Society

Thursday

Miranda Morrison

I’m being terrorised by a Bengal cat

Over the past year and a half, I have been victimised by my neighbour’s cat. Bollinger the Bengal weighs just seven pounds and has a silly dangly bell around his neck, but he manages to terrorise both me and my two cats. He fights my male cat, George, so viciously that I fear he might kill him. Nothing irks me more than watching people cooing around Bollinger when they see his ocelot-like frame. While some Bengal cats can be wonderful pets, their wild instincts make them territorial and aggressive, as well as horribly effective hunters that can ravage bird populations. This summer, the town of Walldorf in southwest Germany introduced

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Gorbachev dies, Gibraltar becomes a city (again) and Meghan’s Mandela moment

Home Liz Truss, the contender for the Conservative party leadership who is expected to become prime minister next Tuesday, resisted temptations to say what she would do about the national energy price crisis. But she was said to have in her pocket licences for new drilling in the North Sea. Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the time being, said that even people earning £45,000 a year would need help with their energy bills this winter. The price cap for energy set by the regulator Ofgem will rise by 80 per cent in October, with electricity going up from 28p per kilowatt hour to 52p and gas from

Luke McShane

Match of the half-century

They called it the Match of the Century. A full 50 years has passed since Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, thereby becoming the 11th world champion. On 1 September 1972, Fischer won game 21 to win the match by 12.5-8.5. I enjoyed the perspective of a new book, The Match of All Time by Gudmundur G. Thorarinsson. (New in Chess, 2022, though first published in Iceland in 2020). Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the exceptional dramatic backdrop – an American against a Soviet in the midst of the Cold War – will ever be equalled. In 1972, Thorarinsson was president of the Icelandic Chess Federation, and

Andrew Tettenborn

Is university good value for money?

Opinion polls these days don’t normally raise more then passing interest. But there are always exceptions worth a second look. One such was a YouGov survey out on Wednesday on what people thought about university finance. The big question was whether they believed nearly £30,000 for three years at college was good value for money. Among graduates, many of whom will have paid these fees, the answer (by a margin of well over two to one) was clear. They didn’t. For good measure, nearly half of the graduates polled thought most degrees actually left them worse off overall, against just over a third who thought they led to financial benefits.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Drama queens: the return of Meghan and Harry

We’ve all spent months bracing ourselves for what our leaders assure us will be a dreadful winter. As the weather turns, we can look forward to ruinous energy bills, runaway inflation, collapsing health services, strikes, blackouts, more strikes, violent crime, and perhaps even – why not? – a nuclear war with Russia. As if that weren’t bad enough, Meghan and Harry are back, wafting over all the way from Montecito, California on billowy clouds of bonkers publicity, self-pity and self-help mumbo-jumbo. On Monday, as Britain announces a new prime minister, Meghan and Harry will attend a ‘One Young World’ summit for youth leaders in Manchester, where Meghan will deliver the

Melissa Kite

My mare has had a ‘misalliance’ with a pint-sized stallion

My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem. Dusk was falling when he climbed out of his battered 4×4 in khaki shorts and crumpled T-shirt, sun-burned, muddy and sweaty from the day’s call-outs. He is a victim of his own brilliance, and the decades of experience that have made him invaluable. Everyone asks for him, and he tries to get to his favourite clients even though he ought to be retired. It was 7.45 p.m. and after me he was heading for a traveller site in Croydon. He does not discriminate. He’s my kind of hero. We had Darcy standing ready by the

Peter Jones

The Roman roots of Tony Blair’s approach to education

Sir Tony Blair’s Tone-deaf suggestion that Stem subjects should dominate the curriculum of all schools would paradoxically take education back to the ancient world, when education was designed to benefit only the few. Take Rome. Wealth in the ancient world lay in land, which the rich exploited for all it was worth. Needing to protect their investment, Romans used their power to ensure that it was they who governed the state. The education system was designed to train them in winning arguments in the Senate and to protect themselves and their money in the courts. That left the remaining 90 per cent to fend for themselves, most trying to survive

The Spectator

What did Nasa achieve last time it visited the Moon?

Of mice and Moon What did Nasa achieve last time it visited the Moon? Apollo 17, in December 1972, involved putting two astronauts, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, there for 75 hours. They used a lunar roving vehicle to collect 254lb of rock and dust samples from areas up to 4.7 miles from the landing site. Among them was some orange dust believed to have originated in a volcanic eruption 3.5bn years ago. Experiments were also conducted into the flow of heat from the centre of the Moon to the surface, into minor changes in gravitational force, and the effect of cosmic rays on mice. At the end, Cernan said

The Spectator

Russia, Ukraine and the legacy of Gorbachev

In her memoirs, Raisa Gorbacheva recalls the moment when her husband turned from bureaucrat into reformer. ‘I’m in my seventh year of working in Moscow,’ he told her as they were walking together one evening. ‘Yet it’s been impossible to do anything important, large-scale, properly prepared. It’s like a brick wall – but life demands action. No, we can’t go on living like this any more.’ It was the first time, she wrote, she heard him say such words. ‘That night, a new stage began that brought big changes.’ Mikhail Gorbachev’s death this week has led to much analysis of his legacy. He is admired more in the West than

Doc

2571: 10”

The unclued lights (one of two words) are of a kind.   Across 1 Bringing down plane that was used on D-Day (7,5) 12 Heart tremor? (10) 14 Member in bar, musing (3) 17 Folds in damask curtains partly drawn back (5) 18 Married? Possibly him! (7) 19 Provide plaster (6) 22 Agamemnon’s father sure to be murdered after a time (6) 24 Entrance halls where amateur contest gets cut (5) 26 Having just one connection travelling via tunnel (9) 29 Biblical heroine abandoned by husband in compound (5) 31 Tenor dear to the Italians around the States (6) 34 Like Muldoon, son gets mad (6) 36 French dish –

The Spectator

2568: Next door… – solution

The unclued lights were characters in Neighbours, paired at 12/19, 14/20, 16/19 and 32/20. First prize Peter Taylor-Mansfield, Worcester Runners-up Dr Wendy Atkin, Sleaford, Lincs; Peter Baldwin, Chorley, Lancs

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: surreptitious sonnets

In Competition No. 3264, you were invited to submit a poem in response to the following journal entry by Wallace Stevens on 3 August 1906: ‘Engaged at the office all day on a sonnet – surreptitiously.’ For much of his life, the Pulitzer prize-winning Stevens was a vice-president at one of America’s leading insurance companies. He jotted down ideas for poems as he walked the two miles between his home and office in downtown Hartford – and evidently continued to work on them once he got there. But his efforts at surreptitiousness paid off. David Shields drew my attention to a remark by a colleague who expressed astonishment at learning

Luke McShane

No. 718

White to play and win. Composed by Alexey Troitsky, Novoye Vremya, 1895. Trapping Black’s queen looks unimaginable on such an open board, but it can be done. What is White’s first move? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 5 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Qg6! threatens Qxg7 mate. Last week’s winner Joe McKenzie, Bedford

Robin Oakley

Goodwood was glorious but it highlighted the range of problems facing the sport

Irish trainer John F. O’Neill owes the stalls handlers at Goodwood a good drink or two. In Ireland this season he has run just three horses – Tullyhogue Fort, Daily Pursuit and Pink Fire Lilly – in a total of 13 races at an average starting price of around 100-1. None has won. Last Saturday, Pink Fire Lilly, who had finished twelfth of 13 in an undistinguished race in Killarney on her previous outing, lined up with three others at the start of the Group Three William Hill March Stakes. The favourite Hoo Ya Mal had a Timeform rating of 131, the Queen’s horse Perfect Alibi was rated 114 and

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 3 September 2022

The beautiful city of Wroclaw in Poland is currently teeming with bridge players, all of them there for the 16th World Bridge Series. Anyone can play, but the standard is fiercely high: most of the world’s top players are taking part. This week it’s the Mixed and Seniors; last week was the Open and Women’s. One surprising thing was how few women’s teams came: just 10. At the last Series there were 17. It seems that women’s bridge is dwindling, due in part to the surging popularity of the Mixed (57 teams). That said, even with so few competitors there was some thrilling bridge on display from the very best

Taki

My unforgettable night with a musical genius

Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago, she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the writer who was handsome but entrapped by Norma Desmond, aka Gloria Swanson. Nancy’s blue eyes shimmered, and her figure was to die for, but what made her memorable was that she was as American as apple pie. Innocence trumped sex in her case, and apparently she was as decent and as intelligent as the ingénue she played in that

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

How Russia reacted to the death of Mikhail Gorbachev

‘Some will say he bought us freedom. Others that he took our country. Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the most controversial politicians in Russian history, has died.’ This is the verdict of the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda – a mixed review of a politician with a mixed record. And one reflected in a Russian press which today reads rather differently to the British. The broadsheet Izvestia’s long obituary had a pitiful verdict: ‘A communist who buried the idea of communism six feet under (most likely against his own wishes), and the leader of a great country who helplessly watched it collapse.’ Ria Novosti, another state-backing news agency, hones in on the divide

Matthew Lynn

Who is Sunak kidding with his warnings about sterling?

There will be a run on sterling. The gilts market will be in freefall. And the FTSE will tumble as global investors take fright and sell off every form of British asset. It might take only a few days, or the government might stagger through until the end of September, but before long Liz Truss and her new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng will have been forced to call in the IMF to stabilise a collapsing economy. That is, at least, according to the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. With just a few desperate days left in his doomer leadership campaign, he has declared his opponent’s tax and spending plans so wild and reckless

Igor Sushko

The FSB agent exposing the secrets of Putin’s war from within

Deep inside Russia’s secret state an agent is working against Vladimir Putin. The FSB officer, dubbed the Wind of Change, writes regular dispatches revealing the truth about the barbarism being carried out in Russia’s name. The revelations within needed to be shared with the West. It fell to me to translate them. In early March, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I came across a Facebook post by Russian dissident exile Vladimir Osechkin. Osechkin had received an email in Russian from, he said, a source inside Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, laying out the anger and discontent inside the agency at the invasion. The letter was deeply intimate;