Society

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Is the Loch Ness Monster heading for real celebrity?

At this time of year my thoughts often dwell on the Loch Ness Monster. Let me recapitulate what we know about this beast. It was first spotted on 22 July 1932. It was described as crossing the main road running north of Loch Ness and being about six feet long. Later it was seen in the water, with its head above the surface. It had a long neck, a snake-like head and flippers, and was at least 20 feet long. A famous but indistinct photo was taken corresponding to this description. The monster has never again been seen on land but is often sighted, always in midsummer, holding its prehistoric

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared opinion

There was a photograph in one of the Sunday papers, and it caught my eye. It showed a cheery bald man in some drowned Gloucestershire village traversing the floodwater on a penny-farthing. Hmm, I thought to myself, almost immediately, I bet that’s faked.I should be careful here. The kind of man who would ride baldly and cheerily through floodwater on a penny-farthing is the kind of man, I suspect, who would fire off a wronged and angry letter to a newspaper at the merest drop of a (doubtless jaunty, perhaps themed) hat. So, to be clear, I am suggesting no impropriety. I am merely suggesting that, perhaps, the situation was

The Spectator

Common sense submerged

The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street… The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street, so that inhabitants were compelled to pass out of their houses through the upper windows, and were thence conveyed by boats along the street’. The year was 1770, though it

Oliver Gilmour

The unromantic approach

John Worthen, a D.H. Lawrence specialist, approaches Robert Schumann’s tormented life without any apparent musical or medical expertise. His aim is ambitious: to prove that Schumann was not the quintessential Romantic figure of folklore and that he died of tertiary syphilis. He attempts to argue that Schumann was not manic-depressive, schizophrenic, unbalanced or even unstable. His publishers, meanwhile, claim that this book ‘frees Schumann from 150 years of myth-making and unjustified psychological speculation’. Worthen hardly covers the music, so nor do I. In 1985, Peter Ostwald, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, published Schumann: Music and Madness. In this brilliant book, Ostwald concludes that Schumann exhibited the classic

Friday

The Spectator

Having a blast before blast off

There are few things that can be more boring that floating around in a tin can looking down at the earth. So I’m glad to hear that the astronauts have found a way, albeit a rather unoriginal one, to make the time fly by. (Insert your own joke about one small sip for man, one giant drinking session for mankind) Following on from the infamous Nasa love triangle, it does seem that these astronauts are rather more interesting than their notoriously anodyne press conferences suggest.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shambo to the Slaughter? For shame!

A couple of days ago I mentioned the heart-tugging story of Shambo, the Heroic Hindu Bull in west Wales threatened with execution simply because he’s contracted TB. This is just the sort of story the British press, bless it, loves: peaceful Hindus, a placid animal, heartless bureaucrats, death, grim gallows humour…It’s the perfect silly season story. And indeed, a Google News search reveals brings up 761 stories concerning Shambo’s plight. According to a wire report, the latest exciting developments include: The plight of Shambo, a bull at the Skanda Vale monastery in Wales, was captured in real-time drama as the monastery launched an Internet campaign to save his life. A

Alex Massie Alex Massie

In which it’s a small, small world…

Heaps and heaps of stuff has been written on the historic/revolutionary/awesome CNN/YouTube debate on Monday night. But what are the odds that you’d see and old friend from college days in Ireland pop up to ask one of the questions? Slim, I’d say. Yet it happened. Lucia Brawley, with whom I appeared in productions of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Heiner Muller’s Hamlet Machine had her question selected by the CNN bods. Weird proof of the smallness of the world and all that, given that one ain’t seen her since those bright college days at Trinity College…

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shock troops latest:

Much gnashing of teeth in conservative circles over a TNR piece written by a soldier in Iraq that catalogues various episodes of unsavoury behaviour in Iraq. The Weekly Standard has been especially indignant, laughably accusing TNR of failing to support the troops and suggesting that Pvt Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s piece was entirely fabricated. Other conservatives went so far as to suggest that Beauchamp was not even a soldier. Bill Kristol’s startlingly dishonest Weekly Standard editorial argued (to use the term loosely) that: “…what is revealing about this mistake is that the editors must have wanted to suspend their disbelief in tales of gross misconduct by American troops. How else could

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of missing the point completely

Good grief. Jonah Goldberg makes this argument: I think, even if broadly accurate, Frank made a mistake in running these pieces because they aren’t up to the standards of his magazine and they advance an argument I don’t think the New Republic should be making. Liberals don’t want to beat up on the troops anymore, they want to enlist them as victims.  The subtext of the pieces is that the war has made American soldiers evil or at least put holes in their souls. But, at this point at least (and I would argue always), I think it’s pretty clear that even if true, Beauchamp’s experience is not representative. But,

The Spectator

Is their money good here?

