Features

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

Maximum Fiennes

I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes - a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers - if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly in the foyer of the Lanesborough Hotel by 8 a.m. Instead, I pitch up at 8.15 with black particles of diesel exhaust stuck to my puce face. 'Sorry I'm late, I came by bicycle,' I explain to a tall, middle-aged man with a fine-boned, urgent-looking face like a pencil sketch. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, Bt, OBE stares at me with a polite but total lack of interest. As we sit across the breakfast table from each other, previous articles about him suddenly make sense.

Simon Heffer

Perverts and the course of justice

One of those bad courtroom dramas on television might have used the scene as a denouement, and then been panned by the critics for its unrealism. A good and faithful servant, accused of felonious behaviour and facing prison, is acquitted thanks to a surprise intervention by a third party. The third party happens to be the Head of State. The former saintly reputation of the accused is immediately restored. God save the Queen. In the aftermath, a near-hysterical and assiduously briefed press blames almost everybody concerned. The police, thick, bigoted and incompetent as usual, are said to be especially at fault. The Crown Prosecution Service, it goes without saying, is highly culpable.

Saturday

Martin Gayford

Sensitive to the drama of light

If a portrait 'happened to be on the easel', wrote Henry Angelo of Thomas Gainsborough, 'he was in the humour for a growl at the dispensation of all sublunary things. If, on the other hand, he was engaged in a landscape composition, then he was all gaiety - his imagination was in the skies.' What Angelo doubtless meant was that the painter's creativity rose like a balloon into the air. But, looking at Gainsborough's work assembled at Tate Britain in a huge retrospective (until 19 January), one might be excused for taking his words literally. Take a step back from the early paintings in the first room, and you become overwhelmingly aware of their skies.

Christopher Booker

Killer peak

Imagine you have been walking up into the sky for four days on end, until you reach a frozen plateau as high as Mont Blanc. Only now does the serious business begin. Starting at midnight, you climb continuously for six hours in the dark up what seems like a near-vertical scree slope the height of Snowdon, at 20 degrees below zero while gasping for breath at 50 per cent oxygen. You have reached the crater rim of the highest free-standing mountain in the world, capped with cliffs of ice, only a few miles from the equator.

Boris Johnson

Commissioner PZtain fights back

Chris Patten is used to rudeness. When he was the last governor of Hong Kong, the Chinese used to call him a 'jade-faced prostitute' and a 'tango-dancer for a thousand years', and other baffling insults. In these very pages he is called EU Marshal Chris PZtain, a byword for general sell-outery. To the neo-conservatives of Washington, he is the consummate Euro-weenie, ever warning us of the dangers of American 'unilateralism' and the risks of duffing up Iraq. To a certain kind of British Conservative polemicist, he shows an excessive willingness to listen to the claims of Palestinian terrorists and Irish republican murderers.

Daniel Hannan

Why can’t the English be more like the French?

We all know what 'vigorous exchange of views' means. But rarely can a summit have ended with both sides boasting that their chap managed to get some juicy insults past the other fellow. Reading the press coverage on both sides of the Channel, a cartoon-like picture emerges. One imagines Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac like two Asterix characters, purple with rage, leaning towards each other with their noses squashed together. This is not the first Anglo-French diplomatic row, of course. Lord Palmerston, on being told by his counterpart that the English had no word equivalent to the French 'sensibilitZ', replied, 'Yes we have: humbug.

Saturday

Interconnect

COMPETITION | 26 October 2002

Mercedes-Benz in association with The Spectator is offering readers the chance to win a wonderful 2-night break including dinner at the 5-star Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds with the use of a new E-Class Saloon. To enter the competition, write an epigram on the theme 'Everything' and send it to Epigram Competition, The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL or e-mail it to mercedes-benz@spectator.co.uk. Winners will be announced in the 7 November issue and the top three winning epigrams will be published on the Letters page of the subsequent three issues. Terms and conditions. Closing date for entries is 31 October 2002. Open to all UK residents aged 21 or over except employees of the Spectator, DaimlerChrysler UK and their agents, and Savoy Hotels.

