Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary Why does anyone ever go abroad? The hassle at the airport, the heaving of cases on and off the conveyer belt while you’re struggling through security, forgetting to put your own belt back on afterwards (and in my case almost getting arrested as I strode through Fast Track at Heathrow Terminal 5 with my trousers falling down) … it’s too much for me at my age. I don’t need it any more. That’s why this summer I stayed at home. Apart from a night in Edinburgh (as the guest of the Governor at Edinburgh Castle - I’m not complaining), a day in Dublin (with Judi Dench and Taylor Swift - I kid you not; I do lead quite the life) and a weekend in Paris for the…

WHAT IS a brat summer? A brat summer is a summer that you spend being a bit brattish and badly behaved. It’s the sort of summer when you stay out until 5.32am wearing a lime-green bikini. The sort of summer when you take up smoking again. The sort of summer when you have an ill-advised fling with a Slovakian bartender, forget to water your hydrangeas, don’t put CDs back in the right cases - and dance to the album Brat by Charli XCX, the éminence verte citron of brat culture. A brat, the British-born Charli XCX, 31, has explained, is ‘that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind…

Sophia Waugh: School Days The deputy head walks into my class, apologising for interrupting. She proceeds to tell the pupils all about the car crash she has been involved in, telling them she thinks they should hear about it directly from her. After the first stunned silence, the whispers begin, growing to a roar. Why is she telling them? Is she going to go round every still class and make the same speech? Has she been arrested? Has she killed someone? She holds up a warning hand and silence gradually settles. ‘What I really want you to know, though,’ she continues, ‘is that I often bring student teachers in to observe Miss Waugh as part of their training. The reason for this is that I want them to see how…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips My favourite coat is in muted turquoise tartan; it was made by Selina Blow 35 years ago. It has worn better than my second favourite by Selina Blow - a dark purple Nehru jacket in silk matka with 15 silk matka buttons running down the front. All the detail was originally exquisite. Fitted and flattering with a cinched waist and flared below the waist, it reached the top of my thighs. I loved it too much. When I asked Selina if she could repair it, she quipped, ‘I think you have had enough wear out of that, Mary.’ But are coats and jackets still necessary? These days, with central heating in all buildings and the tube so hot, you need one only for the short dash…

Postcards from the Edge Jan Leeming, the broadcaster (and jungle survivor of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!) now lives at St Margaret’s Bay, between Deal and Dover, which is the nearest point in England to France. Appropriately, she has fallen in love with a Frenchman, even though, alas, he is dead. Jan - still enchantingly glamorous and spirited at 82 - thinks that a dashing French air ace, René Mouchotte, who was shot down in his RAF Spitfire in 1943, may be a better beau idéal than her five previous husbands - ‘they were all womanisers and left me’. She spent 15 years researching the life of Commandant Mouchotte, made a TV documentary about her quest, and ensured that the French pilot’s war medals, which had been…

An acquaintance recently recommended a wonderful book to me - the Reverend Colin Heber-Percy’s Tales of a Country Parish. Having read the book at a gallop the first time round because I was enjoying it so much, I am now reading it slowly and more sensibly for the third time. It becomes ever more rewarding. Above all, it is a very useful book. It gives pleasure with its humour, appreciation of the Wiltshire countryside and scholarship. Best of all, it is a source of inspiration when it comes to living the Christian life to the full. The author is clearly doing this himself, and not just theorising about it. He encourages without ever being bossy. Heber-Percy writes about the miraculous in less than two pages and, with his thoughtful scholarship,…

The Oldie, 23-31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk Sophocles, oldie egghead SIR: AN Wilson (Oldie Man of Letters, September issue) rightly praises Titian, Verdi and (subject of his latest book) Goethe for excelling in their 80s. Pah - as the ancient Greeks might have said. Tragic playwright Sophocles was allegedly prosecuted by his playwright son Iophon for being too doddery to manage his own affairs. His response: Oedipus at Colonus, composed in the author’s 90s. Old age and the passage of time teach all things. Professor Paul Cartledge, Cambridge You can have two husbands SIR: While I’m reluctant to disagree with the all-seeing, all-knowing Gyles Brandreth, he is not quite right when he repeats (September issue) what a lady…

