Society

Tuesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Sally Rooney’s novels don’t deserve to be translated into Hebrew

I recently had to read a book by Sally Rooney in a work capacity, and my goodness that was half an hour of my life I’ll never get back. Come on, how could I be expected to read the whole darn thing when I’d already had the pleasure of Conversations with Friends and come to the conclusion that once you’ve read one book about people getting naked and saying stuff about the pointlessness of life, you’ve read them all? Her writing is so blank that in parts it reads like a children’s starter book — Janet and John Get Naked and Say Stuff about the Pointlessness of Existence. Rooney describes

Sunday

Peter Hunt

There’s no way back for Prince Andrew

The blindingly obvious continues to evade Prince Andrew. There is no way back to public life for the son of a monarch and the ninth in line to the throne. Blinkered, he used the days after his father’s death to dip his toes in the waters of public redemption. His efforts, especially his attempt to wear the uniform of an admiral on the day of the funeral, raised eyebrows – not least amongst some senior royals. Their concern, hidden for months behind palace walls, is on very public display in the Sunday Times. We now know that William, a king in waiting, sees his uncle as a ‘threat’ to the royal

Sam Leith Sam Leith

No, the term ‘white privilege’ is not extremist

A Tory MP last week raised the delightful possibility that the big family of what we might call the terrorism community should be expanded yet further. Speaking to a group of activists at party conference, Jonathan Gullis declared: “The term ‘white privilege’ is an extremist term. It should be reported to Prevent, because it is an extremist ideology. It’s racist to actually suggest everyone who’s white somehow is riddled with privilege.” Goodness. Even now I see it: online social studies graduates and right-on corporate HR functionaries hauling on the old orange PJs and trooping glumly into their cells in some British equivalent of Guantanamo Bay, alongside the murderous jihadists of

Saturday

Steven Barrett

The EU’s rule of law crisis lets Britain change the Brexit deal

Following Germany’s example, courts in Poland have rejected the supremacy of EU law. That is the principle that, if you join the EU, you give away part of your sovereignty to it and you have to do what the European Court says. I have written before about the precedent set in Germany. Both states now say that their constitution trumps EU law and the rulings of the EU courts. Legally speaking, this declaration is simply untrue – as should be known to anybody who read and signed the Lisbon Treaty, joining the EU. The United Kingdom always upheld this legal truth. If we wanted our sovereignty back, we had to

Thursday

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

How tech revolutions happen

Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller British cities. After a summer in the Apple, I can therefore provide British urbanites with a glimpse of their future. I get around on what I newly perceive as a dumpy, sluggish pushbike. Mayor Bill de Blasio has invested extensively in the city’s cycling infrastructure — much to the resentment of motorists, and often for good reason. As London drivers will also attest, removing whole lanes from congested thoroughfares is rarely justified by the modest number of car trips that cyclists obviate. Still, given the soaring popularity of two-wheeled transport,

James Innes-Smith

Lateral thinking: the beauty of bungalows

We keep hearing about the importance of levelling up. Architects tasked with the responsibility of building new homes, however, might want to consider levelling across. With land prices at a premium, bungalows may not appear to be the most prudent use of limited space but lateral living has plenty to recommend it. Originally built for early European settlers in India, the first UK bungalows — from the Hindi word bangla, meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’ — appeared in Westgate on the north coast of Kent in 1869. These early examples tended to be austere holiday homes constructed from prefabricated corrugated iron. Over in the US, grander structures became increasingly popular with

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why stamp duty doesn’t add up

‘Blame it all on business’ was the Tory strategists’ answer to petrol queues and the risk of a no-turkey Christmas that threatened to distract the party-conference faithful from adulation of the Prime Minister. As spin, it might have been shocking if it wasn’t so familiar. But as an explanation of the supply crisis, the idea that business has been deaf to years of warnings that it could no longer rely on immigrant labour is hogwash, rivalled only by the proposition that spiralling wages will lead us to a fairer society — rather than contributing to a bout of uncontrolled inflation in which higher pay actually buys fewer goods because all

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Blame it all on the middle-class drug users

We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when Facebook and its various ahellspawn offspring go down for seven hours, the country is sent into a tailspin of misery and confusion. On Monday, Facebook users could be seen out on the streets of our towns and cities accosting strangers and explaining to them exactly what they had for supper the night before, or showing photographs of themselves with a couple of friends enjoying a night out in a pub in Ruabon. All they wanted, these people, was a thumbs up from those strangers, or a warm hug or a

Leroy Logan

Why Cressida Dick must go

After the murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, I have come to the conclusion that Cressida Dick needs to go. Yes, it’s easy to call for the resignation of a Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Things go wrong in the policing of London and when the mistakes are big enough, there will be calls for heads to roll. Often, such calls are just another way of expressing anger. But not only has Cressida Dick failed to produce tangible improvements over the past four years: under her tenure, things have become significantly worse. I was a police officer for 30 years and I’m afraid there is much truth in what critics of

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Why I retrained as a butcher

Two years ago, I enrolled on a butchery course. I rather fancied seeing how the sausage was made, and also envisaged taking home handsome pork chops and having an ‘in’ when I needed to order my Christmas turkey. But the amateur course was no longer offered by my local college. So instead of a four-week, two-hour evening course, I signed up for a year-long Level 2 NVQ in craft butchery that involved a lot more anatomical theory and hairnets than I had anticipated. Butchery work is physically demanding — I wasn’t made for carrying beef forequarters over my shoulder — and comes with the usual risks of a job involving

