Molly Guinness | The Spectator columnists & writers

It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who gives seminars about God. The scene is set for a romantic crisis. Fourteen years later, Peri has a violent encounter with a tramp that brings it all back.

Spectator books of the year: Molly Guinness on the inspiring Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks’s autobiography On the Move (Picador, £20) is full of surprising details —for example, the eminent neurologist was a weightlifting champion in his youth who hung out with Hells Angels. Sacks — who died in August — was an inspiring person with an extraordinary breadth of interests and enthusiasms. I also enjoyed Anne Tyler’s family portrait A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99). People have criticised Tyler for being too gentle, but actually she has the rapier wit of a true satirist. You know exactly how awful one character is because she has soft shoes and insists on calling her mother-in-law Mother Whitshank. Monsters by Emerald Fennell (Hot Key Books, £7.99) is absolutely great. It’s about two appalling children, a sinister seaside holiday and a spate of murders.

How to grapple with discipline in schools

The government’s new school discipline leader Tom Bennett has a difficult brief; he’s in charge of stopping the schoolchildren of the entire nation swinging on their chairs, playing on their telephones, making silly comments and passing notes. Discipline is a problem the Spectator has often grappled with over the years. Writing in 1970, Rhodes Boyson said although there had been incidents in the early19th century when schools had called in troops to put down riots, modern schools weren’t much better at keeping control. My first deputy head told me that when he started teaching in 1890 in a small Lancashire textile town he, along with other young teachers, dared not go to the station at the end of the school day without the presence of the headmaster or he would be attacked in the street by groups of boys throwing stones and sods of earth…When I began teaching in 1950, after active service in the war and four years training, my first two terms in a Lancashire secondary modern school were a battle for survival compared with which periods in the war were like a holiday camp.

Rolf Harris’ lack of remorse and the psychology of uncomfortable emotions

A year into his sentence on 12 counts of indecent assault, it doesn’t look like Rolf Harris has developed much of a sense of remorse. After seeing Mr Harris’s latest foray into song writing, his victims’ lawyer has said he mustn’t be given parole, and she has a point. Theodore Dalrymple (also known as Anthony Daniels), then a prison doctor, described in 1994 the baffling ability of violent criminals to avoid that uncomfortable emotion. A murderer came back from court having been sentenced to life imprisonment. A period of depression is, of course, to be expected after such a sentence, but this man was angry, not depressed. He was red with rage. ‘That wasn't justice,’ he said. ‘It was a kangaroo court…They didn't listen to me.

There’s nothing ‘normal’ about turning down a pay rise

The MPs grandstanding about how they’ll give any salary increase to charity should all be ashamed of themselves. The entire point of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is to take away self-regulation from politicians. It’s frankly none of their business to decide how much they’re paid, and the cries of protest are specious anyway given that IPSA has said the pay rise won’t cost taxpayers anything because it’s basically just a restructuring of how they’re paid. Politics has a terrible image in this country and rather than chorusing ‘we’re not worth it’, it’s about time someone mounted a robust defence of the whole system. The expenses scandal didn’t help, but being holier-than-thou about money matters isn’t the way for politicians to win people over.

The battle of St Mary Bourne — and a history of taking the law into your own hands

It’s tough being a vigilante, as Michael Widen in St Mary Bourne village has discovered to his cost. Mr Widen has been monitoring drivers with his own speed camera, and then reporting them to police. People in the local pub have started calling him a speed Nazi and there are mutterings in the village that he should have taken up bridge like other pensioners, rather than become a grass roots traffic officer. The Spectator has quite often taken the side of people who take the law into their own hands, especially in the early ‘90s, when the police didn’t seem to be able to do much about crime. Paul Johnson argued in 1992 that the public had had enough. The media, useless as always, expresses indignation at miscarriages of justice where the innocent — or supposedly innocent — are convicted.

Never marry a lounger, a pleasure-seeker, or a fribble

It’s good to see that an actual anthropologist is studying the behaviour of some of America’s weirdest women. Wednesday Martin’s book The Primates of Park Avenue describes the exhausting lives of Manhattan’s most full-on wives: sci-fi beauty regimes, frenetic fund-raising, intensive mothering and military household management. In 1832 when a farmer in Lancaster offered up his young wife for sale, he advertised a similarly energetic range of skills. 'She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty; she can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies, and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin, or whisky; but she is a good judge of the quality, from long experience in tasting them.

