Features

Saturday

Anthony Gardner

Box-set bullies

 ‘I saw this amazing film,’ people used to say at dinner parties, ‘you must see it.’ And it was nice to have their recommendations; pleasant to trot off to see The Matrix or Four Weddings and a Funeral and be the one to rave about it at the next party. These days, just the words ‘You must see…’ fill my heart with dread because they are invariably followed by not a film, but a whole TV series, available in a box-set: The West Wing, The Killing, The Wire. Nothing makes the heart sink more at the start of a villa holiday than the sight of a fellow guest arriving with 30 episodes of Mad Men under his arm.

Allan Massie

The fascist vote

At the age of 72, I begin to wonder, for the first time in my life, if there might be a future for a fascist party in Britain. The thought has been provoked by the riots, or rather the response of many to them. The riots themselves were horrible, an outburst of callous criminality, doubtless enjoyable for those who took part in it. Yet they were comparatively unimportant. To say this is not to pretend that they weren’t frightening, that people weren’t killed, or that other victims did not suffer injury or damage to their property. Nevertheless, disturbances of this kind have happened before, and will happen again. Sometimes a fuse is lit, in this case by the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police, and then the tinder-box explodes.

Toby Young

Playing with explosives

‘Mps to vote on death penalty’, announced the front page of the Daily Mail earlier this month. This was a reference to a petition on a government website calling for the restoration of capital punishment, but the true significance of the story was buried in the small print. The e-petition in question was created by Paul Staines, the man behind the Guido Fawkes blog. Until recently, Staines’s influence was confined to uncovering political scandals, making him a must-read in the Westminster village but relatively unknown in the wider world. Now, it seems, he’s single-handedly put capital punishment back on the political agenda. ‘Harry reckons this is our Glenn Beck moment,’ says Staines, referring to his second-in-command Harry Cole.

Saturday

Harriet Sergeant

WEB EXCLUSIVE: These rioters are Tony Blair’s children

Nihilism and disorder have been fostered by the state On the third day of the London riots I received a telephone call from Mash, a member of a Brixton gang who I befriended three years ago. He was standing outside an electronics shop in Clapham, watching the looting. I could hear shouts, glass breaking but never a police siren. I urged him to go home. ‘Harri man,’ he remonstrated, his voice hoarse with emotion, "You don’t get to do this every day. You do your thing, and you don’t get arrested. It’s wild and exciting. These few days, it’s our time." The riots engulfing areas of London and other cities this week are not about poverty or race.

Theodore Dalrymple

It’s fun to smash things

Only the wilfully blind could have been surprised by the scale or ferocity of the riots that have engulfed Britain in the past week. Unfortunately, most of the country’s political and intellectual class have been wilfully blind for years, in a state of the most abject denial; a brief walk in any of our cities should have been enough to tell them all that they needed to know. How anyone could have missed the aggressive malignity inscribed in the faces and manner of so many young men in Britain is a mystery to me. Perhaps, like Dr Watson, our political and intellectual class saw but did not observe; and they did not observe because they lacked the moral courage to attempt anything but appeasement.

Ravi Somaiya

A Tottenham notebook

Every reporter knows the feeling. I’m watching television at around 11.30 p.m. on Saturday night when my phone begins buzzing. It’s the distinctive number of the New York Times newsroom: 111 111 1111. Answering means being pitched into chaos. ‘We’re hearing of some unrest in Tottenham,’ says the voice. ‘Can you get there?’ I sigh, jump in a taxi and ask to go as close to the local police station as possible. I know I have arrived when I see a burning car with 20-foot flames jumping out. It crackles and hisses. There’s no fire brigade, no cordon around the car. What, I wonder, is going on? I ask a bystander, a man with gold teeth. He explains that ‘these people want justice’.

Matthew Lynn

Forty years of funny money

The Standard & Poor’s headquarters, inside one of the biggest skyscrapers in New York’s financial district, houses just about every kind of brainiac that Wall Street money can buy. Mathematicians, computer modellers, economists and market strategists pooled their collective wisdom before making last Friday’s decision to strip the United States of its triple-A credit rating. It is a shame, however, that the ratings agency didn’t have a historian with a sense of irony on its team. If they had, S&P might have postponed the announcement, and the market turmoil it inevitably unleashed, for just a few days. The 15th of August would have been the perfect moment to unleash this particular bombshell. Why?

