Society

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Blame Quentin

In Bruges 18, Nationwide This film is about two Irish hitmen, Ken and Ray, who are forced to take a sort of minibreak in Bruges (hence the title; hence why this film isn’t, say, In Milton Keynes) on the instruction of their boss, Harry, who wants them to lie low for a while. The film is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, the celebrated playwright famed for The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman, but I don’t know. In Bruges has some cracking lines in it, a cracking performance from Brendan Gleeson as Ken, and some very funny, provocative jokes, but I still don’t know. Ken and Ray are utterly

Archie Bland

A choice of first novels | 19 April 2008

Oliver Tate, the hero of Submarine (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), is a monologophobic parthenologist. Roughly translated, this means he is interested in finding new words to describe what it’s like being a virginal 14-year-old in Swansea. So is Joe Dunthorne, whose first novel this is, and both he and Oliver are extremely good at what they set out to do. Dunthorne’s success is rooted in his star’s: Oliver is surely the most charming adolescent borderline sociopath since Martin Amis lit up The Rachel Papers with Charles Highway. This is the sort of teenager whose determination to help others overcome their distressing limitations is matched only by his blindness to how unwelcome

Friday

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary – 18 April 2008

Last week several people — well, two to be exact — asked me if I was looking forward to St George’s Day. One of them was a road-sweeper. Apparently it falls this year on 23 April, although in 1861 its date appears to be two days earlier. I know this because I looked it up in the Book of Days. I keep thinking how confusing it would be if one came back from the dead and tried to look things up in newspapers. I visited Liverpool two days later, the road-sweeper’s query still in my head, and inquired of a girl loitering beside the paper stall at Lime Street Station

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What’s the actual cost of living?

Under the headline ‘The Real Rate of Inflation’, The Daily Mail launches its new Cost of Living Index. The idea is to show that the Consumer Price Index’s 2.5 percent rate does not reflect the actual cost of living. The Mail finds that the price of food is up 15.5 percent, with the price of tea bags up by two-thirds for some reason. People’s gas and electricity bills are up by 12.5 and 12.9 percent respectively. Indeed, the only things that seem to be going down in price are booze and broadband. For more on inflation see Brownie No. 1

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

G is for Gower

Well, better late than never, here’s the long, even keenly, awaited G XI. No excuses for its late arrival, but comfort yourselves with the thought that you’ll have less time to wait before the H XI arrives to batter everyone else’s bowling to pieces. So, following Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter,  Edrich and Fry, it is time for Gower. 1. Sunil Gavaskar (IND)2. Gordon Greenidge (WI)3. David Gower (ENG) (Capt)4. WG Grace (ENG)5. Tom Graveney (ENG)6. Adam Gilchrest (AUS) (Wkt)7. Tony Greig (ENG)8. Jack Gregory (AUS) 9. Joel Garner (WI)10. Clarrie Grimmett (AUS)11. Lance Gibbs (WI) Number of players from each country in the series so far:England 31, Australia 13, West

Peter Hoskin

This is England | 17 April 2008

With St George’s Day fast approaching (it’s on April 23rd), The Spectator has taken the opportunity to release a special issue on England. You’ll find the relevant articles dotted around the website, although I’d recommend you check out Rod Liddle’s excellent piece in particular.   It’s also the perfect chance to hear CoffeeHousers’ thoughts on England and on being English. We’ve already asked various public figures “What is England?” – you can see their answers here. Why not register your own response in the comments section?

Wednesday

George Bridges

Hands off Jerusalem, my family heirloom

George Bridges on the part played by his great-grandfather, Robert Bridges, in the composition of Parry’s music to Blake’s lyric: too precious, he says, to be hijacked by separatists I suspect you had better things to do last Friday evening than stay in to watch the English Democrats’ party political broadcast. I missed it. In fact, I didn’t know the party existed until I was throwing out the newspapers at the weekend, and happened to see the broadcast listed on the TV page. Intrigued, I looked them up online. ‘England: we have a right to be angry. THE ENGLISH HAVE HAD ENOUGH.’ I began to feel as if I had

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Doctor’s dilemma

In those distant days when I used to hang out on Facebook one of my favourite user groups was ‘I hate Catherine Tate and she shouldn’t be in the new series of Doctor Who.’ I don’t remember many of the members’ exchanges being particularly witty or illuminating, but then they didn’t need to be. The group’s name said it all, really. And now she’s arrived just how bad and annoying is she? Well, the good news is: not as bad and annoying as you might have feared. But, given how bad and annoying you feared she would be, I’m not sure that’s going to provide total consolation. I’ll give you

