Yes: apparently a new Poirot will appear in 2027 on the BBC, fourteen years after the old boy breathed his last on ITV. That was when David Suchet closed the curtain in Curtain, the seventieth episode of a series that had begun in 1989. I filmed an Agatha documentary with him a few years ago; he was extremely lovely, and rather sweetly said that he had asked for Curtain not to be his final performance in the role - I think Dead Man’s Folly was the last one actually shot - so as to leave Poirot alive, as it were, in his head.

I had thought that Poirot was definitively DONE by Suchet, the completeness of whose performance arc is surely unarguable, but I quickly realized that this was not so. Within weeks of Poirot’s appointment-to-view death he was - much to my surprise at the time - up and about, Lazarus in spats, being played by Robert Powell at my local Richmond Theatre. Then he regenerated again: Branagh. John Malkovich offered a further incarnation, as a tormented priest manqué/ human Brexit metaphor in the BBC’s ABC Murders. More recently Poirot was back in Richmond in the shape of Michael Maloney (whom I wish I’d seen - one of my favourite actors and, with his ability to disseminate gravitas with lightness, perfect for the new TV series, which means it won’t be him).

It does seem somewhat remarkable that this character, who let’s face it is not really a character but an intensely vivid assemblage of traits, omniscience plus a moustache, should be played by men who in their other lives have taken on the roles of Prospero, Jesus, James Tyrone… and that there will no doubt be much Dr Who-style competition as to who will next play the part. But there it is. Poirot is not merely box-office, he is a cultural phenomenon (and, it would seem, the middle-aged actor’s bridge between Hamlet and Lear). The paradox, to my mind, is that his appeal derives from his cartoon-like déraciné quality, the way in which he hovers between the real and the unreal; as soon as he is fleshed out something is lost - what one might call the mercurial literary element. (His love of neatness, for instance, is a felicitous little Christiean inspiration, not a signifier of OCD). That is why John Moffatt, who played him on the radio, is perhaps the most successful of all Poirots, and - I suspect - the one of which Agatha herself would have most approved.

It is not known which of the 33 Poirot novels will be adapted by the BBC. Certainly many of the Suchet adaptations could be improved upon. Not his fault - there had been a choice to emphasize tweedom in those early series (they always remind me of Miranda Hart’s line ‘but it’s nearly nine! Four words: rush home for Poirot’) and an over-compensatory choice to go full Greek-drama-plus-ration-books in some of the later ones. The first novel to be filmed, Peril at End House in 1990, is a period acting fest reminiscent of an am-dram production of Design for Living, with much manipulation of cigarette holders and silvery laughter; thus the tone was set, until - in 2003 and season 9 - the square crumpets were suddenly drenched in neat absinthe: everything went dark and subtextual, which sometimes worked but was quite often overdone, viz the execution scene in Five Little Pigs. Semi-pornographic, and a distortion of the book. Elaboration is one thing; distortion is another.

In ONE’s opinion, and I had no idea I had it in myself to be so nerdish as to make this list, the successful Poirot adaptations are: the season 9 Sad Cypress, then the whole of the brilliant season 10 - The Mystery of the Blue Train, Cards on the Table, After the Funeral and Taken at the Flood, when everything fell into place, and continued on to the Mrs McGinty’s Dead of season 11… then some duds, then a very good The Clocks in season 12, and, fortunately, most of the whole final season, including a very clever riff on The Big Four. These shows (whose writers included Nick Dear and Kevin Elyot) were graced with some of the best actors on earth - the goddesses Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Manville and Geraldine James; the goddesses-in-waiting Kelly Reilly and Lucy Punch; Alex Jennings, Paul Rhys, Tom Burke, Mark Gatiss… all of which helps no end, but really it is about the tone. That quality of high-style sincerity; that elegant balance between the facade and what lies beneath; harder to achieve than it seems, perhaps, as it almost always tips in one direction or the other.

Anyway: that leaves a lot of books that one could adapt quite brilliantly (it is a given that there should never again be an adaptation of Orient Express or Death on the Nile) - top of my list would be Lord Edgware Dies, with its very fascinating central character - therefore what I feel about the new Poirot is that I would be interested, intensely so, if I thought these prospective adaptations would be as well done as they can be. What I actually think is that they will be done in a way to attract the maximum amount of pre-publicity; the really amazing part of which is that the changes wrought upon the originals are still viewed as ‘modernizing’. Who, except a person who has spent the last ten years exclusively watching Talking Pictures, thinks that there is anything radical about multi-ethnic casting? Who, unless they buy into the extremely 20th century image of Agatha as ‘cosy’, thinks it is daring to insert sex and snorting scenes? Agatha knew all about every kind of sin. She just didn’t, as dear Nancy wrote of Louis XV’s foreign minister the Duc de Choiseul, ‘go droning on about things’.

