Society

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: back-to-front sonnets

The latest competition asked for a sonnet in reverse, modelled on Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality. This challenge produced a delightfully varied and engaging entry. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, Jennifer Pearson, David Shields, George Simmers and Philip Roe. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each. Max Ross Art soared to heights as high as man could go When David rose from Michelangelo. A fractured piece of marble, an idea, And genius fingers made the marble live.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Fan Bingbing and the tyranny of Twitter

My first reaction when I read Fan Bingbing’s apology for tax evasion was to laugh. Who wouldn’t? It was so wonderfully OTT in that unmistakably communist way. ‘I have failed my nurturing country,’ declared China’s highest-earning actress, who resurfaced this week after disappearing from sight over the summer. ‘I have failed society’s trust, and I have failed the love of my fans.’ She talked of having ‘experienced pain and torture like never before’ (a figure of speech, one hopes) but ultimately she had come through her ordeal a better person, thanks to ‘the good policies of the [Communist] party and the state’. Bingbing, who has agreed to pay £100m in

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Role model

World champion Magnus Carlsen is not competing in the Batumi Olympiad (of which more next week). Doubtless he is conserving his strength for his title struggle against Fabiano Caruana in London in November.   This lull gives me the opportunity to mention a new book about the great Emanuel Lasker, champion from 1894–1921, a role model of Carlsen’s. Lasker’s forte was to keep the ball in play through thick and thin in order to avoid draws. The same trait is evident in many of Carlsen’s victories, often achieved from risky situations. Notes to the following game are based on those by Zenón Franco in the forthcoming book Lasker: Move by

Raymond Keene

no. 526

White to play. This position is from Giron-Altaya, Batumi Olympiad 2018. Can you spot White’s classic winning combination? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 9 October 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 Qa6 Last week’s winner Barnaby Weiler, Berlin

Toby Young Toby Young

Hey Alexa, let’s make Sean feel like a loser

My oldest friend Sean Langan came to lunch last Sunday and, rather disappointingly, he seemed more interested in playing with our Amazon Alexa than asking me what I’d been up to. Sean is a documentary filmmaker who spends a lot of time in war zones — he’s just back from Syria —and he often reminds me of that Japanese soldier stranded in the Philippines who didn’t realise the second world war was over until 29 years later. The technological changes that occur while he’s in some god-for-saken hellhole are a constant source of wonder to him. I half-expected him to stop dead in front of our TV in amazement: ‘You

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 October 2018

Q. I recently gave a jolly dinner for eight friends (some old, some rather famous), all home cooking, ending with petits-fours. The next morning, everything cleared away, husband out for the day, I relaxed by the open French windows, reading (still wearing my long Victorian nightgown). I was startled to see two of the guests smiling in, come to lend a book we’d talked about the night before. The husband, mildly embarrassed, looked out at the garden intently; the wife kept turning the pages of the book they’d brought. Neither showed signs of leaving. I determined to stay sitting comfortably, explained that I had decided to slum it as I

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Cora Pearl’s conundrum

Cora Pearl is the new, and second, restaurant from the people who made Kitty Fisher’s in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. Kitty Fisher was a celebrated 18th–century courtesan, as the saying goes, and Cora Pearl, whose shrine is in Covent Garden, was likewise the happy and well-paid whore of myth. (Her real name was Emma Crouch, she was from Ply-mouth and she died broke and working as a common prostitute, with not a pearl, if you will, to her name.) I suppose the raging second-wave feminist in me should mind that fashionable restaurants are named for women whose daily work was so bitter and intimate I can’t even detail it here, and

Dot Wordsworth

Empathy

My husband is enjoying Do No Harm, the arresting memoir of the brain surgeon Henry Marsh who was on Desert Island Discs last week. Having confronted the terrible consequences of human error in this alarming speciality, the author mentions the bathetic absurdity of an NHS training presentation by ‘a young man with a background in catering telling me I should develop empathy, keep focused and stay calm’. Empathy is the great thing, it seems. Without it you’re a psychopath; with it you’re the carer we all want. Yet the word has only been in use in English since 1909. Was everybody a pitiless solipsist before that? Empathy translates the German

The Spectator

Britain after Brexit

Over the next few weeks, we can expect breathless reporting about the Brexit deal and its dynamics: the state of phytosanitary checks in the Irish Sea and the desirability of chlorinated chicken. But the real question about Brexit is about what type of country we become, once the process is complete and sovereignty has been retrieved from Brussels. And it’s a question to which the Conservative government is finally beginning to provide an answer. Theresa May’s concluding speech to her conference was one of the best she has given as leader. She spoke about what Michael Howard called the British dream: that children and grandchildren of immigrants and refugees can,

Taki

High life | 4 October 2018

To London for much too brief a visit: a marriage, lunch with Commodore Tim Hoare, and a look-see for a house. Yes, I am returning to live in London, but under one condition. It’s called Corbyn, and if he comes in, I’ll stay away. It’s rather cowardly, I know, but I did live in London during the closed shops of the early 1970s. I experienced the joys of the three-day week, the uncollected rubbish, the hospitals without electricity, and the unions exercising power over the government until a certain Margaret Thatcher put a stop to it. I find it hard to understand how people can root for Labour when the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 October 2018

