to concentrate and a dwindling attention span, as covered in Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. The internet now makes itself so necessary. David Wiggins, former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, wanted to become a National Gallery member but couldn’t without an email address. It takes real determination to resist. Bravo, Edward Thorpe, former Evening Standard ballet critic, who doesn’t have email or a smartphone. He zips about London in his sports car, sees the latest…

In the house of my sister, the writer Artemis Cooper, hangs a delicately beautiful pencil portrait of Harry Cust (pictured), an absurdly handsome man with light eyes: our great-grandfather. The portrait was drawn by Violet, the Duchess of Rutland. Her fifth child was our grandmother, the actress Lady Diana Cooper. When Diana was 19, she was offered condolences on the death of her father. But the Duke of Rutland, her supposed father, was in the pink of health! After the shock subsided, she decided this was good news: her father was not the dull duke but Harry Cust, an MP, magazine editor and the most dazzling man of his era – who bequeathed her those mesmerising blue eyes. I was given similar news, more gently, when I was 12. ‘John…

When Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter, Jack Wild, who had known similar instant, international celebrity as the Artful Dodger in Carol Reed’s film of Oliver! (1968), wrote him a heartfelt letter: ‘Steer clear of temptations. Keep your feet on the ground. Don’t believe the hype. And, above all, enjoy fame and fortune while they last, for they can be fickle. I know; I learned the hard way.’ A child actor who learned an even harder way was William Betty (1791-1874), known as the Young Roscius. The original Roscius (died 62 BC) was a celebrated Roman actor. In 1804, aged 13, he played a range of adult roles, including Romeo and Hamlet, at both London’s Theatre Royals of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to unprecedented acclaim. Also in 1804,…

What word would you apply to Daily Telegraph readers? Respectable? That is certainly what its journalists would have said when I worked on the paper 40 years ago. There are now many fewer retired colonels in Cheltenham, and almost no former District Commissioners in Harrogate. But I don’t suppose the Telegraph’s readership is much rougher than it used to be, even if we probably all have sharper elbows these days. Yet there is one sphere in which a social revolution has taken place that would have been inconceivable four decades ago. As a subscriber to the really excellent digital version of the Telegraph, I sometimes look at readers’ comments beneath articles. Shield your eyes and block your ears! Even a retired colonel who has heard bad language in the mess…

Young people like to embrace the mantra ‘Be kind’. We’ve seen a great display of kindness in the many, many offers to host Ukrainian refugees in the middle of the tormenting war they have experienced. I wished I could invite a refugee into my abode in Deal but, quite honestly, they could do an awful lot better anywhere other than chez moi. I live in circumstances of barely controlled chaos. I’m a dreadful clutterbug. My bedroom is organised according to Quentin Crisp rules – after five years, the dust hasn’t got any worse. The converted loft room – the only space for visitors – has plaster falling down on an inside wall, damaged by a storm. It also has uneven, narrow stairs on which anyone could break a leg. As…

On the ninth day of the war in Ukraine, we had a spring funeral. The cleanness and orderliness of our chapel, with its bare white walls, its silence and the presence of a small, plain coffin encircled by four tall candles struck me as making it the perfect place to be at the very end of life. The calm and tranquillity, at the close of decades of goodness and righteousness, were in marked contrast to the unacceptable face of death, evident in the obscene violence taking place in Ukraine. The only colour in the chapel was a vase of daffodils – Lenten lilies and a sign of hope. The beginning of Sister Katrin’s life was the stuff of which over-sensational biographies are made. She was no stranger to aggression and…

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has been greeted with a steady thud of books by familiar names: Robert Hardman; Andrew Morton; Joanna Lumley. Historians have already published interim reports on the Queen – the volume of the Penguin Monarchs series on Elizabeth II has been out for seven years. Doubtless others are readying final verdicts for the dreaded end of the longest reign in British history. Naturally, we have no idea what the Queen thinks about any of these published opinions, any more than we know what she thinks about her prime ministers (well, you can’t imagine she’s a great fan of Andrew Morton, but we don’t know). If, as is often reported, the recipients of the Order of Merit are the nearest we can get to a sign of personal…

