Society

Thursday

The Spectator

What happened in 2013, from Depardieu’s hug to Sachin’s last bow

January David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said he wanted to ‘negotiate a new settlement with our European partners’, and that before the end of 2017 would ‘give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice’. Gérard Depardieu hugged President Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi as he received a Russian passport. French troops were welcomed in the streets of Timbuktu as they drove back Islamist forces in Mali. HMV, the record shop, and Blockbuster, the DVD rental firm, went into administration. There were riots in Belfast. A helicopter crashed into a tower block at Vauxhall in London. The City of London approved

The Spectator

Joy to the world | 12 December 2013

Pessimism sells. It shifts books and newspapers, sends ratings soaring. It fills lecture halls, wins research grants, makes political careers. We are fed this constant diet of doom, predicting anything from meteorological Armageddon to a tyranny of austerity, and so it is little wonder that we tend to miss the bigger story. A cold, dispassionate look at the facts reveals that we are living in a golden era. and that, if you use objective measures, 2013 has been the best year in human history. As a public service – and one which is rarely provided in broadcast or print – The Spectator will below provide evidence for these assertions. We can

Mr Magoo

Cold Comfort | 12 December 2013

Five Christmas carols (5, 6, 5, 3 and 4 words respectively) have been re-arranged, and re-titled at 23/38 (4 words), 59/54/62D/5 (4 words), 87/12/74 (4 words), 20 (5 words) and 72/46A (3 words). A sixth carol (19 letters, 4 words) has been concealed in the grid under a new title (4 words), which must be highlighted. The initials of all six original carols can spell CUT BACK SWIM — COMFORT ICY DIGITS. Ignore an accent in 36D.   Across   1 Clocks measure time with seconds and musical rods (9) 8 Maths groups used for secret filming (10, two words) 15 Council reduced fare (4) 17 Get embarrassed once, when

Columba

To 2140: Essex Man

The hero is Father Brown, appearing in column 3. ‘The Innocence (22) / Wisdom (15) / Secret (6D) / Scandal (27) of Father Brown’ are four collections containing, respectively, the stories ‘The Blue Cross’ (7), ‘The Purple Wig’ (25), ‘The Red Moon of Meru’ (18) and ‘The Green Man’ (26). First prize Steve Reszetniak, Enfield, Middlesex Runners-up P.L. Macdougall, London SW6; Brenda Widger, Bowdon, Cheshire

Ed West Ed West

You have to admire the chutzpah of the Saudis in protesting religious intolerance

Further to yesterday’s post on Britain’s apathy about Christian persecution, the main question people asked in response was: what can Britain do, without military means? Taking aside that our military power helped to bring about persecution in Iraq and almost certainly would have done in Syria had this government got its way, there are lots of ways you can peacefully influence a country’s politics, including financial and moral pressure. That is what Saudi Arabia does, after all. The Organisation Islamic Co-operation (OIC), for example, a bloc of 57 Muslim countries dominated by the Saudis, has just released the latest edition of its annual ‘Islamophobia report’. It states that in the

Frank Field

The first two years of life are more important for social mobility than schooling

Much is prattled on about social mobility. Practically the whole emphasis, however, is put on schools. Yet by the time most children reach school, life’s race for many of us has been determined. The report I wrote for the Prime Minister published in December 2010, The Foundation Years: preventing poor children becoming poor adults, had this as its main conclusion. Drawing on all the evidence we have available to us, the report suggested that the very first stages of life, in pregnancy, and during the first two years, are crucial as to where most children will end up in adult life. Using one of the national cohorts, Leon Feinstein showed

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Gordon Brown has vanished. Why?

It may come as a grave surprise to you that, when it was offered as a prize in a charity auction, the opportunity to attend a dinner lecture by the former prime minister Gordon Brown failed to reach anywhere near the sum the organisers had expected. Particularly so as the prize promised, as a special treat, the chance to join Gordon for dessert. You would imagine there would be literally millions of people who’d jump at the chance to sit next to Mr Brown as he glowered over his ice cream, to which he had applied copious amounts of salt, totally silent except for the occasional sotto voce murmuring of

The Spectator

Spectator survey: What would you tell your 14-year-old self?

Joan Bakewell Broadcaster and journalist Those early teenage years are a time of doubt and discovery. Take time to be alone and speak honestly to yourself. Weigh up what you think others — family, friends, teachers — think of you. Then consider what you feel about the world and your place in it. Read the world’s great books and see the best of theatre and cinema. Take time to be thoughtful, and then come out bold and confident in yourself. Aim for the good things in life, which are not money and property, or even travel and glamour. Instead learn to value friendship, the beauty of nature, kindness across generations and the

Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov: How Putin’s poker game makes fools of the West

In chess you see everything. Every piece of information you need is available on the board, so what is being tested during a game is your ability to process all that information. In politics things are different: we never have all the information. People often compare politics to chess, but in fact politics is more like a game of cards, poker perhaps, in which winning means relying on guts, instincts and strength. Which is why, in the terrible international game being played over Syria, Vladimir Putin is currently the master. Although — as I will explain — his winning streak may not last, at least for the time being he

