William Flew on Old Geezers Striking Back

A 98-year-old man has appeared in court charged with attempted murder after a policewoman suffered a serious injury.

Sylvester Nowak is alleged to have severely injured PC Shona Beattie, 42, and attempted to murder her by stabbing her on the arm with a knife.

The Polish war veteran is also alleged to have tried to murder her colleague PC Katie Deas, 23, by attempting to strike her head and body with a knife and an axe.

What Mr Novak may not look like.

Mr Nowak, who is thought to be the oldest person yet to be held in custody by Scottish police, faced the two attempted murder charges at Perth Sheriff Court. He is alleged to have carried out the offences at his home in Scone, Perthshire, on Tuesday afternoon.

Mr Nowak, who was born two years before the outbreak of the First World War, was detained in custody overnight before appearing on petition yesterday afternoon.

William Flew and Russian Women

Women outnumber men in Russia by more than ten million as the population continues to shrink despite government efforts to encourage a baby boom.

Preliminary data released yesterday from the 2010 census showed that there were nearly 116 women for every 100 men in Russia. The gender gap is the widest recorded by a census since 1979, with men dying at almost twice the rate of women.

The state statistical service, RosStat, said that Russia’s overall population fell 2.26 million since the last census in 2002, from 145.17 million to 142.91 million. Women made up 53.7 per cent of the population, or 76.7 million, in 2010 compared with 53.4 per cent in 2002, while the number of men stood at 66.2 million, or 46.3 per cent, down from 46.6 per cent in 2002.

The figures indicate that the number of women has fallen by 800,000 since 2002 while the male population has dropped by 1.4 million. The imbalance between the sexes has grown over that period in Moscow, where there are almost 850,000 fewer men than women among the capital’s population of 11.5 million.

The perception of a shortage of eligible men has given rise to a competitiveness among Russian women to find suitable partners. Bookshops are filled with guides offering advice on bagging successful husbands, and women flock to courses that promise to teach them how to be a “ sterva”, or bitch, in beating off rival contenders for the perfect man.

The Russian population has declined steadily since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but average life expectancy for men has slumped to about 60, compared with 72 for women, as the social and economic upheavals have taken their toll in alcoholism, depression and other illnesses.

Forecasts prepared by RosStat show that the Russian population will continue to shrink over the next 20 years to as little as 126.9 million by 2031, creating economic problems as the labour force dwindles.

President Medvedev called the demographic problem “a challenge to our nation” in November last year as he set out measures to persuade families to have more children. He offered free land to couples who had three or more children so that they could build their own homes.

William Flew on London Art Auction

Jeffrey Archer is selling the stopwatch that was used when Sir Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes.

HULTON ARCHIVERoger Bannister races into the record books in May 1954

The proceeds will go to Oxford University Athletics Club, where Bannister strode into history and where Archer was a former president. The provenance of the stopwatch is destined to make it a highlight of the star-studded charity auction at Christie’s on June 27, organised by Lord Archer of WestonSuper-Mare.

The following day the best-selling author, fundraiser, politician and former prisoner will sell off a selection of his art collection. It is estimated to be worth up to £100 million and includes works by Monet, Rodin, Warhol, Sickert, Renoir and Vuillard.

The sales will return Lord Archer to the spotlight after a few years when he has been relatively quiet.

Lord Archer told The Times that he had decided to sell some of his possessions after reaching his 70th birthday last year and wanted to reorganise his affairs before his estate was subject to inheritance tax. He plans to leave nearly everything to Mary Archer, the loyal wife who was praised for her “fragrance” by the judge in Lord Archer’s 1987 libel action against the Daily Star. Their two sons will each receive ten pictures from the collection and he has already promised six works each to the Ashmolean in Oxford (including a Sisley and a Pissarro) and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (including a Henry Moore, an Eric Gill and a Picasso).

Lord Archer will be the guest auctioneer for the June 27 evening charity sale and has persuaded about 20 of his bestknown friends to offer lots.

Baroness Thatcher, Sir Ian Botham and Lord Lloyd-Webber may contribute, Lord Archer hinted, although the only consignors named at this stage are Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One ringmaster, and Laurence Graff, the New Bond Street diamond dealer.

Mr Ecclestone is donating a weekend at the Monte Carlo Grand Prix in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital, while Mr Graff will provide the auction hammer, studded with £25,000 worth of diamonds. An art collector in Japan has offered to throw in a Monet and a Picasso together worth about £30 million to raise funds for victims of the Japanese tsunami, Lord Archer added.

