Society

Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be doing Richard a favour, but the truth is he cheers me up far more than I do him. I visit because I like him, but as the weeks go by, I’m afraid I’ve also developed a grim curiosity about what it’s like to be in your nineties. Meals-on-wheels, crumbling knees, hernias, cannulas, the way a day dissolves into unintended naps… ‘Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?’ says Richard, as we sit knee to knee. But I’m obsessed, like a tourist taking notes on some awful country they must one

‘Fred Goodwin off the hook again,’ declared the Scottish Daily Record. That neatly summed up one strand of sentiment behind the RBS Shareholder Action Group’s battle for compensation for losses incurred in the bank’s £12 billion rights issue in 2008 — preceding its £45 billion taxpayer bailout, in which any remaining shareholder value was largely wiped out. Investors who believe they were misled by RBS’s directors and the rights-issue prospectus have been campaigning for their money back ever since. Most have already accepted a rather modest settlement, but some 9,000 have persevered with a case against the bank itself, Goodwin, former chairman Sir Tom McKillop and two other former directors,

On the Today programme a month ago, Education Secretary Justine Greening was asked whether she could name any ‘respected figure or institution’ in favour of more grammar schools. She declined to answer, which was taken to mean that she couldn’t, and that there wasn’t. I’ve been travelling a lot this year, so wasn’t around to offer my support. I’m back now. Assuming that a professor of education at a Russell Group university is respectable enough, let me wade into the debate: yes, I’m in favour of more grammar schools. Educational experts against more grammar schools — of which there are plenty — point to the current evidence from England and

In the wake of terrorist outrages such as Monday’s bombing, the British public tends to keep calm and carry on. We saw it in London after the Westminster attack in March; we saw it yesterday on the streets of Manchester – a stirring sight. That calmness in the face of evil is an attitude that has almost always been reflected by those who govern and lead us. Think of Margaret Thatcher’s steely response to the Brighton bombing. It’s the British way. But it has, until now, also been the British way not to put troops on the streets unless absolutely necessary. It’s a delicate balance: a prime minister has a

When the pictures of the dead came in, it was hard to take, even from a distance. There was Georgina Callander, 18, a bespectacled Ariana Grande ‘superfan’ who had tweeted that she was ‘so excited’ to go to the concert in Manchester Arena. There was Saffie Roussos, aged 8 and still at primary school, who went with her mother and older sister. There was Olivia Campbell, aged 15. I looked at their bright faces and thought of all the love their families had carefully decanted into them over the years, their wealth of possibility. Then on Monday night a suicide bomber smashed up all their futures in an instant. What

The meeting place of the two worlds could not have been more sharply defined. In Manchester Arena, thousands of young women had spent the night singing and dancing at a show in Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour. Songs such as the hit ‘Side To Side’ were performed: ‘Tonight I’m making deals with the devil / And I know it’s gonna get me in ­trouble… / Let them hoes know.’ Waiting for them in the foyer as they streamed out was Salman Ramadan Abedi, a 22-year-old whose Libyan parents settled in the UK after fleeing the Gaddafi regime.  A man whose neighbours said they believed must have been radicalised in Manchester,