Society Archives

Saturday

19 Jul 2008

Spectator Sport | 19 July 2008

Grass-court tennis eh? A bit boring? Just serve and volley, ace, serve and volley? Well not any more. And sometimes old-style serve-return, bish-bosh, really did get a bit tedious. Go on, admit it. Obscure studies by people with a bit too much time on their hands proved that once you’ve factored in breaks between games, towelling down, or getting ready to bounce balls, top grass-court players would only spend four or five minutes per hour actually playing tennis. Very definitely not any more. Do you know how many times Rafa Nadal served and volleyed in that quite extraordinary, thunderously brilliant epic of epics in the gloom of SW19 last month?

Matthew Parris

My A to Z of scare stories, from Anthrax to Zion (Protocols of the Elders of)

Matthew Parris provides an A to Z of things that at one point scared us rigid but the dangers of which now appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Britain, says the poet Kate Fox, quoted on Radio 4’s Saturday Live last week, is a country ‘eternally poised between a hosepipe ban and a flood’. Or between fearsome, knife-wielding youth gangs and a teen generation of obese couch-potatoes. Knife crime is a horrible thing; and for offering the list of comparable scares which follows you may call me flippant. But in every case it was for a while true that what would have been thought flippant would have been to

James Young

Scorn not the mistress

You are invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2556’ by 31 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition No. 2553 you were invited to write a sonnet by the Mistress in reply to the author of Sonnet 130. Zounds! Such a pounding unkind Shakespeare took When Rival Poets used the sonnet’s power! But who’s to bring their weighty words to book? T.T., thou shouldst be living at this hour! But ’cos thou art well dead, I’ll sing of those Who gave the Avon Swan such well-earned welly. Seven share

Rod Liddle

If the liberal press is to be believed, nobody has ever been stabbed — ever

An apology to all readers: a couple of weeks ago, in a public-spirited sort of way, I offered advice as to how to go about getting stabbed. Although I hope you will accept that I was well intentioned, the article was clearly deficient and even offensive in two important respects. First, I neglected to explain how one might go about getting stabbed twice — and, since I wrote, the window for that particular opportunity seems to have been closed. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, unveiled an exciting plan to let stabbers loose in hospital accident and emergency wards, where they might joyfully run around stabbing people who are recovering from

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 19 July 2008

These things are sent to try us: I’m speaking now of circular letters from the General Medical Council. I recently received a second such letter about the Council’s Ethnicity Census from the president of the Council: Toward the end of 2007, I wrote asking for your help with an important project designed to help us to understand better the diversity of doctors registered with the GMC. We were hugely encouraged by the response we received and now have ethnicity data for over 60% of all registered doctors in the UK. To complete the picture we still need your support and I would be grateful if you would provide the information

Kate Chisholm

Perfect prose

Chekhov, Louisa M. Alcott, Kafka and co. wrote them for money; thinking of them as a lucrative money-spinner to keep their families in bread and potatoes. Now they usually yield so little money from magazines and book publishers that very few writers devote themselves to perfecting the art of the short story (at least in the UK, though it’s not nearly so true in America or Canada). Of the great British magazines that used to churn out stories by Dickens and Gaskell, Hardy and Kipling, only the People’s Friend is left, published since 1869 by D.C. Thomson of Dundee (also publishers of those great products of the literary imagination Beano

Dinah Roe

Flowers of Scotland

The Lost Leader is Mick Imlah’s first collection in 20 years, following Birthmarks in 1988, and it is well worth the wait. It takes in everyone from Saint Columba to John Knox, with appearances from William Wallace, medieval alchemist Michael Scot, Bonnie Prince Charlie and rugby hero Gordon Brown. But this is no dewy-eyed tribute to national glories past. Like Browning’s poem ‘The Lost Leader’, which lamented the political conservatism of the aging Wordsworth, Imlah’s verse is in no mood for po-faced reverence. Wallace, for example, is drawn and quartered in four lines: This done, the moon went overhead; The bell of Mary Magdalen Struck one; and smartly off he

Friday

18 Jul 2008

Alex Massie

Golf interlude

I was part of the team covering the 1999 Open for Scotland on Sunday – that’s the tournament you all remember more for Jean van de Velde’s collapse than for Paul Lawrie’s victory – and what I remember most from that week was how much the pros whinged about the way Carnoustie had been set up. It affronted their sense of themselves. They had a point in as much as the fairways were narrow, the rough had been watered and a tough course had been protected against benign conditions. But they still whinged, forgetting that they were playing, as they do in every competition, the course not the other golfers.

Alex Massie

Headline of the Day | 18 July 2008

From the Daily Telegraph: Could Helen Mirren’s bikini start a revolution? The usual rule is, as you know, that the answer to any question posed in a healine is almost always “No”. But who knows, perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule…

James Forsyth

Why an Israeli strike on Iran could turn nuclear

Benny Morris’s op-ed in The New York Times is essential reading. He sets out how any Israeli, as opposed to American, strike on Iran could easily escalate into a nuclear war. I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but here are the key paragraphs: “But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such

James Forsyth

Livingstone to run again

Ken Livingstone has confirmed to The Guardian that he will run for Mayor of London in 2012. It is hard to see how anyone could stop Livingstone from winning the Labour nomination so we will likely have a reprise of this year’s Ken v. Boris race. Livingstone is presumably betting that it will be harder for Boris to win with a Tory government in power than it was with a Labour one. The thought that he would, provided the Tories win the next election, be the most powerful Labour figure in the country must also be tempting him as well as the thought of being Mayor during the Olympics. The

James Forsyth

The Unions have their strategy right

The Unions have 130 demands that they intend to lay before Labour’s National Policy Forum, Patrick Wintour reports this morning. These range from extending the minimum wage to those under 21 to making union subscriptions tax deductible. This strikes me as exactly the right approach for the Unions to take. Labour is in no financial shape to reject all these demands. Equally, it cannot be seen to cave in on everything. So, Brown will make a big show of resisting a few of the Union’s big ticket demands while conceding on everything else.

