Innehållsförteckning för May 2023 från The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary Joan Collins turns 90 on 23rd May. It's hard to believe (even when you look very closely – and I have), but it's true. When I turned 75 in March, she called me on my birthday – and she gave me a generous present, too. As Dame Joan enters her tenth decade, I want to return the compliment with a small bouquet of my own. She is a phenomenon. Other than the late Elizabeth II, who had an inherited advantage, no other British woman of our time has sustained international celebrity across seven decades. Like the late Queen (whose Coronation in 1953 she remembers vividly), Joan's heritage is fundamental to her story and her success. She was born into a showbusiness family in 1933 (her father was…

WHAT IS circumboob? Circumboob is a recent trend in décolletage – the boob trend that brings all other boob trends full circle, so to speak. Imagine a swimsuit cut so as to show the full circumference of the female breast while (crucially) shielding the nipple. You don't have to imagine it. Just head to the Instagram page of Australian model Gabrielle Epstein, who pioneered the look in February, posing in a green bikini that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have been proud to have engineered. The image prompted a flurry of reports about how 2023 is the ‘year of the circumboob’, a boob trend for a ‘chaotic era’. None of these reports noted that anyone hoping to follow the trend will likely require serious plastic surgery – for boobs do not…

While making tea, I recall a friend's advice. ‘Get a Quooker,’ he proclaimed, referring to a newfangled kitchen tap that can deliver instant boiling water to the teapot. He added, ‘Banish the boredom of waiting for the kettle to boil!’ His counsel could apply to many humdrum routines (waiting for the bus, walking to post a letter). There was an implicit notion that boredom is dead time, better used elsewhere, were it not for the dull necessity of quotidian tasks. I set to work researching the cost of the boiling tap (£1,000+) and the upkeep. I grew wary. Do I actually mind waiting for the kettle to boil – while standing there, alone with my thoughts, staring out of the window? Or do I rather appreciate it? Is a little…

How's your Spanish? Perhaps you already know that the phrase ‘Soy mayor, no idiota’ means ‘I'm old – not an idiot.’ It is just over a year since Carlos San Juan, an 80-year-old doctor from Valencia, came up with the phrase, as part of a Quixotic campaign to persuade banks to respond to customers who wanted to deal with a human being rather than a machine. He was prompted by the closures of thousands of bank branches across the country, just as has been happening in Britain over the last decade or so. Carlos had little idea how that phrase would resound. Within a few weeks, he had 648,000 signatures backing him on change.org and widespread coverage in the media. The banking industry and the Spanish government responded: the main…

Postcards from the Edge Prince Harry seems to be jolly pleased with the progress of his life – bestselling memoir, lovely wife, sweet kids, dogs, chickens, Hollywood glamour and endless opportunity for psychotherapy sessions. He feels he's now so emotionally connected, and a much better parent than his father. But there is one aspect he and Meghan have overlooked: the presence of grandparents in the lives of young children. Harry lives far away from, and distanced from, his father, while Meghan isn't on speakers with hers. According to a German study published by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, we now live in the age of the grandparent. There have never been so many children with four living grandparents – because life expectation has so fortunately increased. There are…

Country Mouse The wife and I have finished our second book. The previous one charted a year in the life of a theoretically incompatible married couple. In this one, we turn the lens away from ourselves to look outside the cottage window and attempt to paint an authentic picture – for urbanites considering a rural relocation – of what country life in 2023 is really like. I wake up in the middle of the night and sit bolt upright, thinking of whole themes and subtexts that should have been included. Yet the book has already gone to press. As a glass-half-empty sort of fellow, I also wanted to add a final chapter, entitled Short-changed, listing what I have missed out on through not living in the county of Wiltshire during…

• Nobody knows where the word dog comes from. • The word cat originally meant dog. It's from the Latin catulus, a small dog or puppy. • There is only one species of dog. Any dog, of any appearance or size, can breed with any other. • There are more than 400 different breeds of dog. • The largest breed of dog is the St Bernard, which commonly weighs 1501b. The smallest is the chihuahua, which weighs less than 21b. •Unusual breeds of dog include the Majestic Tree Hound; the Abyssinian Sand Terrier; the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever; the New Guinea Singing Dog; the Clumber Spaniel; the Billy; the Bolognese; the Dunker; the Petit Bleu de Gascogne; and the Wirehaired Pointing Griffon. •Dogs have been domesticated for at least…

The Doctor's Surgery In the 19th century, there was a substance and a concept known as laudable pus. Copious suppuration was taken as a sign that the body was doing its reparative work. We laugh at the foolishness of our ancestors. Now that such suppuration, thanks to asepsis and general cleanliness, is a thing of the past, stress has taken its place. It is a kind of emotional suppuration. Personally, I think there is such a thing as laudable stress: without deadlines, for example, which cause stress, would anything ever get done? Would this journal ever appear? But the idea that life should be stress-free is now the orthodoxy: if only we had enough wind chimes, essential oils, t'ai chi, mindfulness etc, life would be a piece of cake –…

From the way I've been talking, anyone would think that her death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself. C S Lewis on the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960 Drink is rapidly acquiring a me problem… Sex is obsessed with me. Alan Brownjohn I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) The shiver of a suddenly noticed loss. Alan Hollinghurst, The Spell (1998) Unlike any Dickens novel, A Man in Full is easy to summarise. Christopher Hitchens on the Tom Wolfe novel You cannot learn to cook from cookery books, or learn to drive from reading The Highway Code. Michael Oakeshott on the importance of practical experience A man only has an identity if he's among people who recognise him ……

