Society

Thursday

Jawad Iqbal

The danger of Emma Raducanu’s ‘fixated’ fan ordeal

The scenes involving a tearful Emma Raducanu at the Dubai tennis championships must give pause for thought about the terrifying ordeals faced by women sports stars. Raducanu broke down in tears just two games into a second-round match against her opponent Karolina Muchova. The match had to be stopped after the former British No. 1 appeared to visibly panic, then began to cry, before approaching the umpire to ask for help. In remarkable scenes, Raducanu then appeared to cower behind the umpire’s chair while a ‘fixated’ man was removed from the crowd. She was comforted during this time by the umpire and Muchova before play could resume.  Plenty of other

Hugh Schofield

Why is there no campaign to free novelist Boualem Sansal?

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since,

The Spectator

Letters: The brilliant uselessness of art

Wonderfully useless Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February). A few minutes from our offices, there are several vast buildings, all lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer, whose sole purpose is to allow hordes of strangers to stare at rectangular sheets of fabric on which are daubed various colours and shapes – most of which quite wastefully replicate things that we can already see with our own eyes in the real world. Across the river, many millions more are spent on small armies of people coming together to bang, scrape and blow bits of wood, metal and brass for hours

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

It’s time to scrap the asylum system

Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t succumb to the seductive gravitational pull of the status quo. This is therefore a fitting juncture at which to not simply think outside the box, but in some cases to chuck the box. For example, Donald Trump wants to chuck the US Department of Education. Yet can’t he set his sights higher? Like, set an example for the rest of the West: chuck the asylum system. Having long ago predicted that the subject would dominate this century, I’ve written about immigration for 35 years. Although repeatedly approaching the radioactive issue

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Brace for an outbreak of Trumpist investor activism

If the new Trump era has a theme, it’s one of quixotic disruption with random consequences. In that spirit, stand by for more interventions from activist shareholders seeking to electrify sluggish businesses while making fast bucks on the way through. The first episode over here was the attack by the New York investor Boaz Weinstein on seven London-listed investment trusts, in which he acquired stakes and forced shareholder votes to replace board members, with the aim of taking the trusts’ assets under the management of his own firm, Saba Capital. ‘Go home! You’re selfish and wasteful,’ shouted one headline after Weinstein was emphatically defeated in all seven polls. But his

Peter Jones

Aristotle and the leisurely pursuit of education

Nearly six million people are on out-of-work benefits. It is claimed that, for most of those, going back to work would not be financially worth it. Aristotle would have agreed with them because for him, leisure was the most important possession a man could have. The ancients generally had no concept of the dignity of labour, apart from idealistic views about the farmer working in harmony with gods and man for the moral betterment of mankind. For most people, work was a painful necessity whose only purpose was to keep you from penury. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 680 bc) saw farming mainly as a matter of survival, when men ‘will never

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Is Britain funding organisations that wish us harm?

Frivolous state funding isn’t only going to chancers, the plain lucky and the devious, but also to those who would see Britain – and the West – come to harm. Just over a year ago, the National Secular Society (NSS) compiled a dossier for the Charity Commission which called for 44 charities that had ‘fuelled anti-Semitism and division’ and shown support for ‘Hamas and other anti-western actors’ to be investigated. In every case these organisations have kept their charitable status. The charities in the dossier have the stated purpose of ‘the advancement of religion for the public benefit’. In the NSS’s view, this is being used as cover for political

Toby Young Toby Young

Colombia is a better place to watch football than Loftus Road

I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a job in Medellin. Can’t think where she gets that rebellious streak! So that’s why I’ve spent the past week in South America. Colombia is quite a long way to go for such a short trip. To get to Medellin, I flew via Madrid, which meant departing from Gatwick at 10 a.m. and arriving at about

Dot Wordsworth

What does your name say about you?

In 2015, an orthopaedic surgeon called Limb, with three other doctors called Limb, wrote a paper on whether people’s names were correlated with their medical specialties. The findings were striking. In general surgery there were practitioners called Gore, Butcher, Boyle and Blunt. In cardiology, Hart and Pump. In anaesthesia there was a Payne but also a Painstil. For the 313,445 entries in the medical register that they examined, the median frequency of names relevant to medicine was one in 149 – but in neurology, one in every 21 doctors had a name relevant to medicine. In genito-urinary medicine, one in 52 had a relevant name. The authors admitted that specialties

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How to get your husband to do the vacuuming

This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending the drying cycle when I got home. This facility is, of course, almost entirely pointless. I use it all the time. Thus I was nearly resigned to cancelling this column in order to spend the next six hours fixing the problem. Fortunately, resetting the router fixed the glitch straight away, which is why you are

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I get my friend’s wife to keep her distance?

