Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The shootings prove…

It is terribly important whenever an atrocity occurs to scour the internet for information — however specious — that proves you were right all along about something. It is best to do this before the authorities have made their official statements about the outrage, but also while they are doing it and afterwards. But speed is of the essence — if you can do it while people are still bleeding to death, so much the better. And so it was with the Las Vegas shooting. There was palpable disappointment expressed online by right-wing people at the apparently incontestable fact that the perpetrator was white. Not a Muslim at all. (Although

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Say nothing

To my embarrassment, ever since my novel We Need to Talk About Kevin was published in 2003, I’ve been a go-to girl regarding American mass murders. I’m embarrassed because my credentials are so poor — I’m only an expert on a school killer I made up — and because I’ve so little to say. That’s one of the standard reactions to these things, whose scale seems only to escalate: being struck dumb. That’s why Sky News and the BBC ring me up. They’re desperate, you see. They have nothing to say either. In the days I accepted many of these gigs, I made what I hoped was one serviceable point.

Bruce Anderson

The pride of Australia

When she graduated from university in Australia, Sarah Crowe decided to travel. So she sold her car, raised whatever other funds she could, and bought a one-way ticket to Istanbul. Anxious relatives’ doubts were brushed aside: rightly so. This was a brave and resourceful girl. As she made her way across the continent, Sarah’s embrace of European culture quickly extended to wine. Arriving in Burgundy, she used her personality, determination and zest for hard work to find employment and build up experience. Back in Australia, she had no difficulty in persuading a winery to hire her. Her qualities quickly shone through. No one at the vineyard put in longer hours.

Mark Mason

The great unknowns

Have you heard about the invention that cures your smartphone addiction? Whereas normally you can’t go more than a minute or two without checking your phone, this invention allows you to sit with the thing safely tucked away in your pocket or bag, not giving it a second thought. The invention is known as the ‘quiz’. You’d have thought that smartphones would have killed off this British institution. A pub quiz, with the answer to every question in the world just a fumbled, sneaky glance away? Surely cheating would become rife, rendering the whole exercise pointless? But that hasn’t happened. There’s something about a quiz that returns us to our

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Raising the threshold crappiness

I love anything open late at night. Never mind ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’; even mundane activities like filling up with petrol become enjoyably Edward Hopperish after midnight. Often the places are so quiet you wonder why they bother opening at all. But it is a strange psychological fact that opening a shop 24 hours a day often pays, even if nobody ever buys anything between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Somehow the knowledge that the shop never closes means people are far more likely to shop there at conventional times. This quirk also explains why the most successful coach firm between Oxford and London runs services all

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 5 October 2017

Laikipia Ripping up the black cotton soil on the farm’s high savannah I get a sense of what it must have been like to be a sodbuster on the Great Plains of America 150 years ago. Riding my big yellow tractor I find it thrilling to plunge through virgin land that has been innocent since time began, but it also makes me feel intensely sad that it had to come to this. Through the clouds of dust and diesel fumes I can see a giraffe pouting at me from above a stand of acacia trees that will soon be torn out. Herds of zebra, oryx and eland are retreating as

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Monarch was an airline from an earlier era – but were its owners to blame for its demise?

Monarch Airlines was the ghost of an earlier age of holiday travel. When I used to see its planes lined up at Leeds-Bradford airport alongside those of Ryanair and its brash northern rival Jet2, I sometimes wondered why Monarch was still there. Now it has been brought down by a combination of the weak pound, too much competition on Iberian routes and too little demand for terrorist-threatened ones to Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt. Even the orderly repatriation of 110,000 Monarch passengers has had an old-fashioned feel to it (perhaps even a touch of Dunkirk, for those who have seen that excellent film), enhanced by the reassuring tones of Dame Deirdre

Prue Leith

Notebook | 5 October 2017

To Skibo Castle for a four-day wedding, a dream of super-luxury and great good fun. I was struck by how the American rich are saving the Highlands. Skibo is supported by a band of mega-wealthy Americans, some of whom have invested heavily in the nearest town of Dornoch, which is thriving as a result. They are following a great tradition: Andrew Carnegie, having made his fortune in the US, returned to Scotland and rebuilt Skibo. He also donated libraries and halls ‘big enough for dancing’ all over the world, many in Scotland. A great combo: reading and reeling. I live in the Cotswolds, where the rich often splendidly transform derelict

Jessica Berens

Sentences without end

My first sight of Colin was as a lanky manifestation lying on a desk in the Dartmoor prison education department where I was working as the writer-in-residence. He looked a bit like Ian Curtis; he was mid-twenties, clever and funny. He was also on an IPP — imprisonment for public protection sentence — for GBH, and because IPPs were indeterminate sentences, he had no release date. When he was 18 he had got drunk on a train, beaten a man up and kicked him in the head. It was the kick that got him the IPP, at a time ‘when they were handing them out like sweets’. By 2012, the

The Spectator

Always a dull moment

From ‘Perfect peace’ by Christopher Hollis, 21 October 1960: In Mr Terence Rattigan’s The Final Test, an English spectator of the match is asked by an impatient American: ‘Is anything going to happen?’ ‘Good Lord, I hope not,’ replies the Englishman. He must, I fancy, have been in professional life an organiser of a Conservative Party conference. For a Conservative Party conference is intended to be, and is, the dullest thing that ever happens.

