Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 18 March 2006

Q. I am at a co-ed day school and have been going out with a boy in my year for six months. Last week he dumped me. What has made it worse is that everyone in school has reacted by saying that they could not understand why I was going out with him in the first place as I am — according to them — ‘fit and cool’ and he is not. If this is really true it makes me feel there must be something terribly wrong with me, which only someone going out with me would know. How can I find out what it is? My former boyfriend will

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 18 March 2006

Schools aren’t clubs From Nicholas NelsonSir: Have you given proper thought to the reason that we have an education system (Leading article, 11 March)? Our schools have an essential list of objectives which includes ensuring that young people absorb a body of knowledge and acquire skills that match their potential, and emerge as adults with an ability to assess their world critically and communicate with their fellow human beings. The way you would do this is to hive off 25 per cent or so into exclusive clubs so that they leave school with a strong body of knowledge but no clue about how to communicate with the other 75 per

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 18 March 2006

The restaurateur Oliver Peyton’s latest project is the National Dining Rooms at the National Gallery. It is situated in the Sainsbury Wing, although as Tesco has more or less blasted Sainsbury’s out of the water in every way you can think of in recent years, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Tesco takes it over, moves it out of town until everything in town goes bust, and then moves it back as the Tesco Metro Wing. Supermarkets. Aren’t they just so evil? Last week my car was broken into, window smashed and everything, and while I’m not one of those people who likes to blame supermarkets for

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 March 2006

The Dunblane massacre took place ten years ago. Its effects on the families of the victims are so terrible that it seems dangerous to speak about them. But there were secondary effects as well. In the aftermath of the horror, the then prime minister, John Major, invited the other party leaders, Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown, to join him in visiting the town to pay tribute and meet the bereaved. The idea, surely right, was that this should be a grief which united people across politics. Watching the scene on television, I was struck for the first time by Mr Blair’s way of parading feeling, while everyone else, including the

Gyles Brandreth

Diary – 18 March 2006

Observation of the week: all too often a diary is the achievement of those without achievement. I was an MP and a whip in John Major’s government. My political career did not amount to much, but at least my diary provides a partial record of those years. I have been keeping a journal since 1959. In many ways, it keeps me going. Much that I do, I do because of it. I seek out people and experiences, not only for themselves but also — and, sometimes, solely — so that I can write them up. My diary is proof of my existence. As Alan Clark observed, ‘A day that goes

David Caute

God in the brain

Contemporary atheist writers are increasingly inclined to forsake purely rationalist or psychological arguments against the existence of God. The current bunch are gnawing at the edges of neurological and genetic explanations, with the implication that religion may emerge as a ‘natural’, built-in navigational error. The subtitles of the two books under review say more about the pitch they are making than the rather whimsical titles. The genetic approach suggests that religion could be a (sort of) virus inherent in the brain’s response to the human condition. ‘Sort of’ analogies abound in this experimental playground. Psychological explanations of religion were the norm among early 20th-century writers like Freud, Wells, Shaw and

Philip Longworth

A strange reluctance to be free

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 there was widespread talk of Russia soon becoming an open, democratic polity with a thriving civil society. Under President Putin such hopes have faded. The state has seized back much of the power it lost under Yeltsin, devolution has yielded to centralisation, and the prevailing tone is authoritarian rather than libertarian. Yet all this has been popular. Why should the Russian people prefer authority to liberty? The American historian Richard Pipes sets out to answer this question in his latest book. Montesquieu thought that autocracy was a function of Russia’s immensity. Controlling so vast a space with so low a population density encouraged

Paul Johnson

Bottle-beauties and the globalised blond beast

The hair colour gene MCI-R has seven European variants, one of them blond. It is rare and becoming rarer. A WHO survey calculates that the last true blond will be born in Finland in 2202. Do you believe this? Nor do I. A different lot of scientists argue that this gene emerged over a comparatively short period about 10,000 years ago, with food shortages — and shortages of men — speeding up the natural selection process to the advantage of blonds. A touch of old-style Hollywood here? Certainly not the present dump — which Betty Grable would find unrecognisable, Marilyn Monroe chilly and Mae West distinctly hostile — making bad

Jaspistos

Trochaics

In Competition No. 2434 you were invited to write a poem in the metre of Hiawatha entitled ‘Breakfast’. Trochaics have rarely been more amusingly used than in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’, in which H. is exasperatedly trying to take portraits of a very tiresome and camera-conscious Victorian family. Mama is Dressed in jewels and in satinFar too gorgeous for an empress.Gracefully she sat down sidewaysWith a simper scarcely human,Holding in her hand a nosegayRather larger than a cabbage … See the New Oxford Book of Light Verse, edited by Kingsley Amis. The large entry was swelled by half a dozen 10-year-old school pupils, who showed plenty of talent even though

The Spectator

Time to think small, Mr Brown

Someone should remind Gordon Brown of the Hippocratic Oath before he stands up on Wednesday afternoon to deliver his tenth Budget to the House of Commons. Taking his cue from all good doctors, the Chancellor should above all strive to do no harm; in his case that means no new taxes and no more grandiose schemes to save the world. Such a plan of non-action would be a tall order for a Chancellor addicted to social engineering — but it would at least represent a first step towards the radical change of course that will be needed if the British economy is ever to be rescued from its slow but

