Society

Friday

Molly Guinness

Remembering the decimation of Crimea’s Tatars

Crimea’s Tatars are nervous after Russia’s annexation of the territory. The Tatars, Sunni Muslims who account for 12 per cent of Crimea’s population, boycotted Sunday’s referendum worried that the Russians would impose repressive and discriminatory laws on them. Reading Bohdan Nahaylo’s 1980 article, Murder of a Nation*, you can see why. First, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation. ‘In the early hours of 19 May 1944, some 238,000 people were abruptly awoken by units of the Soviet security forces and within minutes herded into cattle trucks. Sealed in without food or water, they were transported several thousand miles eastwards and eventually dispersed in Soviet Central Asia. Denounced before the

Thursday

Peter Jones

On teaching, St Jerome is with Daisy Christodoulou

Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which might be hard work but was satisfying and good for pupil self-esteem. Romans would have seconded that. In ad 403 St Jerome wrote a letter to Laeta, telling her how to teach her daughter Paula to read and write: make ivory or wooden letters; teach Paula a song to learn them and their sounds and their correct order, but also mix them up and encourage Paula to recognise them without such artificial aid; guide her first writing by hand, or

The Spectator

Spectator letters: John Rutter and Coeliac UK answer Rod Liddle

ME is real Sir: Rod Liddle may or may not be right that certain illnesses become fashionable once given a name and are illusory (‘Children with a severe case of the excuses’, 15 March). But ME — myalgic encephalomyelitis, alias post-viral fatigue syndrome or yuppie flu, is not one of them. It’s an unpleasant physical illness: it ruined seven years of my life. It probably takes a number of forms, but in my case it started with chicken pox, caught off my infant son. I seemed to make a complete recovery until a year later, when I began to experience unpleasant symptoms. These included abnormal sensitivity to sound and light, violently

The Spectator

MH370 isn’t the only flight that’s still missing

Plane vanished Some other planes, besides Flight MH370, which have disappeared without trace: — A Boeing 727 cargo plane that was being prepared for a flight in Luana, Angola, on 25 May 2003. It took off without permission and when last seen was headed south-westwards over the Atlantic. — An Antonov An-72 cargo plane with a crew of five on a flight from Port Bouet, Côte d’Ivoire to Rundu Airport, Namibia, on 22 December 1997. — A de Havilland Twin Otter operated by Merpati Nusantara Airlines with four crew and ten passengers on an internal Indonesian flight from Birma to Satartacik on 10 January 1995. Baby bills Does Britain have

Raymond Keene

True Blue

The Oxford v. Cambridge Varsity Match held at the Royal Automobile Club two weeks ago ended in a draw. This is the longest-running chess fixture in the world, dating originally from 1873, when such luminaries as Howard Staunton and Wilhelm Steinitz were in attendance. Cambridge now lead by 58 wins to 53 with 21 drawn matches. This week’s game is a fine win by Oxford.   Weaving-Chiu: Varsity Match, London 2014; Sicilian Defence   1 e4 c5 2 Nc3 e6 3 Nf3 d6 4 d4 cxd4 5 Nxd4 Nf6. After various transpositions we have reached a standard position from the Scheveningen Variation of the Sicilian Defence, one popularised by Kasparov

Taki

Paddy Macklin’s special kind of courage

On 1 July 1961, a beautiful 17-year-old girl appeared on the cover of Paris Match, then in its heyday: ‘C’est une deb,’  announced the cover, the once upon a time annual British ritual having crossed the Channel to the land of cheese. Her name was Cristina de Caraman, daughter of the Duke de Caraman, and she was so pretty and angelic-looking that even my mother, who was always after me to marry a Greek, told me she was the kind of girl I should get hold of rather permanently. I did that summer on the Riviera, where her mother’s English family had a house high above Monte Carlo. Cristina’s mother’s

Jeremy Clarke

The hilarity of Hoopoes and Luis Suárez’s teeth

My brother’s three Borders are called Roxy, Ruby and Taz. My one ambition in life is to own a terrier again, or rather three terrier bitches, just so that I can call them Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart. (Lear, mad on the heath: ‘The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.’) I ask my brother for the latest news of his dogs. He says he recently took Ruby up to Yorkshire, to be served by a well-known pedigree Border stud dog. My brother is a regular customer there. It’s a ten-hour round trip. The moment he draws up in his car, he says, the dog’s

Melissa Kite

The girl who hadn’t heard of the Berlin Wall

‘Question 2. In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?’ shouted the quizmaster. And then he repeated this with dramatic pauses, as quizmasters are apt to do: ‘In which year…did the Berlin Wall…come down?’ ‘Oh, yeah!’ said the youngest person in our team. ‘I just got that!’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she said, with a huge grin on her face. ‘1989,’ hissed one of the team members. ‘Yup, 89, definitely,’ whispered another member. ‘I remember because I’d just got divorced and I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway and…’ But the youngest member of the team was still having something of an epiphany. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she kept

Alexander Chancellor

It’s sheer madness for Cameron to resurrect the hunting issue

My house in south Northamptonshire looks out over parkland on which Henry VIII used to hunt deer with Anne Boleyn. The only deer on it nowadays are the unhunted muntjacs, charmless little creatures that only arrived in England from Asia 400 years later; but there still are plenty of foxes, which carry out periodic massacres of my chickens. I am in the country of the famous Grafton hunt, but the hunt, alas, never ventures into my area because of the busy roads that surround it. The Grafton is still, however, extremely active elsewhere in the county and thrives just as much as it did before Parliament’s ban on hunting with

