Society

Saturday

2 Jun 2012

Libya notebook

The battle had the busy, obsessive yet irrelevant air of a point-to-point. It was a social event, held outdoors, a good place to see and be seen. The jeunesse dorée of the western Libyan town of Zuwara were out in force. People had come from miles around. Rather than tweed suits and barbours they were wearing battlefield fatigues and clung to machine-guns and rocket-launchers. As artillery rounds and bullets whistled overhead, the Zuwarans made informed comments, ducking when the shooting got too close. Half a mile ahead, street fighting had already claimed some 20 lives and inflicted 300 casualties. Welcome to post-revolutionary Libya. ••• We slept overnight in the Dolphin Hotel on the

Melissa Kite

Paving paradise

The gamekeeper at the Surrey farm where I keep my horses has been banned from his local pub for looking too scruffy. Like the two farm workers in Berkshire who made headlines when they were turfed out of their local a few weeks ago, the gamekeeper has been left in no doubt that his muddy face no longer fits. Apparently, customers complained about his ancient shooting jacket, mud-splattered wellies and cloth cap. These customers are not from the country, you see. They are townies who bought their dream house in prime commuter-belt countryside and now frequent the newly renovated gastropub in Armani jeans and Ralph Lauren sweaters. The landlord is

Clarissa Tan

Queen of the world

A Jubilee for the Commonwealth – and beyond Recently I took a flight to my native Malaysia to celebrate my mum’s 79th birthday. I knew that, since I am currently living in London, a birthday present that screamed BRITAIN was in order — a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ notepaper set wrapped in tartan and placed in a Harrods shopping bag, say, or silver tea caddies in the shape of double-decker buses. At one of the tourist shops in Heathrow, my eyes fell on a shelf of bone china Diamond Jubilee plates all emblazoned in gold, many with HRH Elizabeth II’s visage beaming from the centre. I bought one. On

Rory Sutherland

Divided we stand

Many Native American tribes would consult a shaman before embarking on a hunting expedition. In one tribe, a shaman would take a caribou bone, carve on it images of the kind of prey the tribe were keen to find (buffalo, deer, trailer-park video-poker addicts) and then place it on a fire. At some point the heat of the fire would cause the bone to split. The hunting party would then set out unquestioningly in the direction of the line of the crack. This is of course a completely insane practice; the kind of irrational, superstitious nonsense that would have Richard Dawkins foaming at the mouth. Except it isn’t. In fact,

Matthew Parris

I hope our Jubilee Queen, unlike the last, outlives a hopeless foreign war

War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare victory; but bloodied, shocked, shamed and considerably cut down to size. The whole campaign had been an ill-conceived, over-confident and grisly blunder. Even Kipling hated it. How could the numerical superiority and technical might of Britain’s armed forces be fought to cruel draw by a smaller band of ill-equipped zealots, as light on their feet

Peter Phillips

Proms promise

On first opening a new Proms prospectus, the enthusiastic amateur immediately looks for the things that are there, the things that are not there and, a mixture of the two, the things he hopes will be there. What I hope for every year goes roughly like this: the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics (yes to both); a big operatic production (two this time, one each from the Royal Opera and ENO); one or two Really Famous (and preferably Really Old) artists (Barenboim, Boulez, Dutoit, Gergiev, Haitink, Perahia); some big anniversaries to be celebrated (Debussy, Delius, Cage, Knussen and Goehr — a middling crop); symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler (three each); some

Patrick Allitt

Right thinking

David Frum has spoken for American conservatism for a generation – now he despairs of it David Frum has been a major force in American conservatism for more than 20 years. He was a speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s first administration and is said to have coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’. In the last few years, however, he has fallen out with the leading conservative magazine, National Review, the leading conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and the leading conservative TV network, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. He is an active political blogger at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he regularly deplores Republican intransigence and bloody-mindedness. Rather

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Old Man of Corfu

‘The woes of painters!’ lamented Edward Lear in a letter to a friend in 1862. Earlier that day, he was pottering around his apartment in Corfu Town, when, glancing out of the window, he spotted a troop of soldiers marching past. One of them, a certain Colonel Bruce, spied Lear and saluted. At which, forgetting he had a clutch of paint-brushes in his hand, Lear saluted back — ‘& thereby transferred all my colours into my hair and whiskers, which I must now wash in turpentine or shave off’. As a cameo, it sums him up. In that age of pomp and protocol, he always had (or felt he did)

Emily Rhodes

Monsieur Hollande and Madame Bovary

François Hollande has had it with austerity. Well, fair enough — austerity is dull and painful. No wonder other European leaders are keen to follow his example. But perhaps Hollande should take heed of what happened to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who also longed to escape an austere life. After all, Hollande hails from Rouen, the very city that plays host to Madame Bovary’s adulterous affair with Léon Dupois. It is at Rouen cathedral that Emma Bovary initially resists Léon’s amorous advances — that is, until he hails a cab, bundles her in, and evidently employs some persuasive behaviour while they are snugly ensconced. Famously, all that emerges from the carriage

Gabrielle Donnelly

Being Blunt

Emily Blunt is jolly busy. This year, she’s in three movies – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, with Ewan McGregor; The Five-Year Engagement, with Jason Segel; and the offbeat My Sister’s Sister. Her fans, I tell her, must be really excited. Emily seems unsure: ‘D’you think so?’ she says, wrinkling her nose. ‘It might be just incredibly boring. I can imagine people’s faces when the next film comes out. “Ugh, not her again!”’ We are having coffee in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Emily and I. Emily looks every inch the movie star in a white pencil skirt and a vintage top. But as it turns out, she

