A voyage through fine wine off Sardinia

One could get used to this. I come from seafaring stock, albeit distant. ‘Anderson’ suggests Viking antecedents, especially as my forebears came from the Shetland Islands. Yet there must have been something wrong with the first Anderson. Other Vikings reached Normandy, Sicily, even Byzantium. At the very least, they found the odd monastery to plunder. Later, their Norman descendants compensated for cultural destruction with cultural creation. But to endure the rigours of crossing from Norway and then disembark on Shetland? Was my remote ancestor seasick, or mutinous, or did he rape the cabin boy? We will never know.

A millennium or so later, life at sea was rather different. We were on a yacht, cruising between Sardinia and Corsica. A golden sun presided over a sapphire sea as we sailed among islands, beneath limestone cliffs topped by fishing villages – some fortified. In the background were granite mountains of infinite antiquity. This was a landscape made for mythology plus long history. You might expect to encounter a trireme laden with amphorae, or a Barbary pirate ship searching for slaves. Such expeditions were regular until shortly before the US Marines arrived at Tripoli in the 19th century: hence the fortified villages.

Our expedition was enhanced by a superb crew. If they were merely pretending to take pleasure in our pleasure, they are all entitled to a gold Equity card. Among them was a hugely promising young chef who delighted in making local ingredients sing: superb fish, often raw, including sea urchin, a delight of mine – but reinforced by forays into wagyu beef.

The wine did not fall short. Which was best: the Krug, the Dom Pérignon or the Polly Roger Cuvée Winston Churchill? I could have tried to rack my palate into differentiating between magnificences. Oddly enough, I preferred to luxuriate across them and award gold medals all round.

Our host was an oenophile. At lunch, we concentrated on premier cru chardonnay – Puligny-Montrachet, Chablis, Meursault – interspersed with some excellent Sardinians, not to mention the best Vermentino I have ever tasted, an Antinori Bolgheri Blanco 2017. Leaving aside a 2011 Yquem, as good as expected, the finest white was a Chassagne-Montrachet Les Vergers Guy Amiot 2006, with everything a great white Burgundy should display and not yet at its summit.

Dinner allowed reds to triumph. A ’99 Haut-Brion and a ’95 Rene Rostaing Cote Rotie La Landonne were contrasting excellences. One knew what they ought to do. So lift the glass to the nostril, delight in the overture and then move reverentially to the symphony, and the grandeur. It was everything one expected.

As was the bottle of the voyage, an Armand Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Clos St Jacques ’08. Armand Rousseau regularly exhausts superlatives. Yet even by those standards, this was a splendid wine.

When the viewer is equipped with a great red, or a serious cognac, plus a cigar, dance is an excellent spectator sport. As the sun made a final curtsey behind the mountains, now god-haunted with nightfall, and the sea grew lustrous under a full moon, two enchanting girls took the floor, dancing with mischievous grace. Although neither will see 35 again, they wove enchantments like wood nymphs, or indeed young goddesses. How can we know the dancer from the dance? They added a garland of laurels to a sublime voyage. What glorious fun.

What took you so long, Seb Coe?

There’s a left-wing internet advocacy group called 38 Degrees which suggests to its followers that all they have to do is click a button and all the bad things in the world will be outlawed. It is a pleasant conceit. Its name derives from the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche, which is nicely self-deprecating of it. The problem is that so few people believe in its drivel that the closest it gets is about six degrees, which is the angle at which snowflakes remain exactly where they are until it thaws and they melt.

Still, it is a useful simile and I think we may be in a 38 Degrees moment with transgenderism. The avalanche seems to be happening. I am on this issue, mind, an unreliable narrator, too suffused with a natural optimism to be properly objective – and I have been wrong before. Three or four years ago I suggested that, with regards to the culture war, we were at ‘peak wank’ – a delicate phrase I hoped would be popularised. It wasn’t and we were nowhere near the peak – hell, BLM hadn’t even happened.

So that’s the caveat. But to switch geological similes for a moment, the tectonic plates within our benighted elites seem to be shifting with transgenderism. First we had the transgender cyclist Emily Bridges booted out of an important women’s race when cycling’s governing body decided to toughen up the rules regarding testosterone. Next, swimming’s world governing body, Fina, banned transgender swimmers from competing in women’s races. Then rugby league got in on the act, banning transgender players from taking part in international competitions for the foreseeable future – including the women’s rugby league world cup – while they take further ‘consultation’ on the matter. And then, most recently, there has been the interesting case of Sebastian Coe.

Cue Chariots of Fire theme music. Yes, I know the film wasn’t about him, but it came out at around about the time Seb was winning gold medals at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games, and it tapped into the same sense of national pride we all felt watching him run slightly quicker than foreigners (and sometimes Steve Ovett) around a track. Later Seb went into politics where he distinguished himself by being The Man Who Never Said Anything – it is hard to think of a politician possessed of less charisma or ideology. His most recent posting has been as president of World Athletics and it was in this role that he expressed his support for Fina’s decision to ban transgender swimmers from competing against women and intimated that World Athletics would be very likely to follow suit quite soon.

For Coe, biology trumps gender and he added: ‘If one of my colleagues here in my team suddenly becomes transgender, it doesn’t make a difference to me. They will continue to do the same job with skill and aplomb in exactly the way they were before they made that transition. This is not possible in sport. It is fundamental to performance and integrity and that, for me, is the big, big difference.’ Aah, yes, quite. That would be about right. But what kept you?

And this is the thing. I will bet my most valuable possession – a certificate from the Avenue Junior School in Nunthorpe for coming second in the sack race on sports day, 1969 – that Coe, along with the great and good from all those other aforementioned sporting bodies, has long been of the opinion that having transgender women (or, to give them a simpler title, ‘men’) take part in women’s sport is an absurdity and risks destroying it. But they all kept their gobs shut while brave campaigners such as the former swimmer Sharron Davies (not to mention J.K. Rowling) attracted odium and death threats simply for articulating a number of indisputable truths. They doubtless feared they’d be vilified and presented as being on the ‘wrong side of history’, even if they were on the right side of reality. So they effectively connived with the wokies and, for far too long, did their bidding, gaining brownie points from the progressives all the while.

So what has changed now? How have we suddenly reached this 38 Degrees? Is it the case that these authorities, and ol’ Seb, have suddenly realised that most of the British population (and around 99 per cent of the world population) think it ludicrous that transgender women should compete against women, or be allowed to stay in women’s prisons or all-girls schools? Perhaps – even if the precise opposite opinion is still held by all the parties who will form a singularly unpleasant coalition after the next general election (Labour, the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Greens), as well as one or two Conservatives. That they at last realise that almost nobody buys into this arrant rubbish?

