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Friday

Harry Mount

Remembering Harper Lee, 1926-2016

The sad news of Harper Lee’s death at the age of 89 leaves one of modern literature’s great questions unanswered. We will probably never know whether she gave permission for her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, to be published last year. Perhaps — as the rumours had it — she really was deaf and blind, and mentally incapable of sanctioning the book’s release, as she sat in a nursing home in her birthplace, Monroeville, Alabama. But I do know that — contrary to popular opinion — she hadn’t shut herself off from the world since To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Quite the contrary — over the

Thursday

Matt Ridley

For EU but not for US

So the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, thinks his country has a ‘profound interest… in a very strong United Kingdom staying in a strong EU’, and President Obama is planning to join in campaigning for the Remainders too. They say this not because they think it is good for us, but because it is in their interests that we influence Europe in a free-trading, Atlanticist direction. Well, two can play at that game. How would Americans like it if we argued that it is in our interests that the United States should forthwith be united with all the countries in their continent north of the Panama Canal — Canada,

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

The Pope vs The Donald. Who will win?

It’s pretty extraordinary that a leading contender for the American presidency has just effectively threatened the Pope with terrorism. But then, Donald J. Trump is no ordinary Republican frontrunner. Everything about his campaign is outrageous — and that’s why he is winning. Today, the Pope, returning home from Mexico, told reporters that he thought Trump’s intention to build a wall between America and Mexico was unChristian. Rather than doing what all politicians do, and paying due reverence to the Holy Father, the Donald’s press office decided to reply with the following (Italics mine, to emphasise how Trump would have said it) ‘If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone

Monday

Freddy Gray

Can Marco Rubio win tonight?

Marco Rubio wins tonight in Iowa — by coming third. That, I suspect, will be the on dit among the commentariat this evening in America. And it might not be wrong. According to the latest polls, Rubio is the only candidate to have gained momentum in the run up to today’s caucuses. If the polls aren’t off — big if, I know — he should emerge as the only viable ‘establishment’ candidate that can stop Trump or Cruz. He will emerge as the hope of the rational versus the irrational, the pragmatist’s choice against the stupid and crazy. At least that’s how the ‘narrative’, as strategists like to call it, could develop. (There are reasons to think President Rubio could be

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

No, women can’t have it all

You can’t accuse the redoubtable Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation think tank, of giving up easily: she has arrived in London fresh from the World Economic Forum at Davos, where she slipped on the ice and broke her wrist, spending two days in a Swiss hospital. One arm is therefore out of action, and her voice is hoarse, but she is soldiering on through a dense thicket of meetings and interviews to talk about her new book Unfinished Business, on how the work-life balance is broken and how to fix it. The trigger for the book was a rare, traumatic moment when Slaughter was stopped

Friday

Ed West

Donald Trump is capitalising on America’s declining middle class

While watching MPs in the House of Commons debate banning a politician they find disagreeable, my first thought was to wonder how this chamber once ruled one-quarter of the globe. If Trump becomes president we could not ban him from visiting; if he doesn’t, he doesn’t matter anyway. Either way, having controversial or even obnoxious opinions does not make someone a danger, and we do not need ‘protection’ from them. It is all the more embarrassing when you consider that this country has hundreds if not thousands of genuinely dangerous extremists living here. I’m not sure what to make of this; my instinctive reaction to Trump is that he is rude and

Wednesday

Steerpike

Donald Trump on Parliament ban debate: ‘I hear I had a very big success’

On Monday MPs gathered in Westminster Hall to debate whether or not Donald Trump should be allowed to visit Britain, after over 500,000 Brits signed a petition calling for Trump to be banned from the UK. Ahead of the debate, the SNP’s Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh argued that Trump ought to be banned as otherwise ‘what we’re saying is, if you’re a prospective presidential candidate, it’s alright to say what you want’. So what did the man of the moment make of the debate which saw MPs call him a, others took the opportunity to call the Presidential hopeful a ‘fool’ and ‘buffoon’? It turns out that despite being insulted by several politicians,

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Endurance test

The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish I was back on that boat that went down.’ He is mauled by a bear. Viciously. He is buried alive. He eats still-throbbing, blood-dripping raw liver, and quite forgets his manners. (Wipe your chin, man; there’s never any excuse.) He cauterises his own wounds, falls off cliffs, spins down rapids, slits open a dead horse and sleeps within for warmth. The film recently triumphed at the Golden Globes — best film, best director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), best actor (DiCaprio) — but all I was thinking was, ‘Oh God, please let

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Good cop, bad cop

One of the most shocking items of recent news has been the bald statistic that the number of people shot by law enforcement officers in the United States last year was 1,136. Not died by gangland shooting, domestic violence or terrorist attack. But killed by those who are meant to be preventing such deaths. Many of them are black or Hispanic. As if on cue, the World Service this week launched a documentary series to find out why this is happening. What are the deep structural issues that give rise to such inequalities of experience and opportunity in the (supposed) Land of the Free? The first episode of The Compass:

Leah McLaren

Sticking to his guns

Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the massacre in San Bernardino last month, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston. Uncle Bill likes to email me redneck jokes in the hope of getting my progressive Canadian dander up. Here’s a recent one: The premier of Ontario is jogging with her dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the premier’s dog, then bites the premier. She calls animal control. Animal control

