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12zoewilliams
| 2UK
|
To be honest, I rarely believe the Queen when she addresses the nation; the Christmas number is too much of a duty call, and when she has anything to do with parliament, she always looks slightly sour - as we all would, I'm sure, were we required to endorse absolutely everything, while still pretending to be in charge just to save trouble.When she spoke at the second world war commemoration, though, everything was spot on. You can believe in the debt she feels to the veterans' generation, and the continuing resonance its sacrifices have for her. The only jarring note was this: sandwiched between references to their "resilience" and "courage" was mention of their "sense of humour".I don't think I'm being unfair to her majesty when I say this isn't a language I'd expect her to understand, still less namecheck as a national boon. There is certainly no public record of her ever having made a joke, unless her experiment with crossing the short-legged corgi with the shorter-legged dachshund was actually done in the name of humour. There is likewise no photographic record of her laughing or smiling, apart from when Motivator won the 2005 Derby, earning the monarch ... well, I have no idea what her bet was, but even it was a fairly modest sum, that still leaves a smile related to acquisition, rather than actual mirth.This isn't just blinkered republicanism - there are royals who manifestly have a laugh. Princess Margaret was one; I fancy that Prince Andrew sometimes enjoys a joke or two, albeit of a coarse and obvious nature. I am speculating wildly, but he has the big mouth of a man who likes to laugh.The point is, though, that if you were to find anyone with a solid and expressible sense of British identity, then definitely in their top five, and probably their top two, would be the royal family and A Highly Developed Sense of Humour. There are a number of contradictions here: for a start, our figurehead lacks the one quality that we think recommends us; and the minute you start pontificating on the quality of your humour, it almost certainly rules out the possibility that you have any. But modern nationhood is a complicated business, so you'd expect anomalies.The substance of our fabled wit, as we see it, is this: first, it is much more advanced than any other country's, especially Germany. When people discuss the Blitz spirit, it is very often in terms of the cockney sparrows who lose a leg and then make a hilarious pun about getting legless. We are happy to admit that our bombing of German cities was as devastating as theirs of ours, but we are absolutely determined that it go down in the annals: whoever bombed whom to pieces, we definitely had the most fun. Oh yes. Humour is bound up with pluck and stoicism, as if its prime function were to keep our mouths so occupied with drolleries that moaning and whining were literally impossible.This is something that came out immediately after last week's bombing, a swell of pride in the age-old grit of the Londoner, another bad thing happening without denting our character. It was different to the response in Madrid. The underlying feelings - shock, mourning, sympathy, defiance - were the same, but where they took to the streets to vent them, we have been rigidly business-as-usual.That's not to say that there was an instant cache of tube-bomb jokes circulating over the net - that may happen and it may not. My feeling is that we've all lost our stomachs for the hilarity of breaking the bereavement taboo, which is why disasters such as Beslan or the tsunami spawned nothing like the one-liners they used to.But whether we ever joke about the attack itself is irrelevant. The capital, even by Thursday evening, had its sense of humour back: grim, black and muted it may have been, but the pubs were full. In other cultures, resilience is manifested in dignity and vigil, but here we manifest it exactly as the Queen said: with a sense of humour. We must be OK, because we're ready with our poor wordplay once more.I think this explains why figures such as Ken Livingstone are more welcome in bad times than Tony Blair - not because Ken is incapable of gravitas, but because we know his base register is more skittish and mischievous, closer to the normality we seek instantly to resume.The funny thing is, disasters aren't that funny. Thursday wasn't, and I'm sure the Blitz wasn't exactly a laugh. To take pride in such a response is quirky - but if even the Queen has noticed, it must be true.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
To be honest, I rarely believe the Queen when she addresses the nation; the Christmas number is too much of a duty call, and when she has anything to do with parliament, she always looks slightly sour - as we all would, I'm sure, were we required to endorse absolutely everything, while still pretending to be in charge just to save trouble.When she spoke at the second world war commemoration, though, everything was spot on. You can believe in the debt she feels to the veterans' generation, and the continuing resonance its sacrifices have for her. The only jarring note was this: sandwiched between references to their "resilience" and "courage" was mention of their "sense of humour".I don't think I'm being unfair to her majesty when I say this isn't a language I'd expect her to understand, still less namecheck as a national boon. There is certainly no public record of her ever having made a joke, unless her experiment with crossing the short-legged corgi with the shorter-legged dachshund was actually done in the name of humour. There is likewise no photographic record of her laughing or smiling, apart from when Motivator won the 2005 Derby, earning the monarch ... well, I have no idea what her bet was, but even it was a fairly modest sum, that still leaves a smile related to acquisition, rather than actual mirth.This isn't just blinkered republicanism - there are royals who manifestly have a laugh. Princess Margaret was one; I fancy that Prince Andrew sometimes enjoys a joke or two, albeit of a coarse and obvious nature. I am speculating wildly, but he has the big mouth of a man who likes to laugh.The point is, though, that if you were to find anyone with a solid and expressible sense of British identity, then definitely in their top five, and probably their top two, would be the royal family and A Highly Developed Sense of Humour. There are a number of contradictions here: for a start, our figurehead lacks the one quality that we think recommends us; and the minute you start pontificating on the quality of your humour, it almost certainly rules out the possibility that you have any. But modern nationhood is a complicated business, so you'd expect anomalies.The substance of our fabled wit, as we see it, is this: first, it is much more advanced than any other country's, especially Germany. When people discuss the Blitz spirit, it is very often in terms of the cockney sparrows who lose a leg and then make a hilarious pun about getting legless. We are happy to admit that our bombing of German cities was as devastating as theirs of ours, but we are absolutely determined that it go down in the annals: whoever bombed whom to pieces, we definitely had the most fun. Oh yes. Humour is bound up with pluck and stoicism, as if its prime function were to keep our mouths so occupied with drolleries that moaning and whining were literally impossible.This is something that came out immediately after last week's bombing, a swell of pride in the age-old grit of the Londoner, another bad thing happening without denting our character. It was different to the response in Madrid. The underlying feelings - shock, mourning, sympathy, defiance - were the same, but where they took to the streets to vent them, we have been rigidly business-as-usual.That's not to say that there was an instant cache of tube-bomb jokes circulating over the net - that may happen and it may not. My feeling is that we've all lost our stomachs for the hilarity of breaking the bereavement taboo, which is why disasters such as Beslan or the tsunami spawned nothing like the one-liners they used to.But whether we ever joke about the attack itself is irrelevant. The capital, even by Thursday evening, had its sense of humour back: grim, black and muted it may have been, but the pubs were full. In other cultures, resilience is manifested in dignity and vigil, but here we manifest it exactly as the Queen said: with a sense of humour. We must be OK, because we're ready with our poor wordplay once more.I think this explains why figures such as Ken Livingstone are more welcome in bad times than Tony Blair - not because Ken is incapable of gravitas, but because we know his base register is more skittish and mischievous, closer to the normality we seek instantly to resume.The funny thing is, disasters aren't that funny. Thursday wasn't, and I'm sure the Blitz wasn't exactly a laugh. To take pride in such a response is quirky - but if even the Queen has noticed, it must be true.
|
12zoewilliams
| 2UK
|
Andrew Mackinlay MP tabled a question in parliament last week that only a Christian and a royalist could possibly have dreamed up: was Camilla Parker Bowles going to be added by royal warrant to the state prayers? These prayers are said in many churches (who'd have thought?), included Diana until 1996 (who knew?) and now mention only the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles. The palace responded that there were no plans to include the Duchess of Cornwall by name, though she was included "by implication, because churchgoers pray in general to the royal family" (who knew that?).It's a perfectly defensible decision by the Queen. The marriage between Charles and Camilla has any number of features that aren't particularly reputable - its genesis, for instance. Churchgoers may well object to praying for an adulteress (though they seem to be OK about praying for an adulterer). Some people would probably be upset at the insult to Diana's memory. Blah, blah and blah. They're all good reasons, but it's just not very Christian, is it?As we've seen from the myriad ambiguities of the pomp and semi-pomp surrounding this couple's union, there are no fixed rules where divorcees are concerned any more. The wife of the future king is not necessarily the future queen. The civil-ceremony nuptials of the future head of the church didn't, as it turned out, diminish his fitness for that job. The Queen can refuse to attend the ceremony, but still hold the reception.For all the dark foreboding while the pair were still just - gulp - lovers, none of this turned out to be any more far-reaching or constitutional than the kvetching of any other family about who pays for the bridesmaids' dresses. If the Queen wanted to have Camilla in the state prayers, there isn't a Diana-lover in all of England who could stop her. As it turns out, she'd rather not. Camilla has suffered so many snubs from this quirky woman she must be feeling pretty stoic, but it does make you wonder. Is a parish church the best place to vent a not-very-Christian decision, based on not-quite-forgiveness? Can't she just snub Camilla by inviting her to a cocktail party, but not to the dinner afterwards?This family doesn't just thrive on, it owes everything to, the delicately unasked question: how does it feel to be head of state with no political muscle? Does anyone get a shiver of embarrassment about being head of the church while having no obvious spiritual obligations? Is it a little bit weird to be bankrolled for foreign trips while pursuing your own business interests?Most of this refers to Prince Charles, I now realise, but doesn't a metaphorical plinth seem a bit jerry-built when, after you've been held aloft by the taxpayer, you start sniffing out tax loopholes as fervently as a cash-in-hand plasterer? More pertinent to the young princes, how would even a very intelligent youngster square an attempt to present a "modern" face with the fact that his very position is an anachronism?If the Queen thinks Camilla is too unsuitable a spouse to be named as such, why did she sanction the wedding? Ah, but she didn't - she just, you know, kind of did. That's this family all over. They don't want anything clarified. They treat contradictions like herpes - insoluble, unfortunate, but for God's sake don't mention them and, besides, didn't we all have fun getting into this mess?I had this argument once with someone who said tolerating ambiguity was the sign of a civilised society. It shut me up for a bit. But here, as in so many cases, ambiguity is just another word for bilge. Tolerating bilge is the sign of a lazy society. They're skating along on the carapace of our sloth, this family. I'm sure that's not what the divine right of kings was supposed to be about.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
Andrew Mackinlay MP tabled a question in parliament last week that only a Christian and a royalist could possibly have dreamed up: was Camilla Parker Bowles going to be added by royal warrant to the state prayers? These prayers are said in many churches (who'd have thought?), included Diana until 1996 (who knew?) and now mention only the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles. The palace responded that there were no plans to include the Duchess of Cornwall by name, though she was included "by implication, because churchgoers pray in general to the royal family" (who knew that?).It's a perfectly defensible decision by the Queen. The marriage between Charles and Camilla has any number of features that aren't particularly reputable - its genesis, for instance. Churchgoers may well object to praying for an adulteress (though they seem to be OK about praying for an adulterer). Some people would probably be upset at the insult to Diana's memory. Blah, blah and blah. They're all good reasons, but it's just not very Christian, is it?As we've seen from the myriad ambiguities of the pomp and semi-pomp surrounding this couple's union, there are no fixed rules where divorcees are concerned any more. The wife of the future king is not necessarily the future queen. The civil-ceremony nuptials of the future head of the church didn't, as it turned out, diminish his fitness for that job. The Queen can refuse to attend the ceremony, but still hold the reception.For all the dark foreboding while the pair were still just - gulp - lovers, none of this turned out to be any more far-reaching or constitutional than the kvetching of any other family about who pays for the bridesmaids' dresses. If the Queen wanted to have Camilla in the state prayers, there isn't a Diana-lover in all of England who could stop her. As it turns out, she'd rather not. Camilla has suffered so many snubs from this quirky woman she must be feeling pretty stoic, but it does make you wonder. Is a parish church the best place to vent a not-very-Christian decision, based on not-quite-forgiveness? Can't she just snub Camilla by inviting her to a cocktail party, but not to the dinner afterwards?This family doesn't just thrive on, it owes everything to, the delicately unasked question: how does it feel to be head of state with no political muscle? Does anyone get a shiver of embarrassment about being head of the church while having no obvious spiritual obligations? Is it a little bit weird to be bankrolled for foreign trips while pursuing your own business interests?Most of this refers to Prince Charles, I now realise, but doesn't a metaphorical plinth seem a bit jerry-built when, after you've been held aloft by the taxpayer, you start sniffing out tax loopholes as fervently as a cash-in-hand plasterer? More pertinent to the young princes, how would even a very intelligent youngster square an attempt to present a "modern" face with the fact that his very position is an anachronism?If the Queen thinks Camilla is too unsuitable a spouse to be named as such, why did she sanction the wedding? Ah, but she didn't - she just, you know, kind of did. That's this family all over. They don't want anything clarified. They treat contradictions like herpes - insoluble, unfortunate, but for God's sake don't mention them and, besides, didn't we all have fun getting into this mess?I had this argument once with someone who said tolerating ambiguity was the sign of a civilised society. It shut me up for a bit. But here, as in so many cases, ambiguity is just another word for bilge. Tolerating bilge is the sign of a lazy society. They're skating along on the carapace of our sloth, this family. I'm sure that's not what the divine right of kings was supposed to be about.
|
12zoewilliams
| 2UK
|
It's a tough call for the policemen in charge of royal protection on the occasion of the family's big shindig. On the one hand, if the amiable hippies in charge of Glastonbury can get their heads around a ticket-only entry system, law enforcement officers of far more advanced jobsworth tendencies should have been able to prevent the gatecrash coup of a comedian dressed as a well-known terrorist. And yet, on the other hand, imagine the conversation - "I have a man here, sarge, dressed as Osama bin Laden." "That's no good. Where's the fun in that?" "Well, given that the right-thinking individual doesn't find terrorism in any way amusing, I imagine the joke is that Johnny Foreigner is a funny fellow." "Oh, I see, well you'd better let him in, then. That's the theme of the party." "Is that what Out of Africa means?" "Yup. Pretty much." In a craven attempt to get some goods on William's sex life, certain newspapers have decided that his fancy dress idea derives from the hots he harbours for Jessica Craig. According to the Sunday Times, she is a 21-year-old member of "Kenya's white elite", though whether you can ascend into this white elite just by being white, or whether you have to be loaded as well, remains unclear (lest there be any doubt, however, she is also loaded). The historian Andrew Roberts considers the theme as part of the wider family's relationship with the African continent. "There is an inverse proportion between the amount of time the Windsors spend in Africa and the amount of power they have there. After decolonisation, they went more and more." I suppose the message there is that this is a very nice family which just gets along much better with people it is not actively oppressing. The party theme is therefore a loud hello to celebrate the end of a pernicious empire. But really, to interpret this as either a romantic or a political gesture is to back away from the glaring truth that this is party theming as devised by a complete arse. First, although no reports have been exhaustive on the subject of Will's guest list, all the people who have been mentioned seem to have names that start with Second Earl of ... I wouldn't want to embarrass the palace by checking, but I am prepared to bet that the only black people at the party were members of the band. While nobody can force a young Botswana-travelled royal to have African acquaintances who are not members of its "white elite", the act of making his whitey friends dress up in feathers rather tastelessly underlines the fact. After all, you probably wouldn't have an American-themed party if you had Americans you wanted to invite. They would turn up in their regular clothes, for one thing, and besides, might experience feelings of miffedness. Imagine if someone in Africa had an English-themed party. There would be a lot of top hats and fans; some Jane Austen wear for people prepared to make the effort; a few wags might arrive with fake 12-bores and try to subjugate the rest of the party (with hilarious results); a costume of an animal commonly associated with our island (in all probability, a pig) might make an appearance. The japes would be many and varied, but from our point of view, pretty insulting, having fallen back on the keystone cliches of Englishness - that we are starchy, uptight, brutal and we like bacon sandwiches. Any attempt to represent a nation with its dress is bound to be reductive and therefore dehumanising. It stresses the otherness of foreigners, and rejects the global truth that most people, the world over, dress more or less the same, apart from the ones who can't afford a telly. Furthermore, if you look at the individual costumes chosen, you get an even stronger tang of - well, not wishing to bandy the "racism" word around too freely, let's call it "look at the funny natives-ism". There was a lot of leopard print and snakeskin which (on the basis of only one visit to Africa, granted), I'd say was a closer approximation of a Streatham singles night than an African style statement. Many of the older gentlemen dressed up in safari suits, which is like going to a Spanish-themed party with a beer, a burger and some vivid red sunburn (sure, there are English people in every country, and they tend to look funny, but you wouldn't say they defined that country's aesthetic). Fergie wore a long silver wig and whatever the message behind that, I'm sure, even if I knew, I would find it very offensive. And finally, there is something unsettling about the ongoing (I believe unrequited) love that the posh have for Africa. It does not focus on the realities of its countries in their modern form, but rather is shot through with a plangent nostalgia. And honestly, the subtext of any nostalgia about this continent has to be that it was better when we still owned it. All told, these are some very murky messages for a 21-year-old to be encouraging. It must be hard to get things right, living perpetually in the public eye. But he could afford to be a lot more dudelike, without getting any less regal.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
It's a tough call for the policemen in charge of royal protection on the occasion of the family's big shindig. On the one hand, if the amiable hippies in charge of Glastonbury can get their heads around a ticket-only entry system, law enforcement officers of far more advanced jobsworth tendencies should have been able to prevent the gatecrash coup of a comedian dressed as a well-known terrorist. And yet, on the other hand, imagine the conversation - "I have a man here, sarge, dressed as Osama bin Laden." "That's no good. Where's the fun in that?" "Well, given that the right-thinking individual doesn't find terrorism in any way amusing, I imagine the joke is that Johnny Foreigner is a funny fellow." "Oh, I see, well you'd better let him in, then. That's the theme of the party." "Is that what Out of Africa means?" "Yup. Pretty much." In a craven attempt to get some goods on William's sex life, certain newspapers have decided that his fancy dress idea derives from the hots he harbours for Jessica Craig. According to the Sunday Times, she is a 21-year-old member of "Kenya's white elite", though whether you can ascend into this white elite just by being white, or whether you have to be loaded as well, remains unclear (lest there be any doubt, however, she is also loaded). The historian Andrew Roberts considers the theme as part of the wider family's relationship with the African continent. "There is an inverse proportion between the amount of time the Windsors spend in Africa and the amount of power they have there. After decolonisation, they went more and more." I suppose the message there is that this is a very nice family which just gets along much better with people it is not actively oppressing. The party theme is therefore a loud hello to celebrate the end of a pernicious empire. But really, to interpret this as either a romantic or a political gesture is to back away from the glaring truth that this is party theming as devised by a complete arse. First, although no reports have been exhaustive on the subject of Will's guest list, all the people who have been mentioned seem to have names that start with Second Earl of ... I wouldn't want to embarrass the palace by checking, but I am prepared to bet that the only black people at the party were members of the band. While nobody can force a young Botswana-travelled royal to have African acquaintances who are not members of its "white elite", the act of making his whitey friends dress up in feathers rather tastelessly underlines the fact. After all, you probably wouldn't have an American-themed party if you had Americans you wanted to invite. They would turn up in their regular clothes, for one thing, and besides, might experience feelings of miffedness. Imagine if someone in Africa had an English-themed party. There would be a lot of top hats and fans; some Jane Austen wear for people prepared to make the effort; a few wags might arrive with fake 12-bores and try to subjugate the rest of the party (with hilarious results); a costume of an animal commonly associated with our island (in all probability, a pig) might make an appearance. The japes would be many and varied, but from our point of view, pretty insulting, having fallen back on the keystone cliches of Englishness - that we are starchy, uptight, brutal and we like bacon sandwiches. Any attempt to represent a nation with its dress is bound to be reductive and therefore dehumanising. It stresses the otherness of foreigners, and rejects the global truth that most people, the world over, dress more or less the same, apart from the ones who can't afford a telly. Furthermore, if you look at the individual costumes chosen, you get an even stronger tang of - well, not wishing to bandy the "racism" word around too freely, let's call it "look at the funny natives-ism". There was a lot of leopard print and snakeskin which (on the basis of only one visit to Africa, granted), I'd say was a closer approximation of a Streatham singles night than an African style statement. Many of the older gentlemen dressed up in safari suits, which is like going to a Spanish-themed party with a beer, a burger and some vivid red sunburn (sure, there are English people in every country, and they tend to look funny, but you wouldn't say they defined that country's aesthetic). Fergie wore a long silver wig and whatever the message behind that, I'm sure, even if I knew, I would find it very offensive. And finally, there is something unsettling about the ongoing (I believe unrequited) love that the posh have for Africa. It does not focus on the realities of its countries in their modern form, but rather is shot through with a plangent nostalgia. And honestly, the subtext of any nostalgia about this continent has to be that it was better when we still owned it. All told, these are some very murky messages for a 21-year-old to be encouraging. It must be hard to get things right, living perpetually in the public eye. But he could afford to be a lot more dudelike, without getting any less regal.
