The Oldie

✽ There’s nothing new A about fake news. Look at what happened in the curious case of the Zinoviev Letter too years ago. A British general election was scheduled for 29th October 1924. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia seven years earlier

Robert O’Byrne(p18) is author of A Vanishing World: the Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne. He wrote Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House and The Last Knight. Sophia Waugh (p30) is a teacher and the author of The Oldie’s School D

Why does anyone ever go abroad? The hassle at the airport, the heaving of cases on and off the conveyer belt while you’re struggling through security, forgetting to put your own belt back on afterwards (and in my case almost getting arrested as I str

Forty years ago, in December 1984, the last one-pound note was printed. It ceased to be legal tender in March 1988. It seemed as though an old and venerable item had been stripped from our culture. We could, for example, look back to May 1828, when a

A brat summer is a summer that you spend being a bit brattish and badly behaved. It’s the sort of summer when you stay out until 5.32am wearing a lime-green bikini. The sort of summer when you take up smoking again. The sort of summer when you have a

Man stuck knee-deep in mud by river Brighton Argus Huge firewood stack stolen from garden Aberdeen Press and Journal Council manager who broke wind on colleague guilty of age bias Daily Telegraph £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for

In 1811, architect, stonemason and shell obsessive George Perry published a lavishly illustrated volume, his Conchology or the Natural History of Shells. It featured 348 beautifully illustrated mollusc shells, with descriptions of species, many of wh

After my daughter had got engaged, in December, I was asked the same two questions again and again. The first - ‘Do you like him?’ - was easily answered. ‘Yes - very much.’ The second, hot on its heels, was another thing altogether. ‘So what are you

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

My late uncle Alexander Waugh’s funeral left those who might describe themselves as ‘bubbly’ with a unique opportunity to simmer down. A great man had died, and no one was in the mood to chatter. I knew my uncle Alexander, who died in July, aged only

It’s well known that dog ownership went through the roof during the Covid era. I have nothing against dogs. Many friends and relatives have had nice dogs - nice mainly because of their reliable, sensitive owners. It’s hard to say that now - most owne

Oxford, the university of which Lewis Carroll was in some ways the most characteristic member, is not just an academic institution. It is a dream. Very many people respond to this Wonderland, who have never set foot in the much-spoilt market town whe

The deputy head walks into my class, apologising for interrupting. She proceeds to tell the pupils all about the car crash she has been involved in, telling them she thinks they should hear about it directly from her. After the first stunned silence,

It was Christmas 2004, and my great friend Nick, a party-organiser, invited me to a ball at the Clapham Grand. The party got off with a swing, full of 25-year-old friends mingling in the old theatre. All evening, standing above the dance floor, in th

Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, would have been 90 on 19th September, Instead, he tragically died of an overdose at 32, in 1967. Epstein spent three terms at my old school, Clayesmore School, in Dorset, in 1948. He was not a good student. This w

My favourite coat is in muted turquoise tartan; it was made by Selina Blow 35 years ago. It has worn better than my second favourite by Selina Blow - a dark purple Nehru jacket in silk matka with 15 silk matka buttons running down the front. All the

I had a pang of recognition on watching The Holdovers, the bittersweet story of a cantankerous classics teacher, an abrasive but bright student and the head cook all forced to remain on campus during a 1970s Christmas break. Over the pond in Shropshi

Jan Leeming, the broadcaster (and jungle survivor of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!) now lives at St Margaret’s Bay, between Deal and Dover, which is the nearest point in England to France. Appropriately, she has fallen in love with a Frenchman

Ever since I met John, my husband, a former dress designer and manufacturer, and my TV ‘how-to-look-good’ stylist, Jane Galpin, I’ve been a lot braver with colour. They both push me to pile it on. John trawls through his phone in search of fashion ba

An acquaintance recently recommended a wonderful book to me - the Reverend Colin Heber-Percy’s Tales of a Country Parish. Having read the book at a gallop the first time round because I was enjoying it so much, I am now reading it slowly and more sen

A service was held at the Guards’ Chapel for Sir Richard Vickers, for many years Elizabeth II’s favourite equerry. The celebrant was Rev Deiniol Morgan, Chaplain to the Household Division. The representative of HRH The Princess Royal was Brigadier An

