Spectator articles from June 2003

Spectator archives from June 2003

Portrait of the week.
June 7, 2003... Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, faced an investigation by the all-party Commons foreign affairs select committee into claims that he had misled the nation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said this week: 'Those people who are...

Free Jeffrey Archer now.
June 7, 2003... Jeffrey Archer, the disgraced peer, should be let out of prison as soon as he would be if he were Joe Bloggs, the disgraced dustman. In July 2001 Archer was given a four-year sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice, so in a...

Diary.
June 7, 2003... Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had 'lied' about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worded and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls 'rogue elements', but their...

The NoW is bad news, but the police were just as bad in the Posh 'kidnap' case. (Media Studies).
June 7, 2003... Almost everyone dislikes the News off the World, including many of its readers. It is coarse, intrusive, hypocritical and sanctimonious. It frequently puts itself above or outside the law--perhaps most famously when it so whipped up public...

The Spectator's notes.
June 7, 2003... Further to my mention of the Deputy Prime Minister's newfound enthusiasm for croquet, a kindly reader, Charles Hastings, directs me to the account of another Prescottian sporting distinction. In his excellent new biography of Anthony Eden, D.R....

A conspiracy theory too far: Andrew Gilligan analyses the astonishing charge by John Reid that there is a plot by 'rogue elements' in the intelligence services to damage the Prime Minister. (Cover Story).
June 7, 2003... In showbiz, they always say that one should never work with children or animals. In politics, perhaps the rule should be: never work with children, animals--or dossiers. On Iraq, the government has issued three, and all have got it into...

The great pretender: Peter Oborne says that Tony Blair's troubles over WMD and the euro demonstrate again that the PM does not say what he means or mean what he says.
June 7, 2003... Later this summer, on 2 August, Tony Blair's government will reach its most significant milestone yet. It will become the longest-serving Labour government in history, surpassing the record of six years and three months held by Clem Attlee...

Ancient & modern.(university education)
June 7, 2003... Nearly 75 per cent of university lecturers think the current intake of students is the worst they can remember. Plato may help us decide what 'worst' means; and an important conclusion follows. In his Euthydemus, Plato portrays two...

Why I quit teaching; Nick Butt says he resigned as headmaster of a Norfolk school because of idiotic government bureaucracy.
June 7, 2003... I was on holiday when I read about my resignation as headmaster of St Edmund's. 'Head quits over Labour policies' read the headline. It came as quite a surprise. I knew I had resigned, but didn't think anyone would be interested. Then the story...

The noble feat of Nike: globalisation--otherwise known as 'ruthless international capitalism'--is enriching the world's poor.
June 7, 2003... Nike. It means victory. It also means a type of expensive gym shoe. In the minds of the antiglobalisation movement, it stands for both at once. Nike stands for the victory of a Western footwear company over the poor and dispossessed. Spongy,...

Mind your language.
June 7, 2003... 'If you dial 1471,' writes Dr Roger James, a reader, naturally, 'you are likely to be told by a recorded female voice that "The caller withheld their number." This is an example of the difficulties that our language gets into because it lacks a...

Banned wagon: global: a weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2003... 'Fair trade' coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of...

I am a Tory to my toes: Chris Patten defends himself, and his vision of Europe, against his right-wing critics.
June 7, 2003... It is modestly flattering to find one's views the subject of occasional comment by contributors to The Spectator. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the latest to have a run at it ('A question of loyalty', 31 May). Perhaps I could assist future...

Is Saddam in Russia? Raymond Keene says that chess players have a hunch about what has happened to the former Iraqi dictator.
June 7, 2003... in Moscow on 19 March a press conference was held at the headquarters of the Interfax news agency announcing the results of a Muslim/Christian peacemaking trip to Baghdad, which had taken place over the previous few days. Among the returning...

