Long-married couples are notoriously intolerant of one another at the bridge table. It’s as if all their pent-up irritation comes bursting forth — no matter how humiliating for their partner. Frankly, some players are so mean to their spouses that if they behaved like that in everyday life, it would be classified as mental cruelty.
The mathematician Euclid once boldly informed King Ptolemy Soter I of Egypt that there was no royal road to geometry. However, a royal road to a UK visa does exist and it has just been granted to the family of nine-year-old prodigy Shreyas Royal, by means of the intervention of the Home Secretary himself.
In Competition No. 3062 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean-style soliloquy that a contemporary politician might have felt moved to deliver. Inspiration for this comp came from Aryeh Cohen-Wade’s imagining, in the New Yorker, of Donald Trump performing Shakespearean soliloquies: ‘Listen — to be, not to be, this is a tough question, OK?
Unclued lights are three groups of three words of a kind, each group defined by the name of a different main character from a novel. The fourth main character of the novel (6, two words) must be highlighted in the completed grid. Across 1 I hope gas travels in passages in US (8) 8
The numbers were linked to titles of classic works of FICTION (12): The Two DROVERS (26) (Walter Scott), The Three MUSKETEERS (1D) (Alexandre Dumas (père)), The Thirty-Nine STEPS (34) (John Buchan), The Five RED HERRINGS (36D/5A) (Dorothy L. Sayers), Eight COUSINS (15D) (Louisa M. Alcott) and Five WEEKS IN A BALLOON (14/20) (Jules Verne). 2 x
White to play. This position is from Nakamura-Mamedyarov, St Louis 2018. Unfortunately for Mamedyarov, he has just blundered in a winning position. How did Nakamura exploit his lapse? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 28 August or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out
