Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i The Oldie

‘In Memory of Roger Law’ reads a caption at the end of the first episode of the new series of satirical quiztainment show Have I Got News for You. This was a tribute to the late BBC lawyer Roger Law – but it was certainly news for friends and fans of satirist and Spitting Image co-creator Roger Law. There followed a flurry of activity on social media enquiring after the radical puppeteer ceramicist's wellbeing, as well as such heartfelt tributes as ‘Goodnight, Roger Law – I guess God needs someone to put his arm up his arse.’ Law, 83, rings the Old Un to confirm that news of his death is greatly exaggerated. Still, following a bout of ill-health, he has designed his own gravestone, with final dates to be…

Gyles Brandreth's Diary Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Dame Judi Dench has reached 90 years! Yes, our greatest living actress turns 90 on 9th December, but she does not want us banging on about it, thank you very much. I know. I am doing a couple of shows in the West End with her in the run-up to Christmas. We are celebrating her extraordinary career on stage and screen, but in the advance publicity material she insisted on all references to her milestone birthday being deleted. The only upside to the deeply frustrating age-related macular degeneration that has beset her in recent years is that if I manage to sneak a birthday cake onto the stage, she may not notice it. A couple of years ago, when we were doing…

WHAT IS the Red Book? The Red Book is officially called the Harvard College Class Report, dating back to the mid-19th century. But everyone calls it the Red Book, because of its consistently imposing crimson covers. It is not to be confused with the Red Books of Georgian landscape designer Humphry Repton, or the posthumously published Red Book of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. For me, it is essential reading – be that bedside or bathroom. When you start to read, you just can't stop – and that's not just because your friends (and maybe even a few of your former enemies) are in it. It drops on my doormat with a satisfying thud every five, ten, years or so. Although I am British, this happens to me every few ‘big’ years,…

This autumn, I was in my kitchen when I heard the noise: a bit like a jet aircraft flying just a little too low for comfort. So I opened the doors and stepped into the garden – and then very swiftly stepped back into the kitchen. I could barely see to the end of my garden for the great swarm of insects buzzing around. Honey bees. Many thousands of them. They seemed to have no obvious purpose – apart from scaring the pants off me, which they were achieving most efficiently. Then I realised they weren't remotely interested in me. The centre of their activity was my tall hawthorn tree. High up on one large branch hung two clusters. Each was about the size of a small bag of potatoes…

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both. Dorothy Parker The only place men want depth in a woman is in her cleavage. Zsa Zsa Gabor She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short. Clive James on Marilyn Monroe You must come again when you have less time. Walter Sickert to a departing guest Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four. Katharine Hepburn There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African developments by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of them at the…

Sophia Waugh: School Days ‘Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.’ So says Scout Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, when her teacher, Miss Caroline, tells her to stop reading with her father. The reasons? He has taught her to read words that Miss Caroline deems too difficult for her age, and he is teaching her in a way that is at odds with Miss Caroline's own teaching methods. Why does Miss Caroline not take note of the ‘methods’ Atticus has used to produce one of the most advanced readers in the class? Why is Miss Caroline so against ‘difficult’ words? And what is Miss Caroline hoping to gain by blocking reading? I wish I had Miss Caroline's…

Mary Killen's Beauty Tips Of course there is no such thing as snobbery today. But it was rampant 70 years ago, in the winter of 1954. That's when Nancy Mitford wrote her article on U and non-U – later expanded into her book Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956). Mileage was made for decades about her glossary: which verbal expressions (looking glass, scent) indicated a U (for upper class), civilised upbringing; and which (mirror, perfume) were markers of the opposite (non-U). Mitford allegedly wrote the essay as a joke – but many a true word was spoken in jest. The sales of the book indicated an appetite from a public anxious for these signifiers. And the 1982 equivalent of Noblesse Oblige, The Sloane…

Postcards from the Edge Fifty of Winston Churchill's paintings are to be shown in an exhibition in 2026, at London's Wallace Collection. I hope the accompanying catalogue for ‘Winston Churchill: The Painter’ will mention Winston's art teacher, Hazel, Lady Lavery, who instructed him in artwork. This started during the First World War. Hazel (1880-1935) was an Irish-American beauty, married to the Belfast-born artist Sir John Lavery. She had trained as a painter herself, in Paris, and published a book of etchings. She not only gave Winston painting lessons, but also became a confidante. During the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State, she was a significant political networker. She was madly in love with Michael Collins and donned widow's weeds when he was killed…

Bl**dy asterisks When I was growing up in the 1970s, people knew how to use asterisks properly. All swear words were routinely ‘asterisked out’, leaving the reader to search their mental library of obscenities to try and identify the curse that provided the best fit. Guessing the missing word often provided a fleeting but fun moment of diversion and could be more challenging than one might imagine, especially if your knowledge of curses and smut was extensive. The reader would then have to choose the best fit for the offending word from a wide range of possibilities. Those of a more innocent nature could remain uncorrupted by the foul language and be unable to fill in the blanks. There was an honesty to this approach: bad language was deemed unacceptable…

History Today, interior decoration is a national obsession and a mainstay of our perpetual-motion economy. You can date the democratisation of décor to the appearance of Habitat, the arrival of IKEA or the popularity of the TV show Changing Rooms and its offspring. The original had its final broadcast 20 years ago. A new book, London's Lost Interiors by Steven Brindle, reminds us that interior design was once a more rarefied art, open mainly to the very rich. The book beautifully reproduces dozens of photographs from around the 1880s till shortly after the Second World War. There is a fascination and melancholy to all these vanished schemes. The book is in the same genre as the great Gavin Stamp volumes Britain's Lost Cities and Lost Victorian Britain, as well as…

The Doctor's Surgery These days, people – that is to say, politicians – have some difficulty in defining women, though not, I think, in recognising them. How long will it be before the same 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, as no one thinks about his appendix until he or she gets 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 my…

The Tree Hunters: How the Cult of the Arboretum Transformed Our Landscape By Thomas Pakenham Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30 No one acquainted with his Meeting with Remarkable Trees (1996), an enduring bestseller, can fail to have twigged (pun intended) Thomas Pakenham's love of trees. Memorably, the book opened on his Irish estate in Westmeath on the eve of a great storm in January 1991, when he went to contemplate his score of beeches, reckoned to be 200 years old and about 100 feet tall. He slipped a tape measure round their ‘smooth, silver-green, lichen-encrusted bellies’. None was a champion, but ‘all had been good friends to five generations of our family. As I taped each tree, I gave it a hug, as if to say “Good luck tonight”.’ Dawn revealed…

