Convenience Big Store: Joseph Stalin’s gastro-diplomacy

3 December, 2023

Letters

Cuthbert Bardsley: the greatest batsman ever to hold a bishopric

Sermon cricket with the Bishop of Coventry

A letter to The Times:

At Rugby School in the early Sixties we enlivened, in some cases endured, our compulsory chapel attendance (every morning and twice on Sunday) by playing Sermon Cricket. The rules were simple. Various gestures of the preacher counted for a given number of runs. I can remember an arm wave was a four, and I think a fist bump on the lectern was a single. There were others, including two arms raised aloft denoting a six, and of course a raised forefinger meant out and the preacher's innings was over.

The greatest "batsman" of our time was the Bishop of Coventry, Cuthbert Bardsley, who had an armoury of expansive gestures, and in particular regularly invoked divine intervention ("Come down Oh Lord, come down") raising both arms in the air. On one memorable occasion he had reached 99 when he suddenly paused for dramatic effect. We held our breath. He then began again with an ominous "However…" and raised a solitary forefinger. Out. There was an audible collective sigh from 750 boys.

James Badenoch KC, London

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE This Grade-II listed Georgian house sits in 20 acres of parkland in the South Cheshire countryside. It has six bedrooms; a vast yellow orangery with arched doors that open on to a sheltered terrace; a wine cellar with vaulted walls; and stone fireplaces throughout. The grounds include a lake and tennis courts, while a converted stable and coach house provide additional accommodation. Crewe Station is a 15-minute drive, with trains to London Euston in 1hr 40min. £4m.

Life

Diane with her first husband, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg. Susan Wood/Getty

"I have had a big life"

When I ring Diane von Fürstenberg, I ask where she is, says Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian. "I'm in a very contemplative place," she replies. "I'm almost 77, and I have had a big life… now it is time to look at the balance sheet." I was actually after her geographic, not philosophical, whereabouts – later confirmed to be her Manhattan apartment, "a glittering glass penthouse with a vast leopard-print carpet". But the Belgian fashion designer has indeed lived a big life: the iconic wrap dress "which made her fame and fortune" turns 50 next year. "They were sexy, but proper," she recalls. "Someone said to me, 'It's a dress you can get a man in, and his mother doesn't mind.'"

During World War Two, von Fürstenberg's mother was taken to Auschwitz on a cattle train at 21, and later moved to Ravensbrück, another concentration camp. When liberation came 13 months later, she was "a bag of bones in a field of ashes". Doctors didn't expect her to live – but she did, giving birth to Diane within 18 months. When von Fürstenberg was afraid of the dark growing up, her mother used to lock her in the closet: "She taught me that fear is not an option." Over the decades that followed, von Fürstenberg had a brief marriage to a prince – from whom she gets her surname – and took Warren Beatty, Omar Sharif and Richard Gere as lovers. She kept diaries throughout but has no plans to publish them. "'They are in French,' she adds, as if this closes the topic."

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Nature

The Lake District in autumn. Thomas Molyneux/Getty

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

John Keats called autumn the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", says Peter Caddick-Adams in The Critic – that time of year we now associate with "clotted leaves and woodsmoke", the smell of "Wellington boots and Barbour jackets", and dogs racing through dripping forests. The word "autumn" is from Latin and French, but until the 1600s the English used the Anglo-Saxon term hærfest, with an implied reference to the industrious gathering of crops. The American "fall" and the Lithuanian ruduo (referring to reddish leaves) capture the season better, though neither so well as the Old Irish fogamar, literally "under-winter".

For those gum-booted woodland walks that now define this time of year, we have William the Conqueror to thank. Anglo-Saxon England was "strewn with scrappy copse and covert" until the invading Norman established the concept of Royal Forests – managed areas reserved exclusively for his personal hunting. The Domesday Book lists nearly 150 of them, including Dartmoor and Exmoor, the Peak Forest of Derbyshire, Dean, Epping, Sherwood, and Hampshire's New Forest. "At one stage in the 12th century, all of Essex was afforested." These forests gave rise to the outlaws, poachers and hermits that are so deeply ingrained in our national DNA. And there is something reassuring about all those trees – those "ancient sentinels" – many of which have stood quietly over England for centuries. "How many other objects can we touch, safe in the knowledge that some have witnessed Hastings, the Spanish Armada or Trafalgar?"