If you’re wondering what to make of the Chinese decision to invest in Barclays and the Qatari effort to buy Sainsburys do read this column that Martin Vander Weyer has done for us explaining why there is nothing sinister about such developments.

The Spectator

The case Obama should make against Hillary

It’s the electability, stupid should be one of the major themes of the Obama campaign if they want to play harball with Hillary. The Democrats are desperate to take back the White House and the polls suggest that he is far better placed to do that than her.  Just look at the numbers when you pit the two of them against the current Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani 50Clinton 44 Obama 52Giuliani 43

The Spectator

Obama takes a shot at Hillary

At the YouTube debate Barack Obama and Hillary got into a row about whether or not the US president should meet with some of the world’s least attractive leaders—Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad etc. Clinton went after Obama hard for promising to meet with all these guys during his first year in office. After the debate, she described his plan as “irresponsible and frankly naive.” Hillary, perhaps, overplayed her hand, as her criticisms drew from Obama his toughest attack on her to date: “I think what is irresponsible and naive is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out — and you know I think Senator

The Spectator

Has the Dianaisation of Britain changed the country for the better?

The new issue of the always excellent Prospect has a great debate between Andrew Marr and Joan Smith about whether the mass emotionalism that followed Diana’s death, and is now a regular part of our national life, is a good thing or not.  Andrew Marr argues that thanks to it: “We are a more relaxed and more emotionally healthy people than we used to be, and the “Diana moment,” for all its weirdness and excess, marked this change. It was a telling national catharsis, and the moment too when “holding it all in” was no longer seen as a virtue. I like what we have become. I like the footballers’

The Spectator

RIP Shambo

If you’re thinking about the sacred bullock that is about to be slaughtered on the orders of the Welsh Assembly, do read the incomparable Jeremy Clarke’s piece on Shambo.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The unread

Perhaps only a French professor of literature could write a book entitled How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read. Professor Pierre Bayard’s book became a best-seller in France this year, and one can see why. After all, a book that promises to lift the oppressive guilt one feels at not having tackled many of the giant literary peaks has a lot to be said for it. At the very least this guilt leaves one feeling somewhat inadequate, especially when one compares the amount of reading done by one’s forbears (who admittedly didn’t have the distractions of television or cinema or a thousand other things and, equally, for the

The Spectator

The warped world of Ward Churchill

I have been interested in Ward Churchill for years. So interested, in fact, that his writings inspired me to write a novel about what might happen if the “global justice movement” developed a taste for revolutionary violence. Churchill, who claims Native American ancestry, has finally been sacked by the University of Colorado for calling the dead of 9/11 “little Eichmanns” – his appalling claim being that the financiers in the World Trade Center were no better than the Nazis. In fact, Churchill has been saying this, and much else for six years. His reaction to the September 11 atrocities was: “it’s about time.” And he has written a string of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The clunking fist connects

To date, Cameron has got the better of Brown at PMQs but the clunking fist had some good lines today. I’d bet that this one–“The wheels are coming off the Tory bicycle; it’s just as well he’s got a car following him!”—will be on the news tonight. As Tony might say, clunk!

The Spectator

What a dope

Oh, Vino. How could you be so stupid? You fought all the way up from the bottom, making it from Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan to Paris, France on the strength of your legs and an indomitably aggressive spirit. When your team collapsed days before last year’s Tour de France when German Jan Ullrich was barred on doping charges, you convinced the Kazakh government to put together a team just for you. When you fell on one of the first days of this year’s Tour, you won the hearts of fans by racing on with more than 30 stitches in your leg and arm. Just finishing this year would have been enough to

The Spectator

Bush is not for turning

Anyone who doubts George W Bush’s commitment to Iraq should read this speech delivered by the President at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.  Quoting verbatim from intelligence reports, Bush argues that al Qaeda is firmly established in Iraq, but that its operations there predated the invasion of 2003. He takes Bin Laden at his word, in concluding that this is a test case for the war on terror, not a distraction from it: Our action to remove Saddam Hussein did not start the terrorist violence — and America withdrawal from Iraq would not end it. The al Qaida terrorists now blowing themselves up in Iraq are dedicated extremists