Great minds

A group of Jewish schoolgirls in London boycotted an examination requiring them to answer questions on Shakespeare, whom they believed, based on the portrayal of Shylock in Merchant of Venice, was anti-semitic.

Addressing this charge in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan dismisses the accusation, thus:

No, of course he wasn’t. His universalism, his grandeur, the wholeness of his understanding, makes such questions meaningless. Shakespeare cannot be confined by any set of beliefs: his genius always bursts out, putting both sides of a case far more eloquently than any other advocate. When you try and conscript him to a narrow cause, you make yourself look narrow. Shakespeare’s canon will broaden your experience more than your experience can ever broaden it.

But argues that Shylock has been, perhaps, the greatest source of trouble for the Jews:

. . . on balance, I’m with the pupils at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School. Shylock, precisely because of the depth of his character, precisely because his motives are made comprehensible, is the most dangerous archetype of the malevolent Jew ever created. He’s not just a nasty piece of work; he possesses the character traits that anti-Semites have projected onto Jews down the ages. He is greedy, legalistic, clever and lacking in compassion: a schemer who secretly loathes the Christians he lends money to.

I feel awkward every time I watch the play, as many gentiles do. I can only imagine how much more uneasy I would feel if I were Jewish. Harold Bloom, perhaps the most dedicated Shakespearean of our age, is beguiled by the play, and by the ambiguities of Shylock in particular; yet he well recognises how much it has worsened the lot of European Jewry. “Shakespeare’s persuasiveness has its unfortunate aspects; The Merchant of Venice may have been more of an incitement to anti-Semitism than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, though less than the Gospel of John. We pay a price for what we gain from Shakespeare”.

And this seems to be the nub of a contemporary problem: that great, not narrow minds, can take positions of high moral grandeur, dismissive of the consequences for others.

Draped in despair but keeping up appearances

From this weekend's The Australian

THE last complete sentence my mother uttered before her death was said in a whisper, her hand shakily pointing towards my sister's neck: "I like your necklace." Following this utterance her speech centre failed, then everything else failed, and she died.

I grew up in a family where appearances mattered. My grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, decanted from a remote area of Polish farmland into the English class system, and they believed in a series of maxims, such as, "The only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you're skint", and most significantly, "Only the rich can afford cheap shoes".

So I have never taken to the idea that clothes, shoes, handbags, hairdressing, manicures are part of the realm of the superficial, the trivial. That the high-minded woman should care little for what she wears. For we are clothed almost 24 hours of the day and, like it or not, we are looked at and judged. It came to me a few years ago that you cannot have depths without surfaces, it's a physical impossibility, and how the two cohere is what makes life interesting. There shouldn't be shame in being interested in fashion.

read on

Further Australia/New Zealand events and dates

My main website now has details of all the forthcoming events on this Australia/New Zealand tour

Orchard Road, Singapore

I was supposed to be staying at a gracious old hotel slightly off the main drag, s I was alarmed when the driver who met me with a name sign at the airport took me to an entirely different hotel. Was it possible that I had jumped the limo of another Linda Grant? But a woman from the desk came out and gave me a faxed itinerary with the change of venue. The hotel is more like an airport than a lodging, but I cannot help but notice that outside it is Gucci, Prada and much else. In fact I seem to be right in the centre of shopping mile.

And having eaten a late Vietnamese lunch down by the river , and done masterclass to some fascinating writing students, and met a banker turned poet, and had a late Italian dinner, and got some sleep, and after a tv interview coming up at 9 am and a bunch of newspaper interviews afterwards, I examine the shops before leaving for the airport for the next leg of my journey: Singapore to Melbourne to Adelaide.

I hadn't realised Singapore was so much fun, and had not realised how many Singaporeans have English as their mother tongue. Someone really should write the great Singapore novel

Handcream update

Creme de le Mer handcream at Heathrow Duty free is £51. In the US its normal price is $70. I didn't get it.

