Society

Saturday

30 Jun 2012

Low life | 30 June 2012

After the launch party of Harry Mount’s How England Made the English, there was a second, impromptu, diehards’ party at a flat belonging to a book reviewer called Molly. Here I fell into conversation with a publisher who, while making a lunge for our hostess, invited me to another book launch slated for the following week. An official invitation arrived by email a few days later. The book was called The Irresistible Mr Wrong. It was written by a notorious old roué, I vaguely remembered the publisher saying, who in his prime had married a string of celebrated beauties, seduced countless others, and was so fabulously well endowed he had

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 June 2012

Q. My parents are giving a drinks party for me in our garden which, as all my friends know, is quite big. People also know my parents are very generous and laid back so my worry is that some if not all of the single men on the guest list will assume it is OK for them to rock up with a girl in tow. But I have too many single girls coming as it is. How, without coming over as pompous or predatory, can I tactfully ask these single men not to bring someone? Equally, without seeming desperate, how can I check they are even coming in the first

Simon Walters

Diary – 30 June 2012

The details for my appearance at the Leveson Inquiry arrive. ‘If Mr Walters is content to walk through the public entrance to the RCJ, Bell Yard North One is closest to the Hearing Room. Could you provide names of anyone accompanying Mr Walters in order that we can reserve seats in the public gallery.’ It sounds like a passage from A Tale of Two Cities. David Davis calls with advice on how to conduct myself in the dock. He says he gave similar coaching to Alastair Campbell before his fateful encounter with the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee over the David Kelly affair, which is slightly unsettling, given my views

Tanya Gold

Russian dolls

Mari Vanna is in Knightsbridge, near those pale loitering houses that would be ripped up if only their owners could pay off the council, to be replaced with giant Barratt Homes, with Homes, or maybe Barratt, wrought in gold. The grotesque Candy & Candy development by Hyde Park, all man-of-steel strut, gazes at Harvey Nichols the way a troll stares at a baby. This is the land of basement swimming pools and female sorrow, Lamborghinis, fat teenagers, domestic slavery, tyrants going shopping, and Louis Vuitton bags for dogs. Saddam Hussein would love it. In the midst of this nightmare, Mari Vanna sits like a dollhouse on the road to Kensington.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 June 2012

Home A computer failure left millions of customers of RBS and NatWest without access to their money for days; a man was held in jail over the weekend because his bail payment could not be traced, and other customers feared that their credit ratings would suffer because of missed payments for mortgages and regular direct debits. Alistair Darling, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, launched the campaign against Scottish independence called Better Together. England was knocked out of Euro 2012 in a penalty shootout with Italy. ••• The government introduced, at the instigation of the Liberal Democrats, a bill for a reformed, mostly elected House of Lords. Sir Mervyn King,

Dot Wordsworth

Portmanteau words

My husband woke himself up with a snort that sounded like a crocodile seizing the hind limb of a warthog, reached for his whisky glass and said, as if I had accused him of anything: ‘Just chillaxing.’ If this useless portmanteau word struggles through a few more months of life, it will be thanks to David Cameron — or his enemies. Take these words: bromance, mumpreneur, mankle, frape, emberrorist, foodoir. They were talked up last year as new entries into dictionaries, and are supposed to mean: a sexless friendship; a working mother; a man’s ankle; altering a Facebook profile without permission; someone threatening to reveal embarrassing information; and a memoir

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern: A tax on luxury

The Chancellor is desperate to get more cash into his wallet. Why not try the old trick — a tax on luxuries, or rather, an even greater tax on luxuries? True, it might not bring in much, but it plays well with the voters. Suppressing luxury was always a big hit in the ancient world. In 115 bc the Roman consul Scaurus fixed his beady eye on the yummy dormouse and, at a stroke of his pen, passed a sumptuary law banning them, together with shellfish and imported birds, from the menu at banquets. Not that there had been any campaigns to save them. The ancients had been doing this

Andrew Lambirth

Altered images | 30 June 2012

An important part of the critic’s role is to search out artists, living or dead, whose work has disappeared from general view, and to attempt some kind of reassessment of their value. The trouble with most coverage of the visual arts today is that the same few artists are constantly written about because their work is currently fashionable. Editors seem not to encourage their critics to be wide-ranging. Meanwhile, museums and galleries are not readily inspired to put on exhibitions of less well-known painting and sculpture because they’re primarily concerned with high visitor attendance and sales. As a result, the public is not best served — and neither are the

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 June 2012

‘We’re going to have to shoot you,’ said the man from the auspicious publication about to feature an article on my new book. I naturally assumed he hated it so much he was going to put a bullet through my head, until he said, ‘In fact, we need to photograph you as soon as possible…’ ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ I said, making out I did this sort of thing all the time. Actually, I’ve been the subject of a photo shoot once before. Now I’ve done two, I can confirm that they follow a pattern. They always take place in a loft-style apartment with bare brick walls. When you have

The Spectator

Letters | 30 June 2012

Hunting for real Tories Sir: It is interesting to note that more than 10 per cent (four) of the 39 Tory MPs who comprise the Free Enterprise Group, which your correspondent James Forsyth assures us is full of young radicals determined to lead a fightback from the Tory right (‘Next right’, 23 June), are committed to keeping the ban on fox-hunting. How can you be a right-wing Tory and be anti-hunting? If this is the best that the Tory right has to offer, then Ukip must be looking good. Peter Holt Wellington, Telford Debt is the problem Sir: Your leading article is misconceived (‘Summit of arrogance’, 23 June). The financial

