Society

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Niche

Alan Jacobs at the always-splendid American Scene: Here’s my Little Surprise of the Day: I was reading this blog post about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo, and saw in the chart at the bottom of the post that Yahoo Mail has over fifty percent of the American email market while Gmail has less than six percent. Less than six percent? Are you kidding? Three-quarters of the people I correspond with (or so it feels) use Gmail. How did my experience get so skewed from the norm? Are we Gmail users a bunch of weirdos? And, if so, just what kind of weirdos? (And, whole we’re at it, how could

Matthew Dancona

Canterbury Tales

And so, with his job now on the line, the Archbishop’s fightback begins. It is, predictably, the Prufrock Defence: that wasn’t what I meant at all. On his website, he insists that he was not proposing ‘parallel jurisdiction’ of sharia and British law. No indeed: the phrase he actually used was ‘plural jurisdiction’ which is much further-reaching and more radical, implying a smorgasbord of legal traditions from which the modern citizen can pick and mix. Charles Moore is – as ever – a must-read in the Daily Telegraph, as is Matthew Parris in The Times who advances the fascinating thesis that the practical implications of the Archbishop’s thesis are not

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Reasons for Barack Obama to be cheerful

Super Tuesday was meant to be the decisive day in the Obama–Clinton contest. Instead it was an indecisive super-muddle. Both candidates did only what they needed to do and no more. After California was called for Clinton, Missouri ended up going for Obama — a turnaround which ensured that the evening ended in a score draw but with Obama leading on away goals. It was meant to be the night that Hillary Clinton was anointed as the Democratic nominee presumptive. The Clintonite establishment — which played such a crucial role in setting up a schedule where more than 20 states voted on one day — did not believe that any

The Spectator

McCain, please

Why have the US primaries been so gripping? Partly because they are suffused with an optimism and energy that is conspicuously lacking from domestic British politics; partly because the world cannot wait for the Bush era to reach its bleak conclusion; partly because the contest has been a rollercoaster ride, with a nail-biting finish still in prospect. But this year’s presidential race is more than an exercise in political theatre. Like it or not, America is also engaged in an existential war with fundamentalist Islam that affects all of us. It follows — although it is easily forgotten — that the 2008 race is, at heart, a wartime election. In

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Reptilian reverie

When I was a boy my father and I used to spend our summer holidays collecting lizards. We’d prop a large bucket at an angle in a suitable spot, grease the rim with butter, put some rotting fruit at the bottom and wait for the lizards to get trapped. It’s the best way, otherwise they panic and shed their tails. Then we’d bring them back in our hand luggage in linen bags, which worked fine till the unfortunate occasion when a stewardess wanted to look inside and they escaped on the plane. We kept our lizards (and snakes and crocodiles) in a shed in our garden — called the Lizard

Lucy Vickery

Show me the child  

A couple of years ago there was a programme on the BBC in which well-known public figures gamely revealed the contents of their school reports. We learnt that Margaret Thatcher was a ray of sunshine in the classroom: ‘Her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form’. And if David Beckham (‘makes good cakes’) is looking for a career change he could always give Mr Kipling a call. There was a bumper crop of entries this week. Commendations to Barry Baldwin and Lynn Haken for entertaining glimpses of the schoolboy Jesus. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece. Top of the form is Bill Greenwell, who scoops the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man 

Local newspapaers usually have a slightly dotty reverence for the area they serve. My own local paper recently described Winston Churchill as ‘the former Westerham resident and wartime prime-minister’. The Evening Standard has the opposite problem in that it is a London paper which really doesn’t much like London. In fact it wants its readers to leave. Articles along the lines of Why I’m Buying a Big House in France with the Money I Earn Writing this Rubbish appear alongside news of desperate couples driven away by ‘rush-hour chaos’, ‘crumbling infrastructure’ or ‘soaring crime’. There is, it’s perfectly true, an exodus from London and from Britain in general, but not

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion

‘Sleaze’ is such a nasty word. How much nicer to call it ‘anti-parliamentary activity’ Sometimes, the answer is staring you right in the face. As the Speaker begins to wonder how he can tighten up rules on parliamentary finances without admitting that the day of the Honourable Member is past, the Guardian reports that the Home Office is producing a new phrasebook to advise civil servants how to discuss terrorism inoffensively with Muslims. Here, I suggest, we have a model. ‘Look at this!’ some bright young Commons researcher may be about to say to his MP. ‘I’ve written a phrasebook. It allows people to talk about cleaning up politics without

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 9 February 2008

There is more writing about food now than ever before, most of it feeble. There are exceptions. My Somerset neighbour Tamasin Day-Lewis descants admirably on the subject because she knows everything about the raw materials and has a stunning gift for turning that knowledge into noble repasts. She is quick and graceful too in cooking: watching her dance about her kitchen preparing a three-course meal reminds me of Margot Fonteyn performing Nutcracker. But most of the tribe are dull; off-putting too. All they convey is their own overweight greed. My favourite writer on the subject is Lamb. Whenever he touched on it he struck gold. Consider his comments on a

