Spectator articles from March 2003

Spectator archives from March 2003

The point of the Tories.
March 1, 2003... The Tory party is like some particularly gloomy man going through a mid-life crisis. His wife has left him, to universal applause. As so often in these cases, he seems unable to talk about anything except himself, thereby making his position...

Portrait of the week.(what was news this week)
March 1, 2003... Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, in an emergency statement to the House of Commons on Iraq, that 100 per cent co-operation by Saddam Hussein was necessary, and `anything less will not do'. A day's debate followed in the Lords and...

Diary.(Sarah Sands on being a writer)
March 1, 2003... I have written a novel about Middle England's love affair with female newsreaders. I was struck by a survey which showed that viewers of these grave messengers of world events could remember only the first 30 seconds of what was said. The women...

It's sad in a way, but Michael Portillo is no longer a serious figure. (Politics).
March 1, 2003... The prospect of war now eclipses everything at Westminster. To use the narrow, though reassuring, boundaries of the English racing calendar, hostilities are unlikely to break out before the final day of the Cheltenham Festival on 13 March. But...

Thank me for not screaming: Rod Liddle reports on the frustrations that can accompany a simple rail journey or a visit to a playground, and wonders how much we are paying for petty regulations and public incompetence.
March 1, 2003... THERE was once a golden age, I think, when certain bad things didn't happen. I'm not sure when it was--maybe it was as little as 15 years ago. All I know is that these bad things happen now and that I have a vague recollection of life being...

Mind your language.
March 1, 2003... THE sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, `If I'd have known that...'. At...

If it's Tory, tax it: Ross Clark says that the government is making Conservative councils in the South pay for pet projects in the North.
March 1, 2003... WHEN it became clear that the public were no longer going to be duped by stealth taxes, someone at the heart of government must have made a cruel calculation: if we cannot fool people by disguised tax rises, why not devise a tax hike which is...

Ancient & modern.(Should London bid for the Olympics)
March 1, 2003... THE debate grinds on about whether to bid for the Olympic Games to be staged in London. It is time to apply a little ancient wisdom. Alcibiades, darling of the Bright Young Things in 5th-century BC Athens, was very proud of his achievements...

The glory that was empire: D.J.M. Muffett on how Britain brought peace and justice to Nigeria, and how independence brought turmoil and terror.
March 1, 2003... ON the Ides of March 100 years ago, a column of troops under Lieut-Col. T.L.N. Morland encountered an army of some thousands of Hausa/Fulani horse and foot drawn up on the hurumi (common land) to the southwest of the city of Sokoto in the...

Poles apart? Tim Luckhurst warns that London and Washington should not take it for granted that pro-war Poland will join the EU.
March 1, 2003... IN Warsaw last Tuesday the French defence minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, continued her President's ham-fisted strategy of offering patronising advice to Eastern European nations on course to join the European Union. `It was better to keep...

The end of Die Welt? Andrew Gimson says that German newspapers are at last feeling the economic pinch: some are merging, some are shrinking.
March 1, 2003... HARDLY anyone on this side of the North Sea seems to know that the German press is in the throes of an acute crisis. When one mentions this fact to English colleagues, they ask in a bored tone whether things are as bad there as they are here....

Down with extremism: Norman Tebbit is sick of the dogmatism that drives the modernisers and Eurofanatics in the Tory party.
March 1, 2003... NOT all my collection of political cartoons is hung in the downstairs 100, but one published in the Evening Standard in June 1995 has pride of place there. Contemplating John Redwood's resignation from the Cabinet to accept Prime Minister...

Aids: it's worse than you imagined: there are a lot of myths about why Aids is widespread in Africa. But the facts, says Hugh Russell, are more bizarre.
March 1, 2003... Lusaka THE funeral processions trundle past my garden gates at any and every hour of the day. Sometimes they are rather grand affairs, with a purpose-built hearse and an ornate coffin gleaming through its transparent walls. But more...

Banned wagon: global: a weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... NEWSPAPER readers will have seen a recent advertisement placed by Christian Aid in the form of a spoof boxing poster. The ad depicted a bullying `world-trade enforcer' poised with his bare knuckles, about to take on an emaciated figure by the...

The armchair historians are wrong: this isn't Munich or Suez; it's Sarajevo. (Shared Opinion).
March 1, 2003... We are either at Munich, 1938, or Suez, 1956. Depending on whether we are for or against this coming war, one or the other is the favoured comparison. President Bush and Mr Blair, even more so Mr Rumsfeld, would have us believe that we are...

