Newspapers

Hugh Grant’s account of a (secretly-taped!) conversation he had with a former News of the World hack-turned-whistleblower is most entertaining. Credit to our friends at the New Statesman for commissioning* it. There’s plenty to enjoy, including this fine exposition of the mentality of our upstanding truth-seekers in the popular prints: Me Well, I suppose the fact that they’re dragging their feet while investigating a mass of phone-hacking – which is a crime – some people would think is a bit depressing about the police. Him But then – should it be a crime? I mean, scanning never used to be a crime. Why should it be? You’re transmitting your thoughts

Brother Korski is right to draw attention to Rachel Sylvester’s interview (£) with Unite’s Len McCluskey and right too to note that his defence of Castro’s island gulag* is indefensible. But there’s more that’s wrong with it than that and not all of that is McCluskey’s fault. Consider these lines: He would choose tea and scones at Fortnum and Mason over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled room. He is a fan of the romantic poets — “I love Byron, Keats and Shelley, I’m a romantic at heart” — and takes a feminist interpretation of Christina Rossetti. He is a theatre aficionado — “I do like Shakespeare, I’ve probably seen

Note, please, the wisdom of the man from the San Francisco Examiner who says “We aren’t going to make much [money] from this*.” *So, yeah, subscribe to the Spectator. Please. It’s good for you and, quite importantly, good for us too. [Hat-tip: Radley Balko]

MPs are pretty out of touch, of course, clueless about the way “ordinary people” live. That’s what we’re supposed to think of course. We’re not supposed to remember that MPs probably regularly encounter a much broader range of public opinion and circumstance than highly paid columnists and political editors. Here, for instance, is Ben Brogan committing the sin of assuming (I presume) that everyone is just like the people he meets: If the higher rate threshold stays the same, and yet more thousands of the ’squeezed middle’ are brought into higher rate tax, at what point do we review terms, and rename the 20p rate the lower rate, the 40p rate

Ben Goldacre deplores the reluctance of newspapers to link to original sources and then demonstrates why they don’t: Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently, showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became “Why stilletos are the secret to shapely legs”, for the Mail “Stilletos give women shapelier legs than flats”, for the Express “Stilletos tone up your legs”. But anybody who read even the press release, which is a readable piece of popular science itself, would immediately see that this study had nothing whatsoever to do with shoes. It didn’t look at shoe heel height, it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance

Spot the mistake the New York Times makes here. Unfortunate but amusing. This produced, as it would, a fine correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the new Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny as a female. Enda Kenny is a male. As I suspected this was New York’s fault, not Sarah Lyall’s as a sub-editor changed Mr to Ms. These things happen. A Telegraph sub once inserted “Kenyan-born” into a piece I wrote about Barack Obama’s presidential then-fledgling presidential campaign. This was before the Birther movement had got going but, of course, made the whole piece a nonsense since if Obama had been born in Kenya he

If only Britain had something comparable to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution then we’d enjoy greater freedoms than is currently the case. Three cheers, then, to Bagehot for defending liberalism and liberty from the predations of the law and, naturally, the Sun newspaper. The case? An easy one that might have been designed as a litmus or Rorshach test designed to discover who actually really believes in the “values” we like to congratulate ourselves for holding and those for whom such values and concerns are unimportant and may be abandoned at the first sign of trouble or the dreadful prospect that someone, somewhere is doing something of

I enjoyed Samira Ahmed’s trawl through the history of movies about journalism but was surprised she didn’t mention arguably the greatest example of the genre: Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. It’s just as, perhaps even more, relevant today as when it was made. Lancaster, playing the all-powerful columnist J.J Hunsecker, produces the performance of his career. So does Tony Curtis as that “cookie full of arsenic” and press agent Sidney Falco. Though set in New York, the movie is easily seen as a searing expose of the viciousness, hypocrisy, venality and arrogance of our own beloved tabloid press. It’s all there: the ceaseless bullying of public figures, the rebarbative