The next Labour leader should remember the ‘politics of envy’ never work

Andy Burnham may be the trade unions’ favourite candidate for Labour leader but he is already distancing himself from some of Ed Miliband’s worst populist nonsense. This is what he said in today’s Observer: 'We have got to get away from things that look like symbolism. I am going to put the mansion tax in that category. I am not saying it was necessarily completely the wrong thing to do, but in its name I think it spoke to something that the public don’t particularly like, which is the politics of envy.' In a 1911 article entitled An Unenvious People, The Spectator paid tribute to the nature of Englishmen. The festivities of the Coronation would have set an edge upon envy in England if anything could. It was a time when two persons were " beheld in glory" and exalted above all others; when, below those two persons, the whole ennobled class enjoyed the privilege of being present in Westminster Abbey to the exclusion of countless persons who could probably be proved to possess more merit; and when rich people generally illustrated in their own persons how money means comfort and poverty discomfort.

Sensible Tories still believe in One Nation Conservatism

David Cameron has said the Conservatives will govern as a party of one nation. The phrase was apt at a time when part of the country seems to be pulling away with all its might, and after a bad-tempered election campaign, where class warfare was actively encouraged in some quarters. For a time, the phrase ‘One Nation’ was Conservative code for wanting to spend more, but that’s not what Cameron meant on Friday. This is how he put it: 'We must ensure that we bring our country together…We will govern as a party of one nation, one United Kingdom. That means ensuring this recovery reaches all parts of our country, from north to south, from east to west. And indeed it means rebalancing our economy, building that northern powerhouse.

Possible ways to neutralise the SNP

The prospect of government by short-term deals and extortion is so depressing that you can see why Ed Miliband has said he won’t go in for that kind of thing, and why David Cameron and Nick Clegg have finally started laying down some red lines. But there’s no getting away from the electoral mathematics, as Gladstone and Salisbury learnt 130 years ago. Before the 1885 election, the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell worked out that he could hold the balance of power. If this should happen at the next election, he can enable the Conservatives to turn out the present Liberal Government, and then enable the Liberals to turn out the succeeding Conservative Government, and so on ad infinitum. Parliamentary government will have become an impossibility until Mr.

It’s more important than ever for conservatives to appeal to hearts as well as minds

The Conservatives always do a lot worse than Labour in polls that ask about how proud voters feel of their party. They’re hoping that ‘shy Tories’ might still win them the election, but it’s pretty pathetic that more than 20 years since the phenomenon was first identified, Conservatives still haven’t found a way to remove the stigma and convince the electorate that right-wing politics is about making people’s lives better. Social justice, compassion and coolness are now strictly the domain of the Left in the public consciousness, which makes it all the more baffling that the Tories decided to leave principle and passion out of this election campaign to fight on a dry message of past economic competence. As Fraser has argued, people don’t vote based on what you’ve done but on what you’re going to do.

Duelling advice for Nigel Farage

A Polish prince this week challenged Nigel Farage to a duel. The prince, Yanek Zylinski, blames Farage and Ukip for anti-Polish sentiment in the UK so he’s suggesting they meet in Hyde Park with their swords one morning. The Spectator of 1838 would be disappointed that 21st century princes are still throwing down gauntlets: The pretence on which duelling has been defended – that it serves to polish society – is untenable. The witty Mr Whistlecraft, indeed, speaking of King Arthur’s Knights, avers that: “Their looks and gestures, eager, sharp, and quick, Showed them prepared, on proper provocation, To give the lie, pull noses, stab and kick, Which is the very reason, it is said, They were so very courteous and well-bred.

Bored teenagers are the last people we should be forcing to vote

One of the trendy things to worry about these days is political disengagement among young people. A think tank called the Institute for Public Policy Research is so worried it’s suggested people be forced to vote in the first election after their 18th birthday. They say political apathy among the young is undermining democracy, but their solution is rather perverse. People who are so bored by thinking about the future of the country that they can’t be bothered to vote are the last people we should be consulting on the next government; frankly it’s a relief that so many of the least competent voters keep themselves away from the polling stations. These kind of people were chief argument against universal suffrage when it was first considered, as Charles Moore wrote in 1987.

Jeffrey Bernard and Jeremy Clarkson would have understood each other

A lot of people seem to have confused the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is right wing and amusing (which they believe is at odds with the culture of the BBC) with the fact that he’s shown himself to be a brute (which is why he’s been sacked). The investigation into his attack on Oisin Tymon is pretty unequivocal. It was unprovoked and lasted more than 30 seconds until someone else intervened, and there was a lot of nasty verbal abuse thrown in for good measure. Tymon went to hospital afterwards to get his injuries checked out. Rather magnificently, he didn’t offer any resistance to Clarkson’s assault. The Duke of Cambridge in 1874 showed similar restraint when a disgruntled soldier attacked him in Pall Mall. On Wednesday, the Duke of Cambridge was struck by Captain Charles Studdert Maunsell, on half-pay, who declared “his Royal Highness had done him a grievous wrong.

