Society

Thursday

Taki

Even a perfect opera such as Don Giovanni improves with a good red

End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves. But the days are longer and soon spring will chase away any remaining winter blues. The Eagle Club’s closing is a perennial festive day, with speeches by our president Urs Hodler, an almost teary goodbye to our very own Pino — who has seated and fed us for 44 years — and the Taki Cup awards, won the past two years by my son J.T. in record time: 34 minutes to conquer the highest mountain in Gstaad. (Charlotte Cotton was only five minutes slower, an amazing feat for a young woman.) It was a hell of

Jeremy Clarke

One day the Condor and the Eagle will fly wing-tip to wing-tip

The pub was disappointingly empty, so I took my first pint of the evening upstairs, where some sort of New Age society was holding a public talk and discussion. I gave the woman seated just inside the meeting room my £5 entry fee and found a spare seat at the back next to a big bloke with a beard. In the five minutes or so before the talk began, I counted 47 other people in the room, all of them white. Five chaps had advanced male pattern baldness, another had very obviously dyed hair (black). The total number of beards was six, including a goatee. Average age, at a guess,

Melissa Kite

Farewell, Cobham — oh flat, boring, lovely Cobham; hello, Dorking

Farewell then, Cobham. You were the place I ran to when the metropolis became too much, and urban life overwhelmed me. You were to me a shining beacon of blandness in an otherwise frighteningly exotic world. I loved you and held you in mythical esteem. In times of disappointment, I yearned for you every bit as much as Margo Leadbetter did. ‘Cydney! We’re moving to Cobham!’ I would shout at the spaniel whenever Lambeth Council did something Marxist, which was often. We didn’t ever quite move to Cobham, but we kept the horses there. For nearly 15 years, this gave us a bolthole down the A3 to escape to, from

Alexander Chancellor

The fox that killed my chickens depressed me more than 250,000 tsunami deaths

It is hard to know how a tragedy is going to move a person who is not directly affected by it. Over a death or misfortune in the family, or among one’s friends, one is sure to feel pain and grief. But what of those other ghastly events involving people, maybe hundreds or thousands of them, with whom one has no connection? They provoke shock, disgust and horror, but not necessarily great personal sadness. Could it be true that I was more depressed when a fox killed all my chickens than I was when the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 swept over a quarter of a million people to their

Robin Oakley

Who will fund a prize for the true fighter pilots of the Turf?

After listening to a violinist’s justification of his playing, Dr Samuel Johnson responded tartly: ‘Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.’ Racing’s marketing arm, Great British Racing, probably attempted the impossible in trying to satisfy all parties concerned in devising a new structure for the Flat Jockeys Championship. As part of its efforts to give greater narrative and structure to racing’s untidy seasons, its plan is for the title, which will now include a £25,000 prize, to be awarded to the jockey who rides the most winners between the Qipco-sponsored Guineas meeting at Newmarket on 2 May and the Qipco-sponsored Champions Day on 17 October. It

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 2 April 2015

Wednesday night is league night. Sacrosanct. I’ve missed only one in seven years and that was when my daughter was giving birth. Priorities, you know. But last Wednesday I had an offer I couldn’t refuse: dinner with Henry Kissinger. Not a date, I reluctantly confess, a smallish dinner, but you can’t have everything. He may be 91, but boy does he still have ‘it’! Ooh, the voice. Ooh, the brain. Ooh, the twinkle. I gushed inwardly like some bodice-ripping Poldark groupie. But I have to admit, when talk turned to world defence, my thoughts drifted away momentarily to bridge defence and how everyone says it’s the hardest part of the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 2 April 2015

Home The nation greeted with well disguised enthusiasm the beginning of the general election campaign after the dissolution of parliament. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, stood at a little plywood lectern in Downing Street and said: ‘In 38 days you face a stark choice’ — between him and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party. The Conservatives said they would create two million jobs in the next parliament. Their claims that Labour’s plans would cost each household £3,028 extra in taxes were met with baffled scepticism by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Some business leaders indignantly rejected Labour’s claims on a poster that they supported the party’s opposition to

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How I can I avoid being invited to any more country house weekends?

Q. Someone I was at university with but hadn’t seen much of over the ten years since invited me to come for a weekend at his country house. I went once and, although it was perfectly fine and they are perfectly nice, wouldn’t want to go there again. Life’s just too short to spend weekends with people you can’t really talk to. But now his wife has identified me as a ‘spare man’ and is keen for me to come again. I have given excuses for not accepting subsequent invitations but she is really persistent and has now said they are going to be there all of July and August

Toby Young Toby Young

Lefty myths about inequality

As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left? By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office. George

Lavatch

2205: In shape

The unclued lights (including one of three words, one of two words, and one hyphened) form two thematic groups in the grid. They consist of a theme word, four lights which it defines in one sense, and three which it defines in another. A fourth example of this latter group, part of an unclued light, must be highlighted. Ignore one apostrophe.    Across   10    See bird that’s yellow (6) 11    Old, tragic character’s love for pungent stuff (7) 13    Cook destroying starter in oven (4) 14    Assessment of painter – one’s in shock (9) 17    Suspect pockets diamonds with hesitation in TV programme (6) 19    Time judge gets banned

