Society

Saturday

Taki

Playing it safe

On board S/Y Bushido The island evenings are always subtle and slow. White-painted houses rise up steeply from the wine-dark sea, the sunset drifting over the hills above the port, the streetlamps faintly lighting the quays along the waterfront. In Symi, one of the most picturesque of the islands bordering Turkey, the hawkers emerge as the light fades away and advertise their business. ‘Fresh fish, fresh kalamari, best oysters in the whole of Greece and Turkey…’ The neo-classical houses of Symi, their pediments and courtyards paved with pebbles —- all creations of the 19th century — are a pleasure to the eye. They are ochre and white, with the odd

Christopher Fildes

Governments brushed these ideas aside until they fell over their feet

We should all be in the banknote business. It’s a licence to print money. The Bank of England made £1,618 million out of it last year, and paid every penny of this over to the Treasury, as required by Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Charter Act of 1844. Senior figures in the Bank have long believed that this inequitable Act is due for amendment. Friedrich Hayek, as was his wont, had a better idea. He thought that the Bank should give up its monopoly. A banknote is only a promise to pay, and (so he argued) anyone who wanted to issue promises should be allowed to do so. We would then

Friday

Dylan Jones

Diary – 29 July 2005

Unlike Randy Newman, I’ve always loved LA in a completely unironic way. I love the climate, the light, the vegetation, the fake breasts, the lot. And the celebrity culture is impossible to get used to: I still get a childish thrill when I pull up to the lights and find myself next to Tom Cruise or Samuel L. Jackson. It’s fun. Puts a spring in your step (if you can have one in a rented Range Rover). We had an Aren’t We Clever To Be Here celebration there a few weeks ago, a party in the penthouse at the infamous Chateau Marmont, and most of the guests (gilt-edged parentheses for

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 23 July 2005

A glory of British packaging was the Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup tin depicting a dead lion under what appeared to be a cloud of flies. If the tin was kept in a damp larder long enough, spots of rust would spread through the sticky deposit round its rim. Next to the dead lion was the motto, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’, which was only enlightening if the reader was aware that, in the book of Judges (XIV 14) it was the challenge in quite a difficult riddle game played by Samson, who had killed a lion with his bare hands, the body of which was then used

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 23 July 2005

The fourth suicide bomber in the attacks on London, now found to have killed 56, was named as Jamal, formerly Jermaine, Lindsay, a Jamaican-born convert to Islam. The explosive they used was said to be unstable home-made acetone peroxide. Magdy al-Nashar, a British-trained biochemist whose flat in Leeds had been used by the bombers, was arrested by police in Cairo, but they declared he played no part in the bombings. Three of the bombers had attended a religious school in Pakistan, but Mr Munir Akram, the Pakistan ambassador to the United Nations, said Britain should not ‘externalise’ its search for blame; ‘Britain is now a breeding ground for terrorists too,’

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 23 July 2005

The late Sir Edward Heath was notoriously uneasy with women, but there was one, Sara Morrison, who was a good friend and an important political confidante. She was with him when he died on Sunday. Sara was robust enough to be able to withstand the strange manners and see through to the vulnerable and honourable man within. Which was just as well, because the manners were strange indeed. At one dinner party, Sara noticed that it was still at the soup stage and Heath had already fallen silent. She wrote a note, delivered by the butler, which said, ‘Talk to the women next to you.’ Heath wrote back, ‘I have.’

Robin Oakley

Heading for the 100

Some sportsmen explode precociously into the headlines — and disappear as quickly. Some, while respected by their peers, have to graft their way through the tack-on paragraphs and body copy before they win recognition. If you had looked up Shane Kelly on the internet a few months ago, you would probably have had to be content with references to a sultry-voiced American soul-singer or an Australian Olympic cyclist. As he swung into the saddle aboard Amanda Perrett’s Pagan Crest for the first at Newmarket on Saturday, I was reflecting that, if you had sought odds at the start of the season on the 26-year-old jockey from Leitrim who shares that

Alan Judd

Topless fantasies

It’s often said that the best time to sell your convertible is during good summer weather. This may be so; or it may be one of those self-sustaining beliefs that appears true because so many sellers act on it, i.e., more rag-tops are sold because more are for sale. There’s no doubt, however, that hot spells such as we’ve recently endured incline many towards wind-in-the-hair motoring fantasies (although if your aim is to keep cool you’re better off in an air-conditioned hard-top). But not all soft-top sellers will be pleasantly surprised if they put their pets up for sale. Three of the smaller breeds — the Ford StreetKa, the Citro

Taki

Trouble at club

Far be it from me to denounce the British for having lost interest in their heritage — they have embraced multiculturalism, deny the good their empire once brought the world, have banned fox hunting — but when it comes to changes that directly affect me, it’s time for action. Especially when the change is based on a silly agreement made 26 years ago. Let’s take it from the top: Mark Birley is known the civilised world over as the numero uno upmarketclub/restaurant/ nightclub owner, the so-called Nijinsky of the catering world, a perfectionist like no other, and the proof is in the pudding, as they say in Kansas. His four

Frank Keating

Lord’s prayer

It is astonishing that England have not won an Ashes Test match at Lord’s since 1934 — and that one only because Hedley Verity cornered the Aussies on a wicked, fast-drying pitch. The Yorkie left-armer’s eight for 43 dismantled Australia on the third evening as he took the last six wickets in less than an hour, a collapse which had the one-man BBC wireless commentator Howard Marshall in such a tizz of comings and goings in his makeshift eyrie on the roof of the old Tavern that for the next Test at Old Trafford he was provided with a scorer (Arthur Wrigley, a Lancashire groundstaff player who was studying accountancy

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 23 July 2005

Dear Mary… Q. With reference to the problem of middle-aged women clad in low-slung jeans with thongs akimbo (25 June), perhaps a poem to cure ‘sartorial lapses’ might be more effective? Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants:Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.You look divine as you advance —Have you seen yourself retreating? Published by Ogden Nash in 1931 when he was looking at something very different. A translation into German is needed in this area where most of the women behind their shopping trolleys are hugely pear-shaped — and the first sighting of a G-string last week attracted a long queue at the check-out.M.L., Neustadt/Haardt, Germany A. Thank you.

