Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary ‘I killed Rod Hull – the emu man.’ Well, of course I didn’t, but I have an awful feeling those seven words will be my epitaph. I spoke the words in passing, almost as an aside, but I am fearful they will come to define me. The other day, on my Rosebud podcast, the great John Cleese, 84, told me how, years ago, a man died of convulsive laughter while watching his film A Fish Called Wanda. Prompted by this anecdote from Cleese (who, incidentally, might have been called Jack Cheese, had his father not decided to change surname), I offered my story of being with the entertainer Rod Hull on the night he died. In March 1999, Rod and I both happened to be in the…

Of all the oddities that make The Third Man so compelling, the oddest is that its sublime Vienna setting was an accident. If things had gone differently, the film – released 75 years ago, on 31st August 1949 – would have been set in London. The original idea came from the screenwriter, Graham Greene, as he cooked up the movie with the director, Carol Reed, and the producer, Alexander Korda. Greene showed them a few lines he’d jotted on the back of an envelope: ‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’…

'Are you downsizing?’ asked the estate agent sympathetically, as I squeezed past her to view a potential flat. As a fellow oldie, she had guessed right. Like thousands before me, I was having to face up to the fact that the time had come (accelerated by the termination of an eye-watering interest-only mortgage) to surrender my family home of 25 years. I’ve moved several times, but never before have I been forced into a small space that’s precluded most of my books, paintings and treasured possessions. As a journalist and writer, I found losing my books especially upsetting. I had amassed a hefty collection, augmented by my inheriting many of my father’s first editions from the fifties, when he was a literary reviewer. Racy, lurid dust jackets of novels such…

As the new cricket season gets under way, the injuries in the England cricket team – Ben Stokes’s knee, Jofra Archer’s elbow, Jack Leach’s back and knee – are a reminder that the game is fraught with danger. Even the kitbag is called a coffin. Cricket never features in lists of world’s most perilous sports – which are usually topped by base jumping, mountaineering, bull-riding and – surprisingly – cheerleading. But research by Middlesex University in 1998 found that for every 100,000 cricketers, 130 require hospital treatment in the UK every year. This makes cricket the third-most risky sport, after rugby and hockey – and on a par with skiing. For many years, I’ve illustrated the Chronicle section of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, compiled by Matthew Engel. Every year, there…

Oldie Man of Letters There was a legendary Oxford don called Bruce McFarlane, who supervised Alan Bennett’s thesis on Richard II’s retinue from 1388 to 1389. McFarlane used to say Bennett was the best pupil he ever had – ‘before he went off and joined the circus’. This was the donnish way of describing Bennett, then engaged in his medieval research, who was lured into joining Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe. Those who watched the TV adaptation of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time will have been struck by how brilliantly Bennett portrayed Sillery, the manipulative old don. He could, of course, have been a don. But that was only one of the roles he has played so successfully – none more…

‘Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country of Judah. She went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth.’ (Luke 1:39) Often the Gospels fail to provide their readers with the sort of details that would be a help to their understanding and also provide pleasure. Luke’s very brief account of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is no exception. We are not told how far Zechariah and Elizabeth’s house was from Mary’s home town of Nazareth. I think that one has to presume they lived nearby. The journey was obviously undertaken out of love, but it must have been feasible, and not 100 miles away, as some biblical commentaries suggest. What were Mary’s immediate family’s reactions to this journey? What…

Ladies first with The Oldie SIR: I’ve never written to a publication before, but I was rather annoyed to read the letter from Richard Langridge (Hands off my Oldie, Spring issue) where he berates his wife for rushing him through his reading of The Oldie. His patronising comments about a suggested supplement ‘aimed at the lady reader’ make the assumption that the lady reader is interested only in subjects relating to ladies. How wrong can one be? My husband introduced me to the Oldie, where I find articles ranging from the boring to the enlightening and interesting. Might I suggest that Mr Langridge follow my husband’s lead in allowing his wife to read his Oldie first? Then he can relax and devour it at leisure. Kind regards, A lady reader,…

FRANCES WILSON In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter By Mark Bostridge Bloomsbury £20 Mark Bostridge first came across Adèle, the second daughter of Victor Hugo, when he saw François Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H in 1975. The film, starring Isabelle Adjani, tells the story of Adèle Hugo’s unrequited love for an English lieutenant called Albert Andrew Pinson, played by Bruce Robinson, who later wrote Withnail and I. Travelling under an assumed name, Adèle follows Pinson to Nova Scotia, where she pretends to be his wife. When he is posted to Barbados she goes there too, still posing as Mrs Pinson. ‘If you don’t love me, let me love you,’ she begs him before losing her mind. When Pinson later finds her wandering Bridgetown in rags, Adèle no…

