The unclued lights are words (or one phrase) which contain three pairs (3 x 2, in the title) of double letters: 13 Tennessee, 15/14 Sweet tooth, 17/37 Successfully, 21/24/39 Whippoorwill, 31/2 Bookkeeper, 41 Committee, 42/6 Barrenness. First prize Chris Edwards, Leeds Runners-up Graeme Palmer, Switzerland; Emma Corke, Abinger Hammer, Surrey
The unclued lights, two of two words, and including four pairs using two of the unclued lights twice, are of a kind. Across 1 Metal-workers task expanded reportedly to include trophy (4-4) 11 Bill’s new car. Capital! (5) 13 A way to work out the last part of Hedda Gabler, possibly (7) 17 Patrols out with new steel breastplate (8) 21 Dark patches from red-top special getting loads of money (8) 23 Charladies had omitted mixing pastries (7) 25 Crust of bread, for starters. Yes! (3) 26 River several recalled with nothing missing (3) 28 Old boys’ meeting concerning wedding (7) 29 Protection for half a day’s almost hell
In Competition No. 3261, you were invited to submit a poem about the James Webb Space Telescope. The first dazzling images captured by its infrared eyes were a welcome antidote to our terrestrial woes. They brought to mind the moment in the film Contact when Jodie Foster’s character comes face to face with a celestial object for the first time and says: ‘They should have sent a poet.’ So, it’s over to you. An honourable mention to Bruce Bennett; the winners below snaffle £25 each. Much have I travelled in the realms of space Past supergiants and dying galaxies, With floating rubble tossed on cosmic seas A million miles from Earth’s familiar face. A
White to play. Navara – Batsuren, Chennai Olympiad 2022. In this strange position Czech grandmaster David Navara found an elegant way to conclude the game. Which move did he play next? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by 16 August. 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 delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Qxg2+ White resigned, as 2 Bxg2 Nxe2+ and 3…Nxc3 leaves Black with a winning advantage. Last week’s winner Simon Smith, Wetherby
At the Chennai Olympiad, the Indian team began as second seeds, even with former World Champion Vishy Anand absent from the lineup. But it is the host country’s privilege to field more than one team, and India used its second team to showcase the next generation of talent. This team, which included three 16-year-olds, even won bronze, narrowly ahead of the first team. The gold medals went to another team of exceptionally talented youngsters from Uzbekistan, while Armenia took silver. Dommaraju Gukesh, who was born in Chennai, produced an astonishing performance on board 1 for the second team. He began with eight consecutive victories, including a victory over former World
Funny, isn’t it, the way people bandy the word ‘bastard’ nowadays, without any notion that it pertains to the condition of being born outside marriage? It says lots about how illegitimacy was once regarded that its descriptive noun is now simply a bad word. And yet most children who were born last year are what we’d once have called illegitimate; the Office for National Statistics finds that 51.3 per cent were born to mothers who were neither married nor in a civil partnership. It’s the first time this has happened since records began, in 1845. The most troubling aspect about it is that we’re really not troubled. Time was, this
Whatever happened to the great surge towards a cashless society which the pandemic was supposed to bring about? As I wrote here in February 2021, the cashless lobby was ruthlessly exploiting the pandemic in order to push for its nirvana in which we would be forced to pay for everything electronically, either via cards or phones. But the campaign doesn’t seem to be going too well. This week the Post Office reported that £801 million worth of personal cash withdrawals were made from its branches in July, an 8 per cent rise on June and a 20 per cent rise on July 2021. Of course, we shouldn’t read too much
What’s the point of a university? Regrettably, that’s a genuine question. The censorship and trigger warnings that are rife on British campuses make it hard to work out what our formerly esteemed institutions of higher education are for anymore, now that free speech, intellectual challenge and the pursuit of truth have become deeply unfashionable. Hundreds of freedom-of-information requests were sent out by the Times to officials across 140 UK universities. The responses found that trigger warnings, telling students that certain works might be upsetting or even traumatising, have been applied to more than 1,000 texts. At least ten universities have even removed books from reading lists or made them optional out of concerns they might ‘harm’
On Monday, I wrote here about how the Great Barrier Reef is defying predictions of its own demise, bouncing back from a mass bleaching event last year to show the greatest vegetation cover in 37 years of observations. Now comes news that a prominent scientist involved in some of the doom-mongering work over coral reefs has been found guilty by her own university of misconduct in her research. Science does not become settled just because a paper appears in a peer-reviewed journal According to the draft report of an investigative committee convened by the University of Delaware – and seen by Science, the journal of the American Association for the
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason alone be cherished. He once enjoyed a high degree of pop-philosophical notoriety, being blamed by pundits who had clearly never read his books for the scourge of pomo relativism that threatened to undermine the ‘moral clarity’ of those who deemed it an excellent wheeze to invade Iraq. Such was his leftish celebrity a decade ago that he shared a stage with Julian Assange and was forced to deny rumours that he was having an affair with Lady Gaga. ‘My friends said, “You’re stupid. You should have said: No comment”.’ Since
