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The Point — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:32:28 +0100

Author:The Point

Standpoint now has a Facebook page. "Like" it here to have the magazine's characteristic mix of hardnosed opinions and brilliant writing delivered to your News Feed. It's a great place to spark debate and access additional content. Twitter users can find us at @StandpointMag.

May Issue Out Now

Frances Weaver — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:37:02 +0100

Author:

In defence of marriage

Bishop Nazir-Ali and John Haldane make the case for matrimony as the heart and soul of the family

George Weigel: Obama's threat to religious liberty

Iain Martin: Scrap your old script, Dave

Melanie Phillips: A new age of intolerance

Mara Delius: Betrayed by Günter Grass

The Hijacking of the Human Rights Debate

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:53:00 +0100

Author:Michael Pinto-Duschinsky

Hans Kelsen: His theories have led to a conflict between the human rights establishment and the democratic nation state (Credit: Kern, Fritz)

A telephone call brought my recent visit to Los Angeles to a sudden end. I was to return to London by the next flight. The simmering crisis in the UK Commission on a Bill of Rights over the issue of rule by judges versus democracy had come to the boil. It was time to go ahead with the contingency plans discussed for months with senior political allies. I would announce my resignation in the Sunday Times late on Saturday night, March 10. An interview on national television would follow the next day.

How to Save Marriage From Hitting the Rocks

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:40:05 +0100

Author:Michael Nazir-Ali

Marriage has had a good press lately. More people are marrying and more people are staying married. This is welcome news. I have recently met a number of community groups that promote marriage in schools, colleges and generally in society, an encouraging and hopeful experience for me. But of course while I welcome this greater interest in marriage, both in promoting it and defending it, it is impossible to do so unless we understand what marriage and the family are.

Au Revoir Les Clercs

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:38:12 +0100

Author:Jeremy Jennings

When France's socialist-led government under President François Mitterrand ran into severe economic and political difficulties in the summer of 1983, an article appeared in Le Monde penned by the left-wing writer and commentator Max Gallo. Where, Gallo asked, were the intellectuals when a government of the Left needed them? Where were the equivalents to Gide, Malraux and Alain, those who had rallied to the defence of the Popular Front governments of the 1930s? The answer, in brief, was that they were nowhere to be seen.

Since that summer there has been much debate about whether the French intellectual — born with the Dreyfus Affair — is dead, dying or in need of resuscitation. This year's presidential election campaign provides the answer. The French intellectual looks well and truly dead. Scan the pages of the French press. Listen to the radio or watch the television. There's not an intellectual in sight.

Liberalism, Marriage and Family Values

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:29:48 +0100

Author:John Haldane

In December 2011 Nick Clegg delivered a lecture in Westminster under the auspices of the Open Society Foundation and the think-tank Demos. In it he spoke of "the values of the open society-social mobility; political pluralism; civil liberties; democracy; internationalism" as being "the source of my liberalism" and then set out his own vision of what society should be like. Having observed that "social institutions can be oppressive" and that "the constitution of my party warns that people can be enslaved not only by ignorance and poverty, but also by conformity" he proceeded:

Regenerate Art

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:22:42 +0100

Author:Karen Horn

Lost and found: Marg Moll's damaged "Dancer"

Liberty, Faith and Obama's Leviathan

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:16:26 +0100

Author:George Weigel

Nanny knows best: Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, with President Obama as he announces his contentious "contraceptive mandate" in January (Credit: Joshua Roberts)

Viewed from a distance, the 2012 US presidential election debate must seem very strange: at a moment of severe domestic economic dislocation, escalating national debt, dysfunctional governmental institutions and grave international danger, Americans are arguing about birth control.

Bigotry or Dissent?

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:06:11 +0100

Author:Piers Paul Read

The debate over same-sex marriage has brought home to me how intolerant the British have become of dissenting opinions. After the publication of an anodyne letter I sent to the Spectator suggesting that some might dispute the moral equivalence between conjugal and gay sex, I was congratulated by one journalist for my "courage", while another confided in me that, although he opposed same-sex marriage, he would never dare say so in print.