Here’s some good news for meat-eaters who prefer quality to quantity and are happy to cook the lesser cuts. Pioneering estate-owners Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree of the rewilding project at Knepp, in West Sussex, have returned 350 acres of neglected arable to traditional ways of farming. Since this includes manure-producing, pasture-grazing, woodland-wandering, free-breeding livestock, the result is an excess of surplus-to-requirements, ethically raised animals and a need to find a market. Pot-au-feu Provençale Nothing fancy – this is the traditional Sunday lunch in rural France, particularly in the south. The desired result is enough left-over broth to serve as the basis for other meals throughout the week. Skirt is included for flavour in the broth; shin for strength; oxtail or a pig’s trotter for texture. Vary the vegetable additions…

It is 50 years since the greatest player ever to hold a cue won his first World Snooker Championship. Alex Higgins beat John Spencer 37-32 in a best-of-73 final in 1972, and in the process the Northern Irishman announced himself to the world. In fact, it wasn’t that noisy an announcement. In those days, the competition was held in the less-than-ostentatious surroundings of the Selly Park British Legion Club in Birmingham, and the final wasn’t televised. Higgins blitzed his way to glory in front of just a couple of hundred observers, his flair enveloped in a thickening fug of cigarette smoke. Within five years, however, the World Championship had moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and had become a television staple. It is fair to say, as it travelled…

Our familiar landline telephones are being cut off, and all home telephones will work through broadband only. Old copper phone lines are being replaced with internet cables. Some BT customers have already been transferred to this new system. BT, which provides most landlines, calls it Digital Voice. Campaigners have been warning BT about the dangers this will cause many older customers. Belatedly, BT has paused the switchover for customers who do not want to move to the new technology just yet. The whole analogue phone network was due to be switched off by the end of 2025. When that happens, you won’t be able to have a landline phone without also having broadband installed in your house – though customers who do not want to use the internet won’t have…

Rubbish cleaner Q I think my elderly mum is getting ripped off by her cleaner (a very first-world problem, I know, but…). On the few occasions I’ve been present in the house when she’s around, the cleaner regularly tells sob stories about her son/ missing her train home, and she often cuts corners, both time-wise and work-wise. My mum is very sympathetic to her plight and also generally an easy-going person, but she doesn’t seem to be getting her money’s worth, and sometimes complains about the cleaner’s work. How to proceed with this? R Paterson, Cornwall A Try to visit more often when the cleaner is there. Always look at the clock when you arrive. Make a note of the time. Say, ‘Lovely to see you! You’re looking well! Now…

Allegra Huston (p22) wrote Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and A Stolen Summer, a novel. She is codirector of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. She lives in Taos, New Mexico. Huon Mallalieu (p26) is The Oldie’s exhibitions correspondent and Country Life’s art-market correspondent. He is author of How to Buy Pictures and The Illustrated History of Antiques. Michael Arditti (p29) has written 12 acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His novel Easter won the Waterstones Mardi Gras Award. He was the theatre critic of the Sunday Express. Jenny Bardwell (p32) is semi-retired from the BBC. She volunteers at a bookshop and at Somerset House. She runs a City Lit volunteering course for retirees and is involved with amateur dramatics.…

It by no means comes naturally to devote this space to the celebration of anyone, let alone a member of the governing party. In the case of Michael Fabricant, however, decency demands that the bile be displaced by the hero worship this fine parliamentarian is revered for inspiring. For anyone trapped in ignorance, Mr Fabricant is the Hon Mem for Lichfield in the Conservative interest. Or so at least it seems, because a small caveat is indicated. Even now, decades into their partnership, it isn’t wholly clear whether it is Mr Fabricant or The Creature That Lives on His Head (henceforth, for brevity, TC) that rules this richly engaging hybrid. While it is Fabricant whose name appears on the ballot papers, one school of thought posits that he is merely…

