Society

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sardonic genius

On the morning of 13 August 1985 I was at my desk at the London Evening Standard when Mary Kenny rang; she had left a message the previous evening on my answering machine at home which I had failed to pick up. Shiva Naipaul had held his 40th birthday party in the spring. Less than a week earlier, he had rung and suggested lunch, which I couldn’t make. Now Mary told me that he had died the day before. Shiva had always been afraid of death. In that respect alone it had come to him mercifully, when he was struck by a coronary thrombosis while sitting alone in his flat

Bruce Anderson

Let them build nukes

It would appear to be another August crisis. From Washington to Tel Aviv there are expressions of alarm and despondency, especially in Brussels. It looks as if European diplomacy has failed. The Iranians seem determined to press ahead with their nuclear weapons programme. To judge by the newspapers, one would assume that this has come as a shock. But anyone involved with Iran policy who claims to be shocked is only pretending. Apart from Britain’s relations with the EU, it is hard to think of a foreign policy question on which there has been a greater divergence between the public version of events and the policy-makers’ private thoughts. Over the

Andrew Gilligan

The real threat to Britain

In these frightening days, we must seek our consolations where we can; and one of mine, over the last month, has been running a private contest to log the most idiotic remark made by one of the battalions of ‘security experts’ on standby at times like this to provide vitally needed, life-sustaining, 24-hour fatuous commentary on all major broadcast news outlets. There was the lady from the prestigious think-tank on Sky News who said, quite late on 7 July, that the bombings were ‘clearly a major incident’. There was the ‘risk management consultant’ on The World Tonight who said that shooting people in the head, à la Jean Charles de

Friday

Diary – 12 August 2005

I have always thought I was allergic to the English countryside: too melancholic, too dark, too many Daily Mail readers. So it was with some misgivings that I received the news from my wife that we had taken a lease on a cottage in Oxfordshire. I should say that the property is in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, so it’s not exactly the untamed wilds of the countryside: we have 2,000 acres of beautifully tended Capability Brown parkland to enjoy, we are only an hour and a half from the Ivy, and our fellow tenants on the estate are public relations chiefs, television presenters and TV production executives. In fact,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 6 August 2005

The Irish Republican Army sent out a digital video disc in which Mr Seanna Walsh, once imprisoned for his deeds, read out a statement saying, ‘The leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign …Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.’ In a joint response Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach of Ireland, took this to mean ‘the end of the IRA as a paramilitary organisation’. Mr Blair called it ‘a step of unparalleled magnitude’. The IRA offered to let a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister see some arms being put

The Spectator

Feedback | 6 August 2005

The evil of Hiroshima Andrew Kenny’s article on the blessedness of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima had an unpleasant whiff of 1945 propaganda (‘Giving thanks for Hiroshima’, 30 July). He seems to base his views on his own visits to Hiroshima in modern times, and on the opinions of British people who in 1945 were fed the lie that unless the bomb had been dropped, the war would have continued with great loss of life. A more dispassionate historical understanding suggests that the reason the Americans dropped the bomb when they did was to prevent the Russians entering and dominating the Pacific theatre of war. It had nothing to

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 6 August 2005

As his contribution to Anglo-Islamic understanding, my husband asked me what the connection was between genius loci and the genie in the bottle. I couldn’t say that I knew, although I don’t suppose Osama bin Laden knows either. Genius is complicated semantically. I think it has gone a step further than the OED suggests, now signifying an Einsteinian ‘brains’, not so much in contradistinction to a man of talent as 100 years ago. In Latin it meant first the tutelary deity accompanying a man through life, like Socrates’ daemon. The Middle Ages entertained what was said to be a Pythagorean belief in a good and a bad genius that lead

Frank Keating

The write stuff

Some of the Australian cricketers, it seems, are cagey about sport’s time-honoured hobby of autograph collecting. At Highbury stadium new signs order you never to approach Arsenal players for autographs. There was a minor fuss at the Open golf when Tiger Woods’s men announced the champ would sign his name for fans only ‘in pre-announced and strictly regulated circumstances’. Sports celebs reckon the too liberal scrawl of their name in a schoolboy’s autograph book endangers their precious ‘image rights’ and they fear recipients will at once flog it to the highest bidder on an internet auction site. So what am I bid for the first in my tattered old book?

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 6 August 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I was entertaining a friend to drinks one evening after the pub. When he left (at approximately 1 a.m.) he called up to me from the pavement to say that as he was leaving he had heard one of my neighbours (there are six flats in the building) complaining about the noise coming from my flat. I had been playing music and I concede that — although not greatly loud — it could have been heard by others at this quiet time of day. Naturally, I turned it off. In the morning I woke up to find that I had no electricity in the flat. On further

Taki

Spite and envy

On board S/Y Bushido With plenty of time on my hands to read — television and DVDs are forbidden on board although both are available — I am shocked at the severity, downright viciousness, in fact, of the reviews about my two old friends, Jimmy Goldsmith and John Aspinall, in John Pearson’s book The Gamblers. You’d think they’d murdered somebody and got away with it, judging not from Pearson’s opus, but from those reviewing it. OK, Lucan did murder an innocent, but got away with nothing. I have not read the book, just some criticisms, and the latter tells a lot about some of the reviewers. Let’s be open about

