Society

Saturday

David Rennie

It was almost World War III

Fifty years after the Hungarian uprising, David Rennie talks to Bela Kiraly, now 94, who was urged to call for Western help — a call that could all too easily have sparked nuclear war Budapest Half a century ago Bela Kiraly was invited to start World War III. He said no, though the price was the enslavement of his native Hungary by Soviet invaders. Kiraly was military chief of the Hungarian revolution at the time. The invitation was made on 4 November 1956 by an American reporter, who had somehow tracked him down in the blood-soaked centre of Budapest. The newspaperman was eager for a great scoop: a formal appeal

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 14 October 2006

Q. I am now working from home and am therefore in situ when my Korean cleaners arrive each week. What is the correct way to behave in this situation? Although their English is limited, they are clearly intelligent; both their children have won scholarships to excellent schools. I fear that my current mode — making them cups of tea — is getting on their nerves.M.S., Rozelle, NSW, Australia A.You are disconcerting these cleaners by acting in a way that their cultural background will not have prepared them for. Whereas in the West the polite fiction is ‘we are all good friends’, in the East the polite fiction is ‘I have

Taki

Cheap tricks

The telephone rings and a downmarket voice greets me with a cheery hello. ‘This is Peter McKay, your old friend,’ says the bubbly one. ‘We hear that Vanity Fair paid for your party.’ For any of you unfamiliar with McKay, he is a scandal-purveyor of talent, malice and unparalleled mischief, who writes under the pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail. My first reaction, needless to say, is to wonder why VF should pay for my party. And I tell him so. ‘No, VF did not pay for my party, but Graydon Carter, the editor, and his wife Anna, as well as Dominick Dunne, a VF columnist, were invited

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 14 October 2006

Monday night Am in spare room at Dave and Sam’s! On ‘webcameron’ duty which means I have to follow leader everywhere, and help with that internet thingy he does. There’s a huge team of people here, fussing about. As Jed says, spontaneity doesn’t come out of thin air you know! Did my first shoot today — ‘Dave makes granola-based breakfast while discussing health policy.’ Things got tricky when the false wall the builders put up down the middle of the kitchen to make it look pok-ier started flapping around like an old Crossroads set. Looked like we might have to abandon filming until I came up with a fab idea

Antonia Fraser

Diary – 14 October 2006

‘History in the making can be most exhausting.’ When I first read these words — by Noël Coward — I immediately assumed they applied to the writing of it. Having just finished a long book about the loves of Louis XIV, I thought I knew all about that exhaustion. So much for solipsism. Noël Coward was actually recording in his diary for 3 September 1945 his feelings at the end of a long war with ‘the world in physical and spiritual chaos’. I read the entry in a wonderful book, The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor, with multiple extracts for

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 14 October 2006

Mr George Osborne was criticised for calling Mr Gordon Brown autistic. Osborne had mentioned in a public meeting that his brothers nicknamed him Knowledge as a boy. Miss Mary Ann Sieghart, of the Times, suggested he might have been ‘faintly autistic’. Mr Osborne remarked, ‘We’re not getting on to Gordon Brown yet.’ A psychiatrist friend of my husband’s asked innocently why, if autistic was recognised as offensive, it was all right for people to call each other ‘obsessive’, ‘paranoid’ or even ‘schizophrenic’. He might well ask. After all, autism has a good image at the moment. Those with autism, or perhaps Asperger’s Syndrome, are popularly held to be savants who

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 14 October 2006

Taxing questionFrom Lord Lawson of BlabySir: Pressed to promise tax cuts during the recent Conservative party conference, both Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne were anxious to point out that Margaret Thatcher didn’t promise tax cuts in 1979. What the 1979 Conservative manifesto actually said was, ‘We shall cut income tax at all levels to reward hard work, responsibility and success.’ I hope we can now take it that the same non-promise will feature in the next Conservative manifesto.Nigel LawsonHouse of Lords, London SW1 Killer figures from the US From Robert WallsSir: The recent tendency for the British press to admire the American system of law enforcement puzzles me. Allister Heath

