Society

Saturday

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

Paul Johnson

Don’t laugh too loud — this theatre of the world is unsafe

We smile, naturally, sometimes on our first day of life. But we have to learn to laugh — that is, we imitate the mouth motions, facial contortions and, above all, the laugh noises of our elders. This is why the way we laugh is part of our breeding. I notice every year at the Christmas season a lot of loud, infuriating and ill-bred laughter in restaurants, from people who have had a few, chiefly from shaven-headed men but also from a growing number of women. Jane Austen deplored loud laughter, believing that a fine-tuned control of the vocal cords was a sure sign of a gentleman. Her Emma was convinced

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Snouts still in the trough — and now bosses want 20 per cent of every profit

I like to think I helped start the national debate about fairness and executive pay with an article here in May 1993 headlined ‘Snouts in the Trough’, illustrated by Garland with pin-striped porkers helping themselves to huge portions of gravy. Since then, bosses’ pay packets have ballooned — the heat in 1993 was caused by £140,000 salaries for water company chairmen, whereas this year more than 4,000 City bankers are set to receive million-plus bonuses, and one, Driss Ben-Brahim of Goldman Sachs, is said to be collecting (presumably in an armoured truck) £50 million. But the arguments against fat-cattery remain stuck in early 1980s leftist rhetoric: the TUC’s Brendan Barber

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 30 December 2006

Conversation is an art in which we all prefer to think we excel, and Stephen Miller has written a whole book on the subject (Conversation, Yale, £15), which turns out to be mostly about Samuel Johnson and David Hume, who never did meet and talk. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu comes into it too, and Mr Miller has this to say of her in relation to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury: ‘Lady Mary did not think highly of Bishop Burnet. “I knew him in my very early Youth and his condescension in directing a Girl in her studies is an Obligation I can never forget.”’ I am puzzled by this judgment.

Laura Trevelyan

Diary – 30 December 2006

New York The highlight of my year was undoubtedly interviewing George Clooney. I don’t mean to be star-struck, but in the presence of the square-jawed one my professional façade went Awol. The United Nations is usually a bit short on glamour, but on the day George came to talk about Darfur, a little bit of Hollywood rubbed off on my world. He swept in with an entourage of 50, including the compulsory bossy PR, who kept trying to interrupt and spoil my brief few minutes with George. He was, I can report, devastatingly well briefed on the Darfur peace agreement. ‘What was he like?’ asked Husband, casually, via email. I

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 30 December 2006

Well, here they are! My exciting New Year’s Resolutions for 2007!1) Make more policy Controversial, I know. But after long chat with Jed am convinced that this is where I can make my mark. He says, and I agree, that policy is far too important to be left to politicians, ‘especially clueless Tories. This is a job for people who understand people, Tammy. Their hopes, their fears — goddamit, their dreams. It’s about knowing what they want — and giving it to them.’ Then he clicked his fingers in v sexy way. It’s becoming clear to me why he is in charge. Have already had some success with my 35-hour

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 30 December 2006

Contrary to the culture From Edward Nugee QC Sir: I have in the past felt a little guilty in my belief that an Islamic faith school falls into a different category altogether from an Anglican or Roman Catholic, or even Jewish, faith school. Rod Liddle (‘We are what the English Bible has made us’, 16/23 December) has expressed the reasons supporting my belief well. It is not discriminatory to support schools in which the faith that is taught is the faith that has contributed so much to what it means to be English, and at the same time to oppose schools in which the faith that is taught is contrary

Taki

History lesson

OK, 2007 is upon us, and the end of history, as in Francis Fukuyama’s fearless forecast of 1990, has turned out to be full of you-know-what. In fact, never in seven centuries, give or take a few, has this planet of ours been in more turmoil. Fukuyama is a great scholar, and he meant well, but what he got wrong was religious fervour and human nature. Basically, the urge to control one another’s behaviour. Better yet, the incompatibility of Islamic beliefs and liberal democracy. Let’s begin with Iraq. Uncle Sam’s wrongheaded attempt to placate Sunni Arabs has failed utterly. For all the rhetoric against Shiite shenanigans, it’s the Sunnis who

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 30 December 2006

Q. Six months ago an acquaintance asked me to lunch in the country, apparently to discuss some business she might be able to put my way. I don’t drive and the journey there and back was gruelling, involving taking a tube, then a train and then a mix-up over where we had agreed to rendezvous. The business proposition never materialised and lunch itself was a little trying. I accepted an offer from the highly energetic woman next to me (rather courageously clad in leather trousers) to go to a concert the following week. The event was pleasant enough and the lady appeared to know several people gathered in the foyer