Society

Thursday

17 Feb 2022

What explains the rise in lesbian divorce?

At one stage, I had a special tray in my study into which to throw all my lesbian wedding invitations. This was around December 2005, when lesbian and gay couples could first sign a civil partnership agreement, providing legal protection including a basis for next-of-kin and inheritance rights. Although the law still did not allow actual marriage between same sex couples, many lesbians went full throttle with their weddings. It didn’t seem to matter that the only requirement to enter a civil partnership was a trip to the town hall and a signature in front of a couple of witnesses. When I signed my own, my partner and I turned

Lionel Shriver

Our monetary bubble is about to burst

OK, I finally watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it — especially before its effective subtitle for us thickos, THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, YOU F-ING MORONS. Otherwise, the film might have playfully dramatised the more general phenom of fiddling with celebrity bodices while Rome burns. The comet at which I’m looking up could arrive far more immediately than perilous global warming. Money is in trouble. I’m not only referring to a cost-of-living crisis. Money itself is in trouble. Let’s contemplate, to coin a phrase, a basket of deplorables. US inflation just hit 7.5 per cent, the highest in 40 years. UK inflation, now 5.5 per

Douglas Murray

Work is no place for your ‘whole self’

One of the few things I have learned in this life is that Dante Alighieri was wrong. In the Inferno portion of The Divine Comedy (the only part most people read), the great Florentine poet describes hell as having just nine circles. Whereas whenever I survey matters it has always seemed me that this figure is on the low side. In fact I would go further. I would say that if you look down there is always a circle below every circle. The other week I wrote about our nation’s ambassador to the Ukraine — a woman who seems to think that expressions of vulnerability and not-quite-coping are somehow helpful

Ivo Dawnay

P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era

There was something old school about P.J. O’Rourke, who died on Tuesday, something that felt like a leftover echo of the American Revolution. Visiting him in his ancient, low-ceilinged, clapboard farm-house in Sharon, New Hampshire, one half-expected Paul Revere to burst breathlessly into the kitchen warning that the British were coming. Though he was by birth an Ohio boy, New England felt like the tweedy satirist’s natural environment — a pioneer sensibility that combined American impatience with the Old World with a nostalgic yearning for the oak-panelled values and certainties of yesteryear. Never quite a ‘gonzo’ journalist, his departure to the cigar bar in the sky nonetheless marks the end

Ben Lazarus

The algorithm myth: why the bots won’t take over

Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates. But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent. According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil

Andrew Watts

Sick jokes: why medics need gallows humour

Most jobs have their own joke books. If you’re outside the job, you don’t get the joke — and if you do get the joke, you’re on the inside; which is what the jokes are for. (It’s the same with all comedy: some, if not most, of the appeal of Stewart Lee is in being the sort of person who finds Stewart Lee funny.) But some jobs have joke books which, from the outside, are not just unfunny but actually offensive. Usually the most stressful jobs, those that involve the rawest emotions, have a gallows humour that is thought to relieve that stress. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Or

The Spectator

Andrew, Harry and the enduring prudence of the Queen

Prince Andrew’s decision to settle his case with Virginia Giuffre means he will be spared the potentially humiliating ordeal of a jury trial. It also means that, in the public’s opinion, he will forever occupy a no-man’s land between guilt and exoneration. Even though he has accepted no liability in the case, a return to royal life is surely impossible. As he celebrates his 62nd birthday this weekend, he must contemplate life as a retired royal. However Andrew might feel about his fate, it will bring relief for the monarchy. The darkest of clouds is clearing and the Queen can mark her 70th year on the throne without the reputational

Dot Wordsworth

Where’s the ‘mystery’ in mystery plays?

In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4 broadcast them separately from the soap opera, in which the village policeman has been driven to conversion by playing Jesus. My husband, commenting on all this, said that ‘of course’ the word mystery meant a trade or craft, as the medieval plays were performed by companies of trade guilds. He might have been reading the website of the Chester Mystery Plays, due for their five-yearly performance in 2023: ‘The word mystery comes from the French mystère meaning “craft”, and apprentices joined the guilds to learn their mystery or craft. When

Bruce Anderson

A toast to Victorian Britain

Across oceans and continents, less favoured nations produce more history than they can consume. In these islands, the English — as opposed to the Scots and the Irish — merely consume a lot of well-written military history. The other evening, stimulated by a few decent bottles, someone raised a hoary question. If we could have been born in an earlier century — pre-20th — which would we have chosen? What epoch was worthy to compare with the Antonines and those Good Emperors, as praised by Gibbon? The consensus was that, assuming a strong constitution and plenty of money, the long 19th century in Britain, from the end of the Napoleonic

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I tackle the menace of strangers making mobile calls on speakerphone?

Q. As if it wasn’t bad enough to overhear one side of a conversation as it’s bellowed into a mobile telephone, there is now a worse menace on trains and in restaurants. Those using the speaker function for calls are creating intolerable noise pollution because others nearby are forced to overhear both the tinny caller from down the line and a voice raised to compensate for the distance between mouth and microphone. Mary, have you got any idea how to tackle this? — L.G., Fosbury, Wilts A. If you record a 30-second snatch of the conversation on your own smartphone (using the ‘voice memos’ app or similar) and then use

Toby Young

When does ‘middle age’ end and ‘old age’ begin?

