Features

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Back to basic instincts

Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected [by love]; it is a species of insanity that assails them, and it produces self-destruction in England more frequently than in all the other countries put together.William Cobbett, 1829 What on earth is the Conservative party going to do about sexual intercourse? People are having it off all over the place, willy-nilly, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one day Hell may swallow them up and devour them for such libidinous recklessness.

Saturday

Clive Davis

Clive Davis – full blogroll

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Mark Glazebrook

Chaos in Venice

A couple of vaporetto stops in the direction of the Lido, from near Piazza San Marco – fortified, perhaps, by a cold glass of wine and some lively light music from the immaculately dressed band outside Florians – and you are in the merciful shade of the public gardens, where some of the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale have stood, designed like temples, for a hundred years or so. Here, every two years, you can be sure that, in the form of chaos, all hell will break loose. ,img>It will break loose quite soon during your passionate search for a glimpse of up-to-the-minute visual delight or significance. Visual art is the focus in theory, but other issues compete for the viewer's attention.

Angela Ellisjones

The year aliens became alien

Uncontrolled immigration? A burden on the taxpayer? Terrorists in our midst? The current immigration crisis echoes events of 100 years ago which led to the passage of Britain's first piece of immigration law. From the 1880s onwards, increasing numbers of Russian and Polish Jews sought refuge from pogroms in their homelands. With its long tradition of admitting refugees, Britain was a favoured destination. Germans, Americans and other nationalities also came in their thousands. Between 1891 and 1901, Britain's alien population grew by nearly 70,000, to reach a total of 286,000. Of these, 135,000 lived in London. At this time, there was no British legislation on immigration. Britain was the only country in Europe which had no means of excluding any foreigner who wished to enter.

Christopher Howse

Piano-player in a brothel

Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world – but rebelled against it Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge, with a grimace of welcome, met me at Robertsbridge station, like many another. To reach the Sussex cottage that he shared with Kitty, his wife of 50 years, he had to drive across a fast main road, down which articulated lorries careered. Without slowing down he continued straight across, looking neither to right nor to left. This Russian roulette driving, like his tolerance of curious visitors to Park Cottage, betrayed an underlying trust in an unknown providence that he had spent a lifetime tempting. Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, embodied Western man in the 20th century. And he became its contradiction.

Tim Butcher

How shellfish is that?

Hermanus You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller. Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a poaching and smuggling racket that is outgrowing all other crime in a country widely held to be the world's most criminal. Poachers have been drowned by rivals, gun battles have erupted in supposedly sleepy seaside resorts, and customs officials have been bribed on an industrial scale. And the whole thing is being choreographed by Chinese triads. The situation is so critical that a joint police, coastguard and army task-force has been set up under Operation Neptune to deal with the crisis.

Simon Heffer

Dumb and dumber

At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, declared that 'Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy'. 'The idea,' he went on, 'that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. You need a relationship with the workplace.' He also said that he didn't care too much whether anyone studied the classics any more, and even added it might not be such 'a bad thing' if there were to be a decline in highbrow subjects at university altogether. So, nearly 150 years after Charles Dickens invented – and pilloried – Mr Gradgrind, with his 'facts, facts, facts', hard times are back in English education. Only 0.2 per cent of GCSEs taken in this country are in Latin, and only a fraction of that in Greek.

Harry Mount

Proles apart

I have found it – the land that Nineteen Eighty-Four forgot. When the book's hero, Winston Smith, flees Big Brother and the party operatives, it is to 'the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been St Pancras Station' that he runs. On the eve of the centenary of Orwell's birth, which falls next Wednesday, I have identified those slums; they have been right under my nose for years. Tracing Smith's well-detailed route from St Pancras – 'up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes' – I ended up at my own front door in Kentish Town.

Interconnect

SPECTATORS FOR AFRICA | 21 June 2003

In any discussion about the justifications for the war in Iraq, there comes the Zimbabwe point. Yeah, says the sceptic, but what about Zimbabwe, eh? If we go to war to liberate the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam, why won't we lift a finger to free the victims of Robert Mugabe? Is it a kind of racism? To which the answer is, of course not. It is just that no vital Western geostrategic interests appear engaged by the disaster of Zimbabwe. If we ran our cars on bananas, matters might be different. But since Zimbabwe is neither an oil-producer nor an avowed sponsor of Middle Eastern terror, the dictator is left on his throne.

Boris Johnson

Blunkett the authoritarian

That Lord Woolf, he has a bit of a cheek, doesn't he? I don't know if you caught his intervention in the Criminal Justice Bill debate the other night, but it was the usual stuff. He excoriated the politicians (David Blunkett) for trying to fetter the discretion of the judges. He was appalled, said the Lord Chief Justice, by the attempts of these vote-grubbing politicos to erode a vital judicial freedom. 'The present proposal will have the effect of increasing political interference,' he said. Well, much as we may admire his liberal instincts, it strikes me that his lordship's words admit of a paradox. Where was he situated when he made those remarks? On the red benches of the Upper House, as Parliament debated a piece of government legislation.

Rod Liddle

Crippling burden

There is something a little reckless about having a go at the disabled lobby. I can happily question the zealousness and rectitude of the Commission for Racial Equality, Stonewall and any of a multitude of women's groups, safe in the knowledge that I am not about to be rendered black, gay or female in the foreseeable future. But disabled? Hell, who knows? This is one lobby group not to be messed with. Disablement could happen at any moment; there but for the grace of God, etc. In fact, when you study the qualifications required in order to call oneself disabled, it seems almost impossible that it won't happen in the next 48 hours or so – or, indeed, has already happened. I may well be disabled right now.

