Society

Thursday

29 Jan 2015

Magnificent Magnus

Magnus Carlsen has won first prize in the elite Tata Steel tournament at Wijk aan Zee, Holland. Leading scores out of 13 were Carlsen 9, then Giri, So, Ding Liren and Vachier-Lagrave all in hot pursuit half a point behind. This week’s puzzle shows a crucial variation from one of Carlsen’s best wins. The player who made the greatest mark, apart from the world champion, was 20-year-old Anish Giri, who is maturing into a truly dangerous prospect, notching up himself a four-game winning streak. I kick off this week with a Giri victory from London against a former world champion. Giri-Kramnik: London Classic Rapidplay 2014 In this last

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 January 2015

Home Party leaders mercilessly launched 100 days of campaigning before the general election on 7 May. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said he would reduce the annual maximum household receipt of welfare to £23,000 from the current limit of £26,000. Ed Miliband announced a ten-year plan for the National Health Service, but Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, said: ‘You’ve got a pale imitation actually of the 1992 general election campaign and maybe it will have the same outcome.’ Amjad Bashir, a Ukip MEP, switched to the Conservative party, upon which Ukip said he was being investigated over ‘unanswered financial and employment questions’, allegations he denied. Peers dropped an

Raymond Keene

No. 347

White to play. This is a variation from Carlsen-Aronian, Wijk aan Zee 2015. Black has just played his bishop to a3, uncovering an attack on the white queen while also threatening the c1-rook. How can White respond to this double attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 3 February or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 f4 Last week’s winner Trevor Lloyd, London WC1

Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage’s diary: How I survived Dry January

Dry January is tougher than it sounds. Well, for me anyway. It’s now been some 28 days since I’ve had a drink, and you should see what that means for my campaigning strategy. ‘Ginger beer? Lemonade?’ Pub-goers around the country can’t believe it when I walk in and whisper my order over the bar. The fact is they don’t believe I’m really doing it. ‘I’m not all spin and bluster like those other lads,’ I usually reply. ‘If I promise I’m going to do something, I’ll bloody well do it.’ Still, I can’t say it’s never going to tempt me again. Especially not given the week I’ve had. It all

Lavatch

2196: Diverse

Round the perimeter clockwise goes a place (6) followed by a description of it (10 words, one hyphened) by one of the unclued lights (two words). This description appears in its original language and can be confirmed in its full form in the ODQ. Remaining unclued lights, singly or combined, present five thematic objects which are to be highlighted. Ignore three accents. Across 10 Stranger nearly rejected tuber (4) 11 Brazilian drug a hit also in Rio, perhaps (9) 13 Divine animal sent back by Liberal president (7) 14 Nick bringing back a stone slab (5) 15 A minor thoroughfare beyond the sea (6) 17 Noble flier went

The Spectator

Books and arts – 29 January 2015

Lavatch

To 2193: Celebration II

The MUSICIAN (21), Rod Stewart CBE (25A), was born LXX (16) years ago on 10th January 1945. The associated works were MAGGIE MAY, EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY, SAILING and GASOLINE ALLEY. ROD (27), STEW (17) and ART (23) were to be shaded. First prize Mrs R.J.C. Shapland, Ilkeston, Derbyshire Runners-up Dr J. McClelland, Bangor, Northern Ireland; Tim Hanks, Douglas, Isle of Man

David Nutt

Let’s face it, we need to introduce minimum pricing on alcohol — and legalise other drugs

In the last few years alcohol has become the leading cause of death in men under 50 years of age, and it will soon achieve a similar deadly status in women. Alcohol-induced liver deaths have quadrupled in the past 40 years whereas deaths from heart and lung disease have halved. The reasons for this are well established – alcohol is cheaper and more easily available than it has been since the gin-epidemic of the 1700s and half of all 15-16 year olds are becoming dangerously intoxicated at least once a month. A 21 year woman was recently given a liver transplant for cirrhosis induced by her having essentially an alcohol-only

Keith Cooper

The House-Elphicke report buries a distracting myth on house building

The coalition helped bury an enduring and dangerous myth in a major report into the country’s chronic housing crisis released this week. The year-long probe rubbishes the idea councils are stopped from building new homes by Treasury ‘caps’ on their borrowing powers. As research published on Coffee House revealed last year, the idea caps hold them back is a distracting myth, perpetuated by special interest groups and parroted by columnists like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. All this bellyaching about borrowing ‘restrictions’ continues, led largely by Tom Copley, Labour’s housing spokesperson in City Hall and the Labour-led Local Government Association. The real barriers to town halls getting their oars back into house

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the great European revolt and the dangers of the Green Party

