Society

The Spectator is a civilised paper. If they give you a weekly column, they are pleased for you to say what you like. The only editorial interference you can expect, apart from being hired, is the sack. They’d all rather die a slow and horrible death than exert the slightest influence over what you write. Each week I email this column to the infinitely forgiving Arts editor, Liz Anderson, who has cheerfully fielded my usually late copy for ten years. The only time she interferes with the content — and always with tremendous reluctance and a profusion of stricken apologies — is when the lawyer has indicated that he is

New York How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks went a step further. They did not require a god-like sustenance nor perfection from their kings, only greatness. Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Achilles, Leonidas — they were all great kings but not perfect human beings. Practical Romans distrusted Greek morality about kings and heroes, and in Marcus Aurelius they produced the supreme type of philosopher-king that Plato had merely

Someone, so the Times reported, was asked about young people being unemployed. ‘The problem is not the lack of jobs,’ came the reply, ‘but a lack of determination on behalf of young jobseekers.’ What he meant was ‘on the part of young jobseekers’. It was they who lacked determination, not anyone else on their behalf. This strange use of behalf has become so widespread that it is impossible to tell, out of context, what a speaker means. The new sense is ousting the old, just as bad money drives out good, as Gresham’s Law declares. The only difficulty is that perhaps the old money was never quite as good as