Society

Wednesday

Alan Duncan

The don who embodies Oxford

Sir John Betjeman gripped the sword and, with great gusto, sliced through the marzipan towers of Battersea power station. The party, nearly 30 years ago, was for the launch of ‘Temples of Power’, Glyn Boyd Harte’s delicious compendium of unusual industrial paintings. Such memorable occasions are not so unusual in the life of Jeremy Catto. He is the quintessential Oxford don — his portrait by Boyd Harte shows him in black tie and plimsolls, with his left foot shooting out of the frame. I can’t detect Jeremy anywhere in his friend Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, but if one were to devour C.P. Snow, Goodbye Mr Chips and Porterhouse Blue, there is

Paul Johnson

The misleading dimensions of persons and lives

I am disquietingly conscious of feeling smaller than I was; relatively, that is. For most of my life, being six foot one, I have loomed over the majority of men and almost all women. Now, at the local Sainsbury’s, where queues are constant as they are too mean to employ enough staff, I find I am often out-topped by young fellow-queuers, sometimes even by girls. Many of the young men are enormous, six-and-a-half, even seven feet. Female six-footers stride along the pavements, elbowing elderly dwarves out of the way. When I was a young man living in Paris, one of my girlfriends was a six-footer, an American called Euphemia, whom

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 3 June 2006

Q. A colleague and friend and I have been particularly close since she ‘saved my life’ ten years ago, having arranged help for me during a medical emergency. But since my retirement a year and a half ago, my attempts to meet for lunch have been fruitless, the last time particularly upsetting when she slept through our arranged noontime rendezvous. My feeble attempts to remind her of her promise to make it up by regularly forwarding humorous emails were brusquely rebuffed with a singular response several months ago, with no contact since. Now out of the blue I’ve received — surely at my friend’s guidance — an invitation to her

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 June 2006

As a political scandal rolls on, people always seem to fasten on the wrong reason why the minister concerned should resign. It is surely good news that John Prescott and his team were playing croquet at Dorneywood on a Thursday afternoon. What has happened to our traditional admiration for finishing the game and beating the Spaniards too? Admittedly, Mr Prescott is not taking on any latter-day Spaniards, and his aides made everything worse by saying that their game was constantly broken into by mobile telephone calls, important emails and other rubbish. But the fact that he can be relatively out of mischief for an hour or two is to be

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 3 June 2006

Two kinds of don From Joseph PalleySir: Boris Johnson laments the declining quality of British universities, with growth in student numbers outpacing funding (‘Farewell to the Young Ones’, 27 May). The problem is not just financial but cultural. It has always been assumed that university lecturers, as good teachers, will automatically be good researchers. This false assumption was less damaging 50 years ago, when only a small, self-confident number of school-leavers, better prepared for self-study, went on to university. As staff-student ratios worsen and universities concentrate on research to attract funding, the trend is towards more teaching by postgraduate students, assistant lecturers and part-timers. Surely lecturers entering the profession for

Taki

Lament for a learned friend

Listing page content here Athens On a sad trip to Athens for my friend Yanni Goulandris’s funeral. Throughout the years, mostly in these pages, I have always referred to him as Professor Yohannes Goulandris, mind you, mostly to annoy him. Yanni did not think much of the Germans, the reason being he was 15 when they occupied Greece, and, unlike me at five years of age, did not allow the glamorous uniforms and gallant tales of Teutonic knights to impress him. Yanni was an unusual Greek shipowner. He loved music, literature and art much more than business, and knew more about those three subjects than most professors. Hence his Speccie

Robin Oakley

Thinking big

Listing page content here Watching the woman in front of me in the Ascot Tote queue backing five horses in the same race on Saturday reminded me of Lloyd Bentsen, one of the best US politicians never to become president, who died last week. Asked once if it wasn’t rather unfair running simultaneously for vice-president and for a Senate seat, he said he had modelled his political career on a vet and a taxidermist in his home town. The pair had set up shop next to each other in the main square, erecting a board which ran across the top of both premises, proclaiming: ‘Either way you get your dog

Frank Keating

Mad about the boys

In the euphorically barmy delusions of upcoming World Cup invincibility — the English never used to be so insanely carried away when their teams even had a real chance of winning the ruddy thing — I was taken by one nicely observant line on how manager Sven-Goran Eriksson’s qualifying syntax invariably hedges the bets with his almost permanent employment of the same three words in the middle of every sentence: ‘…of course, but…’ As in, ‘We shall win the tournament, of course, but you never know because this is football’; or ‘I am perfectly prepared to drop David Beckham, of course, but he is the captain’. Eriksson’s quite implausible and half-baked

Friday

Diary – 2 June 2006

To Venice for the opening of François Pinault’s museum in the Palazzo Grassi To Venice for the opening of François Pinault’s museum in the Palazzo Grassi, now showing part of his extraordinary modern art collection. For some reason France rejected the collection, saying that there was no suitable venue. Some say it was a wise decision. The Palazzo Grassi is ideal, though what its original owners would have thought of such exhibits as the pulsating life-size pink latex pig is debatable. However, connoisseurs are agreed that the collection is the most comprehensive survey of modern art from the past 50 years and that Venice is blessed. I am far too

Wednesday

Tim Walker

‘Never be terrible in a terrible movie’

