Society

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Out of sight, out of mind

Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi, long-distance interwar runners, are two of the most extraordinary British athletes. They are also the most forgotten. This is because the distances they favoured were too long to be accommodated by any athletics event: to them a marathon would have been a mere warm-up jog, their distances were 100 miles, and, in one case, a run across the whole of the United States, when they completed 40 miles a day for 80 consecutive days. Mark Whitaker has thus set out to write a poignant account of unrecognised achievement. The only thing is, in the process he has written the most bizarre and bleakly humorous book

Friday

The Spectator

From the archives: Chernobyl, as seen from Minsk

It was this week in 1986 that the Soviet Union admitted there was a nuclear accident in Chernobyl. We’ve dug out this fascinating account by Samuel Phipps, who caught in Minsk when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded.  A sudden evacuee, Samuel Phipps, The Spectator, 10 May 1986 Minsk ‘You’ll be national heroes when you get back to England,’ said one of our Russian friends in Minsk, as we sat outside the hostel, waiting in the evening sunshine for our fates to be determined. Sure enough, pictures on Friday lunchtime television showed a relieved mother pouring champagne over her relieved Sloane Ranger daughter at Heathrow. In the studio afterwards, the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

They Don’t Do Paying Their Way

It’s Friday afternoon and even Rangers fans might have to laugh at this: There have been numerous [football computer] games throughout the history of the genre which have fallen by the wayside: Sierra’s Ultimate Soccer Manager, Elite’s Complete Onside Soccer and… Ally McCoist’s Director of Football. Released in 2001, the game allows you to manage some of the less glamorous sides of the game, including the expansion of your stadium, negotiating contracts and finding sponsorship. If you ever wanted to be part of the decision making process on the number of car parking spaces by your stadium, you genuinely can in this simulation. However, given the current state of Rangers,

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s diary looks clean

Downing Street was seething last night about allegations that there had been meetings between David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch that it had not declared. They know that any sense that they are trying to cover up just how close Cameron was to the Murdochs and News International would be extremely damaging in the current circumstances. There is enough pain to come for Cameron from Leveson without being acccussed of a cover up too. But the revised evidence submitted by News International does support Downing Street’s version of events. The meetings at issue are only described as ‘possible’ and ‘probable’ and — given that Number 10 has constructed what it is

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Did Balls cause the recession?

We take a close interest in Ed Balls and his use of figures here at Coffee House, and it seems that this interest is reciprocated. The Shadow Chancellor has just been on Daily Politics where he revealed himself as a regular reader. He was confronted with some of the facts about spending and the deficit — and whether there have been ‘deep, harsh cuts,’ as he has falsely claimed. When Andrew Neil presented him with the numbers from our earlier blog, he replied that this was cash terms. He’s right, but adjust for inflation and core government spending (that is, stripping out debt and dole) is down just 0.8 per

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Hunt: I’m not quitting

Here’s the full statement: ‘Now is not a time for kneejerk reactions. We’ve heard one side of the story today but some of the evidence reported meetings and conversations that simply didn’t happen. Rather than jump on political bandwagon, we need to hear what Lord Justice Leveson thinks after he’s heard all the evidence. Let me be clear my number one priority was to give the public confidence in the integrity of process. I asked for advice from independent regulators — which I didn’t have to do — and I followed that advice to the letter. I would like to resolve this issue as soon as possible which is why

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A cat cull isn’t just desirable, it’s an environmental necessity

Good stuff from the TV naturalist Chris Packham, who is usually sound on most issues. Firstly he disputes the reports of urban foxes attacking people in their homes. Don’t believe it, he says. No, me neither. We will be reading more of these crazed psychotic fox attack reports in our newspapers now that summer is almost upon us. My suspicion is that all of them are made up. Packham also said the following: ‘Over 200 million animals are killed each year by domestic cats. If you keep them in at night it reduces that figure by 50 per cent. I love cats, I think they are beautiful, a wonderful predator.

Jonathan Jones

The state of the public finances

£126 billion. As we discover today, that’s how much the government borrowed in 2011-12 — the fiscal year that’s just ended — pushing the national debt up to £1.02 trillion. The figures show the deficit falling by 10 per cent in real terms on 2010-11, but it has come in slightly over the £122 billion the OBR predicted in March last year, and well above the £116 billion it forecast when Osborne delivered his first Budget. So the fiscal consolidation is proceeding, albeit a bit slower than planned. So far, it’s mainly being achieved through raising revenues — particularly VAT receipts, which are up 10 per cent on last year.

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

…but Hollande is still the favourite

The best explanation I have seen for why François Hollande should be ranked as the favourite for the French presidency going into the final round comes from the Rue 89 blog. Here, courtesy of a friend who speaks far better French than I, is the key part of the argument: ‘There are no scenarios that lead to a Sarkozy victory. We generously assumed that 50 per cent of Bayrou’s first round votes would go to Sarkozy, with only 20 per cent going to Hollande and 30 per cent abstaining (whereas the latest polls suggest the centrist electorate was divided into three approximately equal parts between these three positions). We also

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Don’t worry, you’ll be spared

Well, most of you lot should be all right if Anders Breivik gets out of prison and decides to recommence his killing spree here. Or at least I assume you will. I haven’t actually met you in the flesh, I’m just guessing. Apparently, Breivik decided against shooting one bloke on the island of Utoya because he ‘looked right-wing’. The spared individual was Adrian Pracon, the son of a Polish immigrant. ‘This person appeared right-wing,’ Breivik explained, ‘that’s why I didn’t fire any shots at him. Certain people look more right wing than others.’ Mr Pracon’s blue eyes were apparently a crucial factor. I think I look quite right wing these

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Happy St George’s Day | 23 April 2012

Elgar, of course, gets into my own English XI alongside the likes of Housman, Wodehouse, Shackleton*, Orwell, Turing etc etc. *Anglo-Irish, of course, as a commenter points out and so, perhaps, should not be on this list.

