Society

Thursday

Taki

Taki: perhaps Obama should read All Quiet on the Western Front

I used to see him in El Morocco, the most famous nightclub of its era during the late Fifties and early Sixties. He was a very handsome man, beautifully tailored and with impeccable old-fashioned manners, and a heavy drinker. Wine, champagne and cognac were his drinks, and vodka later in the night. Although invited to sit at the owner’s table, where only unaccompanied men were permitted, he was never without female company, and what beauties they were. I had made the cut early on, but was never lucky enough to be at that particular table when he was there, and I was too shy back then to go up to

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: War games on Polzeath beach

We picked up the key to the caravan, let ourselves in, ascertained the phone signal situation (none) and went to the beach. Polzeath beach is the kind of bucket-and-spade beach Janet and John’s Mummy and Daddy might have chosen for their annual holiday. First, soft white sand ideal for burying Mummy;  then a broad shining plain of hard, smooth sand, ideal for sandcastles, dam projects, or tunnelling to Australia; then gentle inch-deep wavelets — spent rollers — for toddlers and oldies to paddle in. Then flags. Then thundering surf crowded with Neoprene figures, all shapes, sizes and ages, some of them screaming, and riderless surfboards flipped skywards; each successive wave

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite: hands off my single occupancy discount, Lambeth Council

Some call me paranoid, but I don’t think one can be suspicious enough when it comes to the activities of Lambeth Council. I guessed it might be up to another ruse when I received a more than usually threatening letter at the end of July informing me that it was undertaking a review of council tax discounts. Actually, I didn’t receive it at the end of July, because I was on holiday. Along with thousands of other people who will have been sent the letter at that time, I only read it when I returned from various summer trips. It warned me that unless I re-registered for my single occupancy

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: what’s wrong with the word ‘toilet’?

I was having a nice telephone conversation with a friend the other day when I put my foot in it by suggesting that we might soon meet for a ‘meal’. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Perhaps lunch or dinner?’ For a second I couldn’t think what he meant; but then it drifted back to me that there had once been a time — long, long ago — when I, too, might have been embarrassed by talk of a meal. For use of the word ‘meal’, clear and straightforward though it is, was thought ‘common’ or ‘non-U’ in those days, an indicator of social inferiority, though I cannot imagine why. The terms

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 5 September 2013

Holiday over – and I hopped on the plane home dribbling with excitement. I was going straight to Young Chelsea to play the Friday night IMPs duplicate with my Polish friend, whose unpronounceable name has metamorphosed into Saucepan. It was heaven to be back, even though we did not exactly shine — unlike Tim Gauld. Many years ago, there was a BOL’s Bridge Tip called ‘Save the Deuce’, the principle being that you should take care to keep the lowest card in a long suit, in order to be able to decide who wins the last round of it. Tim must have been thinking of it when he played this

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 5 September 2013

Home Having recalled Parliament to debate British military action over Syria, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, found the government defeated, much to his surprise, by 285-272, thanks to 30 Conservatives and nine Liberal Democrats voting with the opposition. He immediately told the Commons: ‘It is clear to me that the British Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly.’ Next day, Lord Ashdown, the former leader of the Lib Dems, tweeted: ‘In 50 years trying to serve my country I have never felt so depressed/ashamed.’ Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime

Harold Evans

Harold Evans’s diary: Beware Obama – he always pulls the rug out from under his allies

Days ago, I’d have bet that even the most bitterly partisan Congress in generations would jib at humiliating their commander-in-chief. More than two thirds of the population, according to the polls, demanded he go to Congress before firing Cruise missiles against the Syrian regime. Well, he did, didn’t he, but appeasing the people hasn’t cut much ice with Senators of both parties to judge from the hearings this week which have provoked Secretary Kerry to wag a schoolmasterly finger. In the hour their country calls on them to make a stand against the ‘moral obscenity’ of gassing 1,429 Syrians, 426 children among them, the querulous tribunes of the people seem

Doc

2129: Dumpynose

The unclued lights, individually (each of two words), or paired, are of a specific kind, verifiable in Brewer 17th Edition revised. Ignore a diacritic in the solution at 6 Down.   Across 10 Make an impression as a sculptor? (10, three words) 12 Grim death of a harvester (6) 13 Wise men deck out, when allured (8) 17 Like the Arimaspi, seductive, not hard, English at heart (7, hyphened) 18 Tune that’s popular – but not in the plane! (7, hyphened) 20 Pupil worn out after vault (8, two words) 26 Planned in proportion and is clean, oddly (7, two words) 28 It’s on sledge I repaired (7) 29 Farm

