The exchange that gave rise to the expression CURATE’s (19 Down) Egg was ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones’, ‘Oh no, my Lord (puzzle’s title), I assure you, parts of it are excellent’, from a George du Maurier cartoon in Punch (1895), widely accepted to be based on a similar cartoon in the magazine Judy in the same year. First prize Stephen Clarkson, Ipswich, Suffolk Runners-up Pam Dunn, Sevenoaks, Kent; G.H. Willett, London SW19
Eight unclued lights, arranged symmetrically, comprise two quartets, one of which makes the other go round. Across 1 How much poor Matthew has aged (14, three words) 11 What’s got blowers regularly engaged? (5) 13 Cheeky make-up (5) 14 Nothing fresh about first social reformer (7) 15 Some change local larder outside flat (10) 17 Blame husband for going in basin (5) 21 View rascal across floor (6, two words) 23 Partner works both ways (4) 26 Brown primates hold one back (5) 27 Clean up exposed broken bones (5) 28 Stone set in epoxy not backed (4) 30 Encouragement to prima donna, a lady (6) 36 Place of
In Competition No. 3233, you were invited to invent a new character for the Mr Men/Little Miss series by Roger Hargreaves and submit an extract from his or her story. The first character to make an appearance, in 1971, was orange Mr Tickle with his long, wiggly arms. Fifty years on, Mr T.’s overly tactile behaviour has raised an eyebrow or two, earning him comparisons with Harvey Weinstein. Mr Clever, meanwhile, has been denounced as a ‘smug, sexist mansplainer’. Despite the fuss and bother, Roger Hargreaves’s books (written and illustrated by his son Adam since his death) continue to be hugely popular, as was this challenge, which pulled in the
Black to play. Grandelius–Rapport, Tata Steel Chess 2022. With a bishop resting on a3, the White king can never sit comfortably. Rapport’s next move was a crushing blow. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 31 January. 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 Qh5+ Qxh5 2 e8=Q+ Kf6 3 Qxh5 and wins Last week’s winner Anca Gramaticu, Oadby, Leicestershire
When Magnus Carlsen won last year’s Meltwater Champions Tour, they made two trophies. One was for Carlsen, and the second was auctioned online, fetching a sum in digital currency of around $25,000. The trophy only exists as a video showing a stack of rotating gold squares, like a Donald Trump skyscraper from the future. If you bought it, you’d be right on trend. Earlier in 2021, the winning bid at Christie’s for a digital artwork named ‘Everydays: the First 5000 Days’ came in at $69 million. That was for an elaborate collage created by graphic designer Mike Winkelmann, using the pseudonym ‘Beeple’. The pixels aren’t worth diddly squat, since anyone
Is the Church of England on a mission? It should be, of course. But it appears to have confused its purpose of preaching the gospel with seeking to make itself more representative. From now on, at least ten members of the House of Bishops, part of the General Synod, must be from an ethnic minority. This will help create a ‘church that truly embraces people of global majority heritage at every level of its life,’ says the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell. But it’s hard to reconcile Cottrell’s words with those of Paul to the Galatians: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are
Last week it was ‘operation red meat’, designed to recapture wavering Tory voters. This week something very different: changes to the Highway Code are coming into effect, which threaten to upset the not-insignificant number of car owners. Sure enough, the Alliance of British Drivers, the trade union for Mr Toads, has complained bitterly. Responding to a new clause reminding that cyclists and pedestrians have the right to use any part of the road, the Alliance complains: ‘This is a recipe for anarchy and accidents. It is unworkable. Greater clarification is needed as it appears to give pedestrians total control over the entire road network.’ No one set out to turn our
Given that lockdown was very nearly ordered on the advice of Sage last month, it’s worth keeping an eye on the ‘scenarios’ it published, and how they compare to the situation today. Another week of data offers more food for thought. This week was the period when deaths were supposed to be peaking – so given that no extra restrictions were ordered, it’s interesting to compare the peak the models predicted for this week with what actually happened. Deaths were said by Sage to peak at anything from 600 to 6,000 a day (the latter figure, predictably, hogged the headlines). But on Saturday 262 deaths were reported in England, and
As a journalist, it’s never a comfortable feeling when the news organisation you work for becomes the story. But with No. 10 desperate to throw some ‘red meat’ to the green benches — to take the spotlight off the rotting carcass of ‘partygate’ — it was inevitable that the BBC would end up being fed through the mincer this week. The Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, lit the touch-paper by announcing on social media (where else?) that the latest BBC licence fee announcement would ‘be the last’, adding with provocative hyperbole that ‘the days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors’ were over. Up until
Schools are far more than mere exam factories. Across the UK, teachers in 32,000 schools and colleges care for children on over half the days in any given year. Or we did until the lockdown in March 2020. Since then, children have missed the best part of two full terms. And while they were out of our sight, some were at risk. Six year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, for example, may have been rescued from the terrible abuse he suffered had his teachers been able to see him every day. But while most children have returned to class now that Covid restrictions are ending, some are still absent. News of anecdotal cases
Just how many databases was Malik Faisal Akram on? It turns out that the 44-year-old Briton – who was shot dead by an FBI Hostage Rescue Team last week as he held four people at gunpoint in a Texas synagogue – was no stranger to Britain’s creaking protective services. The US is now asking the UK to explain how Akram was able to leave our shores and enter the country two weeks ago to carry out an anti-Semitic terrorist attack without any flags being raised. The information that is slowly emerging is not encouraging. MI5 investigated Akram in 2020 as a possible terrorist and closed his case after a month.
