Features

Saturday

Susan Moore

Slipping through the safety net

If a French national museum wishes to buy a work of art at auction, it simply exercises its 'right of pre-emption'. Substituting itself for the final bidder, which is what this means, is less fair than it sounds - word invariably gets out about the museum's intentions and few bother to bid. In France, as in Italy, Germany and Spain, any work of art deemed of national importance cannot legally leave its shores, a circumstance which once again significantly reduces its market value. Good news for the cultural patrimony, perhaps, but rather less cheery for the owner. Britain's approach, in contrast, is the most liberal in Europe - its system of controlling the export of national treasures while acknowledging the property rights of the individual is peerless.

John Laughland

Hands off Northern Cyprus

A trip to Northern Cyprus is a trip to the 1970s. While the Greek South of the island - home to the Russian Mafia and to the ecstasy-induced raves of Ayia Napa -seethes in corrupt prosperity, the Turkish North indulges in the gentler delights of crazy paving, the New Seekers and Ford Capris. Neither the dried flowers nor the lurid earthenware lamps in my hotel had been changed since the current Turkish manager took the place over from its unfortunate Greek owner; while the second-hand bookshops in northern Nicosia have clearly had no new stock since partition, and are consequently full of paperbacks about Harold Wilson and the dangers of joining the Common Market. If Kofi Annan and the European Union get their way, however, all this will be swept away.

Rachel Johnson

A land unfit for heroes

Things have to come a pretty pass, eh, when an institution as self-consciously august as the University of Oxford has to headhunt a perjuring philanderer to be its next chancellor; even if the felon happens to be the President of the United States (there are no former presidents, of course, just as alumnae of St Paul's girls' school are Paulinas till their dying day). Not since the Albanians asked C.B. Fry, the English cricketer, to be their king has there been so dismal an admission of the lack of home-grown talent. So whom do we have so far? Are any of them going to set the world on fire? The in-house candidate is the distinguished lawyer Lord Neill of Bladen, a former warden of All Souls, former vice-chancellor of Oxford, and former sleaze watchdog.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

What do they want? Victory for Saddam

I'm bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was an amazing occurrence in Hackney last week at a meeting of the Stop the War coalition. I swear this happened. A protester said something perceptive. You don't believe me? No, really, I was there. He was an old guy with white hair and a lovely crinkly face. 'The bigger the march,' he said ruefully, 'the bigger the insult when they ignore us.' I almost fell off my chair in astonishment. Nobody at the meeting disagreed. No one suggested a change of tactics. And none of that surprised me at all. For several months, out of curiosity rather than conviction, I have attached myself to the peace movement. An atmosphere of defeat hangs over its members.

Saturday

John Spurling

Hepworth’s silent classicism

Barbara Hepworth died in a fire in her St Ives home in 1975 and, although her reputation has not diminished since then, it has hardly risen. Rather, perhaps, it has spread, at least among visitors to her studio and garden in St Ives, where she lived the last 26 years of her life, or to Wakefield, where she was born in 1903 and near where her nine-piece group 'The Family of Man' stands magisterially on a grass slope in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She was much honoured in her lifetime and much relished the recognition, since she was always very conscious of her status as the first internationally famous woman in what was then a man's profession.

Rod Liddle

Black is best

Here's something to be cheerful about. At an English Premiership football match last year, the fans of one London club were heard to be singing the following jolly refrain: 'We all agree, our coons are better than your coons.' We should be glad, because this little chanson marks what we might call a paradigm shift in the perceptions and expectations of a certain tranche of educationally subnormal white-trash football supporters. Whereas, some years ago, black players were a rarity to be derided by not-that-small-a-minority of the crowd whenever they touched the ball, they are now happily prominent in pretty much every club throughout every league in England. The dribbling, shell-suited cretins, therefore, can't pretend to themselves any more that black players are useless.

Mary Wakefield

Who’s Hugh?

