Society

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes. You know that already. This holds true for an agreeably diverse range of subjects; however, there is always an exception to test the rule. Occasionally a subject crops up which lies

In Competition No. 2462 you were given the lines, ‘A man so various that he seemed to be/ Not one prime minister but twenty-three …’ (a rejig of Dryden’s famous couplet) and asked to continue. Dryden’s Zimri, the various man who ‘in the course of one revolving moon/ Was  chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon’, is a caricature of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, who killed in a duel the Earl of Shrewsbury, while the countess, Buckingham’s lover, watched, disguised as a page. The incident is commemorated at Cliveden, where it happened, by flowers arranged in the shape of crossed swords, with the date 1667. The standard this week was

Piers Paul Read says that the controversial nature of the Pope’s address has been missed in the furore over Muslim sensitivities: he was daring to equate Europe and Christendom When he delivered his lecture on ‘Faith, Reason and the University’ in Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI said some provocative and contentious things. His comment on Islam was only one of them, and was by no means the most significant; but quoting the judgment of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus that certain aspects of Islam were ‘evil and inhuman’ was the most arresting and has caused a worldwide furore. Some have criticised Pope Benedict for being tactless; others on

Rod Liddle says that we should leave teaching to the professionals, however much they annoy us, and stop pretending that children benefit from learning obscure languages or how to paint like Cézanne at home I think it was the bit about Cézanne which really got to me. It came early on in last week’s article. Perhaps you read it; my colleague James Bartholomew was explaining how he had intended to tutor his daughter Alex, now that he had taken the liberating decision to remove her from school because the teachers and everybody else were useless. From now on he’s going to teach her at home, or in agreeable bits of

Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost anonymous giant in Val Gooding, its 56-year-old chief executive. She is Britain’s second most powerful female boss, but with very little of the profile many of her male counterparts court and enjoy. Over the past ten years Gooding has turned Bupa around, grown its market share, produced record results and built the business into a