Overall, “it will unquestionably be the biggest individual auction I’ve ever done”, he said. Lord Archer is a keen auctioneer and has raised more than £39 million for charity since Norma Major first asked him to stand in at short notice for a constituency event in Huntingdon in the 1980s. He now does up to 30 a year and has done two auctions in the past week to raise funds for victims of the Christchurch earthquake and the Brisbane floods while on the New Zealand and Australia legs of his current book tour.

William Flew on Art

After 35 years Athena’s tennis girl has agreed to be seen alongside the iconic poster

I’M SHY, HONEST

Quite a few people knew I was the girl who flashed her bottom in the Athena tennis girl poster. I don’t regret doing it and I’m certainly not embarrassed by it. In fact I’m quite proud to have been asked to model for the image. Over the years I’ve been asked many times to be photographed alongside the poster, but until now I’ve always declined. Although I scratched my bare bottom for the camera I’m quite shy. But when the Barber Institute of Fine Arts asked me to help promote its exhibition of lawn tennis art — the first of its kind — I felt the time was right to reveal myself. I studied art illustration at university and I’ve always been passionate about art. Last Tuesday morning, before the press conference, I was feeling a bit anxious about it all but it was too late to back out. Seeing the picture again made me smile and I was happy to see it take its place in the history of tennis.

THE DOG HELPED TOO

The picture was taken in 1976 by Martin Elliott, my boyfriend at the time. He was a photography graduate and having just started his own business he decided to shoot a girlie calendar with his colleague — they were all the rage back then. He got girls to adopt cheeky poses for some sporting images. I was helping him, sourcing props and standing in for test shots. We had been together six months when he asked me to pose for a picture in tennis gear. I didn’t have any aspirations to be a model but I thought it would be fun and I trusted Martin. I was 18 at the time and confident about my body. I wasn’t a keen tennis player so I had to borrow my father’s plimsolls. The dress came from a friend of a friend and the tennis balls belonged to my dog.

LOOK — NO KNICKERS!

The picture was taken at the tennis courts at Birmingham University. Luckily they were in a secluded spot so I didn’t get caught jumping in the air with no knickers on. I don’t remember much about the day but I do know the sun was shining and I was feeling carefree. Martin wasn’t satisfied with the first shots, so I suggested I hitch up my tennis dress. I could never have imagined that my future father-in-law would put a copy of the poster on his wall, along with 2m other people. The poster went on to become one of the bestselling of all time. It’s the light that makes the image so appealing and it’s an innocent picture, the kind that a grandmother could give her grandson when he is off to college.

PROUD PARENTS

I’m not sure what month of the calendar featured my picture but I think it was probably June, given that Wimbledon takes place then. I didn’t tell my parents, but a year later when the poster went on sale I came clean. My mother still has a faded copy of the image in the study. I think they were both quite proud. Martin and I broke up a few years afterwards and then I met my husband. The whole thing amuses him and there have been plenty of wisecracks. Once, while on holiday, we spotted somebody who had the image printed on the back of his T-shirt. My husband announced, “Oh, I need to get one of those T-shirts because my wife is always on my back.”

LADS’ MAGS LOVE ME

I’ve never had any negative comments about the picture but I remember being at a party a few years ago and overhearing a snooty old lady say “I don’t think it’s her” as she looked me up and down. My twin daughters and my son get a good laugh out of the fact that their mother is the girl in the photo. When my son was 16 he came home from school and told me that a lads’ magazine had done a feature on the 100 sexiest images and I had been included. My friends don’t make reference to it at all because I think they worry they’ll embarrass me.

HOUSE OF MIRRORS

Standing beside the image again made me feel reflective. Martin died last year after a long battle with cancer. We didn’t keep in touch after we broke up but I know he would have been thrilled with the exhibition. His death brought home to me how much time has passed. I’m 52 now and my bottom is not as pert as it was. I don’t have any mirrors in the house because my possessions are packed away until we move into the new home we’re building. My body has changed but I’m still happy with the way I look. In the new house I shall have plenty of mirrors.

William Flew and the First Time Machine

The first time machine in literature is often credited to H.G. Wells and his story of a British inventor who travels 800,000 years into the future, but this myth is about to be dispelled by curators at the British Library who believe that Wells was beaten by a Spaniard.

Enrique Gaspar, a flamboyant playwright with a slender, blond moustache, published his tale of time travel in 1887, eight years before Wells finished The Time Machine.

While Wells’s book has never been out of print, Gaspar’s story drifted into obscurity. El Anacronópete was written as a comic opera that was never staged, before becoming a book that was neither reviewed nor reprinted.

