Society

Thursday

Peter Jones

How to live morally (according to the Romans)

‘Make America Great Again!’ cries Donald Trump. ‘Do Britain Down Again!’ (DOBRIDA!) screech our academic historical institutions. That was not the Roman way. In ad 31, Valerius Maximus completed his nine books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Roman world. They were enormously popular and became a sort of handbook of Roman moral standards for imitation. While there were sections that castigated cruel, greedy, treacherous Romans who did not live up to the proper standards, most of the 91 chapter headings concentrate on those men and women who exhibited, e.g. endurance, moderation, generosity, compassion, humility, a capacity for friendship, respect for gods, the ability to face changes of fortune,

Toby Young Toby Young

How to be a Lord

At the end of my first day at the House of Lords, I staggered out with so many books and leaflets and three-ring binders I could barely see over the top. These were the official rules, what Walter Bagehot would have called the ‘dignified’ part of the constitution. But on top of these are the unwritten rules, which are twice as voluminous. Some people compare parliament to Hogwarts, and it’s true that there’s a ‘secret’ entrance in Westminster tube station. But Harry Potter didn’t get as many things wrong as me in his first term. Admittedly, some of the rules I’ve had difficulty mastering are pretty basic. When you enter

Mark Mason

The curious language of coins

Lewis Carroll used to travel with purses divided into separate compartments, each containing the exact number of coins he’d need for a particular transaction (train fare, porter, newspaper and so on). These days we have one bank card which gets tapped everywhere. The coinless society might be more convenient – but it’s also more boring. Coins are beautiful and fascinating. For centuries they were the only way most people knew what their monarch looked like. Henry VIII was nicknamed ‘Coppernose’ because of the way the silver coating on copper coins rubbed away, starting with his nose. Even Oliver Cromwell put himself on the currency (as a Roman emperor wearing a

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Can I survive six months without my books? 

My story begins with a very small puddle on the kitchen floor. As it was nowhere near the sink, I blamed Biggles, the border terrier, but ‘you know my methods, Watson. Apply them’. And having applied them, I saw at once that the small dog could not be to blame, because he is reliably house-trained and had been bumbling about in the garden for the previous half hour, lifting his leg hither and thither. So I mopped it up and forgot about it. Then, that same afternoon, another pool of water appeared, slightly bigger and not on the same spot.  I could put up with the loss of a lot

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Boxing belongs in the Olympics

If there is anything more pointless than signing a five-year contract to be Emma Raducanu’s coach, it is the effort to inject some excitement into England’s interminable qualification campaigns for major football tournaments. Everyone knows they will qualify, almost certainly as top of their group, which usually contains such giants as the Moon, Chad and Tierra del Fuego or, as now, Latvia, Albania, Andorra and Serbia. Good luck, Mr Tuchel, with learning much from those fixtures, though Serbia should be interesting. Sport needs jeopardy: there needs to be doubt about the outcome. Here there’s none. There are marginal debates: is Phil Foden too far out on the right? What will

Luke McShane

Softly softly

The best of Aesop’s fables is the one in which the Wind and the Sun compete to remove the coat from a passing man. The Wind goes first, assaulting the man with full force, but the harder it blows, the tighter the man grips his coat. When the Sun takes a turn, it radiates such glorious heat that the man takes off the coat of his own accord. Similar wisdom might inform an interview with a sporting figure. Forget the Paxmanesque inquisition: prepare some open-ended questions, establish a rapport and listen carefully to the responses. You would probably not strap your subject to a polygraph machine, point a camera at

Melissa Kite

My hunt for a doctor took a horror movie turn

My American guest went down with a cough he could not shift and, after a week of protesting that he couldn’t be ill because he was fully vaccinated for everything, he asked me to take him to a doctor. This was an even more complicated request than his desire to call Ubers, and so we set off in my car to drive around the wilds of West Cork in search of medical assistance. I began by driving to the nearest town, and I led him into the A&E department of a hospital where I laid it on thick to the receptionist about him being an American tourist visiting the land

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop Ozempic ruining my dinner parties?

Q. I enjoy giving dinner parties and put a lot of effort into the preparations. However, recently I have noticed that much of the food I lovingly cook goes uneaten despite proclamations of how delicious it is. It has dawned on me that a large number of my friends are secretly on weight-reduction injections, and barely want to eat. I don’t like to ask beforehand about such a sensitive issue, yet neither do I want such waste, so how can I assess the right amount to make?  – M.B., Chelsea, London A. An extremely well-informed source calculates between 15 and 30 per cent of those in elite circles are currently

Luke McShane

No. 843

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by William Shinkman, The Good Companion, 1919. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 31 March. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher 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…Kg3! wins, e.g. 2 Rxf5 Re1 mate, or 2 Kf1 Qb1 mate Last week’s winner Phil Walker, Baschurch, Shropshire