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Circus Must Go On

I’ve also written a piece for Foreign Policy on the great Bahrain Grand Prix controversy: The irony is that a race designed to flatter and showcase the Bahraini regime has instead become a focal point for unrest, shining a light upon a repressive government whose actions would not receive nearly as much attention in the European and international press if Bahrain had not purchased the right to host motor racing’s traveling circus. That, however, is small comfort when set beside the moral iniquity of millionaires and billionaires fretting about tire temperatures and race set-ups while pretending that all is sunshine and sweetness. Meanwhile, the Bahraini regime continues to thwart all

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Woodwoses

My husband gave me a copy of Plutarch’s Moralia for our wedding anniversary, the romantic old thing. It is in the translation of Philemon Holland, made in 1603 and republished in 1657. At the back is ‘An Explanation of certain obscure words… in favour of the unlearned Reader’. That’s me. Some entries in the glossary make sense. To Pinguifie, we are told, means ‘To make fat’, and Gymnosophists were ‘Philosophers of India who went naked and led beside a more austere and precise life.’ But some entries seem to define simpler terms by harder ones, as with Satyrs: ‘Woodwoses or monsters. Creatures with tails, yet resembling Men and Women, and

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Full Marx

Quo Vadis is the restaurant in the house where Marx wrote Das Kapital, and today it is full of tulips. I always expect Soho restaurants to house crackheads and refugees from Esquire, their bloody hands echoing the streets that smell equally of dirt and soap, like a man who wants to wash but finds he can’t. I have hated Soho since I saw a man punch his way out of a brothel and a teenage prostitute buy a cuddly toy that was bigger than she was, in a ghastly montage of the free market. I don’t know why people come to Soho, except in novels. I prefer Kew Gardens but

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 April 2012

Q. My husband and I are at loggerheads. One of the buildings he owns has become vacant and he has planning consent for change of use to a pub. On the one hand we very much need the money. On the other I dread the drunkenness and yobbery it would bring. Can you rule, Mary? — Name withheld, Worcestershire A. He could achieve the same result — filling your coffers — by turning this empty building into toilets. Anyone who doubts that toilets can be an attraction in their own right need only visit Stonehenge, where hordes pass through the toilets each day without even casting a glance at the

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Once upon a time on the motorway

After my recent column about the horrors of travelling with my four children, I got a sweet letter from a 17-year-old called Tara Vivian-Neal recommending the wheeze that her parents came up with to keep her and her brother quiet on long car journeys: audiobooks. ‘Black Ships Before Troy, The Iliad and Tales of William Shakespeare have forever been drummed into my head,’ she wrote. ‘When a story as captivating as King Lear or Macbeth is read aloud you totally immerse yourself and bickering and fighting is ­forgotten.’ Now, I’m not so naive as to think that my children’s attention could be captured by Tales of William Shakespeare. Gnomeo and

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 21 April 2012

I am lucky with my brother John. Although he is 12-and-a-half years older than me, he doesn’t patronise or seek to undermine me. On the contrary, he is wholly supportive of my modest endeavours, whatever they may be. Although, at the end of a successful and varied career as a publisher, author and bookseller, he is still dealing in old books, he doesn’t do as much as he used to. He will be 85 this summer and suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. But he takes a keen interest in whatever I get up to, and he shuffles off to the newsagent to buy any publication that I have written something for.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 21 April 2012

Somehow or other, through some sort of oversight, I seem to have acquired a racehorse. It all happened very quickly, as these things tend to. I was with the boyfriend, visiting his mother’s yard, where she deals horses. The boyfriend was inspecting a coloured pony for driving. The boyfriend fancies himself on a pony and trap this summer, although I can’t quite see the attraction myself. He tells me it will be fun, the two of us clip-clopping around Cobham on a shiny carriage pulled by a smart little trotter. So I went with him to inspect Jim Boy. I peered over the stable door at the black and white

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 21 April 2012

The weatherman had forecast a cold front arriving speedily from the east during the course of the day. As soon as our two guests arrived we eagerly debated this with them. It seemed incredible. The sea was sparkling under a cloudless sky and the sun was getting hotter by the minute. The lovely settled weather we’d been enjoying looked set fair to continue. Had we heard right, we wondered? But our guests had heard the same forecast, and the weatherman had sounded as unequivocal to them as he’d sounded to us. The proprietor of the hotel they were staying at, clearly a man with his guests’ best interests at heart,

Taki

High life | 21 April 2012

New York Seeing Manhattan rising in the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, meant to us who came from the old continent. I was 11 years old and had seen only war and devastation. Dead, stinking bodies in the city parks, bullet-scarred buildings, people starving on the sidewalks, too weak to die in the privacy of their hovels. Then I was suddenly whisked from home and into a TWA first-class ‘stratocruiser’ stopping in Rome, Paris, London, Shannon, Gander, Boston and, finally, New York. I had a bed