Stuart Jeffries

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains for most people a pleasure that, whatever its social significance, can be enjoyed in entire solitude, and a pleasure that remains entirely individual. At the time, 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women were regular smokers. Smoking was not just a means of inhaling death and of escaping the dead hand of others’ sociability, but briefly put the unbearableness of life behind a smoky veil.

Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the hypothesis that Britons don’t care much for philosophising but rarely miss an excuse to dress up, this made me think if only Theresa May had visited Brussels as Darth Vader to meet Jean-Claude Juncker in his Princess Leia mask, Brexit would have been sorted out years ago. Ogden, who not only translated Wittgenstein but wrote a book offputtingly called The Meaning of Meaning, also had the idea that English could be boiled down to 850 words — which, as you know, is 830 more than you’ll need to take part in a football phone-in.

‘I have fallen in love many times in my consulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean that I want to have an explicit sexual relationship,’ she clarifies. That said, she describes herself as the Desdemona of the consulting room, falling in love as she listens to ‘someone share the pity of their history’. And like Othello’s stories that titillated Desdemona, Haynes’s narratives of her and her patients’ painful lives are compelling, if passing strange, particularly given that her profession is usually reticent about what goes on behind closed doors between shrink and shrunken.

Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise taciturn psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, communicated. ‘He was convinced that the farts and burps which Lacan, as a free man, did not restrain in public, were meant to signal to Peyrot the two syllables of his name,’ recalls Catherine Millot. A translator’s footnote helpfully explains that in French pet means fart and rot burp. I love this story as told in this beguiling memoir by Lacan’s last lover — and not just because it evokes a time when deference to Gallic intellectuals was such that even their airy nothings were submitted to bravura semiotic analysis.

Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the result of the failure of an enterprise.’ By that, the Tory grandee meant that in the spring of 1940 Winston Churchill managed to use Britain’s grotesque military cock-up in Norway, for which he was responsible, to supplant Neville Chamberlain. Churchill sidelined Chamberlain’s most likely successor, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax. He overcame Tory backbench distrust. He even got Labour on side, though its leaders had long considered him the class enemy incarnate.