Society

I think it is time to put into effect my plan for the re-shaping of the European Union. A somewhat scaled-down European Union: Greece wouldn’t be in it, for a start. Nor Portugal or Spain or France or indeed Italy south of a line which I have just drawn on my Times Atlas of the World in felt-tip pen, stretching east north east from Genoa to Trieste. And even that northern bit of Italy (Venice in, Bologna definitely out) is there on a sort of probation — and on the understanding that they take their orders from the German-speakers in the new capital Bolzano (or Bozen, as it will become

So much has happened in this Budget that it’s easy to overlook one of the most important announcements: that George Osborne will, after all, fit a lock on defence spending to make sure that it stays at 2 per cent of GDP until 2020. The Spectator has been calling for this for some time; I called for it again last week – and, to be honest, more in hope than expectation. But the Chancellor has delivered; his pledge is watertight. The MoD had thought that defence spending (as defined by Nato) was set to slip to 1.85 per cent of GDP within five years – and filling that gap would cost £3.23

From ‘The Impulse of the Phalanx’, The Spectator, 10 July 1915: A mass of men, large enough to be beyond the control of any immediate words of command, is a difficult thing to stop when once it has been set in motion. It acquires a momentum of its own. The wills of individuals become submerged in the will, or what may pass for the will, of the mass. They respond to an impulse which nobody could precisely trace or define. In a very rough manner one sees the process at work when a crowd comes out of a public building. Perhaps no one is conscious of pushing—every one may rather be

Right now, Britain is sitting on the side-lines waiting to see if there is, to use George Osborne’s phrase, an ‘11th hour’ deal between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. Britain isn’t part of the Greek bailout or the Eurozone so is peripheral to this process; David Cameron isn’t invited to the emergency Eurozone meeting on Tuesday. But Osborne has just told the House of Commons that the UK government expects the Eurogroup to discuss a new proposal from the Greek government at tomorrow’s meeting. As Osborne pointed out, the problem is that the political timetable for a deal isn’t moving as fast as the financial timetable in Greece.

From ‘The Open-Air Hospital at Cambridge’, The Spectator, 3 July 1915: We are all familiar with the open-air treatment of various diseases, and particularly of tuberculosis, but no such startling lesson on the value of open air for wounds, and one may say for practically all diseases, has been given to us before. Even diseases like pneumonia and bronchitis, which by intelligent doctors are still commonly sheltered from any rigours of temperature, have followed an extraordinarily prosperous course in the open-air wards at Cambridge. Of course in winter the wards were bitterly cold. That did not matter much to patients who had plenty of blankets and hot-water bottles. The real

To mark the beginning of Wimbledon, competitors were invited to take as their first line ‘There’s a breathless hush on the centre court’ and continue for up to 15 lines in the style of Sir Henry Newbolt’s 1897 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Newbolt’s poem (which he came to resent, describing it as a ‘Frankenstein’s monster) draws parallels between schoolboy cricket and war. Though there were echoes of this conceit in the entry, your responses were impressively varied. Commiserations to unlucky losers John Whitworth, who submitted a charming tribute to Christine Truman, Robert Cross, Sid Field and R.M. Goddard. Those printed below are rewarded with £25 each. Bill Greenwell hoists the championship

I find it almost frightening to be stuck in London in a heatwave. It is not just the bad air. It is also the sense that this is something that does not suit the British. White northern people have never discovered an elegant means of wearing little in public. We look dreadful and behave as if this is an occasion for having fun, although we secretly know that it is just something unpleasant to be got through. Our street life becomes everything contained in that grim word ‘vibrant’. All cultures are precarious. That of London works only between 0 and 21 degrees centigrade. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s notes. The full article