|
12zoewilliams
| 2UK
|
When the slings and arrows of the lottery deliver up a fortune that is truly outrageous, as onlookers we immediately try to wrestle it into a narrative. Without a narrative, it is just a wonderful stroke of life-changing luck that happened to some other people and didn't happen to us. That's just nauseating you can't live with that, not even for half an hour. One way to overcome it is to make out that the luck is cursed: the Times yesterday ran with a "tale of two lottery winners", in which the super-lout Michael Carroll had his myriad flaws adumbrated yet again, the number of cars he's crashed given yet again, his ludicrous poetry quoted yet again, to ram home the reassuring message that you can get as lucky as you like, but unless you have some laudable interior qualities you will not stay lucky. This message was reinforced by the contrasting case of Pat Griffiths, a winner so ascetic, so hard-working and unmaterialistic, that although she gave up her job editing the local paper, she hasn't stopped working, hasn't moved house and hasn't spent much more than she (probably) could have borrowed from a bank. "Why would we want to move?" she asks, rhetorically, to underline her deserving nature. "We already live in paradise on earth." Ah, Bisto. I feel better already. The Daily Mail, today, took a more gnomic stab at making sense of the luck. The married winners, sharing between them 45.5m, are from Newport. Wait, wait, there's more Newport is in Gwent, and Gwent has been home to seven winners (of, er, 8,000). This luck isn't wild! It's Jackpot Valley, it was preordained by the gods overseeing the intersection of good fortune and geomorphology. Of course, there are people who aren't superstitious, and aren't persuaded that Carroll and Griffiths represent the very reaches of good and evil; there are subtler ways we can kid ourselves that life is fair. The Fabian Society did some research a couple of months ago on perceptions of the super-rich and the underclass, and found that, in our urge to believe that money obeys the laws of the moral universe, we ascribe qualities to people, based on their income, for which we have absolutely no evidence. Respondents would freely assume that bankers, for instance, worked incredibly hard and/or had trained for a long time, or that people on working families' tax credit were lazy and had an unusual number of vices. Lottery winners rob us of these false assumptions: none of these people worked or trained their way to wealth. So it has to be a rags-to-riches tale. And you notice that the Liverpool syndicate who won the other half of the money are already being called "call centre workers" to make them sound skint, ground-down and depressed, even though they were mostly in management. Don't blame yourself. It's all useful salve on the suppurating sore of envy. I personally like to tell myself that they'll all blow their cash on drugs and petty property disputes with their new super-rich neighbours.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
When the slings and arrows of the lottery deliver up a fortune that is truly outrageous, as onlookers we immediately try to wrestle it into a narrative. Without a narrative, it is just a wonderful stroke of life-changing luck that happened to some other people and didn't happen to us. That's just nauseating you can't live with that, not even for half an hour. One way to overcome it is to make out that the luck is cursed: the Times yesterday ran with a "tale of two lottery winners", in which the super-lout Michael Carroll had his myriad flaws adumbrated yet again, the number of cars he's crashed given yet again, his ludicrous poetry quoted yet again, to ram home the reassuring message that you can get as lucky as you like, but unless you have some laudable interior qualities you will not stay lucky. This message was reinforced by the contrasting case of Pat Griffiths, a winner so ascetic, so hard-working and unmaterialistic, that although she gave up her job editing the local paper, she hasn't stopped working, hasn't moved house and hasn't spent much more than she (probably) could have borrowed from a bank. "Why would we want to move?" she asks, rhetorically, to underline her deserving nature. "We already live in paradise on earth." Ah, Bisto. I feel better already. The Daily Mail, today, took a more gnomic stab at making sense of the luck. The married winners, sharing between them 45.5m, are from Newport. Wait, wait, there's more Newport is in Gwent, and Gwent has been home to seven winners (of, er, 8,000). This luck isn't wild! It's Jackpot Valley, it was preordained by the gods overseeing the intersection of good fortune and geomorphology. Of course, there are people who aren't superstitious, and aren't persuaded that Carroll and Griffiths represent the very reaches of good and evil; there are subtler ways we can kid ourselves that life is fair. The Fabian Society did some research a couple of months ago on perceptions of the super-rich and the underclass, and found that, in our urge to believe that money obeys the laws of the moral universe, we ascribe qualities to people, based on their income, for which we have absolutely no evidence. Respondents would freely assume that bankers, for instance, worked incredibly hard and/or had trained for a long time, or that people on working families' tax credit were lazy and had an unusual number of vices. Lottery winners rob us of these false assumptions: none of these people worked or trained their way to wealth. So it has to be a rags-to-riches tale. And you notice that the Liverpool syndicate who won the other half of the money are already being called "call centre workers" to make them sound skint, ground-down and depressed, even though they were mostly in management. Don't blame yourself. It's all useful salve on the suppurating sore of envy. I personally like to tell myself that they'll all blow their cash on drugs and petty property disputes with their new super-rich neighbours.
|
12zoewilliams
| 2UK
|
Prince Philip has done something unprecedented. He has denied, in the strongest possible terms, that he ever called Princess Di a trollop or a harlot in any of his letters to her. This is not very regal behaviour, entering into a media mudfight, but apparently his hands were tied - Prince William had given him an ultimatum, and we can all imagine how shattering that was ("Deny these words, or I'll never look at you shyly from beneath my bambi hair ever again!" he probably said). Clearly, this kind of nonsense shouldn't detain us for a second, whether true or not. The facts of the matter are in no doubt - the people's princess was doing the nasty with someone other than her husband for some time before their separation. Therefore, to anyone capable of using words like "trollop" and "harlot" without laughing, that makes her a trollop. It may never be known whether Prince Philip said as much to her face, but since he gets such timeless joy from saying things like "Gosh, you're very black, aren't you? How hilarious!" to the faces of black people, it seems unlikely that he curbed himself in the face of the harlot. Anyway, in a case where one person's dead and the other one's cuckoo, it doesn't matter terribly who said what; it only matters that the extant one is behaving rather unusually. Devout royal watchers will have noticed that Philip made the news twice at the weekend - the other time, it was a brief mention of the fact that he was spotted ostentatiously leashing his Labrador while out walking, in tacit reference to Princess Anne's recent fine under the Dangerous Dogs Act. Obviously, he was making some kind of humorous statement, here: Labradors are charmless hulks of goodwill, they'd never maul anyone. Perhaps he was saying, "You crazy members of the public, I suppose you'll want me to leash my Labrador next!", or perhaps he was saying something else altogether. But the juxtaposition of the two stories does remind us that Princess Anne's case was also unprecedented. She isn't the first royal to own a dangerous dog, and she isn't the first to cause needless harm to her subjects by failing to do something that anyone with half a brain would have done, but she's certainly the first to be successfully prosecuted under the Dangerous Dogs Act. The Queen, normally a stickler for boring old precedent, also behaved somewhat innovatively during the trial of Paul Burrell. There's certainly no precedent in living memory for a queen to give evidence against herself in a case she really needn't have brought to court, if she'd known she was going to do that (I wonder if she can now prosecute herself for wasting her own time). All families have to break with tradition at some point, but there is a problem when the royals do it. Not because we set higher standards for them than we do for each other, since we're all perfectly aware how only-human they are. No, it's because precedent is all they've got. Precedent is all that's standing between them and the rest of busted-flush aristocracy; more importantly, from their point of view, it's all that's standing between them and proper income tax. It is an undisputed fact that nobody accords the royals any constitutional importance whatsoever. Of 101 Labour MPs questioned by BBC1's On the Record, 80% said the Queen should be stripped of all constitutional powers. These people are supposed to be in charge! Why don't they just put their votes where their views are? Because of convention. Why does Tony Blair waste all that time chatting to the Queen, when he has no intention of doing what she says, and she's not going to say anything anyway? Because that's how it's done. Why do we submit to being subjects rather than citizens? Because that's the way it's always been. If you spend one minute examining their role in the context of logic, rather than tradition, you cannot see the point of them. Even the staunchest monarchists, pressed on this family's purpose, can only come up with one of two things. Either, it's a tourist attraction (which I'd contest - or, better still, offset by building another London Eye). Or, they ask, "What do we put in their place?" - well, what indeed? A freely elected president? A toothless but benign head of state? Some kittens? It doesn't matter, so long as it's been given serious thought; so long as the final decision is reached in accordance with the principles of modern democracy; basically, so long as there is some idea behind it other than "Let's do what we did last year." Now, I'm not necessarily advocating the overthrow of the royal family, since on this issue, more than any other, I feel profoundly indifferent. I merely suggest that they should be a lot more careful, the next time they're tempted to wade imperiously into an issue, thinking to halt our tabloid chattering with one absolute assertion or denial. Every time they do something they've never done before, however tedious it is, they're clawing through their own safety nets. There may not be much dignity in silence, but there's always a chance we'll forget they're there.
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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Prince Philip has done something unprecedented. He has denied, in the strongest possible terms, that he ever called Princess Di a trollop or a harlot in any of his letters to her. This is not very regal behaviour, entering into a media mudfight, but apparently his hands were tied - Prince William had given him an ultimatum, and we can all imagine how shattering that was ("Deny these words, or I'll never look at you shyly from beneath my bambi hair ever again!" he probably said). Clearly, this kind of nonsense shouldn't detain us for a second, whether true or not. The facts of the matter are in no doubt - the people's princess was doing the nasty with someone other than her husband for some time before their separation. Therefore, to anyone capable of using words like "trollop" and "harlot" without laughing, that makes her a trollop. It may never be known whether Prince Philip said as much to her face, but since he gets such timeless joy from saying things like "Gosh, you're very black, aren't you? How hilarious!" to the faces of black people, it seems unlikely that he curbed himself in the face of the harlot. Anyway, in a case where one person's dead and the other one's cuckoo, it doesn't matter terribly who said what; it only matters that the extant one is behaving rather unusually. Devout royal watchers will have noticed that Philip made the news twice at the weekend - the other time, it was a brief mention of the fact that he was spotted ostentatiously leashing his Labrador while out walking, in tacit reference to Princess Anne's recent fine under the Dangerous Dogs Act. Obviously, he was making some kind of humorous statement, here: Labradors are charmless hulks of goodwill, they'd never maul anyone. Perhaps he was saying, "You crazy members of the public, I suppose you'll want me to leash my Labrador next!", or perhaps he was saying something else altogether. But the juxtaposition of the two stories does remind us that Princess Anne's case was also unprecedented. She isn't the first royal to own a dangerous dog, and she isn't the first to cause needless harm to her subjects by failing to do something that anyone with half a brain would have done, but she's certainly the first to be successfully prosecuted under the Dangerous Dogs Act. The Queen, normally a stickler for boring old precedent, also behaved somewhat innovatively during the trial of Paul Burrell. There's certainly no precedent in living memory for a queen to give evidence against herself in a case she really needn't have brought to court, if she'd known she was going to do that (I wonder if she can now prosecute herself for wasting her own time). All families have to break with tradition at some point, but there is a problem when the royals do it. Not because we set higher standards for them than we do for each other, since we're all perfectly aware how only-human they are. No, it's because precedent is all they've got. Precedent is all that's standing between them and the rest of busted-flush aristocracy; more importantly, from their point of view, it's all that's standing between them and proper income tax. It is an undisputed fact that nobody accords the royals any constitutional importance whatsoever. Of 101 Labour MPs questioned by BBC1's On the Record, 80% said the Queen should be stripped of all constitutional powers. These people are supposed to be in charge! Why don't they just put their votes where their views are? Because of convention. Why does Tony Blair waste all that time chatting to the Queen, when he has no intention of doing what she says, and she's not going to say anything anyway? Because that's how it's done. Why do we submit to being subjects rather than citizens? Because that's the way it's always been. If you spend one minute examining their role in the context of logic, rather than tradition, you cannot see the point of them. Even the staunchest monarchists, pressed on this family's purpose, can only come up with one of two things. Either, it's a tourist attraction (which I'd contest - or, better still, offset by building another London Eye). Or, they ask, "What do we put in their place?" - well, what indeed? A freely elected president? A toothless but benign head of state? Some kittens? It doesn't matter, so long as it's been given serious thought; so long as the final decision is reached in accordance with the principles of modern democracy; basically, so long as there is some idea behind it other than "Let's do what we did last year." Now, I'm not necessarily advocating the overthrow of the royal family, since on this issue, more than any other, I feel profoundly indifferent. I merely suggest that they should be a lot more careful, the next time they're tempted to wade imperiously into an issue, thinking to halt our tabloid chattering with one absolute assertion or denial. Every time they do something they've never done before, however tedious it is, they're clawing through their own safety nets. There may not be much dignity in silence, but there's always a chance we'll forget they're there.
|
12zoewilliams
| 2UK
|
It's Prince Harry's birth-month; he's 21, you know. One time, when he was younger, he drank quite a lot, and his father made some noises about putting him in rehab. Now we're talking about it, I can't remember whether or not he did go to rehab, but I remember thinking it was the most ludicrous thing I'd ever heard, putting someone in rehab over a couple of Smirnoff Ices; you might just as well put someone in Broadmoor for killing a squirrel.He once went to a fancy-dress party disguised as a Nazi. He thought this was funny; a lot of people called it controversial. I found it impossible to determine why it would be either funny or controversial. (Really, unless it's the pelt of a creature you care about, who could care less what aristos wear to parties?) I know that he regrets wearing the outfit sincerely, according to some interview he gave to a TV company, which wasn't the BBC, whom he snubbed with his seminal coming-of-age message. He likes motorbikes, and has been photographed by Mario Testino with some grime on his face, looking like a young Marlon Brando, except in the respect of having any charisma, or beauty, or sex appeal. He used the word "arse", apropos of his time at Sandhurst. And, er, that's it.Contrary to popular wisdom, there is a much more serious image crisis in the younger generation of this family than there is in the older. However much the Queen or Prince Charles might be accused of being "out of date", starchy, slightly ridiculous, overfond of pets, they can get away with it, since they belong to a reticent generation. The young ones, however, are required to be accessible yet special. Having no special talents, their speciality must be something basically impossible - a classless version of aristocratic superiority; a faith-free version of divine right.They have been hailed as the great white hope, this generation, free from the tang of the seamy love hexagons that beset their parents, bringing with them a new informality and a new approachability, but it's those very qualities that make them even less viable than their forebears. Make your minds up, chums - do you want to be just like one of us, mucking in with your Sandhurst minions and swearing with the best of them, or do you want to be a breed apart? And if you're not the second, on what possible grounds would we laud you as the first?Politely aware of this tricksy business, our media construct certain fictions around these people to keep them afloat. The first is that they are beautiful. Everyone from Zara Phillips through Princess Beatrice to Prince William has been credited with some physical loveliness, on the basis that beauty is a perfectly comprehensible, modern thing to be celebrated for. Of course, it's wholly bogus; none of them is ever going to put the squeeze on Kate Moss. The second fiction is that their lifestyles are rarefied and unusual for reasons beyond the fact that they spend a lot of money on them. Again, patently bogus. The third is that they occupy an indispensable place in the nation's culture; in fact it is this lie of indispensability that has screwed them, since if they had been allowed to fade quietly into the background, slowly replacing "engagements" with actual "jobs", and "apartments" with actual "flats", they would be well on the way to moneyed normality by now.No such luck for young Harry, who has also exclusively revealed that he "likes to have a laugh". Our expectations of this family are not real, but that won't stop us making a fuss when they let us down; they couldn't fulfil them even if they were real. Nobody, come to that, is sure what these expectations are, but we'll know, next time a prince goes to a party dressed as a member of the Ba'ath party, what they aren't. It's a thorny, inconsistent business that seems to preclude almost all kinds of laugh. Would it not be easier just to pay tax?
