Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 15 July 2006

Q. I read your ‘In the Chair’ Q&As in the online edition of The Spectator with interest. In this session you mentioned a dilemma of your own. You told of how your own good manners had once been compromised by your reluctance to dilute a conversation with the great Auberon Waugh by having to introduce hovering friends. I have a similar problem at parties. I am a close friend of an internationally famous actor. Occasionally we meet up at semi-public events, but I am never able to exchange more than a couple of sentences with him before a host of people, some of whom I hardly know, are queueing up

Jeremy Clarke

Give us a clue

If ever I was passing the Courtauld Institute in London with five minutes to spare, I’d chuck the woman behind the desk a fiver, jog up the 300-year-old spiral staircase and go and look at a picture by Wassily Kandinsky called ‘Rapallo: Grey Day’. I know nothing about painting and I knew nothing about Kandinsky except what it said on the wall: that he was Russian and that he travelled around Europe at the turn of the last century with a female artist called Münter. If I thought anything at all, I thought that perhaps Mr Courtauld had unwisely subscribed to someone else’s enthusiasm for a passing fad, but they’d

Taki

Midsummer marriage

Rome Frankly, this was not a cool wedding. There were no security guards, no stretch limos, no Liz Hurleys, no cutting-edge genetic technology, not even a same-sex marriage. Not very with it, I know, but there we are. John Taki and Assia got hitched last Saturday in the most magical setting I have ever seen — a Xanadu. ‘And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills/Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;/And here were forests ancient as the hills,/Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’ Old Sam Coleridge must have visited Prince Nettuno Borghese’s property by the sea, west of Rome, because what Kubla Khan decreed is where my boy got hitched. Assia’s

Simon Courtauld

Eat your hart out

The Countryside Alliance, through its Game-to-Eat campaign, has been doing some good work in promoting venison. It is higher in protein and lower in fat than other red meat; some supermarkets are now offering venison steaks and sausages, but fewer than 10 per cent of the population buy the meat. Since deer numbers in Britain have apparently never been so high, and the government has been advised that they should be reduced by a third, wild venison, generally with a better flavour than deer that have been farmed, should be more generally available. Thanks to friendly persuasion by the Alliance, wild venison was introduced last year on the menus of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 15 July 2006

Because everyone can see that the government can no longer do anything worth doing, there is a widespread assumption that its days are numbered. But this is a non sequitur. In the past, Labour governments could do things only in the short gap between their election victory and their sterling crisis. Conservative governments had a slightly longer effective life, but the Heath administration was pretty much disabled after the failure of its industrial relations legislation in 1972. The period between 1979 and, roughly, 1989 was quite exceptional in having a government that had ideas about what it wanted to do and the political ability to do them. Implosion does not

Frank Keating

The fabled Fred

Yorkshire buried their Fred in his beloved Dales last week. Umpire Dickie Bird gave the main moist-eyed address. Brian Close remembered their debutants’ county curtsey in 1949, both just 18, against Cambridge at Fenners. At the snooty University Arms, the dinner menu was in French. The haughty waiter hovered. Bewildered Brian, the Guiseley mill-worker’s son, passed it blankly to the Maltby miner’s son Fred, already unblinkingly brimful of bluster. ‘Right, sunshine, I’ll begin w’a large plateful o’that,’ he demanded, jabbing his finger at the menu’s top line. It read: Mercredi le deuxième mai. The tales of Trueman were up and running. The fables of Fred. To Fleet Street and the

Friday

Jeff Randall

Diary – 14 July 2006

Berlin, 9 July. It wasn’t meant to be like this. High in the Olympiastadion — Block 28, Row 4, Seat 22 — at 7.45 p.m. local time, I shut my eyes and imagine the sights and sounds which I’d hoped to experience. For a few seconds, this magnificent amphitheatre is draped in red and white flags, ‘Rule Britannia’ fills the air and Becks and the boys are about to do their bit for Harry, England and St George. My reverie is broken by the pungent smell of a cheap cheroot. Puffing away, one row in front of me, is an Italian with Tricolore face paint. He’s becoming hysterical with excitement.

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 14 July 2006

MONDAY Leaked email trails — 1 (v bad); imploring phonecalls to Dave’s office pretending will have nervous breakdown if sacked — 15 (seems to have worked!); hooded tops delivered to office — 135 (think we’ve struck a chord. Plus some of them are really smart. Am wearing one now, as a matter of fact. It says ‘enta da getto’. Think it’s Italian). Best news is I found the separate bundle of Dave’s responses and burned them in ritualistic anti-leaking ceremony. So no one will ever know what he said about Theresa and Mr Maude (which is just as well because it doesn’t have much to do with our new doctrine

Wednesday

Allister Heath

The rich have never been richer: their predecessors were small fry

The wealthy are now wealthier, more numerous and more socially mobile than at any time in history. But will Gordon Brown’s tax-and-spend policies put an end to this? For the rich and successful, these are the best of times. They are earning more than most had ever dreamt possible and are celebrated in popular culture and courted by the political establishment as never before. Millionaires have become Britain’s fastest-growing social class; every single working day, another hundred people, many of them women, join that once exclusive club, thanks to bumper bonuses or judicious investments. The rich have always been among us, of course, but their current good fortune is utterly

Matthew Dancona

‘The special relationship is safe’