Revenge of the Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell Abacus £25 Malcolm Gladwell is a classic example of the modern US public intellectual: a more user-friendly, populist version of our own Dominic Cummings, with an Afro in place of the beanie hat. Though he was born in England of British and Jamaican parentage, his approach is thoroughly North American: latch on to a half viable idea, Big It Up and then market it to death. Gladwell sprang to fame in 2000 with his first book, The Tipping Point. After endorsement from Bill Clinton, the book spent the usual aeon on the New York Times bestseller list and earned him several TED talks – an influencer's Medal of Honor. The thesis was simple: political trends, ideas, fashions, fads and other sociological detritus…

Fast before feast, as my Edinburgh granny used to say. She wouldn't let me have cake until I'd eaten up the bread and butter. Christmas is coming – but not quite yet. Stir-up Sunday is 26th November. Time to prepare the pudding. Plum pudding There is no extra sugar in the mix as there is plenty of natural sweetness in the dried fruits. The inclusion of a dark sherry gives a fine, rich flavour and helps the colour. Serves 8-10. 1kg dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, prunes, apricots, figs) 1 large glass dark sherry (oloroso or Pedro Ximénez) 1 tbsp blanched almonds, left whole 1 tbsp shelled walnuts, roughly chopped 1 cooking apple, grated (including the skin) 1 large carrot, scrubbed and grated 1 orange, zest and juice 1 lemon, zest…

Sir Mark Cavendish got it right when he talked about his fellow cycling knight Sir Chris Hoy's recent revelation that his cancer is terminal. This really is a hero of a human being. It is not just the six Olympic gold medals that make the great sprint rider stand out. Nor is it the records he stacked up the way the rest of us accumulate parking tickets. Nor is it the astonishing speeds he could engender from thighs so muscular they were apparently cast from an amalgam of granite and bronze. Rather it is that, when he was still competing, Hoy absolutely epitomised what sport should be about. The manner in which he has faced his imminent death at the ridiculously premature age of 48 demonstrates he is a sportsman…

I once described Patrick Sergeant as the man who invented financial journalism as entertainment. Before he started his column as City Editor of the Daily Mail, financial reporting was dry, specialist stuff. He noticed that a majority of the Mail readers were female, and they would respond to a column that had personality, mixed with a little gossip, while telling them what was going on in the City. It was a formula that served him well for 24 years. He died on 18th September, aged 100. I was fortunate enough to work for him for five of those years, the last two as his deputy, writing a second-rate pastiche while he was schmoozing the world's central bankers and finance ministers in exotic locations. The formula he invented for Euromoney –…

Is there something you really miss? My girls. I miss them terribly: twin girls of eight, and our eldest, who's nearly 13. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories in Cuba? We didn't have holidays. We were really poor. But I do remember beach excursions with my father. He used to drive a lorry and invited all the neighbours. Everybody cooked – tamales, black beans and rice – and we played dominoes, with everybody sharing what they'd prepared. Did you dance as a child? Everyone in Cuba used to dance: the Latin dances, Cuban dances, the son montuno. And also in the ‘80s, when the breakdancing movement started, there was Michael Jackson. I was into that too, aged about eight. How did you discover classical ballet? My father decided that…

The word ‘miscellany’ conjures up a random mixture or tantalising lucky dip we associate with festive hampers or Christmas stockings. So how apt that our Winter Review has four pages of ‘miscellaneous’, crammed with new books impossible to pigeon-hole – pity the independent bookseller deciding on which shelf to display them. They include the lyrical new book from literary shepherd James Rebanks and an intriguing book by Robert McCrum about the penalty kick, Virago's heart-warming book about friendship and Dr Rachel Clarke's lauded The Story of a Heart. Elsewhere, Sam Leith chooses those trusted Christmas favourites that never fail to delight and Michael Barber picks the best crime and thrillers, including those from Kate Atkinson, Susie Dent and John le Carré's son, Nick Harkaway. In our fiction pages you'll find…

Apollo, £30, 480pp Catherine was queen consort of France for 12 years, queen mother during the brief reigns of her sons Francis II and Charles IX, and royal counsellor during the reign of her son Henry III. ‘Hollingsworth brings to this study of Catherine de’ Medici her characteristic combination of scholarship and narrative verve’, wrote Glenn Richardson in Literary Review. ‘The story bowls along at a lively pace.’ Hollingsworth, wrote Jessica Wärnberg in History Today, ‘presents Catherine as an astute figure who promoted tolerance and compromise in the face of zealotry and fear. In doing so, she adds her voice to those who have already defended Catherine from the ‘Black Legend’ that has long surrounded her name…’ In the Telegraph, Frances Wilson dismissed the notion that Catherine was essentially a…

Elliott & Thompson, 272pp, £20 Journalist, John Suchet, reported from warzones around the world, becoming ITN's news anchor in 1987. Today he's a presenter on Classic FM and this, his eighth book about Beethoven, is as much about the author's obsession with the subject as about the composer himself. ‘Beethoven is the model of the self-fashioning yet misunderstood genius,’ said Ivan Hewett in the Telegraph, ‘doomed for romantic rejection by women unable to tolerate his less-than-savoury habits. Early biographers vied to honour him; nowadays the tendency is not so much to debunk Beethoven as to reveal him as a deeply flawed and troubled person sorely in need of the psychoanalyst's couch. This lands somewhere in the middle, wavering between a genius and an all-toofallible human being … Suchet attempts to…

Nine Eight Books, 368pp, £22 Lawrence (no surname) selfsabotaged the career of his left-field 80s pop band Felt and his next group, Denim, collapsed when their possible breakthrough single, Summer Smash, was cancelled after Princess Diana died. Now 62, Lawrence lives alone in a council flat on a diet of crackers, milky tea and a particular kind of liquorice he fears Poundland has discontinued. The Times's music critic Will Hodgkinson spent a year wandering round London with him to try and fathom his deathless thirst for fame. The Telegraph‘s Neil McCormick found it ‘mesmerising – a warped, confounding and sometimes perversely amusing tale littered with incidents in which Lawrence effectively plucks defeat from the jaws of victory, then recontextualises it as victory after all, a forensic case-study of our culture's…

Bloomsbury, 496pp, £30 The subject of historian William Dalrymple's latest book is the story, largely overlooked amid our obsession with Greco-Roman antiquity, of how ancient India exerted a vast cultural influence. Indian mathematics, astronomy, textiles, livestock, art and precious stones flooded far to east and west throughout the ancient and early medieval eras – to say nothing of its spirituality, with Buddhism taking root and flourishing in distant south-east Asia. ‘Dalrymple is enthralled by the postcard monuments of ancient India's ‘“soft power”: the magnificent Borobudur Buddhist temple in Indonesia; the Hindu temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia,’ wrote Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in the Observer, who also noted a lively maritime trade with the Italian mainland in ‘exotic spices, gemstones, Indian cotton, elephant tusks, tortoise shells and even substantial numbers of caged wild…

