Society

Saturday

Michael Wolff

A nation wobbles

The New York Times publishes a daily box score with the latest list of the soldiers killed in Iraq under the rubric ‘Names of the Dead’. For instance: KAUFMAN, Charles A., 20, Specialist, Army National Guard; Fairchild, Wis.; First Battalion, 128th Infantry. MUY, Veashna, 20, Pfc., Marines; Los Angeles; Second Marine Division. POWELL, Chad W., 22, Cpl., Marines; West Monroe, La., Second Marine Division. VALDEZ, Ramona M., 20, Cpl., Marines; the Bronx, N.Y.; Second Marine Division. Kaufman, Muy, Powell and Valdez, whose deaths the New York Times noted on 28 June, were the 1,727th, 1,728th, 1,729th and 1,730th American soldiers killed in the Iraq war. So, 1,602 soldiers have been

Friday

Max Hastings

Diary – 1 July 2005

At the weekend, one of my favourite soldiers remarked sombrely that the armed forces have been sandpapered into so small a critical mass that little needs to go wrong for things to unravel disastrously. Amazingly few people notice, however. When army manpower cuts were announced, the story received brief coverage even in supposedly serious papers, and principally in the context of sentiment about cap badges. The services now lack a political or media constituency, such as once raised hell when governments maltreated them. The new indifference suits ministers. General Sir Mike Jackson is the only chief of staff who is known to the public and reaches out to the media.

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 1 July 2005

In our youth-besotted blame culture, the newly recovered poem by Sappho (600 bc: only our fourth complete one) has a point to make. I translate in plodding prose (square brackets = restored words): ‘You, children, [rejoice in] the beautiful gifts of the violet-robed Muses/ [and the] clear, song-loving lyre./ As for me — old age [has laid its hands on] my once [soft] skin./ My hair has gone from black to white./ My heart has become heavy. My knees do not carry me,/ that once were nimble to dance like fawns./ This I lament without end; but what can I do?/ It is impossible for man not to grow old./

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 25 June 2005

Spies will be sent out to inform upon people smoking in public places, including bus shelters and office doorways, under plans by Miss Caroline Flint, the minister for public health, who advocated ‘an intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, borrowed £8.735 billion in May, the highest amount since 1993, when such records began. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, returned from Brussels, where a summit of European Union leaders could not agree on a budget to run from 2007 to 2013; he had defended Britain’s rebate, which he had said should not be renegotiated without connected changes to the Common Agricultural Policy.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 25 June 2005

Last week I went to hear Jung Chang and Jon Halliday talk about their new biography of Mao Tse-tung at a lecture in memory of the Great Helmsman of Moderation, Roy Jenkins. Almost every claim made in favour of Mao, they argued, is untrue — that peasant villages rose up in support of the Communists (not a single one did, say the authors), that the Communists bravely fought and defeated the Japanese, that the Chinese Communist party was a popular mass movement in China (in fact it was the creature of Stalin). When I was at boarding school in the early Seventies, almost the only free literature readily available was

The Spectator

Feedback | 25 June 2005

Sixth sense Anthony Seldon is quite right about exams (‘More exams, less education’, 18 June). A-levels since 2000 have encouraged hoop-jumping, no more so than in his own subject, history. But he is wrong to be so resigned about AS-levels; contrary to assumptions made by leaders in the overwhelming majority of schools, there is no need to submit pupils to these exams at 17, which has created the tyrannical sequence of 16, 17, 18+ exams which he so deplores. At Radley we have used our independence to avoid AS-levels at 17; we do all the exams, AS and A2, at 18+ as if they were the old A-levels. Our boys

