Society

Thursday

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

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The then and now of footballers’ pay

I must have missed the memo when it became compulsory for major football matches to operate as a marketing opportunity for the game’s marquee players, but that was what we got at Kiev after Liverpool were outmuscled and outplayed by a flinty-eyed Real Madrid. After Ronaldo announced that his time at Madrid was in the past, then our very own Gareth Bale, he of the annoying man-bun and sublime skills, in a rather graceless piece of scene-stealing, decided to ask for a transfer. Live on TV. Well, you do the math. He is on £300,000 a week (or £600,000 depending on who you trust), but assuming someone somewhere has to

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 31 May 2018

Laikipia I wake at 4 a.m. these days. At that time you might hear a lion or a braying zebra, but the birds and bullfrogs are quiet under the constellations. False dawn comes an hour later with the liquid song of sandgrouse and the bustards cackling as they angle into the first light. Just before sunrise the birdsong becomes a sound cloud rising from the valley up on to the plains. The cattle spill out of the boma bellowing and mooing and then later, at seven, comes the sound of men’s voices arriving at work, diesel engines warming up, chickens, dogs barking. My father used to rise at 5.30 a.m.

Lucy Vickery

Self appraisal

In Competition No. 3050 you were invited to submit a school essay written by a well-known author, living or dead, about one of their works. The germ of this challenge was the revelation that the novelist Ian McEwan helped his son to write an A-level essay about one of his books (Enduring Love), only to be awarded a less than stellar ‘C+’. The winners below did rather better, and shoot straight to the top of the class, scooping £25 each. Teacher’s pet Alison Zucker gets a well-done sticker and the bonus fiver.   I read The Outsider today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I can’t remember. I don’t think very

Byron York

A failure to impeach

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News? That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy. Just a few months ago, Trump was cooperating with special

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Papal surrender

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact

Tim Wigmore

The people’s cricket

Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market research in the game’s history. They were told cricket was ‘socially inaccessible’, and that there existed a vast swath of ‘cricket tolerators’ — those who didn’t hate the game yet didn’t attend matches. So the ECB decided to take cricket to them. Twenty20, which could be crammed in after work on a midsummer’s evening, was created in the summer of 2003. The new game followed a traditional path: born in England, but perfected abroad. After India overcame its initial opposition, the country inexorably became the home of T20. A decade

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Save us from ‘woke’ superheroes

Comics aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 I was 11 — the perfect target audience for probably the most subversive, gory and entertaining comic series in British history, the now legendary Action. The strips, often rip-offs of movies we readers were too young legally to see, were quite outrageously violent. Hook Jaw was about a heroic great white shark who eats everyone. Death Game 1999 was a death sport based on Rollerball. Kids Rule OK was about a post-apocalyptic world which made Lord of the Flies look like Mary Poppins. Hellman of Hammer Force was the second world war seen from the perspective of a German Panzer major.

Wednesday

Mike Fotis

Building societies are feeling the squeeze – but don’t discount these underdogs just yet

Barely a month goes by without a new banking firm popping up. And while some are interesting, and a few perhaps revolutionary, most have simply rolled out mortgage and savings products in an attempt to muscle in on the home turf of the UK’s building societies. Add to the mix a fast deteriorating High Street environment, and there’s little doubt that building societies are starting to feel the squeeze. But far from being cowed, the mutual sector is gearing up to take on the new kids on the block, in a battle that cuts to the heart of what our society in 2018 really stands for. Since the birth of

Matthew Lynn

Don’t blame the populists for Italy’s chaos

Bond yields are soaring. Stock markets are tanking. The banks are looking wobbly, and money is starting to drain out of Italy. To listen to the mainstream commentary on the Italian crisis part 782, you’d imagine that a wild and irresponsible ‘populist’ government had just been tamed by the financial markets. And that once some sensible suits backed by the IMF and the EU take back control in Rome order would be restored and everything will be back to normal. The trouble is, that is not quite the whole story. In fact, the markets have already worked out that Italy is leaving the euro, at least in its present form.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Roseanne Barr’s downfall is a victory over Trump culture

It’s always the ones you most expect. Roseanne Barr, an icon of Trump culture, has had her TV sitcom cancelled by ABC after she tweeted that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the product of a union between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes. Jarrett is black and was born in Iran.  In the 1980s, Barr was a trailblazer for working-class female stand-ups. In the 1990s, she was ABC’s ratings queen, with a self-titled half-hour that spent seven seasons in the top ten despite her off-camera reputation as a tantrum-throwing termagant. Along came the twenty-something bubblegum sitcoms, Friends and its imitators, with their thin scripts and thinner

Tuesday