Society

Thursday

Raymond Keene

No. 316

Black to play. This position is a variation from Mamedov-Motylev, Gashimov ‘B’ Group 2014. How does Black conclude his kingside attack in fine style? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 3 June 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 Qe8+ Last week’s winner John Briggs, Newcastle upon Tyne

Taki

Why don’t any of the sisterhood take up the banner of poor Noor Hussain’s wife?

 New York Here’s a question for you loyal readers: if a hubby asks his wife to cook him a hearty meal of goat meat and she serves him lentils instead, is he within his rights to beat her to death with a stick, as a New Yorker who is on trial this week did? Mind you, Noor Hussain is not a native Noo Yawker, he comes from Pakistan. But he’s as American as, I guess, not apple pie but lentils, which got him in a spot of bother to begin with. Once upon a time immigrants had names that ended in vowels, like Cuomo or LaGuardia; now they’re called Hussain,

Jeremy Clarke

Two narcissists trapped in one static caravan

I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a Buddhist silent retreat, where you have to listen in horrified amazement to your own thoughts. During the day I walked the cliff path; in the evenings I sat on the caravan steps wishing I had a rook rifle. On my walks, I did acquire a book, however: Sigmund Freud’s essay On Narcissism. It was on a community book-swap shelf in a disused telephone box. I’ve been picking up Freud and putting him down again perplexed and defeated for most of my adult life. But when I opened this one and

Melissa Kite

How I finished writing my novel

In the end, I threw my mobile phone into a sack of Chudley’s dog biscuits. It was the only way I could finish the book. The bag of Chudley’s was in a cupboard so it didn’t even matter that I hadn’t silenced the phone before I threw it in there. At most, all I could hear as I hammered away on the keys of my laptop was a faint beep every few minutes as everyone in the universe texted me to say how disgusted they were that I wasn’t answering. Result: finished book. In one day. That’s all it took. Six months I’ve been labouring over this novel with my

Robin Oakley

Will racing waste its Scoop6 jackpot?

Eight people became millionaires last Saturday, collecting £1,342,599 each when the Scoop6 bet, which had been rolled over for 12 weeks without a winner, was finally won. With racing’s narrative having been dominated for weeks by the gamble to find six winners on the day, there was more than £16 million in the pot: £11 million had been staked that day alone by punters large and small trying to collect an instant fortune. Let us hope no relationships suffer: I could not help thinking of the lottery winner’s wife who asked, ‘Will you still feel the same about me now you’ve won all that money?’ only to meet the reply,

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Harry’s Bar, where a slice of cake costs €32 – and is worth it

Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded tagliarelli and books about the meals it served 30 years ago to the rich and famous; it is into auto-iconography, like the city it lives in. For this, and so much else, I blame Ernest Hemingway. He ate here after shooting birds in the lagoon and doesn’t the world know it? Some men fought against

Dot Wordsworth

The sinister new meaning of ‘support’

When I asked my husband why paramedical professions were given to remaking the language in strange ways, he replied in a threatening tone ‘Whadya mean?’ I think he was in denial. But it is undeniably true that where two or three trained counsellors or disability campaigners are gathered together, the first victim will be the English language. Who was it, after all, that came up with the phrase ‘issues around’? The latest craze is to urge the need for supporting people to do something, or even into something. So, on the NHS careers website, part of the job of a social worker may be to work  with offenders, ‘supervising them in

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 29 May 2014

It is always exciting when a strong new team’s tournament enters the calendar, and the inaugural Balaton Invitational, held outside Budapest at Lake Balaton, looks set to become an annual event. Two members of my team,  Thor-Erik Hoftaniska (Hoffa) and Thomas Charlsen (Charley), played for the Norwegian Open Team (and won the event) and I took as a third pair the brilliant Bulgarian duo Ivan Nanev and Rosen Gunev. Ten teams competed in the round robin and four made it to the semi-finals. Two good things happened to us: we made the play-offs and we beat the Norwegians! Unfortunately, we lost the semi-final to a top-weight Dutch/Norwegian team and finally

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 May 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, responded to the triumph of the UK Independence Party in the European elections (which left the Conservatives in third place for the first time ever in a national poll) by having dinner with other European leaders in Brussels, which he said had ‘got too big, too bossy, too interfering’. Ukip secured 4,352,051 votes, increasing the number of its seats by 11 to 24; Labour took 20, an increase of seven; the Conservatives 19, a reduction of seven. The Liberal Democrats plummeted, narrowly capturing one seat (down from 11). Even the Greens did better, increasing their seats from two to three. Nigel Farage, the leader

Toby Young Toby Young

Michael Gove did not kill Of Mice and Men or To Kill A Mockingbird

I suppose I should be grateful that the liberal intelligentsia doesn’t bother to check any of the facts if an opportunity presents itself to attack Michael Gove. They have a fixed idea about him, which is that he’s a Tory philistine who wants to turn the clock back to the 1950s, and they leap on any story that confirms that view, regardless of how far-fetched it is. The reason I’m grateful is because it enables me to scratch out a living putting the record straight. Last November, Polly Toynbee wrote a column in the Guardian claiming that Gove intended to strip English literature from the national curriculum, an act of

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What’s the best way to squash a bore?