It is partly true that of all the deranged denials of reality issuing from wokedom, the transgender issue is the one which is most easily provable as being ridiculous. It is also true that at least on transgenderism, a hefty proportion of one of our many victim groups, the feminists, side – however briefly – with common sense and reality. We have also seen a certain belated and still insufficient pushback by the state against transgenderism, with the sidelining of organisations such as Stonewall, which dispense radical pro-trans propaganda. In a sense, then, transphobia (as Stonewall would call it) has become the hate that dares to speak its name. And so we have a very welcome avalanche.

We are still not at the peak, though, I fear. There is still a way to go before we can erect statues to Cecil Rhodes in our town centres.

Dear Mary: Must I call my new partner my ‘boyfriend’ when we’re in our seventies?

Q. My girlfriend and I have started using a personal trainer for some joint sessions at our local gym; the sessions are generally very good and we are really enjoying them. The issue is that the trainer spends quite a lot of the time on his mobile phone and it often distracts him from what he is meant to be teaching us. Sometimes we have to ask him what we are doing next while he is scrolling on his device. We are paying a lot and expect a better service, but I find it awkward saying anything to him about his phone habits. Any suggestions?

– Name and address withheld

A. When he starts using his mobile, pull out your own and exclaim jollily: ‘Oh good, we’re having a break are we? What a relief!’ This should embarrass him into desisting. If it doesn’t, ask if he is finding new exercises on the phone to torment you with. Take a teasing rather than a bitter tone, and even jostle the mobile from his hands if necessary.

Q. My wife has recently given birth to our first child. We are obviously thrilled. However we have a problem: my mother. She is a retired midwife (who hasn’t practised since l974 after having children) and is very keen to give us the benefit of her experience. This isn’t always particularly welcome as she is a rather forthright character. Mary, how can we politely ask her to desist with the ‘helpful pointers’ without causing offence?

– J.D., Rogerstone, South Wales

A. This is not the time for you and your wife to assert self-sufficiency. Forthright or not, your mother must be allowed to air her views for self-validation and other reasons, to say nothing of your obeying the fifth commandment. Humour her. She will be the most reliable babysitter you could hope for.

Q. In later life (our mid-seventies) a male friend and I find ourselves in a rewarding relationship. We want to know how we should describe this relationship to others in a way that shows we are more than friends. We feel it would be grotesque, at our age, to talk of having a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and neither of us likes ‘partner’, ‘squeeze’ or ‘we are now an item’. It is none of anyone else’s business, of course, but we would like to be invited as each other’s plus ones.

– F.S., London SW5

A. The word ‘admirer’ is under-used where relationships are concerned. It is pleasantly non-graphic but still conjures up the commitment message. ‘By the way I have an admirer these days – may I bring him along?’ Moreover in day-to-day life it will pay psychological dividends for you to think of each other as admirers. Who wants to behave badly in front of someone who admires them?

The ancient art of love spells

An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall in love. What an appalling prospect! You might suddenly find yourself consumed with an irresistible desire for Ian Blackford. The ancients knew what was really required: a means of ensuring that the object of your passion fell in love with you.

The ancients regarded an attack of lust as the same sort of experience as falling ill or being afflicted by madness. So a man in love with a woman would write a love spell asking a god or some unpleasant earth spirit to, for example, ‘burn, torch, the soul of X, her female body, her limbs, lay her low with fever, until she leaves her husband’s home and comes to me, now, quickly’.

So common were such requests that a lead tablet survives with blank spaces to be filled in with the name of the woman in question: ‘lead _____ to me, burning on account of her love and desire for me, drive _____ from her parents, from her bedroom and force her to give me what I want.’

For women the emphasis was slightly different, usually more a matter of ensuring that her husband remained faithful and affectionate towards her. For this purpose she would write a spell or buy a special ring, amulet, ointment or knotted cord designed for the purpose.

We also hear of the courtesan Hermione, who wore a girdle of flowers with a spell inscribed in gold: ‘Keep loving me for ever and do not get angry if another man holds me.’ She needed to keep her customers.

But it could all go badly wrong. In myth, when Hercules brought a woman home, his wife smeared his robe with a substance which she believed would keep him faithful to her. But it killed him. Indeed, we hear of a remarkably similar court case in Athens in which a woman is accused of accidentally killing her lover with a secret potion.

Still, Oxford dons have made fortunes from vaccines. Why not from love pills? Better move quickly before Goopy Gwyneth cashes in on this hocus pocus.

Portrait of the week: Rail strikes, rates rise and a record-breaking stingray

Home

A rail strike on three alternate days, bringing the system to a standstill for a week, was organised by the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union. On the first day, the London Underground came out too. Tram drivers in south London arranged a strike of their own. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, instructed his frontbenchers not to join strikers’ picket lines, but some did. EasyJet announced plans to cut 7 per cent of its 160,000 flights scheduled between July and September after Gatwick, easyJet’s main airport, said it would reduce the number of flights taking off. Flights carrying up to 5,000 passengers were cancelled at Heathrow airport on one day because of trouble with baggage-handling. The Treasury confirmed that the state pension triple lock was being reinstated, meaning that pensions would rise by about 10 per cent; benefits would also rise by the rate of inflation. Interest rates were raised by the Bank of England from 1 per cent to 1.25 per cent, the highest level in 13 years. Inflation rose from 9 to 9.1 per cent.

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, had an NHS operation on his sinuses under general anaesthetic at 6 a.m. on Monday. Three days earlier he had made another visit to Kyiv to shake President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hand and announce training for Ukrainian servicemen. His absence meant he missed an engagement with the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs, annoying some of them. General Sir Patrick Sanders, the new Chief of the General Staff, said in an internal message: ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underlines our core purpose – to protect the UK and to be ready to fight and win wars on land – and reinforces the requirement to deter Russian aggression.’

Lord Geidt tried to explain why he had resigned as the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser. He had been asked for advice on an issue he believed would amount to a deliberate breach of the ministerial code, he said, and ‘this request has placed me in an impossible and odious position’. He later added that claims he resigned over steel tariffs were a ‘distraction’ from the real reason. The proportion of people with Covid rose by 10 June to one in 50 in England and one in 30 in Scotland, a survey by the Office for National Statistics found. The number in hospital with Covid rose from a low of about 5,000 to about 6,000, though most had been admitted for other things. Barristers belonging to the Criminal Bar Association voted to strike over Legal Aid.

Abroad

Russia continued its artillery assault in the Donbas region and renewed attacks on Kharkiv. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, called Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports, preventing export of grain, a ‘real war crime’. Russia warned Lithuania of ‘serious’ consequences after it stopped the rail transfer of some goods to the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. The Secretary General of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, said: ‘It could take years. We must not let up in supporting Ukraine.’ Russia became China’s biggest supplier of oil, displacing Saudi Arabia. Dmitry Muratov, the Russian editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, auctioned his Nobel Peace Prize medal for £84 million in aid of Unicef’s work for Ukrainian refugees.