Ethical non-monogamy (ENM) is when you have intimate relationships with more than one person – but in a non-cheaty way. It’s all completely consensual, non-exploitative and above-board – and everyone involved has a really nice time. At least in theory. What it doesn’t mean is lobbing all your keys in a bowl after dessert; or meeting the Featherstones behind the pampas grass for nipple clamps and fondue – but, then again, it doesn’t not mean that. ENM is an umbrella term, taking in polyamory, pansexualism, open relationships and all such deviations from the monogamous norm. As long as you and the person(s) with whom you decide to be ethically non-monogamous are fully aware of what you’re signing up to, it can mean whatever you want it to mean. ENM has…

This is a sparkling year for centenaries. The BBC, Ulysses, The Waste Land, the Austin 7, Modernism itself, Doris Day… But they all fade under the dazzling spotlight of one of mankind’s ultimate triumphs. Conceived 100 years ago in a Staffordshire cottage, pride of Britain and a national treasure, literal food of the gods: bring out the Branston! The nation’s favourite pickle originated in the Staffordshire village of Branston on the River Trent. There a Mrs Graham and her daughters Evelyn and Ermentrude sought to bottle winter vegetables from their cottage garden. Evelyn was professionally involved in biological research and had access to exotic ingredients previously unknown in Staffs, such as Indian gherkins and dates from Iran. The three women experimented, macerated and spiced. In 1922, Crosse & Blackwell bought…

Sixty years ago, on 10th April 1962, one of the most famous and influential film-makers of all time died, aged 75. Budapest-born Michael Curtiz was a major player in getting his country’s film industry under way. When he moved to America, he worked with Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Boris Karloff, Errol Flynn and Elvis. Nine of his films were Oscar-nominated. And yet he is still widely remembered only for one masterpiece, Casablanca (1942). There is, though, so much more to Michael Curtiz than one brilliant film. Following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the military dictatorship ended and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was born in 1867. In the economic boom that followed, the Hungarian film industry started to take shape. The first films – documentaries and newsreels – proved to…

I recently interviewed the brilliant and esteemed novelist Margaret Drabble. I was struck and somewhat surprised when she told me that she panics before parties. Social situations make her nervous. You wouldn’t have thought she had any reason to feel timid. After all, Drabble is a dame, recipient of many prestigious awards, the author of 30 books, and one of the most successful literary people of the last 50 years. Surely she would stride into a cocktail party with all the self-confidence of Roger Federer striding on to Wimbledon’s Centre Court? It’s something we’re all thinking about following the end of COVID-related restrictions and the return of socialising. In contrast to Drabble, Town Mouse has greatly enjoyed putting on his frock coat, trimming his whiskers and setting out to a…

For the first time in all my years of teaching, I finished the spring term asking myself, ‘Am I broken? Have I come to the end of this particular road?’ I am 60 this summer and could retire with my dignity intact. I would receive my teaching pension, but not a state pension. Because I did not go into teaching until my late thirties, my teaching pension is not that much, but it would be something. I have just begun a PhD (part time) and could spend all day reading 19th-century novels. I could reclaim my dog, who has been kidnapped by my daughters and taken to London. I could do more grandmothering – my third grandchild is due any day. I would lose the crippling anxiety about some of…

A cat crept up the aisle in the middle of Nicholas Parsons’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. It appeared just as the actress Sheila Hancock was reading from The Owl and the Pussy Cat by Edward Lear. ‘Oh Pussy, my love, what a beautiful pussy you are, ’ read Dame Sheila. Parsons, host of the radio show Just a Minute for nearly 52 years, was a lifelong fan of Lear. He celebrated his work on TV and in a touring one-man show. ‘It’s Mrs Higgins, ’ said the Rev Simon Grigg, vicar of the Actors’ Church, of the church cat. Esther Rantzen, paying tribute to Parsons’s tireless work for charities, asked where the owl and the piggy-wig were. Gyles Brandreth said he first met Nicholas in 1969 at…

