Society

Saturday

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

Bruce Anderson

Drink: A very good year

Nineteen-eighty was a great vintage, at least for American politics. I was fortunate enough to spend many months of that year in Washington, anticipating the election of President Reagan. The outgoing Jimmy Carter was a misery-gutted mediocrity: the man who put the mean into mean-spirited. I am prejudiced, in that I have never finished one chapter of a William Faulkner novel. Once — I think it was The Sound and the Fury — I was floundering and about to despair. Someone said: ‘The principal character is mentally defective.’ I replied: ‘Thank you. How does that differentiate him from all the others?’ Carter was Faulkner on a bad day. Most American

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Not strictly panto

My friend Robin, a retired financier, is a fine comic actor but he’d be the first to admit he has a problem with lines. He bursts on to the rehearsal stage in a huge grey wig and launches into an anarchic approximation of his part as the Magistrate at Calcutta in Around the World in Eighty Days — my adaption of Jules Verne’s classic, and this year’s Christmas show at Helmsley Arts Centre in Yorkshire. Robin is off-piste from start to finish, but with gusto and style. The sentences he imposes on Phileas Fogg and Passepartout (for the latter’s failure to remove his hat and shoes in the pagoda of

Henry Hardy

Maurice Bowra on Patrick Leigh Fermor

When I published Maurice Bowra’s scabrous satires on his contemporaries, New Bats in Old Belfries, in 2005 (pseudonymously), I had to leave blank spaces where two of them should have appeared. This was because their subject was still alive, and was unwilling to give his approval for their inclusion in his lifetime. (Ludovic Kennedy’s name had to be blanked out in another poem for the same reason.) It can now be revealed that Bowra’s target in the excised poems was Patrick (‘Paddy’) Leigh Fermor (PLF), writer, traveller — and Cretan war hero as a result of his activities while serving in the Special Operations Executive during the second world war.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

Just one of Christopher Hitchens’ talents would have been enough for most people. In him those talents — like his passions — all melded into each other: as speaker, writer and thinker. Yet he was more than the sum even of these considerable parts, for he possessed another talent that was even rarer — a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to

Christopher Hitchens

7 May 2011: Christopher Hitchens’ last article for The Spectator

A second excavation from our archives today, and another article by Christopher Hitchens. It is, we now know, the last he would ever write for us: a Diary column dispatched from the States earlier this year on the occasion of Osama Bin Laden’s death. I abhor the idea of taking a mobile-phone call at the dinner table but my friend Douglas Brinkley, eminent historian and editor (of Ronald Reagan and Hunter Thompson alike) has three small children and when his wife calls he rightly answers. So on Sunday night in Houston, Texas, at the home of the bountiful Michael and Nina Zilkha, we got an early notice that the President would

Christopher Hitchens

12 January 1985: ‘Aren’t you scared?’

A sad foray into the Spectator archives today, as we mark the death of Christopher Hitchens. He was, of course, linked with many publications: The New Statesman, The Nation, Vanity Fair — and with The Spectator too. We we all pleased to discover that he wrote so warmly of us in his recent memoirs: ‘…Alexander Chancellor, editor of The Spectator, gave me a call. His correspondent in Washington, and otherwise lovely man, was also having trouble taking the thing seriously and was filing copy that was “frankly a bit ‘flip’”. Would I mind surging down to the capital and seeing if I could hold the fort for a while? I didn’t hesitate.

Charles Glass

Hitch never pulled his punches

One night in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, circa 1979 or 1980, Christopher Hitchens was walking home from dinner at our house when he saw a man beating up a woman. Never one to back away from battle, physical or verbal, Christopher took a swing at the woman’s attacker. He was pleased to have spared her further savagery from the brute, until the woman told him to mind his own business and offered succour to her boyfriend. I think Christopher ended up with a black eye, but I forget which of the pair administered it. The neighbourhood lost a vital element when he moved to New York (and later Washington) not long

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

It was only yesterday that I remembered I should read Christopher Hitchens’ latest article for Vanity Fair: a touching, mordantly funny, survey of life, Nietzsche, Sidney Hook and death. Though one knew the occasion would not be long delayed, it remains wincingly sad that it must be one of the last things the great fighter ever wrote before his death. As he put it: Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the

Thursday

Matt Cavanagh

Dave’s ‘troubleshooters’ policy is right — but it needs working on

David Cameron has finally announced the way forward on his pledge to ‘turn round the lives of 120,000 of Britain’s troubled families’ — and it is good news. These families combine behaviour that is harmful or disruptive to the rest of society with reliance on benefits, social housing and other services, reinforcing the sense that they are taking a lot from their fellow citizens while giving nothing positive back. And although dealing with their problems is expensive, they already cost government and society a lot of money, as the Prime Minister is rightly emphasising today.  He actually made this pledge a year ago, ‘based on the broken society’ agenda he

Matthew Sinclair

The Climate Change Committee’s suspiciously opaque report

The Climate Change Committee, a quango set up to advise the Government on its emissions targets, make a big claim in their report today. They have, they suggest, disproved the argument that climate policy is set to drive substantial increases in energy bills by 2020. They say that ‘policies to achieve a low-carbon economy will add a further £110 to bills in 2020, almost entirely due to support for investments in low-carbon power generation’, less than other estimates. And so the Guardian have used that as a pretext to let climate attack dog Bob Ward accuse the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation of an attempt to

Jonathan Jones

Who’s right on public v private employment?

If you listened to PMQs yesterday, then you’ll have heard two very different accounts of what’s happening in the labour market right now. Had Ed Miliband been able to get anyone’s attention, they’d have heard him say: ‘over the last three months, for every job being created in the private sector, thirteen are being lost in the public sector.’ Cameron’s response: ‘Since the election, in the private sector there have been 581,000 extra jobs. In the public sector, he’s right, we have lost 336,000 jobs.’ According to the Labour leader’s figures, public sector losses are far greater than private sector growth. But according to Cameron’s, the private sector is more

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The growth script still needs writing

The Times is being a bit harsh on Cameron in its leader this morning. ‘On the economy’, it says, ‘Cameron has contracted out policy to George Osborne and then followed the usual (although not invariable) practice of postwar prime ministers of supporting his Chancellor’s decisions. But he has not added to this a convincing contribution of his own.’ Yes, Cameron has not done very well articulating his government’s growth policy. I’ve also noticed that he is not much good at describing the Loch Ness Monster and for the same reason. Unconfirmed rumours of its existence whirl around now and again. Grainy photos of something supposed to be a UK growth

Peter Hoskin

Cameron targets his resources at problem families

The Prime Minister’s message today is, basically, that he hasn’t forgotten about the riots. In a speech this morning, he’s going to announce his biggest new policy in response to them so far: a network of ‘troubleshooters’ who will work with 120,000 of the country’s most unstable families, with the aim, of course, of stabilising them. The idea is that the troubleshooters can help coordinate various services — from police to Job Centres –— to focus on these people. According to the Sun, the families will, in turn, face ‘tough penalties’ if they don’t cooperate. Some of you may be wary of this scheme — and it’s easy to see