Innehållsförteckning för July 2024 från The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary Which came first - the good egg or the bad egg? The bad egg, it seems. The expression, describing a ne’er-do-well, superficially appealing but rotten inside, was coined by Samuel A Hammett in his 1855 novel, The Wonderful Adventures of Captain Priest. The idiom took off, but it was another 40 years before its converse, the good egg, came on the scene. There was a time when Camilla Parker-Bowles was seen as a bad egg by some. Today, I’d say, most people reckon Queen Camilla is a good egg and a very good egg, too. I realised she was definitely my kind of good egg when I discovered we shared a passion for the six Mapp and Lucia novels, written by E F Benson between 1920 and…

WHAT IS puppy yoga? Puppy yoga is the most compelling evidence yet that humanity has taken a seriously wrong turn as a species and that canine-kind really ought to find a better set of masters to serve. As the name suggests, puppy yoga is yoga involving puppies - some as young as six weeks old, according to the RSPCA. The puppies are not participants in said yoga; most canines can after all execute a ‘downward dog’ pose with few difficulties. Instead, they are there to serve as playthings, ornaments, obstacles, amusements and comforters for the posing humans. The idea, according to my local studio, is to improve wellbeing via ‘the serenity of yoga with the playful charm of puppies’. It would appear that there is a high correlation between the…

A Times reader called Jennifer Galton-Fenzi recently gave some helpful advice about how not to fall asleep during boring plays. Carry into the theatre and hold in your palm a small, round, Japanese flowerarranging kenzan implement. And if you feel like conking out, well, clench your hand. ‘It is studded with pins,’ wrote Ms Galton-Fenzi, ‘and is sufficiently painful to guarantee that you will not nod off.’ As one who has reviewed maybe 8,000 shows in his time, I can’t tell you how useful I would have found those kenzan pins. I only wish the theatre assistants had handed them out with the programmes we critics were given free. As it was, I relied on three things in my 60-year war with Morpheus: jamming a Biro into my palm, manually…

Arecent viewing of No Time to Die led me to two conclusions. First, it needed a full score from John Barry, who once said, ‘I think if I like it, if it really makes me laugh or makes me cry, if I do that, I think that the audience is going to go for it, too.’ Secondly, the guitar notes announcing the arrival of Sidney James in Carry On Matron should have accompanied the first appearance of Rami Malek’s Safin, making No Time to Die a more entertaining picture. The gulf between Barry and Eric Rogers, the composer for Matron and many other Carry Ons, may seem vast, but both strove to enhance the mood of a picture rather than swamping the audience. Connoisseurs of British film soon learned to…

In 1978, a few days before she won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch came to lunch. She and her husband, John Bayley, were good friends of my mother and my stepfather, James Howard-Johnston, a Byzantine historian at Oxford. I was 14 and Iris was very sweet to me, not at all intimidating, though she did have a commanding look. She stood by the grand piano in the drawing-room of our house. Her white shirt was hideous; so bright it scorched the eyes, and with a pattern of shocking pink spots like assailants. The material was what I call GBH nylon, the type that, if rubbed up the wrong way, causes sparks. ‘I think if I hadn’t been a writer, I would have really liked to…

‘A ntonia is too old to go to Chequers,’ said my mother. I was bitterly disappointed. ‘You mean she can’t rule the country at the age of 13?’ said my father, making it clear this was a good joke. It was Christmas 1945 and the Labour Party had been elected in the summer. Although Frank Pakenham — as he then was, before he became Lord Longford — had failed to be elected for Oxford, most of his friends now filled the government benches. The question was over the children’s party at Chequers. I was keenly looking forward to it - or rather, I had been until the annoying news came that children in their teens were not admitted. ‘Laborare est orare,’ I muttered to myself — my personal motto, although…

Town Mouse There’s a downside to being a town mouse in a city. Country mice ask to come and stay. In general, friends stay for one or two nights, they bring booze and food and it’s lovely to catch up. But things don’t always work out so harmoniously. A few weeks ago, Young Mouse, now 24 and still living in the nest, asked if he could have some friends to stay. ‘I met these French girls at the Ministry of Sound,’ It’s a nightclub, m’lud. ‘Can they come and stay next month?’ We said, generously, ‘Of course. They can stay in your sister’s room. It’ll be fun!’ Since he speaks in monosyllables, it can be hard to get much info out of Young Mouse. We imagined these French girls would…

In October 2001, my husband and I took a British Airways flight to London from New York. It was just after the September 11 attacks on America. Sky marshals were flying on half-full planes. Close to the end of the flight, it got turbulent. My nerves took over. My husband was running out of patience. I caught the attention of a flight attendant to ask whether tea was about to be served. She assured me that it was. ‘Would you like some help serving it?’ I asked. ‘Excuse me, ma’am, did you offer to work with me to serve the tea?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied enthusiastically. She responded, ‘No one has ever approached me with that suggestion before; I’ll be right back.’ Back she came with a flight officer in a…

The Doctor’s Surgery It is easier, said La Rochefoucauld, to give good advice than to take it. If this were not so, doctors, who spend so much of their time advising others about how to live longer, would live longer themselves - which they do not, when education and social class are taken into account. I myself have several times put my life at risk by doing what I should never have advised other people to do - at least for the sake of their health. The tragic death of Dr Michael Mosley at 67 on the Greek island of Symi reminds us, if we needed to be reminded, that we are not immune to the effects of climate. Excessive heat can kill. It has been estimated that the rate…

Verso £30 As his nephew, Paul, lay in a simple wicker coffin, the Hon Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader, read a tribute from Wordsworth: ‘Ye die not; do thouWear rather in thy bonds a cheerfulbrow:Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,Live and take comfort! Thou has leftbehindPowers that will work for thee; air, earthand skies.There’s not a breathing of the commonwindThat will forget thee.’ Three months later, at a sold-out Hackney Empire celebration of Paul’s life, a visibly ailing Michael Foot, then 91, whose nephew had died aged 66, told the crowd, ‘It’s terrible to think of waking up in a world where there’s no Paul Foot.’ This book is written by Margaret Renn, who worked with Foot at the Daily Mirror and Socialist Worker. Although she seems…

