Society

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Sherpa

My Great Predecessors is an indispensable guide to the achievements, style and best games of the former world chess champions. It is a monumental series, consisting of five volumes, written by probably the greatest champion of them all, Garry Kasparov. In Modern Chess and Kasparov on Kasparov there are several more volumes, and in the latter Kasparov documents his own bouts for the title as well as his major career highlights. All titles are published by Everyman Chess. Kasparov’s oeuvre amounts to the most complete history of chess ever written.   This year’s World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana is set for London in November. This week and next

Raymond Keene

no. 508

Black to play. This is from Paulsen-Morphy, New York 1857. Having sacrificed his queen to expose the white king, Morphy continued 1 …Bh3+ which was good enough to win. But there was a better move, forcing a quick mate. Can you see it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 5 June 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 Qxh7+ Last week’s winner Don McColl, Glenside, South Australia

Taki

High life | 31 May 2018

I’m back in New York and digesting the five glorious days spent in Normandy. What was the fighting all about, you may ask: was it about freedom, equality, cultural diversity, man’s dignity — all liberal catchphrases these days? Liberty and freedom are also big words nowadays, but all I see are massive central governments with arbitrary powers à la Brussels and Washington DC. Normandy promised us a lot but, as far as I’m concerned, delivered little. If freedom of speech was non-existent in Germany in 1940, political correctness makes it just as rare in London and New York in 2018. Our stifling culture of PC makes the sacrifices of those

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 31 May 2018

We were standing in the tiny hall: me, Catriona, Annette and her toy Yorkshire terrier, Ahmed. It was our first Airbnb booking and Annette was welcoming us to her humble home. She was a mature, careworn, attractive French woman with a modest disposition and she spoke pretty good English. Her husband would be coming back from his work shortly and when he did she would introduce him to us, she said. Had we found the flat easily? Not that easily, in truth. The photo had suggested a house on a residential street, but a friendly black woman carrying a bag of laundry, who candidly admitted that she didn’t know her

Melissa Kite

Real life | 31 May 2018

Now I know how the Karate Kid felt. Two hours after I began oiling the newly laid deck in my garden, I could barely move my arms. Wax on, wax off, I kept repeating. I knelt until I had rib marks in my knees so deep they looked as though they might never come out. After eight boards, the muscles in my right arms were bulging. I tried swapping the brush to the other hand, but that took too long so I gave up. Wax on, wax off. I would have to have one big muscled right arm and a scrawny left one. As long as someone attacks me from

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 31 May 2018

Not many players can pull a fast one on Gunnar Hallberg. The seasoned Swede, who came to live over here 20 years ago, has a fearsome reputation, both internationally (representing Sweden, then England) and also at the rubber bridge table. For as long as I can remember, he’s been a regular in the high-stake game at TGR’s in London. He’s notoriously hard to beat, even for other pros. And yet there is one player who he’d readily admit is more than his match: the club’s dynamic manager, Artur Malinowski. The other day, Gunnar came up to me with a stunned look on his face. ‘I can’t believe what Artur just

Toby Young Toby Young

Why have I bought a car I don’t actually like?

I am currently in Brittany with the family, having made the 11-hour drive from London on Monday. It sounds like quite a lot of effort for a few days’ holiday, but my friend Wendy Steavenson invited us to stay and that so rarely happens when you’ve got four children that we felt we couldn’t turn her down. No doubt Wendy will regret this after 24 hours, as nearly all our previous hosts have. The journey wasn’t as much of an ordeal as it sounds since Caroline did the driving and I sat in the back and read Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West. It’s a highly readable, 351-page polemical essay

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 31 May 2018

Q. I work at a desk by a window which looks out on to the street where I live. I am disturbed by the sight of the same Englishman strolling past the window innumerable times per day. I know most of my neighbours and he is not one of them. Who is he? I can’t think of a reasonable way to ask him, nor do I wish to encourage a friendship, but this mystery is beginning to obsess me. — I.D., London W11 A. Put some marketing bumf into an envelope and address it to, for example, ‘John Brown’ with your street name and postcode, but the house number missing.

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Reach for the Skye

The Petersham is a fading hotel on Richmond Hill. I went to a bar mitzvah there in 1986, which gives you a good idea of how fashionable it is. I grew up near Petersham. I always thought it smelled of eternal summer, but it was the late 1970s. The Petersham is also a new restaurant in Covent Garden, a sequel to Petersham Nurseries, the garden centre café by the Thames, in Petersham, that won a Michelin star in 2011. So, the name is either a deranged lack of imagination or a monument to Petersham. I hope it is a monument. It deserves it. Now there is another Petersham restaurant, in

Dot Wordsworth

Spasmodic

To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September 13, 1879. It carried a review of a new edition (encouraged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event, first published in 1843 and mercilessly mocked. Poor Jones had been so upset that he wrote no more poetry until the eve of his death aged 40 in 1860. It was all the worse because he’d hoped to escape through poetry the City counting house where, since he was 17 and his father died, he had slaved for 12 hours a day. Already a victim of unrequited love,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 31 May 2018

