Culture

I am not an avid television watcher, so I did not tune into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for about a year, but when I finally did, like nearly half the nation (19 million viewers at its peak) I was gripped. At the time I was also rather poor and thinking of going to live in France. Night after night, in an atmosphere vibrating with tension, huge sums of money were being won on questions that were no harder than Trivial Pursuit, and the germ of the idea of trying to get on began to lodge in my mind. 'How vulgar!' said my inner Aunt Agatha. And I would read about the 5,000 telephone lines which were open 24 hours a day, the tens of thousands of people trying to get on and one man on the programme said he'd rung 400 times. 'Pointless and hopeless' said my inner Wet Blanket.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman's August 1914. As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command. Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important advice: leave the subordinates to deal with the telegrams while the boss keeps a clear head to decide for peace or war. Curiously, the episode itself produced a book still eminently valuable to a statesman in crisis, Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days. It tells how Bobby, as chairman of the Executive Committee, spared his brother Jack the confusions that helped to drive Europe into the first world war. There is a strong case for arguing that George W.

This is a hopeless mishmash of a book. It is over 600 pages (736 with the notes), and it only covers a mere 24 years of its subject's life. Some reviewers would say that it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn't really written at all. It is hurled together, without any apparent distinction between what might or might not interest the reader. Episodes of supreme importance in the subject's life are given less space than such things as the film reviews he dashed off (with increasing distaste for the task) for the Evening Standard. One does not mean to be unkind about the author, who has devoted more than 25 years to writing Betjman's life.