Features

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Bristol’s animal magic

It's the height of the silly season, and the capital glows in the unexpectedly seasonal heat. For anyone who has not forsaken London for the seaside or elsewhere, I recommend the witty diversions of Video Quartet by Christian Marclay, at White Cube in Hoxton Square until 30 August. Four screens project a profusion of film fragments choreographed seamlessly with accompanying soundtrack – clips from Hollywood movies, of singers and musicians (from Hendrix to Sinatra and Callas), concentrating on keyboards, horns and violins. The result is an immaculately structured 14-minute drama which is very funny and utterly compelling. Marclay (born 1955) is acclaimed internationally as visual artist, experimental musician and composer.

Christopher Howse

A reasonable assumption

Anglicans in the United States believe it is a good idea for bishops to express their homosexual preferences genitally with long-stay companions. Some people will believe anything. Others find it hard to believe in the event commemorated each 15 August, the Assumption into Heaven of the Virgin Mary. I can't myself see it is any harder to believe than the substantial presence of Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist. But I think I know the reason people find the Assumption a credal crux. It is because they suppose the dogma was invented on 1 November 1950, when Good Pope Pius XII declared that 'the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory'.

Mary Kenny

Sex and the City means family values

The sexually explicit scenes in Sex and the City – now into its last series on Channel 4 – make me feel like Maurice Chevalier: I'm so glad that I'm not young any more. It is not that I feel, as my husband Richard West does, that it is all quite 'filthy' and 'disgusting' (he recalls with fondness the Old Aussie saying 'There's nothing worse than toilet talk from sheilas'): goodness me, I'm no prude. It is just that some of the sexual gymnastics, particularly as demonstrated by Samantha and the young men she picks up, seem somehow both humiliating and competitive. I mean, you look at Olympic swimming and marvel at what the human body can accomplish, but you do not imagine that you are supposed to do likewise in the municipal pool the next day.

Ross Clark

Country slickers

Ross Clark on how the new CAP rules make it profitable for city folk to buy farms and use them as homes – with big gardens If the words 'Get orff my land' are delivered in future less in yokel tones than in the mid-Atlantic accent of the trading floor, don't be surprised. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reveals that two thirds of all farms sold between April and June this year were bought by non-farmers, many of them by City bankers who like the idea of living in a country house surrounded by 300 acres of their own land. The land agents Strutt & Parker confirm that wealthy buyers are seeking to buy farms rather than landless houses in order that they might 'control the living space and environment around them'.

Andrew Gimson

Charming wit or oily Welshman?

This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the saloon bar. But mention Sir Hayden Phillips to men of affairs, men of a certain consequence in our public life, men who are members of his club, Brooks's, and you will find that they laugh, or smile at least, and say what an amusing fellow he is, besides being a brilliant operator. There is something about the mere thought of Sir Hayden that cheers people up. But should you ask, with a journalist's impertinence, for some example of Sir Hayden's wit, or some fuller idea of the man's charm, your distinguished informant will first reassure himself that he is speaking 'off the record', then repeat what he has already said – 'amusing', 'brilliant', etc.

Philip Hensher

Give me a break

It started with some junk mail. I threw it out: I gave no consideration to the fact that it was addressed to a Miss Phyllis Henshaw. I put it down to some glitch in the address-sharing industry. But then the telephone calls started. The first one was from a business I'd always been rather unhealthily intrigued by: the photographic makeover studio. 'Could I speak to Miss Phyllis Henshaw, please?' the voice said. 'I think you've made a mistake,' I said. 'This is Philip Hensher. There isn't a Phyllis Henshaw.' 'Ah,' she said, before starting on her scripted spiel. 'I don't think you understand,' I said, in the manner of the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima refusing to dance with George Brown. 'In the first place, I'm not a woman.

David Lovibond

Weep for Wales

I remember Wales: the early start from a sleeping Liverpool, the changes of trains and freezing waiting-rooms at polysyllabic stations, the endless trek across the permanent Sunday that was Anglesey in the 1950s. None of this was supposed to be fun. There were family connections stretching back over 100 years to a fiercely biblical great-grandfather, who had walked from Somerset to Amlwch for a job on the new railway. The austerity of the grey, disapproving little town must have suited; he married a Welsh monoglot, 'went chapel', and put down a taproot. It wasn't until my father escaped into schoolmastering and England that a chink of light was let in.

