Features

Thursday

Thomas Eaton

St. Petersburg: Off Nevsky Prospect

‘On the shore of desolate waves / he stood, full of lofty thoughts / and gazed afar.’ So begins Pushkin’s epic poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, with the legend of Peter the Great founding his new city in 1703. A remote and inhospitable swampland in north-western Russia was transformed into his ‘window on the West’, a Baroque and neo-classical masterpiece. I came to St Petersburg to learn Russian. Enrolled for an intensive course at a private language school, I opted for full immersion and stayed with a local family for the two weeks. At Pulkovo airport I was met by a representative and politely but firmly reminded that we would now only communicate in Russian.

Michael Henderson

Berlin: The best bar in the world

‘You were at the Fish, I hear,’ a Berlin friend told me. ‘I didn’t know you were an old hippie.’ Reputations can cling to places as they do to people. Zwiebelfisch, the Berlin inn he was referring to, has not been a haunt of hippies — radicals, more like, ‘the class of ’68’ — for at least two decades. Now it is a home for all-comers; because, in the eyes of some of us who have spent years staring through a glass darkly, it is the finest bar in Christendom. Sited on the northwest side of Savignyplatz, west Berlin, it may not strike the person wandering along Grolmanstrasse as a world classic. That is part of its charm. Zwiebelfisch does not draw attention to itself.

Alex Massie

George Galloway’s one-man mission to save the Union

George Galloway is unhappy. One of his interlocutors on Twitter has told him to ‘Fuck off back to England’. Gorgeous George is in Glasgow for the first in a series of roadshows in which he sets out his case for Scotland remaining part of the Union and he’s not going anywhere. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not even to England. This will disappoint his many critics. But Galloway has a new, higher calling: saving whatever remains of the British left. To do that he must first save Britain. Which means persuading his fellow Scots they should remain a part of the United Kingdom. Like a latter-day Othello, he loves us not wisely but too well.

John Laughland

Paris: Parc life

Autumn in Paris has been immortalised in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most poignant poems. Having left his wife in Berlin, Rilke moved to Paris in 1902 where he wrote ‘Herbsttag’ (Autumn Day). ‘Whoever is alone now, will remain so for long. He will stay up late, write long letters and wander restlessly in the avenues as the leaves drift.’ If you have ever taken a solitary walk in the gardens of Versailles as the sun glints coldly on the bright autumn colours, you will know that feeling. For four months of the year, from December to March, living in Paris is like being trapped inside Tupperware. The grey skies are more immovable even than in London. So if you are planning a trip, go in October or November when an Indian summer can produce wonderful effects.

William Cook

Tangier: Hidden treasure

‘I remember you from last time,’ said the young man on the promenade. It was my first night back in Tangier. I was alone and tired and lonely. I liked the idea of meeting someone who knew me, if only from a brief encounter a few years before. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, though I didn’t recognise him. In his cheap suit he seemed anonymous, like a policeman in plain clothes. It was nearly midnight, but the esplanade was still crowded. On the beach below, shrieking children were sprinting across the sand. Out to sea, over the Strait of Gibraltar, the bright lights of Tarifa were winking in the darkness. The Spanish coast seemed very close, yet a long way out of reach. We’d been talking for several minutes before I realised I’d never met this man before.

Jack Wakefield

Venice: A feast of great art

Venice is a 10,000-carat jewel set by the greatest ever goldsmith pinned to the breast of the most beautiful woman to have lived. Built out of a need for security in the turbulent world of late antiquity, it was protected by the lagoon, which also gave it political stability, and with political stability came riches, conservatism and trade. The great longevity of the serene republic and the restricted space of the island made it a mishmash of styles and architectures. The exuberant frontage plastered along the canals gives the sensation of being immersed in a grandiose opera set. It is a fabulous and wonderful and totally pleasurable explosion of culture.

John Gimlette

New York: Literary ghost tour

Deep below West 52nd Street is a massive stash of booze. The cops never found it during Prohibition, and it belongs to the 21 Club. Famous for its sumptuously New Yorky dishes (like filet mignon with kumquat vinaigrette), 21 is a real boys’ den. Dark and plush, the subterranean rooms are festooned with intriguing junk: footballs, helmets, a model torpedo boat given by JFK, and a smashed racket from McEnroe. There are even 25 paintings by Remington, left by debtors during the depression. But oddly it isn’t a club at all. Anyone can go there, provided they’ve got a fat wallet and hollow legs. You just need to book (www.21club.com; 212 582 7200), otherwise you’ll be slugging it out with a banker. ‘How did you hide the booze?’ I asked.

