Spectator articles from March 2005

Spectator archives from March 2005

Portrait of the week.
March 5, 2005... The government did a good deal of nodding and winking to the opposition over its rushed legislation to provide for house arrest without trial and other controls on anyone suspected of connections with terrorism. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home...

A despotic act.(United Kingdom Prevention of Terrorism Act)
March 5, 2005... It is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that people who have lived only in conditions of liberty and democracy should have limited interest in the legal provisions that keep societies free. That much is clear from the public's response to...

Diary.(lifestyles)(Brief article)
March 5, 2005... We are so used to reading of malpractice in high places that I dare say our sense of outrage has become blunted. But when some devious act affects us personally, the sense is re-ignited. This is the story that shocked me--my grandmother, who...

Piers Morgan's ghastly diaries will be the epitaph of this government.(POLITICS)
March 5, 2005... By far the most interesting event of this week was the serialisation of the diaries of Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror. Ebury Press paid more than 1 million [pounds sterling] for this work, while the Daily Mail unloaded 250,000...

Paying for Tony's fat cats: with almost a million new jobs added to the public sector payroll since 1997, Martin Vander Wayer asks if it is now democratically possible to reduce state spending.
March 5, 2005... There is a new kind of class distinction in the dining car from King's Cross to York. Most of us--hoi polloi, relatively speaking--observe the convention that once the fishcake starters are served, it is polite to talk to the strangers with...

The blairs.(Cartoon)
March 5, 2005... CHERIE! HISTORY CHANNEL IN LATER YEARS HE WAS DESPISED FOR HIS DUPLICITY, HIS SPINNING. THE COUNTRY HAD SEEN THROUGH THE FAKE VENEER....

So you want to stuff a badger: Sam Leith has been taking lessons in taxidermy, and he hasn't had so much fun in ages.
March 5, 2005... 'Now I'm going to show you what a scalpel handle is for,' says Mike Gadd. I pick up the one nearest me, and start trying to affix the blade that I've so far been using pinched between finger and thumb. 'Don't be silly,' says Mike. 'It's not...

Mind your language.
March 5, 2005... What a terrible injustice Angola Cannings went through, being wrongly accused of killing her baby son, after having lost two previously, and then imprisoned. I heard her on Woman's Hour and felt great sympathy for her and not a little anger at...

The man who should be Pope: Piers Paul Read looks over the candidates to replace John Paul II, and says that Cardinal Ratzinger has got what it takes.
March 5, 2005... Pope John Paul II's recovery from his tracheotomy in the Gemelli Hospital in Rome will have delighted his well-wishers, but it may have come as a disappointment to the Pope himself. He would like to die in harness and, realising that he can no...

Ancient & modern.
March 5, 2005... The problems relating to asylum-seekers have hit the headlines again. The concept of asylum is ancient, and the problems not new. Asylum derives from the ancient Greek asulos, 'inviolable' (noun asulia). Its basic meaning was 'protection...

Why I won't serve with the Tories: Charles Kennedy tells Leo McKinstry that he would not join a coalition government with Michael Howard.(Interview)
March 5, 2005... What is the policy of the Liberal Democrats on acute back pain? I ask myself as I sit outside Charles Kennedy's office at the House of Commons, twisting in agony from my sciatica. It is not a wholly frivolous question, since the Liberal...

Children can't be trusted: Rod Liddle says it is time that British teachers took back control of the classroom.
March 5, 2005... When I was ten years old, in the autumn of 1970, the pupils and teachers of my state junior school in Middlesbrough were moved, en masse, to a brand new complex a few hundred yards away. This was, we were told, not just a new school, but a very...

One for oil and oil for one: Michael Meacher says that the fuss over Ukraine was about the geopolitics of oil, and the growing conflict between the US and China.
March 5, 2005... Yes, our man (Yushchenko) and our system (democracy) won in Ukraine, and once again good triumphed over bad. Yet this presentation, so characteristic of the Western media, misses the point about what the struggle is really about. If the...

