The Spectator back issues from January 2007:
A cautious welcome
Jan 05, 2007 ...The news bulletins over the Christmas holiday were dominated by the vengeful execution of the deposed leader of a ruinous country. The leader, of course, was Nicolae Ceaucescu, the country Romania and the year 1989. That Romania, together with Bulgaria, has just made the then unthinkable step ...
DIARY
Jan 05, 2007; ...I was ready for the depression but it still doesn't stop it hitting. Doing the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures was such an exhilarating, exhausting six-month roller-coaster ride. The climax was a two-week adrenaline-charged loop-the-loop staging what felt like five wild maths pantos. Then ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Jan 05, 2007; ...MONDAY Happy New Year and May The Force Be With You in 2007! I think it's fair to say that Dave's brilliant message sent shivers down all our spines, mine included, even though I was in the office last week when Jed was writing it. V powerful stuff. If any of us were in any doubt of the ...
We already know what the political event of 2007 will be, so let's move on
Jan 05, 2007; ...It is clear from the Prime Minister's new year message (issued somewhat surreally from the Florida home of the Bee Gee Robin Gibb) that he has already entered elder statesman mode. His theme was that Mr Brown must continue along the path which Mr Blair claims to have set: '[Labour] is ...
Israel will do whatever it takes to stop another holocaust
Jan 05, 2007; ...Within the next 12 months, the Americans or the Israelis, possibly both, are likely to launch military strikes aimed at crippling Iran's nuclear ambitions. Those strikes may come sooner rather than later. And they will probably be nuclear. Israeli military analysts say intervention is ...
Ken's mega-mosque will encourage extremism
Jan 05, 2007; ...In 2007 Britain will almost certainly be the chief testing ground of the attempt by radical Muslims to gain more power and influence in Western society. The United States, too, is threatened by militant Islam -- not least by the prospect of terrorist attacks on its own territory -- but ...
Memo to Brown: people must be allowed to fail
Jan 05, 2007; ...He tried targets, and they didn't work. He tried stuffing the doctors' mouths with gold, to borrow from Nye Bevan, and that didn't work. So he tried targets-plus-gold-plus-exhortation, and even that combination didn't produce results anywhere near proportionate to what he had hoped for ...
These people may be bloodthirsty, but at least they understand democracy
Jan 05, 2007; ...Do you remember the Conservative MP Teresa Gorman? An image of this terrifying woman swam up in front of me over the festive season, when I'd had a bit too much drink and was distractedly watching the television news. At least I assume she was a figment of my saturated imagination, rather than ...
Why didn't our government speak out against the execution of Saddam?
Jan 05, 2007; ...Small lapses of taste or principle can be so revealing. Why did it take two days, and why was it left to John Prescott, speaking in what sounded like his personal capacity, for anyone senior in Cabinet to indicate that at least somebody in the British government did not greatly care for the ...
Blair, brave?
Jan 05, 2007 ...From Correlli Barnett Sir: I wish there were something I could do to help poor deluded William Shawcross ('The West must be the strong horse', 30 December). He seems to be just about the only man in England other than our deranged Prime Minister and his ministerial stooges still to ...
Unfair on More
Jan 05, 2007 ...From Julian Brazier MP Sir: Rod Liddle's article on William Tyndale ('We are what the English Bible has made us', 16/23 December) is as unfair to Thomas More as it is unbalanced in praising Tyndale. More did indeed bitterly oppose Tyndale and his tyrannical doctrine: 'The king is in ...
British bad service
Jan 05, 2007 ...From Laurence Hughes Sir: I concur with Rian Malan in his article 'British banks make me glad to be South African' (16/23 December). Banks here are no longer user-friendly unless you take the trouble to go into your branch, and there are other aspects of the quality of life in the UK which have ...
George and the Romanovs
Jan 05, 2007 ...From C.D.C. Armstrong Sir: Simon Hoggart in his review of the Channel 4 documentary Three Kings at War (Arts, 16/23 December) writes that George V reneged on a promise to provide political asylum to Nicholas II, 'fearing the Romanovs would foment Bolshevism here'. What the documentary did not ...
Snouts still in the trough - and now bosses want 20 per cent of every profit
Jan 05, 2007; ...I like to think I helped start the national debate about fairness and executive pay with an article here in May 1993 headlined 'Snouts in the Trough', illustrated by Garland with pin-striped porkers helping themselves to huge portions of gravy. Since then, bosses' pay packets have ballooned -- ...
More often right than wrong
Jan 05, 2007; ...ORWELL IN TRIBUNE edited by Paul Anderson Politico's, £19.99, pp. 401, ISBN 1842751557 . £15.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 After leaving the Burmese police, George Orwell held few regular jobs in his too short life. He wanted to serve in uniform when his country went to war; ...