JASPER REES Long Island Colm Tóibín Picador £20 If you really squint, the chasm between Colm Tóibín and Simon Bates can shrink to nothing. Imagine the ardent strings of Radio 1’s Our Tune sawing away under the story of a teenage girl from provincial Ireland sent by ship across the Atlantic to find work in 1950s Brooklyn. There, at a dance, she falls for a lovely Italian boy and is soon welcomed into the bosom of his large, loud family. They marry in secret, but suddenly her sister dies and she must sail home, where she spends the summer falling for a lovely Irish boy. Desperately torn, will she stay or will she go? That is the plot of Brooklyn (2009), whose superficial resemblance to an Our Tune weepie perhaps…

History Recent reports of a boom in primary-school Latin may be exaggerated. It turns out that the impressive-sounding 400 schools that teach the language make up a less impressive 2.8 per cent of the total. French and Spanish still, quite sensibly, rule OK. Latin’s revival, however small, could have as much to do with politics as linguistics. The two languages it has overtaken are German and Mandarin. I was quite surprised that German was taught much to under-13s at all, while Mandarin’s popularity always seemed faddish, a bit of wishful thinking to match George Osborne’s eyelash-fluttering at the People’s Republic. If tots learn their lingo, the idea seemed to be, when they grow up, they’ll be in prime position to take advantage of all those massive business opportunities opened up…

Now that the old Roberts radio has been replaced by BBC Sounds and podcasts, how very odd the Edwardian tones of Beatrice Harrison seem. ‘I used to wander about the garden at night, you know, with a cello. And, one night, when I’d been playing for hours, I suddenly heard the note of the most heavenly bird I’d ever heard. Next day, a dear old gardener said in great excitement, “The nightingale is back again”.’ This is how Beatrice became the lady of Radio 3’s The Cello and the Nightingale exactly 100 years ago. She was one of four musically gifted sisters who lived in Sussex, with a 13th-century barn in the garden and a bluebell wood where the bird seemed to echo the notes of the cello – a…

Forty years ago, something happened that hadn’t since the ascent of the Beatles. One group – also Liverpudlians – dominated Britain’s radio, charts and pop and national press coverage for 12 months solid. They sold eye-watering quantities of singles, with three Number Ones in succession. They were never off the telly. They shipped tons of merchandise and Katharine Hamnett-fashioned T-shirts. And then, a little less like the Beatles, they almost completely disappeared. Everything about Frankie Goes to Hollywood epitomised the mid-’80s, a decade of flamboyance, controversy, experiment, big gestures and revolutionary recordings. Their second single – 40 years ago – was the anti-war protest Two Tribes, featuring an extract from a ’70s public-information film about nuclear attack, a video with Reagan and Chernenko lookalikes in a boxing ring and Margaret…

In the Czech Republic, it is said that a young woman going out on a date may hang a little bag of lovage round her neck – though whether as an aphrodisiac or a deodorant, I am not sure. In Germany, lovage is called Liebstöckel, or little love stick. In Old English, an alternative word for the herb was smellage, which doesn’t sound quite so romantic. Medieval travellers would put the smellage in their shoes to take away the odour of their unwashed feet. The smell and flavour of lovage, with leaves rather like those of celery or flat-leaved parsley, have more of a spice than celery. It can be grown from seed, but I would recommend buying a plant; once established, it will continue to thrive for years. The…

Twenty or so years ago, I had a splendid lunch at La Famiglia in Chelsea with the late Alvaro Maccioni. The restaurant’s illustrious owner, since the 1960s he had counted A-list celebrities not just as customers, but as friends. While Alvaro was a proud Tuscan, his wife Letizia was from Sicily, and the couple took an annual holiday there to visit family. ‘I love it,’ he told me, ‘but the wines, especially the whites, they give me such a headache.’ He clutched his temples and took a consoling sip from an irreproachably northern glass of Gavi di Gavi. Back then, there were some well-balanced whites from the sunny south, but you had to look hard for them. More often, they were heady, oxidised and unbalanced, the kind of wines to…

