Throughout director Antonin Baudry’s brilliant film, an epithet kept returning to the mind. It was ‘Homeric’. Baudry, in the first part of his drama about General de Gaulle, has achieved what Christopher Nolan, in his version of the Odyssey, never even begins to ‘get’ : namely the simplicity of the heroic theme.

Charles de Gaulle was an extraordinarily brave man. During the First World War he was repeatedly wounded, always returning as soon as possible to the field. The fearlessness continued into later life. There is a marvellous scene in the new film when de Gaulle, sad and in his London exile, stands at the window of the office of the Free French in Carlton House Gardens in London. The Blitz is in progress, and the windows are blown in. The tall, unflappable Frenchman continues to stare out of the window. Entirely convincing, when ione remembers that, as President in the Fifth Empire, he was at Mass in Notre Dame when a terrorist broke into the cathedral and fired off a gun. Everyone fell flat on their face, including the robed priests. One tall, obstinate and heroic figure was left standing in the aisle.

Baudry’s film captures

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Meghan and Harry arrived in Birmingham Airport today, some two hundred and ten years after the sad, lonely death in Saint Cloud,just outside Paris, of that great actor Dorothea Jordan,

and the day after we had all been so strangely shocked to hear of the death of Dolly Parton. Strangely, because, although it was known that this octogenarian genius was ill, we somehow believed she would be there forever. If only Meghan had some of Dolly’s OOMPH and self-deprecation, capacity for for self-mockery, all round niceness and decency. And,- don’t let’s be too unkind, - some of Dolly Parton’s talent.

Back in the days of the Regency,

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As I sat down in the deserted cinema, I remembered

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At the very last minute, before we left the house, an angel from Mount Olympus, designed as a delivery-lady from Redruth, brought the spectacles I’d bought via AMAZON, which enabled us to view the Phenomenon. There were so many of these useful specs, with their cardboard frames that I was able to distribute them to the Foolish Virgins who had not come equipped.

By the time we reached the Pipers, there was a small crowd, some known to us, some not. ‘Didn’t you realize who that was?’ Ruth asked me when we were on our way home. ‘Who? What?’ I asked. ‘The woman who said hello, I’m Kate? ‘Well, I assumed it was someone called Kate’. ‘It was Kate

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We are in the Silly Season, so the newspapers can be forgiven for including some rubbish. Someone in Whitehall has clearly thought they could earn a few bob by leaking a list to my colleagues

in the Street of Shame, disclosing the details of plans for Royal Funerals. It has given some of the columnists the chance to fulminate once more against Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

One of the old cliches of my profession as hack and gutter journalist was ‘he’s suffered enough’. Prince Andrew, as he once was, isn’t a very nice chap, by all accounts. My friend Andrew Lownie has written a whole book - ENTITLED - itemising the gross extravagance of Andrew and his awful ex-wife; the dodgy company they have kept; their dreadful sense of entitlement and in Andrew’s case, his foul-mouthed rudenes to underlings. . And we all know that, in common with dozens of other men, he went to stay with Jeffrey Epstein. We hastily add, when writing about the matter, that he has always denied wrong-doing. But he has SURELY suffered enough?

I am not defending anything which Andrew has done, or not done, but having hounded him to internal exile, the journalists are still slavering for blood, in this case the blood cold in his corpse’s veins. He has been stripped of his titles, made to leave his grace and favour house and removed from his honorary position as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards. All this for his association with a man - Epstein - who entertained Presidents, professors, IT millionaires, and other prominent members of Andrew’s family. None of them have been prosecuted, or stripped of their titles, or publicly disgraced.

Now, thanks to the box-wallah in Whitehall who leaked the documents, we learn that there are still plans, when the time comes, to give Andrew a ‘royal’ funeral. And the hacks have gone wild with faux-fury, suggesting that this is an ‘insult’ to the sex-workers and abused young women who accepted money from Epstein for providing honey-traps by entertaining his famous blackmail-victims.

Andrew, like very many men, has behaved in a stupid, selfish, boorish way, whether or not he has commited a crime. He is not a very nice person - again, like very many people. But he is a human being, with a family, with children and grandchildren. We do not know if he has any friends - I would guess not. He is stupid, so he can’t fill his day as others might, by reading or having interesting thoughts on solitary rides in Sandringham. And one day, he will die. Are we really saying that he should not be allowed a funeral?

Obviously, the Royal Family are not going to give him a big public funeral. But is it really worth getting hot under the collar about his being buried at Windsor, or Sandringham, with a royal standard covering his coffin?

When Queen Elizabeth II died, the code word was LONDON BRIDGE. As soon as the Civil Service, the Army and all those concerned received this encoded message, they knew that Her Majesty was dead, and then whoe carefully-planned funeral arrangements could begin.

All members of the Royal Family have such a code attached to their names. The Cabinet Office holds on to the codes and , when the day comes, they wereprogrammed to send out the message to all those concerned – TADCASTER BRIDGE. That was the code they were using to signal the death of the former Prince Andrew. Because TADCASTER is in Yorkshire and he was Duke of York.

Obviously, they will have changed the code name by now. Perhaps to the BRIDGE TOO FAR , or the BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS.

According to the leaked source, his death will be followed by honours and ceremonies which copy what happened in the case of his aunt, Princess Margaret . So, we are not talking here about a huge state funeral. Nevertheless, there would be a period of court mourning. Flags would fly at half mast. And the coffin, when it arrived at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, would be draped with the Royal Standard.

