The TLS blog

Sir David Cannadine: master of the Honours list

Congratulations to the great historian and TLS contributor, David Cannadine, on his knighthood in the New Year Honours list.

But it must be a long time since that title - or any title - went to a recipient with so much knowledge of the system's murkier past.

Sir David is a man of many 'special subjects'.

Lloyd George's  abuse of the honours system to finance his politics is famously one of them.

How British aristocrats first gained their coronets is another one.

Sir David has written extensively on the subtle symbolism of the monarchy - and how politicians and palace use one another in good times and bad.

And one of his main contributions to recent public debate has been his insistence that Prime Ministers - whether planning ID cards or Iraqi invasions - should pay a more knowing heed to the lessons of the past.

When the subject is 'cash for honours' or catstrophes in the Middle East, Sir David has a pointed way with precedent.

Gordon Brown has long been an admirer.

It is always good to see due recognition for scholarship - especially a TLS writer's scholarship.

But in this submission for a knighthood, our Prime Minister may be showing a little bit more than mere admiration for a fine scholar and man.

Harold Pinter: exit a master

On one of the stranger nights of this very strange year, Harold Pinter waved a sort of farewell to the London theatre.

He was at the Duke of York's on October 7 - for the triumphant London revival of No Man's Land.

When the show was over, the audience stood first for the cast - and then, looking up at the box beside the dress circle, stayed on their feet for as long as they saw the frail playwright peering down.

Many that night sensed that they would not again see the greatest master of the stage to have shared their lives.

Harold Pinter had a very public cancer.

He wrote about it, talked about it, made it a metaphor - and yesterday, three months later, he died of it.

A TLS is for life

There is still time to choose a subscription to the TLS as the perfect present for the loved ones who you think 'have everything' but, until they have their regular TLS, truly do not.

In the best festive spirit I've been flicking through alternative gift suggestions in Just What I've Always Wanted by my old friend, the Oxford writer and photographer, Robin Laurance.

Every date is associated in this book with its own gift.

Today, for example, he notes the birthday of Mary Archer, scientist wife of Jeffrey, and how she once celebrated her secretary's birthday with 'an inch of flat champagne'.

Yesterday it was Stalin's birthday - and an opportunity to learn how Beria's wife treated her homicidal husband's homicidal boss to 'a pot of her walnut jam'.

Four days ago, Tom Cruise's wife, Katie Holmes, marked her arrival in the world: a chance for her to remember the time she got 'a compendium of every movie he had made, including those in which he has sex with his former wife, Nicole Kidman'.

Tomorrow? Something for Queen Sylvia of Sweden. You really don't want to know what.

Christmas Eve? An Afghan bicycle.

Christmas Day. A bedroom of musicians premiering the Siegfried Idyll.

Gifts are tough. Robin proves it.

There is still time to buy his book, I suppose. I recommend it.

But make it even easier for yourself. Just give the TLS.

Happy Holidays to all - with an extra something Mrs Wagner might not have liked so much as her Christmas morning Idyll.

Reading Tina Brown in Dubai

There can be no better place than the Burj al Arab hotel to read Tina Brown's fizzing declamation against our age in The Daily Beast.

"Something went wrong on or about the dawn of the millennium, that’s for sure", she begins.

"And it keeps on going wrong. Did the 2000 election and 9/11 and Iraq and now maybe Great Depression II—in short, the Bush years—unhinge us into some strange collective suicide spree of self-indulgence, self-delusion, and blind pursuit of money money money till we drowned in it? Or did the planet just spin on its axis when all those nines became zeroes and tip us upside down and shake out all our values?"

Read on. It is the best Philippic Against Folly I've read in years.

The message may, however, take a while to make much visible impact in this sail-shaped skyscraper frozen in full rig against the Dubai shore

Burj al Arab diners still look down serenely over the archipelago of private-island development opportunities that is known here as "The World".

You take 'Australia'. Or let's go for 'Greenland'. Pity that 'Britain' is already gone.

Or the not-so-credit-crunched and sterling-afflicted can eat their caviar beside a basement aquarium of giant tropical fish. Tourist tip: this is the less scenic option.

No unscheduled visitor can simply pop in for a look at the hotel that has uniquely awarded itself a 'Seven Stars" rating.

You need a reservation even to take a glance at these golden pillars and cobalt corridors.

Buffet breakfast is the cheapest way. Only £50.

Fancy celebrating New Years Eve here?

£2000 a head should get you started.

And never fear: 'Children from 4 to 12 years of age dine with us at half price', says the brochure.

'Dine with US'? Delighted.

In the gift-shop there is  the perfect replacement for my broken Times briefcase - with a serious-looking combination lock for these days when no security precaution is  too great.

Only 110,000 dirhams.

£22,000 - and more by every crazy, passing, pound-collapsing day.

To buy in Dubai

Yves-Marie de Malleray is a French painter of Arabian horses, wild camels and the Houbara birds that Arab falconers hunt.

This week he is exhibiting in Dubai, in the Grand Gallery at the Royal Mirage One&Only - brightly realistic about the economic slump (an elegant acrylic-on-canvas  'Stallion after Delacroix' is not immune from recessionary angst), but hopeful that his local admirers, even if their oil money is not what it was, will see his 2008 credit-crunched prices as a buying opportunity.

Hope is still much in evidence in Dubai.

The Gulf state that has set the gold-standard for expenditure on itself in the past decade may not have escaped the global economic gloom.

But this is still a place where others can try to escape.

P for Poppy producers

In the mid nineteen seventies, when Margaret Thatcher was barely more than an idea, the playwright Peter Nichols wrote ten satirical songs that he called Jungle Jamboree.

He later asked his friend, Antonia Fraser, whether Privates on Parade would be a better title.

She said it would - and thereafter the author of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The National Health came to prefer titles beginning with a P.

There came Passion Play, Piece of My Mind, Pursued by a Bear and a new musical satire with military and imperialist targets, Poppy, which has been intelligently and spectacularly revived by the young actors of RADA this week.