Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Loud and clear

On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to say: ‘It was given to my husband and I’. Not all adverbs end in –ly. Loud and clear is a well known phrase, made more popular in the 20th century by the wireless response to the enquiry ‘Do you read me?’ But loud as an adverb has a history of more than 1,000 years, fortunately

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 21 July 2012

‘Olympism’ is, according to the 2011 Olympic charter, ‘a philosophy of life which places sport at the service of humankind… exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind… Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.’ The great Greek doctor Galen, who knew a bit about athletes, took a slightly different view. He wrote: ‘All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed

Raymond Keene

No. 227

Black to play. This position is a variation from Commons-Gheorghiu, Lone Pine 1975. Black is two pawns down but has the chance for a tactical coup. Can you see it?  Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 24 July 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 f6 (1 … Bxd5 2 Re8+ Bg8 3 f7) Last week’s winner Derek Shakespeare, Hants

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 July 2012

Some bridge tournaments take everything you’ve got and then some. The emotional output is as extreme as the most demanding, turbulent relationship and you stagger home needing urgent hospital care. Then there are some that are great bridge but not life or death. And then there is Biarritz. A cracking holiday with a bit of bridge attached. The most fun is the teams event which is split into two sections — Main and Handicap — which gives everyone a chance of success. Extra points are given to non-professional players and this year the Handicap was won by my friend Jonathan Harris’s team. Jonathan played with Steve Capal and his wife

Raymond Keene

Sceptred Isle

This week I continue with extracts of play from the new book on the English Opening by Steve Giddins. The timing is solicitous in that the British Championship commences next week in North Shields with grandmasters Gawain Jones, David Howell, Stephen Gordon, Keith Arkell and Simon Williams. Timman-Ernst: Wijk aan Zee 2012; English Opening 1 c4 c6 2 Nf3 d5 Black angles for a Slav Defence. 3 g3 The text is the main attempt to dodge regular Slav lines and preserve a recognisably ‘English’ structure. 3 … Nf6 4 Bg2 dxc4 5 0-0 Nbd7 This is probably Black’s best, and initiates a plan of defending the c4-pawn with pieces. 5

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 July 2012

Waiting games The Olympics have not even started yet, but already one world record is under threat: that for the world’s longest traffic jam. The first day of operation of an Olympic lane on the M4 led to a 32-mile tailback from the edge of London to Newbury in Berkshire. These are the records to beat: Longest jam Nothing has yet surpassed the 109-mile tailback on the A6 between Lyon and Paris on 16 February 1980, caused by Parisians returning home from their skiing holidays in poor weather Longest-lasting jam A record set, appropriately enough, in Beijing — although in 2010, two years after the last Olympics. The 60-mile jam

Dumpynose

Crossword Solution to 2069: Yes and no

The TITLE (36) gives WORDS (34) that, if combined, ANAGRAMMATISED (42) and suffixed to DUMP, defined by 7, 10, 12 and 22, produce the PSEUDONYM (8) ‘Dumpynose’. DUMP appears in the fifth row of the grid and was to be shaded. First prize Annabel Gaba, London NW6 Runners-up Charles Hastings, Upper Woolhampton;  Lucy Mo, Withington, Manchester

Dumpynose

2072: Pediculi

‘1A (four words)!’ is a quotation suggesting the link between the other seven unclued lights (all real words). The domain of the screamer is a clued light and must be shaded. Across 11 Ailing I lie abed a couple of times and weaken (10) 14 Suit Australian stored in home county (6) 17 Student wrenched baguette out of satchel (5) 18 Poetic heathen god upset me (5) 20 Boundless thespians playing at the same stage (7) 21 At which time take food in (wholemeal) (7) 23 Sweetie from Austria cut sullen American (7) 24 Oxide in Balkan state is exported (5) 25 Round fortified houses are motionless (5) 27 As

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Gone holidaying

Sorry folks, but you’ll not have me to kick around these next two weeks. I’m away to the Isle of Jura this week for Midge Fest 2012 (and the 62nd edition of the Ardlussa Sports). Thence to Ireland for a week of cricket as a member of Peter Oborne’s annual travelling circus. See you here next month.

Simon Hoggart

July Wine Club

Earlier this month we held a wine fair at The Spectator, using the tents that next day sheltered the magazine’s summer party. It was great fun, and our six principal partners sold plenty of wine. The event is free; come next year! There were some terrific bottles, many discounted, such as the gorgeous Chilean Pionero Pinot Noir sold by The Wine Company of Colchester – an incredible £6.99 — luscious Château de Sours and Nyetimber from Private Cellar, stunning Menetou-Salon and Côte Rôtie from Yapp Bros, the glorious Maiden Flight, also from Chile, one of the few Gewurtztraminers that really works outside Alsace, and a host of gluggable summer wines

Robin Oakley

The turf

Cramming too much in is always a mistake. It was just one broken jar of tahini paste, requested by Italian friends along with the pork pie, the Marmite and two bottles of Amontillado as items unobtainable in Sardinia, but boy what damage it had done after my holiday suitcase spent three hours in the care of British and Italian baggage handlers. The sherry survived but, having separated itself into separate streams of oil and orange goo, the tahini paste had oozed malevolently around, insinuating itself into every crevice and tainting almost every garment, probably wrecking for ever the rather snazzy pair of Cambridge blue trousers purchased by Mrs Oakley in

