The Spectator back issues from September 2007:
The right mission
Sep 01, 2007 ...Tony Blair - remember him? -- was better at diagnosis than cure. 'I think most people would say that in virtually every aspect of their life things are better than they were 30 or 40 years ago, ' he told the Sunday Telegraph in November 2005. 'This whole question of respect and law and order, ...
DIARY
Sep 01, 2007; ...My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane. Consequently I went to bed with Joanna Trollope, woke up with Philip Roth, had an affair with Tom ...
GLOBAL WARNING
Sep 01, 2007; ...He who would read newspapers must expect to spend his days in the darkest despair, for they contain nothing but war, murder and medical advice. Popular wisdom, however, tells us that every cloud has a silver lining: though my experience of life leads me to conclude that, in general, ...
The politics of the plot
Sep 01, 2007; ...THE ARCADIAN FRIENDS : INVENTING THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN by Tim Richardson Bantam, £25, pp. 562, ISBN 9780593052730 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The man 'of Polite Imagination', according to Joseph Addison, was able to delight in things lesser mortals might fail to ...
Moral panic is the right reaction:we are afraid of our young
Sep 01, 2007; ...Some things don't change in Britain: the teddy bears and CCTV pictures, for example. First come the teddy bears. A princess dies in a sordid drunken accident, a child is abducted in Portugal, two girls are brutally murdered in Soham, a child is shot accidentally-on-purpose and you can't open a ...
Mmeet the shadow minister for militant Islam
Sep 01, 2007; ...The biggest risk to David Cameron's leadership to date has been his appointment of Sayeeda Warsi as the shadow minister for community cohesion. Warsi's rise makes Cameron's ascent from freshman MP to leader in four years look almost sedate. In just two years she has gone from failed ...
'Kill him, Jimmy!' A night at the cage fight
Sep 01, 2007; ...So we went to Wembley Arena to witness for the first time what is called 'cage fighting'. The reason for this being, of course, that the combatants go to war in a rather large cage. The cage is bound in with a net of the kind of wire you might use for a chicken coop. There are no seats for the ...
The supernatural is as British as fish and chips
Sep 01, 2007; ...We're all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism. Naturally, I can't begin to; they're the same people who voted for Bush, after all, which I find a far more ...
Who really knows how much crime goes on at the Notting Hill Carnival?
Sep 01, 2007; ...I hope you enjoyed the Notting Hill Carnival and made it back home in one piece, maybe with a becoming scar of some sort -- gunshot wound to the gut, stab wound in the throat, that sort of thing. Or perhaps just short of a few quid from your wallet, and maybe your wallet itself. Something, ...
Mark Birley: a man who was right in everything
Sep 01, 2007; ...We had arranged to see Mark Birley at noon on the day he died. But my wife Lucy and I were just too late. He had suffered a stroke that morning. We missed him by a couple of hours and now, forever. I heard confirmation of the terrible news as I boarded a plane for Hong Kong. Not a good time to ...
A menace of our making
Sep 01, 2007 ...Sir: What would Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, the coolest of heads, have made of poor William Shawcross's overwrought emotional plea that we must stay on in Iraq as a kind of act of faith ('Britain must stay in Iraq', 25 August)? Well, the Duke once opined: 'The real test of a general ...
The blame for Chindamo
Sep 01, 2007 ...Sir: It was not the Human Rights Act that was the primary reason for the ruling in the Chindamo case (Leading article, 25 August); rather it was the rights of EU citizens to move freely within member states, one aspect of EU membership that most would regard as positive. As to the ruling ...
Fair's fair
Sep 01, 2007 ...Sir: I read Anna Blundy's article ('We blondes face prejudice every day of our lives', 25 August) with increasing disbelief. She asserts that there is no other socially acceptable target for jokes. Perhaps I may refer her here to 'gingers' or the Irish. And I would contend that the ...