The case of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering tiny babies, has aroused passions around the world. It has stimulated large numbers of people to become amateur experts in neonatal pathology, a difficult subject at the best of times. How is i

The Oldie, 23-31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk SIR: AN Wilson (Oldie Man of Letters, September issue) rightly praises Titian, Verdi and (subject of his latest

‘Rule one on page one of the book of war is: “Do not march on Moscow.”’ President Zelensky may not be familiar with the words of Bernard Montgomery, but he will surely be well acquainted with his point. Invading Russia has tended to be a mug’s game.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him. Audrey Hepburn I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor. Joan Rivers Have no fear of perfecti

Non-alcoholic drinks The high point of my day is that first glass of wine at precisely 5.45pm, swiftly followed by another. The sheer bliss experienced when that chilled white wine hits the system and courses through the veins is unequalled by any ot

The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama By Ben Macintyre Viking £25 Remember where you were when six terrorists stormed London’s Iranian Embassy in 1980, taking 26 hostages and provoking a six-day siege - which was brought t

When I told my accountant recently that I was busy with optical research, I spoke nothing but the truth. It would, of course, have been possible to phrase it somewhat differently. I could have described myself as going places - Stirling Castle comes

The Women Behind the Door By Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape £20 In 1997, I visited Dublin to interview Roddy Doyle and, anecdotally, found the city in his thrall. ‘I’ve read three now,’ reported my taxi driver. Doyle’s reputation first rested on a cheerfu

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity By Diarmaid MacCulloch Allen Lane £35 The cover of Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch’s chatty ramble round 2,000 years of sex through Christian eyes shows the lower parts of Eve (by Lucas Cranach, but re

LEE (15) How do you make a film about your mum? Particularly if she was one of the greatest war photographers of the 20th century, a wild spirit - and not the greatest mother of all time. That’s the problem with this film and its screenplay, based on

Readers will remember Stop the Week - a ‘major irritant’ until 1992, with Robert Robinson and guests including Milton Shulman. Every week, Milton told a Goldbergand-Cohen joke. Sample: Goldberg and Cohen are together in the jungle. Suddenly a large w

TOGETHER AGAIN The rock band reunion is the eternal fans’ fantasy and a stadium-filling holy grail, but there’s only one band who could carry it off. It’s a perilously risky business. I realised this with the return of the Velvet Underground in 1993.

PREPARE FOR BLUEBELLS This might sound bonkers and forgive me if it strikes you as boastful: we’re making two woodland gardens. The pair of us have clocked up 142 years (one is 16 years younger than the other). In between our now all-toofrequent hosp

HAMBURG PARSELY Keats’s season of mellow fruitfulness may be upon us, but for me it is more a time of ‘rootfulness’, of the root vegetables now coming into their own in the kitchen. We have been enjoying carrots and beetroot from the garden for some

MAGIC OF MUSHROOMS Autumn is in the air. The mushroom season is upon us. And our unreliable summer weather might well have delivered a generous harvest of edible fungi to the shadier corners of our green and pleasant land. For the novice forager, wha

A TASTE OF CHILDHOOD We all remember putting our elbows on the table as children and being told, ‘All joints on the table will be carved.’ But what about joints under the table? The tables on the terrace outside the revived Julie’s in Holland Park ar

COCKTAIL THAT WON THE WAR The Canon de 75 modèle 1897 is widely regarded as the first piece of modern artillery. It passed into legend as the gun that allowed the French to win the First World War. Combining great accuracy, portability and a rate of

AU REVOIR, GARETH Gareth Southgate has a new job. Sadly it is not in English football. When he resigned as England boss after the Euros, the man who steered the national side to two finals, a semifinal and a quarter final across four international co

DREAM CLASSIC CARS ‘There are few ways in which a man may be more innocently employed than in getting money,’ said Dr Johnson. He presumably meant there’s no pretence about it. Like much of what the great man said, there’s enough in it to make it mem

You may have been baffled by people claiming that they heard the news ‘on social media’. You would be right; social-media platforms do not provide news – at least not directly. Generally, they are just noticeboards on which almost anyone can post any

