Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth (p8) was MP for Chester. He appears on The One Show and Just a Minute. His new book, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, celebrates Winnie-the-Pooh on his 100th birthday. Danielle Kretzmer-Lockwood (p15) worked for Warner Brothers with Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro and Oliver Stone. In this issue, she salutes her father, lyricist Herbert Kretzmer. Annabel Venning (p27) is author of To War with the Walkers: One Family’s Extraordinary Story of the Second World War. She writes for the Daily Mail and other publications. Nicky Haslam (p54) is a writer, singer and interior designer. He performs songs by his friend Cole Porter. He created the Common Things tea towel and wrote Redeeming Features: A Memoir.…

If I wanted to please the ghost of A A Milne (1882-1956) in the course of writing this piece, I would not mention Winnie-the-Pooh. In his lifetime, Milne published more than 90 books and plays: ‘the bear of little brain’ features in just two of them. As a columnist, novelist, playwright, polemicist, Milne wrote millions of words. But he is really remembered only for 70,000 of them, all produced in the mid-1920s, a hundred years ago: the two Pooh books and the two collections of ‘nursery verses’, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. His children’s books made him rich and famous, but they did not make him happy. In many ways, they ruined his life. They led to his falling out with his only son –…

WHAT IS the talking stage? The talking stage is part of the lexicon of Generation Z – those who are now teenagers or young adults. It refers to the early, ill-defined stages of romantic courtship, when young adults are getting to know each other and detecting the first tingling of romantic attraction, but are not yet dating. While many of us oldies could meet potential partners at the workplace, possibilities for romance can be more limited for Gen Z. Working from home is now the norm; workplace flirting and after-work boozing are frowned on. Getting blind drunk at the office Christmas party and snogging the nearest available person is no longer an available or acceptable option. For today’s young romance-seekers, meeting a potential love interest via the internet or a…

Poor Gen Z. Their education blighted by Covid, the idea of ever owning property a distant dream and now, just as they try to step on the first rung of the career ladder, it has been blowtorched by a toxic combination of tax and National Insurance rises, economic gloom and the insidious march of AI nabbing their jobs. The recruitment company Adzuna has linked a 32-per-cent drop in vacancies for junior roles – graduate and non-graduate – since 2022 to the launch of ChatGPT that year, while BT and Amazon have decided to cut recruitment of humans in favour of AI. As the parent of two Gen Z-ers – one midway through university, another a year out of it – I feel for all their generation, and for the employers…

As the summer turns to September, it is a good excuse to read again that great poem Autumn Journal (1939). It is the record of a 31-year-old classics lecturer, living in Primrose Hill, North London, commuting to Birmingham to teach at the university, living through the Munich crisis, watching the sandbags and gun emplacements being put in place in readiness for the inevitable war, drinking a bit too much, puzzling over a wild love life, musing on the Greeks: ‘And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas/I think instead/Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,/The careless athletes and the fancy boys,/the hair-splitters, the pedants/The hard-boiled sceptics/And the Agora and the noise…/and lastly/I think of the slaves.’ Louis MacNeice (1907-63) lives on, almost as a well-kept secret. There are thousands…

One of the most touching things about the small towns of Italy’s Ligurian coast is that the staff in restaurants and bars remain in their posts year after year. Their personalities and physical appearances are seemingly unchanged. Their reliable good humour calls to mind The Truman Show (1998). Truman grows up from babyhood in a reality show, where all the other humans are pleasant all the time. Only Truman does not realise they are actors and his world is a giant stage set. But why wouldn’t these Italian restaurant and bar staff be pleasant all the time? They are often working for, or alongside, a family or extended family member, who owns the business. Italians have the sense to aspire to work within walking distance of home, where Mama will…

The problem, as so often in English history, is Shakespeare. Intrigued by the title of a forthcoming book, A History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke, I came up with a selection of my own, before seeing whether there was any overlap with the author’s choices. None of them was especially original – Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon for Anglo-Saxon carousing, fighting and lamenting; one of the many Robin Hood ballads; something from Chaucer. Then the Shakespeare problem caught me. Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, the Wars of the Roses: how can we think of those moments of English history rendered into poetry without calling to mind sceptred isles, wishes father to thoughts, the breach closed up ‘with our English dead’, ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’ et…