Who will benefit from Syriza’s victory in Greece? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth and Sebastian Borger discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on the impending European revolt. How will David Cameron make political capital from the rise of the anti-austerity party? What are the challenges facing Angela Merkel? Will similar parties be as successful in other parts of Europe? Denis Sewell and Greg Hurst also look at the government’s faltering schools revolution. Why does the coalition talk down one of its most successful policies? How important was the reshuffling of Michael Gove in changing the tone of discussing schools reform? And would a Labour government kill off or continue pushing free schools

Steerpike

Chris Bryant breaks two ribs getting out of bed

It’s been a tough few weeks for Chris Bryant since he claimed that ‘we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk’ in an interview with The Guardian. Privately educated Blunt didn’t take kindly to the comments and responded by calling Bryant a ‘classist gimp’ in an open letter. If that wasn’t reason enough to be gloomy, the new shadow culture minister confides to Steerpike that even laughter brings him misery nowadays. ‘I broke two ribs this morning, so I’m in quite a lot of pain,’ he tells Mr S at Paddy Power’s Political Book Awards. ‘Bizarrely, getting out of bed in the morning I slipped and I

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: What is wrong with Germany?

From ‘What is Wrong With Germany?‘, The Spectator, 30 January 1915: If the inquiry is to be pushed to the ultimate point, what is wrong with the Germans is their dreadful, their slavish devotion to Logic— to the “Absolute” and to Abstractions. When Englishmen create an Abstraction they do not call upon all mankind to enthrone it. They treat it as something which is “there or thereabouts,” as something useful, no doubt, but not to be pressed too far. When the Germans create an Abstraction they fall down and worship it. They not only treat it with intellectual servility, but regard it as a living thing. When their Abstraction is

Lucy Vickery

Election blues

In Competition No. 2882 you were invited to submit a blues song written by a well-known politician contemplating the impending general election. The ghosts of Robert Johnson, B.B. King and Big Bill Broonzy stalked the entry, which was smallish but accomplished. Basil Ransome-Davies’s submission was a clever twist on Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Sunday -Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ but as it’s country rather than blues it didn’t make it into the winning line-up. John Whitworth and Richard Mollet earn honourable mentions, Brian Murdoch pockets the bonus fiver and the rest take £35. Got up this morning, bought me a bacon roll. You know I got up this morning, bought me a bacon

Rory Sutherland

How consumer habits are subject to the law of unintended consequences

Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan) found themselves debating the direction of causation in the purchase of electric drills. Their dispute revolved around one question: do men a) conceive a need for making a hole and therefore go and buy a drill or b) buy an electric drill in a shop because it looks cool and then wander around the house desperately looking for any excuse to make holes in things. (One joy of working in advertising is that you get paid to have the kind of conversations when sober which other people are only allowed

Nick Cohen

As a republican, I used to look forward to Charles III. Now I’m scared

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would

Bruce Anderson

The spirit of Prohibition lives (if you’re a haggis)

It is an old adage, but still pertinent. ‘Every generalisation about India is true, and so is the opposite.’ The other night, some of us were discussing the US and wondering if the same applied. Certainly, there are lots of paradoxes. Although Americans passionately believe that they live in the land of the free, there is plenty of enthusiasm for chains. A few years ago, the state of Vermont simultaneously legalised homosexual marriage and prohibited the serving of fried eggs unless they were ‘over easy’ — i.e. bent over. There is a terrible amount of food faddism. Outside the big cities, it is hard to find cheese made with raw

Carola Binney

History is the art of making things up. Why pretend otherwise?

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’. listen to ‘David Starkey on Wolf Hall’ on audioBoom But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the

Rod Liddle

‘Black,’ ‘coloured’, ‘BME’ – any kind of label is essentially racist. It’s time to move on

How should we refer to non-white people, and foreigners in general, given that of course we do sometimes need to mention them, perhaps over dinner in White’s or when mulling over where to go on our holidays? This is an important question, because the approved terminologies seem to shift by the day, if not the minute, and we could find ourselves in a lot of trouble. I remember the late US politician George Wallace, when he was governor of Alabama, being ticked off for having used the word ‘negroes’. Quite unacceptable, he was admonished — the correct term is ‘blacks’, and there’s an end to it. ‘Sheesh,’ Wallace replied, ‘we

Nicholas Farrell

The benefits of breeding like a rabbit

Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth. I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses

James Delingpole

The hottest year on which record?

Did you know that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded in the entire history of the world? Probably you did because it’s been all over the papers. Not only that but President Obama slipped it into his State of the Union address and the president of the World Bank quoted it at Davos and the singer and rap producer Pharrell Williams is so concerned that he plans to stage a series of Live Earth concerts with Al Gore to emphasise the seriousness of the problem. And these luminaries must know what they’re talking about, right? After all, it’s not just one distinguished scientific institution which has endorsed the ‘2014: