Society

Sunday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Where men with splendid hearts may go

From ‘Rupert Brooke’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: TO all men there is attractiveness in the combination of the soldier and the poet, and perhaps the combination gives a more satisfying pleasure to the countrymen of Sir Philip Sidney than to any other race. This is the reason why thousands of Englishmen mourn for Rupert Brooke who never knew him, and possibly, till a few days ago, never heard of him. They read the brief details of his life and accomplishment, and at once their sorrow was real and, in a sense, personal. Rupert Brooke was distinctly one of the most promising of our poets. He had fire, imagination, a

Saturday

Alexander Chancellor

We are lucky that the royal baby won’t distort the democratic system

The Duchess of Cambridge has given birth to a baby girl. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the survival of the Windsor dynasty on the throne of the United Kingdom for a long time to come. Yet there are many people in this country for whom this commonplace event will be more thrilling than the forthcoming general election, even though it could presage the dismemberment of the country itself. The British monarchy continues to enjoy enormous popularity. There may be doubts about the suitability of Prince Charles to succeed to the throne,

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: Nando’s with Chaucer (plus: what became of Belloc’s Lord Lundy?)

The title of a poem by Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’, prompted me to invite verse submissions describing a meal with a well-known poet. Sylvia Fairley tucked, somewhat reluctantly, into albatross with Coleridge, D.A. Prince shared cocoa with Wendy Cope and Rob Stuart enjoyed a curry with Dante. Honourable mentions go to John M. Fotheringham, who wouldn’t recommend taking up an invitation to tea from Robert Burns; and to Brian Allgar for oysters with Lewis Carroll. Well done, all: it was a top-notch entry. The winners take £25. Frank McDonald nabs £30. Frank McDonald/Elizabeth Barrett Browning ‘How do you like your eggs?’ the waiter says And with a

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The British Empire and the Muslim world

From ‘The Khalifate’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: It seems that the Ottoman Empire is likely to crumble away, and in that event, whether it happens soon or late, the question of the Khalifate will cause many searchings of heart to the Mohammedan world. In an intimate and most important sense Britain is concerned in this matter. The spiritual security and satisfaction of Moslems vitally concern the British Empire. It is not only that we owe it to the innumerable Moslems under our rule that their wishes and susceptibilities should be strictly respected; the communion of feeling throughout Islam is so strong that the British Empire, as a great Mohammedan

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: Senior Tories to plot election response on Friday

Tory MPs will plot their party’s response to the election result and any likely coalition partnerships in a meeting next Friday, 8 May at 4pm, Coffee House has learned. The powerful executive of the 1922 Committee will meet that afternoon in order to prepare their demands for the Prime Minister and discuss any initial outlines of a coalition agreement between the Tories and the Lib Dems that have already been passed on to them. They will be preparing for a meeting of the full party on Monday, where they will set out their demands in full. We have known for some time what the demands of the Committee will be

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Landing at Gallipoli

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: The accounts from the Dardanelles are distinctly encouraging. On Tuesday the British portion of the Expeditionary Force landed on the point of the Gallipoli Peninsula—i.e., on the European side—while the French landed an the Asian side, and have fought a battle on the plain of Troy or its neighbourhood, in which they have taken nearly two thousand prisoners. Our landing on and around the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula has been supplemented by a landing near Bulair, the narrowest part of the tongue of land which forms the European wall of the Dardanelles. If this landing at Bulair can he

Thursday

Taki

High life | 30 April 2015

Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Time magazine was for the better part of the 20th century the model for American newsweeklies. Its style of epigrammatic terseness and punchy prose became known as ‘Timespeak’, the compact format an invention of its founder, Henry Luce. Luce (‘Harry’ to friends and family) was the son of a missionary and was born in China. He was devout, brainy, single-minded and convinced that America was a miracle conceived by the Almighty. In a British boarding school in Shandong, Harry was mercilessly flogged for his insistence, at times, on speaking to God directly, but he also became proficient in French, Latin, Greek, history and

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 30 April 2015

Two stylists work at this deeply rural French ladies’ hairdresser. Christelle is a gorgeous 17-year-old point-of-lay pullet, so lithe and well made I want to weep. Sylvette, the owner, though knocking on a bit, is a man-eater on the rampage. I had my old barnet thatched here for the first time about two months ago. Christelle scissored and shaved my hair with a cut-throat razor for the best part of an hour and I came out of there mentally deranged but with the best haircut I’d ever had. Later that day I found in my jacket pocket a torn-off piece of card with Sylvette’s name and phone number written on

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 30 April 2015

When I first started playing bridge, about 15 years ago, I ‘trained’ at TGR’s rubber bridge club, which was located in a dingy basement in Bayswater Road. I didn’t notice the dinge — I felt intoxicated just walking in there knowing I would get a game. In those days we could smoke in the back room, Richard Selway was the loveable host with the sharpest wit around, and there was a big game going every day for a minimum of £50 a hundred. About eight years ago, we moved to the New Cavendish Club, smoking was banned, Richard died and the big game decreased to £30 a hundred. Now we

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 April 2015

‘I suppose,’ said my dad philosophically, ‘I could always vote Green.’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Not you as well!’ I screamed, as the entire restaurant looked round to see what manner of family crisis was brewing at our table. ‘Look, dad, it’s very simple. Do you agree with 60 per cent income tax?’ ‘Of course not,’ said dad, a look of deep concern on his face. ‘Well then. Enough of this “ooh, the Greens are harmless, aren’t they? They like animals and trees and they don’t have any particular views about anything important one way or the other so they wouldn’t make much difference.”’ Stop! The Greens are harmless the

