Greece

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

Cocktails, castles and cadging

Here is a veritable feast for fans of Paddy Leigh Fermor. This is the story of a well-lived life through letters. The first is from a 24-year-old recruit eager to do battle with the enemy in 1940. The last is by a tottering nonagenarian of 2010, still hoping, 75 years after his ‘Great Trudge’ across Europe, that he might just finish the final volume that had eluded him for decades. The anthology offers the most vivid explanation yet for why he didn’t. Letters were flying to and from all corners of the world — Adam Sisman reckons that Paddy wrote a whopping 5,000 to 10,000. There were parties to attend,

Thursday

Jeremy Norman

Mystery on Mount Athos

I have just returned from one of the world’s most secretive states. I had to apply for a visa a month beforehand and send in a copy of my passport. There is no way into this place by road; you have to arrive on an authorised boat and a policeman checks your visa against your passport before you board. Private boats must keep well offshore and may not land. The visa is valid for only three nights; you have to book each night in advance and may not spend more than one night in the same place. Only ten visas are granted a day. Women have always been forbidden here

Thursday

Harry Mount

Worlds apart

Classics is a boastful subject. Even the name — classics — has an inner boast; as does the classics course at Oxford, Literae Humaniores (‘more humane letters’), and the course’s second half, Greats. Michael Scott, a classics professor at Warwick University and a telegenic media don, tries to put an end to the boastfulness in this book. It has always understandably annoyed him that, in the field of Greek and Roman studies, book titles often include the words ‘Ancient World’ — as if there were only one ancient world, and it only included Greece and Rome. And so he attempts an ambitious reordering of ancient worlds — thus the book’s

Thursday

Taki

High life | 30 June 2016

The two most beautiful words in the history of the world, in any language, are ‘Molon labe’, the accent on the second syllable of both words, the ‘b’ pronounced ‘v’ in the second. These two little words were the laconic answer of King Leonidas of Sparta to the offer made by the great Persian king Xerxes of not only safe passage, if the Greeks laid down their arms, but also a settlement of lands of better quality than any they currently possessed. You know what I’m talking about. The Hot Gates, or Thermopylae in Greek. The year is 480 BC, the month is August, and the Persians number more than

The Spectator

A vote of confidence

During the referendum campaign, it seemed at times as if a competition was on to issue the most hyperbolic claim of what might happen should the British public vote to leave the European Union. Now politicians and commentators are competing to come up with the most hysterical assessment of the British decision to leave. Leading the field is Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, who declared that ‘England has collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.’ In other words: without us, you’re nothing. Politics in collapse? We do not want to intrude on the private grief of the Labour party but the Tories are heading into a leader-ship contest with as

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Madeleine moments

I’d just heard (on catch-up) Jenny Abramsky (a former director of BBC radio) telling Gillian Reynolds (the esteemed radio critic of the Telegraph) why radio is so special to her: ‘It takes place in my head. It paints pictures in my mind. It talks to me as an individual. It surprises me. It stretches me.’ Then I popped down to the kitchen to make some soup for lunch, reached for the radio button and was hooked instantly as Jeremy Vine talked to a man who had lost his wife in a road accident when their child was just two. (Vine’s Radio 2 lunchtime programme on Monday was focusing on child

Thursday

Harry Mount

Two countries now exist: Tourist Greece and Real Greece

‘The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!’ I couldn’t agree more with Lord Byron about the joys of the Greek islands. Here in Cephalonia, the poppies are out, back-lit by a strong spring sun. The swallows are swooping low across the villa, taking little sips from the swimming pool. The tavernas are gearing up for the summer season; the sea bass at lunch was freshly caught this morning. Still, lucky old Byron never had to deal with a ferry strike between the isles of Greece. A general strike meant

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Profit and loss | 9 June 2016

Bertolt Brecht took The Threepenny Opera  from an 18th-century script by John Gay and relocated it to Victorian London. This National Theatre version wants to straddle the contemporary and the antique. Mack the Knife, an Afghan war veteran who murders strangers, contracts a bigamous marriage with Polly Peachum, the daughter of a cross-dressing mastermind who runs begging gangs across east London. This laborious set-up takes an hour to establish and the drama gets started only when Polly’s mum vows to rub out Mack at a knocking-shop. A wise dramatist would have placed this threat in the opening scene. But Brecht isn’t a wise dramatist; he’s a preachy one and his

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Warning: top-performing funds are highly likely to contain tobacco

Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and gradually reduce its €1.6 billion bond holdings in the sector. No surprise, given Axa’s role as a health insurer and the oft-repeated statistic that smoking kills six million people a year; indeed, you might think any health-related investor would have taken the decision years ago. Except that cigarette-makers have been stellar stock market performers since the beginning of the century: British American Tobacco’s shares have multiplied in value a dozen times while paying rich dividends, and Imperial Tobacco (now Imperial Brands) has been almost as good. MSCI’s global index of

Thursday

Yvo Fitzherbert

Desperate straits

 Istanbul Shops in a rundown neighbourhood sell fake life jackets to refugees planning to brave the Aegean Sea. Last year, nearly 4,000 refugees died trying to make this journey. ‘But what am I to do?’ says Erkan, a shopkeeper, as he pushes me out of his shop. ‘I tell them they are fake but the poor souls continue to buy them. The genuine ones don’t sell so well.’ We’re in the suburb of Aksaray, the makeshift centre of the smuggling trade in the city. Here the language is Arabic and the restaurants are Syrian. A town square serves as a hub for migration brokers. This is where dreams are sold.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 10 March 2016

