Society

Thursday

Raymond Keene

The 16th?

Magnus Carlsen is seeking to become the 16th world chess champion in a line that includes such giants as Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov. The $5 million World Chess Championship will be a clash between the reigning Indian world champion Viswanathan Anand (defending champion from the World Chess Championship 2012 and twice winner of the coveted Sportsman of the Year title in India) and the young Norwegian challenger. It will be held under the auspices of Fidé, the World Chess Federation, from 9 to 28 November in Chennai. There will be 12 games — one per day, with days off for rest — plus a 13th and final

Raymond Keene

No. 289

Black to play. This is a variation from Svidler-Nepomniatchi, Novgorod 2013. Svidler avoided this position, despite the fact that White appears to be a piece up for very little. What possible danger had he foreseen? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 29 October 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 Ng4 Last week’s winner Dave Forbes, Ellon, Aberdeenshire

Mary Killen

Dear Mary — The e-cigarette party is the new Tupperware party

Q. One of my oldest and best friends, who has lived up north for years, begged me to let her daughter move in with us as a paying guest for her second year of university in London. The daughter was literally homeless and staying in a Premier Inn. She promised the girl would be good and would not bring friends back. This has turned out to be true. Unfortunately, we had no idea that her classes would only occupy her for two days a week and that the rest of the time she would be present in our flat. How can we ask her not to be at home so

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 24 October 2013

Ridley’s wrong Sir: In last week’s issue the former Northern Rock chairman rejoiced in the ‘good news’ that climate change would not start to damage our planet for another 57 years (‘Carry on warming’, 19 October). I am not a scientist. As a minister, I rely on the opinion of experts including the government chief scientist, the Meteorological Office and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They do not share Lord Ridley’s views. The latest IPCC scientific analysis from 259 climate experts in 39 countries, reviewed by another 659 experts who dealt with 53,000 individual comments, is clear about the very real threat that dangerous man-made climate change poses

Laura Gascoigne

The master of living, breathing landscapes

One sometimes forgets when looking at French 19th-century art that the painting revolution that produced Impressionism coincided with a political one. This is because most French painters, Delacroix and Manet excepted, chose to ignore it — none more completely than Camille Corot, who, as a travelling view painter, had every excuse to get out of Paris when the musket balls started to fly. The July Revolution of 1830 found the 34-year-old artist heading north to Pas de Calais, where he painted a ‘Windmill near St Omer’ and two foreground cows with a bucolic breeziness worthy of Cuyp; the Paris Commune of 1871 found him back in the north, painting the

Taki

Taki: Why is Steve Cohen still getting away with seven billion big ones? 

If, according to a Viennese wit, psychoanalysis is the disease that calls itself the cure, then Steve Cohen’s deal with the US government is the highway robbery that calls itself justice. In brief: Steve Cohen is a bald Wall Street hedgie whose $18 billion fund, SAC, has scored Madoff-like returns over the past 20-odd years. Cohen is a secretive kind of guy whose first wife blew the whistle on him because of his lack of generosity towards her. (Funny how cheap guys never learn. Always be nice to your ex.) Out of the 18 billion big ones Cohen manages, nine are his own, having piled them up over the past

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: Running into Rachel

I’d been trying to curb the habit — one day at a time — and then I felt a bit toxic and marched smartly into my favourite local charity shop as though I were on rails. I’ve been in this particular one a thousand times — a peasant enamoured with tat. I know all the volunteers by sight. One day it might be the big humble guy in the frock and with the devil-may-care approach to applying his lipstick. Or it might be the elderly deaf woman who taps at the touch-screen till with a trembling, apprehensive forefinger, as though the thing were an unexploded bomb; and always, always making

Melissa Kite

‘He said you said she said’ — country chatter is exhausting

Speeding down the farm track from my little country retreat, I came across the gamekeeper in his Defender. I wound down my window. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ he asked, looking askance at the dust cloud and no doubt wondering whether I had collided with any of his pheasants. ‘I’m going back to London for a rest,’ I told him. ‘Oh dear,’ he muttered, lighting a roll-up. Yes, oh dear. Very certainly, oh dear. As he obviously knows only too well, but neglected to tell me when I moved into my rented barn conversion, living in the country is absolutely exhausting. Coming to this tranquil farm

Alexander Chancellor

‘Too Fat Polka’, and other politically incorrect songs of the 1940s

When I was a child, growing up in Hertfordshire just after the second world war, my parents employed a cook called Mrs Sharp, who was a very kind and good woman. But she was also extremely fat and had an enormous protruding stomach that impeded her access to the kitchen stove. Lying around in the house at the time was a 78rpm record of a new popular song from the United States called the ‘Too Fat Polka’, of which the recurrent chorus was ‘I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me’. The song, recorded by the then famous but now generally forgotten American broadcaster and