The Rev Pauline Setterfield conducted the thanksgiving service for Duff Hart-Davis, biographer, novelist and journalist, at St Mary the Virgin, Beverston, Gloucestershire. Hart-Davis’s biographical subjects included painter Raoul Millais; the Berry family, former owners of the Daily Telegraph; and Peter Fleming, the writer, adventurer and brother of Ian Fleming. Journalist Alice Hart-Davis gave the eulogy, She told how her father, son of the publisher Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, joined the Sunday Telegraph when it was founded in 1961. He worked in the books department, becoming literary editor and assistant editor. Alice said, ‘Dad loved an adventure; he’d got a taste for travel in 1957, before university, when he joined a tramp steamer on voyage to West Africa and up-river into the interior. ‘Soon after that, Russia opened up a route for…

In the fifties, in the summer holidays, some newspapers and magazines published competitions for readers. Graham Greene describes one of these in Brighton Rock (1938), where cards were distributed in the seaside town giving clues as to the whereabouts of Kolly Kibber. If you accosted him with a copy of the newspaper, you would win a prize. There were also seaside competitions for children, who had the chance to perform on piers or promenades for prizes. My mother saw me as the next Shirley Temple and forced me to rehearse songs and dances on holiday, but I was always too nervous to perform well. One summer we were staying with relatives who ran a pub in Hastings and we found out that a competition was taking place on the beach.…

What’s with Baum? By Woody Allen Swift Press £18.99 Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He will be 90 on 30th November – so that pay-off has only so many yards to run. The work via which immortality beckons features many if not all the films; also the stand-up, plays, essays, stories and, for trad jazz fans, all those toots on the clarinet. Finally, here is What’s with Baum?, his debut novel. What’s with Asher Baum, a novelist in his fifties? The same as what’s with other fretful schlemiels in horn rims whom we know variously as Alvy (Annie Hall) or Isaac (Manhattan) or Mickey (Hannah and Her Sisters): neurotic hypochondria, nihilistic anxiety, an absurd yearning to…

The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume 1: 1944-1963 Edited by Dan Gunn Virago £35 When I published the first biography of Muriel Spark, in 2009, little was known of her private life. She guarded it ferociously and hated interviews. Even her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), remained tight-lipped. As Victoria Glendinning remarked, ‘One cannot tell from this book which people, if any, she loved with passion.’ Or hated, one might add. That book took us up to the development of her first novel, The Comforters (1957), whose Catholic-convert heroine suffers paranoid delusions. Then Muriel, bored with research, invited me to finish the story of her life. All went well for about three years. But a pattern was emerging. She now disavowed many old friends. And when I presented them as people…

Fruit stickers Aggravating, irritating, exasperating; senseless, pointless and – ha, ha – fruitless. I’m talking about those sodding little stickers attached to fruit in a sterling example – thank you, Kingsley Amis – of Sod the Customer. If anyone is interested, they are known in the retail trade as PLU (Price Look-Up). I make myself a half-pint of fresh juice each morning, and have to detach the PLUs, which stubbornly won’t compost. It’s bad enough that fruit – even bananas – invariably comes shrouded in plastic. Why add a vile plastic blemish? And who was it who thought PLU was a good idea, for Pete’s sake? And when did this start? I’m told they help supermarket staff keep track of their stock, but they do nothing for my equilibrium as I try…

I see from the Oldie Emporium that readers can arrange a life-story recording – ‘Your very own Desert Island Discs recorded in your own home’. Dave Creasey, a former BBC producer, will come and interview you for up to four hours, and edit the results. Hey presto: for £1,495, ‘an audio memoir’ of my life, via CD and digital download. Who needs Lauren Laverne? What a good idea. Old tapes of interviews can be useful, I find, when I’m writing obituaries. Now they pour out from all around. The Spectator’s Book Club podcast offers an episode on Brideshead Revisited, 80 years on, using a 2020 recording of Evelyn Waugh’s late grandson Alexander Waugh. I subscribe to six Substacks, including Tina Brown’s ‘Fresh Hell’. She recently interviewed Prince Andrew’s Nemesis, Andrew…

OTWAY’S HIGHWAY The hardest-working man in showbiz? It used to be James Brown, and then the ever-touring blues-wrangler B B King, but their reputations are now at risk – from a shambling eccentric from Aylesbury who calls himself ‘Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure’. John Otway has played nearly 5,300 shows in 53 years. This is ridiculous if you think about it. Two gigs a week, every week, for five decades. The quantity of motorway service food he’s consumed. The thousands of miles at the wheel of a stuttering van. The sound checks in beer-scented clubs alone could be measured in months. Work-shy underachievers the Beatles played a mere 1,400 times, and the Stones a half-baked 2,161 to date. Even the indefatigable Bob Dylan has managed only a paltry 4,500. But…

