‘I have a wonderful hand to show you,’ Gunnar Hallberg exclaimed when I saw him last week. Gunnar is a world-class professional, now in his early seventies, whose passion for bridge remains undimmed. Since lockdown, there’s scarcely a high-level online tournament he hasn’t competed in, so naturally I assumed the hand came from one of
We are what we do. Alas, in its zeal to suppress the virus, this government would have many people doing not very much. Since March, many musicians, actors, sportspeople and more have had precious few opportunities to perform. In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claimed that the hundreds of live performances played by the
Rapport–Sprenger, Bundesliga, September 2020. The game continued 1 Bxc4 Rxc4 2 Bxe5+ f6 3 Bf4 Rxe4+ 4 Kf3 and was eventually drawn. How could Black improve on this sequence? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 19 October. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please
In Competition No. 3170, a challenge inspired by Shelley’s assertion that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, you were invited to step into the shoes of a well-known poet and write their own law in verse. The above quotation is from Shelley’s 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry, written in response to his
The unclued lights (one of two words and one hyphened) are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Across 10 United in love, writhing, it produces seed (5) 11 Lady Taverner takes sanctuary more than once (5) 14 Gather the harvest, measure spoken about, then cut (6) 15 If at odds, get an intermediary (5) 17
The unclued lights form pairs of famous soloists and the instruments they play; 1A/19, 5/34, 23/8, 31/39, 43/16A. First prize Andrew Herbert, Brooke, NorfolkRunners-up Alexia Dobbs, Tilston, Cheshire; Philip Berridge, Gosberton, Lincs
