Black to play. This position is from Gligoric-Stein, Moscow 1967. Can you spot Black’s winning coup? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 4 April 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 Qxc8+ Last week’s winner Keith Brown, Wells, Somerset
When Gerry Adams rose to announce at his funeral that Martin McGuinness was no terrorist but a ‘freedom fighter’, the historian Thucydides probably allowed himself a grim smile. He knew all about these sort of people. In 427 BC, Corcyra (ancient Greek Kerkura, now Corfu) was in the grip of a ferocious civil war between oligarchic and democratic factions for control of the state. The feature that stood out for Thucydides was the reversal of all normal, civilised values on both sides of the divide. Most striking of all, ‘men reversed the usual evaluative force of words to suit their own assessment of the situation’. The result was that ‘cowardice’ was now
No blanket solution Sir: Paul Collier is right to say that the refugee crisis will not be solved with tents and food alone (‘The camps don’t work’, 25 March). But context is everything, and aid remains vital. In middle-income countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, getting refugees into jobs is essential. Businesses are part of the jigsaw. So is government legislation to ensure, for example, that refugees get work permits or can register as self-employed. So too are labour market interventions that generate incentives to get refugees working. However, in fragile and impoverished states that lack functioning markets and governments, different forms of aid are required. Collier rightly highlights the principles
It is rare for me to write a love letter to a London restaurant, but Joe Allen, which is 40 this year, deserves it; if you have any sense you will throw off misery and go there now for hamburgers. It is not really a London restaurant, which may be why I love it, but a Manhattan restaurant (established on 46th Street in 1965 by a man called Joe Allen) that was transplanted to London in 1977; the idea of Manhattan, anyway, which is more vivid in imagination than in life. I like to imagine the cast of All About Eve in Joe Allen, talking nonsense about ‘the theatre’ as
Gstaad It’s my last week in the Alps, and the snow is gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine. Silence reigns, broken only by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, when the shoppers have finally gone and the locals are preparing to release the cows into the mountains. Training at altitude will make it easy to go at it hard once I am back in the city — at least for a week or two. There is nothing like a three-month Alpine break for the old ticker. Dinner parties out of season are very gay
Repatriated after two months sur le continong, I walked down the sunny high street marvelling at English cheerfulness. A poster in the window of Lloyds bank showed two young chaps hugging joyfully below the words ‘He said yes!’ And a man loitering beneath these newly betrothed I recognised as my great friend Tom. When I think of Tom, I always think of a sentence of Max Beerbohm: ‘None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell.’ Tom spotted me from 20 yards away and his expression changed from blandness to incredulity to that look of apology he always gives me
Of all the many indignities I have suffered at the hands of my iPhone, the humiliation that sickens me the most is that it has rendered me ungrammatical. This monstrous device. This vile, evil, vindictive, obstructive, disingenuous, fiendish machine. I hate it. I loathe it more than I had thought it possible to loathe an inanimate object. For example, I just sent a message to the builder boyfriend saying: ‘Casserole on the oven, can you hear it?’ The BB will come in later, look on the hob for a casserole and, finding none, open himself a tin of soup. He will not look in the oven. And he will not
Bookmaker Paddy Power once famously declared, ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ This year it seemed that the whole place was in danger of being enveloped in Irish tricolours. Irish-trained horses won 19 races compared with the mere nine taken by horses trained in England. Willie Mullins, despite drawing a blank on the first two days and seeing the previously unbeaten Douvan vanquished thanks to injury, still trained six but was beaten to the Festival championship by Gordon Elliott with another six victories and more second places. With Sizing
Everyone praised the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital during the terrorist attack. My husband of course brought his own fly to put in the ointment. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said. ‘They were told about it years ago.’ He was not referring to medical matters but to the spelling of the hospital’s name, attached to the building in letters taller than a man as St Thomas’ Hospital. I mentioned it here in 2008. Now a reader has written to the editor of The Spectator, saying that the jumbo-sized error remains on show. It is undoubtedly wrong. Why can’t people who run a big hospital grasp the simple rules for using apostrophes? Oxford Dictionaries
‘Ducking is for experts. Don’t try it.’ So says my partner Artur Malinowski every time I duck a trick in defence and let the contract through. Nice to know that experts also get it wrong, as was spectacularly demonstrated in the semi-final of the Vanderbilt Teams held in Kansas City recently. The two Davids (Bakhshi and Gold), playing for the Schwartz team, bid a tad enthusiastically to slam, missing two aces. The defence took the first one, and at trick four, after pulling trump, Bakhshi played a diamond towards dummy’s King and West (Swedish international Johan Sylvan) went into the tank. ‘What are you thinking about?’ I screamed at my
An email from the high-minded Carnegie Endowment, marking the triggering of Article 50 and the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, speaks of ‘The Closing of the European Mind’. ‘The cult of the protective sovereign nation-state,’ it goes on, ‘will not provide convincing solutions to 21st-century challenges, which are inherently transnational.’ This is true, in a way. Lots of modern challenges cannot be solved by the nation-state alone. But is there anyone — even including the ‘Anywheres’ defined recently by David Goodhart — who would be happy to inhabit a space completely unprotected by a sovereign state? Surely it is only with the confidence engendered by living in a well-functioning
Q. As an artist I’m indebted to my sponsor. I also like him, but not his habit of ringing me up when he has friends in the room, asking me to describe, for example, a party I’ve recently been to and then putting me on loudspeaker. It’s a good thing that he considers me to be entertaining, but I draw the line at being required to act the stand-up comic to an invisible (even if appreciative) audience. My mother says ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. Can you rule Mary? — Name and address withheld A. You are not a human jukebox available to churn out anecdotes on demand.