There is no tax quite like inheritance tax to get people arguing. Even though it raises less than one per cent of the total we pay each year – and fewer than four per cent of estates actually pay it; and then at only about four per cent of the total

Merrion Square is a handsome enclave in the heart of Dublin, with large-windowed, red-brick Georgian houses set round a verdant central garden. It was in a house (Number 1, pictured) on the north-west corner of the square that Oscar Wilde grew up. He

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? My father (the composer William Lloyd Webber) used to rent cottages in locations chosen because of my brother’s love of ancient monuments. We’d usually end up going down ridiculous unpaved roads, get

Stuck on a train to London in an August heatwave, passengers were taking emergency measures: fans, cold drinks pressed to cheeks, quiet expiration. As I journeyed, I realised I was an hour early for a journalistic assignation at a pub close to Hampst

Smug South was rather pleased with his result on this month’s deal from the Australian Gold Coast Congress. Wisely gambling a one opener on a hand that was palpably game-forcing (so worth two clubs) in order to bid out his shape, he reached the decen

IN COMPETITION No 310 you were invited to write a poem called Autumn Feeling. I enjoyed the refrain of Sylvia Smith’s apocopated villanelle: ‘Let’s face it, Keats – the weather’s up the spout.’ Richard Spencer wrote a sort of autumn carol with the ch

Q I have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and a particular difficulty I have is that I get extremely irritated by other people’s mannerisms. I have been like this since childhood, with parents, partners and professionally, and am finally acce

Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Works of Elaine May, Holly wood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen The House of Beckham Money, Sex and Power by Tom Bower Paris ‘44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop All His Spies: The Secret World of Ro

From the plethora of new books available this autumn, we’d be forgiven for believing that to work in the literary profession is to enjoy a life of abundant rewards. Not so, according to Oldie regular and writer Roger Lewis. On page 25, he describes h

NEIL JORDAN Apollo, 304pp, £25 When Jordan emerged as a writer he was compared to James Joyce and then went on to become known for directing ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Company of Wolves’, ‘The Crying Game’, ‘Michael Collins’ and more.. The Sunday Times’s Tom

I am delighted to see that Canongate has reprinted Climbing Days by Dorothy Pilley, one of the pioneering British mountaineers. It was first published in 1937 when climbers wore tweeds, woolly scarves and hobnail boots and Pilley’s account of a climb

ANNA CHAPMAN PARKER Duckworth, 281pp, £18.99 ‘Weeds are undergoing a cultural makeover’, pronounced Tome Morrissy-Swan, reviewing Understory in the Observer. The author, an artist, spent a year observing the so-called weeds that grew around her home

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had just finished writing a book, and before I embarked on the next one, I decided to have a break. Everyone else was doing it: actor friends ‘rested’. Academic friends took ‘sabbaticals’ (often involving lon

JOYCE CAROL OATES Fourth Estate, 352pp, £16.99 Oates’s 64th novel is ‘ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, ‘RedHanded Butcher’ to others,’ wrote Sophie Mackintosh in the Literary Review. ‘At the New Jersey Asylum f

The other day, I wrote an article about the Krays, which was so well received in the gangster community, word reached me that, should I have enemies who might usefully be ‘taken care of,’ then I was just to say the word. This is tempting, though, as

STEPHANIE MATTHEWS AND DANIEL SMITH icon, 288pp, £18.99 Jack Drummond, born in 1891, was a renowned biochemist, a scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food during the war and knighted in 1944. He produced a plan for food distribution based on ‘sound

BRUCE BOUCHER Yale Uni Press, 224pp, £35 Art historian Bruce Boucher is a former director of the Soane Museum. As the Times’s Laura Freeman put it: ‘He knows its nooks and comers, trick screens, twisting staircases, recesses and secrets.’ Freeman lov

How do you define a crime story? One answer might be any novel subject to the tyranny of plot, including spy stories and thrillers both genres examined in Martin Edwards’s magisterial survey, The Life of Crime (Collins Crime Club, 736pp, £14.99), the

According to a recent report in several medically credible newspapers, as well as in the Daily Mail, the process of human decay is nothing like as random, gradual or unpredictable as you probably assumed. First at 44 and then again at 60 - so the cat