The Royal Family and their advisers have obviously been forced to consider whether this would cause offfence to the sex workers and others who once worked for Epstein. And maybe they think that when the man is actually dead, we can stop, just for a moment, feeling vindictive towards him, and consider his family, who might like to be allowed to bury him with dignity?

His family would be inhuman if they did not want to give him a decent burial, preferably as low-key as possible, but with the dignity befitting the son of a much-loved Queen and the brother of a king, who also knew Epstein, though no one is supposed to say so? Even if Andrew had no scandal attached to his name, he was never going to be given a huge state funeral. His coffin was never going to be trundled through the streets of London on a gun carriage. He was always going to be buried in the relative obscurity, either of Sandringham Parish Church, or of the row of minor-royals’ graves beside the Mausoleum at Frogmore.

In the case of some royal burials in the past, the ceremony happened at night, when it need not become the object of the public gaze. It would seem rather an extreme measure in the case of Andrew. Many people must feel that he paid a very heavy price for his catastrophic friendship with Epstein. We know the names of some of the most illustrious of Epstein’s friends and guests and few of them, apart from Lord Mandelson, have suffered at all. We also know, though libel laws and other factors forbid us from naming them, that there are other people who were just as heavily involved with Epstein, who have never been publicly exposed. The only person involved with Epstein to be sent to prison so far is Ghislaine Maxwell. A woman, we note.

The late Queen was an old-fashioned navy wife. She knew perfectly well how Prince Philip had behaved throughout her mariage.She would have known how her favourite son Andrew, a decorated naval officer for his bravery during the Falklands War, would behave, and how many of his fellow officers behave when their ships came into port. If you had told her that this was a reason for stripping every naval officer of their honours and titles, I suspect she would have thought you were insane.

But, public moods change,

and moral fashions change and no sane person would defend the old-fashioned life of a roue. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has not had a very dignified life and, unlike so many such men, he has had the misfortune of everyone knowing about it.Everyone knows that Andrew Lownie only put a tiny fraction into his book of the mountains of salacious material which as available to him. Everyone knows that Andrew is not the only royal man who has behaved in a way which is nowadays utterly deplored.

In death, though , we either cease to be, or we pass to a judgement more solemn than that dealt out by hacks such as myself. The funeral ceremony , although politenes decrees it is in honour of the dead, is really for the survivors. I liked the retired naval officer who wrote - when this story broke - to say, in the Letters column of a newspaper, that if asked, he would help to carry the coffin of the late duke to his final resting place.

Lord Mountbatten, who was blown up by the IRA, was a naval officer with a chequered reputation, to say the least, almost certainly a paedophile and certainly a by-word among midshipmen and naval ratings . He was given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, and Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye, committed his only known act of cowardice. At the last miniute he pulled a brilliant cover of the mag, which showed a picture of Mountbottom, bearing the simple legend GOODBYE,SAILOR.

The family of Andrew have all often visited the drawing-room at St James’s Palace hung with pictures of great admirals, some of them royal, who have been ornaments of our naval story, or, like dear old King William IV, much loved by the Senior Service. All these portraits are of men whose behaviour would be deplored by current sexual convention .

The royal family deserves to be allowed to bury the former prince decently. And we can all, rather shame-facedly, wonder whether we went too far in our desire to hound and persecute a figure who, however charmless, was not the worst of men - whatever such a phrase might mean.

Trent Park in Hertfordshire was the country seat of Philip Sassoon, scion of the prodigious banking family, who died mysteriously young in 1939. During the Second World War the house was requisitioned by the Government and became a place of legend. Top brass German officers, who had been captured in North Africa, and, after 1944, in Europe, were interned here in comfort. They were allowed to wander round the beautiful rooms (though all the good furniture and pictures had been taken to Sassoon’s sister at Houghton in Norfolk ) they were permitted a limited amount of alcohol, and the stupider among them must have thought that, although the house and park were surrounded by watch towers and barbed wire, they were almost reliving the old house’s glory days, when Sassoon entertained his famous guests such as Charlie Chaplin,

Edwina and Louis Mountbatten, and more or less every rich flapper and silly-ass of the 1930s that you ever heard of. . With some of these famous guests, such as Nazi-sympathizer Edward VIII/The Duke of Windsor,

they might even have felt at home.

Unknown to these German officers,

their British hosts had bugged the place thoroughly - window-boxes, light fittings, picture-frames, even the nets in the tennis courts were bugged. It was possible for the hired listeners - a high proportion of them Jewish refugees - to note down what was being said, and the officers were loose-tongued.

It was from these officers that British Intelligence heard, for example, of the V2 bombers, and because of the German loose talk, the Allies were able to bomb the place where the V2s were being planned and manufactured. It took the Germans months to rehabilitate these deadly weapons.The allies learnt many other secrets from their German prisoners.

At the end of the war, when the Nuremberg trials began,

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I should love to go to Jingdezhen. It is the Chinese Stoke-on-Trent. Only, with a difference: the Chinese Communist Party, seeing what was great about Jingdezhen, allowed it continue, even though it is a whole cluster of family-run businesses, who have been making exquisite ceramics for generations, going right back to the Middle Ages and beyond.

