Society

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Caro can

The Caro-Kann Defence, 1 e4 c6, has always appealed to me. It has the advantage of staking a claim in the centre by means of … d5, without the disadvantages of the Centre Counter (1 e4 d5) which brings out Black’s queen prematurely, or the French Defence (1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5), which locks in the black queen’s bishop. A new book by Jovanka Houska, Opening Repertoire: The Caro-Kann (Everyman), details Black’s strategies against the dangerous Advance Variation, while in the main line she recommends the early development of Black’s queen’s bishop, as in the following game.   Tal-Keene; Simultaneous Exhibition 1964; Caro-Kann Defence   1 e4 c6 2

Raymond Keene

No. 355

Black to play. This position is a variation from Ganguly-Vitiugov, Gibraltar 2014. The game started as a Caro-Kann and is mentioned in Houska’s book. Although Black is a pawn down he has very active pieces he can exploit with a clever tactic. Can you see it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Monday 30 March or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7961 0058. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20.   Last week’s solution 1 Kh1 Last week’s winner Robin Murfin, Lyme Regis, Dorset

Columba

2204: Security

In nine clues, cryptic indications omit reference to parts of answers; these parts must be highlighted, to reveal a definition applicable to each of the five members of the perimeter cordon, reading clockwise, and two unclued lights. Letters in corner squares and those adjacent to them could make TEAM NEAR GAPS. Two of the perimeter’s occupants are hyphened, one doubly so.   Across 11    Whip stopped receiving resistance (5) 12    Hateful person answering poster? (4) 13    Drive back vicious brute (5) 14    Clubs run into trouble with a new synthetic fibre (7) 15    Vehicle is, in general, grand blessing (10) 17    Period of excitement

Columba

2201: Facility | 26 March 2015

The words FAST FORWARD (given by letters added to definitions in clues) define 42 and 11, both indicating the way in which loans (1, 13, 18, 25, 32 and 43) are supplied.   First prize John Newell, Kingston upon Thames Runners-up Tim Hanks, Douglas, Isle of Man; Andrew Hawkins, Prenton, Wirral

Ross Clark Ross Clark

After the Germanwings disaster, do airplanes need to have three pilots onboard?

As soon as I heard the French prosecutor reveal that the co-pilot of the Germanwings jet appears deliberately to have flown his plane into a mountain it took me back to an anecdote told to me by a friend who is an airline pilot. A pilot, like you and I, has to go through scanners being allowed near an aeroplane. On one occasion a security scare had forced him to and his crew to go through a second time. After being asked to remove his shoes he finally flipped: ‘look, I’m the pilot,’ he said. ‘If I wanted to crash the plane all I would have to do is move

Steerpike Steerpike

Benedict Cumberbatch reads at his distant relation Richard III’s burial (despite saying he’s not ‘part of the landed gentry’)

Benedict Cumberbatch once complained that ‘posh-bashing’ had got so bad in Britain that he was contemplating a move to America. Cumberbatch, who attended Harrow, moaned that people showed prejudice towards his background despite the fact that he is not actually that posh. ‘I wasn’t really born with a silver spoon in my mouth, or as part of the landed gentry,’ the Sherlock actor lamented. However, next time the topic comes up Cumberbatch may wish to hold his tongue, as it turns out that the actor may be a lot closer to being a member of the ‘landed gentry’ than he first thought. According to Kevin Schurer, a genealogist at the University of Leicester, Cumberbatch is the second cousin 16

Molly Guinness

Jeffrey Bernard and Jeremy Clarkson would have understood each other

A lot of people seem to have confused the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is right wing and amusing (which they believe is at odds with the culture of the BBC) with the fact that he’s shown himself to be a brute (which is why he’s been sacked). The investigation into his attack on Oisin Tymon is pretty unequivocal. It was unprovoked and lasted more than 30 seconds until someone else intervened, and there was a lot of nasty verbal abuse thrown in for good measure. Tymon went to hospital afterwards to get his injuries checked out. Rather magnificently, he didn’t offer any resistance to Clarkson’s assault. The Duke of Cambridge

Janna Lawrence

Processed food is dangerous. It’s time for radical action that libertarians will hate

Two very different but valuable crops are grown in Central and South America. After hours of toil, each is carefully harvested. But it’s not the plant itself that is prized: it’s the product inside. So both crops are subject to a process of extraction. The aim is to have a high concentration of pure product. One of the crops is sugar cane and the other is the coca plant, which contains cocaine alkaloid. Consuming either sugar or cocaine stimulates the brain’s pleasure centres. When they are purified, this effect is heightened, producing an exaggerated biological response. For example, coca leaf has been chewed in Central and South America for hundreds of

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: President Wilson’s mistake

From ‘President Wilson’s Mistake’, The Spectator, 27 March 1915: President Wilson’s attitude can only be described as a tragedy. We do not believe that there was a man more determined than he was when he entered office to conduct his administration on moral lines, and to show the world that morality and politics are not incompatible, and that cynicism need not really be the rule for statesmen. Alas for the President that he did not follow his own natural instinct for the right instead of his reason. It would never have betrayed him. Instead, it would have led him on the road which he really wants to travel. It would

The Spectator

March Wine Club | 26 March 2015

Chateau Musar is one of those delightful oenological quirks – a remarkable wine of great style produced under extraordinarily difficult conditions in the most unlikely of places: Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. If the success of past offers is anything to go by, Musar has a huge following among Spectator readers and we’re delighted that both Chateau Musar and the Wine Company have decided to offer the latest vintage of the estate’s grand vin – the 2008 – in these pages, before anyone else in the UK has it. Not only that, in this fascinating six-bottle selection we also have two previous fine vintages of the main wine, plus a mid-range and