Reaktion Books, 328pp, £15.99 The Wagner Group was created by Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose ‘implausible journey from street hot-dog seller to secretive international warlord to a social media-addicted insurrectionist’, wrote Miles Johnson in the FT, is the subject of this ‘deeply reported history’ by Jack Margolin, an independent researcher and expert on modern mercenaries. Prigozhin moved on from selling hot dogs to running fancy restaurants where members of the Russian underworld mingled with the political elite, and by 2012 his companies controlled 90 per cent of Russia's military catering, worth $2.9bn at historical exchange rates’. When Putin's ‘little green men’ invaded Crimea in 2014 and ‘bands of pro-Russian volunteers declared a breakaway republic’ in Ukraine's Donetsk region, Prigozhin saw an ‘opportunity to offer up a more organised, but still unofficial military…

When I was young, my parents had an old record of Dylan Thomas reading A Journey by Charabanc to Porthcawl and A Child's Christmas in Wales. Is there any piece of prose like it for evoking the glorious post-prandial carbohydrate slump, ‘the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending’? I think there is not. Christmas – with its ability to make children of adults – is a season festooned with literary magic. And if you manage to hold back a bit on the sherry, there are few greater pleasures than settling down in an armchair on Christmas afternoon with a good Christmassy book. No, not the new Sally Rooney you found in your stocking: one of the classics. Top of the list is Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the closest…

Simon & Schuster UK, £25, 448pp This latest in the Watergate reporter's series of behind-thescenes narratives about occupants of the US White House concentrates on the Biden administration's foreign policy. ‘At its core, Woodward's book is about diplomacy,’ wrote Franklin Foer in the Atlantic. ‘Just past the sundry tidbits about Trump – most horrifying, the former president's ongoing chumminess with Vladimir Putin, a charge that Trump's campaign denies – there lies a serious history of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza… One of the most stunning sections of the book captures Putin mulling the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine – and all the quiet diplomacy that pushed him back from the brink. Newspapers hinted at this threat at the time, but Woodward reveals the backstory in robust…

Granta Books, 272pp, £16.99 Cohen, practising psychoanalyst and professor of literary theory, investigates why rage increasingly drives the world, and what can be done. ‘For the past decade,’ wrote the Daily Mail‘s Glenda Cooper, ‘anger has been the defining colour and tone of our daily lives. Cohen cleverly taps into this feeling that, all around us, people are on the brink of losing their rag.’ Praising ‘a fascinating read, unsettling but compelling’,Lucy Denyer added in the Telegraph, ‘you'll almost definitely recognise yourself among its pages, whatever your irritation. Like Cohen, you may find yourself reflecting on why a childhood slight still rankles; like his own patients, you may struggle with rage towards colleagues, friends or family.’ Cohen offers a ‘prurient peek into the tangles of other peoples’ feelings to make…

Faber & Faber, 448pp, £20 ‘Is there a better novelist at work right now?’ asked Anthony Cummins in the Guardian. Once again Rooney has ‘created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage.’ There are ‘tenderly emotional scenes’, ‘comic touches that persuade you utterly of Rooney's understanding of people and the world’, ‘the delicate dance of talk between two people’. Cummins swooned, ‘Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney's richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.’ In the NY Times, Dwight Garner admired Intermezzo ‘almost without reservation…Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading.’ No novelist can hope for more. Cal Revely-Calder, in the Telegraph found Intermezzo to be ‘a deeply millennial novel, in…

Faber, 480pp, £20 For football fans of a certain age, ‘Munich’ does not mean Appeasement. Instead, it refers to what Houman Barekat in the FT calls ‘a defining moment in English Football history’ – the 1958 plane crash that decimated Manchester United Manager Matt Busby's precocious ‘Babes’. Among the dead were centre-forward Tommy Taylor, scorer of 16 goals for England in 19 games, and left-half Duncan Edwards, destined, many thought, to be the greatest English player of all time. Rather than simply document what happened, David Peace chose to fictionalise the tragedy, the approach he used for Damned United and Red or Dead. The result, said David Annand in the TLS, is often intensely moving – ‘in the disaster he has found a perfect subject for his elegiac prose.’ Peace…

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £20 Clare Chambers's fictional worlds feel safe and cosy, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, ‘conjuring up a lost England of Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin, of candlewick counterpanes and church spires poking through the mist. But from behind the pruned hedgerows and mock-Tudor houses emerge stories of the uncanny.’ She continued: ‘But if the book foregrounds the lives of women trying to establish their roles in a changing society, it eventually gives way to ideas about mental health and the care of children. As in Small Pleasures’[published in 2021], Chambers explores not only the damage of abuse but also of the silence and secrecy that surrounds it. Her touch is deft but delicate, her compassion strong.’ Thomas-Corr thought the writing of the highest quality:…

John Humphrys (p18) presented the Today programme from 1987 to 2019. He presented the BBC Nine O'Clock News and Mastermind. In 1966, he reported on the Aberfan disaster. Hugo Vickers (p22) is the biographer of Queen Mary and the Duchess of Windsor. His new book is Clarissa – Muse to Power: The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon. Rev Dr Peter Mullen (p25) was Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London. He has been an Anglican priest for over 50 years and has published more than 40 books of theology and philosophy. Lucinda Lambton (p80) is our Overlooked Britain correspondent. She is author of Chambers of Delight, Vanishing Victoriana, Old New World and The Queen's Dolls’ House.…

Grumpy Oldie Man The Victorian pseudoscience of physiognomy – the analysis of human character from facial features – has long been out of vogue. By and large, this is a good thing. An erstwhile Turkish baths acquaintance was known and routinely addressed as Derek the Strangler. He had strangled nobody, and as far as anyone knew had no ambition to do so. That it was impossible to glance at that savage boat race without picturing his hands around a throat was plainly and grossly unfair. This tiresome preamble comes preparatory to exploring the source of my feelings about Wes Streeting. Does my visceral phobia about the Health Secretary for which an urgent psychiatric appraisal seems indicated stem from distaste for his political identity? Or is it just his face? At…

When I first had the idea of writing about the six wives of Henry VIII, I got in a muddle. That is to say, I got the wives in a muddle – something Henry VIII was also known to do, although in a rather different way. What happened was this. I was driving along a Sussex lane with my husband, Harold Pinter, when I suddenly saw a notice saying ‘Hever Castle’. Harold was unimpressed as he had come to the conclusion (he told me later) that Sussex had rather too many castles for its own good. But as I was at the wheel, I was able to park and wheel us in for a good tour of the castle without too many complaints from Harold – or from the other…

