Innehållsförteckning för September 2021 från The Oldie

In my neck of the woods, it’s back to normal. How’s it with you? On the bus and the London Underground, I am still wearing a mask, but other than that, everything is much as it was before the pandemic struck – except that my office-worker friends really don’t want to return to their offices for more than two days a week and I am suddenly conscious of how very expensive it is to eat out. I am going to the theatre again and loving it. With my chums Christopher Biggins and Bonnie Langford, I went to a packed-to-the-rafters Barbican and we had the night of our lives at a beyond-belief brilliant revival of Cole Porter’s musical Anything Goes. It is running until the end of October; even if you…

I have to confess I was desperate. I was working in Toronto and my agent put me up for a new comedy that was to star Frankie Howerd. The 1976 comedy series was originally to be called Oooh, Canada! But they quickly changed that to The Frankie Howerd Show when they realised he had a surprising following among Canadian viewers. Although born and brought up an Australian, I decided I would go to this audition reading as a Canadian – and a berserk one at that. The part was the idiot son of Mrs Otterby with the very ‘end of the pier’ name of Hardin I Otterby. Thanks to my ability with accents, I was able to pull off being an outrageous Canadian idiot lad, and in doing so made…

Andrew Neil was billed as the key figure in GB News, which launched in June. As I write, the channel’s linchpin has turned out to be Nigel Farage. That says it all. Neil was for many years the BBC’s best-informed and most forensic political interviewer. Though undoubtedly of the Right, he seldom allowed his personal views to intrude. His role as the founding chairman and prospective star interviewer of GB News suggested that the new channel would have a serious core. Farage is the father of Brexit, and a polemicist. He is overflowing with prejudices. I happen to have something of a soft spot for him, not least because he occasionally amuses me. But no one could pretend that he is a journalist or a proper interviewer. And yet it…

In September 1993, I was admitted to the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, suffering from a serious episode of depression. I was placed under the care of Dr Desmond Kelly, one of the most distinguished psychiatrists in the country. He asked me how I had been dealing with the depression myself and what I did to try to relax. I answered, ‘When I get home and, if I can put off any work I have to do by planning to get up early the next morning to do it, I pour myself a glass of whisky.’ Dr Kelly elicited, by a form of crossexamination of which I would have been proud, that ‘a glass of whisky’ was something of an underestimate. He skilfully dragged the truth about my drinking out of…

When it comes to creating a good life, my hero is the great management guru Charles Handy, who recently celebrated his 89th birthday. Handy’s wife died three years ago. He then had a stroke, which paralysed his left side. But he still maintains a healthy mix of country and town life, shuttling, with his carer, between a flat in Putney and a cottage in Norfolk. Here he writes and reads in the morning and plays croquet and meditates in the afternoon. Handy came to fame in the 1970s with his books, Gods of Management and later The Empty Raincoat, in which he told corporate types to attend their soul as well as their bank balance. Handy’s manuals sold millions of copies, and led to lucrative speaking gigs at Arthur Andersen,…

I was shaving before going to work that glistening morning 20 years ago, when my all-news radio station suddenly broke in to report that a small private plane had crashed into one of the 110-storey World Trade Center towers at the foot of Manhattan. I walked into the bedroom, turned on the TV – and witnessed an infamous moment in American history rivalling the firing on Fort Sumter that opened the Civil War, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered World War II, and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F Kennedy in 1963. It was no private plane, of course, but two jet liners commandeered by Saudi Arabian terrorists and turned into lethal missiles which levelled both towers, murdering 2,996 souls and maiming 6,000 others…

September isn’t mentioned anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. Being born in September increases your chance of getting into Oxbridge by 12 per cent. In the first century AD, most ships in the northern hemisphere stopped sailing in September and didn’t sail again for seven months. September is the ninth month and has nine letters in its name. This coincidence occurs in no other month. Because of the changeover from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, September 1752 was only 19 days long. There are more pop songs with September in the title than any other month. Hitler invaded Poland on 1st September 1939. The Great Fire of London began on 2nd September 1666. 19th September is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. For more on QI, visit qi.com and,…