Role play
Sep 01, 2007 ...Sir: Both Matthew d'Ancona and Patrick Jephson overlooked one excellent argument in favour of monarchy ('How Diana changed the royal family', 18 August), which is that a longstanding hereditary monarchy is by far the most effective way to separate the political roles of head of state and prime ...
Carry on camping
Sep 01, 2007 ...Sir: It is encouraging that Samantha Weinberg and her fellow climate campers aim 'to persuade the wider population to listen to the science, and to make their decisions based ...
Dishonesty in television may arise from lofty principle: but it still bears the devil's fingerprint
Sep 01, 2007; ...A columnist should rejoice, I suppose, when an issue he has spotted early and returned to often suddenly catches fire, becoming the hot topic of the season. I started writing about dishonesty in television about ten years ago, wrote often about it for the Times, and made a programme ...
Calling in the Geek Squad
Sep 01, 2007; ...Why would anyone choose to spend an afternoon with a self-proclaimed geek in a clip-on tie, who calls himself a 'field agent'? Carphone Warehouse is betting that many of us will jump at the chance. They've brought the Geek Squad over from the US and are offering their nerds to UK ...
Now America faces not-so-friendly fire from the rest of the financial world
Sep 01, 2007; ...I'm back, as Arnold Schwarzenegger famously declared in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. In fact I haven't really been away, just hovering in cyberspace to leave room for other contributors in our slimmed-down-for-thebeach summer Business section. While I've been up there, financial markets ...
Waking up late at the Palace
Sep 01, 2007; ...THE UNCOMMON READER by Alan Bennet Profile, £10.99, pp. 128, ISBN 9781846680496 £8.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Since The History Boys transferred first to Broadway and then to the cinema, Alan Bennett has made the journey from national treasure to international superstar. The ...
Movies and talkies
Sep 01, 2007; ...MORNINGS IN THE DARK : THE GRAHAM GREENE READER edited by David Parkinson Carcanet, £18.95, pp. 738, ISBN 9781857548556 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p+p) 0870 429 6655 Arriving at Oxford in 1923, the young Graham Greene made one move he was to regret 30 years later, when applying for a US entry ...
Long live the weeds and the wilderness
Sep 01, 2007; ...THE WILD PLACES by Robert Macfarlane Granta, £18.99, pp. 340, ISBN 9781862079410 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, with an artistic eye for wild and lonely places. He was a friend and follower of Roger ...
You have been warned
Sep 01, 2007; ...THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE by Herman Melville Dalkey Archive Press, £8.99, pp. 354, ISBN 9781564784544 £7.19 (plus £2.45 p+p) 0870 429 6655Many years ago in Texas, a movie advertisement urged viewers 'to thrill to Herman Melville's immortal story of the sea, Moby-Dick, with ...
Likely lads in their day
Sep 01, 2007; ...Simon Raven's first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 when I was in my second year at Cambridge. We fell on it with glee, as I remarked, a few weeks after Raven's death, to a fellownovelist, somewhat to her amazement. 'I've never read any of his books, ' she said. 'I ...
The spirit of Almodóvar
Sep 01, 2007; ...In the theatre programme notes for the new play based on Pedro Almodóvar's film, All About My Mother, the playwright Samuel Adamson observes that the play's protagonist, Manuela, is drawn towards the world of theatre by an unexpected event. Back in 1999, although I didn't know it at the time, ...
True colours
Sep 01, 2007; ...Helio Oiticica: The Body of Colour Tate Modern, until 23 September Supported by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne John Piper Room 20, Tate Britain, until 24 January 2008 How diminished our lives would be if suddenly we could only see in black and white. 'Colour ...
All that jazz
Sep 01, 2007; ...I'm just back from Edinburgh, my 20th successive year at the festival for the Daily Telegraph, which makes me feel very old indeed. How times have changed. When I started going, the paper put us up in the luxurious Sheraton Grand and no questions were asked about the size of your bar ...