Gaspar’s moment may have arrived, however. A first edition of the book has been selected as one of the highlights of a forthcoming exhibition at the British Library and will be published in English for the first time next year.

The story is strange even by the standards of science fiction. The crew of the electricity-powered time machine, which resembles a two-storey houseboat with four vast trumpets attached to its corners, travel to Paris, where they pick up some women of loose morals.

While most of the crew take a special fluid to protect them from the effects of travelling back through time, the women turn into girls. An unforeseen side-effect is that their woollen clothes revert to sheep and they are left naked.

Gaspar sent his travellers to 3rdcentury China and to ancient Rome to watch gladiatorial combat, but concludes the story with the underwhelming revelation that it is all a dream.

William Flew, science fiction collections librarian at the University of Liverpool and guest curator for the British Library exhibition, said that, although there was an earlier story of people being transported back in time by means of a mechanical clock, El Anacronópete was the first proper time machine. Wells also published a short story involving a time machine entitled The Chronic Argonauts in 1888, a year after Gaspar’s work.

The exhibition, the first devoted to sci-fi in the library’s history, will also feature the book that gave Bovril its name: The Coming Race, published in 1871. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, its author, who is best remembered for the nowclichéd introduction, “It was a dark and stormy night . . . ”, was the toast of the publishing world at the time.

His invention of vril, which conferred powers of telekenesis and healing, was seized upon by a company for an energy drink made of meat extract, which merely gave customers powerfully beefy breath. “Bo”, from the Latin for cow, was added to create Bovril.

Other highlights of the show — entitled Out Of This World: science fiction but not as you know it — include an illustration of the first literary space flight. Francis Godwin’s hero, Domingo Gonsales, travelled to the moon 323 years before Apollo 11, albeit using a technique that may not have worked in practice. Gonsales’s spacecraft was powered by harnessing a flock of wild geese.

William Flew Liz Taylor RIP

By the mid-1950s Taylor was a role model. A new hairstyle or strapless dress worn by her could change fashions. As a sex symbol, she was in the same league as her slightly older blonde equivalent, Monroe. Oscar nominations followed for

Raintree County (1957), in which she played a Southern belle, and Cat on a

Hot Tin Roof (1958), in which she was the frustrated wife of a homosexual (played by Paul Newman). During filming of the latter Todd was killed in a plane crash, and production ground to a halt as Taylor grieved. Suddenly, Last

Summer (1959) brought a third nomination, despite the ludicrous nature of her role — an unstable woman who has witnessed her homosexual cousin being eaten by cannibals, and who is being threatened with a lobotomy.

In the interim Taylor had flouted public opinion after her bereavement by almost immediately being seen out on the town with her dead husband’s best friend, the crooner Eddie Fisher, who was then married to Debbie Reynolds. Hedda Hopper, when she heard the rumours, rang Taylor to find out what was happening. “Mike’s dead and I’m alive,” Taylor snapped down the telephone. “What do you expect me to do — sleep alone?” Taylor never expected an old family friend to publish her ill-judged words, but Hopper did and the column fanned Taylor’s growing notoriety as a man-eater.

It seemed ironic, therefore, that the last film which MGM wrung out of her contract was Butterfield 8 (1960), in which she played a prostitute. She had wanted to go straight on to film Cleo

patra, for a reported $1 million. (In due course it was to pay her several times that much.) Incensed to be forced to make the film before her old studio would release her, she behaved badly on set. It was the last film she made as a contract player. From then on, like other stars of her generation, she became independent, and started making real money.

However, Butterfield 8 did bring her her first Oscar, though she called it a sympathy vote. Filming on Cleopatra was held up when she was stricken with pneumonia. Her health had never been robust. She had suffered from chronic back pain since a fall in 1956 on Lord Beaverbrook’s yacht, and despite surgery she took handfuls of painkillers daily for the rest of her life. This time the pneumonia had the benefit of restoring public affection.

That affection was tested again when the cast of Cleopatra continued filming in Rome, where Taylor, her new husband Fisher and their entourage took a villa. The former Shakespearean actor Richard Burton, playing Mark Antony, lived in a villa near by. He first met Taylor on the set when he was suffering from a hangover. She was solicitous and their friendship rapidly became a passionate and not very discreet love affair.

The director Joseph Mankiewicz did not have time to contain “ le scandale” as Burton jokingly called it, as he was battling with budgetary problems of his own. Cleopatra eventually cost about $40 million to make, and to pay for it Twentieth Century Fox had to sell many acres of its backlots. No studio could bear that kind of expense, and the fallout from Cleopatra changed irrevocably the way Hollywood did business.