I bet that if you’re reading this column, you’ve used Google in the last 24 hours – probably even in the last hour. Such is its prominence in the web search market that it has become a verb (to ‘Google’), just like Hoover or Sellotape. This distinction has been achieved astonishingly quickly, as it’s only 26 years since two Californian PhD students founded Google on a shoestring. Now it is worth eight times the value of Shell, the largest UK company. Despite this bewildering growth, you’ve never had to pay a penny to use their search engine. That may be its undoing, as the caravan moves on and technology advances. Google may well be forced to start charging, before long, at least for its best service. You’ve never had to…

Taking a Walk Every day, those of us fortunate enough to be mobile walk short distances because we have to. Usually to a car door, bus stop or railway station. But I rarely take a substantial walk out of necessity. This month, I did. My car was broken and my local train unexpectedly cancelled – so a straightforward trip to a work meeting 45 miles away became complicated. Eventually, I found a bus and a train that was running, and pitched up in the Breckland town of Brandon, three miles from my meeting. I could’ve phoned for a taxi, but it was a gloriously sunny spring day. Spring brings a thrill to the air rather in the same way as falling in love. Occasionally we mistake this excitement for love,…

‘Unlucky,’ said dummy. ‘I’d have got the hearts wrong, too.’ ‘Thanks,’ said declarer. He then turned to Mrs Voyant, a shrewd player who’d been kibitzing. ‘Claire,’ he asked, ‘Should I have got that right?’ (1) Weak two, showing 5-10 points and a decent six-card suit. (2) Often, one would have three cards, bidding to the (ninecard) level of fit. But it pays not to be too predictable. (3) Flat hand but expects partner to have a singleton diamond. (4) Three hearts could be four poor hearts and a near-Yarborough. West had led the king of diamonds, East overtaking with the ace (no cost). East cashed the queen (West following with the knave) and led the ten. How to declare? Reasonably, declarer placed the non-pre-emptor with the queen of hearts. He…

John Humphrys (p14) presented the Today programme on Radio 4 from 1987 until 2019. He presented the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, 1981-87. In 1966, he covered the Aberfan disaster. Nick Newman (p33) is a cartoonist for the Sunday Times. He writes for Private Eye and wrote sketches for Harry Enfield & Chums. His cartoons have appeared in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. Brough Scott (p43), racing presenter for ITV and Channel 4, was the Sunday Times racing correspondent. He won more than 100 races, including the Imperial Cup and the Mandarin Handicap Chase. Anne Robinson (p86), aka the Queen of Mean, presented The Weakest Link and Countdown. She’s written for the Mail, the Mirror and the Telegraph. She wrote Memoirs of an Unfit Mother.…

Grumpy Oldie Man If the details are paltry at this embryonic stage, the same could once have been said for Jesus, and the Buddha. The gist is this. I have decided to start a religion. If you want to get very rich very quick, but lack the criminal talent to cash in on the absence of a functioning police force, founding a religion is the obvious way. L Ron Hubbard’s creation of Scientology enabled him to keep both himself and his dear old mum, L Mother Hubbard, in resplendent style. As L himself put it, ‘If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion.’ That was a long time ago, of course. If we factor in compounded…

Town Mouse If you’re not one its eight million inhabitants, then you might be forgiven for thinking the capital city has become a sort of lawless no-go zone. The papers suggest it’s something out of Mad Max, in which armed gangs roam the rubbish-strewn streets, police are nowhere to be seen and milder citizens live in fear. The wits and commentators of social media make remarks along the lines of ‘London is a sh**hole’, ‘Would never visit’ and ‘London has become Londonistan’. That might be a reference to the fact that the recently re-elected Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a Muslim, and that London is home to many immigrants. Recent mayoral candidates played on this fear. Ex-banker Brian Rose claimed on his website: ‘Since the last election in 2021, our city…

Postcards from the Edge Like many people, I suspect, I have mixed feelings about the migrants who arrive in Kent on dinghies. Yes, it’s illegal, dangerous and the numbers are concerning; but wouldn’t you also be sorry for individuals and families who take huge risks to find a better life? And ‘economic migrants’ aren’t new. Friedrich Engels wrote viciously about the Irish arriving in Britain in the mid-Victorian age – flooding into English cities at an uncontrollable rate. The author of the Communist Manifesto condemned these ‘barely civilised’ Hibernian migrants, who slept with their pigs and ate nothing but potatoes: they would have a ‘degrading’ influence on the native English. They should be stopped! Shouldn’t he have had an element of human sympathy for people who were just poor and…

