Society

Thursday

11 Dec 2014

From the archives | 11 December 2014

From ‘The Vantage Point of Peace’, a leading article in the Spectator of 26 December 1914: We are not going to write a Christmas article on palm boughs and olive branches and the Angel of Peace. Not only is there no peace in sight for the world at the moment, but any talk of peace before our enemies are beaten, or even half beaten, and while their ambition, their hatred, and, if you will, their folly are at full blaze, could only tend to prolong the war. What we and our allies have got to let the world know just now is that, in General Grant’s words, altered to suit the season, we

Douglas Murray

Why are we abandoning the Middle East’s Christians to Isis?

She took the call herself the night the Islamic State came into Mosul. ‘Convert or leave or you’ll be killed,’ she was told. The callers, identifying themselves as Isis members, knew the household was Christian because her husband worked as a priest in the city. They fled that night. Like many of their Christian neighbours they sought refuge in the monastery of St Matthew. But Isis took that over, tore down the Cross, smashed all Cross-decorated windows, used it for their own prayers and flew their black flag on top of the church. Across what was Nineveh, Iraq’s Christians spent this year fleeing from village to village, hoping to find

Edie Campbell

Edie Campbell’s catwalk notes: the joys of the hunt ball, and mystery of Grozny fashion week

It seems as though I have just been on some grand tour of the absurd. It helps that I work in fashion, quite possibly the most absurd of all industries. And the most magnificent display of this absurdity has reached London: the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Planes have touched down and disgorged their precious cargo, the ‘Angels’ (they’re more than just models, remember), who bounced onto British soil, all glossy and shiny and pristine. And where were they heading? To the unsexiest of all venues — Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre, home to those other stalwarts of glamour, the Ideal Home Show and the Professional Lighting and Sound Association Trade Fair.

Pippa Middleton

Pippa Middleton on wine, fishing and Kim Kardashian

A few days ago I went truffle hunting in Piedmont. It’s been a bumper year for white truffles in northern Italy — the best ever, according to some experts — thanks to climate change and an exceptionally wet summer. My guide was a brilliantly sharp-eyed Italian, Mario, whose dog Rex did the snuffling. Mario told me that dogs are better trufflers than pigs because pigs often eat the truffles before you can get your hands on them. We (or rather Rex) found two, and I have been devouring truffle since I returned; I’ve had it with scrambled eggs, mashed potato, pasta and even just straight onto toast. I didn’t think

Alexander Smith

Alexander McCall Smith’s notebook: America vs my diet

The trouble with going on an American book tour is that I know it’s going to play havoc with my diet. People on diets can very quickly become diet bores, but I am unrepentant: I know the calorie content of most things and, for instance, how long it takes to burn off a croissant. Not that I eat croissants any more, of course. (We dieters can be tremendously smug.) America is a challenge, though, because all their food is injected with corn syrup. In Denver I was once served an omelette that had been dusted, in cold sobriety, with icing sugar. But it’s not just icing sugar that is a

Valérie Trierweiler

Valérie Trierweiler’s notebook: Christmas as a singleton

Christmas will be a very warm occasion for me. I’ll be spending it with the Massonneaus — my family — as I do every year. It will be five brothers and sisters, gathered around our mother in our childhood home, a council house that, for us, felt like a palace when we first moved in. As always, our mother will try very hard for everything to be perfect, from the meal to the mountains of presents. With 12 grandchildren, who are all at an age to bring around a special someone or a ‘fiancée’, it usually becomes quite boisterous. However, this will also be my first Christmas for a very

James Delingpole

This Christmas, I wish you the gift of flu

Have you had the horrid bug that’s going round yet? I’ve got it now and I do hope you get it too. But before I explain why let me describe the unpleasant symptoms. These include: frequent headaches; burning lungs; watery mucus that makes you feel like you are drowning, later replaced by thick phlegm which makes you feel like you’re being suffocated; a raw, ravaged throat akin to swallowing ground tiger whiskers; a cough so tickly your sleep is like the ‘Albanian’ torture sequence in The Ipcress File; general dyspepsia, torpor, achiness and malaise; irrational, impotent rage over absolutely everything. The last symptom is so weird it would almost be

