The Spectator back issues from August 2007:
Brown's Darfur triumph is also his test
Aug 04, 2007 ...Those who have exchanged fierce views on the invasion of Iraq have a fresh challenge this week: how to react to the UN resolution, tabled by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy with support from George W. Bush, to send 19,000 peacekeeping troops to the Darfur region of western Sudan. This is one ...
DIARY
Aug 04, 2007; ...I'm in Canada, three hours north of Toronto, up in the great wilderness. Well, wilderness with lattes if I'm being totally honest. I'm on Lake Joe, one of the three Muskoka lakes that are a little bit to Toronto as are the Hamptons to Manhattan. I'm 'cottaging', which always sounds a ...
Reasons for Mr Cameron to be cheerful as the summer holidays begin
Aug 04, 2007; ...Gordon Brown will not holiday abroad this summer. Not for him the allure of a Tuscan palace or the sunbeds of Sharm el-Sheikh. The Prime Minister has instead created perfect happiness inside his home in Fife: a room wired up to the 10 Downing Street computer system where he can monitor the ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Aug 04, 2007; ...Enoch Powell once said to me, 'I love the humbug of the English. I worship it. But I reserve the right from time to time to point it out.' I thought of this last week when I took part in Radio 4's Any Questions? , set up in the nave of Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire. The programme always has a ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Aug 04, 2007; ...MONDAY I can't take much more of this. Even Daddy says I need a holiday and our family motto is 'Don't Make a Fuss' (it sounds better in Latin). It's just unbearable, non-stop horridness. Every time we think we've got on top of it another Dipwig (Deeply Irrelevant Person With ...
On the road with Gordon in the search for hearts and minds
Aug 04, 2007; ...It was a gamble, more than Gordon Brown's aides had cared to admit. Every last detail of the new Prime Minister's press conference at Camp David had been planned, from the tone of the Prime Minister's voice to the colour of his tie. The President's team had taken issue with a few ...
A major defeat in the war to defend the free world
Aug 04, 2007; ...Shortly after the release of Alan Johnston from Gaza the website of Conflicts Forum, a group advocating engagement with Islamists and which is run by the former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke, posted a fascinating transcript. Under the title 'Hamas briefing', it was a conversation between Michael ...
Ancient & modern
Aug 04, 2007; ...Apparently Gordon is planning another tax raid on savings, this time lifeinsurance companies which have 'too much' money in reserve against rainy days. After his last pension raid, this will not be a popular move. The Romans can help him solve the problem. Roman finances under the ...
Why Europe may soon split along religious lines
Aug 04, 2007; ...I wouldn't care to estimate how many words have been written so far on the draft EU reform treaty. If and when it becomes a legal document, the English language will have been near exhausted for new terms to express the fundamental theme of almost every comment -- that it is the old ...
Wired, retired and so hip it hurts
Aug 04, 2007; ...Almost 200 years ago a grassroots movement began in Nottinghamshire close to Sherwood Forest -- the Luddite movement. The Luddites wreaked havoc for a short but intense period of time in a vain attempt to hold back the tides of technological change. I've been thinking a lot about their ...
I don't mean to sneer, but which is more important: equality or inclusion?
Aug 04, 2007; ...Like a good many of you, I imagine, I was worried that hosting the 2012 Olympic Games in London might send out the wrong sort of message, especially to our young people. The games have traditionally been an appallingly elitist and singularly competitive tournament of a somewhat exclusive ...
English lessons
Aug 04, 2007 ...Sir: Graham Lord ('Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?', 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do. The reason is that the incomers have ...
Made in America
Aug 04, 2007 ...Sir: I am concerned that our two new aircraft carriers are to be equipped with US-supplied aircraft and Chinook helicopters, while the future replacement for the Royal Navy's Trident submarine-borne ICBSs will also depend on US-supplied technology. Will not such dual dependence effectively bind ...
Mosque meeting
Aug 04, 2007 ...Sir: I was astonished to read the article by Tom Gallagher last week ('The SNP is playing a deadly game with Islam'), which is an illinformed and offensive rant against Scotland's Muslim community and government for pursuing an inclusive approach in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on ...
Munchausen's muddle
Aug 04, 2007 ...Sir: Rod Liddle ('Wakefield is probably wrong about MMR', 21 July) admits to 'limited medical knowledge' and then proves it in an astonishing and disturbing way, for it seems he has completely misunderstood the nature of Munchausen's by Proxy. He has confused mothers who murder with mothers ...
Not the only fruit
Aug 04, 2007 ...Sir: It's good to scoff at the EU, but can there be an end to the vexatious and piffling insistence that the tomato is a fruit (Letters, 28 July)? Botanically speaking it is, but so ...
