China

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

One foot on the catwalk

St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion world before his suicide in 2010. It opens with a mysterious stalker, Dahlia, breaking into McQueen’s Mayfair home and demanding that he make her a dress. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shrieks but she placates him and they embark on a surreal odyssey to his childhood haunts where they meet his mentors past and present. A pretty clunky start. Who is Dahlia? A dramatic ploy, a figment of McQueen’s imagination or a real person? We don’t know so we don’t care about their relationship. Still less about her flipping dress.

Thursday

Kabita Sapkota

Katmandu Notebook

After the first earthquake we were told that the chance of another one was 200 to 1. A fortnight later, when we were just beginning to recover, the second one hit. Perhaps I’m getting better at this, because this time I was able to control my body enough to run outside and join the crowd in the street. Standing with my family, looking back towards our home, I could see dust billowing from the foundations of the houses. They seemed to be dancing back and forth. The chances of a third strike, we’re told, are minuscule. Should we believe this? No one feels ready to relax. Nearly all of us

Friday

Maggie Gray

Dulwich Picture Gallery fakes its own Fragonard

This article was first published on Apollo magazine’s blog The latest addition to Dulwich Picture Gallery’s permanent collection display was a bargain at $88. For weeks the cheap Chinese copy after Fragonard’s Young Woman – commissioned by contemporary artist Doug Fishbone – stood in for the original, unmarked and slotted into the old frame, as a challenge to visitors. Could they spot the ‘fake’? They could not, as it turns out. Of the 3,000 people who made a guess, only 12 per cent correctly identified the impostor. The rest of us walked past without a second thought – though perhaps with a slightly diminished opinion of poor Fragonard. Last week, when the original was

Thursday

Harry Mount

Two wheels good

Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and certainly addicted in my need to have a daily bike ride. But I can see why people — and drivers in particular — hate some of us: for our smugness, our need to keep on moving through red lights and along pavements. It isn’t like this in Holland, where bicycling is so embedded in daily life that most drivers are bicyclists and vice versa; where mutual understanding leads to mutual respect. Why do bicycles have this effect? Of intense affection among some, hatred among others; of mass use in some

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Designer fatigue

Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault with the habits of their contemporary the Duke of Wellington. At the Bovary wedding were served four sirloins, six chicken fricassées, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, four chitterlings (with sorrel), brandy, wine, foaming sweet cider, yellow custards, tarts and sweets with an architectural cake comprising angelica, oranges, nuts, jam and chocolate. The austere Duke’s ‘conception of duty’, David Piper wrote, ‘did not provoke popularity at all times’. His daily routine was tea with bread and butter in the morning, no lunch and an unvaryingly simple dinner of a joint

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The roots of the matter

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/panictimefordavidcameron-/media.mp3″ title=”Lara Prendergast and Louise Bailey, a hair extensions specialist, discuss the hair trade” startat=1622] Listen [/audioplayer]Perhaps you recall the moment in Les Misérables when Fantine chops off all her hair? The destitute young mother sells her long locks, then her teeth (a detail often excluded from child-friendly adaptations) before she is eventually forced into prostitution. It would be nice to think that her experience was no longer a reality, that the business of human hair had gone the way of the guillotine — but the truth is, it’s booming. The modern market for extensions made of real human hair is growing at an incredible rate. In 2013, £42.8

Tom Leonard

Shrunk

 New York City Nothing says New York like a psychoanalyst’s couch. Think Woody Allen or those New Yorker cartoons. It fits our perception of east-coast Americans as all neurotic and self-obsessed. But that mental picture needs updating, because traditional psychoanalysis is in dramatic decline in its traditional heartland. Across the urban US, in fact, the profession is dying out or having to change drastically. New figures from the American Psychoanalytic Association reveal that the average age of its 3,109 members is 66, up four years in a decade. More seriously, the average numbers of patients each therapist sees has fallen to 2.75. Some shrinks now never meet patients, dealing with

Steven Poole

Indulge your inner reptile

What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question no one in their right mind would ask, but this book represents a kind of answer anyway. Offering a rambling pseudoscientific argument that some countries are better than others at enabling their citizens to flourish, it affects to have uncovered archetypes of the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ that are characteristic of each nation. Meanwhile, cultures get a gold star if they indulge, rather than repress, the ‘reptilian’ part of our brains, which is mainly interested in food and sex, as opposed to the ‘limbic’ brain (emotions) and the cortex (higher reasoning).

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

Little brother’s helper

Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively pulls the rug out from under the other? Of course Gyalo Thondup is entitled to tell his story, beginning with his life as a boy in a small town near the Tibet-China border where, in 1937, his younger brother was identified as the 14th Dalai Lama. He recalls everything from then on without a shadow of doubt: his family’s long overland trip to Lhasa, their transformed, luxurious life there, his trips to China, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong, learning Chinese and about China, and marrying a Chinese woman. He further

Wednesday

Andrew J. Bacevich

The Iran deal heralds a new era for US policy across the Middle East

What is it about a nuclear deal with Iran that induces hysteria in certain quarters of the West?  In recent weeks, editors at both the New York Times and the Washington Post have seen fit to run op-eds calling for preemptively bombing Iran, apparently under the impression that preventive war has not yet received a fair shake.  Sure, Iraq didn’t work out, but why quit now?  By ensuring that the American people and their leaders do not overlook the possibility of giving war one more chance in Iran, these newspapers are presumably performing a public service.    In the Times, John Bolton, Dr. Strangelove with an unkempt moustache, describes a situation on ‘the brink of

