Society

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Russell Brand and Johann Hari – the revolutionary dream team

‘I don’t think Russell Brand has read much Orwell’, says the Catholic Herald, responding to the multi-millionaire revolutionary’s YouTube claim that IS are less of a threat than David Cameron: ‘Not just because he recently described Owen Jones as our generation’s incarnation of the left-wing iconoclast, but because yesterday he engaged in the kind of apologia for foreign fascism which the great man built his reputation on condemning.’ Brand’s video has now been seen by more than 200,000 people, and guess who is helping him make these visual treats happen? Non other than the self-confessed plagiarist and disgraced former Indy columnist Johann Hari. Hari was the ideological lodestar for the

Joan Rivers

Joan Rivers’ diary: ‘Count your blessings, my darlings, count your blessings’

Back in December 2008, Joan Rivers contributed a diary to the Spectator’s Christmas issue. Joan died yesterday at the age of 81. Here’s her piece: A lot of you weaklings out there are probably very upset at how fast the dollar and the pound are falling, and about how every time you turn on the television all they talk about is the economy and how it is getting worse, and how everyone is now saying not only are we in recession but it’s going to get w-o-r-s-e. Well, instead of getting depressed, I have decided to take full advantage of the recession and make this holiday season the happiest one I have

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Gifted and talented

Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, I have persisted in the belief that the ability to play chess well indicates a powerful intelligence. Goethe wrote that chess was a touchstone of the intellect, while Pascal called it the gymnasium of the mind. Arthur Koestler romanticised the mental power of chess devotees, writing: ‘When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a “still life”, but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy — as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.’   Conversely, anyone with a strong

Raymond Keene

No. 330

White to play. This position is from Polgar-Bareev, Moscow 1996. Neither king is entirely happy and in such situations having the move can be crucial. It was here — what did Polgar play? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 9 September 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 shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 Qxe6+ Last week’s winner John Samson, Edinburgh

Taki

Come back Aristotle Onassis – all is forgiven

Back in the very early Sixties there was an uninhabited islet off the west coast of Greece by the name of Skorpios. It was wild, with neglected olive groves, and its asking price was around $60,000. Step forward Aristotle Socrates Onassis, who snapped it up and for good measure put some pocket change up for the even tinier island of Sparti next door. One can swim to Skorpios from the large Ionian island of Lefkas in less than an hour — wearing flippers, that is. Onassis was a much misunderstood character. He had great charm, spoke many languages and was very streetwise, but his looks were against him. His propensity

Toby Young Toby Young

The lesson of the young men fighting for Isis: evil is in all of us

I had an interesting discussion with my friend Aidan Hartley earlier this week about whether the young men fighting for the so-called Islamic State are psychopaths. (This was before the news broke of Steven Sotloff’s beheading.) Aidan is better placed than most to answer this question, having worked as a war correspondent for many years and written a classic book on the subject called The Zanzibar Chest. His view is that the Islamic radicals attracted to IS are not run-of-the-mill jihadis, but a particularly nasty sub-species. Without in any way trying to defend the activities of terrorist groups like al-Shabaab, whose handiwork he’s witnessed close up, he thinks of them

Jeremy Clarke

An undergraduate anorak at 32

When I was 32, tired at last, for the moment anyway, of seizing the day, I stopped drinking and gave up smoking and enrolled for two A-levels in one year at the local technical college. My decision coincided with a state decision to expand the middle class and I was awarded a small government grant. I found I was ripe for study, passed both exams with good grades and applied to Hertford College, Oxford, to read English. The choice of college was specifically and perhaps idiotically based on a romantic obsession with Evelyn Waugh’s life and work. By a startling coincidence, I was interviewed in Waugh’s old ground-floor rooms next

Melissa Kite

These days, when men wolf-whistle at me, I thank them

Incredible as it seems to me now, there was a time when a wolf whistle was annoying. A man would shout something approving from a scaffold and I would harrumph about my privacy being invaded, my gender not being respected, my dignity as an intelligent woman being violated. Then I got old and a wolf whistle made my day. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I knew I had turned a corner, gone over a hill and started to slip down the other side, so far as age was concerned, when I first heard a wolf whistle from a scaffold and, instead of feeling outraged,

Alexander Chancellor

The war on e-cigarettes is enough to make me give up giving up

I have been, on and off, a lifelong smoker; but I gave up in January 2009 on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States. It was out of feelings of solidarity with the poor man, who I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) would have to quit too when he took office; for Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, had ruled that there should never be any smoking in the White House. I myself remained primly smoke-free for five and a half years, but took up cigarettes again in June when I became editor of The Oldie. Before that I had edited four other magazines, including

Robin Oakley

The making of a racing realist

One of the greatest parliamentary sketch-writers of all time, Norman Shrapnel, made a point of never socialising with the politicians whose performances he chronicled. ‘I was worried it might dilute the purity of my hatred,’ he explained. When writing about Turf figures, the danger is a different one: you end up backing too many horses trained by those who have become friends. One day at Goodwood recently I plunged on three horses whose handlers had encouraged me to do so and not one of the three finished in the money. But that was my fault for suspending disbelief. As the Irish trainer Mick O’Toole once explained, ‘If there weren’t a

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How would you answer Radek Sikorski’s goose-stepping question?

