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Saturday

Andrew Rosenheim

Bad enemy, worse lover

Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. It’s less likely to boost his reputation as a man. Bellow was never humble about his talents, and the surviving early letters show an intellectual precocity leavened by the vernacular of melting-pot Chicago. Yet initially he was reluctant to plumb home-grown strengths for his work. His first two novels were constructed on what he

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Chinese burns

The latest cache of Wikileaks has done America no end of good. The Saudis urged the US to bomb Iran – a sign that the Arab world can make common cause with the States and Israel. It has also emerged that North Korea has sold the Iranians long range rockets – Moscow, Berlin and Istanbul are all within the Ayatollah’s range. But the most important revelation is that China has tired of North Korea’s lunatic machinations, recognising that the rogue state is an impediment to global and regional security. China is also convinced that the country will not survive Kim Jung-il’s death and favours a union of the two Koreas,

Saturday

David Blackburn

There was more to Blair than a winning smile

Following Sir Christopher Meyer’s review of George Bush’s Decision Points, here is the other half of the double act. The closest I’ve come to meeting Tony Blair was knocking into Michael Sheen on the street. I got no closer reading Blair’s memoir, most of which is beyond parody. Cherie Booth QC is a strong armed nocturnal adventuress; Anji Hunter is a bountiful babe; and Mr Blair is a would-be Casanova with a taste for premonitions and Schindler’s List. You barely notice New Labour’s reform programme under the torrent of erratic writing and bizarre digressions. The defence of the Iraq war is cumbersome; the sketches of his allies and adversaries too

Ian Thomson

So far from God . . .

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s second largest border city, is clogged with rubbish, fouled with car exhaust and, increasingly, flooded with narcotics. Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s second largest border city, is clogged with rubbish, fouled with car exhaust and, increasingly, flooded with narcotics. Mexican drug cartels are now so deeply ingrained in the city’s political and social fabric that not a single bar or shop remains ‘un-narcotised’. Mexico in the 21st century, according to Ed Vulliamy, is a nation shadowed by gangland enterprise and the rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs. To live on the US-Mexican border, how ever, calls for special qualities of endurance. The four US states bordering Mexico — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona

Thursday

Christopher Meyer

Sir Christopher Meyer reviews George Bush’s memoirs

Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to the United States, has reviewed George Bush’s biography for the latest issue of The Spectator. We’ve pasted his entire review below, for readers of our Book Blog. Taking the long view, Christopher Meyer, The Spectator, 20 November 2010 While Tony Blair emerged from his memoirs as a chameleon of many colours, there is only one George W. Bush in Decision Points. The book reads like the man speaks. If it has been ghosted — and Bush gives thanks to a multitude of helpers — it has been done with consummate skill to preserve the authentic Bush voice. The result will be unexpected,

Thursday

Gideon Rachman

Playing with fire | 11 November 2010

As the G20 summit begins in Seoul, the emphasis in much of the papers is on the economic hostility between America and China. The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote a cover piece on this matter for The Spectator two weeks ago, which we’ve reprinted here for the benefit of CoffeeHousers: In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in

Saturday

James Forsyth

Reading the Tea Party

Copyright BBC Tea Party America with Andrew Neil, Renegade Pictures for the BBC This Tuesday we will find out the electoral strength of the Tea Party, the insurgent political movement that has already toppled several favourites of the Republican Establishment. From this side of the Atlantic, it has been hard to get a handle on the Tea Party. Does it represent a right turn in US politics or is it just a rag-tag group whose policies and candidates are just too extreme to be electable? To answer this question, Andrew Neil headed to the States this summer; travelling to the states where the Tea Party has made the most impact.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Pastures new for David Miliband?

David Miliband’s logic is difficult to fault. If he stayed, he would be treated as the torch bearer for those disgruntled Labour members who feel they were robbed. Without him, such people have no one to turn to. New Labour will now dissolve. ‘Progress’ – supposedly for the next generation of Blairites – held their meeting in a Manchester venue named the Comedy Store and that says it all. Game over: as Neil Kinnock put it last night “I’ve got my party back”.   No matter how loyal he would be, David Miliband could not but be seen as a focal point for the (many) Labour MPs who hate all

Saturday

Sara Wheeler

Way out west

This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. He is the nearest that country gets to a national treasure, with a hefty bibliography to show it: the University of California Press’s 70-volume Works and Papers represents but a fragment, and in June Penguin published an entire book on the food Twain ate. Now here comes Roy Morris Jr with a contribution covering Twain’s pre-fame journeys among the mines and saloons of the western frontier. What does it add? Samuel Clemens (as Twain was born) worked as an itinerant printer and a Mississippi riverboat pilot before a reluctant stint

Saturday

Jane Ridley

Girls from the golden West

Who was the first American to marry an English duke? Most students of the peerage would say it was Consuelo Yzagna who married the eldest son of the Duke of Manchester in 1876. But the banjo-strumming Cuban American Consuelo was not the first Yankee duchess. As early as 1828 the American Louisa Caton married the eldest son of the Duke of Leeds. This was half a century before the dollar princesses, trading titles for cash, played havoc with Burke’s Peerage. Louisa and her sisters were the pioneers of the American invasion of London society. Their conquest was so successful, and they became so assimilated, that they left barely a ripple.