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
It's Prince Harry's birth-month; he's 21, you know. One time, when he was younger, he drank quite a lot, and his father made some noises about putting him in rehab. Now we're talking about it, I can't remember whether or not he did go to rehab, but I remember thinking it was the most ludicrous thing I'd ever heard, putting someone in rehab over a couple of Smirnoff Ices; you might just as well put someone in Broadmoor for killing a squirrel.He once went to a fancy-dress party disguised as a Nazi. He thought this was funny; a lot of people called it controversial. I found it impossible to determine why it would be either funny or controversial. (Really, unless it's the pelt of a creature you care about, who could care less what aristos wear to parties?) I know that he regrets wearing the outfit sincerely, according to some interview he gave to a TV company, which wasn't the BBC, whom he snubbed with his seminal coming-of-age message. He likes motorbikes, and has been photographed by Mario Testino with some grime on his face, looking like a young Marlon Brando, except in the respect of having any charisma, or beauty, or sex appeal. He used the word "arse", apropos of his time at Sandhurst. And, er, that's it.Contrary to popular wisdom, there is a much more serious image crisis in the younger generation of this family than there is in the older. However much the Queen or Prince Charles might be accused of being "out of date", starchy, slightly ridiculous, overfond of pets, they can get away with it, since they belong to a reticent generation. The young ones, however, are required to be accessible yet special. Having no special talents, their speciality must be something basically impossible - a classless version of aristocratic superiority; a faith-free version of divine right.They have been hailed as the great white hope, this generation, free from the tang of the seamy love hexagons that beset their parents, bringing with them a new informality and a new approachability, but it's those very qualities that make them even less viable than their forebears. Make your minds up, chums - do you want to be just like one of us, mucking in with your Sandhurst minions and swearing with the best of them, or do you want to be a breed apart? And if you're not the second, on what possible grounds would we laud you as the first?Politely aware of this tricksy business, our media construct certain fictions around these people to keep them afloat. The first is that they are beautiful. Everyone from Zara Phillips through Princess Beatrice to Prince William has been credited with some physical loveliness, on the basis that beauty is a perfectly comprehensible, modern thing to be celebrated for. Of course, it's wholly bogus; none of them is ever going to put the squeeze on Kate Moss. The second fiction is that their lifestyles are rarefied and unusual for reasons beyond the fact that they spend a lot of money on them. Again, patently bogus. The third is that they occupy an indispensable place in the nation's culture; in fact it is this lie of indispensability that has screwed them, since if they had been allowed to fade quietly into the background, slowly replacing "engagements" with actual "jobs", and "apartments" with actual "flats", they would be well on the way to moneyed normality by now.No such luck for young Harry, who has also exclusively revealed that he "likes to have a laugh". Our expectations of this family are not real, but that won't stop us making a fuss when they let us down; they couldn't fulfil them even if they were real. Nobody, come to that, is sure what these expectations are, but we'll know, next time a prince goes to a party dressed as a member of the Ba'ath party, what they aren't. It's a thorny, inconsistent business that seems to preclude almost all kinds of laugh. Would it not be easier just to pay tax?
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10simonhoggart
| 2UK
|
Up early to go to Belfast for the historic first meeting of the new Northern Ireland executive. Peter Mandelson is on the radio, sounding historic. He asks us to reflect on the "enormity" of what has happened this week. I check it in the OED: "enormity - a monstrous wickedness, a crime or monstrous offence." Another word lost to the language. Belfast is as I remember it - permanently wet. The taxi roars up to Stormont, past the triumphalist Carson statue - how long can that survive? - to the massive parliament building, an edifice of a size and grandeur which would be appropriate if its denizens governed the Hapsburg empire, but which in this small, outlying province looks merely ridiculous. It was here 30 years ago that I heard Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist prime minister, offer places in government to nationalist politicians - a deal not unlike the one which has just been agreed. But that was in the earliest days of the troubles; they would get much worse, 3,000 dead worse, and Faulkner's offer was as pointless as sticking a traffic cone in front of a tank. You can tell how historic an event is deemed to be by the number of satellite TV trucks parked outside. Today I can see 13 - good news for history fans since that implies the story could make the Associated Press top twenty of the year's historic news events, somewhere between the Indian elections and the fall of Jeffrey Archer. Inside the building we wait for the new executive to turn up. William Hague came in the morning, but no one seems to have noticed. Finally a Sinn Fein party walked down the great staircase, past the statue of Lord Carnarvon, and addressed us, looking as they generally do, sour but historic. Gerry Adams spoke in Irish, then in English, but it didn't make any difference, since his words were lost, bouncing off the vast marble walls, the carved stone, the lavish brasswork, the painted ceiling and the massive chandeliers. Lord Carnarvon would have considered this lot Fenian bogtrotters. The sight of them standing in the midst of that splendour - "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" as it was called - might have made his statue crumble, but it was still upright when the party went back up, affording us the chance to notice that Gerry Adams climbs stairs rather like Groucho Marx, which is something you don't see on TV. The executive met for the first time at 3pm. I followed up the stairs to hear the Rev Ian Paisley, whose DUP is refusing to sit in the executive along with Sinn Fein, but whose ministers will take part in government and committees. Paisley is an unchanging constant, and you could measure the progress of the troubles by the whitening of his hair. "I have been told this is a daybreak - but there is no daybreak for the children of Northern Ireland!" He claimed - Paisley always has a scoop - that Bairbre de Brun, the Sinn Fein health minister, was demanding to know the religious affiliation of civil servants, so that she could sack the Protestants. Paisley's enduring appeal to his electorate is that he treats the Unionists as if they were the oppressed minority. On and on he roared. "You, the press, have told wicked lies! This is no new daybreak. It is a new night, and we do not know what midnight will bring!" I would have written more, but my Pentel which writes letters of fire had run out. As he ploughed on, the DUP assemblymen around him looked first embarrassed and then bored. Their evident ennui near their leader may be a hopeful sign. Messrs Trimble and Mallon emerged from the historic first meeting to report historically good progress. They were heckled. "What about those who were murdered?" shouted someone, who could have come from either side. In the crush I found myself jammed up against Martin McGuinness, the former IRA chief of staff who is now education minister. He is a big man, and was wearing a well-cut suit, with neatly trimmed hair and highly polished shoes. He looked like a minister, not a terrorist. Why was I just faintly reminded of the last chapter of Animal Farm?
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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Up early to go to Belfast for the historic first meeting of the new Northern Ireland executive. Peter Mandelson is on the radio, sounding historic. He asks us to reflect on the "enormity" of what has happened this week. I check it in the OED: "enormity - a monstrous wickedness, a crime or monstrous offence." Another word lost to the language. Belfast is as I remember it - permanently wet. The taxi roars up to Stormont, past the triumphalist Carson statue - how long can that survive? - to the massive parliament building, an edifice of a size and grandeur which would be appropriate if its denizens governed the Hapsburg empire, but which in this small, outlying province looks merely ridiculous. It was here 30 years ago that I heard Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist prime minister, offer places in government to nationalist politicians - a deal not unlike the one which has just been agreed. But that was in the earliest days of the troubles; they would get much worse, 3,000 dead worse, and Faulkner's offer was as pointless as sticking a traffic cone in front of a tank. You can tell how historic an event is deemed to be by the number of satellite TV trucks parked outside. Today I can see 13 - good news for history fans since that implies the story could make the Associated Press top twenty of the year's historic news events, somewhere between the Indian elections and the fall of Jeffrey Archer. Inside the building we wait for the new executive to turn up. William Hague came in the morning, but no one seems to have noticed. Finally a Sinn Fein party walked down the great staircase, past the statue of Lord Carnarvon, and addressed us, looking as they generally do, sour but historic. Gerry Adams spoke in Irish, then in English, but it didn't make any difference, since his words were lost, bouncing off the vast marble walls, the carved stone, the lavish brasswork, the painted ceiling and the massive chandeliers. Lord Carnarvon would have considered this lot Fenian bogtrotters. The sight of them standing in the midst of that splendour - "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" as it was called - might have made his statue crumble, but it was still upright when the party went back up, affording us the chance to notice that Gerry Adams climbs stairs rather like Groucho Marx, which is something you don't see on TV. The executive met for the first time at 3pm. I followed up the stairs to hear the Rev Ian Paisley, whose DUP is refusing to sit in the executive along with Sinn Fein, but whose ministers will take part in government and committees. Paisley is an unchanging constant, and you could measure the progress of the troubles by the whitening of his hair. "I have been told this is a daybreak - but there is no daybreak for the children of Northern Ireland!" He claimed - Paisley always has a scoop - that Bairbre de Brun, the Sinn Fein health minister, was demanding to know the religious affiliation of civil servants, so that she could sack the Protestants. Paisley's enduring appeal to his electorate is that he treats the Unionists as if they were the oppressed minority. On and on he roared. "You, the press, have told wicked lies! This is no new daybreak. It is a new night, and we do not know what midnight will bring!" I would have written more, but my Pentel which writes letters of fire had run out. As he ploughed on, the DUP assemblymen around him looked first embarrassed and then bored. Their evident ennui near their leader may be a hopeful sign. Messrs Trimble and Mallon emerged from the historic first meeting to report historically good progress. They were heckled. "What about those who were murdered?" shouted someone, who could have come from either side. In the crush I found myself jammed up against Martin McGuinness, the former IRA chief of staff who is now education minister. He is a big man, and was wearing a well-cut suit, with neatly trimmed hair and highly polished shoes. He looked like a minister, not a terrorist. Why was I just faintly reminded of the last chapter of Animal Farm?
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10simonhoggart
| 2UK
|
Gordon Brown arrived on the front bench in the Commons, laughing and joking with Tony Blair. Laughing and joking? With Tony Blair? Things must be desperate. The prime minister was about to shaft him. And so he did. Shortly after that he told us to expect a referendum on membership of the euro within - he implied - two years of the election. The chancellor himself would prefer it some time after a giant meteor has wiped out all life on earth. At least that way he'd know the result in advance. Step back with me two hours in time, to 1pm yesterday. I was at the Channel 4 Political Awards, to be shown at 8pm on Saturday. It'll be a funny show, so catch it if you can, though it goes out at the same time as Casualty. You might find it hard to tell the difference. ("This man's career is hanging by a thread! We need oxygen, a blood transfusion, and a heart transplant!" "But doctor, look, the Mandelson case file says 'do not resuscitate!'") At my table was Lembit Opik, the LibDem MP who has spent the last few years telling us that the meteor could strike at any time. I asked if we wouldn't have a few weeks' warning, to send up a nuclear device up to smash the rock before it hits us. He said we might get two minutes. What a cheery companion he proved to be. Jon Snow, the presenter, made a joke about Michael Meacher "only stopping by to pick up the rent". That got a big laugh. Lembit Opik appeared on camera talking about Gordon Prentice, a keen opponent of fox-hunting. He, Lembit, had suggested to him that it should remain legal, but there should be a regulatory agency called "Off-fox". Mr Prentice had replied "using the same words, but in the reverse order". There were some queeny "whoo, whoos" from the assembled pols and hacks, but Gordon Brown looked much amused. Stephen Pound, the Labour MP for Ealing, was briefly fooled on air by a phone call from Tony Blair - actually a member of Radio 4's Dead Ringers team. The prime minister would like to visit his constituency. "I can promise you no tomatoes," said Mr Pound, "but a few kiwi fruits and aubergines, perhaps..." The next winner was the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley, for his book about New Labour and their general contempt for the voters. It is said that Gordon Brown was a source for this work, but now regrets telling the author whatever it was he said. As the oeuvre was being praised, the chancellor looked thunderous. Margaret Beckett, two seats away, smiled a tight little smile. Mr Rawnsley praised his wife for all her help. "She is my rock, my comfort and my joy," he said. The chancellor's jaw literally hung open. He hugged himself, like someone signalling the maitre d' to bring a strait jacket. Then Mr Brown himself won the top award of all, for "the MP who has been the most outstanding figure in the House". They showed short clips of people praising him. He looked delighted. Who wouldn't be? Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews declared on the monitors: "He is an absolutely typical Lowland Scot. He believes in the virtues of toil, and plunder." Back in the Commons, Mr Blair was replying to William Hague. Did an early referendum on the euro mean within two years of the next parliament? (The Tory leader seems to have given up any hope of winning.) "Early in the next parliament would, of course, be within two years," Mr Blair replied. Mr Brown scowled. Win some, lose some. But he seems to win nearly all the time, so I don't suppose he'll mind too much.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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Gordon Brown arrived on the front bench in the Commons, laughing and joking with Tony Blair. Laughing and joking? With Tony Blair? Things must be desperate. The prime minister was about to shaft him. And so he did. Shortly after that he told us to expect a referendum on membership of the euro within - he implied - two years of the election. The chancellor himself would prefer it some time after a giant meteor has wiped out all life on earth. At least that way he'd know the result in advance. Step back with me two hours in time, to 1pm yesterday. I was at the Channel 4 Political Awards, to be shown at 8pm on Saturday. It'll be a funny show, so catch it if you can, though it goes out at the same time as Casualty. You might find it hard to tell the difference. ("This man's career is hanging by a thread! We need oxygen, a blood transfusion, and a heart transplant!" "But doctor, look, the Mandelson case file says 'do not resuscitate!'") At my table was Lembit Opik, the LibDem MP who has spent the last few years telling us that the meteor could strike at any time. I asked if we wouldn't have a few weeks' warning, to send up a nuclear device up to smash the rock before it hits us. He said we might get two minutes. What a cheery companion he proved to be. Jon Snow, the presenter, made a joke about Michael Meacher "only stopping by to pick up the rent". That got a big laugh. Lembit Opik appeared on camera talking about Gordon Prentice, a keen opponent of fox-hunting. He, Lembit, had suggested to him that it should remain legal, but there should be a regulatory agency called "Off-fox". Mr Prentice had replied "using the same words, but in the reverse order". There were some queeny "whoo, whoos" from the assembled pols and hacks, but Gordon Brown looked much amused. Stephen Pound, the Labour MP for Ealing, was briefly fooled on air by a phone call from Tony Blair - actually a member of Radio 4's Dead Ringers team. The prime minister would like to visit his constituency. "I can promise you no tomatoes," said Mr Pound, "but a few kiwi fruits and aubergines, perhaps..." The next winner was the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley, for his book about New Labour and their general contempt for the voters. It is said that Gordon Brown was a source for this work, but now regrets telling the author whatever it was he said. As the oeuvre was being praised, the chancellor looked thunderous. Margaret Beckett, two seats away, smiled a tight little smile. Mr Rawnsley praised his wife for all her help. "She is my rock, my comfort and my joy," he said. The chancellor's jaw literally hung open. He hugged himself, like someone signalling the maitre d' to bring a strait jacket. Then Mr Brown himself won the top award of all, for "the MP who has been the most outstanding figure in the House". They showed short clips of people praising him. He looked delighted. Who wouldn't be? Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews declared on the monitors: "He is an absolutely typical Lowland Scot. He believes in the virtues of toil, and plunder." Back in the Commons, Mr Blair was replying to William Hague. Did an early referendum on the euro mean within two years of the next parliament? (The Tory leader seems to have given up any hope of winning.) "Early in the next parliament would, of course, be within two years," Mr Blair replied. Mr Brown scowled. Win some, lose some. But he seems to win nearly all the time, so I don't suppose he'll mind too much.
