Society Archives

Thursday

22 Jan 2015

Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House, review: like a Carry On – but without the jokes

Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in the present where the pen as a weapon against bigotry and hypocrisy has suddenly achieved iconic status. But hold up, let’s not get carried away. We’re talking about Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Though its eponymous poet does indeed extol free expression at the service of love, the sentiments — the voices of reason in a time of high anxiety — don’t run too deep. And so we’re back where we started, with a hoary old melodrama. So how to stage something that only gets staged in the first place if you

Mark Mason

Why tomorrow’s parents won’t want their children to go to university

Could the current generation of parents be the first ones who won’t want their children to go to university? Until now that mortarboard photo on the sideboard has always been the dream, visual proof that your offspring have munched their way to the top of the educational food chain. Advancement by degree. But that was before tuition fees. Now there’s a price tag attached to your little one’s ‘ology’ (to quote Maureen Lipman in those BT ads), how many people will automatically see it as a good thing? Perhaps more of us will refuse to prostrate ourselves before the great god Uni? If so, that can only be a good

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

How to stop being scared of full stops

Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let me know if you need me to help tomorrow… xx’ Emails and texts like this, flitting across the ether in their thousands, demonstrate the free-flowing currency of helpfulness — mother going the extra mile for mother, in her Volvo, every day — in school-run land. But have you noticed the appalling punctuation? The use of the ‘weak comma’, or ‘splice comma’, where there should be full stops? My guess is that you have, especially if you are over 45 and

Olivia Cole

On the Yeats trail in Galway

The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free Wi-Fi if you want it, but it would be criminal to do anything other than gawp at the view. Two and a half hours pass quickly when you are travelling at sunset, passing between rain clouds with rainbows falling out of the sky. While my trip was, as they say, for ‘the craic’ (a good friend’s 40th), I couldn’t come to Galway without making time for a W.B. Yeats pilgrimage. His patron Lady Augusta Gregory had her home near Gort, in the south of the county: Galway is saturated in

Lucy Vickery

Lines on law

In Competition No. 2881 you were invited to do as Carol Ann Duffy has done and provide an amusing poem about a piece of government legislation. The first line of her poem ‘22 Reasons for the Bedroom Tax’, ‘Because the badgers are moving the goalposts’, is, of course, a reference to environment secretary Owen Paterson’s unfortunate attempt to explain the government’s failure to reach cull targets. Adrian Fry was entertaining on the Chancel Repair Bill. Commendations, too, to Mike Morrison, Virginia Price Evans, Max Ross and John Whitworth. Alan Millard takes the bonus fiver. The rest get £25 each. ’Twas legislation heaven-sent, A spark of pure enlightenment, That glorious Act

Jonathan Ray

January Wine Club | 22 January 2015

The end of the month is nigh and the sorry few still on the January water wagon are no doubt clinging to it by their fingertips, knuckles ever whiter. I’m not trying to tempt any of you to jump off prematurely, I promise, but we’ve some cracking wines this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, those crafty runners-to-ground of hidden treats and treasures. I don’t know what the vinous equivalent of a truffle hound is, but FromVineyardsDirect must have a few in the kennel, because nobody is better at coming up with bargain parcels from the unlikeliest of places than FVD’s Esme Johnstone and David Campbell. The 2011 La Réserve Claret (1)

Matthew Parris

The Stonewall dinner left me with one question: why are volunteers so horrible to one another?

I watched the video with some trepidation. Stonewall (the campaigning gay and lesbian equality organisation) had just sent me the YouTube link. This was to a short film of the dinner that Stonewall’s founders attended last year to celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of our existence; and most of us had been there. Now we were but wrinkled reminders of the young revolutionaries we had once been. So this could have been a rather mellow occasion. We had started the organisation as a defiant response to what came to be known as ‘Section 28’: a small measure that was part of a sprawling local government bill and intended to stop the

Ed Lake

Making physics history

The European philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. If you really want to see Plato’s heirs in action, though, philosophy is the wrong place to look. Look, instead, at physics. Nowhere else is the spirit of the Academy cultivated so assiduously: the maths fetishism, the disdain for mere appearances, the passionate yearning for a timeless, radiant truth. Throw a rock in a physics faculty and you’ll hit someone explaining that the laws of reality are eternal, written in the burning sigils of mathematics. Extreme cases, such as Max Tegmark, go so far as to claim that reality itself just is mathematics, which

Wednesday

21 Jan 2015

Isabel Hardman

Ministers to introduce plain-packaging for cigarettes

The government has finally decided to bring in plain packaging laws for cigarettes. This U-turn is a sort of U-turn because MPs will get a free vote on it, after David Cameron recognised the depth of feeling in his party on the issue, so the government has decided to bring in plain packaging, but in as gentle a way as possible. In fact, it is a rotation through 360 degrees, as the original position had been in favour of plain packaging, which was then reversed in 2013. There will be a sizeable chunk of Conservative MPs who oppose the measure, which public health minister Jane Ellison says is a ‘proportionate

Toby Young

Je suis Page 3

Here is a preview of Toby Young’s Status Anxiety column from this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow… ‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’ He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that McGill’s caricatures of women, ‘with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised’, gave expression to ‘the Sancho Panza view of life’. There’s a fat little squire in all of us, he thought, although few of us are brave enough to admit it.