   Athens I am walking around downtown Athens watching as thousands of migrants field pitches from smugglers offering alternative routes to Germany and Austria. I ask a friendly policeman 50 years younger than me why he doesn’t arrest the smugglers and throw away the key. ‘Others will take their place quicker than we put the handcuffs on them,’ he tells me. ‘And they pretend to be migrants the moment we approach.’ Smuggling people is big business, and most of the bad guys are Afghans, as far as I can tell. It is grim stuff, especially where children are concerned. Victoria Square is a tree-lined park where long ago my grandfather

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Linked in

What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of the English-language service. And how does it justify the additional £289 million funding (spread over the next five years) which the Treasury granted it at the end of last year? Will that money, which could after all otherwise go to welfare or the NHS, be well spent? ‘News is our core,’ says Hockaday. ‘It’s all about the now.’ Which sounds a bit Day Today. Anyway, isn’t this what BBC News and Radio 4 do already? It’s not just about presenting the news, Hockaday adds, but putting it in context. This

Friday

Isabel Hardman

EU summit: Tired European leaders left waiting for their ‘English lunch’

EU leaders have a funny way of going about their negotiations. The best way, it seems, is to conduct most of the talks in the middle of the night in order to create a sense of urgency and pressure, and then spend the next day sleep-deprived and not eating. The ‘working breakfast’ that was originally supposed to start at 10 then became a late breakfast, before turning into a brunch, ‘English lunch’ (which sounded unhealthy), late lunch, and now it is ‘foreseen’ to be at 4pm. This is surely afternoon tea. There are reports that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras has threatened to veto the whole deal unless there is

Thursday

Taki

High life | 11 February 2016

Gstaad I had the rather subversive idea of offering a six-figure sum to Oriel College, Oxford. On one condition: that the college immediately withdraw the Rhodes scholarship from the South African Ntokozo Qwabe, the hypocrite who led the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and from any other recipients of Cecil’s munificence who are blackening his name a century later. It is the least these hypocrites deserve. Oxbridge has become a joke in the way it tries to emulate the LSE in radicalism and other such ludicrous poses. The group that called Jihadi John ‘a beautiful young man’ should be allowed to speak at Oxford, according to the

Matthew Lynn

If Deutsche Bank collapses, it’s taking the euro with it

The queues haven’t started forming outside branches in Frankfurt or Cologne yet. Even so, it is hard not to suspect that something is badly amiss at Deutsche Bank, Germany’s and indeed Europe’s mightiest financial institution, and the rock on which that economy is founded. The shares have been in freefall, and executives have been wheeled out to try and reassure everyone that all is well. For Deutsche to be in trouble is bad enough. But here’s the real problem. If Deutsche does go down, it is taking the euro down with it. Why? Because if Germany bails it out, the contrast with the punishment metered out to Greek banks will

Thursday

Taki

High life | 4 February 2016

Athens Viewed from Mars, this is a sunny, peaceful city. Up close, however, things ain’t what they used to be. First, those wonderful Greek smiles are gone, replaced by wintry ones at best. People are worried, as well they should be. At the Divani Caravel hotel, once owned by yours truly, the staff greet me as though I were a conquering hero. I was a benevolent owner who used to party and spread the wealth. Now things are more professional, and the hotel is profitable because of expert management. The staff is the best in Athens by far. The migrant crisis is secondary, from what I hear. Pension reform and the

Tuesday

David Patrikarakos

There’s one major lesson Labour should learn from Syriza’s anniversary

If a week is a long time in politics what’s a year? A century? A millennium? An Ice Age? If you’re Greek it can sometimes feel like all three. One year ago today, on 26 January 2015, Greece’s Syriza party formed the most left-wing government in the country’s history having (ludicrously) promised the Greek people to take on the European establishment and rid them of the austerity measures that had blighted their lives for close to a decade. If hubris and bombast characterised Syriza’s election campaign, then naivety and disaster characterised its first months in office. The new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had given the job of re-negotiating with Greece’s

Wednesday

Mark Nayler

Spain has rejected austerity. So what does it do now?

Spain is a long way from being Greece or Portugal, but in Sunday’s historic general election, Spaniards sent out the same message that the Greeks did in July and the Portugese did in October – namely, a resounding ‘No’ to austerity economics. Anti-austerity Podemos—the left-wing challenger party that is less than two years old—took a staggering 20.7 per cent of the national vote and is now the third-strongest political force in Spain. As long as the composition of Spain’s new government is unknown, the country’s economic recovery is on hold – but two things, at least, are now very clear. First, the Popular Party has failed to convince many Spaniards of its claim

Thursday

Michael O'Connell-Davidson

Forget Syria: a weak Greece endangers us all

There is nothing waiting for people who leave school in Greece today. It does not matter how much young Greeks might be able to give to their nation, because their nation has little to give them in return. Over the weekend, The Times reported that young Greek women are selling sex for as low as €2. Some are even exchanging sessions for cheese pasties, because they cannot afford to eat. It’s not just young Greeks who are suffering. Pensioners are being squeezed by Greece’s creditors, and drugs thrive amongst the homeless in Athens. Election after election has only served to make the country’s political crisis worse, with the second general strike in

Thursday

Taki

High life | 24 September 2015

Gstaad Jeremy Clarke has wiped me out again, for a change. His accounts of the high jinks on board the Spectator At the age of 79, I’m seriously contemplating becoming a bird-watcher cruise had the mother of my children laughing out loud, something she’s not known for among those of us who consider laughing loudly a staggering breach of taste. Never mind, Jeremy’s talents and his ability to describe the indescribable in vivid prose is a badly kept secret among those of us who love good writing. The only thing wrong with Jeremy is that he shows me up week in, week out. Being the fall guy does not suit