Society

Thursday

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

America is seeing a tiny civil war in Texas

Pundits these days often warn that America may be on the brink of civil war. Finally, they’re right – except that in tiny Eagle Pass, Texas, forget being on the brink. In microcosm, civil war is already under way. Once again playing immigration hardball, last week the Texas governor Greg Abbott, the vile, heartless Republican whose voodoo doll progressive Democrats poke pins in, sent the Texas National Guard to assume control of an Eagle Pass park used to process migrants and additional lands along the Mexican border. In so doing, the state militia is actively blocking the US Border Patrol from policing several miles along the banks of the Rio

Toby Young Toby Young

How to drink, according to Spectator readers

My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response – and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night. He rises each day at 4.30 a.m., spends six hours at his desk doing serious work, then does an hour of admin, has a nice lunch, followed by an afternoon nap, another couple of hours’ work and finally a good dinner. ‘The key is the afternoon nap,’ he said. ‘It’s a way of turning one day

Mark Mason

Why criminals love a tunnel

What is it about a tunnel that excites us so? Last week’s story about the secret one in a New York synagogue fascinated the world, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that no one knew why the thing had been built in the first place. Police attempted to close it, and indeed fill it with cement, leading to fights with a group of young men trying to defend the tunnel, which went under the street and led to at least one other nearby building. Maybe it’s the word ‘secret’. Of course that explains our interest in Tom, Dick and Harry, the three tunnels dug during the Great Escape. Roger

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The lesson AI must learn from nature

What’s the difference between a café and a restaurant? It’s not as simple as it seems. Yes, the food at a restaurant will be fancier and more substantial. But there is a social distinction too: a restaurant places you under an obligation; a café does not. When you enter a café you order something out of courtesy – but it can be as insubstantial as a cup of tea. How long you stay, and what you choose to eat or drink, remains up to you. A café, as Nassim Taleb would say, is ‘high in optionality’. By contrast, entering a restaurant is like missing the Wrotham exit on the westbound

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I cut chats short without being rude?

Q. I have been in the wine trade all my working life. This has its pros and cons – dining at friends’ houses, for example, they invariably try to catch me out by serving decanted wine which I have to try to identify. My problem is that I am 50 this year and we have decided to celebrate with a large party. I realise, from comments made, that the pressure is on to serve top wines. I simply can’t afford these. How can I get round this without appearing stingy? – Name and address withheld A. Redirect the pressure by designing the party around wine discovery. Ask each guest to

Bruce Anderson

I’m raising a glass to the Tory party’s future

Wine stimulates the wits, emboldens debate, and inspires the mind. Judicious quantities, abetted by judicious quality, encourage the participants to attack the important questions. Thus it has been over the past few days, discussing God and the Universe. I was talking to an astronomer, whose day is spent contemplating the vastness of interstellar space. Consider one single light year, and how far that would take us from our own celestial neighbourhood. Then let your mind give way before the unimaginable distances. Already daunted, move onwards to the queen of the sciences, theology, and the question posed by that outstanding 20th-century theologian, Mr Prendergast in Decline and Fall. He could not

Luke McShane

A new queen

Promoting a pawn is a moonshot on the chessboard. A new queen is a literal game-changer, so when a humble pawn becomes far advanced, it is worth moving heaven and earth to get it over the line. Ditching a rook or a bishop is a small price to pay for a coronation. One game from the World Rapid Championship, held in Samarkand in December, saw the kitchen sink hurled with enviable force. White has just played 28 f2-f3, supporting the e-pawn and thereby preparing Bg2-f1. Now the prosaic 28…b4 29 axb4 Bxb4 30 Kf2 a3 31 bxa3 Bxa3 32 Rb2 b2 33 Bf1, would give White reasonable chances of a successful defence. Iljiushenok

Luke McShane

No. 784

White to play. Cheparinov-Rapport, World Rapid Championship 2023. White found an elegant combination to make use of the passed pawn on f7. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 January. 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 c8=N+ Kd7 2 b8=N mate! Last week’s winner Andrew Gilmour, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Dot Wordsworth

The genteel roots of dunking

When I was a girl, it was bad manners to dunk a biscuit. Then I went abroad and found that Italian biscotti could scarcely be consumed in any other way. Back home, dunking a ginger nut seemed less criminal. Now I hear people using dunk and dump indifferently. Can this be right? After all, words of similar pronunciation, such as bought and brought, are often misused, one for the other, though the meaning is very different. I’m not sure what word people used before dunk turned up, which was little more than 100 years ago. Did they say sod, seethe, soak? I was surprised to find that dunk is a

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Dylan Thomas changes his tune