Robin Oakley

The real McCoy | 30 April 2015

At Sandown Park last Saturday an era ended. Twenty thousand of us turned up to cheer on Tony McCoy as he took his last two mounts and collected his 20th trophy as champion jumps rider. We cheered, we clapped, we decided there was nothing to be ashamed of about a certain moistness of eye, noting that even the ultimate iron man himself wept a tear or two as he rode back on the third-placed Box Office. Over the past 20 years, the riding of racehorses has become ever more professional, but not once during that period has anybody else been champion jockey over jumps. For once the old cliché works:

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 30 April 2015

I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was in 2002, when I was 62 years old, and rather a pretty girl whom I had been quietly admiring through the crush on the Piccadilly Line suddenly rose to her feet and beckoned me to take her place. I was so shocked that I responded most ungraciously. I just shook my head in irritation and signalled to her to sit down again. For, notwithstanding the fact that my hair had long ago turned white, it was the first time I had realised that I actually looked old. From then on,

Toby Young Toby Young

Reuniondues

A couple of weeks ago I returned to my old Oxford college for a ‘gaudy’ — posh, Oxford-speak for a reunion. This one was for those of us who came up to Brasenose in 1983, 1984 and 1985. That group includes the Prime Minister but, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. I imagine he didn’t want to risk being photographed at a black-tie dinner with a bunch of his Oxford pals in the middle of a general election campaign — or maybe he just finds these occasions a bit of a bore. When I attended my first gaudy about 15 years ago, I assumed that the only people who’d bother to

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Square meal

The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You ride an escalator into a void, glimpse the raging faces of the Plantagenets and take a lift upwards, away from dead kings and film characters walking the streets. (Downstairs, by the entrance to the National Gallery, two competing Yodas from Star Wars are posing for photographs. One is too tall to be a convincing Yoda. Tourists inhabit a different city.) In this long bright room there is no such anxiety; only clean windows to Trafalgar Square and happy women having lunch in a secret glade of stone and brick. You

Dot Wordsworth

Quarter

‘No quarter given,’ yelled my husband as he stabbed at a cushion with his stick, spoiling the cavalier effect a little by catching his foot in the loose rug, about which I have told him twice (not the hundred times he likes to claim). He made his inadvertently slapstick attempt at humour because I had reported to him the appearance of a new commercial sign ‘Royal Quarter’ not far from the former Army & Navy Stores in Victoria. Apart from the presence of Buckingham Palace round the corner, there is very little royal about the area, which is identified by its proximity to Victoria station. Then I came across the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 April 2015

Q. Six months ago I invited some old friends to be my guests at a reunion dinner. We all love each other but never get round to meeting. The evening looms but my problem is that in the meantime one guest has received publicity revealing that he has become a high net worth individual. A member of my own family, famous for her parsimony, will be at the dinner and has become agitated at the thought that I will be paying for everyone out of my limited income when our newly super-rich friend could easily do it without even noticing and is bound to offer. Mary, I want this evening

Peter Jones

Start-up culture in Ancient Greece

Honduras wants to establish start-up cities to experiment with alternative economic, regulatory, and legal systems. Could this concept help stop mass migration into Europe? Ancient Greeks, living in a time and place when poverty was endemic, were adventurers and readily took to the seas to establish their start-ups abroad, all around the coasts of the Mediterranean. These apoikiai (‘homes from home’), far from being ‘colonies’, were in fact new, wholly independent Greek cities. They were variously motivated by e.g. the search for fertile farming land and profitable raw materials, trade in slaves, metals and luxury goods, proximity to and therefore business with non-Greeks, and so on. They spread around the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 April 2015

Home The British economy grew by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, the slowest quarterly growth for two years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out many absurdities in party election promises, noting that most people would see tax and benefit changes that reduced their income; it said that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat plan to increase the personal allowance to £12,500 would not help the 44 per cent of people who now pay no tax, that Labour’s promised 10p tax band would be ‘worth a princely 50 pence a week to most income-tax payers’ and that it could not be sure whether the reintroduction of a

The Spectator

Barometer | 30 April 2015

One-way stretch A study at Louisville University in Kentucky concluded that collisions are twice as likely in one-way streets as in similar streets with two-way traffic. — The one-way street is an older concept than many might imagine. Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of London began in 1666, was one of the world’s first one-way streets. An order restricting cart traffic to one-way travel on that and 16 other lanes around Thames Street was issued in 1617. — Data on traffic flow at the time is hard to come by, but the idea was not copied for over 300 years, until Mare Street, Hackney, became a one-way street in

Raymond Keene

Nigel’s controversy

British chess grandmaster Nigel Short has form when it comes to provocative statements. When competing in a tournament in France as a junior player, some years ago, he was asked the question by an interviewer: ‘What do you hate most in life?’ His answer — ‘The French’ — failed to endear him to the organisers. At a later appearance in a French tournament, an entente cordiale was struck, and Nigel is once again a welcome guest across the Channel. Nigel’s latest foray into contentious self-expression came with his widely reported intervention into the age-old debate about the differences between the male and female brain. As was widely reported, Nigel said