Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

Bernard Cornwell: ‘I don’t believe in writer’s block’

They say never meet your heroes, but Bernard Cornwell didn’t disappoint. Knowing I’m a superfan, the events team at The Spectator asked me to interview him on stage on Monday and he was everything you could hope for: funny, candid, clever. The default register of very successful people in my experience is insincere modesty, but Cornwell was something different – falsely immodest. That is to say, there were moments when he blew his own trumpet, but in a way clearly intended to be ironic. The lasting impression was of someone completely at ease with his achievements – not puffed up, but justifiably proud. Few authors can match Cornwell’s accomplishments. He

Aidan Hartley

Somali nomads are living the good life

Northeastern Kenya We were in beautiful bush country up towards Somalia, in pastures that shone like spun gold in the sunset as herds of Boran cattle came into the bomas to suckle their calves. My hosts, Ogadeni clan stockmen who had invited me to travel here to look at their herds, showed me their favourite animals and then went off to pray, as hundreds of cows lay down to chew the cud. After prayers came a supper in jugs of frothing warm milk. In return, the herders accepted the bundles of qat leaves I had brought as a present for us all to chew. We became a little stoned on

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

My portable charger obsession

A femtosecond, derived from the Danish word femte meaning ‘fifteen’, is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to 10-15 or 1⁄1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second; in other words one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. A femtosecond is to a second as a second is to approximately 31.69 million years. Similarly, a femmosecond, from the French femme meaning ‘wife’, is a slightly briefer unit of time equivalent to the twinkling of an eye. It defines the imperceptibly fleeting interval between my wife saying ‘Rory, why on earth have you bought another portable charger?’ and my wife saying ‘Rory, could I borrow your

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do we tie down an invitation to our friends’ holiday home?

Q. Some friends of ours have an amazing house on the coast in Kenya. Every time we see them they are guaranteed to say ‘You must come to stay, you’d love it’ or something similar. No dates are ever forthcoming but we have decided we’d actually quite like to go this winter. How can we tie them down without making them feel pressurised by our having suggested dates? –  Name and address withheld A. Choose the dates which suit you, then contact them to say you are thinking of going to, for example, Tanzania, or other likely adjacent spot around that time. Is there any chance you could come to

Bruce Anderson

How to drink sake

There is a fellow called Anthony Newman who is fascinated by drink, as a consumer, a producer and an intellectual. That said, he spent some years supplying Australians with craft beer, which does not sound very intellectual. But he insists he paid for his own passage and was able to return without a ticket of leave. While living in Oz he visited Japan, and found himself captivated by many aspects – not least sake, the rice wine which is its national drink. Nearly 90 per cent of sake is consumed locally. Anthony decided the potential export market was enormous. I have heard it persuasively argued that Japan is the most

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Cullen skink is comfort in a bowl

They say not to judge a book by its cover – but what about judging a recipe by its name? Some sound like a disease or worse. Spotted dick, toad in the hole, lady’s fingers, Dutch baby, I’m looking at all of you. Cullen skink is one that has been accused of having an off-putting name. But in its defence, Cullen skink is descriptive. There’s a suggestion that the word ‘skink’ comes from an Old German word for ‘beer’ or ‘essence’, but given that Cullen skink is a creamy, thick soup, with no beer constituent and no obvious German connection, this seems an unlikely origin. More plausible is the explanation

Dot Wordsworth

What makes a ‘survivor’?

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: ‘I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.’ She has so far made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. ‘She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,’ wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual ‘grooming’? Are

Luke McShane

Remembering Naroditsky

Tributes have poured in for Daniel Naroditsky, the American grandmaster who has died suddenly at the age of 29. Those who knew him best told of his kindness and humility. He once noted that his favourite saying about chess was this: ‘At the end of the game, both the king and the pawn go into the same box.’ That ethos made Naroditsky one of the game’s most popular commentators, with over half a million followers on YouTube.     ‘Danya’ was both a precocious student and a gifted teacher. He published his first chess book (Mastering Positional Chess) when he was just 14 and went on to study history at Stanford.

Luke McShane

No. 874

Black to play. Wonderful time-Daniel Naroditsky, Chess.com, 2021. Le Tuan Minh, the Vietnamese grandmaster playing White, faces a fierce attack. Naroditsky’s next move won him the game. What was it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 3 November. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Qa5+! Kxa5 2 Rxa7 mate Last week’s winner John Morton, Stony Stratford, Bucks

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Bad advice

Comp. 3423 invited you to submit a passage about a command or suggestion from literature being taken too literally. I was sorry not to squeeze in Alan Millard’s riff on John Donne’s ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’: ‘The object in question can reach temperatures of almost 3,000˚F when entering the Earth’s atmosphere…’. A popular choice was ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’; nods to Elizabeth Kay, Nicholas Lee, Simon Godziek, Max Ross. Other runners-up: Joseph Houlihan’s ‘If’-inspired story of someone risking every-thing on a turn of pitch-and-toss at Caesar’s Palace; Tracy Davidson’s ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’ leading to disaster at the White House; Brian Murdoch’s

