News
THE WIKI MAN Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00 EST
I'd like to start 2009 with a few words of thanks to everyone who has joined the Spectator readers' lending team at www.kiva. org/team/spectator. So far we have lent money to over 100 small businesses in the developing world, a figure buoyed by the disproportionate generosity of the Spectator's Australian readership (including a lady from Cairns in a particularly elegant hat). We still have some way to go before overtaking the largest lending team -- 1,700 people from Team Obama, since you ask -- but every new joiner helps. And, thanks to the depreciation of the pound, the interest-free loans I made earlier in the year through Kiva (the loans are repaid in US dollars) have turned out to be unexpectedly profitable. So my only successful investment all year has been in a charity; there's a moral there somewhere.
I live with a supermodel -- excessively fussy about diet and grooming. Sadly this gorgeous creature has four legs not two, and is a boy not a girl. He is a Pekingese dog and, five years ago, he was a birthday present from my wife. (She, too, of course, is a supermodel. ) My Pekingese is extremely special. Every British Pekingese is currently extremely special. In figures published recently, the Kennel Club lists only 567 pekes in the country, with only seven accredited peke breeders. This works out at around one peke per 100,000 of population. This challenges the principle of a little going a long way. For God's sake, this challenges the principle of the parable of loaves and fishes.
My Siciliana pizza arrived with three artichoke slices missing last night. Three artichoke slices, two anchovy fillets and a chunk of mozzarella missing to be precise. I know this because I am a creature of obsessional habits and when I get accustomed to a thing, I tend to get neurotically accustomed to it.
Shark attack Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00 EST
Three missed calls. Two answer phone messages. The bank manager. He needed to see me. Would I make an appointment and come in to see him as soon as possible? His tone of voice suggested it was a matter of some urgency. Had some energetic, enterprising person fraudulently obtained my password or pin number and cleaned out my overdraft facility, I wondered?
Wagner treat Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00 EST
Tristan und Lsolde
The year 2008 was like herpes, very hard to get rid of; 2009 will be worse, trust me, as Bernie Madoff used to tell the suckers. This one, incidentally, is not over. The greatest scam ever perpetrated will go on and on. Madoff was not alone, and if the crooks in the SEC who turned a blind eye to his Ponzi scheme are ever forced to come clean, some pretty big names will hopefully end up in striped suits sewing buttons. Madoff scammed small investors, billionaires, hedge fund idiots, charities, pension funds and multinational banks. What is incredible is that his fund was repeatedly brought to the attention of the SEC, and every time he was given a clean bill of health. Libel laws prevent me from naming names, but they're out there, being talked about by everyone who can smell a rat after the fact. The SEC never subpoenaed the firm's records but 'relied on information voluntarily produced by the Madoff family . . . ' That's like asking Al Capone if he had anything to do with a massacre t
When, back in the mists of history, I proposed to Mrs Oakley (in the rather naff Caribbean cocktail bar of what seemed at the time to be a fashionable London venue patronised by a set we could not afford to join) I prefaced my question with a long preview about the perils of marrying a journalist. Fortunately, she did not take me seriously.
There's a very full year's viewing ahead to cheer the eye and gladden the heart however bleak the financial prospects. For a start, the National Gallery is mounting a major exhibition focusing on the fascinating relationship that Picasso had with the art of the past. His reworkings of Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Chardin and Delacroix, together with responses to more contemporary masters such as van Gogh and Gauguin, provide a riveting dialogue of minds. Picasso: Challenging the Past (25 February to 7 June) will offer new ways to look at the Old Masters as well as a different take on Picasso. The autumn blockbuster is The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 (21 October to 24 January 2010). Featuring such artists as Velázquez, Zurbarán, Alonso Cano and Pedro de Mena, and juxtaposing paintings with polychrome sculptures, this should be something of an intensely focused revelation.
LAND OF MARVELS by Barry Unsworth Hutchinson, £18.99, pp. 287, ISBN 9780091926175 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
NAAFI BREAK Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00 EST
'Will you GET a F***ING HOLD OF IT [your rifle], soldier! ! ! . . .
