Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i The Oldie

Judith Keppel (p14) was the first person to win a million pounds on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, in 2000. She was on quiz show Eggheads from 2003 until 2022. John McEwen (p20 and p81) is The Oldie's Bird of the Month correspondent. Former art critic of the Sunday Telegraph, he is author of Swoop Sing Perch Paddle, illustrated by Carry Akroyd. David Ekserdjian (p57) is Emeritus Professor of Art and Film History at Leicester University. His books include Correggio, Parmigianino and The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece. Paul Cartledge (p59) was Professor of Greek Culture and Greek History at Cambridge University. He is author of Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece and The Spartans.…

Our much-loved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy's wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism. What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 28 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 24th November 2025. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.…

It is peculiar, is it not, how long-dormant memories suddenly erupt for no discernible reason? The workings of the subconscious tending to the impenetrably opaque, I've no clue what reignited this one. But, whatever the reason, a longforgotten encounter has lately been flashing vibrantly back to mind. Several years before the pandemic, a dinner party in central London was richly enlivened by a latecomer. The hostess had explained the empty chair by reference to a friend unable to join us until 10.30pm. Even as the clock chimed the half-hour, in bustled a woman of middling years with the gait, aura and haphazard enthusiasm of a Labrador puppy. She seemed a jolly, engaging kind of person, if not necessarily one likely to be given a permanent berth at the All Souls…

I was recently surprised to receive a mildly abusive email from X, an artist friend (possibly now an ex-friend). He said, ‘You are more transparent than you imagine and more readable than you believe.’ It was bad luck for X that a lifetime of receiving highly articulate put-downs has made me almost immune to uncomplimentary observations. I take them as accolades. I took huge pleasure in responding: Dear X There is a certain irony that, in my 74th year, I am still receiving letters commenting on my character, or lack of it. So forgive me when I say that your email yesterday made me laugh out loud – in particular your attempts to question what little integrity I still possess. I am so used to criticism and articulate put-downs that…

I had no idea what a nightmare downsizing would become at the age of 83. It took me more than a year after my wife's death to decide to move to a smaller house. It was a tough, emotional decision because of the fond memories held by the place we shared for so long. Everywhere I look, there is something to remind me of her. Having recently retired – a miserable experience – I know it makes financial sense to move into a smaller and more energy-efficient bungalow. And I have come to the conclusion that if I'm going to move on with my life after becoming a widower, I need to escape from the 20 years of memories my wife and I built together in my current home. ‘It…

First let's address the issue of growth direction. Some 12 per cent of Britons have eyebrows growing in an unhelpful trajectory. To illustrate, think of the late Denis Healey. Imagine the abundance of Healey's eyebrows. It will help to illustrate what can go wrong when eyebrows grow straight out of the head in the same direction as the nose, rather than along the brow line towards the ears. In Healey's case, the eyebrows went untamed throughout his 40-year political career and at one stage even became ‘handlebar’ eyebrows (as in Jimmy Edwards/ Norman Parkinson handlebar moustaches). Looking back at the lack of vanity of this dedicated public servant from the perspective of today's Ozempic-taking, teeth-whitening, spineless sissies and shafting parliamentarians, war hero Healey seems a giant of a man. But…

I'm not normally one for virtue-signalling or humblebragging. But let me say it out loud – I feel very saintly today. Roles are reversed. I am now pushing Mother around, albeit that she's in a wheelchair, not a pushchair. I am practising very muscular Christianity – the High Street is full of crackedpavement peril for the pro-am pusher. I try to reassure Mother with a gentle ‘Remember, I'm right behind you, at your shoulder. You want to stop, go right or left – just let me know. Just think of me as your St Christopher.’ She grumbles back, ‘St Christopher wouldn't take those bloody kerbs the way you do.’ I'm a bit deaf. So we're halfway down the street before I realise that for yonks she's been yelling, ‘I said,…

A small boy, dressed in a blue silk suit and breeches, stands on a cushioned footstool at a table. He is raised level with the eyes of the man seated on the other side, who leans forward and looks straight at him, chin resting on his crossed hands, with an air of earnest kindness. But the boy's pose – arms linked behind his back, as he stands almost to attention – and the attitudes of the other people in the room – looming or slouching armed soldiers, bloodless clerks, two anxious women and a weeping girl – tell us that this is an interrogation. So too does the title of this painting, William Frederick Yeames's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, an imagined scene of hard-nosed, devious Roundheads…

The Rev Canon Dr Giles Fraser, of St Anne's, Kew, officiated at the memorial service for actor Ray Brooks. Ray Brooks starred in The Knack (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966) and Big Deal (1984-6). The King of the Voice-Overs, he was the voice of Mr Benn. He appeared, too, in Coronation Street, EastEnders and Carry On Abroad (1972). Michael Kilgarriff, his friend and fellow actor, recalled a New York Times review of Brooks in The Knack, praising his ‘disrobing voice’. Kilgarriff read out a condolence letter from Ken Loach, director of Cathy Come Home. Ray was a ‘generous and truthful actor’, said Loach, and ‘His performance was central to the success of the film.’ Tom Brooks, his son, recalled Ray's Brighton upbringing and his 1947 elocution lessons: his report said…

I was never sent up a chimney but I was, at 14, stuffed inside a steaming pigswill cooker. Every weekend I'd be up at five, drag on my stinking jeans – Mum made me dress in the garden – and cycle to a farm. First, mucking out. ‘Persuade’ the pigs out of their beds with a broom, then fork out the bedding. Dry sties are easily cleaned but if one pig starts micturating inside, then they all will and the pens become gas chambers. Fork the solid matter into the dumper and squeegee out the wet. Steal a five-minute break while the pigs nibble at your boots. Smiling assassins – if you sit there long enough, they'll eat you. If they escape, you have to catch the muscly rascals. As…