I didn't just cry. I sobbed. I lay there on the blue rug in the sitting room and stared at the fluffy yellow clouds rushing over the chapel roof. I was 13 and playing my parents’ gramophone record of Webster Booth singing Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen from La Bohème. It was my first time with Puccini. Before that, my musical tastes had extended only as far as Bill Haley and the Comets and to the Platters crooning Oh Yes, I'm the Great Pretender! Whereas formerly all my dreams had pulsated with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Jane Russell's cleavage in The Outlaw, now my nights were enchanted by Mimi's porcelain complexion and her tiny frozen hand. Before I was 15, I knew all Puccini's operas off by…

The most beautiful woman I have ever seen – apart from the present Mrs Winn, of course – smiled at me and asked me to come in and sit down. Tongue-tied at the best of times in the company of women, I quivered, croaked and fumbled my way through a kind of mist into a chair. She fixed me with big almond eyes – they may have been brown; they may have been green – and uttered seven simple words that I will for ever treasure, ‘I'm Audrey Hepburn – please call me Audrey.’ Only the truly great are humble enough to introduce themselves and not assume that you know who they are. I can still feel the thrill of her handshake. Aside from working for the nicest man in…

Town Mouse In my youth, we went to the pub the whole time. Despite having very little money, my mouse friends and I popped in and out of the boozers of Camden Town and Notting Hill non-stop. I don't remember worrying for a moment about the cost. Pubs were different then, too. They had pool tables in them, you could smoke and they didn't sell food except crisps and peanuts. Now I'm in late middle age, a trip to the pub is an event; a rare treat. It's slightly scary. How much will a pint cost now? £6, £7, even £8? It's true that pubs are a bit nicer than they used to be. They have plants outside them. They serve organic pork pies and smoked trout with kohlrabi and…

My wife's sudden death after 43 years of blissfully happy marriage came as a cataclysmic shock. I was stunned, confused, hurt and left facing an enormous black hole in my life. A year later, I am still finding it difficult to come to terms with being alone instead of being half of a couple. It has been dramatically brought home to me that, without any notice, relationships can get sundered by illness or accident. It's not given to many people to know when that might happen. Few people want to think about this happening to their partner. The experience of my wife's death makes me challenge you to do so. During the last few hours of her life, she was heavily sedated and unable to communicate. I can't begin to…

The prophet Isaiah is wonderful. For years, my favourite passage has been ‘Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.’ (Isaiah 40:15) My over-imaginative and – strictly speaking – inaccurate vision of this fine dust is not the orthodox interpretation, where fine dust means something minute to the point of insignificance, so insignificant that it won't cause even the slightest trembling of the scales. I have in mind the finest – that is to say, the very best-quality – dust. The islands of Orkney illustrate this perfectly. Seen from an aeroplane coming into land on a sunny day, they look like tiny jewels set in a Homeric wine-dark sea. This idiosyncratic…

I haven't met Gyles SIR: Once every month, you remind me how glad I am not to be famous. The thought of Gyles Brandreth claiming to have met me would be too much. Martyn Davies, Arzal, France Safe in taxis SIR: Alan Judd mentions how narrow some 1930s cars were (Motoring, October issue). This reminded me of the story told me in the mid-1960s by a friend, then in her 20s. She was given a lift to some event by a young man with an elderly sports car with a short and stubby gear lever. He said to her, ‘I'm sorry, my dear, but I can't be a gentleman and change gear.’ Needless to say, the remark was taken without offence and the journey proceeded with due decorum. Yours faithfully,…

Bradley's Railway Guide By Simon Bradley Profile £30 In the 1980s, the half-mile railway bridge across the scenic estuary at Barmouth was being eaten. The culprit was Teredo navalis, the shipworm that in the 18th century forced the Royal Navy to copper-bottom the fleet. Built in 1867, Barmouth Bridge, now restored, saves travellers to Aberystwyth a detour of miles upriver via Dolgellau and is the biggest and most surprising survival of Victorian timber viaducts. Railway engineers were versatile. In the 1870s, the challenge of building a line across the clay, silt and loose rock left by glaciers high up in the Pennines called for foundations 50ft deep for the Arten Gill Viaduct on the Settle-to-Carlisle route. Of the 22 major viaducts across those moors, it is as spectacular as the…

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1814-1945 By NAM Rodger Allen Lane £40 This is the final volume of NAM Rodger's magisterial naval history of Britain. The first appeared 30 years ago and, if Rodger had written nothing else – he has in fact written much else – completion of this trilogy would justify any historian's claim to a worthwhile life's work. The point about a naval history of Britain – as opposed to a history of the Royal Navy, a relatively recent institution – is that it is fundamental to the creation and existence of the country called Britain. Had the peoples of these islands not been such enterprising seafarers, our society and culture would have been very different. We would not have fed ourselves, traded…

Noël Coward Theatre, London, until 25th January ‘Gentlemen, you can't fight in here – this is the War Room!’ Stanley Kubrick's dark, delicious Cold War satire turns 60 this year. This assured, imaginative stage version brings his apocalyptic film bang up to date. Sean Foley's production doesn't tamper with the 1960s setting. We're still in 1964, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ten years ago, it might have seemed like a quaint period piece. With Russia on the warpath again, it now feels horribly topical. Sixty years on, Kubrick's terrifying question still resonates: could a single madman trigger a nuclear war? Before I saw this play, I'd assumed that Dr Strangelove was simply too big for the stage. It features a bloody battle between the US Army and…

‘You may be wondering why I'm not giving you a present today,’ my 25-year-old son, Leo, told me at my birthday lunch. I have to admit I wasn't wondering that much. In previous years, my present has been ‘on order’ or he has piggybacked his sister's present and asked where we're going for dinner. ‘I am going to give you an experience.’ My heart sank; my stomach imploded. All I could think about was hot-air ballooning. I suffer from vertigo, or rather I have the common sense to know that the balloon will definitely burst and I will crash to earth in an Aldi car park. Panic set in. Where was my will? ‘I am taking you out to lunch at Trinity, in Clapham.’ How had this happened? How had…

I'm a bit of a bluffer. That's what I thought when I heard myself pontificate about electric vehicles (EVs). I was deploying jargon I didn't understand in the hope that my interlocutor didn't either. So I sought to make an honest man of myself by asking a non-bluffer friend to explain the EV technology I waffle on about with such fake authority. Electric motors, mechanically simple with few moving parts, generate great power and torque in relation to their size. They use magnetic fields to spin so powerfully that they in turn spin your transmission, your differential and eventually your wheels (there are no gearboxes). EVs accelerate rapidly because, unlike a combustion engine, they don't have to build up revs – maximum power and torque are instantly available on tap.…