Lay off the Tory tabloids.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Nigel Jones Sir: Douglas Hurd advises us to ignore the campaigns of the popular press--and, by implication, the people whose concerns they ably articulate ('Time to fight back', 26 February). Hurd has spent his professional patrician...

Putin the puppet.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Alexander Nekrassov Sir: In his article 'Why Putin sells missiles to Syria' (26 February) Simon Heifer writes that President Putin's hard-line foreign policy represents a danger to the EU. He argues that by siding with Syria and Iran...

Children need 'Rat play'.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Dr Sean Haldane Sir: I agree with Leo McKinstry that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a 'scandal', but he only goes halfway to why in stating it is just 'naughtiness' ('Not ill--just naughty', 26 February). ADHD is linked...

Patten's patter.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Jonathan Mirsky Sir: In his otherwise excellent article on the folly of selling arms to China ('Selling out to China', 26 February), Andrew Gilligan falls into a familiar trap: failing to recognise when Chris Patten is joking or being...

Tutorials are sacred.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Bill Macmillan Sir: James Howard-Johnston suggests that some of the most stimulating students are the 'hot-air specialists who concoct essays out of very little hard material' ('Save the Oxford tutorial', 26 February). Well, yes, if...

Poles put us to shame.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Peter Whyte-Venables Sir: It is not only America in particular that puts our health system to shame, nor is it rich Western countries in general ('Die in Britain, survive in the US', 12 February). Last May I was in Krakow, Poland, and...

Save the moon bears.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Lynne O'Donnell Sir: Paul Johnson's article (And another thing, 19 February) does not present the whole story of China's moon bears. During a long stint as a correspondent in China, I investigated Animals Asia Foundation's activities...

Hunting is no mere pastime.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Julia Pickles Sir: So Anthony Famularo thinks those of us who care about fox-hunting are 'silly' (Letters, 26 February). Much has been written in similar vein by those who care nothing and understand even less about the countryside....

Forbidden to pay taxes?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 5, 2005... From Paul Magrath Sir: Can Bill Woodhouse (Letters, 19 February) tell me exactly which laws forbid us paying public money to organisations that do not keep proper accounts and that condone fraud? In particular, if they prevent the UK...

Brunnhilde was not conjured up in a glass of common gin.(AND ANOTHER THING)
March 5, 2005... Like many journalists, I can write anywhere and under any conditions. I honestly believe I could do an article in the middle of the street provided there was somebody to fend off the traffic. Certainly I could manage on the rim of Alfred...

After 'faith', why not a BBC docudrama on Tony Blair as an untrustworthy airhead?(ANOTHER VOICE)
March 5, 2005... I well remember the Conservative party's shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport. As I never tire of reminding him, in days long gone, before John Whittingdale became the Member of Parliament for Maldon & East Chelmsford, he and...

When the train almost took the strain: Ross Clark mourns the old style of European rail travel.(TRAVEL)(Column)
March 5, 2005... I reached the age of 25 before I flew in an aeroplane. It seemed too much like cheating to me, to be picked up in a box and deposited hundreds, thousands of miles away, having seen nothing of the intervening space save for a few fairytale...

Dining with cannibals.(Travel)(Bruce Parry)(Interview)
March 5, 2005... We're flying high above the Venezuelan rainforest. Occasionally, far below us, a waterfall tumbles over a cliff and as the biplane rolls right, I can see treetops stretching off to the slanting horizon. Inside the plane, a tired-looking man...

Rhyl meet again.(North Wales)
March 5, 2005... My mother and father honeymooned in Rhyl. It wasn't only that my father had a sense of humour: the borders were closed during the second world war and at least Wales was sort of abroad. Anyway, 65 years on I thought a faux pilgrimage to the...

