Society

Thursday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Just what Diego Costa needed: a guide to the traditions of the Premier League

That excitable but likeable hombre, Everton manager Roberto Martinez, took it upon himself to give a stern lecture to the Brazilian-born Spaniard Diego Costa after Chelsea’s sensational 6-3 victory at Goodison at the weekend. Costa, who operates on the field with the speed and directness of the bullet train and will bring Chelsea the Premier League title, I guarantee it, had indulged in a spot of mild gloating after the Everton defender Séamus Coleman, who otherwise had a fine match, had plonked the ball into his own net. And that was what Martinez took exception to. He wasn’t alone, either: the Everton keeper Tim Howard carried on as if Costa

James Delingpole James Delingpole

We need more opinionated English eccentrics making documentaries like, ahem, me…

Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started this job I’d review one almost every fortnight. Always there’d be something worth watching: on the horrors of the Pacific or the Eastern Front, say; or castles; or Churchill; or medieval sword techniques. But now it’s all crap like The Hidden World of Georgian Needlecraft or In The Footsteps of Twelve Forgotten South American Civilisations Which All Look The Same or A Brooding, Long-Haired Scottish Geographer Shouts From Inside A Volcano Why Climate Change Is Worse Than Ever. The presenters have got more annoying too. I mean, I’m not saying

Clive Aslet

Sicily – notes from a large island

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Sicily is anything like the Isle of Wight: it’s 70 times the size, and mountainous. Despite some beautifully engineered roads, it always takes longer to get around than one expects. Even my Sicilian friend has to stop to ask the way. Autostrade are closed, bridges under repair. It doesn’t help that every other motorist drives as though he’s your enemy. Which, unless he comes from your village, he probably is. Beautiful, fertile, sunny, with fabulous wine and cuisine — no island is so blessed by nature. Even the terrible communications, which meant that neighbouring communities couldn’t reach each other, have bestowed a legacy

Simon Barnes

I know that Richard Dawkins is wrong about Down’s syndrome, because I know my son

No household that contains a 13-year-old boy is eternally tranquil. There had been a bit of temperament that evening, an outright refusal to go to bed, hard words for his mother and his father, and trickiest of all, an attitude that seemed to deny not only our parenthood but our humanity. Then the dam broke, and that was better but more exhausting. Still, at last he was in bed and at peace and the world was easy again. So I poured drinks for us both and raised my glass: ‘Dawkins was right,’ I said. And my wife laughed and agreed. Thank God for jokes, eh? What would life be without

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

It’s not just Ashya King’s parents who the authorities despise

My first act upon returning from my holiday was to sign the online petition to have the supremely irritating children’s cartoon figure Peppa Pig banned from television. I have always found the creature half-witted, arrogant and sinister, and the tune which accompanies her exploits is both grating and didactic. Further, even allowing for the usual anthropomorphic licence employed by cartoonists, this Peppa does not remotely resemble a proper pig, and her snout is worryingly two-dimensional. She gave me hours of misery when my daughter was a toddler, although not quite so much as Balamory — a programme which made me feel physically unwell. The Ban Peppa petition was got up

Nicholas Farrell

Italy is killing refugees with kindness

The next time you eat a fish from the Mediterranean, just remember that it may well have eaten a corpse. As the Italian author Aldo Busi told the press just the other day: ‘I don’t buy fish from the Mediterranean any more for fear of eating Libyans, Somalis, Syrians and Iraqis. I’m not a cannibal and so now I stick with farmed fish, or else Atlantic cod.’ Personally, I prefer my fish natural, fattened on drowned human flesh, but there you go. I take the point. Foolishly, last October Italy’s left-wing government became the first European Union country to decriminalise illegal immigration and deploy its navy at huge expense to

The Spectator

From the archives | 4 September 2014

From ‘The giving up of Louvain to “Military Execution”,’ The Spectator, 5 September 1914: Germany has dealt herself the hardest blow which she has yet suffered in the war. By burning Louvain, killing we know not how many of its inhabitants, and turning the rest (say nearly 40,000 men, women, and children) adrift in the fields and on the pillaged countryside, she has forfeited the consideration of decent men. She has committed a deed which two centuries of exemplary conduct could scarcely efface… Germany must henceforth occupy a place with the Vandals and the Huns.