The Telegraph made Iain Duncan Smith. Will it break him? (Media Studies).
March 1, 2003... To say that the Daily Telegraph has the same relationship to the Tory party as Pravda once did to the Soviet Communist party would be a bit of an exaggeration. There are some sections of the Tory party which the Telegraph does not like, and...

Why states fail. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: Bravo to Conrad Black on his piece (`Britain is right to stick by America', 15 February)! Many readers must have been struck by the clarity of his remarks. It is not easy to speak the truth in Britain these days without being maligned as a...

This demi-paradise. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: Tom Palmer (`Hothouse of hate', 22 February) is too hard on the Eden Project. If some facts and figures presented there are a tad distorted or erroneous, any such lack of attention to detail merely reflects an all-pervasive political...

Moving stationery. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: How many staplers, exactly, did George Orwell possess? Alastair Campbell (Diary, 22 February) is pleased that Mark Seddon, editor of Tribune, is contributing to Campbell's London Marathon charity appeal `a great item for auction--George...

Terror's grim reality. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: I agree with Mark Steyn's view (`Death wish', 22 February) that there appears to be an Islamic involvement in most current conflicts and attacks. While we can understand the nature of terrorism as carried out by the IRA or ETA, which are...

Tank think. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: Michael Vestey (Arts, 22 February) suggests that the government was right to station tanks at airports, and that this was not a `stunt'. He feels that there must be a real threat of some kind to which this was a sensible response. I...

A dangerous diversion. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: By comparing Tony Blair with his distinguished predecessors, Paul Johnson (And another thing, 22 February) exhibits a confusion of thought about the national interest that is becoming dangerously commonplace. His predecessors recognised...

Disgruntled of Durban. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: Michael Henderson's slanted and cynical article (Sport, 15 February) on the opening match of the cricket World Cup cannot go unchallenged. Lara's glorious innings was generously applauded by the players and capacity crowd fortunate...

Giant-killing midgets. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: I am one of the many conservatives (with a small `c') who believe that the present lamentable state of the Tory party is the result of, and a judgment on, the parliamentary party's treatment of Mrs (as she was then) Thatcher. While I...

Slight, unmeritable men ... (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: `All gong and no dinner'? Rachel Johnson (`A land unfit for heroes', 22 February) may not have heard of a quarter of the present OMs, but a list of past holders which includes Alma Tadema, Augustus John and E.M. Forster suggests that it...

Favourite withdrawn. (Letters).
March 1, 2003... Sir: I suspect that I will be one of many mourning the departure of Robin Oakley's `The turf column; he will be sorely missed. His stint in Spectator silks has been constantly entertaining and occasionally very profitable for me. I wish him...

A question of inches, facial hair and screaming babies. (And Another Thing).
March 1, 2003... In reading history, which I do incessantly, what I like most is to come across those details which instantly bring the character to life, as if standing in the room next to me. Height, for instance. The importance of height in history cannot be...

Where no birds sing: Matthew Leeming traces the source of the mysterious River Oxus. (Travel And International Property).
March 1, 2003... VERY few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six...

Profonde no longer. (France).
March 1, 2003... TWO good things emerge from the cheap, frill-less airlines like Ryanair and Buzz, as their webs fling further across Europe: they open great tracts of France undiscovered even by fervent Francophiles and they land at tiny, charming rural...

The great in-between. (Scottish borders).
March 1, 2003... IN THE summer of 1934 Edwin Muir set out to explore Scotland in a 1921 Standard car he had borrowed from the director of the National Gallery of Scotland. The product of his trip, an enchanting book called Scottish Journey, divides the country...

Balkan beauties. (Croatia).
March 1, 2003... THE Miss Dalmatia Beauty Pageant was a serious matter. Whoever became Miss Dalmatia could go on to be Miss Croatia. Miss Croatia could become Miss World. I arrived about halfway through, during an interval when most of the aspiring beauty...

Boondocks to Brooklyn. (United States).
March 1, 2003... New England AS I write, snow is piling up against the sides of our Connecticut home. It is already above the sills of the door; soon it will reach the windows. The entire landscape, from here to Long Island Sound, is covered with...

Pieds-a-terre on piste. (Ski resorts).
March 1, 2003... I HAVE just returned from a trip to the Alpine village of Megeve, situated in the heart of the Haute-Savoie, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, where I successfully introduced my three-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter to the pleasures of skiing. It...

Patagonia, here we come! (Terror-free zones).
March 1, 2003... THE London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have...

The most interesting of monarchs.(The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... THE CRADLE KING: A LIFE OF JAMES VI & I by Alan Stewart Chatto & Windus, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 438, ISBN 0 701169842 When an honest citizen was shown into King James I's room in Whitehall, the scene of confusion amid which he found the...

