Any other business

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters

Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others. No doubt I shall be accused of prejudice in favour of my own profession. To demonstrate that I am an unbiased critic, however, I shall cite the work of a doctor who wrote very badly, execrably in fact, the late Dr David Cooper. He was an associate for a time of R.D. Laing, the talented but wayward and self-destructive psychiatrist, and during the Sixties and Seventies of the last century his ravings in book form had a vogue that was (how can I put this kindly?

Paul Johnson

A.J.P. Taylor: a saturnine star who had intellectuals rolling in the aisles

AJ.P. Taylor was born a hundred years ago this month. I owe a lot to him because he was responsible for my getting an open exhibition to Magdalen, my favourite Oxford college, which I had picked out as mine when a boy of ten. Later he tutored me in modern history. You arrived at his house, Holywell Ford, in the grounds of the college, on the dot of the hour, never a second before or after, and the typing within stopped and a growly voice said ‘Enter!’ Then you got a full, crowded hour, and left again on the dot. The typing (of a Sunday Express diatribe, probably) resumed before you had closed the door. You got your money’s worth. I once heard him say, ‘I always give good value’ — whether for books, articles, tutorials, lectures or TV programmes.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

The prince of start-ups is entitled to speak louder than any big-ego business knight

Every time Sir Alan Sugar fires a contestant on The Apprentice, the nation quivers in admiration; likewise whenever Sir Richard Branson launches another airborne publicity stunt. Serial entrepreneurs are accorded guru status, yet whenever Britain’s most prolific kick-starter of enterprise sticks his head above the parapet he is showered with abuse and told to get on with his real job, which is — as the comedian Marcus Brigstocke tastefully put it — ‘waiting for his mother to die’. The Prince of Wales, through the charity he set up when he left the navy in 1976, has helped more than 60,000 young people to start their own businesses.

Paul Johnson

Kindly write on only one side of the paper

A scare article in the Guardian says that handwriting will soon disappear. Not so. In fact, in the last two years I have reverted to doing all my writing by hand as they no longer make the machines I like, and my eyes object to staring at a screen. My assistant, the angelic Mary, puts my scribbles on computer or disk. Being left-handed, I have to hold my pen in a funny way, as writing from left to right is unnatural to sinistrals. I envy the Ancient Egyptians, who carved their hieroglyphs either way and wrote hieratic (the written version) from right to left. When I was writing my history of Ancient Egypt, my favourite book was Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner, from which I learned hieroglyphs, and a little hieratic (the commercial cursive, demotic, was much too difficult).

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Back from the grave and ready to party — that’s the London Stock Exchange

Asked what he did in the French Revolution, the Abbé Sieyes explained that he survived it. Against all the odds, this has been the London Stock Exchange’s achievement. It is still there. Its dreary old building looks better as a hole in the ground, but the Exchange has found itself a new perch in Paternoster Square, and remains an independent British entity. You could have bet against it. Not long ago its only choice seemed to be whether to surrender to the Germans or the French: ‘Levez les mains’ or ‘Hande hoch’? Not so long before that it agreed to join up with the Frankfurt exchange, Deutsche Börse, whose Swiss surpremo, Werner Seifert, would come in and run the merged business.

Paul Johnson

Who was the most right-wing man in history?

The recent death of Michael Wharton, aged 92, raises the interesting question: who was the most right-wing person who ever lived? Many thought he was. I am not sure he did himself. The last time I saw him, when he was already very old, I asked him how he saw himself and he replied, ‘Moving to the right.’ He said this as if regretting a life of obstinate radicalism, though as the honorary editor-in-chief of the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald for more than half a century it was always difficult to get to the right of him (I tried) in any issue on the political agenda. On other matters he resembled Gilbert Pinfold (or his creator, Evelyn Waugh) and ‘abhorred ... everything that had happened in his lifetime’.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Not bad going, to do one imperishable thing in life

There are some people who do one distinct thing in their life — only one — but it is enough, just, to confer immortality on them. Such a person was Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), the Victorian poet. This gifted and sensitive man was a product of Dr Arnold’s superb teaching at Rugby and won a fellowship at Oriel, then the greatest prize you could get at Oxford. But in the theological turbulence created by Newman’s influence and the fierce reaction to it, he contrived to lose his faith, at least in Anglicanism. Expected not only to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles but to expound them to pupils, he found he could not in conscience do so.