They didn't have LOccitaine. I agree with others about Ahava, but I don't like the strong smell and you can't get it at duty free. So in the end I got Clarins. £13. I agree it's an excellent handcream, and it has an SPF. But it also has a slightly medicinal smell which I find off-putting. But beggars can't be choosers. £51 for handcream at Heathrow, $70 at Saks.

Singapore event tonight

Details here

In which Saudi Arabia proves itself to be unexpectedly egalitarian

Usually it is women whose immodest dress and flirtatious manner is condemned as leading impressionable men to commit acts of sexual violence.

Saudi Arabia, however has rounded up 57 young men accused of wearing immodest dress, hanging round shopping malls and flirting. And loitering with the intent to buy red roses.

Saudi men arrested for 'flirting'

Relations between the sexes outside marriage is against the law

Prosecutors in Saudi Arabia have begun investigating 57 young men who were arrested on Thursday for flirting with girls at shopping centres in Mecca.

The men are accused of wearing indecent clothes, playing loud music and dancing in order to attract the attention of girls, the Saudi Gazette reported.

They were arrested following a request of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The mutaween enforce Saudi Arabia's conservative brand of Islam, Wahhabism.

Earlier in the month, the authorities enforced a ban on the sale of red roses and other symbols used in many countries to mark Valentine's Day.

The ban is partly because of the connection with a "pagan Christian holiday", and also because the festival itself is seen as encouraging relations between the sexes outside marriage, punishable by law in the kingdom.

The Prosecution and Investigation Commission said it had received reports of such "bad" behaviour by 57 young men at a number of shopping centres in the holy city of Mecca, the Saudi Gazette said.

The guardians of some of the men defended their actions, however, saying they would regularly get together at the weekend to have fun without ever violating laws governing the segregation of the sexes, it added.

Creme de la Mer handcream

US price $70

UK price £60 (approx $120)

Duty free would be minus 17.5% circa £49 (approx $98)

Oh, land of the free, home of the brave and the unlined.

Hand-cream: readers, please recommend

I am nearly out of my ruinously expensive Creme de la Mer hand-cream and if there's one thing I like to have on long-haul flights it's plenty of hand-cream. So I need to make a purchase at Heathrow duty free on Monday morning, and will accept recommendations.

If you know a fabulous drug store brand only available in the US, do tell, others may take advantage where I cannot.

Smocks - what are they good for?

I nipped down to Jaeger this morning to try on this top, thinking that I might be in need of a cool loose top on my travels.

Who exactly do smocks suit? Not me, and not most of the Jaeger customers, according to the intelligent and helpful saleswoman. 'Most of our ladies find that smocks make them look quite big,' she said.

I went to Cos and found a rather good navy coat, which I'll be travelling in. Click on the hyperlink and check out their SS08 collection on the video. Cos, for my American readers, is the upmarket arm of H&M, only available in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Denmark. Ha! And soon we'll have Banana Republic (20 March) and if ever we get Zappos, that'll be the end of those New York shopping weekends.

Not fashion

Joan Smith, who covered the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the early 80s, has an outstanding and lengthy analysis in the Guardian today on the sex trade and the Ipswich murders:

To begin with, it seemed as though nothing had changed since the 70s when Sutcliffe's murders unleashed a torrent of insensitive headlines about the women he preyed on in the red light districts of Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and Manchester. The Sun's "Fears for vice girls" on November 16 2006 was followed the next day by the same paper's "Fears for hookers", while the Times joined in on December 5 with "Ripper murder strikes fear into vice girls".

But public attitudes to women in the sex industry have changed, as the press quickly discovered. In Ipswich and elsewhere, people were outraged by TV and radio bulletins that baldly announced five "prostitutes" had been murdered in Suffolk. Many people are uncomfortable when the word is used in headlines as though it's no different from "teacher" or "dentist"; the dead women were daughters, mothers and girlfriends but their whole lives were being defined by something they had embarked on out of absolute desperation. "As soon as it became a national story, it became apparent that the language used to describe the women was inappropriate," says a journalist who went to Ipswich when the third body was found. "Everybody knew one of the victims or had been to school with one of them."

That yeti look, again

MaxMara AW08 - do the designers know something we don't? Or haven't they heard of global warming?

