Two more final nuggets from the Christmas Spectator, which I finished a few days ago. Lynn Barber, in her “Diary,” remembered former editor Alexander Chancellor, who died last year, as not just “a brilliant writer and editor,” but also “one of the last of the great lunchers.” People wrote for him, she said, not for the money but for the lunches. Chancellor was editor in 1980, when I discovered the magazine in the British Institute in Warsaw, Poland, and it was his idea to initiate a High Life column, and run it alongside a Low Life column. Evidently he was an eclectic luncher.
And in his “Miscellaneous Notebook,” Ben Schott informed us that the great comedian Peter Cook had a stock reply to people who told him they were writing a novel. It was: “Neither am I.”
