Commentators

Bruce Anderson: The world is in an alarming state of flux – and there is a limit to what Britain can do about it

We are living in a dangerous world, and that will remain true for the indefinite future. Yet to a surprising extent, political debate in this country fails to reflect this. In consequence, our efforts to secure our own future are doubly impeded. We underestimate the urgency of the need to take crucial steps to improve our long-term prospects. We overestimate our influence on global problems.

Inside Commentators

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Eat only local produce? I don't like the smell of that

Monday, 12 May 2008

On Saturday night I committed untold crimes – against the nation, the planet, my grandchildren, and theirs. I should feel contrite and shabby, but I don't. Fourteen dined at our table and were fed patties of cassava and sweet potatoes, spicy Kenyan beans with tindola – vegetables like cucumbers the size of a baby's fingers. Also tilapia, a freshwater fish from East Africa, and a gruellingly difficult dish made with eight kinds of lentils, meat, oats and cracked wheat. Finally, almond and orange cake and raspberries in saffron cream. None of the ingredients was produced locally. This unrepentant sinner even chose Spanish raspberries, so sweet and more concentrated than the English variety.

Andreas Whittam Smith: Life in the long shadow of the First World War

Monday, 12 May 2008

Last week Doris Lessing said that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature had been a "bloody disaster". So much attention, so many interviews to do, no time to write. Yet she has just published Alfred & Emily, one of the most remarkable books she has ever written. For the 88-year-old author finally pays her dues to her parents, or so it seems to me, particularly to her mother of whom she said: "I always in flight from her, she always in pursuit."

Johann Hari: Cameron a progressive? I don't think so

Monday, 12 May 2008

Britain is stumbling in a daze towards Tory rule. Every week now we sleep-walk further up the opinion polls, giving David Cameron a 26-point lead by one count. What keeps us from waking? The lullabies of Cameron posing with huskies and the homeless soothe us; it won't be so bad, he's a New Tory, we mutter, and close our eyes again.

Philip Hensher: The answer lies in the length of men's shorts

Monday, 12 May 2008

The early outbreak of summer made me crack open the hot-weather wardrobe. In the way of these things, it turned out to contain, like Tutankhamun's tomb, treasures dating back practically to the dawn of time, favourite old T-shirts, ancient cracking pairs of sandals, and, especially, a long run of pairs of shorts. Some were 10 years old; others were from just last year.

How To Be Happy: Don't be afraid to put off social get-togethers

Sunday, 11 May 2008

Q. 'I cannot keep up with my life. I am constantly juggling work, social and domestic demands. How can I cope with it all before I become exhausted?' N.

Kerry Brown: Why won't the Chinese make Burma accept the aid?

Sunday, 11 May 2008

When around 100,000 of your people have been killed by a natural calamity, with an estimated doubling of that amount when the final numbers of fatalities are known, you would have thought that a government, of whatever political complexion, would react to offers of outside help with alacrity.

David Canter: Fritzl, like Fred West, believed he was a good man

Sunday, 11 May 2008

Josef Fritzl's complaint, through his lawyer, that he is being portrayed as a monster shows the profound depths to which self-deception can reach. Without doubt he does not recognise the horrors to which he subjected his daughter over 24 years and the children he fathered with her in the dungeon he built to keep them. His protestations are like those of many other violent offenders who cast themselves in the role of misunderstood hero rather than villainous monster.

John Rentoul: Cherie twists the knife, before it's too late

Sunday, 11 May 2008

The most wounding judgement that Cherie Blair makes of Gordon Brown in her book is not in the text. Some of the words are certainly wounding enough, although their impact is mainly that of putting on the record views that were well known. The first impression is that her words are mild, carefully phrased and lawyerly in their self-justification.

Sarah Sands: An imperfect memory fends off a lifetime of shame

Sunday, 11 May 2008

When I worked at The Daily Telegraph, our commercial fortunes were built on a fixed front-page advertisement for improving your memory. The firm that paid so highly for the slot knew that the elderly readership regarded memory as sacred, and its loss as a cruel separation from identity. What are we, if not a sum of our past? Yet for Jill Price, a 42-year-old school administrator and widow, memory is a sadistic jailer, imposing the past on the present, without sequence or respite.

Old Scotland took the high road. New Scotland is upwardly mobile

Sunday, 11 May 2008

During the debates on devolution in the 1990s the then Secretary of State for Scotland, George Robertson, declared confidently and memorably: "Devolution will kill nationalism stone dead." Not only has the Labour Party so far failed to shoot the nationalist fox but last week the leader of the party in Scotland, Wendy Alexander, to the consternation not only of the Prime Minister but of her unionist allies in the Holyrood Parliament, asserted the urgent need for a referendum on the issue of Scottish independence. To say the least, this remarkable juxtaposition of the conflicting responses of Robertson and Alexander, a mere decade or so apart, raises major questions for the historian, not only on the reasons why Scottish devolution has evolved in this way but what the implications might be for the future of the union itself.

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