CUCUMBERS Not much has grown successfully in my kitchen garden during the heat and drought of this summer, but in the greenhouse we have had a bumper crop of cucumbers. From three plants, at the time of writing in late August, I have cut ten full-grown cucumbers, each one about eight inches long. And there are more to come. I know that, in ideal conditions, a cucumber plant may produce ten or more fruit, but we have had quite enough for our needs. The so-called ridge, or outdoor, cucumbers are said to be easier to grow than greenhouse plants, but I don’t think they would have been this year, when it was almost impossible to keep the ground moist. Grown in pots, with liberal watering and feeding, our cucumbers have…

LYON KINGS Lyon may be France’s ‘third city’ by population, but it has a decent claim to be the best city for food and wine – not just in France, but on the planet. This reputation is founded on the grand tradition of the mères de Lyon, stretching back to the late-18th century, and the great chefs – Paul Bocuse and Fernand Point among them – who established the city’s place at gastronomy’s top table. As for wine, even Lyon’s bistros – the famous bouchons – take their name from the French word for a cork. Lyon’s happy affinity with the grape is largely due to its location on the banks of the Rhône and its tributary, the Saône. About 1oo miles to the north are the great vineyards of…

We pass another small milestone in the digitalisation of our world this month: the printed phone book is no more. Published continually since 1880, it will have been a feature of your childhood, but BT won’t supply it from October. From then on, it’s Directory Enquiries (118 500) or nothing. BT say this is to ‘streamline’ their operation. Thus the creeping subjugation of our lives by digital intruders continues. It is seeing the gradual eradication of telephone boxes, cheque books, maps, printed train timetables, paper tickets, library reference sections, TV aerials and coin-operated parking meters. All gone, or nearly gone, often in the name of streamlining. Mind you, as the current telephone book includes no mobile numbers, its best use is probably either as a doorstop or for swatting flies.…

IN COMPETITION No 323 you were invited to write a poem called Back to School. The challenge drew a large entry. For Julie Wigley it was ‘Back to school five decades later./Task – exam invigilator.’ Jane Stubbs looked forward to the new term: ‘Pack away the summer frocks./I’m for a gymslip and woolly socks.’ Bob Morrow’s school was a school of whales. Pauline Watson’s narrator was a horse being schooled for dressage. David Bailey sent a school report for Sappho, written in sapphic stanzas. I like defined metres, so I was grateful. Commiserations to them and to Stefan Badham, Veronica Colin, Con Connell, Sue Smalley, D A Prince, Sheila Gray, Bill Webster, Erika Fairhead, Mike Douse and Martin Elster, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25,…

Issue 73 Autumn 2025 Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie The Cardinal: The Secret Life of Thomas Wolsey by Alison Weir The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera A Shattered Idol: The Lord Chief Justice and His Troublesome Women by Tom Hughes The Letters of Frank Loesser edited by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh and Cliff Eisen The Lady in the Park by David Reynolds The Bookseller Hay: The Life and Times of Richard Booth by James Hanning Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Industry that Reshaped America by Michael M Gunbaum The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of…

TWELVE POST-WAR TALES GRAHAM SWIFT Scribner, 304pp, £18.99 For Ian Thomson in the FT, Graham Swift’s third short-story collection ‘finds a lugubrious comedy in ageing and cognitive decline as characters reflect variously on their past lives in the boondocks of Crystal Palace, Walthamstow, London Docklands and elsewhere. Typically, Swift finds his way into the minds and hearts of an impressive range of personalities.’ ‘Swift’s great skill is indirection. His route to the essence of his characters’ lives – their defining, most meaningful experiences – is often oblique and gradual,’ wrote Alison Kelly in the TLS. ‘Unified temporally by their setting in the period since the Second World War and thematically by an interest in the impact of military conflict on combatants, civilians and their descendants, the stories work together as…

Gustave Flaubert said, ‘Je suis un homme plume.’ But Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989) surely had a much greater claim to this boast. He wrote more than 400 books, and like Trollope, would finish one in the morning and begin another in the afternoon. But the superlatives don’t end there. Simenon also claimed to have had 10,000 women, most of them prostitutes, and possessed an equally insatiable appetite for wine, often drinking three bottles day. Of course, novelists are professional liars, so perhaps he was exaggerating about the wine and the women. But the books are all there on the shelves, 500 million copies of them in 55 different languages. Simenon created all sorts and conditions of characters, but for most readers, I suspect, he’s the creator of Inspector Maigret,…