A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator. Its premise was simple. Players find themselves in a future world, roughly 30 years from now, in which super-efficient robots have snaffled up all the jobs. No longer needed for work, humans entertain themselves instead by donning virtual reality headsets and reenacting ‘the glory days’ — simulating what it was once like to be an office clerk, chef, or shopkeeper. The gameplay, therefore, consists entirely of, well, yeah… carrying out endless mundane tasks: virtual photocopying, virtual cooking, virtual newspaper sales. Job Simulator is pretty tongue-in-cheek, crammed full of dry, self-referential jokes. In the game,
I knew what ‘anxiety’ meant when I was in primary school. But it was not a word I had cause to use regularly, as I moved from my pastel coloured class-room to my David Cassidy-filled suburban bedroom. Today, however, ‘anxiety’ is our children’s word of the year, according to the Oxford University Press. We can’t be surprised. The past two years represent a small proportion of my lifespan – but for a six year old, they are a third of their existence. Daily reports of a mysterious illness, hearing about people dying around them – some of them friends or family — and being banned from venturing outside their home:
Thirteen years ago we shared an office building with a large international bank. A common lift connected both businesses to the underground car park. Here I once overheard one of the bank employees describing our offices: ‘And you know what else they have up there…’ He spoke in the kind of wide-eyed, aghast tone you might have expected if he were about to reveal an opium den or a branch of Stringfellows: ‘They’ve got a bar.’ This was true. In the evenings after work, while the bankers downstairs were soberly hard at work destroying the world economy, there were people only yards above them shamelessly chatting over a beer. If
Catherine Chicken is sickly. She has swollen up like a barrage balloon with an evil face and dinosaur feet. She lumbers about. It is peritonitis, the vet says, after I make my husband drive her to the animal hospital in Falmouth. She will not recover without an implant that prevents her ovulating. Chickens are ever in danger of reproduction, like human women, and that is why I find them so touching. They are feathered paradigms. (There is a novel on this called Brood.) They counsel implants on the chicken welfare site — they counsel deification on the chicken welfare site — but it’s £250 for a chicken that cost less
Here’s a challenge which appeared in a German chess magazine in 1848: place eight white queens on an empty chessboard so that no two queens occupy the same file, rank or diagonal. In other words, none of the queens may defend each other. Perhaps you start with a queen in the top left corner, on a8. The next might be placed on the adjacent file, nearby but not touching, on the b6 square, a knight’s move away from the first. Following the pattern, you put another on c4, and a fourth one on d2. For the e-file, we need to break the pattern, so let’s revert to near the top
Are you ready for ‘Operation Red Meat’? If not, then you should brace yourself. For it looks set to be one of the most fearsome operations of modern political times, liable to make Conservative voters quiver with excitement and feel almost too stimulated. Alert readers will have noticed that Boris Johnson did not have the best end to 2021. Unfortunately he hasn’t had the best start to 2022 either. Hardly a day has gone by when we haven’t learned of some new shocker from No. 10. The impression has been not just of shambolic-ness but of dishonesty, double standards and general incompetence. The point is that the Prime Minister and
Two years ago, Boris Johnson had British politics at his feet. He had won the largest Tory majority since Thatcher, broken the Brexit deadlock and forged a new electoral coalition. Yet Johnson now finds himself on the verge of a vote of no confidence by his own MPs, and this turnaround hasn’t been triggered by some great ideological divide: this isn’t like old Tory arguments over imperial preference, the poll tax or Europe but by Johnson’s own behaviour and the way No. 10 is run. Downing Street had hoped that Sue Gray’s report would come out later this week, and they presumed it would give them the opportunity to launch
On Tuesday night, Boris Johnson loyalists were desperately trying to halt a spate of letters of no confidence going to Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee of backbenchers. They had thought there was plenty of time, that no MPs would move until Sue Gray’s report into the ‘partygate’ scandal was published. ‘Wait for the Gray report’ had become the answer to every awkward question. But it turned out that almost two dozen MPs from the 2019 intake were about to break ranks. In what was dubbed the ‘Pork Pie plot’ — a weak joke explained by the prominent role played by the MP for Rutland and Melton Alicia
On 2 January I woke up late to the sound of my phone buzzing continuously and a sense that something had gone badly wrong. The first message was from a friend. ‘Having a nice holiday?’ he wrote, above a screenshot of my political Twitter account covered in block letters: ‘Suspended.’ My reaction was to swear in just the way my dad does whenever he crashes his car. Politics For All was a news aggregation service I started two years ago when I was 17. It took the most salient lines from news articles and posted them across social media, always pointing readers to the original publication. The aim was to