Rex Winsbury

My first visit to Buenos Aires was different from Michael Wood's. On the pretext of attending a conference, and inspired by too many Hollywood movies of the Bogart era, I went in search of a seedy waterfront bar where, clad in a grubby white suit and Panama hat, I could romantically drink away my declining years. Alas, I couldn't get to the waterfront at all. There was the old port, the new port, the...

It is still a surprise and disappointment to be reminded, as Leofranc Holford-Strevens reminds us (LRB, 22 May), that Julius Caesar did not say ‘Et tu, Brute’ as he died under 23 dagger thrusts on the Ides of March. Footnotes to Shakespeare make clear that this phrase was just a stage tag, but what did Caesar say? Suetonius and Cassius Dio give two versions, one that he said nothing, only grunted,...

I was an industrial reporter on the Daily Telegraph under Ronald Stevens (LRB, 12 December 2002). Lord Hartwell (or ‘Mr Michael’ as he was known) insisted that we publish the monthly coal stock figures, long after any possibility of a national coal crisis had passed. One day the phone rang and the news editor told me I was required on the sixth floor. There I found a special reception desk (to...

A footnote to Frank Kermode’s review of Humphrey Carpenter’s The Angry Young Men (LRB, 28 November): around 1960 I was returning from abroad but was stopped by an immigration official who demanded further proof of my status. I had little on me, but in one pocket chanced on my membership card for the Establishment Club. ‘Well, I am a member of the Establishment,’ I said, to which he replied,...

In his review of Sebastian Faulks’s The Fatal Englishman, Philip French (LRB, 6 June) sneers at the musical Salad Days with its theme tune, ‘We said we’d never look back,’ but then looks back in nostalgic detail at his own salad days at Oxford in the company of the late Jeremy Wolfenden, one of the fatal Englishmen. I knew Jeremy Wolfenden much less well than he did. I accidentally shared a...