In August 1962, my mate Frank and I headed for Butlin’s in Skegness. We were both 16. Frank was fearless. He had been an angelic choirboy but was also a rebel against all authority. The week at Butlin’s was his idea. He reeled me in with the prospect of girls galore, pop music and a certain amount of under-age consumption of alcohol. Frank played piano. His current party piece was Nut Rocker – the Number One hit Tchaikovsky mash-up by B Bumble and the Stingers. I played the drums. Frank reckoned that together we could make a killing in the holiday camp’s talent competition. But where to get a set of drums? My suitcase certainly didn’t contain one. The answer came to us when we were in the ballroom listening…

Headline £20 In February 1485, Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, wrote a letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Elizabeth had, along with her brothers and her mother, been dispossessed and dishonoured by her uncle, Richard. He had declared his brother’s offspring illegitimate and marriage false as a preface to – or a pretext for – seizing the throne himself. Nobody had seen Elizabeth’s younger brothers for months. Many assumed Richard had done away with them, as he had with Elizabeth’s maternal uncle Rivers, her half-brother Richard Grey and her father’s right-hand man Lord Hastings. Now Richard III’s wife, Anne, was sick, and it was rumoured that Richard was planning to marry his niece Elizabeth after her death. Given that background, you might assume Elizabeth’s letter to her ally…

A war that seems as illogical as it is brutal invites attempts at explanation. Perhaps some of the words and phrases associated with Vladimir Putin’s merciless belligerence in Ukraine may prove more revealing than his absurd pretexts. The name Ukraine itself tells us something. In Russian, it means ‘on the border’, and hence also ‘territory’, usually referring to vast expanses of the Russian empire. Despite Ukraine’s long history – the name goes back to the 12th century – Russian rulers have never regarded it as an independent entity. The rest of the world was, until recently, scarcely more obliging. It was often known as ‘the Ukraine’, which many Ukrainians resented, saying it put them in the company of ex-colonies such as the Argentine and the Sudan, which have now sloughed…

I confess I had forgotten the origin of the nickname of Tchaikovsky’s folksy and gamesome Second Symphony. It’s the shortest of his six symphonies, and the most Russian – so ‘The Little Russian’ makes sense. It was his good friend Nikolay Kashkin who first used the name. ‘How I love your little Russian, ’ he is said to have exclaimed. ‘All those delightful Ukrainian folk tunes.’ This at a time, of course, when Ukraine was routinely referred to as ‘Little Russia’, a usage dating back to the 14th century, which gradually fell from favour after the 1917 Revolution. Tchaikovsky loved ‘Little Russia’ but was not of it. He’d been born (in 1840) 600 miles north-east of Ukraine in the town of Votkinsk, where his father managed a large factory making…

If any of you are about to embark on a date, now that spring has sprung, read on if you want to know what to do. 1. Turn up within an hour of the agreed time. At 7.15pm, half an hour before our table was booked, Sharon (not her real name, and she’s a gossip columnist – so best keep mum) texted me to say she was en route from Notting Hill and the traffic was dire. She must have lost her signal for the ensuing 90 minutes, because I received no further updates. After 45 minutes, in my new role as London’s premier abandonee, I thought I should finally get a plate of Trullo’s duck offal spiedini. Ten minutes later, it arrived, as did Matt Hancock and Gina Coladangelo…

I’ve chauffeured brides to weddings three times. The first two were in modern Bentleys, plush and spacious. The latest was in something different. In ancient pre-COVID times, my friend, the groom’s father, bought a 1955 Citroën Traction Avant, known here as the Light Fifteen. Made from 1934 to 1957, these low-slung, breathtakingly elegant four-door saloons featured in almost every film about the French Resistance, as well as The Sound of Music and the Maigret and Clouseau films. Although designed by an Italian, they were archetypically French and innovative, with a chassis-free body, front-wheel drive, independent suspension and rack-and-pinion steering. During the Second World War, they were favoured by France’s German occupiers, who deployed them from Stalingrad to Libya. After the war, tyres were an extra cost for early buyers, while…

