Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

Helpmates

Chess, to state the obvious, is different from painting, or dance, or poetry. There is artistry in it, and yet the game stands apart. When we admire a sequence of moves, they only make sense viewed through the filter of an imagined adversarial contest. Sacrifices and combinations sparkle according to the obstacles that are overcome. The finest chess compositions display dazzling ideas from both sides before the denouement. And yet there is a celebrated genre of chess problem which dispenses with that premise. I’m thinking of the helpmate, in which both sides conspire to achieve mate on the board as quickly as possible. This is chess as choreography. Freed from

Luke McShane

No. 793

White to play and mate in two moves. One of the conventional problems from the same Winton British Chess Solving Championship, composed by Huibrecht van Beek, 1899. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 25 March. 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 1 Ba3! Qa2 2 Bc4 traps the queen, then 2…Bd4+ 3 Kh1 Qf2 4 Qxd4 wins a bishop. Last week’s winner Iain Hope, Musselburgh

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems about great works of art

In Competition No. 3341 you were invited to submit a poem about a great work of art –  a challenge prompted by George Steiner’s observation that ‘the best readings of art are art’. The writer Geoff Dyer has cited W.H. Auden’s 1938 ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ –  about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ and our relationship to suffering – as an example of this: (‘About suffering they were never wrong,/ The old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position…/ …how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster…’). So Nicholas Hodgson’s smart take on Auden’s poem came as no surprise (‘About suffering they were never

Doc

2646 : Too many (In memoriam)

The unclued lights (two of two words) comprise two celebrity pairs which are represented by a singleton, two pairs (one ‘In memoriam’) and a trio of lights . Across 1    Slices top of sausage in front of dogs (5) 4    Traffic police with amphetamine found by small wood, reportedly (5,4) 9    City’s main Mr Big busted importing heroin (10) 11    A nobleman cut down one Oriental bean (5) 12    Nimbleness of US soldier in Italy, wandering (7) 15    Initial investigation into family line on isle (5) 16    Soprano left BBC football pundit for judge (6) 21    Gallows rebuilt by small prankster (3-5) 22    Have a rest around new lido (3,4) 24   

The Spectator

2643: Word-building – solution

The chain of words is ITS (7A), SITE (35), INSET (37), STRINE (20), ENTRIES (5), RESIDENT (24), DESERTING (21D), DENIGRATES (1D), NEAR-SIGHTED (41). First prize Angela Hales, Callow End, Worcester Runners-up A Weir, Broughty Ferry, Dundee; Major Gen A.I. Ramsay, Hurstbourne Tarrant, Hampshire

Toby Young Toby Young

I’ll never surrender my car

I got a letter this week informing me how much it would cost to renew my car insurance: £2,671.47, up from £1,587.86. It could be worse, I suppose. Owners of Range Rovers tell me that the cost of insuring one in London for a year is about the same as the replacement value of the car. But even so. This is a seven-year-old VW Touran we’re talking about. Not the first choice of London’s crack regiment of car thieves. I will not capitulate to the soft totalitarianism of the professional-managerial class  The really depressing thing is this quote came before I’d notified the insurer of the three points Caroline has

Zak Asgard

The trouble with apple cider vinegar

The snake oil salesman is back in town with an old favourite: apple cider vinegar – or ACV as it’s called by those in the know. The ‘wonder-juice’ has been around for centuries, peddled by Greeks and Romans alike. In recent years, it has become something of a panacea, a social media ‘superfood’. But just how good is this cloudy, acidic liquid? The purported benefits range from weight loss to curing cancer. I’m no oncologist, but the cancer claims seem a little dubious. That said, let’s not dismiss apple cider vinegar entirely. The likes of Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Victoria Beckham swear by it – and if

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Where did all the good English football managers go?

It’s not easy for most right–thinking people to care much about golf and golfers apart from gasping in wonder at the size of their bank balances. Right now the Saudi–backed LIV tour and the American and European tours are making occasional grunts of peace towards each other. Soon the various professional golf bodies will have so much money they will be able to club together and buy Saudi Arabia. But what you can be certain of is that no one has ever watched a LIV event of their own free will or is ever likely to, despite the presence of some of the world’s best players, like Jon Rahm, Bryson

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The contradictory brilliance of Boston cream pie

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but perhaps you can teach it old tricks. When I embarked on making a Boston cream pie, I thought I knew it all when it came to sponge cakes. I’d creamed butter and sugar, using elbow grease and a wooden spoon or employing the horsepower of a stand mixer’s whisk attachment. I’ve used the all-in-one-method; I’ve melted butter and folded it into cake batters in the pursuit of sticky denseness. And I’ve folded in egg whites, holding my breath in an attempt not to knock any air out of the mix. But I had never made a Boston cream pie,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop a nosy acquaintance from snooping in my house?