The Spectator

Barometer – 5 September 2013

Shining examples The ‘Walkie Talkie’, a new tower block in Fenchurch Street, was blamed for partially melting the interior of a Jaguar parked in a spot where the sun’s rays are focused by the building’s concave exterior. Other buildings with the same problem: — Vdara Hotel, Las Vegas. In 2010 a guest complained that he felt his head burning as he swam in the pool. Others claim the rays have melted plastic cups. — Museum Tower, Dallas. Blamed for ruining a work by James Turrell in the adjoining Nasher Sculpture Center, as well as burning plants in the building. — Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. Blamed for an unpleasant

Doc

To 2126: Word Building

The chain of anagrams is as follows: 40, 8, 18, 25, 22, 23, 21D, 19, 1A   First prize Robert Hirst, Twineham, West Sussex Runners-up Philip Berridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire; R.B. Briercliffe, Isle of Man

Stuart Etherington

The lobbying bill’s sloppy wording risks silencing charities and community groups

The government’s lobbying bill is intended to promote transparency and enhance the UK’s political integrity. It is meant to bring an end to underhand tactics by clearly setting out what organisations can and cannot do to support political parties, including how much they can spend. These are laudable aims which we understand and support. But the government has been forced to defend a piece of hurried legislation so broad that the likelihood is it will restrict the ability of charities and community groups to speak up on matters of public interest. Under the sloppy wording of the proposed legislation, charities are at risk of being silenced. On Tuesday evening, the law inched closer to

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22: Obama’s zigzagging path to war and Cameron’s tiff with his MPs

What is behind Barack Obama’s wobbly approach to Syria? In the latest View from 22 podcast, former US State department official Colleen Graffy and the Spectator’s Douglas Murray discuss Obama’s latest manoeuvres in Washington and whether the American people still have an appetite for going to war with Syria.  What will happen when the issue hits Congress next week? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss how the developing Syria situation has affected the political landscape in Westminster. Are Conservatives feeling disgruntled with their party leadership over the disastrous vote? What can we expect to see from the main parties in the next few weeks before party conference season? Have Labour regained

Jane Kelly

Hospital food isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal

One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well ask for gravadlax and dill. On the hospital menu, baked potatoes only come with baked beans. I asked one of the Thai ladies who deliver the food if he could possibly have a plain spud. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘all with beans.’ She said she would go and ask someone, but who that might be

Nicholas Farrell

Italians for Maggie

Now that the forces of evil have transformed Silvio Berlusconi into a condemned man, there remains just one person on the planet who can save Italy: Roger Scruton. If the famous philosopher were just to come to Italy to deliver a single speech, his very words would be enough to set in motion la rivoluzione. That at least is the view of the Circolo Culturale Margaret Thatcher, a group whose mission it is to establish at long last, after all those centuries lived without one, a proper Anglo-Saxon Tory party in Italy. So far it has failed, but its members, like all true believers, have not lost their faith. A

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Seamus Heaney’s poems are for Protestants too

The one and only time I met Seamus Heaney, in 2007, he was making tea in the kitchen of his Dublin home when he asked — more modestly regretful than coy — ‘Did you have to do the poems at school?’ I grew up in Belfast, and certainly we had to do the poems at school. Even in the early 1980s, in a disputatious city that was frequently contemptuous of life but rarely of poetry, it was Heaney whose reputation already seemed cast in bronze. His lines on Northern Ireland defined us internationally, like it or not: it was clear that we had somehow grown someone big, a poetic prize

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What are we supposed to say when a grooming ring comes to light?

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it

Christopher Caldwell

Obama knows that America has lost its appetite for war

It was to Fort Belvoir that President Barack Obama repaired on Saturday, minutes after he announced that attacks by the Syrian government on a rebel stronghold in Damascus constituted ‘an assault on human dignity’ and a ‘serious threat to our national security.’ By using what the US government says was sarin gas, Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed a ‘red line’ that Mr Obama had laid down a year before. The President has asked Congress to authorise an attack on Syria as soon as legislators return on 9 September. Fort Belvoir is home to the US army’s 29th Light Infantry Division. More to the point, it is the site of a terrific 18-hole

Nigel Lawson

Sport: Nigel Lawson on the Ashes

Those of us who watched the last day of the final Ashes Test of the present series enjoyed a rare and unexpected treat — and I write as one who has been a devoted cricket follower for more than 70 years: the first first-class match I ever saw was the Royal Navy playing the Army at Lords in 1942. There has, however, been much controversy over the anti-climactic ending, when the umpires decided to call it a day, on grounds of bad light, with England on the brink of victory. Much has been said about how this sort of disappointment must be avoided in future. In fact, the remedy is