Harry Mount

Harry Mount is a barrister, editor of The Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin) and Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury).

Thursday

Harry Mount

The grim life of a Roman legionary

Over the heather the wet wind blows, I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose. The rain comes pattering out of the sky, I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why. The mist creeps over the hard grey stone, My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone. W.H. Auden was right. Life for a Roman legionary on Hadrian’s Wall was bloody miserable. The Vindolanda letters sent to and from legionaries living near the wall – on show in a new British Museum exhibition – chime with Auden’s lines in ‘Roman Wall Blues’. The Romans hated the English weather. In one letter found at Vindolanda fort, near Hexham, Northumberland, a legionary hears about some prized woollen underpants.

Monday

Harry Mount

Starmer is wrong to defend the National Trust

Keir Starmer is drawing up his battle-lines for the next election. First, he came for the public schools, pledging to whack VAT on school fees. Now he’s going for the traditionalist wing of National Trust members.  In a speech today, he accuses the Tories of 'waging a war' on charities and civic society. He claims the Conservatives have denigrated the National Trust by accusing it of pursuing a 'woke' agenda: 'In its desperation to cling onto power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.' The National Trust was once a byword for high-minded thought So that’s how Starmer is dividing the electorate for the general election.

Friday

Harry Mount

The Elizabethan grandeur of Middle Temple Hall

It’s the most beautiful restaurant in London – and the oldest. Built in 1573, Middle Temple Hall is celebrating its 450th anniversary. It’s also where Shakespeare held the premiere of his Christmas play, Twelfth Night, in 1602. How strange that hardly anyone knows about the best Elizabethan hall in London. It’s mostly used by barristers but the public can eat there too, as long as you book ahead.  I looked up to high table to see a purple-faced bencher, glaring down at me The food is lovely, substantial, marvellously unponcey fare and fantastically good value for such a staggering spot – on the western edge of the City, on the banks of the Thames. When I was there this month, I had cream of mushroom and tarragon soup (£4.

Tuesday

Harry Mount

A definitive biography of Liz and Dick, Hollywood’s most controversial and glamorous couple

From our US edition

What is it about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that still hooks us in, thirty-nine years after his death and twelve years after hers? In his magnificent, definitive double biography, Roger Lewis nails down the answer. Liz Taylor was the last great Hollywood movie star, starting in the golden age in National Velvet (1944), aged twelve. As Lewis puts it, her origins were in the magazines and movies of the Forties: “the era of Bing and Bob, Big Bands, such as Glenn Miller, Bogie...Tom and Jerry, Disney.

lewis
queen mother
Harry Mount

Was the Queen Mother ever really funny?

From our US edition

Was the Queen Mother ever really funny? She was clearly extremely good company: an attentive listener, full of enthusiasm and affection, right up until her death, aged 101, in 2002. She was also the ideal queen for an unconfident George VI, undermined by his stutter and caught unawares by his accession to the throne, thanks to the abdication of his appallingly selfish brother, Edward VIII. The only time I ever saw the Queen Mother — when she was eighty, at her Clarence House home — I was only eight, but I remember her clearly. A tiny figure, she beamed away, spreading goodwill among strangers when so many people that age have lost mobility, let alone the ability to cheer up other people. Grumpy George V had thought much the same of her charm nearly sixty years earlier.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

The joy of an archive

It’s amazing how quickly you become ancient history. Thirty years after I left Oxford, my old college, Magdalen – alma mater of Oscar Wilde, Edward VIII and my fellow undergraduate George Osborne – sent out a request to former students. The college archivist asked for ‘Academic work. Records of student societies. College magazines and newsletters. Posters and programmes. Menus and tickets. We need them.’ Hard-copy memories have been increasingly replaced by digital records, as the British Library has discovered to its cost. It has just suffered a ransomware attack, paralysing its online systems. The library’s curator of digital publications, Giulia Carla Rossi, is concerned about the fragility of digital publications.

