Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary This month, all my dreams have come true. My wife and I have reached – and passed – our golden wedding anniversary without her changing the locks. And I have met and made a friend of the one person in the world who for 30 years I have hero-worshipped and most wanted to meet. We will come on to where and how Mrs B and I celebrated our half-century in harness in a moment. First things first. As regular readers of this page will know, I have a weakness for namedropping and a particular fondness for collecting memorable moments with stars of stage and screen. In my time, I have sung a duet with Debbie Reynolds, sipped champagne with Olivia de Havilland and, with both hands, held…

WHAT IS ROMEO? ROMEO stands for Retired Old Men Eating Out. The ROMEO acronym originated in New York, where the first group was called Retired Old Men Eating Out Wednesdays – ROMEOW, which dampens the Shakespearean resonance. It is a growing movement offering camaraderie and the conversation of kindred spirits for the retired or those on the brink of retirement. I discovered ROMEO on a recent trip to Nevis when my brother-in-law (who lives there) invited me along as a guest to his ROMEO group lunch. Sat round the table were a retired dentist from New York, one or two who had been something ‘in finance’, a retired State administrator from California, a still-practising obs-and-gynae doctor and a retired NATO grandee. Conversation ranged from the mundane (local airport expansion) to…

In the cinema, it is hot and the film is boring. Someone a few seats away is yawning. You cannot resist doing the same. At dinner with friends, you cannot hide your tiredness. Each time you yawn, you cover your mouth and mumble, ‘Sorry.’ Why do we yawn at these moments? Yawning is not just deep breathing to give us some fresh air. It has a particular pattern of three phases: a long drawingin of breath, a peak and then a quick exhalation. At the same time, we may or may not stretch our trunk and limbs. Either way, afterwards we feel relaxed and content. Greek physician Hippocrates thought yawning helped clear fever out of our systems in a way similar to how a chimney gets rid of smoke. Only…

One of my oldest friends is Billie Edgson. From 1969, he was the doorman of the Clermont Club and Annabel's, the nightclub beneath the Clermont at 44 Berkeley Square, before 25 years at Mark's Club in Charles Street, followed by his current role at 5 Hertford Street. The Clermont Club was John Aspinall's first casino, which he owned from 1962 to 1972. Among the regulars was Ian Maxwell-Scott, a heavily bespectacled, urbane Old Etonian possessed of three interests: golf, darts and gambling. Having lost his money at the Clermont tables, Ian converted from patron to employee, as right-hand man to John Aspinall, the legendary proprietor and pioneer of gambling in the West End when it was illegal and later, by the late 1950s, legal. Billie well remembers one infamous Clermont…

History In 2019, Alex Morgan, a player for the US women's soccer team, celebrated scoring against England by raising an imaginary cup of tea to her lips, complete with outstretched little finger. Most English viewers took this as a dig at our national drink and our la-di-da ways. More detailed theories abounded. One, put forward on a football website of the sort that exists to analyse everything about the game with the zeal of French philosophers discussing existentialism, was that it was ‘a reference to the Boston Tea Party — a significant event in American history’. The same source placed this in the category of ‘Possible explanations that don't involve making a mockery of English culture’. Up to a point. Describing the Boston Tea Party as a significant event in…

Oldie Man of Letters It was no surprise to read that BUK, a Bermuda-based holding company, had been passed into receivership. The receiving company is called AlixPartners, and they are now selling the holding, which, notoriously, includes the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. The Bermuda-based company was owned by the Barclay brothers, the mysterious twins who bought the titles in 2004 after the collapse of Conrad Black. Conrad Black has his faults. He is a pompous windbag. He was convicted of fraud by a US District Court in Chicago in 2007 and, although two of those charges were overturned, he had to serve his time in two Federal Correctional Institutions in Florida. His protestations of innocence made him seem even more ridiculous than he had done when…

The Doctor's Surgery These days, people – that is to say, politicians – have some difficulty in defining women, though not the same difficulty in recognising them. How long will it be before difficulties attach to the definition of men? How about ‘people with prostates’? I make this as my contribution to intellectual clarity. For most of their lives, men don't think about their prostates, in the same way as no one thinks about their appendix until they get appendicitis. But there comes a time of life when Englishmen's first talk is not of the weather, but of the prostate, with such interesting (and important) questions as ‘How many times do you have to get up at night?’ Cancer of the prostate is a dreaded disease. At least three of…

The late Martin Amis is one of the greatest writers of his generation. He was also one of my relatives. I have known of him all my life. We were quite closely related and yet had no real knowledge of each other at all. He was my second cousin: my mother, Mary, and his mother, Hilary, were first cousins. As the sad news of his death started to filter through, I suddenly felt plunged into my distant past and my myriad early childhood memories. My Great Uncle Len was his Grandpa Len. Hilary Amis was Len and his wife Margery's youngest child. We must have both run around the beautiful Abbey Timbers, in the then very rural Oxfordshire – the large, timber-framed thatched house that Len and Margery had bought…

Hannibal set off with 60,000 infantry, 9,000 cavalry, 37 elephants and a soothsayer called Bogus. Bernard Levin, Hannibal's footsteps She never made the same mistake again. She always made a new mistake instead. Wendy Cope At the age of 32, research says, a woman turns into her mother. Mary Kenny Silver had the rare ability to be at once enthusiastic and relaxed. Obituary of Jonathan Silver, Salford entrepreneur, Daily Telegraph, 1997 You're happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person [in a relationship] happy. Richard Ford What makes us so sure that men and women are basically attracted to each other? We don't know any different, that's all. Kingsley Amis, Take A Girl Like You Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate…

It's interesting what survives from the life of a man such as the writer Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972). ‘Monty’ to his friends, he had an astonishing array of interests and achievements that could have furnished a dozen lives. He's been a good deal written about of late: first, in a superb essay, ‘The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie’, published on the UnHerd website by writer and comedian Andrew Doyle; and more recently in the pages of the special centenary edition of Gramophone, the monthly magazine devoted to records and recording, which Mackenzie founded in 1923. Mackenzie was already a worldrenowned author. His two-volume novel Sinister Street had been lauded by Henry James, been surreptitiously enjoyed by a very young George Orwell, and offered inspiration to Scott Fitzgerald, whose own first novel…

