Features

Saturday

Misti Traya

Breast beating

Recently, I took my baby daughter to the park. When I pulled out a bottle to feed her, some nursing mothers a couple of picnic blankets away stopped their conversation to gawp. They exchanged derogatory looks and clutched their suckling children closer to their bosoms. The message was clear. The sooner I left, the better. I have a similar experience in the park almost every day. Breastfeeding mothers see me bottle-feeding, and they disapprove. ‘Isn’t it sad?’ I overhead one woman saying. ‘Some mothers don’t understand the importance of breastfeeding.’ Some go further — they intimate that the connection I have with my bottle-fed daughter could never be as strong as the one they have with their child.

Dennis Sewell

Pussy Riot were wrong

It’s hard to tell which is the more absurd over-reaction to Pussy Riot’s 51-second performance of political and religious blasphemy in Moscow’s St Saviour’s Cathedral in February — that of the Russian state or that of the western media. It should go without saying that the treatment meted out to the three retro-punks — five months’ pre-trial detention at the mercy of unkind jailers, isolation from their families, heavily embroidered charges, their display in an aquarium-style dock under threat of a seven-year maximum sentence before a clearly biased judge — has been cruel, oppressive and grotesquely out of proportion to the offence they committed. But it cannot any longer go without saying.

Saturday

Paul Wood

‘We are one body’

Near Damascus ‘Remember: what we do, we do for God,’ said the rebel commander to the huddle of his men at the foot of the mountain. They divided up their ammunition. They had so little — one clip’s worth was shared between two Kalashnikovs. They set off, a line of men stretching into the dark, breathing heavily on the steep slope: another night’s gruelling walk to bring them closer to Damascus. The Free Syrian Army’s failed offensive in the capital had been the week before. Fighters poured in, only to run out of bullets. The city did not rise up to help them. Government forces hit back with tanks, artillery and jets; but time and again the regime has tried to crush the uprising using ever greater violence, only to cause a bigger reaction.

Mark Mason

Brush up your Olympics

Amazing how many cycling experts came out of the woodwork last week, wasn’t it? Normally most of us couldn’t tell one end of a bike from the other, but give us an Olympic road race six days after Bradley Wiggins wins the Tour de France and all of a sudden we’ve got pelotons coming out of our backsides. With a week of these Games still to go, there’ll be plenty more chances to play the instant aficionado, so here’s your crib sheet for all the events the whole country will be talking about. For five minutes. Badminton Invented in India by the British Army, and brought back to Blighty in 1873 at a party given by the Duke of Beaufort at his country estate, hence the name.

John Simpson

The office of last resort

Beijing There is no mistaking the place. It isn’t just the crowd of men and women sitting on the steps of the small official building; it’s the way they look as individuals. Once you’ve come across a group of petitioners in China, you can always spot them again. They are usually middle-aged or elderly and poor. Their clothes are worn and dusty. They look discouraged, sad, beaten down by life. And yet there’s something else about them — something which says a great deal for the human spirit. They’re defiant. They’ve crossed the intangible barrier which divides the weak of purpose from those who are determined to see their project through, no matter what it costs.

Mary Wakefield

‘Drone warfare is coming’

Quite soon, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that a revolution is taking place. You’ll look up one day and the skies will be full of flying robots: pilotless drones or UAVS (Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles) — all programmed to carry out different tasks. There’ll be security drones circling shops, streaming video back to base, Royal Mail drones flying parcels to and fro. Even the birds and bees may not be what they seem. The tiniest drones on the market right now are called MAVs (Micro Air Vehicles) and their designs are inspired by nature. There are robot flies with camera eyes — perfect for corporate espionage; mosquito drones that can inject a payload of poison; hummingbird drones that perch and listen on windowsills.

Philip Delves-Broughton

The despair bubble

Economists, we should all have learned by now, are mostly quacks. They practise neither a science nor an art but a bad game of darts. Boozed up on shoddy theory and meaningless statistics, they wobble to the oche of public life, hurl an arrow at the backboard, then blame the flight, the lighting, anything but their own incompetence, when it falls to the floor. So why listen? Why bother with their endless fainting fits over the slightest flicker in the numbers? When they try to tally the Office of National Statistics’ claim that the British economy shrank by 0.

