Features

Friday

Michael Jacobs

Andalucia: A culinary odyssey

On my most recent visit to Seville — the Andalusian city of proverbial fiestas and sunshine — the rain poured for days without stopping. The streets were almost deserted by lunchtime, with tourists taking refuge in the dozens of colourfully tiled tapas bars clustering under the shadow of the cathedral’s soaring bell tower, the Giralda. One day a local friend of mine took me to a newly opened place right in the heart of this district, yet hidden away on a side street, coldly modern in its design, clearly unappealing to tourists, and still barely known to anybody else. It was called Arenero, and there was just one other couple eating there, who turned out to be the proud parents of the friendly, heavily tattooed young chef.

Rachel Howard

Aegean Greece: Eternal bliss

There’s nothing like a financial crisis to bring out the worst in people. Witness the shocking rise of Golden Dawn, a bunch of Nazi thugs masquerading as a nationalist party, currently rampaging through the streets of Athens. Ironically, another unfortunate side effect of Greece’s colossal debt mountain has been a drop in the number of German tourists, deterred by angry locals burning effigies of Chancellor Merkel in SS gear. This is bad news for Greece’s tourism industry, as Germans traditionally top the visitor table; but it’s good news for British philhellenes, who won’t have to fight Fritz for the best sun-bed next summer.

Peter Jones

Holidays with the ancients

For most Romans, there were no such things as ‘summer holidays’. Holidays were for the rich, who went to their Cape Cod equivalent: the bay of Naples, leaving the stench, filth and disease of malarial Rome for the tideless, sheltered bay (‘bay’ derives from the local resort Baiae), cool sea breezes, healthy spas and agreeable villas. They certainly did not tour islands and coastlines by gulet, as I do every year with the sublime Westminster Classic Tours, full of Spectator readers keen to see and know everything, and hear what the ancients thought about it too. Cruises of any sort are, in fact, a 19th-century invention. True, Archimedes (as in ‘eureka’) did build what looks like a cruise-ship for Hiero II, tyrant of Syracuse (240 bc).

Clarissa Tan

“This coming year, I want to live”

What do New Year resolutions mean? Nothing, I have discovered, unless you resolve your old year’s first. In September I was diagnosed with colon cancer and since then, I’ve had time to think about time. It seems as though my past years have collapsed, one after another, one into the other, until I can see my experiences both all at once and as a long train of hours. Everything I’ve been has brought me to where I am now. I must look backwards to move forwards. I am not dying, yet I think much more about mortality. According to certain Eastern traditions, at the moment of death there occurs an unravelling — one revisits one’s life in reverse, unspooling from the Now into the Before, like a movie with the production credits rolling first.

Sophia Martelli

Marseilles: Tough love

Arriving at Marseilles’s Gare St Charles in the early hours of a balmy October night, the first marvel of the city that is pointed out to me — both proudly and affectionately — is a large, well-fed rat that pours itself into a nook in the stone wall of the station. ‘Welcome to Marseilles,’ says Oliver, my laconic host, pushing his bicycle along the street to avoid running into a trio of high-cheekboned Maghrebian hip-hop devotees. As they saunter past, deltoids rippling, bouncing fluidly and elegantly on their toes to some innate city beat, Oliver adds, ‘Also known as North North Africa.’ With a population of 850,000 (1.6 million within the greater city limits), Marseilles is France’s second largest city, dwarfed only by Paris.

Victoria Lane

Aeolian joys

It’s 5 a.m., a splashy grey dawn, and we’re out of here on easyJet. Palermo is another world of heat and brightness but we’re not stopping; at the port we board a catamaran which churns its way towards the Aeolian islands, the volcanic archipelago off the north-east corner of Sicily. The islands are named after Aeolus, son of Zeus and god of the four winds, but there was scarcely a whisper of a breeze in the two weeks we were there. We had all sorts of plans, to island-hop, go to the hot mud baths on Vulcano, visit the black sand beaches of Stromboli and climb its volcano by night, perhaps a day on Panarea, Italy’s Ibiza, where glamorous people prowl in bars.

