World

‘No country for old men’?  Texas looks eerily magnificent though in Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest take on the western genre. Horses gallop, men drawl, and gals do the listening as the heat seeps out of the screen and into a cinema near you. It’s nice perhaps to be reminded of what the sun looks like in these winter days – but NCFOM is hardly this season’s latest feel-good movie. A spring in the step and a song in the heart are not the most likely reactions to this strangely irresolute – but relentlessly downbeat – narrative. The movie’s title-being a line from W B Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ has

This weekend, the title of must-see cultural monolith belongs to the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy.  After much political wrangling, artworks from the the leading galleries of Moscow and St Petersburg have finally been made available to a London audience.  And, oh, how it’s been the worth wait. The Matisse’s are electric; the Kandinsky’s are challenging; but, for me, the unexpected highlight has to be the work of the Lithuanian artist Isaac Levitan – capturing, as it does, both the drudgery and beauty of everyday life.  From Russia, as Adrian Searle puts it, is “Great, ghastly, revolutionary and hilarious” – just as all exhibitions should be. The Spectator’s Deborah Ross has already reviewed the best film release

How worried should we be about the market crash? Turmoil continued in Asia today, but in Europe’s bourses there’s more stabilisation (largely down to US interest rate cuts). But do those red screens mean anything for the real economy? History suggests not. For all its drama the 1987 crash had “no appreciable impact upon economic growth”, and the main casualties of the 2001 crash were the egos (and bank balances) of dot-com millionaires.  What matters is consumer confidence – whether shoppers think this is the beginning of the end, or just a bad day for the men in braces. But this time, there is an added factor – which Brown should worry about. 

There are interesting pieces on the organ donation row by Libby Purves and Polly Toynbee today. Polly seethes that “rightwing commentators are sharpening their pencils for what they see as an excellent ideological dividing line…here we have an important battle of ideas – and the Conservatives have just instinctively plonked themselves on the wrong side.” What is certainly true is that this issue does test one’s fundamental attitude to the relationship between the individual and the state. Locke’s notion of “self-ownership” is not absolute: we do not accept that you can sell yourself into slavery, or (for that matter) sell your organs while you are alive. But the idea that

Last month, I posted about the number of pensioners who die from the cold each winter (more than 20,000). Two events will make it even worse this winter: the decision by N-Power to raise their bills 13% and a cold snap with temperatures as low as -17 predicted. It is in precisely these conditions that an honourable government would raise the winter fuel allowance. If Brown is looking for ideas for his relaunch, he could a lot worse.

Of course, one is supposed to despair at this sort of negative campaigning even when, as in this case, it is directed against a candidate one loathes. But, really, I take my hat off to whomever came up with the idea to send South Carolina Republicans fake Christmas cards purporting to be from Mitt Romney. The text, taken from the first Book of Nephi (part of the Mormon bible) reads: “And it came to pass that I looked and beheld the great city of Jerusalem and also other cities. And I beheld the city of Nazareth, and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin and she was exceedingly