The tree sparrow (Passer montanus) was a legendary victim of Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward plan for China, 1958-62. Among the plan's impositions was an Eight Elements Constitution to increase the annual grain harvest. One of its elements was ‘pest control’, which meant the mass mobilisation of the population to wage war on sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes. Tree sparrows are more rural birds than house sparrows, as their name indicates. In China, this proved their undoing. Mao associated them with agriculture and saw them chiefly responsible for lowering the grain supply. His slogan ‘Man must conquer nature’ (‘Ren ding sheng tian’) became the campaign's war cry. All Chinese over the age of five were enlisted. With regard to children, schools would go on the rampage with drums, firecrackers etc…

Taking a Walk I knew nothing of Titterstone Clee Hill when I realised I was passing, on a long drive. On the map, this capacious common displayed plenty of dotted green lines denoting footpaths. So it seemed like a good place to pause for a walk. As I approached, the beautifully modulated Shropshire countryside abruptly ended and I drove up a huge, unruly hill that appeared to have been splatted onto orderly English fields. Fields gave way to open moor and a lumpy, formerly quarried landscape which, at a great height, contained a rutted and miraculously free car park. Five white campervans were parked amid the puddles and gravel after a sneaky all-nighter. An empty beer bottle rolled in the breeze; wispy low cloud gathered around. The whole place was,…

One of the most exciting young bridge-players today is Zach Grossack from Boston, Massachusetts. He combines brilliant card play with a bidding style that skates very close to the bold/reckless line. Watch him bid and make six clubs on this deal from the US Mixed Trials earlier in the year. Dealer South North Vunerable (1) Would overcall 1♠ if non-vulnerable. (2) Partner's 1♣ could have been short, so supporting would be precipitate. (3) Game-forcing, so a stretch. Yes, the hand has been improved by partner's 1♦, but most would settle for 1♥. (4) Might jump to 4♣ to show the fine support for what is now known to be a real club suit opposite. (5) Showing the five-four-three shape. (6) A bit unclear and I confess I'd have bid 4♣…

An unconscious desire to escape a controlling, abusive husband propelled me to Poland in March 1984. In the Heathrow departure lounge for Gate 15 for the flight to Warsaw, a bird-like woman, with a strong Polish accent, said to me tearfully, ‘They charged me £30 for a sack of tinned food I am taking to my mother-in-law. She's dying.’ Around me, relatives, friends and those with a sense of social responsibility were bringing vital supplies in their overweight luggage. As the plane descended, grey concrete blocks of postwar Warsaw jutted out of the plain, like rectangular rocks. The squat, square airport building loomed nearer, resembling a cage. Young soldiers clad in pre-war khaki greatcoats and top boots stood at the foot of the steps, gripping rifles as the passengers descended,…

Virago, 528pp, £25 Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997 while US Ambassador to France. Her name combines her first husband, Randolph, dissolute son of Winston, and her third, American Averell Harriman, director of Lend-Lease and Democratic party eminence grise. Obituaries were scathing, often sexist. Dismissed as a social climber, her glamorous life and erotic adventures overshadowed what she did behind the scenes to shape the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Subtitled ‘Pamela Churchill Harriman's Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power’, Kingmaker is ‘supremely enjoyable’, found Clemency BurtonHill in the FT. ‘With a historian's eye for rigour, a journalist's for detail and a storyteller's for drama, Purnell is extremely persuasive. Pamela blossoms into a fascinating subject.’ Lisa Hilton, in the TLS, called her ‘mesmerically charismatic. Throughout, Kingmaker…

Chatto & Windus, 256pp, £18.99 Arriving in the West 20 years ago, Guo established herself with a series of semi-autobiographical novels. But more recently, wrote Alice O'Keeffe in the Times, she has discovered ‘a distinct voice’ in straightforward memoirs and ‘revealed herself as something much more than a novelty Chinese-British act’. The reviewer called Guo ‘uniquely determined’ in ‘documenting her quest to live life on her own terms’. Which means we now find the author in the title's East Sussex enclave, where she has bought a dilapidated little flat. Her London-based partner and nine-year-old daughter visit at weekends but her solitude “is something I have to protect and pursue, even if at the same time I suffer the disapproving gaze of other mothers”. After a preface on Hastings's significance in…

Yale, 384pp, £25 American cultural historian Simon Morrison is an inveterate scrutineer of archives, and has published re-evaluations of Sergei Prokofiev's wife, Lina, and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. This book challenges the conventional view of ‘Russia's Greatest Composer’, presenting him in a wholly new light and debunking the conspiracy theorists. ‘Tchaikovsky has long been portrayed as a melancholic and tragic figure tormented by his homosexuality,’ Dalya Alberge reminds us in the Guardian, ‘but Morrison said many of the letters to his siblings are “extremely funny and graphic, a kind of Monty Python sense of humour, talking about everything from his sexual adventures to his terrible intestinal troubles.”’ In the Times, Richard Morrison found it ‘sane, well-grounded and lucid’, marvelling at its attention to detail, as when Swan Lake ‘was…

White Rabbit, 368pp, £22 Moon Unit Zappa – as she was challengingly named when born in 1967 – is the daughter of the famously moustachioed, ‘pagan absurdist’, oddball rock star Frank Zappa and his former groupie wife, Gail. She became a stand-up comic and actor after her hit single Valley Girl, recorded by her father, lampooning the irksome, ‘grody to the max’ teen-speak of upscale LA at the time. She's finally written a riotous account of life in their impossibly bohemian and experimental family home. This book ‘frequently takes the breath from the lungs,’ felt Nick Duerden in the Guardian, ‘leaving you ‘with the conviction that Zappa's complicated clan must have been among America's most dysfunctional. But for such a thoroughly dispiriting saga it's somehow an unconscionably entertaining read with…

Apollo, 464pp, £25 Shakespeare got it wrong. As a youth, Henry was no wastrel, but a diligent student, soldier and player of court politics. As triumphant monarch against the French, he had less faith in English exceptionalism than in Almighty God. Such myth-busting, along with Jones's ‘brio and wit’, led the Guardian‘s Alexander Larman to call this new biography ‘as splendidly readable as ever, full of diverting incident and considered judgment’. Like the king himself – who could be both exceptionally cruel and exceedingly pious – the book divides into two halves: before and after coronation. Raised in the chaotic reign of Richard II, Henry had an uncertain childhood, much of it spent as a hostage against the good behaviour of his father Bolingbroke. When the latter usurped the crown,…

Allen Lane, 598pp, £35 The eminent historian Richard Evans has spent much of his working life examining Hitler's rise and fall. Were it not so long, it would be tempting to describe this book as a footnote, since much of its appeal is anecdotal. As Mary Fulbrook noted in the TLS, ‘Hitler's People is coloured by fascinating details, such as Göring's proclivity for dressing up and painting his fingernails and toenails red.’ According to Evans, Göring, together with Himmler and Goebbels, was one of Hitler's ‘Paladins’. His ‘Enforcers’ included two promoters of ‘the Final Solution’, Heydrich and Eichmann, and among his ‘Instruments’ were the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and the brasshat, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who was, says Evans, typical of the many generals who turned a blind eye to the…

