Spectator articles from February 2008

Spectator archives from February 2008

After Conway, heed Coulson.(Derek Conway and Andy Coulson)
February 2, 2008... Here are some brute facts: the Conservative party still has fewer seats than Michael Foot won in the 1983 general election. To win an overall majority in the House of Commons, David Cameron requires a national swing of 7.1 per cent (compared to...

[Cartoon].(Cartoon)
February 2, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] All aboard for a family outing!

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody.(Diary entry)
February 2, 2008... MONDAY Dave says we are absolutely not withdrawing the whip from poor Mr Conway. If we do such a thing, where will it end? Which MP hasn't at some point given their son a Saturday job answering the phones at the family home? Whose office...

Diary.(Diary entry)
February 2, 2008... As publication of my new novel, My Favourite Wife, draws closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. 'It's good to be alive,' Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym and he bounces a...

If Gordon wins next time, the Derek Conway case will be one of the reasons.(POLITICS)(Gordon Brown)
February 2, 2008... Years from now, when the downfall of Peter Hain has been reduced to a Trivial Pursuit question standing between players and a yellow wedge, the name of Derek Conway will still be remembered. The Electoral Commission's declaration rulebook may...

The Spectator's notes.
February 2, 2008... The appointment of a Permanent Secretary at No. 10 Downing Street shows that the office of Prime Minister is swelling fit to burst. Everyone says that the man with the new post, Jeremy Heywood, is excellent. Nothing is known against him beyond...

Will Obama face McCain? We'll know after Super Tuesday: James Forsyth says that the Republican nomination is all but settled, and McCain has achieved a stunning comeback. If the Democrats want the White House, they must pick Obama as their candidate and put the Clinton past behind the party once and for all.(Barack Obama, John McCain)(Cover story)
February 2, 2008... Tampa, Florida If the Democrats vote with their heads on Super Tuesday--5 February--Barack Obama will survive the Clinton assault and go on to become the party candidate in November. He already appeals strongly to Independents and...

Flash Gordon.(Cartoon)
February 2, 2008... IM TOO FRIGHTENED TO GO OUT AT NIGHT BECAUSE I MIGHT MEET A POLICEMAN [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Two old stagers find vigour in Brief Lives: Tim Walker talks to the theatrical veterans Roy Dotrice and Patrick Garland about their long-awaited return to the work of John Aubrey.(Interview)
February 2, 2008... In a soulless, drafty rehearsal hall just around the corner from Euston Station, Roy Dotrice is doing a reading as John Aubrey under the watchful eye of the director Patrick Garland. The bitchy 17th-century writer and antiquarian is a character...

The wages of beauty are loneliness: Marianne Macdonald says that the crazy bounty nature bestows on gorgeous women can be a curse: a recipe for low confidence and solitary distrust.
February 2, 2008... I am always struck, interviewing the planet's most beautiful women, by the disconnection between their difficult love lives and dazzling looks. Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, Elle Macpherson, Helena Christensen, Emmanuelle Beart, Ines Sastre,...

Ancient & modern.
February 2, 2008... Last time we saw that the currently fashionable buzz-word 'change' was anathema to the Romans, because they looked for stability and permanence, and change implied failure. Romans reinforced this perspective by using the past to act as a guide...

Forty years on from Tet: how the US won Vietnam: Stanley Johnson returns to Vietnam four decades after the offensive that shattered American confidence in the war--but reflects that the US went on to win the cultural battle.
February 2, 2008... Ho Chi Minh City For the last few days they have been putting the flags and bunting up in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in preparation for the nationwide celebrations which will mark the Lunar New Year or Tet. Forty years ago,...

No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills: Christopher Booker launches his eighth decade in India with a spot of street cricket, a return to his mother's birthplace and a salute to a country reclaiming its historical pre-eminence.
February 2, 2008... Forty years ago I met a leading industrialist who had just returned from a visit to India, very depressed. He could see no future for a people who seemed to him fatalistically resigned to antimaterialism, mass poverty and the backward, corrupt,...

