Society

Saturday

Jaspistos

Seen but not heard

In Competition No. 2467 you were invited to write a poem in which all the rhymes are eye-rhymes, not ear-rhymes. Many years ago, even before Jaspistos cast his shadow on this page, a similar competition was set, with this difference: clerihews were demanded. Stuart Woods won with this: If Johann Sebastian BachHad remembered to attachBraces to his LevisHe wouldn’t have been so embarrassed while conducting a missa brevis. Thirty years on ingenuity still rules OK. I especially liked the rhymes ‘Aristophanes’ and ‘planes’, and ‘intuit’ and ‘suit’. The standard was so high that I expect there will be disappointment among the near-winners. Console yourselves with the assurance that you were

Frank Keating

Close combat

Beginning this weekend, we are lumbered with the close combat of international rugby union just about all the way to next October and the World Cup final in Paris. Today Wales play Australia in Cardiff; tomorrow at Twickenham the lately pallid English lillywhites steel themselves to take on the sombre might of New Zealand’s All Blacks. This November series of opening European salvoes also includes visits from Argentina and South Africa. For a long-shot bet make haste to slap down a pony on Argentina making the final, at least next autumn. It is the only worthwhile shout, but odds will shorten considerably once the bookies hear of the bullying the

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 28 October 2006

MONDAY Confusion and misery. Everyone saying Dave has made his first mistake and, quite frankly, I’m beginning to think so myself. If I wasn’t a Cameroon from my Brora bobble hat to my King’s Road pedicure, I wouldn’t know what we stand for at the minute. It seems that people actually believe the policy commissions are producing ideas that are going to make it into our manifesto! This is one eventuality we hadn’t bargained for. I mean, how could we have predicted people would believe Dave is going to adopt £21 billion worth of tax cuts? Now we’re getting hammered by Mr Brown’s nasty people called Ed for promising things

Jeremy Vine

Diary – 28 October 2006

New York My son pulled back the curtains and took in the full splendour of the twilit canyons. Lights were coming on all across Manhattan. ‘Wow,’ said Daniel. It was a slow, unabashed expression of awe. I thought of those lines from The Great Gatsby where F. Scott Fitzgerald imagines the colonist approaching the New World for the first time and coming ‘face to face at last with something commensurate to his own capacity for wonder’. Like father like son. My first collision with New York occurred more than quarter of a century ago. Back then, America was just five years clear of the disaster in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter was

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 28 October 2006

The words in which Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, expressed his historic opinion about withdrawing British forces from Iraq were of some interest. ‘We should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem.’ Or was it, as many papers reported ‘sometime soon’? Aurally there is no distinction between some time and sometime, and while it is the accepted convention to spell it as one word in the slightly pompous usage of ‘sometime mayor of Eastbourne’, I have been a little annoyed lately by the running together otherwise of some and time. A glance at the historically arranged Oxford English Dictionary shows

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 28 October 2006

Q. I am 24 and have just thrown my first drinks party — 120 people came and, although everyone enjoyed themselves, I am conscious that I failed as a host in one important way. I did not introduce people to each other. I found it too difficult to do this as, each time I tried to shepherd someone across the room towards someone I had promised them they would meet, I found myself ambushed en route by other friends and never arriving at the target. What is the technique for circulating fluidly through a party when every single one of the guests is one of your own friends? M.B., London

Jeremy Clarke

Family secrets

Two old carrier bags at the back of the cupboard I’d not noticed before. I dragged them out to see what was in them. It was old letters from the war and sepia photographs, hundreds of them. Detritus from Uncle Jack, whom we looked after in his last years when he couldn’t remember anything and took to the bottle. Uncle Jack was my grandfather’s brother. (My grandfather died of a brain tumour long before I was born.) I sat down and looked at the photographs and read some of the letters. The majority were from Uncle Jack’s mother, my great-grandmother, whom he adored. In them she tells her son all

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 28 October 2006

David Cameron, once a PR man for a TV company, has brought all his skills to bear on becoming the epitome of everything New Tory stands for, like, er, yes, of course, families (wow!) and the NHS (no!). Is this why he comes over as little more than a pretty windsock, without an idea in his head, but keenly pointing in whatever direction the zephyr blows? Very probably. Such a contrast with so many ancient Greeks and Romans. Take, for example, Pompey. On one occasion he could not make up his mind whether to describe himself as consul tertium on a stage he had had erected in 55 bc or

Interconnect

Chevalier, the white knight and the red

Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Claude Ricard inherited the celebrated Graves estate Domaine de Chevalier in 1948, at the age of 21, and abandoned a potential career as a classical pianist to take over the reins. But music still pervaded the domaine when Ricard was in charge. On my

Pj Kavanagh

John Bull as a master of delicacy

This is a book that tells the reader a great deal about a certain kind of Englishman in his interesting times (1753-1828), and also raises the irritating question — the distinction, if any, between art and craft. Thomas Bewick, wood-engraver, was a ‘provincial’ craftsman who became a great artist. John Ruskin saw this: ‘The plumage in Bewick’s birds is the most masterly thing ever done in woodcutting; it is worked just as Paolo Veronese would have worked in wood if he had taken to it,’ thereby, it seems, promoting Bewick to the artistic top table. However, Ruskin remains loftily puzzled. ‘Ruskin and his followers,’ says Uglow, ‘placed Bewick as a