Even writers as lowly as this one (I’m hardly Nabokov reincarnate, am I) are self-doubting souls who crave approval to dampen the neurosis. So it was that a recent enquiry from my son brought a frisson of relief. His partner, reported Louis, was interested in a book I once wrote (technically, ghost wrote). ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Would he like to read it?’ ‘He couldn’t begin to imagine anything worse,’ said Louis sweetly. ‘He wants to know if you were responsible for the title.’ I was not, I confessed. Storm in a ‘D’ Cup: Page Three Profiles was thus entitled before my recruitment to transform the prose of one Christine Peake – the model responsible for this magnum opus about her topless sorority – into something approximating English. ‘Ah well,’…

My father, once described as ‘the most successful lyricist you’ve never heard of’, was born a century ago, on 5th October 1925, in a small town in the Orange Free State, South Africa. It was something he never forgot. Each time he received a recognition for his work, he would always say, with a big smile, ‘Who would have thought it, for a boy from Kroonstad?’ Then he would reflect for a moment; he had come a long way – and he knew it. Settling in London in 1954, Herbie (1925-2020) pursued twin careers as a newspaperman (‘my day job’) and a lyricist. He always considered himself first and foremost a reporter, feature writer and critic. Joining the Daily Express in 1962, he later became its senior drama critic, a…

Like most octogenarians, I imagine, I know little of AI. A friend recently asked ChatGPT to write a poem about me. Within seconds, they (she? he?) responded with: ‘Catwalk at 85: At eighty-five she strutsthe stage,Refusing to act her proper age,In colours loud as parrot feathers,Silk and sequins, all the weathers.Her hat’s a tower, her shoes a crime,She winks at men half the time,The music booms, she shakes her hips,And blows the crowd two scarlet lips.They say she’s mad; she says ‘Tooright,’And twirls beneath thespotlights bright,Over-confident? Of course, mydear – The queen of excess isstill here.’ OK, it’s doggerel, and I probably like it because I’m such an egotist, but isn’t the poem amazing? I begin to sympathise with examiners and teachers who are expected to tell whether students have…

The Guinness brewery was Dublin’s biggest employer when I was a youngster, and they had a reputation for treating their staff very well. The nuns at our convent school wanted girls to become secretaries at the Guinness offices because the working conditions were so enlightened. Wages were satisfying, health, welfare, and sports facilities were laid on, and it was the zenith of respectability. I’ll be fascinated to follow the promising drama House of Guinness, the story of the 19th-century brewing Guinnesses, when it appears on Netflix on 25th September. One of the executive producers is Ivana Lowell, one of the Guinnesses. On the same day, the Earl of Iveagh (aka Ned Guinness), the head of the family, will publish his memoir, Guinness: A Family Succession. Ireland’s celebrity broadcaster and TV…

Every now and again, the hoary old question of the length of the school summer holidays is raised by a malignant press. Of course the sad old journos, hunched over their laptops, or muttering into their beers in some sweaty pub, can’t say the real reasons they hate the six-week break for teachers (because that’s whom they’re cross with). So they have to look around for a high horse to climb onto. It’s outdated, they say. The long summer holidays were built around children helping to bring in the harvest. Where are the children merrily turning the hay? They are on screens in their darkened bedrooms. Get them back to the classroom! In those six week, the malcontents argue, children forget how to learn. Their brains turn to mush. They…

There was a time when one heard a great deal of the University of the Third Age (U3A), but this was always something of a euphemism or misnomer. Shakespeare (as usual) was more apposite for most of the readers of this august publication. They, I suspect, have mainly entered not the third, but the sixth age: ‘The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon… His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank…’ You may think you have expanded with age, but in one respect you almost certainly have shrunk: irrespective of your waistline, your muscle mass will have decreased, on average by eight per cent per decade after the age of 40. This is a natural process, but not a good one, unless…

Mitchell: Father of the Spitfire By Paul Beaver Elliott & Thompson £20 The story of the Spitfire, the iconic fighter aircraft, and of its visionary creator, R (Reginald) J Mitchell (1895-1937), recalls one of the most successful British propaganda films of the Second World War. The First of the Few, released in 1942, its title taken from Churchill’s famous tribute to Battle of Britain pilots, was a drama based on Mitchell’s life. R J Mitchell died of cancer at 42, barely two years before the outbreak of war. But he lived just long enough to know that the Spitfire’s position as the RAF’s new interceptor fighter was assured. Of course, what he did not live to see was the vital contribution made by Spitfires to the Allied victory in 1945.…

