Black to play. Sukandar-Niemann, Reykjavik Open 2022. In this preposterous position, Black found a quick forced mate. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 25 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 Rg1! leaves Black no good response to 2 Rg8+ Rxg8 3 Nf7# Last week’s winner Luís Asúa, Madrid
There are lessons in chess that cannot be learned from a book. One lands, from time to time, in a position which amounts to a trial by fire – a test of conviction as much as skill. The experience of such a game can stay with you for ever, radically altering your sense of what is possible at the chessboard. At least, I suspect that is what 13-year-old Shreyas Royal went through last month, when he faced the Georgian grandmaster Baadur Jobava in the first round of the European Individual Championship in Slovenia. Jobava’s peak rating placed him in the world’s top 20, so this was a David and Goliath
Park the issue Gladstone Park in Brent may be renamed as a result of the former PM’s connections with slavery. Local children have suggested Multi-Faith Park or Diversity Fields. – Gladstone often used to stay as a guest of Lord Aberdeen at Dollis Hill House, which is in the park. Lord Rosebery was also a regular guest, as was Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston. Mark Twain also stayed. The park was named after Gladstone because when it was purchased for public use in 1899 he had recently died. Against the current How successful was Australia’s policy of processing asylum applications offshore for any migrant who arrives by boat? The
Nine years ago, when I invested every-thing I had in a part-rent, part-buy, one-bedroom, government-backed eco-home which proved to be a boiling box in summer, my first instinct was to throw myself out of a window – but I couldn’t because they opened only ten centimetres. My second was to complain about it in The Spectator. Now, I return to update you on my energy bills. Prepare to turn green with envy. Friends who live successful sorts of lives – involving houses, spouses and gardens – exclaim ‘Oh, so you weren’t joking about living in a J.G. Ballard novel?’ when they come around for the book launches I host in
‘Mother nature,’ says Boris Johnson, ‘does not like working from home.’ The Prime Minister wants workers to return to offices so they can have the ‘stimulus of exchange and competition’. His ministers are just as evangelical. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, says he favours ‘being able to interact directly’ with colleagues and Rishi Sunak has spoken about how young people need the office space to learn. The nation’s employers should, they say, get their staff back to their desks. Yet nine months since the end of lockdown and tumbleweed is still blowing through the corridors of power. When Jacob Rees-Mogg conducted an audit to see how many Whitehall desks were
Q. Financially successful friends have kindly invited my husband and me to stay for a week in France. Our problem is that last time we went they asked each couple to post €200 for tips through the hatch of a postbox-style container so they could share out the money appropriately after everyone had left. Named envelopes were discouraged on the grounds that ‘I trust you all’. Annoyingly, later that year, I happened to overhear my host mention that one couple (of the ten staying) had failed to contribute. Mary, how can I ensure that he knows we have paid our dues when the moment comes round again? – J.L., Cornwall
As you may have heard (if you haven’t, I’m losing my narcissistically self-promotional touch) my new TV show Piers Morgan Uncensored launches soon and will air daily in the UK, America and Australia, thus fulfilling my long-held ambition to become a global irritant. The title provokes mirth among those who feel I’ve never shown any sign of being censored. But my enforced removal from Good Morning Britain last year for refusing to apologise for an honest opinion that Meghan Markle is to veracity what Vladimir Putin is to humanity was cowardly corporate censorship, and I’m confident that if Princess Pinocchio writes to my new boss Rupert Murdoch demanding my head
If President Paul Kagame has been tracking the furore over Priti Patel’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, he’s been doing it on the hoof. Kagame moves constantly these days: the news broke while he was en route to Barbados after a visit to Jamaica. In the past two months he has been to Congo-Brazzaville, Kenya (twice), Zambia, Germany (twice), Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Mauritania, Senegal and Belgium. How the president of one of Africa’s poorest nations can afford all this travelling is a puzzle, and the fact that his Gulfstream jet is supplied by Crystal Ventures, his Rwandan Patriotic Front’s monopolistic investment arm, raises interesting budgetary questions. In a
Take a look at the four paintings on this page. If you are acquainted with modern art, you will probably assume, at a quick glance, that it shows four works by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). However, whatever your knowledge of modern art, I suggest you look again, because not all of these works are by that great pioneer of abstract painting. More than one of them is an original image created by a computer model, which was asked to do a digital artwork in the style of Kandinsky. Which are the fakes? I’ll give you the answer at the end of the article. Before we get there, you
‘It makes me hungry,’ said my husband when I mentioned the word salmagundi. That is his reaction to many words. But he liked the sound of it. I think in its sound, suggestive of something impossible to pin down, it resembles serendipity. The obscure French original of salmagundi, a dish of chopped up meat and whatnot, must have become known in English through Rabelais’s gluttonous epic. Thomas Urquhart’s translation of 1653 speaks of the ‘Lairdship of Salmigondin’. Various rationalising respellings emerged, such as Sallad-Magundy (1710). Salad, by origin something salty, was not limited to raw greenery. ‘Sallet,’ wrote Randle Holme, the herald painter, ‘is either Sweet Herbs, or Pickled Fruits,
