Features

Saturday

Jo Johnson

The frog of peace

Paris Game over yet? Don't count on it. As Prime Minister Raffarin retorted to President Bush, 'It's not a game. It's not over.' French President Jacques Chirac and Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, his foreign minister, are having a great war. Just look at the polls: a Sofres survey to be released on Friday will claim that 86 per cent of French people approve his handling of the Iraq crisis. That's more than the 82 per cent Chirac scored in last year's elections against the far-Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. This expresses nicely what most French people think of George W. Bush, and most of it is unprintable. Eighty-one per cent, a figure to make Tony Blair weep with envy, believe France's role in the world has been strengthened by Chirac's 'principled resistance' to American hegemony.

Saturday

Susan Moore

Exhausting but exhilarating

The art and antiques business is as unpredictable as an English summer. And it is not only the works of art that confound market rules and crystal balls. The fairs that serve as the dealers' collective showcase similarly defy expectations. Who would have thought, for instance, that fair entrepreneur David Lester could put up a tent on a forlorn intersection in West Palm Beach - not only on the wrong side of the tracks but just feet away from them - and find himself with one of the most glamorous and successful art fairs in America? Or that a charmless convention centre on the ring-road around Maastricht - a town no one had heard of until the eponymous treaty - could become the venue for quite simply the best art and antiques fair in the world?

Andrew Gimson

The whole tent stank of kippers

Lady Elizabeth Anson 'numbers President William Jefferson Clinton, Hans Heinrich Thyssen Bornemisza, Mrs Henry John Heinz, the late Mr Alfred Heineken, Princess Esra Jah, Mrs Basil Hersov, Mr John Paul Getty II, Mr Galen Weston, the then Mr and Mrs Tom Cruise, Mr Donald Trump and Mrs Ivana Trump and the University of Boston among her international clientele'. It is a glorious list, matched by an almost equally exotic list of British clients, ranging from nearly every member of the royal family to Sir Clive Sinclair and the late Mr Derek Nimmo. Lady Elizabeth has spent the last 43 years working for 'the very rich, the very idle, the very busy and the ones who simply haven't got a clue what to do', as she herself put it when she gave me tea last week.

Rod Liddle

Don’t expel Dr Hook

A dingy community hall in the back streets of Bethnal Green on a cold and miserable winter's evening. We're all here waiting for the weird, hook-handed fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Misri, the most loathed man in Britain, who is about to hold a public meeting. When I say 'we're all here', I mean the infidel scum from the Daily Mail, a bunch of whores from the BBC, a cockroach from the Standard and a lower-than-cattle news agency chap. We're all present and correct. What we're really short of at the moment is fanatics, fundamentalists or, indeed, Muslims of any gradation of fervour. When I last looked in the hall, there were three people, two of whom work for the sheikh, including his cheerful and likable press officer, Abu Aziz.

Max Hastings

Don’t drop the pilot

I keep meeting people with a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to see a swift, successful outcome of President Bush's crusade against Iraq. On the other, if the war goes horribly wrong, they perceive a chance to get rid of Tony Blair. The vision fills them with an ecstasy normally reserved for winning the lottery, catching a salmon of more than 30lb, or seeing a financial services adviser suspended on a spit over a crackling fire. This Prime Minister nowadays provokes extraordinary passion. Among his predecessors, John Major was seen as an object of pity. Even Mrs Thatcher in her poll-tax days did not command the sort of cross-party loathing Blair has achieved. Jim Callaghan retained a certain public affection, even at the depths of his Winter of Discontent.