Giles Waterfield

Menton: The garden of France

A hundred years ago, travel writers commented, there was something peculiarly depressing about Menton — or Mentone as the British would say, recalling the days when the town situated on the Mediterranean border between France and Italy was an independent Italian-leaning state. It was depressing because wherever you looked there were people tottering palely along the promenade past the statue of Queen Victoria (who used to stay in a discreetly grand villa tucked among the hills) or lurking in the numerous hotels with Anglophone names. Since Dr James Bennet in the 1870s had declared that the town’s microclimate and its almost unfailingly good weather offered a hope of recovery for those suffering from lung problems, a foreign colony of the ailing had sprung up.

Petronella Wyatt

Amalfi: This blessed plot

This is not an article about hedonism. Oh, no. The Amalfi coast may be the favoured historical playground of the bad and the beautiful — from Tiberius to Sophia Loren and Gwyneth Paltrow — but my theme is one of culture. What is it about this rocky stretch of southwest Italy that has drawn such disparate artistes as Wagner, D.H. Lawrence, Turner, John Steinbeck and Gore Vidal? Oh, heck, you win. Let’s have some hedonism first. I am sitting, bubbling nicely, in a Jacuzzi that, through the picture window beside it, looks over the town as it runs down to the sea.

Wednesday

Giles Coren

Fifty shades of Santa

During a frantic online rummage for last-minute Christmas presents (I am too old to risk actually purchasing anything on the internet this close to the 25th, but I thought I might find some inspiration for presents I could then go out and buy in the shops and drag home in a bag on a stinking bus full of fat tourists through solid traffic), I came upon something very disturbing indeed: novelty baby clothes inspired by… Fifty Shades of Grey. You thought the sexualisation of children had gone only as far as six-year-old girls dressed up as Lady Gaga. But it has gone much, much further. Such as, for example, tiny romper suits available on a website called Etsy, with ‘My mummy read Fifty Shades of Grey nine months ago’ written on it. Nine months. Get it?

Liam Fox

Egypt on the brink

It is strange now to recall the jubilation with which the ‘Arab Spring’ was welcomed. Amid all the excitement of dictators toppling, many people here in the West, as well as some over there on the ground, forgot that the test of a revolution is not the overthrow of a tyrant, but what comes next. Though they will never admit it, the Arab revolutions surprised western governments as much as the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. History is always producing the unexpected, which is why some of us never took it for granted that all this would have a happy ending. Now, almost two years after the Tahrir Square uprising, the fates of the revolutions and the region are at a deadly junction. The West’s swift initial support for the Egyptian rebels was understandable.

Lloyd Evans

Thank men for women’s lib

Let’s get this straight. I’m a feminist. That’s the way I was brought up. My mum was a passionate women’s libber and I always agreed with my mum — even when she was wrong — but she was right on that one. The struggle to free one sex has liberated both. The human species is now freer, more dynamic and more fulfilled than ever. But here’s the oddity. When I read histories of the women’s movement I rarely find any hint that men were involved at all. Men are either sidelined completely or portrayed as a bunch of sexist wreckers who strove to hold women back at every turn. Quite untrue, of course. But a fascinating prejudice. What’s even more fascinating is to discover why it still goes unchallenged. First, a few facts.

Fraser Nelson

The unlikely revolutionary

Behind Michael Gove’s desk stands an imposing McCarthy-era poster which says: ‘Sure I want to fight Communism — but how?’ In their less charitable moments, Tories may argue that his Department of Education is as good a place as any to start. The strength of its grip over state schools has long been the subject of political laments and Yes, Minister sketches. Confronting the educational establishment was too much for the Blair reformers and even the Thatcher government. But Gove, the least likely of political warriors, finally appears to be making progress. ‘Some things I never imagined we’d be able to accomplish alone, let alone in a coalition government, so relatively quickly,’ he says, when we meet in his office.

Dennis Sewell

Assault on the ivory tower

Look down the list of the masters, wardens and principals of Oxford colleges and you’ll soon see that The Spectator’s contributing editor Peter Oborne was on to something with his theory of the inexorable rise of the media and political classes. At high tables across the university, former journalists, broadcasting executives and quangocrats are increasingly occupying places of honour once reserved for scholars of great renown. Ensconced in the master’s chair at St Peter’s College is the former controller of BBC Radio 4, Mark Damazer. The principal of St Anne’s is former Newsnight editor and Channel 4 executive Tim Gardam. Ex-Guardian and Economist writer Frances Cairncross is the rector of Exeter College.

