Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 8 November 2003

‘This is a good one,’ said my husband, bubbling into his Famous Grouse. ‘Abbreviator: An officer of the court of Rome appointed to draw up the Pope’s briefs.’ ‘But that can’t possibly be a joke intended by James Murray or his collaborators working on the volume for “A” in the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century,’ I said. ‘Briefs isn’t recorded in that sense until the 1930s.’ ‘You can always spoil a joke,’ retorted my husband, returning to a less beetrooty hue. To be fair, Simon Winchester in his new book on Murray and the OED had explained the impossibility of an intended joke. In fact I don’t

Jeremy Clarke

Signing the Declaration

By day Clive drives a tractor. At night he tramps the fields with a pair of greyhound collie crosses called Knocker and Tip and a lamp. The lamp he is currently using is lighter in weight and much more powerful than his old one. To Clive, the almost incredible scientific and technical advances of the last 20 years have manifested themselves chiefly in the invention of the ferret locator and improvements in the hunting lamp. His new one is so powerful, he claims, that he can see into the next county. For someone like Clive, who hardly goes out of the parish, and has never been out of Devon in

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 8 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I have a pressing question. Although I am as addicted to my mobile as anyone else, I do try to keep conversations in public to a minimum. But I have noticed that on London buses there is a very plague of incessant chatterers. These people always seem to shriek as long and loudly as possible, and invariably in a tongue which sounds, to my terribly untutored ears, like duelling magpies. What can one do? The only thing I have been able to think of is to go up and say, ‘I am a doctor and can tell from the sound of your voice that you may have

The Spectator

Portrait of the week

Mr Michael Howard remained the only candidate for the leadership of the Conservative party after a vote the week before of 90 to 75 against a motion of confidence in Mr Iain Duncan Smith, who later likened the event to a ‘near-death experience’. Talks between the Communication Workers Union and the Post Office ended unofficial strikes by postmen that had brought mail in London and elsewhere to a standstill. Firemen went on unofficial strike over pay rises. Mr James Murdoch was appointed chief executive of BSkyB; he is the 30-year-old son of Mr Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the company. The House of Bishops of the Church of England Synod

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 8 November 2003

What should men pray for? The Roman satirist Juvenal (writing c. ad 120) famously answered mens sana in corpore sano, ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. One wonders what he would have made of today’s men and women in search of the corpus sanum, lurching along the fume-filled roadsides in their huge fluorescent trainers, chatting earnestly into the bottles of water clenched to their ears. Good health, largely a matter of pot luck in the ancient world, was very highly valued. If you survived birth, childhood and disease and could enjoy a respectable diet, you could count yourself pretty fortunate. In such a world anything that could do you

Interconnect

LUXURY GOODS

Behind the bar in my local pub, above the pork scratchings and jars of pickled mussels, is more preserved wildlife, a shelf of Victorian stuffed birds and rodents in glass boxes. No doubt the publican keeps these here to remind the punters of life’s fleeting nature and that they might as well get in another round while they can, but they set the place a bit apart from your All Bar One, and give soaks something to raise their glasses to. Some surroundings demand a little tasteful antique taxidermy — a mediaeval hall needs antlers, and there is nothing like a shiny dead armadillo to offset old books. After decades

Interconnect

Man of many guises

David Garrick (1717–79) was widely acknowledged to be the greatest actor of his age, and he was also a successful businessman, managing the Drury Lane Theatre for nearly 30 years. He was broadly interested in the arts, wrote his own plays, and had many friends, among whom were some of the finest painters of the day. The exhibition Every Look Speaks: Portraits of David Garrick, mounted with much brio by the excellent Holburne Museum in Bath, and guest-curated by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, seeks to present Garrick in many guises and to suggest that in at least several cases the portraits of him were collaborations

Rachel Polonsky

Why we need Khodorkovsky

Rachel Polonsky on the fight to save a private school that is threatened by Russia’s new cultural and economic thuggery Moscow In Britain, it is easy to forget what an important human freedom non-state education represents. In post-totalitarian Russia, where civil liberties are in first bud in a hostile climate, this recently regained freedom is menaced, not so much by state ideology as by the rampages of power and money unrestrained by an adequate legal system. My children’s school, a modestly resourced ‘Classical Gymnasium’ founded ten years ago, is threatened with closure at the end of this academic year. Its rented premises have been sold by the City of Moscow

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘I been born to play domino’

The sound in the Grand Hall is like the chattering of sparrows. Milling at the door, most wearing bright yellow T-shirts with plasticky decals so big they practically double the weight of the cotton, are the domino sharks, kibitzing and waiting their turn for the tables. Inside, at the far end, a dais is decorated with an ascending series of enormous silver trophies. And filling the centre of the room, fenced off by the rows of trestle tables behind which spectators sit and holler encouragement, are dozens and dozens of tables of people playing dominoes. That chattering noise is the sound of little plastic tablets being shuffled. We’re in the

Peter Oborne

The growing mystery of a coup without a conspiracy

Last week’s display of virtuosity by Michael Howard was immaculate, ruthless, perfectly executed: high politics at its purest and most beautiful. His clarity of vision, contemptuous facing down of opposition, cunning, efficiency, resolve, above all the compression of eight weeks’ weary business into 90 minutes’ decisive action, combined to clear the battlefield with a single strike. Nothing as Napoleonic in audacity or scope has been seen at Westminster since Tony Blair’s seizure of the commanding heights of the Labour party ten years ago. This was one of those extremely rare occasions when the political correspondent really needs the skills of the art critic. The only proper initial emotion was awe

