Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

As I suspected, my defects can’t be cured

I’ve just finished making a one-hour documentary about character for Radio 4 that’s due to be broadcast on Saturday at 8 p.m. It starts with the premise that there’s been a decline in what we think of as British values — honesty, fortitude, duty, modesty, charity, hard work, good manners, a sense of fair play, etc. — and asks whether anything can be done to restore them. Should they be taught in schools? Do parenting classes help? Or is the younger generation doomed to sink into a morass of indolence and vice? I was originally commissioned to present it because I’ve written about character before, as well as helped set

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 20 September 2018

Q. A neighbour, a wonderful old friend in his late eighties, is a marvellous raconteur. As a family we have enjoyed his company for years. Our problem is that our children have entered their mid-teens and become pompous and intolerant. When we entertain at lunchtime they and their friends ruin the atmosphere by trying to gag our friend, complaining that his remarks are racist, homophobic, snobbish — the works. They particularly object to his imitation of foreign accents, one of his party turns. We love our children but this is causing tension at the table. What do you suggest? — E.D.G., Calne A. Explain to your children that it is

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Cuisine for cadavers

Politicians are having a terrible time of late, along with the rest of us — it’s not much fun watching the remnants of the post-war consensus shatter — and so here is Albert Roux consoling them with a new, glossy restaurant on the door-step of their rotting legislature palace. Food at the Palace of Westminster is not the best, although Corbynistas think it is. They think peers bathe in champagne while laughing and that MPs don’t have to butter their own toast. Well they will learn post-Revolution. They will learn to use a butter knife and how to talk righteously to a nationalised media. It’s called Roux at Parliament Square,

Dot Wordsworth

Whiter than white

A detective superintendent has been placed on ‘restricted duties’ while the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigates a complaint that he used the phrase whiter than white at a briefing. An ‘insider’ told the Evening Standard: ‘It may have been a poor use of language but this is not what the misconduct process is for.’ What nonsense. It is isn’t ‘a poor use of language’ at all. We may take it that the phrase was used figuratively. Literally, whiter than white has been used of necks, teeth and faces for three or four hundred years. In the figurative sense, I cannot find anything definite before 1962, about the time when

Doc

2377: In order

The dozen unclued lights can be arranged in a specific sequence when preceded by or followed by their sequence indicators which do not appear in the puzzle. But, two clued solutions happen to include the second word of the sequence! All but one (at 19, with an apostrophe) of the dozen resulting phrases can be verified in Brewer or Chambers. Ignore two accents, and 15D includes an abbreviation.   Across 1 Talk of money for hidden store (5) 10 Hurry up and organise a change of home (10, four words) 11 Firebomb constituent buddy found in Asian country (6) 12 Hardly protection from the rain (7) 14 For separating an

Angelos Sofocleous

How I was hounded off campus for saying ‘women don’t have penises’

What harm can it do saying that women don’t have penises? Quite a lot, actually, if my experience is anything to go on. After sharing a statement with that message on Twitter, along with a screenshot from a Spectator article, the backlash was swift. Less than a month after sending that tweet, I had lost my position as president-elect of Humanist Students as well as my role as assistant editor of Durham University’s philosophy society’s undergraduate journal, Critique. I was also given the boot as co-editor-in-chief of Durham University’s online student magazine, the Bubble. All for saying something that many people would surely agree with. The reaction against me was extreme,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: icons and god(s) with Neil MacGregor

In this week’s books podcast, I talk to the former head honcho of the National Gallery and British Museum, Neil MacGregor, about his new book Living With The Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples. Neil tells the story of the world’s religions through objects — beginning with a 40,000-year-old carving that might be the first human representation of an entirely imaginary object. What do religions have in common? How do you represent icon-averse creeds through physical objects? Why should there be an evolutionary advantage in engaging with the intangible or imaginary? And what does the history of religion tell us about the common threads of humanity?

Matthew Goodwin

Freshers week is torture for an ageing academic like me

A fellow academic once said that working at a university is one of only a few places where you grow older while everyone around you stays the same age. It was this remark that occupied my mind this week as I trundled through campus, smiling and greeting our ever-younger-looking first-year undergraduates. The whole idea of ‘Welcome Week’ was no doubt conceived by a university bureaucrat with good intentions. But having experienced it first-hand, and as the one doing the welcoming, I can only conclude that it is torture. Once a year, like clockwork, we older folk must be visibly reminded not only of the relentless passing of time but also

James Kirkup James Kirkup

How John McDonnell wooed Mumsnet

As so often these days, if you want real political insight, go to Mumsnet. In a web chat there today, John McDonnell has offered extensive proof that – whatever you think of his politics and policies – he is an extremely professional and skilful political communicator. Mumsnet, as Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and countless others will remember, is about the toughest gig out there: you’re faced with a bombardment of questions ranging from traditional political analysis to deeply personal issues and of course humour, much of it biscuit-related. Striking the right tone is very, very hard. These days, Mumsnet is even harder for politicians because an awful lot of users

