Spectator articles from January 2007

Spectator archives from January 2007

A cautious welcome.(Romania, Bulgaria)
January 5, 2007... The news bulletins over the Christmas holiday were dominated by the vengeful execution of the deposed leader of a ruinous country. The leader, of course, was Nicolae Ceaucescu, the country Romania and the year 1989. That Romania, together with...

DIARY.(Royal Institution Christmas Lectures )
January 5, 2007... I was ready for the depression but it still doesn't stop it hitting. Doing the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures was such an exhilarating, exhausting six-month roller-coaster ride. The climax was a two-week adrenaline-charged loop-the-loop...

DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY.(United Kingdom politics)(Column)
January 5, 2007... MONDAY Happy New Year and May The Force Be With You in 2007! I think it's fair to say that Dave's brilliant message sent shivers down all our spines, mine included, even though I was in the office last week when Jed was writing it. V powerful...

We already know what the political event of 2007 will be, so let's move on.(United Kingdom political events)
January 5, 2007... It is clear from the Prime Minister's new year message (issued somewhat surreally from the Florida home of the Bee Gee Robin Gibb) that he has already entered elder statesman mode. His theme was that Mr Brown must continue along the path which...

Israel will do whatever it takes to stop another holocaust.
January 5, 2007... Within the next 12 months, the Americans or the Israelis, possibly both, are likely to launch military strikes aimed at crippling Iran's nuclear ambitions. Those strikes may come sooner rather than later. And they will probably be nuclear. ...

Ken's mega-mosque will encourage extremism.(Markaz mosque)
January 5, 2007... In 2007 Britain will almost certainly be the chief testing ground of the attempt by radical Muslims to gain more power and influence in Western society. The United States, too, is threatened by militant Islam * not least by the prospect of...

Memo to Brown: people must be allowed to fail.(Gordon Brown )
January 5, 2007... He tried targets, and they didn't work. He tried stuffing the doctors' mouths with gold, to borrow from Nye Bevan, and that didn't work. So he tried targets-plus-gold-plus-exhortation, and even that combination didn't produce results...

These people may be bloodthirsty, but at least they understand democracy.(public opinion polls)
January 5, 2007... Do you remember the Conservative MP Teresa Gorman? An image of this terrifying woman swam up in front of me over the festive season, when I'd had a bit too much drink and was distractedly watching the television news. At least I assume she was...

Why didn't our government speak out against the execution of Saddam?(Saddam Hussain)
January 5, 2007... Small lapses of taste or principle can be so revealing. Why did it take two days, and why was it left to John Prescott, speaking in what sounded like his personal capacity, for anyone senior in Cabinet to indicate that at least somebody in the...

Blair, brave?(Letter to the editor)
January 5, 2007... From Correlli Barnett Sir: I wish there were something I could do to help poor deluded William Shawcross ('The West must be the strong horse', 30 December). He seems to be just about the only man in England other than our deranged Prime...

Unfair on More.(Letter to the editor)
January 5, 2007... From Julian Brazier MP Sir: Rod Liddle's article on William Tyndale ('We are what the English Bible has made us', 16/23 December) is as unfair to Thomas More as it is unbalanced in praising Tyndale. More did indeed bitterly oppose Tyndale...

British bad service.(Letter to the editor)
January 5, 2007... From Laurence Hughes Sir: I concur with Rian Malan in his article 'British banks make me glad to be South African' (16/23 December). Banks here are no longer user-friendly unless you take the trouble to go into your branch, and there are other...

George and the Romanovs.(Letter to the editor)
January 5, 2007... From C.D.C. Armstrong Sir: Simon Hoggart in his review of the Channel 4 documentary Three Kings at War (Arts, 16/23 December) writes that George V reneged on a promise to provide political asylum to Nicholas II, 'fearing the Romanovs would...