Lucy Vickery

Water works

In Competition No. 2755 you were invited to submit an ‘Ode to rain’. No doubt you saw this one coming, what with monsoon June and July’s 50 shades of grey skies. In any case, the lively and entertaining postbag the challenge elicited was certainly a welcome antidote to the ongoing misery of being semi-housebound or repeatedly soaked to the skin. Gerard Benson, Katie Mallett, Mae Scanlon, Roger Theobald and Basil Ransome-Davies were unlucky to miss out on a place in the winning line-up. Those that did make the cut are printed below and rewarded with £25 apiece. Mary Holtby pockets the bonus fiver. A one-off award this week for the

Bruce Anderson

Chinese spirit

My recent drinking has been straight out of Hopkins: ‘All things original, counter, spare, strange.’ A dinner party in Chinatown ended with mao tai, the Chinese rice spirit. I have never been able to decide about mao tai. It has a nose like a school changing room: some would say, a taste to match. It packs a wallop. At around 86° proof, it can be heartburn in a glass. Girls rarely enjoy it. When mao tai is on offer, even the ones who delight in a Havana with some serious armagnac tend to dodge the column. But a ­digestif ought to pull the strings together: a final movement which makes

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Yesterday’s nearly-men

Francis Beckett has come up with an intriguing new brand of political history. The Prime Ministers Who Never Were selects 14 of Britain’s nearly-men and imagines how they’d have fared in the top job. The big beasts are reduced to footnotes and the prat-fallers occupy centre stage. Beckett himself writes the story of Labour in the 1990s without the modernisers, and 13 other contributors cover the rest. John Smith survives his heart attack in 1994 and wins a 99-seat majority in 1997. His first act is to scrap the Millennium Dome, which Beckett describes as ‘a now long-forgotten proposal to build a vast round shed in Greenwich … which no

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Big is beautiful

Sir Terry Leahy might be the UK’s most successful businessman. He turned Tesco, love it or loathe it, from a second-tier supermarket worth £7 billion into the £37 billion behemoth of the sector. As an interviewee, however, he is not a natural performer. There is no Bransonian bonhomie about him. He is dressed in a non­descript dark suit, and, though he has no entourage, is accompanied by a publicist from his publisher; he starts to steal not-so-subtle glances at his watch almost as soon as we have started talking. But Leahy’s awkwardness shouldn’t obscure the truths he has to deliver. He has a bracing analysis of the situation that Britain is

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The price of a good reputation

I have never practised tax avoidance myself. It’s not that I’m particularly virtuous: it’s just I’d rather pay a few thousand pounds to HMRC than spend an hour talking to an accountant. But I was fascinated by the Jimmy Carr affair for one reason. Why was Mr Carr, alone of the thousand or so participants, hounded to withdraw from the Jersey K2 scheme? Innate decency aside, Carr had to withdraw because he is famous and a comedian. A comedian’s career is ‘reputationally fragile’. People need to like you before they’ll laugh at you. (Fatty Arbuckle and Woody Allen are two people who, once tainted by scandal, found themselves ‘just not

Quentin Letts

Easing made easy

Ghastly moment, isn’t it, when at a supper party (worse, at editorial conference or in a meeting with clients) some drawling know-all asks ‘so what do you think about QE?’ Everyone at the table swivels in your direction. Your mental turbines stall, your eyeballs sweat. QE? Is that a conference centre? Cruise liner? A fashionable disease? Anyone who has been through this experience may find useful the following bull-point presentation. With the emphasis on bull. ● On hearing ‘QE’ do not say: ‘You mean that game show fronted by Stephen Fry?’ People may think you are being serious (which in fact you are, but let’s keep that quiet). ● QE

Harry Mount

This sheltered isle

This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This week, I have been soaked six times in as many days. For a moment, I nearly fell for the theory, suggested by some scientists, that the jet stream had slipped south, pushed downwards by warming polar temperatures.  But then the sun came out, and reason — and cynicism — returned. This summer’s weather is unusual, but it isn’t freakish. If anything, our extreme reaction to not-so-extreme rainfall shows how limited the capacities of the British climate

Douglas Murray

Is there any way to stop the infantilisation of Britain

As the world turns to London it may still imagine us a serious, taciturn people. If so, the world is in for a shock. For Britain has become a land all but denuded of grown-ups. We are in the grip of a full-scale, double-dip regression. We were not surprised that our Prime Minister should be addicted to a video game called Fruit Ninja. His predecessor, then in his late fifties, claimed to enjoy listening to teenage pop bands and had a wife who held ‘slumber parties’ for other women in their forties. Stand in any British high street and you’ll see the people to whom these politicians hope to appeal.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The final victory of middle-class football

John Terry — the gift that keeps on giving. It is not enough that this stoic and rat-faced footballer should have provoked the most absurd and hilarious court case I have yet seen. Now it looks like there’ll be another one, perhaps even funnier, predicated upon a reaction to the fact that he wasn’t convicted of racially abusing another footballer, Anton Ferdinand, as everybody seemed to wish. Some chap ‘tweeted’ that Ashley Cole, who gave evidence on behalf of Terry, was a ‘choc ice’ — and of course now the police are involved. They had to be: it is deeply racist to liken black people to items of confectionery or popular