Thank goodness we only have to watch one TV debate

The treasurer of one of Manchester’s Conservative clubs is a lifelong Labour voter who votes only as a mark of respect for his father, who always voted Labour. He’s one of the few club regulars we met who bothers to vote, but he never watches the news and takes pride in knowing nothing about politics. I was in Manchester looking for disaffected voters with the World Service’s political correspondent Rob Watson; Manchester Central had the lowest turnout at the last election. We talked to a lot of people who had a similar attitude – 'I’d rather be a hypocrite than powerless', said one man in Wetherspoon’s. It’s a bit like doing jury service with earplugs in, but the consensus is that disengagement is never the voters’ fault.

Reflections on the importance of Mothering Sunday

For Mothering Sunday, some advice to mothers from a 1912 edition of The Spectator. Be with him yourself as much as you can… I have no fear of your being a fussy mother, worrying him with continual attentions, but I have just the slightest fear lest you should entertain that silly idea that seeing much of a mother makes a boy unmanly. Kipling says that in nine out of ten cases a man calls on his mother's name at the hour of death. I cannot answer that this is so, but if it be it is of glorious significance for motherhood. After years and years of the world's buffeting it is the one who first knew him, who first clasped him in her arms, who counts. Therefore do not be afraid of influencing him too much…There will come a time when in boyish sorrow of heart he will come to you for consolation and help.

50 years on, the battle for civil rights continues in America

Fifty years since the first civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, America still has huge problems with race. Only this week a federal investigation into the killing of an unarmed black man in Ferguson last year concluded that the police there were racist. They’ve been making millions of dollars by targeting black people and issuing tickets for minor traffic infractions. Across America, black people are still poorer, less educated and more likely to go to gaol than white people. In 1962 The Spectator’s New York correspondent Murray Kempton wrote: In the best of cases, to be a Negro in America is to have a station below your capacities… The American economy sometimes seems almost designed for the care and feeding of incompetent and unproductive white men.

How do you tell a sturdy vagabond from a submissive pauper?

The number of people sleeping on the streets has risen by 55 per cent in the last five years. New statistics show that London had 742 rough sleepers on the streets on an average night last autumn, which is about 200 more than the same period in 2013. Governments have tried various tactics to get people off the streets over the years, but the solutions often sound as bad as the problem. An 1893 article attempted to classify the tramps as a first step to getting rid of aggressive beggars, ‘sodden scoundrels too cowardly to commit real crimes, but willing enough to frighten women into paying them blackmail.’ First come the “mouchers,” the habitual vagrants, who wander about and get their living by begging, and who have no idea, immediate or remote, of ever adopting any other calling.

The tragedy of these sex education plans is that five year olds might miss the joke

Most people look back fondly at their sex education classes, remembering the stammering, red faced teachers, the very silly jokes and the endless, irrepressible giggles. The real tragedy about this week’s proposals to teach five-year-olds about sex is that children that small may not see the funny side of it. Generations of policy makers, teachers and journalists have spent years agonising over the question, while generations of schoolchildren have spent the happy hours of the PSHE classes passing notes, thinking up absurd innuendoes and flirting outrageously, eyes shining with laughter. But perhaps the privilege of having whole lessons given over to such cheerful pastimes was only ever to be a flash in the pan.

The sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs makes you long for the good old days

At a recent day’s hunting in Wiltshire, a man in a balaclava trying to pull a rider off his horse and said, 'Some of you will be going home in body bags today'. Later, after the huntsman had put his horse and hounds in the lorry, masked men armed with iron bars set upon him and knocked him out, kicking him repeatedly in the head as hard as they could even after he was unconscious. It’s 10 years since the hunting ban came into force but the sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs is as popular, and as vicious, as ever. It makes you long for the old days; in 1900, when the army reserves, as well as an awful lot of horses, were heading off to fight in the Boer War, most hunts continued just as they always had: If the fields are smaller than usual, and a good many familiar faces are missing, the master very properly feels that as he has his pack and there are plenty of foxes, he may as well employ the one and hunt the other, and keep up the spirits of the county by good sound sport and plenty of it.

