Spectator articles from March 2009

Spectator archives from March 2009

Flash Gordon: Gordon Brown has a showdown with sir Fred Goodwin.(Cartoon)
March 7, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Throw down your pension pot and give yourself up Goodwin!

Standing room.(Munchausen syndrome)(Column)
March 7, 2009... I think I may have unearthed a new strain of the disease Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Munchausen on its own is a psychological disorder in which a person makes him or herself appear ill in order to get attention or nurturing. Munchausen by...

Good lessons to be learned from the much-despised Thirties.(AND ANOTHER THING)
March 7, 2009... A.J.P. Taylor liked to talk about the Great Depression of the Thirties. 'It was all right for some, such as myself,' he said, with satisfaction. 'With a nice, safe job as a university don, I was sitting pretty. Prices were stable or going down....

Don't go Dutch.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 7, 2009... Sir: The Dutch postal service was privatised, you say, 'with no perceived damage to the services they offer' (Leading article, 28 February). You would not say that if you lived here. Firstly, deliveries: there is one a day, which arrives at...

On the wrong track.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 7, 2009... Sir: Ross Clark's article 'Big bonuses in the public sector' (21 February) contained several inaccuracies. Firstly, Railtrack ceased to exist over six years ago. Network Rail has been the sole owner and manager of Britain's railway network...

Heads it is.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 7, 2009... Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator's Notes, 21 February) quotes a headline 'Bishops back Christian in school religion row'. This reminds me of a tabloid headline when Tom King was Minister for Northern Ireland: 'Loyalists punch and kick King'....

Neglected composers.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 7, 2009... Sir: Congratulations to Robin Holloway for drawing our attention to the neglected English composers of the 18th and 19th centuries (Music, 28 February). However, I would like to suggest that they were not merely 'charming wayside bloom[s]'. To...

Sack the Scots.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 7, 2009... Sir: If anyone has written a better rant than Jeremy Clarke's Low Life column (21 February) please show me. Having read Clarke's masterpiece, I felt calmer, knowing that there is at least one other person in the country who feels similarly...

From extreme to extreme.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 7, 2009... Sir: Tim Shipman writes that 'The US believes that if there is to be a repeat of 9/11, it is most likely to be carried out by British Muslim terrorists' ('The CIA now has to spy on Britain', 28 February). There is an historic precedent for the...

Sacrificial lambs.(Bridge)(Brief article)
March 7, 2009... I have been in a towering, 1974 style, dungaree-wearing, feminist rage for a couple of weeks. It started with Susanna's infuriating column on how cute and old-boy it is that the Portland Club graciously opens its doors to laydees on special...

Snobbery and inverted snobbery dictate the words that bring us out in hives.(STATUS ANXIETY)(Viewpoint essay)
March 7, 2009... As a new member of staff at Vanity Fair in 1995, I was given a list of words it was unacceptable to use in the magazine. A few of these reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the editor--'golfer', for instance--but most were slang terms like...

Flash Gordon.(Cartoon)
March 14, 2009... GORDON BROWN'S GUERNICA [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

No axis of evil.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2009... Sir: Melanie Phillips's article ('Beware the new axis of evangelicals and Islamists', 7 March) contains untruthful statements about me. I have never said that I wish Israel, in her words, 'to be destroyed' or to 'disappear just as did the...

Going postal.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2009... Sir: Having worked since 2006 as a postman in Amsterdam, I agree with David Jones (Letters, 7 March) that the privatisation of the Dutch postal service has certainly affected the quality of that service. The objective of the postal service was...

Not Picasso's words.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2009... Sir: It's too bad that Andrew Lambirth closes his review of the National Gallery's Picasso exhibition (Arts, 7 March) with words ('I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time') which Picasso never spoke. The fake quotation...

A useful uncle.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2009... Sir: Lest we lose ourselves in wholehearted admiration for Gail Trimble's outstanding contribution to the Corpus Christi University Challenge team (The Spectator's Notes, 7 March), history records that the quizmasters are no intellectual...

The cost of learning.
March 21, 2009... A momentous shift occurred in British politics this week: the National Union of Students accepted the principle that graduates should contribute to the cost of their degrees. This U-turn is proof that the argument that graduates should pay for...

The spectator's notes.
March 21, 2009... Nicko Henderson, who died this week, wrote a famous dispatch when he retired as Ambassador to Paris in March 1979. It summed up how Britain's precipitous economic decline had undermined her foreign policy, and looked for a solution in being...

Manners maketh the man.(Cartoon)
March 21, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Manners maketh the man: spot the missing word.(Cartoon)
March 21, 2009... I SAY! YOU TROD ON MY FOOT!! DID I? I'M .. ER .. ERR... .. ER .. TERRIBLY...... WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING! ON, ER... ER... I'M .. MOST AWFULLY... ER .. ER .. DUCH! YOU SLAMMED THE DOOR RIGHT IN MY FACE!! I'M ER... I'M...

The G20 summit is lousy value for money. Cancel it: Ross Clark looks ahead to Gordon Brown's summit at which he will try to revive his own political fortunes, found a new global economic order and stage a Bretton Woods for our times. No chance: the whole thing is an expensive sham.(Cover story)
March 21, 2009... It is difficult to look at the photographs of the world's finance ministers, bank chiefs and assorted hangers-on assembled at a hotel in West Sussex last weekend without thinking of those old BT ads with the slogan, 'Why not change the way we...

Standing room.(ethnicity)
March 21, 2009... Last Saturday I was sent a stiff, glossy brochure informing me of imminent changes in my local podiatry services. NHS Westminster plans to invest 540,000 [pounds sterling] in this pressing 'service redesign' and being a taxpayer and local...