Non-alcoholic drinks The high point of my day is that first glass of wine at precisely 5.45pm, swiftly followed by another. The sheer bliss experienced when that chilled white wine hits the system and courses through the veins is unequalled by any other sensation I have ever experienced. So it is with sinking heart that I see ever more supermarket drink shelves being devoted to nonalcoholic beers, wines and spirits. What’s the point? Surely the whole purpose of an alcoholic drink is the alcohol. There are plenty of soft drinks available, without taking all, or most, of the alcohol out of our favourite tipples at the same time as removing the taste - alongside the kick that put you into a pleasurable state of slightly altered consciousness. De-alcoholised beverages are just…

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity By Diarmaid MacCulloch Allen Lane £35 The cover of Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch’s chatty ramble round 2,000 years of sex through Christian eyes shows the lower parts of Eve (by Lucas Cranach, but reversed right to left), made respectable by the placing of her hand. This is the general area of interest, though the angels get a look-in too. Do angels’ names, such as Michael and Gabriel, the author asks, imply that they can be categorised by sex or gender? The tendency to see them as male was ‘expressed in colonial South America by Peruvian painters, who revelled in depicting arcabuceros: angels in splendid dress shouldering a rifle’. I don’t want to quibble for the sake of it, but a 17th-century…

THE REAL THING Old Vic, London, until 26th October Still going strong at 87, Sir Tom Stoppard is one of the greatest playwrights of any era. Critics rave about his wit and insight, and the most remarkable thing about him is the eternal quality of his writing. As Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, he’s not of an age but for all time. This silky-smooth revival is a perfect case in point. You’d never guess Stoppard wrote this play back in 1982. It could have been written yesterday or back in 1882, for that matter. With a few superficial cuts and tweaks, you could set it in almost any epoch, in virtually any locale. The universal appeal of The Real Thing is especially surprising. On the surface, it seems terribly parochial…

A TASTE OF CHILDHOOD We all remember putting our elbows on the table as children and being told, ‘All joints on the table will be carved.’ But what about joints under the table? The tables on the terrace outside the revived Julie’s in Holland Park are so close that you sit literally cheek by jowl. Just like at a café on the Left Bank. We sat next to two girls who displayed the longest bare thighs I’ve ever seen. They were then replaced by three semi-drunk girls who were reeling from an office do. The benign tramp sitting on the bench opposite took a real shine to them and kept winking at them as if an invitation to join was all but inevitable. I would have eavesdropped, but they were…

DREAM CLASSIC CARS ‘There are few ways in which a man may be more innocently employed than in getting money,’ said Dr Johnson. He presumably meant there’s no pretence about it. Like much of what the great man said, there’s enough in it to make it memorable but it’s not the whole truth. Another area of innocent endeavour was on display recently at my favourite classic-car show, at Hooe in Sussex. The innocence involved here was in that owning classic cars is not just another way of getting money – you might if you’re lucky, but mostly you’ll be spending it. Rather, it’s the innocence of ornithologists or numismatists: enthusiasts interested in the thing itself, not in what it might be worth. Thus the 1899 Benz Velo, one of the…

Ask Virginia I’m allergic to people Q I have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and a particular difficulty I have is that I get extremely irritated by other people’s mannerisms. I have been like this since childhood, with parents, partners and professionally, and am finally accepting that this is something I have to live with. I have isolated myself from people, because I don’t want to cause offence when someone I’m with makes small unconscious movements or sounds that I find excruciating. As I can’t avoid all human contact, I was wondering what you considered to be the best thing for me to do in such a situation – make an excuse to leave, grin and bear it or ask the person to stop doing whatever it is that irritates.…

I am delighted to see that Canongate has reprinted Climbing Days by Dorothy Pilley, one of the pioneering British mountaineers. It was first published in 1937 when climbers wore tweeds, woolly scarves and hobnail boots and Pilley’s account of a climbing life is full of adventures in mountain ranges then largely unexplored. She is a splendidly lively, often very funny, writer. I first discovered her when I read that she described the dispiriting tourists’ restaurant that had opened in 1912 at the top of Jungfraujoch as a ‘cross between a cowshed and the Trocadero with flavours of Bakerloo tube and Cheddar Gorge.’ This edition comes with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Tove Jansson is of course most famous for her glorious chronicles of the Moomintrolls. But she wrote for adults…

Robert O’Byrne(p18) is author of A Vanishing World: the Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne. He wrote Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House and The Last Knight. Sophia Waugh (p30) is a teacher and the author of The Oldie’s School Days column. Her nephew Pierre Waugh (p24) writes about her late brother Alexander Waugh, Auberon Waugh and Evelyn Waugh. Mary Kenny (p36), an Oldie columnist, wrote in our first issue in 1992. Her books include Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw and Crown and Shamrock. Matthew Sturgis (p74) is author of Oscar: A Life, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, Walter Sickert: A Life and When in Rome: 2,000 Years of Roman Sightseeing.…