Bowled Over

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:59:42 +0100

Author:Oliver Wiseman

Fertile new ground? Young cricketers in Rwanda

Our Island Stories

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:57:19 +0100

Author:Roger Scruton

Covering up: Scarborough's South Bay beach, August 1952. The sea is both the cause of our insularity and the cure for it

Metro Madrassa

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:54:22 +0100

Author:Brian O'Flann

London Metropolitan University made the news recently when comments from the Vice-Chancellor, Malcolm Gillies, on how to cater for Muslim students, went public.

Gillies said that, for many of the 20 per cent of the university's students who are Muslim, drinking alcohol was "an immoral experience"; he proposed alcohol-free zones on campus. He also nonchalantly noted that many female Muslim students "can only really go to university within four miles of home and have to be delivered and picked up by a close male relative".

At a time when competition between universities is increasing, Gillies is setting out London Metropolitan's stall: he is going to pander to or cater for the most backward elements of the Muslim community.

Jihad Central

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:38:27 +0100

Author:John Ware

Lost souls: Post-migrant Muslims seek a radical identity in multicultural Britain (Credit: Getty Images)

A New Yorker Writes

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:36:56 +0100

Author:Jay Nordlinger

Anthony Daniels has said he likes living in foreign countries. He has lived in several of them. For one thing, a foreign country's problems are not your own problems — your own country's. You can view them with a certain detachment. It may be too bad that Italy has gone childless, let's say. But what really churns your gut is the barbarisation of Birmingham.

Do you know the definition of minor surgery? Surgery someone else is having.

I don't live in Britain, but I have become addicted to the British press. I turn to it for information and amusement, yes. But also for something like comfort. As an American political journalist, I am enmeshed in my own country's problems, and long have been. Sometimes these problems are bitter in one's mouth. My cousins, the British, provide relief.

Bouquets and Barbed Wire

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:31:49 +0100

Author:Tibor Fischer

The pitch is irresistible: some 1,500 letters written by a young couple in love, separated by one of the most hideous totalitarian systems, Stalin's brutal, nightmarish free-for-all for sadists and executioners-1,500 letters, most of them exchanged in secret, in defiance of this murderous aberration.

Just Send Me Word, the account of Svetlana and Lev Mischenko and their clandestine correspondence and enduring love, is a remarkable story, one that a novelist would be hard-pressed to pull off. The whole thing is just so far-fetched. They fall in love as students and then are wrenched apart by the Second World War and the gulag-Lev is drafted, captured and subjected to the Nazi camps, miraculously surviving only to return to the Soviet Union to be jailed as a German spy, the fate of most Soviet PoWs who managed to stay alive.

Truths Stranger Than Fiction

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:24:14 +0100

Author:Ruth Dudley Edwards

Playing with fire: Rioting brought rewards in Northern Ireland

It is the late 1990s, and Lionel Shriver's tyro journalist, Edgar Kellogg, is sent to southern Portugal, to the (fictional) province of Barba, which along with "Bosnia, Angola, Algeria, and Azerbaijan" was one of the "too-complicated and who-gives-a-fuck shit holes" about which he normally avoided reading.

Never a Dull Verse

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:59:31 +0100

Author:Derwent May

Clive James: Ageless enthusiasm

Clive James's new poems are full of the feeling of growing old. But they are different from most of the poems of which that can be said. The dominating note is struck in a line in the first poem in the book, addressed to a lover he has known for 40 years. "Time was more friend to us than enemy," James tells her. He is not going to sigh and mourn. That is not the sort of thing he does. He looks at his past, is glad of it, recreates it and even finds it better than he thought it was.

One of the many excellent poems here, "Fashion Statement" recalls his life as a young man in Sydney. Although he and his poet friends wore army surplus khaki and "the first T-shirts", he sees now that they were extraordinary dandies — not in their dress, but in their words:

The Silence of the Intellectuals

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:57:16 +0100

Author:Daniel Johnson

If the cap fits, wear it — even if it bears the insignia of the death's head. Six years ago, when to promote his autobiography Peeling the Onion Günter Grass finally came clean about his membership of the Waffen SS, Germany's most fêted writer declared: "I kept silent about it after the war out of a growing shame." In an open letter to him in the New York Sun, I replied: "You still do not seem to understand that your silence was itself shameful."