From the Castle to the Hove-l By Nicholas Lezard Salt £10.99 Nicholas Lezard has sustained a feat rare in the annals of literary journalism: writing a weekly column about his own life that isn't either irritatingly banal or infuriatingly egocentric. For more than a decade, he has been lighting up the back pages of the New Statesman with missives that are razor-sharp in observation and richly comic in incident, growing out of his sorry plight as a middle-aged writer, estranged from his wife and eking out an existence at a level once described by Theresa May as ‘just about managing’. This is his third collection, running from 2017 to the outbreak of Covid three years later. The columns have been assembled chronologically and they develop into a novelistic narrative, with…

Trendy hamburgers Hamburgers have recently got completely out of control, particularly in height. Kebab skewers are meant for kebabs, which are rightfully served horizontally on a plate, so you can slide the meat off with a fork. They shouldn't be used to keep the skyscraper of burger ingredients upright, just for the exact amount of time it takes to teeter from the kitchen to your table, before you collapse and take someone's eye out. Soon the altitude of your lunch will mean it's brought to you on a trolley pulled across the floor, just so you can view the top before attempting to scale it with a mountaineer's pickaxe. Unless you have a giant's hand span, these burgers are impossible to pick up. Instead, you need to grip the skewer and…

‘The Clash,’ the New Musical Express bellowed in 1976, ‘are the sort of garage band who should be speedily returned to the garage, preferably with the motor running.’ I remember being stunned by this. Imagine them reading it! They'd probably just pack it in and get a proper job. They didn't. But the NME was brimming with that kind of bile. It's far easier to be funny when vitriolic, and half the thrill of the knockabout music press back then was the shameful, toecurling pleasure of a jarring dismissal. Who can forget Creem magazine suggesting the singer of Black Oak Arkansas was ‘obnoxious’ and ‘should be assassinated’? Or the Village Voice two-word tilt on George Harrison's Dark Horse – ‘hoarse dork’? Rolling Stone's one-to-five rating couldn't encompass Andrew Ridgeley's first…

If there was one meal that prisoners of war, coming back from Germany in 1945, never wanted to be given again, it was probably a stew or soup made from kohlrabi. This was the staple vegetable mentioned by many prisoners in their memoirs as tasting of wood and barely edible. The name is German – Kohl, cabbage - and the Bundestag chose a Kohl as their Chancellor in the 1980s. The rabi is from the German Rübe meaning turnip, though it was first recorded in Italy in the 16th century, when it was called something else. This curious vegetable, with a swollen stem growing above ground, is not a true root vegetable. It is spherical, with leaf stalks sprouting from the bulb, and has been likened to a Sputnik satellite.…

This month marks the 30th anniversary of my first drinks column, for the launch issue of a long-defunct food-and-drink magazine. It was a list of recommendations of wines for less than £3. That, as you might recall, was in 1995 quite a lot of money: according to the Bank of England's website, it is the equivalent of £6.20 today. I wrote about a Bulgarian Chardonnay Sauvignon from Kwik Save; a French red called Le Midi from Victoria Wine; and another French red, Domaine St Pierre, from M&S. In the intervening three decades, much has changed in the drinks world, and not just the prices. One notable phenomenon has been the inexorable rise of ‘celebrity’ brands. Stars of the entertainment world (Kylie Minogue, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Beyoncé, Idris Elba and,…

What are we to make of the plan to issue digital identity cards to everyone? I sincerely doubt it will ever happen. It's been tried before, along with other similar grand computer schemes, and many of them have come to grief. The elderly lady I overheard in a shop saying she didn't want the government knowing her every move may have been expressing a fairly commonly-held view. I do worry about privacy. I don't really see why the NHS, HMRC, DVLA and county councils, for example, should be able to link their databases. Whatever safeguards are put in place, be in no doubt that, once a government department has the ability to snoop around, sooner or later they will do it, especially if it can be done at the click…

The brent goose (Branta bernicla) is the smallest and most marine of geese. There are seven types of brent, two of which migrate to the UK. Commonest is the dark-breaSted (bernicla), which breeds in Siberia and winters in Western Europe. In the UK, it is largely restricted to coastal east and south England. The paler-breasted (Branta bernicla hrota) breeds in Canada, Greenland and Svalbard (Spitsbergen) and predominates in Ireland. Svalbard birds can also come via Denmark to Northumberland, especially Lindisfarne, and east-coast Scotland. Unlike grey geese (greylag, pink-footed etc), which fly in V-shaped skeins, brents fly in bunched or ragged groups. The British visitors (around 105,000) start arriving in late October and early November. Zostera, a type of eel grass, is their favourite food, confining them to tidal sand, mud…

Is there anything you can't leave home without? I hope I could leave home just as I'm standing. I lost all my belongings when I came to Britain on the Kindertransport, aged six. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Southern Austria, and when the Nazis took over, we went to Hungary. I was taken once to the seaside in Britain, and I was terrified because I'd never seen the sea before. What are your early memories of Prague? Seeing my uncles and aunts, Wenceslas Square, the tennis courts being turned into ice rinks in winter and at school. When the Germans occupied Prague, we had to tear down the picture of the Czech President Beneš and stick in Hitler, and there were German soldiers everywhere doing their Heil Hitlers.…

Your December challenge is to make 4 ♥ after West cashes the ace-king of spades and switches at trick three to a trump. The Polish declarer drew two rounds of trumps finishing in dummy, then led a club to the king. West won the ace and returned his second club. Declarer won dummy's queen-knave but, with the ten not falling, had to try the diamond finesse. He ran the queen but, all too predictably, West won the king. One down. The Poles are really good at bridge (I mean really) but this performance was, dare I say it, a tad unpolished. Watch Barry Noble of Australia make a small but crucial improvement. Noble drew two rounds of trumps finishing in his hand, then led the two of clubs towards dummy…