Grumpy Oldie Man According to a recent report in several medically credible newspapers, as well as in the Daily Mail, the process of human decay is nothing like as random, gradual or unpredictable as you probably assumed. First at 44 and then again at 60 - so the catchily named Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University contends, after studying a range of biometric markers - we age suddenly and dramatically. We’ll skip over the fine detail, not least because I understand no part of it. But apparently these two staging posts on the road towards oblivion bring a sharp lurch towards the grave. I cannot speak from memory of the decline on my reaching 44 because it’s ineffably vulgar to affect to remember anything from that long…

What’s the laziest job in the world? Donald Trump’s personal trainer? Lord Lucan’s diary secretary? Or teaching Anne Robinson how to ask rude questions on The Weakest Link? That was my job 15 years ago - and it was entirely pointless. Robinson had an innate gift for examining human character - and tracking down its weak spots. She didn’t need any help from me. One middle-aged lady on the show gushed, ‘Anne, I’m starting an Open University course.’ Quick as a flash, Robinson said, ‘Oh, have you just got divorced?’ The contestant stared at her, openmouthed. How on earth had she worked it out? Her divorce wasn’t on the CV we’d been given. Robinson’s witticisms came bubbling up from a bottomless well. ‘What do you do when you’re not eating?’…

In 1811, architect, stonemason and shell obsessive George Perry published a lavishly illustrated volume, his Conchology or the Natural History of Shells. It featured 348 beautifully illustrated mollusc shells, with descriptions of species, many of which were new to science. Despite the effort that went into producing the work, at a time when conchophilia, or shell-fancying, was at its height, Perry’s Conchology all but disappeared in the scientific literature. It was apparently actively suppressed by the leading conchologists of the day and cruelly mocked for decades afterwards. From the common limpet and razor clam to the valuable cowry and spectacular divine conch, the wide range of shells form a treasure trove of beauty from our oceans and shores. Mark Carnall is Collections Manager of human remains and non-insect invertebrate collections…

It’s well known that dog ownership went through the roof during the Covid era. I have nothing against dogs. Many friends and relatives have had nice dogs - nice mainly because of their reliable, sensitive owners. It’s hard to say that now - most owners seem totally unaware of the effect their pets are having on others. Some recent research has actually proved this. Nor are they particularly aware (or interested) where their dogs are defecating. When I took my mother out for a quiet drink in a local pub recently, she was startled by a huge, snarling beast (which probably should have had a muzzle) barking loudly at her. Of course its red-faced, unsmiling owner didn’t apologise. The dog spent the rest of the visit staring me out, with…

It was Christmas 2004, and my great friend Nick, a party-organiser, invited me to a ball at the Clapham Grand. The party got off with a swing, full of 25-year-old friends mingling in the old theatre. All evening, standing above the dance floor, in the royal box, stood the lonely figure of Captain James Hewitt, 46, surveying the people below. A year before, he’d been on Larry King Live, threatening to circulate the Diana letters. As the ball ended, Baz, a friend, said, ‘Amelia, someone wants to meet you.’ There was Hewitt, a lofty, auburn/ginger-haired man with freckles rather intimidating and good-looking. I was intrigued. ‘Why don’t you both come back to my flat?’ smirked Hewitt. It was midnight. We giggled. ‘Why not?’ we thought. James, Nick and I jumped…

Town Mouse Google has damaged many things. And the saddest is its annihilation of the old maps industry. Gone are the lovely paper maps, objects of great beauty, as well as utility. In come the ugly and far inferior digital maps of the smartphone. Google Maps just doesn’t work very well. The idea is that it knows where you are. But it often gets it wrong. That’s why you see so many people walking down the road and then doing a U-turn because they realise belatedly they’re going the wrong way. The tracking system has not caught up with them. When using Google Maps you have no idea of geography; of north and south, or how one part of the street relates to another. You’re a little serf, meekly obeying…