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10simonhoggart
| 2UK
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The House discussed the leaking of the Stephen Lawrence report yesterday. Here was a crucially important document whose contents go to the roots of our national malaise. So naturally, it was the opportunity for a gigantic festival of hypocrisy, an orgy of cant, a saturnalia of double-speak. We heard a government minister actually suggest that he had tried to stamp on the early publication of the report 'out of respect for this House and its procedures.' Even some Labour MPs seemed taken aback. Respect for the House? The Government regards MPs much as a pharaoh looked on the slaves building his pyramid. He was glad to see them at work, and some tiny corner of him might even be grateful, but he would never dream of taking them on one side to discuss the plans. Jack Straw, previously the recipient of the kindest epithet any politician can give another 'a safe pair of hands' was in deep trouble. The mess over the injunctions had made him look foolish. The claim that he had acted in the interests of Parliament made him look weaselly as well. Then he alleged that his real motive was to avoid 'distress to the Lawrence family' whom, it turned out, he had not consulted on the matter. This was a desperate throw, an attempt to imply that anyone who criticised Jack Straw was actually trampling over people who have suffered agonies for more than six years. But the slaves behind him were well-drilled, having felt the knotted rope on their backs too often. They cheered all his assertions, even the most ridiculous, and when Norman Fowler said that he felt 'the strongest sympathy for the family' they actually yelled 'No!' Of course the shadow home secretary went over the top. The Tories always do. Perhaps they think no one will pay attention unless they froth with rabid fury. 'Humiliating climbdown' he said. 'Defies belief . . . defiance of parliamentary democracy . . . a shabby episode that shows this government at its worst.' Although, as Gerald Kaufman pointed out a few moments later, Mr Fowler's party had pursued Sarah Tisdall into jail, had tried to put Clive Ponting into jail, and had pursued the Spycatcher case all the way to Australia. So which was worse, a Tory claiming to be valiant for the freedom of the press, or a Labour backbencher implying that a problem does not exist if the last government got it wrong too? Mr Fowler had admitted that he was a director of a newspaper company, so Mr Straw startlingly accused him of 'speaking as a newspaper executive and not as an MP.' 'Cheap little man!' Mr Fowler muttered at this daft allegation. Tories demanded that he withdraw. Betty Boothroyd said she had been distracted and had not heard what Mr Straw had said. (Who could blame her? If I were Speaker I would have a miniature TV fitted to my arm rest, so that I could catch Captain Pugwash instead.) Mr Straw repeated the charge. 'Bullseye!' yelled some ridiculous Labour sycophant. Betty gently called on Jack to withdraw. 'I withdraw the remark,' he muttered. 'Apologise!' the Tories screamed. 'I apologise,' he mumbled at his chest, in the way which makes every parent yell: 'Say it as if you meant it!' There was a difference, he said, between a judicial inquiry and a 'run-of-the-mill government publication.' The implication of this, that the Government could leak what it liked when it liked, raised the Tories to new levels of ersatz anger. David Winnick, Keith Vaz and Diane Abbott tightened the hysterical atmosphere by, in effect, accusing the Conservatives of racism and contempt for the Lawrence family. 'I am disgusted . . . they did nothing about race and racism when they were in power!' said Mr Vaz, as if that had any bearing on Mr Straw's misjudgment. The House at its very worst, as we old Commons hands say.
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
|
The House discussed the leaking of the Stephen Lawrence report yesterday. Here was a crucially important document whose contents go to the roots of our national malaise. So naturally, it was the opportunity for a gigantic festival of hypocrisy, an orgy of cant, a saturnalia of double-speak. We heard a government minister actually suggest that he had tried to stamp on the early publication of the report 'out of respect for this House and its procedures.' Even some Labour MPs seemed taken aback. Respect for the House? The Government regards MPs much as a pharaoh looked on the slaves building his pyramid. He was glad to see them at work, and some tiny corner of him might even be grateful, but he would never dream of taking them on one side to discuss the plans. Jack Straw, previously the recipient of the kindest epithet any politician can give another 'a safe pair of hands' was in deep trouble. The mess over the injunctions had made him look foolish. The claim that he had acted in the interests of Parliament made him look weaselly as well. Then he alleged that his real motive was to avoid 'distress to the Lawrence family' whom, it turned out, he had not consulted on the matter. This was a desperate throw, an attempt to imply that anyone who criticised Jack Straw was actually trampling over people who have suffered agonies for more than six years. But the slaves behind him were well-drilled, having felt the knotted rope on their backs too often. They cheered all his assertions, even the most ridiculous, and when Norman Fowler said that he felt 'the strongest sympathy for the family' they actually yelled 'No!' Of course the shadow home secretary went over the top. The Tories always do. Perhaps they think no one will pay attention unless they froth with rabid fury. 'Humiliating climbdown' he said. 'Defies belief . . . defiance of parliamentary democracy . . . a shabby episode that shows this government at its worst.' Although, as Gerald Kaufman pointed out a few moments later, Mr Fowler's party had pursued Sarah Tisdall into jail, had tried to put Clive Ponting into jail, and had pursued the Spycatcher case all the way to Australia. So which was worse, a Tory claiming to be valiant for the freedom of the press, or a Labour backbencher implying that a problem does not exist if the last government got it wrong too? Mr Fowler had admitted that he was a director of a newspaper company, so Mr Straw startlingly accused him of 'speaking as a newspaper executive and not as an MP.' 'Cheap little man!' Mr Fowler muttered at this daft allegation. Tories demanded that he withdraw. Betty Boothroyd said she had been distracted and had not heard what Mr Straw had said. (Who could blame her? If I were Speaker I would have a miniature TV fitted to my arm rest, so that I could catch Captain Pugwash instead.) Mr Straw repeated the charge. 'Bullseye!' yelled some ridiculous Labour sycophant. Betty gently called on Jack to withdraw. 'I withdraw the remark,' he muttered. 'Apologise!' the Tories screamed. 'I apologise,' he mumbled at his chest, in the way which makes every parent yell: 'Say it as if you meant it!' There was a difference, he said, between a judicial inquiry and a 'run-of-the-mill government publication.' The implication of this, that the Government could leak what it liked when it liked, raised the Tories to new levels of ersatz anger. David Winnick, Keith Vaz and Diane Abbott tightened the hysterical atmosphere by, in effect, accusing the Conservatives of racism and contempt for the Lawrence family. 'I am disgusted . . . they did nothing about race and racism when they were in power!' said Mr Vaz, as if that had any bearing on Mr Straw's misjudgment. The House at its very worst, as we old Commons hands say.
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10simonhoggart
| 2UK
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This week I was asked to write a chapter for a book about journalism, and I jokily emailed to say my fee would be £10,000. The commissioning editor wrote back to say that was a relief; the publishers had feared I might demand £10,000 per word.But I suspect something like that must have happened when Jonathan Ross's agent contacted the BBC. "Tell you, what, Jonno, we'll have a laugh, we'll ask for six mill a year, and settle for what? £500k? Twice what you're worth, mate, but no harm in trying, right?" Then the word comes back from Broadcasting House: "Yes, of course, six million is eminently reasonable. We'll send the contract over ..." Mr Ross's salary has now become the great symbol of BBC profligacy and financial incontinence, and there was much talk of it at the bash to celebrate 50 years of the Today programme this week. John Humphrys said in his speech he was sorry Jonathan Ross couldn't be with us: "He's at Buckingham Palace giving the king of Saudi Arabia advice about what to do with his money." It's the kind of thing that creates a boiling and roiling resentment in every other person who works for the BBC, especially in radio, where the fees are famously limp.The fact is that the BBC has such range, such clout, and so many outlets that it can create its own stars. It doesn't need to pay vast sums to bring in established people from outside (Graham Norton) and it doesn't need to beggar itself by holding on to those who are offered ridiculous sums elsewhere. You only need to look at Hancock and Morecambe and Wise to see what can happen to those who follow the cash.<b></b> There was much talk of great Today programme fiascos, such as the time Jack de Manio couldn't conduct an interview because he was locked in the toilet. Or the occasion at the start of the Iraq war when Tony Benn appeared to pronounce anathemas on all concerned. But instead of him, they accidentally played a tape of Mongolian throat music. "So, Mr Benn, what's your view?" "Wurghhh, urggh ..." I'd have enjoyed that. Ming Campbell was there looking happy and relaxed. We got on to the subject of lawyers who are also politicians, and he told a story about the late John Smith. He'd been defending a man accused of attempted murder with a knife. The fellow was convicted, so Smith paid the customary visit to the cells to commiserate and apologise. "Not to worry, Mr Smith," he said cheerfully, "you were so good I was believing you myself!"<b></b> It is my habit, when I pass near the ancient wine merchants of Berry Bros and Rudd in St James, London, to pop in and gaze at their fine wine room. Last time I looked the second most expensive wine on sale was a Chateau Petrus 1990 at £3,600 - per bottle. The priciest of the lot was the 1990 Chateau Le Pin, which now retails at £3,800. The grapes are not trodden by horny-footed peasants.People sometimes ask if it's worth it, and the answer is obviously no, except to folk who use such wine to demonstrate their enormous wealth. Absurd to imagine that it is a hundred times better than a fine claret from a less famous name, or even a thousand times better than Sainsbury's rouge.But wine pricing is a weird business. This week I went to the launch of the 1998 vintage of Pol Roger's prestige line, Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill. It is, as you would imagine, very delicious. And it costs £100 a bottle. But a tiny amount is made, and they are desperately anxious not to get the bling, rock stars and Russian millionaires image. So they refuse to provide it to people who they fear might sell it on to certain West End nightclubs or restaurants. Their long-term image is more important than the immediate profits.They told me darkly that there is a new breed of PR person whose job it is to reduce sales. Companies like Burberry have been horrified to see yobs wearing their design, and some champagne houses are similarly afflicted. So they employ people to discourage the wrong sort of customer. I wonder how they work? "Nah, mate, you don't want this stuff. Now, Woolworth's fiver-a-bottle bubbly, you'll love that ..."Next day I went to a tasting of vintage Hine cognacs (these events tend to come in clusters). We were taken through nine brandies, including the 1944, which was fabulous, by Bernard Hine. He is an outgoing, elderly chap with faultless English and a majestic white moustache. Among the terms bandied about to describe the brandies were "figs, crystallised fruit, gingerbread, honey, apricots, flowers, quince, toast, vanilla, cloves, mushrooms, orange peel, truffles and jasmine" - one of those corporate Christmas hampers in a bottle.At one point a guest said he thought he detected fuel. M Hine looked like a Bateman colonel. His eyes bulged and his nostrils dilated. "Fee-you-ell?" he shouted. "Fee-you-ell? I do not like that word!" I thought he was a little unfair - the greatest Rieslings, for example, often have a touch of kerosene, and believe me, it all adds to the flavour.<b></b> To a literary lunch in Cambridge, to plug my book of sketches, The Hands Of History, and the two round-robin books, now collected in paperback as The Christmas Letters. (Incidentally I'll be doing the annual round-up in January next year; all contributions very gratefully received.) I was slightly alarmed to see that I had been placed next to Princess Michael of Kent, whose image in the press has not always been entirely favourable. To my surprise, she turned out to be extremely friendly, unpretentious, and very chatty about all sorts of topics. For example, she does a lot of work with wildlife preservation, and she told me that baby elephants have ears as thin as the skin on a crispy duck. If they're orphaned they lack the shade of a parent. This means that sun cream has to be applied to their ears. Not many people know that.<b></b> Last week I said that Sir Geoffrey Bindman had, at the knighthood ceremony, stepped on to the kneeling stool and walked up next to the Queen. His son, Dan, tells me that this is untrue - instead he hopped straight on to the dais. I am glad to correct the record, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
|
This week I was asked to write a chapter for a book about journalism, and I jokily emailed to say my fee would be £10,000. The commissioning editor wrote back to say that was a relief; the publishers had feared I might demand £10,000 per word.But I suspect something like that must have happened when Jonathan Ross's agent contacted the BBC. "Tell you, what, Jonno, we'll have a laugh, we'll ask for six mill a year, and settle for what? £500k? Twice what you're worth, mate, but no harm in trying, right?" Then the word comes back from Broadcasting House: "Yes, of course, six million is eminently reasonable. We'll send the contract over ..." Mr Ross's salary has now become the great symbol of BBC profligacy and financial incontinence, and there was much talk of it at the bash to celebrate 50 years of the Today programme this week. John Humphrys said in his speech he was sorry Jonathan Ross couldn't be with us: "He's at Buckingham Palace giving the king of Saudi Arabia advice about what to do with his money." It's the kind of thing that creates a boiling and roiling resentment in every other person who works for the BBC, especially in radio, where the fees are famously limp.The fact is that the BBC has such range, such clout, and so many outlets that it can create its own stars. It doesn't need to pay vast sums to bring in established people from outside (Graham Norton) and it doesn't need to beggar itself by holding on to those who are offered ridiculous sums elsewhere. You only need to look at Hancock and Morecambe and Wise to see what can happen to those who follow the cash.<b></b> There was much talk of great Today programme fiascos, such as the time Jack de Manio couldn't conduct an interview because he was locked in the toilet. Or the occasion at the start of the Iraq war when Tony Benn appeared to pronounce anathemas on all concerned. But instead of him, they accidentally played a tape of Mongolian throat music. "So, Mr Benn, what's your view?" "Wurghhh, urggh ..." I'd have enjoyed that. Ming Campbell was there looking happy and relaxed. We got on to the subject of lawyers who are also politicians, and he told a story about the late John Smith. He'd been defending a man accused of attempted murder with a knife. The fellow was convicted, so Smith paid the customary visit to the cells to commiserate and apologise. "Not to worry, Mr Smith," he said cheerfully, "you were so good I was believing you myself!"<b></b> It is my habit, when I pass near the ancient wine merchants of Berry Bros and Rudd in St James, London, to pop in and gaze at their fine wine room. Last time I looked the second most expensive wine on sale was a Chateau Petrus 1990 at £3,600 - per bottle. The priciest of the lot was the 1990 Chateau Le Pin, which now retails at £3,800. The grapes are not trodden by horny-footed peasants.People sometimes ask if it's worth it, and the answer is obviously no, except to folk who use such wine to demonstrate their enormous wealth. Absurd to imagine that it is a hundred times better than a fine claret from a less famous name, or even a thousand times better than Sainsbury's rouge.But wine pricing is a weird business. This week I went to the launch of the 1998 vintage of Pol Roger's prestige line, Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill. It is, as you would imagine, very delicious. And it costs £100 a bottle. But a tiny amount is made, and they are desperately anxious not to get the bling, rock stars and Russian millionaires image. So they refuse to provide it to people who they fear might sell it on to certain West End nightclubs or restaurants. Their long-term image is more important than the immediate profits.They told me darkly that there is a new breed of PR person whose job it is to reduce sales. Companies like Burberry have been horrified to see yobs wearing their design, and some champagne houses are similarly afflicted. So they employ people to discourage the wrong sort of customer. I wonder how they work? "Nah, mate, you don't want this stuff. Now, Woolworth's fiver-a-bottle bubbly, you'll love that ..."Next day I went to a tasting of vintage Hine cognacs (these events tend to come in clusters). We were taken through nine brandies, including the 1944, which was fabulous, by Bernard Hine. He is an outgoing, elderly chap with faultless English and a majestic white moustache. Among the terms bandied about to describe the brandies were "figs, crystallised fruit, gingerbread, honey, apricots, flowers, quince, toast, vanilla, cloves, mushrooms, orange peel, truffles and jasmine" - one of those corporate Christmas hampers in a bottle.At one point a guest said he thought he detected fuel. M Hine looked like a Bateman colonel. His eyes bulged and his nostrils dilated. "Fee-you-ell?" he shouted. "Fee-you-ell? I do not like that word!" I thought he was a little unfair - the greatest Rieslings, for example, often have a touch of kerosene, and believe me, it all adds to the flavour.<b></b> To a literary lunch in Cambridge, to plug my book of sketches, The Hands Of History, and the two round-robin books, now collected in paperback as The Christmas Letters. (Incidentally I'll be doing the annual round-up in January next year; all contributions very gratefully received.) I was slightly alarmed to see that I had been placed next to Princess Michael of Kent, whose image in the press has not always been entirely favourable. To my surprise, she turned out to be extremely friendly, unpretentious, and very chatty about all sorts of topics. For example, she does a lot of work with wildlife preservation, and she told me that baby elephants have ears as thin as the skin on a crispy duck. If they're orphaned they lack the shade of a parent. This means that sun cream has to be applied to their ears. Not many people know that.<b></b> Last week I said that Sir Geoffrey Bindman had, at the knighthood ceremony, stepped on to the kneeling stool and walked up next to the Queen. His son, Dan, tells me that this is untrue - instead he hopped straight on to the dais. I am glad to correct the record, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
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10simonhoggart
| 2UK
|
The Tories are trying to turn Northern Ireland into a party political issue. They know they shouldn't really, but they just can't stop themselves.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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The Tories are trying to turn Northern Ireland into a party political issue. They know they shouldn't really, but they just can't stop themselves.
|
10simonhoggart
| 2UK
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
|
0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
In its latest bulletin from the frontiers of mental health research, the Daily Mail reports that Prince Charles seems to be, tragically, losing his tenuous hold on sanity, smashing china and losing his temper. "So just what is wrong with the Prince of Wales," probed Richard Kay. Well, it's pretty obvious isn't it? He's gone mad. Or worse. "Friends ... are increasingly concerned about his wellbeing." Which sounds as if the prince has joined Les Dennis, Winona Ryder, Michael Barrymore and Jeffrey Archer, all of whom have been reported, at various times, to be on "suicide watch". If only it were so easy! In jail, where the term originated, suicidal inmates can be checked every hour or more, through a handy peephole. But distressed celebrities are scattered all over the place, often behind closed doors, and quite impossible for their carers in the press to keep tabs on. The safest solution, surely, would be for Lord Rothermere or one of his competitors to establish a sort of celebrity Bedlam adjacent to their newsrooms into which these tragic individuals could be committed for their own good. With the stars monitored 24 hours a day by staff reporters and media mental health experts such as Raj Persaud, we could rest assured that everything was being done to stand between our favourite celebrities and their besetting problems with depression and alcoholism, shop-lifting and overweight and - perhaps saddest of all - crockery.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
In its latest bulletin from the frontiers of mental health research, the Daily Mail reports that Prince Charles seems to be, tragically, losing his tenuous hold on sanity, smashing china and losing his temper. "So just what is wrong with the Prince of Wales," probed Richard Kay. Well, it's pretty obvious isn't it? He's gone mad. Or worse. "Friends ... are increasingly concerned about his wellbeing." Which sounds as if the prince has joined Les Dennis, Winona Ryder, Michael Barrymore and Jeffrey Archer, all of whom have been reported, at various times, to be on "suicide watch". If only it were so easy! In jail, where the term originated, suicidal inmates can be checked every hour or more, through a handy peephole. But distressed celebrities are scattered all over the place, often behind closed doors, and quite impossible for their carers in the press to keep tabs on. The safest solution, surely, would be for Lord Rothermere or one of his competitors to establish a sort of celebrity Bedlam adjacent to their newsrooms into which these tragic individuals could be committed for their own good. With the stars monitored 24 hours a day by staff reporters and media mental health experts such as Raj Persaud, we could rest assured that everything was being done to stand between our favourite celebrities and their besetting problems with depression and alcoholism, shop-lifting and overweight and - perhaps saddest of all - crockery.
