In Competition No. 2432 you were asked for double or treble clerihews. It was E.C. Bentley’s son Nicholas who invented the double clerihew, and treble ones have been recorded. You were in pioneer country. A clerihew, as I see it, deals with one person, and so accordingly should a double or treble. I was prepared to accept Father, Son and Paraclete separately treated, but not the three Bront
For a politician to invite the television cameras into his home is a risky business. An inexperienced Mrs Thatcher in 1975 merely had to open her larder to the nation to find herself accused of hoarding food. Tony Blair was criticised for the heavily draped curtains in his former Islington home, and John Major’s conservatory impressed nobody but the double-glazing industry. Some Conservatives will have been dismayed that David Cameron, too, has fallen for the temptation to be filmed in a domestic situation, even if his kitchen has proved to be a model of sensible, restrained taste. They will argue that it confirms their concerns that the new Conservative leader
Douglas Davis says that George W. Bush’s drive for global democracy may hand the Hashemite kingdom over to Hamas If unintended consequences are the progeny of political activism, then the fate of King Abdullah of Jordan is a lesson to us all. The West’s best friend in the Arab world is now the region’s most vulnerable monarch. It was, after all, America’s war against Saddam Hussein that produced Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, al-Qa’eda’s main man in Iraq and a sworn enemy of the Hashemite throne in his native Jordan. And it was America’s drive to bring democracy to the Middle East that propelled the Palestinians to the polls and produced the
‘Designer babies’ is headline shorthand for a weird new world of genetic enhancement. Thanks to several generations of science-fiction imagery, it evokes an unnatural and evil world of blond, staring, probably homicidal children, which scares ordinary people. Headlines create a cartoon world that subverts understanding and wisdom, but there is some truth in them. Human ‘enhancement’ is now being pursued in many ways, through life extension, psychoactive drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, information technology and, most obviously, through control of reproduction. The decoding of the human genome in 2000 signalled the start of an era in which we could hope to cure hitherto intractable diseases. But it also offers the
Several years ago, in another lifetime it seems, I played a porn star. In fact I played the Pornstar, in a fairly successful little two-hand play called The Dyke and the Pornstar. The piece gained a deserved reputation for being daring, risqué, even provocative. It was described by one critic as being ‘artfully performed, and sexy as hell’ and it was nominated for something called a UK Freedom Award. (We didn’t win.) Though it played unashamedly on the tactic of shock and awe, we in the company were often surprised that our appreciative, though often embarrassed, audiences overlooked the underlying theme of the piece — the loneliness and emotional fragility
Why do middle-class mums go to the gym for pole-dancing classes? Because, says Ariel Levy, they have been conned by kitschy, slutty ‘raunch culture’ Some version of a sexy, scantily clad temptress has been around through the ages, and there has always been a demand for smut. But whereas this was once a guilty pleasure on the margins — on the almost entirely male margins — now, strippers, porn stars and Playboy bunnies have gone mainstream, writing bestsellers, starring in reality television shows, living a life we’re all encouraged to emulate. Prepubescent girls wear ‘thong’ underpants, their mothers drive off to the gym for pole-dancing classes after lunch. Last week
Miles Douglas on the jealousy, ageism and sexual intrigue of gay men’s lives A few months ago I persuaded one of my oldest and best gay friends to invite his lively, articulate heterosexual neighbours to dinner. The meal was, as I had expected, a great success. Conversation was amusing, flowed naturally along with the wine, and covered an impressive range of subjects. Like any good dinner party, it left a warm afterglow. I have had a long and, many would say, complicated relationship with my host, and later that night I asked him to admit that the party was far more successful than his many all-gay evenings. He did so,
One of America’s most celebrated ‘sexologists’ tells Harry Mount that there are some problems she will not advise on New York ‘I tell them about pressure, foreplay …I introduce them to a vibrator but I tell them never to get too used to it. The penis can never duplicate the vibrations of a vibrator.’ At 77, Dr Ruth Westheimer has still got the old magic. It remains as odd as ever to be taught orgasm lessons by a 4ft 6in grandmother who speaks with the seductive rolling ‘r’s and the guttural ‘achs’ of Marlene Dietrich. That this grandmother should have been orphaned by the Nazis, put on the last train
A semantic challenge of the genuine kind comes to me from the distinguished geographer Professor Alice Coleman. She has been responsible for a survey of the whole country’s land use, or utilisation as her project called it, though that distinction is not the semantic question under discussion. She is also the author of more than 300 academic papers (not that she told me this, being politely modest) and this is connected to her challenge. Professor Coleman has a high concept of research as the discovery of something previously unknown, or ‘putting one’s hand out into the dark and bringing in a fistful of light, or — since the unknown might
Q. A dear friend has been going to Pilates classes. She is very proud of her newly taut torso, but I fear she has been taking the discipline too seriously. She now has the rigid bearing of someone wearing an invisible neck brace, and the last time we hugged I was left with the sense of having hugged something more resembling an ironing board than a human body. I feel I am in no position to make any comments since my own body mass index is 26.1 and it would seem like sour grapes, but should I say something, Mary, and if so what?C.B., Berkshire A. Pilates practitioners are trained