A service was held at the Guards’ Chapel for Sir Richard Vickers, for many years Elizabeth II’s favourite equerry. The celebrant was Rev Deiniol Morgan, Chaplain to the Household Division. The representative of HRH The Princess Royal was Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles. Major General Alastair Dennis CB OBE gave the eulogy: ‘Richard was born in Coonoor hill station in southern India, his father being an officer in the 31st Lancers of the Indian army. ‘Tragedy struck in 1938. During a family seaside holiday in Thorpeness, Richard got into difficulties in a dangerous undertow. His mother, Mary, tried to help him but, owing to a weak heart, she died in the attempt. ‘The war took their father back to India and the boys were not reunited with him until six years…

History ‘Rule one on page one of the book of war is: “Do not march on Moscow.”’ President Zelensky may not be familiar with the words of Bernard Montgomery, but he will surely be well acquainted with his point. Invading Russia has tended to be a mug’s game. That’s why no one’s tried since WWII, The limited incursion of Ukrainian forces into Russia in August was not, of course, a ‘march on Moscow’. There was a very recent historical example of the folly of that: Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt last year, which simply petered out. Like a British family heading for the West Country, his Wagner Group mercenaries got stuck on the M4, which in Russia leads from Rostov-on-Don to the capital - rather than falling foul of the…

When I told my accountant recently that I was busy with optical research, I spoke nothing but the truth. It would, of course, have been possible to phrase it somewhat differently. I could have described myself as going places - Stirling Castle comes to mind, where Mary Queen of Scots was born - and looking at them. Not so glamorous, perhaps, but frankly the essence of optical research. Ever since reading H E Marshall’s Our Island Story as a child, I have always wanted to visit historic places. It so happened that it was the harsh winter of 1940 when I reached one particular chapter in Marshall’s book. All of Oxford, where I lived, seemed shrouded in ice and snow. At this point, I read about the escape of Queen…

Readers will remember Stop the Week - a ‘major irritant’ until 1992, with Robert Robinson and guests including Milton Shulman. Every week, Milton told a Goldbergand-Cohen joke. Sample: Goldberg and Cohen are together in the jungle. Suddenly a large wild animal appears and bounds swiftly past them. ‘What was that?’ cries Cohen. ‘How should I know?’ replies Goldberg. ‘I’m not a furrier.’ I still find that hilarious. And so did all the Jewish people I repeated it to later - including Rabbi Jackie Mason. But now a joke like that induces glares from some young people - such effrontery. The future of humour on radio looks precarious. My son said the last funny new show on Radio 4 was Ed Reardon’s Week and nothing has replaced him. So they’ve been…

TOGETHER AGAIN The rock band reunion is the eternal fans’ fantasy and a stadium-filling holy grail, but there’s only one band who could carry it off. It’s a perilously risky business. I realised this with the return of the Velvet Underground in 1993. When the most attractively urban and nocturnal act on the planet - natural habitat the pitch-black nightclub - burst into blistering sunlight on the dairy fields of Glastonbury in hot pursuit of a pension-fund top-up - and worse, tried to be friendly - the damage done to their legacy was irreparable. The Sex Pistols, supposedly a streetlevel political art statement, did much the same in 1996 but at least their Filthy Lucre tour acknowledged it. There are now only five big acts with original line-ups intact who…

HAMBURG PARSELY Keats’s season of mellow fruitfulness may be upon us, but for me it is more a time of ‘rootfulness’, of the root vegetables now coming into their own in the kitchen. We have been enjoying carrots and beetroot from the garden for some weeks, but the turnips did not swell – and I have resorted to buying one of my favourite roots, celeriac, which I confess I have never grown successfully. The seedlings of our kohlrabi, which looks like a root but is in fact a cabbage with a swollen stem, were nibbled and effectively killed off by slugs, which have been rampant this year. But I gave protection to a second sowing under a cloche and am expecting a few of edible size later this month. The…

COCKTAIL THAT WON THE WAR The Canon de 75 modèle 1897 is widely regarded as the first piece of modern artillery. It passed into legend as the gun that allowed the French to win the First World War. Combining great accuracy, portability and a rate of fire of up to 15 rounds per minute, it was still in use in WWIIf, not just by the French – who still had 4,500 of them, until the Germans marched in and nabbed them – but by a host of other nations, including the USA, Poland, Portugal, Greece and Ireland. Why, you may well ask, is this of interest to your drinks columnist? Because this trailblazing gun, known, informally, as the French 75, lent its name to a cocktail of gin, lemon juice,…

You may have been baffled by people claiming that they heard the news ‘on social media’. You would be right; social-media platforms do not provide news – at least not directly. Generally, they are just noticeboards on which almost anyone can post anything they want without validation or justification. Or they can post a link to an item on another website – and then call it ‘news’. That’s bad enough but, human nature being what it is, things quickly get worse. The more sensational posts inevitably attract attention and lots of other people pass them on to their followers. It’s like a chain letter. Those followers then pass it on to their own followers, and so on. No matter that the information may be hopelessly wrong – it multiplies and…

