Society

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Let’s calm down about Amber Rudd’s ‘coloured’ gaffe

If you want to see the detrimental impact political correctness has had on our society, you could do worse than examine the scandal swirling around Amber Rudd today. Rudd is being mauled for using the undoubtedly antiquated word ‘coloured’ to describe Diane Abbott. On Radio 2, she referred to Abbott as a ‘coloured woman’. Cue fury. ‘Told you the Tories were racist’, everyone is saying, to such an extent that Rudd has now issued an apology. But here’s the thing: when she used the word ‘coloured’, Rudd was speaking out against racism. She was condemning it. Does the context of people’s words, their actual meaning, count for nought now? It

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis can never be solved under Corbyn

If racism is to succeed in corrupting institutions and countries it needs authorisation from the elite. The popular caricature of the racist as a white working-class man, or superstitious east european peasant, or shabby paranoid academic, shows not only class bias, but a lack of understanding that what transforms extremism from poisonous men muttering in corners to political movements with the power to ruin lives, is the authorisation given by leaders and intellectuals. A party can have racist members – as the Conservative party undoubtedly does. But because its leadership is not anti-Muslim their effect is constrained to personal abuse. I don’t mean to diminish it. If my experience is

The Spectator

Dangerous liaison

From ‘She was a child and I was a child’ by Kingsley Amis, 6 November 1959: The only success of the book is the portrait of Lolita herself. I have rarely seen the external ambience of a character so marvellously realised, and yet there is seldom more than necessary for the undertone of sensuality… She is a ‘portrait’… devotedly watched and listened to but never conversed with, the object of desire but never of curiosity. What else did she do in Humbert’s presence but play tennis and eat sundaes and go to bed with him? What did they talk about? What did they actually get up to? Apart from a

Rachel Johnson

Publish and be damned

The other day Will Self unburdened himself on the state of fiction with crushing hauteur. ‘What’s now regarded as serious literature would, ten or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young adult fiction… in terms of literary history, it does seem a bit of a regression. If you consider that Nabokov’s Lolita was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, it’s a different order of literature…’ Stop right there! Will Self’s top pick was Lolita. This was the novel of the 20th century that stood the test of time. But would Lolita even be plucked from the slush pile in 2019, let alone be listed as

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 7 March 2019

Laikipia   A female black panther was recently photographed at our neighbours’ place. Exactly like Kipling’s Bagheera, she was ‘inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk’. The images show her to be the most beautiful of creatures. A black panther is a melanistic leopard. I rarely see leopards and I have never seen this individual but for years a local Laikipia researcher called Ambrose Letoluai had heard about these black panthers from elders in our area. Based at Loisaba Conservancy next to us, Ambrose works for a San Diego Zoo leopard project. As part of his routine

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The coolest man in cricket

It can’t be a coincidence that two of the coolest sportsmen on the planet are from the same place, Jamaica. Must be something in the air. Chris Gayle and Usain Bolt have both redefined excellence in their fields. And Gayle’s impending departure from cricket, like Bolt’s from athletics, will have the effect, sadly, of making sport more monochrome, though diehard traditionalists world over will doubtless be glad to see the back of him. Ten years ago, Gayle (aka Universe Boss) said he wouldn’t be ‘so sad if Test cricket died out’. In the intervening decade he has striven spectacularly to promote the action-packed delights of the limited-overs game, rarely more

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t vilify housebuilders for profiting from Help to Buy

Was Help to Buy a timely market intervention with a valid social purpose or a political gimmick that unintentionally showered housebuilders with taxpayers’ cash? Or both: this isn’t a straightforward question. ‘This government supports those who dream of owning their own home,’ said a statement from Philip Hammond last week. So far the ‘equity loan scheme’ launched by George Osborne in 2013 and now extended until 2023 has underpinned 194,000 home sales, the great majority to first-time buyers in the provinces, while another 300,000 have been supported by a £3,000 savings top-up. Meanwhile, housebuilders have upped their game as Osborne wished: annual new home numbers, having almost halved by 2013

Nicholas Farrell

Italians

For a few years before coming to Italy, I lived in Paris and I cannot tell you the life-enhancing difference I felt as I crossed the frontier from France into Italy in my metallic burgundy Honda Prelude. On arrival at the Italian motorway toll that stifling summer of 1998, I discovered I had no money and that the sun had melted my bank card which I had left on the dashboard. The charming young woman on the toll-gate simply gave me a form to fill in and waved me through with a smile. Isn’t this how we should run the world? I remember once being stopped by two Italian police

Kate Chisholm

Making sense of Seurat

‘It’s too familiar, too obvious,’ says Cathy FitzGerald at the beginning of her new interactive series for Radio 4, Moving Pictures. But then she took another look at Georges Seurat’s ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’, that huge, weird and unsettling pointilliste painting of a crowd of Parisians enjoying a sunny afternoon on the banks of the Seine some time in the 1880s. Instead of the 30-second glance we might give it in the art gallery, or five minutes at the very most, FitzGerald encourages us to linger, to look a little more slowly, take in the detail and fully appreciate what’s there on the canvas. After all, Seurat took