A right royal groupie.(The Highlands)
March 5, 2005... Apart from her son, the best thing about my mother-in-law is her home in the Scottish Highlands. For one week each year in October, my husband and I become neighbours of Her Majesty the Queen in the grounds of Craigendarroch, a Victorian house...

ew age traveller.(D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... D. H. LAWRENCE: THE LIFE OF AN OUTSIDER by John Worthen Penguin, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 517, 1SBN 0713996137 [telephone] 26 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 Literary biography has been seen as an...

From mourning into morning.(To Travel Hopefully: Journal of a Death Not Foretold)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... To TRAVEL HOPEFULLY: JOURNAL OF A DEATH NOT FORETOLD by Christopher Rush Profile, 15.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 264, ISBN 1861977085 [telephone] 13.99 [pounds sterling], (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling], p&p) 0870 800 4848 Grief hangs like a...

Living it up in Paris.(Alexis: The Memoirs of the Baron de Rede)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... ALEXIS: THE MEMOIRS OF THE BARON DE REDE edited by Hugo Vickers The Dovecote Press, Stanbridge, Wimborne Minster, Dorset BH 21 4 JD, tel: 01258 840549, fax: 01258 840958, www.dovecote press.com, 45 [pounds sterling] until 31 May, 55 [pounds...

Mau Mau and all that.(Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire)(Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya)(Scram from Kenya!: From Colony to Republic)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... HISTORIES OF THE HANGED: BRITAIN'S DIRTY WAR IN KENYA AND THE END OF EMPIRE by David Anderson Weidenfeld, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 406, ISBN 0297847198 [telephone] 18 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 ...

Once upon a funny old time ...(Moving On)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... MOVING ON by James Hewitt Blake, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 366, ISBN 1857825470 [telephone] 14.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 The drama of this book is not its contents but its frame, the sense of...

A tale of January and May.(A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINE by Marina Lewycka Viking/Penguin, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 325, ISBN 0670915602 [telephone] 11.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 So you'd like your child to be a...

Going astray abroad.(Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... SMALL CRIMES IN AN AGE OF ABUNDANCE by Matthew Kneale Picador, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 277, ISBN 02730435345 [telephone] 11.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 These days we are all sophisticates, or so...

Mary had a little germ.(Typhoid Mary)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... TYPHOID MARY by Anthony Bourdain Bloomsbury, 7.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 148, ISBN 0747566879 A hundred years ago there was no known cure for typhoid. Bourdain quotes British casualty figures from the Boer War: 8,000 by enemy action and...

Trouble at the sex factory.(The Inner Circle)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... THE INNER CIRCLE by T. C. Boyle Bloomsbury, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 418, ISBN 0747575576 [telephone] 14.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 I should perhaps declare, not an interest quite, or at least...

Third day.(Poem)
March 5, 2005... Third Day Respirators sound like trout feeding at night in some dream hatchery--no one there to listen; our subaqueous world of care is halfway blue--peaceful, unthreatening. Spectacles pressed to the glass, our...

Bad presentation of a good cause.(Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... SURVIVING THE SWORD: PRISONERS OF THE JAPANESE, 1942-45 by Brian MacArthur Time Warner, 20 [pounds sterling], pp . 512, ISBN 0316861421 [telephone] 18 (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 Brian MacArthur's credits as an author...

A star but not a team player.(Despite the System)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... DESPITE THE SYSTEM by Clinton Heylin Canongate, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 384, ISBN 1841955868 [telephone] 14.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848 In January 1942 Orson Welles finished filming The...

Mother both superior and inferior.(George Sand)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... GEORGE SAND by Elizabeth Harlan Yale, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 376, ISBN 00300104170 In January 1831 26-year-old Aurore Dupin Duvenant abandoned her secure provincial existence, her husband and small children, and set out for Paris and la...

Cuisine: the master's report.(The New English Kitchen)(Book review)
March 5, 2005... THE NEW ENGLISH KITCHEN by Rose Prince Fourth Estate, 18 [pounds sterling], pp. 468, ISBN 0007156448 I am proud of this book, because I have always regarded Rose Prince as my most promising pupil. Over the years, I have taught a lot of...

