Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

The coming of Viv

Hosepipe bans? Standpipes in the streets? Ah, yes, I remember them well. Prepare for a host of anniversary paeans from us old sweats of 30 summers ago. ‘Sweat’ being the word, or ‘Phew!’ as the headlines had it all through that heatwave summer of 1976, the most relentlessly parched since records began in 1727. By all accounts, an official drought was announced as early as 15 May and (with the help of Wisden) I see that was the very day I  was dispatched to the County Ground, Southampton, to write up a newcomer of promise, an appealing, callow West Indian batsman called Vivian Richards. The summer before, I had seen

Friday

Jeremy Vine

Diary – 26 May 2006

Turning 41, an anonymous age if ever there was one, I found myself back at the school I went to three centuries ago — or so it seems. The occasion was a memorial to a favourite teacher. Neil Laing taught English and died young, at 56. The chapel of Epsom College was full of people in various stages of physical collapse whom I realised, on closer inspection, were the same age as me. We never thank our teachers, and here we were, belatedly, thanking him. He would throw open the windows of his classroom and thunder his enthusiasm for literature and life; a lesson on Paradise Lost would suddenly switch

Thursday

Hugh Cecil

The sunlight on the garden parties

Listing page content here As a social and economic phase of English life the ‘Edwardian age’ had a longer span than the ten years of Edward VII’s reign. It began, roughly speaking, with Queen Victoria’s silver jubilee in 1887 and ended with the outbreak of the first world war in August 1914. Although a far from static period, it was characterised throughout by a jingoistic pride in British world power, then at its apogee, by a growing materialism and hedonism, and, despite an uneasy questioning of the social and political bases on which the Victorian age had rested, by an enduring belief in progress and Britain’s power in the future.

Pj Kavanagh

The murder of Bamber Gascoigne

Listing page content here This book, about real people, was intended to be about quite different ones. In her postscript, Helena Drysdale, the travel writer, says that her initial purpose had been to write a biography of her great-great-grandfather Sir George Bowen, who was a serial governor of colonies — Queensland, New Zealand, Victoria, Mauritius, Hong Kong. Through all these governorships he kept elaborate scrapbooks, and by far the largest concerned New Zealand. In this one Drysdale’s eye was caught by a cutting about the Maori murder of Bamber Gascoigne, his wife and their children, in 1869. ‘This unusual name happened to be that of my cousin, the celebrated writer

Simon Hoggart

MAY WINE CLUB

Offers from Corney & Barrow are always extremely popular with Spectator readers. They may be one of the poshest of all wine merchants — two very wealthy writers whose books you have seen piled high in Terminal 4 were tasting for their own cellars the day I popped in last month. Lunch in their airy new offices is superb (we had oysters, and wild salmon that had just been thrashing about in the River Tay). I only tell you this to make you envious. But the thing is that C&B wines are not all that expensive. In fact, many are tremendous value. And here’s what makes this deal so remarkable:

Michael Tanner

Indestructible Janacek

Listing page content here Janacek’s The Makropulos Case remains a bewildering work, as in fact almost all his operas after Jenufa, and with the exception of The Cunning Little Vixen, are. Capek’s play from which Janacek made his libretto is called a comedy, but the opera, though it has a few jokes, is mainly a painful and even tragic-seeming work, with an enormous, perhaps unique, amount of the paralysingly prosaic. The plot is grotesquely and designedly complicated, all its elaborations being cut through by the shattering central donnée, that its heroine is 337 years old, still the most glamorous and adored opera diva in the world. We are kept outside

Anthony Daniels

Working into the night

Listing page content here The influence of an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to his merit. The late Edward Said was a prime example of this dissociation between influence and merit. His most famous book, Orientalism, has had a profound and lasting effect on writing about the Middle East, yet it is badly written, worse argued and uses evidence so selectively that it is little short of mendacious. Said, however, was a literary critic and accomplished amateur pianist as well as a political polemicist, and in this post- humous work he considers what he calls ‘Late Style’. Unfortunately, it has long been fashionable in some intellectual circles to discuss concepts

Wednesday

Olivia Glazebrook

No messing with redheads

The X-Men trilogy has been a superior translation of comic book to big screen (although I wouldn’t bet money on this being truly ‘The Last Stand’; probably more like ‘The Second Last Stand’, given its ambiguous closing shot). Part of its charm has been the willingness of the writers to handle the metaphor of the comics: that the mutants are representatives of society’s minorities and outsiders. Most explicitly, its homosexuals. This instalment presents its subtext more baldly than ever. Its bang-crash  storyline, i.e., the one that causes maximum kerfuffle, is intriguing. What the (evil, conservative) government likes to call a ‘cure’ for mutants is discovered in the near-future. Government scientists

Russell Chamberlin

Special relationship | 24 May 2006

In 1990 I published a lengthy article on Sicily — and was astonished by the response from English readers who had connections with the island, in some cases going back 200 years and more. All, with one exception, were nostalgic. The exception was an evidently elderly Englishman who was born in Sicily, but never returned after the war, ‘my frequent clashes with the fascists being a rather unpleasant reminder and cause of my reluctance to revisit the place’. But even his criticism was qualified. ‘I have always been proud of being loosely associated  with these past historical events in Sicily.’ All other correspondents looked back as to a golden age,

Jaspistos

Labour pains

In Competition No. 2444 you were invited to offer two stanzas in the metre and rhyme-scheme of Byron’s ‘Don Juan’, making fun of one or more of the Labour party’s present embarrassments. ‘Never,’ said Charles Seaton, my predecessor, when he passed on the sacred baton, ‘give them a political subject. They get too hot under the collar to be funny.’ How wrong he was! Congratulations not only on being amusing but also on handling the challenging ottava rima with verve and skill. Moyra Blyth and Ray Kelley deserve better than to be runners-up. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty. For Charles,

Rupert Steiner

A recipe for guaranteed delivery: post a ripe cheese with every letter

The Rosewall affair signifies everything that is wrong with Royal Mail. The two-and-a-half ton Rosewall sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth was acquired by the Ministry of Works and the Post Office in 1963 for a new Post Office Pension Fund building in Chesterfield, where it became a landmark — until last October, when it took a trip to the Bonhams saleroom in London. Royal Mail announced that Rosewall was no longer part of its ‘cultural heritage’, which of course had nothing to do with the £620,000 it was expected to raise at auction. But after much protest it was withdrawn from sale and repatriated to Chesterfield, presumably along with a

Dominic Midgley

Is political correctness good for business?