In Competition No. 3332 you were invited to supply, in verse form, a retraction of beliefs previously believed in passionately. You weren’t obliged to step into the shoes of a real poet but many chose to and some smart, entertaining about-turns included Robert Schechter’s ‘Palinode on a Grecian Urn’: ‘Truth is beauty,’I said smugly,but lived to findthat truth is ugly. Other standout performers included Janine Beacham, George Simmers and Alex Steelsmith, and they were unlucky to miss out on a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those entries that made the final cut are printed below and earn their authors £25. The world is charged with grandeur we applaud,The sheen and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A beginner’s guide to getting a massage

 The agony could strike at any moment. Daggering pains in my lower back demanded correction. Not just painkillers, I needed a permanent cure. ‘Thai massage’ suggested the internet, so I hobbled across a tangle of east London streets and found a doorway beneath a pink neon sign. A receptionist of south Asian appearance, bundled in a white winter coat, nodded at me unsmilingly. ‘Massage?’ I asked. ‘Forty,’ she said tersely. I counted eight fivers out into her small pink hand. ‘A receipt?’ ‘No receipt,’ she said. ‘Room Two.’ She gestured behind her at a line of numbered doors. Room Two was a narrow, sweet-smelling nook with silvery wallpaper, piped Burmese

Melissa Kite

A meeting with our new boy-racer neighbour

We were riding the two cobs down the lane when I heard the car roaring its engine behind us. I had seen it pull out of a long, winding driveway coming from a house perched on top of the highest point of the hillside, a few hundred yards along from our place. It went the other way for a few seconds, then I could hear it screech, turn and start to hurtle back towards us along the long straight stretch of lane it was evidently using to get up speed. We only had a few yards until we reached the back gates of our house. I looked behind and waved

Doc

2637: Born to sing

The unclued lights (one of two words, and the remainder when paired correctly) are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Ignore two apostrophes. Across 7    Scottish seagull’s gullet (3) 13    Pull back leading troops president recalled (7) 15    Chocolate powder run over in taxi (5) 16    Overwhelmed, Laura was hampered a bit (5) 17    Reporters on Daily Record ignoring first workers’ home (6) 18    Biden, injured, is laid up (2,3) 21    Australia’s Finch from bazaar, going regularly (5) 22    What those in agreement are of the same view (3,4) 27    Coarse fellow admits nothing’s right. Beware! (4,3)… 29    …and he finally embraces other ones! (5) 30    One-time GI getting confused, sticking

Robin Oakley

In praise of trainer Dan Skelton

I’m not sure how the BBC would have taken it in my Nine O’Clock News days if after a tough interview I had embraced a disconsolate politician (though I can guess and it wouldn’t have been to the corporation’s credit). It was, though, the best moment in the ITV coverage of last Saturday’s racing, when presenter Alice Plunkett put her arms around Laura Morgan and hugged the tearful trainer who had just lost her star horse. Earlier in the programme, Alice – who seems to be friends with everyone in racing, from the merest muck-shoveller to owners campaigning £200,000 jumpers – had interviewed Laura following the success of her stable’s

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 20 January 2024

Bidding would be so much easier if you didn’t have opponents. Imagine if you and your partner were given a clear run, without interference from those pesky players on either side. But that’s not bridge. Getting in your way is what opponents do – at the highest level possible. Having to judge whether to bid up, shut up or double them is where the real money is. This deal from the first division of the 2023 English Premier League showed perfect judgment by all four players: North, Andrew McIntosh (‘Tosh’), opened a light 1ª. East, Derek Patterson, made a vulnerable pre-empt of 2«. South, Tom Paske, bid an artificial 2NT

David Abulafia

How the National Maritime Museum is trying to decolonise Lord Nelson

I spent Christmas in Turin, with its superb and often neglected museums that are a particular delight because they are uncontaminated by preaching about the evils of European colonialism. It is not that I have no moral perspective on how the creators of empire across four millennia have acted towards their subjects. But the use of objects in museums to tell a distorted picture in the interests of supposed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, infused with Critical Race Theory, is a betrayal of what museums are supposed to do. Museums are not political tools, as the Museums Association, with its rants against racism and colonialism, seems to think. Racism is indeed

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: air strikes, train strikes and missile strikes

Home Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, said that the ‘red lights on the global dashboard are very much flashing’. He was speaking after Britain joined American air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. The Houthis, backed by Iran and allied with Hamas in Gaza, had been attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told the Commons it was ‘a necessary and a proportionate response to a direct threat to UK vessels’. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, supported Britain’s action, but said that future military interventions – especially sustained ones – should be brought before parliament. Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, announced

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What Nikki Haley has over Trump

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organisation in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way – now highly unusual in US politics – of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. Today, after Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such

Henry Jeffreys

How Britain sobered up

The people of these islands have long been famous for their drinking. A Frenchman writing in the 12th century described the various races of Europe: ‘The French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.’ By 1751, at the height of the gin craze that William Hogarth immortalised in ‘Gin Lane’, the English were drinking on average the equivalent of 20 bottles of gin per person per year. But Britain is losing its taste for alcohol. Around a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds don’t drink at all. Gen Z said they associate alcohol with ‘vulnerability’,