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Saturday

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Democracy in danger

From our UK edition

What with postal fraud and dodgy demographics, next month’s poll is loaded in favour of the government. Rod Liddle says it’s about time Robert Mugabe started to send election monitors to Britain Isn’t it about time we got a little angrier and a little more scandalised? On 5 May we will troop up to the polling booths having endured four weeks of unfathomably banal soundbites, platitudinous drivel and vapid party political broadcasts — and we will do so because we believe it is our duty and because we have faith in the process. General elections and the whole notion of parliamentary democracy is as British as steak-and-kidney pie. We have it and many others do not, much to their disfavour. We trust it and we have implicit trust in ourselves not to abuse it.

Saturday

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England’s greatest export

From our UK edition

Shakespeare was the great glory of England. So wrote Victor Hugo. But he added that if you went to England to admire the statue of Shakespeare you would find instead the statue of Wellington. The English did not like Shakespeare. His fame came to England from overseas. And Hugo believed that the French played their part in making the English conscious of his greatness. There is a generation of English people to whom this will appeal. Those who went to France after the Liberation found themselves taking part in discussions about Shakespeare such as they never knew in England. Central was Jean-Louis Barrault with his production of Hamlet. Was he a great actor? Was the mis-en-scène appropriate? Were the translations acceptable?

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The unease of the distant East

From our UK edition

Defying the geographical promise of its title, The India House turns out to be set in Shropshire. Here, in sequest- ered, Eden-era retreat, two generations of a decayed rentier family — embittered grandma Mrs Covington and frosty daughter Evelyn — are doing their utmost to prevent any noxious post-war fall-out from contaminating the third. They are abetted in this mission by fey Mr Henry, a failed Georgian poet deprived of his school- mastering job after ‘The Incident’, whose educative brief it is to provide Mrs Covington’s grand-daughter Julia with a curriculum from which all traces of the 20th century have been removed. Above this mirthless near-zenana hangs the penetrating scent of lost empire.

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Designed for living

From our UK edition

Andrew Lambirth finds plenty to enjoy at the V&A’s Arts and Crafts show, despite the gloom International Arts and Crafts is the third of the V&A’s major 19th/20th century ‘lifestyle’ themed exhibitions, following on from the successes of Art Nouveau (2000) and Art Deco (2003). Both those shows were ingenious and loving tributes to their subjects, and spectacles of the highest order. Before that, in 1996, there was the justly famed celebration of William Morris. What the current show (until 24 July and sponsored by Heal’s) proves beyond doubt is the danger of establishing a pattern and expecting every cultural development to rise to the occasion and create a similar star turn in exhibition terms. Sometimes the raw material simply isn’t suitable.

Saturday

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Diary – 26 March 2005

From our UK edition

We have just moved back into the house I grew up in. It’s at Sissinghurst in Kent and my father lived there until his death last September, or at least in one part of it. The whole house and garden belongs to the National Trust, but when my father gave it to them in 1967, part of the agreement was that he and any of his descendants ‘however remote’ could live there for ever and a day. It is a slightly strange experience. The house, of course, is overwhelmingly parental: his furniture, his books, his files, his pictures, his whole habit of being. In one or two of the files, there are little yellow Post-Its stuck in significant places, put there, I guess, in the early 1980s.

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Labour’s stolen votes

From our UK edition

Birmingham At one o’clock in the morning of 9 June last year, two days before the local council elections, Police Sergeant John Rattenberry of Erdington police station, Birmingham, was called to investigate something strange going on inside a warehouse. Here’s what he witnessed, in his own words: ‘I entered the first floor of the warehouse and went into a room where I saw approximately five Asian males along with four police officers. I could see a large table on which there were a lot of miscellaneous papers and A5 unsealed envelopes. I could see that the envelopes contained several pieces of paper including marked ballot papers.

Saturday

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End-of-term report on our masters

From our UK edition

The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the imperatives of politics; and a great extension of the state into the lives of individuals, families and businesses. This book is an unqualified celebration of that achievement. Written by the Guardian journalists (and husband and wife) Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Better or Worse? concludes happily that the state has grown much larger under Labour, and shows, in detail, how. It is ineffably boring.

