Society

Saturday

Emma Tennant

Heroes who looked, saw and thought

I imagine that most people, if asked who was responsible for the familiar method of classifying plants and animals into families, genera and species, would name the 18th-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. It is true that he named more species than anyone else, but in this magisterial book his work is seen as little more than a footnote to that of his predecessors. Linnaeus was a filer and an organiser, who eliminated synonyms, and standardised the binomial system whereby two words — the generic name and the specific epithet — describe every species in the Kingdom of Creation. Linnaeus’ predecessors were the original thinkers whose story Anna Pavord tells. In doing

Bevis Hillier

Smut from the Warden of Wadham

Like Sir Edward Marshall Hall and the first Lord Birkenhead, Mr Justice Rigby Swift was one of those lawyers around whom stories accrete like barnacles. He was a Lancastrian who stayed what they call ‘true to his northern roots’; barristers referred to him as ‘Rig-ba’ in imitation of his accent. Born in 1874, the same year as Churchill, he had not gone to university but trained in his father’s chambers in Liverpool; in court, the two called each other ‘m’learned friend’. In 1920, at 46, Swift became the youngest High Court judge. In most respects he was liberal and jovial. He thought the divorce laws ‘cruel’ and believed there was

David Dimbleby

Unconventional site- seeing

I know of a man who took his new bride as a honeymoon treat on a tour of the sites where the Yorkshire Ripper had murdered his victims. A curious choice, but she declared herself well pleased with the visit and in particular with the delicious salami sandwiches her husband provided. I remembered this odd tale when browsing through Clive Aslet’s Landmarks of Britain. Among his ‘Five Hundred Places that Made Our History’ is Bridego Bridge near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, scene of the Great Train Robbery. All I remember of that night in 1963 was that the train driver was brutally beaten about the head and was so badly injured

Jaspistos

Diabolical

In Competition No. 2422 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose entitled ‘Dinner with the Devil’. ‘My meal consisted of an omelette made from eggs seven years past their sell-by date and stuffed with the minced brains of lunatics who never attended church on Sunday’ — Adam Campbell’s menu, reminiscent of Miss Thatcher’s recent gastronomic ordeals on television, struck the sort of flesh-creeping note that Dickens relished at Christmas. But the winners, printed below, were the ones who remained urbane and witty rather than horripilant. They get £25 apiece, and Adrian Fry has the bonus fiver. I wish you all as happy a Christmas as

Paul Johnson

Time for St George to start slaying dragons again

The most striking work in the spine-tingling show at the National Gallery, ‘Rubens: A Master in the Making’, is the enormous painting of St George slaying the Dragon (Prado). What I like about Rubens is that he always goes over the top. Here, the head of the saint’s charger, and especially the mane, is a creative phantasmagoria of hirsute auxesis, and balancing it is the monster’s crazy head, especially the mouth, already skewered by St George’s lance, and exhibiting catastrophic cavities of such horror that it ought to hang in dentists’ waiting-rooms as an example of what happens if you don’t scour your teeth with a yard-brush. The dragon is

The Spectator

Portrait of the Year

JANUARY Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said it was all right to kill burglars ‘honestly and instinctively’. Iraq held elections. Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the al-Qa’eda leader in Iraq, said, ‘We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy.’ The numbers killed by the deadly wave that devastated the fringes of the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 was put at 178,000. Mrs Adriana Iliescu, aged 67, gave birth to a baby girl in Bucharest. China decided to measure Mount Everest, amid reports that it had shrunk by four feet. FEBRUARY Members of the IRA murdered Robert McCartney, a Catholic, at a Belfast pub, provoking

The Spectator

The audit of war

Following the example of progressive local authorities, this magazine will not, on this page this year, be celebrating Christmas but an alternative festival of light in which Muslims can share too. It is called the elections for a permanent government in Iraq. As we go to press, the polling booths are being prepared to enable the people of Iraq, for the second time in a year and only the second time in their history, freely to elect their own leaders: this time for a four-year term. Like ‘winterval’, the secular, multicultural festival concocted by the City of Birmingham, nobody is quite sure what it all means. Does it mark the