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, wrote a letter to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, with formal notification of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. If no agreement is made sooner, Britain would cease to be a member in two years. The other 27 member states had celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Asked by the BBC if Mrs May would be the ‘elephant in the room’ at the shindig, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said: ‘She’s not an elephant.’ Douglas Carswell, the MP for Clacton, announced that he was leaving the UK Independence
I can barely contain my excitement. The Easter break is nearly upon us and I will soon be heading off to an exotic locale where I can cast off my work-soiled garments and rediscover earthly pleasures. I will spend my time eating, drinking and singing, sure in the knowledge that no one will judge me because I’ll be surrounded by members of my elite metropolitan tribe. I’m talking, of course, about Pride Park, home of Derby County FC, where I’ll be travelling to an away game on Friday with 1,000 fellow QPR fans. This fixture clashes with a private party being thrown for my friend Barry Isaacson, once the most
The puzzle marks the centenary of the death of a person whose name is formed by two unclued lights. Five unclued lights (three of which consist of two words each) are titles of 24 by the person in question. Across 1 Language in queue around noon (5) 11 Fly low and pass round lake (10) 13 Gets excited about good idea to produce aubergines (9) 15 Growl resounded around (4) 16 Specific attempt to restrict drip (7) 17 Empty space behind label apart from mark like a birthmark (7) 18 Cross and tense, short of time (3) 19 Hibiscus, some arranged
Extra letters in clues give CONSTABLES, defining 7, 21 and 39. Other unclued lights are CONS (12, 16, 18) and TABLES (9, 20, 30). First prize Roland Rance, London E17 Runners-up Nigel Dobbs, Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim; Ian Shiels, Bramley, Leeds
After George Osborne was announced as the new editor of the Evening Standard, there was outrage across the House as many asked: how can Osborne serve as an MP, financial advisor and daily newspaper editor all at the same time? Alan Rusbridger has now graced us with his take on the situation. In an editorial for the New York Times, the former Guardian editor says that it ‘would be better’ if Osborne were to make ‘a clean break from politics’ and become ‘a great crusading editor on behalf of the people’. Part of Rusbridger’s issue with Osborne’s appointment is that he doesn’t understand how the former Chancellor will have the time: ‘I edited
The Bank of England is concerned that banks and building societies may have made it too easy to borrow money – and with good reason. Figures released by the Bank today show that household debt is at record levels, with credit card debt increasing at its fastest rate in more than a decade. It’s not difficult to see how this happened. Lenders deluge households with offers of new credit cards, and regularly raise the borrowing levels on existing plastic. There’s a plethora of deals on cards to entice people to switch their debt to new providers and the minimum monthly repayments are often so minuscule that many customers only ever
A few years ago, Charlotte Rampling signed a contract to write her autobiography – and then, the project not long underway, called the whole thing off. But this month she publishes something quite out of the usual run of celebrity memoirs. Who I Am, co-written with the French man of letters Christophe Bataille, is a slender, riddling approach to the actor’s inner life – not a catalogue of film anecdotes but rather a hesitant return to the child she was. She joins me to talk about why she’s done things this way, about the legacy of her Olympic medalist father, and about the terrible tragedy that defined her young womanhood.
