Joan Bakewell opens her front door, leads me into her elegant, art-filled, double-height-ceilinged central London home, apologises for the mess, of which there is none, and starts talking about Rory Stewart, whose book is on the sofa. It would be great to be him, we both agree – floating above everything, commenting. She likes the guy fine (I’m on the fence), but that’s not her way: she can’t help feeling responsible, as though she should be helping. She’s spent the morning poring over the awful events in Israel and Gaza, wondering what she could do. Her attitude comes from the era in which she was raised, she says: “First of all the war – never again. Then the discovery of the Holocaust. There was a feeling that you had to sign up to the future and make it better.” I make a kneejerk association of nostalgia with narrow-mindedness, but Bakewell, when she mentions it, brings the past into the room in a completely different way. The things she misses – optimism, collective ambition, cultural bravery, artistic daring, civic responsibility – aren’t the unattainable relics of a vanished time: they’re all things we could have again, if we just took them seriously.
