Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1099 i The Week

What happened Trump triumphs Donald Trump stunned the world this week by defeating Hillary Clinton in the US election. His victory – which defied a wealth of polling data and was fuelled by a wave of support from white, working-class voters – will make the real estate developer turned reality TV star America’s 45th president. Global markets swung sharply in response to the news. Trump won swing states including Florida and Ohio, as well as supposed Clinton strongholds such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that haven’t supported a Republican presidential candidate since 1988 and 1984 respectively. Nearly nine in ten black voters, and two-thirds of Latinos, voted for Clinton, but Trump, despite his inflammatory campaign rhetoric about race, still did better among these groups than Mitt Romney four years ago.…

Children, go easy on the homework! Tom Bennett The Guardian “Spanish parents are revolting,” says Tom Bennett. Appalled by the amount of time their children spend on school assignments, parents across the country are staging homework strikes. Actually, their children have it relatively easy. Spanish pupils do an average of 6.5 hours of homework a week – more, it’s true, than those in Finland (2.8 hours) or the UK (4.9), but far less than pupils in Shanghai (13.8). But however much time is spent, the key point, one that struck me as soon as I entered teaching, is that so many homework assignments – colouring in the Great Fire of London; building papier mâché volcanoes – are “entirely mad”: they’re set purely to fulfil bureaucratic requirements. And even when the…

UNITED STATES We’re diluting the value of election day National Review (New York) If this presidential election showed anything, says Jonah Goldberg, it’s that early voting is a bad idea. The final weeks of the campaign witnessed a series of late-breaking scandals involving Clinton’s emails and Trump’s treatment of women, yet many people had already voted before these stories broke. In Minnesota, people started casting ballots as long ago as September. Early and absentee voting is clearly necessary for some individuals, such as overseas military personnel and those with disabilities, but it has become far too prevalent. An estimated 40% of voters cast their ballots before election day. Some say the system works fine since people who vote early tend to be committed partisans who are immune to new facts…

Tennis: Murray on top of the world The moment when Andy Murray became world No. 1 will go down as “a glorious anticlimax”, said Barry Flatman in The Sunday Times. He didn’t do it with a “spectacular winner”; he wasn’t even on a tennis court. Instead, he won his Paris Masters semi-final by default: Milos Raonic pulled out with an injury, giving Murray the necessary ranking points to overtake Novak Djokovic. The next day, he beat John Isner in straight sets to win the tournament. At 29, the Scot is the oldest first-time No. 1 in more than four decades, and the first British player to top the ATP rankings since they were introduced in 1973. Murray’s latest feat “must go down as his greatest”, said Pat Cash in The…

Theatre King Lear Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Deborah Warner The Old Vic, London SE1 (0844-871 7628) Until 3 December Running time: 3hrs 30mins (including interval) “No ifs, no buts,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Glenda Jackson as King Lear is “tremendous”. Having taken on the “sackcloth and ashes role” of member of Parliament for the past 24 years, the two-time Oscar-winning actress, now 80, has returned to the stage and pulled off an “eleventh-hour feat of human endeavour that will surely be talked about for years to come by those who see it”. Where does all her energy come from? “Or that voice, which can blast out with a force to induce shock waves? She’s so pale, so spectre-thin – with an androgynous crop of lankish hair” –…

Best books… Linda Grant Linda Grant, the acclaimed Orange Prize-winning author, picks her five favourite books. Her latest novel, The Dark Circle, has recently been published by Virago at £16.99 Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means by Brendan King, 2016 (Bloomsbury £25). I’m rereading lots of the women writers I first read in my teens and 20s, and King’s gripping biography of Beryl Bainbridge reminds me of a lost time when writers drank and had sex instead of doing yoga and eating clean. Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, 1984 (Penguin £8.99). Brookner died earlier this year. She suffered throughout her writing career from being judged (by people who had never read her books) as mimsy and slight. In fact, she was a savage novelist fascinated by the…

New cars: what the critics say Auto Express “Remember the old C3?” Probably not – like so many French cars over the past decade, it was pretty forgettable. Thankfully, the same can’t be said of its successor. In an ultraconservative market, dominated by the likes of the Ford Fiesta and VW Polo, this new supermini is “a breath of fresh air”: it “sticks a cheeky two fingers up at convention” with its mixture of style, tech and comfort. The Daily Telegraph The new C3 is certainly eye-catching. Out go the nondescript looks, replaced by a “cute and toy-like” design with protective bumps on the side. The dash panel looks good, too, though the touchscreen is a bit awkward; elsewhere in the cabin, there’s “an awful lot of textured plastic”. The…

