The Sunday Telegraph London back issues from February 2005:
Partying Pete made my life hell First Person
Feb 06, 2005; ... You will, by now, have heard a great deal of Pete Doherty, therock star, crack-cocaine addict and new boyfriend to Kate Moss. Icertainly have -- generally between the hours of 4am and 7am. For two utterly wretched years I lived next door to Doherty inBethnal Green, and 4am tended ...
The Empress strikes back Interview Farah Pahlavi was forced out of Iran 25 years ago in the revolution that overthrew her husband. Now 66, she wants to return, believing that her family can bring democracy back to the country
Feb 06, 2005; ... Farah Diba Pahlavi, the deposed Empress of Iran, lives alone in avast, dazzlingly tasteful apartment overlooking the River Seine. Thefloors are scattered with fine silk rugs, the tables with Persianantiquities, and handmade bon-bons are offered by a silent maid in astarched pinafore ....
It's some motor that does 100,000 miles a minute In Sickness and in Health
Feb 06, 2005; ... The future, it seems, has finally arrived. While we may never joinMr Spock on his interplanetary travels, over the past few years mostfuturist fantasies have become part of our everyday lives: hand-heldphones with which to talk to anyone anywhere in the world, computersthat find any ...
The nuns merely prayed as the girls drowned Beatings, rat-infested dormitories, and being forced to eat rotten food were part of daily life at the Bexhill orphanage. But there was one incident Judith Kelly will never recover from, she tells Olga Craig
Feb 06, 2005; ... In the grainy, age-worn photograph, a nun grips the shoulder ofthe small, anxious-looking girl who stands before her, her tiny bodyrigid with tension. Time has not eroded the impact of Sister Mary'staut grasp, nor the little girl's edgy, squirming unease. To the nun's right is ...
The director, naked and unashamed Michael Winterbottom's '9 Songs' is the most sexually explicit film ever to be given a British certificate - the censors didn't even consider it to be 'titillating'. He talks to Catherine Shoard
Feb 06, 2005; ... Picture the scene. You're in a flat. Two members of your film crewhover round. A couple of actors start having sex in front of you, asper your instructions. But you're not a porn director. You're ahighly-respected 43-year-old film-maker from Lancashire. Are youembarrassed? ``Not ...
Hi-diddle-di-day, an actor's life is gay Theatre
Feb 06, 2005; ... David Mamet is a tough guy with a soft spot. He likes actors. Sodo many of us, but not necessarily with the fervour Mamet tells us hefeels. ``My closest friends,'' he has written, ``my intimatecompanions, have always been actors.'' And he reports that ``in itshealthy state'', any of the ...
All starred up with nowhere to go cinema
Feb 06, 2005; ... Too often, Hollywood heist films resemble tax returns: you sitthrough hours of numbingly complicated preparation to reach a ratherdepressing pay-off. What the better ones offer, however - as a trade-off for thin characterisation - is a glut of style. StevenSoderbergh's 2001 hit Ocean's ...
Pelican steals the show Cinema
Feb 06, 2005; ... Racing Stripes (U) Fans of girl-on-a-horse classic International Velvet won't find itmuch of a trial to be dragged along to Racing Stripes, an anamatronickids flick featuring a full stable of chattering farmyard favourites.So too will fans of another, more recent underdog sports ...
Sell your sister to see it in Ballet
Feb 06, 2005; ... There was an impressively dressy and understandably excitablecrowd out in force at Covent Garden on Thursday for the RoyalBallet's latest revival of Kenneth MacMillan's Manon. The 1974 balletis hardly new, and Sylvie Guillem and Jonathan Cope have each beendancing the leads for longer ...
A talent for impersonation Art
Feb 06, 2005; ... In 1925, Punch published a caricature of the famously fluent and,by the standards of the time, fabulously wealthy painter WilliamOrpen. The anonymous cartoonist showed the grimacing artist, poisedwith his brush as if it were a fencing foil, above a short caption inrhyming couplets: ...
China's new great wall of sound The sleeping dragon is waking up to the sound of Western classical music. Michael White meets the man behind a new cultural revolution
Feb 06, 2005; ... In the candle-lit, colonial darkness of the China Club in Beijing,a member of the great and good hosts a dinner for a group offoreigners. As he stands to make a speech, his seriously expensiveDavid Tang jacket falls open to reveal a lining with an Andy Warholscreen-print of the face of ...