Thursday

17 Jul 2008

Alex Massie

Say it Ain’t So, Ricco…

The other day I was all poised to praise Riccardo Ricco, whose two stage wins in this year’s Tour were thrilling pieces of cycling. I was going to suggest that if Damiano Cunego could show some better form there might be some hope that we could enjoy a modern rivalry that might offer a pale echo of the great Coppi-Bartali tussles of the past. Not so fast, my friends. Ricco has been kicked out of the tour (though, as always in cycling, the details remain less than clear) and the Saunier-Duval team has withdrawn from the race. Perplexingly, the organisers say this shows they are winning the battle against doping.

Alex Massie

A Question of Accent

Megan wonders whatever happened to the classic upper-crust New England accent: Why did this happen? Television tends to flatten regional accents, of course, but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America’s slipped softly and silently away? Well, it’s true that the aristocracy, in as much as it still exists, has maintained a certain distinctive way of speaking, but it’s not heard very often. David Cameron, for example, is sometimes labelled a “toff” but his accent is very different from that of Harold Macmillan or Alec Douglas-Home for instance. There’s not much cut-glass around these days. You won’t, for instance, find many people in British movies talking in

James Forsyth

Coffee House Exclusive: Richard Reeves to be the new director of Demos

I said earlier on Coffee House that who Demos appointed as their new director would give us a sense of where the intellectual energy is on the left and the news that they have appointed Richard Reeves shows that the liberal-left is not yet ready to cede the intellectual battlefield. It also illustrates that even on the left the intellectual conversation has moved passed Gordon Brown. Reeves co-wrote with Phil Collins the recent Prospect essay Liberalise or Die that caused such a stir; Brownite loyalists demanded that James Purnell stop using Phil Collins as a speechwriter after it appeared. The piece argued that Labour was failing to grasp that the

James Forsyth

The next key stage in the SATS debacle

The current SATS marks scandal is going to have huge knock-on effects. Schools are getting back results with pupils marked as absent who were present, other scripts are being returned unmarked and there is growing evidence that the grading has been—to put it mildly—inconsistent. This means that this year’s school league tables are going to be hugely flawed. In these circumstances, the government appears to have three options. It can just not publish league tables this year which would be embarrassing and illustrate just how big a cock-up this has been. It can demand that the National Assessment Agency finds the money to have all the papers remarked but the

James Forsyth

Milburn for Chancellor?

On Tuesday, Coffee Housers mused about the possibility of Alan Milburn replacing Alistair Darling. Today, Andrew Porter reports on the Westminster Village chatter about this: “So could he make an improbable comeback as part of a major reshuffle? The answer, I’m told, is yes, he could. And in a seemingly far-fetched scenario that would shake Westminster he could return as Chancellor if the PM decides to jettison Alistair Darling. Surely not? One Cabinet source said: “It is a possibility. Alan is bright and has the sort of ideas that may be able to make a difference. He still has enthusiasm.” Given Brown’s track record, it seems highly unlikely that Brown

James Forsyth

Director of Demos quits

Stephen has already flagged this, but Catherine Fieschi has resigned as Director of Demos. She sets out her reasons for leaving in The New Statesman as well as defending Demos’s decision to attending Islam Expo. (There is no reason to think that her departure has anything to do with Demos’s participation in Expo). Demos played a key role in the early years of the New Labour project. Who is appointed to this job will offer a fascinating insight into where the intellectual energy now is on the left.

James Forsyth

The Islamism agenda

Seamus Milne’s column in The Guardian today is most revealing. Milne is completely frank that he believes that the government should engage with Islamism. As Milne writes: “The issue is the government’s growing hostility to dealing with anyone connected with the highly diverse movement that is Islamism. This is a political trend that has violent and non-violent, theocratic and democratic, reactionary and progressive strands, stretching from Turkey’s pro-western ruling Justice and Development party through to the wildest shores of takfiri jihadism. But it’s largely on the basis of this blinkered opposition that the government is now funding Husain’s Quilliam Foundation, promoting other marginal groups such as the Sufi Muslim Council

James Forsyth

The Blairite plates are shifting

There have been few harsher—or more prescient—critics of Gordon Brown than John Rentoul. Today, Rentoul again predicts that Brown will be forced out by the Cabinet before the next election but what is new is who Rentoul thinks is coming up fast, James Purnell. Rentoul writes: “That the opinion polls are so tilted against the Government on the basis of Cameron’s offer of fresh faces and an easy manner rather than policy substance ought to give courage to Brown’s enemies – those are the ones on the bench next to him. I suspect that Brown will be forced out by a self-interested Cabinet rebellion by this time next year. David