Saturday

Inigo Thomas

A smooth passage

Jonathan Raban left Britain and moved to Seattle in 1990, when he was 47. He sold his Volkswagen on his way to Heathrow airport. He bought a Dodge with Washington state plates the next day, and in this second-hand car he would, over the years, travel through and write about his new country. ‘The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet — the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess — for hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast,’ Raban wrote in the summer of 1993, in a piece that’s now republished in Driving Home: It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be

Friday

Peter Hoskin

“Henceforward all men everywhere will be living on the edge of a volcano”

With today being the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I thought I’d excavate The Spectator’s leading article from the time:    A Crisis of Civilisation, The Spectator, 10 August, 1945 In Mr Churchill’s statement about the atomic bomb issued by Mr Attlee on Sunday exultation at having anticipated the enemy gave way to awe. Mr Churchill spoke of this “revelation of the secrets of Nature” as one “long mercifully withheld from man.” So terrific a power of destruction is now known to be in the hands of the Allies that in retrospect we can see that the race between the scientists threatened to be the decisive factor in

Sunday

David Blackburn

US double talk on Megrahi

If what the Sunday Times reports is true, then Kenny McAskill deserves an apology. ‘In the letter, sent on August 12 last year to Alex Salmond, the first minister, and justice officials, Richard LeBaron (deputy ambassador in London) wrote that the United States wanted Megrahi to remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime. The note added: “Nevertheless, if Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from Scottish custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer, which we strongly oppose.” LeBaron added that freeing the bomber and making him live in Scotland

Wednesday

John R. MacArthur

King and his killer

In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages. In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages. Even allowing for Bush’s considerable ignorance and malevolent world view, those contemporary doomsayers had forgotten recent history. As bad as the Bush era was,

Saturday

Nicholas Haslam

Schlock teaser

The somewhat straightlaced theatre-going audiences of 1880s America, eager for performances by European artistes like Jenny Lind and solid, home-grown, classical actors such as Otis Skinner, were hardly prepared for the on-stage vulgarity that the (usually) Russian and Polish immigrant impressarios, with their particular nous for show-biz, were to unleash into the saloons and fleapits across the young nation. Of the many weird acts that comprised Vaudeville — the bearded ladies, fiddling baboons, human cannonballs and, apparently, ‘comics wearing enormous rubber phalluses’ — none can have been so strange, have kicked against so many pricks, so to speak, than little Louise, the daughter of the echt pushy stage-mother of Vaudeville’s

Wednesday

Isobel Greenhalgh

Reds under the bed

This Russian spy story just gets better and better. First a young, attractive Russian woman called Anna – with a penchant for uploading suggestive pictures of herself onto Facebook — is seized in an FBI swoop for being at the centre of a Russian espionage network. Next, it emerges that the agents from Moscow had outwitted the FBI by going back in time. Aware that electronic messages — via mobile, or online — are are an open book to any decent spook-catcher, they simply learnt from the past and used invisible ink and messages in buried bottles to send information their colleagues in South America. Some of the spies even

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

High priest of bop

In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.’ In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked

Saturday

Oliver Marre

Whither America?

At the beginning of The Ask, Horace sits with Burke and proclaims that America is a ‘run down and demented pimp’. At the beginning of The Ask, Horace sits with Burke and proclaims that America is a ‘run down and demented pimp’. Horace is not Quintus Horatius Flac- cus; and Burke is not Edmund Burke. The two men are employees of the fundraising department of a mediocre university in New York, whose job is to approach the rich families of former students and solicit donations. This is, of course, a peculiarly American job, where the super-rich are relied upon to finance academe in exchange for favours bestowed on their offspring.

Saturday

Alexander Waugh

Insufficiently honoured here

‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. ‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. His jaunty remark was overheard by a little old lady standing next to me on the platform. ‘Gentlemen, honestly!’ she said, reaching for the train door. But it was locked. Hitchens stuck his torso out of the window and called to the platform manager to let her in.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Trans-Atlantic  powwow

I’m in Washington DC at a high-level seminar on trans-Atlantic relations with the “who is who” of Europe and the US, talking about issues of common concern. The Germans are here in force, as are the French, with high-ranking officials speaking about topics like Russia and Iran. Interestingly, the Brits are notable in their absence. It is probably a sign that the British government is still in transition mode, unable to explain any new policies, unready to stake out new positions. Or they may not be bothered with unofficial events such as these given the privileged access they have. But it is worth noticing nonetheless. The event is both off