Society

Thursday

Emma Park

Not dead – yet

It was a dark afternoon in November, and the wind was rattling the casements of the bare schoolroom. My small but enthusiastic class of Greek students nibbled chocolate biscuits and listened politely as I ploughed through yet another list of irregular verbs. Suddenly, standing by the electronic whiteboard, I had a sort of minor epiphany (Epiphany: from the Greek term for a god’s manifestation to undeserving mortals). Why, I asked myself, were these bright teenagers devoting so much time to studying a difficult language which they would never be able to use to communicate, whose native speakers died two millennia ago, and in which it would take years to reach

The Spectator

2372: Spot-on | 6 September 2018

The key phrase is LIKE A TANSY (39). The scientific name of the tansy is TANACETUM VULGARE (4A 12); remaining unclued lights are synonyms of tan (4D, 34), ace (25, 33) and tum (3, 19).   First prize Eileen Robinson, Sheffield Runners-up Peter Moody, Fareham, Hants; Mrs L. Ashley, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Should we be returning to the safe haven of gold?

All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index of US stocks has risen by more than 300 per cent — and that rise has continued throughout Donald Trump’s reign, despite his trade war threats and other follies. But it has not been reflected in major European markets, which have drifted sideways, and has been increasingly sustained by a small number of top tech

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Sebastian Faulks’s ghosts in Paris

In this week’s books podcast, I’m talking to Sebastian Faulks about his brilliant new novel Paris Echo, which describes the twined stories of a Moroccan teenager and an American academic in the French capital – and the way that the ghosts of the past, from the Occupation to the decolonisation of North Africa, still play out in the present. I asked Sebastian whether writing from the point of view of a 19-year-old Moroccan means he’s going to be chucked in the Lionel Shriver High Security Prison for “cultural appropriation”, whether Paris Echo is an excursion into Magic Realism, how his serious literary novels coexist with his writing James Bond or

Samantha Price

The value of an arts education

With another year of public exams behind us, the education sector continues to navigate its way through the government’s significant programme of reform at GCSE and A-level. These changes are aimed at raising standards, a mission that few would argue with; and in pursuit of this laudable goal, the independent school heads I’ve spoken with are broadly unopposed to the considerable amount of time that we have all devoted in recent years to implementing and adjusting to these reforms successfully. However, heads are all grappling with the same challenge: how do we structure and focus our curriculums to provide the necessary time to deliver the new syllabi without compromising the

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron holds Britain’s Brexit fate in his hands

C.S. Forester, creator of Hornblower, a great student of Anglo-French relations, wrote a now often overlooked exhortative novel titled Death to the French. Contemporary readers might consider it triggering if not racist, yet it captures well a traditional British reaction when angry Frenchmen start throwing missiles at us. Here in the south of France we are some distance from the troubled waters of the Guerre de Coquilles Saint Jacques. On the shores of the Mediterranean, oysters are favoured and war fever muted, although nobody at Chez Trini’s café doubts that the perfidious English are up to their usual conneries. I tend to agree, but then I’m applying for an Irish

James Kirkup James Kirkup

How Caroline Lucas fell foul of the transgender thought police

Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly. Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The pointlessness of banning Bannon

Under David Remnick’s editorship, the New Yorker has become stronger than ever during a period where many titles have collapsed. So you’d think he might be able to fend off the kind of nonsense he’s just experienced. The New Yorker has branched out to publish unmissable podcasts, regular emails, blogs and events which combine to push the magazine sales up 10pc. Remnick hasn’t torn it up and started again. He managed to keep everything the same, by changing everything: projecting and protecting the magazine’s identity, on and off the page. So when he decided to conduct an interview with Steve Bannon live on stage, as part of the New Yorker

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Pope’s cardinal errors

The Catholic Church is confronting a series of interconnected scandals so shameful that its very survival is threatened. Pope Francis himself is accused of covering up the activities of one of the nastiest sexual predators ever to wear a cardinal’s hat: his close ally Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, DC. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI are also implicated; they did nothing, or almost nothing, while Mc-Carrick was seducing every seminarian he could get his hands on. (‘Hide the pretty ones!’ they used to say when he visited seminaries.) Yet powerful cardinals kept quiet and are now suspected of lying their heads off after Mc–Carrick’s crimes were

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Hail to the Chef

I first became aware of Alastair Cook in the Ashes summer of 2005 when he was named the Young Cricketer of the Year by the cricket writers’ association following some epic performances in the county game, not least taking a double hundred off the touring Australians. The assembled brains on our table, including Mike Brearley, agreed that the boy would go far. And how… The greatest of current English players, Cook — happily married and impeccably polite — set a perfect example. There were no nightclub brawls, no pedalos, not even any light aircraft. Blessed with incredible stamina and single-mindedness, he knew what worked and kept at it. He wouldn’t

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 8 September

We were going to run an entirely French offer this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, but I couldn’t resist the 2017 Esterházy Estoras Grüner Veltliner (1) from Austria. I used to drink buckets of GV with my late godmother, the novelist and sometime contributor to this magazine, Sarah Gainham. I’ve never lost my taste for it. This example, produced for the Esterházy princes in Eisenstadt by the celebrated Joseph Pusch, is well up to snuff and my godmother — who single-handedly (apart from my occasional help) kept her local winzer Josef Pimpel in business — would have loved it. It’s crisp yet creamy with a whisper of pepper, spice and nuts,

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why do we care so little about child abuse?

