Society

Saturday

Martin Gayford

Mad genius

Martin Gayford examines the extraordinary lives — and deaths — of great artists and suggests that there is a link between manic depression and creativity In the summer of 1667 the architect Francesco Borromini — one of the most brilliant figures of the Italian baroque — fell into what was later described as a ‘hypochondria’, complicated by fever. ‘He twisted his mouth in a thousand horrid ways, rolled his eyes from time to time in a fearful manner, and sometimes would roar and tremble like an irate lion.’ Doctors and priests were consulted, all of whom agreed that he should never be left alone, should be prevented from working, and

Andrew Kenny

Which kills more: ideology or religion?

The sun set on the 20th century more than four years ago but you can still see a blood-red glow on the horizon. The century that saw unprecedented technological progress also saw unprecedented slaughter. Previously, religion had served mankind’s deep needs for explanation, order, spiritual comfort and transcendental meaning. Now a new and hideous thing was summoned up to serve the same needs. The thing was ideology, and in a few decades it caused more bloodshed than millennia of religion. It was darker and more irrational, and contained within it something unknown to all the Religions of the Book: a death wish. Religious leaders, however bad they may be, however

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Stagnant Britain

What with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month, and Lady Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained what scientists might call inertia-free perfection. Daily observation suggests that the game of snakes and ladders between the classes has never been so vigorously played, and that the rules have been entirely rewritten. An expensive education and a father with friends in high places no longer buy you a double six to start; received pronunciation is now a positive handicap in any career in which you might ever have

Friday

Nigel Farndale

Diary – 27 May 2005

An actor friend and I were worried that we were not being good male role models to our sons, of which we have three apiece. It was all very well taking them around National Trust properties, teaching them chess and explaining to them the difference between native and Pacific oysters, but what they needed were fathers who took them to football matches — especially the eldest, who are now pushing eight. As my friend lives in Chelsea, we decided Stamford Bridge would be the place. ‘Do you just turn up?’ he asked. ‘I’m pretty sure you have to book,’ I replied. ‘Right. I’ll get on to it,’ he said. ‘This

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 21 May 2005

At the state opening of Parliament, the Queen said, ‘My government is committed to creating safe and secure communities, and fostering a culture of respect.’ For the next 18 months 45 Bills were scheduled. An Identity Cards Bill would be introduced; Sinn Fein said this would undermine the rights of Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. Other Bills would progressively criminalise smoking in public places, and create offences of corporate manslaughter and incitement to religious hatred. A Commission for Equality and Human Rights would be given powers to counter discrimination on grounds of age, religion and sexual orientation. There would be no Bill on the reform of the House of Lords,

The Spectator

Feedback | 21 May 2005

More prisoners, less crime Douglas Hurd pointed out that the prison population increased from 44,000 in the 1980s to over 75,000 today (‘Does prison really work?’, 14 May). If ‘“prison works” in reducing crime,’ he says, ‘then obviously a sensational increase in the number of prisoners should produce a sensational reduction in crime. But it hasn’t.’ Actually, it has. A casual glance at the crime figures, available to anyone who goes to the trouble of looking at the Home Office website, would have revealed to the distinguished former home secretary that crime began to fall by rather a lot soon after the prison population increased. The prison population was about

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 21 May 2005

This week: the mystery of the missing banister. But first an example of equable temperament, compared with many inquirers into language, from Dr Sylvia Moody. She mildly wonders why we sometimes say ‘a friend of the family’ and sometimes ‘a friend of the family’s’. The latter construction (like ‘a habit of mine’, ‘a play of Shakespeare’s’) is discussed briefly by the late Robert Burchfield, in his revised Fowler’s Modern English Usage, under the heading ‘double possessive’. It is called ‘post-genitive’ in the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language edited by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik. One of the rules that we unconsciously apply to its use is that the doubly

Frank Keating

Grounds for gratitude

Wales hosts an English Cup Final for the last time today. The builders swear that a spanking new Wembley will be ready for the FA’s 2006 final. We shall see. Border-crossing supporters will be relieved. Jolly nice stadium Cardiff, sure, but the appalling clog of road traffic on match days has been a disgrace, while the railway arrangements have hovered between non-existent and shamefully shambolic. Cardiff has muddled through to get away with a pretty good press on the whole, and for half a dozen years the visiting hordes have readily come back for more. I wonder how the Millennium Stadium will get on now? Can the odd pop eisteddfod

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 21 May 2005

Dear Mary… My husband and I have been invited to stay for Royal Ascot-at-York this year with an old friend who lives close to the racecourse and with whom we have stayed many times before on non-racing occasions. The invitation was extended some months ago, but I have just received a letter from our hostess saying that she hopes we will understand but, given the considerable expense of hosting a house party, she will be making a charge for our visit. The charge she proposes is not insubstantial and, added to the cost of our travelling to York, along with the Ascot clothes and other expenses, means it is going

Simon Courtauld

The tuna the better

A few years before his assassination in 1908, King Carlos of Portugal published a book on the tuna, its distribution and the various species of the fish. I am not aware of any other reigning monarch having written a book on fish, and it may have been Carlos’s most important legacy. In those days, the English name for tuna was tunny, and it is not entirely clear why or when it was changed to tuna. The word may be an import from the United States, since that is the Spanish–American word for the Pacific species of the fish caught off the California coast. From European waters we are familiar with