Quartet Books £21.99 The qualifications to become the Spectator’s Low Life correspondent are pretty daunting. The two incumbents so far - Jeffrey Bernard and Jeremy Clarke - had a prodigious appetite for drink. They died young - at 65 and 66 respectively. But the thing that really set them apart was their pitch-perfect syntax and the ability to turn the disastrous pitfalls of their chaotic lives into comic gold. Most journalism dates, but not the collections of their columns: they rise above mere magazine articles to become perfect, 800-word mini-essays. It’s like gorging on sweets and never feeling sick. This last collection from Clarke is as funny as ever. But the laughs are given a tragicomic edge by the discovery of his cancer, its remission and its rampant comeback, over…

Air-conditioning Have you ever shivered indoors in a heatwave in this country? I have – too many times – and I blame air-conditioning. Last year, I took my granddaughter to a restaurant. ‘Why are you taking a cardigan?’ she asked in disbelief. ‘It’s July and it’s hot.’ ‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but their air-conditioning will be on.’ I explained that, after several visits, I’d realised it doesn’t work properly. Their system belts out icy cold gusts everywhere. There is no escape from the six large slatted squares in the ceiling. I asked a member of staff if she could turn it down, but nothing happened. So I put on my extra warmth. Even more annoying is when the air-con doesn’t work at all. Last September, in yet another hot spell…

I never watch TV, except for football. But I have Radio 4 on all day, with radios in most rooms, in case I might miss anything - or want to turn it off for a few minutes. It is so annoying whenever I hear the dreaded words, ‘And now Thought for Today.’ Strange that I can’t face anything vaguely religious and yet probably my fave prog every week is Sunday Worship. Oh I do love it, singing along in my bath. I can’t sing for toffee, but in my head I can. When my lady friend Miranda, a fab singer, is with me, she sings along as well. We are not in the same bath. Do you mind! How rude. She gets in first then I get in after her…

It’s the summer of 1975 and Chris Stein and his girlfriend Debbie Harry are on the Staten Island ferry. The guitarist and singer with the little-known local art-pop group Blondie live in a cat-filled, bohemian Manhattan loft space and hang out with the kind of people who carry gold-plated bullwhips and have their own tattooing equipment. Some of these exotic creatures are on the boat today, where they’re shooting photos for a self-written fantasy called Mutant Monster Beach Party, in which a tribe of surfers duke it out with a platoon of Nazi bikers. Later that day, the band will play a ramped-up version of the disco hit Lady Marmalade at Max’s or the Mushroom, Debbie in a miniskirt and platforms (or a wedding dress from a thrift store), the…

The cardoon plant is named from chardon, the French word for thistle. At the time of writing, my plant has lots of lush, silvery-grey leaves, with stems rising from the centre to a height of probably six feet next month, topped by globe artichoke-shaped thistle heads. Cardoons have long been popular in Mediterranean countries, especially in Italy, where they are grown for their edible stems. A Still Life with Flowers and Fruit by my favourite Italian artist, Caravaggio, shows not the flowers but the stalks of two cardoons, one apparently lit and the other in shadow. In Britain, however, cardoons have not been generally grown as a vegetable since the 19th century. They are often seen at the back of a flower border the foliage of our plant looks well…

Thirty years ago this year, the splendidly named Mabel Mudge retired, aged 99. She had been landlady of the Drewe Arms in Drewsteignton, a pretty village in north Dartmoor, for the previous 75 years. Standing on the north side of the village square, in the shadow of the handsome Holy Trinity church, the Drewe Arms is, as CAMRA describes it, ‘a legend in the annals of historic rural pubs’; as, indeed, was Mabel, whose record tenure behind the bar may never be surpassed. The phrase ‘behind the bar’ is, though, metaphorical, as I realised when I dropped in for a pint in the middle of May. There is no bar, nor are there any hand pumps. I suspect that, some time in the 1920s, Mabel considered them newfangled nonsense. Instead,…

One of the sensations of our brave new digital world is the Global Positioning System (GPS). It tells you where you are, and the easiest way to get to somewhere else. It is invaluable when you’re trying to negotiate an unfamiliar town. No more A-Z on your knee - GPS will guide you. As with all silver linings, there are clouds attached. As a result of the ease of GPS, almost nobody under the age of 40 can read a paper map. What’s worse is that they can’t see the point of learning; they trust GPS implicitly. It’s a shame. They are missing so much. It’s true that there are some benefits to maps that can be brought up on your phone. They are updated all the time (no need…

What was the highlight of your career? My first Wimbledon, in 2013. It was what I’d always dreamed of. And winning my first Slam in the US, winning my gold medal against Roger during the London 2012 Olympics, and winning the Davis Cup - but I think winning my first Wimbledon is difficult to beat. And the lowlight? The injuries. It’s tough to keep going when you’re injured and you don’t know when you’re going to get back to what you love. What’s your number-one tennis tip to amateurs? Practise your drop shot and use it as your secret weapon. What makes a world number 1? What helps them do what a number 10 can’t? Focus and determination. How do you control your mind during games? It’s quite tough when…

Last year’s World Championships took place in the 40° heat of Marrakech actually a great venue. I’ve always loved Morocco, having run the late Stuart Wheeler’s high-stake bridge week in Tangier for 30-odd years. My team Lawrenzo lost in the round of 32 in the 13th World Transnational Open Teams, where we drew another English team captained by Maggie Knottenbelt (a former student of mine). The student beat the teacher as her team won a tight match - and went on to claim the bronze medal. This board from the match was a body blow to Lawrenzo. Plan the play in four spades on the queen-of-clubs lead. Our declarer won the ace and played a spade to the kingand aspadetothe ace. He then cashed the king of clubs and ruffed…

Thank you to so many of you for responding to my hunch that men don’t enjoy fiction. Your many interesting emails made me wonder what draws someone to or puts them off a book in the first place. This autumn, we’ll be looking at those words on a book’s cover that have you throwing it disgustedly aside. For me, it’s ‘magic realism’ – though it didn’t use to be when I was devouring Vargas Llosa and Marquez in my twenties. Thoughts please to charlottemetcalf@theoldie.co.uk. Aside from the books we eschew, there are many to discover this summer. Biographies range from Pope Francis to Byron. On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there are histories of covert operations during World War II, including Peter Pomerantsev’s book on Sefton Delmer. Then there are…

