Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 13 October 2007

A-bomb or B-movie? Sir: I have no idea whether or not we really came close to WW3 last month, as your correspondents Douglas Davis and James Forsyth insist (‘We came so close’, 6 October), but one line in their exciting piece brings doubts to mind. After ‘secretly’ crossing into Syria (as opposed to coming in on a guided tour, presumably) soil samples collected by ‘elite’ Israeli commandos (thank heavens they didn’t use run-of-the-mill commandos) at Tartous ‘suggested that the cargo [from North Korea] was nuclear’. Really? Presumably any such nuclear material would have been transported and stored in rather robust, sealed and shielded containers. If this stuff was radioactive enough,

Paul Johnson

They sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the Titanic went down

To me, history has always had a double magic. On the one hand it is a remorseless, objective account of what actually happened, brutally honest, from which there is no appeal to sentiment. On the other, it is a past wreathed in mists and half-glimpses, poetic, glamorous and sinister, peopled by daemonic or angelic figures, who thrill, enchant and terrify. I like both, and see them as complementary. My father taught me the first, under his maxim: ‘Never believe a historical event as fact unless you can document it.’ My mother taught me the second, when I was a child cradled in her arms, listening to her soft, musical voice

Aidan Hartley

The terrible secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’

The author’s arrest while investigating Chinese prisons A crowd of faeces-stained, starving figures with haunted eyes stared at us from behind the bars. Some looked cold and wet, as if they had been hosed down with water. Most of them were old, and some handicapped. They began wailing and pleading with us. ‘Let us out!’ they sobbed. ‘This is a prison!’ They showed us one ragged woman. ‘Look at this. She was beaten!’ They carried another elderly woman towards the bars who appeared to be paralysed. Guarding the inmates were young men in black jumpsuits. I knew they would stop us filming any second now, but at first the guards

Hywel Williams

Democracy can’t compete with the history of kings

Archaeology in north-eastern Syria was once a poor relation to the great sites that lie to the south and over the Iraqi border. Southern Mesopotamia is long established as the area that shows the urban roots of advanced civilisation. Ur may or may not be Abraham’s birthplace but by the 3rd millennium bc it was certainly the centre of a sophisticated court society. Nineveh, lying adjacent to modern Mosul, rivals — and may surpass — Ur in antiquity and was an Assyrian centre by the end of the 2nd millennium bc. Widespread looting and military action now make archaeological investigation next to impossible at such centres. But digging has continued

Fergal Keane

‘They come at two or three in the morning’

Rangoon The first few rows were taken up by the more ostentatiously pious of the congregation, elderly women mostly and a few schoolgirls wearing last year’s Holy Communion dresses. To their left, sitting in front of a statue of the Virgin, was a phalanx of nuns wearing the starched and forbidding habits long ago abandoned by their trendier sisters in the Western world. Behind them sat middle-aged husbands and wives, the latecomers and the doubters, and your correspondent, sweaty and portly and dressed unbecomingly in T-shirt and shorts, the necessary uniform of the foreign reporter posing as a tourist in totalitarian Burma. Far above us starlings and pigeons fluttered between

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Intelligence2

The great thing about the Intelligence2 debates is their vitality, pace and compression. A week-long seminar couldn’t have covered as much ground as we traversed in 100 minutes on Tuesday night. The motion ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was proposed by the author Ibn Warraq. He contrasted the West’s openness and flexibility with the ossified ‘closed book’ culture of Islam. ‘Easterners flock to collect their degrees from Oxbridge, Harvard and the Sorbonne,’ he said. Traffic in the other direction is minimal. Rejecting the ‘mind-numbing certainties’ of Islam in favour of the ‘liberating doubt’ of Bertrand Russell, he asked us if Islam would tolerate

Freddie Sayers

Monaco’s man with a plan takes his place centre stage

Last week Prince Albert II, ruler of the tiny Mediterranean state of Monaco since his father’s death in 2005, came to London to unveil his vision for the principality. The playboy of the gossip columns was nowhere to be seen: on display at a press conference at the Ritz hotel was a softly spoken, Amherst-educated, 49-year-old man with a plan. Using words such as ‘turnover’ rather than ‘GDP’, the Prince made it quite clear that the oldest luxury brand in Europe is under new ownership, and that its new CEO plans to develop it with all the skill and science of the private equity generation. ‘Monaco,’ he says, ‘is open

Robin Lee

Memories of the Venetian palace where I lived

Last week Prince Albert II, ruler of the tiny Mediterranean state of Monaco since his father’s death in 2005, came to London to unveil his vision for the principality. The playboy of the gossip columns was nowhere to be seen: on display at a press conference at the Ritz hotel was a softly spoken, Amherst-educated, 49-year-old man with a plan. Using words such as ‘turnover’ rather than ‘GDP’, the Prince made it quite clear that the oldest luxury brand in Europe is under new ownership, and that its new CEO plans to develop it with all the skill and science of the private equity generation. ‘Monaco,’ he says, ‘is open

Lucy Vickery

Decalogue

In Competition 2515 you were invited to supply Ten Commandments for a belief system, real or invented, of your choice. As traditional authority figures and sources of identity crumble round our ears, people (who, when it comes down to it, quite like to be told what to do) are casting around for new rule books. Take, for example, Pastafarianism, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was drawn to my attention by Brian Murdoch. Founded in the US by physics graduate Bobby Henderson in protest at the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools (religion masquerading as science, as Henderson saw it), it has eight ‘I’d really rather you

