Society

All right, I’ll admit it – where exactly is Bologna in Italy? If you are a devotee of all things Italian, particularly the food, then I expect you already know but… for the rest of us it’s ‘somewhere up North, maybe?’ And what can a ‘wine finder’ turn up? Well, the first thing to say is that it has an international airport, so you can get there via Ryanair or BA, or you can drive/train past Milan and keep going across the country to the eastern seaboard. Bologna, in all its glowing redness yet anonimity, sits in the middle of Emilia-Romagna’s Po valley and you really can’t miss it. That’s

Mother Theresa has been canonised today; cue for contained rapture on the part of her Missionaries of Charity and supporters in Rome and a rather different kind of satisfaction on the part of her critics, who now have a useful opportunity to air their objections to her work and cult. It’s hard to think of two groups not so much at odds but at cross purposes. The BBC news reports on the canonisation by the excellent Caroline Wyatt rehearse some of the more familiar criticisms: her hospices lack the best medical equipment and good hygiene; moreover, she took money from dictators. And according to representatives of Hindu nationalist groups, she

Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan from 1990 – 2016, died yesterday following a stroke. Here’s what Daniel Hannan wrote about him in 2003: A strange little row has been bubbling away over the past two months concerning our ambassador to Tashkent. You may have seen the odd headline about it in the inside pages of the broadsheets but, unless you have a particular interest in diplomatic affairs, I suspect your eye will quickly have skipped on to the next story. Why, after all, should we be especially interested in Uzbekistan? A tremendously important region for Britain during the Great Game, of course, but hardly of vital strategic interest today. Yet the

In the months before the referendum, the ‘Leave’ campaign’s press operation had been in control of the campaign. But in the last three weeks, the baton was passed over to the ground campaign to get us over the line. Running a good ground campaign relies on three key phases. The first two of these – identification and motivation – are largely self-explanatory. Find target voters then work out how to enthuse them. The final stage is about getting out the vote – making sure people actually go to the polling station. This means ensuring your supporters vote in greater numbers than the other side (what’s known as ‘differential turnout’). The key to

One of the most reliable methods of frustrating chess computers is to play 1 d4 but then avoid the well-trodden paths of the Queen’s Gambit, in favour of delaying central occupation with c4. Instead white aims for an early e3, possibly supported by the queenside bishop fianchetto, or Bf4. The former is known as the Colle Attack, while the latter is called The London System. Such great masters as Zukertort, Capablanca, Alekhine and even our reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen, have used these less explored ways of entering the middlegame. Now the ever-industrious Cyrus Lakdawala has attempted to impose order and structure on the various transpositional possibilities and multifarious strategic