Society

Saturday

Bill Alexander

When revenge is sweet

The Elizabethans must have had a completely different attitude to physical violence. For a start, it was an inherent part of their system of justice. Even when we had the death penalty, killing someone in the name of justice was expected to be as quick and painless as possible. The hangman’s craft was to assess his subject’s body in a way that would ensure a clean quick twist of the neck, not slow and painful strangulation; that would be a bad hanging. But the Elizabethan hangman’s art was different. In the case of traitors, for instance, prolonging the pain, extending the humiliation, was a part of the punishment, part of

The Spectator

Unfair to the Third World

To appreciate the unique affection enjoyed by the British farmer, it is necessary to look no further than the bumf put out for British Food Fortnight, a series of harvest festivals, farmers’ markets and barbecues to be held across the country from 20 September to 4 October. ‘Farmers would gain if we could all eat more locally, regionally and UK-produced food,’ it reads, before suggesting some prayers for the brave men who plough the furrow in their Massey Fergussons. Let us hope there is room in those prayers for the soul of Lee Kyung-hae, a Korean cattle farmer who last week stabbed himself through the heart outside the World Trade

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The Iraq blunder will make Americans say, ‘Never again!’ And that’s a pity

A charge should be laid at the door of those who urged America onward into Iraq this year, and it should come not from pacifists, United Nations groupies or Uncle Sam-baiters, but from those on the Right who think that a great power does have special responsibilities, including – sometimes – a responsibility to intervene. We should charge the neoconservatives with fouling it up. We should charge them with spoiling the case. We should charge hotheads in the media with egging an administration into making a fool of itself when wiser friends urged restraint. The yee-hah tendency in the Pentagon and in the press has besmirched, by misapplication, a decent

Stephen Glover

Why all the hatred for Andrew Gilligan? His story was essentially correct

It strikes me, as I follow the Hutton inquiry, that almost any human activity can be made to appear questionable, even dodgy. I think of my – not untypical – hurried departure for London yesterday morning. Already late, I filled the dog’s water bowl directly from a jug, though I knew it needed washing out; threw a bank statement into the bin unopened; ate half a chocolate bar left by one of my sons on the kitchen table; and induced the taxi driver to break the speed limit as we raced to the railway station, where I just caught my train, and thereby accomplished my mission. If, though, something had

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 20 September 2003

Sven Goran Eriksson and David Beckham have launched a charity to bring about world peace through football, with Mr Beckham’s immortal words: ‘I think my advice to any children out there looking for world peace is, you’ve got to enjoy life, be happy, and if football or sport is going to make a difference, then, you know, go for it, because it’s important to people.’ If football really is a promoter of peace, Mr Beckham might like to try to explain why Britons, many of whom simply wish to potter harmlessly around cultural sites, have been advised, for their own safety, to stay away from Turkey on 11 October, the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Information superhighwaymen

I occasionally worry that future scholars will be unable to write my biography because of my failure to keep a diary. But it seems I need not be too bothered. There came a moment last week when I realised there will be more than enough information for them to piece together my life in all its excruciatingly tedious detail. That moment came when my wife, who has recently enrolled on a part-time, one-day-a-week course at a former polytechnic, showed me a two-page ‘medical centre database’ form which she had been ordered to complete before she could begin her studies. ‘Have you ever taken illegal drugs or solvents?’ it asked. ‘Have

Roger Scruton

The truth about meaning

There is a certain tradition in American philosophy that combines logical rigour and systematic thinking in a style so concise and self-contained as to offer little or no purchase to the critic. The tradition began with C.S. Peirce, found triumphant expression in Quine and Goodman, and lived again – just at the moment when everybody was beginning to think that it belonged to a vanished phase of American culture, alongside William Carlos Williams and Aaron Copland – in the philosophy of Quine’s most brilliant student, Donald Davidson. When I began research in Cambridge in 1967, Davidson’s name was never mentioned in the philosophy department. But within a year or so

Rachel Johnson

Boys and girls go out to work

So how many did you get this summer?’ I ask. ‘Six hundred and fifty,’ answers Lucy Townsend at Cazenove, the stockbroker. ‘More than 400,’ says Caroline Dawnay, a literary agent at PFD. ‘About two dozen a week,’ moans Ann Sindall at The Spectator. And one of them, who was only 14, should have been at home, in Ann’s frank opinion, reading Jackie magazine. Even I got four requests to supply work experience to students or sixth-formers – a whole generation drawn, like moths to light, to offices over the summer. There they flutter until the darkness of autumn falls and they can go back to school or campus armed with

Anne Sebba

Go straight to Heaven

Tourists in downtown Calcutta (or Kolkata, as we all must now learn to say) cannot fail to be struck by a 50-foot mosaic of the city’s most famous immigrant, Mother Teresa. The Skopje-born nun is smiling benignly on the snarled-up traffic chaos that belches and honks beneath her. To one side of this giant piece of wall-art is an advertisement proclaiming, ‘Reserved for Calcutta’s Best Brands’. Mother Teresa is Calcutta’s best brand. Later this month, when, in record time, the Pope bestows on her the Vatican super seal of approval and declares her blessed, she will be well on her way to becoming a saint. Hers will probably become the

Theodore Dalrymple

Nasty, brutish and on credit

Who says the leisure class is no more? On the contrary, as a recent weekday visit to the new spiritual heart of Britain revealed to me, it is very large indeed. Of course, the modern leisure class is not necessarily very high on the registrar-general’s scale of social classes from I to V, but that is another matter altogether. But where, you ask, is Britain’s new spiritual centre? The very idea of such a centre seems a bit odd – absurd even. It is certainly not Rome or Jerusalem, much less Canterbury. In good pagan fashion, Britain’s spiritual centre is close to its geographical centre. The answer is the Bull