Snouts still in the trough - and now bosses want 20 per cent of every profit.
January 5, 2007... I like to think I helped start the national debate about fairness and executive pay with an article here in May 1993 headlined 'Snouts in the Trough', illustrated by Garland with pin-striped porkers helping themselves to huge portions of gravy....

More often right than wrong.(Orwell in Tribune )(Book review)
January 5, 2007... ORWELL IN TRIBUNE edited by Paul Anderson Politico's, 19.99, pp. 401, ISBN 1842751557 . 15.99 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 After leaving the Burmese police, George Orwell held few regular jobs in his too short life. He wanted to serve in...

A man of many parts.(John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity)(Book review)
January 5, 2007... JOHN EVELYN : LIVING FOR INGENUITY by Gillian Darley Yale, 25, pp. 382, ISBN 0300112270 . 20 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Until the publication of his Diaries in 1818, John Evelyn (1620-1706) was best known as a brilliant plantsman who...

Mr Facingbothways.(The Bisexuality of Daniel Defoe)(Book review)
January 5, 2007... THE BISEXUALITY OF DANIEL DEFOE by Leo Abse Karnac Books, 19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1855754568 The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middleaged hands were no longer apt for writing about the...

Magic in the Gulf of Finland.(A Winter Book: Selected Stories )(Book review)
January 5, 2007... A WINTER BOOK : SELECTED STORIES by Tove Jansson Sort of Books, 6.99, pp. 192, ISBN 0954899520 . 5.59 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Tove Jansson's The Summer Book had been published before in this country, but when, two years ago, the...

The mysterious sign of three.(Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand)(Book review)
January 5, 2007... WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HANDS by Fred Vargas, translated by Sien Reynolds Harvill Secker, 11.99, pp. 388, ISBN 1843432730 . 9.59 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is the fourth of Fred Vargas's crime thrillers to be published in...

Pooter crossed with Wooster.(The Adventures of Mr Thake)(Book review)
January 5, 2007... THE ADVENTURES OF MR THAKE by J. B. Morton Old Street Publishing, 9.99, pp. 194, ISBN 1905847033 . 7.99 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 J. B. Morton, a bluff Old Harrovian survivor of the Somme, succeeded his fellow Bellocian Roman Catholic...

No ladies' man.(Walter Scott's heroines)
January 5, 2007... 'Walter Scott is unjust towards love; there is no force or colour in his account of it, no energy. One can see that he has studied it in books and not in his own heart.' That was Stendhal's opinion, and many even of Scott's most devoted readers...

The discoverer of death.(Truman Capote)
January 5, 2007... Some time after 10 p. m. on 28 November 1966 Truman Capote sashayed into the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York to place himself at the epicentre of New York society. All that autumn New York had speculated about the possible...

Highs and lows.(operas in 2006)
January 5, 2007... In a wise editorial in the January number of Opera magazine, John Allison urges opera-lovers to remember that 'opera is only part of a much bigger musical literature. As a regular concert-goer, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that concerts...

Edwardian sensibilities.(Miss Potter )(Movie review)
January 5, 2007... Miss Potter PG, nationwide Oh no, not a Beatrix Potter biopic. How will I ever get through it? I don't like nature. I don't like the country (what are you meant to do in it? ). And I've never been particularly interested in Miss Potter's books,...

In tune with Dylan.(Bob Dylan on Radio Two)
January 5, 2007... Bob Dylan on Radio Two? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. His Bobness, the hippie troubadour and Voice of Sixties America on the Light Programme, the station for Hooverers and flu-sufferers? But Radio Two has been transforming itself in the past...

Comedy crunch.(television programs)
January 5, 2007... The most popular programme on Christmas Day, with nearly 12 million viewers, was The Vicar of Dibley (BBC1), which returned for its positively final episode on New Year's Day. VoD isn't just cosy; it is all-envelopingly snug. It resembles those...

