New York As British universities lurch from funding crisis to funding crisis, the jealous eyes of the academic establishment focus obsessively on the United States as the role model for future success. The assumption is that if UK universities charged ‘realistic’ fees, they would recreate themselves as ‘world class’ — or, at any rate, superior
Naomi Wolf has eased the burden of silence she has been carrying for over 20 years. In New York magazine she reveals that one evening after a dinner party, when she was a Yale undergraduate, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale placed his ‘heavy, boneless hand hot’ on her thigh. After she repelled the advance, if
Welcome to CNN’s Presidential Election Night Special. We’re just getting the results in live from the 51st State. We can confirm that the Great State of Great Britain has voted overwhelmingly for Senator John Kerry. This is a big blow for George W. Bush, and a humiliation for Governor Blair, who viewers will remember strongly
Simon Heffer believes that if the Tories are to have any hope of returning to power, they’ll have to stop tinkering and go for Labour’s jugular In an impressive observation the other day, a Very Senior Tory Indeed said to me, ‘I don’t buy this argument that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them.
I wants to make your flesh creep,’ is the Fat Boy’s refrain in the Pickwick Papers. In Berlin last week, I was at a conference which the Fat Boy would have enjoyed. The subject was terror; the threat that weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands would pose to the West, during the foreseeable future.
Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist
Rod Liddle says that the government’s White Paper on public health won’t help the fatties, but if we could overcome our fear of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’, children might be able to reduce their weight on the playing field Everybody you know is on a diet because everybody you know is fat. Sometimes they’re just a bit porky,
Something extraordinary and rare is happening in London: we have an incomparable El Greco exhibition in our midst. It doesn’t really matter that it’s being staged in the rebarbative dungeon-like rooms of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing basement, for even those inconsiderate walls are alive with the strange music of El Greco’s vision. For a
Last Saturday must have been a difficult day for St Paul. His cathedral, still covered in patches of scaffolding like pins supporting badly broken legs, was teeming, inside and out, with women in dog collars. In the crypt, an hour before the grand celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the
Last Monday afternoon Professor Lewis Wolpert CBE, FRSL and I sat in his chaotic study in the Anatomy department at University College, London, quietly regarding each other. Professor Wolpert seemed to me to be superior to myself in every way possible. He was better-looking, better-dressed, more self-assured, miles more intelligent, and probably richer. It was
Lady Trumpington is on the warpath. At the age of 81, the author of the tremendous dictum ‘I’d rather be common than middle-class’ will deploy her formidable rhetorical powers to condemn a wretched piece of legislation. The ‘Bill to prohibit the smoking of tobacco by any person in Wales while in a public place’, as
Now that Mr Geoff Hoon has put his Hutton embarrassments behind him and emerged shining like a new pin, some of us hope that he will address his day job. Britain’s defence planning is in a dreadful mess. Unless the Secretary of State acts effectively, the services face a grim future — and they know
Nothing is more important to a journalist than his integrity. The founders of the Independent were men of such unyielding principle that they would not allow their journalists to go on freebies. On other papers most journalists handled the integrity/freebie issue in the time-honoured fashion: by abusing any hospitality they were given — trashing a
Lloyd Evans believes that the lesson of Will Self’s success — which he envies — is that it is better to be a ‘writer’ than to write well It’s happened again. The other day I was deep in the Tube, powering my way through the loose maul, when a poster caught my eye. Will Self
As I waded through page after page of interminable dogma and municipal jargon, one statement suddenly leapt out at me: ‘Some 50 per cent of people being approved of as adoptive parents in Brighton and Hove are from the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.’ Those words — from a policy document entitled ‘Sexuality — the
Blair has made a mess of the top-up Bill, says Freddie Sayers. It’s now up to the Tories to revolutionise our universities on market principles I think I once knew how Tony Blair felt on Tuesday night. It was Matriculation Day for the Fresher class of 2000 at New College, Oxford. With the obligatory white
So what were you all waiting for? You surely could not have been expecting an inquiry, headed by an eminent law lord, to deliver an indictment of the government? They don’t do that, law lords. Certainly they haven’t in my lifetime. And it hasn’t happened now, with Lord Hutton. But even by the standards of
The Royal Academy’s retrospective exhibition The Art of Philip Guston: 1913–1980 (until 12 April) comprises some 80 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, by one of America’s most original 20th-century painters. It’s not easy to look at, being in turn demanding, forbidding, horrific and beautiful, but it’s certainly real, and as an intensely
A few weeks ago executives were endeavouring to bring home to Conrad Black the full horror of his personal and corporate predicament, when a sight met their eyes. His wife Barbara, clad only in a leotard and shades, had swept into the room. For a moment nobody spoke. ‘Oh Conrad,’ Barbara Black proclaimed: ‘Let’s just
Forty years ago today, The Spectator published perhaps the most important and influential article ever to appear in its pages. That is a high standard. R.W. Seton-Watson’s reports before 1914 condemning ethnic oppression may well have led indirectly to the postwar dismemberment of Hungary, for better or worse. And in a leader, headed ‘On the