Daisy Dunn

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the generations for its enigmatic symbolic value.

It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen.  Last night its bells tolled to the sound of Martin Bell reciting from his new book of light-tongued but ominous verse (he prefers to call it ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’), For Whom the Bell Tolls.   ‘The Man in the White Suit’ is sitting in his dressing room prior to his Guildford talk dressed, predictably, in his ‘white suit’, which is actually cream.  Does he have John Donne or Ernest Hemingway in mind with this title?

At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris.  However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic advancement which, ironically enough, was to prove feminine in nothing but name.   While some women at this time were busy playing Calliope to Europe ’s artists and musicians, swathes of other down-and-outs were falling prey to the disease of the moment, Hysteria.

As The Hemlock Cup is released in paperback, Daisy Dunn engages in some Socratic Dialogue with its author, historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes I get the impression from your book that Socrates must have been quite aware of his own eccentricity, or oddness.  Do you think he knew he was doomed from the start? In a way that’s a level of knowledge of Socrates I don’t think I could have, even having studied him for ten years. Our problem is we don’t have any of his words, so it’s a case of jigsaw-puzzling. I think what is certain, from all accounts, is that he doesn’t seem to have cared about the fact he was different from the run of the mill heroic, democratic Athenian.

It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter.   The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least across the Atlantic Ocean. Marking out the paths of convoys used to supply Britain even before this date, these carefully placed pins acquired even greater significance when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Charter in a secret meeting aboard the USS Augusta on 14 August 1941.

Writer Giles Milton talks to Daisy Dunn about the relative who inspired both his family’s artistic passions and the narrative of his most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, reviewed in the Spectator last month by Hester Vaizey. You note that the book grew out of many hours of interviews.  How long did the process take, and how did the book develop? It was quite a long process in getting my father-in-law, Wolfram, to talk about the War. He never spoke about his time in the Third Reich and during the whole Hitler period. I always wondered what he did, but that’s not really a question you can ask your father-in-law.

‘Hollywood was different back then.’  For a start, the Awards ceremonies of the ‘60’s weren’t dominated by ‘very small young men who had just been in a vampire film’. Soirees brimmed with the gravitas of Beverley Hills’ most statuesque, those around whom a youthful Michael Caine gawped and assimilated anecdotes until, all of a sudden, he realised he was counted among them.    Diminutive vampires aside, The Elephant to Hollywood, which is Michael Caine’s second autobiography, contains equal reverence for a select crème of today’s acting talent, and the giants of the Hollywood heyday. Jude Law received mixed reviews for Alfie, but Caine can’t rate him highly enough.