Society

Thursday

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Breaking it down

In Competition 3365 you were invited to submit an extract from a PhD about an aspect of street culture. Obviously this was inspired by Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, the Australian academic/Olympic break-dancer who wrote a PhD on the cultural politics of breakdancing. This intro has to be short to make room for all the long words. Respect to Bob Newman, W.J. Webster, Bill Greenwell, Mark Hunter Brown and others – and the winners get £25. Citius, Altius, Grooviest: An Investigation into the Classical Origins of Breakdance as an Olympic Sport. With an Excursus on Biblical Parallels. In view of objections to breaking as a legitimate Olympic activity, its origins are

Doc

2670: V

The unclued lights (one of three words and two of two words), individually and one pair, can be verified in conjunction with the same headword in Brewer.                   Across 10            Where to find H or C readily available (2,3) 11            Rashford without minute deposit on the cornea (5) 13            Gold miners circling Lochnagar, say (5) 14            Pants, but is not exerting oneself (6) 15            Negative report – one from Arab, for one (5) 16            Tarzan – he is out of place with Scottish hard rock band (8) 19            Deems appropriate for witnesses to attack (4,3) 21            Famed wicket-keeper-batsman in team – Essex? (4) 23            Wild beast has regular date in

Catriona Olding

My dinner date with the detective

Provence ‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to ask the man who told me last autumn it was time to move on. I hoped he didn’t mean find a new boyfriend. I like him and his wife a lot and it was meant kindly – so I kept quiet as we stood in their kitchen and they gave me instructions for my weekly visits to check the house after they left for winter. But it stung. Jeremy was still with me night and day in everything I did. I tried not to let my face fall a second time when the man told me he was paying someone else to

Melissa Kite

Confessions of a hypochondriac

My neighbour had a surgical procedure and keeps telling me about it. Every time she starts, I shout ‘No! Please stop!’, because I’m squeamish. At the risk of distressing anyone else who is squeamish, I do need to say that she had her eyeball injected, because of what followed. Three people in four days – so having your eyeball injected must be no more unusual than having your hair cut A day after visiting my neighbour and having to cover my ears as she explained her eye op, I bumped into a lady I know outside church and when I asked after her husband she said he was going into

The Spectator

2667: Orbital – solution

The unclued lights are SATELLITES of planets, listed on page 1860 of Chambers 13th Edition. First prize Mark Richardson, Exeter Runners-up Steven Lodge, Bridgwater, Somerset; Amanda Spielman, London SW4

Robin Oakley

The new dilemma facing racehorse trainers

There is a new dilemma for racehorse trainers. ‘What do I do?’ some of them are now worrying. ‘Do I put up signs saying, “Please don’t pee in the boxes” or “Urination forbidden at all times”?’ Such measures, they appreciate, are hardly going to attract a young couple who’ve come into money and are being shown round the yard thinking of investing in a couple of horses. But if they do not take such steps they risk facing draconian punishments. Let me explain. Newmarket trainer Ed Dunlop, from one of the most respected families in racing, was last week given a year’s disqualification from racing by a disciplinary panel of

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 7 September 2024

The famous exchange between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard in Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ will resonate with all good bridge players. Gregory: ‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’ Holmes: ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’ Gregory: ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ Holmes: ‘That was the curious incident.’ Holmes was, of course, referring to the fact that the dog didn’t bark, therefore it must have known the intruder. Making deductions from negative inferences is vital at the bridge table, too. You can often deduce as much about the

Toby Young Toby Young

Labour’s backwards steps on free speech

Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff back into the Online Safety Act. Now, Yvette Cooper has said trying to get the police to record fewer ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) was a dreadful mistake. A non-crime hate incident was recorded against a man for whistling the Bob the Builder tune To grasp just how potty this is, you need to understand what

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The expensive business of quoting poetry

Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers?  You’re allowed to quote only a certain proportion of a work before you need to pay the rights holder This week I published a new book in which I spend a lot of time discussing the work of other writers. The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading is a canter through children’s literature from Aesop and

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Mickleover: the real home of cricket

Readers concerned that the seemingly imperious march of Bazball across the cricket firmament has blotted out the more, er, traditional virtues of the game need fret no more. Matches in the ninth division of the Derbyshire League don’t normally make headlines from Australia to Qatar but a needle relegation tussle between Mickleover Third XI and Darley Abbey’s Fourth team was no ordinary game. Mickleover piled up a chunky 271-4 declared in a mere 35 overs, thanks largely to a teenager called Max Thompson who belted 186 from 128 balls, with a feast of fours and sixes. If you have to call up J.K. Rowling’s bespectacled wizard, you really are in

Ian Thomson

The deep sorrow of losing a sibling

My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse: we did not always get on. The other day I accompanied her daughters and husband to scatter her ashes on the Thames at Greenwich in south London where she and I had grown up. The great muddy waterway would take Clare’s ashes out to sea eventually. People like Liz Truss live in Greenwich now, but in my time the inhabitants were Labour-voting bohemian types. Daniel Day-Lewis (a brattish schoolboy) lived down the road from us on Crooms Hill with his poet father Cecil. At Greenwich Theatre opposite, Max Wall performed

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I shake off charity collectors?

