The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Richard Bean

From our UK edition

This week's Shelf Lifer is Richard Bean. The British playwright recently won joint best new play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last year for both One Man, Two Guvnors at the National and The Heretic at The Royal Court. He tells us what he used to read to spite his father, which character in Brighton Rock he would sleep with and which play he would put on the GCSE syllabus. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Chavs by Owen Jones The King's War by Miss C. V. Wedgewood (Both social history books. Play research, I hardly ever have the time to read novels.) 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? On the Road by Jack Kerouac; The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle Junior - basically drug and hippy literature, surreptitiously  'cause my dad was a policeman.

Saturday

The Spectator

Omniscandal

From our UK edition

It is easy to understand Bob Diamond’s miscalculation. In the great pantheon of banking scandals, it was unlikely, he thought, that Libor interest-rate rigging would rank very high. Libor is the average interest rate at which banks lend to each other — or, rather, the rate at which they admit to lending to each other. Any metric that depends on bankers’ honesty is, obviously, wide open to manipulation, so when the Financial Services Authority decided to tighten the rules, with an investigation six months ago, the natural response was a yawn. Barclays had been bending the rules, but so had everyone else, and Barclays was so co-operative that the FSA reduced its fine by £25 million.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 July 2012

From our UK edition

Home  Bob Diamond resigned as chief executive of Barclays a day after he said he wasn’t resigning. Marcus Agius resigned as chairman of Barclays, and a day later was appointed ‘full-time chairman’ to seek a replacement for Mr Diamond. The imbroglio followed a £290 million fine (£59.5 million by the British Financial Services Authority and the rest by American authorities) for Barclays’ having filed false information on its borrowings in connection with the setting of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor).

The Spectator

Letters | 7 July 2012

China and Tibet Sir: Clarissa Tan poses the question: ‘What happens to people who do not have the joy of being Chinese?’ (‘China’s civilising mission’, 30 June). China’s handling of Tibet provides the answer. After 60 years of occupation, torture, intimidation and repression continue unabated. Tibetans are now doing the only thing they can to draw attention to their plight — setting themselves on fire.  If conditions are so desperate that, against all the precepts of Buddhist teachings on nonviolence and the sanctity of human life, citizens are driven to taking their own lives through self immolation, it hardly supports China’s claim to represent a ‘civilising mission’.

The Spectator

Barometer | 7 July 2012

Lost and found  A team from St Andrews University has published its attempts to map the remains of Doggerland, an area of land and later an island in the North Sea which disappeared around 5,500 bc as a result of rising sea levels after the last ice age. Some other possible lost lands: — Atlantis. According to Plato, it was a naval power close to the pillars of Hercules at the western end of the Mediterranean that sank in a day and a night in c. 9,600 bc after a failed attempt to conquer Athens. — Mu. Invented by a Victorian writer, Augustus Le Plongeon, who claimed to have gleaned its existence from Mayan writings. Survivors of its rapid disappearance apparently went on to found ancient Egypt. — Lemuria.

The Spectator

Bookbenchers: Douglas Alexander MP | 7 July 2012

From our UK edition

After a brief hiatus, the Spectator’s Bookbencher interview returns. First up is Douglas Alexander, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South and shadow foreign secretary. He tells which books he’ll be reading this summer.  1) Which book's on your bedside table at the moment? Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway — the recently published memoir of one of Scotland's most controversial and colourful churchman on his life's journey from faith to doubt. 2) Which book would you read to your children? As a family we have read and loved all the Katy Morag adventures set on the fictionalised Isle of Struay based on the actual Isle of Coll in the Hebrides. Right now I am reading with my daughter ‘Katy Morag Delivers the Mail’.

The Spectator

Bookbenchers: Douglas Alexander MP

From our UK edition

After a brief hiatus, the Spectator’s Bookbenchers interview recommences this week. Over at the books blog, Douglas Alexander MP, the shadow foreign secretary, tells us what he plans to read his children over the summer, as well what he hopes to read for himself. He says: ‘My mother, who herself was born in China — the daughter of Scottish medical missionaries — just leant me a book called Through Earth Wind and Fire which is a history of the Scottish missionaries in China which I hope will help fill in some of the gaps in my family history.’ You can read his answers in full.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Cityboy

From our UK edition

Geraint Anderson still has an axe to grind. Filthy lucre is corrupting public life, and the City's casino banks continue to spoil all who come near them. Their venality is the subject of his latest book, Payback Time - of which he wrote in these pages last week. He is this week's Shelf Lifer. He tells us what he's into (the Marquis de Sade) and what he's not (Rick Santorum). He tweets @cityboylondon 1) What are you reading at the moment? William Golding’s Lord of the Flies…again 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? See above as well as page 72 of James Herbert’s The Rats 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

Monday

The Spectator

Calling for Agius’ head

From our UK edition

Marcus Agius' resignation this morning as chair of Barclays took few by surprise after being widely trailed over the weekend. But as ever, The Spectator was far ahead of the curve, with columnist Martin Vander Weyer calling on 5 May for Agius to go, nearly two months before the Libor scandal even broke. You can read his argument below. A word of sympathy for Alison Carnwath, the chairman of Barclays’ remuneration committee, whose re-election to the bank’s board failed to win support from a quarter of its shareholders at last week’s turbulent AGM.

