Society

Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

From ‘The Right Spirit of Concentration’, The Spectator, 15 May 1915: It need not be supposed that we are blind to the dangers which arise from a large number of aliens in our midst. We have several times written of these dangers. But latterly, whenever the subject was debated in Parliament, the answer was that the War Office were responsible for the control of aliens who could do harm, and that the War Office were doing what they thought necessary. We may, if we like, suspect that the War Office were not doing enough, but they, at all events, were in possession of the facts and we were not. In

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

May Rosé Offer

After the thundering success of our last rosé offer, courtesy of FromVineyarsDirect.com, we make no apology for having something of a re-run featuring once again the pink wines from Sacha Lichine’s Château d’Esclans estate in Provence. Yes, they’re the same wines we offered previously, but they’re the most recent vintages thereof, with some tasty discounts to boot. In fact, you’ll be thrilled to hear that this makes them cheaper than last time. Having some experience of making fine rosé himself (he famously put Château de Sours on the map), FromVineyardsDirect.com’s Esmé Johnstone reckons that anything he ever did has been totally eclipsed by Sacha Lichine and his esteemed partner —

Claudia Massie

Normandy

I am compiling a list of the best black puddings. It began in Spain when I encountered my first morcilla de Burgos, a rich, spiced black sausage bulked up with rice. I was smitten. No black pudding could compete with this, I thought. But then I moved to Cumbria and in the flat hinterland of the Solway plain I found a butcher who made trays of the black stuff, studded with nuggets of fat the size of a child’s thumb. A portion of this was a veritable slice of heaven. I’ve sampled Stornoway’s, of course, and a black-pudding Scotch egg, but nothing ranked alongside the twin fruits of Burgos and

Roger Alton Roger Alton

A few tips for Straussie

If you watched England’s three-day Test defeat by the West Indies in Barbados the other day to the bitter end you will have heard some of the England players being interviewed afterwards. They uniformly referred to their coach, the now departed Peter Moores, as ‘Mooresie’. And therein you feel lies a few of the problems infesting English cricket. It’s hard to imagine even John Terry shouting across the car park: ‘Oi Mouro, that was bang out of order.’ Or in an earlier time, a post-match David Beckham telling the world about ‘Fergie’. No, it was always The Boss, or Sir Alex. I know we are all in favour of flat

Kate Eshelby

Away from the herd

 Erbil, Iraq The Kurds here are fighting Isis — everyone knows that. Most of us are at least peripherally aware that the brave Peshmerga (Kurdish militia) have proved an effective force against the Islamists, and we cheer them on. What we don’t realise is that as they battle the world’s latest bogeyman, the Kurds are also simultaneously suffering from another sort of crisis. Traditionally the Iraqi Kurds are nomadic pastoralists. They’ve herded sheep since biblical times, leading their flocks from the mountains to the lowlands and back. The passion they feel for their land is rooted in this pastoral tradition. It’s a weird irony, then, that as their dream of

Mark Mason

Dead expensive

They say that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life. But there seems to be a third, linked to death and as painful as taxes. It’s the astronomical cost of organising a funeral. My partner’s father died recently, and for the honour of a bog-standard cremation in a far from fashionable part of East Anglia she was charged just over £4,000. Jo felt no shame in asking for the cheapest option (it’s what her father would have wanted — he was never a man to waste money), and so the answer came as something of a shock. When a figure has you imagining the cheeky little jaunt to

Max Hastings

Demob unhappy

After all the carousing and flag-waving that followed VE day in 1945, millions of young men fortunate enough not to be still fighting the Japanese faced a problem. Having spent five or six years in uniform, they needed jobs. For those who lacked explicit civilian skills, which meant most, it was hard to persuade employers that a talent for flying a Spitfire, commanding a gun battery or navigating a destroyer qualified a man to run a factory or even sell socks. For years after the shooting stopped, newspapers bulged with small ads placed by demobilised officers. Many such entries exuded unconscious pathos. That quirkily brilliant writer Richard Usborne had the

Lucy Vickery

Gizza job

In Competition No. 2897 you were asked for a job application by a well-known writer, living or dead. Inspiration for this comp came from a young Hunter S. Thompson’s characteristically unorthodox pitch for a position at the Vancouver Sun. An unflattering portrait of his relationship with a previous employer — ‘The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him’ — is followed by an attack on journalists en masse, who are, he says, ‘dullards, bums, and hacks …stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity’. The godfather of gonzo didn’t get the job. Commendations to Peter Goulding, R.M. Goddard and Josh Ekroy. The winners take £25.

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Why won’t the lefties show London a little more love?

London is a bad thing. Everybody knows this now. Britain has had enough of London. Ed Miliband failed in part because he was ‘too north London’ (euphemism) and Chuka Umunna would fail just the same because he is too south London (euphemism). According to one commentator, Britain’s capital is now a ‘Guardianista colony’; filled with the ‘petty moralism’ of the ‘cultural’ elite. According to another — in the Guardian no less; no fan of his own colony, this guy — this is a city of glass and steel, so different from northern cities of ‘brick and hard stone’, and it produces in his northern soul a sense of ‘cultural alienation’.

