Society

Black to play. Wall-Raczek, Northumbria Masters 2023. Black’s next move brought the game to a swift close. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 11 September. 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 Nd5! Qxb5 2 Nc7#, or 1…Qxd6 2 Nf6+ wins. The game continued 1…exd5 2 Qe2+ Ne5 3 Qxe5+ Kd7 4 Qxh8 and Black resigned a few moves later. Last week’s winner Kevin Taylor, Syston, Leicestershire

‘Money has never been a motivation,’ according to footballer Jordan Henderson, the ex Liverpool captain and recent recruit to Al Ettifaq in the Saudi pro-league. But it is hard to believe that the main reason for moving to the Middle East wasn’t the reported £700,000-a-week contract. For many football fans, Henderson tarnished his reputation with his high-profile transfer earlier this summer. Now, he has finally broken his silence on the subject. Yet his interview with the Athletic might make matters worse.  One of the biggest criticisms aimed at the footballer – who was a vocal advocate of the rainbow laces and armband campaign in support of LGBT rights during his time in the Premier

There are many good reasons, we’re constantly told, for millennials and Generation Z to resent their elders. What they can barely imagine, we took for granted: affordable housing, state-paid education, free dentistry and slow, misspent youths on unemployment benefit. But there is another justification for their envy, one that is hardly ever mentioned: we wrote letters to each other. Mine was the very last generation to do so. Bleak and empty was the day you didn’t find a stuffed envelope, in handwriting you recognised, waiting for you on the doormat. As well as being a sign you weren’t forgotten, letters could, at their best, be sources of sheer delight. Many went

Two weeks ago, VJ day (Victory over Japan day) celebrated the end of the Pacific War. On 15 August 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with his high-pitched voice and arcane royal language, which was heard by his people for the first time, announced Japan’s surrender. Huddled around their radios the Japanese heard Hirohito say: ‘We have ordered our government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration [The Potsdam Declaration 26 July 1945, signed by President Truman, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai Shek, ordered Japan’s unconditional surrender or face ‘prompt and utter destruction’]… The

In the past they would put a witches’ bridle on women who yapped too much. Any woman judged to be a gossip or a hysteric or just too darn opinionated risked having this iron muzzle attached to her head to keep her babbling tongue in place. That’d shut her up. Today, more subtle methods of tongue-clamping are used on outspoken women. Who needs metal contraptions when women can be Twittershamed into silence? Public humiliation and the threat of social ostracism have replaced muzzling as the preferred method for taming shrews. Cancel culture grows fatter and more crazed with every retraction it extracts Just ask Róisín Murphy. The great Irish songstress,