A brutal-looking 17-year-old girl takes a long swig from a bottle of sake and thumps it down on the bar, as an ugly- looking man next to her asks her if she likes Ferraris. ‘Do you want to screw me?’ she replies. ‘Yes,’ he says, his goofy and surprised smile revealing bad teeth. She immediately
The Turkish government recently announced that it intended to make adultery a criminal offence. This was not altogether surprising, since the Turkish government adheres to the principles of Islam, under whose laws adultery is a crime punishable by flogging or execution. Nevertheless, it caused such uproar among more progressive Turks, not to mention horrifying the
The figures are unremittingly stark. Last year alone 2.2 million people died from Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-five million people are infected with Aids in Africa. It is not like the Black Death. It is worse. Yet for whatever reason not everyone accepts the seriousness of the Aids epidemic. The South African writer Rian Malan
Baghdad You might have thought that sitting down to watch a series of filmed executions would become tedious after the tenth unfortunate victim is dragged before the camera to be slaughtered like a sheep. After all, most of the characters do not change much. There are the hooded Islamic holy warriors standing to attention, as
Niall Ferguson says that Tony Blair and George W. Bush are perfect partners — Christian soldiers armed with Bibles and bazookas — but Britain now has more in common with Europe than with the United States ‘I kind of think that the decisions taken in the next few weeks will determine the rest of the
Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over
Over the summer, television viewers were treated to a series hosted by the photogenic chief executive of English Heritage, Simon Thurley. In Lost Buildings of Britain, Mr Thurley made a bit of a fool of himself attempting to ‘recreate’ lost architectural treasures based on old drawings and other clues. One superb building which did not
Hungary entered the EU in May, 15 years after the fall of communism. Already Budapest is a new place, and everyone has a car. But don’t be put off: the city’s old pleasures — the music, the thermal spas and boating on the Danube — will stay for ever. If you’re buying a house in
Each morning, when I opened my eyes, there was another clump of hair on the pillow. Within two weeks, I was two-thirds bald with an absurd black tuft projecting two inches over my forehead. It was radiotherapy, of course, supposedly the only remedy after the surgeon failed to remove every bit of a brain tumour.
I love my job as a head teacher. It is really satisfying to be responsible for young people and to guide them in realising their potential. But sadly my time is increasingly occupied by lawyers and I have to divert an ever growing proportion of my budget away from staff, books and equipment towards defending
When I was an atheist back in the 1960s, its future seemed assured. I grew up in Northern Ireland, where religious tensions and violence had alienated many from Christianity. Like so many disaffected young people then, I rejected religion as oppressive, hypocritical, a barbarous relic of the past. The sociologists were predicting that religion would
At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones. Standing
Little old ladies with bottles of ink, mounds of writing-paper and firm hands have long been the bane of government officials. There’s even a name for them: ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells’. My great-grandmother, Lilla, whom I remember living in that venerable Kentish town, was Super-Angry. She was so angry that at the age of 100,
Russia’s continuing brutality in Chechnya is the root cause of the Beslan massacre. So why does Blair grovel to Putin? The answer, says Simon Heffer, is oil Were any of us unlucky enough to be Vladimir Putin, we too would be keen to make the rest of the world think that what happened in Beslan
I had long wanted to return to Kushk-e-Serwan, a small Afghan village at the narrower end of the Hari Rud river oasis, between the Hindu Kush and Iran. The first time I went there, I was travelling with Ismael Khan, the leader of the Afghan resistance in Western Afghanistan. Most days bombs fell on places
If John Prescott needed an easy-to-read précis of the Electoral Commission’s findings on all-postal ballots, published last week, a brave civil servant could have given it to him in four words on a Post-it note: ‘Whoops, not enough fraud.’ The Commission was expected to report widespread hanky-panky in June’s pilot all-postal Euro-elections — especially among
America’s decision to pull troops out of Europe and the Far East should not be seen as a retreat into isolationism. On the contrary: it is classic ‘Rumsfeld-lite’ — the downsizing of old-fashioned Cold War units (principally in Germany) and a new emphasis on flexible, mobile, hi-tech forces to be located around the rim of
Boris Johnson, at the Republican convention, says that Bush’s conservative credentials are not always convincing but his optimism is unfailingly inspiring New York Come off it, I am thinking to myself. The last time I saw Tuesday night’s Republican keynote speaker was only a week ago. I was lying comatose on a motel bed in
According to Jean Paul Sartre, he was ‘the most complete man of his age’. John Berger likened the photograph of his corpse to Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. When I went up to university, in the month of his death, October 1967, the walls were quilted with his image — the famous Korda photograph of the
Next month a group of British MPs will launch impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair. This is a very dramatic and powerful act, rooted deep in British history. Though once a commonplace sanction against abuse of power by the executive, the instrument of impeachment has not been used since 1848, when it was alleged that Lord