Society

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

No, Donald Trump isn’t a ‘massive, magnificent gift’ for Britain

There are certain traditional ceremonies without which the inauguration of a new American president cannot take place. Chief among them, at least on this side of the atlantic, is the opportunity such a moment provides for pondering anew the health and well-being of the ‘special relationship’. A remarkable amount of tripe must be talked on these occasions. You will recall how Bill Clinton’s supposedly-unhappy time at Oxford prejudiced him against this country and you will recall, of course, that Barack Obama’s Kenyan heritage left him temperamentally ill-disposed towards this sceptr’d isle. Obama, of course, confirmed this by removing the now famous Churchill bust from the Oval Office, an act of unpardonable

Thursday

Raymond Keene

no. 440

White to play. This is from Réti-Tartakower, Vienna 1910. Can you spot White’s beautiful tactical coup? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 24 January 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 … Rxf3+ Last week’s winner Alan Dawkins, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Raymond Keene

Hypermodern

Richard Réti is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of chess thought. The author of two seminal books, Modern Ideas in Chess and Masters of the Chessboard, Réti was an expert in simultaneous blindfold chess, successfully taking on many opponents at one and the same time. In terms of his theories and games, his assertion that the centre need not be occupied by pawns must have seemed the chess equivalent of Dada to the classically minded grandmasters of his day, such as Tarrasch, Teichmann and Rubinstein. At the time it was dubbed ‘Hypermodern’ by Savielly Tartakower.   Réti’s successes at the significant tournaments of Kaschau 1918, Amsterdam

The Spectator

Barometer | 19 January 2017

Starting cold Why is US Presidential Inauguration Day always on 20 January? — The date was moved from 4 March in the 20th amendment to the US constitution, passed on 23 January 1933, but it is hard to find any significance to the date. The change was made in an attempt to reduce the lame-duck period of an outgoing president, though it did increase the risk of a repeat of what happened in 1841 when William Henry Harrison was sworn in. Choosing not to wear a coat, hat or gloves, he made the longest inaugural speech of any president, at two hours. Three weeks later he was reported to be

Taki

High life | 19 January 2017

 Athens I can only ask sardonically: was it worth it? Executed after unspeakable torture without giving anything away — and for what? Fat, avaricious and very rich Davos Man? Or those ignorant, self-indulgent, cowardly little twerps who demand ‘safe spaces in universities’? Was it worth dying for the crooks of Brussels and the Angela Merkels of this world? Poor, heroic and stoic Kostas Perrikos, whose statue stands on Gladstone Street in Athens, died a hero, and for what? Let’s begin with heroes. They are very different from peacocks. They don’t strut or take selfies, and they are mostly sotto voce. They don’t create whirlwinds and are a PR huckster’s nightmare.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 January 2017

Our friend Anthony was reportedly dying and a party of four drove over to the nursing home to say cheerio. The journey across deepest Provence was an hour and a half each way and we went in my old Mercedes. I fixed my attention on the badge and the twisting road beyond it, rhythmically chewing one square after another of 4mg fruit-flavoured nicotine gum. My morning dose of 75mg Venlafaxine filtered out extraneous thought, self-criticism and fantasy, leaving me feeling unusually self-possessed. The mental picture I keep of Anthony is just the eyes, which are a startling shade of light blue. I’ve never got used to them. Since I have

Melissa Kite

Real life | 19 January 2017

If the buyer asks me any more questions I am going to pull out. I have to put my foot down somewhere or this is going to drag on indefinitely. I went under offer some months ago now and it was thought I might be in my dream cottage for Christmas. Ha! The next prevailing theory was that I would be in by the end of January. That’s a laugh too. After various legal nightmares to do with disputed rights of way, unmade shared- access tracks and windows in neighbouring properties facing the wrong way, the purchase of the country cottage is good to go. The problem is the other

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 19 January 2017

I am very bad at remembering my dreams: I would have been a poor patient for Dr Freud. But I know that as a little boy most of my dreams were rather frightening, even if I can’t recall them in detail. An oft-repeated dream involved a monstrous apparition that would rush down from the sky into my bedroom and be about to attack me or gobble me up, when I would suddenly leap awake, much relieved that nothing unpleasant had happened. I can’t describe what the monster looked like, except that it was amorphous and not human. Occasionally the dressing-gown hanging from my door would suddenly transform itself into its

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Trumped!

Trump Tower sits between Gucci and Tiffany on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It looks like infant Lego, the Duplo brand, but black — porn Duplo, then. It is militarised; by the door are the fattest police officers I have ever seen. They look like they have been dragged out of Overeaters Anonymous and given automatic weapons; and I wonder how much the NYPD really want to keep him alive. He is in the penthouse. The obvious comparison is with Al Pacino’s penthouse in The Devil’s Advocate, in which Pacino played a devil in a penthouse in New York City, but Trump Tower is less subtle than that, and

Dot Wordsworth

Carillion

‘Look, darling, a spelling mistake,’ said my husband, looking out of the window, as he had been for minutes, like a lonely old woman. Sure enough, a van was parked in the street with a word painted on the side: Carillion. Now, an unpleasant collection of bells hit automatically by hammers is called a carillon. Carillon can be pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, with or without a Frenchified middle consonant. Or it can be pronounced to rhyme with ‘a million’, which is perhaps where people get the idea that it contains more than one i. As a trade name, you might think it perpetuates some founding father.