Lily Cole

Lily Cole’s notebook: My digital dream

I’m in London to work on impossible.com, the social network I have been developing for two years. Impossible is a place where people can post things they want (from work experience to world peace), and things they’re prepared to give (from Mandarin lessons to website design). The idea is to use a social network to try to encourage a culture of giving and receiving. I’m doing it because I believe people are naturally generous, and that’s the kind of world I want to be in more often. I don’t know whether it’s a great or a ridiculous idea, but I have decided to invest in optimism. You just have to

Martin Gayford

Friends, soulmates, rivals: the double life of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are likely to go down together in art history. If the link had not already been set in cement, it certainly became so at Christie’s New York last month, when Bacon’s ‘Three Studies of Lucian Freud’ (1969), a three-part portrait of his friend and colleague, went for $142.4 million or a whisker less than £90 million, thus becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. Perhaps that was a freakish figure — I suspect Lucian would have thought so — but it remains dizzying fact that a figurative painting, done in London within the past 45 years, and born out of a

Harry Mount

‘The pure pleasure of annoying people’ – Peregrine Worsthorne at 90

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne isn’t much looking forward to his 90th birthday on 22 December. ‘It’s awful,’ he cries. ‘It makes me so angry Diana Athill writing about the joys of old age. My eyes, teeth, heart — everything starts to go. Keeping alive becomes a full-time job. I’m so lucky to have a much younger wife. If I was on my own, I’d crumble. But as they say, it’s better than the alternative.’ Worsthorne is speaking in the high Gothic drawing room of the old rectory in Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, where he lives with his second wife, the architectural writer Lucy Lambton. Over lunch, he says to Lucy, ‘My brain isn’t

Michael Nazir-Ali

Act now to save the Middle East’s Christians

It is hard to believe that at one time nearly the whole of the Middle East and much of north Africa were predominantly Christian. Think of the great Christian cities such as Alexandria, Damascus, Edessa, Constantinople and Carthage. Monasticism, the great civilising force, in both east and west, took its rise to the dusty end of the Mediterranean and some of the church’s greatest theologians came from there. What changed the picture? In a word, Islam. The arrival of the newly Muslim Arabs disrupted the flow of history in the Middle East and beyond. The Christian cities capitulated one by one. Some communities were destroyed in the conflict, others were

Norman Tebbit

Norman Tebbit: My recipe for a contented Christmas dinner

As the principal cook in our household, I take the view that the Christmas Day cook should not be left isolated in the kitchen slaving over the hot stove whilst everyone else is making merry in the sitting room. The true purpose of Christmas can be served at Midnight Mass the night before, and the old pagan midwinter feast can be celebrated on Christmas Day, cooks and diners all together. So to hell with the messy business of basting turkeys or draining fat off geese. Go for a casserole which can be prepared and part-cooked earlier in the day and returned to finish cooking for the last 30 minutes. You

James Delingpole James Delingpole

James Delingpole: In defence of cocaine

‘Is anyone here even remotely shocked that Nigella Lawson has done cocaine?’ I asked. Everyone shook their heads. Well of course they did: it was the after-show drinks in the green room at a BBC studio. ‘So why is it being reported in the media as if it were some amazingly big deal?’ No one knew the answer to that one. Everyone present had either tried Class As or been to numerous parties where they were about the only ones there who hadn’t taken Class As. Yet here we were, gossiping about the latest revelations from the Nigella court case for all the world as if they mattered. ‘One Direction

Melvyn Bragg

Melvyn Bragg’s notebook: I found hell on Regent Street

John Lloyd, producer of Blackadder, Spitting Image, QI etc, has boldly picked up where he left off at Cambridge more than 40 years ago. He has gone back to his youthful passion for stand-up. I’m making a South Bank Show about him and last week I went to Ealing Town Hall. He was on the 9.30 slot in ‘Chortle’ week. It was unlike any stand-up I’d ever seen. But then Not the Nine O’Clock News, his first big hit, was like no comedy show I’d ever seen and his originality continues on Radio 4 in The Museum of Curiosities. What makes his act so fresh is the mixture of funny broad

The Spectator

Christmas past in Spectator letters

This is a selection of seasonal letters from The Spectator’s 185-year archive, now online at archive.spectator.co.uk. The emblem to the right is by our cartoon editor, Michael Heath. It was his first drawing for the magazine, and appeared in 1959.   Spare the turkey Sir: Of the thousands who within the next few days will be ordering their Christmas turkeys, are any aware of the fact that the useless custom that makes it the proper and correct thing to have its most useless head upon the dish condemns the poor thing to a cruel and lingering death, while but for this custom, its head would be cut off comfortably and

Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr’s notebook: Rescued by Jonathan Ross

We live by simple stories. X has a stroke. X recovers; or doesn’t. But we live inside more complicated stories. Recovering from a stroke is a long haul; I still have an almost useless left arm and walk like a wildly intoxicated sailor. In my mid-fifties, my stroke has been a special excursion ticket into old age — socks and toenails a bewildering distance away, walking sticks with minds of their own — that kind of thing. But here’s the odd bit. This is an old age whose effects (if you do the physio) lessen as the months pass. I’m living backwards — what a rare privilege! I am getting