Paris

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The painter as poser

Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was Buffet’s original backer and boyfriend, later performing identical roles for Yves Saint-Laurent, turning the sensitive designer into a global ‘luxury brand’ and turning himself into one of France’s richest men with pistonnage to spare. Foulkes is the accomplished writer on style who, in this new book, aims to rehabilitate an artistic reputation which he feels has been dissed by the narrow prejudices of the art-historical establishment. To a degree, this is true. Because Buffet’s scratchy and splashy paintings are (mawkishly) ‘figurative’, he never satisfied the criteria of ‘relevance’ and ‘progress’

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Moving statues

One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche in the centre of Oxford for more than a century without, for the most part, attracting any attention at all. Now, of course, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign is demanding that the sculpture — its subject having been posthumously found guilty of racism and imperialism — should be taken down from the façade of Oriel College. The controversy is a reminder of the fact, sometimes forgotten by the British, that public statues are intensely political. This was clear — until quite recently, at least — when one drove into the

Saturday

A A Gill

Despite terror and tragedy, the world remains a miraculous place

I was on Kangaroo Island, in the great Australian Southern Ocean, when I heard about the terrorist attack on Paris. It was Paul, an abalone diver, who passed on the brief story of atrocity as we bobbed in his chaotic old rubber boat beside black swans, piebald cormorants and piping oystercatchers in the silver morning chill. He was putting on his wetsuit and checking his air line, strapping on his weights before slipping over the side to collect urchins and purple-shelled king scallops. ‘It’s terrible, just terrible,’ he said, in a tone that implied I must be used to this sort of thing. ‘It’s why we live out here. Nothing

Thursday

Miriam Gross

Diary – 31 December 2015

Disappointingly, the recent film about Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, does not include the thing about him which most struck me in Walter Isaacson’s biography: Jobs habitually parked in disabled parking bays. Naturally, this is something that I (in company with many drivers, I suspect) long to do whenever disabled spaces are the only available parking, especially when two or three of them are standing empty. But I don’t — even for a five-minute dash to Tesco. The fear of exposure stops me, as well perhaps as a smidgen of unselfishness. The fact that Steve Jobs unhesitatingly committed this minor offence reveals more about him — that he was unscrupulous, that he didn’t

Douglas Murray

Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam? | 31 December 2015

Written after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January and revised after the Paris attacks in November, Douglas Murray’s piece on politicians’ responses to Islamic terror attacks was The Spectator‘s third most read article of 2015: The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The political wisdom of people who don’t even know what a circle is

Why are liberals morons? I’m sure that this question has rattled around your mind before, perhaps when watching one of those fair and balanced debates between three ill-dressed but very liberal women that Newsnight puts on every evening, hosted by Kirsty Wark. You hear them tiptoeing through the -nether regions of some important political issue, carefully sidestepping the nub of the matter, obfuscating, denying the patently obvious even when it is staring them right in their smug faces, jabbering ineffectually about nothing in essence. How can these silly mares be this way, you may have asked yourself. How can they navigate their way through life on such slender mental resources?

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

France: #ToutsAuBistrot!

My word, I do like the French! That’s up there with things I thought I’d never say, like ‘Just the one, please.’ But after spending three days in Paris two weeks after the Islamist massacre, I have become their biggest fan. Yes, I’m fully aware that the Parisiennes aren’t the French –— but the pedants among you will please overlook the sweeping generalisation. I thought it was important, having read that France had already lost €2 million worth of business due to a wave of cancellations, to show support. When I read that Parisiennes were trending the hashtag ‘#ToutsAuBistrot’, it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we arrived on the first day

Saturday

Benny Peiser

Don’t worry: the Paris climate deal is non-binding – and, ergo, toothless

The Paris agreement is another acknowledgement of international reality. Further proof, if any was needed, that the developing world will not agree to any legally binding caps, never mind reductions of their CO2 emissions. As seasoned observers predicted, the Paris deal is based on a voluntary basis which allows nations to set their own voluntary CO2 targets and policies without any legally binding caps or international oversight. In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris deal removes all legal obligations for governments to cap or reduce CO2 emissions. This voluntary agreement also removes the mad rush into unrealistic decarbonisation policies that are both economically and politically unsustainable. (And this is, word-for-word, the same

Bjørn Lomborg

The Paris Climate deal addresses 1pc of the problem. How is that a victory?

The  Paris deal promises to keep temperature rises below 2°C. However, the actual promises made here will do almost nothing to achieve that. It is widely accepted that to keep temperature rises below 2°C, we have to reduce CO₂ emissions by 6,000Gt. The UNFCCC estimates that if every country makes every single promised Paris deal carbon cut by 2030 to the fullest extent possible and there is no carbon leakage, CO₂ emissions will be cut by 56 Gt by 2030. The maths is simple: in an implausibly optimistic best-case scenario, Paris leaves 99pc of the problem in place. To say that Paris will get us to “well below 2°C” is cynical posturing at best. It relies on wishful thinking. It’s

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

How Marine Le Pen is winning over the Muslim vote

‘Shock’ was the one-word headline on the front of Monday’s Le Figaro. France was bracing itself for a swing to the right in Sunday’s regional elections, but few imagined it would be quite as dramatic. Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN) polled nearly 30 per cent of the vote in the first round of voting, ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right Les Républicains and the ruling Socialist Party, who trailed in third with 23 per cent. As it stands, the FN are on course to take control of six regions after Sunday’s second round, although the predictions are they will triumph in no more than three due to tactical voting. Among those who

