Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: Should conservatives be worried that high-spending Boris has a majority?

My father’s imprisonment Sir: Harald Maass’s piece on the plight of Uyghurs in China (‘A cultural genocide’, December 14) captures the grim reality of what has been happening. Articles like this draw vital attention to the crisis. I am an ethnic Uyghur and live in Belgium with my wife and children. My father, a 58-year-old secondary school teacher from Xinjiang, was jailed in China in April 2018. No reason was provided by the authorities as to why, and there was no trial or any other legal procedure. He was obviously imprisoned just because he is a Uyghur. After 18 months in prison, he was finally released recently and is at

Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford visits the greatest one-artist show on Earth

For a good deal of this autumn, I was living in Venice. This wasn’t exactly a holiday, I’d like to point out, but a suitable place to work while beginning a new book. The result was, though, that week after week, when I had finished writing, I went for a stroll around the neighbourhood, Dorsoduro, which very quickly came to feel like home. One thing I realised as I wandered around, between buying the groceries and admiring the view, was just how crammed the city was with works by Tintoretto. There must have been well over 70 within a few minutes of the apartment where I was staying. There are

Stuart Jeffries

Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500

Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its cave, most likely because the pattern of lines and holes on its surface looked beguilingly like a face. Perhaps this was the birth of art. Or perhaps not. Maybe art arrived in this world later. One day in 1940 Marcel Ravidat was walking in the Dordogne when his dog, Robot, fell into a hole. Robot had stumbled across the entrance to a network of caves containing more than 600 wall and ceiling paintings of horses, deer, aurochs, ibex, bison and cats dating from 17,000 to 15,000 BCE. The discovery of

William Dalrymple

The forgotten masterpieces of Indian art

As late as the end of the 18th century, only a handful of Europeans had ever seen the legendary Mughal capital of Delhi, which, within living memory, had been the largest, richest and most spectacularly beautiful city on earth, twice the size of London and Paris combined. But after a century of anarchy, Delhi was not what it once was. By 1805, it lay half-ruined and sparsely populated, ruled by a blind Emperor from a crumbling palace. Delhi’s ruins bewitched the young artist James Baillie Fraser when he arrived in the 1810s from Calcutta. Fraser was already planning two series of aquatints, one on Calcutta, the other of the Himalayas.

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: From May to a December election

January ‘If parliament backs a deal, Britain can turn a corner,’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said. The Commons defeated her withdrawal agreement with the EU by 432 to 202. Patrols found 15 people on inflatable craft off Kent. The Argentine footballer, Emiliano Sala, 28, died when a light aircraft crashed into the Channel. Off Libya and Morocco, 170 migrants drowned in two shipwrecks. Patisserie Valerie went into administration. US President Donald Trump refused to approve a federal budget without funds for a wall with Mexico. A fatberg 210ft long was found blocking a sewer beneath Sidmouth. February Seven MPs resigned from the Labour party, objecting to anti-Semitism and lukewarmness

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The mysteries of the Corbyn world-view

It is worth fixing for posterity the feelings which, on polling day, swirled in the breasts of many who wanted a Boris victory. Being a journalist, I normally enjoy the electoral scene with some detachment. I cannot claim to be neutral, since I have never, even in Tony Blair’s pinkish dawn of 1997, wanted a Labour government; but I can take it in my stride. This time, however, millions, including myself, were knotted with fear that anything other than a clear Tory victory would destroy Brexit and make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister. The risks were actually frightening. We sought distractions. Listening to the Radio 4 Today programme that morning, I

The Spectator

What did psychics predict was going to happen in 2019?

Bah humbug Some of the things reported to have been banned this Christmas: — Mulled wine banned from being sold by street traders at Christmas fayres in Castleford, West Yorkshire, on the grounds it would break a Public Spaces Protection Order designed to stop street drinkers. — Christmas lights banned by health and safety officers in Pembury, Kent, on the grounds they each weighed more than 4kg. — Children banned from sending more than one Christmas card each to classmates at Belton Lane Primary School, Grantham, on the grounds that cards are environmentally unfriendly. — Glitter banned from Marks and Spencer cards, wrapping paper and decorations. Crystal balls What psychics

The Spectator

Democracy redux: the lessons of 2019

Britain’s parliamentary democracy is easily mocked: the medievalisms, the men in tights, the ayes to the right. But it has been preserved because it tends to work. It focuses minds and makes order out of chaos. Yet again we have a general election result that almost no one predicted — and one that offers plenty of lessons for those with an eye to see them. The communities so often patronised as ‘left behind’, typically in northern and coastal towns, have now demonstrated that they are powerful enough to decide elections. During the Blair and Cameron eras they were written off as a declining demographic: older, poorer, less educated and often

Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson: Perhaps my campaign was ‘clunking’. But sometimes, clunking is what you need

