Spectator articles from September 2007

Spectator archives from September 2007

The right mission.(Conservative Party's answer to crime)
September 1, 2007... Tony Blair--remember him?--was better at diagnosis than cure. 'I think most people would say that in virtually every aspect of their life things are better than they were 30 or 40 years ago,' he told the Sunday Telegraph in November 2005. 'This...

Global warning.(obesity)
September 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] He who would read newspapers must expect to spend his days in the darkest despair, for they contain nothing but war, murder and medical advice. Popular wisdom, however, tells us that every cloud has a silver...

Diary.(El Bulli )
September 1, 2007... My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane. Consequently I went to bed with Joanna Trollope,...

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young: let those who loved Rhys Jones grieve for him, says Theodore Dalrymple. But national outbursts of emotion are no substitute for impartial application of the law or a recognition that we have betrayed a generation of children.
September 1, 2007... Some things don't change in Britain: the teddy bears and CCTV pictures, for example. First come the teddy bears. A princess dies in a sordid drunken accident, a child is abducted in Portugal, two girls are brutally murdered in Soham, a child is...

Mind your language.(Old English words in modern texts, Optimum Communications Development Ltd )
September 1, 2007... A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. Very pretty. They have posted up some examples from famous writers free...

Meet the shadow minister for militant Islam: James Forsyth talks to Paul Goodman, the Conservative MP tasked to deal with Muslim separatism--and to balance the wayward views of his immediate boss Sayeeda Warsi.(Interview)
September 1, 2007... The biggest risk to David Cameron's leadership to date has been his appointment of Sayeeda Warsi as the shadow minister for community cohesion. Warsi's rise makes Cameron's ascent from freshman MP to leader in four years look almost sedate. In...

'Kill him, Jimmy!' A night at the cage fight: Steven Berkoff goes to the modern version of the Roman Colosseum: men going to war in a chicken-wire cage before hundreds of baying fans, with no holds barred.
September 1, 2007... So we went to Wembley Arena to witness for the first time what is called 'cage fighting'. The reason for this being, of course, that the combatants go to war in a rather large cage. The cage is bound in with a net of the kind of wire you might...

The supernatural is as British as fish and chips: Sarah Churchwell says that our love of spooky stories shows that the longing for supernatural solutions to natural problems is as strong as ever in our 'secular' society.
September 1, 2007... We're all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism. Naturally, I can't begin to; they're the same people who...

Who really knows how much crime goes on at the Notting Hill Carnival? Rod Liddle says that the verbal gymnastics employed to claim that the event has been peaceful are laughable. It's time for the organisers to foot the bill for the policing.(LIDDLE BRITAIN)
September 1, 2007... I hope you enjoyed the Notting Hill Carnival and made it back home in one piece, maybe with a becoming scar of some sort--gunshot wound to the gut, stab wound in the throat, that sort of thing. Or perhaps just short of a few quid from your...

Mark Birley: a man who was right in everything.(Obituary)
September 1, 2007... We had arranged to see Mark Birley at noon on the day he died. But my wife Lucy and I were just too late. He had suffered a stroke that morning. We missed him by a couple of hours and now, forever. I heard confirmation of the terrible news as I...

A menace of our making.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2007... Sir: What would Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, the coolest of heads, have made of poor William Shawcross's overwrought emotional plea that we must stay on in Iraq as a kind of act of faith ('Britain must stay in Iraq', 25 August)? Well,...

The blame for Chindamo.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2007... Sir: It was not the Human Rights Act that was the primary reason for the ruling in the Chindamo case (Leading article, 25 August); rather it was the rights of EU citizens to move freely within member states, one aspect of EU membership that...

Fair's fair.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2007... Sir: I read Anna Blundy's article ('We blondes face prejudice every day of our lives', 25 August) with increasing disbelief. She asserts that there is no other socially acceptable target for jokes. Perhaps I may refer her here to 'gingers' or...

Role play.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2007... Sir: Both Matthew d'Ancona and Patrick Jephson overlooked one excellent argument in favour of monarchy ('How Diana changed the royal family', 18 August), which is that a longstanding hereditary monarchy is by far the most effective way to...

Carry on camping.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2007... Sir: It is encouraging that Samantha Weinberg and her fellow climate campers aim 'to persuade the wider population to listen to the science, and to make their decisions based upon it' ('Climate camp: next year we'll go for longer,' 25 August)....