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…

This month must be peak wood-admiration season. Given a single moment to visit a wood, most of us would choose to stroll a carpet of purple haze beneath a canopy of lime-green, just when the birds are at their busiest, singing their hearts out. I wandered through Blean Woods near Canterbury shortly before the shimmering beauty of bluebell season, and became convinced that actually early spring is the greatest time to be inside a wood. After several hours of ecstatic forest-bathing – as wood-wandering is known in Japan – I realised that whenever we take a forest foray, the wood sprites persuade us that very moment is the optimum time to do it. There is no occasion when we think, oh, this is a grotty time to visit a forest.…

Scaffolder says he does not usually hit people Manx Independent Man found hiding behind tree East Kent Mercury Esther the dog sleeps under man’s desk Great Titchfield Tittle-Tattle £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The June issue is on sale on 1st June 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.…

Now that some schools are introducing gender-neutral toilets, I wonder what today’s generation would make of the strict segregation in coeducational grammar schools in the 1950s and ‘60s. For us, it started on the school bus for pupils who had to travel to the place. Girls and boys were not allowed to sit next to each other. Any contravention of this strict rule would be reported by the bus prefects and result in a stern warning. Once we got off the bus, the segregation intensified. Girls and boys had separate entrances and separate staircases. If a pupil was caught using the ‘wrong’ staircase, it meant instant detention. In the classroom, boys sat on one side, girls on the other. Boys were known by surname only. For most of my time…

While other men are becoming addicted to rolling news of Russia’s advances and setbacks in Ukraine, I have been scanning the footage for background signs of agricultural activity. Any tractor action? Cultivators? Crop-sprayers? Unless the fields are sown with spring corn soon, there will be no harvest this year. Although we can see tractors towing abandoned Russian tanks out of the fields, there has been no sign of them ploughing or scattering the good seed on Ukrainian land. Once I would have been unable to point to the position of Ukraine on the map. Now I am a font of knowledge on Black Sea ports, and their strategic importance to Vladimir Putin. As for Odessa, it’s clear to anyone’s naked eye that it is vital for the Ukrainians to retain…

• Some biologists believe trees speak a language human beings can learn. • American trees are steadily moving west, and no one knows why. • All the 77,000 trees in Melbourne, Australia, have their own email addresses, so people can write love notes to them. • In January 2018, it was so hot in Sydney, Australia, that boiled bats fell out of the trees. • In January 2018, it was so cold in Florida that frozen iguanas fell out of the trees. • A New York man has carved a bar stool from a tree using only his teeth and nails. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge liked to eat fruit while it was still attached to the tree. • If every US household replaced one virgin-pulp loo roll with a recycled-paper…

What stands to reason depends critically on the reasoner, of course. For many people – probably most of them – if a deficiency of x in the blood is associated with an increased death rate, then correcting that deficiency will reduce the death rate. After all, it stands to reason that it should. Such reasoning has in the past led to runs on products in supermarkets. I remember a run on Brazil nuts subsequent to a report that low levels of selenium were associated with high rates of heart attack. Brazil nuts had also been reported to contain high levels of selenium. Nature, however, is not always reasonable; at least not by our – sometimes not very high – standards. She fails to co-operate as she should. By now it…

In the ‘60s, I really was a ‘Mad Man’ in New York advertising, when America produced half the globe’s wealth and Madison Avenue was the ad world’s epicentre. I was working for BBDO, the American ad agency that inspired the megahit TV series Mad Men. The picture in the series – of top-level execs as privileged Wasps with fast-paced, alcohol-fuelled, sybaritic lives – bore little resemblance to reality at 383 Madison. After my ad jobs in London, Lausanne and Paris, my NY BBDO boss, Fritz ‘R’, steered me from account executive/ supervisor to international department manager. Some 90 per cent of people in advertising do not write the ads. Copywriters were often thought too ‘bohemian’ to risk direct client access. It was ‘point men’ like me who hogged the glamour,…