You may wonder why I am up at 4.45 a.m. writing this diary when I have a country to run, Queen’s speech to prepare, vast mandate to deliver, and so on. The answer is simple. It is a question of obligation. When I bumped into the editor (at Sajid Javid’s 50th birthday party) a couple of nights ago, he explained — with a slightly glassy expression — that he had taken a gamble. He had already printed the cover of the Christmas treble issue, he said. I know all about the Xmas cover. It is lavish, laminated, and on much thicker stock than the normal cover. It costs a bomb. Once

Luke McShane

no. 585

Black to play. Ilfeld & Vachier-Lagrave–Picot & McShane. Pro-Biz Cup, London 2019. My move. White threatens checkmate with Qc4-g8, so I exchanged rooks on f1 to divert the queen. We won in the end, but what would have been a stronger move? Answers to ‘Chess’ at The Spectator by Tuesday 7 January or via email to victoria@-spectator.co.uk. 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 Qe7! threatens mate on h4. 1…Rxg3+ 2 hxg3 g5 3 Qxh7+ Kg4 4 Qh3 mate.

Luke McShane

A multitude of contests

Besides the Grand Chess Tour final, an abundance of chess was played at this year’s London Chess Classic. More than 2,000 children visited the festival, which was organised by the charity Chess in Schools and Communities. Fittingly, two talented youngsters shared first place in the Fide Open event — 14-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa from India and 18-year-old Anton Smirnov, from Australia.   Michael Adams added another title to his collection by winning the British Knockout Championship. He had a close shave in the quarter finals, narrowly surviving an Armageddon game against the promising young player Marcus Harvey, who sailed through a qualifying tournament with 8.5/9 the previous day. So, like last year,

Mr Magoo

Magical Mystery Tour

A quotation (in ODQ), starting on the  appropriate side of the grid, runs clockwise around the perimeter. The other unclued entries (one of two words, one of three words), will show solvers the event being described, interrupted by some disposals. The original author of the quotation, found in anagrams in symmetrical answers, must be highlighted, as must the name in anagram form of the poet who wrote about the ‘event’. A first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of The Penguin Book Quiz: From The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Ulysses by James Walton will be awarded for the first correct solutions opened. The first four winners will

Rupert Shortt

Richard Dawkins and the ignorance of ‘New Atheism’

I recently met an old friend at a party. She works for a Christian NGO. Later that evening we were introduced to a man with a background in software engineering. Having learnt about my friend’s job and then discovered that she goes to church, he asked her how old she thought the universe is. Her jaw dropped a bit. But she was composed enough to reply with a counter-question. ‘Did you know that it was a Catholic priest [the cosmologist Georges LeMaître] who proposed the Big Bang theory in the first place?’ Now it was the engineer’s turn to look shocked. Some may dismiss this exchange as a flash in

David Paton

How Boris can avoid May’s Brexit trap during EU trade talks

Much of the nation breathed a sigh of relief when the exit poll was released. Whatever one’s views of the Tories, their clear majority has at least saved the country from yet more years of argument and damaging uncertainty. All the other major parties were committed to overturning the result of the 2016 referendum. At heart, the election outcome was a validation of democracy: voters do not like the sight of politicians ignoring their clear instructions that the UK must leave the EU. But despite the emphatic result, it did not take long for some to try to reframe the debate in a pro-remain direction. Boris, we were told, could

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Ones to watch: The most promising new MPs of 2019

Last week’s election saw 140 new MPs joining the House of Commons, along with 15 former parliamentarians who have managed to regain a place. 2019 has seen a record number of women entering parliament as well as the most ethnically diverse set of MPs yet elected. Many of the new intake have impressive CVs and some could well find themselves on the front benches of their respective parties before too long. Here is our list of the most promising new MPs from each of the major parties: Claire Coutinho – East Surrey Con HOLD – 24,040 majority Coutinho won the candidacy for the Conservative safe seat of East Surrey when the

Steve Silberman

For Tom Cutler, being diagnosed autistic was the happiest day of his life

It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a compelling autobiography was dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as highly unlikely. Though the term ‘autism’ was originally derived from the Greek word for self, autos, people with ‘self-ism’ — who were routinely described by non-autistic experts as being ‘trapped in their own world’ — were ironically thought to be incapable of the kind of introspection and self-reflection necessary to produce trustworthy documentation of their own experience. When the industrial designer Temple Grandin published Emergence: Labeled Autistic in 1986, it was billed as ‘the first book written by a recovered autistic

Alex Diggins

Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed

It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful and finger-pointing: them, not us. But looked at in another way, it is rangy, open and expansive. It suggests horizons, not walls. That first meaning has done much heavy lifting in discussions of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As the first black British woman to be awarded the prize, this was perhaps inevitable. Evaristo cuts an unmistakable dash through the ranks of past winners: they have been, on the whole, more pale and — damningly — a lot more male. The Booker judges hardly steadied the debate with their