Minette Marrin

Don’t even ask

‘Say seebong-seebong, say seebong-seebong,’ sang the Filipino band in their white tuxedos, swaying cheerfully from side to side. ‘Si bon, si bon,’ whispered Sweetie to the music, smiling carefully, swaying her sumptuous jade earrings in time to the Filipinos’ narrow hips and tapping her manicured nails on the tablecloth; everyone said that before she had left her last husband, who was with the Banque de L’Indochine, she had made him pay for a face lift and a bottom lift. ‘Si bon, si bon,’ she half-sang again, looking archly at her guests round the table; she was giving a birthday party for her new husband, a Scottish investment banker. For its

Rian Malan

The Great White Hyena

Cape Town ‘This is a goer,’ declares Deon du Plessis. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the Great White Hyena is presiding over a news conference in the Johannesburg offices of the Daily Sun, the largest daily in Africa. Mr du Plessis is publisher and part-owner. Seated before him are his editor, Themba Khumalo, an amiable Zulu in a baseball cap, and a cheerful menagerie of subs and reporters. Some weeks ago they ran a story headlined ‘Dark Secrets of Crime Terror!’ which revealed that unscrupulous witch-doctors were charging up to £8,000 for magical potions (almost) guaranteed to render thieves and armed robbers invisible to police. Now fate has delivered a follow-up

Alasdair Palmer

Life, liberty and terrorists

‘When it comes to the British courts,’ Charles Clarke insists, ‘I am a perpetual optimist.’ Which is fortunate, because he needs to be. We met on the day the Law Lords proclaimed that the government was not permitted to detain terrorist suspects on the basis of evidence which might have been extracted under torture. The government had been arguing that it needed to be able to use such information in court in order lawfully to detain people who were a threat to the British public. The Law Lords called that argument ‘disquieting’ and ‘disturbing’. It was merely the latest in a series of reverses that the government’s policies to combat

John Hemming

The people who shun us

I have just spent a week in Amazonia with Sydney Possuelo, the man I regard as the world’s greatest explorer — well, at any rate, the greatest tropical explorer. Weatherbeaten, balding, with a neat salt-and-pepper beard, 65-year-old Sydney exudes vitality and charm. Although he has just had a triple heart bypass, he looks lean and fit, as you would expect of someone who has spent much of his life in unexplored rainforests and who has by no means hung up his hammock and mosquito net. For two years in the early 1990s Sydney Possuelo was a very successful president of the Brazilian government’s Indian protection agency, Funai. But he is

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The awkward squad

An excited twitter filled the assembly room of the Eastside Young Leaders Academy (EYCA) in Plaistow, east London. ‘David Cameron’s arrived! He’s in the corridor! He’s nearly here!’ Day three of his leadership, and just the thought of Dave’s presence has the same effect on Tories as Will Young has on teenage girls. Middle-aged charity workers patted their hair, Dave’s female handlers began to herd hacks into ever smaller spaces; across the room our host, Iain Duncan Smith, sat up straighter. A silence, then David Cameron bounced in, his left hand clenched in its trademark fist, his face the usual pink. Bulbs flashed, women clapped, pens scratched. ‘I’m here,’ said

Tina Brown

Can anything stop Hillary?

