GRASSHOPPERS (9) of ZURICH (30) is a team that plays football — not cricket, as indicated by corrections of misprints in clues. Other unclued lights are related STRIDULATING INSECTS (13 28). First prize R.C. Teuton, Frampton Cotterell, South Glos Runners-up N.J. Smithies, Guernsey; Charles McCulloch, Temple, London
This podcast is sponsored by Berry Bros, The Spectator’s house red. Boris Johnson’s leadership ambitions have been significantly harmed by David Cameron’s general election victory — can the Mayor of London still succeed? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson discuss the latest Spectator cover feature on Boris’ time in the wilderness and whether he can still be Tory leader. Does this mean George Osborne’s is now the most likely candidate to be the next Prime Minister? And what about Nicky Morgan, who has hinted in the magazine this week she may run as Tory leader? What should we look out for at Tory conference? Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth also review Labour’s conference in Brighton and why it
Monday (21 September): to St John’s Smith Square for the opening night of the London International A Cappella Choir Competition, which happens to coincide with the 2,000th concert of the Tallis Scholars, broadcast live on the BBC. This is a coincidence, since when we planned the event a year ago it was far from hitting precisely that round number. The inevitable reshuffling of dates since then has come out in favour of veracity, not that anyone but me, the keeper of the database, would have known. Or cared, probably. It is a big occasion which we made all the harder for ourselves by having to travel back that same day from
You may notice some changes being introduced to the Spectator website today; we’re having a small refresh to make it cleaner, more elegant – and better able to cope with the two million people (or ‘unique users’) who now read us each month. Everything should be in the same place as before: Nick Cohen, Rod Liddle, Alex Massie still occupy their usual corner of cyberspace. We’re phasing in changes, so don’t expect to see change everywhere. There will, of course, be glitches along the way; comments, for example, may take a couple of days to be transferred across to the new design. But in this, as in so much else, we rely on the comments and feedback of
Pity poor Chris Robshaw. England’s sturdy captain might have a knockout girlfriend and exceptional skills on the cappuccino machine, but he has taken one hell of a pounding from Her Majesty’s armchair battalion of former players and coaches, much more than he took from Sam Warburton at Twickenham on Saturday. Give the guy a break. His decision to go for a line-out and set up a possible winning try rather than attempt a very difficult penalty kick at goal to draw ‘defied belief’ said one newspaper, the same paper that described a similar decision by the Japan captain Michael Leitch in that miraculous last-gasp victory over South Africa as ‘faultless’.
Jason Yapp has been even more ebullient than usual, if such a thing was possible, Yapp Brothers having scooped three awards at the International Wine Challenge, including ‘Languedoc-Roussillon Specialist Merchant of the Year’. Jason knows Languedoc-Roussillon like nobody else: he and I had a memorable trip there recently thanks not only to the spectacular wines we tasted but to the transvestite nightclub in Avignon we found ourselves in, for reasons that now escape me, surrounded by French truckers in summer frocks discussing brake systems and the perils of the Paris périphérique. For this offer, I challenged Jason to show a selection that might justify his IWC gong. He put up a
By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled by the motion and murmurings of the rocking sea, I slept like a baby. I was never bored. Queen Mary 2, the Cunard Line’s flagship, has everything from a ballroom, planetarium and library to an art-deco Titanic-style dining hall. Passengers do not want for anything: there’s even a mortuary. The last time I shipped out to New York from Southampton was in 1961, when I was a baby. We stayed in New York for more than a year while my father worked for a Wall Street investment bank. During our
Maybe what we love about radio is the way that most of its programming allows us the luxury of staying content with ourselves, of realising that it’s OK to be no more, or less, than average. There’s no spangle, no sparkle on the wireless; nothing to make us feel we should be aspiring to live in a fake and fantastical world of gilded lives, to be uber-rich, super-tanned, ultra-happy. On the contrary, you could say most radio is a celebration of Ms or Mr Average. Think of all those short stories, plays, features and real-time, real-voice recordings which take us right inside (too far inside, some might say) the banality
Here’s a strange truth about British life: we love a hedgehog. Britain is conspicuously short of an anti-hedgehog lobby. No one runs down a hedgehog with malice. None of us can see a hedgehog crêpe without a twinge of regret. It takes an unfeasibly tough human to look at a hedgehog — even a photograph — without an unbidden softening of the heart. So if wishes were hedgehogs, our country would be an erinacean paradise. Why, then, have we lost a third of our hedgehogs over the last decade? The British Trust for Ornithology — they’re experts on censusing and go beyond their original remit — cites estimates of 30
In Competition No. 2917 you were invited to submit a reply from Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress. Marvell’s mix of cajoling wit and harsher truths failed to persuade the Australian (male) poet A.D. Hope. Here’s an extract from his blistering reply, ‘His Coy Mistress to Mr Marvell’, published in 1978: Had you addressed me in such terms And prattled less of graves and worms, I might, who knows, have warmed to you; But, as things stand, must bid adieu The contemporary American poet Annie Finch wasn’t having any of it either. Her equally stinging riposte begins: ‘Sir, I am not a bird of prey:/ a Lady does not seize the day.’
