Society

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Primo Levi’s warning about the young forgetting the holocaust resonates now

One of the most thought-provoking pieces in The Spectator this week is from Alastair Thomas on why his generation don’t get so upset about anti-Semitism. He explains the phenomenon and offers an explanation: the years have passed, the memories of the holocaust have dimmed. It’s no longer the experience of someone’s grandparents’ generation, but further back. Since then, there are more recent memories: of the Israeli Defence Force and Gaza. The conflation between Jews, Israel and Zionism has restored the idea of the Jews as being suspiciously powerful – the oppressors rather than the oppressed. This certainly stands to reason. Memories of the holocaust were kept alive for my generation

Owen Matthews

The diplomat expulsion game is a pointless charade

Diplomats are poker chips. The pomp and mystery that accrues to the diplomatic and intelligence services en poste overseas conceal a simple truth: in today’s world, journalists, bankers, NGOs and bloggers are, far more often than not, better informed than diplomats about the countries in which they operate. I know this to be true in Russia – I speak to senior British and US diplomats in Moscow regularly. Believe me when I say that I can think of half a dozen veteran foreign correspondents in Russia who have considerably more extensive, diverse and senior contacts in the Russian establishment than any Western diplomatic mission. And yet – the expulsion of

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Australians are finally waking up to their cricketing hypocrisy

The only thing, as a modern-day Macauley might observe, more ridiculous than the British public in one of their periodic fits of morality is the Australian public acting in just such a fashion. To which we might also add that the spectacle of Australia melting itself in an orgy of cant and humbug cannot avoid being hilarious.  Thus far, the ball-tampering scandal rocking Australian cricket has resulted in the dismissal of Steve Smith, the country’s captain, David Warner, his deputy, Cameron Bancroft, the latest Australian opening batsman, and Darren Lehmann, the team’s coach. Given how high this goes, there’s an argument for James Sutherland, the chief executive of Cricket Australia,

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: How to Rig an Election

On this week’s episode, we discuss how elections across the world have been taken advantage of to give more power to corrupt leaders. We also talk about the international persecution of Muslims, and ask, why don’t young Corbynites care about anti-Semitism? While the world has been reeling from news of Cambridge Analytica’s political interference, two academics have been following the trail of shady election rigging across the world that go deeper than social media. Professor Nic Cheeseman, at the University of Birmingham, and Dr Brian Klaas at the LSE, have visited developing democracies from Asia, to Africa, to Europe. In this week’s cover piece, they explain the extent of election

Douglas Murray

Why can’t we speak plainly about migrant crime?

On Wednesday, two striking events happened in France. The first was that the President of the Republic led the nation’s mourning for Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, the policeman who swopped himself for a hostage at the siege at a supermarket in Trèbes last week. Elsewhere in Paris on the same day there was a silent march past the flat of Mireille Knoll. As a girl, in 1942, Mme Knoll narrowly escaped being rounded up by the French police and put on a train to Auschwitz. Last weekend, at the age of 85, the remains of her wheelchair-bound body were found in her Paris flat. Her body had been stabbed and burned. Mme

Wednesday

Raymond Keene

Victor Ludorum

A match which has attracted less attention than it deserves was Luke McShane’s victory over David Howell in the final of the UK Knockout championship, which coincided with the London Classic last December. En route to the final, Luke eliminated both the reigning British champion Gawain Jones and England’s most celebrated grandmaster, Nigel Short.   The following game from the final is furnished with notes based on those kindly provided by the victor.   Howell-McShane: British Knockout Championship, London 2017; King’s Indian   1 Nf3 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 g3 Bg7 4 Bg2 0-0 5 d4 d6 6 0-0 Nbd7 7 Nc3 e5 8 e4 c6 9 h3 Qa5

Raymond Keene

no. 499

White to play. This position is from a later game in the match, McShane-Howell, London 2017. How did White conclude his kingside attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 3 April 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 … Nxg3+ Last week’s winner Martin Dlouhý, Meziborí, Czech Republic

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 March 2018

Not cricket The Australian cricket captain Steve Smith was banned for a match and fined his match fee after a player was caught tampering with the ball by rubbing it with tape in the hope of making it swing more. How do you make a cricket ball swing? — The science was covered in a paper by N.G. Barton in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1982, which claimed, after wind tunnel tests, that maximum swing can be achieved by keeping one side of the ball shiny and bowling it at 30 metres per second (67.5mph), with the seam at an angle of 20 degrees from the

The Spectator

Letters | 28 March 2018

The antidepressants con Sir: Congratulations to Angela Patmore for exposing the many troubling aspects of the escalating use of antidepressants (‘Overdosed: Our dangerous dependency on antidepressants’, 24 March). The drug companies have conned doctors into prescribing antidepressants, patients into taking them, and taxpayers into paying for them with fake information. Such is the present epidemic of depression that one in ten of us is now taking them. NICE is drafting new guidelines for depression, and it is to be hoped it will expose this con, and that clinical groups in the UK will instead facilitate access to talking therapies for those millions of depressed people. John Kapp Hove, East Sussex Drugs problems Sir:

Dot Wordsworth

Dot

With the sensation produced by hearing one’s name, I jumped when I saw mine on a poster advertising an Amazon product: the Echo Dot. I shan’t launch a billion-dollar lawsuit to retake control of my name. It’s more likely that Amazon would send the men in the horsehair wigs after me, though I declare that I, or my parents, got there first with Dot. I’m surprised, though, that Dot is regarded as a cheering name for a tech gadget 17 or 18 years after the dotcom bubble went pop. Companies that failed then were called, by way of a little joke, dot-bombs. But it was strange in the first place

