Society

Thursday

Malcolm Deas

Raymond Carr by María Jesús Gonzalez – review

This is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of an English historian of Spain. In doing so, as the historian in question is the extraordinary Raymond Carr, still with us at 94, María Jesús González also writes about the rural West Country of his childhood, the English class system, educational opportunities in the 1930s, social mobility, Wellington College, the Gargoyle Club, Rosa Lewis at the Cavendish, four Oxford colleges, Giraldo and his orchestra, G.D.H. Cole, John Neale, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A.J. Ayer, John Sparrow, A.L. Rowse, Oswald, Diana and Nicholas Mosley, Isaiah Berlin, Margaret Thatcher and even the Queen. In academia and society — mostly high — here

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A windfall tax on monster basements could solve London’s housing problem

The mega-rich are best housed behind high fences, on wooded estates patrolled by dogs; that way, they don’t have to annoy the rest of us. But I can see how irritating it must be, if you live in the crowded Ladbroke Grove area of west London, to have a neighbour like Reade Griffith, an American hedge-fund manager who has received planning permission for a vast basement extension to his house that will take many months to excavate. Fellow residents of Kensington and Chelsea, other than those wealthy enough to have similar schemes in mind, will probably think it serves him right that he has been charged an £825,000 ‘Section 106’

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

By all means wring your hands over Syria. Just don’t ask me to trust you

They’re getting the rebuttals in early, have you noticed that? You might call them a pre-emptive strikes. Here’s William Hague, speaking to BBC Radio 4 about those chemical attacks in Syria… ‘To believe that anybody else had done it, you would have to believe that the opposition in Syria would use, on a large scale, weapons that we have no evidence that they have, delivered by artillery or air power that they do not possess, killing hundreds of people in areas already under their control.’ Pretty good, that. He must have practised it beforehand. ‘Have’ and ‘possess’ mean the same thing, after all, so you need a bit of preparation

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Notes on…Rome

Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is the destination. The eternal city is endlessly glorious, chaotic, stylish and funny: where else do you see nuns listening to iPods? Or medieval churches with condom machines by the doors? You can barely walk ten feet without coming across something that might change your life: obelisks, piazzas, churches, gardens and statues. All that antiquity makes Roman Catholicism seem distinctly modern. And there’s the hotels. I spent a Friday night in Rocco Forte’s Hotel de Russie on the Via del Babuino, near the Spanish steps, slap-bang in the best part of

Nigel Farndale

The views that inspire writers

Unimaginatively, I usually take the same route for a morning walk when on holiday in Cornwall, over the dunes to Brea Hill, inspiration for Betjeman’s poem ‘Back From Australia’. I know the scenery so well I no longer see it. But for a change the other day I walked along the other side of the estuary and it was like seeing an entirely new landscape: the gently scalloped sandbanks, the clarity and blueness of the water, the breadth of the sky where it met Pentire Point. There were no clouds, which emphasised the white of the sails, the seagulls, the cabbage butterflies. Imagine having this as the view from your

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Welcome to Ryanair Britain

Which businessman is the most influential in the making of government policy? The answer came to me when I received a letter fining me £80 for forgetting to renew my car insurance by the correct date. But it could also have come to me had I forgotten to fill out of council tax enquiry form (fine £70), missed getting in my tax return by one day (£100), or got caught in a box junction in the King’s Road which has two sets of traffic lights in quick succession (£130). It is, I have come to believe, Michael O’Leary. The Ryanair boss has mastered a business model whereby you lure in

Mark Greaves

The charity that could make you love social workers

Is any public service more reviled than social work? Policemen, when not drinking with journalists, chase down baddies; firefighters save babies, and doctors cure diseases. Social workers, on the other hand, take away people’s children. They miss catastrophic abuse. In no news story are they ever -heroic. The perception of social work is unremittingly grim. It’s badly paid, box-ticking, mired in bureaucracy. Only go into it if you like being a martyr. Josh MacAlister, the chief executive of Frontline, wants people to imagine things differently. In a decade he thinks social work will be one of the main options for top graduates. At an Oxford careers fair, he suggests, students

Robin Harris

Whoever wins in Syria, its Christians will lose

David Cameron will almost certainly get his Syrian war. Who will fight it, let alone who will win it, remains unclear. But who will lose it is already known — the Christians. The relentless persecution of Christ’s followers is foretold in the Gospels. Suffering is portrayed as the pathway to triumph. The global position today conforms quite closely to that picture. Three quarters of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians — the expanding part — now live outside the largely tolerant West. At the same time, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that Christians suffer more persecution than any other religious group. Within the Middle East, however, the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 August 2013

Home The nation settled down to watch the Paralympic Games on television. Some 2.5 million tickets had been sold for events. The government reconsidered building a third runway at Heathrow after all. Grant Shapps, the housing minister, said that ‘all options should be considered’, even though the Transport Secretary, Justine Greening, whose constituency is under the flight path, has campaigned against it. The former minister Tim Yeo asked whether David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was a man or a mouse. Ms Greening said that there was no reason to delay signing a contract with FirstGroup to run the West Coast main line; Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Trains lost the

Steve John

Diary – 29 August 2013

‘You are a very naughty man!’ My heart pumps in my chest and a feeling of panic surges through my veins. I spin round to find a small, impeccably dressed Asian gentleman shaking a finger at me and twinkling with glee. This is an interesting situation. I do not wish to be rude. This man clearly enjoys the psychological torture my character, Michael Moon in EastEnders, inflicts on people. However, he has accosted me at the checkout at M&S. What to do? But wait, something else is happening: two elderly ladies have witnessed this exchange and are motoring over. One is clutching a soap magazine. These biddies mean business. I

