Society

Saturday

Sarah Burton

The Welshman in the Court of Vienna

In the opening pages of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller books are memorably divided into certain useful categories: Books You Needn’t Read, Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Need To Read First, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, and so on. Most intriguing of all these categories is Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too. Along similar lines is Mr Crawford’s observation in Mansfield Park: ‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His

Jaspistos

Devil’s work

In Competition No. 2461 you were invited to think up Seven Deadly Virtues and to mock them in verse. Chastity and sobriety and political correctness were obvious Aunt Sallies. Michael Saxby gave a wise warning against honesty: ‘Thus “Does my bum look big in this?” will land one in a mess/ Unless one says, “Of course not, dear” when really one means “Yes!”’, while Mike Morrison derided ‘the heinous vice/ Of being so insufferably nice’. The notion of the Seven Deadly Virtues, by the way, comes from George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man, which strikes a lot of attitudes but also hits a great many nails on the head.

Frank Keating

Bogey women

Golf’s Ryder Cup is uniquely irresistible. Like most show-stopping spectaculars, the biennial challenge boasts ‘a full supporting cast’, in this case the two distinctive dolled-up distaff teams — a shapely sorority of Stepford Sindies vs a bevy of Barbies — devoted cheerleaders geeing up their frowning fellows as they go about the sombrely obsessive business with mashie and putter. The phenomenon is a new one to international football, as the English learnt in the World Cup this summer when the late-night antics of the Wags — the players’ wives and girlfriends — were wincingly, shamelessly documented each morning by the London tabloids. But I was surprised this week to discover that America’s golfing

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 16 September 2006

Q. I am in the process of planning a party for my husband’s 60th birthday. We have excellent caterers in place but my problem concerns the place à table. We will have ten long tables in the marquee, each one seating 30 guests, but how can I possibly decide who should go beside whom? It is too large an event for precedence to play any part but I am already being leaned on by friends asking for either themselves or their children to be placed next to certain people they would like to know better. There is a lot of competition to be next to the same handful of people

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 16 September 2006

Gordon Brown has promised that, when he comes to absolute power, he alone (not parliamentary colleagues, let alone the people) will appoint a cabinet ‘of all talents’ to do his bidding. Even the Romans were more democratic than that. Roman toffs naturally took it for granted that none but they could legislate effectively. As Cicero argued, ‘Many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robber had agreed to make them,’ and placed responsibility for law-making firmly with the Senate. That was because the people could in practice override the Senate, since the Senate contained tribunes of

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 16 September 2006

Earlier this year the red-tops, as we must learn to call tabloid papers, became very excited about wee Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter’s name. It was Suri, you may remember, and the Sun newspaper went as far as to slap an ‘exclusive’ label on a thoughtful article pointing out that the name did not mean ‘princess’ in Hebrew, as the parents suggested, but was a designation of the Lord Krishna in Hindi. Now I’ve caught up with the name that Nelly Furtado has given her own little daughter. Nelly Furtado, aged 27, is, as you must know, today’s most successful Portuguese–Canadian singer. She was named after Nellie Kim, the

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 16 September 2006

Monday Busy busy. Dave is adamant that foreign policy cannot be reduced to soundbites, so of course, as Jed explained, we need a range of soundbites to convey this. ‘We will give solid not slavish support to the US’; ‘We will not come up with grand schemes to remake the world’ (Nigel says this is just as well because we can’t think of any); and most important ‘We’re all neo-libs now’. Unfortunately, we’re short-staffed due to holidays in Corfu (we should set up an office there) so I end up doing both sides of the briefing. The notes were like a market research questionnaire. ‘If reporter neocon omit par. 5’,

Michael Winner

Diary – 16 September 2006

I was very naughty when young. I stole from my schoolmates’ pockets as they played games. I stole from Woolworth’s. And probably more places. As responsibility entered my maturing soul, I tried to make amends. I advertised for those at school whom I might have made poorer and paid back many times the amount to the only one who turned up. I sent a cheque for £500 to the chairman of Woolworth’s for about £1.50 of nicking. He asked if he could put this in his staff newspaper as he got many similar donations. And in the 1960s when top tax was 98 pence in the pound, I stashed some

Jeremy Clarke

Maiden voyage

The emblazoned ship was just in. Foot passengers had yet to appear in the terminal’s arrivals shed, which was silent and deserted except for this wonderfully fat, moon-faced man taking up all the room on the only bench provided for meeters and greeters. He was perched at the exact centre, his legs as wide apart as they’d go. He looked up and smiled at me, and without any formal preliminaries told me that he was waiting to meet his Aunt Dolly, his only living relative, whom he hadn’t seen for about a year. I would have liked to reciprocate his open-heartedness by telling him I was there to meet my 16-year-old boy,

