Society

Saturday

Michael Hanlon

Science & Nature SpecialAstronomy

One way to throw an astrologer into confusion – well, even more confusion than that under which they normally labour – is to find a new planet. When Clyde Tombaugh spotted Pluto in 1930, the third oldest profession found itself in a tizzy. So when a tenth planet, beyond Pluto, was announced a few months ago, the astrologers again let out a collective groan and started redrawing their charts. But it isn’t just the stargazing charlatans who were bothered by the new discovery; the rest of us were just as bemused, not by the planet itself but by its name. Quaoar. Qua-oh-what? Hard to spell, harder to say. The only

Michael Moorcock

Science & Nature SpecialScience fiction

I’m rather hoping that some of the stories which appeared in Science Fiction Adventures during the early 1960s don’t come true. Though its title suggests otherwise, SFA was actually quite an intellectual magazine. There, many of J.G. Ballard’s stories first appeared, including his brilliant The Drowned World, which predicted global warming and seriously rising sea levels. My own The Sundered Worlds foresaw the discovery of black holes and first offered the term ‘multiverse’ to describe an infinity of alternate versions of our own universe, nesting side by side but unaware of the others’ presence. In New Worlds, SFA’s sister magazine, we – I edited the magazine from 1963 to 1980

Matt Ridley

Science & Nature SpecialThe humbling of Homo sapiens

Scientists are not interested in facts. What they like is ignorance. They mine it, eat it, attack it – choose the metaphor you prefer – and in the process they keep discovering more ignorance. Every answer leads to a set of new questions. The past few years have seen a once-in-an-aeon explosion of new knowledge about the human body and mind, as a consequence of our becoming the first creature in four billion years to read our own genetic recipe. Even more, they have seen an explosion of newly discovered ignorance. Most people now know the humiliating news from the Human Genome Project that we have the same number of

Rachel Johnson

Publish or be damned

If dons don’t churn out books and articles – whether they want to or not – they will lose funding. Rachel Johnson wonders whether that’s what education is about Our rendezvous is the new laptop-and-latte bar on the first floor of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. The history don is a few minutes late and this gives me time to reread an extraordinary document, which reveals that he (and thousands like him all over the country) is being subjected to a production quota for published work that makes Stalin’s five-year plans look positively market-driven. The document, circulated to ‘postholders’ in the faculty of Modern History, concerns the nationwide process called the

Neil Clark

How the battle lies were drawn

If you ever get to Belgrade Zoo, don’t miss the snake house. There, in nicely heated tanks, you will see two rather fearsome-looking pythons, one named Warren and the other Madeleine. The names of Bill Clinton’s secretaries of state – Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright – will not be forgotten quickly in the capital of the former Yugoslavia. Seeing the two pythons slithering in their tanks reminded me of the murderous foreign policy of the Clinton administration and the enthusiastic support it received from New Labour. For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this country

Peter Jones

Language barriers

In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), George Orwell laments the corruption of the English language in postwar society. Everywhere he finds pompous phrases designed to sound weighty (‘render inoperative’, meaning ‘break’); Latin- or Greek-based words where simpler words will do (‘ameliorate’ for ‘improve’, ‘clandestine’ for ‘secret’); words which have lost their meaning (‘fascism’, meaning ‘something not desirable’); padding to give an impression of depth (‘this is a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind’); clichés (‘ring the changes on’, ‘play into the hands of’, ‘toe the line’, ‘explore every avenue’). Words that give him particular grief include ‘phenomenon’, ‘element’, ‘objective’, ‘categorical’, ‘virtual’, ‘basic’, ‘primary’,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The grim reefer

They say that if you can remember where it was you had your first skunk, you probably haven’t been smoking enough. But I can, quite distinctly. It was at the party of the daughter of a well-known literary agent, in the basement of their house in Notting Hill; the year, give or take, was 1991 and I was just getting ready to leave – having failed to pull again, probably – when I was stopped in my tracks by the most extraordinary smell. Skunk is called skunk for a very good reason: because it, smells exactly, but exactly, like skunk. I didn’t know this in 1991. We were all skunk

James Cartlidge

How to win votes for the BNP

The following statement appears on the website of Carlton, owners of ITV: ‘The company does not discriminate between employees or potential employees on grounds of sex, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, colour, race, ethnic origin, age or disability.’ Unless, it would appear, you happen to be white. As a freelance print journalist with an eye on one day moving into the broadcasting side, my attention was grabbed when I recently saw a recruitment advertisement for a funded training scheme in television news. The scheme sounded like a pretty good way in: it was the ‘award-winning TV training scheme for news journalists’ provided by London News Network (LNN), maker of London

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 13 June 2003

Chancellor Brown has identified our national genius with ‘enterprise and inventiveness, our tolerance and belief in liberty, fairness and public service – and our internationalism’. This last, meaningless aspect of our ‘genius’ is tossed in to help him argue that we should adopt the ‘you-row’, as that Welsh newscaster puts it, and change Europe to our way of doing things. It is not a logic that would have appealed to Pericles. The Athenian historian Thucydides tells us that Pericles devoted his Funeral Speech of 430 bc (commemorating those fallen in battle that year) to identifying the unique qualities that made up the ‘national genius’ of Athens. First, Pericles emphasises the

