Society Archives

Thursday

8 Jan 2015

Royal Opera’s Un ballo in maschera: limp, careless and scrappy

Whether by chance or bold design, the Royal Opera’s two Christmas shows were written at precisely the same moment, between 1857 and 1859, and both mark a high point of refinement in their respective traditions. Both Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Verdi’s Ballo in maschera sometimes give the impression of being entranced by their abstract musical fantasy; the drama on stage is suspended, drawn out, barely engaged with as the characters and audience peer down into the writhing or transfixed world being created in the orchestra pit. In my view, neither composer ever did anything better in musical terms. But sometimes you feel that there is no hope for Ballo.

Kate Chisholm

Without childhood traumas, how did Alan Bennett ever become a writer?

‘So — take heart,’ said Alan Bennett, sending us out from his play, Cocktail Sticks, on a cheery note. The treatment for cancer had been gruelling, but that was 15 years ago, so… This Radio 4 production was adapted (and produced) by Gordon House from the stage version at the National Theatre but was perfectly made for radio, a monologue interrupted by dramatic scenes that take us back into Bennett’s childhood. Why, he wonders, is there nothing from that past for him to write about — no trauma, no deprivation, no disappointment? Surely, his parents could have done more to help him become a writer? With anyone else this would

Jenny McCartney

The Krays, Dennis Nilsen – and Chris Grayling: a conversation with Sir Ivan Lawrence QC

I’m standing with Sir Ivan Lawrence QC in a narrow room at his Pump Court chambers, examining an oil painting sent to him from Broadmoor by his former client the late Ronnie Kray. It is a naive depiction of a house in a field which could, at first glance, be the work of a worryingly forceful five-year-old. Yet what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in emphasis: the signature ‘R Kray’ is daubed in thumping capitals. Sir Ivan defended Kray in his 1969 murder trial over the killing of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel. Cornell, a member of the rival Richardson gang, had reportedly

Mark Mason

Check yourself: have you succumbed to this corporate speak epidemic?

You know how it goes with corporate speak. A strange new habit grows and spreads, creeping largely unnoticed into the language, until one day you hear a sentence so bizarre, so divorced from normality, that it brings you up short. It happened to me the other day. A call centre operative, in the middle of a prolonged display of not being able to help, had to check something with a colleague. Before doing so she said: ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’ Just stop and consider that sentence for a moment. ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’ The woman who uttered it

Martin Vander Weyer

The eurozone is strong enough to kick out Greece if Syriza wins

Ever since European Central Bank president Mario Draghi declared himself ready, in July 2012, ‘to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro’, the likely disintegration of the single currency — as predicted by pundits such as yours truly over the preceding years — has all but disappeared from the comment agenda. The combination of a persuasive ECB leader with reform in some bailed-out eurozone states (notably Ireland and Spain) and an easing of bond market pressures, plus the iron will of Germany to see the euro survive, drove the break-up argument into retreat. Indeed it seemed for a while to have been vanquished, and that ex-president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing

Matthew Parris

When did we become a nation of police informers?

There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that. It’s true that I would never shop a friend for drink-driving — but frankly I doubt I’d shop a friend for murder. This column isn’t about what we should do if we know a friend drink-drives — responses will be various and variously arguable — but about shock at my own serious misreading of my countrymen. I was tooling along in our Mini on the first Saturday of the year, with BBC Radio 2 playing. It was Graham Norton’s fizzy and engaging morning show, where a regular feature is his ‘Grill

Jonathan Ray

January Wine Club | 8 January 2015

I’ve so many mates on the wagon this month that there is hardly anyone left to play with. It turns out that even my old chum Jason Yapp is doing a detox. More baby steps really, he tells me, a day at a time, but even so. Happily, though, before Jason went all virtuous, he and I sat down for a lengthy tasting in order to choose some seriously tasty fare for the first Spectator Wine Club of the year. And I am really chuffed with the final six that we picked, for they are excellent examples of what regional France has to offer the discerning drinker. All three reds

