Xi's game | The Spectator

Read all over

In the 1880s a new group of women was entering newsrooms. Not content to write society sketches or cover the fashionable hats of the season, they went for bold reporting — often going undercover or participating in other dramatic ‘stunts’. The antic that launched Nellie Bly’s career in 1887 was getting admitted as a patient on Blackwell’s Island in New York, then an insane asylum for women. She had told the editor of the New York World she would do anything fora job on the paper, and this was what she was assigned. She went to a boarding house under an assumed name, pretended to be unhinged and was duly committed. Rescued after 10 days by a representative from the World, her exposé of the indignities suffered by patients in the asylum was a sensation.

Luke Haines

I’m turning Japanese

The history of late-20th-century Japanese pop music can seem like an impenetrable forest to western minds. But stare past the trees and there is light from a parallel universe. The Japanese Group Sounds records of the mid-Sixties (the Spiders, the Tempters and er, the Mops) were heavily influenced by the original moptops’ Budokan Temple show of 1966 and surf bands such as the Ventures. The university campus hard rock of Tokyo’s late-Sixties freak scene — Les Rallizes Dénudés, Flower Travellin’ Band, Speed, Glue and Shinki — and the lysergic rock soundtracks to Shuji Terayama’s revolutionary theater plays by the great J.A.

Emily Ferguson

School of hard Knox

Rudy Guede was released from prison this past December. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because for a long time, the brutal murder he was sentenced for was blamed on Amanda Knox. The 2007 burglary gone wrong made worldwide headlines for years. Knox, a photogenic American student studying abroad in Perugia, and her nerdy Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty, twice, of murdering Knox’s British roommate Meredith Kercher in what the Italian police called a ‘drug-fueled sex game gone awry’. Everyone, save Knox and those close to her, was shocked to learn four years later that there was no slasher sex game, and, more importantly, there was absolutely no DNA linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime scene that imprisoned them for years.

William Cook

Berlin has always been a Faustian metropolis

Each time I return to Berlin, the wonderful, awful city where I spent the best days of my misspent youth, I pay a sentimental visit to Grolmanstrasse, where my German grandparents used to live. There isn’t much left to look at. Their apartment block was destroyed in 1945 in the Battle of Berlin. The site where it stood is now occupied by a children’s playground. For me, that empty space seems to symbolize the way Berlin has changed — mainly for the better, but at enormous human cost. So much has vanished — not just the buildings, but also the people who inhabited them. For my children’s generation, Berlin is a party town. For me, it’s a city full of ghosts. It is these ghosts that keep bringing me back to Germany’s battered, bombastic capital.

Daniel McCarthy

Is Sohrab Ahmari a Satanic ogre?

Sohrab Ahmari is an ogre sent by Satan to annihilate American freedom. At least, that’s the reputation he has with liberals of the more excitable sort. His new book ought to soothe their twitchy nerves. The Unbroken Thread is an easy going, ecumenical, rather cosmopolitan tour of 12 moral questions and select thinkers who responded to each of them. ‘My primary purpose,’ writes our implausible theocrat, is ‘not to offer definitive answers, drawn from any one particular tradition, but to explore the possibility that our contemporary philosophy might be wrong in crucial respects.’ Ahmari has been much vilified for his criticism of Drag Queen Story Hour, an event in which crossdressers introduce themselves to children in public libraries.

James Panero

Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans

For a few years in my youth, I tried to be a scuba diver. In the deep pool of the 63rd Street Y, I learned how to clean my goggles and clear my air regulators. In a lake in upstate New York, I earned my certification by swimming around a junked car in 40 feet of murky water. I went on to dive to some cold wrecks in Rhode Island and to swim among the warm sea life of Key Largo. But it wasn’t for me. The bobbing boats and the heavy equipment caused much discomfort. In one dive I banged my head against the tank of my divemate and nearly got knocked out. It was all less elegant, and quite a bit more involved, than I had expected. My inspiration, of course, had been Jacques Cousteau. The French underwater explorer dived the world’s oceans a generation ago as both celebrity and icon.

Lawrence Osborne

Korean film has mastered the supernatural horror genre

There is a moment in the Jung brothers’ 2007 ghost film, Epitaph, when a young doctor in wartime Korea realizes that the wife he adores does not have a shadow. He is entertaining her with a shadow puppet show in their home when he notices the aberration. ‘Walk to me,’ he says as he waves a naked light bulb in front of her. She had been a visiting medical student in Japan a year earlier and, unbeknownst to him, had died in an accident. It’s a moment that perfectly illustrates the psychological subtlety and brilliant scene-making of Korean film. Epitaph is about a group of young doctors working in a hospital under the Japanese occupation.

Nicky Otis Smith

A film festival fiasco in Narrowsburg, New York

If you’ve been involved in the production of a film, you know how intoxicating it can be. The prospect of seeing your work projected in a theater is reason enough to put up with a nightmare of unrelenting stress — for some people, anyway. Others might struggle to understand how an entire town (Narrowsburg, an admittedly very small town in Upstate New York) could be so easily swindled by a cartoon mobster and a mysterious woman with a French accent who tells people she’s from South Africa or Normandy, or descended from French royalty. Then again, Richard Castellano did appear with Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro in Analyze This, and Jocelyne Castaldo, well, who in America wouldn’t be charmed by such an accent?

Books & Arts