Florence King

No man’s land

Fredericksburg, Virginia Walt Whitman once observed, ‘In America, the men hate the women and the women hate the men.’ That sounds like a commentary on feminism and probably was. Although Whitman was caught up in personal sexual conflicts more befitting a sensitive poet, he lived through most of the 19th century, when women were in vociferous pursuit of the vote, so he probably muttered his share of ‘If I hear “vote” one more time… .’ To judge from our current cris de coeur, his remark about the battle of the sexes rings truer for our own time than for his.

Saturday

Stanley Johnson

Peloponnese: Return ticket

I first visited the Peloponnese in the spring of 1959, at the beginning of my gap year. I was 18. Having been accepted for university as a classicist, I decided I might as well combine business and pleasure by visiting the great sites of the Mycenaean era before going on to my studies. It was mind-blowing. Olympia, Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae! I went from place to place with the Oxford edition of Homer’s Odyssey weighing down my rucksack, and  each day brought a new revelation.  But I had to leave out the great Palace of Nestor near Pylos on that first peregrination through the Peloponnese. The buses didn’t seem to go that way. And a year wasn’t long enough to do and see everything.

David Chazan

Eating British in Paris

‘On va manger anglais ce soir?’ — ‘Shall we eat English tonight?’ — is not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear a Frenchman say, especially a chef. But my friend was quite clear on the phone. ‘Le restaurant, c’est anglais, comme toi.’ My initial disbelief gave way to suspicion. I remembered that he once led us to a Franco-Italian-Japanese hole-in-the-wall whose signature dish was spaghetti with sea urchins and fermented soya, on the grounds that it was ‘different’. It was.  ‘I’m not in the mood for fish and chips,’ I told my pal. ‘How about Chinese?’ He sighed. ‘It’s not that kind of English restaurant — it’s good.

Taki

Athens: Love among the ruins

A very long time ago, still in my teens, I knew a beautiful Athenian girl whose eyes were green and her hair golden blonde, and she was madly in love with a friend of mine. He loved her just as passionately but then he went away to school in Switzerland, and you can guess the rest. It sounds a bit opportunistic, even shabby, but I stood by her, listening to her laments late at night, and then, one evening under a moonlit Acropolis, we kissed. She told me she felt guilty for having done it, but on we went, the moon, the ruins, the Attic breezes all helping me along. It was a case of patience and perfect timing. (The retsina also helped.) Which brings me to the point I wish to make. Now is the time for all of you to visit Athens.

Stephen Pollard

Dead Jews don’t make news

I’ve a question. You’ll see in a moment why I’m tempted to call it a Trivial Pursuit question. Can you tell me when the worst suicide bombing in Europe since the 7/7 murders took place? I doubt you’d believe me if I said it was last week. I can hear your response: ‘What suicide bombing? What murders?’ Last week, six people died and nearly 30 were injured when a suicide bomber, widely thought to be acting on ­Iranian orders, set off a device on a bus taking a group of tourists from their charter flight to their hotel. But if you got your news from the British media — the story was huge elsewhere — you would know almost nothing about it. The BBC news channel did mention the incident for a short while.

Freddy Gray

Mad Frogs and Englishmen

The English like nothing better than the idea that the French hate us. Bradley Wiggins, an Englishman, wins the Tour de France, and we are full of in-votre-face triumphalism. British journalists search the French media for sour grapes. How the frogs must be fuming! Beaten by a rosbif on their own turf! Yet if the French were all so bitter about Wiggins, why did thousands of them line the Champs-Elysées on Sunday to cheer him home? Far from being grouchy, France seemed eager to hail Wiggins as the likeable and quirky champion that he is. It’s true that some French papers complained about the boringness of this year’s Tour. But that was part of a ­longstanding gripe about the contest being too technical and unromantic, i.e. not French.

