Society

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Maecenas

Andrew Paulson, an American who lives in London, has been responsible for a remarkable chess revolution over the past year. He commissioned a YouGov study which showed that more than 600 million people worldwide regularly play chess. Paulson proceeded to raise sponsorship funds to stage two of the best chess tournaments ever held in London — and all within a matter of months. These were the London Grand Prix and the Candidates qualifier, to determine the challenger for the world title match which starts in a few weeks. Almost every grandmaster from the current elite — Carlsen, Kramnik, Svidler, Ivanchuk, Gelfand — was present in one or both of these

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What do I do when the pizzas arrive at the opening of my art show?

Q. I spent a week in a house party abroad, with an elderly and extremely polite friend of mine and his wife among my fellow guests. Our hostess really pulled out the stops for us — I have never been so well looked after in my life. While I was exchanging emails with her after the holiday, it emerged that she had not received a thank-you letter from our mutual friend, which was very odd as he is punctilious and always writes very good B&Bs at once. Three weeks later I was at a party with the couple in question and I revealed that our hostess was hurt that she had

Raymond Keene

No. 288

White to play. This position is from Goganov-Motylev, Russian Championship, Novgorod 2013. Black has just captured on d5 with his bishop, after which White has a killer blow. Can you see it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 22 October or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. 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 Nf7 Last week’s winner David Armitage, Headington, Oxford

The Spectator

The week: Property price record; Lampedusa drownings; ‘basically’ banned

Home Shares in Royal Mail, floated on the stock market at 330p, began trading at 475p. SSE, the energy supplier, raised prices by 8.2 per cent, and other suppliers were expected to follow suit. Ofwat, the water regulator, said it would block Thames Water’s request to increase bills by up to 8 per cent next year. The rate of inflation, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, remained at 2.7 per cent, and, as measured by the Retail Prices Index fell from 3.3 to 3.2 per cent. The average price of a property in the United Kingdom rose to a record £247,000. Unemployment fell to 2.49 million, and those with work rose

Taki

Taki: Watch James Toback’s film starring Alex Baldwin and me

 New York He came from a wealthy background but was always in trouble. His parents were not particularly religious, but nevertheless insisted that little Jimmy read the Scroll of Torah and grow up to be a good Jewish boy. You can imagine their horror when they found naked pictures of Hedy Lamarr and Brigitte Bardot among the holy pages, the former in Ecstasy, the latter in Le mépris. He was given a hiding and taken to all sorts of rabbis to have his evil side exorcised, but soon after young Jimmy did it again, this time with a really disgusting picture of two girls together billing and cooing like there

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Charles Moore: I’m on Twitter! But what do I say?

AS THE WHOLE Leveson wrangle approaches its climax (or anti-climax), one collateral, innocent victim of it all is the Queen. The government ruse to make its proposed system of statutory regulation seem less objectionable was to burble on about a Royal Charter and the Privy Council. By doing so, it hoped to put the matter beyond politics. But the implication that the enterprise is sanctioned by monarchical neutrality is a) untrue and b) embarrassing for the monarch. Untrue because in royal charters, as in legislation, the Sovereign acts solely on the advice of her ministers, making no personal contribution; embarrassing because, by seeking royal cover for its actions, the government

Jeremy Clarke

My sky-blue 50mg Viagra tablet fell on to the floor. ‘Do you need to get that?’ she said – Jeremy Clarke

I’d booked a private one-to-one session with her for an hour on the afternoon of the day she flew in. I’d booked it casually, thoughtlessly, on a recommendation, a month in advance, unaware of her reputation. I’d dutifully filled in the form she sent me, circling problem areas on a drawn representation of my body, and mailed it back. It was only as the appointment drew near that I began to take heed, when overhearing talk at the yoga centre, of the excitement at the imminent arrival from across the pond of the great Linda Strong (as we’ll call her). The impression was of a St Paul scheduled to visit

Melissa Kite

‘I’m going to move things along as quickly as I can, but first of all can I say…’

‘Hello, good morning, my name is Gavin Moneypenny, and I’m your customer service representative for today and I’m pleased to inform you that during the course of this call I will be looking for ways to improve the service you are getting from us if I can, and if I can at any point make your experience easier in any way, for you, there, Miss Kite, I will endeavour to do so, and to let you know, during the course of this call, what I can do to help you, Miss Kite, if I can call you Miss Kite, or do you prefer…’ Stop! I only called my bank to

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: Why aren’t Italians angrier about Nazi atrocities?

