Society

Q. My father missed my mother so much after 50 years together that, following her death, he married again. I make every effort with my new stepmother but we have nothing in common. To be frank, common is the operative word. What I really mind is that when he and I meet alone for our weekly lunches, this distinguished man now reeks of the fabric conditioner with which she washes his clothes. He lost his sense of smell years ago so has no idea what he smells like. How can I tell her that in the world into which she has married, fabric conditioner is never used? – Name and

As regular readers will know, I am an inveterate fan of cryptic crosswords. At the everyday level, they are the perfect way to kill 20-50 minutes of otherwise boring time. There is a refined elegance to clue-setting: the best are little works of art. Crossword-solving also cultivates the useful talent of looking beneath the clue’s explicit surface meaning to the meaning lurking beneath – which trains solvers in the essential creative act of seeing the same thing from different perspectives. Cryptic crosswords instil the very important idea that problem-solving is rarely linear But there is perhaps something even more valuable about the habit. There are many ways of solving any given

At the end of last week, the Holodomor was commemorated in Britain. There was a service at Westminster Abbey. But the chief point to notice is that no important British government or opposition representatives appeared. Nor, with the honourable exception of Stephen Fry, did any of the celebrities who infest causes such as ‘Free Palestine’. Almost everyone knows, thank goodness, what the Holocaust was. But even now, although Vladimir Putin is trying a small-scale repeat, have most people heard of the Holodomor? (If you haven’t, read Anne Applebaum’s astonishing Red Famine.) It was the largely deliberate starvation of about four million Ukrainians by Stalin in 1932-33, bringing death at a