Frank Keating

Captain Bligh’s bounty

Midsummer — Wimbledon at full-throttled grunt, England’s cricketers in meaningful challenge with Australia at last, down by the river the bunting’s gay and the hanging-baskets plump and plenteous for Henley’s hearty annual heave-ho, and deep down in the cold southern seas this very morning we shall know who has drawn first blood as the rare and ancient rugby challenge resumes between marauding Brits and defiant New Zealand All Blacks. A couple of you were tickled by last week’s en passant here on the first Wimbledon of 1877 being suspended between semi and final to allow spectators to attend the Eton v. Harrow cricket at Lord’s. Had it not been, I

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 25 June 2005

Dear Mary… Q. The new fashion of women wearing pants (sic) that do not fit properly and reveal their underwear is in full flight here. There is no hope for the young, who will slavishly follow whatever is in fashion, regardless of how stupid it looks. However, we have a friend in her late thirties or early forties. She is still quite an attractive women for her age, but not so attractive that she should be wearing these sorts of things. What can we say to her, without appearing to be perverts or fuddy-duddies, to stop her wearing her pants so that her g-string underpants and the top part of

Taki

Sailing into the sunset

To the Royal Hellenic Yacht Club, high above the tiny gem of a marina once upon a time known as Turkolimano, its name changed to Mikrolimano after the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The yacht club also dropped the Royal, which is par for the course. Actually, it is the standard method used by Greek busybodies and other pests for seeking redress against those who have never sinned against them — like the Greek royal family. Never mind. The club will always be connected to the royals because it is they who sponsored it and put it on the map. The present King Constantine was our first post-war gold medal

Jeremy Clarke

Bourgeois complacency

Leaning against the hotel bar after dinner on the first evening of our residential erotic-writing course. On my right, John, a tall young energetic skinhead theatre director. On my left, Yannis, a short dignified old Greek intellectual who was kicked out of Greece by the Colonels. Yannis owned the hotel. John and I were would-be erotic writers. Our trio was a sort of self-consciously male enclave in a bar jam-packed with wine-swilling female erotic writers. We hadn’t met before. John wanted to talk politics straight away. Worse still, he wanted to shake Yannis and me out of our — presumably — bourgeois complacency. He kicked off by lamenting the fact

Jaspistos

Mal voyage

In Competition No. 2397 you were invited to supply an acrostic poem, the first letter of each line to spell out TRAVEL TROUBLES. I had my share of these recently. The Saturday flight to Milan was cancelled. Our tickets were adjusted (incorrectly, it turned out) for Sunday. On Sunday the flight is cancelled again, but a bus is promised to take us to Milan with a free overnight stay at a hotel — subito! Finalmente a bus appears and after a nine-hour journey deposits us at a frightful hotel at 3 a.m., where we are told that we shall be alarm-called in one hour’s time for further bussing to an

Paul Johnson

Whatever else you do, don’t miss the bus!

Americans grumble to me that the price of cabs in London is outrageous, and they are right. I tell them to take a double-decker red bus, but they look doubtful. Too complicated? Certainly, when I am in New York, I hesitate before I take one of those convenient buses that go up and down Fifth Avenue because the drivers are so impatient and sarcastic, and when I fiddle for dimes and nickels to pay them, call out, ‘Oi, oi! Hoy Foynance! Hoy Foynance!’ Reading Thackeray’s Collected Letters the other day, I see he had the same experience with a Manhattan streetcar (horse-drawn of course) in the 1850s. I now take

The Spectator

What is hate?

If this Labour government deserves to be remembered for anything at all, it will be for the systematic stamping out of freedoms that have been enjoyed in this country for centuries. Smoking in public is now all but certain to be banned. Habeas corpus has been curtailed by Charles Clarke’s grotesque ‘control orders’. This week in Parliament, Labour simultaneously announced the abridgement of the right to trial by jury, and forced through an almost mediaeval erosion of free speech, in the form of the ban on incitement to ‘religious hatred’. This is a contemptibly bad measure, which has nothing to do with the needs of criminal justice, and everything to