Once the critics had seen the laboured product, they agreed unanimously that its cost and the TaylorBurton affair were the only aspects of

Cleopatra worth remembering — “The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse,” wrote Judith Crist in The

Herald Tribune.

After filming ended, Burton wavered for a while between Taylor and his wife Sybil, before eventually getting a divorce and marrying Taylor in 1964. Her fifth marriage introduced Taylor to a more normal life than she had ever known. Burton took her to rugby matches, to his Welsh home town and taught her to drink beer and eat fish and chips. The daughter she had intended to adopt with Fisher became instead her adopted daughter with Burton.

Just as after Todd’s death she had converted to Judaism in his memory, so now she took up British citizenship in honour of Burton. Even as respectably married tax exiles living in Switzerland, the Burtons were still big news, and they cashed in by making a run of films together. Films such as The

VIPs (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965) were good as well as lucrative. The Tam

ing of the Shrew (1967), for which Burton threw out two fifths of Shakespeare’s lines and concentrated on gorgeous pictures, was rewarded with excellent box-office takings.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which Taylor played the frowsy, academic wife, Martha, was the high point of their collaboration, and won Taylor her second Oscar. It was one of her most brilliant performances, vulgar yet truly passionate. Taylor yelled her “screw-yous” and “God-damnyous” at top volume, abandoning glamour to show the psyche’s underbelly.

The pendulum began to swing the other way at the end of 1967 with Reflections in a Golden Eye, an interesting film version of the Carson McCullers novel, The Comedians, and Boom! — all of them flops. Audiences were staying at home, perhaps out of boredom with the Burton-Taylor double act, perhaps because Taylor, despite always giving good performances, was looking out of date. Modern bare-faced actresses such as Vanessa Redgrave were casually stripping for the camera, where Taylor was still clinging to low-cut gowns.

Having bordered on chubby since the late 1950s, she was now becoming uncontrollably overweight. In the film of Under Milk Wood (1971) her personal photographer, according to one observer, “kept flinging himself to the ground to photograph her so that her double chins wouldn’t show”.

But if Taylor was not such good box office, her personal life was still as big news as ever. As the Burtons had become richer, so their lifestyle had become more ostentatious and imperial. Her habit of arriving late on set, which had been a minor annoyance to directors in MGM days, seriously threatened to undermine some of the independent productions in which she now appeared. Directors would be alerted to her arrival by a stately procession of secretaries and hairdressers.

It was during the 1960s that Taylor became the owner of some of the world’s costliest diamonds. Princess Margaret asked to try on one of them, the 33.19 carat Krupp, when she met Taylor at a wedding. “ How very vulgar,” she said when it was on her finger. “Yeah, ain’t it great?” was Taylor’s response. Besides the Krupp, she also owned the 69.42 carat pear-shaped Taylor-Burton diamond, a gift from the actor. A book, My Love Affair with

Jewellery, appeared in 2002. It was Burton’s yearning for a more normal life, as much as his wife’s professional slump, which led to their divorce in 1974. To a noisy fanfare they were remarried in Botswana in 1975, but the second marriage soon foundered on Burton’s womanising and drinking. He went on to marry Suzy Hunt, the former wife of the racing driver James Hunt, and Taylor, in 1976, wed the Republican senator John Warner.

In 1981 she leapt at the chance to act in a stage play, The Little Foxes, and, meeting Burton in London, she agreed to do another with him, Noël Coward’s

Private Lives. The plot about two middle-aged divorcees who still love each other would guarantee good box office.

Taylor divorced Warner in 1982. But any hopes that the old Burton-Taylor magic would be renewed on the American tour of Private Lives in 1983 were soon dashed. In rehearsal they were quarrelsome; in performance they were unexciting (and, in Taylor’s case, not always audible). Taylor had other problems too. Although not at her heaviest, she was 12 stone, and no amount of whalebone could conceal it. The show limped on to Los Angeles where it closed in November.

The next month Taylor was persuaded to book herself into the Betty Ford Centre in California to tackle her addiction to painkilling drugs and alcohol. Though the cure appeared to work, she readmitted herself in 1988, and it was then that she met her eighth husband, a recovering alcoholic builder named Larry Fortensky. Not many gave the Fortensky marriage more than six months. But Taylor, who had always enjoyed thumbing her nose at Hollywood, seemed genuinely happy with her young husband — until their divorce in 1996.

