Innehållsförteckning för June 2021 från The Oldie

* Our radio correspondent, Valerie Grove, has just unearthed a shaming letter she received from the great comedian Barry Cryer in 1970. At the time she was, briefly, standing in as TV previewer for the Evening Standard. ‘Dear Valerie,’ wrote Barry, ‘I must thank you on behalf of those readers of the Standard who do not own a copy of Movies on TV by Leslie Halliwell and have therefore been saved 7/6d – as your film previews appear to be taken verbatim from this book, coupled with a few gems from the Radio and TV Times. Why not throw in one or two original thoughts of your own? Or are you, as I suspect, much too young to know, or even have heard of, many of the films in question?…

Catching sight of Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts on page 87 of the Spring issue of The Oldie reminded me of several things, as you might imagine. Chief among them, beyond the fact that this magazine never ceases to surprise me, was a sudden vivid recollection of the night Ms Hurley taught me that in this country we seem to need royalty. Back in June 2003, I helped out at a charity gala at Grosvenor House. The charity (for children with Down’s Syndrome) was one that had been close to the heart of Diana, Princess of Wales. But for her tragic death, she would have been there as guest of honour. Because she couldn’t be, Liz Hurley came in her place – and played her part to perfection. Beautiful, gracious and friendly…

Fifty years ago, on 28th May 1971, the first British literary festival was launched. The Bedford Square Book Bang was the brainchild of the dandyish Martyn Goff, bookseller son of a Russian furrier in Hampstead. Goff ran the Ibis Bookshop in Banstead, Surrey, and on the side wrote novels, some with daringly gay themes. He wore square, horn-rimmed specs and striped blazers, and lived in Chelsea next door to Peter Sellers. Goff was determined to shake up the somnolent book world. When he got the job of heading the almost-moribund National Book League, he resolved to ‘make books fun’. His 1970 Christmas poster had the slogan ‘Give a book this present’. The publishing elders muttered about its grammar; but young whizz kids such as Tom Maschler thoroughly approved of his…

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… Working from home with two elderly parents in the house is a bit like being in a lift with a wasp. The chances are that nothing bad will actually happen, but the underlying Hitchcockian tension that it might play havoc on the more nervous small intestine. The company I work for has done all it can to mitigate the tension, by recording a message on the phone lines: ‘Our friendly advisers are working from home – so you may hear unusual background noises such as pets, children or building work.’ But this does not cover the possibility of a…

There was racing that day at Ascot, London’s Chantilly, and all else gives way to that great national source of pleasure. It’s an occasion when the snows of English coldness melt and, seeing their furious animation, you wouldn’t say you were among the most phlegmatic people in the world. Horses and ships alone can impassion the British people, and whoever has not observed the English at sea and on the turf does not know them. They are basically seamen and stablemen, two aptitudes that do not seem to go together, and which perhaps share secretly the same aim – locomotion. The French walk on the spot, moving a lot without going anywhere; the English fly like cannonballs, and if spleen gets up behind them in the saddle it must get…

In 30 BC, Horace, the Dr Johnson of the Augustan age, wrote the parable of the town mouse and the country mouse. Authors in those days did not attempt to be ‘original’ – the fable had been around for a long time before. Horace introduces it as ‘an old wives’ tale’. The town mouse is devoted to activity, sociability and luxury, while the country mouse lives a life of genteel poverty, solitude and quiet reflection. For Horace, the story is a warning that wealth, which so many of us desire, has its own stresses. He was an Epicurean by philosophy. He praised the quiet and simple life, though, in paradoxical fashion, he also had a busy career in Roman politics. The country mouse is a sort of parsimonious hermit: ‘He…

Reader, I realised the dream. And may I give you a warning: DON’T. For 20 years, I laboured in London and New York, manufacturing TV ads. I crammed gourmet food into the mouths of greedy, demanding clients with high anxiety pumping through their veins along with the copious alcohol I provided. My pleasure in food, drink and life itself quite drained away as my liver withered. After so much, I quit. I bought a ruined olive mill in the foothills of the Alps behind Nice, on the bank of the River Cagne. Upstream, one’s sight line was cut off by a vertical cascade of white water plunging into the ravine. There was only one snag: the river ran in the bed of the ravine, hidden from the mill. To make…

