Victoria Lane

Fleeing streets of slush, we touch down in a north African spring, where we are driven through the desert scrub outside Marrakech, passing dusty ochre expanses filled with old plastic containers and half-built hotels and the odd donkey before turning down a track which runs alongside a walled garden. Tantalising green fronds poke above the wall. The gates open (someone is posted to look through a gap in the wall to time it right) and reveal a lush complex of grass, palms, roses, figs and orange trees around a T-shaped pool. This hotel is one of a handful to have popped up a short way away from the clamour of the city. It’s peaceful — there is a view of the Atlas mountains in the distance — but you can get to the souk whenever you want.

It’s 5 a.m., a splashy grey dawn, and we’re out of here on easyJet. Palermo is another world of heat and brightness but we’re not stopping; at the port we board a catamaran which churns its way towards the Aeolian islands, the volcanic archipelago off the north-east corner of Sicily. The islands are named after Aeolus, son of Zeus and god of the four winds, but there was scarcely a whisper of a breeze in the two weeks we were there. We had all sorts of plans, to island-hop, go to the hot mud baths on Vulcano, visit the black sand beaches of Stromboli and climb its volcano by night, perhaps a day on Panarea, Italy’s Ibiza, where glamorous people prowl in bars.

Diana Athill, now nearly 94, lives in what must be the nicest retirement home in London, a large red brick house at the top of Highgate village, run by a charitable trust and populated by former writers and doctors and psychiatrists. On this unseasonably warm day she has on a flowing Kenyan kaftan — the residents’ summer clothes get packed away in autumn to make space, and she is worried about what to wear if the heatwave continues. A strong, boxer’s face, direct blue eyes. She aims a hearing aid at her ear, it whistles briefly, and away we go. Her latest book (see review, p. 38) is a kind of epistolary memoir, called Instead of a Book: her first book was Instead of a Letter, and she thinks this will be her last.

‘I think he is probably the devil,’ said the work experience boy when I was going to meet Derren Brown, the magician, mindreader, ‘psychological illusionist’, what-have-you. ‘Because he does exactly what I’d do if I was the devil, which is pretend he can’t really do magic and that it’s all just a trick.’ Brown turns out to be an extremely nice man, so his evil telly presence must at times be a bit of an albatross for him. The thing is that, meeting him, you can’t help being aware that he is a genius puppet-master with strange powers of perception and the ability to manipulate people into doing the most extraordinary things.