To turn an army on one’s own people is bad enough. But to call in foreign mercenaries, as Colonel Gaddafi did this week in Libya, is a rare form of savagery, one which offers a chilling glimpse into the real nature of his dictatorship. He should be stopped. We have heard this week the familiar
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited Egypt, speaking to Mohamed Tantawi, the head of the armed forces supreme council, and to Ahmed Shafiq, the caretaker Prime Minister. Later, in Kuwait, he said that ‘denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the reverse’. Before leaving Britain, Mr Cameron had written about the
The point about crowds, as Gaddafi is now learning, is that there are more of them than there are of him. Romans knew this only too well and, like Gaddafi, went out of their way to prevent large gatherings. Time, therefore, for Libyans to take radical Roman action. In 494 bc, the Roman poor were
University challenge An analysis of university applications has suggested that 30,000 students had committed plagiarism when writing personal statements on their forms. An earlier trawl through applications found: 175 applicants were inspired to apply for medicine by an infirm grandfather 234 had developed an interest in medicine after ‘burning a hole in my pyjamas aged
Question the sceptics Sir: Let’s set aside the fact that the article by Matt Ridley and Nicholas Lewis, ‘Breaking the Ice’ (19 February) — to which you oddly gave cover prominence — was outstandingly the most boring thing I have come across in The Spectator for over 30 years. What, exactly, is the point of