No one really expects, or wants, a personal relationship with his or her histopathologist – the man or woman who examines one’s biopsy under the microscope when cancer is suspected. On the other hand, no one wants to be treated impersonally, as a mere specimen in a bottle, on that first to the doctor with something wrong. British medicine, in particular, is becoming more and more impersonal, no doubt for a variety of reasons. Even before COVID-19 struck, there was an increasing tendency everywhere for so-called face-to-face consultations to be face-to-profile consultations. The face in question was often the doctor’s, as he or she peers into the computer screen, like a soothsayer at a funfair peering into a crystal ball to descry the client’s future. Sometimes, on the rare occasions…

Allen Lane £20 There is nothing like writing the fictional version of history before it happens. Back in 2017, Lawrence Wright, a distinguished Pulitzer Prize winner at the New Yorker, started his novel The End of October, about a global pandemic that spreads from Asia to shut down the world. He finished it in 2019 but by the time it was published, in May last year, the real thing was already well under way. The business shutdowns, empty airports, overwhelmed hospitals and chronic maladministration by a narcissist President had all been anticipated in fictional form. Wright claims no special prescience for anticipating the disaster. The prediction that a global pandemic was coming was ubiquitous in the medical world. He simply decided to imagine it and its consequences. ‘It [the novel]…

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99 The Paper Lantern is a pub that really exists. Close to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, it sits both literally and symbolically at the heart of England. Will Burns’s parents run it and he himself lives and works in it part-time. So this is a work of autofiction. It describes the dream days of the first lockdown when the pub was closed, conjuring in restrained and elegiac prose the ‘sad, amusing, strange, disquieting types’ of its male regulars. On long lockdown walks through the Chilterns, Burns examines the life of the pub and its fragmented community. He asks how England came to have this heart; what is it, exactly, and how was it made? The atmosphere is one of gloomy fatalism, hopelessness, male incapacity and…

If this summer is to be like last summer, we are in for a show of sublime roses, some bearing women’s names that seem to me almost as romantic as their exquisite blooms and beguiling scents. I know nothing about the lives of Zéphirine Drouhin, Louise Odier, Félicité Parmentier and Mme Isaac Pereire, to mention just a few; only that they have given their names to roses. But that is enough for me. I admit that not all are quite so sensuous, and that the high-street associations of Dorothy Perkins, for instance, bring an element of bathos to the romantic ensemble. Though prone to mildew, she – the rose – is lovely, which is why, in 1919, the company stole its name. But luckily there are plenty of others as…

SEMELE MARGARET CATCHPOLE Two catastrophes struck England near the start of Queen Anne’s reign. The first was the Great Storm of 1703, a category-two hurricane that killed more people and felled more oaks than the Great Storm of 1987. The second was the arrival of Italian opera. No lives were lost when the theatre wars triggered by the Italian insurgency caused the suppression of a memorable operatic treatment of the Semele story. It was a blow to the opera’s creators, William Congreve and John Eccles, our longest-serving Master of the King’s (and Queen’s) Music. What was left dead in the nest was English opera in its fledgling form. Happily, a superb new recording of the opera has just been released by the Academy of Ancient Music, handsomely packaged with one…

THE DALLOWAY TERRACE, BLOOMSBURY, LONDON THE MUSEUM INN, SHAFTESBURY, DORSET One of the unsung joys of meeting friends in restaurants is that they are never late. Maybe it’s because we equate the booking time – eg 8pm – with ‘Curtain up’ at the theatre. Or because we’re fed up with being told, after giving our order, ‘And, just to remind you, we will be wanting your table back in two hours.’ I suspect many of us simply don’t want to miss one minute of being fed, sluiced and cherished. Those adept in the art of gamesmanship often subscribe to the motto ‘First come, first served’. They’re also the first able to steal the advantage on that first bottle of wine or champagne which goes on the shared bill. Oh, yes!…

WIMBLEDON RETURNS Incredibly, this year’s Wimbledon tennis championship marks 40 years since John McEnroe blew up in his first-round tie against Tom Gullikson and issued the words that came to define him. I was a witness to this. My girlfriend had secured us ground tickets and, in those days, one could queue up to stand at the side of No 1 Court. We watched as, with that gorgeous arc of a serve, McEnroe fired in what looked like a perfect ace. A puff of chalk dust flew up, suggesting the ball had hit the line. Gullikson appeared to think it had, and looked a tad bemused when the line judge called it out. When the umpire, Edward James, ruled the call was good, McEnroe, his headband struggling to corral his…