Choking Charities

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:47:44 +0100

Author:Michael Mosbacher

Question 1. Who said this: "Too many people think that all we care about is balancing the books. Wrong. We are going to encourage a stronger culture of giving in Britain — with more people giving more money and more time to good causes around us."

It was the Prime Minister, of course: David Cameron generously donating his time to the cause of explaining his Big Society idea, on May 23, 2011.

Corporation Crackdown

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:40:56 +0100

Author:Joshua Rozenberg

Does tax evasion by a multinational corporation breach the human rights of people in the countries where it operates? And can an international organisation of 45,000 individual lawyers and more than 200 bar associations use legal principles to fight poverty?

Those are the intriguing questions posed by a new research project launched by the International Bar Association (IBA) at the end of March. Its starting point is that an equitable taxation system serving the interests of the nation is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. The IBA's human rights institute has appointed a task force, which is to publish a report next year.

Vinyl Revival Causes Discord

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:38:10 +0100

Author:Norman Lebrecht

For the record: Valentina Lisitsa is releasing a Liszt album on vinyl (Credit: Jon Crwys-Williams)

There is a truth, universally held among classical musicians, that old recordings are better than new. The absurdity of this proposition is obvious. It is the same as arguing that athletes and equipment in the 1948 London Olympics were superior to those of 2012. But where sport can prick pretension with statistics, music is a matter of faith — and faith, as Richard Dawkins refuses to accept, flourishes where reason ends.

In music, the flat-earthers are winning the argument. Listen carefully, the grinding noise you hear behind this column is the sound of the musical clock being turned back. Here's the latest news: the classical LP has resumed production.

Labour's Losing Legacy

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:35:50 +0100

Author:Tim Congdon

One interpretation of the Bradford West by-election is that George Galloway secured his extraordinary 10,000 majority over Labour by his openly Islamist speechifying, which appealed to the high proportion of Muslims in the constituency. That was undoubtedly part of the story, but it is not a complete explanation.

Galloway's Respect party took almost 56 per cent of a 50 per cent turnout, but at the last census Muslims were only 38 per cent of the population. Given that many Muslims supported the other parties, a substantial proportion of Galloway's vote must have come from non-Muslims and most of these would have been Christian. By implication, a big chunk of the Respect vote was not for Galloway the man or Islam the religion, but against Labour, which has been the traditionally dominant political force in this part of Yorkshire.

The Mask of the Monarchy

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:33:37 +0100

Author:Michael Prodger

A holographic monarch: Chris Levine's "Lightness of Being" required hundreds of shots, each exposed for eight seconds (Credit: Chris Levine)

Historically, royal portraits are only nominally images of an individual: their real subject is an idea. They were designed to show the institution of monarchy itself and the divine right of kings — the personality of the sitter was not a prerequisite. As Edward Burne-Jones noted: "The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not anything temporary, fleeting, or accidental."

Provincial Life and its Discontents

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:29:16 +0100

Author:Anne McElvoy

Gruelling role: Cate Blanchett shines in Botho Strauss's dystopian take on West German anomie (Credit: Lisa Tomasett)

Nature bestowed Cate Blanchett with lynx eyes, a generous mouth, graceful agility and a sexy growl of a voice. None of this seems to have held her back.

After an Oscar-winning Hollywood run, she is now co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, who bring Gross und Klein ("Large and Small"), Botho Strauss's dystopian take on the anomie of West Germany, to the Barbican main stage after rave Antipodean reviews.

Brave Bombers

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:29:01 +0100

Author:Michael Burleigh

Next month will see the dedication of a memorial in Green Park to the heroes of RAF Bomber Command. At its heart will be a bronze sculpture by Philip Jackson, depicting a wartime aircrew, though not a British one as it happens.

On the night of May 12, 1944, a Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax was shot down on its mission to destroy railyards at Louvain in Belgium. It crashed into a swamp in Schendelbeke, remaining there until 1997 when a nephew of the Canadian pilot, Wilbur Bentz, organised the recovery of the wreckage, with the remains of three missing crew (including Bentz) still at their stations. Five others scattered from the wreckage had been retrieved and buried back in 1944.

