GARDEN (at 46 Across) reveals the theme. Paired solutions are ‘gardens’ in ‘countries’; 8/10, 32/1D, 33/28+29, 12/36, 37/34, 38/2, and 41 on its own. First prize Helen Stone, Horfield, Bristol Runners-up Jenny Atkinson, Amersham, Bucks; Sara Macintosh, Darlington, Co. Durham
According to the Times, a new academic study finds that nations become richer when they become more secular. It contests the traditional idea that a nation gets rich, probably with the help of Protestantism, and then loses interest in religion. Instead, a nation first becomes secular, then becomes rich. There might be some truth in this: the keenest capitalists are often rational individualists who idolise financial success. Enough such people can affect a nation’s economy. But the study, judging from the Times’ report, explains the trend differently. The authors found ‘that a decrease in religious belief was linked to an increase in tolerance for individual rights, including of women and gay
As Love Island enters its final fortnight and the ink dries on the annual moralising thinkpieces, decrying a younger generation happy to flaunt their bronzed bodies and sex lives before the viewing public, a new survey reminds us of the more depressing reality: that young people are less debauched than ever. According to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, teenagers are much less likely to have sex, or drink, and are as happy spending time with their families as with their peers. Of 1,000 16- to 18-year-olds, two-thirds said they had never had sex. And 24 per cent said they had never drunk alcohol. It’s further proof of what has previously been
Every four years, when the World Cup ends, I make a promise to follow the players I’ve come to know, or the ones I’d forgotten about for four years, until the next tournament; but I never do. It’s not that following the Premier League, the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, or Ligue 1 is difficult, even in the United States: matches for all these leagues are on television each week. Instead, I glance briefly at the scores in the Monday papers. When the Champions League reaches the semifinals in spring, I pay slightly more attention, and might look back to see who were the losing quarterfinalists. But when it’s always the same teams
Not the least extraordinary thing about the campaign to leave the European Union is that it turns out no-one was in charge of it. Things just happened and decisions were just made without the oversight or knowledge of the most senior politicians whose support for the project was reckoned, with some reason, to be crucial to its essential success. If Boris Johnson gave the Leave campaign a popular – and populist – presence in the nation’s television studios, Michael Gove gave it a certain intellectual credibility amongst the – admittedly small – percentage of the electorate that worries about such things. And with good reason: Gove’s intelligence, if not always
If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject. ‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’ And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue. It was posed to a young woman called Ash Sarkar who writes for an obscure blog named Novara Media. Last week Sarkar had her 15 seconds of fame when she managed the impossible and appeared to out-arrogant Piers Morgan in a television shouting-match ostensibly about Donald Trump’s visit to the UK. The exchange finished with Sarkar telling
The Kingdom of Spain always sends outstanding ambassadors to the Court of St James, none more so than the appropriately named Santiago de Mora–Figueroa, Marqués de Tamarón, who was en poste when José María Aznar was the Spanish premier. Santiago is also a highly regarded poet, and he has a further advantage. He looks like a Grandee of Spain as painted by Velázquez or Goya. So during one of his recent visits, a good audience assembled to hear him. There was an obvious agenda: Catalonia, the closely fought left/right conflict in Spanish politics, and Spanish attitudes to Brexit. We took wit and charm for granted, while awaiting enlightenment and controversy.
