Features

Saturday

Petroc Trelawny

An English composer in Ireland

In the basement of the Boole Library at University College Cork, I find myself face-to-face with a death mask. Slightly collapsed cheeks give it a look of the elderly Churchill. It is actually Sir Arnold Bax, the Romantic composer from Streatham, in south London, who briefly became one of the more unusual advocates for the end of British rule in Ireland. Alongside the mask, dust lies thick on the autograph scores of tone poems and chamber works, and personal effects including a pair of glasses and a cigar case from the Savoy Hotel. Across town at the university's music department, his grand piano is propped sideways against a wall. Few of the keys produce any sound. It is a forlorn sight.

Paul Robinson

Code comfort

The influential American journalist Robert Kaplan recently commented that the real shapers of his country's foreign policy are junior and middle-ranking military officers. When an engineer captain in Afghanistan mobilises his men to de-mine a road, or a major in Baghdad oversees the training of competent new policemen, the 'Global War on Terror' (GWOT) moves one step further towards a successful conclusion. But when their colleagues violently raid houses and carry off the wrong Afghans to detention, or gun down innocent civilians in Iraq, Osama bin Laden and his kind garner another handful of followers. Much depends on what individual American officers in the field consider to be acceptable behaviour.

Damien Mccrystal

First, weigh your nanny

This being the time of year when people are hiring new nannies and au pairs, I would like to offer some words of caution: do not hire a fatty. Although it is no doubt offensive and quite possibly illegal to say so, my considerable experience of the fat ones is that they are not very good. When my daughter was about a year old, we hired a great fat girl from Northumberland. I was sceptical about having something so space-consuming and undecorative in our moderately sized house, but held my tongue. I shouldn't have, for within days of her starting work she revealed that she was a Jehovah's Witness.

Melanie Phillips

Honest Tony

Tony Blair told us the truth. There, said it. Shocking, isn't it? Something you would never dream of reading in a family publication. Especially The Spectator - the paper that supports Andrew Gilligan. Everyone knows, after all, that Mr Blair is a liar. We wouldn't believe him, would we, if he told us the time. Everyone knows he made up the threat from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction because none have been found, and if something isn't found then it proves that it never existed. Everyone knows that this is, well, just obvious. And apparently, everyone knows that the evidence to the Hutton inquiry has proved Mr Blair misled the country over the case for war against Iraq.

Martin Walker

Never glad confident morning again

Washington The process is drearily familiar from the plots of countless tawdry novels. Opposites attract: two unlikely people begin a passionate affair. Friends all warn them that it cannot last. The friends are ignored as the lovers stand magnificently alone against an uncomprehending world. Then the first trace of an unfamiliar lipstick is found on a collar, and breezily explained away. Someone else's earring is found in a suitcase after a business trip and laughed off as a colleague's practical joke. But suspicions have been roused. Doubts creep in. Headaches are pleaded. What was once charming starts to irritate. Never glad confident morning again.

Saturday

Bill Alexander

When revenge is sweet

The Elizabethans must have had a completely different attitude to physical violence. For a start, it was an inherent part of their system of justice. Even when we had the death penalty, killing someone in the name of justice was expected to be as quick and painless as possible. The hangman's craft was to assess his subject's body in a way that would ensure a clean quick twist of the neck, not slow and painful strangulation; that would be a bad hanging. But the Elizabethan hangman's art was different. In the case of traitors, for instance, prolonging the pain, extending the humiliation, was a part of the punishment, part of the justice. A hanging was a public piece of theatre; the scaffold, a stage on which the state took revenge.

Ross Clark

Information superhighwaymen

I occasionally worry that future scholars will be unable to write my biography because of my failure to keep a diary. But it seems I need not be too bothered. There came a moment last week when I realised there will be more than enough information for them to piece together my life in all its excruciatingly tedious detail. That moment came when my wife, who has recently enrolled on a part-time, one-day-a-week course at a former polytechnic, showed me a two-page 'medical centre database' form which she had been ordered to complete before she could begin her studies. 'Have you ever taken illegal drugs or solvents?' it asked. 'Have you ever been pregnant?' 'Do you use any form of contraception? If yes, which method?

