Miriam Gross

What explains the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey? This question has been much skirted around but, as far as I know, no one has come up with what seems to me the obvious answer: a large proportion of women are to some degree closet masochists. Of course it’s an embarrassing thing to admit, but we are longing, in our sexual imaginations if not in real life, to be dominated and subjugated by a masterful male. This tendency also explains the enduring popularity of Mills & Boon romances, bodice-rippers and the novels of Georgette Heyer, many of which have been in print for almost a century. Fifty Shades is merely a more (much more) explicit continuation in the same genre.

When we switched on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news on 18 February, we had no idea that it was the day of Whitney Houston’s funeral, and even less that the coverage of this sad event would blot out all other news. So we expected the item to come to an end. But it never did. I was spending the weekend with, among others, two teenagers and we were all transfixed by the relentless mawkishness of the proceedings. After about an hour, we switched off and had supper. When we came back, the tributes were still rolling on. But now a large subtitle had appeared at the bottom of the screen. It read: ‘You wait a lifetime for a presence like her’s [sic]’. We decided it was time to ring the BBC’s complaints line. Naturally it took an age to get through.

The other day my husband and I went to Winter’s Bone, the much praised (overpraised, we thought) film set in Missouri. Both of us have normal hearing but neither of us caught more than about half of the dialogue. Naturally, we didn’t fully grasp what was going on. It was a familiar experience. In many films now, as well as in much television drama, the sound is muffled and the actors seem to mumble and slur their words. No doubt this is in the interest of authenticity. But what about comprehensibility? Plots today, particularly of thrillers, are hard enough to follow; not being able to hear properly makes it almost impossible. This has been going on for ages.

‘New is not generally a word to use in politics. It is exhausted before it even begins: it generally means that the user of it has no ideas of any depth, and runs out of steam early on.’ I came across this observation in Norman Stone’s wonderfully unorthodox ‘personal history of the cold war’, The Atlantic and its Enemies, published last month. Not that it is in itself a very ‘new’ insight — more a case of ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ (Alexander Pope). I have certainly oft thought — and so I’m sure has nearly everyone else — that our new politicians’ relentless use of the ‘new’ word at every opportunity is one of the more worrying things about them.

Not long ago, I astounded the men sitting next to me at a dinner party (yes, dinner parties still take place here and there) by saying that I thought Gordon Brown was handsome, and indeed had sex appeal. The men exclaimed that I had gone off my rocker. But the women within earshot immediately chipped in to support me. They agreed that the Prime Minister was an attractive man: he exuded an aura of manliness, of reticence, of depth of feeling, all qualities which are very attractive to women. There then followed one of those enjoyable conversations about who among our leading politicians did, and who did not, have sex appeal.

I was completely taken aback by the brutality of Casino Royale. I had asked various friends who had seen the film, including two mothers who had gone with their children, whether they would recommend it. One mother told me that she and her 11-year-old boy had loved it — he had already seen it twice. The other found it boring but her boy had quite liked it. None of my friends had mentioned that the film was full of violent beatings and killings, nor warned me that it contained a scene of horrendous torture in which Bond’s testicles are whipped with heavy iron chains while he howls in agony. I find it depressing that so many people seem to enjoy this kind of thing, or take it in their stride.

The other day I went into the National Portrait Gallery gift shop to buy a postcard of George Orwell. There wasn’t one. I then looked for Anthony Powell. Again, no luck. V.S. Naipaul wasn’t there either. In the course of my search, however, I couldn’t help noticing that there were two versions of Helena Bonham-Carter and two of Michael Caine. Britain has again become a two-nation state. It is divided between those who watched Big Brother and those who didn’t. But this split is not between the elite and the masses, or between the more and the less intellectual (some of my most intellectual friends watched), or between those with good taste and those without.

I’d never have guessed that there was a connection between Joan Collins and the novelist Anthony Powell, the centenary of whose birth is being commemorated with an exhibition at the Wallace Collection. But there is, as I discovered quite by chance 20 years ago when I went to interview Powell to mark his 80th birthday. He and his wife Lady Violet had invited me for lunch before the interview; indeed he had himself prepared one of his famous curries and he greeted me at the door wearing a cook’s apron. At one point during lunch he asked me who had been my last interviewee. My heart sank. Would he feel demeaned when he heard my answer? Would he think that he was in the wrong company? Should I name my last interviewee but one, Isaiah Berlin? I plucked up my courage.

During last Thursday’s two-minute silence I was in Knightsbridge, standing on Brompton Road. When it was over, the hundreds of office workers and shoppers who had come out into the bright sunshine broke into spontaneous applause. I found myself enthusiastically joining in, to my own surprise. I am usually rather put off by public displays of emotion, but on this occasion the applause somehow underlined the depth of feeling. It also emphasised that the silence had not just been observed because the government had called for it. I wondered whether the same thing had happened in other parts of the city.

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived. My parents both came from secular, middle-class, professional German (and Russian) families and although — unlike thousands of German Jews in the 19th and early 20th century — they didn’t convert to Christianity, they were nevertheless assimilated members of German society. Indeed they believed that assimilation was the best answer to the Jewish ‘problem’. My mother hoped that I would marry a non-Jew, preferably an Englishman.

The Telegraph Group, for which I work, happens to use the same taxi firm as the BBC, and in the days when I was lucky enough to be driven to my office at Canary Wharf, I made friends with several of the firm’s regular drivers. In the course of our chats I couldn’t help learning something about the habits of some BBC executives — though these discreet drivers never, unfortunately, named names. Shopping trips, taking children to school, theatre outings and drives to the country were among the services provided. The drivers also spent many hours waiting for their passengers.

Whatever critics might say about Martin Amis's Kobra the Dread, his recent book on Stalin's atrocities, he was certainly right when he pointed out that people are generally indulgent, even flippant, about communist tyrants in a way they would never be about Nazis. This thought strikes me every morning as I walk through Canary Wharf on my way to work and catch sight of a large marble bust of Lenin, placed - by way of ornament - on a shelf above the counter of Mark Birley's excellent sandwich bar. Next to Lenin sits a slightly smaller head of George Bernard Shaw. He is there, one suspects, not so much to commemorate his dramas, as in the role of 'useful idiot', as Lenin famously dubbed Western fans of the Soviet regime. Clearly Mr Birley and his sandwich people haven't yet read Amis's book.