HANNAH ROTHSCHILD says she has never felt like an aristocrat because of the anti-Semitism she and her relatives experience.
“I am a very, very privileged person but I don’t necessarily feel like I’m part of that tradition,” the novelist told the Cliveden literary festival yesterday.
“The name is quite totemic,” she explained, adding “that success over many generations means they become something you can fixate on”.
Rothschild told the story of her grandfather Victor, Lord Rothschild, who took his wife-to-be on a date to Wiltons in Jermyn Street in 1936. The man at the door recognised him and promptly said “we don’t serve Jews here”. Hannah Rothschild, above, explained: “That’s really hard actually to get over… that’s so recent, that’s not that long ago.”
Rothschild’s most recent novel, The House of Trelawney, came out last year and was nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. She added, “I don’t do much social media because I get horribly vilified because of my surname and I don’t quite understand why still people feel they can do that but they do.”
Feminists ‘should unite not fight’
ELIF SHAFAK says her heart breaks when feminists clash in the UK. “It’s as if you can either defend women’s rights or LGBTQ+ rights,” the novelist told a Cliveden literary festival event. She added: “It’s not happening in Turkey, it’s not happening in Brazil. It’s not happening in those countries where there’s so much violence against both women and sexual minorities that you don’t have the luxury to get divided like this... we need to go beyond these conversations.”
Conrad Black: Boris could struggle with truth
BORIS JOHNSON occasionally struggled to tell the truth when he was editor of The Spectator, says its former proprietor Conrad Black. The disgraced publisher recalled that Johnson had agreed early on he wouldn’t run for Parliament. “Two weeks later my sources... told me he had put in for selection,” Black told an event yesterday adding: “In two constituencies, not one but two.” Pot meet kettle?
Lack of Common Ground in capital
NAOMI ISHIGURO thinks London has a public space problem. “There are a lot of places where you feel you have to move on all the time,” the author and daughter of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro told a Southbank London Literature Festival event recently. In central London, she said, not only were there few places to tie up a bike, but “everywhere there are these spikes, so if you’re homeless or just want to sit down you can’t occupy that space”. Ishiguro released her first novel Common Ground earlier this year. She added that elsewhere gentrification is “hugely at work and can be sinister and weird”.
SW1A
NIKKI da Costa, the former head of legal affairs at No10, says the day of the prorogation of Parliament in August 2019 “was one of the best moments of my career”. Da Costa told the Women With Balls podcast that she still loves a tweet that said “illegal it is not”. The Supreme Court ruled the prorogation unlawful just a month later.
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MICHAEL GOVE tells us his dancing days are over. “I live a life of exemplary sedateness now,” the Tory minister insists to us. He was spotted earlier this year throwing shapes in an Aberdeen nightclub and then caused a stir at Tory conference with his dance floor grooving. But The Londoner wonders whether Gove protests a little too much.
Trauma platform gets star backing
ACTORS Rosie Day and Ciara Charteris partied at Wolf & Badger in King’s Cross to celebrate the launch of I am Arla, a platform to help survivors of trauma. Actor Ellise Chappell and filmmaker Ella Greenwood went along too. In the Middle Eight hotel at in Covent Garden, musicians Vanessa Haynes, Emma Hatton and Leo Green performed at the launch of QT Presents The Green Room.