Elliott & Thompson £25 Take a small English country town – Sherborne, say, or Kendal – picture-postcard cute and surrounded by beautiful landscape. Then imagine it after a defeat in war, a sixth of its men dead, chaos in the capital, hyper-inflation and political riots in all the major conurbations and a reparations bill of a quarter of its total income, payable for 50 years. What would become of it and its inhabitants? Or, perhaps more pertinently, take Russia’s rural villages today: why would they doubt for a minute the Kremlin’s explanation for the ‘special operations’ in Ukraine? Those are the unasked – but implicit – questions posed by Julia Boyd’s gripping new dive into the minutiae of the German experience from 1918 to the end of the Second World…

Viking £14.99 There are many remarkable things about Cressida Connolly’s third novel, whose subject is historical recurrence, and the most striking is the timing of its publication. How could Connolly have known, as she imagined the impact of the Crimean War on several generations of the same family, that the book would appear just as the Russians were hellbent on destroying Ukraine? Bad Relations, which divides into three parts, begins on the battlefields of Sevastopol where, in the spring of 1855, William Gale is cutting locks of auburn hair from the head of his brother, Algernon, whose dead body is still warm. Their mother and sister, and Algie’s fiancée, can wear the hair close to their hearts, behind a brooch or in a locket. While Algernon, a dreamy, slow and…

Theatre Last week, I went to the theatre. The experience was everything you’d expect: actors stomping about the stage, gesticulating wildly, assuming exaggerated facial expressions, talking in unnaturally loud voices with flecks of spittle flying from their mouths, uttering unnatural sentences all-too-obviously intended to denote internal conflict or character development, occasionally making lame jokes greeted by arch laughter from the audience. I watched the whole embarrassing spectacle in discomfort, jammed up in a narrow seat with wooden arms. There was so little room that the entire row had to stand when anyone passed. The ordeal was relieved by a 15-minute interval, spent in a queue for a £25 gin-and-tonic. It’s already set you back a hundred quid just to be there. And, of course, the play was staged at a…

How did a nice, talented, Jewish girl from Brooklyn get two Oscars and a Tony by the age of 27, without changing her name or getting her nose fixed or her teeth capped? The obvious person to tell this story (Archive on 4) was Maureen Lipman, who has followed Barbra Streisand since she was an ambitious schoolgirl in Hull, and read about Streisand in her brother’s Time magazine: ‘The shtick, the chutzpah… I felt her power 6,000 miles away.’ The result was To Barbra, marking the diva’s 80th birthday. ‘No woman has ever cried more in any cinema than I did at The Way We Were, ’ said Maureen of the 1973 film in which Streisand lost her Wasp, Robert Redford. Lipman had fun with Hollywood moguls’ voices – ‘She’s…

In his 17th-century poem on the joys of finding fruit in an English garden, Andrew Marvell writes of ‘the nectarine, and curious peach’. It is unsurprising that he puts these two together, but I wonder about his description of the peach as curious. It would be 300 years before a curiously shaped flat peach, sometimes likened to a doughnut, was widely grown in this country. Saturne is the variety most readily available today. Apart from a childhood memory of peaches grown against a high wall in a large, Victorian, lean-to glasshouse, I have no experience of growing these fruit at home. Gardening expert and television personality Carol Klein – at 77 next month, she is an oldie to cherish – says that peaches and nectarines do not have to be…

Greg Lambrecht knows his needles. Trained in medicine, in the 1990s he developed a smart way of delivering chemotherapy to children with leukaemia without traumatising skin tissue. Since then, he says, ‘I got really good at making needles that didn’t damage things.’ Why should this interest the discerning oenophile? Because Lambrecht, who loves wine and has a vast cellar, had a problem: like Mr and Mrs Jack Sprat, he and his wife had different tastes in wine. A bottle of wine, however, is not a platter of meat, and he found himself with too many half-finished bottles on his hands. When she was pregnant with their first child, the problem became even worse. And so he invented Coravin, a preservation system that sucks wine from an unopened bottle through a…

