The Oldie

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Michael Hardaker Supplements editor Jane Mays Editorial assistant Amelia Milne Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowit

Peter York (p20) invented the Sloane Ranger in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, written with Ann Barr. He is author of Dictators’ Homes and The Blue Riband: the Piccadilly Line. Rachel Johnson (p61) is our Golden Oldies columnist. She edited The

Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy's wit and lightness of touch in his books an

‘Do you reckon,’ I enquired on a visit to my wife in bucolic Dorset, ‘that this is an early sign of frontal-lobe dementia?’ Rebecca, who underscored her high intelligence and flawless judgement by vacating the marital home 13 years ago, pondered this

I am writing this on a train. Another train. I am on tour. In fact, I am on two tours. Simultaneously. With one tour, I am taking my one-man show (Gyles Brandreth Can't Stop Talking) across the land, from Edinburgh to Eastbourne. There's no rhyme nor

At the October Oldie Literary Lunch, we were lucky enough to host Sir Don McCullin, the world's greatest war photographer. Don was talking about his new book, Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor, published with a commentary by Barnaby Rogerson. He says

In the 1930s, rambling was popular -anything to get away from the city smoke and into the clean air of the countryside. The LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) served most of the eastern side of the country. In 1933, it hit on the idea of convert

He's leng. She's soooo leng. This ice cream is leng. That handbag is leng. What on earth does ‘leng’ mean? If you have regular contact with teenagers, you'll know that ‘leng’ is a superlative term of the highest praise. ‘Lena,’ can be applied to anyt

Missing vole delays bridge opening Eastern Daily Press Lick of paint needed on public bench Peeblesshire News Shock as Wetherspoon tables and chairs dumped in New Forest car park Southern Daily Echo £15 for published contributions The January issue i

Going to the theatre is simple enough. Going backstage afterwards to visit one of the cast is a minefield. In his dressing room, you'll catch the actor with his trousers down, literally and metaphorically. Out of your mouth will flow a torrent of ran

I was about 13, on a sofa in front of the television on a wet Saturday afternoon. I was carelessly able to do that once – sigh. I was watching a black-and-white film. Or maybe the TV was black-and-white – probably. It was a story about a nanny caring

Gordon Brown is a son of the manse. John Major's dad was a circus performer who sold garden gnomes. My own father, R F B ‘Dick’ Letts, was a prepschool headmaster at Oakley Hall, Cirencester, from 1962 to 1992. Having a boarding school for one's home

We live in an age of Hibernian popularity with the likes of Graham Norton and Dara Ó Briain helping to create a green-tinged feelgood factor. It is easy to forget that in the seventies and eighties it was not only unfashionable but often unpleasant t

There's no sugarcoating the awfulness of going bald, especially when you're young. I lost my hair – first slowly, then all at once – when I was in my late twenties. I had it worse than most, but better than some. I've had decades to get used to seein

My ex-husband reckons that for most of his life, he has been pretty much invisible to other people, and that as he has got older, this invisibility has increased. But, just lately, he has been getting sideways approving looks from passersby, even at

Whatever happened to the classic silk headscarf? Ubiquitous for decades, headscarves have lately been lying dormant. Now we are poised for a comeback of sorts. Investors, priced out of the iconic handbag market (the Birkin, the Fendi Baguette etceter

Look, I know you are far too clever to jump on every passing investment bandwagon, but you will, you know. We all do. The fear of missing out (FOMO) runs through our psyche. If only I had bought Amazon when it seemed like a daring idea and some cleve

‘And if you know your history’ sounds like the sort of thing a politician might say, or a pub bore. To hear several thousand people say those words together, you would need to be at the football. Fans as far apart as Glasgow, Liverpool and London can

Do you suffer from Plyushkin's disorder? Statistics suggest that five per cent of us do, but my guess is it's more. Stepan Plyushkin is a character in Gogol's novel Dead Souls, who saves everything he finds. He is, in other words, a hoarder, who inve

Growing old, one loses one's capacity to be shocked. But lately I have been shocked by the senior clergy in our neck of the woods. Somers Town is just north of the British Library and Euston Station. It has always been a deprived neighbourhood. It wa

I was quite a young mouse. It was in the early nineties. I was lying in bed one morning, staring at the ceiling, and decided I'd like to start a magazine. It would be called the Idler and would celebrate the fine art of doing nothing, which I took to

Quite why my wife gets up so early is a mystery. Is it to avoid me? It's not as if she's milking cows or churning butter, even as the master hulks heavily in his sack. ‘Admin’ is her reason. From dawn till dusk, she's on the phone checking that provi

I recall nostalgically how London – and Paris – numbers indicated topography: MAY(fair) KEN(sington), HOL(born) – and ELY(sées), TRO(cadéro), PAS(sy). In France, phones had an extra earpiece, so a two-way phone call could include a third party (or ev

In general, schoolchildren are litterbugs. Some of them even enjoy the habit. I've been sitting marking in my classroom, or even teaching a class, and seen cheese strings hurled through an open window or half-eaten sandwiches tossed through my doorwa

I found £20 in the fold of my old wallet. It felt as if God was buying me breakfast. But I was then plunged into existential despair. If He did buy me breakfast, He must hate me, given what He provided. It came in the form of a misbegotten, flattened

‘What a way to run a railroad.’ So began a lecture by a visiting Biblical scholar at our monastery. It was on the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which the landowner pays the same wage to those who arrive at the eleventh hour as to those w

Alexander Cameron, one of Britain's leading KCs at the criminal bar and the elder brother of David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, was remembered at a thanksgiving service at St Luke's Church, Chelsea. The first address was by Christopher Wilmot-

Matthew Perry was famous for two things: first as a comic actor in Friends and latterly as a man who was addicted to drink and drugs. He had, as the current-day cant phrase has it, ‘opened up’ about the latter in a memoir published last year. Famous

The first time I met Gérard Depardieu, the great French actor was stark bollock naked and about to get into bed with me and my wife in a Paris penthouse. It was not how I had imagined things would turn out on that fateful night some 20 years ago. We

SIR: Among the things that Giles Wood is so pleased to have avoided, by turning down an invitation to stay for a week on a Scottish island (October issue), is the prospect of chatting through three-course dinners every night. As his putative (and ers

Tackle! By Jilly Cooper Bantam £22 When Tackle! with its saucy cover shot of a buff bloke in tightie whities thudded onto my mat, I thought I could predict the plot without even having to gallop through the 424 pages. For her new book, the first sinc

Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South—East (Pevsner Buildings of England) Revised by Simon Bradley Yale University Press £45 Round the great domed rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera ‘there is a density of monuments of architecture which has not the like in

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing Hilary Mantel John Murray £25 ‘On Sunday last, I had a shock waking up to find that my novel Wolf Hall was 2-1 favourite to win the Man Booker prize.’ So wrote Hilary Mantel in September 2009. ‘It was alm

Pru & Me: A Love Story By Timothy West Michael Joseph £22 Until relatively recently, Timothy West and Prunella Scales were middle-ranking mimes. They had to put up with members of the public saying things like (to Pru) ‘I've seen you in that comedy w

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine By General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts William Collins £26 Plato reckoned that only the dead have seen the end of war. More recently, a 19th-century jurist, Sir Henry Maine, reflected pres

Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint By Peter Sarris John Murray £30 From the date Octavian took the name Augustus in 27 BC to the bloody end of Constantine XI on 29th May 1453, the Roman Empire was ruled by more than 150 emperors. Leaving aside its mu

My wife said, ‘Can my mother come down for the weekend?’ So I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Well, she's been up on the roof two weeks already.’ Bob Monkhouse When I played drunks, I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was

My husband is training for a marathon. This is, in theory, a good thing as it means he is keeping fit. In reality, it means he spends much of his free time running around our neighbourhood in brightly coloured Lycra, stopping only to check his bright

Wyndham's, London, until 9th December What a piece of work is Kenneth Branagh! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! He's surely the leading Shakespearean actor of our age – the finest since Olivier. As a director, he's a lot more fallible, a

‘We live in such horrendous times,’ said Sir András Schiff, the great pianist. ‘There is no escape from the horrors. But perhaps there is some solace and consolation. Maybe in a small way, in two or three hours – my concerts are rather long – we can

ITV's pre-Christmas treat is a cheery little number called Platform 7, adapted from the psycho thriller by Louise Doughty. Doughty also wrote Apple Tree Yard, turned into a popular BBC series starring Emily Watson as a 50-something scientist sleeping

I am late to this party. I was only dimly aware of the Taylor Swift phenomenon. I'd managed to tune her out with my internal synthesiser since Swift signed a deal aged 14 with Sony/ATV in 2003. She is now unignorable. The girl next door is now worth

ANGELICA Christmas in the almost forgotten past of my childhood always included crystallised or glacé fruits and chestnuts. There were also little candied green bits in the Christmas cake, which apparently were called angelica. It was not until this

CLAIRE CANSICK: YOU AND I ARE EARTH LUCY HARWOOD: BOLD IMPRESSIONS Firstsite, Colchester, to 14th April It would be mean to say that for centuries Colchester has lived on its status as the first city of Roman Britain. After all, it was also rich from

CONSTANCE SPRY'S XMAS PUD Whatever's happening elsewhere in the world, keep the home fires burning with a luscious, sticky-fingered Christmas pudding. It's best made with butcher's beef-suet. But it's fiddly to prepare, as you have to separate the cr

DINING WITH MICKEY MOUSE The most noticeable change since 2021 in the post-Covid world of restaurant service is the rapid ‘turning’ of tables. Before March 2020, the announcement ‘We'll need your table back by 9pm’ was the preserve of the truly smart

A TASTE OF AUSTRIA In common with much of the rest of Europe, Austria in 1983 enjoyed a grape harvest that was pretty good. A balmy spring had given way to a long, hot summer. So the grapes were abundant and ripe – in some cases perhaps too ripe, lac

NOT SO GRAND NATIONAL Several months ahead of the event, the organisers of the Grand National announced that, from next April, there will be significant alteration in the way the greatest of all horse races is run. This is the beginning of the end, i

TAXING CHOICES The Treasury has a problem: how to replace shrinking road taxes in the age of ZEVs (Zero Emission Vehicles). Left unattended, it would blow a significant hole in government finances. We pay about 52.95p in tax on every litre of fuel, n

In October, the slightly improbably named Vinton Cerf spelt out some internet-related home truths when he spoke at the Royal Society. Mr Cerf is one of the creators of the worldwide web, being part of the team who invented the way computers talk to o

I have been writing about finance for 45 years – and am reminding myself how much has changed in that time. When I began in 1978, credit cards and cash machines had arrived only a decade before. Until 1971, just before decimalisation, you paid two ol

The short-eared owl (Asio flammeus) has a great advantage for birdwatchers. It's a daylight hunter and not as nocturnal as the majority of owls. Its ears are concealed as normal at the sides of its head. The tufts – more visible in its forest-dwellin

Sir John Lavery (1856-1941) is best known for a banknote. From 1928 until 2002, his second wife, Hazel, appeared on Irish notes. The formidable, bewitching Hazel appears, too (pictured, above right, in red and gold), in the new Lavery show at Ireland

Is there something you really miss abroad? I miss banter, irony, rudeness and English humour. Do you travel light? No, I'm a terrible packer. I didn't have a uniform at school and I would take things I might change into. Gawn [her husband] is very go

A sense of foreboding gripped Wigtown as I strolled into its generous market square. The wind was tearing at the fabric of this pretty stone town on a hilltop, overlooking the snaking estuaries of the Solway Firth. Then the rain began, great sheets o

7 Bread spread (6) 8 Hillocks, mounds (6) 10 Account for, justify (7) 11 Jewelled headdress (5) 12 Trade in; exchange (4) 13 Andean beast of burden (5) 17 Confuse (issue); sweet (5) 18 So be it! (4) 22 Bags; fires (5) 23 Maintains (values of) (7) 24

You hit a great drive down the edge of the fairway, but it takes a bad bounce into the heavy rough and your lie is near unplayable. What bad fortune. But there's no point in ruing the unfairness of it all. Hack the ball back onto the fairway and try

IN COMPETITION No 299 you were invited to write a poem called My Prime. Rob McMahon found it hard to unsubscribe to Amazon Prime: ‘Infected now like some unwelcome affliction / I cannot escape this new monthly subscription,’ and Hugh Cartwright told

Q My granddaughter brought her boyfriend over to have lunch with us and he spent most of the time, between courses, texting. I felt this was very rude, but does this mean I'm an old fuddy-duddy as it's common behaviour these days? Or was he just bein

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and ElizabethTaylor by Roger Lewis The Secret Life of John le Carre by Adam Sisman 2SAS: Bill Stirling and the Forgotten Special Forces Unit of World War II by Gavin Mortimer The Letters of Gustave Fla

Books are amazing, born of years of research and scholarship or from the creative minds of novelists. We can derive hours of enjoyment, instruction and inspiration, all for the price of a reasonably decent bottle of wine – or two. This season is no e

September, 320pp, £18.99 A cache of letters in a stockings box was the trigger for this much-praised memoir by the BBC's former technology correspondent, who retired in 2021 when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, a genetic inheritance from the fathe

Virago, 256pp, £18.99 Natasha Walter is a writer and human rights activist, and this ‘deeply passionate and humane memoir’, wrote Catherine Taylor in the Financial Times, centres on Walter's 75-year-old mother, Ruth. In December 2017, she ordered a d

Simon and Schuster UK, 688pp, £28 ‘Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,’ writes Walter Isaacson in this biography of the richest man in the world, who created electric car manufacturer Tesla, bought Twit

John Murray, 323pp,£25 It's fair to say self-defined ‘national trinket’ Miriam Margoyles is critical Marmite. According to the blurbs on her second volume of memoirs, some in fluorescent pink, the actress and chat-show-guest embarrasser is‘wonderful’