Saturday

The Spectator

Cyber insecurity

From our UK edition

The NatWest banking disaster is an ominous reminder of the way in which technology has come to control our lives. We now know what a proper IT collapse feels like: a piece of computer code goes wrong and, within days, bank machines shut down and chaos ensues. This week the stories range from unpaid bills to the parents of a critically ill seven-year-old in hospital in Mexico fearing that her life-support machine would be turned off for want of funds. NatWest says it was a software screw-up, not a cyber-attack. But there are plenty of the latter taking place every day. As we show in our special cybersecurity supplement this week, Britain’s dependence on computers has become one of our biggest vulnerabilities.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 June 2012

From our UK edition

Home A computer failure left millions of customers of RBS and NatWest without access to their money for days; a man was held in jail over the weekend because his bail payment could not be traced, and other customers feared that their credit ratings would suffer because of missed payments for mortgages and regular direct debits. Alistair Darling, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, launched the campaign against Scottish independence called Better Together. England was knocked out of Euro 2012 in a penalty shootout with Italy. ••• The government introduced, at the instigation of the Liberal Democrats, a bill for a reformed, mostly elected House of Lords.

The Spectator

Letters | 30 June 2012

From our UK edition

Hunting for real Tories Sir: It is interesting to note that more than 10 per cent (four) of the 39 Tory MPs who comprise the Free Enterprise Group, which your correspondent James Forsyth assures us is full of young radicals determined to lead a fightback from the Tory right (‘Next right’, 23 June), are committed to keeping the ban on fox-hunting. How can you be a right-wing Tory and be anti-hunting? If this is the best that the Tory right has to offer, then Ukip must be looking good. Peter Holt Wellington, Telford Debt is the problem Sir: Your leading article is misconceived (‘Summit of arrogance’, 23 June).

Thursday

The Spectator

Shelf Life special: The Skidelskys

From our UK edition

Robert and Edward Skidelsky have written a new book for our times, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, which is published today. In their own words: ‘it is the story of… how we came to be ensnared by the dream of progress with purpose, riches without end.’ But what have this father son combination been reading while penning this and their other books? The answer is: rather more than just John Maynard Keynes. Robert Skidelsky 1) What are you reading at the moment? Laurent Binet, HHhH 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? J.B.Priestley, The Good Companions Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? As a child, F.W. Farrar, Eric, or Little by Little — uncontrollably.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Samantha Brick

From our UK edition

Journalist and former TV producer, Samantha Brick was recently castigated for her Daily Mail article suggesting that some might be intimidated by her good looks. But since we're always game at Shelf Life, we invited her to reveal which books she would read during solitary confinement, where she wouldn't like to find herself with Patrick Bateman and what she used to read under the covers. Samantha Brick has a personal website. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Lots of ex-pats-who-have-relocated-to-France type memoirs. I’ve just negotiated a deal to write my own warts’n’all version of living the French ‘dream’, so I thought I really ought to read the others in this genre too. My favourites so far are the Carol Drinkwater series, she writes exquisitely.

Monday

The Spectator

Transcript: IDS on Today

From our UK edition

Iain Duncan Smith appeared on the Today programme this morning. In a heated interview with Evan Davis, the work and pensions secretary was interrogated about David Cameron’s radical welfare proposals. Conversation ranged from cutting rental payments for under-25s to protecting non-means tested pensioner benefits. The bulk of the exchange was devoted to discussing Cameron’s intentions, as he seeks to make welfare reform a central part of the 2015 election. Here is a transcript of those passages: Evan Davis: Okay, I’m going to quote a couple of things that you wrote in your green paper. ‘Successive governments have made well-intentioned but piecemeal reforms to the system.

Saturday

The Spectator

Summit of arrogance

From our UK edition

The folly of jetting off to an international summit in a pleasant tropical resort during a time of emergency at home was amply demonstrated by Jim Callaghan in 1979 when he arrived, suntanned, back from the Caribbean apparently unaware of the seriousness of growing industrial unrest at home. But at least he never actually uttered the words ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ This week, on the other hand, the EU Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, really did make a statement that deserves to enter the history books, as a symptom of the detachment of EU leaders from the economic crisis engulfing the eurozone.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 June 2012

From our UK edition

Home Europe faced ‘perpetual stagnation’ unless leaders acted to resolve the euro crisis, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said at the G20 summit of leading economies in Mexico. He also said that he would ‘welcome more French businesses to Britain’, where they would pay tax at a lower rate than that imposed by the Socialist government. David Lidington, the Europe Minister, insisted that a proposal by European Union ministers to reduce the British budget rebate was pointless, as Britain would not accept it. Workers paid less than £13,000 a year will no longer be able to claim working tax credits when they are on strike, the government said.

The Spectator

Letters | 23 June 2012

From our UK edition

Full steam ahead Sir: Your cover story (‘A U-turn to celebrate’, 16 June) claimed that the government has ditched High Speed 2: we absolutely have not. The article was built on three assertions, none of which stand up to scrutiny. Firstly, HS2 legislation has always been planned for the 2013–2014 session of Parliament, as set out in my department’s business plan of over a year ago, and never earlier as alleged in the story. There is no delay, no rethink. Secondly, as the article points out, I do listen to the concerns of those opposed to the project because I recognise the impact HS2 will have and I care about how I deal with the local communities affected. But no one should think that means I no longer support the scheme.