ARTS
Sep 01, 2007; ...Julian Bailey's bright and colourful paintings of the Dorset coast are a welcome antidote to this summer's gloomy weather, see 'Durdle Door' above. Bailey (born 1963) studied art at the Ruskin School while at New College, Oxford, before moving to the Royal Academy Schools, where he was ...
World class
Sep 01, 2007; ...Next time you're bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC's World Service. A different quality appears to prevail in their making of radio documentaries -- more time spent on research, less on presentation. No tricks, no smoochy music. Just experts sharing with us their enthusiasm and ...
The wonder of it all
Sep 01, 2007; ...Selfridges used to be my local. My wife and I have poured plenty of our hardearned scratch into its coffers over the years (and, thanks to Marina's obsessive- compulsive handbag-buying disorder, not just in the Food Hall either), and I'm delighted to learn that they've been putting our moulah ...
Shocking cheats
Sep 01, 2007; ...The most egregious example of cheating in wildlife photography was the 1958 Disney film Wild Wilderness. They wanted footage of lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea -- heaven knows why, since lemmings do no such thing. Since the crew were in Alberta, where neither sea nor ...
Making the switch
Sep 01, 2007; ...Rider Mick Fitzgerald was asked by his careers master when still at school what he wanted to be. 'I've half a mind to be a jump-jockey, ' he declared. 'Good, ' replied the laconic pedagogue, 'because that's all you'll need.' Fitzgerald is actually one of the brightest men in the saddle, but ...
Man of mystery
Sep 01, 2007; ...OK. It is early 1964, the Profumo scandal has proved beyond reasonable doubt that English men can also be swingers (and with women, to boot), and my friend Yanni Zographos and I have just had a big win upstairs at Aspinall's and are taking the circular inside staircase that connects Annabel's ...
Happy families
Sep 01, 2007; ...My boy's mother and Adolf Hitler share the same birthday, and, as an astrologer might expect, their personalities are in many ways similar. She can make a long-term plan and stick to it; she's intensely loyal; and if you get on the wrong side of her you do so at your peril. I'd paid her no ...
Strained relationship
Sep 01, 2007; ...There was, the architect said, no hope of getting planning permission for an extension. So I had the ingenious idea of solving our bedroom shortage by building what amounts to an annexe on the 'footprint' of the dilapidated potting shed on the other side of the orchard. The plans which we ...
Having your cake and eating it
Sep 01, 2007; ...I had certain misgivings. I mean, it's not quite rock 'n' roll, Madeira, is it? It's known more for blue-rinsed ladies in bath chairs, and producing a tipple not dissimilar to sherry, than for anything wild or mad. I may be getting older, but holidaying in a pensioner's paradise seemed ...
Paris match
Sep 01, 2007; ...At any sporting junket involving pretentious national prestige, you can guarantee that the ritzy no-expense-spared 'resplendence' of a dire and irksome opening ceremony matters far more than any of the actual sport which follows it. Rugby union's World Cup curtain-up promises the full phonily ...
Change must still be the message
Sep 08, 2007 ...The great paradox of the Tory party is that its predicament in recent years reflects not failure, but success. For 18 years it was in government, for 11 of them under one of the most influential prime ministers in history. The Conservatives dominated the 20th century: Austen Chamberlain and ...
DIARY
Sep 08, 2007; ...Bayreuth Alifetime's ambition is fulfilled as I get to hear and see Wagner in Bayreuth. After 1945 it was touch and go whether enough support could be found to get the Bayreuth Festspielhaus back on its feet for the month-long festival of Wagner operas. It was the German trade unions who ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Sep 08, 2007; ...MONDAY V. exciting. Was in charge of note-taking and smoothies at our Emergency TreacheryManagement Meeting. We couldn't decide what to do about Mr Mercer. Jed argued for something v unpleasant-sounding, which would involve us digging for a lot of complicated information, and would take ages ....
