Features

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Young Turks

Comparisons are odious, generalisations dangerous and stereotypes invidious, but without them conversation would be tedious and talk nothing but an endless regression of subordinate clauses, each qualifying what the previous one had asserted. It is cowardly and dishonest to refuse these means of arriving at truth, nor would we approach any nearer to truth were we to do so. Refusing to generalise is often a form of denial. So when I say that a recent trip to Turkey reminded me (once again) of the repellent character of British youth, I do not mean that every last British youth is repellent, very far from it: only that, as a human group, British youth is, by and large, the least attractive in the world, at least of any known to me.

Simon Hoggart

Kings and jokers

Last year I was having a thoughtful glass of champagne with the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell at the Spectator party during the Tory conference. We were suddenly interrupted by the Prime Minister, who greeted us warmly — ‘Hello Simon, hello Steve’ — because he’s a first-name kind of guy. Or possibly an aide had reminded him of our names. It very soon became clear that what he wanted to talk about was the way that Steve always draws him with a condom over his head. Steve explained courteously that this was because he seemed to have incredibly smooth skin. At first he had thought of clingfilm, but a condom seemed the natural extension. I said that the Guardian had wanted to drop the condom, but readers demanded its reinstatement. Cameron seemed unsatisfied.

Douglas Davis

Syria’s family business

In the absence of free speech, a free media and other political mod-cons in Syria, Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar cultivated the convenient habit of transacting business in the shadows, advancing and protecting — brutally, when necessary — the interests of the family and their fellow Alawites. But Damascus has always remained alive with intrigue and speculation. To process and disseminate that mix of conjecture and fact, a highly developed rumour mill sprang up. And for those interested in Middle East affairs — particularly Syrian affairs — London became the hub of the Syrian information exchange. Take the unlikely succession of Bashar following the death of his father in June 2000. It wasn’t meant to be like that.

Mary Wakefield

‘Anti-semitism is on the rise’

Exactly halfway through my conversation with the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, I had an attack of conscience, a small one, but there it was. Sacks had explained the thesis of his book, The Great Partnership — that religion and science don’t have to fight but can co-exist, as separate strands of inquiry. We’d discussed our respective religions (I’m Christian) and agreed that man will always wonder: what am I doing here? And that science has no answer to this. Then Sacks began to speak about the need for the three great Abrahamic, monotheistic faiths to stand together.

Saturday

The Spectator

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Melanie McDonagh

What women want

The Tories are desperate to regain the female vote – but they have a very patronising idea of how to do it You’d never think it to look at them, but the Tory party used, for much of the 20th century, to be the natural party of women. That’s right: women are, contrary to what most feminists like to think, instinctive Tories, if you judge by the voting record since the advent of universal suffrage. Not in recent elections, admittedly, but in general. And women liked David Cameron — until about six months ago, when, judging by the figures, as a sex we started going off him. And that has created something like consternation right at the top of the government.

Ned Cranbourne

LIBYA NOTEBOOK

Benghazi On the surface, at least, these are youm maasel, or sweet days, in Benghazi. Benghazi On the surface, at least, these are youm maasel, or sweet days, in Benghazi. Strolling along the seafront I pass the exuberant crowds who have set up camp in Liberation Square. There are carpets laid out for prayers and around them, flags and trinkets coloured in the distinctive red, black and green of Libya Hora — free Libya. Around the square triumphal marches take place and from a ramshackle platform excitable rebels deliver speeches about imminent victory. Two colonels, both called Ali, have set up shop on the Corniche in front of an old Mig fighter. Their stand displays exciting paintings of engagements between the free Libyan air force and troops loyal to Colonel Gaddafi.

Pavel Stroilov

Moscow’s jihadi

The Russian secret service and the new al-Qa’eda commander What do we know about the new head of al-Qa’eda, Ayman al-Zawahiri? Not very much. We know he’s a former ‘emir’ of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad who spent three years in an Egyptian prison after his group assassinated the pro-western President Anwar Sadat. He’s also said to be a qualified surgeon, who became bin Laden’s personal physician and adviser in the late 1980s. But there is one curious fact about him that it would be foolish for the West to ignore: his links with the KGB, and its successor, Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB.

Rod Liddle

The Daily Mail is not so uniquely British after all

I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. Every day, a new piece of information, which I will make up, about tumours and property values and perhaps how these two phenomena are unexpectedly linked. I will also run photographs of young people you have never heard of but who sing in The Saturdays or star in things like Hollyoaks — largely nubile women in thongs with large breasts and tattoos — and supply a paragraph or two about how they haven’t got cancer or that they are about to buy a house, or simply live in a house, and how much it is worth. I expect to clean up, with all the online advertising that comes my way.

James Forsyth

The Alexander technique

Brown’s former disciple is now trying, very gingerly, to reconcile Labour with Blairism Douglas Alexander is a politician who has risen without a trace. He is now shadow foreign secretary, the third most senior member of the shadow cabinet. He has spent his career in the service of bigger beasts, first Gordon Brown and then David Miliband, so few know who he is or what he stands for. Now, at age 43, he is determined to make himself heard. As he tells me when we meet in his Commons office, ‘One of the vanishingly few consolations of opposition is having a more public voice for what I believe and where I think we need to go as a party and as a country.’ Alexander’s office resembles a psychoanalyst’s consulting room.

John Laughland

Liberty, equality, fecundity

At a wedding in the Loire last weekend, in the grounds of the groom’s parents’ small château, an acquaintance from work unexpectedly materialised out of the crowd. In his early thirties, he introduced me to his blonde, gangling wife, maybe a year younger than he. The conversation turned to children: they have four, including a five-month-old baby — ‘and a fifth is on the way’. ‘Where are they?’ I asked. They were staying with his wife’s siblings, of which there are ten. The phenomenon of young parents and large families is widespread in France, and unique among Europe’s native populations with the exception of gypsy families in Slovakia or Albanians in Kosovo.