Dramatic alchemy: Henrietta Bredin believes we shouldn't be too eager to categorise performing-art forms.(ARTS)
March 5, 2005... Do we all make a good deal too much fuss about which particular category different performing-art forms fit into? We seem to be a pretty conservative bunch, happiest, or at any rate most comfortable, when artistic expression doesn't flow...

Dual experience.(Exhibitions)
March 5, 2005... Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments Tate Modern, until 2 May August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer Tate Modern, until 15 May This brace of exhibitions takes up the whole of Level 4 (aside from the coffee bar and...

Make the most of it.(Olden but golden)(Column)
March 5, 2005... One word in this column's title strikes an especially ominous chord this week and it is neither 'golden' nor 'but'. By the time The Spectator hits the shops, I will have notched up my 50th year on this earth, and be heading into the mysteries...

Cultural renaissance.(Manchester)
March 5, 2005... When Liverpool, Newcastle--Gateshead, Birmingham and a host of other regional centres across the UK were slugging it out in the fight to win the title 'UK Capital of Culture 2008', one of our greatest cities chose to remain mysteriously quiet....

Irish horror.(Dance)(Dance review)
March 5, 2005... Giselle Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre Barbican In Michael Keegan-Dolan's Giselle for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre there are no pretty peasants on pointes and no picturesque rustic cottages. What you get instead is a small Irish rural...

Dated whinge-a-thon.(After Intimacy)(Days of Wine and Roses)(Lorelei)(Theater review)
March 5, 2005... Days of Wine and Roses Donmar After Intimacy Pentameters Lorelei Old Red Lion There used to be a thing on British telly called the Wednesday Play. It's gone. Current wisdom ascribes its death to philistine executives who crushed a...

Russian revelation.(Opera)(The Mariinsky Theatre)(Concert review)
March 5, 2005... The Mariinsky Theatre The Barbican The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of...

Legal hoops.(Music)(Hyperion Records v. Dr Lionel Sawkins)(copyright infringement case)
March 5, 2005... Legal cases involving copyright law have a mind-numbing quality which ensures that the general public doesn't follow them. This kind of law evolves as it is invoked, and the principles behind it can easily seem to be balanced on the head of the...

Authentic brilliance.(Radio)(Yes, Minister: the View from Whitehall)(Radio program review)
March 5, 2005... Looking back over the radio and television comedy of the past 25 years, my own feeling is that Yes, Minister on BBC television was by far the most brilliant, almost a work of comic genius, particularly when you compare it with the feebleness of...

Shock treatment.(Television)(Desperate Housewives)(Television program review)
March 5, 2005... In happier times, Charles and Diana came to visit Washington. I was working there then, and a friend of mine at the British embassy described a lunch they attended. Our ambassador, Sir Oliver Wright, gave the Princess a detailed description of...

Girl power.(The turf)
March 5, 2005... Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, a show-biz historian once pointed out. Only she did it backwards. The feminists do have a point, and while women riders still don't get a fair deal in British racing, Kempton on Saturday...

Ideology of violence.(High life)(history)
March 5, 2005... In the American Conservative, Leon Hadar asks, 'Is it possible that a homeless and failed artist from Vienna, a paranoid gangster from Georgia, and a paedophile and drug addict from Beijing led to the ruin of millions and millions of lives?'...

Holding back the years.(Low life)(Column)
March 5, 2005... I'm beginning to decompose even before I m dead. My eyesight's going, my hair's falling out, I've got galloping gum disease, my legs are covered in eczema and I've found a small hard lump on one of my testicles. To stop the rot, I got on the...

Clued up.(Bridge)
March 5, 2005... GOOD declarers will always assume the role of a detective when playing--they'll count the hand, look for clues, try to minimise the element of guesswork. Meanwhile, the defender with the critical holding--not the one whodunnit but the one...