The countdown has begun. The carol service at my local church kickstarts the season in early December, prodding me to donate to charity and scurry in search of a door wreath and stocking fillers. I'm looking for a traditional Advent calendar - and find instead countless beautiful, contemporary ones, concealing mini-gifts, from chocolates to beauty to beauty products. I'm already planning how to decorate niy new flat and what to cook on the day. Hread sauce for the turkey. Goose fat for the spuds. Mince pies, proper old-fashioned plum pudding and brandy butter. I'll soon be seeking out my mother's embroidered tablecloth, counting my wineglasses and plates, polishing my silver and thinking about what coloured candles to buy. As per family tradition. I'll go with my daughters to choose the…

At the Henley Literary Festival, Mary Beard, discussing her book Emperor of Rome, was asked if she would have liked to have lived in Ancient Rome. ‘Things are much better today, particularly for a woman like me,’ she said. ‘In the last century, my mother was laughed at for wanting to be an engineer. ‘So I'd like to go to Rome - but only with a return ticket.’ It brings back memories of Philip Larkin being asked if he'd like to go to China. He said, ‘I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.’ Mary Beard also discussed the new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn of The Odyssey. Mendelsohn translates Odysseus's epithet - polutropos - as ‘roundabout’. It has previously been translated as ‘of many turns’…

In Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China (Collins, £25), Jung Chang picks up the threads of her bestseller Wild Swans, describing how she came to pursue a life as a writer in the West, and how China then responds to her success. Sebastian Faulks's Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20) offers a snapshot from his post-war childhood and Fleet Street to celebrated novelist. Queen Elizabeth II by David Cannadine (OUP, £12.99), billed as A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign, is just that at 192 pages: a brief yet impressively rich and vivid biography. Margaret Atwood's long-awaited Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Chatto & Windus, £30) charts the author's life from the forests of Quebec via 1980s Berlin and major political turning…

Summit Books, 560pp, £30 ‘Of all modern Greek poets,’ wrote Maria Margaronis in Literary Review, ‘Constantine Cavafy [1863-1933] is the one most deeply immersed in the stream of world literature, absorbing influences from Robert Browning to Baudelaire and Poe and shaping the sensibilities of later poets like W H Auden, James Merrill and Robert Hass … ‘The biography is thematic rather than chronological, approaching the poet obliquely, as you might a wary cat, exploring the worlds he inhabited as a way into his mind.’ In the Guardian Michael Nott though this a ‘deeply researched and engaging’ biography (the first for 50 years) that ‘brilliantly recreates his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigates his place within it.’ During Cavafy's lifetime, Peter Parker in the Spectator…

Polity, 336pp, £25 Is ours a golden age of stupidity? Narcissistic politicians, mindless voters, influencers, conspiracy theories and dismissals of science? From ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, Jeffries examines the growth of stupidity but also casts a sceptical eye over attempts to root it out – such as IQ tests, eugenics, gene editing, and racist education policies – finding them stupider than the problem they were devised to eradicate. Julian Baggini in Literary Review noted that ‘when Jeffries asks in the first chapter, “What is stupidity?’” we await an illuminating answer. He concludes, however, that it is a fuzzy concept that only the foolish try to sharpen. The result is that the book's subject remains amorphous throughout.’ But, Baggini conceded, he ‘treats idiocy with humour, intelligence and (relative) brevity.’ In…

Headline Press, 432pp, £25 The veteran royal correspondent Valentine Low's new book takes a long view of the relationship between the monarchy and the elected government, asking how the palace has wielded and benefited from political influence over the last two centuries. In the Evening Standard, Robert Jobson judged it to be ‘brisk, clear, never reverential’ book which told a story whose basic arc was of the monarchy's ‘slow retreat from political influence’. In Literary Review Robert Hazell called it a ‘serious and nuanced analysis which is also a rollicking read’. However, in the Spectator Tessa Dunlop was pleased this wasn't just a work of sober constitutional analysis: ‘I waded through tranches of 19th-century history in the knowledge that Low's gilt-edged gossip would not eventually disappoint.’ We learn that that…

Oneworld, 298pp, £18.99 The proposed high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham (and, originally, beyond) has cost us all dear, with little to show for it. ‘This is a story of equal-opportunities failure to which every part of the British establishment has contributed,’ wrote David Leeder, a transport industry professional in Literary Review. ‘It tells us much about the wider state of the country's governance structures, leadership class and politics. ‘Gimson's book features all the ghastly types who have played a part in the decline of Britain's economy over the last 30 years, from ineffectual civil servants, MPs who think they are local councillors, human rights lawyers, sock-puppet lobbyists and quangos to rapacious suppliers who can't believe the perverse incentives baked into the system.’ Leeder recommended reading ‘with a stiff…

If I could be a fly on any wall in literature, I'd choose the cabin of a Colombian riverboat in the mid 1920's. On the 7th of July at 6pm, a woman of 72 and man of 78 ascend a gangplank to begin one of the greatest adventures in modern fiction. The man is Florentino Ariza, president of the Caribbean Riverboat Company. The woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza. She has earache. He is bald and lame. Their journey upriver holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of an amor interruptus spanning half a century. There are stories, like journeys, you never want to end, and Love in the Time of Cholera is one of those rare novels that become an enduring part of your life,…

Picador, 141pp, £12.99 After arguing with her husband, Miquel's mother leaves their Pyrenean home, never to return. With his brother away on military service and his father ostracised by the townspeople, Miquel and his father must fend for themselves, battling their mutual resentment through a long winter. As Miquel faces up to his mother's absence, orphaned Manolo arrives from the next village to help out, offering the promise of new love and another kind of life. In the Guardian Clare Clark praised this ‘most striking example of Tóibín's emotional control’ as an ‘eloquent expression of the bond between a mother and son,’ describing Tóibín as ‘the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity … the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for.’ A superbly powerful tale…

