Commentariat

Independent Commentators

Shakespeare ou pas Shakespeare? Telle est la question. The French are replying with a resounding “oui”. The theatre scene across the Channel has become a kind of Paris-upon-Avon or Shakespeare-sur-Seine. There are, at present, more of his plays on the stage in the greater Paris area – six, to be exact – than by the most popular of classical French playwrights, Molière.

There are three events which will characterise the coming age. The first is the transfer of power from the nations gathered around the Atlantic rim to those gathered around the Pacific, which will not be smooth. We are reaching the end of the period of hegemony of Western values in international affairs and we will have to start accepting new governmental concepts if we are to have a rule-based global system.

It is right to try a variety of rapprochements between us and the Middle East, and to the political we might add cultural approaches. You never know; that might do the trick where hard diplomacy is always going to fail.

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, wild speculations swirled, furious cyclones that threw up windy and wild theories, charged conspiracies and noisy condemnation. Inevitable perhaps, just human nature responding fearfully to sudden and unspeakable violence. The terrorists cleaved the body, heart and soul of this cosmopolitan, enterprising hub which draws to its bosom the richest and most wretched of the earth. What they did coldly in hotels, cafés and the Jewish centre was as atrocious as the killings in Beslan. But as the panic subsides, it is the duty of all world citizens to confront truths, however inconvenient.

Readers sometimes complain that newspapers don’t publish more cheerful stories. Eager to oblige, I would point out that, in a week of mostly grim tidings, from economic meltdown to terrorist carnage, there’s one bright spot. Ahead of the Nato summit, the US government has said that it will no longer demand “fast-track” membership for Georgia and Ukraine. “I am satisfied common sense prevailed,” Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian President, said on Thursday, even if the effect of his words was spoiled slightly by the fact he was in Cuba. The irony passed him by that, if Moscow understandably sees the former Soviet republics as its “near abroad”, then that is also how Washington sees Central America and the Caribbean.

As we learned about the harassment of Damian Green and his family, a lot of us wondered whether we were still living in Great Britain, or whether our country, which was once synonymous with its people’s freedom, had ceased to exist. It is absurd to compare Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith to Stalin and Mugabe, but righteous anger knows no verbal niceties. After Mumbai, it might seem wrong to refer to terrorism except literally. Even so, the assault on the Greens was a terrorist attack on civil liberties.

My first job was in Woolworths, Shepherd’s Bush, west London. In spite of studying for loads of exams at school, I had to sit through a formal interview and pass the in-house intelligence test before I could sign on as a Saturday girl. My best piece of advice from a fellow worker: look busy at all times, especially when the supervisor walks in your direction.

Not so long ago, about the only motorcades you’d come across in Chicago were the long funeral cortèges of police cars or fire trucks to honour a fellow officer, especially one who had fallen in the line of duty. Now the Windy City is getting used to another sort of cortège: the convoy of black vehicles with blacked-out windows, lights flashing and sirens wailing, slicing through blocked-off intersections, treating the local citizenry like a vanquished enemy.

It was not Denis Healey who promised to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked; it was Sir Eric Geddes, speaking at Cambridge in 1918, and he was not referring to the rich but to the Germans.

The Richard Curtis wedding – village church, silly hats, Hugh Grant pulling faces – is going out of fashion. One in six couples now prefer to get married abroad. They want something secular, hot and relaxed. Suspension of their everyday lives, freedom from their in-laws, wedding shots framed in Caribbean sunshine.

Is it possible to guess a person’s politics by finding out which movies they watched when they were growing up as impressionable young teens? Possibly. Who else are Network Rail bosses but grown-up young nerds who watched Trevor Howard being snatched away from a tremulous Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter and vowed never to let the trains run on time again? How many members of the modern Conservative Party have secretly modelled themselves on a character in Brideshead Revisited? (It was probably Aloysius, in the case of Boris Johnson.) And do we really think that the stockbrokers, mortgage lenders and hedge-fund managers who have buggered up Britain during the credit crisis learned absolutely nothing from Charlie Sheen in Wall Street?

Lately, whenever anybody asks me how I’m doing, I find myself, as if by reflex, parroting the phrase, “Oh, struggling.” Or I might mumble, “You know, just about surviving the crunch.” Even allowing for the fact that I am not known for being a ray of sunshine at the best of times, I have never lived in a time when prospects seemed so bleak. The yellow brick road of prosperity has finally turned into lead and dust.

Earlier this year, an Austrian woman told astonished officials that her father had imprisoned her in a cellar for 24 years, repeatedly raped her and made her pregnant with eight children. As many older Austrians were enthusiastic Nazis, commentators were quick to assume that Josef Fritzl’s behaviour shone fresh light on wounds in the national psyche.

One lucky Briton who escaped unscathed from Mumbai was Princess Eugenie, younger daughter of Prince Andrew. I’m told 18-year-old Eugenie, who is in India as part of her gap year travels, was staying in the Taj hotel, although a palace spokesman denies this when I call. “Princess Eugenie was in Mumbai but is fine and in good health,” she says. “There are various rumours about what hotel she was staying in but we do not comment on her personal travel arrangements. She left this morning, but I don’t know where she has gone, to be honest.” My source claims Eugenie had been staying in the room where the last terrorist was shot. Earlier this month Eugenie was in Turkey with her mother, Sarah Ferguson, but is now travelling with schoolfriends.

David Ruffley, the Conservative police spokesman, last week published a plan to “save one million hours of police time”. How timely. Unfortunately, he missed out one important proposal: when considering investigations that involve Members of Parliament, the police should be required to make very sure that they know what they are doing.

Even in a country that has endured more than its fair share of terrorist atrocities, last week’s events in Mumbai came as a vicious shock to India’s system. The attack that began on Wednesday evening will long be remembered for its chilling mix of indiscriminate butchery and meticulous organisation. Well-armed Islamist gunmen – most likely linked to the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, backed by elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services – tore through the heart of the metropolis, storming Mumbai’s main station, a children’s hospital, a high-rise complex, two hotels and a tourist restaurant. The militants reaped a terrible toll that spared no segment of this world city: Indian and foreigner; rich and poor; Hindu, Muslim, Jew and Christian all numbered among Mumbai’s dead.

Sir Paul McCartney is practically ubiquitous these days. Two weeks ago he could be found urging the release of the "lost" Beatles track "Carnival of Light" and on the receiving end of a papal imprimatur.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai have dramatised how the urgent will often take precedence over the important for the incoming Obama administration.

I had almost forgotten what a shit Yeats could be. I don’t mean his flirtation with Italian fascism, which Conor Cruise O’Brien first publicised; after all, Churchill was a bit enamoured of the younger Mussolini. And Yeats remains one of my favourite poets. No, what I am recalling – thanks to a wonderful book just published in Dublin – is his outrageous decision to expel the poetry of Wilfred Owen from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Last weekend, I went on a “fact-finding” trip to The Hague. I would like to be able to say that the facts in question were to do with the processes, ramifications, and perhaps shortcomings, of international justice and its implementation, but I’m afraid they weren’t.

I had almost forgotten what a shit Yeats could be. I don’t mean his flirtation with Italian fascism, which Conor Cruise O’Brien first publicised; after all, Churchill was a bit enamoured of the younger Mussolini. And Yeats remains one of my favourite poets. No, what I am recalling – thanks to a wonderful book just published in Dublin – is his outrageous decision to expel the poetry of Wilfred Owen from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

I used to look out from the balcony of The Independent’s first floor room in the al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad thinking that one day the hotel would be attacked and wondering from which direction the attack would come.