Roger Scruton

The power of negative thinking

Roger Scruton says that France has never recovered from Jean-Paul Sartre’s horror of the bourgeoisie and his repudiation of both Christianity and the idea of France Jean-Paul Sartre, born 100 years ago on 21 June 1905, was the most striking presence in French post-war literature, and the originating cause of the left-bank culture of the Sixties. His prodigious literary gifts found expression in seminal works of philosophy, in novels, plays, stories, criticism, in a highly influential literary journal (Les Temps modernes) and in a remarkable work of autobiography (Les Mots, 1964). His versatile sensibility set him high above the intellectual landscape on which he poured down his scorn, and his

Interconnect

Action stations

New Hampshire There’s a moment in the new Batman (reviewed elsewhere in these pages) that made my ears prick up almost as much as those on top of the dark knight’s cute little Bat-mask. Bruce Wayne has just bumped into his childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes in the lobby of some Gotham City hotel. Unfortunately, he’s sopping wet, having been cavorting in the ornamental fountain with a couple of hot pieces of arm candy. Rachel is a crusading district attorney and Bruce can see she’s a bit disappointed to discover her old pal is now Paris Hilton in drag. So he attempts to assure her that deep down he still cares

Friday

Diary – 24 June 2005

Just as no man is a hero to his valet, no mother-in-law is a heroine to her son-in-law. Except mine, that is. Miloska Nott (bullet dodger, charity fundraiser, daffodil farmer) is a remarkable woman. In 1992 she started the Fund for Refugees in Slovenia of which I am now a trustee. In its typically confusing Balkan way, it now helps to rebuild the lives of the surviving Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) of Srebrenica, where Miloska has just built 25 houses, a school and a surgery. Wherever she goes, they hold up her picture and wave it as with an old-style communist leader. Let Bob Geldof strut his stuff over Africa, but

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 18 June 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew to Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin, then to Berlin, Luxembourg and Paris, in preparation for the European Union meeting later this week. A bone of contention was Britain’s £3 billion rebate of its contributions to the EU budget, which President Jacques Chirac of France said Britain should give up as a ‘gesture of solidarity’. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany told Mr Blair that there was ‘no place for national egotism’. In talks with Mr Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, which currently holds the EU presidency, Mr Blair declined a formal proposal to freeze the rebate between 2007 and 2013.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 June 2005

What do we think of children? Boarding schools are out of fashion because they represent ‘delegated parenthood’ and we are taught to believe that we should be very ‘hands on’ with our children, and that everyone else’s hands are suspect. We are horribly mistrustful of Michael Jackson where our grandparents loved the equally strange J.M. Barrie. But probably never before in history have so many children seen so little of their parents. This is partly because so many (mainly fathers) are absent through divorce or separation, and partly because parents are now encouraged by public policy, social pressure, house prices and the tax system to work so hard. The phrase

The Spectator

Feedback | 18 June 2005

Let them smoke dope Eric Ellis is way way off in his piece (‘The whingers of Oz’, 11 June). Why are the Australians angry? I would think it’s because the 20-year sentence passed on Schapelle Corby for smuggling marijuana is savage. No doubt Eric Ellis has never smoked any marijuana, but it is a harmless and pleasant plant that, like a couple of cocktails, makes you feel relaxed and, unlike them, quiet. Why is the stuff still illegal? I assume it’s the power of the alcohol lobby (commerce being behind most things). Alcohol has damaged and killed friends of mine, but I’ve never known anyone harmed by the weed, whose

Simon Courtauld

Shop around

Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon, is a most remarkable fish. Having gone to sea, where it has to run the gauntlet of modern deep-sea trawlers, it returns, a year or up to three years later, to the river of its birth to spawn. On the way it may fall prey to seals, to estuarial nets and to disease emanating from salmon farms. Once in the river it may have to leap up and over waterfalls (‘salar’ means the leaper) as it swims upstream, eating nothing until, having spawned, it dies in the river or returns to the sea. In this final phase of its life it is known as a