Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

Candidates debate

The grace of a snowflake lies in its outward simplicity, which on closer inspection reveals a sublime complexity. Chess endgames beguile me in much the same spirit. The examples below both occurred at the Fide Women’s Candidates tournament, which is currently approaching its conclusion in Toronto. Just a few moves earlier, Anna Muzychuk had an extra pawn in a rook endgame, which was being patiently guided to victory. Lei Tingjie has sacrificed her rook to reach the diagram position, pinning her hopes on the passed g-pawn to salvage a draw. Crucially, her king can shepherd the pawn while also impeding the approach of the White king. Time is of the

Dot Wordsworth

Amol Rajan is right to change his ways on ‘aitch’

My husband thought it brave and manly of the BBC’s Amol Rajan to resolve publicly to change his pronunciation of the letter-name aitch. He’d said haitch all his life, but declared in a blog: ‘Dear reader, I’m here to tell you: it’s aitch.’ This attracted wide attention. He also announced that biopic is pronounced bio-pic, not bi-opic. That is true too, but attracted little attention. Amol Rajan is 40 and took an English degree at Cambridge, but has only just caught up with the eighth letter in the alphabet. Still, we all have blind spots. The key to the mispronunciation haitch is hypercorrection. Children were so often told to pronounce

Luke McShane

No. 797

White to play. Makkar-Cherniaev, 4NCL Spring GM, March 2024. White is a pawn down, but his pieces are well placed. How did he strike a decisive blow? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution …Bd4! wins a bishop by force: 2 Qxd4 Qxf3 3 Qf2 Qd1+ 4 Re1 Qxd6 and Black went on to win comfortably. Winner Ben Hale, Flimwell, East Sussex

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Chaucer goes to Wimbledon

In Competition No. 3345, you were invited to submit a report on a popular sporting event as it might have been written by someone who is not first and foremost a sportswriter. In a high-class field, David Silverman, the Revd Dr Peter Mullen and Ben Hale were unlucky to lose out on the £25 which goes to the winners below: It is the usual nightmare. I select a horse of those milling at the start of a steeplechase. I opt for the grey, committing immediately a humiliating crime against the form book Father scrupulously maintained. No steeple materialising from the winter gloom, I grow anxious how the race can be

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

My (surprisingly) decent proposal

‘Like being chained to a lunatic.’ That’s how a man feels in relation to his libido. And the lunatic latches on to anything, irrationally, and without warning. In Cambridge recently I dropped into a lecture given by a beautiful historian, Lea Ypi, from Albania, whose discourse included this observation about revolutionaries: ‘Once they attain power they lose all interest in revolution.’ Good point. Her blonde hair spilling over her shoulders absorbed far more of my attention than her political reflections and I was desperate to speak to her afterwards, but I had no way to orchestrate a meeting. She raised one eyebrow at me suggestively. This was the cue for

Mr Magoo

2650: Detention for history

One of the unclued entries is responsible for a quotation that makes up the others (two of three words, one of two words). Across 1    Precious metals Cook nearly left (1,6) 6    Netball players in mid-court for three quarters? (7) 12    Another one bites the dust, recipe being trapped wind (7) 14    Biting an animal’s brought about this? (5) 15    Married in mostly passionless times (5) 16    Caught this lassie forming a dance party? (6) 17    Top cops needing person to stop suspect (6) 19    Identifiers for Ben and James (minor characters) (9) 21    New ____ could be synthesised by men or women? (7) 24    Farmyard bird made a meal

Melissa Kite

Lefties don’t know anything about farming

The artists and hippies are re-wilding their land, which is to say doing nothing at all to it and watching it fill up with brambles. The builder boyfriend and I are un-wilding our land, which is to say pulling out every bramble we can find and cutting back the overhanging tree branches. ‘Seven hundred trees,’ she said, sipping her fresh mint tea, her artisanal walking crook propped against the wall We have nothing in common with the hippy English blow-ins who come to West Cork, of course. However, I have made friends with a few of the local lefties, including a very nice lady who lives down the lane whom

The Spectator

2647: Pabulum’s last bow – solution

The theme word is MARCH. The examples are CROWN IMPERIAL (1A/22) and COLONEL BOGEY (26/33). The March sisters from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth, appear in SOJOURN (12), OMEGA (34A), CRYPTOGAMY (10) and BETHINK (28). ALCOTT (in the third column) is to be shaded. Title: (pabulu)M + arch (defined). First prize Pam Bealby, Stockton-on-Tees Runners-up Chris Edwards, Pudsey, Leeds; Richard Andrews, Ashford, Middlesex

Charles Moore Charles Moore

My letter from Chris Packham

I do not know Chris Packham, the BBC nature broadcaster, personally, but he wrote me a letter last month, enclosing a book called Manifesto, The Battle for Green Britain by Dale Vince which, he tells me, ‘has something very important to say at this most important time’. In his letter, Chris says that ‘irrespective of any party politics’, ‘The coming election will be the most important of our lifetimes’ because we are ‘halfway through the last decade’ left to avoid ‘the worst of climate breakdown’. So ‘we must help young voters navigate the new voting rules’. Politics has ‘become the final frontier for a real greener Britain’. What Chris does

