Society

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 4 October 2018

Laikipia, Kenya   The Turkana cowhands are on Facebook and they spend a lot of time on their cell phones, but they are also superb trackers and one of them, called Ekuwom, can divine the future by ‘reading’ the entrails of a butchered animal like the Etruscans. After the confusion of a heavy thunderstorm before dusk one evening we lost a flock of sheep; we searched all night and rescued dozens. In my experience with lion, leopard, jackal and hyena, a sheep left outside the boma overnight has a 50–50 chance of living until morning. At dawn, beneath low cloud, we found 12 carcasses scattered white and red across the

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Teamwork? It’s not the American way

For a nation which gave us a brilliant TV show called Band of Brothers, the Americans find it hard to bond like brothers, or even second cousins. Gratifyingly, they seem to loathe each other. The best part of Europe winning the Ryder Cup, especially with a thrashing, is always the American meltdown afterwards. Four years ago in Scotland, Phil Mickelson gave his captain, the much-loved Tom Watson, a full barrel–load post-match. ‘We have strayed from a winning formula,’ was the gist. Later, when asked about Mickelson’s disloyalty, Watson replied with customary courtesy: ‘He has a difference of opinion. That’s OK. My management philosophy is different than his. It takes 12

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 6 October

As we all know, getting the first drink of the day right can be a tricky business, not least because what you fancy at noon will be very different from what you want at 7 p.m. On either occasion, you need to tread carefully, with nothing too dry, too sweet or too alcoholic. Too dry and you shock the taste buds and everything tastes overly acidic; too sweet and you bugger up your palate for later. And as for the alcohol, well, you’re just getting your eye in, so take it easy. You can always turn it up to 11 later if necessary. Full marks, then, to my old chum

Christopher Fletcher

Mann and motorbike

In Thomas Mann’s astonishing novel The Magic Mountain the indolent young Hans Castorp visits his brave, terminally ill soldier cousin at a sanatorium at Davos, high in the Swiss Alps. Intending to stay three weeks, he remains seven years. A dubious diagnosis of light tuberculosis is all the excuse he needs to dismiss ‘the flatlands’ and discover, with increasing wonder, that in the midst of death he is in life. We could have done with more than one night at Le Grand Hôtel Plombières-les-Bains in Eastern France in order to penetrate the Thermes Napoleon to which it is attached. ‘Accèss strictement réservé aux curistes’ warned a blu-tacked sign on a

The Spectator

The decisive moment

From ‘News of the week’, 5 October 1918: The Western Front is now aflame from the sea to Verdun. This week has seen the hardest fighting of the war. Marshal Foch has launched not one offensive but a whole series, in one sector after another, so that now the battle is joined along a front of over two hundred miles. The enemy is thus hotly engaged at almost every point, and can no longer weaken one part of his line to strengthen another, since a breach at any place would be disastrous. The decisive moment has come.  

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The joys of Neglexit

The new political buzzword is ‘Neglexit’: the state of being in which, because the government is so wrapped up in Brexit negotiations, Britain is barely being governed. No big, visionary new policies are being launched. Gone are the days when every parliamentary session included an NHS Bill, a Criminal Justice Bill or an Education Bill. ‘The UK is stuck in political and bureaucratic torpor. The country — as an administrative entity — has virtually stopped working… ministers just don’t have the time to attend to the needs and ambitions of ordinary citizens,’ said a report from Bloomberg Businessweek. ‘Theresa May’s flagship EU Withdrawal Bill has taken up 273 hours of

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Yes, we cyclists really are nasty

One morning a long time ago, when the Spectator offices were still in Bloomsbury, I hopped my bike up onto the kerb outside the new Pret a Manger on Theobalds Road, locked it to a post and went in. A man followed me, his face vacuum-packed with fury. He shouted: ‘No bikes on the PAVEMENT’, then he spat in my face. Not a soul moved. Only a few looked up from their contemplation of the sandwich calorie count. They thought, I suppose, I deserved it. And since that day, I’ve defended my fellow bikers against any number of anti-cycle fanatics. We’re not innocent, I thought, but we’re undeserving of this

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The truth is we prefer to lie

There are no necessary truths any more. Everything is contingent. And those contingencies are the consequence not of what happens in the real world, but of the derangement in our own minds. Some will insist it was ever thus. Well, if so, it’s never been more evident. Take just two examples. We will never know the truth of the Kavanaugh case unless one of the two principal actors ’fesses up — and even then I wouldn’t be too sure. If the case went to court and Christine Blasey Ford were a reliable witness, and several of her contemporaries gave evidence that they witnessed the attempted rape and all Brett Kavanaugh

Lucy Vickery

Back-to-front sonnet

In Competition No. 3068 you were invited to provide a sonnet in reverse, using as your model Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality.   This challenge produced a delightfully varied and engaging entry. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, Jennifer Pearson, David Shields, George Simmers and Philip Roe. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each.   Six days to build the Cosmos! I was hot! With stars and planets, galaxies, the lot — And life! Amoebae, microbes, dinosaurs, Crustaceans,