Toby Young Toby Young

A myth that keeps growing and growing

I had lunch recently with an assistant head of a leading independent school and he told me about their ‘growth mindset’ work. He was excited about this and he’s by no means exceptional. Eton, Wellington and Stowe have all enthusiastically embraced it, as have thousands of state schools. Highgate Wood, a comprehensive in north London, says on its website that ‘growth mindset is the cornerstone of our learning ethos’. I hesitate to call growth mindset a ‘fad’ because that implies it lacks the imprimatur of academic respectability when the opposite is true. The term was coined by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, who made a startling discovery

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 19 January 2017

Q. At a drinks party at Christie’s this evening my face was splattered with flecks of spit from the guest I was talking to. I desperately wanted to wipe them off but felt that would have been impolite (and in fact I had no handkerchief anyway). What is the top way to deal with this problem? — F.I., County Down A. Ideally you would drop something and then quickly wipe your face with your hand while your interlocutor is bending to pick it up for you. Should he/she fail to perform this courtesy, scoop it up yourself with one hand while wiping with the other. Q. My son goes to

The Spectator

Letters | 19 January 2017

Particle of faith Sir: Fraser Nelson draws our attention to the most worrying aspect of economists getting it wrong, which is their reluctance to recognise it (‘Don’t ask the experts’, 14 January). Some economists, seduced by sophisticated mathematical models, aspire to the status of, say, particle physicists, who can tell us they have found something called the Higgs boson. The fact that we tend to believe the particle physicists despite being more familiar with prices, jobs and buying and selling than with quantum equations comes down to physicists having a long track record of heeding the biologist E.O. Wilson’s advice: ‘Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost

Robin Oakley

The turf | 19 January 2017

You had to feel for ITV’s new racing team on their opening day at Cheltenham. It was cold, wet and utterly miserable but they opted not to take refuge in a warm studio but to stay close to the action under their brollies, putting a brave face on things. During what I nowadays look back on as my misspent youth as BBC political editor, I once did the same. As I began a live interview for the Nine O’Clock News from an outside balcony at a Labour party conference, bursting to reveal some exclusive information, the heavens opened. I was drenched within 30 seconds but continued, only for the newscaster

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 19 January 2017

The Friday night IMPs game at the Young Chelsea is still the best game around. Some of yesterday’s internationals may have been replaced by tomorrow’s, but it remains pure, unadulterated fun! The newest superstar in town is French Junior sensation Christophe Grosset, married to our very own Alice Kaye. On today’s hand, he refused to admit defeat when things were going well for declarer, and came up with an imaginary false card that led his opponent astray: Christophe was West, and led the ♣Jack, East unblocking the ♣Queen under dummy’s Ace. South started brightly with a Diamond to his nine, West winning the King and continuing Clubs. Declarer threw a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 January 2017

Home Britain will leave the single market on leaving the European Union, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said in a speech at Lancaster House. Britain will leave the customs union to boot, she said, and ‘Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe.’ As for EU citizens living in Britain, she wanted to ‘guarantee their status here in the UK, but we do need reciprocity’. She proposed a ‘phased process of implementation’ of a Brexit agreement, but not ‘some kind of permanent political purgatory’. Parliament would be able to vote on the final agreement between Britain and the EU. In sum, she declared:

Doc

2293: Topping

The unclued lights (one of two words and one hyphened) are of a kind, all verifiable in Chambers.   Across 4    Night-flier in gear (11, two words) 11    Fancy pictures from one publication with topless sequences (9) 14    City faraway from Helsinki, evidently (4) 15    Aunt Sally is retiring (3) 18    Dropping openers, new eleven win cheer (7) 19    Morning porridge for old bishop (7)… 22    …gay bishop, flexible (6) 23    Altered course on board being transported (6) 27    Welsh lake engulfing small wood (5) 29    Second Roman soldier beams (6) 31    Joints giving trouble in the feet, not the head (6) 34    New oboe pit in ecological community (7) 35   

Simon Wilder

Flight into Israel

I’ve always lived in London. I grew up near Baker Street and went to school in Camden. Even when I was at college in Kent, I lived in Islington and commuted. Five years ago I moved to Belsize Park and I’ve been here, the nicest place I’ve lived, ever since. I didn’t mean to stay — I was going to see the world, but my father died and my mother said she needed me to be close. She said it with a tremor in her voice, so I stayed. London is in my heart and in my blood, but the wind has changed, like it did for Mary Poppins, and I

Doc

to 2290: Timely II

Perimetric trios combine to suggest HOG/MAN/AY: SHILLING, MALE, INDEED; SWINE, ATTENDANT, YES; MOUND, EMPLOYEE, EVER. The relevant activity is FIRST-FOOTING (35/25/16) and the relevant name is SYLVESTER (11).   First prize Helen Hinder, Knaphill, Surrey Runners-up Mrs J. Smith, Beeston, Norfolk; Bill Stewart, Leicester