Robin Oakley

The magic of Aintree

However hard some people try to make it a business, jump racing remains a sport and the Grand National its greatest race. Two fences out this year 20 horses were still in contention, ten still seemingly in with a serious chance of winning. As Ruby Walsh noted: ‘If that doesn’t convince people it’s a wonderful sport I’m not sure what will.’ Of the 32 starters 21 finished. Four horses unseated their riders and seven were pulled up but not one fell. The Grand Nationalwill remain a great race. But it is changing Still in the battle two out were the three ‘story horses’. Latenightpass was point to point trainer Tom

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 20 April 2024

‘If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck.’ For Bridge players, the problem is that it doesn’t always look like a duck and it rarely quacks. My regular partner, Artur Mali, says ducking is for experts, and goes puce in the face if I duck and it’s wrong – which it almost always is. I was reminded of this when watching a match in the popular ALT online teams tournament:  What should South do at his second turn? I would prefer a double – seems most flexible – and if North pulls to 5♦ it may sometimes be

Michael Karam

The Lebanese always return home

Beirut You might have thought that the threat of the Gaza war spiralling into an all-out regional conflagration, along with breathless travel advice from western governments urging their nationals to leave the country, would have deterred Lebanon’s expats from flying home to celebrate Eid al-Fitr this year. Not one bit. Flights, hotels and restaurants were fully booked despite Iran’s drone strike. The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting (and in South Lebanon, there is on an almost daily basis), if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s no reason to stop the party. The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting, if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: the war on smoking, Trump’s trial and O.J.’s death

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said that British fighter jets had shot down ‘a number of drones’ fired at Israel from Iran. Additional RAF jets were deployed over Iraq and Syria, where Britain was already taking part in Operation Shader against the Islamic State group. Some people decided not to attend the annual Downing Street Eid party in protest at the government’s support for Israel; the Prime Minister was not there because he was making a statement to the House on Iran’s attack. A Muslim pupil at the Michaela School in Wembley, whose head teacher is Katharine Birbalsingh, failed at the High Court in challenging its ban on prayer

Joan Collins

I always judge a hotel by its club sandwich

As a child I was fascinated by the exotic names of certain cities: Havana, Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles sounded so glamorous to me, and I was determined to visit them (which I eventually did). But never in my childhood musings did the country of Czechoslovakia join this roll-call of dream destinations. However, since a few friends returned from filming in the renamed Czech Republic and extolled the virtues of Prague, it started to interest me. So, I was delighted when producer Mark Rozzano offered me the role of Francesca Carlyle in his murder mystery Murder Between Friends. ‘Brad and George have made movies there,’ he said, ‘and the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Are Stonewall and Mermaids charitable?

Iwas once asked by a colleague to sponsor him on an undertaking designed, he said, to raise money for a very good charitable cause. I can’t remember what the cause was – cancer, maybe, or mental kids – but I do remember the nature of the undertaking. He intended to walk a number of miles down the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. Why not, I suggested, just donate the enormous amount of money such a trek would cost direct to the charity? It would easily outweigh the amount raised, not least because miserable bastards like me would probably decide it was not a charitable act at all but first-world grandstanding

Wednesday

Andrew Tettenborn

The National Portrait Gallery’s bizarre obsession with slavery

The movement to radicalise the art and museum world was always going to come back and bite its own children. It has happened more quickly than we thought, as demonstrated by the seriously red faces at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) last week. Among the paintings on display at the NPG was one by French society artist James Tissot of Edward Fox-White, a well-known British 19th century art dealer who opened his first gallery in Glasgow in 1854. Last year, Donald Gajadhar, a descendant of Fox-White’s and manager of the art appraisal business founded by him, noticed a statement in the gallery’s notes next to the picture of his great-great-grandfather.

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Sunak has no excuse to not proscribe the IRGC

Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’ Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Surely if

Debbie Hayton

JK Rowling has exposed the weak spot in the SNP’s misogyny law

When will the Scottish government get on with the day job? Hot on the heels of his controversial Hate Crime Act, Humza Yousaf has now promised a misogyny law that will apparently protect members of both sexes. The First Minister insisted that ‘anyone affected’ by misogyny would be covered, whatever their biological sex. This includes, of course, transgender women. One wonders if the SNP is so detached from reality that it does not know the difference between men and women, or they are so deeply in the pockets of an activist lobby that they pretend not to know. Either way, it is bad for women and bad for Scotland. Once

Tuesday

Laurie Wastell

The outrageous shutdown of NatCon Brussels

Brussels A familiar refrain at any National Conservatism conference is that leftist elites are censorious, authoritarian and intolerant of free speech. Today, it seemed like this was proven correct, after the Brussels police were ordered to shut down the conference in an outrageous assault on freedom of speech. It has been a surreal day so far, but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is an outrageous, authoritarian assault on democratic freedom by the Brussels authorities When the conference started at the Claridge hotel this morning, it was already on its third venue, after two others were forced to cancel at the behest of Brussels’s socialist mayor, Philippe Close. The conference

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s 2024 no-CV internship scheme is now open

The Spectator runs the UK’s only double-blind internship scheme. We don’t ask for a CV, we don’t use your name. We don’t care where (or whether) you went to university, we anonymise your application. We give each applicant a city name, mark out of 100 and give offers to the best ones. You’ll come in for a week of your choosing. It’s a useful window into journalism and gives us the chance to meet new talent. When jobs come up, as they do in various fields, we look to hire past interns. About a third of our editorial staff came through this way: online (Gus, John and Max), broadcast (Cindy