Douglas Murray

What happens when Steve Bannon is given a platform?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the interesting question of whether or not the former chief strategist to the President of the United States is too fringe a figure to be allowed to speak in public. A lot of very prominent people seem to think that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be given a platform. And among two venues to have recently invited him, the New Yorker promptly disinvited him from their festival under fire from political heavyweights including former ‘funny man’ Jim Carrey. By contrast, the Economist managed to hold firm, surviving the withdrawal of a British blogger and going ahead as planned with their live interview. The video

Christopher Buskirk

Donald Trump is a free trade hero

President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to increase trade. Under his wise rule, he assures us, American trade will thrive. It will be Yuge! Why would anyone doubt that desire? He’s a businessman and businessmen want to do more business not less. In pursuit of this, Trump has also said that that he favours a low or no tariff world, but that it must be based on reciprocity – an easily understandable form of fairness but one which has earned Trump scorn from right, left, and centre. The subject came up at a dinner I attended recently. It was mostly populated by right of centre journalists

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Is there any limit to what the body can do?

Has the world gone mad? There’s Beauden Barrett, the world’s best stand-off, and rugby player of the year seemingly by right, missing a shedload of kickable goals from easy distances to gift an enthralling game to the Springboks. But don’t read too much into it you Twickers types. The All Blacks played at relentlessly high speed, made innumerable handling errors and even took a quick line-out straight to the only Springbok for miles around. They still only lost by a couple of points. I can’t see it happening again. Then the beloved Pumas beat Australia on the Gold Coast and stopped the Rugby Championship becoming a procession. And there’s Simon

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

A wake-up call

Pupils are back in classrooms and parents can finally have a brief respite from worrying about their children’s excessive screen use — or, at least, worrying it is all their fault. This angst peaks each year in the summer holidays, those long, sunny weeks illuminated in large part by the blueish light from children’s smartphones, tablets and laptops. The beep and ping of devices triggers complicated emotions. In many homes, parents simultaneously castigate their offspring’s use of tech and are relieved by it: like some goblin babysitter, it squats in the corner of family life, whispering powerfully, turning children silent and glassy-eyed. The erratically applied adult phrases ‘That’s enough screen

Dan Hitchens

Deep and meaningless

Walking down the street on my lunch break, I sometimes pass a delivery man wheeling a large handcart of Japanese food. The cart bears a striking message: ‘Creating a world where everyone believes in their own authenticity.’ It raises some immediate questions: for instance, what does it mean to believe in your own authenticity? How would you go about creating a world where everyone does? And what’s it got to do with Japanese food? It’s unfair to single out the delivery service. Today, brands big and small have a Profound Statement to make. On my way home I pass a 30ft electronic billboard which displays a young couple embracing beneath

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 22 September

Everyone loves the wines of Louis Latour and I’m delighted to offer such a tasty selection of them here, particularly — thanks to the good offices of Mr Wheeler — at such appetising prices. Louis Latour was founded in 1797 and remains family-owned, with the 11th generation represented by 54-year-old general manager, Louis-Fabrice Latour, who, until his son Louis was born, was known simply as ‘Young Louis’. Maison Louis Latour not only makes wine from its own 50-hectare domaine in the Côte d’Or but also from grapes and wines bought in from other long-standing growers. Quality is everything. I’ve always loved and trusted the company’s wines and whenever I spy

Lucy Vickery

This sporting life

In Competition No. 3066 you were invited to submit an ode to a piece of sporting equipment. There is a long and distinguished tradition of verse inspired by sport, going all the way back to Pindar’s odes celebrating ancient Greek athletic achievement. (As London mayor, Boris Johnson commissioned a poem in the style of Pindar to mark the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games.) Some entries adopted the grand ceremonial tone and structure of classical odes Pindaric, Horatian or Sapphic. Others took the more modern, anything-goes route. Ian Barker and Philip Machin earn an honourable mention, as does Adrian Fry’s clever, Kipling-esque entry. The winners below are rewarded with £25

Anne Applebaum

The wrong right

To the inhabitants of the British Isles, the nations of central Europe have always existed in a semi–mythical space, near enough to be recognised as somehow European, but too distant to be taken seriously. Neville Chamberlain dismissed them as ‘faraway countries of which we know little’; Shakespeare gave landlocked Bohemia a coastline. In British school textbooks, Poland appears for the first time in 1939 and then vanishes again, just as abruptly. In the feverish politics of the Brexit era, central Europe has once again returned — and, once again, it is in a semi-mythical form. This time, the region is playing the role of an imaginary alternative Europe, one perfectly

Mark Mason

Coming second

Who was the second prime minister? Everyone knows Robert Walpole was the first. Firsts get all the fame and glory. But what about the poor seconds, elbowed into the shadows of history? Isn’t it time they were given some love? Step forward, the Earl of Wilmington, PM from 1742 to 1743. Let us celebrate the fact that his country house in Warwickshire appeared as a monastery in Carry On Camping — and was the inspiration for Croft Manor, Lara’s childhood home in the Tomb Raider games. Likewise, no one knows very much about James Garfield, the second US president to be assassinated. I certainly didn’t until I researched him for