Lord Falconer of Thoroton KC, the former Lord Chancellor, gave a tribute for Lord Morris of Aberavon, the last surviving member of Harold Wilson’s Cabinet, at St Margaret’s, Westminster. As John Morris, he was Secretary of State for Wales, 1974-79, and later Attorney General. Morris had been called to the Bar for five years when first elected as an MP for Aberavon in 1959. Falconer said, ‘For anyone else, that would have been the beginning or the end of one or other of those careers. Not for John. That was the beginning of an extraordinary professional and political life. That year was also the year he married Margaret, his companion and support through the whole journey.’ Falconer said Wales ran through John Morris’s life. That period as Secretary of State…

On 28th June 1914 – 110 years ago -Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, sparking off the First World War. My great-uncle Dr Richard Pollak tried to save his life. In 1951, when I was four, my parents took my older brother Michael and me to Holland. We were to stay with my father’s uncle Richard, whom he had not seen since 1939 when he was living in Czechoslovakia. In the intervening years, many family members had perished at the hands of the Nazis. So it was an emotional reunion for my father. Great-Uncle Richard was then 77. Born in Jičín in 1874, he had trained as a doctor in Vienna in the 1890s, specialising in bacteriology within the armed services. In 1914, having married and now with a…

LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century By Ariane Bankes Duckworth £18.99 In 1935, Norman Parkinson photographed two lovely twin sisters wearing ruffles and with their beautiful profiles shown to best advantage. The celebrated Paget sisters, Celia and Mamaine, looked so identical that even friends had difficulty telling them apart. In Ariane Bankes’s wonderfully readable account of the Pagets’ triumphant progress through literary bohemia in the 1930s and ’40s, there are broken male hearts on every page. It seems almost impossible not to have been smitten by the Pagets’ beady intelligence, their alluring mixture of gracefully slender physical charms and a very English matter-of-factness and drollery. The men who loved them appear to have fallen without whimper, staunch friends to the last. They…

PHILIPPA STOCKLEY The Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go By Clover Stroud Doubleday £18.99 In our Instagram world, the real-time memoir, celebrating and ‘sharing’ the smallest detail of daily life, is big business. Over three previous memoirs, Clover Stroud’s distinctively unbuttoned revelations of her spirited, spiritual life have gained a growing audience. She has told of her adventurous single life and sexual adventures; of the violent pain of childbirth; of the unbearable, decades-long loss of her mother to brain damage when Stroud was 16, then of adored sister, Nell, suddenly, to cancer. Now, in The Giant on the Skyline, she explores raising five children by two marriages in historic rural Oxfordshire, along with cats, dogs and horses, under the constant threat of having to…

Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star. Bette Davis The world has lost a comic genius. I’ve lost my best friend. Stan Laurel on Oliver Hardy’s death in 1957 The body is like a car: the older you become, the more care you have to take care of it – and you don’t leave a Ferrari out in the sun. Joan Collins All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that, in what I have done, I have not prevented a single murder. Albert Pierrepoint (1905-92), English hangman We talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right. Brian Clough on listening to players’ opinions The Prime Minister must realise that in this…

For light relief, turn to Baby Reindeer (Netflix), the psychological horror show dominating the British news. Written by and starring Richard Gadd, the events described are not, we are told, based on a true story. They are a true story, which Gadd is reliving. Martha starts stalking Donny (Gadd) after he offered her a cup of tea in the Camden pub where he worked. Donny, an unsuccessful stand-up comedian, is initially flattered by her attention but he also identifies with her. Martha is lonely and damaged and so, we realise, is he. Martha turns up at Donny’s shows, attacks his girlfriend, throws a glass in his face, camps outside his house, besieges his parents and sends him 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours’ worth of voicemails. At the same…

Silver linings, anyone? Our unusually wet spring and straitened national circumstances might combine to preserve this year’s roadsides from the municipal lawnmower. So our native wildflowers can set seed, go forth and multiply for the benefit of those who appreciate the vigorous flavours of the wild. Lady’s smock, ragged robin and field sorrel are all excellent in soups and salads, says Fiona Bird in The Forager’s Kitchen Handbook, the only guide you’ll ever need on a bracing holiday in the Hebrides or a damp weekend on the Sussex Downs. No need to remind Oldie-readers to forage with care and take only as much as you need. For a new-potato salad, the perfect foil for wild gatherings, choose young leaves of beech, hawthorn, hazel, birch, hedge garlic (just the leaves), nasturtium,…

