Society

Thursday

Richard Dearlove

What Five Eyes does – and doesn’t – see

In the famous ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Elizabeth I her gown is embroidered with eyes and ears, a reference to her efficient surveillance of the threats to the emerging nation state that was Tudor England. ‘Five Eyes’ is the modern equivalent of the concept but applied to the general security of the Anglosphere: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. For an alliance that was originally one of listeners more than watchers, it might have been more correctly called ‘Five Ears’, but that name would hardly have conveyed its permanent vigilance. The existence of Five Eyes owes more to historical accident than deliberate design – it could never be

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Don’t write off literary fiction yet

I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in publishing. It’s true that no one reads book reviews any longer, and I should know because I write book reviews. I’ve no use for fiction exclusively powered by plot. If the words are flat and lifeless, I can’t read the book It’s true, too, that literary prizes don’t trigger the massive surge in sales they

Nicholas Farrell

Why I won’t accept the Laurels of Dante 

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I have just refused to accept the local equivalent of an Oscar, which was to have been presented later this month in the Basilica di San Francesco next to the tomb of Dante Alighieri. I have done so because I believe I am not worthy. To accept would be unbecoming. It would dishonour both the award and me. They want to crown me with the ‘Alloro di Dante’ – the Laurels of Dante – which each year they do to a tiny number of people they feel have made an important contribution to literature. The ceremony involves the placing of a wreath made of bay leaves, similar

Toby Young Toby Young

The curse of Disney’s Snow White

One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the film is played by a trans actor, would be box office poison. Better to take the tax write-off, he decided, than spend tens of millions of dollars trying to market the film to an American public that was fed up with being lectured by virtue-signalling Hollywood liberals. Incidentally, the highest-grossing film of 2022 in the

Luke McShane

Answering back

The vast majority of winning blows in chess are delivered by a piece moving forwards. Powerful retreating moves are rare, but the very fact of going against the grain makes an aesthetic impact. Played for purely strategic reasons, such moves are all the more admirable, so I was duly impressed by a move played in the Varsity Match earlier this month. Ashvin Sivakumar, representing Oxford, holds the advantage, with pressure in the centre and the kingside, but it’s not obvious how to move forward. There’s the rub! By retreating his bishop from e3 to c1, he reroutes it to b2 to bear down on the kingside from afar – a

Melissa Kite

There are no Ubers in the wilds of West Cork

My American guest kept telling me he was going to call an Uber and I could not persuade him that no Uber was going to appear in the wilds of West Cork. I assured him that the only taxi service I knew of was the local funeral director. ‘What? Will I have to go in a hearse?’ said the chap from Philadelphia, laughing. I agreed it was quirky, but the funeral director really was the only taxi. ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’ is his unofficial slogan. The American laughed and laughed and texted his sons back in Philly to tell them the joke. It’s no joke, I thought, as

Luke McShane

No. 842

Black to play. Verbytski – Sarakauskas, British Rapidplay Championship, 2025. 1…Re1+ 2 Kf2 is wildly complex, while Sarakauskas tried 1…Qb1+ and lost. But he missed a move which wins on the spot. What was it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 24 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 Qa6! Then 1…Kf3 2 Qe2# or 1…Kxf5 2 Qg6# or 1…Kxd5 2 Qc6# Last week’s winner Andrew Miller, Gloucester

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

What’s the point in spending a fortune on a wedding?

I follow the YouTube postings of a maverick young economist called Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game. Whatever you think of Gary, he is absolutely right about one thing. Economists, by using what are called ‘Single Representative Agent’ models, have taken a dangerous wrong turn. Such simplistic models, which contain the convenient but absurd assumption that what is good for the average person must be proportionately good for everybody else, have allowed economists to make confident pronouncements on policy while ignoring social and intergenerational inequality completely. In one of the Brexit TV debates, a woman in the audience was derided by the cognoscenti because, on being told that leaving

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 22 March 2025

It can be hard to recover your morale when you have a bad start in a tournament. You came in all positive and then need to claw your way back to average. Not everyone feels that way, though. I recently went to Bath with Sebastian Atisen, a regular partner, to play in the Wiltshire Congress Swiss Teams with my old friends Lou and Robert Hobhouse (who run the wonderful Hobhouse Bridge Holidays). As we were about to start, they told us they had a strategy. It’s important, they said, to lose the first match: it takes the pressure off. Lou and Robert often have a wonderfully eccentric take on things,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop my husband eavesdropping on my phone calls?

