Features

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Macron marches on

The rentrée politique in France next month promises to be the most exciting in decades as the dynamic superstar president Emmanuel Macron, aged 39¾, embarks on his mission to rescue France from its recent ignominy and restore it to glory. No matter that the polls are showing the shine may already be off this particular golden youth, and that a protest movement abruptly halted his wife, Brigitte, from having a formal First Lady role. President Macron marches on into the new political season, as full of confidence in his own abilities as he has always been. Many have been the comparisons of Macron to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and even Jupiter, the Roman king of the gods, upon whom Macron models himself.

Katie Glass

Puppy love

There have been times since the break-up when I’ve felt so low I’ve opened a bottle of Shiraz and spent the whole night flicking through my mobile-phone photos of the two of us: the sunsets we watched; the meals we shared. I’d remember long walks on the beach and longer mornings in bed. How you’d crawl up over the duvet and wake me by licking my head. Leaving the boyfriend was surprisingly easy but oh, the agony of losing the dog! My sweet double doodle (that’s a labra-doodle, goldendoodle cross). ‘Yes, she is pretty isn’t she?’ I’d say to the strangers who accosted us. ‘She’s 18 months old and she’s called Stringerbelle after the crack dealer in The Wire.

Sam Leith

The dice men

‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of coffee in his airy open-plan kitchen. ‘This is a bone I have been waiting to pick for, oh, 35 years. That bloody maze!’ Livingstone chuckles. ‘That was Steve’s. He’s the sadist.’ That maze, in a way, is the reason we are meeting. The near-unnavigable labyrinth featured near the end of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain — the choose-your-own-adventure novel which launched the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy series. Here was an adventure ‘in which you are the hero’. Some 400 numbered paragraphs, connected in a web of decisions: ‘If you head west, turn to 125; if you choose to stay and fight the monster, turn to 74.

Thursday

Julie Bindel

The ‘sex worker’ myth

In the midst of all the outrage about modern-day slavery, usually vulnerable men forced into manual labour, there is actually a far worse form of abuse going on in the UK. It happens in every city, town and even village. It’s endemic to every culture and region of the world, and yet these days we justify it in the name of ‘liberation’. We’ve become accustomed to thinking of prostitution as a legitimate way of earning a living, even ‘empowering’ for women. We call it ‘sex work’ and look away. We should not. For the last three years I’ve been investigating prostitution worldwide to test the conventional wisdom of it being a career choice, as valid as any other.

Ashley Writtle

Varsity blues

A vast cohort of bright young things have secured their university places with A-level success this week. But things are not so rosy at the universities they will set off to join: after 25 years of rapid expansion, the sector is drifting away from both the core principles of education and the world of work. A few figures illustrate the problem: 2.3 million students are in higher education; 47 per cent of young people are in university; 51 per cent of A--level students will begin undergraduate study aged 18. And almost three quarters of them will get a 2:1 or a first. What exact distinction does a university degree confer? True, the vast majority of students enter paid work or further research within six months of graduating.

Paul Wood

The true Trump scandal

 Washington DC The National Enquirer presented Trump watchers with a mystery last week. Why did it print an attack on Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort? A headline screamed: ‘Trump advisor sex scandal — Paul Manafort’s sick affair.’ A 68-year-old man’s alleged dalliance with a ‘hottie half his age’ might seem a trivial subject to discuss as the US convulses over the issue of race once again, this time after a white supremacist killed a woman protester in Charlottesville, Virginia. President Trump has electrified supporters and opponents alike by siding with those who want to keep the town’s statue of the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.

Carola Binney

Beyond the pale | 17 August 2017

Setting off to spend a year teaching English in Zhejiang province in south-eastern China, I expected plenty of surprises. But what struck me most was something they tend not to tell you about in the guidebooks: the racism. It started when I went around the classroom, asking pupils which city they were from. When I got to a slightly darker-skinned boy, his classmates thought it was hilarious to shout ‘Africa!’ It’s a theme. A girl with a similar complexion was taunted with monkey sounds; her peers refused to sit next to her, saying she smelt bad. I apparently erred when, teaching the word for wife, I showed my students a picture of Michelle Obama. The image of the then First Lady was greeted with exaggerated sounds of repulsion: ‘So ugly!’ they said.

Ross Clark

Hostile climate

The subtitle of Al Gore’s new film is ‘Truth to Power’, which is supposed to give the impression of brave old Al fighting for right against the mighty fossil fuel establishment. But it is somewhat ironic, given his response when the power being challenged is Gore himself. The former vice president was in London last week to promote his new film and I, along with the world’s press, was invited to a private screening before being allotted an entire eight minutes talking with the great man. An Inconvenient Sequel is an odd film. Billed as a film about global warming, it is really about Gore himself.

Peter Jones

Frater, ave atque vale

As his obituaries pointed out, my brother David made a name for himself with his unrideable bicycle; his ‘perpetual motion’ machine — a bicycle wheel still rotating in a frame on our mantelpiece (it attracted 1.1 million hits on a German website); and his theory that the arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair and fingernails was down to his wallpaper. The papers naturally got all this wrong (‘Napoleon killed by wallpaper’ they intoned, as did Andrew Roberts), and the image of the potty prof emerged. In fact, his purpose was serious. He was equally serious about our children — after a failed marriage, he had none of his own, to his great regret — and at lunch every Sunday the idiosyncratic scientist and dedicated uncle came together.

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Going nuclear

Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these fearsome weapons since. Can it really be a coincidence that the day before this eerie anniversary, Donald Trump issued his implicit threat to unleash an unprecedentedly devastating nuclear attack on North Korea that would apparently eclipse Hiroshima and Nagasaki? ‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,’ said the President.

