Features

World Cup fever has arrived. Every morning on the way to work, more little plastic flags of St George flutter from white vans or, in my case, from the window of our trusty Audi A6. Many of my fellow countrymen regard this footie orgy as wholly unnecessary — not me. Bunting will go up at the front of our house if we advance to the quarters, whereupon my wife will spend most evenings in a curry house with a girlfriend, leaving me to invite the lads round for random games such as Honduras v. Ecuador. Result. More than anything, the tournament offers a chance to wheel out my one Roy Hodgson (he’s the England manager) anecdote. It was back in 1994 when he was coach of Switzerland and about to take his team to the World Cup in America, for which England did not qualify.

The Kindle has changed reading in so many ways. A library in your pocket rather than the hulk of a hardback. Uniform pixels where once dust motes rose from an ancient page. But the biggest change, the most fundamental one, is emotional rather than physical. Reading, which used to be the most private of activities, is now an increasingly public one. The same internet that lets you download a book’s content also lets you upload your reaction to that content. As well as allowing you to mark passages in a book, Kindle’s highlighting feature shows you which passages other readers have marked. What’s more, Amazon ranks the results. Of the 25 most highlighted passages, all but six come from the Hunger Games trilogy.

Americans make movies about slavery and its abolition. In the past two years we’ve seen the Oscar-winning Twelve Years a Slave, based on a 19th-century slave narrative, and Django Unchained, with Christoph Waltz as a bounty-hunter who, uniquely among bounty-hunters of the period, did not make his living from capturing fugitive slaves. Spielberg’s Lincoln was about the Great Emancipator himself, as was the less historically rigorous Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. But the abolition of slavery in England has never received the same attention. Perhaps it is because abolition here came not through blood and glory, but through the common law; or perhaps because emancipation does not frame constitutional debates here in the same way it does in the States.

Attending public executions, whether beheadings or stonings, is not my predilection, yet one does come across them in the course of life in Arabia and Pakistan. Beheading and stoning are the accepted penalties for a range of presumed offences in much of the Muslim world, and the all-male crowd — especially the old men — push and shove outside Riyadh’s main mosque after Friday morning prayer for a better view of offenders losing their heads by the ceremonial sword. The seeping cadavers and their heads are left on the tarmac pour encourager les autres.