Society

Saturday

Jaspistos

Paracrostic

In Competition No. 2469 you were invited to supply a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first line.Another comp that was last set nearly 30 years ago, when it was won by J. Crooks with the intriguing key line, ‘Moguls at the BBC’. This time round many of the key lines had a topographical slant. Examples were ‘Liverpool Central’, ‘The midges on Mull’, ‘On Morecambe sands’ and ‘Street maps reveal’. Two delightful openings were ‘A camel, please!’ (Piers Geddes) and Laura Garratt’s Pepysian ‘And so he went to bed’. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes,

Frank Keating

Sixty-six and all that

A perennial sucker for feature films with sporting references, I suppose I’ll drag myself to Sixty Six, in spite of the verdict by the Spec’s Deborah Ross that, for all its occasional charm, it is ‘a comedy without any good jokes which takes itself too seriously’. It concerns a Jewish family’s dilemma, particularly 12-year-old Bernie’s, when the date of his bar mitzvah coincides with the England football team winning through to the 1966 World Cup final. The reasonable idea has Ross longingly sighing, ‘Where is Jack Rosenthal when you really need him?’ The late Rosenthal, of course, was a luminously original television (etcetera) playwright in the vanished, lamented days of

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 11 November 2006

Q. Several weeks ago I was asked to keep clear a date in November for a surprise 60th birthday party. In anticipation I purchased a carefully chosen and expensive gift which, being particular for the host, is of no use to me and cannot be given elsewhere or returned to the shop. The formal invitation arrived and the party is to be held at a restaurant. Enclosed with the invitation was a menu from which to choose my dinner and a request that I return my choice with a cheque to cover the cost. I have entertained the host, who is quite able to afford the price of the meal,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 11 November 2006

My husband has been trying to interest me in the architecture of the stations on the Jubilee line on the London Underground. Some of them — Westminster and Canary Wharf — are indeed impressive in an overpowering way. The line, before its extension eastward from Green Park, was named after the celebration of the Queen’s 25th anniversary on the throne, and I had, I suppose, always thought jubilees were something to do with jubilation. But, as with all misapprehensions, only when it was pointed out to me was this one exploded. John Ayto set off the explosives in Word Origins (A&C Black, £12.99), his excellent ramble through unlikely etymologies. I’ve

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 11 November 2006

Am sleeping on the bunk bed at Dave and Sam’s. The atmosphere is v tense. SUNDAY Am sleeping on the bunk bed at Dave and Sam’s. The atmosphere is v tense. We don’t know when they will come for us, but we know they will come and when they do we have to be ready. Miliband wasn’t ready, and look what happened to him. They found contact lens boxes and tin cans — tin cans! No doubt he was too busy thinking about policy to have someone check what was going into his bin — well, that is not going to happen to us. When the Mail and the Mirror

John Humphrys

Diary – 11 November 2006

Ring ring …‘John Humphrys speaking.’ ‘Oh that’s wonderful because I just know I can help you!’ This has been happening a lot in the past week or two. Ring ring …‘John Humphrys speaking.’ ‘Oh that’s wonderful because I just know I can help you!’ This has been happening a lot in the past week or two. Heaven knows how total strangers get my number, but they do. Maybe it’s divine intervention. I knew I’d be offering a sizeable hostage to fortune by doing a Radio 4 series with the preposterous title Humphrys in Search of God. I knew clever-dick columnists would write witty pieces about God in search of Humphrys

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 11 November 2006

Whatever the eventual result of the West’s incursion into Iraq, the Iraqi people will have to rewrite their history to make sense of the occupation. Doubtless the West will try to influence the outcome — but surely not as cleverly as the Roman emperor Hadrian wooed the Greek world. It helped that the Romans in general held the Greek, in particular the Athenian, cultural achievement in awe. The poet Horace talked of Greece educating rustic Rome in the liberal arts, and the emperor Nero felt his own artistic abilities were more appreciated there than anywhere else. In the ad 130s Hadrian set about proving his admiration for Greek culture by

Robert Salisbury

When our servants become our masters

This country is incompetently governed. The cost to the taxpayer is vast and growing. The level of incompetence has increased almost as rapidly as public expenditure. Indeed, taxation has failed to keep up with Gordon Brown’s prodigality. So, in order to feed the Moloch, he has been obliged to raise taxes. That has proved inadequate to satisfy the public sector’s insatiable demand for money, so he has had to turn to ever more ingenious devices to squeeze the tax-payer. His most expensive device is likely to prove the longest lasting. The Private Finance Initiative failed to take off under the Major government, largely because Kenneth Clarke sensibly refused to soften

Philip Womack

In praise of unwanted gerundives

I had a succession of brilliantly eccentric Classics teachers. Father Hunnwycke, a kindly and acerbic priest, showed his hatred of school inspections by holding up a German book called Group Sex in Ancient Rome every time the inspector’s dreary head was bowed. Another, a small, military Scottish man, would, after berating my misuse of the optative, launch into a diatribe about the evils of Tesco — or the Antichrist, as he preferred to think of it. He eventually ended up on Mount Athos. These wonderful people are a dying breed, says Harry Mount in this likeable, easygoing book. It is an odd creature — part memoir, part grammar book, part