Her feature film career never recovered after the 1970s. There was an illfated attempt at a comeback as an ageing diva in Young Toscanini (1988). And there were also unworthy television movies, mini-series and cameo roles. She hardly needed the money. Apart from her fortune invested in jewels and Impressionist paintings, she was making a tidy sum from the launch in 1987 of a new scent, Passion.

But a shortage of good roles hardly affected her popularity. As she weathered the 1980s, in particular the deaths of Burton and her friend Rock Hudson, she was as newsworthy as ever. Her friendship with the singer Michael Jackson made her visible to a younger generation; and her charity work for an Aids foundation used up much of her formidable energy.

When she became 60 Taylor appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, and, for a moment, became introspective: “I worked all during my childhood, except for riding horses. My peers were all grown-ups. The child in me was really suppressed. I worked, and was paid. And it was on the screen, but it wasn’t me.” Typically, the introspection did not last long. A moment later she raised her fist, triumphantly and said: “I feel great. I am happy. My life is wonderful. I never think about growing old. I barely think about growing up.”

That vulgar joie de vivre was the key to Taylor’s longevity in the business. At home she looked at ease with herself, a plump, suburban grandmother in a tracksuit. And, at Hollywood parties, garishly dressed and pasted in diamonds, she showed that she could still play the grande dame.

As her film career wound down she concentrated on charitable work, notably in the field of combating Aids, through her own foundation and through the American Foundation for Aids Research, which she established in 1985. In 1982 she had initiated the Elizabeth Taylor-Ben Gurion University Fund for the Children of the Negev.

In 1987 France bestowed on her the Legion of Honour (she was also a Commander of Arts and Letters); in 2001 President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal in recognition of her philanthropic works. In 2000 she had been appointed DBE, and in 2005 she received the Britannia Award for Artistic Excellence in International Entertainment.

She had two sons from her marriage to Michael Wilding, and a daughter with Mike Todd. She and Burton adopted a daughter. Elizabeth Taylor, DBE, actress, was born on February 27, 1932. She died on March 23, 2011, aged 79

William Flew on Africa

Africa is alive with opportunity and the time to invest is ripe, but huge challenges lie ahead for governments, investors and businessmen.

The message from The Times CEO Summit Africa was that, despite the most favourable investment climate for 20 years, Africa’s old ghosts — corruption, mismanagement and poor policies — were still very much present and could ruin the new banquet driven by India and China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for raw materials.

Peter Mandelson, the former European Trade Commissioner, sounded a note of caution in a key address. He said that Africa’s mutual back-slapping over economic progress — the average rate for growth in the continent this year is 5 per cent — should be seen in context.

“The question we should be asking is: why is it not ten times better? Expectations are lowered for Africa,” he said. He targeted poor policies by governments and protectionism within the continent as areas to be addressed and said that too much growth was based on natural resources, which often proved “to be a curse”.

Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian businessman who according to Forbes is the continent’s wealthiest man, said that corruption remained a significant problem for Africans and foreign investors alike. “Corruption is still the major impediment to economic growth, from small cases of backhanders demanded by officials to institutional corruption from government agencies,” he said. He would not allow his cement lorries to travel the quickest route if it meant leaving the country, as bribes to border guards would make it “far too costly”.

Kofi Bucknor, managing partner at Kingdom Zephyr Africa Management, agreed that there was enormous interest in Africa but said “there’s still a good deal of scepticism from investors as to whether the gains in Africa are sustainable”. This was acting as a brake on much larger inflows of funds. Other speakers emphasised that the days of political instability may be over but they had not yet been replaced with investorfriendly government policies.

Niall FitzGerald, deputy chairman of Thomson Reuters, said: “Although it is improving, there are many areas where it is still extremely difficult to do business on the ground, despite the friendly rhetoric.”

Like Mr Dangote, he highlighted the problem of corruption as one of the main disincentives for Western companies. “It is not something that is the domain only of African governments and businesses but it is a particular issue in Africa and, if you are going to do business there you have to confront it.” He added that many Western groups had declined to tackle the issue head on.

Tribute Bands

Tribute bands have become a fixture on the pop landscape. Some venues and even whole festivals are now given over to these acts, whose raison d’être is to pay homage to established or defunct stars by playing their repertoire and often impersonating their look and other performing mannerisms. Setting the gold standard in this faintly bizarre genre is

The Australian Pink Floyd Show. The band, whose brief is to recreate or, to put it more bluntly, imitate the magic of a Pink Floyd show, claim to have sold three million concert tickets in a career dating back to 1988. They perform in major venues all over the world, and their success has been such that their former promoters have announced the establishment of a rival The British Pink

Floyd Show — effectively a tribute to the tribute band — who will be touring the UK in April and May.