Robin Lee-Navrozov

Is this the new Berlusconi?

Rome. A summer evening at the Colosseum. Snarling traffic and noisy crowds can be heard, but inside the arena the air is cool and still. On the dais, here to formally inaugurate the site’s restoration, which he is funding with a €25 million donation, is Diego Della Valle, ‘the shoemaker’, as the snooty Romans call him. He has built a fashion empire, transforming his father’s successful shoe business into a global brand, Tod’s, which continues to expand even in the depths of recession. His has plenty of other business interests, too, from the football club Fiorentina to the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most respected newspaper.

Melanie McDonagh

The secret of self-help

This being summer, many of us are going to spend a lot of time in airports. So we may as well make the most of it. During half an hour in WH Smith in Dublin airport, I learned to take life one small step at a time, the importance of learning how to delegate, and the best way to make decisions. I picked up Warren Buffet’s cardinal rule, which is to make a list of everything you want to get done today, begin at the top and work down. I’ve learned the 43rd of Duncan Bannatyne’s 43 Mistakes Businesses Make... and how to avoid them (it’s the things you don’t do that you regret). In short, I hung around the self-help stand of the bookshop business section and filleted each of them in turn. I love self-help books.

Matt Ridley

The polar bear problem

They’re thriving – and they’re hungry The terrible story of the boys mauled by a polar bear in Spitsbergen has sparked a debate about the risks of adventure travel. But what does it tell us about polar bears? Some have claimed that this month’s tragedy is evidence that they are getting hungrier and more desperate as Arctic ice retreats. More likely, it shows that they are getting ever more numerous as hunting pressure relents. For years there was a skin of a bear hanging on the wall of the cafeteria in Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen’s capital village — maybe it is still there. By rights that bear should have eaten me, or my friend Charles Gillow.

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

America’s overdue financial crisis

When Congress went into deadlock on the debt ceiling, it was the culmination of years of bitterness and complacency – and there is worse to come Washington DC It’s obvious to me why the United States found itself so deep in debt that only an ugly compromise — rushed through Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday — could save it from failing to pay its bills for the first time in its history. The country is in the middle of a moral crisis. So often have Americans heard the tale of their forebears’ self-reliance and genius for political accommodation that they have grown complacent. If the crisis is new, the danger is of long standing.

Aidan Hartley

Drought didn’t cause Somalia’s famine

War did. And food aid may well make it worse It seems wicked to question charity appeals for starving people in the Horn of Africa. Hunger is a terrible way to go, as I discovered when I once asked a dying Somali near Mogadishu to tell me what he was feeling. He was just passing into that zombie-like state with staring eyes. He said how the first ache was replaced by burning thirst that never leaves you. Marasmus turns children into martian-headed skeletons. Kwashiorkor swells their bellies. Glossy black hair turns reddish. Teeth fall out and ulcers like gunshot wounds eat into the cheeks. Inside, the body cannibalises itself, eating up fat reserves, then muscle proteins. Immune systems crash, diseases pour in and terminal release comes with organ failure.

Melissa Kite

Does everything give you cancer?

I'm sick of being scared by scientific studies Tall women are more likely to get cancer. As research findings go, this has to be among the most randomly vindictive scientific conclusions ever to spill out of a university research department into a screaming newspaper headline, and lord knows there have been a few. Women who breastfeed are less likely to have heart attacks or strokes. Women who don’t breastfeed are more likely to abuse children. Women who are stressed are more likely to have children with asthma (how stressful a piece of knowledge is that?). Men who are circumcised are more likely to suffer erectile problems. Children born to men aged over 35 are more likely to have a cleft lip or palate. Men are more likely to get cancer than women.

