Join me in a little thought experiment. For several months now, Tony Blair has been insisting that the European constitution would be a defeat for Euro-federalism. Within hours of appending his name to it, he announced that, far from creating a superstate, the constitution was about ‘sovereign nation-states co-operating together’. Let us play along with
At its annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in May, the Royal Society of British Artists held a debate on the motion ‘This house believes that a found object cannot be a work of art’. The motion’s obvious subtext was that since Duchamp’s snow shovel the ‘found object’ has been digging away at the foundations
Alexander McCall Smith counts Donald Rumsfeld and The Red Hot Chili Peppers among his fans, and has a very cool cat. Mary Wakefield talks to him about Africa and ‘reality’ Alexander McCall Smith wants to show me his cat. ‘I think he’s asleep in the spare bedroom,’ says Edna, his cleaning lady, putting down a
One of my favourite quotes of the last ten years, for a public display of unintentional black humour, came from a spokesman for Noraid, the American-based organisation which raises funds for the IRA. This chap had been asked, a few days after 9/11, to comment upon the possibility that people might perceive some similarities of
Is it possible to feel a personal warmth and affection, even love, towards someone one has never met? It must be, because that’s how I feel about the late President Ronald Reagan. The reason I felt so fond of the old Cold War warrior, and the reason I cherish his memory now that he is
Sixty years on, the crossing to Normandy was flat as a millpond, the sun shone, the helicopter from the Portsmouth to Ouistreham ferry’s British destroyer escort (there were three other destroyers, one French, one American, one Canadian) performed all sorts of clever tricks for our amusement, and our welcoming party comprised a Royal Marine and,
The Portuguese police are donning their riot gear, the café owners are boarding up their premises and the locals are telling each other, ‘Don’t go down to the square, the English are coming….’ It’s Euro 2004, and the English have already arrived. They are sitting in clumps around the fountain, groups of pink, misshapen men,
It’s hard to suppress a feeling of schadenfreude when reading accounts of the crusaders going to the Holy Land in support of Christianity and finding that the indigenous Christians were often the lowest of the low, whereas the infidel leaders, rich and educated, were much more like those whom the Western leaders instinctively admired and
George Osborne says that on the basis of the ‘keys’ forecasting system George W. Bush will be President next year and Michael Howard will be in No. 10 In the next few months George Bush and John Kerry are going to spend more than $1 billion trying to win the presidential election, while everyone else
Kabul The minister had been stood up. Here we were in Bamiyan, in the heart of Afghanistan with Her Majesty’s drugs-busting minister Bill Rammell, and there was no sign of the Afghan farmer who had reportedly given up growing poppies in favour of dried apricots. He seemed an unlikely enough character in any case. Perhaps
New York I forgot: you need coins or a pre-paid Metrocard for the New York buses, and one morning several weeks ago, as I stood at the eastbound stop on the corner of Broadway and 125th Street, I realised I had neither. Only notes. Two other men were waiting for the M60, the cross-town bus
Over the next few days we shall see countless images, in photographs and on film, of the men who won the second world war. The D-Day generation can claim to have been the last that had a genuine measure of greatness. These were not, for the most part, professional warriors, for whom the services had
One important factor in New Labour’s special kind of political success has been its ability to capture independent institutions or individuals and convert them into accomplices. Again and again Tony Blair has pulled off this feat. In his early days he co-opted organisations as diverse as the Country Landowner’s Association, the CBI, the Government Information
John Laughland talks to the Czech President, V
Owen Matthews goes on patrol with American soldiers in Afghanistan’s ‘Indian Country’ and sees them capture and interrogate suspects It was one of those wonderfully luminous Afghan days, the spring sky a vibrant baby-blue, the heat of the day cut by a breeze which blew though fields of poppies and winter barley. We were on
Acts of brutality are carried out in the name of ‘reasonable chastisement’ but, says Rachel Johnson, banning smacking will only encourage children to believe that they have a right to behave as they please Well, this promises to be a fair old punch-up. In the anti corner, we have some 350 parenting and counselling organisations,
Over in Notting Hill, at England & Co., 216 Westbourne Grove, W11 (until 12 June), is a fascinating retrospective of that underrated painter Albert Herbert (born 1925). Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art with the Kitchen Sink painters, Bratby, Middleditch et al., but was less drawn to gritty social realism than to an
France gave back artefacts looted by Napoleon. So what’s different today? asks Martin Gayford ‘Give us back our marbles’ is the cry. Passionate demands are made for the return of famous works of ancient sculpture. In response, there is equally heated resistance. Sending them back would be an offence against civilisation, it would break up
A perfect market is a utopian ideal of economists. In such a market, accurate information is instantly available to all, there are no barriers to trade, participants may be buyers or sellers, and there are no middlemen. But it is generally accepted that such perfection cannot exist in practice — the concept is merely a
James Delingpole gives both barrels to the ‘pea-brained’ isolationists who fill the papers — even The Spectator — with their defeatist snivelling Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit. United you feel strong, happy, immune to