President Emmanuel Macron of France lost his majority in parliament with the broad left-wing alliance under Jean-Luc Mélenchon winning 131 of the 577 seats and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally 89; both left and right oppose the President’s attempt to raise the retirement age gradually from 62 to 65. Israel is to hold its fifth general election in three years; until then its prime minister, Naftali Bennett, will swap places with the alternate prime minister, Yair Lapid. In America, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.75 of a percentage point to a target range of 1.50 to 1.75 per cent.

Fina, the world governing body of swimming, barred transgender women from elite female competitions if they had experienced any part of male puberty. The Rugby League authorities followed suit. A French court, the Conseil d’Etat, prohibited Grenoble from allowing burkinis to be worn in public swimming pools. A court in Japan, the only country in the G7 not to allow people of the same sex to marry, ruled that the prohibition was not unconstitutional. American-led coalition forces said they had captured a senior leader of the jihadist Islamic State, named as Hani Ahmed al-Kurdi, in a helicopter raid near the Turkish border in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, held by opposition forces. A nasty-looking freshwater stingray weighing 661lb was caught in the Mekong in Cambodia. CSH

How McCartney and I helped put pop on the map

In 1977, when I set up the South Bank Show for ITV, I wanted Paul McCartney to be on the first programme. His unique talent apart, I thought he would be the key to unlocking one of my chief aims in the new programme, which was to disrupt the accepted order of play in which classical music, ballet and opera were at the top of the pyramid while down at the bottom was pop music. McCartney took some netting, but he came on and we met at Abbey Road Studios at about midnight and the programme was launched. Not without criticism: the Daily Telegraph critic wrote that as far as arts programmes were concerned, it drew the line at Lennon/McCartney. Those were the days. Clive James saw what the programme was trying to do and backed it and that was vital. Forty-five years on, pop music is now well dug in as one of the major creative springs in the arts and, at 80 years old, even more impossibly handsome, relentlessly prolific and immovably grounded, McCartney still seems to be a ruler in that world. His lyrics now run alongside contemporary poetry, his music is orchestrated, but above all the songs go on and so does he. Who would have thought that an 80-year-old would dominate festivals and television as he has done these past few weeks? What happened to 64?

Hunter Davies, author of 103 books, wrote the first full biography of the Beatles in the 1960s. His most recent book is on Hampstead Heath, that postage-stamp Lake District that is a unique, complex open space in a world city. Hunter points out in his book that again and again this (for a city) vast heathland has been saved by obstinate and far-sighted individuals who are prepared to be awkward. We need people like that again now. ‘Developers’ are on the march. It seems that the best way to get what you want is not to apply for permissions, but to just go ahead, do what you want and hope that a council which does not have resources will give retrospective permission to what has been done unlawfully. In the neighbourhood, for instance, I know that very extensive excavation/landscaping has taken place in a large back garden, with at least 100 skips of soil removed. Flats have been turned into short-term-letting apartments and much else. It’s odd to watch the law being ignored in what I still believe is essentially a law-abiding country.

It’s difficult for me not to compare this recklessness to England 1945-1958, the timescale for my memoir Back in the Day, which is set in the small town of Wigton. Wigton is essentially a market town but had two small factories, 5,000 people, 12 places of worship and, most of all for myself, my friends and every one from my background, an astonishing Ali Baba’s cave of hobbies. The often numbing, ill-paid and repetitive work was overlaid with layers of wonderful local examples of these passionate private pursuits. There were dogs of dozens of varieties, including those who won at Crufts, church choirs, school choirs, town choirs, a cycling club, a swimming club, football, rugby, cricket, tennis, the Scouts and the Guides, mini copses of allotments, of course, regular dances and socials. There were fights in pubs and at the dances sometimes on Saturday nights, and by contemporary standards some of the accommodation was near intolerable. But the people came out of two wars and an economic breakdown to build what became a better place. The book is a memoir and not social history, yet as I was writing the story of my time, it seemed England then had great stoicism and a deeply textured attachment to community. The problem is, this sort of stuff can run into a blizzard of nostalgia. But there were differences and it’s sometimes hard to remember that we live in the same country as back then.

This is the last week for this season’s run of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. Rarely has there been a more misleading title. One of our rules is to be ‘never knowingly relevant’. Another is to rove wherever we want – from the Far East to medieval Europe to the Ancient World, from astrophysics to philosophy to religion, each time guided by three outstanding academics. We now bring in contributors from all over the world and a ‘panel’ can regularly include someone from Washington and Germany, as well as a British university. Simon Tillotson, the producer, and I take great pleasure in hopping from Mao to Dylan Thomas, to Chinese warlords to key points in religious history. When it came up at the BBC, after I’d left Start the Week, I was offered, rather gingerly, a six-month contract. We have been going now for about 24 years, and the podcast seems to whizz around the world like Ariel. I can’t think of any other broadcasting institution in the world that would put on, sustain and nourish such a programme.

Cutting the cost of government is the only solution to this crisis

A little over a year ago, The Spectator printed a cover story about the risk of inflation. Britain, we argued, was hugely vulnerable: the national debt was structured in such a way that even a small uptick in inflation followed by a rise in interest rates would inflict immense damage on public finances. The conventional wisdom was that there was no such risk, that rates would be ‘low for long’. But what if this consensus was wrong? The Financial Times took the unusual step of writing a story about our story. ‘The Spectator joins the inflation doom-mongers,’ it announced.

‘Doom’ was pushing it a bit: we simply sought to underline the complacency with which governments, central banks and many analysts viewed the economic horizon. Lack of concern about inflation was all the more dangerous because it helped justify the spending, borrowing and money-printing of the post-crash years – and the response to the pandemic. It confirmed that any belief that a ‘modern monetary theory’ had done away with the need to balance budgets was misguided. As it turns out, basic economic rules always applied. The big spenders ended up unleashing forces that they have since struggled to control, or even understand.

Yes, the problem is global. Joe Biden borrowed a trillion dollars and spent it on a rebounding American economy, which was always going to have risks for the world economy. But Britain was just as bad, extending lockdowns for far longer than was necessary and printing £400 billion to pay for it, while all the time saying that inflation would not return. In November, the Bank of England thought that inflation would peak at 5 per cent, more than double its target. In February, it thought 7 per cent. Now it says 11 per cent, and even this might not be the worst of it. The price of petrol is rising much faster, with many drivers paying £2.20 a litre, against an average of £1.30 last year. While the Ukraine war has forced up fuel prices, this is only part of the problem. Workers everywhere will see the value of their salaries decline – while having to hand over a greater slice to the government than at any time in living memory.