Allen Lane, 432pp, £25 ‘What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ St Mark must have had someone like the author of this cautionary tale in mind. Humbly born in Ilford, within sight of Canary Wharf, Stevenson’s talent for maths took him to the LSE, where he discovered many ‘rich people expect poor people to be stupid’. Determined to prove them wrong, he landed a job with Citibank, earning a £4,000 bonus within a year. Seven figure bonuses followed as he set out to become the world’s most profitable trader. Then, with the prize within reach, he had an epiphany. Not only was he profiting from other people’s misfortunes – he made millions from the Japanese tsunami in 2011 –…

HarperOne, 240pp, £25 Bom Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, Francis is the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, Southern Hemisphere, and first non-European since Pope Gregory III, 1272 years earlier. ‘When Bergoglio was elected, wrote the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse, he named himself Francis, after the Poor Man of Assisi and ‘refused to move into the grand papal apartments or wear special red shoes,’ He set out to transform the Catholic Church into “a Church for the poor, a field-hospital Church, an outgoing, missionary Church”. The autobiography matches 14 scenes in his life with world events, as told to journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona (not holy ghost-written). The book opens as war breaks out in 1939, with three-year-old Jorge with his mother in…

Faber, £480pp, £25 The Plantagenet dynasty began with Henry II, who saved his country from anarchy before passing it to his largely-absent son Richard. But between 1199 and 1399, it was their half-dozen successors who —often despite themselves — put bones on the fledging nation. Hence this account is not only, as the Telegraph’s Daniel Brooks opined, ‘a welcome shelter from the permanent torrent of Tudors’; it’s also a necessary and ‘deeply studied’ book, demonstrating how our history must include the origins of our institutions. Above all, added Katherine Harvey in the Sunday Times, it ‘makes a persuasive case that Magna Carta, to paraphrase the comedian Tony Hancock, did not die in vain — and that her ghost haunted the country for several centuries’. However, while Arise, England tracks the…

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £22 In the royal courts of history, ladies-in-waiting are ever-present but rarely the star of the show. Reviewing Nicola Clark’s new book in the Telegraph, Dan Jones reflected that ‘they are a group well represented in Tudor costume dramas, but poorly understood in history. On television, they’re always there: lace-trimmed extras, scuttling and blushing, whispering and giggling, and eventually weeping when the queens they serve are beheaded.’ Naturally, Clark’s book sets the record straight. According to Jones, ‘Some were spies, power-brokers and gatekeepers to powerful agents at court. The best could shape domestic, dynastic and even international politics without fluffing their needlework.’ The Literary Review’s Suzannah Lipscomb noted that ‘the oversight is a modern one.’ The power of ladies-in-waiting, she wrote ‘was understood by contemporaries. Louis…

Viking, 642pp, £30 ‘For most of us the war is epitomised by Verdun or the Somme,’ said Margaret Macmillan in the FT, and ‘for the most part the eastern front is seen as a sideshow to the main event. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nick Lloyd, Professor of Modern Warfare at King’s College London, shows just how wrong that view is.’ The death toll was staggering: 2 million Russian and 1.2 million Austro-Hungarian soldiers died, not to mention Civilians. Serbia lost more men in proportion to its population than France. Lloyd’s book moves between big strategic issues and those human beings caught up in the catastrophe. ‘The compelling narrative shows massive armies moving across a vast theatre of war, from the Baltic to the eastern end of the…

Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £22 In her latest ‘osteobiography’ to reveal our ancestors through their remains, TV anatomist Alice Roberts digs into the extended medieval period. Poring over people’s bones and the DNA in their tooth-pulp she uses new disciplines like palaeopathology and archaeogenomics to interrogate both the historical record and its modern interpretations. She proved the occupants of an 11th-century Oxfordshire mass grave ate mainly on fish and that they were nearly all young males, probably Vikings. But the skeletoms were not those of fighting men; and the wounds seem more consistent with execution than battle. If the victims were in fact ethnically-cleansed new settlers, history may need to rewritten. Syphillis is believed to have been imported from North America. In which case, how did a 15th-century anchoress, who…

Viking, 640pp, £25 Endgame 1944 tells the story of Operation Bagration, the Russian campaign named after a Russian general, and its consequences. Starting in June 1944, it saw five Soviet armies and one Polish, a million men in all, advance westwards along a 2,000-mile front towards Poland and Germany. ‘Jonathan Dimbleby has written several good books about the second world war,’ said the Guardian’s Neal Ascherson. ‘But this is the most interesting. It is not about “turning points”, those diamonds of interpretation that authors love to dig up, sharpen and mount on alluring book jackets. Instead, it’s about what happened after a turning point, about the gigantic consequences as the inevitable slouched out of the future into the present…. Dimbleby parallels his military story with often devastating extracts from Russian…

Generalising about poetry is hard, given that it is among the most difficult forms of writing to categorise. Poems in modern collections often fail to share any characteristics, other than being written by the same author. However, one trend emerges from the latest crop of collections: a difference in subject matter according to sex. While male poets like Michael Ondaatje (known best for his 1992 novel The English Patient, but who began life as a poet 50 years ago) and Will Burns write lyrically and ambiguously about landscapes, countries, maps and atmospheres, women like Hollie McNish and Jackie Kay evoke their personal concerns, whether about political activism, post-partem nightmares, body positivity or parenting. Such subject matter may also reflect the poets’ stage of life. Ondaatje is 80, and his A…

Allen Lane, 384pp, £25 Harriet Baker explores the lives of three 20th-century female novelists who at some point retreated to Sussex, Dorset and Berkshire respectively. As Laura Hackett wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘Woolf was recovering from a suicide attempt, Townsend Warner had ended a long relationship and Lehmann had separated from her husband. Rural England offered rest and retreat.’ Susan Owens in the Literary Review found the ‘original and highly enjoyable’ book ‘immensely readable’. ‘It bristles with evocative detail and she invests each chapter with the narrative drive of a short story.’ Hackett too was swept away. ‘She conjures the sights and sounds of mid-20th century rural England with vivid lyricism: “The men scything by hand, the magnificence of a tithe barn, the chalky tracks cut into the hillsides…

