Society

In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, there lives a fat rodent called Phil whose job it is in the middle of every winter to tell us how much longer we must suffer through the cold and dark until spring. Phil is a groundhog and his annual prediction is taken very seriously. There is even a celebrated film about him, starring Bill Murray. But this year Phil has been usurped by Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke. The President and his bearded Federal Reserve chief emerge daily from their offices like Phil from his hollow tree stump to tell us that ‘green shoots’ are poking through the hard and frozen earth despite obvious signs that

Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock tower Boing. That most familiar sound is now 150 years old. Because I am fortunate enough to live near Westminster, I often hear it during solitary moments at night in the bathroom. But, like the rest of the world, I know it even better from radio. At home or abroad, its sombre, magnificent melancholy is both reassuring and — somehow — a little bit disturbing, as time passing always is. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf wrote ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’. In

Sir Olaf Caroe — a legendary figure of the Raj, ethnographer of the Pashtuns and last administrator of the North-West Frontier of British India — wrote in 1958 that ‘unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over; in British times at least they were apt to produce an after-crop of tribal unrest [and] constant intrigue among the border tribes.’ Western leaders would have been wise to consider his words after the ‘stunning defeat’ of the Taleban, whose ramshackle theocratic tyranny crumbled in less than ten weeks’ fighting after 9/11. On 7 December 2001, as the last Taleban stronghold fell at Kandahar, only 110 CIA and a