Crossrail

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger behind the fun

When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts with the death of Dr David Kelly, the former United Nations weapons inspector, discovered dead in woodland on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire on 18 July 2003, shortly after casting doubt on the government dossier that claimed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Rachel was ten at the time, staying with her grandparents and school friend Alison in the nearby village of Beverley. For the next ten years — during which she gets into Oxford from a state school, graduates with a 2:1 in English, and becomes a private tutor

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Remember when Britain could build stuff?

Heathrow. The whole British story is there. Reading up around that debacle last week, I came across the eye-watering — and I think true — claim that, over the course of the second world war, Britain built 444 airfields. Four hundred and forty four. Although not all in the United Kingdom, probably. Some will have been in far-off lands, where Johnny Foreigner could be bought off in exchange for a pretty goat, or just shouted at, at gunpoint, until he went away. Hundreds, though, will have been here, on British soil — where it has now taken us over half an actual century to not quite build a new runway

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Presence of mind

‘It’s hard to know how to tell this story,’ she said as she began. ‘Because it’s so loaded. It’s so heavy-duty.’ Lore Wolfson was talking about the death of her husband, Paul, or rather about the onset of the illness that led him a year later to take an overdose of heroin, aged 61. He had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, in a peculiarly aggressive form, rapidly losing his words, his memory, his capacity to work or function independently. Lore began recording her conversations with Paul very soon after they knew for sure why he was having word-finding difficulties. ‘It was the natural thing to do,’ she said, because she’s

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Spending review 2013: Crossrail 2 is a clear win for Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson’s powers of persuasion have once again wooed George Osborne. In today’s spending review, the Chancellor has put aside £2 million to investigate Crossrail 2 — a new underground line for London. The fact the Mayor was able to bag another win from Osborne — Crossrail 1 was protected from funding cuts in 2010 — is testament to the political power of both the Mayor and the capital. Boris doesn’t even have re-election to think about this time. Crossrail 2 is key to Boris’ London legacy. His grand 2020 vision is peppered with references to the new line, which he claims is vital to London’s future and work could even begin

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: sheep pay for themselves

Why Ukip aren’t extremists Sir: I don’t wish to be rude to Matthew Parris (‘Why Ukip is a party of extremists’, 1 June), but he should think carefully before labelling civilised citizens as extremists. It’s a silly word to use given what real extremists get up to these days, but the important point is that a growing majority of perfectly sane voters see current UK politics as baby steps meandering around a leftward-curving path to decline; and long for some good old-fashioned radicalism to wake everyone up. For many ordinary people, the real lunacy lies not in the Ukip manifesto but rather in our courts’ slavish submission to the ECHR,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Crossrail: transport miracle or public sector folly?

Phyllis has gone to Tottenham Court Road, but Ada is having a day off. In fact she’s slumbering deep below us, just south of Bond Street station with her head under Grays Antique Centre. Phyllis and Ada are twin sisters, 140 metres long, weighing 1,000 tonnes each. I’m imagining them as domesticated versions of those monstrous sandworms on the planet -Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune, with their crystal teeth and ‘bellows breath of cinnamon’. They are the tunnel-boring machines that are munching through London’s sub-terrain from Royal Oak to Farringdon where, some time in autumn 2014, they will bump into their cousins Elizabeth and Victoria, coming the other way from