Lavatch

To 2202: Problem XI

Seven unclued lights are ANAGRAMS (23) of numbers. 2 (7A) + 11 (17) + 10 (40) + 16 (5) + 18 (6) + 3 (31) = 60 (36). First prize Jack Shonfield, Child Okeford, Dorset Runners-up Michael Ollerenshaw, Bowdon, Cheshire; M. Purdie, Cupar, Fife

Sebastian Payne

Listen: The Spectator’s verdict on the TV leaders’ debate

The snap polls suggest there was no immediate winner of the televised leaders’ debate on ITV — so what happened? In this View from 22 podcast special, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the first (and last) debate  of the general election campaign with all the party leaders. While the consensus is that Nicola Sturgeon met the high expectations, did the other insurgent leader Nigel Farage fall short? Was David Cameron able to appear Prime Ministerial or did Ed Miliband successfully challenge him? And will the programme make any difference to the election campaign and result? You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or

Daniel Jackson

Low income damages children’s brains, says study. If so, that’s a tragedy

The link between wealth and attainment is a subject that’s close to my heart, or perhaps more accurately my cerebral cortex. Like 20 per cent of the population I was raised in technical poverty. My first home was a touring caravan. It’s safe to say that no statistician would have expected me to amount to anything – especially if they’d had access to the findings of a new study in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers have found that there is an association between low family income and the structure of the brains of children. The study looked at the relationship between wealth and the size of the brain’s surface area. The measurements were derived from a

Max Hastings

Prince Charles letter: “There is a DIVINE Source which is ultimate TRUTH”

I notice an online howl of anguish from a Kentucky professor of biology who faces demands from local evangelical Christians that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in his classes. This, it seems to me, parallels the Prince of Wales’s successful lobbying for some NHS funds to be diverted from conventional medicine to homeopathy. I have beside me a copy of a letter allegedly written by him some years ago to a cultural institution, asserting the conviction that ‘there is a DIVINE Source which is ultimate TRUTH… that this Truth can be expressed by means of numbers… and that, if followed correctly, these principles can be expressed with infinite variety

Julia Hartley-Brewer

Zero-hours contracts have nothing to do with flexibility and everything to do with dodging tax

Could you live on a zero-hours contract? David Cameron was forced to admit, during his grilling by Jeremy Paxman, that he couldn’t. But 1.4 million Britons do. Some out of choice, some through necessity. But the latest attempts by the main parties to tackle the injustices of zero-hours contracts fail to get to the heart of the problem – which has nothing to do with a need for ‘flexibility’ and everything to do with dodging tax. Many of us might be horrified at the thought of not knowing when our next pay cheque will be coming and how much it will be, but large numbers of people on zero-hours contracts are

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

April Wine Club | 2 April 2015

Private Cellar is the Jack Russell of the wine trade, tiny but tenacious, nipping in and snuffling out first-rate everyday wines that others either miss or require in greater quantities than are available. Private Cellar, based in Newmarket, has no shop to speak of and a staff of just eight, selling online from a commendably concise list and at their brilliant countrywide tastings. Private Cellar’s team are all graduates of such fine oenological finishing schools as Corney & Barrow, Armit and Lay & Wheeler, and the wines they unearth are invariably excellent value and great examples of both grape and region. It was no surprise to those of us who

Michael Gove

In defence of Christianity

Jeremy Paxman was on great form last week, reminding us that when it comes to being rude to prime ministers he has no peers. Jeremy’s rudeness is, of course, magnificently bipartisan. However elegant the sneer he displayed when asking David Cameron about Stephen Green, it was as nothing compared to the pointed disdain with which he once asked Tony Blair about his faith. Was it true, Jeremy inquired, that he had prayed together with his fellow Christian George W. Bush? The question was asked in a tone of Old Malvernian hauteur which implied that spending time in religious contemplation was clearly deviant behaviour of the most disgusting kind. Jeremy seemed

Mark Mason

Tourists are trickling back to Egypt – to beat the crowds, go now

Egypt’s revolution of 2011 didn’t just get rid of President Mubarak: it did a pretty good job of clearing out the tourists, too. The political uncertainty since then has made people wary of visiting — meaning more space and lower prices for those who do make the trip. But you’d better be quick if you want to take advantage: this seems to be the year that Egypt is opening up again. BA are resuming their Sharm el-Sheikh flights in September, while Abercrombie and Kent are back up to three boats for their Nile cruises (they had been down to one). I started in Aswan, home to the alarmingly named Hotel

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Rory McIlroy and the grandest prize in golf

The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors in the same year, and has only been done once, by the extraordinary Bobby Jones in 1930. Jones was awarded a ticker-tape reception in New York, and a golfing writer of the time with a feel for geometry called it ‘The Impregnable Quadrilateral’, a fortress that could never be taken. Jones, a lawyer by profession and unimpeachably honourable in his play, was a canny young man as well as a remarkable player: he had backed himself for the grand slam at the start of the year with a British bookmaker

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

What happened to Julie Burchill on silent retreat

When I told my friends that I was planning to attend a silent retreat, they all laughed. It’s true that I am something of a convivialist; my idea of heaven is a big table in a warm restaurant, the table shimmering with the laughter of friends and the glugging of wine, and me picking up the bill. On the other hand, I was a solitary only child and I look back on those days with great fondness. Before the long stagger up the primrose path of pleasure started, the only companion I needed was a book; I well remember my mother crying because I preferred to sit in my room