Martin Vander Weyer

Even Lassie gets to Yorkshire quicker than the Royal Mail these days

Watching the charming remake of Lassie, I realised — stifling a sob — how easy it was to suspend my disbelief that a soulful collie could make a solo journey from the Highlands via Glasgow to a village in Yorkshire, arriving home just in time for Christmas. But I find it much harder to believe that a Christmas card posted in Sloane Street on 21 December could have taken until 8 February — almost seven weeks — to reach me in Yorkshire. Had the card, like Lassie, been impounded by pompous officials en route but bravely outwitted them? Had it tagged along with a good-hearted travelling showman in a caravan? That sounds far-fetched, I know, but no more so than the fact that the Royal Mail has just been fined £11.

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Mind your language | 11 February 2006

No, doctor, it’s not as bad as you think. I can keep it under control — my wife has been wonderful, don’t know what I’d do without her — it’s just that, well, sometimes it seems to take over my life. Oh, I have a job that’s quite demanding sometimes, and I manage to put it out of my head for up to 20 minutes, sometimes, but then it’s back. And I can’t stand it! No! I cannot tolerate the way that the makers of period drama constantly include phrases which are not merely anachronistic, but also as ill-timed as a bacon double cheeseburger in a Jacobean tragedy. When are they going to stop and put an end to this throbbing in my head? Take Marple: Sleeping Murder on ITV this week (Sunday). (For a start, the one-word Marple is silly.

Paul Johnson

Did Timothy take Paul’s advice about water?

The headline on the tabloid said, ‘Britain running out of water’. I don’t believe this. Indeed, I never believe scare stories about the world going to pot. But water is a fascinating subject. Considering how important it is to us, we know extraordinarily little about it. G.K. Chesterton used to say, ‘There is something inherently comic in the fact that our water is brought to us by who knows what from who knows where, often hundreds of miles away.’ There are more than 1,408 million cubic kilometres of water on the earth’s surface, and this total has changed little in the whole of geologic time. But nearly all of it is in the oceans (97.25 per cent). All the rain and clouds contain less than 0.001 per cent, and lakes, no matter how big, only 0.

Christopher Fildes

Round in circles and over the edge — that’s the way the money goes

This week’s message from the Confederation of British Industry: we’ll just die and then you’ll be sorry. I take this as more of a threat than a promise, but since it is all about pensions, anything is possible. Many (perhaps most) of the CBI’s member companies must now be stuck with underfunded pension schemes, the regulators want to set them a timetable for topping up their funds, and the CBI says that if this is taken literally, one company in every five will be put out of business. A perverse logic would work itself out: overstretched companies and underfunded schemes are always likely to go together. Companies like these would be required to find more cash in more of a hurry. They would also have to contribute loaded payments to the Pension Protection Fund.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

A winter’s day walk in the Quantocks

I shall remember Saturday 20 January 2006. What it was like elsewhere I do not know, but in west Somerset it was the perfect winter’s day. A great surge of happiness ran through me as I set off for my walk in the hills and coombs. It had been sunny the afternoon before but blustery. Now all was still and the sun was majestic in the cerulean sky, summoning his court. And they came! I swear a multitude of things had happened since the day before. In my garden were irises, peeping through the foliage, and japonica had just appeared, and winter jasmine and its coeval, honeysuckle. I found the first snowdrop in the churchyard.

Theodore Dalrymple

Second Opinion | 4 February 2006

What a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the very fabric of our lives, but it has a profoundly corrupting effect upon youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom. Worse still, it persuades each young person that he is uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of his rights, it becomes impossible to reason with him; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath. The doctrine of rights has borne putrid fruit.

