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The word is ‘rack’. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, their meanings are indicated by: FRAMEWORK (41), VENGEANCE (4A), DECANT (15D), BONES (1A), GAIT (25), MIST (17), DRINK (42) and SKIN (24). RACK in CRACKED (13) was to be shaded, Title: a further meaning of rack1.
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The first, essential task: repudiate your parents. Reject their values and advice. Make clear they have no right to legislate. There will be rows, of course, but that’s the price. The later task: reject the youthful you. Remove the smirk from that conceited face. It may take tens of years to see this through. Slow and painful, like shedding a carapace. The final, urgent task: repudiate the first repudiation. Try to mend the damage that you wrought. If not too late. Assuming they’re still there to re-befriend.
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It’s the Chancellor who will deliver next week’s Autumn Statement, but every-one knows it will have been ghost-written by Rishi Sunak. When Jeremy Hunt ran for party leader, his own proposal was to take corporation tax from 19 per cent to 15 per cent. Now, he wishes to raise it to 25 per cent. When Hunt speaks next week, we should imagine Sunak’s voice. Liz Truss spooked the markets by combining unexpected tax cuts with a spending splurge bigger than Sunak’s furlough scheme: a £10 billion-a-month subsidy on energy prices, going even to the richest. This was a shock, sprung on markets at a time when interest rates were rising globally. About two-thirds of the interest rate rises that emerged under Truss would probably have happened anyway, but politically this is irrelevant.
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Running the asylum Sir: The interview with Robert Buckland must be the most depressing article I have read for a long time (‘Let them contribute’, 5 November). He notes that the many months of lockdown when no one came into the country presented the perfect opportunity to cut the asylum backlog. Instead it got bigger. He suggests reforming the system so that all information material to a case must be presented upfront, instead of cases being subject to endless appeals. (There’s also the fact that many asylum claimants have confused matters by tossing their passports in the sea during their transit.) One wonders how the Tories allowed this mess to develop, and why they can’t take commonsense steps (including his own suggestions) to resolve it.
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Home Sir Gavin Williamson resigned from the cabinet as minister without portfolio following publication of texts he had sent (annoyed at not being invited to the Queen’s funeral) to the chief whip Wendy Morton, full of swear words. ‘There is a price for everything.’ A former civil servant said that Sir Gavin had told him to slit his throat, which he denied. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, agreed with Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, £35 billion of tax cuts and £25 billion of tax rises, in time for the Office for Budget Responsibility to peruse the proposals before the Autumn Statement next Thursday. The Bank of England had raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage points to 3 per cent.
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Andrew Lycett Describing how individuals get drawn, often haphazardly, into a bloody conflict such as the English Civil War is not an easy task. But Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25), which tingles with a discerning historical imagination. Lily Dunn’s memoir Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99), about her mixed reactions to her beloved dad’s dive into a religious cult and subsequent alcoholism, is notable for its emotional truthfulness, sure sense of time and place and appealing tone of delivery. The novel which gave me most pleasure was Winchelsea by Alex Preston (Canongate, £14.99), a rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and seafarers in Romney Marsh and its coastal hinterland in the 18th century.
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Carbon dating Did burning fossil fuels begin with the industrial revolution, or is there someone else from whom we could claim reparations for carbon emissions? — Artefacts made from coal and dated to 4000 bc have been uncovered in the Shenyang province of north-eastern China, with a formalised industry using coal for copper-smelting in operation by 1000 bc. In Britain, coal has been traced to bronze-age funeral pyres lit prior to 2000 bc. The Romans began mining for coal in the Midlands, and the first deep coal mine was opened in Ashby de la Zouch around 1450 ad. The earliest-known oil product is asphalt used in the construction of the walls of Babylon c. 2000 ad. China probably started using oil as a fuel in around 400 bc.
Live analysis as the results come in from your favorite Spectator editors, staffers, columnists and contributors (and some you don’t like, for good measure).
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and where yesterday I lay broiling in the vat of my bedroom today a sneaky little breeze tickles my soles — Coo-ee! Only me! shifty at first but soon breeze picks up speed with What — did you think I was gone for good? That me and my three ‘e’s had danced our final conga around your curtains and hightailed it out of the element once and for all? Finita la commedia? Leaving you with only the hot, hot heat to tan your hide? My God, you’re a tragedian. I bet you spent the whole 48 hour heatwave being Blanche Dubois around the place, fainting and drawing cold baths. Don’t tell me. I bet you were writing poetry. Oh God, you were. Oh you have to have your psychodrama, don’t you?
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Philip Hensher There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life in the depths of Siberia. I always enjoy Mick Herron’s half-arsed spy thrillers, but Bad Actors (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement. Sheila Llewellyn’s Winter in Tabriz (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.
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Catalogue of disasters Sir: Matthew Parris, in his article ‘The real cause of all the chaos’ (29 October), asks of our last three prime ministers: ‘What big thing did any of these unfortunate souls do wrong?’ In a spirit of helpfulness: Mrs May: net zero by 2050, derisory defence spending. Mr Johnson: hospital clearances, lockdown, vaccine mandates, derisory defence spending. Ms Truss: tax cuts without public sector spending cuts. As a consequence of these three, Britain is not so far away from having to go cap in hand to the IMF once more, and is again confronted by war in Europe as a result of the failure of conventional deterrence.
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in his Clouseau-era. I want to get home knowing at any minute I might karate chop Burt Kwouk as he comes flying round the corner or trap his trouser-tie in the fridge door or flip up the fold-down bed on his head — basically I want to triumph frequently by freakish misadventure. And I want a beige mac and to take liberties with my vowels and I want a range of disguises for every occasion (including one involving lederhosen) and a lava lamp and always at least one eccentric, vastly rich admirer who finds me fascinating. And I want terrible timing that’s also somehow — sublime and I want to be the badass buffoon who might snap the evil villain’s snooker cue but doesn’t break a sweat.
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Talking gobblers Has Elon Musk picked up a turkey in Twitter? – Musk paid $54.2 per share. The share price reached $41.57 on its first day of trading in 2013. It slumped to $14.62 in April 2016 and peaked at $77.06 in February 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, it claimed 229 million active daily users, a rise of 15.9% year on year. There were 39.6 million users in the US. – In Q1 2022 the company raised $1.2 billion in revenue: $1.11 billion from advertising and £94 million from subscriptions. However, in the same quarter the company ran up $1.33 billion in costs. Dirty Cop How are Cop conferences doing at cutting their own carbon emissions?
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Olaf Scholz will be in Beijing this weekend, making the first visit of a western leader to China since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. What might at any other time be regarded as a routine piece of diplomatic outreach is instead a matter of deep concern. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has just cemented his position as dictator-for-life at the Chinese Communist party’s 20th congress. Beijing has followed this up with a series of high-profile visits from countries taking Chinese money for major infrastructure projects. The President of Vietnam arrived on Monday, the Presidents of Tanzania and Pakistan on Wednesday. This will culminate in Scholz’s arrival, the first G7 leader to accept Xi’s invitation. China’s sphere of influence is truly global.
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Home Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, spoke in the Commons of an ‘invasion on our southern coast’ by migrants in small boats. ‘Let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress,’ she said. ‘The whole country knows that is not true.’ She was reacting to a crisis at a migrant processing centre in Manston, Kent, built for 1,600 but housing 4,000. David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, called it ‘really dangerous’. He said an Afghan family had lived in a marquee there for 32 days. It was made more crowded after migrants were moved following an attack with three petrol bombs on a Border Force migrant centre in Dover by a man in a car who then killed himself. On Saturday alone, 990 migrants crossed the Channel.
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Drake, the clot, missed it by a mile. That hook of rock failed to snag his sails into the only gap for a thousand miles and the Ohlone breathed easy in their skins unaware of the Great Inevitable whilst the dew on the antelope’s nose lay undisturbed. Salmon knew the river would not deepen. The eagle’s shadow rippled like a whisper over desert ridges. Grassland rolled a parody of Atlantic waves. Crow and Lakota were still safe behind the Appalachians which dipped to the farms of the Puritans and the graves of the Seminole. One curious soul raised his head, wondered what lay beyond the forest and the valleys. To the west.
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The unclued lights are Oxbridge colleges, hence LIGHT AND DARK blue in the title. First prize A.H. Harker, Oxford Runners-up David Morris, Birchington, Kent; D.
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In her, oily tongued Hughie found his perfect foil: a cockney sparrow, whose pixie cut and skinny frame won the hearts of millions in the age of monochrome. Her money more than doubling as she made the ratings soar, bringing with it a rags-to-riches change. The sky seemed the limit, yet something in her ached for her lost world of nine-to-five, round the corner local, down-to-earth mates. Until finding herself broken on the wheel of flashbulb fame, she threw in the towel, hoping to return to her old, ordinary ways. Instead, uprooted for too long, she withered, took to God and pills, deadheading herself with an overdose on one light-starved, February day.
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Prime numbers At 42, Rishi Sunak is Britain’s youngest PM since Lord Liverpool took office the day after his 42nd birthday in June 1812. He replaced Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister to be assassinated. Much is made of Sunak’s wealth, but he hasn’t enjoyed the privilege Lord Liverpool did (his father was an adviser to George III). Thanks in part to his connections, Lord Liverpool was elected to the Commons as member for Rye at the age of just 20. As he had to be 21 to sit in the Commons, he went on a Grand Tour of Europe until he came of age. He was PM for 15 uninterrupted years. Asian heritage How large is the Asian British population? – According to the ONS, there are 4.2m people in England and Wales – 7.
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Sculpting a solution Sir: Noel Malcolm’s article ‘Relief fund’ (22 October) rightly suggests that legislators should consider the issue of the Parthenon sculptures seriously. Yet the article does little in the way of advancing a meaningful solution. What makes The Parthenon Project unique and not just ‘the latest in a sequence’ is that it offers a real, viable way of breaking the impasse on a centuries-old debate. Its proposal of a win-win solution involving the return of the sculptures to Athens and the establishment of a rotating exhibition of Greek artefacts in London is new but already changing minds – including my own.