On the road

From early Monday I am on a three-week book tour of Singapore, Adelaide, Melbourne, various places in New Zealand, culminating in a one-day shopping trip in Hong Kong. (Thank you, Sarah.) Details of the events will be going up on my main website in the next day or two.

I will be maintaining this site, but it will be more of a travel diary. No thought for the day, I'm afraid, or polls.

In the meantime, I'm pleased to say that I have just signed a contract with my publisher to write a non-fiction book about our relationship with clothes. The provisional title was Why Clothes Matter, but my editor has come up with a better name: The Thoughtful Dresser. Now why didn't I think of that? Publication is scheduled for this time next year.

I hope to meet some of you in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. In the meantime, keep checking in.

Thought for the day

in memoriam: Gemma Adams, Tania Nichol, Anette Nichols, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell

'"My dear, I had to laugh," she said. "D'you know what a man said to me the other day? It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?' 'What a swine of a man, ' I said. 'Yes, that's what I told him,' Maudie said. That isn't the way to talk,' I said. And he said, "Well, it's true, isn't it? You can get a very nice girl for five pounds. a very nice girl indeed; you can even get a very nice girl for nothing if you know how to go about it. But you can't get a very nice costume for five pounds. To say nothing of underclothes, shoes etcetera, and so on." And then I had to laugh, because after all it's true, isn't it? People are much cheaper than things.' Jean Rhys

An apology to my American readers

The name is Bond, James Bond

For the past forty or so years we in Britain may have given you the impression that our security services are staffed by devilishly handsome, impeccably tailored men in Aston Martins who exclusively drink martinis shaken not stirred and who have a license to kill.

Due to the the subpoenaing of the retired head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, to the inquest of Princess Diana yesterday, we must now concede that this is not the case:

He was MI6's director of operations from 1994 to 1999, and served as head of the agency from 1999 to 2004.

He denied that any assassinations took place under his authority.

Ian Burnett QC, for the coroner, asked him: "During the whole of your time in SIS, from 1966 to 2004, were you ever aware of the service assassinating anyone?"

Sir Richard replied: "No, I was not."

He added that the service was legally required to seek authorisation from the Foreign Secretary to carry out any operation which involved breaking the law.

actor

A rocket aimed at Moscow

'That collection was like a rocket aimed at Moscow and Brazil and many other places that are influencing through capital and other means the rest of the world.'

So writes Cathy Horyn in her NYT blog of the Milan shows this week. We labour under the illusion that designers design clothes for us, whoever us is. She goes on

I kept thinking, as Zegna pointed to this row of fabulous shoes and that display of $10,000 vicuna jackets, “Who buys all this stuff?” America is hurting, so is Japan. But Zegna told me that nearly 20 percent of the company’s sales now come from the so-called emerging markets, like Brazil, Russia, China and parts of the Middle East, and that’s happened in just a matter of a few years. And the runways shouldn’t reflect that fact both in design and the casting of the models? It’s an interesting reality challenge for fashion companies, maybe more so for its design leaders like Prada.

Of the Gucci show, the Telegraph writes:

The Gucci designer, Frida Giannini, staged a Russian Revolution at Milan Fashion Week this evening.

	Russian Revolution: Frida Giannini's new a/w collection for Gucci

Her models invaded the Gucci catwalk as a band of sexy Cossacks in folklore-printed tunics, heavy metal hip-belts, skin-tight jeans bristling with studs and riding boots, embellished with long, whip-like, leather thongs.

If, at times, they looked more like early 1970's Rolling Stones' girlfriends, this was exactly what Giannini intended.

Her aim was to combine the bohemian mood of Paris at the turn of the century when Russian émigrés transformed the arts and theatrical scene, with the kind of 'boho chic' in vogue when The Stones recorded 'It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)'.

