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August 2008

Standpoint is published monthly by Social Affairs Unit Magazines Limited, a subsiduary of the Social Affairs Unit (Registered Charity No.281530). The views expressed in Standpoint are those of its individual authors, not those of the Social Affairs Unit Magazines Ltd and its Directors or those of the Social Affairs Unit and its Trustees and Director

Counterpoints

Does the Arts Club Have Good Taste?

RICK STEIN

In the dictionary on my laptop it defines art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”. To me, that’s cooking

A Modest Proposal for Rugby

ROGER SANDALL

No doubt the haka is all very well in its time and place – but that place was long ago and far away. It’s essentially a cannibal war dance designed to scare the living daylights out of those you hope to kill and eat

Institutionalised Radicalism

BERNARD GLICK

Universities have been transformed into the most Marxist, postmodernist, anti-American, anti-military and anti-capitalist institution in American society

Verse Makes a Comeback on Stage

KATE MALTBY

As society grows increasingly nostalgic for traditional structures it seems that the theatre world is experimenting with ways to recreate them

The Facts of the Matter

MIRIAM GROSS

Mastering facts, memorising rules, learning poems by heart have come to be regarded, not as enlarging a child’s world but as positively crushing his or her spirit

More Courage than Prudence

ANDREW ROBERTS

Brown has put his conception of the national interest before popularity in a way that has left him trailing in the opinion polls and possibly even mortally wounded politically

Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink

ANNE MCELVOY

Nudge is glib trickery, albeit of a very nicely spoken, bland cross-party 21st-century sort