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 7 June 2003

Dear Mary… Q. Earlier this year we went to stay with friends in Devon for the weekend. Our host went to tremendous trouble trying to find enough horses to enable our whole family (of six) to hunt. We had brought with us a present of a small box of chocolates and when, on the Saturday evening, our hosts took us out to dinner at a neighbour’s they brought these chocolates with them, exclaiming cheerfully in the car on the way, ‘I thought we’d give them your delicious chocolates. I’ll tell them they are from all of us.’ Either wittingly or unwittingly, they thereby conveyed to us their view that a

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 7 June 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, faced an investigation by the all-party Commons foreign affairs select committee into claims that he had misled the nation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said this week: ‘Those people who are sitting there and saying, “It’s all going to be proved to be a big fib got out by the security services, there will be no weapons of mass destruction,” just wait and have a little patience.’ He added, ‘We are going to assemble that evidence and present it properly.’ A dossier published last September had said, ‘Intelligence indicates the Iraqi military is able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Diary – 7 June 2003

Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had ‘lied’ about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worried and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls ‘rogue elements’, but their complaints were very sober and unrogueish. They were worried about both the dossiers on WMD, but for different reasons. The first dossier, drafted by John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was, in their view, respectable, but Mr Blair was unwise to have tried to publish such a thing and the Foreign Office should have stopped him. Publication inevitably politicised the intelligence and bowdlerised it in order to avoid

The Spectator

Feedback | 7 June 2003

Comment on Television creates terrorists by Patrick Sookhdeo (31/05/2003) Dr Patrick Sookhdeo is the second Spectator contributor in the past few weeks to express the view that the world should hear and see a good deal less about the world than he thinks is right. What we can do about the stuff that concerns Dr Patrick Sookhdeo isn’t all that clear: bomb the TV broadcasters he disapproves of? Already done in Belgrade and Iraq and Kabul, and we must be running out of nations that have little choice but to grit their teeth ad take it. Qatar, which your correspondent correctly names as the home of Al-jazeera, is a “friendly”

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 June 2003

‘If you dial 1471,’ writes Dr Roger James, a reader, naturally, ‘you are likely to be told by a recorded female voice that “The caller withheld their number.” This is an example of the difficulties that our language gets into because it lacks a word that means “his” or “her”. Years ago, she would have said, “The caller withheld his number,” but political correctness has taboo’d that way out. What should the recorded operator say?’ What, indeed? I think I prefer ‘The caller withheld their number’ to ‘The number you have dialled knows you are waiting’, which is not true literally or figuratively. The loss of he as a sexually

Taki

Truth twisters

New York I remember well a conversation I had with Gianni Agnelli in the winter of 1963 about John Profumo and lying: ‘Poor man,’ said the charismatic Fiat chairman- to-be, ‘such disgrace for so ugly a tart.’ Both of us at the time took it for granted that British politicians did not lie, something unheard of in our respective countries, which made Profumo’s falling on his sword only natural. Britain, back then, was a place that did not tolerate lies from public servants. Needless to say, no longer. Forty years on, Mr Tony Blair can stand up in Parliament and, without blinking an eye, tell a whopper about weapons of

Jeremy Clarke

Beyond Boswell

All I knew about Corsica before going there last week for a touring holiday was that it is a French possession, that Napoleon hailed from there and that James Boswell visited there once. Exactly where Corsica was in the Mediterranean sea, I was uncertain about. I remembered Boswell was there because not long ago I found a scrap of paper on which I’d copied out a paragraph from his Corsica journal. It’s a mystery to me why I’d taken the trouble to do this. But before last week virtually my entire knowledge of the island was based on this one short paragraph, which goes: 19 October 1765. While I stopped

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 7 June 2003

Monday Jed has reassured us that he will still be working full-time for Dave once he moves to America. All those silly people claiming his physical whereabouts makes a difference to The Project are hysterical. There is no reason why he cannot run the Conservative party from his new home in California. This is a modern, family-friendly working practice in action. Indeed we hope the move will inspire hard-working Britons everywhere to relocate to sunnier climes and demand their employers keep pace with their changing lifestyle by continuing to pay them their full salary. Of course Gary will have to take on those duties which require an actual physical presence

Stephen Glover

The NoW is bad news, but the police were just as bad in the Posh ‘kidnap’ case

Almost everyone dislikes the News of the World, including many of its readers. It is coarse, intrusive, hypocritical and sanctimonious. It frequently puts itself above or outside the law – perhaps most famously when it so whipped up public hysteria over paedophilia that the mobs took to the streets, in one case mistaking a paediatrician for a paedophile and driving her out of her house. The editor of the newspaper at the time was Rebekah Wade – now editor of the Sun – who invariably refuses to talk to the press or to be interviewed even when she sets Britain ablaze. A more disagreeable example of the new media aristocracy