Society

Monday

Anne Jolis

The idiot economy – behind the ‘dark web’ cyber-crime busts

Spectator Money is out, with ideas on how to make it, spend it and even how to be seen spending it. Freddy Gray looks at the ‘social economy’ – think tax loopholes for financiers of politically favoured endeavours; while Camilla Swift peruses credit cards such as Kanye West’s ‘African American Express’ and the Dubai First Royale, ‘studded with diamonds. Bring it on, Sheikh Sugardaddy.’ Spare a thought, though, for the inconspicuous consumers – or at least, the wannabes. This segment took a hit last week in a joint operation dubbed ‘Onymous’, in which the FBI, Europol and friends arrested 17 alleged web-administrators and vendors and shuttered dozens of sites peddling child pornography, weapons, fake Danish passports, hacking services and so on. ‘Cash, drugs, gold and silver

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Armistice, war and remembrance, seen through the pages of The Spectator

The verse before Laurence Binyon’s ‘They shall not grow old…We will remember them’, is this: They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted, They fell with their faces to the foe. It’s reflected in an article that appeared in a 1917 Spectator under the headline ‘The Splendour of Youth’. We may not say that the development of the noblest qualities in the flower of the nation is a justification of war, but none can deny that it is a sustaining consolation. The war has shown of what British youth is

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Michael O’Leary, my favourite anti-hero

Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has long been an anti-hero of this column. I loved his airline when it was consistently rude to me as a passenger, because it set benchmarks of ruthless punctuality and rock-bottom fares that shook the whole European airline sector. I was suspicious of the idea that, having exhausted other routes to growth, he was going to polish up his customer service and stop ‘unnecessarily pissing people off’; but the new tone is a triumph, and Ryanair’s profit is expected to top €750 million for the current year. ‘If I’d known being nicer to customers was going to work so well,’ O’Leary says, ‘I’d have started many

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: acknowledgment pages that say thanks but no thanks (plus: verse viagra)

E.E. Cummings does the anti-dedication in style in his 1935 volume tellingly titled No Thanks, which he self-published with financial help from his mother. Its dedication page contains a concrete poem printed in the shape of a funeral urn that opens with the words ‘NO THANKS TO…’ and goes on to list the names of the 14 publishing houses who had turned the collection down. The latest competition, which called for an author’s acknowledgments page that bears subtle indications that no thanks at all are due to those mentioned, required an altogether more softly-softly approach, with any ill will on the part of the author to be cunningly concealed beneath

Friday

Julie Bindel

24 Hours in Police Custody: a C4 programme that finally tells the truth about ‘honour crimes’

Settling down to watch 24 Hours in Police Custody, the new Channel 4 programme brought to us by the team behind the excellent 24 Hours in A&E, I was expecting some proper gripping telly. What I did not envisage was to be further educated about the level of plonkery that some men are capable of. And I don’t just mean the criminals. The custody sergeant this week was checking in a 60-year old man who was under arrest for an alleged assault and kidnap. The case was called ‘honour-based violence’, which usually refer to crimes against women and girls perpetrated by religious maniacs. There are countless such cases in the UK: revenge attacks on women who refuse to

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Watching the Home Front

From The Spectator, 7 November 1914: We say without hesitation that if every town and urban district and village in England had a Guard formed on the lines of the Mitcham Town Guard, something would have been accomplished that might prove most valuable in the event of invasion. We shall no doubt be asked by many military critics whether we really believe that these Village and Town Guards, composed of boys under nineteen and middle-aged men from thirty-eight to sixty-five, would be of any sort of use from the military point of view. Our answer is, in the first place, that men who have learned the use of the rifle, and

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Mindfulness, addiction, and dinner with Richard Nixon

Mind games Sir: I hope that people are not unduly put off by Melanie McDonagh’s misrepresentation of mindfulness as a cop-out for navel-gazers who lack the moral fibre to engage in ‘proper’ religion (‘The cult of mindfulness’, 1 November). She describes it as a ‘practice of self-obsession’, but it is the opposite: it creates a space in which the self can be seen for what it is as it hops around, generating superfluous judgments. You begin to obsess less about what your ‘self’ compulsively comes up with, and to approach life from a more anchored perspective. May I invite those who think that sounds bogus and flaky to engage in

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I stop my future son-in-law saying ‘must of’

Q. My future son-in-law has been successfully house-trained in the use of upper-middle-class English over the years that he has been walking out with my daughter. However, one bad habit remains. How can I cure him of saying ‘must of’ when he means ‘must have’? He always says ‘of’ very clearly, as though he really means it. I dare not correct him for fear of making him feel inadequate. —Name and address withheld A. First disarm him with praise. Find an excuse to praise the fluency and elegance of his conversation, perhaps by comparing him with a less articulate contemporary. Then add, ‘And I don’t think I’ve ever caught you

Raymond Keene

Sochi Challenge

On Saturday 8 November the first game will be played in the three-week long rematch between defending world champion Magnus Carlsen and the man from whom he took the title last year, Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand. When Carlsen seized the title from Anand in Chennai last year, the magnitude of his victory was so immense that it would appear to have terminated Anand’s career at the top. Surprisingly, Carlsen then proceeded to display feeble form as world champion, losing a couple of games to lesser lights in this year’s Olympiad and turning in a lacklustre performance in the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis. Anand, on the other hand, qualified for

