Society

Saturday

Mark Steyn

The ultimate movie pro

I happen to be writing this on board ship, in a little café, at a table by the window, with an idle eye on any glamorous women passing by. And as always in such settings I think of North by Northwest, which contains the all-time great strangers-on-a-train/ships-in-the-night scene. In a lifetime’s travel, everyone should have a North by Northwest moment: on the Twentieth Century train to Chicago, Cary Grant walks into a crowded dining car and is seated opposite Eva Marie Saint, the coolest of cool blondes. The conversation starts out quietly smouldering and heats up from there: He: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start

Jaspistos

Herculean task

In Competition No. 2400 you were invited to write a sonnet picturing one of Hercules’ labours. I used the word ‘picturing’ with a purpose: I wanted you to be visual. I was thinking of the sonnets in Les Trophées (two describe vividly the Nemean and Stymphalian missions), written by José-Maria de Heredia, that gifted, Cuban-born (father Spanish Creole, mother Norman) Parnassian French poet whose cameo-like glimpses of the Classical world enchanted me early. Out of the 12 labours, easily the most popular (are you filthy-minded?) was the cleansing of the Augean stables, which would have defeated seven maids with seven mops, sweeping for half a year. The winners, printed below,

Christopher Fildes

Hockey and hanging baskets count as risks, but now we have a real one

Risk assessment is the mantra of our time. You cannot organise a girls’ school hockey match without having to assess the risk that the combatants will bark their knuckles. The baskets of flowers that used to hang outside the Ring of Bells pub in Norton Fitzwarren have been assessed as a risk to passers-by who, if they were more than eight feet tall, might have to step into the road or bump their heads. Trustees of charities and pension funds must assess their risks or take the consequences. Much good all this did for us on the day when City and suburban life developed a new kind of hazard: the

The Spectator

No concessions

The bombs in London last week killed people of all races and religions indiscriminately — as of course they were intended to. The terrorists who planted them were not interested in distinguishing between kinds of people: they simply wanted to kill as many of us as possible. The police now believe that the killers were suicide bombers who found fulfilment in blowing themselves up on the London Underground. The murderers were Britons born and bred. They were raised and educated in West Yorkshire. The revelation that the murderers did not come in from abroad has understandably prompted people to ask: what has gone wrong with our society that it is

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Driven cyclist

Pau, France Until 1981 no American even so much as rode in the Tour de France. Since then an invading fleet has crossed the Atlantic to dominate what was once a European sport, and a race whose very name is its country’s proud standard. First of the Yanks was Greg LeMond, who won the Tour in 1986, then Bobby Julich, and more recently Tyler Hamilton. After his Olympic triumph last year he is now in disgrace, charged with the faintly ghoulish offence of ‘blood-doping’, transfusing someone else’s blood, although nothing can erase his heroism in the great centennial Tour of two years ago, riding for three weeks in agony from

Stephen Schwartz

Literary courtesan

Cultural tourism can be an edgy adventure when promoted by intellectuals, no less than when pursued by ordinary travellers. Backpacking across the Pakistan–Afghanistan border could get a foreigner killed. The tourist mentality inhabiting Western literary circles, however, carries no such fatal risk. Anglo-American critics and publishers foist their taste for exoticism and leftism, exemplified by authors like the Colombian Gabriel Garc

Boris Johnson

Just don’t call it war

If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would do the same to all the other houses in the area thought to have been the temporary or permanent addresses of the suicide bombers and their families. After decades of deranged attacks the Israelis have come to the conclusion that this is the best way to deter Palestinian families from nurturing these vipers in their

Friday

Lucy Kellaway

Diary – 15 July 2005

Wednesday last week, back when travelling on the Tube was no big deal, I was on the Central line on my way to White City to appear on a BBC2 lunchtime business programme whose usual select viewing audience was going to be greatly swelled that day by my mum and dad. The loudspeaker at the end of the carriage crackled to life: ‘We would like to inform all customers that London has been successful in its bid to host the 2012 Olympics.’ I looked at the line of people in seats opposite. They responded exactly as they would have done to ‘Stand clear of the doors. Mind the closing doors,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 9 July 2005

The G8 leaders (of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia) assembled in Gleneagles to discuss Africa, climate change and that sort of thing. The Live 8 concert for 200,000 in Hyde Park, intended to attract attention to poverty in Africa, passed off without incident. About 225,000 people walked through Edinburgh in a similar cause. The next day police arrested 100 in violent clashes with anarchists. Around Gleneagles 3,000 police, some from England, gathered; there was fighting in Stirling and nearby Auchterarder was overwhelmed. London was chosen as the venue for the Olympic Games in 2012. The government admitted that about half a million illegal immigrants

The Spectator

Feedback | 9 July 2005

The war will be won It is nonsense to suggest, as Michael Wolff tried last week (‘The nation wobbles’, 2 July), that the war in Iraq is almost lost. Terrorists are certainly doing their best to destroy the hopes of Iraq. But the resistance to them is strong. Mr Wolff dismisses the fact that eight million people defied the terrorists in January to vote as merely a ‘high moment of triumphalism’. So much for the freest election ever held in the Arab world. He claims that the Sunni 30 per cent of the country who did not vote are now ‘supporting an insurgency against both the occupiers and the rest

