The Oldie Spring 2024

It was 70 years ago today

My romance with Roger Bannister by Joan Wheeler Bennett

Features

14 My brief encounter with fame Celia Johnson

16 Sportswriters off their game

Michael Henderson

18 Dad’s fling with Kathleen

Hale Merlin Holland

20 Tristram Powell, star of BBC’s Golden Age Melvyn Bragg

22 Time for a Lady Chancellor?

Michael Beloff

23 Play School turns 60

Kath Garner

24 Queen Victoria’s secrets

Nicky Haslam

29 Paddy Leigh Fermor’s kidnap, 80 years on Harry Bucknall

30 Roger Bannister’s record, 70 years on Joan Wheeler Bennett and Anton Digon

32 Hollywood censors Bruce Beresford

33

5

12

Moray House, 23/31

Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk

12 Modern Life: What is delulu?

Richard Godwin

34 Prue’s News

37 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

38 Oldie Man of Letters

A N Wilson

41 Small World

Jem Clarke

42 Town Mouse

Tom Hodgkinson

43 Country Mouse

Giles Wood

44 School Days

Sophia Waugh

45 Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

46 God Sister Teresa

46 Memorial Service: Lord Brooke James Hughes-Onslow

47

48

51

51

63 Rant: Fitted sheets

Sharon Griffiths

89

91

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Michael Hardaker

Supplements editor Charlotte Metcalf

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

Books

52 Keir Starmer: The Biography, by Tom Baldwin

Anne Robinson

53 A Very Private School, by Charles Spencer Hugo Vickers

55 The Shortest History of Italy, by Ross King

James Owen

57 Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, by Julie Peakman Philippa Stockley

59 Treetime: Tales of a Layman’s Lifelong Adventure with Trees and Tree Folk, by Ted Green Patrick Barkham

61 Until August: The Lost Novel, by Gabriel García Márquez Harry Mount Arts

66 Film: The Trouble with Jessica Harry Mount

67 Theatre: Nye William Cook

68 Radio Valerie Grove

68 Television Frances Wilson

69 Music Richard Osborne

70 Golden Oldies Mark Ellen

71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Oldie subscriptions

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Roger Bannister, 70 years on page 30

Celia Johnson on fame

Stone me!

The Old Un’s Notes

This 12 May marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tony Hancock (1924-68), the wonderfully lugubrious comedian with his trademark homburg and astrakhan-collared coat, and the somewhat dilapidated lodgings at 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam.

After catching the acting bug in an RAF wartime entertainment unit, Hancock got his big break with his eponymous half-hour radio – and later TV – series broadcast from 1954 to 1961.

Playing a down-at-heel comedian who merged with his real personality, he was beset by a supporting cast of conmen and oddballs, including the future Carry On troupe of Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams.

It was the show’s wonderfully observed focus on the mundane aspects of everyday life that made it a work of comedic genius. In the process, it paved the way for the likes of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as every tragic British sitcom star from Rupert Rigsby to Alan Partridge.

Unfortunately, Hancock was also one of those comedians cursed with the ability to make other people laugh and himself feel miserable. He struggled with alcoholism and depression, and never quite became the major film star he aspired to be.

In an effort to kick-start his career again, he agreed to film a 13-part TV series for the Seven Network in Australia. In June 1968, he killed himself there, overdosing on sleeping pills and vodka in a small rented flat in Sydney, aged just 44.

‘Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times,’ he wrote in a farewell note.

These unpublished photographs (pictured) come from Hancock’s last film cameo in The Wrong Box (1966). He played a detective in this frenetic Victorian romp, released two years before his early demise.

The rare stills were given to Oldie contributor Philip Glassborow by his second wife, Freddie Hancock.

Among this month’s contributors

Celia Johnson (p14) was one of Britain’s greatest actresses. She starred in Brief Encounter, In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed. She wrote her previously unpublished Oldie piece in the 1950s.

Nicky Haslam (p24) is a writer, interior designer and singer. He wrote Redeeming Features and produces annual Common List tea towels. He performs the songs of his old friend Cole Porter.

Bruce Beresford (p32) directed the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy. He also directed Breaker Morant and Don’s Party. He wrote The Adventures of Barry McKenzie with Barry Humphries.

Anne Robinson (p52), aka the Queen of Mean, presented The Weakest Link and Countdown. She worked on the Mail, the Sunday Times and the Mirror. She wrote Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

Hancock had very little to do in this movie, but audiences were always delighted to see him in just about anything.

His glory days at the BBC were long gone. His second feature film had flopped. Likewise his ITV comedy series. He’d recently been most visible in some commercials for the Egg Marketing Board.

As the late Barry Cryer said, Hancock discarded his brilliant writers, and his wonderful supporting actors, his agent – and almost everyone close to him –before, finally, tragically discarding himself.

Since 2012, Robert O’Byrne has been exploring Ireland’s hidden corners for architectural gems.

O’Byrne is now publishing the fruits of his labours in a new book, The Irish Aesthete: Buildings of Ireland, Lost and Found

Happy 100th, Tony Hancock – in The Wrong Box, 1966

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Lynn News

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He took every photo in the book with his phone camera, including this enchanting picture (below) of ice-fringed Gortkelly Castle, Tipperary – built by John Ryan in 1746.

O’Byrne writes, ‘Gortkelly Castle was unroofed around 1940, not long after the last Ryan to live there died, and then left to fall into the striking ruin that can be seen today.’

How enchanting that O’Byrne has tracked down these beauties. He has taken more than 100,000 pictures of them – 150 appear in the book.

A former vice-president of the Irish Georgian Society, O’Byrne says, ‘Astonishingly, there continue to be more places to be investigated… The Irish Aesthete has a future as well as a past.’

Sir Don McCullin, the greatest war photographer of all time, is running out of film, he told the Old Un recently at an Oldie Literary Lunch. If he didn’t get hold of some soon,

‘This one has a nicer tree – but I think I preferred the sand on the first one’

Afterwards, the scribes went into a huddle to try to work out what he meant. No one knew, but it certainly shut them up. he said he might ‘pack it in’. McCullin prefers film to digital for his stirring landscape pictures, particularly of Roman ruins, as seen in his latest book, Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor (pictured below).

Thank God, Don’s camera won’t get dusty. On hearing about his plight, an American film manufacturer has just stepped into the breach and promised him as much as he needs.

The footballer Eric Cantona once bamboozled sports journalists with a metaphor about seagulls following a trawler in the hope of catching sardines.

There was a hint of that when George Galloway faced reporters after his election as MP for Rochdale.

Taking issue with what he felt to be an unreasonably hypothetical question about Israel, Galloway replied, ‘If my aunt had a beard, she’d be my uncle.’

‘Sorry, you must have a medical emergency before we give you blood’

To Suffolk for the funeral of Ian Lavender, distinguished actor and recipient of our Stupid Oldie Boy of the Year Award in 2015.

He had been ill for years and died too young, at 77, despite his permanently cheerful spirit, and the devoted care of his wife, Michele.

The newspapers, inevitably, focused on his career, the poignant placing of Private Pike’s scarf on the coffin, and the famous faces in the congregation.

However, what most affected those of us in the full church and in the village hall afterwards was the tremendous warmth towards Ian that glowed from his very many local friends. They saw him not as a star of Dad’s Army but as an exceptional husband, father, friend, and neighbour – and a very useful

Gortkelly Castle, Tipperary

Don McCullin and his picture of Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek

man to know – for Ian, it seems, was a peerless handyman.

The vicar recalled him installing her dimmer switches; his son Sam listed Ian’s considerable skills as a carpenter, plumber, garden designer, car mechanic and more, talents he was always ready to deploy to help people or projects in the village.

It’s easy to forget that even famous people play a part in more normal life, but no surprise to the Old Un that Ian played that role so well. RIP.

‘It’s an old photo’

Rachel Reeves, who hopes to become the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, is sometimes teased for her honking tones, but is that deep voice in fact an asset?

During recent Commons exchanges, Ms Reeves was up against Bim Afolami, a Treasury minister. In their heated parliamentary debate, Mr Afolami’s voice rose markedly higher than his Labour counterpart’s.

In short, he sounded squeaky – Don Estelle to her Windsor Davies, for those who remember the 1970s pop hit Whispering Grass

‘With my brains and your money, Mr Pumroy, we have nothing to lose but your money’

Margaret Thatcher’s voice deepened – partly as a result of coaching – after she became Conservative leader.

Theresa May is one of life’s altos, as were Shirley Williams and the Blairite cabinet minister Ruth Kelly. Betty Boothroyd spoke pure Player’s Navy Cut and former Labour MP Clare Short sounds like a Brummie Henry Kissinger.

This may be unfair, but female politicians seem to benefit from having leathery larynxes.

The Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has many qualities, but reading complicated names is not necessarily one of them.

Recently, Mr Speaker received a diplomatic visitor at his official apartments and invited him to the Commons chamber afterwards.

‘We are joined today in the gallery,’ Sir Lindsay proudly told MPs, ‘by the Speaker of the Supreme Council of the

‘Oh no! My drink’s been spiked’

Krupgshtph Republic.’

Actually it was the Kyrgyz Republic, but it came out sounding like a sneeze. Sir Lindsay has our sympathies.

Gavin Stamp (19482017) was a much-loved architectural historian and Oldie contributor.

His enthusiasms were wide – and far from tweedy. He was chairman of the Twentieth Century Society and wrote books about Edwin Lutyens, George Gilbert Scott and the history of the telephone box.

Now his posthumous book,

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39, has been published. It covers that great collision of styles: the Egyptian Revival, the Swedish and American influences, and the factories, churches and suburban Olde Worlde tea shoppes of the 1920s and ’30s.

Pictured is the thrilling hall

of the Daily Express Building on Fleet Street, built by Robert Atkinson in 1933.

Stamp praises ‘this sleek new building in glass and Vitrolite’. And what a dream it is – part Aztec temple, part Fred ’n’ Ginger stage set, part 1930s ocean-liner; the very soul of Art Deco.

How uplifting it must have been for the hard-bitten, hard-drinking hacks of the Daily Express when they entered these hallowed halls every day to file their copy and claim their whacking great expenses.

‘So how bad was the divorce settlement?'

Labour’s Lord Snape is sceptical of suggestions that national service might be reintroduced.

His Lordship recalled in Parliament that, 60 years ago, a recruiting sergeant ‘offered to swear me in that same afternoon and send me on my way to the Royal Engineers depot the following morning’.

‘Recruitment is now dealt with by Capita and it takes nine to 12 months for each individual to join a regiment.’

If Capita had to cope with national service, ‘By the time we had recruited a regiment of these reluctant conscripts, most would be too old.’

The Tory peer Lord Fowler, who ‘got some in’ in the 1950s, recalled that ‘not everyone had happy memories’ of national service, some conscripts keeping lists of days and hours left to serve.

British forces radio used to play Happy Days Are Here Again for those nearing discharge, said Fowler.

Winner of the Oldie trip to Lisbon is Nick Brazil from Reading. Many congrats!

Fleet Street palace: Daily Express Building, 1933

Brandreth’s Diary

Rupert Everett’s gay abandon

What a wild, sex-fuelled life the actor has led! And how beige my existence has been

Spring has sprung. The sap is rising. And I realise I have barely lived at all.

I have just come from recording a conversation for my Rosebud podcast with the actor Rupert Everett, 64.

Rupe has lived – and some. The star of My Best Friend’s Wedding (and, more recently, The Happy Prince, the best of the several films about the life and downfall of Oscar Wilde) came to live in London’s Earl’s Court when he was just 15, quickly discovered the notorious Coleherne pub in the Old Brompton Road, and didn’t look back.

During his late teens, and into his twenties and beyond, sex was central to his existence. Young men, old men … he had them all – and women, too. Morning, noon and night, Rupe was having it away with gay abandon.

To hear him tell the tale, it sounds terrific – though he acknowledges the downsides: the occasional encounter with a sinister stranger (‘I screamed like blue murder and ran out of the building’); the fear of having contracted AIDS in the 1980s (‘Every morning, I looked into the mirror, dreading seeing the mark of the disease on my face’); the fact of his multiple overlapping affairs hurting people he loved…

Inevitably, alcohol and drugs were part of the rich mix, but the driving force was sex. I have never met anyone before who has enjoyed so much sex and can talk about it so disarmingly –and hilariously.

Rupert is knocking retirement age now, with a settled boyfriend, is continent and content and has a rich and raunchy past to look back on.

I have got nothing. I have never smoked. I have not touched even the mildest drug. I don’t drink and if I wrote up the story of my love life, it would be called One and a Half Shades of Beige.

Of course, it’s too late now. I saw the beautiful and brilliant actress Rachael

Stirling the other day and was reminded of a lunch I had with her wonderful mother, Diana Rigg, more than 20 years ago, when I was in my fifties and Dame Diana (my teenage crush when she was in The Avengers) was in her sixties. We talked about mature sex.

‘It’s horrific,’ Diana said, with a shudder. ‘You’ve got to do it in the dark because you both look so hideous – and the heaving of one body on top of the other … it’s simply exhausting.’

Diana Rigg and I bonded because we had both published collections of theatre stories in the same season.

Mine was called Great Theatrical Disasters; hers was an anthology of terrible theatre reviews, entitled No Turn Unstoned. In her book she quotes a review of her 1971 Broadway performance in Abelard and Heloise, in which she appeared topless, prompting a New York critic to write, ‘Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.’

We agreed that it’s the coruscating reviews that stick in the memory. We also agreed that in our lifetime, the play that had received probably the most universally favourable reviews was Laurence Olivier’s 1963 production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, in which Olivier played Dr Astrov and Michael Redgrave gave the performance of his life in the title role. Impeccably cast (with Joan Plowright as Sonia, Rosemary Harris as Elena and Sibyl Thorndike as the nurse),

it still strikes me as the closest thing to perfection I have seen in the theatre.

I have seen the play many times (apart from Shakespeare, it’s my favourite play) and it never disappoints. Currently, there is a wonderful production selling out at the 180-seat Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. Adapted and directed by the great Sir Trevor Nunn, 84, it is a heartbreaking joy, and if you get the chance to see it, you must.

Now and then, the National Theatre and the RSC are still doing good things, but these days the best of British theatre is to be found in the smallest of venues.

I have recently chanced to have a few encounters with Akshata Murty, the Prime Minister’s wife. She’s young (44 on 25th April), engaging, funny, highly intelligent, full of energy and interested in several of the serious things that interest me: education, literacy, the importance of poetry, the untapped potential of the Commonwealth.

In the past, she has had a torrid press because, thanks to her father and her own acumen, she is reportedly richer than the King. But from what I have seen of her, she is a good thing, an under-theradar philanthropist who has been quietly busy bringing children into Downing Street for interesting educational opportunities.

I mention her because I realise that I often judge a person I know but don’t know well (such as Rishi Sunak) by the quality of their partner.

Actually, it’s an approach I have relied on for more than half a century. People who might regard me as a bumptious, name-dropping loud-mouth meet my wife and think, ‘Well, if she’s been with him all these years, he can’t be that bad.’ All I can tell you is that she hasn’t stayed for the sex.

Gyles Brandreth: Can’t Stop Talking! is at the Cadogan Hall on 26th April

Rupert Everett, 1987

I’m ready for my naked close-up

The agony of putting out the bins – in the nude matthew norman

If there was one thing my front garden didn’t need to underscore the existing aura of dystopian gloom, that thing has come.

For years, no one passing could glance towards the house without recognising it as the home of a sad little man who has given up on life.

The crisp packets and used Durexes (Durices?) lobbed in from the street, the wild unevenness of the steps to the front door, the browned and desiccated old Christmas trees, the phalanx of wires flapping down from the roof … the clues have not strictly required the decryption services of Bletchley Park.

It was with a gruelling sense of inevitability, then, that I recently noted the addition to this wretched montage of an infestation of rats.

Although they showed no ambition to enter the house (probably out of fear of what they’d find within), discouraging measures seemed mandated.

My metal bins having corroded at the bottom, allowing the little bleeders access, plastic wheelie models were the obvious solution.

My neighbour Tom, whose immaculate front garden had the same problem, passed on a Council email address whereby rat-proof bins might be procured.

To this end, I wrote to the imaginatively named newbins@lbhf.gov.uk.

They swiftly replied that I should have had the new bins already, and that the request would be chased up.

Two days later, that request having developed not necessarily to my advantage on the new-bins front, and with waste storage almost exhausted, I transported a wheelie bin bought via Amazon for £85 from my late parents’ unsold home six miles to the north.

The following Monday, shortly after 7am, I heard from my bath the sound of binman on gravel, looked down to see a

chap removing my wheelie, and raced down to add one last bin bag to the haul.

Actually, ‘raced’ is not entirely accurate. While I was living with my ailing parents, a post-shower sprint to append one final bag concluded with the towel’s descent – in full view of three hugely amused collectors. This time, I succumbed to the urge to don trousers.

By the time I reached the garden, the wheelie had gone. I found a nearby van and asked for it back, but the guy said it must be in a different truck and would be returned soon.

It was not.

So ensued a correspondence with newbins, if they’ll excuse the diminutive, about my missing wheelie and its absentee replacements.

Newbins couldn’t have been sweeter or more apologetic. ‘I’m ever so sorry your bin was taken away,’ read one of many emails. ‘Could you confirm if it was a member of [our] staff that took this away?’

I could, and I did.

The following day also passed newbin-less. With little option now but to leave the black bags in the garden – not widely regarded by experts as an effective rat-repellent tactic – I sent yet another plaintive email.

‘I have chased the delivery of new bins for you,’ was the reply. ‘I can only apologise about the issue with the wheeled bin; our crews are under instruction not to remove any bins without any prior consent.

‘If you have a picture of the bin you purchased,’ it went on, ‘we can check our yard…’

It’s a faux pas to offer refuse-collectors a full-frontal of your genitals

It was here that the sense of binrelated humiliation reached a new apex. If it’s a faux pas to offer refuse-collectors a full-frontal of your genitals – and it’s not ideally designed to earn a distinction from the headmistress of your finishing school on the banks of Lake Lucerne –having no picture of your wheelie feels somehow worse.

With none of the compensatory comic impact, it bespeaks social inadequacy on a higher plane.

I toyed with demanding a referral to the Nancy Mitford of newbins for some etiquette guidance.

Should one commission a painting of the bin, perhaps by Jonathan Yeo, and if so in oils or watercolours? Or is that a touch déclassé, when good form dictates hiring Annie Leibovitz, or possibly Mario Testino, to take a photograph?

Perhaps this doesn’t matter much to newbins either way. But, for all who have a bin, the lesson is plain. At the absolute least, do a charcoal sketch of your own.

Despite the dearth of pictorial assistance, the prodigal bin miraculously returned the following day. The next day, meanwhile, came two new plastic wheelies, one for recycling and one for household waste.

Jostling for space with that pair are a second wheelie transferred from my parents’ place lest the above never arrived, two tiny plastic bins for food waste, and two degraded metal specimens that gave the apparently departed rats such feasts.

The total of bins in the front garden now stands at eight. That may be enough for an important exhibition – paintings or photographs, or a mixture – at Tate Modern.

But it isn’t doing much, to tell the God’s honest, to dispel the impression that this is the front garden of a man who has thrown in the towel on human existence, and belongs in the bin.

what was skiffle?

Seventy years ago, in July 1954, Lonnie Donegan recorded his version of Rock Island Line. It reached the Top Ten in the hit parade on both sides of the Atlantic. Skiffle had arrived.

The term ‘skiffle’ evokes a bunch of 1950s sixth-formers in NHS glasses earnestly lamenting life on the chain gang, but it inspired countless 1960s groups. A tape survives of John Lennon singing a skiffle song, Putting on the Style, with the Quarrymen on 6th July 1957.

One theory about skiffle’s origins is that it evolved from rent parties of the 1920s, where musicians played on improvised instruments to raise funds.

By the early 1950s, the Yarmouthborn jazzman Ken Colyer formed a skiffle group within his band, with Alexis Korner and Anthony ‘Lonnie’ Donegan on guitar, Chris Barber on bass and his own brother Bill on washboard.

In 1953, Jazz Journal urged its readers to visit the London Jazz Club and ‘feel the electric atmosphere that builds up’ during the skiffle sessions.

Colyer departed in 1954, and Barber became the bandleader, with the Lonnie

Donegan Skiffle

Group playing during breaks in performances. During a recording session for the New Orleans Joys LP, Barber decided to include two skiffle numbers – John Henry and Rock Island Line by Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter. Decca released the latter as a single.

Lonnie Donegan

Rock Island Line sold over a million copies and inspired thousands of listeners to borrow washboards from sculleries and construct a bass from a tea chest and a broom handle. Meanwhile, novice guitarists strove to master the A, E and B7 chords. By 1956, there were approximately 20 skiffle groups around London. A year later, the figure was nearer to 400 in the capital alone.

By 1957, the genre had become a cultural phenomenon. Bob Cort and His Skiffle Group provided the theme tune to Six-Five Special, the programme ‘designed for the young in spirit’, and Woman magazine gave helpful suggestions on arranging a jolly skiffle party.

what is delulu?

Delulu is short for delusional.

It’s another one of those Gen Z-isms, where people take a perfectly serviceable English word, abbreviate it in a quirky way and let it loose on the internet. See also: Oxford Word of the Year 2023, ‘rizz’ – short for charisma.

Only, while the meaning of rizz is fairly straightforward – if you have ‘mad rizz’, it’s a good thing! – delulu is a little more, shall we say, ambigugu.

At first, it was an insult. Specifically, it was used by K-Pop fans to mock the most obsessive and delusional of their number. As in: ‘OMG, Stacey actually thinks Jungkook from BTS is going to respond to her Reel? Totally DELULU!’

Over time, however, delulu has evolved and is now used mostly in an approving

way. A person who does whatever the hell they want without giving a damn what anyone thinks might be said to be delulu.

A person such as London teenager Sabrina Bahsoon, who gained a large TikTok following for the videos she posted of herself performing elaborate choreography on the Tube. ‘Reject cringe,’ she advises.

‘Being delulu is the solulu,’ another popular TikToker affirms.

So the delulu dance as if no one is watching, fake it till they make it, and always follow their bliss. Should you decide to perform excerpts from HMS Pinafore in a cashmere thong on the 8.22 from Sevenoaks, there’s a decent bet some young person would capture the content on their phone, post it to their TikTok account and declare you to be the last word in delulu. (There may be less desirable consequences too, just to warn you.)

Delulu has its serious side. On TikTok, a video by Dr Nicola Thomas of the University

Skiffle was not universally enjoyed; the critic from the Daily Telegraph thought Donegan’s music ‘a form of torture that the clever Chinese forgot to invent’. Such observations did not deter youths with dreams of fame on a par with the Vipers Skiffle Group from investing £2 10s 6d in a DIY guitar kit. Plus another 4/6d for Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day instruction book.

This popularity contained the seeds of its demise. The Observer reported that newer groups ‘do not distinguish between skiffle and rock ’n’ roll’. Many younger players devoted their evenings to learning the solo from That’ll Be the Day. Melody Maker, on 17th May 1958, bore the stark headline ‘SKIFFLE ON THE SKIDS’. That year, the BBC renamed Saturday Skiffle Club as Saturday Club, while would-be Buddy Hollys acquired hire-purchase electric guitars.

But skiffle’s legacy remains immense. Billy Bragg wrote in his magisterial Roots, Radicals and Rockers, it was ‘the first music for teenagers by teenagers in our cultural history’. Surviving footage – Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey performing Freight Train in The Tommy Steele Story or Lonnie Donegan singing Lonesome Traveller – captures its sheer excitement.

Andrew Roberts

of Sheffield Department of Psychology offers a clinical defence of delulu.

‘Humans respond primarily to what they believe, not what is true nor what others believe,’ she says. ‘Researchers have even suggested that self-delusion is a healthy response, particularly if it can serve to bolster self-esteem when people are victims of circumstance.’

I’d go further. Delulu frequently appears to be a prerequisite to success in the modern era. I could name a few individuals from recent political history who at first seemed utterly delusional – but then styled out the laughter, scorn and outrage and became very powerful indeed.

So you might see our delulu youth as a generation of Hamlets, pretending to be mad, because the world is mad. And, in irrational times, being irrational is the only rational response. They are but delulu north-north-west. Until the revolulu.

Richard Godwin

My brief encounter with fame

In a previously unpublished piece from the 1950s, Celia Johnson reveals the highs and lows of being a film star

For a short while, some years ago, I was a sort of sub-film star.

This was very surprising, and by the time I had got used to it, I stopped being one. I was never very good, frankly. I was very bad at doing the sort of things that film stars are required to do by the publicity department.

I remember in Paris being photographed shaking hands with the engine drivers at the Gare du Nord. I got the giggles and they must have thought me rather impolite but I wanted to tell them, as if they didn’t know, that they

Lucy Fleming, Celia Johnson’s daughter, recalls her mother’s modesty and her big break – In Which We Serve (1942).

When asked why she had chosen an acting career, my mother said, ‘I thought I’d rather like it. It was the only thing I was good at. And I thought it might be rather wicked.’

were not shaking hands with a real film star but only with me, and that it was very nice of them to be so kind and pretend so well.

Later, I used to try to do better by over-playing it more and giving great, goofy smiles and wearing long, smart French gloves, but it wasn’t a part that suited me.

At a Berlin film festival that I attended, I managed to be so insignificant that the organisers omitted to invite me to the main celebrations in a vast open-air amphitheatre.

This delighted me, but the kind director who was with me was so annoyed by the rebuff and slight to me and to the film that he planned a tremendous splash at the opening night of our film.

He arranged to go on stage and make a speech in German building me up, and read telegrams and tributes from anyone he could think of. Then I was to come on in my most splendid dress and bow and smile in a scintillating manner and be snowed under with flowers and make a little halting speech in German … the

Celia (1908-82) was an established West End star when the Second World War broke out, taking the lead in many plays. Uncharacteristically, she went up to Noël Coward at a party and asked if she could play his wife in his forthcoming film In Which We Serve, planned for 1942.

A screen test was

arranged and, as she said, ‘I got the part!’

So her feature-film career began. She hated the waiting about and the rushes – ‘My second day’s filming consisted of being made up at 8.30 and not being used till 6.30. It wasn’t improved by seeing the rushes in which I looked like a soused herring. I don’t think I’m going to be

the Vivien Leigh of Nettlebed [where Celia lived with my father, the writer Peter Fleming, brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming].’ Coward, Ronnie Neame and David Lean – the dream team, known by Noël as ‘my little darlings’ – kept her busy through the war years. At first, she didn’t enjoy filming,

missing the camaraderie of a theatre company.

With Ann Todd, Joyce Carey and Peggy Ashcroft, she was an ATS girl in a Ministry of Information film (right). They ‘laughed without stopping’. Her acting – simple and truthful – was well-suited to a camera, but her

Filming Brief Encounter in Regent’s Park with Trevor Howard. Right: in 1945

Rushes I never liked – you are horrified by your lack of subtlety or the size of your nose

confidence and belief in her performance was low.

Even after Brief Encounter, she wrote, ‘I do hope I’m good in this film. I really do want to be most dreadfully badly but am very dubious about it. I feel that I could have done it about a million times better but then one always feels that.’

halting part was easy enough … and everyone would see that I was a great and fine Film Star.

As I waited in the wings, I couldn’t understand why the director’s speech was taking so long but when at last I heard my name and floated on, wreathed in smiles, I found a face of anguish greeting me.

‘That was a near thing,’ he gasped in my ear while heaving great wodges of flowers towards me. ‘I had to spin out my speech for ages because I simply couldn’t think of your name.’

None of this do I regret, but sometimes I get a sort of nostalgia for the actual work of filming. I miss the strange, unmistakable smell of paint that you find on all film sets and the hot powdery smell of the make-up rooms.

I miss the curious sort of camera worship that goes on. The camera has its own devoted band of acolytes who feed it and polish it and push it gently about.

There is an organised confusion on a film set when nothing seems to happen for hours and then everything goes quiet for a few seconds. In those seconds, you have to try and fit something consistent and true on to something that you probably did days before or have not yet done.

There is a challenge in trying to act in a little cut-off bit of light, with no audience but the technicians and a fastidious director. Those technicians not concerned with the take are probably filling in their football pools and if you can make them look up and watch to the end of your shot, you have probably achieved something.

I like the dedication that great directors have, that nothing matters except the film they are making and they cannot think that anything matters to anyone else either.

I like being measured for focus by a tape from the end of one’s nose to the camera and measured for light by the

cameraman with his meter and I like to watch the skill of the technicians and I forget all the things I don’t like.

They were many. Mainly the waiting about, when one had an early call, and that means dawn rising, and then not being needed on set until dusk. Rushes I never liked. That is when you see the shots of the day before and are horrified at your lack of subtlety or the size of your nose.

I used to be annoyed by what I thought was the waste, but at the same time impressed by the lordly way in which anything – however peculiar, rare or costly – could be produced at a moment’s notice.

With David Lean on the set of Brief Encounter, 1945

I liked the machine that can make cobwebs, delicate threads of rubbery solution shot from a spray in a twinkling and the detailed observation shown by the continuity girls, who can tell you the length of ash on your cigarette necessary to match for a close-up.

I have always liked professionals, and to watch professional film-making from the inside is a pleasure, though not, I think, from the outside, and I am glad that for a while I was able to do this.

I never felt anything but surprise at being there, but I also think and hope that I became a professional at it on the set, though never on parade.

She came round to the joy of filming: ‘I have enjoyed making it a lot but I don’t believe that David Lean knows all he should about directing.’ This opinion was not to last.

Despite Oscar nominations, BAFTA awards, a New York Film Critics Circle prize and a CBE followed by a DBE – her proudest moment – she was

always modest. This was not false modesty – it was how she was. She wrote this article in the 1950s.

Lucy Fleming appears with her husband, Simon Williams in Posting Letters to the Moon – a play about the wartime letters between her parents, Celia Johnson and Peter

Fleming

From left: Ann Todd, Joyce Carey, Peggy Ashcroft and Celia Johnson in a Ministry of Information film

Off their game

The golden age of sportswriters has been killed off by show-offs and pseuds. By Michael

Henderson

Organised loafing’ – that’s what William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944, called cricket.

But surely that’s the essence of all games. Young men and women run around for the pleasure of those who can’t or won’t. For the professionals, it’s work; for the rest of us, it’s fun.

It should also be diverting to read about, so long as writers maintain a sense of proportion.

Hugh McIlvanney called sport ‘a glorious distraction’. And Hughie knew whereof he wrote – until the second bottle arrived.

Sports scribblers were usually straight-no-chaser types, particularly the football hounds, with their ‘teak-tough’ tacklers and ‘scheming’ inside forwards. The goalie was a ‘custodian’, full-backs ‘flinty’, and an attempt at goal (‘the onion bag’) flew ‘like a rocket’.

In his wonderful book The Football Man (1968), Arthur Hopcraft recognised that, far from scorning clichés, readers lapped them up. They loved it when managers ‘rapped out warnings’ or ‘roared defiantly’. They still do.

Amid the muck and nettles there was some excellent writing. The young McIlvanney dazzled. Michael Parkinson was magnificently funny. Patrick Collins looked like a headmaster, and carried a stiletto. Simon Barnes quoted James Joyce every other week, with a wink towards readers happy to be in on the act.

Champions:

Michael

Parkinson and George Best, 1996

Others served as rectors, on hand to reassure. There has never been a football writer like Brian Glanville, nor a cricket correspondent like John Woodcock. There was never an all-rounder like Ian Wooldridge – and there never will be, because TV has changed the way we see sport.

The gifted ones still prosper. Stephen Jones, Sunday Times rugby correspondent, remains the best on-the-whistle reporter in the business. Martin Samuel, back in the Times fold after a peripatetic career, can do – indeed, has done – everything.

These are the bottle-aged performers, who grew up in a world of clattering typewriters and deaf copy-takers. That is not in itself a mark of distinction.

There were also a few shockers, who made things up and watched their reputations rise like bubbles. Desmond Hackett of the Express, one of Fleet Street’s not-sogood ol’ boys, built a career on falsehood, and claimed the expenses to prove it.

A man like Wooldridge, who died in 2007, might not recognise the modern landscape. Now there is a different kind of chronicler, who ascends the pulpit with a holy book he has written himself.

Footballers no longer ‘pass’ the ball; they ‘recycle’ it. They ‘break lines’, effect ‘transitions’ and opt for a ‘high press’. It’s not a language that would have impressed Matt Busby or Brian Clough, whose teams conquered Europe. And it isn’t hard to work out what Cloughie would have made of a ‘skill set’.

Unlike the telly pundits, whose stock-in-trade is jargon, writers should know which words work best. In Glanville’s case, that meant describing Alan Hansen, the Liverpool defender, as ‘an elegant giver of second chances’. Could any TV wallah define so wittily a player’s gifts and faults?

Glanville was a master of concision, unlike some modern showboats. The Times, where Samuel, Matt Dickinson and Michael Atherton write so clearly, also houses

Matthew Syed, a former table-tennis starlet, whose eagerness to pronounce on events is matched by a reluctance to attend them. Syed the omniscient sounds like a primary-school teacher guiding pupils through their times tables. Only, in his reckoning, four fours make 17.

There were always witty writers at the Guardian, going back 100 years to Neville Cardus, where sports writing began. Frank Keating, Matthew Engel and David Lacey lit up their pages, and now there are those who smile at Jonathan Liew.

For all Liew’s self-conscious tilting at windmills, it’s possible to recognise his talent, even if it’s a talent best glimpsed from afar, like snake-charming.

Then there’s Barney Ronay, the Guardian’s chief sports writer. Ronay’s thing, as Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner confirms frequently, is an adolescent urge to be noticed.

Roger Federer’s backhand, Ronay said, is ‘a European cultural treasure, like a Bach cantata or a complete acorn-fed Iberian ham’. Simon Barnes, brilliant and self-mocking, might get away with that. For one thing, he knows his Bach from his Handel. Ronay, who displays neither love nor knowledge, is merely saying, ‘Look at me.’

An old-school wit died last year. Mike Carey liked to keep his powder dry, but when he took up his musket, he rarely missed. One dismal evening at Birmingham City, noting the singing of the club song, Keep Right On to the End of the Road, he told Guardian-readers ‘in view of the primitive football on display, it was more a case of keeping the woad on till the end of the rite’. That’s the way to do it.

Carey’s wit is lost on ‘Pinky’ Ronay and ‘Perky’ Syed. One reads Schopenhauer, even when nobody is looking; the other longs to play second house on Blackpool’s north pier. They would do better to put away the mirror, and read those who came before.

If in doubt, they can always begin with a line that never fails: ‘The Blues kicked off with a rush…’

Michael Henderson is author of That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket

Cat woman in love

Merlin Holland on the shawl that revealed an affair between his father and Kathleen Hale, author of Orlando the Marmalade Cat

Like all small children, I used to be fascinated by the semiforbidden contents of adults’ chests of drawers.

One particular discovery, which I remember most vividly, was that of a heavy silk shawl intricately embroidered with small flowers and wrapped in tissue paper. It was never taken out and used or even mentioned. So, as a child, I had the impression that I was the only person to be aware of its existence.

After my father, Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son, died in 1967, I asked my mother about the shawl and she said rather vaguely that it had belonged to some girlfriend of his long before the war.

I left it at that and the shawl remained more than ever a forgotten reminiscence in its crumpled tissue, a sort of memory mothballed for eternity.

Twenty-five years went by. I was checking my father’s diaries to verify the date of some event in the early 1940s, when I came across the following entry. It

was around the time his old friend Edward Heron-Allen had died, and his wife, Nour, had been going through her late husband’s possessions:

‘I heard from Nour yesterday that she still had the lovely Spanish shawl which I gave to Armorel [her daughter] for her 21st birthday and was prepared to let me have it back.

‘I have told so many lies about that shawl that I have almost forgotten its true history. At various times, I have said that it belonged to my mother, to an imaginary sister who died, to my former wife, and to a lady to whom I was engaged but who died in tragic circumstances shortly before the nuptials were due to take place.

‘I’ve told so many lies about the shawl that I’ve almost forgotten its true history’

‘Whereas the real truth is that I bought it in the Rastro in Madrid for about £12 for Kathleen Hale, with whom I was travelling in sin some 17 years ago, just at this time of year.’

Could my childhood discovery, I wondered, be the very same shawl? The only way to find out was to ask Kathleen, whom I had known off and on for many years.

She used to come to my father’s flat in London to inscribe her Orlando books to me in the early 1950s, just about the time I had first found the shawl in its drawer.

My father must have kept in touch with her, because she sent him a little watercolour in 1967 on his return from New York where he had been to help promote Brian Reade’s Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition on Aubrey Beardsley.

Vyvyan, it turned out, had written to Kathleen saying that he had seen himself on colour television for the first time and ‘looked like an anaemic prawn’.

This prompted her to send him the watercolour of Orlando’s wife Grace

Top: Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son, and Merlin, 1954. Right: Orlando and the shawl

sitting, chin on paws, in front of a TV with a mirror image from the screen –‘Vyvyan Holland in Colour’ (pictured).

I, too, had kept in touch since 1983 when I had nearly started a children’s books imprint and wanted to reissue the Orlando series.

All in all, I felt I knew her well enough to call her and broach the subject, and I wrote out her reply as well as I could remember it immediately after I had put down the phone:

‘He bought that shawl for me in the market in Madrid; it was bright royal blue with flowers embroidered on it. It was very loud and I probably didn’t have very good taste. I gave it back to him when I got married in 1926.

‘My husband made me give it back. He then gave it to Viva King who phoned me up and asked if Vyvyan was “all right”. I didn’t know what she meant and she said, “Well – what was he like in bed?”

‘I suppose she was implying he might be queer because he hadn’t yet made love to her.’

By this time, the history of the shawl was beginning to take on all the elements of a Maupassant short story. Before long, it led me to a bundle of letters from Kathleen to Vyvyan spread over 40 years, from when they had made that trip through southern France and Spain in September 1925, up to his death in 1967.

In one of the last ones, it was clear that she wanted, briefly, to relive those days asking Vyvyan if she could reread her letters to him, and when she returned them she wrote:

‘My dear Vyvyan,

‘I am registering these letters because I promised their safe return.

‘On reading them, an overwhelming nostalgia crept through me, for the Vyvyan I knew, & the Provence and Spain that was his. I have never felt so nostalgic, & it is a measure of what that wonderful time really meant to me, despite the canker that was eating out my heart. [She was recovering from a broken love affair.]

‘You gave me something from the world of imagination & human warmth which is indestructible. But Nostalgia is a Siren & one must be wary of her; she can destroy the present & the future unless disarmed.

‘I shall offer up a sacrifice upon her altar, in culinary form & shall cook a Provençale Bouillabaisse and a Spanish Paella … their steamy fragrance will sinuously rise, incense-wise to salute the Past & placate the Present.

‘But pity the poor Siren: she must fight a losing battle against folk who have the solid & lovable rocks of family life to cling to. Love & smiles to you from the “Plain but amiable cat”. K.’

On the last occasion that I saw Kathleen before her death in 2000, aged 101, I took the shawl with me, a little

apprehensive about what effect, if any, it might have.

I like to think that I saw her pause for a second or two as she picked it up, memory fanning the embers of a distant affair and a very old friendship. It had been my father’s friendship, but it had become mine too, and together they had made more than 70 years.

I still have the shawl, which lives (in more senses than one since I discovered its history) in that same drawer.

I know that it will always remind me of the remarkable, sometimes eccentric and very lovable creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat.

Merlin Holland is author of The Wilde Album: Public and Private Images of Oscar Wilde

Kathleen Hale with her son and her cat (the original Orlando), 1935

Grace, Orlando’s wife, watches TV

Film star

Director Tristram Powell made visionary films with Alan Bennett and Michael Palin. Sixty years ago, Melvyn Bragg met him at the BBC

Tristram Powell (1940-2024) was an outstanding programme-maker, a director of documentaries and dramas for television, films for the big screen and platform performances for Jewish Book Week.

His output was hugely impressive in quantity, quality and variety. What was also remarkable was that, over seven decades, I never heard of a disruptive encounter. His style was to be unfussed, congenial and, when necessary, politely implacable.

