Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

No. 617

Black to play. Efimov–Bronstein, Kiev 1941. Normally White seeks glory in the King’s Gambit, but here Bronstein scored a lightning victory for the Black side. Which move did he choose? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 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 prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…a4! wins, as 2 Bxe7 axb3 3 Bxd8 Bxb5 4 Bxg5 Bxd3 left Black a piece up. Or 2 Qxa4 Bxb5! hits the queen.Last week’s winner Aaron Milne, Winnington, Cheshire

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 15 August 2020

I am frankly repulsed by the latest cheats, exposed after the online invitational Alt and OCBL tournaments. When F2F bridge became impossible, a few innovative bridge organisers came up with a sensational alternative that enabled world-class players to compete against each other online and the rest of the (bridge) world to watch and learn from their play. Sadly too tempting for Michal Nowosadzki and Sylvia Shi, respectively Polish and American World Champions, who, when investigated and confronted, ‘voluntarily confessed’ to self-kibitzing (seeing all four hands by logging on with two devices) throughout. Of course kibitzing was instantly banned (as were they), ruining the fun for thousands and making everyone else’s

Dot Wordsworth

Did Taylor Swift really ‘overthink’ her album release?

Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just thinking.’ If so, he seems recently to have been overthinking. Overthinking is a pretty annoying word, often used by people not noted as great thinkers. Taylor Swift, the belle of West Reading, contrasts it with honest gut feeling. ‘Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music,’ she said when suddenly bringing out a new album to coincide with one due from Kanye West. ‘My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world.’ That is

Nicholas Coleridge

Nicholas Coleridge: The Ghislaine Maxwell I knew

I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked her, everyone did, and I find it hard to reconcile the Ghislaine I knew with the heinous crimes of which she now stands accused. I visited her several times at Headington Hall, her family house on the edge of Oxford, when her father Robert Maxwell was at the height of his power. It was a peculiar house, rented from the council, like an enormous municipal town hall. The entrance hall and corridors were lined with at least a hundred framed cartoons by Jak and Mac of the great narcissist newspaper

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A great Dane: Snaps + Rye reviewed

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of Notting Hill, just north of the Westway, a road I uncomplicatedly love, probably because it takes me from Notting Hill to places I like better. Notting Hill fell to gentrification long ago — it gasps with boredom — but here London feels like a real city, though only just. ‘This home is not a shop,’ says a sign in a nearby window, with as much feeling as signage can muster. Or should muster. ‘Nothing is for sale.’ It is a bitter time for restaurants and those who love them. Nearby,

The Spectator

How hot does a ‘heatwave’ have to be?

Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three consecutive days when maximum temperatures exceed the 90th percentile maximum temperature for mid-July. In London that means when the maximum exceeds 28˚C. For the rest of the south-east, as far west as Hampshire and as far north as Nottinghamshire, the threshold is 27˚C. For Dorset, Somerset, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire it is 26˚C, and everywhere else, including the West Country, most of Wales, the north of England and Scotland it is 25˚C. In places it will mean a heatwave occurring in 30 to 50 per cent

The Spectator

Letters: Will office workers ever want to return?

The future of offices Sir: I agree with much of Gerard Lyons’s article about the future of the capital (‘London in limbo’, 8 August), but there is more to consider. Before the virus, many organisations considered having staff working from home. However, there were always objections: people needed to be at meetings; the technology wasn’t good enough; questions over whether workers would work their contracted hours. With the onset of the virus, working from home was forced upon many, and has proved to work better than could ever have been expected. Will these workers ever want to come back to the office? Many will miss the social side of work,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is Chris Packham finally facing facts on shooting?

Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting forfeit the impartiality required of a television nature presenter. So it is bold of the excellent new magazine, Fieldsports Journal, to give Mr Packham lots of space in its issue designed for the start of the grouse season this week. Photographed in a butt, Mr Packham not only grants an interview, but also contributes his own article, which begins with his almost lyrical description of holding a rifle (‘I lift the fore-end and feel its weight on the bulb of my left thumb…’). Not strictly relevant, since grouse are dispatched

Toby Young Toby Young

I’ve started a dating site for lockdown sceptics

I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of den mother to a large group of people who believe the risk of coronavirus has been exaggerated, and it dawned on me that this could be a useful service for them. The idea is that if you’re a Covid realist you don’t want to go out with a hysteric who thinks the lockdown is being eased too quickly and frets about a ‘second wave’. You probably wouldn’t even be able to arrange a first date, let alone manage a kiss at the end of the evening. What you need is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What can I do about fellow passengers who won’t wear face masks?

