Books and Arts – 14 February 2013
Society
Thursday
2097: spaced
1D, 2 40, 12 and 15 36 are PERSONAE (43) that have been adopted by DAVID BOWIE. Unchecked letters of unclued lights are supplied by the thematically allusive astronaut writer, piano guy spelt by extra letters in clues. First prize Simon Harris, London SE21 Runners-up Trevor Evans, Drulingen, France; Kevin Ward, Quorn, Leicestershire
The UK needs a serious debate on shale gas
Arguments over the potential development of UK shale gas resources are too often characterised by rhetoric and hyperbole on both sides. Some of the wilder claims need to be challenged and we need to separate the facts from the ill-informed speculation. That is why I am one of a cross-party group of MPs and Peers who have come together to set up the new APPG. Members include MPs who are in favour of developing a domestic shale gas industry, MPs who are opposed, and MPs who simply want to better understand the truth. The intention is to cut through the rhetoric and get to the facts. Much of the excitement
An interview with Lars Hedegaard
A couple of days ago I managed to interview Lars Hedegaard – the Danish journalist currently at an undisclosed location under police protection after an assassination attempt at his home in Copenhagen. The results are in this week’s magazine. Lars was his usual calm, eloquent and forthright self. If anybody thought they could silence him, they’ve got another thing coming.
Happy Valentine’s Day
Thanks to AH for this reminder that the Victorians – and many since – were right to think Scotland a land of romance and all that stuff.
More nonsense in the newspapers
There’s another one of those fatuous “studies” in the papers today, based upon that favourite newspaper device, the false correlation. This time it’s about marriage; if you want to make your marriage work, move to Dorset, because part of it has the highest number of married couples in the country and they are more likely to stay married. The implication is that there must be something magical about Dorset, and that if you moved to, say, Wimborne, or Curry Rivel, any marital problems you might have had would immediately evaporate. Of course the reason more people are married in Dorset is that the average age of the population there is
The View from 22 – Ex-Benedict, Mexican Horsemeat and goodbye to Sindy
What does Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation mean for the future of the Catholic church? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Daily Telegraph’s Damian Thompson and Freddy Gray discuss our in-depth cover feature on the papal resignation. What will be Benedict be remembered for? Will his sweeping reforms be left in place? How does his legacy compare to John Paul II? Was there more to the resignation than just his health? And what challenges lie ahead for his successor? And just who might that be? James Forsyth also joins to discuss his political column in this week’s Spectator, revealing the huge scale of the horsemeat imports from Mexico. Listen
Horse and bourbon
At a club table, a group of us were discussing horse–eating, marvelling at the confusion and sentimentality of our fellow countrymen while telling hippophagic anecdotes. I mentioned a typically Provençal street market in Apt. There had been a group of horses. They were not looking happy. More intelligent than Boxer on his way to the knacker’s, they clearly sensed that the good days were over and were summoning reserves of stoicism to help them through the (brief) final phase. ‘What’s going to happen to those horses?’ inquired an English female member of the party. ‘Well, er, it is either the Sunday Joint Derby or the Hamburger Cup.’ ‘Oh no, I
Farewell, Independent on Sunday
On Tuesday the Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced to a breathless world the latest development in the Leveson saga. The government wants a royal charter to oversee a new press watchdog. I say ‘the government’, but the Liberal Democrats are only half on board. Like Labour, they seem still to hanker after some sort of statute to set Leveson in stone. As for Hacked Off, the celebrity-backed pressure group that has campaigned for greater press regulation, it will settle for nothing less than a statute, and wants every recommendation made by Lord Justice Leveson to be implemented without delay. On the day Mrs Miller did her little turn in the
Chris Huhne and the £500,000 speed camera
I don’t want to defend Chris Huhne, I really don’t. Apart from anything else, I have always thought the country would be better off if all Oxford PPE graduates were simply imprisoned immediately, instead of the present inefficient system where we wait for them to commit a crime first. This would save us from being ruled by people who wanted to be politicians at the age of 17. But no newspaper has yet pointed out that the speed camera which caught Chris Huhne was not just any old speed camera. From what I have found online it seems to have been the long-notorious ‘Site 050’ camera at the M11 at
Benedict XVI in perspective
In March 2005, when it became clear that Pope John Paul II would soon die, Boris Johnson asked me to write a piece for The Spectator predicting who would be chosen as the next pope. With no special insight into the minds of the cardinals, I ran through the possibilities that had been mentioned in the press — an African such as the Nigerian Cardinal Arinze, a South American such as Cardinal Claudio Hummes, a Frenchman such as Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris — but concluded that the best candidate would be the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger. At the time
Come, friendly bombs
