Society

I celebrated Eid in a sandy bay in Sri Lanka, watching from the warm, shallow sea as gaggles of local Muslims in holiday mood sauntered past to congregate at the public end of the beach about half a mile away. Since they looked so much more colourful, picturesque and exotic than the tourists in the security-guarded enclave where I was, I thought I’d wander down to take a few snaps. Having just finished Ramadan, they were all very excited — the young men especially. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a group of dark-skinned boys with wispy beards, bare-chested but in long trousers, had surrounded me. ‘Selfie!’ one of them said —

Poor Walter Palmer – I bet he wished he’d stayed home in Minneapolis and left Cecil the Lion alone, because now he’s officially the Worst Person on Earth and there are grown humans outside his workplace dressed as animals. As the Guardian reports: Protesters placed animal toys outside Palmer’s River Duff dental practice in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. The practice was forced to close as protesters staged a recreation of the hunt involving cuddly toys and water pistols. Personally I don’t understand why anyone would want to shoot a lion, but there are lots of things people do which I can’t comprehend, but which I don’t really consider my

It’s nearly 30 years since I worked in Japan, but I still have a few words of the language and a certain idea of how the place works. The role of the business press, for example, was to trumpet export successes of Japanese corporations, and not to report shenanigans in which securities firms boosted prices of selected shares by pushing them to housewife investors, to generate campaign funds for favoured politicians. So I’m curious how the Financial Times will fare under its new owner Nikkei, the very Japanese media group that has paid £844 million to acquire the world’s most prestigious business title. Has the culture changed since my day?

From ‘The Struggle in Russia‘, The Spectator, 31 July 1915: We must not write more than a few lines, but we cannot do less, in admiration of the Russian endurance, doggedness, and skill. If we indulged our inclination in this respect, we should write an article about nothing else. All our sympathy and deep respect goes out to these splendid men. Inferior to their enemy in everything which is implied by long preparation, they are making good the defects during the bad time—for the good time is coming, never doubt that—by a wonderful example of stubbornness and resolution. Every soldier salutes them, every civilian raises his hat. Their reward is

On Broadcasting House, one of my favourite Radio 4 programmes, was this morning discussing a report (pdf) from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty commission. It finds, amongst other things, that ‘education at a private or a Grammar school is also associated with an increased chance of labour market success’ amongst dim kids. Who’d have thunk it? During the subsequent R4 discussion, the Labour peer Joan Bakewell referred to a ‘two-tier education system’. It’s a familiar phrase and a familiar idea: that British kids are somehow cast in a binary divide: the privately-educated and the state-educated. You hear this analysis all the time. Only yesterday, my Spectator colleague Matthew Parris referred to the

Transport for London’s efforts to use verse to encourage Tube users to mind their manners produced poems whose rhyme and scansion would have made William McGonagall blush. So it was over to the experts: competitors were invited to imagine that poets, living or dead, had been recruited to improve on the unlovely likes of: ‘We really don’t mean to chide/ But try to move along inside/ So fellow travellers won’t have to face/ An invasion of their personal space.’ Adrian Fry’s Emily Dickinson — ‘Because I would not mind the gap’ — was an impressive runner-up, as were Charles Clive-Ponsonby-Fane, Mike Morrison and Alanna Blake, but they were outstripped by

Tomorrow sees the start of the Special Olympic World Games in Los Angeles. I’m sure you’ll be watching with great interest. Just one question: what does the word ‘special’, as used by the event organisers, mean, exactly? Is it to alert us to the possibility that the athletes taking part are even better than those who take part in the ordinary, run-of-the-mill, Olympics? And if they are not, then again, what does the word special mean in this context? Isn’t it all a bit condescending?

Sadly, Michael Adams, for many years Britain’s leading grandmaster, will not be playing in the British Championship, which starts next week. Michael is often referred to as ‘Spidey’ because of the way he spins a web to ensnare his opponents. The most spidery player ever was Anatoly Karpov, world champion from 1975, when he beat Bobby Fischer by default, to 1985, when the young genius Garry Kasparov took over. A new book by international master Sam Collins, in the well-known Everyman Move by Move teaching format, brings out these refined qualities in Karpov’s play and shows how he was able to reduce even the most formidable opposition to utter helplessness.