Chelsea Green Publishing, 208pp, £20 ‘Hedges may be ancient, but we still have a lot to learn from them,’ concluded Adam Weymouth in the Sunday Times, after reading Christopher Hart’s anthem to the common or garden hedge. Not giving much thought to this natural barrier that keeps two areas of space apart is ‘to ignore Britain’s greatest habitat.’ It all began when farmers found a way to contain their animals, but since then the hedge has become ‘one of the happiest accidents in human history,’ providing outstanding habitat for over 1,000 plant species and 1,500 invertebrate species. ‘Hart’s passion for the potential that resides here is intoxicating,’ wrote Weymouth. ‘Occasionally an environmental solution comes along that is so breathtakingly simple you can’t believe that not everyone is already doing it.…

Picador, pp336, £20 Olivia Laing is a celebrated proponent of the genre-bending literary mashup: in this case of memoir, landscape history, literary criticism and travelogue. In her latest book, wrote Louis Cammell in The Skinny, ‘their [Laing is non-binary] journey is in search of a common paradise. From their own walled-garden in Suffolk, it stretches back to Milton’s Paradise Lost, a text conceived against the backdrop of the Plague in 1665. “Time is cyclical”, Laing remarks from a Covid-ridden England in 2020.’ The Guardian’s, Kathryn Hughes set the scene. ‘Just as the first lockdown was easing, Laing moved into a Georgian house in Suffolk that came with the tangled remnants of a once-glorious walled garden. She had always been a plant person, having spent her 20s training to be a…

Faber & Faber, 512pp, £25 Harris has taken William Blake’s maxim of seeing ‘the world in a grain of sand,’ and returned to the small patch of West Sussex where she grew up, drilling down into its historical strata to discover, as the Guardian’s Kathryn Hughes wrote, ‘the multitudes that lie within.’ Hughes thought the book ‘wonderful’: ‘Her patch of what T.S. Eliot called “significant soil” stretches from the foothills of the Weald down to the sea and takes in Chichester, Arundel, Petworth and Pulborough. What this home turf lacks in breadth it gains in depth.’ Harris unearths life stories ‘from the Second World War (Canadian soldiers, Polish resistance workers), the days of the French Revolution (bedraggled refugees arriving on the beach), travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working…

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown was about the politics of water in pre-war Los Angeles, then a small city in a large desert. I was reminded of this when reading Cover the Bones (Wildlife, 512 pp, £20) by Chris Hammer, whose scary outback thriller Scrublands was televised last year. In the 1920s, a consortium of Australian families, calling themselves the Seven, create Yuwonderie, a lush oasis in the parched outback that relies on a system of irrigation canals. Treating the town like a demesne, the Seven and their descendants prosper. But suppose their gains were ill-gotten from the start? Two detectives, investigating the murder of a Seven family member, uncover a century of corrupt feudal oppression. The Sunday Times’s Mark Sanderson said that ‘a tide of blood - bad, mixed, stirred and…

Griff Rhys Jones (p20)was in Not the Nine O’clock News and Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. Their company, Talkback, made Da Ali G Show, I’m Alan Partridge and QI. Marianne Faithfull (p28) is an actress and singer. Her song As Tears Go By was a top-ten hit in 1964. She is author of Faithfull: An Autobiography. Her latest album is She Walks in Beauty. Lady Antonia Fraser (p39) is one of our leading historians. Her books include King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1954), Mary Queen of Scots (1969) and Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023). Mark Ellen (p68) is our Golden Oldies columnist. He co-presented Live Aid, wrote Rock Stars Stole My Life! and edited Q magazine. At Oxford, he played bass in Tony…

After Baby Reindeer, the recent Netflix hit, it would appear that second-ratecomedian-celebrity stalkers still fascinate the sofa crowd. Here’s another for you. Before Baby Reindeer was even conceived, I had my own bizarre fixation experience. Most stalkers seem to be thwarted lovers. Mine was far from that. Can you even have a stalker whom you never encounter? An invisible huntsman who dogs your every tread? I don’t know. But I once had an invisible and frankly threatening presence in my life. This took place about a hundred years ago, in the nineties. My agent got in touch with me. (That could be the end of the story - it was a rare enough event.) In those days, Mel Smith and I had the same agent. We shared everything. Or at…

I always wanted to be a silver fox. I liked to believe that I’d make a raffish George Clooney who, according to Fox News, ‘embraces his age and lets his natural grey hair shine on the red carpet’. Unfortunately, I am no George in the charm or looks department. Nor, more importantly, do I have a grey hair in my head. At 73, I have hair the colour of ink. Most think this doggedly dark thatch a blessing. To me, it is a curse. I want to be grisly. I want to look wise and distinguished. ‘Grey hair is a crown of splendour,’ says Proverbs 16:31. Old age without a few speckles of salt and pepper suggests someone who has not suffered the usual slings and arrows of life. It…

The joy of the picnic has always seemed peculiarly British. It isn’t simply eating outside — barbecuing in the ‘yard’, as the Americans do — but the act of packing up an entire meal and transporting it to some distant location to eat alfresco. It gained popularity in the 19th century as a pursuit of the rich, along with fêtes, opera and balls, and became a favoured activity of the upper classes. In 1983, Anne Tennant (better known as Lady Glenconner, author of Lady in Waiting) and Susanna Johnston (the late sister of the late Alexander Chancellor, the sainted editor of The Oldie) compiled a book in aid of charity called The Picnic Papers, and enlisted their friends and family to write about their favourite picnics, along with recipes. The…

Oldie Man of Letters The 11th Duke of Devonshire was the only duke I ever knew or am likely ever to know. He told me that his father, who died as long ago as 1950, had been approached by several peers — hereditary peers the overwhelming majority in those days in the House of Lords — to see if they could not liberalise the law for homosexuals. ‘Throughout my lifetime’, he correctly stated, ‘it has been illegal. You’ll help to make it allowable. By the time your son inherits, it will have become compulsory.’ It is certainly the case, thank God, that no disgrace now attaches to being gay —thanks, quite largely, to the liberal-minded peers who widened the debate in the 1960s and allowed the Labour Home Secretary, Woy…

Mary Killne’s Beauty Tips There are basic rules about formal hat etiquette. Men always take them off indoors. Women allegedly keep them on. Still, you would have to be an Anglophile American woman to be worried about the niceties - such as not taking your hat off inside a wedding marquee until the mother of the bride has first taken hers off. In this country, unless we are being advised by courtiers prior to a Royal audience, only about five per cent of guests at any gathering know what the rules on hats are. The etiquette giants are dead Betty Kenward and Peter Townend. And Charles Kidd has retired. You can only go by the Mitford dictum ‘If it’s me, it’s U.’ I always laugh at a diary piece by…