The smoking ban was always going to be the thin end of the wedge: Rod Liddle is appalled by Sir Liam Donaldson's deployment of statistics in the hope of making it harder to have a drink. A surrealist would struggle to keep up with such campaigns against our human pleasures.(LIDDLE BRITAIN)
March 21, 2009... Iatrogenesis accounts for the deaths of an estimated 72,000 British people every year--or slightly more than the combined numbers of those feckless people dying from smoking, drinking and being very fat. I suppose you could call it the silent...

Mind your language.
March 21, 2009... The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: 'Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?' The girl behind the counter said: 'No problem.' A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it...

Art for money's sake.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: It is hardly surprising that Olivia Cole ('How to put children off art', 14 March) found so many schoolchildren in the National Gallery and that they seemed to be learning little about art from their visits. The Gallery, like other public...

Inside knowledge.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: I was impressed that Charles Moore is able to tell the time, to within 15 minutes, without recourse to a watch (The Spectator's Notes, 28 February). When I was a jackeroo in Western Australia in the 1960s there was an aboriginal stockman...

Israel's terrorists.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: Jonathan Mirsky declares himself to be 'no expert' in writing about the early days of Israel's struggle for independence (Books, 14 March). But in these days when everyone and his wife seems to be happily trading half-truths and whole...

Marriage a la mode.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: Oh dear, oh dear! How could it be that your correspondent Mary, who solves readers' problems and is such a magnificent arbiter of good taste and manners, should have fallen into such a dreadful error as to go along with the misconception...

A drowsy numbness.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: I have long been an admirer of the elegance and scholarship of Allan Massie's column, and it was therefore with a sense of astonishment probably shared by many other readers that I found him misquoting John Keats's 'memorable words' from...

Phillips and the facts.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: Melanie Phillips ('Beware the new axis of evangelicals and Islamists', 7 March) states that I was present at the meeting last July, at All Nations Christian College, Ware, Hertfordshire, organised by Global Connections and the group...

Standing ovation.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
March 21, 2009... Sir: In her wonderful, hilarious and compulsive new column Standing Room, Sarah Standing seems to have penetrated the part of my brain that concerns itself with the endlessly infuriating minutiae of life. How did she know that the Congestion...

Why would Brown want to look like a tax-grasper and a twitchy hypocrite, too?(SHARED OPINION)(Gordon Brown)
March 21, 2009... Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes,...

Celebrating the Michelangelo of the Maida Vale pub.(AND ANOTHER THING)(Edward Ardizzone)
March 21, 2009... One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of...

Rome on the skids.(The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower)(Book review)
March 21, 2009... THE FALL OF THE WEST: THE DEATH OF THE ROMAN SUPERPOWER by Adrian Goldsworthy Weidenfeld, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 560, ISBN 9780297845638 [telephone] 20 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 THE...

View.(Poem)
March 21, 2009... View They say the Emperor watched television: For hours and hours, servants soft-trod carpeting; No bell, no antique telephone could ring; Each chiming clock was muffled with a cushion. Thus undisturbed, he puzzled...

Barking up the wrong tree?('The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning' and 'He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia')(Book review)
March 21, 2009... THE VANISHING FACE OF GAIA: A FINAL WARNING by James Lovelock Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 179, ISBN 9781846141850 [telephone] 16 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT:...

Order out of chaos.(The English Civil Wars, 1640-1660)(Book review)
March 21, 2009... THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS, 1640-1660 by Blair Worden Weidenfeld, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 192, ISBN 9780297848882 [telephone] 10.39 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ...

In Both Senses.(Poem)
March 21, 2009... IN BOTH SENSES Scarcely discernible at first Faint peachlight spills through blinds undrawn: A soft sussurus from the East Gently proclaiming dawn. The sun, a single cymbal still Ringing from some...

The mother's tale.(The Lost Child)(Book review)
March 21, 2009... THE LOST CHILD by Julie Myerson Bloomsbury, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 293, ISBN 9780747591900 [telephone] 11.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'I'm sick of this...

Exhibitions Bathed in light.
March 21, 2009... Sickert in Venice Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 31 May Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) is a key figure in 20th-century British art, and an immensely talented and enjoyable painter into the bargain. His long life was a productive...

Music therapy.(Olden but golden)("Focus Level" by Endless Boogie)(Sound recording review)
March 21, 2009... My son turned to me in the car the other day, and observed, 'This is the band you've been waiting for, isn't it, Dad?' Playing on the car's CD player, at a volume that would have led my wife to accuse me of deliberately trying to deafen our own...

That's priceless.(Television)(Television program review)
March 21, 2009... The most gruesome television moment of the week I caught on Saturday night, part of the Red Nose Day mutual congratulation fest. A gang of minor celebs had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and Davina McCall--she must be hard to live with, running...

A piece of paradise.(Gardens)
March 21, 2009... I find it impossible to be dispassionate about the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. For me, it is not just an area of part-designed, part-semi-natural landscape of 300 acres in south-west London, as well as a world-renowned centre of research and...

Cash in hand.(Low life)
March 21, 2009... I've come into some money. Twenty grand. Nice. Best not to shove it straight in my permanently overdrawn current account, though, I thought. My laptop is riddled with computer viruses. It would be just my luck if, after holding off for years,...

Learning curve.(Bridge)(Brief article)
March 21, 2009... Whenever someone says 'It's not the money it's the principle' a tiny bell goes off in my head and I think--I bet it's not the principle. I bet it's the money. Money is the giant dividing factor between rubber bridge and duplicate, and if...