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Bish bash Bosphorus: Elif Shafak’s saga of love and death in Istanbul is crammed with incident on every page

If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his elephant in Istanbul in the 1500s, The Architect’s Apprentice might be suitable for you. My heart sank slightly when the review copy arrived: a 452-page brick by an Orange-Prize-shortlisted Turkish author and ‘global speaker’ who ‘blends western and eastern methods of storytelling’ and has 1.6 million Twitter followers. But I resolved to get caught up in the novel and did.You have to suspend all need for irony and modernity and latch on to Jahan, the Indian boy who is the central character. As a child Jahan stows away on the

Wednesday

7 Jan 2015

Nick Cohen

Charlie Hebdo: the truths that ought to be self-evident but still aren’t

Religious murderers gunned down European freedom in Paris today. Tonight everyone is defiant. I am just back from a ‘Je suis Charlie’ vigil in Trafalgar Square, and the solidarity was good to see. I fear it won’t last. I may be wrong. Perhaps tomorrow’s papers and news programmes will prove their commitment to freedom by republishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But I doubt they will even have the courage to admit that they are too scared to show them. Instead we will have insidious articles, which condemn freedom of speech as a provocation and make weasel excuses for murder without having the guts to admit it. Tony Barber, Europe editor

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: In which today’s big loser is the NHS

Everyone predicted a sombre PMQs. It was anything but. A mood of opportunistic and lacerating silliness dominated today’s exchanges. The NHS – poor thing – was fought over like a bunny rabbit caught by two packs of ravening hounds. Miliband’s aim was to take the word ‘crisis’ and gum it to the health service with Superglue. He accused Cameron of destroying walk-in centres, wrecking social care and wasting billions on reorganisation. In reply Cameron airily waved five billion brand new pounds to be spent on social care which he says Labour opposes. Then he blundered by asking Miliband to suggest a solution to the problem. This not only validated Miliband’s

Steerpike

Guardian hosts champagne tasting for champagne socialists

As Mr S revealed yesterday, The Guardian has vetoed brown sauce for their palatable readers, confining it to be fit only for lowly members of the establishment. Champagne, on the other hand, is still okay. The paper are running a bubbly tasting session tonight which will allow their readers to ‘break down the barriers of this exclusive domain’ and give them the skills to ‘be able to talk about champagne with confidence’. With ticket prices listed at £99, only the paper’s finest champagne socialists need consider attending.

William Cook

A & E just saved my son’s life. Let’s not forget how important it is

We were lucky. The ambulance came in half an hour. By then my teenage son Edward was unconscious. He’d had a headache the day before, but by the evening he seemed to be getting better – sitting on the sofa, watching telly, annoying his little sister. We’d been through the meningitis checklist on the NHS website: no rash; no stiff neck; no aversion to bright light. He ate a big supper and went to bed. In the small hours he started vomiting. We thought it was the norovirus. By dawn he was delirious. Then he stopped responding altogether. My wife and I went with Edward in the ambulance. The paramedics

James Forsyth

PMQs: Playing Punch and Judy with the NHS

Today’s PMQs was, predictably, about the NHS. But the Punch and Judy nature of the session seemed particularly small in the light of events in Paris. After expressions of solidarity with the French, normal business was resumed. Ed Miliband was enjoying himself, confident that he was on his party’s chosen turf. He piled into Cameron accusing him of blaming patients for the crisis and demanding that he apologise to those who have had to wait for more than four hours. Cameron fended him off, but didn’t look particularly comfortable. However, he had a good counter-attack ready, attacking Miliband for allegedly having told the BBC’s Nick Robinson that he wanted to

Fraser Nelson

Not in our name – Muslims respond in revulsion to Charlie Hebdo massacre

The Muslim Council of France, and of Britain, have denounced today’s attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The imam of the mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, has said: “This is a thunderous declaration of war. The times have changed. We’re entering a new phase of this confrontation… we are horrified by the brutality and the savagery” But Muslims don’t need imams – or ‘community leaders’ – to speak for them – they can do it for themselves. Here are some of the denunciations on Twitter:- As a Pakistani Muslim I condemn this attack, my Religion is not under threat from cartoons #Notinmyname #CharlieHebdo — kanza akhwand (@akhwandk) January 7, 2015 As a Muslim

