Society

I got told off this week by a presenter on BBC radio for using a four-letter word live on air. In my defence, I was merely quoting a tweet from a black Hollywood comedy star called Leslie Jones which said: ‘Lord have mercy… white people shit.’ And the only reason I did so was that I thought it important that someone, somewhere, spoke out against the double standards which seem to exist on social media right now: one rule for progressives and accepted victim groups; quite another for everyone else. A good example is the ban recently imposed by Twitter on my friend and colleague Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo had got

I always feel sorry for Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol.’ He wore a heavy chain he had unknowingly forged in life. Unlike Scrooge, Marley had not received ghostly visitors to warn him of his future burden. Marley’s chain was made up of ‘cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel.’ The chains many people are forging today are made of high mortgages, shiny new cars, and bundles of credit cards. And we are dragging these heavy debts with us into the uncertainties of the post-Brexit world. Low interest rates have not only scuppered the plans of those living off savings. They have also given borrowers

Fr Jacques Hamel, murdered today by Islamists in Normandy, was 84, and in his life would have seen his country transformed, from the Occupation to the Thirty Golden Years and through to this modern unhappy age. I can’t imagine that a young priest in the age of the Piuses would have expected to end his life in such a manner, near to where Joan of Arc was martyred, but then Europeans are getting used to things that a few decades ago would have been absurd. After the war, Europeans thought they could escape history, and retire to a secular, progressive world in which historical conflicts of identity would be a thing of

One real giant who is towering over a previously tainted sport is the extraordinary Chris Froome, whose victory in the Tour de France was as inevitable as a pair of Theresa May kitten heels. This is Froome’s third Tour victory, and a colossal achievement. He’s been undervalued, perhaps because he looks like a spindly seven-stone weakling who is about to get sand kicked in his face. But he is as tough as tugboats. As one commentator recently observed, he now not only dominates the Tour as a rider but he bosses it as a person too. Froome is indeed slightly built, even for a cyclist, and is very accommodating with

The latest competition asked for poems with titles which riff on that of Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Although it was a varied and inventive entry there was a fair amount of doubling-up: while G.M. Davis and Tracy Davidson decided to speculate on what the first perusal of an Ann Summers shop window might be like, impressive entries from both Jayne Osborn and Alanna Blake revealed the contents of a teenage daughter’s diaries. There was a lot of skill on show elsewhere too: commendations to Paul Evans, A.R. Duncan-Jones, Tony Goldman, Tim Raikes John Whitworth and John Priestland. The winners take £25 each. Max Ross nabs £30.

Finance firms love taking football fans for suckers. The latest is Virgin Money which has this week launched a Manchester United savings bond. It pays just 1.25 per cent for 12 months which is roughly two-thirds the interest you could get at the current best buy account. So far, so rubbish. But it has a neat gimmick designed to reel in optimistic fans. If Manchester United win the title next season, the interest rate paid doubles to 2.5 per cent. Sound attractive? It’s meant to. But in reality it’s a total con. And it’s just the latest in a long line of football-related finance deals that take fans for mugs.

Sergey Karjakin, the challenger for Magnus Carlsen’s world title later this year, has announced in Bilbao, where he is contesting an elite tournament, that he wants to launch his challenge ‘anywhere but the USA!’ His stance poses an awkward problem for the World Chess Federation, which does not seem to have even contemplated an alternative venue, though no final arrangements have yet been announced. Disagreements over world championship venues have bedevilled former contests, and although we do not know the precise reason for Karjakin’s complaint, once one of the two protagonists digs in his heels it can be hard to shift them. So I propose that it is high time