French food in London goes through phases: bistro in the seventies; Roux brothers lavish in the eighties; nouvelle cuisine in the nineties; some of the above in the noughties; nowhere in the teens – and in the twenties? It's the era of Bouchon Racine, in Farringdon: gutsy, smelly, noisy French cuisine for truckers (and publishers). And I know why. Henry Harris, the chef/owner, is a major fan of the gutsy, smelly, noisy French cop series Spiral. Like the rest of us, he mispronounces it Speeeeraaaaal, ignoring the fact that the French title is Engrenages, and Spiral its English translation. No matter. Spiral is France, as we know it to be: the men are as ugly, unshaven and as smelly as Quasimodo. They grunt and swear, and live in holes in…

A winding country road, two lanes, narrowing in places, and stepping on it a bit in the old Volvo because road diversions had made me late – about 50mph where I'd normally have done 40mph – and a smallish oncoming SUV doing the same. Clunk. Wing mirrors. The interior mirror showed he didn't stop – not even any brake lights as he disappeared round the bend. Neither did I. It's happened before, about seven years ago, and the mirror surround has been taped ever since. Whose fault – mine, his or both? Or can we find something else to blame? Cars, like us, have got fatter. The younger they are, the fatter they're getting (that's happening to us too, though some don't like it said). Since the 1990s, safety legislation…

The sand martin (Riparia riparia) is the smallest and least numerous of British Hirundinidae (swallows). Up to 225,000 pairs arrive in the UK to breed in the summer, mostly from tropical West Africa, which compares with 620,000 house-martin pairs and 700,000 barn swallows. It is one of the earliest summer migrants and also the most water-loving. As its name suggests, its natural habitat is sandy; it nests in tunnels dug to a depth of three feet. It is the most gregarious of the species: its favoured sites are honeycombed with the holes of hundreds of pairs. The tunnelling requirement makes the sand martin less familiar to us than either its Hirundinidae cousins or the swift (not classified as a swallow), all of which frequent buildings. John Clare (1793-1864) celebrated the…

Taking a Walk Seek quotes about rain and you'll be drenched in platitudes: don't wait for the storm to pass but learn to dance in the rain; there is no life without rain; sunshine after the rain is really quite pretty. The architects of such philosophy of precipitation have never braved the Brecon Beacons on a filthy wet day. Here, spitty, spiteful rain insinuated cold wetness through every seam of ‘waterproof’. Icy water trickled down my neck, soaked my feet and fogged my glasses. It offered no refreshment or revelation; it was cold, chilling and obscuring. The rain began gently enough, at the bottom of the hill, as I clicked through the gate with my walking companion, Tom Bullough. He has written an illuminating book about walking along Sarn Helen,…

Across 7 A verse in poetry (6) 8 Breathed heavily and deeply (6) 10 Medical injector (7) 11 Rub out (5) 12 What left after losing wheels (4) 13 Attempt; piece of writing (5) 17 Silly mistake (5) 18 (Your) magic power? (4) 22 Equipment for lifting something heavy (5) 23 Make reparation for (7) 24 A song of devotion or loyalty (6) 25 Walking aid (6) Down 1 Like normally (2,5) 2 Register of salaries (7) 3 Fresh bracing sea air (5) 4 Watering hole after work? (4,3) 5 Ampoule (5) 6 All the best! (5) 9 Agreed break in hostilities (9) 14 Made a move at chess (7) 15 Freedom from vanity or conceit (7) 16 Beetroot soup (7) 19 Leading (5) 20 Panoramic view (5) 21 Love…

Ask Virginia Marriage jitters Q This sounds such a silly problem. My partner and I have lived together for 15 years after divorcing our respective partners. Suddenly, my partner has asked me to marry her. I feel so bad, but the whole idea fills me with horror. I don't want to lose her, but I feel getting married might be bad luck, since we've got on so well so far. She's accusing me of not loving her enough. What do you think I should do? Name and address supplied A How much does getting married matter to her? How much does not getting married matter to you? I can't see any way out of this except to discuss it – again and again and again, and preferably with an experienced…

Weidenfeld and Nicolson,320pp,£22 This is ‘a work of historical recovery,’ wrote David Olusoga in the Guardian. It concerns those people who were brought back to Europe by explorers and colonisers, and ‘paints these marginalised figures back on to history's canvas, complicating familiar narratives of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery.’ It introduces us to the Brazilians who met Henry VIII and the Inuit man who was brought to late 16th-century Bristol and hunted ducks on the River Avon. We learn of the thousands of others who arrived as intermediaries and translators, diplomats and servants… In one of her early chapters Pennock urges us to ‘imagine the sixteenth century a little differently.’ Despite the enormous challenges presented by the sources and the inevitably fragmentary nature of the lives that appear from within them, few…

William Collins,480pp,£25 This book by Oxford ethicist Biggar was originally commissioned by publishers Bloomsbury, then cancelled out of pusillanimity following the backlash to Biggar's opposition to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. In the Literary Review, Jonathan Sumption praised Biggar's objective approach. ‘He confronts the famous horror stories: the Opium Wars, the Benin expedition, the Amritsar massacre, the suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya. In each case, he sets out the historical context, which is so often absent. He acknowledges the respects in which the charges are justified, but points out in what respects they are unjustified or exaggerated.’ In the online magazine Quillette, John Lloyd said that Biggar's book ‘is patiently argued and carefully balanced yet passionately committed to the production of a narrative which replaces denunciation with evidence…

Yale,480pp,£25 For one book to narrate and analyse the reigns of all five Tudor monarchs is a daunting task,’ Helen Hackett acknowledged in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘To add to this an interwoven account of the social and cultural contexts of the period … might seem impossible, yet this is what Wooding has achieved in this impressive book’. Not only is the book ‘monumental’, she continued, but ‘the technique of zooming in on striking details and zooming out to debate big questions creates a reading experience that at once engages, enlightens and provokes further reflection.’ Describing the book as ‘a radical new history’ and ‘incredibly ambitious’, Daniel Brooks in the Telegraph noted that ‘each chapter offers an important nuance backed up by a laudably diverse cast of sources.’ Hailing the…

Ebury, 272pp, £16.99 Michael Rosen's latest is billed as both a self-help manual and a memoir. It details his long bout of Covid, including a 40-day induced coma, from which he awoke realising he had to find ways of ‘getting through.’ James McConnachie in the Sunday Times gave examples of this advice – from stretching like a cat to learning to adjust your grip on things that hurt, as you would a plastic bag that's cutting into your fingers. He praised Rosen's offbeat voice, skittish yet thoughtful, and his exceptional storytelling, which circles an incident, then alights on its emotional centre. Reviewers listed the incidents Rosen, now 76, has had to confront: the impact of the holocaust on his family; the loss of his BBC job; his undiagnosed hypothyroidism; the…

Elliott & Thompson, 233pp, £20 ‘For the HRVP* job we need a Brit and a woman from left-of-centre politics,’ Jose Manuel Barroso, then EU Commission president, told Catherine Ashton, as she was plucked from relative political obscurity to be the EU's chief diplomat. Simon Tisdall in the Guardian suggested the anecdote ‘is typical of Ashton's self-effacing approach to her job,’ arguing that her quiet diplomacy was often able to ‘inch negotiations forward.’ Luke Harding in the Observer agreed: ‘The assumption was that she would be hopeless. In fact she proved to be a consummate diplomat: quietly effective, focused on detail … She was interested in getting things done, rather than grandstanding. And painfully aware that there were “no perfect solutions” to complex issues.’ He found it ‘an enjoyable read,’ offering…

Picador, 421pp, £10.99 ‘Thrumming beneath this tale of sunken cargo ships, gangland executions and human smugglers is the enduring appeal of the American dream,’ Will Lloyd wrote in the Times. ‘What would migrants risk to get there?’ The most sophisticated smuggling operation of all time, shipping desperate Chinese migrants to the US, came to grief when in 1993 the cargo ship Golden Venture, with 286 undocumented Chinese aboard, ran aground off the coast of New York. At the heart of this trade was Sister Ping, responsible for bringing at least 3,000 illegal migrants to America and in the process making a fortune of $40 million: as Lloyd noted, she was both ‘a facilitator and an exploiter.’ Tim Adams in the Guardian was impressed by the ‘indefatigability’ of the author's ‘approach…

Jan Moir (p20) is a columnist at the Daily Mail. She was restaurant critic at the Daily Telegraph and worked at the Observer. She won Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards. Duncan Campbell (p32) was crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent for the Guardian. He wrote If It Bleeds, The Paradise Trail and That Was Business, This Is Personal. Hugo Vickers (p40) is our leading royal biographer. He wrote biographies of the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary. His latest book is Coronation: The Crowning of Elizabeth II. Christopher Howse (p59) writes for the Daily Telegraph, where he's been Letters, Comment and Obituaries Editor. He wrote Soho in the Eighties, A Pilgrim in Spain and The Train in Spain.…

Grumpy Oldie Man Inspired by the Government's postCOVID drive to coax the venerable back to work, I've been thinking hard about a new career. This contemplation stems from two sources. One is financial pressure. For reasons requiring no explanation to readers of this column, the journalistic income has of late dried up alarmingly. It would be a relief to find a more gushing revenue stream. In a First World country such as Finland or the Netherlands, someone approaching his 60th birthday could look forward to a decent state pension. Here, a far more meagre pay-out now kicks in at, so far as I remember, 91. The non-financial motivation is patriotism. I was greatly moved not long ago by the words of one Guy Opperman, an employment minister. ‘Older workers are…

There comes an age when you get to a certain age – and that is the age when you are crumbling inside like a landslip, but determined to present a Mount Rushmore-strength façade of youthful capability to the outside world. Those who have gone before you, those who have already tottered down this path of incipient doddery, often leave helpful hints to navigate the terrain. Here is rule number one; never complain about the price of anything, because nothing is more ageing. Too true – but who said it first? Dame Joan Collins? Haile Selassie? Obviously, I can't remember. Obviously, I had to Google ‘American presidents carved in stone’ to retrieve the Mount Rushmore reference and slip it back into a dusty file in the Jan-brain, where it promptly disappeared…

Martin Scorsese's new film Killer of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, is running at three hours 20 minutes. The Cannes festival officials are asking, no doubt cautiously and respectfully, if it could be trimmed before the May festival. During the past 20 years, a considerable number of films have hovered around the three-hour mark. It's a striking shift from the previous 70 years, when a film of even two hours was considered too long for its content. Silent films were generally under 90 minutes; many were around 60 minutes. Exceptions were rare, the most notable being those of pioneer director D W Griffith: Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1917) were both over three hours. Neither film started a trend. Griffith's career petered out…

I can't exactly remember when I became a curmudgeon. Grumpiness creeps up on you – slowly, surreptitiously but inevitably for someone now 67, like me. In retrospect, the first telltale signs were a few Christmases ago when I was genuinely delighted to receive a couple of pairs of socks, though irritated that they were held together by annoying tough plastic and, worse still, they had a letter ‘L’ stitched on one and an ‘R’ on the other. Then there was the ambivalent reaction to someone offering me their seat on the London Underground. A polite gesture to be sure, but the temerity of suggesting I was too feeble to stand caused a near stroke, especially as I was determined to stand the rest of the journey, even though my feet…

There aren't many pleasures associated with old age. But a potent one is shedding all the burdensome responsibilities you had when you were younger. As a teenager, I used to see in stationers’ shops those expanding organiser files with separate compartments for mortgage, car, insurance, tax and so on – and heave a sigh of relief that I didn't have to worry about any of that. Then, gradually, I acquired them all – along with the organiser file. First, the mortgage. For years, I tussled with varying interest rates and the pros and cons of repayment versus interest-only loans. The sensation of being conned never left me. Next came the car, and all that entailed; insurance, tax, MOT, servicing, filling up with petrol, new tyres, parking fines, depreciation and the…

