Books and Arts – 19 April 2018
From our UK edition
The Spectator
Thursday
to 2352: Upright Characters
From our UK edition
‘THE WRITING ON THE WALL’ (Daniel 5.5) at 12/22/41 was ‘MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN’ at 23/16/26, according to Brewer, which also gives ‘IF YOU HATE GRAFFITI, SIGN A PARTITION’, at 19/1D/7, as an example of GRAFFITI. First prize C.V. Clark, London WC1 Runners-up Francesca Charlton, Sleaford, Lincs; A.R.
Saturday
Theresa May’s Syria strikes statement, full text
From our UK edition
Last night British, French and American armed forces conducted co-ordinated and targeted strikes to degrade the Syrian Regime’s chemical weapons capability and deter their use. For the UK’s part four RAF Tornado GR 4’s launched storm shadow missiles at a military facility some 15 miles west of Homs, where the regime is assessed to keep chemical weapons in breach of Syria’s obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention. While the full assessment of the strike is ongoing, we are confident of its success. Let me set out why we have taken this action. Last Saturday up to 75 people, including young children, were killed in a despicable and barbaric attack in Douma, with as many as 500 further casualties. We have worked with our allies to establish what happened.
Viktor Orban and Hungary’s muzzled media
From our UK edition
There are several ingredients for a successful democracy: the rule of law, opposition parties working without harassment, and a free press able to discuss every issue from every angle. Viktor Orban won a landslide victory in Hungary’s elections last weekend, reflecting public support that is far wider than his critics allow. But was it the result of a free and fair debate? This week, the last serious independent Hungarian daily newspaper closed. Magyar Nemet — and its sister radio station Lanchid Radio — have been unable to recover from financial problems which have been exacerbated by government advertising being withdrawn from troublesome newspapers and ploughed into friendly ones.
Thursday
Letters | 12 April 2018
From our UK edition
For the many not the few Sir: As is clear from the last paragraph of your leading article (7 April), the ability of Tony Blair to rewrite history (or persuade others to do so) obviously remains undiminished, although it is surprising to find that your own publication succumbs so easily to his ‘charms’. How many more times does the canard that he and the Labour party pioneered the use of the phrase ‘for the many not the few’ have to be refuted? In fact, it was one of your own former editors, the late and very sadly lamented Iain Macleod, who first used that phrase (and, of course, in a different context) at the Tory party conference on 9 October 1969.
Barometer | 12 April 2018
From our UK edition
Disapproving chorus Derbyshire’s Chief Constable told the all-male Derbyshire Constabulary Choir to sever all police ties unless it takes women. How strong is the male choir tradition? — A directory compiled by the Cotswold Male Voice choir lists 238 active in England and one on the Costa Blanca. There are other police male choirs in Avon and Somerset, West Mids, South Yorks, the Met, Kent, Hants, Gloucs, Torbay and Durham. — Cornwall has the most, with 39 male voice choirs. London and Brighton both have gay male voice choirs. — The Welsh Association of male voice choirs lists 91 members, up from a founding 26 in the early 1960s. Northern Ireland’s association lists 26 and the National Association of Choirs lists six in Scotland.
Crown and countries
From our UK edition
Next week, 53 world leaders arrive in London for the Commonwealth summit. It is hard to imagine a better network for the globalised age. Leaders of countries with a combined population of more than two billion will come to discuss issues of common interest. There will be a banquet hosted by the Queen — in her role as the Head of the Commonwealth — at Buckingham Palace, and a day-long leaders’ retreat at Windsor Castle. A nod to history, to be sure, but if the Commonwealth was just about nostalgia the summits would have stopped long ago. The G53 will have much to discuss. The Commonwealth has a shared language, overlapping administrative and legal systems (largely based on English common law) and a shared heritage.
Portrait of the week | 12 April 2018
From our UK edition
Home Parliament was in recess when Theresa May, the Prime Minister, agreed with America and France that the international community should respond to the chemical attack reported from Syria. It was not certain in any case that Parliament would back direct action by Britain. Yulia Skripal, who with her father Sergei was poisoned in Salisbury on 4 March, was discharged from hospital and taken to a safe place. Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, who killed a burglar with a screwdriver with which he had been threatened, learnt that he would not be charged. He and his disabled wife had to leave their house for fear of revenge by associates of Henry Vincent, the dead man. People removed from a fence bouquets of flowers commemorating the burglar.
to 2351: Triplets
From our UK edition
Unclued lights associated with IRIS are: flowers (2, 11, 40), Greek goddesses (10, 16, 30), and parts of the eye (6, 12, 34). First prize P.
Our future queen
From our UK edition
From The Spectator, 15 April 1943: Princess Elizabeth will be 17 next Wednesday, which means she is ceasing to be a child. Her life has so far, most rightly, been spent in her home rather than in the public eye, and her future subjects know little of her, apart from the admirable broadcast talk she gave three years ago, to the children of the Empire, at home and overseas, when she was only 14. Now that the Princess stands on the threshold of public life, they may feel some natural desire to know something of how she is being prepared for the high office that will one day be hers, and the Queen has shown a gracious readiness to make available such information as is relevant for that purpose.
