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Society
Monday
Germans say nein to Cruise
The news that the German government has banned Tom Cruise from filming at the defence ministry on the grounds that he is a Scientologist will reopen the whole debate about whether or not Scientology is a religion. The Germans take a very dim view of it; 4 of its biggest political parties even bar Scientologists from joining. I must admit to finding it a tad weird but after reading Tessa Mayes’s undercover investigation of it in this week’s magazine I can’t see it as anything worse than a bit odd.
Anyone for venison sushi?
The price of tuna is now so high that Japanese sushi chefs are considering making their dish with raw horse meat and cuts of smoked deer instead of the traditional tuna. The Japanese, who eat three quarters of the tuna caught each year, are victims of sushi’s global success; it is the new found demand for it from Muswell Hill to Moscow that has sent tuna prices sky rocketing. However, I don’t think even the most adventurous eater is going to be too keen on raw horse meat sushi.
Gridlocked
This Today Programme special on social mobility is well worth listening to. Also, do read this piece on how to break down the social barriers in education by the head of the Sutton Trust Sir Peter Lampl.
Sunday
How Harman won
When puzzling over how on earth Harriet Harman won Labour’s deputy leadership, my mind went back to an episode of Auf Wiedersehen Pet. The boys had voted to choose a colour to paint their shared hut. The votes were counted – and pink won. They were all aghast. Neville explained that no one voted pink as their first choice – it had come through on second- and third-preferences. “Brilliant” said Oz. “So everyone gets what nobody wants.” That sums it up what’s just happened for Labour. Harman wasn’t ahead in any of the earlier voting rounds, but came up in the end as the second choices were tallied up. It’s good news
Saturday
Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 23 June 2007
Monday A day of high drama. Heart-stopping parliamentary meeting at which Dave put the party on stand-by for an election in October… THIS October! Ordered everyone to start digging for dirt on Gordon. This would mean certain political death for those supplying the dirt when the Great Clunking Fist found out. Nevertheless it was our solemn duty. The GCF Unit is being headed by Mr Grayling. He was standing in the corner with a face as white as a sheet. With all the excitement it was clearly no wonder I got confused and told the driver to take Dave to Tottenham instead of Tooting. We were half way across London
The Spectator’s Notes | 23 June 2007
Tyranny is most successful when most extreme. Because we all know that North Korea is absolutely foul, we do remarkably little about it. The new report into mass killings, torture and arbitrary imprisonment there by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (North Korea: A Case to Answer) is amazing not only for the horror of what it reveals, but for the fact that no such work has been produced before. It could be that as many as a million people have been killed by the father-to-son dictatorship. The case for international investigation is overwhelming, yet, until now, so little has been done. On Tuesday, I chaired the press conference in London to launch
Diary – 23 June 2007
I have long thought there is no analogy quite so perfect for the process of writing a book as childbirth. There is the initial stage when it’s little more than a fond idea, until you sell it to the publisher. The months of research as the deadline marches inexorably nearer, the periodic panic during that process that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all, then the labour — 12 hours a day at your computer, seven days a week for three months — OK, a little longer than the average baby takes, but you get the drift. Then that triumphant moment, that in the darkest hours you thought
Dear Mary… | 23 June 2007
Q. Please can you enlighten me as to the difference between an actor’s agent, an actor’s manager and an actor manager? I recently met a famous actor at a party and was soon out of my depth.Name and address withheld A. An actor manager is now rather a thing of the past. Most actor managers tended to cast themselves in roles for which they were usually 20 or 30 years too old. One played Hamlet well into his sixties. An actor’s agent handles all the actor’s contracts and in the US a lot of actors have managers to look after their day-to-day living and talk to the agent if he is
Local heroes
When I was six or seven I went up to London with my father in his car. As we passed through Whitechapel in the East End, he pointed out a pub called the Blind Beggar. ‘That’s where Ronald Kray shot George Cornell,’ he said. There was an element of something approaching pride in his voice, as if the grim-looking pub set back from the road was a significant cultural landmark of which I ought to take note. I did take note (I was an obedient and faithful child), and later, when I became a reader, I tried to find out everything I could about Ron and Reg and their criminal
Letters to the Editor | 23 June 2007
Lie of the land Sir: In the past few weeks Hamas has shown itself to be a merciless, power-hungry organisation with little interest in the well-being of its own people, let alone that of its Jewish neighbours, so Dr Hamad must be laughing into his cup of Earl Grey tea at the ease with which he has manipulated Clemency Burton-Hill (‘Tea with Hamas’, 16 June). Her naivety is breathtaking, as is her willingness to pass on his fanciful assertions to the rest of us without challenge. It would not take much research to show Hamas for what it is: a fundamentalist Muslim organisation which gets its money and its orders
The rules of the meddling game
Paddy Ashdown was standing by a muddy roadside in mid-winter outside Sarajevo enduring the daily humiliation of the assembled members of the international community in Bosnia. The civil war was at its height. Sarajevo was under siege. The first horror stories of rapes and massacres were beginning to surface. And yet to gain access by the only road open to this desperate European capital, UN troops, aid workers, journalists and even the then Liberal MP had first to be subjected to an intrusive search by the very Serb soldiers responsible for tearing the country apart. They not only had a stranglehold on the city, but they also demonstrated their control
The tame Englishman
This is an unusual, disturbing and powerful book. It is part autobiography of an English schoolboy who grew up in Nazi Germany, and part biography of the mother who left him there. Widowed early, Norah Briscoe sought with great determination to build a career in journalism in the face of much prejudice. Adversity did not improve her. She was the mother from hell, unfeeling, selfish and cold. She never once kissed or embraced her son Paul. The logical culmination of Norah’s personal development was that she became a Nazi. As the authors point out, ‘Nazism did not count a lack of sympathy for other people’s feelings as a weakness; rather,
Mr String, considering
Cups in the midden.Imagine.Made by madmen, nineteen hundred of themIn the asylum’s heyday.Idle hands, then, idle minds.England.Whole institution round the bend.
