Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 18 August 2012

State of the Union Sir: One did not expect Iain Martin (‘Unionist Gold’, 11 August), a former editor of the Scotsman, to turn up in the Spectator, still arguing against Scottish nationalism and promoting the union. So that is what the Olympics are about — waving the Union flag. Not for itself. We do not rejoice in other countries’ golds, only in those of Team GB. Ah well, I said farewell to the Scotsman and will do the same to the Spectator if we cannot have a slightly higher standard of debate. How about: why is it beneficial for all countries except Scotland, one of the oldest nations, to be

Raymond Keene

No. 231

White to play. This position is from Duchamp-Smith, London 1928. Can you spot White’s artful conclusion? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 21 August 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 … Rxb3+ Last week’s winner  Trevor Lloyd, London WC1

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 18 August 2012

Here I sit, in hot, sunny, glorious France, pretending to be on holiday but feigning lots of headaches so I can nip up to my computer. BBO is showing the second World Mind Games which started last Friday in Lille. In each Group the 16 teams play a complete Round Robin and the top four qualify for the play-offs. England got off to a slow start in both the Open and Women’s Series but hopefully they can pull back some of the magic they generated in the recent European Championships and qualify for the next stage. Happily our ‘Oldies’ are leading their group and appear guaranteed to go through. Here

Raymond Keene

Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was the strongest chessplaying artist the world has seen. He defeated a number of master players, including Koltanowski, the Knight’s Tour expert and exponent of blindfold play, and represented France in the Chess Olympiad. Chess permeates his work; there is even a chessboard pattern concealed beneath his work Étant donnés in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp’s obsession with the game influenced other artists of the Dada and Surrealist schools such as Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Francis Picabia and Man Ray, to incorporate chess themes in their work. René Clair’s 1924 film Entr’acte, which has been described as an absolute Dadaist movie, starts with a chess game on

Dot Wordsworth

What Nodwe isn’t

‘Lady Day,’ it said in the New Oxford Style Manual (one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’, as it said on the jacket), ‘25 May, the feast of the Annunciation.’ Well, it is the Annunciation, but it isn’t in May but March. Of course, one does not look up ‘Lady Day’ in the New Oxford Style Manual to find out what it is, but whether to use capital letters, perhaps. But even so… The odd thing about this mistake in one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’ is that it has languished there since 2005, when it was last revised. You’d think someone would have told them. Perhaps

Robin Oakley

Team spirit

Sometimes it is all about how you look at things, as was made clear to a clean-living accountant who had helped old ladies across the road, given generously to charity and even found something nice to say about George Osborne. When he shuffled off the mortal coil he found himself sharing a heavenly cloud with an old crone. Peeved when on the first cloud they passed he saw Saddam Hussein sharing a duvet with a gorgeous blonde he put in an official complaint to St Peter. ‘Ah, you just don’t get it,’ he was told. ‘He is her penance.’ I, too, may have been looking at something from the wrong

Doc

2076: Carte blanche

The crossword is of the usual barred pattern and is symmetrical whichever side is uppermost. The Across clues are presented in order and precede the Down clues. Three solutions are hyphened, and one is of three words. Solvers are required to  insert the bars; clue-numbers are not required. — Former Foreign office abroad revealed in smallest Welsh shire — Garland unknown county — Small shovel for Scottish climb — A spike … – obtained from indigo — Palm giving a g-gentle hit — MacVicar’s domain with capital and money — not good — Filthy places for Bond on board — Vinegar’s that’s turned – a deception — Answer distracted persons

Doc

2073: Yonkers bonkers | 18 August 2012

The unclued lights (including the pair at 36/9) are islands on the ORKNEYS (an anagram of     ‘Yonkers’). Solvers had to highlight the three letters HOY of the solution at 39D (Ahoy), which is ‘a call’, hence the wording in the preamble. First prize M. Williamson, Chelmsford, Essex Runners-up Mrs Pamela Bealby, Stockton-on-Tees; Robert Hinton, Swansea

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Saturday Afternoon Country: Robert Earl Keen – Spectator Blogs

Saturday country sessions have been delayed while the new Spectator website was being built. But that’s been done now and, hell, it’s good to be back with all you good folks. It’s a beautiful afternoon in Edinburgh and Selkirk Cricket Club have just been confirmed as – oh, my giddy aunt – champions of Division Six of the East of Scotland Cricket Association. What better, then, than a cold one and Robert Earl Keen, that under-rated Texas troubador, reminding us that The Road Goes on Forever? It’s summer, at last.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Police commissioners: how a flagship policy could embarrass ministers

The staggeringly low turnout that the Electoral Reform Society is predicting for November’s Police and Crime Commissioner elections comes as little surprise to those involved in organising the vote. In fact, I was quite surprised that the ERS expects a turnout as high as 18.5 per cent, and I suspect the Home Office might be, too. Nick Herbert betrayed his nerves about the turnout earlier this week when he was harangued by Evan Davis on the Today programme. Today the ERS’ chief executive Katie Ghose predicted that this could be a ‘perfect storm, which could result in the lowest turnout for a national election in British history’ and could ‘degenerate

Simon Hoggart

August Wine Club

August is a slow month for wine sales, which no doubt is why Mark Cronshaw of The Wine Company in Colchester has slashed so many prices in this offer. These six wines are all delectable. One is reduced by a remarkable £48 a case. (Often this happens because a wine is absolutely first-rate but largely unknown, with the result that it doesn’t sell off the page, so to speak. So it is heavily reduced, and the people who snap up the bargain are thrilled by their luck.) Three of my choices this week are from France, two from South Africa, and one from Chile. Two are what I think of