The world is full of hazards – so full, in fact, that it often seems a miracle that anyone survives as long as they do. But, as someone once said, whatever happens must be possible, and survive most of us do – for a time, at least. Hidden hazards may lurk in all that we consume, but consume we must. It therefore comes as a great relief when some comestible of which we are fond receives the medical nihil obstat, as it were. Caffeinated drinks and, in particular, coffee, have long been suspected of causing cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms), a risk that compounds with age. An American study using British data – therefore bound to be both accurate and true – has shown that these fears are exaggerated; in…

One night in October 1940, during a heavy raid on London, a string of bombs obliterated most of the street where my family were living. The bomb that should have sent us to kingdom come failed to explode as it hit the garden about 20 feet from our Anderson shelter. The bombdisposal squad arrived the next day, and we went to live in the London Underground, awaiting evacuation. My brother was ten and I was five, so he was responsible for me. Most evacuees went with their schools, but we were classed as miscellaneous and eventually joined others locked into a train compartment at Waterloo Station. There was one adult with a loaf of bread, some water and a bucket. The train pulled out during an air raid – the…

Calling holidays ‘leave’ I hope we’ll soon be going on holiday after this pandemic. But will we? People don’t go on holiday today. They go on leave. Why? The only ones who go on holiday are children. They never refer to Christmas leave – thank goodness! Everyone else seems to go ‘on leave’. Why? Does it sound more important? What’s wrong with the word ‘holiday’? Being an oldie, I can remember Cliff Richard, in the 1960s, singing ‘We’re all goin’ on a summer holiday’ – great stuff! The word ‘holiday’ is from ‘holy day’, when Christians were expected to attend church. Gradually, the words became one and the meaning shifted to mean a day of recreation. In the meaning of ‘holy day’, the words are found in the Lindisfarne Gospels…

If you haven’t yet heard of The Oldie music column’s award for Conspicuous Bravery in the Staging of Rare Repertory, it’s because I’ve only just thought of it. There were two contenders for the award: David Pountney’s Grange Park Opera production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov, also known as Ivan the Terrible, and Garsington Opera’s revival of Handel’s musically glorious but little-known and rarely performed Amadigi. Like Rinaldo and the Water Music of 1717, Amadigi shows the 30-year-old Handel at the peak of his early powers. It’s the libretto’s less-than-skilful reshaping of this popular 16th-century Spanish romance, Don Quixote’s favourite reading, that has long seemed problematic. That and the minimalist cast: an alto castrato (Amadigi, our dauntless hero), a contralto (his ill-fated rival) and two sopranos (a flame-haired temptress…

One of the highlights of The Oldie’s calendar is the judges’ lunch for the Oldie of the Year awards (TOOTY). Not all the judges could make it last month, but a discreet table was booked in the wholly indiscreet Academy Club, in Soho. Panic! Lucy, the manager, told us they had been forced to close that day because half their staff had been carried off by the pingdemic, and there weren’t enough left to boil and serve an egg. So we were forced to find shelter elsewhere. Bang opposite is Mildreds, London’s premier vegan restaurant, and the obvious solution. Gyles Brandreth, our eats-nothing-with-a-face chairman, was thrilled with the change of venue. So Maureen Lipman, Rachel Johnson (in hot pants), the Editor and I followed in his wake. Mildreds was started…

Depending on how you define a birthday, Gordon Keeble is either 57 or 61. There are said to be 90 in the family – a remarkable survival rate, given that there were only ever 100 (or 99, if you exclude one made later from spares). They were, of course, cars – the product of an eager young start-up company founded by John Gordon and Jim Keeble. Their elegant, Bertone-designed, Corvette-engined four-seater prototype caused a sensation at the 1960 Geneva Motor Show. Put together in three months, it did 70mph in first; 140mph flat out. That was going some in 1960. Production began in 1964, followed by liquidation in 1965. They ran out of money: a strike delayed the supply of steering boxes. I’ve only ever seen one, parked in Hastings.…

Britain has been the seasonal home of the hobby since time immemorial. ‘When things were looking bleak for the Western Powers in the last war, Field Marshal Alanbrooke took a short leave to this country. He did not attend conferences at the War Office or with the War Cabinet. He retired to a wood in southern England and watched and filmed a pair of nesting hobbies,’ wrote Henry Douglas-Home on the final page of his bird memoir, The Birdman. Like the osprey, the hobby (Falco subbuteo) is a summer migrant, but can arrive as early as February and depart as late as November. Hobbies breed from late May to July in southern England and across Europe, as far north as Finland and into Russia, before returning, like most of our…