Travel warnings are bad for business; the Kenyan foreign minister, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, says that thousands are being laid off as a result of Britain's ban on flights to Nairobi.
June 7, 2003... Nairobi About four months ago I was invited as Kenya's new foreign minister to give a talk on the aims and goals of the new Kenyan government at Chatham House. My speech was an upbeat assessment of our future following one of the most...

A fat cat writes: away with this girthist and speciesist bias in boardrooms. (City And Suburban).
June 7, 2003... It is a sad reflection on modern business life that the debate on corporate governance and boardroom pay should be conducted in terms of mindless prejudice (writes my feline correspondent, Mrs Jellicle). Every director who is allowed to curl up...

An architectural nightmare in which we may soon find ourselves lost. (And Another Thing).
June 7, 2003... Recently I read W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, described as a novel but to my mind more a series of essays on architectural oddities and natural phenomena (such as moths) which happened to obsess the author. As such it is a work of strange and...

Axed by the BBC. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: What an extraordinary tangle of contradictions the BBC has generated about its coverage on the night of the local elections! Matthew Parris (Another voice, 31 May) appears to have been told by somebody that I, as the lone IDS loyalist, was...

Major and Maastricht. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... From Lord Deramore Sir: John Major ('Why we must veto this alien constitution', 24 May) is right to demand a referendum on the draft European constitution, but his article revealed a singular blindness to the reality of Britain's 30-year...

Lenin remembered. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: I am surprised that Adam Zamoyski, while reviewing Anne Applebaum's book (17 May), is surprised that the Russian Gulags have not produced the same sense of horror as did similar Nazi camps. Since the war, the political slant in this...

Opium rules. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: Peter Oborne and Lucy Morgan Edwards ('A victory for drug-pushers', 31 May) omitted one significant factor in the current Afghan opium trade. In, almost, a pre-run of Iraq, Tony Blair made stopping the opium industry an important...

Too kind to Canada. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: Having also lived and worked in Canada, I cannot let Paul Robinson's eulogy of all things Canadian ('Land of the free', 31 May) go unchallenged. We do agree on one point, at least. A Tim Hortons Boston cream doughnut (custard filling,...

The stalker's tale. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: My attention has been drawn to a scurrilous item in your most recent issue concerning my stalking activities in the Outer Hebrides around ten years ago (The Spectator's notes, 31 May). It is indeed the case that I have had the pleasure of...

Rod and the P-word. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: I am appalled by the tone of Rod Liddle's piece ('They love to hate us', 31 May) and the use of the word 'pikey' which is, as you and he should know, equivalent to 'nigger'. The word Gypsy should also have an upper case 'G', as...

Morbid morale-booster. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: As is to be expected, Peter Jones's summing up of military morale is clear and concise (Ancient and modem, 31 May). There is, however, an ambiguity, and it is caught by the novelist John Masters (acting brigadier in the Burma campaign)....

Jobs for the peasantry. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: Dr E.G. Klepfish (Letters, 31 May) tells us that 'Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are major job and wealth providers for the local Arabs'. I am reminded of Arthur Hugh Clough's lines: I've seen it observed by a...

Travelling with Supermac. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2003... Sir: Paul Johnson's memories of Harold Macmillan on the Tube (And another thing, 31 May) brought to mind a further memory of the PM on public transport by one George F. Penn, a guard on British Railways' London to Glasgow services, writing in...

How de Gaulle defeated the Vichyite tendency in the United States. (Shared Opinion).
June 7, 2003... Last week was the week when plenty of Britons, though not their government, seemed to place themselves on guard against M. Giscard's constitution. It was appropriate, then, that it was also the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest among the...

The government is addicted to persecuting fat slobs who smoke. (Thought For The Day).
June 7, 2003... I am writing this article at my dining-room table. To my left is a bottle of cut-price Bulgarian Soave, to my right, stacked neatly in their three smart black packets, 60 cigarettes of the Raffles brand. I very much doubt that I will get...

