The Old Un
was sad to hear of the death of Fleet Street titan and former Times editor Harry Evans at the age of 92.
His mother-in-law, mother of Fleet Street queen Tina Brown, was the vivacious Bettina, wife of film producer George H Brown. A witty journalist, she wrote gossipy stories of the rich and starry for glossy expat magazines on the Costa del Sol.
In the early 1980s, when young Tina brought Harry, 25 years her senior, to Marbella, Bettina said, ‘Tina’s boyfriends these days are so old, George sometimes wonders if he should call them “sir”.’
All oldie hat-wearers will like The Hats That Made Britain – A History of the Nation through Its Headwear, a new book by David Long. They’re all here, from the tam-o’-shanter to the deerstalker.
Most of the hats are long gone, not least the Old Un’s favourite, the pith helmet – a hat that no living person can wear for anything other than comic reasons, surely?
White cloth-covered pith helmets were first used by British troops during the Anglo-sikh wars of 1845-49.
They were made of shola pith, a milky-white, spongy material extracted from a species of swamp bean. When dried, the pith was light, comfortable and resistant to humidity. The
explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904, pictured) was particularly keen on pith helmets.
They had their drawbacks, though. They weren’t so good for fighting in, being (a) highly conspicuous on the battlefield and (b) not very effective against bullets.
Stanley, I presume? The explorer in his pith helmet
Sasha Swire’s explosive political diary is reviewed on page 51 by Sarah Sands.
Lady Swire’s mother, 85-year-old Lady Nott, Sasha assures me, is ‘greatly enjoying my book and the hoo-ha around it’.
For Sasha is not the first wife in her family to make a dramatic political intervention. Readers may recall the night in 1992 when Miloška Nott – whose fair hair and fine Slavic cheekbones her daughter inherited – erupted into the nation’s consciousness, for rather different reasons.
Lady Nott had until then been a traditional political wife, unobtrusive and self-effacing, who stayed in Cornwall with the three children, growing daffodils and opening occasional fêtes. People used to wonder what John Nott’s wife looked like.
Then came the ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo. Lady Nott, born in the former Yugoslavia, could no longer remain silent.
In a Newsnight discussion among Tory pundits and diplomats (Professor John Casey, Sir Nico Henderson and Sir Anthony Parsons) about sanctions, arms embargoes and peace talks, she sprang from her seat in the studio audience.
She had actually just been to Sarajevo, she said with passion – ‘I am Slovene. I speak Serbo-croat’ – and vividly described the slaughter of the innocents she had witnessed. She elaborated further to the Oldie’s Valerie Grove next day, for the Times – at 6am, before catching another flight.
‘She had never made a political speech in her life
before,’ Valerie recalls. ‘But she’d always felt deeply affected by events. When her husband was Defence Secretary during the Falklands War in 1982, her hair turned white overnight on the night HMS Sheffield went down.’
Sasha Swire is immensely proud of her mother, who devoted her energy to sending charitable aid to Slovenia: ‘As a foreigner in this country, she was always battling Establishment attitudes towards her and her ilk. And she did come into her own when my father left the political stage. Yes, she was the perfect MP’S wife – much better behaved than me!’
At 80, photographer and writer Marion Kaplan has published a new book of a lifetime of photographs – Marble and Mud: Around the World in 80 Years.
Over the years, many of them spent in Africa, she’s worked for the Times, the Observer and the New York Times.
Pictured (left) is Hugh Hefner, of Playboy fame, posing in Kenya with two of his Bunny Girls and Schniff, a cheetah from the Nairobi Animal Orphanage.
Schniff looks rather bemused – is it the Bunny Girls’ hairstyles or their safari gear that disturb him more?
In his postscript to the book, Michael Palin says the embarrassed Schniff is ‘clearly dying to tear them all apart’.
Have you ever dreamt of binding a book in your own skin?
That practice is one of the more disgusting finds in a new book, The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History by Edward Brooke-hitching.
William Burke – as in Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh murderers – was hanged in 1829. His skin was then made into a wallet for ‘the doorkeeper of an anatomical classroom in
Edinburgh’. Another bit of his skin was used to make ‘Burke’s Skin Pocket Book’, which even came with its own handy pencil and pencil-holder.
Jollier books that are featured include those in the 18th-century xylothek (a wooden library) at Lilienfeld Abbey, Austria. Each volume is made from a different type of tree and contains samples of its bark, leaves and seeds. The perfect Christmas present for tree-loving readers.
The National Gallery in London is being naughty. From 7th October until 3rd January, it’s staging the first exhibition in Britain dedicated to sin.
Called simply Sin, it begins with the apple being plucked from the forbidden tree and traces all our trespasses through to the violent transgressions of today.
Pictures include Brueghel’s The Garden of Eden and Cranach’s Adam and Eve, next to Ron Mueck’s disturbing, near-life-size statue of a stabbed boy. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth are all represented in a Hogarth painting, too.
‘Most people at some point in their life will do something they regret,’ the National says.
But there is a glimmer of hope. The Mass of Saint Giles shows the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne kneeling; his prayers of intercession led to his being granted absolution. Andy Warhol’s Repent, and Sin No More! cries out for us to confess our shortcomings.
God forgive me, it sounds so naughty that I might just have to visit.
It’s hard to be funny about gardening, but Sam Llewellyn manages it in his new book, Digging Deeper with the Duchess.
‘The Duchess’ is his name for his wife, a formidable ginguzzler who could have gone ten rounds with any of Bertie Wooster’s gorgon aunts.
When it comes to their garden at The Hope, a medieval house in the Welsh Marches (pictured), he is the effete botanist, she the no-nonsense gardener: ‘That thing,’ she said. ‘What thing?’ ‘White flowers. Smells. Glossy green leaves.’
‘ Trachelospermum jasminoides?’
‘It is not getting enough water… Why people have to give plants these damn silly names is absolutely beyond me. If there is anyone in the universe as pompous as you I have yet to meet him.’
It’s the ideal book for any couple separated by a common love for gardening.
And you’ll learn that Trachelospermum comes from the Greek for neck ( trachelos) and the Latin for seed ( spermum).
Looking for a book to help you through the long hours of lockdown?
The answer is The Magic Hour: 100 Poems from the Tuesday Afternoon Poetry Club by Charlotte Moore.
Moore, Oldie contributor and former English teacher at Westminster School, started holding poetry readings at her Sussex house and so produced this enchanting anthology.
‘My aim is to take the fear out of poetry,’ she says. ‘The fear that it will make you feel stupid and the fear that you’ll be bored.’
The book includes Yeats, Shelley and Betjeman’s ideal lockdown poem, Indoor Games near Newbury.