Simon & Schuster, 336 pp, £22 Bill Gates ‘is the archetype of the computer nerd-turned-master of the universe, the forerunner of the generation of tech founders who now dominate the business world, said Richard Walters in the FT. Furthermore, ‘the foundation he set up with his former wife Melinda has reshaped the philanthropic landscape, matching some big governments in its spending on global health and development.’ So what's not to like? Well, says Anupreeta Das, ‘a large tear in Gates's public image has forced us to reassess the man we knew.’ He was chummy with Jason Epstein and intimate with a Microsoft staffer, a liaison that led to his divorce from Melinda and a cooling of his friendship with Warren Buffett. So powerful is the Gates foundation that few dare…

The Borough Press, 320pp, £16.99 ‘Can you honestly say, if you are a mother, that you've never even thought about it?’ asked Gaby Hinsliff in the Observer, ‘How it would feel to just walk out of the door and leave all the chaos behind, on one of those long, scratchy afternoons when it seems as if bedtime will never come? If you haven't, then perhaps this book isn't for you.’ Gómez Urzaiz compiled this collection of wayward mothers trapped during lockdown, a time that pushed many mothers close to breaking point. Some of Gómez Urzaiz's monsters are ‘jaw-dropping stories in themselves’. They include Muriel Spark, a Youtube influencer, Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, Gala Dalí and, the most ironic of all, Maria Montessori, the Italian doctor who made a career and…

Simon & Schuster UK, 416pp, £25 ‘Money is so fundamental a part of our conceptual furniture,’ wrote Felix Martin in the FT, ‘that it's hard to get an objective view: misleading metaphors, conventional misunderstandings and the surreptitious special pleading of vested interests abound. Any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity. In the wrong hands, it can degenerate into a conceptually confused and unmanageably expansive mess. McWilliams dodges these elephant traps.’ Any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity Martin attributed this ‘enjoyable and insightful addition to the bulging canon of books (on money's mysteries) partly to ‘McWilliams's unusual background. The classicallytrained economist has worked both as a central banker and on the financial markets, and is founder…

Grove Press, 304pp, £18.99 Based on intimate diaries his mother kept over 40 years, Elaine attempts to explore her interior life prior to Self's own existence. It is ‘not for the faint-hearted to write about one's mother's sex life,’ wrote Mia Letvin in the Spectator, ‘but Self is no stranger to outrageousness. We have already met versions of his mother in his fiction, but here we have a detailed portrait – her rages, frustrations, fantasies, panic attacks and extramarital affairs.’ In the mid-1950s, before Self's birth, Jewish-American housewife Elaine, married to a Cornell academic (“a milquetoast man who doesn't know how to make love properly”), lives ‘a densely frustrated life the reader intimately, even claustrophobically shares,’ wrote Sandra Newman in the Guardian. ‘The narration is close third person, infused with…

Whale thought to be Moscow spy is dead Aberdeen Press & Journal Man in bucket hat tried to access Bath film set Somerset Leveller Trams get a clean-up Sheffield Mercury £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…

WHO WERE the Dagenham Girl Pipers? The Remembrance Sunday celebration in Dagenham will see the final appearance of the Dagenham Girl Pipers after nearly a century. Recently, there has been much less interest among young girls in joining the band. The pipers were founded in 1930 by the Rev Joseph Waddington Graves, Minister of Dagenham's Osborne Hall congregational church. The band members were only young girls at school (average age 14), at a time when playing the pipes was a male-dominated pastime. The first performance was for the girls’ families. But along came the press, local and national, including a film crew, for cinema newsreels. Their fame began to spread. Within two years, the band were the stars of the Lord Mayor of London's show, performing before huge crowds. By…

Clarissa Avon (or Eden) is best remembered for her line about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room. It is a line she regretted, not least because the phrase ‘drawing room’ made her look remote. There was so much more to her. No other Prime Ministers’ wives knew Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau. In her early life, her friends were some of the most interesting figures of the age – James Pope-Hennessy, Duff Cooper, Isaiah Berlin, Cecil Beaton and Lucian Freud. The list goes on. My own friendship with her was unlikely. I never knew why it worked, but it did – for over 40 years. I certainly respected her and I believe I understood her. She was an intellectual: she had studied philosophy with Isaiah Berlin, Tony Peck…

Oldie Man of Letters Authors will stoop to any low trick to promote their own wares. So, having written a book about Goethe, who completed his Faust when he was well over 80, I shamelessly used this column to suggest that many of the greatest works of art – Goethe's Faust, Verdi's Falstaff, Titian's Flaying of Marsyas – were composed by ancients. My words were used by a relatively juvenile peer, the historian Andrew Roberts, speaking in the Lords, to justify the continued presence there of the superannuated old bores aged 80 and over. We all know, however, that giants like Goethe and Titian are the exception, and that most of us are past our best by the age of 50. Maurice Bowra's advice to undergraduates, ‘Don't waste your time…

Fifty years ago, I worked in a Soho bank, and I fondly recall many things. There was the bookmaker who drew wads of notes from his underpants when paying in. Pity the poor girl cashier. The same bookmaker once arrived home to find his wife on her knees, with two men pointing sawn-off shotguns at her head. ‘Open the safe,’ they shouted, ‘or we'll blow her f***ing head off!’ ‘Do what you like,’ he replied. ‘I've been wanting to do that for f***king years. I'm going to the pub.’ Other memories include staff arriving at our neighbouring branch to find a gentleman nailed through his hands to their back door. Then there was the Foreign Clerk enjoying reading, fairly loudly, the inventory of various ‘interesting’ items, imported by a customer who…

Country Mouse I have been charged with organising the order of service for a forthcoming funeral. It's a task that has forced me to concentrate the mind – and by so doing has thrown me into confusion. The departed one was a committed atheist and there are so many aspects of conventional religious ceremonies that I have enjoyed in life and instinctively want to include. As a child and young man, when chapel was compulsory at my boarding schools, I responded to the language, aspects of the liturgy, the psalms, certain hymns, the music and particularly anthems sung by choirs. We used to be bussed off from my prep school to traditional Welsh male-voice choir performances – you couldn't help but be moved. I have always been attracted to sacred…

My mother had a marvellous talent for mishandling money – mine. Judy Garland Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. Pablo Picasso Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast. Marlene Dietrich Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring. Hilaire Belloc I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I refuel. Audrey Hepburn Two of the saddest words in the English language are, ‘What party?’ And LA is the ‘What party?’ capital of the world. Carrie Fisher The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them. Thomas Jefferson You entertain people…