If you were to take a trip to Lichfield this summer – millions of you won't feel the urge – you would see a plaque boasting that, at 84 miles inland, Dr Johnson's birthplace is the furthest town in mainland Britain from the sea. I have never understood why, surrounded by water, we island folk don't want to live slap-bang next to the eternal blue. What's the point of living in Wiltshire? The only possible explanation is that we still have an innate fear of being picked up from the beach and taken into slavery by Barbary corsairs, the fate of so many Devonian families until the navy took control of our shores. In 1740, we were finally able to sing ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’ with some…

Government is difficult. There's so much going on, capacities are limited and the best-laid plans do not always survive contact with reality. Although there are some issues that are no more difficult to get right than to get wrong, getting them wrong is what the Government sometimes seems bent on. Sales of new ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles are to be banned from 2030, with hybrids banned from 2035. The year 2030 is an arbitrary date, chosen to show we're more virtuous than the EU, which will ban ICEs from 2035. I bet it ain't gonna happen – not by 2030 nor by any time soon after. Four reasons. First, synthetic fuels work and are with us now, contributing radically less to global warming than petrol and diesel. In bio-form,…

The Canada goose (Branta canadensis) is the largest of our geese. Ganders weigh up to 14lb. They're also the most sedentary – and therefore domesticated – of our geese. They were first introduced from north America in the 17th century, when Canada was not yet designated. They were imported as an exotic addition to Charles II's new lake for ornamental water birds in St James's Park. The 18th century saw them decorate the landscaped lakes of country seats, and the 19th century the parks of industrialised cities. It was only in the 20th century that a long-established feral population earned this goose the status of a British bird. By 1953, the most generous estimate was 3,600, since when numbers have burgeoned. In the 1960s, birds were collected during the flightless…

Taking a Walk My walk around east Jersey was governed by sparrow time. On a gloriously fresh, early summer morning, the whole island seemed to run on it. Time was stilled by the desultory, monosyllabic chirp of plump brown birds in the shrubbery. ‘Time?’ they seemed to say. ‘What's that?’ ‘Calm.’ ‘Down.’ I set out from Gorey Pier, an achingly pretty row of old stone houses built mostly during the 19th-century oyster boom when 250 boats brought back 12,000 oysters on every trip, soon exhausting the wealth in the shallow turquoise seas just off the coast. Above them loomed the hulking medieval castle of Mont Orgueil, once the seat of power in Jersey, built on the closest outcrop to France. Small boats slumped in the low-tide harbour, beyond which was…

Across 1 Sounds horn (5) 4 Cereal crop (5) 8 Objective (3) 9 Data, gen (11) 10 Spend money extravagantly (4,3) 12 Characteristic (5) 13 Pardon, forgive (6) 14 Deviated, diverse (6) 17 Conflagration (5) 19 Profaneness (7) 21 Vision, resourcefulness (11) 23 Form of matter (3) 24 Admission, ingress (5) 25 Fencing swords (5) Down 1 Hearing; tribulation (5) 2 Cancelled; turned (of food) (3) 3 Grave, important (7) 4 Ghost (6) 5 Throw out of accommodation (5) 6 Provisional, speculative (9) 7 Took as your own, fostered (7) 11 Mix well at parties (9) 13 Trade barrier (7) 15 Conciliate, assuage (7) 16 Dismissively (6) 18 Precise (5) 20 Donkey's years! (5) 22 Form of water (3) Genius 426 solution Winner: Erika Fairhead, Aberdeen Runners-up: Dr Stephen Clarkson,…

Ask Virginia The incredible sulk Q Recently you seemed to support a partner's destructive behaviour towards their other half – sulking. He asked why she couldn't just shout and get it over with, like him. Sulking – a refusal to talk or have eye contact – can be classified as abuse. This couple urgently need to seek counselling. What a terrible example to set to young children, who can find this behaviour most frightening. Jeremy D, Edinburgh A I quite agree. But children can find shouting very frightening as well. Also, some people find anger almost impossible to express and a couple of days of withdrawal is their only method of retaliation. My correspondent wasn't writing of weeks of silence – obviously extreme sulking is as bad as extreme violent…

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF EUROPE Bodley Head, 384pp, £20 ‘As Europe's “old normal” of state-onstate thuggery comes back,’ wrote Boyd Tonkin in the Financial Times. ‘Homelands looks through the prisms of personal memory, shared history and political analysis to measure the continent's progress in its post-war decades of hope, and to ask how much endures. Bright nuggets of autobiography – whether Garton Ash's father's memories of the D-Day landings, or his own adventures in insurgent Poland and on the scorched earth of former Yugoslavia – illuminate a broad-brush chronology. This “history illustrated by memoir” journeys via bold strokes and pivotal scenes from the “Destroyed” continent of 1945 across its “Divided”, “Rising”, “Triumphing”, and now “Faltering”, periods… Readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide. Over 40 years, Garton Ash has…

HOW BRITAIN PREPARED FOR NUCLEAR WAR Bodley Head, 256pp, £22 ‘Oh, we will all fry together when we fry/We'll be French fried potatoes by and by ….’ So sang Tom Lehrer at a time when the Cold War had begun to hot up. His fatalism echoed edgy jokes about clap before antibiotics. But the Government had to keep a straight face, even though they must have known that gallows humour was a legitimate response to the apocalyptic consequences of nuclear fall-out. As Julie McDowall emphasises, in what the Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley calls her ‘cracking book on civil defence during the Cold War’, the ‘only defence against nuclear blast was avoidance of nuclear war.’ Stanley invokes Dad's Army when describing how amateurish our early warning system was. He recounts how a…