In Competition No. 2784 you were invited to rewrite John Betjeman’s poem ‘Slough’, substituting the target of your choice. The poet Ian McMillan sprang to Slough’s defence in 2005 with ‘Slough Re-visited’, an antidote to Betjeman’s jaundiced take on the town: ‘Come friendly words and splash on Slough!/ Celebrate it, here and now/ Describe it with a gasp, a “wow!”/ Of Sweet Berkshire breath’. But according to Betjeman’s daughter, Candida Lycett-Green, her father regretted having written the 1937 poem, a fact acknowledged by Frank Osen and several others besides. Mr Osen takes £30; the rest £25. Although he lived to disavow His wish that bombs might fall on Slough, Soon
The poor have been sold horse dressed as beef – and they should be compensated
Well at least — so far — no middle-class food has been found to contain large chunks of horsey. It’s all been in the junk they feed the chavs. It’s true that Waitrose withdrew some beefburgers for sale a week or two back, but this was only a ‘precautionary measure’ and later the burgers were found to contain ‘100 per cent beef’, from privately educated cows, according to the supermarket. Thank the lord, etc. Instead, it’s all in the Findus beef lasagne and some unspeakable frozen product from Tesco which masquerades as spaghetti bolognese. Or spaghetti bologneigghhhhhhhhhs, as I daresay the red tops will call it henceforth. It seems highly
Reshoring: how jobs came flooding back to America
It is 20 years since the US presidential candidate Ross Perot railed against globalisation, warning of a ‘giant sucking sound’ as millions of jobs left America and went to foreign factories. The presidential hopeful warned that a new economic curse — offshoring — would shut steel mills and factories without government protection. But listen closely and a different sucking sound can now be heard: jobs coming back to America. A country once panicked about ‘offshoring’ has a new buzzword: ‘re-shoring’. The US recovery is weak and unemployment remains high. But quietly, manufacturing has been making a strong recovery, adding 500,000 jobs since the end of the recession. America, influential analysts
Why do Brits seek Eastern spirituality when they have so much of their own?
I used to hang around a group of friends who worked for a British events company. Their boss was a keen follower of Buddhism and all things Oriental and, since the course of business never does run smooth, regularly consulted a feng shui practitioner. The practitioner, who wanted to be called Jampa, gave advice on everything from the setting up of a branch office to the placement of a goldfish bowl. He charged £500 a visit, with the viewing of two floors in an office counting as two visits. Jampa’s real name was something like Trevor Stevens, and in the days before he started donning the saffron robes of an
Lars Hedegaard interview: ‘I may be killed if I write this’
The assassin came to his home dressed as a postman. When the historian and journalist Lars Hedegaard opened his front door, the man — whom Lars describes as ‘looking like a typical Muslim immigrant’ in his mid-twenties — fired straight at his head. Though Hedegaard was a yard away, the bullet narrowly missed. The mild-mannered scholar (70 years old) then punched his assailant in the head. The man dropped the gun, picked it up and fired again. The gun jammed and the man ran off. More than a week later, he has yet to be found. Hedegaard has had to leave his home and is under police protection at an
Where did all the sweet people go?
To say someone was ‘sweet’ used to be quite common in Britain. We didn’t just use the word to describe our mothers and grandmothers, but a wide range of people, including public figures. But not any more. Public acts of sweetness, such as gently warning people that their shoelaces were untied, are now rare. Sweetness seems to be in terminal decline. Having just celebrated Valentine’s Day, now seems an appropriate time to ask why. Sweetness is not just about niceness, or good manners, though both help. Sir Cliff Richard may be nice and well-mannered, but is he sweet? He’s a little too self-regarding — and self-regard and sweetness don’t go
How Twitter almost destroyed me
Last year, my old sparring partner George Monbiot got himself into a spot of bother. ‘Why not stick the knife in on your blog?’ various people suggested. But I didn’t because George’s travails had nothing whatsoever to do with his wrongheaded political views (which I’m more than happy to attack at every turn). They had to do with a libel he’d repeated about someone on Twitter. About this, I refused to gloat. This is not because I’m an incredibly decent, warm and caring person. Well, not just. It’s because, as a fellow Twitter user, I recognised a case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Of course
Here’s my strategic review, Barclays: see shareholders right and the rest will follow
Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my contemporaries there (I coincided with him in Barclays for a decade) ever mentioned him as a man to watch before he was picked to follow Bob Diamond. His ‘strategic review’ is full of hot-button stuff about ‘values’, but what struck me about his interview on the Today programme on Tuesday morning was that in his
Giles Coren eats fried seal loin with Eva Avila
My week began on a plane to Quebec, where I’m filming a show for Canadian television. It is a broadcast pilot for a format of my own devising and, if it flies, I stand to make billions. But first it must succeed in Canada. Because Canada is the country that has bravely chosen to try it first, and shelled out the initial moolah. I am delighted that my show is getting its big chance in this great country, rather than boring old America, say, or England. I love Canada. I have always said it is the most culturally innovative and pleasant-to-visit country on earth. (I have never been to Canada in my life before.)
