Features

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

Save our Van Dyck!

Why should a portrait of a Flemish painter by a Flemish painter be considered so important to Britain that the culture minister Ed Vaizey has slapped a three-month export delay on it, and the National Portrait Gallery has announced a £12.5 million campaign to keep it in the country? Moreover, why is it so important that after reading this article you should immediately go to www.savevandyck.org and make a generous contribution to save it from going abroad? The answer lies in four words: Sir Anthony Van Dyck. No other single artist has had such an impact on British art as Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) not only in his own lifetime but also — as the 2009 Tate Britain’s exhibition demonstrated — right up to the 20th century.

Thursday

Mark Forsyth

What rhetoric can do for you – and what you can do for rhetoric

Listen to Mark Forsyth discuss what makes a political sound bite: [audioboo url="http://audioboo.fm/boos/1746136-mark-forsyth-inkyfool-on-the-importance-of-political-sound-bites"/] In December 2011, there was a major reversal of American policy and ideology. Barack Obama told a crowd of veterans: ‘You stood up for America. Now America must stand up for you.’ A U-turn! A flop-flip! Because, if you think about it, Obama was saying the exact opposite of JFK: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’ And nobody noticed. Obama was still the heir to Kennedy, because he used the same rhetoric. Technically, it’s called chiasmus. The press and the public hate rhetoric.

Melanie Phillips

The Revd Paul Flowers ticked all the right ‘progressive’ boxes — that’s why he could get away with anything

Listen to Melanie Phillips and Jesse Norman discuss Paul Flowers: [audioboo url="https://audioboo.fm/boos/1746120-melanie-phillips-vs-jesse-norman-on-revd-paul-flowers"/] Yet again, one particular question has formed on lips up and down the land. How in heaven’s name could so many people have failed to spot such a spectacular abuse of a public position? We heard it first in the Jimmy Savile scandal, when the posthumous discovery of half a century of predation left people incredulous that so many had known about but done nothing to stop his serial depravities.

The Spectator

The 2013 Michael Heath Award for cartooning  — shortlist (part I)

Nine cartoonists are shortlisted for the first ever Michael Heath Award for cartooning. The theme of the contest, sponsored by John Lobb, is ‘Man in Motion’. Work by four of the shortlisted artists is below. We’ll print four more next week, and the winner on 7 December. Thanks to all who entered — and congratulations to those on the shortlist.

Sarah Reynolds

Notes on…London galleries

Everybody knows that the London art scene is thriving, and so of course the big international commercial galleries have set up here: Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth and Pace. This global razzmatazz puts pressure on the city’s home-grown independent galleries — especially those in Cork Street in Mayfair. Cork Street has been at the heart of London’s art scene for more than 90 years, and helped launch some of the most famous artists of modern times. It is now closing for redevelopment by international landlords, so let’s hope they appreciate the street’s cultural importance and welcome the galleries back. But we don’t have to lament too long for Cork Street — London’s gallery sector is always in flux.

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite: I can no longer find knickers small enough to fit me

Barely a week goes by when a female Lib Dem minister doesn’t pledge some new coalition initiative on ‘female body confidence’. The junior equalities minister Jo Swinson was at it again when she congratulated Debenhams for becoming the first high-street retailer to introduce size 16 mannequins. Ms Swinson said: ‘The images we see in the world of fashion are all pretty much the same. It’s as if there’s only one way of being beautiful. Yet nine in ten people say they would like to see a broader range of body shapes shown in advertising and the media.’ For broader range of body shapes, read fat, by the way. For nine in ten people, read nine in ten fat people.

Christopher Booker

Profumo. Chatterley. The Beatles. 1963 was the year old England died

Shortly before his death, David Frost rang to ask me to take part in a radio series he was making to mark the 50th anniversary of ‘the year, Chris, that I know is closest to your heart, 1963’. This was not because 1963 was the year when he and I worked together on the BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was (TW3), which overnight made Frost a television superstar. It was because he remembered the importance I had given to the events of that year in The Neophiliacs, a book I wrote long ago analysing the tidal wave of change which swept through British life in the 1950s and 1960s. By any measure the stream of scandals, shocks and sensations which poured through the headlines in 1963 made it as extraordinary a year in Britain as any since the second world war.