I had not taken a walk in the Lake District for 20 years. I arrived to the soundtrack of dark warnings that England’s most majestic Alpine landscape had become a giant car park and litter bin – its mountain tracks eroded by 4WDs and mountainsides wrecked by sheep. Would it be strippe dof its World Heritage status? The reality was a landscape under some strain and undergoing change. Some of this will be for the better, as Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks’s writing makes plain. There are native trees where, 20 years ago, there was none, for instance. Granted the most wonderful gift – a sunny day liberated from children – I soon realised that the main prerequisite for a good stroll in today’s Lakes isn’t mountain boots or Nordic walking…

Say you hold as a defender ♥ J109 and you must follow suit twice. Being equals, they can be played in one of six ways: ♥9-then-♥10, ♥10- then-♥9, ♥9-then-♥J, ♥J-then-♥9, ♥10-then-♥J, ♥J-then-♥10. However, if instead your holding is ♥J10 doubleton, you can play them in one of only two ways: ♥10-then-♥J, or ♥J- then-♥10. So from declarer’s perspective, it follows that if a defender plays, say, ♥10-then- ♥J, they are about three times as likely to have ♥J10 doubleton as they are ♥J109. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable The bidding (1) Stayman, asking for four-card majors. (2) No major. (3) Showing his fifth heart (and implying four spades – otherwise why use Stayman?). West led the ten of clubs – preferring to keep back the ace-king to retain communication with partner.…

Jilly Cooper (p13) is one of Britain’s most popular writers. She is author of Mount!, Polo and Riders. Her new book is Between the Covers: Sex, Socialising and Survival. She was in the first Oldie issue in 1992. Graham Boal QC (p27) was First Senior Prosecuting Counsel and a judge at the Old Bailey. He was involved in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, the last appeal of the Birmingham Six and the Guinness trial. Paul Heiney (p18) is a broadcaster and writer who became a farmer, using carthorses rather than tractors. Having now retired from a life on the land, he has returned to his first love, of ocean sailing. Liz Hodgkinson (p11) began her career on a rabble-rousing mass-circulation tabloid. She progressed to The Lady, where she is now…

The horror engulfing the southern United States focuses the remnants of my mind on the intriguing matter of misdirected loyalties. In Florida, Louisiana and elsewhere, legions of the wilfully unvaccinated are vacating the planet, out of fealty to Donald Trump. As a draft-dodger who left the missus at home suckling their newborn to court a porn star, the once and perhaps future President isn’t an ostentatiously loyal soul himself. Overlooking this, phalanges of worshippers all over the South, not all necessarily light on chromosomes as a result of familial affections, are refusing a brace of painless injections in befuddled tribute to the mores of a double-jabbed old goat who came so close to succumbing himself. If you imagine that such a deranged mass act of self-sacrifice represents the gold standard…

Mercury retrograde is an astronomical phenomenon. Mercury appears to slow its serene progress through the night sky and move backwards for a short spell. This happens three or four times a year. Modern science tells us that this is a trick of perception, caused by the relative trajectories of Earth and Mercury around the Sun. However, it freaked out our ancestors. And it continues to freak out astrology-obsessed Gen Z-ers and Millennials today, who believe that Mercury retrograde portends terrible things here on Earth. Mercury is, of course, named after the Roman messenger god and governs communication, travel, technology and intellect in general. So whenever Mercury goes into retrograde – as it did between 29th May and 22nd June, for example – those who believe in this stuff brace themselves…

In the mud and cold of Auschwitz, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was approached by an Alsatian Jew, who had never read Dante. Could Levi please explain why people spoke of this medieval poet in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, as one of the greatest European spirits? Levi recited to him the 26th Canto of the Divine Comedy. It is the passage that describes the encounter with Ulysses. Dante and his guide through hell and purgatory, Virgil, have entered the infernal realms, and climbed down from circle to circle of hell, meeting now the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, now his old tutor everlastingly running on hot sands for the sin of sodomy, here forgers of currency, there corrupt clerics, here men Dante had known, there suicides,…