Perseverance pays.(horse racing)
January 5, 2007... It was 7.30 on Christmas Eve, a time when all sensible people are filling children's stockings or starting on the single malt. I was instead armpit-deep with an Italian friend in a cottage-sized rubbish skip in the shadow of Battersea Power...

Lethal combination.(Column)
January 5, 2007... Gstaad Penned in by the surrounding Alps, huddled around the Saanen valley and scrambling up the mountains for extra space, Gstaad bursts at the seams during the New Year celebrations. For the first time in its 100-year history, the Palace...

In the high silence.(Sierra Nevada)(Column)
January 5, 2007... To escape the foul weather and the inevitable family bust-ups over the Christmas period, I holed up in a tiny rented cottage in the Sierra Nevada in Spain until it was all over. The house was halfway up a mountain. Melting snow lay on the...

Picking up.(infected dogs)
January 5, 2007... The epidemic which struck the village last week is nothing like as severe as the contagion that made Eyam * just four miles away * famous in 1665. But it has caused great distress to a proud people. At Eyam, the plague * exported, like so...

Tricked into trekking.(Morocco)
January 5, 2007... In the dark days after Christmas, what could be nicer than a friend calling to ask if I'd come to Morocco for a long weekend with luxury spa, sunshine, Atlas Mountains and no jetlag? I said yes immediately. Then it became clear that this was a...

HOTELS OF THE WEEK.(Riad El Arsat)(Hivernage Hotel and Spa)(Brief article)
January 5, 2007... RIAD EL ARSAT 10 Derb Chemaa, Arset Loughzail, Marrakech, Morocco Tel: 212 24 387567 www. kasbah-tabelkoukt. info HIVERNAGE HOTEL AND SPA Angle Avenue Echouhada et Rue des Temples, Quartier Hivernage, Marrakech, Morocco Tel: 212 44 42 41 00...

Anniversary year.(sports)
January 5, 2007... If you thought you'd got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket's World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through...

It's the incompetence, stupid.(public schools)
January 13, 2007... If a week is a long time in politics, then 13 years is a positive eternity. In 1994 it emerged that the new Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, had sent his eldest child, Euan, to the London Oratory School - a school that had opted out of...

DIARY.
January 13, 2007... The new year is little more than a week old and while everybody else is no doubt still righteously munching lettuce leaves, joining gyms and going teetotal, I've already broken Personal Resolution Number One: to reduce my carbon footprint....

Brown will find that there's more to foreign policy than disowning Blair.(Gordon Brown)
January 13, 2007... From the moment that the snatched camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein's execution emerged, it was hideously clear that the sentence had been carried out in a deplorable manner. The Americans immediately briefed that their calls for a delay...

THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES.(education of politicians' children)
January 13, 2007... Obviously Ruth Kelly is a 'hypocrite', but the hypocrites in her party are more admirable than the consistent ones. At least the former show some human feeling. There must be Labour ministers who know that their children would be better off in...

DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY.(Diary entry)
January 13, 2007... MONDAY Who would have thought thrift could be so much fun! Am having a ball teaching working people to be careful with their money as part of our 'Live Life For Less' campaign. Obviously we can't actually cut the cost of living or mess about...

How Cameron has made the Tories the only party ready for an election.(Sam Cameron)
January 13, 2007... The Byron Consort Choir of Harrow School is exacting in its choice of audience. It has sung for popes and for royalty - and the setting for its performance at Blenheim Palace one night last month was grand enough for either. Trumpeters manned...

Bush's fate is now entirely dependent on Iraq.(George W. Bush)
January 13, 2007... Washington On 5 January the newly installed Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, sent a letter to President Bush. 'News reports suggest, ' the two Democrats wrote, 'that you believe the solution...

Fancy a new career for 2007? Computer says no.
January 13, 2007... It has become a cliche of modern political rhetoric and social commentary to declare that the typical 21st-century worker will have not one but several careers. Those in the job market are warned that they will have to be ever more versatile...