At the end of a long day, 2nd June 1953, the Queen broadcast to the nation. She spoke in ‘a clear and firm’ voice, showing not a trace of weariness, but at least one listener detected ‘a deep undercurrent of emotion as she spoke’. She reflected on the memorable day and thanked all those who had supported her, ‘spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world’. She confirmed how she had pledged to serve: ‘Throughout all my life and with all my heart, I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.’ The Queen referred to the ancient ritual that had played out that day and, as ever, gently hit the nail on the head: ‘I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not a symbol…

‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.’ So sings the heavenly host at the beginning of Luke's Gospel, acclaiming Christ's nativity. But this hymn of praise is just as relevant to us now as we approach Easter. At the moment, we are all longing for peace: peace in the world at large, peace in Ukraine, peace in our strike-torn country and peace in our own homes. The nicest illustration of peace I can think of is by the American naïve painter Edward Hicks (1780-1849): Peaceable Kingdom (pictured). Hicks was a Quaker. The left side of the picture shows that other great Quaker, William Penn, a lover of harmony, justice and tolerance, signing the legendary treaty of 1682, whereby the native Lenape tribe and the…

Oldie Man of Letters The memorial service for former Times editor Charlie Wilson (1935-2022), reported in this magazine (page 44), was also a memorial for old Fleet Street, and the days when editors and proprietors appeared to count for something. Nowadays, the under-40s scarcely ever buy a newspaper, and those who read the papers online are probably in a minority. Like the Church of England, the trade-union movement and the monarchy, the press is on its last legs. Obviously, as an old journalist, I find this sad. Since my first foray into the hurly-burly of the popular press, I have echoed Beaverbrook's words – ‘I PITY anyone who isn't a journalist.’ Fastidious people, especially lefties, squirm at the mention of the great newspaper proprietors. Alan Bennett, for example, would not…

By Tanya Frank HarperCollins £14.99 Zig-Zag Boy tells the story of Tanya Frank's battle to save her son Zach from his persistent psychotic schizophrenia. When Zach starts at UCLA, he is an A-grade student across a range of diverse academic subjects, a good guitarist, with a variety of other interests, and a joy to be with socially. But as his psychosis takes hold, his grades deteriorate and in the end he doesn't graduate. The guitarplaying stops. The girlfriends leave. Despite the title of the book, its central character is not Zach, but Tanya, the author. She is a fiercely devoted mother to Zach, but the experience of looking after him as he comes apart nearly tears her apart as well. There are three dimensions to her agony. The first is…

May God preserve us from the universal gloop – modern gravy. One thing the British do well is Sunday lunch. Nothing beats a good roast and all the trimmings, whether it's beef, pork, lamb or chicken, each served with its own gravy made from its own juices, intensifying the flavour. So why do so many pubs and restaurants – and especially carveries – ruin it all by dousing good meat in some anonymous all-purpose brown gloop that tastes of nothing but flour, salt and burnt caramel? This is not gravy. It is an abomination unto the Lord's Day. As soon as I see that single great urn at the end of the carvery table, my heart sinks. Or when the waiter brings one jug of gravy to go with every…

It's never a good thing when the BBC becomes the news and gets discussed – endlessly. My favourite comment on the Lineker affair was Matt Pritchett's cartoon, showing a weather girl giving the forecast: ‘Freezing temperatures. Snow’ and travel chaos. Gary Lineker compares it to Stalingrad 1942-3.’ I don't have any favourite comments about Richard Sharp, BBC chairman. Or about the inexplicable, un-Reithian decision to axe the BBC Singers, the career route for many solo stars. Saving money? It barely covers the amount paid to Lineker for his three-day week. My singing friends are now signing friends – petitions abound. Favourite Radio 3 presenters are horrified, but stifled by omertá from saying so. What can one approve? Well, I welcome Martin Jarvis's lifetime achievement award among the BBC's annual audio…

Quince trees are more susceptible to spring frosts than other fruit trees, as they come into flower earlier. After a bumper quince crop last autumn, I cannot believe that we shall again have a hundred fruit from one tree this year. But we are hoping to get through April without any damaging frosts. It is not too late to plant a quince tree in April; bare-root trees about four feet tall can be bought for less than £30. Quinces, which are self-fertile, can also be grown in containers, and their height restricted, with pruning, to a few feet. Whether they're in open ground or in pots, a sunny, sheltered site should be chosen where possible, and the trees covered with fleece if frost threatens. Our trees have reached a height…

The Oldie's publisher, James Pembroke, who some years ago was, after a gruelling selection procedure, also appointed its restaurant critic, is a man of almost monastic self-denial. His métier, however, occasionally forces him to over-indulge in alcohol and to cope with its deleterious effects. Knowing that I have the same dedication to my craft, he kindly shared his latest discovery: a Swedishmade product called Myrkl. Swallow two pills, he said, a couple of hours before going out on the lash (I paraphrase) and you'll wake next morning as fresh as a daisy. Mankind has achieved much, but a hangover cure cannot be counted among its successes. There is Jeeves's favourite, the prairie oyster – ‘It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious.…

I have just done my first proper travelling since before the pandemic, visiting Singapore and Vietnam. It was a great trip, and I was especially struck by how easy it was to make all the arrangements by mercilessly using apps on my smartphone. To start with, I booked our long-haul flights on my phone, as the airline offered a small discount for using their app, which also checked us in at Heathrow (no queuing at the counter) and sent our boarding passes to our phones. In Singapore, our COVID vaccinations were checked using the NHS app. We'd booked our hotel using the Hotels.com app and our taxi came from the Grab, com app, the local Uber equivalent. In the hotel, and many restaurants, the menu was visible only by our…

What started your interest in ballet? My mother was American and danced on Broadway and talked about ballet endlessly which encouraged my desire to learn ballet. When did you start ballet? About age ten. Would you have preferred to become a ballerina instead of an actress? My first intention was to become a famous ballerina and call myself Caronova. How come you went to Hollywood? Gene Kelly saw me dance and decided he would like me as his partner for An American in Paris (1951). That's how it all started, but I had no intention of being in the movies. What was Hollywood like in the ‘50s? At first, I thought it was extremely excessive. The steaks were enough to feed a family for a week. What was Gene Kelly…