Musical grossness
The latest revival of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera, in Francesca Zambello’s 2002 production, now directed by Duncan Macfarland, is so bad as to be almost sensational. The production itself was never any good, and although I have now seen it with four largely different casts, in none of them was the title role taken with conviction, not even by such seasoned Dons as Simon Keenlyside. Nor has the conducting, which has included such eminent and long-lasting Mozartians as Colin Davis and Charles Mackerras, ever been better than somewhat disappointing. This time round though is a connoisseur’s item of musical grossness and dramatic nullity. The best thing about
Pet sounds
In Competition No. 2499 you were invited to submit a poem eulogising a pet.It was not only Dr Johnson’s Hodge who inspired this assignment; credit, too, goes to Jeoffry, immortalised by Christopher Smart in ‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry’ from ‘Jubilate Agno’: ‘…For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./ For he is tenacious of his point./ For he is a misture of gravity and waggery./…’A rather more unusual pet, belonging to the bohemian poet Gérard de Nerval, was brought to life by Bill Greenwell. Nerval apparently took his crustacean chum for walks in Paris fastened to a piece of blue ribbon, and regarded lobsters
Radio days | 23 June 2007
BBC radio’s Test Match Special will deservedly be celebrating particularly special champagne moments in a couple of weeks when their tardis settles on Edgbaston for the one-day international; for it was at Birmingham’s pleasant ground they began their ball-by-ball odyssey of jabber and jape 50 summers ago. In its turn, tennis next week nods to a cluster of even more venerable broadcasting jubilees. This year’s Wimbledon championships, which begin on Monday, mark the four-score anniversary of radio’s first running commentary of a match on SW19’s strawberry fields; ten years later, in 1937, the BBC’s fledgling television service relayed some fuzzily flickering outside-broadcast pictures for the first time; and 40 years ago
Good news for everyone except Mr Chu: the post-Prescott era dawns at last
On Wednesday, when John Prescott finally steps down as Deputy Prime Minister, the city of Hull will breathe a collective sigh of relief. Just as Joseph Chamberlain defined Birmingham in the 1870s, so Prezza personified Hull for the past decade. Chamberlain built a great industrial city — but Prescott has reduced this proud, historic port, whose eastern parliamentary constituency he has held since 1970, to something approaching a national laughing stock. It seems unlikely, for example, that Hull would have been named the ‘crappest’ of Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, had Prescott not lived there. And I fear
Terry Wogan and Ken Bruce are beloved because they soar above English ideas of class
Presenting Pick of the Week on Radio Four the other day, I was determined to feature (and did) BBC Radio One’s Annie Nightingale, and Radio Two’s Janice Long — both excellent presenters who take us through the watches of the night; but my producer and I didn’t find it easy to identify any short clips that triumphantly demonstrated their brilliance. The skill of a presenter/disc jockey (or what use to be called a compère) rarely resides in showpiece tours-de-force, but in the whole atmosphere in which by chit-chat, humour, wit and sympathy they contrive to cocoon their hours on air, so that we feel we know them, and are sharing
The man who took a PhD in Happiness Science
Lady Diana Cooper used to relate that, at a dinner she gave in the British embassy in Paris, not long after the war, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to now her husband had left office. To the consternation of the table she replied, ‘A penis.’ Whereupon the General spoke: ‘No, my dear, you are mispronouncing the word. You mean “appiness”.’ Yes: but what did the lady really mean? What does anyone mean by happiness? It is the most subjective of all emotional states. As Kant said in his Ethics, ‘Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.’ Nevertheless, public-spirited people, wishing to ‘do