A man of many parts
Jan 05, 2007; ...JOHN EVELYN : LIVING FOR INGENUITY by Gillian Darley Yale, £25, pp. 382, ISBN 0300112270 . £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Until the publication of his Diaries in 1818, John Evelyn (1620-1706) was best known as a brilliant plantsman who pioneered Italianate garden design in ...
Mr Facingbothways
Jan 05, 2007; ...THE BISEXUALITY OF DANIEL DEFOE by Leo Abse Karnac Books, £19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1855754568 The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middleaged hands were no longer apt for writing about the erotic Catullus. In his 90th year, Leo Abse ...
Magic in the Gulf of Finland
Jan 05, 2007; ...A WINTER BOOK : SELECTED STORIES by Tove Jansson Sort of Books, £6.99, pp. 192, ISBN 0954899520 . £5.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Tove Jansson's The Summer Book had been published before in this country, but when, two years ago, the enterprising Sort of Books reissued it for ...
The mysterious sign of three
Jan 05, 2007; ...WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HANDS by Fred Vargas, translated by Siân Reynolds Harvill Secker, £11.99, pp. 388, ISBN 1843432730 . £9.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is the fourth of Fred Vargas's crime thrillers to be published in English -- the third, The Three ...
Pooter crossed with Wooster
Jan 05, 2007; ...THE ADVENTURES OF MR THAKE by J. B. Morton Old Street Publishing, £9.99, pp. 194, ISBN 1905847033 . £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 J. B. Morton, a bluff Old Harrovian survivor of the Somme, succeeded his fellow Bellocian Roman Catholic convert D. B. Wyndham Lewis ('the wrong ...
No ladies' man
Jan 05, 2007; ...'Walter Scott is unjust towards love; there is no force or colour in his account of it, no energy. One can see that he has studied it in books and not in his own heart.' That was Stendhal's opinion, and many even of Scott's most devoted readers would not dissent from it. Dialogues between his ...
The discoverer of death
Jan 05, 2007; ...Some time after 10 p. m. on 28 November 1966 Truman Capote sashayed into the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York to place himself at the epicentre of New York society. All that autumn New York had speculated about the possible guest list for Capote's Black and White ball ....
Highs and lows
Jan 05, 2007; ...In a wise editorial in the January number of Opera magazine, John Allison urges opera-lovers to remember that 'opera is only part of a much bigger musical literature. As a regular concert-goer, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that concerts are often more satisfying.' I would substitute ...
Edwardian sensibilities
Jan 05, 2007; ...Miss Potter PG, nationwide Oh no, not a Beatrix Potter biopic. How will I ever get through it? I don't like nature. I don't like the country (what are you meant to do in it? ). And I've never been particularly interested in Miss Potter's books, although I do perk up a little bit when, at the ...
In tune with Dylan
Jan 05, 2007; ...Bob Dylan on Radio Two? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. His Bobness, the hippie troubadour and Voice of Sixties America on the Light Programme, the station for Hooverers and flu-sufferers? But Radio Two has been transforming itself in the past few years, sneaking in Jamie Cullum and Suzi Quatro ...
Comedy crunch
Jan 05, 2007; ...The most popular programme on Christmas Day, with nearly 12 million viewers, was The Vicar of Dibley (BBC1), which returned for its positively final episode on New Year's Day. VoD isn't just cosy; it is all-envelopingly snug. It resembles those zip-up duvets advertised in the back of magazines, ...
Perseverance pays
Jan 05, 2007; ...It was 7.30 on Christmas Eve, a time when all sensible people are filling children's stockings or starting on the single malt. I was instead armpit-deep with an Italian friend in a cottage-sized rubbish skip in the shadow of Battersea Power Station, feverishly flinging aside the recycled ...
Lethal combination
Jan 05, 2007; ...Gstaad Penned in by the surrounding Alps, huddled around the Saanen valley and scrambling up the mountains for extra space, Gstaad bursts at the seams during the New Year celebrations. For the first time in its 100-year history, the Palace hotel sold tickets to its premises, and they ...
In the high silence
Jan 05, 2007; ...To escape the foul weather and the inevitable family bust-ups over the Christmas period, I holed up in a tiny rented cottage in the Sierra Nevada in Spain until it was all over. The house was halfway up a mountain. Melting snow lay on the ground and each day the sky was a clear, intense blue ....
Picking up
Jan 05, 2007; ...The epidemic which struck the village last week is nothing like as severe as the contagion that made Eyam -- just four miles away -- famous in 1665. But it has caused great distress to a proud people. At Eyam, the plague -- exported, like so many undesirable intrusions into country ...
Tricked into trekking
Jan 05, 2007; ...In the dark days after Christmas, what could be nicer than a friend calling to ask if I'd come to Morocco for a long weekend with luxury spa, sunshine, Atlas Mountains and no jetlag? I said yes immediately. Then it became clear that this was a trekking trip, organised by a company who do the ...
