Society

Saturday

Taki

The right woman

Unlike Peregrine Worsthorne, I thought the Duff Cooper diaries were interesting and terrific, and also made me envious as hell. Oh, to have lived back then. People sure had fun. I particularly liked the part where Duff puts down a certain party as boring because of the presence of spivs. Well, lucky old Duff. If he were around nowadays, he’d be writing about some sponsored event where among the spivs he might run into a gent of sorts. Of course, one could have fun back then, because the barbarians were still outside the gates. No journalists, no people in trade, no cheap celebrities, no It girls, no New Labour. One

Jeremy Clarke

Off night

The active volcano Stromboli, one of the Aeolian islands, rises out of the sea off the north-east coast of Sicily. It is forbidden to make the three-hour trek to the top without a guide, so I signed on with a chaperoned party of 30 tourists for a night climb. Our piratical-looking guide was a fierce disciplinarian. At each resting place he issued very specific instructions in harsh and oddly guttural French. Here we must drink something. Now we must put on our anoraks and hard hats. Here those that need to must urinate. Now we must eat something. And then, about halfway up, just before darkness fell, he ordered us

Lucy Vickery

Hot Property | 5 November 2005

These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at what psychiatrists like to call ‘impression-management’ has echoes in the project on which the men are engaged — to liberate the area from its sordid past and transform it from a place where people don’t linger if they can help it into somewhere they choose to settle. The industrial age turned semi-rural King’s Cross into

Owen Matthews

Diary – 5 November 2005

Baghdad Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and someone’s definitely out to get us. Last week the Palestine hotel, home to many journalists here, was almost demolished by a particularly telegenic truck bomb. The neat mushroom cloud rose a thousand feet into the sky, shedding a geometrically near-perfect ring of falling debris about halfway up. It was terribly beautiful. Our security minders tell us that the attack was a sign that all journalists in the city are now fair game. Some of us have reacted by going into lockdown mode, retreating behind the walls of the world’s greatest fortress, Baghdad’s Green Zone, guarded

Jaspistos

Special reduction

In Competition No. 2416 you were invited to reduce the life story of a famous person or a fictional character to three limericks. I was strict about metre and rhyme. A limerick is technically a very conventional form of poetry, and so when my ear was offended I turned my thumb down. And I was certainly not going to countenance ‘neuralgia’ rhyming with ‘Trafalgar’! A third criterion was the necessary biographical element demanded by ‘life story’. Iain Crawford wrote tellingly about John Lennon, but spleen overwhelmed history. Commendations to him, Bernadette Evans, Brian Murdoch and Dominica Roberts. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver is Colin

Christopher Fildes

Dalai Alan and Helicopter Ben may propose, but the markets dispose

I have long thought that Alan Greenspan would have made a passable Dalai Lama. Those gnomic utterances, that air of inner calm, that instant access to a deep well of understanding…. The faithful have come to accept that the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board is the embodiment of power and wisdom, and they are now preparing themselves for his next incarnation. Ben Bernanke, sometime winner of the South Carolina state spelling-bee, then professor of economics at Princeton and authority on the Great Depression, is told that he will soon be the most powerful man in the world, and is so wise and clever that all will be

Paul Johnson

Science can be just as corrupt as any other activity

My old tutor, A.J.P. Taylor, used to say, ‘The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history.’ Not true. History does not exactly repeat itself, but there are recurrent patterns. And the historian learns to look for certain signs. He asks, What is the prevailing orthodoxy, in any field, at a particular time? And his training teaches him: it is almost certain to be wrong. That is one reason why I am so suspicious of the Darwinian establishment today, and in particular its orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole form of evolution. This establishment still has enormous power. It controls the big university biology faculties,

Richard Ehrman

A dying breed

By mid-century, the world’s population will be 50 per cent higher than it is now, says Richard Ehrman, but the boom will come from developing countries, not Europe, and that’s very bad news indeed If demography is destiny, then, on the face of it, Britain should be feeling pretty smug. In late May the number of people in the UK finally passed the 60 million mark. By 2031, according to official projections released last month, there will be 67 million of us. While populations across most of the rest of Europe are stagnating, and many will soon be shrinking, ours is booming. So why does this bountiful prospect make so

Saturday

Taki

Female spat

Washington DC As far as catfights are concerned, this one cannot compare with, say, Bette Davis v. Joan Crawford, or even Crystal v. Alexis Carrington, but it will do for the rainy season. Maureen Dowd, a 55-year-old New York Times columnist known for her hysterical outbursts against George W. Bush, has taken an 800-word swipe against her Times colleague Judith Miller, fresh out of jail for refusing to reveal her so-called sources. This is the kind of fight where the fans root for a double knockout. It’s more Paris Hilton v. Nicole Ritchie, if you know what I mean. The more blood spilled, the better. If any of you have

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 29 October 2005

In the Lozells district of Birmingham, Isaiah Young Sam, a black man aged 23, was fatally stabbed as he returned from the cinema in an attack by ten or 11 men. The murder came amid fights and rioting by black Caribbeans and South Asian youths. The violence came after a rumour had gone round, and was retailed on a pirate radio station, that a 14-year-old black girl had been raped by 19 Asians after being caught shoplifting. Another man was shot dead nearby the next day. A White Paper on education set out plans to free schools from the control of local authorities and give them power to expand, change