Frank Keating

Big hits

Rugby’s World Cup has been surprisingly engaging — hooray for the gallant grandeur of England, France and the other small-fry nations! It has been salutary for the Celts, however, with Wales and Ireland given such a contemptuous bums’ rush that each had to watch last weekend’s quarter-finals on television back in their own homes and behind closed curtains. If their self-esteem is in shock, it’s nothing to the severe clattering their bodies had to endure. Mind you, that goes, with knobs on, for the surviving teams still scrapping to contest next week’s final, for any rugby pitch is now a major crash site — bell-clanging ambulances, paramedics and all. The

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Laws that constrain free speech bring out the childish bigot in me

There was a strange non sequitur in Jack Straw’s latest policy announcement. The Justice Secretary revealed that inciting hatred of homosexuals would soon be a crime punishable by seven years in prison. And justifying the legislation, he said this: ‘It is a measure of how far we have come as a society in the last ten years that we are now appalled by hatred and invective directed at people on the basis of their sexuality. It is time for the law to recognise this.’ The logic of this quite defeats me. It seems to be saying that because homosexuals are no longer loathed or despised, it should be against the

Peter Eyre

The ideal romantic partner

Before embarking on Julie Kavanagh’s magnificent Nureyev, I had recently the pleasure of reading Richard Buckle’s The Adventures of a Ballet Critic. This passionate and witty memoir (a book so obsessively driven by the author’s love of dance, I defy anyone to read it and not be intoxicated by this love) gives a wonderfully vivid picture of the English ballet scene after the war. The main characters featured among the dramatis personae include Fred (Ashton), Billy (Chappell), Bobby (Helpmann), Margot (Fonteyn), and Madam (Ninette de Valois). You get the feeling this rather cosy and oh-so-naughty group with their private jokes and schoolgirly tiffs could be amusingly transformed into the comedic

Edward Norman

The withdrawal of God

Here is a book which the theological establishment will doubtless fall upon as an obese child might reach for a packet of crisps. Not that they will understand much of it: for this is a universal explanation of things, written from a philosophical perspective, and which, despite the homely illustrations to which philosophical writers are sometimes given, is densely composed and at times difficult to follow. It is also nearly 1,000 pages of fine print. Yet endurance is rewarded; this is a distinguished work both of scholarship and of understanding, by an academic from McGill University of international reputation. The difficulty in following the arguments is not due to lack

Edward Skidelsky

A march that has lost momentum

‘Do not judge a book by its cover’ is not a dictum that applies in the present case. Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West by Mr A. C. Grayling, Printed in the year 2007, sets us up for a rollicking defence of Freedom and Enlightenment in the style of Tom Paine or William Godwin. And that is exactly what we get. This is the story of modern Europe as told by a 19th-century liberal secularist, updated but not fundamentally rethought. Beginning with the horrors of the Spanish inquisition, it moves on to liberators of the mind such as Galileo,

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

If Al Gore really wants to stop Hillary this is what he’ll do

The dream scenario for the Gore supporters who’ve kept the faith was that Al would pick up the Nobel, return to national acclaim and a draft Gore movement and then—like a modern day Cincinnatus—reluctantly return to public life for the good of the Republic. I’ve always been rather sceptical about this scenario. Gore still has many of the political weaknesses that so bedevilled his 2000 run for the presidency and if he gets in the race he splits the anti-Hillary vote. Also many doubt whether he has the stomach for the fight that would follow. But it is almost certain that Gore would still like to stop Hillary. To paraphrase

Lucy Vickery

Going for a song | 12 October 2007

Twenty years ago when I worked at Our Price Records the thing we shop assistants dreaded most were customers who would march up to the counter and announce that they’d heard this song on the radio by [insert artist’s name] before launching into a toe-curling rendition which we were expected to identify. Today’s Virgin Megastore employees are presumably spared such agonising encounters thanks to Web 2.0, which has spawned countless resources for tracking down a snippet of music that has tickled your fancy. My favourite is foxytunes.com which allows you to search for an artist and brings together, on a single page, relevant elements from all corners of the web:

Philip Hensher

A worthy winner

Most of the media seemed determined to turn Doris Lessing into a sweet old lady who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as it were, in a fit of absence of mind. Almost all of them said, on no evidence at all, that she’d been “shopping” at the time of the announcement. She has never been one to waste anyone’s time, least of all her own, and was absolutely clear about this prize; she’d won every other literary prize by now, she said, so she might as well have this one. As indeed she might. When you start your literary career, nearly sixty years ago, by writing an absolutely

Matthew Dancona

From Oscar to Nobel

I think I am right that Al Gore and George Bernard Shaw are the only two people ever to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. Can Coffee Housers confirm this?

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Who remembers the Armenians?

I’d been quietly, if feebly, sympathetic towards some of the realpolitik concerns about the forthcoming Congressional vote on recognising the Armenian genocide. Then the Washington Post came out fighting. Apparently the resolution is “Worse than Irrelevant” The Post chuntered that Congressman Adam Schiff, the driving force behind the resolution thanks to the vociferous lobbying of US-Armenians in his California district (mere parochialism according to the Post because of course it’s stupid to listen to one’s constituents…) is up to no good. Worse still, the paper sneered: How many House members can be expected to carefully weigh Mr. Schiff’s one-sided “findings” about long-ago events in Anatolia? Apparently given: the high risk

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Blood Sports

Toby set tongues wagging with his post about whether David Cameron was Muhammed Ali to Gordon Brown’s George Foreman. (Do see Clive’s post on why Gordon is really Sonny Liston) So, here–at Toby’s suggestion–is yesterday’s encounter between Cameron and Brown and the combination of punches from the Rumble in the Jungle that Toby thought that Cameron threw the verbal equivalent of yesterday. Which was more brutal?