Peter Jones

What James Bond and Aristophanes have in common

So James Bond is back, doing exactly what he always does, inviting the audience into a fantasy world for the pleasure of wondering ‘What if?’ In this respect, Bond films resemble the work of the world’s first recorded comic poet, the Athenian Aristophanes (c. 440-380 bc). His premise was that Athens’s problems could be solved only by little people of no importance, not the greedy, vain and incompetent leaders in the public eye. So the scene was set for the hero(ine) to put them firmly in their place. One favourite subject for his comic fantasies was the long war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc). Take three examples. In 421

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of Land Rovers

How to stay safe Sir: Mary Wakefield is correct to highlight the opprobrium heaped on anyone who suggests sensible safety advice to women (‘Don’t mix up murder and hate crime’, 2 October). It has long been the case that this is the one area where it is impossible to give crime prevention information without stirring up a hornet’s nest. Motorists are constantly told not to leave valuables on display when they park their cars, as they may return to find their windows broken and the articles stolen. No one claims that motorists are being ‘victim shamed’ when given this advice, even though the police may well roll their eyes when

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Facebook’s blackout, California’s oil spill and Rishi’s kitchen sink

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he did not think Britain was in a crisis; he wanted it to move towards ‘a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy’ that was not addicted to cheap foreign labour. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that he had committed £500 million to renew job-support schemes, now that furlough and the £20 a week universal credit bonus had ended. Of the unemployed, he told Sky News: ‘We are throwing literally the kitchen sink at helping them.’ A group of people in the street shouted ‘Tory scum’ at Sir Iain Duncan Smith and hit him with a traffic

Toby Young Toby Young

Who let the dog out?

Caroline and I are just back from a weekend break in Scotland and, nice though it was, I hadn’t realised how difficult travelling anywhere is at the moment. We had originally planned to drive, but the fuel crisis put paid to that, so we had to book a last-minute flight. EasyJet from Luton to Edinburgh was £475.92 for the two of us — ye gods! — and three days in the mid-stay car park was a whopping £128. To cap it all, the bus that takes you from the car park to the airport wasn’t running — Covid, obviously — so we had to walk about half a mile carrying

Ananyo Bhattacharya

The forgotten Einstein: how John von Neumann shaped the modern world

More than anyone else, John von Neumann created the future. He was an unparalleled genius, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and he helped invent the world as we now know it. He came up with a blueprint of the modern computer and sparked the beginnings of artificial intelligence. He worked on the atom bomb and led the team that produced the first computerised weather forecast. In the mid-1950s, he proposed the idea that the Earth was warming as a consequence of humans burning coal and oil, and warned that ‘extensive human intervention’ could wreak havoc with the world’s climate. Colleagues who knew both von Neumann and

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The case for dodging cracks in the pavement

It is interesting to consider what would have happened if the Covid virus had emerged in 1921. Or 1821. Or 1521. There would have been no vaccine, for one thing. Treatment would mostly have been worse. In the 17th century we would have blamed the entire thing on Catholics. But in a few respects, bizarrely, we might have done better. For instance, miasma theory, although technically wrong, might have protected us better against airborne transmission than the early scientific consensus that the disease was spread via droplets on surfaces. A believer in miasma theory might have practised mask wearing (ideally with a large beak), indoor ventilation and outdoor gathering more

Matt Ridley

China is using the climate as a bargaining chip

China’s President Xi Jinping has apparently not yet decided whether to travel to Glasgow next month for the big climate conference known as COP26. That is no doubt partly because he’s heard about the weather in Glasgow in November, and partly because he knows the whole thing will be a waste of his time. After all, the fact that it is the 26th such meeting and none of the previous 25 solved the problem they set out to solve suggests the odds are that the event will be the flop on the Clyde. But another reason he is hesitating was stated pretty explicitly by his Foreign Minister, Wang Yi: ‘Climate

Seb Kennedy

Power grab: who’s hoarding all the gas?

Before Britain started worrying about a shortage of lorry drivers and petrol, we were fretting about a spike in wholesale gas prices. A couple of weeks and news cycles later, it would be easy to imagine that crisis had gone away. It hasn’t. On the contrary, global gas markets are preparing for a volatile winter. Britain, along with the rest of Europe, will face the full force of the crisis, raising the prospect of factory closures, if not general power cuts. Like Covid, the energy crisis came from China but has spread worldwide. Last week, Xi Jinping’s government raised the stakes by ordering its state-owned energy companies to secure winter

Bruce Anderson

Is this Greece’s finest wine since Homer strummed his lyre?

We were in deepest Dorset, l’Angleterre profonde. The weather was also typically English: inundations followed by counter-attacks from the Indian summer. Despite those, and even under a still blue sky, it was just too nippy to eat outside — or at least, that was what the less well-insulated members of the party insisted. Fear no more the heat of the sun. It has gone south with the swallows. But there was mellow fruitfulness, in this season which offers a delicious choice between grouse and partridge (unless you are Nicholas Soames, and have both). When it came to accompanying bottles, we were eclectic. Our hosts are good friends of Giugi, Marchese