Family

Thursday

Nicola Shulman

Should Elizabeth Jane Howard have brought back the Cazalets?

Some years ago, a woman wrote to Dear Mary, at the back of this periodical, with an unusual problem: she was a keen follower of new fiction but felt guilty to be seen lying around on sofas reading novels in the presence of her domestic staff. Mary advised that she should let it be known she had taken up fiction reviewing. If there is anything in publishing to melt the realities of book reviewing into this delicious scene it’s the prospect of a new Cazalet novel. Not only do I get to read it in plain sight, but the 19-year break since the last one necessitates a re-read of the

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Here’s a thought about child care: what about giving parents some choice?

George Bernard Shaw made no bones about the merits of schooling: it was, he felt, a way for parents to offload the care of their children onto other people, and he was right. The rich do this systematically, of course, in delegating their children to boarding schools, but for the rest of us, Ed Miliband’s plan to extend childcare provision by obliging primary schools to take in our children from eight in the morning to six in the evening will have a good deal of appeal. At least for parents it will; if I were a teacher, I’d take a dim view of having babysitting added to my other duties. But

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Yes, let’s have a debate about teenage sex and the age of consent

Whenever a public figure says ‘we need a debate here’, as Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has done, it doesn’t need much in the way of translation to interpret this as ‘let’s change the law to my way of thinking’. Alas, the debate he started so promisingly about lowering the age of consent to 15, with the pundits all nicely worked up, has been nipped cruelly in the bud by Downing Street. David Cameron, possibly taking the view that he has upset social conservatives quite enough with the gay marriage issue, has said the government isn’t going there. And given that Labour policy is getting quite

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The real reason for rotten online reviews on TripAdvisor

‘Sorry, I’d love to go the pub this evening, but I have to go out. It’s my wife’s wedding anniversary.’ This Freudian slip was uttered by one of my colleagues a few years ago. It sprang into mind when I was casually browsing reviews of restaurants and hotels on TripAdvisor. I always head for the negative reviews first. Not for what they tell you about the venue, but for what they unintendedly reveal about the reviewer. Sarcastic quotation marks and periphrasis are always a bit of a give-away: ‘…there was a floating rubber object in the toilet bowl!!! After complaining at reception we were given another room and a full

Wednesday

Ed West

Opponents of marriage tax breaks need to ‘check their privilege’

What with the flap about Ed Miliband’s dad, the legion of the outraged have forgotten what they were planning to get angry about this week – the marriage tax break, which is social engineering and a blatant Tory attempt to punish single mothers in favour of the patriarchy. As a paid-up member of the patriarchy it always sounds more fun coming from people complaining about it than it actually is. Marriage, for men, is a form of domestication and many would rather spend their 30s and 40s playing computer games, if possible with a live-in girlfriend to whom they have made no commitments. Many end up getting married partly because

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

My 50 weddings

A couple of weekends ago, I went to my 50th wedding. Everyone I have mentioned this to has pulled a rather strange face, as though to say, ‘You count the weddings you go to? What unhinged variety of cross-eyed lunatic does that?’ But like so much of lasting value in life, this began with a conversation in a pub. Back in 1997, I was moaning to my old friend Terence about how many weddings I was having to go to. People I knew simply wouldn’t stop getting married. So how many in all? asked Terence. I don’t know, said I. It could, and probably should, have ended there. But the

Monday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Interview with a writer: Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Booker longlisted The Lowland

The Lowland is the magnificent new novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, which has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize. It tells the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who come of age in Calcutta in the late 1960s. ‘Subhash was thirteen, older by fifteen months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there,’ writes Lahiri. This was the beginning of a troubled period in West Bengal, as a radical communist movement known as the Naxalite cause swept through the region, inciting idealistic young men, in particular, to violence and acts of terror. While Udayan becomes caught

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Rosh Hashanah reading list

Happy New Year! No, it isn’t three months’ early if you’re Jewish, and those of you who aren’t might like to cash in on the celebration. So, in honour of Rosh Hashanah – Jewish New Year – today, I thought I’d pick out a few of my favourite Jewish books. This proved to be such a hopelessly vast category, however, that I’ve narrowed it down to books about Jewish London – the place where 60% of British Jews, including myself, live. Whether or not you’re Jewish, might I encourage you to pick up one of these excellent books as a means both of discovery and of celebration. Happy New Year,

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: The day I walked into a postcard

This time last year the postman delivered a picture postcard depicting a village square in Provence. The photograph on the front of that postcard was contemporary, but the colours were digitally manipulated to invest the image with a nostalgic, hand-tinted, vintage air. The square was eerily deserted. No customers were seated at the tables under the gay sunshades set out under the trees. Time stood still. I’d never been there. I hadn’t even heard of the place. And yet the square and its forsaken tables seemed oddly familiar. The photograph transmitted a nostalgic sweetness which was almost sinister. An invitation was implied. ‘Come!’ the picture seemed to be saying. ‘Life!

Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr’s diary: Holidays after a stroke, and what the Germans really think of us

It’s been a strange summer. After a stroke, holidays are not what they used to be. We went to Juan-les-Pins for a week in a hotel. It seemed perfect because it had beaches for the family, and at nearby Antibes there is a great little Picasso museum for me to haunt. It has the best drawing of a goat ever made. My daughters and wife doggedly manhandled me across hot sand into and out of the water and I enjoyed that. But being surrounded by so many fit people running, cycling and swimming was a little dispiriting. Mind you, I’ve always been useless at holidays. I hate being too hot.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I stop this bore reading his novel aloud?