One sunny Monday morning in May, something unexpected happened in downtown Manhattan. The Empire State Building, the proud architectural symbol of American life, was lit up with, of all things, an ad for a cricket tournament. Flicking the switch to crank up the illumination was Chris Gayle, the former West Indies international, a cricketer renowned for his ferocious six-hitting. ‘The Big Apple, take a bite,’ Gayle said as he sparked the lights. ‘Cricket is coming. America: are you ready?’ If it seems the most unlikely piece of sporting evangelism, Gayle is not being wholly fanciful in his insistence that the USA is the new frontier of cricket. The New York light show was there to celebrate the fact that on 9th June India will play Pakistan in a men’s T20…

Do you have a smart meter? Of course you do. You’ve been badgered to convert to one by your energy company, and by all those pictures of smiling happy people with miraculously lowered fuel bills, until you gave in. It’s free, after all. That is, ‘free’ in the modern sense of that word, in that you are not paying the individual cost, but it is spread between all consumers – including you. It’s quite a spread. Estimates of the cost of converting us all range from an official £13.5bn in 2019 to as much as £20bn today, a number leaked from inside the energy companies. That translates to between £200 and £300 per household, which is disguised in your energy bills, whether you convert or not. The saving is officially…

Police inspector demoted for selling trousers online Times Man fined £50 for not buying parking ticket blames puddle Eastern Daily Press Appeal for information after large storage basket stolen from B&Q Scarborough News £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHAT WAS Kensington News? Kensington Church Street in London was part of the Swinging Sixties – especially the lower end, when Biba the boutique arrived 60 years ago, in 1964. But, in the less fashionable bit near Notting Hill Gate, there was a business that had changed little during the last century. The Kensington News and West London Times was slowly dying. It had three reporters – all male, because the editor Barbara Denny thought women were less likely to work long hours. The starting salary was £150 a year. She claimed to have employed Barry Norman and Michael Winner, both local lads, and fired them. The paper was printed on an elderly press in a mews building round the corner. It struggled to produce eightpage broadsheets. Readers were often…

I was once a Penthouse Pet – and had the time of my life. At 26 years old, with long, dark, curly hair and shapely legs, I wanted to do something exciting and different. My gorgeous, blond, blue-eyed boyfriend was a croupier at Charlie Chester’s club in Soho. We had just returned from a stint of hard work in Scotland running a hotel, and wanted to do something frivolous. It was 1971, the year of Vietnam War protests, Khrushchev’s death, decimalisation and – says David Hepworth, author of 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year – ‘the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music’. And it was the year, for me, of the discovery of how my small waist could be squeezed into…

For centuries, Britain was known on the continent as das land ohne musik, the land without music, and – ouch – it was apt. After our brief purple patch of Tudor brilliance, we tumbled down the European rankings, not re-emerging until the Stanford and Parry era following the founding of the Royal College of Music in the 1880s. Now, once again, we find ourselves in a grim period of music die-back in the UK. It’s a baffling drought of our own making – particularly dispiriting because you didn’t need to be Joseph to know what the procession of endless lean cows hobbling this way might mean. I’ve noticed for years, now, how parish churches have been quietly switching over to prerecorded organ music as their supply of actual organists who…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips No offence, but many oldies heading for the sun may now be cringing at the thought of exposing themselves. The beach will force a moment of truth for those whose figures have gone. Whether we let our figures go, or they went of their own accord, is another matter. And of course some of us never had a figure in the first place. But even if you intend to skip the beach on aesthetic grounds, the reality is that when you get to a hot country, it becomes more unbearable to swelter away in the baking heat than to feel the fear and strip off anyway. The beach is like an AA meeting. It clears the air to be with others who have admitted themselves powerless.…

Country Mouse Consternation comes in many forms. A hundred and thirty years before those Household Cavalry horses caused mayhem through the streets of London in April, the capital had an equestrian crisis of a very different kind. Welcome to the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. Back then, there were not the 300 or so police, ceremonial and military horses that you now see on the streets. There were nearer 300,000 to serve the six million Londoners. Everything was shifted by horse. There were 11,000 hansom cabs and four-wheelers and 5,000 six-horse omnibuses – not to mention all the phaetons and landaus in those back-of-the-block Belgravia stables that are today’s coveted mews flats. A horse excretes around 2½ gallons of urine and up to 40lb of manure a day. Do…

