Society

You thought it was difficult to get into an NHS bed? Try getting out when the bureaucrats say no. In my own case you might have thought they would urge me to be gone, for I was a bad patient. Normally I have a high pain threshold, but that Monday as I came round from the general anaesthetic the pain was sensational and I took it personally. Returned to my ward, the curtains drawn around my bay, I heard the sounds of a nearby patient being prepared to be wheeled to the operating theatre. I also heard a woman shouting ‘Do not let Dr Mooney operate on you. Dr Mooney

For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the Kennedy administration in 1961. Promoted to the post of US attorney general by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Clark’s left-liberal political trajectory has taken him so far from the political mainstream that he is now campaigning for the rights of the two most hated men in the world. Is he mad? These men’s very names resound

Baghdad As the Puma chugs over Baghdad I look out over the machine gun and I have to admit I am full of a sudden wistfulness. I have been here before, almost two years ago exactly. It was a week after the end of the war, and in those days my feelings were of nervous hope. I jogged by the twinkling Tigris. I ate out in restaurants — shoarma and chips, served with every sign of friendliness. I wandered around without a flak jacket and shoved my notebook under people’s noses, and said things like, ‘What do you think of George Bush, hmmm?’ And now look at the dear old

About once a decade, the editor of The Spectator asks me to write a diary column. I always accept, though diaries, contrary to what might be supposed, are among the most difficult types of journalism to write. I accept partly because I like The Spectator, and partly because of an early memory of Peter Fleming; he was Ian Fleming’s brother and, before the Bond books appeared, much the better known of the two. He was the author of a weekly Spectator diary. As a schoolboy I wrote a letter of comment on something he had written. Peter was a kind man and replied with the sort of encouraging letter journalists

Last year there was one Classics Cup on offer. This year there are no fewer than three: one for the Open competition (any 200-word piece from The Spectator in Latin or Greek prose or verse); one for undergraduates (200 words in Latin or Greek on the theme ‘Tony and Gordon’); and one for school pupils (200 words in Latin or Greek retelling the story of Homer’s Odyssey). For the stars of the Open competition, it will be exquisite business as usual: the chance to take any passage from The Spectator and map the language and concepts of this world on to that of the ancient. Take Steyn: ‘If Rumsfeld were

In Competition No. 2382 you were invited to supply pretentious ‘intellectual’ tosh in the form of a review of a play, book, film or piece of classical music. Back in 1990 that grand old comper Roger Woddis sent me a wonderful specimen of pseudocrap perpetrated by James Wolcott in the Observer. It deserves some space: ‘What’s interesting about Richard Ford’s Wildlife is not its chipped polish but its numb insularity. For all its Western smoke, it reads like a chamber play for phantoms. It has the ghostly rustle of white folds begging for a bloodstain.’ My apologies to those of you who misread my intentions: the tosh, I presumed, belonged