James Delingpole

How I learned to stop worrying and love being hated

Girl: Dad, why do people want to punch your face in? Me: Er, I’m not sure that they do, darling. Where did you get that idea? Girl: It’s on YouTube. Look, here: ‘When Delingpole does that “air quotes” thing with his fingers I just want to punch him. Actually, I’d quite like to punch him anyway.’ Me: Ah, well, darling, you mustn’t worry about that. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. It means Daddy’s famous. Actually what I should have said was ‘infamous’. I’d first noticed this a couple of days earlier, at the Caprice, when I stopped by at the table of Daily Mail diarist Richard

Paulo Coelho

Thirty days to live: An encounter with mortality

Death is a beautiful woman, always by my side. She’ll kiss me one day, I know. She’s a companion who reminds me not to postpone anything — ‘Do it now, do it now, do it now.’ Her voice is not threatening, just constant. It tells me what matters is not how long I live, but how I live. I was once stranded in the Mojave Desert, running out of water, and without having read any of the manuals that tell you how to survive in the arid lands. And once, I got lost while climbing in the Pyrenees. Both times, I thought I would be leaving this life, but I

John Preston

A date with death

On 8 January 1937, an old man was taking his prize songbird for an early morning walk in the eastern section of Peking when he came across a woman’s body lying in a ditch. The face had been disfigured, the ribs hacked apart and the heart removed. Pathologists who examined the corpse thought it was one of the worst cases of mutilation they had ever seen — ‘and that was saying something’. She was identified as a 19-year-old British schoolgirl called Pamela Werner, the adopted daughter of a former British consul, Edward Werner. To begin with, the murder was thought to be the work of a random sex maniac. Pamela

Paul Bew

And thereby hangs a tale

The heart sinks when news breaks that an already distinguished novelist is trying his or her hand at the Irish revolution. The track record is uninspiring. Anthony Trollope lived many years in Ireland and knew senior nationalist leaders like Isaac Butt; even so, The Land Leaguers (1882) is very disappointing. Iris Murdoch had deep roots in the Northern Irish middle class; despite, or because, of this The Red and the Green (1965) is again a failure by the standards of middle-period Murdoch. Raymond Queneau’s sado-erotic satire on the Easter Rising, We Always Treat Women Too Well (1947), was perhaps unfairly excluded from the official Gallimard edition of Queneau’s oeuvre until

Friday

1 Jun 2012

David Blackburn

Euphoria gives way to worry as fog of war descends

The slaughter of the innocents in Houla, Syria, has concentrated the West’s collective mind. The Times declares (£), not unreasonably, that there is a desire to stop what the UN, while making Robert Mugabe its tourism envoy, has tepidly described as ’18 months of violence’. The paper adds that ‘all options are on the table’. Western voices are emitting decibels of disgust. Secretary of State Clinton has castigated the Russian regime for its intransigence in the Security Council, and has said that Russia’s policy will ‘contribute to a civil war’. Meanwhile, Senator John McCain has repeated his view that the Obama administration’s inaction on Syria denies what it is to be American.

Peter Hoskin

A farewell

Here’s a first for Coffee House: a farewell by one of its contributors. And that contributor is me. It’s been four-and-a-half years since I first joined The Spectator to tend to this blog, but now I’m moving on. Or, rather, I’ll still be in the office until the end of next week — but I’ll be working on some non-blogging stuff then, so I thought I’d say goodbye to CoffeeHousers now. It’s been a blast: the best first job in journalism that I could have hoped for. So I hope you don’t mind if I say a few thank-yous, Oscars style: to my first boss, Matt d’Ancona, and my second,

David Blackburn

Euphoria gives way to worry

James Forsyth

Another Downing Street exit

Sean Worth was one of the buccaneers of the Downing Street policy unit. But as the civil service began to take a hold of it, Worth was sent over to the Department of Health to help Andrew Lansley see the NHS reforms through. It was also thought that Worth, an expert on social care, would be able to help craft the Tory response to the Dilnott report. But Worth is now leaving to go to the think-tank Policy Exchange. This suggests that any government action on social care is a long way-away. Worth is just the latest in a growing list of Tory aides who have quit the government. Partly,

Rod Liddle

Grand follies

The economy’s not looking terribly good, is it? Manufacturing has sunk to a three year low, rather worse than anyone expected — and the Eurozone crisis is only partly to blame. I note that our manufacturing sector now constitutes just ten per cent of the economy. One reason for this is that it has been starved of investment and the quantitative easing, as these monkeys call it, which will now be sprayed lightly in its general direction will do little to affect the overall trend, which is ever downwards. It seemed unlikely to me that we would ever see a clearer and more self-evident example of a political class being

Sebastian Payne

Welcome to the new Spectator.co.uk

The Spectator is delighted to introduce its revamped online presence. You’ll have noticed the revamped design. But let me explain some of the other changes. We’ve restructured the content to make it easier for readers to navigate the site. Magazine articles are now arranged in the same manner as their printed counterparts. The full magazine content is available exclusively to subscribers, and non-subscribers can join us by following this link. Our array of blogs and bloggers remains free to access. We say goodbye to a few features of the old site, but I’m pleased to announce the arrival of two new bloggers. Contributing Editor Douglas Murray will be tackling religion