White to play. This is from Anand–Caruana, St Louis 2017. Can you spot White’s incredible winning move? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 15 August or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 … Qxc3 Last week’s winner Louis Busuttil, Mildenhall, Suffolk
Unbearable wait Sir: Like Jenny McCartney, I too am fed up with flying (‘Civilised air travel? Pigs might fly’, 5 August). However, it’s not for any rudeness on the part of the staff, which I have as yet not encountered. Nor is it the lack of meals. Who needs them? No, it’s the agony of endless queues at the airport, the misery of taking off shoes and putting them back on, with no chairs supplied, and the confiscation of small items overlooked in packing. This is no fault of the air companies, but the rise in terror attacks has made such scrutiny necessary. I have ceased to travel long journeys
Greece is jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, cypress, olive, pine, oregano and sage, rock, sand, wine, fruit and the bluest and cleanest water in the Med. The Peloponnese has the nicest, most welcoming and generous of people, none more than my host and hostess at their private island, literally a paradise on earth. Around 60 staff keep the place ticking along perfectly, and one thing I’ve learned in this long life of mine among the rich and famous is, you can’t fake it with the ones who work for you: if they don’t love you, it shows. I’ve seen it time and again, the long faces of staff among famous Italian carmakers,
My grandson and I are reprising the 1968 film The Swimmer. Burt Lancaster is an advertising executive at a pool party who attempts to swim eight miles home via his affluent Connecticut neighbourhood’s outdoor swimming pools. We don’t have a pool, but our friends are generous with offers to use theirs. Our aim is to take advantage of these offers by swimming in a different pool every day and working our way through the expat society of this remote part of the Provence. It’s Oscar’s first trip abroad; he is staying for a fortnight. Today was day four. The effect of the contrast in his plastic mind between a flat
Like Steve McQueen gone slightly to seed, the builder boyfriend strode off into the sunset. Nothing becomes him so much as the manner of his leaving. He does so every now and then, this time, perhaps for good. I can’t blame him. As he walked away, his blonde hair shining in the sun, it occurred to me that he is a free spirit. I watched him disappear down the track and thought, it’s a shame to tie him down. He did his best trying to renovate my wreck of a cottage but inevitably he imploded after assorted petty battles. Being dictated to by a Lib-Lab parish council would take its
The Andrew Robson Bridge Club in Parsons Green deserves its huge success. The standard may not be as high as at some other London clubs, but the atmosphere is always great. It is the place to learn bridge: the staff are friendly and fun; the rooms are large, airy and bright; the daily duplicates are jam-packed, and no one ever calls for the tournament director. Recently my friend Guy Hart was playing a morning duplicate there. He was in 3NT, and when the woman to his left led a spade, her partner immediately gave her a big thumbs-up. ‘I guess that’s one way of playing attitude signals,’ Guy laughed. ‘Or
Out with a whimper Usain Bolt managed only a bronze in his last appearance in the 100 metres at the World Athletics Championships in London. Final appearances often don’t go to plan: — Don Bradman was bowled for a second-ball duck by Eric Hollies in his last Test at the Oval in 1948. Four runs would have given him a career average of 100. — Stanley Matthews bowed out in 1965 in a testimonial between his personal XI and an international XI, which won 6-4. — Pelé appeared for the last time in a Brazil-Yugoslavia friendly on 18 July 1971. The match ended 2-2, with neither of Brazil’s goals scored
Earlier this week, a technology website published an internal memo written by a Google employee called James Damore criticising the company’s efforts to diversify its workforce. This is ‘where angels fear to tread’ territory. The American technology sector has come under fire for years for failing to hire and promote enough women and Google is being investigated by the US Department of Labor for allegedly underpaying its female employees. What makes this memo particularly controversial is that Damore takes Google to task for discriminating in favour of women. He begins by saying that he is pro-diversity and accepts that sexism is one of the reasons women don’t constitute 50 per
No sympathy from me for the Brits stuck in the European heatwave. I’ve never understood people who go abroad for their holidays at this time of year. OK, as this week shows, you’re not absolutely nailed on for sunshine back home. But it’s probably going to be at least pleasant, and certainly won’t tip over into the furnace-like conditions of Italy and Greece. Even France gets too hot. Why not stay and explore all those places in Britain you keep meaning to visit, and take your foreign sun in January, when you really need it? If funds or holiday allowance permit only one trip per year, copy the family I