The word ‘wholesome’ has been reclaimed by the Gen Z-ers, as those born in the early-21st century are known. It’s now applied to activities considered innocuous or harmless good fun. Sister Boniface Mysteries (BBC1), a spin-off of Father Brown, is plugged as a ‘cosy mystery period comedy drama detective series’, but would be better described as wholesome. Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson), a moped-riding nun with an IQ of 156 and a PhD in forensic science, lives at the convent of St Vincent’s in the Cotswold town of Great Slaughter. The murder rate being what it is, the local constabulary lean heavily on her skills. The Sister finds herself regularly advising dishy DI Sam Gillespie and Felix Livingstone, who is from Bermuda and ended up in Great Slaughter owing to an…

PICASSO IN HIS STUDIO National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 9th October to 22nd February 2026 Picasso changed his studios almost as often as he changed his wives, mistresses and muses. Generally, one change coincided with the other, and quite often with a change of style. He carried many things with him, including his own paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, prints and engravings, kept for reference and continuing inspiration or for personal reasons. In accordance with his wishes (and for tax reasons), about 4,000 of these were donated by his family to form the Musée Picasso in Paris, along with his photographic archive, notebooks, and correspondence. About 1,000 further key works have been bought or donated since then, some coming from his second and last wife, Jacqueline Roque. The museum is housed…

EXPRESS PIZZA Pizza, the nation’s favourite dial-up dinner, isn’t the modern incarnation of a venerable tradition that began in the slums of Naples as fast food for the poor. The very reverse, says culinary historian Luca Cesare in his new book, The History of Pizza. Pizza as we know it is a late-19th-century invention by southern Italian immigrants in America – the land of hot dogs and hamburgers, with nothing but dough, tinned tomatoes and processed cheese to remind them of home. The earliest published recipe for Neapolitan pizza – plain, with just salt and olive oil – appeared in 1871, in Il cuoco sapiente (The Wise Chef). Two variations were offered: pizza with anchovies, with a scattering of salt-cured fish, cleaned and broken into pieces; and pizza with grated…

FOOTBALL THERAPY For any residents of the Gloucestershire town Nailsworth who are feeling a little down in the dumps there is, this football season, new hope. Under a pilot scheme, a dozen GPs in the area are now able to offer an innovative treatment for any of their patients suffering from bouts of depression, anxiety or stress. Following an agreement between the regional NHS and the local non-league club Forest Green Rovers, residents can now cheer themselves up by heading to the game with a medical prescription in their hand entitling them to a free ticket. ‘I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve been a bit fed up and excluded,’ Dale Vince, the renewable-energy magnate who owns Rovers, explained when the scheme was announced. ‘It’s easy to spiral downwards…

James Smith & Sons has been beaming down on New Oxford Street for as long as I can remember. It is the most distinguished old firm for umbrellas, with as many old-fashioned qualities as you could ever wish to find, yet still going roaringly strong. Driving past its façade, if you stretch your neck for even the merest glimpse of its shop front, you get the purest pleasure. It was established in 1830, which to this day it still proudly acknowledges. You glow with delight at this superbly glass-lettered front and interior. Massive and quite wonderfully distinguished, it brings you screeching to a halt at even the sight of its extraordinarily high quality. In you go, wondering at its most marvellous entrance, with fancy Gothic flourishes of stained glass, with…

It was the evening of a heatwave and the land looked parched. Hot air blew across desolate, tawny fields. Combines roared in the distance, cutting the last sunburnt wheat. I was taking a walk with my son, Ted, in rolling South Lincolnshire. This was not fenland but it’s still the breadbasket of England. Big farming holds sway. We set out from Boothby Lodge Farm, a bleak trio of grain barns which rattled in the wind. There was no one around. The villages were neat and quiet. Few people work, walk or visit this land. It’s mostly left to large machines. Four years ago, when I first strolled here, this 1,525-acre farm looked much like any other: a remote-controlled business – no farmer living in the farmhouse – growing beans and…