Jackboots of New Labour From Philip FreemanSir: I expected a more robust defence of our liberty from the Spectator (Leading article, 18 February). Just because a majority of the snivelling puritans who populate Parliament today voted for the smoking ban does not mean we should shrug our shoulders and accept it meekly. Individual freedom and liberty are more important than democracry, which is more like mob rule in this country. I am a committed non-smoker, but I have a quaint belief in ‘live-and-let-live’. What’s it got to do with me if somebody smokes in a pub? I’ll go elsewhere if necessary. Are we really going to tell a war veteran
Six Nations’ rugby resumes this weekend. Still all to play for. The first two rounds of the tournament, which ends on 18 March, produced a generally grey show of unforced errors and a glum lack of daring. Only the briefest shaft of sunlight has penetrated. BBC television’s overly enthusiastic blanket coverage, welcome in some ways, has been too desperately schizoid in its execution; the live play’s coherence interrupted by so many muttering ex-player experts dotted around all over, alongside comely, bland-questioning blondes. The refereeing has been as blinkered as much of the play. England have won both their matches, yet with neither flair nor all-court conviction. The outstanding team performance
Tory criticism of David Cameron has begun. Robin Harris gives the best articulation so far of the case against the new leader in the latest issue of Prospect. This attack was inevitable, and some of it is correct. It is wrong, for example, to disparage grammar schools — and this was a mistake which no non-public-school-educated Conservative would have made. But the critics still have not understood the premise on which Mr Cameron’s actions are based. They work on the assumption that the Conservative party has a secure place in the political landscape. It has only to achieve the right policies, therefore, and it will win the election. Mr Cameron
A clause to criminalise the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, which had been removed from the Terrorism Bill by the Lords, was reinstated when the Bill was passed in the Commons by a majority of 38, with only 17 Labour MPs voting against the government. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the vote, ‘The type of demonstrations that we saw a couple of weeks ago, where I think there were placards and images that people in this country felt were totally offensive, the law will allow us to deal with those people and say, “Look, we have free speech in this country, but don’t abuse it”.’ A High Court judge
Is there perhaps at the bottom of the Thames, slithering back and forth with the tides, a muddy heap of mobile phones, glowing faintly in the dark, some emitting their last faint trills and so interfering with the radar of errant amphibians? I only wonder because nobody every returns to me the mobiles which, to the despair of Mrs Oakley, I lose at frequent intervals. I use only secondhand untrendy models of no interest to passing youth and I label each one with name, address and telephone number. The last two were abandoned in taxis but never made it to the Lost Property Centre. Presumably it is too much trouble
The story goes that my great-grandfather Murray Finch Hatton, MP for Lincolnshire in the 1880s and later 12th Earl of Winchilsea, shot an African tracker in the leg while big-game shooting in Kenya. Mortified by what he had done, he rushed forward and gave the tracker a golden guinea. The man limped off, but soon returned. He had consulted his wife, he said, and wondered if his lordship might kindly oblige by shooting him again. Dick Cheney didn’t need a golden guinea to buy the goodwill of Harry Whittington, 78, the multimillionaire Republican lawyer he shot two weeks ago while quail-shooting in south Texas. In fact, it is hard to
In the spring of 1916, the young French officer Charles de Gaulle was captured at Verdun. The French demanded from the British a diversionary offensive to prevent the entire French army from collapsing. Most British troops were not yet trained for such an effort. Nonetheless, they opened an offensive on the Somme. There, the young British officer, Harold Macmillan, was almost fatally wounded. Twenty-seven years later, the Anglo-Americans intrigued against that same de Gaulle in North Africa, and he intrigued back against the same. Churchill sent that same Macmillan from London to help resolve the dispute. De Gaulle survived as Free French leader, partly as a result of Macmillan’s diplomatic
Prince Charles was low in the water during the early 1990s. The collapse of any marriage is painful. In the case of the Prince the agony was magnified beyond endurance by a merciless public scrutiny with which the royal publicity machine, whose armoury of lethal weapons included the raised eyebrow and the old boy network, was ill equipped to deal. Looking back, the Prince must have drawn on enormous reserves of moral courage in order to cope at all. Relief came only with the arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland, smart, gay, and educated at a comprehensive school. Five years later Bolland was rightly named PR professional of the year.
The recent death of Michael Wharton, aged 92, raises the interesting question: who was the most right-wing person who ever lived? Many thought he was. I am not sure he did himself. The last time I saw him, when he was already very old, I asked him how he saw himself and he replied, ‘Moving to the right.’ He said this as if regretting a life of obstinate radicalism, though as the honorary editor-in-chief of the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald for more than half a century it was always difficult to get to the right of him (I tried) in any issue on the political agenda. On other matters
In Competition No. 2431 you were invited to write a poem commemorating the recent death of the whale in the Thames. Verse marking a special occasion can be serious (Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’) or light (Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’). I can only explain the fact that this was the smallest entry I have ever received by the supposition that many of you wrongly thought that I was asking for a funny poem on an unfunny subject. Perhaps it would have been easier to treat the subject with a straight face if it