Kieran Healy wants to know how Newsweek can think a line can be fine and blurry: Growing Up Giuliani: Rudy Giuliani was raised to understand that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner. The making of his moral code. I want to know how the line between saint and sinner can be fine or blurry. Then again, Giuliani doesn’t enjoy even a residual, ingrained Calvinism does he?
In a TV interview tonight, Barack Obama takes one of his harshest shots yet at Hillary Clinton. “I think the fact of the matter is that Senator Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn’t work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it,” Obama said, and added, referring to his relationship with his wife, Michelle, “There is no doubt that Bill Clinton had faith in her and consulted with her on issues, in the same way that I would consult with Michelle, if there were issues,” Obama told “Nightline” co-anchor Terry
The Oxford Union’s decision to invite David Irving and Nick Griffin to speak confuses the right to free speech with a duty to offer people a platform. Nick Griffin is, within the bounds of the law, free to sound off in his usual obnoxious way. But that freedom doesn’t oblige anyone to ask Griffin to come and speak to them. Equally, artists were free to draw the Muhammad cartoons but newspapers weren’t obliged to reprint them. When it comes to Irving the question ,as Deborah Lipstadt points out–via Clive, is not about intelligence but knowledge. Those listening to him won’t be able to hold him to account for his views, as they
The Observer has a very readable piece on the opaque nature of the European Parliament this week. One fact in it is truly shocking, even to someone fairly sceptical about the whole affair. This year, the European Union spent £14,400,400 investigating how to reduce the parliament’s administrative costs. As they say, you couldn’t make it up.
Barack Obama got the question about who he would invite to his ideal dinner party from a newspaper in New Hampshire. The guest list of Jesus, Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln was revealing about how he sees himself. First, it is noticeable that Obama doesn’t pick a Democrat. Second, no figure from the civil rights movement is included. Finally, the mention of Jesus is typical of Obama’s comfort with talking about faith. Who would be on Coffee Housers’ list? Hat tip: The Politico
Q. I am a fan of The Archers but my listening pleasure always dips whenever one of the villagers makes the offer of ‘a coffee’ to another Ambridge resident. I feel the producers of the soap are failing to serve their loyal audience as it deserves, and are also missing an audio trick, in that they persistently omit any information about the nature of the beverage provided even though we live in a very caffeine-conscious age. For example, I would expect the Grundys to be a Nescafé family and the Aldridges users of cafetières, but there is never the happy sound of beans being ground in Jennifer’s Aga kitchen, and
For the past five years or so, my best friends and I have been getting together for a Christmas lunch. Because I’m a food critic — or was, until recently — they have always left it to me to make the booking on the understanding that I’ll be able to secure a better table than they would. More often than not, this assumption proved to be correct and we have enjoyed memorable meals at some of the country’s finest restaurants. Now that I no longer have a restaurant column, this year is shaping up to be very different. I had forgotten just how hard it is for a mere ‘civilian’
My partner has bought a wood. Seriously, he has. He simply came home one day and said, ‘I have something to tell you.’ Oh good, I thought, he’s leaving me. Now at last I can get on with my life. ‘I’ve bought a wood,’ he said. My partner likes the outdoor life and camping. He’ll often go off for a few days, big rucksack and frying-pan bouncing off his back. I tried camping with him once but ended up sitting in the car for two days with the heater on, crying and wishing I was in John Lewis. I guess I am more the indoorsy type. He has, it turns
Soon we will live on Mars. There is no doubt about that. Space is the great adventure of this millennium. It’s growing more rapidly as a place of business than China or India. It just needs its Damien Hirst. One peerless and fearless luminary who can make us all realise how much we need a piece of it: someone who can take command of the heavens and sell them to us. We are already in a golden age of planetary science. Since the Apollo moon landings nearly 40 years ago there have been missions to every planet and most of the interesting moons in the solar system. All of these
Last Saturday I was sitting at the kitchen table ready to go out for the evening, when I heard at the tail end of a radio news bulletin that the English poet Vernon Scannell had died. The name rang a bell. I went to the bookshelf and, yes, there was Vernon Scannell’s Collected Poems 1950–1993, bought several years ago in a charity shop and not looked at since. I hadn’t heard of Vernon Scannell before I came across his book of poems by chance, or of the publisher. I was intrigued by the paperback’s unpretentious design. On the back cover a poetry critic admitted to liking the poems enough to
New York Talk about synchronism. The invitation to the launch of John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso arrived the same day as Peter Arnold’s letter concerning the artist. Volume III, 1917–1932, was reviewed by William Boyd on 3 November, in these here books pages. The novelist loved it and eagerly awaits more. I like John Richardson, in fact I had sat next to him at dinner one week previously, but I do not like Picasso, hence I have not read the book, although the mother of my children bought it. The reason I did not attend the party for it, but sent my concubine instead, was the hostess, Mercedes Bass.
