Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

No. 680

White to play and win. The conclusion of an endgame study by Henri Rinck. The imminent promotion of the g-pawn makes White’s situation look desperate, but there is one way to win the game. What is White’s winning move? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 November. 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 Qxf6+! Kxf6 2 Rxh7 Rxc1+ 3 Nxc1 and Black cannot prevent both Rxf7# and Ng4# Last week’s winner Willie Dong, Santa Cruz, California

Luke McShane

Sacrificing the queen

One of the most eye-catching games from the recently concluded Fide Grand Swiss in Riga saw an early sacrifice of queen for knight, bishop and pawn. This exotic balance of material usually favours the queen, based on the rule of thumb that pawn = 1, knight = 3, bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9. But when the minor pieces coordinate well, particularly with rooks alongside, they can be more than a match for the queen. A queen’s greatest strength is her ability to attack, and perhaps fork, any pieces that are not nailed down. So when you jettison your queen for a miscellany of pieces, they had

Wednesday

Michael Mosbacher

Christ’s Hospital shouldn’t lecture pupils on white privilege

Students and teachers at Christ’s Hospital, a £36,600-a-year boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, are set to be given ‘diversity training’. The plans, announced in June 2020, mean lessons will be given on ‘micro-aggressions and stereotyping’. Christ’s Hospital is far from the only public school to march headlong down this route; they are following a path previously trodden by the United States’s private schools. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t making a big mistake.  The narrative of those who welcome Christ’s Hospital adopting the post Black Lives Matter fad for universal inclusivity training is that it is precisely the privileged pupils of Britain’s leading public schools who are desperately in need of discovering why

Rachel Johnson

It’s hard not to pity Ghislaine Maxwell

This week, I’m having puppies! First litter! The Johnsons were not doggy as we always moved around too much (my late mother claims it was 32 times in 17 years), but once you have a dog, life seems boring without. I have a theory that children give couples something to talk about and, when they go, only a dog can fill the conversational void. The mother (or ‘dam’) is Ziggy, who entered our lives one week before lockdown after I had a sudden strong urge to get a dog. On 13 March last year I drove to a farm in Somerset and fell for a puff of white fur with

Monday

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

What the Liverpool attack means for Britain

What’s happening in Liverpool? This morning police declared the detonation of a device in a taxi outside a large women’s hospital, and subsequent arrests of four people in the city, as a ‘terrorist incident’. It has just been announced that our terror threat level has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’ meaning another attack is highly likely.  It appears the Liverpool incident involved a taxi passenger detonating an improvised explosive device outside the hospital, which was apparently its intended destination. The single passenger was killed as the car exploded and was engulfed in flames. The CCTV image is extraordinary, showing a blast of some force showering debris around. The taxi’s driver

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries of popular fiction of the second half of the last century. He joins Jameses Michener and Clavell, Hammond Innes and Harold Robbins in the great 1970s dad bookshelf in the sky. Kids of today will say: ‘Wilbur who?’ But I owe that man a debt of gratitude. He was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novelists I really got stuck into; along, of course, with Stephen King. Like Stephen King, he was grown-up in just the right way to appeal to children — really, a hop and a skip from Willard

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Liverpool terror attack: what we know so far

Britain has been subjected to another terror attack, just as the nation fell silent for yesterday’s annual Remembrance Sunday memorial. An explosion occurred in a taxi outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Sunday morning, killing the passenger and leaving the driver in hospital. Police have now confirmed that the incident is being treated as a terror attack.  Reports suggest that the driver, David Perry, noticed that his passenger had a device and locked himself in the car alongside the bomber. The as-yet-unnamed passenger was declared dead at the scene. Boris Johnson has hailed Mr Perry’s ‘incredible presence of mind and bravery’. He was discharged from hospital last night after receiving treatment for cuts and burns as

Sunday

Andrew Richards

David Railton and the final journey of the Unknown Warrior

The sound of footsteps on cobbled streets in the dead of night was a familiar sound in Margate during the autumn of 1920. The Reverend David Railton MC, the newly installed vicar of the town, frequently walked the streets unable to sleep, his mind ravaged by the memory of what he had witnessed during the war where he served as a chaplain on the western front. Just a few days after one of these night-time strolls, on the anniversary of Armistice Day, Railton was at Westminster Abbey to see his flag, a Union Jack he had carried throughout the war, hung above the grave of the ‘Unknown Warrior’. A year

Saturday

Samantha Smith

Why is Durham offering training for student sex workers?