Q. In his Spectator notebook of 30 August, describing a recent gaudy at the Oxford college he attended in the l980s, Radek Sikorski asked, ‘Dear Mary, please help, what do you say when asked: “Do you remember goose-stepping in your jackboots across the Chapel Quad lawn at four in the morning?’’ Mary, may I press you for an answer?’ — L.P., London SW1 A. He might have best replied: ‘Nearly right. My goose-stepping — but your jackboots, surely?’ Q. I recently paid a fortune to a salon in Primrose Hill so that my ten-year-old daughter and I could be de-nitted. I am on good terms with her father but you

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Fischer’s is like visiting Vienna without having to go to Austria (thank God)

Fischer’s is Austria made safe for liberals, gays, Jews and other Untermenschen riffraff, because it is a restaurant, not a concentration camp, and because it is in Marylebone High Street, not Linz. It is the new restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who opened the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel, and it is more profound and lovely than any of them. There is always a clock in a Corbin and King restaurant, a big old clock from some fairytale train station, poised over the clientele as they stuff and age; for remembrance of mortality, I guess. Or maybe they just like big clocks? In any case, the guests

Dot Wordsworth

‘Escalate’: an exciting new way to say ‘pass the buck’

Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire, spoke to Sky television last week about how little he knew of sexual exploitation of young people in the area. ‘This report demonstrates that lots of information was not escalated up to political level or indeed senior management level,’ he said. ‘For that I am hugely shocked and hugely sorry.’ He did not apologise for having used the word escalated, no doubt because he thinks it is a fine and proper thing for a man in his position to use the word escalate. Mr Wright uses escalate in a different sense from the escalation reported in the papers last week

Paul Wood

Paul Wood’s diary: From James Foley’s memorial to gunfire in the streets

 Lebanon The Beirut press corps gather to remember the murdered journalist Jim Foley. People stand for a minute’s silence, drink in hand. Below the balcony, the nightly Beirut traffic jam sends the sound of car horns floating upward. Before killing him, the so-called Islamic State emailed his family: ‘The scum of your society… are held prisoner by us, THEY DARED TO ENTER THE LION’S DEN AND WHERE [sic] EATEN!’ I always thought of the hardy band of foreign freelancers, of which Jim was a part, as the best of us. They venture into Syria without the cushion of a big news organisation behind them, often not knowing if they’ll even

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 4 September 2014

One person who lets out a whoop of delight when I am on holiday is my saintly partner, Artur Malinowski. He gets a holiday too — from me and my daft mistakes — and can play proper bridge with some of the greats who are dying to partner him. This time it was the turn of Peter Bertheau, Swedish World Champion, playing the Palace Cup in Warsaw. Sixteen world-class pairs competed for the coveted first prize, which was won by the young Polish stars Kalita and Nowosadzki.  Until the last session any one of five pairs could have won — Artur and Peter among them. I sent him a message

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 September 2014

Home Britain’s terror threat level was raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’ in response to fighting in Iraq and Syria, meaning that an attack on Britain was ‘highly likely’. Three days later, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, in a hesitant statement to the Commons, proposed that: police should be able to seize temporarily at the border the passports of people travelling overseas; there should be all-party talks on drawing up powers to prevent suspected British terrorists returning to Britain; those under terrorism prevention and investigation measures (Tpims) should be subject to ‘stronger locational constraints’. The Celtic Manor Resort (rooms from £77), near Junction 24 on the M4 outside Newport, prepared to accommodate

The Spectator

Nato must rediscover its purpose, or it will end up losing a war

This week’s Nato summit was originally intended to look back on lessons learned from Afghanistan and reflect on the notion that (as Barack Obama put it) a ‘decade of war is now ending’. How naively optimistic that seems now. In the past week a second American journalist has been beheaded in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents who call themselves Islamic State say that a British hostage will be next. So far, their war has claimed more than 25,000 lives. Meanwhile Russia is intensifying its war with Ukraine in a conflict that has seen the loss of at least 2,000 lives. The dignitaries who arrive in Cardiff for the summit will

Lavatch

2178: Saint and playwright

The unclued lights are connected by 33/23. One pair of unclued lights gives one context, in which two further pairs of unclued lights are followers of 33/23; remaining unclued lights, in another sense, are 33/23’s predecessors.   Across 1    Nasty offer about shock treatment for responsive organ (8) 8    Rubber — a lump’s returned (4) 11    Rarer Islamic itinerant message-bringers (12, hyphened) 12    It leaves soldiers with white marks (5) 14    Final, long ending shows addition to bill (7) 16    Greek maiden’s torment on earth (5) 17    Eddy in Glasgow is to go left (4) 22    Artist’s manipulated a ruler (8) 24    Chaos in bit of spring border (6) 25    Scot’s

Lavatch

to 2175: Elated grunt

The four works were Waverley (anagram of 12/21), Kenilworth (15/8), The Talisman (29/2) and Ivanhoe (38/37) by SIR WALTER SCOTT (diagonally NW to SE) which was to be shaded. Title: anagram of Redgauntlet.   First prize Roy Robinson, Sheffield Runners-up Sebastian Robinson, Glasgow; M.F. O’Brien, London N12