Celebrities “on the wane” love to give advice about how to be happy, says Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. In her 2020 book Happiness Becomes You, Tina Turner wrote: “Thank you for being you, exactly as you are.” The former TV personality Noel Edmonds tells readers of Positively Happy to memorise the phrase: “I am a special person. I am allowed to be happy in what I do.” And in Thrive, Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington tells readers to “forgive yourself for any judgments that you are holding against yourself”. But I have to say, in my experience “one of the surest paths to unhappiness is to read books that tell you how to be happy”.
Instead, psychologists might have the answer: a recent study of 1,700 men found that those who went fishing were “significantly happier than the rest of us”, and less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Another trick is hard work. “Busy people are happy people,” is what Gyles Brandreth’s old headmaster told him, and those five words have “informed his entire life”. David Hockney, 86, and Melvyn Bragg, 83, are two more great examples of keeping busy – and content – into old age. Can both approaches be true? Fishing involves “doing virtually nothing”; working is about “doing as much as you possibly can”. But fishing and working are both ways of “thinking of a world beyond ourselves” – and beyond the reach of self-help gurus.

Ian Fleming was, in the words of Noël Coward, “almost suspiciously overemphatic about sex… he loved f***ing women. It was as simple as that and he was quite unscrupulous about it.” The James Bond author’s famously “cut-and-run” attitude to sex – which he passed on to 007 – may have come from his mother, says Nicholas Shakespeare in a new biography. Eve Fleming “stamped on any blossoming romance” as her son grew up – until, aged 22, Ian fell head over heels for Monique Panchaud de Bottens, a 19-year-old Swiss girl with dark hair, blue eyes and a “strong sense of humour”. They were engaged for three years and often went skiing together.
But when Fleming failed his exams for the Foreign Office in September 1931, his mother blamed Monique, and put “unrelenting” pressure on him to break off the engagement. She even issued an ultimatum: he would have to choose between the girl and his allowance. Finally, in October 1933, he cut short the relationship, and spent his late twenties going after women “in the alternately determined and careless manner with which he collected first editions: the hunt, the acquisition, the shelving”. A journalist friend of his, Mary Pakenham, saw this as an “ugly response” to his mother forcing him apart from Monique. “He was always looking for his mother in women,” said another friend, Morris Cargill, “and then hating them when they gave in.”