You might have thought the same would have happened in Britain, where, in the Potteries - the pottery-manufacturing towns of North Staffordshire - Minton, Doulton, Johnson, Spode, Meakin, and dozens of others were doing the same. Maybe not on the stupendous scale of the Chinese, maybe not with the Chinese artistry and sheer brilliance; but, still, pretty bloody marvellous. And, of course, the British Potteries supplied the world, both with cups,plates and saucers to eat from, and bathroom fittings. Until the 1960s, when a financial whizz-kid called Arthur Bryan became the Managing Director of Wedgwood, floated the company on the stock exchange, went round the Pottery towns taking over the small firms, asset-stripping and destroying the industry. When he began there were getting on for 80,000 people employed in the ceramic industry in Britain. By the time he had finished, there were fewer than 5,000. Wedgwood had been taken over by Waterford Crystal and gone bust. What a bastard. But it was happening all over British industry, and by the time of Thatcher, it became the norm. Business , rather than being something which bosses and workforce did for the benefit of customers became an investment opportunity for the shareholders. The spiv ruled the roost. Witness what had happened to the Water Supply in the British Isles where our beautiful waterways and beaches are filled with excrement as the shareholders put the profits into their wallets.

I always go back to Stoke, therefore with a heavy heart. But, oh my goodness. I did not regret going to see the exhibition at the Spode Works which closed last week. It was put on in a winning conjunction - ceramic experts from the University of Staffordshire joined forces with those of Jingdezhen. The exhibition told

the story of Willow Pattern. It would seem as if the story told by our familiar willow pattern plates, cups and saucers is

largely made up in the late eighteenth century. The Chinese exported huge amounts of exquisite blue and white china to Europe

and eventually, the clever people of Stoke tried to ape their products, and make some money. Although no one, not even the great Spode

ever achieved the delicacy of line, the richness of blue, the sheer majesty of the real thing, Spode did pretty well.

The exhibition, and the catalogue, LEGACY AND CONTINUITY , available online,also explored the whole story of Europe clumsiness in relation to Asian markets. The British do not emerge well from the story. Worried by the success of the Chinese in selling them tea, the British deliberately, and horrifically, imported opium to China - the so-called Opium Wars were the result, and the sheer vandalism of the British troops makes for very uncomfortable reading if you are a European. But I did not think the exhibition was at all heavy-handed in its dealing with this ticklish matter. It was chiefly aesthetic and celebratory.

and it had turned up some interesting old stuff, including this Punch Almanack for 1945, in which the British Tommy is seen is seen chasing the Japanese back over the famous Willow Pattern bridge. Eh? Surely the Japanese did not invent this china, and our eighteenth century trade was with CHINA?

Well, if you are going to be pedantic and to worry about such things as the difference between Japan and China…!

A thousand congrats to Professor Dashu Qin of Jingdezhen, and Professor Neil Brownsword University of Staffordshire . This show was not just a delight to the eye, it really filled the mind with all sorts of thoughts, many of them profoundly disturbing, but all interesting.

It was also wonderful to visit the Spode Works. They have the most imaginative shop I ever saw attached to a museum. It’s not just postcards and tea-towels. They have assembled a vast array of old china which they are selling for very reasonable prices. We bought a pair of Spode candlesticks, 1820ish, for £30, and some of my dear old Daddy’s ‘Summer sky’ plates, that he designed for Wedgwood for £5 each. I now wish we’d hired a van and bought a load more.

Making our way back to Stoke-on-Trent station, I wondered what it would have been like if, like my father, grandfather, and so forth, stretching back to the mid-eighteenth century, I had worked in the potteries. It would have been a good life, I think, had it not happened to coincide with mid-to late twentieth capitalism which I more and more think is the chief cause for the ruination of the world.

The Potteries endured very tough times in the 1930s, after the Wall Street Crash, when wages were halved, but they survived - just. In all the Pottery towns, women taught their daughters how to paint flowers on plates, how to stick handles on to tea-cups, even before they applied for jobs at the various ‘works’. The men worked as modellers, and in various other capacities. One of my abiding memories, walking round the Wedgwood works one Saturday morning when I was a boy of seven, was a woman turning to me - a paintbrush in her hand, as she decorated a plate, and as she said, with the broadest of smiles - ‘WE LOVE OUR WORK’. I weep, I literally weep, when I think of this woman. The evil , evil rats - chief of them Arthur Bryan - who asset-stripped the old potteries for the sake of quick gain destroyed the life of this woman and of thousands of thousands of women and men like her. All the old firms have closed. The famous Pottery towns struggle. Three generations have gone by, and all those skills have been lost.

‘I find it harder and harder ever day to live up to my blue and white china’. This remark, made by the young student aesthete Oscar Wilde, was seen by the philistine dons of Oxford as a mark of his decadence. But for me, it makes perfect sense. As I walked round the exhibition at the Spode works, I thought - these people were not just making bowls and vases and plates; they were ennobling us. There is a true spiritual beauty in good ceramics. We have a spiritual duty to surround ourselves, where possible, with beautiful things. To walk round the abandoned Spode works, this place where so many stupendously beautiful things were once made by skilled, dedicated women and men; to walk round and see it all deserted, wrecked for the sake of enriching some philistine bastard… it makes you very sad, and very angry.

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A very kind friend asked me to come to a musical called J.EDGAR, which has been compelling cult-watching in the USA and has now come to the King’s Head theatre in London. I went because I liked the friend, and because he had also invited some other friends I like, rather than because I felt much in the mood for a musical on one of the hottest nights of the year in Islington. But I can happily report two hours of

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My dear old non-believing father was obsessed by the place, and often took me there as a boy. He said it was because he wanted to look at their pottery but retrospect teaches me that he was one of those unbelievers who believed that members of religious orders, who spend so much of their time in prayer, might - horror of horrors - actually be on to something. For some of the same reasons, Norman Wilson sent all his children to a Roman Catholic convent as their first school.

