Society

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Blast through Boxing Day

Video games are an ideal gift – especially the violent ones Not long ago, Salman Rushdie took to Twitter to say, ‘Passed this billboard: “From the Makers of Doom… Rage!” What does it say about us that these are the names of games?’ The author of Fury had a point. Video games are now bigger business than movies, and the biggest business in video games is war: exploding aliens, terrorists being shot in the spine, guns, guns, guns. To those who don’t know their FPSs from their STDs, it looks like a bewildering miasma of regressive male adolescent nonsense. Which, of course, it is. Most of these games have crude

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A patient cure

Andrew Lansley stands on the concourse of Euston station cracking jokes with a gaggle of civil servants. Lansley, who must be at least 6ft3, towers over the group. He looks relaxed. The contrast with how he looked a few months ago could not be sharper. Then, the Health Secretary seemed to be carrying all the troubles of the coalition’s NHS reforms on his shoulders. He had developed a stoop and he would talk to you with his arms crossed. But now his controversial, much revised bill is almost through parliament. What he calls his period in ‘purgatory’ is nearly over. For a Cabinet minister, Lansley is surprisingly free from ego.

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Winter Notebook

You don’t go to North Norfolk in winter for good weather, but we had it — vast blue skies, sunshine and a couple of wild gales. North Norfolk in summer, like the Cotswolds in which I live landlocked, mingles the horribly overcrowded with quiet spaces about which locals keep schtum. In late November it had been reclaimed by them and was half-empty. Staying in a peaceful converted barn, we were there to work but also to walk on near-deserted Holkham Beach, where Poppy the border terrier thought she had died and the sand and sea were heaven. Best, friendliest coffee shop was in Burnham Market, small, un-chic Tilly’s, which sells

Tom Hollander

I can’t get out of bed

Life is about choices. You can explain your lot away as bad luck, but I face you with the possibility that your lifestyle is the result of choices you have made. Said the therapist I went to see last week. Before leaving I made another appointment to see him so that I wouldn’t appear to have the problem with commitment that he had identified. But I don’t think I’ll go. I went to see him because, with the combination of the end of a relationship and George Osborne’s well-named autumn statement, I’ve been finding it hard to get out of bed. I went to see Ruby Wax’s excellent show about

Ed Smith

He knew he was wrong — Daniel Kahneman interview

When I was 13, my school cricket team received a visit from a top professional cricket coach, an intoxicating visit from the big leagues. I tried to hear what the great man was saying as he watched us, how he advised our teacher. ‘Never praise kids — they only mess it up next time,’ I overheard him say. After pausing to berate me for a below-average cover drive, he whispered to the teacher, ‘It’s different with criticism — that really works.’ Like a typical cocky teenager, I longed for a clever riposte. Perhaps fortunately, I didn’t have the intellectual insight to deliver one. But last week I met up with

Adam Werritty

Breaking the silence | 17 December 2011

When you hire a morning suit for a wedding, you count on being photographed a few times on the day — for photos that will be quickly buried in wedding albums. But by now, half the country will probably have seen pictures of me as Liam Fox’s best man at his wedding, six years ago. Had I known, I’d perhaps have hired a suit that fitted a little better. But I’d never have imagined that I’d end up in a Force 12 political storm. When this all began, some three months ago, I opted to keep a low profile, thinking that any other course of action would only fan the

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Parliament shouldn’t pay

This year has seen a sombre centenary, which passed almost unnoticed. It was in August 1911 that Members of Parliament voted to pay themselves for the first time — an annual stipend of £400 a year. What was meant to open parliament to all ranks of society and allow men of low birth but high gifts to sit as MPs has proved a fine example of the law of unintended consequences. A seemingly modest innovation began the process which has culminated in what we now have: the professionalisation of politics and the creation of a new class of full-time but mediocre politicians. And instead of changing the House of Commons

Roger Scruton

The green and the blue

For as long as I can remember, the word ‘conservative’ has been used in intellectual circles as a term of abuse, while to call someone ‘right-wing’ has been the next thing to social ostracism. This habit has persisted throughout 50 years in which the Conservative party has had the largest overall share of the vote. But the habit is not new. It took root two centuries ago, when the French Revolution excited British intellectuals to think that they too might get the chance to cut off the heads that contained less brains than their own. John Stuart Mill, when a Liberal MP, spoke for the intellectual majority by denouncing the

Bruce Anderson

Projecting Thatcher

‘The Iron Lady’ and the Iron Lady I knew The Iron Lady is a cruel film: brutally unsparing in its depiction of the hazards of old age. I was ready to be angry and to believe that, like jackals, Hollywood lefties were closing in on an aged lioness, safe in the cowardice of assailing the vulnerable, overlooking in their sniggerings the obvious point. In her prime, one roar, and they would all have fled in terror. Those suspicions were unjustified, for this is cruelty in the pursuit of art. The outcome is cinematographic power. It is a work of force and pathos. For most of the time, I was enthralled;

Hugh Eakin

Here comes Qatar

Suddenly, the tiny Gulf emirate is the Middle East’s superpower In late October, Syrian state television aired a 17-minute documentary unmasking what it said was the real force behind the country’s seven-month-old revolt: the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. ‘The name of Qatar surfaces once a disaster or conflict breaks out in the Arab and Muslim world,’ the programme begins. ‘Qatar intervenes in major and minor issues, seeking to wield influence by backing rebel and extremist movements as well as armed Islamic groups.’ Along with sowing ‘sedition’ everywhere from Egypt and Tunisia to Sudan and Yemen, Qatar had been ‘financing and arming the rebel movements in eastern Libya.’ Now