Leah McLaren

Natural born cheaters

Daisy was my first midwife at the London hospital where, upon finding out I was pregnant, I’d planned to have a ­straightforward, perfectly average birth with lots of euphoria-inducing drugs and expert medical attention. That, of course, was before I knew anything about the NHS and its methods. My 12-week appointment was arranged through my GP. After sitting close to three hours in a waiting room filled with sweaty pregnant women who looked as if they might kill each other for a sandwich, I was shown into an office by a large 60-something woman in a blue smock holding a clipboard with my notes on it. She wore a name tag but did not introduce herself.

Ross Clark

The Tory delusion

Many a Conservative MP will spend the summer dreaming happily about what the party should do in office once it has freed itself from the shackles of coalition. Few even consider the painful truth — that the coalition party most likely to survive the next election is not the Conservatives but the Lib Dems. Imagine the misery of watching Nick Clegg disappear through the door of No. 10 to begin his second term as deputy PM — this time under Ed Miliband. But it could be worse: it could be Vince Cable, who seems to have decided (in spite of declaring himself too old at 64 to stand for the Lib Dem leadership in 2007) that he fancies a crack at the job in his early seventies.

Daniel Hannan

The pain in Spain

Spain was always going to be where the doom of the euro would be determined. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus amount, together, to less than 5 per cent of the EU’s economy. They can be rescued without emptying the bailout fund. Alternatively, their defaults can be managed as controlled explosions. Spain is in a different category. Europe’s banks are massively exposed there: an explosion could blast the continent’s financial system to splinters. On the other hand, the sheer scale of a rescue package might finally exhaust the patience of the northern European taxpayers. Spain’s agonies were caused directly by the euro. We can’t, as we can in Greece, blame irresponsible local politicians or poor tax collection.

Alasdair Palmer

Mad money

Daniel Kahneman is a very modest man — amazingly so for someone who has won the Nobel prize in economics. When I met him in the lobby of a London hotel, he never used his very great intelligence in the way that some very distinguished economists do, to bully or to intimidate. ‘But then I am not an economist,’ he says with a mischievous smile. ‘I am a psychologist.’ Prof. Kahneman smiles a great deal. His eyes sparkle behind his large spectacles. His cheeriness is infectious, but it is also disconcerting, given that he is not optimistic about humankind. He thinks, for instance, that it will be ‘miraculous’ if we manage to do anything to stop global warming.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Big is beautiful

Sir Terry Leahy might be the UK’s most successful businessman. He turned Tesco, love it or loathe it, from a second-tier supermarket worth £7 billion into the £37 billion behemoth of the sector. As an interviewee, however, he is not a natural performer. There is no Bransonian bonhomie about him. He is dressed in a non­descript dark suit, and, though he has no entourage, is accompanied by a publicist from his publisher; he starts to steal not-so-subtle glances at his watch almost as soon as we have started talking. But Leahy’s awkwardness shouldn’t obscure the truths he has to deliver. He has a bracing analysis of the situation that Britain is in.

Quentin Letts

Easing made easy

Ghastly moment, isn’t it, when at a supper party (worse, at editorial conference or in a meeting with clients) some drawling know-all asks ‘so what do you think about QE?’ Everyone at the table swivels in your direction. Your mental turbines stall, your eyeballs sweat. QE? Is that a conference centre? Cruise liner? A fashionable disease? Anyone who has been through this experience may find useful the following bull-point presentation. With the emphasis on bull. ● On hearing ‘QE’ do not say: ‘You mean that game show fronted by Stephen Fry?’ People may think you are being serious (which in fact you are, but let’s keep that quiet).

Nicholas Farrell

Berlusconi bounces back

As I for one predicted, the defenestration of Silvio Berlusconi last November in a palace coup orchestrated by Europe’s bores has made no difference. Italy may well be governed by a dour former economics professor, Eurocrat and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, Mario Monti, but Italy is still in a total mess. So I greeted the news that Silvio il Magnifico, as I call him, will stand for the fourth time as Premier in the next general election by trying to high-five my Italian wife Carla in the kitchen. ‘Dammi un cinque!’ I shouted. Bravo Silvio! Che uomo! Yes, Il Cavaliere (the Knight) is a bit long in the tooth.