With such misery in prospect, it’s no wonder that the unions are demanding more pay. Their tactics work. Unions have, over the years, helped the average train driver to be paid a salary twice that of the average passenger. Striking is an effective tool of leverage, and the RMT’s donations of almost £250,000 to the Labour party over the past ten years have secured it allies in parliament. Two dozen Labour MPs joined the picket lines this week. Why would the unions not keep pressing ahead? There’s no incentive to stop.

More strikes will be coming. Employees of several former state-run companies – Royal Mail, British Airways and BT – are considering industrial action. Civil servants and teachers could be next. The Royal College of Nursing, a union representing NHS workers, wants a pay rise of five percentage points above inflation – which, if granted, would be a massive bite into an NHS budget that will soon account for 44 per cent of day-to-day public service spending by the state (up from 27 per cent 20 years ago). How much money will be left to try to deal with an NHS waiting list which is now at six million, and is expected to rise to nine million?

The problem for Boris Johnson is that he now has a reputation for caving in to pressure. He struggles to survive on an almost weekly basis, and his government loses almost every fight, including battles with footballers. It makes perfect sense for the unions to push him, and to expect that at some point he will buckle.

The average public sector pay rise is 2 per cent: any more, the government says, would be inflationary and irresponsible. But the ‘triple lock’ policy means state pensions are guaranteed to rise with inflation. So once again older voters are protected while the young are told that there’s nothing to be done.

All this will present obvious problems at election time. Tories are panicking already, but their ideas will come to nothing unless they see that the only solution is to cut the cost of government. High taxes hold back economic growth and make everyone poorer. So it’s time to ask whether we really want to pour £300 billion a year into a welfare system that doesn’t work properly and to keep 5.3 million on out-of-work benefits in a labour shortage.

Radical thinking is needed once again, and new arguments will be required. This presents a problem for a Prime Minister who came to office with the expectation of constant borrowing – dismissing concerns from those who warned that inflation might return. He can shake the magic money tree all he likes, but there’s no cash left. Johnson has weighed down the economy by presiding over a government that is now 55 per cent larger than it was even in the Blair years.

The strikes are just one of the many side-effects of inflation. The only option now for Johnson is to start charting a course towards restraint on spending, to lift the huge burden of taxation and give the economy a chance to recover. This will be a long, slow process, but if the Tories are serious about governing, they must start it now.

Will my kitchen be designated a ‘safe space’?

As the father of four children who will be entering higher education in the next few years, I’m worried that my home will shortly start to resemble a university campus. In other words, I’ll be forced to declare my preferred gender pronouns, the kitchen will be designated a ‘safe space’ and the collected works of J.K. Rowling will be burnt on the garden lawn. You may think I’m joking, but a new poll from the Higher Education Policy Institute lays bare just how thin-skinned today’s students are.

For instance, 61 per cent of undergraduates say that ‘when in doubt’ their university ‘should ensure all students are protected from discrimination rather than allow unlimited free speech’ and 79 per cent believe ‘students that feel threatened should always have their demands for safety respected’. You may think it was ever thus – haven’t the long-haired opium-eaters always been zealous enforcers of progressive orthodoxy? But the same questions were asked of students six years ago and they’ve become even less tolerant since then.

In 2016, an alarming 16 per cent of respondents thought ‘students’ unions should ban all speakers that cause offence to some students’, but that figure has now climbed to a whopping 39 per cent. Today, 76 per cent of students think universities should ‘get rid of’ controversial statues and memorials, up from 51 per cent in 2016. Six years ago, 48 per cent of undergrads supported safe-space policies; that number is now 62 per cent. I’m tempted to brand these militant crybabies ‘Generation Snowflake’, but they’re so hypersensitive that might lead to mental health services on campus being overwhelmed.

Nick Hillman, the director of HEPI, charitably attributes this decline in support for free speech to the tough time students have had in the past six years, leading to a preoccupation with ‘safety’. ‘Back then undergraduates had been born in the previous century, whereas today’s young undergraduates were born after the turn of the millennium – and they have had to contend with Covid, industrial action and a cost-of-living crisis,’ he says.

There may be something in that, but surely the main cause is that organisations such as Stonewall and Advance HE have successfully infected British universities with hard-left identitarian ideology under the guise of promoting ‘diversity and inclusion’. Last week, 25 Conservative MPs and peers signed a letter to the Education Secretary alerting him to the Racial Equality Charter, Advance HE’s latest attempt to tackle ‘institutional and cultural’ discrimination in a sector which must rank as the least racist in the UK. In their desperation to secure a bronze or silver Race Equality Charter award, 20 universities have said they are ‘decolonising’ their courses. The irony is that nearly all these ‘anti-racism’ initiatives have been imported from America – ‘colonisation’ might be a more accurate description of the process Advance HE is overseeing on British campuses.

Hillman implies that HEPI’s poll points to the need for universities to get their own houses in order rather than more ‘top-down regulation’, a reference to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill which will impose greater obligations on English universities to protect and promote free speech. But haven’t they squandered that chance? Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced some light-touch legislation designed to defend academic freedom in 1986 and in the intervening decades things have got much worse. The Higher Education Bill is a much needed corrective.

An additional reason that parents of teenage children should be worried about the ideological monoculture at British universities is that the Law Commission of England and Wales has recommended the scrapping of the ‘dwelling exception’, whereby you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up hatred against various protected groups in the privacy of your own home. It has already been done away with in Scotland and there are moves afoot to get rid of it in Northern Ireland. Once that’s gone, university students will be able to inform on their parents to the authorities and then be summoned to appear as witnesses for the prosecution. In Northern Ireland, one proposal being considered is to make ‘transmisogyny’ a hate crime, meaning you could be prosecuted for telling your pink-haired teenage daughter that you don’t think trans women are women.

In the name of keeping vulnerable groups ‘safe’, Britain is rapidly becoming a totalitarian society and, as this new poll makes clear, universities are doing their best to help this along.

The Battle for Britain | 25 June 2022

Bridge | 25 June 2022

At a bridge tournament about 15 years ago, I started chatting to a friendly, eccentric woman in her mid-sixties, wearing a sequined baseball cap. I had no idea who she was, but when she told me her name, I knew at once: the well-regarded bridge columnist of the Independent. What I hadn’t realised was that Maureen Hiron, who died last week, led such a fascinating life outside of bridge. She started her career as a teacher at a London comprehensive, but was pensioned off at 32 when an air-conditioner fell on her head. The accident, she believed, somehow unshackled her creativity, and soon after, she invented Continuo, an abstract strategy game played with coloured tiles. It rapidly became the bestselling game in England. She went on to invent 70 more games which sold across the world, and co-authored several trivia quiz books with her husband. As if that wasn’t enough, she wrote songs, and for a while was manager of the pop group Boney M., having made friends with one of them on a Caribbean cruise. And all the while, she played bridge at the highest level, several times representing England in the women’s game.