A marriage of true minds.(Transformation of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... TRANSFORMATIONS OF LOVE: THE FRIENDSHIP OF JOHN EVELYN AND MARGARET GODOLPHIN by Frances Harris OUP, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 330, ISBN O199252572 How often John Evelyn appears as the sober stand-in or continent follow-up to his more...

Challenge and response.(The Fall)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... THE FALL by Simon Mawer Little, Brown, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 442, ISBN 0316 725242 The first four pages of this novel arouse the highest expectations. Some walkers in the Snowdon area stare up at the boiler-plate slabs of a crag up...

Down to the last detail.(The Lock)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... THE LOCK by Frank Egerton Smaller Sky Books, Bryn Maen, Maentwrog, Gwynedd L 41 4HN, tel: 07050 632277, 8.99 [pounds terling], pp. 283, ISBN 1903100097 One might assume that the Oxford novel, like some long-delayed train finally pulling...

Heart of darkness and silence.(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... THE GATE by Francois Bizot, translated by Euan Cameron Harvill, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 286, ISBN 1843430010 Joseph Conrad is famous for having chilled our blood with Heart of Darkness and its `the horror, the horror'. A great...

Rich, regal and kosher.(Charlotte and Lionel )(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... CHARLOTTE & LIONEL by Stanley Weintraub Simon & Schuster, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 316, ISBN 0743219910 Charlotte & Lionel is billed as a `Rothschild Love Story'. This is misleading. There was nothing romantic about the long, solid,...

Oppenheimer: fact and fiction.(America's Children)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... AMERICA'S CHILDREN by James Thackara The Overlook Press $26.95, pp. 330, ISBN 1585671118 `Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible,' Virginia Woolf once wrote. She was deploring the decision of her friend, Lytton Strachey, to...

A two-pipe case not solved.(The Hitler/Hess Depiction)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... THE HITLER/HESS DECEPTION by Martin Allen HarperCollins, 19.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 324,. ISBN 0007141181 Where was Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess heading when he took off in his Messerschmitt 110 from Augsburg, near Munich, on the evening...

Tale of a survivor.(Diary of an Ordinary Woman)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... DIARY OF AN ORDINARY WOMAN by Margaret Forster Chatto, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 403, ISBN 070174129 Women were always feminists. Their rebellion, or protest--against their mothers, against men, against financial inequality--may not have...

Icons in bowler hats.(Kafka Goes to the Movies)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... KAFKA GOES TO THE MOVIES by Hanns Zischler University of Chicago Press, 21 [pounds sterling], pp. 143. ISBN 0226986713 IN THIS SINGULAR BOOK, HANNS ZISCHLER (CRITIC, DIRECTOR & ACTOR) INVITES US TO SEE THROUGH KAFKA'S EYES. WHAT WE...

Living under the volcano.(What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-33)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... WHAT I SAW: REPORTS FROM BERLIN, 1920-33 by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann Granta, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 227, ISBN 1862975786 Regrettably history is not among the core subjects now prescribed by the government's...

Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley.(Poem)
March 1, 2003... Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley In the last year of her life I dined with Diana Cooper Who told me she thought the best thing to do with the poor Was to kill them. I think her tongue was in her cheek But with that...

The next best thing.(Winslow Homer: Artist and Angler)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... WINSLOW HOMER: ARTIST AND ANGLER by Patricia Junker and Sarah Burns Thames & Hudson, 32 [pounds sterling], pp. 200, ISBN 0500093075 This handsome book should be given to all those non-Waltonians who say, `I don't fish because I haven't got...

Nothing new on display.(Life in a Climate)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... LIFE IN A COLD CLIMATE by Laura Thompson Review, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 426, ISBN 0747245746 Assuming that a biography is worth writing in the first place, it is often asserted that after 20 years or so another look at the same subject...

Titian's touch of genius: Andrew Lambirth on the National Gallery's magnificent show of this Renaissance giant. (Arts).
March 1, 2003... Walking around this exhibition is a humbling experience. We are privileged to have a display of paintings of this quality in London, and it is an incredible achievement to have obtained loans of such distinction. One of the pictures scheduled...

Clash of talent.(exhibitions at the Tate St. Ives)
March 1, 2003... Among the four Tates, St Ives has always been the exception in having a local artistic connection. While this makes it special, it also creates problems for the go-ahead programmer. There are only so many St Ives artists to go round, and in the...