Q. Two acquaintances of mine have somehow inveigled their way into my dining circuit. They are men who, despite privilege and early promise, have made failures of their lives, but my goodness they both believe they have a story to tell. It’s not just tedious, but they bore with a ferocity that feels ideological in nature. After the last occasion I was determined to sort them out but was restrained by my friends who claimed they were basically good men. I know the dinner-party bore is nothing new but I wondered if you had any fresh ideas on how, with a degree of politeness, such people could be tempered and

Doc

Blank crossword

Solvers must create the barred grid for themselves; the resulting grid is symmetrical whichever side is uppermost. When submitting an entry, solvers need not indicate the clue numbers, but must clearly indicate the pattern of eight bars at the centre of the grid which is an example of the theme. This pattern is named as one of the unclued lights which are of a kind and all are shown in Brewer. Ignore three acute accents. Across 4    Dictator takes Artemis out East – he fears Gaul (11) 11    What about painting wrongly? (7) 12    (6) 13    Trains initially need union backing before long connection by phone

Doc

to 2161: Appellation contrôlée

The unclued lights begin with DOC (the Italian abbreviated equivalent of APPELLATION CONTRÔLÉE).   First prize Dennis Cotterell, Carlisle Runners-up Clare Reynolds, London SE24; Richard Poole, Harlech, Gwynedd

Kris Hopkins

This government is solving Britain’s homes crisis

An Englishman’s home is his castle. And today, record numbers of people are living that adage thanks to Help to Buy; a scheme that is reviving house-building after decades of inaction. Statistics released today show more than 27,000 homes have been bought through Help to Buy. This is great news. For too long, hardworking people in this country have been priced out of the housing market: for the simple reason that demand was outstripping supply and because prospective buyers who could afford a mortgage were not able to stump up the huge deposits banks were demanding. Politicians on all sides recognise this problem; but it is this Conservative-led government which is taking action.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Let Evangelical Protestants be Evangelical Protestants

Pastor James McConnell of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast has gone and done it. He declared in a sermon that: “Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell”. Golly. Not since the Rev Ian Paisley got the boot into the pope as Old Redsocks and indeed as the Scarlet Woman herself have we heard anything quite so robust in the way of religious rhetoric. (Oddly enough, there was something almost lyrical about it; he had lovely cadences.) But the anti-popery tradition is precisely the context these remarks should be seen in. Evangelical Protestantism has a thing about false prophets; it also has a thing about

Max Pemberton

Introducing a new magazine: Spectator Health

This week’s issue of The Spectator comes with a new quarterly magazine, Spectator Health. As editor of this exciting new publication, I aim to do something no other health magazine does: give readers an informative and above all useful health guide that is authoritative without being bossy. As a doctor, I’m fed up of seeing people bombarded with conflicting health advice in the media. It’s difficult for even highly intelligent readers to know what to believe and what to ignore.I’m also fed up of health nazis using the media to order people to be good. Spectator Health will cut through the jargon and confusion and give you clear, sensible and

Roy Kelly

Approaching Little Big Horn

All spring the scattered bands gathered, the People, the Human Beings, all those like themselves on this earth — Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho. Movement and magnetism, wildness in the air, the power of the buffalo and the People swarming and flowing north to the sweetness of the old land and the old ways, up on the Powder River, out along the Rosebud and Greasy Grass called by whites the Little Big Horn. The great leaders come: Low Dog, Two Moon, Touch The Clouds, Rain In The Face, Gall. Wise men and leaders, young warriors, all come. The family men and the family members, babies and children, wives, grandparents, all

Liam Halligan

The revolution the West needs (and won’t get)

The western world is a mess. The ‘advanced’ economies are failing to generate higher living standards for the majority of citizens. Many of us believe, rightly, that our children and grandchildren will have less prosperous lives than we do. That not only runs counter to the tide of western history, but jars with natural human instincts, creating a deep sense of unease. The public no longer trusts the political classes to deliver a brighter future, so lots of us don’t vote. In the European elections, only two fifths of voters bothered casting their ballot. Many of those who did, of course, abandoned mainstream parties for the extremes. The common western

Roger Alton Roger Alton

From Lewis Hamilton to Kevin Pietersen – who’s the worst team player?

Ah teamwork! There’s no me in team, as David Brent used to observe sagely, but there are often plenty of cocks, as he didn’t. And really, you get to thinking, Lewis Hamilton ought to start sorting himself out. He whines and moans just a tad too much. Watching Lewis and Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg on the podium at Monaco, it was impossible to imagine how one human being could ignore another in so many ways in such a confined space. Max Mosley and the editor of the News of the World in the ante-room at the Pearly Gates couldn’t run them close. Lewis has an alarming habit of not getting