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk What Google knows… https://adssettings.google.com When you are logged into Google, this page will show you what they know about you, to target their ads. National Archive https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk Lots of videos and talks from experts at the National Archive. Well worth a browse. I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk…

In James Fisher’s Bird Recognition (1951), the once ubiquitous red kite (Milvus milvus) had been reduced to six pairs in central Wales. In 2003, on the M40, you’d see kites for the next hour after passing the Chilterns gap. In March this year, Helen Bellany wrote from Essex that she thought her wood would soon be ‘designated UK red-kite headquarters. I counted seven swooping and hovering over my garden the other day, some with twigs and straw in their beaks. We think that they are nesting in the wood… They are formidable birds when they turn tricks in the sun and the glorious red patterns of their wings are caught in the streams of light.’ The exponential increase of red-kite numbers is modern Britain’s ultimate conservation success story. A Kite…

I imagined a walk along the north coast of Jersey would deliver the ghosts and ruins of distant wars with France. I did not expect to encounter real, 21st-century Royal Navy ships dispatched against restive French sailors. Current affairs have resembled an overblown satirical novel for a while now. The latest chapter, in which navy patrols were dispatched to ensure French fishermen did not block Channel Island ports, was one of the more improbable recent plot twists. This turbulence did not quite reach the little footpath that wiggles around the north-eastern edge of Jersey, but the island was abuzz with the dispute. Locals took their children to various rocky promontories to scan the horizon for the Navy boats. France looms large from most points on Jersey, not least Rozel Bay,…

‘I always lead an ace against an opposing slam,’ said Player A. ‘Do you?’ countered Player B. ‘Isn’t that a bit simplistic?’ I am afraid A stands for amateur. Player B is correct – the decision is far more nuanced. Take this deal from an ARBC online duplicate on Bridge Base Online. Dealer West North-South Vulnerable The bidding (1) Weak Two, showing a six-card suit and five-ten points. West is rock-bottom minimum. (2) Strong balanced, 15-19, with spades stopped. (3) Raising pre-emptively to the (nine-card) level of the fit. (4) Reasonable practical leap. When West looked no further than the ace-of-spades lead, declarer had an easy ride. He won West’s heart switch with dummy’s ace and could draw trumps and cash 12 tricks via two spades, three clubs, six diamonds…

Robert Bathurst (p24) is in The Mezzotint (BBC4) and Munich (Netflix), coming out later this year. He is co-directing The Fall, a film about jockeys. He starred in Cold Feet. Anne Sebba (p36) is the author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, published on 24th June. She also wrote That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. Christopher Douglas (p13) plays Ed Reardon in Ed Reardon’s Week (Radio 4), which begins a new series on 9th June. He also writes the series, with Andrew Nickolds. Philip Norman (p11) wrote Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation, The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography, John Lennon: The Life and Paul McCartney: The Biography.…

The hijacking of the cargo ship Albedo was living proof that worse things happen at sea. Its 23 crew were captured by Somali pirates in late 2010, only to discover that the ship’s owner lacked the money to pay a ransom. They spent the next three years stuck in captivity, often tortured by their captors, who presumed the owner’s plea of penury was just a callous negotiating ploy. One sailor was executed in cold blood; others beaten and lashed for weeks on end. Merchant mariners may bring us most of our daily goods, as the world was reminded recently when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal. But when they get hijacked, they seldom attract the attention of celebrities or human-rights groups. Instead, the Albedo crew’s salvation came in the…

A non-fungible token (NFT) is basically a way of making things on the internet exclusive and ownable. The term is particularly used of art sold exclusively online. NFTs are either the future of fine-art collecting or the latest insane internet speculation bubble. At Christie’s in February, American digital artist Beeple – aka Mike Winkelmann, 39 – sold an NFT of his digital collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for 42,329.453 ether – around £50 million in old money. Ethereum is a kind of cryptocurrency. It was the first time that Christie’s had completed a sale in cryptocurrency. It was also the first time no one even bothered to pretend that the art was any good. And it was the first time it had sold an entirely digital-based work. For Beeple’s…

