Colonialism

Thursday

Liam Mullone

Why I won’t let my children learn French

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_March_2014.mp3″ title=”Liam Mullone and Freddy Gray debate whether it’s a good idea to let children learn French” startat=1467] Listen [/audioplayer]My children won’t learn French. If their school tries to force the issue, I’ll fight tooth and nail. There’ll be the mother of all Agincourts before I let it happen. It’s not that I have any problem with the language, even though it has too many vowels and you have to say 99 as ‘four-twenty-ten-nine’, making it impossible (I imagine) to sing that song about red balloons. It’s just that I want my children to be successful, and learning French makes no business sense. There’s a moral issue too, but

Thursday

James Forsyth

The New Colonials can raise our sights beyond the Channel

There’s a quiet Colonial takeover of British public life going on. An Australian, Lynton Crosby is in charge of the Tories’ political strategy. A South African, Ryan Coeztee performs this role for the Liberal Democrats and the deputy Prime Minister. While a Canadian, Mark Carney is Governor of the Bank of England and, arguably, the single most economically power figure in Britain. I argue in The Spec this week that the rise of these New Colonials tells us something important about this country, its flaws and its place in the world. Crosby, Coetzee and Carney are, in some ways, the missing meritocrats. They are filling a gap in British public

Friday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Katie Kitamura interview

Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura’s second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place. Tom and his father live on a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee’s South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The novel opens with a broadcast by the land’s natives, which Tom overhears on a radio that has been left, eerily, on the homestead’s verandah. The men’s strained relationship is compounded when a sly young woman, Carine, comes to live with them. Their sinister dealings with each other, the other white farmers and servants expose the