Umm Qasr The shriek of artillery shells has died away from Umm Qasr, the first city in Iraq to be taken by allied troops, but another whining sound can already be heard here. It is the sound of the doubters and sceptics at home, wringing their hands on short-wave radio programmes and satellite television broadcasts
I had the strangest experience at the ballet in Dresden: all perfectly pretty onstage, the company well schooled but I couldn’t believe the orchestra. I’ve never heard a ballet orchestra playing with such love for the music – beautiful phrasing, elegantly balanced winds, seamless ensemble, the right notes all the time, in tune…I had to
Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, seems to base his policy in the present crisis on: 1) the need to avoid killing innocent Iraqis; 2) the need to uphold the authority of the United Nations; and 3) the need to avoid association with the crudities of the present American administration. People assert that 100,000 or
Paris Game over yet? Don’t count on it. As Prime Minister Raffarin retorted to President Bush, ‘It’s not a game. It’s not over.’ French President Jacques Chirac and Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, his foreign minister, are having a great war. Just look at the polls: a Sofres survey to be released on Friday will claim
The art and antiques business is as unpredictable as an English summer. And it is not only the works of art that confound market rules and crystal balls. The fairs that serve as the dealers’ collective showcase similarly defy expectations. Who would have thought, for instance, that fair entrepreneur David Lester could put up a
Lady Elizabeth Anson ‘numbers President William Jefferson Clinton, Hans Heinrich Thyssen Bornemisza, Mrs Henry John Heinz, the late Mr Alfred Heineken, Princess Esra Jah, Mrs Basil Hersov, Mr John Paul Getty II, Mr Galen Weston, the then Mr and Mrs Tom Cruise, Mr Donald Trump and Mrs Ivana Trump and the University of Boston among
A dingy community hall in the back streets of Bethnal Green on a cold and miserable winter’s evening. We’re all here waiting for the weird, hook-handed fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Misri, the most loathed man in Britain, who is about to hold a public meeting. When I say ‘we’re all here’, I mean
I keep meeting people with a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to see a swift, successful outcome of President Bush’s crusade against Iraq. On the other, if the war goes horribly wrong, they perceive a chance to get rid of Tony Blair. The vision fills them with an ecstasy normally reserved for winning
The West might be superficially divided between hawks and doves, but there is a deeper division: between foxes and hedgehogs. In a famous essay on Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin said the division was ‘one of the deepest’ among human beings. The distinction applies just as well to politicians and governments. Foxes, said Berlin, are sophisticated, pluralist,
Days Like These is only the second Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, so the reader may be forgiven for not being altogether familiar with the set-up or its purpose. It’s intended as a kind of alternative or extension to the Turner Prize, offering a representative cross-section of contemporary art practice in the British
TWENTY-FIVE years on, Andrew Marr recollects the episode well but insists that it was all down to mistaken identity. They were after the Jews, he claims, and they got me as second best. Marr’s account is at any rate open to challenge. There was plenty about the future political editor of the BBC which a
The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all
I have just returned from a trip to the Alpine village of MegŒve, situated in the heart of the Haute-Savoie, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, where I successfully introduced my three-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter to the pleasures of skiing. It occurred to me, while out there, that there has never been a better time to head
Very few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six candidates, was only finally settled in 1892 by Lord Curzon himself.
Walking around this exhibition is a humbling experience. We are privileged to have a display of paintings of this quality in London, and it is an incredible achievement to have obtained loans of such distinction. One of the pictures scheduled for the show is not in fact available, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ from the Villa
In Warsaw last Tuesday the French defence minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, continued her President’s ham-fisted strategy of offering patronising advice to Eastern European nations on course to join the European Union. ‘It was better to keep silent when you don’t know what’s going on,’ she declared. Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, resented the lecture. ‘France
If a French national museum wishes to buy a work of art at auction, it simply exercises its ‘right of pre-emption’. Substituting itself for the final bidder, which is what this means, is less fair than it sounds – word invariably gets out about the museum’s intentions and few bother to bid. In France, as
A trip to Northern Cyprus is a trip to the 1970s. While the Greek South of the island – home to the Russian Mafia and to the ecstasy-induced raves of Ayia Napa -seethes in corrupt prosperity, the Turkish North indulges in the gentler delights of crazy paving, the New Seekers and Ford Capris. Neither the
Things have to come a pretty pass, eh, when an institution as self-consciously august as the University of Oxford has to headhunt a perjuring philanderer to be its next chancellor; even if the felon happens to be the President of the United States (there are no former presidents, of course, just as alumnae of St