The odd thing is that it is left-wingers, not Cameron, who have lurched to the right
Sep 08, 2007; ...It's not hoodies. It's not single mums. It's not even jittery City whizz kids down to their last ten million. No, it's lefties we should be furrowing our collective brow about. We shouldn't worry about the threat they pose to society (even though successful countries can survive anything except ...
If Bush doesn't force Iran to back down, then his successors will
Sep 08, 2007; ...To many, 20 January 2009, George W. Bush's last day in office, can't come soon enough. The President's pugnacious speech to the American Legion summed up why: not content with vigorously defending two wars, he seemed to start banging the drum for another with his statement that Iran's pursuit ...
A chat with the man who invented the internet
Sep 08, 2007; ...Imagine actually meeting Thomas Edison, or the Wright Brothers, or Newton, or Archimedes, or whichever Sumerian it was who invented the wheel in the fifth millennium BC. That, when you think about it, is what it's like to have a conversation with Vint Cerf. Few people in the history of humanity ...
The end of the 'noddy shot' is a ray of hope for television
Sep 08, 2007; ...Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it's a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal -- processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you ....
'I'm a pin-up for Scottish pensioners'
Sep 08, 2007; ...I'm tempted, just for a second, to feel sorry for Clarissa Dickson Wright. There she is, with her back to me, 15 feet away, at a table in Valvona & Crolla -- a refined little deli/café full of focaccia and Parmigiano Reggiano tucked in beside the lager shops on Edinburgh's Leith ...
How I was saved from Mongolian torture
Sep 08, 2007; ...My 12-year-old sister shouted, 'Come and watch this TV programme, you'll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.' She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online form ...
This is a true Catholic revolution
Sep 08, 2007; ...Next Friday, 14 September, the worldwide restrictions on the celebration of the ancient Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church will be swept away. With a stroke of his pen, Pope Benedict XVI has ended a 40-year campaign to eradicate the Tridentine Mass, whose solemn rubrics are regarded ...
Our thuggish society
Sep 08, 2007 ...Sir: Theodore Dalrymple's cover story about our sentimental and brutal society ('Too many teardrops', 1 September) has given me an idea. In order to reduce the impact of the British disease of vulgarity and rudeness, the principle of offsetting could be extended beyond carbon ...
Who are the enemy in Iraq?
Sep 08, 2007 ...Sir: William Shawcross in your cover story ('Now, more than ever, Britain must stay in Iraq', 25 August) argues that the US needs support from British forces in Iraq to continue on course with the destruction of al-Qa'eda in that war-torn country. Destroying al-Qa'eda in Iraq will not ...
Blonde bombshell
Sep 08, 2007 ...Sir: Anna Blundy is justifiably outraged by the 'dumb blonde' imputation ('We blondes face prejudice', 25 August), but there is in fact a medical explanation at the heart of the prejudice. According to my neurologist, blue-eyed blondes have a genetic propensity to develop pernicious anaemia ...
Woodhouse's cricket heroes
Sep 08, 2007 ...Sir: Mr Alan Magid draws attention to the excellent Mike by P.G. Wodehouse as both a major cricket novel and the best school story ever (Letters, 25 August). I am sure he is right on both counts and this is at least partly because P.G. Wodehouse was basing his book on facts, which would have ...
End of an era
Sep 08, 2007 ...Sir: Thank you to Taki for mentioning Louis, that wonderful maître d' at Annabel's, in High life last week. How sad and ironic that within a week of Mark ...
'Rugby is almost wholly devoid of skill'
Sep 08, 2007; ...Knock knock. Who's there? Jonny. Jonny who? The morning after England's Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local high street and saw two boys doing something which deeply disturbed me. I knew these kids and had always ...