When I saw my first jogger in Wales in the early 1970s, I assumed he was running away from the police. Presumably joggers were familiar in California by then, but not elsewhere. I can’t imagine any of the characters in Goodfellas going jogging, any more than I can imagine Rick in Casablanca going to a spinning class. Nothing was stopping you from running around the streets back then. It was simply that there is always a high social cost to doing things most people don’t do. Our brain’s two most powerful default settings are social copying and acquired habit. Hence our preferences are not independent of our past behaviour, nor
‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady is pretty impregnable. Even the keys to her vaults are more than a foot long (the locks also now incorporate voice-activated software). Until 1973 the building was guarded at night by soldiers from the Brigade of Guards, who received a pint of beer with their dinner there. With all this security, how can you hope to get in? One answer came in 1836, when the directors received an anonymous letter inviting them to meet the letter writer in the bullion room late one night. At the agreed hour they heard
The atmosphere in Brussels has become, of late, reminiscent of the late Brezhnev era. We have a political system run by a bureaucratic apparatus which — just like the former USSR — serves to conceal important evidence. Especially when it comes to the health of its supreme leader, Jean-Claude Juncker. At the Nato summit gala dinner last week, videos emerged showing Juncker unable to climb the few steps leading to the podium. He hesitates at the bottom before being grabbed by the very sturdy Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko. He is then held up during the ceremony. Afterwards Juncker — who is only 63, hardly an old man — staggers and wobbles
My old mate Jason Yapp was chirpier than ever when we met to taste his wines the other day. Never knowingly under-ebullient, Jas (despite the whisperings of a hangover) had an extra spring to his step having just bagged three gongs at the previous night’s International Wine Challenge, namely that of Rhône Specialist Wine Merchant of the Year and ditto for both the Loire and Languedoc-Roussillon. We tried some delicious wines together and these six were my favourites, all ideal for mid-summer sipping. The 2017 Domaine l’Ancienne Cure (1) is an organically farmed, un-oaked blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon from Bergerac, south west France. Bergerac can be a pretty
England didn’t just lose the World Cup. When it comes to male nudity, the country has also lost its sense of shame. Everywhere — on the Tube, in buses, on the streets, in the pub — men are striding around topless. On Sunday in north Oxford I saw a man skiing topless, on roller-skis, with poles, down the Banbury Road. It’s as if Adam and Eve never ate from the tree of knowledge. Yes, it’s very hot. And yes, in the summer of 1976, men took their tops off but only in particular situations: on the beach, on a building site or in their back garden. I must admit that
It’s middle-class commentators – not supporters – who seem obsessed with the number of black players There were altogether too many darkies in England’s World Cup Squad for me to take any pleasure in their moderate achievements out in Russia. They did not represent me. I learned this via the Guardian in an article by a man called Steve Bloomfield who insisted that the team represented only the 48 per cent of Britons who voted Remain, because there were too many ‘players of colour’ in the side for the likes of us gammon-faced scumbag racist Leavers. Also, they were young. Apparently we ‘don’t usually like’ these kinds of people. Steve had been through the squad and
In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too but was just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each. Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could pretty much set up an artificial neural network and let it spread all over the electronic world like Japanese knotweed. With hindsight, the result was inevitable.
I’ve just returned home from seeing Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris on stage at the O2 Arena in London before a crowd of 8,000 people. And I have to say, it was a pretty good show. Once you’re past the bizarreness of seeing three top-flight intellectuals calmly occupying the same stage normally strutted upon by the likes of Iron Maiden or Def Leppard, it’s tempting to try to evaluate the content of the discussion, score it like a boxing match, or try to figure out which gentleman is the more brilliant or righteous. But those angles, valid as the might be, miss the larger point: namely, that deep
If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject. ‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’ And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue. It was posed to a young woman called Ash Sarkar who writes for an obscure blog named Novara Media. Last week Sarkar had her 15 seconds of fame when she managed the impossible and appeared to out-arrogant Piers Morgan in a television shouting-match ostensibly about Donald Trump’s visit to the UK. The exchange finished with Sarkar telling Morgan repeatedly
The call for elegies on the death of the High Street brought in a large entry that was poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays under the spell of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you rise!/ Swamping all before your eyes…’ spoke for many, though J.R. Johnson thinks that the roots of destruction run deeper, to Buchanan’s 1963 Traffic in Town: ‘Blaming online, high rents, might just be wrong/ It was Buchanan perhaps all along’. The winners earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell pockets £30. Bill Greenwell Hear their doors and cash-tills close, Play their dirges, sing their
Last week, for the first time since 1996, and for the second time in nine attempts, England won a match that was decided by a penalty competition. You may have read something about it. The penalty shoot-out is the classic example — the type specimen — of a sport transforming itself for television. Television loves penalties because television loves drama. When drama is mixed with partisanship the mixture is irresistible: a perfect piece of entertainment. Many sports have gone down the same route: changing their essence to please television, to create entertainment and ultimately to make more money. It’s not always a bad thing. The tie-break in tennis was first
Gavin Mortimer’s article on the decline in good behaviour among rugby players suggests the possible influence of anabolic steroids in the game. I played league for my grammar school and then union for Sheffield University Medical School Rugby Club 2nd XV for a couple of years in the 1970s. Back then, I never saw any unbridled aggression, except on the field, as part of the game. Mortimer’s article states that some players’ aggression is now being taken off the field and on to the streets. There are examples here in the United States, where I now live, of police officers, soldiers and sportsmen becoming addicted to muscle enhancing medications, which help
