Society

It could be a bleak Christmas party for Arsenal Football Club on the 22 December, as Steerpike hears their planned festive bash booked in at Brocket Hall in Berkshire may be a little austere thanks to a lack of the hall’s usual furniture. Since Lord Brocket’s spell at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, the artistic accountant has been forced to rent out the 500 acre family pile and he’s fallen out in spectacular fashion with current tenant Dieter Klostermann, the German leisure entrepreneur whose company is reportedly burdened by debt of £16.5m. The argument boiled over into the pages of the Mail in July after eight police cars intercepted an audacious attempt by Brocket to extract heirlooms

Why is Libby Lane the first woman bishop appointed by the Church of England? She was one of the first to be ordained as a vicar 20 years ago when the Church approved women priests, and today she was unveiled as the Bishop of Stockport. But she was not one of the favourites, and so Bishop Libby was as much of a surprise as her appointment, which the Church kept under wraps until late last night. When we meet in the Crewe YMCA, she has just been touring the building surrounded by a small cloud of cameras and journalists and is preparing to say goodbye to her congregation at a

It is difficult to describe with equanimity the culture shock that has been administered to Arts Council England, the 69 year-old benefits office for the creative industries. Invented by Maynard Keynes to nurture the grass shoots of an English renaissance with a few quid here and there – £25,000 for Covent Garden, £2,000 for the LSO – ACE has burgeoned into a mighty quango that distributes £1.9 billion of public cash and £1.1 billion of lottery money over three years. It feeds not only the performing arts but museums, galleries, monuments, public libraries, poetry and pottery. It is a nanny state in miniature which, over the past generation, has become

Yesterday it was Sydney. Today it is Peshawar. Yesterday a coffee shop. Today a school. Yesterday a lone gunman. Today a gang of them. If anybody wondered about the global and diffuse nature of the challenge that Islamic fundamentalism poses, the last 24 hours have given another demonstration of the problem. Yet what is amazing, after all these years, is how unconcerned many people remain with working out what is going on. How could the Taliban have chosen to attack a school in Peshawar? Why did Boko Haram steal the Nigerian schoolgirls? Why did the Sydney attacker fly that flag? Why do Isis fly theirs?  The Western world in particular seems

Steph and Dom are the posh-sounding, drunk couple from Gogglebox – the surprise hit programme where people are recorded sitting on sofas giving a running commentary on the TV shows they are watching. If they had been reviewing Steph And Dom Meet Nigel Farage, I like to think, they’d have been very rude. ‘What a right pair of slippery tossers,’ they would have yelled, chucking canapes at the incredibly bad mannered, disturbingly callous pair of smug hypocrites on the screen. ‘Leave the poor sod alone. He’s supposed to be your guest.’ All right, so the poor sod can take it. He’s Nigel Farage – taking it is what he does.

From Mr N.M. Gwynne Q. Have you any suggestions on how I could milk my newly raised profile (as a bestselling author on English grammar and Latin, and a regular BBC Radio 5 broadcaster on how to speak and write English, and that sort of thing) to make the acquaintance of the kind of people whom, perhaps a little to my shame, I sometimes find myself rather longing to meet — such as Miss Kate Moss, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Mick Jagger, and, as of the past few weeks, Mrs George Clooney? A. As a bestselling author you should have no difficulty getting a contract to write a biography of

From Francis Fulford Q. Have you any suggestions for what to give my wife for Christmas? She doesn’t want anything practical and was deeply unamused when I gave her a ‘top-of-the-range’ Barbour tweed coat some years ago. So obvious things like gardening forks, dog leads etc are out of the question. My children have suggested that she would like a 50” colour TV from Argos (currently a ‘bargain’ at £299) but I am not convinced and don’t want to have her suffer a major sense of humour failure when she unwraps it in front of all our Christmas guests. A. What do women want? You need look no further than

From News of the Week, The Spectator, 19 December 1914: A SMALL squadron of German cruisers made an attack on Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough on Wednesday morning. It seems that the squadron consisted of at least three battle cruisers and two armoured cruisers. Hartlepool and Scarborough were shelled simultaneously for about half an hour shortly after eight o’clock. The bombardment of Whitby began at nine o’clock, and it is possible that one or more of the ships which took part in it had come from Scarborough, which is only fifteen miles distant. As soon as the presence of the German ships was reported a British patrolling squadron tried to cut

A.L. Kennedy Novelist I dislike dates. It’s either a yes, or a no. Why date? Sadly, I am both bad at reading the signals which indicate the outbreak of a date and attractive to people who are bad at signals. This means that I end up — often in coffee shops — with a variety of men who suddenly exhibit enthusiasms I cannot return. Among these gentlemen would be the portly chap in Day-Glo cycle shorts, the man who brought an ugly plant with him, the man who cried, the man who talked unendingly about the rows he used to have with his last girlfriend, the man who sat next