AFGHANISTAN AFTER THE AMERICANS LEFT Yale, 256pp, £16.99 Oliver-James Campbell in the TLS felt that Abbas had successfully challenged the persistent version of recent Afghan history: [He] demonstrates that the received narrative – that the [Taliban] takeover was abrupt, opportunistic and a capitalisation on the withdrawal of US troops – is wrong. ‘By detailing secret US-Taliban negotiations from 2018 onwards, he reveals a gross negligence and lack of consideration for ordinary Afghans who are now susceptible to the whims of the Taliban. More heinous is the way Afghanistan's President Ghani and his government were excluded from all peace negotiations.’ Isambard Wilkinson in the Times said this book was being ‘sold as the first account of the “new Taliban” ruling the country. Hassan Abbas is a veteran observer of the region…

A WOMAN'S LIFE ON THE ROAD Abacus, 368pp, £22 ‘Glowing Still is a thoughtful and entertaining meditation on identity, geography and the position of the self in the world,’ Viv Groskop wrote in the Spectator, a ‘magnificent and unusual book’. ‘Some of the “travel” here is not a journey to a place but instead through her memories …. She turns herself into an expert revisionist guide, reframing voyages from the Antarctic to Paris and from Bangladesh to Russia through the lens of an increasingly uncertain and contradictory 21st-century world. She does this with humour, pathos and genuine curiosity about herself and her work’. Ian Sansom in the Telegraph regretted that Wheeler has always preferred to travel alone, but decided the book ‘is the next best thing to hopping on board…

BARNES WALLIS: AN ENGINEER'S LIFE Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 520pp, £28 Boffins, as they used to be called, helped us win the last war. Think of Alan Turing, who broke the Enigma code, or Professor R.V. Jones, the Air Defence wizard. But for those of us for whom the Dam Busters’ March is as evocative as Proust's madeleine, the palm must go to Sir Barnes Wallace, inventor of ‘Upkeep’. the bouncing bomb. Little did we know that Upkeep was initially dismissed as ‘tripe’ by Bomber Command's curt supremo, Sir Arthur Harris. This is one of the many fascinating details to emerge from Richard Morris's biography. In the words of the historian James Holland, author of an acclaimed account of the famous dam buster raid itself, ‘Morris skilfully picks through the myths, the legend,…

Faber, 272pp, £25 Now approaching 90, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn is still working but is also one of the last survivors of a mid-20th century world of letters now almost completely vanished. His recent collection of short essays, becomes, mused Tim Adams in the Guardian, ‘a thoughtful and often moving portrait of a disappearing world in which a generous kind of bookish rigour and worldly wit created fleeting incandescence at the heart of British cultural life.’ In the Telegraph, Ian Sansom tried to pin Frayn down. ‘The thinking man's Alan Bennett? A less cleverdick Tom Stoppard? Ayckbourn without quite so many laughs? Intelligent without insisting on his intelligence, witty without too much trying-to-please, ingenious yet sedulous, Michael Frayn is the ideal of the old-fashioned man of letters.’ Sansom…

(Allen Lane, 496pp, £30) ‘It is not too much of a stretch to see Martin Wolf, the FT‘s chief economic commentator, as a modern Marx,” wrote Bill Emmott in (where else?) the FT. ‘He, too, is an economist forever looking for the bigger political and social picture, as well as for the crises that may shape it. But unlike Marx, he does so without relish. And in his fine new book […] his principal concern is with democracy rather than capitalism.’ This gloomy new book – which draws a line between the 2008 crash and culmination of Trump>s “pluto-populism”,’ in the January 6th Capitol riots – identifies a ‘doom loop’ that threatens the future of both. ‘Adam Smith warned two centuries ago of “the tendency of the powerful to rig…

TLS Books, 112pp, £9.99 Two years ago, David Baddiel published an angry polemic, Jews Don't Count, which set out to demonstrate ‘how identity politics failed one particular identity’, Matthew Reisz reminded us in the Observer. ‘The God Desire presents itself as a similarly rigorous statement of the case for atheism.’ Its central thesis is that, to conquer our fear of death, we need to believe in God. Rabbi Howard Cooper described in the Jewish Chronicle how it is in the face of Baddiel's ‘terror at the thought of annihilation’ that his God Desire kicks in. ‘The desire for this kind of utilitarian God — “a superhero dad who chases off death” — is a desire that he believes exists “within the deep recesses of most humans”.’ Baddiel, Cooper believes, ‘is…

Oneworld, 304pp, £16,99 Alice Robb had always been obsessed with ballet. And on her third attempt at the age of nine she won a place at the School of American Ballet, feeder school for New York City Ballet. Aged 11, she wrote in her diary: ‘It is my dream to become a ballerina. I love ballet.’ However, her dream ‘of turning professional unravelled when she reached puberty’, explained Fiona Stages in the Guardian. ‘Her hips widened, she grew tall and her teachers began to ignore her in class. She started bunking off lessons and, in 2004, was finally expelled. Robb subsequently finished high school, went to college and embarked on a successful career as a science writer and journalist. But, she notes: “I couldn't unlearn the values of ballet.’” ‘Don't…

Cleo Watson (p18) was Boris Johnson's Deputy Chief of Staff. She worked on Barack Obama's 2012 election campaign, and on the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections. She is author of hips. Nick Newman (p30) works for Private Eye and does cartoons for the Sunday Times. With Ian Hislop, he co-wrote the comedy film A Bunch of Amateurs (2008), starring Burt Reynolds. Algy Cluff (p34) struck oil in the North Sea over 50 years ago. He owned the Spectator magazine. Tom Stoppard came up with the title of his new memoir, The Importance of Being Algy. Elinor Goodman (p57) was political editor of Channel 4 News from 1988 to 2005. She was one of the panel members on the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking.…

Grumpy Oldie Man For an institution widely believed to be on life support, the health service shows signs of vibrant health when it comes to inclusivity. Take me, as the late Max Miller might have put it. Seldom does a month pass without the NHS – ‘our NHS’, technically, if only to Tory politicians with lavish private health insurance – graciously including me in one way or another. Over the last couple of years, I have been such a regular at the Royal Free Hospital in north London that I anticipate the arrival of a loyalty card, entitling the bearer to free vinyl gloves and a two-for-one colonoscopy deal, any day. In succession to impertinent inspections of the testes, kidneys and oesophagus, the latest act of inclusion concerns the heart.…

