Sex

Natalie Rowe’s strange duet with Marvin Gaye

Among the more bizarre parts of Natalie Rowe’s Chief Whip, of which Mr S wrote earlier, is her alleged encounter with Marvin Gaye. The scribbling dominatrix even claims that she sang a duet with the deceased singer while they were on their way to buy cocaine at six in the morning: ‘As we walked an idea hit me. “Marvin?” “Yeah.” “Could we sing a duet?” “Sure. What do you want to sing?” “You Are Everything.” I cleared my throat and started to sing and he sang back. It had been a long night and our throats weren’t at their freshest but, as he held my hand as we sang in

Steerpike

Who is Natalie Rowe’s ‘Joe’?

The only question on lips this morning: Who is Joe? This mysterious character lurks on the pages of a new book by Natalie Rowe, a former prostitute and dominatrix who was once photographed with George Osborne. Rowe will only confirm that ‘Joe’ was ‘a young politician’ when she knew him and that he became a minister. It has been made very clear that ‘Joe’ is not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, so who is he? ‘There was a spark of attraction ­between us. We once had a snog at one of my parties and, as we chatted, he told me he’d never had a black girl before. Not because he didn’t want

Liberté, égalité, pornographie

Bravo Melanie McDonagh. Your stand against the coarsening of society’s sexual sensibilities is very welcome. But it is not just in Britain that porn has gone mainstream. We French now have our share of outrageously lewd tastes, too. Long gone are the days when the French could hide their perversions behind a veneer of sophistication, as if sex was somehow something that the French did in a classier – plus distingué – way. Our revolutionary ancestors would roll in over in their graves if they knew how unenlightened and childish we have become when it comes to pleasures of the flesh. Crude, cheap sexual material, whether it is on TV

Ban the word ‘twerk’

Jesse Norman MP, who used to lead the Prime Minister’s policy forum, is using his spare time to write for ConservativeHome. About twerking. For those of you who have missed this craze, the Oxford English Dictionary, in a shameless PR stunt, added the term to their latest edition: ‘To dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.’ Turning to Jesse’s piece, apparently ‘the press have started to scrutinise’ Norman’s ‘public remarks with all the fervent enthusiasm of a group of Miley Cyrus fans at a twerking convention.’ How could we not? After all, Norman is the author of such deathless prose as this:

What if Byron and the Shelleys had live tweeted from the Villa Diodati?

It’s one of the most famous – indeed infamous – episodes in English literary history. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron took a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. He was attended by his doctor, John William Polidori, and another nearby house was rented by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom the married Shelley had eloped two years previously, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress. The weather was terrible that year – so bad they called it ‘the ‘year without a summer’ – and the party spent most of their time indoors, gathered about the fireplace in Lord Byron’s drawing-room. And it was there,

The week in books – a 19th century career woman, the courtesan of the camellias, Vasily Grossman and why France is turning into the USA

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here’s a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor and then as newseditor at the Pittsburgh Leader — an unprecedented post for a woman. She was later a successful managing director ofMcClure’s Magazine. With her gumption and vitality, she was a stalwart among women facing the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of competitive work. It is regrettable that her book Office Wives — a collection of stories about women in business —

I’d vote for DSK the pimp over Weiner the ‘sexter’

You can’t keep a good pervert down. Every time the Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga – l’affaire DSK, to give it its nom propre – threatens to fade from view, it rears its dirty head again. The latest is that DSK was, according to a leaked document written by the magistrates investigating his case, a ‘pimp party king’ (‘Roi de la fete’) who lorded it over various complicated orgies with prostitutes. The parties amounted to ‘aggressive pimping’ (‘proxénétisme aggravé’) and were ‘carnage on a pile of mattresses’, say the judges, who appear to be enjoying their indictment. The headlines reminded me of a recent encounter with a European politician at the Spectator offices. Does

A secret sperm donor service in post-first world war London

These days there are sophisticated and scientific solutions to the dismal problem of unwanted childlessness — there are IVF, Viagra and well-established egg and sperm donor services. We think of these as recent advantages and give thanks for the modern age. But what only very few people are aware of is that long before sperm donation was practically or ethically possible, in the early 20th century, a secret sperm donation service existed for those women most in need. Helena Wright was a renowned doctor, bestselling author, campaigner and educator who overcame the establishment to pioneer contraceptive medicine in England and throughout the world. Kind, intelligent, funny and attractive, Helena had

Mind your language: Who says there’s a ‘correct name’ for the penis?