Robin Oakley

Fashion stakes

An American Treasury official was commenting recently on Tony Blair’s efforts to get one item on the G8 agenda. ‘We said no over dinner,’ he declared. ‘We said no on the ride home. We said no on the front porch, and still he said, “Come to bed.”’ By the time you read this we will know whether Mr Blair’s persistence has paid on an international financing facility for poorer nations. But persistence clearly pays on the racetrack. As an admirer of Terry Mills’s highly efficient stable, I am always delighted when the no-nonsense Epsom trainer gets his hands on a good one, as he has with the sprinter Resplendent Glory.

Taki

First-rate educator

A note from Jeremy Sykes enclosing an article about a friend of mine who died 40 years ago last Tuesday, on 5 July 1965. In his kind letter, Jeremy Sykes assumes that I knew the man who died in his Ferrari returning from a Parisian nightclub so long ago, and he is absolutely spot on. In fact, I was with Porfirio Rubirosa until 3 a.m. in New Jimmy’s, the legendary Montparnasse club, and had left only because I had to be on court in Nice the next morning for a tennis tournament. (That’s how we trained back then: in nightclubs doing a fast mumbo.) Rubi left Jimmy’s after 6 a.m.,

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 9 July 2005

Dear Mary… Q. Our son and his fiancée are getting married in Pretoria, South Africa, later this year, although they both live in London, where they have their established home. They would prefer guests not to give them presents they would be unable to cope with in their small flat in Pretoria, and shipping gifts back from RSA would prove especially problematic and costly. How can they say politely and nicely, without offence, that they would prefer financial gifts to help with the proposed refurbishment of their kitchen rather than ‘another toaster’? I know you will know what to do, Mary.M.E., Cyprus A. Practical though the suggestion may be, many

Interconnect

Calm resolution

This week’s disgusting attack on London will naturally be seized upon by politicians of all hues to advance their various agendas. Opponents of the war in Iraq have lost no time in blaming Tony Blair and British engagement for the bombs that hit London and killed dozens and injured many hundreds. They have a point. As the Butler report revealed, the Government was explicitly warned before the Iraq war that our involvement would exacerbate the risk of terrorism in this country. But that does not for one moment mean that if Britain had not been involved in Iraq, then London would have been safe. It bears repeating that more British

Jaspistos

De haut en bas

In Competition No. 2399 you were asked for a reply in blank verse by the maid addressed in Tennyson’s poem, ‘“Come down, O maid from yonder mountain height:/What pleasure lives in height?” the shepherd sang…’ You can only catch a glimpse of me this week, since my head is going to disappear behind the curtain once I have announced that there are seven winning entries to this comp, all in a photo-finish bunch. The camera adjudges Basil Ransome-Davies top winner. He gets £30 and the others have £20 each. That’s all, folks. ‘What pleasure lives in height?’ Why, sir, you seemTo picture mountain tops as barren, cold And void of

Christopher Fildes

HSBC should lend a clerk to the summit to help count the cost of biscuits

Meetings can be a substitute for work, and an expensive one, at that, which is why the thrifty bankers at HSBC had a rule about them. A note had to be kept of every meeting, and the last line of the note would read, ‘This meeting lasted for one hour and 33 minutes and is estimated to have cost £2,822.27p, including the digestive biscuits.’ The biggest item on the bill would be the time of all those present, and they might think twice before incurring it, given the chance that head office would take umbrage. Perhaps HSBC could lend Tony Blair a clerk to help him cost his summit meeting.

Paul Johnson

The histrionic Jane slipping in and out of the limelight

It is remarkable that the English, so reserved in their emotional displays in ordinary existence, should have always shown such capacity, even genius, for enacting them on the stage. Or perhaps it is only logical, theatre being for us an escape from our natural inhibitions. Whatever the explanation, we have led the world in acting for half a millennium now, and still do, emphatically. Such performances as Michael Gambon as Falstaff, or Eve Best as Hedda Gabler, or Laura Michelle Kelly as Mary Poppins — and these are only the outstanding examples — are not to be seen anywhere else on earth. There is about the West End of London,

Simon Heffer

A pointless, grotesque and quite repulsive act of grandstanding

The agenda for the G8 is now clear: economic revival through better trading conditions; the elimination of corruption; the humbling of dictators; possibly even regime change. Yes, most of the G8’s member nations are in an almighty mess, and until they show the will to sort themselves out, you can forget their doing anything useful for the rest of humanity. It is difficult, on the occasion of this utterly pointless, grotesquely expensive and quite repulsive act of grandstanding, to know for whom to feel more contempt: the Blairs, the Chiracs, the Schröders and the Berlusconis, or the silly little anti-capitalist plonkers parading themselves through Edinburgh rejoicing that they can chuck