Ignoring his own oft-given advice to “Calm down dear”, Michael Winner appears to have got himself into a frightful tizzy over remarks made about him by the novelist and newspaper columnist Frederick Forsyth. The bouffanted-one devoted a significant chunk of his Sunday Times restaurant review this week to answering Forsyth’s charge, made in the Daily Express, that he had inherited a “huge fortune” from his mum. (So what? you might think; he wouldn’t be the first if he had.) After refuting the allegation, Winner went on to express his anger that Forsyth had refused to allow a correction beside his column “where he’d offered his readers his inaccurate and unchecked story”.

He continued: “Geraldine [Lynton-Edwards, Winner’s fiancée], who, unlike me, is extremely charming and tolerant, met Forsyth at a party last year. He lectured her pompously on Zimbabwe where she’d lived for ten years and to which she frequently returns.

“Then he pontificated on the French singer Jacques Brel, whom Geraldine knew well and worked with in Paris. She was enraged at how inaccurate and tedious he was. Forsyth obviously has a problem separating fact from fiction. He should go back to journalism school.”

After all that it seems almost cruel to point out – though I am sure Mr Winner can take it – that he appears to have his own problem with an “inaccurate and unchecked story”. As I am sure Geraldine could tell him, if the poor woman ever gets a word in edgeways, the late Jacques Brel (pictured below) was not French but Belgian. And famously so – he was one of the few names people could conjure up (Hergé, Jacky Ickx, Axel Merckx and Georges Simenon were others) in the party game, Name a Well-Known Belgian. (Hercule Poirot didn’t count as he was fictional.) Long a favourite singer of mine, Brel first became known to me, I feel pretty sure, through the work of Scott Walker who recorded a number of his songs (including the singles Jackie and Mathilde) at the start of his solo career. He has remained a loyal champion in the 40-odd years since. Other keen fans of the balladeer (with various of his songs to their credit) have included Mark Almond, David Bowie, Alex Harvey (who gave us a sensational Next) and Dusty Springfield. It is unfortunate that the best-known cover, certainly in terms of chart success, was Terry Jacks’s Seasons in the Sun, a mawkish recording miles removed from the spirit of the up-tempo original, Le Moribond.

I was surprised to discover, after a quick trawl through various reference books, that this musical giant is overlooked in all of them. He is celebrated in his native Belgium, though, where (as Mr Winner might have noticed) Brussels has a Metro station called Jacques Brel.

Widely considered to be the filthiest novel of the moment, Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands was given front-page treatment in the Sunday Times’s Culture section (see right) on February 1, with a two-page story inside and a huge puff on Page 1 of the main paper. Odd priorities, I thought, when I read what the book was about. Should a respectable newspaper be promoting such vileness?

On Sunday, the book was reviewed by the ST, again in the Culture section. Adam Lively wrote: “The most obscene thing about Wetlands is its cynicism of conception and banality of execution . . . Wetlands was written wholly with an eye to creating a media tizzy.

“In the case of some books that ‘one has read though not personally’, there is actually something worthwhile behind the brouhaha. Not here, though. Believe me.”

Need I say more?