Lucy Vickery

End paper

In Competition No. 2890 you were invited to imagine that one of the major newspapers has ceased publication and provide a verse lament for it. In his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper Philip Meyer predicted that the final hard-copy newspaper will plop through someone’s letterbox in 2043. So who’ll be the first to go? Over to you. D.A. Prince pockets £30; her fellow prize-winners earn £25. No more the morning doorstep thumps that bring news and opinions from the public sphere. The Guardian’s laid to rest where angels sing and deadlines are no more, is grieved for where the muesli-ed tables sit, forlorn and sad. No more the Toynbee fire

The Spectator

Better off out

From ‘President Wilson’s Mistake’, The Spectator, 27 March 1915: The Americans have a world of their own in which to take sides physically, and are perfectly entitled to say to Europe: ‘You must do your own police work and restrain your own malefactors. Europe must not expect from us more than abstract sympathy in regard to a European struggle.’ On the whole, and in spite of ex-President Roosevelt’s generous and chivalrous attitude, we are strongly inclined to think that this is the right attitude for Americans to adopt. At any rate, it is the attitude that they do adopt.

Aidan Hartley

The warrior arched his body, readying to sling his spear at my chest

 Laikipia With a shriek, the warrior arched his body, readying to sling his spear at my chest. The tear-dropped javelin point flashed in the sun. In the heat, dust swirled up from the hooves of the young blood’s cattle invading my farm. In his hand, the seven-foot shaft lance quivered, ready, poised for release — and then he yelled again. This is March 2015, I reminded myself, not AD 991 at the onset of the Battle of Maldon. I had asked the man to come with me to the police, where he would be arrested for trespass. The spear flashing was his response. He had pushed his cattle into what

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

A lesson in decision-making from the world’s worst road sign

Driving from Dover on the M20 a year ago I missed the turning for the M25. A month later I did it again. Then again. ‘You bloody idiot — you missed the turning,’ I said to myself each time. Eventually, after I had missed the turning five times in ten journeys, I wondered if it was really all my fault. So I logged on to Google Street View and retraced the stretch of the M20 leading up to the junction. That’s when I found the image below. Perhaps it doesn’t look odd to you. It took me a while to spot why it is a contender for the world’s worst

Bruce Anderson

Wines to toast a warrior saint

Towards the chimes at midnight, a few of us left a — respectable — establishment near Leicester Square. Eight or nine youngsters were brawling vigorously, boots and fists. 999 was dialled, and the response was admirably fast. The cops would no doubt have recorded it as just another trivial incident in the life of a British inner city. But how squalid. That day, there was a story about undergraduettes moonlighting as lap-dancers or strippers, or worse. We have suffered a loss of civilisation since Newman: most of the ‘universities’ to which those girls were accredited should never have received that status. Until the day before yesterday, they would have been

David Prycejones

‘You are always close to me’: Unity Mitford’s souvenirs of Hitler

The English aristocracy has had its fair share of misfits, and one of the most far-fetched was Unity Mitford. No novelist would dare invent the story of a young woman of 19 who settles in Germany in 1933, determines to captivate Hitler, and succeeds. Eva Braun, the long-term mistress whom Hitler married in the last days of his life, gives way in her diary to jealousy and spite. There is evidence provided either by Unity herself or Nazi officials that Hitler held her hand, stroked her hair and called her ‘Kind’ (child). During his preparation for world war in the summer of 1939, he found time to arrange for a

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Belle Gibson and the pernicious cult of ‘wellness’

Belle Gibson was a publicist’s dream: a ‘wellness guru’ and young mother with a wholesome blonde beauty, a wide white smile, and just enough tattoos to look modern. She had already encountered appalling adversity for one barely into her twenties: in 2009, she revealed, doctors had diagnosed her with malignant brain cancer and told her bluntly: ‘You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months tops.’ Sickened by two months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, Gibson said, she had abandoned conventional treatment in favour of a range of holistic treatments, including Ayurvedic medicine and oxygen therapies. She embarked, too, on a gluten-free, refined sugar-free diet which she detailed on her 2013 Instagram

Mark Greaves

Rise early to see the Vatican at its best

The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican. Our guide, Tonia, takes us through security, and within minutes we are in a nearly empty Sistine Chapel. In an hour it will be crammed with tourists — sweating, gawping, getting in each other’s way. Vatican officials will be shushing and clapping to quieten the chatter. Now, though, we are free to contemplate Michelangelo’s swirl of naked bodies in peace. Michelangelo claimed that he painted the ceiling entirely on his own. In fact, Tonia explains, he started off with 15 helpers, though he got rid of them all along the

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

In praise of messy old kitchens

‘I love my new kitchen heart of the home let’s fill it with friends happy.’ So says the thought bubble in the current ad for the estate agents Rightmove, part of their ‘Find your happy’ campaign. Don’t even get me started on the lack of punctuation — or the use of ‘happy’ as a noun. What I’m worrying about is the kitchen itself. Glimpsing Ed Miliband’s second kitchen last week, we came face to face with the drabness of today’s hyper-hygienic kitchen. Is the kitchen really ‘the heart of the home’ in Rightmove’s imaginary domestic paradise, or is it in fact one of those spotless, minimalist, metallic kitchens, all hard