Picador, 332pp, £16.99 The title of the late Jonathan Raban's last book evokes Edmund Gosse's classic of the same name, though the text never refers to it. One chapter was left unfinished at Raban's death in January, and what remains is essentially t

Manchester UP, 944pp, £30 This biography of the British-Asian author Hanif Kureishi was finished just before Kureishi collapsed in Rome last year. He subsequently spent six months in hospital, unable to move arms or legs and is now being treated in a

OUP, 464pp, £25 Wilfred Owen was one of the leading poets of the first world war who was killed in action at the age of 25 a week before the war's end. In his review for the Spectator, Daniel Swift explained that in a 1967 edition of his letters, edi

Head of Zeus, 384pp, £27.99 A controversial and attentionseeking celebrity in Restoration London, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was also a feminist, a philosopher, and a poet. She was later nicknamed ‘Mad Madge’ by a Victorian commentator

This memoir by the maverick Old Etonian who failed in his bid for the Tory leadership covers his nine years as a Conservative MP and is ‘filled with similarly grim and darkly amusing episodes,’ wrote Luke Harding in the Observer. ‘It is an excoriatin

It was formed not in 1922, when Lloyd George's coalition government was brought down by a rebellion of Tory backbenchers, but in early 1923 by a handful of the new intake of Tory MPs, some 20 to start with. Conservative peer Philip Norton, also a pro

The Telegraph's Michael Deacon got his review copy of Chris Bryant's book about parliamentary sleaze two months ahead of publication. In those two months alone, he wrote, there was so much evidence of scandal and misconduct that the book was ‘both bl

It was only after the end of the Second World War, wrote a wistful Richard Vinen in the Literary Review that ‘history no longer felt like a Sunday drive through the Home Counties in a Bentley. It was more like a session on the dodgem cars at a fairgr

This not an autobiography or a political memoir, explained Tim Dale in the Literary Review, but ‘a series of case studies of scandals’ which May was ‘able to use her position in order to bring to light’. As a result, it ‘risks being seen… as an exten

‘Riley's aim is to push the notion of multicultural Britain much further back into the national past than the recent emergence of this term would suggest is justified,’ wrote Barnaby Crowcroft in the Literary Review. ‘This story runs through seven ch

The Conservative MP Danny Kruger has been a vocal backbench advocate of a particular species of social conservatism: deploring the breakdown of the traditional family, the erosion of Christian values, and the fraying of the social fabric. In Covenant

David Ellis, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent, has written a book, drawing on many decades of deep reading, that should have been more widely reviewed, given its universal theme – which is the consolations of literat

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was a vast project, begun in 1879 (and still going) and overseen by the indefatigable Sir James Murray who recruited a network of 3,000 volunteers around the world who were tasked with reading a particula

‘This book is at once an education and a joy to read,’ Sarah Gristwood proclaimed in theLiterary Review. There have been a plethora of biographies of Anne Boleyn, but Guy and Fox take a different approach – ‘something more interesting’. Leanda de Lis

Poison pen letters were how people stirred unhappiness before the days of anonymous comments online. Emily Cockayne whose books delve into interesting corners of human experience (her last was about waste) has scoured three centuries of local newspap

Of the two new biographies of Anne Boleyn and her family, Claire Martin's ‘is the more unorthodox of the pair,’ Daniel Brooks wrote in the Telegraph, ‘a bold study of the Boleyn family which takes us from the first evidence of the name in the village

‘Given the profound importance of the Hundred Years’ War, it's astounding that its details are so little taught and so little understood.’ Older readers, recalling with pride such victories as Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, may raise an eyebrow at th

‘Gareth Russell's scintillating hybrid of a book … is partly a biography of place and partly something stranger: an episodic history of England from Tudor times to the present, illustrated by lightning flashes of gossip and politics, set against the

‘We may ask ourselves why we are so concerned with finding and identifying the bones of the distant dead,’ Cat Jarman wrote of her new book. Given the limits of even modern forensic archeology, it is a fair point,’ Dan Jones rejoined in the Times, ‘b

Professional historian Gerard DeGroot, in his review for the Times, noted that ‘big books on monarchy still get published and still sell’, and that ‘the English have an insatiable hunger for boring kings’. Comedian David Mitchell, panel show guest an

‘Heffer has been chronicling our island story, since the accession of Queen Victoria, for years,’ wrote A.N. Wilson, a fellow historian of the period, in the Critic. ‘It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to tell the story of the 1920s and 19

This is the fifth volume in Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem post—WWII social history of Britain, which covers such subjects as the rise of the Beatles, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, the Profumo sex scandal, the funeral of Wi

When, last year, Boris Johnson referred to the UK's ‘proud history’ of welcoming foreigners fleeing persecution, he presumably meant refugees like the Jewish children on the Kindertransport. But all too often, says Paul Dowswell, émigrés have been tr