Nigel West

How Labour has subverted British Intelligence

It is not just the reputation of ministers and their bagmen that is taking a bashing at the Hutton inquiry. So is the reputation of Britain's intelligence services. British Intelligence has been subverted. The nation's front line of defence has been catastrophically damaged by New Labour's spin machine. The tawdry ethics of Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror newsroom have infiltrated the secure Cabinet Office rooms occupied by the Joint Intelligence Committee. The merest suspicion that an intelligence agency has succumbed to spin undermines its credibility and authority. But there is more than mere suspicion here. Recent events highlight a process of politicisation that has been going on since Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street in 1997.

Saturday

Martin Gayford

In love with economic disaster

We spent part of the last two weeks – as has become a family custom – mooching round Siena. And although, like Venice, the place can absorb a huge number of visitors before becoming unpleasantly crowded, we were by no means the only ones. That's because, of course, Siena is just about perfect – an intact mediaeval town, with hardly a building later than the 16th century, but a living community, not a mummified museum. It is also a prime example of what most of us love to look at when we go travelling. Namely, economic failure. Siena looks the way it does because of a series of disasters. At the beginning of the 14th century it was one of the most go-ahead places on earth, a prototype of the way we all live today.

Theodore Dalrymple

Bum rap for Jamaicans

Whenever I have a patient who belongs to the first generation of Jamaican immigrants, I cannot help but ask myself what England has done to the Jamaicans. How has such a charming and humorous community been turned into the sullen, resentful people that so many of their children (or grandchildren) seem to be today – particularly the males, possessed as they are of an arrogant sense of radical entitlement that renders them almost extraterritorial both to the laws of the land and the laws of good manners? What has England done to them that they should turn out thus? Of course, there is still a strong strand of church-going respectability among the Jamaicans.

Mary Keen

Gardener’s question time

Is the taxpayer about to stump up another £16 million for the Duchess of Northumberland's pet project, Alnwick Garden? Mary Keen investigates To him that hath shall be given, and to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland hath been given quite a lot. We are talking public funding here. The £11.5m Lottery sum awarded to secure the Duke's Raphael for the nation is a record for a work of art. This could be chicken- feed, however, compared with the funding the Duchess hopes to bag for her pet project, the Alnwick Garden, which by the time it is completed will have cost an estimated £42m. When I interviewed Jane Northum-berland in March for the Daily Telegraph, she said something that I agreed not to mention in that article.

Tom Fort

The rising tide of clichés

In more tranquil times, before the Gilligan storm broke over his head, the BBC's admirable and honourable director of news, Richard Sambrook, contributed a foreword to one of the corporation's periodic attempts to remind its journalists of their responsibilities towards the English language. 'Clear storytelling and language,' Sambrook wrote, 'is at the heart of good journalism.' These are words which, given subsequent events, have acquired an ironic resonance. What is at issue here is not Sambrook's unexceptionable sentiment, but his grammar. Richard, Richard, I can hear myself saying in the pedant's weary tones (for many years ago, when he was an eager and fresh-faced newsroom subeditor, I used to check his stories), plural subject requires plural verb.

Aidan Hartley

How to kill a burglar

Nairobi One evening in the Kenyan capital late last year, my friend Sean Culligan endured an experience that, in several instructive ways, can be compared and contrasted with that of the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin. Sean is a mild-mannered man who, after retiring from the British military, settled in East Africa. He works for a medical charity that is held in high esteem. For a pastime he likes target shooting. He has a licensed pistol. 'My military training tells me that if you have a gun, you should carry it,' Sean tells me. 'If you carry it, you should be prepared to use it.' The incident occurred on a Friday evening in Nairobi's suburbs, where Sean had arranged to pick up a doctor and colleague named Suzanne from her house. They were going on to a meeting downtown.

