One could pity this year’s Olympians as Covid denies them the opportunity to experience one of the world’s great cities. It has reminded Sebastian Coe of his first Games in Moscow, where recreation in the Soviet capital was limited to the Olympic village. “Wherever we went we had the constant company of a guard called Boris,” he writes in the Spectator. Boris was always reading, and Coe achieved détente when he discovered it was some Graham Greene. This encouraged the runner Brendan Foster to try his luck. “Boris,” he inquired, “where is the nearest nightclub?” The watchman kept staring at his page and replied “Helsinki”.
Patrick Kidd took a day off to catch up with the Games, but suddenly messaged me with some parenting concerns. “How little influence a father can have!” he exclaimed. “Jessica Springsteen, Bruce’s daughter, is in the showjumping. All that being told from infancy ‘baby you were born to run’ and she chooses to ride instead.”
BETTE DAVIS SIGHS
The BFI’s new season celebrating Bette Davis will struggle to capture how big a character she was off screen as well as on, chiefly in her rivalry with Joan Crawford. Davis’s biographer, George Perry, says she never forgave Crawford for marrying her paramour. “At a dinner party long after Crawford’s death, Davis tore into her with her usual venom,” Perry tells TMS. “The host said, ‘But Bette, she left us a couple of years ago.’ Davis snarled back, ‘Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she’s become a better person.’ ”
Yesterday’s story about being omitted from a newspaper’s list of birthdays has struck a chord. Nigel Rees of the radio show Quote . . . Unquote complained to The Guardian when they cut him after four decades. “Were it not for The Times and The Telegraph, who maintain the faith, I would have had to conclude that I was dead.” He is unimpressed with his replacement: “Dave, rapper and songwriter, 23”.
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ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE
This month marks 40 years since the death of Tommy Lascelles, the Queen’s first private secretary. He became a saviour of the monarchy, although his early career was tempestuous. Henry Oliver writes for Unherd that Lascelles stopped working for the future Edward VIII while lecturing the prince about his louche behaviour. When rehired by George V, he narrowly avoided chastising a young man on his train to Sandringham before recognising the Duke of York, the future George VI. Then, four days into this job, George V died, leaving Lascelles working for his despised former boss. In truth, he initially worked for the royals with mixed motives. He first took work at St James’s as it was “half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club”.
MEGHAN JOINS THE GREATS
The Duchess of Sussex can adorn the second edition of her novella with a quotation comparing her to a literary great. “It all goes a bit Gertrude Stein,” says the London Review of Books, though one doubts if that’s what one wants from a children’s picture book. In his review of the duchess’s The Bench, the novelist Andrew O’Hagan was reminded of more heavyweights. Upon reading phrases such as “You’ll sit on this bench. As his giving tree,” O’Hagan was forced to admit: “I’m not sure what this means, and I’ve read Finnegans Wake.”