The semi-colon

From the Guardian, today:

New York has been celebrating the semicolon; a development as welcome as it is unexpected. According to the New York Times, an announcement about the disposal of newspapers, posted on the city's subway, which was to have read: "Please put it in a trash can, that's good news for everyone" was amended by some scholarly hand in the marketing department to insert a semicolon in place of its comma. Congratulations have followed, and rightly; it is usually seen as bad practice to join two sentences together with a mere comma, that is something only the semi-literate do. "In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising", the New York Times reports, "the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism." Not, however, in the Guardian, whose most famous editor was unusually fond of the creatures. The speech in which he declared that comment was free but fact sacred is peppered with them, as in: "It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair." That is how the semicolon ought to be used - as a kind of necessary staging post on the way to the end of the sentence; or as the great authority Fowler put it, to indicate "a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that indicated by a comma but less than that indicated by a full stop". This is, of course, dangerous territory; where pedants are on the prowl. Even the best intentioned will sometimes blunder; but as Alexander Pope impeccably said: "To err is human; to forgive, divine."

Thought for the day

Being 'well-dressed' is not a question of having expensive clothes or the 'right 'clothes - I don't care if you're wearing rags - but they must suit you. Louise Nevelson (sculptor)

Diana: The Movie

Over on this side of the pond, dear readers, we remain in thrall to the latest testimony of Mohammed al Fayed at the Diana inquest.

My friend George Szirtes has written the scenario for a forthcoming blockbuster based on the Harrods owner's penetrating insights into the British Establishment (I particularly enjoyed his rejoinder to the judge who asked if he had any evidence - 'How can I have evidence? There is a ring of steel around the security services.'

20.02.08 : FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA AND THE WOLFMAN

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The Mohamed Fayed story has gone down in history as a mixture of pathos and comedy. I can't entirely resist the comedy element. Particularly this, of course:

The murder was, he said, the result of an audacious plot hatched by Prince Philip, who was not only a member of the Frankenstein family but also the real ruler of Britain and a crypto-Nazi. Philip was assisted by his son Prince Charles, Mr Al Fayed claimed; they were the two principal royal plotters, the senior male members of what he called a "Dracula family".

Hard to resist the conjunction, that is, of Frankenstein being a member of the Dracula family. Then there is the 'Crocodile Princess'. It's good. It's very good, but he hasn't gone far enough in my opinion. It's a missed opportunity. Here, after all, is a horror movie to trump all previous horror movies such as King Kong vs Godzilla and Frankenstein meets The Wolfman.


Scenario:

Prince Philip (Frankenstein) is plotting with Prince Charles (Dracula) - OK, I know even the Daily Mail has got so far, but are too thick to go on - the murder of innocent naive American tourist, Diana (played by Tuesday Weld).

He enlists the help of the Queen (Bride of Frankenstein, natch), Rupert Murdoch (The Creature from the Black Lagoon) and a nauseating butler (The Blob).

Alistair Campbell (The Wolfman) persuades Tony Blair (Child of the Damned) to arrange an accident employing the driver, Henri Paul (The Alien) of Diana and Dodi (Jack Nicholson) to drive into bright flashlights operated by Russell Brand (The Mummy) on 'The Night of the Living Dead'.

Paparazzi (Zombies) enter and eat everything in sight.

Dracula marries The Crocodile Princess and she gives birth to Captain Hook.

It's a winner. Ridley? Wes? Abbott and Costello?...

Deception

One of the advantages of having a soi disant relationship with the media, is that you do get to know about what the press cannot, for various reasons (usually legal) report. So from time to time one hears things that are not in the public domain but for which the the word is so firmly out, that it's only a matter of time before it goes mainstream. Charles and Diana's marriage being on the rocks, was one such story I remember hearing, as early as the late 80s.

You go along for years thinking that certain fabulous women in their fifties and sixties look fabulous because of a combination of personal, beauty, lucky genes, good diet, exercise, facials, and make-up artists, and believe that if only you could put the same dedication into your appearance as they do, why, you too could look - not as good, but a bit as good.

And then you find out that all is an illusion. Facelifts, botox, fillers. They have all had it done. Do I blame them? No, I don't. If your career is dependent on how you look, then you do what you must do. And we can stop beating ourselves up because we don't look like that. For unless we're prepared to go under the knife, the fact is, we won't. I hope I have made myself clear.