HOTELS OF THE WEEK
Jan 05, 2007 ...RIAD EL ARSAT 10 Derb Chemaa, Arset Loughzail, Marrakech, Morocco Tel: 212 24 387567 www. kasbah-tabelkoukt. info HIVERNAGE ...
Anniversary year
Jan 05, 2007; ...If you thought you'd got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket's World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby's in France in September and ...
It's the incompetence, stupid
Jan 13, 2007 ...If a week is a long time in politics, then 13 years is a positive eternity. In 1994 it emerged that the new Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, had sent his eldest child, Euan, to the London Oratory School -- a school that had opted out of town hall control under a Conservative policy ...
DIARY
Jan 13, 2007; ...The new year is little more than a week old and while everybody else is no doubt still righteously munching lettuce leaves, joining gyms and going teetotal, I've already broken Personal Resolution Number One: to reduce my carbon footprint. Barely off a Ryanair flight from Provence (where we'd ...
Bush's fate is now entirely dependent on Iraq
Jan 13, 2007; ...Washington On 5 January the newly installed Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, sent a letter to President Bush. 'News reports suggest, ' the two Democrats wrote, 'that you believe the solution to the civil war in Iraq is to require ...
Fancy a new career for 2007? Computer says no
Jan 13, 2007; ...It has become a cliché of modern political rhetoric and social commentary to declare that the typical 21st-century worker will have not one but several careers. Those in the job market are warned that they will have to be ever more versatile and nimble and be prepared, in the government's ...
Israel's 'spin'
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Alex Bigham Sir: Douglas Davis has clearly been spun a good line by some Israeli military analysts if he thinks the Israeli threat to use nuclear bombs against Iran is more than that -- a ruse to scare Iran into returning to the diplomatic table ('Israel will do whatever it takes', 6 ...
Hope for Iraq
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Dr Duncan Anderson Sir: Correlli Barnett (Letters, 6 January) declares William Shawcross deluded and the Prime Minister deranged. They are, apparently, the only people left in Britain who believe the Iraq intervention to be anything other than a disaster. Not quite. I served in Iraq in ...
Brown will find that there's more to foreign policy than disowning Blair
Jan 13, 2007; ...From the moment that the snatched camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein's execution emerged, it was hideously clear that the sentence had been carried out in a deplorable manner. The Americans immediately briefed that their calls for a delay had been ignored by the Iraqis. On 4 January George ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Jan 13, 2007; ...Obviously Ruth Kelly is a 'hypocrite', but the hypocrites in her party are more admirable than the consistent ones. At least the former show some human feeling. There must be Labour ministers who know that their children would be better off in a private school, can afford to send them there, ...
How Cameron has made the Tories the only party ready for an election
Jan 13, 2007; ...The Byron Consort Choir of Harrow School is exacting in its choice of audience. It has sung for popes and for royalty -- and the setting for its performance at Blenheim Palace one night last month was grand enough for either. Trumpeters manned the gates and candles led the way to the Long ...
The law can't force me to love other people, and it shouldn't try
Jan 13, 2007; ...I have often thought about opening a bed and breakfast establishment, but am discouraged from doing so by two important considerations. First, I live in a place which no sane person would wish to visit voluntarily. And second, I dislike so many different communities of people and am so ...
In praise of the green-eyed monster
Jan 13, 2007; ...Like all right-thinking people, I was initially rather dismayed to read about Bafta's decision to drop the current affairs category from its annual television awards. From now on, it seems, current affairs programmes will have to compete against the likes of Jamie Oliver and Michael Palin in ...
No Olympic mosque
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Martyn Hurst Sir: I enjoyed Irfan al-Alawi and Stephen Schwartz's article on the proposed new mosque for London ('Ken's mega-mosque will encourage extremism', 6 January). After Britain has happily been a Christian-based society for a thousand years, I am appalled that in less than ...
Slavery figures
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Ted Nevill Sir: An interesting piece on the modern slave trade by Fraser Nelson (Politics, 30 December) was spoilt by uncritical use of police statistics. The police claim that four in five prostitutes come from overseas, but when they raid 300 brothels in Kent they find two dozen women ...
Care for the dying
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Dr Andrew Lawson Sir: Charles Moore seeks to perpetuate the myth of a 'death threat' for seriously ill patients when going into hospital, alluding to the supposed widespread practice of withholding fluids from sick patients (The Spectator's Notes, 30 December). As a doctor and a (lapsed) ...
The pots of the palace
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Paulo Lowndes Marques Sir: I was amused to see in Bevis Hillier's review of a book on euphemisms that chamber pots used to be described as 'articles' by journalists (Books, 16/23 December). It reminded me of the Churchill story where the great man was ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Jan 13, 2007; ...MONDAY Who would have thought thrift could be so much fun! Am having a ball teaching working people to be careful with their money as part of our 'Live Life For Less' campaign. Obviously we can't actually cut the cost of living or mess about with interest rates and inflation (we're not going ...