Tjolpe Flodqvist, who died last year aged 82, was a mainstay of the Swedish team for nearly 50 years and won European championships. He also translated my 20 Bridge Lessons books into Swedish. This month's deal comes from the 1980 World Team Championships versus Iceland and features Tjolpe on opening lead to Three Notrumps. Which card would you have selected? Choose from these options: (a) ♠7, (b) ♥ 7, (c) ♦ A, (d) ♣ 6, (e) something else. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable (1) Facing a 12-14 Notrump (as North was), this is optimistic. Pass is indicated. You could make a case for all four of the above leads. You could choose (a) or (b) – fourth highest of your longest suit, perhaps choosing spades as they're a tad stronger. You…

It started early this year with Roald Dahl and spawned a tidal wave of wokery in which writers from Ian Fleming to Enid Blyton fell victim to the curse of the re-write, with some authors even choosing to self-censor. In February, it emerged that that Roald Dahl's publisher Puffin UK had made hundreds of changes to his books ‘to minimise offence’.’ Augustus Gloop could no longer be called ‘fat’ nor Mrs Twit ‘fearfully ugly’. Soon after, news emerged that ‘a raft of sexist and racist terms’ were to be removed from Ian Flaming's Bond novels in time for the unreformed spy ‘s 70th anniversary this year. In France, Gallimard refused to countenance changes to Dahl's works. While it is not illegal to change a dead author's works, French lawyer Antoine…

Allen Lane, 208pp, £16.99 ‘Let us tell, then, a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, makebelieve kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel-thieves, poisoners, devil worship, and sexual obsession.’ So, beguilingly, begins David Graeber's last book, published two years after his sudden death at the age of 59. A radical anthropologist whose books include Bullshit Jobs, about the meaningless tasks so many people perform to earn their corn, Graeber spent his life challenging preconceived ideas about the way we live, move and have our being. Libertalia – an egalitarian utopia by the sea In the 1980's, as part of his doctoral research, he spent much time doing fieldwork in Madagascar, the north-east littoral of which in the early 18th-century provided a safe haven for pirates, who…

Icon,400pp,£20 Focusing on five American women who joined the Office of Strategic Services in WWII and joined the CIA when it was founded in 1947, Holt's book covers their ‘battles for recognition over several decades.’ This epic history ‘is as rich with the detail of what the women spies were working on as with the professional barriers they faced,’ wrote Helen Warrell in the Financial Times. ‘The gadgets are straight out of spy fiction: a compact mirror which, when angled correctly, displayed a secret code; a poison extracted from Alaskan clams that could kill when dispensed with a single scratch. While all this makes for a gripping story, the chronological thread jumps, sometimes confusingly, between the four women, shuttling from [Eloise] Page's work surveilling Soviet military capabilities to [Liz] Sudmeier…

Cape,384pp,£22 While the involvement in the Spanish Civil War of such male writers as George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway is widely known, Sarah Watling has chosen to write about the women for whom this conflict became a defining experience, including Jessica Mitford, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nancy Cunard, and Martha Gellhorn. ‘What drew Watling to these women, wrote Caroline Moorhead in the Literary Review, ‘was that they chose not to be dispassionate but to take sides.’ Although ‘group biographies are notoriously hard to write’, Watling ‘knits together with considerable skill the details of her characters’ lives and adventures in Spain…. She also intersperses her narrative with perceptive commentary. Each of these women, as she shows, battled with her own demons.’ Battling fascism with guts and determination As Alexander Larman put it…

Biography & memoir HarperCollins, 336pp, £20 The biography of Britain's shortest-lasting prime minister, whose term of office was mocked by one tabloid as having been outlasted by a lettuce, does not offer much promise. But Harry Cole, political editor of the Sun, and James Heale, diary editor of the Spectator, have ‘cleverly’ turned ‘a story of surprise victory into a well-researched tragedy of warnings ignored,’ wrote Tim Stanley in the Daily Telegraph. Truss ‘comes across as such a slight character that one wonders if there's a big market to read an entire book about her, but when Cole and Heale get stuck into her fight against Sunak, they offer a masterful, behind-thescenes perspective on theatre that affected us all.’ A well-researched tragedy of warnings ignored Observer reviewer Andrew Anthony thought…

Bloomsbury, 202pp, £20 Frank Field, now Baron Field of Birkenhead, describes this brief memoir as his ‘death mask’. He has incurable cancer and could die at any moment. But you could also call it his ‘testament’, because it explains how, despite his reputation for saintliness, he survived forty years in British politics, that blood sport without a close season. A committed Christian, Field did not turn the other cheek. Aged 15, and threatened by his violent father with a hammer, he grabbed the hammer and said that if his father tried that again, he would use the hammer on him. Later he showed the same resolve when threatened by Momentum activists in Birkenhead, the constituency he represented for forty years. In the Telegraph, Tim Stanley said that as a young…

Yale, 208pp, £16.99 ‘So many legends have been connected to the espionage agent Sidney Reilly–most famously, that Ian Fleming modelled James Bond after him–that it's no easy feat to establish the facts of the life he actually led. Further muddying Reilly's trail are the countless lies he himself spread,’ said Diane Cole in the Wall Street Journal. Clare Mulley in the Spectator said of Reilly: ‘Born Sigmund or Schlomo Rosenblum (in the 1870s), he spoke possibly six languages and identified at different times as an Englishman, an Irishman, a Greek or Turkish merchant, a German machine-tool operator and a Tsarist officer. In fact he came from a Ukrainian Jewish family, but… devoted his life to making love and money and, with only slightly greater dedication, fighting Bolshevism as an MI6…

