Life
Bridge
If you and your partner ever want to improve your bidding system, I can’t recommend Phil King highly enough as…
Dear Mary: how can I stop my husband from chopping down all our trees?
Q. My husband — currently unemployed — has started ‘sourcing’ logs from our own smallholding. Chopping down perfectly good trees, sawing logs,…
Magnificent Magnus
Magnus Carlsen has won first prize in the elite Tata Steel tournament at Wijk aan Zee, Holland. Leading scores out…
No. 347
White to play. This is a variation from Carlsen-Aronian, Wijk aan Zee 2015. Black has just played his bishop to…
Election blues
In Competition No. 2882 you were invited to submit a blues song written by a well-known politician contemplating the impending…
2196: Diverse
Round the perimeter clockwise goes a place (6) followed by a description of it (10 words, one hyphened) by one…
To 2193: Celebration II
The MUSICIAN (21), Rod Stewart CBE (25A), was born LXX (16) years ago on 10th January 1945. The associated works…
Come on, Tristram Hunt, if you think you’re hard enough
For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought education might become an issue in the general election campaign. The…
Battle for Britain
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How consumer habits are subject to the law of unintended consequences
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
The spirit of Prohibition lives (if you’re a haggis)
It is an old adage, but still pertinent. ‘Every generalisation about India is true, and so is the opposite.’ The…
What Benedict Cumberbatch didn’t understand about ‘coloured’
Benedict Cumberbatch apologised at length: ‘devastated’, ‘shaming’, ‘offended’, ‘inappropriate’. What had he done? Been caught in a compromising situation or…
The spirit of Prohibition
It is an old adage, but still pertinent. ‘Every generalisation about India is true, and so is the opposite.’ The…
Shopping and viewing
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
My four great loves were unrequited (though I had a chance with Ginger Rogers)
I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies…
Twelve miles of indefatigable misery
The taxi-driver wound his window one third of the way down and put a priestlike, confessional ear to the freezing…
I’m opening the pony X-Files: mine may be psychic
My ponies may be psychic. I think they are communicating with each other telepathically. And before you call me delusional,…
The quiet pleasure of washing up (and why I'm still buying a new dishwasher)
I have been having trouble with my dishwasher. It’s seven and a half years old, and it’s manufactured by a…
The Grand National doesn’t need Jeremy Kyle
Never mind David Cameron. Are you participating in the Great Debate about an event of national significance that stirs the…
Bridge
2015 got off to a rollicking start with TGR’s sixth Auction Pairs — chief rollickers being the Norwegians, whose unparalleled…
London Blitz
Britain’s leading grandmaster, Michael Adams, started well in the London Classic, with a beautiful win against the rising star Fabiano…
No: 346
White to play. This position is a variation from Kramnik-Nakamura, London Classic Blitz 2014. How can White make a decisive…
Lines on law
In Competition No. 2881 you were invited to do as Carol Ann Duffy has done and provide an amusing poem…
2195: In question
Each clue contains a superfluous word. When these words are put in sequence according to alphabetical order of answers to…
To 2192: Never again
Eight unclued lights were papal names used only once. Pope JOAN (30) was the fanciful ninth. First prize Michael…