Herbert Smith, a firm of City solicitors, last month announced that it had hired its first ‘inclusivity manager’. There were chortles all round, and the Times ran a short piece about the appointment under the headline ‘Political correctness seems to have broken out at one of London’s top legal firms’. The caravan swiftly moved on, but the recruitment of Carolyn Lee by one of the ‘Magic Circle’ of leading law partnerships is the latest sign that the City is coming to terms with the realities of modern life. While the number of women in the professional workforce has mushroomed in recent years and a tolerance of male chauvinist piggery has

Interconnect

Why bother to save for your baby?

There is a popular book for new parents called What to Expect the First Year by Arlene Eisenberg. In the chapter on what to expect during the third month there is a list of things your baby should be able to do. One of these is ‘pay attention to a raisin or other very small object’. This seems innocuous but it is the exactly the sort of thing that induces panic in a first-time parent. Scores of sleep-deprived novices, keen to make sure their little ones are developing as they should, routinely spend hours trying to persuade reluctant babies to concentrate on raisins when they would much rather be sucking

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The real case against Tesco

Corporate success can generally be measured by the size and strength of the campaign to boycott your business. But until very recently there was a remarkable exception to this rule: Tesco. For a supermarket group which now accounts for a remarkable one in every eight pounds taken by retailers in Britain, opposition has been remarkably light. Where are the student demos, the bricks flying through Tesco windows on May Day? Even tapping into www.boycotttesco.com is something of a disappointment; the site was bought up some time ago by a bunch of American libertarians who object to the way loyalty cards are used to spy on our shopping habits — not

Paul Johnson

The message of a great European cathedral

On 12 May I sat down at a café on the square, ordered coffee and Perrier, and began to sketch the west front of Strasbourg Cathedral. This was presumptuous: the complexity of the facade would have baffled the skill even of Muirhead Bone, who taught my father to draw, and who was the greatest architectural draftsman since Piranesi. Strasbourg is over 2,000 years old. There was a cathedral on the site as early as ad 550, and the present one, of red sandstone from the Vosges, was more than three centuries a-building (1200–1521). The plans for the west front survive, and are in the marvellous cathedral museum, showing that a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Profusion of choice makes us unhappy

Has the David Cameron dog sled recently swung by the little Himalayan city of Thimphu, do you suppose? His latest policy — to make us all, in a rather nebulous way, happier — seems to have been taken word for word from the philosophy of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the supreme ruler of Bhutan. Bhutan is the only country in the world which has an annually measurable index of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which takes precedence over such arid and abstruse criteria as GDP. The country was the subject of a rather wide-eyed and credulous BBC documentary recently, so perhaps David caught the tail end of that before The Bill

Boris Johnson

Farewell to the Young Ones

Now if you were an average overworked overtaxed Spectator-reading parent of a university student, I think I know how you would feel about this lecturers’ strike. I think you’d be fit to be tied. You would be chomping the carpet and firing off letters to the editor about the Spartist whingers who were prejudicing your daughter’s future. You would be ringing up Radio Five phone-ins after midnight, and raving about how these degrees were life-defining moments, and how unthinkable it was that papers should go unmarked. You would find it incredible that the Labour government has said nothing in defence of the students. Exams are being scrubbed! Vital academic credentials

Christopher Caldwell

Why I love the French

Taking issue with the Americans’ Francophobia Washington DC On the night of the Arsenal-Barcelona match, I was on the train between Manchester and London when something happened that would be inexplicable to my American compatriots. Two English couples, aged about 60, sat across the aisle. They were what Americans would call middle-class, and they were tidily dressed: sweaters and ties for the men, sweaters and necklaces for the women. They were discussing the first Barcelona goal when one of the men loudly broke wind. This is not the part that is outside the American experience. It was rather that the guy followed up with a triumphant burst of laughter. His

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Hinduja file is reopened over lunch in New Delhi

The Hinduja scandal is the closest the Labour party has to radioactive waste. Though officially buried five years ago, it remains lethal: the Indian billionaires had involved so many powerful people in their quest for British passports that the scandal threatened to engulf the whole government. In the event Peter Mandelson was — conveniently for New Labour — the only casualty of the affair. His downfall was so spectacular, and so gleefully received, that little attention was paid to the subtle, sometimes playful clues Sir Anthony Hammond left in his official report of March 2001, pointing those who cared to look towards a much deeper mystery. The former Treasury solicitor

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 20 May 2006

Q. We have lived in a very nice, civilised square in south London for nearly 20 years. It’s surprisingly private and everyone gets on well. One of our neighbours is an eminent Liberal Democrat peer of the realm. Unfortunately his wife and he persist in aggressively canvassing and leafleting our neighbours and us, even though they know that I have belonged to the Conservative party since before the Liberal Democrats were even formed. I would never consider canvassing their household and I consider this macho flaunting of their political affiliations to be bad form, and actually rather rude. Can you tell me how I can make this plain to them