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Aural wonderland

My resolution this New Year is to get to grips with podcasts, to brace up and embrace this new aural wonderland stuffed full of sound stories, experiments, features, adventures. They’ve been around for a decade, and there’s now hundreds of thousands of them, lurking in the web, hoping for someone to stream or download them. But where to start? What will be worth listening to, and not a waste of time, or just a bore, or even worse nightmare-inducing (there’s nothing like stories told on radio for creeping insidiously into the mind)? How do you find just what you want to listen to amid this babel? The easiest place to

Thursday

The Spectator

It is time to join the fight against IS in Syria

The Islamic State is as monstrous an enemy as we have seen in recent history. It crucifies and decapitates its victims, holds teenage girls in slavery and burns captives alive. It is wrong to call it a medieval force, because such institutionalised barbarity was seldom seen in medieval times. As far as five centuries of records from the Ottoman Empire can establish, stoning was authorised only once. Isis now regularly stones suspected adulterers to death. It is not seeking inspiration from the Middle Ages. We are witnessing a modern form of evil — and it is spreading fast. Labour MPs, now accustomed to receiving threats from hard-left activists, were told

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 12 November 2015

It is hardly uncommon for politicians to lie, especially when their careers are threatened by a sexual transgression — John Profumo about Christine Keeler, for example, and Bill Clinton on not having had ‘sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’. But there is a particular kind of distortion of the truth that is rare over here but almost routine among American presidential candidates; and this is the way they embellish their personal histories to maximise their appeal to voters. It’s been going on for ages among candidates of both main parties, but presently most scrutiny is directed at Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Seventh-day Adventist — denier of global

Tuesday

Steerpike

‘Death to America’ is more diplomatic than you think, says Iran’s supreme leader

When the Iran nuclear deal was debated in Washington, the popular Iranian chant ‘Death to America!’ was a regular point of contention. According to the New Yorker, on one occasion the Texan republican Ted Poe asked John Kerry if the slogan meant that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted to destroy the United States: ‘I don’t believe they’ve said that,’ the Secretary of State replied. ‘I think they’ve said ‘Death to America’ in their chants.’ ‘Well, I kind of take that to mean that they want us dead,’ Poe quipped. So happily today, Khamenei has stepped in to clarify just what is meant by the now infamous chant, which first arose

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

I’ve never thought much of John Lennon’s music – until now

It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it must be good but it’s never made much of an impact on me no matter how hard I’ve tried to appreciate it. If I like a Beatles song, I usually discover it’s by George. But the discovery from a radio trailer (reluctantly, I’ll have to admit they do sometimes work) that Lennon would have been 75 this week was shocking enough (how could he ever be that old?) to make me tune in on Thursday night to John Lennon’s Last Day. Stephen Kennedy’s docudrama for Radio 2 (produced by James

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 1 October 2015

When Robert Peston, the economics editor of the BBC, interviewed George Osborne on television in an open-necked shirt with collar awry and a wisp of chest hair on display, he was subjected to a barrage of criticism to which he responded with vigour. It was ‘bonkers’ to suggest that wearing a tie made a journalist serious, he said, or that a tie should be worn out of respect for the interviewee. ‘I didn’t not wear a tie out of disrespect for the chancellor,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t wear a tie because I don’t really like wearing a tie. I think these TV conventions are nuts.’ A report in the

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Home is where the heart is | 24 September 2015

99 Homes is an American drama about house repossession. Bummer, you might think, but here is what you don’t yet know: films about house repossessions can be electrifying. Or at least this one is. Set in 2008 or thereabouts, against the backdrop of the real-estate bust and ensuing foreclosure crisis, this has much to say about a system that allows the rich to get richer while the poor get shat on (basically), but, above and beyond that, it is also nail-bitingly tense, as gripping as any thriller, and it will totally tear your heart out. In terms of impact, it may even be the Cathy Come Home of our times.

Thursday

Sherard Cowpercoles

A hero of our time

I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting Edward Heath, I had to secure for an almost desperate former British prime minister a meeting with the former US secretary of state, also in town. Once with Kissinger, Heath promptly subsided into a deep slumber. I had the alarming experience of trying to keep the conversation going. The other occasions were more recent, but almost as scary. My hostess at the ‘secret’ (but much publicised) transatlantic talkfests which Kissinger (92 this year) still attends twice summoned me to sit beside the great man at dinner. On each occasion I

Wednesday

Chris Woods

Drone assassination is addictive. Is Britain now hooked?

With the drone killing in Syria of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, Britain joins an exclusive club. Only Israel and the United States publicly admit to carrying out targeted killings – assassinations – away from the hot battlefield. Yet as both of these nations have already found, a single killing today can lead to a conveyor belt of death further on. The challenge for the UK is whether it can do things differently. Israel targeted and killed hundreds of alleged militants in the West Bank and Gaza during the Second Intifada using snipers, booby-traps and drones. Indeed it was Israel which coined the term ‘targeted killing’ – a more palatable

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 3 September 2015

While the Germans were raining bombs on London during the second world war, the architects’ department of London County Council was busy colouring in Ordnance Survey maps of the city to record which buildings had been destroyed and which had not. These maps have now been published as a book by Thames and Hudson, The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939-45. Those buildings that had been totally destroyed were coloured black on the maps; those that had been damaged beyond repair, purple. And a review of this book in last Saturday’s edition of the Times was accompanied by a reproduction of one map covering the area around St Paul’s