It is a truth universally acknowledged by the annual Women's Prize for Fiction that men don't – or at least didn't until recently – read novels by women. The prize, which celebrates its 30th this year, is a valuable antidote, shining a spotlight on the best of women's writing, proving it can be literary as well as popular. If arguably the finest novels in English since 1900 have been written by the Irish and the Americans, so some of the best authors writing today are defiantly not men: think Rooney, Shafak, Roy, Harvey, Alderman, Burns, Evaristo, Kingsolver, Strout and Smiths from Ali to Zadie, not to mention the late-lamented Mantel. So here are some of the best to watch out for this winter. One of Us (Fourth Estate, 352pp, £18.99),…

Forget Where's Spot? as board books become increasingly highbrow. This year's precocious toddler will be reading Ingela P Arrenhius's Where's Jane Austen? (Nosy Crow, 10pp, £6.99), in which we meet Shakespeare (‘Here he is!’) and Dickens, before finding the elusive Miss Austen hiding under a felt flap. And Oh Dear, Look What I Got! (Walker, 40pp, £12.99) is a joyful new picture book by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury of We're All Going on a Bear Hunt. In another masterpiece of understated surrealism, they tell the story of a boy whose shopping trip goes counter to plan: ‘I went to the shop to get me a carrot. Oh dear, they gave me … a parrot!’ Don't miss A Good Night's Sleep (Harper Collins, 32pp, £7.99) by Emma Chichester Clark, in…

Thames & Hudson, 360pp, £40 Launched in London 1933, the Artists’ International Association united traditional and modernist artists in supporting the radical left against fascism and authoritarianism. It is a story ‘of collision – of art and politics, of aesthetics, of warring parties, and of unity,’ wrote Millen Brown Ewens in Elephant. ‘Despite the archival thinness left by their deliberate destruction of records after Dunkirk, Friend captures the striking prescience of the group's early work some 90 years on.’ In the TLS Charles Darwent found Friend tells the story ‘dispassionately and with clarity: a triumph, given the subject's organisational and moral complexities. It also reintroduces artists who … tend to have faded from history: [Cliff] Rowe and [Peggy] Angus both deserve to be better known’. Stephen Smith in the Observer…

Allen Lane, 416pp, £30 The art historian ‘claims to have made startling, even revelatory discoveries about Vermeer's work and life’, wrote Evgenia Siokos in the Telegraph. ‘With the skill of a good showman, and the meticulousness of a scholar, he takes us back into the Dutch Golden Age.’ As Paul Abels of Leiden University noted, the author has made clear that Vermeer's paintings were not simply atmospheric genre pieces, but coded works with a deeply religious meaning. In the Observer Vanessa Thorpe thought Graham-Dixon's ‘detective work hinges on the faith of the painter's close circle of patrons, neighbours and benefactors, all members of a persecuted religious group who can at last step out of the shadows. ‘The new information also allows Graham-Dixon to set out a persuasive case for naming…

WHAT WERE polyfotos? Polyfotos existed from the 1930s to the mid-1960s. At their height, there were an impressive number of polyfoto studios around the country. There were ten in London, including one at Selfridges and one at the Army & Navy Stores. Across the country, there were too many to count, from Bangor (Kinistil Photos) to York (Timothy Whites), from Edinburgh (Binns in Princes Street) to Belfast (Robinson & Cleaver). The sitter was placed against a plain, neutral background. The camera, with its single glass plate measuring 5 by 7 inches, was operated by the photographer using a hand crank. On the walls, but out of view of the camera, would be various props, such as a pen or plastic flowers, and images, which the photographer used to direct the…

The Iris Murdoch industry goes on. Whereas many of her contemporaries have already passed into oblivion (does anyone under 40 now read Kingsley Amis?), Iris (1919-99) is still read, and studied by the young. Miles Leeson and Ann Rowe – Professors of Murdochology – have been rummaging in the novelist's attic in Oxford, and found a cache of her poems, some of them celebrating the beauty of nature, but most of them sobbing with love for one girl, or bloke, after another. Leeson and Rowe have done much to keep Iris's memory green and they have been kindly custodians of her flame. No one could accuse them of stirring malice or gossip. But, yet again, those of us who knew Iris have a strange feeling of the ground sinking beneath…

I've spent nearly all my long life longing to lose a stone. I doubt there is a potion or a regime I haven't tried. Remember Limmits, the little biscuits, each 100 calories? You ate twelve of them a day, instead of everything else. Then there were slimming drinks, WeightWatchers unsatisfying ready meals, and some amazing pills called Nobese which were rapidly banned. And all sorts of diets: the drinking man's diet, the banana-and-milk diet, the grapefruit diet, the milkshake diet, and a delicious one on which I lost no weight at all – the pineapple-and-lamb-chop diet. I've twice been to starve farms. The first time was to the now defunct Shrubland Hall, when my son was four months old and I wanted to lose the post-baby fat. I went with…

You will not be surprised that, as a mouse, I fear and hate the rats of London. But there is another rodent tribe that fills me with even more loathing and extreme annoyance –the grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. These thugs do everything they can to wreck my life. When I play tennis, they climb along and then down the fence, tear open my bag and steal my banana. They run across the court, meaning the point has to be replayed. They have absolutely no fear. When I cycle across Hyde Park, I see them cynically manipulating tourists into giving them small pieces of bread. The squirrels have learned to flatter the vanity of the visitors. They make them feel like David Attenborough, as if they have a special connection with…