Smug South was rather pleased with his result on this month’s deal from the Australian Gold Coast Congress. Wisely gambling a one opener on a hand that was palpably game-forcing (so worth two clubs) in order to bid out his shape, he reached the decent-ish (but not great) six spades. (1) Showing his fifth spade and therefore, because he bid clubs first, a sixth club (he would open one spade with five-five). (2) Needs so little opposite. West led the nine of his partner’s hearts, declarer beating East’s queen with the ace. Declarer now cashed the ace-king of spades and was delighted to observe East’s queen fall (if four low spades had appeared, he had planned to play ace-king of clubs, ruff a club – with the ten – and…

From the plethora of new books available this autumn, we’d be forgiven for believing that to work in the literary profession is to enjoy a life of abundant rewards. Not so, according to Oldie regular and writer Roger Lewis. On page 25, he describes his disillusionment with the world of books, finding it to be full of ‘horrible people’ who are ‘childish, grasping, disloyal and on the make’. Having achieved zero recognition and less financial reward, Lewis wonders why all the writers who inhabit these pages keep going and finds solace in the suspicion that ‘only mediocrities live long and contented lives’. Spare a thought too for those in the desperate business of selling and promoting books. In the last edition, I asked readers which book cover blurbs have them…

UNDERSTORY A YEAR AMONG WEEDS ANNA CHAPMAN PARKER Duckworth, 281pp, £18.99 ‘Weeds are undergoing a cultural makeover’, pronounced Tome Morrissy-Swan, reviewing Understory in the Observer. The author, an artist, spent a year observing the so-called weeds that grew around her home in Berwickupon-Tweed. Then inspiration struck while she was looking at Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’ at the National Gallery: “Weeds were everywhere”, she wrote, “dotted all over the dry ochre earth, emerging from cracks in every rock.” Morrissy-Swan enjoyed the author’s illustrations and sound ecological message of the book - in the UK alone we’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows - but also the fantastic names of weeds, redolent of history, folklore and generations of deep local knowledge. ‘Groundsel is known as old-man-in-the-spring and there is…

BUTCHER JOYCE CAROL OATES Fourth Estate, 352pp, £16.99 Oates’s 64th novel is ‘ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, ‘RedHanded Butcher’ to others,’ wrote Sophie Mackintosh in the Literary Review. ‘At the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, Weir devotes himself to the study and experimental treatment of female maladies that nobody else wants to address. Weir is modelled on actual doctors; his operations based on actual procedures inflicted on women.’ Butcher takes the form of a biography compiled by Weir’s son, in 1898, ten years after his father’s death. For the New York Times’s Daphne Merkin it ‘has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude - sometimes to excess - of much of Oates’s earlier work’ and ‘disgust, particularly regarding the body, permeates the…

THE DRUMMOND AFFAIR MURDER AND MYSTERY IN PROVENCE STEPHANIE MATTHEWS AND DANIEL SMITH icon, 288pp, £18.99 Jack Drummond, born in 1891, was a renowned biochemist, a scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food during the war and knighted in 1944. He produced a plan for food distribution based on ‘sound nutritional principles’ despite rationing. Post-war, he became director of research at Boots. ‘But as [the authors] show in The Drummond Affair,’ wrote Alex Wade in the TLS, ‘if Drummond was a pillar of the establishment, there was also something of the éminence grise about him. Was it possible that he was in fact a spy? And was this why he, his wife and daughter were killed by the roadside on a sultry Provençal evening on August 4, 1952?’ Was this…

Man stuck knee-deep in mud by river Brighton Argus Huge firewood stack stolen from garden Aberdeen Press and Journal Council manager who broke wind on colleague guilty of age bias Daily Telegraph £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features - the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHAT WAS the one-pound note? Forty years ago, in December 1984, the last one-pound note was printed. It ceased to be legal tender in March 1988. It seemed as though an old and venerable item had been stripped from our culture. We could, for example, look back to May 1828, when a petition was announced, signed by ‘a numerous body of the most opulent and respectable inhabitants of Cheltenham’, against a bill to withdraw the one-pound note from circulation. A century and a half later, in Putney in February 1978, the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, held up a pound note and, to demonstrate how badly the government had allowed its value to fall, cut it in half with a pair of scissors. The Cheltenham petitioners failed. The pound…

