EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Dame Mary Beard says reporting tittle-tattle about the state of Harry and Meghan’s marriage is important because it will serve as a historical record

Reporting tittle-tattle about the state of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex‘s marriage is important, because it will serve as a historical record of what people are talking about, declares television historian Dame Mary Beard. 

‘I’ve been reading that they are going to get a divorce,’ the Cambridge classicist says. 

‘Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, but that’s very much the same sort of gossip’ [as in Roman times]. 

Promoting her new book, Emperor Of Rome, she adds: ‘Before anyone thinks I’m trivialising it, gossip is very important… from a historical point of view.’ Hear, hear… 

Dame Mary Beard (pictured) says reporting tittle-tattle about the state of Harry and Meghan’s marriage is important because it will serve as a historical record

‘I’ve been reading that they are going to get a divorce,’ the Cambridge classicist says

Promoting her new book, Emperor Of Rome (pictured), she adds: ‘Before anyone thinks I’m trivialising it, gossip is very important… from a historical point of view.’

Vogue’s top of the class

Model Vogue Williams, who co-presents a podcast, was surprised — and delighted — when it picked up an award.

‘I got suspended from school for talking sh**e all the time and now I’ve got an award for it,’ she tells me in London’s Soho, where she won the Podcast Champion trophy for My Therapist Ghosted Me, which she presents with Joanne McNally.

‘I’m going to dedicate this award to my teacher,’ adds Vogue, who was 38 yesterday.

Model Vogue Williams, who co-presents a podcast, was surprised — and delighted — when it picked up an award

Dame’s married to the job

She is Britain’s highest-paid female boss of a FTSE 100 company, with an annual pay packet of £8 million, yet Dame Emma Walmsley surprised young women at Cliveden Literary Festival hoping to learn the secret of her success with some seemingly old-fashioned advice.

‘Marry well,’ declares the GlaxoSmithKline chief executive, 54, who has four children with entrepreneur David Owen, 58. Dame Emma did not, however, mean women should marry a man from a higher social class.

‘Be careful about the company that you keep because work is a human endeavour and you want colleagues that teach you, support you and you learn from,’ she explains. ‘So pick culture carefully. And my other top, not very feminist, advice is: marry well. I mean that, if you want a career.’

Strange but apparently true: Queen Elizabeth II was anointed with holy oil at her Coronation in 1953 that had been stored in a Chanel No 5 bottle.

Justine Picardie, author of Coco Chanel: The Legend And The Life, reveals: ‘We had a letter last week from someone whose family were the pharmacists to the Royal Family. They made holy oil for anointing new monarchs. Unfortunately Westminster Abbey was bombed during the war and the holy oil got lost.

‘Luckily her aunt, Mabel, had saved some in an empty Chanel No 5 bottle.

‘She liked to think that when the Queen was crowned she smelled not only of holy oil but also of Chanel.’

Rosie brings the sparkle to party in Paris

Her hugely popular lingerie ranges for Marks & Spencer have helped turn round the fortunes of the previously struggling High Street retail giant, yet Rosie Huntington-Whiteley showed off underwear made by someone else at Paris Fashion Week.

The Devon-born model, 36, wore a diamante bra by Valentino beneath an oversized black jacket to the event at Raspoutine nightclub in the French capital.

She also wore a £2,700 maxi skirt by the same Italian brand and carried a silver handbag that matched her sparkly bra.

Rosie, who has two children with Hollywood hardman Jason Statham, was there to support her friend, the photographer Mert Alas, who gave the party.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, 36, wore a diamante bra by Valentino beneath an oversized black jacket to the event at Raspoutine nightclub in the French capital

He endured the Blitz in South-east London during the war and rationing as he was growing up, but nothing could prepare Bill Wyman for the squalid Chelsea flat he shared with his Rolling Stones bandmates in the early 1960s.

‘The flat was a nightmare,’ the bass guitarist, 86, says at a Chelsea History Festival event promoting his new book, Bill Wyman’s Chelsea: From Medieval Village To Cultural Capital.

‘The kitchen was disgusting: they had all kinds of bottles with different amounts of mildew in them. They had written dirty lyrics on the ceiling. It was a particularly cold winter, 1962 to 1963; you had to put a shilling in the gas meter to keep warm.’

Wyman left the Stones more than 30 years ago, but plays on the track Live By The Sword on the band’s new album, Hackney Diamonds.

He adds of living with Sir Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: ‘For people they didn’t like, they had a chair with three legs and they would invite them to sit down there.’