Home Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, said that the referendum in Ireland on abortion had no impact on the law in the province, where it is a devolved matter. But the Northern Ireland Assembly has not sat since January 2017, when power-sharing arrangements broke down. The DUP currently provides the British government with a parliamentary majority. Ireland had voted by 66.4 to 33.6 per cent (with a turnout of 64.1 per cent) to repeal the eighth amendment of the constitution, which gives equal rights to women and the unborn. The only constituency to vote against the repeal was Donegal, a county of Ulster

Pabulum

2361: Snoot

Unclued lights are anagrams of eight words which are of a kind.   Across 1    Result of hooker’s foul work? (13, two words, one hyphened) 9    Flower from 19th State in yellow and light brown (except for edges) (7) 11    Penniless cleric one passes (7) 16    Lord, say, occupies lounge (5) 17    Poet’s pigsty fellow shuns as foul (4) 20    Absolute fool upset churn (7) 21    Movement’s hub that includes English and Welsh women (7, two words) 23    Chambers issued across a series of years (7) 24    Wet weather shelter thoroughfare incorporates (5) 25    Woman showered endlessly (5) 30    Adroit Charlie dancing like Rupert? (7) 31    ‘Inglorious’ son of Phinehas

Michael Morpurgo

Diary – 31 May 2018

By 74 it is easy to feel that you have seen it all, done it all, that nothing much surprises you any more. Striving gives way to coping. Drop a pencil and it rolls under the sofa. What you have to do is think about the best way to find it and pick it up. Problem. Do you get down on your knees and reach in under, which of course means you will have to get up again, or do you simply push the sofa away? Such problems don’t really bother you. You cope with it. You don’t reflect on growing decrepitude. It has been so slow coming, you have

Spectator Money

Is money an appropriate wedding present?

Dear Mary: I have been invited to the wedding of a distant relative through marriage, to her long-term partner. I did not expect to be invited, therefore would like to show my gratitude. However, there is no wedding list and they have specified on the invitation that the only gift they wish to receive is money. I find this to be slightly vulgar and frankly, given that they already own their home and are from relatively wealthy families, rather brass-necked. I do not wish to give cash in an envelope — à la Goodfellas — but would still like to get them something. What do you suggest? —C.S., Leicestershire A.

Hamish Robinson

A cat, a dog and a ghost

Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well understood — a child is lost — and the viewer, with certain advantages, rides through the unfolding events saddled up on the back of a questing protagonist, in Alison Moore’s Missing, as in her Booker-shortlisted first novel The Lighthouse, the reader is placed in a very different position. Jesse Noon, a divorced mother approaching 50, is followed round her house in Hawick in the Scottish Borders by a cat and a dog, and the reader follows too. Something is wrong — several things. One morning less than a year earlier,

The Spectator

to 2358: Poem IV

The poem was ‘Composed upon WESTMINSTER (1A) Bridge’ by William WORDSWORTH (1D). The words are ASLEEP (20), DOMES (36), EARTH (37), SHIPS (7D), GLITTERING (19) and ANYTHING (24).   First prize P.G. Hampton, Wimborne, Dorset Runners-up Geran Jones, London SW1; Feinberg, Carlsbad, California

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why is Ucas pigeonholing students into ethnic groups?

David Lammy is upset again, as he is every week. This time it is thanks to data released by Ucas, which reveals that while black applicants make up nine per cent of the total, they account for 52 per cent of those whose applications have been flagged up for possible cheating – either because they may have falsified qualifications, used fake identities, sent false documents or because an algorithm has picked out their personal statement. According to Lammy, it is not good enough Ucas simply publishing this data – he says that the organisation ‘needs to be able to explain this huge disproportionality and satisfy students from ethnic minorities that

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Podcast: Pope Francis, homosexuality and the spectre of schism

Only one pope in the history of the Catholic Church could have uttered the following words: ‘Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.’ Speaking to a gay Chilean victim of clerical sex abuse last month, Pope Francis – yes, you guessed it – appeared to press the ‘delete’ button on the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is ‘intrinsically disordered’. As I say in this week’s Spectator, the Vatican hasn’t denied Juan Carlos Cruz’s account of the conversation. So, even if

The Spectator

Inverted Tsarism

From ‘News of the week’, 1 June 1918: Bolshevism is the negation of democratic government. There is no pretence on the part of M. Lenin and M. Trotsky that they wish the will of the people to prevail. What they say is that the proletariat must rule, and must crush both capitalism and the bourgeoisie. They are opposed to the existence of everybody who does not agree with them… Even the Russian peasants in the mass are not Bolshevik by conviction. Bolshevism, now that its principles are thoroughly understood, turns out to be nothing but an autocracy ‘by the proletariat’ — and not even by the proletariat, but by that