Society

Thursday

Christopher Howse

The Spectator’s 2024 Christmas quiz

Events, dear boy In 2024: 1. Twenty-two tons of what were stolen from Neal’s Yard in London? 2. Down which steep, grassy hill in Gloucestershire was a Double Gloucester cheese wildly pursued by competitors? 3. Which film from 1964 had its classification changed from U to PG because the eccentric character Admiral Boom exclaims: ‘We’re being attacked by Hottentots!’ 4. How did the black horse Quaker and the grey Vida attract wide attention? 5. A dental plate with seven false teeth set in gold was bought at auction for £23,184. To whom had it belonged? 6. Which London gallery escaped harm when a fire broke out in Somerset House? 7.

Marcus Walker

What The Spectator taught Benjamin Franklin

Christmas came early this year. No, I’m not moaning about the carols that my local café started piping at the beginning of September (although that’s enough to enrage any priest). This year my first proper Christmas moment occurred two weeks early when a lovely couple chose to have not one but two Christmas carols for their wedding. We hadn’t even hit December before I found myself in the curmudgeonly position of muttering ‘Except Easter’ as a full church belted out the line ‘This holy tide of Christmas all other doth efface’. It was all very jolly, even if I felt momentarily Scroogelike. Not that this was the most amusing of

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why the ‘family’ is under threat

Now that John Lewis has produced a Christmas ad that celebrates family, starring white people as humans, all sorts of thinkers and commentators on the right have decided that the progressive madness is nearly over. One after the other they’re popping up in print, like bunnies who’ve decided the fox has gone. ‘Whisper it, but woke is over,’ these pieces begin. Even those Tories who thought it wisest to put their pronouns in their Twitter bios have quietly deleted them. The soundtrack to the John Lewis ad, the Verve’s dirgey ‘Sonnet’, was recorded in the spring of 1997, just as John Major was vowing to put ‘the family’ at the

Luke McShane

Twelve questions for Christmas

1) Which former US women’s chess champion, who in 1961 became the first chess player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, died earlier this year? 2) This year a boy from Argentina became the youngest ever to be awarded the International Master title, at the age of ten years and eight months. He even defeated Magnus Carlsen in an online bullet game. What is his name? 3) Noland Arbaugh, who was paralysed below the shoulders after a diving accident, demonstrated the outcome of his pioneering medical procedure by playing chess. How did he make the moves? 4) The grandmaster parent of a well-known chess streamer played a ‘Battle of

Luke McShane

No. 830

White to play. The conclusion of one of the rapid games from the ‘Battle of Generations’ match (See question 4 above). Which move did the grandmaster play to decide the game in her favour? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Friday 27 December. 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 Rf8! wins, e.g. 1…Qxa7 2 Bxe4+ f5 3 Bxf5+ Kh6 4 Rh8#

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Season’s eatings

Comp. 3379 invited you to submit a contribution to a collection of Christmas recipes by fictional characters. This is a festive version of one you made earlier, and it turned out well again. There were a couple of Ancient Mariners and Macbeth covens – special mention for Max Ross’s Christmas cauldron with its ‘badger’s head and reindeer’s toes, robin’s beak and snowman’s nose.’ A few gave meal plans rather than recipes, but George Simmers’s J. Alfred Prufrock deserves to be quoted anyway: In the room the ladies come and go, Preparing to watch The Gruffalo. There was a certain amount of cannibalism, courtesy of Paul Freeman’s Hannibal Lecter and David Silverman’s Titus Andronicus,

Cheesecracker

Christmas crossword: Organic Message

Down clues and entries are normal. Across clues have normal definitions but wordplays that omit a single letter from each answer, whose enumeration is given, and whose reduced form must be entered in the grid. Read in clue order, omitted letters spell out an Organic Message. Download a printable version here. Across 1               Mistress fixed this South African town (9) 7               Architect cycles to revive (5) 10            Allure of extremely adept discretion (7) 14            Worry bully, humiliate oneself (3,4) 16            Prepared study (5) 17            Escort gold checker briefly (8) 18            Rebuke solver after identical working (5,2,3) 19            Garnish good oatmeal rolls (9) 21            Somehow rids Co-op of arachnids? (9) 22           

Maureen Lipman

Notes from a national treasure

I’ve started rehearsals for the pantomime Beauty and the Beast at Richmond Theatre: two shows a day and just 13 days to learn everything, with songs, tongue-tying shticks, ghouls, hairy beasts and all. It’s like weekly rep with falsies and fart jokes. At the first rehearsal I confess I felt a little out of place in the cast of ridiculously bright-eyed young things with shiny cheeks and Lycra shorts. The director asked us all to introduce ourselves in one sentence. ‘I’m Maureen Lipman,’ I muttered, ‘and I’m a fucking National Treasure.’ The baked potato I eat in a café near the old Battersea Town Hall, now a slightly bedraggled, palazzo-style

Michael Farr

The prescient politics of Tintin

Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was a failed journalist. His first job after leaving school was on a Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle, but boringly in the subscriptions department. His mind was set on becoming a top foreign correspondent like some of the leading names of the 1920s. Having failed to join the ranks of renowned reporters, Hergé had created one in Tintin He really had started on the bottom rung, for subscriptions were located in the basement of the newspaper building. At every opportunity he would migrate upstairs, to the busy newsroom and especially to the cuttings library, where he discovered the world at

Craig Brown

Don’t tell me to ‘unwind’!

