Society

Wednesday

11 Jan 2023

The genius of Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone

Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the human eye, they have meaning of their own. History is topiary. From a superabundance of data, the historian and his reader make themselves a story. The parts the narrative is constructed from stay: the rest, like foliage falling victim to the topiarist’s shears, is discarded. If one Wednesday morning W.E. Gladstone notices that a senior

Peter Jones

What the ancients would have made of Harry and Meghan

The antics of Harry and Meghan would not have gone down well in the ancient world, where the family and its future flourishing were an absolute priority. Harry’s proposal to marry Meghan would have been a matter of some negotiation – Roman orators argued that the paterfamilias (‘head of the family’, with absolute authority over it) should always be consulted on such matters, but ultimately it was wise to allow the son to have his way – but Meghan’s attitude would not have gone down well. The point is that the family was welcoming into its bosom a female outsider – a doubly dangerous moment – who had to learn

Petronella Wyatt

In defence of Camilla

This week, the Duke of Sussex, self-proclaimed feminist and Lochinvar of Montecito, launched an unprovoked attack on a 75-year-old woman. In an irony that will no doubt escape him, Harry accused his stepmother, Camilla of being ‘dangerous’ and a ‘villain’. The Queen Consort, he said, in a series of television interviews, began a ‘campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown’, and briefed journalist friends in an attempt to ‘rehabilitate her image’. Harry has proved he does not possess a laser-like intelligence but even he might have thought twice before attacking a divorced woman for trying to marry a prince. Consider the howls if anyone accused Meghan of ‘campaigning’ to marry

The Spectator

Who was the monarchy’s original wicked stepmother?

Wicked stepmothers Prince Harry said that he was worried Camilla would become his ‘wicked stepmother’. But she would have to be rotten indeed to match the English monarchy’s original wicked stepmother, Aelfthryth, who married King Edgar in 965. Upon Edgar’s death the succession should have passed to his elder son, Edward, but Aelfthryth had other ideas, wanting her own son, Aethelred – King Edgar’s younger son – to take the throne. She invited Edward to meet at Corfe Castle, Dorset, where, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, she sent out her servants to stab the boy – then aged about 16 – to death. As a result, it was Aethelred who

Lionel Shriver

Are we kidding ourselves over Ukraine?

Optimism can be surprisingly hilarious. In my last novel, two spouses agree to quit the planet once they’ve both turned 80, and the book explores a dozen possible outcomes of their pact. No chapter made me chuckle at the keyboard more than ‘Once Upon a Time in Lambeth’ – in which the couple don’t kill themselves but live to 110 in perfect health because they eat their vegetables. Young people flock to their table for advice, as my protagonists grow only wiser and more physically riveting in old age. Meanwhile, modern monetary theory makes everything free. Limitless energy is derived from carbon dioxide. A new portmanteau religion, ‘Jeslam’, eliminates Islamist

Douglas Murray

If only Harry took after his grandfather

Do you remember the Duke of Edinburgh awards? Some of you may even have one somewhere. An award for map-reading, orienteering or otherwise managing to find your way around in the age before Google Maps and Uber. It was – and still is – a useful scheme, set up by a man who accepted his position as second fiddle, performed the role impeccably for decades and set up the awards to help millions of other people find their way. It was on my mind as I was reading the latest revelations from Montecito, California. For the memoirs of Harry Sussex are even worse than expected. If I was the head

The Spectator

Letters: What Benedict XVI did for Catholicism

Oxford’s Big Brother Sir: Your Oxfordshire council correspondent (Letters, 7 January), who refers to himself as the corporate director of environment and place, refutes Rod Liddle’s description of councillors as ‘dictators’ and his criticism of the way Oxford will be divided into zones to reduce traffic. Bill Cotton’s letter put me in mind of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The sectors, the checkpoints, the control of access, the difficulties in just trying to go about your business, the paperwork. Ah, the paperwork! Cotton’s letter mentions residents’ applications for permits – at cost – to drive through the ‘filters’ for 100 days or 25 times a year for county visitors. How will people keep

Theo Hobson

The truth about Martin Luther King

Why does the United States seem to be falling apart? The ideal that used to bring Americans together seems to have failed in some way. ‘Liberty and justice for all’ is the best summary. Sure, it was always a frail creed, and interpretations of it differed, but still. It semi-worked. The creed failed in a very paradoxical way. It was voiced too well, too purely. Its greatest articulator was Dr Martin Luther King, who is commemorated with a US national holiday celebrated on Monday. (Ronald Reagan signed Martin Luther King Day into law in 1983, in less sectarian times.) The problem, of course, was that Dr King was black. Half

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 14 January 2023

Being caught with your hand in the cookie jar must be embarrassing enough, but almost worse is being suspected/accused of cheating when you’re not! These days everyone (particularly online) is on their guard, and if you make a good play you can suddenly become the focus of attention for the wrong reason. My good friend Nick Sandqvist was playing a regular cut-in game on BBO with his favourite partner, when the following hand turned up (See diagram). South’s hand is playable in three suits, so Nick elected to start the bidding on the 1-level, but when partner had enough to make a negative double (showing hearts) he was off to

Robin Oakley

The magic of Veterans’ Chase Day

Like most people in racing I began 2023 down in the dumps, moaning about insufficient prize money, small fields and declining crowds. Gloom only intensified with racing’s administrators, the British Horseracing Authority, yet again forced into a humiliating U-turn on new rules it had proposed governing jockeys’ use of the whip, doing so just days before the bedding-in period for their implementation began. Lions unled by donkeys once more. In my despondency I had forgotten the actual magic of going racing but it took only a few hours at Sandown on Veterans’ Chase Day to rekindle the sheer joy of the sport and its rich tapestry of characters who will

