Yahoo News Londoner's Diary: Poetic tributes to sharp-talking agent Ed Victor
LAST night the Forward Prize for Poetry crowned Sinead Morrissey its winner, for her work On Balance. But she had to share the attention: the memory of Ed Victor, the über literary agent who died earlier this year, dominated proceedings.
William Sieghart, the award’s founder, recalled his difficulty setting it up in the Nineties. “Trying to get a national poetry prize off the ground was not going to be easy,” Sieghart recalled. “However, I bumped into a rather remarkable man — Ed Victor. He took me out to lunch, and I said I wanted to start the Forward Prize. He said, ‘You need Stephen Spender and Maggie Drabble as your judges’.
“Three days later, he said, ‘Sir Stephen Spender will be chairman of your judges, Maggie Drabble and John Bailey will be two of the others and you’ll never struggle to find a judge again’.”
This year’s chair of the judges, Andrew Marr, also counted Victor as his agent. “He asked at one point if he could renegotiate my contract with the BBC, and I said, ‘Yes, fine’,” Marr recalled. “Within months I was getting batsqueaks of pain from BBC apparatchiks.
“I said, ‘Ed, I’m really sorry, but you’re being a bit rude and aggressive with these people — they’re not publishers. They’re herbivorous — they’re gentle.’
“Victor replied, ‘Are you saying I’m being rude and aggressive in an inappropriate manner that makes you feel personally uncomfortable?’” Marr said yes, to which Victor replied: “Andy, why do you think you employ me?”
The Prize’s 2018 anthology is dedicated to Victor. The perfect tribute.
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MOVE over Hillary Clinton. The Times has enlisted the former US presidential candidate to speak at next month’s Cheltenham Literary Festival, but the Financial Times has chosen someone a bit more on-trend. Victoria Beckham is the keynote speaker at its Women at the Top summit next week, discussing how to tackle gender imbalance in business. Other speakers include think-tank New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter. Girl power!
Never judge a Kim book by its cover
KIM Jong-un has sparked a debate among classicists after an image of the North Korean leader, sitting slack-jawed in his study, revealed an extensive volume of books with standardised green covers.
Tom Holland speculated they were Oxford Classical Texts but fellow historian Caroline Pennock disagreed. “I think the bottom shelf are Loebs [which are smaller in size] and the upper ones are Oxford Classical Texts.” Another thought the tomes were racy volumes of the Lives of Twelve Caesars by Suetonius.
Our favourite theory came from Tracy Edmonds Herz: “This is a virtual background and he’s in a strip club watching pole dancers.”
Quote of the Day
“‘Dotard’ is a good one to pull out of the bag. Wish I learnt it doing a crossword instead of through being on the precipice of nuclear war”
Baby Driver director Edgar Wright on Kim Jong-un’s new nickname for Trump
A lesson for May from tearful Churchill
TO SOTHEBY’S for a dinner in honour of The Vivien Leigh Collection, with actresses Joanna Lumley and Kim Cattrall perusing the screen goddess’s possessions, as well as Cecil Beaton photographs to be auctioned to raise funds for The Old Vic.
Among the lots are items given to Leigh by Winston Churchill, who was a bit of a fanboy: a diary entry records that he watched her in That Hamilton Woman, about Lady Hamilton, for the fifth time and was moved to tears. He loved the movie so much that he sent it — presumably on old film reels — to Joseph Stalin, and discussed it with him at the Tehran Conference of 1943. Could Theresa May try that with Vladimir Putin?
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TALKRADIO presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer hosted an event at Westminster last night, with ex-footballer Frank Lampard among the speakers. He recalled an occasion when he was naked in the shower with Jose Mourinho at Chelsea: halfway through the story, a woman in the audience fainted. “You must have this effect on women all the time,” Hartley-Brewer said. “I’ve never actually made a woman faint before,” Lampard replied. Now he knows how to.
Arise, Duchess Meghan
SPECULATION across La Manche, as French royalist publication Point de Vue dedicates nine pages of its latest issue to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s, supposedly imminent engagement. Two of those pages are dedicated to wondering what title Prince Harry might receive in the event that he marries the US actress. The magazine concludes that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex is the most likely.
The Dukedom of Clarence has, it says, been deemed unsuitable by those in the know due to a so-called “Jack the Ripper stain”. The magazine reminds readers that the Victorian royal, is on the list of suspects for the historic East End murders. Naturally, they also sniggeringly point out that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is out of the question, lest anyone think of the last time an American divorcee fell in love with a British royal.
Tweet of the Day
“British Prime Minister goes to Florence to talk mainly to British people to convince them it shouldn’t be that easy to go to Florence.”
Comedian Tiernan Douieb explains Theresa May’s speech today in layman’s terms.
Animal accusation of the day: Jazz Johnson-Merton, a distant cousin of US Ambassador Woody Johnson, is being investigated after allegations she kicked her horse at an equestrian show. Why the long face?
Nostalgia rules for Sir Ian's King Lear
Sir Ian McKellen will be treading the boards as King Lear at the Chichester Festival Theatre from tonight and shared a throwback photo to mark the occasion. Standing in front of the auditorium, on “a fine summer’s day in 1965”, the actor looks the picture of youth. O, let me kiss that hand!