The key to the highly impressive performance by The Australian Pink

Floyd Show in Hammersmith was a level of musical expertise and technological investment that surpassed that of most “real” touring bands currently on the circuit. Tonnes of high-tech gadgetry and state-of-the-art production equipment was deployed on a stage dominated by a circular screen at the back, framed by a huge proscenium of lights and lasers. Many of the images on the screen were filmed in 3-D, so flying pigs and pieces of exploding furniture seemed to hurtle in slow motion over the audience as they sat goggling at the screen in 3-D glasses provided on arrival.

Musically, no effort was spared to recreate the Olympian sound of Pink Floyd. Two guitarists vied with each other to achieve the most perfect replication of David Gilmour’s crystalline solos.

They both sang, as did the bass player and an extra dedicated vocalist, who seemed a little surplus to requirements. There were four more backing vocalists, a saxophonist, a keyboard player and a drummer, all completely static and secure in their musical expertise and ultimate anonymity.

Together they recreated the Floyd’s music with eerie attention to detail, cherry-picking material that ranged from the band’s first single, Arnold Layne, released in 1967, to the tracks What Do

You Want From Me and Coming Back to Life from the band’s last album, The

Division Bell (1994). The PA system bounced sound effects around the theatre as they worked their way through a significant swath of Floyd material including Money, Time, Another Brick in the Wall Part II and a majestic finale of Comfortably Numb.

It was perfect in just about every way — but for the fact that it wasn’t the real group. A perfect facsimile of a diamond will never be as valuable as the diamond itself. But even paste jewellery can acquire a remarkable lustre when constructed and tended with enough care and precision.

I actually prefer tribute bands. I paid around $200 to see (half) The Who at a stadium, which obviously meant that the best view was on the screen.

But it was really the content that I objected to. I don't want to hear the latest crap you've come up with; I'm here for the classics, the songs I can sing (well yell, really) along with. If I'm paying that much money, I call the shots, not the performer. The performer is obviously thinking something along the lines of "I'm an artist, and I'm here to show you my artistry" Well bollocks to that! I'm not in the market for new music. My musical tastes pretty much stopped adding new tracks 20 years ago, and I'm perfectly happy with that.

I read an article recently where the writer described the emotion people used to feel in church services a s a 'Woosh' experience: a transcendent, one-part-of-many all feeling the same intense emotion at once.  His point was that that emotion is today mainly found at the football stadium.

I want to hear my 60's memories in same way. Since I can reproduce a concert hall sound in my own living room , the only point of going to an event is to be with other people sharing the same experience, and we can't do that with songs we've never heard of.

But that's what a tribute band provides - just the classics. They know that the punters won't come back if they try to add their own material. So they play the songs we've all heard before, that we can sing and dance to.

William Flew Roman Hoard Goes to Museum

A pot of 52,000 Roman coins — the largest haul discovered in a single vessel in Britain — will be put on display at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton after a successful fundraising campaign (Jack Malvern writes).

The museum has paid £320,000 for the Frome Hoard, which Dave Crisp, a hospital chef, found in a field last July using a second-hand metal detector. A further £100,000 was raised for the conservation of the coins. The profit from the sale will be split between Mr Crisp and the field’s owner.

The third-century coins, estimated to be equivalent to four years’ pay for a Roman soldier, include rare examples of money minted by Emperor Carausius, a rogue general who broke away from the rest of the empire and set up his own dominion in Britain. He was deposed by his finance minister.

The hoard challenges historians’ understanding of why the Romans buried coins. The pot appears to have been buried in the ground before the coins were poured in, possibly in a single event, as a token of gratitude to the gods.

A second hoard, of Iron Age gold jewellery discovered near Stirling, was also acquired by a national museum yesterday. Four torcs, or neck ornaments, will go on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh after £462,000 was raised. The intricately designed ornaments were found in September 2009 by David Booth, on his first outing with a metal detector.

William Flew on Hugh Laurie in London Times

Isolated, paranoid, in therapy – it’s not easy being the highest-paid actor on American television, says the star of House, Hugh Laurie.


“I’d some very dark times when I first arrived here. I was taking on this pretty overwhelming thing and it could all get a bit much. I felt the strain. So it was good to spend time with someone who wasn’t going to tweet my stuff all over the place. It is still good. Good too for that person not to be a friend, so that I don’t have to feel guilty about boring them. You don’t have to entertain a shrink. You’re paying for the responsibility to entertain to be lifted, and that’s a great relief to me.”