Stupid music for thinking people Pop
Feb 06, 2005; ... Black Eyed Peas are determined to enjoy their new found success.The audience at Hammersmith Apollo is made to jump through all sortsof hoops and hooks, beats and boasts, time zones and time signatures,before making it to the uplifting end-of-show safety of the smash-hit number one ...
Irresistible urges Classical
Feb 06, 2005; ... The Richard Eyre production of Verdi's La Traviata has become afixture at the Royal Opera House. The 10-year-old production, in itseighth revival prepared by Patrick Young, is still looking good - theset for Flora's party once again drew a buzz of pleasure from lastSaturday's audience - ...
Richer than industry Pop 2
Feb 06, 2005; ... A little bit of mythology goes a long way in the early stages of a pop career. Anyone who's noticed the huge excitement surroundingthis 20-year-old Massachussets singer-songwriter may feel theyalready know the story about the occasion on which he was standingtoo close to a drug dealer ...
Eternal youth Radio
Feb 06, 2005; ... Some people have been needlessly worrying about what was going tohappen to Giles Wemmbley Hogg. We have already had two marvellousseries of Giles Wemmbley Hogg Goes Off, in which our hero travels theworld to show lucky foreigners just what an English public schoolboy,at his finest, is ...
A for arrogance Television
Feb 06, 2005; ... Today I am delighted to announce the formation of my new politicalparty, The Flatus Party. Flatus, as you will doubtless be aware, isLatin for arrogance, but also has - to me at least - pleasing aswell as apt associations with uncontrollable wind. By coincidence,Robert Kilroy-Silk ...
A grand and crabby music Anthony Thwaite enjoys the many voices of Geoffrey Hill
Feb 06, 2005; ... HEARING Geoffrey Hill reading a selection of his poems to a raptaudience in Cambridge the other day, two things struck me forcibly.The first was how speakable his work is, however congested it maylook at a first silent reading. This held true throughout theperformance (he began with ...
Aussie arrondissements This paean to Paris by an Australian screenwriter is fair dinkum, reckons Aileen Reid
Feb 06, 2005; ... ``IT IS AT this moment that I wake up, and find I am urinating inthe bed of my future father-in-law.'' If that sentence offends you,you should perhaps stop reading now: We'll Always Have Paris, withits cast of exhibitionists, voyeurs, transvestites and fartingaristocrats, is not a book ...
The men who unchained the slaves This history of Britain's anti- slavery movement brings home the scale of the abolitionists' achievement, says Max Hastings
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE SURVIVAL of the African slave trade into the 19th century onlyseems remarkable until one considers the range of white humanity alsoliving in bondage in those times, from the factory hands of theIndustrial Revolution to the victims of the Royal Navy's press gangs. Granted, ...
A Fuchs in the landscape Anne Chisholm on an unsentimental 1940s childhood memoir, spiced with fiction
Feb 06, 2005; ... WITH THIS BOOK, Candida Lycett Green has taken a bold step. Shehas made a name for herself writing with affectionate expertise abouthouses, gardens and the English landscape; she has also edited fourcollections of her late father Sir John Betjeman's writing, includingtwo volumes of his ...
The forgotten Fellow Blair Worden admires a scholarly resuscitation of a once famous mathematician
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE EARLY Fellows of the Royal Society, that essential forum ofthe scientific discoveries of the later 17th century, are mostly well-known figures. Such men as Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, RobertHooke and their successor Isaac Newton are secure in their fame. Yet there is one ...
The point of counterpoint This study of Bach and Frederick the Great is sharp on music but flat on politics, says John Adamson
Feb 06, 2005; ... DIVINING THE exact moment of a cultural transition -- when themedieval world ends, say, and the Renaissance begins -- has long beenthe non-question historians most love to ask. Of course, we realisethat the quest for this moment is almost invariably elusive; thatcultural change is for ...
HOW DID CELEBRATED BOOKS GET THEIR NAMES? Continuing our series, we look at the story behind Dante's Divine Comedy
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE Divine Comedy, or Divina Commedia, was not always so known.Dante himself titled it simply Commedia, meaning ``comedy''. In aletter to his patron he explained that a comedy was a work that might``begin in adverse circumstances, but ends happily''; a tragedy, bycontrast, might begin ...
Nature is the best nurturer Jane Shilling on the botanist who turned to what he knew best when his life fell apart
Feb 06, 2005; ... HARK! I HEAR the plaintive call of an ecologist in distress.``Like an epiphyte, I was lost when my substrate started tocollapse,'' it seems to say. The hapless epihphyte with the collapsing substrate is the writerand naturalist Richard Mabey, and the distress call is ...