Daniel Hannan

How Britain invented freedom – and why we need to save it now

The single most common reaction I get from Americans when they learn that we’re placing our newspapers under our politicians is: ‘Y’all need a Bill of Rights’. You can see their point. Absolute freedom of expression used to distinguish the English-speaking peoples from the run of nations. The restrictions which even other western democracies applied — prohibitions on Nazi symbols, for example — were inconceivable in the Anglosphere. Over the past quarter of a century, that has changed. Anglophone democracies now regularly prosecute people for saying the wrong thing, usually on grounds of putative insult to some minority group.

Eliza Filby

The death of Tory Anglicanism

This week the General Synod edged one step closer towards permitting the ordination of female bishops. The final outcome is likely to be some kind of compromise to appease traditionalists similar to that in 1992 when the ordination of female priests was passed. But unlike that occasion, one crucial voice will not be heard nor probably venture an opinion — the Conservative party, which has distanced itself from ecclesiastical affairs over the past 20 years. This was not the case back in 1992 when a band of Conservative MPs joined Anglican traditionalists in opposing female ordination.

Thursday

Carol Sarler

Justice isn’t supposed to make a victim ‘feel better’, Damian Green

Coming next month to a courtroom near you: a bewildered young man, freshly convicted, trembles in the dock while awaiting his fate. But just before sentencing, a weeping widow stands, turns welling blue eyes to the bench and beseeches His Honour: ‘I cannot forgive him for his part in my husband’s death. My life is ruined. I beg you to punish him to the maximum.’ Murmurs of assent are shushed in the public gallery. ‘Well,’ says the judge, ‘I had planned leniency, in light of the coercion from older bullies and his mental age of six. However, since you ask so nicely — Officer! Take him down and throw away the darned key!’ And the gallery erupts in applause. All right... hands up to a smidge of exaggeration. But only a smidge.

David Rose

Blackout Britain — why our energy crisis is only just beginning

BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, has been headquartered in Germany since before the country formally existed. Founded in 1865 by the industrial pioneer Friedrich Engelhorn, it still occupies the vast site on the banks of the Rhine at Ludwigshafen where its first dye and soda factories were built. A third of its staff are employed in Rhineland Palatinate. It is a global company, yet as German as Goethe and gummi bears. A few days ago Kurt Bock, the firm’s chief executive, warned that its Ludwigshafen plant may soon be forced to close, with BASF’s German jobs relocated elsewhere. The reason, he said, was Germany’s soaring energy costs and the crippling green levies being used to pay for ‘renewables’ such as wind farms.

Harry Mount

Notes on… Motoring in Greece and Italy

‘Buy on the bullets’ is the cry of the most ruthless stockbrokers — invest just before a war, after the stock markets dive, before the recovery kicks in. In the same way, now is the time for us heartless continental drivers to head for poor, battered Greece. Maybe it’s not quite war-torn yet, but driving around the Peloponnese this autumn was like touring a post-apocalyptic ghost town. Once you get out of the sun-bleached concrete sprawl of Athens, the splendid motorway to Kalamata is eerily empty at all hours of the day. Rocketing along at 80 mph, I could afford to stare for several seconds at the Corinth canal below me, and the ancient acropolis of Corinth above, with little danger — there was no one to crash into.

Melanie McDonagh

The man who made it OK to talk about immigration

It takes a lot to make the subject of immigration respectable for liberals, at least if you’re pointing out its problematic aspects. But Paul Collier, an Oxford economist specialising in the world’s bottom billion, has, in the 270-odd pages of his new book Exodus, opened up the issue for the left — well, for all comers, actually. Which, for a book suggesting among other things that, left to itself, there is no natural limit to immigration, is quite something. ‘The overwhelming reaction I’ve had,’ he told me, from his Oxford berth at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, ‘is that people thank me for making the subject discussable.

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.