Society

As happens every bank holiday, the roads were chock-a-block this weekend with people on the move – many of them heading off to weddings at opposite ends of the country. It can sometimes feel as though weddings cost a fortune; and that’s just going to them, not even having one of your own. Perhaps the reason it feels like they cost an awful lot, though, is because they do tend to be quite expensive for wedding guests. Of course, it’s lovely to be invited to a wedding, and perhaps even the engagements drinks and hen or stag do as well. But the price does tend to hit your wallet quite

Many of us want to be able to access our money whenever we want. But, at the same time, we still want to make as much interest as is feasibly possible. Here are the current best easy access accounts, from data supplied by Moneyfacts.

The idea for the latest competition came courtesy of Steven Joseph, who suggested that I invite competitors to change a letter in the title of a well-known play and submit a programme note for the new production. David Silverman’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Deaf started well but ran out of steam rather halfway through. Other promising titles that didn’t quite deliver included The Cheery Orchard, A Waste of Honey and The Wind in the Pillows. And no one, regrettably, did justice to The Bugger’s Opera. I admired A.H. Harker’s Cook Back in Anger — ‘an intense investigation of the stresses that competitors in Bake Off and Masterchef bring to their

Donald Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio — his first exercise of the Article II prerogative — is not an act of mercy. It does not mend, it provokes. It neither asks for remorse nor enjoins an expression of regret from the recipient. It sets a man who offended society’s laws above the society that tried to hold him accountable. We are the sinners; Sheriff Joe is invited to forgive us. Thus has the President of United States contorted moral reasoning and constitutional propriety.  Arpaio is a former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, where he made a name for himself as a tough cop on the illegal immigration beat. He sought out

The proposed marriage of two mid-sized wealth managers, Rathbone Brothers and Smith & Williamson, has not made City pulses race. But it will create a business with £56 billion under management, following a trend of sector consolidation in search of economies of scale that kicked off with the merger of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management. And though the new couple’s names won’t mean much unless you already happen to be their clients, they have interesting histories. Rathbones began as a timber-trading venture in Liverpool in 1742 and is the family firm of a dynasty of Quaker social reformers, including the formidable proto-feminist Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946). Smith & Williamson, an

There was a time when France was the dominant power in world chess. When Howard Staunton commenced his remarkable series of match victories in the mid-1840s, his ascent was seen as an assumption of the sceptre wielded by that great 18th-century master of the game, André Danican Philidor. After Philidor came Labourdonnais, who was succeeded by St Amant, and it was Staunton’s annihilation of the French champion at the Café de la Regence in Paris in 1843, which heralded the end of French hegemony over the chessboard.   It is true that Alexander Alekhine, the mighty Russian champion, represented France in the chess Olympiads of the 1930s, but he was anything but a