Society

Thursday

Columba

2366: The square

Three items (one consisting of three words, and two consisting of four words each) read clockwise round the perimeter. Part of their source’s name is given by a light clued without definition; the rest (two words, rendering the 13 in 30) is concealed in one row and should be highlighted. Ignore an accent. Letters in corner squares and those adjacent to them could make SHORTER STUDY.   Across 11    Ordinary church long ago (5, two words) 12    Actually, left out, back in tent (4) 14    Concession by queen for singers (7) 15    Suffering, receiving mixture of nectar and medicinal substance (10) 17    Ghastly, stupid man,

Lucy Deedes

Being the perfect guest

Come to our house in France, say generous friends, come to Italy, come fishing. ‘How wonderful, what shall we bring?’ Nothing, they reply. They are lying, obviously. Bring cash, a thoughtful present for the house — pillowcases, new books — and your biggest smile. You don’t want the hosts rolling their eyes and punching the air when you drive away down that olive grove. The thing is, it’s not a hotel. There are people who can be a little peremptory with their friends’ staff. There is no point during the day or night when the dishwasher won’t need emptying and the cook will be delighted if you do that —

Graham Greene

Ideas in the cinema

190 years of The Spectator   19 November 1937 Not even the newspapers can claim so large a public as the films: they make the circulation figures of the Daily Express look insignificant. The voice of Mr Paul Muni [who stars in The Life of Emile Zola] has been heard by more people than the radio voices of the dictators, and the words he speaks are usually a little more memorable. The words of dictators do not dwell in the brain — one speech is very like another: we retain a confused impression of olive branches, bayonets and the New Deal. But does reaching the public necessarily mean reaching the

Donald Hankey

The honour of the Brigade

190 years of The Spectator   11 December 1915   The road was full of troops. Columns of infantry slogged along at the side. Guns and ammunition-wagons thundered down the paved centre. Motor despatch riders flew past with fresh orders for those in rear. The men sucked their pebbles in grim silence. It was no time for grumbling. This meant business. They forgot their fatigue, their thirst, their hunger. Their minds were full of the folk at home whom they might not see again, and of the struggle that lay before them. So they marched, silently, and with frequent halts, most of the morning. At length they left the road,

Crispin Kelly

Gimme shelter

How we love our homes: we make them cosy and secure, protected from the outside world, defended by locks, bolts and burglar alarms. But we haven’t always had our own private dwellings, and under the invasive influence of the internet, home, as we’ve come to understand it, may well soon be a thing of the past. In early medieval times, a home was often just a basic tenement, a shelter shared with cattle, owned by an employer. As prosperity spread, so a sense of the private developed. Common areas subdivided into individual ones; pieces of furniture (chests, bookcases, beds, wardrobes) marked areas for particular activities and specific people. At the

The Spectator

to 2363: Case ending

In Henry VI part II, Dick says to Cade: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’, thus potentially victimising Atticus Finch (3A), Perry Mason (20D) and Rumpole (30D).   First prize Mrs R. Bailey, Swindon Runners-up Mrs E. Knights, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire; Mark Roberts, Hostert, Luxembourg

Steerpike Steerpike

Naz Shah gets another NHS payday

‘Happy 70th Birthday to our wonderful NHS,’ the Labour MP Naz Shah tweeted earlier today. Shah isn’t the only one marking the anniversary, but it would seem that the Labour MP has more to celebrate about our health service than most. The latest register of MPs’ interests reveals that last month Shah received £1,800 for providing ‘leadership training’ for the NHS. The payment, for twelve hours’ work, means that Shah earned a healthy £150 an hour. This isn’t the first time that Shah has received a payday from the NHS. Last year, the Labour MP took home £1,200 from the NHS for delivering two leadership training sessions at the NHS Leadership

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: 190th birthday

Happy birthday to the Spectator. This week, we’re celebrating our 190th birthday. Lara Prendergast takes a walk down memory lane with three editors of the Spectator, past and present. But before that, it’s the podcast as usual. This week, we’re asking – do anti-Trump protests achieve anything other than virtue signalling? And are driverless cars on a road to nowhere? Donald Trump is soon to visit the UK, and after two false alarms, this time, it will actually happen. Next Friday, Trump will be welcomed by May in London and greeted with major protests. There is a carnival of resistance organised, with special guests such as Lily Allen and a

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Is 70 years of the NHS really something to celebrate?