Thirty-five years ago, When Harry Met Sally asked a question: can men and women be good friends without sex getting in the way? The answer, after a lot of funny lines, appears to be no. The film couple do eventually have sex and, after 12 years of bumping into each other from time to time, get married. My own experience, minus the witty one-liners, is quite different. I am lucky enough to have a number of close, even intimate, men friends, but sex doesn’t get in the way and never has. We are content for our relationships to remain platonic, even though we can enjoy close physical affection with each other. My earliest such man friend is Ivan, whom I have known since I was three, when we lived opposite…

After my daughter had got engaged, in December, I was asked the same two questions again and again. The first - ‘Do you like him?’ - was easily answered. ‘Yes - very much.’ The second, hot on its heels, was another thing altogether. ‘So what are you going to wear?’ ‘I thought white,’ I said cheerfully. ‘With a veil.’ My daughter would appreciate the moral support. And if it turned out that she was too self-obsessedly Bridezilla to share the spotlight (this generation!), I was sure I had a dress in my wardrobe that would do nicely. I might as well have suggested turning up stark-naked. Had I gone mad? This was my only daughter’s big day. My outfit had to be not only new but Special with a capital…

Oldie Man of Letters Oxford, the university of which Lewis Carroll was in some ways the most characteristic member, is not just an academic institution. It is a dream. Very many people respond to this Wonderland, who have never set foot in the much-spoilt market town where the university finds itself. Think of the success not only of Through the Looking Glass but of Brideshead Revisited. The older I become, the keener is my sense that we all need saving illusions and that the dream of Oxford is not just harmless, but potentially beneficial to the human race. On 28th October, the MAs of the University will vote for a new Chancellor, to succeed such grandees as Oliver Cromwell (who held the post for seven years and was surprisingly good…

Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, would have been 90 on 19th September, Instead, he tragically died of an overdose at 32, in 1967. Epstein spent three terms at my old school, Clayesmore School, in Dorset, in 1948. He was not a good student. This was one of nine schools he attended before he was 16. When the Beatles broke through in 1963, I was at the school. The English master John Appleby proudly put on show three pictures Epstein had painted while there. Some time later I interviewed, for the school magazine, three men who had been at school with him. One couldn’t understand why he had left so suddenly. Another felt that Epstein’s listening to Bach, his love of Picasso, lack of interest in sports and desire to be a…

Country Mouse I had a pang of recognition on watching The Holdovers, the bittersweet story of a cantankerous classics teacher, an abrasive but bright student and the head cook all forced to remain on campus during a 1970s Christmas break. Over the pond in Shropshire, in the same decade, I had removed myself from the clamour, chaos and midsummer pomp of the final term at my own school. Yes, I could now smoke my head off, grow my hair long and put up Che Guevara posters in my bedroom, but also I found myself marooned - not on campus but at home, a villa near Keele service station with only my hapless parents. It was a dangerous and damaging regression. Mary and I were watching The Holdovers in the blue…

Ever since I met John, my husband, a former dress designer and manufacturer, and my TV ‘how-to-look-good’ stylist, Jane Galpin, I’ve been a lot braver with colour. They both push me to pile it on. John trawls through his phone in search of fashion bargains. He boasts he never spends more than $20, which is a lie. And Jane spends my TV clothes budget on glasses, necklaces, shoes and clothes, without ever buying anything in grey or beige. She knows I hate wishy-washy colour. Why have insipid mauve, when you can have vibrant purple? Why mustard, when you can have daffodil? Or bottomof-the-pond green, when you can have deep emerald? If your fashion style reflects your personality (which I think it does), I have to confess to having an in-yourface,…

The Doctor’s Surgery The case of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering tiny babies, has aroused passions around the world. It has stimulated large numbers of people to become amateur experts in neonatal pathology, a difficult subject at the best of times. How is it that there are no knockdown arguments about causation of death that settle the matter beyond even the suspicions of conspiracy theorists? You might have thought that healthcare workers were at a general advantage in the committal of murder. They have the means and the opportunity to hand - and technical knowledge into the bargain - in a way that few people do. And their underlying motives are not very different from the run of mankind’s. Dr John Bodkin Adams (1899-1983), a GP in Eastbourne,…

