Brought up in Surrey, Craig Brown has been writing the parodic diary in Private Eye for nearly 30 years. He also writes a humorous column for the Daily Mail and is the chief book critic for the Mail on Sunday. His most recent book, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, is currently shortlisted for the James Tait Black prize for biography and the South Bank Sky Arts award for literature. It is released in paperback on 28 June.
1. Comedy
Kieran Hodgson
Hodgson is easily the most intelligent young comedian I’ve seen recently, and the funniest too. Unlike so many others, he relishes knowledge, nuance and ambivalence. His last two shows were about 1) Lance Armstrong and 2) Gustav Mahler, so he paints on a broad canvas. I am going to the Edinburgh fringe in August and plan to see his latest, ’75, at the Pleasance Courtyard. It’s about Britain joining the Common Market in the 1970s. Hodgson is a master mimic and promises to bring Edward Heath, Barbara Castle, Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins back to life before our very eyes.
2. Book
The Diary of John Evelyn
When I told a friend I was reading John Evelyn’s diaries, she got very excited. It emerged that she thought I’d said Johnny Flynn, who is a rock star. Anyway, John Evelyn was a contemporary and friend of Samuel Pepys. His diaries are perhaps a little dull by comparison, but I enjoy reading diaries so much that even dullness has its charms. Just as you’re thinking you’re going to have to plod through yet another dogged description of the interior of a church in Rome, Evelyn suddenly gets mugged, or witnesses an execution, and it wakes you up with a jolt.
3. Dispute
Jimmy Page v Robbie Williams
I can’t get enough of this wonderfully un-neighbourly dispute. Williams is forever trying to extend his already vast house in Kensington, while, brooding next door, Page fights him every inch of the way. Sixty years since the birth of rock, this is what it has boiled down to: sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ contested planning applications. The saga has a weird historical context: Page’s house was built by William Burges and lived in by both John Betjeman and Richard Harris, while Williams’s was built by Norman Shaw and lived in by, ahem, Michael Winner.
4. Collecting
Trompe l’oeil artworks
Over the past few years, I’ve been collecting trompe l’oeils. Virtually every vase, window, bowl, apple and china dog in my house turns out, on closer inspection, to be an illusion. All art aspires to magic and I love the trickery of it. I particularly like trompe l’oeils that resemble old message boards, with crumpled photos, postcards and love letters pinned on to them. They have a curious melancholy, as though their busy owner dashed off a century ago and then for some unexplained reason failed to return, leaving these remains behind him.
5. Sport
Swimming
We live so close to the sea that its shimmer makes a dappled effect on our bedroom ceiling. Twenty-five years ago, when we first moved, I vowed to swim every month, but over the years I’ve grown steadily more weedy. It’s now June to early November or whenever the first real storm occurs. I particularly like it when it’s rough: after a few minutes of being tossed about, you feel you have lived outside time. This year, I’m also walking the Thames, or at least the Thames Path, for a book I’m writing, and it’s full of pleasant nooks for a calmer kind of swimming.
6. Exhibition
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece at the British Museum
This shows how much Rodin was influenced by what the British Museum now tactfully refers to as “the Parthenon sculptures”. But it’s far more than an arid compare-and-contrast. The amazing dynamism of sculptures such as the Burghers of Calais is given an extra dimension by the curator’s deft use of beautiful quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke, who worked for a time as Rodin’s secretary. How lifeless most modern sculpture is by comparison: the new statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square looks like something out of Trumpton.