Ancient & modern
Jan 13, 2007; ...The country 'needs' more scientists, but no one yet seems able to crack the problem. Ancient attitudes may suggest a way ahead. The earliest Greek 'scientists', c. 600 BC , speculated about how the world was made. They assumed there was a basic stuff (or stuffs) from which everything ...
Confessions of an Oscar voter
Jan 13, 2007; ...On 16 May 1929 a modest ceremony took place in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. As the age of talkies began, a number of the great and good gathered to partake of squab, lobster, terrapin, salad and fruit suprème before handing out the first Oscars. Unlike ...
More on More
Jan 13, 2007 ...From Sir Rowland Whitehead Bt Sir: Julian Brazier puts the case for Thomas More (Letters, 6 January). May I respond? In the clash between two passionate men, More poured seething, and at times almost scatological, venom on Tyndale; the latter replied always in measured and reasonable ...
Why we need no-frills, low-cost private schools
Jan 13, 2007; ...If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here's a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one ...
The real 3G phone boom: it's about girls, girls, girls
Jan 13, 2007; ...Suppose you have 15 minutes to while away waiting for the train. Why not pull out your mobile phone, punch in your pin number and download a Playboy movie for as little as £5? Not interested? Of course you're not; you're a Spectator reader, for heaven's sake. But there are plenty of ...
The New Year hangover of debt
Jan 13, 2007; ...Last week, Britons staggered into 2007 more hungover and overdrawn than ever before. According to separate research by Mintel and Creditaction, the average consumer downed 137 units of alcohol between Christmas and New Year -- nearly four times his, or six times her, recommended intake -- while ...
Open for business again - thanks to mom-and-pop stores and voluntourists
Jan 13, 2007; ...New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and ...
That damned, elusive Prussian
Jan 13, 2007; ...TIP AND RUN : THE UNTOLD TRAGEDY OF THE GREAT WAR IN AFRICA by Edward Paice Orion, £25, pp. 488, ISBN 9780297847090 . £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 'Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?' was the indignant outcry of Captain Berndt, as he rowed alongside the Guendolen ....
Not what Europe wants to hear
Jan 13, 2007; ...AMERICA ALONE by Mark Steyn Regnery Publishing, £15.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0895260786 . £12.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Between the revolution and the firing squad, a Russian aristocrat once observed, there is always time for a bottle of champagne. Between the demographic ...
To flee or not to flee
Jan 13, 2007; ...TIME TO EMIGRATE ? by George Walden Gibson Square Books, £8.99, pp. 233, ISBN 1903933935 . £7.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 'Why is no one talking about what is happening in our country?' demands the splash across the front cover of the latest book by George Walden. It is ...
Slums in the sky?
Jan 13, 2007; ...ESTATES : AN INTIMATE HISTORY by Lynsey Hanley Granta, £12, pp. 244, ISBN 1862079099 . £10 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Just after dawn on 16 May 1968, on the 18th floor of a block of pre-cast, system-built flats in Cleaver Road, Canning Town, Mrs Ivy Hodge, a 56-year-old cake ...
How at last we got it together
Jan 13, 2007; ...THE NATION'S MANTELPIECE : A HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY by Jonathan Conlin Pallas Athene, 42 Spencer Rise, London NW5 1AP, Tel: 0207 692 9984, £24.99, pp. 555, ISBN 1843680181 . £19.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Stand in the Corinthian portico of the National Gallery's ...
The other side of silence
Jan 13, 2007; ...CAGE TALK by Peter Dickinson University of Rochester Press, £25, pp. 296, ISBN 9781580462372 Asked by a journalist whether he went to the opera, John Cage replied, 'No, I listen to the traffic.' The remark, often quoted, was less sententious than this abbreviated form would imply ....
Luminous serenity
Jan 13, 2007; ...Shanti Panchal: In the Mind's Eye Chelmsford Museum, Oaklands Park, Moulsham Street, Chelmsford, until 18 February Born in Gujarat, western India, in 1951, Shanti Panchal studied art in Bombay before coming to London on a British Council scholarship in 1978. He has made his home in ...
Sing the unsingable
Jan 13, 2007; ...Everybody needs a new catchphrase from time to time, even Sir Cliff Richard. 'I think I'm the most radical pop star around, ' he now tells most interviewers (or words to that effect), clearly reasoning that his evangelical Christianity, celibacy and unfeasibly black hair set him apart from ...
Space invaders
Jan 13, 2007; ...A visit to the Holbein exhibition at Tate Britain last week taught me something new: interest in serious culture has reached epidemic proportions. I don't think I've stood in the same room with the same density of people around me since I last queued for a Ryanair flight at Stansted (which, ...