Society

Perhaps only a French professor of literature could write a book entitled How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read. Professor Pierre Bayard’s book became a best-seller in France this year, and one can see why. After all, a book that promises to lift the oppressive guilt one feels at not having tackled many of the giant literary peaks has a lot to be said for it. At the very least this guilt leaves one feeling somewhat inadequate, especially when one compares the amount of reading done by one’s forbears (who admittedly didn’t have the distractions of television or cinema or a thousand other things and, equally, for the

Just recovering from a 21 hour Istanbul-Washington trip (thanks American Airlines), so still catching up with correspondence and the like. Still, here’s a piece I wrote for The New Republic defying the (emerging) conventional wisdom – at least amongst some soccer snobs – that Beckham’s arrival is the beginning of the end for US soccer. Of course, it’s also the case that, psychologically, some American soccer fans fear what might happen to their game if it really takes off (I argue that it has already taken off). Can soccer survive American interest? And, just as pressingly, can soccer fans, many of whom are proud to have the sophisitication and the

Why Russia’s defensive Sir: The only pertinent fact from Fraser Nelson’s anti-Russia diatribe last week is that the country’s defence budget is 5 per cent that of America’s. (The New Cold War, 14 July). The rest of the article is scaremongering. An evening spent in Moscow should convince anyone that Russia has not left ‘the orbit of the West’, rather that it has embraced our way of life with gusto. Five minutes spent in a supermarket in Saint Petersburg, Saratov or Volgograd nails the lie that ‘the free market has perished in Russia’. And why should not Russian gas companies start to charge market prices for their output, after years