The moral argument for three-person babies

If all goes according to plan, the first baby with the DNA of three people will be British, and could be born next year. Mitochondrial transfer could end years of misery for some couples and prevent appalling conditions being passed on to the next generation. Some scientists have raised concerns that it’s such uncharted territory that the babies could be born with disabilities or genetic defects, but the majority are happy that the research has been through necessary reviews. Melanie McDonagh and Isabel Hardman have drawn attention to the breakneck speed with which MPs voted to legalise the procedure. Parliament should act as a national conscience, and we don’t want them essentially outsourcing complex decisions to experts.

The horrors of concentration camps

Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, Roman Kent, who was 12 when he was sent there, wept as he implored the world not to allow anything like that to happen again. 'How can one erase the sight of human skeletons – just skin and bones, but still alive?' he said. 'How can I ever forget the smell of burning flesh?' Paul-Emile Seidman was working as a doctor in Bichat hospital in Paris when the survivors of the concentration camps began to arrive. In a few days our beds were occupied by skeletons…They all seem to be of the same age, whether they are twenty or sixty. Their heads appear tiny—nothing but a fragile skull in which the eyes seem to occupy the whole face. There are bald spots on their heads; you take a strand of hair, you barely pull it, it remains between your fingers like the coat of an old diseased animal.

The perils of being posh

This week’s wazzock spat hasn’t polarised people in the way that arguments about class often do; most of us have just enjoyed the spectacle of the pop star James Blunt and the Labour MP Chris Bryant exchanging insults. In case you missed it, Bryant said it was a pity the arts were dominated by public school boys like Blunt, who responded in an open letter to The Guardian by calling him a ‘classist gimp’ and a ‘prejudiced wazzock’, and Bryant wrote back to say that Blunt was being ‘blooming precious’. Blunt said he’d become a pop star despite his poshness, not because of it. In 1969, Nigel Nicolson met some girls at a private boarding school who were experiencing a similar kind of posh anxiety. They wondered whether they would ever escape from the jolly merry-go-round on which their parents had launched them so impulsively.

Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do

Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will Boast spent years trying to turn his life story into fiction, but eventually gave up and wrote an autobiography. In Epilogue, he describes how his mother died of brain cancer when he was in his first year of college; two years later, his younger brother Rory was killed in a car crash, then his father set about drinking himself to death. Later, he discovered that his father had had two sons from a secret previous marriage, so he tracked them down and made friends. Boast certainly has plenty of material to work with, but this book feels like it’s been written more for himself than for his readers. The characters remain shadowy, sketched in with brief vignettes and half-remembered dialogue.

Would a dash of hooliganism improve the game of snooker?

The recent BDO and PDA darts championships were undeniably glorious. Ronnie O’Sullivan is arguing that snooker needs to learn from darts by introducing shot clocks and power play to speed things up. Perhaps another way of boosting snooker’s status would be to bring in an element of hooliganism. John Wells was delighted when a Jamaican crowd started ‘lobbing bottles of Auntie Emily's Home Town Goulash at the soberly clad riot police’ at a cricket match in 1968. In carrying sporting violence into Test cricket they have triumphantly invaded yet another cherished sanctum of peace and fuddy-duddy ritualised conflict…Violence is here to stay. As I stood and roared myself hoarse at the breathtaking climax to last year's FA Cup Final, when referee Bert Entwhistle was dismembered and eaten by the crowd within seconds of appearing on the field, as I…listened to that exhilarating exchange of small-arms fire between the rival supporters' clubs, my heart went out to the deprived spectators of old-fashioned, stuffy sporting events, still groaning in the shackles of petty restrictions and head-in-the-sand reactionary rules.

The joys of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions

There’s something so depressing about the newspapers’ tips for sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions that to shield yourself from boredom and irritation, you may decide not to make any at all. But they can be rather romantic; the diplomat Harold Nicolson had a tender affection for resolutions, much preferring them to Christmas. How far more delightful, how far less cumbersome, is the search for New Year's resolutions. No careful planning is required for this catalogue; the resolutions trip merrily along together, as gay as a group of children leaving school…One should realise that the ease with which they buzz and settle implies an equal capacity for being able, in the dark days of January, to flit away. They should be treated tenderly as butterflies; smiling affectionately, one should observe their happy movements and their volatile stance; they are but the insects of an hour—let them be gay and irresponsible while their short span of life may last.

Is torture acceptable if it helps save thousands of lives?