Robin Oakley

The Qataris are influencing every aspect of racing

Not having the odd £100,000 to spare, I had never before joined the world’s richest owners and their bloodstock agents at Tattersalls yearling sales. It was my loss. Sheikhs in tracksuits and princes in flat caps mingle with ruddy-faced, padded-jacket consignors. In the sales ring, auctioneers rattle through their machinegun patter: ‘What do you want to get her away?…Here’s a wonderful chance to buy into this family who rarely come up for auction, do I have 100,000?…280,000 will seal the deal…he goes right-handed now at 750,000, any more outside?…The hammer’s up, 280,000 will seal the deal.’ They work through 22 lots an hour (at an average price this year for

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 24 October 2013

It’s difficult for non-players to imagine the extent to which bridge hands can torment us. I’ve spent hours this week mulling over a fiendishly complicated slam, endlessly jotting down diagrams on bits of paper and snapping at my children whenever they interrupted my train of thought. I described it last time — it was played by Fulvio Fantoni and won Declarer Play of the Year. When I showed it to the manager of TGRs, Artur Malinowski, he spotted a superior line. See what you think: East had passed and then made a take-out double (vul), strongly suggesting a void in hearts. Fantoni won the ♣ lead and played a low heart

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan Aitken’s diary: My life as a Christian outreach speaker

The last time I wrote for The Spectator I was sitting in a prison cell. I sent the then editor a poem called ‘The Ballad of Belmarsh Gaol’. Instead of printing it in the poetry column, Frank Johnson put it on the magazine’s cover. It received what is euphemistically called ‘a mixed reception’ — so mixed that I have never again tried my hand at verse. In those dark days 14 years ago I was wrestling with my self-inflicted agonies of defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and jail. As I contemplated my non-future, its only certainty was that I would never again be in demand as a public speaker or as a

Toby Young Toby Young

Toby Young: It’s biological, I become a caveman when my child is sick

The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after school and hardly a rare occurrence so I didn’t think anything of it. The following morning, he still had a tummy ache. Not a good enough reason to miss school in my opinion, but Caroline thought otherwise. Before I left for a meeting I told him to eat some toast. ‘You’re probably just hungry,’ I said. By lunchtime the pain had become localised on the lower left-hand side of his stomach and Caroline decided to Google his symptoms. It sounded like it could be appendicitis so she took him to

The Spectator

How the Spectator helped blow the whistle on health tourism

In February, an NHS surgeon came to The Spectator’s offices to discuss a piece he felt it was time to write. He wanted to blow the whistle on health tourism. Professor J. Meirion Thomas knew he was taking a tough decision, given the hostile reaction of the doctors’ unions and civil servants to anyone who makes the slightest criticism of the NHS. But the Francis Report into the Stafford Hospital scandal had just come out, reminding GPs of their ‘statutory duty of candour’. The professor said that he would like to expose what he regarded as the systematic abuse of the NHS. His Spectator article was read at the highest

The Spectator

Barometer: How is the National Theatre like Tesco? 

National statistics Some lesser-known facts about the National Theatre: — 26 per cent of its income comes from box office sales on the South Bank, 33 per cent from commercial productions elsewhere and 20 per cent from government grants. — Attendances at the main Olivier Theatre have fallen year on year since 2008/09, from 402,000 to 342,000. — Overall attendances including touring productions rose from 817,000 to 1.48 million. — While Prince Charles likened the building, by Denys Lasdun, to a nuclear power station, Sir John Betjeman, not generally a fan of modern architecture, said he ‘gasped with delight’ when he first saw it. — Like Tesco, the National Theatre

Dot Wordsworth

The bare-brained youth of south London

‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly puzzling tangle of disinformation. My husband had just been reading about the Harris Academy in Upper Norwood (south London), which has banned its pupils (or students as they all seem to have become) from using a list of words including coz, ain’t, like, innit, yeah (at the end of a sentence) and basically (at the beginning). Those, he could agree, were annoying in the wrong context, but he couldn’t see why bare and extra should be singled out. As Veronica was able to explain to her father, bare is a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 24 October 2013

Home The government agreed a guaranteed price for electricity that persuaded a consortium led by the French-owned EDF Energy and including Chinese investors to agree to build the Hinkley Point C power station in Somerset. The strike price agreed was £92.50 per megawatt hour (compared with a current wholesale price of £45). Following an energy price rise by SSE of 8.2 per cent, British Gas said it was to raise prices by 9.2 per cent and NPower by 10.4 per cent. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that this was ‘extremely disappointing news’. Sir John Major, a former prime minister, helpfully suggested a windfall tax on energy profits. The Daily

Mr Magoo

2136: Howdunit

Six of the unclued entries (one of three words, three of two words and one hyphened; all in Chambers apart from one name; unchecked letters can spell ACTOR OR WOMEN ETC ARE CHIEF SUSPECT) share a connection which will allow the other two to be deduced.   Across   9 Apparently overdrawn, and without a leg to stand on? (4) 11 Metal band twisted into antenna on the top of a building? (10) 14 A poster in the capital of Vietnam’s summer palace (6) 16 Old saw (5) 17 Took great steps to abridge editor (5) 20 Old plants initially tossed into filthy ash-can (7) 21 Feudal tenant taking half-dollar