Christopher Howse meets Mary Douglas, Britain’s foremost anthropologist, and learns the connection between ritual taboos and al-Qa’eda’s cells ‘It’s no good attacking enclaves,’ Mary Douglas said, dissecting a piece of guinea fowl on her plate. ‘It just makes them more firmly enclaves.’ When I had lunch with her, she sat upright in her chair, not
Liam Byrne says the English must be less apathetic about the United Kingdom, and about the threat of Scottish independence that looms in next week’s elections One party rule sums up the history of Welsh politics from 1945 onwards. Labour’s hegemony here has been both cultural and political with its tribal elders portraying any alternative
A few months ago I asked a Kremlin grandee, who worked with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, which president of Russia he preferred. I expected him to favour the warm but shambolic Yeltsin rather than the competent but icy Putin. I was wrong. ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is that Yeltsin was a capricious Tsar;
Anne Applebaum says that dissidents against the authoritarian regime, many of them in London, are raising the stakes. The President’s response is to get even tougher — and to target Britain in his new propaganda war About two years ago, Mikhail Kasyanov, ex-prime minister of Russia, made a private visit to Washington. Off the record,
Matt Frei reports from the scene of the US campus killings, listens to the survivors and concludes that the only question worth asking is: where next? Blacksburg, Virginia The last school shooting I covered also happened in the morning. It was October 2006 and a middle-aged milkman finished his night shift, got a few hours’
Rod Liddle says that young princes in their twenties will always prefer a peroxide blonde with a non-U name to a fragrant, well-spoken English rose This has been a difficult week. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that I was responsible for the traumatic break-up between Prince William and Kate
David Selbourne says that George Bush is losing the war in Iraq as surely as George III lost the war against the American colonists — and that the US imperium has entered on its decline after only six decades With both houses of the US Congress set to maintain their challenge to President Bush’s conduct
A taxi driver in Mexico City, who in my presence had just paid la mordida (the bite) to a traffic cop, taught me some lines by the 17th-century Creole nun and poetess, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: O who is more to blame, He who sins for pay Or he who pays for
New York As I ascend the solemn steps of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, a Parthenon transplanted to Broadway, the early spring snow crunches underfoot and the woes of Africa and the developing world seem very distant. Yet that is what I am here to discuss with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the university’s Earth
In guessing at the shape of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we have to ignore two groups. First, there are the idolaters, the inner clique that believes, really believes, that application of the Brown intellect to the social and foreign policy problems facing Britain will cause those problems to crumble under the pounding of that clunking fist.
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has suggested that the Church of England has become obsessed by homosexuals. His implication seems to be that Jesus Christ didn’t go on about them too much and so, really, neither should we. The term ‘obsessed’ is a strong one, but I think justified. If Dr Sentamu had
The slide towards extinction in Scotland has persuaded the Tories to draw up a blueprint for separation, says Fraser Nelson. The Scottish Tories would split off — and Cameron’s Conservatives would become the English party For the son of an Aberdonian stockbroker, David Cameron has had an uneasy relationship with Scotland. It is a land
I meet Ian McEwan for lunch at Elena’s L’Etoile near his Fitzrovia home. He is greeted like a member of the family, and he tells me with relish that the restaurant features in The Dean’s December by one of his literary heroes, Saul Bellow. McEwan’s last book, Saturday, was explicitly influenced by Bellow, and in
In Westminster Cathedral a dozen or so deaf mutes are doing the Stations of the Cross. They have reached the 14th station, ‘Jesus is laid in the tomb’. A priest leads the prayers in sign language. ‘We, too, O God, will descend into the grave whenever it shall please Thee, as it shall please Thee,
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is a masterpiece, whatever other category one finds for it. It is bursting with vitality, it has a larger number of memorable, indeed unforgettable tunes than any work of comparable length in the 20th century, whether opera or musical. And what counts still more for its stature is that the great
Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown Les Vans During the height of the Dreyfus affair, a cartoon appeared depicting the setting of a bourgeois dinner party before and
‘Probably best to do the interview before lunch,’ says a spokesman for Gérard Depardieu, France’s best-known export and highest-paid actor. This made sense. The last time I was due to meet Depardieu, at the UK launch of his cookbook two years ago, he failed to make it to the lavish party thrown in his honour,
Edward Stourton has had unrivalled access to the protagonists in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Here, on the eve of the Winograd Commission’s report, he reveals what really happened in this conflict that nobody won Hogarth’s ‘Fourth Stage of Cruelty’ is a compelling evocation of what it must have been like to attend a
If you are thinking of taking your summer holiday abroad this year and have not yet alighted upon a suitable destination, then why not bear Zimbabwe in mind? It looks increasingly likely that Robert Mugabe will not be President for very much longer. Instead they’ll have someone else in charge. The general rule for African
Dame Eileen Atkins is adamant that she is a horrible person. ‘My mother looked at me as if she had hatched a snake, but then I could be vile to her and to my family,’ the actress says. ‘My parents were angry people, frustrated with their lot in life, and I inherited their anger. I’ve