Tesco Bank: current accounts and cucumbers Investors have treated Tesco’s “online bank robbery” (see page 23) as “a hiccup that could happen to anyone”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. They might want to take a closer look. “The direct cost of reimbursing customers may be merely a rounding error for a company of Tesco’s size”, but the “knock-on effects” could be “severe”. Tesco “intends to be big in banking”, and until this week, one of the main factors in its favour was its status as a brand that enjoyed greater public “trust” than its disgraced older rivals. That is now in jeopardy, said Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. “If it wants a future in financial services”, Tesco “needs to make sure that something like this never happens again”.…

Right up until the polls closed on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign team were confident that she would become the first female president of the United States, said Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post. For the Democrats’ election night party, they chose a New York conference centre “notable for one architectural feature: a glass ceiling”. But in the event, one of the best-qualified candidates in recent history was defeated by one of the most disliked and divisive. Donald Trump successfully portrayed his opponent as the embodiment “of a rigged system that had failed the everyday American”. Her credentials – as a former first lady, a senator and secretary of state – “which in another electoral climate would have been an asset, pegged her in his supporters’ views as the ultimate establishment…

The man who made Trump Tony Schwartz blames himself for Donald Trump. In 1985, Schwartz – then a young, left-wing journalist – went to interview Trump for Playboy. When the businessman, then 38, said he was thinking of writing his autobiography, Schwartz suggested instead penning a book called The Art of the Deal. Trump agreed, and asked him to ghostwrite it. Schwartz needed the money, and he got plenty: the book sold more than a million copies, with the royalties split 50:50. But by tidying up Trump’s chaotic ramblings, and giving him an air of sagacity, Schwartz helped create a golden aura of success around him. It led to Trump hosting The Apprentice for a decade – further burnishing his fame, and his image as a preternaturally gifted businessman –…

GERMANY Nazi language is poisoning our discourse RBB-online.de  (Berlin) Germans need to watch their language, says Anke Fink. Largely thanks to the influence of the far-right group Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), our newspapers are once again filled with phrases popularised by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Pegida first burst onto the scene in Dresden in 2014, when it began staging marches to demand that borders be closed against refugees and that Muslims be forced to assimilate. And in just two years, it has “altered the daily speech of many Germans”. Pegida’s habit of calling Chancellor Angela Merkel Volksverräterin (“blood traitor”) is still confined to fringe groups, but its use of überfremdung, a vicious term for foreign infiltration, has been adopted by mainstream politicians – and…

In death, as in life, Michael Winner can be somewhat overbearing. The film director died in 2013, in bed at the Kensington mansion in which he grew up. Pop star Robbie Williams and his wife Ayda Field (pictured) bought the house for £17.5m, and have spent nearly three years redecorating. But Field, 37, says she can feel the spirit of the late bon viveur “watching over her” and criticising her taste in furnishings. “I am kind of concerned because I’m like: ‘Michael, do you like this? Is this OK with you?’” she told the Daily Mail. Field has hired a Native American shaman to drive out Winner’s spirit using burning herbs. “I am going to have it blessed, saged, the whole LA thing,” she said. Lindsay Lohan unveiled a mysterious…

Exchange of the week Remembering Haig To The Times Ben Macintyre is absolutely right: it is well beyond time to restore Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig to the heart of poppy remembrance and to acknowledge as well his remarkable and successful role in that conflict. Arguing, debating and criticising the means of success is all too easy 100 years after the event and with the benefit of hindsight, but as his son, with whom I fished for more than 20 years in the Scottish Borders, said to me on several occasions: “My father was put in charge to win the War – and he won it.” He showed courage and leadership at a time when it was desperately needed. Stephen M. Fielding, Galashiels, Selkirkshire To The Times My late father…

Nocturnal Animals Dir: Tom Ford 1hr 57mins (15) Revenge drama served cold by Tom Ford Seven years have passed since fashion designer Tom Ford’s Oscar-winning film debut, A Single Man, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent; and the pains he has taken over this “superb” sophomore effort make it worth the wait. A “gut-wrenching” thriller that is also a meditation on remorse, Nocturnal Animals stars Amy Adams as a brittle, unhappy LA gallery owner who one day receives the manuscript of a novel by her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she cruelly abandoned for his lack of ambition. The book turns out to be a brutal revenge story – which we see acted out as she reads it: a decent man (Gyllenhaal again) hunts down the Texas rednecks, led by a…

