Society

Wednesday

Jason Yapp

What wine when?

This is a good question and the knee-jerk reaction for those with plenty of money to spend would be to think of silly City bonuses and high-end, classed growth Bordeaux, beloved of the pin-striped fraternity. While this does have its attractions one would be wise to hold off until the highly acclaimed (and much hyped) 2005 vintage is available. But I can see little advantage of buying this en primeur (in futures) so maybe this is a consideration for subsequent windfalls. For immediate gratification (of more secular rewards) I think the Languedoc-Roussillon offers both value and interest and the recent (post 2002) vintages have all been commendable. Picpoul de Pinet

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 22 July 2006

Q. I have a small problem with vanity. I have made a successful application to join a specialist library where I can work in peace almost every day of the week and have access to an unrivalled set of references on my subject. I am aware that this is a privilege. However, because of the rarity of the collection, members are required to carry at all times photo ID, supplied by the library itself using its own machine to take the photograph. These famously unflattering photographs are sealed permanently into tamper-proof lamination, and updated only every seven years. A friend who is a member even says that having to brandish

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 July 2006

Writing this column in 90˚F heat on the edge of a normally bleak and chill Yorkshire moor, I reflect on the relationship between political culture and weather. Montesquieu, who attributed great importance to climate and geography in the political spirit of nations, thought that heat contributed to despotism, suppressing the active disposition of a people. But might it not, by the same token, make despots idle? The bureaucrats of oppression are no more likely than ordinary citizens to bestir themselves in the dog days, indeed rather less so. Certainly in Britain the effect of heatwaves is to remove people’s already slight interest in public affairs and in most forms of

Jeremy Clarke

Career advice

My boy left school at the end of last term, aged 16. He can read and write after a fashion, and he knows something about the rise and fall of the Nazi party and how to make delicious scones, so all in all a good result. After he’d been at home for a week his mother’s boyfriend asked him what he was going to do for a living. My boy said he wanted to be a businessman. My boy’s mother’s boyfriend — an unbelievably decent, hardworking, teetotal, pigeon-shooting man — scoffed. This led to some hard words being said on both sides, which made my boy’s mother weep and left

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 22 July 2006

Cameron on crime From Oliver Letwin MPSir: Your leading article ‘Love isn’t all you need’ (15 July) misses the point of David Cameron’s speech on the causes of crime (indeed, it gives the impression that you did not read the speech very closely). David’s speech focused from the very beginning on the fear and suffering caused by crime and disorder; the no-go zones our town centres become on a Friday or Saturday night; and the damage done by vandalism and graffiti. But — more importantly — it looked beyond the usual hand-wringing and hasty gimmicks of Labour’s approach to consider how we solve these problems for the long term. It

The Spectator

Let Israel finish the job

At a time of global tension and regional bloodshed, it is easy for governments to retreat behind rhetorical platitudes and uncontroversial diplomatic ‘initiatives’. As Clausewitz observed: ‘Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.’ In the case of the Middle East conflagration, such lazy fascination would be disastrous. Moshe Kaplinsky, Israel’s deputy army chief, insisted this week that his country’s military forces required sufficient time to achieve ‘very clear goals’ in Lebanon before any notional ceasefire would be countenanced. The international community would do well to emulate Major General Kaplinsky’s focus and clarity. To take an obvious and worrying example: the British government’s

Frank Keating

The man Jeeves

Ninety years ago this weekend the battle of the Somme had settled into its ghastly inexorability. The excruciating debacle of its opening offensive on 1 July — 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, the British army’s highest casualty rate in a single day’s fighting — was already logged as a grievous scar on future generations as well as history. The guns continued until muffled by the snows of November when the scoreboard of losses read: Germany 650,000, Britain 418,000, France 194,000. Back home in Blighty, shining idealism long replaced by a bitter and cynical despair meant that only a pursuit of mundane ‘normality’ kept spirits up and home fires burning.

Friday

Joan Collins

Diary – 21 July 2006

Princess Margaret’s grand car-boot sale at Christie’s last month reminded me of my own souvenir of PM. Several years ago I had decided to collect silver boxes, and a mutual friend asked if I would be interested in a couple belonging to her. ‘She’s having a clear-out,’ the friend explained, ‘Wants to get rid of a lot of junk. Would you be interested?’ He brought over a beautiful, and rather large, embossed square silver box for which I cheerfully coughed up £600. The following month PM had another clear-out and I bought another smaller but equally attractive box. When I opened the first box, I was fascinated to discover hidden

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 21 July 2006

MondayVery odd thing has happened. Was in Starbucks queuing for brownies when gorgeous Alessio fixed me with his sultry stare and said, ‘Hey, lady, you leave your things!’ And produced my folder of emails! He said it fell off the counter, and he’s sorry it’s soggy but it landed in a puddle of semi-skimmed. So I didn’t leak the emails after all! Am so disappointed. Was enjoying being femme fatale and having everyone treading on eggshells. Tuesday Another Tory belief successfully ditched! Rail privatisation goes the way of patient passports, tax cuts, leaving the EPP and fighting crime. (‘To the great resting place of principles in the sky,’ Nigel says.)