It began when I strained the potatoes. When I was very young, I once excused myself from the dinner table with the polite announcement that I was ‘just off to strain the potatoes’. When I returned from the bathroom, my mother was still berating my poor father. ‘Where would Barry pick up things like that, Eric? Probably from one of your rough men.’ She added, ‘You should never taken him to those jobs of yours. Who knows what language he’ll pick up!’ My father was a successful builder of nice houses for the well-to-do, and I loved to accompany him to the building sites and talk to the workmen, Pat Bagot, Alec Gibson and Arthur Gallagher. My father wore a grey, chalk-stripe, double-breasted suit, a tie from Henry Buck and…

In his poem Tortoise Shout, D H Lawrence describes tortoise sex from the perspective of the male. ‘Mounted and tense’, as though nailed to the cross, he ‘cleaves behind the hovel wall of the dense female’ and, with his wrinkled neck and long limbs vulnerably ‘extruded’, curves his ‘deep, secret, all-penetrating tail’ beneath her carapace ‘’til suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!’ It is the only description I know of tortoise orgasm. Lawrence liked tortoises, but this poem is about himself and not only because he and his wife also carried their homes upon their backs (the Lawrences never stayed put for more than a few months). The Lawrentian heroes who strut through his novels, like Birkin in Women in Love or Mellors…

How have I managed to live in Wiltshire for 30 years without Nikolaus Pevsner’s guide to the county, first published in 1963? This third edition now sitting in my hands is regarded as the most comprehensive, reliable and essential guide to Wiltshire’s architectural heritage from prehistory to the present day. Well, to answer my own question, I have managed quite easily. Trowbridgebased Ken Watts’s Exploring Historic Wiltshire (1998) has been an agreeable companion for this layman, researching his adopted county. I also stumbled across HW Timperley’s The Vale of Pewsey (1954), which taught me more about my immediate surroundings. Moreover, far from being a ‘lookingglass dreamer’, as Geoffrey Grigson once dubbed him, Richard Jefferies (1848-87) has through his writings furnished me with a forensically detailed picture of local life in…

‘May we give glory to God by the lives that we lead.’ These are the words spoken by the priest at the end of our daily Mass. The day had barely begun. In general, was it going to give God glory? And, in particular, was my day going to do so? It was a major cleaning day – so the community was certainly giving God glory – cleanliness being next to godliness. This saying is not actually to be found in the Bible, but originated in one of John Wesley’s sermons in 1778. There is a mass of detail regarding uncleanliness throughout the Old Testament. One is only too thankful not to have to comply with such regulations. Some of the rules on diet amount to sensible personal hygiene, but…

Larkin visits Monica SIR: John Sutherland’s piece ‘Larkin’s bare cheek’ (May issue) reminded me of Philip Larkin officially opening the new Library at Leicester University on 27th September 1975. As sub-librarian for administrative matters, I had to organise the occasion. After Philip had spoken and unveiled a commemorative plaque, the architect Alan Park presented him with a print of old Leicester which my wife had wrapped in colourfully patterned paper. Philip’s response, ‘How kind – I do need a new pair of pyjamas,’ brought the formal, rather stuffy event to a delightfully relaxed conclusion. A photograph showing Philip speaking to the audience, with Monica Jones in the front row, can be seen in the photo below. Sincerely, Michael Hannon, Sheffield Callaghan’s son on No 10 SIR: Like most of the…

Finally we know the date when Year 11s are to leave us. They have two weeks’ school after the exams – how to entertain them? I’ve been having fun, planning lessons on short stories about fear – Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson and Raymond Carver. I don’t want them to write anything – just to do a bit of wider reading and have a bit of a discussion. And, once again, my book benefactor will come into play. I’ve decided to give all Year 11s who are going on to take English Literature a couple of fine books to be reading over the summer: a 19th-century classic (Far from the Madding Crowd, Dracula or Agnes Grey, depending on the student) and a 20th-century masterpiece (Brighton Rock, A Handful of Dust or…

Handheld Press £15.99 One old reviewer found a tear rolling round his cheek towards the end of this book. When the poet Valentine Ackland went into hospital with breast cancer, she wrote to her lover of 38 years, novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘Your love has never failed, and never will, life or death.’ Warner, aged 76, would sit by 60-year-old Valentine’s bed, holding her hand, and together they repeated their ‘marriage vows’ to each other. It is the untruth, not the truth, of the declaration that prompts the tears. Halfway through their long association, Sylvia developed a crush on an aspirant American writer, Betty White, which then turned into the raging, years-long affair between White and Valentine. When it was over, Sylvia wrote to Valentine, ‘I was WRONG. I traduced…