Hollywood in Distress

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:23:35 +0100

Author:Peter Whittle

Whit Stillman on the set of "Damsels in Distress": His films about Wasps and preppies made him a distinctive voice

March on Syria

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:19:47 +0100

Author:Emanuele Ottolenghi

The Assad dynasty is not content with slaughtering its own people in great numbers. It is also destroying Syria's rich archaeological past. Writing last month in the US Weekly Standard, Victoria Coates described the devastation in detail.

The tattered landscape of magnificent ruins, which the desert preserved for centuries is being blown up under a barrage of mortar fire. Crumbling stones are nothing compared to the mangled bodies of Assad's tortured victims, of course. They are a good illustration, though, of the price of our impotence and the hypocrisy of our policies.

Wanted: Artists for Hard Times

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:18:57 +0100

Author:Nick Cohen

Paula Milne's "White Heat": The series was dismissed for its high-mindedness

The BBC's White Heat was dominated by characters from a left-wing milieu. The central figure of Paula Milne's drama is Jack, the son of an upper-class father, who becomes in rapid succession a socialist journalist, Labour candidate and drug addict. Alongside him is his occasional feminist lover; a Belfast woman, who is so concerned about the homeless she takes them into her home; an Indian, who is terrified his traditional parents will find out he is gay; and a Jamaican immigrant, whose experience of racism turns him into a radical lawyer.

Measuring Meritocracy

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:11:12 +0100

Author:Lionel Shriver

Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 (Random House) is chock-full of things you're not supposed to say. Putting my foot in it having become a personal speciality, I feel compelled to repeat them.

Murray's larger thesis — that the US has polarised into a not-always-metaphorically gated community of the "new upper class" that still hews to traditional American values of industriousness and intact families, and a "new lower class" in which hard work and marriage are, fatally, no longer the norm — is too wide-ranging to address here. But his submission about "homogamy" is irresistibly incendiary.

A Light Shining From Babylon

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:09:10 +0100

Author:Mark Ronan

Solar eclipse: It took thousands of years to determine the phenomenon's cycle

More than 300 years ago, Isaac Newton came up with the revolutionary idea that objects have gravitational mass. He also developed the mathematics that could use the resulting gravitational force to yield equations defining how the planets orbit the Sun. It was a stunning achievement, explaining detailed observations made previously by astronomers such as Tycho Brahe in Denmark and Johannes Kepler in Germany.

Overrated: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:58:08 +0100

Author:Con Coughlin

Ever since he became Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has had to contend with the nagging doubt that he is simply not up to the job. Unlike Cyrus the Great, who was born into one of the great Persian dynasties and acceded effortlessly to the throne on his father's death, Khamenei's rise owed everything to the patronage of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, his mentor and the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Betrayed by Günter Grass

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:56:46 +0100

Author:Mara Delius

This spring, with the weather in Berlin a little less grey, the ominous phrase "the German past" came back to haunt me with unexpected force. I've written about the German attempts to work through our country's responsibility for two world wars and, above all, the Holocaust; I've talked with my parents and grandparents about it; I've gone to Israel and Poland with Jewish survivors. You could say that I've done my fair share of atonement. And yet, a different angle opened up when Günter Grass published his short prose-poem "What must be said" early in April.

Underrated: Cyrus the Great

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:50:32 +0100

Author:Daniel Johnson

Talking STIs and Complacent Coppers

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:48:21 +0100

Author:Douglas Murray

I had not been to Doncaster ice-rink until the BBC asked me to film a new discussion programme there on issues of relevance to youth. So, inevitably, Owen Jones and I discuss crime, sex and class with a singer called Sway, a "glamour-model" who wants to hang paedophiles and an audience of Doncaster's young. While we are discussing sex education it emerges that Doncaster has the highest rate of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) in the UK. Nevertheless, a council STI worker talks of the success of her work. I turn down an offer to hit the town afterwards.

Uneducated Unions

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:35:40 +0100

Author:Katharine Birbalsingh

Teachers pay membership to their unions in the belief that union leaders represent their views. But when Chris Keates, the general secretary of NASUWT, stands next to a cardboard cut-out of Michael Gove, at their national conference, and speaks of the Education Secretary's "unparalleled, vicious assault" on teachers, schools, and state education, one has to wonder whose views these union leaders are representing.