Thursday

Will Heaven

Britain’s educational empire

Late last year Britain’s independent schools received a wake-up call. Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s College School in Wimbledon, delivered it. Far too many of them, he said, have become the ‘finishing schools for the children of oligarchs’ because of an ‘apparently endless queue’ of wealthy foreigners who have pushed fees sky-high; there’s a ‘fees time bomb ticking away’ and one day, when it explodes, a lot of these schools are going to be screwed. It really was that blunt. Cue cheers from struggling parents all over the country, and squeals from school governors, who’d rather no one asked too many questions about the £30,000 price tag on a child’s yearly education.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

How Labour’s 50p tax trick has ended up helping George Osborne

Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention than the employment and wage-growth numbers a week earlier, underlining my belief that voters care a lot less (or indeed not at all) about the intangible ‘fiscal deficit’ and its implications than they do about their own prospects and spending power. And rightly so. Failure to shrink the deficit at the rate he first promised is nevertheless the one major issue on which George Osborne is seriously open to criticism as Chancellor. But what matters in political terms at this stage is that borrowing this year is 7.5 per cent

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

What’s good about austerity (whatever the Greeks think)

The only question I remember from my Oxford moral philosophy paper was ‘What is integrity and is it a virtue?’ In the margins of all the politicking that follows the victory of Syriza in the Greek election, I hope someone asks: ‘What is austerity, is it a virtue, and why has it worked in the UK and Ireland but failed in Greece?’ My own definition of austerity in the context of financial crisis, when I debated it with former Greek finance minister George Papaconstantinou, was ‘a synonym for frugal, uncorrupt government supported by willing taxpayers of the sort that has been largely absent in southern Europe’, at which George got

Thursday

Richard Walker

The real mystery is how it got published

As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless enterprise involved things like staining paper with tea or vinegar, together with plenty of burning, and creasing, and copying of random texts with a scratchy old inkwell pen. Typical silly small boy stuff. Reading this book on a collection of maps supposedly derived from Marco Polo suddenly brought it all back — especially the silliness. Now Marco Polo is a figure wreathed in some mystery. He was known from the 14th century as the first European to report in detail and from personal experience on that fabulous world called ‘Cathay’,

Wednesday

The Spectator

Cameron’s reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks has been depressingly predictable

Last Sunday, David Cameron marched through Paris in solidarity, so it seemed, with those who stand up for free speech. Anyone who thought he meant it must now be crying out, ‘Je suis un right Charlie!’ Hardly had the march finished than the Prime Minister had rediscovered his other side: the one which reacts to terror by threatening yet more surveillance, more state control. He has promised to revive, in the Conservative manifesto, the ‘-snooper’s charter’ which would allow the state to retain indefinitely information about every email we ever send, every telephone call we ever make. Not only that. He added a further measure: he wants to ban all

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The eurozone is strong enough to kick out Greece if Syriza wins

Ever since European Central Bank president Mario Draghi declared himself ready, in July 2012, ‘to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro’, the likely disintegration of the single currency — as predicted by pundits such as yours truly over the preceding years — has all but disappeared from the comment agenda. The combination of a persuasive ECB leader with reform in some bailed-out eurozone states (notably Ireland and Spain) and an easing of bond market pressures, plus the iron will of Germany to see the euro survive, drove the break-up argument into retreat. Indeed it seemed for a while to have been vanquished, and that ex-president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing

Thursday

Damian Thompson

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

How would the real Mary Magdalene have reacted to her posthumous reputation? Not very kindly, one suspects. Our only historical source, the New Testament, does not even hint that she was a prostitute, and she’s unlikely to have been placated by Christians telling her: ‘It’s OK, we think you were a reformed whore.’ No one in the Bible has been so elaborately misrepresented. In addition to not being an ex-prostitute, Mary of Magdala was not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints the feet of Jesus with ‘about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume’ and then wipes it up with her hair. Nor was

Monday

Jonathan Mirsky

Spectator books of the year: Jonathan Mirsky on dogs

The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs by Mikita Brottman (William Collins, £16.99). I have read thousands of books in my 81 years and this is the only one that has made me happy. Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the real world out there, towards which I am increasingly ambivalent’. This book deals frankly and unsentimentally with the question of whether dogs really love us and describes close relationships between dogs and their owners, going back to Alexander the Great and including Virginia Woolf, Galsworthy and Dickens. And into each learned, sprightly chapter pads Grisby. The New

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 November 2014

Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote in the Commons, which enraged backbenchers all the more. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, tabled a procedural motion, forcing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to hurry from the Lord Mayor’s banquet in white tie to vote amid angry scenes. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came back from Brussels claiming that Britain would now only have to pay half of a £1.7 billion bill that the European Union had presented; but critics said that he was merely counting a future rebate that Britain was owed in any case. A

Douglas Murray

Citizenfour: the paranoia of Snowden & co will bore you to death

In simple entertainment terms Citizenfour isn’t as interesting as watching paint dry. It is more like watching someone else watching paint dry. People with opinions on Edward Snowden tend to divide into those who think he’s one of the biggest heroes of all time and those who think he’s at least one of the worst patsies or traitors of all time. Either way it’s hard to imagine why either party would want to watch two hours of footage of him typing on a keyboard. And then typing some more. While the camera focuses on him from the other side of the keyboard. For a very long time. Neither is it