Mary Kitten's Beauty Tips In 1997, newly elected Tony Blair declared that he aimed to deliver a university education to over 50 per cent of schoolleavers. He didn't want anyone to feel they had to ‘settle for being a hairdresser’. ‘What on earth is wrong with being a hairdresser!?’ raged my intellectual friend Anne. ‘Hairdressers can double as psychotherapists and it can be an incredibly well-paid job.’ I think of her words each time I visit my own good-vibes-emitting local hairdresser Serena. I reflect on her trajectory from unmotivated teenager who left school at 16 to prosperous salon-owner by the age of 30. Serena was amazed when her mo ther told her, the day after school ended, that she couldn't just sit around at home and she needed to get…

Town Mouse This year, it's a summer in the city for Mrs Mouse and me. No foreign holidays. No fretting about suitcases being overweight. No early starts. No shuffling through Stansted Airport like condemned pigs. No shovelling out untold piles of cash on swordfish steaks, questionable pizzas and strange beer. No lining up outside the Uffizi. No embarrassed pointing at things in charming delis as the only Italian I know is ‘Due birre, perfavore.’ No boredom on beaches. There's a clue in the name. The word ‘travel’ is derived from the Latin trepalium, meaning ‘a three-pronged instrument of torture’. In French, travail means pain, suffering or work. Instead we'll be holidaying at home, in Shepherd's Bush. It'll be great. We're near the Thames. We'll visit Hyde Park and Soho and…

Sophia Waugh: School Days We are in the middle of exam season and, you might think, towards the end of revision season. I was a staggeringly idle student in every subject except for English, but then doing what I love (reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles) never really felt like work to me. It still doesn't — hence my late return to university to work for a PhD. I have soppy memories of lying on the lawn revising in the sun while my pet goose grazed around me. But I can't tell the students that — ‘lawn’ and ‘pet goose’ both sound a little showy-offy. Even I, lazy as I remember myself to be, am taken aback by the lax attitude to revising that many of my students have. I have…

Curiosity, most of the time, consists in taking an intelligent interest in what is going on around us. But if carried to excess, it can become bad manners and insensitivity, both of which almost inevitably tip over into sinfulness. ‘Custody of the eyes’ is something that was and still is taught to a Carmelite novice. Its purpose is to ensure that at all times she is concentrating on God: not necessarily having high-flown thoughts on theology while looking at a blank wall, but ensuring she is not dispersing her energies by nosily looking around at what other people are up to. This in turn carries with it the highly likely consequence of uncharitable criticism. Even if it is not voiced aloud, it is hardly constructive. When I first arrived at…

Postcards from the Edge Who's afraid of artificial intelligence (AI)? It seems that everyone is, and sometimes with reason – even its inventors have been panic-stricken about the robots’ threats to humanity. It's predicted that AI will wipe out jobs by the tens of thousands, from accountancy to the waiters’ and waitresses’ trade. In Korea, you may now be served at table by a robot – which children love. Journalism too will come under pressure from the AI takeover: I have been told by an editorial pal that a robot may be instructed to ‘write a column in the style of Mary Kenny’. I take this as a compliment. Robots dominating our civilisation doesn't seem an inviting prospect. Even Alexa, Amazon's disembodied voice box that answers questions, encouraging mental laziness,…

Please, I am begging the men in my life, don't come charging to my rescue! Although I have lived on my own and coped reasonably well for over 30 years, I am still seen by male friends and family as a damsel in distress or, more likely, given my age, as a dowager in distress, even when i am not remotely in distress. The ‘damsel in distress’ syndrome, which forms the basis of every romantic novel and many fairy stories, happens when a man, a supposed knight in shining armour, leaps to aid the woman in trouble. To put this into a presentday context, every time I mention to a male visitor that I have a computer, printer or electrical glitch, he offers to fix it for me. He seems…

It's been reported that 800,000 have switched off – fleeing perhaps from fearful news of cyber-crime, disinformation, strikes, transphobia, witchcraft, abuse of all kinds … or from a certain presenter's gabbling voice. Libby Purves says listeners have always been infuriated by Today presenters, including her. ‘Contumely goes with the job,’ as she put it. Contumely! Hamlet's word. Radio 4 assumes a Shakespearean hinterland: so Michael Gove could quote (re Boris shenanigans) Marc Antony's ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’ ‘I used to want a bomb to go off under Radio 4 – it felt so stale,’ wrote the Observer‘s Miranda Sawyer, apologising for having dared to single out three Radio 4 items in one week. Every new generation of radio…

I can't think why King Charles chose, as the principal ingredient of his Coronation Quiche, a vegetable that was not in season in the fi rst week of May. As every gardener, including the King, knows, the season for broad beans begins in mid- June. So the broad beans for this unexciting quiche would have been frozen or imported, and should not have been approved by our organic monarch unless, which is unlikely, they had been organically grown. My broad beans are a bit late this year owing to the cold winter. I planted them outside, as usual, at the end of February, but they did not appear above ground for a month, and were not fl owering until midMay. However, we were picking the fi rst little beauties during…

The recent Oldie trip to Bordeaux featured many memorable ingredients. These ranged from the grandeur of the rooms, terrace and gardens at our home for the week, Château Beychevelle, to the draught horses in the stables at Château Pontet-Canet, and the Chanel-chic décor at Château Canon. Admittedly, there was the little matter of the bistro in Margaux that had lost our lunch reservation. Chef looked in a barren fridge and off ered us merguez sausages and pasta, a dubious fusion of Maghrebi and Italian cuisine. But he was, eventually, persuaded to rustle up steak frites for 16, and the day was saved. What struck me most about all the wineries we visited was the extraordinary level of investment. Beychevelle, owned by drinks giants Suntory and Castel, and Château Kirwan, owned…

