Understanding the American class system is elementary. In Ruggles of Red Gap, the striving American wife instructs her new English butler on the duties she expects him to perform for her husband. ‘I want him to look like somebody,’ she explains. ‘Like who, madam?’ asks the perplexed servant. ‘Like somebody,’ she repeats firmly. There you
Who should we get to sort out our venal and cavalier bankers? It’s an interesting question. The Labour party wishes to inflict upon them a plague of lawyers, to use Jeremy Bentham’s apt expression, presided over by some bewigged and self-regarding judge. A judicial inquiry, then, which will end up costing the equivalent of a
Walk into George Osborne’s suite of offices in the Treasury and you are struck straightaway by a new excited mood. People who a month ago looked worn down by the burdens of office are now full of life. In no one has the transformation been more dramatic than the Chancellor himself. He strides out of
Gratefully we cast our bread upon the blue-green waters of the Salzach to give thanks to this festival city. Across the river the famous castle stands fortress over the old town. On the terrace of the Cafe Bazar one hears the tongues of France, Italy and Spain as well as Austria, because this is old
Paris for lovers, tick. Paris for gastronomes, tick. Paris for the fashion-conscious, obviously. But children? Funnily enough, I find it one of the most child-friendly cities we go to. The proprietors of grand boutiques and restaurants who cold-shoulder grown-ups are all smiles when it comes to children. Propping up a bar with my two on
You’ve done the sights: the Hagia Sofia and the great imperial mosques, the Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar, the Bosporus cruise and Basilica Cistern. With the tourist boxes ticked and the past squared away, it’s time to start exploring the real, living city. You may have had enough of museums, but Orhan Pamuk’s new
New York The western world seems not just unhappy, but intoxicated with anger. It is the kind of anger that feeds on itself. Offence is not just taken but relished, and multiplied as in a hall of mirrors. I have a name for this kind of anger. A few years ago, in a book about
We’re just saying our farewells to the Post Office Hotel in Chillagoe, in the outback of Far North Queensland, and I’m telling Dorothy Lawler, the hotel’s 70-year-old part-time cook, that the coleslaw she made with the steaks we had the other night was the crunchiest and most delicious I’d ever eaten. (It’s a great place,
There is nothing as dangerous, they say, as the zeal of the newly converted. So it was when Labour under Tony Blair suddenly discovered capitalism. What had been a small-scale pragmatic policy under John Major’s government, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), was taken up with huge gusto in order to see the rebuilding of hundreds
On my first visit to Egypt, soon after Hosni Mubarak succeeded the assassinated Anwar Sadat as president, a cruel joke was circulating among Cairo’s cognoscenti. ‘When Nasser came to power, he looked around for the most stupid member of his party and appointed Sadat as vice president. When Sadat came to power, he looked around
We all know what a city does when a local boy or girl has done good. But what do you do when the local boy turns out to have done very bad indeed? This is the dilemma facing the Georgian authorities in the city of Gori, not far from the boundary line of South Ossetia.
Last week, a distinguished Chinese thinker arrived in Oxford University to give a talk. His mission was audacious: to explain to Britain’s brightest young things that far from being a repressive or unhappy place, China is in fact pretty perfect. More to the point: now that Europe is on the rocks, China will be the
We live in thoroughly PC times, when tweeting rotten things about a black footballer can land you in jail and opposing gay marriage can see you branded a bigot. But there are still two groups of people it’s OK to hate: chavs and toffs. The tracksuit-wearing poor and the tweed-covered rich. The blinged-up yoof who
What do Historic Royal Palaces think they are doing? They’re the people who look after the five royal palaces not occupied by the Queen, and their activities have been constrained by the fact that most of the contents are owned by her. But the recent reopening of Kensington Palace has gone to their heads. It’s
Sister Catherine Holum remembers her first Olympic speed-skating race very clearly. The crowd, she says, was very loud. Three men with television cameras knelt in front of her as she tied her skates up. She felt the whole world was watching. And when she had finished the race, she burst into tears. At the time
Homs province Between the distant pop of the mortar when it’s fired, the pressure wave, and the roar of the blast five or six seconds later when it lands, the rebel fighters recited the Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of faith. ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.’ ‘We do this in
It is midsummer, and England are playing the West Indies at cricket. The teams have completed a three-Test series, which England won 2-0, and they are now playing five matches of 50 overs a side, a form of the game that suits the big-hitting Caribbean batsmen. You would have thought that West Indian supporters would
Under such headlines as ‘British butterfly defies doom prediction to thrive in changing climate’, the usual suspects (e.g. the Guardian and the Independent) recently publicised a study claiming that, thanks to global warming, ‘a once-rare British butterfly’, the Brown Argus, ‘is becoming a common sight in the English countryside’. A paper from York University, it
If you wanted a preview of the future of British politics, you should have headed through the back alleys of Westminster to Lord North Street on the last Monday in February. There, in the slightly cramped premises of the Institute of Economic Affairs, you could have seen the early stirrings of a Tory revolution. A
New York The Manhattan tattoo artist Craig Dershowitz had already spent $60,000 fighting a desperate legal battle with his ex-girlfriend for custody of their ‘son’ before he appealed to the public a few weeks ago. He needed another $20,000 so he can keep going, he said. Had the helpless victim at the centre of this