Mika Ross-Southall

Field trip with father

Sarah Moss’s concise, claustrophobic sixth novel concerns the perils of family life. The narrator Silvie is a frustrated 17-year-old on holiday in the Northumbrian countryside with her father Bill, a bus driver with an insatiable interest in prehistoric Britain, and her mother Alison, who works as a cashier in a supermarket. They have joined an ‘experiential archeology’ field trip — ‘to have a flavour of Iron Age life’ — run by Professor Slade for a group of his university students. But Silvie dislikes the scratchy tunic that she’s forced to wear and the small wooden hut she must sleep in because her father insists on authenticity. (The others, meanwhile, are

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

How three pranksters exposed the insanity of the social sciences

One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘the conceptual penis as a social construct.’ This was an academic paper which proposed that: ‘The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.’ This gobbledegook was presented in an academic journal, was peer-reviewed and published in Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax. A big, beautiful brilliant hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immersed themselves in the academic BS of their time.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What the rise of the middle class reveals about the global poverty myth

According to a Vienna-based think tank, the World Data Lab, a remarkable milestone was reached this week – for the first time, half the world’s population can be classified as middle class. Obviously, there is wide room for interpretation as to what constitutes membership of the middle classes – the World Data Lab defines it as the ability to afford a washing machine and to be able to go on holiday. But it is nevertheless an indicator which deserves far more attention than it gets paid. After all, it is not so very long ago that economists would have described the middle classes as constituting a small proportion of the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

2018 finalists lunch – Midlands

Today we’re in the baronial setting of Hampton Manor Hotel in Warwickshire — a long iron shot from Birmingham Airport, but happily out of earshot of the fractious Tory Party conference up the road. We’re here to meet the Midlands regional finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards: our host is Mark Embley, regional manager for our sponsor, the private bank Julius Baer, and our guests are Dr David Jehring, chief executive of Black Pear Software, Ian Firth, vice president for products at Speechmatics, and Steven Greenall, founder of Warwick Music Group. I’ve met or talked to some 16 of our 22 disruptor finalists so far, listened

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Edward Leigh becomes the latest victim of the Twitter mob

I continue to be in two minds about Twitter outrages. The part of me that longs for an easy life wants to believe they are deeply stupid and ephemeral. The part of me that makes Eeyore look like the tears-of-laughter emoji suspects they are deeply stupid and important markers of changing cultural attitudes. If you want to test whether an opinion you hold is still socially acceptable, post it on Twitter and hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of complete strangers will kindly enlighten you. Some of them will even turn off the caps lock first. Sir Edward Leigh, a Tory MP, tweeted this today: https://twitter.com/EdwardLeighMP/status/1047127417565974528 Some background first. The government has

Monday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Cern sexism row shows that even scientists can’t talk about gender

The great Quentin Blake, who illustrated the Roald Dahl books, has come up with some charming new illustrations for Matilda, the child prodigy who was so brainy she could make things move by sheer mind-power. For the 30th anniversary of the book, he speculates on what she might have become: there’s Matilda, world traveller, chief executive of the British Library, astrophysicist. Or maybe not. Alessandro Strumia at the university of Pisa has cast doubt on that last one. In an address at Cern, the European nuclear energy body, to an audience of women – grown up Matildas, all of them – he declared that the reason men are so over-represented

Sunday

Andrew Marr & Theresa May

Marr vs May on Windrush: the transcript

Andrew Marr: Let me ask you about another burning injustice which you didn’t mention but I think a lot of people would regard as a burning injustice: the treatment of all of those West Indian people who came here in the 1950s and 1960s – asked here to work, people from the Caribbean and elsewhere. We were very, very short of jobs in those days. We brought them into this country. And as a result of your hostile environment policy, their lives have been turned upside down. I’m talking of course of the Windrush generation. Do you not think that was a burning injustice? Theresa May: I think – and

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Dante’s holiday from hell

The seed of the latest assignment — to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known voyager from the fields of fact or fiction — was a column in the Observer called My Crap Holiday, which invited readers to share their travel horrors: inclement weather, devil children, oven-like bedrooms, Arctic bedrooms, wardrobe-like bedrooms — you get the idea. I had high hopes of this one but it clearly failed to light your fire, producing only a modest haul of entries — albeit with a few crackers. D.A. Prince’s Lucy Honeychurch was thoroughly hacked off with Florence: ‘If it wasn’t Cousin Charlotte twitching at every imagined slight and

Saturday

Prue Leith

The young people I meet give me hope for Brexit

I’m heartedly sick of hearing how feckless and selfish the young are. Maybe I move in enchanted circles, but I keep on meeting young people making a go of it, and frankly if they are the future, we should have no fear of Brexit. At Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Festival, there were (among the Glastonbury refugees selling henna tattoos, yoga classes and herbal remedies) new cheesemakers, butchers, jam- and pickle-makers, restaurateurs, furniture-makers and brewers, all having successful careers out of work they love. England now has more artisan cheeses than France. Last month I helped judge the first year of the British Charcuterie Awards and there were 443 entries, mostly

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why is Canada letting Isis fighters off lightly?

What is the difference between the SS and Isis? A big one, it seems, in the eyes of Canada, where this week a federal court refused to review a decision to strip the Canadian citizenship of Helmut Oberlander, a Ukrainian immigrant with alleged ties to a Nazi killing squad in World War II. According to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC), Oberlander served as an interpreter in the Einsatzkommando, mobile death squads that swept through Eastern Europe in the early years of the war, liquidating men, women and children, mostly Jews, but also homosexuals, gypsies and communists. It is estimated that the squad Oberlander allegedly belonged to, Einsatzkommando 10a, killed 23,000 civilians