Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 13 January 2007

Israel’s ‘spin’ From Alex Bigham Sir: Douglas Davis has clearly been spun a good line by some Israeli military analysts if he thinks the Israeli threat to use nuclear bombs against Iran is more than that — a ruse to scare Iran into returning to the diplomatic table (‘Israel will do whatever it takes’, 6 January). Iran’s nuclear sites are not a small, isolated reactor like Osiraq was in 1981; they are widespread, well-defended, near urban areas, and many are buried deep underground. After Israel’s failure to destroy Hezbollah last summer, does it really have the stomach to take on a country of 70 million, with an army of over

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 13 January 2007

Q. When I was a boy men who dyed their greying hair were something of a laughing-stock. Now I notice that many 50- and 60-something politicians, rock stars and television presenters have apparently failed to age in the normal way. I wonder whether I should prepare to follow their lead, Mary, or risk looking past it by contrast to my peers? I am only 36, but rogue white/grey hairs are starting to appear in my normally all-black thatch. D. d’F., London SW10 A. It is acceptable for males who appear on television to have had their hair coloured. Note the passive clause. These men can often claim, quite truthfully, that

Jeremy Clarke

Perfect manners

Winston Churchill’s secretary John Colville records that one of the first signs that the great man’s phenomenal memory was beginning to fail him, and that dementia was setting in, was when he made the intriguing faux pas of addressing a man by the name of Brownjohn as Mr Shorthorn.  A sure sign that the mental ebb tide is in full flood, of course, is when you can’t remember your own name. Nursing homes are packed to the rafters with people who’ve forgotten what they’re called. It’s said that US President Ronald Reagan, making a visit with Nancy to a residential home for the elderly, was led up to the oldest

Simon Courtauld

Small is beautiful | 13 January 2007

My grandfather used to enjoy eating ortolans in Biarritz, sometimes in the company of Rudyard Kipling. In London, it amused him to ask for these little birds of the bunting family when dining at the Savoy, though I don’t think they were ever on the menu. Ortolans have always been a French delicacy: la chasse aux petits oiseaux, which involves trapping small birds in nets, may continue in parts of south-west France, but their sale for the table has been banned for some years. President Mitterrand, no great respecter of the law, was said to have had ortolans for one of his last meals, a week before he died —

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 13 January 2007

The country ‘needs’ more scientists, but no one yet seems able to crack the problem. Ancient attitudes may suggest a way ahead. The earliest Greek ‘scientists’, c. 600 bc, speculated about how the world was made. They assumed there was a basic stuff (or stuffs) from which everything derived, and argued about what it might be and how it changed into the different forms of matter we see around us. From such speculation an atomic theory of matter emerged. It was Socrates (469-399 bc) who changed all that, becoming disillusioned with cosmology because it did not seem to have anything to do with ‘the one thing it is in a

Matthew Lynn

Why we need no-frills, low-cost private schools

If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In the last two decades, the British private schools industry has pulled off a trick that most business-school textbooks would tell you is impossible: attracting more business while becoming more and more expensive. Schools have broken out of what is usually the most rigid of all the dismal science’s iron laws: that as prices rise, demand

Stephanie Grace

Open for business again — thanks to mom-and-pop stores and voluntourists

New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and the developed world if they had seen it. On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed that other side for all to see. Residents who filled the Superdome, who lined the streets around the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center waiting for days for food, water, help, were in many cases the same people who filled the low-wage service jobs that made the tourist

Edie G-Lush

The real 3G phone boom: it’s about girls, girls, girls

Suppose you have 15 minutes to while away waiting for the train. Why not pull out your mobile phone, punch in your pin number and download a Playboy movie for as little as £5? Not interested? Of course you’re not; you’re a Spectator reader, for heaven’s sake. But there are plenty of people out there who are, and they’re not only bringing in revenue for the niche market of mobile porn, they’re actually driving the development of mobile technology. Three years ago, when third-generation mobile phones were first launched in Britain, the joke was that 3G stood for ‘girls, gambling and games’. That has proved substantially correct, though it could

Frank Keating

Radio days

Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney Wooderson died on 21 December, and a week later the oldest surviving English Test cricketer, Norman Mitchell-Innes, unbuckled his pads for the last time. By coincidence, each of them was aged 92, born in the 1914 summer (of dreaded portent) and therefore members of just about a final generation oblivious of a boyhood surrounded by the incessant jabber and rabbit of round-the-clock sports broadcasting. Scobie, the midget 16-year-old prodigy from Wagga

Paul Johnson

The best thing ever written about music in our language

If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music, I would not hesitate to give him or her Essays in Musical Analysis by Donald Francis Tovey. This is a formidable work. The first volume is on symphonies, the second on symphonies, variations and orchestral polyphony, the third on concertos, the fourth on illustrative music and the final volume on vocal music. There is also an index volume which includes a valuable glossary, and the general introduction provides a dazzlingly clear explanation of such basic concepts as key, tonic, dominant, tonality and sonata form. There are copious musical illustrations throughout. You say a teenager is not going to

