Society

After an hour’s beach work I was just about done. I’d read some book, I’d skimmed the papers, I’d eaten some bits of cheese on some oat biscuits (the closest I’ll concede to picnics, which I hate), I’d drunk some water as per my instructions from the Fawn (‘Drink some water! You never drink enough water’), I’d dried off from the swim, I’d got a pair of very numb buttocks after sundry failed attempts to get comfy on the not very flat rock: surely I’d done enough now to earn my release? But I knew I’d never be allowed to get away with it. Not this soon. The Boy, maybe:

In case you missed it,  Apple’s market capitalisation has now hit the $1trillion mark – something which is as mind boggling as it was inevitable. Everyone with a newswire, Twitter feed and website seems to have latched onto the milestone. You’d have thought they’d all successfully predicted this event on 1 April 1976, when the company was founded. But the question now is whether the valuation has made a fool of all of us? According to Mike Ingram, Chief Market Strategist at WH Ireland, ‘In just over a decade Apple has transformed itself from a niche tech company for nerds to a global consumer goods powerhouse. While it currently deserves its

Finding a savings account that allows you to collect any interest at all – while still having access to your cash when you want it – can be tricky. There are some options out there, though. Here are the best Easy Access savings accounts on the market at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

My anecdote last week about upgrading to BT’s ‘superfast’ broadband provoked several readers, unasked, to tell me their own unsatisfactory experiences. So I thought we should compile a Spectator dossier on the subject — as we did to good effect on the issue of high street bank branch closures, on which your combined report reached the desks of a selection of banking’s top dogs. We did not persuade them to reverse the trend but I know we made them think about how to make it less irritating for customers. In the same spirit, feel free (if your wifi connection is working) to tell me how good or bad the broadband service is

There is a big glaring problem for anyone trying to accuse the government of ‘austerity’ – a charge that is continuously laid by virtually all opposition parties. Just where does that charge fit in with HS2? True, the nation’s roads are full of potholes, the bins in some places are being emptied only once every three weeks and the NHS is trying to wriggle out of offering hernia operations – something it seemed to manage perfectly well to perform in 1948. But still it is a little hard to square the charge of austerity with a government planning to spend £56 billion of public money on a single railway line,

I’m fairly certain the Pope’s a Catholic but Andrew Cuomo is anyone’s guess. Barely had the Holy Father revised Church teaching to declare capital punishment ‘inadmissible’ than the New York Governor tweeted this: The death penalty is morally indefensible and has no place in the 21st century. Today, in solidarity with @pontifex and in honor of my father, I will be advancing legislation to remove the death penalty from State law once and for all. https://t.co/BxFvym4YTB — Archive: Governor Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) August 2, 2018 The scion of the Cuomo dynasty — the Kennedys remade for radio — is battling Sex and the City star turned progressive heroine Cynthia Nixon

When does a religion become an ethnic group? You may consider the premise of this question absurd – after all ethnicity is immutable, faith a choice. Bizarrely however, this has become the subject of a major dispute amongst British Sikhs. It hinges on whether or not a Sikh ‘ethnic’ tick-box should be included by the ONS in the 2021 Census. A voluntary question – ‘what is your religion?’ already exists, with ‘Sikh’ an option which 423,000 readily chose back in 2011. Back then a campaign resulted in 83,000 Sikhs refusing to select the available ethnicity tick boxes (eschewing Indian because of the Indian government’s betrayal of Sikhs in the 1980s),

The recent successful revival of the musical Chess, by Sir Tim Rice and the men of Abba, featured some genuine extracts from play in the staged re-enactments of decisive games. One of the most impressive — and most easy to identify even from a distance without opera glasses — was Bobby Fischer’s infamous and very loud rook swoop against grandmaster Pal Benko, who has just celebrated his 90th birthday. Fischer-Benko; US Championship, New York 1963 (diagram 1) White has a powerful attack but his problem is that the natural 19 e5 is met comfortably by 19 … f5, when Black has no problems. Fischer’s solution is startling. 19 Rf6! Fischer famously