Charlotte Higgins: The Diary's favourite holiday-season pastime was smelling perfumes
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Charlotte Higgins: Bennett, Burnham and the Booker
The Diary's favourite holiday-season pastime was smelling perfumes, inspired by its favourite holiday-season book: the virtuosic Perfumes: the Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which offers a critical analysis of 1,500 fragrances. Do not scoff: this is a branch of aesthetics as worthy as any other, and Turin and Sanchez's prose is a delight, with scents related to the orchestration of Ravel or to Bruckner symphonies.
In its haunting of London's perfumery halls, the Diary ran across novelist Philip Hensher, buying Margaret Thatcher's favourite scent Mitsouko, and Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, who wears Creed's Bois du Portugal. Mitsouko is Turin's favourite perfume. However, he is scathing of Bois du Portugal: "Close in intent but not in richness or quality to de Nicolaï's divine New York, which is at once cheaper and vastly better."
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There's an annual dose of much-needed sanity in the 2008 diary of Alan Bennett, published in the first London Review of Books of the year. He includes an amusing account of a Downing Street reception he attended for Fanny Waterman, founder of the Leeds piano competition. Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, is described thus: "with his heavy dark hair [he] looks as if he's strayed out of an early Pasolini movie". I hope Burn-ham is an LRB subscriber, because this may well be the most erotically charged thing anyone ever writes about him.
Bennett earlier lets drop that he was once invited, though declined, to act as a Booker prize judge, thus putting paid to Martyn Goff's claim that no one has ever refused the chance to sit on the panel. Other Bennettiana: he is now the proud owner of an overcoat made by Proust's tailor.
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