Robin Ashenden

Anyone without time to read an author’s long works (most of us these days) might want to consider simply going to the top of the tree and reading their table-talk instead. Conversations with Writers, a series of books from the University of Mississippi Press, has hundreds of titles featuring collected interviews with different authors, from Sam Shepard to Graham Swift, Joan Didion to Nabokov, Edna O’Brien to Ken Kesey, nearly all of whom supply insights about writing or life itself on every page. ‘Worse things can happen than to write a novel and not have it published’ In many cases these books, with their reverence for literature and fascination with the creative process, depict a vanished world and remind you of something lost.

Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty found it crushing to realise that he was never going to be given the part of Hamlet – ‘I shall never play the Dane!’ – for many of us, an equal disappointment is realising, sooner or later, that we’ll probably die uninvited onto Desert Island Discs. This programme has run almost unchanged since 1942 and is the nearest thing – after a knighthood or a CBE – to a nod of recognition from the Establishment, a sign you’ve finally arrived. I imagine most people in public life occasionally ponder the eight discs they’d take should the call from Radio 4 ever come, or which luxury or book (along with Shakespeare and the Bible) would go into their knapsack.

After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West Wing series could do a lot worse than watch the films below. The first is Nixon (1995), Oliver’s epic three-and-a-half hour movie starring Anthony Hopkins as America’s disgraced 37th president – a surprisingly generous portrayal of a man as reviled by the Left, in his day, as Donald Trump is now.

Arriving in Blackpool by train is just as I’d always dreamed. At the Pleasure Beach station, I disembarked right by the roller coasters, which rear up like Welsh hills beside you and, with the seagulls, welcome you with shrieking riders and clattering wheels. There are vast coasters in wood and metal weaving in and out of each other. Curvaceous and sprawling, they’re Gina Lollobrigida in steel. I’ve wanted to visit Blackpool for years. Spending my early childhood near Clacton-on-Sea, I got used to the delights of a tacky seaside town, and Blackpool is surely the mother of them all – even if it’s a mother with too much blusher and mascara on, who looks as though she’d scratch your eyes out if provoked.

One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed it, and why did it matter? Coolness, in my youth, seemed in the DNA, something you either had or didn’t There were various things that defined ‘cool’ when I was a teenager, and most of us in some way fell short. It was the ability not to get too excited about things. To feel enthusiasms but show them obliquely. To wear clothes that hinted at certain trends but never to copy anyone else’s style too slavishly. To hang out with beautiful women but not develop crushes on each of them in turn.

When, after three years of living in Eastern Europe, I came back to the UK, I found myself acutely nostalgic for the post-communist world. Life over there had a charm and directness that London seemed to lack. Luckily, I discovered that even in the capital you can find the best of Eastern Europe all around you – if you know where to look. A lovely place to walk into on a winter afternoon, or to visit at Orthodox Easter, as people teem outside and priests scatter holy water about I was aware of course, even in my teens, of Polish London. There was the restaurant Daquise in South Kensington which, before its 2012 refit, was one of those places you couldn’t imagine the area without.