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 December 2015

Home The House of Commons voted on air strikes in Syria. Labour MPs had been allowed a free vote by their party amid much ill-feeling. Members of the shadow cabinet shouted at Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, when he tried to insist that the formal Labour party policy should be to oppose air strikes. Mr Corbyn said: ‘We’re going to kill people in their homes by our bombs.’ Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, said: ‘Inaction has a cost in lives, too.’ Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women, was said to have been successfully treated for schizophrenia and was being considered for transfer from Broadmoor

Michael O'Connell-Davidson

Forget Syria: a weak Greece endangers us all

There is nothing waiting for people who leave school in Greece today. It does not matter how much young Greeks might be able to give to their nation, because their nation has little to give them in return. Over the weekend, The Times reported that young Greek women are selling sex for as low as €2. Some are even exchanging sessions for cheese pasties, because they cannot afford to eat. It’s not just young Greeks who are suffering. Pensioners are being squeezed by Greece’s creditors, and drugs thrive amongst the homeless in Athens. Election after election has only served to make the country’s political crisis worse, with the second general strike in

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A different species of argument

Because I used to go to venues like Bataclan an awful lot myself, I’ve been dwelling a great deal on what the fans must have gone through that night. And the conclusion I’ve reached is how utterly random the whole business must have been: whether you survived or died was almost entirely dependent on being at the right or wrong bit at the right or wrong time. Even the band Eagles Of Death Metal, it turns out, only escaped by the skin of their teeth. The bassist barricaded himself into a room; the singer and guitarist escaped into the street and went briefly back to look for a missing girlfriend

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

There’s nothing cowardly about the French

Several years ago I visited the village of Couillery in Lower Normandy to interview Juliette Girard for a book I was writing about the wartime SAS. She was 80, small, grey and bird-like. She still lived on the farm on which she’d grown up, the same farm where in the summer of 1944 she hid three members of the SAS. The Germans knew the British had parachuted into the area and for nearly two weeks they scoured the countryside. They came to the farm where Juliette lived with her parents; they searched it inside out, but the soldiers had been smuggled out of the back, across a field and into

Thursday

Taki

It is political correctness, not maniacal bigots, that will end civilisation

What does one do, attend or refuse a party after a tragic event such as the recent Paris outrage? My son happens to live next to Place de la République, where the massacre of innocents by those nice Islamists showing off their manhood took place. He was having dinner with his two little children when the shooting started. Luckily, they’re all OK, but I spent a terrible couple of hours trying to get through after the news came over the TV screens. The next evening in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute was celebrating The Art of Style with a black-tie dinner honouring Jacqueline de

Jeremy Clarke

The GP charged around to my side of the table and roved her hand all over my pubic area

On Friday morning I was peeing razor blades so I rang up the doctor and was given an appointment after lunch. The surgery was at the top of a dingy staircase in an ancient, dilapidated village house. Except for some magazines spread out on a table, the waiting room might have been a comfortably furnished private sitting room. The woman with whom I am staying speaks better French than me and she came along to translate if necessary. We sat down on one of the sofas, and while we waited she picked up a magazine and was immediately absorbed by beach photos of celebrity couples. I made a snobbish remark

Alexander Chancellor

How do you explain events that even adults can’t understand to a child?

Seeing my ten-year-old daughter, Freya, a week after the massacre in Paris, I asked her if she had heard anything about the events there. She said, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, that she had heard something, but didn’t say what it was or from whom she had heard it. All she would say was that it hadn’t been mentioned by her teachers at school. And then she changed the subject. I didn’t feel like saying any more on the matter. Either she didn’t know anything much or she didn’t want to talk about it. And what would have been the point of discussing something so horrible with her? We

Toby Young Toby Young

Mr Spielberg, you cannot be serious

I wonder if Steven Spielberg is having second thoughts about Bridge of Spies in light of the attack on Paris? Spielberg’s latest film —released this week and tipped for Oscar glory — is an espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War with no immediate relevance to the ‘war’ we find ourselves in today. But it contains a strong liberal message about the importance of observing due process when dealing with enemy combatants and prisoners of war. The hero of Bridge of Spies is James Donovan (Tom Hanks), a straight-arrow insurance lawyer who is asked by the American government to defend Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a Brooklyn-based artist

Andrew J.

The pretend war: bombing Isil won’t solve the problem

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatfakewar/media.mp3″ title=”Andrew J. Bacevich and Con Coughlin discuss the West’s war with Isis” startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer]Not so long ago, David Cameron declared that he was not some ‘naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet’. Just a few weeks after making that speech, Cameron authorised UK forces to join in the bombing of Libya — where the outcome reaffirmed this essential lesson. Soon Cameron will ask parliament to share his ‘firm conviction’ that bombing Raqqa, the Syrian headquarters of the Islamic State, has become ‘imperative’. At first glance, the case for doing so appears compelling. The atrocities in Paris certainly warrant a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The French might as well bomb Belgium

I am always open to spiritual guidance from any quarter, all the more so if that guidance is of practical import. So I was especially grateful to hear reports of a fatwa from the prominent Saudi Arabian cleric, Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah. This fatwa apparently made it clear that it was perfectly permissible for me, if suffering from ‘severe hunger’, to eat my wife. Either eat all of her — or merely, as it helpfully elucidated, some of her ‘body parts’. It did not say which body parts. In lieu of further enlightenment, I assumed that all of them were up for grabs. Anyway, many has been the time that I have