Urban Myths: Is Lily Allen quitting the music business?

Fans were shocked recently when Lily Allen revealed that she had ‘no plans to make another record’. Blogging in September about music-piracy laws, the multi-platinum-selling singer announced: ‘The days of me making money from recording music has [sic] been and gone as far as I am concerned, so I don’t (at this point) stand to profit from legislation. Except future purchases of previously recorded material.’ Shortly afterwards, Allen’s publicist moved to reassure Lily-lovers that she would not be turning her back on music: she was simply too busy promoting her second album, It’s Not Me, It’s You, to contemplate future recordings at present. But this isn’t the first time that the 24-year-old singer has threatened to end her music career. Two years ago, with just one album under her belt, she said in this magazine: ‘Maybe I could retire at 25. I’m only going to do one more album. It’s a great job, but it doesn’t leave time for what’s important. Like having a family. I’d like to live in the country and have a walled garden, and chickens and pigs.’ In her recent song The Fear, she sings: ‘I don’t know what’s right and what’s real any more.’ Nor do we, Lily.

Unsung Hero: The pilot whose death made history

Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was a courageous Californian pilot in the US Army Signal Corps in the early years of powered flight. He made history in 1907 when he made the first recorded passenger flight of a heavier-than-air craft in Canada, flying in a box-kite contraption called the Cygnet. The following year, when Orville Wright brought his famous biplane, the Wright Flyer, to the Signal Corps for a demonstration flight, Selfridge accompanied him as a passenger. The Flyer took off and circled 150ft above Fort Myer in Virginia. But suddenly the right propeller broke, causing it to nose-dive. It hit the ground, leaving Wright with severe injuries and Selfridge with a fractured skull. When he passed away later that day, September 17, 1908, aged just 26, Thomas Selfridge made history once again: he was the first person to die as the result of an aeroplane crash.

Under Cover: The ingredients that went into Billy Bunter

Greed, selfishness and obesity aren’t traits we usually think of as endearing. Yet, against these heavy odds, Billy Bunter, the ever-scoffing pupil of Greyfriars School, became one of the most popular children’s characters of the last century. A true multimedia star, Bunter has appeared in comics, novels, on television and on stage. He first wobbled onto the scene in a boys’ paper called The Magnet in 1908, a story by Frank Richards, the pen name of Charles Hamilton. Unhappy with much of the far-fetched fiction written for boys, Hamilton said he wanted “to produce characters taken from actual life, with the faults and failings and good qualities of ordinary human beings”. Bunter is famous for his sweet tooth, so it is appropriate that Hamilton took his antihero’s surname from the remedy Bunter’s Nervine, which was said to “cure toothache instantly”. In his earliest appearances, short-sighted Bunter — nicknamed “the Owl” — spent a lot of time blinking behind his glasses, which was a habit borrowed from Hamilton’s own sister, Una. But Bunter’s famous girth was inspired by a Welsh editor called Lewis Ross Higgins who, Hamilton said, “seemed to overflow the editorial chair and almost the editorial office” at Amalgamated Press, publishers of The Magnet. The location of Bunter’s fictitious Greyfriars School has been identified as Kent. Hamilton, who never went to public school himself, appropriated its name from the school in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1855 novel The Newcomes. Thackeray, in turn, had based Grey Friars on his own public school, Charterhouse in Surrey — the county where the Bunter family home, Bunter Villa, is situated.

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