Julia Rausing, philanthropist and Christie's art expert, was remembered at St James's, Piccadilly. The Rev Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James's, presided. The Countess of Derby read from Ecclesiastes 3:1-11: ‘For everything there is a season.’ Lucy Hervey-Bathurst read 1 Corinthians: 13: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels.’ Nick White recalled working alongside her in the Old Masters Department at Christie's. Orlando Fraser KC, Chairman of the Charity Commission, saluted Julia's work with the Julia Rausing Trust, set up by Julia and her husband, Hans Rausing, an heir to the Tetra Pak fortune. The Grinling Gibbons organ case at St James's was restored by the trust. In his address, Lord Reay quoted from William Blake, in describing the love between Hans and Julia Rausing: ‘Love…

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough Macmillan £25 Can there really be anything new left to say about Elvis Presley? I'm not talking just about the inevitable biopics and dodgy stage tributes. Since Elvis terminally left the building in 1977, we've also had the written thoughts of his ex-wife Priscilla, a shelfful of gossipy books by former girlfriends and bodyguards, and the growing number of highbrow studies attempting to place the King in his proper historical context. The latest entrant to the overcrowded field of Elivis biographies is this memoir by Elvis's only child, Lisa Marie Presley. It's tainted by a certain amount of grief from the start. The author herself died in January 2023, aged 54, owing to weightloss-surgery complications. She…

Unleashed By Boris Johnson William Collins £30 History might have been different had Boris Johnson, in the late 1980s, joined us on the Daily Telegraph‘s diary column rather than joining the leader-writers. At the paper's new offices on the Isle of Dogs, the leader-writing department was separated from the diary by a few rubber plants. Boris arrived after his expulsion from the Times. Sackings being commonplace in those days, little shame was attached to that. Yet, through the pot-plant jungle, I would see Boris at his keyboard looking forlorn, gripping his head like some beachball. Attempts to lure him to the pub for lunch were never successful, for he was not much of a boozer. Leader-writers are solipsists. They fall prey to theories and a belief that intractable problems can…

We oldies know we're back in our time whenever programmes begin ‘It was 50 years ago today…’ And they bring on old rockers such as Mark Knopfler and Bryan Ferry, old folkie Shirley Collins or brainbox Dr Jacob Bronowski. Déjà vu guaranteed. Knopfler said he'd listened so intently to Listen with Mother and Children's Favourites that he could sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer ‘all the way through’ at 18 months. Bryan Ferry, 79, grew up (with a paper round) near Knopfler in County Durham. Then we had The Lucan Obsession, a true-crime series by Alex von Tunzelmann about Lucan's frenzied attack on the nanny, Sandra Rivett, in 1974. It was witnessed by his wife, who apparently said, ‘Don't you dare touch my pearls.’ And more déjà vu: the Profumo…

Van Morrison used to have a house in leafy west London. Some locals called him ‘the hermit of Holland Park’. On the rare occasions he ventured out alone, he always had a mobile clamped to his ear to avoid having to talk to anyone and, more importantly, to sidestep the scourge of celebrity at the time: the loitering and over-persistent autograph-hunter. Rod Stewart's ruse was to wear shades when he set foot outdoors so he never made eye contact and so couldn't be accused of ignoring people. Paul McCartney devised his famous thumbs-up, so he could walk at a brisk, purposeful clip as if desperately late for something – without stopping, lest a scrum might form – while leaving any onlooker with a warm sense of digitally dispensed goodwill. Dallas…

I was rather confused when I bought a small plant of mace in the local market. It had thin, serrated leaves and small, creamy, daisy-like flowers. Surely this could not produce the spice called mace which, when ground, is available in a jar? Perhaps it was naive of me to think this pungent spice could be grown in my kitchen garden. But I'm looking forward to enjoying, next year, a new herb – which I now learn is known as English mace (not to be confused with the marigold called sweet mace). It is still in the pot in which I bought it and, though a hardy perennial, will be over-wintered in the unheated greenhouse. In spring, I intend to plant it outside in well-drained soil; I expect the foliage…

The strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, grows happily in many parts of Europe. It graces gardens and hillsides from Ireland to Turkey, it is prominently portrayed in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, and its spiky red fruits make jolly good jam. In the Algarve, those same fruits also make a particularly potent firewater. Called medronho, it weighs in at around 50% ABV and is best served very cold in a small shot glass. It has both a faintly floral whiff of pear and a bittersweet flavour that lingers happily on the palate, especially after dinner with a viscous little black coffee: uma bica, as they say in Lisbon. That is exactly how I tried it at Marisqueira Rui, a fabulous seafood restaurant in the historic…

IN COMPETITION No 312 you were invited to write a poem called An Unfinished Book. Ian D Morrison summed up his disillusionment with one hyped volume: ‘Unlike Charlie Dickens’ Drood/ Or Frankie Schubert's catchy score/ That left consumers wanting more/ This tale is just a thorough bore.’ Paul Holland began intriguingly: ‘I read The Hunting of the Snark when I don't know what to do.’ Quite a few competitors took the volume to be life's book. No harm in that. As for poetic form, I must say that I welcome rhyme – which may make composition harder, perhaps, but achieves rewards if done successfully. Certainly if a poem lacks metre, it can be a bit of a puddle. Commiserations to Jenny Lumley, John Mattock, Bob Morrow, G M Southgate, Mike…

Ask Virginia Money's a boring present Q How long do I have to go on giving my grandchildren presents at Christmas and for their birthdays? They are 20 and 21 and one of them even has a Saturday job. I used to give them £100 each year. It now seems rather unnecessary. I love them so much, but just doling out money to them every year seems a bit mad. What do you think is the answer? Ann Denton, Edinburgh A If I were you, I'd change the scenario. I'd ask them (and their partners, if they have them) for a simple local supper. Now it may well be that if you took them out, with wine and all, the supper might cost more than £100 each, in which case…

Faber & Faber, 768pp, £25 Nicholas Jenkins's monumental study of the first three decades of Auden's life – in which he argues that Auden was a writer deeply shaped by the Great War and preoccupied with what it would mean to be an English national poet – was blurbed by the great Auden scholar Edward Mendelson as representing a ‘Copernican revolution’ in our understanding of the poet. Some reviewers found more in it to admire than enjoy. In the Times, James Marriott found it ‘intimidatingly conscientious’ – and complained that the ‘boyish Auden — charismatic, whimsical, selfdelightingly virtuosic — is too little in evidence’. Jenkins's revisionism was ‘meticulous’ but ‘unconvincing’. ‘Jenkins's conception of Auden as “a traumatised poet haunted by war and suffering” is at odds with the poetry and…