The end of la Gloire Waterloo may be well-trodden ground but this pithy account is very welcome, says Saul David
Feb 06, 2005; ... SO FIERCE IS the competition around big battle anniversaries thatmany authors are jumping the gun. Last autumn saw three new books onNelson, and two on the battle itself, a good year before thebicentenary of Trafalgar. Andrew Roberts goes one better - or shouldthat be 10? - by bringing ...
An infection of goodness Leprosy brings out the best in people, says James Le Fanu
Feb 06, 2005; ... LEPROSY IS an unlikely choice for a full-scale biography. It is,after all, rather an old-fashioned disease, evoking memories of themissionary literature at the back of the church, with its pictures ofthe grotesquely deformed sufferers holding out their stump-like handsin ...
A drowning foretold
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE PROTAGONIST of this novel, David Winkler, is a hydrologist, astudent of the water cycle. Water, for Winkler and for his author, isa powerful metaphor for time - endlessly changing, essential,impossible to understand fully. Throughout the novel Winkler'sobsession with the ...
The best of Blighty
Feb 06, 2005; ... JAMES HAWES is a frustrating writer. There is a thin line betweenschoolboy humour and grown-up satire; and in Speak for England, as inhis earlier books, he zig-zags to and fro across that line like adrunk. One of the comic ``highlights'' of the novel is a characterall too obviously based ...
The Literary Life
Feb 06, 2005; ... MICHAEL PALIN has every reason to be on top of the world. Hislatest book, Himalaya, although not published by Weidenfeld &Nicolson until last September (when the BBC series began), proved tobe the best-selling work of travel literature in 2004. According tofigures from Nielsen BookScan, ...
Bees and beasts
Feb 06, 2005; ... HERE IS an extremely short book by an American writer not hithertoknown for succinctness. Michael Chabon won instant recognition backin 1988 with his charming first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,then apparently got the writer's block that so often accompaniesoutstanding early ...
A dance of death Jessica Mann enjoys this Hogarthian novel
Feb 06, 2005; ... A MYSTERIOUS French lady arrives in London in the early summer of1784, intending to establish herself in the highest society, andquickly becomes intimate with a dashing Viscount, a sinister Earl andan innocent dIbutante. These ingredients are usually mixed into aGeorgette Heyer pastiche ...
Life as a game of chance Jane Shilling is captivated by the plainness and restraint of these masterly short stories
Feb 06, 2005; ... ``IT WAS AS IF she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs,and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But everyonce in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was stillthere.'' This particular sense of stabbing unease is experienced by Carla,irresolute ...
Scandalous prodigal
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE MADONNINA of the title is a mountain from which, on a clearday, the Madonna of Milan cathedral can be seen in the distance. Itis a remote, eerie place, usually shrouded in mist, and it providesthe setting for a remarkable love story, with the theme offorgiveness at its ...
Paperbacks
Feb 06, 2005; ... Browning by Iain Finlayson Harper Perennial, pounds 15 WRITING TO a friend about Browning's interminable poem The Ringand the Book, George Eliot asked: ``Who will read it all in thesebusy days?'' We're even busier now, and Browning is remembered morefor rescuing Elizabeth ...
Paperbacks
Feb 06, 2005; ... Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare Vintage, pounds 7.99 FEW contemporary male novelists are as unashamedly romantic asNicholas Shakespeare. His latest book is a typically stylish taleabout a young Englishman who has a one-night stand in Cold WarLeipzig, and is then haunted for ...
Who can kill him first? Amnesia, the occult and Edgar Allan Poe feature in Susanna Yager's choice of recent crime fiction
Feb 06, 2005; ... I'M PREPARED TO like any book which is mostly set in my favouritecity, Bologna, so The Broker by John Grisham (Century, pounds 17.99)starts with an advantage. And the Bologna scenes are the best partsin this story of a once-powerful Washington lawyer -- the broker ofthe title -- who ...
Cinema
Feb 06, 2005; ... Meet The Fockers (12A). Director Jay Roach returns to the festivalof unease he first created in the 2000 hit comedy Meet The Parents.`Greg' Gaylord Focker (Ben Stiller) has won the consent of JackByrnes (Robert de Niro) to marry his daughter Pam (Teri Polo) - butnow the uptight WASP ...
Art
Feb 06, 2005; ... Lee Miller: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, 0207312 2463, to May 30. Miller started out as a fashion model and museto Man Ray. Later she became a talented photographer in her ownright. On show are more than 120 black and white portraits fromthroughout her ...