Q. Every year my husband takes two weeks’ prime salmon fishing on a Scottish river. It’s a really nice holiday with a comfortable lodge and a cook. Around Christmas time we start inviting couples to come to stay as our guests, usually by email. Some of them tend to be slow to respond, which is annoying because you just want to know if they’re coming so you can ask other people if not. I feel it would slightly spoil the invitation to put at the end: ‘Please get back to us with your decision as soon as possible.’ Do you have a more subtle idea? – Name and address withheld

Bruce Anderson

Should you bother decanting wine?

We were almost having a symposium and I was invited to define Toryism in one sentence. I replied that one book would be easier: the late Roger Scruton’s On Hunting, which ought to be subtitled: ‘From Horse-Shit to Heaven: the Search for Love, Order and God.’ ‘But what if you leave out God, and therefore heaven?’ said one fellow: ‘What would be left?’ ‘What indeed. Many learned Tories – Dr Johnson, Salisbury and Quintin Hogg being obvious examples – would have given a simple answer: nothing.’ Those of us who have to do without God and yet avoid the abyss of nothingness can only fall back on eupeptic pessimism. Edward

Dot Wordsworth

RFK Jr and the curious birth of ‘brainchild’

‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the New York Times last year. A problem experienced in 2010 was, he had said, ‘caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’. ‘No, if it was cysticercosis,’ my husband insisted, ‘it would have been a larval form of the tapeworm forming a cyst in the brain.

Susan Hill Susan Hill

A game of hide-and-seek with the Queen

One of the best things about growing older is being far less easily embarrassed. You have dealt with so many potentially tricky situations so often that you breeze through, no longer blushing, staring at the floor or looking for the nearest exit. I feel sorry for the young when they make a small faux pas and are convinced that everyone in the room is staring, or worse, laughing at them behind their hands, whereas at my age you know that probably no one has even noticed. If they have, and they do stare, laugh or comment, you can handle that with aplomb, too. The last time someone made a remark

Melissa Kite

I won’t let my mother be sent to a care home

My mother was about to be taken to a care home called Willow Trees, and the first thing my instincts told me about that was that willow trees would not be the prevailing feature there. When I looked it up, my suspicions were confirmed. Not only could I not see willow trees, it also had a low rating for infection and safety. I phoned a private company to be quoted a mind-blowing fee for a live-in carer for a week or two, until I can get there, so she can be discharged from the hospital ward where they are holding her – there is no other word for it – while

Aidan Hartley

How I found my way to my half-brother

Kenya In my dream my father is sitting next to me in the car as we drive around our hometown of Malindi, in Kenya. I realise it must be odd for him, because so much has changed in the decades since he died. He keeps shaking his head in disbelief at the thronging crowds of modern Africa and all the buildings, the vanished forests, the once-empty bush and all the other things that have changed. I say I’m pleased to see him but ask why he has returned here after all these years and he just says: ‘Take care of Michael’. I first learned about Michael at the age of

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 22 February 2025

If you don’t like highly artificial bidding systems, then the auction below – awarded Best Bid Hand of 2024 by the International Bridge Press Association – isn’t for you. But you can’t deny it’s pretty impressive. With a combined 32 points, balanced hands and no 8-card fit, Linlin Hu (East) and Yinghao Liu (West) were the only pair in a top-flight Chinese tournament to bid slam on a 4-3 fit. All those in 6NT went down. Most players try to steer clear of Moysian fits, as they’re known – after all, 64 per cent of the time one opponent has as many or more trumps than you. But sometimes they’re

Luke McShane

Good Keymer

Freestyle Chess (also known as Fischer-Random, Chess960, or Chess9LX), is the variant in which pieces on the back row are shuffled in one of 960 configurations at the start of the game. Until now, it has been regarded as a novelty. Standard chess offers a great starting position, in that there are countless ways to develop harmony between the pieces. But elite players have studied this phase in depth, and it is rare that they face any truly novel problems in the opening phase. Freestyle Chess is arguably a more stringent test of skill than the standard game, because players cannot rely on their memory. Even for elite players, the

Esther Walker

Have I been blacklisted by the binmen?

Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would? Things my husband and I have bickered about this week: my devotion to an ugly but comfortable pair of rubber