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

A foxy Chancellor knows many things, but a hedgehog learns the hard way

Tutti possono sbagliare: we can all make mistakes, as the hedgehog observed, getting down from the hearth-brush. Whether our prickly Chancellor is a student of Italian proverbs, I cannot say, but he could learn from this one. In the five and half years since he auctioned half the nation’s gold reserves, the price of gold has doubled. He was bid rather less than $280 an ounce, the hammer fell, and he put the proceeds into dollars, yen and euros — but none of them has been as good as gold. Looking on as the price soared above $560, I could only reflect on the timing that caused him to sell at the lowest price on offer for two decades. He was, after all, under no pressure. Did he want to take a clever initiative, to cut a dash and to overshadow his neighbour in Downing Street?

Paul Johnson

‘Should there be a retiring age for writers?’ Discuss

‘You writers never retire, do you?’ said the guest at the party condescendingly. ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, right to the end,” as Edward Gibbon said.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it was said to Gibbon, either by George III or the Duke of Gloucester, accounts differ.’ ‘Quite a know-all, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘But my point is this: there’s no retiring age for writers, and perhaps there ought to be.’ I might well second that wish, ill-natured though it was. I recall vividly V.S. Pritchett, then in his late eighties, telling me how he had to drag himself, groaning and cursing, up the high stairs to his study at the top of the house every morning to do his daily stint. And there was J.B.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

What I would do if I were a multibillionaire

There is nothing sinful in amassing wealth, provided it is done justly. Andrew Carnegie, in his essay ‘Wealth’, got it right. What is reprehensible is to hang on to it: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’ By the time he went, in his sleep, in his 84th year, Carnegie had disposed of virtually everything, and he was buried at Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, New York, next to Washington Irving. A sizable volume, A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie (1919), shows that, by this date, $350,695,693.40 had been spent on a variety of gifts, including 2,811 free libraries and 7,689 church organs. The last item, considering he was an atheist, is interesting. Are you listening, Richard Dawkins?

Martin Vander Weyer

Labour tries its hand at privatisation — and hands John Major’s firm a fast buck

QinetiQ, the business created out of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, is Labour’s first attempt at full-scale privatisation, and it has deservedly run into heavy flak. The Daily Telegraph is particularly agitated about the fact that private investors cannot apply for shares in next month’s £1.1 billion flotation, which is open only to institutions. Bankers handling the sale say QinetiQ is too complex to explain to ordinary punters without spending unjustifiably large sums on a marketing campaign. Spokesmen for small shareholders declare that every citizen should have the chance to benefit from the sell-off of state assets.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

What happened to all that ‘ivy never sere’?

People have mixed feelings about ivy (Hedera helix). It is believed to do unhurried damage to buildings while artfully concealing its depredations. ‘Creeping ivy ...hides the ruin that it feeds upon,’ as Cowper says. Not long ago, Jerome, who looks after our London garden, had to cut back the ivy covering the high wall abutting the veranda of my library, thus exposing the brick. This grievously disturbed my post-breakfast period of contemplation, when I look out on the garden and work out what I will write during the day. However, with its characteristic tenacity and fecundity, the ivy has grown back again, the bricks have vanished and the incident is closed.

Martin Vander Weyer

Who will be man enough to stand up for big business against Cameron and Brown?

Everyone seems to be concocting their own shortlists for the most desirable job in London (I speak, of course, of the leadership of the Liberal Democrats), but the contest that catches my eye is the one to become the next director-general of the CBI — not least because, in a moment of whimsy, I once applied for the post myself. The present incumbent, Sir Digby Jones, will step down by the end of this year and the CBI’s intention is to announce his successor before the summer. The search is in the hands of former Cabinet minister turned headhunter Virginia Bottomley and the early spin suggests that, for the first time, a female candidate may be preferred.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Three cheers for life and to hell with the pessimists

When I first came to London, half a century ago, the head of the journalistic profession was Arthur Christiansen. ‘Chris’ was much admired in the trade. I considered it a signal honour to have a drink with him in what his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, called ‘El Vino’s Public House’. Beaverbrook made him editor of the Daily Express, and over the quarter-century of his rule there he raised its circulation from 1,700,000 to well over four million. It was the finest popular newspaper in the world. One of Chris’s sayings was, ‘You may speak with the tongues of angels and write with the pen of Shakespeare but you cannot beat news in a newspaper.’ (How true; and how forgotten today.