The Spectator

The unclued lights (10/30/39 and 16/41, 28/35 and 30/32) are WALTZES by Johann Strauss II, apart from (THE) SKATERS Waltz which was composed by Waldteufel. First prize Jon Owen, London Runners-up John Henson, Windsor; J.

Working out the Kinks American singer and vegan activist Moby called the Kinks’ song ‘Lola’ ‘transphobic’ and ‘unevolved’. According to the band, the song was based on a real incident when their manager, Robert Wace, spent the night dancing with a cross-dressing man in a bar in Paris, was alerted to the stubble on his dancing partner’s chin but replied that he was ‘too drunk to care’. The band admitted they did attract such attention because of their name, which was supposedly inspired by their dress sense. As for the name Lola, it had different connotations at the time, as the name of a racing car marque which featured in motor races during the 1960s.

Dark Greens Sir: Both your leading article and Angus Colwell’s cover piece (‘Zacked Off’, 28 March) are bang-on. Although I have never been an activist, I do have some previous as an environmentalist. Among other things, I was briefly employed by the Green party at the turn of the century. I felt I could support it because it represented something important that was otherwise missing from political discourse. It was vaguely liberal, or even libertarian, but not really on the left-right axis. In the mid-2010s I rejoined the party for two years and found that it had been heavily colonised by ‘progressives’ but still contained a decent core. No longer.

The initial and final trio of letters of the eight nine-letter unclued lights are reversals of each other. This property is suggested by the ‘other title’ – There and Back Again – of the puzzle’s title The Hobbit. First prize Tom Rollinson, Borehamwood, Herts Runners-up Richard Higson, Rugby, Warwickshire; Norman Watterson, Hillsborough, Co.

Crude estimates Why is crude oil measured in barrels?  — From medieval times onwards, all sorts of commodities were measured in barrels for convenience, from wine to eels to whale oil. However, standardisation only arrived in fits and starts. Since Richard III’s time, a barrel of wine was defined as 42 ‘wine gallons’, but this wasn’t the same as 42 gallons of water. When the US oil industry started in the mid 19th century, traders adopted the same measure as was used for selling wine. However, in 1824, Britain had standardised a gallon as 20 per cent larger than a wine gallon, the latter of which was renamed a ‘US gallon’. Hence a barrel of oil is only 35 imperial gallons.

Leave the US to it Sir: I was struck by the dichotomy of your 21 March issue. Christopher Caldwell describes President Donald Trump’s world-affecting miscalculation in attacking Iran (‘The end of Trumpism’), while the editorial exhorts us to climb aboard this runaway train to ‘finish the job’. The conflux of multinational involvement in this fiasco is already reminiscent of the tumbling dominoes of August 1914. Underlined by three colliding religions, the scale is now much larger and touches the entire planet. The Americans, for whom the ‘special relationship’ is skin-deep, made this bed and should lie in it, not us. J.B.