White to play. Bjerre-Bodrogi, European Individual Championship, 2025. The game was eventually drawn, but in this position Bjerre missed a beautiful winning move. What was it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 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 1 Rf8+ Bxf8 2 Nf6+ Kh8 3 Qh7 mate Last week’s winner Samantha Morgan, Rayleigh, Essex
For Competition 3394 you were invited to submit a vernal triolet. In 1894, the poet Banjo Paterson wrote a heartfelt triolet in dispraise of the triolet and Brian Allgar did the same this week: I really hate the triolet, And, Spring or not, I find them hell. ‘Oh, tra-la-la, it’s cold and wet.’ I really hate the triolet. All those repeated lines that get Nowhere (just like the villanelle). I really hate the triolet, And, Spring or not, I find them hell. Nonetheless, you rose to the challenge with gusto, producing a funny and poignant entry that was hard to whittle down to a winning line-up. Hats off to unlucky
Fourteen unclued lights comprise seven pairs. Across 7 Looked for nothing when leader makes a U-turn? (6) 12 Medical instruments deal with something breaking old cast (9) 13 Maybe Queen’s speech is without purpose, on reflection (5) 15 Shot bird left, eaten by parasite (9) 16 Twins, perhaps extremely amoral, notable (6) 21 European dictionary contains chestnut for ‘imitated’ (6) 22 Wasted new mortgage in Scotland (6) 24 Coterie didn’t regularly boast duke (2-5) 27 Cut shaft, losing line (3) 28 Bird’s bone uncovered (3) 32 Think ancient Persian priests will stop in east (7) 33 Times introducing trendy revolutionary snack (6) 34 Port that iså red (6) 38 Press
The theme-word is SMITH which can be preceded by GOLD (24A), LADY (37A), HAMMER (3D), BLACK (5D) and SILVER (22D). The pertinent quotation ‘A mighty man is he’ at 9D comes from The Village Blacksmith by Longfellow. BLACK had to be shaded. First prize Andy Grady, Tutbury, Staffs Runners-up Steve Reszetniak, Margate, Kent; Oenone Green, Feltham, Middlesex
Having been made redundant from a job in the City, I could have afforded not to sign on at all. But since my P45 showed I had paid well over £40,000 in income tax last year, I didn’t feel desperately guilty about clawing back £90 a week in New Style Jobseeker’s Allowance. I didn’t know how long I would remain unemployed. Plus I wanted to protect my national insurance to keep my entitlement to the state pension. The chaos started almost immediately. I registered online in early February and was told to await a date for my ‘assessment interview’. Instead, a month later, a letter arrived to say I had
Parliament’s last day before recess is usually a dull affair. A one-line whip allows MPs to return to their constituencies early and the matters for debate are deliberately parochial. When the Commons rose for Easter this week, the government could have expected attention to have been even more desultory than normal, since politicians and the media were focused on the fallout from Donald Trump’s global tariff war. Which is why it is all the more concerning that the Home Office chose that afternoon to slip out the announcement that it was retreating from its commitment to investigate the operations of grooming gangs in five local authorities. Someone must have thought
In his recent interview with our American edition, The Spectator World, Donald Trump is reported to be faced by a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his Oval Office desk. ‘A lot of people say, why do you have FDR?’ Trump says. His answer is: ‘Well, he was a serious president, whether you agree with him or not.’ He does not state what he particularly likes about FDR, though one might guess that his capacity to be elected president four times is an attraction. Surprisingly, perhaps, FDR is not anathema to all Republicans. He even appeals to their isolationist strand, because of Yalta. At that fateful conference,
I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew she existed – but how she existed and what she did with her existence did not impinge because she was safely sequestered in that booby hatch of methadone, lady-men, corruption and pies which we know as ‘Scotland’ and thus would have no jurisdiction over my life. This is, I grant, a solipsistic attitude to have taken – and I realise that now it has been shattered. A new and unwanted homunculus has slipped into my life, then, and I fear it is time to talk about the smirking, pudding-faced Green
Home In response to President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘This is not just a short-term tactical exercise. It is the beginning of a new era.’ He wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm.’ The FTSE100 fell by 4.9 per cent in a day, its biggest such fall since 27 March 2020. The government published a 417-page list of US products upon which Britain could impose retaliatory tariffs after 1 May. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that, although in 2023 the UK imported £57.9 billion of goods from
The cherry blossom was at its finest as I made my last early morning trip through Regent’s Park to Broadcasting House to present Radio 3’s Breakfast. When hire-bikes arrived in London, the planners were thoughtful enough to install a docking station outside my flat. I have used the heavy cycles for my commute ever since. Over the past 14 years I have become accustomed to the regular faces on my route: the man in an elegant dressing gown, surveying the morning scene while waiting for his dog to pee; the jogger who for some reason processes backwards along the pavement (whatever the supposed health benefits of his technique, I’ve always
‘You wouldn’t steal a car…’ began the early noughties anti-piracy video. ‘You wouldn’t steal a television… You wouldn’t steal a handbag.’ No, but it seems from reports from restaurants, you might slip some silverware into a handbag if you’re out for dinner. In February, Gordon Ramsay revealed that nearly 500 cat figurines had been stolen in one week from his latest restaurant, Lucky Cat. The maneki-neko cat models – said to bring good luck – cost £4.50 each, which makes that a loss of more than £2,000 for the restaurant in just seven days. What is it about dining out that means we think pocketing property is acceptable? People who