This week’s Senate Report on the CIA hasn’t settled the question of torture once and for all, as Bruce Anderson has pointed out. When we talk about the heroes of the Resistance, our deepest admiration is reserved for the fighters who didn’t give away their secrets under torture, so the claim that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques did not result in any useful intelligence is rather surprising: it’s too morally neat. British law has never condoned torture (though the Tudors found ways round that), and when the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria was trying to reform the European criminal justice system, Britain was already setting a good example: When Beccaria published his famous treatise On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, there were, it is said, only three European States in which prisoners and important witnesses at criminal trials were not examined under torture; they were England, Sweden and Prussia.

From the archives: Some advice on stripping

There have been some glorious celebrations of human flesh in the newspapers this week – who could resist poring over the pictures from the Victoria’s Secret catwalk show, or taking a few minutes to study Madonna’s page three shoot? Of course they’ve also spawned an awful lot of articles containing words like empowerment and objectify, so it’s refreshing to see how reasonable The Spectator has always been when it comes to nudity. Take this article from 1932, when local courts were occasionally fining people for walking to the beach in mackintoshes with nothing on underneath but their bathing suits. It is time some general working philosophy was evolved…there is more prurience than principle in most of the annual outcry about the inadequacy of the costumes at this or that popular resort.

Tristram Hunt’s proposals for public schools are nothing new

The Shadow Education Secretary is suggesting that private schools provide qualified teachers to help deliver specialist subject knowledge to state schools. It’s depressing that they don’t all already have in-house specialists. Not surprising though, according to Terence Kealey, who argued in 1991 that the state should never have got involved in education in the first place: Ever since St Augustine had founded King's School, Canterbury in AD 597, charitable church schools had flourished. They were rarely short of sponsors. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for example, was raising no less than £10,000 p.a in London alone in 1719. New societies continued to be formed… But the Commons did not believe that the free market could supply sufficient education.

Agonised questions

Agonised questions

Spectator books of the year: Molly Guinness on the inspiring Oliver Sacks

Spectator books of the year: Molly Guinness on the inspiring Oliver Sacks

How to grapple with discipline in schools

How to grapple with discipline in schools

Rolf Harris’ lack of remorse and the psychology of uncomfortable emotions

Rolf Harris’ lack of remorse and the psychology of uncomfortable emotions

There’s nothing ‘normal’ about turning down a pay rise

There’s nothing ‘normal’ about turning down a pay rise

The battle of St Mary Bourne — and a history of taking the law into your own hands

The battle of St Mary Bourne — and a history of taking the law into your own hands

Never marry a lounger, a pleasure-seeker, or a fribble

Never marry a lounger, a pleasure-seeker, or a fribble

The next Labour leader should remember the ‘politics of envy’ never work

The next Labour leader should remember the ‘politics of envy’ never work

Sensible Tories still believe in One Nation Conservatism

Sensible Tories still believe in One Nation Conservatism

Possible ways to neutralise the SNP

Possible ways to neutralise the SNP

It’s more important than ever for conservatives to appeal to hearts as well as minds

It’s more important than ever for conservatives to appeal to hearts as well as minds

Duelling advice for Nigel Farage

Duelling advice for Nigel Farage

Bored teenagers are the last people we should be forcing to vote

Bored teenagers are the last people we should be forcing to vote

Jeffrey Bernard and Jeremy Clarkson would have understood each other

Jeffrey Bernard and Jeremy Clarkson would have understood each other

Thank goodness we only have to watch one TV debate

Thank goodness we only have to watch one TV debate

Reflections on the importance of Mothering Sunday

Reflections on the importance of Mothering Sunday

50 years on, the battle for civil rights continues in America

50 years on, the battle for civil rights continues in America

How do you tell a sturdy vagabond from a submissive pauper?

How do you tell a sturdy vagabond from a submissive pauper?

The tragedy of these sex education plans is that five year olds might miss the joke

The tragedy of these sex education plans is that five year olds might miss the joke

The sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs makes you long for the good old days

The sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs makes you long for the good old days

The moral argument for three-person babies

The moral argument for three-person babies

The horrors of concentration camps

The horrors of concentration camps

The perils of being posh

The perils of being posh

Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do

Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do

Would a dash of hooliganism improve the game of snooker?

Would a dash of hooliganism improve the game of snooker?

The joys of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions

The joys of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions

Is torture acceptable if it helps save thousands of lives?

Is torture acceptable if it helps save thousands of lives?

From the archives: Some advice on stripping

From the archives: Some advice on stripping

Tristram Hunt’s proposals for public schools are nothing new

Tristram Hunt’s proposals for public schools are nothing new