William Morris was many kinds of man: visual artist, poet, political activist, and Marxist theoretician. He was also many kinds of designer. Morris designed numerous, special one-off objects that he either made himself, the design often evolving through the processes of making, or collaborated on with his craftworkers and friends. Morris designed for one-off and small-batch production in his early workshops and for relatively large-scale production runs in later days at his factory at Merton Abbey. To an extent that few people are aware of, he designed other products to be made by subcontractors and sold through his firm’s showrooms. He acted as designer-buyer for his shops in the sense of searching out and commissioning new ranges to be sold alongside Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co’s own products. On a…

In the late 1920s, Evelyn Waugh was staying with the Sitwells at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. Standing on the terrace, Sir George Sitwell stood silently, gazing out across the valley. Eventually, he turned and spoke to Evelyn ‘in the wistful, nostalgic tones of a castaway, yet of a castaway who was reconciled to his own company. Ignoring the settlement in the mining valley nearby, its streets packed with terraced housing, Sir George declared, “There is no one between us and the Locker-Lampsons.”’ The story used to resonate, not only with snobs who found themselves ‘marooned’ in the country, but also with artsy former Londoners who were desperate for intellectual communion with others on their wavelengths. And for these former Londoners too, even in the Home Counties, there was invariably no…

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... ‘It’s a shame there’s not a nicer word for nipples,’ my Great-Aunt Jessie once told me. Jessie was known widely as ‘the donkey lady’. As a robust but very small teenager living a street away from the beach, I was often called on by her to road-test a troublesome donkey before she could designate it tourist-friendly. If I left only partially bitten (‘Gum, no teeth,’ said Great-Aunt Jessie), then the donkey would soon have the offspring of every coal miner east of Mexborough on its back for the summer season. We had a cousin, Jinny, who was also known…

Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed is a stirring book by the Rev Patrick Woodhouse. He tells the story of a young Jewish Dutch woman who goes from being a crazy, mixed-up kid in her mid-twenties to someone of heroically understated goodness in a mere two and a half years. She was born in 1914 to exceptionally disparate parents. In her diaries, she describes her mother as ‘a model of what I must never become’. The chaotic way in which she was brought up left her stuck in a rut of exaggerated promiscuity. It took her a while to realise that chaos has, at its heart, the void of despair and that eroticism had betrayed her. She was highly intelligent and very well-educated, but this did not stop her being a…

The luxuriantly coiffed Scottish TV historian-archaeologist Neil Oliver is a man of mystery. How does he keep that barnet so clean in the salty, muddy, windswept environments he favours? What does he store in that satchel he always carries? What possessed him to join Andrew Neil’s Fox TV Mini-Me, GB News? His latest book, The Story of the World in 100 Moments, prompts another question. When did we start dividing history up like this, as if the past was a sort of hit parade? What will be Number One? 9/11? COVID-19? The prime suspect is Oliver’s fellow Scot the former director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor. A glance at the British Library catalogue confirms that, before MacGregor published his A History of the World in 100 Objects as a…

One of Radio 4’s virtues is in confronting subjects we’d rather not think about. In a recent edition of Helen Lewis’s The Spark – in which people find solutions to social problems – the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh questioned why, with him having advanced prostate cancer and facing intolerable pain, ‘The law insists I must suffer.’ A more common unthinkable is Alzheimer’s. The disintegration of the mind was dreaded by the late Jonathan Miller, since his author mother died with it at 55. The subject of memory, what it is and how it defines us obsessed Miller since he first practised as a doctor. He had devised a television series called Memories Are Made of This, but could never get it commissioned – one of the many professional slights that so…

The year was 1954 and I was 21 and loving my job as personal assistant/secretary to the actor-manager Donald Wolfit. Marlene Dietrich – the 120th anniversary of whose birth is in December – was been 53 and at the height of her fame. She was in London to do a season of 100 nights at the Café de Paris. The management had arranged for a different celebrity to introduce her each night. On that never-to-be-forgotten night, it was Donald’s turn and he took with him his wife, Rosalind, and me. I wish I could remember what I wore. I can’t imagine that I had anything adequate to the glittering occasion. We took our places at a prominent table just at the foot of the famous curved staircase, down which she…

