Society

Thursday

26 Jun 2025

The hidden value of notes

‘You asshole,’ was my friend’s cheery greeting when we met in Ludlow. I’d mucked up the time. Reconciled, we walked to his place and on the door was a note he’d left me, scrawled on a card with an image of him mimicking Philip Larkin proudly sitting on a border stone: ‘Just a note that you are an asshole. Call.’ Stuart, a collector of manuscripts, showed me a recent acquisition, a note by Sir Edward Elgar, graced with a self-portrait featuring, my friend is sure, an immodestly large penis. I think it’s his coat tail. We debated the iconography while listening to ‘Nimrod’. Notes are often discarded – who hasn’t

Rory Sutherland

The rise and rise of the ‘tantric sector’

For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this in adherence to Sutherland’s Law – not the excellent 1970s BBC series featuring Iain Cuthbertson, but a rule of my own devising which states that you should always travel from the smallest airport or railway station possible. Recently, much of the station car-park was closed so a colossal pedestrian footbridge could be constructed 50 yards away; this replaced a pedestrian level crossing at the same spot, which lay along a footpath connecting one part of Otford to another. In 25 years, I have seen pedestrians using it on three occasions.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Where should I seat Hollywood stars at dinner?

Q. My husband and I have recently made very good friends with some neighbours in France. They know I am having a 60th birthday party in London and have assumed they will be invited too. My problem is one of these new friends is a world-famous Hollywood actor and his wife is famous in her own right. I am worried about where I will seat them. I wouldn’t want to give the impression to a roomful of my oldest friends (none of whom is famous) that I think the ‘stars’ are more important than they are, but neither do I want to offend the stars, who I fear will expect

Olivia Potts

The key to a great American key lime pie

A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of them esoterically British. It was snapped up by an American publisher who, as well as converting my friend’s careful metric measurements into loosey-goosey volume-based cup measures, queried a couple of her more British ingredients, one being golden syrup. My friend had a recipe for treacle tart which – as anyone who has made it knows – is just a whole tin of golden syrup held together with a handful of breadcrumbs and an egg. But golden syrup is hard to get hold of in the US. Her American publishers wanted

Luke McShane

False moves

Right before the end of my game against Alexei Shirov at the World Rapid Team Championships earlier in June, I had the better side of a drawn position and a full 20 seconds to make a move. Not too bad: Shirov is a former member of the world elite, whose brilliant games I had revered since childhood, and a draw would secure us victory in the match. At that moment, my mind left the chessboard. It pondered the winning position I had earlier in the game. And it drifted back, yet again, to the middlegame, which reached the position in the diagram below, right after I, playing Black, had captured

Bruce Anderson

To rehydrate, drink beer

‘The nuisance of the tropics is/the sheer necessity of fizz.’ Over the past few days, during which England endured sub-tropical sweltering, it was more a matter of beer. I do not wish to denigrate water, which is all very well in its place. I often drink it. But for urgent, nay life-saving, rehydration, nothing beats beer. Now that almost all beer is properly made, I just tend to order any pint that catches my eye. In recent temperatures, the eyes have been busy. As I may have written before, there is one curiosity about beer. The Belgians, Czechs and Germans – plus other European countries – produce lager-style beers that

Luke McShane

No. 856

White to play. Maroroa Jones-Aronian, World Rapid Team Championship, London 2025. Aronian’s last move Nf6-e4 was a blunder. Which response prompted immediate resignation? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 30 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Rh8+! If 1…Kxh8 2 Qg8 is mate. The game ended in a draw by repetition after 1…Qxh8 2 Qxe7+ Kh6 3 Qg5+ Kh7 4 Qe7+ etc. Last week’s winner Ted Ditchburn, Monkseaton, Tyne and Wear

Nicholas Farrell

My daring escape from the Italian police

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La Résistance in Nazi–occupied France because I have three disco-age daughters. Last week, the call-to-action stations flashed up on WhatsApp at 03.06, just as the cockerels were beginning to crow and the enemy was setting up his road blocks. ‘Papà, can you come and get me?’ It was Rita, aged 16. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Marina.’ Cristo bloody Santo! A 25-minute drive away. ‘I can walk towards you,’ suggested Rita, the little sweetie. ‘No! Not if you’re wearing a miniskirt,’ I messaged back. ‘Or hot pants.’ She had gone with a girlfriend

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Who’s who?

For Competition 3405 you were invited to submit a scene in which Doctor Who has regenerated into someone very unexpected. Plenty of interesting transformations resulted, featuring among others Paddington Bear, Mary Berry and two Jacob Rees-Moggs, but the winners of the £25 vouchers are below. The Doctor, regenerating as a tall, meaty-faced man in jeans, a plaid shirt and his mid-sixties, soon got clumsily busy for comic effect with screwdrivers, sonic and otherwise, setting about the Tardis console and causing Fleetwood Mac to play at excessive volume before sending us zagzigging erratically across spacetime on a far from grand tour. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ he bellowed, overemphasising every word

Dot Wordsworth

The cunning meanings of quant

The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants were and all my husband could say was: ‘Complete quants’, as though it were funny. Of course I kept thinking of Mary Quant, and I suppose her name was French in origin. There was a Hugo le Cuint in 1208 and a Richard le Queynte in Hampshire in 1263. The name would relate to quant or quaint, meaning ‘clever’ or ‘cunning’, and derived from Latin cognitus. The varied spelling overlapped with the word Chaucer used for a woman’s private parts, which comes from a completely different Latin word. Such is

Melissa Kite

Has my father’s BBC addiction peaked?

‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while she moaned to me about it on the phone. ‘How fast do you want it to go?’ I asked, imagining it doing 60mph down the short run of stairs in their little house in Coventry, coming to an abrupt halt at the bottom, then catapulting her across the living-room floor because she never does the seatbelt up. ‘It’s too slow!’ she declared, and I could hear her slapping various bits of it and banging the switches on the arm. ‘When the man comes to service it I’m going to tell

Doc

2709: Our set

The unclued lights are of a kind. One of them consists of two separate theme-words juxta-posed: one is of two words and two have to be paired. The letters in the red squares spell another theme-word and the letters in the yellowsquares can be arranged to form yet another (two-word) theme word. Across 1 Realise she can be awkward (6) 11 Pedro’s ‘See you later’ makes Oates laugh (5,5) 14 Bravo, gents, maybe May’s first flower (5) 18 Sky lad mixed polyester resins (6) 19 Bristle at small letter (4) 22 38 with mould in relief (6) 24 Obtain oil that’s for cooking the chop? (9) 25 European birds in

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 28 June 2025

At any big international bridge tournament, the chances are you’ll end up playing a star name or two. And while it’s always a privilege, I find it hard to stop my inner voice whispering how incomparably better they are than me; I’m just a sitting duck. I have a mantra, however, which helps: ‘Anyone is beatable.’ So I couldn’t help laughing when I read an interview with the German champion Sabine Auken recently, in which she revealed she has a rather different mantra: ‘Anyone can beat me.’ We’re both right – there’s no place for fear or hubris at the bridge table. Sabine, though, is an unusually tough opponent. She

The Spectator

Let Kneecap play

During the Troubles, some 2,500 people were victims of kneecappings – punishment shootings, dished out by paramilitaries, for perceived crimes ranging from fraternising with British soldiers to drug dealing and rape. The term is something of a misnomer. The torture entails a low-velocity gunshot to the knee from a handgun. That isn’t guaranteed to destroy one’s kneecaps but could cause tissue or nerve damage and joint fractures. At least 13 victims had to have their limbs amputated; one in five was once estimated to limp for the rest of their lives. Until recently, a mention of kneecapping was a reminder of the terror that plagued Northern Ireland within living memory.

The Spectator

2706: Pitched – solution

The unclued lights are fielding positions in cricket. First prize Gillian Ollerenshaw, Altrincham, Cheshire Runners-up Richard Thorpe, Burntwood, Staffordshire; Fran Morrison, London SW15

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Assisted dying, Israel vs Iran and Zelensky’s visit

Home MPs voted by a majority of 23 – 314 to 291 – for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which says people in England and Wales may lawfully ‘be provided with assistance to end their own life’. In the free vote, the Health Secretary voted against and the Prime Minister voted for. The bill now goes to the Lords. ‘Iran never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and the US has taken action to alleviate that threat,’ Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said. Seven men were charged with grievous bodily harm after protestors outside the Iranian embassy in London were attacked. Palestine Action was proscribed

Sarah Vine

Who wants to read an unemotional memoir?

On the hottest day of the year, St Pancras station would not have been my first choice for lunch, but it turned out to be, quite literally, the coolest of venues. I was meeting my brother (not Jeremy, as is often assumed, but Ben), over from Spain to attend the launch of a book I’ve written, How Not to Be a Political Wife. Even Ben was struggling with the heat, and when London is hotter than Madrid, you know something’s up. Anyway, he was heading to Stansted, I to Corby, so it seemed like the logical place. We found a table at Booking Office 1869, cool and dark beneath huge,

Charles Moore

Is the Met finally getting tough on pro-Palestine protests?

It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go to parliament and to interview Kemi Badenoch at a Policy Exchange event across the square. Palestine Action had announced a protest march against Donald Trump’s and Israel’s ‘genocide’ for that time. Although the Met had banned it from the area, I had recently witnessed so many ill-contained and threatening protests there – almost all for Palestinian causes – that I fully expected delay, disruption and occasional harassment. This time, however, it turned out that the Met meant business. The protest was well-contained in the designated streets round Trafalgar Square. May

Peter Frankopan

Israel’s attack on Iran has been planned for years

It was clear at the time that what happened on 7 October 2023 would change the Middle East. What was perhaps less obvious was the impact it would have on the rest of the world. In addition to the suffering in Gaza, the weeks and months that followed Hamas’s horrific attacks have seen the reconfiguration of Syria, the effective dismantling of Hezbollah, the decapitation of the leadership of Hamas and now, with Iran, a time when the decision-making in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington will have a profound effect on the shape of the emerging global order. Historians like to think about turning points and moments in the past where the

Wednesday

25 Jun 2025

Brendan O’Neill

Zohran Mamdani and the Hipster Intifada

I see Generation Intifada has a new hero. Those rich white kids who never leave the house without their keffiyeh and who love to annoy their parents by saying ‘Globalise the intifada!’ are falling at the feet of this political idol. At last, they cry, a man who ‘gets it’ and who might even prise open the eyes of the dim and uneducated to the terrible injustices of our cruel world. Why use a word that you know will trigger in Jews the most hellish memories of persecution and death? It’s Zohran Mamdani. Of course it is. The meteoric rise of this 33-year-old ‘democratic socialist’, who last night became the