Society

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 18 June 2004

As MPs prepare yet another raft of vital legislation relating to killer dogs, no, sorry, gun-control, no, ah yes, of course, the obesity ‘epidemic’ (or was it anorexia? no, that was a year or so back), they might do well to read what Plutarch (c.ad 110) has to say on the general issue. In one of his ‘Table Talks’, Plutarch and friends are trying to work out whether brand new diseases could come into the world — as some doctors claimed — and if so, how: from other worlds, or what? The general conclusion reached is that, just as the facts of any case might allow one true statement to

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 June 2004

Britain went to the polls to elect members for the European Parliament, an exercise which the Liberal Democrats had portrayed as a ‘referendum on Iraq’. Thousands of postal ballot papers went undelivered in Bolton, and two men were arrested in Oldham after claims of fraud. London re-elected a mayor. ‘I am back playing the guitar now and I love it,’ Mr Blair said in an interview with Time Out. Heads of state from Britain, the United States, Russia, France and Germany marked the 60th anniversary of D-Day with ceremonies in Normandy. The first transit of Venus visible from Britain for 122 years duly occurred. Government figures showed that military equipment

Max Hastings

Diary – 12 June 2004

I spent Sunday in the BBC TV studio in Arromanches through six hours of live coverage of the D-Day commemoration. It would never do to tell them this, but I would have done it for nothing. It is 30 years since I took part in a big outside broadcast. The cliché is true: it brings out the best in the Beeb. No one else can do anything like it. Even when vulgarity has overtaken some other bits of the Corporation, the Events department has inherited from the Richard Dimbleby era an instinctive sense of national responsibility and an infinite capacity for taking pains. I was moved by how jolly and

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 12 June 2004

I heard the other day that the late Lord Hartwell, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, had once exclaimed that when he was at Eton he had been taught never to begin a sentence with the word but. He then found to his slight mortification that his chance remark had been set as an iron rule for the newspaper’s stylebook. God knows what material their stylebook is made of now. Something spongy, I think. Now Professor Canon J.R. Porter has written to me about a related question: beginning sentences with and. I had mentioned that sentence after sentence in the so-called Authorised Version of the Bible begins with and. The

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 June 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I have an etiquette question for you. I came back from Egypt with a stomach bug the other day, was overcome by nausea on my way across Westbourne Grove, and had to choose between vomiting in the gutter or in the litter bin outside Agnes B. I chose the litter bin but have been told that that was wrong/inconsiderate. Can you rule, Mary? M.W., London W11 A. As the vomiter will be equally humiliated by either course, the point here is to minimise offence to the supporting cast in this mini-drama, so I am sorry to say this means the gutter would have been the better option.

Frank Johnson

There was nothing slow about Ronald Reagan. He spotted me for an Englishman right away

Ronald Reagan fascinated me from the moment he became governor of California in 1966. He was a right-winger who had won office. In those days right-wingers never won anything. Every office-holder or potential office-holder in every democracy — Labour, Tory, Democrat, Republican — seemed to be a liberal or a centrist. All the authorities said that that was the only way democracies could be governed. I had only just become interested in politics, and was bored by the subject already. If no one could do anything differently from anyone else, when would I witness any of the great clashes that I had just started reading about in books? Then came

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Brooding ’bout my generation

Sixty years on, the crossing to Normandy was flat as a millpond, the sun shone, the helicopter from the Portsmouth to Ouistreham ferry’s British destroyer escort (there were three other destroyers, one French, one American, one Canadian) performed all sorts of clever tricks for our amusement, and our welcoming party comprised a Royal Marine and, later in the evening, a magnificent fireworks display from Omaha all the way to Sword. ‘Bet you wish it had been like this on D-Day,’ I said to George Amos, late of 47 RM commando, as we gazed over a sea rather different from the boiling, grey, vomitous, shell-ravaged killing zone which had claimed nearly

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 11 June 2004

How would Pericles have dealt with the problems facing America after 9/11? As rationally as ever, no doubt. The great Athenian statesman (c. 495–429 bc) controlled the Athenian Assembly so effectively from the 440s till his death that the Athenian historian Thucydides remarked that Athens at this time was a democracy in name only. Not that Pericles wielded any constitutional authority; the Assembly of Athenian males over 18 was sovereign, and it was only by his powers of persuasion that they accepted his policies. As Thucydides said, he ‘knew what was required’ in any situation, and was equally able to restrain the Assembly when it became over-ambitious, and rally it

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 June 2004

Minister Mr Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist who has lived in exile in Britain for decades; he was not the man America had chosen. Under the terms of a new draft resolution put to the United Nations, American and British forces would leave Iraq by early 2006, with the election of a new parliament. American forces agreed to halt offensive operations in the Shiite cities of Najaf and Kufa if Muqtada al-Sadr disbanded his armed militias there; but friction continued. Fallujah remained in the control of a brigade that is supported by the United States but which bars any Coalition forces or Western contractors entering the city. A powerful bomb

A.N. Wilson

Diary – 5 June 2004

I was once naive enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked Eastbourne, and he replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it. The same was true of Heywood Hill, the Bookshop for the Quality. He owned that too, and was generous enough to endow a special prize, presented each year during a jolly garden party at Chatsworth, to a writer not just for one book but for a lifetime’s achievement. This year the prize goes to Dame Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl’s achievements are so many that she really deserves ten prizes, but this will do very nicely to