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You’ll have to promise not to talk about the heat, says William Hurt in that sexy piece of neo-noir for the Reagan era, Body Heat, but having just tipped a tray of ice down my T-shirt I’m afraid it is all I can think about… I am sitting here fiddling about with permissions for the Book from Hell (apparently required yesterday, although the book itself i…

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I have spent an hour this morning reading about AI and what is the point of anything anymore… ENOUGH.

I must be very very stupid, and increasingly I do feel that I understand very little of how careers are forged and fortunes made on insincerity and larceny and the clever marketing of idiocy, but HOW is it possible for a work of art to be created by an e…

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Those lovely subscribers who have stuck with me will know of my interest in - obsession with - a murder case from late 1922: the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, for the killing of Edith’s husband Percy. A story both ordinary and extraordinary, in which three people died young and violently; a story about class, passion and the power of …

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So: The Devil is wearing Prada again.

All power to it, I like a non-Marvel hit and this one has grossed $234m to date, which proves the worth of The Sequel, although on the whole I am anti-them. Sequels, prequels, spin-offs: the lot. Even Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a serious masterpiece, seems to me slightly less good than Jean Rhys’s four preceding nov…

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This is a very old post, somewhat refurbished… apologies for this but I am on holiday for a few days for the first time, properly, in two and a half years (not an exaggeration); however I hate not posting after I received so many new subscribers from my birthday offer, for which I am hugely grateful. So this is that unfashionable thing in hysterical times: a compromise.

I finished going through the copy-edit of my little Agatha Christie book, Eleven Days, at 2am on Sunday, then had another pick at it the next morning - then realized I was in danger of becoming obsessional, as one does with these things. So it has gone. Done.

Although my publisher did ask whether I would like to add a dedication… which reminded me both of this post, and of an unexpected email exchange that I had last year with an immensely courteous American, who messaged me to say that he was giving a speech about Roger Ackroyd at a club in Washington, had found my Agatha biography of great use and wanted to ask, if I didn’t mind telling him of course, the origin of the dedication at the front of the book?

Which is, as it happens: ‘To Vinny, my friend, O.F.D.’

Those who know Agatha Christie’s books may well recognize that O.F.D.: it features in The Mystery of the Blue Train, which was published in 1928 and dedicated ‘To the two distinguished members of the O.F.D. Carlotta and Peter’.

The acronym stood for ‘Order of the Faithful Dog’.

Peter really was a dog, a wire-haired terrier, who later became ‘Bob’ in Dumb Witness and whose bronze image now accompanies Agatha in that rather nice new statue on Torquay harbour. Agatha had clung to Peter throughout the terrible year of 1926, the one I have just written about in my book, which culminated in the eleven-day ‘disappearance’. In 1930 she wrote to her second husband, Max Mallowan: ‘You’ve never been through a really bad time with nothing in the world but a dog to hold on to.’

Carlotta was Charlotte Fisher, Agatha’s secretary-companion and lifelong friend, who had also stood by her in the matter of the eleven days: whatever Charlotte knew about the event - and speculation upon this is very much part of my new book - she never betrayed a confidence.

So the dedication to Blue Train, a wretched book from Agatha’s point of view, completed in the grey aftermath of 1926, was to those who had shown its author loyalty and love, those most dog-like of qualities.

Vinny was my dog, a superlative dog. He died not long before my Agatha biog went to print, and so - the dedication.

I explained this to the charming American and he later emailed me to tell me that he told the little story of the dedication in his speech to the Washington society, which I found extremely touching.

In his middle years Vinny acquired this companion Italian greyhound, Louis, who had been bred for showing, then rejected as there was something not quite right about the angle of his tail (that cranky tail did him a big old favour, as my father was wont to say). Louis died - aged nearly eighteen - just after I completed The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. So I dedicated that book to him: the inscription was in fact ‘To Louis, the well-beloved’, thus also an allusion to Louis XV, about whom Nancy had written in her biography of Madame de Pompadour (one of her slightly pompous friends advising her ‘that she might not say Louis XV was perfect heaven 3 times on one page’).

And most recently I dedicated Au Revoir Now Darlint, the edited letters of Edith Thompson, to ‘Milo, the darlingest boy’. Milo was my black labrador. Again, he had died not long before the book was published, and I still miss him quite atrociously. ‘Darlingest boy’ was how Edith described her young lover Freddy Bywaters; well, Milo was mine.

I have also dedicated a book to both my parents: easy decisions.