Interconnect

Motoring | 26 October 2002

I confess bias: I like Mercedes. I've owned several, though by the time they got down to my level they were getting on a bit. But they last, these beasts with the three-point star, which is one of the reasons we respect them. How many other up-market breeds do you find serving out their last decade as African taxis bouncing along pot-holed dirt roads, and still getting you there? It's a treat, therefore, when a brand new one comes to stay for a few days, delivered to your door. This is the chief perk of being a motoring correspondent, regarded by everyone else as compensation for inadequate pay. When the car is the new E-Class saloon, it's hard to argue. I had the petrol E 320 V6 model.

Robin Simon

Turin’s jewel-box in the sky

It is not every day that an exhibition of just 25 works of art is officially opened by a head of state. But this is Italy - and the art belongs to the legendary Gianni Agnelli, head of the Fiat empire. The little gallery containing it is designed by Renzo Piano; and it is perched above the roof of the visionary Lingotto car factory at Turin, one of the most extraordinary industrial buildings ever made. As Signor Ciampi made his way across the red carpet on 21 September, he passed a display of historic Fiat cars which had been driven up the purpose-built ramps that wind through the guts of the factory.

Rachel Johnson

Not a level playing field

Tom Hill, a 19-year-old Marlburian (and son of parents with deep pockets, we hope), is suing the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA exam board (commonly known as OCR) that marked his A-levels for damages of up to £100,000. Now here's an odder thing. If many more follow suit - and there is evidence they will - Oxbridge would have a good case for countersuing the Secretary of State for Education for undermining its own balance sheet and damaging its reputation. Isn't the law fun! Yes. Believe it or not, Oxford and Cambridge are enjoying what the City calls a 'Ratner moment', unique in their long and gilded history, and all because the introduction and marking of the new A-levels was an absolute horlicks.

Michael Duffy

Grief is good in Australia

Sydney I live near the main road here, running down to Coogee Beach. Sun-lovers slouch down it all weekend: Australian families, British backpackers, Swedish grannies, American students. Last week they came as usual, in their shorts and their sleeveless tops, their hats and their flip-flops and their suncream. But there was something wrong on Sunday: few carried towels. They were on their way to the local Oval for a memorial service for 12 October. Our rugby team, the Dolphins, lost six members in Bali, and members of other teams from nearby suburbs were also among the murdered. This was Australia's day of mourning, and people came in their thousands. The first words of the ceremony were those of John Lennon.

David Marsh

The currency with a hole in it

The drama of the European single currency has had more than its fair share of theatrical twists and turns. The prize for the most spectacular transformation in the long-running Folies Maastricht must, however, be awarded to the quaintly named Stability and Growth Pact. This character entered Act 1 as a strutting hero, but now - several years into the plot - has been unmasked as the villain of the piece, destined shortly to be skewered behind an arras and then hauled off into oblivion. The Pact's demise may dampen the spirits of euro enthusiasts, but it creates a chance for Britain to obtain more influence on European policies while maintaining its position outside the euro.

Saturday

Alex Spillius

Climate of terror

Denpaser SEVERAL days after the bombs, the people of Bali, and tourists who have stayed on, are still in profound shock, still asking, 'Why here? Why us?' This was not an American embassy or military base, so why Bali? Yet in the twisted minds of the bombers an entertainment zone packed with alcohol-fuelled Westerners was the perfect target, and the warning signals that something big was being planned in south-east Asia had been flashing for months, if not years. For some time Indonesian Islamic militias have targeted nightclubs frequented by Westerners, as well as brothels favoured by local men. Such assaults were mostly with sticks and stones. Last year militiamen of the Islamic Defenders Front bearing wooden clubs stormed into JJ's nightclub in Jakarta.

Interconnect

Motoring

I confess bias: I like Mercedes. I've owned several, though by the time they got down to my level they were getting on a bit. But they last, these beasts with the three-point star, which is one of the reasons we respect them. How many other up-market breeds do you find serving out their last decade as African taxis bouncing along pot-holed dirt roads, and still getting you there? It's a treat, therefore, when a brand new one comes to stay for a few days, delivered to your door. This is the chief perk of being a motoring correspondent, regarded by everyone else as compensation for inadequate pay. When the car is the new E-Class saloon, it's hard to argue. I had the petrol E 320 V6 model.

