07/10/2006
7 Oct 2006

07 October 2006

7 Oct 2006

07 October 2006

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Features
Allister Heath
The mean streets of Britain

The shootings in a Brixton McDonald’s were a terrible metaphor for the way we live now, writes Allister Heath. A whole section of society, raised on violence and fast food, is drifting away from the rest of the nation: nutrition is destinyInstead of the heavy police presence I had expected to find at Brixton’s underground station, I was greeted by a canned rendition of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. To cool tempers in the notoriously volatile south London hotspot, classical music is being pumped through the ticket hall’s sound system; unfortunately, like the flower power ‘make love, not war’ ideology of the 1960s, this latest gimmick is straight out of the politically correct rulebook.

Michael Henderson
Ken Dodd: still happy at 78

More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes AristotleThere are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through the Ring cycle in a week (both need a head for heights). There are other things one might do in dreams, like scoring a century at Lord’s.

Rod Liddle
Slaughter in Pennsylvania

Rod Liddle says that a society brutalised by violent imagery and the death penalty  has learned to expect such horrors as the bloodbath in the schoolhouseIt was what the psychiatric services, with commendable understatement, often call a ‘special’ murder: obscure in its motive, repugnant in its selection of vulnerable and powerless victims, excessively brutal in its denouement. Charles C. Roberts, a milkman, marched into the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at 10.

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