Q. Is there a polite way of halting a wannabe novelist from reading his oeuvre aloud to an unwilling audience? A neighbour on the residents’ committee happened to be leaving as friends were arriving for drinks and I felt I should invite him to join us. It was all going swimmingly until he told someone he was writing a novel, and she made the mistake of pretending she would be interested in reading it. No one had reckoned on this (very insensitive) man having a copy of the wretched thing on his iPhone and he read aloud at length, pausing only to laugh at his own genius. It killed the

Wednesday

Aime Williams

Review: In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge – a tale of rebellion and conformity

In Times of Fading Light’s seven narrators exist in an almost permanent state of bewildered disappointment. Given that the narrators are various generations of the same family, what we’re shown is youthful hope turning recurrently to despair. The story begins in Berlin with Alexander, who is dying, visiting his now demented father, Kurt. This is 2001 and Kurt is at the end of his life, speechless and largely uncomprehending. Alexander, meanwhile, plans to elope to Mexico where his grandparents lived in exile almost 50 years previously. Walking his father through the streets of Berlin, he measures everything against the world he’d known before the fall of the Wall: ‘That was

Wednesday

Michael Amherst

‘Ballistics’ by D.W.Wilson is a novel about what it really is to be a man

Ballistics is the debut novel from D W Wilson. It playfully and interestingly twists and pulls at the heart of what we understand about human relationships. This is rural Canada, where men are men and Hemingway is a sissy. These are the blue-collar workers of Bruce Springsteen and no problem is too small not to be solved by increased muscle, increased drinking or, failing that, the ballistics of the title. Yet, underlying the bravado and occasionally excessive butch depictions of butch life, this is a subtle novel. For example, we are repeatedly told that Cecil West, the grandfather at its heart, is an unreconstructed male and that it’s ‘a hell

Monday

Steerpike

Katie Hopkins gets her comeuppance

Former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins, who has become a ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’-style rent-a-quote in middle age, was never going to applaud the appearance of names like Riley, Isla and Mia in the top ten popular baby names of last year. In high dudgeon, she interrupted elevenses to hit the airwaves: ‘These are the sort of names you can hear parents screaming across the playground, screaming because they have not done their home learning, they are the sort of people that choose names like this.’ Hopkins, a professional snob, reiterated that she uses names as ‘a shortcut, a very efficient shortcut to deciding who my children play with.’ Apparently she

Thursday

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton’s diary: Finding Scrutopia in the Czech Republic

Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere.

Tuesday

Matthew Sinclair

Stamp Duty is stomping all over Middle England

65 per cent of the people buying a home in London in 2012-13 paid the 3 per cent rate of Stamp Duty or more. You can pay that rate on a one or two bedroom flat in the capital now. But it would be a mistake to think that Stamp Duty is only an issue in London and its leafier suburbs. Just 200,000 of the 500,000 transactions subject to Stamp Duty in 2012-13 were in London and the South East. Family homes around the country are subject to punitive rates. Imagine you bought a house in the West Midlands for £300,000 at the start of 2007. Not a mansion but

J P O'Malley

Roddy Doyle: I’m a middle class person commenting on working class life

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He first came to prominence with his debut novel The Commitments, which he self-published in Ireland in 1987. The book was then published in the UK in 1988 by William Heinemann. The two books which followed, The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), completed his Barrytown Trilogy. All three books were subsequently made into extremely successful films. In 1993 Doyle won the Booker Prize for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The book was praised for Doyle’s ability to write convincingly in the idiom of his main protagonist, Paddy Clarke: a ten-year-old boy residing in Dublin in the 1960s. Doyle’s popularity

Thursday

Gina Ford

The Contented Royal Baby: Gina Ford on how to bring up Prince George

I was delighted to hear that the Duchess of Cambridge had a healthy baby boy. The build-up to the royal birth during the last week has been phenomenal. Even my tiny ‘Contented Little Baby’ office has been affected by the birth of our future king — our email inbox is getting fuller by the day with inquiries from interested mothers about how I think the royal baby should be brought up — so much so that we have had to allocate a file called ‘Baby Cambridge’! The majority of emails ask what advice I would give the Duchess to help her through the early weeks of motherhood. The truth is

Peter Jones

Plato on the Today programme

A woman is invited to join the Today programme, and the chatteratae are immediately a-twitter on the subject of female equality. Unlikely as it seems, Plato was all in favour of it, as he argued in his Republic, and for a hysterically incorrect reason, too. Women in the ancient world had, in fact, far more important things to do than chair Footsie companies or hold down tightly scripted TV chat shows. The very existence of the state depended on them, for one simple reason: the biological imperative. Any state that did not maintain a viable population level did not survive. So since life was short and survival at birth precarious

Thursday

Toby Young

Can I turn the West London Free School into Fame Academy?

‘Another opening, another show,’ sang five-year-old Charlie on his way to school this morning — and then proceeded to belt out the entire first verse of the famous Cole Porter song. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. All four of my children are deep into rehearsals of Kiss Me Kate, this year’s ‘summer production’ at their primary school, and they’re taking it very seriously. Even more seriously than last year, if that’s possible, when they did Oklahoma! I say Oklahoma! and Kiss Me Kate, but in fact they’re bowdlerised versions, rewritten by the headmaster. This involves sanitising some of the content — ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’