Trump’s in tray is full of problems Martin Wolf Financial Times Compared with other economies, the US has recovered well from the Great Recession, says Martin Wolf – largely because of “bold action” taken early by the US Federal Reserve, and the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. But even so, the president-elect “has an economic in tray full of problems”. Donald Trump takes over a country with “mediocre growth of productivity, high inequality, a growing retreat from work, and a declining rate of creation of new businesses and jobs”. Real median household income remains below 2000 levels – which “helps explain the tide of disillusionment, even despair, revealed so starkly by this grim election”. The crisis has left deep scars; “deteriorating infrastructure, worsening relative educational performance and a terrible…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys Clarkson The Daily Telegraph The ship broker has strong cash flow, no debt and a rising 3.1% yield. It’s gaining market share and is set to grow when global trade volumes recover. Successful managers and board directors own significant stakes. Buy. £19.75. DekelOil Public Shares Rising global demand, and a premium-priced bid for peer MP Evans, bode well for this West African palm oil minnow, which has completed its Ayenouan mill and refinanced. Cantor Fitzgerald forecasts a jump in profits. Buy. 11.75p. HomeServe The Mail on Sunday The household emergencies insurance provider is growing steadily, and expanding in partnership with water and energy firms. LeakBot, a new leak-detecting smart device, is already in demand. Profits are rising. Buy. 595.5p. Next The Times Shares…

Paris Camp cleared: French police have cleared up to 4,000 people from Paris’s biggest makeshift migrant camp, which occupied the streets around the Stalingrad Métro station in the northeast of the city. The number of people at the camp – most of whom are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan – had doubled since the closure a fortnight ago of the so-called Jungle camp in Calais. Officials said that families and those considered vulnerable would be taken to two new reception centres in the outskirts of Paris, while single males would be dispersed to centres nationwide. Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said that around 85% of the Calais Jungle migrants are likely to qualify for asylum status. Paris Wooing business: In a sign of France’s determination to profit from Brexit,…

The swifts’ record-breaking flight Common swifts can remain airborne for up to ten months at a time, scientists have discovered. The record for non-stop flight was previously held by the Alpine swift, which has been recorded flying continuously for 200 days. But when researchers at Sweden’s Lund University fitted 13 common swifts with tags that enabled them to precisely record their route and flight activity during their annual migration, three of the birds travelled all the way from Northern Europe to Central Africa and back without once touching down; the others made only a few brief landings. “Common swifts have evolved to be very efficient flyers, with streamlined body shapes and long, narrow wings, generating lift force at low cost,” said lead researcher Anders Hedenström. In fact, the birds are…

“The poor object to being governed badly; the rich to being governed at all.” G.K. Chesterton, quoted on The Browser “Sport matters because it doesn’t matter.” Mick Imlah, quoted in The Observer “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Napoleon, quoted in The Guardian “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Herbert A. Simon, quoted in The New York Review of Books “What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you.” James Baldwin, quoted in The Paris Review “A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.” From Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief , quoted in Country Living “I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.” Albert Einstein, quoted on Qz.com “Fiction is the lie through which…

The autumnal charms of quince Originally from the Caucasus – where it still grows wild today – the quince made its journey west across to the Mediterranean regions of Europe, and then north to the gardens of England. The tree has beautiful small flowers when it blossoms in the spring, and the fruit, famous for its glorious lemonish colour as it ripens, is in season now. You wouldn’t want to eat quinces raw, but they make lovely jams and jellies thanks to their high levels of pectins; you can also add a single quince to an apple pie, or a dish of stewed apple, to enhance the flavour. The fruit last well if stored in a cool, dark place such as a shed or garage. In Denmark, quinces, or kvæder,…

Biographer who dedicated 30 years to Graham Greene Norman Sherry 1925-2016 Norman Sherry, who has died aged 91, was Graham Greene’s official biographer – and spent 30 years trying to unravel the novelist’s secrets. He became so immersed in his subject that he began to think of himself as Greene’s adopted son but, in fact, the pair weren’t even on first-name terms for many years, said The Daily Telegraph – and Greene was deeply ambivalent about the project. Famously private, the writer had gone to great lengths to conceal the complexities of his personal life, to the extent that in his diary, he sometimes wrote two separate pages giving alternative accounts of the same day – “one containing sober observation and the other chronicling a visit to a prostitute”. Sherry…

Lee Jae-yong Can things possibly get any worse for Samsung’s crown prince? Lee Jae-yong has been in the hot seat at South Korea’s largest conglomerate since his father, the current chairman, disappeared from view following a heart attack in May 2014, said WSJ.com. He recently faced “his first critical leadership test” when he “pulled the plug” on Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, following a disastrous spate of exploding batteries. Profits have duly plunged. Now Samsung and its heir apparent have been dragged into the biggest political scandal to have hit South Korea for decades. Prosecutors have raided Samsung Electronics’ offices as part of their probe into Choi Soon-sil – the now notorious confidante of President Park Geun-hye – who was detained last week on charges of fraud and abuse…