Events, dear boy, events.(Sowing The Wind)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... SOWING THE WIND by John Keay John Murray, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 448, ISBN 0719555883 As everybody knows, as soon as you start to talk to any citizen of any Middle Eastern country about any aspect of their current situation, the...

Gluons, bosons and quarks.(A Short History Of Nearly Everything)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING by Bill Bryson Doubleday, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 515, ISBN 0385408188 This modestly titled book, Bill Bryson tells us at its outset, is 'a quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big...

The best of British.(Brick Lane)(The Voices)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... BRICK LANE by Monica Ali Doubleday, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 413, ISBN 038560484X THE VOICES by Susan Elderkin Fourth Estate, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 323, ISBN 1841152013 If you are suspicious of lists and publishers'...

Speculating into the void.(Cosmopolis)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... COSMOPOLIS by Don DeLillo Picador, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 209, ISBN 0330412760 Though Don DeLillo published his first novel in 1971, it was during the 1980s with such books as the effervescent and grimly comic campus novel White...

From gin craze to twin Krays.(London's Underworld)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... LONDON'S UNDERWORLD by Fergus Linnane Robson Books, 16.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 288, ISBN 186105548X In this jolly history of London crime, Fergus Linnane fathoms the city s underbelly of lurkers, crack-dealers and other chancers. There's...

Blood and Sand.(Chopin's Funeral)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... CHOPIN'S FUNERAL by Benita Eisler Little, Brown, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 231, ISBN 0316860212 Among those whom in adolescence I wanted to be when I grew up was Chopin. His music seemed very close to sex and the misery of not having...

Jolly serious work.(An Inspector Recalls)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... AN INSPECTOR RECALLS by Derek Sherborn The Book Guild, 16.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 300, ISBN 1857766536 Back in the early 1980s I set off with my lamented friend Patrick Montague-Smith, the learned genealogist, who shared my enthusiasm for...

Pursued by the Furies.(The Calligrapher)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... THE CALLIGRAPHER by Edward Docx Fourth Estate, 10.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 353, ISBN 1841155438 Two men stand reading a hand-scripted copy of Donne's poem, 'The Legacy'. Eventually one speaks: 'I know you can get a long way up your own...

The biggest bang in the world.(Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded, August 27, 1883)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... KRAKATOA: THE DAY THE WORLD EXPLODED, AUGUST 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester Viking, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 408, ISBN 0066212855 How irritating, I thought after completing this splendid volume, that I never took Simon Winchester up on...

All over the place.(Loot)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... LOOT by Nadine Gordimer Bloomsbury, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 240, ISBN 07747564973 Nadine Gordimer's lazily allusive and unkempt prose style makes most of the stories in her new collection, Loot, a pleasureless slog. This is Gordimer's...

A nest of vipers.(The Heat Of The Kitchen)(Glimmers Of Twilight)(Book Review)
June 7, 2003... THE HEAT OF THE KITCHEN by Bernard Donoughue Politico's, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 392, ISBN 1842750518 GLIMMERS OF TWILIGHT by Joe Haines Politico's, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 216, ISBN 1842750712 Donoughue and Haines were the David...

Under the influence: Felicity Owen on the wide-ranging success of the Prince's Foundation. (Arts).
June 7, 2003... HRH the Prince of Wales's two charities bearing his name rightly enjoy wide approval. Yet their work and the distinction between them is less than clear. The Prince's Foundation, a remarkably influential minnow, its turnover around 3 million...

Real merits.(The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts)(Audiovisual Review)
June 7, 2003... The Summer Exhibition Royal Academy of Arts until 10 August The season is with us again, and it's time to wander down to Burlington House for that great bazaar of contemporary and traditional art, the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. This...

Ahead of his time.
June 7, 2003... Thomas Jones (1742-1803): An Artist Rediscovered In his memoirs, the Welsh painter Thomas Jones (742-1803) attributes the premature death of his fellow artist Nicholas Dall to 'Discontent & despair from the reflection that when all the...

