Life
Spectator competition winners: filmericks
In Competition No. 3257, you were invited to summarise a film in limerick form. A nod to Ezra Haber Glenn,…
Has identity politics had its day?
Have we reached peak woke? In Hollywood, that seems to be the emerging consensus. Thanks to the box office success…
Silver and gold
The ‘English chess explosion’ that began in the 1970s produced a bumper crop of grandmasters, which meant that by the…
The Battle for Britain | 16 July 2022
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The Oprah-fication of Wimbledon
Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 – the year of the boycott – is over, a few thoughts about…
The power of prayerful washing-up
My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the…
Bridge | 16 July 2022
The return to pre-Covid normality has been slow and a bit dispiriting. Attendance at the popular English tournaments has been…
Aussie life
Coined, as it was, by a dead white man whose oeuvre is considered one of the crowning achievements of Western…
Language
No language column can ignore Professor Brendan Murphy’s extraordinary 78-word definition of ‘woman’. As you know, when he was questioned…
No. 710
White to play. J. Polgar-Carlsen, Casual blitz game, Madrid 2022. Carlsen’s last move 15…Ra8-c8 was a losing blunder. How did…
Sundae best: how to make a knickerbocker glory
I grew up by the seaside. More precisely, I grew up near South Shields, on the north-east coast – somewhere…
2560: Obit VI - solution
The perimetric names are NIJINSKY, NEVER SAY DIE, CREPELLO, THE MINSTREL, ROBERTO and TEENOSO, six of the nine Derby winners…
Spectator competition winners: famous poems rewritten as short stories
In Competition No. 3256, you were invited to take a well-known poem and recast it as a short story. Ben…
2563: Areas for development
11 Across (two words) suggests the other unclued lights, which are all one-word anagrams of words of a kind (one…
Nepo’s playbook
Ian Nepomniachtchi is back for more. The former world championship challenger left his rivals in the dust at the Candidates…
The Battle for Britain | 9 July 2022
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Why racing needs Frankie Dettori
Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was…
The joy of a children’s choir
All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those…
A boiler service, spaghetti western-style
The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came…
Dear Mary: How do I get my cleaner to put everything back in its proper place?
Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests…
The delights of two-timing
Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky.…
My admiration for the other Toby Young
It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert…
The unhappy truth about holidays
In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of…
My memorable night at the Carlton Club
‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a…
‘Pinch’ has long packed a punch
Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking,…
