T S Eliot, the "guru-in-chief": this great phrase was coined by Ted Hughes after he learnt of the poet's death in January 1965. Hughes's entry in a previously unseen journal, which his widow has just given to the British Library, goes on display in an exhibition there about Eliot from September 14. Hughes records that the death of Eliot, who published him at Faber, was "like a crack over the head. I've so tangled him in my thoughts, dreamt of him so clearly and unambiguously. At once I feel windswept, unsafe. He was in my mind constantly, like a rather over-watchful, over-powerful father. And now he has gone".
Wonderfully evocative, as you might expect from a future Poet Laureate. I also like this from a young Hughes at his first Faber party, given for WH Auden in June 1960. "Auden just inside the door; face almost immobile in heavy wrinkles. Later, photo on stairs with Eliot, Auden, Spender and MacNeice. Herbert Read told me Eliot has always been the ill one of the group. Chest trouble."
Sadly, similar reminiscences will no longer be so available because virtually nobody writes things down any more, except in fleeting e-mail or text form. Pity the future biographers.
By the way, Eliot's Volume Two of his letters, from 1922 to 1925, the year he joined Faber from Lloyd's Bank, will finally be published in November - a staggering 21 years after Volume 1 and 20 since Faber first hoped they would appear. Trust they're worth the wait.
Tacky revelations in a new biography out next week of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, who died in 1992. Jann Parry tells how MacMillan "colluded" with his lead dancer, Lynn Seymour, in 1960, to have an abortion so she could dance for him in his new Romeo and Juliet. The Royal Ballet even arranged the clinic and advanced her the £500 against her salary of £40 a week. Not surprisingly, Seymour's husband was concerned about the effect on their marriage.
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It was her "singing in the mud" performance at Glastonbury in 2007 that gave some welly to Shirley Bassey's career. Now she is to bring out her first contemporary pop album at the tender age of 72. Mind you, that is nothing compared with Vera Lynn, now back in the charts at 92. All bar one of Bassey's songs have been newly composed by fans such as the Pet Shop Boys, Rufus Wainwright, Kaiser Chiefs, Manic Street Preachers, KT Tunstall, Gary Barlow, plus John Barry and Don Black. Nothing, too, like a bit of Taff rivalry between the dame and the knight. Her fellow Welsh crooner, Tom Jones, who is a mere 69, brought out his pop album last year, with help from Bono and the Edge, and then performed it at Glastonbury. Iechyd da to both these troupers.
When you are in the mire, hire a PR company. Firstsite, an art gallery in Colchester, was supposed to open last year, but now it won't until at least 2010. The cost of the building, by the trendy architect Rafael Viñoly, has rocketed from £19m to £27m, nearly all from the public purses of the Arts Council and the local authority. Enter Idea Generation, a PR company that specialises in showbiz clients. Daftly, they have just asked me what I think of Firstsite. My tart response? "Over budget and over-running."
Lost in the joy of the demise of Big Brother comes news that Channel 4 will instead put more money into drama. Good. Included will be Shane Meadows's TV debut about the gang from his brilliant movie This Is England; an adaptation of William Boyd's Any Human Heart; and Homeland, from Peter Kosminsky, partly set in the late 1940s, as Israel was being founded, and partly in the present. Both Kosminsky and the producer, David Aukin, are Jewish, but the drama takes a laudably even-handed approach, showing that Britain must take its share of the initial blame for the region's problems, 60 years on.
A new film about Jean Charles de Menezes, directed by the UK-based Brazilian Henrique Goldman, is showing at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Let's hope good reviews get it a British distributor. Also this week, a new witness-statement play, Stockwell, about the young man's death, opens at the Tricycle theatre. Ironically, de Menezes was boarding the Tube to Kilburn, where the Tricycle is based, on that fateful morning of July 22, 2005.