Recently added articles from The Spectator:
Taxing questions
Aug 30, 2008 ...Demoralised Labour backbenchers, watching helplessly as their government disintegrates and the prospect of electoral humiliation looms, have at last found a cause to which they can rally: higher taxes on the 'super-rich', both private and corporate. In the first of those categories, ...
DIARY
Aug 30, 2008; STANDING, SARAH ...Needs must and I've become extremely skilled at booking cheap, credit-crunching flights on easyJet. The volume of hours, energy, blood, sweat and tears I've devoted to acquiring dream e-tickets for my family ought to qualify me for some sort of tenacious travel operator award. This summer I've ...
With minor adjustments, Cameron can turn the Democrats' methods against Brown
Aug 30, 2008; NELSON, FRASER ...Denver, Colorado Just as high street stores send spies to the Paris fashion shows in order to copy all the latest designs, so British political parties send agents to American conventions in search of ideas and inspiration. Several Brits were skulking around the Democratic National ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Aug 30, 2008; Lightwater, Tamzin ...MONDAY I wish people would stop sending in complaints about the cost of hotels in Birmingham. I am not the English Tourist Board! But as we're on the subject, let's be clear -- the point of having conference there is not to save money, or have fun. It's so we can get out to parts of ...
Here's how McCain can beat Obama to the White House
Aug 30, 2008; Salam, Reihan ...Washington DC In January, I met a friend of mine to discuss his impending departure from Washington DC. He was moving to Chicago to join Senator Barack Obama's budding presidential campaign. At the time, it was hard not to have an instinctive sympathy for Obama, not least because the ...
BEIJING NOTEBOOK
Aug 30, 2008; JOHNSON, BORIS ...We only had a few seconds left to get ready. There were 91,000 people in the stadium and (allegedly) about 1.5 billion watching apathetically at home. I advanced to the little plastic sign on the red carpet saying 'Mayor of London', and as we waited to be called to the centre of the arena I ...
Our obsession with paedophilia is more dangerous than Gary Glitter's return
Aug 30, 2008; Liddle, Rod ...Hello, hello, he's back again. Although not necessarily -- as the words of his 1972 hit had it -- 'on the right track'. Nobody, these past few weeks, has accused Gary Glitter of being on the right track. The lady in my local post office wants him strung up by his gonads and, ...
GLOBAL WARNING
Aug 30, 2008; DALRYMPLE, THEODORE ...I think I should abandon the world: I am too easily irritated by it. I should follow the example of Xavier de Maistre, brother of the brilliantly reactionary philosopher, Joseph, and stick henceforth to my room. In his Voyage autour de ma chambre, de Maistre tells us that by describing his ...
Confessions of a travelling non-dom
Aug 30, 2008; Pali, O'ar ...Perhaps it goes with the territory: if you have decided to live your life between two countries you must accept the consequences. And no, I am not talking about Darling's taxation treat. I am referring to what most non-doms endure on a monthly if not weekly basis. While the average UK ...
Reading on the web is not really reading
Aug 30, 2008; Jacoby, Susan ...One of Senator Barack Obama's persistent themes, since the drawn-out US presidential campaign began in the snows of 2007, has been the need for parents to turn off the television, put away video games, and spend more time reading to and talking with their children. Although no candidate would ...
Notes towards an explanation of why straight men like watching lesbians
Aug 30, 2008; PARRIS, MATTHEW ...For five years I served on the Broadcasting Standards Council, and there I encountered a riddle whose resolution has eluded me. The BSC has passed into history. Its function was really just to exist, and by existing to provide politicians and broadcasters with a plausible ...
Artistic diversity
Aug 30, 2008; Lambirth, Andrew ...Love National Gallery, until 5 October It's that time of the year -- some call it the Silly Season -- when a themed exhibition visits the Sunley Rooms of the National Gallery, after previously showing at Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery, and the Laing Art Gallery, ...
The credit crunch reaches the home of the rotten apple and the 'Rolex' watch
Aug 30, 2008; WILSON, ELLIOT ...James Gregory Pool III is an elderly, stooping Canadian with a most unusual job. Every month he boards a plane from Canada with 200 sedated heifers and flies with them to Almaty to beef up and variegate Kazakhstan's breeding livestock. He's the archetypal eccentric foreign entrepreneur one ...
The peculiarities of a realist
Aug 30, 2008; Hensher, Philip ...FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS: WYOMING STORIES by Annie Proulx Fourth Estate, £14.99, pp. 240 ISBN 9780007269730 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The realism of Annie Proulx's fiction is an extraordinary phenomenon. Realism in a novel has never been the same thing as plausibility, ...
Will he, won't He?
Aug 30, 2008; Waugh, Alexander ...ARARAT by Frank Westerman, translated by Sam Garrett Harvill Secker, £16.99, pp. 229 ISBN 97881846550898 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Who was Noah? The Bible tells us little. He was the flood hero of course, but what else? A drunken viniculturist who lived to the ...
On a wing and a prayer
Aug 30, 2008; Rodgers, Byron ...THE BALLOON FACTORY by Alexander Frater Picador, £16.99, pp. 243, ISBN 9780330433105 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a curiously enjoyable book. Its structure is very odd for it is basically two books bolted together across 100 years: the first is the high drama of ...
Worldly and otherworldly
Aug 30, 2008; Buchan, James ...STORIES by John Buchan, selected and introduced by Giles Foden The Folio Society, £22.50, pp. 384, www. foliosociety. com, Tel: 0207 400 4222 In 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel', John Betjeman has Wilde whimper to Robert Ross: 'So you've brought me the latest Yellow ...
A new angle on autism
Aug 30, 2008; Moore, Charlotte ...UNSTRANGE MINDS by Roy Richard Grinker Icon Books, £14.99, pp. 461, ISBN 9781840468939 £11.99(plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When Roy Richard Grinker's daughter Isabel was diagnosed with autism in 1994, the condition was considered rare. It was thought to affect three in ...
Like father like son
Aug 30, 2008; Holland, Tom ...PHILIP II OF MACEDONIA by Ian Worthington Yale University Press, £25, pp. 336 ISBN 9780300120790 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Alexander the Great, it goes without saying, was a man not much given to modesty. In 334 BC, as he was preparing to embark on his invasion of Asia, ...
Who is selling what to whom?
Aug 30, 2008; Cartwright, Justin ...POWERS OF PERSUASION: THE STORY OF BRITISH ADVERTISING by Winston Fletcher OUP, £16.99, pp. 304 ISBN 9780199228010 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, selfserving, ...