Time Trouble

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:33:21 +0100

Author:Dominic Lawson

It is often said that the chief characteristic distinguishing the modern era from all previous history is the value put on time. Arguably this is just another way of demonstrating that capitalism has speeded up the world in a way our ancestors could not have imagined: the main point about industrial efficiency is that it saves time.

Chess being a cultural artefact, rather than just mathematics, is not immune from the historical process. Thus it is not surprising that 150 years ago next month there took place the first chess tournament with a time limit: the London chess tournament of June 1862 was part of the second Great Exhibition, designed to show the world the marvellous new technology of the British industrial revolution. Its chess tournament had its own innovation: the moves would all have to be played within a set time — to be precise, 24 moves every two hours. Sandglasses were used, one for each player.

Choppy Waters

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:26:38 +0100

Author:Daisy Waugh

You've got to feel for them. All those long months of training...

It is a long time.

Well he Twittered it, didn't he? The chap. The Oxford chappie. He said, "My team went through seven months of hell."

It's a lot of hell to go through.

"This was the culmination of our careers," he said, "and you took it from us..." That's what he said to Mr So-Called Anti-Elitist, I-went-to-Public-School Trenton Whatnot.

I should think Trenton felt pretty rotten about that. When he read it. Mind you, I don't see why, just because he went to public school —

What?

The Demon Drink

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:24:36 +0100

Author:Saintsbury

In Act II scene 3 of Othello Cassio, who has just disgraced himself by brawling when drunk, inveighs against wine: "Every inordinate cup is unblest, and the ingredience is a devil." However Iago — who hates Cassio because he has been promoted above him and because he is a Florentine rather than a Venetian, and who has tempted Cassio into drunkenness precisely to discredit him with the Moor — will hear none of this: "Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used: exclaim no more against it." Which man is right?

Real Men Don't Use Brylcreem

Frances Weaver — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:13:21 +0100

Author:Simon Heffer

Nay, lad: Yorkshire bowler Darren Gough with hands full on "Strictly Come Dancing"

You may remember a few years ago a magnificent rebuke issued to Lord Mandelson by Ken Follett, the novelist, whose wife Barbara had crossed swords with Mandelson in her role as a Labour MP. I cannot recall the feline shift of behaviour that caused Mr Follett to issue the rebuke, but he described Mandelson as having done something that was not very "manly".

Who's Really Supreme?

Frances Weaver — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:24:01 +0100

Author:Andrew Roberts

Judicial v. executive branches: Chief Justice John Roberts watches President Obama sign the guest book of the Supreme Court (Credit: Gage Skidmore)

The suspension of Rick Santorum's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was a sensible move, both for the GOP and himself. He will be 58 when he runs again in 2016; or, if Romney wins the presidency this year and therefore is unopposed in 2016, Santorum will only be 62 should he run in 2020. (The reason why candidates such as Santorum, Herman Cain and Rick Perry "suspend" rather than "end" their campaigns is a legal/financial one to do with the paying-off of campaign debts with contributions, but in effect a suspension equals a termination.)

"Weary of Silence, Soon Sickened by Words"

Frances Weaver — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:57:14 +0100

Author:David Womersley

Samuel Beckett: "I write the kind of queer English that my queer French deserves" (Credit: Getty)

As an Irishman, Samuel Beckett was entitled to neutral status in the war with Nazi Germany, but on September 1, 1941 he joined the Resistance. In the summer of 1942, on the point of being arrested by the Gestapo, he and his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, fled Paris and eventually settled in Roussillon until shortly after the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

The New Intolerance

Frances Weaver — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:01:27 +0100

Author:Melanie Phillips

Athiest hedonism: Their poster campaign on London buses in 2009 was supported by Richard Dawkins (right). Its fatuous slogan gets to the heart of why people have turned away from biblical religion — not because it is irrational but because it puts constraints on their behaviour

To judge from what we are reading and hearing almost every day at the moment, it would seem Britain is in the throes of a war of religion. A war, that is, between religion and atheism. Professor Richard Dawkins, the Savanarola of atheism, regularly hurls his thunderbolts at believers. Christianity, says the church, is under siege. Christians are being prevented from wearing the crucifix at work, being barred from adoption panels. Even Delia Smith has now brought her rolling pin to the fight to defend the faith.