Bodley Head £14.99 I feel sorry for publicists sometimes. They know that ‘Look – here’s another book’ isn’t a winning line. So they are driven to extremes of absurdity in the hope of attracting attention. Horst Krüger’s Broken House, we are told, is a ‘forgotten masterpiece in the mould of Alone in Berlin or Stoner’. Well, for a start, Broken House isn’t a novel. It’s a memoir, verging on autobiography. I wonder how forgotten it is in Germany, where it was published in 1966. The comparison to Alone in Berlin rests on the fact that Krüger grew up under Hitler and had a fleeting involvement with a left-wing resistance movement. Now available to the English reader in a translation by the estimable Shaun Whiteside, it is certainly in the running…

Not long ago I wrote that, at the age of 90, Rupert Murdoch is still on the ball. It’s true. But these days the ball is not often in the back of the net. The latest setback for his company News UK is the aborting of the plan to launch a new, right-wing, rolling news channel. Mr Murdoch – who, 30 years ago, nearly went bust after launching Sky Television – got cold feet, and his chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, got even colder feet. Murdoch had great ambitions for the new station. He hired a big-shot American called David Rhodes to run it. A former President of CBS News, Rhodes is a considerable figure in his business. He must have been a true believer in Murdoch’s dream, to be prepared…

Smutty TV A recent TV show by the former Top Gear team was called A Massive Hunt. How Clarkson, Hammond and May, the public-school version of Last of the Summer Wine without the charm or wit, must have laughed. There is a trend for nudgenudge TV-show titles. The current crop includes Schitt’s Creek, PEN15, Trucking Hell, Pawn Stars and Hardcore Pawn. Snigger. Even now, latte-drinking creatives are thinking up titles before fitting a programme round it. It’s not new. Remember when Channel 4 introduced TFI Friday, claiming it stood for Thanks Four It’s Friday, when we all knew otherwise? Where TV gets edgy, Hollywood follows. The romcom Meet the Parents set the scene by creating a central character called Gaylord Focker, a play on words so funny it was stretched…

SWEET POTATOES Sweet potatoes may have been around when I was young, but I don’t think I was aware of them until about 20 years ago. In fact, they have been grown in Europe since Columbus brought sweet potatoes back from the West Indies, half a century before the first common potato arrived here from Peru with the Spanish conquistadors. Potatoes they may both be called, but they are not related. The sweet potato belongs to the family of flowers that includes morning glory and convolvulus, the invasive bindweed. I have noticed that many of the sweet potatoes sold in shops have been grown in America – they are the state vegetable of Alabama and Louisiana – but China has by far the largest share of the global market. For…

THE CASE FOR CHARDONNAY I never joined the ABC club. Dating from the mid-1990s, the name stood for Anything But Chardonnay and was a reaction against the ostentatiously yellow, invariably Australian chardonnay that filled many a supermarket trolley at the time. Oversweet, over-oaked and over here. While I never liked that style of chardonnay, especially when the vanilla aroma came not from new casks but from giant teabags of oak chips dumped in stainless-steel tanks, it seemed unfair to blame the grape variety. To paraphrase that great philosopher Jessica Rabbit, it wasn’t bad, it was just made that way. Similarly, you might not care for egregiously fruity Californian merlot, but Château Pétrus isn’t a bad drop. Chardonnay is, after all, responsible for Chablis, Montrachet, Meursault, Pouilly-Fuissé and blanc de blancs…

EXPENSIVE MILES ON THE CLOCK A reader from Tonbridge wrote seeking advice on car insurance. Almost 85, he has been driving for 65 years without ever having an accident. He is a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists and covers a low annual mileage in his 2013 Kia Rio 2. He wrote because his insurance company seemed to increase his premiums with unjustified enthusiasm every year. Sensibly, he tried shopping around but found only minor savings. Also, the process was exasperating: ‘When you get past all the phone recordings, you end up talking to people who are from another world, speaking very quickly from a script, when all you want is a price.’ It is hard not to sympathise. I suggested a few companies reputedly receptive to older drivers,…

