Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 24 April 2004

Dear Mary… Q. As a child I largely complied with my parents’ wishes and there was no question of baiting them ad infinitum as my own children do me. In my day there was still the fear of smacking but, needless to say, my own children, a boy aged nine and a girl aged seven, have never been smacked. They do love each other and usually get on well, except during long journeys, when they fight like cat and dog. Over Easter I arrived at various destinations totally drained from breaking up fights. I am now developing travelphobia in anticipation of long journeys scheduled for the summer holidays. My husband,

John De-Falbe

Outposts of the imagination

This novel, translated from the Afrikaans by André Brink, was offered to me for review with an apologetic note advising me to abandon it at the first onset of boredom. Seven hundred and fifty dense pages later I can report that it is riveting throughout. Based on the first 50 years of Dutch settlement in South Africa, it is a monumental, vividly imagined epic that, in spite of its huge cast and range, maintains its balance and direction. It may give some idea of the book’s scale to observe that the central character, Pieternella, is not born until page 154. She is the first half-caste to be born in the

Stephen Glover

Don’t worry: the ‘tabloid revolution’ is not going to carry everything before it

It is becoming a commonplace that the ‘tabloid wars’ between broadsheet titles are transforming the newspaper market. There is a widespread belief that in producing tabloid editions the Independent and, to a lesser extent, the Times have stolen a brilliant march on their rivals. The Guardian is accused of having fallen asleep on the job, and one excitable commentator has suggested that the paper is doomed. The Daily Telegraph is also thought by many to be fatally missing out on the revolution. As soon as it finds a new buyer, it is suggested, it must unveil the tabloid edition with whose prototype frustrated executives have been tinkering. Such is the

Graham Claydon

Harry, England and St Alban!

This is the time of year when we stop complaining for a moment about the dreadful spring weather and start complaining about the neglect of England’s patron saint, St George. Our grumbles go something like this: we don’t know what to do to mark his feast day (23 April), we have no traditions like the shamrock or daffodils to fall back on — and the nearest we can manage to a dragon seems to be a bout of football violence. All that is true; and it reinforces my view that adopting St George as our patron saint was a terrible mistake. It was something we stumbled into and don’t know

Gerald Kaufman

Recipe for terror

Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths One morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John’s Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel and that her daughter, on aliyah (the Hebrew word for immigration to the Holy Land), was a doctor in Jerusalem. This nice lady told me, ‘I would defend Israel with my last breath.’ So, it might be thought: here was exactly the kind of person who would have been delighted by last week’s accord between

Mark Steyn

Only Bush can save Europe

Mark Steyn says that the US President’s ‘transformational’ response to Muslim fundamentalism can save the Old World; European ‘managerialism’ can’t New Hampshire Last July, speaking to the United States Congress, the only assembly on the planet in which he’s still assured of a warm reception, Tony Blair remarked: ‘As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?’ Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 23 April 2004

A personal catastrophe strikes, and the cry goes up ‘Why me?’ and ‘Not fair’. The ancients knew all about this, and the 5th-century bc Greek historian Herodotus supplies an answer — of sorts. But first, back to Fronto. Marcus Cornelius Fronto (c. ad 95–166), orator and public servant, was a close friend of emperors, being appointed by Antoninus Pius (emperor ad 138–61) as tutor to the next emperor, the Stoic Marcus Aurelius (ad 161–80). Much of Fronto’s correspondence survives. In one of his many affecting exchanges with Marcus Aurelius, he bewails in ad 165 the loss of a beloved grandson. This, Fronto exclaims, is neither aequum (‘fair’) nor iustum (‘just’).

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 April 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, in reaction to violence in Iraq, ‘Our response to this should not be to run away in fright or hide away, or think that we have got it all wrong. Our response on the contrary should be to hold firm, because that is what the vast majority of the Iraqi people want.’ He was speaking before a visit to the United States for talks with President George Bush. A convicted murderer, James McCormick, aged 17, was allowed to go free from Hamilton sheriff court; he was under the care of Reliance Custodial Services, which had just begun an £11 million contract to escort

Boris Johnson

Diary – 17 April 2004

It was our last day in Courchevel, and everyone was having a snowball fight by the lifts at 1850, when my friend Charlotte said in urgent tones, ‘You know you’ve been looking for Posh Spice?’ Too damn right I had. Le tout Courchevel had been hunting the maritally troubled superstar, who was rumoured to be somewhere on the slopes patching things up with ‘the most famous Englishman since Nelson’ (Rees-Mogg). One wife of a stupendously rich Goldman Sachs banker had pursued her so fast down Pralong, a blue run, that she had beaned herself with her own ski and needed four stitches. ‘Well, don’t look now,’ said Charlotte, ‘but she’s

The Spectator

Feedback | 17 April 2004

Criterion of culture David Lovibond (‘The real racists’, 10 April) is quite right in his assertion that culture rather than race and ethnicity is what determines whether an immigrant will integrate well in the host society. To me it matters little if the person next to me is from India or the West Indies, is African or Chinese, if they broadly share my cultural priorities and values, and are willing to promote the good of our common society. What does concern me is when I read of second- or third-generation immigrants who not only show no interest in doing this but who also actively attack those values and condemn the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 17 April 2004

