Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Old man Wisden

Forget moons, suns, solstices and altered clocks, for half the world spring officially sprang on Wednesday when the 142nd edition of Wisden was launched with a banquet at London’s Inner Temple Hall. Eighteen-sixty-four was memorably busy: down the slope from the Inner Temple, they began building the Thames Embankment; Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened; General Gordon captured Nanking; Bhutans were boldly bothering Brits, and in Africa the Ashanti were restless; Dickens brought out Our Mutual Friend and photographs by magnesium flash were taken for the first time in Manchester; Oxford won the Boat Race by a rollicking 27 seconds; in his first-ever race a white-faced chestnut Blair Athol won the

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 9 April 2005

Dear Mary… A number of correspondents wrote in regarding the problem (26 March) of what to call the unmarried mother of one’s son’s child. Here is a selection. Q. Oh Mary, I love it when you go all family values! Yes, yes, you are so right to stop the rot! Partners forsooth! Even worse are married couples where the husband refers to his ‘wife-companion’. Well, that’s rather touching but still icky. Anyway, mischievously, may I suggest that the word ought to be pronounced as if French, i.e., imprégnée? That would give it a little style. ‘This is Carlotta, Nevil’s dear imprégnée!’ And practically, may I suggest: ‘This is the mother/father

Andrew Taylor

Patron and prisoner

Joan Brady’s previous books include Theory of War, a powerful historical novel which won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. Now she has written a thriller. It is set in Springfield, Illinois, once the home of Abraham Lincoln and now a prosperous city overshadowed by an unholy alliance of politicians, cops, lawyers and bankers. No one, however, doubts the integrity of Hugh Freyl, whose family has dominated the city’s public life for generations. Like justice itself, Hugh is blind, which means he cannot see the face of the person who bludgeons him to death in the library of his own law firm. The novel has a double narrative in

Jaspistos

Ego Trip

In competition No. 2386 you were invited to provide an extract from an imaginary autobiography of a boaster. The dramatic critic James Agate unabashedly called his diaries, in nine volumes, Ego. Cellini was a bit of a braggart, but the autobiographer’s cake is surely taken by Frank Harris, just ahead of George Moore, though I incline to believe that more of the former’s related sexual conquests were true than the latter’s. I suspect that straightforward pounces between stops in Victorian railway carriages were successful more often than we might imagine. Speaking absolutely candidly, to tell you the honest truth, as the politicians say, this competition was disappointing. Few of you

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I was rubbish

Did any of you catch me being rubbish on BBC4 last week? I was one of the talking heads on a series called TV on Trial, where various critic types argued over which of the past six decades produced the best TV. My job was to be rude about the Eighties, with David Aaronovitch defending them. Aaronovitch used to be on my death list because he always comes across as such a po-faced lefty bastard, but as it turned out he was really charming and I liked him a lot. Plus, he was way, way more fluent than me. But, then, he had a much easier job. How do you

Paul Johnson

What is good, and how do we define goodness?

The passing of a great pope promotes thoughts about goodness, and what constitutes it. What is goodness? And, for that matter, what is good itself? Joseph Addison was quite clear: ‘Music is the greatest good that mortals know.’ But among the greatest evils of our time, I would put pop music, its idols, its drugs and its diabolic possession of tender susceptible youth high on the list, certainly among the top ten. Edmund Burke was equally sure: ‘Good order is the foundation of all good things.’ That is arguable, anyway, though most dictators would support it ex officio. And all good things? Surely not. Most poetry, art and literature spring

Christopher Fildes

Equitable takes its directors to court, so guess who the winners will be

Charles Thomson has achieved what I thought was impossible. He has provoked me to sympathise with the directors of Equitable Life: the gold braid, that is, on the bridge when the ship hit the iceberg. Our oldest life assurance office — set up in 1762, which made it Barings’ twin — had been holed below the waterline. I have not, until now, had a kind word to say for them. I accused them of trying to save the society’s skin at the expense of its reputation, and failing. After that failure, they were pushed overboard, and now their successors are trying to sink them. Next week, in the High Court,

Alexander Van Straubenzee

The stench of death

Lieutenant John Randall discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by accident. Sixty years ago, on 15 April 1945, Randall, then a 24-year-old SAS officer, was on a reconnaissance mission in northern Germany. He and his driver were heading down the road to L

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Everyone benefits | 9 April 2005

Thirteen local authorities have been chosen by the government to be Cultural Pathfinders, showing how culture and sport can help to deliver government priorities across public life. The government’s social, environmental and economic agenda is to be promoted through cultural initiatives at local level. In a joint initiative with the Local Government Association (LGA), the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has chosen Birmingham, Canterbury, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Liverpool, Manchester, North and South Tyneside, the London Borough of Richmond, Spelthorne, Sheffield, Somerset and Suffolk to: * Show how culture can contribute to other government work at local level in the fields of healthy living, community safety and social cohesion * Use

Norman Davies

God and mammon

Krakow The greatest churchman of modern times is dead; and the most Catholic nation in Europe is bereft. John Paul II, ‘Papa Wojtyla’ has passed on to a better life. His faithful compatriots must fend for themselves. Men and women weep without shame. Requiem services are celebrated every hour from dawn till midnight. Congregations spill out on to the street, kneeling on the paving stones. Thousands of candles flicker in their coloured-glass holders before makeshift shrines. Radio stations play sombre symphonies or take calls from distressed listeners. The TV channels which aren’t closed down flip endlessly between ‘St Peter’s Square — Live’ and long prepared films about the late Pope’s

