Society

Thursday

16 Aug 2018

The turf | 16 August 2018

Making racing profitable depends on getting information at the right time. In the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood two Saturdays ago I had a fancy for trainer Clive Cox’s Tis Marvellous and plunged accordingly. He finished 25th of the 25 finishers. Last Saturday he was racing again at Ascot where I spotted a friend with connections to his stable. ‘Any chance?’ I asked. ‘Good horse but I won’t be having a bet,’ he replied — so neither did I. After the diminutive but determined Hollie Doyle had brought home Tis Marvellous to win the opening race of the Shergar Cup competition at 6–1, Cox explained the sprinter’s contrasting performances: ‘You can

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 16 August 2018

When I was first married, there were no satnavs to hold our hands; we relied on maps (if there was one handy) or trial and error. Whenever my husband wasn’t sure whether to go left or right he would ask me. ‘Left,’ I might say. He immediately turned right — and he was never wrong. I sometimes think of this when I am defending. In the two or three-card ending, if there is a choice I can be relied upon to do the wrong thing. So much so that I have tried doing the opposite of my instinct and, humiliatingly, it worked. Well, not so humiliating actually, as my partner

Raymond Keene

No. 519

White to play. This position is from Fernandez-Pritchett, Hull 2018. White found an extraordinary, problem-like move to finish the game. Can you see it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 21 August 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 … Qg3!+ Last week’s winner C.D. Massiah, Langholm, Dumfries and Galloway

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 16 August 2018

Home Unemployment fell by 65,000 to 1.36 million — at 4 per cent the lowest level since 1975. The economy in the United Kingdom grew by 0.4 per cent in the second quarter, compared with 0.2 per cent in the first. The rate of inflation rose a jot from 2.4 to 2.5 per cent, measured by the Consumer Price Index. Sports Direct, run by Mike Ashley, agreed to buy the House of Fraser chain of 59 department stores for £90 million after it had gone into administration. Homebase said it was closing 42 of its 241 stores. Marks & Spencer closed seven clothes stores as part of its programme to

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 16 August 2018

Q. My husband and I were among the first to arrive at a recent large house party in Scotland. We were shown to our bedroom at the far end of a corridor and told that the occupants of the other rooms were not expected till the next day. We were tired after a day’s travelling and hence when my husband annoyed me I’m afraid that, confident no one would overhear, I let loose with a full tirade rather in the manner of a fishwife. Later I was horrified to find another guest had in fact arrived and been billeted in the adjoining bedroom. Our stay was then overshadowed by paranoia.

Dot Wordsworth

Petrichor

I’m not too sure about the word petrichor, invented in 1964 as a label for the pleasant smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. Some things about it are awkward. Two Australians, Richard Thomas and Joy Bear, had been working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation on the chemistry behind the smell. They found it comes from the ‘blue haze’ of hot summer days, part of the 450 million tons of volatile compounds released by plants into the atmosphere each year. But in the air the compounds do not smell attractive, as they do after being catalysed on the surfaces of

Columba

2372: Spot-on

One unclued light (three words) is a phrase referring to an item whose scientific name is formed by two unclued lights. The first word of this name can be divided into three words, each of which has two synonyms among the other unclued lights. Across 1 Strip back stagecoach seat, not wide (5) 9 Check railway damage in station, causing weeping (10) 11 Artist reversed whole process (5) 14 Second-class designation sadly for red mineral (5) 15 Work in group with no time for sleep (5) 16 Jerks shout to encourage hounds (6) 21 Obtain picture showing slipper (8) 22 Support holding clamped valve (7) 24 Bore wanting new

Ayesha Hazarika

Diary – 16 August 2018

Taking my new stand-up show Girl on Girl to the Edinburgh festival this year and playing at the prestigious venue the Gilded Balloon, was hand on heart the most stressful thing I have ever done — and I lived through the Ed Stone. My nerves were off the scale. Will anyone come to see the show? Will it be a massive disaster? Is this a very public and expensive cry for help? Why don’t I just go on a yoga retreat? These are all the things which swirl round your head seconds before you go on stage. Stand-up is one of the hardest things you can do. It’s just you

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2018 H1

Sales of The Spectator broke through an all-time high three years ago, and we’ve kept growing ever since. The latest industry figures, for the first half of the year, are out today – and I’m delighted to say that it’s our best-ever start to any year. Our worldwide sales averaged 71,102 in the first half of this year, up 1,939 from the same period last year. I’d also like to share some other figures. Evening Blend, our daily newsletter, has now broken through 40,000 subscribers (you can sign up free to it here) and it’s growing fast, on account of it being the best evening newsletter anywhere. We offer it

