Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 August 2004

Shakespeare invented the words anchovy, well-ordered, worm-hole and zany. Or did he? I’ve been nagged at the back of my mind (a tender spot) by doubts about Shakespeare ever since I wrote (5 June) about Dr David Crystal’s remarks in his excellent book The Stories of English. Dr Crystal notes that of the 2,035 words (or ‘lexemes’) first attributed to Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary, 743 are found elsewhere within 25 years of his using them, and that 900 words eventually fall out of usage. So how many coinages can we attribute to Shakepeare? Dr Crystal concludes, ‘Whether we assess his lexical contribution as 800 or 1,700, it is

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 7 August 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I am 16 and am looking forward to the delights of Daymer Bay in Cornwall, a meeting-ground renowned for its nightly teenage public-school gatherings. I am somewhat nervous as I do not smoke, and most of my friends use cigarettes as tools of entry into a circle of people. How, Mary, can I avoid the terrible prospect of being left standing alone, and thus immediately being classified as a loser? M.M.H., Wooton Rivers, Wiltshire A. I am reliably informed that the correct etiquette for those wishing to enter a conversational cluster on Daymer Bay is to simply walk into it saying, ‘Blahblahblah.’ This is an ironic nod

Petronella Wyatt

All change

I was lunching with some friends the other day (I don’t lunch for every column, incidentally, but these happened to be friends from abroad whom I hadn’t seen for a while). I took them to a restaurant and we began catching up on our news over the gazpacho. ‘How’s so-and-so?’ I asked of a girl my age, who lives in America. This girl, let us call her Lucy and hope she doesn’t recognise that it’s her I’m talking about, is a good friend of mine (in a way we grew up together). Recently, though, we haven’t been in touch so much as she has been moving round the States. Anyway,

Celia Walden

It sure beats The Priory

The chances are that if you’re nearing 30, you have begun to feel the itch of dissatisfaction. You’ve struggled to find the perfect profession, job, partner and home, but have failed in at least one respect, and are suffering from a sense of existential disgruntlement that is becoming known as the quarter-life crisis. But however bad it gets, there is one temptation you must resist: the Alpha experience. I came across this phenomenon when a friend invited me to a dinner party recently in Holy Trinity Church on the Brompton Road. Our collective hosts were to be Alpha, an organisation that offers an introductory course in Christianity, over a meal

Daniel Wolf

Think before you bomb

If there is a crisis in a remote place, and governments, newspapers and aid agencies start to agitate for ‘action’, you naturally begin to suspect that much of the information you are being fed is false. When Tony Blair starts talking about intervention, your suspicion turns into virtual certainty. This is not necessarily because journalists, officials, agencies and Blair are ignorant of the facts (although ignorance is invariably a contributing factor); it’s because the tragedy and the publicity exist in different universes. On the one hand, there is how things are — the grim, confusing, recalcitrant reality of events; on the other hand, there’s how the tragedy is presented, how

Michael Hanlon

There’s no time like the present

The world is, we are told day after day, week after week, going to hell in a handcart. After the most brutal, catastrophic and inhuman century in history, the new millennium has kicked off in the way it clearly intends to go on. War, famine and pestilence stalk the savannahs and forests of Africa. The Middle East is turning into a charnel house. And the planet itself is under a human onslaught the likes of which we have never seen before. Every day, it seems, there is new and ever-more persuasive evidence that the age of doom, if not quite upon us, must surely be very nearly nigh. Last week

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 6 August 2004

When Plato writes about education, he comes up with a brilliant image of the master-pupil relationship: ‘After a long partnership in a common life, truth flashes on the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark.’ The Labour and Tory education manifestos have very little to say about this ‘rather dodgy’ (© C. Clarke) concept. They think the answer to school problems is to play about with systems and structures. The Roman professor Quintilian (c. ad 90) is the first ancient to think seriously about how schools work. He insists that a good school depends as much on the character and psychological understanding of the teacher as on the

Boris Johnson

Diary – 6 August 2004

Las Vegas Whatever else we import from American politics, please let us avoid the appalling new practice of requiring children to give testimonials on behalf of their parents. I was sitting with my 11-year-old daughter in our VIP suite in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, waiting for John Kerry to come on CNN, when my blood ran cold. Not one but two Kerry daughters were produced to give speeches in praise of Kerry the loving Pop. This is America, of course, where top politics has Hollywood production values, and both speeches were impeccably charming. One of the girls, Alexandra, told of the time when the Kerry hamster fell, in its cage,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 31 July 2004

The government is to post a leaflet called ‘Preparing for Emergency’ to all 25 million households in Britain; it recommends keeping indoors with bottled water, tinned food, a battery radio, spare batteries and a first-aid kit in case of terrorist attack. Mr Peter Mandelson, the Labour MP who was twice obliged to leave the Cabinet, became Britain’s sole nomination as a European commissioner, to work under Mr Jose Manuel Barroso, the president-elect of the Commission. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, turned his attention to animal rights extremists. Labour party policy-makers agreed to stop employers counting bank holidays as part of workers’ statutory 20-days-a-year holiday, and proposed increasing the length

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 31 July 2004

M. Jacques Myard, the bouncy French deputy, was talking on the wireless the other day about ‘unsecurity’. I am not mocking his English; there was a word unsecure in the 17th century, and we still talk of unsecured loans. But the meaning of security is like a pea in the butter-dish — hard to get hold of. In France security (or its French analogue) is an unsubtle codeword for ‘safety from mugging by foreigners’. By foreigners I don’t mean French people, but Algerians and other immigrants widely feared and hated. Hence Le Pen and, in Holland, Pim Fortuyn, the murdered populist with the strangely pronounced surname. Security means lots of

