Spectator - The Magazine

Competition

, 04 Nov 2009 16:30:00 GMT

In Competition No. 2620 you were invited to submit an argument, in verse, for the superiority of one vegetable over another. It was Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the artichoke’ that got me thinking about the pecking order in the vegetable kingdom. Here’s a snippet: ‘The cabbage/ Dedicated itself/ To trying on skirts,/ The oregano/ To perfuming the world,/ And the sweet/ Artichoke/ There in the garden,/ Dressed like a warrior,/ Burnished/ Like a proud/ Pomegranate...’ In a bumper crop of entries Martin Parker impressed, as did Frank Osen, David Mackie, Ray Kelley, Robert Schechter and Juliet Walker. In fact, you]]>

Crossword

, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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Bridge

, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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Mind your language

, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Every time I see a Shakespeare play, I wonder how many of the words the audience is picking up. It is all very well their getting the drift from the behaviour of the actors, but that makes it like a mime accompanied by unknown utterances.

Matters are not helped for the poor children who must study Shakespeare by internet glossaries that mislead. So, in Hamlet, the word gall in the line ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’, is explained on a commonly used website as ‘Bitterness, anything bitter’. The meaning here, though, is not ‘embittered’ but]]>

Chess

, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

, 04 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of success was misleading. The communists exercised considerable secret influence in universities, publishing houses, journalism and even the civil service for decades after 1945.

Its greatest power, however, lay inside the Labour party and the trade unions. It was perhaps especially strong in the National]]>

How my party was betrayed by KGB boot-lickers

, 04 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. As leader, Michael Foot was wedded to policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the European Economic Community. The strategy, if there was one, seemed to be to lose as many votes as possible.

The remarkable revelations published in the Chernyaev diaries make this attempted political suicide easier to understand. It is clear that key elements in the Labour party structure were determined to ingratiate themselves with Moscow — regardless of]]>

Sharp as an arrow

, 04 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. It’s being revived at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in repertory with a rather different take on coupled life, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for an aptly named season, ‘Behind Closed Doors’. The three separate bedrooms fill up the unusually wide lozenge-shaped stage of the new Rose (modelled on the Elizabethan original) as our four couples writhe and wrangle under the spotlight of Ayckbourn’s all-seeing, all-knowing wit.

Ernest and Delia who occupy the pink satin boudoir with en-suite bathroom]]>

Ancient & modern

, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As part of a revolution in higher education, Lord Mandelson is requiring information about universities to be modelled on a food-labelling system that will treat students as paying customers — another step on the route to the day when the job of our university teachers will be to provide not education but gratification. What else do paying customers demand? The don becomes a pimp.

In his dialogue Gorgias, Socrates describes a pimp as a person who caters for the desires of others. Socrates is driving towards the view that the body and soul have genuine interests that must be served]]>