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 16 September 2006

Third degree at Heathrow From Andrew HamiltonSir: In my experience the overzealous and politically correct airport security in America (High Life, 2 September) is being replicated in this country. At Heathrow security recently, off to see my son in Shanghai, I couldn’t resist asking the body-searcher whether or not I resembled a Muslim terrorist (I am 59, white, grey-haired and an accountant). The gentleman looked rather embarrassed. But his young Asian colleague said, ‘You shouldn’t have said that, just stay where you are, I’m calling the supervisor.’ The supervisor appeared and after an animated conversation turned to me and said, ‘You are in deep trouble, wait there.’ He then made

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 16 September 2006

Order the wines online Private Cellar is a very classy company. Its four principals all worked for Corney & Barrow, and its buying director is a Master of Wine with the magnificent name of Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler. I assumed this indicated Eastern European origins; in fact it’s an old English spelling of ‘Archdeacon’. Nicola and her colleagues have created a list that is short but very carefully chosen. France still dominates, but in the past year or so they have moved into the New World, with excellent results, which is why three of the wines in this offer come from South Africa — now soaring around the world in both prestige

Edie G-Lush

The rich West must stop grabbing the profits but ducking the costs

Heroes of anti-capitalist protest don’t usually hang out at the Savoy. But Joe Stiglitz is different: the establishment figure who turned on the establishment. He’s a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate. He chaired Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and he’s not afraid to tell you about it (‘When I was in the White House…’). He wears a nice suit and a tidy salt-and-pepper beard. He doesn’t even wear Birkenstock sandals, and he looked well at home amid the comforts of the de luxe London hotel when I met him there. But beneath the professorial façade is a combative mind and an inability to

Jonathan Davis

Happy birthday, index funds

What has been the single most successful and socially useful investment innovation of the last 30 years? Although paradoxically few investors will know what it is, or why they should be grateful that it exists, my nomination is the index fund. On 31 August this year, largely unheralded in the media, this dull but remarkable invention celebrated its 30th year in existence. An index fund, also known colloquially as a tracker fund, is a fund that does nothing more exciting than set out to mimic the performance of one of the market indices that are regularly featured in media reports about the day’s events in the stock market. Most of

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Do dreams come true? Will Hornby save Airfix? Will I be chairman of Barclays?

Can there be a middle-aged man in Britain whose heart did not beat a little faster last week at the news that Hornby has expressed an interest in acquiring Airfix? This would be a merger that might have been dreamed up in a 1960s toy cupboard. Ailing Airfix is owned by Humbrol, which makes the little pots of enamel paint we used to use on our Airfix model aeroplanes, and which also produces Plasticine. Hornby is the great model railway company that also happens to make Scalextric cars. To complete the set, all we need is a deal-structure modelled in Meccano (also originally a Hornby product) by a suave young

David Rennie

What you can pick up in Iceland

It is no mystery why British Eurosceptics love Iceland. A bracing visit to Reykjavik is all it takes to see what the European Union could have been, if Brussels had stuck to the path of free trade and shunned ever closer union. Like pilgrims to a shrine, British Tories come to observe how Iceland enjoys the best of all worlds, thanks to its membership of the European Free Trade Association and — equally vitally — its stubborn non-membership of the EU. Iceland enjoys the great prize Brussels has to offer: access to the EU single market. Yet Iceland is not a member of the Common Agricultural Policy. Iceland can strike

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You shouldn’t be arrested for …

Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him ‘If a man has sexual relations with a man, as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’Leviticus xx 13 Britain’s most energetic and entertaining bigot, Stephen Green of Christian Voice, has at last managed to get himself arrested. His crime was to hand out leaflets, which quoted the above passage from the Bible, in a park in Cardiff. Stephen believes that Leviticus

John Reynolds

Gordon will do the job very well

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

Frank Keating

Just the one

This week they named the men to defend the Ashes. The trumpets of 12 months ago are muted, the martial drumbeats muffled. It has not been a good year. I fear the worst. England’s batting now looks fitful, the bowling feckless. Of the three champions, the flighty daredevil Pietersen might win you a Test match, but not a whole series; ditto the moody fast bowler Harmison; and the dynamic Flintoff’s fitness will be a worry all winter. After a few one-dayer warm-ups in India, the first Test match begins in Brisbane on 23 November. We shall see what we shall see, but I fancy the Australians are feeling more smug

Wednesday

Jaspistos

Inaction man

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

Tuesday

Interconnect

Beneath every spire a cellar

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,