Love etc

Kissinger with the actress Marlo Thomas in 1970. Frank Edwards/Getty

The "Playboy of the Western Wing"

Everyone knows about Henry Kissinger's influence on foreign policy, says Ben Judah in The New Statesman, but he was also an enormously successful businessman. After founding Kissinger Associates in 1982, he became "the world's leading consultant", delivering his paid counsel to, among others, "American Express, Fiat, Rio Tinto, Lehman Brothers, Merck, Heinz, Volvo, JP Morgan, and a slew of clients in Russia, China and the Gulf". Others followed his example: former secretary of state Madeleine Albright founded Albright Stonebridge; Antony Blinken, the current secretary of state, launched WestExec Advisors. Kissinger's moneymaking explains why so much of what he said was so bland – an outside expert is usually hired "not to inform but to bless a decision".

The other thing Kissinger was known for was romance, says Timothy Bella in The Washington Post: such was his status as a serial dater, he was dubbed the "Playboy of the Western Wing". A "short, plump and greying" man, he had to seduce with his wits. He got on so well with socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor when sitting next to her at a White House state dinner that they later went on a date. He drove her home afterwards, and as he was "about to lean in for a kiss", his beeper rang – it was a summons from the president, Richard Nixon. He then had to cancel a second date, and when Gabor asked why, Kissinger again blamed his boss. "I can't fly down because we're invading Cambodia tomorrow," he reportedly said. "It's a big secret, you are the first person outside the White House who knows about it."

🗣👂 Kissinger was born in Bavaria and fled Nazi Germany to America in 1938, aged 15. But whereas he never lost his German accent, his brother Walter speaks like any other American. When asked why, Walter said: "Because I'm the one who listens."

Quirk of history

A lighthouse on Lundy Island, which gives its name to one of the 31 areas in the shipping forecast. Ashley Cooper/Getty

From HMS Beagle to inventing the weather forecast

The Shipping Forecast was established by "one of those people whose careers are so impressive they make the rest of us feel inadequate", says Jonn Elledge on Substack. Robert Fitzroy was a naval officer who, as well as captaining HMS Beagle on the voyage where Charles Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection – and serving for two years as governor of New Zealand – "essentially invented the science of weather forecasting". In 1861, he began establishing weather stations around the UK, using their reports to predict future conditions. The Shipping Forecast was first issued on 24 August 1867, by telegram – radio hadn't been invented yet.

The forecast's "ostensibly strange vocabulary" actually conveys highly specific meanings. "Imminent" means within six hours; "soon" is six to 12; "later" 12 to 24. In the visibility section, "good", "moderate", "poor" and "fog" all denote "defined distances" you can see for. Thirty of the 31 areas included in the forecast are named for maritime features like headlands, estuaries and ports. Just one is named after a person: a patch of sea off northwest Spain called Fitzroy.

Eating

Brezhnev (left) with Gerald Ford in Vladivostok in 1972. David Hume Kennerly/Getty

Feasting with the Soviets

"Joseph Stalin understood the power of feasts," says The Economist. Hosting his Allied counterparts for the Yalta Conference in 1945, he laid on "buckets of caviar and Crimean champagne". It set a trend. Richard Nixon was so impressed by the food at his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 that he "had photos taken of every dish". Margaret Thatcher – "known for her picky eating" – was so blown away by the fresh blinis in Moscow the following year that she asked for seconds, then thirds, then fourths. The peak of this "gastro-diplomacy" was in the 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev, who once served guests a "roasted pheasant, perched on a pedestal of bread and decked with its own feathers". Brezhnev himself was a man of much simpler tastes. After returning home from these lavish banquets, he would get his chef to rustle up "fried potatoes with soured milk".

🇷🇺🍦 Vladimir Putin knows the importance of the Kremlin's chefs better than anyone. His grandfather, Spiridon, cooked for Lenin and Stalin, and was "probably part of the secret police". As for Putin's tastes, he apparently has a "childlike obsession with ice cream".

What's Cooking in the Kremlin by Witold Szablowski is available to buy here.