Some people dread the end of the summer as the nights draw in. But, for book-lovers, autumn can present a welcome excuse to stay in and read. It’s also the season to spend time in a warm kitchen. Elisabeth Luard picks some of the best cookery and food books from around the world to inspire us to be adventurous with our autumnal cooking. For lovers of thrillers and crime, Michael Barber has not just picked out the best new releases but also celebrates the reprinting of crime classics by the likes of Georges Simenon, P.D. James and Elmore Leonard. Lucy Lethbridge hunts down some of the best reprints, including Marguerite Yourcenar’s A Blue Tale, a collection of three stories which were the last of her work to be translated into…

THE DANDY A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF SARTORIAL SPLENDOUR PETER K ANDERSSON OUP, 352pp, £30 When Oxford historian Peter K Andersson was a teenager in the 1990s, he stood out from his peers in provincial Sweden by wearing tweed jackets, bow ties and carrying a cane. So he brings to his recent book real understanding of the dandy’s central paradox: that his exquisite dress is both conformist and subversive. In the TLS, Henry Hitchings thought Andersson’s ‘memoiristic flourishes’ and his ‘empathy with the “need to be visible” add real charm’. Andersson begins, inevitably, with Beau Brummell, the uber-dandy whose immaculate tailoring marked a break with the extravagantly elaborate male fashions of the 18th century. Dandyism gave young men emerging into the 19th century a tribal identity. As Lucy Lethbridge wrote in…

Revamped public toilets nearly finished Hampshire Chronicle Stockbridge eatery with stunning pastries asks customers to stop eating them on doorsteps Scotsman £15 for published contributions NEW! Tune into Radio Oldie Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with some of our Oldie friends, such as John Humphrys, Leslie Caron and Roger McGough. And we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHAT WAS being sent to Coventry? Before you could be ‘ghosted’ or, worse still, ‘cancelled’, this was the term people would use when they embarked on a systematic denial of your existence. Of course, back in those pre-internet days, this would mean pointedly ignoring your physical presence. If you walked into a room, others would ignore you. Speak and no one would reply. In fact, they would carry on as if you didn’t exist. The phrase is a particularly British idiom. But how on earth did a perfectly normal Midlands city like Coventry become a term for social ostracisation? It is believed to originate from the Civil War, when Royalist prisoners of war were imprisoned there. Coventry was a strongly Parliamentarian stronghold and the locals didn’t take kindly to hosting…

Forty-five years ago, in ‘A Day’s Work’, Truman Capote wrote a brilliant essay about a day in New York, following his cleaner, Mary Sanchez, around her other clients’ homes. The cleaner knows EVERYTHING about her clients, he discovers. In the essay, published in Music for Chameleons (1980), Mary is an admirable figure. She even prays for her clients in a little Catholic church on Lexington Avenue and 86th Street: ‘Please, Lord, help Mr Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don’t leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world… ‘And please don’t let Mr Smith’s family send him to that retirement home; he don’t want to go, he cries all the time.’ A new BBC1 series,…

I will never forget the wave of emotion that surged through me when I first looked into Noël Coward’s bathroom cabinet. It was 1999 and I was in Firefly, his hilltop house in Jamaica, where Coward died in 1973. Firefly is open to the public and, as on the Marie Celeste, the rooms and their contents are preserved unchanged from the day the playwright died there. Most poignant for me were the half-used contents of his bathroom cabinet. Need I explain how redolent they were of the very essence of the man? Moreover, with tiny traces of DNA still present on the razor and toothbrush, might the museum world admit there is a new curatorial niche waiting to be filled – ‘bio-obilia’? I may add that, although Coward was one…

Granny Mouse was appalled. ‘You’re going on holiday with your parents?’ She said to Young Mouse, my 25-year-old son. ‘We stopped all that family holiday nonsense when your dad was 14.’ And so it was. My baby-boomer parents reckoned that by the time my brother and I became teenagers, their responsibilities to us were essentially over. They’d done the package holidays to Corfu. Now they could attend to their own lives, which in my father’s case consisted of meditating, studying religious texts and visiting India; and in my mother’s, of writing books about the advantages of celibacy. And we would be left to ours. ‘Well, they’re paying for it,’ said Young Mouse, who thinks in strictly utilitarian terms. He is the sort of mouse who maintains a sort of internal…

There is much spiritual writing on pain; most of it is so high-flown that it makes me wonder whether the writers have ever even had so much as a leg ulcer. I have a leg ulcer right now, and there is nothing sublime about it; it is just painful and nasty to look at. As an antidote to self-pity, when I am lying in bed, I look at Rembrandt’s etching The Three Crosses. I concentrate on one of the two thieves crucified with Christ; he ison Christ’s left. The crucified figure is bathed in a light that comes from above. Immediately behind him is deep darkness. The light that illumines the thief also shows up a tiny section of chaos – fine lines etching figures of despair, including a diminutive…