In my teens I was so haunted by the great church of the ages that I ‘went over’ to Rome , but I reverted to my mother’s religion, the C of E, in my early twenties. I have not regretted coming back, but just occasionally, I have a day which makes me wonder! Today is such a day, as I sat listening to the sublimity of the chants coming from the abbey on a Wednesday afternoon, on Radio 3, my mind unwillingly dragged back to the morning broadcast of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.

Manchesterism, the creed of the new Prime Minister, is rife in the BBC. I think it is possible that the Corporation invented it even before Mr Burnham embraced it. Nearly all the announcers on Radio 3 have Northern voices, and as many broadcasts as possible seem to be aired from Salford.

And as many Thoughts for as many Days as possible are expressed by Northerners. Today we had the Bishop of Manchester, who is one of their regulars. He sounds like a nice enough bloke, so one hesitates before adding that he also sounds like a complete chump. I mean, a real chump. Today, listeners could hear the cogs of his brain clanking round like some crazy old piece of Northern machinery invented by Heath Robinson.

We have a new Prime Minister - a Man from the North. How will he match up, compared with the England manager, who , like Burnham, picked his ‘team’, And, in a very real sense, is there anything we could learn from the Bible about Men from the North picking teams? There you have the brilliant ‘thought’ of this Bishop .

I should have switched off at this point, because i could see where the ‘Thought’ was going, and I knew it was going to make me become a Voltairean. I should not have listened at all, of course. Years ago, I gave up listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme, finding in Petroc Trelawny and Bach Before Seven a spiritual and aesthetic nourishment which was definitely not provided by Thought for the Day. Indeed, Thoughts for the Day often provoked in my the sad and contradictory Thought that I did not believe a ruddy thing, and certainly did not believe what the daily Thinker was saying. But Petroc has been replaced by another Cheeky Northern Chappy who tries to Dumb Down even Bach Before Seven, and so I do sometimes drift back to the Today Prog. And today I did so because it was being compered by the wonderful Katya Adler.

The Bish today - the Right Reverend David something - plunged in, like Cassius, and bade us follow. So, indeed, we did. Thomas Tuchel took great care to choose a good England team and many have criticised his choices. How about Andy Burnham? Being good centrist Radio Four listeners, we all wish Andy well - or so the Bishop would like to believe. Maybe Andy will think of another Man from the North choosing a team?

The Bish thinks that Jesus did not surround himself with ‘lookalike’ males when forming his Cabinet of Apostles. Strangely enough, very little is said in the Gospels

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The new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has told his adoring followers that he means to bring an end to the revolution begun by Margaret Thatcher over forty years ago.

The contention is clear. In the 1970s, Britain, and other European countries, had exhausted the ideas of John Maynard Keynes - namely that governments could borrow money, pay for welfare, and when the bills mounted up, simply borrow more. The governments of Britain which based their economic ideas on Keynes were well-intentioned - perhaps none more so that the Labour administrations of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. But by the time Mrs Thatcher defeated the Labour Party in 1979, the United Kingdom was more or less bankrupt, inflation was destroying people’s wages, the unions had enormous power to ‘hold the government to ransom’, as the phrase went.

It has been well-noted - especially by Lara Spirit, the young political correspondent of The Sunday Times, who is the most brilliant analyst and essayist, writing in England today - that if you say the word ‘Thatcher’ to back-bench Labour MPs they actually HISS. This is understandable enough. Thatcher meant what she said. Unlike the ‘wets’, ie moderate-minded Keynesian conservatives - she brought in anti-union legislation, she waged war, literally, on the most powerful union, the National Union of Mineworkers, and in the short term, it looked as if her crusading zeal for the economic liberalism of the United States was going to yield wonderful results for your ‘ordinary voter’.

On the day of Mrs Thatcher’s funeral, April 17, 2013, I went down to watch the coffin being brought by car from the Palace of Westminster to a gun-carriage outside St Clement Dane’s Church.

The whole of the Strand, from Trafalgar Square, was lined with people. Outside St Clement Dane’s, when the coffin became visible, the crowd, much moved, some weeping, burst into cheers and clapped. The majority of this crowd were Eastern Europeans. They regarded Thatcher as the Western leader who had led the charge against tyranny of the Soviet Union… led the charge and won. She was the Iron Lady. When I had seen this spectacle - and it was moving - I beetled down to the river, and ran , since the crowds were too thick to allow me to shuffle up Fleet Street. Near El Vino, I could see the gun carriage making its slow wobbly journey towards Ludgate Circus. A policeman near me pointed out a protester. There was just one from where we could see, and he said, ‘That’s a very brave young person’. A solitary young woman was turning her back as the coffin went past. (Protesters had been asked not to cry out, but simply to turn their backs).

All the others stood in deeply respectful silence. This crowd, unlike the crowd by St Clement Danes, were British. They had bought shares in privatised industries, when there was a chance to do so. They had been the occupants of council flats, and had exercised the right to buy . They were part of the ‘property-owning democracy’ which was the central pillar of Thatcher’s programme. And on she went, the Iron Lady, towards St Paul’s Cathedral, and I, nostalgic for the old days in the Fleet of Shame, (for we had all moved out by then, and my paper, the Standrad was in Kensington of all unlikely places for a paper) went and ordered a very large glass of plonk at El Vino. About an hour later, the cynical , thirsty, right-wing journalists came in, having attended the service in St Paul’s, all making jokes about her death - suggesting that the Barclay brothers had tired of her running up expenses in the Ritz and had her bumped off. (She died in the Ritz). But these bad-taste jokes were the jarring notes. The crowds in the streets had been saying goodbye to someone they regarded as a heroine.