Lucy Vickery

Rhyme time | 4 September 2014

In Competition No. 2863 you were invited to recast a well-known nursery rhyme in the style of a well-known author. The entry was evenly split between prose and poetry but in general verse worked better. Commendations go to Chris Port, Mike Morrison, Max Ross, Nick MacKinnon, Adrian Fry and Mark Shelton. The winners earn £25 each. Chris O’Carroll takes £30. Once upon a sturdy tuffet sat a maid the world calls Muffet, Dining on a wholesome bowl of dairy oddments, curds with whey. On a sudden, just beside her, she espied a loathsome spider; Cold abhorrence surged inside her. She could find no words to say, No ejaculations suited to

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

‘Rape is rape’ serves no one well, least of all rape victims

When Mary Jane Mowat remarked recently that rape conviction statistics would not improve ‘until women stop getting so drunk,’ the retired Crown Court judge knew there would be a row. It followed. The judge, knowing that only 60 per cent of rape charges that reach court end in conviction, was making a narrow point. There are big evidential difficulties in pitting the claimed recollection of someone who says she was too drunk to know what she was doing against the claimed recollection of someone who plainly wasn’t. But the row spread wider, as it keeps doing, into the moral status of taking advantage of an inebriated woman. Rape need not

Robert Collins

How on earth did David Mitchell’s third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?

Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999), featured a disembodied spirit that wandered around making itself at home in other people’s souls. Transmigration spread throughout that book — the lives of its characters intertwined in brilliantly intricate ways — and has continued to throughout Mitchell’s fiction. When his characters aren’t being reborn as new people in one book, they’re turning up alive and well for a second outing in another. His latest, The Bone Clocks, continues the cycle of endless rebirth. Like four out of five of his earlier works, this supernatural, intertwining epic has made it

Wednesday

Melissa Kite

Justine Greening: the Tory message on social mobility ‘has been diluted’

This feature is a preview of this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow: Justine Greening wants to talk about social mobility. If it is not immediately obvious why the Secretary of State for International Development wants to talk about this issue, it becomes clear. Growing up the daughter of a steel worker gave her an insight into what it’s like to struggle, she tells me, when we meet in a conference room overlooking Parliament Square. She says she feels that the Tories are not pushing as hard on social mobility as they ought to be. Ms Greening thinks the issue needs a champion. She never says so explicitly, but clearly this is

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

The equine squatters that landowners have no power to evict

Fly-grazing will be discussed for two hours in Parliament this afternoon. But what is it – and why should the government care? Put simply, fly-grazing is the unauthorised grazing of land by equines. Or, as Defra puts it, ‘the practice of leaving horses to graze on public or private land without the permission of the owner or occupier.’ Essentially, it’s the equine version of being a squatter. This afternoon the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee will take evidence on the topic, after Julian Sturdy MP put forward a Control of Horses Bill that will have its second reading in October. But are irresponsible horse owners something that the government really ought to be

Susannah Hickling

Seven ways to protect your ears

Did you know that ten million people in the UK have some hearing loss? In fact, long-term exposure to sounds that are only as loud as a food processor and just a bit less noisy than a lawnmower can damage your ears. Here are some easy ways to avoid going deaf – or preserve what hearing you’ve got: Turn it down. An MP3 player turned up to max can be as loud as a pneumatic drill. Get someone to stand next to you when you’re listening to your iPod. If they can hear it above your earphones, then it’s loud enough to do damage. Make earplugs your friend. Be kind

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Driven to distraction

‘Distraction’, from The Spectator, 5 September 1914: EVER since the world began great trouble has been surrounded by ceremonial. From age to age the ceremonial changes. It tends to become a bondage or a hypocrisy, and bold social reformers step in, as they think, to destroy it, but immediately it appears again in a new form. Modern mourning is the sackcloth and ashes of the past. The grave tone in which we address the afflicted, though their trouble touch us but little, is as much a ceremonial as was the wailing of the ancient Jewish sympathizer. The Psalmist was greatly aggrieved because, when his false friends were in distress, he

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How can Jews oppose Muslim anti-Semitism without being ‘Islamophobic’?