The most irritating word of the year was ‘unwind’. ‘Unwind with one of our artisan cocktails in the curated ambience of…’ and so on. For most of us, the call to ‘unwind’ promotes the very stress it purports to alleviate. Radio 3 is currently the station most fretful about unwinding, beseeching us to ‘ease into your day with welcoming harmonies’ and ‘focus for the morning with stress-busting music’. Its new ‘24/7 stream’ is called ‘Classical Unwind’. Is this a wind-up? If you’re still feeling anxious by the evening, Classic FM offers ‘Calm Classics’ at 10 p.m.: ‘The perfect soothing soundtrack to help you wind down at the end of the day.’

The Spectator

A Spectator Christmas poll: Who is the most overrated painter?

Jonathan Meades       This is a crowded field. A few years ago, I was delighted when Tracey Emin walked out of an address I was giving at the Royal Academy. But she’s no painter. The crown, then, has to go to Lucian Freud who was, unquestionably, a painter but a really bad one. Early on in his career were a few works which owed their being to the neue sachlichkeit (although he denied it). Soon however the primacy of ‘the mark’ asserted itself – splodgy, messy, coarse, smeared, oafish, impasted and increasingly auto-plagiaristic. It’s all very well attempting to reduce your models and daughters (often the same) to bulky chunks from

Peter Jones

The curious cures of ancient Greek medicine

Ancient Greek thinkers tried to explain every natural phenomenon in human terms, without reference to magic or gods. That was a major intellectual revolution. Greek doctors’ contribution was to invent what has been called ‘rational’ medicine, embedding a principle of the highest importance, however hopeless its premise: which was that the health of the human body depended on the proper mixture inside it of four ‘elements’: earth, air, fire (i.e. heat) and water and their associated properties (heat, cold, wetness, dryness and so on). Further, since dissection was mostly forbidden, they knew little about how the body actually worked (they did not know what the heart was for). But because

Tom Holland

I’m a fighter, not a quitter

‘Ring out the old, ring in the new…’ This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had been a housemaid deflowered, impregnated and turfed out on to the street by her self-evidently villainous employer – but also that another had been land agent to Lord Tennyson. The perfect incentive for me, then, this festive season, to curl up with ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ The poem’s tone of plangent melancholy, its regret that the years must slip by, will be more than usually in tune with my mood: for in 2025, a mere five days after new year, I shall be marking my 57th birthday. There is, as Tennyson

Ed West Ed West

The surprising truth about old myths

I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the ancient hillfort of a millennia earlier truly feels as though it belongs to the world of gods and heroes, of Homer and the Trojan War. If my imagination hadn’t been destroyed by decades of television, I could almost imagine myself there. One of the curiosities of findings in archaeology and DNA is that many of the old myths appear to be true Walking past ancient burial mounds and gazing at Argos in the near distance, I liked to think that I was in the footsteps of a real Agamemnon –

The Spectator

In defence of faith

For what should we give thanks this Christmas? The faith that sustains millions through life’s challenges and inspires countless acts of compassion every day? The hope that our world may be redeemed by love? The charity that makes us think of the voiceless and the vulnerable who need our love and protection? Faith, hope and charity are virtues at the heart of Christian belief. They are not exclusive to Christianity, of course, but the place of religion in our national life has underpinned the moral reasoning which has upheld our civilisation. The idea that atheists are privyto some higher level of neutrality doesn’t stand up to scrutiny The principle of

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A world without Jewish artists

It’s Christmas, and the far left have a gift for us in their stocking: a cultural boycott of Jews. They don’t call it that, of course. Rather, they say it is a boycott of Israel, and that those who support Israel, and people who confuse Israelis with Jews – that  is, most people – are anti-Semites. That peace-seeking, leftist Israelis and Jews (good Israelis and Jews) will be those boycotted (I can’t see Itamar Ben-Gvir turning to romance fiction) doesn’t seem to bother them any more than murdering good Israelis and Jews mattered to Hamas on 7 October 2023. It was, rather, the point of it all. Hollywood Jews often

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The joy of our village Christmas play

We are just recovering from the village play. This annual Christmas event was taken over last year by our son William, who writes it and acts in it, and his wife Hannah, who directs. Last year, it subverted the genre (as critics like to put it) of ghost stories. This year, it did a similar trick with whodunnits. It was entitled Death on the Dudwell, a reference to the trickle of a tributary which runs beside our fields. The play, set in 1935, opens with the idle would-be heir Arthur Prince (William) reading a contemporaneous Spectator on a sofa. It concerns the murder of his father, the unsavoury Lord Haremere (played

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Subpostmasters scandal, Rishi in the rain and Syrian rebels topple regime

January After an ITV drama, the government suddenly proposed to do something about the unjust prosecution of sub-postmasters. Junior doctors went on strike. There was a surge in scabies. The King went to hospital and was later found to have cancer. The Princess of Wales was in hospital with what turned out to be cancer. Five migrants died boarding a boat for England off Wimereux. In Beirut, Israel killed the deputy head of Hamas. Israel said that it expected war in Gaza to continue throughout the year. The United States, with token British support, struck sites in Yemen to deter Houthi attacks on shipping. Russia mounted the biggest missile bombardment

Dot Wordsworth

The Twelve Hates of Christmas

I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day. 12. Outside Starbucks a sign declared: ‘The holiday icons you’ve been waiting for are back!’ The icons were things like gingerbread latte, indicating that holiday meant ‘Christmas’, an unpleasant usage from America, where holidays are rare and they have invented one called Kwanzaa in case anyone feels left out. It just happens to be at Christmas. Besides