Society

The recent scorching weather in London has brought out some repellent pairs of trousers, particularly those baggy half-length affairs, worn by stocky, thick-calved, T-shirted young men, with shaven heads and beer bellies, who now appear to epitomise English youth. Trousers are useful, indeed indispensable garments, but sartorially the only solution to the trouser problem is to make them as inconspicuous as possible. The moment you notice trousers, critical thoughts arise. This applies to both men and women. Trousers are popularly supposed to date from the 1790s, when they began to replace breeches or culottes, first in Paris, then in London. Revolutionary gentlemen, wishing to dissociate themselves from the aristos, adopted

Hezbollah and genocide From Lord KalmsSir: William Hague’s usual good sense has deserted him. Criticising Israel for being disproportionate without serious consideration of the alternatives merely mouths the buzzwords of the ignorant armchair critic. Think again, William, for whom you speak. How do you deal with the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, who is committed to Israel’s total destruction (not a single Jew to remain alive in Israel) and who rains thousands of rockets on Israel, keeping the population in shelters, devastating industry, kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers within Israeli territory? Hezbollah combines a unique and dangerous formula: a terrorist organisation ensconced within a large area of the independent but incompetent nation

‘The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and …no other task is of any consequence.’ So Palinurus, aka Cyril Connolly, warns in the opening sentence of The Unquiet Grave. This ruthless reminder made me totally depressed as I published my first book in English in Hong Kong last week. Obviously it’s not a masterpiece. But what could I have done? The only thing I had published before was a Chinese translation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. English is my second language and my book is in no way erudite. It is merely an anthology of articles I had written for a Hong Kong

The French are finally coming to terms with generic wines. The bottles, instead of being labelled with the name of the grower and location, have names that are either trendy (Fat Bastard or Le Freak) or else amiably meaningless, such as Chamarré, a kind of butterfly. The labels also show the grape variety. This information was previously thought unnecessary; if you didn’t know that, say, Chablis was made from Chardonnay, or Condrieu from Viognier, you probably weren’t fit to drink it. But these wines, it’s thought, will be welcome to confused drinkers everywhere, in Britain, the US or in France itself. But it will be a slow process. The notion

During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint of northern origins. ‘I just thought it was the right thing to do; I still think working in government service is extremely important.’ Now the chairman of the iconic John Lewis Partnership, where the staff owns the company, Hampson retains a strong sense of that early virtue. Tall and clean-cut, with a steely gaze, in

As the conflict deepens in the Lebanon, the word on many lips is ‘proportionality’. Israel keeps being told that her actions are ‘disproportionate’. Proportionality is, indeed, a key moral concept in wars, but how is it to be calculated? The question becomes more complicated in an age in which opponents often prefer terrorism to formal military engagement. The regular army fighting the irregulars can almost always be made to look like a sledgehammer taken to crack a nut. In this case, it is probably right to argue that Hezbollah does not, as a fighting machine, pose a threat to the territorial integrity of Israel. But it can and does train