The Spectator

Thursday

17 Oct 2013

Foxes 3

‘The foxes round here are so urban that they go to the country at weekends.’

A fat lot of good Sir: Max Pemberton is right that obesity is a terrible problem in western society (‘The battle of the bulge’, 12 October). But it is not helped by doctors. He seems to think that eating fat makes you fat: ‘While people back then were slimmer, they ate fattier foods.’ He then

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Should ‘Union Jack’ just be used at sea?

Union dispute Pedants suffered a blow as the chief vexillologist of the Flag Institute declared that the Union Jack and Union Flag are interchangeable terms, the latter being just as correct on land as it is at sea. Here are both sides of the argument: evidence for ‘union jack’ being correct only at sea —

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Global race? Lack of air routes means we’re already on the slow boat to China

Trade missions are almost comically pointless nowadays, as George Osborne’s visit demonstrated this week in Beijing. He is right that there are serious problems in our trade relations with China — an emerging economic superpower that buys more from Switzerland than it does from Britain. In fact, we export depressingly little to any major emerging

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The week: Property price record; Lampedusa drownings; ‘basically’ banned

Home Shares in Royal Mail, floated on the stock market at 330p, began trading at 475p. SSE, the energy supplier, raised prices by 8.2 per cent, and other suppliers were expected to follow suit. Ofwat, the water regulator, said it would block Thames Water’s request to increase bills by up to 8 per cent next