Society

Michael Foot and I are sitting in the kitchen of his house in Hampstead, north London. Outside in the garden a red ‘Labour’ rose blooms in the afternoon sun; inside, the house is crammed with books: they’re in piles on the kitchen table, on shelves on every wall: William Hazlitt, William Blake, John Keats, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Paine. Upstairs there’s a whole roomful of books on women’s suffrage that belonged to his late wife, Jill Craigie, then another room where an entire corner is devoted to Irish writers: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift. Mr Foot believes that politicians should have a love of great literature (he has written

In Competition No. 2460 you were invited to submit a short story with the title ‘The Man Who Did Not’. This assignment gave you the opportunity to step into the shoes of the doomed young writer Konstantin in The Seagull (though, given his fate, you’d perhaps have chosen not to). Konstantin’s Uncle Sorin suggests the title of a short story which reeks of frustrated dreams and failed lives. In the Martin Crimp version now running at the National it is rendered as ‘The Man Who Did Not’, while Michael Frayn, in his adaptation, translates it as ‘The Man Who Wanted To’, which strikes me as marginally less bleak. The standard

Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have built highly respectable private cellars of their own. Frequently a case of misunderstanding when a tourist asks ‘Where is the University?’, the colleges collectively comprise the university despite being self-governing, quasi-autonomous legal entities. Their wine cellars are correspondingly as diverse and different as they are, and they might be compared to a large extended family,

Last week I discovered that I have to have two separate checks made on me by the Criminal Records Bureau. One is because I am a trustee of a charity which works with children. The other is because I sometimes serve at the altar at Mass and therefore come into contact with children who do the same. In both cases, I have to produce documentary evidence of who I am and where I live to people who know these facts already, and I have to fill in forms in black ink with my National Insurance number and my unspent criminal convictions (none) on them. I have to do two forms

Inevitably, at this time of year, it has been a fortnight dominated by cricket. It began in extraordinary fashion. The Oval, where I was working, became the scene of a unique event in the sport: the first time that a Test match had been forfeited by one team refusing to take the field. The team was Pakistan and the umpire who sparked off the row was Darrell Hair, after he accused the Pakistan team of cheating. In the commentary box we scoured hours of footage to try to find any visual evidence of ball-tampering, but we couldn’t find a thing. Since then I have not changed my opinion: if there

George Orwell was deeply hostile to vegetarianism. Vegetarians were of ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. And before the days of South Indian restaurants in London, one had only to go to a vegetarian eating establishment to see that he had a point. It wasn’t only the beards that wilted (to quote Orwell again): it seemed that nut rissoles had an existentially wilting effect on those who subsisted on them. Of course, one might have mistaken cause for effect. Tristram Stuart’s very, indeed excessively, long and somewhat shapeless history of

Dedication of Elgar’s Enigma Variations    The faded, grainy photographs reveal   A late-Victorian decent openness.   These were his friends: with them he could express   His candid self, indulge his whims and feel   That there was nothing that he need conceal.   Their loyalty assuaged delayed success,   Keeping at bay the hurt of bitterness   No future accolades would ever heal.    ‘Enigma’ made his name and changed his life.   Honours and fame made him a traveller;   He roamed the world, was fêted, made new friends.   His amour propre guarded by his wife,   He kept his wounds, sensitive to a slur.   The music, nobilmente, made amends.