Life
My battle with British Gas
By the time I got through to someone at British Gas to complain about them holding £491 of my money…
New York’s new normal
New York Ms Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is a 40-year-old…
Why ‘great’ should be used with great caution
Sir Keir Starmer told his party conference last month that a Labour government would within a year set up a…
The Eton vs Winchester of the wine world
A few days ago, when everything looked black, a small group of us were consoling ourselves over a couple of…
Losing their heads
Chess players tend to fidget while they think. They crack their knuckles, stir their coffee, and bounce their legs. I…
2576: After Eleven – solution
The unclued lights are names of the men who followed Armstrong and Aldrin (Apollo 11) in walking on the moon…
Dear Mary: Should I give weekend guests paper napkins or napkin rings?
Q. I have a hatred of paper napkins – eating outside, they blow away; inside, people drop them on the…
No. 726
White to play. Salov-Horvath, Groningen 1983. In this treacherous rook and pawn endgame, White found the only winning move. What…
Lesson to self: don’t put a bet on in autumn
When things went wrong in his days running the Daily Mirror, the scoundrel Robert Maxwell used to shout: ‘Which effing…
At last, a PM I can look down to
Rishi Sunak’s victory is a testament to how much progress we have made on the equalities front. As recently as…
Aussie life
Australian manufacturers have long been obliged to alert consumers to health hazards. As soon as we found out that peanuts…
Language
Richard Littlejohn wrote recently in Britain’s Daily Mail about an 18-page Inclusive Language Guide which has been sent out to…
The death of humour
New York Rodney Dangerfield was the American Benny Hill: lewd, funny and not exactly politically correct where the weaker sex…
My grandsons have sensed weakness – and it’s costing me
The grandsons are putting two and two together. Grandad is always lying down and groaning when they video call and…
2575: Problem XIII - solution
5 (the number of GOLD RINGS, from ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’: 34/22A) x 103 (the number of the PSALM…
What makes a ‘crisis’?
In his picture from 1932, ‘Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare’, Henri Cartier-Bresson caught the moment when a man in a hat…
Echoes of John Lewis: Piazza at Royal Opera House reviewed
The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves…
Rugby union needs its own Richard Thompson
Dear oh dear, as exasperated kings are known to murmur – just look at the state of rugby union. But…
Dear Mary: How do I curb my brother’s unsavoury language?
Q. My brother, who lives in southern France, uses unsavoury words to gain my attention, such as ‘infernal swine’, ‘schweinhund’…
The embarrassing truth about how I got injured
I had a bicycle accident last week. Not terrible, but not great either. Of the five I’ve had since I…
Spectator competition winners: poems about the Oxford comma
In Competition No. 3271, you were invited to submit a poem about the Oxford comma. Thérèse Coffey’s much-maligned edict about…
Class of the 1980s: my Balliol reunion
Laikipia, Kenya No portrait of Boris Johnson hangs in the hall of Balliol, his old Oxford College. Hardly a surprise,…
Wanted: a trap for a happy mouse
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for something to catch a mouse that won’t cause it any distress,’ said the young chap…
The Battle for Britain | 22 October 2022
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2578: Torture
The same word appears as eight headwords in Chambers. Unclued lights indicate what they mean. The word will appear in…