Max Hastings

Britain is furious with America

A distinguished American writer reported after visiting Iraq: ‘The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.” Friend and foe alike look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly disappointed they are in you as an American…. Instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction, we came in full of evasions and apologies. A great many Iraqis feel that the cure has been worse than the disease.’ I have cheated by substituting the word Iraq for Europe in the passage above. It was written by John Dos Passos for Life in January 1946. His

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 November 2003

Twenty-five Conservative MPs wrote to the chairman of the 1922 Committee calling for a vote of confidence in their leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith. The Labour party expelled Mr George Galloway, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin, on the grounds that remarks he made about Iraq ‘fighting for all the Arabs’ were in some way ‘grossly detrimental’ to the party. Mr Paul Burrell, once the butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote a book, serialised for a week by the Daily Mirror, in which he gave a list of her nine close male friends, and reproduced letters to and from members of the royal family. Princes William and Harry issued a

Joan Collins

Diary – 1 November 2003

I was as excited as a kid going to Disneyland to be invited on Concorde’s last flight from New York to London. I’ve always regarded it as one of Britain’s greatest ambassadors, and we considered that being a part of its final journey was too important a historic event to miss. Percy and I thus arrived at a darkened and seemingly deserted JFK airport at 6 a.m. for a 7 a.m. flight. Are we the first?, I inquired of the charming special services representative. ‘No, you’re the last,’ was the reply. ‘The party’s been going for hours.’ We checked in without luggage, which for me is itself a historic event,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 1 November 2003

My husband’s favourite programme on television, to judge by what he shouts at the screen, is Grumpy Old Men. You should hear him when they sound off about automated telephone answering (‘Press 2…’, etc). I think I have caught something from him, because when I was listening to Poetry Please on the wireless, I too began to bay at the machinery. Someone was reading ‘Jabberwocky’, and she said ‘borogroves’. I don’t blame her; this is a common misreading of borogoves. She did it both times. I do blame the producers. Someone ought to have noticed. She said ‘frabjuous’ too, for frabjous, and she pronounced tulgey with a hard ‘g’. That

Interconnect

Your problems solved | 1 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. My husband and I are planning to celebrate our 55th (emerald) wedding anniversary with a modest family party. We have verbally accepted a quotation for a finger buffet from a local caterer, but our grandson, who with his wife runs a small catering business in Birmingham, has expressed a wish to do the catering. Delighted as we are with this offer, we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary: we were hoping that this couple would be among our guests, and we don’t want them to be occupied in the menial task of preparing the buffet and clearing up afterwards. On the other hand, we don’t

Simon Courtauld

Dogged by ill fortune

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has done Captain Scott’s memory some service. For the past two decades, since Roland Huntford’s devastating demolition job — Scott bad, Amundsen good — was first published (also by Hodder & Stoughton) in 1979, ‘the world’s greatest explorer’ has dropped quite a few places in the league table. Fiennes may not have succeeded in putting his man back at the top of the first division, but he has certainly written a more dispassionate and balanced account than Huntford ever set out to do. Yet Fiennes is not entirely objective. A distingushed polar explorer himself, he is, like Scott, a manhauler. He feels instinctively, as Scott’s mentor, Sir

Interconnect

Guardian of the nation’s treasures

Exhibitions celebrating the nation’s art treasures have a habit of backfiring. Within 50 years of the great Art Treasures of the United Kingdom show held in Manchester in 1857, for instance, around half the works of art exhibited in this inadvertent shop window had been sold by their owners and had left the country. What strapped-for-cash country landowner, hit by the agricultural depression of the 1880s, could resist the newly bulging chequebooks of the German museums and the equally bulging American plutocrats? Not least when a loan to an exhibition had proved to the family that it could, after all, live without its greatest heirloom. As the heritage Jeremiahs warned

Interconnect

Pig business

We ignored the ‘No Entry’ sign at Smithfield hog factory, near Szczecinek, west Pomerania, in northwest Poland. Clambering over wire barriers, we wrenched open the ventilation shaft of one of three vast concrete and corrugated iron sheds. Inside, 5,000 squealing pigs were crammed into small compartments. Outside, effluent from concrete cesspits had overflowed, sending a small stream into the lake below. In a large plastic bin (empty the previous night) we found 20 dead pigs. Pig factories are invading Poland. When the German army launched its invasion in 1939, Britain declared war to save the country. Now, when the world’s largest pork production company, Smithfield Foods, threatens the livelihood of

Rachel Johnson

The oldest fresher in town

He may have caught your eye at the Freshers’ Fair for first-year undergraduates, held in the examination schools on the High Street. He was signing up for the rugger club and the law society; he was a tall, athletic student wearing a navy jersey, chinos and black loafers. Or he may have caught your eye elsewhere over the past three decades, for the tall figure at the Freshers’ Fair was none other than the Hon. Sir Oliver Bury Popplewell, the High Court judge who pretended ignorance of what Linford Christie was packing in his ‘lunchbox’, and decided that Jonathan Aitken’s sword of truth was not so simple after all. Yes,

Peter Oborne

The cult of treachery

For the greater part of the last two centuries it was axiomatic that three great institutions upheld a large part of the structure of our national life. These were the monarchy, the established Church and the Conservative party. In different ways all three were expressions of identical values: loyalty, decency, tolerance, service, respect for tradition. They all taught that the individual matters far less than the whole. These institutions were, and theoretically remain, wholly antipathetic to individual greed and naked ambition. They are grounded in a homely native empiricism and suspicion of abstract ideas. Any account of why Britain, alone among the great European powers, did not succumb to the