Q. I’m very fond of a neighbour in our village and we see a lot of each other. She has told me she has got X, an acquaintance of mine, coming to stay and wants to bring her over for a drink before lunch on the Sunday. The trouble is X is a decorator and will ask if she can look around the house. I happen to know that she’s very nosy and indiscreet – but how can I say no? – Name and address withheld A. Why not pretend to be enthusiastic about the visit and then, on the day before, ring to say you are longing to see

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘The interiors are happily insane’: Dear Jackie, reviewed

Dear Jackie is the restaurant in the new hotel Broadwick Soho on Broadwick Street in Soho, which is most famous, if you are an infectious diseases nerd, for being the site of the 1854 cholera outbreak and its cure. Dr John Snow isolated it to the street’s water pump, noted local brewers were immune, and proved cholera is not airborne. When children stopped dying, Soho eased into its time of moral rot. This is as spirited an attempt to re­animate the 1970s as I have found beyond musical theatre This is a changeable thing. Drama fled Soho in the 1970s, and Broadwick Soho is an attempt to put it back.

Dot Wordsworth

The normalisation of ‘normalcy’

My husband devotes his decreasing hours of daytime wakefulness to looking at Twitter, as he still calls it. He shouted out, ‘Look at this’, just as I was putting the potatoes in the oven to roast. It was a post criticising the ENO for saying 2021 was ‘a year spent slowly returning to normalcy’. The author said, ‘Brits don’t use the word normalcy’. Is that true? In 1899, on leaving Eton at the age of 17, Evelyn Wrench was well on his way to making a fortune from selling picture postcards at tourist spots. Then he overstretched himself and went bust in 1904. Instead he turned his energies to promoting

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The greatness of Steve Harley

You may have noticed by now that the airtime devoted to dead popstars bears scant relation to their actual importance in the genre, or indeed their popularity. So, for example, the death of the smackhead rapper Coolio was headline news on the BBC and the subject of a fawning feature on the PM programme, despite the fact that he had only one really big hit in the UK – ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ – the bones of which were written by Stevie Wonder. The tragedy of Harley, a charming and hugely talented man, is that he is remembered for one song Meanwhile, Rick Parfitt was the co-writer of a large proportion of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Directors shouldn’t meddle with Shakespeare

A strip club, a prison, a mental asylum, a Great War field hospital, an addiction clinic, a Napoleonic palace. These are the typical locations for a modern production of Shakespeare, whose interpreters seem to agree that any setting is better than the one chosen by the playwright. The assumption today is that the Bard needs help from directors who can see where he went wrong and know how to get his ideas across with greater force and clarity. Aside from the Greek tragedians, no other playwright attracts this sort of condescending vandalism. If a director were to set The Cherry Orchard on a spaceship or in a Guyanese penal colony,

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Reeves speaks, Varadkar resigns and Putin plots

Home Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said that if Labour were elected it would aim to borrow only for investment. Annual inflation fell to 3.4 per cent in February, from 4 per cent in January. Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, said that only a ‘small minority of MPs’ were talking about getting rid of Rishi Sunak as party leader and replacing him with Penny Mordaunt. Mr Sunak rushed to Coventry to announce a scheme to help apprentices. Barack Obama, the former US president, called at 10 Downing Street. Vaughan Gething became the First Minister of Wales; his father was born in Glamorgan and his mother in Zambia, and he said: ‘I have

Richard Madeley

The BBC has an aura of entitlement

To W12 to be in W1A. The spoof TV series on internal BBC politics (one of that vanishingly rare UK television species – a comedy that’s actually funny) filmed a special episode for Red Nose Day. It poked fun at Lenny Henry’s final appearance as Comic Relief host after nearly 40 years at the helm. I featured as myself, cockily pitching for his job in front of an increasingly outraged Lenny. Richard Curtis’s script was hilarious, but filming was a surreal experience. Not because I was in the same room as the W1A cast, all in character as appalling BBC apparatchiks, but because we really were in the equivalent of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

We have less freedom now than we did 40 years ago

Forty years ago this week, I became the editor of this paper. That is as long ago from now as was D-Day from then. It must seem as distant to today’s young as did the men on the Normandy beaches to my 27-year-old self. I can now see more clearly how much my generation enjoyed the freedom for which those men had fought. That freedom is trickling away. Re-reading The Spectator’s Portrait of the Week (which I restored to the front of the paper as soon as I became editor), I find many aspects of the world in March 1984 echoing today. There was near-anarchy in Lebanon; American marines withdrew.

Lucy Hunter Blackburn

Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act is fraught with danger

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words… make me feel hated just for being me… make me scared to leave my house… make our lives a living hell… cause wounds that never heal. Hate hurts. If you witness a hate crime, report it.’ If you live in Scotland, you may have seen the ‘Hate Hurts’ adverts from the Scottish government. The government is worried about, as another police advert put it, the things Scots might say ‘to a neighbour, somebody on the street, on a night out [to a] security guy at the door’. If you lose your temper, then ‘before you know it, you’ve committed a hate

Wednesday

Monica Porter

Is Viktor Orbán really anti-Semitic?

Much of the criticism directed at Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s long-serving populist prime minister, is richly deserved. Orbán poses as the bête noire of the EU, despite Hungary being a net recipient of EU largesse. Another source of the opprobrium directed against Orbán is his opposition to aiding Ukraine in its existential war against Russia. This is downright indecent for someone who, as a handsome young political firebrand in 1989, helped to end Soviet control of Hungary. Has Orbán forgotten, now that he is grey-haired and rather porky, what it means to yearn for your country’s freedom and independence? Continued access to cheap Russian gas and oil just isn’t a good