Raymond Keene

No. 339

White to play. This position is from Carlsen-Anand, Amber Rapidplay 2008. White is a pawn ahead but Black has counterplay. How did White now increase his material advantage with a tactical shot? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 11 November 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 Nxe5 Last week’s winner Chris Adams, Llangollen, Wales

Peter Jones

No, Richard Branson, our greatest achievements don’t come from our greatest pain

Explaining the death of a pilot testing a Virgin Galactic rocket-ship, Sir Richard Branson intoned: ‘I truly believe that humanity’s greatest achievements come out of the greatest pain.’ The ancients would have been appalled, both at the crass ignorance of the sentiment and its implication. It is hard to see how papyrus, made out of marsh plants in Egypt since about 3,000 BC, resulted from ‘the greatest pain’. Yet, in combination with the presumably pain-free invention of the Greek alphabet, from which the Roman and our alphabet derive, this material was to drive literacy and a knowledge revolution across the Mediterranean. The technology took another dramatic leap forward when the codex,

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and

Taki

The difficult art of finding the right yacht

To Newport, Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union but one of the most beautiful. Driving north-east from the Bagel, there’s Long Island Sound on one’s right, and beautifully foliaged farms and towns on the left. The colours are spectacular: golden browns, brick reds and lemon greens. New England is the most beautiful region of America, except for parts of Virginia, where they build warships rather than sailing boats. The reason for the trip was to find the new Bushido — as difficult a task as living one’s life under the Bushido code, and then some. Just before crossing into Rhode Island I stopped at Mystic, Connecticut, where 26

Jeremy Clarke

Bidding a fond, and drunken, farewell to the awe-inspiring Mark Amory

Rubbing shoulders with political suits on the pavement outside the Westminster Arms, I drank two pints of Spitfire. Pump primed, I strolled the 50 quaint yards along Old Queen Street and entered the Spectator offices through the open door of number 22.  An elderly chap on his way out said, ‘You’ve missed the speeches.’ I said, ‘Is all of literary London in there?’ ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he said huffily. I went downstairs to the party and grabbed a ready-poured gin and tonic from the drinks table of one’s dreams. For the next hour, knocking back gins and working my way to the back of the garden, I chatted

Melissa Kite

My spaniel Cydney has covered herself in glory and disgrace

Just before Cydney ran off and disgraced me on the first day of the shooting season, she covered herself in glory. This seems to be the way of things with spaniels. They are a bit like children in the sense that, so far as their public performances are concerned, they either fill you with pride or plunge you into an abyss of mortification. Before she decided to drop me right in it, the little dog performed a really difficult retrieve from a fast-flowing stream. A hen bird was wedged between some fallen branches underneath the current. The head of the picking-up team — who also happens to be the guy

Alexander Chancellor

Two ways to disgrace a president

On 21 October Ben Bradlee, the famous ex-editor of the Washington Post, died, aged 93. The day before that, on 20 October, Monica Lewinsky, 41, the even more famous ex-girlfriend of Bill Clinton, made her first public speech after ten years spent keeping out of the public eye. They had nothing in common except for the fact that each had been responsible for bringing disgrace to a president of the United States. Richard Nixon would have faced impeachment by Congress over the Watergate scandal, which the Post exposed, if he had not first resigned in 1974 (the first president ever to do so) and then been pardoned by his successor,

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 6 November 2014

To get good results at bridge, it’s not enough to play well — your opponents need to play badly; and if they won’t oblige, you’ll need to help them along. Some players do this the unethical way: they try to intimidate their opponents with officious behaviour, or else create a whirlwind of jollity designed to shatter their concentration. One player I know — I’m tempted to name him but I won’t — always manages to make the sort of cutting remark that leaves his victim unable to dwell on anything for the next hour. He once walked behind me before a match was about to start and paused to say,

The Spectator

You can still book your flight to Mars

Space to dream Richard Branson’s dream of commercial space flights has suffered a setback after a prototype craft crashed. But others are still offering opportunities for adventure… — Golden Spike is an American company planning to send a couple of passengers to the Moon from 2020 onwards. Each will pay an estimated return fare of $700 million. — Inspiration Mars Foundation plan to take advantage of a rare alignment of planets in 2018 to send a male/female couple on a ‘quick’ 501-day flypast of Mars. As yet, it hasn’t announced whether or not they will have to pay for the privilege. — Mars One, a Dutch company, plans to start

Toby Young Toby Young

Why schools can’t teach character

I participated in a lively discussion about character education at Policy Exchange earlier this week. For those of you who don’t follow every twist of the education debate, the idea that ‘character’ should be taught in schools has gained a lot of traction in recent years. And support for it doesn’t divide along party lines: both Tristram Hunt and Nicky Morgan are advocates of character education. By ‘character’, the supporters of this idea have various desirable traits in mind, such as tenacity, reliance and self-control. There’s plenty of evidence that a child’s possession of these qualities is a strong predictor of later success. To give just one example, children who

Dot Wordsworth

Should ‘suicide’ mean pig-killing?

There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking as to be denied by Baptist historians for two and a half centuries,’ Stephen Wright, the expert on separatist clergy wrote, ‘he rebaptised first himself and then his followers, and set out his new views in The Character of the Beast (1610).’ His former confederate Richard Bernard fired a counterblast in that year showing (to his own satisfaction) that ‘the Church of England is Apostolicall, the Separation Schismaticall’. Reading a word like sebaptist we take the prefix se- to indicate a reflexive act, a self-baptism, as we would if reading