Thursday

Sophia Waugh

Young people aren’t driven by fun, but by fear

Family legend has it that when I arrived in Durham, a fresh-faced ingénue from deepest Somerset, I called home. ‘This is the life,’ I said, after a bare 24 hours in the frozen north, and they hardly heard from me again. I would have expected my first daughter to have a similar experience, but by the time she set off for university I had already learned how very different the new generation is from ours. I arrived from a girls’ grammar school, having chosen a university as far from my (much-loved) home as I feasibly could, determined to have Fun. I threw myself into the whole thing. I stayed up night after night drinking nasty wine and talking rubbish and I doubt there was a single pub or college bar that I didn’t try out.

Tiggy Salt

Notes on…Leaf-peeping in Gloucestershire

Don’t delay — this is the year to visit the National Arboretum. Thanks to the long hours of sunlight we had this summer, followed by the cooler and shorter days of recent weeks, this autumn is going to be one to remember. Fruit, hops, hips and nuts hang heavy on the bough, but there is still much to look forward to. Reserves of the green pigment chlorophyll in our deciduous trees and shrubs have been exhausted, allowing the hidden yellow pigments of xanthophyll and the orange of betacarotene to come to the fore. Although always present in the leaves, they are masked by the overriding green of the chlorophyll which is needed during the food producing months of summer, allowing plants to create reserves for winter.

Fraser Nelson

Boozy, druggy adults. Sober, serious kids. Welcome to Ab Fab Britain

Twenty-one years ago this week a sitcom arrived on British television involving three characters so improbable that they held the nation in thrall. It had started as a French and Saunders comedy sketch about a hedonistic ‘modern’ mother (Eddy) and her appalled, straight-laced daughter (Saffy). To spin this out into a series, Jennifer Saunders added Joanna Lumley as a hard-nosed, hard-drinking best friend (Patsy) and two essential props: Bollinger champagne (Bolly) and Stolichnaya vodka (Stolly). Absolutely Fabulous was born. It was never intended as a piece of social commentary — yet it has turned out to be bizarrely prophetic. Over the past two decades, Britain has steadily witnessed precisely the change in generational behaviour adumbrated by Saunders.

Nick Cohen

Why can’t we admit we’re scared of Islamism?

Firoozeh Bazrafkan is frightened of nothing. Five foot tall, 31 years old, and so thin you think a puff of wind could blow her away, she still has the courage to be a truly radical artist and challenge those who might hurt her. She fights for women’s rights and intellectual freedom, and her background means her fight has to be directed against radical Islam. As a Danish citizen, she saw journalists go into hiding and mobs attack her country’s embassies just because Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammad that were so tame you could hardly call them ‘satirical’. Bazrafkan is also the daughter of an Iranian family, and the Islamic Republic’s subjugation of women revolts her.

Mary Dejevsky

Has Germany confronted its Nazi past? Not where art is concerned

From repentance to restitution, Germany has done an exemplary job of facing up to its Nazi past — with a little help, it might waspishly be said, from the victorious Allies. Every aspect of life, from education and philosophy, to science, politics, music and the law, was held up to the light early on and thoroughly cleansed. There has, though, been one puzzling exception; a place where shadows linger. That is the art world. The discovery, announced this week, of almost 1,400 paintings stashed away in a Munich apartment, lifts the curtain a fraction, but only a fraction, on this hidden realm.

Aidan Hartley

The only people thriving in post-revolution Egypt — tomb raiders

 Cairo Hook nose, blue chin, Arab headdress: the tomb robber resembled a villain from a Tintin comic. His friend was packing a big pistol and behind them it was sunset over the pyramids at Dahshur, south of Cairo. Looting’s been rife in Egypt since antiquity — but there has been an alarming acceleration since the 2011 revolution, and Hook Nose and Big Pistol are in up to their respective necks. I met them as they were about to set off for a night’s work: excavating holes in tombs right up to the foot of the famous Black Pyramid outside Cairo, built around 2,000 bc by a Pharaoh called Amenemhat III. Hook Nose was cock-a-hoop about his profession. ‘The police let me do whatever I want,’ he said.