Sophia Waugh: School Days One of our department came into the office at break. As she switched on the kettle, she idly said, ‘There’s a school in lockdown in Wales.’ Another trend has crossed the Atlantic and entrenched itself on this side of the herring pond. We found it hard to believe at first. Of course we did. We (or at any rate I) had laughed a lot at our practice ‘lockdown’, sneering at any form of fear or hysteria that suggested that all wasn’t for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The children, too, had found the whole exercise incredibly funny. How often are they instructed to get under desks or into cupboards? It is the sort of prank they would try on us, expecting fury,…

The Doctor’s Surgery When you read about a potentially life-saving medical advance, I suppose your pleasure should be unconfined. Here, unequivocally, is progress. But, occasionally, if you’ve lost a friend or relative to a disease that has since become curable, you’re inclined to rail a little against the injustice of the world and the cruelty of fate. Why was the advance not made earlier, when it might have saved him or her? You know this is a foolish thought, but you can’t help having it. The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of. There’s a relatively new treatment for severe asthma with monoclonal antibodies – known as biologics because they are produced by and harvested from such living tissue as Chinese hamster ovaries. It offers not merely amelioration…

I worked at 10 Downing Street from 1966 to 1973, first under Harold Wilson and then Ted Heath, as a ‘garden girl’ – one of a dozen or so Civil Service secretaries. We were so called because our large office, situated below the Cabinet Room, overlooked the garden at the back of the building. We worked in shifts, which included nights and weekends, and manned the office at Chequers when the Prime Minister stayed there. Number 10 was a very relaxed environment. When I worked a weekend shift, my husband, without having to identify himself in any way, could drive our MG Midget up Downing Street, park at the end and come in to share supper with me, and watch Match of the Day on the Prime Minister’s television before driving…

PAUL CARTLEDGE The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It By Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25 She had a dream, of a Greece that might be peaceful and free. She attempted to put it into effect, deploying the unheralded tactic of a conjugal-sex strike. All was well that ended well. Except that this early example of women power was a fiction, created and dramatised by an Athenian citizen man of the fifth century BC – the comic playwright Aristophanes in his Lysistrata of 411. The actual power, whether public or private, domestic or political, of real women in the ancient world – here meaning anywhere in and around the Mediterranean from the third millennium BC to the first millennium AD –…

PATRICK BARKHAM The Lost Paths: A History of How We Walk from Here to There By Jack Cornish Michael Joseph £20 ‘An old path electrifies weary legs,’ wrote Alfred Barron. That must be one reason for the increasing number of sprightly walkers afoot in Britain. There are 140,000 miles of officially recognised footpaths weaving through England and Wales – and many are far older than our most fêted ancient monuments. Unlike monuments such as standing stones, these path portals into our past are still used in exactly the same way as they always were, trodden by the feet of people on the move. The reasons they are walked on, however, are today usually completely different, as Jack Cornish reveals in this fascinating history of path-making and path-taking in England and…

The bagging area There’s something joyful about the self-checkout. Maybe the lack of gigantic trolleys in the queue. Perhaps the promise of no human interaction. Ultimately, it offers the ability to whizz straight through. But all this comes with downsides. Serious ones. I truly hate the bagging area. It’s an annoying name for starters – complete with an irritating robotic voice – and, to my easily befuddled self, can be hard to distinguish from the basket area. Only basket area isn’t a term. Whatever. I’m always putting my basket on the wrong side and this personal stupidity drives me wild. Then, directly over the bagging area – on the more modern machines, at least – there’s a tiny little camera and screen showing confused old me. There I am mixing…

Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 24th August Hip hip hooray! After seeing so many Shakespearean productions in modern costume – often daft or dreary – I found it a nice change to see one played as it should be played, in traditional Elizabethan dress. When it comes to staging Shakespeare, contemporary clothing tends to be the hallmark of a pretentious, experimental production. Period dress is a good indication that the show will remain faithful to the script. In this beautiful replica theatre, built on almost the same spot where Shakespeare’s dramas were first performed, doublet and hose should be obligatory. The Globe should be a refuge from tedious reinterpretations of his plays. If the actors are wearing Elizabethan garb, you can be fairly sure you’re in for an enjoyable evening. Sure…