We've had some good thunderstorms round here recently. In one of them, my internet connection was struck by lightning. Late one Friday evening, our internet stopped working. I assumed it was temporary, and expected it to be better in the morning, but it wasn't. So I called BT. The recorded message sympathetically advised me to report the problem online, which is a bit like asking someone with a broken-down car to drive to the garage. My mobile phone still worked. So I filled in the online form and, to my happy surprise, within 20 minutes a cheerful chap in Wales called me. He told me, among other things, that the weather was lovely there. He explained that there had been a rash of similar problems in my area, because of…

Is there somethingyou really miss when you're away? For the last 38 years, I would say my wife [Joan Washington, who died in 2021, aged 74]. Do you travel light? My luggage got lost flying to New York 22 years ago, and I swore I would never ever travel with luggage again. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Mozambique, one hundred miles from Mbabane where I grew up. We went to the beach there almost every other Sunday and ate two dozen prawns for lunch. What was Swaziland (now Eswatini) like when you were growing up? Sub-equatorial Ealing… It was a kind of homogenously sealed goldfish bowl of a very strict pecking order, according to where you were in the colonial hierarchy. And that was pre-independence, which I remember…

Should you make Four Hearts on best play and defence? Dealer South Neither Vulnerable (1) A Two Diamond overcall would be unsound, short of high-card values. (2) A Two Club overcall would be unsound, short of suit quality, shape and tricks. (3) Upgrading because of the useful holdings in partner's Clubs and Hearts – plus Ace and doubleton in partner's other suits. West leads her singleton club, East winning the king and presumably playing ace and another club – the eight as a suit-preference signal for spades (over diamonds). West ruffs and duly switches to a spade to dummy's ace. What should declarer do? Alfie, our first declarer, led a diamond to the queen – no good when the finesse lost to West's king. Bertie saw an improvement. He led…

In March this year, Granta announced its Class of 23 Best of British Young Novelists list. First published in 1983 – and every ten years since – the list for this decade has been deemed less ‘sexy’ than the original, which featured Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Rose Tremain and, of course, Martin Amis, whose death on 19th May sent a seismic shock through the literary world. Martin's publisher Dan Franklin writes a personal tribute to him on page 15, to join the outpouring of words following the news that he had died. It is perhaps worth reflecting that Amis was luckier than today's listed authors in that he inhabited a world in which the notions of wokeness and AI were unknown. Today's authors, as the Critic magazine pointed out, ‘will…

ENGLAND, MUGHAL INDIA AND THE ORIGINS OF EMPIRE Bloomsbury, 480pp, £30 In 1614, Sir Thomas Roe led the first English embassy to the Indian subcontinent, but his meeting with the Mughal Emperor Jahangir was initially deemed a failure. ‘For Das the Roe mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power – and initial powerlessness – in India,’ wrote William Dalrymple in the Financial Times. ‘For at the time, as Das shows, England was a place of little consequence, least of all to the mighty Mughals… Born in Bengal, Das is now a professor of early modern English literature at Oxford and is as sure-footed and knowledgeable about the…

SEX, SPYING AND SURVEILLANCE IN THE THIRD REICH John Blake, 320pp, £22 When the Nazis came to power, the backlash against ‘moral laxity’ was swift. Yet, perversely, the high-end brothel of the notorious madam Kitty Schmidt was repurposed by the SS to spy on senior Nazi officials and other unwary customers. A listening-post was set up to eavesdrop on the pillow talk picked up from microphones in the bedrooms. As Daniel Brooks described it in the Telegraph, it is ‘a tale of sex and surveillance … murky and salacious’. Brooks recalled the film treatment of Salon Kitty, a 1976 soft porn romp. ‘The book offers a more factual, if harrowing account,’ even if in ‘the course of seeking out the truth a lot of dirty laundry gets aired.’ A paucity…

THREE STORIES OF DECEPTION AND SURVIVAL Atlantic Books, 320pp, £20 What do Himmler's Estonian-Dutch masseur, a non-binary Manchu princess, and a Jewish economist from Lviv have in common? They are ‘self-invented figures’ who became collaborators during WWII and the subjects of Buruma's ‘richly enjoyable, vital and astute book’, as Richard Davenport-Hines put it in the Literary Review. ‘Each of this trio had childhoods dislocated by war, which left them with confused nationalities, divided loyalties, fallen status and idealised memories of lost paradises. Buruma sees them as exemplary figures for the 2020s: avid, idealistic thrillseeking, improvisational, lusting for status and with an overmastering need to be valued at their own high estimation.’ They are connected by ‘their outsize, self-delusional fabulism,’ wrote Lesley M. M. Blume in her New York Times review,…

(Coronet, 256pp, £18.99) Mother and daughter actors Diane Ladd and Laura Dern (above) have produced a joint account of two generations of life in Hollywood. They based it on the conversations they had while on the walks that doctors had prescribed for Ladd's health. The result is, said Helen Brown in the Telegraph, ‘brutal.’ This is the ‘best, truest, most shockingly entertaining Hollywood memoir I've ever read. It is also one of the most loving.’ Dern, 56, is the daughter of actor Bruce Dern, who met Ladd when the pair appeared in a 1961 production of Orpheus Descending, by Ladd's cousin, Tennessee Williams. ‘Most Hollywood autobiographies,’ wrote Brown, ‘are stuffed with therapyendorsed self-exculpation. So its gripping to hear these two Tinseltown titans, Oscar-winning (Dern) and -nominated (Ladd) respectively, holding each…

GEORGE ELIOT'S DOUBLE LIFE Allen Lane, 372pp, £25 Declared a genius by her literary critics and a pariah by society for living for 25 years with George Lewes, a man not divorced from his wife, Eliot considered herself ‘married’, though not in the conventional sense. Jane O'Grady in the TLS described the book as ‘fascinating and scholarly’ and Marina Benjamin in Prospect as ‘a richly textured and absorbing biographical study’. Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph felt ‘it doesn't add any facts or documents to existing accounts.’ Kathy O’ Shaughnessy in the Financial Times disagreed, calling it ‘a splendid addition to the Eliot biographical canon.’ ‘Carlisle's magisterial book has many facets to it: biographical, philosophical, literary,’ she continued. ‘Carlisle takes the reader into fascinating territory with the doubleness of Eliot's life.…

