Dinosaur
‘Oh come on, guys. I’m a dinosaur! Kids love dinosaurs.’
The Spectator
Thursday
Angels 2
‘I’m expecting a cherub.’
Job 2
‘Any-of-the-major-credit-cards-a-job week...’
Windy
Valkyrie
‘This must be the Ring road.’
Axed
‘Wait a minute – what about my severance package?’
Tax 3
Haircut
‘I don’t want a haircut — I just dropped in to talk about where I’m going this summer.’
Voodoo
‘We did comparative religion at school today, Mum.’
Gorilla
‘I guess they’re just trying to deal with the psychological torture of being in captivity.’
Letters | 20 June 2013
Being good without God Sir: It is a rash person who tangles with the Chief Rabbi, but his piece on ‘Atheism and barbarism’ (15 June) shocked me. After championing until his last paragraph the old lie that religious belief is a necessary foundation for morality, he suddenly says he doesn’t believe ‘that you have to
Barometer | 20 June 2013
Painting the town The tarting-up of Northern Irish villages on the route between Belfast International airport and Lough Erne, the resort which hosted the G8 summit, has been likened to the ‘Potemkin villages’ employed by the Soviet Union in the 1920s to impress foreign visitors. But is the concept of a Potemkin village itself a
Portrait of the week | 20 June 2013
Home On the eve of the G8 summit, at a press conference with David Cameron, the Prime Minister, President Vladimir Putin of Russia bluntly opposed British proposals to aid the Syrian opposition: ‘People who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their entrails in public before the cameras. Are these the
Lesson of Afghanistan? That you can, after all, bomb your way to the negotiating table
It’s not just soldiers who risk their lives in Afghanistan. Anyone who enters the country’s judicial service becomes an assassination target. Only last week, six Afghan judges were killed by a suicide bomb outside Kabul’s Supreme Court. A Taleban spokesman said they had been ‘sentenced to death’ for playing an ‘important role’ in ‘legalising the
Friday
The week in books
This week’s magazine is full to the brim with cracking book reviews. Here is a selection of quotes to whet your appetite. Sam Leith on Modernity Britain, David Kynaston’s rampaging account of the birth of the consumer age during Harold Macmillan’s premiership: ‘The jacket quotes a passage from late in the book that is an