The country-and-western singer Kinky Friedman has a song called 'They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore'. 'They don't turn the other cheek the way they done before,' sings Kinky. Had he met The Right Reverend Hugh Montefiore, the former Bishop of Birmingham, Kinky might have changed his tune. 'It happened out of the blue.' Montefiore, now 82, leans back on a delicate-looking wooden chair, balances it on two legs and rocks gently as he recalls his schooldays. 'I was 16, a keen Jew from a devout and influential family. I knew nothing about Christianity and I had never even been to a church service.' His voice becomes quiet. 'It was very, very strange.

Paul Robinson

A dodgy constitution

I once heard of an Ivy League professor who had written 50 constitutions. All of them collapsed, including the one for the college boat club. If that gentleman is not now advising the Convention on the Future of Europe, someone very like him surely is. On the opening day of the convention in March 2002, its president, ValZry Giscard d'Estaing, bravely compared the congress to the Philadelphia Convention, which wrote the US constitution in 1787. One might equally make a comparison with the conferences which created the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the constitutions of the Ivy League professor, the products of those meetings have stood the test of time.

Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t feel sorry for the City

Here are four connected facts. First, on Monday, Standard Life - one of Britain's most respected investment institutions - cut the value of its payouts to 2.3 million pension savers by 15 per cent. Second, some 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the City of London this winter - including Alex, the cartoon archetype invented by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, who was given the heave-ho by 'Megabank' a couple of weeks ago. Third, also on Monday, Gordon Brown gave a rambling speech to the Social Market Foundation in praise of his own economic policies, in the midst of which he made a single, brief reference to investors, claiming to understand their concerns.

Saturday

Julian Manyon

Korea opportunities

Beijing We were halfway across the narrow pontoon bridge on the Tumen river which separates China from North Korea in a remote area not far from Vladivostok when I reflected that what we were doing was completely mad. By then, however, it was too late to turn back. Approaching rapidly was the red-and-blue flag with its central star, and, beyond it, a grimy concrete blockhouse containing the border police of the hermit state. The story had begun three weeks earlier when I telephoned our Chinese producer, Lu, in Beijing and asked him to inquire about entry to North Korea. His answer was that journalists are currently barred but that he had found a small travel agency which might be able to obtain invitations for a party of businessmen. Two weeks later an excited Lu rang me.

Rod Liddle

Loony meets butcher

Now that Dr Blix has done his work, how will Saddam Hussein cope with the latest threat from the West to both his political stability and his sanity? It seems that, as a softening-up exercise before vaporising Baghdad with expensive ordnance, we have begun to export British lunatics to Iraq. And, because this is total war; because we are seriously angry with Saddam, it is not quite enough that we should dispatch George Galloway. We have gone further. We have thought the unthinkable. We have pushed the envelope. This week, cruelly, we have deployed our Weapon of Mash Deshtruction. You can be assured that by teatime the Iraqi dictator will be in a befuddled state of mind. He may also be bored to the point of expiry.

Christopher Caldwell

The fruits of victory

Washington DC George W. Bush announced during his State of the Union message that America and its allies will disarm Iraq with or without the UN. If America, as appears increasingly likely, gets war, it will be thanks in large part to Tony Blair and Britain. But what will Tony Blair and Britain get thanks to America? A typical American would answer (a) that's the wrong question, and (b) quite a lot. If Tony Blair is America's poodle, then his yap is being heard. Britain stands higher in US estimation than at any time since 1945. Recent opinion polls yield results that could make an American question whether Britain was a foreign country at all.

Saturday

Julian Holloway

TRAVEL SPECIAL: Tamerlane

In the 14th century, Timur the Lame led a nomad army against the whole settled world. He plundered from the Ganges to the Dardanelles, but the heartland of his empire lay between two great rivers north of Afghanistan, the Amu Dar'ya and Syr Dar'ya. Today both rivers sink into the sands of what is now the Republic of Uzbekistan. Many ancient cities lie beneath those sands, among them the city of Benaket. I was in Uzbekistan this summer exploring the life of another great conqueror, Babur, and decided to try to find Benaket. It has an interesting history: as a 13-year-old, Babur came to meet the hostile Mongol Khan, a descendant of Genghis, in a garden outside Benaket's city walls, and made the Khan his ally.

