Society

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Pauline conversion

Paul Keres, the Estonian grandmaster and many times world championship contender, was born a hundred years ago this month. His record against world champions was very impressive: he defeated all nine in sequence from Capablanca to Bobby Fischer. Keres was probably the strongest player, pace Nimzowitsch, Rubinstein and Korchnoi, never to have won the world title. The hallmark of a Keres win was a flowing initiative, often directed towards the opposing king, frequently converted into victory by a shattering sacrifice. Here he is at his best. Keres-Spassky; Riga 1965 18 d5! Despite the two pawn deficit, Keres has a huge initiative against Spassky’s disorganised and undeveloped position. 18 … Kf7

Raymond Keene

No. 392

White to play. This position is from Keres-Spassky, Gothenburg 1955. Can you spot White’s crushing blow? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 26 January or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. 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 Rf6 Last week’s winner Graham Witty, Hull

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 January 2016

Roll out the barrel The price of crude oil dropped below $30 a barrel. Why do we measure it in barrels? — A standard barrel for the purposes of measuring oil is 42 US gallons or 35 imperial gallons. This was the size of a ‘tierce’, a unit for measuring wine in medieval England. — When demand for kerosene provoked an oil rush in Pennsylvania in 1859, producers were so desperate for vessels that they used all kinds of containers. — In August 1866, however, producers met in the town of Titusville to agree on a standard measure. A 42-gallon barrel of oil weighed 300lb:  just enough, it was found,

Taki

High life | 21 January 2016

The death of David Bowie — how is it that Stephen Glover always gets it right about our over-reaction and hysteria when a pop star goes the way of all of us? — triggered a memory of something that happened long ago with Iman, his still beautiful widow. It was exactly 30 years ago, on a rainy and cold night in New York. But first, a brief background to the story. In the winter of 1985 the mother of my children had taken them to Paris, to her mother’s, as a warning to me that my constant womanising would no longer be tolerated. At the same time, an English friend

Toby Young Toby Young

The Islamist Nazis and Corbyn’s wilful blindness

Many people watching Jeremy Corbyn’s interview on Marr last Sunday will have been shocked by his remarks about the need to begin a ‘dialogue’ with the leadership of the Islamic State. ‘I think there has to be some understanding of where their strong points are,’ he said. Afterwards, when these comments were widely reported, Corbyn’s supporters said they’d been taken out of context — the standard defence whenever he is criticised for saying something positive about Islamist terrorists, such as describing Hamas and Hezbollah as his ‘friends’ or the death of bin Laden as a ‘tragedy’. But there are only so many times this excuse can be used to explain these apparently

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 21 January 2016

Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000 miles on an 07 plate, it was a tight, solid little car before I accidentally wrecked it. Someone offered £300 for scrap, and I was about to sadly take it, when a pal pointed out that one second-hand Golf door alone costs £300 from a scrapyard. He urged me instead to buy a second-hand Golf engine for a few hundred quid and simply ‘drop it in’ — as he so persuasively put it. He even found a buyer for a Golf thus renovated who was guaranteeing trade price sight unseen.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 21 January 2016

When in India, I always appal my highly educated tour guides. They despair of me, as they drag me round the cultural sights, trying to force education and refinement into me as I lounge about on the walls outside temples soaking up the atmosphere. This trip was no different. My guide had come to pick me up bright and early from the Hyatt in the business district of Calcutta where I had been staying for a three-day economic summit. I had arranged for a further three days of what the tour operators refer to as R&R before I headed back to London. India is one of my favourite destinations but

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 January 2016

Q. We have two granddaughters working hard and happily at university. It is our pleasure to give them some cash at regular intervals for books, rooms, foreign travel and, we hope, a lively social life. But we have just learned that they have each come under the influence of a new political leader, to whose party and cause they are making serious donations of cash. While appreciating their right to do what they want with our gifts, it is far from our wish to support a man whose political views we reject. Should we take the obvious sanctions? — Name and address withheld A. I consulted a member of my

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 21 January 2016

Here I go again. I have stopped smoking. Until recently I had been smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, but it is now two weeks since I last had one. Initially I used e-cigarettes and nicotine lozenges to help me give up, but now I already feel I can manage without them. I think I may have conquered my addiction. I feel I could be free at last. But I hesitate to say so, because it is a feeling I have often had before. Like Mark Twain, I have often stopped smoking, but always after a period of time, even one as long as five years, I have taken it

Robin Oakley

Small wonder

Cheltenham, Ascot and Sandown Park are wonderful but without the little tracks racing would be lost. It was perishing cold — cold enough for brass monkeys to be keeping a watchful eye on their private parts — and the ground was heavy, but you could not have a better day’s racing than Warwick gave us on Saturday. I fuelled myself at the blue-and-white Whitby scampi stall, which would be a welcome presence on any track, and a fellow muncher set the tone: ‘I only really come for the scampi,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mind if I never back a winner.’ But he was clearly enjoying himself, as were the

