Reincarnation

Radio 4’s Lord Lucan series is rescued by a brilliant narrator

It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become the most talked about crime scene of the 20th century. A coroner’s inquest jury named him as the killer of Sandra Rivett, his children’s nanny, but his disappearance ensured that he was never convicted of the crime – or of the attempted murder of his wife, Veronica. Stripping away the sensationalism of the story needn’t render it boring Understandably, given the mystery that still envelops his precise actions and whereabouts, Radio 4 has chosen to mark the anniversary with a soft question rather than to provide answers. Soft, but also

‘I had once been a cat’ – the feline fantasies of Caleb Carr

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’ I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a