Society

Thursday

Columba

2139: Separated

Nine unclued lights can be separated into three groups; each group consists of three definitions of one of three words into which the remaining unclued light can be separated.   Across   1    Estate wild spree devastates (8) 6    Bird with tail obscured by country shrub (6) 10    Fellow, one feels sadly, holding role in retreat that can be clearly shown (12) 11    Old sweets, no end of lemon drops (5) 13    Measure day in life (7) 14    Operating illegally in desert in confusion (6) 16    Locate quote in speech (4) 17    Oval base designed for basins (8) 21    Cattle thieves

Columba

To 2136: Howdunit

Six of the unclued entries contained the Cluedo character surnames; the remaining unclued entries were therefore a murder weapon and location from the game.   First prize Michael Hawkins, Matlock, Derbyshire Runners-up Ferdinand Dobbs, London SW1; C.R. Haigh, Hassocks, West Sussex

Steerpike Steerpike

Prince Charles lights up India

It could have all gone very, very wrong for Prince Charles on the day he reached retirement age. The Prince of Wales has not even started the job he was born to do, yet as part of his training he is in India ahead of his officially deputising for the Queen as Head of the Commonwealth. Where back home a simple candle on top of a cake would have done the birthday justice, the owner of an antiques shop in Kochi put out 65 oil lamps for the visiting heir, one of which set fire to the Prince’s linen jacket. According to ITV News who witnessed the festivities, Charles quipped: ‘How quickly did you put me out?’

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 podcast: Blackout Britain, the rudeness of John Bercow and breaking the immigration taboo

Is Britain on the verge of an energy crisis? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Mail on Sunday’s David Rose discusses how Britain’s choice green energy over efficient energy has put us on a path to disaster, and why it is politicians, not the Big Six energy firms, who are blame for the coming crisis. Would repealing the Climate Change Act make any difference? And will a significant policy change only come if the lights go out? Douglas Murray also examines Paul Collier, the man who has made it OK for the left to talk about immigration. After the negative reception of David Goodhart’s book on immigration, can

David Rose

Blackout Britain — why our energy crisis is only just beginning

BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, has been headquartered in Germany since before the country formally existed. Founded in 1865 by the industrial pioneer Friedrich Engelhorn, it still occupies the vast site on the banks of the Rhine at Ludwigshafen where its first dye and soda factories were built. A third of its staff are employed in Rhineland Palatinate. It is a global company, yet as German as Goethe and gummi bears. A few days ago Kurt Bock, the firm’s chief executive, warned that its Ludwigshafen plant may soon be forced to close, with BASF’s German jobs relocated elsewhere. The reason, he said, was Germany’s soaring energy costs and the

Aidan Hartley

Aidan Hartley: Kenya is special like no other African nation

As I write this, my hands are seared and bruised from holding a hot iron after branding our cattle. We have castrated our steers and piled up the testicles on fence posts to fry later. We fought the cattle to the ground. We pulled their tails and they bellowed. I feel so happy. The cattle brand sizzles into the flesh with a hiss and a cloud of smoke as it burns in the brand KH9, which has been the Hartley mark here in Kenya since 1936. Finally we might have a stud herd that can make a difference. This has all been going on in my absence, but I have

Joan Collins

Joan Collins’s notebook: Captain Phillips is great, but Gravity sent me to sleep

All eyes on the Philippines this week, and rightly so. Godspeed to those American and British ships making their way to the devastation in Leyte and Samar. It’s sad, though, that the global news machine can only process one disaster at a time. The world has all but forgotten the tropical storms and floods that have battered Acapulco in the past two months. It’s a lesser tragedy, with mercifully a much less significant death toll, but nevertheless it tears at my heart. Acapulco was my youthful stamping ground, the most glamorous, exciting, beautiful place I had ever been. At 22 I went on holiday there for a week and stayed

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: I’ve been living with a miracle for 60 years

This is probably the most self-indulgent column I’ve written. I hope not to make a habit of it. It’s an ode to — and something of a lament for — my own right arm. I was six when I fell off a small cliff above a disused railway embankment in Nicosia, Cyprus. The blue bicycle I was wheeling was new: a birthday present and my first bike. A novice, I let the back wheel slip over the edge — and if you’re holding the handlebars and the back wheel slides, a bicycle moves in counter-intuitive ways. Mine pulled me with it. I refused to let go. I came to in

Harry Mount

Notes on… Motoring in Greece and Italy

‘Buy on the bullets’ is the cry of the most ruthless stockbrokers — invest just before a war, after the stock markets dive, before the recovery kicks in. In the same way, now is the time for us heartless continental drivers to head for poor, battered Greece. Maybe it’s not quite war-torn yet, but driving around the Peloponnese this autumn was like touring a post-apocalyptic ghost town. Once you get out of the sun-bleached concrete sprawl of Athens, the splendid motorway to Kalamata is eerily empty at all hours of the day. Rocketing along at 80 mph, I could afford to stare for several seconds at the Corinth canal below

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The man who made it OK to talk about immigration

