Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Down under and out

By nice fluke, there has been a heady clash of cultures over the past few days, with comparisons anything but invidious. The intriguing bundle of important international football matches has converged precisely with both rugby league’s grand final and the closing stages of rugby union’s World Cup in France. The ubiquitous radio phone-ins and the letters pages of the public prints have been enthused with discussion on each code’s relative merits, particularly on the simplicity or otherwise of the respective rules and the discipline, chivalry and civility of the players. The pros and cons, the cut and thrust of the polemic in many cases has led to penitent crossover and

Simon Hoggart

Spectator mini-bar offer | 20 October 2007

This is our last mini-bar before we start to get ready for Christmas. I have chosen four medium-priced but excellent wines to see you through to the serious festive season. They come from another of our favourite merchants, Tanners of Shrewsbury. One of the attractive features of the wine trade is the way that people who work for different companies usually get on terrifically well. In fact, six of the leading companies co-operate as The Bunch, and together hold a couple of serious tastings in London every year. These are unmissable events, and the most recent is where I tasted some of the wines in this, I hope engaging, offer.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Less is more | 20 October 2007

Theatre: Shadowlands; Cat’s-Paw; Glengarry Glen Ross Repressed Brits are on parade in Shadowlands. Author C.S. Lewis is portrayed as an emotional cripple who can’t bring himself to articulate his love for Joy Gresham, a sassy, super-intelligent American poet. Charles Dance is perfectly cast in the weird role of Lewis. With his stately, ruminative face and his air of embarrassment barely mastered, he looks like a befuddled giraffe performing good works in Africa. His eyes are just right too. Their expressive, pink-rimmed moistness makes him look as if he stopped weeping about ten minutes ago. And there’s great chemistry between him and Janie Dee as the besotted, endlessly patient Joy. William

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why can’t British builders be more like the Poles?

Over the past 20 years or so, I have found myself almost continuously on the client side of building contracts, large and small, domestic, corporate and charitable, in four different countries: Britain, France, Hong Kong and Japan. It is an activity in which optimism is rarely justified by experience: builders the world over tend habitually to under-estimate the time required for any task, to have trouble with supply chains, to misread architects’ plans, and to fall off ladders and take time off to recover The most recent contract I’ve been involved with, in the hands of a team of native Yorkshire contractors and labourers, is by no means the biggest

Jonathon Brown

Homage to Sebald

Despite its pun, Waterlog is not quite a catalogue of an exhibition; rather it documents, expands — and in some cases might seem to seek to justify — the contents of an exhibition held first in Norwich and now in Lincoln to honour the East Anglian resonances of the writer W. G. Sebald. It clearly would like to be judged in its own right. Just the fact that it speaks of the exhibition in the past tense, even though published between the two dates, gives it that vividly elusive quality so admired among attributes of Sebald that always demand similarly oxymoronic description. Sebald seems to inspire in others a frustration

Douglas Dunn

Belfast to Edinburgh

Belfast to Edinburgh For Michael and Edna Longley At the beginning of descent I see Wind-turbines cast their giant, spinning arms. The Southern Uplands send out false alarms, Semaphore shadows, all waving to me. Then still descending, as the windows weep Or something out beyond the tilted wing Surrenders to the planet’s suffering, Plural phenomena that never sleep, A far-off brightness shines on the wet plane. A cockpit voice says something about doors. The Forth Bridge is a queue of dinosaurs. A field of poppies greets a shower of rain. Douglas Dunn

Linsey Mcgoey

The windfalls after the storm

By the time The Shock Doctrine lands on your desk, it’s hard not to feel suspicious. Seven years after her bestselling No Logo, Naomi Klein’s latest book promises to expose how natural disasters and political crises across the globe have been exploited by a cabal of secret operatives seeking fresh slates to introduce draconian financial measures of the variety championed by the late, great Milton Friedman. From Chile to Bolivia, to Russia, one finds the legacy of Friedman’s economic shock therapy, the idea that sweeping economic changes are best imposed when citizens are reeling in the aftermath of a crisis: a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist act. In Friedman’s

David Harsent

The Cure

The Cure (After Yannis Ritsos) Although the fever had left him months before, he kept to his bed: the invalid, his room a swelter of sweat and booze and that meaty smell from the hide draped on the floor. The creature had been skinned alive, he said; the underside of the pelt still carried the pain and sometimes, at night, you could see its hackles rise. Once he dreamed that he got out of bed and stood astride the thing. It made a back to carry him out of his sick room into the hall, then breakneck through the kitchen, through the yard, and down the street to the sound

Fay Hart

Yard sale

Yard Sale Oh, but it is incalculable — this side yard full of her things laid out on folding tables ranged along a chain link fence. Her Tupperware cake saver takes precedence over egg timers hand mixers, Pyrex, 4-H ribbons, and forty-seven souvenir shot glasses, one from almost every State. The cake saver’s ridged base (slip-proof in a swerving car) holds fast a translucent milky dome with crossover plastic handles yellowed now after how many years transporting her prize devil’s food to summer camp at Raccoon Lake. Fay Hart

Stephen Knight

The Head

The Head would like to see us. Now, Inside: before the day is done. But we are having too much fun Out here. We will not listen now, Now smoke obscures the pot-holed yard. This is going to be hard. The Head cannot believe we’ve gone This far. Have we been fighting? Yes, We have. The cause of some distress Around these parts, though we have gone To ground before the grown-ups come. Our actions leave them dumb. The Head’s contention? SICK, we are. Graffiti, ash, this path of glass The fruits of all that come to pass — But we will tell you what we are. Hunched behind a

