Nigella Lawson: "The most luminous beauty ever to lighten Lady Margaret Hall's brown corridors" (illustration by Michael Daley)


“Food for where I am in my life,” Nigella Lawson promised in her new autumn TV series, Simply Nigella. But what a life. It has been said that all men want to be with her and all women want to be her — but what woman would wish for a life so peppered with tragedy?

Even as an undergraduate, she narrowly escaped death in a horrific car accident, and suffered the nightmare every Finals candidate dreads: turning over an exam paper to discover that she could not answer a single question. (She was one of only two students taking a particular literature option and the examiners had misunderstood which texts they had studied.)

Small inconveniences, compared with the loss of her mother, a sister and a kind, warm, witty first husband, all to different forms of cancer within 16 years. In 2013 her second marriage to a “brilliant but brutal” man ended in tandem with an agonising court ordeal where, bizarrely, she was not the defendant, yet, because of the character assassination methods used by the defendants’ lawyers, she appeared to be the only person on trial.

Now she is back, bouncing and bonny as ever. After exile to a rather dreary American contest show Nigella is where she belongs, on British TV screens, sticking her fingers in cake mixture and making us feel unsettlingly included in her world as she slyly licks the spoon.

The alabaster brow might not be quite all God’s work these days (she is 55 after all) but who the hell cares? The most luminous beauty ever to lighten Lady Margaret Hall’s brown corridors will always shine more brightly than any surgeon’s art.

Of course, the new show was instantly slammed from all corners. On one side were the old fans who complained she wasn’t using as much sugar and butter as they thought she ought, even though she plainly still regards sugar as a morally blameless flavouring which you put in a sauce to “balance the heat of the spices”.

The same fans were shocked that she was including “healthy” vegan chocolate cake and multi-seed bars among her recipes. Presumably these fans haven’t noticed that these “healthy” foods are packed with calories and nutrition — unlike the recipes from the anorexic “clean eating” trend.