Wednesday

Rupert Steiner

The oil-rich kingdom where camels are still a safer investment than shares

It’s not that the Saudis aren’t pleased to see foreign visitors, it’s just that they use the first possible opportunity to issue a death threat. ‘Traffickers will be killed’ promises the landing card distributed before we touch down in Jeddah. It’s a reminder of Saudi Arabia’s tough stance on crime and its direct approach to business, even drug-smuggling business. But for those blue-chips interested in rather more mainstream corporate endeavours, opportunities in Saudi Arabia are booming. The oil-rich kingdom is offering more than £624 billion worth of contracts in defence, transport and infrastructure to international firms. Despite the worst stock-market crash ever seen in the Arab world — the Tadawul

David Selbourne

The Islamists are winning

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century Truth is generally the first casualty in war. On the battlefields of the Middle East, especially when Israel is involved, Reason also has a hard time of it. For neither Israel nor the Jews are seen — whether by themselves, by their friends, or by their foes — as a nation and a people like others. One form of irrationality, shared by (some) evangelical Christians and (some) Jews, has it that Israel

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Wine Club July Offer

This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. Order the wines online This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. For example, if you saw, on the list published by the old and distinguished house Averys, something called Rare Spice Petit Verdot at £71 a case, you might wonder what on earth it was, and why you should pay nearly £6 a bottle for a grape you’ve never heard of from a winery you don’t know. But seeing it at £4.58, and being told that it is a

Douglas Hurd

Half a century on, the ghosts of Suez return

Fifty years since Suez, and this week the cauldron boils over yet again. Some of the ingredients are different. Britain and France used force in a way they would not now dare. The United States in 1956 had the power to stop the crisis which it has now lost. Most Arabs today accept the existence of Israel, but fail to impose that acceptance on those still bent on its destruction. Israel still tries to safeguard its citizens by using overwhelming force which breeds hatred and future danger. Suez was a dramatic setback for Britain; but this week we can look back almost with relief at how quickly that crisis was

Jaspistos

A good innings

In Competition No. 2452 you were invited to write an elegy on the death, in Queensland, Australia, of a 176-year-old tortoise called Harriet, who had met Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and was for most of her life wrongly thought to be male. D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Ogden Nash have all written lyrically about tortoises, so you were in good company. As for Harriet (whose parents were Testudo and Tartarus and whose favourite snacks were aubergine, courgette, beans and barley), a biologist tells me that it’s not as simple as you might think to tell the sex of a tortoise. Just try it! I realise now that my childhood

Irwin Stelzer

Bush wants much more than ceremonial diplomacy

Washington It is not to be. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a more than passable classical pianist, had blocked time in her summer diary for a pleasant meeting with some of the 700 music students attending classes and performing at the Aspen Music Festival and School. President Bush has other ideas. Instead of the cool breezes of the Rocky Mountains, Rice will find herself in the hotter-than-hot Middle East, attempting to bring an end to the two-front war in which Israel finds itself engaged which, in past flare-ups, has been bad news for the Israelis. Rice presides over a department that traditionally holds that almost any deal is better than

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 19 July 2006

I don’t much care for Napoleon, but I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for Napoleon III. His boundless ambition combined with an ultimate lack of ruthlessness, his self-importance and vanity combined with flashes of insight into his own personal insignificance, make him a far nicer man than his odious uncle. I mean no self-praise when I say that men who are failures are in general much more attractive than men who are resounding successes. It was my sympathy for the Emperor of the French that impelled me to pick up a little volume entitled Napoleon III (My Recollections) by Sir William Fraser, Bart. Sir William was elected MP for Barnstaple

Andrew J. Bacevich

This is not World War Three — or Four

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished American journalist and neoconservative godfather, penned a series of articles describing the attacks of 11 September 2001 as the opening shots of what he called ‘World War IV’. For Podhoretz, the more commonly used construct ‘global war on terror’ is too generic. Placing 9/11 in its proper context requires fitting it into the grand narrative of contemporary history which, as Podhoretz sees it, began in 1933 in Berlin. For Podhoretz and other neoconservatives — for large numbers of Americans generally — history is above all a morality tale. They prefer simple stories that yield simple and unambiguous truths: about the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

It’s so hot that I’m even cross with the evacuees

Yo — Reader! How are ya doin’? Hot and bothered, I suspect; sticky and irritable. And no less so for having been addressed in such a manner, or for being reminded that this is how the leader of the free world addresses those who do his bidding, the lickspittle minions who bring him gifts of questionable knitwear at world summit meetings. (Apparently it was a Burberry jumper our Prime Minister gave to George W. Bush; so if he wore it, he’d be refused entry to quite a large number of public houses and bars in the Leicester area, where Burberry knitwear has become associated with monosyllabic, aggressive troublemakers. Yes, how

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