Abusing children is one of the most terrible things men do. We all agree about that. And I think we’re all aware, as Sajid Javid announced on Monday, that it’s a growing problem. The same technology that allows millions to share videos of romping kittens has created an awful, expanding market for images of children — mostly very young girls. There has been a 700 per cent rise in reports of child abuse images since 2012, said Javid: an average of 400 arrests a month. Police think that there are now 80,000 people in the UK who pose a serious threat to kids. Javid is shocked by the scale of

Ian Sansom

Monkey Tennis and tarot

Alas, the great Alan Partridge never got to make Inner-City Sumo, despite his famously desperate pitch to BBC TV commissioners. ‘We take fat people from the inner cities, put them in big nappies, and then get them to throw each other out of a circle… If you don’t do it, Sky will.’ Nor did we ever get to see Cooking In Prison. Arm Wrestling with Chas and Dave. Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank. Or — the ne plus ultra — Monkey Tennis. Some ideas, it seems, are just too strange for telly. Fortunately, there’s a place for them on YouTube. Plenty of people have uploaded videos of themselves playing tennis

Liam Halligan

The world the crash made

With September marking a decade since the Lehman Brothers implosion, stand by for a slew of economic retrospectives. Any meaningful analysis, though, needs to get beyond historic balance sheets and plunging share price graphs — however dramatic the data. For the most significant impact of the biggest financial and economic upheaval since the Great Depression has been the growing loss of faith in western liberal capitalism. Politics has been upended by the 2008 crisis — doing much to explain Trump, Corbyn and the broader shift away from centrist parties towards extremes. The demise of Lehmans, a once-impregnable investment bank, exposed a US financial sector riddled with chronic debts and fraud.

Richard Bratby

Cannock Chase

Cannock Chase is the long, low range of hills that’s visible to your right as you drive north up the M6 beyond Birmingham. If you’ve travelled by train between Euston and Crewe, you’ve practically brushed its cloak. Soon after Rugeley the landscape closes in, and a palisade of dark pines presses down the slope before your Pendolino ducks into the tunnel that Lord Lichfield made Robert Stephenson dig in 1846 so as not to spoil the landscape of his Shugborough estate. You don’t see much of the Chase, but you certainly sense it. It’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but that feels rather an effete description for something so

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m up on memes and down with the kids

Boy and I have been driving the Fawn mad by singing the ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ song. It goes (roughly to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star): ‘Johny Johny/ Yes, Papa/ Eating Sugar?/ No, Papa/ Telling Lies?/ No, Papa/ Open Your Mouth!/ Ha Ha Ha.’ In the likely event that you don’t know it, you’ll probably find it as irritating as the Fawn does — especially the misspelling of Johnny and the bad Indian accent. But in the unlikely event that you do, you’ll be congratulating yourself on your pop cultural credibility. This is because for a brief period peaking around last weekend — ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ was the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Bleak House

It takes seven years to know your way around Parliament. That’s what I was told when I arrived in the Commons press gallery seven years ago, but I am still none the wiser about how to get from the Snake Pit to the North Curtain Corridor, and have only recently discovered the location of the Yellow Submarine. As a building, the Palace of Westminster is a confusing, contradictory rabbit warren of underground corridors, secret briefing rooms at the top of towers and rooms with strange names. The very fabric of the building is dysfunctional, with pieces of masonry falling onto cars, and mice creeping through kitchens. Winston Churchill famously said

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why can’t Britain hang on to its best new companies?

Costa, in my opinion, sells a decent cup of coffee. It employs polite youngsters who seem happy in their work. If you’re desperate for caffeine, even its petrol-station vending machines are not too bad. And unlike the UK operation of Starbucks, whose coffee is vile, it pays tax on its profits at close to the full rate of corporation tax. Founded by two Italian brothers in London’s Vauxhall Bridge Road in 1971, it’s a triumph of brand development — and a credit to its current owner Whitbread, which acquired Costa as a diversification from its own traditional brewing business in 1995. Now Costa has been sold to Coca-Cola for a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The lunatics have landed

I remember the moon landing very well. I was nine years old. I can remember too my sense of outrage and disillusion. ‘This is a blatant violation of the moon’s dignity and sovereignty,’ I told my parents, as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong attempted to secure the US flag to the lunar surface. ‘An act of imperialistic, Zionist barbarism and a statement of intent from the American government that it intends to export its white supremacy throughout the known galaxy. You will note that no people of colour were chosen as astronauts, nor women, nor people with fibromyalgia.’ A day or two later, when I had been let

Lucy Vickery

Living dangerously | 6 September 2018

In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.   It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery. As usual with this type