New York It may have been lost in all the news about Iraq but Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat Senator of New York, has received the 2005 National Farmers Union presidential award for her leadership in introducing the Milk Import Tariff Equity Act. The snippy feminist who nearly derailed her husband’s first presidential campaign by scoffing that she didn’t just ‘stay home and bake cookies’ can now be presented as the Butter Queen of the Empire State. It’s another piquant moment in the stunning evolution of Hillary Clinton. The first lady who chafed at the hostessy duties of political wifehood has been all homey practicality since she got out of

Roger Scruton

Your countryside needs you

Roger Scruton says that it’s time for rural residents to protect the land they love by clubbing together and buying it If you look at an electoral map of England, you will discover that most of it is blue, the occasional pockets of red corresponding to the large conurbations. Rural England is Tory and always has been. It is not surprising, therefore, if our present government has little affection for the countryside, or if it is always looking for new ways either to punish rural voters or to destroy the idyll that nourishes their dissent. No character in politics more clearly embodies this anti-rural sentiment than John Prescott, whose plans

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 10 December 2005

Mr David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative party in a ballot of members, beating Mr David Davis by 134,446 votes to 64,398. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his pre-Budget report astonished investors planning self-invested personal pensions by announcing that they ‘will be prohibited from obtaining tax advantages when investing in residential property and certain other assets such as fine wines’. He also enraged North Sea oil producers by increasing corporation tax on their profits, from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Mr Brown hoped to get an extra £2.3 billion from the oil taxes and another £700 million from other corporate taxes, in

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 10 December 2005

Austria and the Jews In Austria it is illegal publicly to deny the Holocaust (‘Let Irving speak’, 3 December). ‘Words are deeds,’ said Sigmund Freud, and in Austria we are aware of this connection. ‘There is no more anti-Semitic nation in Western Europe than Austria’? Neither the report on ‘Manifestations of anti-Semitism in the EU, 2002–2003’ by the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, nor the recent study by the Anti-Defamation League on ‘Attitudes towards Jews in 12 European countries’ corroborates this claim. It is true and shameful that many Austrians participated in the Holocaust. Was this guilt ‘extraordinary’? A relatively greater number of Austrian Jews survived than did

Frank Keating

Comparing colossi

England’s cricketers came rudely down to earth in the rose-red sandstone of Lahore, and they remain in the old Punjab for another week as they endeavour to pick up the pieces in the one-day rubber which begins today. Less than three months after the heady Ashes parades they began the Test series as warm favourites, but after their batsmen wantonly surrendered a winning position in the first match at Multan they were seldom in the ball park as a suddenly vibrant young Pakistan team, under the shrewd guidance of English coach Bob Woolmer and serenely avuncular captain Inzamam-ul-Haq, grew into men in front of our very eyes. To be honest,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 10 December 2005

Q. Recently I agreed to a male friend of mine’s suggestion to take out a couple that we both know. I said that I would pay for half the dinner as the couple had entertained me many times. The male friend had recently joined an old established club and wanted to take the couple there, so I agreed. I told him to let me know discreetly at the end how much my half of the bill would be. I then arranged a convenient date with the couple as he asked me to do this. However, at the dinner itself, as the evening wore on, I became worried that the couple

Taki

Sliding back to anarchy

New York My last week in the Bagel and then back to good old London. And it’s just as well I’m still here, or some of Sunny Marlborough’s children might take a swipe at me. Last week I wrote about the old duke, correctly calling him Sunny, a diminutive which derives from Sunderland, one of his family handles. Somehow the ‘u’ turned into an ‘o’, as in Sonny Corleone, plus an ‘l’ went missing, which reminded me of the bad old days of 1977, when disgrundled printers massacred names on purpose. But not to worry. Thanks to Lady T. and the ghastly Murdoch the printers have gone the way of

Robin Oakley

Stars of the future

Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin said the other day that he had got on better first time at George Bush’s ranch than he had expected. ‘He must have thought: “What’s going to happen if he invites in a former Intelligence officer?” But Bush himself is the son of a former head of the CIA, so we were a nice little family circle.’ It reminded me of asking Tony Blair after his first meeting with Putin how it had felt doing business with a guy who had made his way in the world not as a democratic politician but as a KGB spook. ‘Well,’ mused the PM, ‘there are some advantages. It