John Laughland

A chat with Milosevic

John Laughland on a memorable encounter with the butcher of the Balkans at the UN detention centre in The Hague — and his claims of innocence to the last I was one of the last Western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. It was early last year. A fierce wind was whipping the cold rain straight off the sea and through the ugly streets of Scheveningen as I unbundled from my pockets the various secret cameras and recording devices which I had in vain hidden there, and made my way through the security checks at the United Nations Detention Unit. A series of doors clanged open and shut and there was

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 11 March 2006

‘The government are entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that. ‘The government is entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that either. In British English (as opposed to American English) collective nouns may take either a singular or a plural verb. Americans prefer singularity. In a publication like The Spectator, conventions have to be adopted to keep the herbaceous borders of language neat. It is house style to use a singular verb with collective nouns such as government, BBC, nation. If in British English it is normal to regard a company as plural (‘British Leyland are defunct’), that convention

Taki

Winning Wyoming

Gstaad I wrote this last week, as we’re going to press early. It seems everyone who is anyone is staying up late on Sunday night in order to watch the Oscars, and cheer for the gay western which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. I have not seen Brokebutt Mountain, but I hear that the film’s haunting musical score, ‘Homo on the Range’, is wonderful. But these are old, Fifties jokes, and beneath contempt. Mind you, not in Wyoming, where the author of Brokeback Mountain based her story. Wyoming is a wonderful place, where once upon a time my friend Professor Yohannes Goulandris was accosted by some ranchers who

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 11 March 2006

Q. I am in the process of restoring an old barn and want to use only environmentally friendly, locally available or recycled materials. However, the clipboard Nazis at the local council have told me I must coat my exposed beams with fire-retardant paint. I am very anxious to avoid the chemicals contained in these paints. Have you any suggestions, Mary?P.J.K., Cirencester A. Why not take a tip from Lady Bamford’s eco-spa at Daylesford just down the road from you? The spa, housed in an old farm building behind the fashionable shop, was transformed by architect Spencer Fung to a strict ecological brief. He too was instructed by fire officers to

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 11 March 2006

What sells wins From Peggy HatfieldSir: How exciting and unusual to see people in the media advising sexual restraint (‘Anyone for chastity?’, 4 March)! As Piers Paul Read reminds us, our culture is up to its eyeballs in sex — in films and also on the high street. But though I’m quite sure that most normal British people could secretly do without a bonking scene in every film, or vibrators in front of children’s noses in Boots, they daren’t say so, even to their friends, for fear of appearing ‘repressed’. How have we got ourselves into this unsettling state of affairs? Read suggests that feminism and the decline of religion

Frank Keating

Skippers of yore

Pitched suddenly into England’s cricket captaincy, it has been a delight to see Andrew Flintoff going about the job with a smile on his face. However the series ultimately pans out, wholehearted Flintoff’s ursine charms made for a winning start all right. Traditionally, of course, established England captains steered clear of India. The anointed monarchs of my boyhood (Hammond, Yardley, Brown, Hutton and May) never once led a tour to the sub-continent, hiving off the captaincy to such greenhorn amateur apprentices as Nigel Howard and Donald Carr. Later, stalwart county captains like Tony Lewis and Keith Fletcher were given one-tour commands. I was on the latter’s trip in 1981–82. Unlike

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 March 2006

As so often with people in public life, the career of David Mills is beyond satire. If an anti-Blair left-wing playwright invented him, critics would accuse him of improbability. Mr Mills seems to have done almost everything which traditional Labour supporters hate. He has made a career of advising people, including the loathed Silvio Berlusconi, on how to create offshore tax-shelters. He has given questionable court evidence for him, allegedly for money. He facilitated a £300 million sale of tanks by Ukraine to Pakistan. He administered a company in the Isle of Man. He lobbied to prevent the ban on tobacco advertising in motor racing because of his former directorship

Joan Collins

Diary – 11 March 2006

Los Angeles When I boarded the plane for Los Angeles in New York last Friday to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party, as well as several others, the beautiful Uma Thurman was just ahead of me, looking every inch the star (she is, after all, 6ft tall) even though she was sans maquillage. She sweetly turned to me and said, ‘I hear you and your husband are not sitting together — I’m happy to change seats with you if it helps.’ I thanked her, and explained it was OK, because the airline had just bumped Rosie Perez so that Percy and I could sit together. Each year, before the Oscar

Rupert Christiansen

The outsider who felt the cold

The journal ADAM — an acronym for Art, Drama, Architecture and Music — was the life’s work of a Jewish Romanian exile Miron Grindea (1910-95), who was its only editor. Embodying a style of cosmopolitan cultural sophistication, it represents a fascinating episode in the history of the London literary world, its bent being more internationalist than Bloomsbury’s and less Bohemian than Fitzrovia’s or Soho’s. Having started ADAM in Bucharest, Grindea arrived in London on the fateful day of 1 September 1939, re-establishing the journal in 1941 on the thoroughly insecure footing on which it steadfastly remained. But as it tottered heroically from financial crisis to financial crisis — at one