Society

I’ve never lived with a man I didn’t marry: Tweedledee, 1979–1984, and Tweedledum, 1984–1995. (The names have been changed to irritate the pair of them.) So when I left my second union and moved to Brighton to chase the man who is now my third (and hopefully final) husband, I was keen to establish and keep separate households. I was quite pleased to find that not only was I having a blast seeing Daniel while maintaining a maverick social life (he didn’t want to be in a swimming pool full of drunken, shrieking girls’n’gays any more than I wanted to be in a room full of game-playing, beer-drinking men) but

The targeted assassinations at Charlie Hebdo are triply repellent. Being planned, they are the product of considered decisions, not a moment of folly. Being aimed at journalists, they have deliberately chosen the vulnerable heart of the freedom that is fundamental to our values. Being gratuitously cruel in casually murdering an already wounded policeman, they display a chilling depravity. As such, attacks like this are intolerable: they must be stopped, and therefore they must be understood. The assassinations follow the random car-crash terrorism of December and the Syrian beheadings of November. All were perpetrated by young Muslim men. But what we are experiencing is not the product of a religion: it

Je suis Charlie indeed. This is the problem with placards — there is rarely enough room to fit in the caveats, the qualifying clauses and the necessary evasions. I suppose you could write them on the back of the placard, one after the other, in biro. Or write in brackets and in much smaller letters, directly below ‘Je suis Charlie’: ‘Jusqu’a un certain point, Lord Copper.’ Then you can pop your biro into your lapel as a moving symbol of freedom of speech. Only a few of the British mainstream national newspapers felt it appropriate to reproduce the front cover of the latest, post-murder, edition of Charlie Hebdo, which shows the Prophet

This afternoon Labour has its debate on forcing energy companies to pass on lower oil prices to their customers. The potency of the political attack has been blunted rather by the party’s admission that its energy price freeze is in fact a cap, rather than an endless promise that no matter how fabulously low prices already are, Labour will freeze them. But the Opposition Day debate is designed to suggest that the Tories don’t care about people’s energy bills. The motion reads: ‘That this House notes the policy of the Opposition to freeze energy prices until 2017, ensuring that prices can fall but not rise; and calls on the Government

There is the distinct suspicion that at last some more usually bien-pensant commentators are getting it. I mean getting the threat posed to us by irritated Muslim people. First, unexpectedly, David Aaronovitch talked a degree of sense in the Times last Thursday. Yay, David, way to go. Something else you’ve been wrong about for ten years – but credit where it’s due, the man’s come around. And Nick Cohen wrote an unexpectedly interesting piece about the whole shebang, too. And then there’s the mayor of Rotterdam – a city with a huge Muslim population. It is his final two words which, I think, sum up my perspective.

From ‘The Windfalls of Soldiering’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: This war is unlike all our previous wars, in that it was known from the very beginning that a vast number of men would be required. Thus it was plain at once that the only speedy way of reaching the front for the civilian of military age was by enlistment. But for the man over military age who has never had any military training, yet burns to do something active, the windfalls of soldiering still seem to be just possible. No doubt the vast majority of the older men would find it impossible to leave the country, or give their

The latest competition invited you to take a leaf out of Hilary Mantel’s book and provide a scene that shows a well-known villain from history or literature in an uncharacteristically kindly light. Mantel has said that she was driven by a ‘powerful curiosity’ rather than by any desire to rehabilitate Cromwell. ‘I do not run a Priory clinic for the dead,’ she wrote, which is a nice way of putting it. You plundered Dickens for baddies in need of a makeover — Fagin made repeated appearances alongside Daniel Quilp and Josiah Bounderby. Judas Iscariot and Dr Crippen were also popular choices. The standard was on the patchy side, but honourable

Last week I lost count of the number of times we’ve been told, pace the Charlie Hebdo murders, that we have no right not to be offended, that freedom of speech involves the possibility of criticism and ridicule of any religion; indeed, that it’s the flip side of religious liberty. Salman Rushdie, who has more right to make the point than most, said that ‘religion deserves our fearless disrespect’ and  people like Suzanne Moore in the Guardian seemed to suggest that we have a positive duty to disrespect religion, though I am still waiting for that paper to reproduce some of Charlie Hebdo’s finest on the subject of the prophet of Islam as

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: Friday’s Times contains on its “leader” page an appeal to our soldiers by Sir William Osier in regard to inoculation against typhoid. He tells the soldiers in simple but stirring language that it is their bounden duty to keep themselves in as perfect a state of health as possible, and reminds them that their worst foes are those of their own camp—the foes of disease. He recalls the fact that in South Africa the bacilli of disease killed twice as many men as did the bullets of the Boers. He next goes on to point out how inoculation safeguards men