Taki

A classic head-turner

On board S/Y Bushido I know, I know, it’s a bit much, filing from one’s yacht — but, what the hell, it’s not every day that hacks own boats. One thousand, one hundred square metres of sail, 125ft-long overall, steel hulled and very fast downwind, she is my latest pride and joy, now that I’ve been shot down at the Oxford Union, that is. Mind you, I began thinking about building a boat only three years ago. All my other ones were hand-me-downs from my old dad. The reason for building from scratch was that classic sailing boats were on the market but at astronomical prices that not even Russian

Petronella Wyatt

Vintage me

The other day I was asked by a friend to a lunch party. I told her that, unfortunately, I would have to leave early as I had a very important appointment at three in Westbourne Park Villas. ‘Oooh,’ she said, intrigued. What is it? I duly told her and that was that. The lunch turned out to be very jolly and I began to forget the time. I looked at my watch and it was twenty to three. Crumbs. Everyone was still on coffee. I stood up and said, ‘I’m really sorry but I have an appointment and if I don’t go I’ll be late.’ My hostess then giggled and

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 31 July 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I wonder if I might pass on this little tip to your readers. We have recently had new neighbours move in who keep a terrier, which is locked in the house all day while the owners are out at work. The constant whining and barking of the bored and lonely dog was driving us to distraction, and the new neighbours seemed disinclined to do anything about it. The solution turned out to be simple — laxative chocolate, removed from its wrapper, and pushed through the letterbox. After coming home to a house full of dog excrement for only two days in a row (minimalist decor with white

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Sending Mr Mandelson to Brussels can only add to the sum total of human happiness

I hastened last Friday to the Grays Inn studios of five news on Channel 5 to be interviewed for their 7 p.m. bulletin alongside Nick Watt of the Guardian, on the sensation of the hour. The sensation was the planned appointment of Mr Peter Mandelson as an EU commissioner in Brussels. On time, Mr Watt and I were in place on the sofa. Channel 5’s Charlie Stayt asked us about the appointment. Starting with me, he asked what I made of his Channel’s public opinion poll which had suggested that nine out of ten respondents objected to Mr Mandelson’s appointment. I replied that this said more about the British public

The Spectator

The Leader | 31 July 2004

But why is Diana’s fountain being closed? Some people are decently embarrassed at the failure of this £3.6 million waterwork. Some people may be secretly amused. They look at the bone-dry channels of the Hyde Park memorial, and the metal security barriers that now surround it, and they feel that distinctive British joy in architectural disaster that went with the Dome. Some people seem to be blaming Kathryn Gustafson, the designer, who was responsible for another dud fountain somewhere else. Some are even blaming Rosa Monckton, the friend of the late princess who gave the commission to Gustafson on her casting vote. Some say the whole project has been jinxed

Andrew Lambirth

Secrets of the mummies

Mummies have exerted a strange fascination over Westerners ever since the first tomb was rifled and its contents transported to Europe. At one point, the unwrapping of mummified bodies became fashionable events to which came fee-paying audiences of the rich. Lord Londesborough’s At Home card, for Monday, 10 June 1850, was a numbered invitation to attend at 144 Piccadilly. A mummy case in profile decorates the card which is thrillingly inscribed ‘A Mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past Two’. The problem with such dramatic divestments was that nearly all the useful information to advance our knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians was lost or destroyed during the spectacle. Nowadays,

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

What a load of b*ll*cks

Young men are being bullied into examining themselves for testicular cancer. It’s not very dignified, says Brendan O’Neill, and may do more harm than good Why is New Britain so obsessed with its young men’s testicles? If, like me, you are aged between 15 and 34 you will almost certainly have been advised by a doctor or a magazine feature or a glossy poster in a GP’s waiting room to test yourself regularly for signs of testicular cancer (or the Big TC for short). Health authorities and cancer charities are spending millions of pounds on ‘raising awareness’ of this disease, in order to keep us blokes on full alert for

Mark Steyn

Terminator or girlie man?

New Hampshire Everyone wants to know what the key demographic will be in this election. In 1996, it was ‘soccer moms’; in 1994, ‘angry white men’. For Campaign ’04, the columnist Michelle Malkin has been touting the concept of ‘security moms’ — gun-owning women whom 9/11 shook out of their Gen-X stupor. I’d say ‘security moms’ — or ‘bellicose women’, as Prof Glenn Reynolds, America’s Instapundit, dubbed them — were certainly a factor and maybe a decisive one in Republican gains in the 2002 elections. But I wonder if there are quite so many of them two years on. And, in the absence of any alternative suggestions, it seems to

Friday

Radek Sikorski

Diary – 30 July 2004

Kabul Gandamack Lodge is Harry Flashman’s fictitious address in the original George MacDonald Fraser novel about the caddish officer, set at the time of the first Afghan war. You can now stay at Gandamack Lodge, a handsome if dilapidated villa in downtown Kabul. A lawn, wicker chairs, prints of Surrey on the walls: if it wasn’t for the electricity cuts and the coffee, which the Afghans just can’t get right, this would be a piece of England in the heart of the slum that is Kabul. Two of Osama bin Laden’s wives, number one and number two, lived here during the Taleban’s reign. In their haste to depart, as American

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 24 July 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, passed the tenth anniversary of his election as leader of the Labour party. During a Commons debate on the Butler report, he defended his decision to go to war against Iraq. He then turned his mind to a reshuffle. Mr Blair had said earlier that it was time to abandon ‘the 1960s liberal social consensus on law and order’. Mr David Blunkett came up with a bundle of law-and-order wheezes, in a ‘five-year plan’, including £80 fixed penalties for shoplifting, the experimental tracking of up to 5,000 convicts and suspects by satellite, and an invitation to every town to delate 50 culprits for antisocial