10/04/2010
10 Apr 2010

10 April 2010

10 Apr 2010

10 April 2010

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Features
Leanda De-Lisle
A Tudor mystery unravels

The fate of Lady Mary Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner and a potential heir to the throne, has never been resolved. Now Leanda de Lisle tells allAt the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, scribbles on the walls of the 12-foot prison room bear testimony to the dreary misery of the woman Elizabeth I had kept there. An heir to the throne, a potential English queen, now buried in obscurity. If Lady Mary Grey is recalled today, it is as a historical footnote.

A Tudor mystery unravels
Kim Levine
Bringing up baby

For my 19-month-old son Santo, living in Rome meant that a typical morning went something like this: get up, get dressed, get hoisted up and down by a hydraulic car lift in our local garage (the mechanic Paolo was one of his good friends), stop for a sugary cornetto for breakfast, help the barman make a café for Mama, sit on a random selection of parked motorini (motorbikes), hang out at our friend Emiliano’s alimentari sticking grubby hands on legs of prosciutto while being fed hunks of parmigiano, get kissed passionately by a wide variety of complete strangers.

Daniel McCarthy
The trouble with tea parties

For many Tory voters, a change of government on 6 May will not be enough. What Britain needs, they think, is little less than a revolution — against skyscraping taxes and personal debt, a corrupt parliament, and a surveillance state that is stripping away liberties as old as Magna Carta. In short, Britain needs what America has: tea parties, a grassroots movement willing to take to the streets in protest against state power.

The trouble with tea parties
Freddy Gray
‘If we have souls, then so do chimps’

Freddy Gray meets Jane Goodall, the primatologist whose ‘unprofessional’, empathetic approach led to astonishing discoveries about how human-like chimpanzees really areA 76-year-old woman is making chimpanzee noises at me. ‘OOOHHH HAAAAA, OOOHHH HAAAA,’ she shouts. ‘And then there’s a WRAAAAH! That’s a threat! WRAAAH!’This woman isn’t mad, though. She is Jane Goodall, the world-renowned primatologist, arguably the greatest behavioural scientist of her time.

‘If we have souls, then  so do chimps’
John Mcentee
A very Catholic education

It seems mandatory at the moment to refer to all cases of child abuse as ‘child rape’. Well — I wasn’t raped but I was, as the euphemism goes, ‘interfered with’ by a representative of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. And rather than seek out those who were sexually abused by priests, nuns and members of religious orders in Ireland, it would, I believe, be easier to identify the minority who were not subject to a sexual advance of some kind.

A very Catholic education
Rod Liddle
The sheep-worrying aliens made me think about homosexuals and B&Bs

Alien life-forms have been cutting holes in sheep in Shropshire with highly powered lasers and strange glowing balls of light. According to a local farmer, reported by an oddly credulous chap from the Daily Telegraph, there is a ‘corridor’ of 50 miles stretching from Shrewsbury towards the Powys border where UFOs arrive quite regularly and do weird stuff with sheep. The farmer insists that sheep have been found with perfectly circular burn holes on their foreheads, and sometimes their brains dissected.

The sheep-worrying aliens made me think about homosexuals and B&Bs
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