He worked with Alan Bennett, Michael Palin, Andrew Davies, Philip Roth, Samuel Beckett, Nigel Williams and Harold Pinter. His own wide reading provided many of the subjects he directed. Above all, he always trod his own path.

We met in the 1960s when the BBC took on BBC2. The Corporation was ill-prepared for this. Huw Wheldon (1916-86), Head of Arts, was given the job of scrambling together an extra department for this new channel. He chose to bring on new, largely untried talent instead of going to those who had worked for his base camp – Monitor.

Huw asked me to start a new arts magazine. I had worked on Monitor for two to three years and Huw decided that was enough to qualify me as editor of the new programme. Our first recruit was Tristram.

We were a raw and motley young crew. The common denominator was inexperience. But Huw always trusted his instinct, which had led him, for instance, to a photographer called Ken Russell in the Monitor days.

Wheldon was very good at saying yes to any idea he fancied and the new raw rank suited his philosophy perfectly.

Tristram and I became lifelong friends and from the beginning we were let loose by Wheldon. In the first few years, Tristram directed a film on Yukio Mishima in Japan, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Susan Sontag in New York and Marcel Duchamp. We were given an Aladdin’s lamp.

Huw would come into the final rough

cuts of every film we made and manage to be ruthless, helpful and good-hearted.

There was no doubting that he had a brilliant eye for a story, which he always maintained was the basis of any film. We could not believe our luck and played it for all it was worth.

To pick out three programmes from the scores Tristram directed: first, a film that I’m convinced no one else in television or radio would have dreamt of making or even known about.

This was a long interview with David Jones (1895-1974), whose prose poem (In Parenthesis) about the First World War was Tristram’s first film. It is a classic; unsurprisingly literary, given Tristram’s background. His father was the novelist and essayist Anthony Powell.

David Jones was living in a bedsit in Harrow. It was so small Tristram had to open the French windows to accommodate the camera.

There was a unique innocence about Jones. At one stage, conversation was about the relationship between sacred texts and poetry. Jones said that if there was no connection, then the whole business was ‘balls’! Tristram kept it in.

The next writer was John McGahern (1934-2006), an Irish writer whose books Tristram and I admired enormously. Though a young author, he gave the impression of being a well-established master. It was a strange location. I remember going to the WC through meandering and ancient walls.

By the side of the seat was a hardback book hanging on a chain attached to a nail that had been hammered into the wall. It was Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh.

On the title page, in his precise script, Waugh had written, ‘What genius I had then!’ Tristram and I thought the same could be said of McGahern. The film has been lost in the archive.

Finally, there is Alan Bennett. Tristram directed many of the early, beautifully written Talking Heads, which needed the director (ie Tristram) to have as deft a touch as the writer. Between them, they brought off what can claim to be a rare masterpiece series.

In his unshowy way, he made an extraordinarily rich contribution to TV drama, as well as documentaries.

His final illness, which spread over months, was borne by him with such a lightness of touch, as if he didn’t really want to bother his visitors. He had always been able to switch into an amused mode and it did not desert him here. When confined to a wheelchair, he said he would take up wheelchair basketball! Archie and Georgia, Tristram and Virginia’s two children, were constantly round at the house.

Tristram and Virginia had been married for over half a century. I knew them for all that time and she was his rock, as well as pursuing her own life as an artist. Some of Virginia’s paintings and drawings are on the walls of their house, never ceasing to give Tristram pleasure. To go to tea at the house, or to have a drink, was just as it had been before his afflictions dug in.

He was invariably thoughtful, witty and entertaining. It was difficult to believe that the man who could now not walk and had to endure great pain could be as courteous and warm to others.

So many people will miss him greatly. Someone like Tristram is impossible to replace.

Tristram Powell directs Michael Palin in American Friends (1991)

Ladies in waiting

Michael Beloff KC found that, in law, women could be Garrick Club members. Should Lord Chancellors now become Lady Chancellors?

Some institutions move with the times. Others prefer to resist the tide.

The Garrick Club has declined, so far, to take advantage of my recently revised opinion about accepting women into the club. I found that, in law, women were now eligible for membership.

A similar debate is going on at Gray’s Inn, the Inn of Court where I am a Bencher. In February, the Benchers voted, unlike the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn, to retain their title of Master. The other Inns of Court – Inner and Middle Temple – have yet to decide.

The proponents of the change argue that abolition of the title would be a step towards making the bench more diverse, as well as assuaging the feelings of those offended by it. The opponents argue that such a step is superfluous –the Inns are already diverse – and that no offence could reasonably be caused by the title’s retention.

A senior judge once said that in law, context is everything. Though Master is a masculine word, it does not imply that those called by that name are superior to women, still less that they must be misogynistic; nor that they are, or aspire to be, slave-owners simply because that group were also called masters.

Where’s the offence, then? In fact, the trend among thespians is to favour the name actor above actress – with notable exceptions such as Joan Collins.

Why not look for precedents at our ancient universities? Sonita Alleyne, born in Barbados, is the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. She applied unsuccessfully to the Diocese of Ely to remove from the college chapel a memorial to its 17th-century benefactor Tobias Rustat, because of his links with slavery. But she appears rightly to have had no concerns that her own title of Master carried any such connotations.

Nor did Baroness Amos, born in Guyana, on becoming Master of University College, Oxford. The head of Girton, the first all-female college in Cambridge, was called Mistress without anyone suggesting that the title-holder might be in an illicit relationship with a man. Nor, when the College went co-ed in 1976, did it occur to anyone that the retention of the title might somehow put off male applicants for places.

If consistency is a legal virtue, it is not apparent in the nomenclature within the legal system.

The title ‘Master’ was not invented by any of the Inns, but by the guilds and livery companies, those associations of tradesmen and artisans. A cousin to the concept of a Master of Arts, the title reflected a level of skill sufficient for the teaching of others.

Even within the Inns, the meaning of ‘Master’ has undergone several mutations. The historic Masters were not the top of the barristerial tree; that status belonged to the Serjeants-at-Law.

When Elizabeth Butler-Sloss became the first woman in the Court of Appeal, she asked the then Master of the Rolls, John Donaldson, whether she should be called Lady Justice. His negative retort was that his wife, Dame Mary, was Lord Mayor.

The style of ‘Lord Justice of Appeal’ was

prescribed by the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1877. But the term ‘Lady Justice’ was used in practice by women soon after they were promoted, and the term was included in the Courts Act 2003.

The Blair Government’s proposal in 2003 to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor proved easier said than done.

It had not been noticed how many statutes would have needed to be repealed to achieve that end. The office, shorn of its ancient functions, was duly preserved in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. But its title was not thought to require feminisation in law or even in practice when Liz Truss became the solitary female incumbent to date.

In 2023, Sue Carr was sworn in as Lord Chief Justice. She chose to be known as Lady Chief Justice. Sir Geoffrey Vos, an über-moderniser and current Master of the Rolls, whose office dates back to 1286, hopes that his first female successor might be designated Keeper of the Rolls.

Brenda Hale, the first female Law Lord, retained the traditional name. Still, in her memoir, Spiderwoman, she light-heartedly wondered whether she was truly eligible. The Appellate Jurisdiction 1886 Act specified that ‘the office was for suitably qualified persons’. Her doubt was not as to the suitability of her qualifications, but as to whether she was a ‘person’ – a term once reserved in the statute for men only.

After her presidency of the Supreme Court, she became Gray’s Master Treasurer. A renowned feminist, she was never dissuaded from seeking to – nor did she refuse to – acquire the status of Lord or Master.

The moral of all this? Inclusivity is achieved by practices, not emblems. The answer to Juliet’s question in Romeo and ‘What’s in a name?’ is ‘Not much.’

But Spiderwoman still can’t become a member of the Garrick.

Michael Beloff KC is author of MJBQC: A Life Within and Without the Law

Above: Cruikshank’s A Lawyer’s Advice. Right: Liz Truss, first female Lord Chancellor

Ready to play?

Kath Garner celebrates the 60th birthday of Play School, which had a huge influence on international television

When a fire broke out at Battersea Power Station on 20th April 1964, West London was plunged into darkness. And the opening night of new channel BBC2 descended into chaos, just minutes before its first transmission.

Newsreader Gerald Priestland battled on, transmitting from Alexandra Palace. Instead of the expected programmes, there came repeated apologies for the loss of normal service and news captions.

The first programme, broadcast the next morning, was a brand-new concept devised by Joy Whitby, who championed the idea ‘play is the child’s first school’.

Her vision of a television programme for nursery-age children, a direct response to the perceived lack of preschool provision, was one that provided a ‘teacher’ to entertain and educate. It would create learning through play opportunities and provide a well-earned break for hard-working mothers.

It began, ‘Here’s a house, here’s a door. Windows 1, 2, 3, 4. Ready to knock? Turn the lock – it’s Play School.’

And so the programme was launched, becoming unmissable everyday viewing in over five million households. It was a cornerstone of children’s television for 24 years, until 1988. It was shown on weekdays on BBC2 at 11am.

Enthusiastic presenters entertained with songs, stories and crafts based around a simple theme. The timetable was: Monday, ‘The Useful Box Day’; Tuesday, ‘DressingUp Day’; Wednesday, ‘Pet Day’; Thursday, ‘Ideas Day’; and Friday, ‘Science Day’.

It was revolutionary for the time. The presenters (always a male and a female), instead of puppets, spoke directly to the viewers. Hordes of tiny tots eagerly joined in the action songs. They watched what could be made from odds and ends. And they laughed at the antics of goldfish Bit and Bot and the cheeky cockatoo, who once caused Johnny Ball to shout an expletive on camera after he’d been bitten.

There were storybook shelves, a pets’ corner, a science table, a hamper filled with useful bits and bobs and dressingup clothes hanging from pegs.

And, most famous of all, there were the windows: the circle, the square and

the exotic arched window, through which children glimpsed the outside world. A window was chosen; the camera turned, blurred and finally cleared to reveal the excitement of factories churning out chocolate biscuits, squirrels scurrying up trees or dustbins being emptied. The simple concept, later replicated in Teletubbies provided opportunities for children to witness real-life experiences.

Story Time was introduced by the clock. Children were taught basic time-telling and asked, ‘What’s underneath the clock?’ Magically, the clock slowly revolved, displaying clues to the selected story or naughty Little Ted who frequently turned up unexpectedly!

The clock was said to have caused a BBC strike, as unions disputed whether it was a prop or special effect and who was responsible for operating it.

Play School became a training ground for many presenters including Phyllida Law, Floella Benjamin and Derek Griffiths and regular favourites Brian Cant, Carol Chell and Toni Arthur. They performed alongside the toys: Humpty, Teddy, rag doll Jemima with her redand-white-striped stockings and Dapple, the wooden rocking horse.

When Teddy mysteriously disappeared in 1970, Big Ted and Little Ted arrived. And who could forget Hamble, the rather scary-looking plastic doll? Introduced to represent a ‘humbler’, lower-class background, she was disliked by many presenters for being unable to sit up independently and being too hard to cuddle! Hamble was replaced in 1986 by black doll Poppy, introduced in response to changing attitudes in society.

Hamble’s whereabouts remain unknown, while her colleagues reside in the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford.

Play School was originally the only

morning programme transmitted on BBC2. It was transferred to BBC1’s 10.30am slot in 1983, when schools programming moved to the sister channel. The schedule was rigorous, with five programmes produced over two days: one for rehearsing, one for filming.

Famous story-tellers included Clive Dunn, Roy Castle and Cilla Black – she was

delighted to be asked to use her Liverpool accent after initially trying to modify it! Play School broke further records as the first children’s programme to employ a black presenter (Paul Danquah) and the first broadcast in colour.

The format was sold to many countries. Scripts and film segments were provided so that they could be used in independent versions. Having bought the programme in 1966, Australia remains the longeststanding producer of Play School. It is still running down under.

With its simple premise, lack of gimmicks and emphasis on joining in, Play School became a family favourite, providing weary mums with an opportunity to sit while their children were entertained and engaged. More than 5,000 episodes and 100-plus presenters later, this simple concept became part of television history and is now fondly recalled by many.

The opening lines changed. We viewers were then asked, ‘Ready to play? What’s the day? It’s…’ How we shouted out the day with glee and settled down.

We groaned at the ending: ‘Time for us to go now – but only till tomorrow.’ We switched off the TV set – and demanded the empty washing-up bottles, paints and newspaper we needed to recreate it all again for ourselves!

Brian Cant and Chloe Ashcroft with Humpty and Jemima, Play School, 1970

Victoria’s secrets

Nicky Haslam recalls his mother’s godmother, Queen Victoria, her favourite Prime Minister – and her evening tipple

Ihave always had a bit of a sweet spot for the Widow of Windsor.

It’s partly because I’d read she hated her actual given name –Alexandrina Victoria; who wouldn’t? –and promptly changed it (I longed to be called Dominic). It’s also that she was the first monarch to drink a Martini cocktail, when on holiday in Cimiez.

But it was more largely due to my mother being one of her myriad godchildren. We had, at home, a crimson velvet cushion strewn with pearls, supposedly the gift of the old girl. So, to me, her image was rather more vivid than the crêpe-clad crone in a few fusty photographs.

This perception would be enhanced by her being taken, quite young, to a matinée of an extravaganza called The Glorious Days. England’s leading soubrette, Anna Neagle, created, on stage, musical vignettes of her fabled film

was by now somewhat la-di-dah, leading one critic to suggest that Albert had married beneath him.

And, later on, in my late teens, there was a fabled South Ken landlady, Viva King. She proudly possessed some of Victoria’s undergarments, and had a couple of impudent boy lodgers.

‘I didn’t really mind,’ said Viva, in her Mayfair Cockney voice, ‘when they ate kitty’s food, or jiggled their bits in the garden, but I DID object when they used Queen Victoria’s knickers to wipe up their love-juices’. It somehow made the Queen almost contemporary.

Further random information made her sound positively human.

Despite framed admonitions – ‘NO SMOKING’ was displayed in her every room – the Queen liked to nip out on to the terrace for a few puffs, ostensibly to repel the midges that plagued Balmoral.

dressed Empress Eugenie, Victoria elected to wear heliotrope plush, and carried a large matching bag, emblazoned with a life-size poodle in white chenille.

The prominent historian Anne Somerset has no need of any such flippant ephemera in her enthralling new book. Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers is erudite, entertaining, flawlessly researched and elegantly written. The author’s subtitle, A Personal , seems somehow too modest.

Personal, and history, it certainly is, but the vast canvas of the near-century it covers and the wisdom and foibles of the figures depicted are compelling to a universal readership.

Somerset succinctly sizes up exactly how the Queen developed and adapted her relationship with each of 11 extremely opinionated men, without changing one iota of her own personality.

Victoria’s secret was her total lack of guile. Very few people, unless they had a touch of the exotic, could get round her.

Even Albert seems faintly cowed, and had to abandon a plan to have the entire town of Windsor moved to a suitable distance from the castle. While flagrantly susceptible to flattery, the Queen-Empress was basically immune to male charms.

Except, of course, Lord Melbourne’s. Though Victoria had, a few years earlier, been described by Charles Greville as a ‘short, vulgar-looking child’, on the morning of her accession, ‘calm, graceful and modest’, she knocked Melbourne for six.

For him, she was substitute child-wife, a Caroline Lamb without the irritating affectations and madness.

For her, he was romantic and instructive: his looks and the Byron scandal with Caroline Lamb were intriguing. And she was diverted by his ‘outrageous’ views on things he found common, which included birdsong, cookery, forcing flowers, bonnets and drinking Hock.

If, towards the end of his administration, she was less amused at pronouncements such as ‘I don’t like the middle-classes,’ she acknowledged that ‘Lord Melbourne grew up when society was very vicious.’

After him, ministers had a hard time gaining her approval. Russell she called ‘Good for nothing Johnny’, and Aberdeen ‘a scarecrow, stiff as timber’. Robert Peel’s dancing was ‘mincing,

Her bugbear was that ‘monster and devil incarnate’, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy

with his legs and feet’, and Palmerston, ‘always audacious with women’, shocked her deeply.

Her chief bugbear was that ‘monster and devil incarnate’, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Two court ladies were suspected of this mortal sin. A forced medical examination proved Lady Flora Hastings’s virginity, but Lady Augusta Somerset, believed to be pregnant by the Queen’s cousin, Prince George of Cambridge, was brought to the

served this little woman by identifying her with her people and Empire.

In the last long years, she’d forgone dancing – spinning ‘like a pot’, as a confused German cousin wrote – and only rarely sang.

But there were amusements; the solemn but benevolent old lady was at ease with her 40 grandchildren and their friends, and enjoyed watching them play tennis at Frogmore. She arranged performing bears for their entertainment, even having Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show on Windsor’s terraces.

But one habit she never broke: her fondness for a strong drink at sundown.

In May 1900, at the evening celebrations for the Relief of Mafeking, Eton boys gathered in the quadrangle at Windsor, singing patriotic songs under her open window.

The favourite: Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister (1834 and 1835-1841), mentor of the young Victoria

Paddy’s last lines

Eighty years after Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general on Crete, Harry Bucknall recalls the writer’s final act of kindness

Eighty years ago, on 26th April 1944, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) led the daring raid to kidnap General Kreipe, the officer leading the German forces in occupied Crete.

I am afraid that, nearly 70 years later, I think it was me what done ’im in – as Eliza Doolittle almost put it in My Fair Lady.

I never met Paddy, but not for want of trying on either side. Ours was a unique relationship of rooms just left, right weeks yet wrong countries, if-only-wehad-knowns or you-should-have-saids. It was filled with lengthy exchanges, a constant correspondence, often with erroneous enclosures such as hearing-aid invoices, and extended conversations on the telephone between Kardamyli, his Greek home, and my Dorset house.

They lasted for hours as he very kindly agreed to edit much of my first book, In the Dolphin’s Wake: Cocktails, Calamities and Caiques in the Greek Islands, the tale of my 5,500-mile journey through the Greek islands from Venice to Istanbul in 2006.

I still have the pencil-marked papers – ‘De trop’ was a favourite comment.

Four years, 27 rejections later… My courageous newly appointed publisher, Anthony Weldon, at Bene Factum, came up with the outlandish suggestion that Paddy might actually endorse my work.

The exorbitant courier charges alone almost brought the diminutive publishing house to its knees – and drove Elpida Beloyannis, Paddy’s devoted housekeeper, to the point of nearnervous breakdown.

‘He love your book very much, Harry, but every time he put it down, he can’t remember where he left it,’ an exasperated Elpida explained over the phone, long distance from the Mani.

Towards the end of our dealings, so great were the number of printed manuscripts sent out to Kardamyli, there was one in every room of the house and almost one on every side table, too.

‘Your bloody book, i’s everywhere,’ the beleaguered retainer cried.

Top: William Stanley Moss, PLF and Manoli before the kidnap of General Kreipe, 1944. Above: kidnapped General Kreipe and PLF, Crete

But as the days wore on, so the possible seemed to grow ever more impossible. Just weeks before Paddy’s death in 2011, we were told to prepare a quote which he would sign off. Reluctantly, we agreed and my redoubtable editor, Alan Ogden, manfully squared up to the unenviable task of drafting something ‘in the style of’. The more we tinkered with it, the more unremarkable, contrived and unFermoresque it grew. Still, the quote was hastily despatched to Athens.

Almost by return, an envelope arrived in Paddy’s unmistakable if shaky hand –it contained two printer labels with kind words that only he could have written and only I could have dreamed of:

‘Harry Bucknall carries us by magic flights from the thousand birds of St Mark’s to the far distant Symplegades… It’s a lovely book.’

I guess that In the Dolphin’s Wake was quite possibly the last thing Paddy ever read.

He was very kind and generous to me, which he needn’t have been. He was desperately ill in his last year.

We launched Dolphin in the Officers’ Mess at Wellington Barracks on 9th June 2011; the same day Paddy flew back to England for the last time.

As I mentioned his name in my speech, not only did a great cheer go up from the assembled guests, but the massed bands of the Guards Division, preparing to beat the retreat, broke into fanfare on the drill square below – and an enormous rainbow appeared in the sky behind me. People will scoff, and rightly so, but, at the time, it was as if he were patting me on the back and urging me on.

We partied till dawn and, later, walking home, I rang Elpida to report how things had gone the night before. It was then she told me that Paddy had died.

Mine is but a pitiful walk-on part at curtain, already lost in a crowd scene –I have no cause-célèbre claim to Paddy’s memory.

Patrick Leigh Fermor stands like a lone figure in a landscape lost to time. Known to the German Secret Police and the Cretans as Philedem, he was an adventurer, war hero and writer. His deeds – the stuff of legends – are testament to the memory of a great man.

Listen to Paddy Leigh Fermor’s story of the kidnap at www.theoldie.co.uk/podcasts. A Road for All Seasons: From Mull to Dover by Harry Bucknall is out in 2025

Whirlwind romance

Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile 70 years ago. Joan Wheeler Bennett recalls their courting days

The 70th anniversary of Roger Bannister’s record plunged me back into the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.

I went out with Roger from June 1949 until September 1952. l was at Vassar College, New York, and met Roger when he captained the Oxbridge athletics team trip to Harvard and Yale. We became best friends and travelled around Europe.

In 1950, we travelled to Rome together (pictured) and went to a party at the British Embassy to celebrate an athletic event.

With the Helsinki Olympics looming. he asked me to join him in England for the preliminaries. The competitors were segregated in the Olympic Village but a few visitors slipped through the cordon – including me, escorted by Norris McWhirter.

Norris had been Roger’s bulldog, timekeeper and holder of encyclopaedic knowledge. Later he was the founder, with his twin brother, Ross, of The Guinness Book of Records. He kept the time in Oxford, when Roger broke the four-minute mile.

Norris was invariably at Roger’s side when Roger was performing, and he also looked after me whenever Roger was otherwise engaged.

Roger had pressed me to leave my job in the Gold Division of the

International Monetary Fund in Washington DC to be his companion in the lead-up to what was then the race of his life: the 1952 Olympic 1,500 metres.

He was a dedicated graduate student in neurology and expected to abandon competition on the track after winning the Olympic crown.

The weight of an expectant press was on his shoulders – a volatile mix of patriotism and more than a hint of xenophobia.

Roger did not expect to disappoint his followers. But the stress of press attention had long since forced him to go underground with his preparations – and his girlfriend.

Loyal supporters were engaged in the cover-ups. Norris was at his elbow with a car, ever ready with relevant statistics on the opposition. Harold Abrahams (the 1924 Olympic 100-metre champion in Chariots of Fire) unearthed obscure cinder tracks for practising stops and starts. With his D’Oyly Carte actress wife, Sybil, they offered a rural retreat.

E W ‘Jim’ Swanton, the cricket writer, provided a bolthole in St John’s Wood and runner Christopher Chataway’s family offered practical refuge.

Christopher Brasher, another athlete friend, came into the picture when encountered heading for London

from Cambridge on foot, a hurdler in the making. It was the perfect illustration of the extreme amateurishness of the Olympic preamble 70 years ago. Still, Roger’s close acquaintance with Oxford’s chemistry labs allowed frequent testing of his lungs and muscles in private.

At a distance, professional coaches were keen to become involved but were kept at bay. No payments were involved in Roger’s training. Exceptions were made for guest appearances at American universities, with expenses only paid.

The Olympic Village in Helsinki was not only set apart from other accommodation – it was on a different planet. The density of feeling was an awkward mix of fear, hope and suppressed energy like no other except the accident-and-emergency department in a busy hospital.

At the Olympic Village, I encountered a different Roger, the optimism gone. It had been decided that not one but two heats were required for the 1,500m race, to accommodate the unexpected numbers of qualifiers.

Roger was fleet of foot and a flourishing finalist, but endurance was not his forte. He felt betrayed: this was not what he had trained for, nor was his spare body equipped for a long haul. His close supporters shared his foreboding and were thankful that he survived Heat 1 and Heat 2.

In the final, he came fifth equal –honourable in an outstanding field. But it seemed he had covered himself and his country in disappointment.

After Roger’s devastating failure to

Joan and Roger, Rome, 1950

Joan Wheeler Bennett, Norris McWhirter and Roger, Rome, summer 1950

Bannister (1929-2018) runs the mile in three minutes 59.4 seconds, 6th May 1954

win the Olympic crown, l resumed my career at Citibank in London.

Roger was now set on the goal of the four-minute mile and cancelled our planned engagement – a hurtful and ruthless action but l knew him so well that l understood.

Of course, l could not share my knowledge with anyone else and suffered the ignominy of having supposedly turned the great man down.

I married Richard Clement WheelerBennett on 8th May 1954 in the Memorial Chapel at Harvard. News of Roger’s record reached us the night before.

His great triumph was at the Iffley Road Track, Oxford – now the Roger Bannister Running Track.

The other doctor asked what I meant – but Sir Roger added, ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

In 1971, I was a medical student in Spain. Having done French at school, I decided English would be more useful for my future profession.

I applied for a summer job in ten London hospitals. All of them answered politely, but only the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, as it was then called, in London’s Queen Square, offered me a nursing auxiliary job.

There I saw the excellency of British neurology and some of its mythical consultants, such as the supremely gentlemanly sub-fourminute-miler Sir Roger Bannister.

I remember him as a tall, lanky figure who walked intensely down the corridors with what looked like a worried smile. He wouldn’t normally notice a minnow like me, but one day I coincided with him and another doctor in a cranky scissor-gate lift.

The lift didn’t stop at the floor we expected it to, and I said that it tended to be ‘whimsical’.

I’ve always felt proud of my only contact with the great man.

The cultural shock was enormous. Apart from the language barrier, I was an inexperienced provincial lad, abruptly thrown into England’s ‘permissive society’. That could have been my undoing but for a nurse, a north-London girl, who for some unfathomable reason decided I was worth educating.

She guided me through the vagaries of English life and the intricacies of its language to the extent that, after a few years, some English natives mistook me for a compatriot.

I even became proficient in the subtle skill of understatement, so that a consultant once described me as ‘the most English Spaniard’ he’d ever met.

I became a neurologist in Spain, intent on following the great Queen Square tradition. I managed to entice that London girl to come here, where we established an English-speaking enclave, in which we raised three bilingual children.

One condition of the arrangement was that every year we spend several weeks in London, an obligation I fulfilled with pleasure. As Samuel Johnson had anticipated, not being tired of life, I couldn’t possibly be tired of London.

As an ultimate linguistic challenge, I got into the arcane world of the English cryptic crossword. My favourite setter was the late Araucaria in the Guardian; I still remember my emotion on solving the puzzle in which he cryptically announced his imminent death.

Now, at an age when my faculties might start fading, I tackle The Oldie’s Genius crossword.

If, as fortunately happens most months, I manage to solve it, I take it as proof that I’m not losing my marbles yet.

This year, we celebrate our golden wedding anniversary. I reckon that north-London girl, now acclimatised to Spain but always a Londoner at heart, must consider that my education is complete – save for a few Spanish rough edges that may still need smoothing off. Anton Digon, Vitoria, Spain

A medical student remembers the kindness of Sir Roger Bannister, the top neurologist

Losing the plot

In Hollywood, actors are a joy to deal with. It’s the producers who can’t stop meddling. By film director

Bruce Beresford

The editor of this magazine actually asked me if I would write an article about how I deal with actors’ egos.

I replied that, although I’ve directed more than 30 feature films, I’ve found the actors (with very rare exceptions) to be co-operative and good-natured.

But I could fill a book with anecdotes of the erratic, inexplicable and often hostile behaviour of film producers and production executives.

When my film Breaker Morant (1980) was completed, the executive producer, John Morris, an old film buff (now deceased) with a remote manner, declared that the final scene had to be partially deleted.

Frances McDormand, and Cate Blanchett in Paradise Road (1997). Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

Morris’s objection was that the two Australian soldiers, walking to their execution spot, held hands as they walked. Despite the fact that my research (a letter from a member of the firing squad) proved that this was actually the case, Morris was convinced an audience would believe the two men were lovers –though it seemed obvious that no one watching the film could possibly reach this conclusion.

The issue dragged on until it was decided to screen the film to celebrated English producer David Puttnam (who produced Chariots of Fire). Puttnam thought the hand-holding should remain. It did and does.

Driving Miss Daisy was filmed in Atlanta in 1989, principally financed, on a modest budget, by Jake Eberts, a Canadian producer.

Once the shooting with key actors was over, I pointed out that we still needed shots of Miss Daisy’s car travelling through countryside and small towns. Otherwise, all that would be seen of the Driving in the film title would be Daisy (played by Jessica Tandy) and her chauffeur, Hoke (Morgan Freeman), talking in the car.

A message came from an unnamed executive at Warner Brothers that shots of the car travelling weren’t needed. Warner Bros hadn’t invested in the film but had distribution rights.

The actual producer of the film,

Richard Zanuck, was sympathetic.

But he was aware we’d exhausted the shooting budget (reduced from $17 million dollars to $7.5 million). He agreed he could dig up a small amount if I shot with doubles in the car for Daisy and Hoke and worked with a greatly reduced crew.

This crew consisted of the cameraman, Peter James, and me. The amiable couple who had been stand-ins for Jessica and Morgan agreed to sit in the car as it whizzed by the camera.

We filmed for three days in rural Atlanta, carefully avoiding other cars or buildings that would reveal it wasn’t the 1940s or ’50s. I also took some painted signs denoting state borders, hastily rigged these up by the side of the road and filmed the car passing them.

All the shots we took are in the finished film.

After an LA screening, a recommendation – more of a directive – arrived from on high. It suggested we replace the aria Song to the Moon with a country-andwestern song. Richard Zanuck and I pointed out that Alfred Uhry’s script made it clear Miss Daisy listened to an opera on radio every Sunday afternoon.

Warner Bros reluctantly released the film when they suddenly realised they were lacking a film for a Christmas release. Its popularity amazed the studio. Driving Miss Daisy had nine Academy Award nominations and won four –Best Film, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Make-Up. I wasn’t nominated for Best Director.

Paradise Road (1997) is a script I wrote, set in a women’s prison camp in Sumatra during the Second World War. I cast Cate Blanchett in the leading role of a young Australian nurse.

Fox, financing the film, surprised me by their dislike of the test sequences I filmed with Cate. As she’d not appeared in any feature films, they wanted me to use a well-known English actress. As the cast already included Glenn Close, Frances McDormand and Julianna Margulies, I argued that we could afford to use an unknown, especially one with the obvious (to me, anyway) talent of Cate Blanchett.

After the film was shot, I sent a director’s cut to Fox for their comments. They insisted that all scenes with Cate Blanchett be removed from the film. Stunned, I replied that not only had she given a remarkable performance but if she wasn’t to appear, the film’s running time would be only about 45 minutes – rather than two hours. I was emphatically told to send the version without Cate. The editor removed Cate’s scenes and the result went to LA.

There was an ominous silence. All Cate’s scenes remained as the executives realised a short version of the film would be incoherent – and therefore unreleasable. Among Cate Blanchett’s awards in many fine films are two Academy Awards.

Why all this strange behaviour? It’s because film-making is expensive and a number of erratic – if gifted (or talentless) – directors have managed to bankrupt quite a few production companies. It’s understandable that efforts, often misguided efforts, are made to control expenditure.

Not all producers and studio executives adopt the attitude of producer Richard Zanuck: ‘You’re directing it –you make the decisions.’

Bruce Beresford directed the Oscarwinning Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

CINEMATIC / ALAMY

Scams – a victim’s guide

Rachel Johnson thought she was too savvy to be scammed.

Now she’s found, to her cost, that everyone’s vulnerable

According to the greatest magazine editor of my generation, Graydon Carter, this is the Age of the Grifter. To that I would add ‘and the Gullible Punter’.

Whenever I read of someone falling for one of the myriad scams abroad and ending up in the papers or on a podcast, I would unattractively congratulate myself that I’d never be so stupid.

I would shake my head in wonderment as to how on earth my own brainy sister-in-law Caroline found herself withdrawing £4,000 in cash from her bank to hand to a man pretending to be a policeman who’d had rung her on her landline.

‘He told her that her credit card had been compromised and that she could help officers catch a ring of scammers by withdrawing a wad of “marked” money from the bank,’ the Times reported.

Anthony Loehnis, a retired executive director of the Bank of England, no less, was scammed online for tens of thousands by a grifter pretending to be BT staff sorting out his computer’s security – via a trick Loehnis termed ‘mental colonisation’.

The writer Jonathan Keates was persuaded to empty his bank account of his life savings via a scam similar to the one my sister-in-law succumbed to a few years ago. This time, a copper with a reassuring Scottish voice persuaded Keates that he, too, could be a noble crimestopper if he moved all his savings from one account to another.

Every day, we are made aware of how easy it is to fall for these scams, from the Nigerian princes who want to put millions into your account to the fake text from DHL.

But not me. I am ready for them: I’m beady. Alert. I delete those many texts purporting to come from delivery companies or the Royal Mail, and forward dodgy emails to report@ phishing.gov.uk with a tap of the keyboard.

But then, having kept a clean sheet my entire adult life, I came a cropper – twice

in the same week. In fact, it was the same week the Government launched a new awareness campaign, ‘Stop! Think Fraud’, to underscore that four out of ten crimes involve fraud, costing England and Wales £6.8bn a year.

As you might have read in my Golden Oldies column in this magazine, I recently invested in a pair of tickets to see Paul Simon at the York Barbican in December for my husband’s birthday. Or so I thought.

I’d put Paul Simon and UK tour dates into Google. York Barbican came up. It was a kosher venue – plus the tickets were reassuringly expensive (£90 each, which I thought sounded about right for outside London).

I don’t live in York, but my friends Nick and Vicky Howard are locals and I thought we could make a double date of it. So I pinged Nick a WhatsApp asking him if he fancied joining us (my treat) and then we could all repair back to Castle Howard for the weekend (their treat).

‘Sounds fab!’ he said.

So I went online. The ticket price for the stalls had plunged – it was now for some reason £35 – and I snapped up another pair. With the admin charges, this all came to £300.

Later in the day, Nick texted again. ‘You know it’s not actually Paul Simon?’

No, I didn’t. But if you searched and searched, it became apparent that the invisible performer below the headline was ‘Classic Albums presents’. I had bought four tickets to a tribute act!

Furiously I tried to ‘reach out’ to the Barbican (you can’t telephone). I sent two

Fake fashionista: Anna Sorokin gets four years at the Manhattan Supreme Court, 2019

emails. Nothing. Finally, I sent a direct message on Twitter.

‘We can only discuss purchases made by our official ticketing partner Ticketmaster UK,’ York Barbican replied. ‘For third-party purchases, you would need to contact your point of purchase directly for assistance.’

I console myself by telling myself that at least there was no malign intent by some psychopath here – I wasn’t diddled by the Tinder Swindler, the fake fashionista Anna Sorokin or that poor boy pretending to be an oligarch’s son.

My Paul Simon ticket saga would never make a gripping podcast series. It was a lesson learnt, and it was the usual one: caveat emptor.

The next day, while I was out and about, a Shrewsbury number manifested itself on my mobile. A man from EE said if I wanted to upgrade to the 5G network free of charge, he needed my email address.

‘But aren’t I already on 5G?’ I asked. And then I said, ‘And why is this a Shrewsbury number, not EE?’ But I was holding shopping and a dog and gave it anyway.

By the time I got home five minutes later, they’d already tried to hack into my account. I’d had one of those emails saying, ‘We have detected unusual activity’ and ‘If you have not recently tried to change your password, please contact us.’

The best EE could do was tell me to change my email address.

A few days later, the Shrewsbury scam happened again – only this time the call was from Henleyon-Thames.

Be warned. Just when you think you know all the scams, the grifters shape-shift and come up with a new one.

And the grifters know this, too: there’s no fool like an old fool!

Prue’s News Fat chance of a thin Britain

I apologise if I’m telling you stuff you know, but I need to set the scene: we are the third-fattest nation in Europe.

Only ten per cent of us cook meals with fresh food at home. Thousands of households lack a kitchen. Half the children arriving at primary school cannot use a knife and fork. Diet-related diseases kill more people than smoking.

I’m by nature optimistic and an activist – one of those irritating women who insist of fixing things. I’ve spent much of my life fussing about what we eat, the damage that junk food does, the dearth of food education, and poor food in hospitals, prisons and schools. With me are thousands of dieticians, writers, chefs, charities, government task forces, think tanks and companies trying to change things.

Two years ago, Henry Dimbleby wrote a report for Defra, recommending a comprehensive workable plan for reversing the tide. Needless to say, the government lacked the bottle to run with it. He then wrote the best book on the subject I’ve ever read. It’s called Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and

Our Planet Into Shape. It is intended to persuade the public and government to act.

But I fear it won’t work. Yes, individual charities, such as Chefs in Schools, Sustain and Food for Life, do immense good, but they cannot outpace the unstoppable trend towards more junk food, more obesity and general ill-health.

Why is this? What’s wrong with cheap food that people love? Well, as Chris van Tulleken explains in his excellent book Ultra-Processed People, there is an unholy conspiracy we are all trapped in.

Junk food is almost irresistible. Anything deep-fried tastes great, and we are programmed to love sugar, salt, fat and high-calorie foods. And ultra-processed foods (almost all manufactured products) tend to be soft, easy to eat and pretty addictive. We eat it fast and

Manufacturers know this and exploit it: sugar goes into almost everything and innocent ingredients get hydrogenated, homogenised, emulsified, aerated, tenderised and generally made to fit the soft, sweet, light-and-easy formula we unconsciously crave.

Junk food is cheap to make and cheap to buy. We spend less per head on food than any European country. Our government, not wanting to act like the nanny state, taxes food high in sugar rather than restrict its sale. The more chocolate, ice cream and Coke we consume, the happier the Exchequer.

What’s more, an anxious public fuels a tsunami of supplements, diet books, health gurus, slimming products, diet regimes, personal trainers, surgical interventions, gyms, exercise machines and other magic bullets. Millions of people make their living from obesity. Even doctors depend on diet-related disorders for a good chunk of their income. And I’m paid to write about it. I hate to admit it, but this unwitting cartel is winning the war.

Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips Walk tall in high heels

They take ten pounds off you and enhance the bust – but be careful you don’t take a tumble

The late, great Sir Terry Wogan regularly broadcast to eight million listeners on his Radio 2 show, Wake Up to Wogan.

One morning, Wogan drew listeners’ attention to a beauty advert splashed over London billboards.

It boasted that the product in question could ‘reduce the seven signs of ageing’. Wogan noted that the most obvious sign of ageing that he knew of had nothing to do with wrinkles, fine lines or sagging. It was the moment when a woman entered a shoe shop and pronounced the words ‘Those look comfortable.’

Even younger women suffer for their shoes – though not so badly as oldies. A few years ago, in the days when glossy magazines still had money to splash about, I attended a party in Fulham Palace to celebrate the career of a Condé Nast editor.

The limos arrived and legions of perfectly groomed women got out of them. In terms of champagne, canapés, flowers, palatial venue and guest list, it was one of the best events I’ve been to.

At a party where I know too many guests, I usually stand at the door to ‘process’ as many people as possible. So I was mystified to see so many people pouring back out through the doors, less than an hour after they had arrived. ‘My shoes are killing me,’ was the most frequently given explanation.

But why did they wear uncomfortable shoes in the first place? ‘Because everyone else was going to be wearing them and it would have made me just look very short if I didn’t wear them too,’ one told me.

If you are overweight, heels take ten pounds off you. If you are squat, you no longer look squat – and heels thrust the breasts forward. If you are

almost perfect, heels just add to your magic. Think of the late Princess Diana (five foot ten) who looked stunning even in trainers, ballet flats and Mary Janes. In heels, she became the most glamorous woman in the world.

But wearing high heels is an art that needs to be mastered – ideally at an early age. Remember the days when debutantes had lessons in deportment – walking with books on their heads and learning how to get out of cars in an elegant manner? They were schooled in walking in heels. One eternally chic eighty-something friend told me her grandmother even forced her, as a child, to practise walking in high heels for

which go with anything and add almost four inches. Kendall Jenner (five foot ten) wore eight-inch Marc Jacobs platforms to the Met Gala in 2023.

Meanwhile, her half-sister, Kim Kardashian (only five foot two without heels), has regularly fallen in public. Actress Liza Koshy (five foot) took a tumble in her eight-inch platforms on the red carpet at the 2024 Oscars.

