20 November 1998

US v Saddam, a farce: scene 94

• 20 November 1998

Who are the world's most long-lived dictators? Top of the list is Fidel Castro, who came to power when Macmillan was the British prime minister and Eisenhower the American president. ...

The Journal of Lynton Charles, Deputy Minister without Portfolio

• 20 November 1998

Monday "Is it true," asks Zero Anstiss in her slightly hoarse voice, "that you new Labour people are all control freaks?" I put down my Bourbon - half nibbled - ...

7 Days

• 20 November 1998

Spare the Rhodri Labour is boosting Rhodri Morgan's chances of beating the Blairite favourite, Alun Michael, to the post of Welsh Assembly leader. The principality's 25,000 party members are ...

Blair doesn't have enough control

• Steve Richards
• 20 November 1998

All party leaders are control freaks. Some are more successful at controlling than others, but none of them is relaxed about the rise of dissenters within their own ranks.

This ...

On my tombstone will be engraved: "One of the untouchables - she drank her own pee"

• Sarah Miles
• 20 November 1998

Where did they go, our travelling minstrels, our strolling players? It seems impossible today for any new venture to be allowed the grace to blossom organically, through word of mouth ...

Please spare us this golf club bore

• Quentin Letts
• 20 November 1998

Alistair Cooke has been our man in America since 1938.Quentin Lettsbegs him to stop

In bed on Sunday mornings my wife and I play a little game. No, not that sort of game. This one is conducted just after the Radio 4 announcer has ...

A prejudice as American as apple pie

• Charles Glass
• 20 November 1998

A new film that depicts Arabs as blood-thirsty terrorists is creating a storm in the States. Charles Glass, in New York, sees a sinister reason for its success

America's politicians and pundits sound as disgruntled as the Duke of York's 10,000 men marching down that hill again. President Bill Clinton took them to the Baghdad brink yet again, ...

Instant Expert Kit - Saddam Hussein

• Duncan Parrish
• 20 November 1998

He was born near Takrit, Iraq, in 1937. Beaten by his step-father and hated by the other children in the village . . .

Oh please, I can hear violins ...

Professional secrecy and public faith allow doctors to get away, literally even, with murder

• Mary Riddell
• 20 November 1998

I realised that my relationship with my one-time GP was foundering when I discovered that my surgery file consisted of a note of two old prescriptions and assorted press clippings. ...

Today's women and yesterday's men

• Matt Barnard
• 20 November 1998

Female pornography is supposed to mark a new chapter in gender relations. So why does Mr Darcy keep rearing his coiffeured head, asks Matt Barnard

"She arched up her hips and he glided into her, filling her up and stretching her out. Clarissa looked up at him in the darkness, his face only partially illuminated ...

Blacks do 8 in 10 gang rapes? If so, we should be told

• Darcus Howe
• 20 November 1998

This week, I chaired a discussion show on Channel 4. The current affairs department had commissioned a small independent company, Laurel Productions, to make a 30-minute documentary on young people's ...

Hard times for the lucky and the lazy

• David Halpern
• 20 November 1998

Where is British politics heading? David Halpern found some answers at a Harvard seminar

Last weekend saw an extraordinary gathering. Around 30 key thinkers and policy experts from across Europe met in the plush surroundings of Harvard University for a three- day seminar to ...

How to cut energy use without pain

• John Prescott
• 20 November 1998

John Prescott insists that we can remain prosperous and still beat global warming

A year ago, at Kyoto, the world reached an historic agreement to combat climate change by cutting greenhouse emissions. Developed countries would reduce emissions 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels ...

The New Statesman Profile - Hugo Young

• John Lloyd
• 20 November 1998

The liberal conscience of the nation despairs of the grubby hypocrisy of our politicians

When asked what influence he would name upon his writing, Hugo Young said instantly - before the question was fully out of my mouth - "Macaulay". There is, in fact, ...

Hurrah! Brash Radio 5, which gives ordinary people a voice, is taking over from stuffy old Radio 4, nanny to the nation

• Cristina Odone
• 20 November 1998

Time was, whenever I took a cab to a friend's house, I'd find Radio 5 Live blaring in the bumping, grinding vehicle, and Radio 4 murmuring at my friend's. No ...

Poem - Don't You Want Me? (Remix) (with apologies to the Human League

• Bill Greenwell
• 20 November 1998

The hit parade is dominated by artists from the eighties and from even earlier

We were working for the party on our council beat

That much is true

We ...

Trust us - until you're ill, that is

• Andrew Stephen
• 20 November 1998

If you take out comprehensive, worldwide health insurance with Britain's second mightiest medical insurers, PPP healthcare - started as long ago as 1938 - you'll be covered for vital medical ...

What's humanitarian about this aid?

• Anne Applebaum
• 20 November 1998

The US has imposed on Russia an aid package that will leave the country poorer but American farmers richer. Anne Applebaum reports from Moscow

Here we are at the end of 1998. More than ten years has passed since Russia began experimenting with economic and political reform. During those ten years, we have had ...

The New Statesman Essay - How to make a humane market

• Amitai Etzioni
• 20 November 1998

Quality of life or economic success? Amitai Etzionitries to have it both ways

This is a true account. It would take a Bertolt Brecht to improve on this ultimate analogue for the dehumanisation of the social market. Rod Grimm (his real name) is ...

Thinker's Corner

• 20 November 1998

Identity and Politics (Centre for Reform, Horseferry Road, London SW1P 2AF, 0171-222 5121). Just as we all fell asleep over our rebranded Britishness, this paper prods us between the ribs. ...

