Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Peter Hitchens vs Nick Cohen, and the case against the middle class

Piggies in the middle Sir: Your feature ‘The strange death of the middle class’ (24 August) assumes that young people who do not attend fee-paying schools cannot have access to the same opportunities as those who do. I attended my local comprehensive in the first decade of this century. Despite the variable teaching quality, I did well in exams, went on to a good university, and now work for an aerospace company. I can afford to rent a flat, go on holiday and save a little, all on an income not much higher than the average starting salary for a graduate. I have not inherited any money, nor did I

Dot Wordsworth

Vikings

‘What’s he saying now?’ asked my husband in a provoking manner when an actor read out a bit of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on one of those excellent television programmes by Michael Wood about King Alfred. Very good the Old English sounded — a little like the Danish in The Killing. There were subtitles for those whose focus went further than their whisky glass. Despite a good deal of Viking smiting, the word Viking was not heard. It is a historian’s word, not used in English until as late as 1840. In Alfred’s day they might be called Danish and in The Battle of Maldon (about an encounter we lost in

Peter Jones

Varro on The Apprentice

Budding businesswoman Luisa Zissman, with her A in A-level English, has enquired whether ‘Bakers Toolkit’ or ‘Baker’s Toolkit’ is correct. As usual, the ancients are to blame. Ancient Greeks were fascinated by language and invented much of the terminology in which we still talk about it: parts of speech, e.g. nouns (which included adjectives), pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions; case, number, gender, tense, voice, mood and so on — all words translated by Romans from the Greek into Latin. Greeks also argued intensely about right and wrong usage. Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century AD) pointed out that, if you examined traditional orthography, you could see that there were historical reasons behind word-formation

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I stop this bore reading his novel aloud?

Q. Is there a polite way of halting a wannabe novelist from reading his oeuvre aloud to an unwilling audience? A neighbour on the residents’ committee happened to be leaving as friends were arriving for drinks and I felt I should invite him to join us. It was all going swimmingly until he told someone he was writing a novel, and she made the mistake of pretending she would be interested in reading it. No one had reckoned on this (very insensitive) man having a copy of the wretched thing on his iPhone and he read aloud at length, pausing only to laugh at his own genius. It killed the

Dumpynose

2128: Carbon copy

This puzzle marks a 42/27 by 11 in 17/19. Five other unclued lights (one twice hyphened) together suggest another form of 42/47: solvers must shade the pair. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across   12    Description of diseases in German, prosy Noah revised (10) 14    Necklace from coastal region shortened by earl (7) 15    Not quite excellent distinctive dresses for balls (10) 16    Piano queen behind very good singers (7) 20    Tent constantly capsizing, lecturer dumped (4) 22    Amateur has put up platform … (7, two words) 23    … torn apart by gale (4) 24    Release of gang without charge (7, two words) 26    Lass in dress beginning to tan

Dumpynose

Solution to 2075: an outstanding idea?

The quotation is inappropriate for the CHAMELEON and the PTARMIGAN (shown in red), both of which survive by blending in to the background. Appropriately, they were hidden in the final grid and were revealed by entering the correct words at 24A, 26A, 35A, 5D and 29D. First prize M.F. O’Brien, London N12 Runners-up Gerry Fairweather, Layer Marney, Essex; R.J. Green, Llangynidr, Crickhowell

Dumpynose

Solution to 2125: Nil desperandum

The part quotation was ‘BUT WESTWARD, LOOK, THE LAND’ (1/5/28) from Say not the struggle naught availeth by Arthur Hugh Clough. Remaining unclued lights, read from right to left (‘westward’), each contain a ‘land’: Libya (4), Oman (23), Iran (30), Cuba (35) and Italy (41). CLOUGH (in the fourth column) was to be shaded.   First prize Mr P. Taylor-Mansfield, Worcester Runners-up John Light, Addlestone, Surrey; G.H.Willetts, London SW19

Dumpynose

2078: Nonet

After thematic 32 a 5 of 12 form the other unclued lights of which only one is a real word. Across 10 Less than colossal choir seize Worms (10, hyphened) 14 Death of Grendel (3) 16 Sewer trimmed outer garment roughly (6) 17 Destroy with top armour (5) 20 Decamping sons bounding along (7) 22 Convoluted legal document Scots challenge (7) 24 Several coaches plus royal coach (7) 25 A broken round metal plate (5) 26 Expectant pastor slips in glamour girl (5, two words) 28 Be quiet having extreme problem talking (7) 31 Otto (maybe) and restless Chris (almost) like Texas (7, hyphened) 33 One trapping fish in Turkey

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ed Miliband’s problem is he’s trying to keep his options open on Syria

Ed Miliband’s scepticism about striking Syria puts him more in line with public opinion than David Cameron. On top of this, he’s had the better of the political manoeuvrings these past few days — forcing the Prime Minister to pull back from a straight parliamentary vote on military action. So, why then did his speech today fall so flat? Part of the problem is the nature of the Commons chamber. Tory MPs heckled and intervened on him effectively, rather throwing him off his stride. But the more fundamental problem is that Miliband is trying to keep his options open. Miliband’s opening was a strong argument against any British intervention in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron attacks Blair’s ghost in Syria debate