Then it starts to get a bit more complicated… rather weakly, I dedicated my Lucan book to ‘my family’, which was a half-hearted attempt to resolve a dedication-related issue, a family member by marriage who never reads a word that I write (hence I can say this on here) yet clearly expected to have a book dedicated to them, and has Meghan-level abilities to take offence at things. However I have no intention of dedicating a book to this non-reader, which merely entrenches the sulking situation in which none of my work is ever read.

As for love objects: when I think of a couple of the men to whom in the past I yearned to dedicate a book… suffice it to say that I would now pay good money, even in these hard times, even if it meant going round bookshops with a bottle of Tippex (should that still exist), to remove any such hypothetical inscriptions from any remaining copies.

Look at the fix that Nancy Mitford got herself into when she dedicated The Pursuit of Love to her adored Gaston Palewski: the ‘Colonel’, the ally of General de Gaulle whom she had met in London in 1942 and who, in the novel, is reimagined as the Duc de Sauveterre. Which gave Palewski great pleasure, although as I wrote in my Nancy biography (dedicated to my mother):

‘There had been a rift with Palewski in 1947 when The Pursuit of Love was published in France, and the dedication picked up on by the French press: ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’, ran a newspaper headline. This had turned the ever-cautious Colonel’s blood to ice; had he been in love with Nancy he would have laughed it off (he had, after all, wanted the dedication), but in his state of always trying to dance slightly away from her he reacted coldly: ‘he is in a great do about it & really I think I shall have to go away from here for a bit’, Nancy wrote to [her sister] Diana. ‘He says the General will be furious.’’

(Incidentally I am pretty sure that Unity Mitford was not Hitler’s mistress; but that is by-the-bye).

So I think I have been right in never dedicating a book to any person with whom my relationship is not absolutely fixed; although I am sure that Nancy never regretted the dedication to Palewski, even when, having told her for years that he could never marry a divorced Protestant (ie her), he went ahead and did exactly that. But their attachment - unsatisfactory as it was for her - was also something more, and when Nancy was dying Palewski helped to get her the Légion d’honneur: ‘she stood’, as I wrote, ‘while the love of her old life pinned the decoration to her dress.’

But I do wonder whether - for instance - Elizabeth Jane Howard later wished that she had not dedicated After Julius ‘To Kingsley’ in 1965. That was the year of their marriage, a time of such radiant bliss that Amis even wrote a short passage in the novel (EJH returning the favour in One Fat Englishman). Yet when the relationship broke down, some fifteen years later, he became immovably rancorous towards both his ex and her writing, as in this 1989 letter to Robert Conquest:

‘Martin tells me the bad news is they’re making a film of one of her books [Getting It Right], but the good news is it’s on a v. low budget. It amazes me now that for several months I was v cut up about it, wanted her back, contemplated a poem on the subj if you don’t fucking well mind… Well it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.’

A dedication is of its time; but because a book is, in a sense, for all time, at least until the skies fall in upon civilization (which I hope will be less soon than it sometimes seems), the dedication acquires its own quality of the eternal. Charlotte Bronte dedicating Jane Eyre to William Thackeray. Shakespeare and his onlie begetter. In the interests of ‘research’ I pulled out some random books from my own shelves and learned (what I had never before noticed) that Hotel du Lac is dedicated to Rosamond Lehmann, that Madame Bovary is dedicated to nobody, that The Go-Between is dedicated to ‘Miss Dora Cowell’ and that In a Summer Season is dedicated to John, which I found very interesting. The ‘John’ in receipt is presumably Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, who was not entirely faithful; the subject matter of the novel is the second marriage of an attractive, well-to-do, middle-aged Home Counties woman (in other words, very much Elizabeth Taylor herself) to a younger man, who envelops her in a haze of sexual desire that the novel conveys, almost chokingly, without a single explicit word or phrase. No such second marriage ever occurred for Elizabeth, although after her death aged just 63, John Taylor - who lived to be almost a hundred - acquired a second wife.

So those two words, ‘To John’, tell a little tale of their own, as many dedications surely do.

This, for instance, is from Agatha Christie’s 1932 novel Peril at End House: ‘To Eden Phillpotts, To whom I shall always be grateful for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me years ago.’

Phillpotts, a successful writer in the early twentieth century, had lived near Agatha’s family, the Millers, in Devon. When Agatha wrote her first novel, the unpublished Snow Upon the Desert, in around 1909, her mother Clara - always a determined advocate - urged her to send him the manuscript. He gave Agatha an introduction to his literary agency, which would indeed later represent her, although she was told to forget the novel. Later - but still some time before her first detective fiction - she sent Philpotts a short story, now lost, to which he replied:

‘All is going exceedingly well with your work and should life so fall out for you that it has room for art and if you can face the uphill fight to take your place and win it, you have the gifts sufficient. I never prophesy; but I should judge that if you can write like this now you might go far.’

