Society

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 26 March 2005

The Passion narrative, read in all churches this week, reminds one of exactly why Jesus was put to death. In Matthew’s account, it is based on the evidence of two false witnesses. They accuse Jesus of saying ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.’ Then the chief priest asks Jesus whether he is ‘the Christ, the Son of God’. Jesus replies: ‘Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power….’ This is denounced as blasphemy by the chief priest, and the crowd calls for Jesus’s death. Pontius

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 26 March 2005

What is the difference between a cad and a bounder? It depends on your dictionary. ‘A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards women,’ says the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) of cad, and of bounder, ‘a dishonourable man.’ Both words are marked ‘dated’. The origin given for cad is: ‘Late 18th century, denoting a passenger picked up by a horse-drawn coach for personal profit.’ This demonstrates the difference between etymology and explanation. Certainly that was the meaning of the word in the late 18th century, but the appeal that the former denotation makes to the imagination does not explain the current meaning of the word. This passenger was not

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 26 March 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am 43. I am starting to develop terrible furrows on my forehead. I do not wish to go under the knife nor do I wish to have any more Botox because I do not like the ‘Botox delay’ effect. What do you recommend, Mary? S.F., Sunningdale, Berkshire A. Some readers may be unfamiliar with the expression ‘Botox delay’. This effect can be viewed when an injectee’s facial expression fails to run concurrently with views being expressed, but manifests itself, inappropriately, a few seconds later, when the subject has moved on. This is unnerving for interlocutors. Why not try the ‘Polyfilla’ version of make-up which comes highly

Simon Courtauld

Let them eat hake

Why, I wonder, is a fish revered in one European country yet largely ignored in the others? As a fish of the Atlantic, and other cold waters, hake is little known in exclusively Mediterranean countries. Nor is it hugely popular in France, where it is called by one of three names — merlu, merluche, colin — suggesting that the French are unsure about it. Hake is certainly available here but a lot of the British catch is sold to the country which really can’t get enough of it. This, of course, is Spain, where hake (merluza) is the national fish. And when one considers that the Spaniards eat about four

Frank Keating

Days of wine and oysters

What with the frenzied finales of Six Nations rugby, Cheltenham’s four days’ hooley, and my own ruddy all-day asthma, I had to miss John Jackson’s 70th birthday banquet in the Gay Hussar. I suppose in the old days the Manchester Guardian and the old Daily Mirror were some sort of soulmates, and certainly JJ and I can dance back together into the mists. In fact, he goes back further. My first Olympic Games were Tokyo’s in 1964, John’s first five-ringed circus was Rome’s in 1960; my first World Cup was 1966, his in Chile in 1962. We both turned up for our inaugural Wimbledon on Monday 22 June 1964 and

Interconnect

Diary – 26 March 2005

We have just moved back into the house I grew up in. It’s at Sissinghurst in Kent and my father lived there until his death last September, or at least in one part of it. The whole house and garden belongs to the National Trust, but when my father gave it to them in 1967, part of the agreement was that he and any of his descendants ‘however remote’ could live there for ever and a day. It is a slightly strange experience. The house, of course, is overwhelmingly parental: his furniture, his books, his files, his pictures, his whole habit of being. In one or two of the files,

C J Tyerman

A monumental mediaeval muddle

The history of England in the 14th and 15th centuries has traditionally been regarded either as a corrupt aftermath (as in ‘Bastard Feudalism’) or a confused prelude (as in the ‘New Monarchy’ of the Tudors). Its most vivid narrator remains Shakespeare who, perhaps surprisingly, supplies the title for this earnestly modern new account by Professor Miri Rubin of London University’s Queen Mary College. As so often, tradition misleads. To these centuries belong the origins or establishment of such enduring features of national life as the collegiate universities of Oxford and Cambridge; Justices of the Peace; parl- iamentary scrutiny and audit of public finances; the legal profession; the Order of the

Jaspistos

Bucolics

In Competition No. 2384 you were asked to supply an extract from an imaginary translated novel which unwittingly conveys the utter boredom of simple agricultural life. The great boring British novel in this genre is Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, recommended to the nation by the prime minister Stanley Baldwin and parodied soon after its publication (1925) by Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. Set in darkest Shropshire, it is, according to my Reader’s Encyclopaedia, ‘a story of fierce, morose country people, in which Prudence Sarn, the narrator, finds a husband who appreciates her in spite of her harelip’. Having been a publisher, I have been subjected to many a ponderous tale

Christopher Fildes

Oh to be caught ’twixt love and duty at the world’s biggest boondoggle

Paul Wolfowitz may have to choose between Shaha Ali Riza’s affections and his sense of duty. She is a gender specialist employed by the World Bank as an acting manager for external relations and outreach, he has been nominated as the Bank’s new President, the world’s biggest boondoggle is full of quasi-jobs like hers, and he must nerve himself to take an axe to them, whatever this may mean for relationships on his domestic hearth. He is the Pentagon’s scholarly super-hawk, who put his shirt on Ahmed Chalabi (now scratched) for the Iraq Stakes and, when ambassador in Indonesia, urged his hosts to stand no nonsense from East Timor. His

Harry Mount

What makes a hero?

