Society

Few things in life are more French than a dispute animée about holidays. While the Spanish enjoy an easy relationship with mañana and the Italians savour il dolce far niente (sweet idleness), the French will incite a riot over any threat to their leisure time faster than you can say faire une pause. It’s therefore little surprise to witness the ardourof government officials in condemning childfree resorts, a rare but growing feature of French holidaymaking. Saint-Delis in Normandy is but one hotel offering an ‘ever more exclusive and peaceful experience’ with ‘absolute relaxation’ for only €334 a night. Much of this comes downstream of intellectual attempts to paint child-rearing as a

There are certain names of puddings that, if whispered to an Englishman of a certain age, will bring back near-Proustian reveries about their childhood. Rhubarb crumble. Bakewell tart. Sticky toffee pudding. The most naughty-sounding of them all, spotted dick. These, and many more, are often dismissed with the sobriquet ‘nursery food’, but in fact only the most well-heeled of dessert-munchers would ever have enjoyed such fare in their nursery. In fact, they were mostly likely to have been encountered at various fee-paying institutions, firstly as a staple of the boarding school lunch or supper. They then would have kept popping up in different guises throughout life, whether served at Oxbridge

The governance of Oxford University is plumbing new depths – and this doesn’t mean dons or deans, but the university’s 2,000-strong central bureaucracy based in Wellington Square. Everyone thinks of Oxford in terms of colleges but there is a whole other layer of university administration that has been steadily encroaching on the parts of the university which are responsible for teaching and research – the colleges and the academic faculties and departments. The latest grim example of the trend is a new consultation document from the bureaucrats called the Strategic Plan 2025-2030. The draft copy I have seen runs to a dozen pages and at the moment is only available

Last month, the Trump administration announced that the United States would once again withdraw from Unesco, the Paris-based UN cultural agency responsible for World Heritage Sites, education initiatives, and cultural programmes worldwide. The official line? Unesco promotes ‘woke, divisive cultural and social causes’ and its ‘globalist, ideological agenda’ clashes with America First policy. Predictably, the Trump administration framed it as a culture-war grievance. But, set aside the politics, and it soon becomes clear that Trump might not be entirely wrong. The designation treats the Georgian crescents and Roman baths as inseparable from the supermarkets, car parks, and 1970s infill Unesco – founded in 1945 with the lofty mission of promoting peace

‘So you mean rather than writing something out, you could just talk to somebody from a distance? But that would be so cool. And so much quicker. And so much more real.’ ‘Exactly!’ There was a distant time when phone calls were in themselves seen as the cowardly opt-out way of communicating rather than just doing it face to face Imagine if after decades of just being able to text, phone calls were only invented now. Everyone would be all over them. But instead the telephone is something used exclusively by  sad old people to talk to each other. No self respecting teen would talk when they could text. Or