Am I about to become the ‘Spectator One’? Having cleared the first airport-style security check at the US Embassy on Upper Grosvenor Street, I reach a second perimeter inside the building itself. This time the X-ray machine picks up a mysterious electronic device inside my briefcase which turns out to be a mobile phone I do not recognise. Uh-oh. Here I am, on my way to interview the American ambassador, and there is a stray mobile in my case — a potential trigger device, as everyone around me is thinking, but not saying. Not good. Hushed calls are made, a Marine frowns and a plainclothes officer straight out of 24

Paul Johnson

A summer rhapsody for a pedal-bike

Nothing separates men from women more significantly than riding a bicycle. Whenever I see a man on a bike in London, he is invariably breaking the law: riding on the pavement, whizzing through a red light, pedalling arrogantly along our one-way street in the forbidden direction. I have never seen a woman doing any of these things. Their cycling is strictly utilitarian, economical, discreet, at modest speeds and on machines which have no element of display. What does this tell us about the sexes? Well, it certainly makes me revert again to my technological vision of the future, in which men have been eliminated, their prime function taken over by

Simon Baker

In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel

In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol set in the years after the end of the first world war, a young man arrives on a desolate Antarctic island, where for the next 12 months he will study the local climate. Oddly, his predecessor, who was due to be collected, cannot be found; there is only a half-mad lighthouse-keeper, who appears to be the island’s only other inhabitant — or so it seems until night falls, when the man hears the patter of feet outside his window. The novel borrows from so many popular genres — horror, thriller, B-movie — and yet ultimately transcends them all

Rupert Steiner

‘Bill Gates is just a figurehead. I am actively engaged’

In the bookcase in George Soros’s South Kensington drawing-room, neatly lined up beside works on Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Popper, are multiple copies of Open Society, written by one of today’s aspiring philosophers: Soros himself. The literary line-up is testament to the Hungarian–American billionaire’s search for something that money can’t buy — acceptance at the same table as these great thinkers. But his cash has paid for a place on the same shelf, at least in his own home. And last week Soros was in London to talk about his latest book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Weidenfeld). Despite giving away $5 billion of

Matthew Vincent

A compost heap of hot stocks

‘A piece of sh*t’ was the non-technical term used by Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget to describe a dotcom stock called 24/7 Media, back in October 2000. To him, it was just another ‘new paradigm’ company to foist on an overheating market. To some observers today, the flotation on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) of another ‘renewables’ company may look just as suspicious. In June 2006, self-styled ‘hot-dung’ stock Geotrupes Energy proved it is actually possible to go public with what is, technically, a big piece of the afore-mentioned. That’s because Geotrupes develops projects using dung, or ‘biomass’, as a source of energy, as well as more conventional sources such

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Reflections on the book trade from the man who wants his shops back

The week in which HMV completed its £63 million takeover of Ottakar’s — and announced that Ottakar’s bookshops will be rebranded as Waterstone’s, which HMV already owns — seems a good moment to contemplate the future of the book trade in the virtual and digital age. There is something so unchangeably pleasing about the feel of a book in the hand and the ambience of a room full of books that it is hard to imagine the demise of the traditional well-stocked bookshop, what-ever alternatives technology may offer. And yet our own book-buying habits are the best indication of the speed of change. Take me, for instance: I am often

Jaspistos

The bug that failed to bite

In Competition No. 2451 you were asked to imagine that two strangers have met through our column ‘The Love Bug’ and that both have simultaneously posted letters indicating that further meetings are not on. You were invited to provide both letters. Only once have I responded to a sex advertisement. As a result I found myself outside 231 Majuba Road in some suburb in a light drizzle. I was welcomed by a drab couple, who offered me Nescafé, after which I was invited to enjoy the wife on the rug in front of an electric fire while the husband photographed us from the next room. It was easy to decline,

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 8 July 2006

Q. Your correspondent (1 July), who was asked to pay towards a dinner to which he had been invited as a guest, has the opposite problem to my own. Whenever I have lunch with a much-loved friend, he pays for it. He is not wealthy and I would like to reciprocate his hospitality but he makes it impossible, either by insisting on going to venues where he can leave his credit card at the door or to his club where only he is allowed to pay. Although I crave this friend’s company, his reluctance to let me treat him, to say nothing of the guilt that I feel knowing his

Taki

Robots and winners

When was the last time one cried for having to leave London at a weekend for two days on a beautiful sailing boat in the south of France? Actually, last week, when the mother of my children gave me an ultimatum to come down or else. Why, oh why, are women so unreasonable? Just because I was having a grand old time and going to all the parties during the last week of June, I suddenly had to do penance and spend the weekend like some American husband who failed to wash up in the kitchen. Sitting on a boat and dreaming about what I was missing back in the capital

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 8 July 2006

Elite electorates From Alan HallSir: I was amused by your leading article this week (1 July), criticising New Labour for treating ‘the highest office of government’ as if it were ‘the captaincy of its own team’. You affect to be shocked that the debate on who should succeed Tony Blair is not being conducted, so to speak, in open forum — or perhaps at the Court of St James’s — where the Queen’s loyal subjects might be invited to contribute their own pennyworth of opinion. But since when was the leadership of a political party (in or out of office) anything more than a matter for the party itself to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 8 July 2006

This week, an alliance of bodies concerned about ‘heritage’, led by the National Trust and including English Heritage and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, launched a campaign called History Matters. It is designed to ‘raise awareness of the importance of history in our lives’, with the strong implication that our public culture — and our current government — ignores this. As if to confirm their view that history is pushed to the sidelines, the media preferred to concentrate on football and Wimbledon, and gave the star-studded (Boris Johnson, David Starkey, Tony Benn, Stephen Fry) opening presentation little attention. I have a local story which confirms the problem. As befits the