As the cost-of-living crisis bites and a recession looms, women are once again being fed a dangerous message: that the sex trade might be a great place to make money. In an article on the BBC website, OnlyFans has been cited as a lucrative way for attractive youngsters to top up their income. Soaring prices have, we are told by the BBC, ‘led to a rise in young people posting sexual content for money’. The report cites as an example Alexia, a 20-year-old, who posts pictures and videos of herself on the internet. The BBC says her ‘9-5 salary is now dwarfed by the earnings she makes from her online presence.’ It goes on:
On this day in 2020, Belarus held presidential elections. Standing against the dictatorial incumbent of 26 years Alexandr Lukashenko was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. An unlikely candidate, English teacher Tsikhanouskaya decided to stand for election in place of her vlogger husband Siarhei, who was arrested and subsequently jailed for 18 years after the authorities refused to register his own candidacy for the contest. Dismissed as a threat by Lukashenka on account of being a ‘housewife’, Tsikhanouskaya was permitted to run. Hugely underestimated, her rallies attracted tens of thousands of supporters, making them the largest in Belarus’s post-Soviet history. Despite unofficial polling indicating Tsikhanouskaya had won with as much as 60 per cent
When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t be able to take the reins of successfully? A system that we hadn’t been raised with the discipline to appreciate, or even to understand? Were we doomed to decline? The years since – and the current state of Britain – suggest I was right. Looking back, it seems clear I was picking up on the doomy declinism of
Let me be clear: I am a committed feminist and a passionate supporter of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Indeed, I have been the beneficiary of those ideals in ways unimaginable to most people in the western world. I travelled from a genuinely patriarchal society poisoned by Islamism to a free, secular society where women, whatever issues we might still have, were equal to men under the law and able to pursue opportunities I could scarcely have dreamed of growing up. As I have written before, however imperfect western civilisation might be, we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in human history. The progress we have made is dizzying.
We are, of course, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth. It is just that one of the iconic victims doesn’t seem to be playing ball just at the moment. As recently as May, environmentalists were warning that the Great Barrier Reef, the 1,500-mile coral structure off the coast of Queensland, was being doomed by warming seas. It was reported to be suffering a ‘mass bleaching’ – where the plants which live on the reef and provide food for it die off. The blame was put on warmer seas. Worse, this was the first mass bleaching event to occur in a
For years, security services have worried about terrorists unleashing a ‘dirty bomb’ – where a conventional explosive is used to spread radioactive material over a large area. Russian forces now stand accused of threatening a similar form of warfare in Ukraine: attacking a nuclear power station with conventional weapons. Shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station on the Dneiper River in the south of the country over the weekend is not believed to have released any radiation, although it did damage some equipment and one worker has been reported injured. However, the possibilities for causing havoc by attacking nuclear stations is very clear. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned
In times of crisis in the 20th century, voters called for politicians from opposing parties to put aside their differences and unite in a national government. Such is the collapse of the Conservative party we now must beg Tory politicians to stop fighting and unite in a Tory government. Martin Lewis has said that Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson should be able to agree on a package to cover the expected 70 per cent rise in the domestic energy cap in the autumn (with more to come in January). ‘You’re all in the same party,’ he cried. ‘You should be able to work out some unifying policy, something
In Brenners, Germany’s grandest grand hotel, in Baden-Baden, Germany’s smartest spa town, there’s a corner of a foreign drawing room that is forever England. Above the fireplace hangs a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of the Honourable Mrs Beresford – a quintessential English Rose in a quintessential German Kaminhalle. At first sight it seems incongruous but in fact it’s rather fitting, for this hotel and this spa town epitomises the close relationship between the British and German upper classes, a relationship only slightly sullied by the awkward happenstance of two world wars. Brenners has always been a home from home for the British aristocracy: its guest book boasts the signatures
Premier League footballers ‘taking a knee’ came in at the tail end of the 2019-20 season, when stadiums were empty because of the first Covid lockdown. Thus were the game’s moneyed elite spared having to initiate the fad in front of full houses. By the time supporters returned it was a fait accompli, normalised by endless self-righteous newspaper columns and political speeches on air by TV football pundits. Only one view of the matter was permitted. Any supporter who expressed dissent about the gesture of support for the Black Lives Matter campaign risked being branded a knuckle-scraping racist. Given that the gesture emerged in the United States as a show of outright
