Society

Saturday

Walter Ellis

Survival of the richest

New York As British universities lurch from funding crisis to funding crisis, the jealous eyes of the academic establishment focus obsessively on the United States as the role model for future success. The assumption is that if UK universities charged ‘realistic’ fees, they would recreate themselves as ‘world class’ — or, at any rate, superior — institutions, like those in America. But what is the truth about American universities? Are they really so much better than those in Britain? Are US students in general better educated? Does the US profit from the enormous sacrifice made each year by parents and students? Some — perhaps 20 or 30 — American universities

Sam Schulman

What’s the big deal, Naomi?

Naomi Wolf has eased the burden of silence she has been carrying for over 20 years. In New York magazine she reveals that one evening after a dinner party, when she was a Yale undergraduate, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale placed his ‘heavy, boneless hand hot’ on her thigh. After she repelled the advance, if it was an advance, Mr Bloom took his bottle, proclaimed his innocence — or so I take it — by saying ‘You are a deeply troubled girl’, and left. But for me, it awakened a more intimate memory. I was 27, a postgraduate student at Yale in my last term, and then, as now, a

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 February 2004

Mr Oliver Letwin, the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the Tories wanted to freeze government spending, except that on health, education and pensions, and would fund increases there from economic growth. On the day he made his remarks, a report by the government’s efficiency review, headed by Sir Peter Gershon, said that perhaps £15 billion could be saved by transforming the way public-sector bodies worked; his prescription envisaged centralisation, economies of scale and regulation by penalties. Vodafone was beaten in its attempt to take over AT&T Wireless by the American group Cingular. Mr Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector of schools, recommended that GCSEs and A-levels should turn

Alexander Chancellor

Diary – 21 February 2004

It had never occurred to me that India might have an obesity problem, but apparently it does. Just before leaving India this month to return to Britain, where I found an obesity panic going on — see this week’s cover story — I chanced upon a story in the Times of India headlined ‘Obesity costs India dear’. According to the article, 27 per cent of Delhi schoolchildren are obese, and the country has spent over £43 billion on treating obesity-related health problems over the past five years. Since we know that millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition, this seems very odd. But then it turned out, further on in the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 21 February 2004

I blushed to learn I had been wrong all my life. ‘Though Sir William Golding consistently pronounced the word as contsh in a lecture that he gave on The Lord of the Flies at the University of Oxford in 1990,’ says Professor Robert Burchfield in his New Fowler’s, ‘the more usual standard pronunciation is conk.’ I cannot think that I have ever heard anyone pronounce conch as conk. William Golding, a man interested in language, might have been expected to know, especially since the shell played a notable part in his novel. Etymologically there is some sense in the conk sound, since the word comes from Greek konche; I should

Jeremy Clarke

Odd dogs and Englishmen

In my experience a long coat on a man is often a sign of mental instability. Frankie’s brown woollen overcoat was so long he kept stepping on the hem and treading it into the mud. Jim did the introductions. Frankie took no notice of my name, calling me ‘laddie’ instead. Then he said he’d got the kettle on and led us into the house. His hunting dogs had the run of the ground floor and there were little piles of their excrement on the bare floorboards. In the kitchen a tractor tyre was leaning against a wall, and there was a chainsaw leaking oil on the kitchen table. We took

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 21 February 2004

Dear Mary… Q. When one is present at a dinner party where a politician is a fellow guest, I have noticed a tendency for the politician to hold forth with a monologue which brooks no interruption or response from would-be interlocutors. There is nothing party political about this — it seems to happen across the spectrum, from fascist to left-wing. Members of other professions — legal, medical, the racing fraternity and so on — do not indulge in this monomania, so how can one tactfully discourage it?S.T., Chirton, Wiltshire A. Even Queen Victoria said of Gladstone, ‘He speaks to me as if I was a public meeting.’ Yet at the

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 21 February 2004

Parents who find the state education system unsatisfactory but cannot afford private schooling are getting together to hire tutors to teach their children at home. The Roman public servant Pliny the Younger (AD 61–112) would have applauded. Pliny was visiting his native town of Comum (modern Como) when he found out that the young son of a fellow citizen was being taught not locally but in faraway Mediolanum (Milan) — and he was not the only one. Baffled, Pliny remonstrated with the fathers for not raising their children in their native town where they belonged, adding that at home they could also be guaranteed to be properly brought up. He

Andro Linklater

A curse — or a blessing in disguise

The death of Francesco Cenci has the ring of a contemporary crime. A wealthy, well-connected man is killed when he steps onto a balcony which inexplicably gives way beneath him. Within days of his burial, local gossip suggests that it was no accident — the hole in the balcony is too small for anyone to slip through. Investigators discover blood-stained bed-clothes, and when the body is exhumed the skull is found to have been caved in by blows from an axe. Under questioning, Francesco’s servants reveal that he was killed on the orders of his wife and daughter aided by two sons. The Cenci murder took place in Italy in

Michael Glover

The great English blight

Mark Abley is a Canadian poet of Welsh descent who has recently been travelling the world in search of minority languagues which are bleeding to death or, in the case of Welsh, Faroese and Basque, just about succeeding in staunching their gaping wounds. This is an emotive subject for many writers (perhaps especially for poets), the fact that every year, somewhere in the world, the last wheelchair-bound speaker of some native tongue is probably expiring somewhere in a nursing home, surrounded by middle-aged socio-linguists with highly sensitive voice recorders, as he takes with him those 27 different words which somehow manage to mean, by some miracle of mouth-gapingly ancient linguistic

