Biography

They say there are old soldiers and bold soldiers but very few old, bold soldiers. Well, Tim Spicer is pretty old, and there’s no question about his boldness. In a long life spent running towards, rather than away from, danger and adventure, he has consistently put the daring into derring-do. I discovered this when working for him in Iraq in 2004, just as al-Qaeda was doing its worst. He never seemed happier than when terrorists were aiming an RPG at him. To his unflappable soldierly credentials and a buccaneering ability to make a fortune from private security we must now add a late-career talent with the pen. In A Dangerous Enterprise (2021) he told the story of the little known secret second world war flotilla operating from Devon.

One day during the summer of 1765 a young black man, an enslaved person called Jonathan Strong, stumbled into a doctor’s surgery on Mincing Lane, off Fenchurch Street in the City of London. He was seriously injured, having been badly beaten about the face by his ‘owner’, and there were fears he might lose his sight. The doctor, William Sharp, though respected enough in his profession to be called upon to treat members of the royal family, was also known to be willing to tend those who had no means of paying. Sure enough, Sharp cared for the injured man, and he and his younger brother Granville arranged for Strong to be admitted to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he remained for more than four months.

It was December 1942 and J.R.R. Tolkien was having doubts about his new book, a sequel to The Hobbit published five years earlier. ‘Is such an “epic” possible to consider in the present circumstances?’ he wrote to his publisher Stanley Unwin. The specific circumstances included the second world war; but the literary climate was hardly more propitious. The warden of Merton College, Oxford, where Tolkien was Professor of English Language and Literature, was ‘visibly shaken’ when Tolkien showed him the blurb for that sequel, eventually titled The Lord of the Rings. Reviews were largely poor: the American critic Edmund Wilson was not alone in thinking it ‘juvenile trash’. In a sense, Tolkien’s question to Unwin holds good.

When Michael Gambon was made a CBE, Ian McKellen wrote generously on behalf of the acting profession: ‘We think you’re the best.’ Arthur Miller pronounced him greater than Laurence Olivier. From a spear-carrying start in the early days – indeed on the first day – of the National Theatre, Gambon rose steadily to stardom and eventually, via a series of movie flops, to the well-paid prison of the Harry Potter films. On stage, in Shakespeare, Beckett, Pinter and Ayckbourn, or on television in The Singing Detective and Longitude, there was a might and scale to his talent that few could match – a force that did not preclude delicacy and emotional truth, his physical bulk capable of both high comedy and balletic grace. The essence of Gambon’s art was contradiction.

‘The whore of the Risorgimento’ or ‘the divine Countess’ – Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione was among the most extravagantly flamboyant figures of the 19th century, notorious principally as the mistress of Napoleon III. Drawing on thousands of unpublished documents, Benedetta Craveri’s biography of the woman whose name, according to the arch-priest of aesthetes Robert de Montesquiou, became ‘synonymous with beauty’ presents a nuanced portrait of an aristocratic adventuress. Her talent for seduction played a pivotal, yet largely unacknowledged, role in the unification of Italy.

Erroll Prior-Palmer had one decision to make on D-Day. It wasn’t as momentous as Eisenhower’s to launch the invasion, having postponed it for 24 hours due to bad weather, but, for the 40 or so tanks that were meant to swim ashore and give covering fire to the infantry as they stormed Sword Beach, it was life and death. Sword Beach, the easternmost of the Allied landing sectors, guarding the vulnerable left flank of the entire Allied landings, was entrusted to the 3rd (British) Infantry Division. Their task was to reinforce the overnight airborne landings and take Caen, the route centre that would open up Normandy to rapid advance inland.

If you remember the 1970s you might also remember Carlos the Jackal, an international terrorist notorious for taking the Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He also murdered two French policemen in Paris, later claiming to have personally murdered 83 people, plus another thousand killed on his orders during his terrorist career. But that may be wishful thinking. His name is not Carlos and he didn’t award himself the ‘Jackal’ sobriquet. That came about through the discovery of an arms cache he had hidden in a girlfriend’s flat in London. The Guardian reporter who broke the story noted that a briefcase full of weapons was placed next to a bookshelf displaying Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller, The Day of the Jackal.

David Hockney painted ‘Beverly Hills Housewife’ between l966 and 1967, during an exceptionally happy period of his life. He was thrilled to be living in Los Angeles and was enjoying his first great love affair, with Peter Schlesinger, who loved him back. John Kasmin, his art dealer, came out from London to introduce him to various collectors. One of them was Betty Freeman, who lived at 703 Hillcrest Road, a fairly typical Beverly Hills house. Hockney asked if he could take some polaroids, which became the source for the painting. Hockney and Freeman liked each other from the start and would become lifelong friends.

In the summer of 1726, the writers Jonathan Swift and John Gay spent several weeks at the home of their friend Alexander Pope on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham (then known as ‘Twitnam’), not resting but toiling away at their various literary activities and mutually inspiring each other. On the surface they were an unlikely trio: Swift was almost 20 years older than either Pope or Gay; Pope was Catholic (at a time when Catholicism was still treated with suspicion) and financially independent, while Swift was an Anglican cleric, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Gay, in contrast, was a jobbing writer, dependent for financial security on his amiable sociability and maintenance of good relations with a long list of wealthy patrons.

On a day in the early spring of 1998 I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Hollywood waiting to hear whether or not I would be interviewing Carlos Castaneda. He was the author of The Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1968, a book which recounted his apprenticeship in the deserts of Mexico at the feet of an elderly Indian shaman and his induction through mind-altering substances into ‘the Yaqui way of knowledge’. In revealing the deeper reality behind the illusion of existence, providing a blueprint for the life of ‘a warrior’ free from the fear of death, Don Juan’s teachings were perfectly attuned to the zeitgeist of the age.