I am angrier with the government about the smoking ban than the Iraq war: Rod Liddle says that the ban exemplifies all that is wrong with Labour: nannying piety, control freakery and an endless capacity for lies. What's more, it's put him to considerable inconvenience.(LIDDLE BRITAIN)
February 2, 2008... This week we have been bombarded with statistics about how the smoking ban, introduced exactly six months ago, has not remotely damaged the pub trade, but has resulted in millions upon millions of people giving up smoking--so that cancer is now...

Global warning.(aesthetics and architecture)
February 2, 2008... There is no building so hideous that it is beyond the powers of any modern architect worth his salt to design something even worse. This important truth of the science of aesthetics was borne out recently when I visited Paris and went for the...

Phoney war.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 2, 2008... Sir: I was sorry to see that Con Coughlin ('Agent Brown's new plan to smash terror', 26 January) has now joined the likes of poor William Shawcross on the pottier side of paranoia in asserting that the occasional acts of Islamist terrorism in...

Tax return.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 2, 2008... Sir: Anthony J. Burnet makes two interesting points in his comment on my 'Economics of Mr Brown' (Letters, 26 January). The first is that my questioning of the proposed new taxes on the worldwide income of non-domiciled foreigners should have...

Target practice.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 2, 2008... Sir: Pauline Holroyd's experience regarding choice in NHS referrals (Letters, 19 January) becomes even more frustrating when government targets interfere. I was referred in much the same way last November and made an appointment with the only...

Wing and a prayer.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 2, 2008... Sir: Ataturk banned the call to prayer in Arabic throughout Turkey as long ago as 1932 (The Spectator's Notes, 12 January). He decreed that it could henceforth only be in Turkish, Arabic being an alien language incomprehensible to Turks. He...

Top tip.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 2, 2008... Sir: I was reminded by Martin Vander Weyer's footnote of Hugh Massingberd's huge appetite and of his extraordinary generosity (Any other business, 26 January). Hugh and I trundled round the UK giving his compilation from the diaries of James...

Mind the gaps.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 2, 2008... Sir: Matthew Parris's article on the 'surprising gaps' the English language has in its vocabulary (Another voice, 19 January), reminds me of all the times I have asked British friends to give me the equivalent of a modern Greek word by...

After much deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that life does not exist.(ANOTHER VOICE)
February 2, 2008... This January Prometheus paid our era a call. Scientists (it was reported at the end of the month) have 'announced the creation of a synthetic chromosome, knocking down one of the final hurdles to building the world's first artificial life...

Shakespeare, Neo-Platonism and Princess Diana.(AND ANOTHER THING)
February 2, 2008... The litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And what is forgotten in this grimy attempt to prove conspiracy theory is...

Why it's raining dividends in Wales: Neil Collins meets Nigel Annett, who runs Welsh Water--a unique utility company which operates without shareholders and distributes profits back to its customers.(BUSINESS)(Interview)
February 2, 2008... It does sometimes stop raining in Wales. When the sun comes out, it's pretty stunning, thanks to the green all that rain produces, but much of the time the residents must wonder why they pay so much to get what the Lord deposits on their heads...

The disappearing bezzle.(THE SOCIETE GENERALE SCANDAL)
February 2, 2008... My friend Herbie from the Last National Bank of Boot Hill understood about rogue traders. When another hapless bank owned up to losses 'due to unauthorised trading', he added: 'They mean nobody authorised the guy to get it wrong.' Now that...

Farewell to Asia's greatest kleptocrat: Eric Ellis says the death of Indonesia's former dictator may spur attempts to recover the loot accumulated by his family.(SUHARTO'S BILLIONS)
February 2, 2008... The strangest moment of the elongated theatre de mort of the billionaire Indonesian dictator Suharto came islands apart on the day after the old crook died. In Central Java, the remains of the despot the United Nations last year declared...

The vile behaviour of the press.(Flat Earth News)(Book review)
February 2, 2008... FLAT EARTH NEWS by Nick Davies Chatto, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 408, ISBN 9780701181451 [telephone] 14.39 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 This book exposes newspapers to the same...

A very vicious circle.(The Secret History of the War on Cancer)(Book review)
February 2, 2008... THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER by Devra Davis Basic Books, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 505, ISBN 9780465015665 [telephone] 13.59 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 This book is...