When you exchange written notes with someone, over the internet or otherwise, the text has a formality that transcends the ephemeral nature of a chat in the corridor. The corridor conversation vanishes once it’s over, but the written one does not drift away. It remains there to be read, re-read and passed around; it has some substance. Or so I thought. According to a recent court-witness statement from Sarah Harrison, Chief Operating Officer for the Cabinet Office, when politicians engage in a written exchange of views by WhatsApp, it’s officially of no consequence. It should be treated as informal chat – not as proceedings to be noted, recorded and archived in the way that the Public Records Act 1958 requires of most government business. Of course, that Act did not…

… Stranger! these gloomy boughsHad charms for him; and here he loved to sit,His only visitants a straggling sheep,The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piperWilliam Wordsworth, from Lines Leftupon a Seat in a Yew-Tree… The ‘glancing sandpiper’ refers to the common sandpiper (Actitis hypoleucos). ‘Glancing’ is the perfect word to describe the glimmer of its white breast (hypoleucos, white) as it skims across water so close to the surface that it could be a winning stone pitched in a game of ducks and drakes. The common sandpiper’s breeding range encompasses the world, apart from the Americas, where its western equivalent, the spotted sandpiper, holds sway. The European contingent migrates to Africa in the winter. In the British Isles, they can be seen anywhere but for breeding prefer the uplands. There has…

How did you meet Laurence Marks? We grew up within about half a mile of each other and we first met at the Jewish Lads’ Brigade which we were compelled by our parents to join. How do you work together? Attritionally, through a dialectic of shouting and bullying… How did you get on with Rik Mayall? We loved him. Did any particular MPs inspire Alan B’Stard? He was really a compendium of Tories and I was very keen to get his hair right. Conservatives had this crinkly hair behind their ears achieved by someone running a wet comb through it, which is presumably what Nanny used to do… Have real politicians been worse than B’Stard? I think that Alan B’Stard was quite loved – he was never a hypocrite and…

There is one clue with no definition. The grid, when completed, has a cunningly hidden word which links to this answer. Please highlight this word Across 8 Location of houses developed for stars? (6) 9 Lines featured in soldier’s regular letters (3) 10 Our responsibility may be a burden (4) 11/17/22 House of Lords retinue end day fighting (3, 7, 5, 2, 8) 12 Lacking the go-ahead for recess? (4) 13 Productive type investing millions in food runs (6) 16 Scheme incorporating emblem is oddly vulgar (8) 17 See 11 18 Hold back as result of smear by sailor (7) 22 See 11 25 State answer by king unfortunately takes precedence (6) 26 Draw attention to line crossed by bore (4) 27 Where pilot may be playing cards on steps…

IN COMPETITION No 279 you were invited to write a poem called Broken Bottle. Basil Ransome-Davies portrayed himself as ‘The man who dropped his wine in Marks’, by Bateman. Mike Morrison’s narrator found that the wind had knocked from the shelf ‘A novelty “Souvenir from Alum Bay”, / Late ’70s: glass phial of layered sands’. At the seaside, Max Ross remembered ‘The bite of brine upon my foot, / The rock pool where I washed.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the smashing bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Erika Fairhead. Shouting assails me. I am bottle green.A fight, knife glints in darkness, hotblood boils.Mindless rage hurls me down to rocks.I’m wholeNo more. I shatter, shrink, a wounded shard.Battered…

Shortly after William Dalrymple posted the opening chapter of his first book to the publisher, he found a curt message on his answering machine. ‘I am assuming this is a first draft,’ it said. ‘If not, we will have to seriously reconsider your advance.’ Dalrymple, 24 at the time, began again. In Xanadu was published in 1989, winning plaudits – as all his ten books since have done. Olivia Fraser, his girlfriend, then also 24, decided to put a cosy and secure future at risk. She abandoned her scholarship to Chelsea Art School to join him in the great adventure of making a new life in India. Today her mystical paintings, using Indian miniature-painting techniques on a large scale, hang in galleries around the world. Their Indian venture started badly.…