For a man who did not prophesy, this showed a tremendous kindly prescience.

And the delicately implied warning - that life and art must strive to be reconciled - applied to no book so much as The Mystery of the Blue Train, which was completed in a state of grave unhappiness and which had, nonetheless, to be written, because that is what writers do.

As for my own latest, Eleven Days… the obvious dedicatees have put themselves forward, thus:

but I am more glad than I can say that they are both (I hope) several books away from requiring that particular kind of immortality; that time when the physical presence has gone and yet there they are, honoured, publicly yet intimately, the ineradicable words a signifier of the space that they occupy in my heart-memory.

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You probably know the story, one of my favourites, of how Gore Vidal gave a copy of one of his books to Norman Mailer and inscribed the words ‘Hi Norm’ next to Mailer’s name in the index, knowing full well that this would be the first page to which his reader turned.

Well: I did a Hi Norm myself, on the recent biography of Jessica Mitford (Trouble Maker …

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This began as a slightly edited repost from two years ago, when almost nobody would have seen it. However I’ve rewritten it so extensively that it is now 90% new. Please forgive the absence of anything BRAND new - I had to do a sensitivity edit on the Book from Hell (not a process I recommend, in fact absolutely bloody horrible) and am about to move on …

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The last week or so has been full-on, in a slightly fraught but mostly good way, including a high-speed edit of my little Agatha Disappearance book (very kindly received I’m glad to say), after which my main computer finally said: ENOUGH. Courteous of it to wait until we had finished our sixth book together, I felt. Buying a replacement is, as a character in After Julius says of buying petrol, a dull way of spending one’s money, but it does feel quite nice to be writing without the constant fear that implosion is imminent.

Also nice (a word I like) was an invitation to be interviewed for a French TV documentary in the Secrets d’Histoire series - I had instant delicious visions of Eurostars; sadly the interview is in London - whose subject is the Mitfords. This has led me to start thinking about them - for the first time in a while, as I had deliberately put them out of my mind for a few months after watching two episodes of Outrageous, and realizing that I had Mitford overload.

I have been writing about them for long enough - more than twenty years - to be aware that opinion on the Mitfords is subject to pendulum swings, between compelled fascination and repelled condemnation, with not very much in between. When my book The Six was published, ten years ago, their strange collective enchantment was entering full bloom, and they were inspiring catwalk collections, guides to life and the like. Now, in darker times, opinion against them seems to have hardened; their political aspect has burst through the crème brûlée topping of charm and their compelling fascination - which blazes on - is under attack. ‘I demand an end to the glorification of these six dead posh women and their dysfunctional, unpleasant, and largely fascist family’, was the deliberately sweeping pronouncement of the historian Guy Walters; a statement that received plenty of endorsement on social media.

Oddly enough, I am not entirely out of sympathy with it; even though, when people (mostly men) hate the Mitfords in that way, one has the sense that as much as anything they are despising the kind of people (mostly women) who are interested in them, which I suppose includes me. They see something fatuous in – say - admiring the style of somebody who admired Hitler, and I know exactly what they mean, but for me that is not quite the point.

First: much of the ire against the Mitfords derives from their class. They are ‘posh’, a simple fact that arouses an immense complexity of reactions; in the end, however, inverted snobbery is no more logical than the other kind. Perhaps most of all there is a loathing, in some quarters, for the quality that I love most in them, which is their profound and sincere levity. Ours is an age that takes itself desperately seriously, as if to laugh is in some way to transgress or offend: a Cromwellian age. I miss the constant rippling humour that ran through my more cavalier youth, and for all that their lives were often appallingly sad I hear it in the Mitfords; like Elizabeth Bennet they dearly loved a laugh, their writings and letters fairly bubble with that urge, and the streak of darkness that propels it is at the heart of the Mitford Paradox, wherein a family with such charmless allegiances has become an emblem of English charm.

Like the anti-Mitfordians, I am deeply bored with the fetishizing of the Mitford tropes - the network of nicknames, the Hons’ Cupboard, the blissikins, do admit idiom – particularly when the subject matter is so often as grim as Hades. But here, precisely, is the point. It is the tension between the two, the self-ironizing jokes and what lies beneath, that makes the family feel so alive still; so much more interesting than the usual interwar cocktailing crowd, Sacheverell and Emerald and the gang, whose eccentricities and witticisms cloy easily in the mouth while the Mitfords remain tart and fresh. Modern, in their knowingness, which is not the same thing as relatable (a quality that the TV series Outrageous sought to find in them).