Jaspistos

Three for luck

In Competition No. 2476 (in error numbered 2477) you were invited to supply three haikus (rhyme optional) which form a single poem greeting the New Year.The traditional Japanese haiku has 17 syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. Western poets have widened their scope to cover almost any mood. I like this one from the late D.J. Enright: Everest, Mont Blanc,Matterhorn, Mons Veneris —Hills so hard to climb. The prizewinners, printed below, get £18 each, and the bonus fiver belongs to John Whitworth. This is the year ofthe pig and is better byfar than the past one. This is the year thata consummate liar hadclaimed

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown will find that there’s more to foreign policy than disowning Blair

From the moment that the snatched camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution emerged, it was hideously clear that the sentence had been carried out in a deplorable manner. The Americans immediately briefed that their calls for a delay had been ignored by the Iraqis. On 4 January George W. Bush felt obliged to admit that he wished that the proceedings had been ‘more dignified’. Yet it took until 9 January for Tony Blair, normally a far more astute politician than the President, to speak publicly about how the manner in which the sentence was carried out was ‘completely wrong’. Even then Blair was visibly irritated, giving the impression of having

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 6 January 2007

With the intention of making us healthy they sell us meat now with no fat. What is the point? If you cook it, it shrivels into dry toughness. During the period we have just survived, when cooking large birds is customary, I was amused to come across this sentence from Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘When I bid them lard a Fowl, if I should bid them lard with large Lardoons, they would not know what I meant: But when I say they must lard with little Pieces of Bacon, they know what I mean.’ Lard in Old French meant bacon, hence lardoons. I have a larder at home, but I keep

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 6 January 2007

Monday Happy New Year and May The Force Be With You in 2007! I think it’s fair to say that Dave’s brilliant message sent shivers down all our spines, mine included, even though I was in the office last week when Jed was writing it. V powerful stuff. If any of us were in any doubt of the seriousness of the battle ahead of us as Darth Vader prepares to take control of the Empire with his formidable band of Imperial Stormtroopers, then our leader’s words must surely galvanise us into a state of readiness. It can be no coincidence that Sky was showing the entire Star Wars saga from start

Marcus Du-Sautoy

Diary – 6 January 2007

I was ready for the depression but it still doesn’t stop it hitting. Doing the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures was such an exhilarating, exhausting six-month roller-coaster ride. The climax was a two-week adrenaline-charged loop-the-loop staging what felt like five wild maths pantos. Then the last lecture is given, filmed and delivered and bang, the ride comes to an end and I’m spat out the other side on my own again. The camaraderie of staging a show is a very temporary thing. I remember as a student the feeling of isolation after the last night of putting on a play. You promise to see each other soon. Take phone numbers. Swear

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 6 January 2007

Blair, brave? From Correlli Barnett Sir: I wish there were something I could do to help poor deluded William Shawcross (‘The West must be the strong horse’, 30 December). He seems to be just about the only man in England other than our deranged Prime Minister and his ministerial stooges still to refuse to accept that the intervention in Iraq has resulted in a disaster. Moreover, Shawcross’s prescriptions for redeeming the disaster are sheer fantasy. For example, he writes, ‘There should be thousands more US soldiers embedded with the Iraqi army. The same goes, on a smaller scale, for the British.’ But where are these soldiers to come from? Already

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 6 January 2007

Q. A friend decided to celebrate her anticipated Christmas bonus by taking a day’s shooting and kindly invited me to be one of the guns. She emailed that most of her other guests were booked into the hotel near the estate for bed and dinner the night before. Would I like to book a room and a place at the table? My dilemma was that the shoot happens to belong to one of my greatest friends and the Scottish side of me recoiled at the thought of a hotel bill when I would be welcome in the house. I asked myself, would it be seen as pulling rank for me

Taki

Lethal combination | 6 January 2007

Gstaad Penned in by the surrounding Alps, huddled around the Saanen valley and scrambling up the mountains for extra space, Gstaad bursts at the seams during the New Year celebrations. For the first time in its 100-year history, the Palace hotel sold tickets to its premises, and they sold out three days before the night of the 31st. I tried to enter the Palace at 8.30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, accompanied by my son and a couple of floozies but was refused admission because of my drunken state and also because elderly clients were coming down for breakfast. It was just as well. I can’t remember anything past 3 a.m. and there

Frank Keating

Anniversary year

If you thought you’d got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket’s World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby’s in France in September and October. Anniversaries to celebrate, too, and with a nice aptness. I fancy you can easily make a centenary case for 1907 being the year in which genuine international sport became a reality: for the first time an overseas competitor (Aussie leftie Norman Brookes) won the men’s title at Wimbledon, and another, French golfer Arnaud Massy, was first to

Jaspistos

No place to hide

In Competition No. 2475 you were invited to provide entries from the diary of someone trying to escape from the Christmas season — and failing. Maybe you were all suffering from pre-Christmas exhaustion, maybe it was an unsuitable comp, or maybe I was in an atrabilious mood, but the entries were so substandard that, to cries of ‘Have a heart, ref!’, I rule that there are only three prizewinners this week. They are printed below, earning £30 each, D.A. Prince taking the bonus fiver. To fill in the extra space in a seasonable manner I append an entry from Mr Pooter’s ‘Diary’, followed by the last paragraph of Max Beerbohm’s