In 1965, aged 12, I was invited on a summer holiday by a friend to his parents’ apartment in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the South of France. The apartment was in a smart and exclusive high-security building, across the bay from Monte Carlo. Not quite a teenager, I was whisked into the restaurants and bars of Monte Carlo, snacking on canapés at the Metropole; was introduced to the evils of gambling at the casinos (in breach of the age rules); and spotted my first 275 GTB Ferrari. A few days after my arrival, my friend’s mother told me one of the top-floor apartments was occupied by Marshal Josip Tito (1892-1980). I learned that he rarely left his apartment in the daytime and that he led a secretive and mysterious life when he…

The Predicament By William Boyd Viking £20 About five minutes into Gone with the Wind (1939), the camera stills on a wooden sign attached to a fence. ‘TWELVE OAKS. JOHN WILKES (owner)’, we read. Lovers of the book will laugh. It’s a dated – if delightful – trademark of the old Hollywood film: the use of signs unsubtly to state the facts of a story for slower viewers. Reading the beginning of William Boyd’s latest novel, The Predicament, can often feel a little like this. Maybe it’s the pitfall of a sequel. The Predicament is the second novel to feature 1960s gentleman spy Gabriel Dax. Its forebear, Gabriel’s Moon (2024), was typical of Boyd’s recent output: globe-trotting, womanising, the works. For all its clichés – it didn’t hold a candle…

I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt. Eric Sykes People ought to be one of two things: young or dead. Dorothy Parker Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time. E M Forster ‘I don’t think…’ ‘Then you shouldn’t talk,’ said the Hatter. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in. Katherine Mansfield The only good place to work is in your head. Ernest Hemingway Only…

EVERY BRILLIANT THING Soho Place, London, until 8th November Lenny Henry has run the dramatic gamut: from Tiswas to Comic Relief, from The Black and White Minstrel Show to Othello. His latest project is arguably the most challenging of all – a solo show about depression and suicide. It hardly sounds like a barrel of laughs. I was rather dreading it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Duncan Macmillan’s play (written with comedian Jonny Donahoe) is full of life-enhancing humour. Every Brilliant Thing premièred in Edinburgh in 2014, where it was the big hit of the Festival Fringe. It’s since been produced all round the world, in more than 80 countries – yet this is its West End debut. ‘It seems extraordinary,’ observes Nica Burns, founder of Soho Place,…

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL At this year’s array of Edinburgh festivals, one image was difficult to forget – a red-frocked acrobat making a spiralling, rope-assisted descent through the clouds to the Earth below. This was at the start of Opera Queensland’s staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s radical reimagining of the Orpheus legend, set to music by Christoph Willibald Gluck in Vienna in 1762. Not that the production had much to do with Gluck or Calzabigi. One had only to read the brazenly rewritten synopsis in the festival freesheet to realise this was less a staging of the opera, and more a showcase for the tumblers of Circa – Rock n Roll Circus, as it was originally called – and its founder, director-designer Yaron Lifschitz. With a sell-out circus show…

MY MARILYN MOMENT Seventy years ago, in the opening sequence of The Seven Year Itch (1955), the narrator tells how every August the men of Manhattan Island have always sent their wives and children off to cooler climes, thus granting themselves a pink ticket. And even a liaison with Marilyn Monroe. Clubland imitates this tradition when clubs such as the Garrick and Beefsteak close for three weeks in August. The rest are obliged to open their doors to the most debauched tribe in the city: the reciprocals. Summon up the entire membership of the Drones Club on day release. Shameless in their sharp-elbowing past the actual members at the bar while grabbing fistfuls of nuts, the raffish ones boast of the clubs they have already plundered that week, while ungraciously…

ON THE ELECTRIC FENCE There are about 36.16 million passenger cars on our roads, of which about 1.3 million are electric. The latter are increasing but nothing like as fast as the government wants. Hence the recent announcement of subsidies (for some). Common reasons for delaying going electric are cost (EVs – electric vehicles – cost more to make and insure than their combustion equivalents), an inadequate charging infrastructure, time taken to recharge, rapid depreciation and the high cost of replacing batteries. AI reckons these average £7,235.07. Most manufacturers guarantee new ones for 100,000 miles or eight years, but the average car on UK roads is nine and a half years old, and half are over ten. However, if battery replacement is your main anxiety, a recent survey of battery…