Dishonesty in television may arise from lofty principle: but it still bears the devil's fingerprint.(ANOTHER VOICE)
September 1, 2007... A columnist should rejoice, I suppose, when an issue he has spotted early and returned to often suddenly catches fire, becoming the hot topic of the season. I started writing about dishonesty in television about ten years ago, wrote often about...

Whoever expected writers to be other than difficult people?(AND ANOTHER THING)
September 1, 2007... As someone who has spent nearly 60 years as a professional writer, I am inevitably set in my ways, though capable of changing them radically in a crisis. But I recognise that my ways are not typical, that there is no such thing as a typical...

Calling in the Geek Squad: Edie G. Lush tests a home-help service that can solve the biggest problem of modern life--how to connect your computer to all the other gizmos in your house.(BUSINESS)
September 1, 2007... Why would anyone choose to spend an afternoon with a self-proclaimed geek in a clip-on tie, who calls himself a 'field agent'? Carphone Warehouse is betting that many of us will jump at the chance. They've brought the Geek Squad over from the...

Now America faces not-so-friendly fire from the rest of the financial world.(ANY OTHER BUSINESS)
September 1, 2007... I'm back, as Arnold Schwarzenegger famously declared in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. In fact I haven't really been away, just hovering in cyberspace to leave room for other contributors in our slimmed-down-for-the-beach summer Business...

Waking up late at the Palace.(The Uncommon Reader)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... THE UNCOMMON READER by Alan Bennett Profile, 10.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 128, ISBN 9781846680496 [telephone] 8.79 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 Since The History Boys transferred first to Broadway and...

Movies and talkies.(Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Reader)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... MORNINGS IN THE DARK: THE GRAHAM GREENE READER edited by David Parkinson Carcanet, 18.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 738, ISBN 9781857548556 [telephone] 15.19 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p+p) 0870 429 6655 Arriving at Oxford...

Long live the weeds and the wilderness.(The Wild Places)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... THE WILD PLACES by Robert Macfarlane Granta, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 340, ISBN 9781862079410 [telephone] 15.19 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at...

The politics of the plot.(The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... THE ARCADIAN FRIENDS: INVENTING THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN by Tim Richardson Bantam, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 562, ISBN 9780593052730 [telephone] 20 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 The man 'of Polite...

You have been warned.(The Confidence Man: His Masquerade)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE by Herman Melville Dalkey Archive Press, 8.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 354, ISBN 9781564784544 [telephone] 7.19 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p+p) 0870 429 6655 Many years ago in Texas, a...

Likely lads in their day.(LIFE AND LETTERS)(Simon Raven and James Kennaway)
September 1, 2007... Simon Raven's first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 when I was in my second year at Cambridge. We fell on it with glee, as I remarked, a few weeks after Raven's death, to a fellow-novelist, somewhat to her amazement. 'I've...

The spirit of Almodovar: Daniel Sparrow on how he persuaded the Spanish director to let him stage All about My Mother.(ARTS)(Pedro Almodovar)
September 1, 2007... In the theatre programme notes for the new play based on Pedro Almodovar's film, All About My Mother, the playwright Samuel Adamson observes that the play's protagonist, Manuela, is drawn towards the world of theatre by an unexpected event....

True colours.(Exhibitions)
September 1, 2007... Helio Oiticica: The Body of Colour Tate Modern, until 23 September Supported by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne John Piper Room 20, Tate Britain, until 24 January 2008 How diminished our lives would be if suddenly we could only see in black...

All that jazz.(Olden but golden)(theJazz digital radio station)
September 1, 2007... I'm just back from Edinburgh, my 20th successive year at the festival for the Daily Telegraph, which makes me feel very old indeed. How times have changed. When I started going, the paper put us up in the luxurious Sheraton Grand and no...

Mutual loathing.(On Raglan Road Old, White Boy )(Theater review)
September 1, 2007... On Raglan Road Old Red Lion White Boy Soho Dublin. Terrific to write about, terrible to experience. This was the verdict of Patrick Kavanagh, poet, alcoholic and failure, born in 1904 and now brought back to life in Russell Kennedy's...

