Society

I remember the arrival of Toys ‘R’ Us in Britain, because as a young banker in 1984 I was tasked with devising a menu of exciting financial products to offer a brash American retailer that was clearly going to take a bite out of our sleepy — and in those days still Christmas-seasonal — domestic toy market. How we sneered at that childlike reversed R in the logotype; likewise the Guardian, commenting on insatiable demand for Cabbage Patch dolls, derided the chain’s huge stores as ‘-cathedrals to kiddie gratification’. But however tacky its image, this was the ultimate ‘economic disruptor’, to use The Spectator’s current favourite phrase: a business that

This is an extract from this week’s Letters pages in The Spectator Sir: One objection to an increase in National Insurance contributions to rescue the NHS is that it would once again exempt from contributing those who most heavily use the NHS — the retired — and heap yet more of the burden on the working young who least use it and can least afford it (‘The Tory tax bombshell’, 17 March). As you acknowledge, National Insurance contributions long ago ceased to be purely contributions into a pension and sickness benefit scheme, and became part of general taxation. This means that entirely exempting retirees from contributing when many of them are

Is there really a cross-party consensus on tax rises for the health and social care system? A group of MPs from across Parliament has written to Theresa May calling for a year-long parliamentary commission on funding for all branches of the health system. Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt is calling for a ten-year settlement for the NHS, attacking a ‘feast or famine’ approach to funding it. ‘There’s no doubt that NHS staff right now are working unbelievably hard and they need to have some hope for the future, but their real concern is this rather crazy way that we have been funding the NHS over the last 20 years,’ he told ITV’s

For the latest challenge you were asked to come up with poems against poets or poetry. Plato started it, of course, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change — to name a few. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’), and to Auden (‘poetry makes nothing happen’), and to much else besides. Commendations go to Nicholas Stone, Mae Scanlan, Brian Allgar and Nigel Stuart. The winners take £30, except Basil Ransome-Davies who snaffles £35. Basil Ransome-Davies There’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machine

Boris Johnson is right that Vladimir Putin will seek to use the World Cup this summer in the same way that Hitler did with the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Putin doesn’t care much for football, but the World Cup is a useful chance to confer legitimacy on his pseudo-democratic regime by basking in the glory of a tournament watched the world over. Hitler did the same when the Olympics came to Berlin, milking the Games for all they were worth and opening them himself amidst plenty of fanfare. The Führer’s aim was to present Germany as a great power. When the World Cup opens this summer in Moscow, Putin will be aiming

Every so often a game is played which is worthy of joining the immortals in the pantheon of chessboard masterpieces. Anderssen v. Kieseritsky, London 1851, Zukertort v. Blackburne, London 1883, Botvinnik v. Capablanca, AVRO 1938; these are the jewels to which every chess player aspires. As Marcel Duchamp once observed: ‘not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists’. The former world champion Vladimir Kramnik played such a game against Levon Aronian, one of the pre-tournament favourites in the Berlin Candidates to determine the challenger to Magnus Carlsen’s crown. The championship match itself is set for London in November. Aronian-Kramnik: Fidé Candidates Berlin 2018; Ruy Lopez 1