Michael Lind

The age of turboparalysis

More than half a decade has passed since the recession that triggered the financial panic and the Great Recession, but the condition of the world continues to be summed up by what I’ve called ‘turboparalysis’ — a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move. The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression might have been expected to produce revolutions in politics and the world of ideas alike. Outside of the Arab world, however, revolutions are hard to find. Mass unemployment and austerity policies have caused riots in Greece and Spain, but most developed nations are remarkably sedate.

Paul Johnson

Reason to believe

My belief in God is not philosophical. It is not rooted in metaphysics or reason. It springs from the heart and the senses. It is practical. Every Sunday I attend the 11 o’clock Mass at the Jesuit church in Farm Street, Mayfair. I have been doing this, intermittently, for decades. For me, Farm Street is the centre of English Catholicism and brings back memories of my boyhood at Stonyhurst, the ancient Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire. The Mass is in Latin, and is sung to music written mainly in the baroque centuries. The sermons are brief and sinewy in the Jesuit manner. The congregation is a cross-section of Catholicism in England today, from old recusant families to Poles and Irish. Among these people I feel at home, happy and safe.

Damian Thompson

Alpha male

Just before stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury, the late Robert Runcie told me — in a sotto voce conversation during the General Synod — that charismatic evangelical parishes such as Holy Trinity Brompton (‘HTB’) in South Kensington, with their American-style worship, near-fundamentalist teaching and smart social connections, posed more of a threat to the Church of England than divisions over women priests. I wonder how he would have reacted to the news that, 21 years later, an HTB man has been given his job. Justin Welby, only recently appointed Bishop of Durham, is being translated to Canterbury with a minimum of fuss.

Mark Mason

The tao of washing up

Christmas isn’t about giving. Or receiving. It’s about washing up. And for some of us that’s its greatest joy. You think men hide from housework? Not when it comes to the soapy science, we don’t. Virtually all my male friends share a love of the bubbles. For us, ‘festive season’ equals ‘even more plates and cups to wash than usual’, and so we’re happy as pigs in Fairy Liquid. Why do we feel the lure of the sink, when other household tasks send us scurrying? Simplicity is part of it: ironing is fiddly, vacuuming and dusting unproductive, in that they leave you with literally nothing to show for your efforts. I know that’s the point, but it’s still an annoying one.

The Spectator

The greats we hate

Craig Brown Which classic work do you think this comes from? ‘Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same golden tawny brown. She had high cheek-bones, merry eyes and a straight mouth with full lips. Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field that has been burned dark in the sun but it was cut short all over her head so that it was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt.’ Jeffrey Archer? Jackie Collins? Lee Child? I’ll give you one more clue.

Mark Greaves

‘We rot. Don’t we?’

Joanna Lumley and Sister Elizabeth Obbard are seated at the front of the church. Lumley is perched elegantly on the edge of her chair; Sister Elizabeth settles deep into hers, submerged under folds of habit. They are talking in front of an audience at the Carmelite church in Kensington, west London, about life as a nun. And Sister Elizabeth is being wonderfully honest. ‘The first six months were dreadful,’ she says. This was in the 1960s, when religious sisters did hard, physical work that was ‘supposed to make you humble’. Did it make her humble, asks Lumley. ‘No,’ says Sister Elizabeth, who is meek but steely. ‘It made me angry.

Brian Sewell

Screen burn

In mid-November an Indian chauffeur taking me to Broadcasting House made a detour to show me the Christmas lights in Regent Street. He wished to share the pleasure that they gave him and it was with glee that of the shops he used the terms ‘top class’ and ‘posh’, when to me the street seems almost as tawdry as the ghastly trek from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus. Dissembling, I went through the motions of agreement, thanked him for the treat, and fell into deep melancholy at the thought of yet another Christmas and all that it no longer means to me.