Sinclair McKay

I was ten years old during the Silver Jubilee in 1977. That perfect, daft summer formed and cemented my view of the country I live in, and still makes me feel a wave of unconditional affection every time I think back to it. Social historians seem almost contractually obliged to present England during that time as a tatty, shambolic, declining realm, a dreary windswept concrete shopping precinct where everything was brown and orange. But that is not what we ten-year-olds saw. We saw the vivid bright green of Slime (a fashionable novelty toy then) and the mellow purple of our Chopper bikes and the thrilling scarlet from our LED digital watches. And in the summer of 1977, there was a ubiquity of red, white and blue.

Can I be frank? I can’t get enough of the Middletons. I am mad for them. Not just the Duchess of Cambridge, heroically staying awake throughout a cruelly protracted tour of Ottowa (you try it). Not just because of the fact that if you type the words ‘Pippa Middleton’ into Google, it offers you a remarkably narrow range of options from ‘underwear’ to ‘bottom’. Not just because of the Mail Online’s laudable efforts to get Prince Harry and Pippa paired off (before the advent of posh knicker-model ‘Flee’ Brudenell-Bruce). It is because the Middletons represent something we have not seen in proximity to the royal family since — well, perhaps ever.

Sinclair McKay celebrates 30 years of Britain’s funniest, sharpest and most irreverent cartoon. David Cameron need look no further for a perfect picture of broken Britain Some night soon on the peaceful back streets of Bloomsbury, you might want to keep an eye out for two young ladies from the north for whom the term ‘muffin top’ might have been invented. They will be extremely drunk, laughing like open drains and displaying unsuitable underwear. They will be looking for romance. They are known widely as the ‘Fat Slags’. Sandra and Tracey are two of the Hogarthian figures that populate the pages of Viz, a distinctly adult comic.

Sinclair McKay attends the 70th anniversary reunion of the men and women who broke the Enigma code, and asks why the government won’t fund their museum ‘The turnout is very good,’ says eighty-something Ruth Bourne, glancing around at the tight, slow-moving mass of neat pink woolly cardigans, sensible skirts, pressed grey flannels and sports jackets. ‘More of us,’ she adds, ‘have come out of the woodwork.’ Ruth Bourne helped to shorten the second world war by two years, as did the 80 or so other elderly folk gathered here.

Double-dealing female agents. Secret ciphers. Car chases. Now that we have all ingested rather more than a quantum of publicity for Ian Fleming’s gaudy fictions, it might be time for the true inventor of the modern spy novel — and the original purveyor of the above-named elements — to take his bow. The name was Le Queux. William Le Queux. He is almost totally forgotten now. But between the 1890s and the 1920s, he was one of Britain’s most phenomenally popular authors. In the dying days of Victoria’s reign, right up past the first world war, Le Queux turned out countless thrillers that gave us all the familiar leitmotifs of the spy genre.