I am sometimes asked why our clifftop house in north Cornwall is called after a fruit – the medlar – which would have little chance of growing successfully on this exposed, windswept coast. The short answer is that the house’s name is Medla – probably taken from a place in the hills of West Bengal. But that’s another story. Medlar trees (available from Pomona Fruits) can be planted from late November through the winter. Grafted on to quince or hawthorn rootstock, they will grow to a height of about 10-15 feet and, since they are self-fertile, one tree will happily produce fruit on its own. Nottingham and Dutch are the best-known varieties, the latter having the larger fruit. Provided that your soil is not too chalky and is well-drained and…

What happened to hock and Moselle? In Raymond Postgate’s The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine (the 1960 vintage), the author – ‘not to be mincing about it’ – declares that the best of these ‘Rhenish’ wines ‘are the finest white wines in the world’, with ‘an astonishing floral bouquet, which is unparalleled’. He spends five pages extolling their virtues before mentioning Riesling, and then in relation to the wines of Alsace, ‘still most usually marketed under the names of their grapes’. Alsace rather stole a march on the rest of the Old World in putting the grape variety on the label. Whatever the reason – perhaps it was the tidal wave of Liebfraumilch that engulfed Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, alienating serious wine-lovers – our historic penchant for the…

If you are involved in running a website of any size, you should be alert to copyright traps, especially as they relate to images. There are litigious copyright-enforcers hunting for you if you break the rules, and they are becoming more and more numerous and active. It’s all too easy to trip up: copying a picture from a news website is easy, and then sticking it into your own website is a doddle. It makes your website look better and probably illustrates a point being made in the text. The trouble is it’s almost certainly copyright infringement, and the big news websites in particular are fed up with their stuff being copied onto countless blogs and websites without either payment or attribution. You can see their point. So they are…

What was it like leaving Woman’s Hour? I felt, come on – you’ve worked for the BBC for so long: for Woman’s Hour for 33 years. You’re nearly 70. If you don’t make a change now, you never will. In the last programme, I was not going to cry when I said goodbye – but I did. I got the loveliest cake from Mary Berry and lovely flowers. What were your high points of Woman’s Hour, and low points? I looked back at my 1987 diary to the September date when I started and on the second day it said ‘Bette Davis – posh hotel’. In this elegant hotel, she sat on a sofa – tiny, immaculately dressed with long red fingernails, very fierce. I started talking to her about…

IN COMPETITION No 270, you were invited to write a poem called The Hall. Heather Oxley began, ‘Our halls are gateways to our outside selves.’ John Oldershaw’s narrator started in medias res: ‘“It’s the hall that sells the house!”/ Said Mr Valentine, holding a clipboard in his hand.’ Hilary Adams had a problem of decoration: ‘Perhaps I should have chosen Orange-rind,/To complement Banana in the hall.’ Several chose the hall through which Bede’s sparrow flew in the winter. Basil Ransome-Davies marked the electric moment for Dylan at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Max Ross’s church hall had cups of tea and salmon-paste sandwiches: ‘It would be nice if paradise/ Had the welcome of an old church hall.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below (including Con Connell, who had…

Bus stop is possibility in Innerleithen Border Telegraph Prince Charles steps in cow pat at Great Yorkshire Show Telegraph Parrot who went missing near Loch Lomond found in Dairy Ayrshire Daily News £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The October issue is on sale on 22nd September 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/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN…

It is one of the most painful problems facing many older people contemplating downsizing to a smaller home: what to do with all your precious books. If you’re thinking of moving to a new-build house or retirement home, you’ll probably find there’s no space whatever for any books. Instead, there will be a ‘feature wall’ of garish wallpaper. Very few new homes allow for bookshelves. Although show homes are designed for maximum appeal, with nicely-laid tables, pot plants and artwork on the walls, you will never find any books among the colour-coordinated décor. Whenever I visit a show home, I always ask why there are no bookshelves. They say they make the rooms look too small and crowded. And yet, as novelist Anthony Powell knew, Books Do Furnish a Room.…