Dominic Green

Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul is dead

Aretha Franklin, who died this morning at the age of 76, was called the Queen of Soul. But she did not inherit her crown, so much as create it. Nor, though she inspired plenty of oversold and over-souled pretenders, did she ever have a plausible heir. She wove that crown from the music of the black church, the blues and Broadway, from faith, pain and love. No one else could touch her, and she will meet her maker still wearing it. Aretha—the voice was so distinctive that her surname seemed superfluous—was simply the finest popular singer of her generation. Unlike every other pop star of the Sixties and Seventies, she

Spectator Money

Best Buys: 2 year fixed-rate bonds

If you’ve got a chunk of money that you don’t mind having locked away for a set amount of time, fixed rate bonds can often give a better rate of return than most accounts. Here are this week’s picks of the best two year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

James Ball & Andrew Greenway

The rise of the bluffocracy

Any time we see a politician fail, or an idiotic policy collapse as it passes through parliament — which these days seems like a regular occurrence — we are left with a familiar feeling. That this screw-up is the result of a chancer at work. Someone who has, at the very best, a shallow understanding of the country they’re trying to govern. Someone who knew how to come up with a headline-grabbing idea, and how to make it sound convincing and radical — but didn’t ever have the faintest idea how to implement it. What we see perhaps less often is that the UK has — for a variety of cultural, social, and economic

Ahsan Akbar

The heart of the master | 16 August 2018

When I went to see V.S. Naipaul in hospital last week he was feeling marginally better. His wife Nadira had arranged for a violinist to play some Mozart to him, helping him relax. She did not allow too many visitors. This was not the first time he had been in hospital. His health had been deteriorating for the past 12 months and the family had been receiving — as always — a flurry of invitations from literary festivals and heads of state. All had to be declined. In his hospital room we discussed his coming 86th birthday and I suggested that we celebrate with champagne at the Ritz. He smiled

Dennis Zhou

You can’t go home again | 16 August 2018

If the 20th century popularised the figure of the émigré, the 21st has introduced that of the returnee, who, aided by a combination of Skype, social media and cheap air travel, doesn’t so much exchange countries as exist between them. ‘I was an émigré. I had left. Now I’d returned,’ announces Andrei Kaplan, somewhat incredulously, in Keith Gessen’s vigorously funny second novel. An inverted Pnin, Andrei is a Russian-American academic, making a living by moderating online discussion groups for a professor who, in due course, compares Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky to Kanye West. Failing to find a tenured job, Andrei moves to Moscow, where he was born, to care for

Michael Heath

The Battle for Britain – 16 August 2018

The Spectator

to 2369: Prodigious

WUNDERKIND — given by corrections of misprints in clues — can be read as W UNDER KIND, indicating the unclued lights in each of four columns. First prize Cathy Staveley, London SW15 Runners-up Frank Anstis, Truro, Cornwall; S.J.J. Tiffin, Cockermouth, Cumbria

Cindy Yu

Why are 27,000 fewer boys going to university than girls?

Despite the numerous photos doing the rounds of girls celebrating their exam results today, one of the main headlines from A-Level results day is the news that boys are outperforming girls in the highest grades of A*s and As. This is the second year that boys have done better than the girls (and just by 0.4 percentage points, mind). However, when it comes to the bigger picture things aren’t looking up for boys just yet. The gender gap in academic achievement has only been getting bigger in recent years, though its rate is slowing. Mary Curnock Cook, educationalist and former head of UCAS, tells Coffee House Shots that today’s results show that

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: Bluffers and Royals

We often complain that our politicians are all bluffers who know very little about a lot. But is the very structure of our political institutions at fault? And speaking of bluffers, Theresa May is so far successfully fudging her way through the Brexit negotiations, but can she survive after March 2019? And last, maybe all this politics has made you long for the good old days of monarchy. With Prince Charles’s art collection on exhibit, we talk about how it reflects Charles’s One Nation Toryism. PPE – that notorious Oxford degree that ostensibly teaches its students Philosophy, Politics, and Economics – and apparently, how to govern a country. Or at

James Kirkup

Is the BBC scared of the transgender debate?

I like the BBC. I like the idea of a national broadcaster and I like a lot of BBC output. I admire many BBC journalists – the Corporation employs some of the very best. I am not a Beeb-basher, not least since so many of the people who bang on relentlessly about the BBC’s supposed biases are stupid or horrible or both. I say these things because for all my affection for it, this is an article about an area where the BBC is sometimes getting things wrong. Some recent BBC coverage of transgender issues fails to meet the usual standards of its journalism. Those failings, in turn, raise some

Alex Massie

The myth of Jeremy Corbyn, a kind and gentle man

I am relaxed about Jeremy Corbyn being thicker than mince but draw the line at the assumption, all too evidently held by most of his most devoted supporters, that you must be too. If Corbyn wishes to deny the obvious that is his prerogative; the notion you should be prepared to swallow any and every piece of whitewashing nonsense peddled by his fans is quite a different matter. “I was present” when the wreath was laid “but I don’t think I was involved in it” is, I suppose, a step forward from the Labour party’s previous suggestion that “The Munich widows are being misled. Jeremy did not honour those responsible