The Spectator

Barometer | 29 August 2013

One-legged wonder The Paralympic Games began in 1960 and can trace its origins to the 1948 International Wheelchair Games, held for ex-servicemen at Stoke Mandeville hospital in 1948. Before that, however, a disabled German-American gymnast, George Eyser, put in a remarkable performance at  the 1904 Olympic Games in St Louis. — Eyser, who emigrated to the US aged 14 in 1884, had lost his left leg when run over by a train in his childhood, and competed with a wooden leg. — Having put in a mediocre performance in the opening events, he won six medals in a single day, with gold on the parallel bars, the long-horse vault and

Peter Jones

Cicero on Prince Harry

Personal privacy in the modern sense became a cause in the USA in the late 19th century, with the massive expansion of newsprint and the development of cameras and professional snappers. Prince Harry clearly has not quite caught up yet. Even the Romans knew what the problem was: privacy was very hard to come by. The reason then was that every top Roman had, as a mark of his status, an army of slaves with him most of the time, ready to do his every bidding. Crassus had 800. Horace composed a poem announcing that he was accustomed to walking alone, but in a few lines it appears he had

The Spectator

Letters | 29 August 2013

Reasons to try a tyrant Sir: The premise of Douglas Murray’s otherwise compelling essay (‘Dictating terms’, 25 August) is mistaken. He doubts whether the conviction of malevolent dictators by the International Criminal Court acts as a deterrent to other wicked leaders. Of course it does not. Nothing will deter a monster from iniquity. The principal objective of the ICC must therefore be simple retribution. Why create an offence if a transgression is met with impunity? Tyrants who commit crimes against humanity deserve punishment, not to deter others (even the gallows is unlikely to achieve that), but because they must suffer for their evil. Murray contends that innocent lives might be

Taki

High life | 29 August 2013

Sultry August days and nights, with the gift of privacy an added bonus. In summer the village contains the die-hards, the locals and a few tourists. Bucolic freedom, fresh air and sunshine were once anathema — foul-smelling, airless dives like New Jimmy’s were the real McCoy — but now the sound of bells on roaming cows means instant happiness. It’s called old age. I can now walk from my place to the next village and back, a trip of about one hour, before the pain becomes unbearable. The good news is that early next year I’m trying out a revolutionary treatment in Germany, one with a 70 per cent success

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 29 August 2013

We agreed that we ought to get dressed, leave the holiday apartment and do something else for a few hours in the evening. There was a choice. Richard lll performed outside on a grassy bank, or we could drive over to the St Ives School of Painting for the drop-in life drawing class. We had a copy of the play with us to acquaint ourselves with the plot. But while reading it she took offence at a misogynistic speech made by the hunchback King. Also the weather looked a bit uncertain. So the life drawing class it was. She paints and draws and is familiar with life drawing classes. I’m

Melissa Kite

Real life | 29 August 2013

Animals have a terrific sense of humour. Mine have just co-ordinated a mass outbreak of malingering. Every single last one of them has gone down with a complicated illness or injury. It all started a few weeks ago when Tara the chestnut mare ripped her lower eyelid open. The vet who came to stitch it then discovered that she was also lame, and had suspected Cushing’s disease. She took a blood sample and it came back with a slight positive, too ambiguous to merit treatment. ‘It could just be because she is overweight,’ said the vet. ‘Then let’s go with that,’ I said, because I know full well that if

Robin Oakley

Praise indeed

Shortly after he became champion apprentice, when he was launching the next stage of his career from Mick Channon’s stables back in 2001, the lads nicknamed Chris Catlin the ‘Cat’. His surname helped but so did the fact that the pale-faced, dark-eyed jockey moves quietly about the place. His unobtrusive style hasn’t changed. You simply couldn’t imagine Chris Catlin doing a Frankie Dettori flying dismount. But two significant things have happened this season to one of the best-liked middle-rank jockeys. Back in May his colleagues applauded him back into the weighing room for riding his 1,000th winner, and the highly particular Sir Mark Prescott has begun regularly putting Catlin, along

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 29 August 2013

Two weeks of watching the 2nd World Mind Sports have come to an end and I feel rather like I did after the last episode of The Killing. Bereft. The English Ladies proved that, with the help of a drop of lavender oil, they are the undisputed Queens of the World, taking both European and World Gold Medals within two months of each other. Sweden won the Open title and, for me, pair of the tournament goes to Peter Bertheau and Per-Ola Cullin. In the quarter final Sweden played USA and they doubled the mighty Meckwell in 4NT, taking it SEVEN off and knocking them out of the tournament. But

Raymond Keene

Gligoric

The great Svetozar Gligoric passed away last week at the age of 89. Gligoric represented Yugoslavia at a time when that nation was second only to the USSR in terms of chess strength. Three times a world title candidate, Gligoric was able to defeat such champions as Fischer, Botvinnik, Tal and Petrosian. Petrosian seemed to bring out the best in him. Petrosian-Gligoric: Rovinj/Zagreb 1970; King’s Indian Defence 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 Bg7 4 e4 d6 5 Be2 0-0 6 Nf3 e5 7 0-0 Petrosian avoided his favourite 7 d5 Nbd7 8 Bg5, because his opponent was very confident in his handling of the variation 8 …

Raymond Keene

Puzzle no. 233

White to play. This position is from Gligoric-Petrosian, Belgrade 1954. How did White blast his way through to the black king in fine style? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 4 September 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 I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Ng5+ Last week’s winner Malcolm Friend, Edgbaston, Birmingham