Jessica, incidentally, is the Mitford sister who gets a free pass from the ‘largely fascist’ accusation. A recent biography led her to be feted by commentators as the sole escapee from the taint of her family. Certainly she was vehemently opposed to the pro-Hitler views espoused by her sisters Unity and Diana, by her mother Lady Redesdale and - briefly - by her father. Nevertheless she was a card-carrying member of the Communist party until 1958, two years after Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin’s murderous crimes. ‘Terrible as the revelations were’ - she later wrote - ‘it seemed to me that the very fact that Khrushchev had seen fit to lay them out before the world signified that the Soviet leadership was set on a course of fundamental change.’ If you say so, Jessica.

She also ghosted her father - never seeing him again after she absconded to the Spanish civil war in 1936 - in a way that I find extremely chilly (while maintaining relations with her mother, and retaining a fondness for Unity). But she gets away with these contradictions because her views became recognizably liberal-left, and because the causes that she espoused in mid-life - particularly with regard to the civil rights movement, in which she displayed great heroism - were so admirable.

Also, of course, she publicly criticized the inherited privilege that defined her upbringing; her mea culpas for having been born posh make hers a very 21st century voice. Jessica’s memoir Hons and Rebels bears a strong resemblance to her sister Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love - ‘In some respects she has seen the family, quite without knowing it herself, through the eyes of my books’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh; ‘I haven’t said this to anyone but you as it sounds so conceited’ - although Nancy, who did not do mea culpas, instead marketed her Honourableness for all it was worth, thus becoming the architect of what is now the Mitford mythology.

By publicly turning her back on her upbringing, moving to the US, marrying a bold young anarchist (Esmond Romilly) then a left-wing lawyer (Robert Treuhaft), Jessica was the only Mitford to become an outsider on her own Mitford-ness. At the same time - let us be honest - she played it for all it was worth; but, it might be said, in a good cause. It might also be said that the acceptable way, now, in which to view the Mitfords is through the eyes of Jessica, the only one of them who is recognizably One of Us.

Of course Deborah has a vast fanbase, but her trenchant sanity is - as she herself wrote of Chatsworth - ‘not very progressive’. And nobody is going to view anything through the eyes of Unity, Nazi fangirl, nor Diana, whose superior brain was skewed through the prism of loyalty to her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. Nor, indeed, through those of the countrywoman Pamela, although I always suspect her of being a dark horse, within her pale sheep clothing. ‘Nard, let’s face it, she’s ruined four years of our lives,’ she said to Diana after Nancy’s death in 1973, meaning the length of her terrible illness; to my mind this is one of the most shocking statements made by a family that specialized in them.

It is known that Pamela was atrociously teased by Nancy as a child, and the obvious inference is that the memory of this smouldered deep within her.

Or did she know - or guess - that Nancy, who famously denounced her fascist sister Diana to the authorities in June 1940, had a few months later done the same thing to Pamela?

I am, as an NYC journalist once rather charmingly put it to me, ‘in Nancy’s corner’; but if Jessica is allowed an exemption from the ‘largely fascist’ epithet, then so too should Nancy be; for all her appearance of frivolity, it might be argued that her credentials are at least as substantial.

In the spring of 1940, when the war began to get serious, Nancy had contacted her friend Gladwyn Jebb at the Foreign Office, who invited her in, then passed on her views to the Home Office. On 20 June she wrote to the family friend, Violet Hammersley: ‘I have just been round to see Gladwyn at his request to tell what I know (very little actually) of Diana’s visits to Germany. I advised him to examine her passport to see how often she went. I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behaviour but in such times I think it one’s duty?’

Then, in November - by which time Diana had been confined to Holloway jail, where she would remain until late 1943 - Nancy marched off again to do a bit more denouncing: reiterating her views of the Mosleys but also throwing in suspicions of Pamela, and her then husband Derek Jackson, who was in the RAF while at the same time openly pro-fascist.

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This is not what I intended to write. But I was looking at the images from the Actors Awards (formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild awards; is the acronym SAG regarded as too triggering?) and feel compelled to ask the question: why has Demi Moore shrunk to the proportions of a child ballet dancer?

Usually I do not comment on this kind of thing. As far as I am concerned, people can weigh whatever they want. They can also use whatever cosmetic enhancements they choose - this is not a moral question, in my view. Demi Moore has had a lot ‘done’ and what I say is good luck to her; everybody knows that she and Nicole Kidman do not look as they do because they drink gallons of water, plus spirulina and marine collagen; they have spent multiple thousands and undergone a certain amount of pain and trauma to preserve their very considerable looks, and that is their business. The so-called pressure to have a face without lines is no different, really, from when old Hollywood required Marilyn to have a nose job, put Alida Valli on a three-steaks-a-day ur-keto diet and shaved Rita Hayworth’s hairline.

