The Oldie

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old M

Sasha Swire (p33) is the daughter of Sir John Nott, MP for St Ives, and wife of Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon. Her book, Diary of an MP’s Wife, is an indiscreet account of life as a political plus-one. Gareth Neame (p14) is a BAFTA, Emmy and Golden G

* Have Oldie-readers who wear glasses ever thought where specs come from? The answer lies in a new book, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, by Travis Elborough. Elborough, himself bespectacled, traces the history of spec

Legendary ’80s chocolate bar wrapper found in Fairford Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard Man found with drugs hidden in intimate area Matlock Mercury Rejected bike rack is coming to Stamford Stamford Mercury £15 for published contribution The August

‘I love him – I really do.’ I am taking tea with Mary Archer at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and she is not talking about her husband, Jeffrey. She is talking about the other man in her life: Rupert Brooke. Dame Mary, 76, a chemist of distinction

It was 7th July 1981, and I was at Lord’s, thinking, not for the last time, ‘Funny business, cricket.’ One moment, the nation’s basking in the all-round splendours of your performance. The next, you’re a laughing-stock. Little did I know that I was a

Eric Maschwitz (1901-1969) was one of the most versatile and influential people in 20th-century British entertainment. I doubt we’ll ever see his like again. In 1934, under his pseudonym, Holt Marvell, he wrote These Foolish Things with those lovely

We know Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. But did he write him a school report? Did it say, ‘He is always daydreaming of building empires and must focus more if he is to pass algebra this summer’? Unfortunately, no record exists. School reports d

In Berlin in 1961, aged 18, serving with the Royal Sussex Regiment, I was detailed for my first two-day duty as guard commander at the nearby gloomy Spandau Prison. It housed the last three Nazi war criminals: Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess; the Hitler

There are some words that defy too much definition. Only the other day, I was trying in vain to explain the concept of cheekiness to a Latin American friend. The dictionary explanation – ‘Being slightly rude, but often in a funny way’ – just didn’t q

The return of the Wimbledon Championships this year restores a much-loved fixture of our summer calendar – and delivers an injection of nostalgia for the greatest job I ever had. In 2000, after graduating from Loughborough University, I rewarded my p

Compare the Duchess of Sussex with Anne Boleyn. Both married into the Royal Family and were imprisoned: Anne in the Tower of London awaiting execution; Meghan, like the rest of us, during the pandemic. Both, too, turned to poetry. Anne wrote the haun

Stop all the clocks … The Good Food Guide has ceased publication. Waitrose, who bought the guide from Which? in 2013, has decided ‘to focus on our other publications, Waitrose Food and Waitrose Weekend’. In common with Michelin and Time Out, they wer

I was there again last night. It looked a bit like old Sydney as I remember it from the fifties, before they pulled it down in the name of progress. But wasn’t it more like the badlands of San Francisco, that once beautiful city that is infested by b

A friend who teaches English at one of our more august institutions says her students want a trigger warning on W B Yeats’s Leda and the Swan. For the lucky few who don’t know the term, trigger warnings – the worst part of the wokery plaguing the stu

appendage. Noun. 1. a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important. That’s me! The appendage, my whole lovely life: daughter of an MP (Sir John Knott, MP for St Ives, 1966-83, and Defence Secretary); wife of one (Sir Hugo Swi

I’ve now spent 30 years transforming an acre of grade one agricultural land into a snake-infested wilderness featuring rank weeds. A visiting friend had the brilliant idea of setting up a motion-sensitive ‘trail’ camera within the acre, to see what w

The good news is that the generation gap is over – that incompatible hostility between the generations, described by writers from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan. And now that Dylan, who’s just turned 80, is part of our oldie culture, the generations unders

Let me be honest. We on the chalk face of education had not heard of Kevan Collins before he was appointed the COVID catch-up tsar for education – and then promptly resigned in June. Worse, I have just done a vox pop among my colleagues and they stil

Ever since I caught my first trout with my father, John Profumo, in 1963 – shortly after he had resigned from Macmillan’s government – my life seems to have been embroidered by the course of various rivers. My angling education proper began at Eton,

An assortment of people have asked me what difference lockdown made to life in the monastery where I live. Precious little, in that we live almost entirely inside an admittedly generous enclosure. Trips to the outside world are kept to a minimum and

July used to rhyme with ‘truly’. In July 2013, more people in Britain believed in ghosts than supported the Labour Party. In July 2017, woken by a ‘loud crunching noise’, a teenage camping supervisor in Colorado found his head was inside a bear’s mou

Photographer Lord Rossmore briefly hit the headlines twice. First in 1970, when he announced his engagement to Marianne Faithfull. And again in 1981, when his house at Rossmore, County Monaghan, was burnt down by the IRA during the Bobby Sands hunger