World class.(British Broadcasting Corporation's World Service)
September 1, 2007... Next time you're bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC's World Service. A different quality appears to prevail in their making of radio documentaries--more time spent on research, less on presentation. No tricks, no smoochy music....

Shocking cheats.(television programs)(Television program review)
September 1, 2007... The most egregious example of cheating in wildlife photography was the 1958 Disney film Wild Wilderness. They wanted footage of lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea--heaven knows why, since lemmings do no such thing. Since the...

Making the switch.(The turf)(jump racing jockey Jim Crowley)(Interview)
September 1, 2007... Rider Mick Fitzgerald was asked by his careers master when still at school what he wanted to be. 'I've half a mind to be a jump-jockey,' he declared. 'Good,' replied the laconic pedagogue, 'because that's all you'll need.' Fitzgerald is...

Man of mystery.(High life)(Mark Birley)
September 1, 2007... OK. It is early 1964, the Profumo scandal has proved beyond reasonable doubt that English men can also be swingers (and with women, to boot), and my friend Yanni Zographos and I have just had a big win upstairs at Aspinall's and are taking the...

Happy families.(Low life)
September 1, 2007... My boy's mother and Adolf Hitler share the same birthday, and, as an astrologer might expect, their personalities are in many ways similar. She can make a long-term plan and stick to it; she's intensely loyal; and if you get on the wrong side...

Strained relationship.(Letter from Arcadia)(building and maintaining a home annex)
September 1, 2007... There was, the architect said, no hope of getting planning permission for an extension. So I had the ingenious idea of solving our bedroom shortage by building what amounts to an annexe on the 'footprint' of the dilapidated potting shed on the...

Basic instinct.(Bridge)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... Sometimes in bridge you get a hunch about which opponent holds a certain card. I'd like to say you should always follow your hunches--but in the case of non-experts like myself, you should probably ignore them and stick to the odds. After all...

The wonder of it all: Jonathan Ray samples Selfridges' newly opened Wonder Room.(STYLE AND TRAVEL)
September 1, 2007... Selfridges used to be my local. My wife and I have poured plenty of our hard-earned scratch into its coffers over the years (and, thanks to Marina's obsessive-compulsive handbag-buying disorder, not just in the Food Hall either), and I'm...

Having your cake and eating it: Belinda Archer finds Madeira is not just for the blue-rinse brigade.(ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER)(Portugal)
September 1, 2007... I had certain misgivings. I mean, it's not quite rock 'n' roll, Madeira, is it? It's known more for blue-rinsed ladies in bath chairs, and producing a tipple not dissimilar to sherry, than for anything wild or mad. I may be getting older, but...

Stupor mundi.(CHESS)(Viktor Korchnoi's chess plays)
September 1, 2007... Bobby Fischer used to be the amazement of the chess world, but that title has been annexed by Viktor Korchnoi, who at the age of 76 continues to win strong tournaments. His most recent exploit was to share first prize in the grandmaster event...

Past caring.(COMPETITION)(excerpts from Victorian self help books)
September 1, 2007... In Competition No. 2509 you were asked to provide an extract from a Victorian self-help book. Self-help by Samuel Smiles was a hit when it was published in 1859. Almost 150 years later it is described on Amazon.com as 'the precursor of...

1830: Dilemma by dumpynose.(CROSSWORD)(Brief article)
September 1, 2007... Round the grid in clockwise sequence from 39 run modified versions of a Mull village, a mottled vegetable (two words), Tragopogon pratensis (quintuply hyphened), an Isherwood novel (three words), subaquatic plants and a London market (two...

Paris match.(SPECTATOR SPORT)(Rugby Union's inaugural World Cup in Auckland, New Zealand)
September 1, 2007... At any sporting junket involving pretentious national prestige, you can guarantee that the ritzy no-expense-spared 'resplendence' of a dire and irksome opening ceremony matters far more than any of the actual sport which follows it. Rugby...

Dear Mary.(YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED)
September 1, 2007... Q. A very good and loyal friend of mine has just had two operations and recently she rang and asked if she could come and stay for the weekend. I immediately said yes. However, two days later, I opened an email from a boyfriend who lives abroad...

Change must still be the message.
September 8, 2007... The great paradox of the Tory party is that its predicament in recent years reflects not failure, but success. For 18 years it was in government, for 11 of them under one of the most influential prime ministers in history. The Conservatives...