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Theatre of cruelty

From our UK edition

‘The Colosseum is the most famous and instantly recognisable monument to have survived from the classical world.’ In the 19th century the thing to do when in Rome was to visit the Colosseum by moonlight, and quote Byron. This is no longer possible. The ruin is closed at dusk, and anyway the moon will have been obscured by the combination of street lighting and traffic fumes. Thronged with tourists, the Colosseum is not the place for Romantic reveries. Perhaps they were always inappropriate. Everybody knows the Colosseum, but far less is known about what went on there than many of us may suppose. Misconcep- tions abound. Thanks to Quo Vadis? we know that the Emperor Nero watched Christians being devoured by lions in the arena.

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Alice doesn’t live here any more

From our UK edition

Alice Thomas Ellis, the novelist and former Spectator columnist who died last week, once took part in an earnest feminist questionnaire that asked her to name the most important event in women’s history. ‘The Annunciation,’ she replied. Alice — known to all her friends by her real name, Anna — bore the physical aspect of a sensitive north London novelist: her huge, panda eyes were pools of compassion, framed by wispy hair and hand-made earrings. When people discovered that she was a Catholic — indeed, that it was the most important thing in her life — they sometimes assumed that she belonged to the Church’s ‘justice ’n’ peace’ brigade and subscribed to the Tablet, an archly progressive Catholic magazine.

Saturday

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The Pentagon’s new pin-up boy

From our UK edition

Mukhtara, Lebanon With his bald pate, droopy moustache and sad, bleary eyes, Walid Jumblatt looks more circus clown than Pentagon pin-up. And if the warlord’s eccentric appearance were not enough to dismay White House officials, then his penchant for virulent leftist anti-Americanism would seem to place him firmly in their ‘against us’ category. As Lebanon’s Soviet-backed chieftain of the Druze, a secretive sect which broke away from Shia Islam in the 11th century and believes in reincarnation, Jumblatt, now 55, played an active role in the country’s blood-soaked civil war. In 1983 he announced a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Maronites. ‘With the help of our Syrian allies we have removed the Christians and only the Druze villages will remain....

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A revolution made for TV

From our UK edition

On Tuesday, half a million people were demonstrating in the streets of Beirut, chanting and waving flags. If you only gave the TV a quick glance, you probably assumed that they were protesting against the Syrian presence in Lebanon. In fact it was a rally organised by Hezbollah in support of Syria, but for almost a month now — since the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri — the newspapers have been full of Beirut rising up in outrage against occupation, men and women in the streets dressed in red and white, shouting, ‘Syria Out!’: the Cedar Revolution. Last Saturday, in Beirut, I set off in search of the revolution. I took a friend for company in case of a hostage situation, and walked west to the Place des Martyrs to show solidarity.

Saturday

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Time to fight back | 26 February 2005

From our UK edition

It is 7 a.m. and across Britain sober citizens awake to switch on the BBC Radio Four news. They expect perhaps to hear about Iraqis killing Iraqis, about some hope in Palestine or Gordon Brown’s latest boasts on the economy. Instead, at the top of the bulletin they learn what the BBC judges the most important news of the day. With all solemnity it announces that the Duchess of York has voiced support for Prince Harry in the argument about a swastika at a fancy dress party. How low can the BBC sink in obeisance to the triviality of the popular press? No one should blame the Duchess, who needs all the headlines she can get. But the BBC is a public-sector body, at present arguing its portentous case for continuing the licence fee.

Saturday

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Champions Chelsea?

From our UK edition

Not that soccer’s ubiquitous hurly-burly has remotely gone away, but its yawping volumes are even increased next week with the resumption of serious international stuff and the two-leg frenzies of the Champions League. Setting sail with various degrees of strut and confidence are Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea. Anticipation of the latter’s contest with Barcelona especially zaps the taste-buds and riddles the spine. Chelsea have surely settled the Premiership and their consistent nous and narrow-eyed killer instinct has fair rattled the erstwhile monarchs, Arsenal and Manchester United, who thus begin in Europe’s knockout bouts with extra trepidation.