Daring to defy the myth.(Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy)(Book review)
February 2, 2008... WEIMAR GERMANY: PROMISE AND TRAGEDY by Eric D. Weitz Princeton, 17.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 425, ISBN 9780691016955 [telephone] 14.39 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 Weimar lasted 14 years,...

Champagne on dirty floorboards.(Lucian Freud)(Book review)
February 2, 2008... LUCIAN FREUD by William Feaver Rizzoli, 65 [pounds sterling], pp. 487, ISBN9780847829521 Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to...

Spartans did it wearing cloaks.(The Greeks and Greek Love)(Book review)
February 2, 2008... THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE by James Davidson Weidenfeld, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 634, ISBN 97802978199 [telephone] 24 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 However loaded or coded, 'Greek love' is...

Footpath.(Books)(Poem)
February 2, 2008... Footpath All that the path said was what we attended to on the windy fell. It advised and demanded, it questioned and entertained. It described its course. Most of all, it instructed. Its teachings...

A return to the grand themes.(Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics, and Culture in Britain)(Critical essay)
February 2, 2008... PENULTIMATE ADVENTURES WITH BRITANNIA: PERSONALITIES, POLITICS AND CULTURE IN BRITAIN by Wm. Roger Louis I.B. Tauris, 35 [pounds sterling], pp. 320, ISBN 9781845116934 Between 1975 and today, under the direction of Professor Wm....

Pulp fiction for the intelligent.(The Metatemporal Detective)(Book review)
February 2, 2008... THE METATEMPORAL DETECTIVE by Michael Moorcock Prometheus Books, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 327, ISBN 9781591025962 The late Alan Coren once called a collection of articles Golfing for Cats, in order, he claimed, to maximise his...

We Being Ghosts.(Books)(Poem)
February 2, 2008... We Being Ghosts Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked By various diseases of the intellect Or failing body. How am I still upright? And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night. How did it come...

Unthinking dogmatism: James MacMillan explains why he hates the assumption that he is a liberal left-winger.(ARTS)
February 2, 2008... In my travels I see myself frequently described in foreign media as a 'leftwing and Scottish nationalist' composer. The latter label is ludicrous, and I just put it down to a foreigner's ignorance and justifiable disinterest in the parish-pump...

Italian treats.(Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art )
February 2, 2008... A Decade of Discovery Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, until 6 April This year, as the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art celebrates its tenth anniversary, garlanded with plaudits for the loan exhibitions it...

What a monster.(Cloverfield)(Movie review)
February 2, 2008... Cloverfield 15, Nationwide Cloverfield is tiresome, dumb and horrid, and just in case you didn't get that I'll say it again: this film is tiresome, dumb and horrid. Don't go. Do anything but go. Don't be swayed, as I was, by the fact...

Teletubby approach.
February 2, 2008... The President's Holiday Hampstead The Sea Haymarket The Vertical Hour Royal Court There's no such thing as a great script idea. Ideas are equally good or bad, what counts is how they're treated. Take the 1991 coup...

Truffling around.(Pop)(finding good music in radio stations)
February 2, 2008... Where do you find your music? Yes, I know, you go to the CD rack and there it is. Or, if you are as obsessed as some of us, you go into almost any room in the house and there is a pile of the stuff, because you can't get rid of any of it, even...

Britten surprises.(Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes )(Opera review)
February 2, 2008... Peter Grimes Opera North Of all Britten's operas Peter Grimes is the one I have seen most often, and it remains not only the one that I find it hardest to make up my mind about, but also the one which I still don't feel I know...

Reasons for hope.(Radio)(Start the Week, Fortunes of War)(Radio program review)
February 2, 2008... 'Pakistan is a dysfunctional state,' said the writer Martin Amis in a debate about ideologies and ideologues in our post-9/11 world on Start the Week (Monday, Radio Four). He seemed curiously unaware that he was in conversation with a woman...

Cult viewing.(Television)(Jonestown, Moving Wallpaper, Echo Beach)(Television program review)
February 2, 2008... 'Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid' is an American slang phrase--tart, cynical and funny--used for telling people to get on with something they must do but would prefer to avoid. It refers back to the mass suicide of 909 members of the Jim Jones...