Robin Oakley

Comebacks, longshots and cruel disappointments: what makes Cheltenham Festival great

No sporting event anywhere compresses so much drama, emotion and character into a single venue as the Cheltenham Festival. It wasn’t just an extraordinary Gold Cup — in that six horses jumped the last with a chance of winning and at least two jockeys will go to their graves believing they were denied a victory that should have been theirs: the blanket finish had to be investigated fully by the stewards before the result was confirmed. What kept crowds of 60,000 or so entranced were the endless series of back stories, of comebacks that worked and comebacks that didn’t, of opportunities taken and cruel disappointments. Jim Culloty, who had ridden

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 20 March 2014

A number of young Israelis are taking the International bridge world by storm. All in their twenties, their achievements so far have been impressive and show no signs of slowing down. Their Junior team took Silver in China’s 2012 World Youth Championships. Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz won the coveted Cavendish Pairs in Monaco, and four of them have just qualified for Israel’s Open Team in the European Championships in Croatia this June. The two I know best are Lee Rosenthal, a 24-year-old ex-soldier, and Dror Padon, arguably one of the strongest Junior players of all time. Lee now lives in London and Dror is a frequent visitor, often playing

Raymond Keene

No. 306

Black to play. This position is from Miles-Hodgson, Zaragoza 1993. Black has a powerful build-up on the kingside. How did he now exploit this to score a quick win? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 March 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 Qxb8+ Last week’s winner Richard Hazell, Tickhill, South Yorkshire

Toby Young Toby Young

I was all for press freedom. Then I heard from Gary Lineker…

It looks as though Hacked Off has finally won its three-year battle for tighter regulation of the press. Why do I say this? Because on Tuesday it published a list of 200 people who agree with them in various national newspapers. These weren’t just the usual suspects — Hugh Grant, Rowan Williams, Richard Curtis. And this isn’t the same list of panjandrums Hacked Off has published in this week’s Spectator. No, these were, in Hacked Off’s words, ‘the leading figures in literature, arts, science, academia, human rights and the law’. Not some leading figures, mind you, but the leading figures. So who are these luminaries? One of them is Zoe Margolis,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How long must I wait to tuck in?

Q. I am always making or receiving phone calls which get cut off. When I ring the person back their line is engaged as they are trying to ring me too. Mary, whose responsibility is it to ring back when a call has been disturbed in this way? Can you use your immense authority to rule, once and for all? — A.B., London W8 A. The person who initiated the call is duty bound to ring back. It was they who made the overture in the first place and they who presumably have something to say to you. There is no implied hostility in your failure to ring them back.

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Who dines at Highgrove when Prince Charles doesn’t?

Highgrove is the country house of the Prince of Wales. I write about Highgrove because, although it is not a restaurant, even of the wackiest kind — which can only make me fantasise that Ludwig of Bavaria opened a gay sauna in Neuschwanstein castle — the prince does admit strangers when he is not there and only when he is not there: on Burns Night for instance, or Mothering Sunday, and now, on St David’s Day: a black tie dinner for £95 per face including service. The dinner is in a custom-built barn in the Hobbit style. It is made for his receptions, so I suppose it is less a

Dot Wordsworth

When Google can’t help you

‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious way these machines have. But my husband had unwittingly hit upon a trend in modern culture: that we hardly know anything if we are deprived of the help of Mr Google and his friends. Last week I was standing outside St Fin Barre’s cathedral (in Cork) and someone was pointing out the angel on the central gable of the west facade, which the architect William Burges had wanted to be a figure of Christ in

Charles Moore Charles Moore

How I became editor of The Spectator – aged 27

Thirty years ago this Saturday, I became editor of this magazine. In the same month, the miners’ strike began, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as the right-wing press still insisted on calling him) won the Chesterfield by-election, the FT index rose above 900 for the first time and the mortgage rate fell to 10.5 per cent. Mark Thatcher was reported to be leaving the country to sell Lotus cars in America for £45,000 a year. Although she now tells me she has no memory of it, Wendy Cope wrote a poem entitled ‘The Editor of The Spectator is 27 Years Old’. Because I was young, the events are vivid in my mind,

Laurence Fox

Laurence Fox’s diary: On being married to a WOP

I have just shaved off my beard in preparation for a new series of Lewis because I want to look my best for my on-screen love, Donald Whately. Donald? Isn’t his name Kevin? I’ll explain. A few years ago I was fishing off the end of a jetty in Florida. A large American gentleman approached me. ‘I’m sorry to bother you son, but my wife asked me to ask you if you are an actor from the British TV?’ I am, I said. ‘Dang. I just knew it,’ he replied, patting me vigorously on the back. His wife stood behind him, nodding and smiling kindly. ‘Well, we just had to say

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 March 2014

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the economy was working but the job was far from done. He expected further falls in unemployment and wages rising faster than prices this year. The economy, he suggested, would return this year to its size in 2008. Before the Budget, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that as many as 1.9 million working families could receive a tax-free childcare allowance worth up to £2,000 per child. Mr Osborne had announced that the help-to-buy scheme for new homes would be extended until 2020. He also let it be known that a garden city of 15,000 dwellings would

The Spectator

George Osborne’s pensions revolution

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the 2014 budget” startat=749] Listen [/audioplayer]It is easy to see why George Osborne seemed so confident ahead of the Budget. His radical reform of the pension system, allowing people far easier access to their pension pots, will not only help the retired (in the short term) but will raise money for the government, as it taxes what they spend. The Chancellor boasted that this was the biggest single reform to the pension system since the 1920s, and he has a point. Until now, the system had operated on the premise that people should save, and that banks normally offer reasonable