Here she is in action, bringing home a slam that most players in the same tournament failed to make.

Against 6♥, West led the ♦A and continued the suit. The only thing that could go wrong was a bad heart split: if West held Jxxx there was no hope, but if East did, she might prevail via a trump coup. To reduce her trumps to the same number as East, she began by cashing the ♠A and ruffing a spade. Then came the ♥A and a heart to the ♥K (West showing out), followed by another spade ruff. She now cashed her minor suit winners, ending in dummy with the A♣, and in the 2-card ending, a spade from dummy caught East’s ♥J under her ♥Q10.

The joy of Royal Ascot

In a disintegrating country, stuck for the moment with a Prime Minister who can’t see the difference between a proliferation of photo-ops and the act of governing, we needed a Royal Ascot week. No racecourse in the world does photo-ops better than Ascot – the carriage processions, the toppers and tails (and yes, Madam, wear what appears to be a pair of mating macaws on your titfer if that is what rocks your boat), the bandstand singsongs. But at Ascot they know that the show counts for nothing without the substance and in its enthusiastic embrace of internationalism (another contrast with Downing Street) Ascot delivers, bringing top-class contestants from the United States, Australia, Japan, France and Germany to vie with Britain’s best.

Typical was the Queen Mary Stakes. America’s Wesley Ward has had eight juvenile winners at Royal Ascot and collected four Queen Marys. He told everyone how confident he was that his Golden Pal would win, but Yorkshire’s Karl Burke, opposing him with Dramatised, declared: ‘I’ll take my hat off to him if he can beat Dramatised – in fact, I’ll give him my hat.’ In the end, no handover of head wear was required: Dramatised won handsomely and Ward proved that Americans, too, can be good losers with the wry comment: ‘Some days it’s chicken, some days it’s feathers.’

The week was about jockeyship as much as equine athleticism and sometimes it can be as hard for riders to acclimatise as it can be for horses. Wesley Ward had brought over the US star Irad Ortiz to ride Golden Pal. I noted Ortiz before the race, constantly twitching in the saddle as if dissatisfied with his gear. He was then caught napping as the stalls opened because he hadn’t realised that horses in Britain only get so many attempts to enter the stalls and his eye was on a horse who had been excluded thinking he was yet to load. More homework next time, Irad. To add to his misfortunes, the talented US jockey also got a five-day suspension for letting another Wesley Ward star, the filly Love Reigns, drift across others in her race.

It was a different story for the 20-year-old Irish jockey Shane Crosse who rode State of Rest for Joseph O’Brien in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes. In 2020 he had been due to ride Galileo Chrome in the St Leger but caught Covid at the wrong time and missed out as Tom Marquand rode him to Classic victory. This time he faced jockeys of Derby-winning experience in Frankie Dettori on multiple Group One winner Lord North, Cristian Demuro on the Japanese Derby winner Shahryar, Mickael Barzalona on French Group One winner Grand Glory and Ryan Moore on the Sir Michael Stoute-trained favourite Bay Bridge. None of them wanted to make the pace, so Shane Crosse went out in front and stayed there. Maybe the other riders forgot that State of Rest had already won big races in the United States, Australia and France. Anyway, when they tried to pass him they couldn’t: the young rider had judged it perfectly in front. As he said afterwards: ‘It’s the most straightforward way to win the race.’

For Frankie Dettori, so long the darling of Ascot, it was a meeting he will want to forget. Not only did he have bad luck on Lord North, his hood becoming entangled in the bridle as they left the stalls, on his 24th ride on the crowd’s favourite Stradivarius he simply got it wrong, inexplicably taking him back halfway through the race and then becoming caught up in traffic when he needed to unleash a burst of speed at the end. Stradivarius, looking for his record-equalling Gold Cup, was only third and Frankie’s long-time mentor John Gosden and owner Bjorn Nielsen were openly critical. He was unable to win on the Queen’s Reach For The Moon, an odds-on shot who wasn’t quite good enough, and got beaten by a head finishing fast on her Saga in the Britannia. Being Frankie, though, he rescued his popularity by winning on Inspiral after another poor start.

The other jockey story was that of Paul Hanagan, winner of the Norfolk Stakes on the 50-1 shot The Ridler for trainer Richard Fahey. Two weeks before, he had been dropped as Fahey’s stable jockey at 41, having joined him at 17. It was an emotional moment for the now freelance Hanagan, but emotions of another kind were stirred as he veered across the course in the final stages, wiping out the chances of three other runners without much effort to keep his mount straight. The stewards gave him a ten-day holiday from the saddle but in some other racing jurisdictions – the United States, for example – The Ridler would have been disqualified. Champion trainer, yet again, was Ireland’s Aidan O’Brien, but one thing I noted was that, of the English trainers who succeeded, five were Yorkshire-based. Richard Fahey and Karl Burke had two winners apiece, David O’Meara one. If they can do it on the Flat, why do northern trainers do so poorly over Cheltenham’s jumps?

Rewilding will kill Waitrose

‘Do you care about the woodland? Do you care about the wildlife?’ shouted the bearded Woodland Trust volunteer from his table of tree-hugging paraphernalia set up outside Waitrose.

He had pitched his camp – a trestle table covered in leaflets and bedecked with pictures of foxes and badgers – so close to the supermarket entrance on Cobham High Street that it was impossible for customers to get through the doors without running the gauntlet of his leaflets.

No doubt these leaflets explained that the Woodland Trust is the largest woodland conservation charity in the United Kingdom and is concerned with the creation, protection and restoration of our native woodland heritage. It has planted 55 million trees since 1972.

I did not stop as I was in a hurry to buy a sandwich, because one of the things I care about is putting calories inside myself so that I can keep going. That day, as usual, I needed energy in order to tend four horses and six acres of land, although I know that would be something the man with the beard would probably frown upon, for where is the woodland in that situation?

It’s around the sides of the fields, as it happens, but in the main, the place where I keep my horses is a farm producing food.

There is woodland, but there are also crop fields, where the stuff we put in our mouths to sustain our time on this planet is grown.

And I rushed inside Waitrose to buy an example of this, a sandwich including the sort of iron-rich greenery that is grown on the estate where I keep my horses, and where the rent from my being an equestrian enthusiast helps, along with other diversification, to make financially viable the back-breaking and often heart-breaking endeavour of planting and harvesting good-quality vegetables for human consumption.