I had to laugh when I read that Princess Diana’s old Ford Escort Ghia has just been sold at an Essex auction for £52,000. The last time I saw the royal runabout, I was strapped into the passenger seat, terrified for my life. I was hurtling at loomph down the Ml in the early hours of the morning in the teeth of a storm, being driven by Lord Rothermere’s chauffeur, affectionately known to all as Maltese Joe. ‘For God’s sake, Joe,’ I yelled above the crack of thunder, ‘You’ll smash the car and we’ll both be killed. Diana wouldn’t want that.’ It was April 1988 and I had just handed over £10,000 of Lord R’s money for the silver Escort with the frog mascot on the bonnet to be offered…

To be honest, I haven’t burst into print for yonks, so The Old Fella is the lucky organ to take my latest input, to be perfectly honest with you. First up: g’day and God love you all. You’ve probably heard that I have retired from the cut and thrust of Australian diplomacy – I don’t get half-cut any more and my thrusting is strictly recreational. But what does a statesman like me with an international track record like mine turn his hand to in semi-retirement? I actually showed up the other day at a high-end vocational-guidance joint in Knightsbridge Street, London. I asked the sheila behind the desk if she had any openings I could explore. All she did was stick the ‘Closed for lunch’ sign on the door. She…

Both my grandfathers had nicknames. My father’s father, Henry Channon, was called Chips. It is a mystery why he was given this nickname. Did he once live with a Mr Fish at Oxford? Or was he the first person to introduce potato chips or crisps to London? Who knows? My mother’s father, Richard Wyndham, was nicknamed Whips. Unfortunately, we do know why he was called that. He loved whipping ladies. However, according to his brother, Francis Wyndham, he always whipped the ladies gently, so as not to hurt them, Usually they enjoyed it, regularly returning for more. Richard ‘Whips’ Wyndham was a terrible father. He was a talented painter and writer and he travelled the globe, being both. He fought at Ypres in 1914 and never really recovered from it.…

It’s understandable that there’s so much concern about the record number of migrants and asylum seekers who have crossed the Channel this year. By July this year, the numbers had reached over 9,000 – more than in the whole of 2020. Yet I consider it a compliment to this country that so many migrants want to come to Britain. They have paid large sums with their life savings to make the journey, in frail dinghies. I doubt that most are motivated by benefits and free housing – migrants are often ambitious people, who seek work and a better life. The strenuous efforts they have made to embark on the journey amount to a kind of Darwinian survival test. People may blame the French for not controlling the flow, or the…

I’ve never really had a summer holiday before. That might seem silly, given that we all know teachers have the longest and best summer holidays of any profession in the land. What I mean is I’ve never experienced the summer holiday entirely as other teachers do. I’m spoilt. My parents had a house in France which they gave to me as a dowry – the only way they could give it to only one child under French law, and also a method very appealing to my 19th-century sensibilities. So, come the summer, I usually hightail it out of England on the first ferry after we break up, drive down through France for ten hours, and then become another person for six weeks. For those six weeks, I do not think…

Vanessa Vie, partner and soulmate of the poet Michael Horovitz for the last 11 years, played the anglo-saxophone at his funeral in Kensal Green Cemetery. ‘Michael told me he once wanted to learn to play the saxophone, and failed,’ she tells me. ‘The kazoo was an easier option … easier to blow… Eureka! The anglo-saxophone was born. ‘It became his trademark, a mixture of a saxophone and a kazoo. He used it as a lyre to accompany his poems and jazz improvisations. And, of course, he used it when performing with me in a duo. We were each other’s muse.’ Michael organised – and performed at – the Wholly Communion poetry event that filled the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, featuring Allen Ginsberg and other poets. Karyl Nairn recalled meeting…

In April 1965, Norman Mailer and his wife Beverly were in the UK to promote his book An American Dream and to visit friends Diana and Lionel Trilling in Oxford. His biographer relates that, in a letter to Diana Trilling, Mailer wrote that the novel was either ‘an extraordinary piece of crap’ or ‘the first novel to come along since The Sun Also Rises which has anything really new in it’. Mailer was enjoying the argument over the novel’s merits ‘because no vice of mine could be greater than my desire to create a sensation and be forever talked about’. I was at Teddy Hall, Oxford, and sharing a house with David Dodd and Michael Palin. David was a huge fan of Mailer. We knew he was coming to Oxford.…