Robert Stewart

A shortage of wine and olives

War and religion are the enduring themes of history and they, or at least war and the Church (for theology gets short shrift), are the chief matters in John Julius Norwich’s latest book. It attempts the difficult job of making a coherent entity of the history of Mediterranean lands from antiquity to the close of the first world war and it does not altogether succeed. The idea of a discrete Mediterranean history makes most sense for the millennium when Greece, then Rome, had reason to think of their compass as the ‘known world’ and the Middle Sea as their lake. A coherent theme is also provided by the mediaeval contest

Giannandrea Poesio

Mixed blessings

Labelling is an annoying trait. The practice, instigated by some highbrows for their own pleasure, has rapidly spread among dance-goers, generating irritating generalisations. ‘It’s post-modern stuff,’ commented a young thing last Monday at the end of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s 2006 D’un soir un jour. Whether the comment was intended as praise is difficult to say. What is certain, though, is that the dance student’s comment epitomised the arbitrary pigeon-holing that underscores today’s dance culture. After all, the debate on what is post-modern dance has been going on for more than two decades in the vain hope of finding an acceptable definition. And while the debate continues, some claim that

Simon Hoggart

Christmas Mini-Bar Offer

Click here to send an order by emailThis is the first of our Christmas offers — a little early, I know, but a chance for you to stock up on pleasingly discounted bubbles for the festive season. It’s a very flexible offer from Armit of Notting Hill — you can buy most of the wines by the half-dozen, or acquire our two tasting cases: the Luxury and the Grand Luxe. The only requirement is that, for free delivery, you have to order at least a dozen bottles. The Prosecco La Riva dei Frati NV1 is a delicious example of this plump, moussy, zestful and fruity wine, from the Prosecco grape,

Jaspistos

Catchphrase

In Competition No. 2466 you were invited to supply a poem or piece of prose ending with the phrase ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ These words, according to Eric Partridge’s definition, are ‘applied in retrospect, jocularly or ruefully, to anything done impulsively with disastrous consequences, whether or not those were foreseeable at the moment of action’, like, I suppose, the self-castration of the priests of Cybele or the invasion of Iraq. I move aside to make room for six prizewinners, who get £25 each. The bonus fiver goes to Piers Geddes, who, if memory serves, is a newcomer. But if memory serves, it is often a

Frank Keating

Brass neck

Football’s European club matches, which continue next week, have so far tiptoed around in such predictable outline that only the obsessed have been bothered — leaving the headline writers to continue their lather over recriminations about the serious head injury to Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech, when he dived to save from an onrushing opponent in a mundane Premiership match at Reading. Keen to wade in with my two-penn’orth here, I was about to telephone an old Manchester acquaintance, long retired to Spain, when a bright young sports reporter from the Times saved me the trouble and the money. Nick Szczepanik called Bert Trautmann, who chuckled down the line at the

Paul Johnson

As Tom Paine wrote, ‘Every nickname is a title’

A recent movie suggests that the Duke of Edinburgh’s nickname for the Queen is ‘Cabbage’. His experience dates back to the day when this delicious vegetable was overboiled into tastelessness. But now that most people cook it very lightly and so preserve its fine flavour and crispiness, the term is one of endearment, as (no doubt) he intends. The nickname is originally French, ‘mon petit chou’, and I know at least one other wife who is called cabbage by her spouse, though as an alternative to ‘Old Bag’. Royal nicknames are not as common as you might think. Edward VII was ‘Tum Tum’ (not to his face). The Prince Regent

George Trefgarne

How the first multinational was hijacked by greed

In June 1773 Adam Smith was at home in Kirkaldy, Fife, hard at work on his Wealth of Nations, when an excited letter arrived from his fellow philosopher David Hume. ‘Do these events affect your theory?’ wrote Hume. ‘What say you?’ Smith was caught up in perhaps the third or fourth most serious stock market crash of all time. Shares in the East India Company — which, along with government stock, made up most of the market — had collapsed, bringing about 30 banks down with them. Smith had deposited his savings in the Ayr Bank and one of its customers who had borrowed to speculate on the market had

Allister Heath

The City’s surprise success story

Once synonymous with men in red braces peddling junk bonds, the leveraged buy-out industry has become almost respectable. This is in large part thanks to some clever rebranding that would make even David Cameron blush; now invariably described as ‘private equity’, which sounds a lot cuddlier, the industry has even enticed that holier-than-thou old rock star Bono to hop on to its gravy train. Private equity companies, such as the former U2 star’s $1.9 billion Elevation Partners, are investment funds that borrow money to buy companies, manage them for a few years and then sell them on, ideally at a huge profit. The business pages are full of this industry’s

Jonathan Davis

Amaranth: how to lose $6 billion in a fortnight

Hedge funds, you read here in June, are often riskier than they are made out to be. Putting your money into ‘a fund that blows up, closes down or disappears with all your money’, I suggested, is a real risk for the unwary investor. The danger, I could have written, is that you will find your money being looked after by Brian Hunter, a 32-year-old energy trader from Calgary who last month single-handedly accounted for the largest hedge-fund meltdown since records began. In the space of two short weeks, Mr Hunter worked his way through some $6.5 billion when his complex strategy of forward bets on the price of natural

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Time to invest in Korean reunification? I know a man who did

As the absurdly coiffed and probably deranged Kim Jong-Il fingers his nuclear button, not even the ballsiest hedge fund manager would contemplate investing in the prospect of Korean reunification. But I could name one secretive London investor who took a big punt back in the 1980s, buying a bundle of North Korean government debt at a tiny percentage of its nominal value on the off-chance that it will one day be redeemed at par by a united Korean treasury. I guess he’s going to have to hold on for a few years yet. It wasn’t such a mad idea, though. In the days when I was a regular visitor to