Cosmo Lush

The promise of real profits from a weird virtual world

My name is Cosmic Finucane. I have lots of money, a body to die for and I’m building my dream house on an island with an ocean view. At least, that’s my alternative persona — sadly, a far stretch from the real me. He inhabits the internet’s hottest new phenomenon, the virtual world of Second Life. Cosmic is an ‘avatar’ — a computer-generated 3D human lookalike who makes friends, throws parties, goes shopping and has the potential to help me earn real money. Launched by San Francisco-based Linden Labs in 2000 with backing from the founders of eBay and Amazon, Second Life is now hitting the big time. Its population

Joanna Pitman

Flawless, timeless, almost priceless

White diamonds are the world’s most expensive gems. White diamonds are the world’s most expensive gems. The ideal stone is like a piece of ice, whiter than white, graded ‘D’, the purest possible grading, and cut with exquisite precision. Only a handful exist. Ten years ago a pure white, pear-shaped 100.10 carat diamond (pictured here), classified as ‘D’ and internally flawless, was sold by Sotheby’s in Geneva for $16,548,750. Named ‘The Star of the Season’, it is still the most expensive precious stone ever sold at auction. Today its whereabouts are a closely guarded secret, but it is likely that it sits contentedly, if a little unloved, in a secure

Richard Orange

A year in exile, but still in the game

Bill Browder is strangely apologetic for the grandeur of his offices in Hudson House, a Lutyens mansion off Covent Garden. ‘I like the high ceilings,’ he says, scanning the room with a nervous smile, ‘It’s easier to work with some space around me.’ Somehow, though, neither the building’s fine fa

The Spectator

Let justice be done

The US mid-term election results have many lessons, but one of them, as Christopher Caldwell argues on page 14, is that most Americans believe that the war in Iraq is over, and that it has been lost. This reflects a broader, bone-deep fatigue in the West with the war on terror generally: a perception that the price we have paid has been too high, that our governments have systematically misled us, and that the whole enterprise stinks of arbitrariness and illegitimacy. This is why the sentencing this week of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and the jailing of the British al-Qa’eda terrorist, Dhiren Barot, were so significant. True, the two trials

Alasdair Palmer

Saddam’s trial shouldn’t be fair

When Mohammed al-Ureybi, the presiding judge at the trial of Saddam Hussein, started reading out that the court sentenced Saddam to death for killing 148 inhabitants of the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982, Saddam interrupted him. Just as the learned judge got to the part about the punishment for ‘crimes against humanity’, the deposed tyrant shouted, ‘Down with the traitors! Down with the invaders! To hell with your articles and your clauses!’ It is not how a man accused of crimes against humanity is supposed to react to a guilty verdict. According to the ideals of international law, he is supposed to accept his own guilt and bend his

Fiona Maddox

A last, affectionate look

Three decades ago, in one of modern musicology’s great labours of love, David Brown began work on his definitive four-volume study of Tchaikovsky. Fifteen years after his initial researches, he laid out the composer on his death-bed and pulled up the sheet, so to speak, in 1991. Brown’s efforts transformed Tchaikovsky’s reputation from that of sentimental tunesmith of the ‘1812’ Overture, the B flat Piano Concerto and a few sugary ballets (as they were perceived) to towering figure of late Romanticism and an opera composer of genius. Even the Russians were startled. Given the repressive censorship of the Soviet years, Brown’s discoveries were remarkable, though since he had learned Russian

Simon Hoggart

Lay & Wheeler Spectator Christmas wine offer

Click here to order online We have two Christmas offers this month, both from top-ranking wine merchants. The first is by Lay & Wheeler. Nearly all the wines have been reduced by 10 per cent (with free delivery); there are further discounts if you buy more than one case, and two of the reds represent astonishing value. Both are over-production of famous names. The strict French appellation system limits the amount of wine that can be sold under any particular label. This must be infuriating if, for example, you make white wine in one of the great Burgundy districts and in a particularly good year you produce more than you’re

Jaspistos

Rip Van Winkle

In Competition No. 2468 you were invited to imagine that you fall asleep and wake up 20 years hence, and then report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke. Brian Murdoch reported new stamps issued for the Queen’s 100th birthday and the 2012 Olympics postponed yet again, for the 17th time. Mike Morrison envisaged an aged Ken Barlow supervising a pedestrian crossing in Coronation Street and Madonna in the news for adopting a Lithuanian grandmother. Last week I read H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes in which the hero, after a nap of a mere 203 years, is faced with ‘the nightmare of Capitalism triumphant — higher buildings,

Frank Keating

Eye screams

At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. All I could think of was Private Eye — for this was where the magazine’s founders learnt their cricket. I wondered what they’d have thought of four floodlit indoor nets, bowling machines, and banks of television screens to examine the crookedness of your cover-drive. Not that

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 4 November 2006

Q. I knew that legal aid lawyers like myself were facing a difficult future, but I was caught somewhat off guard when a barrister colleague told me that she had just turned 40 and wondered if she were too old to ‘go on the game’ as an alternative career option. As she is a frequent opponent, I knew that anything short of honesty would undermine my credibility with her, and yet I did not want to be ungallant. I said that I thought she could manage it, but might have to specialise. Do you think I got it about right? M.D.S., Gravesend, Kent A. Congratulations on your intelligent response to

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 4 November 2006

Look, first off I’d just like to say that what follows has nothing to do with not being either hip or edgy. Look, first off I’d just like to say that what follows has nothing to do with not being either hip or edgy. I am hip and edgy. Some days I’m so hip and edgy that’s all there is to me: hip and edge. ‘Wow, look at the hip and edge on that,’ people have even been known to gasp when I pass them in the street. I just wanted to get this absolutely straight so you wouldn’t think I just wasn’t hip or edgy enough for his week’s