Shining example.(Us and Them at the Hampstead Theatre)(Elmina's Kitchen at The Cottesloe)(Little Baby Nothing at The Bush)(Theater Review)
June 7, 2003... Us and Them Hampstead Theatre Elmina's Kitchen The Cottesloe Little Baby Nothing The Bush It's taken me a while, but I'm gradually warming up to Jenny Topper, the artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre. I've only met her...

Disobeying orders.(Tristan and Isolde at the Coliseum)(Opera Review)
June 7, 2003... Tristan and Isolde Coliseum Tristan und Isolde at Glyndebourne was followed five evenings later by Tristan and Isolde at the Coliseum, the first revival of David Alden's 1996 production, with an almost entirely new cast. Comparisons are...

Radical moves.(Nederland Dans Theater 2 at Sadler's Wells Theatre)(Dance Review)
June 7, 2003... Nederland Dans Theater 2 Sadler's Wells Theatre Those who love Jiri Kylian for his distinctively fluid choreography might find 27'52" a little shocking. The 2002 creation shows a radical departure from the formulae that have made Kylian...

For better not worse. (Pop).(Say You Will by Fleetwood Mac)(Sound Recording Review)
June 7, 2003... 'Id rather jack/Than Fleetwood Mac,' sang two dippy girls in the heady summer of 1988, thus cocking a snook at all the sorry old people who still occasionally played Rumours. These days no one remembers what 'jack' meant, but the same sorry old...

They've worn well. (Music).
June 7, 2003... So--Luciano Berio (1925-2003)--they called you 'Lucky Luciano' 'Rossini of the avant-garde', --another light out, the 'gaiety of the nations' depleted, no more sequenzas, no more wheeler-dealing; sadly I...

The charms of Chelsea. (Gardens).
June 7, 2003... 'I don't mind admitting it, it was a rather clever wheeze. I managed to acquire a ticket for Press Day at Chelsea--the Monday, you know--by bringing up a plant for an award at the show. I asked my poor sister Pam to cut an armful of lilac from...

Too heavy-handed. (Television).(The Forsyte Saga)(Cambridge Spies)(State of Play)(Television Program Review)
June 7, 2003... I've had to give up on The Forsyte Saga, I'm afraid. I stuck it out through the whole of the first series, which I rather enjoyed. But in the new one I find myself curiously reluctant to give a toss what happens to anyone, least of all the...

I'm sorry, they haven't a clue. (Radio).
June 7, 2003... When I tuned in to Fi Glover's morning programme on BBC Radio Five Live last Wednesday I thought for a moment I was listening to a British spokeswoman for the EU. In fact, it turned out to be the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Mirror,...

Humbling experience. (Bullfighting).
June 7, 2003... If anyone believes that the EU can impose cultural and political homogeneity, they should come to Madrid for the festival of St Isidore. Twenty-nine corridas, on the trot, from 10 May to 7 June! Lest any animalists should believe the fiesta...

Truth twisters. (High life).
June 7, 2003... New York I remember well a conversation I had with Gianni Agnelli in the winter of 1963 about John Profumo and lying: 'Poor man,' said the charismatic Fiat chairman-to-be, 'such disgrace for so ugly a tart.' Both of us at the time took it...

Beyond Boswell. (Low life).
June 7, 2003... All I knew about Corsica before going there last week for a touring holiday was that it is a French possession, that Napoleon hailed from there and that James Boswell visited there once. Exactly where Corsica was in the Mediterranean sea, I was...

Mingling with the mighty. (Singular life).
June 7, 2003... There I was standing in a room with the word 'Service' painted on the door, in the Gellert hotel in Budapest. I was attempting to iron a pair of trousers for the first night of Phantom of the Opera, which was to be the biggest stage production...

Footsure. (Bridge).
June 7, 2003... SOMETIMES I despair at my lack of concentration playing bridge. When I get tired, instead of forcing myself to sharpen up, all too often I either forget the bidding or have a kind of hallucination when looking at my hand, imagining I've got...