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 14 October 2006

Click here to send an order by emailStone, Vine & Sun of Winchester is one of my very favourite wine merchants. I’ve never tried anything of theirs that wasn’t first rate, and I was not remotely surprised when they won the Best Small Independent Wine Merchant award from Wine International this year. What they do brilliantly is fossick around for amazing bargains in unexpected places, and there are few discoveries more pleasing than a delicious wine at a price that allows you to buy plenty. White wines need to breathe as much as reds, but generally people are afraid of them getting too warm — though they should never be

Interconnect

The shape of things to come?

The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh had quite a send-off. As per the plans he drew up himself before his death, the memorial party organised by the Friends of Theo was adorned with a rock band, comedians, miniskirted cigarette girls, and female guests in twin-sets and pearls — something Van Gogh had found an erotic turn-on. A wooden coffin rotated on a platform surrounded by champagne bottles, and the room was scattered with ‘phallic cacti’. On stage were two stuffed goats, supposedly there for anyone who felt the urge to have sex with one. This alluded, defiantly, to what had caused all the trouble in the first place. ‘Goat-f****r’ was

Philip Womack

Magic and mischief

Susanna Clarke taps enchantingly into a vein of folkloric gold. She presents our world as existing in tandem with ‘Faerie’, but without butterfly-winged Victoriana. Instead she creates a sense of danger, as if the Faeries in question are the displaced gods of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, still retaining elements of frightful power over mankind. Her debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, was hard to miss: it worked, like a charm. A story of the relationship between two master magicians in the early 19th century, it combined wit, vigour and elegance with a cracking good story. Clarke convinced us that magic is part of the world we live in:

Judi Bevan

Leadership, clarity and a very thick skin

If you get up early enough you might spy the solid frame of Allan Leighton running round one of the London parks before he pays a surprise visit to a Royal Mail delivery office. The reaction of the postmen and women is usually the same. ‘They always say, “Oh s***, it’s the chairman”,’ Leighton laughs. He then gathers them round and asks them how it’s going and how they feel. ‘Those visits at half past five in the morning are the most important part of a recovery like this,’ he says firmly. ‘Going to the board meetings is the least important part.’ Tony Blair asked him in 2002 to become

Matthew Vincent

Switching channels

‘Have you had an accident at work that’s led to a loss of income?’ ‘Would you like to consolidate your debt?’ ‘Do you want to release equity from your property?’ If you’ve ever had the misfortune to find yourself watching ITV1 during the daytime (according to the British Market Research Bureau, not a single Spectator reader admits to doing so, so take my word for this), you’ll recognise those questions from the relentlessly downmarket ads that the channel now carries. But — in an irony apparent to industry watchers, if not to daytime couch potatoes — those same questions can just as easily be asked of the company itself. That’s

John Andrews

Every home should have a hedge fund

John Andrews says investing is like motoring: it’s not the vehicle that’s dangerous but the way it’s driven Dave wins millions on the lottery, and the first thing he does is sprint down to the nearest Ferrari showroom and jump into the latest model with extra-deep bass woofers and a little fold-down table for his can of Red Bull. His mother spits out her tea with fright. ‘You’ll kill yourself!’, she screams. ‘Why don’t you buy something safer, like a Vauxhall?’ ‘Mam’, he says, ‘if I drive the Ferrari at 200 mph down the wrong side of the M1, blindfold…’ his mother starts to hyperventilate, ‘…you’re right, I’ll kill myself.