John R. Bradley

Putin the peacemaker

When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin has emerged triumphant and Bashar al-Assad’s future is secure. They will soon declare victory over Isis inside the country. The dismal failure turned out to be our cynical effort to install a Sunni regime in Damascus by adopting the Afghanistan playbook from the 1980s. We would train, fund and arm jihadis, foreign and domestic, in

Lucy Vickery

Get a life | 5 October 2017

In Competition No. 3018 you were invited to take your lead from Meik Wiking — CEO at the Happiness Research Institute and author of The Little Book of Hygge and The Little Book of Lykke — and provide an extract from your own Little Book of…. When I set this challenge, I had in mind the words of the Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl (he was speaking of American culture): ‘…again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy”. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.’ You probably don’t need to tell that to Svend Brinkmann, whose book Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze is a

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

Capping energy prices will leave us all worse off

We have a couple of hundred years of economic history to tell us that some things are just a really, really bad idea. Printing loads of money, for example. State control of industries. Punitive taxes. Subsidies. But of all the really terrible polices a government can put in place, the very worst of all is price controls. The trouble is, that also seems to be the most popular idea in British politics right now. Last week, Labour announced what amounts to price controls on credit cards, with a cap on the interest rate that can be charged. It is already in favour of controls on rents. Today, Theresa May stepped

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Women-only colleges were the original ‘safe space’

My old college, formerly known as New Hall, is women-only for its undergraduates. But now the term is expanding, as so often these days, to include anyone who, at the time of application, ‘identifies as female’, as well as the non-binary, those who really can’t make up their minds. During my time in college, I shared a room with another girl; quite what it would have been like to share with someone aspiring to being a woman I don’t know…presumably entirely non-threatening but a bit odd. The point about this women-only college is that it was meant to provide a bit of gender balance to the male majority in the

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Bien-pensant Britain is abandoning Burma

At first glance, the new footage of Boris being slapped down for reciting a fragment of Kipling in Burma seemed like just another of his gaffes. Many Burmese people, however, reacted with bafflement. This was an affectionate poem expressing British love for their country through a soldier kissing a Burmese girl. (My great-grandfather, Sir William Carr, as it happens, did more than that. He married her and brought her back to Britain – with their eight half-Burmese children.) What was wrong with that? It seems that bien pensant Britons are more sensitive about our colonial past than the Burmese, who are understandably rather more preoccupied with dealing with their country’s agonising

Spectator Money

Best Buys: Easy access savings accounts

Although the interest rates are rarely as good, sometimes you want a savings account that allows you to access your money whenever you like. Here are this week’s Best Buys, of easy access savings accounts. Data provided by moneyfacts.co.uk

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Can we no longer distinguish between an evangelical Christian and a jihadist?

Is it possible that London commuters are now unable to tell the difference between the cry of God is Great, Allahu Akbar – a sentiment that unfortunately accompanies every IS atrocity – and the actual Bible? It seems like it from the reaction on the Shepperton to Waterloo service at 8.30am yesterday. As one report put it, ‘a man with a rucksack began reciting what seemed to be passages from the Old Testament. He apparently declared homosexuality and pre-marital sex to be a sin.’ Or as one commuter put it, ‘Some nutter starts reciting verses from the Bible… and causes such panic that some people have forced open the doors

Ed West Ed West

Stricter gun controls won’t turn American into Denmark – but they’d certainly help

There’s a scene in the touching Richard Linklater film Boyhood where the young Mason goes to visit the rural family of his estranged father and is given a Bible and shotgun for the first time. I felt a niggling terror watching it, remembering Chekhov’s maxim, that the film would end with the boy taking the gun to himself, or his family, or his school classmates. It’s understandable why the audience might fear the worst, seeing as America’s spree-killing epidemic seems to has no end in sight, with a new low reached on Sunday in Las Vegas. Why doesn’t America just ban the damn things, people ask, or at least make

The Spectator

Jeremy Hunt’s Conservative conference speech, full text

“We have a great team at the Department of Health so let me start by thanking them: the wise Philip Dunne, the savvy Steve Brine, the smart James O’Shaughnessy, the street-smart Jackie Doyle-Price and our perfect PPS’s Jo Churchill and James Cartlidge. Sometimes something happens that reminds you how lucky we are to have an NHS. That happened right here in Manchester in May. When that bomb went off at the Arena, we saw paramedics running into danger, doctors racing to work in the middle of the night, nurses putting their arms round families who couldn’t even recognise the disfigured bodies of their loved ones. One doctor was actually on

Monday

Mike Fotis

UK savers beware. Misleading advertisements are coming for you

Scams are nothing new. From the Nigerian Prince who needs our help transferring money to the glut of fake goods sold as genuine articles, scams are here to stay. But forget the cheap Louis Vuitton knock-offs – the new battleground is UK savers. UK savers are perfect targets. They have money readily available (at times tens of thousands of pounds) and are desperate to beat the paltry 1% that most big banks are touting. Over the last few years, savers chasing the best available rates have also become used to a lot of new names popping up in best buy tables. These new savings-focused banks include Charter Savings Bank and