All this was going through my mind as I took the sandwich from the shelves of this nice, smart Waitrose and wrestled with something called ‘quick check’, which I should have known did not mean I could scan my own sandwich quickly, but rather that I should have done something with a gadget as I went around the shop.

So I queued up for a cashier and when she was putting my sandwich through, I remarked to her – because they are all very friendly in Waitrose – that the man outside the door was a perplexing thing.

‘What man?’ the lady asked, as she beeped through my beef and spinach sandwich. ‘The man from the Woodland Trust,’ I said, and I explained the huge, slightly manic-looking trestle table crammed with leaflets, which was virtually up against Waitrose’s sliding front doors.

‘Oh, he’s not meant to be there,’ she said, as I tapped my card. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he is there, and he’s asking everyone who comes in here if they care about the woodlands. It’s ironic, isn’t it?’

She shrugged, so I said: ‘You know, the more we rewild to woodland, the more we plant trees, like they are doing everywhere now, the more farmland we lose, the less we can grow what you’re selling in here.’

I looked around at the gleaming shelves of organic produce boasting ethical origins and careful sourcing. And the well-dressed, environmentally conscious, wealthy Surrey types with their ‘bags for life’, wandering around conscientiously choosing meat and veg that made them feel good because it had been produced in this country and not flown or shipped across the world using horrible amounts of fuel, or in conditions that could not be verified.

The cashier looked nonplussed, so I let it go. I did not spell it out: they were letting a man who was advocating, in effect, the end of her job, stand outside her place of work shouting at her customers to help him end it. Because let’s be clear, once there is no locally grown produce, because all the farmland is woodland, not many people are going to shop at Waitrose because there is not going to be much point. When all our food is imported from Europe, North and South America and the Far East, we may as well all shop at places that are so cheap the staff don’t care if you put a box of cereal up your jumper (as someone once told me).

I walked back out and the bearded man had another go at me, this time really giving it his all.

‘Do YOU CARE about the woodland? Do YOU CARE about the wildlife?’

I shouted back at him: ‘Do YOU CARE about where they grow all the food that is being sold in this shop?’

And the customers pushed their trolleys towards the doors, stopping to talk to the tree man about signing a direct debit.

In praise of a solidly, wonderfully French hotel

Nothing in the beach hotel was made of plastic. It wasn’t advertised as being a plastic-free hotel, but we noticed it. Nor was there a television in the room nor air conditioning nor a ‘no smoking’ notice on the wall nor a list of hotel rules. Instead there was a wall of books in the reception area, ashtrays from the golden age of smoking, sea breezes and an air of greater liberty. When I presented myself at reception to check in, the woman didn’t want to see a credit or identity card – my Christian name was credential enough. She led us up the marble-slatted stairs, unlocked the door with an old-fashioned key, wished us a very pleasant stay, and went away again.

The decor of our first-floor room with balcony was artfully artless early 1960s, designed by a genius. I laid on the bed under the slow ceiling fan and imagined the scent of Gauloise cigarettes and heard the faintest echo of Charles Trenet singing ‘La mer’ on a gramophone somewhere below. If there was a Figaro lying around somewhere, I wouldn’t have been surprised to read in it that Algeria was still part of France.

Our balcony overlooked the hotel restaurant and the wide sea. Enclosing the bay were the islands of Porquerolles, Port-Cros and Le Levant. The Mediterranean was glassy flat. Paddle boarders and elderly sea hikers swinging their old arms passed slowly back and forth. Catriona burst into tears.

We unpacked and clattered down the stairs for a pre-dinner drink. ‘How goes it?’ asked one of the hotel restaurant waiters, laying tables, barefoot in the soft white sand. ‘Could be worse,’ I said. He looked shocked. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. He showed us to a table within spitting distance of the lapping wavelets. The gin measures were stonking. The tonics came in old-fashioned bottles.

I looked around at those still on their sun loungers or coming and going between the restaurant tables. Solidly French, ages ranging from babies to the fantastically old. Roughly half the adults were smoking. Paperbacks outnumbered devices. But what social class of French were these, I wondered? The rooms weren’t cheap. Lower-middle exercising a nostalgia for Les Trente Glorieuses? Former Poujadists? Never good at identifying French economic or social classes, here I couldn’t begin to guess. Given the slightest opening, however, everyone was most friendly, natural and without pretension. It was like a members’ club for people who ‘got’ the hotel. Later on we enquired about future available dates, and the woman said it was completely booked for the rest of the summer.

Between drinks and dinner I walked into the warm shallow sea. Soft sand, then a shoreline of pebbles, then comfortable wrinkled sand under the clear water. I watched an old man with his shorts hauled up over his navel give a comic performance for anyone who might be watching of someone unused to walking over stones in bare feet. With each wobbling step his old comic’s face registered shock, determination, agony and misery. When he noticed that he had an appreciative audience of one, he scowled jovially. A shoal of small fry leapt out of the water close by and he started and windmilled his arms to stop himself toppling. I walked out 40 yards before it was deep enough to swim.

I kept on my wet trunks for dinner. Others were elegant and chic. Every so often a dinghy crammed with people from one or other of the yachts moored far out in the bay approached the hotel and the passengers scrambled happily ashore like illegal migrants and made for one of the longer restaurant tables. Invariably they had with them one or two slender young women with lovely sunned backs and spare midriffs who carried their youthful beauty as if constrained by a physical handicap. In spite of that, theirs were the most tanned, relaxed and convivial tables. My landlubber’s liberty, I realised, was nothing to theirs, and I experienced a touch of envy.

We ate all our meals at the excellent hotel restaurant and between meals I slept and Catriona read. Forty hours of feeling slightly damp, slightly salty and lulled to a deeper insensibility each night by the muted crashing of the waves. On the sad morning when we went downstairs to check out, the comic old man and his wife were there in reception, also preparing to leave. He picked a straw hat from the free-straw-hat basket, passed it behind his head, span it down an extended arm, caught it in his hand and stepped forward with an entertainer’s flourish. I laughed. ‘Thirty years a clown in the circus,’ he said, thrusting out his lower lip.

The Lido Beach Hotel and restaurant at Hyères: solidly, wonderfully French; could be a lot worse.

Don’t bet against Emmanuel Macron

It’s nice to be back on the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple of hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names such as Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff and their ilk. It meant that I flew out of the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has become unrecognisable, a violent land where a Democratic Congress winks at riots and intimidations by the left, and where career criminals are seen as victims. It is a place in which one’s livelihood can end with one slip of the tongue. And they call it a free country.

Over here, in lefty old London, everyone’s against Boris, but telling whoppers over a party or two – or even ten – cannot compare to the lies Blair told to justify waging a war in which hundred of thousands of human beings died. Or does it? I find it amazing that Blair is given the Garter, while Boris might soon be shown the door. I am against lying, and didn’t lie when customs asked me if I was carrying almost 40 years ago. But asked to choose between a cake and thousands of dead, I’ll take the cake any day.

And speaking of leaders, Macron recently caught hell for asking us not to rub Putin’s nose in the dirt, but I’m afraid the Frog was right. Biden knows how to spout slogans reading a teleprompter; Boris plays the tough guy in order to make them forget the cake. But Macron understands the world. I haven’t read much about the French president, but I think I understand him. He’s a bit of a con man, but so what? I like Mme Macron: she’s old, elegant and she’s got good legs. A con man I once met whom Macron reminds me of is André Malraux, fantasist, famous novelist, Gaullist minister, Cambodian historical-treasure plunderer, self-invented resistance hero, and air squadron leader for Republican Spain against Francisco Franco.

André Malraux was a man of action, that’s for sure, and also an attention-seeker par excellence. Unfortunately, I met him when he was a very old man, and half-asleep or doped while getting a lecture from my dad on the evils of communism. (The Greek minister of culture had brought him on board my father’s boat.) Malraux became famous early on after his book Man’s Fate was published. It was 1933, Malraux was a Marxist activist, and he followed up with Man’s Hope, and other books. From early on, Malraux was accused of being a man of image, not of ideas, by people who would soil their trousers if a shot was fired anywhere near them. Malraux admired and wished to emulate T.E. Lawrence. Unlike the tortured Brit, the Frenchman adored women, but he identified himself as Lawrence’s son – symbolically, that is.

Malraux’s other hero was Gabriele D’Annunzio, also a bit of a con man albeit an influential thinker, and Man’s Fate dealt with the revolutionary movement in China. He paraded around with a cape and a cane and had a true passion for art, and an even greater passion for the root of all envy. He satisfied the latter with an archeological expedition in Cambodia to rob Khmer temple ruins near Angkor. On a boat down river with the loot, he and his party were arrested and spent a few months doing a Taki. His wife Clara got a petition going and he was eventually freed. Returning to Indochina, he became active in the Canton uprising and saw action. The artist and the man of action became one. From then on, he was known as an exemplary revolutionary figure and a symbol of the communist revolution.

He sided with Stalin against Trotsky because the former looked more of a winner, but then he redeemed himself in Spain, a Byronic enterprise, as he called it. Without qualifications, he took command of an air squadron and went on operations against nationalists but also filmed himself while bombing the enemy. The force of his personality and courage prevailed over his inexperience. He made himself the hero he had pretended to be. When hostilities broke out with the Germans, he went to Lanvin and ordered a uniform. He was taken prisoner almost immediately.

Malraux joined the Resistance at a very late stage and greatly inflated his role in it. He met De Gaulle after the liberation and became his minister of culture in 1958. He had Paris washed, freshly painted, and spruced up. I remember seeing him dishevelled and probably doped up leading an anti-student rally of pro-Gaullists in 1968. Eight years later, he was dead and 20 years after that his remains were transferred to the Pantheon.

Malraux was an aesthete and self-invented. He lied a lot about himself but his courage was undeniable. Why does he come to mind when I think of President Macron? I wish I could explain it, but I cannot. (Actually, Malraux resembles more François Mitterrand – brain-wise, that is.) What they have in common is an understanding of and love for art and an opportunistic streak. Macron, like Malraux – who saw no glory in resisting the Germans, only death, but jumped in at the end, when victory was assured – went after the brass ring after two French presidents had failed the office. The cultural after-effects of Napoleonic grandeur influenced them both. Malraux is long gone, but in the Pantheon. Macron is still to make his mark, but don’t bet against him.

2558: Blonde, 78 – solution

Unclued lights were associated with JUBILEE: years (CALENDAR, SCHOOL, FINANCIAL), clips (CROCODILE,PAPER, TIE) and London underground lines (CENTRAL, CIRCLE, NORTHERN). The title suggested PLATINUM (element 78, and type of blonde).

First prize Brian Midgley, Shipston on Stour, Warwickshire

Runners-up Arabella Woodrow, Riddlesden, West Yorks; Andrew Vernalls, Milton Common, Oxfordshire

2561: PORTS

Six unclued entries comprise systematically ordered non-words thematically linked by a normal entry, itself unclued.

Across

1 Awaiting consideration, poor hippie teen holding nothing back (2,3,8)

11 Most of back pain almost leaves (7)

12 Some over-50s right about Hindu music? (5)

14 Small section of foreign letter penned by French novelist (6)

16 Love very good conclusion (5)

17 Debauchery current in corruption (4)

21 Excellent – a little cheesy item (7)

24 Wood block turning has advanced (5)

25 Engine part wrapped round old tree (5)

30 As nice as Rothschild’s premier bubbly (7)

35 Bloke that Parisian brought round (4)

36 Backing old president, master US shape-shifter (5)

37 One after the other, as quarrelers now are (2,1,3)

38 Cheers on army’s top men in vessel (5)

39 Stunning tailless bird east of north African city (7)

41 Poor Spectator slammed for being extremely late? (13)

Down

1 Dwelling in Liege off and on – where to go next? (5)

2 They might be spare flags getting picked up (5)

3 Composer large in Vogue’s circulation (5)

4 Firmly maintain where publicity goes for abuser? (6)

5 Heavenly place in image of the paranormal (7)

6 Uncoil newly born baby animal (4,3)

7 Of course hosting universal dance in Asia (6)

8 Hypocritical chap, one wrongly holding a gentleman up (9)

10 Almost issue moral story that’s similar (10)

13 Maybe a recital should be composed (7)

15 Denier of yarns woven round half of 30 (3-5)

18 Carrier’s unnatural chat-up (7,3)

19 One celebrating about new proprietor (8)

22 Artist in 3 shunning a novelist from Italy (2,5)

26 Extremely fine rock uplifting hairy sort (7)

28 Picturesque fresh lily I’d caught (7)

29 Somewhere above ground, might I be located thus? (3-3)

30 Primate’s as you say, captain (3-3)

32 Girl involved in northern criminal racket (5)

33 Head over for comic (5)

34 Food served up for agents (5)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 11 July. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk – the dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point.

Download a printable version here.

‘Poundland and Prejudice’: book titles tweaked for straitened times

In Competition No. 3254, you were invited to tweak a well-known book title to reflect the straitened times we live in and provide an extract. Honourable mentions, in a closely contested week, go to Mark Ambrose’s To Grill a Mockingbird, David Silverman’s The Great Gas Bill and to a trio of Alice’s Adventures in Poundlands (John O’Byrne, Celia Jordan and Richard Spencer).