In a very rum letter to the Daily Telegraph, the Mother’s Union of all people joined with some other bodies to demand that ‘primary schools should teach the correct names for genitalia’. What can they mean? A confederate of the Mother’s Union in this campaign, the Sex Education Forum, says that by the age of seven, children should name ‘external genitalia’. From examples supplied, it seems to want us all to speak Latin. It’s as if we should no longer say womb but uterus, not skull but cranium, not big toe but hallux. By using Latin names for genitalia, the campaigners hope to avoid ‘perpetuating shame’. I wonder whether they

To their coy mistresses: two poems about the arts of seduction

Andrew Marvell, from ‘To His Coy Mistress’ But at my back I always hear Times winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found: Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song. Then worms shall try That long preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace. This is the middle stanza of Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, which I imagine many will know well. The first stanza begins ‘Had we but world enough and

Discovering poetry: John Donne, from deviant to Dean of St. Paul’s

Holy Sonnet 7, John Donne At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go – All whom the flood did, and fire shall, overthrow, All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.     But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space For, if above all these my sins abound, ‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace When we are there. Here, on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good

Sheila Heti: ‘I did worry putting sex in the book would eclipse everything else’

There is a question which writers (and readers) of literary fiction get tired of hearing: which bits really happened? The traditional and respectable answer is that this doesn’t matter. Everything in the book will have been transformed by art, and isn’t something that comes straight from an author’s imagination more autobiographical, more telling, than things that might have happened to them, anyway? But these serious maxims don’t always quell your desire for real-life incident or gossip. Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be, subtitled ‘A novel from life,’ had me googling paintings by Margaux Williamson: Heti’s best friend in real life and a character in her book. How Should A

Less alcohol, fewer drugs: how the British seem to be shedding their harmful habits

Gripped by his habitual despair, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend in 1872, ‘I am appalled at the state of society. I’m filled with the sadness that must have affected the Romans of the 4th century. I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.’ Warming to his bleak scatological theme, he continued, ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’ Many commentators would feel that exactly the same words could be applied to modern Britain. According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in

Dangerous romance – Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever Girl. Stella moves from childhood in 1950s Bristol through a series of episodes to end up married and financially secure. However, a ‘flag announcing nothing’ might describe some of these discrete episodes, which sometimes fail to contribute to the larger narrative of Stella’s life. It’s as if the book is a study in the misunderstanding of consequence, where this misunderstanding is played out at a formal level. An early encounter between a child and a seemingly dangerous man appears to

What can society learn from the ‘grooming’ scandals?

The verdicts have been delivered in the Operation Bullfinch trial. Seven of the nine men have been found ‘guilty’. The case involved the highly organised sexual and physical abuse of underage girls in the ‘care’ system. This was carried out by a gang of men in Oxfordshire over the course of nearly a decade. As I wrote of one of the most shocking aspects of the case: ‘One of the victims sold into slavery was a girl of 11. She was branded with the initial of her “owner” abuser: “M” for Mohammed. The court heard that Mohammed “branded her to make her his property and to ensure others knew about

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 May 2013

On Tuesday night, at a Spectator readers’ evening, Andrew Neil interviewed me about my biography of Margaret Thatcher. He asked me if, after leaving office, Lady Thatcher had come to the view that Britain should leave the European Union. I said yes (I think it happened after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992), although advisers had persuaded her that she should not say this in public since it would have allowed her opponents to drive her to the fringes of public life. I had believed this was widely known, but according to Andrew, it is a story. My revelation, if such it was, came on the same day as Nigel Lawson’s piece

The unfair sex – how feminism created a new class divide

James is 15 years old, coming up to his GCSEs; and the researcher he is talking to is clueless about girls. Yes, he tells her, girls at his school, underage girls, do indeed have sex. With guys in their class, like him. The researcher is surprised. Haven’t girls gone studious; aren’t they collecting the top grades, leaving the boys behind? James states the obvious. ‘It’s not girls with As or A*s,’ he explains. ‘Girls with As are virgins.’ Today, almost a quarter of girls report having underage sex. But there are almost as many girls waiting till they’re 20 or more. This isn’t random, a question of whether and when

Heat Lightning by Helen Hull – review

‘I had decided that I wished to write a novel about the immediate present – this was the summer of 1930 – and I had been speculating about the way people were acting and feeling,’ wrote Helen Hull of Heat Lightning in 1932. Heat Lightning follows the tumultuous Amy Norton as she returns temporarily to her family home, only to be subjected to all sorts of minor family dramas — illegitimate children, sudden deaths, hidden debts and destroyed wills (the usual problems). This book, beautifully reprinted by Persephone, is solid domestic fiction, but it replaces the acute social observation and deep psychological profundity available to the best of its genre

Falling out of love, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 – discovering poetry

How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn big with rich increase Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widowed wombs after their lord’s decease. Yet this abundant issue seemed to me But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit, For summer and his pleasures wait on thee And thou away, the very birds are mute: Or if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near. Spring is a

Long life | 28 February 2013

Eight years ago I was in Rome for The Spectator to write a piece about the election of a new pope after the death of John-Paul II. Within two days, and after only four ballots, some wispy white smoke emerged from the little chimney on the roof of the Sistine chapel. The College of Cardinals had made its decision and chosen the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to be the 265th occupant of the throne of St Peter. He was already 78 years old and said to be longing for speedy retirement from his taxing job as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the oldest of the