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A creche for nepo babies: the River Cafe Cafe reviewed

The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification of Hammersmith, which has stalled now that Hammersmith Bridge is closed to traffic and sits dully on the Thames, a bridge of decline. The River Cafe appears, thinly disguised, in a J.K. Rowling Cormoran Strike novel where a literary agent murders her client because he writes Swiftian pastiche, and it is a good place to

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Out of the tomb

Comp. 3392 invited you to write ‘The Curse of King Thut’ (in poetry or prose) in response to the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose II, the first such since Tutankhamun’s. There were many imaginative curses, from the archaeologist Artemis Spendlove Jr’s tinnitus (Mark Ambrose) to the contents of the tomb turning out quite meh (Frank Upton): No treasure beyond measure No ‘wonderful things’ in the Valley of Kings No chaps in white suit and Panama No mummy or daddy or granama Mark Brown foretold of the influencers descending: ‘The mummy fumes beneath his wraps,/ As tourists pose for selfie snaps’ while Bill Greenwell promised a litany of

Robin Oakley

My highlights from the Cheltenham Festival

When Poniros, trained by Willie Mullins, swept home in this year’s Triumph Hurdle as the first 100-1 Cheltenham Festival winner since Norton’s Coin won the Gold Cup in 1990, one of the very few people who had backed him was my regular racing companion Derek, known in this column as the Form Guru. His successes are normally a reward for rising before the dawn-chorus blackbirds have gulped their first worm and ploughing through the stats for a horse which had possibly shown a glimmer of form on a wet Thursday at Uttoxeter the April before last. But with Poniros there was no form. Not the merest trace. The ex-inmate of

Dot Wordsworth

Why do we diminish ‘compendious’?

My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games. Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its ludic capability depended on two dice and an accompanying booklet of rules. And now I come across a quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the use of the word compendium: ‘Guide to the compendium of games. Comprising rules for playing – backgammon, besique, chess…’ The dictionary estimates the date as about 1899, which is

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 29 March 2025

I am sure that readers of this column need no introduction to Victor Mollo’s most famous creation, The Hideous Hog. Bridge in the Menagerie was first published in 1965 and today, Mollo’s stereotypes are as sharp and apposite as they were 60 years ago. And don’t think (as I did) that hogging is an exclusively male prerogative; I’ve seen women bid their five-card major three times rather than let their partner near the cards. And what about trick hogging? If the worst and most annoying thing is  your partner overtaking your trick with no clear plan as to where to go next, a close second is when they overtake in

Fire

2696: It’s better up north!

The unclued lights are of a kind. Across 12    Sun ruined helter-skelter without cover (9) 13    Lizard found in Wagamama! (5) 15    Screen role I transformed into (9) 16    Rabbit’s discovered in delay at terminus (6) 20    Quietly thatched house and made watertight (7) 21    Oddly, his leg is pulled by Cupid! (6) 22    Location of small storm (6) 26    In with ugly bruiser (4) 27    Recalled child’s little digits (3) 28    Are offstage? (3) 29    Attitude of disheartened gang (4) 32    Melon is a messy thing to eat (8) 34    Woman from New Zealand overwhelmed by wah-wah in England (6) 35    Weavers weaving without a weave (6) 37    Shed

The Spectator

2693: Summer dresses – solution

The unclued lights were odes by Keats and Shelley. The title could sound like ‘Some Addresses’. First prize Peter Wreford, Cambridge Runners-up Angela Tebbutt, West Caister, Norfolk; Anthony Harker, Oxford

Andrey Kurkov

Steve Witkoff is wrong to see peace in Putin’s eyes

Kyiv ‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’re abolishing the Ministry of Education,’ my old friend Dima told me. ‘Judging by what Steve Witkoff said on the Fox channel, neither history nor geography are taught in America.’ Team Trump’s energetic but purposefully misdirected attempts to push the negotiation processes forward have left Ukrainians in shock. Each day reveals new depths in the Oval Office’s inadequacy and we can only shrug when we hear things like ‘Putin is not a bad guy’ or ‘I feel that he wants peace’. President Volodymyr Zelensky said something similar after his election in 2019, when he promised to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin within

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has the Assisted Dying Bill been killed off?

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spring Statement, Heathrow fire and Prince Harry quits his charity

Home In the Spring Statement, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made further cuts to benefits (such as freezing the Universal Credit health element for new claimants). The Office for Budget Responsibility had said that the cuts announced before would not let her meet her budget rules. She now planned a £9.9 billion surplus by 2030, but would borrow more in the coming financial year. Civil service running costs would be cut by 15 per cent, with about 10,000 of its 547,735 staff to go. She concentrated on a £2.2 billion increase in defence spending and proposed that Britain should become a ‘defence industrial superpower’. The OBR reduced its forecast