Andrew J.

General rule

Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn Americans in 1961 of the ‘military industrial complex’, but perhaps it is now the only thing that stands between the US and chaos. The new White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, is the third general Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet. Kelly is already getting a good press for introducing military discipline and order to the Trump White House. His first move was to fire the attention-grabbing billionaire Anthony Scaramucci as head of communications, and he’s said to have told even members of Trump’s family that they must book ‘face time’ with the President through him.

Tom Holland

Don’t forget the Yazidis

As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its timbers had scraped the peak of a mountain range called Sinjar. Water began to pour in. Fortunately, a black serpent, its coils as thick as an arm, moved to plug the breach. The Ark did not sink. Noah, his family, and all the various animals on board survived to repopulate the earth. This story, so familiar, so strange, can be seen illustrated in a shady courtyard that also boasts, just for good measure, the very spot where Adam is claimed to have been fashioned from dust. Lalish, a magical compound of domes, towers and stairways, stands in a valley in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sam Leith

How I write

How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the authors of literary nonfiction go about their work is interesting. If, as Kingsley Amis argued, most of a writer’s work is the application of the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of the chair, it’s legitimate to ask: what trousers, what chair, sexuality where and when? In my experience the answers are wildly different from writer to writer; an experience borne out by our sampling — 400 words a day, or 15,000? A bath for inspiration, or exercise?

Julie Burchill

The joy of sex

Your typical Trollope-loving, Brahms-bothering Spectator reader probably won’t be aware that the most recent winner of Big Brother was a girl called Isabelle Warburton, but her victory was a joy to behold — and a lesson to be learned. The unemployed 21-year-old had a tan so orange it made Oompa-Loompas look pale and interesting, and on her first night in the house she was already wisecracking about how she’d caught an STD in Ibiza from a fellow contestant. Everyone presumed she was an air-headed bimbo, but she went on to display the most extraordinary decency — the only word for it — with her honesty, self-sacrifice and boldness. She took on and saw off the strutting alpha male of the house and volunteered herself for eviction to save a rival.

Jamie Bartlett

A tale of two Valleys

Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of ordinary houses and picket fences, clustered in villages notable only for the mega-companies they serve: Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) or Mountain View (Google). There’s the odd charm, but it’s generally clean, sterile, young, overpriced. Life here, they say, is five years ahead of everywhere else. Well, if that’s the case, I’ve seen the future and it is a bit disturbing. The surface ordinariness of the Valley hides a deep utopianism. In the late 1960s San Francisco was the home of both hippie counterculture and the early computer communities. Both groups shared an aversion to the existing order.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Riot chic

Last weekend, I got into a conversation with the son of an old friend. He’s a nice middle-class boy, mid-twenties, who plays in a band and has lots of tats and piercings. We got into a conversation about summer festivals. I was telling him about a wonderful one I’d been to — the Curious Arts Festival — and then I asked him, ‘You been to anything exciting?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said with a grin, ‘I went to a riot in east London.’ The riot, I discovered, had been a protest for Rashan Charles, a 20-year-old black man from east London who died after being chased and apprehended by a police officer in Dalston. It was a horrible death, the circumstances of which are still being investigated.

Daniel McCarthy

You’re fired!

 Washington D.C. Even a reality show needs good plot twists, and Donald Trump has delivered them like the master he is. First the misdirection: a week of publicly humiliating his attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, to the point where Sessions would surely quit or be fired. Then the sudden swerve — it was the press shop, not the justice department, that was decapitated. Sean Spicer was out as press secretary. Anthony Scaramucci, a mini Trump whose language was as blue as the lenses of his fancy sunglasses, was in as White House communications director. Reince Priebus, chief of staff, was next to go, sacked after clashing with ‘the Mooch’. And then the climactic twist: in virtually his first act in office, Priebus’s replacement, Marine Gen.

Simon Barnes

Girl power | 3 August 2017

England won the cricket World Cup for the fourth time. Huzzah! England reached the semi-finals of the European football championship. Huzzah again! Or you can, as some have preferred, say well, it’s not really England, is it? It’s England women — and that’s not the same thing at all. Ten points for observation, eh? I remember when I first noticed. But there’s less power, less speed and it’s altogether less thrilling a spectacle than the men’s versions, they say. Anya Shrubsole, the demon fast bowler who secured the win for England by taking six wickets in the final, only bowls at 70 mph; she’d be cannon fodder in a men’s game.

Jenny Coad

Snapping point

Our family holiday snaps used to be slides. We’d gather in the sitting room while Dad clicked through each one. He and my mother are archaeologists, so the pictures were short on people and long on fortifications. These days we tourists take so many photographs that a slide show would take all day. We record everything. The slightest thing. That promising first glass in the airport departure lounge; the entertainingly bungled English on the local restaurant menu (lol); our toes burrowing happily into smooth beach pebbles. I went mad for the tiles on a recent Portugal trip, photographing hundreds, eager not to miss an even prettier patterned frontage. They were so lovely, so pleasing. But what will I do with all the pictures?

Lloyd Evans

Whither Ukip?

‘Some wine? How about a beer? Shall we settle into a good old pub?’ I make these suggestions to Ukip’s interim leader, Steve Crowther, as we meet in central London, but he opts for a quiet bistro where he orders a cup of tea. He has a dapper suit, a ruddy, forceful face and a white beard of neatly trimmed bristles. His rat-a-tat laugh resounds across the bar like a well-oiled machine gun. Our intended subject is the Ukip leadership election (hustings this month, results on 30 September), but the n-word elbows its way through and claims our attention. The negotiations.