Q. I’m quite a good friend of a member of our royal family – going back to our shared school days. However, someone who has recently married into my family knows this and they are quite shamelessly pushing me for an introduction. At the moment I am playing for time but I definitely have no intention of fixing up a meeting. Please can you come up with a suggestion that will enable me to knock what would be an awkward scenario on the head? – Name and address withheld A. Kill their ambition by a bit of overstatement: ‘The funny thing is, because we became friends when we were at

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Ode-worthy

For Competition 3391 you were invited to submit one of Keats’s odes rewritten as a sonnet or a limerick. Four out of the five odes composed by Keats in the spring of 1819 feature in the winning line-up, as does ‘To Autumn’, written in September of that year. Once again there were many more winners than we have space for. A consolatory pat on the back to unlucky losers Benedict King, Duncan Forbes, Gail White, John Redmond, Jennifer Zhou, Iain Morley, David Cram and Mark Brown. The winners below earn a £25 John Lewis voucher. It’s autumn, harvest-time, maturing sun, Cue mellow fruitfulness, soft mists and bees, Things ooze, swell,

Bruce Anderson

The Berry Bros supremacy

For more than 50 years I have assumed that any sensible person will be a right-winger, even if not all of them will admit it, and that this will be especially true of oenophiles There are exceptions. Harry Waugh, a clubman, author – Bacchus on the Wing is especially good – and merchant-connoisseur, was one of the most delightful wine experts of the last century. It was an education to sit with him as he talked his way through a good bottle, which effortlessly became a good several bottles. Moreover, Harry lived to be 97. I spent far too little time in his company and cannot remember his ever talking

Dot Wordsworth

Do you ‘damp down’ or ‘tamp down’?

‘Dampfschifffahrt!’ shouted my husband as though it were funny. I had been saying how strange it was that explosive gas in a coal mine should be called firedamp, since damp things burn with difficulty. Nevertheless, my husband was on to something, for the German Dampf, steam, is related to English damp. Damp in English originally meant ‘a noxious exhalation’. Caxton used it in the 15th century when writing of a prophecy of Merlin about a goat breathing from its nostrils a ‘damp’ that would betoken hunger. By the 17th century various kinds of damp were feared in mines, fulminating damp or firedamp, which caught fire from the miners’ candles, and

Pabulum

2695: Struck hard

A word can be prefixed by six unclued lights so as to form new words (including two place names). 9D is a pertinent piece of poetry (five words). Solvers must shade the appropriate unclued light. Across 1 Pepper makes host back off (5) 6 Butterfly and weathercock fool about (7) 11    Small fly buzzing round yellow plant (10) 13    With head of arrow no good, perhaps 75-year old is returning missile (9) 15    Paint waterfall about noon (4) 16    Prosecutor up to fitting cubic blocks (7) 17    Film star Richard talked of secluded retreat for antelope (7) 18    Fish? Some stay underwater (3) 19

The Spectator

2692: Flexibility – solution

‘YOU MIGHT AS WELL FALL FLAT ON YOUR FACE AS LEAN OVER TOO FAR BACKWARD’ – James THURBER (from ‘The Bear Who Let It Alone’ in the New Yorker of 29 April 1939). First prize Rhidian Llewellyn, South Africa Runners-up Emma Corke, Abinger Hammer, Surrey; Gerry Fairweather, Layer Marney, Essex

Angus Colwell

Bring back beef dripping!

For several years, a debate has raged (mainly on Twitter, now X) over whether animal fats are actually better for you than industrially processed ‘seed oils’. The debate has become more mainstream thanks to the efforts of the new US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who wants to Make America Healthy Again. His strategy involves a back-to-the-land style embrace of animal fats, particularly beef dripping. The anti-seed oil community use technical-sounding terms like ‘linoleic acids’ to firm up their side of the debate but fundamentally their point is that our bodies have evolved to process animal fats rather than overly processed stuff. J.D. Vance doesn’t cook with seed oils,

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Sole meunière: simple one-pan sophistication 

Picture the scene. The year is 2004. The setting, a British field or maybe a beach. There is a small open fire burning with a single cast-iron pan perched on it. A male TV chef – dressed in a striped shirt, open at the neck, chinos, possibly red, leather shoes – is standing over it, reverently holding a fish. ‘This is a beautiful piece of fish,’ he says, ‘and we’re not going to do anything fancy here. It doesn’t need it! We’re going to keep it simple.’ There must have been a clause in the contract of any TV cookery show in the early 2000s to say that a beautiful

Piers Morgan

What Donald Trump told me about Keir Starmer

Two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the habitual liberal hysteria about his rollercoaster presidential style is reaching shrieking banshee levels again. But as always with my friend in Pennsylvania Avenue, I urge patience and a focus on what he does rather than what comes out of his inflammatory machine-gun mouth. I sense cold, calculating method to all the apparent madness, entirely in keeping with Trump’s election campaign pledges, and predict that – after the current bumpy ride – he will get the US economy purring again, America’s border under firm control and win the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Oh, and he’ll

Rupert Harrison

It’s time for Rachel Reeves to stop gambling

Next Wednesday Rachel Reeves will stand up in the House of Commons to deliver what she is calling her ‘spring forecast’. As so often with political language, everyone in Westminster knows it is no such thing, just as there was nothing ‘mini’ about Kwasi Kwarteng’s Budget of September 2022. The ‘spring forecast’ will be an emergency Budget, and the reasons for it reveal a surprising truth about the Chancellor of the Exchequer: she is an inveterate gambler. Unless everything turns out to be a brilliant exercise in expectation management, the worst-kept secret in Whitehall is that Reeves has already broken her ‘iron-clad’ fiscal rules. The Chancellor’s team will receive the