I turned on the TV news expecting to see at least some coverage of the funeral by the BBC, even though she had hated the Corporation and they had hated her. There was no suggestion, not by so much as a syllable, that her funeral had brought out a crowd which one would normally only see for a Royal funeral. It has never to my knowledge been mentioned by the BBC that this vast public spectacle took place in London. It has been airbrushed out of the story.

Mrs Thatcher had many qualities which set her apart from her successors as conservative Prime Ministers. Unlike any of them, she was keenly ideological. She was extremely brave, both physically (witness her sangfroid after being nearly blown sky high by the Brighton bomb) and morally. She was prodigiously hard-working. She had vision. But - and hence the hatred of the Left - she was profoundly wrong.

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We were stayting together at a grand house in Ireland, Clandeboyes,

to address a Literary Luncheon, organised by the Oldie Magazine. The mag’s editor, Harry Mount, is a trustee of the house, which was, until her fairly recent death, the home of his godmother, Lindy Dufferin.

It was only when I turned in for the night , and found a copy of Robert Lowell’s long verse novel, ‘The Dolphin’ on the bedside-table, that I thought of Lindy’s sister-in-law, Caroline Blackwood, with whom I formed a friendship when I was in my twenties, and she, I suppose, just around fifty.

Robert Lowell, her husband, had just died. I was researching a book about the poet and controversialist Hilaire Belloc.

Caroline’s uncle, Lord Basil Blackwood (killed at Ypres in 1917)

used to do the brilliant illustrations to Belloc’s Cautionary Verses for children.

I remain everlastingly in Caroline Bl;ackwood’s debt, because she offered me kindness and friendship, and because she introduced me to one of the people who was to become one of the dearest of my friends, Beryl Bainbridge. Caroline suggested we met for lunch, which began at 1pm, and ended somewhere beyond 1pm the next day.

In what follows, I am not ‘passing judgement’. God knows,

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But, with the leftover pastry, I made jam tarts and put in too much jam! Just look at the gooseberries almost bursting through the short crust.

We had two absolutely spiffing parties . The first was in the Royal Albert Hall itself. (My title comes from tjhe Biblical quotation which emblazons the frieze of the Royal Albert Hall, ‘The Wise and their Works are in the hand of God’. ) It was organized by the 1851, and it was they who commissioned me to write the book.

The second party was in Hatchards’ bookshop in Piccadilly. It was organized by my adored publishers, Bloomsbury.

Certainly, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 were wise, and their works were wonderful. Prince Albert. Sir Henry Cole. Henry Labouchere. Scott Russell. Lyon Playfair. These were men inspired. They conceived the idea, first of a great national exhibition to display the triumphs of British engineering and to suggest what was best in modern design. Albert persuaded tghem to make it an INTERNATIONAL exhibition, and it became a symbol of that optimistic generation’s belief in Free Trade, and their hope that Free Trade would bring universal peace.

Almost every country in the world sent exhibits. Only China kept itself to itself, understandably furious that the British had behaved so appallingly during the Opium Wars.

The nay-sayers predicted that the Exhibition would bring crime to London, wreck Hyde Park, spread diseases etc etc etc None of their fears were fulfilled. Six million people came to the Park in the course of the summer of 1851. Six million! If the exhibition had been a flop, every Commissioner would have lost a lot of money and some of them would have been ruined. As it was, they amassed a large sum, getting on for £200,000 in their money, which enabled them to fulfil Prince Albert’s dream - what is now the Albertopolis in South Kensington. The V and A Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum. Three world-class academies - for Science, Imperial College, for Music, the Royal College of Music, for the visual arts, the Royal College of Art, not to mention the Royal Albert Hall and many other institutions,

The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 is still in existence today, and because the Commissioners have included some clever financiers, it is sitting on a substantial sum of money which it uses to encourage scentific and engineering scholarships. It remembers that Prince Albert was 30 when he patronised the Great Exhibition. TheVictorian success story was a story of the young. We, by contrast, have an anti-young system, which saddles students with burdens of debt before they have even got their first job or a mortgage.

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In the course of writing my book, I went to a number of functions and dinners when the scholars and fellows of ‘1851’ were lauded. They are such an impressive lot of men and women - young, and from all over the world. There are over a dozen Nobel prizewinners, who started out as 1851 scholars, including Ernest Rutherford and Peter Higgs, he of the particle.

Royal patronage has been one of the key ingredients in the success story. Prince Albert we know about. But his two sons, the Prince of Wales, Bertie, and Affir, Duke of Edinburgh, as well as being roues and playboys, were intensely musical and it was largely because of them that the Royal College of Music got off the ground.

The 1851 Commissioners built the British School at Rome. And in more recent times, under the patronage of Prince Philip, and now of Princess Anne, the work goes on of encouraging design,

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And it WAS enjoyable. But a bit disconcerting. Why? What none of the reviews (that I read) had told me, was that the new version entirely forgets what made The Devil Wears Prada, 2006 one of the best films ever made. We all remember the scene where Ann Hathaway, clad in that famous cerulean sweater, is asked by the merciless editor of RUNWAY, Miranda Priestly whether she thinks that she ‘chose’ the garment.