The real issue, to my mind, is whatever induces a woman like Demi Moore - a beautiful woman, who would probably have been embraced more closely in France than in new Hollywood - to starve herself to the dimensions of a pocket handkerchief.

Now that is the real pressure. Ozempic chic. Ozempic is a great thing if it helps anybody, but it is not designed for a woman who weighs 120 pounds to get below eight stone.

I am a hypocrite, by the way, because I have been on and off a diet ever since a ballet mistress at my school (a performing arts school) told me that my ‘line’ would be improved if I lost weight. These were the days before teachers had to tread warily around this kind of thing; ballet students are already teetering on the edge of collective hysteria, and we were all mightily impressed by a girl who lived on a Ryvita at every meal; anyway the comment has stuck across the decades. I never do an adult ballet class without wishing there were less of me. Less! There is something truly awful about that notion.

Nevertheless I am sufficiently unharmed to prefer slim to skinny. My body type wouldn’t do skinny anyway, not without deranged interventions, although Demi Moore - who as a slim woman looked absolutely marvellous - seems not to have let that stop her.

The skinny body type is exactly that, a type; not even all ballerinas possess it (the great Lynn Seymour was a womanly shape, by the standards of her art form, with accordingly voluptuous lines). But it is an enduring obsession in our culture. The age of body positivity and Kate Moss-does-wellness might never have been. The 90s are back, and with them the perverse reverence for a real size zero (ie not just a ‘flattering’ label stitched inside an eight); almost with a sigh of relief, as it seems, worship of the bodiless is back.

Look at how many women are obsessed with Audrey Hepburn, about to be reincarnated on screen by Lily Collins. Audrey had a unique quality of the incandescent on screen; her immense Bambi features meant that one saw her emotions in heightened, unfettered form, and her screen performances, notably in the masterpiece The Nun’s Story, form a small cache of exquisite jewels. But I suspect that the true reason why she is venerated - including by Victoria Beckham - is her skinniness. The prettiest-girl-in-the-school ease of being unencumbered by one’s body. It may in truth have been the product of wartime starvation, but Audrey’s lack of flesh looks natural, not forced, simply the way she was; and this defining aspect of her beauty continues to fascinate.

And then: the Love Story show on Hulu, Ryan Murphy’s retelling of the relationship between JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, which has generated the whole nine yards in terms of social media plus a revival in the cult of minimalism.

Why?

It is Carolyn, of course. Throughout my adult life, Carolyn - who died in July 1999, with her sister Lauren and her husband John Kennedy Jr, when the plane he was flying crashed close to Martha’s Vineyard - was a series of sleek still images, captured like pinned butterflies (those that adhere to a Calvin Klein palette), upon which innumerable fantasies – mostly female - were projected. ‘Bessette is clearly a religious figure’, said Ryan Murphy, when venomous fury greeted early images of Sarah Pidgeon (in the Carolyn role) wearing what was described as looking like a Karen Millen iteration of the real woman’s Prada camel coat.

And, in another image, Converse sneakers that aroused the special rage of people with not enough to do: ‘A Converse? Baby, I don’t think so.’

Carolyn did have phenomenal style, ironically because it was her own style: she was not one of the innumerable ‘influencers’ trying to emulate it. But again, I am convinced that what really fascinates is the skinniness. How it was achieved is not the issue; it was not ‘natural’, in that she was heavier before she became a Manhattan It girl, but it certainly looks that way; being skinny suited her. Carolyn was bodiless, pared to her thoroughbred bones. Nobody in possession of normal amounts of flesh would have looked as she did in her outfits, for instance the camel skirt and black top - ordinary, hallowed - replicas of which were sold by the Fashion Auctioneer in February. Carolyn’s actual camel coat went for $192,000.

There is something so odd about all this. I really do not know what to make of it, but it is as if a woman’s life has become a kind of iconography comprising the clothes that she wore. Seeing Carolyn animated by Sarah Pidgeon - given a reality - is obsessing the many watchers of Love Story, but what it is really doing is driving them back to the treasured relics: the empty Prada coat, the empty white slip dress, the empty headband. Those are what create obsession.

Carolyn herself has been silent from the age of thirty-three, but her silence is part of why she fascinates, possibly the heart of the matter: bodiless goes naturally with voiceless. Similarly with her mother-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy. There is an implicit dynamism within the images of these women, but the image is what counts. The moment that the body reveals its reality, the worship will start to fragment and divide.

Flesh is our strength, but it makes us vulnerable.

In my 2021 book Heiresses, I wrote about two women in particular who were plagued by this strange desire for fleshlessness: Jackie’s step-daughter Christina Onassis, and the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, born in 1912, who like Christina ‘carried the scent of vulnerability, and there was not enough Mitsouko in the world to cover it.’

