This month's featured article...

 

       Mark Ellen, founder of the monthly rock music bible The Word, recalls an encounter with Joan Collins when he found that his role as a celebrity walker required rather more than a winning smile...

 

• Philip Purser chooses Danger UXB by JAMES OWEN
• Piers Brendon chooses ADAM SISMAN'S biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper
• Peter Lewis chooses PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
• Ronald Blythe chooses The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals by PATRICK BARKHAM

•           plus selections by:              Peter O'Toole, Mary Kenny, Katharine Whitehorn, Patrick Mercer, Roger Lewis, Chris Mullin, Jane Gardam, Lucinda Lambton, William Trevor, John Amis and Jilly Cooper.

 

• Whatever happened to...
  King Michael 1 of Romania?

BBC correspondent Nick Thorpe brings news of the former king of Romania, last on the throne in 1947, who recalls turbulent times at the hands of the communists and even does an impression of Adolf Hitler whom he met in 1941.

He remembers Hitler's rather curious habit of screwing up his face to make a point: "Like this..." says the King...

• Colonel AD Wintle

  Tony Randall recalls an encounter with a bemonocled, moustachioed old buffer, Colonel AD Wintle, who showed him scars from bullet-wounds in his chest after an alleged undercover mission in Vichy France went wrong - only to discover years later that the scars were almost certainly obtained in a joke-shop.

  
_{(Left, a photo of Alfred Daniel Wintle, complete with monocle)}
      
 
 




 

"...Put an end to my wife's life in a fit of blind, jealous rage, and thirteen years on, I still haven't come to terms with it."

What is it like to be inside for life? And inside a North Carolina penitentiary, at that? Elwyn Jones gives us a unique insight.

• Gone to Pot
  Roger Law - one half of the much-vaunted Spitting Image puppeteering team, Fluck and Law - reports from China where, at the age of 70, he has taken up an apprenticeship in ceramics in the ancient porcelain city of Jingdezhen.

• Sir Thomas Allen
  
  John Amis meets one of our great operatic stars, baritone Sir Thomas Allen, as he celebrates 40 years with the Royal Opera House.   

• Lewis Wolpert
   

Melanie McFadyean brings us the Pearls of Wisdom as gleaned from Lewis Wolpert - the eminent South African-born biologist and writer whose many books include The Anatomy of Depression and, most recently, You're Looking Very Well - a pacey read about growing old in the UK.