Restaurants.
March 5, 2005... Off to the Duke of Cambridge, which, when it first opened in 1998, was the world's first fully certified organic pub, a fact I thought I'd mention, just in case you care about such things, although I'm not especially sure I do. Indeed, as it...

Varsity.(CHESS)
March 5, 2005... Saturday 5 March sees the annual match between Oxford and Cambridge, the longest fixture in world chess. Some of the alumni who have gone on to achieve great things in chess include Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, CHOD Alexander, John Nunn, William...

Bouts rimes.(COMPETITION)
March 5, 2005... In Competition No. 2381 you were invited to supply a poem using a given rhyme-scheme and rhyme-words. The rhymes were taken from Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, that splendid narrative poem which uses Pushkin's tricky Onegin metre with...

1704: the gang's all here.(CROSSWORD)
March 5, 2005... The unclued lights (1 of two words) are of a kind and can be found here regularly. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A first prize of 30 [pounds sterling] and a bottle of stylish Warre's 1992 unfiltered Late Bottled Port for the first correct...

Solution to 1701: buffer zones.(CROSSWORD)
March 5, 2005... The unclued lights are TERMINI on the London Underground. The possible fourth accent could appear in Adele at 38A. First prize: M. Nash, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire Runners-up: K. and R. MacCutchan, Woking, Surrey; J.S. Roberts, Lewes,...

Cech, mate!(SPECTATOR SPORT)
March 5, 2005... On the face of it, Liverpool have the best chance of the four English clubs seeking progress in the European Champions' Cup next week. They take a 3-1 lead back to Germany, but the away goal holds crucial significance and, wisely, no Scouser is...

Dear Mary.(YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED)
March 5, 2005... Q. My teenage daughter's lifelong friend has over the years developed the most unfortunate strain of body odour, obviously unbeknown to her. It has become increasingly unbearable recently and presumably in her earlier years was either masked in...

Portrait of the week.
March 12, 2005... The government was defeated in the House of Lords by 249 to 119 when a Liberal Democrat amendment to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill was passed--to apply the prior sanction of a judge rather than the say-so of a home secretary to all proposed...

Two faces on terror.(Irish Republican Army)
March 12, 2005... The latest crime-fighting proposal from the IRA is so boneheaded, so stunning in its stupidity, so stereotypically moronic, that if it had not come from a bunch of thugs and killers we might be tempted to say that it is almost sweet. The...

Diary.(Column)
March 12, 2005... About once a decade, the editor of The Spectator asks me to write a diary column. I always accept, though diaries, contrary to what might be supposed, are among the most difficult types of journalism to write. I accept partly because I like The...

Suddenly, the Chancellor has extra money to play with.(Politics)
March 12, 2005... Mr Len Cook lives with his wife in a flat near Victoria and can often be seen eating a modest lunch at Goya, a quiet family restaurant in Pimlico. In the evenings he is a keen theatregoer. Later this year he returns for good to his native New...

The Spectator's notes.(habeas corpus and the IRA)
March 12, 2005... Right-minded people are fighting to retain habeas corpus. We would have more popular success, I feel, if the public knew what habeas corpus meant. The trouble is that, even translated into English, it is still obscure. Habeas corpus means,...

A revolution made for TV: Mary Wakefield talks to hip, fun-loving young people in Beirut and sees how cameras and lip-liner are helping to spread democracy in Lebanon.(Cover Story)
March 12, 2005... On Tuesday, half a million people were demonstrating in the streets of Beirut, chanting and waving flags. If you only gave the TV a quick glance, you probably assumed that they were protesting against the Syrian presence in Lebanon. In fact it...

The Blairs.(Cartoon)
March 12, 2005... 'AVE AN HEART GUV! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Pentagon's new pin-up boy: Toby Harnden talks to Walid Jumblatt, who has seen the error of his anti-American ways.(Interview)
March 12, 2005... Mukhtara, Lebanon With his bald pate, droopy moustache and sad, bleary eyes, Walid Jumblatt looks more circus clown than Pentagon pin-up. And if the warlord's eccentric appearance were not enough to dismay White House officials, then his...