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

China’s singles market

 Shanghai ‘How old are you, young lady?’ A small, curious crowd starts to surround me. ‘How tall are you? What do you work as?’ The parents camping out in Shanghai’s infamous marriage market have no time for small talk. They come here every weekend, rain or shine, seeking a partner for their grown-up son or daughter. Age, wage, height, education — everyone has a wish list, and they also condense their own child into such a list. Today’s special: me. The so-called Matchmakers’ Corner has seen tens of thousands of Chinese parents, including members of my own family, come to investigate what (or who) is out there. A great many

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Save your children – take them out of school

A good decade or so ago I wrote a fairly vituperative article in response to a piece by the writer James Bartholomew in this magazine, who had announced that he intended to home-school his daughter Alex, aged nine. James had explained in great detail how he would inculcate his charge in the liberal arts: ‘I don’t want to give the impression that I will be a Gradgrind. We will have some fun, too. Alex loves to paint. We will go to the major Cézanne exhibition in Aix and see his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Then we will see the mountain itself from the same viewpoint that he used. I hope

Lucy Vickery

Political noir

In Competition No. 3088 you were invited to submit a short story in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction set in the corridors of power. Raymond Chandler cast a long shadow over an entry bristling with stinging one-liners, dames, black humour and grandstanding similes laid on with a trowel. The mean streets of Westminster were the most popular setting, though there were glimpses of Brussels and the Oval Office too. Commiserations to unlucky losers Bill Greenwell, D.A. Prince and Alan Millard. High fives to the winners, printed below, who trouser £25 each.   Down these dull corridors a man must go who is not himself dull. Besides, I was expected

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Books Podcast: love, death, and loss with Max Porter

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to Max Porter, former publisher at Granta and author of the prizewinning debut Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, about his brilliant new novel Lanny (reviewed by Andrew Motion here). He asks: why are we used to novels having 15 page boring bits? What does the Green Man myth, and myth in general, have to offer readers? How do you convey the white noise of a village’s chatter on the page? And which Thomas brother is the best: Dylan or RS?

Tuesday

Debbie Hayton

A collapsed case shows the perils of policing ‘transphobia’

The bizarre stories of censorship and bullying by trans activists frequently made baffling reading. But the spectacle of Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, ending up in the dock for apparent ‘transphobia’ (all at the behest of a non-trans person) really takes the biscuit. An author would struggle to pitch such an incredible scenario at a publisher but, to quote Mark Twain, truth is stranger than fiction. Our post-truth world is off the scale. The story started with a social media spat between Yardley and a campaigner called Helen Islan. Yardley is a transsexual with a strong view on gender politics: namely that male people cannot become female people just because

Monday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Ella Risbridger

40 min listen

In this episode of Table Talk, Lara and Livvy talk to Ella Risbridger, chef and writer, whose new recipe book is Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For. It’s part memoir, part cookery; exploring mental health, friendship, love, and the redemptive power of food and cooking. On the podcast, Ella talks about the man that she moved from Dubai to London for, what it’s like to be the cover girl of Aga Living (can you tell she grew up with an aga?), and the recipe for the best roast chicken in the world. Please note that this podcast features a candid discussion of suicide and suicide ideation.

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Jonathan Dimbleby’s Any Questions? was the BBC at its best

The recent history of the BBC is a tale of two Dimblebies. David, the elder, enjoyed the higher profile on television, but at a terrible price: his latter years at Question Time saw him acting as ringmaster for a programme that had become a ‘show’, a three-ring circus of shallow anger and offence. Now Jonathan, the younger, is retiring from Any Questions?, the Radio Four programme that served as a weekly reminder of what the BBC can be when it remembers its real purpose and stops worrying about being popular. For a generation – 32 years, to be exact – Jonathan has spent Friday nights in town halls, schools and

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: crossing a haiku with a limerick

We already have short-form hybrids such as the clerihaiku (here’s one from Mary Holtby): Peter Palumbo Cries, ‘Mumbo-jumbo!’ and rails At the Prince of Wales And the limeraiku: A haiku will do For a limerick trick, called A Limeraiku That was by Arthur P. Cox. And now clever Bill Webster, veteran competitor, has come up with the haikick, a new version of the haiku-limerick combination. You responded to the call for topical haikicks with your customary vim and wit, and drew on such notables as William Spooner, Abraham Lincoln and Jeremys Clarkson and Paxman. The winners below are rewarded with a tenner per entry printed. Hugh King Abraham Lincoln Once

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is it good news that there are fewer UK-born students at Oxbridge?

How to classify the story that there are a thousand fewer UK-born undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge than there were ten years ago? For those (seemingly all three main political parties) who love subjecting education to social control, is this good news? Is it a roaring success for ‘diversity’ (in the same period, Oxford numbers of overseas undergraduates rose by 51 per cent and Cambridge numbers by 65 per cent)? Or is it an example of social regression, since the main feature of most overseas undergraduates is that they pay much higher fees, and therefore are of much greater interest to the university authorities than our own fee-capped students? The

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases

The Romans never invented the stirrup. It took 50 years after the invention of canned food for someone to invent the can opener. And we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. This seems silly. But it is worth understanding each invention in context: often, a concatenation of other events has to occur before an invention can become widely adopted. The stirrup was of no use until the invention of the saddle-tree, which more evenly spread the rider’s weight across the horse’s back. The can opener had to wait for thinner cans: early tins were too hefty to submit to anything less than a chisel.