Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Must my fish and chips come with a side of geopolitics?

‘Our boys went to Lebanon and trained Hezbollah!’ shouted the drunk Irish lad in the fish and chip shop as an Indian man behind the counter silently fried chips. ‘Chucky ar la!’ the lad shouted, or Tiocfaidh ar la, to correctly spell in Irish the slogan of the IRA, meaning ‘Our day will come.’ And he went on shouting this, over and over, as the Indian fellow stared down into the fryer, and the Friday night customers formed a queue in this small fast-food joint in a West Cork harbour town. The Irish lad was not getting the message that the Hindu chap frying chips was probably not a massive

Dot Wordsworth

Spinoza, Epicurus and the question of ‘epikoros’

With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his expulsion from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. An American professor of philosophy, Yitzhak Melamed, asked the Portuguese Jewish synagogue there for permission to film some footage. The rabbi pointed out that Spinoza had been excommunicated ‘with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time’. So, no he could not visit

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 31 May 2025

Everyone has moments of tiredness during bridge tournaments. But it’s a merciless game. Taking your eye off the ball for a second – even missing something as small as a spot-card – can lead to disaster. At the recent Spring Fours in Bristol, on a team with Sebastian Atisen, Alice Coptcoat and Ollie Burgess, I found myself defending this hand: Sitting North, I led a spade to dummy’s ♠️10. Sebastian (South) played low, and declarer overtook with the ♠️Q. Next, he led a low diamond. I played the ♦️Q, he ducked, I pondered dummy, turned the trick over and – disaster! I couldn’t recall which diamond Sebastian had played. The

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

It’s time to reclaim tapioca pudding

‘Nothing will surely ever taste so hateful as nursery tapioca,’ wrote Elizabeth David. She’s not alone in her hatred of the stuff: tapioca pudding has become a shorthand for those childhood dishes we look back on with horror. It’s exactly those dishes that I’m trying to restore to their former glory – if such a glory ever existed. In fact, the first recipe I wrote in these pages was about blancmange, an attempt to persuade readers that that school dinner staple was worth a revisit. From there, rice pudding was a similar challenge and made way for jam roly-poly, spotted dick and cornflake tart. Though I’ve had tapioca pudding on

Luke McShane

Resigning in error

Anyone who plays chess will know the feeling of reaching a winning position, only to screw it up and to lose the game instead. So far so normal, and the cliché about ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ can apply to any sport. But chess offers a far more piquant anguish, unavailable in most other endeavours. Even among chess players, only a tiny minority will experience it. Directly resigning in a winning position – that is the stuff of nightmares. It sounds ridiculous – why would you ever do that? All it takes is to overlook one crucial resource, and it happened last week to one of the best

Luke McShane

No. 852

White to play. Torre-Parker, New York Simultaneous exhibition, 1916. White resigned, seeing no defence to the threat of Rc5-c1+. Which move would have led to the opposite result? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 June. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher 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…Qf4+! 2 Rxf4 (or 2 g3 Qd2+ wins) g3 mate. Last week’s winner Michael Low, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset

The Spectator

Will any party stand up for ‘Nick’?

Meet Nick. He is 30 years old, has a good job and lives in London. He keeps himself to himself. He isn’t political. At least he never used to be. And yet the struggle of Nick has become the struggle of our age. For Nick, the social contract has broken down. Nick embodies a generation for whom achieving the same life quality as their parents is a distant dream  After he has paid his taxes, student loan and the rent for his Zone 4 shoebox, Nick’s take-home pay is meagre. He knows where his money goes: on the benefits, social housing and remittances of one Karim, 25, an aspiring grime

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How Covid broke Britain

It was at about this time, five years ago, that the workers at my (then) local farm shop began wearing plastic bags on their feet, over their trainers. This was because of a report somewhere that said the Covid virus hung about on the ground and then leapt, with great agility and cunning, on to people’s shoes, from whence it swiftly decamped to your bloodstream and killed you. We were still rubbing raw alcohol on to our hands wherever we went, if you recall, because whatever you touched harboured the virus. You couldn’t actually go in the farm shop but had to give your orders to the staff who manned

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Marvelling

For Comp. 3401 you were invited to submit a poem that included the line ‘My vegetable love should grow’ from Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. There were lots of entries, some of them quite fruity (sorry). There are too many worthy runners-up to name names, but the£25 vouchers go to the winners below. My vegetable, love, should grow, not end up on your plate, at least until it’s won first prize at the village fète. I’ve never nurtured one so vast, nor hosed a hue so green – how can you think of eating it like some mere runner bean? But at my back I hear you mutter It’s just

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Liverpool parade crash, Starmer sacrifices Chagos Islands and an octopus invasion

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that ‘more pensioners’ would qualify for winter fuel payments, but did not say how many or when. Nigel Farage of Reform said he would scrap net zero to fund things like abolishing the two-child benefit cap and reversing the winter fuel cut in full. Millions of public-sector workers such as doctors and teachers were offered rises of between 3.6 and 4.5 per cent. From July, typical household energy costs will fall by £129 a year, still higher than a year earlier. South Western Railway was renationalised. Thames Water was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat for breaching rules on sewage and shareholder dividends.