Peter Tatchell

TRAVEL SPECIAL: Palm Springs

Trying to arrest tyrants like Robert Mugabe is a tiring, stressful business. Even I need a break. So I headed for Palm Springs, California, to indulge my passion for mountain hiking. Palm Springs is no ordinary desert resort. A mere half a mile from the main street, mountains rise steeply to nearly 11,000 feet. During winter, while the town basks in 28?C sunshine, the peaks are sub-zero and snow-capped. The morning after my arrival, I set off for the summit of Mount San Jacinto (10,804 feet). Surprisingly, I was the only hiker. But that was fine by me. Like Greta Garbo, sometimes I love to be alone. From 8,000 feet upwards, the air was a chilly 2?C and the trail was dotted with snowdrifts. With the sun blazing fiercely through the cloudless, thin atmosphere, I soon worked up a sweat.

Bruce Anderson

TRAVEL SPECIAL: Pride and preservation

A PAIR of lionesses were ambling through the grass; three cubs were scampering around them. A delightful spectacle, but this was the African bush, not Disneyland. The lionesses were not going for a stroll. It was many hours since their last meal, so they were out to kill and feed. As for the cubs, they were playing regardless of their doom. I said to our guide that they had presumably survived the worst menaces that overshadow leonine infancy, but was told that this was not the case. Unfortunately for them, the leader of their little pride was a ten-year-old lion. That is late middle-age in the lion world and, in the same neighbourhood, a four-year-old lion was lurking.

Mark Glazebrook

Hockney’s controversial experiment

The last David Hockney show at Annely Juda Fine Art was in the summer of 1997. It was a large show of oils on canvas with the alliterative and rhyming title Flowers, Faces and Spaces. In one prominent, large painting called 'Sunflowers' no fewer than five different blue, purple or green vases containing these fiery yellow blooms, previously thought to have been patented by Vincent van Gogh, were arranged against a bright-green background on a plain, bright-red tablecloth. By out-Vincenting Vincent in the colour contrast department, these works seemed positively to court accusations of being over-the-top. Gone was the restrained but individualistic colour of Hockney's early work. Gone was the magical colour of some of his stage designs.

Sarah Barclay

Mixed blessing

When Emmy Myerson was born in June 1991, everyone celebrated. Those 'weird, regular kicks', which began when her mother was seven months pregnant, had been brushed off as 'perfectly normal' by the doctors. Even if they had been investigated, there probably wasn't much anyone could have done for the Myerson family. When Emmy was three months old, she had her first fit. The fits continued, with increasing severity. She spent nine months in hospital, wired up and subjected to every test and medical student in sight.

Andrew Gimson

The naked truth

Would you like 'a framed 16 x 20 inch nude portrait' of yourself? The picture would be 'in black and white or tinted blue' and would be taken 'in the privacy of your own home (with a chaperone in attendance)' by a photographer who would bring a 'portable studio' with him. One of his nude portraits would make, according to the advertisement he placed in my local north London newspaper, 'a gift that is really special and personal'. My curiosity was piqued by the man offering this service, who rejoices in the name of Jack Lamport-Mitchell. But my wife said she on no account wanted to receive a gift consisting of a nude portrait of herself.

Anthony Browne

The secret threat to British lives

Several hundred years ago, the British brought mass death to foreign lands. They crossed the Atlantic, sneezed on the native Americans and watched them die of the common cold. Now the tables have turned. We live in fear of foreigners bringing death to our own land. Tony Blair said on Tuesday that it was 'inevitable' that al-Qa'eda would try to launch a terrorist attack on the United Kingdom; but immigrant terrorists are by no means the most potent threat to British lives. It is not through letting in terrorists that the government's policy of mass immigration - especially from the Third World - will claim the most lives. It is through letting in too many germs. From exotic cuisines to driving entrepreneurialism, Third World immigration brings many good things to this country.