Raymond Keene

Puzzle No. 224

Black to play. This position is from Morozevich-McShane, Tal Memorial, Moscow 2012. Black’s next move did not elicit an immediate resignation but nevertheless essentially destroyed the white position. What was it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 3 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, the prize is £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1… Bd3 Last week’s winner Alexander Denley, London

Raymond Keene

Chess: Magnus Dei

Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian chess superstar, has added to his numerous laurels by winning the Tal Memorial in Moscow, ahead of most of the world’s elite. The absentees were Anand and Gelfand, presumably exhausted after their strenuous efforts in the World Championship, also held in Moscow, just before the Tal. Magnus escaped, as if by a miracle, from a couple of lost positions against Kramnik and Morozevich, but ultimately he went through unscathed to seize first prize. Top scores were Carlsen 5½/9; Caruana and Radjabov 5; Morozevich, Aronian and Kramnik 4½. England’s Luke McShane was invited by popular demand and defeated the elite trio of Kramnik, Aronian and Morozevich in

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 30 June 2012

The European bridge championships are over, and although all the England players did well, the real stars were the women’s team, who won gold. Congratulations to Sally Brock, Nevena Senior, Nicola Smith, Heather Dhondy, Susan Stockdale and Fiona Brown. In the Open series, there was never really any question who would win, although a few years ago it would have been unimaginable: Monaco. In 2010, Pierre Zimmermann, a Swiss real estate tycoon, hired five of the world’s best players to join him in forming a team to represent the mini state: Geir Helgemo and Tor Helness from Norway, Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio Nunes from Italy, and Franck Multon from France.

Dumpynose

Crossword 2066 solution

The ten unclued lights were all types of ants and were therefore defined by 7D. First prize B. Taylor, Bolton Runners-up Neville Twickel, Shipston-on-Stour, Warks; M. O’Hanlon, North Berwick, Scotland

Dumpynose

Crossword 2069: Yes and no

The 36 gives 34 that, if combined, 42 and suffixed to the word defined by each of 7, 10, 12 and 22, produce a 8. The defined word appears hidden in the completed grid and must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 1 Parties have a nap then start Olympic event (14, four words) 9 Sultanate scholar visits continually (4) 11 Game played later against Irish town (10, two words) 14 Laddery structures spoiling Alsace (6) 17 Honest sect admits eccentricity (5) 18 Peculiar character’s spoken to listeners (5) 20 Wearing headdress circling posh island (7) 21 Dreamy individual in defunct police

Fraser Nelson

Of bankers and bartenders

It suits a great many people to blame the banks. The ministers (like Ed Balls) who oversaw the debt-fuelled credit bubble; the Tories (like George Osborne) who signed up to Labour’s debt-fuelled spending binge; the regulators who failed so appallingly (a global crisis but how many collapsed banks in Australia and Canada?); and Mervyn King, who oversaw this hideous asset bubble and didn’t sound the alarm. When George Osborne told the Commons that banks ‘brought our economy to its knees’ he suggested that, even now, he has not worked out what caused the crisis. The theory that wicked, greedy bonus-seeking bankers caused the crisis has been repeatedly debunked, but it’s

Giannandrea Poesio

New world order

When World Cities 2012 — better known as the current Pina Bausch season — was first presented, questions were raised about the apparently random order of the various pieces. Yet a chronologically structured retrospective would have deprived the event of the theatrically stimulating game of juxtapositions that the reordered version possesses. As with her non city-specific works, Bausch’s city-specific creations can be grouped in two categories: the more and the less danced pieces. The pendulum swung dramatically throughout the four decades in which Bausch worked, though not frequently. So a chronologically structured retrospective would have suffered from clumps of similarly formulated compositions. A vibrant chiaroscuro is key to the success

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Short story

In Competition No. 2752 you were invited to submit a short story ending with the phrase: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’ Dr Livingstone’s pronouncement, written in 1873 a few days before his wretched death, is putting it mildly. His final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches, hostile African tribesmen and a large blood clot in his gut. Several competitors wove Livingstone in, but the postbag was impressively wide-ranging: crime rubbed shoulders with horror and sci-fi, and there was even a smattering of erotica — very much the genre du jour. Commendations to Lance Levens and Frank Osen, £25 each to the

Michael Henderson

Notes from Salzburg

Gratefully we cast our bread upon the blue-green waters of the Salzach to give thanks to this festival city. Across the river the famous castle stands fortress over the old town. On the terrace of the Cafe Bazar one hears the tongues of France, Italy and Spain as well as Austria, because this is old Europe. Not ‘European’ as defined by the EU, European as in the Arnoldian sense, handing on from one generation to another the best that has been thought, or said, or done. There is a European way of living, and it is easy to find it here. ••• No city of comparable size (150,000 souls) enjoys

Alexander Chancellor

Long Life

When the man from the Cabinet Office telephoned, he was anxious to find out why I hadn’t replied to a letter asking if I would find it ‘agreeable’ to be appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. I told him I hadn’t got the letter, which he said had been posted to me c/o Guardian for which I used to write a column. (The letter, in an envelope labelled ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, ‘urgent’, ‘strictly private’, and stuff like that, was eventually forwarded to me, but a month after it had been sent, already opened and resealed with Sellotape.) In response to my puzzlement, the civil servant