Commentariat

Times

Although his name had latterly been associated rather with perfumes,
accessories and watches than couture, Ted Lapidus had stamped his
personality indelibly on the fashions of the 1960s and 1970s, in what is
acknowledged by French fashion historians as an “heure de gloire” in the
business.

Harold
Pinter

Born in London, but moving as a child with his parents to Australia in 1925,
Dacre Smyth went on to a distinguished career in the Royal Australian Navy
in which he saw a great deal of active service during a career of nearly 40
years.

Eric Wilson won the first Victoria Cross to be awarded in the campaigns in
Africa during the Second World War. His story is one of persistent yet
seemingly nonchalant gallantry as, by his lights, he was simply doing what
he was trained to do. He stuck to his precious guns to the bitter end and so
certain was the brigade staff that he had been killed in the enemy’s final
attack he was awarded a posthumous VC. But he survived to fight in two more
campaigns.

While the Romans are widely held responsible for the timing of New Year’s Eve
- at a Senate meeting in 153BC they reset the calendar to begin on January 1
- the modern version of this night of enforced jollity is an undeniably
American affair. There’s the central role of television (climaxing with that
inexplicable ball-dropping ritual in Times Square); the exorbitant cover
charges; the all-you-can-eat buffets - not to mention the exclusionary
spectacle of good-looking people locating each other at midnight so that
they can smooch to that hymn to narcissism, My Way.

For those of us who find that a new year means a new hole in the belt and a
resolution to diet, genetics can be a comforting science. Where once we
would have muttered something about metabolism to explain why our weight
balloons over Christmas while others stay slim as ever, DNA has given us
reason to hold up our heads as we suck in our stomachs. Since recent
discoveries have shown how far genetic factors influence obesity, “big
genes” have become the new big bones.

A friend of mine - let’s call her Gill - was one of six directors recently
made redundant by a well-known UK consortium. Once she’d recovered from the
initial shock of losing a post that she had held for 18 years, Gill set out
to find another.

Let’s have a pointless discussion about Gaza and begin it by talking about
whether Israel’s bombing is “disproportionate”.

There aren't many Morris Oxfords left plying the world's highways, and even fewer de Haviland Comets criss-crossing the skies, but there is still one British export that can swell your heart with pride: British place names. According to an analysis of The Times atlas there are no fewer than 55 Richmonds spread around the world, along with 46 Londons and 41 Oxfords. There is even a smattering of Croydons, from Pennsylvania to New Zealand, which suggests either that colonials had a sense of humour or that they hadn't been to the original one.

Two things attested to the health of the market for idea books in 2008. First
was the rock-star reception accorded Malcolm Gladwell on his arrival in
London at the end of November. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The
Tipping Point and Blink, filled a West End theatre with eager fans when he
turned up to talk about his latest book Outliers, which promised to deflate
the idea of individual genius and “tell the story of success”.

For millions of ordinary readers, as for conservative politicians and pundits,
Samuel Huntington was the man who predicted the grand narrative of the 21st
century. But long before bloggers and book groups were discussing The Clash
of Civilizations (1993), Huntington had been among America’s most
influential political scientists for decades. In an era when many academics
were content to hoe narrow specialties, he bestrode whole disciplines;
writing seminal works on international relations, comparative government,
political theory and American politics. In the early 1990s a colleague asked
the Harvard professor, then writing the work that would make him a household
name, why he had chosen to focus on civilisation. Huntington shrugged: “It
was simply the biggest thing I could think of.”

Adrian Mitchell

Christopher Hibbert was probably the most widely-read popular historian of our
time and undoubtedly one of the most prolific.

Those of us who were alive at the time, or who have seen the film, have vivid memories of the sinking of HMS Hood in 1941, and of the pursuit and subsequent sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. Ten years earlier the Hood had been involved in another episode of naval history, which had a significant influence on British economic history.

A billion people around the world face a stark choice - to drink potentially lethal water or nothing. Sometimes when faced with these huge facts, we can feel that there is nothing we can do to change them.

Fly back with me to the Labour Party conference of 2003 and Chancellor Brown's speech. He promised never to “abandon fiscal responsibility or set aside economic discipline”, to “meet and master the next wave of global economic change”, to cut back central bureaucracy and national debt - no, too sad, too cruel, I can't go on.

This miserable road to freedom is lined with the carcases of dead donkeys. For about 100km before the Beitbridge border post, there are scores of them, smashed by the roaring 40-ton juggernauts that thunder up and down the road from South Africa in the night. Donkeys never move out the way. All that is left is a hide stretched over a skeleton, cleaned within a day by dogs and maggots in the 40 degree sun.

Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Chancing upon Lord Mandelson in the week before Christmas, I asked the
business secretary if he could explain what the sense would be in diverting
£1 billion or so in public funds to the bank account of Tata, the sprawling
Indian conglomerate that owns Jaguar and Land Rover. I added, in the
mistaken impression that I was being original, that with many of the world’s
car companies conducting a similar exercise in special pleading, this was
not so much a case of governments picking winners as losers picking
governments.

Harold Pinter was the greatest English playwright of the 20th century. That is
as near to a fact as one gets in such matters. It is quite likely that, in
the future, he will be seen as one of the greatest English playwrights in
history. Pinter’s early plays are what is meant by creative genius.

Since the financial crash, Gordon Brown’s herculean efforts have once again
revived his political fortunes. From being written off, Labour is back in
the political game. There is everything to play for in 2009. But all this is
being jeopardised by the proposal to privatise the Royal Mail. If the
government goes ahead, it will be the biggest political battle of the year.

Barack Obama was said to have the in-tray from hell even before the conflict
between Hamas and Israel resulted in substantial loss of life in Gaza, as
the Israelis took revenge on the terrorist organisation for its recent
rocket attacks. If Obama harboured any idea of allowing the Arab-Israeli
conflict to fall down towards the bottom of his agenda as he dealt with the
economic slump or Iran or Afghanistan, he will by now have been disabused.

It takes a certain nerve and chutzpah to invoke the messiah approvingly when
Christ’s followers are relentlessly persecuted at home in Iran by, er,
Mahmoud himself. Christians who have been unable to get the hell out of
Ahmadinejad’s Islamist hellhole are routinely arrested, have their property
confiscated and their churches closed; at least one evangelical preacher
faces the death penalty for “proselytising” and “apostasy”. Ahmadinejad
didn’t disclose what he thought Christ would have to say about that. Maybe
he thinks he wouldn’t mind too much, all things considered.

I wonder how many parents of idealistic children shuddered over their mince
pies when they heard the story of 20-year-old Gerrah Selby, the attractive
middle-class girl who fell in with Greg Avery, evangelical leader of the
Animal Liberation Front (ALF).

The unprecedented wave of airstrikes yesterday could not have been a more
dramatic indication of the failure of Israel’s policy to remove Hamas from
power in Gaza.