It takes a lot to make the subject of immigration respectable for liberals, at least if you’re pointing out its problematic aspects. But Paul Collier, an Oxford economist specialising in the world’s bottom billion, has, in the 270-odd pages of his new book Exodus, opened up the issue for the left — well, for all comers, actually. Which, for a book suggesting among other things that, left to itself, there is no natural limit to immigration, is quite something. ‘The overwhelming reaction I’ve had,’ he told me, from his Oxford berth at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, ‘is that people thank me for making the subject discussable.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

If Carberry doesn’t open for England, the world should split asunder

In sport, as in life, you just don’t know where you stand any more. Look at the Premier League: no club knows where they stand except for Crystal Palace, who are being stood on by all the others. Everyone else can beat everyone else. Manchester City, who must be one of the best teams, are eighth; Southampton are good for the Europa League but currently could end up in the Champions League. But it’s all good for business. The England football team are about to find out exactly where they stand after two friendlies and the World Cup draw next month. The England rugby team are about to find out

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Soldiers aren’t social workers, Mr Cameron. Remember that before taking on hopeless wars

The ghost people, the letter people. The ones we hear about in court but never call by their real name; instead, Baby P and Girl A. And now Marine A. They remain hidden from us for reasons which are, one supposes, rational and sensible, but somehow this non-naming magnifies our shame or abhorrence at whatever has befallen them, or what they have done. It must be bad if we’re to strip them of their identities, no? Eventually they shuffle off the stage, after some sort of justice has been dispensed, still in some cases anonymous, shrouded. Shuffle off, indeed. Marine A dispatched a Taleban insurgent with a bullet to the

Thomas Eaton

St. Petersburg: Off Nevsky Prospect

‘On the shore of desolate waves / he stood, full of lofty thoughts / and gazed afar.’ So begins Pushkin’s epic poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, with the legend of Peter the Great founding his new city in 1703. A remote and inhospitable swampland in north-western Russia was transformed into his ‘window on the West’, a Baroque and neo-classical masterpiece. I came to St Petersburg to learn Russian. Enrolled for an intensive course at a private language school, I opted for full immersion and stayed with a local family for the two weeks. At Pulkovo airport I was met by a representative and politely but firmly reminded that we would now only communicate in Russian.

Michael Henderson

Berlin: The best bar in the world

‘You were at the Fish, I hear,’ a Berlin friend told me. ‘I didn’t know you were an old hippie.’ Reputations can cling to places as they do to people. Zwiebelfisch, the Berlin inn he was referring to, has not been a haunt of hippies — radicals, more like, ‘the class of ’68’ — for at least two decades. Now it is a home for all-comers; because, in the eyes of some of us who have spent years staring through a glass darkly, it is the finest bar in Christendom. Sited on the northwest side of Savignyplatz, west Berlin, it may not strike the person wandering along Grolmanstrasse as a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

George Galloway’s one-man mission to save the Union

George Galloway is unhappy. One of his interlocutors on Twitter has told him to ‘Fuck off back to England’. Gorgeous George is in Glasgow for the first in a series of roadshows in which he sets out his case for Scotland remaining part of the Union and he’s not going anywhere. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not even to England. This will disappoint his many critics. But Galloway has a new, higher calling: saving whatever remains of the British left. To do that he must first save Britain. Which means persuading his fellow Scots they should remain a part of the United Kingdom. Like a latter-day Othello, he loves

William Cook

Tangier: Hidden treasure

‘I remember you from last time,’ said the young man on the promenade. It was my first night back in Tangier. I was alone and tired and lonely. I liked the idea of meeting someone who knew me, if only from a brief encounter a few years before. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, though I didn’t recognise him. In his cheap suit he seemed anonymous, like a policeman in plain clothes. It was nearly midnight, but the esplanade was still crowded. On the beach below, shrieking children were sprinting across the sand. Out to sea, over the Strait of Gibraltar, the bright lights of Tarifa were winking in the darkness.

Jack Wakefield

Venice: A feast of great art

Venice is a 10,000-carat jewel set by the greatest ever goldsmith pinned to the breast of the most beautiful woman to have lived. Built out of a need for security in the turbulent world of late antiquity, it was protected by the lagoon, which also gave it political stability, and with political stability came riches, conservatism and trade. The great longevity of the serene republic and the restricted space of the island made it a mishmash of styles and architectures. The exuberant frontage plastered along the canals gives the sensation of being immersed in a grandiose opera set. It is a fabulous and wonderful and totally pleasurable explosion of culture.

John Gimlette

New York: Literary ghost tour

Deep below West 52nd Street is a massive stash of booze. The cops never found it during Prohibition, and it belongs to the 21 Club. Famous for its sumptuously New Yorky dishes (like filet mignon with kumquat vinaigrette), 21 is a real boys’ den. Dark and plush, the subterranean rooms are festooned with intriguing junk: footballs, helmets, a model torpedo boat given by JFK, and a smashed racket from McEnroe. There are even 25 paintings by Remington, left by debtors during the depression. But oddly it isn’t a club at all. Anyone can go there, provided they’ve got a fat wallet and hollow legs. You just need to book (www.21club.com;