Here’s a modish metaphor that is dead but hasn’t stopped breeding: ‘If I had taken cannabis, I would be transparent about it,’ said Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. ‘I want a transparent, non-variable law on drugs.’ And here’s another specimen caught in the verbal butterfly net of Mr Francis Radcliffe of York, who sent it in, chloroformed and set on a pin: ‘We need a transparent set of vocational qualifications,’ says Mr Mike Tomlinson, the educationist. First, let us admit that Shakespeare used it. ‘Transparent Helena, nature shewes art,/That through thy bosome makes me see thy heart,’ we find in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And if transparent could mean

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 17 April 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I recently went business-class, for the first time in my life, to New Zealand and back. On the second lap of the long return journey, from LA to London, I returned to my correct seat, one of two near a window, to find a couple in their sixties standing there. They said they had been incorrectly given seats away from each other and seemed to expect me, because I was travelling alone, to change to a seat in the centre. Since that would have had no window, I refused. I said I had never flown business-class before, I liked my seat and was looking forward to seeing

Philip Hensher

Three founding fathers of the media

We had all probably agreed by now that the whole memoir thing was getting out of hand, and a UN-negotiated ceasefire between memoirists and suffering readers was urgently needed. We have had more than enough, surely, of whiny books about alcoholism, rape, criminal pasts, drug addiction, all of which culminate, for some reason, in a scene where the narrator sits alone in a hotel room and ‘considers committing suicide’. Enough already, as they say. But, hey, what do you know? Take the form away from juvenile American solipsists and give it back to a wily old English fox with some interests in life, and see how enchanting it instantly becomes.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 17 April 2004

Slaves transported from Africa to the New World in the 18th century had a wretched time, but does the same apply to their distant descendants? It does according to Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who with seven other descendants of slaves this week filed a lawsuit demanding $1 billion in damages from Lloyd’s of London, FleetBoston and the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds. These companies, claims Ms Farmer-Paellmann, who has had her DNA traced to the Mende tribe of Sierra Leone, ‘have destroyed our national and ethnic identity’. She accuses them of ‘aiding and abetting the commission of genocide’ by financing and insuring slave ships. Does Ms Farmer-Paellmann really wish she was plodding around

The Spectator

A loss of respect

Margaret Thatcher is to blame for the abominable rudeness with which parents and children nowadays treat schoolteachers. So said Pat Lerew, president of one of the main teaching unions, earlier this week, and while it is preposterously unfair of her to hold Lady Thatcher personally responsible for the lack of respect in which teachers are now held, it is certainly true that some of today’s parents who were themselves children during the 1980s have absolutely no idea how to behave. The worst among this Eighties generation are marked by a hideous egotism, and by an inability to understand that anything beyond their own dreary consumerist appetites might conceivably be worthy

James Morwood

The pluperfect is doing nicely

We classicists like to think that our subject is one of the great civilising disciplines, that it makes the people who study it better. Sadly for us, though, there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. A lot of us are arrogant, offensive and utterly assured of the rightness of our position. The most famous exemplar of this is probably the poet and scholar A.E. Housman whose unsurpassed skills as a Latinist were communicated by the most venomous pen of his time. (One Oxford professor of Latin, he commented, had ‘the intellect of an idiot child’.) This is the kind of classicist whose obituary so often includes that

Sam Kiley

The hogs of war

Mercenaries make big money in Iraq but, says Sam Kiley, the ‘outsourcing’ of security work is adding to the chaos in the country They bustle through the Palestine Hotel lobby in central Baghdad clanking with military hardware. They have a very special look. The head is crew-cut, the sunglasses wraparound. A Heckler and Koch 9mm submachine gun is de rigueur — strapped across a black Kevlar bullet-proof vest, barely hidden by a photographer’s jacket. Pockets are stuffed with radios, a hand-held global positioning system, medical trauma packs. From the webbing belt holding up ‘rip-proof’ combat trousers, a Gerber multi-tool dangles beside a Leatherman knife. Another gun, usually a Glock 9mm,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 April 2004

After the resignation of Miss Beverley Hughes as immigration minister, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, called a ‘summit’ at Downing Street to plan a ‘cross-government assault’ on failures in the system; MI5 was called in. It had been reported that Mr Blair had promised the Romanian Prime Minister he would lift visa requirements on Romanians coming to Britain as a ‘reward’ for a reduction in the number of asylum-seekers. It was also claimed that immigration officials were ordered not to arrest illegal immigrants lest they apply for asylum and swell the official figures. To mark the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, the Queen took a train with 200 schoolchildren

Michael Vestey

Diary – 10 April 2004

I gave up smoking 11 months ago. It had reached the point where I had come to regard eating as an inconvenient interruption to smoking. People keep asking me if I feel any better but I don’t really. I have a permanent cold, excessive catarrh, I experienced hay fever last summer for the first time, and I have insomnia in the early hours. I’m told by ex-smokers that this can last for two years as the body adjusts. I was smoking too much: 60 Silk Cut Extra Mild a day and, thanks to successive chancellors, was spending about £5,000 a year on the habit. I began buying nicotine replacement patches

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 10 April 2004

‘It’s all Greek to me,’ said my husband, putting down his whisky glass, which was not wet but might have been, on the cover of Liddell and Scott. ‘Oh, darling,’ I said, snatching it up and restoring it to a ‘Guinness is good for you’ mat next to his chair. ‘Don’t pretend to be stupid. There’s no need.’ I had been rummaging around perichoresis, which has suddenly become voguish in English among the sort of people who speak of the ‘anthropic principle’. Not that it is a new word. Gregory of Nazianzus was happily using it in the 4th century. But he spoke Greek. What does it mean? It is