A question of breeding: Rod Liddle believes that the huge increase in the number of children with autism may be explained by modern mating habits.
March 12, 2005... Why has there been such an enormous rise in the number of children diagnosed as 'autistic' in the last 20 or so years? How can we account for the quite astonishing increase in cases of this harrowing and alienating affliction? The question...

Second opinion.(politics and battered women)
March 12, 2005... Having spent so long, if not in the lower depths exactly, at least among their inhabitants, it is not surprising, perhaps, that I see the lower depths wherever I go. My experience haunts me, and I am on the lookout for them. For example, not...

Let's not be dumb about stupidity: a new prejudice has emerged--discrimination against people with low IQs.
March 12, 2005... The strange notion of a dumb Britain has taken hold in the national psyche. A-levels are now so simple, we are told, that they can be tackled by a goldfish. We have media studies degrees, children who don't know who Churchill was, the whole...

The Spectator Classics Cup 2005.
March 12, 2005... Last year there was one Classics Cup on offer. This year there are no fewer than three: one for the Open competition (any 200-word piece from The Spectator in Latin or Greek prose or verse); one for undergraduates (200 words in Latin or Greek...

The price of happiness: Petronella Wyatt talks to Richard Layard, who believes that higher taxation can reduce envy and make us all happier.(Interview)
March 12, 2005... Richard Layard, the founder of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, is a brave man. The Labour peer and adviser to the government has written a book on happiness. Or to be more precise, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. This is big...

Mind your language.
March 12, 2005... I enjoyed the book Long Live Latin rather more than the Spectator reviewer (5 February) seems to have done, and its author, John Gray, has put his finger on a misleading passage in Lynne Truss's famous book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The Zero...

Bogus Brown: Allister Heath says it's business as usual: next week's budget will be another prosperity-destroying exercise in big government.
March 12, 2005... Britain's hard-pressed taxpayers may finally be getting better value for their money, but not in the way they expected. They are now being promised two Gordon Browns for the price of one, just in time for next Wednesday's budget, courtesy of...

Spoil sports: Lloyd Evans joined a march against the Olympics, and returned more convinced than ever that London needs the Games.
March 12, 2005... Necessary evils have been good to London. The Great Fire torched all those fiddly Tudor houses, the Luftwaffe wiped away the filthy slums, and now the Olympics threaten to burn a path up the Lee Valley and unleash a frenzy of new building....

No, Minister: Tory plans to cut waste remind David Howell of Edward Heath's failed initiative of 1970.
March 12, 2005... If the Tories want to know how Wars on Waste work out, the best test is to go back not to 1979 but to 1970. That was the year Ted Heath won the election--against most of the odds and the widespread predictions of experts. And the centrepiece of...

ADHD is an illness.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 12, 2005... From Lady Astor of Hever Sir: I am the mother of a daughter who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For the past 23 years I have protected her and defended myself against the sort of opinionated, didactic comments made on...

Japanese discipline.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 12, 2005... Sir: Rod Liddle says it is time that British teachers took back control of the classroom ('Children can't be trusted', 5 March). When I was in Japan a few years ago, a local newspaper carried a report about a teacher who beat two of his teenage...

Nothing in the pipeline.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 12, 2005... Sir: Michael Meacher's flaccid charge that the Afghanistan war was in part about the Unocal pipeline ('One for oil and oil for one', 5 March) is just silly, especially considering that the pipeline study had been pushed by the Clinton...

Gilligan hard to defend.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 12, 2005... From The Rt Hon. Lord Patten of Barnes Sir: Andrew Gilligan ('Selling out to China', 26 February) ascribes to me the view that Europe should end the arms embargo because it is humiliating for China. What I actually said on the BBC was that...