Society

The festive season is long over, so it’s time to stock up on less expensive but delicious wines that will be gluggable through the cheerless winter months. Last year one of our most successful offers was with Averys of Bristol, who offered terrific discounts, largely to reduce stocks of wines that were first-rate but weren’t flying off the list. They have done the same again, and some of the reductions are boggling. It’s the perfect opportunity to refill your post-Yuletide cellar at a very modest price. You might get the sample case, try them all, and order more of the ones you like best. The offer will be open for

The rhyme scheme is from Auden’s ‘The Composer’. As eagle-eyed Basil Ransome-Davies, who spotted this, remarked, ‘It’s hardly the best of Auden, so compers have a chance of writing a superior poem.’ We shall see. Some objected to the word ‘adaption’, claiming their spellcheck didn’t acknowledge its existence. Auden was no slouch: the word is plainly recognised in my Chambers. I reckoned it was a difficult comp, so a large and skilful entry impressed me. Commendations are too numerous to mention. Just general congratulations. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to George Simmers. Says God, ‘That’s one of my unfinished sketches —A planet I’ve

It was Ronald Reagan who warned that ‘inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man’. Having just worked out that my personal rate of inflation is running at a scary 6.6 per cent, I know exactly what he meant. A few months ago Britain’s official statisticians began to panic. They had realised that nobody believed their figures any more. With school fees, gas bills and the cost of car insurance soaring, many people — especially pensioners and middle-class consumers — laughed through gritted teeth when told that inflation remained at rock-bottom. In desperation, the number-crunchers decided to launch

Monday Don’t ask me why, but suddenly the buzzword is ‘Thatcher’. Memo marked ‘Urgent’ says the T-word count for an average speech is now ten times minimum ‘until further notice’. Jed rushed into the office this morning all breathless and sweaty, and announced extra greenie points (frappuccino machine tokens, carbon offset holiday credits, soft loo-roll allowance!) for anyone who thinks up new and inventive ways of relating Dave’s policies to ‘the Leaderene’. All ideas must be fully reversible in case we want to ditch her later. Am going to give it a whirl. I could really do with a ski-ing holiday and the thought of being allocated a roll of

If you have started to fear that Tesco, that rampaging retail beast, is running the country, then you may be right. Let me explain. When Time magazine made everyone who uses the internet their ‘Person of the Year’ last month, it got us all thinking about the nature of ‘power’ in the modern technological age. In pre-internet days, power was fairly easily definable. Politicians and newspaper proprietors essentially ran the country, because they decided how we led our lives, how we got our news, and how we thought. But the emergence of the world wide web has changed everything.  I recently interviewed Gordon Brown for a forthcoming GQ ‘power’ issue,

Stop hounding us From Simon Hart Sir: Ever since he was sacked by Radio 4’s Today programme for his obsession with the Countryside Alliance, Rod Liddle has not been able to leave us alone (‘At least they understand democracy’, 5 January). The problem is that it suits Liddle to pillory us as a single-issue pressure group when he knows full well that the truth is somewhat different. While no one would deny that we have played an active and key role in the hunting debate up to and beyond the introduction of the largely ridiculed Hunting Act 2004, we have been far from ‘utterly silent on the real problems which