Cosmo Landesman

Straight white males are the winners in the sexual counter-revolution

When it comes to the battle of ideas, it’s often said that the right won the economic argument and the left won the cultural one. But consider the case of the radical lesbian with the deluxe dildo I met at a north London squat party in the early 1980s. We were having an argument about sexual politics. She was drunk and trying to be provocative when she pointed the dildo at me and declared, ‘You lot are finished. The future belongs to us: the sexual freaks.’ By ‘you lot’ she meant white, middle-class heterosexual men like me. (And ‘us’ were radical lesbians, gays, the S&M brigade, bisexuals, transsexuals, try-anything-once-sexuals.) This

Paul Wood

Black flags and Christmas lights: a letter from Beirut

Blue and white Christmas lights twinkle over the shops near my apartment in Beirut’s Christian quarter; pricy boutiques display elaborate nativity scenes. But people are having trouble getting into the festive mood. ‘Do you think the war will come here?’ asks my landlady nervously, not for the first time. There is no rush to battle, no electric charge in the air, just a rather depressed feeling among Lebanese that their country can no longer escape the violence over the border in Syria. The black flag of the so-called Islamic State has appeared after Friday prayers in some mosques in the north. The assumption is that Lebanon will be the next

John Rutter

The threat to Christmas carols – and how to save them

So, Christmas carols — they haven’t really gone away, but we don’t sing them as much as we used to. We aren’t, in general, much good at massed singing these days. Look around you at a church wedding when it’s time for a hymn and watch the congregation standing in mute embarrassment, the only sound coming from the organ and the choir (if there is one). That’s partly because hymns nowadays are known only to churchgoers, and they are in a minority; but it’s also inhibition. Singing is like swimming — a natural, healthy and intensely pleasurable physical activity — but you have to try it, preferably when very young,

Nina Stibbe

The Christmas lunch

Illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy There was no soup in the freezer. She surveyed the jettisoned items and there, on a can of creosote, was a tub The early Christmas lunch party had been Bunny Wedgewood’s idea. But Bunny had pulled out the day before, having been sectioned by her daughter and son-in-law. Notification came from Bunny herself, apparently calling from a phone box in the cafeteria of the psychiatric wing of Leicester General Hospital. Bunny claimed to have been admitted ‘just for Christmas and the worst of the winter’ and expected to be home — albeit on tablets — by Shrove Tuesday. Unless it was a joke — one never

Matthew Parris

Why it’s time to revive the commonplace book

Among the gifts that have come my way this Christmas season, none has given me pleasure more immediate or more lasting than Kenneth Baker’s new commonplace book, More Rags of Time. I dislike the title. It sounds precious, as does Lord Wavell’s famous and wonderful poetry anthology Other Men’s Flowers; or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Perhaps it’s inherently difficult to find a name that personalises what, by definition, isn’t yours. Scrapbooks are collections of things that are unrelated except by being regarded as delights by their collector. And Kenneth (Lord) Baker, who was Margaret Thatcher’s technology supremo and education secretary and John Major’s home secretary, and is a godfather of the

Hugo Rifkind

Twentysomethings: you won’t miss being poor. But you will miss not knowing what you’re doing

What I miss most about being very young is the cluelessness. It’s enormously liberating, cluelessness. The boundaries of life are simply not comprehended. The boxes into which others will put you are not apparent. Thus, you float out with life, and you see all. I moved to London at 22, with a vague plan to sleep on my dad’s living-room floor until something better happened. He was very good about it, although I’m not sure he’d been consulted. Before long, I moved to Camberwell with an old schoolfriend. Lord knows why we chose Camberwell; very possibly because it’s mentioned in Withnail & I. And anyway, this was more like Elephant

