Новости за 05.07.2015

What did they mean by that? Did Greece’s No voters truly think the creditor nations were bluffing when they said No meant goodbye to the country’s membership of the single currency? Or did the majority of voters who marked Oxi on their ballot papers in cities and villages across Greece really want out of the eurozone? We can’t be sure. That’s the problem with referendums. Plebiscites are presented as the apotheosis of democracy – but they often leave as many questions as answers.

Few church services in Britain are busier than the Polish-language mass at St Mary’s in Boston, Lincolnshire. On an ordinary Sunday morning the pews are so packed that the congregation spreads into the entrance hall, with more still craning their necks through the doorway.

Fasten your dungarees.  Practice your Southern drawl. Fire up the Cajun barbecue and hurry down to your local bookshop. 'Go Set a Watchman', the publishing event of the year – nay, decade – is upon us, and it can only mean one thing. That most communal, least literary of events: the midnight launch party. Yay!

What is to follow may offer the people of Greece little consolation, but amid the traumatic uncertainties this much is sure. Never before has nominative determinism (the cod scientific theory that names can dictate one’s destiny) known a greater champion than a commentator on Greece’s economic nightmare, and it never will again.

It has been scarcely five months since the Government last passed legislation designed to combat the terrorist threat – in February’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Yet already, following Seifeddine Rezgui’s bloodletting in Tunisia, David Cameron, Theresa May, and other senior ministers have offered fresh promises to ratchet up measures in the fight against extremism and in preventing ideological radicalisation.

Last Thursday I was invited to speak at a summer party for various charities, philanthropists and think tanks. I praised the way this country had evolved systems and institutions which maintained equilibrium between interests and authorities: “It is like an intricate, symbiotic, finely poised mobile made up of different shapes, components and colours”. They liked that image.

Index on Censorship, which campaigns for freedom of expression, held a fascinating debate last Wednesday to consider the degree to which free speech is under threat on university campuses. It is a hot topic after the recent controversy surrounding a sexist joke by Professor Tim Hunt led to his resignation from University College London.

Get all of the ingredients for a feast delivered direct, without any of the fuss

It begins in darkness. Not a cold negative darkness. But a warm velvety one. A sound like clapping is heard. But the rhythm is complex, stuttering, syncopated, pulsing like a message – a message of genesis, of the genetic, of both.

There was a blinding lightning flash and Maxine Peake slammed onto the stage her face ten inches from mine, consumed with an unspeakable intensity and ferocity. In this re-envisioning of Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker the audience sit amid the action in a theatre transformed into an underground bunker bedlam. Peake is an ancient malevolent faerie, a sterile shape-shifter, who is out to seduce two teenage mothers, one carrying a child, the other who is in the mental hospital because she has killed hers. Читать дальше...

Ambrogio Maestri is one of the most in- demand opera singers in the world, but if it all ended tomorrow he could probably forge a new career as a television chef.

I think I’m going to take early retirement soon. It’s not that I’m bored of showbusiness or have made enough money to buy a beach house in Malibu …. No, it’s just that my pig appears to be a lot more popular than I am, and sometimes you’ve got to take the hint. Wilbur is the pig. We rescued him from a sad life in a flat in Cheltenham where he was not enormously happy. Now he is enormous and happy on our farm. We were told he was a kunekune, but the vet now thinks he is at least three-quarters wild boar. Читать дальше...

In response to Paul Vallely’s well observed article I would say Britain’s altruism doesn’t just seem to be missing; it is missing (28 June). Shamefully so. This country, mostly guided by the Conservatives, seems hell-bent on destroying all the “values” I was brought up to believe we are supposed to have. In our own political world today you don’t actually have to do, you just have to “be seen” to do; and anything – nay everything, has become a matter of spin, not substance.

The Edinburgh Fringe has proved a fertile hunting ground for this column in the past couple of weeks, and with a month to go until curtain up I can’t promise that there won’t be more Out There stories lurking in the 400-page-plus festival programme.

The chap from the gas company is at the door. His first words are meant to be civil, almost certainly, but sound abrupt. "You all right?"

In her late twenties now, blonde, well-dressed and not obviously deriving from any particular social class – in fact, her father is an estate agent – Natasha Spendlove belongs to a somewhat rarefied part of the contemporary demographic: the rich man's girlfriend. And how do you gain admittance to this exclusive club? The answer is that you have to infiltrate the palisade in which such men are to be found – in Natasha's case Oxford Brookes University where, 10 years ago, she surprised herself by going out with the heir to a marquisate. Читать дальше...

In the space of a few days last week, the nation acquired some new heroes and role models. The England women’s football team pluckily lost in extra time to Japan in the World Cup semi-final on Wednesday, and Heather Watson pluckily lost to Serena Williams at Wimbledon on Friday in what was probably the tournament’s best match this year. We know from recent history that yesterday’s plucky losers can be tomorrow’s giantkilling winners: last week was a great one for British women’s sport.

It was the French moralist Blaise Pascal who wrote, “I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” In 1657, he knew what many modern writers seem to forget: that taut prose is harder to write but often much more pleasant to read than someone who blathers on and on. I could name names, but I only have about 500 words ….