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him. Audrey Hepburn I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor. Joan Rivers Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it. Salvador Dalí I wonder why it is that young men are always cautioned against bad girls. Anyone can handle a bad girl. It’s the good girls men should be warned against. David Niven I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate. George Burns I’m not well-read but when I read, I read well. Kurt Cobain One of the many pleasures…

The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama By Ben Macintyre Viking £25 Remember where you were when six terrorists stormed London’s Iranian Embassy in 1980, taking 26 hostages and provoking a six-day siege - which was brought to a sudden end by the SAS? Ben Macintyre, author of this gripping and well-researched account, reckons everyone does, just as everyone remembers where they were when they heard about 9/11 or the murder of President Kennedy. Well, I do remember hearing of those two events but curiously not the siege, despite eagerly following it as it became the world’s first protracted terrorist event played out from beginning to end on camera. Its consequences included launching Mrs Thatcher’s reputation as the Iron Lady, giving worldwide publicity to the little-known…

The Women Behind the Door By Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape £20 In 1997, I visited Dublin to interview Roddy Doyle and, anecdotally, found the city in his thrall. ‘I’ve read three now,’ reported my taxi driver. Doyle’s reputation first rested on a cheerful, demotic trilogy about workingclass Dubliners, which he helped adapt for the screen. Alan Parker filmed The Commitments; Stephen Frears did the others. The tone darkened in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, in which a ten-year-old watches cracks widen in his parents’ marriage. It won the Booker Prize in 1993 and promoted its author to the list of celebrities who open supermarkets. Not an accolade conferred on, say, Penelope Lively. Doyle then deepened his commitment to scriptwriting. Each episode of Family, a savagely honest and whimsy-free drama about…

VAN GOGH: POETS AND LOVERS National Gallery, to 19th January MONET AND LONDON: VIEWS OF THE THAMES Courtauld Gallery, 27th September to 19th January 2025 There is an unusual link between these shows - other than the Strand. They are both to an extent curated by their artists, and for once the modish word is jus tified. The National Gallery brings together three long-separated paintings that Van Gogh had planned as a triptych, while the Monet is largely an impression of the 1904 exhibition he himself organised in Paris. With over 60 paintings and drawings, the National Gallery show is the biggest of the many devoted to Van Gogh in recent years. I hope that is a good thing; at half the size, the 2008-9 Colours of the Night had…

MAGIC OF MUSHROOMS Autumn is in the air. The mushroom season is upon us. And our unreliable summer weather might well have delivered a generous harvest of edible fungi to the shadier corners of our green and pleasant land. For the novice forager, what pops up in the woods can look like a lethal pick-and-mix, when you’re deciding what’s edible and what’s not. As a general rule, it’s fair to assume that mushrooms in the wild are reliably seasonal and place-specific. Avoid anything that’s out of order or time. A single chanterelle, alone in a meadow in spring, is unlikely to be the same as one of the sunny yellow beauties that appear all together in woodland in autumn. Mushroom preferences are extraordinarily regional. In Catalonia, top of the class…

AU REVOIR, GARETH Gareth Southgate has a new job. Sadly it is not in English football. When he resigned as England boss after the Euros, the man who steered the national side to two finals, a semifinal and a quarter final across four international competitions took up a position with UEFA. He is to be a technical adviser, watching and analysing games across Europe, reporting back to the organisation’s headquarters in Switzerland on what he sees. Which is good news for UEFA. And wretched news for anyone with an interest in improving the game in this country. Quite how it is that we have allowed the man who transformed the England team to take his skills elsewhere is baffling. Because this is a talent we should be doing everything in…

There is no tax quite like inheritance tax to get people arguing. Even though it raises less than one per cent of the total we pay each year – and fewer than four per cent of estates actually pay it; and then at only about four per cent of the total assets passed on – there seems to be a visceral feeling that it’s confiscating what you’ve got left after paying tax all your life. In the desperate last days of the Tories, the government floated the idea of scrapping it altogether, apparently believing it was a vote-winner. Well, perhaps, but the first question about IHT is: would you rather pay tax now, or when you’re dead? Governments are always looking for revenue, and this one has a particularly urgent…

Taking a Swim Stuck on a train to London in an August heatwave, passengers were taking emergency measures: fans, cold drinks pressed to cheeks, quiet expiration. As I journeyed, I realised I was an hour early for a journalistic assignation at a pub close to Hampstead Heath. I hadn’t set foot in this pub since I lived close to the Heath a quarter of a century ago, when I was new to London and swam in the ponds. I had a sudden, nostalgic brainwave: could I swim in the ponds before my meeting? I’d heard dark tales about pre-booked admission only, but when I checked online, miraculously, the hour-long slot before my interview was still available. I booked and changed trains for the Heatwave Express, the North London Line, which…