Bruce Anderson

Make war on terror, not drugs

I wants to make your flesh creep,’ is the Fat Boy’s refrain in the Pickwick Papers. In Berlin last week, I was at a conference which the Fat Boy would have enjoyed. The subject was terror; the threat that weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands would pose to the West, during the foreseeable future. One point impressed itself, instantly and forcefully. The proceedings were dominated by scientists, discussing anthrax, smallpox and chemical weapons in the most matter-of-fact manner. There was agreement that given the difficulty of acquiring plutonium or enriched uranium, the terrorist nuclear threat was still over the horizon. But as for all other threats, horizons contract and

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Not a shred of evidence

Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Fear of paedophilia makes you fat

Rod Liddle says that the government’s White Paper on public health won’t help the fatties, but if we could overcome our fear of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’, children might be able to reduce their weight on the playing field Everybody you know is on a diet because everybody you know is fat. Sometimes they’re just a bit porky, a roll of subcutaneous blubber the colour and consistency of a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake around the midriff, or at the top of the legs. Quite often, though, they’re quiveringly leviathan and — rather like our universe — in a state of perpetual, hectic expansion; the folds of enveloping flesh growing almost before your eyes. And

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 February 2004

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, announced plans to set up a Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was likened to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, to replace the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, and to take over the functions of the Home Office and Customs and Excise in investigating the smuggling of people, tobacco and illegal drugs. Mr Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, asked on television: ‘What would be wrong with making heroin available on the state for people who want to abuse their bodies?’ Nineteen Chinese workers, two of them women, were drowned as they picked cockles in Morecambe Bay. One telephoned

Max Hastings

Diary – 14 February 2004

It is hard to define qualifications for the new chairman and director-general of the BBC. Now that I am past being even a joke candidate, I will confess that I once told my old friend Christopher Bland I regretted not having been D-G. He remarked tersely, ‘You would have hated it, and you would have been rotten at it.’ The more we talked, the more I believed him. My own ideal of the D-G was formed as a teenage BBC researcher during Hugh Carleton Greene’s reign in the early Sixties. The function was then plainly understood to be editorial. This has long ceased to be the case. In recent years

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 14 February 2004

‘We need closure,’ said Mr Greg Dyke after resigning as director-general of the BBC. ‘Not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there.’ Over the past couple of months the newspapers have reported the closure of more than one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, of mother-and-baby units, of factories, railway stations and motorways. Some of these closures were more welcome than others. But Mr Dyke was not proposing the closure of the BBC — a truly radical idea; he was using a metaphor, or, if you prefer, borrowing a bit of psychobabble. He meant much the same by his phrase as Mr Blair meant by ‘drawing a

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 14 February 2004

Dear Mary… Q. What would be a fitting response to the extremely patronising remark ‘My goodness, you’ve got him well trained!’ This whenever my husband serves, clears (and has often prepared) a dinner party. Such behaviour is still obviously unacceptable to the majority of guests, even in these enlightened times, and among forty-somethings. I am normally left speechless. Please help. Name and address withheld A. Why not reply, ‘On the contrary. He’s got me well trained into just standing back and letting him do everything. Didn’t you know that housework is the new leisure activity of choice? It’s so soothing compared to real life.’ Q. The other night I was

Interconnect

Seek those things that are above

Something extraordinary and rare is happening in London: we have an incomparable El Greco exhibition in our midst. It doesn’t really matter that it’s being staged in the rebarbative dungeon-like rooms of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing basement, for even those inconsiderate walls are alive with the strange music of El Greco’s vision. For a few months the dungeon becomes a sacred crypt, filled with the fluttering spirits of El Greco’s agonies, ecstasies and visitations, with a wild chant that cannot be stilled. Against such strong magic we are powerless: along with El Greco’s saints and sinners our gaze drifts inevitably heavenwards. The artist John Craxton has spent more than

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Equal rites

Last Saturday must have been a difficult day for St Paul. His cathedral, still covered in patches of scaffolding like pins supporting badly broken legs, was teeming, inside and out, with women in dog collars. In the crypt, an hour before the grand celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood, there were women priests of every description: fifty-something tiggywinkles with thick NHS spectacles; red-cheeked 30-year-olds, their clerical collars just visible above green fleeces; Laura Ashley skirts and sensible slip-ons mixed with smart black trouser suits and high heels. Exciting rarities included a very tall woman in black breeches waving a walking stick decorated with

Stephen Glover

Why is Tony Blair being given such an easy ride over his WMD blunder?

One of the most brilliant myths fostered by Alastair Campbell is the idea of our nihilistic media attacking the government morning, noon and night. It is utter bunkum. Until the Iraq war the BBC gave Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt in scandal after scandal. Among newspapers, the Prime Minister could count on the support of the Murdoch press, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and, for much of the time, the Guardian and the Independent. The prospect of the war against Iraq, and its aftermath, changed things somewhat. The Independent, Guardian, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail constituted the opposition, but they were outweighed by the Murdoch newspapers and