Alexander the Great. (Chess).
June 7, 2003... Alexander Kotov was the victor of the brilliant game featured in last week's puzzle, a position which has the distinction of being perhaps the most difficult problem I have ever set in The Spectator. The solution is so intricate that I feel...

A week to remember. (Spectator Sport).
June 7, 2003... Is there anywhere more beautiful in May than England? And can anybody recall a more glorious week than the one we have just enjoyed? The answer to the first question is: of course not. Those who wobble a bit over the second are lucky souls...

Dear Mary. (Your Problems Solved).
June 7, 2003... Q. Earlier this year we went to stay with friends in Devon for the weekend. Our host went to tremendous trouble trying to find enough horses to enable our whole family (of six) to hunt. We had brought with us a present of a small box of...

The once and future president?(The Clinton Wars)(Book Review)
June 14, 2003... THE CLINTON WARS by Sidney Blumenthal Penguin, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 822, ISBN 000670912042 A friend of mine recently sat next to Bill Clinton at dinner. She was dazzled by his brilliance as he gave her a private tutorial on world...

Portrait of the week.(politics)
June 21, 2003... Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, tried to abolish the Lord Chancellor overnight by ukase, and to reassign his powers. But Lord Irvine of Lairg disagreed and was sacked. Lord Falconer of Thoroton was made Secretary of State for Constitutional...

Fetish for fatherhood.(politics in the UK)
June 21, 2003... It is now a week since Alan Milburn seriously inconvenienced his patron, Tony Blair, and threw the reshuffle into chaos by announcing that he was quitting the Cabinet to spend more time with his children. In the interval, the entire resources...

Diary.
June 21, 2003... TO Gateshead to appear on Question Time last Thursday with Nick Brown, Tom Strathclyde, David Steel and Janet Street-Porter. Until the show is filmed at 8.30 p.m., Nick Brown, the Minister for Work, hasn't been told that he is being sacked in...

There are echoes everywhere of the final days of John Major's government. (Politics).
June 21, 2003... I was unable to cope when I joined the parliamentary lobby as a reporter for the London Evening Standard more than ten years ago. I faced two problems, both of them disastrous. The first was that I did not know how to recognise a political...

Eurosceptic newspapers are too competitive to work together on a referendum. (Media Studies).
June 21, 2003... Polly Toynbee of the Guardian believes that the Daily Mail is responsible for most of what is wrong with this country. When she learnt that the paper was intending to hold its own referendum on the new European constitution, the streets of...

Osama bides his time: Sanjay Anand says that Osama bin Laden is living in north-west Pakistan and is planning mass murder on an ever larger scale. (Cover Story).
June 21, 2003... We have al-Qa'eda on the run,' President Bush was reported to have said in April. In May, al-Qa'eda and its associated groups masterminded a week of bombings which left more than 100 people dead. It looked like a deliberate riposte to the...

Mind your language.
June 21, 2003... A kind-hearted reader wondered whether Chinaman might not be a derogatory term. I used it the other week. If you believe the Encarta dictionary, it is not just derogatory--it is offensive. But then, the (mainly Zulu) Encarta (as I like to...

It's not the oil, stupid: conspiracy theorists should lighten up, says Simon Nixon. The US is not about to use Iraq's fuel reserves to dominate the world.
June 21, 2003... These are tough times to be a Middle Eastern despot, so perhaps it is understandable if a few of them feel a little paranoid right now. Iraq is under foreign occupation, Iran is in open revolt, and Saudi Arabia is apparently under attack from...

Within the German pale: Andrew Gimson on why increasing numbers of Jews are returning to Germany.
June 21, 2003... More Jews are moving to Germany than to any other country in the world, including Israel. This statement seldom fails to provoke gasps of astonishment among people whose knowledge of Germany is limited to the Holocaust. To them it seems a very...

