Features

Charles Moore pays tribute to his friend Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator 1995–99, who died on 15 December: a man of awesome learning — and light touch ‘In the Fifties, job advertisements used to read “smart boy wanted”. That’s me,’ Frank Johnson would say. The joke tells you a good deal about Frank. First, it places him in his social milieu. He was an upper-working-class East End boy born during the war. He remembered the present Queen’s Coronation, with everyone crowding into his parents’ front-room to join in the first mass televisual occasion in British history. This was the last age of working-class respectability: Frank had such a fear of debt that, he told me, he had never had a mortgage.

There is an interesting debate doing the rounds at the moment: should we allow faith schools in Britain? The debate has been occasioned by our tortuous and interminable wrangling with all things Islamic; it has suddenly occurred to us that allowing children to be inculcated into an ideology which may be antithetical to our national culture is a dangerous and divisive thing. And during the course of filming a two-hour documentary for Channel 4 about the translation of the Bible into English, I was struck by the strange, almost perverse nature of this debate. It seems to be polarised: you are either for faith schools or you are against them. It is almost a given that if you oppose Muslim faith schools, you must, with even-handedness, oppose Church of England faith schools.

When he’s not starring in comedy shows, performing stand-up or picking up awards, Ricky Gervais is master of the world of the Flanimals — crazy and spectacularly ugly creatures, many of whom eat each other. Here is a brand new Flanimal, exclusively for Spectator readers Lumby Spud(Chavius Brum) This Brumboidian Chavloader is scuppered. He tries to shorten the depressing gap between birth and death by eating till he bursts. This is a slow method and he is at risk of having a meaningful thought before he splatters everywhere. Death brings him the last laugh as he has no TV licence. He’s up.

In the downstairs loo of Richard Dawkins’s house in Oxford there’s a framed award from the Royal Society; to remind visitors, or maybe Richard himself, that here lives a man of some purpose, some gravitas and intellectual clout. The Faraday prize is given to those who communicate science with brilliance and verve to the scientifically ignorant, thick general public. Richard has done a lot of that, ever since The Selfish Gene in 1976. It is his job these days; he holds the Simonyi chair in the public understanding of science at Oxford University. His latest wife, the actress Lalla Ward, has done her bit too, helping out various bereft timelords in Dr Who. Richard himself is a bit of a timelord, if you like.

The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from the Gironde, Château d’Yquem, a bottle of which recently became the most expensive wine ever sold in the United States and is now the most expensive white wine in the world The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from the Gironde, Chateau d'Yquem, a bottle of which recently became the most expensive wine ever sold in the United States and is now the most expensive white wine in the world Yquem 1847.