Rod Liddle

The Chilcot inquiry is too early to really savage Tony Blair

The Chilcot inquiry is too early to really savage Tony Blair Apparently Sir John Chilcot is likely to be ‘critical’ of Tony Blair in his long-awaited report into the Iraq war. We know this, or think we know it, because the Mail on Sunday has told us as much, in some detail. How does the Mail on Sunday know? It is odd of the committee to leak its findings, but I suppose that must be what has happened. Perhaps they are gripped by committee-envy, annoyed that other investigative committees have recently stolen their thunder and prominence, and wish to set up some advance publicity for the publication of the report. For students of establishment inquiries, the Chilcot inquiry is an interesting beast.

Andrew J. Bacevich

How good a general was David Petraeus?

Neoconservatives have constructed dangerous illusions around David Petraeus's strictly limited successes History has not dealt kindly with American generals of late. Remember when ‘Stormin’’ Norman Schwarzkopf ranked as one of the great captains of the ages? When members of Congress talked of promoting General Colin Powell to five-star rank, hitherto reserved for the likes of Marshall and Eisenhower? When bombing the Serbs into submission elevated General Wesley Clark to the status of a would-be presidential candidate? Or when Tommy Franks travelled the world giving speeches at $50,000 a pop to explain how he had liberated Afghanistan and Iraq?

Christopher Ward

My grandfather, the Titanic’s violinist

When he died, the White Star Line sent a bill for his uniform There can be few better places to consider the irony of the phrase ‘the good old days’ than Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I went last week to visit the grave of my grandfather, a 21-year-old violinist in the band of the White Star liner Titanic. More than 120 passengers and crew are buried here, 40 of them still unidentified as we approach the centenary of Titanic’s sinking. The body of Jock Hume, my grandfather, was one of 190 recovered by the cable ship Mackay-Bennett and brought back to Halifax (more than a thousand bodies were never found).

Olivia Glazebrook

A letter from the Lot

I have become one of those irritating people who bangs on about how wonderful France is I am living in France on the border between two regions (the Midi-Pyrenees and the Limousin) which also marks a border between two départements (the Lot and the Corrèze). The place lies at the centre of a large, empty patch of France coloured green on the map to signify an unspoiled, ravishing landscape and one more beautiful and generous than anywhere I’ve lived before. Four months ago I put my belongings into my car and came to France, heading with crossed fingers and bated breath for a small, mushroom-coloured house I had found on the internet and rented.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

If you think the left is twisting Norway’s tragedy, check out the neo-Nazis

So is Anders Breivik mad, or just right-wing? His lawyer has decided to go with the former, presumably on the basis that the Norwegian courts will look more kindly upon someone who is doolally than on someone who is a shade to the right of centre. He is probably right about this. There is a (usually) unspoken subtext within the liberal media here that the two are in any case synonymous, an elision between these two states of mind, right-wing and doolally. This was borne aloft on the palpable triumphalism that it wasn’t a Muslim wot done it, as we all thought; quite the reverse, it was instead one of you lot who always thinks it is Muslims, one of you Islamophobes, with your irrational fears about Muslims.

Peter Hitchens

The thrills of summers past

How my heart sinks at the sight of those little features on ‘summer reading’. Follow these recommendations and you will strain your shoulder and your purse, buying and carrying books that will stay unread at least until the cool blast of the autumnal equinox, and probably forever afterwards. Ignore the log-rolling, the favours to friends and publishers, the favouritism of the bookshop display tables. As an occasional author, I long ago realised that at least half the book reviews in Britain are written by people who haven’t read the book they are writing about, and don’t much care.

Oliver Gilmour

The great unknown

Who was Carlos Kleiber, and why has he been voted the best conductor of all time? Carlos Kleiber — the name evokes both Hispanic and German spheres — cancelled performances, never gave interviews, claimed he only conducted when the fridge was empty, and told Placido Domingo he’d prefer to devote his time to drinking wine and making love. He only conducted 96 concerts in his life (does Valerie Gergiev notch up more in a year?). Yet, according to Claudio Abbado, Kleiber was the most important conductor of the 20th century. He scarcely even wanted to be ‘a contender’, yet staggeringly, he was recently voted the most inspiring conductor of all time by a BBC survey of 100 conductors. Who was this remarkable man?