But just as we can learn to swim or ride a bicycle in later life, we can also learn to walk in heels. First, they need to be ‘worn in’. Get a friend with the same shoe size and more time on her hands to wear them in for you. Next, don’t put your whole foot down at once. Put your heel down first, followed by your toe, and take small steps. Your stride needs to be shorter than normal. And visualise yourself walking in a straight line.

Vivienne Westwood show, 1993

Summer is a-coming in and we will want to be bare-legged. Wedge espadrilles, tied at the ankle, will give stability but only on dry ground. Rope wedges become soggy on damp terrain.

The answer is the new, wooden wedge by Chemena Kamali for Chloé. Much less orthopaedic-looking than earlier Chloé platform wedges, these allow wearers to combine elegance with height.

The chunky platform combines a sturdy wooden wedge with two crossover straps of leather over the foot and a slingback strap for extra stability. It’s the shoe version of a car seatbelt. The wedge was eagerly worn by every celebrity in Chloé’s front row at Paris Fashion Week, from Sienna Miller and Georgia May Jagger to model Pat Cleveland and her daughter, Anna (now married to Kate Moss’s ex,

They will retail for around £500 but, with this level of interest, there’ll be copycat cheapies on the market for oldies any day now.

Naomi Campbell falls in nine-inch heels.

Strange decline of the British Museum

It’s been tarnished by thefts, dim trustees and George Osborne a n wilson

The other day, on the anniversary of my father’s death, I paid a trip back to the British Museum to see some of the things we used to enjoy together.

The Prints and Drawings Room used to let us both in – child though I was – to leaf through paintings and drawings of clouds by John Constable.

Now there is a deadly little exhibition there – Gesture and Line. Yawnsville. ‘Four post-war German and Austrian artists.’ A legacy, I suppose, of the disastrous period when Hartwig Fischer was the director, and on whose watch large numbers of artefacts were stolen.

The British Museum is observably in a bad way. Fischer has to take a lot of the blame. But so does the vulgarian Chairman, George Osborne, and the Trustees, who have been chosen for their trendy or celeb status or because they are rich, not because they have any feeling of what a Museum actually should be.

The Trustees positively writhe with embarrassment at the idea of Sir Hans Sloane, the Enlightenment figure on whose collection the Museum was based.

The present atmosphere at the Museum, which is trying to be matey and family friendly, is probably slightly intimidated by the values of the Enlightenment and what used to be called Civilisation.

This is not because the Enlightenment coincided with the existence, and eventual abolition, of the slave trade – more because it thought our little present could be elevated by contemplating the great past, above all the past of Greece.

We all know about the Parthenon marbles. Fewer of us have the chance to see the Townley marbles – Greek antiquities accumulated by that great man Charles Townley (1737-1805), together with antiquities from India, Persia and Egypt. Nearly all the Townley Collection had languished in the

basement of the Museum, unseen by the public for years, which is how the thefts, mostly from that collection, could happen undetected.

The thefts happened because those in charge had lost sight of what the museum was for. For the Chairman and the Trustees, the Museum was simply an excuse for them to sit on a board and feel grand. For the increasingly disillusioned – and undervalued – staff, it was no longer enough to care passionately about the past and its artefacts.

The museum had become a tourist commodity, which could best advertise itself not by concentrating on its chief treasures, but by trying to cheapen itself and make itself popular.

Those of us who have been going to the Museum for years have noticed a steady decline. The quality of the exhibitions is poor. Legion: Life in the Roman Army was a dud idea because there are not enough interesting artefacts to justify the title of the show.

‘Bring the family along to meet Roman soldiers,’ urges the publicity hand-out. No thanks. Imagine the embarrassment of meeting some poor member of the Museum staff dressed up like something in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

The point of a museum is to confront you with wonders you had not seen before, which lift you outside your own little world into the strange world of that other country, the past. I was repelled by a book in the souvenir shop in the Great Court: Write Your Own Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Osborne is a classic example of how FUMU dominates public life

I do not want to write my own. I want to stare in wonderment at the Rosetta Stone. All the visitors were barging past the stone, unheeding. Yet it is one of those objects that compels you to confront the paradoxical morality of museums. The Rosetta Stone was double plunder –Napoleon stole it from the Egyptians and we, in effect, stole it from him.

Yet, without a Western scholar having compared the three versions of its inscription – one of which is Greek –none of us, the Egyptians included, would be able to read hieroglyphs. Comparable thoughts come to mind when one thinks of how many of the most famous exhibits in the BM came to be there.

My favourite moment on my last visit there was when a Greek – a schoolmaster, I’d guess – asked me to take a photo of him and 15 young students. Behind them was one of the most glorious of all Hellenic monuments in the Museum – so I could understand his pride.

‘Why did you choose to be photographed in this spot?’ I asked.

‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘Soon, that’ – he pointed behind him – ‘will be in Athens.’

He was pointing at the superb Nereid Monument from south-western Turkey, built for the ruler of Lycian Xanthos in the fourth century BC. He clearly thought they were the Elgin Marbles.

If they ever do send the Marbles back to Athens, we should specify that George Osborne is sent too, and is asked never to come back.

Osborne is a classic example of how the principle of FUMU (Eff Up, Move Up) dominates public life. Osborne made a hash of being Chancellor of the Exchequer. He got himself a cluster of grotesquely well-paid directorships while he made a balls-up of being editor of the Evening Standard

So, of course, he became Director of the BM. We all deserve better. Osborne should go.

Caught short on the Leeds line

With no loo on board the train, I rushed behind the bushes – and nearly died

jem clarke

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

I am increasingly of the opinion that King Charles III and I live parallel lives.

I come from loving but emotionally unavailable parents. Well into my adulthood, I still live in their property gratis.

As a child, I grew cress in a row of yoghurt pots with faces drawn on them. I used to talk to these ‘cress heads’ every day.

I wonder if there was a similar poor soul at Gordonstoun, sharing childhood confidences with a stealth-grown beef tomato with a Biro smile.

I’ve got prostate problems – and I have a refreshingly breezy openness about sharing them with the public.

Unlike the poor King, I don’t have cancer. But I still have something as grandiose and poshly plural as a medical team. There are seven doctors currently tending to my medical ailments. Every time I go, there’s a different face rolling its eyes at me. Mother calls the GP surgery Revels – ‘You don’t know if you’re going to get the tough one, the fruity one or the little one who’s probably nuts.’

Since my promotion coincided with a national drive to work more from a physical office, my commute has grown in tandem with the ‘gland downstairs’. By the time I’m past Doncaster but nowhere near Leeds, on a rattly one-carriage local service, I’m desperate to go.

I make a deal with myself that if the next station is not Leeds, and looks quiet enough, I shall alight there and hope there’s somewhere to wee.

And so it was that a short man with hungry eyes stumbled out of Outwood Station.

With my time-bomb todger on alert, I made for some bushes. Thankfully, being no more than five foot, I could disappear into the shrubs like a tubby wood spirit.

I suddenly realised that behind the bushes was the cuttings slope leading

down to the railway tracks. Conscious that I was already about to become an outlaw by outraging public decency, I thought I might as well double down and trespass on the railway itself.

The slope was slippery and mudmade. I used one end of my Doctor Who scarf to anchor me to a bush stump, and wrapped the other round my waist. That allowed me to sort of half-abseil down part of the slope – more of a face-first dangle, to be honest. Still, it hid me from any public censure. And then I unzipped.

For one fractional moment as I felt the cold but not unpleasant air about my bits, and sensed a gentle wind on my wee, I suddenly thought, ‘Could this be a thing?’

We’ve had wild swimming. Could I be at the start of the free-weeing movement? But then, as I reached full jet, the propulsion of flow became overwhelming. I had no control over where I was aiming.

Worse, the scarf pinged free and I ended up at the bottom of the cutting. Scrambling up the slope, I appeared back on the platform, just in time to catch the next train. Nothing so despicable has ever boarded a train.

But, in that strange post-pee reverie men get, I was oddly calm. Looking about the train’s interior as we pulled away, I looked at a sign opposite my seat.

There was a pictograph of a basic man and a lady – and, underneath, the legend ‘Toilets’ with a helpful arrow. It appears that one-carriage regional train offerings have toilets now.

I am like the King – we both travel extensively for work. I don’t think he has ever offended the citizens of Outwood, though. And he has never arrived at work with muddy trousers and a discarded Turkish Delight wrapper attached to his left ear.

Town Mouse

At last, we’re Dikes! Dual Income, Kids Evicted

tom hodgkinson

The little mice are slowly leaving the nest. We see them less and less.

A few weeks ago, Mrs Mouse and I had our first taste of an empty house. We had a three-week stretch with no little mice in the house.

Now Mrs Mouse had always feared this moment. Before the day came, she started looking at various therapists online, because she reckoned she might need some counselling. Well, we dropped the eldest mouse, who is 24, and still living at home, at the airport for a long business trip to India. Mrs Mouse shed a tear on the journey back and I feared the worst. Mothers don’t like losing their children. I remember that when I was a country mouse living on a farm, when the calves were taken from the cows, the mothers lowed and wailed for a week.

But within about 24 hours, Mrs Mouse had adjusted. She’d adjusted very well. In fact, she was joyful.

‘This is wonderful,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised just how much brain space they

were taking up. And it’s pure bliss to have so little laundry to do.’ Empty-nest syndrome? Paf. This was like the old, pre-children days. Freedom.

We certainly didn’t miss the crashing of the front door at 4am when Mouse Jr returned from his night-time revels. We didn’t miss making an effort to cook for him in the evening, and then staring at an empty place setting at dinner, before he arrived home at 10pm with a kebab. And we didn’t miss his monosyllabic summaries of his day: ‘Fine.’

I have never understood ‘empty-nest syndrome’. This is because my mother, Granny Mouse, was a little unconventional. She was not the most maternal of mothers. When I came home from university in July 1989, she said first, ‘Don’t regress!’ And then, ‘You’ve got a month – then you’re out!’

From the age of 21, I was renting my own room in London. That was it. And tough Granny Mouse is appalled that my 24-year-old son is still living at home.

But things were easier in the 1990s. In my first year of renting, I paid £55 a week for a room in a shared house in Camden Town. That’s the equivalent of £140 today, or £600 per month. But Mouse Jr says he’d have to pay more like £1,200 for the same thing. In other words, London rents have doubled.

So for all concerned, it’s a financial decision. Mouse Jr says he couldn’t possibly afford London rents. If he did manage it, he’d have nothing left over and would certainly be unable to save.

He’s quite a sensible young rodent, and has already started putting money aside for a mortgage deposit. When I praised him for his financial acuity –which he certainly does not inherit from me – he said, in worldly-wise fashion, ‘It’s just fear, really.’

We’re part of a trend. The Office for National Statistics says that ‘The number of families in England and Wales with adult children living with their parents rose 13.6 per cent between the 2011 Census and Census 2021 to nearly 3.8 million.’

London kids stay longest: ‘Adult children were oldest in London, where the average age was 25 years. The median age in every other English region and that of Wales was 24 years.’ And one in four London families had older mice still hanging around the nest.

A couple of months ago, Mouse Jr horrified me when he declared, ‘I’d like to stay at home till I’m 30.’ We decided to charge him a small amount of rent –£300 a month – as the costs of keeping him here are considerable, when you think of the breakfasts, dinners, heating and washing machine facilities we provide (not that he uses the latter much).

Mrs Mouse and I used to argue on this point. I put the view that Mouse Jr should be shown the door ASAP. Mrs Mouse insisted he should stay as long as he likes because the world out there is so tough and expensive. If we have a spare room, it would seem to crazy to force him into a grotty flatshare in Plaistow where his hard-earned salary would go straight into the pocket of a greedy landlord.

Luckily, Mouse Jr is now also getting fed up with living with his parents. One Sunday morning, I was admonishing him for waking us up in the middle of the night with an ‘all back to mine’ weedsmoking session.

‘This is why I want to move out,’ he said. ‘I want to be free.’

Inside I rejoiced. I remember the days of wine and roses when we were Dinkys – Dual Income, No Kids Yet. Now life as a Dike couple – Dual Income, Kids Evicted – awaits, and we just can’t wait.

Country Mouse

Fear and loathing in a Lisbon Airbnb

giles wood

Since druidic times, physicians have recommended a change of location as a panacea.

The nature-writer Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) said, ‘If men should acquire the art of flying, there can be no doubt that migration would become the custom, and whole nations would change their localities.’

I suspect Jefferies was envisaging wing suits or jet packs. For there is nothing artistic about the series of endurance tests that await the modern frequent, or even infrequent, flier who signs up for a misleadingly named ‘city break’. Even the rail journey to the airport must often be abandoned owing to the euphemisticallyknown ‘incidents on the line’.

Dante’s nine circles of Hell spring to mind as the passenger begins to pass through security. This now involves what feels to older geezers like a ritual humiliation, as we are forced to unbuckle our trouser belts and struggle out of carefully laced stout boots before being frisked.

You stare, not at a book, but upwards at digital displays in search of the departure gates. You are then ‘kettled’ with other passengers in airless, corrugated metal tubes for more temps perdu

The final straw for me, on our recent flight to Lisbon, Portugal, was when a passenger in front of me got the last ‘Tom Kerridge generously filled ham hock and cheddar sandwich’, leaving me with no option but to accept a stale muffin with my warm gin and tonic with lemon wedge but no ice – they had run out.

It was raining hard when we arrived at our Airbnb at the top of a cobbled street in hilly Lisbon. Our Angolan taxi-driver warned us how slippery even the tessellated pavements could become after rain. Mary leaned heavily on my arm as she disgorged from the taxi. It must be

reassuring for her to have a husband when so many of her age are divorced.

Tucked on a ledge beneath São Jorge Castle, our tile-clad villa (half the price of a hotel) boasted a view, from an extensive balcony, of the city and beyond, which gave a new meaning to the expression ‘peak tourism’.

The panorama was white and glistening, although, closer to hand, the primacy of the city’s night-time economy was evident as thuddings of trance music came drifting up through the drizzle.

Could I hear the mournful tones of fado being ululated from some back street bar in Alfama, the labyrinthine working-class district, left untouched by the 1755 earthquake that destroyed 80 per cent of Lisbon?

This was my first experience of renting an Airbnb. Adding to the travel anxiety had been my fear of not being able to get into the joint.

I had been haunted by the experience of a fellow guest at a wedding we attended in Florence, who had to spend the night on the doorstep of his Airbnb having been unable to master the lock.

But we gained our entry and I swiftly immersed myself in a bath. We had counted ourselves lucky to have one, as the modern traveller often finds them in

short supply. It seems only Britons like to wallow ‘in their own gravy’ and others prefer showers. Yet only a few inches of hot water were forthcoming. The landlord pompously informed us the next day that, ‘for ecological reasons’, the water system was programmed to deliver limited amounts of hot water.

As it was our first night and getting late, with the rain still sheeting down, we decided to negotiate the slippery cobbles only as far as the nearest restaurant.

The next day, we found we had paid twice as much as we need have done as there was a better and much cheaper hostelry just round the corner. Leaving the restaurant, we began the climb back to the Airbnb in the rain, through which we could see two figures silhouetted at the top of the hill, waiting, it seemed, for us.

They were not muggers. Instead, a young English couple from Harrogate had booked an Airbnb in the same street as us but, despite going up and down the hill for almost an hour, had been unable to find it. We were at number 29, and they were looking for number 8. Yet, illogically, the house next door to ours was number 35.

The ‘bloke’ was dragging an unfeasibly large suitcase over the wet cobbles. No one was answering at the booking service they had used to source the apartment. The girl was almost in tears. We could do nothing to help them.

Their mistake had been to take an Uber, rather than a governmentapproved taxi. The latter have the means to lower the electric bollards which block entry to residential streets. The Ubers must leave passengers and heavy luggage at the end of said streets.

It reminded me forcibly that these so-called city breaks we go on are in reality ‘fact-finding trips’. You need to know how a city works before you have a break in it. The fact-finding would serve you well, were you to return to the city, but our consumerist urge is to notch up another city and go elsewhere.

By the time we had learned the ropes of Lisbon, it was time to leave.

‘Your wife doesn’t understand me’

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Why do children bunk off? Meet the parents

A massive problem facing schools at the moment is the huge number of children who are persistently absent.

‘Persistently absent’ means they are in school for less than 90 per cent of the time – 20.6 per cent, a fifth, of school children fall into this category. This is the average. Primary schools have a lower rate of absenteeism than secondary schools. You see what a genuine problem we face. How can we get absent children to pass any exams, fitting them for the next stage of their lives?

Only one in 20 children, whose attendance is 50 per cent or below, achieve five GCSE passes (at a four, which is the low pass), including English and maths. Compare the overall results of the rarely absent – 78 per cent of them achieve good grades – with the 36 per cent of the persistently absent who achieve good grades. And, of course, the most absent are those in GCSE years and those with free school meals.

What, we cry, are we to do?

Currently there is a great deal in the papers positing that the pandemic is to blame for all these absences, as it is to blame for the rising numbers of those not in work and claiming benefits. This must be one possible cause of the problem.

But who can turn this around? Those pupils most affected by the lockdown have passed through our doors and are now out in the world. Why are so many children still not turning up?

My own form has quite a high count of persistent absentees. There’s one I have literally not seen in three years, although he still appears on the school roll. This one has a hideous set of circumstances to deal with. I would argue this might make him safer in school than at home, but it’s hard to persuade anyone at home of that.

Most of them, however, are not so unlucky. These are the reasons I am given when I ring parents:

‘He slept really badly.’

‘He’s got a cold.’

‘He just goes back to sleep.’

‘I’ve tried stroking his arm to wake him up, but he just won’t.’

And these are my answers:

‘Take away his Playstation.’

‘If he hasn’t got a fever, send him in. I have tissues on my desk.’

‘Wake him up more harshly.’

When I was really driven beyond patience, I said, ‘Walk into his bedroom and take the duvet off the bed and hide it somewhere. Turn of the Wi-Fi and the heating during the day. Cancel Netflix. Make it so unpleasant for him to be at home that he would rather be in school.’

One of my own daughters went through a pretty rebellious phase at school. She did very little work, had a dodgy boyfriend and pretty much did what she liked – but she always went to school. When I told her about a child who was refusing school because she saw ghosts in her house, my daughter, aghast (and alas rather impressed), said,

It is not Covid that held them back –it’s weak parenting

‘I’d be far too scared of you not to go to school.’

Isn’t that the point? Isn’t it the parents’ job to get their children through the school gates? We make calls, write threatening letters and send attendance officers to knock on doors, but actually the only people who can get the children into school should be their parents. Don’t we all fundamentally want the same thing for our children – that the next generation should do better than ours? That naughty daughter went on to get a first-class degree and now earns more than I ever have or will.

I do everything I possibly can for the children in my classes, but as I look down the list and predict their future results, ‘Never here – can’t help’ comes up more often than it should. It is not the aftereffects of Covid that will hold them back – it is, in most cases, the after-effects of weak parenting.

It’s not good being so frightened of your children that you let them lie in bed; they need to be too frightened of you to stay there.

Postcards from the Edge

I never felt more like singing the blues

Mary Kenny loved the new colour of her house – and then an informer tipped off the council…

I’ve been a resident of Deal, near Dover, for more than 25 years, but now I’m in big trouble with the authorities. Like being expelled from convent boarding school, I wonder if I will soon be asked to leave town.

My offence is that I had the house painted in what I thoughtwas a lovely Matisse blue. There were two other dwellings on our street painted blue, and I took inspiration from them. Previously, our house had been a faded, dirty yellow, showing every crack and stain.

Passers-by thought the blue colour looked pretty. But then someone complained to the council that it was not in keeping with regulations.

Eh? Which regulations? Deal has an old part of the town – Jacobean and Georgian – known as the conservation area. But we are in an Edwardian villa, not a Jane Austen terrace. I’d been explicitly told by the estate agent that we were not under planning regulations.

However, it seemed that the regulations kept changing: since 1968, the conservation area boundary has been extended three times. Permission is needed for changes to windows, doors, roofs and chimney stacks; façades; construction of porches; walls and fences; and ‘hard standings’, whatever they are.

I support conservation, but you do wonder how just these regulations are made, and who decides what streets should come under their command. Despite modern blather about ‘transparency’, it is often very hard to find the answers to such queries.

What also nags me is – who is the neighbour who made the complaint? I am officially told this also cannot be disclosed. I don’t wish to invoke France during the Occupation, and the practice of ‘denunciation’, but I who the snitch was.

I have six months to repaint – at a cost of about £4,000 – or, presumably, to get out of town.

It’s just as well I didn’t indulge in another fancy – to have a mural painted on the gable end, depicting King Billy meeting King James at the Battle of the Boyne. That would really have given the snitch something to complain about…

‘What a nice-looking café,’ I remarked to a Deal neighbour, as we passed a new eaterie on the sea front. ‘That’s not a café – it’s a very expensive Japanese restaurant,’ came the reply.

Then a kind friend, Colin, took me to this Japanese-inspired restaurant, the Blue Pelican. It is exquisitely decorated in that restrained Japanese way, in pale colours, with the kitchen area in open view. The menu includes such delicacies as tamagoyaki, sansho pepper and cavolo nero with walnut miso.

I couldn’t pronounce most of what I perused, but what I ate was delicious (a crab starter, a mixture of pork and eel for the main dish, then a Japanese crème caramel with kumquat and kinako). The bill for two, with two beers and sparkling water, came to £100, which Colin considered very reasonable.

Now that Finland and Sweden are members of NATO, the Republic of Ireland remains one of the few EU countries outside the defence bloc –along with Austria, Cyprus and Malta.

The politicians discuss defence, but the Irish public is solidly against military engagement. Churchill always worried about Ireland’s Atlantic coast being a vulnerable attack point – the Spanish and the French had recourse to it historically, and German U-boats prowled during the Second World War. Russian vessels have been spotted hanging around the Atlantic field –two years ago, it took a group of West Cork fishermen, headed by a valiant leader, Patrick Murphy, to warn off the Russian Navy from these fishing areas (which also contain vital underwater cables).

There is also a huge Ireland under the sea – that is, an extensive sea-shelf attached to the west coast, which makes it particularly hospitable for fishing, or other activities. There’s a riveting geological map of this undersea Atlantis in the Galway City Museum.

If the Russkies start lurking again, will Ireland still call on the West Cork fishermen for defence?

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s old spinmeister, hosts a successful political podcast (partnered by Pashto-speaking Rory Stewart) to which he apparently hopes to invite Dame Anna Wintour, world queen of fashion.

Dame Anna as a political commentator? Her father, Charles Wintour, once told me drily, ‘I’m almost sure Anna knows there are two main political parties in America.’ She had, he assured me, absolutely no interest in politics whatsoever. Her passion was always frocks.

Being a celebrity doesn’t qualify you to dole out political opinions. Even if it does seem to be the spirit of the age.

sister teresa

A stitch in time saves pride

‘For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the sovereignties and the powers who originate in the darkness of this world’ (Ephesians 6:12).

This passage from St Paul is typical in its reference to sovereignties and powers. They (and principalities) are scattered liberally throughout his writing.

For St Paul and his contemporaries, these sovereignties were the evil spirits that rule the world in terrifying and unspeakable ways and about which it seems that we can do nothing.

Although we no longer think in terms of evil spirits, these same principalities are still with us.

In the older New Testament commentaries, they are translated as Nazism, racial hatred and drug addiction. We are no strangers to these horrors, and in the contemporary world many more have reared their ugly heads: global warming, pollution, materialism and built-in obsolescence, to name but a few.

It has been impossible, for several

decades, to get anything mended, with the resulting pile-up of broken consumer durables. The latest addition to a long and unpleasant list is clothes mountains.

There is no clothes mountain at our monastery: every inch of fabric is used until it is too small and worn-out to be fit for anything at all, even for mopping up spillages.

One of the younger sisters came to me with a badly-torn apron. Could I mend it for her? (Like many women under 80, she was never really taught to sew.)

Mend it I did. It took an hour. Many people these days might say that I wasted my time. The minimum wage per hour is £10.42. A new apron could easily have been bought for that sum – and many more, had I been correctly paid for my highly skilled manual work.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself sitting by an open window in the sunshine, looking out over a perfectly trimmed beech hedge and listening to birdsong. Darning requires a good deal of skill and practice, and though it is not as decorative as embroidery, it

Fisherman’s Wife

Sewing by Anna Ancher (1890)

has the same calming rhythm.

It could be argued that it would have been good for the economy, the rag trade and the retail business had I not mended the apron. But it was a favourite: of fine-quality material and embellished with a cheerful pattern of bright blue ducks. In a tiny way, I had done something to save the planet from yet another unnecessary piece of litter.

Throughout his epistles, St Paul tells us, his readers, to struggle against the principalities. He also tells us that ultimately all evil things, including death, will be put under the feet of Jesus, leaving us with the peace that comes with the total absence of anguish.

Memorial Service Lord Brooke CH (1934-2023)

Sir John Major paid tribute at St Margaret’s, Westminster, to Peter Brooke.

As Northern Ireland Secretary, he did much to start the talks with the IRA that led to the Good Friday Agreement. As Culture Secretary, he introduced legislation to launch the National Lottery, which has raised £46bn for the arts and sport.

‘Peter was attractively innocent of black arts and slick deceptions,’ said Sir John. ‘They disfigure political life and were never for him. He could find a kindly word for the worst of rogues and, if he ever did feel ill will, he hid it.’

‘Even so, he was shrewd about life and politics, except perhaps on one occasion.’ The former Prime Minister told how he first met Brooke 50 years ago when he

was seeking election to the Greater London Council. Brooke asked the selection committee what he should talk about and was told, ‘Anything you like.’

‘Peter took this at face value and delivered an erudite address on the Battle of Waterloo, ending by quoting Wellington, that it was “a damn close-run thing”.’

This baffled the committee – and Brooke lost.

Sir John told how Brooke brought the parties together in Ulster for talks about talks: ‘He also made public, for the first time, the important truth that Britain, “had no selfish, strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland” and that the unification of North and South was dependent on the will of the people, not the diktat of the British Government.’

‘His love of cricket was legendary, and his knowledge of it encyclopaedic,’ said Sir John. He had a theory that women invented over-arm bowling because their voluminous skirts impeded them from bowling under-arm.

Lord Eames, former Archbishop of Armagh, told how Brooke won the trust of both sides in the province. They were in a car going to an Orange Parade, when Brooke realised he didn’t have a hat. So they stopped at a shop –which sold only bowler hats. He realised the political significance of the bowler hat to the Orange Order, but he bought one anyway and doffed it to everyone he saw. ‘We can trust that man,’ the people said.

Brooke’s children and grandchildren read the lessons.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Don’t smoke dope and drive

Like alcohol, cannabis is a killer on the roads

dr theodore dalrymple

Eternal adolescence – rather than eternal youth – is now the summum bonum of human existence.

So it isn’t surprising that more old people than ever before are smoking dope. Between 2006-07 and 2012-13, the percentage of over-65s who smoked in America increased by two and a half times. Those who smoke dope have not taken it up later in life. Most of them have been smoking for much of their lives, and purely for enjoyment.

The dope they smoke, however, is much stronger than dope was when they started – up to five times as strong.

Driving under the influence of cannabis is associated with an increased chance of accident. And so researchers in the United States performed experiments on 31 people aged, on average, nearly 69, to discover the effect of cannabis on their driving. Perhaps long usage produced tolerance to its effects.

The subjects of the experiment were all habitual smokers – and had been for on average 40 years. They were asked not to smoke for a little while. And then they were asked to smoke their own dope –this is called ‘ecological realism’. And then they undertook a simulated driving test.

At 30 minutes after smoking, their driving was less steady than it had been before. They kept to their lanes less well and were more erratic in their speeds.

Also, they tended to drive more slowly – perhaps in an effort to compensate for their unsteadiness. By three hours later, the effect on their steadiness had worn off, though the smokers still felt they were driving less steadily. Their performance was better than they perceived it to be.

There was no correlation between levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) levels in the blood and performance. This is important. In jurisdictions where the smoking of cannabis has been legalised, it makes it impossible to set

a scientifically valid level above which it is deemed unsafe to drive. Moreover, the amount of THC smokers absorb from similar joints can vary enormously.

The experiment was unusual. The subjects were getting on in age. Most of the experimental work in the field had been performed on younger age groups, on the assumption that it was they alone who smoked cannabis.

There are many caveats to the work. Experimental conditions don’t automatically transfer to real-life situations. The actual effect of cannabis on the roads might be better or worse than those suggested by the experiment.

The subjects of the experiment were self-selected. They answered public advertisements for experimental subjects. They might therefore not be typical of elderly dope-smokers. Many of them might be wary of owning up to chronic consumption of cannabis, notwithstanding the change in its legal status. Blacks might have been especially wary of coming forward. Twenty-nine of the 31 subjects were white, one was Latin American and one was mixed-race.

‘Participants were compensated for their participation in the study.’ In other

words, they were paid. Furthermore, the fact that they knew they were participating in an experiment might have affected their behaviour and therefore the results – for example, by making them more cautious than they would otherwise have been.

This is a confounding factor that’s very difficult to overcome in such research.

The effect on their performance, on a driving simulator, of smoking one joint of their choice was approximately the same as at the upper permissible limit for alcohol. The authors conclude, ‘Older drivers should refrain from using cannabis when contemplating operation of a motor vehicle.’

Bureaucratese seems to have colonised the minds of medical writers. What they meant was ‘Old people should not smoke cannabis before driving.’

Surely this is ageist. Why only old people?

‘Mother, you’re not being fair. You’ve only seen Ted’s raging, abusive side’

Don’t do this at the wheel: Morgan Freeman

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk

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Mystery camera man

SIR: In 2016, my book A History of Magazine Design was published by that great oldie of a museum, the V&A.

On page 15, there is a cover of the Weekly Illustrated Annual from 1937 (see picture). There were various candidates for ‘The Man Behind the Camera’, but I was never able to settle on one.

Seeing the Jimmy Jarché self-portrait in your March issue makes me think I might have found him –the eye over camera, the hat, the cut of the sideburn.

Please pass this on to Peter Suchet and ask him, ‘Could it be?’

Best wishes,

Anthony Quinn, London NW6

Peter Suchet responds: ‘That’s him, all right!’

‘How are you with sad endings?’

Chilly Teasmade

SIR: Peter York’s affection for his Teasmade (April issue) is understandable, especially if he likes to drink his morning beverage black. The drawback my husband and I found when we were thrilled to be given one as a wedding present was the necessity for one of us to

‘No, thanks – I’m trying to drop a casket size’

fetch some milk from the kitchen downstairs, which rather defeated the object. (Kept overnight by the bedside in a Thermos, it had an unpleasant tang to it, so we soon abandoned that idea.) A built-in refrigerated compartment would have been ideal, but – at least as far as I know – no models with that facility have ever been produced. If I’m wrong about that and someone can point me in the right direction, I’ll set about ordering one.

Best regards,

Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire

Sexy Teasmade

SIR: Peter York’s article on the Teasmade (April issue) omitted to include a popular joke of the era.

It concerned the unexpected arrival of potential guests who’d been attracted to a hotel’s slogan – ‘A Goblin Teasmade in Every Room’.

John Gilroy, Cambridge

Simon Dee, my lovely pal

SIR: The portrait of Nick Henty-Dodd aka Simon Dee’s declining years by Andrew Roberts (April issue) does not ring entirely true. I was a close friend of his in Winchester where he lived in a council flat. We shared coffee most days at Tom’s Deli with its international clientele. He was broke but cheerful, full of entertaining stories from the past and much attached to his 14-year-old son from his last marriage, who lived locally.

He told me he had seven years of fame and wealth but never once moaned about his luck. Before he died he successfully sued, with the help of a local barrister acting on his behalf for a free coffee, a red-top newspaper who claimed he was expelled from his public school for stealing money. Totally untrue.

The small windfall enabled Simon to

take his ex-wife and son on a trip to Crete. Shortly after this he was diagnosed with bone cancer and given little time left. I went to see him in hospital with Sue, the ex-mayor of Winchester and a friend of his. ‘Is there anything we can get for you, Simon?’

‘Yes, I would love a home-made apple tart with Cornish cream.’

We went back to the hospital just the day before he died and gave him the apple delicacy. He beamed, saying, ‘I’m in heaven.’ I replied, ‘Not quite, Simon, but soon.’ He roared with laughter.

Along with a priest friend, Paul Kennedy, we organised his funeral at a 12th-century city church called St John’s. All his ex-wives and children were there, as were a hundred or so grateful rockers from the Radio Caroline days. He would have been surprised and delighted that his bubble of fame had not been entirely extinguished. Yours sincerely,

John Harding, Winchester, Hampshire

Jolly Toon Army

SIR: I’m sorry to say that Jim White is incorrect when he ends his article (April issue) by writing that we fans are all masochists at heart. Living in North East England for most of my life and

supporting Newcastle United and Spennymoor United (now Town), I find it is optimism, usually unrequited, that keeps us going. Speak to a Sunderland or Middlesbrough supporter and they know that good times are just round the corner.

It is also why the 14 miserable Ashley years at Newcastle were so awful – there was no hope and so no optimism.

Andrew Sanderson, Solihull, West Midlands

Hands off my

SIR: As an avid reader of The Oldie, I look forward eagerly to that day in the month when my latest copy pops through the letter box.

But then the problem starts. I am immediately subjected to a tirade of verbal harassment from my normally tranquil wife to, ‘Hurry up! Get a move on! Finish it quickly then I can read it!’

I now have to retreat to the smallest room in the house, just to get a bit of peace and quiet and to browse through the latest edition in my own time!

Surely I cannot be the only subscriber in this situation. But I have a solution!

In future editions, please include a

small pull-out supplement aimed at the lady reader. It should contain numerous recipes, ladies’ fashion articles and stuff immediately to attract my wife’s attention and thus divert the verbal abuse I have been suffering to date. Yours, more in hope than in expectation, Richard Langridge, Hundon, Suffolk

I was Hayley Mills’s double

SIR: I read in The Oldie (April issue) about how as a 11-year-old Gyles Brandreth worshipped Hayley Mills, having seen her in the film Tiger Bay. I was lucky to be chosen to be her ‘double and stunt’ in the film. I have always treasured this photograph. The stunt was around her falling over the side of the ship and climbing back up the ladder followed by John Mills, her father, who played the detective.

I always particularly enjoy Gyles’s very perceptive and amusing articles.

Best wishes,

Patrick Simpson, Axbridge, Somerset

Feline farewell

SIR: I loved Prue Leith’s (albeit sad) news about the brilliantly named Magnificat – it reminded me of the demise of our beloved glam-rock family cat, Ziggy (1972-92). I wept buckets, despite my choice of job at the time (Crown Prosecution Service) having rendered me as hard as nails… We buried him in my parents’ garden and I wrote a little epitaph:

Here, Ziggy Stardust, our beloved cat Lies buried underneath his favourite tree

And, with conviction, I can tell you that No finer feline ever lived than he. Kind regards,

Carol Hunt, Kingston upon Thames

Hayley and me

I’m a boom baby, born before the NHS. I grew up in the slums of Aston in Birmingham – as did John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, now 75.

I Once Met Ozzy Osbourne

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I’d drink beer and play snooker with Ozzy, his dad, Jack, and his Uncle Jim – also known as Ozzy – along with my own dad, Frank, at the Brookvale Park Social Working Men’s Club.

My dad had been friends with the Osbourne family for years. Before the war, he lodged with Jim and Violet Osbourne, along with a woman known as Old Lady Osbourne in Turfpits Lane, Erdington.

On Saturday nights, I’d go and listen to Ozzy’s band in their earlier incarnation as Earth, a rock/blues band, at Henry’s Blueshouse, upstairs at the Crown Pub in Brum’s city centre.

Later, Ozzy invited me to the first ever Black Sabbath concert at Birmingham Town Hall. Others invited included his mother, Lily, and father Jack who had paid for the venue, Uncle Jim and Aunt Violet, my mum and dad, my wife, Kath, plus my Uncle Joe. Ozzy organised that we’d have the dress circle to ourselves. All the men were dressed in suits and ties.

The paying public were few. They initially sat in the cheap seats, on the steps of the organ, behind the stage.

This wasn’t surprising – only those of us who’d known about Earth would have heard of the new band.

Once Sabbath started their act –and the audience realised the more expensive seats on the ground floor were empty – there was a mad rush as they climbed over the dividing barriers to occupy them.

Some of the invited family ‘guests’ complained that ‘the music was a bit loud’, never having heard a band like Sabbath before.

Jack, an engineer by trade, made the band’s original large crosses – part of the Black Sabbath image – out of aluminium sheet. It was amazing that he could do that, as he never even repaired his own spectacles, which were held together with an Elastoplast. He claimed this allowed him to adjust the frame when playing snooker – something he was very good at, unlike Ozzy.

In the early days, Freddie Harris, Concert Secretary of the working men’s club, asked Ozzy’s dad if he could book the band for one of the Saturday-night

Early in 1978, as a young and relatively inexperienced stage manager, I was lucky to be employed on a West End revival of N C Hunter’s 1950s play Waters of the Moon at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

This was to be a classy production, with the cast led by Ingrid Bergman and Wendy Hiller. It had begun life at Chichester Festival Theatre the preceding summer.

Rehearsals began with a ‘meet and greet’: coffee,

dances. As the couples attending expected waltzes, quicksteps and tangos, it was no big surprise that Black Sabbath was never booked again.

I always found Ozzy a laid-back, easy-going guy. I believe him when he says the nearest he ever came to black magic was a box of chocolates! A young man with a wicked sense of humour, who liked a pint, he had ‘just an interest’ in heavy rock. He was nothing like the man he became. It seems the years of drugs and alcohol abuse have taken their toll.

At the launch of the band as Black Sabbath, John gave me the first off-thepress publicity photo. He signed it and gave me a copy of their first album, which I have to this day. I took it home, played it and thought that the first track was a mickey-take. It had church bells and torrential rain, along with thunder and lightning.

When I told John, he was far from impressed. He told me quite firmly, ‘It was supposed to be serious.’

John Slatford

The phantom of the theatre

followed by a reading of the play. Having met the company, I seemed to have one more slightly older lady than I expected. The company manager explained that she was the author’s wife, Germaine, who would attend rehearsals daily.

Rehearsals progressed and the director, Patrick Garland, when faced with a question he did not want to address would frequently suggest that I ask Germaine.

Each time I did this, her response would be ‘I’ll ask Norman and let you know.’ Sure enough, she would always return the next day to tell me that Norman preferred this, or Norman would like that.

Rehearsals continued well and Norman’s opinions were received via Germaine on many matters, from changes in casting to choices of props.

The production was well received on its out-of-town opening at the Theatre Royal in Brighton. It then moved into the Haymarket and began previews.

As the previews progressed, all seemed set fair for a successful West End opening. I asked Griff James, the Company Manager, whether we might see our esteemed author at the press night.

Griff fixed me with a look that was filled with both pity and a deep conviction that I

was barking mad. Seemingly I was the only person in the company who did not know that Norman had died in 1971!

To this day, I am still deeply grateful I did not know, in all my dealings with Germaine, that I was actually asking her to go home and commune with the departed. Had I known, I doubt I could have looked her in the eye or listened seriously as she returned to convey Norman’s wishes from the other side!

By Iain McAvoy, Findon, West Sussex, who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

John’s signed photo of Ozzy (bottom rt)

Waiting in the wings

ANNE ROBINSON

Keir Starmer: The Biography

By Tom Baldwin

William Collins £25

The writer Keith Waterhouse had a shelf in his library for what he called unreadable books. His prize choice was Thirty Years a Durham Councillor

Not quite so catchy but very much deserving of space, if Waterhouse were still around, is Keir Starmer: The Biography.

It’s the story of a working-class boy with a difficult, eccentric father. His heroic mother led an increasingly painful life, suffering from a rare and complicated form of arthritis.

Meals are eaten in silence. Keir is guarded and inward-thinking. He hates his Christian name. His second one –Rodney – Keir associates with Only Fools and Horses. Shame! I rather like Rodney – and if Keir had become known as ‘Rodders’ and won The X Factor, all the above would be fine and dandy.

Alas, a man apparently well-liked becomes a fabulously dull leader of the Labour Party – and, unless there is an unexpected political earthquake, will soon be Prime Minister – renowned for his awkwardness and inability to shine in public.

