Thank heaven I am on holiday! For the past week I have been up until 4 a.m., glued to the BBO coverage of the Spingold Knockout Teams, the main event of the ACBL’s Summer Nationals, held this year in Toronto. In the very first round of 128 there were two major upsets: the Strul team,
The great Mikhail Botvinnik excoriated chess played at fast time limits. Botvinnik believed that classical chess at time limits of, for example, 40 moves per player in two and a half hours each, was the purest expression of the art and science of chess. Radically faster alternatives cheapened and debased the thought processes, he believed.
In Competition No. 3009 you were invited to submit a poem about a domestic object. I set this challenge with Philip Larkin’s ‘The Mower’ in mind, which he wrote in the summer of 1979 after inadvertently killing a hedgehog while cutting the grass. According to Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s secretary and onetime lover, he told
One unclued light, defined by the title, is a word that can be divided into three words; each of these defines each of three of the other unclued lights. Across 1 Unsteady in yard, thrust backward (5) 10 Mixture of metals in roof really worked (10, hyphened) 14 Check sun and
SOIL (9) — cryptically indicated by ISLAND IN THE SUN (1A), the title of a SONG (40) recorded by HARRY BELAFONTE (43) — defines each of the other unclued lights. First prize Mrs P. Newbury, Linlithgow, West Lothian Runners-up C. Elengorn, Enfield, Middlesex; Smithies, Vale, Guernsey
Black to play. This is a position from Kramnik–Carlsen, Leuven Blitz 2017. How did the world champion win even more material? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 8 July 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
