Diary – 7 December 2017

Lunch with the great Sir Michael Howard, 95 last week. During a conversation about BBC1’s Howards End, he said: ‘I met Forster once, at a lunch party in London in 1943, given by Arthur Koestler, just before I went to Italy. We spoke much about Richard Hillary, then just beginning to be canonised. Forster suddenly turned to me and asked: “What do you think about sardines?” I was confounded, and have often since wished that I had produced some appropriately witty riposte.’ Michael expresses ironic gratitude for the state of the world, saying that without its horrors, at his age he might be frightfully bored: ‘The distinction between war — a word that signifies the use of force — and warfare — clashes between states using every other means — has seldom seemed so significant.’

To the Berkshire Macmillan carol concert at St Nicolas Church in Newbury, an enchanting affair of which the star turn was the soloist, a teenager named Isabel Irvine, with the face and voice of an angel.