Welsh wizard prang
Sep 08, 2007; ...A PEMBROKESHIRE PIONEER by Roscoe Howells Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, Ysgubor Plas, Llwyndrys, Pwelheli, Gwynedd, Tel: 01785 750440, £6.85, (£1.50p+p), pp. 120, ISBN 9781845240844 In 1903, in one tremulous little 12second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered ...
Fighting Finn
Sep 08, 2007; ...Where does Sibelius stand today? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been not very high. Today, 50 years after his death, I think it would be 'on the up' again, especially as we now know not just the symphonies and tone-poems but also the wonderful songs in performances by Karita ...
Love and loss
Sep 08, 2007; ...On a beautiful, crisp Saturday morning on the first of the month I flew from Gstaad to the château de Dampierre, the duc de Luynes's seat southwest of Paris. My old friend Jean-Claude Sauer was getting hitched for the fifth time, to a wonderful girl by the name of Brigitte -- incidentally, the ...
Short-haul heaven
Sep 08, 2007; ...'I did not fully understand the dread term "terminal illness" until I saw Heathrow for myself, ' wrote Dennis Potter in 1978. Nearly 30 years later the illness is much more acute and there are yet more terminals at what is Europe's busiest airport. Let me make my own historical ...
Our present fear of Chinese products masks our real fear of China - a swelling Other
Sep 08, 2007; ...How on earth did they get them through customs? 'Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh dear. Any lead paint? What's that? Not any more? Just naked terracotta? Dearie dearie me. But ...
The desert breeding ground of India's billionaires
Sep 08, 2007; ...'This is backwoods, really backwoods, ' says Aditya, as the rackety, jam-packed bus pulls into Rajgarh, a small town in the north-west of Rajasthan, India's desert state. Aditya is the only person on the bus who speaks any English, and the goggle-eyed stares and toothless grins of many ...
Who's the mug at the table?
Sep 08, 2007; ...Once upon a time there was an investment banker. He was hardly today's stereotypical WASP smoothie, but an overweight, sweaty trader from the Bronx who shouted a lot, ate pizza at his desk when he wasn't standing on it, and treated colleagues as imbeciles. Lewie Ranieri was, according ...
Golfers with more clubs are more likely to win
Sep 08, 2007; ...You know Kipling's words, about meeting triumph and disaster? Well, imagine this. You're in your mid-forties, chief executive of one of Britain's fastest-growing public companies. Your personal fortune is in nine figures; you are fast becoming one of the Britain's top ...
Coffee-shop trade suffers as the General keeps Thais guessing if he'll run for office
Sep 08, 2007; ...Anyone who claims to understand Thailand's politics should be sectioned. The country is preparing for a national election in December and the leader of last year's bloodless military coup, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, is retreating on his promise to drive his tank back to barracks. Instead, ...
Can we do it again?
Sep 08, 2007; ...During this summer of catastrophic floods, a good news story washed up on one or two newspaper sports desks. Ben Kay and Martin Corry, two of England's most experienced forwards who had been preparing for the Rugby World Cup at the appropriately named city of Bath, drove home through ...
Five tournaments that shook the rugby world
Sep 08, 2007; ...Twenty teams turn up for rugby union's World Cup but, realistically, less than half a dozen can ever possibly win it -- the heavyweight trio from the southern seas, New Zealand, South Africa or Australia and, from the north, 2007's hosts France and, in any given year, one of the four from the ...
Happy as Larry
Sep 08, 2007; ...Rugby players come in all shapes and sizes, even if the small ones are now big, strapping and muscle-bound, but when it comes to characters most are only two-dimensional at best. Jonny Wilkinson is the nearest thing the game has to a Beckham-style icon. He is wonderfully talented, admirably ...
Dear Mary
Sep 08, 2007 ...Q. My son is a member of a rugby team at his university. They are a lovely bunch of chaps during daylight hours but some sort of group hysteria seems to take hold during post-match victory celebrations and they behave more like cavemen than gentlemen. They obviously need the civilising ...