Society

From ‘The fall of Combles and Thiepval’, The Spectator, 30 September 1916: The trench — ugly, dirty, dull, untidy serpent of mud and sandbags — will always have the advantage of the most artful fortress. In the last resort, the reason for this seeming miracle is the fact that the trench has something of mobility in it, and mobility is the vital essence of war. You can prolong a trench line to infinity, or to the sea or a neutral frontier, which is even better than infinity. A fortress has a finality about it which is fatal. The moment mobility is abandoned, as in an invested fortress, putrefaction, physical and spiritual, seems to

A year ago there was a confirmed sighting, and even film, of a wild wolf in the Netherlands for the first time in perhaps 150 years. It was hanging out near a farm, a few kilometres from the German border in the north-east of the country, looking bored. A couple of years previously a dead wolf was found 40 miles to the west, well inside the Netherlands, but the locals thought it was probably a hoax. Almost certainly it wasn’t. Wolves are doing well in western Europe — there have been plenty of sightings in neighbouring Belgium, for example. France, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain and Germany have reasonably healthy populations

At last, an English football manager who actually deserves to be sacked (or ‘left by mutual agreement’ if you prefer the official line). An England manager on £3 million a year shouldn’t be dreaming up ways of helping himself to an extra few hundred thousand through dodgy deals. But that makes Sam Allardyce something of a rarity. It is hard to think of another England football manager of recent times who really deserved the heave-ho. Roy Hodgson led a team to an embarrassing defeat against Iceland, but was it really him who deserved to go or the useless players who couldn’t even pick up a pass? It is no use

My name is Helen Nugent and yesterday I turned the heating on. I daren’t tell my dad, a man who resolutely refuses to even approach the thermostat until November because ‘once you turn on the radiators there’s no going back’. I was nine-years-old before I realised we had central heating. During the bitter Northern winter months, my mum would lay mine and my sister’s clothes in front of the fire before we got up for school. I have many memories of getting dressed in the half-light, silently lamenting the face that our radiators were just for show. I’m still cross about that. Now I fear the cold. So it felt good

Royal Bank of Scotland is to pay $1.1 billion (£846 million) to settle US lawsuits over claims it sold toxic mortgage securities to two American credit unions in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to The Telegraph. But the bank still faces almost 20 claims over its sale of mortgage-backed securities in the US, the largest of which are those brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the US Department of Justice (DoJ). RBS investors were rattled earlier this month when the DoJ demanded a $14 billion settlement from Deutsche Bank, sparking fears the German lender will be crippled by the bill. Analysts estimate RBS could end up paying billions of dollars to

Just when you thought the trigger-warning trend on campus couldn’t get any more bonkers it’s reported that archaeology students are being allowed to dodge discussions of ‘traumatic’ historic events. Yes, students  whose entire academic mission is to dig up bones, pore over old stuff and work out what the hell mankind was doing / thinking a thousand-odd years ago are being warned that such excavations can uncover ‘disturbing’ stuff that might ‘traumatise’ them because ‘bones can be scary’. So they should feel free to nip out of class if it gets too much. Archaeology students being told archaeology is a scary pursuit — I think we’ve reached peak campus madness.

When you write for The Spectator, it’s tempting to stick to the more cerebral issues of the day. As money editor, this can include tracking the progress of Sterling post-Brexit, ruminating on the downward trajectory of house price growth or reflecting on the merits of equity release. Some days, however, that’s the last thing you want to do – Monday mornings being a case in point. We’re only a few hours in to the working week and already I’ve been invited to breakfast with the Austrian federal minister of finance, Hans Jörg Schelling, to an obesity lecture, a hotel show, and a FinTech launch. Sometimes I wish I’d never gotten out

UK financial services firms are becoming more pessimistic about their prospects in the wake of the Brexit vote, an industry survey suggests. Optimism fell for the third consecutive quarter according to the CBI employers group. It is the sector’s longest period of falling sentiment since 2009 – in the midst of the financial crisis. The survey of 115 companies found low interest rates and potential restricted EU market access were seen as risks. But while 28 per cent of the respondents were gloomier, 15 per cent were more optimistic. And almost 40 per cent of the firms surveyed reported healthy profits in the last quarter. Meanwhile, Sterling is trading near a five-week low as lingering