It was always the voice. If you knew nothing else about him, as soon as you heard that voice – on the radio, on the telephone – you’d know it was the art critic Brian Sewell. He seemed permanently to have at least one plum either in his mouth or at t

On 14th May 1940, at the age of 17, I listened to a wireless broadcast by Anthony Eden. His message was that the Government intended a new home defence army. It would consist of ex-servicemen beyond the call-up age and young men not yet of conscripti

Profile £30 Hogarth (1697-1764) holds a special place in our cultural landscape: the first really distinct, distinctive British artist. His images – paintings and prints, portraits and ‘conversation pieces’, ‘modern moral subjects’ and ‘comic history

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 A few minutes after her husband, Julius Rosenberg, was executed, Ethel Rosenberg was executed, too, on the evening of 19th June 1953, for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The couple left two sons, aged ten and six

Ebury Press £16.99 The midlife crisis can take many forms, but it commonly begins with a feeling of ‘Is this it?’ And, if it is, is it enough? Do you just trundle along on the same path for another 30 years? Or could you throw it all in? Become an os

Faber £14.99 At one time, lots of children were made to read Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners at school. Nowadays, even if the Traveller broke the door down, he might find there was nobody there. De la Mare, once a literary lion, centrepiece of

Allen Lane £20 I’ve never met a normal human adult. I’m not sure I want to. We’re not satisfied with our ‘normal’ states of consciousness. We’re always seeking something else. Many plants help in the search. We sniff them in gardens, inhale their ess

‘Call it vanity if you will but, from a very early age, my great object was to make every man and every woman love me.’ 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1674-1773) Chesterfield’s ambition strikes a chord today (particularly as we re-enter society after the

Is it possible to kill a word? Many words certainly go unuttered. If you’re a typical English-speaker, you have a vocabulary of roughly 20,000 words, or perhaps 40,000 if you’ve been to university. Yet the OED puts the number of words at over 500,000

An en suite bathroom is meant to give the impression of continental luxury. You can tell that because it’s spoken of in French, like toilet and serviette, for that added sense of, er, mystique. In a five-star hotel, an en suite bathroom may resemble

Now that we’re all being asked to prove our identity every time we go out to lunch, the idea of being an impostor seems quite attractive. But could we go as far as Anna Sorokin, the lorry driver’s daughter from a Moscow suburb who passed herself off

ELVIS PRESLEY: THE SEARCHER You might think this Elvis documentary would be biased. It was devised by his ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, and his great friend, Jerry Schilling, cleverest of the Memphis Mafia. Instead, it’s a two-part, 215-minute, objecti

THE DEEP BLUE SEA NATIONAL THEATRE AT HOME Helen McCrory’s death in April, from cancer, aged just 52, robbed the British theatre of one of its great performers. To honour her memory, the National Theatre is streaming one of her greatest performances,

A watercolourist with bowel cancer tells me she’ll shortly be in St Mary’s, Paddington, ‘having a camera shoved up my arse’. I suggested she sells the footage to Netflix or the ITV Hub, or any of the other channels, as it’ll be more interesting than

I wish I could create a podcast I might ‘host and monetise’, as websites advise. Something simple; infantile even. Like Michael Mosley’s Just One Thing, which suggests you should stand on one leg every day. Or breathe in and out, slowly. Or I could k

THE TURK RETURNS TO GLYNDEBOURNE Fifty summers have passed since Glyndebourne first staged Rossini’s Il turco in Italia. And here I was again on a Bank Holiday Sunday, treading those same flowering lawns, with the same warm sun beating down from an a

IN THE NIGHT GARDEN Midnight. A three-quarters moon. A gibbous moon, thinly veiled under a gossamer haze. Further south, on the horizon, cauliflower clouds drift eastwards to worry the Cotswolds – no threat to my nocturnal plan. It’s high summer, 18°

MELONS Victorian gardeners growing fruit for grand houses were fond of their melon hothouses, and some developed their own varieties, such as Blenheim Orange. If you want to grow melons today, on a much smaller scale of course, the cantaloupe is the

DOWN MEXICO WAY Exotic holiday destinations are unlikely this summer. So wrap up warm, light the barbecue and head into the wilds – thanks to Mexico artist-illustrator Corinna Sargood’s story of love and learning in the 1980s, The Village in the Vall

THE BEST, FASTEST FOOD My son recently accused me of writing only about formal restaurants. The ones in which people use knives and forks. To which I disdainfully replied, ‘Well, I am hardly going to review K-F-bloody-C.’ I could feel the wrath of th

THE SEX-FREE GAMES Back in 2000, ahead of the Sydney Olympic Games, there was a sudden panic about sharks. The swimming leg of the triathlon was scheduled to take place in the harbour and a warning had gone out about danger from snappy great whites.

