The Oldie

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

Celia Johnson (p14) was one of Britain's greatest actresses. She starred in Brief Encounter, In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed. She wrote her previously unpublished Oldie piece in the 1950s. Nicky Haslam (p24) is a writer, interior designer and

Thief broke in ‘to make Pot Noodle’ Aberdeen Press and Journal Arrests after man had his hair pulled Oxford Times Man who was asked to leave King's Lynn nightclub said, ‘I'm not getting a f***ing taxi home’ Lynn News £15 for published contributions S

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

Spring has sprung. The sap is rising. And I realise I have barely lived at all. I have just come from recording a conversation for my Rosebud podcast with the actor Rupert Everett, 64. Rupe has lived – and some. The star of My Best Friend's Wedding (

If there was one thing my front garden didn't need to underscore the existing aura of dystopian gloom, that thing has come. For years, no one passing could glance towards the house without recognising it as the home of a sad little man who has given

Seventy years ago, in July 1954, Lonnie Donegan recorded his version of Rock Island Line. It reached the Top Ten in the hit parade on both sides of the Atlantic. Skiffle had arrived. The term ‘skiffle’ evokes a bunch of 1950s sixth-formers in NHS gla

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

For a short while, some years ago, I was a sort of sub-film star. This was very surprising, and by the time I had got used to it, I stopped being one. I was never very good, frankly. I was very bad at doing the sort of things that film stars are requ

When asked why she had chosen an acting career, my mother said, ‘I thought I'd rather like it. It was the only thing I was good at. And I thought it might be rather wicked.’ Celia (1908-82) was an established West End star when the Second World War b

Some institutions move with the times. Others prefer to resist the tide. The Garrick Club has declined, so far, to take advantage of my recently revised opinion about accepting women into the club. I found that, in law, women were now eligible for me

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

Eighty years ago, on 26th April 1944, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) led the daring raid to kidnap General Kreipe, the officer leading the German forces in occupied Crete. I am afraid that, nearly 70 years later, I think it was me what d

In 1971, I was a medical student in Spain. Having done French at school, I decided English would be more useful for my future profession. I applied for a summer job in ten London hospitals. All of them answered politely, but only the National Hospita

The editor of this magazine actually asked me if I would write an article about how I would deal with actors’ egos. I replied that, although I've directed more than 30 feature films, I've found the actors (with very rare exceptions) to be co-operativ

According to the greatest magazine editor of my generation, Graydon Carter, this is the Age of the Grifter. To that I would add ‘and the Gullible Punter’. Whenever I read of someone falling for one of the myriad scams abroad and ending up in the pape

I apologise if I'm telling you stuff you know, but I need to set the scene: we are the third-fattest nation in Europe. Only ten per cent of us cook meals with fresh food at home. Thousands of households lack a kitchen. Half the children arriving at p

The other day, on the anniversary of my father's death, I paid a trip back to the British Museum to see some of the things we used to enjoy together. The Prints and Drawings Room used to let us both in – child though I was – to leaf through paintings

‘For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the sovereignties and the powers who originate in the darkness of this world’ (Ephesians 6:12). This passage from St Paul is typical in its reference to sovereignties and powe

Sir John Major paid tribute at St Margaret's, Westminster, to Peter Brooke. As Northern Ireland Secretary, he did much to start the talks with the IRA that led to the Good Friday Agreement. As Culture Secretary, he introduced legislation to launch th

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

SIR: In 2016, my book A History of Magazine Design was published by that great oldie of a museum, the V&A. On page 15, there is a cover of the Weekly Illustrated Annual from 1937 (see picture). There were various candidates for ‘The Man Behind the Ca

I'm a boom baby, born before the NHS. I grew up in the slums of Aston in Birmingham – as did John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, now 75. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I'd drink beer and play snooker with Ozzy, his dad, Jack, and his Uncle Jim – also known as O

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

They fit hardly any mattress known to man. They are invariably too big, too small, too deep, too shallow, too long or too short. They are an independent life force possessed of the devil. When you're putting them on and are triumphantly tugging down

The best drink of the day is just before the first one. James Bond in Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun There's a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminals blow some guy's brains out. I'm a crook. Ronnie Biggs What have

Historians pride themselves on taking the long view. They strive to rise above our daily preoccupations while working on less smug-sounding variations of the conclusion ‘It's all happened before.’ Sometimes, that long view can get very long indeed. P

WELSH WONDERS On a recent cold and blowy afternoon, I spent a few hours in a series of greenhouses, sniffing exotic scents and marvelling at the sheer abundance of flowering bulbous plants. I was just a mile from the National Botanic Garden of Wales

Next time somebody criticises you for doing something ecologically evil such as owning a car or using a log-burner, ask them to glance at the phone in their hand – and consider how much energy, water and raw materials it is using up. Not so much the

There is nothing like a good scare story to grab the attention of readers. Perhaps you saw the recent analysis of how Russia and China were the biggest producers of some of the metals that are vital for the batteries in electric cars. China is restri

In a twilit corner of the Gallerie d'Italia, a bombastic, fascistic building on the grungy Via Toledo in Naples, there hangs the last picture ever painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, enfant terrible of Renaissance art. Painted here in Naple

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? When I was 10, I emigrated to New Zealand. So a lot of my holiday memories are travelling around New Zealand. Before that, during the war when it was more possible to travel, at least one or two holi

Across 1 Ice over (6) 4 Cheap (anag) (5) 8 Form of water (5) 9 Soft, not severe (7) 10 Flow (from) (7) 11 Rice drink (4) 12 Affirmative (3) 14 Pack away (4) 15 Encourage (4) 18 The day before (3) 21 Informed (4) 23 Reply (7) 25 Placards, stickers (7)

At the other table on this month's deal from the European Open Championships in Strasbourg, East-West had bid on to six spades over North-South's six clubs, doubled and one down. Declaring six spades, West had won North's singleton-heart lead with th

IN COMPETITION No 304 you were invited to write a poem called Balm. Soothed sensibilities led some to write poetic lines of excessive length untroubled by rhyme. Yet, without striving for metre and rhyme, Maggie Cobbett's short poem was rather sweet:

Q Last year my husband had an affair with someone at his office. He's now given her up and says he regrets it, and he swears he loves me and the children, so we have made it up – but only up to a point. I just can't bear having sex with him any more.

When Kingsley Amis learnt he'd won the Booker Prize, he assumed his Evelyn Waugh face: an apoplectic diehard, puffed up, empurpled and complete with bulging eyes. This was doubly appropriate. The face one of ‘Lucky Jim’ Dixon's party pieces. Also, Am

Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book

OUP, 608pp, £25 Historians of sex between men face an enormous challenge, wrote Catherine Fletcher in History Today, because ‘so many sources derive either from the prosecution of illegal acts, or from literary texts that were by necessity often code

Bloomsbury, 366pp, £20 As Labour continues to ride high in the polls and prepares for government once again, it is worth looking back on the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in its centenary year. In The Wild Men, ‘David Torrance, a bio

As we civilians struggle with global recessions, cost of living crises, inflation, sluggish growth and all the rest of it, we continue to marvel at the stupendous wealth of a few tech billionaires who seem to have escaped the laws of economic gravity

Hamish Hamilton, 160pp, £18 In The Spectator, Robert Adès found that in this ‘collection of seven new, loosely associated essays… two stand out in their brilliant use of the dialectical psychoanalytic method (otherwise known as the old switcheroo, or