MoneyHelper – a service offering free help to people who want to sort out their money problems and take control of their finances – will be rolled out in June. While the brand name is new, the service is not. For years, there have been three sources of free financial guidance and information: the Money Advice Service, the Pensions Advisory Service and Pension Wise. All three give help with pension problems and you can see the overlap. At the start of 2019, the three were brought together as the Money and Pensions Service, which has the natty acronym MaPS, but they continued to operate separately. MoneyHelper will be the public face of MaPS which is sponsored, though not funded, by the government. It is paid for by a levy on…

Anything you can’t leave home without? I’m not planning on going anywhere. Is there something you really miss? If I go anywhere, it’s always to work, really, now – and if I’m working, I don’t miss anything much [he chuckles]. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? We had only one holiday away – in Hull, with some relatives; otherwise we went on day trips to Morecambe or Blackpool. Do you travel light? Just an iPad. Where do you feel happiest – Yorkshire, LA or Normandy? Right now, in Normandy – we live here. There’s just three of us living in the house: me, JP [Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima – Hockney’s assistant for 20 years] and Jonathan Wilkinson [a technical adviser]. Which has the best light? They’re all different. In…

IN COMPETITION No 267, you were invited to write a poem as a cat’s view of a famous (named) person. It proved a successful device. Jennifer Willis gave Mitsou’s view of Marilyn Monroe: ‘My mistress has big eyes of blue/But not so blue as mine./My mistress wears a coat of fur/But mine is much more fine.’ Gail White’s cat lived uncomfortably with Edgar Allan Poe, as did Peter Hollindale’s with Agatha Christie: ‘She fills my dish. I sniff it. Carefully.’ Basil Ransome-Davies’s cat’s eye had Raymond Chandler in focus. Andrew Bamji’s was one of several takes on Larry’s view of Carrie. G M Southgate inverted Gray’s Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes and made the poet the fatality. T S Eliot got…

Husband’s sex worries Q My husband is not as virile, shall we say, as he used to be. We haven’t managed to have sex for a year now. To put it bluntly, he can’t get it up. Now, I don’t mind a bit, because sex had become very painful recently, but he is devastated and refuses to talk about it. During my researches into the subject – Viagra etc – I came across The Penis Poem by the country singer Willie Nelson written when he suffered similarly. I thought it would cheer him up, but he simply wasn’t amused at all. In fact he was furious. What can I do to convince him it doesn’t matter? Barbara V, by email A Well, I find the whole poem, which you can…

Open windows at school shock mum Nottingham Post Man hid in bush after breaking into dentists Inverness Courier Man jailed after breaking into cinema and stealing fizzy drinks Lincolnshire Live £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The July issue is on sale on 30th June 2021. FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Best of The Oldie Cartoons 1992-2018, The Oldie Annual 2020 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readerscorner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box.…

Most art forms – like Miss Jean Brodie (and the rest of ) – have their primes. They may then stagger on, growing gradually more feeble, while still enjoying occasional highs that match their former glories, but their best days are behind them. Very occasionally, as with the epic poem, their reign can last for millennia. But as a rule, managing to hang in there for two or three hundred years is pretty usgood going. Take the symphony, which held sway from Haydn and Mozart in the second half of the 18th century until Sibelius and Vaughan Williams in the first half of the 20th. The heyday of the altarpiece lasted roughly from the late-13th century until the early-17th. It was above all an Italian triumph in the field of…

apples, to be To be OK basically The most popular word in Australian speech since ‘hopefully’ big spit, to go the To hurl, chunder or play the whale bonzer (see under whacko-the-diddle-oh) Beaut, extra grouse and fan-bloody-tastic Captain Cook, to take a To take a dekko, to look dip the wick, to To feature or exercise the ferret Fosters A modest Melbourne brewery catapulted to fame by Barry McKenzie’s tireless and inexplicably unremunerated promotion grope, going the An Australian caress kangaroo valley Earl’s Court, west London. A popular destination for newly arrived Australians in the 1960s neck oil Whisky overseas-based (Oz journalese) traitor pom syn. pommy bastard English person point Percy at the porcelain, to To drain the dragon *Qantas hostie A desirable sexual partner rudie A solecism sheets, to…

Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American mother, died shockingly prematurely 100 years ago this month, on 29th June 1921, after a fall downstairs. She was 67 and in the prime of life, newly married to a man 20 years younger and had finally found a way of earning money, one of her lifelong preoccupations. But how many people today, even those who idolise the man they consider Britain’s greatest prime minister and saviour of the nation from Nazi Germany, know who she was? If they know anything about her, she is often maligned as a woman who had 200 lovers – a suspiciously round number, according to Churchill’s biographer Roy Jenkins – or a woman with a snake tattoo on her wrist (unproven). The big question is: how important was her American…

Just before he died, John le Carré, an embodiment of Englishness in his writing, took Irish citizenship. In one of the last photographs of the spy author, he was wrapped in an Irish flag. Le Carré – real name David Cornwell – joins a tradition of Englishmen who became, or claimed to be, Irish. Patrick O’Brian, author of the Aubrey–Maturin stories, lived a private life but let it be supposed he was Irish. Actually, he was Richard Patrick Russ from Buckinghamshire – father of German heritage, mother with a distant Irish connection. Similarly, actor Peter O’Toole claimed to be from Connemara: in fact, he was a Yorkshireman, if temperamentally Irish. WB Yeats’s ‘Irish’ muse, Maud Gonne, was a spirited Englishwoman, drawn to Ireland by revolutionary fervour. The head of the…

Samantha Broadhurst and her brother Matt Gardner led the tributes at the funeral in the Cordell Chapel, Melbourne, of their father, Shan Gardner. He was an exuberant auctioneer, whose manner and comic timing on the podium were often said to be a polite version of Barry Humphries’s chum Sir Les Patterson. Brought up in Ballina, County Mayo, and christened David, Gardner was always known as Shan after his godfather Sir Shan Hackett, the Australian general, military historian and veteran of the Battle of Arnhem. After Harrow, in 1963 Gardner joined Nonning Station, a million acres of saltbush and red earth near Port Augusta, as a jackeroo (trainee manager), chasing sheep and cattle on horses and motorbikes from dawn until dusk in extreme heat. Samantha said it was hard to imagine…

British Caledonian Airways had been awarded the fixed-wing and helicopter contract to fly His Holiness and party round the British Isles on his visit in 1982. We used two Sikorsky S-61N helicopters, normally based in Aberdeen in support of offshore oil and gas operations: one crewed by Frayne Coulshaw and me, and the second by Mike Webber and David Babbington. First, we went to Wimbledon Park for the pick-up. I was co-pilot for the day, sitting in the left seat and watching over my right shoulder as His Holiness came up the aisle, followed by an assortment of cardinals, archbishops, lesser dignitaries, speechwriters, medics, security men and hangers-on. His Holiness came forward and selected the front-row double seat. Cardinal Hume took the single seat on the other side of the…

Rosa June Whitfield is a rose named after Oldie of the Year winner Dame June Whitfield (1925-2018). As she pointed out at the time, ‘The catalogue describes it as “superb for bedding, best up against a wall”.’ June in America is National Accordion Awareness Month. 1st June is World Milk Day. In the Philippines, the Milkiest Celebration runs all month. On 15th June 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta. In 2006, 15th June won most votes in a BBC History poll to find a national Britain Day. In 2008, a YouGov poll found that 45 per cent of Britons didn’t know what the Magna Carta was. By June 2013, there were no men left in the world who’d been born in the 19th century – but 21 women were. On 28th…

Picador £20 This is the story of six female foreign correspondents in the Second World War. They were pioneering, astonishingly brave and mostly damaged thereafter. The title is a quote from Martha Gellhorn as she set off to cover the war in Spain. As George Gellhorn disapprovingly put it to his daughter, Martha, ‘There are two kinds of women. And you are the other kind.’ The physical glamour of these women derived from their origins. Lee Miller and Martha Gellhorn had worked at Vogue. Virginia Cowles was a society columnist. Clare Hollingworth trained in domestic science and secretarial work before becoming a peace activist and finally a war reporter. ‘I love weapons,’ she once wrote. Even after she had scooped the world with her story about the German invasion of…