One of the 20th century’s most innovative record producers, John Culshaw, was born 100 years ago this May into a modest family in coastal Merseyside. Like several historically important record producers, he was not a trained musician. He was, however, a shining example of what composer Aaron Copland called ‘the gifted listener’ – the person who marries ‘the preparation of the trained professional with the innocence of the intuitive amateur’, without whom the work of composers and performers has no true audience. Self-teaching was commonplace in those days, but Culshaw’s, like that of his great contemporary Walter Legge, must have been something other. An avid listener to anything he could find, he’d spent his teenage years agonising over such questions as why a Mozart piano concerto meant so much more…

My son, Leo, is working at Arlington (formerly the Caprice). He’s ‘front of house’. I don’t think you’re allowed to call him or any of his colleagues ‘a waiter’ any longer because that comes with the negative connotations of service, tantamount to the sort of subservience experienced by the oarsmen on Roman galleys. And don’t even think about the French ‘g’ word that translates as ‘boy’. I was teasing him about this, just days before he announced he was being moved to the front desk to meet and greet the likes of you. And Jeffrey Archer. So thrilled was I about this glamorous promotion that I took him out to dinner at the Dover, named after its street in Mayfair – as opposed to the way Garrick Street is named…

I heard recently of an Austin 7 driver who was pottering happily along on his four-inch-wide tyres when he came to a puddle covering almost the entire road. Sensibly, he pulled into the centre, but he was then forced by an oncoming Mr Toad to swerve back into the side. Next thing he knew, he had a broken wheel and axle and his beloved 7 was comatose in the road, upended. He had hit a pothole. Motorways and main roads apart – they are maintained by Highways England – it seems our entire local government-maintained road network is pitted by an epidemic of tarmac smallpox. How has it got this bad? Principally it’s because we don’t spend enough on road maintenance. We haven’t for decades. But, in 2020, the government…

Waders (Charadriiformes) tend to be more splendidly and identifiably plumaged in summer. For that very reason, many nest out of harm’s way in remote places. Contrarily, in winter, when migration dramatically increases most of their populations, they assume drabber plumage. Mixed flocks further confound their identity, to the gratification of gear-laden all-weather birders. Among the exceptions which do dare to nest on beaches is the dainty ringed plover (Charadrius hiaticula). At 6-7 inches long, it’s one of the smallest waders. This preference for sand – bare or shingled – suits their pebble-disguised eggs. It accounts for the nicknames in some of their breeding grounds: sandy lo (Shetland), sandy laverock (Orkney) and sand tripper (County Down). It is a sign of the times that, within living memory, they were common in…

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? A travelling knife and fork. Is there something you really miss? The dogs. I’d love to take the dogs on tour, like Maria Callas. Do you travel light? After touring from my 20s to my 60s, it’s now a fine art. I was with my partner in Padstow last week – flying there, he checks a bag and I make it a point never to check a bag for a trip of that duration. So there’s always a little airport tension. What’s your favourite destination? Kintyre. Earliest childhood holiday memories? I grew up in Kettering in Northamptonshire, and my family had a holiday cottage in Ringstead in Norfolk and a beach hut in Hunstanton – so we used to spend the whole…

FOR COMPETITION No 306 it was time for the annual, ever popular challenge of bouts-rimés, writing a poem with specified rhyme words in order. The rhyme scheme was based on a poem beginning ‘Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green’ by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-47), though I substituted ‘bought’ for ‘nought’ to head off archaic diction. Ann Drysdale spotted the source and ended her entry: ‘This poem,’ muttered Surrey, ‘isn’t going where I thought,/ And my intellectual property has been too cheaply bought.’ I liked Alan Ravenscroft’s first line: ‘His used pound notes were dirty green.’ Philip Wilson also began enticingly with: ‘They hanged some witches on our village green./ Today I buy my wife a chocolate ice.’ Commiserations to them and to Alan Clarke, David…

Ask Virginia Gay cousins on family tree Q I’ve been asked to sketch out a family tree from the 1800s to put up at my aunt’s 80th birthday. I’ve had quite a bit of experience with genealogy and, as we are a very fertile family, there’s a lot of work to do. My problem is that one of my cousins is gay, and married to his partner, and another, female, has been with her female partner for ten years. How do I express this on the family tree – which will be huge, poster-size? I so want it to be acceptable to the ancient, the middle-aged and the young! Alan, by email A A The married couple is easy. Just put ‘m’ or ‘=’ or whatever format you’ve used for…