Q. On my way to Devon recently I stopped for lunch with an impeccably mannered friend. He produced first crab meat, then smoked salmon with a delicious salad of avocado, lettuce etc. Halfway through I noticed he had four or five prawns on his plate and I had none. As prawns are one of my favourite foods I vocalised my disappointment. He was mortified but could not transfer any prawns to my plate for fear of coronavirus. Should I have kept my mouth shut, Mary?— E.S., Ripe, Sussex A. No, but you could have proceeded differently. You might have set your host at his ease by gushing: ‘Oh you haven’t

Douglas Murray

When everything is ‘racist’, nothing is

Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get back the whirlpool bath she charged us on her parliamentary expenses. But the officers skipped the boot and went straight to the passenger side, where they found the member for Brent Central recording them with her phone and looking pleased as punch to audition as the new Rosa Parks. As it happens, the footage she released showed the police being deeply polite, and they subsequently explained that the pull-over had been due to a registration-plate mix-up. But Butler claimed it was a case of the dreaded ‘stop-and-search’ and within hours

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

In the race to recovery, Britain is losing

At the start of lockdown, the government was obsessed with how other countries were dealing with the Covid crisis. In No. 10 press conferences, Britain’s daily death toll was shown next to numbers from the rest of the world, putting our handling of the virus into perspective. But when our death toll jumped, the government claimed the calculations were too different to compare and dropped the graph. A few weeks ago, the Office for National Statistics picked up where the government had left off, revealing that England had the highest number of excess deaths in Europe, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were in the top eight. The UK had

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The absurd self-pity of Stuart Broad

You are, shall we say, a famous commentator, one of a tiny elite in the British media. You are paid hundreds of thousands of pounds, and are hugely admired. Then at a time of some crisis for others, one of your employers suggests you do 50 columns rather than 52. For exactly the same money, status and prominence. How do you react? Do you start shaking with grief? Do your legs turn to jelly and do you consider immediate retirement? No? Well you’re clearly not following the Stuart Broad guide to working practice. After being ‘rested’ for the first Test against the West Indies, he gave an extraordinary interview to

Lewis Feilder

The dangers of unconscious bias training

To read the press releases, you would think we’ve found the panacea to racism in the form of unconscious bias training. Numerous organisations, including the Labour party, have announced they would be putting their staff through such programmes. This follows in the footsteps of the civil service, which has required all civil servants to undertake unconscious bias training since 2018, magistrates, for whom the training is compulsory, and the Met police, where it forms part of ongoing officer training. Google, Facebook, the FTSE 100, government departments — including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice — and non-profits proudly advertise the programmes they put their staff through. But the

Mark Honigsbaum

Why bats are the perfect hosts for viruses

The common horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus affinis, is a feat of biological engineering. The size of a small pear, it spends most of the day hanging upside down in dark, dank caves. To keep itself warm it huddles in tight colonies, wrapping its wings — which can measure up to two inches — around itself like a blanket. Even so, in winter its body temperature can fall as low as 43°F (6°C). Then, two hours before sunset, it emerges to forage for insects using a horseshoe-shaped sonar dish on its nose to find its bearings. But now it has a new problem: flying requires so much energy that its metabolic rate

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The dismal rise of the modern elopement

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on a mountain top. It makes sense while we’re all social distancing, but I suspect the elopement trend is set to continue — and I think it’s dismal. I first saw the signs when I asked a friend what he was up to this Saturday. ‘Oh, I’m just off to an elopement,’ he said. My immediate

The Spectator

2467: Girl Talk solution

The unclued lights, 3/34, 12/31, 26/1A/33, 35/9, 39 and 18 PEAKE (an anagram of the red highlighted letters), are six of the actresses who appeared in the recent BBC production of Talking Heads. First prize Chris Edwards, Pudsey, LeedsRunners-up Elizabeth Duff, London NW3; Jenny Atkinson, Amersham, Bucks

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Keatsian sonnets

In Competition No. 3161 you were invited to supply a sonnet with certain rhyme words to be used in a given order. Bout-rimés contests were a favourite parlour game of Dante Rossetti and his brother William, but the given end rhymes for this assignment come from a sonnet written in the winter of 1816 by John Keats. It was also the result of a competition — Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged one another to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ and Keats apparently rustled one up in the space of 15 minutes (as did his opponent). In an enormous and stellar entry,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The hidden costs of Covid

We do not know what the long-term impact of coronavirus will be on mental health. We are still not through the pandemic, for one thing, which means that many people who have found the experience of lockdown, of losing their livelihood, or of losing loved ones traumatic, have not yet had the chance to process what has happened. People often don’t process a trauma until they feel safe again, and it’s not yet clear when that will be: we still don’t have an effective vaccine for Covid-19 and Britain’s economy is in recession, with heavy job losses on the way. It could be that in time there is an escalation