Society

Saturday

Andrew Roberts

Diary – 23 September 2006

Talk about from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. My fiancée and I have just been staying at the incomparable 13th-century Château de Bagnols near Lyons. Spectacular panoramic views of the Beaujolais countryside; a Michelin-starred restaurant; Olga Polizzi’s taste (our room had a Louis XIII bed); pure perfection in hospitality. Then straight on to Center Parcs in Wiltshire with my children. Of course, I was warned how nargy it was going to be, and several people assumed I was only going there to write a spectacularly snobbish article. I was also pretty suspicious about a place that couldn’t spell its own name properly, in either the adjective or the noun. In the end

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 23 September 2006

Bill’s legacyFrom John O’ByrneSir: Toby Harnden (‘Clinton: Tony and Gordon just have to work this out’, 16 September) states that the former president ‘feels he was cheated of the chance to prove himself while president; so he is anxious to cement his legacy’. What legacy? Bill Clinton is among the most overrated presidents ever. In his eight years in the White House he had plenty of time to ‘prove himself’ but achieved nothing spectacular. For example, his policy of cutting defence-spending left America exposed to terrorist attack (the bill was left to his successor). He had a chance to catch Osama bin Laden after the World Trade Center bombing in

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 23 September 2006

A group of gangsters’ molls in Pereira, which evidently has the highest murder rate in Colombia, has decided to withhold sex from their boyfriends until they give up their guns. Inevitably they have been likened to the women in Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata (staged in Athens in February 411 bc) whose purpose was to persuade their men to make peace in the war between Athens and Sparta that had been going on for some 20 years. But the Colombian ladies have not been reading their Aristophanes. The point about Lysistrata, the heroine of the play, is that she fully understands the nature of her fellow Athenians, i.e. that the women (in the

Piers Paul-Read

The Pope was not attacking Islam

Piers Paul Read says that the controversial nature of the Pope’s address has been missed in the furore over Muslim sensitivities: he was daring to equate Europe and Christendom When he delivered his lecture on ‘Faith, Reason and the University’ in Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI said some provocative and contentious things. His comment on Islam was only one of them, and was by no means the most significant; but quoting the judgment of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus that certain aspects of Islam were ‘evil and inhuman’ was the most arresting and has caused a worldwide furore. Some have criticised Pope Benedict for being tactless; others on

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Who is right about home schooling?

Rod Liddle says that we should leave teaching to the professionals, however much they annoy us, and stop pretending that children benefit from learning obscure languages or how to paint like Cézanne at home I think it was the bit about Cézanne which really got to me. It came early on in last week’s article. Perhaps you read it; my colleague James Bartholomew was explaining how he had intended to tutor his daughter Alex, now that he had taken the liberating decision to remove her from school because the teachers and everybody else were useless. From now on he’s going to teach her at home, or in agreeable bits of

Rupert Steiner

A vision in lilac driving a world-class business

Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost anonymous giant in Val Gooding, its 56-year-old chief executive. She is Britain’s second most powerful female boss, but with very little of the profile many of her male counterparts court and enjoy. Over the past ten years Gooding has turned Bupa around, grown its market share, produced record results and built the business into a

Robert Cottrell

A terrific deal for Mr Silverstein — but will Governor Pataki get his monument?

Larry Silverstein, the 75-year-old property developer who bought a lease on the twin towers of the World Trade Center six weeks before they collapsed, has been a lonely defender these past five years of his right to build the office space of his choosing on what to others is sacred ground. But he has played a difficult hand well — not least because he is, by all accounts, a difficult man. Facing off against the Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center site, and the state government, which half-owns the Port Authority, and the city government, which has had its own ideas for the site, he has haggled doggedly

Sarah Burton

The Welshman in the Court of Vienna

In the opening pages of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller books are memorably divided into certain useful categories: Books You Needn’t Read, Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Need To Read First, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, and so on. Most intriguing of all these categories is Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too. Along similar lines is Mr Crawford’s observation in Mansfield Park: ‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His

Jaspistos

Devil’s work

In Competition No. 2461 you were invited to think up Seven Deadly Virtues and to mock them in verse. Chastity and sobriety and political correctness were obvious Aunt Sallies. Michael Saxby gave a wise warning against honesty: ‘Thus “Does my bum look big in this?” will land one in a mess/ Unless one says, “Of course not, dear” when really one means “Yes!”’, while Mike Morrison derided ‘the heinous vice/ Of being so insufferably nice’. The notion of the Seven Deadly Virtues, by the way, comes from George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man, which strikes a lot of attitudes but also hits a great many nails on the head.