Jaspistos

Pseudospeak

‘What we have to facilitate is a bottom-up approach.’ In Competition No. 2464 you were invited to provide a specimen of ministerial waffle. ‘What we have to facilitate is a bottom-up approach.’ When I heard those words come out of the mouth of Ruth Kelly (could she really have been Secretary of State for Education?), I knew we had a competition. I am grateful to Virginia Price Evans for drawing my attention to ‘bafflegab’, defined in Chambers as ‘the professional logorrhoea of many politicians, officials and salespeople, characterised by prolix, abstract circumlocution and/or a profusion of abstruse technical terminology used as a means of persuasion, pacification or obfuscation.’ Dr Johnson

Paul Johnson

No wise man, and no great artist, leaves God out

I can perfectly well understand why someone should be an agnostic. But to be an atheist — to deny flatly and without qualification the existence of God — is to me wholly unsympathetic. The depth of folly, indeed, and not without malice to us all. It makes little sense in reason. For if it is difficult, even strictly speaking impossible, to ‘prove’ the existence of God, in the sense in which we prove a theorem in geometry or the second law of thermodynamics, it is much more difficult to prove that he does not exist. More seriously, atheism necessarily demeans humanity. The point was powerfully made by Francis Bacon: ‘They

Roderick Conway-Morris

An ancient modernist

In 1944 an Allied bomb fell into the circular courtyard of the ancient Roman-inspired house that Andrea Mantegna had built for himself in Mantua, bouncing off its frescoed frieze. It failed to detonate. On 11 March of the same year, another landed on the Eremitani church in Padua, blowing the Ovetari chapel, whose walls were decorated with the precocious young Mantegna’s first fresco cycles, to smithereens. By then the only other surviving monumental work executed by the artist in Padua was the San Zeno altarpiece, destined from the beginning for Verona. It was delivered there on the eve of his departure for Mantua, where, from 1460 until his death in

Giannandrea Poesio

Soggy in the corps

There are many different ways to start a ballet season, but an artistically disjointed triple bill is not the ideal one. Even on paper the Royal Ballet’s opening programme for 2006/7 looks awkward, and the rationale behind joining Balanchine’s Violin Concerto (1972), Jirí Kyliàn’s Sinfonietta (1978) and Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries (1973) remains unclear. Little matters if each work boasts an important, non-dance-specific score — something that prompted the most welcome presence of Antonio Pappano in the pit. And little matters when each of the three works represents a significant moment in late 20th-century ballet history. But to come across as successfully woven, a mixed programme requires much stronger artistic, cultural

Allister Heath

‘Anti-Americanism is a form of fascism’

Narrow nationalism, hatred of Jews, and chauvinism find their meeting place in anti-Americanism, the acclaimed French thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Allister Heath What is most unusual about Bernard-Henri Lévy is not that he wears his white shirts open almost all the way down to his bellybutton; one would expect little else of a French philosopher who grew up hooked on the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida. Far more intriguing is that the top half of his shirts are entirely and deliberately devoid of buttons â” and have clearly been expensively and carefully tailored, manufacturing the ‘noble savage’ look for which he is renowned. Lévy â” or BHL as he is

Iain Johnstone

Keanu Reeves teaches Python magic

Some years ago I was writing a script with John Cleese in Los Angeles and we went for dinner at a buzzy brasserie called Chaya. When the waiter brought our steaks he also brought a $200 bottle of St Francis Cabernet Sauvignon. We hadn’t ordered it; the waiter said it was a gift from some anonymous diners. John suggested to the waiter that they come by our table as they were leaving the restaurant. It turned out to be Keanu Reeves and a couple of chums. They joined us for a drink and then the most remarkable thing happened: they started to re-enact scenes from Monty Python and the Holy

The Spectator

Make North Korea blink

The Korean nuclear crisis marks the bankruptcy of one style of post-Cold War diplomacy and should be the midwife of wholly new methods. It is not only essential that Pyongyang itself be punished for its flagrant act of provocation. The crisis must be resolved in such a way that no other rogue state is tempted to pursue the same reckless path. The eyes of Iran’s rulers are fixed on the Korean peninsula to see how much Kim Jong-Il is allowed to get away with. But other regimes with nuclear ambitions — Syria, Venezuela — are watching too. This is a test of the West’s resolve, and of the principles it