My version (somewhat shortened here) of their story is behind the paywall, with a free trial option should you be interested to read it.

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I did not intend to write this, then woke up and did so. A short post of the kind one can only write on Substack… in other words, not really conclusive.

But with all this Wuthering Heights talk, and my own recent resolution to re-read the novel, having disliked it intensely first time around, I have understood something. I have rationalized my profound …

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I was wondering whether, if I had a bit more time (am now editing the book that I delivered last Monday - THANK YOU for the kind congrats), I would wander down to the nearest cinema and see Wuthering Heights.

On the whole, I think not. Not even out of curiosity. I resisted Hamnet, and when the hype around it disintegrated into a series of articles heade…

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I posted a note last week about stage 1 of the reissue of my book The Last Landlady (the old stock has been taken on by Wilton Square Publishing and is now available through Waterstones etc)… Thank you all, so much, for the incredibly kind response. And sales! I’m hugely grateful.

Pubs are like Shakespeare: they are having a moment. The urgency about saving them - which is very real, given the crazy financial pressures that many of them are facing - is nothing new, however. Pubs have been slowly dying for many years, although it never seemed until now that they might actually cease to exist. But I remember mornings at my grandmother’s pub when the silence was hollow and heavy, and one was pathetically grateful for the presence of a solitary old soak, poignant in retrospect, making a double Teacher’s last for half an hour while saying ‘ah well’ on repeat, creating an extended performance out of thinking about standing up, preparing to stand up, half-standing up, searching for money, finding money, fully standing up, staggering to the counter and ritualistically ordering another double Teacher’s (‘go on then’), before doing the whole performance again in reverse.

I remember, too, the prescribed solution for this calamitous morning opening situation, which was food. My grandmother - who was very opinionated but, because she was also innately humorous and swept one along with her personality, got away with it - really hated food in pubs. She thought it decadent. Anything more than crisps, peanuts and the giant chunk of Cheddar that she placed on the bar (plus encircling necklace of Ritz crackers) was not, to her, pub-like. It was something different.

A few years ago I had the immense pleasure of appearing on a podcast about pubs, hosted by the extremely wonderful John Robins and . Now there are so many podcasts I don’t know how anybody has a clue where to start sifting the good from the tripe. But this, The Moon Under Water, was genuinely special. Most of the guests were properly entertaining (I was a bit of an outlier); I was there because I had written The Last Landlady.

The Moon Under Water was the name of Orwell’s dream pub, as imagined in his famous essay, and so guests would discursively describe their own ideal, which in my case was pretty much the pub run by my grandmother. I was only in my teens when she left it - as Robin truly said, the real subject of the book is memory - but, in so far as objectivity is possible, I do think that it was an extremely good pub. In my book I try to analyse why, and why good pubs, in their blissfully sane and ordinary way, matter so much.

Guests were asked a series of questions as a means to define the perfect pub, one of which was: what would you ban from your perfect pub? To which my answer was: food. And what follows, partly behind the paywall (free trial option available) is an extract from The Last Landlady, in which I recall the introduction of food into my grandmother’s pub in the 1980s - mornings only - and the change that it wrought: financially beneficial, atmospherically not so much.

… The notion of a pub as a place where people simply congregated, a social hub that did not need to be named as such because nobody would have doubted it, or even thought about it, all this was evaporating along with the smell of Player’s Navy Cut: it was over, or as near as dammit.

Again, the change was not sudden. Pubs had been remodelled as Berni Inns since the mid-1950s, and those steak-and-chips-plus-Chianti meals were a near institution by the late 1960s. Similarly with Aberdeen Angus ‘restaurants’. These chains surely influenced the way in which pubs evolved, prefiguring Harvesters – which started in the early 1980s – and their kind.

But food in pubs was one thing; good food was another. The first intimations could be felt of what would become another obsession (was this, in fact, when things became obsessions?), but the gastronomic revolution had not yet gained momentum. Fifteen years later, the village pubs where I grew up would be offering ingredients such as roasted peppers (almost all of the seeds removed), balsamic vinegar, mascarpone, the usual suspects gathered together in assorted herb-flecked groupings.

At the time I am describing, the food on offer was rather more basic. In preparation for the great Lunch Launch my grandmother, mother and I visited another pub in the area – the White Horse, or possibly the Hope and Anchor – to see what they were up to. We had intended to be incognito, like spies for Egon Ronay, but my grandmother could not really do that. Barely had we got through the door before she was enveloped by wheedling, traitorous customers and a wary, perspiring publican. She batted away the questions as to whether she was retiring, or considering her own forays into food. She sat in her leopard-print coat, smiling with slightly alarming regality, opening her heavy gold compact to retouch her lips, as sweetly incompetent young waitresses hovered with typewritten menus and took down orders all wrong.

