Features

Lubbock, Texas The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it. Within the first two minutes of his stump speech, the ageing cowboy with Frank Zappa facial hair and a history of substance abuse proudly confesses to lewd conduct and breaking a state law. ‘I’m a member of the Mile High Club,’ declares Kinky Friedman, the former country and western singer, to delegates at the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas conference, where stalls advertise professional ‘tragedy clean-up’ services and a commemorative handgun auction.

We’ve got enough pollution around here already without Harold coming over with his fly open... peeing all over me. Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1965 The words ‘special’ and ‘relationship’ contain within them an endless multiplicity of meaning, all the more so, paradoxically, when they are deployed in combination. You may describe your relationship with another person as most definitely ‘special’ if you lavish love and affection upon them, and in return they break your glasses and spit on your shoes. In this case, the word ‘special’ would mean out of the ordinary, unusual in its lack of reciprocity; not the sort of relationship one might expect.

Wine has been collected since the late 17th century by everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Not much has changed either, except the idea of wine as an investment  -  any suggestion that wine might be sold on for a profit, effectively creating a wine stock market, would in days gone by have made any gentleman choke on his venison.  But the most important considerations for buying wine are the same as ever, namely to know what to buy, who to buy it from, when to buy it, and how much to pay for it. The advantages of investing in wine are fairly straightforward.  Wine is an easily transferable asset with an established and thriving broking and auction market.  There are no limits to investing; you can put in £250 or £250,000.

Washington It is not to be. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a more than passable classical pianist, had blocked time in her summer diary for a pleasant meeting with some of the 700 music students attending classes and performing at the Aspen Music Festival and School. President Bush has other ideas. Instead of the cool breezes of the Rocky Mountains, Rice will find herself in the hotter-than-hot Middle East, attempting to bring an end to the two-front war in which Israel finds itself engaged which, in past flare-ups, has been bad news for the Israelis. Rice presides over a department that traditionally holds that almost any deal is better than no deal at all. The President is hoping that his Secretary of State and long-time foreign policy adviser can bring that bureaucracy to heel.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished American journalist and neoconservative godfather, penned a series of articles describing the attacks of 11 September 2001 as the opening shots of what he called ‘World War IV’. For Podhoretz, the more commonly used construct ‘global war on terror’ is too generic. Placing 9/11 in its proper context requires fitting it into the grand narrative of contemporary history which, as Podhoretz sees it, began in 1933 in Berlin. For Podhoretz and other neoconservatives — for large numbers of Americans generally — history is above all a morality tale.

Yo — Reader! How are ya doin’? Hot and bothered, I suspect; sticky and irritable. And no less so for having been addressed in such a manner, or for being reminded that this is how the leader of the free world addresses those who do his bidding, the lickspittle minions who bring him gifts of questionable knitwear at world summit meetings. (Apparently it was a Burberry jumper our Prime Minister gave to George W. Bush; so if he wore it, he’d be refused entry to quite a large number of public houses and bars in the Leicester area, where Burberry knitwear has become associated with monosyllabic, aggressive troublemakers. Yes, how apt, good old Leicester, etc.). I don’t know how you reacted to that stolen snatch of conversation broadcast around the world this week.