Alan Judd’s latest spy novel, ‘Queen & Country’, is published by Simon&Schuster.
Who’d be a car dealer now? With new sales 20 per cent down and dropping, manufacturers moving to four-day weeks, dealerships closing and the used-car market awash with unsold vehicles, they must feel like turkeys being sized up for Christmas. And that’s before anyone has felt next year’s swingeing road-tax increases on post-2001 mid-sized vehicles
The first Rolls-Royce I drove was a 1960s Shadow, across the Cairngorms on the glorious A939 to Tomintoul. It was a memorable drive, clear skies, snow-capped mountains, little traffic. When we returned to his Speyside house the owner suggested I try his Jaguar XJ6, which he thought a better drive than the Shadow. It was:
Some at least of the 71 vehicles I’ve owned (68 if tractors don’t count) are probably best excused by a weakness for romantic impracticality. It was never inherent impracticality that attracted me but something else about them — rarity, unusual histories or locations, coincidence, the appeal of rescue. Hence the Daimler Conquest Century convertible, the
How far will the proposed road tax changes influence what we actually buy in the new car market? Not as much, perhaps, as the government likes to think. After all, if you want something like the admirable Fiat Panda you are never going to look at the (differently admirable) Audi A8 anyway. It’s those in
The first lap of Le Mans last weekend passed in a daze. The thought of performing on that hallowed 14km (8–9 mile) circuit in front of thousands was bad enough, even for one who would have been content with the record for the slowest lap, but the thought was as nothing compared with the fact.
Boris would have approved. He might have been envious. He might even have remembered the lunch he owes me. But I’d have let him off that just to have seen his face when he saw me at the wheel of a Routemaster bus. Since it is a vintage vehicle, an ordinary car licence suffices provided
There is growing unease at the contemporary proliferation and inflation of human rights. Not only do undeserving cases benefit from over-generous or quixotic judicial interpretations of Labour’s Human Rights Act, but there is a booming business in ascribing rights to groups. Peoples, nations, races, ethnic, cultural and religious groups are now perceived to have rights
Albania is small and little known, its history sufficiently confusing and its names sufficiently unpronounceable for us to be funny about it or, worse, to romanticise it. But humour and romance were in short supply for Albanians during the second world war (and after), and there wasn’t much left over for those sent to help
Big, lazy V8 engines, powerful and durable, are as American as Coca-Cola and Stetsons. Europeans, with smaller cars, shorter distances, dearer petrol and high-taxing governments, have traditionally gone for fewer cubic centimetres and higher revs, which usually meant more stressed engines but better handling cars. There have been many exceptions, of course, particularly those manufacturers
Alan Judd on Marc Sageman’s latest book Marc Sageman is deservedly one of the best-known academics working on terrorism. A clinical psychologist and former CIA officer, in 2004 he published Understanding Terror Networks, a book which enlarged the way the subject was seen. Hitherto, most researchers and governments had located the ‘root causes’ of terrorism
Most of my regrets are of sins of omission rather than commission; what I didn’t do rather than what I did. (I’m thinking here of acquisitive opportunities rather than moral actions, where the balance of regret should probably be more even and the total certainly greater.) Recently, I’ve been thinking particularly of an XK150 Jaguar.
‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ John Maynard Keynes retorted to a critic. A pity he’s not here to ask the same question of the Department for Transport (DfT) when they lecture us on road deaths this Christmas. Four years ago The Spectator (22 November 2003) helped to
At Oxford I had a clerical friend, a mature postgraduate and student of 19th-century evangelism, who developed a temporary but consuming passion for car tyres. Unlike his more lasting passions for tobacco, alcohol and (I believe) cannabis, his enthusiasm for tyres was as great as his ignorance; he didn’t know a cross-ply from a radial.
Depreciation is to cars what compound interest is to us: it bites sooner and deeper than you think. In March 2006 my sister-in-law paid a main dealer £8,000 for a 2002 Renault Laguna Sports Tourer Dynamique, an 1,800cc estate equipped with air-conditioning, sunroof (the UK market is apparently the only one that demands both), alloys,
‘I saw Eternity the other night,’ wrote the 17th-century religious poet Henry Vaughan, arrestingly combining the numinous and the mundane. ‘I saw Eternity the other night,’ wrote the 17th-century religious poet Henry Vaughan, arrestingly combining the numinous and the mundane. ‘I drove a Facel Vega the other day’ may not be quite as evocative, but
Is Gordon Brown the first prime minister who can’t drive since, well, since Asquith? Is Gordon Brown the first prime minister who can’t drive since, well, since Asquith? Hard to imagine the 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith mastering a non-synchromesh gearbox. His successor and rival, Lloyd George, was out of office for 23 years
When I was a child Bristol was a port somewhere beyond Kent. Later on I discovered that in the plural — as in a nice pair of — it referred, mystifyingly, to mammalian tissue. Why not a nice pair of Wolverhamptons or Plymouths or Canterburys? But when I became a man I put away childish
New York Two men prostrated themselves before the new Freelander — in gratitude, presumably, for anything more reliable than the previous model — but it turned out that the turntable on which it was displayed had jammed. On the Hummer stand another man went from car to car covering the filler caps with sticky tape.
‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ ‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ Thus spake Elizabeth I, that font of pithy regal eloquence who learnt such worldly wisdom without buying or selling
There’s a fascinating new book about a man with a passion for a house which he lost and regained, brick by red Jacobean brick. The house was Thrumpton in Nottinghamshire, its devotee the late George Seymour, a complex man whose daughter, novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour, tells all with elegance and insight in In My