Why write a biography that confirms his dullness? Or rather, why take over what was originally an autobiography which Keir changed his mind about writing? Whatever the reason, this book fails to explain the single thing that baffles me about Starmer: at the height of the antisemitism furore, when he was in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, he failed ever to mention publicly that his wife is Jewish and that the family pay a respectful nod to his

wife’s roots by visiting a local Liberal synagogue a couple of times a year. Caution? Avoidance of risk? Misplaced artfulness? None of the above suggests great political promise any more than the office of DPP, which Starmer held for six years, is known for housing mavericks. Give or take the nineties kerb-crawler Sir Alan Green.

Tom Baldwin, the book’s author, is a

former spin doctor to Ed Miliband. A good man to precede Alastair Campbell, you might think. Spin-doctoring made its name in Britain when Campbell, one of Fleet Street’s best, took the job of Press Secretary under Blair and effortlessly bullied the political journalists. Campbell excelled in spotting a banana skin before it left the banana.

The bigger question is why we’ve

ended up with Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak heading the two main parties, when neither, in showbiz terms, would make the first tier of the secondraters. Meanwhile, across the pond the choice is old man Biden or the male trollop Trump.

The short answer is that clever young graduates are no longer attracted to politics when the City and the tech world offer untold wealth and none of the backbreaking hours, terrible pay and general ugliness of Westminster.

Given the duff material they have to deal with, my advice to Labour and Tory HQ is to ditch expensive pollsters and lofty advisers and simply channel my Aunty Betty from Birkdale. She was a brilliant working-class waitress who took her and her husband Tom off to Hollywood, organised big parties for the stars, earned a fortune and retired to a whopping great mansion near her local golf course. She’d probably be clueless on inflation, the Northern Ireland protocol and the reality of net zero by 2050. But she’d very much recognise the current struggle of people to pay their bills.

As a rough guide: she admired Churchill; thought Anthony Eden weak; considered Harold Wilson a rogue but felt we needed a change; adored Thatcher but not quite as much as she worshipped Blair. And yes – until Partygate – she would have found Boris irresistible.

In other words, she liked, as most of us do, politicians with ‘the roar of the greasepaint – the smell of the crowd’, to echo the title of a musical by Anthony Newley.

In my scheme, neither party should wait to beg Ridley Scott to make their election broadcasts. Instead, they need to sign up immediately a movie castingdirector, seasoned TV producers, fashion stylists and scriptwriters.

Even a runner from the BBC’s The One Show would stop Keir Starmer talking about ‘working people’. Or saying to Sophie Ridge on Sky, ‘Let me take that question in two parts.’ An intern from Vogue would persuade the Prime Minister to resist dressing like Norman Wisdom and lengthen his trousers, bulk out his jackets and fatten his ties.

Alternatively, they’ve still time to take my father’s advice, which he claimed was an old army adage when you’re choosing who to get rid of: ‘Nice fella –post him.’ Particularly if he looks as if he has gel in his hair.

Anne Robinson presented The Weakest Link and Countdown

Dotheboys Hall revisited HUGO VICKERS

A Very Private School

By Charles Spencer

William Collins

£25 Charles Spencer has put Stuart history aside to expose his experiences at prep school in the 1970s.

He was sent away at the age of eight to a terrifying institution called Maidwell Hall, in Northamptonshire. A shy boy, he hated the idea of leaving home and dreaded the day (12th September 1972) when he was to go.

I have considerable sympathy for him. He highlights the trauma of children being deposited in such schools, into closed communities where pupils could communicate with their parents only by letters (often vetted by teachers). Abuse was rife, beatings the order of the day, and bullying an accepted part of the way discipline was maintained.

At his school, there was the slipper for a host of minor misdemeanours and two canes for worse crimes: ‘In fencing

parlance, the Flick could be seen as the épée, with the Swish the sabre.’

Stories of corporal punishment dominate this book, and since that is the one topic that inspires public-school boys to reminiscence when they meet in later life, this book will have a certain readership.

Spencer gives us a devastating portrait of ‘Jack’ Porch (1926-2022), the headmaster, who presented one face to the parents, another to the boys. He was not only a sadist, but also a paedophile. According to an old boy of the school known to me, he was ‘a good educationalist’ and he certainly wrote sympathetic and perceptive school reports to parents.

The stories of his cruelty are horrendous. I can only hope that the fate of Perry Pelham is exaggerated. For a boy to be given eight strokes of the cane every night for a week would surely more or less kill him. Spencer goes so far as to state, ‘It’s clear to me now that the purpose of Maidwell’s strict structure was to provide Jack with a steady stream of boys’ buttocks to contemplate and strike.’ Porch was removed in 1978.

This book is easy to read – beautifully written – but it is also painful. I could hardly bear to read of his drive to school on his first day. Why were we put through that at such a tender age? How could the parents do it? They knew full well the implications. This book attempts to provide answers, but the conclusion is invariably the same – that is what that generation did with their children. ‘To survive it, a small but important part of us had to die,’ writes Charles Spencer.

He gives us vivid portraits of the tyrannical matron Mrs Ford, and of Henry Maude who possessed ‘a chilling menace’, cuffing boys about the head, and yanking them by the ear. Mr Barker was a godsend, and then there was the young matron who groomed some 11-year-olds for her sexual gratification.

There was something sinister about those schoolmasters. If you seek horrific reminders of the type, Google Nevill Holt school, a similar institution, which was closed down in 1998, following rafts of accusations.

Evelyn Waugh said it all in Decline and Fall when young Paul Pennyfeather is unfairly sent down. He hands back his key to his porter who comments, ‘Very sorry I am to hear about it. I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.’ Many of the masters in Spencer’s day would have been

damaged by the war, or by their avoidance of it. Today, many would be in prison.

At my prep school, Scaitcliffe, I experienced none of the horrors described in this book. But for a third of the year, I lived in comfort at home and ate edible food, and for two thirds of the year, I was in an iron bed in a dormitory, eating revolting food and was always slightly frightened. Within days of my arrival, a boy called Best in the next bed was summoned down to the headmaster’s study in his pyjamas. We could hear the distant caning, and we witnessed his forlorn return. Scaitcliffe was a good school, and it may have helped me that the headmaster was a Mr Vickers. Only once, when cornered, did I suggest he was my uncle. The bullies backed away. As Ali Forbes said, ‘Inside every bully there’s a coward desperately trying to stay in.’

Fortunately, these schools have reformed themselves. When my children went to Elstree, it was rather like a country club – they studied a while, ran round the athletics track, and had hot baths or showers. Flexi boarding eased them in. My elder son asked to be allowed to board. I would have given anything not to.

You cannot change human nature, but you can change what is acceptable and unacceptable in human behaviour. That is a good thing. I believe this book will help.

Hugo Vickers is author of Elstree 175: Celebrating 175 Years of Elstree School

Bella Italia – in brief JAMES OWEN

The Shortest History of Italy

By Ross King

Old Street £14.99

After I had been living in Italy for some years, a friend of mine asked my advice. He had been offered a job as a foreign correspondent by a newspaper. The options were Rome, or Moscow. He was genuinely havering.

Don’t worry, I told him – you’ll get plenty of bylines here. The thing about Italy is that there’s always something going on. If it’s not politics, then it’s the Pope, or the mafia. Or art. Or pizza.

As Ross King, author of such books as Brunelleschi’s Dome (2001), knows full well, the same is true of Italy’s history. Indeed, those things have shaped much of its history.

Yet that list is far from exhaustive. I haven’t mentioned the Romans or Galileo, let alone good coffee. With his customary light but learned touch, King has performed a miracle of compression in distilling all this and more – opera! Dante! Bunga bunga! – into a little over 200 pages.

This would be a splendid companion to a holiday in the bel paese (the beautiful country, a coinage of Petrarch’s and Dante’s). Hazy about your Manzoni? Mix up Marconi with macaroni? King is that ideal friend, stimulating rather than intimidating, who has seen everything, and doesn’t mind doing it again with you.

More properly, perhaps, he’s a cicerone, a guide who ensures you get a grasp of the fundamentals, yet makes time for those fascinating relics to be found in the side chapels of the past.

His brief to be brief means that inevitably complex events slide past in kaleidoscopic fashion. The First World War – the defeat at Caporetto, A Farewell to Arms – gets a page. Caesar versus Pompey is over in a paragraph or two. It is to King’s credit, however, that there is never the sense that he is just ticking boxes.

He rightly dedicates a third of his space to the ancient Romans. You can’t get away from everything they did

‘The other cows just lie down when it looks like rain’

Review of Books

Spring round-up of the reviews

Angry Old Men – Michael Barber on Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis

Why don’t men read fiction? By Charlotte Metcalf

Biography & Memoir History Music War

Fiction Politics Wealth Cities Crime

Review of Books

Issue 67 Spring 2024

Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Until August by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis by Julie Peakman

A Very Private School by Charles Spencer

Treetime: Tales of a Layman’s Lifelong Adventure wiht Trees and Tree Folk by Ted

Green

Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin

The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

Love from Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal by Gill Johnson

Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux

The English Soul: The Faith of a Nation by Peter Ackroyd

I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles: Women of the Resistance in World War One by Rick Stroud

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East by Steve Coll

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

Editorial Panel: Michael Barber,Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Charlotte Metcalf, Harry Mount, James Pembroke, Christopher Silvester.

Editor: Charlotte Metcalf

Design: Lawrence Bogle

Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Lucy Lethbridge, Sam Leith, Christopher Silvester, Tim Willis

Publisher: James Pembroke

Advertising: Paul Pryde, Jasper Gibbons, Monty Martin-Zakheim

For advertising enquiries call: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093

For editorial enquiries email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Do oldies hate fiction?

Many recently published books make depressing – even harrowing –reading, from books about war to historic miscarriages of justice. However, some new books on the Holocaust relate inspiring stories of courage and love. And there is some heart-warming fiction emerging from the RussiaUkraine conflict.

History reviews range from Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld to books on Teddy Boys and Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire. There are books about cities, crime, film and money, including Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried’s astonishing rise and fall. And Sam Leith rounds up the best books on threats to our planet, like AI and climate change.

Aside from Gill Johnson’s beautifully observed Love from Venice, reviewed in the April issue, memoirs and biographies that caught reviewers’ eyes included Hardy Women (about those in Thomas Hardy’s life) and Lisa St. Aubain de Terán’s long-awaited new memoir, Better Broken than New.

On the fiction front, the experimental Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel by Margaret Atwood with others, was seized upon with mixed feelings by reviewers. Fiction as a category makes slim pickings and, as a keen reader myself, I’ve learnt that few oldies, particularly men, enjoy it.

Why? Much recent fiction is by women, which led me to wonder if men have rather given up on writing it. It’s 70 years since Lucky Jim was published. Michael Barber compares Kingsley Amis with Evelyn Waugh and finds the two literary giants equally curmudgeonly. However unpleasant as characters, though, there are few male novelists to rival them today. The last four Booker Prize winners have been men, but how many men have read the winning entries? The best thing about rounding up book reviews is the questions the process throws up about our reading habits. I hope the books we’ve chosen to include here will appeal a wide range of them.

Charlotte Metcalf

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Michael Barber on Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis

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Charlotte Metcalf on the male aversion to novels

21

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Sam Leith on our obsession with infinite riches

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Michael Barber on crime novels

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Sam Leith on books about global threats

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

HARDY WOMEN MOTHERS, SISTERS, WIVES, MUSES

PAULA BYRNE

William Collins, 656pp, £25

Thomas Hardy created some of the best women in English literature. Among them, Tess Durbeyfield, Eustacia Vye, Bathsheba Everdene and Sue Bridehead.

His relationships with real-life women were troubled and often sadistic, romantic passion turning almost immediately upon realisation into abstracted indifference.

Paula Byrne’s examination of Hardy’s women concentrates on the real ones. In the Observer, Rachel Cooke mused on how the strange triangle of the author’s later years would make a play. ‘The cast comprises three main characters: a celebrated writer with white hair, an unusually big head and a beaky nose; his elderly wife, whose clothes, like her manner, are eccentric; and a much younger woman, a companion and typist whose careful warmth barely covers the ruthlessness beneath.’ It is 1912, the setting is Max Gate, Hardy’s house near Dorchester, and the two women are his wife Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale who was to become wife number two.

Cooke found Byrne’s book ‘deeply researched and often well-written’ but thought it over complicated and frequently repetitive:

‘At moments, it feels like every woman he ever met is between these pages: a neighbour, a schoolteacher, a girl at a harvest supper.’

Reviewers agreed that, as the Guardian’s Olivia Laing put it, ‘the best of Hardy, the most original, lies in the women he made up.’

It was only after his pathetic wife Emma died that Hardy wrote his wonderful poems about her, some of the most sublime in all literature.

Susie Goldsbrough in the Times wondered: ‘How could one man be both champion and chauvinist? Hardy desired “unattainable” women, Byrne says. Once he had them, there was nothing to write about, no wish to fulfil. Happiness makes for good marriages — but not good poetry.’

TRAILBLAZER

BARBARA LEIGH SMITH BODICHON,

THE FIRST FEMINIST TO CHANGE OUR WORLD

JANE ROBINSON

Doubleday, 416pp, £25

In her 19th-century heyday, feminist pioneer Barbara Bodichon was right where it was at: Florence Nightingale was a cousin, George Eliot a close friend. Jane Robinson’s biography attempts to put her back at the centre of events which have shaped women’s lives for over a century. Bodichon and her friends described themselves as ‘Ye Newe Generation’ – which they most definitely were.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Times enjoyed the ride. ‘You get a vivid sense of what Bodichon looked like reading Robinson’s lively and well-researched, if sometimes gushing, biography. Here’s a description by the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “She is blessed

with large rations of tin [ie money], fat, enthusiasm, and golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in breeches or wading through a stream in none.”’

Bodichon had an abundant talent for organisation and, as Lucy Lethbridge put it in The Literary Review, ‘because organisational skill doesn’t always make a character leap off the page, what makes her life alluring to the modern reader is the riotous unconventionality of her own family. The eldest of five, she was born illegitimate in 1827 to Benjamin Smith, a wealthy man who appears to have had an aversion to marriage, and Anne Longden, the milliner daughter of a miller.’ Aged 30, Barbara married the eccentric Dr Eugene Bodichon, dividing her time between England and Algeria.

Robinson brings the highminded, radical, dissenting, unitarian circles in which Bodichon moved to vivid life.

Although (because of her illegitimacy) she tended to avoid the limelight, the Observer’s Rachel Cooke (who found Robinson’s tone ‘twee’) nonetheless enjoyed the emerging picture of ‘a pleasing, bustling kind of figure: independent, cheery, rather bohemian for her time – and sharp, too.’

BETTER BROKEN THAN NEW A FRAGMENTED MEMOIR LISA ST AUBIN DE TERÁN

Amaurea Press, 326pp, £16.99

Novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán was famous in the 1980s and 90s for plots which closely followed her own magical-realist adventures. Now 70, she had rather fallen off the literary radar. So her new memoir is a

Sergeant Troy confronts Bathsheba Everdene in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd

Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Memoir & biography

welcome reminder of a life in which no opportunity for jumping in with both feet has been missed. She has a gift for landing husbands with lovely, crumbling houses. Aged 16, Lisa met her first husband, an aristocratic gangster and owner of an avocado estate in Venezuela, on a street in Clapham. Her second was the poet George MacBeth, with whom she lived in a castle in the Fens. Her third was an artist in an Umbrian villa.

In her new book, the first for 20 years, we learn that de Terán has recently been living with a Dutch war correspondent in a ruined palace in a Mozambique fishing village – but is now alone on a houseboat on the Thames. In the Observer, Hephzibah Anderson marvelled at a life lived at full tilt and enjoyed a ‘warm, shrewd book.’

Clare Allfree in the Telegraph observed that, ‘like the heroine of a rackety opera, de Terán only ever seems to have lived in dilapidated mansions, alongside peacocks and baby eagles. Until she moved to Africa, she only wore long Edwardian dresses.’

But, for all that, Allfree found the memoir ‘less enthralling than you might have hoped,’ and ultimately ‘disorderly’ and undisciplined.

But Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Times, who was charmed by de Terán when she interviewed her, thought it ‘a riveting — if rather disjointed — read, one that conjures up a lost world of international bohemianism in which freedom fighters, poets, artists, opera singers and the odd stray python shack up in semi-feudal situations.’

THE PROMISED PARTY KAHLO, BASQUIAT & ME

JENNIFER CLEMENT

Canongate, 304pp, £16.99

This memoir chronicles Jennifer Clement’s coming of age in 1980s New York, where the counterculture ruled, wrote Hephzibah Anderson in the Observer – and, before that, her childhood in Mexico, a country caught between surrealism and communism. ‘Whether stashing her poems in a Basquiat-daubed fridge that later sells at Sotheby’s or playing with Diego Rivera’s granddaughter in Frida Kahlo’s bathtub, [Clement’s] memories are a

perfect synthesis of clarity and mystery,’ she enthused.

Clement has written several novels as well as poetry books, and is a former president of PEN International. Her books have been translated into 40 languages.

‘When I worked on my poems about science or love, or my novels on gun violence or the trafficking of little girls in Mexico,’ she wrote in Harpers Bazaar, ‘above all, I searched for the aesthetic and poetic, even while I knew my words were also battlefields....Chance has been at play throughout my life. I’ve been so lucky.’

‘I was covered in the dust of the golden age of Mexican muralist and surreal art and ideas’

Her childhood, she told Chloe Ashby in the Independent, was filled with art, books and theatre. From a young age, she wrote poems and danced, and at weekends her father would take the children to the opera.

It was a childhood ‘steeped in Surrealism’, which was part of the impetus for her to write The Promised Party. ‘I felt like I was covered in the dust of the golden age of Mexican muralist and surreal art and ideas, and that I needed to write about it,’ she said.

Clement believed she’d been ‘a witness to so many things’ in two worlds now gone: ‘Mexico is no longer that Mexico, and New York is

no longer that New York....The fantastic freedom of life before Aids never really came back,’ she explained.

‘Raw, beautiful and difficult to peel yourself away from’, inews summed up.

MISSING PERSONS, OR MY GRANDMOTHER’S SECRETS

CLAIR WILLS

(179pp, Allen Lane, £20)

Clair Wills, professor of English Literature at Cambridge, gets personal in her memoir about the ghostly figures that haunted her childhood. The wider context is filled with the dead children and disgraced women of Ireland’s recent history.

Wills’s personal focus is Mary, born in 1954, the illegitimate daughter of her cousin Jackie and a local girl, Lily, deemed unworthy of marriage. Mary, unknown to the happy band of cousins in Wills’s childhood holidays, was incarcerated in an orphanage just 25 miles away. Her researches lead to the discovery that finding herself pregnant like her mother before her, 19-year-old Mary killed herself in the face of a future that seemed intractably hopeless.

In Literary Review, Ian Samson wrote, ‘Wills’s family story fascinates, in particular the manifold ways in which the lives of those in the past have influenced the lives of those in subsequent generations.

‘She writes, for example, 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 decaying family farmhouse back in Ireland, visited for holidays, both “the centre of a world” and “a ghostly void”.’

In the Guardian, Olivia Laing compared Missing Persons to Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. ‘Like Sage, she is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning.

‘Both women understand how trauma might be inherited, reduplicating through the generations, leaving a stain you have to work to interpret.’

As John Banville reflected in the Observer, Wills is ‘a powerful witness for the prosecution’.

Frida Kahlo. As a child, Clement played in Kahlo’s bathtub

Two of a kind

When Lucky Jim was published 70 years ago, Evelyn Waugh likened Kingsley Amis to a Teddy Boy. In fact, they had much in common, writes MICHAEL BARBER

When Kingsley Amis learnt he’d won the Booker Prize, he assumed his Evelyn Waugh face: an apoplectic diehard, puffed up, empurpled and complete with bulging eyes.

This was doubly appropriate. The face one of ‘Lucky Jim’ Dixon’s party pieces. Also, Amis had come to resemble Waugh in real life.

He once complained to a friend that, for 20 minutes, he’d sat at the Garrick Club bar ‘and nobody came near me.’

His friend replied, ‘Kingsley, doesn’t it strike you that it could be because you can be so fucking curmudgeonly?’

Something similar happened to Waugh at White’s.

‘Why are you alone?’ asked a fellow member.

‘Because no one wants to speak to me.’

‘I can tell you exactly why: because you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig.’

Waugh and Amis wrote some of the funniest books in English ever written. But there was nothing funny about the way they behaved.

When an American woman praised Brideshead Revisited to Waugh, he replied: ‘I thought it was good myself, but now I know that a common, boring, person like yourself admires it, I am not so sure.’

In 1982, Amis behaved just as badly, when The Observer, for whom he had reviewed since the fifties, gave a 60th birthday dinner in his honour. Responding to the editor’s ‘fulsome toast’, Amis began by calling The Observer ‘a bloody awful paper’ and then gave them chapter and verse.

So, should you ask of Amis what he asked of Waugh: if he hadn’t been such a shit, would he have written half so well?

Amis admitted that ‘a good source of material’ was to take an aspect of his character he wasn’t particularly proud of ‘and push it to the limit.’

Amis’s biographer, Zachary Leader, hints at this when he refers to Amis’s ‘lifelong obsession with egotism, selfishness, inconsiderateness, qualities he acutely anatomises and censures in his writings even as they threaten to overwhelm him in his life.’

Amis never met Waugh (who

always called him ‘Ames’). Amis gave hearty thanks for this when reviewing Christopher Sykes’s biography, in which many of Waugh’s egregious delinquencies were first aired. Waugh, he was sure, would have given him ‘a social drubbing’.

But Sykes emphasised that Waugh was ‘always an actor’. You could say the same about Amis, his genius for mimicry acknowledged by all. And, like Waugh, he became so identified with what John Bayley called his ‘fantasy persona’ that it was difficult to tell them apart.

Amis and Waugh were both heavy drinkers, who could be described as ‘functional alcoholics’. Waugh once told his doctor he’d ‘practically given up drinking – only about seven bottles of wine and three of spirits a week.’

‘Surely you mean a month?’ asked the doctor.

In On Drink, one of his three handbooks on the subject, Amis gave the recipe for Waugh’s ‘Noonday Reviver’: 1 hefty shot gin, ½ pint bottle Guinness, Ginger Beer.

‘This mixture’, said Amis, ‘will certainly revive you, or something.’

Waugh’s neighbour, Frances Donaldson, noted his habit of serving short drinks in very large glasses. So

Waugh once told his doctor he’d ‘practically given up drinking: only about seven bottles of wine and three of spirits a week’

you began proceedings with the equivalent of a triple.

Amis, in my experience, was equally generous. Drink, to him, was inseparable from conversation and hilarity, without which life was not worth living.

Like Maurice Alington, the publican hero of The Green Man, he drank to experience ‘that semimystical elevation of spirit which, every time, seems destined to last for ever.’ Almost his last coherent words were, ‘For God’s sake, you bloody fool, give me a drink.’

Drink explains why, for a season, Amis and Waugh went mad, the description they both used.

For many years, Waugh, a poor sleeper, had been ingesting ‘fabulous quantities of chloral’ on top of alcohol.

This cocktail had alarming consequences. On a voyage to Colombo, he began to experience the mocking voices described so vividly in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Something similar happened to Amis when, in 1982, after a heavy lunch, he fell and broke his leg. Confined to bed and forbidden to drink, he was pumped full of drugs instead, resulting in ‘voices’ and hallucinations.

Waugh’s friends, who included tough, opinionated females like Nancy Mitford and Ann Fleming, forgave him his trespasses because his qualities outweighed them.

‘What a monster!’ wrote Mitford on lhis death. ‘How I miss him.’

No doubt some of Amis’s old mates felt the same. But I don’t suppose many women shed tears.

Like Jake, in Jake’s Thing, Amis gave the impression he never really liked women; he only wanted to sleep with them.

Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis: both ‘apoplectic diehards’

Russia and Ukraine

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THE SHOWMAN INSIDE THE INVASION THAT SHOOK THE WORLD AND MADE A LEADER OF VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY

SIMON SHUSTER

William Collins, 432pp,

£22

With privileged access to Zelensky, his bunker and inner circle, Simon Shuster might easily have leant towards hagiography. All credit to the author, born to Russian parents in Kyiv and a senior correspondent for Time, that his biography, begun before war broke out and revised as it unfolded, keeps some critical distance.

The Showman avoided ‘canonising St Volodymyr of Kyiv,’ wrote Colin Freeman in the Telegraph. Political naivety, off-shore bank accounts and broken electionpromises were part of the story, even before the president sacked his commander of armed forces.

Freeman repeated Shuster’s observation that ‘Zelensky has used emergency decrees to shut down independent TV channels, meaning that not much criticism gets aired’.

He concluded that the book ‘an elegant account of the invasion’s first year as seen by those in the very eye of the storm’.

Shuster might easily have leant towards hagiography

Roger Boyes concurred in the Times, calling The Showman ‘a brilliant piece of extended reportage peopled by insiders full of self-doubt

acting on incomplete information’.

He praised ‘an account of a singular man who made a successful career as a comedian and television personality…then reinvented himself as a wartime leader for the information age’. And he supported Shuster’s argument that the president’s media-savvy had been vital ‘to hold the world’s attention and open international coffers while retaining the sympathy and fighting morale of his battered people’.

This angle made The Showman ‘more than a biography’ and demonstrated ‘how to sustain an asymmetrical war [and] how to find and build a practical alliance’. About that, time will tell.

OUR ENEMIES WILL VANISH YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

Michael Joseph, 400pp, £25

Though President Zelensky and his Western allies were caught napping by Putin’s invasion, the nowdismissed General Zaluzhny luckily had been busy preparing. After Russia’s push for Kyiv was thwarted by the ingenuity and courage of the

city’s defenders, the evaporation of Ukraine’s foes really did seem possible.

But only briefly, as Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief correspondent records in what the Times’s Antony Loyd called ‘a deft, skilled account of the first year of the conflict that mixes the panache of first-hand witness with retrospective analysis and interviews’. Trofimov is a Kyiv-born Ukrainian, ‘which gives his writing a depth of insight and an edge of righteous heat’, continued Loyd. Add to that the author’s experience as a war reporter and few writers could have been ‘as well placed’.

The Economist also recommended Trofimov’s ‘brilliant and stirring account’, which built up a vivid picture ‘by layering detail upon telling detail’ (such as three Ukrainian soldiers deceiving Russian intelligence ‘by talking non-stop on their radios, as if they were part of a much larger force’).

In the FT, Tony Barber was impressed by the author’s descriptive powers. In once-charming and now ‘eviscerated’ Kharkiv, ‘giant icicles where water had burst out of broken pipes clinked eerily in the wind overhead’. Barber supported Trofimov’s assertion – even though made early last year – that Ukraine had won the war for its independence, but went on to quote its corollary: ‘It wasn’t certain in what borders the country would remain.’

GLORIOUS PEOPLE

SASHA SALZMANN, TRANS IMOGEN TAYLOR

Pushkin Press, 332pp, £16.99

Salzmann was born a Muscovite but has lived in Berlin since 1995, when her family left their homeland under the Jewish emigration plan; and emigration is the subject of this novel (ironically titled and written before the war).

At its heart are two ex-pat Ukrainian women – Russianspeaking Lena and Tatjana – and their daughters Edi and Nina. Escaping the shabbiness and hopelessness of the former Soviet bloc in the nineties, the mothers endure more of the same in Germany: at first as part of a stifling and small-minded Russophone community in Jena, about 60 miles from the Czech border, and later in liberal Berlin.

Volodymyr Zelensky: media-savvy showman and leader for the information age

Tanks roll into Donetsk, 2015

Enduring disappointment, made worse by venal and dishonest men, is what distinsguishes Salzmann’s characters

Disaffected Edi finds a home in the capital’s gay scene but, on a return trip to Jena, is beaten-up by a group of Ossie thugs; embittered Nina gives her succour.

Enduring disappointment, made worse by venal and dishonest men, is what distinguishes Salzmann’s characters and in the TLS Vesna Goldsworthy conceded that Glorious People may be short on optimism’ but ‘is certainly not short on vibrancy and humour’. In the FT, Lucy Popescu agreed, commending the book as ‘an astute, deeply empathic portrayal of the dislocation of first-generation immigrants and intergenerational trauma’.

THE UKRAINE ARTEM CHAPEYE, TRANS ZENIA TOMPKINS

Seven Stories Press UK, £12.99, 240pp

Note the ‘The’. Attached to the country, it’s a Western solecism, not appreciated by Ukrainians like

Russia and Ukraine

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Chapeye. He has a reason for using it in the title work of this collection of 26 stories, published while their author was volunteering at the front last year.

The stories deliberately blur fiction and ‘creative’ non-fiction. Contrasting foreigners’ perceptions of pre-war Ukraine with the less rosy reality, the lead story’s affectionate focus on the ordinary sets the tone for its companions: in one, an old woman bemoans the depopulation of her village; in another, two wayward souls attend church while under the influence.

So, not exactly topical. But could they be timeless? The Guardian’s Ella Creamer believed them ‘candid’ and ‘darkly funny’, registering ‘Chapeye’s love for travel and the truths it reveals’.

Ruth Comerford went further in The Bookseller. They ‘dazzle’, she wrote, ‘and succeed in conveying a sense of the raw and humble beauty that is Ukraine and its people’. Or was, anyway.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN

GUILANO DA EMPOLI, TRANS WILLARD WOOD

Pushkin Press, 304pp, £16.99

Da Empoli has penned a fiction and stressed that he is no Kremlinologist. His novel is simply an exploration – at two removes – of what might drive Russia’s dictator and in turn its people. But many of the world’s

policy-formers have taken da Empoli literally. The New York Times even chided him for a ‘sympathetic’ portrayal of Putin.

Meet Vadim Baranov, the ‘wizard’ of the title, who stands in for real-life PR man Vladislav Surkov. (A master of political theatre, the now-retired Surkov once played Goebbels to Putin’s Hitler.) In late-night conversation and anecdote, Baranov explains to the narrator the grievances that motivate the president; how they manifest themselves in his ambitions and ruthlessness; and how – like Ivan the Terrible – he uses fear to force acquiescence. As for Ukraine, Baranov reveals: ‘What we’re aiming for is not conquest but chaos…The West drops you at the first bump in the road, and you’re left all on your own to deal with a demolished country.’

To Victoria Nelson in the TLS, da Empoli’s central contention was that ‘the fates of nations hang on stories spun by…personalities’, something ‘uncomfortably relevant to the present global political environment’.

But to Peter Hitchens in the Mail, the message was more urgent. Differing from the New York Times, he wrote: ‘To understand is not to forgive or excuse. But to fail to understand, or to refuse to understand, is to be a fool. Take this magical mystery tour of the Kremlin and see if it does not make you

Putin: a wizard motivated by grievances

A border guard says, ‘Russian warship, go f**k yourself.’ 2022 Ukrainian stamp

EMPIREWORLD HOW BRITISH IMPERIALISM HAS SHAPED THE GLOBE

SATHNAM SANGHERA

Viking, 464pp, £20

In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book is ‘based on secondary sources, most readers will learn a lot, from the imperial origin of moustaches to the shameful invasion of Tibet, and Queen Elizabeth I complaining in 1596 about England being swamped by black immigration... Repeatedly the book emphasises that in virtually every period of imperial expansion, alongside the enthusiasts, there were just as many opponents in Britain.’

It helps too that ‘Sanghera has a good newspaper writer’s eye for a vivid sentence.’

For Arjun Neil Alim, writing in the Evening Standard, ‘the story of how so many artefacts found their way into Britain’s museums... is entertaining and relevant. But more interesting is the analysis of our national psyche. The experience of running the world’s largest empire, according to Sanghera, made the British more multicultural, internationalist and wealthier.’

Vigorous dissent was offered by Pratinav Anil on englesbergideas. com. Calling it ‘a dispiritingly bad book’, Anil pointed out that Sanghera ‘isn’t encumbered by facts. That’s just how he rolls, proceeding sans substantiation from one sweeping condemnation to the next. The effect is that of being cornered in a pub by a conspiracy theorist convinced that he alone can give you the “real” truth, not the brainwashing sort of thing they teach you at university...it’s more of a breezy memoir than an argumentative essay. It is also as tedious as it is tendentious.’

TEDDY BOYS

POST-WAR BRITAIN AND THE FIRST YOUTH REVOLUTION

MAX DÉCHARNÉ

Profile Books, 336pp, £25

A mainly British youth subculture of the early 1950s and 1960s, Teddy Boys were so called for their mock

History

Edwardian fashions — tight narrow trousers, pointed shoes, long sideburns (a newspaper headline had shortened Edwardian to Teddy and the name caught on).

‘This sub-class of disaffected youth,’ wrote Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph, ‘was associated...with all manner of social evil. Even in the following decade, my sheltered suburban childhood was haunted by dark rumours about them, creatures perceived to be the embodiment of juvenile delinquency and the decline in the nation’s moral fibre.’

Since Décharné is an author and lead singer of garage punk band the Flaming Stars rather than an historian, his book is mercifully free of the overstrained jargon that mars many books about youth culture, said Dominic Sandbrook in the Times:

‘Where did the Teddy Boys come from? Plenty of historians have mentioned them in passing, but none has ever investigated them with Décharné’s enthusiasm and attention to detail.’

However, David Honigmann in The Spectator, wrote that although the book was ‘rich with contemporary newspaper reports, editorials and letters condemning, or occasionally defending, the Teds’, he thought the author provided ‘derisive and occasionally heavy-handed commentary’.

‘So what happened to the Teddy boys?’ asked Sandbrook. ‘Décharné explains, they were a victim of that most unsparing of all cultural forces, the relentless passage of the years.

‘By the turn of the 1960s the first drape-jacket enthusiasts were approaching 30. Trendsetting tearaways had become harassed

homeowners, and the Edwardian look was yesterday’s news,’ he concluded.

JUDGMENT AT TOKYO

GARY J. BASS

Pan Macmillan, 912pp, £30

‘Every so often, a new work emerges of such immense scholarship and weight that it really does add a significant difference to our understanding of the Second World War and its consequences,’ wrote James Holland in the Telegraph

Judgement at Tokyo is ‘a monumental work in both scale and detail, beautifully constructed and written, leaving the reader not only moved but disturbed.’

The Tokyo war crimes trial of Japanese military and civilian leaders (though excluding Emperor Hirohito) lasted from May 1946 to November 1948, resulting in 16 life sentences and seven hangings, including that of Japan’s wartime prime minister and minister of war, Hideki Tojo.

It was ‘far more complex, drawn-out and contentious than the Nuremberg trial,’ wrote Robert D. Kaplan in the Washington Post Bass has produced a ‘comprehensive, landmark and riveting book, which is both a sickening record of atrocities and a legal, hairsplitting analysis, as the judges argued over natural law, aggressive war, chain of command and more’.

Bill Emmott, in the FT, found that it ‘arguably dwells for too long on the history that led up to the trial, but on the proceedings themselves the book is a well-crafted, warts-and-all account from which almost no one emerges unscathed. The villains range from the drunken American chief prosecutor, Joseph Keenan, to the openly racist European and Australian judges, to the robotic Soviet officials, whose forces were meanwhile imprisoning and often slaughtering Japanese prisoners in Manchuria, to the often deceitful Japanese defendants.’

However, Max Hastings in the Sunday Times said that in his disgust at the trial’s outcome, ‘Bass overcooks his own adverse verdict on it. The indictments against the leaders of Japan, like those against the Nazis, may not have represented justice, but they delivered at least some fraction of it.’

Teddy Boys: a 1950s sub-class disaffected youth

History

DARK BRILLIANCE THE AGE OF REASON FROM DESCARTES TO PETER THE GREAT PAUL STRATHERN

Atlantic Books, 382pp, £25

The Age of Reason succeeded the Renaissance and preceded the Enlightenment. But according to Paul Strathern, it could justifiably be called The Age of Reason and Unreason, because for every advance in human thought, like the philosophy of Descartes, there was a corresponding retreat into the irrational and violence, as witness the Salem Witch trials and the Thirty Years War.

The New Statesman’s Michael Prodger said ‘Strathern approaches the myriad paradoxes of the period through a series of significant lives and events, whether Caravaggio and Robert Hooke or the founding of the Dutch East India Company and the development of money markets. He is adroit in bringing together his personalities and wider currents, and illuminates them with vivid detail, such as Racine restricting his plays to a vocabulary of 4,000 words.’

In the Telegraph Noel Malcolm was less charitable, reminding readers that ‘popular histories’, particularly one like this with such a broad sweep, require ‘much cornercutting and liberty taking.’ He then said that ‘it is a well-known cliché of guidebooks that they can describe any city as “a city of contrasts”, the same principle has just been applied to a century of European civilisation here.’ Malcolm acknowledged that Strathern supplies his readers with ‘a mass of interesting details.’ So, he

found it a pity that ‘too many of the details are unreliable.’

‘Mortlake did not get its name from a waterlogged burial pit for plague victims in 1665. Residents of SW14 may be relieved to know that it was called “Mortelage” in Domesday Book. I can even derive that last detail from Wikipedia, another source quoted quite often by Strathern.

‘Alas, on too many of these issues, readers would do better to stick to the source, and cut out the middle man.’

FIGHTING RETREAT CHURCHILL AND INDIA

BY WALTER REID Hurst, 344pp, £25

‘No other figure in British history has enjoyed such an easy ride – at least until recently,’ wrote Gerard DeGroot in the Times. ‘Reid deserves congratulations for bravely questioning Churchill’s attitude towards India and for rightly labelling it racist. This book is a polemic, but a careful and convincing one.

‘The writing style is occasionally pedestrian, but nevertheless endearing – Reid wears his heart on his sleeve. What shines through is a careful, lawyerly logic that leads to painful conclusions.’

Andrew Roberts, a pro-Churchill biographer, offered a scathing rebuttal in the Telegraph. The only charge Reid proves against Churchill is that he opposed the Government of India Act 1935 (though not because he was ‘disingenuous and unprincipled’). There was ‘nothing disingenuous,’ said Roberts, ‘about Churchill’s central message about the dangers of over-hasty Indian self-government, which was that the Hindus would use their numerical advantage to strip the Indian Princes, with whom Britain had treaty obligations, of their powers, as well as dominate the Muslim minority and keep the Untouchables at the bottom of an unaltered caste system. Those were the essential bases of Churchill’s critique, and Indian history from 1947 to the present day has proven him correct in all three. Not a word from Reid about Churchill’s prescience.’

Allan Massie in the Scotsman, thought the book was a ‘fair and sympathetic examination of Churchill and India, in which he [Reid] largely acquits Churchill of responsibility for the Bengal famine.

‘Reid quotes Clement Attlee, ‘Churchill’s “opponent, colleague and friend”, who spoke of Churchill’s “wide sympathy for ordinary people all over the world” and said he “saw himself as an instrument for freedom, for human life against tyranny”. I think this is true, and it renders some of his follies and occasional wild language unimportant.’

DETHRONED

THE DOWNFALL OF INDIA’S PRINCELY STATES

JOHN ZUBRZYCKI

Hurst,

352pp, £25

‘How did you Indians manage to liquidate the princely states without liquidating the princes?’ Typical of Khrushchev to put it so crudely.

But he had a point. A map of the Raj was not all pink. It was spattered with yellow daubs representing over 500 independent fiefdoms, ranging in size from Hyderabad, with a population of 16 million and an income rivalling that of Belgium, to Bilbari, with a population of 27. Unless a solution to the problem could be found, independence would lead to the Balkanisation of the sub-continent.

Writing concisely about how this problem was solved must have been almost as big a challenge as solving it, but according to India’s news magazine, The Week, Australian historian John Zubrzycki has form. His acclaimed study, The Shortest History of India, covered 5000 years in under 300 pages. The demise of the princely states, by comparison, took place over just a few decades. But, says Zubrzycki, it was certainly ‘complex, because there were so many

Frans Hals’s portrait of Descartes

The Maharaja Holkar of Indore, 1877

competing narratives at play.’

Although Zubrzycki focuses on architects of the solution like the ‘small, alert and ferociously intelligent civil servant’ V. P. Menon, he does not neglect some of the notoriously profligate and spendthrift princes. In the Telegraph, Mick Brown cites the ruler of Bashawlpur, Sadeq Mohammad Khan, ‘who ruled with a mixture of piety and perversion’ and had ‘a collection of 600 sex toys’.