Seventy years ago, when the National Health Service was founded, the UK established the principle of universal access to healthcare. Rich or poor, young or old, you have the right to obtain treatment for your condition. It set a standard amongst the rest of the world, that healthcare is a vital part of a safety net that all wealthy countries should strive to provide. In 1948, this was a new and progressive ideology, far ahead of its time. It’s important to be proud of one’s history – but 1948 is long gone. What exactly is the UK celebrating today? Universal access is no longer a unique feature of British healthcare. Almost every developed country

William Cook

Why Sebastian Kurz is Europe’s most important politician

Austria assumes the Presidency of the Council of the European Union this Sunday, and normally the response among rightminded Britons would be a resounding ‘Who Cares?’ Even before we voted Leave, this rotating six month stint was generally regarded with indifference. Now we’re on our way out, why should we be bothered whose turn it is in the EU chair? Well, the big difference this time around is that Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is rapidly emerging as Europe’s most influential politician. And for the EU, his spell in the hot seat could hardly have come at a more crucial time. Like Trump’s America and Brexit Britain, Europe is divided. In

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My World Cup plea to Putin

Here is a letter which I sent today to the Russian Embassy. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. To: His Excellency Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko Dear Mr Yakovenko, I hope you are well. As you are aware, the World Cup is in progress and both of our sides are doing unexpectedly well in what has been an exciting and extremely enjoyable tournament. You are probably also aware that should England, by some miracle, reach the final, no dignitaries from my country will be present, as would normally be the case. They have effectively boycotted the event. No Prime Minister, no member of the cabinet, no Royals – not even the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Raheem Sterling’s article is brilliant but did he actually write it?

England’s Raheem Sterling has underwhelmed so far at the World Cup. Off the pitch, however, he is winning new fans. The Manchester City winger’s essay blog, ‘It was all a dream’, tells the story of his father’s murder and his mother’s subsequent struggles to make ends meet. It’s brilliantly written, tugs at the heart strings and there’s a happy ending: Sterling, the ten-year-old boy who had to help his mother clean hotel toilets, now earns hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and is idolised by football fans the world over. Sterling isn’t the only footballer recently to have shown a previously unknown talent for writing. His fellow Premier League player

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The ‘Stop Trump’ blimps

Last summer, the crowds in the fields at Glastonbury Festival filmed themselves chanting ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. It was the fashionable political statement of the summer. This year, there’s no Glastonbury — those fields lie fallow — and Corbyn-mania suddenly feels very 2017. Britain’s Instagram-addled middle classes are eager for a substitute form of mass entertainment dressed up as radicalism. How else do you stay cool and smug in this hot weather? The answer, apparently, is to join the protests against Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, as he visits Britain next week. Britain’s ‘Stop Trump’ campaign has been busy organising a ‘carnival of resistance’, and it

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Should people be forced to be gay?

At last I have found a summer festival I can attend in good faith without the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn turning up. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there seemed to be no festive gatherings planned which Corbyn wouldn’t attend, with his retinue of Trot imbeciles. In response, the philosopher Roger Scruton very kindly invited me to join him at a shindig hosted by the psychopathic tweed-jacketed fox-stranglers of the Countryside Alliance. It was a generous offer and I hope Roger will take it in good part if I say I would rather perform a colonoscopy on Diane Abbott than mix with that lot. Instead, I have found

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 7 July

My dear old alma mater Berry Bros & Rudd broke with Spectator Wine Club tradition recently by offering a six-bottle box rather than the more usual dozen bottles. It was such a hit with readers that they asked to do it again this week. Needless to say, the thirstier among you desperate for a full dozen can simply sign up for two cases. I strongly recommend that you do, since the wines — a delightfully eclectic selection — are first rate and, given that Berry’s are offering free delivery and have knocked a bit off here and there, there’s a saving of some £20 to be had on the normal

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The price of looking busy

The behavioural scientist Dan Ariely once found himself chatting to a locksmith with a curious problem. The better he became at replacing locks, the less he got paid. In the early days, he explained, he might wrestle for hours with a jammed lock, but because his inexperience made his job look difficult, his customers would pay without demur, often adding a tip. Eventually, however, he became highly expert, and could fix the same problem in minutes. Now his customers resented paying his call-out fee, and never tipped him at all. Thirty years ago, companies buying a mainframe computer soon outgrew their first machine. The firm would duly write an huge

Lucy Vickery

Question time | 5 July 2018

In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.   My boyfriend says I should ‘give in’ to his advances. What’s your advice?   Some boyfriend; some cheek. I would observe that many of his ilk have tried to break down such defences, but few have succeeded, at least not honourably. Upon resistance rests your future. Upon the strength of your redoubt rests the probity

The Spectator

The Spectator’s Mission

190 years of The Spectator   5 July 1828   The principal object of a Newspaper is to convey intelligence. It is proposed in The Spectator to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week. In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad.

Bruce Anderson

London’s perfect Paris brasserie

We order some French things better in London — often, admittedly, with French help. A grenouille friend recently took me to lunch at the Beaujolais Club just off Charing Cross Road. He said that it overwhelmed him with nostalgia. As a child, living in Paris, if the family were in town for the weekend, it was just the sort of brasserie in which they would have Sunday lunch (cook’s day off). Traditional dishes; proper bourgeois cooking; wine, no premiers crus, but solid, dependable bottles from solid, dependable growers — who were often friends or relatives of the owners. The children demonstrated their command of table manners and served an apprenticeship