Society

For the vociferous band of Tesco-haters, waiting for the supermarket giant to slip up on one of its own homogenised banana skins has been a long and frustrating business. OK, you can clutch on to the failure of Tesco to achieve the 4 per cent year-on-year increase in sales during the Christmas period which analysts had predicted (it only managed 3.1 per cent). You can point out that its shares have plunged by 20 per cent since December — but which retailer’s shares haven’t? You can crow that a remarkable number of its executives over the past year have been scattering to jobs in rival businesses (one of them, dammit,

Harlan Coben takes to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to recommend parents install spyware on their kids’ computers. Make no mistake: If you put spyware on your computer, you have the ability to log every keystroke your child makes and thus a good portion of his or her private world. That’s what spyware is — at least the parental monitoring kind. You don’t have to be an expert to put it on your computer. You just download the software from a vendor and you will receive reports — weekly, daily, whatever — showing you everything your child is doing on the machine. Scary. But a good idea.

Brilliant Ryan Lizza piece on Hillary in this week’s New Yorker. Key paragraph: Unlike Hubert Humphrey, Al Smith, or even her husband, Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail has never been able to project the image of the happy warrior. There is now, and has always been, a certain joylessness in her bearing. She has been trying to make discipline a selling point since her first “listening tour” of New York State, in the months before she ran for the United States Senate—a device designed to portray tireless commitment to voters suspicious of her carpetbagging and celebrity. After landing in Columbus, the campaign entourage headed by motorcade to Zanesville, a

Martial virtues Sir: In his article about his film of the Haditha killings (‘The burden of guilt at Haditha’, 8 March), Nick Broomfield subscribes to the tired cliché that, in war, ‘everyone is a victim’. This has been the prevailing assumption of film-makers since at least the 1970s, and I had hoped a Spectator article might take a less lazy view. Mr Broomfield’s article adds a new dimension to these prejudices only by suggesting that participation in the making of a motion picture helps to heal the scars of war. I do not wish to make light of the serious problems faced by veterans of combat, nor question the healing