BREAKING FREE William Collins, 416pp, £20 Imagine your parents taking you out of school to sail the oceans of the world. Sounds blissful? Reviewers of Suzanne Heywood's memoir found it a useful corrective to any mistaken dreams of freedom on the high seas. Heywood's father Gordon took his wife and two small children off to sea in a schooner 1976 and they didn't return for a decade. ‘I can't think of a better education that sailing around the world,’ he told them. His daughter has a different story. In the Times, Hadley Freeman observed that the book describes ‘an unforgettable kind of parental negligence.’ Freeman thought that Heywood's accounts of her parents’ monstrousness were somewhat one-sided, ‘like reading a teenager's diary’ but in the Daily Mail, Ysenda Maxtone Graham listed…

Carcanet, 396pp, £25 People don't use the term ‘causerie’ much these days, but it sums up NB, the pithy miscellany that in 1997 first appeared on the back page of the TLS, and soon became the item that very many of its subscribers turned to first. For more than 20 years, it was written by James Campbell, alias “JC”, a TLS staffer who enjoyed ‘going against the grain’, like Private Eye. Cant, of which there is, alas, no shortage in the modern literary world, really ripped his knitting. But he also enjoyed grappling with such grammatical enigmas as ‘the potential of “whom” to ignite class war; the invasion of the impertinent preposition; the anxiety-provoking apostrophe’, and so on. Vexatious columns: the TLS with the gloves off In the Literary Review,…

Granta, 320pp, £16.99 Julian Baggini, the non-academic journalist-philosopher, has produced a book reviewers found ‘lively’ and ‘engaging’, offering both a guide to the basics of philosophical thinking and a portrait of its practitioners, many of whom Baggini has interviewed for the Philosophers’ Magazine. In the Literary Review, Alexander Raubo usefully stripped the book down to its component parts: a chapter each on deductive and inductive logic and philosophy of language, then consideration of the qualities required in a philosopher, especially their attitude, knowing what to pay attention to and always being ready to ask questions and not assume one is right. Raubo enjoyed Baggini's more contentious opinions, especially about fellow philosophers: scholastic theologians seemed to be a bugbear, along with those who would turn the discipline into a branch of…

In 1962, an international writers’ conference, attended by a pride of literary lions and lionesses, was held at the Edinburgh Festival. One of the last to speak was Simon Raven, who caused a mild sensation by saying he wrote primarily for money. He felt the other speakers, who included Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy and Stephen Spender, had been too coy on the subject. Raven had a point, I once asked Eric Ambler what he and Ian Fleming used to talk about when they lunched together. ‘Royalties,’ he relied. Dr Johnson would have applauded. ‘No one but a blockhead wrote, except for money’, he famously declared (though even he sometimes wrote on spec). So does that mean the literary world is full of blockheads? – because it now seems…

‘Alcoholic dog’ is taken in by shelter I Car stopped for ‘illegal’ window tints Oxford Times No more deaths recorded in Monmouthshire Abergavenny Chronicle £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The August issue is on sale on 26th July 2023. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

WHAT WERE Teddy Boys? Seventy years ago, Britain seemed under threat from menacing young men who favoured exaggerated frock coats and drainpipe trousers. Savile Row devised the ‘Edwardian’ suits for their wealthy clientele in 1950, and working-class youths across Britain quickly adopted this look. A Daily Express article of 23rd September 1953 shortened the term and created the phrase Teddy Boy. Jeff Nuttall wrote in Bomb Culture that Teddy Boys were ‘waiting for Elvis Presley’. Popular mythology associates them with frenzied bouts of cinema-seatslashing to the strains of Jailhouse Rock, but the first Teds jived to Ken Mackintosh's The Creep at their local Palais. The 1953 proto-Teddy Boy drama Cosh Boy, the first of a succession of cinematic Brylcreemed menaces, recommended thrashing to cure juvenile delinquency. In the following year,…

Robbie Williams, 49, the rock god voted the sexiest man in the world by Cosmopolitan in 1999, recently announced he was eschewing marital sex. Thousands of oldies rolled their eyes at the banality of the news. Tell us something we don't know. Thousands of married oldies have not had sex together for well over a year – though they would baulk at admitting they had given it up for good. Robbie insists he adores Ayda, his wife of 13 years, and has no plans to leave her. He is just reverting to the norm of the many oldies who have long since yielded to a sexless but functioning companionship. Those who have been in a relationship in which the sex fades out – often because of starting a family –…

My cousin Alan Coren would have been 85 on 27th June. The former editor of Punch and the Listener, regular panellist on The News Quiz, team captain on Call My Bluff, columnist and author was one of the most gifted and loved humorists of postwar Britain. When he became editor of Punch, then a bastion of English satire, he was profiled by the Jewish Chronicle. He allegedly waved around a copy of the paper and said, ‘This is ridiculous I haven't been Jewish for years.’ He was, of course. I should know because my late parents were at his bar mitzvah. My father, Phil, was Alan's cousin. Only a second cousin – not especially close – and Dad was 15 years older than Alan. But he was part of the…

L aughter's a funny thing. Who hasn't had to stifle a giggle at a funeral – and stared blankly at a legendary comedian like Charlie Chaplin? When Spike Milligan was being shelled at Monte Cassino in 1944, he saw a sign written in chalk on a stone with an arrow pointing to ‘World War II – this way’. The bleakest of situations can be defused with the blackest of jokes. As Mark Twain noted, ‘The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.’ To understand why we laugh and what we laugh at, I recently took part in an experiment at London's Cartoon Museum. The Laughter Lab research project was conducted by Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University. His experiment asked visitors to choose…