Country Mouse My late father’s Broadwood baby grand piano entertained my sister and me throughout our early childhood. The sounds of Chopin mazurkas and Beethoven sonatas lulled us towards the land of nod each night. Towards the end of his life, the quality of my father’s playing went downhill in direct proportion to the amount of Noilly Prat he had imbibed. Practising the same piece night after night did not in his case make perfect. He was a past master at practising ‘in’ the same mistakes ad nauseam. You dreaded the glitches just as you dreaded the anticipated scratches on well-worn vinyl of the day. When the time came to vacate my mother’s successfully sold single-storey dwelling on the Isle of Anglesey, we found there were no takers for large…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Labour is planning to stop the charity status of public schools and charge them VAT. The money raised - around £1.6 billion - will be spent on state schools. How could those of us committed to state schools not rejoice? We could have smaller classes, buy more books, be paid more… And yet. A governor of a local public school told me that, from the very day the general election was called, parents were paying for the rest of their children’s education up front. Three children, say, with years of education yet to get through - all paid for overnight. This is the face of capitalist fear, representing hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of cheques suddenly being written. There is a lot of money slopping…

I used to query the accuracy of ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ (Matthew 5:4) When we are young, grief feels incomprehensible and wrong. When we get old, the truth of this Beatitude comes into its own: we realise that grief can be right and fitting because it enables us to grasp the extent to which someone was lovable. My brother Chips Keswick (19402024) died a few weeks ago, leaving an unbridgeable gap in many people’s lives, not least my own. He was, among other things, a distinguished figure in the City and a supporter of Arsenal from the age of nine - he became the club’s chairman. All this was extensively covered by the press obituary notices. But I became exasperated by their lack of…

Third Man’s money man SIR: Like Harry Mount (June issue), I have long been a devotee of The Third Man. As to why it was filmed in Vienna rather than London, the story I heard was that Alexander Korda had money in Austria from pre-war days. Unfortunately, owing to currency restrictions, he could not get it out, even when the war was over. So he decided to use it to make a film set in Vienna. That seems entirely plausible - to me, at least. David Culver, London SE9 Rockin’ Nanette Newman SIR: I read with interest your piece on Nanette Newman in Old Un’s Notes recently (May Issue), and it is wonderful that she is still with us. I have always been curious as to why she received a…

History The man in charge of Gaza was confident that ‘it could never be taken by assault’. He had prepared for a long siege and, in the face of overwhelming odds and an army that was used to victory, he and his Arab mercenaries dug in. The besieging force had the latest technology to draw on, and knew that tunnels would play a crucial role. Both sides trusted to their gods, and fought in their names. The besieger was Alexander the Great. The man holding out against him was a Persian eunuch, variously named as Batis, Betis or Babēmēsis, and the year was 332 BC. Alexander had triumphed at the Battle of Granicus and at Issus in Asia Minor against the great Persian empire of Darius III. He then turned…

Next time you play your grandson at chess, don’t be surprised if he unleashes the French Defence Advance Variation 1, beating you with a subtle, decisive attack on your king. Just like policemen, Premier League footballers and French Prime Ministers, chess champions are getting ever younger. The leading young light is a ten-year-old from Argentina, called Faustino Oro. He has already finished ahead of the world’s top three ranked players in an online quick-fire competition. The three of them had assumed their experience, knowledge and collective wisdom would see off youthful enthusiasm. But Oro’s speed of thought and ability to change strategy in an instant completely outflanked them. Forget about the attention span of the young lasting less than two minutes. He can cheerfully sit at the board for up…

Do you remember Covid? Of course you do - you’re still here. You survived lockdown, the thought police, WFH and learning to use your computer. You also (I hope) decided not to buy shares in Peleton, Zoom or some hotshot Japanese pharma company whose name you couldn’t pronounce. If so, congratulations. The stocks that glittered during those dark days have fizzled out. Indeed, the FT and Bloomberg calculate that they have lost a combined $1.5 trillion in market value - that’s twice the UK’s economic output for 2023. The money hasn’t exactly gone, since it was there only on paper in the first place, but looking at the worst falls may help you avoid the next bubble. We were going to get fit - so, while we couldn’t get out…

Taking a Walk If this is what the apocalypse looks like, we can all relax. The end of civilisation will be very green and smell of coconut and willow warblers will call. I was walking across Greenham Common. For much of the 20th century, it was an important RAF base. Famously, in the 1980s, its nuclear weapons were opposed by a long-running women’s protest camp. Old photographs show a bleak scene: a vast runway, fencing, bunkers and concrete. Today, 32 years after its closure, it’s rewilded. There’s still a whisper of runway but everything is swaddled in vegetation. Show me a place as intense as southern England. It is a landscape absolutely stuffed with history, stories and strangeness. No wonder visitors from big countries adore it. This twohour walk encompassed…

IN COMPETITION No 307 you were invited to write a poem called A Funny Smell. Competitors seem to live a rich dog’s life of the nose. Richard Spencer’s heroine, faced with a smelly-cheese hater, dreamt of ‘modes of curd-based killing:/Like Death-by-Fondue, Boursin Brick…’. Rob McMahon’s narrator, after a heart attack, hears a voice: ‘If you detect a funny smell,/It’s sulphur from the fires of Hell!’ Sue Smalley found garden scents rather feeble: ‘We’ve sacrificed plants’ natural scents / To feed our eyes, not nose.’ Commiserations to them and to Ann Beckett, Denise Norman, D A Prince, Con Connell, Bill Webster, Miriam Heyburn, Dorothy Woolley, Iris Bull, Dorothy Pope, Frank McDonald, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going…

Cambridge University Press, 300pp, £25 Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Byron’s death, Stauffer’s book explores the poet’s life and work through over 3,000 letters, which make for ‘some of the most remarkable missives in the English language,’ according to the Spectator’s Alexander Larman. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker found it a ‘compact biography, elegantly structured…Each letter affords Stauffer a chance for a ruminative riff on…Byron’s history.’ Corin Throsby in the TLS judged it ‘both scholarly and accessible’, resulting in a ‘pleasingly compact book’ that ‘brings to the fore Byron’s fabulous, captivating voice, which is at its most convivial in his letters. Stauffer uses each carefully selected letter to illustrate periods of Byron’s action-packed life…and uses them to show Byron’s evolution as a writer. The emphasis on his…