A life among music's greats: Michael Henderson remembers his friend Peter Steiner, who died recently. (Arts).(Obituary)
March 1, 2003... A remarkable man died a few weeks ago. At the age of 74 Peter Steiner was not old by modern expectations but he had given 47 of those years to the world's greatest orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, joining as a teenager when Wilhelm...

Everyman's Journey. (Arts).(Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... An exhibition of work by Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis (born 1966), entitled Everyman's Journey, can be seen at the Portland Gallery, 9 Bury Street, St James's, SW1. Aytoun-Ellis was orphaned as a young child and brought up by her grandmother, whom...

Ravishing spectacle.(The Cunning Little Vixen)(Opera Review)
March 1, 2003... The revival of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen at the Royal Opera is only a partial success, though with this glorious work even a quite good performance leaves one both glowing and with a renewed appetite for life. Bill Bryden's production,...

Forever young.(Maguy Marin's Cinderella)(Dance Review)
March 1, 2003... Maguy marin's Cinderella was created in 1985 but unlike other and equally important examples of dance theatre from the same period it has not aged at all. The body masks that cover the dancers from head to toe, intentionally limiting their...

Durham Wharf. (Arts).(Julian Trevelyan)(Mary Fedden)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Durham Wharf is the title of an exhibition of paintings (till 18 March) by that remarkable husband-and-wife team, Julian Trevelyan and Mary Fedden. Mounted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Bohun Gallery (15 Reading Road,...

Acid-laced banter.(My Brilliant Divorce The Green Man)(Theater Review)
March 1, 2003... By my own rather conventional standards of what constitutes a good play, I should have hated The Green Man. Set in a non-descript pub somewhere in south-west London, it probes the relationship between four working-class men and one woman during...

Two's company. (Pop music).
March 1, 2003... Up to the moment as ever, I suddenly find myself listening a great deal to Radio Two. Would anyone have admitted to this ten years ago? Certainly not. Radio Two was the music station for people who don't like music. It was the home of such...

A lot to learn. (Television).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... I was reading an interview with hippy multi-millionaire Felix Dennis the other day in which he claimed that watching television is a massive waste of life. `My God,' I thought. `So that's why I'm not a multi-millionaire.' And I quietly promised...

Speaking out. (Radio).
March 1, 2003... Despite its mistakes over the years I've always had a soft spot for the CIA. I was glad it was there through the Cold War and, after 11 September, even more thankful it is here now. Those of a leftish liberal cast of mind thought the agency was...

The end of the line? (Hunting).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... We were sliding slowly downhill out of a Welsh cloud towards the end of the day. We had begun as a mounted field of 21 (`Sorry we're so big today,' said the Master, `we're normally only eight or ten'), and now the small remnant was chatting. A...

Marrying money. (High life).
March 1, 2003... Gstaad In 1903 the following resolution was introduced in Texas on 20 February: Whereas there are many dukes, lords, and counts touring the US, seeking matrimonial alliance with our most accomplished and richest...

Mind games. (Low life).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Times have changed. At the party I passed out at last week someone had gone to the trouble of putting the magic mushrooms in an orange-flavoured vodka jelly. The jelly was presented in a rather lovely Art Deco china bowl. You took a dish and...

Personality factions. (Singular life).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... I hardly spend my life attending dinner parties given by the chattering classes. But I will admit to attending dinners given by people who chatter--though not in the Hampstead/Islington fashion but more in the Tory manner, if it exists any more...

Tricks. (Bridge).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... I'VE spent a lot of time lately kicking myself. The reason is that I've been reading one of the most cunningly contrived bridge books I've ever come across--More Hocus-Pocus by Erwin Brecher & Julian Pottage (Panacea Press 9.95 [pounds...

1001 knights. (Chess).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... BAGHDAD is in the news once again, though for all the wrong reasons. A thousand years ago, it was a world capital of science, mathematics and, indeed, chess. During the 8th and 9th centuries in the Caliphate of Baghdad of the Abbasid dynasty,...

Jekyll and Hyde. (Competition).
March 1, 2003... IN COMPETITION NO. 2278 you were invited to supply an address or letter from your better self to your worse, or vice versa. Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor--see and approve the better course, but follow the worse.' In five words...

1603: a sense of place. (Crossword).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... A first prize of 30 [pounds sterling] and a bottle of Graham's exquisite ten-year-old Tawny Port (delicious drunk chilled) for the first correct solution opened on 17 March, with two runners-up prizes of 20 [pounds sterling] (or, for UK...

Cape boredom. (Spectator Sport).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Durban EVERYBODY has a black spot, some subject or interest dear to others that they can't crack. Andrew Marr doesn't care for Wordsworth or for English beer, but then he's a lippy Jock. Philip Hensher, who seems to have inherited Anthony...