Tuesday
Where is Artificial Intelligence taking us?
From our UK edition
Recently, The Spectator, in association with NatWest, brought together leading entrepreneurs, MPs and technology writers to discuss where Artificial Intelligence (AI) – or the fourth industrial revolution as it is often termed – is taking us.
Thursday
Letters | 5 April 2018
From our UK edition
Self-limiting beliefs Sir: As someone who spent much of his working life teaching at Eton and Harrow, it was amusing to learn from Toby Young (31 March) that privately educated pupils achieve better exam results than pupils in other schools because they came into the world equipped with high IQ genes which, together with parental background, guarantee success, with the school adding little. If only we teachers had known! If genes are as important as Toby, Robert Plomin and others insist, it does ask questions of the drive to improve social mobility. If schools are limited in the difference they can make, do we fuss too much about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools?
Criminal policies
From our UK edition
Any notion that the surge in killings in London was a problem confined to gang members has been dispelled by the death of 17-year-old Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, who acted as a mentor for troubled children but who died in her mother’s arms after a drive-by shooting. The number of people killed in the capital has now risen to more than 50 this year, with the latest victim an 18-year-old man who was stabbed to death in an east London street on Wednesday night. Violent crime is everyone’s problem, yet until this year it had slipped a long way down the list of pressing political issues. Terrorism continues to take up debate, as do sexual offences, especially allegations involving public figures.
Portrait of the Week – 5 April 2018
From our UK edition
Home Alison Saunders said she would relinquish her position as the Director of Public Prosecutions when her five-year contract ends in October. Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told the Times that she was ditching the previously embraced principle of believing all complaints of sexual assault. ‘We should have an open mind when a person walks in,’ she said. In February, 15 people were murdered in London and 14 in New York; in March it was 22 and 21. On 2 April two teenagers were shot in London; one died at the scene and the other the day after. Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, said that the sale of ivory items of whatever age would be made illegal.
to 2350: Pieces
From our UK edition
The unclued lights are classical French plays (‘PIÈCES’) by Corneille (9, 18, 21A), Molière (11, 23, and 21D/29) and Racine (1A, 24 and 25). The highlighted letters reveal the three playwrights’ names.
Sunday
Theresa May has shown Putin that the West can still unite
From our UK edition
After Britain voted to leave the European Union, there was much mistaken talk about how it might also move away from its allies. Boris Titov, one of Putin’s appointees and a half-hearted challenger to him in the presidential election a fortnight ago, claimed that it would break the transatlantic alliance, turning the remainder of the EU into Russophiles, adding: ‘It’s not long until a united Eurasia — about ten years’. That fantasy was destroyed last week when, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, 23 countries announced that between them they are to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats whom they suspect have been working as spies.
Wednesday
Barometer | 28 March 2018
From our UK edition
Not cricket The Australian cricket captain Steve Smith was banned for a match and fined his match fee after a player was caught tampering with the ball by rubbing it with tape in the hope of making it swing more. How do you make a cricket ball swing? — The science was covered in a paper by N.G. Barton in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1982, which claimed, after wind tunnel tests, that maximum swing can be achieved by keeping one side of the ball shiny and bowling it at 30 metres per second (67.5mph), with the seam at an angle of 20 degrees from the direction of the ball and a backspin of between five and eight revolutions per second. Contrary to the lore of the game, humidity makes no difference, though a bit of sandpaper on the non-shiny side certainly would.
Letters | 28 March 2018
From our UK edition
The antidepressants con Sir: Congratulations to Angela Patmore for exposing the many troubling aspects of the escalating use of antidepressants (‘Overdosed: Our dangerous dependency on antidepressants’, 24 March). The drug companies have conned doctors into prescribing antidepressants, patients into taking them, and taxpayers into paying for them with fake information. Such is the present epidemic of depression that one in ten of us is now taking them. NICE is drafting new guidelines for depression, and it is to be hoped it will expose this con, and that clinical groups in the UK will instead facilitate access to talking therapies for those millions of depressed people.
Portrait of the week | 28 March 2018
From our UK edition
Home ‘We recognise that anti-Semitism has occurred in pockets within the Labour Party,’ Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said. ‘I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused.’ His remarks were released before the publication of an open letter to Labour MPs from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council which said Mr Corbyn was incapable of contemplating anti-Semitism seriously ‘because he is so ideologically fixed within a far-left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities’.
War and peace | 28 March 2018
From our UK edition
After Britain voted to leave the European Union, there was much mistaken talk about how it might also move away from its allies. Boris Titov, one of Putin’s appointees and a half-hearted challenger to him in the presidential election a fortnight ago, claimed that it would break the transatlantic alliance, turning the remainder of the EU into Russophiles, adding: ‘It’s not long until a united Eurasia — about ten years’. That fantasy was destroyed last week when, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, 23 countries announced that between them they are to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats whom they suspect have been working as spies.