Every day's a learning day, we say. (Do we actually? Ugh.) We definitely had a learning day at the beginning of the term when we gathered in the school theatre for a Twilight Session (ie an extra-long day). We were told our ‘learning’ on this occasion was around PHSE (Personal Health and Social Education, sometimes called PSHE and sometimes PSHEE – basically the stuff parents used to teach their children until we were told to tack it on to Shakespeare and the Civil War and the pluperfect). In this case, sex. ‘Hi, I'm Sex Deb,’ said the round, cheerful woman at the front of the theatre. And, just in case we didn't believe her, the first PowerPoint slide boasted a big smiling picture of her, with ‘Meet Sex Deb’ emblazoned…

Would I want to know that I was likely to develop Alzheimer's disease at some unspecified time in the future? What would I do with this information if I had it? There are now blood tests partially diagnostic of the disease, even before there are any clinical signs of it. The tests detect raised levels of amyloid and tau proteins in the blood that are present in the disease, even before it makes itself manifest. Traditionally, the diagnosis has been made by means of the clinical history, often provided by close relatives, combined with examination of the patient's cognitive functioning. This method is fallible – first because relatives and patients may be imperfect witnesses, secondly because severe depression may mimic Alzheimer's, and thirdly because other causes of dementia (which is…

Rude Brian Sewell SIR: In the latest Oldie newsletter (online), Barry Cryer attributes his favourite dirty limerick to Brian Sewell, but Sewell stole it from elsewhere – and rather ruined it. The correct version runs: There was a young tart from Peru Who filled her vagina with glue; She said with a grin, ‘They'll pay to get in And they'll pay to get out of it too.’ Giving the young lady back her proper sex-worker status makes more sense of the commercial nature of her proposal. The original was definitely around before 1967, when my father Vyvyan [Holland, Oscar Wilde's son], who used to exchange such naughty limericks on a regular basis with Alec Waugh, recited it to me. It was among the many censored from his own book of limericks, published that year.…

Holbein: Renaissance Master By Elizabeth Goldring Paul Mellon Centre £40 The amount we do or do not know about the lives of Renaissance artists is almost mind-bogglingly uneven. In the case of the hero of Elizabeth Goldring's biography, Hans Holbein the Younger (c 1497-1543), we are tolerably well-informed about his comings and goings, and indeed about his artistic productions, but completely in the dark about his inner life. So we gain a vivid sense of Albrecht Dürer's personality from his correspondence, above all in the form of the chatty letters he wrote in 1506 from Venice to his great friend Willibald Pirckheimer, back home in Nuremberg. But we do not possess so much as a single letter penned by HH, as he signed himself. Holbein's first major biographer was Karel…

National Gallery, 7th November to 10th May 2026 Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) has frequently been tagged the Caravaggio of the Enlightenment for his best-known subjects. This show concentrates on them – the theatrically-lit, often night-time, scientific experiments and industrial processes. Caravaggism – otherwise tenebrism – refers to the light-dark chiaroscuro style and intense realism developed by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). It swept much of 17th-century Europe, coming late to Britain, where Baroque art was suspect, as an expression of the Counter-Reformation. In France, it was the art of the authoritarian monarchy. Even in the Dutch Republic, where tenebrism flourished, Caravaggio's closest disciples were principally centred on Utrecht, which had a large Roman Catholic population. Comparatively few British artists visited Italy until the 18th century was well under way…

Supper for one. Soup of the evening - beautiful soup. What could be happier, in the last hours of a winter day, than a steaming bowlful of something you've been hoping for that's taken you 20 minutes from scratch? That's all it takes if there's only one of you. Better still, complete control of the remote means the choice of movie is yours – and the choice of soup: carrot and ginger (Fred Astaire?); cauliflower and cumin (Ava Gardner?); butterbeans and allspice (Marilyn, naturally). Add cheese straws for the fun of it, and nothing lumpy or challenging for the soup – smoothness is all. Leek-and-potato soup A well-matched couple that already love each other, so there's no need for a stock cube or ready-made stock (even if it's your own)…

A few Novembers ago, at a Premier League match, I bumped into a football manager I knew, who was at the time out of work. He was doing some radio co-commentary, he explained. It was the first time he had done it, he added, and he admitted he was terrified. He wished he hadn't agreed to do it. ‘But my agent told me to get my face out there,’ he added. ‘Or at least my voice.’ ‘Why was that?’ I asked. ‘It's November,’ he said, as if it was perfectly obvious. ‘We're coming up to the killing zone.’ The what? ‘The third international break of the season,’ he explained. ‘It's when managers get sacked. You've got to be ready for the killing zone.’ For those without a job, he added,…

‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.’ As well they might, if the cutlery were English sterling silver. The metal has been gold's poor relation, but it seems to have caught some of the gold fever gripping the bullion market. After bumbling along for years at around £13 per ounce, silver has shot up, in two frantic bursts, to around £35 today. That magnificent canteen you inherited, which needs so much polishing, is worth enough to pay off the rest of the mortgage. Silver is, in truth, a rather odd commodity. Unlike gold, which has very few commercial uses (but has been a store of value for millennia), silver was for a long time the stuff of coins, being cheap enough while difficult to…

IN COMPETITION No 325 you were invited to write a poem called On the Train. They came in by the shoal. Some told of the misfortunes of a bridal train; Pat Gannon-Leary wrote of a westbound wagon train. For Erika Fairhead, it meant memories: ‘I venture through the tunnel of the past./ The sleepers wake at last! I'm on the train.’ Albert Caton wrote of electric power ‘Permitting quite alarming speeds/ Compared to those of equine steeds.’ Rafe Potter, aged seven, sent a clever acrostic. Commiserations to them and to Teresa Charman, D G Herring, John Moore, Ian Nalder, D A Prince, Con Connell, Frances Aitken, Ian Higgins, Clive D Brand, Bill Greenwell, Sue May, Peter Hollindale, Linda Dobbs, Penny Langton and Diana Cutler, and congratulations to those printed below,…