Diary.(Bayreuth, Germany)
September 8, 2007... Bayreuth A lifetime's ambition is fulfilled as I get to hear and see Wagner in Bayreuth. After 1945 it was touch and go whether enough support could be found to get the Bayreuth Festspielhaus back on its feet for the month-long festival of...

The odd thing is that it is left-wingers, not Cameron, who have lurched to the right.(POLITICS)(David Cameron)
September 8, 2007... It's not hoodies. It's not single mums. It's not even jittery City whizz kids down to their last ten million. No, it's lefties we should be furrowing our collective brow about. We shouldn't worry about the threat they pose to society (even...

The election war.(Brief article)
September 8, 2007... Location: an aerodrome somewhere in England Cameron and a few close chums get together to really plan things out Hi! I'm Andy Coulson. I'm in charge of planning I think you've Already met Michael Ancram, Quentin Davies and John...

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody.(Column)
September 8, 2007... MONDAY V. exciting. Was in charge of note-taking and smoothies at our Emergency Treachery-Management Meeting. We couldn't decide what to do about Mr Mercer. Jed argued for something v unpleasant-sounding, which would involve us digging for...

If Bush doesn't force Iran to back down, then his successors will: James Forsyth says that the world's fixation with the President's errors in Iraq has obscured the collective determination of the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, to end Iran's nuclear ambitions.(George W. Bush)
September 8, 2007... To many, 20 January 2009, George W. Bush's last day in office, can't come soon enough. The President's pugnacious speech to the American Legion summed up why: not content with vigorously defending two wars, he seemed to start banging the drum...

Flash Gordon.
September 8, 2007... GORDON'S CITIZENS' JURY [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A chat with the man who invented the internet: Vint Cerf, 'co-founder of the internet', tells Matthew d'Ancona that its power has barely begun to be realised and that the freedom it gives to people vastly outweighs any loss of privacy.
September 8, 2007... Imagine actually meeting Thomas Edison, or the Wright Brothers, or Newton, or Archimedes, or whichever Sumerian it was who invented the wheel in the fifth millennium bc. That, when you think about it, is what it's like to have a conversation...

The end of the 'noddy shot' is a ray of hope for television: Rod Liddle praises Channel Five for ending one of the petty deceits of programme-making--a trick typical of television's assumption that the viewers are absolute idiots who cannot spot a fraud.(LIDDLE BRITAIN)(Viewpoint essay)
September 8, 2007... Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it's a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal--processed excrement which everybody,...

'I'm a pin-up for Scottish pensioners': Clarissa Dickson Wright talks to Mary Wakefield about life as the last of the Two Fat Ladies, surviving alcoholism--and why she used to call Blair 'Miranda'.(Tony Blair)
September 8, 2007... I'm tempted, just for a second, to feel sorry for Clarissa Dickson Wright. There she is, with her back to me, 15 feet away, at a table in Valvona & Crolla--a refined little deli/cafe full of focaccia and Parmigiano Reggiano tucked in beside the...

Mind your language.
September 8, 2007... English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans...

This is a true Catholic revolution: far from being an obscure theological debate, the return of the Tridentine Mass is a hugely exciting moment in the history of Roman Catholicism.
September 8, 2007... Next Friday, 14 September, the worldwide restrictions on the celebration of the ancient Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church will be swept away. With a stroke of his pen, Pope Benedict XVI has ended a 40-year campaign to eradicate the...

How I was saved from Mongolian torture: Henry Sands doesn't like reality television, but that didn't stop him auditioning for it. The show sounded macho and adventurous--ideal, apart from the risk of ritual mutilation.
September 8, 2007... My 12-year-old sister shouted, 'Come and watch this TV programme, you'll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.' She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for...

Our thuggish society.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 8, 2007... Sir: Theodore Dalrymple's cover story about our sentimental and brutal society ('Too many teardrops', 1 September) has given me an idea. In order to reduce the impact of the British disease of vulgarity and rudeness, the principle of offsetting...

Who are the enemy in Iraq?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 8, 2007... Sir: William Shawcross in your cover story ('Now, more than ever, Britain must stay in Iraq', 25 August) argues that the US needs support from British forces in Iraq to continue on course with the destruction of al-Qa'eda in that war-torn...