Kate Chisholm

Human stories

‘The aggregation of marginal gains’ is the key to success, according to Dave Brailsford, the extraordinarily successful cycling coach to Team GB. You could say that’s been the motto of this Olympic Games. Not massive injections of dosh (or drugs, for that matter). But a heady cocktail of supreme physical effort and tactical nous. Brailsford recognises it’s the little things that can make the difference when mere fractions of a second are all that’s between gold and nothing. We discovered that his cyclists sleep on specially chosen mattresses and wear heated hot pants (yes, I do mean hot pants). Cyclists, he reckons, need to sleep well before a race. They

Bruce Anderson

Magnum force

A double magnum is a triumphant spectacle. A single bottle of claret looks slender, elegant: a suggestion of a late Gothic spire. In the 15th century, architects bent their efforts to achieve effortlessness: stone sublimated into light; ethereal, disembodied, breath-taking columns, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, shooting upwards like fireworks to make love to the sky: flamboyant. A double magnum rests on firmer foundations. Robust and proud on its massy haunches, this is Atlas or Antaeus, not Ariel. A double magnum is Romanesque, Norman. Far from seeking to conceal power, it revels in it. In its mighty eminence, Durham Cathedral tenses itself on primevally igneous rock, like a crouching lion, overawing

Lucy Vickery

Second hand

In Competition No. 2759 you were invited to submit a well-known poem rewritten by another well-known poet. You were outstandingly good this week and there are lots of unlucky losers. Honourable mentions to Graham King, Janet Kenny, Jerome Betts, Barbara Smoker and Gerard Benson and a hearty pat on the back all round. Those printed below earn £25 each; Noel Petty takes the extra fiver. The church tower casts an ever-lengthening shade And evening cloaks the dismal rural scene. Beneath these stones the hamlet’s dead are laid. How devilish dull their living must have been! No claret, cards or courtesans repaid Their tedious agricultural routine. I fancy, though, if I’d

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Complexity is too simple

Pojoaque, near Santa Fe, New Mexico This is a magical part of the world — and it’s easy to see why D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Douglas Adams were tempted to hang around for a while. When James Delingpole finally gets his act together and leads 10,000 Spectator subscribers into the desert to form a libertarian commune, northern New Mexico should be the first place he tries. He’ll have the blessing of a former two-term governor here, triathlete and Everest mountaineer Gary Johnson, now the Libertarian party’s presidential candidate. As Republican governor, Johnson spent part of his second term campaigning for the decriminalisation of marijuana: when asked of his past

Peter Jay

National Service, by Colin Shindler

For over 15 years after the second world war young men between the ages of 18 and 20 were conscripted by law to serve in Britain’s armed forces for two years. This was officially in order to man the army, navy and air force sufficiently for them to be able to perform the roles which government assigned to them, mainly in the management of British colonies and, after the formation of Nato, in opposing the feared westward expansion of the Soviet Union. Some serious fighting was done in Korea and later in Malaya, which was surprisingly successful from the colonial point of view. Others of us disported ourselves in the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Barclays’ surprise choice for chairman: Old Father Time with his lyre

I’ve had a picture on my wall of the newly appointed Barclays chairman, Sir David Walker, for about 25 years. If that sounds creepy, I should explain that it’s a photograph of a 1986 meeting of the Court of the Bank of England, of which my father was a member. Walker, then an up-and-coming forty-something, was an executive director of the Bank and chairman of Johnson Matthey Bankers, which the Bank had bailed out two years earlier to avert a domino collapse across the City. Tall and bespectacled — taking his glasses off for photographers these days seems to me a mistake, giving him the mildly befuddled look of Corporal

Charles Glass

A hostage’s daydream

Twenty-five years ago, in a windowless Levantine oubliette, my wrist and ankle were bound with chains, but my imagination soared. Among my many daydreams was a reunion a quarter-century hence. The guests at this illusory affair were to have been my captors. There were times when I envisaged our encounter as real, and others as a piece of theatre. Either way, 25 years on, it hasn’t happened. Nor has anything else I expected before I escaped from Hezbollah in Beirut in August 1987. The rendezvous was to take place at the Grand Hotel Kadri in Zahle, a Christian village where the foothills of Mount Lebanon descend into the Bekaa Valley.

Douglas Murray

Have it by heart

Earlier this year the Education Secretary Michael Gove suggested that primary school children ought to learn a poem by heart. Even if the teaching unions had not objected I would have needed no further convincing. I was converted to Gove’s idea years ago, by Terry Waite. Having haphazardly discovered poetry on my own at state school, it was slightly later that I heard Ronald Runcie’s hostage-negotiator-turned-hostage give a sermon on a cold Sunday evening in chapel. Within ten minutes he had introduced me to a new poem and a new idea, which is a good average for a sermon. The poem was ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four

John R. Bradley

Recipe for revolution

It started in America. The Midwest has for weeks been suffering what is now the worst drought in living memory. Prices for maize and wheat have soared by 50 per cent and the G20 will next week decide whether to call an emergency meeting to discuss what the United Nations believes could be a repeat of the 2008 food price crisis. It is being spoken of as a humanitarian disaster, and rightly. But the last few years have taught us that, when hunger strikes, political upheaval will not be far behind. Even now, the Arab Spring is seen as a popular outcry for political freedom, but those of us who