Society

The cancellation of Wimbledon this summer deprived fans of their annual exercise in moralising. There is one topic SW19-goers love to complain about every year: the grunting sounds that players emit as they hit the tennis ball. Maria Sharapova, who retired in February, was called the Queen of Screams. Her grunts were once recorded at 101 decibels, more than a Boeing 707 as it touches down. They even inspired a series of ringtones. ‘I’ve done this ever since I started playing tennis and I’m not going to change,’ Sharapova once said. Yet her grunts were said to be mysteriously absent on the practice court. Grunting can give players a tactical

Recently, the government has provided Covid data on a UK basis – merging official figures from the constituent parts of the UK. But are the English and Scottish figures really comparable? Take figures for the number of Covid patients in hospital in Scotland on 28 August. The Scottish official count is 255, a drop of 42 per cent since 1 July. But this is odd when you see that England has recorded a far higher drop, of 81 per cent (from 2,289 to 430 patients over the same timeframe). The difference is much starker when you analyse the number of patients in hospital beds per population, given England’s population is

There was plastic aplenty at today’s Extinction Rebellion rally in Parliament Square. Plastic shoes, plastic badges, plastic sunglasses, plastic phone covers. A woman offered me a sticker peeled from a strip. ‘Are they plastic?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘Someone gave them to me.’ XR is starting a week of demos and civil disobedience. I arrived just as a sit-down protest opposite Parliament was being cleared by police liaison officers. ‘If you occupy the road you’ll be arrested under Section 14 of the Public Order Act, 1986,’ they said politely. An XR steward went around quietly advising the tarmac-squatters: ‘Don’t acknowledge what they’ve said. Then they can’t say you knew you’d broken the law.’ But the cops

A few weeks ago, I spoke on The Spectator’s podcast about my A-Level results. My story in short: I lost my dream place at UCL to study medicine (my conditional offer was: A*AA) after being downgraded by the algorithm to AABB. As the daughter of a single mother, in a low income household, I’m not exactly the sort of person expected to score top grades (especially not by the now-defunct algorithm). However, with a run of 9s and A*s in my GCSEs, I proved I could beat the odds once, and, had I sat the 2020 exams, I am confident I would have beaten the odds again. But the virus

Lord Hall, the outgoing director general of the BBC, used his valedictory interview on Radio 4’s Media Show this week to ruminate on the question of what funding mechanism should replace the licence fee. But to my mind, this was like listening to a man whose house is perched precariously on the lip of a crumbling cliff talking about whether he should plant an orchard. Somehow one feels it’d be a better use of Hall’s time to address the immediate problems rather than worrying about long-term issues. In the BBC’s case, the next Great Leap Forward might well be over the edge of the cliff. It is undeniable that the licence fee –