2610: 700 – solution
Each of the unclued lights (with the pair at 15/26) includes D C C (= 700). First prize Rosamund Campbell, Woodstock, Oxon Runners-up J. Smithies, Vale, Guernsey; William Devison, Shaldon, Devon
Society
Wednesday
2613: Way off
The unclued lights (one of two words), all verifiable in Brewer, precede a word which appears as an abbreviation four times in the lower right-hand quadrant of the completed grid. Solvers should highlight all four examples. Ignore two apostrophes. Across 1 All omelettes cooked with pesto and chives, first (8,3) 7 Furtwängler finally reveals this wood (3) 11 A few words from Romeo in poor shape (6) 13 Athlete swallows one more fluid (7) 15 New name given to one strait (5) 16 Look in morass for criminal (5) 17 Tufts of wool giving female bad colic (6) 18 Damage ground, parking in it (5) 20 Waterweed from East Anglian
Spectator competition winners: verse obituaries for Berlusconi
In Competition No. 3207 you were invited to submit a verse obituary of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian former prime minister who, despite sex scandals and court battles, managed three stints as PM, died last month aged 86. His more startling gaffes included suggesting that Abruzzo earthquake survivors see their situation as ‘a weekend of camping’ and describing Obama as ‘young, handsome and tanned’. The winners, printed below, pocket £30 each. Singular Silvio, Italy’s serial populist leader and prime-ministerialDemagogue basked in the glow of funereal dignity, peacefully lying in state,Though one could picture him post-existentially barking at archangels unreverentially,Somewhere near Limbo but unpenitentially keeping things raucous and carnivalesque. Now’s not the
No. 760
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Michael Lipton, the Jerusalem Post, 1960 Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 July. 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 Rf8+! Kg7 2 Rg8+ Kf7 3 d8=N+ Ke7 4 Re8+ Kd6 5 Nf7+ and at least Rxe2 to follow. Last week’s winner Richard Hazell, Tickhill, South Yorks
Mate in two
‘Lipton’s writing is characterised by its rigour, and though his working through of alternative hypotheses can be demanding for the reader, his positions are always stated with great clarity’. That line is taken from an obituary of Michael Lipton, published in the Financial Times, who died in April at the age of 86. Lipton was a development economist whose early work was based upon a close observation of farming techniques of the rural poor. Rather disarmingly, the CV on his website attributed his education to ‘the people of Kavathe village, Satara district, Maharashtra, India 1965-66’ right after Haberdashers’ School, Balliol College, Oxford and MIT. But Lipton was also a prolific and accomplished
George Washington’s lesson for Ukraine
The Australian morning TV host called me darlin’. We’d never met, but she opened with: ‘Good to have you on, darlin’. Be with you in a moment.’ Then the picture went black. When the live show returned to my Zoom screen, I was just another viewer, watching the three hosts seated on a couch half a world away chatting about the charity walk one of them had done over the weekend and the toll this had taken on his feet, which led – in a surprise twist – to a brief discussion of the strange internet hunger for images of feet. Somehow, the fetish conversation segued into a video montage
What does Keir Starmer mean by ‘oracy’?
‘Is that something to do with oratory?’ asked my husband, looking up from the Guardian, which he only reads to annoy me, though it doesn’t. He was talking about the word oracy, which featured in Sir Keir Starmer’s speech last week about ‘smashing the class ceiling’. I think that, like my husband, most people assume it is a word that has been around from time immemorial, though not often used. In fact it was invented in 1965 by Andrew Wilkinson in a book called Spoken English: ‘The term we suggest for general ability in the oral skills is oracy; one who has those skills is orate, one without them inorate.’
Who lifted the ban on trans women taking part in Miss Universe?
Mx Universe A transgender woman was named ‘Miss Netherlands’, and will now compete in the Miss Universe contest. British TV viewers might be surprised to learn there are still such things as beauty pageants, given they disappeared from the main TV channels in the 1980s. They might be even more surprised to learn who was responsible for lifting the ban on transgender women taking part in Miss Universe. – The decision was made in 2012 by Donald Trump, who then owned the franchise for the competition, after a Canadian trans woman, Jenna Talackova, had been banned from taking part and her cause had been taken up by the Gay and Lesbian
Dear Mary: How do I stop fans asking me for selfies?