Blonde bombshell.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 8, 2007... Sir: Anna Blundy is justifiably outraged by the 'dumb blonde' imputation ('We blondes face prejudice', 25 August), but there is in fact a medical explanation at the heart of the prejudice. According to my neurologist, blue-eyed blondes have a...

Woodhouse's cricket heroes.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 8, 2007... Sir: Mr Alan Magid draws attention to the excellent Mike by P.G. Wodehouse as both a major cricket novel and the best school story ever (Letters, 25 August). I am sure he is right on both counts and this is at least partly because P.G....

End of an era.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 8, 2007... Sir: Thank you to Taki for mentioning Louis, that wonderful ma[R]tre d' at Annabel's, in High life last week. How sad and ironic that within a week of Mark Birley's death Louis Emanuelli should also die, also following advanced Alzheimer's....

Our present fear of Chinese products masks our real fear of China--a swelling other.(SHARED OPINION)(Essay)
September 8, 2007... How on earth did they get them through customs? 'Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh dear. Any lead paint? What's that? Not any more? Just naked terracotta? Dearie dearie me....

When the skies darken, the glow of gold is always welcome.(AND ANOTHER THING)
September 8, 2007... 'When markets are unsteady and investors are nervous, you can't beat gold.' That was my grandfather's saying, common enough, I daresay, in late Victorian Manchester. Jimmy Goldsmith was another believer. 'You know what the Aztecs called it,' he...

The desert breeding ground of India's billionaires: Richard Orange visits an arid region of Rajasthan which struggles to grow its own food but has nurtured some of India's richest trading dynasties, including the Mittal family.
September 8, 2007... 'This is backwoods, really backwoods,' says Aditya, as the rackety, jam-packed bus pulls into Rajgarh, a small town in the north-west of Rajasthan, India's desert state. Aditya is the only person on the bus who speaks any English, and the...

Who's the mug at the table?(THE DEBT MARKET CRISIS)(Essay)
September 8, 2007... Once upon a time there was an investment banker. He was hardly today's stereotypical WASP smoothie, but an overweight, sweaty trader from the Bronx who shouted a lot, ate pizza at his desk when he wasn't standing on it, and treated colleagues...

Golfers with more clubs are more likely to win: John Andrews talks to Stanley Fink, who turned Man Group from a commodities trader into a hedge-fund pioneer.(INVESTMENT)
September 8, 2007... You know Kipling's words, about meeting triumph and disaster? Well, imagine this. You're in your mid-forties, chief executive of one of Britain's fastest-growing public companies. Your personal fortune is in nine figures; you are fast becoming...

Coffee-shop trade suffers as the General keeps Thais guessing if he'll run for office.(IN BANGKOK)(Sonthi Boonyaratglin)
September 8, 2007... Anyone who claims to understand Thailand's politics should be sectioned. The country is preparing for a national election in December and the leader of last year's bloodless military coup, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, is retreating on his...

Can we do it again? Southern hemisphere heavyweights or home nations hopefuls? Ian Malin on who has the best chance of lifting the Webb Ellis trophy.(RUGBY WORLD CUP)
September 8, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During this summer of catastrophic floods, a good news story washed up on one or two newspaper sports desks. Ben Kay and Martin Corry, two of England's most experienced forwards who had been preparing for the Rugby...

'Rugby is almost wholly devoid of skill': Rod Liddle reminds a nation about to descend into World Cup fever that rugby is an infinitely inferior game to football.(RUGBY WORLD CUP)(Viewpoint essay)
September 8, 2007... Knock knock. Who's there? Jonny. Jonny who? The morning after England's Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local high street and saw two boys doing something which deeply disturbed me. I knew these kids...

Five tournaments that shook the rugby world: all the World Cups played since 1987 have produced remarkable moments. Frank Keating looks back at the finest.(RUGBY WORLD CUP)
September 8, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Twenty teams turn up for rugby union's World Cup but, realistically, less than half a dozen can ever possibly win it--the heavyweight trio from the southern seas, New Zealand, South Africa or Australia and, from the...