CENTURY, £25, 384pp Hollywood legend Pacino is three when this memoir begins. With an absentee father and an alcoholic mother who required electro-therapy and eventually died of an overdose, his early years were bleak. ‘Pacino's account of New York's postwar mean streets is startlingly cinematic,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian. ‘He introduces us to his gang of little toughs, kids called Cliffy, Bruce and Petey who bunk off school to play in the derelict allotments or fish in open sewers for anything shiny’ to sell for a dime’. Later, he ‘learns his trade in off-off-off Broadway, sometimes earning a favourable mention, but just as often a stinker. He is both a fish out of water and an absolute star’, although in the book's second half he ‘spends more time…

Head of Zeus, 480pp, £30 ‘The cello is the most obviously carnal of musical instruments,’ said Kathryn Hughes in the Times. ‘It is the cello's capacity to live materially and biographically that Kate Kennedy explores in this strikingly original book. She organises her account around four European cellists in the 19th and 20th centuries whose difficult and dangerous lives extended far beyond the good manners of the concert hall.’ They were Lise Cristiani – ‘the Jacqueline du Pré of the Victorian period’; ‘the Hungarian Pál Hermann, a brilliant performer and composer’, sent to Drancy in 1944; and Amedeo Baldovino, ‘owner of the “Mara” Stradivarius that was shattered when the musicians were shipwrecked in 1963 during a tour of South America’. ‘Kennedy's most harrowing account concerns Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a talented young…

Faber & Faber, 994pp, £30 Joe Boyd produced the early Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, R.E.M and the Incredible String Band among many others, going on to launch the Hannibal label, specialising in world music. In 2007 he wrote White Bicycles about his pioneering days in the 60s. This epic work is the refreshingly lightly written story of how centuries-old global music is fundamental to how today's world sounds, and comes with an illuminating Spotify playlist. ‘Inasmuch as music is an expression of the human world – our aspirations, tribulations and celebrations – this is a history of that world, told through music,’ thought Ed Vulliamy in the Guardian. ‘Music is, by definition, ‘sans frontières’ and the book explores how rhythms, scales and melodies flowed across the globe, constantly…

AllenLane, £35, 688pp Richard II was just ten when he ascended to the throne in 1377. ‘A child king comes to power without the apprenticeship of a king-inwaiting,’ explained Jonathan Sumption in Literary Review. ‘He is surrounded from his earliest years by the incense of monarchy, which can turn even the most level of heads. Confronted by the challenges of ruling over experienced older men, he depends on intimates and favourites to give him reassurance and support. It's hardly surprising that Richard grew up a neurotic and unstable narcissist with exalted ideas of his own status and powers.’ He alienated many of his most powerful nobles, several of whom ‘were executed or exiled and their estates forfeited’. Henry IV's problem was different. He returned from exile to usurp the throne,…

Bantam, 432pp, £25 Operation Market Garden, or the Battle of Arnhem, twice immortalised in film as Theirs is the Glory and A Bridge too Far, was a daring attempt to secure a Rhine bridgehead and end the war before Christmas 1944. Arnhem, spawning myriad books, notably Antony Beevor's, invariably written with unerring hindsight, was destined to fail. But the men fighting didn't know that that was their fate. For comedian Al Murray it has become a personal obsession. His book offers a ‘very different perspective on the battle, by writing as if without the benefit of hindsight,’ heralded Caroline Sanderson in the Bookseller. It chronicles a single day – Tuesday 19 September, the “most catastrophic 24 hours faced by the British military during the Second World War”. Best known for…

Atlantic Books, £22, 384pp In his Observer review, former Tory MP Dominic Grieve noted that ‘49 days [in Number 10] provides rather thin material for a book, as does any account of the steps that got her there. Truss's personal background and prior political career are covered quickly, in about 12 pages out of 330. Seldon identifies her core belief as being ‘free market liberalism with a deep suspicion of entrenched vested interests.’ Her ‘downfall was the result of the big policy failure of her mini budget, the resulting loss of any reputation for economic competence, a humiliating U-turn in having to appoint Jeremy Hunt chancellor and ditch her plans for growth, and the resulting collapse in confidence – such as it was – among her MPs.’ ‘Seldon writes very…

Allen Lane, 512pp, £30 In Mother State, Helen Charman takes the concept of motherhood and levels it up. Motherhood is no longer about the individual, nor is it simply about her rights and struggles as a mother to be perceived as equal. For Charman, the time has come to view motherhood as a political state. She makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s. In her ‘provocative and wideranging study of “motherhood” in all its iterations’, wrote Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian, Charman studies motherhood's relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years. “Nurture, care, the creation of human life… have more to do with…

Haus Publishing, 368pp, £22 The contention of these collected essays? That without achieving highest office, Bevan, Jenkins, Benn, Joseph, Powell and Farage transformed Britain more than most prime ministers. In the Sunday Times, Max Hastings applauded Bogdanor's ‘devastating judgment’ on his old friend ‘Woy’ [Roy Jenkins], ‘he was perhaps the last really literate and civilised member the House has seen’, while also commending the author's ‘cool objectivity about his chosen subjects, which some of us, who knew the monsters among them, could not match’. Two are best remembered for legislation. (Nye Bevan created the NHS – ‘much of the developed world provides better healthcare’ – and Jenkins was ‘a great liberalising home secretary’.) Three got into Cabinet, but were strongest in debate and forming policy. (Powell and Joseph were architects…

Hutchinson Heinemann, 400pp, £20 The American's Booker-longlisted, 14th novel ‘travels across time and space, covering AI, human drama and scuba-diving in typically fitful style,’ wrote the Telegraph‘s Susie Mesure. Classic Powers, the ideas are ‘big, the writing overdone,’ combining the ‘wonder of an Attenborough series with the imagination of a J J Abrams drama – even if from a craft perspective, it's imperfect.’ After a brief creation myth, Powers fast-forwards to 2027 and three interlocking narratives: Todd, billionaire inventor of social-media platform Playground; Evie an oceanographer; Ina and husband Rafi, raising adopted children on Polynesian Makatea. In the Guardian, Xan Brooks identified ‘themes of transformation, loss and regeneration’ in this ‘deep dive of a novel that almost caves under the weight of its ambitions.’ For the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles…

Harvill Secker, 224pp, £14.99 The author was born in Manchester but has lived in Italy since 1981. He has written some 20 novels, including Europa, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1997. He has also published many non-fiction works including The Hero's Way, Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna in 2021. In the Telegraph, Susie Mesure set the scene: ‘“Mr Geography” is Daniel Burrow, a geography teacher who's newly retired and embarking on a 220-mile walk from Konstanz, in the German-Swiss borderlands, to Como, in Italy.’ Daniel is retracing a route he started with Julia Ingram, a married professor with whom he had been having an affair, and who is now dead: ‘I decided to complete the walk we only began.’ Mesure thought that Parks wrote with…