The Queen Mother’s tipsy bons mots and other stocking fillers

The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I myself may have moaned to this effect in the past. But either they are getting better or my critical faculties are beginning to fail. I think it’s the former, but if I’m wrong don’t be surprised if I’m sucking on milky rusks by this time next year.

My daft picture book of the season – a vital category – is Ryan Herman’s Remarkable Football Grounds (Pavilion, £25), which is exactly what it seems to be: a collection of colour photographs of some of the most spectacular football grounds in the world. There are all the usual suspects, such as Anfield and Old Trafford, and others that resemble a crocodile, an armadillo or a chocolate box. Some of these grounds are almost impossibly hard to reach: to get to the one in Venice you’ll need to take a water taxi, while another in Switzerland is only accessible by cable car. The front cover shows a stadium on a rocky island in Norway which must have a regular gate in single figures. Other books in the series include Remarkable Cricket Grounds, which sits happily in one of my larger bookcases, and Remarkable Golf Courses.

Kate Summerscale’s The Book of Phobias and Manias (Wellcome Collection/Profile, £14.99) has already been reviewed in these pages, but it fits here equally well. It’s a magnificent piece of random scholarship which lists its phobias and manias in helpful alphabetical order and tells absorbing stories about each.

Erythrophobia, for instance, is the morbid fear of blushing (from erythros, meaning ‘red’ in Greek). One young patient in the 1840s had started to blush at the age of 13, and by the time he turned 21 he was so tormented by the fear of blushing he avoided even his best friend. Eventually he took his own life. In other news there are 66 blushes in Anna Karenina. Summerscale, who first came to our attention with her wondrous non-fiction novel The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, has brought her boundless capacity for research and weakness for a good tale to this book.

The year’s wacky words book – because there’s always one – is Tom Read Wilson’s On the Tip of My Tongue (Aurum, £12.99). The author is an actor turned TV presenter and podcaster for whom outrageous campness is a way of life, and his book is a ridiculously entertaining journey through the English language. Obmutescence, for instance, is when one is rendered mute by a situation or circumstance, as in ‘forgive my momentary obmutescence’. ‘Lepid’ is an undeservedly obscure word meaning ‘charming’, and a useful compliment to a loved one, especially if you have been previously struck by obmutescence. ‘Callipygian’ is a portmanteau word created in the 17th century, which combines the Greek words for ‘beautiful’ and ‘buttocks’: an incredibly useful word, although the last time I let it slip I was lucky not to be slapped.

In the humour category, often tricky terrain to be negotiated, there’s Craig Brown’s latest bumper collection of comic journalism, Haywire (Fourth Estate, £25), and Will McPhail’s new book of cartoons, Love & Vermin (Hodder &Stoughton, £18.99). But I think my favourite this year is Count Binface’s What on Earth? (Quercus, £14.99), a manifesto-cum-collection of old jokes from the alien with a bin for a face who keeps standing in general elections against leaders of the Conservative party, the scamp. Binface thinks that Adele should be nationalised, Ceefax should return to our screens and the price of croissants should be capped nationwide at £1. He also believes, slightly more sensibly, that London should join the EU, loud snacks should be banned from theatres and all government ministers’ pay should be tied to that of nurses for the next 100 years. It’s a really funny book, full of great comic ideas and sometimes surprising common sense.

But possibly my favourite book of the season is Gareth Russell’s Do Let’s Have Another Drink: The Singular Wit and Double Measures of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (William Collins, £20). This is a brief and highly selective biography of the QM, rather in the manner of Craig Brown’s book about Princess Margaret, concentrating on good stories at the expense of all the guff that usually goes into these books.

Russell is a historian by trade, prone to writing long, serious books about Henry VIII’s wives, but here he takes Brown’s template and runs with it. Along the way we learn some fascinating facts. Did you know that ‘coming out’, in the debutantes’ sense, is linked to ‘coming out’, as used by gay and trans people?

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The gay community in 1920s and 1930s New York organised parties in the era of early ballroom culture, where they used the language of the contemporary debutante season to celebrate a new gay person’s arrival or acceptance into the ballroom demi-monde.

And just after George VI became king, Princess Elizabeth saw an envelope addressed to ‘Her Majesty the Queen’. She turned to her six-year-old sister Margaret and said: ‘That’s Mummy now.’ After her husband died, the QM showed no desire to marry again:

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By the 1960s she enjoyed her independence so much that, on waking each morning, her favourite thought was ‘And what would Elizabeth like to do today?’

You know you want this book, and I know you want it, and if you’re very good Father Christmas might bring it for you.