Cameron Should Scrap His Tired Old Script

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:47:46 +0100

Author:Iain Martin

Slam dunk footage: David Cameron told Tory MPs that images of him watching basketball with Barack Obama were more important than press criticism of the government — but few British voters were impressed (Credit: Getty)

In 1992, Governor Bill Clinton agreed to allow a leading documentary-maker inside his campaign as the Democratic primary season got under way. A pioneer of direct cinema, or cinéma vérité, D. A. Pennebaker had been part of the team that made Primary, the classic 1960 account of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's battle in the Wisconsin Democratic primary.

No need to pander to the Bear, Mr Obama

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:14:24 +0100

Author:

JULIA PETTENGILL

The Cold War may be over but the paranoid rhetoric is not. It's time for the US to recognise the Kremlin is crumbling.

April Issue Out Now

Frances Weaver — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:42:31 +0100

Author:

Germany's Euro AngstChristopher Caldwell reports from Berlin on the woes of Europe's paymaster

Douglas Murray and David Green on Gay Marriage

Jonathan Bate: Set Our Universities Free

Lionel Shriver: The NHS Makes Me Ill

John Bolton: Obama's Timidity Risks War

The Real Marriage Problem

Frances Weaver — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:57:24 +0100

Author:Daniel Johnson

Marriage is under scrutiny, but for the wrong reason. The issue of same-sex marriage is, it seems, of consuming interest, especially to those who want it (the minority of homosexuals who feel that civil partnerships lack the dignity of matrimony) or those who fear that they will sooner or later come under pressure to solemnise it (the churches and other faiths). This debate has revealed widespread uncertainty about the definition and value of this most ancient of institutions. In this month's issue, David Green and Douglas Murray write from opposite sides of the argument; next month Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali will consider the question of what we mean by marriage.

Good Idea, Bad PR

Frances Weaver — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:52:32 +0100

Author:Iain Martin

To the long list of flagship ideas and slogans that have failed to catch on (which includes Tony Blair's Stakeholder Society and Gordon Brown's British Jobs for British Workers) David Cameron has added the Big Society. The shoeless bicycling guru who convinced the Prime Minister to put it at the centre of his bid for power is frustrated with life in government and is departing for California. As far as most Conservatives are concerned, Steve Hilton can take the Big Society with him and keep it.

But, before it is dispatched, the failure of the concept should be properly understood. It was not, contrary to how it is usually presented, purely a piece of marketing which obscured an absence of ideas. It was the reverse. It was a very good idea, appallingly badly marketed.

Faithless Wonder

Frances Weaver — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:50:09 +0100

Author:Piers Paul Read

Alain de Botton: The apostle of atheism claims we "expect to much" of secular artists if we hope they will compensate for religious ones

Meaning only to skim through Alain de Botton's new book Religion for Atheists (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) I read every word, engaged by his wit and limpid prose, impressed by the sheer plenitude of facts on display, and finally delighted to find such an effective apologia for religious belief.

Money Talks

Frances Weaver — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:47:40 +0100

Author:Christopher Fildes

Cutting City cant: Terry Smith thinks Occupy protesters have a point, and markets should work properly

I once proposed a short book, to be called How to Make Money out of Life Assurance. This would have read, in its entirety: "Don't buy it, sell it." Such disrespect for the City's accepted wisdom found no takers.

Terry Smith was luckier. His book Accounting for Growth denounced some of the City's favourite arithmetic as pure self-serving cant. Nowadays he runs a big financial company, but he still classes accepted wisdom as a contradiction in terms. In Guildhall the other day, he told a City gathering that the Occupy movement's protesters might be right.

Perishing Publishers

Frances Weaver — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:45:04 +0100

Author:Mark Ronan

How do you publish a research paper? Unlike book publishing where authors, as a general rule, get advances, you first have to write it. You then submit it to a journal, and after a long process of refereeing and possible rejection it may eventually go to press, with the quality of the journal lending gravitas to promotion and salary decisions.

In this important system, all the work, from submission, refereeing, editing, and final acceptance, is done by academics at universities. Many of the journals appear under the imprimatur of academic publishing houses, and as academics now typeset their own papers using modern technical software the publisher's costs have come down in recent years. Yet strangely the price of some journals from commercial publishers has risen, and this at a time when papers appear on the internet well before printed versions arrive in libraries.