Living over the shop: what it’s really like in No 10

“The most underrated musician of all time”

Ringo Starr’s head-shaking figure flailing away behind his drum kit was as much a trademark of The Beatles as their “collarless jackets and three-part harmonies”, says Sean Egan in The Critic. His wit was equal to John Lennon’s “more acerbic” humour, and the morose persona he presented in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night “broke just as many female hearts as Paul McCartney’s doe eyes”. But when it comes to musical prowess, Starr is spoken of in terms “ranging from dismissive to derisive”. The consensus is that he landed “the most fortunate bit-part in history”. As a comedian once quipped: “Ringo isn’t the best drummer in the world... he isn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.”

But so vast is the chasm between this discourse and Starr’s actual talents that it wouldn’t be a stretch to call him “the most underrated musician of all time”. Witness She Loves You, the hit which cemented the Fab Four as a global phenomenon. “Starr’s contribution is pitch perfect.” To a recipe containing an unforgettable vocal hook and flawless harmonies, he adds breathless pace and “sizzling” cymbal-splashes – the “final ingredients to a dish of exhilaration”. On A Day in the Life, Starr’s haunting percussion turns a “merely sublime creation into a phantasmagoria”; on Get Back, an album which lurches between “majestic and raggedy”, it’s his “efficient yet imaginative work” that holds the whole thing together. Elvis Presley’s drummer, DJ Fontana, said Starr had “the greatest conception of tempo I’ve ever heard”. It’s time the rest of us appreciated him for what he is: one of the greats.

The year women took over crime writing

The year 1929 marked the start of the “golden age of detective fiction”, says Susie Goldsbrough in Air Mail. Much of it came from women: Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham both debuted their detectives, Alan Grant and Albert Campion; Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie were knuckling down to the first full-length adventures for Harriet Vane and Miss Marple, “two lady sleuths who would change crime fiction”. Further afield, Georges Simenon was “taking a brief hiatus from sleeping with 10,000 women” to dash off Maigret’s first outing, while the American writer Willard Huntington Wright was working on The Bishop Murder Case, a book that made him a national sensation and (by his own description) the “favourite crime writer of two presidents”. It was, in short, “one of those inexplicably dazzling years when the talent, energy and audacity of a handful of individuals collided, then fermented into something greater”.

So why was this period so “booming for sleuths”? Counterintuitively, it’s the genre people typically turn to at times of national disaster. “There’s something very reassuring about the central premise of a crime novel,” says writer Nicola Upson, “that each life matters and people should be allowed to live it to their last natural moment.” Grief is central to a crime novel, and in the inter-war years the gaps left in the younger generations were still stark. The 1920s were also a decade when the world changed rapidly, and in many ways the detective novel was “a fictional buttress” against all the upheaval. It’s a genre that challenges, then restores, the status quo, often leaving a “strong conservative aftertaste”. The fictional worlds of these writers were worlds in which, as one author put it, “murder was committed over and over again without anybody getting hurt”.

Add an anchovy. You won’t regret it

Anchovies are “always a good idea”, says Christopher Beckman in The New York Times. They are the ideal food for our age of climate consciousness and wellness: small, fast-growing fish that can be sustainably caught, and are packed with protein and Omega-3 fatty acids. And adding even half an anchovy to an otherwise simple dish can “turbocharge it to a new realm of flavour”. We know this because people have been doing it for millennia. During the 1960s, excavators in Pompeii unearthed 2,000-year-old pots that still exuded the pungent smell of garum, the vastly popular anchovy sauce. In the ancient Roman recipe compendium known as Apicius, the world’s oldest cookbook, 350 of the 400-odd recipes use it.

In 18th-century England, traders returning from the Far East brought back fish sauces, including one called kecap that became something of a culinary sensation. Canny cooks and housewives reverse-engineered it to produce their own anchovy-based versions, which they eventually called “ketchup”. In 1769, Elizabeth Raffald’s cookbook The Experienced English Housekeeper contained 144 recipes that called for “anchovy-infused ketchup”. Today, we’re in another “anchovy moment”: chefs eagerly confess their love for the “bacon of the sea”; there are whole restaurants devoted to tinned fish. And that’s wonderful. Next time you want to “add a little magic to your meal” – from French vinaigrette to scrambled eggs or a pot of lentils – add an anchovy. “I don’t think you’ll regret it.”