Donald Trump's fake tan was not the only dazzling curiosity when the US president visited Chequers. In my duties as a political reporter, I was at the PM's country house that day. Entering its great hall for the StarmerTrump press conference, I was almost blinded by the 17th-century portraits. Aieee, the brightness – such gaudy colours and the strange, glistering sheen. The most glaring offender was a group portrait, The Perryer Family, by Peter Lely (1618-80), blazing directly behind Sir Keir and The Donald. A near-full-length oil of Lady Croke attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (d 1636) made one's retinas throb. So did a Van Dyck of Queen Henrietta Maria with the infant Charles II. These paintings were so shouty that they seemed almost to be barging into the…

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith We Did OK, Kid by Anthony Hopkins A Life in Letters by John Updike The Great Gambon by Milly Ellis Beyond Beauty by Devon Cox Via Garibaldi by Jim Holden Waiting in the Sky by Peter Ormerod A Short History of America by Simon Jenkins Battle of the Arctic by Hugh Sebag Montefiore The English House by Dan Cruickshank Shellshocked: Britain Between the Wars by Alwyn Turner World in Peril by Al Murray and James Holland Winter by Val McDermid Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart The Forever War by Nick Bryant Pearl Harbor: Japan's Greatest Disaster by Mark Stille We Are What We Eat by David Cox…

‘Tis the season to be luvvy, as celebrity memoirs, some by repeat offenders, and showbusiness biographies pile high in bookshops. After Teenage Revolution (2010) and Just Ignore Him (2020), QI stalwart Alan Davies has written White Male Stand-Up (Monoray, 352pp, £25). Having lost his mother when he was eight and been sexually abused by his father between eight and 13, as described in Just Ignore Him, Davies ‘found a whole new surrogate family, supportive and warm, on the 1990s alternative-comedy circuit,’ explained Telegraph interviewer Helen Brown. Celebrity memoirs, some by repeat offenders, and showbusiness biographies pile high in the bookshops ‘Davies was a hit from the beginning, using quick improvisation and childlike charm to win over audiences. Today, he locates the root of those skills in trauma.’ Brenda Fricker, who…

John Murray, 480pp, £25 In 1943 in Berlin, the Solf Circle of influential high-society anti-Nazi dissenters meet one September afternoon to plot Hitler's downfall, unaware that one of them will betray them to the Gestapo. ‘In 74 short, punchy chapters, each ending on a cliffhanger, Freedland tracks the twists and turns by which these reluctant heroes sought to evade and then face their fate,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, praising ‘an impeccably sourced history book that reads as propulsively as an airport thriller’. She went on, ‘Yet this is also a profoundly serious work, posing an uncomfortable question. How many of us, given the chance to sit out an unpalatable political present without too much discomfort, would find the courage to step up, speak out and face the inevitably…

Granta Books, 320pp, £20 George has written on a wide variety of topics, including sanitation, women's health, depression and an award-winning book on the shipping industry, about living for five weeks aboard a container ship and a week patrolling for pirates on a Portuguese navy frigate. ‘It was a bold move,’ Tom Fort wrote in Literary Review, ‘for a publisher to commission a book on the murky and tortuous subject of the global fishing industry from an author who refuses to eat fish and develops seasickness every time she boards a boat … but her appetite for unearthing startling and often shocking information about how these [fish] delicacies arrive on our plates is insatiable.’ For the first time in history humans are eating more farmed fish than wild, and that…

Jonathan Cape, 304pp, £18.99 Cosmo Adair explained in Literary Review that the author was familiar with the horrors of war as he had been Asia editor of the Times for more than 20 years. This, his first novel, is ‘a jungle caper that quickly descends into political commentary’. In the Times John Self thought it ‘essentially a thriller in a well-established genre: the westerner in a troubled foreign country’ and found the opening sections ‘terrific as Lloyd Parry establishes his characters with efficiency and colour’. He summed up: ‘This is a good, nasty, thought-provoking entertainment.’ In the Guardian M John Harrison found In the Green Heart was a ‘strange tale: a little awkward, intensely political, designed to lay bare the fictions of contemporary colonialism yet inseparable from the close-up portrait…

Stolen tractors found in Stevenage and returned to owner Comet Large stone left at field Worcester News Woman hit partner with wooden giraffe Aberdeen Press & Journal £15 for published contributions NEW! Tune into Radio Oldie Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with personalities such as A N Wilson, Alexander McCall Smith and Gyles Brandreth. Top of the Pods Each week we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

When I was a little boy, living in London in the 1950s, my enchanted place was the London Underground. As a family, we travelled everywhere by Tube – and always in a smoking carriage. My father's two preferred brands were Olivier, named after the actor, and Craven A. The packaging for both was very classy. From the age of six, I took the Tube to school every day on my own. It was only two stops from our mansion flat at Earl's Court to the French Lycée at South Kensington and, it turns out, in the early days I wasn't as alone as I thought. Not long before she died, aged 96, my mother confessed to me that she followed me to school at a discreet distance, travelling in the…

WHAT IS stupidogenesis? A stupidogenic society is a society that tends to make the people in it stupider. Just as obesogenic environments promote excessive weight gain, stupidogenic environments promote dumbness, laziness, foolishness, banality, triviality, mental torpor and idiocy. The point is, if you're a fathead it's not entirely your fault – just as obesity experts agree that socioeconomics is the critical factor in obesity. Healthy food is more expensive: if you're in the bottom ten per cent of earners, following the government's healthy eating advice would cost 74 per cent of your income. Also you probably have less time to cook, you're tired, you're surrounded by unhealthy options, you're bombarded by junk-food advertising and so on. The thing about stupidogenesis, though, is it seems to affect all of us –…

