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Thursday

J P O'Malley

Interview: John Irving on writing sexuality

John Irving’s latest novel, In One Person is narrated by a bisexual writer, Billy Abbot, who recalls his high school days from the 1950s, in the small New-England town of First Sister — where the majority of the cross-dressing residents are more likely to celebrate polymorphous perversity than puritanical punishment. Billy takes a fancy to various people, including: his stepfather; his friend’s mother; the captain of the school wrestling team; and the local librarian, Miss Frost — who reveals to Billy a secret regarding her own identity. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s, witnessing the AIDS epidemic.

Wednesday

Richard Foreman

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other ‘great’ character

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

Clinton hurts Obama

Bill Clinton — the man who was such a thorn in Barack Obama’s side during the 2008 Democratic primaries — has become one of the current President’s most important supporters this time around. All the more significant, then, that Clinton has added his name to the list of Democrats who have voiced concern at one of Team Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney. For a while now, the Obama campaign has been trying to make Romney’s investment career at Bain Capital, which he founded, as a reason for voters not to back the presumptive Republican nominee. They’ve hit him with the stories of workers who lost their jobs at companies taken

Friday

David Blackburn

Euphoria gives way to worry

The slaughter of the innocents in Houla, Syria, has concentrated the West’s collective mind. The Times declares (£), not unreasonably, that there is a desire to stop what the UN, while making Robert Mugabe its tourism envoy, has tepidly described as ’18 months of violence’. The paper adds that ‘all options are on the table’. Western voices are emitting decibels of disgust. Secretary of State Clinton has castigated the Russian regime for its intransigence in the Security Council, and has said that Russia’s policy will ‘contribute to a civil war’. Meanwhile, Senator John McCain has repeated his view that the Obama administration’s inaction on Syria denies what it is to be

Tuesday

Graham Brady-Mp

The US has taken a stance against Argentina’s brinkmanship — it’s time we joined them

The 30th anniversary of the Falklands War – and the bellicose rhetoric (and videos) currently emerging from Buenos Aires — has once more shone a spotlight on the UK’s relationship with Argentina. Were it not for the Falklands, it’s unlikely that Argentina would occupy much discussion in this country. The truth, for those of us who have followed the country’s recent history, is that Argentina, most notably under the current Government, is truly remarkable. But for all the wrong reasons. In Britain, of course, our chief concern is the ongoing nationalist rhetoric that President Cristina Kirchner is whipping up around the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. But if you were

Wednesday

Clarissa Tan

May Day, May Day

There was a sense of urgency, even emergency, in many countries on May 1 this year. The goings-on in the UK were muted in comparison: France Presidential incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy staged a rally in front of the Eiffel Tower called ‘The Feast of Real Work’, to counter the traditional show of heft by the left. ‘Put down the red flag and serve France!’ he shouted to the unions. His campaign claims a turnout of 200,000. The left was irritated by Sarkozy’s hijack of their celebration, and his insinuation that they don’t understand what work is. The far right, led by a scornful Marine Le Pen fresh from rejecting an overture

Peter Hoskin

Obama’s words meet with the Taliban’s bombs

Political theatre, that’s what Barack Obama delivered in Afghanistan last night. A year on from the death of Osama Bin Laden, and with the US elections fast approaching, here was the President reheating his existing timetable for withdrawal — and offering it up as reassurance for weary Afghans and Americans alike. There were some new details, courtesy of an ‘Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement’ signed with Hamid Karzai, but this was mostly about the symbolism and rhetoric. As Obama put it himself, ‘We can see the light of a new day on the horizon.’ Except this ‘new day’ quickly slipped back into night. A couple of hours after Obama had left

Sunday

Jonathan Jones

Comedian-in-Chief

Every year, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner boasts an eclectic guest list, and last night’s was no exception. Stars of the political world — including Colin Powell and Chris Christie — were joined by Hollywood stars including George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Spacey and Lindsay Lohan. Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel provided after dinner entertainment, but — as last year — the best jokes came from Barack Obama. He poked fun at himself: ‘Some have said I blame too many problems on my predecessor. But let’s not forget, that’s a practice that was initiated by George W Bush.’ The Republican primaries: ‘[Mitt Romney] took a few hours off the

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Britain’s longest downturn

As of today, we now have four years’ worth of GDP figures since the UK first went into recession — and they don’t look pretty. By this point in the 1930s, we’d already fully recovered from the Great Depression. This time, we’re still more than 4 per cent below where we were at the start of 2008: And the international comparison isn’t very flattering either:

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Jonathan Haidt on left vs right

Why are Dennis Skinner and George Osborne locked in enmity? The answer, according to Jonathan Haidt, lies beyond the obvious partisan explanation, and reaches back into humanity’s first nature. Haidt is a professor of moral and social psychology at the University of West of West Virginia, who has written a compelling book, The Righteous Mind, which argues that politics is determined by evolutionary biology and what he terms ‘Moral Foundations Theory’. In a little over 300 pages of incisive prose, Haidt presents a theory that explains why politics is always personal. His research shows that our high-minded ideals are mere spontaneous gut-reactions, a primeval hangover from our less evolved forebears. He