Given that more than 9,000 innocent Italian civilians, many of them women and children, died in Nazi massacres during the dreadful last 18 months of the second world war, it is amazing how few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice. Only five members of the German occupying forces were ever imprisoned in Italy for war crimes; and with the death last week, aged 100, of Erich Priebke, the former SS captain who in 1944 helped organise the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome, none of them is now still alive. Hundreds of others were, of course, involved in these crimes, but

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 17 October 2013

The season got off to a very bad start for my team — and continues in much the same vein. The Premier League, which has become the trials for the Camrose, is played over three weekends, this year starting in Manchester. Our first match was against David Mossop’s strong squad and we did rather well! May I boast that I made two 3NT contracts that went down in the other room? OK — moment of glory over. The second weekend in London is finished — and so, it would appear, are we! One more weekend to avoid relegation. Take this hand as an example of when things are not going

Doc

2135: Strange

The unclued lights are of a kind.   Across   1    Remains close to the co-founder of the Townswomen’s Guilds (5) 10    Willing to help prepare musical backing (11, hyphened) 15    Girl in a race to immerse boy with fragrant oil right away (8) 18    Wrung a confession out of us subjectively instead, maybe (7) 20    Snake wriggling in net on part of rigging (7) 23    City General — deserted on the Sabbath (5) 24    Sweet rice wine reduced — it goes round palm (6) 25    Wavering magistrate has no charge for disgrace (6) 28    Heard to have made one’s way

Susie Dent

‘Bauklotzartigewortzusammensetzung’

Mark Twain had a notoriously thorny relationship with German, a language he gamely tried to conquer. His main beef was with its knotty grammar: ‘Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.’ He cast a satirical eye over its vocabulary too: ‘These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions,’ he wrote of such linguistic whoppers as ‘Unabhängigkeitserklärungen’ (declarations of independence). Many a German student would recognise Twain’s perplexed awe at a language that positively encourages Lego-like word-building (which would go something like

Doc

2132: Ricochet | 17 October 2013

The unclued lights, when paired 12/20, 16/33, 25/29, 31/6, 42/2, are RICOCHET or reduplicated words.   First prize Mrs Rhiannon Hales, Ilfracombe, Devon Runners-up Roger Sherman, Richmond, Surrey; D.V. Jones, Llanfair Caereinion, Powys

Stephen Barclay

Labour just don’t get it – the NHS is about patients not process

Sometimes the small points say a great deal.  Yesterday Steve Rotherham, the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, tabled a written parliamentary question about emails I obtained from the Care Quality Commission under Freedom of Information about patient safety concerns at Basildon. Steve Rotheram: To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will carry out an internal investigation into which officials in his Department released confidential emails to the hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire. [170605] Norman Lamb: The Department understands that this parliamentary question relates to the release of emails sent or received by the then chief executive of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) during the month of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Help! I don’t know what to tweet!

The Daily Telegraph now has a policy that all its journalists should be on Twitter. This is a good idea, since it is the most immediate form of public communication, and a way of advertising oneself. So last week, I went on. The problem is that I have not got the faintest idea what to say. After agonising for about half an hour, I decided this might be my May 1979 moment, so I wrote: ‘I’ve joined Twitter. Where there is discord, may I bring more of it.’ Immediately, I received emails and texts warning me that someone was pretending to be me (this has happened before). Since then, I have had

Douglas Murray

A letter to the Editor of the New Statesman

I have a letter in this week’s New Statesman. It is a response to an article in last week’s magazine by Mehdi Hasan. As NS Letters appear not to be published online I am pasting it here: Sir, The piece by Mehdi Hasan in last week’s magazine (‘Who needs Tommy Robinson and the EDL, when Islamophobia has gone mainstream?’) tries to infer that statements by various writers, including myself, are identical to those on show at some EDL demonstrations.   For instance he quotes some EDL supporters caught on camera chanting: “Burn the mosque!” and then quotes me as calling for ‘mosques accused of spreading “hate” to be “pulled down”.’  Mehdi then

Steerpike Steerpike

Is the new Indy editor a Countryside Alliance supporter?

Right on types at the Indy look away now. It would appear that your trendy new editor, Amol Rajan, is a supporter of the Countryside Alliance. He appeared on the Daily Politics recently sporting an alliance branded tie. Mr Steerpike hears that when this was pointed out to Rajan in the Green Room by Ukip MEP Roger Helmer, Rajan denied all knowledge of the green, deer-horned number. Apparently, he bought it from a charity shop for sixty pence. I’m not sure whether that says more about the Countryside Alliance, the shop or the Indy editor.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator website passes one million unique monthly users

It’s a red-letter day here at The Spectator: figures in this morning show that we are now read by more than a million people a month. The popularity of the magazine’s digital edition is surging. Since its relaunch last year, our visitors (or, in the digi-lingo, ‘unique users’) have trebled. Now, as the  chart below shows, we are into seven figures: The introduction of a paywall seems to have done nothing to deter our growing army of readers – it’s annoying, of course, to encounter a subscription barrier. But what we offer is a simple and cheap remedy. Our online visitors are converting into paying subscribers at a fast rate – and understandably,