Interconnect

COMPETITION | 19 October 2002

Mercedes-Benz in association with The Spectator is offering readers the chance to win a wonderful 2-night break including dinner at the 5-star Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds with the use of a new E-Class Saloon. To enter the competition, write an epigram on the theme 'Everything' and send it to Epigram Competition, The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL or e-mail it to mercedes-benz@spectator.co.uk. Winners will be announced in the 7 November issue and the top three winning epigrams will be published on the Letters page of the subsequent three issues. Terms and conditions. Closing date for entries is 31 October 2002. Open to all UK residents aged 21 or over except employees of the Spectator, DaimlerChrysler UK and their agents, and Savoy Hotels.

Martin Gayford

Inspired madness of the artist

The average man sitting on the Tube, according to Gilbert of Gilbert & George, sees nothing but breasts. Now, that may underestimate the range of interests of the average man (though it is entirely consistent with the stratagems used by mass-circulation newspapers to attract his attention). As for G&G, on the contrary, they find 'ideas blow up' in their brains - not very nice ones, some people say. But then, as they are proud to acknowledge, they are 'mad, crazy artists'. Artists are not, perhaps, the same as you and I. They make unexpected connections. William Blake remarked that where you might see the sun as a disc, something like a guinea, he saw a host of angels crying holy, holy, holy (so obviously ideas blew up in his mind too).

Natasha Mann

Punjabi moon

The 2002 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize winner. There were more than 100 entries from a total of eight countries. The runners-up were Clementine Cecil, Gregory Lascelles, Jonathan Ledgard, Rory Stewart and Ben Yarde-Buller. Just below us we could hear the chowkidar tut-tut-tutting his disapproval on the ground with his stick, pacing up and down, tut, tut, tut, while we two sat together on the flat-topped roof above, our backs to the Lahore skyline. Behind us the plains of the Punjab had been swallowed whole by a syrupy blackness, the villages, the wheat fields and beyond that the border with India. We were sitting in darkness. Tut. Tut. Tut. The chowkidar continued his agitated walk. He was distressed at the scandal unfolding on the roof of 'Aunty's' house.

Barrie Penrose

Jack Straw’s nocturnal delving

Jack Straw looked acutely uncomfortable. He was standing in the doorway of his tall Victorian house in Islington's Battledean Road, scruffy on the outside, plush inside. He was casually dressed in sandals and cords, saying he had hoped for a quiet evening. It was May 1976, and his visitors were Roger Courtiour and myself, both BBC journalists. He ushered us to his upstairs front room. We sat. He stood. Mr Straw began by lying. 'I know nothing of a missing file,' he said. Surely he knew of the missing DHSS file belonging to Norman Scott, the gay lover of Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe? Mr Straw changed tack. 'I cannot say anything because of the Official Secrets Act.' Hang on, we said. We knew that Barbara Castle had spoken to him about this file a few days ago.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Kennedy’s finest hour

Forty years ago the Americans won what I hope will be the nearest thing to nuclear war between superpowers - of which only one is left - ever fought; and the fact that they won it without firing a shot should not diminish but rather increase the extent of the victory. What I am referring to is known, of course, as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is how it will go down in history. But for those of us who lived through that extraordinary fortnight in October 1962, it was more than a crisis. First, the placing of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, within 90 miles of the American coast, was an explicit and unequivocal casus belli; as explicit and unequivocal as would have been the placing of American nuclear missiles in Tito's anti-Soviet Yugoslavia.

Andrew Gimson

She wanted to murder Mandy

Elisabeth Furse, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of the most amazing hostesses London has known. One could not say she had a 'salon', for the word carries connotations of politeness and self-restraint which were entirely foreign to her. When I first descended the fire-escape-style steps to her basement flat in Belgravia in the mid-Eighties, she had already been inducting shy young Englishmen into the charms and horrors of bohemian Central European life for half a century. Her flat felt like a Berlin flea market. It was dominated by a long table at which 20 or more people could sit down to dinner, squashed together on rickety chairs.