I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It is Nabokov’s fish-tank of a department store, but with lampshades, not hebephilia. Its wares have surpassed its beginnings, which were haberdashery. Charles Harrod’s first shop was at 228 Borough High Street when George IV, who would love Harrods, was king. His second was at Stepney. Harrod came west for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and now we have this: the most crazed example of a crazed aesthetic, which is imperial Edwardian. Or Disney pinnacles the colour of blood. Harrods used to have a boutique in which almost-normal children could be
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have been removed from it. A spokesman proclaimed: ‘In an effort to make the puzzle more accessible, we are reviewing the solutions and removing obscure or potentially insensitive words over time. HARRY is an example of an obscure word.’ Other more obviously ‘insensitive’ words had already been removed, such as ‘sluts,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’, and though I’m the most rad of femmes, I do wish they’d stayed. Removing ribaldry makes the language increasingly bland. ‘Sensitivity’ is one of those words that’s changed its meaning. It was once used mostly to refer
Some years ago there was a study at Harvard that tried to find out what people did when they held an incorrect opinion. Not an opinion of the kind that the era happens to deem incorrect, but one that is actually, provably not the case. The study looked at what happened when that factually incorrect view was introduced to the evidence that it was wrong. We might hope that the results would be clear: man holding wrong view meets the right view, immediately throws up his hands and asks himself how he could have been such a dolt. Alas, as anyone who has ever been married will know, people do
Got slightly wrecked over the bank holiday weekend and had hoped to kind of glide through the early part of the week without too much requirement for that bane of the columnist, research – looking stuff up, talking to people, etc. But I crawled downstairs on Tuesday, switched on the laptop and there was a message bearing the address s.fidelis@almighty.com: ‘Hey Rod, I might have something for you. Give me a call x.’ I hadn’t heard from Semp for three or four years, when he was a canny and ambitious junior press officer, helpful, disinclined to panic, never obsequious. Slightly grating Cardiff accent but other than that, a good sort.
My friend, the novelist Alan Judd, emails with the right quotation for those who argue that Putin should be given an ‘off-ramp’. It is from Henry V: ‘How can they charitably dispose of any thing when blood is their argument?’ It really is Putin’s argument. I have been studying an astonishing piece from RIA Novosti, the official Russian news agency, earlier this month, called ‘What Russia should do with Ukraine’. Barbarously written (or possibly barbarously translated), and barbarous in thought, it is about the need to extirpate every ‘Nazi – read Ukrainian –’. The Ukrainians have for years supported ‘total terror’ in ‘Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol, and other Russian cities’,
Normal families spend the Easter holidays by the seaside or in the Mediterranean. But not the Youngs. My three boys and I took advantage of the two-week break to criss-cross the country following Queens Park Rangers, going to Sheffield, Preston and Huddersfield. We lost 1-0 to Sheffield and 2-1 to Preston, but managed to draw 2-2 with Huddersfield, which made it a good day out by QPR’s recent standards. I’ve always enjoyed going to the occasional away game, but this season my sons and I have tried to go to as many as possible to compensate for the closure of football grounds during the pandemic. Our original plan was to
You couldn’t ask for a more amiable man than Rob Key to run English cricket: affable, shrewd and universally liked, he has the look of a recalcitrant monk, nipping out the back for a quick drink and a fag. Whether he’s any good is another matter, but let’s hope so for all our sakes. The sequence of events seems a bit upside down though – appointing a managing director first, then a chair and CEO. Without coming over all corporate, surely the MD is the next CEO’s biggest appointment. And wouldn’t the new MD, Key, want to know who he’s working with? One man I hope he will soon be
When the vet had finished giving my horses their annual flu boosters, she reminded me the vaccination regime had changed. For the purpose of competing, horses must be vaccinated for flu every six months, which is something that had passed me by. What with worrying about human vaccines, I had not noticed this change in the rules for equestrian jabs. I thought about it for a split second, then decided. ‘Lucky I don’t compete then,’ I told her. Because being a rabid anti-vaxxer, I don’t want my horses pumped more full of vaccine than is absolutely necessary. And this is precisely the sort of irrational and illogical reaction people have
It seems ironic that while many bridge players are fighting to ‘Keep Bridge Alive’, raising money to encourage and teach the next generation of potential enthusiasts, the English Bridge Union seems to be doing the exact opposite. They have just cut the funding for sending Juniors to championships – crucial to the development of their game – and not because lockdown has left them decimated. They have relocated the funds to further support our Ladies and Senior teams – many of whom are professionals or sponsors – while most of the Juniors are still in education. Go figure. Here is 17-year-old Sam Anoyrkatis playing and winning for England in the
