Society

Thursday

16 Jan 2014

My iPhone, iPad and Blackberry are conspiring against me

‘How often do you de-frag this?’ said the Good Geek in the phone shop. I had gone in finally to buy an iPhone. Trembling, I produced my laptop so we could download some software and save all the contacts in my BlackBerry and then port them back over to the new device. Or something. The Good Geek is so called because, unlike the other whizz kids who look at me like I’ve got two heads when I come in and ask for ‘a phone with buttons’, he always tries to help me. But he still terrifies me. He had only had my laptop open a few seconds before he typed

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of showing my grandson how to wield an axe

Until a fortnight ago there was a healthy, graceful, 70ft-specimen of Eucalyptus dalrympleana — or mountain gum — in the garden. Now there isn’t. Or rather, the remains of the trunk and branches are lying in sections on the ground. To knock a few quid off the tree surgeon’s bill, I’d grandiosely told them not to bother reducing the trunk and major branches to fire-grate-sized logs. Leave it in rings, I said, and I’ll split them up with an axe. Which they did. The next time I looked out, the men had departed and there were a couple of tons of wood lying in wheels in the sodden grass. The

Taki

When I played softball for Esquire, against Screw

Al Goldstein, who died recently and made the front page of the New York Times, was among the world’s most disgusting men. But hardly as repellent as Charles Saatchi and certainly without the coward’s bullying manner — against women, that is. Goldstein founded Screw magazine during the Sixties and pushed hard-core porn into the mainstream without the usual excuses of it being art disguised as porn, or vice versa. He apologised for nothing and took no prisoners and gave the finger to an outraged establishment who thought him rather vulgar, to say the least. I met him once and it was on a baseball diamond. Back in the Seventies there

Damian Thompson

I know how to cure my music addiction

About 30 years ago, not long before he died, my father bought an LP of Sir Clifford Curzon playing Schubert’s last piano sonata, in B flat D960. He was slightly defensive about the purchase. You see, he already had a record of Alfred Brendel playing the same piece. ‘It’s a bit of an extravagance,’ he said, ‘but I think in this case it’s worth it.’ Of course it was worth it! First, the B flat sonata touches the sublime in almost every bar. I was so lucky that, thanks to my father’s impeccable taste, it was one of the first pieces of classical music I got to know after we

William Cook

The best thing to come out of Davos

Another new year and once again the world’s leading CEOs and politicians descend on Davos, transforming this little Alpine town into the world’s most (self-) important talking shop. Yet there’s another side to Davos that’s far more interesting than dry geopolitical debate. Long before it became a stage for the World Economic Forum, this quiet corner of the Swiss Alps was the home of one of the most brilliant figures in modern art. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his last 20 years in Davos. The town features in many of his finest paintings. It’s the only place with a museum devoted to his work. The Kirchner Museum in Davos is a

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: Oh dear… perhaps Standard Chartered isn’t as dull as it looks

The cautionary tale of the Co-operative Bank, its black hole and its naughty chairman has recently taught us that if a financial institution has the reputation of being dull, earnest and set in its ways, it probably isn’t. The collapse last year of Switzerland’s oldest private bank, Wegelin & Co — whose boss once claimed that being small and provincial made it ‘easy to avoid the deadly emotions of greed and fear’ — was another example. Attention now turns to Standard Chartered, an overseas commercial bank that has long had the reputation of sticking cautiously to the mode of business in which it has historic roots, notably in Asia, and

James Delingpole

When trolling pressure groups cause real harm

My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally, physically she’s not the lithe young thing she was in her 1920s adolescence. I mean no disrespect to my beloved grandmother, but if we’re honest, when Michael Bay is casting his next blockbuster and it’s a choice between her and Megan Fox for the female lead, well… . It’s not just me who has noticed this: the kids have even more so. When they were younger, especially, and I asked them to kiss their great-grandmother they’d react — as so many children do when confronting their older relatives’ decrepitude — as

Rod Liddle

Christians – and Muslims – still behave better than the rest of us

Two years ago this week the philosopher Alain de Botton unveiled his proposals for a giant gilded tower in central London at which atheists such as himself could indulge in a spot of self-worship. This edifice was to be 46 metres tall and a line of gold at the top would pick out the years on earth at which creatures almost as brilliant as Alain, i.e. human beings, have been kicking around. He wanted his tower to have majesty and mystery, ‘like you get from looking at Ely Cathedral’, and added: ‘You should feel small, but not in an intimidated way.’ I don’t know if this monumental Tower of Arse

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes: French presidents used to have a touch of the monarch. Not any more

When I interviewed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France, for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I asked him why, when she lunched with him at the Elysée Palace for the first time, he had been served before her: she had been offended. M. Giscard explained that no slight had been intended. It was a matter of protocol — the president is the head of state, the British prime minister only the head of government. ‘You must remember,’ he added, ‘that the president is in the line of sovereigns.’ I recalled these words when reading about President Hollande and his amorous adventures in his helmet. To the British, it is

James Forsyth

Cameron’s mission for 2014: stay out of third place

European elections are normally an afterthought in British politics. As even David Cameron admits, most of us struggle to remember who our MEPs are. Two-thirds of us don’t even bother to vote for them. But this year, the European elections are threatening to dominate politics. Talk to Tory ministers and MPs about the year ahead, and they all look nervously towards May, because they know that the Conservative party is in real danger of coming third in a nationwide election for the first time in its history. In and of itself this need not matter too much. The trouble is that a third place finish would send the party into

Michael Heath

Michael Heath’s diary: I’ve fallen among hipsters (and I have the T-shirt to prove it)