In January, the Home Secretary pledged £5 million for five locally led inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’, in the wake of public outcry led by the richest man on the planet Elon Musk. Yesterday, on the last day before Easter recess, the government watered down its promise to victims and survivors of rape gangs. The £5 million in funding may now also go towards ‘locally-led work’ following feedback from local authorities. The Conservatives had previously called for a national statutory inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’, but a proposed amendment attached to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was voted down at the beginning of the year. Not surprising, given the Labour government’s
Thank God for Katie Lam. Yesterday the government tried to conduct a grubby betrayal of thousands of young girls groomed and raped in towns and cities across the country. On the last day parliament sat before the Easter recess, Jess Phillips, the junior minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls spoke to an almost empty Commons to update MPs on the government’s plans to deal with ‘grooming gangs’. Few MPs were present. Phillips assured her colleagues that Labour are developing ‘a new best practice framework to support local authorities that want to undertake… local inquiries’. A meagre £5 million will be available for local authorities should they wish
At the beginning of the debut episode of Meghan Markle’s new podcast, she is keen to assert her own identity. After flirting with tradwifedom in her most recent Netflix show With Love, Meghan, she is now casting off her brief nomenclature of ‘Meghan Sussex’, but nor should you refer to The Artist Formerly Known As The Duchess of Sussex as ‘Meghan Markle’ any longer. Instead, she is simply ‘Meghan’ these days, like Madonna, Buddha or, to name another showboating and opportunistic celebrity who had a penchant for backing into the limelight, Liberace. Not that Confessions Of A Female Founder features anything so interesting as its presenter offering the world a virtuoso piano solo. Instead,
Very little surprises me about Sadiq Khan’s London anymore. It’s now a city in which low-level lawlessness is implicitly tolerated via the complete absence of enforcement. Where the fetid smell of cannabis pervades the streets, where phone-snatching is endemic and where shop-lifting goes unpunished. And now, people are smoking crack cocaine on the Victoria Line. Yes, really. In a video posted on Reddit, a tube passenger appears to be smoking the Class A drug in front of commuters. The Reddit poster said, ‘every few moments he’d spit yellow liquid onto the floor below him whilst constantly clicking away at his lighter trying to get his crack to smoke, which was
It’s not even a month since Adolescence ‘dropped’ on to Netflix and into all our lives, whether we actually watched it or not. The mania about the thing is still raging like a persistent brush fire, with the Prime Minister – apparently still unsure whether it’s a drama or a documentary – meeting its makers in Downing Street, and a lot of other politicians and public figures pulling very concerned faces about the internet, the manosphere, toxic masculinity etc. Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for getting this (adult-certificated) show into schools for the instruction of children is very revealing, I think. It is, he tells us in his special language of searing
The shocking case of Lucy Connolly is becoming a cause célèbre. In October, the Northampton childminder and wife of a Tory councillor received 31 months behind bars for stirring up racial hatred for a tweet on the night of the Southport massacre. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, now says her sentence was ‘excessive’ and that she is the victim of a ‘politicised two-tier justice system’; former PM Liz Truss wants her ‘released immediately’. With the White House already putting pressure on the UK over free-speech concerns, that the case has now reached Elon Musk will surely be setting nerves jangling in Downing Street. The new attention comes after an article
How do you breach an abortion buffer zone protection order? Why, by being within 150 metres of any part of a building where abortions are carried out. You’re not allowed to cause harassment, alarm or distress to anyone going to them, nor obstruct them from the site. Neither are you allowed to ‘influence’ anyone having or providing an abortion. And there’s the thing. When Livia Tossici-Bolt stood near a clinic in Bournemouth in March 2023 with a placard saying, ‘Here to talk, if you want’, the clinic and council complained on the basis that the placard and the woman were in breach of the order and a judge, Orla Austin, said
Horatio Nelson passed his examination for lieutenant on 9 April 1777 (possibly with a little help from his uncle, who was one third of the examining panel). He was then just 18 and a half years old, and yet he already had six years of naval experience. The man who was to become England’s greatest fighting sailor had served in the West Indies and the Arctic, and had spent two years on the India station, at a time when sea voyages to India could take as much as six months each way. He had seen combat, albeit a brief and insignificant skirmish, and had recently recovered from a serious bout of
Seeing the mugshot of Old Etonian Douglas Clifton Brown following his conviction for attempted murder, transported me straight back to 1986. We were in the same house and the same year at school: Clifton Brown and his friend bullied me regularly, making my life hell. Triggered, I went into the attic and found an old image from my schooldays: Even in this supposedly formal house photo, the camera shows him elbowing me out of the way. He sports a smug smile and stares straight at the camera, whereas I didn’t dare to acknowledge the photographer. My house, particularly when I first arrived, suffered from endemic bullying. Young for my year,
