Sunday Strange call from Gary. Wanted to know if I knew anything about meatloaf. I said no, not my taste in music but that wasn’t what he was after. Said he’d rung every single girl in the press office and no one knew how to cook it, or what was in it, apart from meat.
President-elect Obama (as I write) is preparing his inaugural, and it will doubtless display the same persuasive charm and intelligence that has characterised all his speeches. ‘Change’, ‘belief’ ‘opportunity’, ‘freedom’, ‘hope’, ‘equality’, ‘rights’ and ‘listening to the people’ will be qualified by ‘responsibility’ and ‘challenge’. ‘Yes, we can’ may become ‘Yes, we can, but only
It is a rich irony that the true audacity of President Obama’s inaugural address was its dampening of hope. Having campaigned under a banner emblazoned with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, the 44th President’s first act of government was to administer a stiff dose of realism. He had been expected, with good reason, to emulate
Islam and the Nazis Sir: Charles Moore touches on an important point when he ascribes a Nazi–Hamas continuum of interests (The Spectator’s Notes, 17 January). While helping Europe Minister Denis MacShane write his recently published book, Globalising Hatred — The New Anti-Semitism, I was numbed by the depths of the relationship between radical Islam and