Michael Tanner

Agents will be queuing up to sign this 26-year-old baritone from Sichuan

The Royal Academy of Music’s end-of-term opera can always be looked forward to because it never disappoints: the repertoire is enterprising, the musical performance is invariably on a high level, and the productions are almost always sane and unpretentious: qualities that can’t be relied upon in more prestigious houses. This term’s production(s) were no exception: the strongest two of Puccini’s Il trittico. If you have to say that one of the three is weaker than the others, my vote goes to Il tabarro, Puccini’s attempt at verismo, a B-opera comparable to B-movies of the 1940s, except that they tended to be not quite so relentlessly conscientious in building atmosphere and

Mark Forsyth

The Servant

You will see, alas, that all of this is true. One morning, I awoke in a feather bed in a room in a tavern and reached, as I always did, for my purse of gold, but it was not there. I had been travelling on business for many months and weeks with only my faithful coachman Joseph for company. Wherever I stayed, I would put the purse of golden coins by my pillow. Each night it was the last thing that I touched, and the first thing I touched in the morning. Sometimes, when I climb a flight of stairs, I have a strange feeling, which may be peculiar to

Jonathan Ray

Christmas Wine Club II

Just in case you missed it last week we’re showing again the details of the final Wine Club offer of the year, courtesy of Private Cellar, the East Anglian wine merchant which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The great Jancis Robinson recently declared the company to be the finest independent merchant in the UK, which is one heck of a compliment and one with which many of our readers would agree, certainly the readers who joined us the other week to taste a dozen or so of their wines, of which the following selections were the highest scorers. The Henri Chauvet Brut Blanc de Noirs NV Champagne (1)

Roger Alton

Fifteen things we learned about sport in 2014

It was the year of KP, Keano and the Kiwis; of Federer, Froch and Phil the Power (no change there then); of Sochi and Suarez; of Rory and Ronaldo; McCaw, McGinley and McCoy (as always). But it was also the year when we learned some very valuable things about sport. 1. For all the boasting about how good the Premier League is, there’s actually only one team in it — which is less than in Italy, Spain or France, or even poor old Scotland. The only country where anything similar is happening is Germany, where Bayern are running away with the Bundesliga, just like Chelsea here. Which only goes to

Rory Sutherland

How to pick the perfect present

I had always attributed it to bad luck in the genetic lottery. I am three-eighths Welsh and a quarter Scottish, which is a rotten mixture: part Cavalier, part Roundhead. This means that every pleasurable experience I have in life is coloured by Calvinist guilt: in the remote likelihood that I were ever to find myself sitting in the grotto in the Playboy Mansion, my Welsh part would enjoy it while the Scottish part would be worrying about how much it cost to heat. But it seems this guilt problem is nothing to do with my ethnicity: no human brain is remotely monolithic, but a bundle of conflicting modules cobbled together

Christopher Howse

Christmas Quiz | 11 December 2014

So they say In 2014, who was quoted as saying: 1. ‘There is no status for the partner of a head of state, and there has never been one.’ 2. ‘He’s there to serve a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron’s lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device.’ 3. ‘Money is no object in this relief effort.’ 4. ‘I smoked pot as a kid. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.’ 5. ‘If Jesus Christ was alive today, I cannot see him, as the Christian person that he was and the great person that he was, saying this could not happen.’ 6. ‘Rush, O Muslims, to your state, because hijrah to

Bruce Anderson

Cognac and the Viking connection in la France profonde

The chestnut trees were still resplendent in yellow leaf along the banks of a misty autumn river on its glide through woodlands, pasture, comfortable towns — and vineyards. This was the Charente. Eighty years ago, before the lorry became dominant, it would not have been so peaceful. In those days, barges laden with barrels of Cognac made their way along this river to the coast to be shipped all over the world. Wine has been grown in Cognac for centuries and exported since the Middle Ages. But it was always inferior to the products of Bordeaux, to the south-west. Even so, its acidity and low alcohol content made it ideal