Ephraim Hardcastle
WESTMINSTER Abbey bigwigs have decided, subject to practicalities, to return a sacred tabot (a symbolic tablet) to the Ethiopian church from which it was looted by British troops in 1868. HRH’s vast Royal Collection of art, jewellery, furniture, decorative arts and costume is the largest in private ownership in the world and features many dubiously acquired treasures. Queen Victoria even arranged a special exhibition for her diamond jubilee of items removed from monarchs her troops had overthrown.
COMIC Dom Joly, touring the UK with conspiracy theorist Dr Julian Northcote, reports: ‘Dr Northcote is a man possessed. He is currently writing a new book about his theory that Ringo Starr was a KGB agent. If I hear one more story about how [The Beatles’s] Octopus’s Garden is a coded message to his handlers back in Moscow, I’ll explode.’
HAVING never achieved the Hollywood success of his versatile ex-comedy partner Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, pictured together, has another tilt at Tinseltown immortality by playing a Holocaust survivor called Edek in the movie Treasure. But The Hollywood Reporter says: ‘However much we all love Fry, a certified national treasure in the UK, he’s never been an actor with much range, and he’s pretty much at his limit here. Admittedly, it’s deeply admirable that he put in the time to learn Polish well enough to speak a considerable amount throughout the film. But given that Edek moved to New York after the war, wouldn’t he have a New York accent in English instead of sounding like a British Pole from South Kensington?’
ELVIS Costello is ‘too relentless’, says Bob Dylan in his recent book, The Philosophy Of Modern Song, adding: ‘He exhausts people. Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. ’ Feisty Costello responds: ‘Too many words? Coming from Bob Dylan, the man who just wrote a 16-minute song!’
PETER Capaldi, who played the dying Siegfried Sassoon in the BBC’s moving film about the WW1 poet, broadcast last week, is the husband of Elaine Collins, who brought Shetland and Vera to TV screens. She is the brains in their family, he says. ‘People walk into our house and it’s full of books. They say, “Have you read all these books?” And I say, “No, my wife has, I’ve just read the Doctor Who annuals over there.”’
AMID the chaos of the Antwerp siege on October 3, 1914, as vehicles jammed against each other in the streets, horses reared and ambulances entangled with ammunition wagons, a dashing individual in a ‘flowing dark blue cloak, dressed like a lion tamer [and] wearing a yachting cap’ climbed atop a platform. He began directing traffic, yelling out commands in a crazy mixture of English and French. As shrapnel rained down ‘he tranquilly smoked a large cigar’. Winston Churchill ( for it was he) has been analysed through the lens of psychiatry by Gordon Parker, a professor at Sydney’s University of New South Wales, who says: ‘I would make the case that Churchill was bipolar.’