Gross greed.(High life)
February 2, 2008... Gstaad The fat cats were all over Davos last week, greedy bankers, self-important bosses of publicly owned multinationals, craven hedge funders and shameless publicity-seekers such as Bono and others of his ilk mixing freely with Gordon...

Love and loss.(Low life)(Personal account)
February 2, 2008... Tom proudly showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend doing a striptease. Confident girl. The tattoos must have cost a fortune. 'So who's this one?' I said. 'The first time I woke up beside her, thought, "Oh no!...

Crime and nourishment.(Real life)(Personal account)
February 2, 2008... Despite efforts not to be superstitious, I am much obsessed by the idea of disaster seepage. That is to say, when one thing goes wrong, a hundred others usually follow. So it was that a leaking roof segued seamlessly last week into blocked...

Food to go.(The table)(dining in travel)(Personal account)
February 2, 2008... In the midst of an author tour for a new book, I am confronting both the worst evils of fast food and some surprising exceptions. Writers today cannot simply write books; readers want to see you in the flesh, talk to you, send you thoughts or...

Take five.(Bridge)(Brief article)
February 2, 2008... Andrew Robson and his partner Alexander Allfrey have what they call the 'nought-to-five rule' when playing bridge: at crucial moments, they count to five while thinking to stop themselves rushing into what looks like the obvious play. I have to...

The art of life: gap-year students, try Italy, not Vietnam.(STYLE AND TRAVEL)
February 2, 2008... A wise friend once said that you only regret what you don't do. Until I met John Hall and Nick Ross, I had never really thought about it but ever since I have been regretting that I didn't spend my time between school and university on one of...

Very Moorish: Gibraltar has a colourful past, discovers John Torode.(ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER)(Travel narrative)
February 2, 2008... 'British as the Rock of Gibraltar.' That was how an aged relative used to describe iconic objects--traditional London buses, perhaps, or red telephone boxes. British my foot. The very name is foreign, deriving from Jebel Tariq--Tariq's...

Hotels of the week.(Directory)(Brief article)
February 2, 2008... The Rock Hotel 3 Europa Road, Gibraltar Tel: + 00 350 73000 Email: rockhotel@gibtelecom.net www.rockhotelgibraltar.com [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] O'Callaghan Elliot Hotel Governor's Parade, Gibraltar Tel: +00...

When he's 64.(CHESS)(Bobby Fischer)
February 2, 2008... Bobby Fischer, the stupor mundi of chess, died at the symbolic age of 64 in Reykjavik two weeks ago. This week I conclude my tribute to a man who has been described as both the pride and sorrow of chess. Fischer-Ivkov: Piatigorsky Cup,...

Just like a woman.(COMPETITION)(Poem)
February 2, 2008... In Competition No. 2529 you were invited to submit a poem describing what women are like. It was Wendy Cope's funny and poignant poem 'Bloody Men' that prompted the comp. There was no obligation to mimic her style, though several did. A...

1849: All together now.(CROSSWORD)(Brief article)
February 2, 2008... 1A (two words, confirmed by Brewer), 12, 32 42 and 14 19 are four members of a contiguous group of five. The other unclued lights are definitions of words which, put together in the correct order, form a two-word name of the remaining member of...

The disturbing thing about fairy stories is that the father is always a useless weed.(STATUS ANXIETY)
February 2, 2008... As a father of three small children, I find myself constantly baffled by what is known in our household as 'the boredom paradox'. Why is it that my four-year-old daughter considers a trip to Loftus Road to watch QPR battle against relegation...

Mind your language.
February 2, 2008... A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in the water. The usage annoys me as a cliche. It is generally a deal or...

First Serb.(SPECTATOR SPORT)(tennis players Novak Djokovic, Ana Ivanovic, and Janko Tipsarevic in the Australian Open)
February 2, 2008... Like this journal's esteemed High Life commentator, I too have been spending too much time watching the last fortnight's Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne-but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially lethal...