HELIOPOLIS by James Scudamore Harvill/Secker, £11.99, pp. 279, ISBN 9781846551888 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
If you don't mind -- yeah, like you've any choice in the matter -- what I thought I'd do for this New Year column is to do just enough TV for the editor not to want to sack me, then move swiftly on to the stuff my hardcore fans prefer, namely the rambling and shameless solipsism.
AND THEN THERE WAS NO ONE by Gilbert Adair Faber, £14.99, pp. 258, ISBN 9780571238811 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
THE DUEL: PAKISTAN ON THE FLIGHT OF AMERICAN POWER by Tariq Ali Simon & Schuster, £17.99, pp. 304, ISBN 9781847373557 £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
PUTIN AND THE RISE OF RUSSIA by Michael Stuermer Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 253, ISBN 9780297855095 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
It's early days in Indonesia's election season, but already Jakarta is transformed into a riot of colour. Political bunting of all shades sprouts from every conceivable vantage point, brightening the grey of poverty; the green of the surging Islamist parties; the red and black buffalo of the party of Sukarno's eldest daughter Megawati; the yellow of Golkar, the clan of the late kleptator Suharto and his cronies. Posters and promises garland walls, bridges and streetside food stalls.
Sir: If, as William Leith says (Books, 13 December), Shakespeare was born in 1516 and died in 1564, who was it who wrote the plays attributed to him which were first performed between 1590 and 1616? I think we should be told.
Sir: Robert Beaumont (City life, 6 December), whomsoever he may be, didn't do his research when he visited Nottingham. Its heritage is manufacturing, not mining, and so the city was unaffected by the pit closures in the 1980s and 1990s, as it didn't have any. The 'melancholy' and 'bitter legacy' which apparently hung over the city when Mr Beaumont visited must have been one of those awful 'northern' fogs which had perhaps journeyed down to the city long known as the Queen of the Midlands. That can be the only explanation for the clouded vision that allowed him to make a truly remarkable journey from the Victoria Centre to Broadmarsh simply by walking down Clumber Street. Clumber Street actually takes you to Gustafson Porter's awardwinning Market Square, which Mr Beaumont must have missed while he was busy lamenting the lack of a plaque commemorating Jesse Boot.
Sir: On the popularity of modern poetry (Ancient and modern, 13 December) G.K.
Sir: I read Paul Johnson's admirably simple explanation of the origins of the universe (And another thing, 13 December) on the 6.46 Chiltern Railways train from Marylebone to Saunderton. His argument, that the creation of the universe by a single god is simpler than any other explanation and hence true, opened my eyes to a deeper truth about the world around me. Simplicity can sometimes be stunning.
Sir: The Spectator is right (Leading article, 13 December) to call not just for 'benefit claimants actually to do something for their handouts', but for a significant increase in the income tax threshold. There is little sense -- or fairness -- in trying to push people off benefits and into work if they are worse off in work than on benefits. In any case, there is something absurd in telling a man (or a single mother) that they are simultaneously poor enough to need benefits and rich enough to pay income tax.
While I accept that the arrest of Damian Green and the invasion of his privacy was quite appalling, and that those responsible have to be held to account, this kind of abuse does not usually take place in the other 43 police forces in the kingdom, and certainly not in Devon and Cornwall. The upper echelons of the police are composed of highly qualified and dedicated men and women whose professionalism is without question.
The public face of Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve after a long illness, was rather daunting. At the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago he acknowledged as much when he admitted that he could sometimes be 'a pain in the arse'. But those who knew him well, or came across him occasionally, saw a different man: intolerant of imprecision, of course, but also warm, amusing, and -- this may surprise those critics who never met him -- capable of selfmockery.
Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a 'pick and mix' approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said 'yes'. But in fact I felt 'no'. It wasn't that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn't believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God.
Reading an account by the historian John Waller of the Dancing Plague in Alsace in 1518 recently, I could not help but notice the interesting but perhaps incomplete parallels with our own time.