Corsair, 400pp, £22 Viet Than Nguyen is a literary star in the States. His novel The Sympathizer, wrote Francesca Angelini in the Sunday Times, ‘ripped into America’s involvement and cultural retelling of the Vietnam War: it sold more than a million copies worldwide, earned Nguyen the Pulitzer prize and was hailed as “genuinely unprecedented” by The New Yorker.’ Now, Nguyen’s much-anticipated memoir of his family’s flight from Vietnam in 1975 has been deemed an uneven work. The Telegraph’s Frank Lawton wrote, ‘at its best the book traces how the wounds of the past – and, in particular, the Vietnam War – can be felt in the present. At its worst, it dresses up flabby thought as nuance.’ ‘He rarely uses the first person,’ continued Angelini. ‘Instead the book is structured…

Under the corporate foliage of mainstream book publishing, independent seedlings are flourishing. Reprinting the bestsellers (or even the not-quite-best sellers) of the past can be not only modestly lucrative but there is an appetite for books that feel like books, that offer an old-fashioned, material, reader experience. Think of delicious Slightly Foxed limited edition clothbound hardbacks with gold blocking and a ribbon bookmark; or the lovely reproductions of period textiles on the endpapers of a Persephone volume. The plots of the British Library’s crime classics (Crimson Snow, Calamity in Kent) may not, in the age of Netflix, pack the thrills they once did but their retro covers are irresistible. Norah Perkins, archive sleuth, says publishers once thought it enough to make their backlist gems available through e-books and print-on-demand. But…

Allen Lane, 448pp, £30 The Capetian dynasty of French kings reigned from Hugh Capet in 987 until the death of Charles IV in 1328, their heraldic symbol being the fleur-delys, hence this book’s tide. ‘It’s an epic tale, well known to specialists,’ wrote Levi Roach in Literary Review, ‘but seldom has it been presented in a manner accessible to a wider audience. In Justine Firnhaber-Baker, it has finally found a worthy narrator. With a supreme command of the source material and an eye for telling detail, she succeeds in bringing the period to life like never before… she lets the sheer human drama of the story carry the narrative forward… Nor is this simply a story of men, militarism and realpolitik. Queens and daughters figure prominently, with considerable space given…

Profile, 352pp; £25 ‘Archaeologists have long acknowledged the power of wall carvings,’ wrote Paula Byrne in the Times, yet ‘cultural historians have been slow on the graffiti uptake.’ This book is ‘not only a history of graffiti, but a history of the 18th century via the lost voices of those who lived through it. Pelling explores “smoke graffiti” in army barracks, made by blackening a surface with a lit candle, a rare opportunity for self-expression in a regimented existence.’ Bog-houses and death-cells provide rich sources, with ‘many latrinalia including lovers’ laments or trite tales of female inconstancy. The ‘most moving’ graffiti concerned an unknown suicidal man (named John Doe by the press) found drowned in the Thames. His last words were scrawled on the tenement walls where he lived his…

Ireland Picador, 352pp, £25 The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke proclaimed this sweeping survey of the 19th-century’ way of death as ‘masterly, while the Telegraph’s Roger Lewis praised its ‘sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail’, and the Times named it a ‘book of the week’. Today Britain’s infant survival rates are 50 time higher than the Victorians, with its cult of death, exemplified by their grief-crazy Queen. Flanders leaves no gravestone unturned, from bodysnatching, suicide and capital punishment to cremation, describing vividly how our forefathers’ monetised mourning: ‘seances and quack-cures; the professional mutes and souvenir shortbread wrapped in black-edged paper; the death-masks and postmortem portraits.’ In funerary emporia, hatbands, armbands and acres of highmaintenance crepe were colour-graded, from bleak blacks to wistful greys and mauves, to signify how much one…

Letters for the Ages Behind Bars: Letters from History’s Most Famous Prisoners (Bloomsbury Continuum, 320pp, £20), edited by James Drake and Edward Smyth, brings together letters from figures as various as St. Paul, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Dostoyevsky, Billy the Kid, A1 Capone, and Martin Luther King Jr. Extracts are organized into categories such as confession, injustice, life behind bars, and redemption. Amid ‘raw agony there is gentleness and even humour,’ writes jailbird politician-turned priest Jonathan Aitken in his foreword. ‘The ambush of the unexpected is a common feature of this enthralling book.’ In The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked Up Women in its Private Prison (The History Press, 224pp. £20), Cambridge Resident, Caroline Biggs, has uncovered the history of a peculiar institution. In 1561, Elizabeth I…

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 327pp, £25 Since the war, says FT foreign editor, Tobias Buck, countless German families, including his own, have asked, ‘Was Grandpa a Nazi?’ And answer, in most cases, came there none. The Western allies, particularly the Americans, encouraged this reticence, because once the Iron Curtain came down, they wanted West Germany onside: no question of collective guilt. So all but the most notorious Nazis went unpunished. Meanwhile, as Adam LeBor noted in the Times, ‘Numerous corporations that supported Hitler and exploited slave and forced labour carried on their dominant positions in the post-war German economy,’ and this ‘legal chicanery’ meant many war criminals got off lightly, claiming to be obeying orders. Then, in 2009, John Demjanuk, former guard at Sobibor death camp, was convicted as an accessory…

Island’s white-tailed eagles are not eating livestock Isle of Wight County Press Man caught after odd bike behaviour Eastern Daily Press Ipswich police deliver food after arresting delivery driver Ipswich Star £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features - the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, readertrips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHO WAS Elsa Maxwell? Elsa Maxwell, the gossip columnist and socialite, was a byword in Cole Porter’s song I’m Throwing a Ball Tonight (‘I feel … so Elsa Maxwell-ish’). She organised more than 3,000 parties - the Duke of Windsor said that ‘Old battering-ram Elsa always gave the best parties.’ She made Venice’s Lido chic with the 1925 International Motor Boat Races; and never owned a home. She lived in expensive hotels or as a house guest of the famous, including the Windsors. She appeared in Hollywood films, wrote bestselling books and a syndicated gossip column, hosted a radio show, Elsa Maxwell’s Party Line, and was a fixture on TV chat-show host Jack Paar’s weekly show in the 1950s. Christened Elsie, she was born in Keokuk, Iowa, a single child,…