Crippling burden: Rod Liddle says small businesses fear they won't be able to afford to install facilities for the disabled.
June 21, 2003... There is something a little reckless about having a go at the disabled lobby. I can happily question the zealousness and rectitude of the Commission for Racial Equality, Stonewall and any of a multitude of women's groups, safe in the knowledge...

Blunkett the authoritarian: Matt Kelly QC, the chairman of the Bar Council, tells Boris Johnson that the Home Secretary is eroding judicial independence.
June 21, 2003... That Lord Woolf, he has a bit of a cheek, doesn't he? I don't know if you caught his intervention in the Criminal Justice Bill debate the other night, but it was the usual stuff. He excoriated the politicians (David Blunkett) for trying to...

Spectators for Africa.(farming in Africa)
June 21, 2003... In any discussion about the justifications for the war in Iraq, there comes the Zimbabwe point. Yeah, says the sceptic, but what about Zimbabwe, eh? If we go to war to liberate the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam, why won't we lift a finger...

Proles apart: in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kentish Town escaped the gaze of Big Brother. Not any more.
June 21, 2003... I have found it--the land that Nineteen Eighty-Four forgot. When the book's hero, Winston Smith, flees Big Brother and the party operatives, it is to 'the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been St Pancras...

Ancient & modern.(history and business)
June 21, 2003... A spate of books is being published to explain the many useful lessons that businessmen can learn from the great figures of the past. One of the figures is Alexander the Great. Well, yes. But then again, no. In 334 BC, with a formidable...

Spectator mini-bar offer.
June 21, 2003... THIS is a particularly exciting mini-bar: fine Italian wines from the admirable John Armit company of Notting Hill. They'll be holding a tasting of these and other wines from 5.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. in their offices on Tuesday 1 July. They've...

Dumb and dumber: Simon Heffer says utilitarian education is destroying hearts and minds.
June 21, 2003... At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke declared that 'Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy'. 'The idea,' he went on, 'that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right....

How shellfish is that? Tim Butcher says that abalone poachers are bringing terror to sleepy seaside towns in South Africa.
June 21, 2003... Hermanus You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller. Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a...

Banned wagon: global.
June 21, 2003... In China over the past fortnight, the waters have been rising in what will eventually be a 350-mile-long reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam. When finished, the dam's turbines will generate energy equivalent to 18 nuclear power plants....

Piano-player in a brothel: Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world--but rebelled against it.
June 21, 2003... Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge, with a grimace of welcome, met me at Robertsbridge station, like many another. To reach the Sussex cottage that he shared with Kitty, his wife of 50 years, he had to drive across a fast main road, down which...

The year aliens became alien: Angela Ellis-Jones on the report issued in 1903 that resulted in Britain's first attempt to control immigration.
June 21, 2003... Uncontrolled immigration? A burden on the taxpayer? Terrorists in our midst? The current immigration crisis echoes events of 100 years ago which led to the passage of Britain's first piece of immigration law. From the 1880s onwards, increasing...

Second opinion.
June 21, 2003... Needless to say, the full beauty of the human personality could not possibly emerge until man had freed himself from the sheer economic necessity that previously so deformed his whole being. That is why the welfare state is so noble an...

When silentiaries whacked their pillar in ancient Byzantium. (And Another Thing).
June 21, 2003... For someone who loves silence as much as I do, it is frustrating to find there is no book on the subject. Thousands of books on sound, naturally; but not a squeak on silence. Indeed, my rummages this week have failed to turn up even a...

Don't mention that Mussolini saved Jews: it is Politically Inconvenient to do so. (Shared Opinion).
June 21, 2003... Weidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: 'Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini...

The colour of caring. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 21, 2003... From Mr Thomas Cooke Sir: As a mixed-race (as I often have to define myself) man who has worked in the so-called 'care-sector' in London, I am able to add an observation to James Cartlidge's exposition ('How to win votes for the BNP', 14...