In BBC 1's SAS: Rogue Heroes, our introduction to Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne (1915-55) is in a brawl in an army prison, where he floors three military policemen. Yet this war hero, given four DSOs and recommended for the Victoria Cross, was a solicitor before the war and, after it, became secretary of the Northern Irish Law Society. Solicitors tend to be regarded as the less exciting members of the legal profession. Who was the real Paddy Mayne – killed in a car crash 70 years ago in his native Newtownards? Born there on 11th January 1915, he went to Regent House grammar school where his rugby ability led to his playing for Ireland and the British Lions before the war. He joined the Territorial Army in 1939, and by 1940…

Sir John Vanbrugh – who died 300 years ago, on 26th March 1726, aged 62 – was a man of protean abilities. In the second half of his life, he became Britain's greatest architect of country houses. Before that, Vanbrugh (1664-1726) had been a soldier and spent four years in French prisons, including the Bastille, and had then volunteered for naval service and taken part in the 1694 Battle of Camaret Bay in Brittany. His next venture was the London stage, where he became one of the leading Restoration playwrights. His best-known comedies were The Relapse and The Provok'd Wife. While continuing to write, he burst onto the architectural world with the palatial house built for the 3rd Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. That commission led to a…

When Celia Cooke went to clear out her late father's bits and pieces a couple of years ago, she uncovered a beguiling vignette of cinema history. Her dad, Alex Smith, a trained electrician who died in 2001, had run a private cinema at his parents’ home in Maidstone from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. A perfect collection of everything required for screening pre-war movies – projection equipment, lighting arrangements, sound recordings, film and handcrafted models of cinema organs – lay in a box. The private cinema was in the front room of his parents’ home – a two-up, two-down at 52 Kingsley Road in Maidstone. Tickets were issued for the eight audience members – all that could be accommodated – and a local girl, Doris Waghorn, dressed as…

An outing from the village occurred last Friday. It offered a chance to witness a rare terrestrial alignment of our local MP Danny Kruger with his mother, The Oldie's Prue Leith, plus Soil Association and resiliencefarming do-gooders. All these lined up on a stage at Carvers, one of Wiltshire's climate-change-enabled vineyards. Prue and her son famously disagree on assisted dying. Would she support his new membership of a populist right-wing party of the sort sweeping through Europe and deposing the traditional middle-ground party, I wondered. Resilience is a buzz word: how can we make farming and food procurement resilient in a world of global systemic collapse? Think local was the conclusion to the debate – local abattoirs and farms supplying local schools with proper food. Dame Prue said the education…

There is no beige in the Bible. This will no doubt please Prue Leith, who regularly and generously takes brightly coloured cushions to hotel bedrooms which are so often upholstered in beige. She leaves the cushions behind to brighten the next occupant's stay. There is grey in the Bible: ‘The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendour of old men is their grey hair’ (Proverbs 20:29). Part of the splendour comes from strength being replaced by wisdom, experience and honour – a great relief to us all as we grow older. Unlike beige, grey is not bland. The Old and New Testaments are not bland either. And they discourage being lukewarm – in most cases the culinary equivalent of bland. ‘I know all about you: how you…

‘Did he make a pass at you?’ asked Gerry the sports writer on the Jewish Gazette, a weekly community newspaper circulating in Manchester. I'd just interviewed Tom Jones in his bedroom at the Milverton Lodge hotel, south of the city, in 1966. Gerry and Tom had known each other years before, when he was a trainee journalist in his native Cardiff and turned down Tom's request to be his manager. ‘A singer I knew called Johnny Bennett brought Gordon to see me at the Top Hat Club one night,’ Tom told me. ‘I was fronting a band called Tommy Scott and the Senators. Gordon was already big in the music industry in London. ‘I signed up with him and, instead of being Tommy Scott or my real name Tom Woodward,…

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely. Charlotte Brontë The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. Voltaire Think before you speak. Read before you think. Fran Lebowitz Pure technique is the spider's web without the spider – it glitters and catches but doesn't kill. Charles Wright I've always loved high style in low company. Anita Loos Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. Robert Frost It takes a very long time to become young. Picasso Who ever hears of fat men heading a riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs? No – no, your lean, hungry men … are continually worrying society,…

Touring nationwide, until 23rd May ‘Plays are much easier to write than books,’ said Britain's queen of crime Agatha Christie. ‘You are not hampered by all that description which clogs you up – and stops you from getting on with what's happening.’ That's why her whodunits are perfect for the theatre. Her prose is clunky but her plotting is sublime, and in Hercule Poirot she created a sleuth to rival Sherlock Holmes. No wonder her light, compulsive novels have spawned so many dramatisations. Unlike highbrow novelists, she gives dramatists room to breathe. This creative freedom has resulted in a huge array of adaptations, of hugely variable quality. I adored the 1978 film of Death on the Nile, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot. I couldn't stand Kenneth Branagh's 2022 remake. So…

It's Johann Strauss's stepdaughter, Alice von Meyszner-Strauss, who's said to have spotted Brahms dining in his favourite Viennese restaurant. After making herself known to him, she asked if he would mind signing her napkin. Taking out his pen, Brahms sketched the opening bars of the Blue Danube waltz and signed it, ‘Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.’ Compliments don't come much greater than that. Strauss (1825-99), born on 25th October 1825, is celebrating his bicentenary. The Blue Danube is Strauss's most popular composition and one of his most profound – the kind of smiling-throughtears piece of which Mozart and Schubert were also consummate masters. At Vienna's annual New Year's Day concert, the waltz follows the orchestra's traditional new-year greeting ‘Prosit Neujahr!‘. In 1987, Herbert von Karajan, whose sense of the music's…

There isn't a boulevardier, a chancer or even a gigolo who is unaware that Carla Bruni is lonesome tonight. I'm too modest to say I'm in with a chance but, unlike you, I once met her. And not just anywhere – but in Venice, in 1990, at a ball (I gatecrashed) for the granddaughter of the last King of Italy, the short-reigned Umberto II, who, at 34 days in office, couldn't even hit Liz Truss's target. As meetings went, it was a brief encounter: she wanted a cigarette while chatting to Jack Nicholson, and I was laden with Silk Cut. Yet the memory of her misty eyes through the torch of my lighter will never leave me. No more ‘what might have been's. Let's concentrate on what might be. I…