In his new book, The History Makers, Richard Cohen tells a story from the golden age of historians’ rivalries. That was not so long ago – in the 1960s, when, he was told, the obituaries desk of the Daily Telegraph realised that they didn’t have an obit prepared of the two best-known – and most disputatious – historians of the day, AJP Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The tempting idea arose of asking Trevor-Roper to prepare the – anonymous – obit of Taylor. Then, naturally, Taylor was asked in turn if he would like to write Trevor-Roper’s obituary. The wicked plan came to light only when someone on the desk whose task it was to get annual updates of the two pieces sent the Taylor obit to Taylor, and the Trevor-Roper…

I was shocked to learn Paul Ritter had gone to his reward, at the age of 54. I’d assumed he’d be around for decades more. Everyone enjoyed him as the father in Friday Night Dinner (‘A lovely bit of squirrel, Jackie’), and personally I appreciated him as the pathologist in Vera and as the sneering physicist in Chernobyl. Ritter was very good impersonating Jimmy Perry in a Dad’s Army biopic, discussing constipation-alleviating techniques with Arthur Lowe. He was one of those character actors who improved any scene he was in. He could be slimy and sinister or noble and forthright. And, of course, he could be funny. He commanded attention without making a fuss about it. Within days I was reeling because Helen McCrory was also dead, at only 52.…

A GREEK BEARING GIFTS Those of us who won’t be leaving home this summer (me too) can console ourselves with Yasmin Khan’s sparkling new food-and-travel cookbook, Ripe Figs. Glorious photographs illuminate the recipes – nothing fancy, just what you’d hope to find in a taverna on a Greek island or in a remote village in Anatolia. Khan is a civil-rights activist and a regular on Radio 4; her earlier cookbook Zaitoun (named for a variety of thyme endemic to Palestine) established her as a master story-teller. There are tales from the island of Ikaria, where Communist dissidents (artists and intellectuals, who else?) were exiled during Greece’s bloody civil war. The islanders’ self-sufficient way of life – a year-round growing season, goats for cheese and meat, olive groves, vineyards and a…

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines from the Mas de Daumas Gassac in the Languedoc: a 100-per-cent chardonnay sparkler made in the pétillant-naturel style; a pale, summery rosé made from grenache and carignan; and a spicy red in which syrah predominates. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Mas de Daumas Gassac ‘Folie’ Pét Nat NV, offer price £13.99, case price £167.88 Gently sparkling, with crisp acidity and clean, green apple fruit. Lemonade for grown-ups. Moulin de Gassac Guilhem Rosé 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Pale and interesting, bone-dry rosé with classic aromas of red fruits and a hint of garrigue herbs on the finish. Moulin de Gassac Guilhem Rouge 2019,…

Do you want our government to read your WhatsApp messages? Neither do I. And, thanks to end-to-end encryption (E2EE), they can’t – at the moment. Using E2EE, only the writer and the recipient can read the message; nobody else, not even the message service itself. WhatsApp uses E2EE and Facebook intends to, soon. These two cover half the active message-senders worldwide. However, officialdom doesn’t seem to like us keeping secrets and the Home Office has just started yet another attempt to ban E2EE. It is at least their third effort. In 2018, they linked it to terrorism, claiming that WhatsApp provides a ‘secret place for terrorists to communicate’. They wanted a skeleton key; this received a very cool reception from an industry that rates security pretty highly. In 2019, the…

Dame Beryl Grey celebrates her 94th birthday on 11th June. Who could possibly guess? She was just as stylish nearly 70 years ago when my best friend and I queued for her autograph at the Royal Opera House. Grey is the perfect example of disciplined elegance, traditional in the ballet world. She never became a household name like Margot Fonteyn, but she is as significant in her own quiet way. First, she starred as a prima ballerina of the Royal Ballet, and then she was a freelance guest dancer around the world. She was the first British dancer to appear with the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. Finally, she became artistic director of the English National Ballet. She knew Fonteyn and Nureyev well, but never danced with the Russian star because,…

‘A man who dies rich dies disgraced,’ thundered my hero Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). In an essay – his foundational work on philanthropy, The Gospel of Wealth – he wrote, ‘The problem of our age is the proper distribution of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.’ Having made a vast fortune as an industrialist, particularly with steel, iron and the railways, he was responsible for the stupendous architectural, as well as philanthropic, achievements of building some 3,000 libraries worldwide. Not only that; he also gave more than 7,600 organs to churches, as well as creating and endowing myriad organisations dedicated to education, music and scientific research. From 1899-1903, he built manytowered Skibo Castle in Sutherland, originally a 13th-century castle,…