Frank Keating

Bogey women

Golf’s Ryder Cup is uniquely irresistible. Like most show-stopping spectaculars, the biennial challenge boasts ‘a full supporting cast’, in this case the two distinctive dolled-up distaff teams — a shapely sorority of Stepford Sindies vs a bevy of Barbies — devoted cheerleaders geeing up their frowning fellows as they go about the sombrely obsessive business with mashie and putter. The phenomenon is a new one to international football, as the English learnt in the World Cup this summer when the late-night antics of the Wags — the players’ wives and girlfriends — were wincingly, shamelessly documented each morning by the London tabloids. But I was surprised this week to discover that America’s golfing

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 16 September 2006

Q. I am in the process of planning a party for my husband’s 60th birthday. We have excellent caterers in place but my problem concerns the place à table. We will have ten long tables in the marquee, each one seating 30 guests, but how can I possibly decide who should go beside whom? It is too large an event for precedence to play any part but I am already being leaned on by friends asking for either themselves or their children to be placed next to certain people they would like to know better. There is a lot of competition to be next to the same handful of people

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 16 September 2006

Gordon Brown has promised that, when he comes to absolute power, he alone (not parliamentary colleagues, let alone the people) will appoint a cabinet ‘of all talents’ to do his bidding. Even the Romans were more democratic than that. Roman toffs naturally took it for granted that none but they could legislate effectively. As Cicero argued, ‘Many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robber had agreed to make them,’ and placed responsibility for law-making firmly with the Senate. That was because the people could in practice override the Senate, since the Senate contained tribunes of

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 16 September 2006

Earlier this year the red-tops, as we must learn to call tabloid papers, became very excited about wee Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter’s name. It was Suri, you may remember, and the Sun newspaper went as far as to slap an ‘exclusive’ label on a thoughtful article pointing out that the name did not mean ‘princess’ in Hebrew, as the parents suggested, but was a designation of the Lord Krishna in Hindi. Now I’ve caught up with the name that Nelly Furtado has given her own little daughter. Nelly Furtado, aged 27, is, as you must know, today’s most successful Portuguese–Canadian singer. She was named after Nellie Kim, the

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 16 September 2006

Monday Busy busy. Dave is adamant that foreign policy cannot be reduced to soundbites, so of course, as Jed explained, we need a range of soundbites to convey this. ‘We will give solid not slavish support to the US’; ‘We will not come up with grand schemes to remake the world’ (Nigel says this is just as well because we can’t think of any); and most important ‘We’re all neo-libs now’. Unfortunately, we’re short-staffed due to holidays in Corfu (we should set up an office there) so I end up doing both sides of the briefing. The notes were like a market research questionnaire. ‘If reporter neocon omit par. 5’,

Michael Winner

Diary – 16 September 2006

I was very naughty when young. I stole from my schoolmates’ pockets as they played games. I stole from Woolworth’s. And probably more places. As responsibility entered my maturing soul, I tried to make amends. I advertised for those at school whom I might have made poorer and paid back many times the amount to the only one who turned up. I sent a cheque for £500 to the chairman of Woolworth’s for about £1.50 of nicking. He asked if he could put this in his staff newspaper as he got many similar donations. And in the 1960s when top tax was 98 pence in the pound, I stashed some

Jeremy Clarke

Maiden voyage

The emblazoned ship was just in. Foot passengers had yet to appear in the terminal’s arrivals shed, which was silent and deserted except for this wonderfully fat, moon-faced man taking up all the room on the only bench provided for meeters and greeters. He was perched at the exact centre, his legs as wide apart as they’d go. He looked up and smiled at me, and without any formal preliminaries told me that he was waiting to meet his Aunt Dolly, his only living relative, whom he hadn’t seen for about a year. I would have liked to reciprocate his open-heartedness by telling him I was there to meet my 16-year-old boy,

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 16 September 2006

Third degree at Heathrow From Andrew HamiltonSir: In my experience the overzealous and politically correct airport security in America (High Life, 2 September) is being replicated in this country. At Heathrow security recently, off to see my son in Shanghai, I couldn’t resist asking the body-searcher whether or not I resembled a Muslim terrorist (I am 59, white, grey-haired and an accountant). The gentleman looked rather embarrassed. But his young Asian colleague said, ‘You shouldn’t have said that, just stay where you are, I’m calling the supervisor.’ The supervisor appeared and after an animated conversation turned to me and said, ‘You are in deep trouble, wait there.’ He then made

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 16 September 2006

Order the wines online Private Cellar is a very classy company. Its four principals all worked for Corney & Barrow, and its buying director is a Master of Wine with the magnificent name of Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler. I assumed this indicated Eastern European origins; in fact it’s an old English spelling of ‘Archdeacon’. Nicola and her colleagues have created a list that is short but very carefully chosen. France still dominates, but in the past year or so they have moved into the New World, with excellent results, which is why three of the wines in this offer come from South Africa — now soaring around the world in both prestige

Edie G-Lush

The rich West must stop grabbing the profits but ducking the costs

Heroes of anti-capitalist protest don’t usually hang out at the Savoy. But Joe Stiglitz is different: the establishment figure who turned on the establishment. He’s a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate. He chaired Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and he’s not afraid to tell you about it (‘When I was in the White House…’). He wears a nice suit and a tidy salt-and-pepper beard. He doesn’t even wear Birkenstock sandals, and he looked well at home amid the comforts of the de luxe London hotel when I met him there. But beneath the professorial façade is a combative mind and an inability to

Jonathan Davis

Happy birthday, index funds

What has been the single most successful and socially useful investment innovation of the last 30 years? Although paradoxically few investors will know what it is, or why they should be grateful that it exists, my nomination is the index fund. On 31 August this year, largely unheralded in the media, this dull but remarkable invention celebrated its 30th year in existence. An index fund, also known colloquially as a tracker fund, is a fund that does nothing more exciting than set out to mimic the performance of one of the market indices that are regularly featured in media reports about the day’s events in the stock market. Most of