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0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
In further sensational, never previously broadcast interviews, Princess Diana describes events which will astonish the public and cast yet further doubts on her husband's fitness to rule. The recordings were made by her voice coach, Peter Pension-Scheme, whose teaching methods included immortalising the Princess on compromising video tapes, which were left with him for safe-keeping. In one tape, he is heard encouraging her to discuss her troubled marriage: "You must have been desperate for a real, red-blooded man, given that your everyday life was a desperate vortex of disappointment, bulimia and unbearable sexual frustration." "Yeah," Diana says. Pension-Scheme: "Your husband wasn't really meeting your needs?" The Princess laughs. "Twice a year, birthdays and Christmas - and that was cancelled if either of them fell on the 13th of the month. Typical Libra." Pension-Scheme asks: "So you were forced to seek intimacy elsewhere?" "And how," Diana says, rolling her eyes. "Couldn't get enough - until we were found out. Then it was curtains." Although she does not mention any names, it is understood that she is referring to John Major, the former Tory prime minister. Pension-Scheme: "He's said to be a very well endowed man." Diana giggles again. "Shall we say I thought he was just drop dead gorgeous. I don't find it easy to discuss - but I used to fantasise about running away from all this, finding a little bungalow somewhere, and spending the rest of my life taking care of him - but it wasn't meant to be." Diana's intimate friendship with Mr Major is understood to have continued until he was thrown out of office in 1997. Asked if she thinks his electoral defeat had anything to do with MI5, Diana lowers her voice. "With a little help from You Know Who. I didn't know anything about it until Labour had been in for three weeks. Charles just came in and told me they'd won. By a landslide. Typical." Minutes later she had to put on her public face and go shopping. "I was devastated. Threw both of us down the stairs. Total and utter stitch up. But there was no way of proving it." The outgoing Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, has ordered an investigation into claims of voting irregularities in the 1997 election. Before she was due to make an important speech, Mr Pension-Scheme would urge Diana to focus on the most hurtful aspects of life with her husband, then imagine herself performing a seductive victory dance with Wayne Sleep. She says she was devastated to discover, during her engagement, that Charles snored. "Too late to change my mind. Completely shattering. He said he wasn't going to be the first Prince of Wales not to snore. Utterly typical." Pension-Scheme: "Anything really disgusting? On a totally confidential basis, obviously." Diana pauses. "The worst thing - never told a soul, just too dangerous - is the devil worshipping thing. Right from the start of our marriage, I'd hear these terrifying howls at Highgrove. Spine chilling. Charles used to say it was owls." Refusing to accept this explanation, a frightened Diana contacted one of her clairvoyants, Evelina Chequebook. "Evelina came down and said the place was emitting more high-potency evil than anywhere she'd ever experienced. Totally toxic. Did my head in. Told me I absolutely had to get the boys out of there, before they were sucked into it. Can you believe it?" Mr Pension-Scheme asks what happened. "Went to see the Top Lady, as I call her," Diana says. "Said, I happen know for a fact that Charles and Camilla and the Van Cutsems are devil-worshipping in the quinsy garden." But the Queen refused to intervene."Just said, 'Oh Charles is utterly insane. Always has been. Always will be.' I said, 'Insanity! I see mental instability of such magnitude in my role that you would never understand.' And that was it. Nada." The outgoing Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, has ordered an investigation into claims that a satanic cult is operating from Highgrove. In another sensational confession, Diana says she discovered the location of Lord Lucan. Invited by Peter Pension-Scheme to share any empowering but deeply private experiences which might extend her vocal range, the Princess reveals that she has the power to track down missing people and objects. "People who have passed on, they tell me stuff. Tracked Charles down once, with his Lady. Behind his faith shed. Boy, were they surprised. And an earring. And Elvis came through once, saying Lucan's not really dead at all. Got me so upset." "Where is he now?" Pension-Scheme interjects. "What's the exact address?" "He's living under a false identity in -" here the Princess checks herself. "I can't tell you. Too risky. And he begged me not to expose him. Knows what he did was wrong, but he's trying to rebuild his life. Absolutely begged. I said OK. Left it to fate. I know what goes around comes around." Asked if she has told anyone else about her psychic powers, Diana tells Mr Pension-Scheme that he's the first. "I know I can trust you." On the basis of new evidence, Sir John Stevens has ordered a re-investigation of Lord Lucan's disappearance. <B>Who is the 'melons' man? </B> <BR> Even as one sympathises with the women MPs who, as a new report alleges, have endured unforgiveable insults from male colleagues, their reluctance to disclose which individuals offered them 10,000 for sex (reported by Oona King), or shouted "melons" (Barbara Follett), or "literally" pinned them to a wall by the neck (unnamed woman MP), or expressed a desire to "roger" a nearby woman (reported by Jackie Ballard), is quite mystifying. Who are these men? If they are still in parliament, should they not be named, and if guilty, subjected to public emasculation without anaesthetic? Or at any rate, invited to step down. Not only is it wrong to protect these primitives, the steady drone of unresolved complaint, if it persists for much longer, might give people the unfortunate impression that many women MPs are disproportionately preoccupied with their own specialness and personal grievances. One is still grumbling about the "public school atmosphere". Yet another says she "dreads" PM's questions. Can nothing be done to help them? Some effective collective action might liberate female MPs and civilise rogue males, at the same time as encouraging women who regularly face worse treatment, in far harder circumstances, all over the country. Unless one explanation for this apparent passivity is that many of the more lurid offences reported this week actually occurred years ago, long before the breast-feeding reforms and the changes in Commons hours and culture which now make the woman MP's lot the envy of many full-time workers with four weeks annual holiday. Although, as Dawn Primarolo suggested, it can still be difficult for women MPs to escape from work in order to watch their children play in rugby or football matches. I wonder if they have considered doing so during important parliamentary debates. A debate, for example, like the one about David Blunkett's outrageous and ignorant proposal to restrict freedom of speech where it relates to religion. You couldn't help but notice, on Tuesday afternoon, that this long, non-boorish discussion did not feature a single contribution from a woman backbencher. Two female junior ministers spoke in defence of censorship. Perhaps there were some important matches on. <B>Ridicule us too, please </B><BR> Jackie Rowley, communications director for Charles Kennedy, emails to ask why the Lib Dem leader's card did not feature in a piece, published earlier this week, about politicians' Christmas cards. "Did you fail to mention the Kennedy card because it was too normal (and in aid of a constituency charity)?" she asks. I see that lack of space is no excuse for ignoring Mr Kennedy's almost unimproveable Christmas card (in aid of the Highland Hospice in Inverness), which depicts a croft in the foreground and, behind it, the sunlit eminence of Glencoe, partially obscured by a line of horizontal cloud. I am conscious that there may be other cards which ought to be described in the Guardian. If so, do let me know.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
In further sensational, never previously broadcast interviews, Princess Diana describes events which will astonish the public and cast yet further doubts on her husband's fitness to rule. The recordings were made by her voice coach, Peter Pension-Scheme, whose teaching methods included immortalising the Princess on compromising video tapes, which were left with him for safe-keeping. In one tape, he is heard encouraging her to discuss her troubled marriage: "You must have been desperate for a real, red-blooded man, given that your everyday life was a desperate vortex of disappointment, bulimia and unbearable sexual frustration." "Yeah," Diana says. Pension-Scheme: "Your husband wasn't really meeting your needs?" The Princess laughs. "Twice a year, birthdays and Christmas - and that was cancelled if either of them fell on the 13th of the month. Typical Libra." Pension-Scheme asks: "So you were forced to seek intimacy elsewhere?" "And how," Diana says, rolling her eyes. "Couldn't get enough - until we were found out. Then it was curtains." Although she does not mention any names, it is understood that she is referring to John Major, the former Tory prime minister. Pension-Scheme: "He's said to be a very well endowed man." Diana giggles again. "Shall we say I thought he was just drop dead gorgeous. I don't find it easy to discuss - but I used to fantasise about running away from all this, finding a little bungalow somewhere, and spending the rest of my life taking care of him - but it wasn't meant to be." Diana's intimate friendship with Mr Major is understood to have continued until he was thrown out of office in 1997. Asked if she thinks his electoral defeat had anything to do with MI5, Diana lowers her voice. "With a little help from You Know Who. I didn't know anything about it until Labour had been in for three weeks. Charles just came in and told me they'd won. By a landslide. Typical." Minutes later she had to put on her public face and go shopping. "I was devastated. Threw both of us down the stairs. Total and utter stitch up. But there was no way of proving it." The outgoing Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, has ordered an investigation into claims of voting irregularities in the 1997 election. Before she was due to make an important speech, Mr Pension-Scheme would urge Diana to focus on the most hurtful aspects of life with her husband, then imagine herself performing a seductive victory dance with Wayne Sleep. She says she was devastated to discover, during her engagement, that Charles snored. "Too late to change my mind. Completely shattering. He said he wasn't going to be the first Prince of Wales not to snore. Utterly typical." Pension-Scheme: "Anything really disgusting? On a totally confidential basis, obviously." Diana pauses. "The worst thing - never told a soul, just too dangerous - is the devil worshipping thing. Right from the start of our marriage, I'd hear these terrifying howls at Highgrove. Spine chilling. Charles used to say it was owls." Refusing to accept this explanation, a frightened Diana contacted one of her clairvoyants, Evelina Chequebook. "Evelina came down and said the place was emitting more high-potency evil than anywhere she'd ever experienced. Totally toxic. Did my head in. Told me I absolutely had to get the boys out of there, before they were sucked into it. Can you believe it?" Mr Pension-Scheme asks what happened. "Went to see the Top Lady, as I call her," Diana says. "Said, I happen know for a fact that Charles and Camilla and the Van Cutsems are devil-worshipping in the quinsy garden." But the Queen refused to intervene."Just said, 'Oh Charles is utterly insane. Always has been. Always will be.' I said, 'Insanity! I see mental instability of such magnitude in my role that you would never understand.' And that was it. Nada." The outgoing Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, has ordered an investigation into claims that a satanic cult is operating from Highgrove. In another sensational confession, Diana says she discovered the location of Lord Lucan. Invited by Peter Pension-Scheme to share any empowering but deeply private experiences which might extend her vocal range, the Princess reveals that she has the power to track down missing people and objects. "People who have passed on, they tell me stuff. Tracked Charles down once, with his Lady. Behind his faith shed. Boy, were they surprised. And an earring. And Elvis came through once, saying Lucan's not really dead at all. Got me so upset." "Where is he now?" Pension-Scheme interjects. "What's the exact address?" "He's living under a false identity in -" here the Princess checks herself. "I can't tell you. Too risky. And he begged me not to expose him. Knows what he did was wrong, but he's trying to rebuild his life. Absolutely begged. I said OK. Left it to fate. I know what goes around comes around." Asked if she has told anyone else about her psychic powers, Diana tells Mr Pension-Scheme that he's the first. "I know I can trust you." On the basis of new evidence, Sir John Stevens has ordered a re-investigation of Lord Lucan's disappearance. <B>Who is the 'melons' man? </B> <BR> Even as one sympathises with the women MPs who, as a new report alleges, have endured unforgiveable insults from male colleagues, their reluctance to disclose which individuals offered them 10,000 for sex (reported by Oona King), or shouted "melons" (Barbara Follett), or "literally" pinned them to a wall by the neck (unnamed woman MP), or expressed a desire to "roger" a nearby woman (reported by Jackie Ballard), is quite mystifying. Who are these men? If they are still in parliament, should they not be named, and if guilty, subjected to public emasculation without anaesthetic? Or at any rate, invited to step down. Not only is it wrong to protect these primitives, the steady drone of unresolved complaint, if it persists for much longer, might give people the unfortunate impression that many women MPs are disproportionately preoccupied with their own specialness and personal grievances. One is still grumbling about the "public school atmosphere". Yet another says she "dreads" PM's questions. Can nothing be done to help them? Some effective collective action might liberate female MPs and civilise rogue males, at the same time as encouraging women who regularly face worse treatment, in far harder circumstances, all over the country. Unless one explanation for this apparent passivity is that many of the more lurid offences reported this week actually occurred years ago, long before the breast-feeding reforms and the changes in Commons hours and culture which now make the woman MP's lot the envy of many full-time workers with four weeks annual holiday. Although, as Dawn Primarolo suggested, it can still be difficult for women MPs to escape from work in order to watch their children play in rugby or football matches. I wonder if they have considered doing so during important parliamentary debates. A debate, for example, like the one about David Blunkett's outrageous and ignorant proposal to restrict freedom of speech where it relates to religion. You couldn't help but notice, on Tuesday afternoon, that this long, non-boorish discussion did not feature a single contribution from a woman backbencher. Two female junior ministers spoke in defence of censorship. Perhaps there were some important matches on. <B>Ridicule us too, please </B><BR> Jackie Rowley, communications director for Charles Kennedy, emails to ask why the Lib Dem leader's card did not feature in a piece, published earlier this week, about politicians' Christmas cards. "Did you fail to mention the Kennedy card because it was too normal (and in aid of a constituency charity)?" she asks. I see that lack of space is no excuse for ignoring Mr Kennedy's almost unimproveable Christmas card (in aid of the Highland Hospice in Inverness), which depicts a croft in the foreground and, behind it, the sunlit eminence of Glencoe, partially obscured by a line of horizontal cloud. I am conscious that there may be other cards which ought to be described in the Guardian. If so, do let me know.