Saturday

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Bush will not be mocked

From our UK edition

Mark Steyn says it’s time for limp, languid Tory toffs to join the fight for freedom New Hampshire On the eve of the Iraq election, the Times treated us to a riveting columnar collaboration: ‘We need to fix an exit timetable, say Robin Cook, Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell’ — in perfect harmony. To modify Churchill, defeat may be an orphan, but defeatism has many fathers, and these three were in tripartisan agreement about what a disaster Iraq had been.

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Die in Britain, survive in the US

From our UK edition

James Bartholomew says American healthcare is an expensive muddle that leaves millions unprotected, and yet it delivers much better results — for everyone — than the NHS Which is better — American or British medical care? If a defender of the National Health Service wants to win the argument against a free market alternative, he declares, ‘You wouldn’t want healthcare like they have in America, would you?’ That is the knock-out blow. Everyone knows the American system is horrible. You arrive in hospital, desperately ill, and they ask to see your credit card. If you haven’t got one, they boot you out. It is, surely, a heartless, callous, unthinkable system. American healthcare is unbridled capitalism, red in the blood of the untreated poor.

Saturday

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He didn’t linger

From our UK edition

The Australian Robert Dessaix, a Russian scholar, chooses to regard himself, in relation to Western civilisation, as an ancient Greek might have considered a Phrygian or a Scythian — a barbarian outsider. This, he believes, brings him even closer to his beloved and Russian Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life outside Russia, but whom his lifelong love, the French opera singer Pauline Viardot, always regarded as ‘a barbarian’. This famous love leads Dessaix to speculate about the nature of love itself. It was ‘triangular’, in the sense that Viardot was married, and, in the manner of the 12th-century troubadours, it became a ‘courtly love’.

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A crushing defeat for the insurgents

From our UK edition

Tikrit Sitting beneath a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt pinned to the wall of his office deep inside a former Baathist presidential palace, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe lolled back in his chair and roared with laughter at the fatal idiocy of so many of his enemies. ‘We’ve had well over a dozen examples of these knuckleheads doing stupid things,’ he chuckled. ‘Here’s a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone. They didn’t have a baseplate so they were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them in the tube and they exploded, blowing their legs off.

Saturday

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Self-exiled by bad dreams

From our UK edition

About Grace is about David Winkler, a man crippled and made fearful by the accuracy of his dreamed premonitions — a man who foresees future events and who is then constrained to watch them unfold. He dreams of a man killed in an accident and then witnesses that accident. He dreams of meeting his future wife and then encounters her exactly as foretold. And then he dreams of the death by drowning of their one-year-old daughter, Grace — a death in which David Winkler himself plays a large part. In an effort to forestall this, Winkler decides to leave the only two people he loves, escape to the Caribbean, and live alone there for the next 25 years.

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A woman of some importance

From our UK edition

The writer William Mayne has said, ‘I don’t know why there are supposed to be only two sexes. I can think of at least eight, even before you get to women.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, though no wit, would have been pleased with this. She saw herself as neither male nor female but ‘a new genus’, one who must always ‘follow her own track’, and be ‘tender’ but intransigent. She could not see herself as of the same species as other girls who seemed to live for marriage — any marriage — to escape the shame of poverty and spinsterhood. She herself had been the child of a terrible marriage; her father a violent drunk and her mother a passive depressive. She burned with zeal to change things.

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An art of surprises

From our UK edition

Sir Anthony Caro celebrated his 80th birthday last year, and this slightly belated but determinedly triumphal exhibition marks a half-century of remarkable and sustained achievement. Caro is phenomenally successful, an international figure almost as prominent as Henry Moore, and equally if not more important historically. For it was Caro who revolutionised sculpture in the early 1960s, bringing it down off its pedestal and creating a vibrant and brightly coloured language of abstract form which swept the world with its radical values, spawning a host of imitators.