Q. A friend, who I love dearly and who comes to stay a lot, has always been unforthcoming with gifts. I personally don’t resent this. I know his problem is not meanness but a neurosis about spending. He more than makes up for it by being wonderfully entertaining and sympathetic company. Another woman, having seen what a good guest he was at someone else’s house party, has invited him to stay for a week in a house she has rented. I know a bit about this woman, and it will go down very badly if he arrives empty-handed. She is not that nice and will talk about him. Despite our

Peter Jones

The first Olympian: what was there to celebrate about Heracles?

However great the achievements of athletes at the Olympic Games – and even more so the Paralympics – there will always be those who have their doubts about their real value. Some ancient Greeks certainly felt like that about their Olympics. Complaints were made that an athlete’s physical fitness did nothing for the public health. No boxer would order the city better or stock her granaries, and surely it was valour in war that counted. A satirist pointed out that naked wrestlers covered in olive oil would not be much use in the front line of battle. Others expressed concern about the character of the Games’ founder, Heracles, the greatest

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What happened to pride in our nation?

I suppose there must be someone somewhere in this nation of ours who was surprised by the news that our fellow citizens have a much lower sense of pride in our country than has ever previously been the case. This apparent fact was reported by the National Centre for Social Research, whose representative did not seem terribly distressed by the findings. In short, only 64 per cent of us have any sense of pride in our nation’s history (down from 86 per cent in 2013) and a little over half of our number are proud of our democratic system. What do they put in its place, these guardians of Now?

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Curiously understated: Porthminster Kitchen reviewed

Porthminster Kitchen sits above Warren’s Bakery on St Ives Harbour, like a paradigm of the British class system in food. This happens everywhere, but it is particularly pronounced in St Ives, which is unlucky enough to be a site of pilgrimage for Virginia Woolf addicts – her childhood holiday home sits above the town, her lighthouse is on the bay – and other feckless Londoners. But the balance is long lost. Since the Tate Gallery arrived in 1993, Cornish natives, who used to live alongside artists – Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron – have left the old town (‘downalong’). It is now a wonky Disneyland of holiday cottages with stupid names

Dot Wordsworth

What does ‘maidan’ have to do with cricket?

Freddie Flintoff recently called the Maidan ‘the home of cricket’. For supporters of Ukraine’s independence, the Maidan saw continual demonstrations a decade ago. The outline of the Hippodrome of Constantinople is marked out on the Maidan. Quite a place, then. Or rather, places. Our tacking ‘the’ on to Maidan, indicates its use as ‘a square’. Indeed, foreign places that we call ‘Square’ are often called Maidan in their own country. (Cairo’s Tahrir Square is Maydan at-Tahrir.) The Calcutta Cricket Club was founded at its own Maidan. The Young Zoroastrians still play at the Maidan in Mumbai, where Parsis founded the Oriental Cricket Club in 1848. Like Parsis, the word maidan

The Spectator

The real crisis in our school system

For years, each school in England has been put in one of four categories: ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’. While undoubtedly crude, the system offered clarity to parents. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has now abolished this categorisation structure but not yet said precisely what will replace it. Children are returning to school in the middle of uncertainty. Are politicians blind to the staggering inequality within a state system that educates 93 per cent of pupils? The National Education Union has long urged schools to ignore Ofsted ratings and to stop referring to them on their gates. Phillipson’s reform seems to nod towards this. But instead of abolishing Ofsted,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: UK cancels Israel exports, Grenfell fire report released and AfD victory in Germany

Home The government cancelled 30 out of 350 export licences for arms to Israel on items that it said could be used by Israel for ‘offensive purposes’ in Gaza. Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, said: ‘A step like the one taken by the UK now sends a very problematic message to the Hamas terrorist organisation and its backers in Iran.’ Nine offshore wind farm contracts were awarded by the government; last year there were no bidders. The previous government had increased the maximum guaranteed price from £44 to £73 per MWh. The headquarters of GB Energy, a new UK government-backed energy company, will be in Aberdeen. Shona Robison, Scotland’s

David Hare

What’s gone wrong at the National Theatre?

Now we have a Labour government, it would be nice to feel repertory will return to the National Theatre. It used to be possible to come to London for a week and see six plays. Audiences loved it. New writing spoke to old in ways which enriched both. Today, you’re more likely to see Ibsen, O’Neill, Molière and Marlowe in the West End. What happened to the library of world drama? The new practice is to offer only a couple of straight runs, sometimes first-rate. So there’s nothing to stop any random producer saying: ‘Hey, the Lyttelton seems to be empty this autumn, can I hire it to do one