India’s The Week, sums up Dethroned thus: ‘Zubrzycki weaves anecdotes, trivia and some razorsharp sketches of people and places into a silky smooth yarn. He not just illuminates the labyrinthine plots and counter plots that determined India’s borders, but also delves into the motivations of people who played pivotal roles. The book has both brains and a pivotal heart.’

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD BETTANY HUGHES

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 416pp, £25

Author and broadcaster Bettany Hughes’s book has plenty of awesome statistics to boggle reviewers’ minds. Take Khufu’s pyramid at Giza, built in 2560 BC, for nearly four millennia the largest building on earth and the only surviving wonder: it was built by 20,000 labourers raising one block ever two or three minutes, ten hours a day for 24 years. In the Times, Patrick Kidd noted that the 11 years it took to build the Colossus of Rhodes is the same time it took to build a

History

footbridge at Theale Station.

The Mail’s Nick Rennison enjoyed Hughes’ ‘richly detailed’ account. More than 100 feet tall, with a skeleton of iron and a skin of bronze, the Colossus lasted only 56 years before it was toppled by an earthquake, and ‘an earthquake also did for the final Wonder, the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria, for a long time the second tallest structure. It finally fell in AD 1303, close to 1,500 years after it was built.’

Other wonders are now relegated entirely to imagination. What exactly were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Did they even exist? Kidd mused that they allegedly appeared around the time the Book of Genesis was written. ‘Leaders would have wanted to create their own Edens, not just for pleasure, but also to show stability.’

The Observer’s Ben East was taken with Hughes’ trademark combination of historical and archaeological research, enjoying her ‘bright, inquisitive style’, and concluding: ‘Perhaps Hughes could have included more of her own travels, but Seven Wonders is still quite the adventure.’

And in the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes was enthralled by a ‘mission to re-enchant us.’ She liked Hughes’s emphasis on material evidence over wild conjecture. ‘It is this capacity to move deftly between registers –mythic, historical, sacred, profane and pitifully personal – that make her such a beguiling guide.’

A COLD SPELL

A HUMAN HISTORY OF ICE MAX LEONARD

Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20

‘Leonard’s charting of the history of humanity’s interactions with ice is a brisk and fascinating piece of work,’ wrote Charlie Connelly in The New European, ‘encompassing the last hours of Ötzi the Iceman, polar tourism, George Mallory’s Everest camera, and the man who almost two centuries ago came up with the wheeze of exporting ice from America to India. Climate change obviously thrums through the narrative but this is not a didactic read, rather a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing one.’

Gerard DeGroot, in the Times, was impressed by ‘how Leonard has managed to cram so much into such a

relatively short volume. He writes only about what interests him and leaves out a lot, so he conspicuously ignores the polar explorers and their “remote and solitary tales we’ve all heard before”. Instead we learn, for instance, about Churchill’s plan to build a cargo ship out of ice and a frightening American project, junked in the 1960s, that placed a military base, powered by a nuclear reactor, inside a slowly shifting glacier in Greenland. Ice has a way of making men do crazy things. The weird and wonderful stories are delivered in light-hearted prose that conveys Leonard’s love for his subject.’

For Jonathan Dore in the TLS, Leonard’s book is ‘artfully structured in thematic chapters that are also roughly chronological in sequence. Despite its single subject, this is a book that thinks big – or at least, widely and in unexpected places. At first glance a blend of commodity history, like Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Salt, with popular environmental history like Brian Cathcart’s Rain, it emerges as an unusually wideranging cultural and intellectual journey.’ Indeed, it is ‘the human element’ that ‘predominates, fulfilling Max Leonard’s aim to “concentrate on how ice has affected our lives in our world”’.

SURVIVORS

THE LOST STORIES OF THE LAST CAPTIVES OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

HANNAH DURKIN

William Collins, 432pp, £25

This is a history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the Atlantic slave trade’s last ship. It follows them from their kidnappings in what today is Nigeria, through a 45-day journey across the Atlantic and their arrival in Mobile Bay in Alabama in July 1860, to what happens thereafter. It was a miracle, Hannah Durkin observes, that 108 out of 125 survived the journey.

Pratinav Anil in the Times wrote: ‘On the eve of the civil war, when the Clotilda anchored in the Mississippi Sound, the slave trade had ostensibly

Of Alabama’s million residents, almost half were slaves

The Colossus of Rhodes, depicted in Martin Heemskerck’s 16th century engraving, was toppled by an earthquake

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been banned for more than half a century. But like many laws, this one was often ignored in the South.’

He continued: ‘Durkin’s abundance of illuminating figures and vignettes show why Southern slave owners — Alabamans especially — reacted so violently to President Lincoln. Of Alabama’s million residents, almost half were slaves. A fifth of America’s cotton output was produced in the state....It was simply impossible to wean the South off slavery.’ Anil thought Survivors a ‘remarkably wide-ranging book taking in everything from science to soft drinks to show how slavery’s insidious hand wormed its way into the very fabric of American life.’

Michael Taylor in The Literary Review confirmed that although the ‘inglorious years in the life of the American South are well known to historians’, he believed that Durkin’s ‘exhaustive, exhilarating research has created something new — something personal, emotional, almost tangible — from the history of this collective trauma’. And Sandra Dallas in the Denver Post agreed that Durkin, with her sympathetic writing, had rescued the Clotilda survivors from previous patronising and sanitised descriptions. The last survivor was Matilda, who was abducted as a two-year-old. She died in 1940 at the age of 81 or 82. A survivor, indeed.

LITTLE ENGLANDERS BRITAIN IN THE EDWARDIAN ERA

BY ALWYN TURNER Profile Books, 400pp, £25

Piers Brendon opened his review for The Literary Review with a glowing recommendation: ‘Alwyn Turner has achieved the remarkable feat of

shedding new light on the Edwardian era....this is the first [book] to examine it through the prism of popular culture, as reflected in an encyclopaedic range of contemporary newspapers and journals.’

‘Popular culture,’ agreed Simon Heffer in The Spectator, ‘is a valuable means of learning about a particular society and, without wishing to sound Marxist about it, a hitherto under-appreciated one.’ Heffer thought that although the book was far from a definitive history of ‘this fascinating age’, it was ‘exceptionally useful’.

Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times agreed that there have been plenty of books on the Edwardians before but there has never been one as richly enjoyable as Turner’s. Other books ‘are rarely as clever and not remotely such good fun. Above all, nobody has done a better job of capturing what ordinary people thought and cared about more than a century ago, the fears and fantasies that kept them awake at night.’

Andrew Marr in The New Statesman thought some of the parallels between our era and the Edwardian one were reassuring: ‘Our Edwardian forebears are at least as disputative, chaotic and hypocritical as we are.’ But he continued: ‘Others are less so: that, after more than a century, we still have such ingrained inequality and poverty is a source of shame.’

However, Brendon ended with a note of caution, warning that because Turner does not set the era in context, treating it as a discrete entity rather than part of a historical continuum, he may have relied on internet sources to the neglect of more academic works. Despite this, Turner’s ‘research is impressive and his book is consistently stimulating’.

A NASTY LITTLE WAR

ANNA REID

John Murray, 384pp, £25 As the First World War was coming to an end, an expeditionary force of 180,000 soldiers from 16 countries, including Britain, France, America, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, was invading Russia to fight alongside the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. ‘In almost every respect

it was an abject failure, characterised by weak political leadership and delusional thinking,’ explained Luke Harding in the Observer. ‘Anna Reid brings this little-known period thrillingly back to life. It is a vivid and sparkling account, full of colour and dark drama. She chronicles the terrible moments of Russia’s civil war – such as the pogroms against Jews – and the sometimes ridiculous behaviour of the interventionists.’

In the Telegraph, Andrew Roberts said the book ‘is generally well-researched and well-written.

‘Yet, for all its admirable qualities in relating a struggle that stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, Reid adopts an unrelentingly snarky tone when describing her chosen villain, who is not Lenin or Trotsky or any of the other Bolshevik mass-murderers of the day, but instead is Winston Churchill.’ Since ‘Communism killed

over 100 million people in the 20th century’, argued Roberts, Churchill ‘had every right to try to strangle it in its cradle, even at the loss of 938 British soldiers killed and £100 million spent.’

Max Hastings, in the Sunday Times, disagreed. ‘This war would ‘seem the stuff of stand-up comedy were it not steeped in blood, betrayal, incompetence and ugliness,’ he wrote.

‘The story Reid tells deserves to be much better known. Her book records one fiasco after another...

‘Even a century later, this sordid saga invites shame that our forefathers were parties to it. The attempt to undo the 1917 revolution was always doomed, principally because the Russians on “our” side were so unsympathetic, especially to their own countrymen.’

Engraving from Brantz Mayer’s Captain Canot: Twenty Years of an African Slaver

Austrian forces shoot patriotic Jugo-Slavs in Serbia

Beneath the horror

MICHAEL BARBER rounds up the reviews of four moving books about the Holocaust

‘Should genocide really be the stuff of a night out at Carnegie Hall?’ asks Jeremy Eichner, author of Time’s Echo, (Faber, 400pp, £21).

Some would say no. That’s why, at many performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, the audience are asked not to clap. But, argues Eichner, you cannot blame composers who lived through the Second World War for seeking to memorialize their experience of it. Approaching his task with ‘the ears of a critic’ – he writes about music for the Boston Globe –‘and the tools of a historian’, Eichner considers four works about the war, including A Survivor from Warsaw, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony and Britten’s War Requiem.

In the New York Times, Kira Thurman describes Time’s Echo as ‘a compelling testimony to the relationship between music and remembrance….Eichner’s beautiful meditation on the dark shadows that compelled, propelled and ultimately haunted classical music in Europe during and after World War II inspires our ears.’ The Sunday Times’s Dominic Sandbrook was equally complimentary: ‘If you’ve ever doubted that music matters, Eichler has written the book to prove you wrong’. But given that modern classical music is often considered rather recondite, perhaps the greatest tribute came from The Big Issue, which voted it 2023 Book of the Year.

Unspeakably horrific though the Holocaust was, uplifting stories emerge. One describes the heroic exploits of Janina Spinner Mehlberg, a Polish Jewess who masqueraded as a Countess and helped free and feed thousands of Poles imprisoned at Majdanek concentration camp.

The Counterfeit Countess: The Untold Story of the Jewish Heroine who Defied the Holocaust (John Blake, 336pp, £18.99) is based upon a recently discovered memoir, edited by the authors, Elizabeth B. White and Joana Sliwa.

Why Mehlberg, who settled in America after the

war, chose not to publish herself is a mystery. Describing her in the TLS as ‘a rational humanitarian with a great deal of chutzpah’, Jeffrey Veidlinger said she could be viewed ‘in the model of Raoul Wallenberg or Oskar Schindler, but with two crucial differences: Mehlberg was a woman asserting herself in what was a man’s world, and she was a Jew putting herself at great risk to save Gentiles. In this sense hers is a unique story of personal heroism.’

Years ago, I interviewed a French cabaret artist, part of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra. She must have known Zippi Spitzer, who helped set up the orchestra. Spitzer was employed in ‘the sauna’, where uniforms were cleaned and painted with identifying insignia. There she met David Wisnia, who owed his survival to his singing voice.

Both were, by Auschwitz standards, privileged. They had an affair, conducted in a sort of cubby hutch where they worked.

Should they survive, they agreed to settle down together. But after the war they didn’t meet again for over 70 years, and by the time Keren Blankfeld was on their case, only Wisnia, aged 92, was alive to tell their tale. The result is Lovers in Auschwitz (W.H. Allen, 400pp, £22), an astonishing story, but one which raises

some obvious problems, particularly when Blankfeld tries to put herself in Spitzer’s shoes. In the Guardian, Matthew Reisz says ‘the book captures well how some astute and very lucky Jews were able to exercise limited forms of agency even within Auschwitz. And there is something inspiring about Wisnia and particularly Spitzer’s sheer will to survive … But is a real pity that the writing rings false whenever their romance takes centre stage.’

It starts like a classified ad for a pet: ‘I seek a kind person ….’ But the advertiser, Leo Borger, was trying to place Robert, his ‘intelligent’ 11-yearold son. The date was August 1938, by which time life for Jews in Vienna was becoming insupportable. Desperate parents like the Borgers advertised their children for adoption in the Manchester Guardian, the one British newspaper that had consistently reported on their fate. Even so, the right words in the right order could make the difference between life and death.

Luckily for Borger, a ‘kind person’ obliged. But Robert never came to terms with his exile, and killed himself in 1983, aged 56. Learning this, his foster mother said: ‘Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got him in the end.’ In I Seek a Kind Person (John Murray, 304pp, £20), Robert’s son, Julian, a journalist, tells not only his father’s story, but that of seven other children who got out in time. The result, said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, is ‘a family memoir, a collective biography and a gripping detective story rolled into one.’

Above: Jews going to the gas chambers at Birkenau. Below: ‘Counterfeit Countess’ Janina Spinner Mehlberg

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE MALE-MALE SEXUAL RELATIONS, 1400-1750 NOEL MALCOLM

OUP, 608pp, £25

Historians of sex between men face an enormous challenge, wrote Catherine Fletcher in History Today, because ‘so many sources derive either from the prosecution of illegal acts, or from literary texts that were by necessity often coded.

‘One of the most thoughtprovoking books I have read in some time, Forbidden Desire is an ambitious comparative study of sex between men in the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Its argument unfolds in a very readable narrative... From the starting point of a scandalous case of sodomy in the household of the senior Venetian official in 16th-century Constantinople.’ Noel Malcolm compares patterns of sex between men between men in the eastern and western Mediterranean, then asks if these also prevailed in northern Europe. ‘The conclusion, proposing a link between the differing marriage patterns of northern and southern Europe and the practice of pederasty in the south...will prompt many questions.’

The cast includes lustful Turkish potentates

Gay history

JAMES AND JOHN A TRUE STORY OF PREJUDICE AND MURDER CHRIS BRYANT

Bloomsbury, 336pp, £20.99

In 1835, James Pratt and John Smith were the last men in England to be hanged for sodomy. A landlord and his wife had spied on them in flagrante through a keyhole.

SEX, SPIES AND SCANDAL THE JOHN VASSALL AFFAIR JOHN GRANT

Biteback, 464pp, £20

Malcolm, said Peter Conrad in the Observer ‘fields a cast that includes lustful Turkish potentates, predatory Catholic priests, corruptible scullions and smooth-cheeked choristers, together with two English kings who allegedly fooled around with virile young favourites. But mostly the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them, are left to satisfy their desires in private; the historian’s concern is the forbidding religious commandments that the same-sex couples flouted and the crazily brutal penalties imposed by laws that purported to uphold the divine order of the universe.’

In the TLS, Jan Machielsen found the book ‘a masterclass of what historians can and cannot do with evidence... In this remarkable study, Malcolm sweeps much of this orthodoxy away.’

This study by the gay Labour MP Chris Bryant ‘rightly sees the story of Pratt and Smith as one that needs retelling for as long as there are places in the world where homosexuality is punished by death: among them Saudi Arabia and Uganda,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian. ‘Admirable though that aim is, it can’t disguise the thinness of the material that he has to work with here. Neither Pratt nor Smith left diaries or letters, so it is impossible to know what they were thinking or feeling. Instead, Bryant looks outwards, conjuring a word picture of pre-Victorian London by examining its public records. Consequently, even the most minor upper-crust character is given a full and lavish family tree. No street can be mentioned without a rundown of all the shops that lined it. The intention is to suggest a certain social density to a world that unblinkingly put gay men to death. But the narrative result is to dislodge the story of James and John from its proper place, at the heart of the story.’

In 1962, male homosexuality was a criminal offence and gay men with access to secret material were targets for honeytraps, like John Vassall. He was snared while serving as a clerk on the Naval Attaché’s staff in Moscow. The KGB photographed him in flagrante with other men and so he agreed to photograph and hand documents to the Russians, continuing to do this once back in London. Exposed by a defector, he triggered a witch hunt that lasted until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.

Vassall: the wicked backlash

In the Times, James Owen said there was nothing very ‘thrilling’ about Vassall’s detection. ‘The principal achievement of this biography is its recreated portrait of an era in which homosexuality not only had to be concealed, but also carried the threat of ruin and imprisonment … Sparked by the discovery of women’s clothing in Vassall’s wardrobe, the newspapers delved into the “twilight world of the homosexual”. The Sunday Mirror alerted readers to ‘How to spot a possible homo’ (pictured), warning ‘not all had limp wrists and wore suede shoes’.

The Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen wrote that Bryant ‘has rescued Pratt and Smith from the rubbish dump of history’. 56 men were hanged for sodomy between 1806 and 1835, but records are few. ‘Exceptionally, a detailed account of Pratt and Smith’s perfunctory trial was prepared for a sub-committee of the Privy Council that reviewed death sentences. Combining this with a richly detailed portrait of the more squalid and miserable aspects of Georgian London, Bryant has assembled a tragic story that is as shocking as it is pathetic.’

The Guardian’s Luke Harding agreed Grant was ‘good on the anti-gay paranoia that gripped British institutions in the 1950’s and 1960’s.’

56 men were hanged for sodomy between 1806 and 1835

But he’d have liked more on ‘the Soviet shadow world and the mentality of its practitioners. Was Rodin, Vassall’s handler, a cynic or a Marxist zealot? How much damage did Vassall do? The KGB’s archive is unavailable, and we still don’t know exactly what Vassall swiped.’

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FOURTEEN DAYS

A COLLABORATIVE NOVEL MARGARET ATWOOD AND OTHERS

Chatto & Windus, 384pp, £20 Boccaccio had the idea first when he wrote his Decameron in the mid-14th century, in which ten young characters flee plague-stricken Florence and gather to relate stories.

Mirroring our own Covid times, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston marshalled 36 American and Canadian writers to contribute stories. A group of residents locked down in a down-at-heel Manhattan apartment block meet nightly on the roof, drink aperitifs, socially distance and spin yarns for each other.

‘Ghost narratives vie with tales of lost love, shaggy dog stories with the defiantly quotidian, gallows humour with the sweet and sentimental; and each of the residents’ stories reveal, whether they intend it or not, something about themselves,’ said Alex Clark in the Guardian. The book becomes a ‘kind of jigsaw puzzle’ which resulted in ‘an immensely enjoyable product of an immensely unenjoyable time. Fourteen Days is lively, freewheeling and, with its skilfully paced denouement an impressive achievement.’

Rob Merrill in the Independent, enjoyed it too. ‘There are lengthy jokes, a smattering of horror, some nonfiction, even romances, poetry and parables. Befitting their oral delivery in the book, they sort of wash over you as a reader.’ These tales are ‘proof that the stories we leave behind are what makes us human.’

Jessa Crispin, writing in the

Telegraph, wasn’t convinced. ‘At its best, Fourteen Days is an offbeat collection of flash-fiction.’ She concluded that the writing of the stories ‘shines in brief moments, but it’s something more to flip through than savour.’ But, recalling the emptiness of the days of lockdown she applauded the effort, ‘at least it gave these 36 writers something to do.’

HYPER

AGRI ISMAÏL

Chatto & Windus, 352pp, £18.99

A family saga set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, Hyper is the story of a Kurdish family torn apart by migration, spanning two generations and three continents.

Rafiq Kermanj, founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his conservative wife Xezal and three children. We follow the fates of the children as they come to grips with the capitalist world their father failed to defeat. Siver is an unwilling housewife in Dubai, Mohammed a desperate banker in London, and Laika a digital genius in New York.

Rahul Raina in the Guardian admired the novel’s scope: ‘This is a book of big, heady ideas: how 20th-century concepts of communism and solidarity have been run through the digital shredder of the 21st century; how technological change has created refugees out of all of us. It’s about immigrant families being torn apart by the tidal forces of money and the post-ideological world that money created, captured in

intense, minute, unflinching detail.’

Alev Adil, in the TLS, agreed: ‘The author portrays engaging characters with emotional acuity and simultaneously evokes the hyperreality of life in the first decade of the 21st century, which moves “faster than the human ability to make sense of it” and becomes instead ‘a tangle of timelines”.

‘Here is a sprawling narrative that explores and explains the interconnected network of social, cultural, economic and political systems, and their overwhelming dominion.’ Adil bewails Ismail’s conclusions; he leaves ‘all the characters we have grown to love at moments of crisis, denying us comfortable closure. There are no reassuring bromides on offer here.

‘Neither poetry nor love, nor even money, it seems, can save us.’

THE VULNERABLES

SIGRID NUNEZ

Virago, 256pp, £16.99

Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel is set against the early days of New York City’s Covid lockdowns.

The narrator, who qualifies as a ‘vulnerable’ because of her age, finds unlikely companionship in a parrot, which she is bird-sitting, and a young student who returns to the apartment from which he had fled at the start of the pandemic. These three and their relationships, become the scaffolding for Nunez’s exploration of her theme, the core business of being alive: human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time.

‘Nunez’s plain and subtle writing carries what is not precisely a story but a way of being, a sensibility,’ said Erica Wagner in the Telegraph.

All kinds of vulnerability are laced through this ‘layered, thoughtful book’. While the story is static, centred in time and place, ‘the states of feeling Nunez conjures are quietly shocking, reminders of the pleasures and costs of our shared humanity.’

Sam Byers in the Guardian liked Nunez’s audacious central conceit: ‘the pandemic is an atmosphere, not an event. Are we really to care, against the backdrop of global plague, about a writer in a penthouse with a parrot?’ Byers’ view is that ‘such is Nunez’s great talent: she can make us care about anything.’

Manhattan project: the rooftop setting for Atwood’s novel

Dwight Garner in the NY Times described himself as ‘committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels.’

He enthused, ‘I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative.’ Nunez signalled the death of the traditional novel. ‘Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.’

THE HOUSE OF BROKEN BRICKS FIONA WILLIAMS

Faber, 400pp, £12.99

This is Fiona Williams’s debut novel and follows a year in the life of the Hembrys, a mixed-race family who have moved from Brixton, south London, to rural England.

In the Observer, Stephanie Merritt explained the title of the novel: ‘An elderly lady tells ten-year-old Max Hembry that the broken bricks employed to build his family’s cottage were also used as ballast at sea, “to weigh down them clipper ships sent to collect sugar from the Caribbean... yes, where your nana and grandad came from”. The symbolism could not be more explicit: that which appears damaged can, from a different perspective, offer stability.’

‘Williams,’ wrote Susie Mesure in inews, ‘structures her novel by giving each family member the chance to narrate the story.’ She thought her writing was ‘richly atmospheric’, giving as an example a son’s description of his parents’ marital disharmony: ‘Now everything inside this house feels itchy, as though the air’s full of unsaid words that tickle

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like sawdust.’ But she also thought that Williams forgot you can have too much of a good thing, at times overdoing the figurative language and metaphors.

In the FT, Erica Wagner thought it was clear from the start that there was a fracture in the family:

‘The reader doesn’t yet know the source of their sorrow....Slowly — perhaps a little too slowly, for the first third of the novel drags at times — it becomes apparent where the specific breakage has occurred. But individual sorrow is gracefully laced into a larger sense of displacement...’ She described it as an ‘affecting debut from a talented new writer’.

And Merritt summed up: ‘The House of Broken Bricks is a tender and powerful novel, all the more profound for its apparent simplicity, and establishes Williams as an exciting and original new voice.’

DAY

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Fourth Estate, 288pp, £16.99

I think we can all agree with Catherine Taylor in the FT when she wrote that Day is a pandemic work ‘which thankfully resists mentioning the words “pandemic” or “coronavirus” at all. Instead, the author uses the Covid years as a framework from which to explore a modern, intramural interpretation of family, love, desire and loss.’ Day, Taylor explained, ‘focuses on a single 24 hours: April 5, 2019 and the same day in 2020 and 2021.’

Inspired by his great literary heroine, Virginia Woolf, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corrin the Sunday Times, this American author ‘likes to peer into his characters’ consciousnesses, disentangling what he calls their “inner tumble of thwarted desires”.’ She went on: ‘Each character is looking for the “truer life” that they imagine awaits them somewhere else. But when the pandemic hits they lose any hope of escape.’ In almost every scene, she wrote, ‘characters stop to ask themselves how they became who they are.’ Thomas-Corr thought the questioning device became a predictable writerly tic as did the self-conscious literariness of the writing. She ended her review: ‘Hours and hours and hours and hours might have been a more apt title.’

‘In this, his eighth novel,’ wrote Alexandra Harris in the Guardian, ‘Cunningham renews his long commitment to writing about intimate, domestic love of many kinds: straight, gay, motherly, brotherly and avuncular love, and the love between old friends, to name a few, though the writing works against discrete categorisations.’

She thought: ‘Day is written with caressing attention to its characters, a kind of long massage that seeks out tiny subcutaneous knots.’

Richard Canning in The Literary Review admired Cunningham’s ‘descriptive capabilities’ and thought his approach to character ‘alternately precise and impressionistic’.

But it left him ‘longing for a stronger hold on several things: material reality, ethics, motive, plot’.

MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE LUCAS RIJNEVELD TRANS. MICHELE HUTCHISON

Faber, 352pp, £16.99

Lucas Rijneveld won the Booker International Prize in 2020 while still in his twenties. He is the first Dutch author and non-binary person to do so. As Sandra Newman explained in the Guardian, ‘My Heavenly Favourite...belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it’s narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love.’

In the Observer, Anthony Cummins confessed he ‘was floored

Lucas Rijneveld: creating a sense of ‘unholy brilliance’

Fiona Williams: ‘an exciting and original new voice’ JEROEN

JOSEPH

WILLIAMS

by this novel,’ and continued, ‘if you’ve followed Rijneveld’s career to date, I suspect it can’t help but feel even more troubling.... “I dig into everything I’ve been through and what I’m going through,” Rijneveld once said. “For me, it’s about turning something sad or beautiful into art.” Readerly attentiveness can become a type of intrusion; do we even want to know where My Heavenly Favourite came from? Yet I can’t pretend such thoughts play no part in my sense of its unholy brilliance.’

The novel is set in a small Reformed village on a branch of the Rhine in the central Netherlands. The TLS’s Pablo Scheffer explained that the narrator ‘is a local livestock veterinarian, a married father of two who has just reached the “biblical age of seven times seven”; the “favourite” of the title is the troubled 14-year-old daughter of one of his clients, a cattle farmer. In one long stream of consciousness the veterinarian recounts their summer-long affair...’ Scheffer was not the only reviewer to draw comparisons with Nabokov: ‘Rijneveld, in fact, actively invites them, peppering the plot with nods to Lolita,’ he wrote. But Scheffer admitted he felt relieved when he reached the end.

Luke Kennard in the Telegraph thought the novel ‘graphic, unsettling and brilliantly written’ — a harrowing portrait of the narrator’s soul: broken, damaged and profoundly dangerous.

THE LODGERS

HOLLY PESTER

Granta, 224pp, £14.99

Holly Pester is a poet and writer who has also worked in sound art and performance. The Lodgers is her debut novel. In her first poetry collection, Comic Timing (2021), she described the weirdness of the ‘transactional relationship between tenant and landlord’, according to Lucy Scholes in the Telegraph. In the novel, Pester ‘expands on the peculiar precarity of a life spent living in other people’s houses, among other people’s objects, or in nondescript rented properties kitted out with “low-cost

To sublet is to not live totally as oneself

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utensils, designed to be nice enough but not to last long”, reeking of “men’s shower gel and repeated nights of instant noodles”’.Scholes thought Pester’s use of language, the oddness of her metaphors and similes, infused ‘the text with unexpected lyricism’.

In the Observer Ellen PeirsonHagger called Pester’s protagonist ‘restless. Her mind is always whirring, which makes for a disorienting read. But how, this novel asks, could she be any different? To lodge, the narrator thinks to herself, is to “adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy”. To sublet – and to stay in any kind of precarious housing – is to not live totally as oneself. This stylistically eccentric novel holds a pressing, political truth.’

The Guardian’s M. John Harrison described Pester’s book ‘a poet’s novel’. He thought the ‘structural shifts — past to present, present to alternative world — are, like her prose, blunt and lithe at the same time’. He summed up: ‘What is it like to wish — and at the same time not wish — to live near but apart from the lives of others? The Lodgers is a serious, sad and darkly comic confrontation with that central question.’

And Chloë Ashby in the TLS believed it a ‘pleasingly weird’, ‘compelling’ novel and well timed, coming in the ‘midst of the UK’s cost-of-living crisis’.

COME AND GET IT

KILEY REID

Bloomsbury, 500pp, £16.99

Come and Get It is a sharp, edgy social tale, set at the University of Arkansas. Agatha, a 38-year-old gay, white, visiting professor befriends Millie, a 24-year-old black research assistant and together they eavesdrop on five undergraduates who live next door to Millie.

Agatha becomes fascinated with the girls, particularly their relationships to money. She pays Millie (who needs money for a down payment on her first flat) to let her come in and eavesdrop on them.

Reid explores how money guides relationships with people and unpacks the unsettling dynamics of college campus capitalism.

The story ‘unfurls like a magic trick, its breeziness disguising an incisive and damning exploration of economics and ethics in America,’ wrote Julia May Jonas in the New York Times. She found Reid to be ‘a social observer of

How far

would you go for the money for the life of your dreams?

the highest order, knowing exactly when a small detail or beat of dialogue will resonate beyond the confines of the scene.’

Reid’s characters ‘feel unique, often lovable — and always human. Money drives them in the way it drives us all, and that’s the beauty (and the terror) of Reid’s point. With her remarkable examination of American monoculture — from fast food to pop culture to handed-down ideals — she tells a story about economics that’s neither poverty porn nor finance fantasy. Instead, it’s about the hows and whys of everyday consumerism and the insidious toll it takes on our lives.’

‘How far would you go to get the money to lead the life of your dreams?’ asked Ellen Peirson-Haggerin in the Observer. For her, this is the central question of the novel, but she is unconvinced that Reid succeeds. In exploring young women’s financial anxieties, ‘Reid gives just attention to an important but rarely examined topic. But her depictions too often feel like farce. And what’s the point in that?’

King of the rentiers: Rupert Rigsby (Leonard Rossiter) in Rising Damp

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Why do men hate novels?

CHARLOTTE METCALF investigates

Fiction soothes me. A good memoir is enjoyable enough and I like reading about current affairs, history and politics. Yet nothing compares with escaping into a novel.

A novel never fails to reassure me that, despite all my supposed woes, I am merely suffering from being human. A great novelist’s genius is to write imaginary experiences with such accurate understanding of our universal condition that we recognise ourselves immediately in the characters’ responses to what life throws at them. Fiction helps us understand that suffering is, by and large, experienced by us all similarly and makes us feel less isolated.

The moment I began editing The Oldie’s book supplements, I excitedly presented the team with a long list of novels for review round-ups.

My designer winced - and not just because fiction pages are notoriously difficult to illustrate. My editor quickly put me straight, explaining that only a tiny minority of our readership is interested in fiction.

But isn’t an aversion to fiction a male rather than just an oldie thing? Arguably it is, because women account for 80% of their sales in the UK, US and Canada. Women are far more likely to go to literary festivals or be members of libraries, literary societies and book clubs.

As Ian McEwan once wrote, ‘When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.’

Nearly 20 years ag,o he took a pile of unwanted books to the park to give away. Whereas women took around three each, men tended to reject them, frowning ‘with suspicion, or distaste’.

I started wondering if the fact that men generally don’t read novels, and some don’t read at all, explains why I’m single. How often my heart has sunk on entering a suitor’s home only to find it bereft of books. It used to be a man’s taste in music that could comprise a deal-breaking point of difference.

Now I can equally be put off by finding well-thumbed paperbacks by James Patterson and Dan Brownthough both authors clearly have their merits. Give me a man who can talk about literary novels, including those written by women, and I’m half way to the bedroom.

Can women even be funny in the way Waugh, Amis (both senior and junior) and Wodehouse were?

I recall the American film-maker John Waters’s advice, ‘If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!’

Maybe men have turned their backs on fiction because fewer of them write it nowadays. The allure of Barbara Kingsolver, Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood or Bernardine Evaristo, however fêted and prize-winning, has less traction than the tough, sparse, manly prose

of Hemingway, Orwell, Greene or Roth. Can women even be funny in the way Waugh, Amis (both senior and junior) andWodehouse were?

Sue Townsend is undoubedly funny but Adrian Mole is hardly categorised as literary fiction.

Despite their past supremacy, today’s male fiction-writers are a beleaguered lot. Take the brilliant novelist Nicholas Shakespeare, who put writing fiction temporarily on hold for the more lucrative undertaking of penning biographies, most recently Ian Fleming’s.

Returning to work on his latest novel, he says he dare not open the valve to depression by pondering how few people might read it, even as he struggles to write it.

It’s not just women’s fiction men are turning their backs on. Of the last four Booker Prize-winners, all

Orson Welles as Mr Rochester and Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre in the 1943 film of Charlotte Brönte’s classic novel

male, I suspect very few men have read Shuggie Bain, The Promise, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida or the most recent, Prophet Song

Perhaps we should blame the inexorable rise of the female novelist, promoted by initiatives like the Women’s Prize for Fiction, founded by best-selling author Kate Mosse. Looking back at the contemporary fiction I’ve read in recent years, the vast majority is by women. I can sympathise with men feeling alienated from fiction, as they watch the macho offerings from novelists past and present like Bellow, Updike or McEwan, or even best-sellers by the likes of John Irving or John Grisham, drowning in an ocean of female best-sellers.

Reviewing John Walsh’s book Circus of Dreams for The Oldie in Spring 2022, I admitted to relishing Walsh’s account of the tsunami of creative literary energy that consumed the eighties.

It was a time when men and women alike discussed books, like Earthly Powers or The White Hotel, with the excitement reserved today for blockbuster movies.

Reading in general has dwindled in status since then because we’re now seeking entertainment on devices rather than the page.

Ian McEwan: ‘When women stop reading, the novel will be dead’

The fate of contemporary fiction is a topic I will return to as we continue rounding up book reviews here, and I hope to do so with insights from our readers.

Please email me at charlottemetcalf@theoldie.co.uk and tell me what fiction you read and why. If you read none, have you never done so or simply given up? I wait to hear.

THE WILD MEN

THE REMARKABLE STORY OF BRITAIN’S FIRST LABOUR GOVERNMENT

DAVID TORRANCE

Bloomsbury, 366pp, £20

As Labour continues to ride high in the polls and prepares for government once again, it is worth looking back on the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in its centenary year.

In The Wild Men, ‘David Torrance, a biographer and clerk at the House of Commons, tells the story of MacDonald’s rise and the first Labour government, its people, policies and purpose, with sympathy and fastidious attention to detail,’ wrote Jason Cowley in the Sunday Times. ‘His reading and research are exemplary, but the focus is narrow:

MacDonald’s pragmatism and caution reassured the nation that Labour was more than a band of rebels and cranks. It was a national party of government

he conveys little sense of what Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country and is much more interested in people than in ideology or the political ideas powering change as Europe struggled to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War.

‘MacDonald’s pragmatism and caution reassured the nation that Labour was more than a band of rebels and cranks. ‘It was a national party of government, led not by revolutionary wild men, or a “beggarly array” as Asquith called them, but patriotic politicians who believed in moderate reform and the parliamentary road to socialism.’

Andrew Rawnsley, in the Observer, welcomed Torrance’s approach. His ‘lucid account tells a lot of the story through a series of well-crafted and elegantly written mini-biographies of the leading players, a good device for navigating a turbulent period of complex events and issues... Full-fat socialism, such as a wealth tax and nationalisation of the mines and railways, had to be abandoned for the lack of a parliamentary majority.

‘The “wild men” of 1924 did succeed in making Britain a bit more civilised by improving the previously dire wages of farm workers and pointing the way to better schooling for the children of the less affluent.

‘Its most enduring legacy was John Wheatley’s ambitious programme to help working-class families escape the misery of the slums by building homes for rent.’

The Spectator’s reviewer, Chris Mullin, found that ‘Torrance tells an absorbing, meticulous and balanced story... using a wide range of sources, some of which have not been seen before. The Royal archives, in particular, shed light on the fascinating relationship between MacDonald and George V.’

Ramsay MacDonald: Labour’s first PM

Do books about money make for good reads? SAM LEITH assesses the reviews

As we civilians struggle with global recessions, cost of living crises, inflation, sluggish growth and all the rest of it, we continue to marvel at the stupendous wealth of a few tech billionaires who seem to have escaped the laws of economic gravity. Few escapes lately have been faster than those surfing the crypto bubble, and few were first as impressive and then as notorious as Sam Bankman-Fried.

When Michael Lewis started writing his book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Penguin, 272pp, £25), SB-F was in his impressive phase.

Lewis, with his infallible nose for a good story, had secured unrivalled access to his subject and thought he was writing the inspirational tale of the world’s youngest, coolest billionaire. Halfway through the process, SB-F’s crypto exchange went bankrupt and he landed in court on a whole raft of fraud charges.

The result is as well-written as ever – the Guardian’s Emma Brockes said, ‘Going Infinite is insanely readable and I devoured it, marvelling at Lewis’s ability to pace, structure and humanise a story about something as dense and unfriendly as crypto.’

Lewis’s access gave him lots of good stories – SB-F considering personally paying off Barbados’s national debt once he’d headquartered his business there; SB-F being pursued by Katie Perry, or SB-F tuning out a call from Anna Wintour in order to play a videogame.

But most critics thought that Lewis had struggled (having started out on the wrong side of the story) to turn the supertanker round. He still wanted to believe the best of his fraudster subject. Brockes added: ‘One feels for Lewis having to reassess, mid-project, someone he clearly likes and respects. My question would be why he regarded Bankman-Fried with such indulgence in the first place.’

Writing in the Spectator, David Honigmann compared Lewis’s book with that of the Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux’s more crypto-skeptical account, Number Go Up: Inside

Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp, £25). He called Faux’s book ‘an appalled, Wolfeian look at the barely concealed cynicism and grift that fuelled and continue to fuel cryptocurrency’s vast speculative bubble’.

‘Number Go Up technology is a very powerful piece of technology,’ Dan Held of the crypto exchange Kraken tells an audience early on. ‘Powerful in terms of parting fools from their money, certainly.’

Jennifer Szalai of the New York

Michael Lewis thought he was writing the inspirational tale of the world’s youngest, coolest billionaire

Times made the same comparison, calling Faux’s book ‘shrewdly skeptical, where Going Infinite is stubbornly credulous’.

As Honigmann saw it, Lewis did a persuasive job of making SB-F sympathetic: ‘He raises enough

sharp questions for the reader to finish the book less sure of Bankman-Fried’s guilt than at the start,’ but said, ‘A lot of people would have to be wrong for Lewis to be right.’

And he added: ‘Both books recount the end of an era. Crypto was born of a specific macroeconomic climate, the low interest rates after the global financial crisis, when capital sloshed around the world looking for returns. [...] Now that interest rates have risen again, all this is melting away. In the case of crypto, not before time.’

Should the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried have existed in the first place? It’s a version of this question that the Labour MP Liam Byrne seeks to tackle in his book The Inequality of Wealth: Why It Matters and How to Fix It (Head of Zeus, 320pp, £22).

Byrne remains notorious as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury who, while clearing his desk after Labour’s defeat in 2010, left his successor a cheerful note saying, ‘There is no money.’ As he writes in his introduction, he’s had cause to regret the joke: ‘For 15 years, that wretched leaving note has been wielded and waved by prime ministers like a rallying flag for laissez-faire economics.’

Byrne argues that the UK is the most unequal country in the G7 apart from the US, and that that inequality causes real harm. He rails against what he calls the ‘market supremacists’ wedded to neoliberal laissez-faire. But, as the Telegraph’s Ben Wright noted approvingly, Byrne doesn’t just gripe about the existence of inequality: ‘he also proposes some means of alleviating the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. These include establishing a sovereign wealth fund, an overhaul of the tax system and the introduction of a wealth tax of one per cent on those with assets of more than £10m’.

Though skeptical about Byrne’s ‘politics of envy’, Wright conceded that he was ‘an engaging writer, and his latest book is full of ideas’.

Writing in the Irish Times, Paschal Donohoe agreed. He called it an ‘elegantly argued polemic’.