The tables, near-weightless dark wood, bore a bowl full of semi-liquid butter pats and no cutlery. Up came the nervous landlord: ‘Got your irons, Vi?’ He meant knives and forks.

The food was unspeakable: my lasagne was swimming in water from defrosting. It later transpired that everything had been stashed in the freezer straight from the cash-and-carry store, a place infamous for its cheap spirits, which certain low publicans would decant into bottles of Teacher’s and Gordon’s. The conversation on the drive home – more of a soliloquy, in fact – was characterised by its repetitions (‘Could you believe how/when/why . . .?’) and its rages (‘Did you see Laura’s?/I wouldn’t have given mine to the dog/Did you see old Rex and Sheila, looked a bit bloody sheepish didn’t they . . .?’). It proved one thing: that the visit to this other pub had not been wasted. My grandmother’s spirit had been wholly roused. If she had to give people food, she would show them how it was done. She was a hostess, after all, and nobody west of Whitechapel made a better salt beef sandwich. ‘And those bloody menus . . .!’: she was referring to the typed sheets with their letters out of alignment, like clues in detective fiction.

The ideas began to flow like fine wine.

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Shakespeare is ‘for all time’, as dear Ben Jonson put it, but four centuries later he is also ‘having a moment’. Putting those two things together leads to Chloe Zhao, director of Hamnet, pronouncing that ‘Shakespeare is the ultimate IP’, which made me all the more certain that I was doing the right thing (for me) in not seeing Hamnet.

There is now what…

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Agatha Christie died fifty years ago today. I remember standing in the room where this happened, at her Oxfordshire home, Winterbrook House. A lovely bedroom, but - as with all ending places, where even the greatest of lives shrink to the limits of the vulnerable body - a sense of chill and melancholy.

I am so grateful to her. Quite literally, it is impossible to imagine a world without her. I started researching my biography of her in 2003, when her daughter Rosalind was still alive, and I have written about her on and off ever since - including ep 1 of a biographical drama that the BBC so nearly red-lit, then sadly did not. Something about the dual nature of her monolithic fame and the secretive woman within continues to fascinate me. I also admire her, enormously, as I wrote in my biography:

Agatha’s virtue lay in her vitality. That was what led her to cover the century with such zest and curiosity: hers was a life that refused to waste itself, and that is a noble thing. As an artist, too, she was on the side of virtue: her detective fiction dealt in justice and her Mary Westmacotts sought the humanity in her characters, not a single one of whom is dismissed as unworthy of consideration.

From what I have heard about forthcoming books, TV shows etc, I think that this year may finally achieve Peak Agatha, and that by the time my own little offering is published in November people will be screaming NO MORE… I confess that I myself am now quite bored with the Agatha industry, all that knowingness and rebooting and band-wagon-jumping. Agatha for Gen Z, or quite possibly Gen Alpha - Agatha graphic novels - Agatha academic conferences - Agatha as trope-maker-in-chief for Rian Johnson and co. - Agatha as raw material for 21st century creatives to mould/ politicize as they please… It seems so remote from her simple genius. But the wonderful thing is that as soon as I start reading her, or writing about her, or thinking about the magical days at Greenway researching her long and complex life, I am under the spell again.

So my little book, which plunges deep into her mystery, remains precious to me (despite a deadline that I confess is nearly killing me).

What follows behind the paywall - free trial option available, of course - is today’s little tribute: an edited extract from the end of my biography, when Agatha entered the last years of her life.

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A few years ago I watched one of those three-part ITV dramas that are often no more than serviceable (although usually watchable) but was, in this case, notably elevated. The show - Leaving - had a central pairing of Callum Turner, then barely-known, now 7/4 to be the next Bond, and the very great Helen McCrory, whose performance had a power worthy of h…

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But Christmas morning. There’s something about Christmas morning… the first moment when you wake up. Somehow, I don’t know why, I always know it’s Christmas morning. It’s as if during the night, while you were asleep, something had happened…

Lines spoken by Celia Johnson in The Holly and the Ivy, my favourite Christmas film (as described in a recent pos…

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This is an old post, only minimally edited so some subscribers will have seen it… but today seemed a good day to reissue it.

Nevertheless anniversaries are ridiculous, really. Why should Jane Austen be commemorated more in 2025, because she was born two and a half centuries ago, rather than in 2024 or 2026? But they do serve a purpose, in that they const…

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Firstly: if you want some proper recommendations for Christmas films then check out , but these are my random thoughts… fun to write and inspired, if that is the word, by the fact that I couldn’t sleep the other night and for the first time in my life watched The Holiday.

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