The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 8 August 2013

Home Retail sales enjoyed their fastest July growth in seven years, thanks to demand for beer, sun cream, swimwear and barbecue food. Manufacturing output rose by 1.9 per cent in June, following declines in both April and May. Lloyds Banking Group announced profits of £2.1 billion for the first half of the year and António Horta-Osório, its chief executive, said he expected it to pay out 70 per cent of profits in dividends by 2015. Sir Ian Andrews resigned as the chairman of the Serious Organised Crime Agency after failing to declare a directorship in a management consultancy firm.

The Spectator

Causes and effects

When spending money is declared to be a good in itself, it is certain that much of it will be wasted. If that was not obvious already, it was proven by experiment when Gordon Brown announced 13 years ago that he wished to increase healthcare spending in Britain to the European average without much of a plan as to what he wanted to achieve with the money. There followed years of plenty for NHS staff, whose pay packets bulged. Patients found it harder to discern an improvement. Indeed, Brown’s great NHS spending splurge coincided with the Mid Staffs scandal. It should come as little surprise, then, that the same is happening in the charitable sector. The government’s target of pumping 0.

Tuesday

The Spectator

Spectator event: An evening with Simon Schama on the history of the Jews

There was a row earlier today when a leading figure in the EDL linked (inadvertently, he says) to a website of anti-Semitic sympathies. It is dispiriting that, more often than not, Judaism and Jewish people only receive mainstream media coverage when there is a public spat about anti-Semitism, for there is so much more to their history than persecution. As it happens, Simon Schama will be telling this, for want of a better phrase, “alternative history” in a BBC TV series this autumn. But readers of the Spectator don’t have to wait for the telly or the DVD because Schama will be giving us an exclusive talk at Cadogan Hall in London on Tuesday 17th September.

Monday

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When bats trump people

The grey long-eared bat is threatened by extinctions, according to various news reports this morning. Scientists at the University of Bristol, who made the discovery, have called for more protection of ‘foraging’ habitat in marshland and lowland meadow in southern England, where the climate is ideal for the grey long-eared bat. The scientists will probably get what they want, because the Bat Conservation Trust wants for nothing. Melissa Kite explains in this week’s issue of the Spectator: ‘Imagine: it’s Sunday morning, and the warden of a medieval village church arrives to get the place ready for communion only to find the altar covered in bat droppings.

Friday

The Spectator

The man who built Russia’s empire in America

Did you know that the Russians once had an empire (of sorts) in the Pacific North West of America? No, neither did Sam Leith. He has reviewed ‘a blindly good story extremely well told’ about this forgotten history (Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America by Owen Matthews) in this week’s edition of The Spectator. Here’s a passage to whet your appetite:  ‘Like most if not all imperial adventures, the civilising mission (ho ho) followed the money. Ever since the first Cossack pirate found a way through the Bering Strait, fur, or ‘soft gold’, was what they were all after.

The Spectator

Some brilliant book reviews | 2 August 2013

As ever, there are some absolutely scintillating book reviews in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here is a selection: Sam Leith revels in ‘a blindly good story extremely well told’: Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America by Owen Matthews. ‘Like most if not all imperial adventures, the civilising mission (ho ho) followed the money. Ever since the first Cossack pirate found a way through the Bering Strait, fur, or ‘soft gold’, was what they were all after. The discovery that in Chinese entrepot towns the pelt of a single sea-otter would fetch the equivalent of two years’ salary for an ordinary seaman was all anyone needed to know. Fur, tea and American manufactures were the basis of a Pacific triangle trade.

The Spectator

Rod Liddle on the cant of the Great Porn Act

Several articles in this week’s issue of the Spectator are worth the cover price alone. We’ll be flagging them up on Coffee House over the weekend. To start with, here is Rod Liddle on the row over pornography: ‘The Co-operative stores, with all the high-handed self-righteousness of the political movement to which it is paying obsequy, has demanded that henceforth publications such as Nuts and Zoo and Front must be displayed in plastic bags which disguise their front page. The front page of these mags usually consists of a young woman in a state of partial undress — but no nipples on display and certainly nothing from the really naughty region, that famous neck of the woods below the waist and from which babies emanate.

Thursday