Friday

Boris Johnson

Diary – 8 April 2005

This election is a swindle. It is a fraud on the electorate. We are asked to vote for one man, Blair, when he has explicitly said that he will not serve a full five years, and the chances must therefore be that the Labour machine will try, at some point in the next few years, to insert Gordon Brown. That would be utterly outrageous, not just because he is a gloomadon-popping, interfering, high-taxing complicator of life, but mainly because he is a Scot, and government by a Scot is just not conceivable in the current constitutional context. Not only is Scotland full of rotten boroughs, where Labour MPs are returned

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 8 April 2005

Great thinkers have recently been grappling with what ‘happiness’ is, and various answers have emerged that have surely never occurred to anyone before: ‘love and friendship’, to which ‘respect, family, standing and fun’ have been added. Who would have thought it? Ancient Greeks would have narrowed those six down to three. They would have matched ‘family’ with ‘friendship’ and seen both as aspects of philia, feebly translated as ‘friendship’ but actually meaning something like ‘being in a relationship with someone who makes common cause with you’ (philia is cognate with Latin suus, ‘one’s own’). Greeks famously divided society into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, and urged doing good to the one and

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 2 April 2005

Mr Howard Flight who, many were surprised to learn, was deputy chairman of the Conservative party, had the whip withdrawn and was told by Mr Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, that he could not stand for Parliament as a Conservative candidate after he addressed a dinner of the Conservative Way Forward association. When discussing savings in public expenditure identified by the James report, Mr Flight told the meeting, ‘The real issue is, having won power, do you then go for it?’ This was presented by Labour as an admission of secretly planned cuts. When Mr Flight refused to go quietly, the row overshadowed the embarrassment in the Labour party about

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 April 2005

The attempt by the Pope to pronounce his Easter blessing on Sunday and his failure in that attempt were so moving. On the day which, of all days, affirms life, John Paul II must particularly have longed to speak. As he struggled to do so, he looked like a strong man drowning, in sight of the shore yet unable to reach it. Some say that such a sick man should abdicate. But surely the Pope is fulfilling the vows which he made when he became a priest. He is trying to stand in the place of Christ, not usurping Him, but imitating Him. Against the humiliations which Christ endured, those

Taki

Untold suffering

Nemmersdorf is a village in East Prussia that was overrun by the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. After seizing the village, the Russkies raped all the women, regardless of age, and then crucified them. All of them. Men and children were clubbed to death or run over with tanks. Not a single person survived. It was payback for three years of Nazi atrocities during their invasion of Russia. German units counter-attacked and retook Nemmersdorf, and then invited reporters from three neutral countries — Sweden, Switzerland and Spain — to see what our Allies had done. German newsreels showed the horror non-stop. Which brings me to General George Patton, my

Frank Keating

Dream on!

Until the 1980s, England vs Northern Ireland was a calendar annual. Then the ‘Home’ championship was brutally abandoned. So to those of a certain generation last week’s soccer fixture seemed surreal. As surreal, I daresay, as the play which opens in Stockholm next Friday — British playwright Nick Grosso’s depiction of a randy Swedish coach of an England soccer team described, deadpan, by the theatre spokesman as ‘a relationship-comedy twisted into the realms of the absurd’. Methinks Nick will have to be on top form to ratchet any new ‘twist’ from our sexy Sven’s real-life relationship absurdities. England’s World Cup qualifier against Northern Ireland was followed closely by another in

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 2 April 2005

Dear Mary… Q. As a single person I invite many people over for dinner. Invariably the numbers are not equal, but I go to immense pains to get a mixture of guests who will find each other interesting, and also try to cook something special and delicious. The return invitations are invariably of the ‘take-us-as-you-find-us’ variety (‘Do come over. It’ll be Just Us. I don’t know what I’ll cook — probably pot luck’). To rub salt into the wound, at these suppers I am regaled with stories of the sparkling dinner parties my hosts have recently held, all featuring people who are fascinating but — most important — in couples.

Aidan Hartley

Don’t Worrie Be Happy

Swat, Pakistan The Swat valley’s apple orchards are in blossom even as the snow still lies thick on the mountains. It’s been the harshest winter in memory. I came here on the trail of my late friend Carlos Mavroleon, an extraordinary man who had many of his adventures in this part of the world. The ancients thought Swat was paradise. It must still have been lovely 30 years ago, when Carlos — just 17 at the time, on the run from Millfield and following the Magic Bus route East — descended the Malakand Pass to see the valley open out before him. Today, from the Grand Trunk Road turnoff to

Jaspistos

A tricky hand

In Competition No. 2385 you were invited to incorporate 13 given words into a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-card sense. Searching for Tolstoy’s ‘happy families’ quotation in my Bartlett’s, what did I find bang next to it? This from War and Peace: ‘The old man used to say that a nap after dinner was silver — before dinner, golden.’ ‘Finesse’ was the tricky one: I didn’t think it sounded unforced on the lips of either Gerard Benson’s plodding policeman or Brian Murdoch’s violent burglar. Blackjack and poker led to a lot of GBH, but the top prize (£30) goes to Margaret Joy’s peaceful rural scene, in

Christopher Fildes

Ce que je redis au peuple fran

The trouble with a referendum, as Kenneth Clarke noted, is that people do not always answer the question you ask them. You want to know if they favour a bimetallistic approach to the currency, and they say ‘Throw the rascals out.’ Something of the sort may be happening to Jacques Chirac. He had the French all geared up to vote for Europe’s new constitution, the polls are now running against him, but it may be that the voters have tired of a President who keeps flying off to Japan to watch the sumo wrestling. Even so, a Non vote next month would halt the constitution in its tracks, and would