Lloyd Evans

Making waves | 25 June 2011

The title Her Deepness is partly satirical, partly reverential. The woman herself, Sylvia Earle, is an American oceanographer and a global campaigner for maritime preservation. She dropped into London last week to collect a medal from the Royal Geographical Society and her visit coincided with a month-long promotion at Selfridges in Oxford Street. The shop decked itself out in deep-sea livery to alert us all to the perils of overfishing. Frogmen patrolled the escalators. Kids cavorted on whale-rides. Cardboard silhouettes of leaping marlin dangled from the ceilings. The shop windows were blazoned with slogans intended to foster alarm. ‘For every shrimp caught, ten other lives are lost.’ ‘In the blink of an eye sea-life could be extinct.

Julia Stephenson

Pet hate

When my mother died last year, her small 13-year-old sheltie, Nutty, came to live with us in our London flat. I knew it would be difficult to keep a dog in town, but it was a terrible shock to discover how anti-dog the city has become. While taking him out and about on my daily rounds, I am often booted out of shops. In the bank, the chemist, most boutiques, the post office and department stores, it is No to Nutty. Even in our local garden square, dogs are forbidden, even if I have a poop-a-scoop and Nutty’s on a lead. I was recently refused entry to a bus, which I now know is illegal although I wasn’t sure enough of my ground to complain. It’s ridiculous: Nutty is far smaller and less of an obstacle than a child’s buggy.

Saturday

Harry Mount

England, their England

Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England — the soft airs, the “heat” waves, the cold spells — the only country where you can take a walk every day of the year.’ It used to be just eccentric Englishmen who acquired this peculiar taste for the changeable English summer. But no longer. Quietly, but decisively, the English summer and social calendar have been globalised and commercialised.

John R. Bradley

Gay Damascus

A few years ago, I spent a month in Damascus. I arrived late in the evening but was so eager to see a city I’d long wished to visit — getting a visa had proved nightmarish — that I soon found myself in a little coffee shop round the corner from my budget hotel. I was well aware of Syrians’ reputation for being extraordinarily welcoming and friendly, even by Arab standards; but even I wasn’t quite prepared for the frank opening salvo from the handsome young guy sitting next to me. ‘Are you active or passive?’ he asked me. It turned out that the coffee shop — packed with men of all ages and types, from English-speaking teenagers to elderly Bedouins — was a pick-up joint.

Rod Liddle

A warm May and a wet June don’t tell us anything about climate change

What do you suppose the chances are of this being the coldest June since records began, or maybe the dampest June since records began? My guess is that it will almost certainly be the most dramatic of some climatic variation since records began; paradoxically, every other month is. Every season is. Every year is. Every year is something. The weather is on a roll, it keeps breaking records, nothing can stop it. Why is this? The most obvious answer is climate change; we are seeing more extreme weather patterns both globally and locally. We know that the weather patterns are more extreme because we are told that they are, every week, every month, every season. Extreme weather is a consequence of man-made climate change, so we shouldn’t be surprised at this.

James Forsyth

On the edge of his seat

Michael Gove’s plans for education don’t allow for a moment’s pause When I walk into his office on the seventh floor of the Department for Education, Michael Gove is sitting behind his desk with his jacket off. He is hunched over, writing a note on House of Commons letterhead. His left arm is pushed right out across the desk and the lines on his forehead are showing as he rereads what he’s put down so far. Even as a civil servant and I advance towards him, Gove’s concentration does not break. Eventually, the civil servant asks loudly, ‘Have you met the Secretary of State before?’ At this, Gove looks up, sees the people in the room and springs out of his chair.

Patrick Leigh-Fermor

Transylvanian hay-day

An afternoon’s diversion on the way to Constantinople, 75 years ago One day when we were invited to luncheon by some neighbours, István said, ‘Let’s take the horse’ and we followed a roundabout uphill track to look at a remaining piece of forest. ‘Plenty of common oak, thank God,’ he said, turning back in the saddle as we climbed a path through the slanting sunbeams, ‘you can use it for everything.’ The next most plentiful was Turkey oak, very good firewood when dry, also for stable floors and barrel staves. Beech came next, ‘it leaves scarcely any embers’; then yoke elm and common elm, ‘useful for furniture and coffins’.

Colin Thubron

Patrick Leigh Fermor remembered

When I was asked to select a passage from his work that encapsulated the spirit of Paddy Leigh Fermor, who died last Friday, a crowd of images leapt to mind, from his encounter with the grotesque burghers of Munich in A Time of Gifts to the eerie vespers of A Time to Keep Silence, to the gongs of Byzantium and the gambolling of dolphins in Mani. When I was asked to select a passage from his work that encapsulated the spirit of Paddy Leigh Fermor, who died last Friday, a crowd of images leapt to mind, from his encounter with the grotesque burghers of Munich in A Time of Gifts to the eerie vespers of A Time to Keep Silence, to the gongs of Byzantium and the gambolling of dolphins in Mani.

Leah McLaren

Brush up your Shakespeare

‘William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived,’ is the audacious opening line of Canadian writer Stephen Marche’s recently published book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. It’s the sort of bold claim that makes you immediately think of other contenders: Jesus? Muhammed? Newton? Freud? Oprah? And while we’re at it, how exactly should influence be measured? Is it counted in literary references and Google hits — or is it something less tangible, more magical than that? Marche suggests the latter but conveniently skips over the criteria for determining his thesis.