Nick Timothy

Racing is being regulated out of existence

As a parable that sums up the dysfunction of the modern state and the over-regulation of industry, this has it all: government by unaccountable quango, ministers whose actions are the opposite of their words, puritanical campaigners given the power to dictate how people spend their money, a refusal to recognise glaring trade-offs and the cost of regulation, and the complacency with which a great British success story might be killed off. The success story in question is horse racing. With five million fans a year visiting 59 courses, racing is Britain’s second most popular spectator sport after football. And we are good at it. We have the best horses, the

Fire

2705: Thirty sevens

The unclued lights have an award-winning feature in common. Across 5 Webcam perhaps covering temporary accommodation (6) 10  With Head absent, our teachers brewed liqueur (10) 12  Start to grumble and show contempt, returning cabbage and sprouts (6) 16  Virginia starts to gripe about loss of nerve (5) 17  French film-maker returns in time to shake things up (7) 20  Views wild rhinos surrounding empty zoo (8) 25  Women’s popular victory (3) 26  Hero sat awkwardly in proximity (7) 28  Can start to see city in outline (7) 29  Hail one empty vehicle (3) 31  Run profit-making facility for outside users (8) 34  Distinctive qualities of musical about revolutionary (7)

Henry Dimbleby

Should we give weight loss jabs to children?

I have seen the future of food. And some of you won’t like it. On a research trip to the Netherlands last week, along with the fellow partners of my firm, Bramble, I took a speedboat tour of the port of Rotterdam. One of the most awesome sights was the so-called ‘Innocent Blender’ – a vast smoothie-making fortress, box-shaped and silver – glinting over the water. This is where the British-based, Coca-Cola-owned company makes its ‘tasty little drinks’. The factory location makes sense: most of Europe’s imported fruit comes via Rotterdam. Massive tankers – 600ft long and filled with 40,000 tons of chilled orange juice from Brazil – move through

The Spectator

2702: Some beef – solution

Triplets related to 38 WELLINGTON were 4A, 13 and 26 (WW2 bombers): 11, 27 and 32 (boots) and 1D, 12 and 31 (New Zealand cities). First prize Jude Wilson, Surbiton, Surrey Runners-up Sarah Darlington, Acton Trussell, Stafford; Sharon Harris, Hadlow, Tonbridge, Kent

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough

Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion coincided with the addition of all the letters after the first three. This is when it became a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality – very old hat – but just about anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional, ranging from wearing wigs to not fancying any kind of sex at all. Every peccadillo was

Lara Brown

The next front in the gender wars

April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation. Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity. The semantic contortions

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Are beards a political statement?

Yes, it was right of the police to announce quickly that they did not think terrorism was the motive in Monday’s Liverpool horror, thus heading off potential riots. The police also said the person arrested was a white man. If he had been a black man, would they have said that? If not, why not? Watching film of the incident, I felt uneasily reminded of the scene in Belfast in 1988 when two British soldiers in civvies drove out of a side road and found themselves in the middle of a Republican funeral cortege. The suspicious crowd began to threaten the car. The soldiers lost their nerve, one drawing his

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

I like King Charles. I visited him at Windsor Castle recently as Mrs Miller picked up a gong. The castle has been beautifully restored. It is full of treasures, looted from the Empire. There were no refreshments, only a porcelain water bowl for the guide dog of one of the honourees. The King was charming, looking a little the worse for wear, perhaps. He graciously laughed at Mrs M’s joke. He’s a thoughtful guy. A little odd, which is no bad thing. But he seems to have gone completely doolally on his trip to Canada this week, where he opened Parliament with the most modern of empty gestures. The King’s

Chas Newkey-Burden

We need more animal cruelty on TV

Animal rights campaigners are up in arms because Disney+ is able to use a legal loophole to broadcast a scene of a rat being forcibly immersed in liquid. The RSPCA has slammed Disney for showing a controversial scene from the 1989 thriller The Abyss where a live rat is deliberately submerged in fluorocarbon liquid. The rat is seen struggling during the scene and the charity said the experience was clearly one of ‘terror’ for the poor little rodent, although the filmmakers insist it survived. The scene had previously been cut from all UK screenings by the British Board of Film Classification, which ruled that it breached animal cruelty laws and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Robert Macfarlane: Is a river alive?

40 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise our relationship with the natural world.