The New Statesman Interview - Chris Powell

• Mary Riddell
• 20 November 1998

Sir Charles advised Thatcher, Jonathan advises Blair; now a third brother will launch a re-branded Britain on the world

The trouble with his family, Chris Powell says, is that none of them has ever really done anything. "We are all just whisperers in ears, aren't we?" he complains. This ...

Moving house can turn sweet old ladies into Al Pacino, but at least you get to nose round their bedrooms

• Sean French
• 20 November 1998

I've been trying to imagine how I would describe what it's like to move house to someone who had never done it. Everybody knows the old cliche about it being ...

This England

• 20 November 1998

Terence Savage returned with the axe and asked for Mr Barlow before prowling the corridors until police arrived and arrested him.

Savage claimed he had no intention of hurting Mr ...

The shock of the Brew

• Richard Cook
• 20 November 1998

Breakthrough or blind alley? Exotic or extraneous? Miles Davis's Bitches Brew sessions still divide the jazz house. Richard Cook hears a lavish new boxed set

Miles Davis was the most prolific of record-makers, but most know him for three touchstone albums: Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. To go from the first ...

Good enough

• Dermot Clinch
• 20 November 1998

Opera

Boris Godunov trundles through the crowds at his coronation on a tricycle rickshaw. He strikes bold, rhetorical poses a la Lenin, then crumples under the weight of a private guilt ...

Towering imbroglio

• Jonathan Romney
• 20 November 1998

Film

It's clear from the opening credits of King Vidor's The Fountainhead that the film is in the grip of phallic dementia. It begins with a skyscraper swinging round to turn ...

Big helpings

• Andrew Billen
• 20 November 1998

Television

To describe a comedy as "dark" is virtually a compliment in itself these days. That unexpected wrench into tragedy, exemplified by the coronary suffered by Beverley's husband in Abigail's Party, ...

Quiet, please

• David Thompson
• 20 November 1998

Modern Times

"Far from being the mere absence of sound, silences express what no words or sounds possibly could." Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983)

One of ...

Communication breakdown

• Andrew Brown
• 20 November 1998

Internet

Cruel winds of fate have blown me to Rome twice in the past three weeks: sitting in a hotel lobby, I still can't believe people pay me to come here ...

Living on our luck

• Ziauddin Sardar
• 20 November 1998

Science

Scholars who study the decline of great civilisations sometimes find an environmental factor behind their fall. The river-valley cultures of the Middle East may have destroyed their habitats by over-irrigation, ...

Competing flavours

• Bee Wilson
• 20 November 1998

Food

As all dinner party bores are aware (and never pause to inform us), there are far too many cookery shows on British TV. To compound the offence, they fulminate, most ...

China tease

• Victoria Moore
• 20 November 1998

Drink

"Would you like to try it first, madam?" the waiter enquires as I order a bottle of wine. He is charming, politeness embodied. But something in his manner assures me ...

The US left-wing mags are thriving, but don't go on their cruises

• Ian Hargreaves
• 20 November 1998

Media

To arrive at a San Francisco conference knowing that half a day later you must be on your way back to the airport is to see what it is like ...

Not one **** goal, as they wouldn't have said in 1934

• Hunter Davies
• 20 November 1998

I've just got back from a derby game between Arsenal and Spurs. Which I was really looking forward to. Turned out pretty boring, really, and my mind kept wandering all ...

The darkness at noon for Arthur Koestler was in his heart. Yet his early work, inspired by his disillusionment with communism, will survive the memory of his unlovable personality

• Geoffrey Wheatcroft
• 20 November 1998

Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind David Cesarani Heinemann, 646pp, £25

Not all extraordinary writers lead extraordinary lives - some shelter happily in ivory towers of the imagination - but Arthur Koestler's own story might seem implausible even in one of ...

A gilded brand

• Natasha Fairweather
• 20 November 1998

The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild Niall Ferguson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1,309pp, £30 The Rothschilds: Portrait of a Dynasty Frederic Morton Kodansha International, 332pp, $16

Superlatives attach themselves to the Rothschild family like burrs. They are the greatest, richest, most enduringly successful banking dynasty the world has ever seen. From their five European power bases, ...

Spanking good copper

• Phil Whitaker
• 20 November 1998

Manners Robert Newman Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £9.99

Robert Newman's novel is narrated by a Metropolitan Police constable in north London. The title, with its reference to anodyne English comedy, is, as you might expect from one of ...

Monopolies of loss

• John Gray
• 20 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life Michael Ignatieff Chatto & Windus, 356pp, £20

Nietzsche wrote somewhere that all philosophy is involuntary biography. It is hard to think of a philosopher of whom this is less obviously true than Isaiah Berlin. The heart of ...

Novel of the week

• William Geordiades
• 20 November 1998

A man in Full Tom Wolfe Jonathan Cape, 742pp, £20

Tom Wolfe once described his celebrated new journalism as "a garage sale . . . vignettes, odds and ends of scholarship, bits of memoir, short bursts of sociology, apostrophes, epithets, ...

Commentary - Step forward, Mr Motion

• Michael Glover
• 20 November 1998

Michael Glover wonders who is best placed to toady to order as the next poet laureate

When a poet laureate dies, it may be time to take stock. What is the meaning of the role, and has it a place in our society? And why have ...

Competition - Win a bottle of champagne

• 20 November 1998

No 3553 Set by Gordon Gwilliams

The year 2000 is the Labour Party's centenary. We asked for fly-on-the-wall reporting of new Labour's strategy session to discuss the "opportunities" presented by ...

In the dreamy, poetical suburb that gave us Michael Portillo

• Paul Barker
• 20 November 1998

This is aspirational London. Get out and get on. Going through Enfield, I could navigate from Tesco store to Tesco store. The newest has just been opened by the town ...