Listing page content here The waiters at Le Caprice in St James’s have never had to go out to see the world. The world has always come to them. Just after the war, Humphrey Bogart used to dine at the ineffably glamorous establishment with Lauren Bacall and, since then, just about every major headline-maker of the past century — and the start of this one — has had a regular table, including the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Over the past two decades I have broken bread there myself with a variety of political, social and show-business figures and, needless to say, the waiters never batted an eyelid. Until the

Laura Gascoigne

Birds and buoys

Listing page content here You learn something every day, so the saying goes, though these days it rarely happens in a gallery. But at the Fine Art Society next week, ignorant visitors will learn that curassows, guans and chachalacas are not

Nick Boles

Alan Johnson is the Labour leader that Cameron’s Conservatives fear

Alan Johnson is the Labour leader that Cameron’s Conservatives fear I got the shock of my life the other day. Recording a programme called What Is Right? for Radio Four, Norman Tebbit, that pitiless scourge of touchy-feely tree-hugging modernisers, went out of his way to agree with what I had said. Three times. It was quite unnerving, not to mention flattering. But I do not kid myself about my role in this. The Thatcherite war-horse’s compliments were not directed at me, but at the man who has dragged the Conservative party from third-time also-ran to pole position in under six months. In politics, no argument is as persuasive as electoral

Paul Johnson

A rich man should not always give his money to the poor

Studying, the other day, Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite miniature ‘Young Man Among Roses’, I decided that it epitomised everything that was most delicious about Elizabethan England. Who, I wondered, gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the young man now stands in his briery bower? I discovered it was an Australian collector called George Salting (1835–1909), a dim figure who led an obscure life and then left Britain the biggest single series of art donations in her history, remarkable not just for its quantity but for its superlative quality. The kind of person who amasses great collections often amazes me, and leads me to conclude that taste in art

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The art of chairmanship

Listing page content here ‘We all have different ways of doing things,’ says David Jones, when I ask him what makes a good captain of a corporate ship. He certainly has his own way of preparing for a high-pressure day like the one he had last week at the annual general meeting of Wm Morrisons, the supermarket group where he is deputy chairman and troubleshooter-in-chief. ‘I generally wake up about 6 a.m. My body is stiff and I’m almost unable to move. If I’m at home, I ask my wife Ann to move my legs out of the bed and pull me up. If I’m away, I have developed a

James Delingpole James Delingpole

My top tip: buy a time machine

Listing page content here About this time last month I was at a party at The Spectator, drunkenly urging anyone who’d listen to buy into this amazing share I’d discovered called Tullow Oil. I’d done exceptionally well by this little gem over the last 12 months and I wanted as many people as possible to share in my joy so that when — as was inevitable — it reached ten quid a share we would all have doubled or trebled or even quadrupled our money. ‘But what does it actually do?’asked Martin Vander Weyer. ‘Well, it’s in oil,’ I said. ‘Yes, but is it an exploration company or what?’ ‘Oh,

Deborah Devonshire

Jack the lad

‘Coming out’ had a different meaning in 1938 to what it has today. Nearly 70 years ago the London Season followed much the same pattern as it had before the first world war. For a small section of people there were three frantic months of entertainment. For 18-year-old girls and their young men friends there was a dance (and sometimes two) four nights a week, and often one in the country on a Friday night (not on Saturdays, because it was not seemly to dance into Sunday morning) from early May until the end of July. The bands, led by Ambrose, Carol Gibbons and, best of all, Harry Roy, played

Jaspistos

Snookered?

In Competition No. 2445 you were given a dozen words and invited to incorporate them, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-snooker sense. Despite the fact that occasionally someone writes to complain that this is a boring type of comp, this week’s entry was the largest ever, nigh on 200. To avoid an outbreak of salaciousness I deliberately denied you the chance to use screw as well as kiss in a non-snooker sense, and the result was refreshingly clean and various. Among those who delighted me with their ingenuity I single out Noel Petty, Robert Kingston, Mae Scanlan and G.M. Davis. The prizewinners,

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 27 May 2006

Europeans made the USAFrom Ronald FletcherSir: David Mayger (Letters, 20 May) seems to be unaware that the history of his country has been written many times, and that the salient fact to emerge is that the USA was largely the creation of Europeans, among whom the British were to the fore.It is deeply regrettable that in the 20th century one European power was so determined to impose itself on the rest of the world that it waged two aggressive wars in which America was reluctantly obliged to participate; but the notion that America could stand aloof from ‘foreign entanglements’ was exploded, I should have thought, at Pearl Harbor. America actually

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 27 May 2006

Are we now more ignorant than Bertie Wooster? Orwell, in his essay defending P.G. Wodehouse, noted that when ‘he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his readers will know something of Greek mythology’. Orwell characterised such references as deriving from a ‘traditional education’. I’ve been looking at the Ukridge novel, Love Among the Chickens (revised 1921), with the help of the indefatigable Trevor Mordue’s internet source notes. Bertie had, of course, as a boy won the Scripture Knowledge prize, and, even though his biblical references are not recherché, few of the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 27 May 2006

Q. Returning from a trade fair held at a neighbouring stately home I was reminded of the apophthegm ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’. Before my visit I thought a trade fair was full of dusty men with brawny arms selling exotic tools such as adzes, bradawls and drill braces. This, however, was the County female contingent prepared — as vendors at various bric-à-brac stalls — to embark on a discursive rambling gossip with any customer. These conversations were of such detail and duration that my wife, who is generally reliable in stores and shops, found it impossible to move on without making a purchase (in the same