What to think about Egypt? Pick up most newspapers and you see a flood of words, but a
trickle of information. Not so with this week’s Spectator, which has everything you need to know – and nothing more. Here are some pieces that I thought may interest CoffeeHousers.
1. What you need to know. Our lead feature is an interview with a dozen people who know their onions. Anne Applebaum on whether it can be compared to Poland, Charles Glass on fifty years of Egyptian dictators, Douglas Murray on neo-conservatism and Islamism, Professor Stephen Walt on the geopolitical fallout and Andrew Roberts on the alarming power of the Cairo mob.
2. What to make of the Muslim Brotherhood. John R Bradley didn’t just predict the Egyptian uprising but wrote a book on it. We ask for his take on the Brotherhood. Beware the claims that they have mellowed, he says, its mainly due to their hiring adept English-speaking spin doctors. Their manifesto shows what they’d do to Eypt – and it looks terrifyingly like what the Ayatollahs did to Iran.
3. Who’s next? Anthony Sattin, who has lived and written extensively in the Middle East, looks at the other tumbling dominoes.
4. How to bluff your way through it. Quentin Letts has detected a high degree of bluffing about this from people who (unlike the above) have no knowledge or expertise. We’ll post the piece on Coffee House later: it really is genius.
5. We get spied upon now, not sacked. Matthew Parris says that the Andy Gray farrago shows the rise of the notion that you can be sacked for what you say and do outside of work. “It may be because of aggressive human rights and employment protection laws,” he says. “It’s increasingly difficult to remove an employee on grounds of age, incompetence, incapacity etc. But a wandering hand at an office party, or a private quip when the cameras are off may be lighted upon by management looking for a complaint that an industrial tribunal will entertain.”
Plus: James Delingpole on how the BBC stitched him up over that global warming documentary, Alastair Campbell’s diary, Melissa Kite on the Gypsy Wedding series on Channel Four, Simon Hoggart on Broadwalk Empire and Sky Atlantic, Kate Chisholm on saving the World Service, Deborah Ross trashes the new adaptation of Brighton Rock, Andrew Lambirth on the Bridget Riley exhibition, and the best books pages in Britain.
And finally, a quote from Simon Hoggart’s television column:
“The joy of HBO is that it is for grown-ups and doesn’t follow the ferociously asexual ethic of American terrestrial channels. We see Nucky and his girlfriend actually at it as two – count them – whole breasts flip merrily around. It assures you there’s no purse-lipped puritan sitting on the writer’s shoulders – and inspires more trust in the rest of the story.”
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