Peter Robins

Sharpen your pencil

‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career options in the first section of this odd but charming cross between a memoir and a usage guide. ‘I liked cows: they led a placid yet productive life.’ Instead, she found a productive life — if not always as placid as she might have liked — as a copy editor on the New Yorker magazine. In Between You and Me, she presents the accumulated wisdom and winsome anecdotes of several decades of proof-reading, editorial queries and office arguments, ‘for all of you who want to feel better about your grammar’.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Charles’s ‘spider letters’: The Guardian falls for the pseudoscience of graphology

The Prince of Wales’s ‘spider letters’ are out today – his letters to government ministers written or annotated in his distinctive spidery hand (see above) have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. Hat tip to James Snell on Twitter for alerting me to this utter garbage from the Guardian’s liveblog: What can we tell about Charles’ personality from the small amount of handwritten annotations in the black spider memos? Actually, quite a lot, according to the chairman of the British Institute of Graphologists. Charles’ fluid strokes, joined-up words and slight slant to the left reveal interesting things about his personality and how he will approach his kingship. Adam Brand told the Guardian

Christopher Snowdon

‘Binge Britain’ has ended. Get over it

A certain amount of amnesia is required if you are to believe everything the ‘public health’ lobby tells you. Alcohol is frequently in the media but the only story relating to drink that is genuinely newsworthy is the steep decline in drinking that has occurred in the last decade. Britain has been witnessing its biggest fall in alcohol consumption since the 1930s. This trend was ignored for a long time, but once it became clear that it was not a statistical blip the truth began to seep out. The BBC, which has never seen an anti-alcohol press release it doesn’t like, asked in 2011: ‘Why is alcohol consumption falling?’ After years

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeremy Clarkson and James May take to the road after TV talks

After Jeremy Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear, his fellow presenters James May and Richard Hammond resigned in protest. Since then, the trio have been spotted together over the past few weeks having ‘secret talks’ about their futures, with the pair reportedly visiting the home of ITV director Peter Fincham. Now Mr S hears that with talks for a new show under way, Clarkson and May are once again doing what they do best: driving around in fast cars. Steerpike’s mole spied the pair roaring around Covent Garden in a rather fancy sports car on Tuesday evening: ‘Clarkson and May were speeding around Covent Garden with Clarkson in the drivers’ seat. It certainly didn’t

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Will Germany change her ways?

From ‘Germany and the United States’, The Spectator, 15 May 1915: The questions that concern us now to the exclusion of all others are: What will the German answer be to Mr. Wilson? and To what action by the United States will Mr. Wilson’s Note lead? We take it for granted that Germany will not consent to abandon her submarine campaign against “unarmed merchant vessels carrying non-combatants,” for that would mean an entire reversal of her criminal policy at sea. She attaches enormous importance to that policy, and hopes by means of it ultimately to neutralize the existence of our Fleet. Besides, she has dipped her hands too deep in

Tuesday

Mathieu Vaillancourt

I used to have Asperger’s. Now I’m autistic, according to ‘experts’. I don’t believe it

Autism is being diagnosed all over the place right now. There’s been an explosion in the number of cases, we’re told. This could be something to do with better diagnostic tools, and it’s hard to argue that more media coverage of mental health isn’t a good thing. But the scientific community still know little about this mysterious condition and how and why it affects certain people. And that’s a problem for me, because – according to the textbooks – I have an ‘autism spectrum disorder’. I’m not happy with that label, so I feel perfectly entitled to ask: has the definition of autism become too loose, to the point where it has so many symptoms that you

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The sinking of the Lusitania

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 15 May 1915: SINCE our last issue every day has been to packed with incident and emotion that it is difficult to see events in their right perspective. The diabolical crime of sinking the ‘Lusitania’ is, from a military point of view, of course much lees important than the development of large and critical movements on both fronts of the war. The battle raging in the western theatre is probably the greatest which has yet been fought, and, measured by the employment of artillery, it is probably the greatest battle in history. But the passions roused by the murder of the ‘Lusitania’s’ passengers—feelings

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Danny Alexander leaves no handover note for Greg Hands

When Liam Byrne departed from the role of chief secretary to the Treasury in 2010, he left a note for his successor which read that ‘there is no money’. The note went on to haunt the Labour party throughout their unsuccessful election campaign, with Byrne recently describing it as ‘the letter I will regret for ever’. Happily, Danny Alexander hasn’t followed suit. Greg Hands, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has taken to Twitter to report that there is no handover note from Alexander: Given that the beleaguered Liberal Democrats currently have enough obstacles facing them, it’s probably for the best.

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Porn and video games: more hysteria about ‘rewiring brains’

Here we go again. What effect do you think watching porn and video games have on young men? Yup, they rewire the brain. It’s such a clumsy metaphor – the brain isn’t ‘wired’ in any meaningful sense – that you’d think psychologists and neuroscientists would run a mile from it. Unless, of course they’re Baroness Greenfield, who is a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. She was director of the Royal Institution until her post was abolished in 2010, ‘amid claims that there was almost no other way to get rid of her’ (thank you, Wikipedia). Susan Greenfield’s evidence-light claims about the neurological dangers of digital technology have exposed her to much mockery

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Bottles of Bolly arrive at Downing Street

While cases of Moët & Chandon champagne have been photographed making their way to Downing Street in previous years, the new government appears to have developed finer tastes. Sean Clare, a BBC producer, reports that a delivery of Bollinger champagne – the favoured tipple in of Patsy in the BBC’s Absolutely Fabulous – has arrived at Number Ten Downing Street: A bottle of standard Bollinger retails for around £45 compared to Moët & Chandon which is a bargain at £32.50. However, given that the Bullingdon club has the nickname ‘Bollinger Club’, Mr S suspects it’s only right that former member David Cameron sticks with this brand of bubbly.