If (unlikely , I know) I was asked to teach economics to students, I would start with this clip, which demonstrates more clearly than Marx’s Das Kapital the way markets work, the way consumers are

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in the sunshine. In Emily’s early days in Philly, she lived here and it was our stamping ground before she moved to West Philly. We’ve had some really happy times here, but also some very sad ones, so it slightly churns me up every time I revisit. I still love wandering about here, though. I am sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and reading Aylmer Maude’s Life of Tolstoy.It is even better than I remembered, and I’d like to write about it here quite soon. Meanwhile, the sun is shining, and I read - ‘Regarding a future life, Tolstoy’s views changed after he began to wriute of these things in the early eighties. At first he saw no reason for believing in life after death.’… Later, ‘ the consciousness that his most real Self was part and parcel of the Infinite grew so strong within him, that it appeared inconceivable that it should cease at the death of his body’. I put down my book, sip some coffee and listen to the nearby bells of St Mark’s ringing in Locust Street

I nearly always go to church when I am abroad, and in America, the religion I like best - High Church Anglicanism - seems to be alive and kicking. Unlike the High Church in England, where the ordination of women created a savage , often hate-filled, division between the Big Enders and the Little-Enders, the Anglo-Catholics of America appear to have noticed that, after the arrival of women priests, the skies have not fallen. As a pillar of the Church of the Advent, in Boston, said to me years ago when women first joined the ranks of the clergy, and some men were wondering if there even could, let alone should, be female clergy - ‘The God who can turn water into wine can surely turn a woman into a priest’.

In Philly, I like to go to St Mary’s, on the edge of the campus of U Penn, where my daughter Emily is a professor of Greek. Emily is not a churchgoer, but we all have a happy family relationship with this church - Emily’s children having been to the creche which meets in the crypt. The priest, also called Emily, is wonderful, and the church is the old Prayer Book, which , to an English visitor is a rare treat. But this Sunday, I go to St Mark’s, Locust Street ,because I am meeting my daughter for lunch near Rittenhouse Square. When you walk into this darkened, beautiful Victorian interior place, you are stepping back to the true glory days of Anglo-Catholicism. A magnificent choir gives a concert-level performance of a Palestrina Mass. Acolytes drift to and fro in clouds of incense. The place is packed out. And the sermon is by Mother Lucy Ann Dure. The name itself is a sort of poem, no? It is a well-constructed, beautifully-delivered oration, and it is the most fervent, unambiguous call to us all to believe, without doubt or qualification in Life After Death.

I love the Christian Church in all its forms, while believing less and less as I grow older. I try to conform to the Everlasting Gospel. I feel ever-deepening gratitude to the three-thousand years or so of tradition, including the wisdom of Judaism and of Plato’s Academy, in such places as St Mark’s Locust Street. It is not just an ‘aesthetic’ appreciation of bells and smells, and beautiful music. It is a sense that these places do not merely cherish but they embody a way of life which helps us all to be kinder people, less materialistic, less angry, less self-centred. Such churches have always been engaged with the poorest of the poor, with the sick and the lonely and the bewildered. But the bewilderment is not something which will go away, and whenever I feel swept up in the drama of Christian life and tradition, I also find it impossible to banish Doubt. When I was a child and a young man I thought I would become a priest, but when it actually came to the moment of offering myself for ordination, I thought of the most serious aspect of a priest’s life - namely anointing and befriending the dying, and sitting with them in their last hour. When they asked for reassurance, when they spoke to me of their hope of Heaven, would I be lying when I told them that I had absolute confidence in Life Beyond?

Funnily enough I have had three very distinct experiences of the ‘paranormal’ in my grown-up life, which have made me feel that three different people have been in some way or another ‘in touch’. But even though I have definitely ‘believed’ in these experiences (too intimate to describe here), this does not stop me doubting; in fact I question the very nature of these ‘experiences’, and wonder whether it is not simply that I missed these dead ones so much that my heart had conjured them up out of desire .

The preacher at mass, Mother Lucy Ann Dure, was magnificent. The mass was a glory. St Mark’s, Locust Street is a real gateway into the Heaven of Heavens. And yet, and yet, and yet. In the sunshine of Rittenhouse Square, I walked around, trying to hold on to the knowledge of all that I had learnt from the last hour, and not to dwell on the Doubt which nags at the heart of the experience. I sat down and began to write this poem -

ON HEARING A SERMON BY MOTHER LUCY ANN DURE AT ST MARK’S LOCUST STREET

In the bright vision of a Philadelphia spring,

In that glad glory, I hear the choir of St Mark’s Locust Street sing

Palestrina, and in candle-lit chancel , perfectly choreographed, I watched

Acolytes and brocaded priests mysteriously waft

Like shafts of sun in incense smoke, which gleam

Through long decades of worship and of dream.

So many years of my life, watching loves, marriages, creeds collapsing,

So many years of praying, affirming, lapsing;

And now, here in the pulpit, surpliced Mother Lucy in a golden stole

Speaks of the Immortality of Soul.

Speaks of the Resurrection of the Dead;

And I am held by every word that’s said.

Lucy Ann in the Victorian pulpit. Blessed are the poor

In spirit. Blessed is the Faith of Lucy Dure,

Et expecto - blessed are the Dure in Heart -

For they shall see God - Our Mother who art

And wilt in Heaven be - she spoke of the songs her childhood used to know -

Each summer with her folks, Sweet Chariot, swing low -

She spoke of a simple, grounded faith - my loss

Of faith gnawed - One more river to cross -

Her voice, as clear and bell-like as her faith,

Spoke to my heart. Now and in the hour of my death,

Pray for me, Mother Lucy Ann Dure,

That I might have a quiet faith, which will not flicker but endure.

Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet

Can kneel with Doubting Thomas at the wounded Feet.

Believe, believe, the Risen Lord says, TRUST.