Jonathan Fenby

Does Xi Jinping really want reform? If so, he would unravel China

It is now 35 years since Deng Xiaoping gained mastery of China and launched a process that changed the world. The diminutive, chain-smoking ‘paramount leader’ adopted market economics to make his nation a great power once again and to cement the rule of the Communist party with no room for political liberalisation. The formula he adopted at a Party plenum after winning the power struggle at the end of 1979 that followed the death of Mao Zedong has been amazingly successful by its own lights, but is fast running out of steam.

James Tooley

Malala for free schools

That Malala Yousafzai, the girl the Taleban tried to murder, is a brave and resolute young woman is not in doubt. The youngest person ever nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, she has won many awards, including the Sakharov Prize and an honorary degree from Edinburgh University, in her campaign for ‘the right to -education’. But something curious is going on. Something crucial to her experience is always omitted when her life and mission are described by international agencies and the media. Education International, the global teachers’ union umbrella group, is typical. Malala is campaigning, they say, so that all can benefit from ‘equitable public education’; that is, government education.

Rod Liddle

Off yer bikes! Cyclists are a menace to society — and self-righteous to boot

 ‘Such anti-cyclist anger reminds me in many ways of the feelings about gypsies that I would hear expressed when I lived in central Europe. In Hungary, people would tell me they disliked gypsies because they were lazy and dishonest. The truth was that gypsies — like, I would suggest, cyclists — were unpopular principally for being different.’ —The Invisible Cyclist, anonymous blogger Like many people, I am worried that too few cyclists are being killed on our roads each year. While the number of cycling journeys undertaken in the UK has risen enormously since 2006, and exponentially since the exciting, hirsute Sir Bradley Wiggins won a bicycle race in France in 2012, the official statistics show only a moderate rise in fatalities.

Thursday

Andrew Haldane

There’s a revolution — in banking

In 1925 Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, famously declared that he wished to see ‘finance less proud and industry more content’. In the light of the financial crisis, much the same refrain has been heard from policymakers and politicians over the past five years. How are we to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? And how might the financial sector reinvent itself for the future? I wish to argue there are grounds for optimism. Out of the ashes of the financial crisis a new type of banking is emerging. Old business models are being rewritten and new entrants are driving change. Indeed, it’s possible that the financial sector is in the early throes of a miniature revolution, the like of which has swept through a number of other industries recently.

Jonathan Foreman

The one good thing we’re leaving in Afghanistan

 Kabul A strange new institution is rising from the dust in the mountains west of Kabul. The foreigners here call it the Sandhurst in the Sand. Those who work at the new British-led military school, which welcomed its first cadets last week, prefer the more cumbersome ‘ANA-OA’, short for Afghan National Army Officers Academy (though the Australians who guard the place call it ‘Duntroon in the Desert’ after their own Sandhurst equivalent). Whichever name sticks, the ‘Afghan Sandhurst’ will be perhaps the only significant British contribution to Afghanistan’s security after the Nato mission finishes at the end of next year.

Melissa Kite

David Cameron has lost the countryside

When hunt supporters visit the office of a Tory cabinet minister these days, they like to turn up armed and dangerous. And so it was when a delegation from the Countryside Alliance arrived for a private meeting with the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson a few weeks ago, wielding an alarming new poll of their membership. Setting the dossier down in front of Mr Paterson (one of their few allies in government), they spelt out the bottom line: 13 per cent of Countryside Alliance members now intend to vote Ukip in the next general election. Let’s be clear: given that the CA is basically the voice of the shires, that is only a shade less shocking than saying that 13 per cent of Mr Cameron’s own family intend to vote Ukip, although that is always possible, I suppose.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Are you a Yuffie? 

I remember, during one of my last classes at UCL, the topic of conversation turned from the cultural implications of Algerian independence to the subject of life after university. Our lecturer, a grumpy ‘progressive Hoxhaist’, told us that things had never been worse, and out of the 20 or so students in the room, only one or two would have found any kind of full-time employment by the time the year was out. ‘But it’s not fair!’ cried one girl, ‘we’ve all worked so hard over the last four years, we’re all clever [speak for yourself, I thought], we all have debts and we’re just going to be ignored!’ ‘Who are you going to blame, then?’ responded the lecturer. The question was a pertinent one: who were we to blame?