Saturday

Harry Mount

In defence of Eton’s Provost

The world divides into two groups. Those who liked school and those who didn’t. Sir Nicholas Coleridge, the next Provost of Eton, is firmly in the first group. In an article in the Telegraph, he has frankly admitted that he prefers people who went to Eton, as he did. He said: I am bound to say that if I meet somebody that I have never met before – for example, if I am travelling abroad, or through work or something – and it emerges that they were at Eton, I feel an interest in them that is multiplied by at least ten. If we are being completely candid, I do accept that I prefer the company of Etonians to the company of people from any other school in the world. This might sound shockingly snobbish to some.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

Women are obsessed with the Romans, too

Infamy! Infamy! That was my response to the TikTok trend about ancient Rome. Women asked their partners how often they thought about the Roman Empire. Many men admitted they thought about it every day; three times a day, said one. One confessed he was obsessed with ‘aqueducts and the fact that they had concrete that could harden’. The scoundrels who came up with the idea should have asked women. Because they, too, are obsessed with ancient Rome. ‘I’ll be at a picnic when I look at my sandwich and suddenly ask: “Did you know the Romans had sandwiches?”’ Professor Mary Beard told me: ‘I must confess that I probably think about the Roman Empire about 50 times a day… but then it is what I do. But I don’t think about macho men in military kit or orating in togas.

Harry Mount

Fellowship of the Lamb: how we’re saving Tolkien’s pub

I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank. Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag closed, in January last year, thanks to the pandemic trading slump. Across the road, the Eagle and Child pub also closed, in 2020, because of Covid. Tolkien and Lewis drank there, too – they called it ‘the Bird and Baby’. It remains shut. What rare survival stories these two pubs are – or were. The Eagle and Child, owned by St John’s College, opened in 1650.

Tuesday

Harry Mount

How the Aeneid was nearly destroyed

According to legend, Vergil declared of himself ‘Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.’ (‘Mantua bore me, Calabria took me; now Naples holds me: I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders.’) In her rigorously researched biography, the American classicist Sarah Ruden shows that this is largely true – even if the author of the Aeneid was in fact born 30 miles from Mantua, in a little village called Andes, in 70 BC.  Ruden must necessarily rely on Vergil’s most influential biography, written by Suetonius more a century after his death.

Saturday

Harry Mount

Why some men are obsessed with the Roman Empire

Why do men think about the Roman Empire so much? That’s the subject of a new social media trend, where women ask their partners how often they think about ancient Rome.  Some men do it every day; one admitted to doing it three times a day. But why is it men who love the Empire so obsessively? 'There’s so much to think about,' one man said to his fiancée on TikTok. Another admitted he loved 'their aqueducts and the fact that they had concrete that could harden'. He’s right. The Pantheon in Rome was built out of a special Roman concrete that has held up its extremely delicate dome since 126 AD. Some academics say that the teaching of Roman history has concentrated on its masculine aspects: gladiators, legions, warfare and imperial eagles.

Thursday

Harry Mount

What’s in a school nickname?

‘Have you met Sperm?’ a friend from Westminster School asked me at a teenage party once. Sperm was a charming, pretty, confident girl but, still, I didn’t feel quite ready to use her startling nickname on our first meeting.   My own nickname – Mons, Latin for Mountain or Mount – seemed unadventurously fogeyish by comparison. I didn’t pass it on to Sperm.   Old school nicknames can be fantastically rude – but the ruder they are, the more affectionate Old school nicknames can be fantastically rude – but the ruder they are, the more affectionate. Sperm happily responded to the nickname – and her friends used it in an utterly friendly way. They had long detached the word’s meaning from its use as a name.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

‘She had no neutral gear’: Lindy Dufferin remembered

In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son] was staying the night here… It was most embarrassing because Randolph was very drunk…’ In October 1957, she was in Paris: ‘The Dutchess [sic] of Windsor came… I did a show of Rock & Roll. It was all great fun. Bon Soir!’ But, amid all the luxury, a note of seriousness enters – there was art, too. Clandeboye became a kernel of art, literature and music. Vikram Seth stayed.

Thursday

Harry Mount

After Putin: how nervous should we be?