Letter from America Ever since the heady days of the 1972 Local Government Act, changes to the map of Britain have come around like stops on the Circle Line. Constant tinkering with the nation’s ancient county boundaries is the rule, long periods of benign neglect the exception. It’s different in the USA, where the last detectable change to the nation’s internal borders came as long ago as 1961. Even then, it amounted only to a bit of prudent geological housekeeping: the state of Minnesota agreed to cede two narrow strips of marshland to neighbouring North Dakota after the area had changed shape as a result of flooding. During the next year, however, American voters will be offered the chance to alter a significant chunk of the north-west part of their…

Exactly 50 years ago, I was a young captain in the Army’s Royal Signals. I received a plum posting: independent command of a troop providing communications to the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), But first I had to get to Nicosia. I chose to do so by car, being the proud owner of the young officer’s car of choice, my ‘Atlantic blue’ BMW 2002. On 6th June 1974 - the 30th anniversary of D-Day, as it happened I crossed the channel to Zeebrugge with my girlfriend, Ro, and we spent the next two weeks camping in Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia and Greece, finally arriving in Piraeus in time to catch the ferry to Limassol. Barely had I settled into my new command, and less than a month after I’d arrived,…

What the hell happened to bohemia? It took 100 years for poets, painters and talented layabouts to create and just 20 years for slick pseudo-hipsters to f**k it all up. It’s the curse of hollow tinsel bohemia! Everybody’s cool and nobody knows what the hell it means. It’s just prêt-à-porter bohemia… consumer cool. I was happier back in the old bohemia. Art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter, too - more repressed! And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today. It was much smaller, much more authentic. I need a time machine to take me back to when the writer Caroline Blackwood (1931-96) was a dear friend - an inspiration, mentor and role model of the oddest sort. She defied reality, housekeeping…

The Tories are famously averse to any legislation that would attract the charge of nanny-statism. But Keir Starmer, announcing his plans for improving child health, says he’s up for a fight over it - and I hope he is. Teaching toddlers to brush their teeth, and improve their access to dentists, doctors and mental-health professionals is all well and good, but let’s do something to prevent ill health in the first place. How about restricting the sale of the foods that make kids fat and their teeth full of holes? Politicians like to bang on about the importance of leaving decisions to parents and the public having the freedom of choice. This is bollocks, and an easy way out of making tough, unpopular but essential decisions. Sometimes children need a…

Postcards from the Edge When Tony O’Reilly died in May aged 88 - he had once been the wealthiest Irishman - he was accused by the Irish Times of having ‘Anglophile tendencies’ and holding Winston Churchill in great esteem. When he became the first Irish citizen to be knighted by Elizabeth II, he ‘attracted some hostility in his homeland by proudly insisting that he should henceforth be addressed as Sir Anthony’. He had, it was claimed, ‘little time for nationalism’. I knew Tony O’Reilly and had many conversations with him about matters political and cultural. He was a genuinely proud Irishman and had been a glittering rugby star. He made the greatest contribution to his native country by persuading international businesses to invest in the country through the Ireland Funds.…

In 2007, I coaxed the now reclusive Victor Lownes (1928-2017) into meeting me for tea at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. He was the original business partner of the Playboy supremo Hugh Hefner, running Playboy’s lucrative British enterprises from 1964 until 1981. Then nearing 80, Lownes still had a twinkle in his eye. He was formidably smooth: floppy grey hair, cream flannels, blue blazer, open-necked silk shirt and shiny black shoes. At one time, he’d been Britain’s highest-paid executive, with a lifestyle to match. A book about the Playboy empire described him as the real force behind Hefner’s organisation, a confirmed rake who ‘loved parties, girls and sex, and was never happier than when enjoying all three simultaneously’. Lownes agreed to meet to give me his views on the director Roman…

The Rev Richard Carter introduced the memorial service for Martin Amis at St Martin-in-the-Fields, It opened with chamber music by Bach and Handel and ended with jazz - and recordings of Amis talking about his love of words. Ian McEwan listed his favourite Amis quotations, including the noise of a man in a lavatory cubicle - like ‘emptying a sack of melons into a deep well’. Amis once described Michael Crichton’s prose as ‘herds of clichés, roaming free’. Magazine supremo Tina Brown, an old flame, said of commissioning Amis: ‘Whenever his copy arrived, it was Christmas Day in the office: so eagerly awaited, never a disappointment.’ When Brown asked Amis to write about a new play by David Hare, his first question was ‘Do I have to see it?’ All…

Booze, broads or a bible … whatever helps me make it through the night. Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s line inspired Kris Kristofferson’s song Help Me Make It Through the Night (1970) It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture. Ian Fleming, Thunderball Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went. Edith Piaf A great change in life is like a cold bath in winter — we all hesitate at the first plunge. Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1831) The song you write that deserves to be heard, the brilliant piece of work, [people] don’t realise how brilliant it is, and it sits in a drawer. Ivor Novello What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.…

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 3rd August Going to the theatre is often a maddening experience. The seats are cramped, the tickets are expensive and fashionable productions are often spoiled by wokery and gimmickry. Sometimes, I’m sorely tempted simply to stay in and watch TV. And then, every so often, along comes a show that restores my faith and makes me fall in love with live drama again. A View from the Bridge is such a show. What’s most notable about it is all the things it doesn’t do. It doesn’t try to reinvent a period piece for a modern audience. It doesn’t cast against type or take liberties with the text. This Theatre Royal Bath production plays it straight, and it’s all the better for it. It confirms the…

Dear Jackie is the talk of Soho. So it should be. At last, some postlockdown joie de vivre. This superbly kitsch restaurant in the basement of the Broadwick Soho hotel, on Broadwick Street, is a paean to owner Noel Hayden’s mum, Jackie. It screams its arrival from the carnival-decorated front entrance. It has been designed by Martin Brudnizki, who transformed Annabel’s into an impossibly lavish brothel, but its roots lie firmly in joyous seventies Bournemouth, when the English Riviera was peaking. In 1973, during the last hurrah of the Anglo-Jewish Riviera, Jackie and Noel senior thought they’d open the Hotel Mon Ami, in Bournemouth, whose epicentre was the Green Park Hotel. Opened in 1943, it quickly became a glamorous kosher hotel for the AngloJewish aristocracy. And why Bournemouth? Because it…

