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Saturday

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Your Problems Solved | 9 November 2002

From our UK edition

Dear Mary.... Q. During August there was a time when members of Brooks's were allowed into White's. A Test match was on and I wanted to see what the score was but the gun, or operator, to switch on the set was resting in the hands of a fairly aged member who was fast asleep at the back of the room. There was no one else present in the room. If you are in somebody else's club, what is the protocol about taking the operator out of the more legitimate member's hands?J.S.S., London W1 A. You were fortunate to have this rare opportunity to breach the portals of White's, since the club does not normally collude with the system of offering hospitality on a reciprocal basis to members of other clubs in St James's whose premises are being 'cleaned'.

Saturday

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More debit than credit

From our UK edition

The people in Hanif Kureishi's short fiction are rarely in the first flush of youth. Adam, the bleary sixtysomething protagonist of the title story, soon allows himself to be talked into experimenting with a new physical frame. Even at 45, Rick, the focus of 'Remember This Moment, Remember Us', is darkly conscious of having fetched up 'on the wrong side of life'. To corporeal frailty can be added emotional mishap. Festooned with ex-partners, children seen at weekends, weighed down by complex domestic arrangements, the average Kureishi male can seem faintly dogged in his efforts to secure some private space amid the chaos of his fraught, middle-aged life.

Saturday

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COMPETITION | 26 October 2002

From our UK edition

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.

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Motoring | 26 October 2002

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

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Motoring

From our UK edition

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.

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COMPETITION | 19 October 2002

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

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COMPETITION | 12 October 2002

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

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A poet under strict controls

From our UK edition

This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts - who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa - which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the risk of missing something revealing, amusing, germane. Perhaps these bits should have been printed in different type. Not a mountain, perhaps, a quarry for future Yeats scholars. However, these - a last complaint - will not be helped by the index: under 'astrology', for example, there are no less than 150 page references but no indication at all what occasion, or aspect of astrology, the pages mention; as an index, therefore, it is useless.

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COMPETITION

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

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Not one to be stared down

From our UK edition

No ghostwriter haunts this account of a cricketing life, so obviously written by the man who played the way he did: stubborn, scornful of frills and too intelligent to be dull; a man (a boy) who could stick up for himself. At 19, in 1987, while still at Cambridge, he was already playing for Lancashire, causing resentment. Someone daubed FEC on his locker, which did not mean 'Future England Captain' (the E stood for 'educated'). In only his third match for the county he put some wet clothes in the pavilion dryer and Paul Allott, a senior player, took them out and threw in his own. Atherton took out Allott's and replaced his. It will stand for an image of his whole career: no one was ever going to stare him down.

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Boots, boots, boots, boots

From our UK edition

KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYby Roy KeanePenguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455 One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being mildly puzzled by a joint biography of the Kennedys which sports a picture of two duelling footballers on its cover, but no, Jack and Bobby turns out to be a chronicle of the Charlton brothers. As such it recapitulates, and to a limited degree extends, a saga that sports journalists have been amusing themselves with for nearly 40 years, certainly long before the celebrated joint appearance in the 1966 World Cup final. On the surface - a surface diligently polished by the sports writers and professional colleagues - the story of the Charltons is one of diametrical opposites.

Saturday

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Black Wednesday remembered

From our UK edition

They got it wrong last time... It is the tenth anniversary of Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, and, across the nation, there will be diverse commemoration of that astonishing moment when the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Some may be brooding sorrowfully on the Tory party, which has not since recovered in the polls. Some may want to show a mark of respect to the myriad job losses, the 100,000 destroyed businesses, and the 1.75 million homes which were plunged into negative equity during the calamitous two years of Britain's membership. Here at The Spectator, we thought it right to remind you of all those who clamoured for the pound to join in October 1990, and who heroically pretended that the system was working.

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As sharp as cut tin

From our UK edition

In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most cherished bookworld fantasies involves a bored literary agent plucking A. S. Byatt's latest (not the internationally celebrated author, but an A. S. Byatt who has laboured on unregarded for 40 years) from the unsolicited manuscripts pile and then, a few moments later, in a spirit of mild bewilderment, putting it back. Read cold by someone unfamiliar with the dazzling encomia that litter Nicola Barker's book jackets, Behindlings, you fear, would produce a similar result. Two years back Miss Barker's Wide Open won the IMPAC award, 'the English-speaking world's largest prize for a single work of fiction'.

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When inner and outer reality collide

From our UK edition

Coleridge's Notebooks have been a companion during most of my mature life and this is a marvellously judged and varied selection, 1794 to 1820, from his 22nd year to his 48th. By that time he had become the loquacious Sage of Highgate, 'an archangel, a little damaged'. To the end he was a self-observer, still making, as it were, entries in his Notebooks, although it was now up to others to write them down.