Q. I was brought up to stick rigidly to any invitation accepted and never to ‘chuck’ when a better one came along. Recently, therefore, when invited to lunch at Boisdale to meet my favourite actor on the same day as a long-standing invitation to lunch at White’s with an old friend, I didn’t chuck the first invitation for the ‘better’ (because unrepeatable) one. Later, I wondered if it is ever acceptable to play Invitation Trumps — to just be honest and say: ‘I’ve had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet X on the same day as I’m meeting you. Would you mind if we postponed our lunch?’ What is the protocol,
Haworth is in a constant simmer of Brontë anniversary fever. It is looking forward to Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday next year. (This year is poor old Branwell’s.) I can’t think of a book title more widely mispronounced than Wuthering Heights. Soft, effete southerners pronounce it with a short u. But the wuthering in the title is a good Yorkshire word and its first vowel must be pronounced like the vowel in good. Yet if you look up wuthering in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find it under whither, the main English form deriving from the Old English hwitha. Emily Brontë should perhaps have called her novel Whithering Heights,
A pair of unclued lights (three words in total) give an event. Remaining unclued lights, including a pair (three words in total), each bring to mind the same relevant word in one of three different ways. Across 1 Collectors trim and polish bits in disrepair (14) 9 Ape with recurrent depression in trap (7) 12 Dutch and Goan mice sick of interbreeding (9) 14 Souvenir of Long Island found in playing field (5) 16 Loos prince put up (6) 18 Most acerbic polemicist mad cop released (7) 20 Arab in row involving maiden (4) 22 Deed in English and small caps finalized by dandy (7) 23 Lass rejecting my
The UK magazine industry figures have just been published, and The Spectator has an extraordinary set of results to report. Our sales stand at the highest level in our 189-year history. We are not just the oldest weekly magazine in the world, but today’s ABC figures show that we’re growing faster than any comparable magazine with sales up 8 per cent year-on-year. The introduction of a paywall has not stopped our traffic hitting an all-time high. Our new podcast, Coffee House Shots, has released 100 episodes since the election announcement, with over 1.3 million listens. And this in a tough market. Newspaper sales have fallen by more than a third in the last
Like the splitting of the atom – but perhaps not as significant to the whole of mankind, the bitcoin split into two on August 1. We now have bitcoin cash. For the less knowledgeable investor, the bitcoin is a digital currency which was launched in the wake of the financial crisis in 2009, borne out of a general mistrust of the existing financial institutions. Unlike a traditional currency, the bitcoin has no central monetary authority. Instead it has a peer-to-peer network made up of users’ computers. Without requiring physical presence, bitcoins do not have material form (except in a few cases where companies have fabricated ‘physical’ bitcoins.) Instead, bitcoins work
The poem was Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. The words from the poem are LEGS (16), TWO (17A), SANDS (26), NOTHING (37), KING (42), ANTIQUE (5), LAND (9), TRAVELLER (10), MET (23), DESPAIR (32). OZYMANDIAS (in the twelfth row) was to be shaded. First prize P.J.W. Gregson, Amersham, Bucks Runners-up Mrs P Bealby, Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland; Mark Foreman, Sholing, Southampton
This article is, partly, about Fiona Hill. You remember Fiona Hill, the most evil woman in Britain, the wicked, snarling monster who led Theresa May to disaster then quit as Downing Street chief of staff. That Fiona Hill. That same Fiona Hill is a friend of mine, so you can feel free to ignore everything I say about her: I’m not objective and I don’t pretend to be. Let’s just say I don’t think you should accept at face value the lazy, unfair and often self-serving caricature of my friend that has been put into the public square by various people, for reasons of their own. Maybe one day I’ll
As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its timbers had scraped the peak of a mountain range called Sinjar. Water began to pour in. Fortunately, a black serpent, its coils as thick as an arm, moved to plug the breach. The Ark did not sink. Noah, his family, and all the various animals on board survived to repopulate the earth. This story, so familiar, so strange, can be seen illustrated in a shady courtyard that also boasts, just for good measure, the very spot where Adam is claimed to have been fashioned from dust. Lalish, a magical compound
How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the authors of literary nonfiction go about their work is interesting. If, as Kingsley Amis argued, most of a writer’s work is the application of the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of the chair, it’s legitimate to ask: what trousers, what chair, sexuality where and when? In my experience the answers are wildly different
Like many artistically inclined children, I was given a set of Daler Rowney watercolours for my birthday one year. My first paints! What delights would I unleash with these cubes of colour? Well, practically none, as it turned out. Unschooled in the art of watercolour and evidently lacking any instinct for the medium, I used them, as undiluted as possible, to colour in my drawings of horses and Dogtanian characters. It was a bit fiddly with the blunt brush provided and, frankly, felt tip worked better. I went on to art school where, in the late 1990s, everyone would rather have dropped dead than be seen prodding around a tin