Sam B-F: ended up in court on a whole raft of fraud charges

ON GIVING UP ADAM PHILLIPS

Hamish Hamilton, 160pp, £18

In The Spectator, Robert Adès found that in this ‘collection of seven new, loosely associated essays... two stand out in their brilliant use of the dialectical psychoanalytic method (otherwise known as the old switcheroo, or as Freud put it once: “Heads I win, tails you lose’’).

‘A chapter titled “Dead or Alive” could have been called “How dead do we need to make ourselves in order to live?”’ One essay contends that censorship is necessary for intellectual survival, as only untrue statements pass the censor, never the true. ‘Phillips recasts this beautifully by referencing Nietzsche: we have censorship (rather than art) that we may not perish of truth.’

Adès concluded that ‘this short, subtle and nuanced book is a fast and stimulating read: an account of how giving up is a form of progress, and how giving up is a form of loss – and yet strangely, or predictably, the only person who always comes out on top is Freud.’

In The National (Scotland), John Quin confessed to feeling intimidated by the author’s reputation. After all, ‘John Banville says he’s one of the finest prose stylists in the language and compares him to Emerson, John Gray says he’s the best living essayist writing in English.’ Phillips, declared Quin, ‘needs to be read slowly – his maxims, axioms, his apophthegms, demand time, a seat, a mull, a muse. As with Blaise Pascal and Don Paterson, Phillips proves that slow, aphoristic thinking – classy pensées – are not written by, ahem, ponces. And such thinking is necessarily

hedged with qualifications, hesitations, occasional fuzziness – he’s not writing a scientific paper after all – and irresolution. He actively disillusions us by insisting we face up to what we don’t know.’

OUR MOON A HUMAN HISTORY REBECCA BOYLE

Hodder & Stoughton, 336pp, £22

Rebecca Boyle’s first book is a wide ranging and energetic survey of everything to do with the earth’s original rocky satellite: how the moon figures in human culture, what we know of its science, and the role it has played in our civilisations. The Guardian’s Hannah Beckerman called it ‘fascinating’.

Boyle’s claims for the moon’s influence are not modest. She says life on earth would not have been possible without its gravitational tug, stabilising Earth’s orbit, nor without its tidal cycles helping stir all those amino acids in the primeval soup. Its use for timekeeping was a bedrock of civilisation and the birth of science and mathematics.

She tells you all sorts of interesting things, too, about what we now know of how it formed, what it’s made of, and why it’s receding from us at about the rate fingernails grow. What does it smell like? Doused firecrackers, apparently.

James McConnachie in the Sunday Times, was wholly moonstruck: ‘If you thought the moon was beautiful but irrelevant, a lump of pretty rock in the sky — or a “withered, sun-seared peach pit”, in the words of the Apollo astronaut Michael Collins — this delightful cultural-scientific history will disabuse you.’

The Telegraph’s Simon Ings enjoyed how Boyle described how the moon’s ‘horizon is not where you think it is. Its hills could be mere hummocks or as tall as Mount Fuji:

you can’t tell from looking.’

‘Our Moon is superb,’ Ings concluded, ‘as much a feat of imagination as it is a work of globe-trotting scholarship.... it will surely inspire its readers to dig deeper.’

UNDER THE HORNBEAMS

A TRUE STORY OF LIFE IN THE OPEN’

EMMA TARLO

Faber & Faber, 384pp, £18.99

In that eternal summer of the first lockdown, anthropologist Emma Tarlo, walking in Regents’ Park, encountered Nick and Pascal, long-time inhabitants, the subject of her book. Alice O’Keeffe in the Times set the scene: ‘Nick is a kind of wandering sage, with an unruly beard and an annotated stack of books stored in his “skipper”.

‘His companion Pascal is almost mute, communing more with the birds and foxes than other humans.

‘The pair have lived side by side for almost two decades, on the streets in central London, under a bridge and then in the park, foraging food from bins or relying on soup kitchens. But they are “hobos”, Nick insists, not tramps — since they don’t drink or do drugs, or see themselves as victims. Quite the contrary: their quality of life under the trees with the birds and squirrels for company is “phenomenal”.’

Robbie Griffiths in the Evening Standard compared Nick to George Orwell’s freedom-loving Parisian hobo, Bozo: ‘“I’m here as a sort of two fingers up,” Nick says. “I could live differently but I’ve always preferred being outdoors.” Griffiths was disappointed there was no wider examination of homelessness in London but he enjoyed a ‘strange but ultimately refreshing book.’

The Literary Review’s Cal Flynn liked the book’s ‘unusual, iterative style...formed of a thousand tiny fragments – information that rose naturally to the surface over months of informal dialogue, sometimes in response to her questioning but more often offered freely.’

The Tablet’s Lucy Lethbridge was ‘utterly charmed’: ‘Tarlo is a somewhat earnest companion but once in the open air, her writing takes off, freed up by unexpected joy.’ Still

from Le voyage dans la lune (1902)

Michaelangelo’s Damned Soul. Could giving up be our route to salvation?

Cities

VENICE CITY OF PICTURES

MARTIN GAYFORD

Thames & Hudson, 464pp, £30

Choosing this as a book of the year in the Times, Laura Freeman wrote that ‘Gayford is the perfect cicerone – observant, original and energetic.

‘This isn’t a straight history of Venice or Venetian art, but a book about how artists and writers have pictured Venice and shaped the way visitors see Venice in turn.’

In the Tablet, Bess TwistonDavies found the scale of the book ‘dazzling, spanning 500 years of history, opera, sculpture and buildings, religion, philosophy –and, of course, art. Along the way, elegant prose introduces a fascinating cast … All told, this is a wonderful lesson in Venetian paintings, and how to look at them.

‘It made me desperate to return to Venice and rush to the Frari Basilica to contemplate Titian’s Assunta.’

While Venice ‘embodies perhaps the greatest concentration of art treasures the western world has ever known,’ wrote Lisa Hilton in the Spectator, ‘the freshness and precision of Gayford’s vision reanimates even the most familiar Venetian masterpieces.

‘A Titian scholar, his evocation of the disarming, almost hallucinatory sensuality produced by the dash and flutter of brushstrokes is positively gleeful. It is from Venice, not Florence, that the European tradition of oil painting derives, one which Gayford describes as the city’s “greatest gift to the world”... Gayford vaults the psychological crevasse between the 15th century and the present with élan, recovering the vitality, energy and thrilling modernity of its innovations.’

In ‘a celebration that sidesteps some of the clichés of a more heritage-driven approach,’wrote Keith Miller in the TLS, Gayford’s book ‘is conversational, amiable; the effect is that of wandering around the city, its

museums, churches and confraternities, its calli and campi, its limping bell towers and scenestealing façades, its duelling bridges and blind alleys, with a thoughtful and and well-read friend.’

THE CITY OF TODAY IS A DYING THING

IN SEARCH OF THE CITIES OF TOMORROW

DES FITZGERALD

Faber & Faber, 288pp, £16.99

Des Fitzgerald’s new book is a tour through the present and future of utopian town planning – charting with a drily skeptical outlook the responses of architects and environmentalists to the longstanding idea, going back to the Romantics, that cities are dirty , dehumanising blots on nature. Should we plant trees, preserve ‘green-belts’, and find new ways to bring the countryside into our urban spaces? Is the ‘green city’ the future?

What is often assumed to be an obvious good, Fitzgerald thinks, deserves closer examination.

As Edwin Heathcote wrote in the FT, ‘Where planners see green landscapes, Fitzgerald sniffs out hints of fascism, Fordism, eugenics and exclusion.’ He added that while Fitzgerald is ‘far from biophobic [he] sets out to question the flimsiness of contemporary culture’s reliance on greenery as a universal salve. Plentiful parks are fine, but they do not solve the housing crisis. [...] Counterintuitive, funny and provocative, The City of Today is a Dying Thing asks whether we take for granted the bland platitudes of the post-ecological age and disregard the incredible advances of modernity.’

The Irish Examiner’s Brendan Daly thought the ‘free-wheeling, occasionally baggy narrative’ was livened by its irreverent style: ‘Explaining the social theory of “parametricism”,Fitzgerald brands it the type of “pretentious bollocks” that architectural theorists “get the absolute horn for”.’

Writing in The Spectator, Helen Barrett said, ‘Fitzgerald’s best passages deal with the most absurd manifestation of the “green city” of all: the Marble Arch Mound [...] By revealing the emptiness beneath its structure, it exposed the “green city” as a hollow gesture rather than any serious attempt at ecological change.’

Darran Anderson, in the Telegraph, however, took issue with the title: ‘He expects you to take its assertion as a given, when it’s highly contestable; it says something of the narrowness of current discourse about architecture and urbanism that his views are seen as controversial at all.’

Venice, artistic Queen of the Adriatic

The Green Planet, an immersive, vertical rainforest in Dubai

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL: A MEMOIR

WERNER HERZOG

The Bodley Head, 386pp, £25

‘A very thin thread of autobiography runs through an otherwise vibrant tapestry of anecdotes and adventures,’ declared Becca Rothfeld in the Washington Post

‘In many ways, this is a shockingly impersonal memoir, but there is one sense in which Herzog is palpable in it. His melancholic, meditative and theatrically nostalgic way of being is as irrepressible in his writing as it is in his films. Sometimes, he verges on self-parody, as when he observes that “the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake,” or confesses, “I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes.” But if Herzog is a fertile subject for satire, it is only because he is so inimitably and emphatically himself.’

Claire Dederer, in the Guardian, found that the book ‘covers the expected elements: accounts of the making of his films; descriptions of his relationships with actors such as

Klaus Kinski and friendships with luminaries such as Bruce Chatwin and the mountaineer Reinhold Messner; glimpses into his personal life, including an exploration of his parents’ Nazi ties and his relationships with his several wives. Fans of his work (and perhaps fans of his persona) will find much to love here, all of it jumbled up into a kind of memoir-diary-polemic hybrid. At times so jumbled I found myself wondering: is this actually a book?

‘But that hardly seems to matter, given the power and specificity of Herzog’s writing. In fact, what we have here is something weirder and truer than a mere autobiography.’

Another reviewer who appreciated the weirdness was Georgie Carr in the TLS ‘First published in Germany in 2022, and now translated into English by Michael Hofmann, Every Man for Himself and God Against All has the force of an epic poem in which Herzog is both author and subject.’

THE FATAL ALLIANCE: A CENTURY OF WAR ON FILM

BY DAVID THOMSON HarperCollins, 448pp, £25

‘I doubt there is any such thing as an anti-war film,’ writes the eminent film pundit, David Thomson.

Echoing him in the Guardian, John Banville says that, at the pictures, ‘Everyone is 11 years old, and the 11-year-olds glory in the mayhem going on up there, and the

more blood and mangled bodies the better.’ 11-year-old boys, perhaps. But 11-year-old girls? I suppose we must accept that most of us would turn away in horror from real life carnage but happily pay money to see it on the screen.

Banville says ‘Thomson’s book is as much about war and our noncombatants’ attitudes to it as about war movies. This is the dilemma that he turns to again and again, “that there is a tension in all war films between the vivid peril on screen and our demure safety in the dark.” Thomson notes that in what he wonderfully describes as “the vain pandemonium of Hollywood moviemaking”, the playing field –the battlefield – is flat, with no rising ground.’

At the pictures, ‘Everyone is 11 years old and they glory in the mayhem’

In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Athitakis says ‘the book’s best chapter is a meditation on Mel Gibson, and how films like Braveheart and Apocalypto crystalise the war movie’s contradictions and dangers: “This is Trumpian cinema, and you can feel his contempt for us and shudder at the power it may attain.” The deepest trouble with war movies, Thomson suggests, is that they warp how we experience and understand the real thing. What do we miss, or misunderstand, when we look at Gaza or Ukraine through the filters taught to us from war movies, with their easy platitudes about valour and patriotism? What kinds of heroism are we pining for, and does that urge come at the expense of seeing war’s essential chaos plainly?’

Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula in Herzog’s 1979 masterpiece, Nosferatu the Vampyre

John Wayne in The Longest Day

Herzog: a ‘melancholic, meditative and theatrically nostalgic way of being’

ALAMY

Film

HOLLYWOOD AND THE MOVIES OF THE FIFTIES

BY FOSTER HIRSCH Knopf, 654pp, £26.63

‘One major virtue of the film historian Foster Hirsch’s teeming new book... is to bring the output of this extraordinary decade back into the forefront of attention,’ wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker

‘In the best Hollywood movies of the fifties, there’s a fury, a wildness, a violence (sometimes physical, principally emotional), a sense of resistance to a stifling or menacing order, a sympathy with the free spirit of youth and a view of its subjection to oppressive norms.’ This is ‘not a specialist monograph or nostalgic wallow but a wide-ranging critical history that can uncontroversially celebrate the best of these movies as key works of modern art.’

Hirsch ‘praises many good and often overlooked films’ and ‘explores idiosyncratic genres, such as ancientworld epics and low-budget sci-fi. When Hirsch is passionate about a movie, such as Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, his fervor is matched by eloquence and an eye for detail.’

He also ‘writes himself into the story. Having been born in 1943, he is in a position to reminisce about his childhood and adolescent moviegoing experiences in a way that complements both his research and his critical assessments.

The result is a kind of firsthand sociology, in which moviegoing is treated as an experience, of which the

movie itself is only a part.’

Bruce Brawer, who reviewed the book for the American Spectator, welcomed the fact that ‘Hirsch doesn’t approach films as an art-house snob or with a political agenda; he appreciates genre pictures on their own terms; he’s splendid at describing directing, camerawork, lighting, sets, acting styles, and much else.

‘It’s equally fun to read Hirsch’s always intelligent takes on films you’ve seen and to be given a vivid introduction to movies you’ve never seen or perhaps never even heard of.’

THE PATH TO PARADISE: A FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA STORY

BY SAM WOOLASTON Faber, 400pp, £20

The film director Werner Herzog said that, if necessary, he would travel down to hell and wrestle a film away from the Devil. No doubt Francis Ford Coppola would do the same.

There were times when shooting Apocalypse Now in the Philippines – battling typhoons, frenzied egos and ballooning costs – when he must have come within touching distance of the heart of darkness. Indeed,

according to Robbie Collin in the Telegraph, this book’s title is ‘drawn from a maxim – “The path to paradise begins in hell” – often attributed to Dante.’

Coppola has always been prepared to take risks, not just with films, but with the way they are made. In 1980, flush with cash from blockbusters like The Godfather, he created Zoetrope Studios, described by The Hollywood Reporter as ‘its own top-to-bottom, all-encompassing, soul-enriching creative ecosystem free of Hollywood dysfunction.’ Alas, its first and only film, One from the Heart, bombed. But according to the Los Angeles Times, ‘even this flop is described by many participants as a whirlwind of collaborative excitement, the likes of which can’t be repeated.’

Writing about someone as gifted as Coppola is challenging. But Robbie Collinfinds Sam Wasson up to the task. ‘He has a great journalist’s eye for telling details and a great stylist’s ear, washing the reader along on a torrent of prose that mirrors Coppola’s own unfailing energy.

‘Through the wastes and wilds of Coppola’s existence, he beats a path with rigour and flair, to a destination that still gleams tantalisingly up ahead.’

Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film

A film you can’t refuse: Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) & Godfather (Marlon Brando)

MICHAEL BARBER on the enduring allure of crime novels

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, an 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.

Reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, Mark Sanderson said ‘a tide of blood – bad, mixed, stirred and spilled – surges through this epic tale,’ and echoing Balzac: ‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime.’

Balzac also wrote about the corners that ambitious young men cut to get on, so he would have recognised the dilemma faced by Adam Sealey, anti-hero of The Actor by Chris Macdonald (Michael Joseph, 384pp, £16.99). Sealey, a graduate of a Method acting drama school that in the pre ‘MeToo’ era took egregious liberties with its students, has been tipped for an Oscar. But there’s a skeleton in his cupboard that someone is threatening to rattle. How far will he go to prevent this?

An unidentified New York Times reviewer, quoted in the Mail Online, reckoned there was ‘an almost universal unpleasantness about the characters that is both repellent and totally compelling … But Macdonald has a real understanding of the actor’s mind. And perhaps more importantly, the moral ambivalence of us, the audience.’

Midway through The Last Word by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, 338pp, £22), a successor to The Postscript Murders, a character casually leans on a ‘pile of Richard Osmans’ at his local library. Nice touch, I thought, because you could be forgiven for

comparing the partners of Griffiths’ Shoreham based K and F detective agency (one aged 85) to Osman’s band of oldie sleuths a few miles inland. Like Osman, Griffiths writes in the present tense. And her style, like his, could be described as ‘cosy’.

But she’s no copycat. This is her 30th crime novel, many of which take place along the coast in Brighton, where she lives. Long before Osman, she set out her stall.

Cover the Bones:

‘A tide of blood - bad, mixed, stirred and spilled - surges through this epic tale’

Griffiths’s plot kicks off with the suspicious death of a female novelist which may be linked to that of other writers. The common factor is a rather creepy writers’ retreat in a Gothic mansion near Battle Abbey, to investigate which two of the partners must pose as aspirants and attend a writing course.

‘It’s an enjoyably literary novel,’ said Joan Smith in the Sunday Times, ‘enlivened by Griffiths’s trademark irony and brought up to date by references to the war in Ukraine, where one of the protagonist’s brothers is fighting on the front line.’

Another war, that between the sexes, informs One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall (Macmillan, 322pp, £16.99), reviewing which The Literary Review’s Natasha Cooper began like this: ‘Germaine Greer famously said she thought women have very little idea how much men hate them. One of the Good Guys is a demonstration of just how much some women hate men.’ The participants in this war are Cole, the ‘good guy’, Mel, his thrusting wife, Lennie, an artist Cole fancies, and Molly and Phoebe, two ardent young feminists on a sponsored south coast walk to protest against male violence.

Cole and Mel split up because she puts her career before yet another gruelling and expensive course of IVF treatment. Demoralised house husband Cole decamps to an isolated coastal warden’s cottage on the south coast, which is where he meets LennieA and also has a run in with Molly and Phoebe. When they go missing Cole becomes a suspect.

The story is told from three contrasting perspectives, that of Cole, Mel and Lennie, prompting the Guardian’s Alison Flood to confess that she likes ‘a good unreliable narrator story and this is among the best I’ve read in ages.’ But, asked Kirkusreviews, ‘Could this novel exist without the male voice – or should it? Hard to say, but it’s a fascinating read.’

Finally, To The Dogs by Louise Welch (Canongate, 336pp, £16.99), another meditation on causality. The swotty son of a deceased Glasgow hard man, Professor Jim Brennan has amassed a score of glittering prizes. But just as the top of the ladder seems within reach, his son is busted for drugs and his antecedents reassert themselves. In The Big Issue, Doug Johnstone liked it. ‘The author, herself a Glasgow professor, casts a cold eye over her native city, juxtaposing the worlds of academe and criminality with a sly wink that asks: which is really worse?’

King of Crime: Watson and Holmes, The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892)

Apocalypse now?

We are not all doomed – according to the latest books on threats to humanity.

By SAM LEITH

Are we all doomed? A lot of publishers seem to think so. The only question, it sometimes seems, is whether it’s going to be climate change, another pandemic, or murderous Terminator-style Artificial Intelligence that finishes us off first.

But a handful of new books seem determined to look on the bright side. First among them is Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet (Chatto & Windus, 352pp, £20). Ritchie is a data-scientist, and the argument of her book is that, contra the doom mongers, the data shows that we aren’t too late to save the planet from ecological catastrophe.

The Times’s Ben Cooke said that ‘while still in her twenties, Ritchie has made a name for herself in sustainability circles by using data to tell a surprisingly optimistic story about the planet’s future. As the head of research at the website Our World in Data, she has shown that on a number of indices — air pollution, climate change, deforestation, overfishing and biodiversity loss — humanity is beginning to abandon its dirty habits. [...] “I don’t think we’re going to be the last generation,” she writes. “We have the opportunity to be the first generation that leaves the environment in a better state than we found it.”’ And though some of her approach is ‘a tad Pollyanna-ish’, he thought, on the whole it was a tonic. ‘Written in chatty, lucid prose, this is a book for anyone who finds it difficult

to believe in a better future. It’s the most uplifting book I’ve read all year.’

Writing in the Guardian, Bibi van der Zee was more cautious: ‘I would love to say that I came away from this book as convinced and optimistic as Ritchie.’ But she applauded Ritchie’s ‘pragmatic’ approach to ‘air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics and overfishing’, and said: ‘Ritchie’s book is extremely useful as far as it goes, and we urgently need her and people like her – optimists who’ll say: you know what, we can turn this around; look at these numbers, look at these solutions.’

The Bloomberg reporter Akshat Rathi, in Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global race to Zero Emissions (John Murray, 272pp, £20), is another writer who seeks to rebut the fatalists who think it’s too late to save the planet.

Rathi doesn’t argue for a communist eco-revolution along Extinction Rebellion lines, though.

We have the opportunity to be the first generation to leave the planet in a better state than we found it

He argues that good old capitalism is our best bet for saving the world.

His argument, Pilita Clark reported in the FT, is that ‘striking technological, financial and policy progress is being made around the world’ already, and Rathi ‘brings this shift to life with engaging stories of people behind some of the most important advances in recent decades. There’s the little-known Chinese bureaucrat who has revolutionised electric car production as profoundly as Elon Musk; the British baroness who forged worldleading climate legislation; the Texan oil boss investing millions of dollars in direct air-capture technology, which sucks carbon out of the air and stores it deep underground. Rathi’s assessments sometimes veer into overly rosy territory, [but] this is still a highly readable reminder that efforts to cut emissions are achieving a lot more than is widely realised.’

The TLS’s Peter Geoghegan was also charmed by Rathi’s ‘breezy tour of the new frontiers of “climate capitalism,”’ which, he said, ‘makes the case for “economic common sense”. Put simply, the climate crisis is so dire that financial incentives have naturally swung away from denial and delay and towards action – even in the boardrooms of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations.’

A more optimistic account of technology, too, comes from the tech writer Tom Chatfield in his Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are (Picador, 336pp, £20). In the face of the now familiar menu of moral panics about AI, ‘grey goo’ and dwindling attention spans, Chatfield seeks to take a sanguine long view of our relationship to technology, said The Bookseller’s Caroline Sanderson.

He offers ‘a highly readable exploration of just that relationship, from the emergence of our species to now. Showing that we have always been deeply involved with our creations, from the first use of tools to the creation of the internet, its central message is that we are neither masters nor victims of such technologies. They are part of who we are, and so our future—and theirs— lies squarely in our own hands.’

A wildfire in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest, 2000

for us. And had done to them. King has a relish for the X-rated soap opera –Dynasty, you could call it – that was the Julio-Claudian family of emperors. This isn’t a book that has much room for the little people of history, but it will leave you wiser as to which ruler murdered their mother or slept with her, or both.

You’ll also know that the Colosseum is named not for its size, but because it was near to the colossal statue of Nero.

King has tricks to teach old dogs –maybe old doges as well. I hadn’t known that the Lombards, one of the invading tribes in the Dark Ages who prompted the locals to seek refuge on islands in the Venetian lagoon, had no written language.

They did leave behind a clutch of words still used today – guerra (war), sgherro (thug) and bara (coffin) among them. I’m sure they were good to their mothers, though. The word ‘ghetto’ probably derives from the site of the dump in Venice – gettare is to cast away – where from medieval times the Jews were forced to live.

King reminds us that Mussolini had been ridding the Italian language of foreign words long before he succumbed to Nazi notions of racial purity.

Terms you might hear on your Roman holiday include autista (driver) and cornetto (a breakfast pastry). Until Il Duce came along, people had made do with the French chauffeur and croissant. Perhaps he was on to something. Nowadays, the heirs of Virgil lard their vocabulary with bad English. Il footing (which may have come via France) is used to mean ‘jogging’.

As you would expect from a Renaissance man, King is hot on the great artists but he’s also good on those centuries that usually fall through the cracks. I hadn’t known much about the Italian Enlightenment – it gave the world the first professor of economics – nor that before Cavour masterminded the unification of Italy, he had helped create Barolo wine on his family estate.

One forgets that Italy has been a nation for only 150 years, and Italians will tell you that it still isn’t one. The influence of its history can make it feel more familiar than really it is, and those differences –notably the absence of trust in the state – have roots. One might quibble that there could be an overarching thesis to King’s history, or more about how Roman Catholicism shaped the country.

I’ve got a better suggestion. Drink up and watch the parade go by – Napoleon, Fiat, Fellini and Gucci. E dolce far niente

James Owen is author of Commando

‘What about the exterior?’

Sex in the City

PHILIPPA STOCKLEY

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis

By Julie Peakman

Reaktion Books £25

Today’s woman is sometimes frustrated by lack of parity – in wages or opportunity. In Libertine London, Julie Peakman, an authority on 18th-century sex, makes these irritations pale beside the life-threatening horrors women endured in the ‘long’ 18th century (16601830), should they have sex outside marriage, as men frequently did.

The treatment women received afterwards, even if they’d been raped, was awful compared with that of their male counterparts: ‘A ruined reputation and ostracisation from respectable society.’

While the term ‘libertine’ usually applied to amoral, lascivious, well-off men who screwed around with no effect on their reputation, it could only occasionally be applied to women.

Because of a double standard that the book explores, once a woman had been exposed for sex outside marriage, whether of her own volition or not, she was vilified.

If poor, she was turned out of home or work, a social pariah. From there, the usual way to avoid destitution was prostitution. She might then be arrested for disturbing the peace. Prostitution itself was not a crime; but the law often applied a range of

Northern exposure: Quaker in Love (1815), by Thomas Rowlandson

trumped-up charges to any woman found unaccompanied on the streets.

Those unfortunates ended up in prison (Bridewell) or a place of ‘reformation’, such as the Lock Hospital.

Conditions were filthy and the regimes so cruel – stripped upper-body flogging; solitary confinement for swearing – that death, including from diseases such as typhus, was common. A few – shrewder or more violent than the others – ended up with their own brothels, which gave some financial security but did not preclude arrest for disorderly conduct.

Peakman’s book abounds in stories, including those of numerous prostitutes. One is Mother Needham, a madam Hogarth made notorious in his titillating A Harlot’s Progress – busy procuring an innocent country virgin on behalf of the odious Colonel Charteris, aka ‘the Rapemaster General’.

Needham was arrested several times. In 1731, she was pilloried – a common punishment. So savage was the onslaught that she died two days later, aged 51.

Charteris raped a 16-year-old girl he’d hired as a maid, locking her into a room, and stuffing his cap in her mouth to muffle her screams, all with the complicity of his staff. The poor girl struggled to describe what had occurred. ‘A great deal of wet,’ she told the judge.

Alas, in rape cases, unless the defendant could demonstrate severe brutality, injury and perhaps buggery, the courts rarely bothered. Worse,

Charteris accused his victim of stealing a snuff box he’d given her as a (failed) bribe. Women could be hanged for less. As a frequent rapist, he was eventually sentenced to death, but a rich relative got him off.

Peakman chillingly clarifies that since women were legally the property of men, rape was considered theft from either father or husband, who were sometimes awarded damages.

Another prostitute, Jane Webb, also called Jenny Diver, who had worked for Needham, had a knack for ingenious pickpocketry. She used a false pregnant belly and arms, which allowed her to thieve at leisure in church. Caught for this, she was hanged – alongside 19 others.

Only those who acquired wealth, position or property were admired for their well-dressed, flamboyant sexuality and multiple partners.

These included successful actresses who caught the eye of rich or titled admirers, ‘courtesans’ (who usually began as prostitutes but were lucky or pretty enough to scoop a wealthy patron early on) and royal mistresses, who began as actresses or prostitutes.

Courtesans ‘were at the centre of a cult of celebrity’. They were celebrated in pamphlets and cartoons. Their lives were recounted in alleged biographies and memoirs. These fictionalised, sexualised works were almost invariably by male hacks, who thus milked successfully libertine women.

Several tragic cameos show how precarious their positions really were, dependent on patrons who could suddenly withdraw financial support to bestow it on another. Meanwhile the courtesan had to maintain a costly lifestyle to satisfy public curiosity. However flamboyant, their lives often ended in early death.

Because they were faced with this barrage of sexual unfairness, poverty, misery and death, one longs for success against the odds.

It did happen. Enter the actress Harriot Mellon, mistress of Thomas Coutts, 42 years her senior. In 1815, his wife died. He was 80 and Harriot now 38. But he married her and, at 87, left her the bank. At 49, she married the skint 26-year-old Duke of St Albans.

When Harriot herself died, she left her eyewatering £4.8m fortune to her step-granddaughter, Angela Burdett Coutts, who set up a home for prostitutes.

Philippa Stockley is author of Murderous Liaisons

Old man and the trees

PATRICK BARKHAM

Treetime: Tales of a Layman’s Lifelong Adventure with Trees and Tree Folk

By Ted Green Arboricultural Association £25

There are at least 3,400 ancient oaks in England, more than are found across the rest of continental Europe. Each tree over 400 years old is both ancient monument and ark, with native oaks supporting more than 2,000 other species – insects, birds, mammals, plants and fungi.

And yet, as Ted Green reminds us in this fascinating, quirky and provocative memoir-cum-tree manual, our unique wealth of ancient trees has no special legal protection. The slab of wood hewn from an ancient oak and plonked into a yeoman farmer’s house 300 years ago has far more protection – via our listed buildings regulations – than its living peers.

Green’s first book, published in his 90th year, challenges us on this state of affairs and many other aspects of our ancient trees.

As the subtitle suggests, Green eschews the ‘expert’ label, but it is difficult to see him as anything other than a guru after a lifetime immersed in tree lore and science. Treetime is not a conventional chronological reminiscence, but we gradually learn

about his remarkable childhood, when he roamed wild in Windsor Great Park.

His father went missing during the Second World War and, six months after VJ Day, his mother was told that his father had been on a Japanese PoW ship torpedoed by mistake by a US sub.

The cargo ship wasn’t displaying the International Red Cross signs as it should; the Japanese evacuated their troops, but left PoWs locked down on the sinking vessel.

Green and his mother were then evicted from their home by their private landlord (‘I can still see the houseowner’s son driving past in a RollsRoyce,’ he writes) and the council couldn’t accommodate them.

Through subterfuge, Green obtained a key to a former US Air Force concrete shed. He and his mum transported their furniture in a pram and lived in the shed – sandbag sacks soaking up the water from the leaking roof – for two years.

As a boy, Green spent long periods off school, in the woods, learning at the shoulder of the old foresters who still worked there. A keen birdwatcher, he later met the ornithologist John Ash, who was studying bird parasites at Imperial College. Ash recommended him to become a technician at their Silwood Park field station beside Windsor Great Park.

Green spent decades there, answering scientists’ research questions and developing his own uniquely independent mindset, before becoming a consultant for the Crown Estates at

‘Your call … is important … to us, and these look like musical symbols’

Windsor Great Park, where he still works, aged nearly 90, today.

Treetime is a compendium of decades of wisdom about how trees grow and relate to the world around them.

Green loves challenging shibboleths and rigid conservation and arboricultural mindsets. He’s relaxed about many ‘invasive’ species, diseases and ‘pests’ that threaten trees such as the oak processionary moth.

The French simply put up more nestboxes so that small birds will control these voracious caterpillars. He thinks we’re often too obsessed with dividing trees into ‘good’ native and ‘bad’ non-native. Green considers the sycamore, often derided as a non-native ‘weed’ of a tree, to be our ‘Celtic maple’ and vitally important in northern Britain.

With some excellent colour photographs, Treetime reveals the crucial role played by ‘dead wood’ – he prefers the term ‘decaying wood’ – as home to myriad beetles and other species. Decay, he writes, is an essential natural process. An ancient hollow tree is not ‘dead’ or ‘dying’ but recycling itself, fertilising its roots with its own decomposing material.

Green is also a refreshing critic of conservation ‘stakeholders who love meetings that only end up deciding a date for the next meeting’, and criticises ‘the current unimaginative national crusade to cover our countryside in dense, dark, lifeless plantation forestry’ for ‘carbon capture’.

He argues that open-grown hardwoods, for instance, will ultimately capture far more carbon than short-lived, small-crowned plantation trees.

Green once gave a lecture at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, entitled ‘Kew: The biggest plant grave in Europe’.

Despite his rebelliousness, Green is a staunch defender of King Charles’s environmentalism – which he has witnessed up close at Windsor, where the King has planted the next generation of ancient oaks. Green quotes a Greek proverb: ‘Anyone who plants trees knowing that they probably will never sit in their shade has at least started to understand the meaning of life.’

There is a forest of similar sagacity in this book. ‘Every human in times of stress,’ Green writes, ‘should walk amongst trees or stand under one, look up and follow the trunk into the spreading branches and contemplate its beauty. It beats all the pills.’

Patrick Barkham is author of The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin He is The Oldie’s walking correspondent

‘These feedback forms are a pain - do you agree, slightly agree, strongly agree, strongly disagree...’

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH Caribbean Cupid Stunt HARRY MOUNT

Until August: The Lost Novel

By Gabriel García Márquez

Penguin Viking £16.99

If only Gabriel García Márquez’s lost novel had stayed lost. It’s a bin-end book that should have stayed in the bin.

In fact, it was never actually lost. Márquez (1927-2014) wrote it as he was losing his memory. He told his sons, ‘Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.’

And so he declared of this book, flawed by his declining talents, ‘This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.’

But now, as his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, acknowledge in the preface, ‘In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations.’

There is little pleasure in this inadequate, short novel. And the sons’ flimsy justification for publication –‘The fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realising how good it was’ – doesn’t hold true.

You wouldn’t know the writer of Until August was losing his memory, a few very minor repetitions apart. You would just think he was a rubbish writer – a mediocre A-level English pupil imitating Márquez on a very bad day.

The plot is good enough. A happily married, middle-aged woman, Ana Magdalena Bach, takes a trip to a Caribbean island every August to clean up her mother’s grave. And then she falls into the annual habit of selecting a new lover every time she visits.

This could have been a clever way of investigating middle-aged marriage and infidelity. Instead, it’s just a dull, linear series of romantic escapades: one time,

she’s picked up by a man who thinks she’s a prostitute; another time, it’s by a swindling serial killer, though she escapes unharmed.

It all provides a chance for Márquez to fall into the elderly writer’s habit of liking attractive female characters to be naked a lot. It reminded me of Cupid Stunt, the huge-breasted American actress created by Kenny Everett and Barry Cryer: ‘And ALL my clothes fell off, but it’s all done in the best possible taste!’

Márquez’s sex scenes come straight from the School of Bad Soft Porn: ‘She was astonished by the magician’s mastery with which he removed her clothes piece by piece, his fingertips barely touching her, like peeling an onion.’

When Márquez isn’t stripping his main character, he falls into a plain prose – a sort of sub-Hemingway simplicity that ends up being just Geography-GCSE simple: ‘She explained that gladioli are not very common, but someone had brought them to the island and they had thrived, just along the coast and in some other interior villages.’

Gone is the magical realism of his great books, Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. The only magic comes with Cupid Stunt’s mysteriously disappearing clothes: he ‘kept kissing her while removing her clothes piece by piece with magical mystery’.

Any attempt at lyrical writing falls flat. At one point, Bach tears up the card of one lover and tosses the fragments ‘into the seagulls’ complicit breeze’. Well, I suppose the breeze could be complicit in a magical-realism sort of way. But in what sense do the seagulls own the breeze? It’s illogical and not in a great novelist’s way.

Gone, too, are the engaging plots of Márquez at his best. Instead, alongside the main plot line – of those repeated one-night stands – Márquez opens up little side plots and then quickly closes them down. So some bristling tension over Bach’s daughter wanting to become a nun is suddenly ended when, Márquez writes, ’Their daughter’s fate was resolved easily and without haste.’ Hardly nail-biting stuff, is it?

There is no humour, wit or sophistication here. Other writers –Virgil and Kafka among them – asked their heirs to destroy their works. The heirs rightly refused – both writers were at the height of their powers in the books they wanted destroyed. Márquez’s sons should have obeyed their father’s wishes.

The best drink of the day is just before the first one.

James Bond in Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun

There’s a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminals blow some guy’s brains out. I’m a crook.

Ronnie Biggs

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

Sammy Davis Jr

I’m one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.

Marie Lloyd

Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too?

I thought that no one but myself…’

C S Lewis

I never predict anything, and I never will.

Paul Gascoigne

I sing each word as though it were my last on Earth.

Mario Lanza

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

Billy Connolly

Commonplace Corner

I was the first homegrown sex symbol, rather like Britain’s naughty seaside postcards.

Diana Dors

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

J B Priestley

I made up my mind years ago, that the best parts in films always went to the villain. I was determined to corner the bad man’s market.

Stanley Baker

Hell is just a frame of mind.

It’s better to be looked over than overlooked.

Mae West

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets.

Nye Bevan

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you’re just standing still?

Fitted sheets

They fit hardly any mattress known to man. They are invariably too big, too small, too deep, too shallow, too long or too short. They are an independent life force possessed of the devil.

When you’re putting them on and are triumphantly tugging down the fourth

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairytale.

Marie Curie

Good theatre draws the energies out of the place where it is and gives it back as joie de vivre

Joan Littlewood

corner, two others leap back up and lie in a heap in the middle of the bed, almost crowing in triumph. Turn your back and another corner springs free. You race round the bed in a demented game of Whack the Rat.

At night, they are sneakier. They creep quietly from under the mattress, away from the corners, until you find you are trying to sleep on a long ridge of elastic. Or on the mattress cover. Or on the bare mattress. Or they gather in puffy little creases in the middle of the bed and form a knot under the small of your back.

None of this induces blissful comfort or a good night’s sleep.

What have fitted sheets ever done for the good of mankind? Why were they

J Paul Getty

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

George Eliot

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Victor Hugo

ever invented? Like one-size tights – which are never the one size you happen to be – they are great in theory but hopeless in practice.

A standard flat sheet is much more versatile. You can stretch a double to a kingsize, or tuck it in more for a single. No problem. They are easier, more comfortable

SMALL DELIGHTS

and infinitely adaptable to mattresses of different widths, lengths and depths.

Yes, you actually have to tuck them in – but mastering hospital corners takes seconds and is a splendidly satisfying skill.

A well-made bed with tight flat sheets is a thing of beauty and comfort. It will stay neat and well-made whatever the night-time offers. Well, pretty much…

Waiting at a bus stop, which has several routes, and the first bus goes to my destination.

RHONA

THORNTON, LEEDS

M

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Flat sheets are becoming an endangered species. They are vanishing from our shelves. John Lewis, that temple of sheet-buying, offers twice as many fitted sheets as flat.

Act now. Buy flat sheets while you can. Unless you really like playing Whack the Rat around the bed…

SHARON GRIFFITHS

First UK sex symbol: Diana Dors

Jurassic Park – in Wales

What a thrill to find mammoth bones under Pembroke Castle david horspool History

Historians pride themselves on taking the long view. They strive to rise above our daily preoccupations while working on less smug-sounding variations of the conclusion ‘It’s all happened before.’

Sometimes, that long view can get very long indeed. Peering back into prehistory, astonishing remains are still being uncovered.

Less than a blink of an eye ago (in prehistoric terms), researchers in Norfolk in 2013 were able to show that fossilised hominid footprints beneath the sands of a Norfolk beach at Happisburgh were up to 950,000 years old.

That’s more than half a million years older than the oldest footprints discovered anywhere else in Europe, and the oldest outside Africa.

Pictures of the footprints showed outlines that could have been left by anyone wading along the shore today.

The find tempts you to identify with an ancestor who was not even of the same species as us, probably Homo antecessor, who became extinct around 800,000 years ago.

For the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens, you need to go west, while still staying south. Around 40,000 years ago, when Britain was connected to mainland Europe (it remained so until about 5000 BC), our direct human ancestors migrated to the south of modern Britain. Their interaction with a previous wave of migrants, the Neanderthals, is still a matter of great scholarly discussion.

In a cave beneath Pembroke Castle, Wogan Cavern, archaeologists have for the past three years been uncovering some of the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens anywhere in the UK. As well as stone tools, there are remains of the animals these humans lived alongside (and ate): wild horse, reindeer and mammoth. These discoveries have lain undisturbed for as many as 40,000 years.