Melissa Kite

No one will admit to owning the track outside our house

The county council insist the unmade track leading to my house is nothing to do with them, while the parish council change their position depending on how they feel on the day. If they want to boss us about, they infer they are leasing the land from Surrey county council, along with the rest of the village green, and therefore we must do what they say when we are using it. So, for example, they charged us for a weekly permit when we put a skip outside our house while renovating. At other times, including when the track needs repairing, they infer that it is not really that much to

Jeremy Clarke

My deliriously happy primary school days

I remember my first day at South Benfleet County Primary School with rare clarity. My mother left me at the school gate and I hadn’t been in the playground five minutes when a supervising woman trotted up to me, suspended me in the air by my arm, and slapped my leg, hard. Apparently I ought to have stood still at the first blast of her whistle and lined up at the second. But no one had told me the drill. While everyone else stood stock-still, I had remained in motion. Her anger and unhesitating violence surprised, then shocked me. You might argue that I learned everything I needed to know

Taki

The joy of an unplugged life

Gstaad ‘Living my life in person’ is not a redundancy of expression. What it actually means is living without social media. Why have I chosen the unplugged life? That’s an easy one to answer, but first a little history: I think I was the last one to switch to writing on a word processor when the then back-of-the-book editor Liz issued an ultimatum. (I’ve had seven sainted male editors in 46 years, but only four ladies fixing the column: Jenny, Gina, Liz and Lucy, and never a cross word between any of the aforementioned 11 and poor little me.) Bron Waugh used to send in his copy in long hand,

James Jeffrey

In defence of Harry’s Taliban comments

Let’s just simmer down about Prince Harry, at least when it comes to his comments about the Taliban. In his memoir Spare, released this week, the Prince writes that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan and thought of ‘Taliban fighters not as people but as chess pieces.’ This wasn’t the best choice of words. He shouldn’t have given a precise tally of the enemy dead – it goes against the unwritten and fragile code of the battlefield. And it fell short of ‘showing decency and respect for the lives you have taken,’ as former army officer and MP Adam Holloway has noted. The ‘othering’ that Harry talks about is the only way an enemy

Tuesday

10 Jan 2023

Freddy Gray

Will Mexico help Biden stop illegal immigration?

27 min listen

President Biden is visiting Mexico this week to meet with President Obrador, and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. Biden is expected to bring up illegal immigration with Obrador, and hopes that he can offer him some way out of what is becoming a spiralling crisis. But is any help coming? Freddy Gray speaks to Todd Bensman, author of the upcoming book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Biggest Border Crisis in US History.

Damian Thompson

Why Catholics are torn between the Church of Benedict and the Church of Francis

16 min listen

The fallout from the death of Benedict XVI has been unexpectedly dramatic. Pope Francis’s behaviour at his predecessor’s Requiem on Thursday struck many observers as graceless. The liberal Catholic journalist Robert Mickens, a long-time opponent of many of Benedict’s policies, wrote that Francis ‘looked unpleasant throughout the liturgy and, surprisingly (shockingly, some would say), he did not attend the interment of Benedict’s body in the crypt after the Mass. The Vatican did not observe a single day of mourning… There are many of us who were never particularly enamoured of Joseph Ratzinger. But the man was the Bishop of Rome for nearly eight years. And for that alone, he deserved

Debbie Hayton

The UK can’t ignore Scotland’s gender recognition Bill

On Monday we learned that Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) issued in Scotland might not be accepted in England and Wales. Last month Scotland passed its contentious Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which means that anyone over the age of 16 can legally change their gender after three months, even if they don’t have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. But now, according to the Times, UK government sources say that unless the Scottish government amends its legislation and requires someone to have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, Scottish gender recognition certificates won’t be recognised in the rest of the UK. The UK government may think this is the ‘Legoland driving licence’ solution to gender

Philip Hensher

Spare reviewed: Harry is completely disingenuous – or an idiot

A surprising number of royal personages have published books under their own names, and sometimes they have even been written by the purported authors. The first, I think, was the Eikon Basilike, published shortly after Charles I’s execution and presented as his account of himself and of events. The authorship of this highly effective piece of propaganda has been questioned, but its simple, direct, haughty tone is very similar to the king’s recorded speech at his trial. After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria published two journals of her life in the Highlands. We know that she was an enchantingly vivid writer from her diaries and letters, with a novelist’s ear

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry’s Spare ends with a whimper not a bang

The epigraph for Spare, Prince Harry’s frenziedly awaited memoir, is from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. It states simply ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ As a gesture of authorial intent, it’s a bold one. It suggests from the outset that this is not going to be some backwards-gazing book, but instead that it is going to be fully engaged with the present. Given the fact that Spare’s publication has dominated headlines for days, it’s not an inaccurate statement. Yet – how best to put it? – Harry has never struck most of us as the kind of man who habitually quotes Faulkner. His Pulitzer Prize-winning ghostwriter JD Moehringer (credited in the acknowledgements as ‘my collaborator and friend, confessor and sometime sparring partner’), however, seems like

Gareth Roberts

What Howards’ Way taught me about Margaret Thatcher

Splice the mainbrace! Howards’ Way, the BBC’s Sunday night sailing and sex 80s soap, is back, courtesy of UKTV Play, with the whole first series now available to stream free with ads. Nearly 40 years on, I’ve found myself caught in its swell all over again. The combination of corporate chicanery (Fry and Laurie’s ‘Damn you, Marjorie!’ sketches owe a lot to this) and sizzling sex on satin sheets is made all the more glorious because the backdrop isn’t the sun-drenched skyscrapers and rodeo ranches of Texas or Colorado but the village of Bursledon on the Hampshire coast, renamed Tarrant for the fiction. The sailing, and there’s a lot of