The promise Boris must make if he is to become mayor of London
Aug 04, 2007; ...Boris Johnson could make a great Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty, and a great mayor of London. But he'll need to get the pitch right. I'm afraid the first thing he'll have to do is steer well clear of The Spectator. This splendid and in the best sense rather exclusive ...
Rare stamps in a class of their own
Aug 04, 2007; ...Stamps, it is said, are the most valuable commodity on earth by weight. An 1868 Benjamin Franklin stamp, for example -- a standard-sized stamp weighing a fraction of a fraction of a gram -- was bought recently for $2.97 million by an American investor. So the claim may well be ...
The disease and us
Aug 11, 2007 ...Given the boost in the opinion polls enjoyed by Gordon Brown following the recent floods, a cynic might wonder whether the outbreak of footand-mouth disease in Surrey has been staged in order to give the Prime Minister an excuse to break off his holiday in Dorset and earn brownie points by ...
DIARY
Aug 11, 2007; ...Xining, Qinghai province, China What is up with the once superb Blue Guide that it fails to so much as mention beautiful Qinghai province, up in China's northwest? Here a lively mix of minorities make up 46 per cent of the population. Tibetans and Muslim Hui are the most ...
Brown has handled the crises well, but let's not forget he is to blame for many of them
Aug 11, 2007; ...There has been something almost Biblical about the challenges which Gordon Brown has had to contend with since moving into 10 Downing Street. It started with the curiously unseasonal weather, which plunged London into darkness one July lunchtime. Then floods which submerged Middle England, and ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Aug 11, 2007; ...We are paying now for the lack of a single, comprehensive inquiry into the great foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. We were unprepared. Although foot-and-mouth information notices were first posted on 4 July, there was confusion when the Surrey outbreak was confirmed on Friday afternoon last ...
The West is running a protectionist racket against the developing world
Aug 11, 2007; ...On 27 September, President George W. Bush will finally come in from the cold over global warming. On that day he will host a conference in Washington to be attended by what he has defined as the world's 15 most polluting nations. He intends, for the first time, to commit the United States to ...
Why we are in Afghanistan for the long haul
Aug 11, 2007; ...The phrase 'think global, act local' originated in the environmental movement. It can be a glib substitute for serious attention to large problems. But it can also be a telling rejoinder to the temptations of top-down, big-government solutions. I believe it is relevant to our challenge ...
'Some say Bill Clinton's running for a third term'
Aug 11, 2007; ...When you enter the offices of the Great and the Good in Washington -- or even the Not so Great and Not so Good -- you always find an Ego Wall. Senator Trufflebacker's Ego Wall will have photographs of himself at Nasa with the astronauts, a signed photograph with President Ronald Reagan and ...
GLOBAL WARNING
Aug 11, 2007; ...You -- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I -- can't get away anywhere from crime and criminality. I was walking down a country lane in one of the most beautiful shires of England. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the lambs were gambolling in the fields, the trees ...
Now we know: Brown is a European, not an Atlanticist
Aug 11, 2007; ...There is little doubt, as Matthew d'Ancona and others have pointed out, that Gordon Brown is secure in the thought that he has established himself as what is called these days a 'change agent', cutting the ground out from Tory cries that 'It's time for a change.' If you want change, go for the ...
The irony and the ecstasy of Lady Mary Clive
Aug 11, 2007; ...Deep in a remote valley on the edge of the Black Mountains sits one of the last great witnesses of the 20th century. Lady Mary Clive, who turns 100 on 23 August, shook Kitchener's hand before the first world war, and heard firsthand accounts of the 1916 Dublin Easter Uprising hours ...
Shambo's revenge: this is what happens when you mess with the gods
Aug 11, 2007; ...Ittook some of our farmers less than 24 hours after the first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) last week to demand an immediate and comprehensive culling of Britain's ramblers, dogs, badgers, Defra vets, tourists, van drivers, biochemists, etc etc. It is not enough that we should ...
Why's Brown so slow?
Aug 11, 2007 ...Sir: In his interesting and positive account of Gordon Brown's visit to America, Matthew d'Ancona reveals that Brown's thinking on the causes of terrorism has 'shifted' since the recent so-called Islamist 'doctors' plot' to set off car bombs in the West End and at Glasgow airport. 'In ...
The Melanie maze
Aug 11, 2007 ...Sir: It's a pity Melanie Phillips didn't do the basic journalistic checks with us before going into print with her highly speculative article about Alan Johnston's kidnap ('A major defeat in the war to defend the free world', 4 August). Alan lived and worked as a reporter in Gaza for ...
Science and conscience
Aug 11, 2007 ...Sir: Stephen Pollard's commentary on the opt-out regarding certain medical scientific procedures seems to be an argument for an abandonment of all restrictions ('Why Europe may soon split along religious lines', 4 August). He apparently believes that restrictions hurt the less well-off who ...