Peter Hitchens

Reform the BBC, don’t kill it

Why do I now find that I, one of the BBC’s most persistent critics, feel the need to defend the organisation that I have attacked so many times in the past? Because for all its faults I would rather that Britain had a public-service broadcaster than that the airwaves were sold to the fattest cheque book. The time has come for sensible reactionaries to rally round their old enemies at the BBC, and for the BBC to seek support among those moral and cultural conservatives it has spent too long despising. Those who think that such an alliance would be as unprincipled and doomed as the Nazi

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 19 September 2003

Commentators are expressing shock at the Hutton inquiry’s ‘revelation’ that Tony Blair consults a private cabal of chums about policy. Excuse the Roman historian while he stifles a yawn. The Greeks had a word for ‘a monarch’s court’, and Roman writers adopted it (aula) to describe the imperial ‘court’ that emerged with the advent of emperors: politics having been a relatively open affair under the republican system (rule by Senate and elected executives), power was now in the hands of the emperor and his chosen associates, a closed circle with personal access to the emperor and the power to control access for others. Immediate family, including wives, bulked large in

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 13 September 2003

Many people think a runcible spoon is a sort of pickle-fork with a serrated edge. If that is what they call it, then that is the word for it, but it is not the same word that Edward Lear used when he wrote of a runcible spoon in 1871. He also wrote of a runcible hat and a runcible cat, neither much use for eating pickles. The new meaning of runcible can be traced no further back than 1926, when someone wrote to Notes and Queries with the suggestion. The correspondent gave its origin as a ‘jocose allusion to the battle of Roncevaux because it has a cutting edge.’ A

Taki

Vienna lost in time

Gstaad There seems to be a touch of autumn in the air, a damp, still greyness. How quickly summers drift away nowadays. Typically, my boat is just about ready to be launched, now that my thoughts are turning inward, towards Mittel Europa, Vienna and the Danube to be exact. Richard Bernstein, writing in the New York Times, described Vienna as a city of spectacular opulence ‘mixed with a sense of something missing, even at its core’. It’s a good one, but I prefer a different one, the one about ‘a city that’s like a grand opera sung by the understudies’. One drives from Passau into the metropolis through thickly forested

Jeremy Clarke

Safety first

Sophia was such a very large lady, the seatbelt of my car, even when fully extended, wasn’t quite long enough to go round her. She insisted on wearing it though, so her lover Ulrika and I redoubled our efforts. After a titanic struggle we found that we could force it around her if we pulled on the strap with our combined might and clicked it into the catch on the driver’s side. The belt cut so deeply into Sophia’s stomach it was lost from view, but she insisted she was happy. She would rather be uncomfortable and safe, she said, rather than the other way round. I’d met Sophia and

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 13 September 2003

Britain sent about 1,400 more troops to Iraq, the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry and the 1st Battalion Royal Green Jackets, to supplement its force of 10,000. Another 1,200 may be sent too. A man died during a clash between two factions of Iraqi asylum-seekers and two dozen men using baseball bats, sticks, bricks and knives in the St Ann’s district of Nottingham. Mr Paul Evans, the commissioner of Boston city police department, was appointed by Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, as head of the Police Standards Unit, which monitors local forces. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the press he was going to say, at a TUC dinner,

Nicholas Farrell

Diary – 13 September 2003

Last week The Spectator interviewed Silvio Berlusconi, and there followed a political furore that dominated the Italian news for – well, at least a couple of days. The cause of the crisis was the opinion of Italy’s 57th Italian post-war prime minister on the subject of judges. This is a field in which he is expert, as a result of 500 raids in the past decade by the Guardie di Finanza on the various tendrils of his media empire. Il Cavaliere – as he is nicknamed – told us that Italian judges are ‘antropologicamente diversi’ from the rest of us for two reasons: (1) they are left-wing; and (2) they

The Spectator

Feedback | 13 September 2003

Comment on Forza Berlusconi! by Boris Johnson and Nicholas Farrell (06/09/2003) As a Swiss citizen interested in political history, and as an observer of recent political developments in Europe, I must question the approach of the media to the phenomenon Berlusconi and the effects it may produce in the long term. After 1989, a new class of politicians has appeared the members of which are not in the least interested in maintaining the conventional texture of the nation-state and it’s traditional principles, e.g. separation of powers, constitutional law, independence of the judiciary, but mainly in the pursuit of personal power play. If these politicians have started their career on the

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 13 September 2003

Dear Mary… Q. Like an earlier correspondent this summer, my wife and I find ourselves in the invidious position of being asked, very much as an afterthought, to the wedding of friends to whom we considered ourselves close. Worse, on the grounds that they had ‘run out of’ the real thing, we have not even been sent a proper invitation, but a photocopy. How can we best express our dismay at having this B-list status so blatantly thrust upon us? H.R.-T., East Lothian A. Punish the couple by the following means. Arrange for a third party, posing as a Sloaney factotum service, to ring them to arrange a time for

Interconnect

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMini-breaks

Mmmm. Got lovely new mini-break brochure: Pride of Britain: Leading Country House Hotels of the British Isles. Marvellous. Going through all the pages one by one imagining Daniel and me being alternately sexual and romantic in all the bedrooms and dining-rooms.Bridget Jones’s Diary Last weekend my husband and I went on a mini-break to Majorca. Two weeks before this we spent a long weekend in Whitby, with friends. Earlier this summer I attended a two-day hen weekend in Manchester, and next week my husband is off on a three-day mid-week break to Valencia for the famous annual tomato-throwing (sounds like most dinner times with my two-year-old, but apparently this is