Simon Heffer

Collapse of England

Since it is always helpful to blame the government for most things, it might be some consolation to those of us who sat shellshocked at Lord's last weekend, and watched South Africa obliterate England, to reflect on how politics has brought about the decline of English cricket. Such an analysis will bring no short-term comfort to those who must prevent further thrashings of the national side; but only by understanding the causes can we hope, in due course, to eliminate the symptoms. Class is at the heart of the problem. For various reasons, few state schools engage in serious competitive sport any more, and cricket has suffered especially. It requires more time than most games, and that is in short supply thanks to the National Curriculum.

Jeremy Clarke

Sleeping with Freda

Miss Busby's room – room five – had a westerly facing seaview. Latterly, if it was shaping up to be a particularly beautiful one, and there was nothing on telly, I'd go and sit with her and watch the sunset. We'd sit side by side in a pair of her comfortable high-backed antique chairs and watch the sun going down in flames over the sea. We didn't say a lot. We'd just sit there in appreciative, companionable silence. It was very therapeutic. Sometimes I'd turn my head and see the redness of the sun reflected on her face. She had rather a long, hooked nose and her eyes were small and a bit too close together. And whenever she had her hair done it fluffed up, ludicrously, like candy-floss. But it was a fascinating face, one that had looked out on three very different centuries.

Peter Hitchens

God save the nation

If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not crown our next monarch, then who will? The president of Europe? A multi-faith collective? Nobody at all? In which case, what sort of country will we then be and where will ultimate authority and legitimacy come from? Perhaps the prior question is why there should now be serious doubt about the Archbishop's role at the heart of our constitution. It says something about the state of the worldwide Anglican Church that it seems more interested in homosexuality than in anything else. Last month we were entertained by the Archbishop of Canterbury's U-turn on the appointment of a homosexual bishop. Now the Episcopalians have broken the taboo.

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

Giving something back

In the past, great benefactors to the visual arts have generally doubled as tastemakers. Their success, as the US critic Jed Perl recently noted, is often best judged by the extent to which their avidities become what the culture takes for granted. But how does taste, which is private, become public in this way? It's a complicated question, and in answering it one can never hope to filter out sheer force of personality as a decisive factor. In curmudgeonly cases such as Grenville L. Winthrop, whose spectacular collection is showing at the National Gallery, and Albert Barnes, as well as more effervescent personalities such as William Beckford or Peggy Guggenheim, a degree of egotism and grandstanding inevitably play their part.

Simon Nixon

Bring back Beeching

Simon Nixon says that we must build more motorways – and scrap railway lines Perhaps the most important discovery I have made over the last few years is that the way to stay sane in Britain is never to use public transport. The Department of Health tells us to eat five portions of fruit a day and to give up booze and fags. But what it dare not tell us is that the best way to reduce the risk of a heart attack and a host of other stress-related ailments is never to use the bus, Tube or train when you can drive a car or ride a bicycle instead. I've been thinking a lot about this in the weeks since my fiancée and I found ourselves – for reasons we're still arguing over – facing the wrong way down one of the approach roads to the M11.

David Gardner

Plain Hinglish

A n early-morning phone call the other day alerted me to the news that my midday appointment in New Delhi had been 'pre-poned'. Could I 'do the needful', the voice said, and 'get my skates on'. A few months ago, I received an invitation from an Indian ministry. First they sent a fax giving me 'advance intimation' of the event, then two more faxes advising me of a 'formal intimation'. After this, an invitation card arrived with the preamble: 'Sir, we would like to confirm our intimation....' Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour – not all of it intended. Hinglish is full of cricket terminology and army metaphors, with echoes of P.G. Wodehouse and Dickens.

Anthony Browne

Some truths about immigration

Something strange is happening when a left-wing government publicly accuses the BBC, riddled with institutionalised political correctness, of – can you think of a more wounding insult? – a 'Powellite anti-immigration agenda'. The Pope publicly denouncing one of his cardinals as a Satanist would hardly be more surprising. It is not just cats of the postwar fractured Left scratching each other's eyes out; David Blunkett's intemperate outburst was in reality an admission that he is losing the most important political argument of the day. It is not only that Britain doesn't want mass immigration but that, despite the government's attempts to persuade us that we need it, even parts of the BBC are finally waking up to see that there are real problems.