 I operate in this horrible world of false names, dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. The modern world, I believe it’s called. I even had the windows of my car tinted because it just became so boring, trying not to get stuck at the front of the line at red lights.

“Everyone’s got digital cameras, and before you know it you’ve caused a hold-up. Pedestrians crossing might spot you and gawp. You daren’t look to the left or right either, in case you catch another driver’s eye. It was pretty much straight ahead only for me, pre-tinting, which made route-planning very laborious.”

“Pick up groceries or collect dry-cleaning? I haven’t done that stuff in years. Terrible of me. Terrible. But the last time I did try going to the supermarket I was photographed and I hated it. I hate people peering at what I’ve bought, taking photos of what’s in my basket. I just hate it.”

So fame on this scale has made him unhappy? Laurie gives a sharp little laugh. “No, I was that way already.” He reaches for his coffee. “I am of course incredibly grateful for all I have. It’s hugely satisfying to be part of something which you believe is good and which resonates with people. I feel amazingly lucky to be experiencing it. You can’t be taken on a journey like this and then complain about the bumps in the road. I know how blessed I am, especially when so many other people are facing all kinds of adversity.

“But you can’t go out and lead a normal life. You can’t just be yourself. Oh, I know, that’s a very low-level form of adversity compared to being imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi secret police, isn’t it?”

he enjoyed a privileged education: Eton, then Cambridge, during which time he became president of the Footlights Club and went out for a time with fellow member Emma Thompson.

It was she who introduced him to Stephen Fry, who would become not only his lifelong friend but also his partner in Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and, later, the P. G. Wodehouse series of adaptations,Jeeves and Wooster. In each of them he played, well, a bit of a twit, and a certain level of typecast fame seemed assured. But then, somehow, he turned that expectation on its head and won himself employment as the sexy, American antihero of what quickly became a hit show. I can’t help but wonder how his peers and old Cambridge chums have reacted to him achieving such overwhelming popularity across the world. Is he familiar with that old Morrissey track, We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful?

 I suppose it’s possible that there are people who are resentful at some level, but then they probably weren’t very good friends in the first place. And incidentally I don’t remember that Morrissey track but I do recall the Gore Vidal saying, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. One’s friends must fail.’”

Laurie has no illusions about Los Angeles as a working town. “This is a good place to live when things are going your way, so mine has been an unusual experience. From what I hear, it’s not a good place when they’re not. There’s no community. You don’t run into people by chance. Here [he gestures at the Chateau’s courtyard] is one of the few places where you might. It’s all planned in advance, all strategic, with people thinking of any meeting they’ve arranged, ‘What am I going to get from this?’

“It’s actually rather a lonely city. You could go quite mad and end up spending all day in your pyjamas, never washing, growing those super-long fingernails. There’s no general rub of existence. No one around to say, ‘What on earth are you doing? Pull yourself together!’ Just lots of isolated lives, some of quiet desperation, I imagine.”

is there no one with whom he can relax when his wife Jo is back in England?

“In the age of Facebook, Twitter and all the rest, it’s hard to confide in anyone. There’s this malevolent delight in spreading stuff. I might say something on set and two hours later I’ll read about it on the net. It’s happened. The result is that I can’t be completely honest in any situation. I always have to think what will be a political or diplomatic way of dealing with it.

“Everyone can just run off to their computers now and buy themselves some feeling of importance. To have a secret is to have power, however briefly: ‘Oh yeah. I was there. I saw it. I heard it all.’” As in the case of Christian Bale’s leaked meltdown during the filming of Terminator Salvation? “Exactly so!”

Another good reason to embrace psychotherapy, then. “Well, you do find yourself needing someone who’s professionally bound, if bound in no other way, to treat you with courtesy and in confidence. The whole notion of privacy… 20 years from now, I’m not sure people will even know what the word means. It’s actually dying as a concept before our eyes.”

 (Wrote a book) The novel, a spy genre spoof called The Gun Seller, came out in 1996 and was well-reviewed and has now been published in 30 languages, “including some I’d never heard of”.

Laurie submitted it under a pseudonym and only revealed his identity on the manuscript’s acceptance. Hoping to have it published under that same pseudonym, a bigwig explained why that wouldn’t work. “This is no place for shrinking violets. In our world, you have to scream in order to whisper. Think you’re being coy and modest? No one gives a f***. You’ve disappeared. You were never even there in the first place. But shout at the top of your voice and then you might − just might − have a chance of appearing coy and modest, as you intended. Then you might be whispering.’”