Faber, 160pp, £25 ‘Part memoir, part essay’, Auster's book offers a reflection on the role that the gun has played in [American] history, society and the novelist's own life,’ wrote Gary Younge in the Guardian. For example, we discover ‘that while there were no guns in the Auster home, there was a significant, if rarely mentioned, gun death in the family's history: his grandmother shot his estranged grandfather in front of his uncle.’ He insists that the United States needs to have ‘an honest, difficult national conversation’ about gun control, but ‘instead he takes us on a journey that passes by the second amendment, slavery, Native American genocide, Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, neoliberal globalisation and much more… Auster, one of the finest storytellers in the…

Reaktion, 256pp, £20 The two authors are both history professors – Hamlett at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Strange at Durham University. So they should be well placed to tell, as the publisher put it, the ‘story of the “pet revolution” alongside other revolutions – industrial, agricultural, political – to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life.’ The book describes the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops and the development of veterinary care creating the pet economy. Furthermore, Hamlett was principal investigator in a project that explored the role of pets in British family life between 1837 and 1937 and looked at the emergence of new kinds of pets. In the UK, in 2022, some 62 per cent of households owned a pet,…

Tinder Press, 320pp, £18.99 During the pandemic, Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Coslett and her husband adopted a cat, Mackerel, which to her surprise she grew to care for obsessively. According to the Guardian's Alex Clark, ‘Keeping this defenceless creature alive is a way of confronting her own terrors and ambivalences – a way to think deeply about the PTSD that engulfed her after an unknown man attempted to kill her in the street when she was 23, and which resurfaced when she was caught up in terrorist attacks in Paris; forced to endure lockdown separation from friends and family and to navigate the clash between her overwhelming desire to have a baby and her fear that she is “too mad” to undertake motherhood.’ Like other reviewers, Clark had to head…

Music Oneworld,352pp,£20 ‘Lebrecht, in this glorious study of Beethoven, [takes] 100 different pieces by the composer, spinning around them a heady mixture of facts, comedy and tragedy,’ said Jenni Frazer in the Jewish Chronicle. He ‘explores Beethoven in six parts–as himself, in love, immersed, immured, in trouble, and inspired,’ said Kirkus Reviews magazine. ‘In each chapter, the author provides biographical information related to a particular piece of music, his insightful and emotionally charged interpretations, interesting stories related to the piece, and recommended recorded versions.’ For example, said Dalya Alberge in the Observer, ‘Lebrecht presents evidence that the Bagatelle No 25 in A minor has been known as Für Elise (For Elise) purely due to a misreading of the dedication on the now lost 1810 manuscript. ‘He argues that Babette Bredl,…

Lewisham taxi driver's life made a misery as crows poo on his car News Shopper Seafront public toilets closed due to ‘maintenance issues’ Argus Hunt for parrot with loud squawk and foot injury missing in Fife Courier and Advertiser £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The Spring issue is on sale on 3rd May 2023. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 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 UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

WHAT WERE preceptors? What do H G Wells, David Puttnam and Trevor McDonald have in common? The answer is they all have links with the College of Preceptors. The College of what? The word preceptor in Victorian English means teacher. In a bygone age, for those teachers practising in schools in Britain, a lot centred round the College of Preceptors. A member of the preceptors belonged to a pioneering group of private teachers in Victorian England. H G Wells worked for the college, mainly as an editor on their newspaper the Educational Times. Before graduating from London University in 1890, Wells passed the preceptors’ exams in the theory and practice of education, maths and natural sciences. Trevor McDonald was made an honorary fellow of the college in 2001. Film producer…

The departure of 50-year-old Antony Lambton (1922-2006) from government office in May 1973 had all the ingredients of a classic British establishment sex scandal. Lambton, an Old Harrovian with a reputation as something of a playboy, enhanced by his habit of wearing sunglasses inside as well as out, was photographed reclining nude in a London flat between two prostitutes, with a joint in his mouth. With help from the News of the World, Colin Levy, one of the women's husbands, had bugged the flat, installing a camera and fitting a microphone in a teddy bear. In scenes reminiscent of the Profumo affair ten years earlier, Lambton resigned both his parliamentary seat and his office as Air Minister in Ted Heath's Conservative government. An outspoken advocate of decriminalising cannabis, Lambton had…

I will never forget that telephone call to Hugh Trevor-Roper. It was 8am on Saturday 23rd April 1983, almost exactly 40 years ago. The great historian came to the phone at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he was Master. ‘I'm sorry to call you at this hour, Lord Dacre,’ I said, ‘but we've been working on these Hitler Diaries, and we find them a bit, er, troubling. I wondered if you could give me your personal assurance that they are genuine.’ There was the briefest of pauses. Then he said, ‘Oh yes, I'm 100-per-cent certain … well, let's say 99 per cent.’ Perhaps I should have questioned that 99 per cent. But here I was, talking to the greatest living expert on Nazi history, who had been in Hitler's bunker shortly after…

Mary Killen's Cosmetic Tips Imagine Princess Grace of Monaco or Audrey Hepburn preparing for a Hollywood gala event in the days when stars were stars, not celebrities. The dresses would be exemplars of breathtaking, though understated, elegance. Immaculately coiffed and bejewelled, their wearers would emanate serenity and calm as they glided through the throngs of admirers. Today, aesthetics are barely taken into account when celebrities turn up on the red carpet. Outfits are designed with one purpose only – to get the most attention possible, however short-lived this attention will be – and to have the greatest number of paparazzi encircling them. Pop performer Sam Smith succeeded in being the most photographed celebrity at the 2023 Brit Awards. Smith wore an inflatable black latex suit, whose arms and legs were…