They are evidence of human life as old as the Red Lady of Paviland, discovered

30 miles to the east, on the Gower Peninsula – perhaps older. The Red Lady is in fact a man, a sign less of prehistoric gender fluidity than of scientific developments since ‘she’ was first excavated by William Buckland in 1823.

The places where these earliest remains of Homo sapiens have been found are mostly in the southern parts of Britain because, until around 10,000 years ago, most of the north was covered in ice. So the majority of discoveries run beneath a line of latitude just north of London.

But these were nomadic people, and some of them do appear to have ventured much further north. The furthest these palaeolithic forebears of the tough northerner who thinks coats are for softies seem to have made it is modern Cumbria. There, bones and tools only a little more recent than the Pembroke finds were uncovered at Kirkland Cave.

Don’t look for them. English Heritage backfilled the trenches in the late 1980s to halt the effects of erosion and previous digs.

Only when the ice began to melt did humans start to live in more permanent settlements. Perhaps the most extraordinary is at Star Carr in North Yorkshire. This site shows signs of occupation for hundreds of years, and archaeologists have found evidence of the ‘earliest house in Britain’, post holes for a circular construction dated to

around 9000 BC. That’s at least 1,000 years before the very earliest evidence of habitation around Stonehenge.

The first stone monuments on Salisbury Plain were set up in around 3000 BC. The megaliths we still see today (or will drive under, if National Highways get their way) came another 400 or so years after that.

The stones that make up England’s answer to the Great Pyramid are sarsens from around 16 miles away. The smaller bluestones at Stonehenge come from 150 miles away in Pembrokeshire’s Preseli hills, not so far from those earliest humans, already dead for thousands of years, who had feasted at Wogan Cavern.

The really long views offered by our prehistory show that the historian who mutters ‘’Twas ever thus’ is not only smug, but wrong. London, for example, was nothing like the centre of activity it became. If Stonehenge emerged as the ritual heart of England, the Neolithic equivalent of a northern industrial powerhouse was at Great Langdale in the Lake District. At what has been called the Langdale axe factory, thousands of flint axes were quarried and fashioned.

Langdale axes have been found on the Sussex coast and in the Scottish Highlands. Some of them were polished to such a peak of delicacy that they were clearly meant for ornamental or ritual use, rather than practical purposes.

These discoveries are reminders that our own civilisation is a mere tick of the clock. I like to concentrate on those shafts of light that seem to connect us to otherwise unknowable ancestors.

I think of the mudlarkers of Happisburgh, the homemakers of Star Carr, the mystics of Stonehenge – and the diners of Wogan Cavern, gnawing on barbecued mammoth 40,000 years ago, under the site of Pembroke Castle, where Henry VII took his first breath, and Oliver Cromwell snuffed out Royalist resistance between attacks of gout.

Pembroke Castle

FILM HARRY MOUNT

THE TROUBLE WITH JESSICA (15)

Think of the worst dinner party you’ve ever been to. Then multiply the desperation by a thousand.

That’s the premise of The Trouble with Jessica. At a smart professionals’ dinner party in fashionable London, uninvited guest Jessica (Indira Varma) turns up, is rude to everyone – and promptly stomps out into the garden to hang herself.

It gets worse. The hosts, Sarah (a marvellously neurotic Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tudyk, a fine mixture of smugness and despair), were on the verge of selling their dream house – with its vast, echoing, metallic kitchen, perfect for show-off kitchen suppers.

But the scandal of a suicide in the garden might jeopardise the sale – a disaster because, beneath the sleek, rich surface of their lives, Sarah and Tom are on the verge of financial ruin.

And so they decide the best thing to do is to cover up the death of their embarrassing old friend, Jessica.

Arts

The skeleton of this black comedy is completed by the other guests – the glamorous friends, Richard (Rufus Sewell) and Beth (Olivia Williams). Their comfortable middle-class existence is threatened, too, by the decision over what to do with Jessica.

The result is a kind of Whitehall farce meets Patrick Hamilton’s Rope – how do you get through an evening with your friends and frenemies with a dead body on the premises?

It’s a brilliant set-up, with the farcical twists and turns deftly set up by director, Matt Winn, with his co-screenwriter, James Handel. The chops and changes are so delicately stage-managed that you can completely believe it when Beth stops the other guests from calling the police – when she herself tried to call them earlier on.

The balance between tragedy and comedy doesn’t completely work, though. The wit isn’t quite good enough to take the edge off the gruesome suicide.

And the repartee between the guests, although perfectly serviceable, doesn’t quite skewer the sort of nightmare dinner

party so many of us have undergone. Given that dinner parties are largely about talking – and that the suicide takes up only a few minutes of the film – the dialogue over the kitchen table, before and after the suicide, must be razor-sharp in its observations. And it isn’t quite.

So it doesn’t make the grade among the great dinner-party – or party – plays and films. Take Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), a masterpiece in marital angst. Albee’s A Delicate Balance (1966) plays wonderfully and horrifically with the guests from Hell, who want to stay with you – for ever! Or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a subtle film about race relations, where Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn discover that Sidney Poitier is to be their son-in-law.

Then there are the comic masterpieces about entertaining. Don’s Party (1976), directed by Bruce Beresford (who writes on page 32 about tricky film producers), is the funniest exposé of how much we really dislike so many of the people we meet at dinner parties. The Party (1968), where the kooky sixties shenanigans now look a little dated, is saved only by the genius of Peter Sellers.

More recently, in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is the master at revealing the mechanics of dinner parties; how you need someone very funny to ‘middle’ – ie sit at the middle of the table – to keep the bores and mutes at the fringes of the action.

Throwing a corpse into the middle of the room is a clever way of heightening the tensions and agonies of the modern dinner party.

But The Trouble with Jessica doesn’t make it into the pantheon of party films – because the guests are just a little too boring, as they so often are in real life.

The Trouble with Jessica is out on 5th April

Guests from Hell: Jessica (Indira Varma) and Beth (Olivia Williams)

THEATRE

WILLIAM COOK

NYE

National Theatre, London, until IIth May

Michael Sheen, the talented Welsh actor, caused a bit of a kerfuffle last year, when he told the Telegraph, ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t Welsh.’

Some people (including me) thought this was rich, coming from a Welshman who’d made his name playing famous Englishmen such as Tony Blair, Brian Clough and David Frost. Surely pretending to be people who aren’t like you is what acting is all about?

Ironically, the problem with Sheen’s latest role isn’t that his character comes from another country. If anything, it’s that he’s too close to home.

After David Lloyd George, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan was the greatest Welsh statesman of the last century. Hailed as the father of the NHS (though William Beveridge, conspicuous by his absence in this drama, should share some of the credit), he was also a brilliant orator, in spite of an acute stammer.

Born into a poor mining family, he left school at 13 to go down the pit, pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and became a hero of the Labour movement, a champion of the working class.

In a recent radio programme, Sheen called Bevan ‘one of my all-time political heroes’. It’s one thing narrating a documentary about one of your heroes –quite another playing him onstage.

Like a lot of politicians, Bevan was a bruiser – a bellicose debater and a ruthless backroom operator. Churchill called him ‘a squalid nuisance’. Despite his humble origins (or maybe because of them), he enjoyed the high life. The press dubbed him the Bollinger Bolshevik.

Yet the Bevan in Tim Price’s play is far too saintly for my liking. Yes, he’s depicted as pugnacious and obstreperous, but there’s no real scrutiny of the vanity and self-destructiveness that blighted his career and helped keep Labour out of power throughout the 1950s.

The construction of Price’s play is ingenious. We begin in hospital, where Bevan is undergoing a routine operation for an ulcer, only for doctors to discover he has stomach cancer – from which he died, aged just 62. Drugged up with morphine, he slips into a hallucinatory trance, recalling the odyssey of his life, from Tredegar to Westminster.

It’s an inventive device, allowing for a powerful element of fantasy. Many of the

scenes have a surreal, almost Alice in Wonderland air (Sheen spends the entire play in his pyjamas, like a sleepwalker).

The dramatic possibilities are numerous and director Rufus Norris creates some striking set pieces. If only the central character was more nuanced.

In the early scenes, Sheen plays Bevan as a boy, and he never quite shakes off that boyish manner. Yes, Bevan had a high-pitched voice (which Sheen imitates perfectly), but he was a big bear of a man, an intimidating presence. Sheen has bulked up to play the part, but he remains childlike, almost innocent – an image at odds with the historical record.

You’d need to have a heart of stone not to sympathise with the hardship of Bevan’s early life: he was one of ten children, only five of whom survived, and his father died of pneumoconiosis (aka black lung), a deadly disease brought on by mineworking, for which the family received no compensation.

In these early scenes, Price’s Dickensian treatment is fair enough, but when Nye enters politics, it tips over into hagiography. There’s a Brechtian

flavour to these later scenes that feels drearily didactic.

This pedagogical approach is compounded by some colour-blind and gender-fluid casting. I know this is commonplace now, and normally I hardly notice it, but one place where it really jars is in historical dramas about real events and real people. Why on earth is Clement Attlee played by a woman in a bald wig?

The best character by far is Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, played with feisty passion by Sharon Small. This fiery Scottish socialist, who sacrificed her own career for her husband’s, would make a much better subject for a play.

Nye ends with a paean to the National Health Service. I’m eternally grateful to Bevan’s creation – it saved my son’s life and my daughter’s – but I can’t help feeling such a sentimental approach does this admirable institution no favours.

As the rest of the audience rose around me in a standing ovation, I was uncomfortably reminded of that embarrassing debacle during lockdown, when we all stood on our doorsteps applauding the NHS.

Welsh wizards: Nye Bevan, played by Michael Sheen

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

Some words I love to hear. ‘That was a Clive Brill production from Clive Brill Productions’ inspires confidence. You know this book will be well-read – viz Alan Cox, son of Brian, reading the new book about Sefton Delmer.

Or ‘The following programme was first broadcast 60 years ago.’ Hooray! A beautifully modulated voice heralds the poetry of Sylvia Plath, recorded by her in 1961, magically revived. And then Penelope Keith majestically guiding us through Great Dixter in Suffolk, and Gertrude Jekyll’s Munstead Wood, with Jekyll’s own words of wisdom. Radio, now 102 years old, is a priceless repository of the English spoken word.

Brian Redhead – strong on accent but, like Jim Naughtie, faultless in diction –once showed me his method. Redhead wrote things down, in short pithy phrases. ‘Here,/ on a wet Thursday afternoon / in 1651/, they hanged the Earl of Derby./ And not before time.’ It wasn’t to make it easier to read. He was determined, he said, ‘to cut out all superfluous babble’.

Radio reviewer’s ear, a nasty condition I have just invented, consists in hearing nothing but superfluous babble. Election year brings a plague of it: the same voices bobbing up on every station, spouting platitudes (‘With great respect…’), interrupting (‘If you’ll let me get a word in’) and solecisms.

My radio notebook, erstwhile repository of happy discoveries, makes for tragic reading. ‘Inaudible scribble.’ ‘Idiotic, ignorant.’ ‘Thanks for “holding fort”!’ ‘Choral reefs in the Pacific!’ ‘Between you and I.’ ‘Drawring.’ Who was that? What did he say?

‘Speak up!’

The switch-off button is triggered by shrill voices, especially American female ones, over-emphasising the word a-yand. Also by clichéd use of ‘toxic’, ‘traumatic’, ‘emotive’, ‘resonates’ and ‘from the get-go’. If you claim to have ‘agency’ or to be a ‘content-creator’, or mispronounce ‘aitch’ as ‘haitch’, off goes my switch. Then there’s the childish ‘Thank yey for having mey.’ Brandreth and Everett provide balm.

I remember Germaine Greer saying years ago that something terrible had happened to female vocal cords, to make them sound stupider. Instead of maturing at about ten, they acquire a babyish croak. Or a bold, shouty timbre of self-regard, such as was heard from an ‘interiors influencer’ recently on, I’m

sorry to say, Woman’s Hour. I’m sort of sorry to lose Emma Barnett, who gave time to women to tell terrible stories of the real pain of life – mothers forgiving their daughters’ killers, being ignored by supercilious medics, getting over the cruellest fates. But, also, I must point out that bewildered Oldie-readers have never understood why women now witter on about menopause, brain fog etc.

It’s all change at Radios 3 and 4. I am all for more collaboration. The best example of a combo is Radio 4’s Add to Playlist, produced by Jerome Weatherald, on Radio 4. It’s presented by Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye.

They introduce well-informed guests who can make adroit leaps between genres, countries and centuries: Bach’s Prelude in C Major played by András Schiff, is reminiscent of Gounod’s Ave Maria, written in 1853, one and a half centuries later … and a heavy inspiration for Lloyd-Webber’s Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina, 1974. Great game.

TELEVISION

FRANCES WILSON

Back in the nineties, novelist William Boyd invented an under-appreciated American painter called Nat Tate, who jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry on 8th January 1960.

Boyd’s hilarious mock-biography, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, was blurbed by David Bowie, who was in on the hoax. ‘The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph,’ wrote Bowie, ‘is that the artist’s most profound dread – that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist – did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate.’

Fanny: The Right to Rock (BBC4), written and directed by Bobbi Jo Hart, is the story of an under-appreciated all-girl rock band and it also begins with a quote by David Bowie: ‘One of the most important bands in American rock has been buried without trace … Revivify Fanny and I’ll feel my work is done.’

Having never heard of Fanny (in America, the word refers to the back rather than the front bottom) and wary of being tricked by another of Bowie’s spoofs, I assumed this documentary was a mockumentary.

But Fanny was an actual seventies garage band, consisting of two sisters, June and Jean Millington (bass, guitar, vocals), Alice de Buhr (drums, vocals), Brie Brandt (keyboards, drums) and Nickey Barclay (keyboard, vocals). They lived together in an LA mansion called

Fanny Hill, where Bob Dylan hung out in their kitchen, and Jean dated Bowie for a year.

Fifty years later, June, Jean and Brie – far from over the hill – have reunited to make a comeback album. We see them jamming away in their pyjamas with the amps turned up full, and bowling along in a yellow convertible, punching the air as they belt out one of their own numbers: ‘Girls on the road, girls on the go, doin’ what we do is gonna save our souls’. With big voices, heavy on the guitars, it’s the kind of dirty rock that gets the head banging.

They were the first all-women rock band to release an LP with a major record label (Warner/Reprise, 1970). The plan was to turn Fanny into the female Fab Four. This meant getting rid of Brie – who now looks like Debbie Harry. ‘They weren’t wearin’ miniskirts with their tits out,’ says Joe Elliot from Def Leppard. ‘It’s like this – a girl with an INSTRUMENT.’

According to former top UK music journalist Steve Peacock, ‘If you close your eyes, it’s like listening to the Stones.’ If they looked as buggered as the Stones, says Jean, there’s no way they would have been asked to record a new album.

Permanently on the cusp of fame, Fanny toured with Steely Dan, Chicago, Slade and Ike and Tina Turner, but in 1975, when their terrific single Butter Boy reached number 29 in the charts, they broke up.

The reason they never found their fan base, it seems, is that their record company had no idea how to market them. Half the group were lesbian and half Filipina. They had attitude and gusto and were absolutely bloody terrifying. The only question they were ever asked by interviewers is what it was like to be a woman playing a guitar/keyboard/set of drums.

‘All we had to do was get on stage,’ reflects Alice. ‘I knew I was going to get that bass drum right up the crotch. That’s where I wanted it’.

The film’s footage and soundtrack are great and the interviews are salty, but there are gaps in the story the size of the Grand Canyon. One moment, Joan and Jean are dressed in twinsets on the school stage, doing cover versions of pop songs. And the next, they’ve taught themselves to play like Jimi Hendrix and are rocking out with their own badass girl band. What happened in between?

The biggest hole in the film is the absence of Nickey Barclay. She’s not part of the reunion, nor is she interviewed. When her name comes up,

McLachlan

‘I see his lordship’s got the gout again’

Jean and Joan say they didn’t really know who Nickey was.

A mystery at the time, Nickey has since become a missing person – but I found an interview with her online which pieces together the full story.

‘I hated every hour of being in Fanny,’ Nickey says. Her reason, she says, for hating being in Fanny is that ‘I am one of the world’s most passionate misogynists. My “nurturing instincts” run strictly to keyboards, plants and small animals. I can’t abide the sound of most female singers, and I sure as Hell have never understood the female bonding/ sisterhood thing.’

Had the hell-raising Nickey Barclay been interviewed by Bobbi Jo Hart, this dutiful hagiography would have kicked ass and David Bowie’s work would have been done.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE RADIO 3 DUMBS DOWN

The new-look Radio 3, which launches on 2nd April, is being accused of dumbing down.

And, no, I’m talking about not BBC Radio 3 – more of it later – but BerlinBrandenburg’s cultural channel, rbbKultur, known in a previous incarnation as Radio 3.

This wasn’t the first German station to adopt a British name to polish its credentials. In 1962, Northwest German Radio and Sendes Freies Berlin joined forces to set up their Drittes Programm: a mix of classical music and high culture, modelled on the BBC’s world-renowned Third Programme, launched in 1946.

In 1967, the eventide Third Programme became the new dawn-todusk Radio 3 as part of a wholesale reform of BBC Radio. The director-general at the time was Hugh Carleton Greene, the same man who, in 1945, aged 34, had overseen the remaking of postwar German radio on BBC lines.

As part of the 1967 reform, Radio 1 was launched, devoted exclusively to a radically new kind of youth-driven popular music – much of it British in origin – that was rapidly becoming a global phenomenon. Whatever Greene’s private views, both

he and the BBC had no option but to reflect the tsunami of social and cultural change that was sweeping the country.

George Steiner, the philosopher, chronicled the phenomenon in his 1971 volume, In Bluebeard’s Castle. The question was, would this brash new insurgency eventually drive all other species of music to the social periphery, rather as the American grey squirrel was doing to our native red? The answer, in the fullness of time, would be yes.

Right top: Third Programme began in 1946. Right below: Pyschedelic, baby! Radio 1 launches

Which brings me back to our own Radio 3.

This month, it receives a historic makeover at the hands of BBC Music.

Since the former Radio 1 head, Lorna Clarke, took charge of BBC Music in 2021, it’s an outfit that’s been seen as – how shall I put it? – not entirely friendly to classical music.

How the revamp will affect listening habits and ‘ratings’ is not something most of us are going to lose any sleep over. Some listeners will continue listening, others will depart and new

ones will be bussed in – followers of Radio 2’s Friday Night Is Music Night, for instance, which relaunches on Radio 3 this month.

The most historically significant change is the ending of the late-evening discussion programme – arts-related and philosophically orientated – that has been a key element in the Third Programme/Radio 3 mix for the past 78 years.

What I found entirely missing from the digests of the proposed changes, both online and in print, was any indication of just how momentous the changes are for music itself. How, at a stroke, they drive a coach and horses through the principles that have always underpinned the BBC’s coverage of serious music.

From the outset, the broadcasting of classical music and opera was rooted in the corporation’s founding mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.

We see this in the array of famously long-running programmes that have provided a necessary complement to the broadcasting of the music itself. Such programmes as Composer of the Week (1943), Music Magazine, later Music Weekly (1944), Antony Hopkins’s Talking About Music (1954) and Record Review (1957).

The BBC’s first serious loss of nerve came when Classic FM launched in 1992. It was then that Music Weekly was replaced by Music Matters. The new programme inherited neither its all-important Sunday morning slot nor its presenter, the incomparable Michael Oliver, who had been inexplicably dropped.

At the same time, Radio 4 ditched Hopkins’s Talking About Music, whose impact on music education in the UK –first on the Third Programme and later on Radio 3 – was probably as great as that of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America in its own particular sphere. (There would been numerous attempts to axe that, too.)

Broadcasters never tire of telling us that scheduling is an art. And, my goodness, how ruthlessly it’s been deployed by BBC Music in this latest round of changes, with Music Matters, Composer of the Week and Record Review all kicked into the long grass of afternoon broadcasting.

Of these, the most serious for the classical music industry, is the moving of Record Review from 9am on Saturdays to the dead time of a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon.

On-message executives will have argued that few people listen in real

time any more and that CDs are a thing of the past; claims, where Record Review is concerned, that are demonstrably untrue.

I first contributed to Record Review in March 1971, shortly before its start time switched from 11.15 to 9am. It was a switch that delighted listeners before they set about their weekend business, and record companies and record outlets, which saw their sales climb exponentially as the morning progressed.

It’s said they still do. Or did until this month.

GOLDEN OLDIES

MARK ELLEN

BANDS ON THE RUN

The Brit Awards happened in March, but something was missing. There was a deafening absence of bands.

Part of the fabric of the UK’s music Oscars was that, at some point, a gaggle of stylishly dishevelled louts waving bottles of lager would shamble on stage to receive some gong or other. They would affect insouciance, swear a lot, lampoon any rock elders present, trash the government, remind you of the attraction of their freewheeling lifestyles, drop the microphone and beetle off to drain the after-show party.

I remember one awards where the combative singer of Oasis passed a seated Mick Jagger on his way to the spotlight and tapped ash on the old boy’s hair.

But all that seems to have evaporated. No one is in a tearing rush to form a group any more and the biggest streaming and record sales are mostly solo acts – Ed Sheeran, Drake, Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift.

Songwriters tended to form bands just to record and perform, but obviously you don’t need a drummer or bassist now if you can key their parts into a laptop.

Bands are notoriously hard to manage too – prickly, fiercely competitive types with bruisable egos. Why have one if you don’t

have to and can save a wad of cash in the process?

Does the same hunger exist to be in a band in the first place? In a digital world, the idea of physically lugging a ton of amplifiers and cymbals to some distant and malodorous rehearsal space seems too exhausting even to contemplate.

And if you did form a group, where are you going to play? The colossal ticket prices of the big acts have hoovered up the available cash and the old rock clubs and pub circuits are disappearing anyway.

But I think social media plays a part in this. The most powerful attraction about a band was the idea of being in a gang. The Faces, Thin Lizzy, Madness … they all looked like a posse of old pals you’d want to join: the brothers you never had; charismatic kindred spirits, us-againstthe-world renegades out to extract the maximum amusement from everything in their path, a fantasy vigorously promoted in the golden age of the NME and Melody Maker

But if you can link up with your closest friends in WhatsApp groups every day, doesn’t that give you the same sense of identity and comradeship?

Bands used to celebrate loudly the worlds they inhabited – hot and cold running booze, ‘herbal cigarettes’, guilt-free sex. Tweet about any of that now – if it still happens – and widespread condemnation will be your reward.

Maybe bands are just too complicated for the speed and narrow vision of modern media. They work only if you understand the characters involved and the fine detail of their joint artistic vision – and that belongs to the age when the music press could explain it all. Would anyone start anything as subtle, ambitious, maverick and original as the Doors, the Smiths, the Clash or Roxy Music in the impatient world of 2024? I doubt it.

The good news? We were born at the right time.

Mark Ellen edited The Word and presented Live Aid

STEPHEN WRIGHT / GETTY

Morrissey (left) and Johnny Marr of The Smiths, February 1985

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

AUGUSTUS JOHN AND THE FIRST CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE

Piano Nobile, London W11, 26th April to 13th July

When Augustus John (1878-1961) arrived at the Slade School of Art, he was ‘quiet, methodical and by no means remarkable’ – according to his teacher Henry Tonks.

Then, during the 1897 summer vacation, he smashed his head on rocks while swimming at Tenby. When he returned to the Slade, he was a changed character. By the end of his time there, William Rothenstein said he possessed ‘the eager understanding, the imagination, the readiness for intellectual and physical adventure one associates with genius’.

Several of his Slade contemporaries were particularly gifted, which gave rise to Tonks’s coinage ‘crisis of brilliance’. However, John’s draughtsmanship was exceptional even among them, and his wild Bohemian glamour established him as the archetype of an artist.

Between the wars, he was Britain’s pre-eminent portrait painter. But by 1938, Anthony Blunt could suggest he was to some extent frittering his talent: ‘John is almost as gifted as a painter can be. It is only because his gifts are so great that one is forced to judge him by the very highest standards, and it

Above

is only by such standards that he seems to fail.’

Despite the evident decline, his New York Times obituarist could still call him ‘the grand old man of British painting, and one of the greatest in British history’.

Post mortem, his reputation went down much further, partly owing to over-large studio sales which put far more of his work out onto the market than it could absorb. His prophecy that ‘in 50 years’ time, I will be known as the brother of Gwen John’ came true.

Without detracting in any way from

Left: Augustus John, Landscape in Wales, 1911-13; Below: Augustus John, Portrait of Percy Wyndham Lewis, 1905

Gwen’s rightful current eminence, it is now time for a rebalancing of Augustus’s reputation.

This show will be an excellent start. It demonstrates that his landscape paintings in the decade between his leaving the Slade and the First World War could be heart-stopping; they are dashed down with freedom and facility but are in no way facile. Particularly effective are those of the Arenig valley, North Wales, which he visited with fellow painter James Dickson Innes around 1910.

As well as paintings, drawings and etchings by John himself, the exhibition provides context by showing works by a number of his brilliant contemporaries, including Derwent Lees, Henry Lamb, Jacob Epstein, William Rothenstein, William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy – and of course, Gwen John.

THE ESTATE OF AUGUSTUS JOHN, COURTESY OF PIANO NOBILE, LONDON

At quia volora cus volumaditati ostrum rem reperum anis ex earum qui aut

Above: Gwen John, Sleeping Nun, 1914.

right: Derwent Lees, Lyndra, 1909

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER WELSH WONDERS

On a recent cold and blowy afternoon, I spent a few hours in a series of greenhouses, sniffing exotic scents and marvelling at the sheer abundance of flowering bulbous plants.

I was just a mile from the National Botanic Garden of Wales in south Carmarthenshire, in a hilly landscape renowned for its high rainfall – higher than ours nearer the coast, just half an hour away.

Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, the wild Stans and the Great Game’s distant steppe – places on the map I’d be hard put to lay a finger on.

My hosts are retired from the hellish nine-to-five tedium, now seemingly spending all their waking hours tending plants and running various local and national horticultural societies and their events. They’re travellers, too, imminently off botanising in the surprisingly floriferous wastes of Kurdistan.

Their assembly of mostly alpine bulbous plants is perhaps the UK’s largest privately-held collection, possibly exceeding in both number and rarity those at Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley.

From books, a lifetime’s gardening and my own comparatively few horticultural travels, I could easily identify miniature daffodils and dwarf tulips, diminutive irises and the fritillary, snowdrop and cyclamen clan. But of the individual species I was ignorant. I was trawling the pages of a botanical encyclopaedia, reading labels stuck into pots beside unspeakably beautiful plants, whose names were known to me only from rarefied periodicals and obscure websites.

Moreover, almost everything laid before me was grown from seed, from collecting excursions over many years to

The glasshouses were not heated, although some of the myriad pots they contained were plunged up to their rims in deep beds of sand through which warming electric cables had been laid. But most of the plants are cold-tolerant; lingering damp is their foe. Ventilation is therefore crucial. Some, needing more light than a Welsh sky can bestow, were helped along by overhead lights familiar to all you cannabis-growers.

Beyond the glasshouses there are several acres of intensively planted trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials and, yes, ever more bulbs. Hellebores of known and unknown provenance proliferate.

Snowdrops of many different kinds mingle with scillas, corydalis, trilliums, erythroniums, alliums and narcissi. Some Himalayan white- and buffstemmed birches and a venerable magnolia afford midsummer shade, while in March and April plentiful camellia bushes sway in full flower. A few rhododendrons were at the party, as was one of my own springtime favourites – Corylopsis pauciflora, decked out in small, primrose-yellow flowers on a mesh of bare twigs.

As with so many gardeners, generosity was at the fore. ‘We’ve got several pots of this – would you like one? That allium you admired, can I dig you a clump? Oh, and we have a surplus of cyclamen coum seedlings raised from seed from a recent trip to Greece. I’ll fetch some for you.’

While I learnt a great deal about little-known plants that afternoon, I

discovered even more about the pleasures of obsession. Dedicated to their botanical and horticultural interests, my chums threw Latin names at one another like competitive, well-tempered professors, exchanging fragments of plant stories dear to them both. Their memories are keen; their recall impressive. It keeps them young. It beats sudoku.

Over tea and cake in the warm kitchen, we reminisced about our various travels. At different times, we had covered some of the same ground – memorably the Golan Heights, mindful of unexploded ordnance, and that flank of south-eastern Lebanon studded with Crusader castles perched among groves of wild flowers.

Alas, my passport gathers dust in a drawer these days; theirs do not.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTALD GRAPES

At the last count, there were about 900 vineyards in Britain (the vast majority in southern England), growing a total of almost 10,000 acres of grapevines. As the remarkable increase in the amount of land planted with vines – 75 per cent over the last five years – is at least partly attributable to the warming climate, gardeners should surely be encouraged to grow more grapes for eating.

As a result of not only the change in climate but also the introduction of modern varieties, it is now possible to grow what are called dessert grapes outside – ideally against a south-facing wall or fence.

They can be more reliably grown, however, in a cold greenhouse. The Royal Horticultural Society advises planting the vine just outside a greenhouse with

Corylopsis pauciflora

the stems trained inside through a gap near ground level.

This is supposed to help keep the vine well-watered, though I can imagine myself tripping over the base of the plant. The safer alternative is to plant at the far end of the greenhouse and train the stems horizontally towards the door.

Pomona Fruits in Essex will supply vines in three-litre containers throughout the year, each costing about £20. ‘Muscat Bleu’ is recommended for taste and resistance to disease, while ‘Boskoop Glory’ is said to crop outdoors even in northern gardens. Seeded grapes tend to do better than seedless varieties.

A grapevine does require patience. For the first two years, it is best to remove all the flowers so that the plant’s energy is concentrated on its getting established. Then allow no more than four bunches of grapes to grow over the next two years.

The number of bunches on each stem should be controlled, and the grapes in each bunch may need to be thinned; nail scissors are useful for this job. Pruning should be done during early winter, when the vine is dormant, and no later than January.

To see what can be achieved with an exceptionally mature vine, it is worth visiting Hampton Court Palace, where the Great Vine, planted in 1768, produces about 600 pounds of fruit every year.

COOKERY

ELISABETH LUARD ASPARAGUS TIPS

Strawberries, I think – don’t you?

Try the first of the field-grown crop, warm from the spring sunshine, eaten with thick yellow cream and soft brown sugar and a fistful of buttery shortbread, or a ginger biscuit with a cracked top.

Don’t overlook our home-grown asparagus, fat and green and fresh from Kent, Herefordshire, Dorset or somewhere near you, cooked plain with melted butter, a lemony hollandaise, or with this year’s pressing of olive oil, grassy and bittersweet, with just a pinch of sea salt on the tongue.

No time to lose. Spring is over all too soon.

Steamed asparagus with no-fuss hollandaise

Nothing to it, really. Just don’t overcook the asparagus – it’s a delicate flower –and prepare your hollandaise like mayonnaise but with melted butter rather than oil. Easy. Serves two greedy people.

Enough asparagus of similar size –say a pound per person

For the hollandaise

1 tbsp lemon juice

3 egg yolks (save the whites for the strawberries)

About 350g unsalted butter

Salt

Rinse and trim the asparagus, scraping off tough woody stalks, and leave in cold water with a few chunks of ice while you prepare the hollandaise.

Mix the lemon juice, egg yolks and a tablespoon of warm water in the liquidiser or processor for ten seconds – just long enough to blend. Melt the butter gently in a small pan till it oils (it should bubble but not brown).

With the motor running, gradually add the hot butter to the egg and lemon in a thin stream, leaving the milky residue behind in the pan, till smooth and thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon.

For extra thickening, transfer to a bowl set over a panful of simmering water and whisk gently, as for a custard. If it looks like curdling, remove and set the base over ice water, whisking at it cools with a spoonful of thick yoghurt or cream.

Place the asparagus in a bundle, tips uppermost, in a roomy pot in enough boiling, salted water to come two thirds of the way up the stalks. Bubble up, then simmer till the stalks are just tender but the tips are still firm – 10 to 20 minutes, depending on thickness. Drain on a napkin folded over on a warm plate, with the sauce kept warm in a bowl over warm water.

Strawberries and cream with balsamic vinegar

A simple dessert of strawberries and cream lightened with egg white, orange juice and a drop of balsamic. The real thing, as they take it in Modena – a dark, treacly, viscous, crazily expensive elixir made with unfermented grape must by the solera method, as conveyed to Florentine princesses on marriage to Medicis. Magic. Serves 4-5.

1kg ripe strawberries, dusted over and hulled

1 orange – its juice and grated zest

About 300ml double cream, whipped 2 egg whites, whisked stiff 3-4 tbsps caster sugar

Balsamic vinegar of Modena, aged five years or more

Reserve a few of the most perfect berries for finishing, and purée the rest in the liquidiser with the orange juice. Fold the cream with the whisked egg whites, sugar and orange zest, then fold in the strawberry purée till delicately and not too thoroughly blended. Chill for an hour or two.

Spoon into your best glasses (of course), and finish with the reserved strawberries. Have the balsamic separately – the real thing comes with a dropper. And if this year’s budget won’t stretch to a 12-yearold Modena, it’s the thought that counts.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE LE CAPRICE REVISITED

Jeremy King has had identical twins. Fortythree years apart: Le Caprice in 1981 and, now, last month, Arlington. On the same site.

Returning there was like the closing sequence of Titanic when ‘old’ Rose descends to the sea bed in her dreams to the monochrome wreck, which is suddenly restored in glorious Technicolor to its 1912 glory. And all the original crew are there to meet her on the staircase.

Likewise, all Jeremy’s very own Magnificent Seven are there, including Jesus, the original maître d’, who has been beautifully preserved in olive oil for the last five years, Graziano from Colbert and Eric from the Ivy. Mario Gallati, who launched the restaurant in 1947 with the backing of Ivor Novello and Terence Rattigan, must be having a few celebratory Negronis upstairs.

The menu is the same, too: that crispyduck salad, the nuttiest bang bang chicken and very fishy salmon fishcakes for just £22.50. But you won’t be going for the food, will you? You’re going to relive those happy lunches of the ’80s and ’90s, when Princess Di and Elton John would sit ten feet away, when you knew that you and only 80 other diners were at the epicentre of London. Unlike at that other star-spotting venue, the Wolseley, with its treble-height ceilings, at low-ceilinged Le Caprice you can get up close and personal with the very, very famous, pretending not to rubberneck at the spectacle of Jeffrey Archer and, yes, little Rachel Johnson.

But here’s the rub: famous people are now selfied everywhere. So seeing them au naturel is anticlimactic. Who would render

ELISABETH LUARD

you genuinely speechless if you saw them?

For me, Michael Caine. Yet if I could save up £100,000, I could have lunch at River Café every day – well, for a month – and, eventually, he would stroll right past me.

I discovered Catch in Weymouth in late November but had to put my review on ice. Then, blow me, Giles Coren tells a million Britons foolish enough to read the Times, ‘I think I just went to the best restaurant in the world.’

So the secret is out. Here’s what I wrote. ‘I have just had the best lunch this year. Not in London, Bristol, Manchester or, even, Brighton but in dear Weymouth. Local mates took us to Catch in the Old Fish Market. I’ve always loved the Esplanade at Weymouth, whose golden Georgian front rivals that of any other resort on the south coast and whose finale is the Technicolor statue of the town’s patron saint, George III.

‘But the town’s hidden gem is the old harbour, lined on both sides of the River Wey with a rainbow of bay-fronted houses. It was from here that the American landing craft set sail on D-Day. Padstow pales in its wake. Winter is the best time of the year to visit: no crowds and lots of parking.

‘Here, right by the fishing boats, lies a restaurant serving the very best seafood in an unpretentious roof space, above the fishmonger. Our four-course menu for £40 included Portland crab dumpling and crab broth, poached oyster in a barbecued leek and potato tart, and pan-fried sea bass with celeriac chowder. I even enjoyed their orange wine.

‘We weren’t too full to enjoy the pudding of praline mousse, hazelnut cake and sourdough ice cream. I defy any of you to eat this well at this price anywhere else in Britain in 2024.’

DRINK

BILL KNOTT

FLYING WINE-MAKERS

The film Mondovino, released 20 years ago, ruffled more than a few famous feathers. Jonathan Nossiter’s Palme d’Or-nominated documentary took globalisation in wine as its subject, lamenting the influence of such gurus as critic Robert Parker and consultant –‘flying’ – wine-maker Michel Rolland.

His central criticism, to summarise nearly three hours of footage, is that Parker, Rolland and a host of others in the wine business are to blame for standardising wines to suit an unsophisticated global palate in which sweetness and oakiness are prized above terroir or individuality.

Nossiter’s subsequent book – Le Goût et le Pouvoir (Taste and Power) – fanned flames still further.

The unrepentant Parker, in turn, described Nossiter as a ‘narrow-minded zealot’, one of the ‘scary wine Gestapo’. ‘Anyone with half a chimp’s brain,’ he fumed, ‘can see through Nossiter’s transparency easier than a J J Prüm Riesling.’

The sound and the fury have abated, but the dispute about the influence of consultant wine-makers rumbles on. I was reminded of this at a recent tasting hosted by another ‘flying wine-maker’, Pascal Chatonnet, who worked with Michel Rolland and consulted for some of the greatest names in wine, including Vega Sicilia and Cos d’Estournel.

A graduate in oenology from the University of Bordeaux, a trained scientist who knows more about wine faults and oak barrels than you could shake a bâton at, Chatonnet has matured from a Young Turk into an avuncular éminence grise

He rejects the notion that consultant wine-makers must necessarily make wines in their own image. Waving an arm around the tasting room, in which more than 40 of his wines from eight different wineries were on show, he said, ‘These wines are all very different. If you could taste a wine and say, “Ah, this is a Chatonnet wine,” then I have failed.’

He had a point. Working my way round the room and tasting wines from Portugal, Spain, France, Israel and Hungary, I found no hint of a ‘one size fits all’ approach. If Chatonnet’s ministrations have one constant theme, it is to make sure that the wineries in which he works are clean and can consistently produce top-notch wine. As his inner scientist might put it, he tries to eliminate as many variables in the equation as possible.

The wines from Vega Sicilia – the Valbuena 5* 2018 and the Unico 2013 – were predictably rich, complex, savoury and delicious, although, at £131 and £340 respectively, only for the most deep-pocketed oenophiles. For more modest budgets, I loved the wines from Quinta do Portal, especially the Colheita and the Reserva. Both are made from a blend of Tinta Roriz (aka Tempranillo, one of Chatonnet’s favourite varieties) and Touriga Nacional, the port grape, and both have a refreshing juiciness as well as plenty of power. The Reserva, in particular, seems built to last.

Both wines I tried were from the 2021 vintage, which should find its way to the UK soon. In the meantime, you might try the Colheita 2020 (henningswine.co.uk, £19.95) or the Reserva 2020 (grapeandgrind.co. uk, £27.50). You might also raise a glass to the affable, talented M Chatonnet and his one-man crusade to save the world from badly-made wine.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a low-alcohol delight from northern Portugal, a pale and interesting Pinot from Romania, and a well-structured Bordeaux to partner a Sunday roast. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Vinho Verde Lago Cerqueira, Portugal 2023, offer price £8.95, case price £107.40

A mere ten-per-cent ABV: eminently gluggable with a light spritz. Perfect gardening wine.

Lautarul Pinot Noir, Romania 2022, offer

£8.99, case price £107.88

Another of Bristolian Phil Cox’s excellent efforts: light, chillable Pinot with bags of fruit.

Château Daviaud, Bordeaux Rouge 2020, offer price £11.50, case price £138.00

Modern, classy, fruit-forward claret: ripe and fresh, with a hint of spice.

SPORT

JIM WHITE

CARRY ON REFEREEING

I have a new sporting hero.

In fact, he is more than just a personal paragon. He’s a role model for everyone – someone whose spirit and endeavour set an example across the nation. Not that you’ll see him recognised in halls of fame or awards ceremonies.

Instead, you’ll have to head up to Sheffield, where, three times a week on the city’s artificial football pitches, you can find him, in his shorts and boots, a couple of pencils tucked into his kneelength socks, going through his extensive pre-match stretching routine.