This thing is actual. It is the Thing-in-Itself, you must

See this is REAL. From His arising, we infer

OUR Immortality. A Truth. A something sure.

*
To be a mad priest , or a lightning rod

Between us, suffering mortals, and our God:

That was my youthful hope, and I’d have done

It all, the bizarre golden glad-rags, the hateful institutional church, but for one

Thing, one only. When, gasping on their bed

& knowing that they’d very soon be dead,

They’d look at me, the sufferers, with eyes

That needed more than empty pieties.

They’d need to know

That when their corpse, morgue-bound, was wheeled from ward

They’d be with angels, gazing on Our Lord.

Sometimes, I’d think, ‘maybe the WORDS suffice.

I’d hold their hands and pray the word’s. ANIMA CHRISTI, call on Christ’.

And then I’d think, ‘but this isn’t enough, merely to SEEM

To share in Dante’s or in Elgar’s DREAM’.

‘But, father, is it true, I’ll meet my wife,

Whose agonizing death destroyed my life?’

‘My cancer-eaten child, will I again,

Gaze on her face, eyes, limbs and spirit, now free of pain?’

‘My motor-bike-mashed lover, does he yet love

My broken heart? He waits for me above?’

They’d plead these questions to my tearful eye,

And there they’d read, quite unmistakably, a lie.

They’d know my prayers had fallen from dishonest lips,

That when you’re dead, you’re dead, you’ve had your chips;

That to an honest mind, religion fails

By offering to console with fairy tales;

Insults the grieving, mocks their true heartbreak

With something ultimately cruel, so obviously fake.

THE ILIAD or KING LEAR don’t try to fool us

By trilling polyphonic Hallelujahs.

The young man ,who went away sorrowful,

Went to seed. And so, for the next half century,

The seed fell among thorns.

I’ve nursed a grief

For what I never fully had, belief.

Oh, I’d still come to Mass, ‘believe’ them when they said

Symbolic Lord lives in Symbolic Bread.

But THIS, our life-in-body in the world of Nature -

Simply an Interval before the Feature?

A trailer for the movie that’s about to start?

The moment that some nurse watches me depart this life?

O, Doubting Thomas Didymus, pray!

Help me believe what Mother Lucy has to say.

*
For Life that lasts forever, I have felt no need.

Viewed in such temporal terms , faith is a kind of greed.

One life’s enough? No?

But I revere the Everlasting Gospel, & with John

I hope to see the Father in the Son.

Would kneel with Thomas , and in the wounded side,

Revere the Suffering God, Rise with the one who died.

And show my faith, not in the tangled Athanasian Creed

So much as, kneeling, to take one whose flesh is meat indeed,

Who kneels a penitent, who fails, and will again fail,

Gobbles the Mercy at the altar rail.

You don’t need a silver spade, Sweet chariot, swing low -

Lucy Ann Dure spoke, not of what they hope but what they know.

And in the beauty of the Mass, Mother Lucy Ann Dure

Could my faith restore.

It billows, faith, like incense clouds in the sunlight there;

Billows, grows, and then, like that sweet smoke,

Dissolves in air.

We are in Bucks County, Emily and I, about an hour out of Philadelphia, visiting Doylestown, the home , long ago, of Oscar Hammerstein and of James Michener.

It’s a nice little place, with about eight thousand, I should guess quite well-heeled, inhabitants.

The object of our journey is to read in the footsteps of an Edwardian eccentric called Henry Chapman Mercer, an archaeologist who came into a fortune and decided to spend his money on realizing some rather innocent ambitions. He was a proper archeologist who, for example, worked among the remains found in the Kennedy Bone Caves. While he was digging up shards from the remote past, it occurred to him that the really vulnerable past was the most recent, because we consider that household goods, vehicles for transport, clothes, which have become immediately out of fashion are good only for the scrap-heap. He set to work accumulating an enormous amount of .., well, yes, junk, but, because it is all obsolete and all dates from the 18th and 19th centuries, it is weirdly fascinating. Here is an old stage coach. Here are the contents of a blacksmith;’s forge from some remote village in Bucks County. Here are kitchen implements. There is not just a lot of stuff, there is a plenitude, reinforcing the knowledge that you have somehoiw stepped into the mind of an amiable madman. Storey after storey of old carriages, whaling boats, hunting and fishing gear, … And one of the really wonderful things about it all, is that , unlike almost all modern museums, this one has not troubled to keep the exhibits clean, nor to bombard the visitor with information. There are almost no labels and the exhibits are grey and cobwebby with dust. LONG MAY THIS CONTINUE.

.The museum is built out of reinforced concrete. Mercer loved the stuff. It is seven storeys high.

• We ask whether his house, Fonthill Castle,

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But I am in a land which has never heard of Andy Burnham, still less of Markerfield. I am in America, visiting my firstborn, Emily. And she has taken me, on my first night in Philadelphia, to the end of year show at the conservatoire, Curtis Institute of Music. It is a superb training ground of dancers, singers and musicians, and this year they are staging Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bliss.

Bottoms spoil the play when they are too aware that they are funny . The poignancy and comedy of Bottom the Weaver is that he is deadly serious, trying to persuade Quince the carpenter to let him take all the roles in ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy , and most cruel death odf Pyramus and Thisbe’. This Bottom , played by Yulin Yan, was, like the Puck, perfect. He looked like a working man, with the combination of innocence and arrogance which Bottom has in the play.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also easily spoilt by Puck, and by Bottom. An unsuccessful Puck is too aware of the character’s camp mischief, his cruelty, and, in many productions of the play which I have seen, he is often too much of an acrobat, which can be distracting. Puck is a thing of air, of humour, of spirit. This one, played by Israeli Maya Mor-Mitrani, was simply perfect. Lovely voice, gentle movements, and - a sprite!