Happy as Larry: Lawrence Dallaglio has been through heartbreak, scandal and injury, and at 35 he is old enough to retire. But, says David Edwards, he's a fighter to the finish.(RUGBY WORLD CUP)(Biography)
September 8, 2007... Rugby players come in all shapes and sizes, even if the small ones are now big, strapping and muscle-bound, but when it comes to characters most are only two-dimensional at best. Jonny Wilkinson is the nearest thing the game has to a...

Dear Mary.(YOUR RUGBY PROBLEMS SOLVED)(Column)
September 8, 2007... Q. My son is a member of a rugby team at his university. They are a lovely bunch of chaps during daylight hours but some sort of group hysteria seems to take hold during post-match victory celebrations and they behave more like cavemen than...

Flights upon the banks.(Thames: Sacred River)(Critical essay)
September 8, 2007... THAMES: SACRED RIVER by Peter Ackroyd Chatto, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 608, ISBN 9780701172843 [telephone] 20 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 For some reason, the sight of the sea or a river in any...

Once more with less feeling.(Diary of a Bad Year)(Book review)
September 8, 2007... DIARY OF A BAD YEAR by J. M. Coetzee Harvill Secker, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 231, ISBN 9781846551208 [telephone] 13.59 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 In the last scene of J. M. Coetzee's Booker...

A choice of recent paperbacks.(historical and mystery books)(Bibliography)
September 8, 2007... Non-fiction: John Betjeman by Bevis Hillier (John Murray, 9.99 [pounds sterling]) On Royalty by Jeremy Paxman (Penguin, 8.99 [pounds sterling]) Christopher Marlowe by Park Honan (OUP, 12.99 [pounds sterling]) Europe East & West by...

Not making Italians.(The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796)(Critical essay)
September 8, 2007... THE FORCE OF DESTINY: A HISTORY OF ITALY SINCE 1796 by Christopher Duggan Allen Lane, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 653, ISBN 9780713997095 [telephone] 24 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 As O-level students 40...

Agony of the aunts.(Singled Out)(Critical essay)
September 8, 2007... SINGLED OUT by Virginia Nicholson Viking, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 312, ISBN 9780670915644 [telephone] 16 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 One day in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for...

The last of Rebus?(Exit Music)(Book review)
September 8, 2007... EXIT MUSIC by Ian Rankin Orion, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 400, ISBN 9780752868608 [telephone] 15.19 (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 'You... are... history.' Approximately halfway through Ian Rankin's latest and surely...

A choice of first novels.(modern fiction books)(Book review)
September 8, 2007... Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday, pretty sure he has gout and otherwise minding--well, monitoring is perhaps more accurate--his own business, typing 'Giles Wareing funny/brilliant/clever' into search...

Safe for the kiddies.(The Golden Age of Censorship)(Critical essay)
September 8, 2007... THE GOLDEN AGE OF CENSORSHIP by Paul Hoffman Doubleday, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 349, ISBN 9780385606332 [telephone] 14.39 (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p+p) 0870 429 6655 T. S. Eliot thought it a curiosity of our culture that we use the...

The measure of the man.(Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings)(Critical essay)
September 8, 2007... EUAN UGLOW: THE COMPLETE PAINTINGS Catalogue raisonne by Catherine Lampert; Essays by Richard Kendall and Catherine Lampert Yale, 65 [pounds sterling], pp. 244, ISBN 9780300123494 [telephone] 55 (plus x.xx [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655...

Welsh wizard prang.(Roscoe Howells' A Pembrokeshire Pioneer book on Bill Frost's airplane crash)(Book review)
September 8, 2007... A PEMBROKESHIRE PIONEER by Roscoe Howells Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, Ysgubor Plas, Llwyndrys, Pwelheli, Gwynedd, Tel: 01785 750440, 6.85 [pounds sterling], (1.50 [pounds sterling] p+p), pp. 120, ISBN 9781845240844 In 1903, in one tremulous...

Starved for choice.(Zugzwang)(Book review)
September 8, 2007... ZUGZWANG by Ronan Bennett Bloomsbury, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 273, ISBN 9780747587118 [telephone] 11.99 (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 Zugzwang, from the German Zug (move) and Zwang (obligation), is a term used in...

Turning Up.(Poem)
September 8, 2007... Turning Up The department wasn't where it used to be. Break times had changed, but I got a third-former To show me where he'd be And waited at the top of a fire escape Till he came up under an umbrella, Replied to...