Sebastian Payne

Labour’s new political broadcast uses a veteran to promote NHS scare stories

Now we know what ‘weaponising’ the NHS looks like: a World War II veteran. Labour has released an emotive party political broadcast via Mirror Online starring Harry Leslie Smith. The 91-year old received two standing ovations at the Labour conference last year for his strident defence of the NHS — a theme continued in this video. The purpose of the PPB can be summed up in two words: emotional blackmail. Labour appear to have used Leslie Smith, telling a very moving story about his family and how much the NHS has done to improve our quality of life, to point to the notion that the health service is somehow in

Alex Massie

Delaying publication of the Chilcot report is the right thing to do

I don’t know about you but I tend to think Sir John Chilcot’s report into the Iraq war should not be published before it is finished. Actually, I do know about you and I know I hold to the minority view on this matter. So be it. Fashionable opinion is not on my side. Then again, fashionable opinion thinks Tony Blair is a war criminal so we may safely treat fashionable opinion with the contempt it has earned. It can go hang. Nevertheless, as Isabel says this new delay will feed a perception the report is crooked. That is, zoomers zoom and morons gonna moron and there’s nothing anyone else can do

Sebastian Payne

Obama prepares for battle in his sixth State of the Union address

If you think British politics is broken, just look across the Atlantic to see how dysfunctional things can really become. Since the Republicans seized control of the Senate in November, the gridlock in Washington has become even worse. The Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives are set to spend time and money debating legislation, only for the White House to veto it. In his sixth State of the Union (SOTU) address last night — the rough equivalent of the Queen’s Speech here — Barack Obama killed off any hopes of bipartisanship. The president pointed to the priorities set out by the Republicans and set out why he doesn’t intend to work with

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: German hospitality

From The Spectator, 23 January 1915: The Press Bureau has published, at the request of the Russian Embassy, a narrative of the insults, privations, and assaults suffered by Russian subjects in Germany after the outbreak of war. All the facts have been carefully verified, and the names of the chief victims are given. The story of the violent treatment which the staff of the Russian Embassy endured is already well known, but here we have the first detailed evidence of the cruel treatment of the hundreds of Russians who were convoyed to the frontier. As an example we may mention the case of one party of sixty travellers who were

Tuesday

20 Jan 2015

Steerpike

Does Harriet Harman love or loathe Obama? It’s becoming hard to tell…

‘Most people will feel that Obama does not really know what is going on in this country,’ said a snappy Harriet Harman last night. The Labour deputy leader was sent out to bash the President after his glowing endorsement of David Cameron and tactical backing of the Tories for the May election. But Harriet has changed her tune. It seems like just yesterday that she was lavishing praise on Obama, suggesting that we apply his magic tonic to our country: ‘Barack Obama’s campaign challenged pessimism and defied defeatism and said “yes we can” – and he made this happen. That’s what we need to do here as well.’ Six years

Monday

19 Jan 2015

Steerpike

Now that the Sun has axed Page 3 girls, will Britain ever be the same?

Word is that Friday’s edition of The Sun was the last to have a topless woman on Page 3 – thereby closing a chapter of British cultural history. Immortalised, perhaps, in the following sketch from Yes, Prime Minister:- PM: Don’t tell me about the press, I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read

Damian Thompson

Catholics must not breed like rabbits, says the Pope. Yes, you read that right

Catholics should not breed like rabbits and gender theory is a bit like the Hitler Youth. Yup, the Supreme Pontiff is giving another of his in-flight interviews and yet again he leaves everyone shaking their heads: ‘He said what?’ Now, let’s be clear. Francis reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control (sort of) while observing that ‘God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that – excuse the word – that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No.’ I know what he means. I think. Contraception and family planning are fine so long as you don’t artificially block procreation. But the subliminal and unintended messages are (a)

Steerpike

‘Blooming precious’ James Blunt vs ‘prejudiced wazzock’ Chris Bryant

Chris Bryant’s call for more diversity in British culture, has hit a nerve with James Blunt. After Bryant, the new shadow culture minister, remarked that ‘we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk,’ the You’re Beautiful singer has responded in an open letter. Despite initially brushing off the comments on Twitter, Blunt writes that Bryant is a ‘classist gimp’. Really? I thought we’d got rid of me years ago. RT @ianbirrell: James Blunt is ‘dominating’ UK culture, according to Labour arts spokesman — James Blunt (@JamesBlunt) January 18, 2015 The musician, who is married to Lord Wellesley’s daughter Sofia, claims that his Harrow education did not help

Ryan Bourne

Under Oxfam’s dodgy maths, someone with 50p to his name is “richer” than bottom 2bn

Global capitalism has eradicated poverty and generated prosperity in the developing world at an unprecedented rate. You might imagine that a global anti-poverty charity, such as ‘Oxfam’, would celebrate this fact. But no – today Oxfam is making the headlines instead because it is worried about global wealth inequality. In particular, that ‘the wealthiest 1 per cent will soon own more than the rest of the world population combined’. Oxfam has been pushing this sort of meme for a while. Last year, it made the startling claim that ‘the world’s 85 richest people own the same wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion combined’. It was shown at the time, not least by

Fraser Nelson

What Oxfam doesn’t want you to know: global capitalism means less poverty than ever

The hijacking of Oxfam by the politicised left is nothing short of a tragedy. It’s heartbreaking to see a charity that has built up so much goodwill from so many people being used by activists as a vehicle for global class war. As a result, Oxfam is switching its focus away from global poverty towards something very different: wealth inequality. It has today come up with some questionable figures suggesting that the richest 1 per cent will soon own over 50 per cent of the wealth. Here is Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, with a message she intends to give before she heads off to Davos: ‘We see a