The three members of Pussy Riot have been sentenced to two years each in prison today for hooliganism after performing a ‘punk prayer’ protesting against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral. The sentencing has been denounced as disproportionate and the charges as trumped up, but in last week’s issue of the Spectator, Dennis Sewell asked
Given it’s V.S. Naipaul’s birthday today, we’ve dug out from the archives a 1979 Spectator review by Richard West of A Bend In The River. Don’t forget that the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, named after his younger brother, is currently open for entries. One of the dark places The protagonist and narrator of this book is a
Philip Davies is the Conservative MP for Shipley and the present holder of the Readers’ Representative at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. He is the latest MP to answer our Bookbencher questionnaire. He is known by some as the ‘darling of the right’, but perhaps he should now be nicknamed ‘The Gruffalo’. 1)
It is a paradox that the nation most committed to free enterprise — the United States — can be one of the most aggressively protectionist countries on earth. The accusations made this week by the New York State Department of Financial Services against Standard Chartered Bank are serious and deserve investigation, as were those made
Home The Olympic Games dominated national life. Eight of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s first 22 gold medals (outdoing its 19 golds in Beijing in 2008) were in cycling. Sir Chris Hoy brought the total of gold medals in his Olympic career to six, outdoing Sir Steve Redgrave’s record. Bradley Wiggins added an Olympic gold
Beware the drones Sir: Well said, Daniel Suarez (‘Drone warfare is coming,’4 August). These flying killing machines we call drones are a menace to humanity. We had better wake up to the threat they pose before it’s too late. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of pop culture can tell you what happens when automatons develop
Family fortunes Louise Mensch became the latest MP to resign in order to spend more time with her family. The phrase has become something of a euphemism over the years to refer to somebody who has made a suspicious exit, not least because the original politician to resign for that stated reason — Norman Fowler
Nell Freudenberger is one of the brightest young novelists in America, and she takes the Shelf Life hot seat this week. She suggests that Michael Gove should introduce English Literature GSCE students to international authors, and confides that she needs to read the self-help book she would like to write. Her latest novel, The Newlyweds, is
An outsider viewing the Olympic opening ceremony could easily have gained the impression that Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A week on Sunday we are promised an equally spectacular closing ceremony. For the moment, the cost of staging the Olympics — £9.3 billion for the games, including £80 million for the opening
Home After an opening ceremony going on into the early hours, directed by Danny Boyle and watched at one point by 26.9 million viewers in Britain, the Olympic Games in the Lea valley settled down to its sporting business, with only marginal complaints about empty seats, food queues, over-protective branding and the loss of the
Midwife crisis Sir: All Leah McLaren has to do is wait and see if she still wants a hospital birth after antenatal care from her home-birth midwife (‘Bullied by the NHS’, 28 July). Our helpline is deluged with calls from women who, having experienced a first birth in hospital, have booked a home birth for
The ninth of August will mark the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the credit crunch: the day in 2007 that the banks found themselves frozen out of the debt markets, leading to the Northern Rock collapse and on to the more general banking crisis of 2008. By this stage of the Great Depression, western
Home The nation was divided between those who moaned about the Olympic Games and those who didn’t. Some immigration staff decided to hold a strike, then called it off an hour before the government was due to go to court to seek an injunction against it. Another 1,200 troops joined the 3,500 deployed to cover
Divisive he stands Sir: Finally, a western European publication questions whether Barack Obama can be re-elected (‘No he can’t’, 21 July). Before Jacob Heilbrunn’s article I have seen nothing save lame re-writings of pieces from the New York and Washington media, which is still in thrall to Obama. Heilbrunn’s analysis is compelling: the President’s campaign
Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright is on this week’s Shelf Life. She tells us which book qualifies as the first satisfying satire on the Irish boom, gives us a long list of the parties in literature she would like to have attended and reveals which is the only book by Norman
Over at the Books Blog, the Labour MP and shadow health minister Jamie Reed has answered our questions about his summer reading. He is taking Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir on his travels. It’s one of 4 non-fiction recommendations about US politics, supplemented by some Herman Melville, The Grapes of Wrath and a
This week, Jamie Reed, the Labour MP for Copeland and Cumbria and shadow health minister, is in the hot seat. He is big on books about American politics, and reads poetry occasionally. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? Most books now on my iPad… but Fear & Loathing on the
Scambusters is the name of a government initiative to prevent householders falling victim to rogue traders who use high-pressure sales techniques to flog lousy and vastly overpriced goods and services. It would be more convincing if the government did not so frequently allow itself to be ripped off. At his appearance before the home affairs
Home The Armed Forces were called upon to supply 3,500 men to look after security for the Olympic Games after GS4, a security company, failed to recruit enough staff. Nick Buckles, its chief executive, agreed before a Commons committee that it had been a ‘humiliating shambles’ but said that the company would keep its £57
Beyond a boundary Sir: This is the first time that I have been really annoyed by an article in your magazine. Your leader ‘The Tories are back’ (14 July) concludes by stating that the redrawing of constituency boundaries is a piece of blatant gerrymandering. But the present boundaries are grossly unfair to the Conservatives. When