Dance
Feb 06, 2005; ... Henri Oguike Dance Company Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, 0870401 8181, Wed-Feb 10: Oguike, one of the most exciting voices inBritish contemporary dance, presents his latest work, Seen of Angels,an 11-man piece danced to selections from Handel's Messiah. Northern Ballet Theatre ...
Opera
Feb 06, 2005; ... Royal Opera 020 7304 4000. Verdi's La Traviata (Tue-Sat) withNorah Amsellem, Ana Maria Martinez, Charles Castronovo, JosephKalleja, Gerald Finley and Anthony Michaels-Moore alternating asVioletta, Alfredo and Germont. ENO Coliseum 020 8632 ...
Classical CDs
Feb 06, 2005; ... Bruckner: Symphony No 5 Vienna PO/Harnoncourt (RCA Red Seal 8287660749 2, two CDs, pounds 13.99). Nikolaus Harnoncourt continues hisexploration of Bruckner with this resolute and imposinginterpretation of the Fifth, perhaps the quirkiest of the canon. Theauthor of the sleeve-note finds ...
Rock
Feb 06, 2005; ... The Bravery. Promising electro-rock hipsters from New York.Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms Tues, 023 9286 3911; Brighton Concorde 2Wed, 01273 608 806; Oxford Zodiac Sat, 01865 420 042. Ed Harcourt. Solid uplifting tunesmithery from Britain's mostunpretentious and heart-rending ...
Concerts
Feb 06, 2005; ... Royal Festival Hall, 0870 382 8000, Fri, 7.30pm: Bernstein's scintillating and satirical Candide isgiven a concert performance by the BBC Concert Orch and Maida ValeSingers, Rumon Gamba conducts. Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 0161 907 9000, Wed, Thur & next Sun,7.30pm: ...
Theatre
Feb 06, 2005; ... The Anniversary Garrick, 0870 890 1104, to Apr 16. The anniversaryis that of Mum's wedding: she summons the family to celebrate it,even though she drove Dad to an early grave and has been a widow foryears. But then she is the mother from hell - which gives SheilaHancock the chance to let ...
DVDs
Feb 06, 2005; ... Before Sunset (Warner Bros, 15, DVD pounds 15.99, to rent onvideo). Lightning strikes twice in Richard Linklater's superb sequelto Before Sunrise. The one-night lovers of 1995 (Ethan Hawke andJulie Delpy) meet again by chance and roam Paris exploring brokenpromises. Red Lights ...
Opening this week Enchanting the Eye
Feb 06, 2005; ... There is no other national art that gives so direct an idea ofwhat life was like at a certain time, in a certain place as Dutchpainting of the 17th century. The art of Holland's `Golden Age' canbe read as a teeming self-portrait of this new, burgeoning nation,freshly broken away from ...
Rock CDs
Feb 06, 2005; ... Roots Manuva: Awfully Deep (Big Dada, pounds 13.99). South London preacher's son Roots Manuva (aka Rodney Smith) isnot your typical rapper, belonging neither to the guns, drugs andboasting end of the spectrum, nor to the worthy, consciousnessraising one. Instead, he sings ...
Prefabulous They are assembled in a flash and can cost no more than a new car. So why, asks Ross Clark, are so few people willing to live in a kit house?
Feb 06, 2005; ... When Adam Thomas wanted to build a new home for his family on theIsle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, the last thing he wanted wasfor the builders to be hanging around for weeks on end. ``It is oneof the remotest corners of the country and everything has to beshipped in from the ...
Word on the Street
Feb 06, 2005; ... It was amusing to hear an estate agent last week confidentlystating that the property market had ``bottomed out''. Amusingbecause he had never admitted that prices had fallen in the firstplace. Even so, there was some evidence last week that the much-reported -- and very modest ...
Winds of change Hurricanes, typhoons and other forms of extreme weather can make buying property in exotic locations a risky investment. Graham Norwood investigates
Feb 06, 2005; ... Property counts for little compared with human life. But as Asiacomes to terms with the consequences of the Boxing Day tsunami, it isclear that recent extreme weather around the world may change aspectsof holiday-home ownership for good. The market for second homes in far-flung ...
We're looking for... a lake view
Feb 06, 2005; ... ISLE OF WIGHT Westover Park This six-bedroom Regency house, one of the island's best, wasremodelled between 1813 and 1815 by John Nash. The 47-acre propertyhas two courtyard cottages, a gate lodge, walled garden, swimmingpool, tennis court, helicopter hangar, garaging and a ...