Taki

High life | 28 March 2018

Gstaad At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very silly question, and we all had a laugh about it. ‘As Achilles told me in his tent the other evening, Helen always fancied him and Menelaus didn’t like it a bit.’ Or, ‘I’m rather tired of listening to Claudius complaining that Agrippina doesn’t hold a candle to Messalina in the sack.’ We played that game for a while and then I dropped the name of Highgrove, and the first time the Queen was seen in public with Camilla. I began to describe the outdoor lunch and my guests started to

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 March 2018

I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre has the same effect on me, I imagine, as the Great Exhibition must have had on a Dorset peasant with a cheap-day return on the newly opened Great Western Railway. But by what strange magic does an actor transcend his or her everyday persona and convincingly dissemble an altogether different, fictional one? Is it the training? Or a gene — Romany, perhaps? Or are actors afflicted by a peculiar personality disorder in which part of the brain is either overdeveloped or missing? For a newspaper article, I once rehearsed with

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 March 2018

The sound of something hideous woke me in the dead of night, and I shot out of bed. I looked at my watch, blinking in the gloom of the energy-saving bulb as it grudgingly dribbled out a slither of light. It was 3 a.m. and there was a strangled wheezing sound in my bedroom. I’m getting used to this house making noises, though it took me a while to come to terms with the groaning. An old man groans in pain in the dining room. I assumed it was a ghost. I’ve got every other problem going, structural, legal and decorative. So now I’ve got a poltergeist: the tortured soul

Robin Oakley

The turf | 28 March 2018

At soggy Newbury last Saturday racegoers were still reliving memories of an epic Cheltenham Festival. ‘Were you there for that mano a mano Gold Cup between Native River and Might Bite?’ people were asking each other. ‘With the likes of Presenting Percy, Balko Des Flos, Footpad, Samcro and Laurina flourishing are we ever going to beat the Irish at Cheltenham again?’ No excuses, then, for taking my first opportunity for Festival reflections, especially since Roksana, the winner of the most important event on the Newbury card, the Grade Two EBF and TBA Mares ‘National Hunt’ Novices’ Hurdle Finale, was ridden by Bridget Andrews. Her stylish victory underlined the first lesson

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 28 March 2018

Q. A couple who live directly opposite us in London have sent a save-the-date notice for a big party they are giving in a few months time. We like these neighbours, despite the fact that they are absurdly grand and snobbish, but we find their big parties exhausting and neither of us wants to go. How can we possibly get out of it, Mary? We can’t claim to have a prior appointment because we didn’t answer immediately. There is also an important sporting fixture on telly on the same evening that we both want to watch, and our neighbours, who can see directly into our house, will be in no

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 28 March 2018

Have you ever picked up your hand, opened a weak 2 on a proper six-card suit (all right, if you’re being honest, maybe a bit underweight point-wise but you’re not vulnerable) and watched with mounting alarm as it goes pass, pass, DOUBLE, all pass? Have you then sat there while they take the first seven tricks, and a couple more at the end, and written miserably on your scorecard minus 800? Scoring up is not too attractive, is it? It has happened to me so often that bad weak twos or two level overcalls with only a five-card suit are toys I have put away. I look at my hand

Tristram Hunt

Diary – 28 March 2018

On the gently lapping shores of the Persian Gulf, in the steely shadow of the Burj Khalifa, I bump into former chief inspector of schools Sir Michael Wilshaw: I in my dishevelled blue trunks, he in his well-fitted white T-shirt (always strong on uniforms). We are guests of the Varkey Foundation’s global summit on education and skills. Whilst I am there to explain the V&A Museum’s new programme to support design teaching in industrial communities, Sir Michael is still rightly beating the drum for strong leadership and high standards. Aged 72, he remains a model of Carlylian workfulness, mentoring headteachers in Argentina while supporting a multi-academy trust in Derby. We

Toby Young Toby Young

Money can’t buy good exam results

A paper published last week in an academic journal called npj Science of Learning attracted an unusual amount of press attention. It looked at the GCSE results of 4,814 students at three different types of school — comprehensives, private schools and grammars — and found that once you factor in IQ, prior attainment, parental socio-economic status and a range of genetic markers, the type of school has virtually no effect on academic attainment. Less than 1 per cent of the variance in these children’s GCSE results was due to school type. I should declare an interest, since I was one of several co-authors, along with the distinguished behavioural geneticist Robert

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 March 2018

Home ‘We recognise that anti-Semitism has occurred in pockets within the Labour Party,’ Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said. ‘I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused.’ His remarks were released before the publication of an open letter to Labour MPs from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council which said Mr Corbyn was incapable of contemplating anti-Semitism seriously ‘because he is so ideologically fixed within a far-left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities’. Earlier, Mr Corbyn had said: ‘I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely’ at a mural satirising Jewish financiers when he posted remarks

Mr Magoo

2352: Upright Characters

Of the unclued entries, three combine to form a phrase (five words) describing three more (four foreign-language words). The remaining three combine to form a sentence (seven words) given by Brewer as an example of one of them.   Across 1    It’s brimming, almost like an optimist’s view? Not half! (8) 8    Song or dance following song and dance (4) 13    Something woven when you choose (6, two words) 14    Slight fracture of leg caught in net (7) 15    Played loud or very loud in quarters (8) 18    I’m ‘snailed’, struggling with these? (9) 20    Measure of drink needed for bender (4) 21    Upset copy-taker includes this? (4) 24    He gets