Tony Blair would have had less of a presence in today’s Commons debate on Syria if he’d actually turned up to it. The former Prime Minister was threaded throughout the speeches, and no more so than in David Cameron’s address to MPs. Cameron was keen to emphasise at every opportunity the difference between the government’s response to the current situation and the Blair government’s handling of the Iraq war. He was quick to refer to it, saying ‘I am deeply mindful of the lessons of previous conflicts’, and later said that Iraq ‘poisoned the well’ of public trust on military intervention. Though as James pointed out as the debate was

Thais Portilho-Shrimpton

Hacked Off’s double standards on press freedom

Professor turned campaigner Brian Cathcart, executive director of Hacked Off, wrote a comment piece for the Guardian this week where he asked: ‘Does it show double standards to condemn David Miranda’s detention without criticising the arrest of journalists suspected of illegal phone hacking and bribery? There are news organisations that want us to believe it does.’ Brian, I’m afraid they are right. I remember bringing up this exact issue with Brian when I was still working at Hacked Off. I asked him if we should not react to the fact the MSC (Management Standards Committee set up by Rupert Murdoch to hand over evidence to the Met Police) might have

John O'Neill

Decline in net migration stalls

Good news today for the OBR (who want a constant flow of more than 140,000 immigrants a year to support Britain’s debt burden and ageing population) and bad news for David Cameron (who thinks immigrants are a drain on Britain’s welfare state). Statistics show that in the year ending December 2012, net migration to the UK was 176,000, up from 153,000 in the year ending September 2012.The latest figure is equivalent to 482 more people a day entering the country than leaving it. Net migration is the figure that Cameron wants to be down ‘in the tens of thousands’ by the end of the parliament. It’s been heading down since June 2011. The drop

Shiraz Maher

Hitting Assad – and hitting him hard – is urgent and necessary

There has been lots of debate about our impending intervention in the Syrian conflict today. Many of my Coffee House colleagues have counselled against intervention, arguing against Danny Finkelstein’s piece in the Times yesterday. I’m in broad agreement with the general sentiment of the piece, but some of its subtexts need greater illumination. Leave aside Finkelstein’s argument about omission bias. For a moment, forget the ‘complexities’ of the conflict, imbibed as it is with sectarian differences, confessional rivalries, and great power posturing. Even the discussion of what should happen next in Syria can wait for another day. The use of chemical weapons against civilians is an affront to the very

Adrian Hilton

Revd Dr Alan Clifford’s ‘homophobic’ comments referred to the CPS

You’re at home, enjoying a summery Saturday afternoon with the bees and nasturtiums on the patio, when the doorbell intrudes. You’re greeted by an impeccably courteous, fresh-faced police officer from the Norfolk Constabulary – ‘Dedicated to this neighbourhood’, according to their website – and he’s come to speak to you because there’s been a complaint. Not, you understand, about the troubling number of burglaries, rising car thefts, incidences of property vandalism or madhouse music accompanying balmy barbeques. No, someone has reported you for sending them two gospel tracts by email, one entitled ‘Christ Can Cure – Good News for Gays’; and the other ‘Jesus Christ – the Saviour we all

Simon Hoggart

August Mini-Bar | 29 August 2013

Four wines, four different countries, four different grapes. All these come from Adnams of Southwold, the -admirable brewers, who also ship superb wines from around the world. Their selection is a joy, and if you visit one of their shops, you will also find a range of attractive kitchen implements, many designed to perform tasks you didn’t know needed performing. I’m rather proud of these wines, since although I didn’t discover them I did choose them, and every one is delicious in its own distinctive way. They are all discounted. For example, with a £10 case reduction, the white Rioja 2011 (1) from the Riojanas winery costs only £7.17 a

Bruce Anderson

Dining in style at David Cameron’s favourite Italian

It is impossible to think about any Italian region without wondering ‘What if?’ Sardinia lacks the glamour, grandeur and menace of Sicily, but it is still a fascinating exemplar of Mediterranean culture: the different historical strata stretching back to pre-history. So: what if the mediaeval rulers of Aragon had been more enduring? What if the Catholic kings had never married? There is no reason why Barcelona should have been ruled from Madrid: still less for the Sardinians to be governed by Turin. A sea-girt Aragonese kingdom, including the Languedoc, Sardinia and Sicily — that would have been a glorious flowering of civilisation and romance: Venus emerging from a scallop shell.

Michela Wrong

Letter from Somaliland

Ayan Mahamoud, one of the organisers of Hargeysa’s International Book Fair, has all the girly vulnerability of a factory-tested steel girder. So it was disconcerting when, having called to the stage the western writers attending in the teeth of strict travel warnings, she burst into tears. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so hard when the whole world is against you,’ she sobbed. The word ‘beleaguered’ constantly comes to mind when visiting Somaliland, a country that doesn’t officially exist. For the past 22 years, this former British protectorate has waited for the world to notice that, in contrast to its unstable southern neighbour — the Somalia of warlords, Black Hawk Down and Al-Shabaab

Michael Tanner

Mark Elder and the Hallé surpassed any other account of Parsifal that Michael Tanner has heard

The Proms season of Wagner operas — pity they didn’t do them all; Die Meistersinger would have been specially welcome, since no one else is doing it either — concluded appropriately with Parsifal, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. The conducting at all these performances has been remarkably good, but in some respects Elder was the most striking of all. Working with his orchestra, the Hallé, he produced an account of this miraculous score which, for a combination of passion and precision, surpassed any other that I have ever heard. Without for a moment stinting on climaxes, Elder and the Hallé explored and expounded the refinements and economies of Wagner’s subtle