Autumn brings the winter migrants from the north. Most of them are ducks and geese, among them the diving duck pochard (Aythya ferina). Pronounced variously ‘potchard’, ‘poachard’ or ‘pockard’ (OED), the name is possibly derived from Old French pocher ‘to poke’. That refers to its poking about underwater to feed. Reedy but open fresh waters are its habitat, providing nest cover. It consumes much more vegetable than animal matter, which makes it the tastiest of diving ducks. In rustic times, it was netted for the table in considerable numbers. As with all UK ducks, its resident numbers are dwarfed by the winter migration from Europe and beyond, as birds seek the protection of warmer winters when the north freezes over. Resident mallard (145,000 breeding pairs) compare with a winter migration…

‘Sorry, partner – I’ve got absolutely nothing for you,’ said North as he laid down his dummy. He wasn’t far out – but he wasn’t quite right. See if you can make use of the dummy to make your four hearts. You ruff West’s top diamond lead and lay down the ace of hearts, West discarding (a diamond). Dealer South Both Vunerable (1) The strongest opener in bridge, showing 23 or more points (or an upgrade for shape), unrelated to clubs. (2) Putting on the pressure, and doubtless wishing South were sitting opposite, not at 90 degrees. If you continue trumps out of hand, followed by spades, you will need the queen to fall doubleton (or singleton). Instead, and this is the key play, advance the knave of spades. The…

I panic over panic attacks Q I suffer terribly with panic attacks. They seem to have got worse since I’ve got older – I’m now 81 – and now really dominate my life. I have tried everything. Tranquillisers helped to start with, but eventually turned me into a zombie. I tried acupuncture – rubbish – and I went on a meditation course but that had no effect at all. I went to special breathing classes but again nothing happened. I try pretending the panic isn’t there, but then it gets even worse … it’s like trying to stop up a broken dam. True, I had a very stressful childhood – my mother killed herself in front of me when I was seven – but since then I’ve been known for…

MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS ESTHER FREUD Bloomsbury, 288pp, £18.99 Esther Freud confirmed to Hephzibah Anderson in the Observer that her latest novel is ‘probably my most autobiographical work yet … I’m using the framework of my own family, then going off into territory that fiction is so brilliant at examining.’ It is the long-awaited sequel to her first, Hideous Kinky, in which two young siblings, Bea and Lucy, were growing up in Morocco with their hippy mother at the end of the 1960s. Freud returns to this world ‘with a coming-of-age tale depicting the experiences of adolescence and young adulthood: first loves, work, addiction sex, grief and motherhood,’ wrote Rachel Armitage in Literary Review. ‘Freud’s “episodic approach” means reading it ‘is like dipping in and out of a diary…

ARTISTS, SIBLINGS, VISIONARIES THE LIVES AND LOVES OF GWEN AND AUGUSTUS JOHN JUDITH MACKRELL Picador, 598pp, £30 ‘Judith Mackrell has produced a fine portrait of these two artists in her double biography, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. Forged in the same unremarkable Welsh childhood, each in different ways threw off society in order to paint and love,’ wrote Oliver Soden in the Telegraph. For him, the story of these two lives is the story of British art in the early 20th century. Once, it was Augustus who was toweringly famous; now it is Gwen, whose delicate and nuanced portraits are admired more. Soden distinguished between the two; ‘her quiet and mottled interiors, of women alone or cradling cats, have a glowing stillness and piercing precision that make her brother’s verve seem merely…

Susan Glaspell is best known for her 1915, semi-autobiographical novel Fidelity, which is set in the stifling moral atmosphere of provincial America. An account of a woman who becomes a pariah after an adulterous affair, it is as searing as Kate Chopin’s career-ending adultery classic The Awakening of 20 years earlier. Glaspell’s Brook Evans (Persephone, £15) was first published in 1928 when the moral atmosphere was different. Glaspell examines women’s freedoms, illegitimacy and the grinding horror of an inescapable, hard-scrabble and uncompanionable marriage but gives to her narrative a surprising dollop of 20th-century optimism. The Expendable Man by Dorothy B Hughes (Persephone, £15) is a bleak and noirish thriller from 1963 which hits the mid-twentieth century running. Hughes learned the storytelling trade by watching her boss Alfred Hitchcock, and many…