Ian Hay-Davison

How to rescue a bank: be firm, be quick, be quiet

To judge from the media coverage of Northern Rock, one might imagine that the circumstances of a bank collapse have never occurred before — or at least not for 150 years. But this is not the case. There have been several in recent years, including those of Johnson Matthey and Barings. But the closest parallel is one that is less well known: the collapse of National Mortgage Bank (NMB), of which I was appointed chairman in February 1992 to supervise the run-off of its business. The story begins with the collapse of the fraud-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991. This was not the direct responsibility of the

Clare Asquith

The dying of the light

‘Tenebrae’ is the last office, the final prayer in the ritual day of the Benedictine monk. But there is a double finality to the Tenebrae evoked at the beginning of this book. This is the great cathedral church of Durham, and the date is 31 December 1539. ‘A few hours earlier, the Prior of Durham and his monks had surrendered their monastery to King Henry VIII, just as so many had done before them by then’. These monks are about to disperse, the church’s treasures will be appropriated and the ancient tombs of St Cuthbert and St Bede will be broken up after hundreds of years of continuous tradition. Though

Neil Collins

Lessons for less: affordable excellence

Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might think — yet there’s another primary school in this street that the site doesn’t show, which is so oversubscribed that it has just registered its first pre-birth application from desperate parents. Maple Walk is a fee-paying school, but quite unlike other prep schools in the capital. Where they boast of the quality of their facilities,

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What Goes Up Should Come Down

A splendid piece on elevators – yes, lifts – in this week’s New Yorker. Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tuesday Linkage

Mr Eugenides has a delightful item about everyone’s favourite “Viewspaper”, The Independent Matt Zeitlin points out a couple of elementary truths to the Weekly Standard It’s April 15th, so it’s time for Megan’s tax plan to get another airing. Stephen Colbert on the candidates. Plus! Who’s the real Irishman, Colbert or Bill O’Reilly? The wives of high-ranking Cambodian officials are expected to be angry this year. Is Barack Obama a Marxist? Joe Lieberman says that’s “a good question.” Sigh. Sign of the times: a Virginia school bans playground games of tig. Double Sigh.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is Basra back under Iraqi government–not militia–control?

Today’s AFP dispatch from Basra makes for fascinating reading. It suggests that the Iraqi government efforts to rein in the militias that had come to dominate the town, thanks in part to British policy, has been much more successful than initially thought:  “Residents say the streets have been cleared of gunmen, markets have reopened, basic services have been resumed and a measure of normality has returned to the oil-rich city. The port of Umm Qasr is in the hands of the Iraqi forces who wrested control of the facility from Shiite militiamen, and according to the British military it is operational once again.” There’s no doubt that Prime Minister Maliki’s

Matthew Dancona

A better effort. Just

Take two: Gordon did better in his interview with the BBC today than in his exchange with Nick Robinson last week. As I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, Brown answered Robinson’s questions in the earlier exchange about people’s anxieties over the economy without a shred of apparent empathy or feeling for worried mortgage holders and aspiring home owners. Today, the PM tried hard – so hard – to show the emotional intelligence that you just knew his media handlers had been urging upon him. So today it was different: deep breath: “I wake up in the morning thinking about how I can help those people who have mortgages or are

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tax refugees

Shire Pharmaceutics, a FTSE100 firm worth GBP5.5bn, is to relist its head office offshore for tax reasons. Global firms (as Shire now is) can report profits anywhere – and Shire will move to Jersey and pay tax in Ireland (where corporation tax is 12.5% for trading income, not 28%). It is a move explicitly “designed to help protect the group’s taxation position”. Shire is fearing a bid from Pfizer, and perhaps quitting the UK tax system is a form of defence. This fits a trend. Hiscox and Amlin have already switched. Amazon recently headed to Ireland.   Businesses do not petulantly say: we’ve had enough of Brown, we’re off. This

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Wanted: A Revolution

Astonishingly, this story seems to be true: THE railway station bar, once a classic venue for romantic encounters, has fallen victim to the health and safety police. When Michael Leventhal, a London publisher, wanted to impress his date on her birthday, the longest champagne bar in Europe seemed to be the perfect setting. So Leventhal, 35, made a booking at the new St Pancras station, whose 96-metre bar has been promoted as a perfect meeting point for lovers. He also e-mailed a request for help in arranging a birthday surprise. Leventhal asked whether he could bring a candle and have it surreptitiously placed on a cake, brought to the bar

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Self-indulgence Alert

This blog is, I just realised, one year old today. Jings, who’d have thunk it? Anyway, thanks to all those who linked and, of course, to all who have visited and read and left comments and all the rest of it.