Dear Mary.(YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED)
February 2, 2008... Q. I wonder if you can give me some advice. My parents have agreed I can have 20 people to a party in our house in Balham. I am 16 but very responsible so they agreed to go out between 7 p.m. and 11 when the party is taking place, though they...

McCain, please.(John McCain)
February 9, 2008... Why have the US primaries been so gripping? Partly because they are suffused with an optimism and energy that is conspicuously lacking from domestic British politics; partly because the world cannot wait for the Bush era to reach its bleak...

Diary.(winter (Chinese) New Year in Hangzhou, China)
February 9, 2008... My daughter telephoned to say, to my disbelief, that she was snowbound in Hangzhou, where it never snows. The city is regarded as the most beautiful in China, with swaying willows surrounding an old lagoon on the edge of which Mao Tse-tung...

The Spectator's notes.(Derek Conway)
February 9, 2008... Derek Conway maintains his position. 'I still believe I have done nothing wrong,' he told the Mail on Sunday. To understand why he could possibly think that, one has to dig deeper into British class feeling. In wanting to become a Conservative...

Is that what it has come to?(Brief article)(Cartoon)
February 9, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Londoners protect themselves from the smell coming from the House of Commons [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Supervising everybody in the UK [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Audience at another relaunch of Gordon...

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody.(Tories, Mr. Khan)
February 9, 2008... MONDAY Operation Policy Surge a complete success! Slap-up breakfast with wholemeal muffins and organic bucks fizz to celebrate burial of Tory sleaze under a confusing heap of random announcements. Of course the problem now is keeping track...

Trust in politics is dead: long live 'wiki-politics': Fraser Nelson says that the recent run of 'sleaze' stories has merely reinforced the public's contempt for the political class. Hierarchy is dead, 'peer-to-peer recommendation' has replaced authority, the web has changed everything. Politicians must adapt or die.(Cover story)
February 9, 2008... If a museum were built to honour the ancestral political class, it would not look much different from the House of Commons. Its corridors are lined with portraits of the political greats and its staircases are adorned with old Vanity Fair...

Flash Gordon.(Cartoon)
February 9, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE TELEPHONIST WHOSE JOB IT WAS TO BUG GORDON BROWN

Reasons for Barack Obama to be cheerful: James Forsyth says that Super Tuesday did not give the Illinois senator the mandate he craved. But, with money, time and inspiration on his side, he can still beat Hillary.
February 9, 2008... Washington Super Tuesday was meant to be the decisive day in the Obama--Clinton contest. Instead it was an indecisive super-muddle. Both candidates did only what they needed to do and no more. After California was called for Clinton,...

Inside Hamas: my journey to its secret heart: the film-maker Mike Chamberlain has gained unprecedented access to the Islamist organisation. He recounts the cloak-and-dagger methods that led him to its leaders and its foot soldiers.
February 9, 2008... This was it: as soon as I stepped through the door of the offices of Khaled Mishal I held out my flimsy plastic folder and jabbered away in English to the four slick-suited men who were my reception committee, trying desperately to make clear...

Essex and the City: my life as a 'posh bird' broker: Venetia Thompson on how she learnt to fit in with the hard-drinking barrow boys on the trading floor, who live on fish and chips, pickled onions and the most expensive vintage wines.
February 9, 2008... He is sending back a bottle of 1965 Croft because it 'doesn't taste right'. I know that the odds of it tasting identical to the bottle we just drank in Petrus are slim to none even if we were sober. He is miffed at the lack of label and they...

Venice is the only city on earth going backwards: Stephen Bayley rejects the sentimentality that locks the city in the past and that resists every invasion of modernity except tourism. The place is a corpse.
February 9, 2008... The peril in Venice is the people trying to save it. But save exactly what for precisely whom? Venice is a corpse. It died in 1797 with the last, preposterous old Doge eased out by the French. Napoleon then insulted the Venetians by calling the...

If we don't bug a conversation between Khan and Ahmed, who do we bug? Rod Liddle says that discussions between a radical Muslim MP and a man suspected of facilitating terrorism overseas are fair game. Extradition is a much bigger worry.(LIDDLE BRITAIN)
February 9, 2008... Should members of Britain's beleaguered and persecuted bombing community be subjected to intrusive surveillance techniques such as bugging? It seems a bit illiberal, given their very real difficulties in day-to-day life. Hard enough trying to...