Dot Wordsworth

Box set

There is no chance whatsoever of box set being replaced by the more correct form boxed set. So stop seething about it and causing yourself distress. The form, boxed set has been in use for 125 years or so, but the Oxford English Dictionary has dug up a reference from Wisconsin in 1969 to a ‘box set of tumblers’. Admittedly, binge-watching a set of tumblers for hours on end would be a minority interest. The triumph of box set is partly a matter of phonetics. In ordinary speech the d after the s sound in boxed set is hardly out before the poor old tongue gets round to hissing the

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Brass tacks

The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do to change my opinion of Selfridges. Don’t worry, I told him, Spectator readers don’t go to Selfridges to sit in a fake Cornish fishing village, because they are too busy eating the remnants of the Labour party. And they don’t care about shopping. You don’t dress a Spectator reader. You upholster it. I felt guilty about mocking the stupid fake Cornish fishing village so I avoided the next themed restaurant in Selfridges, which was a fake forest on the roof (‘inspired by an autumnal forest’… because who can be bothered

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 January 2016

The New Year got off to a great start with TGR’s annual auction pairs, the best run tournament I have ever played and one of the most fun. It’s matchpoint scoring, meaning every trick makes a difference — certainly not my forte as the pained face of my partner made clear every time I sloshed away an overtrick. My teammate Nick Sandqvist, playing with his regular partner Tom Townsend, showed how it’s done when he magically led declarer astray on today’s hand: Nick was West and led the ♣7. The start of the play was normal enough: declarer won in hand, led a Heart to the King and another one

A.N. Wilson

Diary – 21 January 2016

Quarrelling about the date of Easter has been a Christian pastime for centuries. The chief bone of contention is whether Easter should be held on 14th Nisan in the Jewish calendar — that is, at a fixed point of the lunar month — or whether it should be held on the nearest Sunday to this date. The Celtic church(es) evidently had their own ideas on the question. In the year 651, Queen Eanfleda of Northumbria was fasting on what she regarded as Palm Sunday on the very day that her husband, Oswy, King of Northumbria, was celebrating Easter. Behind the seemingly batty arguments lay the world-changing conviction that Christ’s death

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 January 2016

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that Muslim women must learn English, and that those who had entered on spousal visas would be told halfway through their five-year spousal settlement: ‘You can’t guarantee you can stay if you are not improving your language.’ He said that learning English had ‘a connection with combating extremism’. A heterosexual couple went to the High Court to claim the right to enter into a civil partnership. MI5, the security service, was rated as Britain’s most gay-friendly employer, following a survey by the organisation Stonewall. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said: ‘Now is not the time to raise interest rates.’

The Spectator

Safety first | 21 January 2016

This week brings to a close an absurdly overblown cause célèbre. The Court of Appeal ruled that David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow three years ago under the Terrorism Act was lawful. He had been part of a professional operation leaking classified information to the Guardian, which compromised British and American national security. Yet the judgement was hailed as a victory for Miranda because the court also noted that the Terrorism Act didn’t include sufficient protection for journalists carrying sensitive information. It asked Parliament to look again, in order that it be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights — even though, in this case, there was no breach. This

Doc

2244: Faithful

The unclued lights, one of two words, are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer.   Across   1    After the outskirts of Barnsley, overtake on road round town (6) 7    Series for bikers? (6) 13    Regularly burn options and release (5) 14    Like a Peruvian, having completed filming? (5) 15    Mine worker who boozes habitually (7) 17    Saw lead restraining theme word (7) 19    Composer’s not accepted old coins (4) 22    Frank nominee dined out (6) 24    Turn a blind eye when poor lady’s dropped bicycle part (9, two words) 25    Witness support right away (5) 28    Cruel demeanour

Doc

To 2241: Customary

The unclued lights (1A, 1D, 6A/33, 13, 18, 32 and 38/24) are seven of the ‘Twelve Curious CUSTOMS Worth Reviving’, as listed in Brewer 19th edition. First prize J. Bielawski, Liverpool Runners-up Neil Mendoza, London W11; K.J. Williams, Kings Worthy, Winchester

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Sir James MacMillan mourns the little granddaughter who brought ‘cosmic love’ to his family

Just before Christmas, the Catholic Herald named the composer Sir James MacMillan as its first Catholic of the Year. The award recognised many things: masterly compositions such as the St John and St Luke Passions and the Fourth Symphony, the latter played at this year’s Proms; his investiture as a knight in December; the setting up with his wife, Lynne, of a new music festival, the Cumnock Tryst; and his intellectually dazzling defence of orthodox Catholicism. What the magazine didn’t tell its readers, or even James, was that we also wanted to honour the MacMillan family for its profoundly Catholic response to a family crisis. James and Lynne’s daughter, Catherine, had a severely

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The police system for handling sex abuse accusations is absurd

Many have rightly attacked the police for their handling of the demented accusations against Field Marshal Lord Bramall, now at last dropped. They ostentatiously descended on his village in huge numbers, chatted about the case in the pub and pointlessly searched his house for ten hours. But one needs to understand that their pursuit of Lord Bramall — though not their exact methods — is the result of the system. Because the doctrine has now been established that all ‘victims’ must be ‘believed’, the police must take seriously every sex abuse accusation made and record the accusation as a reported crime (hence the huge increase in sex abuse figures). Even if you