IN COMPETITION No 310 you were invited to write a poem called Autumn Feeling. I enjoyed the refrain of Sylvia Smith’s apocopated villanelle: ‘Let’s face it, Keats – the weather’s up the spout.’ Richard Spencer wrote a sort of autumn carol with the chorus ‘That umami of Roquefort and nuts…’ Ian Nalder remembered the days when one might expect at the end of autumn a Christmas card depicting ‘deer clad in scarlet hats, to avoid them, I suppose, from feeling chilly’. GM Southgate began with two lines that made me want to read on: ‘It isn’t that I don’t care for the leaves / That swirl around, tired out, barely alive’. Bill Holloway’s opening couplet was surprising too: ‘Bare buttocks now no longer burn,/ And “noble rot” becomes Sauternes.’ Commiserations…

AMNESIAC A MEMOIR NEIL JORDAN Apollo, 304pp, £25 When Jordan emerged as a writer he was compared to James Joyce and then went on to become known for directing ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Company of Wolves’, ‘The Crying Game’, ‘Michael Collins’ and more.. The Sunday Times’s Tom Shone marvelled at a career he called ‘a bridge between two worlds … the sort of bifocal commitment that is hard to imagine of anyone but an Irishman’. Even though Amnesiac doesn’t stint on Hollywood gossip - Brando, Tom Cruise, or ‘Stanley Kubrick, calling at all hours of the night to needle him about the IRA’s latest atrocities’ - ‘It’s a measure of Jordan’s strengths as a writer […] that the Hollywood dish feels like an afterthought to the main meat of the book:…

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had just finished writing a book, and before I embarked on the next one, I decided to have a break. Everyone else was doing it: actor friends ‘rested’. Academic friends took ‘sabbaticals’ (often involving long liquid lunches in the Chelsea Arts Club). Others had even retired altogether, disappearing into sunny, time-rich uplands filled with zumba classes and yoga retreats. While I had no intention of retiring myself, I could hardly remember a time when I didn’t have either a book or a child on the go - often both at the same time. My last book, Brave Hearted, about the experiences of women during America’s westward expansion, had been a particularly harrowing one to write. As I ground to the…

The other day, I wrote an article about the Krays, which was so well received in the gangster community, word reached me that, should I have enemies who might usefully be ‘taken care of,’ then I was just to say the word. This is tempting, though, as my list of enemies is laughably long, my new pals will have their work cut out, putting the likes of a pompous nonagenarian (who took the trouble of getting his agent to instruct my publishers to have his name removed from the acknowledgments section of one of my books), a crippled Oxbridge don (for a nastily stupid review) and a female freelancer (for her condescension) upside down in a rubbish-skip outside a Greek restaurant. I should also like to see everyone past and…

JOHN SOANE’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES REFLECTIONS ON AN ARCHITECT AND HIS COLLECTION BRUCE BOUCHER Yale Uni Press, 224pp, £35 Art historian Bruce Boucher is a former director of the Soane Museum. As the Times’s Laura Freeman put it: ‘He knows its nooks and comers, trick screens, twisting staircases, recesses and secrets.’ Freeman loved the book, pointing out that it isn’t a straightforward biography of the architect and antiquarian but ‘rather a map of Soane’s mind, a history of the acquisition and display of objects in the 18th and early 19th centuries and a fascinating gazetteer to the niche-r niches of Soane’s collection. It is elegantly and engagingly written for the general reader and richly illustrated.’ Other reviewers also praised it. Spectator reviewer Tim Newark called the book ‘a treasure house…

How do you define a crime story? One answer might be any novel subject to the tyranny of plot, including spy stories and thrillers both genres examined in Martin Edwards’s magisterial survey, The Life of Crime (Collins Crime Club, 736pp, £14.99), the first of its kind since ‘Bloody Murder’ by Julian Symons. Edwards quotes Raymond Chandler, who said ‘the form …. is too various for easy classification.’ A bit like Chandler’s plots, in fact. So, let’s leave it at that. But there’s nothing mystifying about the reception Edwards’s book received in the press. ‘Edwards,’ said the Spectator’s Andrew Taylor, ‘combines wide reading with a good memory, meticulous control over his unruly material, critical acumen and sheer bloody persistence.’ While Sarah Weinman in the New York Times found there to be…