Taki

Security counse

New York A letter from an English couple, who are long-time friends of mine, arrived, thanking me for lending them my London flat. (They live in America.) ‘We also managed to fit in a wedding near Oxford and a long private chat with the Queen at Windsor…who, in contrast to the incumbent at the White House, drove herself (in a nice ordinary Jaguar) to church and drinks with us without a sign of security. Just a lady sitting next to her in a dark-blue suit. It is possible the slight bulge in her skirt covered a weapon, but there wasn’t a sign of the boys in blue anywhere. Amazing —

Jaspistos

Beauty treatment

In Competition No. 2392 you were invited to supply a poem in praise of something generally considered ugly. Chesterton beatified the donkey ‘with monstrous head and sickening cry, And ears like errant wings’ who carried Christ to Jerusalem, and Stephen Spender rhapsodised (as one of you did) about pylons, ‘bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret’. I could not accept a 1930s Murphy radiogram as an icon of ugliness (nostalgists might adore one), nor wasps, which are pesky rather than unbeautiful, but the back end of a bus (especially when you have just missed it) I allowed. The winners are printed below, Paul Griffin taking £30 and the

Christopher Fildes

A hedge fund on your balance sheet, a cuckoo in your nest

A Scottish accountant has his own way of injecting the fear of God into his hearers. This must be one reason why Douglas Flint is finance director of HSBC, and made him the natural choice when his fellow accountants at Cima wanted someone to lecture on pensions. On the day, he came right up to proof. A company running a pension scheme, he said, might as well have a hedge fund on its balance sheet. On the backs of the necks of his City audience, hairs could be seen rising. Hedge funds, they thought: arcane, inherently risky and possibly dodgy — what were their companies doing in this sort of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Asbo madness

Like many of my countrymen, I find the cantankerous figure of Charles Clarke somewhat alarming. In fact, I think on balance I would rather live next door to David Boag. It would certainly be more entertaining. Boag, a 28-year-old warehouseman from Dechmont, West Lothian, is a man of unusual habits. He likes to watch the film An American Werewolf in London, after which he spends some time howling. Not only that; neighbours who have taken to watching him through his curtainless windows have spotted him climb up a step ladder, leap on to his sofa and then dance around the room with a Christmas tree. Whether Mr Boag is a

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism

Looking back at the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up in Germany, one of the most striking things was that everyone talked about work and money. The country was infuriatingly materialistic. The old West Germany felt more like an economy than a country. It used to have a proper currency, the Deutschmark, but it lacked a proper political capital. At a time when the British believed in incomes policies, capital controls and state ownership, Germany was as laissez-faire an economy as you could find anywhere in Europe. The Germans were the Americans of Europe, as a friend remarked at the time. Everyone was brimming with confidence and the superiority

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 20 May 2005

A reader, Mark Savage, points out to me that there are comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Cleopatra — both wily, mysterious Easterners needing eradication because (according to the spin-doctors) they posed such terrible threats to a Western way of life. But that makes George Galloway, whose passion for Saddam was such a rare and precious thing, the equivalent of Marc Antony. Where might it all end? [Scramble lawyers at once — Ed.] Whenever Roman envoys visited Egypt, they were given the grand tour up the Nile to Memphis. On one such occasion a Roman commented that Egypt had the potential to become a great power if only its leaders could

Joan Collins

Diary – 20 May 2005

A halcyon yet chilly afternoon in our house in the south of France, strolling around the garden trying to understand the gardener’s explanation for why he had ferociously slaughtered so many plants, shrubs and bushes that seemed perfectly healthy to us. Suddenly, we heard a piteous mewing from a bush outside the kitchen. The gardener reached down and grabbed a minuscule kitten by the scruff of its neck. He looked at it with some disdain and was about to chuck it back when he was stopped mid-throw by my own piteous mewing: ‘Non! Arr

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 May 2005

Labour won a majority of 67 in the general election, securing 356 seats (of the 645 contested), 47 down, with 9,556,183 votes, 35.2 per cent of the total; the Conservatives won 197 seats, 33 up, with 8,772,598 votes, 32.3 per cent of the total; the Liberal Democrats won 62 seats, 11 up, with 5,982,045 votes, 22 per cent. The United Kingdom turnout was 61.3 per cent and the swing from Labour to Conservative was 3 per cent. In England more people voted Conservative than for Labour. Mr Michael Howard said he would resign as leader of the Conservative party ‘sooner rather than later’ leaving by Christmas after a new leader

The Spectator

Feedback | 14 May 2005

Tories must be less strident Simon Heffer tells us that what the Conservative party now needs, above all, is ‘stability’ (‘The way ahead for Conservatives’, 7 May). But it cannot have escaped his notice that the level of success we have enjoyed in the last decade has been all too ‘stable’, and that this is in no small part down to the influence of those who, like him, insist on seeing modernisation as an evil. Whilst Heffer and his friends resist change, Mr Blair is left grinning ever more manically. Mr Heffer gives him the ammunition to paint politics as a choice between those who believe the vulnerable should be

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 May 2005

‘What does SIM mean?’ asked my husband, looking up like a sulky sunset from a mobile-phone instruction booklet. Well, I knew what it was, but not what the acronym stood for. This independence of word and significand allows the tiresome multiplication of new labels for new technological gadgets, but it also teaches old words to learn new tricks. The Queen Mary 2 still sails saillessly. And though I hate train station instead of railway station, at least the train part was used in the 15th century for the trailing part of a dress (as now), and in a bundle of connected senses of things pulled, extending to the retinue of