History A hundred years ago, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote, Germany dodged a bullet: ‘During 1923, the swastikas disappeared, the storm troops and the name of Adolf Hitler all but fell into oblivion. Nobody thought of him any more as a possible political factor.’ Writing this in his memoir in 1941, Zweig knew that he and his contemporaries had been wrong. He was so despairing that, a year later, in exile in Brazil, he and his wife took a lethal overdose of barbiturates. A new book on the ‘forgotten crisis’ of the year that led to the putsch, 1923, by Mark Jones, is soon to be published. The event that had apparently sealed Hitler's fate might seem to reverse Karl Marx's famous pronouncement that ‘History repeats itself, first as…

Town Mouse Ah, for the days before plastic and cardboard! An urban mouse's life these days demands an inordinate amount time for thinking about, dealing with, sorting, transporting, growing angry over and otherwise pondering the subject of rubbish. In the old days, vegetable matter was thrown on the compost heap. Meat matter was given to the dogs. Wood and papery matter was burned on the fire. Dead animals were buried under an apple tree. And there was no rubbish, or very little. Bottles were flung into hedges, for future generations to discover. Then came oil and, with it, plastic, the unrottable, unburnable, inelegant material that covers everything. If you order a takeaway, there is plastic everywhere. Plastic trays, plastic covers. Sausages, cheese, chickens and everything from the supermarket come with…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Children all over England are revolting. A wave of protests is sweeping schools. I love a bit of a protest myself and admire the French for the way they regularly take to the streets on almost any provocation. But I am not convinced these children are really ‘fighting’ for a particularly honourable or worthwhile cause. Neither am I convinced they are really sure what they are fighting for. In some cases, it is about use of the lavatory; in others, about the length of the girls’ skirts. Either way, it is fairly ridiculous. Most schools have rules about lavatories. Lavatories are used for so much more than peeing. You go to the lav to smoke, vape, meet your friends or throw stolen dictionaries away. In fact,…

Charlie Wilson was editor of the Times from 1985 to 1990 – included the period when it moved from Gray's Inn Road to Wapping. Rupert Murdoch's tribute to Wilson was read at St Bride's, Fleet Street, by his daughter Elisabeth. Murdoch spoke of how Wilson took the Times circulation from 300,000 to 500,000: ‘He did it the old-fashioned way, matching hard news with brilliant writing from new talent he had promoted, such as Matthew Parris.’ Murdoch sent Wilson to America in 1984 to edit the Chicago Sun-Times: ‘The staff did not take kindly to working for an unknown Scot from across the Atlantic. They made their contempt obvious. That all changed one night in February that year. ‘Long after the last edition had been printed, when the presses had stopped…

When I moved from London to Sydney in 1986, the advertising agency that hired me was kind enough to put me up in a posh hotel until I found a flat. Every big name in the music business stayed at this hotel. By the end of the first week, I'd spotted several famous faces. But, at 26, I was far too cool to show that I recognised them, and would never have tried to start a conversation. The hotel had a rooftop jacuzzi. I got into the habit of sitting in it for half an hour at the end of each day, when I was pretty sure I'd have it to myself. But one afternoon, I stepped out onto the decking and saw, at one end of the tub, a…

By Roger White Yale University Press £40 This book has an impeccable provenance and has been long in the making. The author reveals that his thoughts were first turned to it by reading Barbara Jones's Follies and Grottoes in the mid-1970s – a charming book, written by an artist, which remained the principal work on the subject for many years. In 1987, he organised an exhibition for the Georgian Group, bearing the same title as this book. It is only now that Yale have brought out the current tome, packed with a lifetime's thought and observation. It's a milestone. The sharp-eyed will have noticed that ‘follies’ is not in the title. Roger White objects to the term. These little structures, built to adorn the 18th-century gentleman's park or estate, could…

Get yourself out and about this merry month of May with Gill Meller's Outside, a gloriously imaginative collection of recipes and stories for campfire cooks. Atmospheric illustrations by the author's long-time collaborator, photographer Andrew Montgomery, perfectly match the romance of the text. Meller learned his craft working with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the River Cottage cookbooks, several of which he wrote, and it shows. Here's a mouthful of spring. New season asparagus with goat's cheese, mint and lemon First of the year's young spears, slivered and dressed with fresh white cheese, are served raw as a salad with a sharp, lemony dressing. Serves 2-3 as a starter. Large bunch of asparagus, trimmed of its woody parts 1 large lemon 4 spring onions, thinly sliced 100g soft white goat's cheese (Optional) handful…

Did Jeremy Hunt have a word with Crystal Palace Football Club's owner? There was the Chancellor, presenting a budget in which he urgently tried to fill the gaps in the labour market by encouraging oldies back into the workforce. And then it was announced that Roy Hodgson was to end his retirement and return as the Palace manager at the fine old age of 75. What an ad he is for the working oldie. Here is an astonishing statistic about the veteran coach: he was born closer to the first-ever football-league fixture in September 1888 than he was to today. And yet here he is, fighting the imposed boredom of retirement, not by stacking shelves at Tesco or by volunteering at his local food bank, but by engaging in one…

Between 1921 and 1924, the great Sir Edwin Lutyens built a doll's house for Queen Mary, George V's wife. How could this little house ensnare the devotion of over a thousand craftsmen, as well as three years’ passionate attention by the country's best architect? It was Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, who on the ‘impulse of the moment’ first thought of asking her friend the renowned architect Edwin Lutyens to design such a rarity for the Queen. He triumphed with glittering golden knobs on. Queen Mary had been an obsessive collector of objets d'art, most particularly of ‘tiny craft’ with a family connection which she amassed with a manically knowledgeable eye. So it came to be that perfection was to reign in miniature, to be cheered at, loved and…

IN COMPETITION No 291 you were invited to write a poem called Plastic Grass. The huge number of entries almost ignited the e-mail machine. Basil Ransome-Davies put the pros and cons: ‘While photosynthesis, alas, / Is what it doesn't do, / If you're a fan of greenhouse gas, / This is the grass for you.’ For Robert Morrow, it has appeared ‘Now the world has gone to pieces – / River's full of bikes and faeces.’ Judith Green's narrator was worried about ‘whales and fish and krill / all ingesting toxic chemicals that eventually kill’. Alec Dingwall, in serious register, declared: ‘Doom plastic grass, sane men, lest it turf the graves of all.’ But Con Connell celebrated its suitability for ‘walking football’ played by the over-60s: ‘It's artificial as our…