Doc

2727: On track

The unclued lights, one of two words, entered individually or as two pairs, are of a kind. Across 4 Media broadcast about 12 that’s cheap and practically useless (1,4,1,5) 11    Letters being sent to distant branch (7) 12    Medium range paintings (6) 13    Passing nurse in van (9) 14    Join princess having kiss (5) 21    Roman numeral from cross against heads of two icons (4) 23    Having abandoned shelter, Loch Ness Monster shocked army personnel (3-4) 24    A new version of Black Beauty? (4) 25    Delight with visit, providing that money, finally (7) 30    Sportsman’s call angered doctor (2,5) 31    Assumed name I omitted, sadly (4) 32    On the soapbox,

The Spectator

2724: Word building – solution

The WORD-BUILDING series is: eat (40A), tare (8D), cater (37A), recant (11A), certain (27A), canister (2D), nectaries (3D), transience (19D), incinerates (1A). First prize Christine Rees, Cowlinge, Suffolk Runners-up Mark Humble, Beercrocombe, Taunton; Graham Westmore, Sibsey, Lincs

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Minimum wage was a mistake

As others, including Nigel Farage, were quick to point out, Sarah Pochin got it wrong. She uttered words which, shorn of their context (as they obviously would be), made her sound racist. But the almost compulsory use of persons of colour to promote products and services is a bit of a wonder of the world. Modernisers often speak of the need for institutions to ‘look like Britain as it is’ (depressing thought), but this seems not to apply on screen. In the style of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, I offer a definition of the phrase ‘television ads’, as follows: ‘Short filmic fictions about the blissful and virtuous lives of persons

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How the occult captured the modern mind

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with ‘magick’. Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early aeroplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is Reform racist?

Sarah Pochin’s gonna take a lot of coachin’. You can’t just turn up on the telly and say you’re sick of all the blacks everywhere. And the Asians. Un-accountably, perhaps, you will be accused of racism, the definition of the term having been extended rather further than my interpretation: to discriminate against an individual on the grounds of his or her race. There will be outrage among the deluded; there will be faux outrage among the opportunistic. Your own party leader will slap you down by saying, in effect: ‘Well, she’s right, obvs, but you can’t say stuff like that.’ And her own leader is not wrong. The Overton window

Arabella Byrne

Hex appeal: the rise of middle-class witches

In King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, written in 1597, he vigorously encourages witch-hunting and, in particular, the tossing of witches into the sea. Only the innocent would sink. As a way of identifying witches, it was clear and presumably efficient. These days, we have no such clarity. But witches walk among us. I’m not talking about women in black pointy hats, but something far scarier: the middle-class witch. In the past, she might have been called a depressive, a spinster or a divorcée. Now, she’s probably a middle-aged woman in the Home Counties with a TikTok account, a litany of spells and deep trauma. Modern witchcraft has always invited

Douglas Murray

Don’t fear the bogeyman

Britain is beset by a bogeyman. A giant, mystical beast that the public are forever being threatened with. Remember last year when a young Welsh choirboy stabbed three young girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport? Long before we were allowed to know the name of the culprit – Axel Rudakubana – we were warned about a much greater menace: a rallying by the ‘far right’. After impromptu protests and some rioting broke out in various cities, we were promised on an hourly basis that the ‘far right’ was mobilising. Soon there were crowds of Muslim men organising to counter any such threat. Nick Lowles, of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Hurricane hits Jamaica, Plaid reigns in Caerphilly and sex offender gets £500 to leave Britain

Home An Iranian man who arrived on a small boat and was deported to France on 19 September under the one in, one out scheme returned to England on another small boat. Hadush Kebatu, the migrant whose arrest for sexual assault sparked weeks of protests outside the Bell hotel in Epping where he was living, was freed by mistake from Chelmsford prison; he was arrested two days later and given £500 to be deported to Ethiopia. The Home Office ‘squandered’ billions on a ‘failed, chaotic and expensive’ system of asylum accommodation, a Commons home affairs committee report found. Some 900 of the 32,000 asylum-seekers in hotels might be rehoused in

Peter Jones

The Romans would have known that AI can’t replace architects

Architects are thrilled about AI, confident that it will take us into an exciting new world at the flick of a switch. The Roman architect Vitruvius begins his ten-book De architectura (c. 25 bc) by describing an architect’s education. Craftsmanship – continuous and familiar practice – must go hand in hand with theoretical skill and method. He must be a man of letters so that he can draw on precedents; proficient in drawing and geometry; and a master of rule and compass. Optics will teach him how to use the sun to best effect in lighting rooms. He must also be good at arithmetic to cost his buildings. He must