For some years after the Second World War, Britain was the world’s leading car-exporter. But the Attlee government’s policy of low investment and low growth, followed by decades of botched mergers, myopic management, self-destructive unions and poor labour relations ensured there is no longer a British-owned car industry of any scale. Although we’re now a minnow internationally, there is still a significant UK motor industry - largely foreignowned. In the year to April, it produced 678,822 cars and 118,701 vans and light trucks, plus over 1.5 million engines. The industry employs about 182,000 people directly and over 600,000 in allied jobs, and exports 80 per cent of its products. But now two leaders of that industry have warned the Government, ‘You have a mandate that is going to kill your…

Across 1 Food that’s good after whisky perhaps (6,3) 6 Awkward employees need one for answer (5) 9 In France she never ever lost her name (5) 10 Eager to put cheese back on the shelf for sale (5-4) 11 One may apply pressure if there’s dough (7,3) 12 Consequence of injury that’s almost frightening (4) 14 Prescribed act over English credit (7) 15 Old form of capital managed by thug (7) 17 Defer pay out after American flipped (7) 19 Work out saying nothing about pressure by firm (7) 20 Parrot’s speech organ, essentially (4) 22 Reach people primarily through achievement (10) 25 The Wirral perhaps gets a nine plus for development (9) 26 Do something about part of London (3,2) 27 A poet’s race for place, for example…

Ask Virginia My son’s got the blues Q After a difficult divorce, my 50-year-old son has fallen into a deep depression. He’s seen his doctor but the pills he’s been given don’t work. He’s bought a lot of‘helpful’ books to read while he’s staying with me temporarily, and it breaks my heart when I hear him in the bedroom next to me making all these positive affirmations like ‘I am complete and happy today and tomorrow’ and then breaking down in tears. Is there any way I can help him? Name and address supplied A If he’s into books, I hope he’ll chuck all the positive-thinking ones into the dustbin - in my experience, they only make people more depressed - and try to accept his unhappiness with compassion, and…

Chatto & Windus, 352pp, £20 This memoir is witness to the necessity of trust within a community. Following the death of her father, Catherine Coldstream was plunged into spiritual crisis. After a three-year search for deeper meaning and ‘a transcendent source of love’, she joined the Carmelite community of enclosed nuns at the Northumberland Priory she calls Akenside, in the early 1990s. She stayed for 12 years. After a honeymoon period, discontent crept in. The community became fractured and a breakdown of trust among the Sisters followed. Cliques and alliances form, power struggles erupt ‘The second half of Cloistered veers into a far darker narrative, uncovering an underbelly of petty feuds and jealousies among the shrouded sisters, all those ordinary human neuroses and complexes they thought they could suppress,’ wrote…

(Allen Lane, 179pp, £20) The memoir of Wills, a professor of English Literature at Cambridge, is full of ghostly figures that haunted her childhood. Her personal focus is Mary, born illegitimately in 1954 to her cousin Jackie, and Lily, a local girl deemed unworthy of marriage. Mary was hidden away in a nearby orphanage and at just 19, finding herself pregnant like her mother before her, she killed herself in the face of a an intractably bleak future The Literary Review’s Ian Samson found Wills’s family story ‘fascinating’, particularly the way past lives affect subsequent generations. Wills writes about her own sense of being “half-Irish” – of growing up in England but with a sense of “living in the aftermath of a series of catastrophic decisions” – and of the…

Bodley Head, 400pp, £25 This is ‘a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through BritishIrish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916’, wrote Rory Carroll in the Guardian. Roger Casement, described by T.E. Lawrence as having ‘the appeal of a broken archangel’, was born in Dublin in 1864 to an Anglo-Irish family but ‘his parents were dysfunctional, possibly alcoholic and died young,’ continued Carroll. ‘He clerked at a Liverpool shipping company before sailing to Africa where he became a roving consul for the Foreign Office. ‘His exposé of atrocities in the Congo… prompted sweeping reforms. He repeated the feat in South America where he revealed the rubber industry’s horrific abuse of Indigenous people. Casement was knighted in 1911, an…

Duckworth, 544pp, £25 Citing his historical novels and wildly popular podcast, the Sunday Times’s Max Hastings declared Cooper ‘a phenomenon’: ‘a gifted collector of historical jigsaw pieces’ unveiling ‘a host of things we never knew about places that once were’, whose ‘mastery of anecdotage and accessible storytelling’ has revived the study of the past. The Spectator’s David Abulafia found the essays ’eminently readable’, illustrating how 14 great cultures, or branches thereof, rose to eminence before collapsing; not just old favourites like the Aztecs and Roman Britons, but lesser-known examples like Han China and the Muslim sultanate of Delhi. Causes varied: plagues, war, natural disasters, hubris and (yes, sometimes) climate change, so Cooper avoids a grand unifying theory. However, in his final chapter — which takes a rather dim look at…

Quercus, 352pp, £22 In the Literary Review, Malachi O’Doherty thought the book gets to ‘the heart of the Northern Ireland Troubles.’ In May 1986, the body of an undercover British agent, Frank Hegarty, was found by the side of a lane in County Tyrone, with ‘four shots’ in his head, fired by an IRA assassin, rope around his wrists and tape over his eyes. Hegarty ‘was recruited by a British Army agent handler to infiltrate the IRA…He worked alongside IRA commander Martin McGuinness’ and, according to the widely accepted account, was killed by Freddie Scappaticci (codename ‘Stakeknife’) on McGuinness’s orders. The Times’s Sean O’Neill explained that Stakeknife ‘was perhaps the most important spy in the IRA’s ranks…having been interned in Long Kesh with Gerry Adams in the early 1970s.’ O’Neill…

Belying our reverence for fair play, the British have always excelled at covert operations. In the last war we trained a small army of gifted amateurs for all the dirtiest tricks, from lying, bugging, forging and embezzlement to necessary murder. In the vanguard of the information war was Sefton Delmer (1904-1979), a Rabelaisian figure, fluent in German, whose speciality was the blackest of black propaganda. In How to Win an Information War (Faber & Faber, 304PP, £20) Peter Pomerantsev, himself an expert on contemporary propaganda, celebrates Delmer. Working for the Daily Express, Delmer got to know the Nazi élite, which as Roger Boyes reported in the Times, ‘helped him understand what makes a dictatorship tick. He realised it was useless expecting ‘good’ Germans to rise up, so you had to…