Nip terror in the bud.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2008... Sir: Correlli Barnett would have us believe Con Coughlin is suffering from paranoia and describes George Bush's 'war on terror' as stale rhetoric (Letters, 2 February). One wonders what ailment Correlli Barnett suffers from--perhaps 'paranoiac...

In my own defence.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2008... Sir: In last week's editorial (2 February) about Derek Conway and 'sleaze', you conjured up the demons of 'cash for questions, the Neil Hamilton saga and brown paper envelopes.' In the mid-1990s, under Frank Johnson, The Spectator was one of...

Persuasion not coercion.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2008... Sir: I enjoyed reading James MacMillan's passionate and provocative article (Arts, 2 February). His disquiet seems to be based around two related areas: modern liberalism's 'planned dismantling of the family' and its 'hatred of Christianity'....

Smoked out.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2008... Sir: In June 2006 the then public health minister, Caroline Flint, told the House of Lords economic affairs committee that 'in relation to deaths from smoking and second-hand smoke, the most serious aspect is smoking in the home. Ninety-five...

Funeral music.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2008... Sir: I agree with G.W. of Pewsey ('Dear Mary', 2 February) about variety in hymn selection at funerals. However, equal care must be taken in considering the relevance to the deceased: some years ago, at the funeral of a butcher, the family's...

'Sleaze' is such a nasty word. How much nicer to call it 'anti-parliamentary activity'.(SHARED OPINION)
February 9, 2008... Sometimes, the answer is staring you right in the face. As the Speaker begins to wonder how he can tighten up rules on parliamentary finances without admitting that the day of the Honourable Member is past, the Guardian reports that the Home...

When gobbling brawn is caviar to the general.(AND ANOTHER THING)(food)
February 9, 2008... There is more writing about food now than ever before, most of it feeble. There are exceptions. My Somerset neighbour Tamasin Day-Lewis descants admirably on the subject because she knows everything about the raw materials and has a stunning...

The entrepreneur's art: buying, building, selling: Judi Bevan meets David Young, who served in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet before chairing Cable & Wireless and creating his own successful private-equity business.(BUSINESS)(Interview)
February 9, 2008... Few 75-year-olds supply and programme their grandchildren's computers or keep in touch with the younger generation by text. But Lord Young of Graffham--the businessman who was parachuted into the cabinet as secretary of state for employment by...

... And good riddance to the beerage.(FAREWELL TO SCOTTISH & NEWCASTLE ...)
February 9, 2008... Usually the passing of a major UK company into foreign ownership --and with it the ending of British pretensions to global leadership in another industry--is the cue for national soul-searching and recrimination. Not so the demise of Scottish &...

A crash course in survival.(Miracles of life)(Book review)
February 9, 2008... Miracles of life by J. G. Ballard Fourth Estate, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 278, ISBN 9780007270729 [telephone] 11.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 No one would be allowed to have J. G....

Gas.(BOOKS)(Poem)
February 9, 2008... Gas Seeing the country from a train I've grown convinced its gasholders in fact are used to house the spite and gloom of post-industrial towns. Arriving anywhere, I credit them for signs, barometers of...

God and the GOM.(Gladstone: God and Politics)(Book review)
February 9, 2008... Gladstone: God and Politics by Richard Shannon Hambledon Continuum, 80 [pounds sterling], pp. 550, ISBN 9781847252029 Richard Shannon has been writing about Gladstone on and off for almost 50 years. His first book, a study of Gladstone...

Getting a kick.(Ethel Merman)(Book review)
February 9, 2008... ETHEL MERMAN by Geoffrey Mark Barricade Legend, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 312, ISBN 1569802939 One frequently reads of chaps for whom their epiphany was the first sight and sound of Julie Andrews. Mine happened a good few years...

Alcoholic.(BOOKS)(Poem)
February 9, 2008... Alcoholic I often talk to strangers in bars, and sometimes wonder what it would be like to meet my late parents-- out for a drink together in their early courting days. Would I bore them too? Ruin their evening ...