The Week

Diary

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 5 January 2008

It’s that time of year again My Fellow Compassionates! So here they are, my New Year’s Resolutions for 2008! 1.) Go easy on the policy. I don’t know about you but I’m suffering a major hangover in this department. Not that I haven’t enjoyed being at the cutting edge. I was as surprised as anyone

Diary – 5 January 2008

My daughter has just got married and a beautiful and lively event it was, moving from her local church in St James’s Gardens to the Dorchester via Routemaster buses. I took the opportunity in my speech to thank many for their efforts to be present but reserved my principal praise not for those who had

Ancient and modern

Ancient & Modern | 05 January 2008

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman

More from The Week

1828 and All That

The year 2008 marks the 180th anniversary of The Spectator. The original Spectator, founded by Addison and Steele, ran only briefly from 1711 to 1712, although its spirit lives on in our Coffee House blog. Today’s Spectator was founded by Robert Stephen Rintoul, in 1828, and we shall be inviting readers to a series of

Global warning | 5 January 2008

It was part of the convenience of modern life that information about agents in the area should have been immediately accessible to me at the touch of a few keys on a keyboard. Shortly thereafter, however, a rather less pleasant aspect of modernity made itself manifest: most of the agents charged their callers for calling

Letters

Letters | 5 January 2008

Hoggartian paradox The result has been the Hoggartian paradox of programmes that managed to be both, in Simon’s words, ‘scaringly revealing’ and largely covering ‘old and well-travelled ground’. Hoggartian paradox The result has been the Hoggartian paradox of programmes that managed to be both, in Simon’s words, ‘scaringly revealing’ and largely covering ‘old and well-travelled