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 29 October 2005

In email addresses we find a punctuation mark /. There is a widespread and strong feeling against calling this a forward slash or just slash. The / once languished like the @ on the typewriter keyboard, seldom used except by the billing department (‘To one gross wingnuts @ 1/3 a dozen … 15/-’). It was from its function of separating shillings (solidi) from pence (denarii) that the sign acquired its name of solidus. In the Middle Ages the same sign had been used in manuscripts in much the same way that we use a comma, and in this function it was called a virgula in Latin, because it looked like

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 29 October 2005

Power to the locals Leo McKinstry takes a dim view of the new localism (‘Local schmocal’, 22 October), but most of the new intake of Conservative MPs have signed up to the localists’ ‘Direct Democracy’ charter. We have done so because we believe Britain’s centre-right needs a strategic rethink. Why? First, because we recognise the government has failed to improve public services because it has tried to micro-manage them from Whitehall. Second, because we realise that no matter who wins elections, power will still reside with unelected and unaccountable quangos, judges and Eurocrats. Only by making the public services downwardly accountable to the people they are meant to serve, as

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 29 October 2005

‘Most of us are asleep most of the time,’ says Jamie Oliver in the new Sainsbury’s television commercial, possibly recorded before he went off to Italy with a film crew and production team for his much-needed break from the cameras. ‘Even when we shop we are sleep-shopping,’ he continues, ‘filling our trolleys with exactly the same things week in, week out.’ Christ, I thought, you’ve got a point there, James. That’s exactly what I do. I can go to the supermarket absolutely determined to not buy any of the stuff I usually buy but I still somehow manage to come home with all the stuff I always buy. ‘There’s a

Frank Keating

Clash of the 10s

There is a poignant sale next Wednesday at Bonhams auction house in Chester. Under the hammer is due a skip of spiritually priceless mementoes — shirts, boots, medals — belonging to the Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, one of soccer’s immortals. His family need the money to help pay the 78-year-old’s round-the-clock medical care in his Budapest nursing home. On sale will doubtless be quite a few faded shirts numbered ‘10’ in either the soft plum-red of Hungary or the all-white of his club Real Madrid. Nearer home, another imperishable No. 10, England’s Johnny Haynes, died at 72 after a road accident last week in Edinburgh. A dozen or so years ago

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 29 October 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I have recently inherited a beautiful tapestry from an uncle of whom I was particularly fond, and who, I believe, was rather fond of me. While my cousin — who is shortly to move into her late father’s house — is happy to respect his wishes and let me have the tapestry, her husband is less enthusiastic and is more than a little exercised as to what to put in the place of this work, which occupies almost all of one wall of the dining-room. That empty wall will make me feel uncomfortable every time I visit. I get on very well with my cousin and would

Gill Bennett

Soviet tricks of trade

The very existence of The Mitrokhin Archive — material copied covertly from the KGB’s foreign intelligence files and brought to Britain in 1992 by a senior Soviet intelligence officer, Vasili Mitrokhin — represents a stunning intelligence success, something worth celebrating at a time when intelligence failures are a far more popular subject for discussion. Mitrokhin’s tenacity and courage in copying the material — over a period of nearly 20 years — and his exfiltration from Russia by the British Secret Intelligence Service are themselves the stuff of legend. The massive if unwieldy archive he brought with him provides a unique insight into KGB activities on a global scale between the

Interconnect

A comfortably British Scot

Donald Dewar once said to me, ‘I can’t stand your journalism, but I like your novels.’ It was perhaps characteristic of him that he put it in that order, the disapproval first. It wasn’t just that he was given to speaking his mind, or that he was capable, as his friend, Fiona Ross, one of the contributors to this memorial volume of essays, remarks, ‘of spectacular rudeness’. It was rather that, like so many of us Scots brought up in the Presbyterian tradition, he was more comfortable criticising than praising. His political career was a long one, and for most of it he was condemned to wander in the waste

Patrick Carnegy

President’s cure

It is all the fault of John Tusa. He’d been slated to give a lecture to launch the RSC’s autumn festival of new work. This year’s focus has been on the West’s relationship with what is usually called the developing world. The talk was to have been at 11.00 a.m., and I’d booked into a hotel for the previous night. But when Tusa cancelled I did the same for the room. Time enough to drive up on the day for the first event at 2.30 p.m. But that was without reckoning on a massive blockage of the M6 due to a serious accident. After a couple of hours, the local

Jaspistos

Six types

In Competition No. 2415 you were invited to categorise six types of …walk? drunk? bore? I left it to you. Here is one of Sydney Smith’s types of handshake: ‘The retentive shake — one which, beginning with vigour, pauses as it were to take breath, but without relinquishing its prey, and before you are aware begins again, until you feel anxious as to the result, and have no shake left in you.’ The prize-winners, printed below, get £25 each, and Noel Petty has the bonus fiver. SITTING DOWNThere are many ways of sitting down. There is the ‘vesture-protective’, under which we may subsume both the trouser-hitch and skirt-smooth; there is

Paul Robinson

The return of White Russia

‘Unbelievable,’ the professor told me. It was hard to disagree. We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-communist Russian philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Il’in. Just a short time ago, mere possession of one of Il’in’s books would have brought six years in prison. Now the Russian state has reburied the philosopher in Moscow with all the pomp and ceremony it could muster. Earlier this month the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei II, presided over a service of reburial at the Donskoi monastery in Moscow for not only Il’in but also his far more famous contemporary General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in southern