Faber,304pp,£20 As the Guardian's correspondent in Beijing for seven years, Tania Branigan came to believe that the Cultural Revolution – the savage decade from 1966 until Mao's death in 1976 – was the story behind the story of that nation: repressed, yet omnipresent. Red Memory is her detailed reported investigation of the people still grappling with that legacy, which as Yuan Yi Zhu's Times review put it, ‘left an unmendable tear in the country's fabric.’ Yuan commended Branigan's patient reporting and her ‘unsentimental, unforgiving narrative,’ and called the book ‘beautifully written and thoughtprovoking.’ The book's ‘gratuitous comparisons’ with recent outbreaks of Western populism, however, ‘made me doubt whether Branigan understood her subject at all […] You cannot compare the Cultural Revolution to the Tory government or the Brexit campaign or…

YALE,400pp£25 Whereas WillIam Dalrymple's 2019 bestseller The Anarchy focused on the East India Company's later hegemony in India, Howarth's Adventurers goes back to the company's 17th-century origins. When the company was formed in 1600, Britain lagged behind Spain as a maritime power and was rivaled by the Dutch. ‘While its foreign “factories” (free trade zones that functioned as dependencies) laid the groundwork for colonisation,’ wrote Daniel Brooks in the Daily Telegraph, Howarth ‘shows how it started out as “a parlous, improbable institution”, struggling among the many European trading interests that shaped global commerce for good and ill’. He ‘does well to transform bills, logs and itineraries into gripping reading. If he tends towards digression, this is forgivable given the scope of the company's activity… Howarth never shies away from the…

Yale, 160pp,£20 Robert D Kaplan is an American reporter and theorist of international relations whose enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq is credited with having had a decisive influence on the George W Bush administration. He has come to bitterly regret the hubris of that adventure, and this ‘short but profound’ book, as Francis P Sempa called it in the New York Journal of Books, is his attempt to make sense of the mistake, and of his regret: ‘I had failed my test as a realist, on the greatest issue of our time, no less!’ Kaplan's argument in the book is that the great tragedians of the classical world – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – had a profound understanding of the human situation, and that in the modern world we…

Biography & memoir Faber, 384pp, £16.99 The Scottish poet and academic Don Paterson's first foray into memoir was rave-reviewed in all quarters for its robust prose style, its humour, its unflinching honesty and his pinsharp memory for names and personalities, even in the fog of drugs, prescribed or otherwise. It was ‘a memoir in a million’, proclaimed John Walsh in the Sunday Times, ‘yelping with real-life experience.’ The title, John Mullan explained in the Guardian, is a kids’ game: a mass brawl begun for no discernible reason. It was an apt metaphor, he suggested, for Paterson's early life in Dundee, which involved fights with God, drugs and insanity. In the Scotsman, Stuart Kelly particularly relished Paterson's description of his education: ‘a foetus in a blazer’ who thought school was ‘something…

Faber, 260pp, £20 ‘Now in his 80s, King might be rock history's best-kept secret,’ said the Guardian's Alexis Petridis, ‘a Zelig-like figure whose career in the music industry connects the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Elton John, Freddie Mercury and the late 1970s zenith of disco. He was there when the Beatles recorded All You Need Is Love and met the Maharishi. ‘Born in 1942 into a complicated family – his parents were in fact his grandparents, his Auntie Kay was really his mother – he grew up in Eastbourne, a grammar school boy who decoded his [gay] sexuality with a dictionary and the plays of Tennessee Williams,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘He was unstoppable, working in record shops before starting a job at Decca at…

Princeton, 336pp, £20 Marion Turner, author of an acclaimed biography of Chaucer, now puts under the spotlight the ribaldly independent and red-stockinged Wife of Bath, Chaucer's most celebrated creation. As Erin Maglaque put it in the New York Times, ‘she is unlike any female character ever written before her, neither princess nor witch nor damsel in distress.’ When we meet her on her way to Canterbury, Maglaque went on, ‘Alison has been married five times, having outlived each of her husbands and inherited much of their wealth. She is a clothmaker, a powerful figure in one of the most lucrative industries in 14th-century England; she has many friends, reflects on aging, is a wickedly funny storyteller, unapologetically loves sex.’ Turner calls her ‘the first real woman in English literature’ yet…

Current affairs Bloomsbuy Continuum, 224pp, £20 The post-WWII grammar school system lasted only twenty years before the Labour Party started to dismantle it, with education minister Anthony Crosland vowing ‘to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.’ There were 1,300 such schools in 1965; today, only 163. ‘What makes the book fascinating’, wrote Tomiwa Owolade in the New Statesman, ‘is that Hitchens, who now describes himself as a socially conservative social democrat, invokes an old left-wing defence of grammar schools to support his case for reviving academic selection; his arguments are underpinned by a certain kind of idealism. ‘The Conservative Party’, he writes, has ‘no particular belief in the virtues of academic selection. If a return to such selection is to come about, it will…

History Press, 280pp, £20 Animals played a large part in the history of the Roman world – think, for example, of Rome's founders Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a she-wolf; Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with 37 elephants; the geese who saved the day when their honking alerted the Roman guards to the invading Gauls. As Daisy Dunn described in the Spectator, Caroline Freeman-Cuerden's commonplace-type book is a ‘jumble of intriguing quotations and snippets arranged by animal – followed by chapters on chariot racing and the place of animals in medicine, fashion and the army, as pets and, shudder, meat’. Dunn thought it a ‘Did You Know?’ kind of book, ‘very chatty and informal.’ And that the cornucopia of stories and anecdotes, taken from both poetry and prose,…