The law can't force me to love other people, and it shouldn't try.(Viewpoint essay)
January 13, 2007... I have often thought about opening a bed and breakfast establishment, but am discouraged from doing so by two important considerations. First, I live in a place which no sane person would wish to visit voluntarily. And second, I dislike so many...

Ancient & modern.(Greek scientists)
January 13, 2007... The country 'needs' more scientists, but no one yet seems able to crack the problem. Ancient attitudes may suggest a way ahead. The earliest Greek 'scientists', c. 600 BC , speculated about how the world was made. They assumed there was a...

In praise of the green-eyed monster.(British Academy of Film and Television Arts)(Viewpoint essay)
January 13, 2007... Like all right-thinking people, I was initially rather dismayed to read about Bafta's decision to drop the current affairs category from its annual television awards. From now on, it seems, current affairs programmes will have to compete...

Confessions of an Oscar voter.(Academy Awards)
January 13, 2007... On 16 May 1929 a modest ceremony took place in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. As the age of talkies began, a number of the great and good gathered to partake of squab, lobster, terrapin, salad and fruit suprme before...

Israel's 'spin'.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Alex Bigham Sir: Douglas Davis has clearly been spun a good line by some Israeli military analysts if he thinks the Israeli threat to use nuclear bombs against Iran is more than that - a ruse to scare Iran into returning to the diplomatic...

More on More.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Sir Rowland Whitehead Bt Sir: Julian Brazier puts the case for Thomas More (Letters, 6 January). May I respond? In the clash between two passionate men, More poured seething, and at times almost scatological, venom on Tyndale; the...

Hope for Iraq.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Dr Duncan Anderson Sir: Correlli Barnett (Letters, 6 January) declares William Shawcross deluded and the Prime Minister deranged. They are, apparently, the only people left in Britain who believe the Iraq intervention to be anything other...

No Olympic mosque.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Martyn Hurst Sir: I enjoyed Irfan al-Alawi and Stephen Schwartz's article on the proposed new mosque for London ('Ken's mega-mosque will encourage extremism', 6 January). After Britain has happily been a Christian-based society for a...

Slavery figures.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Ted Nevill Sir: An interesting piece on the modern slave trade by Fraser Nelson (Politics, 30 December) was spoilt by uncritical use of police statistics. The police claim that four in five prostitutes come from overseas, but when they...

Care for the dying.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Dr Andrew Lawson Sir: Charles Moore seeks to perpetuate the myth of a 'death threat' for seriously ill patients when going into hospital, alluding to the supposed widespread practice of withholding fluids from sick patients (The...

The pots of the palace.(Letter to the editor)
January 13, 2007... From Paulo Lowndes Marques Sir: I was amused to see in Bevis Hillier's review of a book on euphemisms that chamber pots used to be described as 'articles' by journalists (Books, 16/23 December). It reminded me of the Churchill story where the...

Why we need no-frills, low-cost private schools.(Statistical data)
January 13, 2007... If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here's a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market...

The real 3G phone boom: it's about girls, girls, girls.(telephone pornography)
January 13, 2007... Suppose you have 15 minutes to while away waiting for the train. Why not pull out your mobile phone, punch in your pin number and download a Playboy movie for as little as [pounds sterling]5? Not interested? Of course you're not; you're a...

The New Year hangover of debt.(consumer spending)
January 13, 2007... Last week, Britons staggered into 2007 more hungover and overdrawn than ever before. According to separate research by Mintel and Creditaction, the average consumer downed 137 units of alcohol between Christmas and New Year - nearly four times...

Open for business again - thanks to mom-and-pop stores and voluntourists.
January 13, 2007... New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to...

That damned, elusive Prussian.(Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa)(Book review)
January 13, 2007... TIP AND RUN : THE UNTOLD TRAGEDY OF THE GREAT WAR IN AFRICA by Edward Paice Orion, [pounds sterling]25, pp. 488, ISBN 9780297847090 . [pounds sterling]20 (plus [pounds sterling]2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 'Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you...