Daniel Kruger

The case for colonialism

The West might be superficially divided between hawks and doves, but there is a deeper division: between foxes and hedgehogs. In a famous essay on Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin said the division was 'one of the deepest' among human beings. The distinction applies just as well to politicians and governments. Foxes, said Berlin, are sophisticated, pluralist, usually atheist, and distrustful of absolutes. Hedgehogs are anti-intellectual, single-minded, often religious, and comfortable with certainties, chief among which are 'good' and 'evil'. Foxes think many small things; hedgehogs think one big thing. The UN and the EU are fox heaven. They stand for multilateralism and the 'post-modern' world order, for negotiation, containment and compromise.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Farrago of multiple choice

Days Like These is only the second Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, so the reader may be forgiven for not being altogether familiar with the set-up or its purpose. It's intended as a kind of alternative or extension to the Turner Prize, offering a representative cross-section of contemporary art practice in the British Isles. This particular show (which runs at Tate Britain until 26 May) features the work of 23 reasonably diverse artists, and reveals - and I quote the press release - 'the breadth of thoughtfulness, humour, subtlety and complexity in contemporary British art'. Oh, that it did. The artists seem to have been selected almost at random, provided they fit readily into what has become the new orthodoxy.

Peter Oborne

Decline and fall of the Hooray Henry

TWENTY-FIVE years on, Andrew Marr recollects the episode well but insists that it was all down to mistaken identity. They were after the Jews, he claims, and they got me as second best. Marr's account is at any rate open to challenge. There was plenty about the future political editor of the BBC which a Cambridge University undergraduate dining club on its mettle would have found both appetising and provocative. He affected a little goatee beard at the time. That could easily have done the trick on its own. So might his little flat cap, carefully modelled on photographs of Lenin in exile. The little denim bag he swung jauntily over his shoulders, a fashion statement on the hard Left in the late 1970s, must also be taken into account.

Saturday

Ross Clark

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Terror-free zones

The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all bad news in the property world, however. Real-estate agents in Finland and New Zealand could not be happier. American ex-pats, more used to life in the cosmopolitan districts of London and Paris, have discovered a taste for living in the world's backwaters. Pick up a copy of the Offshore Real Estate Quarterly, the bible of the chronically worried American, and you are transported to a world where survivalist freakery meets the swish language of property marketing.

Sebastian Deckker

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Ski resorts

I have just returned from a trip to the Alpine village of MegŒve, situated in the heart of the Haute-Savoie, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, where I successfully introduced my three-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter to the pleasures of skiing. It occurred to me, while out there, that there has never been a better time to head for the hills and buy a place in the mountains. According to the International Residential Department of FPDSavills (020 7824 9030), 'a nervous stock market and low interest rates have led many people to look at alternative investments, especially in overseas property offering both pleasure and profit'.

Matthew Leeming

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Where no birds sing

Very few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six candidates, was only finally settled in 1892 by Lord Curzon himself. He chose the highest glacier as the true source. I prefer the source of the biggest volume of water, christened Lake Victoria in 1835 by a British army officer. Both are found at the end of the Wakhan Corridor, that thin finger of Afghanistan that pokes out towards China.

Andrew Lambirth

Titian’s touch of genius

Walking around this exhibition is a humbling experience. We are privileged to have a display of paintings of this quality in London, and it is an incredible achievement to have obtained loans of such distinction. One of the pictures scheduled for the show is not in fact available, 'Sacred and Profane Love' from the Villa Borghese in Rome, but two late additions more than compensate for its absence. One is the 'Crucifixion with Saint Dominic' from Ancona (which was so last-minute that it hadn't yet arrived when I previewed the exhibition), and the other is the magnificent 'Flaying of Marsyas' from the Czech Republic. When 'Marsyas' was last seen in London at the Royal Academy 20 years ago in The Genius of Venice exhibition, we were warned that we'd never see it again in England.

Tim Luckhurst

Poles apart?

In Warsaw last Tuesday the French defence minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, continued her President's ham-fisted strategy of offering patronising advice to Eastern European nations on course to join the European Union. 'It was better to keep silent when you don't know what's going on,' she declared. Poland's deputy foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, resented the lecture. 'France has a right to its opinion and Poland has the right to decide what is good for it,' he told an interviewer. Then, addressing himself directly to Ms Alliot-Marie's boss, 'I would prefer it if he expressed himself more politely.' Another East European diplomat said Chirac had spoken in a tone that even Moscow would have been reluctant to use with its Warsaw Pact clients.

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.