In at the deep end Everything went swimmingly with her cellar conversion - until one fateful lunchtime when Clare Paterson got cold, and very damp, feet. She explains why
Feb 06, 2005; ... When you think about converting a basement, nobody talks to youabout water. The drawings and photos that basement companies have ondisplay in their smart sales folders are bright and glowing with thepromise of extra space and added value. Everything looks excitinglyclean, modern and ...
Garden Notebook
Feb 06, 2005 ... Buy of the Week Cheer up those unhappy souls without a garden by buying them aHome Garden by Smeg at about pounds 900. The toughened glass-and-steel house-shaped shell has temperature, humidity and light sensorsso that exactly the right conditions can be created for your ...
Wildlife warrior Garden solutions
Feb 06, 2005; ... I was saddened to learn of the death last month of Dame MiriamRothschild. Her dedication to wildlife remained with her to the end,and I am sure her influence on gardening will live on. Theenvironmentalist Chris Baines, a former lecturer of mine, had beenswapping notes with her about ...
Be bold with bulbs
Feb 06, 2005; ... When I was a child, I used to love creating miniature gardens intrays or old seed boxes to bring inside the house. My parents wouldallow me to dig up a few plants from here and there in our garden, onthe understanding that I would keep them alive, and replant them onceI'd finished. I ...
Brown makes progress in debt-relief crusade
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE Group of Seven of the world's largest economic powers lastnight agreed to provide up to 100 per cent ``multilateral'' debtrelief ``on a case-by-case basis'' for some of the world's poorestcountries, after two days of heated talks. However, the US refused to back a British plan ...
Glazer secures pounds 800m for new Man Utd offer US tycoon ready to launch 300p per share terms that board will find difficult to reject out of hand
Feb 06, 2005; ... MALCOLM GLAZER, the American sports tycoon, has succeeeded inraising the pounds 800m in funds he needs to mount a formal takeoveroffer for Manchester United. It is understood that JP Morgan, the US investment bank, hasagreed to be the principal financial backer in an offer that ...
Euronext to answer FSA concerns about bid for LSE
Feb 06, 2005; ... EURONEXT will this week spell out how any bid it makes for theLondon Stock Exchange would pose no threat to the governancestandards and takeover rules that apply to UK-listed companies.However, it will not at this stage accede to the desire of the LSEfor it to convert into a ...
BAE and MoD avert 'train wreck' by demoting Kellogg
Feb 06, 2005; ... BAE SYSTEMS, Britain's largest defence contractor, is close toagreeing a compromise with the Ministry of Defence, its largestcustomer, on how to manage the construction of two aircraft carriers. Last-ditch negotiations to salvage Britain's largest naval defenceproject continued ...
Unity at last for Unilever as Burgmans becomes sole chairman
Feb 06, 2005; ... UNILEVER, the Anglo-Dutch consumer products group, is set to scrapits historic tradition of having two chairmen as part of a corporategovernance shake-up that could eventually lead to the company havinga single headquarters in the UK. Unilever, which owns brands such as Hellman's ...
Audit Office to probe Connex's removal
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE NATIONAL Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, haslaunched an investigation into the shock sacking two years ago ofConnex, the French train operator, from the running of South Eastcommuter rail services into London. The investigation will also cover the appointment of ...
News Corp branches out into Ukraine
Feb 06, 2005; ... NEWS CORPORATION, the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch, isin talks to buy an advertising business in Ukraine, the former Sovietrepublic that recently elected a pro-Western president. News Corp hopes to buy a stake of more than 50 per cent in aUkrainian company that ...
Fund managers' confidence in British equities soars
Feb 06, 2005; ... THE top-rated fund managers' confidence in the UK stock market hassurged to its highest level for more than two years, according to asurvey by Citywire, the financial publishing and data group. The poll reveals that Citywire's stock market confidence indexjumped from 102.17 to ...
Whitehall cost cuts are 'pie in the sky'
Feb 06, 2005; ... MEMBERS of Parliament will this week attack plans by the Treasuryto cut civil service jobs and slash government spending as ``half-hearted'' and ``pie in the sky''. On Wednesday a sub-committee of the powerful Treasury SelectCommittee will question Paul Boateng, the chief ...
Irish energy firm plans pounds 1.2bn North Sea wind farm
Feb 06, 2005; ... AIRTRICITY, the Dublin- based renewable energy specialist, ispreparing an audacious plan to build the world's biggest wind farm inthe North Sea at a cost of about pounds 1.2bn. The Irish group is putting together a consortium of energy andconstruction partners to raise finance to ...