Not what Europe wants to hear.(America Alone)(Book review)
January 13, 2007... AMERICA ALONE by Mark Steyn Regnery Publishing, [pounds sterling]15.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0895260786 . [pounds sterling]12.79 (plus [pounds sterling]2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Between the revolution and the firing squad, a Russian aristocrat once...

To flee or not to flee.(Time to Emigrate?)(Book review)
January 13, 2007... TIME TO EMIGRATE ? by George Walden Gibson Square Books, [pounds sterling]8.99, pp. 233, ISBN 1903933935 . [pounds sterling]7.19 (plus [pounds sterling]2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 'Why is no one talking about what is happening in our country?'...

Slums in the sky?(Estates: An Intimate History)(Book review)
January 13, 2007... ESTATES : AN INTIMATE HISTORY by Lynsey Hanley Granta, [pounds sterling]12, pp. 244, ISBN 1862079099 . [pounds sterling]10 (plus [pounds sterling]2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Just after dawn on 16 May 1968, on the 18th floor of a block of...

How at last we got it together.(The Nation's Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery)(Book review)
January 13, 2007... THE NATION'S MANTELPIECE : A HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY by Jonathan Conlin Pallas Athene, 42 Spencer Rise, London NW5 1AP, Tel: 0207 692 9984, [pounds sterling]24.99, pp. 555, ISBN 1843680181 . [pounds sterling]19.99 (plus [pounds...

The other side of silence.(Cage Talk)(Book review)
January 13, 2007... CAGE TALK by Peter Dickinson University of Rochester Press, [pounds sterling]25, pp. 296, ISBN 9781580462372 Asked by a journalist whether he went to the opera, John Cage replied, 'No, I listen to the traffic.' The remark, often quoted,...

Luminous serenity.(Shanti Panchal)
January 13, 2007... Shanti Panchal: In the Mind's Eye Chelmsford Museum, Oaklands Park, Moulsham Street, Chelmsford, until 18 February Born in Gujarat, western India, in 1951, Shanti Panchal studied art in Bombay before coming to London on a British Council...

Sing the unsingable.(Back Home )(Sound recording review)
January 13, 2007... Everybody needs a new catchphrase from time to time, even Sir Cliff Richard. 'I think I'm the most radical pop star around, ' he now tells most interviewers (or words to that effect), clearly reasoning that his evangelical Christianity,...

Space invaders.
January 13, 2007... A visit to the Holbein exhibition at Tate Britain last week taught me something new: interest in serious culture has reached epidemic proportions. I don't think I've stood in the same room with the same density of people around me since I last...

Royal dazzler.(The Last King of Scotland)(Movie review)
January 13, 2007... The Last King of Scotland 15, Nationwide This film will knock your little socks off. In fact, it knocked my own little socks off so comprehensively that I'm still searching for them. I think it may have even knocked them to Sheffield. But...

Where are the women?(Nancy Pelosi)(Biography)
January 13, 2007... Those pictures of Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker in the House of Representatives in Washington, celebrating her accession to power surrounded by her husband, children and grandchildren were mightily encouraging. She may have used her husband's...

Shared hardship.(Fighting the Taleban)(Meeting the Taleban)(Television program review)
January 13, 2007... If Sean Langan isn't the bravest, best and most likeable foreign correspondent on TV, I don't know who is. And what a bumper week this has been for his admirers. On Monday, a Dispatches documentary (Fighting the Taleban, Channel 4) about the...

Small is beautiful.(ortolans recipes)
January 13, 2007... My grandfather used to enjoy eating ortolans in Biarritz, sometimes in the company of Rudyard Kipling. In London, it amused him to ask for these little birds of the bunting family when dining at the Savoy, though I don't think they were ever on...