|
0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
In Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, PG Wodehouse recorded the sterling response of Beach, the butler, on discovering Lord Emsworth's son in a drawing room with a sack of rats in his hand. "With a murmured apology, he secured the sack and started to withdraw. It was not strictly his duty to carry rats, but a good butler is always ready to give and take. Only so can the amenities of a large country house be preserved." Anyone who has marvelled, in recent days, at the duties routinely performed by Paul Burrell in his days of butling for the Prince and Princess of Wales may find that the Wodehouse passage has lost some of its old impact. They may feel that in comparison with the demands on Burrell's give and take, Beach's was barely tested. For a man, like Burrell, who might, at any time, be ordered to retrieve one of Diana's unwilling lovers from his hiding place in a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, or have a book thrown at him by Prince Charles as a punishment for second-rate lying, or be despatched to Paddington to stand proxy for the Princess as the saviour of deserving prostitutes, or be sent out by his mistress to buy pornography for her teenage son, the efficient disposal of a sack of rats would probably have presented a nice break from routine. For Burrell's unfortunate colleague, the valet who had to hold Prince Charles's hospital specimen pot while the royal membrum virile pissed into it, rat-securing could only have offered a glimpse of a better, more beautiful life. Of the many unanswered questions currently stacking-up, Sherlock Holmes-fashion, in the wake of the Burrell trial, the most fascinating is not, surely, the issue of why the Queen dallied so long before springing Burrell from the witness box, nor why our senior police investigators are so spectacularly thick, nor what possessed Burrell to remove boxes of old pop CDs, as well as letters, from proximity to those beastly shredding Spencers, but the far more intriguing subject of the Windsors' execrable treatment of their servants. How have they got away with it for so long? Naturally, confidentiality agreements and the official secrets act have been helpful to the feudal tradition. Had it not been for Burrell's trial, Prince Charles must have felt quite confident that no one would find out that fibbing to his wife formed part of the Highgrove butler's job description. Wendy Berry, who wrote an engrossing account of her servitude at Highgrove (and one which was rather kinder, though otherwise consistent with the subsequently published recollections of Ken Wharfe, the detective, and Patrick Jephson, Diana's secretary) had to flee to America after Prince Charles took out an injunction on her book, one which remains in place, ensuring that no part of it can be quoted. But even with this legal deterrent to gossip, it is remarkable how little, until now, has been disclosed by their servants about the preposterous expectations and demands of members of the royal family. Most people will have waited until the Burrell trial to discover that Prince Charles is notorious not only for temper tantrums but for the ludicrous and time-wasting requirement, like a child who cannot leave the house without her comfort blanket, that his personal arrangements, even in hospital, should replicate those at Highgrove. Thanks to Burrell, we now know that for the heir to the throne, there can be no disruption without a van-load of transitional objects. Also that this ardent believer in the dignity of mankind prefers, when at home, to recreate the social arrangements of Altman's satire, Gosford Park - a film, incidentally, which Charles has screened for guests at Sandringham: quality in the comfy chairs, servants in the hard ones at the back. Perhaps they were lucky. The Queen, by Burrell's account, prefers the lower orders to stand in her presence, even when, as in his own, notorious case, their encounter lasts for three hours. As for these bullied butlers and dressers, valets and housemaids, only proximity to power - and, of course, the free accommodation - can explain why so many are content to indulge their masters, remaining mutely loyal, infinitely discreet. For Burrell, Diana's intimacy and trust must have compensated for the dignity he forfeited when she appointed him Rock of the Bedchamber, a sort of gentleman-procurer responsible for delivering her lovers, stowed in a car boot, in and out of Kensington Palace. Similarly, his sovereign's abrupt recollection of their chat - "the Queen came through for me" - seems instantly to have made up for her two years of forgetfulness. Those who now condemn Burrell for telling his story should perhaps marvel instead at his forbearance during the many years of being pelted with books by the heir apparent and besieged by out-of-hours calls from the moody princess while unwanted presents from colonial visitors stoked the Highgrove bonfires. Moreover, even as they add to the gaiety of nations, the Burrell confessions may effect some improvement in palace working conditions. Next time some troublesome Helot has him reaching for the nearest, book-shaped missile, the Prince of Wales may want to think twice, and send for a rat sack instead.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
In Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, PG Wodehouse recorded the sterling response of Beach, the butler, on discovering Lord Emsworth's son in a drawing room with a sack of rats in his hand. "With a murmured apology, he secured the sack and started to withdraw. It was not strictly his duty to carry rats, but a good butler is always ready to give and take. Only so can the amenities of a large country house be preserved." Anyone who has marvelled, in recent days, at the duties routinely performed by Paul Burrell in his days of butling for the Prince and Princess of Wales may find that the Wodehouse passage has lost some of its old impact. They may feel that in comparison with the demands on Burrell's give and take, Beach's was barely tested. For a man, like Burrell, who might, at any time, be ordered to retrieve one of Diana's unwilling lovers from his hiding place in a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, or have a book thrown at him by Prince Charles as a punishment for second-rate lying, or be despatched to Paddington to stand proxy for the Princess as the saviour of deserving prostitutes, or be sent out by his mistress to buy pornography for her teenage son, the efficient disposal of a sack of rats would probably have presented a nice break from routine. For Burrell's unfortunate colleague, the valet who had to hold Prince Charles's hospital specimen pot while the royal membrum virile pissed into it, rat-securing could only have offered a glimpse of a better, more beautiful life. Of the many unanswered questions currently stacking-up, Sherlock Holmes-fashion, in the wake of the Burrell trial, the most fascinating is not, surely, the issue of why the Queen dallied so long before springing Burrell from the witness box, nor why our senior police investigators are so spectacularly thick, nor what possessed Burrell to remove boxes of old pop CDs, as well as letters, from proximity to those beastly shredding Spencers, but the far more intriguing subject of the Windsors' execrable treatment of their servants. How have they got away with it for so long? Naturally, confidentiality agreements and the official secrets act have been helpful to the feudal tradition. Had it not been for Burrell's trial, Prince Charles must have felt quite confident that no one would find out that fibbing to his wife formed part of the Highgrove butler's job description. Wendy Berry, who wrote an engrossing account of her servitude at Highgrove (and one which was rather kinder, though otherwise consistent with the subsequently published recollections of Ken Wharfe, the detective, and Patrick Jephson, Diana's secretary) had to flee to America after Prince Charles took out an injunction on her book, one which remains in place, ensuring that no part of it can be quoted. But even with this legal deterrent to gossip, it is remarkable how little, until now, has been disclosed by their servants about the preposterous expectations and demands of members of the royal family. Most people will have waited until the Burrell trial to discover that Prince Charles is notorious not only for temper tantrums but for the ludicrous and time-wasting requirement, like a child who cannot leave the house without her comfort blanket, that his personal arrangements, even in hospital, should replicate those at Highgrove. Thanks to Burrell, we now know that for the heir to the throne, there can be no disruption without a van-load of transitional objects. Also that this ardent believer in the dignity of mankind prefers, when at home, to recreate the social arrangements of Altman's satire, Gosford Park - a film, incidentally, which Charles has screened for guests at Sandringham: quality in the comfy chairs, servants in the hard ones at the back. Perhaps they were lucky. The Queen, by Burrell's account, prefers the lower orders to stand in her presence, even when, as in his own, notorious case, their encounter lasts for three hours. As for these bullied butlers and dressers, valets and housemaids, only proximity to power - and, of course, the free accommodation - can explain why so many are content to indulge their masters, remaining mutely loyal, infinitely discreet. For Burrell, Diana's intimacy and trust must have compensated for the dignity he forfeited when she appointed him Rock of the Bedchamber, a sort of gentleman-procurer responsible for delivering her lovers, stowed in a car boot, in and out of Kensington Palace. Similarly, his sovereign's abrupt recollection of their chat - "the Queen came through for me" - seems instantly to have made up for her two years of forgetfulness. Those who now condemn Burrell for telling his story should perhaps marvel instead at his forbearance during the many years of being pelted with books by the heir apparent and besieged by out-of-hours calls from the moody princess while unwanted presents from colonial visitors stoked the Highgrove bonfires. Moreover, even as they add to the gaiety of nations, the Burrell confessions may effect some improvement in palace working conditions. Next time some troublesome Helot has him reaching for the nearest, book-shaped missile, the Prince of Wales may want to think twice, and send for a rat sack instead.
|
0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
For loyal followers of Prince Charles's career, Mark Bolland's statement only confirmed something that became evident years ago, even before Jonathan Dimbleby's biography and television documentary introduced us to the suffering, misunderstood outsider who is our future king. As long ago as 1982, in one of my favourite Prince Charles speeches (in which he lectured the BMA on the benefits of healing), our embryonic dissident anticipated disapproval with a short digression about the role of the intellectual outcast, reminding the doctors of the persecution of the 16th-century physician, Paracelsus: "He is probably remembered more for his fight against orthodoxy than for his achievements in the medical field. As a result of his unorthodox approach to medicine in his time, he was equated with the damnable Dr Faustus."Such, the doctors gathered, was Charles's estimation of his own, heretical role. "Perhaps," he told them, "we just have to accept it is God's will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and man-kind is ready to receive his message ..."Later, he appears to have extended this analysis to include the obstacles to popularity faced (though now, mercifully overcome) by his mistress; certainly he could be heard telling her in the Camillagate tape, "You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies." By this time, it seems, the prince had come to feel that his sufferings so far surpassed the occasional comparison with Dr Faustus as to approach the trauma of contemporary political dissidents.Bolland's evidence, together with the extracts from the Chinese Takeaway diary, also suggest that, since styling himself a medico-mystical sort of seer, doomed to suffer the mockery of the ignorant for possessing insights whose truth would only be revealed long after his death (when they'd all be sorry), Prince Charles has developed into a roving, proactive campaigner for human rights, more along the lines of a one-man Amnesty International. And a campaigner, incidentally, who knows what it is to be spied on, followed, and publicly denounced in his struggle to win freedom of speech for the hereditary monarchy.This is the unafraid, outspoken dissident who refused to dine with President Jiang Zemin, out of solidarity for the Dalai Lama, and determined that this deliberate snub should be advertised in the press, where the Chinese delegation would read it - and either fume with frustrated social ambition, or renounce their claim to Tibet.And this is the outspoken dissident who is also a close ally and companion of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, where, as he is presumably aware, many of the liberties he craves for the oppressed Chinese are routinely denied to subjects of the Saud dynasty. Possibly, he prefers the Arab rulers' noble, hawk-carrying look to that of the yellow-tinged Chinese "waxworks" in their ill-fitting suits. Or it could be a question of artistic affinity. In 2001 Charles and Prince Khalid al-Faisal held a joint exhibition of their paintings; watercolour prince reaching out to oil-painting prince, across the human rights divide. Unless it is the very different feel of human rights violations, when they are imposed by a hereditary monarch who has been educated at an English public school. If so, this would explain Charles's trip to Bhutan, a few years ago, where the torture and ethnic cleansing of Nepalese speakers did not prevent him enjoying hours in the company of the absolute monarch, King Wangchuck.What manner of dissident, then, does Prince Charles aspire to be? He travels too much to have a lot in common with Aung San Suu Kyi, and while his zeal for writing letters betrays some affinity with the late Mary Whitehouse, the astonishing range of his known interventions (one senses the existence of many more, of which we remain unaware) - medicine, China, history teaching, architecture, GM foods, Shakespeare, the compensation culture, religion, farming, hunting, cancer care, nano-technology, mutton, political correctness gone mad - makes him more reminiscent, surely, of Gandhi, whose unorthodoxies also extended beyond revolutionary political thinking to embrace spirituality, morality, dietary restrictions, and dress.True, Gandhi is indelibly associated with non-violence and sexual restraint, while the Prince has been known to throw books and wrench washbasins off walls, but in their shared sense of destiny, their search for the truth, ambitions for their country, and strict rules about what to eat for breakfast, the two might be spiritual brothers, each filled with a profound sense of mission to do what is right. "You have to stand against the whole world although you may have to stand alone," Gandhi said. "You have to stare in the face the whole world although the world may look at you with blood-shot eyes. Do not fear. Trust the little voice residing within your heart." Or, as it might be, sitting on your throne.It could be, of course, that when he inherits, the Prince plans at once to abandon controversy, emulating instead his stoical mother, who this week received at the palace - with her habitual lack of complaint - a reception for expatriate Australians including Clive James, Germaine Greer, and her old tormentor, Rolf Harris. But given the prince's existing commitment to saying the unsayable on any subject from grey goo to the power of coffee enemas, the acquisition of a throne seems more likely to inspire still greater flights of unfettered self-expression. At liberty to snub or flatter any political leader he chooses, King Charles III will be free to invite the entire Saudi royal family to hunt in St James's Park, to commission Quinlan Terry to beautify both the interior and facade of Buckingham Palace with ornamental pineapples, and - once a week! - to introduce prime ministers as yet unborn to the mysteries of integrated medicine, before reading to them, for hours at a time, from Shakespeare's Henry V or the King James Bible. There will no mummy to glare at him, no daddy to mock him, and more importantly, no interfering little Bollands where there should be only pleasing and agreeable favourites. No one will dare implore him to avoid controversy and ludicrous contradictions (such as helicopter travel and lectures on global warming). Mankind, in short, will be ready to receive his message. He will be our first absolute dissident.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
For loyal followers of Prince Charles's career, Mark Bolland's statement only confirmed something that became evident years ago, even before Jonathan Dimbleby's biography and television documentary introduced us to the suffering, misunderstood outsider who is our future king. As long ago as 1982, in one of my favourite Prince Charles speeches (in which he lectured the BMA on the benefits of healing), our embryonic dissident anticipated disapproval with a short digression about the role of the intellectual outcast, reminding the doctors of the persecution of the 16th-century physician, Paracelsus: "He is probably remembered more for his fight against orthodoxy than for his achievements in the medical field. As a result of his unorthodox approach to medicine in his time, he was equated with the damnable Dr Faustus."Such, the doctors gathered, was Charles's estimation of his own, heretical role. "Perhaps," he told them, "we just have to accept it is God's will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and man-kind is ready to receive his message ..."Later, he appears to have extended this analysis to include the obstacles to popularity faced (though now, mercifully overcome) by his mistress; certainly he could be heard telling her in the Camillagate tape, "You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies." By this time, it seems, the prince had come to feel that his sufferings so far surpassed the occasional comparison with Dr Faustus as to approach the trauma of contemporary political dissidents.Bolland's evidence, together with the extracts from the Chinese Takeaway diary, also suggest that, since styling himself a medico-mystical sort of seer, doomed to suffer the mockery of the ignorant for possessing insights whose truth would only be revealed long after his death (when they'd all be sorry), Prince Charles has developed into a roving, proactive campaigner for human rights, more along the lines of a one-man Amnesty International. And a campaigner, incidentally, who knows what it is to be spied on, followed, and publicly denounced in his struggle to win freedom of speech for the hereditary monarchy.This is the unafraid, outspoken dissident who refused to dine with President Jiang Zemin, out of solidarity for the Dalai Lama, and determined that this deliberate snub should be advertised in the press, where the Chinese delegation would read it - and either fume with frustrated social ambition, or renounce their claim to Tibet.And this is the outspoken dissident who is also a close ally and companion of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, where, as he is presumably aware, many of the liberties he craves for the oppressed Chinese are routinely denied to subjects of the Saud dynasty. Possibly, he prefers the Arab rulers' noble, hawk-carrying look to that of the yellow-tinged Chinese "waxworks" in their ill-fitting suits. Or it could be a question of artistic affinity. In 2001 Charles and Prince Khalid al-Faisal held a joint exhibition of their paintings; watercolour prince reaching out to oil-painting prince, across the human rights divide. Unless it is the very different feel of human rights violations, when they are imposed by a hereditary monarch who has been educated at an English public school. If so, this would explain Charles's trip to Bhutan, a few years ago, where the torture and ethnic cleansing of Nepalese speakers did not prevent him enjoying hours in the company of the absolute monarch, King Wangchuck.What manner of dissident, then, does Prince Charles aspire to be? He travels too much to have a lot in common with Aung San Suu Kyi, and while his zeal for writing letters betrays some affinity with the late Mary Whitehouse, the astonishing range of his known interventions (one senses the existence of many more, of which we remain unaware) - medicine, China, history teaching, architecture, GM foods, Shakespeare, the compensation culture, religion, farming, hunting, cancer care, nano-technology, mutton, political correctness gone mad - makes him more reminiscent, surely, of Gandhi, whose unorthodoxies also extended beyond revolutionary political thinking to embrace spirituality, morality, dietary restrictions, and dress.True, Gandhi is indelibly associated with non-violence and sexual restraint, while the Prince has been known to throw books and wrench washbasins off walls, but in their shared sense of destiny, their search for the truth, ambitions for their country, and strict rules about what to eat for breakfast, the two might be spiritual brothers, each filled with a profound sense of mission to do what is right. "You have to stand against the whole world although you may have to stand alone," Gandhi said. "You have to stare in the face the whole world although the world may look at you with blood-shot eyes. Do not fear. Trust the little voice residing within your heart." Or, as it might be, sitting on your throne.It could be, of course, that when he inherits, the Prince plans at once to abandon controversy, emulating instead his stoical mother, who this week received at the palace - with her habitual lack of complaint - a reception for expatriate Australians including Clive James, Germaine Greer, and her old tormentor, Rolf Harris. But given the prince's existing commitment to saying the unsayable on any subject from grey goo to the power of coffee enemas, the acquisition of a throne seems more likely to inspire still greater flights of unfettered self-expression. At liberty to snub or flatter any political leader he chooses, King Charles III will be free to invite the entire Saudi royal family to hunt in St James's Park, to commission Quinlan Terry to beautify both the interior and facade of Buckingham Palace with ornamental pineapples, and - once a week! - to introduce prime ministers as yet unborn to the mysteries of integrated medicine, before reading to them, for hours at a time, from Shakespeare's Henry V or the King James Bible. There will no mummy to glare at him, no daddy to mock him, and more importantly, no interfering little Bollands where there should be only pleasing and agreeable favourites. No one will dare implore him to avoid controversy and ludicrous contradictions (such as helicopter travel and lectures on global warming). Mankind, in short, will be ready to receive his message. He will be our first absolute dissident.
