Andrew O’Hagan

Overnight, the newspapers got in on the act, behaving as if history were simply a concatenation of our large feelings. ‘Our Hearts Are Broken,’ the Daily Mail screams. ‘How to find the words? Our grief is a hundred different emotions, all of them hard to grasp.’ (Is shame an emotion, and is it hard to grasp?) ‘We Loved You, Ma’am,’ roars the Sun, which changed its banner from red to purple. It seems consistent with the general nullity that the papers emoting most extravagantly are the ones that made the queen suffer the most.

When guilty men kill themselves, are they acknowledging their guilt, or is it more like an act of self-pity? Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide in prison terminates a judicial process that he spent millions to disdain, but it also cancels a life in prison he was desperate to avoid.

The average mid-life crisis ends in a red sports car, but mine landed in a caravan. I bought it during a fearful rainstorm 18 months ago and moved my fishing rod in the following day. There are two bottles of whisky here and a pot of soup on the hob; there’s a jar of pencils, an old typewriter, and a nice edition of The Mill on the Floss, which contains the best written account of a British flood that presently exists. As I write, and look out at the Clyde Firth, I fear that George Eliot’s coagulated waters might be about to overtop Ailsa Craig, the craggy rock in the middle of the sea that in my childhood was called Paddy’s Milestone.

It takes about a year to publish a book now, what with the festivals, the hairdos, the film producers and the jetlag. At the Jaipur Literary Festival earlier this year, I was happy to see the Indian schoolchildren out in force, ready – as nowhere else – with their autograph books and stubby pencils, keen to capture a signature just in case the author turned out to be famous. The children of Jaipur seem to imagine that anyone placed before a microphone is a possible celebrity. But, more than that, they have watched the talent shows over the last few years, and they know the difference between a common clerk and a monster celebrity is merely a matter of time and a little exposure to the public vote. It was nice, though, to see how open they were to the notion that writers stood a chance, as opposed to the average Joe mangling a Whitney Houston song.

It's nice to see Marilyn liked pot. It's so much more sociable than Nembutal, Seconal, Dalmane and Quaaludes, the stuff she took on her own. Somebody at Twentieth Century Fox told me the summer before last that she liked weed: the grips on her films were always happy to dole it out. When I heard that, I immediately pictured her sitting with her dog Maf in Forest Lawn, puffing her face off.