Niall Ferguson

On being called a racist

My ‘literary spat’ with the London Review of Books Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings. It is indeed astonishing that, from the beginning of the 16th century until the third quarter of the 20th century, the West (Europe and its settler colonies) did much better than the rest of the world and came to rule over it. But that’s what happened. By the 1970s the average American was roughly 20 times richer than the average Chinese. The average Briton was at least 12 times richer than the average Indian. In the first half of the 20th century, westerners had life expectancy

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Christmas for the ladies

At this time of year you’ve probably had it with festive planners, Christmas countdowns and those magazine features about what presents to buy — as if picking presents, rather than paying for them, were the problem. So when I say that the Christmas season is actually too short, and that we should round it off with a second, mini-Christmas, you may get a bit restive. But bear with me. Let’s get onto the second idea first, viz, the mini Christmas. In Ireland, that’s actually what it’s called, the Nollaig Beag or Nollaig na mBan — the Little Christmas, or the woman’s Christmas. That’s the name for the Epiphany in the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Thank God I don’t have that ghastly sense of entitlement that Eton instils

I honestly didn’t realise I’d been to a ‘minor’ public school until my first term at Christ Church. Before that, I thought — as all of us did at my alma mater — that though of course there were lots of other public schools out there, Malvern could hold its head high with the very best of them. So coming up to Oxford was a bit of a shock. As far as the Etonians and Wyckhamists and Wets were concerned, my school was so obscure and worthless I might have attended a shabby comprehensive. Among those who very much gave off this vibe was David Cameron. Dave was never aggressively

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

I have absolutely no opinions whatsoever on the euro – aren’t I a lucky boy?

It’s a remarkable stroke of luck for a columnist, but I have no views whatsoever on the euro. It’s not deliberate, this, just a function of my age. Most columnists seem to have started forming their euro views some time prior to 1992, and I simply wasn’t that sort of 14-year-old. ‘Do you worry about the effect that high German interest rates might have on Britain’s continuing participation in the ERM?’ is exactly the sort of thing we didn’t say to each other, while shaving odd bits out of our grunge-era hair and debating the merits of inhaling deodorant through a towel. I do remember very briefly having an opinion

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

How a friend bought a flat in Berlin and became custodian to a dead Russian

My friend Stephen (let us call him Stephen) is an unsentimental sort of man. In his thirties, he has a sharper mind than his job as a middle-ranking civil servant really demands, but he has more or less settled down. Stylish (and one for the girls) in his twenties, he keeps his neat good looks and slight, alluring stammer, but seems content now in a steady relationship with a good woman in comfortable lodgings he’s able to afford, a long way from the centre of London. His intellect, though, still roves. He has an edge, a critical, sceptical outlook; and has avoided that benign, mellow fuzziness that can settle on

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: A seasonal sermon for the City: give generously to portly gentlemen

A consolation of the financial crisis is that it is producing a bumper crop of fiction, the best of which will be read long after all the hefty works of investigative non-fiction have been forgotten. Last year I praised Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, and my Christmas reading this year will include Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money and Robert Harris’s The Fear Index. The ‘silo mentality’ of the hedge-fund manager offers a rich psychological seam, the drama of the trading floor provides all the McGuffins to sell the film rights, and the contrast between the financiers’ lifestyle and that of the people whose livelihoods they damage is the 21st-century

Anthony Horowitz

The trail

A Christmas short story by Anthony Horowitz Illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy They were spending their first Christmas together in Antigua, Simon and Jane Maxwell, enjoying not just a holiday but a honeymoon after a courtship that had taken them both by surprise. It was his second marriage, her first — and perhaps it was because she had waited so long that she had jumped into it so readily. Of course, she was a modern woman with a perfectly successful career… in publishing, as it happened. She might be single but she would never have described herself as ‘on the shelf’. It wasn’t as if she kept cats or anything dreadful

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 17 December 2011

In Competition No. 2726 you were asked for a modern version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ taking as your first line ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me…’ and continuing for a further twelve. Perhaps inevitably there was a fair amount of repetition in the entry: plenty of leakers leaking, hacks a-hacking, lawyers laughing and ‘Five Olympic rings’. Still, you were on good form. Here are extracts from three submissions that only just missed out on a place in the winning line-up. ‘Five wiccan charms;/ Four Hamentaschen/ Three Buddhist texts/ Two Tarot packs/ And a card wishing “Happy winterval” ’ (Dominica Roberts); ‘Five MEPs,/

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: In times of crisis, use your head

A few years ago in Malaysia I found myself reading the national paper, the New Straits Times. There was a headline on the front page that caught my eye. It read something like ‘New road to the airport will make it easier to get to the airport’. I’m sure those weren’t the exact words, but that was pretty much the import of the thing. I read the whole of the ensuing article, which effectively confirmed at length what I already had been led to believe — that the new road to the airport would indeed make it much, much easier to get to the airport. I read it again. Something

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: All must have prizes

What a year for a world in turmoil: crisis, riots, revolution and economic catastrophe. And that’s just Manchester City. Meanwhile, there’s the cheering news that next year’s even more calamitous financial armageddon will coincide with London hosting a fortnight’s sporting event costing, oh, £23 million an hour give or take some change. Ah yes, 2011 — we will miss you dearly. But after a canny trip to the bookies, some highly complex leveraging against future gains, and by cashing in the remnants of a pension, this column has secured a few bottles of Asti for the traditional end-of-year awards ceremony. With Manchester’s Euro downgrade affecting both blue and red halves