General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State, mastered the art of secret weaponry at an early age.

He recalls how as a child he worked in a Jewish toy shop in the South Bronx. “Relatives would come to the store to buy something and [the store owner] Mr Sickser would say, ‘Colly, you take them upstairs, you show them the merchandise and you tell them I give them the best price,” Powell reveals in an interview for the Radio 4 documentary My Yiddisher Mother Tongue.

“The conversation would go back and forth and they’d kind of look at me and the husband would say something like, ‘Shvartser khaver nisht farshteyn’, which essentially means ‘The black kid doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know what we’re talking about’. But shvartser khaver did farshteyn, and I’d run downstairs and tell Mr Sickser ‘This is what they’ll pay for it’, and he found that useful intelligence.”

Many years later, as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Powell visited Yitzhak Shamir in Jerusalem and, with a straight face, disarmed the former Israeli Prime Minister by asking if he would like to converse in Yiddish.

Damon Albarn, the versatile Blur front man, isn’t a shoo-in to become artistic director of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. “We’re talking to a range of people,” Tessa Jowell, the Olympics tsarina tells us after a lively Demos debate at the Labour Party conference. “The ceremony has to embody a national theme for 2012, not just London, and we want children to be involved.”

Ms Jowell is seeking a flamboyant impresario to oversee the bash. However Albarn, with his East End breeding, will surely have some role.

The tragic and gifted cellist Jacqueline du Pré inspired the Prince of Wales to take up the instrument. “I can still remember her performance clearly and ... it inspired me to start to learn the cello myself,” HRH reveals in the foreword to The Incredible Story of Classical Music. “Enjoying music, whether as a listener or as a music-maker, seems to me to be as basic a human activity as laughter.”

Lady Antonia Fraser had a confession to make over the weekend at the charity match between her late husband Harold Pinter's cricket team, the Gaieties, and the Lord’s Taverners: “Tennis is my sport. Women don’t play cricket, though we can’t say that.”

Fresh from sharing a world stage with Hillary Clinton in the US, David Miliband had family problems at his party conference. “Bedtime in Brighton,” tweeted the Foreign Secretary on Sunday. “Current running tally on being mistaken for brother Ed: 8.”

Lord Heseltine was delighted to be handed a framed photograph from one of his early appearances on Question Time in an impromptu presentation at the end of filming in Bournemouth last week to mark the programme’s 30th anniversary. He grinned at David Dimbleby’s description of him as a “dashing matinee idol”, but looked befuddled by part two of the gift — Shirley Williams’s autobiography.

The Face: Lysette Anthony

High heels off when treading the boards

She has been one of Woody Allen’s leading ladies, danced on screen with John Travolta and been the muse of David Bailey, who called her the face of the 1980s when she was a teenage model.

Today the actress Lysette Anthony, 46, has her eyes set firmly on forging a career in her own country. This week she will star at the New End Theatre in Hampstead, northwest London, with Susannah York in a Tennessee Williams triple bill that includes Talk to Me Like the Rain.

Best known for her roles in Allen’s Oscar-nominated film Husbands and Wives and the Eighties BBC sitcom Three Up, Two Down, Anthony, who once shared a flat in Los Angeles with the Dynasty star, Emma Sams, has never been happier. “I was sidetracked by Hollywood all those years, but it’s great to swap high heels and limousines for treading the boards,” she tells us.

Postscript

Jane Fonda is planning to live to 101. The actress is experiencing her annual autumnal low, she writes on her blog. Apparently this is the “inevitable melancholy that accompanies all transitions especially at my age when there is a limited number of falls [autumns] left — 30, maybe”. As she is now aged 71, her planned schedule isn’t so bad.

Suggs, the Madness front man, was a proud onlooker as his daughters Scarlet and Viva played a set at Absolute Radio’s first birthday bash. “They’re not part of a special celebrity kid set. Making kids celebrities is just something that is wrong with today, but that’s another story,” he said.

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