37 min listen

This week: In the magazine we look at the Wagner Group’s failed coup and its implications for Putin’s reign. The Spectator’s Russia correspondent Owen Matthews examines why the Kremlin permits the existence of private armies such as Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, and joins the podcast alongside Jim Townsend, former deputy secretary of defence for European and NATO policy under the Obama administration. (01:15) Also this week: The Spectator’s special projects editor Ben Lazarus writes this week about the claims made in the recent Mirror Group phone hacking trial, and the man orchestrating many of the accusations, Graham Johnson.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

The lewdness and lyricism of ancient Roman graffiti

Throw him to the lions! That’s what I thought when I saw the video of a grinning moron desecrating the walls of the Colosseum with the words ‘Ivan + Hayley 23’. He must have been referring to his girlfriend, standing by his side – and the year. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d defaced the greatest of all Roman buildings. It was that he’d written something so depressingly banal. He could at least have written the year in Roman numerals – MMXXIII. And he could have borrowed some themes from the Romans – the rudest graffiti artists ever. ‘Ivan’ could at least have borrowed some themes from the Romans – the rudest graffiti artists ever We like to think of the Romans as highfalutin, high-minded gods. But they swore like us. They were obsessed with sex, like us.

Sunday

Harry Mount

Lady Caroline Lamb and the frantic bed-hopping between the great houses of England

From our US edition

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” That’s the line Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) is known for — her brilliant, pithy verdict on her lover Lord Byron. Her other great claim to fame — her marriage to Viscount Melbourne, twice prime minister — was marginal from a historical point of view: she died, aged only forty-two, her health shattered by drink and laudanum, before Melbourne became PM; before he became Lord Melbourne, in fact — he succeeded to the title after her death. But, still, as Lady Antonia Fraser reveals in her gripping biography, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit, she was a remarkable woman, possessed of exceptional charm, as was Byron.

Caroline

Thursday

Harry Mount

Curtis Sittenfeld is the great American observer

From our US edition

If a Martian landed on Earth and wanted a quick summary of the state of modern American life, I would point him toward the works of Curtis Sittenfeld. Sittenfeld (born 1975 in Ohio) is a novelist. Like all the great ones, her perceptions are more accurate about real life than most nonfiction writers’ could claim. In Prep (2005), she skewered American class in the story of a Massachusetts boarding school; Sittenfeld herself went to private school at Groton. In Rodham (2020), a novel about Hillary Clinton, she nailed today’s politics. And, in her best book to date, American Wife (2008), a thinly disguised novel about George and Laura Bush, she filleted the American approach to inherited money, and the swaggering confidence it produces.

sittenfeld

Saturday

Harry Mount

Humza Yousaf and Anas Sarwar’s debt to private schools

Humza Yousaf, the favourite to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish First Minister, has been ticking all the right boxes in his campaign so far. Last week, he declared: ‘As your SNP First Minister, and as someone from a minority background myself, I will stand up and champion equal rights for all.’ I don’t imagine he’ll be championing the rights of Scottish public-school boys, though. But that is exactly what Yousaf is.  Yes, the 37-year-old Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care is the first non-white, first Muslim cabinet minister in the Scottish government. But he’s also an old boy of Hutchesons’ Grammar School, Glasgow, one of the oldest public schools in Scotland, founded in 1641 by brothers George and Thomas Hutcheson.

Sunday

Harry Mount

What kind of king will Charles III be?

From our US edition

In 1988, Prince Charles asked the late Peregrine Worsthorne, then editor of the Sunday Telegraph, what he should do in public life. Perry told Charles he should restrict himself to public duties and never ever air his private thoughts. The prince buried his head in his hands, moaning, “But then I’m just a cipher.” And that, indeed, is what he has just become, as King Charles III. At the end of September, his cipher — the symbol of his reign — was unveiled. The elegant combination of a C, an R (for Rex) and the Roman numeral III come together to symbolize King Charles III. In time, the cipher will appear on government buildings, state documents and new postboxes. Perry Worsthorne was right all those years ago.

charles

Thursday

Harry Mount

How to get through a school reunion

T here’s no need for a mirror at school reunions. Just look all around you to see the cruel effects of anno domini on your old contemporaries – and don’t fool yourself that you alone have miraculously dodged the hair-thinning, waist-expanding horrors of middle age. Is that really the semi-divine girl who scored a modelling contract in her first term in the sixth form and was in a Nivea advert in Elle? Can that be the Brad Pitt of the Remove – the one who had sex before first lesson every morning? Where has the plumpness in her dewy lips fled to? How far back along his scalp have the golden ropes of hair retreated? I’m certainly not one to speak.