I was a bit irritated by all the millennials saying the Superbowl half-time show made them feel old. The 15-minute musical extravaganza at Sunday’s game was a tribute to the golden age of hip hop and featured Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Eminem and Dr Dre. The reason it made so many people in their thirties and early forties feel a bit long in the tooth is that all artists are now candidates for the Hall of Fame. Dr Dre is 56 and Snoop Dogg turned 50 last year. Seeing their idols thickening around the waist and sprouting grey hairs was a mementomori for people who came of

Peter Jones

How the ancients approached the three Rs

German archaeologists have found ancient Egyptian tablets covered in repetitive writing exercises and ask — were they pupil punishments? But if classical examples are anything to go by, they sound more like normal education. For elite Roman boys, education began with elementary reading, writing and numbers. From about the age of nine, they developed these skills further, especially in the study of poetry, and began Greek; and at 15, they were taught the arts of political and legal argument, drawing widely on mythical, historical and philosophical precedents, to prepare them for life at the top of Roman society. Rote learning, memorisation, repetition (and the whip) were the means of ‘driving

The Spectator

How do Russian and Ukrainian military forces measure up?

Facing the music Police in New Zealand played Barry Manilow records to truck drivers in an attempt to persuade them to break up their protests. One of the first uses of music as a weapon was by US forces attempting to force Panamanian military leader and drug dealer General Manuel Noriega to leave the Vatican embassy, where he had sought sanctuary in December 1989. For three days over Christmas they played an eclectic mixture of music including ‘Too Old to Rock’n’Roll, Too Young to Die’ by Jethro Tull, ‘Judgment Day’ by Van Halen, ‘Born to Run’ by Bruce Springsteen, ‘Give It Up’ by KC and the Sunshine Band, ‘We Gotta

Charles Moore

What would Thatcher have made of Putin?

When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom that he was British ambassador to Moscow. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for thinking the sub-editors have got it back to front and he was actually Russian ambassador to London. Sir Tony’s message in every letter is ‘It’s all Britain’s fault’. In his latest, his particular target was the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, after her visit to Moscow. He said she ‘might usefully recall Margaret Thatcher’s wise message to Mikhail Gorbachev sent in 1985 as perestroika began to take off: “We know that you have as much right to

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of the police

A health-care disaster Sir: Kate Andrews’s piece on who really controls the NHS (‘Waiting game’, 12 February) gives us a flavour of how things have come to this: an unaccountable health service with a government attached. We are about to enter a new phase, with additional taxation in the form of increased NI based on promises which are already looking hollow — waiting lists will continue to rise. There is no sign that the 100,000 key workers who are needed are going to be found any time soon. The truth of the matter is that the people have been fed a number of lies for decades: that health care in

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Inflation hits 30-year high, Andrew settles out of court and Turkey changes its name

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, made ready for a Russian invasion of Ukraine by cutting short a planned visit to northern England for a Cobra meeting. ‘We are on the edge of a precipice,’ he said. He said Britain was prepared to target Russian banks and companies, and stop them raising money on London’s financial markets. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, condemned an online rally called No War in Ukraine: Stop Nato Expansion, organised by the Stop the War coalition, of which Jeremy Corbyn is the deputy president. Petrol prices reached a new high of 148.02p a litre. Inflation rose to 5.5 per cent, its highest for 30

Nadine Dorries

Why I should never look at Twitter

Foreign trips can offer a sense of perspective. Heading to Saudi Arabia, I prepare for my first stint of diplomacy. While most of the world has been fixated on Ukraine, a different subject has dominated the news in Britain for the past few weeks. I wonder how, if asked, I’d explain to a Saudi minister the British media’s interest in whether an open packet of crisps and a length of mauve tinsel constitutes a party. My first problem is more practical: what clothes does a feminist pack when visiting Saudi Arabia? Ministerial briefing packs are not terribly helpful on this point. As a mother of three adult daughters, I’m not

Robin Oakley

The young trainer Sam Drinkwater is one to watch

Certain sections of the media love to run a knocking story and when champion trainer Paul Nicholls’s horses failed to win as many races as usual over the past three weeks, the groaners were soon at it. Was the magic missing? Had the maestro mislaid his baton? The Nicholls response was characteristically bold. He sent out his star young chaser Bravemansgame, his best hope for the Cheltenham Festival, to contest a novice handicap at Newbury last Saturday in which he had to give lumps of weight to a couple of handy performers in the shape of Grumpy Charley and Pats Fancy. Bravemansgame was the highest-rated horse to run in a

Melissa Kite

Insurance is like a toxic love affair

‘Do you have any questions?’ said the man at the insurance company after an hour of me trying to take out a new car policy. ‘No. I wouldn’t know how to ask you a question about what has just gone on even if I wanted to,’ I replied, because insurance is now so complicated there is no way a person not employed in the underwriting industry can understand it. And that would not matter, except we do need to get our heads around it, because we have to change it every year. Insurance companies are good to you until they’re not, because insurance is like a toxic love affair. After

Jeremy Clarke

My existential crisis was straight out the terrible twos’ playbook

Early on St Valentines Day I walked down to the car park where the raindrops were knocking off the young almond blossom petals. The slow-dropping rain was refreshing after the January drought. In the car park the red car was shining wet instead of furry with dust. I drove for 20 minutes on a winding road through low hills, intensively cultivated since the days of Roger the Norman, but abandoned since the Grande Guerre. My destination was a commercial laboratory in the nearest town for a pre-scan blood test. On the journey I went over in my mind what Catriona had said to me the night before. I wasn’t yet