Alex Massie

Je Suis Charlie

It is important, today especially, to remember that this is nothing new. We have been here before. On the 11th of July, 1991, Hitoshi Igarachi was murdered in his office at the University of Tsukuba. His crime? He had translated The Satanic Verses into Japanese. That was all. Eight days previously Ettore Capriola, the novel’s Italian translator, had been fortunate to survive an attempted assassination in Milan. And in October 1993 William Nygaard, the Norweigan publisher of Salman Rushdie’s novel, was shot three times. Mercifully and remarkably, he survived. In fact, it had begun before that. On Valentine’s Day 1989 when the Iranian Ayatollah issued his fatwa against Rushdie. That was a test

Hugo Rifkind

The A&E crisis must be all my fault, obviously

A preview of Hugo Rifkind’s column in this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow… Oh, I see. So it’s my fault. There I was, thinking that the general swamping and near collapse of accident and emergency services in hospitals across Britain might be the result of, you know, some sort of systemic problem within the NHS. With me, a mere member of the public, just being an occasional victim. But no! Apparently it’s all because I took my wailing two-year-old daughter in, one Sunday afternoon last year, to get some antibiotics for her ear. This is good to know. For, had I not been told that all this was the fault of

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Efficiency and blundering

From ‘The Threat of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz’, The Spectator, 9 January 1915: THE Manchester Guardian of Tuesday published the text of the interview with Grand Admiral von Tirpitz which appear last week in the New York Sun. This was the interview in which Admiral von Tirpitz seriously proposed that German submarines might declare war on all enemy merchant ships. It is obvious that submarines would hardly ever be able to save the persons on board torpedoed merchant ships. Such warfare would be unmitigated murder, outraging not only the letter and spirit of all the Hague Conventions which Germany signed, but the customs of war as they were understood and practised long before

Tuesday

6 Jan 2015

Melanie McDonagh

Why is Stephen Fry’s decision to get married a major news story for the BBC?

Why, do you reckon, was Stephen Fry’s decision to marry another man an item in a BBC radio news bulletin earlier today, right up there with the row over Jim Murphy and the mansion tax? I mean, we’re obviously interested – personally I was completely riveted by the revelation he’s all of 30 years older than his partner – but not as in national interest? I mean it’s one for the papers, in the light celeb stories slot, but not the news… surely? Even those who accept that gay and heterosexual marriages are on a par – which I don’t – must question whether Mr Fry’s status as Twitter king and Well-Known Gay

Ed West

PEGIDA and the Left’s morality play

Germany is on its feet again, ja, so what can go wrong? This week Good Germans have been taking to the streets to counter-protest the PEGIDA (the Bad Germans) and their ‘anti-Islamisation’ rallies that began in Dresden; Europe’s media is horrified, if also slightly fascinated, with the clear subtext being ‘if the rest of Europe can’t go in for flag-waving there’s no way you lot can’. Not that media hostility will make much difference, I imagine; across western Europe the anti-politics movement is also anti-journalism. Large numbers of people feel that the broadcast and broadsheet media gives an inherently distorted account of multiculturalism, which its journalists view as a tenet

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: New Year haikus (plus: a poem about the bedroom tax)

Your New Year challenge was to submit a poem composed of three haikus that looks forward to the year ahead. The traditional Japanese haiku contains 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules are not always observed by western poets). It is neatly summed up here by the late Stanley J. Sharpless: This is a haiku. Five syllables, then seven. Then five more. Got it? The winners below take £17 apiece. Hats off to Max Ross for injecting a sliver of optimism into the almost all-encompassing gloom of the winning line-up. And Happy New Year to you all! Alan Millard Ukip wins more