From ‘The western victories’, The Spectator, 2 October 1915: As this is a war of heavy artillery, masses of slow-moving guns and ammunition have to be brought to fresh positions, and there installed with all the exacting formalities which are foreign to the handling of field-guns and horse artillery. Patience is as valuable as determination. There are times to go fast and times to go slow… If the Hohenzollern and Kaiser Wilhelm Redoubts can be captured in spite of all the lavish care on their construction which is implied in their proud names, there is no redoubt yet invented that will ultimately survive the combined assault of hurricane artillery and well-trained
When I was pregnant, nearly everyone who’d had children asked me and my husband whether we’d booked our antenatal course with the National Childbirth Trust. Men tended to ask with a gleam of sadistic glee in their eye, and the question was almost always followed by a hurried disclaimer: ‘Ignore most of what they say, but it’s worth it for the friends.’ It seemed like an expensive and boring way to make friends: the courses are usually 17 hours long and they cost several hundred pounds. The NCT offers heavily discounted rates to people who can’t afford it, but for most of its pupils, the full fee is an accepted
I was unable to join the violent protests held by Class War at the Cereal Killer Café in London last week because I had to stay at home to supervise our gardener. Yes — I know what you’re about to say. It is indeed ridiculous that one should have to stand over workmen to ensure that they are doing a decent job. But there is a patch of lawn towards the rear of our grounds which the blighters always skimp on, believing that it is too far from the house for us to notice. So I stand down there, with a cheerfully expectant expression, as the surly little man goes
Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route or afterwards. In an era when British factories could make nothing better than a laughable Allegro or a downmarket Escort, everyone coveted a German car — the top choice for twenty-somethings being the VW Golf convertible (Sciroccos were rarer) whose quality came as a revelation after years of broken fanbelts and burst radiators on unreliable
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than most writers of any epoch; but more important than any particular work was that so much survived to define his time. He had a secretary, Tiro, who can reasonably be given the credit for researching, correcting, copying and casting out his master’s words. In Robert Harris’s three novels of Cicero’s life, Marcus Tullius Tiro, the freed slave who took his name as well as dictation from his boss, gets his full reward. Over more than 1,000 pages, the secretary is the narrator of how the world’s first great republic slipped
After Jeremy Corbyn gave his conference speech yesterday, the media-shy Labour leader has undertaken a publicity blitz this morning. While his day got off to an okay start on the Today programme, things quickly went downhill with an appearance on Sky News. Eamonn Holmes began the interview by heaping praise on Corbyn, likening him to a religious figure. He then decided to focus on football — and Corbyn’s love of Arsenal: ‘Every young lad has a dream of appearing in the FA cup final, and scoring the winning goal, and I was looking at you and the love there was for you in the room, and you were basking in it –
There has recently been a craze for people posting pictures of a Syrian refugee next to a snap of the same guy dressed in Isis uniform two years back, showing that they are on their way to destroy us. It was nonsense, inevitably. But then they always are. The same goes for the photos of overcrowded migrant boats doing the rounds, which are actually of an Albanian ship from 1991 (an interesting story in itself, told here). As a rule never trust a meme, especially one that makes some profound point, because it’s almost certainly untrue. Among the most popular is an image of a matador sitting down next
Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route or afterwards. In an era when British factories could make nothing better than a laughable Allegro or a downmarket Escort, everyone coveted a German car — the top choice for twenty-somethings being the VW Golf convertible (Sciroccos were rarer) whose quality came as a revelation after years of broken fanbelts and burst radiators on unreliable
Jeremy Corbyn has just delivered his first conference speech as Labour leader. Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the address in this View from 22 special — looking at his delivery, the reaction in the hall, who it was meant to appeal to and whether it will change Corbyn’s standing with the general public. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the player below:
Like so many of the conjoined twins Dr Ben Carson has skilfully separated, Islam the monotheism, compatible with democracy, and its impostor, Islamism, the totalitarian ideology, incompatible with democracy, while intricately conjoined, couldn’t be more distinct in personality. Dr Carson’s assertion that American Muslims are unfit to hold the Presidency is explained only by his ignorance – not only of US constitutional history but of Islam and Islamism. His inability to conceive of an American Muslim as a pluralist liberal democrat shows the doctor’s inability – or unwillingness – to separate Islam from Islamism. Dr Carson’s assertions are hardly new. The barring of American Muslims from the Oval office was