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0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
As with Diana's death, so with her inquest: it is impossible to predict how customarily sober, hysteria-proof individuals will react. In 1997 one soon learned not to ridicule the mass keening, just in case a formerly dependable fellow cynic turned out to be a born-again vigil-fancier. Today, while people who should know better discuss the contents of Diana's womb, cautious types who would not trust Mohamed Fayed to look after their sandwiches, let alone a deposit box, are aligning themselves with the obstreperous shopkeeper. Accordingly, anyone who puts their trust in seat belts rather than in the imprecations of Mr Fayed is likely to be asked to prove a negative. How can we be sure the car accident wasn't assassination? How do we know Charles didn't do it? Because it's risible? "You don't know him, do you?" was the dark rejoinder from an acquaintance who normally considers himself far removed from vulgar speculation. Well, no. But still: to go from temper tantrums to what-the-butler-saw to a murder rap in three months - shouldn't even a preposterous, priapic, self-styled defender of faiths be considered innocent until proven guilty? It would help his cause, of course, if the behaviour of Charles and his family were not so incorrigibly shifty. If the Windsors had not shown themselves to be overwhelmingly averse to public scrutiny - whether it related to marital disharmony, tax avoidance, domestic servants' memoirs, malicious prosecution or flogging official gifts - there might now be more inclination to believe that Diana's death was, as the official version had it until yesterday, an accident. With an inquest, as the royal coroner explained, which was only put off for six years because of adminstrative reasons to do with the French. And not, therefore, anything whatsoever to do with a defensive and secretive royal family. Why believe him? Only a year ago the official version had it that our normally astute sovereign - the same one whose wisdom has been prized by a succession of prime ministers - had somehow forgotten a conversation with Paul Burrell in which he told her he would take some royal bits and bobs into safekeeping. A recollection which, when it came back to her - at a crucial stage of the butler's trial for theft - not only saved Burrell from jail, but coincidentally prevented more embarrassing disclosures from the witness box. Disclosures from Burrell, that is, not the Queen (the royal family still considering itself exempt from giving evidence in a criminal trial). Shortly afterwards, when the same trial prompted allegations of financial impropriety in Prince Charles's household, the official version assured us that the best possible person to investigate the alleged malpractice was Charles's very own private secretary, an accountant called Sir Michael Peat. More recently there was some deliberate-looking obfuscation about which of Princess Anne's killer dogs had dispatched a corgi. When it was announced - after an internal inquiry, presumably headed by Peat - that it was Florence and not, as initially alleged, the known criminal Dotty, we were assured that, this killing being a first offence, the beast should live, like Dotty, to bite another day. Concealment has become so reflexive a royal habit that even when something of little consequence is reported, the palace can be relied upon to try to suppress it. Thus, after two batches of Mirror photographs portraying life at court, with its tabletop Tupperware and two-bar fires, in an endearingly frugal light, the palace responded with one of its traditional royal injunctions. Paul Burrell's book, which shows the Queen to be just as noble and gracious as it says in the anthem, is considered so damaging that its publisher, Penguin, must not be allowed anywhere near a forthcoming hagiography of the Queen Mother. All this pointless evasiveness only adds, now, to a general suspicion that the truth is being suppressed. The very last-minuteness of yesterday's intervention by the former royal coroner, with his repellent Amanda Burton-style confidences from the autopsy room, recalls the Queen's last-minute intelligence about her conversation with Burrell. Why did Mr Royal Coroner never mention it before? Another year or so of gruesome Diana-related histrionics beckon, and like the last time, the uncomprehending, arrogant inhabitants of the palace must accept responsibility for much of the excitement outside. If its officials will dissimulate about the extinction of a corgi, who is going to trust them on the death of a princess? <B>My fellow columnist, Osama</B>With his first column for this paper, my new colleague, Osama bin Laden, reminds us how rarely today's commentators attempt to take the long view. Leaving aside our regular references to the emperor who made his horse a consul, and the occasional, hazy deployment of Walter Bagehot, most journalists clearly feel that too much dwelling on the past will sound either schoolmasterish, or show-offy, or both at the same time. No such scruples beset Mr Bin Laden, who this week compared Arab rulers who cooperate with the Americans with "our forefathers, the Ghassanids". Perhaps sensing that parts of his audience may not be au fait with these forefathers - whom I now understand to have been an ancient, pre-Islamic tribe living in what are today's Jordan and southern Syria - he supplied the following gloss: "Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs. Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places." Did the early Ghassanid collaborators do so much damage? Wouldn't we have heard about it? Even at this distance? A rudimentary search confirms that the Ghassanids were, as Bin Laden states, successful and accomplished vassals of the sixth-century Byzantines. In the Oxford History of Byzantium, Robert Hoyland quotes a Ghassanid poet addressing his master: "Do you not see that God has granted you such a degree of power that you will observe every king trembling at your feet; for you are the sun, the kings are stars, and when the sun rises, no star will be seen." Less than a century afterwards the Ghassanids had been crushed in battle and absorbed into the rapidly expanding Islamic empire. Indeed, from this admittedly unscholarly perspective, it is hard to see how the defeat of the Ghassanid collaborators could be anything other than a reassuring precedent for the jihad-minded Bin Laden reader. Still, whatever the lesson of the Ghassanids, Bin Laden's latest references to ancient history confirm comments made by Bernard Lewis, in his enlightening and lucid The Crisis of Islam. "In current American usage," he says, "the phrase 'That's history' is commmonly used to dismiss something as unimportant ... The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it." It is hard, he adds, "to imagine purveyors of mass propaganda in the west making their points by allusions dating from the same period, to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy in England or the Carolingian monarchs in France". And even if our politicians did go in for more historical allusions, alluding to the past is not the same as trying to enforce it. If there is no point in arguing with Bin Laden's implacable call to arms, there is every reason to try to comprehend his appeal to his followers. Which requires some acquaintance with history. Which, as we know, is not compulsory in the national curriculum for children over 14: precisely the age, some teachers point out, that they begin to understand it.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
As with Diana's death, so with her inquest: it is impossible to predict how customarily sober, hysteria-proof individuals will react. In 1997 one soon learned not to ridicule the mass keening, just in case a formerly dependable fellow cynic turned out to be a born-again vigil-fancier. Today, while people who should know better discuss the contents of Diana's womb, cautious types who would not trust Mohamed Fayed to look after their sandwiches, let alone a deposit box, are aligning themselves with the obstreperous shopkeeper. Accordingly, anyone who puts their trust in seat belts rather than in the imprecations of Mr Fayed is likely to be asked to prove a negative. How can we be sure the car accident wasn't assassination? How do we know Charles didn't do it? Because it's risible? "You don't know him, do you?" was the dark rejoinder from an acquaintance who normally considers himself far removed from vulgar speculation. Well, no. But still: to go from temper tantrums to what-the-butler-saw to a murder rap in three months - shouldn't even a preposterous, priapic, self-styled defender of faiths be considered innocent until proven guilty? It would help his cause, of course, if the behaviour of Charles and his family were not so incorrigibly shifty. If the Windsors had not shown themselves to be overwhelmingly averse to public scrutiny - whether it related to marital disharmony, tax avoidance, domestic servants' memoirs, malicious prosecution or flogging official gifts - there might now be more inclination to believe that Diana's death was, as the official version had it until yesterday, an accident. With an inquest, as the royal coroner explained, which was only put off for six years because of adminstrative reasons to do with the French. And not, therefore, anything whatsoever to do with a defensive and secretive royal family. Why believe him? Only a year ago the official version had it that our normally astute sovereign - the same one whose wisdom has been prized by a succession of prime ministers - had somehow forgotten a conversation with Paul Burrell in which he told her he would take some royal bits and bobs into safekeeping. A recollection which, when it came back to her - at a crucial stage of the butler's trial for theft - not only saved Burrell from jail, but coincidentally prevented more embarrassing disclosures from the witness box. Disclosures from Burrell, that is, not the Queen (the royal family still considering itself exempt from giving evidence in a criminal trial). Shortly afterwards, when the same trial prompted allegations of financial impropriety in Prince Charles's household, the official version assured us that the best possible person to investigate the alleged malpractice was Charles's very own private secretary, an accountant called Sir Michael Peat. More recently there was some deliberate-looking obfuscation about which of Princess Anne's killer dogs had dispatched a corgi. When it was announced - after an internal inquiry, presumably headed by Peat - that it was Florence and not, as initially alleged, the known criminal Dotty, we were assured that, this killing being a first offence, the beast should live, like Dotty, to bite another day. Concealment has become so reflexive a royal habit that even when something of little consequence is reported, the palace can be relied upon to try to suppress it. Thus, after two batches of Mirror photographs portraying life at court, with its tabletop Tupperware and two-bar fires, in an endearingly frugal light, the palace responded with one of its traditional royal injunctions. Paul Burrell's book, which shows the Queen to be just as noble and gracious as it says in the anthem, is considered so damaging that its publisher, Penguin, must not be allowed anywhere near a forthcoming hagiography of the Queen Mother. All this pointless evasiveness only adds, now, to a general suspicion that the truth is being suppressed. The very last-minuteness of yesterday's intervention by the former royal coroner, with his repellent Amanda Burton-style confidences from the autopsy room, recalls the Queen's last-minute intelligence about her conversation with Burrell. Why did Mr Royal Coroner never mention it before? Another year or so of gruesome Diana-related histrionics beckon, and like the last time, the uncomprehending, arrogant inhabitants of the palace must accept responsibility for much of the excitement outside. If its officials will dissimulate about the extinction of a corgi, who is going to trust them on the death of a princess? <B>My fellow columnist, Osama</B>With his first column for this paper, my new colleague, Osama bin Laden, reminds us how rarely today's commentators attempt to take the long view. Leaving aside our regular references to the emperor who made his horse a consul, and the occasional, hazy deployment of Walter Bagehot, most journalists clearly feel that too much dwelling on the past will sound either schoolmasterish, or show-offy, or both at the same time. No such scruples beset Mr Bin Laden, who this week compared Arab rulers who cooperate with the Americans with "our forefathers, the Ghassanids". Perhaps sensing that parts of his audience may not be au fait with these forefathers - whom I now understand to have been an ancient, pre-Islamic tribe living in what are today's Jordan and southern Syria - he supplied the following gloss: "Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs. Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places." Did the early Ghassanid collaborators do so much damage? Wouldn't we have heard about it? Even at this distance? A rudimentary search confirms that the Ghassanids were, as Bin Laden states, successful and accomplished vassals of the sixth-century Byzantines. In the Oxford History of Byzantium, Robert Hoyland quotes a Ghassanid poet addressing his master: "Do you not see that God has granted you such a degree of power that you will observe every king trembling at your feet; for you are the sun, the kings are stars, and when the sun rises, no star will be seen." Less than a century afterwards the Ghassanids had been crushed in battle and absorbed into the rapidly expanding Islamic empire. Indeed, from this admittedly unscholarly perspective, it is hard to see how the defeat of the Ghassanid collaborators could be anything other than a reassuring precedent for the jihad-minded Bin Laden reader. Still, whatever the lesson of the Ghassanids, Bin Laden's latest references to ancient history confirm comments made by Bernard Lewis, in his enlightening and lucid The Crisis of Islam. "In current American usage," he says, "the phrase 'That's history' is commmonly used to dismiss something as unimportant ... The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it." It is hard, he adds, "to imagine purveyors of mass propaganda in the west making their points by allusions dating from the same period, to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy in England or the Carolingian monarchs in France". And even if our politicians did go in for more historical allusions, alluding to the past is not the same as trying to enforce it. If there is no point in arguing with Bin Laden's implacable call to arms, there is every reason to try to comprehend his appeal to his followers. Which requires some acquaintance with history. Which, as we know, is not compulsory in the national curriculum for children over 14: precisely the age, some teachers point out, that they begin to understand it.
|
0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
If the public, as Lord Justice Scott Baker declared this week, really does have "concerns" about the death of Princess Diana, it has a funny way of showing it. For all the "groundless suspicion" which, according to the judge, still exists in minds of many people, scarcely any of these haunted individuals turned up in court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice this week, to have their anxieties officially allayed. To avoid disappointment, the courts had even laid on a special marquee, with a screen and rows of chairs. In the event, a two-man tent from Millets would have accommodated the spillover, with room to spare.Assuming it is not the fear that Prince Philip might demand their execution that keeps everyone away, it seems that Diana's death has become one of those odd subjects, like the likelihood of a November election, that is of consuming fascination to the media, even as it evokes, among the bulk of civilians, only a fathomless indifference. Where, the papers ask, did Henri Paul go in those crucial eight minutes? If we don't know now, after two official inquiries, we may well have to live with that mystery. Though of course we hope M Paul did not - as he certainly could have - use these missing minutes to ring the Duke of Edinburgh with the news that he was already pissed and about to get in the car.Meanwhile, as the Mail asked about a picture of Diana in a lift, "What did her smile signify?" That Diana liked going in lifts? Or did she really, as the Daily Mirror avers, have "not a care in the world"? If the inquest finds that this was indeed the case, Tina Brown will certainly want to go back to her authoritative Diana Chronicles and adjust at least one word in her opening tour de force, an extended piece of Ritz hotel realite ("Diana was at the end of a chaotic night out, and her mood was sour"). And what about the surpassingly awful "dis-moi oui" ring? Was it a straightforward taste accident on the part of her lover, or, as some sources have hinted, a sinister plot by MI6 to make Dodi and Diana look vulgar?In reality, after three days of evidence (the jurors rested on the fourth, prior to next week's fact-finding trip to Paris) - the one, compelling mystery is that, following both a French inquiry and a British one, Mohamed Al Fayed should have prevailed on the authorities to recruit a judge, 12 jurors and an army of 30 lawyers, so they could all spend another six months, and an estimated £10m, weighing up what Lord Justice Scott Baker likes to call the "building blocks for the conspiracy to murder theory".One important block, raised on day one, was whether Diana was pregnant. Put forward by Mr Fayed, the claim for pregnancy was apparently supported in the past. with the evidence consisting of a personal phone call to Mr Fayed, and a Sunday People picture of the Princess forgetting to hold her tummy in. Producing it for the court, the judge described as "famous" (in what is presumably an unconscious echo of Dylan's cadences) this "photograph of Diana in a leopard print swimsuit", before pointing out that it was taken before her relationship with al Fayed's son had begun. Thus, "her physique" - as he delicately put it, could have nothing to do with Dodi.None the less, the judge reassured the court that this seeming impossibility would be soberly investigated - "the question of whether Diana was pregnant at the time of her death is one that will be explored". So, too, will be the question of her embalming - a process held by Mr Fayed to be part of a conspiracy to conceal the secret pregnancy. So will the question of Diana's engagement to Dodi Fayed, which is also alleged by Mr Fayed, though, one gathers, by none of Diana's close friends.Now that they see the enormous consideration being extended to Mr Fayed and his theories about the murderous nature of Prince Philip, many amateur investigators must wish that they, too, had put some of their more ambitious conjectures before the court. Is there no plan, for example, to examine the popular theory that Diana planned to stage her own death, in order to withdraw from public life? It can hardly be more preposterous than allegations made by the late princess herself, according to the judge, when she told an astonished lawyer that the queen was about to abdicate, while she and Camilla were both to be "put aside". Lord Justice Scott Baker revealed that Lord Mishcon said that Diana told him that Camilla was not really Charles's lover, but a "decoy" for his real favourite, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke. "She had also," the judge went on to say, "been told that Miss Legge-Bourke had been operated on for an abortion and that she (HRH) would shortly be in receipt of a certificate."It is tempting, once you're in the conspiratorial frame of mind, to see the judge's patient rehearsal of this dreadful stuff as, if not actually subversive, his meaning way of emphasising the abject, tabloid-serving agenda of this inquest. Hopefully, Lord Justice Scott Baker can only bear to talk about Dodi's girlfriend, Kelly, and Diana's famous leopard-print bathers - dishing out the original snap, with the rest of the court papers, for closer inspection by the masses - because he believes that if this final Diana fest is what it takes to once and for all satisfy Mr Fayed, then it is his duty, as the fourth coroner on the case, to get the job done.This might also explain the absurd court commentary that accompanies every single frame of the videos from the Ritz hotel. "The Princess of Wales is carrying Dodi Al Fayed's cigar box", a policeman said, presumably in case someone were subsequently to allege it was a bomb, or a baby's coffin. "Trevor Rees-Jones is looking at his phone and notebook." Later, as Henri Paul goes through a revolving door, "you will see him holding his cigarillo box in his hand".If Mr Fayed refuses to withdraw his accusations without having his months in court, then maybe we really do have to hear, again, about the embalming and the ring, about Paul Burrell's fears and Prince Philip's letters - not to mention the hitherto unsuspected role of cigar boxes and abortion certificates in the life of our favourite princess. Then again, is Mr Fayed remotely likely to retreat, if Prince Philip turns out, on the balance of probabilities, not to be a ruthless killer? You can't help thinking that it might have simpler, and definitely cheaper, if our secret services had just added him to the hit list.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
If the public, as Lord Justice Scott Baker declared this week, really does have "concerns" about the death of Princess Diana, it has a funny way of showing it. For all the "groundless suspicion" which, according to the judge, still exists in minds of many people, scarcely any of these haunted individuals turned up in court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice this week, to have their anxieties officially allayed. To avoid disappointment, the courts had even laid on a special marquee, with a screen and rows of chairs. In the event, a two-man tent from Millets would have accommodated the spillover, with room to spare.Assuming it is not the fear that Prince Philip might demand their execution that keeps everyone away, it seems that Diana's death has become one of those odd subjects, like the likelihood of a November election, that is of consuming fascination to the media, even as it evokes, among the bulk of civilians, only a fathomless indifference. Where, the papers ask, did Henri Paul go in those crucial eight minutes? If we don't know now, after two official inquiries, we may well have to live with that mystery. Though of course we hope M Paul did not - as he certainly could have - use these missing minutes to ring the Duke of Edinburgh with the news that he was already pissed and about to get in the car.Meanwhile, as the Mail asked about a picture of Diana in a lift, "What did her smile signify?" That Diana liked going in lifts? Or did she really, as the Daily Mirror avers, have "not a care in the world"? If the inquest finds that this was indeed the case, Tina Brown will certainly want to go back to her authoritative Diana Chronicles and adjust at least one word in her opening tour de force, an extended piece of Ritz hotel realite ("Diana was at the end of a chaotic night out, and her mood was sour"). And what about the surpassingly awful "dis-moi oui" ring? Was it a straightforward taste accident on the part of her lover, or, as some sources have hinted, a sinister plot by MI6 to make Dodi and Diana look vulgar?In reality, after three days of evidence (the jurors rested on the fourth, prior to next week's fact-finding trip to Paris) - the one, compelling mystery is that, following both a French inquiry and a British one, Mohamed Al Fayed should have prevailed on the authorities to recruit a judge, 12 jurors and an army of 30 lawyers, so they could all spend another six months, and an estimated £10m, weighing up what Lord Justice Scott Baker likes to call the "building blocks for the conspiracy to murder theory".One important block, raised on day one, was whether Diana was pregnant. Put forward by Mr Fayed, the claim for pregnancy was apparently supported in the past. with the evidence consisting of a personal phone call to Mr Fayed, and a Sunday People picture of the Princess forgetting to hold her tummy in. Producing it for the court, the judge described as "famous" (in what is presumably an unconscious echo of Dylan's cadences) this "photograph of Diana in a leopard print swimsuit", before pointing out that it was taken before her relationship with al Fayed's son had begun. Thus, "her physique" - as he delicately put it, could have nothing to do with Dodi.None the less, the judge reassured the court that this seeming impossibility would be soberly investigated - "the question of whether Diana was pregnant at the time of her death is one that will be explored". So, too, will be the question of her embalming - a process held by Mr Fayed to be part of a conspiracy to conceal the secret pregnancy. So will the question of Diana's engagement to Dodi Fayed, which is also alleged by Mr Fayed, though, one gathers, by none of Diana's close friends.Now that they see the enormous consideration being extended to Mr Fayed and his theories about the murderous nature of Prince Philip, many amateur investigators must wish that they, too, had put some of their more ambitious conjectures before the court. Is there no plan, for example, to examine the popular theory that Diana planned to stage her own death, in order to withdraw from public life? It can hardly be more preposterous than allegations made by the late princess herself, according to the judge, when she told an astonished lawyer that the queen was about to abdicate, while she and Camilla were both to be "put aside". Lord Justice Scott Baker revealed that Lord Mishcon said that Diana told him that Camilla was not really Charles's lover, but a "decoy" for his real favourite, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke. "She had also," the judge went on to say, "been told that Miss Legge-Bourke had been operated on for an abortion and that she (HRH) would shortly be in receipt of a certificate."It is tempting, once you're in the conspiratorial frame of mind, to see the judge's patient rehearsal of this dreadful stuff as, if not actually subversive, his meaning way of emphasising the abject, tabloid-serving agenda of this inquest. Hopefully, Lord Justice Scott Baker can only bear to talk about Dodi's girlfriend, Kelly, and Diana's famous leopard-print bathers - dishing out the original snap, with the rest of the court papers, for closer inspection by the masses - because he believes that if this final Diana fest is what it takes to once and for all satisfy Mr Fayed, then it is his duty, as the fourth coroner on the case, to get the job done.This might also explain the absurd court commentary that accompanies every single frame of the videos from the Ritz hotel. "The Princess of Wales is carrying Dodi Al Fayed's cigar box", a policeman said, presumably in case someone were subsequently to allege it was a bomb, or a baby's coffin. "Trevor Rees-Jones is looking at his phone and notebook." Later, as Henri Paul goes through a revolving door, "you will see him holding his cigarillo box in his hand".If Mr Fayed refuses to withdraw his accusations without having his months in court, then maybe we really do have to hear, again, about the embalming and the ring, about Paul Burrell's fears and Prince Philip's letters - not to mention the hitherto unsuspected role of cigar boxes and abortion certificates in the life of our favourite princess. Then again, is Mr Fayed remotely likely to retreat, if Prince Philip turns out, on the balance of probabilities, not to be a ruthless killer? You can't help thinking that it might have simpler, and definitely cheaper, if our secret services had just added him to the hit list.