I've sold my tractor again. It was a 1960 Fordson Power Major, blue with orange wheels – big by the standards of the time; dwarfed nowadays by those great-wheeled John Deere behemoths that fill our country lanes from hedge to hedge. They lived hard lives, those old British tractors of the 1950s-'70s. It's a testimony to their rugged simplicity and over-engineering that so many are still around despite a strong export demand in previous decades. All its life, mine was a Sussex tractor, worked into the ground until rescued and restored about 20 years ago by the previous owner who used it mainly for agricultural shows and tractor runs. I took it on a few runs too, but mostly put it to work when we had fields and woods to…

Genius at Amboise, murder at Blois, beauty at Chenonceau, a musical mystery at Le Mans, the Maid at Orléans, the cradle of the Plantagenets as well as the French monarchy… with not only history but wonderful food, wine and poetry, the Loire really does have it all. And Huon has designed a completely fresh itinerary. We shall be returning to the splendid Château Perreux, partly carved into the cliff face, which has been magnificently restored by its owner Olivier Fructus. Lucy Ogilvie-Grant and the excellent staff ensure our comfort, and we'll have exceptional drivers for our excursions. ITINERARY Monday 14th September – Departure Catch the 12.31 from St Pancras, arriving at 15.51; transfer to Montparnasse to get the 17.27, which arrives at 18.48 at Tours. Talk by Huon and dinner…

Triangles are paranormal places where people go missing. The Bermuda Triangle. The Bass Strait Triangle. The Devil's Sea Triangle. ‘The Woodford Halse Triangle’ doesn't have the same tingle and, thankfully, I found no mention of mysterious disappearances before I dared take a walk there. It is a junction where the Great Central Main Line – the last railway to be built in Britain until the 21st century's HS1 – crossed the Stratford-upon-Avon line. Now both lines are green ghosts in the landscape, and this triangle of old embankments and cuttings has become a nature reserve. South Northamptonshire has a touch of the Bermuda Triangle: it is a region most visitors miss when they race past on the M1 or M40. Its rolling countryside, the wellspring of important southerly rivers, the…

Dear Editor, Along with Jilly Cooper's Rivals, Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence has been named as one of the sexiest books of all time. I can remember when Penguin won its case to publish the unexpurgated edition in 1960 after a trial attracting huge publicity. I was at school at the time and the headmaster issued a decree that nobody below the fourth form was allowed to read the book and if caught reading it, a prefect would confiscate it. I was in the fifth form and so just escaped the ban. Of course, we all rushed to read it in the Penguin edition, costing 3/6 (42p). I gather much the same thing happened with schoolgirls caught reading Jilly's sexy novels. Yours faithfully, Liz Hodgkinson, Oxford This letter from…

Profile, 288pp, £25 As Jonathan Egid observed in the TLS, the sage of Hippo and father of the Western mindset came not so much out of Africa as out of Africa Proconsularis, a narrow strip of now-Arab coast on the southern Mediterranean, which had been Romanised five centuries before his birth (in 354AD). So might a better title have been ‘Augustine the Provincial’? Egid admitted Conybeare succeeded ‘in revealing the benefits of reading him in light of his own sense of Africanness’, and found that ‘the reintroduction of this context allows us to appreciate his thought anew’, which was ‘amply demonstrated by this rich, erudite and sympathetic biography’. In Literary Review Angela Tilbury praised the psychological insights in this ‘beautifully written, thoroughly engaging and highly recommended book’. And she was…

As borne out by the autumn crop of new books on ancient history, it's wonderful how many give fresh insights into antiquity. But there's always one bad apple; and this season it was TV academic Alice Roberts's Domination: The Fall and Rise of an Empire (Simon & Schuster, 432pp, £22). Her assertion that the might and riches of Imperial Rome had survived in the structures of Catholicism was hardly novel to the critics; nor did they like the sneers with which it was made. The left-leaning press led the charge, with the Guardian's Frank Cottrell-Boyce finding the story's detailed unfolding ‘a revelation’, but its ‘cynicism’ appalling. ‘The trouble with rolling your eyes,’ he wrote, ‘is that you end up looking in the wrong direction.’ And in the New Statesman A…

Constable, 576pp, £25 In the 1690s, Tories and Whigs began gathering in coffee houses and our current system came about, wrote Daniel Hannan on Conservative Home. Owers ‘brings the age magnificently to life, dwelling on the personalities and the colour: the boneheaded stupidity of the High Tory faction in pushing for policies that Queen Anne had set her face against; the Whig Sarah Churchill openly accusing Queen Anne of lesbianism; the bigoted Dr Sacheverell, put on trial for an incendiary sermon, implausibly delivering the greatest Tory landslide of the era … It makes for a terrific read, whether you are a historian or completely new to the era.’ In the Telegraph, Tim Stanley found this ‘accomplished, funny’ book ‘does a clever job of implying comparison with the present without being…

Bantam, 688pp, £25 Fans of Dan Brown have waited eight years for his latest novel. It ‘reunites readers with the world's only professor of symbology, Robert Langdon …[who] is still so world-renowned that, as doesn't happen for most academics, fancy hotels monogram his slippers for him’, wrote Sam Leith in the Guardian. Leith thought the book ‘weapons-grade bollocks from beginning to end, none of it makes a lick of sense, and you'll roar through it with entire enjoyment if you like this sort of thing. Welcome back, big fella.’ Jessa Crispin in the Telegraph believed that Brown's novels were fantasies, and if you read them in that spirit, they were fun. ‘Unfortunately,’ she continued, ‘the prose does its best to keep you grounded.’ Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Times thought the…