Country Mouse It is good practice for all growers to observe crop rotation — it is the cornerstone of organic gardening. But with my patch being the size of a London-square garden, it makes sense to break new ground when I'm planting potatoes. Potatoes love fresh soil, especially where tall flowering nettles have graciously enriched it with their peaty roots. I was pleased to read that the variety I favour, the Red Duke of York, was also recommended by the great organic gardener Lawrence D Hills, founder of the Henry Doubleday Research Association. During the site preparation, a strange, inanimate artefact literally flew out of the ground, as though in a hurry to be reunited with a living soul. Or so I fancied as a student of Carl Jung's acausal…

•The saddest-ever unclaimed item at Dublin Airport's lost-property office was a tombstone bearingthe words ‘You will always be remembered, never forgotten.’ •There are over 41,700 airports in the world, almost one-third of them in the USA. • Passengers at Hong Kong international Airport can de-stress at the nine-hole golf course next to Terminal 2. • King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, takes up 192,000 acres — more than the entire country of Bahrain. •The world's shortest commercial airport runway is on the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba. It's only 15,744 inches long. • The world's oldest airport is College Park, Maryland, founded by Wilbur Wright in 1909. • The world's prettiest airport is said to be Compton Abbas airfield in Dorset, now owned by film director Guy Ritchie. In 1993,…

Sophie Ziegler led the tributes to her father, Philip Ziegler, biographer of Edward VIII, Lord Mountbatten and Edward Heath, at Christ Church, Kensington. She said, ‘You don't leave Oxford with a First, win the Chancellor's Prize, enter the Foreign Office, write 21 books, complete the Times crossword every day and become editor-in-chief of one of the largest publishing houses in England without having a fairly extraordinary brain. ‘As a child, I remember him writing in the morning before he went to work, then getting back from Collins at night, settling down to continue from where he left off for a couple more hours, before he came down to supper. His focus was such that we could weave in and out of his feet in the kneehole of his desk, playing…

One Last Thing: How to Live with the End in Mind By Wendy Mitchell Bloomsbury £16.99 In July 2014, when she was a 56-year-old NHS administrator, Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with young-onset vascular dementia and Alzheimer's. Since then, she has written two bestselling books about adapting to her ghastly disease, Someone I Used to Know and What I Wish People Knew About Dementia: From Someone Who Knows. Know, knew, knows… Wendy (we are on first-name terms) is a fountain of knowledge about what it is like to live with dementia, and she is also someone we feel we know. I know, for example, that when she walks along the River Ouse in her home town of York, she follows the flow of the water (the other direction would be too…

Be Mine By Richard Ford Bloomsbury £18.99 ‘When you're young, your opponent is the future. But when you're not young, your opponent's the past.’ Frank Bascombe came up with that fretful axiom in Independence Day (1995), the second of Richard Ford's novels featuring Frank as narrator and, perhaps, alter ego. Middle-aged and thus with no opponent to speak of, back then Frank imagined that when he reached his seventies, he'd be in diapers. In Be Mine, he's made it to his dotage and the glad tidings are that he's still got everything under control down there. He even boasts of functionality in ‘the erectile department’ – a Vietnamese masseuse called Betty can attest that he is capable of what he calls ‘a frank tumescence’ (a Frank tumescence?) although, the old…

This summer, His newly crowned Majesty returns for his hols to Transylvania and the rural Saxon lifestyle he admires. I first paid a visit to the region in 1985, four years before the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator, while researching European Peasant Cookery. On the way through Bucharest, I'd acquired an introduction to the Lutheran Bishop of Sibiu – aka Hermannstadt. This is the German-speaking capital of the Siebendörfer, seven villages full of hard-working, upright Protestants who'd been ploughing the fields and keeping themselves to themselves since the 12th century. The bishop was away on business, but his wife, Frau Klein, volunteered to collect recipes for me on her weekly round of the parish. ‘We like to eat soup. Lettuce soup with eggs and cream. Cabbage soup with…

By the time the first drive is struck at this year's Open in Hoylake, golf will be under new ownership. The Saudis have bought out the game. Lock, stock and pitching wedge. The moment a barrow laden with the Saudi Public Investment Fund's cash was wheeled into negotiations, the existing organising bodies crumbled, dispensing with things like heritage, history and tradition in the blink of an eye. Forget talk of partnership or amalgamation. This is a takeover. This is not the last of it. Saudi Arabia is on an unabashed sporting campaign: not to win things, or to top medal tables – but to own sport. All sport. Golf, football, boxing, tennis, Formula One: their shopping list is comprehensive. They want the lot. For many an observer in the West,…

Thousands of Fulham FC fans revere the club's ground, Craven Cottage, on the bank of the Thames. But how many of us know about the original Craven Cottage, the grand yet minuscule dwelling in five acres? The cottage was set in woods used tor hunting by Anne Boleyn. It was built in 1780 for a Lady Craven (1750-1828), later the Margravine of BrandenburgAnsbach-Bayreuth. She was notorious for her love affairs; she also gave her husband, the Margrave, six children by way of proof of their union. Lady Craven was a dramatist, a composer of musical farces and the authoress of pantomimes and such works as Modern Anecdotes of the family of Kinvervankotsprakengatchder: a Tale for Christmas. From 1785 to 1786, she travelled through Central Europe to Saint Petersburg, Moscow and…

IN COMPETITION No 294 you were invited to write a poem called Artificial Intelligence, with enough evidence to show its author was a robot. J M Olsen took the clever step of asking ChatGPT to write the poem. It produced something that made a sort of sense: ‘In circuits humming, dreams take flight, /Virtual beings, forged in luminescent light.’ But it totalled 20 lines. Can't computers count? Commiserations to her and to Judith Green, Graham Rumney, Bill Holloway, Sue May, Stefan Badham, Ted Lane, Jeremy Conway and Jonathan Lovett, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom win £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Richard Spencer. The stroll was long, but not unduly strenuous. Such Cumbrian meanderings perpetuated My predilection to remain companionless: A…