Bruce Anderson

Tinker, tailor, soldier, stooge

THE conventions of secrecy were maintained. Only Richard Dearlove's disembodied voice appeared in front of the Hutton inquiry. But, irrespective of the effect on individuals' reputations, there are fears that recent events have compromised the Secret Intelligence Service. Its operating procedures have been subjected to too much daylight, and it has been used for purposes that were never intended. One former intelligence officer has described this as the Icarus syndrome; SIS has flown too close to the sun. In this case, the sun is Tony Blair. There is a piquancy in Mr Blair's developing such a close and indeed affectionate relationship with SIS. About a year before he became Prime Minister, he was invited to lunch at the service's Vauxhall Cross HQ.

Roger Scruton

The truth about meaning

There is a certain tradition in American philosophy that combines logical rigour and systematic thinking in a style so concise and self-contained as to offer little or no purchase to the critic. The tradition began with C.S. Peirce, found triumphant expression in Quine and Goodman, and lived again – just at the moment when everybody was beginning to think that it belonged to a vanished phase of American culture, alongside William Carlos Williams and Aaron Copland – in the philosophy of Quine's most brilliant student, Donald Davidson. When I began research in Cambridge in 1967, Davidson's name was never mentioned in the philosophy department.

Rachel Johnson

Boys and girls go out to work

So how many did you get this summer?' I ask. 'Six hundred and fifty,' answers Lucy Townsend at Cazenove, the stockbroker. 'More than 400,' says Caroline Dawnay, a literary agent at PFD. 'About two dozen a week,' moans Ann Sindall at The Spectator. And one of them, who was only 14, should have been at home, in Ann's frank opinion, reading Jackie magazine. Even I got four requests to supply work experience to students or sixth-formers – a whole generation drawn, like moths to light, to offices over the summer. There they flutter until the darkness of autumn falls and they can go back to school or campus armed with a trophy reference and another impressive line on their CV. 'Here's what I really hate,' one senior fiction editor confided.

Anne Sebba

Go straight to Heaven

Tourists in downtown Calcutta (or Kolkata, as we all must now learn to say) cannot fail to be struck by a 50-foot mosaic of the city's most famous immigrant, Mother Teresa. The Skopje-born nun is smiling benignly on the snarled-up traffic chaos that belches and honks beneath her. To one side of this giant piece of wall-art is an advertisement proclaiming, 'Reserved for Calcutta's Best Brands'. Mother Teresa is Calcutta's best brand. Later this month, when, in record time, the Pope bestows on her the Vatican super seal of approval and declares her blessed, she will be well on her way to becoming a saint. Hers will probably become the fastest sainthood since the Roman Catholic Church set rules controlling saint-making in the 13th century. Why the haste?

Theodore Dalrymple

Nasty, brutish and on credit

Who says the leisure class is no more? On the contrary, as a recent weekday visit to the new spiritual heart of Britain revealed to me, it is very large indeed. Of course, the modern leisure class is not necessarily very high on the registrar-general's scale of social classes from I to V, but that is another matter altogether. But where, you ask, is Britain's new spiritual centre? The very idea of such a centre seems a bit odd – absurd even. It is certainly not Rome or Jerusalem, much less Canterbury. In good pagan fashion, Britain's spiritual centre is close to its geographical centre. The answer is the Bull Ring, Birmingham, or rather – as it is now called – Bullring.

Peter Hitchens

Reform the BBC, don’t kill it

Why do I now find that I, one of the BBC's most persistent critics, feel the need to defend the organisation that I have attacked so many times in the past? Because for all its faults I would rather that Britain had a public-service broadcaster than that the airwaves were sold to the fattest cheque book. The time has come for sensible reactionaries to rally round their old enemies at the BBC, and for the BBC to seek support among those moral and cultural conservatives it has spent too long despising.

