Multiculturalism is in crisis. By that I don’t just mean that political correctness has ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail likes to put it: the British public worked that out long ago, and merely shrugs when it learns (for example) that the Lake District National Park is to abolish its guided walks because they attract
‘Unmöglich! Unmöglich!’ or as we would say — impossible. It cannot be built. It won’t stand up. The initial reaction to Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the Jewish Museum, Berlin, completed (adhering faithfully to those plans) in 2001, might have been more apposite in quattrocento Florence given their somewhat hysterical, God-fearing nature. But one soon becomes
In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection. For the purposes of this quintessentially Great
If you like looking down on your fellow men, take a trip to Gipsy Hill. So transfixed was I, on a recent visit, by its panoramic views over the City, Kent, Sussex and Surrey that I became embroiled in an uncomfortable exchange with a man in a stetson and a bootlace tie who accused me
As a service to Spectator readers who still have any doubts about the decline in educational standards, we are printing these exam papers taken by 11-year-olds applying for places to King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1898. ENGLISH GRAMMAR 1. Write out in your best handwriting:— ‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call
What a welcome change from the energetic staccato style of many modern thrillers is this, Rennie Airth’s second book. No short thudding sentences for him, no relentless brutality and spattered swear-words, more a leisurely, gentlemanly unfurling of a story which yet is as bloody and grim as any. The rape and murder of a Surrey
When they showed on television the cave on the island of Flores where the remains of little people had been found, I felt, I admit, a Yeatsian frisson that the world of politics cannot give. It was not delight at a new branch on the hat-stand of anthropoid evolution, but the thought that in the
Raphael, affirmed Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘stands in general foremost of the first painters’. In other words, he was the best artist who ever lived. When Reynolds wrote this — in the second half of the 18th century — Raphael’s reputation had remained on that peak for centuries. He was the ideal, the model for students
Rachel Johnson meets Ukip’s pin-up boy and finds to her horror that she likes him In order to interview Robert Kilroy-Silk, the orthodontically perfect public face of Ukip, it is first necessary to talk to his people. But his people, it turns out, are his wife Jan. ‘So,’ Jan growls in what the BBC calls
Since appeasement is in the air again, this is a timely book. It tells the story of how Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5, sought to avert what would be the second world war by befriending the Nazi leaders. Londonderry, 7th Marquis and directly descended from Lord Castlereagh
On 25 June 2003, the day on which Alastair Campbell declar- ed all-out war against the BBC in his evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the BBC’s Director-General, Greg Dyke, was engaged in country dancing in Surrey. He and other top BBC executives were attending one of their regular strategy conferences
By the Grand Canal takes place, not wholly unexpectedly, in the Venice of the immediately post-Great War era. To this idyllic if decaying refuge comes dapper Sir Hugh Thurne, a fortysomething career diplomat, bruised by the turmoil of the past four years (in particular the death of his fast friend Philip Mancroft) but keen to
Each morning, when I opened my eyes, there was another clump of hair on the pillow. Within two weeks, I was two-thirds bald with an absurd black tuft projecting two inches over my forehead. It was radiotherapy, of course, supposedly the only remedy after the surgeon failed to remove every bit of a brain tumour.
When I was an atheist back in the 1960s, its future seemed assured. I grew up in Northern Ireland, where religious tensions and violence had alienated many from Christianity. Like so many disaffected young people then, I rejected religion as oppressive, hypocritical, a barbarous relic of the past. The sociologists were predicting that religion would
Alexis Soyer was Britain’s first celebrity chef, and the catalogue of his achievements dwarfs that of Delia or Jamie. He made his name providing banquets for the richest Victorians, including Prince Albert and half the Cabinet, yet he also designed a soup kitchen for victims of the Irish famine, which fed 8,750 people daily in
Next month a group of British MPs will launch impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair. This is a very dramatic and powerful act, rooted deep in British history. Though once a commonplace sanction against abuse of power by the executive, the instrument of impeachment has not been used since 1848, when it was alleged that Lord
W. H. Davies was a phenomenon of whom, it seems, few nowadays have heard. His lines, ‘What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare?’ were quoted with approval in the local pub the other day, but nobody knew who wrote them. In 1996 that poem, ‘Leisure’, was
‘We are very proud of Amir Temur,’ the Uzbek ambassador to the Court of St James’s told Justin Marozzi. ‘We do not call him Tamerlane.’ Nevertheless this is the title of Marozzi’s biography, and perhaps the publishers insisted it be marketed as Tamerlane, which is Temur-i-Lan or Temur the Lame, the name Amir Temur not
To Portcullis House at Westminster, to take part in a Reuters debate on war and journalism. I notice John Reid, the Prime Minister’s most prominent capo regime these days, lurking at the back. His minder tells me that ‘the boss would like a word’ but a division bell saves me from finding out whether I
A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on 28 January 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we