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0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
Since the American showman David Blaine believes himself to be the new Houdini, it follows that he should, like his more gifted predecessor, have decided to bring his tricks to London. It was, says Ruth Brandon in her biography of Houdini, the reception of his manacle escapes on the London stage that confirmed his "uttermost hopes and expectations". Houdini became so famous here, she adds, that Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper proprietor, visited his dressing room, asking advice on various topical events. And who knows? If Blaine's new stunt - "his toughest endurance feat yet" - comes off, maybe our own newspaper proprietors will soon be seeking enlightenment from this most sapient of nappy wearers. At the time of writing, however, it seems unlikely. So far from confirming his uttermost hopes and expectations, Blaine's encounter with the British public appears to have been his first ever encounter with sustained derision. After two days in which the magician came under assault from fish and chips, eggs, golf balls, laser pens, wake-up calls from bhangra drums and women displaying their breasts, a spokesman for Sky television, which has bought the rights to this stunt, regretted that not everyone had been "respectful to the challenge... unfortunately you will always get one or two thugs". But the antics of these one or two had been enough to frighten Blaine's organisers into surrounding his crane-and-dangling-box arrangement with some untidy wire fencing. Now, with its profusion of electrical wires, tents and heavies, his "Above the Below" encampment below Tower Bridge looks about as edifying as the back end of a funfair. Still, should you be looking for an agreeable picnic spot, I can think of no better place, just now, than below the above: the area of dusty, trodden-down prairie over which Blaine now languishes for a living. Not because the magician himself is much to look at. In a few weeks time, when he begins, like all ill-nourished down-and-outs to resemble someone who could be Lord Lucan, it might be different. For now, the visiting daredevil simply looks greasily out of sorts, podgy enough to last several weeks, and seems to share Tony Blair's lack of inhibition about yawning and picking at himself in public. No, the place is worth a detour not in order to admire Blaine, but to participate in an exhilarating act of collective ridicule. If you can take some food with you, so much the better. If not, I have discovered, even a blob of oily ice cream from the van tastes exquisite when consumed in the suspended company of the preposterous, faux-starving Blaine. Improved security had done little, when I visited, to bring about the desired reverence for Blaine's very public diet. And the previous night's adulatory C4 documentary, in which the visitor proclaimed, "I'm an artist, nothing more, nothing less," probably hadn't helped, even if it had attracted more people. Anyone who remembered Blaine's parting speculation about his chances - "Will the air supply suddenly get cut off and cause suffocation... even death?" - had only to look up to realise that the simple answer to this question, was, no, it wouldn't. You'd think he would have known that. Not with those two little windows. The disparities between the advertised, and real event were such that you wondered if there could have been some kind of mistake. Weren't Tower Bridge and the Thames meant to be somehow involved, instead of just picturesquely adjacent? And on telly, a wide-eyed Nicky Campbell had referred repeatedly to "solitary confinement". Blaine had also stressed a desire for "no distractions... I think that's the purest state you could be in... " In practice, he has made his lit-up box the pinnacle of a non-stop party. Passing riverboats and vans tootle jolly hellos at him. Women wave. Spectators guffaw more or less in his face, shout at him to "put the kettle on", mime flying with their arms, threaten to come back with signs reading: "Are you mental or what?" When, laboriously, Blaine wraps a sheet round himself and makes as if to wee into a hidden tube, there are uproarious shouts of, "He's having a piss!"; then, "He can't still be having a piss"; then, "No - he's wanking!"; then - after the business is seemingly complete - hearty cheers and applause. Next, in his solitary confinement, Blaine takes up what we know, from Campbell's breathless tribute, to be "his journal". "Day one," says a man behind me, "Sat in a glass box." "Day two, still sitting in a glass box. Day three... " Paid observers inform us that after a while Blaine's body will begin a metabolic process known as "ketosis", in which, if I understand correctly, it eats itself for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A year or so ago, this might have sounded quite awful and impressive. Alas for Blaine, one in 10 Britons have now learned from Dr Atkins that ketosis is in fact a "wonderful process" - that beatific stage of the slimming regime when the dieter begins to burn his own fat reserves, and so starts to become a lovelier, more streamlined person. Lucky Blaine! For different reasons, people who have been unable to eat because of advanced illness, and their relatives, may also find themselves indifferent to Blaine's agonies. If agonies they are. Though, being notably well covered, he seems unlikely to be as indifferent to food as Kafka's hunger artist, who never found any food that he liked, as Blaine's task is presumably made easier by the 5m he will earn from this episode of professional fasting. Aside from micturate and attend to his journal, Blaine also waves for the cameras, turns over to show his tattoo, moves his sheet around, scratches his head and, from time to time, fills a water bottle from another tube. These actions are duly texted, photographed, reported and filmed on mobile phones - mostly redundant devices which seem almost to have been waiting for this still more redundant event in order to prove that they may, after all, occasionally serve a purpose: "No, he's just sitting there, no, he hasn't moved, no, it's really funny... " This was not, you gathered from the Blaine programme, the intended response to ostentatious fasting, an act repeatedly introduced as "his toughest endurance feat yet". The crowd are supposed, like the American multitudes before them, to faint with anxiety, empathise through the long nights, discern some noble purpose in his supposed travails in the ice, up pillars, inside glass containers. Instead they watch, eat and cackle. To anyone who has recently felt downcast by popular displays of credulity and celebrity worship, this massed derision should come as a reassuring, even an inspiring, sight. In fact, the prospect of Blaine at the mercy of a good humoured, but predominantly satirical crowd, composed of visitors of all ages, classes and ethnicities, hints at some residual, collective good sense, which can tell the difference between a huckster and a hero, and thus differentiates us from Americans. If Blaine could be induced to stay, for all time, in his silly box, there could be many worse ways of acquiring British nationality by composing some appropriate insult in the English tongue, then throwing an egg at him.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
Since the American showman David Blaine believes himself to be the new Houdini, it follows that he should, like his more gifted predecessor, have decided to bring his tricks to London. It was, says Ruth Brandon in her biography of Houdini, the reception of his manacle escapes on the London stage that confirmed his "uttermost hopes and expectations". Houdini became so famous here, she adds, that Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper proprietor, visited his dressing room, asking advice on various topical events. And who knows? If Blaine's new stunt - "his toughest endurance feat yet" - comes off, maybe our own newspaper proprietors will soon be seeking enlightenment from this most sapient of nappy wearers. At the time of writing, however, it seems unlikely. So far from confirming his uttermost hopes and expectations, Blaine's encounter with the British public appears to have been his first ever encounter with sustained derision. After two days in which the magician came under assault from fish and chips, eggs, golf balls, laser pens, wake-up calls from bhangra drums and women displaying their breasts, a spokesman for Sky television, which has bought the rights to this stunt, regretted that not everyone had been "respectful to the challenge... unfortunately you will always get one or two thugs". But the antics of these one or two had been enough to frighten Blaine's organisers into surrounding his crane-and-dangling-box arrangement with some untidy wire fencing. Now, with its profusion of electrical wires, tents and heavies, his "Above the Below" encampment below Tower Bridge looks about as edifying as the back end of a funfair. Still, should you be looking for an agreeable picnic spot, I can think of no better place, just now, than below the above: the area of dusty, trodden-down prairie over which Blaine now languishes for a living. Not because the magician himself is much to look at. In a few weeks time, when he begins, like all ill-nourished down-and-outs to resemble someone who could be Lord Lucan, it might be different. For now, the visiting daredevil simply looks greasily out of sorts, podgy enough to last several weeks, and seems to share Tony Blair's lack of inhibition about yawning and picking at himself in public. No, the place is worth a detour not in order to admire Blaine, but to participate in an exhilarating act of collective ridicule. If you can take some food with you, so much the better. If not, I have discovered, even a blob of oily ice cream from the van tastes exquisite when consumed in the suspended company of the preposterous, faux-starving Blaine. Improved security had done little, when I visited, to bring about the desired reverence for Blaine's very public diet. And the previous night's adulatory C4 documentary, in which the visitor proclaimed, "I'm an artist, nothing more, nothing less," probably hadn't helped, even if it had attracted more people. Anyone who remembered Blaine's parting speculation about his chances - "Will the air supply suddenly get cut off and cause suffocation... even death?" - had only to look up to realise that the simple answer to this question, was, no, it wouldn't. You'd think he would have known that. Not with those two little windows. The disparities between the advertised, and real event were such that you wondered if there could have been some kind of mistake. Weren't Tower Bridge and the Thames meant to be somehow involved, instead of just picturesquely adjacent? And on telly, a wide-eyed Nicky Campbell had referred repeatedly to "solitary confinement". Blaine had also stressed a desire for "no distractions... I think that's the purest state you could be in... " In practice, he has made his lit-up box the pinnacle of a non-stop party. Passing riverboats and vans tootle jolly hellos at him. Women wave. Spectators guffaw more or less in his face, shout at him to "put the kettle on", mime flying with their arms, threaten to come back with signs reading: "Are you mental or what?" When, laboriously, Blaine wraps a sheet round himself and makes as if to wee into a hidden tube, there are uproarious shouts of, "He's having a piss!"; then, "He can't still be having a piss"; then, "No - he's wanking!"; then - after the business is seemingly complete - hearty cheers and applause. Next, in his solitary confinement, Blaine takes up what we know, from Campbell's breathless tribute, to be "his journal". "Day one," says a man behind me, "Sat in a glass box." "Day two, still sitting in a glass box. Day three... " Paid observers inform us that after a while Blaine's body will begin a metabolic process known as "ketosis", in which, if I understand correctly, it eats itself for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A year or so ago, this might have sounded quite awful and impressive. Alas for Blaine, one in 10 Britons have now learned from Dr Atkins that ketosis is in fact a "wonderful process" - that beatific stage of the slimming regime when the dieter begins to burn his own fat reserves, and so starts to become a lovelier, more streamlined person. Lucky Blaine! For different reasons, people who have been unable to eat because of advanced illness, and their relatives, may also find themselves indifferent to Blaine's agonies. If agonies they are. Though, being notably well covered, he seems unlikely to be as indifferent to food as Kafka's hunger artist, who never found any food that he liked, as Blaine's task is presumably made easier by the 5m he will earn from this episode of professional fasting. Aside from micturate and attend to his journal, Blaine also waves for the cameras, turns over to show his tattoo, moves his sheet around, scratches his head and, from time to time, fills a water bottle from another tube. These actions are duly texted, photographed, reported and filmed on mobile phones - mostly redundant devices which seem almost to have been waiting for this still more redundant event in order to prove that they may, after all, occasionally serve a purpose: "No, he's just sitting there, no, he hasn't moved, no, it's really funny... " This was not, you gathered from the Blaine programme, the intended response to ostentatious fasting, an act repeatedly introduced as "his toughest endurance feat yet". The crowd are supposed, like the American multitudes before them, to faint with anxiety, empathise through the long nights, discern some noble purpose in his supposed travails in the ice, up pillars, inside glass containers. Instead they watch, eat and cackle. To anyone who has recently felt downcast by popular displays of credulity and celebrity worship, this massed derision should come as a reassuring, even an inspiring, sight. In fact, the prospect of Blaine at the mercy of a good humoured, but predominantly satirical crowd, composed of visitors of all ages, classes and ethnicities, hints at some residual, collective good sense, which can tell the difference between a huckster and a hero, and thus differentiates us from Americans. If Blaine could be induced to stay, for all time, in his silly box, there could be many worse ways of acquiring British nationality by composing some appropriate insult in the English tongue, then throwing an egg at him.
|
0catherinebennett
| 2UK
|
If the government is to persuade us, contrary to appearances, of its determination to end discrimination against older people, it really must ensure that its senior members avoid dismissing eminent legal figures who have said something controversial as "muddled and confused old codgers". Not only does the insult reinforce malicious stereotypes and dishearten all of us currently struggling with the concept of unending subjection, it signally misrepresents two men who are, it seems to me, trying to teach us something rather beautiful about the transience and essential unimportance of material possessions. When Lord Irvine says that "most people" would not be "disturbed" at first, or maybe second time burglars not going to prison, it can only be because he expects us, like him, to care more for the spiritual life than we do for inanimate things. Notice how he does not dwell on the sentimental value of what might have been taken: a grandmother's wedding ring, say, rather than a mobile phone. No, to him it is all so much heavy baggage, dragging us down. Neighbours in Cheyne Walk, where there have been 40 burglaries in the past three years, have complained that Irvine is unsympathetic. Have they considered that Lord Irvine might have his mind on higher things than the acquisition, or loss of, as it might be, fine art, or hand-made wallpaper or second homes in Scotland? Similarly, though I have no knowledge of the extent of his property and other assets, I feel sure that Lord Woolf has only the highest motives when he asks us to imprison burglars only if their crimes are aggravated by violence or undue frequency. Lying awake, heart racing, listening for robber-sounds recently (the neighbours on either side having both been burgled in the past week, at night, from the empty street), I try to benefit from Lord Woolf and Lord Irvine's teachings. All is illusion. You can't take it with you. What goes around comes around. It's probably just a gentle novice burglar, so it doesn't count anyway. Isn't it rather sweet of this keen young burglar to force the window while you sleep, thus avoiding unnecessary panic? If he - they? - came upstairs, would turning the other cheek help? Meditating on this, I can almost hear these two great sages chorusing "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can." I can, actually. Once you realise there are no police to speak of, hardly any convictions, no significant deterrents for all but the most dedicated and violent offenders - it's the easiest thing in the world.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
If the government is to persuade us, contrary to appearances, of its determination to end discrimination against older people, it really must ensure that its senior members avoid dismissing eminent legal figures who have said something controversial as "muddled and confused old codgers". Not only does the insult reinforce malicious stereotypes and dishearten all of us currently struggling with the concept of unending subjection, it signally misrepresents two men who are, it seems to me, trying to teach us something rather beautiful about the transience and essential unimportance of material possessions. When Lord Irvine says that "most people" would not be "disturbed" at first, or maybe second time burglars not going to prison, it can only be because he expects us, like him, to care more for the spiritual life than we do for inanimate things. Notice how he does not dwell on the sentimental value of what might have been taken: a grandmother's wedding ring, say, rather than a mobile phone. No, to him it is all so much heavy baggage, dragging us down. Neighbours in Cheyne Walk, where there have been 40 burglaries in the past three years, have complained that Irvine is unsympathetic. Have they considered that Lord Irvine might have his mind on higher things than the acquisition, or loss of, as it might be, fine art, or hand-made wallpaper or second homes in Scotland? Similarly, though I have no knowledge of the extent of his property and other assets, I feel sure that Lord Woolf has only the highest motives when he asks us to imprison burglars only if their crimes are aggravated by violence or undue frequency. Lying awake, heart racing, listening for robber-sounds recently (the neighbours on either side having both been burgled in the past week, at night, from the empty street), I try to benefit from Lord Woolf and Lord Irvine's teachings. All is illusion. You can't take it with you. What goes around comes around. It's probably just a gentle novice burglar, so it doesn't count anyway. Isn't it rather sweet of this keen young burglar to force the window while you sleep, thus avoiding unnecessary panic? If he - they? - came upstairs, would turning the other cheek help? Meditating on this, I can almost hear these two great sages chorusing "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can." I can, actually. Once you realise there are no police to speak of, hardly any convictions, no significant deterrents for all but the most dedicated and violent offenders - it's the easiest thing in the world.
|
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