Britten and Peter Pears did not rely on a librettist for this opera. They sliced up Shakespeare’s play themselves, and the result never fails to impress. It is particularly clever that they save the opening words - ‘Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour/Draws on apace’…for the beginning of the last act. Britten’s opera takes us straight into the wood, to the fairies, and to the four star-crossded lovers. Tytania, played by Jeysia Rosairio Santos, from Puerto Rica, is absolutely superb. She has already made a stir, and won many awards, I think we shall be hearing a lot of her in the future.

I suppose all good libretti have been written by someone who knows how to pare down a story to a few essential details. The most supreme example is the way in which Wagner takes the many-stranded medieval traditions about Tristan and Isolde and makes their drama out of simply three key moments. But Britten has some of the same gift, and there are many ways in which we get the most out of Shakespeare’s play when we see it in his version. And the music is simply wonderful.

Emily and emerge into the Philadelphia street slightly dazed. Bottom bless thee, thou art translated. It takes a while to return to the real world, as we rattle back to West Philly on the trolley, and have dinner in her favourite Vietnamese restaurant, buried in Shakespearean talk.

At least he would never have given utterance to E.M. Forster's fatuous statement ,"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

It sounds so beautiful, doesn’t it, but it is a meaningless statement. Since when was it ever an alternative? It is often trotted out as having some relevance to the Cambridge spy ring, not least, one supposes because Forster was sitting comfortably in his rooms in King’s College while Philby and co , only yhards away from Forster’s comfortable ‘set’ , were being recruited by their Soviet minders, and going on to betray almost every personal friendship, every marriage, every relationship into which they entered, while wallowing in the thrill of betraying their country. They enjoyed plum jobs, they got richly rewarded for their murderous activities, they ate and drank themselves silly in clubland and they died in their beds. They also , of course, betrayed the agents in the field and the peoples of the Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of the Soviet bloc, who looked to Britain to help them, as they suffered under the most appalling tyranny ever known to human history. Agents betrayed by Kilby were tortured, and their families were compelled to look at their mutilated bodies which were put on public display in the Ukraine. Only one of many details laid bare in an absolutely magnificent new book about the whole story by Antonia Senior - STALIN’S APOSTLES. The double-meaning of the title is alone brilliant: for these defenders of the indefensible were both advocates for a regime which enslaved millions of human beings for two generations, but also part of the prissy intellectual group in Cambridge which was nicknamed ‘the Apostles’. No one, not even Cambridge was to blame, Auden wrote in a very different context. Reading this book, you feel the opposite, EVERYONE is to blame, and especially Cambridge.

It is a horribly upsetting story, and not just because

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Rigoletto, the cynical, furious court jester who has a cruel word for everyone , nurses a secret. The equally cruel, cynical courtiers of the Duke of Mantua, hear that he visits a beautiful young woman , and conclude that - ugly and unpleasant as he is, that he has a mistress. They determine to kidnap her, and torment him with their knowedge…

And, of course, the secret is, that this Diogenes has a hidden love, all right, but not for a girlfriend. The love of his life is his daughter, Gilda

.

In the days when ENO staged Jonathan Miller’s production, set in Mussolini’s Italy, we used to go quite often. One of the many things about it which wrings your guts

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When I bought a copy of FLESH by David Szalay, the young woman in the bookshop told me it was the best novel she had ever read. Bless. I was snooty enough to wonder, but kind enough not to ask, whether she had ever read War and Peace, David Copperfield, The Magic Mountain, or To the Lighthouse.

She had clocked up this sale because there has been a hoo-ha about Booker Prizewinner David Szalay’s novel Flesh. And I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

The story concerns a young Hungarian of no means or prospects joining the army, eventually getting to England, working as a bouncer in a strip-club , and, through charm and sex appeal rising through the ranks. Through a deft love affair, he eventually joins, or thinks he has joined the rich set, not as a chauffeur but as a member of the fast set, only to come the inevitable cropper.

This rags to riches and back again is a classic trope and if you believe, as I do, that there are only a limited number of plots in the world, then it is not surprising that Szalay, who is a spare, stylish writer, should have hit upon a story which one can see replicated in folk stories all over the world.

But there have been those who accuse him of borrowing from Stanley Kubrick’s wonderful film BARRY LYNDON, which is itself a dramatization of Thackeray’s novel of the name.

David Sexton, a book reviewer of long standing, says, ‘It’s not plagiarism,it’s completely legitimate to adapt something..He can’t deny this’.

There are indeed moments in FLESH where the allusions to the Kubrick film are so close as to be quotations. One thinks of a moment when Istvan, the oikish protagonist, trying to seem less likish than he actually is, is taken to the National Gallery by his protectress, and he says, ‘I like the use of the colour blue in that one’. In the Kubriock film, Barry Lyndon, speaking of the Adoration of the Magi by Lodovico Cardi, says, ‘I love the use of the colour blue by the artist’.

The story of FLESH and the story-line of BARRY LYNDON are indeed remarkably similar. And, as David Sexton says, there is nothing disgraceful about this.

Most novelists are distinctive for their style, their characterization, their realism or lack of it, and not simply for their story lines. I seldom review books these days, but I remember when I was more of a reviewer than I am now, pointing out that Ian McEwan’s early novel THE CEMENT GARDEN had a plot which was identical to that of Julian Gloag’s OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE. McEwan tearfully responded

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