Adoption policy
Aug 11, 2007 ...Sir: The difference between young early adopters and old ones is that young folks often adopt things (Facebook, for example, or iTunes) because it is currently fashionable whereas oldies like myself adopt things if and when they see a use for them ('Meet the wired retired', 4 August). For ...
Why Gordon Brown's British holiday plans cast a dark cloud over Westminster
Aug 11, 2007; ...If anybody actually welcomed the eventual death of British motor-car manufacturing last year, you can bet it was government ministers. For 30 years, theirs had been a lumpen unhappy world of Rovers and Vauxhalls, while every other executive in Britain threw patriotism to the wind and enjoyed ...
A healthy enthusiasm for danger
Aug 04, 2007; ...SUFFER AND SURVIVE : GAS ATTACKS, MINERS' CANARIES, SPACESUITS AND THE BENDS - THE EXTREME LIFE OF J.S. HALDANE by Martin Goodman Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp. 422, ISBN 9780743285971 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The picture on the dustwrapper of Suffer and Survive ...
The invisible woman
Aug 04, 2007; ...THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH : A WOMAN IN WORLD HISTORY by Linda Colley HarperPress, £25, pp. 363, ISBN 9780007192182 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Elizabeth Marsh was an undistinguished member of an unremarkable dynasty. She was neither famous nor infamous and had no ...
The school of hard knocks
Aug 04, 2007; ...LIFE CLASS by Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp. 248, ISBN 9780241142974 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography ...
Dark heart of the deep south
Aug 04, 2007; ...END GAMES by Michael Dibdin Faber, £12.99, pp. 335, ISBN 9780571236152 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned ...
Making the stones speak
Aug 04, 2007; ...FAREWELL BRITANIA : A FAMILY SAGA OF ROMAN BRITAIN by Simon Young Weidenfeld, £16.99, pp. 286, ISBN 9780297852261 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The current must-see exhibition at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London EC2 (The Missing Link? until 8 August) includes a ...
'Keep all on gooing'
Aug 04, 2007; ...Francis King's new novel was published a few weeks ago. Nothing, you may say, remarkable about that. He is among the most professional of authors; writing novels is what he does. Well, yes, of course, but it is certainly worth remarking that his first novel appeared in 1946. A career spanning ...
Littlestone Days
Aug 04, 2007; ...After the golf, the bridge and the cocktails, after the sets of tennis with Noël Coward and the Maughams looking on from the balcony, 'Ah, the dear boys!' after sherry and theatricals, the dinner-dances and the outings, after charades and canasta and evenings with the gramophone, you alone of ...
Brimming over with music
Aug 04, 2007; ...'Hello, Gavin. Have you got the sackbuts with you?' Administrative magician Rebecca Rickard is dealing with what is, for her, a fairly ordinary sort of phone call in the greater scheme of things. As it turns out, Gavin (Henderson) has indeed got no fewer than three sackbuts, and is planning to ...
Birth of the seaside
Aug 04, 2007; ...Impressionists by the sea Royal Academy until 30 September Sponsored by Farrow & Ball If we must have frequent Impressionist exhibitions, and it's clear from the public's insatiable appetite for them that we must, then at least let's have good ones. The current ...
Fount of all gardens
Aug 04, 2007; ...The Antique Garden from Babylon to Rome Lemon House, Boboli Garden, Florence, until 28 October According to an Hellenic historian, Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the 6th century BC to make his wife, who was from a mountainous region of Iran, feel at home. In ...
Boundless passion
Aug 04, 2007; ...L' Amore dei tre Re Opera Holland Park Macbeth Proms, Albert Hall Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre Re has had a puzzling history. It was first performed at La Scala in 1913 and was quite successful; far more successful under Toscanini at the New York Met, until ...
How to feel young again
Aug 04, 2007; ...The older I become, the easier I find it to sink into that old-gittish state of believing everything has got worse with the passage of time. In my childhood there was the hippie movement, when young people felt that peace and love and expanding your mind might be a nice idea, helped ...
Midnight's children
Aug 04, 2007; ...Yet another rash of programmes has erupted marking the anniversary of yet another of Britain's disastrous foreign policy decisions. At midnight on 14 August it will be 60 years since Nehru, as the prime minister of newly independent India, pronounced those fateful words, 'A moment comes, which ...
Misleading the public
Aug 04, 2007; ...I was fascinated to watch the low-key struggle the other day between BBC and ITV executives, and members of the Commons culture committee. The television people said they were appalled by the chicanery revealed in various programmes -- premium-rate phone-ins, the show about the Queen, for ...