On Sunday there was a rally in London demanding ‘zero tolerance’ of anti-Semitism. About 4,500 people gathered in front of the Royal Courts of Justice. Speakers who addressed the crowds included the Chief Rabbi, Maajid Nawaz and me. Among the things I told the crowd was to expect more and to demand more of their ‘communal leadership’. Long-term readers will know that I’ve never had much time for communal leadership of any kind. I don’t like the groups who claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims – groups which disproportionately represent a politicised and fundamentalist hard-line interpretation of their faith. And I don’t like groups that have claimed to

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Jennifer Lawrence’s leaked photos highlight feminism’s next frontier: cyberspace

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_4_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman, Emma Barnett and Jamie Bartlett discuss the leaked photos” startat=1312] Listen [/audioplayer]Nobody wants naked photos of themselves leaked across the internet so a global network of creeps can beat off to them. But celebs and plebs alike are increasingly confronted by this unsavoury reality. Whether it’s anonymous hackers or enraged ex-boyfriends who post the images, the story is the same: women are being let down by their ignorance of the pitfalls of technology. You should be able to take naked photos of yourself. But if you choose to store them using technology that isn’t secure and that you don’t quite understand, there’s every chance they will

Steerpike Steerpike

Parris vs Monty rumbles on

As Mr S predicted yesterday, the row between Times colleagues Matthew Parris and Tim Montgomerie has simmered on. And turning up the temperature in the Times’ Red Box email this morning, Parris seemed to be getting rather catty: ‘I was pleased to be singled out by my friend and colleague, Tim Montgomerie, in yesterday’s throwaway “I’m looking at you, Matthew Parris”. In the course of these remarks, Tim also wrote this: “Political leadership … becomes impossible if a leader is not willing to give large majorities of his or her party’s natural supporters what they want. From a less well-intentioned speaker than Tim I would regard that as a disgraceful

Anna Baddeley

21 Up is intelligent and sensitive – and makes me crave for sex, vomit and immaturity

At 9 o’clock last night, I sat down with my take-away curry, flippedback the lid of my MacBook and went to the iPlayer website to catchthe first episode of 21 Up: New Generation, taking care to click thebutton that says ‘Yes, I do have a TV licence.’ One small problem: 21Up wasn’t on. Not until 10.35 p.m., aka time for Newsnight.Surely, I wondered, my small prawn karahi rapidly decreasing intemperature as I hunted for something rubbish to watch on 4oD, thelatest instalment of the 21st century remake of Michael Apted’s bold,immensely flawed sociological experiment, 7 Up, deserves a prime-timeslot?The reason why it had been denied one became apparent halfway throughthe episode. This new Up

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Military execution and the act of ‘Germanism’

The Giving up of Louvain to ‘Military Execution’, from The Spectator, 5 September 1914: GERMANY has dealt herself the hardest blow which she has yet suffered in the war. By burning Louvain, killing we know not how many of its inhabitants, and turning the rest (say nearly forty thousand men, women, and children) adrift in the fields and on the pillaged countryside, she has forfeited the consideration of decent men. She has committed a deed which two centuries of exemplary conduct could scarcely efface. “German” must for a long time to come be almost synonymous with those epithets of nationality which we use to denote barbaric behaviour, particularly barbarism directed

Julie Bindel

My ‘fare-dodging’ hell

At least every other time a ticket inspector boards a train or bus I’m on, I pretend I can’t find my ticket or Oyster card. I then miraculously find it at the very last second before my stop. Why? Pure revenge. I hate this nasty group of sadistic jobsworths and, having been stung by them myself, take great pleasure in distracting them for long enough to allow those who are fare dodging to get away without being spotted. The smugness of ticket inspectors becomes unbearable in the face of the chronically bad service on London transport. My blood boils when I spot a bank of uniformed inspectors, flanked by police officers, when disembarking