Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 1 June 2017

Q. I am a member of a well-known country house opera society, and I organise annual trips to performances for a group of friends. We all look forward to these very much, as we don’t see each other as often as we would like. As the member, I have to stump up a large sum in advance for the tickets and then recoup the money from my pals. Unfortunately one of our party pays very late, often leaving it to the day before the performance to cough up his share. I don’t wish to embarrass him and we enjoy his company very much, but I do not wish to keep

Toby Young Toby Young

Race, gender and a terrifying witch hunt

A leading article appeared in Nature last week in defence of intelligence research. It lamented the fact that it is not included on the undergraduate psychology curricula of many leading US universities, and attributed this to its association in the minds of students and faculties with elitism and racism. That, in turn, is due to the misuse of intelligence research in the past by eugenicists and ‘race scientists’ to justify their poisonous beliefs. The article expressed the hope that this toxic baggage can be discarded and intelligence rehabilitated as an important strand of psychology. This optimism is often shared by academics who study the genetic basis of human differences; not

Dot Wordsworth

Reference

When Dickens wanted to buy a house in 1837, he wrote to Richard Bentley, who had started the magazine in which Oliver Twist was to be serialised, saying he had mentioned his name ‘among those of other references, to testify to my being “sober and honest”.’ Some people seem to think it was this kind of reference that was meant by the remarkable president of Magdalen College, Martin Routh, who stayed in office until his death aged 99 in 1854, shortly before which, on being asked what advice he would give to a young don, said: ‘You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!’

Taki

High life | 1 June 2017

I feel like an obituary writer, what with Nick Scott, Roger Moore, Alistair Horne — all great buddies — and now my oldest and closest friend, Aleko Goulandris, dead at 90. Mind you, they all had very good lives: plenty of women, lots of fun, accomplishments galore, and many children and grandchildren. And they all reached a certain age — what else can you ask of this ludicrous life of ours? Well, I won’t be writing about the high life this week, but scum life instead. And I’ll tell you why: those innocent young children slaughtered by that Islamist scumbag in Manchester, that’s why. Those sweet young lives deserved better,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 1 June 2017

My latest bed partner is a seven-year-old lad. That first night we slept together in my double bed, I hardly got a wink. Vivid dreams made him lash out at me in his sleep with kicks and flailing arms. In the morning I opened my eyes and his clear blue eyes, three inches from mine, were studying me. ‘Did you have nightmares, Oscar?’ I said. The eyes considered. ‘Not nightmares,’ he said judiciously. ‘Dreams.’ ‘What about? You were kicking and punching me all night,’ I said. ‘I dreamt Dominic came to my school, and we didn’t do any work, we just played football all day.’ Dominic was Oscar’s best friend

Melissa Kite

Real life | 1 June 2017

‘You’re probably excited about your new service and keen to start using it as soon as you can,’ said the email from BT, not quite taking the words out of my mouth. I’m sorry to be difficult, but I just want Wi-Fi. I don’t want to get excited. I’ve been excited numerous times over the years and it was, quite frankly, over-rated. I’m getting to the age when I really could do without excitement altogether. I would like to send some emails. And I’d like a land line to telephone my mum of an evening. I just don’t want to get stirred to the verge of hysteria about it. But

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 1 June 2017

It’s the funniest bridge story I’ve heard in ages. At the recent Lady Milne championship (the women’s Home Internationals), one of the English pairs was fined a point for slow play during their match against Ireland. The pair insisted that they hadn’t been particularly slow — indeed they’d bid to a grand slam rather quickly — and appealed to the Vugraph operator to support them. The operator replied sarcastically: ‘I certainly wouldn’t be proud of the way you bid that slam if I were you.’ To which one of the pair retorted: ‘Well we can hardly expect an Irish operator to be impartial.’ The fact that he turned out to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 June 2017

Home The Conservatives grew restive when polls, for what they were worth, indicated a closing gap between their support and Labour’s. In a generally uneventful 90 minutes of television, in which Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative party, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, were questioned, Jeremy Paxman said to Mrs May: ‘If I was sitting in Brussels and I was looking at you as the person I had to negotiate with, I’d think, she’s a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire.’ Mr Corbyn said in an earlier interview with Andrew Neil: ‘I never met the IRA,’ leaving viewers wondering in what sense this

Columba

2312: Bandleader

Two unclued lights form the title by which a 38 32 is commonly known. This title’s first word defines one unclued light, and can also be divided into two words, each of which is defined by an unclued light. The title’s second word defines each of the remaining three unclued lights. Ignore one diacritic in an unclued light and one in a clued light.    Across   10     Component of tracer, late model designed to follow dog (12, two words) 11     Joyful cry about part of Bible with right opening (5) 13     Old medicine, poor, mixed with illicit drug (7) 14     Indulged eagerness, releasing our firework

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

Lessons and games

‘Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that, mate,’ the Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios remarked to his opponent Stan Wawrinka during a match in Montreal in 2015. He was referring to Thanasi Kokkinakis, who had partnered Wawrinka’s girlfriend in mixed doubles. After Kyrgios’s remark, Wawrinka’s game went to pieces, and he soon retired from the match with a ‘back problem’. Was Kyrgios’ gambit unethical? That is the sort of problem that occupies David Papineau in this mixed bag of essays. Papineau, a philosophy professor at universities in London and New York, is obsessive even by the standards of sports obsessives. Only a man who derives his identity from