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sod You, Broon…

Ah, the tabloids… Bless them. Just when you think no newspaper can keep a healthier stable of high horses than the New York Times, Fleet Street reminds one that humbug and sanctimony are both alive and well in London. Gordon Brown just made his life more difficult. If he does renege upon Labour’s promise to hold a referendum upon the EU constitution treaty – even in its revised “non-treaty” form- he’s made an enemy of Britain’s best-selling paper, The Sun. Good. Here’s what The Sun says today: GORDON Brown last night took the fatal step of breaking his word to Sun readers. Over dinner with 26 other EU leaders, he

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The problem with targets

Merit pay, eh? Normally I’m all for hopping on the teachers-unions-are-spawn-of-the-devil bandwagon. But they’re right to think that performance-related pay, or at least any form of it likely to be introduced by bureaucrats, is likely to be a disaster for exactly the same reason as most government-mandated teaching requirements offer exactly the wrong incentives. Neill Harvey-Smith explains: If one in twelve children sitting their GCSEs in 2010 raise what would have been a D to a C grade, in just one subject, and everything else stays the same, then the government will have met its supposedly tough new target for secondary education. Would your kid have got 5 A to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A brewing Clinton scandal

The gloves are coming off in the US presidential race. Today, Rudy Giuliani’s team labelled Mitt Romney a Hillary Clinton clone, which is like a Labour politician calling one of his colleagues a Thatcherite in the 1980s. While on the Democratic side, John Edwards and Barack Obama are taking increasingly openly swings at Hillary Clinton. So this LA Times story about Hillary’s fundraising might give either of them the opening they need to go after Hillary on what are her three biggest weaknesses: her links to the Clinton scandals of the 1990s, trustworthiness and being part of the same old political establishment. It is hard to put a sympathetic spin

Michael Heath

Alan Coren RIP

Alan Coren, who has just died after a long illness, was one of the finest comic writers of the past 40 years. He was very, very funny. That’s rare. I’d known him since he became editor of Punch in 1978. He was an inspiring editor, and good company. And he wasn’t just a great comic writer: he was also a great broadcaster. I have seldom come across anybody who could think as quickly on his feet. As with all funny men, of course, he wasn’t kidding when he joked — his jokes were serious — and he was especially serious about an England that has been vanishing these past 20

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It’s official: Elder children are smarter

Time magazine has a very fun story in this week’s issue about the importance of birth order. Apparently, elder children are smarter and earn more while younger ones are funnier and more inclined to take risks. Time even has the scientific data to back this up. “In June, for example, a group of Norwegian researchers released a study showing that firstborns are generally smarter than any siblings who come along later, enjoying on average a three-point IQ advantage over the next eldest—probably a result of the intellectual boost that comes from mentoring younger siblings and helping them in day-to-day tasks. The second child, in turn, is a point ahead of

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Derbyshire voted off the island…

John Derbyshire on fetishisation and Islamophobia (which does, of course exist, even if it is much less widespread than muslim “community leaders” would have you believe): Speaking of which, I have been voted off the New English Review site for being insufficiently Islamophobic. Fair enough. NER has now settled down as a definitely and strongly Islamophobic vehicle, and I’m a poor fit for it, being Islamophobophobic. In matters editorial I am anyway a believer in totalitarian despotism. I’ve seen enough of magazine and newspaper editors tearing their hair to know that it’s a wellnigh impossible job—”herding cats” is the merest approximation—and am content to leave them to it, so long

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

We can’t go on like this

Last Friday, I was invited on the radio to have a go at Kelvin MacKenzie who attacked Scotland’s welfare dependency on Question Time. I had to drop the bombshell: I broadly agreed with him. When I was political editor of The Scotsman, I was regularly amazed at the picture told by the reports I was reading. Masses of cash (much of it English) had deformed our once-great economy. We had gone from Silicon Glen to Mandarin Mountain and the “Scottish government” would be a lot more worried about our appalling levels of poverty-fuelling welfare dependency if they, not Whitehall, were picking up the bill. In his column today, McKenzie says

Neil Obrien

The Independent–surely shome mistake?

With wearying predictability The Independent splashes today on “10 Myths about the Reform Treaty” – and prints a rebuttal of those eurosceptic “myths” on page three. They looked curiously familiar to me.  And then I figured out why.  The piece is an almost word-for-word reprint of a Foreign Office briefing note – but without any attribution that that is the source. Have a look at this thing, circulated by the FCO which Open Europe obtained a copy of. And then read the Indie piece. They are almost exactly the same. (Rather like the relationship between the “new” treaty and the re rejected constitution, you might say…) Perhaps you thought the idea

James Forsyth James Forsyth

They haven’t gone away

David Ignatius’s column today on the dangers of a nuclear attack by al Qaeda is absolutely essential reading. Ignatius, who is neither a scaremonger nor a shrill but an experienced journalist with incomparable intelligence sources, lays out the reasons to worry about what al Qaeda has up its sleeve. Perhaps, the greatest puzzle of the last six years is why al Qaeda stood down a cyanide attack on the New York subway. Ignatius reports that Zawahiri told the “plotters to stand down because ‘we have something better in mind.’” Certainly, one of the reasons why the United States hasn’t been attacked since 9/11 is that al Qaeda would like to