Robin Oakley

King of the sprint

After last Saturday’s Stewards’ Cup, trainer Dandy Nicholls was bouncing around the unsaddling enclosure like one of those rubber balls one always coveted as a child: small and perfectly formed but hard and indestructible, too. He carries several stones more than he did when he won the most competitive sprint of them all as a jockey on Soba in 1982, but not an ounce of it is soft. Nicholls is a tough Yorkshireman who turns out tough horses, but for a while after the last-stride victory of Gift Horse we saw the softer side of a man in a state of what one can only call dazed elation. For a

Robert Stewart

Protecting the infant republic

Ever since Edmund Burke deserted the liberalism that had distinguished him as a champion of American independence and Irish home rule and threw up his hands in horror at events across the water, generations of writers have recoiled in disgust from the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. In other words, Robespierre and his allies should have behaved better. The supreme merit of David Andress’s dispassionate study of the course of the revolution after the attempted flight of Louis XVI in 1791 doomed the French monarchy is to draw our attention away from a select band of supposedly bloodthirsty, crazed demagogues and to focus it on what became a true

Jaspistos

Bathos, not pathos

In Competition No. 2403 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the fate of a famous person in which bathos is the keynote. Bathos, or unintentionally falling flat, implies a hoped-for height to fall from. A poet like McGonagall whose verse is consistently bad is pathetic rather than bathetic, whereas Wordsworth could drop hundreds of feet in seconds; witness the ‘Lucy’ poem which plunges fatally in the last two lines: ‘But she is in her grave, and Oh!/ The difference to me.’ In awarding the prizes I haven’t strictly applied the above distinction; in fact Gerard Benson’s entry never fell because it never tried to rise, but since it

Paul Johnson

The magic moment when you go under the great Forth Bridge

There are times when I think that a great bridge is the noblest work of man. I recently had the thrilling experience of travelling under the famous Forth Rail Bridge on a 52,000-ton ocean liner. I was up on the top deck before 7 a.m. to see this remarkable event, which had to be timed exactly to coincide with the right tide. At high tide the clearance of the bridge is 44 metres, and as the liner’s mainmast is 46 metres, its captain has to come in on mid- or low tide. Even so, the clearance is only a few feet, and the magic moment when the vast ship moves

Christopher Fildes

A call for Sir Nicholas Goodison to save the Stock Exchange for the nation

We need a fund for the preservation of financial monuments. Sir Nicholas Goodison — successively chairman of the Stock Exchange, the TSB and the National Art Collections Fund — would be just the man to head it. My fund would have saved Cazenove for the nation, and could now get a second chance with a monument familiar to Sir Nicholas: the Stock Exchange itself. As can happen with works of art, it has been given a stay of execution. The two foreign collectors who have cast covetous eyes on it — Euronext in Paris and Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt — are being held off by the Competition Commission. All that

The Spectator

Boosting the gangsters

The speed with which the government propitiated republican opinion since last week’s so-called declaration of peace by the IRA suggests a prepared strategy. Within days of this palpably insincere protestation of peace and goodwill the watchtowers were razed in areas effectively owned by the IRA. Three thousand home service troops of the Royal Irish Regiment were told they would be disbanded. Firm promises were given to Sinn Fein that, once devolved government is restored, they could have carte blanche to destroy Northern Ireland’s superlative secondary education system — and no doubt poison the minds of the next generation of Ulster men and women against any idea of Britishness. When republicans

Mj Akbar

The home of jihad

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, aristocrat by temperament, catholic in taste, sectarian in politics, and the father of Pakistan, was the unlikeliest parent that an Islamic republic could possibly have. He was the most British of the generation of Indians that won freedom in August 1947. As a child in the elite Christian Mission High School in Karachi, he changed his birthday from 20 October to Christmas Day. As a student at Lincoln’s Inn, he anglicised his name from Jinnahbhai to Jinnah. For three years, between 1930 and 1933, he went into voluntary exile in Hampstead, acquired a British passport, set up residence with his sister Fatimah and daughter Dina, hired a

Matthew Bell

Just the ticket

Kate Middleton is a Home Counties brunette with pretty, if not quite supermodel, features who has been Prince William’s girlfriend for just over two years, and naturally speculation is flourishing that she will one day be his Queen. The couple are now reunited following William’s first official tour in New Zealand, and though the media largely spared them while they were both at St Andrews University, television and tabloid coverage is already threatening to be ruthless, especially since it now emerges that they will share a house in London. Despite the earlier denials of the Prince, friends now believe this is the prelude to marriage. Kate first came into the

Harry Mount

New squawk

While Rudy Giuliani’s zero tolerance policy took care of crime, the Audubon Society, America’s RSPB, which celebrates its centenary this year, has been taking care of the birds. After decades when the only bird life that flourished in Manhattan was of the Bianca Jagger/Jerry Hall variety — and even they came close to starvation — New York has become one of the greatest bird-watching sites in the world. Within sight of the Empire State Building you can see 500-strong flocks of great egrets, snowy egrets, glossy ibises, cormorants and night herons, emigrés from southern climates nesting in colonies on the islands of New York harbour. For most of the 20th

Michael Hanlon

Why do greens hate machines?

When George W. Bush last week stunned the world with his plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, no one was more surprised than the green lobby. Human psychology being what it is, no one was more furious. It is not so much the scale of the planned reductions that have offended the eco-warriors: how could they possibly quibble with a proposal — supported by China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia — to reduce greenhouse emissions by 50 per cent? No: what gets the greens’ goat is the methods that Mr Bush proposes to employ. What drives the greens nuts is the boundless technological optimism of Washington, and they have