Columba

2309: Complicated | 1 June 2017

Corrections of misprints in clues give TANGLED UP IN BLUE, the title of a song by Bob Dylan. Answers to thematic clues are nine (15), rip (20), char (24), into (25) and fur (30), each tangled up in blue (respectively perse, cyan, navy, Saxe and teal) to form entries defined by 22, 1D, 13, 38 and 31. The artist’s name, tangled up at 26A/29, is shaded in blue. First prize Pam Dunn, Sevenoaks, Kent Runners-up Willie Hamilton, Exeter; D& D. Keating, Beeford, Yorks

Laura Whitcombe

Five simple ways to beat soaring car insurance premiums

The average annual car insurance bill is expected to hit a record high of £800 this month, according to comparison website comparethemarket. The cost has increased by around £200 over the past two years thanks to factors including the soaring cost to the industry of dealing with whiplash claims. And from today, the government is forcing insurers to make bigger payouts for serious personal injury compensation to ensure they’re not eroded by inflation – a measure that is expected to add £15 on to all insurance policies. Yet despite the rapidly rising cost of car insurance, drivers are turning their backs on the easiest way to make significant savings by

Helen Nugent

People paying the highest rate of tax now at record level

A record number of people are now paying the highest rate of tax thanks to wage inflation and the reduction in pensions tax relief. That’s according to figures from HM Revenue & Customs. While the proportion of people paying the 45 per cent additional rate is still small compared to the overall number of income tax payers (just 1.2 per cent), it is nonetheless a 10 per cent increase on the previous year. It also represents a 54 per cent rise since the tax band was introduced. HMRC says that, by the end of this financial year, an estimated 364,000 people will be paying the 45p rate of tax on income

Mark Palmer

A rugby legend

‘There’s a chance we’ll meet up with Richie McCaw in Christchurch,’ proffered the PR on our New Zealand press trip. The man from the Sunday Times and I let out a little gasp. We weren’t sports journos but we knew where McCaw stood in the pantheon of all-time greats. He is the most capped player in rugby union history, a World Cup winner on two occasions and arguably the best open-side flanker there has ever been. He captained the mighty All Blacks 110 times out of his 148 matches, and is probably the most popular living Kiwi. That’s all. Richie, as everyone knows him, retired from the game in 2015

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 1 June 2017

The guests at my brother-in-law Rick’s 70th birthday lunch party were distinguished, silver-haired, well heeled. Long before Rick rescued the Rothschild’s giraffe from extinction, and did so many other things for wildlife conservation in Africa, I remember him and his friends in the 1970s. The chap sitting opposite me at table, now big in IT, had once been a hard-core hippie with heavy-lidded eyes like the stoned rabbit in Magic Roundabout. A coffee baron, now discussing ‘aromatic compounds’, once wore a headband, blue-tinted shades and hair down to his bum, and a man who is today a company chairman I picture still in his Afghan fur-trimmed coat, going barefoot. They

Bruce Anderson

Rosé-tinted glasses

It was a typical bank holiday. Usual English weather: glorious, until you leave home without a brolly. Then fickleness supervenes — just like the opinion polls. I was pressed by anxious enquiries. ‘You’re supposed to know about these things. There’s no chance of Corbyn winning, surely?’ On the assumption that enough of the sovereign people are still in their right wits, I was able to sound reassuring. But as I did so, a memory came back: Quintin Hogg in 1964, proclaiming that anyone who voted Labour was stark, staring bonkers. These days, that would be called a gaffe. The once and future Lord Hailsham was famous for gaffes. As he

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Don’t look for any merit in meritocracy

A few years ago, someone asked me how to fix social care costs for the elderly. One eventual idea of ours was that, at age 65, people could pledge to pay a higher level of inheritance tax as a form of insurance against social care costs. If, say, you pledged £20,000 of the value of your estate, you would receive an annuity worth perhaps £150,000 should you develop dementia or need long-term care. This, we thought, would be appealing enough to be made voluntary. The idea was designed to align with a known property of human psychology called Prospect Theory, which  shows that people much prefer a small, certain loss

The Spectator

Our flying machines

From ‘News of the week’, The Spectator, 2 June 1917: There has been a lull on the Western front. It is sure to be succeeded by another storm, but this week there is little to record measured by the standards with which the titanic fighting in France has made us familiar. One fact, however, must be mentioned. Our flying men have done exceedingly well. Last Sunday, for instance, the Germans lost 13 aeroplanes and ten others were driven down out of control. Only three of our machines did not return that day.

Simon Barnes

Chez newts

The dragon hung motionless above the surface of the earth, belly picked out in the colours of fire and a stegosaurus zigzag along his back. A beautiful thing, this dragon, but not easily seen: you must go out at dusk in spring with a torch and a knowledge of the places they lurk. Here was just such a spot. It was his season of grand passion, and yet the expression on the face was remote, almost indifferent. A great crested newt. Floating in a pond. It is the dread of every developer: to pay decent money for a mandatory ecological survey and to have the surveyor find a population of