William Flew and Supermoon

A magnificent full moon tonight will loom larger and brighter than usual in the night sky, in a spectacle that has been called a supermoon.

At 7.10pm, the Moon will be a mere 356,577km (221,567 miles) away, the closest a full moon has been to Earth in almost 20 years, what is known as perigee. And in a rare astronomical conjunction, the peak of the full moon, when it reaches its maximum illumination, will occur just an hour earlier, at 6.11pm. As a result, the Moon will be 30 per cent brighter and 14 per cent larger than it appears at its farthest point from Earth, or apogee.

The weather forecast is encouraging for much of the UK, with plenty of clear skies, although a front approaching from the Atlantic could bring cloud to western regions.

A great deal of excitement has been generated by this rare coincidence of astronomical events, but there have also been suggestions that it will bring freak tides and chaos to the world’s weather, or even cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

There is, however, little evidence that a full moon has any effect on weather patterns or can trigger an earthquake. “Looking at years and years of lunar tides, there is no link with any earthquake activity,” said Brian Baptie, of the British Geological Survey.

We Love to see the French humbled

Italy’s win over France on the weekend, by a nerve-jangling 22-21, is one of the biggest shocks in the history of Test rugby.

Not since the 1951 game between Scotland and Wales at Murrayfield has there been such a sensation in this tournament. In a dismal period of Scottish rugby history, Grand Slam holders Wales went north packed with Lions, only for Scotland to win 19-0. But that did not compare with this Six Nations stunner in Stadio Flaminio, Rome. The glorious comeback against the reigning Grand Slam champions, sealed by a late penalty from the boot of Mirco Bergamasco, nudged Italy further towards the top table of world rugby.

This was the Azzurri’s 59th match in the championship and only their eighth win. They had to fight back from an 18-6 deficit early in the second half. Andrea Masi’s try approaching the hour, Bergamasco’s conversion, then two Bergamasco penalties brought the underdogs within kicking distance of glory at 21-19. Then, in the 75th minute, when France conceded another penalty near the touchline, Bergamasco stepped up and nailed the tournament’s biggest upset.

Italy’s coach, the South African Nick Mallett, said: “We played today against a good French team who have reached two World Cup finals and have always thrashed Italy, really, so it’s a huge achievement.” Mallett had said before the match: “We are still not as good as the other teams but we are going to cause them as much inconvenience as possible.” They caused France not only inconvenience but humiliation. It was Italy’s first victory over France in the tournament; only Ireland and England have not lost to them.

Computer Passwords

We all have problems remembering passwords and access codes, so we all do what we're not supposed to - write them down. And when it all turns to custard .....


London Sunday Times reported last week that the SAS is facing a serious security breach after Libyan rebels discovered that soldiers captured during a bungled operation were carrying on scraps of paper the usernames and passwords for secret computer systems.

 The Libyans seized a store of sensitive communications equipment when the MI6 and SAS mission went wrong nine days ago.

The rebels found personal details needed to access the computers on notes among their captives’ belongings.

“It is so inept, it is unbelievable,” one expert said.

The rebels tapped the usernames and passwords into the confiscated computers. One system opened with a screen that read “Sunata deployed”. It appeared to be a program for accessing a secure military network. A rebel source said: “It takes you right into the MoD system in the UK.”

Asked whether the rebels had accessed the system, he said: “Yes we did. We were, of course, curious. But as a courtesy to the UK we wil l not divulge all, but just enough to let them know that we know. It’s a good thing this hasn’t fallen into enemy hands.”

The rebels said much of the equipment was marked “Secret: UK eyes only.” One rebel with military experience said: “Some of the communications systems they carried is the stuff that you only see in the movies.” He described it as “espionage equipment”.

The haul included five laptop computers, six GPS trackers, two “Bgans” — said to be “broadband global area network” systems, eight satellite telephones and shortwave radios, plus lithium batteries and solar panels for recharging.

The Libyans seized maps marking “Suluk” as a landing location in red and “Gaminis” as an extraction point in yellow; passports, including three from different countries in the name of one man; and a fistful of credit cards, mostly from Barclays.

Components for explosives, “portable welding machines”, office equipment and five guns were also taken.

A source confirmed that two sophisticated communications systems had been seized. The source claimed this did not leave MI6’s systems vulnerable, and that the captured MI6 computer was “clean”. The Ministry of Defence denied that its main network could be accessed.