Social media

How to deal with a troll In Scandinavian mythology, trolls were shady creatures who lived below ground and varied in size from giants (in Iceland) to dwarfs (in Sweden). They snatched infants and replaced them with baby trolls, or ‘changelings’, in an attempt to improve their breeding stock. They could, however, be tackled: — By leaving a knife on a baby’s cradle, the trolls being frightened of iron. — By ringing church bells constantly. — By baptising infants quickly, as trolls will not snatch those already christened. — By exposing them to sunlight. Hello, strangers Which European capitals have the highest and lowest percentages of foreigners in their populations? HIGHEST

In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM (‘More stars than there are in the heavens’) was rumoured to have had a very strange chart on his wall. This graph, allegedly, kept a record of the menstrual cycles of the studio’s leading ladies: Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly and the rest. By consulting it, directors and cameramen knew when their precious cargo might be feeling a mite tearful and would ruin her make-up if spoken to sharply, or when her skin might not be in the best condition for a big close-up. Some mornings when I come back from my husband’s place, sit

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_31_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ross Clark and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of individualism”] Listen [/audioplayer]Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. As for the absolute pit, the eighth circle or however else you describe the geography of Beelzebub’s kingdom, that is being left alone without a 3G mobile phone signal. Of all changes in British life over the past generation, nothing has been quite so as stark as the strange death of individualism. When in 1995 the then transport

Q.  My 16-year-old son, who has recently had his first experiences of Clubland, has observed to me, his mother, that men’s table manners degenerate inside men-only clubs. Is this true? — A.D.M., London SW1 A.  Allegedly so. Men seem hard-wired to let standards slip when the civilising influence of women is absent. According to the late sage Hugh Massingberd, the seating protocol of man/woman/man/woman originated in the early days of chivalry, when it was noted that a more courtly pace of consumption would characterise the round tables when knights were faced and sandwiched by females. Then as now, a courtly pace was much less disruptive to the digestive system and

The French for tête-à-tête is one-to-one now, according to a new survey of English invaders by Alexandre des Isnards. Actually, only half of the 400 neologisms that M. Isnards has collected for his Dictionnaire du Nouveau Français (Allary Editions) are English, though that’s a high enough level. It seems to me that French and English people are in common cause here, for it is in business-speak that the English neologisms most easily put down their nasty little suckers — an unweeded garden in both languages. Bullet-points now seem as desirable to French business people as to English. Verbs are spawned simply by sticking –er on the end of English words:

My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally, physically she’s not the lithe young thing she was in her 1920s adolescence. I mean no disrespect to my beloved grandmother, but if we’re honest, when Michael Bay is casting his next blockbuster and it’s a choice between her and Megan Fox for the female lead, well… . It’s not just me who has noticed this: the kids have even more so. When they were younger, especially, and I asked them to kiss their great-grandmother they’d react — as so many children do when confronting their older relatives’ decrepitude — as

You probably have no idea how much of yourself you have given away on the internet, or how much it’s worth. Never mind Big Brother, the all-seeing state; the real menace online is the Little Brothers — the companies who suck up your personal data, repackage it, then sell it to the highest bidder. The Little Brothers are answerable to no one, and they are every-where. What may seem innocuous, even worthless information — shopping, musical preferences, holiday destinations — is seized on by the digital scavengers who sift through cyberspace looking for information they can sell: a mobile phone number, a private email address. The more respectable data-accumulating companies

My mum had a friend at university who had been called ‘Pudding’ at school. They’d sometimes be walking down the street, and someone who had known the now-svelte adult as a chubby 13-year-old would say ‘Hello, Pudding’. As I get ready to start at university myself in October, it’s in the knowledge that my schoolgirl self will be even harder to escape. Reinventing yourself at the end of sixth form was once a time-honoured rite of passage, hindered only by a few easily avoided old acquaintances. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder frees himself from the self-consciously serious circle of his school days with relative ease: ‘At Sebastian’s approach these grey