Ascot shows its class
Aug 04, 2007; ...The late Jim Callaghan told a few of us one day about life in the House of Lords after being an MP in the Commons. 'In the Commons you wonder if you'll survive the next election. In the Lords you wonder if you'll live until Christmas.' On his first day in the Lords, the Whip detailed to show ...
Dog days of summer
Aug 04, 2007; ...On board S/Y Bushido Sailing away from St Tropez, I felt a bit like Lot; I asked the wife to take one last look, but Alexandra, alas, remained unsalty and very much in command. Portofino was the next stop, probably the most beautiful of tiny ports anywhere in the Med, green and very ...
Homicidal urges
Aug 04, 2007; ...During the wettest July since records began, I was completely dry. As usual, not drinking made me angry and withdrawn. As usual, I had homicidal urges and couldn't read. And, as usual, cleaning and polishing was the only way I could distract myself. I cleaned and polished the floors, ...
View from the high ground
Aug 04, 2007; ...It was, I think, Governor Winthrop, one of the founders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who said that politicians must think of themselves as a house on a hill. I have never been sure if he meant that they had the advantage of being 'looked up to' or the problem of being ...
Sick a-hoy!
Aug 04, 2007; ...Iam not a sailor, but a couple of years ago I was invited to help crew a racing yacht across the Atlantic. The voyage home took 27 days, and I spent 26 of them hanging off the back of the boat throwing up. 'I suggest you never set foot on a boat again, ' said the skipper. I ...
Snap shots
Aug 04, 2007; ...Always keen to buff up its romantic aura, Lord's this summer inaugurated a 'tradition' by nominating a different cricketing notable to toll the umpires' bell before each day's play. At last week's Test an old friend did the honours, fittingly because ace snapper Patrick Eagar was covering his ...
The case for privatising Manchester airport
Aug 11, 2007; ...It is 12 years since Tony Blair did battle with the socialist dinosaurs and forced them to abandon their commitment to nationalisation with his celebrated 'Clause 4 moment' -- the very birth of New Labour. Now that Blair has been and gone, you would struggle to find a serious politician in any ...
And so to plot
Aug 11, 2007; ...THE PLOT AGAINST PEPYS by James Long and Ben Long Faber, £17.99, pp. 322, ISBN 9780571227136 £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 There's a theory, no doubt implausible and based on selective evidence, that alone among the peoples of Europe the English are somehow immune from ...
Not forgetting the horses' indigestion
Aug 11, 2007; ...WORLD WAR ONE : A SHORT HISTORY by Norman Stone Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 157, ISBN 9781846140136 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The appearance of this volume is an important publishing event. It is the first book in ten years from one of the outstanding historians of our age ....
A gallery of pen portraits
Aug 11, 2007; ...CULTURAL AMNESIA : NOTES IN THE MARGIN OF MY TIME by Clive James Picador, £25, pp. 876, ISBN 9780330481748 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must crowd into ...
Trusty steeds and saucy varlets
Aug 11, 2007; ...CHALEMAGNE AND ROLAND by Allan Massie Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 232, ISBN 9780297850694 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Supposedly narrated by the scholar and Aristotelian Michael Scott to his pupil the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, sometime in the early 13th century, ...
Child of the New Forest
Aug 11, 2007; ...WILDWOOD : A JOURNET THROUGH TREES by Roger Deakin Hamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 391, ISBN 9780241141847 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, 'quasi-hippie', art critic, naturalist, ...
He killed off Georgian style
Aug 11, 2007; ...GOD'S ARCHITECT : PUGIN AND THE BUILDING OF ROMANTIC BRITAIN by Rosemary Hill Penguin/Allen Lane, £30, pp. 416, ISBN 9780713994995 £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Pugin is not unknown in the way he was 50 years ago. Two major exhibitions in the 1990s, in New York and London, ...
Move over, Monet-maniacs
Aug 11, 2007; ...On 30 January 1999, not long after the Royal Academy had mounted its second Monet exhibition, The Spectator published my first exhibition review. It was about a renewal of Cubism in the sculpture of Ivor Abrahams and began as follows: 'The end of a century, like a wedding, notoriously calls for ...
Artistic harmony
Aug 11, 2007; ...Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until 9 September If you are planning a holiday visit to Shakespeare country and fancy a change of mood and visual pace from the usual round of sightseeing and theatre-going, Compton Verney is a splendid alternative destination. Besides the remarkable ...
Musical gazumping
Aug 11, 2007; ...Why do people spend their lives doing something which makes them nervous, even to the point of making them sick? I have watched musicians go on stage so frightened that it has been obvious to everyone present that they could not possibly be about to perform as well as they could. They ...
Dying of love
Aug 11, 2007; ...Tristan and Isolde Glyndebourne 'I fear the opera will be banned -- unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance -- : only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, -- I cannot imagine it otherwise.' So Wagner famously wrote to ...