GETTING THE SACK ‘Duke Ellington? What was he doing there?’ asked a confused member of our group of wine writers. Artur Gama, the softly-spoken owner of Quinta da Boa Esperança in the hills north of Lisbon, was hosting an alfresco lunch, and one of o

BEST-VALUE-FOR-MONEY CAR In 2014, my friend Celia bought a new Dacia (pronounced Datcha) Sandero, a range whose £5,5995 base model was then the cheapest new car in Britain. Celia opted for the more expensive Stepway version, finding that the extra he

We all know the rules of a committee meeting. The more convenient it is to be there and the less time it lasts, the more likely there will be decent attendance and sensible decisions. This is why the innovation of online meetings has been a revelatio

Afternoons have just got a whole lot livelier. Anne Robinson has become the first female host on Countdown, the game show beloved by afternoon TV viewers. Robinson and I were at school together 65 years ago. Her family were Irish Catholics in Liverpo

Sara and I sat on the pebbles as Zoë, her dog, skittered ahead on her sharp claws. Like a spiritual goal, Zoë disappeared at intervals, where the beach dipped or a boulder proved too irresistible a surface not to pee on. Sara had recently returned fr

Pugin said, ‘Gothic is more holy the nearer it reaches Heaven.’ After his myriad ecclesiastical designs, he would have been refreshed by the domestic rarity of the Gothicry of Hadlow Castle in Kent. What a building! What a heart-soaring, sky-kissing,

I feel very privileged to have spent many happy evenings at the Portland Club, the oldest bridge club in the world. No conventions are allowed – no Stayman, no Blackwood, no Transfers, no nothing (except for a Weak Notrump and a take-out double). All

IN COMPETITION No 268, you were invited to write a poem with the title The Writing on the Wall. Anthony Young observed of the makers of those great spray-paint tags that we see from trains, ‘They paint their aims with aerosol,/Abiding to the protocol

Q Having spent a year wearing soft shoes, I was due to lunch at my club recently, which meant putting on proper lace-ups. It was a lovely day, so I walkedfrom Sloane Square to St James’s Street. Fine. But when I left, I found that both heels were blo

Issue 56 Summer 2021 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie A Stinging Delight by David Storey Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life by Frances Bingham Going with the Boys by Judith Mackrell The Plague Year: America in the T

A NEW HISTORY OF VIKINGS FROM SCANDINAVIA TO THE SILK ROADS CAT JARMAN Wm Collins, 336pp, £25 As a 17-year-old, Financial Times reviewer William Dalrymple was one of ten diggers who made an important archaeological discovery in a vicar’s garden near

Have you read more books in this Covid-infected year than you have in any other? With my obsession for lists I know that I definitely have. And at least a couple (Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, and Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots) hav

In 1983, when The Constant Nymph was reprinted by Virago, Penelope Fitzgerald described it an excellent example of a ‘good bad book.’ She felt its ‘good-bad enticement’ at once, she wrote in the London Review of Books: ‘I know that the 15-year-old Te

MICHEL FOUCAULT Modern Classics, 416pp, £25 For most of the last four decades or so, the obscure philosopher Michel Foucault has been a name seldom mentioned outside academic social studies departments. Now, though, he’s all the rage – blamed by cult

VOL 1: 1941–1966 A RESTLESS HUNGRY FEELING CLINTON HEYLIN Bodley Head, 528pp, £30 Just one of many publications tied to Dylan’s recent 80th birthday, this one garnered the most attention. ‘Heylin’s 13th book on Dylan,’ said Will Hodgkinson in the Tim

Writers, like cats, are resistant to herding, hence how fraught their relationship with the film industry has often been. The arrival of talkies put them in the frame, but also under the yoke. Coarse-grained movie moguls like Jack Warner, who boasted

AN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY FOR THE PEOPLE ELIOT HIGGINS Bloomsbury, 272pp, £20 Bellingcat is an investigative journalism website founded by Eliot Higgins, who ten years ago was a college dropout who became obsessed with the Arab Spring and the discovery

JHUMPA LAHIRI Bloomsbury, 176pp, £14.99 Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her short stories in 2000. Twenty years later, having moved to Rome, she swapped her native language for Italian to write Dove mi trovo; ‘I am, in Italian, a tougher, free

STEVEN LOVATT Particular Books, 160pp, £12.99 Among the unanticipated effects of last year’s daily walks in lockdown was the nation’s rediscovery of birdsong. As PD Smith, reviewing Steven Lovatt’s new book, put it in the Guardian: ‘The pandemic stru

If Harold Pinter’s plays were about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Charmian Clift’s memoirs are about fish rotting in the Greek island sun. With her writer husband, George Johnston, and their three children, she decamped from London in 1954,

At the age of 35 in 1934, First World War veteran Maurice Wilson attempted the first solo attempt to climb Mount Everest. In The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War and Everest (Penguin, 288pp, £10.99) Ed Caesar tells the story of how Wi