I now live in the hippest part of London, Shoreditch. It must be Tony Blair’s idea of heaven, a multicultural mix of hugely rich and up-and-coming young things of every nationality, huge high-rise blocks of £5 million duplexes, old Victorian buildings ripped apart to make way for young men with beards working on searing new technology, hordes of young beautiful women striding around looking very much in charge. But amazingly something has escaped developers. The pubs, of which there are many. There is a wonderful example on the corner of my alley, the Eagle, a finer example of a Victorian pub than you’ll ever see. It was once the locale

The Spectator

Forget Wall St. The Wolves of Whitehall caused the crash – and could do so again

This week, Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street opened and the Office of National Statistics reported that house prices are up by 12 per cent in London and by 5 per cent across the UK as a whole. While the former represents the cocaine-fuelled greed of bankers, which many like to think caused the financial crisis in the first place, the latter represents a wider form of greed which has even more to do with the problems that have afflicted the world from 2007 onwards. The Wolf of Wall Street is no fantasy. While the behaviour of the antihero, Jordan Belfort, has been ratcheted up for the purposes

Douglas Murray

Amsterdam

‘What are people in your country saying about Holland these days?’ one Dutch friend recently asked me. I hadn’t the heart to reply that no one was talking that much about his country. But the question seemed typically Dutch. Endlessly outward-looking and interested, yet charmingly insular and with a slightly off-kilter view of itself. The Dutch character — like the country — is fascinating for that cocktail of conservatism and libertinism, strict rule-making and anarchism which runs through it. Foreign tourism there has undoubtedly suffered in recent years from an exaggeration of just one side of that complex character. And although this seems mercifully to have declined in recent years,

Rian Malan

What a lost prison manuscript reveals about the real Nelson Mandela

This is a story about Nelson Mandela, and it begins on Robben Island in 1974. Prisoner number 466/64 is writing up his life story, working all night and sleeping all day. Finished pages go to trusted comrades who write comments and queries in the margins. The text is then passed to one Laloo Chiba, who transcribes it in ‘microscopic’ letters on to sheets of paper which are later inserted into the binding of notebooks and carried off the island by Mac Maharaj when he is released in 1976. Outside, the intrepid Mac turns the microscopic text into a typescript and sends it to London, where it becomes the Higgs boson

Vernon Bogdanor

The Spectator book review that brought down Macmillan’s government

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Vernon Bogdanor discuss Iain Macleod’s ‘What Happened’ article” startat=1460] Listen [/audioplayer]Fifty years ago this week, a cover story in The Spectator helped to bring down a Conservative government. It was called ‘The Tory Leadership’ and was written by the editor, Iain Macleod, who had been a senior minister in Harold Macmillan’s government. Purporting to be the review of a book by Randolph Churchill on how Lord Home had ‘emerged’ in October 1963 as Macmillan’s successor, it claimed that Macmillan had fixed the succession so as to scupper the chances of the natural candidate, R.A. Butler, who had been deputy prime minister in all but name. In those days,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I escape my neighbour’s spy cameras?

Q. I have a problem with what might be called location blindness. I live in Balham, but when I arrange restaurant lunches with friends, most of whom live in west London, they tend to assume I will be happy to make three times as long a journey to meet up as they will have to make themselves. A good midpoint for me would be, for example, Green Park, which takes only 15 minutes by Tube from Clapham South, but often, when someone has agreed to meet there, they ring at the 11th hour to suggest Notting Hill instead (50 minutes by tube for me, ten minutes’ walk for them). Or else

Raymond Keene

Warhorses

Towards the end of last year, those two old warhorses Anatoly Karpov and Jan Timman added to their total of over 100 competitive games against each other by contesting a four-game match in Groningen, Holland. Both aged 62, the players displayed resilience and ingenuity which contribute to the annals of age-related achievements in serious international competitive chess. After draws in the first three games, Karpov broke through to take game four and overall match victory by 2½–1½. Karpov-Timman: Groningen Match 2013; Queen’s Indian Defence 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 b6 4 g3 Ba6 5 b3 This variation was popular in the World Championship matches between Karpov

Raymond Keene

No. 297

White to play. This position is a variation from Nepomniachtchi-Ivanchuk, Beijing 2013. White has a ferocious attack. How can he land the killer blow? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 21 January or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week there is a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qc8+ Last week’s winner Richard Hughes, London SW17

The Spectator

Spectator letters: On the Pope, Jesus and Mandy Rice-Davies

Papal blessing Sir: In his excellent article on Pope Francis (‘Pope idol’, 11 January), Luke Coppen mentions the satirical rumour that the new pontiff had abolished sin. It could never be said, however, even in a spoof, that he has abolished the Devil, whom he has named and shamed on a number of occasions. What Coppen calls ‘the cockeyed lionisation of Francis’ is surely itself a trick of the Devil: so too the ‘older son problem’ — the disgruntlement of obedient Catholics at Francis’s embrace of sinful prodigal sons and daughters. Virtue is surely its own reward, and no one who has experienced grace hankers after the fleshpots of Egypt. Piers

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 16 January 2014

Do you ever watch the greats playing bridge? And if you do, are you sometimes baffled, because instead of playing the obvious card, they do something that seems to be completely random? Of course, it never is random — it’s just that they are operating on a different plane from the rest of us. Not only is their awareness deeper and their technique better, but they never lose sight of the psychological aspect of the game. They are always trying to see things from their opponents’ points of view, to entice them to defend in a way that will bring about their own defeat. As John Lennon once said, you