It was as if we’d never been away for the Flat season. On Paddy Power Gold Cup day at Cheltenham Tony McCoy, implacable in his concentration, pale-faced as a cadaver, wearing about him an aura of resolution the way others trail clouds of aftershave, rode the first two winners. As if to remind us what we’d been missing, the double took him to his century for a season which only now starts to get full media attention. Foolishly I suggested to a couple of jumping friends that for once the National Hunt scene would be hard put to it to compete with the drama and excitement provided by the duel
Build on the past Sir: Simon Thurley (‘Britain is being demolished’, 17 November) calls us to think again before politicians, short-term financiers and architects repeat all the mistakes we made after the war. I well remember as a student in the 1950s being exhorted by duffle-coated and starry-eyed tutors to ‘change the face of Britain’. Sadly, we have. And still we have not learnt the lesson. Simon Thurley asks ‘will we get anything better than we did in the 1960s and ’70s?’ and, ‘Will old and new be blended successfully to make beautiful places?’ It isn’t really a question of style or of consciously making a beautiful place. A Modernist
Monday Ugh. Have been in Tranquillity Room all day. Was meant to be briefing Mr Gove’s new policy of making all children geniuses by age of six but got migraine. Told Jed I would be lying in the dark thought-storming. Wondered a lot about how our proposal to end mixed-ability classes and bring in ‘setting’ might be applied to the shadow Cabinet. Obviously Mr Letwin, Mr Willetts and Mr Gove would be in the top set. Gids, Mr Hague and Foxy would be in the middle. Spelman, Lansley, May, Villiers and little Grant Shapps would be in the bottom, might even qualify for extra tuition. DD and Mr Mitchell would
I ’ve seen my fair share of films-turned-into-live-shows over the past couple of years. All About My Mother, The Producers, The Sound of Music, Dirty Dancing: I’ve endured or enjoyed them all. Live performance can be the most transformative, exhilarating experience, or it can kill you, drip by drip, clonking metaphor by clonking metaphor, wasted minute by wasted minute. Desperately Seeking Susan, the flick-turned-musical I saw last Tuesday, was like an exclusive audience invitation. To commit hara-kiri. Blondie’s songs, kidnapped and forced into hard labour because Madonna wouldn’t license the original music, butchered by rawk arrangements and a bellowing cast; charmless leads; cheap costumes; tacky tacky tacky. And what is
Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf or into anything too energetic, such as a hare. There are strong hints in the poem that Beowulf is a shape-shifter or skin-changer too. They’ve made a film of Beowulf, which is strange, because hardly anyone finds the poem of any interest whatsoever. And one gets the feeling that whatever good things there are hidden
Time, now, for a slightly different tack, to point out another great advantage of the Athenian model towards which Prime Minister Brown might even appear to be groping. It has to do with the party system. When Athenian male citizens over the age of 18 gathered on the Pnyx to take decisions about whatever matters of state confronted them, they must have brought with them a raft of prejudices on any number of matters, including their bias towards one or other of the influential, big-name speakers (like Pericles) who would be almost certain to address them. But what they did not bring was any preordained commitment to a party line
Just as some remote tribesmen fear that cameras and mirrors have the power to steal their souls, so the people of the modern world have come to fear that computers have the power to misuse and misdirect their most private data. Identity theft is a potent nightmare of the digital age, and it is with deep foreboding that we part with personal information even to departments of government that should, in a well-ordered democratic society, be the most secure of all repositories of it. For HM Revenue & Customs to allow the National Insurance number and bank account details of a single citizen to fall into unknown hands would be
Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than a month, he’d pressed the button on an audacious £67 billion bid for BHP’s mighty British-based rival Rio Tinto. The prize: a £170 billion conglomerate that would be far and away the world leader in its sector, with mines everywhere from Brazil to Australia and control of vast reserves of mineral riches. If successful, the
I have been a technical analyst — or chartist, if you prefer — for 55 years, since reading that the stock market is the nearest thing to the classical economists’ definition of the perfect market, where price is determined purely in accordance with the law of supply and demand. More buyers than sellers, price rises; more sellers than buyers, it falls. Shares frequently lead separate lives from the companies they represent. Buying and selling is guesswork, but can be educated or uneducated; technical analysis being the former. Short on theory, technical analysis is long on empirical observation. Freed from unreliable intellectual and emotional preconceptions, the technician is well qualified to