Harbour Books £20 Invited to give a reading at the Catholic Poetry Society, G K Chesterton sat in miserable silence, unable to remember a single poem. ‘Will you recite The Donkey?’ someone asked. ‘Don’t know it,’ came the doleful reply. He brightened only when an audience member produced a volume by Chesterton’s friend Hilaire Belloc. ‘Ah! That’s real poetry.’ Perhaps no writer of Chesterton’s stature has exhibited such a complete lack of literary vanity. He dismissed his writing as hackwork, was bemused when admirers quoted his words back to him (‘I may have written something of the sort’) and had not a trace of the writer’s usual vices, envy and backbiting. This humility, combined with his gifts for friendship and personal kindness, has moved some Catholics to propose him as…

Jonathan Cape £20 The 1851 census was taken on 30th March. This latest book by one of our most beguiling Victorian scholars is by way of being a census of Britain at the time of the Great Exhibition, 170 years ago, seen through the prism of the greatest English imagination of the time. This momentous year found Dickens starting to write Bleak House. In both cases, we feel there is a turning point. With the erection of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Britain was celebrating its arrival as the most successful technocratic, commercial nation in the history of the planet. With the writing of Bleak House, with its two unreliable narrators, many readers have felt that the oeuvre of Dickens changed, and that the modern novel has arrived. Robert…

It was lockdown, and I needed some human company. So I decided to throw a party. But who should be asked? My first thought was Sir Roger de Coverley: he would get the guests onto the dance floor. And, being fond of a reel, he would bring some friends who would set the pace. Paul Jones would mix everyone up, and could be joined by Fergus McIver and several others from north of the border. All would be welcome. Major Ian Stewart, the Duke of Perth and indeed the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh would add to the fun, as would Brown-Eyed Mary and Texas Tommy. More than music would be required, though. I would put Jack Daniel and Tom Collins in charge of the drinks. For the soft-drinkers, poor…

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle 11th September to 26th February 2022 To pick a small nit at the outset, the title of this admirable show could mislead. It is not an examination of one portrait of one artist, but a fascinating display of the ways in which a generation of artists saw themselves and one another. I am an admirer of the husband-and-wife dealership Liss Llewellyn, which has organised this exhibition. They have spent 30 years working directly with artists and visiting their studios, and the show is a distillation of that long experience. Their judgement and taste in modern British art is impeccable, but my faith was shaken for a moment when I received what I had been led to believe was the catalogue. It contains over 380 paintings and…

When the pandemic-postponed Ryder Cup takes place at the Whistling Straits course in Wisconsin, it will be a very different kind of contest from those stretching back to 1997. It is unlikely to feature any contribution from Tiger Woods. He has played or vice-captained in nine of the last ten cross-Atlantic golf competitions (he was absent in 2014 with back issues). But this time the complications from a catastrophic car accident in February seem certain to keep him away. He still requires crutches to aid his walking. And the last thing Woods has ever wanted is for the world to see a hint of weakness. The suggestion is he will absent himself, even from watching from the sidelines. And it would seem, at least from this side of the Atlantic,…

Nothing could be more enlivening than a walk round Kensal Green Cemetery in London, the capital’s first great necropolis, founded in 1832. Whatever your passion, with all those who are buried here, the inventors, writers, entertainers etc – every one of them of them of top-notch interest – the very essence of their roots and shoots can be joyfully relished within these walls. Surrounded by the scrunching cityscape of the Harrow Road, it suddenly appears; a vast tract of Arcadia, a place that makes your spirits soar to screaming delight. Trollope lies here, as does Sir Charles Locock, who delivered all Queen Victoria’s children. Blondin the tightrope-walker is buried at Kensal Green; so too is W H Smith – with a marble book atop his grave. Charles and Fanny Kemble,…

HRT boosts sex appeal Q I would just like to thank you for your advice to Barbara, in June’s issue, to ‘get help for your own sexual problems...’ Post-menopause, I had lost all desire for sex and when also it became painful I told my husband and thought, with some relief, that that was that: no more for me! However, after reading your advice, I decided to try HRT and, my goodness, are we both glad that I did! It’s only been two weeks but it’s like rolling back the years! So, thank you again and if there are any post-menopausal women reading this who think they’ve just gone off sex completely, please give HRT a try! Name and address supplied A I’m thrilled to hear this! But, before everyone rushes…