Once the house move was completed, Catriona’s oldest and best Scottish friends, two of them, came to stay for a week. Now that Catriona lives in France they see each other but infrequently. A seven-day female catch-up feast did not appeal to me. Neither would a shadowy male presence about the house appeal much to them, I imagined. An unenlightened point of view, perhaps. But gender is more sharply defined in Scotland than south of the border. The lassies are proud of their lads’ outrageous, even ludicrous, masculinity, but they sympathise with each other more. Scottish gender begs to differ. So I planned to bugger off back to England the

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 October 2018

Two and a half hours after my tech guy began trying to uninstall Norton, he had purple smoke coming out of his nose and mouth. Well, Vimto-flavoured vapour. Sucking on this pseudo-crack pipe like a junkie, he was, and I was itching all over from a bad case of techno-hives. ‘What on earth is happening?’ I kept asking him as he ransacked the hard drive of my laptop, making code flash all over the screen. He told me that if this didn’t work, the only option would be to wipe the entire hard drive clean and start again. I couldn’t explain to you what he explained to me about what

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 October 2018

Home Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, played a well-nourished Banquo’s Ghost at the Conservative party conference, where Theresa May, the Prime Minister, declared that Britain after Brexit would be ‘full of promise’. She had insisted that the Chequers proposals for Brexit were the only ones possible. Mr Johnson called them ‘deranged’. Mrs May felt obliged to tell Andrew Marr on television: ‘I do believe in Brexit.’ Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, mocked Mr Johnson’s way of speaking: ‘Boris sits there,’ he told the Mail on Sunday, ‘and at the end of it he says, “Yeah but, er, there must be a way, I mean, if you just, if

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 4 October 2018

I’ve just arrived in Orlando, where the 15th World Bridge Series is taking place. I’m here for the second event — the mixed teams — but I fear this week won’t be half as exciting for England fans as last. In the women’s teams, several England players triumphed magnificently: Sally Brock and Fiona Brown won gold, Nicola Smith and Yvonne Wiseman silver. Yvonne is on my mixed team this week and I’ve banned her from too many boozy celebrations.   Meanwhile, in the open teams (the Rosenblum), England won its first medal since the tournament began in 1978. Congratulations to Andrew Robson and Alexander Allfrey, and their young teammates, Tom

Pabulum

2379: Shocking

Eight headwords in Chambers consist of the same word. Unclued lights (including two trios and one doing double duty) give definitions of these headwords. The word will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded.   Across 5    End with cloudy sort of wine (7, hyphened) 10    Strappers said to break down (4) 12    Rod pranged caravan in Mexican city (10) 15    Scandinavian chap portrays meadow with tailless leporine rodent (6) 18    Greasy stuff’s turned Nicole Knight off (5) 19    Is Corn State Charlie related to goddess? (5) 21    A romance at sea being filmed (8, two words) 22    Despise duff component post office dispatched (7) 24    Gale almost

Roger Awan-Scully

The humiliating end to Leanne Wood’s Plaid Cymru leadership

‘The morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead.’ So said Churchill about the career of Lord Curzon. But these words could also summarise the leadership of Plaid Cymru by Leanne Wood – a leadership that came to an abrupt and rather humiliating end on Friday. Most observers of politics outside Wales, and plenty of people even within Wales, only really became aware of Leanne Wood after the televised leaders’ debates during the 2015 general election. By that point, she had actually been leader of her party for more than three years. Wood was a surprise leader – even to herself. First elected to the Welsh

The Spectator

to 2376: Somewhere XI

On 15 September, Costa Rica, bordered by PANAMA (31) and NICARAGUA (5), and whose capital is SAN JOSÉ (40/10), celebrated its INDEPENDENCE (43) from SPAIN (35). Its main exports are BANANAS (36) and COFFEE (19D) and, unusually, it has no STANDING ARMY (1). CR (in the twelfth column) was to be shaded.   First prize Revd Anne Kiggell, Headington, Oxford Runners-up Frank Anstis, Truro, Cornwall; D.G. Page, Orpington, Kent

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Emily Thornberry’s speech shows why Team Corbyn went cold on a female deputy

For those wondering why exactly Labour vetoed plans for a new female deputy leader this morning over fears the role could undermine Jeremy Corbyn, look no further than Emily Thornberry’s conference speech. This afternoon, the shadow foreign secretary offered a pretty good explanation as to why Corbyn’s allies had become nervous about the idea of promoting a woman to second in command. Fresh from talking movingly about her backstory in a fringe event (Isabel reports on part 1 of Thornberry’s leadership launch here), Thornberry gave her boss a run for his money with a crowd-pleasing – at times barnstorming – speech which neatly set out the clear blue water between

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Has Priti Patel found the answer to Corbynism?

What’s the antidote to Corbyn? Thatcher, according to Priti Patel. Britain’s former PM might be public enemy number one in the eyes of the Corbynistas, but it’s vital the Tories return to Thatcher’s ideas and her way of doing things. That, at least, is the verdict of Patel, the Brexit-backing former international development secretary. Patel said that Britain is now at a crossroads: a similar juncture to the one it faced when Thatcher came to power in the seventies. Back then, she said, regressive socialism was in danger of taking control. The same is happening now, according to the Tory MP, and it’s vital that the Conservatives and the government