Antonia Fraser

Staying with the old firm

There have been many books over the years with titles that approximate to Why I Am Still a Catholic. In the Fifties a dream team would have included, I suppose, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene with Alec Guinness, received into the Church in 1956, as a promising newcomer. In 1955 my mother Elizabeth Pakenham, later Longford, another postwar convert, edited a book called Catholic Approaches which was described as ‘a sincere attempt to face the most disturbing questions of our time with boldness and honesty’; the fairly dreamy team included Father D’Arcy on the problem of evil and the great poet-artist David Jones on the arts and ‘the Christian commitment

Jaspistos

Split personality

In Competition No. 2401 you were invited to provide a dialogue in verse or prose between two parts of yourself at odds with each other. Hands up anyone who has never talked to themselves…. Not a hand? I thought so. And yet it’s odd that when one does it, it isn’t a dialogue. ‘For God’s sake pull yourself together,’ my voice may say, but the Caliban bit of Jaspistos being addressed never replies in speech, just grunts mutinously. In the 17th century a poetic dialogue between Body and Soul was common, and I anticipated modern arguments between Ego and Superego, but I got few. Never mind, it was a good

Frederick Mocatta

He did it his way

In January, as the then schoolboy editor of the Eton College Chronicle, I wrote to Sir Edward Heath to ask him for an interview for my school magazine. A few days later, a typed letter from Sir Edward arrived through my letterbox. He was flattered, he wrote, to have been asked, and would be delighted to meet me, but he feared that such an interview, despite the Chronicle’s limited readership, would attract undue and unwanted attention to him in the run-up to the general election. We agreed, therefore, to meet in May. His secretary, when I rang her, told me he was ill. His mobility was poor, but ‘his mind

Matt Price

Why Aussies are rooting for the Poms

Sydney First, a macabre coincidence. The last Ashes series, the eighth straight pitiful England capitulation, started days after the Bali bombing which killed 88 Australians and 26 British travellers. Now, as the Lord’s Test begins, London reels from the atrocious targeting of morning commuters. The recent bombings have evoked enormous and deserved admiration for stoical Londoners. Down in the convict colony, headline writers and cartoonists have utterly exhausted the clichés depicting ye-olde-Dart-never-surrender-stiff-upper-lipped-British-bulldog spirit. Still, as cricketing hostilities resume, you’d think there’d be scant room for sentiment. Australians, you’d reckon, would be rooting for Ricky Ponting’s worldbeaters to humiliate the Poms over the coming months. And you’d be dead wrong. Many

Bruce Anderson

War on the law

The House of Lords has already been subjected to thoughtless changes. It is now threatened with further political correcting, including a change of name. This government is not only hostile to its ethos and its historical resonance. The Blairites resent the Upper House’s independence and its ability to make life awkward for ministers. Last Thursday, both of those attributes were on display. It was only a three-hour debate, on a motion for papers, with no legislative consequences. But the quality of the speeches and the force of argument would have graced any debating chamber in any era. Six former chiefs of the defence staff took part and the issues under

Andrew Gilligan

Have the bombs scared the government?

Watching the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week, as he denied any link whatever between the London bombings and the war in Iraq, I must confess that I felt the tiniest prickle of sympathy. How undignified it must be, endlessly having to pretend that black is white, the sun sets in the east and the Pope’s religion is really not quite as simple an issue as some irresponsible commentators make out. It is of course true, as Mr Straw says, that al-Qa’eda wanted to attack us long before the Iraq war, and did attack several of our allies. But London was something quite new: the first al-Qa’eda attack against a

Friday

Miriam Gross

Diary – 22 July 2005

During last Thursday’s two-minute silence I was in Knightsbridge, standing on Brompton Road. When it was over, the hundreds of office workers and shoppers who had come out into the bright sunshine broke into spontaneous applause. I found myself enthusiastically joining in, to my own surprise. I am usually rather put off by public displays of emotion, but on this occasion the applause somehow underlined the depth of feeling. It also emphasised that the silence had not just been observed because the government had called for it. I wondered whether the same thing had happened in other parts of the city. Londoners have been criticised both for being too phlegmatic

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 22 July 2005

Six former chiefs of the defence staff have rounded on politicians and lawyers for threatening to prosecute soldiers who are simply trying to do their best in life-or-death situations. Romans would have been aghast. The two cardinal virtues demanded of Roman soldiers were virtus (‘manliness, courage’) and disciplina (‘obedience to orders’), and the two frequently clashed. When in his Gallic campaigns of 52 bc Caesar was defeated at Gergovia (south of Clermont-Ferrand) with the loss of nearly 700 men, including 46 centurions, he read his men the riot act, saying that ‘he admired their greatness of heart but not their lack of control and high-handedness in believing they knew more

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 16 July 2005

A recent cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a punkish teenager saying to a more conventional youth, ‘I’m bored. Can I shave your head?’ Ho, ho. But then the paper published a letter from ‘Merrill’ from Nova Scotia saying, ‘Would you please explain why nobody here knows the difference between can and may? In Nova Scotia, our teacher would not let us out of grade three if we didn’t know the difference.’ In reply the paper said, ‘Cartoon creators want their characters to be believable, so they have them speak in a way that would be typical for the characters.’ Then it went further: ‘In our country, so many