If there is any good to come out of November's bloody terror attacks in Bombay, it can be found not on the city's angry streets, nor in the Lok Sabha, New Delhi's lethargic lower house, but in a more nebulous place, dismissed by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain but embraced by US Presidentelect Barack Obama: the internet.
Here they are, my New Year's Resolutions for 2009:
When David Cameron agreed last June to let his chief strategist work from California for six months, it seemed a timely break from what was threatening to become a dull job. Gordon Brown looked finished, and his party too weak to depose him. British politics threatened to be a comedy of errors stumbling on until the middle of 2010 -- leaving plenty of time for Steve Hilton to go abroad, get married and send email advice from beside the swimming pool. From there, he must have watched in horror as British politics changed utterly.
ARTHUR MILLER, 1915-1962 by Christopher Bigsby Weidenfeld, £30, pp.739, ISBN 9780297854418
DIARY Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00 EST
Baghdad
Barack Obama got to the heart of the matter in July when he visited Sderot in Israel, a town in range of Hamas missiles. 'If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep, ' Mr Obama said, 'I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect the Israelis to do the same thing.' No less acutely, he observed that it is 'very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognise your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon and is deeply influenced by other countries'.
Virginia senator points to statistics in saying reforms are long overdue. Sen. Jim Webb is a decorated Marine and former Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan. He will need the kind of determination and mental toughness stressed in the military to shepherd through Congress a bill addressing his long-standing passion ? prison reform.
Senate report finds veterans not served by tax-supported corporation. A nonprofit corporation that Congress authorized to help veterans start or grow small businesses seems to have had no trouble spending $17 million in taxpayer money since 2001. But only 15 percent of the funding has been spent on business resource centers that are supposed to provide services to veterans, a congressional investigation concluded.
Group?s effort to curb export of electronic junk will help people and the environment. For years, human rights advocates and environmentalists have sounded the alarm about the export of old computers and other electronic equipment to recyclers overseas.
CSN faculty leader backs freeze ? if it applies to all. Conflicting stances on pay raises could put some college faculty and K-12 teachers representatives at odds during the upcoming legislative session.
CORRECTION Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00 EST
CORRECTION
CARSON CITY Lost in the debate over the legality of Gov. Jim Gibbons attempted appointment of the friend of a friend to head the state Tourism Commission is the governors penchant for another kind of favoritism.
As Las Vegas struggles with its worst budget crisis in years, the city has reached an important agreement with the union representing about 1,500 municipal workers.
Man detained in hard labor camp writes book in local program for persecuted authors. Las Vegas-based author Er Tai Gaos memoir traces its origins to scraps of paper, dog-eared and yellowed with age, that he keeps in a nondescript photo album, each sheet tucked behind protective plastic.
President-elect John Atta-Mills appealed Sunday for wisdom to lead Ghanaians, a day after winning a presidential poll deemed exemplary by African standards.
President elect John Atta-Mills Sunday attended a church service along side many other Ghanaians who resumed their normal activities after a presidential poll deemed exemplary by African standards.
Ghana is consolidating its democratic credentials as, for the second time in a decade, one elected leader prepares to hand over power to the opposition following a peaceful presidential poll.
A South African woman and her two children who were kidnapped on Friday in southern Yemen have been freed, foreign affairs ministry said Sunday.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown played down the prospect of injecting more state cash into struggling banks in an interview Sunday, amid fears that October's bailout has failed to boost credit flows.
Two powerful earthquakes rattled Indonesia's West Papua province early Sunday, triggering panic among residents but there were no immediate reports of any casualties or heavy damage.
President George W. Bush was briefed on the situation in Gaza where Israel sent in troops Saturday, while the United States warned any ceasefire must prevent a return to the "status quo" with Hamas.
Spanish international midfielder Andres Iniesta marked his comeback from injury with a crucial goal as leaders Barcelona defeated Real Mallorca 3-1 on Saturday to continue where they left off before Christmas.