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 5 June 2004

On The South Bank Show in January 2000 a contributor said excitedly, ‘Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language.’ Rubbish. I found that reference, and its refutation, in a new book by the indefatigable Professor David Crystal, The Stories of English (Allen Lane, £25). First, he asks, how big is an Englishman’s vocabulary? Dr Crystal says he has lost count of the times he has been told that the Sun uses a vocabulary of 500 words. His reckons an average issue contains 6,000 different words (or ‘lexemes’, i.e., words stripped of bolt-on features). Academics, by inviting respondents to look through a slice of dictionary, say that an average English speaker

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 5 June 2004

Dear Mary… Q. As I am getting on a bit I find the process of uncorking bottles extremely arduous and fear doing irreparable damage to my aortic muscles. Can you give me some guidance about any of the wines that come in screwtop bottles? Is it all inevitably second-rate, or are there any good names you can recommend? J.O., London SW4 A. Times have changed — at least as far as New Zealand wines are concerned. The majority of the Wine Society’s New Zealand wines come with screwtops, and the Sauvignons that come from Marlborough are thought to be absolutely acceptable. What is more, says Charlie Wrey of The Vintry

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Blairophobes may indeed be crazy, Mr Aaronovitch, but they aren’t stupid

David Aaronovitch writes for the Guardian. He has suggested (‘Why do they hate Blair so much?’, 18 May) that opposition to Tony Blair has driven some of us crazy. I fear Mr Aaronovitch is right, and will try to explain why. His argument is straightforward and, though directed more to Mr Blair’s critics on the Labour Left than on the Tory Right, it has application too to Conservatives like me. Essentially, says Aaronovitch, we Blairophobes are in denial. We cannot accept what in our hearts we secretly fear: that Blair is right and — worse — that Blair has won. We therefore continue in a fool’s paradise where the present

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 5 June 2004

According to the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, the failure of the world to confront global warming is going to result in the royal family being freeze-dried at the breakfast table at Balmoral and our cities drowned in raging tornadoes. Never mind that this scenario — based on the global-warming lobby’s latest hobby-horse, the theoretical displacement of the Gulf Stream — is in direct contradiction to the drought and heatwave which scientists have been predicting for years. And never mind that much of the film’s scenes are physically impossible: to reverse the Gulf Stream, according to some calculations, would involve first having to stop the world rotating. It is

Interconnect

Traveller in time

It’s hard to suppress a feeling of schadenfreude when reading accounts of the crusaders going to the Holy Land in support of Christianity and finding that the indigenous Christians were often the lowest of the low, whereas the infidel leaders, rich and educated, were much more like those whom the Western leaders instinctively admired and wanted to meet. And these Christians were technically heretics, their religious observances thick with dodgy practices, their allegiances fixed on Patriarchs nobody had heard of or respected. It must have seemed a bit like not finding weapons of mass destruction — which didn’t stop our boys from invading again and again. The descendants of those

George Osborne

Bush and Howard are winners

George Osborne says that on the basis of the ‘keys’ forecasting system George W. Bush will be President next year and Michael Howard will be in No. 10 In the next few months George Bush and John Kerry are going to spend more than $1 billion trying to win the presidential election, while everyone else is going to spend millions of dollars trying to guess the result. They needn’t bother. The result is already obvious. Or so I have just been told by a man called Professor Allan Lichtman. He is a well-known American political scientist who has a simple and (almost) infallible system for forecasting the outcome of presidential

Justin Marozzi

Smack in your face

Kabul The minister had been stood up. Here we were in Bamiyan, in the heart of Afghanistan with Her Majesty’s drugs-busting minister Bill Rammell, and there was no sign of the Afghan farmer who had reportedly given up growing poppies in favour of dried apricots. He seemed an unlikely enough character in any case. Perhaps he never existed. Protected by a phalanx of armed Special Branch officers, we had flown into Bamiyan in a C-130 Hercules to catch up on the British-led counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan, a country that supplies 95 per cent of the heroin on our streets. The UK is providing £70m over three years to help the

Inigo Thomas

Life in the bus lane

New York I forgot: you need coins or a pre-paid Metrocard for the New York buses, and one morning several weeks ago, as I stood at the eastbound stop on the corner of Broadway and 125th Street, I realised I had neither. Only notes. Two other men were waiting for the M60, the cross-town bus — the one I was to take to the Harlem railway station — and there was no time to go in search of change. Through the broad arch of the iron bridge over 125th Street, which supports an elevated section of the Broadway subway line, I saw a bus coming from the Hudson, and I

Mark Steyn

Reality check

Mark Steyn says the so-called realists are wrong about the war on terror, and suggests that ‘creative disruption’ is the best way to deal with Saudi Arabia New Hampshire Here’s a headline from Tuesday’s Glasgow Herald: ‘Saudi Security Forces “Allowed the Killers to Escape”’. Hold that thought for a moment. For two-and-three-quarter years now, there’s been a continuing debate between, loosely, the ‘neoconservatives’ and the ‘realists’. The old realpolitik crowd dispute that the war on terror is a war at all, except in the debased sense of the ‘war on drugs’. That’s to say, terror, like drugs, will always be with us, and the best thing to do is manage

Simon Heffer

They won the war but lost the peace

Over the next few days we shall see countless images, in photographs and on film, of the men who won the second world war. The D-Day generation can claim to have been the last that had a genuine measure of greatness. These were not, for the most part, professional warriors, for whom the services had been a vocation. They had been plucked from civilian life, in many cases straight from school, to defend their country and win the bloodiest war in history. Such an achievement required beliefs, values and attitudes that few young people today can begin to imagine. We shall also, over the next few days, see modern images