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Memoirs of a golden Oldie





The distinguished writer, editor of The Oldie, and former editor and founder of Private Eye, has collated a lifetime of wisdom into the pages of Quips and Quotes: A Journalist’s Commonplace Book.
Part-memoir, the book shares his favourite quotations and snippets of humorous prose, some famous, some not, from the pages of his own notebooks.
“I’ve been writing these things down all my life, it was just a case of putting them in some sort of order, they didn’t always fit. The emphasis was always on journalism and writing, as something that has been very close to me all my life,” he said.
“It’s not the kind of book you would read in one go, it has been divided into sections, that was the aim when I started.
“The nice thing is we have done it completely in house, it was designed and subbed in the Oldie office, it was nice not to have to hand it over to a publisher to muck about with.”
Breaking up the pages are rare doodles from the cartoonist and humourist late Willie Rushton, Ingrams’ childhood friend and co-conspirator on Private Eye, with some taken from the early days of their friendship as pupils at the Shrewsbury School in the 1950s.
That Ingrams has outlived Rushton as well as many of the other luminaries of Private Eye; Paul Foot, Peter Cook and Auberon Waugh, amongst others, is something he said he often thinks about, and the chapter on death is particularly well stocked.
“Death comes up quite a lot, it was always something that interested me as subject,” he said.
“Older people are supposed to think about death and they do think about it, even if they don’t say it, it cant be avoided that once you start getting older you find your contemporaries are much more thin on the ground. People have written a lot about it as a subject, and it’s something I’ve thought about all my life.”
The Oldie celebrated its 20th year in print this year, and this weekend the magazine will hold its second annual literary festival, in Soho, with the Aldworth resident again pulling the strings.
Showing no signs of slowing down, Ingrams hinted it may be about as close to an autobiography as we are likely to get from him.
“I didn’t find it that hard to put anything in there, any old memories. Some people think it is revealing, I don't particularly think so.”
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FOR a tiny village Aldworth seems well overstocked with local talent.
The portrait staring out of the jacket of Richard Ingrams’ new book (pictured), Quips and Quotes, was painted by a woman who lives just down the road from the noted journalist and editor.
Wendy Clark was commissioned to paint Mr Ingrams for his 75th birthday, and said she was overjoyed to find out it was being used.
“It’s lovely that he would do something like that for a neighbour,” she said.
“I think it captures his steely look and his sense of humour, he has that glint in his eye. I wanted to portray that side of him. I always look to capture a personality in a painitng, and I think it does that.”
Mrs Clark, born to a family of artists, has spent her life painting, and is now building up her portfolio with portrait commissions of people and pets, and hopes one day to hold her own exhibition.
Mr Ingrams told the Newbury Weekly News he thought it was a “lovely” painting and was so delighted with the outcome he couldn’t think of a better place to put it than inside his book.
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