1898 TO THE PRESENT Allen Lane, 400pp, £30 Sarah Watling, whose own feminist history of the Spanish Civil War was published recently, reviewed this for the Spectator, describing it as ‘a chronicle of ineffectiveness and corruption at the highest levels, and of failures to implement reform. Townson, an academic at Complutense University of Madrid, ‘offers a detailed survey of political, economic and social history, illuminating many of the trends, tensions and power players that have influenced the course of Spain's modern era. A chronicle of corruption at the highest levels The Catholic Church, Catalan and Basque nationalism, a legacy of clientelism, an endlessly fractured left and frequently embattled middle ground, and the peaks and troughs of working-class activism all receive space.’ Although he ‘sacrifices some of the pleasures of narrative…

EAST GERMANY, 1949-1990 Allen Lane, 496pp, £25 Beyond the Wall ‘aims to show that real people lived real lives in a Germany that for forty years was utterly distinct from its neighbour to the west – and that this other Germany offered “opportunity and belonging as well as oppression and brutality”,’ wrote Karen Leeder in the TLS. The book is ‘fast-paced, vivid and engaging.’ Hoyer, who was born in the GDR, ‘covers the large political history with economy and confidence, ranging from geopolitical tensions to the personal shortcomings of the GDR leadership. Her history is humanised by the many smaller stories of ordinary individuals whose lives are told through snippets of memoirs, archive documents and interviews… Cumulatively they give a rich insight into a vanished country from the bottom up.’…

FIGHTING FOR A NEW WORLD Allen Lane, 896pp, £35 Cambridge's Regius Professor of HIstory turns his attention in his latest book to what he calls ‘the only truly European revolution there has ever been’: the upheavals of 1848-9 in which, as Dominic Sandbrook put it in the Sunday Times, ‘a tide of protest swept from the streets of Paris to Denmark, Naples, the patchwork of German states, even Moldavia and Wallachia’. The 1848 revolutions occupy a strange place in European historiography,’ said the Guardian‘s Kenan Malik. ‘Most historians acknowledge their significance as a Europe-wide set of uprisings. Yet they remain largely a submerged presence in European consciousness, viewed not so much as Radowitz's ‘turning point’ but ‘the turning point at which modern history failed to turn’, in GM Trevelyan's pithy…

A LIFE IN POETRY Faber, 320pp, £20 Former poet laureate and literary elder Andrew Motion's new memoir received a thorough pasting from young Turk James Marriott in the Times. Sleeping on Islands, he wrote, might ‘usefully be described as a meditation on the futility of being Andrew Motion.’ Like Motion's poetry, he continued, his prose ‘aims at a Wordsworthian solemnity and plainness. The still surface is presumably intended to be suggestive of subaqueous profundities and dramas. But all too often the reader feels he has been confronted with a millpond of a man. The author's character presents a turbid and unruffled blank.’ Ouch. David Wheatley, reviewing the book in the Literary Review was more generous, though he noted the ‘committee-pleasing tone’ that creeps into Motion's accounts of a life spent…

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF KARL LAGERFELD Ebury Press, 470pp, £25 The fashion designer who revived Chanel and was the creative director of two other major brands, Fendi and Lagerfeld, also led a mysterious personal life. Indeed, his one serious relationship was with Jacques de Bascher, who died from Aids in 1989. ‘Was his and de Bascher's relationship really celibate, as Lagerfeld claimed?’ asked Hadley Freeman in her review for the Sunday Times. ‘And was he sleeping with the beautiful young men he collected in his later years?’ Freeman acknowledged that this is ‘a deeply researched book, written by someone with a fondness for Lagerfeld, and although I came away from it not knowing the designer as well as I would have liked, I did end up liking him more than…

Atlantic, 624pp, £25 ‘If the reign of Bad King Boris looked dreadful from the outside, it was even more diabolical viewed from the inside,’ said the Observer‘s Andrew Rawnsley after reading what he called ‘an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam’ in Boris Johnson's Downing Street. Daniel Finkelstein, writing in the Times, agreed: ‘Even those already pretty sceptical about Johnson will find this book eye opening. Johnson was incapable of taking a decision, failed to read his papers, often ignored the detail and would tell whoever was with him whatever they wanted to hear’. He also had bad points. Gaby Hinsliff, in the Guardian, found room to enter a note of regret that the authors’ high-mindedness – they are more interested in failures of policymaking than gossip…

Current affairs Allen Lane, 352pp, £25 Michio Kaku is a Japanese-American professor of theoretical physics who has made his name outside the academy writing friendly gee-wow explainers about black holes, time travel, space exploration and other staples of science-fiction speculation. His latest book addresses quantum computing, which Kaku says has the potential to revolutionise human life even more profoundly than the first digital revolution or the invention of the printing press. They have such vast potential, Kaku explains, because instead of calculating with ‘bits’ -- the binary states of a transistor, either noughts or one --they use “‘qubits’, the infinite number of states of an atomic particle. (The problem so far is that quantum computers are expensive and tricky to keep running.) The Telegraph‘s Steven Poole was cheered by ‘a…

William Collins, 400pp, £20 As Simon Winchester explains in the prologue: ‘This book seeks to tell the story of how knowledge has been passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of its passage have evolved over the centuries of human existence.’ In the Sunday Times, James McConnachie wrote: ‘This is not a memoir — far from it: it's all about objective knowledge and people in history who have obsessively hoarded and enthusiastically disseminated it…. It is erudite and sprightly…Fearful of what will become of knowledge in the computer age, Winchester has now written a book that is really just two covers stuffed with knowledge of knowledge-related stuff.’ Michael Dirda in the Washington Post explained: ‘The book… covers oral…

Arts & Music Bodley Head, 240pp, £20) Patrick Bringley was working in the events department of the New Yorker when his brother died. Bringley found he ‘badly wanted to stand still a while.’ He gave up his job and went to join New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art as a guard. He spent a decade wearing the Met's regulation blue suit and clip-on tie, developing calves of iron from standing still amid the bustle of a busy museum. In the Telegraph. Alex Diggins loved his ‘gentle mix of memoir and criticism.’ The Met, according to Waldemar Januszczak reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, is a weird place to work. ‘When it conies to separations, Upstairs, Downstairs has nothing on the Met. Upstairs live the curators, who rarely make an…