Wednesday

Mark Riley

‘We just want to ask people a few questions,’

'We just want to ask people a few questions,’ we said, innocently clutching our pollster’s clipboards. The GI didn’t know whether to laugh or give us a slap. ‘You’re out of your heads. Don’t even think of leaving the Palestine Hotel. I’ve been in every kind of war situation you can imagine, and this is the most dangerous — because there are no rules. It’s completely unpredictable. Now they’ve taken to CQAs (close-quarter assassinations). It’s open season on Westerners.’ A month earlier, the editor of The Spectator had asked YouGov to conduct a poll in Iraq. Our reaction had been the same as the GI’s: he must be crazy.

Saturday

Interconnect

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMini-breaks

Mmmm. Got lovely new mini-break brochure: Pride of Britain: Leading Country House Hotels of the British Isles. Marvellous. Going through all the pages one by one imagining Daniel and me being alternately sexual and romantic in all the bedrooms and dining-rooms.Bridget Jones's Diary Last weekend my husband and I went on a mini-break to Majorca. Two weeks before this we spent a long weekend in Whitby, with friends. Earlier this summer I attended a two-day hen weekend in Manchester, and next week my husband is off on a three-day mid-week break to Valencia for the famous annual tomato-throwing (sounds like most dinner times with my two-year-old, but apparently this is special). I'm hoping to fit in a visit to Sitges before the end of September.

Justin Kerrsmiley

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMalta

To the romantic, Malta smells of thyme and fig; to the cynic, tar and goat – but, whatever a traveller's disposition, he can't deny that the country's place in Mediterranean history is unique. Malta's past is bold and bloody. In 1530 the emperor Charles V gave the Knights of St John their home after they had been forced out of Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent. The knights used Malta to raid the Ottoman fleets, sending gold and silver back to their protector, and in 1565 Suleiman finally tired of this and set out to destroy the 'Monks of War'; and so began the Great Siege. For months the attackers pitted themselves against the walls of modern-day Valletta. They succeeded in storming Fort St Elmo, where the mostly French knights fought with extraordinary heroism.

Michael Hanlon

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALBest avoided

Another summer over and, once again, the question forms in my mind: where not to go on holiday next year? It seems a silly question – for the list, surely, is endless. There are all those places which have simply nothing worth seeing. The homes of light industry and flyovers, with no distinguishing architecture, scenery or climate. The Midwest, and its English equivalent, the East Midlands. The industrial towns of the German plains, the grim squalor that is the urban Third World. However, there is another – rather smaller – list of places that, although they are very much on the tourist circuit, have absolutely no appeal. This is not just because they are likely to be overcrowded or overpriced.

Lucy Vickery

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALNew Zealand

If Australia, as a nation, is negotiating late adolescence, cocksure but fragile, striving to establish its identity, then New Zealand is a child: clear-eyed, blemish-free, with a steady, candid gaze. My introduction to this gigantic adult playground came by way of a promotional video, shown by Air New Zealand on the flight from London to Auckland and starring the country's Prime Minister, gutsy, trouser-clad Helen Clark. The no-nonsense name suits Ms Clark, who has the aura of a strict but fair headmistress.

Michael Mcmahon

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALThe great escape from other people

There is rust on the griddle of the barbecue, dust on the shoulder of the Pimm's bottle and must in the air in the summerhouse, where the cushions and the picnic rugs are damp. Each day, dusk limps in earlier and earlier, and it can't be long before the spirits start to go as flat as the paddling pool that has long been packed away. And yet now that the holiday season is over, the best time for a holiday has arrived – particularly if you have already had one, for stolen holidays, like stolen kisses, are sweet. Award yourself a bonus week or weekend away upon an impulse, and you will probably have far more fun than you had in the August fortnight you looked forward to for so long. With no time to build unrealistic expectations, you'll certainly be far more relaxed.