World

From ‘Bogy-Mongering’, The Spectator, 3 July 1915: Of late there have been all sorts of dark hints and rumours as to wonderful new German devices by air, land, and water. No doubt such devices will be tried, and no doubt they will give us some anxious moments, just as did the poison-gas. It is not, however, by such sensational devices that battles are won. The shell, the bayonet, and the rifle still remain masters of the field. Once again, the danger for us is not in fancy inventions or in the bogy schemes we have described. It is in want of preparation, want of activity, want of men and munitions.

I’ve just watched a rather good DVD. This happens so rarely that I thought I’d share the fact with you. It was a film called The Man Who Saved The World, by the Danish director Peter Anthony, premiered last year and has presumably gone straight to DVD. It tells the story of Stanislav Petrov, formerly of the Soviet Air Defence Force. It was Mr Petrov who in September 1983 decided not to instruct his superiors that the USSR was under attack from US Minutemen missiles, despite the computers which told of this fact. Told him first one missile was incoming, then another……then five. But Petrov did not do what he

From ‘Thrift and the War Loan’, The Spectator, 3 July 1915: There can be little doubt that tens of thousands of people who would never think about the War Loan merely as an investment can readily be persuaded to put their money into it on the ground that it is a patriotic duty so to do. But if every- body is to subscribe, everybody must save money, and part of the object of the campaign which Mr. Asquith and Mr. Bonar Law have inaugurated is the advocacy of thrift. This advocacy must of necessity be directed to all classes in the community. To single out any particular class and urge

The terrorist attack at Tunisia’s Hotel Riu Imperial Marhaba that left 39 people dead was remarkable in its brashness and its detail. Islamic State were quick to name 23-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui as a ‘soldier of the caliphate’ yet on the surface Rezgui appeared to have been a regular young man. He’d never been abroad, let alone to Syria or Iraq. He was a fan of Real Madrid and a former break-dancing enthusiast. This was the single largest attack on foreign tourists in a North African country since the Luxor massacre in 1997 and many will be asking why it took place in Tunisia, the country hailed as the only success story

‘Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which our children will never see’, says Pope Francis in his gloomy encyclicalLaudato si. Can this possibly be true? Over the past 500 years, 1.3 per cent of birds and mammals are known to have become extinct — 200 species out of 15,000. There are far, far more species of invertebrates and plants in existence of course. The latest ‘predicted number’ of species is 8.7 million, of which 7.7 million are animals. (The remaining million are plants, fungi and microbes.) If you assume — which the great Matt Ridley assures me is unlikely — that an equally high percentage

Usually, one of the first indications that you’ve entered a bilingual country is that the road signs are in two languages. At least this is the case in Ireland or Wales — but not in Belgium. In Flanders, the signs are written in Dutch. In Wallonia, they are all in French. French is spoken in Flanders, by the small local Francophone community, but more notably by the huge number of French people who descend on Brugge for the Christmas sales. The French registration plates and the gaggle of overly loud wanderers with cameras are giveaways, but don’t even think about trying French here yourself. It’s considered rude if it’s not

It sounds a bit odd these days but economics was actually invented by the Greeks. Back then, in ancient Greece, the ethos of economics was to keep the house in order and generally manage finances in a way that would make Wolfgang Schäuble blush with embarrassment for extravagant habits. Now economics is about to get a new meaning for Greeks. Perhaps not a science, but Greekonomics is now the art of killing an economy softly. The Greek tragedy is not that it teeters on the brink of default. Greece is going to get its deal – and its euro membership will live to die another day. The deal that is

On a narrow, sloping street in downtown Athens sits a graffiti-strewn wall that has captured the spirit of a nation. Amidst the spray-painted slogans and flaking posters, a black-and-white stencilled image of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras looks down benignly (beneath a perfectly-observed monobrow) at passers-by. His arms outstretched, dressed in flowing robes and with a halo circling his head, he is Christ come to redeem Greece. Such is the bitter humour that now pervades the country’s capital city as the prospect of financial implosion nears. Tsipras came to power promising to get rid of austerity and take the fight to Greece’s European partners. Reality, alas, proved less accommodating. The

The government’s new school discipline leader Tom Bennett has a difficult brief; he’s in charge of stopping the schoolchildren of the entire nation swinging on their chairs, playing on their telephones, making silly comments and passing notes. Discipline is a problem the Spectator has often grappled with over the years. Writing in 1970, Rhodes Boyson said although there had been incidents in the early19th century when schools had called in troops to put down riots, modern schools weren’t much better at keeping control. My first deputy head told me that when he started teaching in 1890 in a small Lancashire textile town he, along with other young teachers, dared not

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, widely known as DSK, formerly France’s minister of the economy and finance, ex-director-general of the International Monetary Fund, frontrunner as Socialist candidate in the presidential elections of 2012, is a broken man. Or so it would seem. He was acquitted last week by the Lille criminal court of aggravated pimping and organising an international chain of prostitution, but his reputation is nonetheless in ruins. Ever since he was taken off an Air France flight in handcuffs by New York police in May 2011, and charged with raping a maid in the Manhattan Sofitel — a case dropped after his accuser was deemed an unreliable witness — he has