Come shine or – more likely, this being Yorkshire – rain, Frank Foster is out there belting around a football pitch, flourishing his cards, keeping the city’s young footballers in order. Frank has a particular distinction: he is the oldest football referee in Britain. And here’s the thing: at 90 he has no plan to hang up his whistle any time soon.

‘I just love it,’ he says. ‘I’m up and down like a yo-yo. When it comes to age, I say, “Forget how old you are.” Do what you can as long as you can.’

Frank was once a pretty useful player himself. Then, back in 1951, when he was doing his national service with the RAF, during a game he suffered serious ligament damage to his knee and had to retire from playing. He took up coaching instead.

But he felt frustrated watching from the sidelines, wanting to get back out there in the action. So he sat his refereeing examinations, passed with 98 per cent and in 1980 slipped on a black shirt for the first time. Forty-four years later, he’s still at it. He has presided over more than 5,000 matches, in men’s, women’s, boys’ and girls’ football. As long as there’s a match on, Frank will be there to keep order.

Not that he finds it hard. In an era when referees seem to be the invariable target of displeasure, nobody abuses him or tries to trick him. He is strict, but not bossy or fussy, preferring to control by consent rather than diktat. But then he has a natural authority over things –which, he reckons, comes from his age.

‘I love it because you’re making players abide by the rules,’ he says.

Pretty much the only issues he has are from mouthy parents during youth games. If there is a particularly vociferous mum or dad voicing off on the touchline, he will step over and warn them that he will stop the game if they don’t keep quiet. Almost invariably they do. Only twice, across his four decades of keeping control, has he been obliged to curtail things.

One thing does always happen, though: after every match, someone will ask him how old he is.

‘I usually say, “How old do you think I am?”’ he says. ‘The other week someone said “67” – which was very flattering. But I think they were only being polite.’

Not that he is entirely polite when describing the performance of the professional referees he sees on television. While the rest of us may concentrate on goals and saves, his eye is on the offsides and free kicks. And he finds some of what he sees frustrating.

‘I think they should let the game flow more,’ he says. ‘People want to see the action, not the stoppages.’

With an attitude like that, the authorities should do the right thing and put Frank in charge of the FA Cup Final this May. He would certainly be up for it.

‘I want to carry on and on,’ he says of his officiating. ‘When I find I can’t keep up with the players, I’ll go back to coaching. That or I’ll buy a moped.’

MOTORING ALAN JUDD

BIG BROTHER WATCHES YOU DRIVE

Two intriguing events happened recently.

In 2017, Elon Musk jokingly claimed that as Teslas become increasingly autonomous, the flick of a switch could send them all to Rhode Island. And in 2022, Russian troops captured a Ukrainian dealership in John Deere tractors. As usual, the Russians looted what they hadn’t destroyed, taking the tractors 700 miles away to Chechnya.

Both events were recalled by Isabel Hilton in Prospect magazine Although not normally a watering hole for petrol-heads, this issue contained some startling motoring facts and predictions. Hilton revealed what Musk did not: that Tesla had already tested their systems to see whether someone could hack into them and cause such carnage, using a ‘white-hat hacker’ – who proved it could be done.

With the John Deeres, something very like it was done. Those green monsters are all connected to the internet, with sensors telling them where to turn in a field while analysing soil moisture, density, humidity etc. The Ukrainian dealership tracked them to Chechnya and then, using their VINs (Vehicle Identification Numbers – your car has one too), flicked the kill switch, immobilising them permanently.

Connectivity is the point here. Cars are becoming increasingly connected via systems such as lane assist, autonomous

cruise control, over-the-air modifications and even your good old satnav.

This is especially true of electric vehicles (EVs) and in many ways we ain’t seen nothing yet. In China, there are ‘smart’ cities, where cars ‘talk’ to traffic lights and are guided by lines in the roads. A fleet of such EVs could map an entire city in real time, sharing that knowledge with – well, whoever can get into the system. The Chinese government already sees Teslas, with their cameras and geolocation sensors, as a security threat, banning them from military and other sensitive areas.

So what? If such systems make us more law-abiding and lead to safer and more efficient traffic movement, why not?

The problem is they bring with them their own vulnerabilities. Criminal hackers with ransom demands and hostile state actors are constantly probing weaknesses; advances in security and new weaknesses leapfrog one another. Institutions think their systems are secure until suddenly they’re not (ask the British Library).

And there’s China. Having welcomed Tesla and VW into their markets, and learned from them, a single Chinese firm – BYD – is now outselling Tesla worldwide. The Chinese government subsidised EV and battery development to the tune of $29bn, and now half the world’s 12 million EVs have been sold in China, three million by BYD alone.

Subsidies have ended – so the Chinese have mounted a serious export drive; they’re building a fleet of 200 car-transport ships with a capacity of 8,000 cars each. One ship carrying 5,000 EVs is on its way to Europe now.

They’ll be cheaper than anything produced in the West and probably of acceptable quality. People will buy them: the German government wants 15 million EVs on the road by 2030 – impossible without Chinese imports.

Does this matter? Only if you worry about the demise of the European –especially German – motor industry. And if you worry about the vulnerabilities of connectivity. Chinese companies are obliged by law to co-operate with their security authorities and not to reveal they’re doing so, which is partly why the EU banned Huawei 5G technology.

But those EVs contain Huawei modules – also solar panels, windmills, charging networks and household smart meters. It’s not only that hostile states or criminals could eavesdrop on you – they could bring about national paralysis.

Alarmist exaggeration? Maybe – most things may never happen, as Philip Larkin observed. But don’t forget all those John Deeres, quietly rusting away in Chechnya.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Mobile phones – the hidden charges

or phone provider. It stays there, and a copy is sent on to the equivalent in your recipient’s services. It will keep it and send another copy to your friend.

Not so much the phone itself, although there are plenty of rare elements in it, but the various services it is connected to, especially data centres.

Every time you send an email, a WhatsApp or a picture, the original stays on your phone and a copy passes into the big computers run by your email service,

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

oldbaileyonline.org

Searchable records of 197,752 trials from 1674-1913. Find the family outcast.

nationalarchives.gov.uk/ trafalgarancestors/

The National Archive list of all who served Britain in the Battle of Trafalgar, with some biographical details.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

So, there now exist at least four copies of the message. But there are actually far more, because every company will have created backup copies of the message, as you may have done yourself without realising it. Most phones automatically back up your messages to somewhere in the ether – invaluable when you lose or change your phone – and that backup will itself be backed up, too. No doubt the recipient’s phone is doing the same thing.

So now we have at least eight, and probably more, copies of the message or picture. And they all take up computer space in big data centres somewhere.

These are usually anonymous, windowless, highly secure warehouses, which need lots of electricity to power them and lots of water to cool them down. To give you an idea of scale, Google has announced a new data centre in Hertfordshire that will occupy 33 acres – about 16 football pitches.

These warehouses, collectively, are what has become known as the Cloud.

Here your phone is making its silent but significant contribution to the use of the world’s energy resources. The amount of data stored worldwide is thought to be going to increase by at least 25 per cent per annum. The International Energy Agency thinks global demand for electricity from data centres could double in four years.

The problem is especially stark in parts of the world that have encouraged the growth of a digital industry.

Ireland, for example, has become home to many large digital corporations, attracted by the low-tax regime. No doubt that seemed like a good idea at the time, but it has meant that in 2022 almost 20 per cent of Ireland’s electricity was sucked in by data centres, and the figure is growing. To put that in context, in the UK, data centres soaked up only one per cent of our electricity in 2023.

The Irish electricity grid has been forced to stop supplying new connections for data centres in Dublin until at least 2028. It is not alone; Germany and Singapore have also introduced similar restrictions.

This flies in the face of most governments’ desire to digitise government business. There will likely be a clash of heads between the digitisers and the electricity-suppliers at some point.

There is undeniably a fast-growing demand for data centres. I don’t see how it can be curbed; we all want them. But they will, in turn, need more power and water to meet our demands. Everyone using a phone or an online computer is feeding this growth, even if they don’t know it.

So when you are next scolded for driving a diesel car, ask your accuser to consider their own contribution to the depletion of the world’s resources through the innocent-looking little phone in their hands.

Neil Collins: Money Matters Metals lose lustre

There is nothing like a good scare story to grab the attention of readers.

Perhaps you saw the recent analysis of how Russia and China were the biggest producers of some of the metals that are vital for the batteries in electric cars. China is restricting some exports, while we would rather not be beholden to Russia for anything.

The latest metal that is high fashion for the traders is uranium. This is probably not because it’s the raw material Next time somebody criticises you for doing something ecologically evil such as owning a car or using a log-burner, ask them to glance at the phone in their hand – and consider how much energy, water and raw materials it is using up.

for atomic bombs, but the dramatic rise in price reflects the realisation that if we are ever going to wean ourselves off oil and gas (we won’t), then much more nuclear power is going to be needed.

The UK government, displaying its usual Pollyanna approach,

has even set out targets for future nuclear generation. The politicians may even believe their fantasy numbers, although we know they won’t be met. However, fear has driven a

Copper-ore mining in Chile

spectacular bull market in yellowcake, or uranium oxide. According to dailymetalprice.com, the price has gone from $30/lb in 2021 to $105 today.

This sort of rise helps fuel the myth that we are running out of raw materials. You may be surprised, but it is a myth.

Here are a few key metal prices: copper has risen by just 20 per cent in the last decade. Cobalt costs the same today as in 2016. Lithium (remember the scramble to find supplies?) rose from under $5/lb in 2021 to $37/lb in 2022.

Price today: about $6/lb. Mines are being closed all over the place.

It’s the same story with most other exotic metals, as well as everyday ones such as nickel, which is the same price today as in 2021.

I could go on, but you get the point. We are not running out of anything. The earth is a closed system, and all we do is churn the ingredients. Metals have been a rotten long-term investment, and there is only one rule in commodities: today’s shortage is tomorrow’s glut.

'Just follow the sound of the can-opener'

'Don't give me too much – I'm terrible with money'

The Whitethroat

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

From Home-Thoughts, from Abroad by Robert Browning

The whitethroat (Sylvia communis) remains (with 1.1 million UK territories) the fourth most populous of the summer migrant warblers.

The best time to see them is on their April arrival, the male puffing his white throat feathers into a beard to proclaim his presence from a prominent perch.

John Clare’s The Happy Bird romantically identifies the female as the singer:

The happy white throat on the sweeing bough

Swayed by the impulse of the gadding wind

That ushers in the showers of April – now

Singeth right joyously and now reclined Croucheth and clingeth to her moving seat

To keep her hold – and till the wind for rest

Pauses – she mutters inward melodies

That seem her heart’s rich thinkings to repeat

And when the branch is still – her little breast

Swells out in raptures gushing symphonies

And then against her blown wing softly prest

The wind comes playing as an enraptured guest

This way and that she sways – till gusts arise

More boisterous in their play – when off she flies.

As with the more numerous blackcap and chiffchaff warblers, the whitethroat’s descriptive name came long before its scientific identity – with the blackcap, it is one of the Sylvia species.

Among the least shy warblers, whitethroats will sing on the wing, sometimes climbing to a height

and dancing as if attached to an invisible yo-yo.

In the usual way of migration, males arrive first to claim a territory. They even build a nest before a female makes herself available. Fidelity to the chosen mate lasts the season, before migration reshuffles the pack.

Often three nests are built, the one selected finished with the female’s help and lined with hair. Egg-laying begins in mid-May, with second broods possible from late June and through July.

The 18th-century enclosure acts did it a favour. Nettle-fringed hedgerows are a favourite singing and nesting site. In British Birds, Francesca Greenoak writes how that earned the whitethroat the old name of ‘nettle creeper’. One reason for the high population is its adaptability to nesting in gorse, tussocks and reeds, too.

Its strongholds are in southern and middle England, with a pronounced inclination to the east. They dwindle in coastal sites north of Northumberland and are rare beyond the Moray Firth. Uplands and their margins in Wales, Scotland and Ireland are in the main lightly occupied, compared with eastern densities – notably in East Anglia, where whitethroats can linger into November.

In 1969, an African drought led to a 75 per cent drop in numbers, from which it is still fully to recover.

The lesser whitethroat (Sylvia curruca)’s 79,000 UK territories are centred on southern and central England. Grey rather than pale brown legs are distinctive, and it is the lesser songster. Despite migrating via the eastern Mediterranean, in recent years it has been seen in Cornwall, Wales and southern Scotland.

Caravaggio’s ghost

As a new show opens in London, William Cook visits Naples in the perilous steps of the dashing, murderous artist

In a twilit corner of the Gallerie d’Italia, a bombastic, fascistic building on the grungy Via Toledo in Naples, there hangs the last picture ever painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, enfant terrible of Renaissance art.

Painted here in Naples in 1610, shortly before he died, aged 38, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is as dramatic as any of Caravaggio’s previous paintings – but there’s something fatalistic about it; a feeling that the game of life is up. Fatally wounded, Saint Ursula gazes at the arrow in her chest with weary resignation, as if death will be a welcome release.

Behind her is Caravaggio – his

last self-portrait – but while his previous self-portraits are energetic, here he looks distracted, disengaged and sickly.

A few weeks before, he’d been attacked outside a local brothel and left horribly disfigured – probably in revenge for one of his numerous misdemeanours. Like Saint Ursula, he looks tired of living – a walking ghost.

For the next few months, you can see this riveting painting at London’s National Gallery, in a new show, The Last Caravaggio. To really get to know Caravaggio, go to Naples. Lively and unruly, this restless city has the same personality as the man himself.

Born in Milan in 1571, Caravaggio

spent only two years in Naples – from 1606 to 1607, and from 1609 to 1610 –but these were two of the most colourful and productive years of his short life.

Both times, he arrived here as a fugitive from justice. In 1606, he came to escape a murder rap after killing a pimp in a duel in Rome. In 1609, he came here from Sicily after escaping from Malta, where he’d been imprisoned by the Knights of St John.

Caravaggio came to Naples because at that time the city was ruled by the King of Spain. While he remained here, he couldn’t be arrested for his homicide in Rome or his other offence in Malta (yet another duel, it seems; notoriously hotheaded, he was incapable of staying out of trouble).

Even though the law couldn’t touch him, he wasn’t safe. As that brutal assault outside the brothel proved, his enemies could still reach him. This sense of danger is endemic in all the pictures he painted here.

Around the corner from the Gallerie d’Italia is an even better Caravaggio – even more arresting, because it’s still in the Pio Monte della Misericordia, the chapel for which it was made. Painted in 1607, during his first stay in Naples, The Seven Acts of Mercy depicts the seven Christian acts of charity. Though his figures are dynamic, it’s their setting that makes them live and breathe. Rather than being a church or a palazzo, the location is a dark street corner, the sort of scene you’d find right outside the door today.

See Naples and die: the Bay of Naples, with Vesuvius beyond

When Caravaggio came to Naples, it was one of the biggest cities in Europe, with a population of 300,000, three times the size of Rome. Founded by the Ancient Greeks, it’s one of the oldest cities in the Western world.

Though it’s now a modern metropolis, with a million inhabitants, in its labyrinthine alleyways the past feels very close. Tall apartment blocks shut out the light and the narrow streets swarm with people, spilling out of bars. These rugged men and sultry women could have stepped out of one of Caravaggio’s paintings. He’d still feel at home here. He’d recognise this scene straight away.

Naples is not a pretty place, but it’s intensely invigorating – a caffeine rush for the senses: burly blokes on Vespas zigzag through the backstreets; every inch of every wall is adorned with graffiti. There are some stunning murals, but most of this ‘street art’ is downright ugly. Yet if Naples was any tidier, it would probably be overrun with tourists. There’s a smattering of sightseers, but none of the big tour groups you get in Venice.

Unlike in a lot of smarter cities, its historic city centre remains a residential neighbourhood – not for wealthy yuppies, but for ordinary people like you and me. The balconies are strewn with washing lines, clothes drying in the sunshine like pennants at a carnival. Up above, the sun is fierce, but the alleys below are cool and dank.

There’s a film-noir feel about Naples, like the setting for a murder mystery, but I didn’t find it menacing, even late at night. It can become very claustrophobic – that is why my hotel, the San Francesco al Monte, on a steep hill above the old town, is such a fine retreat.

A monastery for several centuries, it became a school in 1969 and then a hotel 30 years ago, but its holy ambience prevails. The building still contains a chapel and other religious relics, including the cell where San Giovan Giuseppe della Croce, patron saint of Ischia, lived for 12 years.

From the rooftop terrace, you get a stunning view over the Bay of Naples, framed by Mount Vesuvius and the rolling hills beyond. Watching the big ships chugging in and out of the busy harbour, I thought of all the other ships that had sailed in and out of here before.

‘From my little room, I could see a great scene,’ wrote Frà Guglielmo da Entrevaux in his diary in 1612. ‘The whole city and its Gulf in front of my eyes.’ Four hundred years later, not a lot has changed.

The hotel restaurant serves a good selection of local staples: cured meats, battered seafood – how do Neapolitans stay so slim? In the penthouse bar of Vesuvio, I wolfed down a delicious burrata. At 117 Toledo, above the Gallerie d’Italia, I sampled picturesque little portions of eel and octopus.

The best thing about Neapolitan cuisine is its no-nonsense street food – a slice of pizza from a basic hole-in-the-wall cafeteria, or a seductive pastry and a potent espresso (the coffee is superb).

I’d planned to finish my Caravaggio pilgrimage at the Palazzo Reale di Capodimonte, a flamboyant Bourbon palace in a lush garden above the city, which houses a colossal haul of fine art.

There’s an impressive range of Old Masters and a large collection of Caravaggisti, those 17th-century painters who followed in the footsteps of the bad boy of Italian art.

Among these paler imitators are several canvases by Mattia Preti, to whom The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was misattributed until 1980, when an old letter was discovered which proved it was by Caravaggio himself.

Normally, the museum’s star attraction is Caravaggio’s The Flagellation of Christ, which he painted in 1607 during his first stay in Naples.

Until the end of May, it’s at the Museo Diocesano, in a baroque church in the old town down below. It’s always far more moving seeing religious art in a religious setting, rather than a secular gallery. In a place where people have worshipped for centuries, this violent, poignant masterpiece feels especially powerful.

Caravaggio never recovered from that sadistic hit job outside the brothel. A few weeks later, he left for Rome, convinced he’d receive a pardon from the Pope, but his horrific mutilation (which left him almost unrecognisable) had weakened him, and he died of fever on the way.

Rome has a better claim to him – he spent 14 years there and barely two here in Naples – but it’s in this grimy, intoxicating city that his rebellious spirit lives on.

Doubles at Hotel San Francesco al Monte (www.hotelsanfrancesco.it) from €180, including breakfast. The Last Caravaggio is at the National Gallery, London (www. nationalgallery.org.uk) from 18th April to 21st July; admission free

Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610

The Seven Acts of Mercy, 1607

BLUEJAYPHOTO / GETTY; ARCHIVIO PATRIMONIO ARTISTICO INTESA SANPAOLO

Overlooked Britain

The Yorkshire Versailles

Medieval Fountains Abbey is nestled in Studley Royal’s 18th-century landscape

lucinda lambton

Studley Royal Park is an 800-acre estate. It includes the ruins of Fountains Abbey – named after the six springs that watered the site.

The abbey was founded in 1132 by Benedictine monks. They had left St Mary’s Abbey, York, to follow the Cistercian order.

Their leader St Benedict’s rule was a firm one: ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul. For this reason, the brethren should be occupied at certain times in manual labour; at other times, in sacred reading.’

Fountains became wealthy through wool production, lead mining, cattlerearing and stone quarrying. After the Dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, the abbey buildings were sold by the crown to Sir Richard Gresham, whose family stayed at the helm until 1598.

As a scholarly bonus, the gardens and the park were to reflect every stage in the evolution of English garden design. If that were not enough, it has some of the largest Cistercian abbey ruins in Europe, as well as the ruins of a Jacobean mansion and a Victorian church, designed by the great architect William Burges. Hurray for such a wealth of

Heavenly: Fountains Abbey, founded in 1132 by 13 monks

wonders! Since 1983, Fountains Abbey has been owned by the National Trust.

Between them, Studley Royal and Fountains Abbey encompass one of the finest assemblies of buildings in the country. Furthermore, they are set down in an exquisitely beautiful parkscape.

This also has – blow me down – a deer park, abundantly full of creatures; so numerous that when they stirred, they were once described as a ‘moving forest’.

There was once a glorious water garden, too. It was all the work of John Aislabie, a Chancellor of the Exchequer who created it from 1720 until his death in 1742. Two beautiful little buildings, most pleasingly known as the Fishing Tabernacles, date from the late-17th century.

The tabernacles’ windows were opened for angling. You could catch mainly trout, grayling and roach. The salmon were killed off by the neighbouring cascade.

Aislabie was, catastrophically, the first and principal sponsor of the world’s first financial crash, the South Sea Bubble.

When the bubble burst, so did he! Accused of ill-gotten gains, he was decried by parliament as most ‘notorious and dangerous with infamous corruption’. He was expelled from the House and incarcerated in the Tower.

Nearly every cloud, though, however dark, has a silver lining. Aislabie’s forced,

humiliating retirement sent him north, where he was to toil with his admirable plans of beautifying his estate by Fountains Abbey.

Later, his son bought the adjoining estate of Fountains Abbey, adding the sublime 12th-century ruins to the fold. Father and son could claim to have created heaven on earth.

There was a bathing house, a boathouse, a grotto and an octagon tower with fancy stucco work, as well as temples and scenic foot paths galore. A private garden with an aviary gave a good deal of pleasure. There were two ice houses, as well as a Gothic garden room and a statuary scheme. At one point, 100 gardeners were employed on the job.

With the River Skell flowing through his parkland, Aislabie was off to a picturesque flying start. He created cascades and a lake – in fact, a reservoir – as well as a canal, over which he built a rustic bridge.

The Temple of Piety is a real beauty of a building, standing over the round Moon Pond, flanked by two crescent pools, all still cut out of the turf with exquisitely sharp delineation. Aislabie is thought to have been helped in his great endeavours by the renowned architect Colen Campbell.

It was then that John Aislabie created the greatest shock of all: one that could make you pass out with excitement.

Called the Surprise View, that is precisely what it was: a panorama of the ancient abbey ruins, standing like a giant folly in the midst of the planted parkscape, swept around by the River Skell.

In William

Walls slid away, revealing –EUREKA – the view!

Aislabie’s day, visitors were ushered into a little wooden building. While they were sitting in the dark, the walls would suddenly slide away, revealing –EUREKA – the view!

Stop, stop, stop! How many more delights can be introduced? Here goes with a few more! The gardens were to be flooded and the reservoir expanded with such new water features as the Green Arch and the White Seat. Also sadly no more is the early18th-century Wattle Hall, entirely built of bent branches. A giant stone pyramid was planned, but never built.

John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer,

There were schemes for a Chinese House, too, with blue columns, gilded decoration and a quantity of Chinese decoration outside. Most appealingly, it was approached by Chinoiserie-style bridges.

The Temple of Venus was filled with family portraits and smothered with plasterwork decoration, when its name was changed to the Banqueting House.

Most suitably for our purposes, the gardener of this paradise on earth was called William Fisher.

The Fishing Tabernacles – anglers caught trout, grayling and roach

1721-28

The Surprise View, which overlooks the ruins of the abbey and the River Skell

On the Road

When Barry met Maggie

Cartoonist Nicholas Garland created Barry McKenzie, drew Margaret Thatcher for the Telegraph and was exasperated by Boris.

By Louise Flind

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

When I was 10, I emigrated to New Zealand. So a lot of my holiday memories are travelling around New Zealand. Before that, during the war when it was more possible to travel, at least one or two holidays in South Wales in summer.

Did you draw as a child?

cabaret, I got the job of directing it.

Did it seem like a golden age?

It was my thing; what I could do – I could draw. My mother had also been at the Slade. A gifted sculptor, she taught me quite a bit as a child. I remember my older brother asking for a slide rule for his birthday. He liked geometry and I was thinking, ‘God, that’s so weird.’

What did you initially want to do?

My father paid me an allowance while I was at the Slade, but afterwards I had to find a job. I worked in a factory for a while just to pay the rent. My ambition was to pay the rent.

Why did you work in the theatre after the Slade?

In New Zealand, I had a great interest in the theatre, and belonged to the theatre club at school and worked for the New Zealand Players, and learned stage management. I worked at the Royal Court Theatre for four years after leaving art school. And I learned an awful lot, among other things, that I’m not cut out for the theatre…

And you worked for the Establishment Club?

At the Royal Court, I got to know John Bird very well.

And later, when he, with Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron, John Fortune and Jeremy Geidt set up the Establishment Club to do

It was like a growing-up age. And looking back, I see what a terrifically influential and important period that was. There was a sort of relationship between the satire boom and the political cartoonist I became later. Peter Cook, who was the great genius of the satire boom, owned half of Private Eye. He said, if you come up with an idea for a comic strip, I’ll publish it in Private Eye

What was Peter Cook like?

He was a marvellous man who helped make things happen, and his influence was enormous on me.

How did you invent Barry McKenzie (pictured)? Did Barry Humphries take the credit?

I came up with this idea of an Aussie loose in London. With the influence and help of Peter Cook, I came up with this character. I drew him with his slouch hat, double-breasted suit, striped tie and weird big chin (below). I took that to Barry and his script breathed life into my idea. To that extent, Barry is completely I noticed her slightly sloping eyes – most people’s eyes slope upwards from the nose; hers slipped downwards – her sharp little nose, the rosebud mouth and quite strong ).

gifted than I was, who could see the likeness which I could then develop.

Do you have some favourite characters? Politicians? No, I don’t think I have a favourite.

Did you have a favourite cartoon?

The cartoons you remember are the really, really terrible ones, when you think, ‘I can’t do this. This cartoon is so bad that I won’t survive publication,’ and you hope everybody will forget.

What was it like to work with Bill Deedes, editor of the Daily Telegraph and ‘Dear Bill’ in Private Eye?

Bill was enormously charming and you always came away feeling pleased to have been in his company for a while. I also felt a bit exasperated by him when he didn’t get things done.

How did you get along with

You just began to see the way other people other cartoonists more

OK, while he was a harmless journalist. He was irritating and exasperating and he was also capable of charm – but always out for himself. He had something that sort of set him aside from all the rest. A friend of mine was editor of the leader page and Boris was a columnist. And he was always late with his copy. And one day when Boris was an hour late, the editor said, ‘OK, forget it, Boris. We’ll put in the other column.’ And when somebody told him the page had gone, he exploded with rage and threatened the editor.

Were you surprised he became Prime Minister?

No, because I think the Tory party was just off its trolley at that time and also the leader of the Labour Party that Boris trounced was Jeremy Corbyn.

What was the highlight of your career? Getting a chance to have it.

Across

1 Flattery coming as result of Electra complex (7)

5 Pressure that is on search for food (4,3)

9 Log time taken by returning Frenchman (5)

10 Tasty - to an unspecified number eating hot stew ... (9)

11 ..and in the case of Cadbury, advice from dentist is spun sugar (10)

12 Sweet and sour? (4)

14 Unique, like railway lines out of shape (12)

18 Bigoted and in demand, possibly about right argument (6-6)

21 Underhand and underfoot? (4)

22 Pig mixture of dry egg and suet (6,4)

25 Highlight energy restriction covering old instrument (9)

26 Resin that’s somewhat timeless in retrospect (5)

27 Bloodsucker seeing quarry on strike (7)

28 Superfluous material producing flat sound of bell (7)

Down

Genius crossword 438 EL SERENO

1 Ditch or river full of fish? Quite the contrary (6)

2 Pregnant, lacking exercise clubs and still surviving (6)

3 Talking endlessly as involved in an affair (8,2)

4 Applaud as former sale item turned up (5)

5 Look serious about good spring that produces life in pond (9)

6 Hotel in very old part of London (4)

7 Investigation covering sailor initially less likely (8)

8 Still on course as night approaches (8)

13 Dozy individual yelped as he dressed (10)

15 A day on my trial at sea for government department (9)

16 Terrible - supporting a French line is forbidden (8)

17 Declare in favour of allegation (8)

19 Bad smell - I’m not sure I will see bones (6)

20 Inviting supremo when on top (6)

23 Order not normally needed for 22? (3,2)

24 Little sign of sadness in career (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 1st May 2024 We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 438

4

7

13

17

19

20

22

24

Genius 436 solution

Runners-up:

Moron 436 answers: Across: 1 Duke, 3 Hair (Do you care?), 9 Error, 10 Synthetic, 11 Ideas, 12 Apartment, 15 Closet, 17 Sloppy, 19 Round trip, 21 Creel, 23 Desperado, 24 Pesto, 25 Meet, 26 Whey. Down: 1 Distance, 2 Kangaroo, 4 Anther, 5 Recital, 6 Brae, 7 Arms, 8 Shut, 13 Approach, 14 Symphony, 16 Earldom, 18 Tussle, 20 Dues, 21 Capo, 22 Erse.

Winner: Justin Bendig, Banstead, Surrey

Kevin Collier, Otley, West Yorkshire; L Hayes, London E18

At the other table on this month’s deal from the European Open Championships in Strasbourg, East-West had bid on to six spades over North-South’s six clubs, doubled and one down. Declaring six spades, West had won North’s singleton-heart lead with the ace and led the knave for a ruffing finesse, South playing low, declarer discarding his club, and North ruffing. The defence wisely cashed a diamond, whereupon declarer could handle the rest.

‘Drat,’ said East-West. ‘We shouldn’t have bid on to six spades. No chance of six clubs making – West will win the queen of diamonds.’

No chance? Let’s travel to our featured table.

Dealer South East-West Vulnerable

The bidding

South West North East

1 ♣ 4 ♠ (1) 5 ♣ 5 ♠ 6 ♣(2) end

(1) Weak with eight spades. (2) Buoyed by the void.

West led his singleton heart to East’s king, East switching to a hopeful ace of spades. Declarer ruffed the spade and cashed two top clubs, West discarding (a spade). Declarer now ruffed a heart and noted that West again discarded (another spade).

So, West began with singletons in both hearts and clubs. Surely he was eight-one-three-one (in ranking order of suits). Declarer crossed to the ace of diamonds, ruffed a third heart (with the ace), ruffed a spade, drew East’s third club (throwing dummy’s last spade) and led the ten of diamonds.

Phooey to ‘Eight ever, nine never’. Declarer ran the ten, East discarding. Declarer could now cross to the (queen and) king of diamonds and run the suit. Slam made.

I talked to another North-South. ‘We played six diamonds. We had to guess diamonds without your perfect count. Naturally, we didn’t play the spade preemptor for queen-to-three. One down.’

ANDREW ROBSON

Competition TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 304 you were invited to write a poem called Balm Soothed sensibilities led some to write poetic lines of excessive length untroubled by rhyme. Yet, without striving for metre and rhyme, Maggie Cobbett’s short poem was rather sweet: ‘Balm for my soul / Or balm for his cracked heels? / No contest really. / I leave the bookshop behind / And head for the chemist’s. / Passions cooled long ago, / But love remains.’

Phil Hornby came up with a complicated joke about a trumpet-blowing cricket fan joining the ‘balmy army’. Bill Inglis’s conclusion should cheer someone: ‘The “balm” that’s best for me – / And always does me good – / The tender love from she / Who’s always by me stood.’

Commiserations to them and to Paul Wilson, Ian Nalder, Anne Stokes, Julie Wigley, D A Prince and Kevin Hartley, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Philip Wilson.

Once they bathed in daylight by the ton And, truth to tell, the sizzling brought them fun, Until there dawned a day when done was done, When skin was raw from too long in the sun.

Once they kissed each other through the night

And, truth to tell, the heart was burning bright,

A dark-defying, midnight-mocking light, But now their skin is chapped and chipped and tight.

Once lips sipped champagne and gin and wine

And slurped and sluiced below the Plimsoll line,

Down where green fairies dance and dodos dine.

So why does skin turn traitor to this shrine?

They wander to the chemist in Chalk Farm

And scan the shelves with feelings of alarm And humbly stammer, trying to stay calm: ‘Our world is hurting. Have you any balm?’

Philip Wilson

‘Is there – is there balm in Gilead?’ Poe demanded of a bird

Which he thought a welcome godsend. ‘Nevermore’ was all he heard.

Typically, this dusty answer

Caused his upbeat mood to swing.

All at once the candid raven Was a foul, satanic thing.

Absent soothing balm, the poet, Whose morale was on the floor, Went bananas, ranting, raving All about his lost Lenore.

Worse still came the bird’s denial

That they’d meet in Paradise, And the news that changing fashions Bode the Body Shop’s demise.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Keats called sleep soft embalmer and Macbeth

Imagined it as balm of troubled minds

Emily Dickinson likened sleep to death, Which Owen saw in drawing down of blinds.

Of course we all must move towards that state

Whose dreams made Hamlet pause; we close our eyes

And nobody can tell what dreams await Or if that sleep holds hell or paradise. But sleep acts as a balm for ageing limbs, A balm for minds grown weary of today; Sleep is a balm that brings us soothing hymns

And meadows where our past companions play.

Heavy old hearts appreciate the calm That welcomes them to sleep’s refreshing balm.

Frank McDonald

Balm is not spelt like farm

And paw is not spelt like sore Fried is not spelt like side

And roar is not spelt like floor.

I sometimes wonder how the hell Our wretched children learnt to spell.

Imogen Thomas

COMPETITION No 306 Time for the annual, ever-popular challenge of bouts-rimés. Please write a poem using these rhymes in this order: green, ice, seen, twice, tree, day, be, grey, hell, flood, smell, bud, thought, bought. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie. co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 306’, by Thursday 2nd May.

Taking a Walk

The woodland that time forgot

This is a magical place: a mystical grove that glimmered on the map; a small slip of green, surrounded by contour lines, bogs and military firing ranges.

Black-a-Tor Copse is a fragment of a type of ancient woodland that has been returned to the public imagination by Guy Shrubsole. His book The Lost Rainforests of Britain breathes new life into the idea that damp, emerald-green, ferny woodlands along our archipelago’s Atlantic edge are worth reviving.

Wistman’s Wood is a celebrity, highaltitude, ancient wood on Dartmoor, favoured for selfies among its fantastically gnarled oaks. Black-a-Tor, stuck out on the moor’s unfashionable northern slopes, is much less visited, and more enticing.

I struck out for Black-a-Tor with Guy on a filthy late-winter’s morning. We walked briskly across the dam at the end of Meldon Reservoir, lines of white spittle drawn on the dark, choppy water. A torrent was roaring through the dam.

As we turned away from the reservoir, our path became a pleasant green track beside start-up streams which raced to meet the main West Okement River, up whose valley we strode.

Occasional bundles of catkins were the only signs of spring, until sharp-eyed Guy spotted early frogspawn in a minuscule rivulet. Suddenly we saw generous clumps of spawn in every wet puddle between the tussocky molina grass and last year’s bracken, rusty brown and flattened by relentless wind and rain.

We crossed a short stretch of open moor, and there was Black-a-Tor Copse.

The wood was a small rectangle surrounded by vast bare hills and yet it possessed TARDIS-like qualities. Almost every tree was an oak. The highest trees were barely five yards tall and their branches were fantastically twisted, as if grappling imaginary foes. They were decorated with dozens of species of moss and lichen, shades of grey-blue and lime-green.

The trees grew from a field of boulders; some stones were as big as a small car and each one was swaddled in vivid green moss.

patrick barkham

Black-a-Tor copse is an extremely special national nature reserve and yet it seemed a strange half-wood, frozen in time. Like the Ents, the tree-men who have lost their wives and children in The Lord of the Rings, Black-a-Tor has lost its child oaks.

Last year’s acorns were scattered on the ground but there were no seedlings, saplings or junior trees – no oaks younger than a century. And the reason was watching us from behind the boulders like pale spies: sheep. The wood was beside an unfenced common, and the commoners of Dartmoor make full use of their ancient and historic right to graze sheep.

Of course Dartmoor is treeless. It is a bleak moor, covered in blanket bog, and that’s how it has been since Neolithic times. But swathes of it were once wooded, and are treeless now only because of grazing by ponies and sheep.

On this foul day, at least a dozen sheep were sheltering in Black-a-Tor. On the wood edge, we found evidence of their impact: stumpy oaks no more than a foot

high. Each one held stunted branches with ends like clenched fists. Each spring, new shoots grew and each year they were chomped by hungry sheep. So these youngish oaks were stuck at the height of a sheep’s chin, unable to grow any higher, ever. I love a tender leg of lamb, but ideally not one fed on one of three high-altitude ancient woods on Dartmoor.

Clambering out of the wood, we disturbed a woodcock, which sped off up the valley. A raven croaked, a buzzard wheeled, and that was about it for stuff that moved. Apart from the sheep, who watched us, suspiciously, as we retreated down the valley.

We parked at Meldon Reservoir car park (What3Words: Thus.however.foresight) just off the A30, skirted the southern edge of the reservoir before turning south and following the east bank of the West Okement River up into Dartmoor until we reached Black-a-Tor Copse. It’s a relatively easy four-mile-up-and-back walk

GARY WING

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Geneology

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

My unfaithful husband

QLast year my husband had an affair with someone at his office. He’s now given her up and says he regrets it, and he swears he loves me and the children, so we have made it up – but only up to a point. I just can’t bear having sex with him any more. I do, but it’s really difficult. All my friends say, ‘Just move on,’ but I don’t seem to be able to. What can I do?

Name and address supplied

A‘Just move on’ – what a completely useless piece of advice! After all, if you could move on, you would. You can’t suddenly ‘move on’ from feeling completely cold – or even repulsed by the idea of sex – to burning with desire. Sadly. You may think you’ve got over this betrayal, but clearly your body reminds you that you haven’t and you’re still, at some level, seething with resentment and mistrust.

It’s surely time to see a marriage counsellor. I suspect that if you could express your true feelings in front of a third party, you might find they’d start to dissipate considerably. I do hope so.

I long to see grandchildren

QReferring to the lady who doesn’t want any presents for Christmas or birthdays (January issue), at my advanced age of 87 all I ever want is for any of my 12 adult grandchildren to come and take

me out, if only for a coffee. Just an hour out of my little house would be so very welcome … but not one of them ever seems to think of this! To me, this would be the most appreciated present of all. Anne Parfitt, by email

AI think this is a brilliant idea – and what puzzles me is why you’ve never suggested it to them. They’re young and can’t imagine what it’s like being your great age. They’re not mind-readers. When you were their age, would it have crossed your mind to think that taking your grandmother to the park, say, for a delicious picnic on a bench would have been a far nicer present than a plant or a bunch of flowers or yet another scarf? Or perhaps a simple visit would be hugely appreciated. Let them know!

What’s in a name?

QWhen my son was six, we adopted a girl of three and they became loving brother and sister. But my son’s married a girl who won’t let my grandson (my daughter’s son) call her Auntie. My son reluctantly supports her. How can we maintain a relationship with our son and his wife on this basis?

‘Confused’, by email

AI’m being a bit brutal here, but frankly I think you’re all completely bonkers, to put it mildly. Your daughter-in-law is crazy not to let the child call her Auntie, and you’re both dotty to consider cutting them off, simply over a name. I suspect your daughter-in-law has some subconscious reason for objecting to being called Auntie, which she may not even be

aware of. Who cares what she’s called? Why doesn’t your son ask her what would work for her and get everyone to go along with it? As long as this woman is kind and affectionate towards the child, who cares whether she’s called Auntie or Zog? Or, easiest, her real name? Grow up.

Make friends with death

QI’m in my eighties and I’ve got quite a few things wrong with me, including chest and breathing problems. Recently my daughter came over to see me and it turned out she had a raging cough.

I felt so upset. In my situation, I’m very vulnerable to infections. True, she didn’t kiss me hello and she kept her distance, but it’s still risky, isn’t it?

I don’t want to die!

S Buckhurst, by email

AYour daughter should certainly have told you what the situation was before she came to visit. And she should have left it up to you to decide whether you were prepared to take the risk or not.

But when you say you ‘don’t want to die’ – well, that may be true, but the truth is that we’ll all die some day. I think what you mean is that you don’t want to die now. A very different thing.

Perhaps you should try, if you can, to start feeling more comfortable with the idea of death. Whether you like it or not, at your (and my) age, isn’t it time to make friends with death, rather than treat it as an arch-enemy?

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.