Dear Mary. (Your Problems Solved).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Q. I rather prefer the use, however dated, of the English version of foreign place names, such as Leghorn, Peking and Bombay. I recently had occasion, in conversation, to refer to Majorca, whereupon my interlocutor pointedly (and from the point...

Portrait of the week.
March 8, 2003... Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech in Swansea: `In 1938 Chamberlain was a hero when he brought back the Munich agreement. And he did it for the best of motives. He had seen members of his precious family, people he loved, die...

Stoking panic.(safe keeping of Tony Blair in the event of a terrorist attack)
March 8, 2003... Having had a peek through the gates of Downing Street, the next item on a tourist's itinerary is a short stroll across Horse Guards Parade to the Cabinet War Rooms, from where Winston Churchill directed operations in the second world war. We...

Diary.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2003... `You once said something I remind myself of at least twice a day,' Alan Rusbridger said to my excitement, over our lunch at Flaneur. `You told me never to go on TV or radio.' I denied this (Johnsons are not noted for their aversion to...

Things have come to a pretty pass when a freeborn Englishman is not allowed to kill his wife. (Thought For The Day).(Hariet Harman trying to eliminate provocation as a defence in murdering women)
March 8, 2003... The government is considering a new law which would make it illegal to kill women, no matter how annoying they may have become. Men should lose recourse to the defence of `provocation', argues Harriet Harman, the Solicitor General. The idea...

Mr Blair is being timid in not joining the nations now resisting the hawks of Washington. (Another Voice).
March 8, 2003... The Prime Minister is right. The whole credibility of the United Nations is at stake this week. If the Security Council buckles under the US blackmail to which it is now subject over Iraq, we can discount the organisation as an independent...

The decline and fall of the hooray Henry: Peter Oborne on why undergraduates dunked Andrew Marr in a Cambridge pond, and why such an outrage would not be perpetrated today.
March 8, 2003... TWENTY-FIVE years on, Andrew Marr recollects the episode well but insists that it was all down to mistaken identity. They were after the Jews, he claims, and they got me as second best. Marr's account is at any rate open to challenge. There was...

Banned wagon: global: a weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade.
March 8, 2003... TWO weeks ago, this magazine warned of the consequences if well-meaning scientists and equality campaigners were to have their way and pharmaceutical companies were forced to surrender patents on the anti-retroviral drugs they have developed to...

Turks versus Kurds: Julian Manyon on the bitter hostilities in northern Iraq.
March 8, 2003... Erbil ON the road to ancient Nineveh, now sign-posted Mosul, I stood with a group of Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers watching one of the acts of spite which still mark the Saddam Hussein regime, even in what appear to be its death throes. We were at...

Ancient & modern.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2003... THE EU has recently proclaimed that, for the purposes of its statistical analyses, Britain is not an island. That poses an interesting question: when did it become an island? It has recently been argued that it became one, in Roman eyes at any...

Sin for your supper: in the French catechism, gluttony is given as `gourmandise'. Philip Delves Broughton says virtuous French gourmands want it changed.
March 8, 2003... Paris BEFORE his death last year in a helicopter accident, France's best-known baker, Lionel Poilane, drafted a letter to the Pope in which he asked for a change to the French translation of the catechism. He wrote that the capital sin of...

Second opinion.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2003... IN the days when relations between men and women were not so fluid or elastic that they left some room for the only cement that holds civilisation together, namely hypocrisy, it was widows and spinsters who were pitied for their condition of...

Mind your language.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2003... DR C.M.W. Tang writes from Georgetown, Guyana, to say that an English lady professor of his acquaintance was perplexed when she was admitted to a hospital there and had to tick her race as `Caucasian'. She wondered what connection she was...

How to be British: Sir Bernard Crick on the tests that immigrants must pass to achieve citizenship.
March 8, 2003... THE foreign hotel register demands: `Nationality?' By `nationality', of course, the hotel means `legal citizenship'. The question has nothing to do with the late 19th-century assumption that every nation should be a state (with many terrible...

Spectator mini-bar offer.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2003... FOR some people, Burgundy is the only wine. Everything else is alcoholic grape juice. And a great Burgundy, red or white, has a style and flair and perfume and finesse and depth and richness which can't be found anywhere else. On the other...

Stalinist statistics: the government insists that the reconviction rate among young offenders is falling. But that's not true.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2003... THERE is nothing a professional pessimist hates more than good news: it disheartens him so. There is a great deal of comfort to be derived from the idea that the world is going to the demnition bow-wows, which is completely spoiled by...