‘Flashman’s just a monster,’ says George MacDonald Fraser. ‘He’s extremely unpleasant but he knows how to present a front to the world, and at least he’s honest about himself. But that was because he assumed that his memoirs would never be published.’ I’d just been putting to the author of the Flashman novels the theory of this magazine’s editor: that far from being a scoundrel, Flashman — the fag-roasting rotter thrown out of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays only to pop up in the great historic moments of the Victorian age — was in fact the toppest of eggs; an accidental hero who’s actually the genuine article because he at

Miriam Gross

What it means to be Jewish

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived. My parents both came from secular, middle-class, professional German (and Russian) families and although — unlike thousands of German Jews in the 19th and early 20th century — they didn’t convert to Christianity, they were nevertheless assimilated members of German society. Indeed they believed that assimilation was the best answer to the Jewish ‘problem’. My mother hoped that I would marry a non-Jew, preferably an

Anthony Browne

Church of martyrs

For most citizens of Iraq, the invasion meant the end of tyranny. For one group, however, it meant a new start: the country’s historic Christian community. When the war stopped, persecution by Islamists, held in check by Saddam, started. At a church in Basra I visited a month after the war ended, the women complained of attacks against them for not wearing the Islamic veil. I saw many Christian-owned shops that had been firebombed, with many of the owners killed for exercising their legal right to sell alcohol. Two years and many church attacks later, Iraq may still be occupied by Christian foreign powers, but the Islamist plan to ethnically

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 March 2005

In a widely leaked tinkering Budget, Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, raised the threshold for stamp duty to be payable on houses from £60,000 to £120,000 and the threshold on inheritance tax from £260,000 to £275,000; slightly increased pensions; deferred petrol duty rises until September; increased excise on cigarettes by 7p a packet ‘for health reasons’; and announced plans for stem-cell experiments and a memorial to the Queen Mother in the Mall. A Downing Street official said that Mr Brown’s part in the election campaign would be equal to that of Mr Alan Milburn’s, if not more important. The five sisters and the fiancée of Robert McCartney,

The Spectator

Feedback | 19 March 2005

A Liddle simplistic I read Rod Liddle’s article (‘A question of breeding’, 12 March) with dismay. It appears that my son has autism because I found my husband’s company congenial and we married and had a child. As an explanation for a complex neurological disorder this seems slightly simplistic. In fact it seems only just better than the blame-the-mother argument that was popular in the 1950s. Those people who married and had children with disorders such as Hunter’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis or haemophilia undoubtedly found their partner’s company appealing as well, but all these disabilities have identified genetic causes. What is different about autism is that the genes responsible have

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 19 March 2005

While I was trying to puzzle out the Hebrew for ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’ last week my husband was moved to begin a series of Christmas carols from the shelter of his armchair, occasionally waving a little mat soiled with the glass-rings of ages in time to the music. Lovely. There was method, or at least a tenuous anchorhold on reality, in his madness, for he began with ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’. He tried it out alternately with ‘God rest you’, and seemed equally happy with either. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has it as ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, the version given in the Oxford Book

Taki

Skiing for pleasure

Gstaad Skiing without poles accentuates the new carving technique, which uses one’s edges and the upper body to turn. During the 1950s we checked before a bump, planted the pole, unweighted the skis and turned. Then came the Austrian technique of weddle, which involves a shifting of the hips while keeping the body straight on the fall line. The new carving style derives from racing and new technology. One never brakes, while keeping the weight on both skis, using the upper body and almost facing the mountain, a real no-no in the past. Until the new high boots came along, the ankles were the most likely bones to break in

Frank Keating

A grand Celtic slam

Final curtain for rugby’s 2005 Six Nations tournament: Grand Slams, Triple Crowns, Wooden Spoons. Before England and France presumed shared control of the old competition a decade or so ago, a clean-sweep Grand Slam season by one nation was such a rarity as to be scarcely a consideration. Sure, the glistening Welsh team of the 1970s won three vivid scarlet Slams on the trot. Scotland has achieved it only twice since 1925, when star sportswriter of the Daily Telegraph (always bylined ‘Colonel Philip Trevor CBE’) inventively described the exploit as ‘the impregnable quadrilateral’. Only on one single occasion has Ireland revelled in the gorgeous grandeur of the Slam. It was

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 March 2005

Dear Mary… Q. May I humbly correct the advice you gave about the life-long friend who has developed an ‘unfortunate strain of body odour’? She is suffering from trimethylaminuria, a rare metabolic defect which causes a fish-like smell due to abnormal breakdown of choline. Simple blood and urine tests are available to confirm the diagnosis, often triggered by a fishy meal. Appropriate dietary modification can cure the problem.M.A.M. (consultant nephrologist), London Wl A. Despite the fact that my correspondent of 4 March gave no indication of the body odour in question being ‘fish-like’, readers will join me in being delighted by your learned advice. Knowledge that this condition exists provides

Robin Oakley

The Irish are coming

For me there was never a comedian to match Ireland’s Dave Allen, perched on his stool fastidiously flicking imaginary cigarette ash off his suit, drawing out a story with a sip of whisky and flaying with the laughter he provoked all those who set themselves in authority over us, from mothers superior to prime ministers. My favourite Allen story was the one about the two drunks in a pub who leave at ten-minute intervals, making their way home across a churchyard. The first one falls into a freshly dug grave. He tries a few jumps at the slippery sides, a few shouts for help, then settles down in a corner

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 19 March 2005

The IRA now revealed as the criminal gang the government has been desperately trying to pretend it is not, there can be no more pretence of democratic dealing with Sinn Fein–IRA and its leaders Adams and McGuinness. So what next? The collapse of the Roman republic in the 1st century bc was largely down to the naked power that dynasts like Caesar and Pompey could wield by having private armies at their back. The result was that the tradition of ‘checks and balances’ involving Senate, consuls and people that was felt by Greeks and Romans to be the great strength of the republican system applied no more. When Julius Caesar