Andrew Gimson

Within the German pale

More Jews are moving to Germany than to any other country in the world, including Israel. This statement seldom fails to provoke gasps of astonishment among people whose knowledge of Germany is limited to the Holocaust. To them it seems a very strange and wonderful thing that the Jewish life which the Nazis tried with such grotesque thoroughness to extirpate should now be flowering anew on German soil. This generous reaction is surely in the end the right one, but I must admit that my own reaction – when a colleague pointed out a news-agency report according to which 19,262 Jews moved to Germany last year from the former Soviet Union, compared with 18,878 who went to Israel and fewer than 10,000 who went to the United States – was less generous.

Simon Nixon

It’s not the oil, stupid

These are tough times to be a Middle Eastern despot, so perhaps it is understandable if a few of them feel a little paranoid right now. Iraq is under foreign occupation, Iran is in open revolt, and Saudi Arabia is apparently under attack from British bootleggers who look surprisingly like friends of Osama bin Laden. Under the circumstances, even the most pampered autocrat might be forgiven for feeling a little anxious. But what is really troubling many in the Arab world is not so much the threat of internal opposition – they have ways of dealing with that – but fear of America, and specifically fear of what America plans to do with Iraq's oil.

Sanjay Anand

Osama bides his time

We have al-Qa'eda on the run,' President Bush was reported to have said in April. In May, al-Qa'eda and its associated groups masterminded a week of bombings which left more than 100 people dead. It looked like a deliberate riposte to the President's triumphant optimism. There were two explosions in Chechnya on 12 May, which killed 59 people and injured 200. There were three in Morocco on 16 May; the toll was 27 dead and more than 100 injured, not counting the blowing to smithereens of the 12 suicide bombers who had jointly detonated the bombs. And in the same week, there were the bombs in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which killed 34 people, as well as the 19 bombs which exploded in Shell petrol stations in Pakistan.

Saturday

Roger Highfield

Science & Nature SpecialNanotechnology

Once again we have the Prince of Wales to thank for alerting us to the latest apocalypse that scientists are planning to unleash upon mankind. Having attacked GM foods in the past, and after much hand-wringing over how scientists are reducing the world to a 'laboratory of life', the Prince has turned his attention to nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate matter at scales of a nanometre (a billionth of a metre). As you will have read over the last few weeks, Prince Charles's great worry is that swarms of 'nanomachines' will reduce everything in their path to 'grey goo'. And if the idea sounds like a cracking storyline for a science-fiction novel, that's because it is. This scary scenario was presented to the public by Michael Crichton in his book Prey.

Zac Goldsmith

Science & Nature SpecialEcology

Until quite recently, if it could be found at all in shops, the Ecologist magazine, which I edit, would invariably have been wedged somewhere between Motor Digest and Computer World at the far end of the lowest shelf in a magazine rack. That may have had something to do with the magazine itself. But not exclusively. Survival of the planet, it goes without saying, is the ultimate priority. If only half the reports on the state of the world are true, then logically we should all be environmentalists. But we aren't, and environmentalism remains a 'niche' concern. Newspapers, terrified of upsetting the corporations that subsidise them, are partly to blame, having too often relegated the worst examples of environmental destruction to three-line notes at the end of obscure pages.

Carl Gierstorfer

Science & Nature SpecialThe chimp genome

Everyone knows that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe and that mankind has descended from the apes. But what about this: according to the latest estimates, we share 98.8 per cent of our DNA with the chimpanzees. What distinguishes us from our closest living relative is due to a 1.2 per cent genetic distance. Now the race is on to decipher the chimp genome, a draft of which will be published later this year. By superimposing the human genome on the chimp's, researchers hope finally to shed light upon the genetic basis of human nature. In fact, some hints of genes underlying uniquely human traits, such as our big brains as well as our ability to use language, have already been discovered. We shared our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee about six million years ago.

Michael Hanlon

Science & Nature SpecialAstronomy

One way to throw an astrologer into confusion – well, even more confusion than that under which they normally labour – is to find a new planet. When Clyde Tombaugh spotted Pluto in 1930, the third oldest profession found itself in a tizzy. So when a tenth planet, beyond Pluto, was announced a few months ago, the astrologers again let out a collective groan and started redrawing their charts. But it isn't just the stargazing charlatans who were bothered by the new discovery; the rest of us were just as bemused, not by the planet itself but by its name. Quaoar. Qua-oh-what? Hard to spell, harder to say. The only person I know who can pronounce Quaoar properly is a small boy who had to present a talk on the thing to his classmates.

Michael Moorcock

Science & Nature SpecialScience fiction

I'm rather hoping that some of the stories which appeared in Science Fiction Adventures during the early 1960s don't come true. Though its title suggests otherwise, SFA was actually quite an intellectual magazine. There, many of J.G. Ballard's stories first appeared, including his brilliant The Drowned World, which predicted global warming and seriously rising sea levels. My own The Sundered Worlds foresaw the discovery of black holes and first offered the term 'multiverse' to describe an infinity of alternate versions of our own universe, nesting side by side but unaware of the others' presence.

Matt Ridley

Science & Nature SpecialThe humbling of Homo sapiens

Scientists are not interested in facts. What they like is ignorance. They mine it, eat it, attack it – choose the metaphor you prefer – and in the process they keep discovering more ignorance. Every answer leads to a set of new questions. The past few years have seen a once-in-an-aeon explosion of new knowledge about the human body and mind, as a consequence of our becoming the first creature in four billion years to read our own genetic recipe. Even more, they have seen an explosion of newly discovered ignorance. Most people now know the humiliating news from the Human Genome Project that we have the same number of genes as a mouse. There is no special set of 50,000 genes for making human brains, as was being seriously mooted just a decade ago.