John Craxton (born 1922) is a painter who has spent much of his life in Greece. Growing up in an intensely musical family in Hampstead (his father was the first pianist to play Debussy in England, his sister was a celebrated oboist), he was aware from a very early age of the infinite and magical
Poetry and conflict are as old as each other. From war springs suffering and from suffering song. Fourteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the ancient association is as vibrant as ever. According to the Guardian, an anthology entitled 100 Poets Against the War has outstripped the opposition and become the nation’s most frequently borrowed
Baghdad As Iraq burns, Paul Bremer’s men remain inventive. Faced with the problem of getting their positive message out from behind the blast walls and barbed wire which surround the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad, they have resorted to technology. A television studio has been built inside Saddam Hussein’s former palace, and broadcasting companies such as
Bruce Anderson says that the scandalous events of the past week show that the Arabs can take brutality — but not from American women Anyone who wants to understand the peoples of Arabia and the surrounding regions ought to start with Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. He was writing about the late 1940s and, as he
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election triumph, Simon Heffer says the Iron Lady has a new spring in her step In her 79th year, widowed after a long and happy marriage, and having endured indifferent health, Lady Thatcher might seem to some to have become vulnerable, damaged and
Deborah Ross joins her mother on a trip down the aisles of Britain’s favourite food chain When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury’s, the Sainsbury’s on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I must have accompanied her sometimes because I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer, turned by hand,
Forget Dame Shirley Porter, says Theodore Dalrymple. If it’s real scandal you are after, consider the millions wasted as a result of public service corruption Dame Shirley Porter is the unacceptable face of corruption, a rich woman taken in gerrymandering (had she started off poor, no one would have minded). But though the sum of
Rod Liddle says that Blair’s great U-turn on immigration has placed the Labour party to the right of Ray Honeyford — the man once vilified as a racist Do you have a core of Britishness within you? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is anxious for us all to have one,
This is the time of year when we stop complaining for a moment about the dreadful spring weather and start complaining about the neglect of England’s patron saint, St George. Our grumbles go something like this: we don’t know what to do to mark his feast day (23 April), we have no traditions like the
Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths One morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John’s Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel
… now that April’s there The annual miracle of spring is thrilling everywhere. It is especially beautiful in the Chilterns, where the Prime Minister has a country house courtesy of you and me, the taxpayers. Our leader, however, scorns the beechwoods, the bluebells, the song of the blackbird and the call of the cuckoo. The
Bruce Anderson says the Tories’ revolutionary new education policy will devolve power to schools and parents In 1874, Disraeli told the House of Commons that ‘Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.’ Over the subsequent decades, few senior Tories would have disagreed — yet hardly any of
Peter Oborne says that the Prime Minister is a client of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire — and he decided to hold a referendum on the EU constitution only because the press magnate told him to An essential part of the New Labour belief system is structured around the proposition that Tony Blair is a resolute,
We classicists like to think that our subject is one of the great civilising disciplines, that it makes the people who study it better. Sadly for us, though, there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. A lot of us are arrogant, offensive and utterly assured of the rightness of our position. The
Mercenaries make big money in Iraq but, says Sam Kiley, the ‘outsourcing’ of security work is adding to the chaos in the country They bustle through the Palestine Hotel lobby in central Baghdad clanking with military hardware. They have a very special look. The head is crew-cut, the sunglasses wraparound. A Heckler and Koch 9mm
Baghdad Twelve months after the war which was supposed to return Iraq to the ‘international community’, to open it up for democracy, trade and progress, Baghdad is a city almost totally cut off from the outside world. Not one of the four main roads linking the capital with its neighbours, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Kuwait,
On 11 September 2001 Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was on an aircraft heading for America. He was about to meet his counterpart in the FBI for talks about combating organised crime. Instead, crime organised on a scale neither of them had anticipated was being committed. Sir John’s plane did a U-turn
Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of privacy — and of England The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their introduction, when he means that nobody
Tom Walker says that Tony Blair is too busy doing global management to bother much about the consequences of Nato’s humanitarian intervention in the Balkans From the kitchen balcony of our old flat in Pristina, we used to look out on a rubbish dump in the foreground, then the precipitous and rutted Plevljanska Street, and
I have never had much confidence in heritage legislation since I discovered that I would need to seek permission to have a row of leylandii trees in my garden felled. This, not long after the Highways Agency’s bulldozers had torn their way through Twyford Down, and half of Smithfield Market was condemned for redevelopment. No