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

What today’s Abu Hamza ruling means

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five terror suspects, including notorious Islamist cleric Abu Hamza, can be deported to the United States — a decision welcomed by both David Cameron and Theresa May. Last year, Hamza and three of the other men appealed to the ECtHR against extradition to the US on a whole host of grounds — including that they might face the death penalty and that their trials would be prejudiced. The Court found almost of all their grounds inadmissible, but allowed the appeal to proceed on two grounds: that they would be held in the ADX Florence ‘super-max’ prison and would face extremely long

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Cameron dines with Obama… and Clooney

The Camerons weren’t the Obamas’ only big-name guests at the State Dinner last night. They were joined by a host of stars including Warren Buffett, Richard Branson and George Clooney, who’s just returned from war-torn Sudan. In their speeches (above), the two leaders had very warm words for each other. Of Cameron, Obama said: ‘In good times and in bad, he’s just the kind of partner that you want at your side. I trust him. He says what he does and he does what he says.’ And the PM returned the compliments: ‘There are three things about Barack that really stand out for me: strength, moral authority and wisdom.’ Obama

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Afghanistan overshadows Cameron’s America trip

Afghanistan, what now? After a week of death and retaliation in the country, it appears that a car bomb has been detonated on the runway at Camp Bastion — probably aimed at the visiting US Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta. A spokesman has since said that ‘at no point was anyone on board Mr Panetta’s plane at risk,’ but it certainly highlights the dangers attached to his visit. What chance, now, that he will be successful in his goal of ‘easing tensions’? The incident cropped up very briefly in David Cameron and Barack Obama’s press conference just now. Asked for further information by Sky’s Joey Jones, the PM stressed that

Peter Hoskin

Cameron and Obama, sans yellow mustard

Above is what they call the ‘raw video’ of David Cameron’s and Barack Obama’s trip to a basketball game last night. It’s the unrefined version of what Downing St hopes will be refined, packaged and sent to your television screen at hyperspeed: images of the PM and the President dressed casually and chatting away as the game goes on. Like I said yesterday, it’s political theatre — designed to benefit both men. They were then both interviewed at halftime, which you can watch here. This was more about sports than about the political intricacies of the special relationship (Cameron: ‘It’s hard to follow,  sometimes, who’s done exactly what wrong’) —

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s sub-prime thinking

You’d think the American sub-prime crisis would have taught politicians the world over not to try to rig the housing market. But no, David Cameron is back on it today — about how to ‘unblock’ the system so the debt geyser starts to gush again. ‘The problem today is that you have lenders who aren’t lending, so builders can’t build and buyers can’t buy,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘It needs the government to step in, and help unblock the market.’ The idea that lenders may not lend because they feel the housing market may fall, and people may be unable to repay, is instantly dismissed. He speaks as if debt

Wednesday

Matt Cavanagh

Today’s NATO leak highlights the need for more realism over Afghanistan

Today’s leaked NATO report on ‘the state of the Taliban’ has generated the predictable responses: excessive attempts by the media to hype it up, and excessive attempts by NATO and the Pakistani government to play it down. What is its true significance? It’s a good scoop, but there is little or nothing in it which really counts as ‘news’ to anyone who has been following the debate. The report is the latest in a series going back several years (I remember reading earlier versions during my time in government), which summarises thousands of interviews with captured insurgents and others, in an attempt to build up a picture of the state

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Godfather of rap

At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives in the vocal inflections of rap. To its detractors, rap presents black (increasingly, white) people to the world in terms the Ku Klux Klan might use: illiterate, gold-chain-wearing, sullen, combative buffoons. (‘Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money’, harangued the Los Angeles combo N.W.A. in a reversal of Martin Luther King’s ‘black improvement’.) Yet Bob Dylan had offered an early version of rap

Jonathan Mirsky

Fall from grace

Barack Obama is not up to the job. That is Ron Suskind’s oft-repeated contention. The President, he states, compromised with, rather than curbed, failing American financial institutions, and has surrounded himself with warring staffers who are either no more competent than he is or, if expert, disregard his wishes. Following a picture caption that reads ‘Obama showed real weakness in managing his own White House,’ Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winner, justifies his title: The confidence of the nation rests on trust.Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions: justly enforced laws, sound investments, solidly built structures . . . . Gaining the trust without earning it is the age-old work

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Would Iran block the Strait of Hormuz?

With the EU agreeing a new round of sanctions on Iran – outlawing European oil and gas purchases from Iran in six months, freezing Iran’s Central Bank and banning trade in gold and other precious metals with any state-related bodies – tensions between Iran and the West are increasing. An Iranian MP has – again – warned that Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz and the US administration has – again – said that such an action will be countered. But what would happen if Iran carried out its threat? Iran has noteworthy littoral warfare capabilities, including mines, anti-ship cruise missiles, and land-based air defence. If Iran uses these

Monday

James Delingpole

The laughing lefty

What a shame the Christmas literary recommends season is over: otherwise I would have loved to draw this to your attention as quite the funniest book of the year. In The Reactionary Mind political author Corey Robin pretends to analyse the psychopathology which drives conservatives to think and act the way they do. I say “pretends” because obviously the whole thing is a sustained exercise in hilarious, spot-on pastiche of just how shrill, absurd and ludicrous the liberal-left can be when it tries too hard to be clever. Robin’s comedy spoof thesis goes like this: conservatives are power-crazed bullies who just love to oppress; they are a self-perpetuating elite who’ll