As a first year university student from a disadvantaged background, I know all too well the constant struggle students can face to make ends meet. Before starting my studies at Durham, I worked three jobs to keep food in my mouth and clothes on my back while in full-time education. Living in group homes and emergency accommodation, I saw those around me searching desperately for any way to earn a living, even if it meant endangering their health and their lives. So it was both surprising and disturbing to find when I arrived at Durham that the university’s student union was encouraging young people down an incredibly dangerous path by

Madeleine Kearns

The grim reality of gender reassignment

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage. There is no objective diagnosis for transgenderism, and the evidence supporting hormonal and surgical ‘reassignment’ as an effective remedy for gender dysphoria (the feeling of

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Meghan has been found out

‘Speaking her truth’ has been one of Meghan Markle’s USPs – and what an absolute disaster it’s been, leading inevitably to the low point she has now reached this week, after she apologised to the Court of Appeal for ‘forgetting’ information about the Finding Freedom biography. For there are not different truths for different people; there is one true version of events. The Windsor’s motto ‘Never complain, never explain’ was thought to have been introduced by the Queen Mother in 1936. A few years before she said, when it was suggested that the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to a safer place like many British children of the

Thursday

Taki

I’ve been back one week and the good old US of A has never seemed more depressing

New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamist gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No siree, people over here are shot every day and night but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, with the rest of Gotham experiencing a level of street crime not seen in a decade. Robberies and felonious assaults are up 15 per cent in a year and gun arrests by a whopping 20 per cent.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Yorkshire cricket: the long view

The new chairman of Yorkshire County Cricket Club played a blinder in his first innings, consistently hitting the boundary and finding a settlement to defuse the troubling allegations made by the county’s former player Azeem Rafiq. It’s a pity he wasn’t moved up the order earlier, as Yorkshire’s performance in the storm over allegations of racism has been truly dreadful. Cricket really needs to move beyond this as pretty soon a significant minority of the England team will be of Asian origin. Yorkshire was always a players’ county, seeing itself as a plain-speaking republic. But speaking as you find has its drawbacks, as does ‘banter’. Complaints about other counties are

The Spectator

The power of remembering

On the advice of doctors, Queen Elizabeth II will not attend this year’s Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall. Her absence will be poignant. The Queen was 19 on VE Day in 1945. She served in uniform in the war, in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She represents the very youngest generation who fought in the second world war. That generation will not be with us much longer. The Queen does still hope to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on Sunday. But we have to face up to the reality that one day there will be no one left who knew the world at war; there will be no

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Court of Chaos: Boris’s style of government isn’t working for him — or his country

Without Boris Johnson there would be no Conservative majority. The millions who turned to him at the last election were not voting for the Tories, but for something (and someone) very different: they wanted Brexit and they trusted him to deliver it. Without Johnson, the Tories would struggle to keep his electoral coalition together, so when the Prime Minister asks his MPs to vote for something they dislike, though they denounce his madness, they do it. But now, for the first time, these MPs are beginning to waver. They’ve seen a pattern in the PM’s behaviour, they’re beginning to understand how each debacle will end, and they’re becoming wary. This

The Spectator

Is there any evidence climate change is making hurricanes worse?

Horror shows Eight people were killed when fans of rapper Travis Scott rushed the stage at a concert in Houston, Texas. Some previous deadly concerts: — 11 were killed at a Who gig in Cincinnati on 3 December 1979, after a crush sparked off by concert-goers outside the entry doors mistakenly thinking the band had started playing when they were only tuning up. — Nine were killed at a concert by Pearl Jam at Roskilde, Denmark on 30 June 2000. — 11 people were killed during a festival in Rabat, Morocco on 23 May 2009. Stevie Wonder and Kylie Minogue were on the bill, although not on stage at the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I learn to cope with my husband’s mess?

Q. My husband has fallen in love with ‘the country’ and retired to Exmoor while I maintain a presence in our Notting Hill residence for work. The problem is he has left his London study, carved from half our ground-floor sitting room, in its traditional disordered condition as if he has only popped out to buy milk — drifts of detritus, newspapers and plastic bags on every surface. I would like to Marie Kondo the study but I don’t dare tidy it as he will accuse me of throwing away even more things he has in fact lost himself. It is also a terrible waste to have half our available

The Spectator

Letters: climate protestors would do better to boycott China

Heat Sir: May I place some of Nigel Lawson’s comments in a sensible historical context (‘Stupid fuels’, 6 November)? First, he notes that the difference between the average annual temperature in Finland and in Singapore is at present 22°C. However, he is wrong to suggest that we should therefore not be concerned about a predicted rise in the average global temperature of a few degrees. The average global temperature during ice ages was only about 6°C colder than today, but that difference was enough to make the planet unrecognisable: much of the northern hemisphere’s land was covered in glaciers several thousand feet thick, and the sea level was 100 metres

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tory sleaze, NHS jabs and Elon Musk’s shares

Home NHS staff in England will have to be fully vaccinated against Covid by the spring. Britain had ordered 250,000 courses of a Pfizer antiviral pill available from early 2022 shown to cut the risk of hospitalisation or death from Covid by 89 per cent. Britain approved another antiviral pill, developed by Merck, and ordered 480,000 courses. In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 1,185 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 141,743. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 1,097.) Numbers remaining in hospital stayed at about 9,000. Rolls-Royce gained the backing of private investors

Dot Wordsworth

Has Boris Johnson really ‘trashed’ parliament’s reputation?

‘When they posted the closing-night notice for his first Broadway play, Comes a Day, he went into a drunken rage, threw his fist through a glass window and played the last act bleeding into a rubber glove before being forced into a hospital where he required 22 stitches.’ So said the New York Times in a profile of George C. Scott in 1970, 12 years after the event. Scott’s infatuation with alcohol saw him through five marriages. My husband admires his screen performances, naturally. In another profile of the actor, in 1971, the Times in London said of the incident: ‘Backstage at Comes a Day he got drunk and trashed