Carole Angier

The unwilling executioner

Carole Angier reviews Imre Kertész’s new novel Fatelessness, Imre Kertész’s first novel, fitted one of the coolest accounts we have of Auschwitz into a mere 262 pages. Detective Story, his third, distills it still further into 113, each of them mercilessly sharp and clear. This time Kertész sets his story in an unnamed South American dictatorship; but there are several connections. Like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Colonel’s regime lasts only a few years; one of his torturers carries a book about Auschwitz; and their two main victims are Jewish. Like many of the Nazis’ victims, Federigo and Enrique Salinas are wealthy, educated and assimilated members of their society. The perpetrators —

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Get a grip, Ron Burgundy

Will Ferrell: clown. Top Hollywood star Will Ferrell last night appeared in University College Dublin to accept a prestigious award in front of 1,500 students. The 40-year-old star of ‘Anchorman’ was dressed in the full Irish rugby kit as he accepted the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society for his outstanding contribution to comedic acting. Ferrell had a packed O’Reilly Hall in stitches throughout his 40- minute speech where he joked: “As I look out at this crowd, I see the future of Ireland, the future of Europe. And let’s face it, the future looks pretty bleak.” [Editorial note: given the location, this was clearly a serious

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Al Qaeda in Iraq admits that it is on the run

There is a hugely encouraging story about the difficulties that al Qaeda in Iraq is facing in The Washington Post today which Joe Klein highlights. In it, one of al Qaeda in Iraq’s top leaders admits that its membership has plummeted from 12,000 in June 2007 to around 3,500 today. A sign of how rattled the terrorists are is revealed in one of their strategy memos which says “Do not interfere in social issues such as head covering, the satellite and other social affairs which are against our religion until further notice”. The surge and the Sunni awakening have brought al Qaeda in Iraq to the verge of a momentous

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Premier of a bad idea

You couldn’t have a better example of how badly run English football is than the idea for a round of Premier League matches to be played overseas. The issue is not with games being played on foreign shores, Daniel Finkelstein makes a persuasive case for this over on Comment Central, but the fact that the integrity of the competition is being destroyed to make this possible. The league title should be decided by each team playing every other team an even number of times. This change would abandon that fundamental principle as the games would be an additional round with a draw deciding which teams played each other. Just imagine

Matthew Dancona

A massive clerical error

For once, the devil does not lie in the detail. The real problem with the sharia row triggered by the Archbishop of Canterbury is not legalistic, but that it should be happening at all. What on earth possessed the most senior Christian churchman in the land to suggest what he did in the first place? Since when is the function of the established Church to recommend an accommodation with the tenets of imported theocracy? The Archbishop’s primary role, one assumes, is to care for the souls of his own dwindling flock. Instead, poor Dr Williams gets his surplice in a twist, proposing with the garbled logic of which only a

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama Now Officially Front-Runner

So says Time Magazine’s (and friend to this blog) Jay Newton-Small: For anyone who thinks this race might be a tie, and yes, David Axelrod, that includes you, there’s a lot of evidence today that Obama is now the frontrunner. He leads in number of states won, he leads by his own campaign’s tally in pledged delegates, he is so far ahead in the money race that his opponent is borrowing money and he clearly has the momentum coming out of Super Tuesday. How is he NOT the frontrunner?? The Expectations Game just became a little tougher for Obama.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Religious Stupidity

According to Mitt Romney, Europe is doomed because we’re all a bunch of godless pornographers. Yes, really. But then, here’s what the Church of England has been up to, just today. Exhibit A: Let there be Darkness.                         LONDON (AFP) – Two senior Church of England bishops called Tuesday for Britons to cut back on carbon, rather than the more traditional chocolate and alcohol, for the Christian period of Lent this year. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, have teamed up with aid agency Tearfund to invite the public to take part in a “carbon fast” for

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Super Tuesday Quidditch

Vital US election issue: which Hogwarts house would each candidate be in? The Economist reveals all here. In other news, CNN and Fox remain unwatchable. Fancy that! How to choose between ghastly Lou Dobbs and David Gergen on the former and Bill O’Reilly on the latter?

Venetia Thompson

Essex and the City: my life as a ‘posh bird’ broker

He is sending back a bottle of 1965 Croft because it ‘doesn’t taste right’. I know that the odds of it tasting identical to the bottle we just drank in Pétrus are slim to none even if we were sober. He is miffed at the lack of label and they bring back the cork. I exchange an exasperated look with the sommelier, who woefully nods at yet another example of an Essex wide-boy embarrassing himself, and quietly brings another bottle. Our clients, traders visiting from Germany, continue to puff on their cigars. The Essex boy is not a breed that most public-school girls from Devon often encounter. Historically, however, and

Mike Chamberlain

Inside Hamas: my journey to its secret heart

This was it: as soon as I stepped through the door of the offices of Khaled Mishal I held out my flimsy plastic folder and jabbered away in English to the four slick-suited men who were my reception committee, trying desperately to make clear that, yes, there was a potentially lethal weapon in there. I smiled and pointed sheepishly to the scissors, and they were confiscated before my cameraman and I were allowed to pass through the airport-style security portal. It was hardly surprising we were tense: it was the autumn of last year and we were making a film about Hamas for Channel 4. Khaled Mishal, the unofficial leader

Tuesday