Vintage Tony.(Tony Lambton)
January 13, 2007... Gstaad About 20 years or so ago, Tony Lambton, the mother of my children and I drove from Siena to Florence in my brand-new Audi Quattro. Our destination was La Pietra, Sir Harold Acton's Florentine marvel of a villa, where the great man...

Perfect manners.(dementia)(Column)
January 13, 2007... Winston Churchill's secretary John Colville records that one of the first signs that the great man's phenomenal memory was beginning to fail him, and that dementia was setting in, was when he made the intriguing faux pas of addressing a man by...

Keep your neuroses to yourself.(offence-taking)
January 13, 2007... One of the things I find most offensive about the modern world is the way everyone so easily takes offence. A friend tried it on me the other day in an email which quite ruined my morning. 'I think u have been quite rude to be honest, ' she...

In search of Genghis Khan.
January 13, 2007... Writing a historical fiction series on Genghis Khan was always going to be a challenge. Mongolia is an alien place, with a hard climate, grinding poverty, rabies and bubonic plague. To write his story, I needed a thousand small details I could...

HOTELS OF THE WEEK.
January 13, 2007... CHINGGIS KHAAN HOTEL Tokyo Street 10, Ulaan Baatar 49, Mongolia Tel: 976 313 380 www. chinggis-hotel. com Email: chinggis-hotel@mongol. net BAYANGOL HOTEL Chinggis Khan Avenue 05 Ulaan Baatar-210628, P.O.B-43, Mongolia Tel: 976 312 255...

Radio days.(sports radio )
January 13, 2007... Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney...

United we stand.(British-Scottish relations)
January 20, 2007... The 300th anniversary this week of the Act of Union between England and Scotland has been a depressingly defensive event rather than a festival of celebration. In the Daily Telegraph, Gordon Brown - that indefatigable champion of 'Britishness'...

DIARY.(Internet, David Beckham, Kate Middleton )(Column)
January 20, 2007... If you have started to fear that Tesco, that rampaging retail beast, is running the country, then you may be right. Let me explain. When Time magazine made everyone who uses the internet their 'Person of the Year' last month, it got us all...

'Social responsibility' is a bad name for a good idea: Cameron is truly on to something.(David Cameron)
January 20, 2007... How much does a hamburger really cost? Within this question, as one of David Cameron's senior advisers explained to me, lies the Conservatives' new driving philosophy. A Big Mac costs [pounds sterling]1.99. But if children guzzle too many they...

THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES.(Lord Willoughby de Broke, Lord Browne, BP Mervyn King, Bank of England )
January 20, 2007... Are you a hedger or a ditcher? The distinction was invented to describe the opposition to Asquith's threat to the House of Lords in 1911, and it applies today to Euroscepticism. It is not a coincidence that Lord Willoughby de Broke, one of...

DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY.(British politics)(Column)
January 20, 2007... MONDAY Don't ask me why, but suddenly the buzzword is 'Thatcher'. Memo marked 'Urgent' says the T-word count for an average speech is now ten times minimum 'until further notice'. Jed rushed into the office this morning all breathless and...

Last hours of a monster let off the hook by his American foes.(Fidel Castro)
January 20, 2007... Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so it has proved for Fidel Castro. Sixteen years ago, he looked finished. The USSR had collapsed, and the Soviet subsidies that had propped up the...

Memory of that terrible day will long survive Castro.(Fidel Castro)
January 20, 2007... Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust -...

'No one has the last word on climate change'.(Sir Nicholas Stern)(Interview)
January 20, 2007... In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he 'had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn't really sure'. What a difference a year makes. The man I meet in the Treasury office has been...

'To be with John Betjeman was to enter another world'.(Biography)
January 20, 2007... Mymother first met John Betjeman in the summer of 1929. She was 20 and he was a master at Heddon Court prep school in Potters Bar where her brothers Dick and John Addis were pupils. Together with her parents, she had driven over from Primrose...