September makes serious demands of your Best life columnist, what with book launches, birthdays and the birth of Mona Leda, daughter of my darling niece Lara (which means Boris beats me to grandparenthood and bumps our father, Stanley – who is off-grid in Tibet researching his 30th book – up to great-grandfather).

Significant launches included my sister Julia Gray’s excellent Kitty and Mary, an epistolary extension of Pride and Prejudice (the launch was in Highgate, Mrs Gray wore a Regency muslin and there was a communal bonnet); Victoria Hislop’s The Wine-Dark Sea in Marylebone (slinky gold slip); and Marina Hyde’s What A Time to Be Alive! in Victoria (stunning white cut-out revenge dress to celebrate leaving the Graun after 26 years). But I want to tarry at Simon Sebag Montefiore’s party, as it was there I saw Niall Ferguson for the first time since we were at university together, when we had such a calamitous contretemps it made headlines (well, the splash in the Oxford Mail).

The Lebanonisation of Britain is well under way

Has the plague broken out in Russia?

Must the Free Palestine mob march on October 7?

He was standing in front of a ziggurat of Sebag’s new bestseller, The Cauldron, a history of the Middle East. There was nothing for........

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