Q. My wife and I live in a grace-and-favour house with beautiful gardens, of which our landlord is justly proud. He employs a full-time gardener to tend the grounds around the big house and also around our cottage. The gardener has recently developed a habit of using petrol-powered tools, such as strimmers and lawn mowers, at increasingly antisocial hours, including a recent 6.50 a.m. chainsaw attack on some dead trees. We do not pay for his services, which include not only looking after our little garden but also keeping us stocked with firewood and clearing a tennis court for our use, so we are reluctant to appear ungrateful. How can
Ancient lessons in oracy
It is encouraging to see Sir Keir Starmer taking a leaf out of the ancients’ book by putting oracy (from Latin orator) on the curriculum. Indeed, on the ancient curriculum, there was little else of such importance. State education did not exist. It was an entirely private operation, designed to supply the elite with the skills necessary to win arguments in political and legal forums. (They alone had the time for such an activity; our ‘school’ derives from scholê, the Greek for ‘leisure’). It began with the young relentlessly analysing language in minute technical detail, e.g. dividing words into syllables, pronouncing, spelling and parsing them, learning grammatical terms, parts of
I expected more from Caitlin Moran
I first met Caitlin Moran at Julie Burchill’s flat in Bloomsbury. This was in the early 1990s and she was a precocious teenager who’d written a play and published a few pieces. Julie had asked her to write for the Modern Review, a magazine I co-owned with Julie and her then husband Cosmo Landesman, and Caitlin’s stuff was really good. After that, she became a kind of junior member of our gang and I remember liking her a great deal – she was warm and funny and didn’t seem remotely intimidated by older, more experienced journalists. It was obvious that she was going to have a brilliant career. I tried
Daniel Korski and the lives of others
The news has been coming so thick and fast of late that every week there are dozens of stories we don’t have time to linger over. Major scandals take up all our attention, only to fizzle out or be replaced by new ones. All the while there are little bits of roadkill that are at least as suggestive. Bear with me as I address one such recent fatality. We seem to expect everybody in public life to have the sexual history of an especially devoted nun Daniel Korski was the deputy head of the No. 10 policy unit when it was David Cameron’s turn to be prime minister. Korski quit politics
The changing face of the BBC Proms
There are two faces of the BBC Proms. The faces are somewhat at odds with each other. The one that everyone knows, whether they have an interest in music or not, is the Last Night of the Proms. It’s a concert consisting of a series of small musical items, or ‘lollipops’ as Sir Thomas Beecham used to call them. It culminates in a sequence of sea shanties, ‘Rule, Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Jerusalem’. Classical music has gone from being a supreme cultural statement to just another curious musical genre The other face, much more substantial, is the series of concerts that precede that last one, from mid-July
Should we fear AI? James W. Phillips and Eliezer Yudkowsky in conversation
James W. Phillips was a special adviser to the prime minister for science and technology and a lead author on the Blair-Hague report on artificial intelligence. Eliezer Yudkowsky is head of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. On SpectatorTV this week they talk about the existential threat of AI. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. JAMES W. PHILLIPS: When we talk about things like superintelligence and the dangers from AI, much of it can seem very abstract and doesn’t sound very dangerous: a computer beating a human at Go, for example. When you talk about superintelligence what do you mean, exactly, and how does it differ from
What’s the point of confetti?
All things considered, probably the least of George Osborne’s concerns on the occasion of his second marriage was being showered with orange confetti by a woman apparently sympathetic to the Just Stop Oil protestors. Bingo: a whole new form of protest came into being. What is the whole confetti thing about anyway? You used to be able to tell if there’d been a wedding at a church by the amount of pastel-coloured horseshoe and bell shapes ground into the pavement outside. It was sold in boxes decorated with wedding motifs. Nowadays, no eco-chic guest would throw paper confetti; dried flower petals are the way to go, available in tasteful cones
Heritable guilt is in vogue
I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday. Yet despite my apostatic nature, any number of biblical tenets with broad secular application have become touchstones. Of particular value during our post-Floydian festival of flagellation is Ezekiel 18: ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.’ Ergo, while we can’t take credit for our forebears’ virtues and achievements, at least whatever horrors our ancestors got up to is
Letters: How to reform the NHS
How to reform the NHS Sir: During the pandemic I and millions of others went out every week and clapped for the NHS (‘National health disservice’, 8 July). But if you’ve experienced it lately, it’s a dystopian nightmare. Appointments regularly cancelled, paperwork missing, 1950s administration. It appears the only thing being managed at the NHS is its decline. A working group of trusted business leaders should consider ‘best practice’ at excellent private and public hospitals in the UK and across Europe, and implement reform of the service immediately. The Tories don’t have the bottle or anyone with the talent to get this under way. All the reform talk is coming
Would a German takeover of BT be so bad?
To the Mansion House, on an unbearably humid evening, for the Lord Mayor’s annual ‘Financial and Professional Services’ dinner. It’s a big night for the City, with the formal unveiling of reforms designed to channel pension money into unlisted equities, creating by 2030 a £50 billion pool of capital for high-growth UK companies that might otherwise list in New York or sell themselves elsewhere. Simplified London listing rules, favourable to founder-entrepreneurs, will be another part of a wider reform package, much of which has been foreshadowed in this column over recent months. But what a way to put out a major policy announcement. ‘No wonder the tech kids don’t want
Has the Vatican abandoned beauty?
The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the Cambridge-shire market town of Ely is one of the supreme achievements of European Gothic architecture. Its octagonal tower lifts the eye to a sumptuously restored wooden lantern from which Christ looks down in majesty. Who on Earth thinks faith can be awakened by seeing a crucifix floating in urine? On the last Friday in June, his gaze fell on a congregation worshipping him at Evensong. Two hours later, as the Times reported, the cathedral was filled with ‘a very different crowd: 800 people [wearing headphones] attending a 1990s-themed silent disco. They wore diamanté strappy heels and leather trousers, carried