The prize-winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

Here it was, Guesthouse du Lac, an unexpectedly wearying half-hour walk from the Lowestoft seafront. ‘Guesthouse’ struck Edith as a rather grandiose appellation; bed and breakfast, with its suggestion of the exhausted yet somehow uncomfortable slumber following a journey and dangerously fried food, might have been more apposite. A creased postcard of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Landscape with Mountain Lake’, incongruously affixed to the pinboard in its subfusc hallway, strained to justify the latter part of its name. This, Edith reflected, unpacking her few grey skirts and secretarial blouses, was what she could afford. Her fellow guests were a boisterous quartet of Polish bricklayers and a fastidious yet threadbare salesman with receding hair whose gingerly manner of segmenting black pudding suggested a civilised upbringing on which he had failed to capitalise. As they cautiously exchanged sallies about the weather, Edith began to imagine the relationship they would never quite have.  Adrian Fry/‘Guesthouse du Lac’

It is a most extraordinary thing, but there is nowhere so cold as the vicinity of a radiator that has been turned off. Out of habit, the three of us huddled around it, and yet I swear we should have been warmer in the snow outside. All the same, we persisted, warmed only by an outsize greatcoat George had found in his garden shed. It must have belonged to a giant, and was holed and incompetently patched, but it afforded us some semblance of dignity after fuel bills crossed the Rubicon of £1,000 a month. Harris stared forlornly at the fireplace, and the ashen remains of a complete Gibbon.   A mournful howl alerted us to Montmorency’s return from the forage on which we had sent him. It had evidently been unsuccessful. I eyed him, and he eyed me back, insolently, as if to say Eat Me If You Dare. Bill Greenwell/‘Three Men in a Coat’

‘What’s wrong, ma’am?’ demanded Mr Bounderby. ‘You do not see any sunflower spread, I suppose? You don’t care for the taste of lard?’ ‘I was thinking…’ began Mrs Sparsit. ‘No, ma’am. Let Bounderby do the thinking. I have thought my way up from the gutter – from the worst of gutters – from a time when I yearned to taste a spoonful of dripping! Yet I, Bounderby, ask my grocer for sunflower spread, and there is none. My grocer mutters about a war in the Crimea, as if that were any concern of Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown, manufacturer! Did I ask for this war, Loo Bounderby? Did I?’ Giving a perfunctory answer, Louisa thought wearily of her delinquent brother. Had there not been something oleaginous about the hand so grudgingly given to her, when they last spoke? O Tom! My doom is already upon me! Do not hurry to yours! Frank Upton/‘Lard Times’

In these straitened times when war has destroyed modern machinery, people have reverted to old ways. Who would have thought the working horse would be brought from retirement or the ox again made to pull the plough? Though buildings have been flattened there is still work to be done in the countryside. Across the land people are using oxen in their fields and it seems that hostilities have turned the clock back a century. But at least the fields are being tilled and seeds planted and however slow the process, it is tried and true. Harvests will come and it is to be hoped that ships will sail with their cargo across the world. And so, when you see these stout animals pulling their ploughs, you need not ask for whom the bull toils. It toils for us all. Frank McDonald/‘For Whom the Bull Toils’

‘I would not be so fastidious as you are,’ cried Bingley, ‘for a kingdom! The trolleys and belted checkouts! The beer, wine and spirits! Upon my honour, I never met with so many discounts in my life, and several are uncommonly good value.’   ‘You are shopping with the only credit card in sight,’ said Mr Darcy, looking at Bingley’s laden basket.    ‘Oh, it has the highest bonus points I ever beheld! But there is one shop behind you which is full of bargains, and I dare say, very agreeable.’   ‘Which do you mean?’ and turning around, Mr Darcy caught Elizabeth’s eye as she set out budget frozen foods in aisle nine. He coldly said, ‘Poundland is tolerable, but not customer-friendly enough to tempt me.’   Elizabeth was left with no cordial feelings towards him, especially considering their pandemic staff shortages. She delighted in the thought that his grocery bills were ridiculous. Janine Beacham/‘Poundland and Prejudice’

To buy or not to buy, that is the question: Whether ’tis cheaper in the end to count on The swings and roundabouts of unit pricing Or to take up their special offer and Get extra free. But then there is too much Of one thing, and an absence of the rest – Ay, there’s the rub! Fishpaste is good But heart-ache comes when there’s no ham for tea. We grunt and sweat, pushing our trolleys round, Seeking that undiscovered bargain which As ever is devoutly to be wished, But of which we perchance must only dream, Till we have shuffled round the aisles In the calamity of an extended shop. My purse is out of joint! O misery, That I, Hamless, shall be ham-less at tea. Brian Murdoch/‘Hamless’

No. 3257: Filmerick

You are invited to summarise a film (please specify) in limerick form. Please email entries (up to three each) to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 6 July.

The unimaginable horrors confronting the Allies in 1945

No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what they would find. The discovery by the Soviets of the extermination camp of Majdanek in July 1944, and Auschwitz in January 1945, had not really registered, not least because they had been partly emptied and demolished by the retreating Germans. In any case, no one – not the International Committee of the Red Cross, nor the Vatican, nor the British and American governments – had been able, or wanted, to believe what they had been told. The scenes of slaughter and horror that awaited the British, Canadian and American troops were unimaginable.

Peter Caddick-Adams devotes considerable space in his detailed account of the last 100 days of the war in the west – a period he considers to have been somewhat overlooked by historians – to what the Allied forces encountered as they pressed west. Understanding what, ‘materially and spiritually’, Germany had descended to was like ‘conducting a series of archaeological digs’. One by one, including concentration and extermination camps, torture and detention centres and the places where the estimated12 million slave labourers were kept, some 45,000 camps came to light.

The sheer number was like a ‘sledgehammer’. Neuengamme alone had 99 satellite camps. Fighting their way forward against an enemy keen to hide evidence of their crimes, Allied soldiers found piles of unburied corpses, skeletal and dying survivors, typhus and trains full of rotting bodies. The stench was overwhelming. In Belsen, liberated on 15 April, 60,000 profoundly emancipated people, from 20 different nationalities, lay dying. As the camps were freed, the soldiers were ordered to look closely, so as to understand what it was they were fighting against. Come to grips with the Germans, they were told, and ‘kill lots of them’.

Some four million soldiers, in seven Allied armies, took part in the invasion of the western Reich. The fighting was bitter all along the front until the very end. In the middle of the Ardennes, in January 1945, General Patton wrote in his diary: ‘The Germans are colder and hungrier than we are, but they also fight better.’ The advancing Allies were overwhelmed by confusion, shelling, mines and panzers; all were ‘cautious, many were tired and no one wanted to be the last to die’.

1945 is a meticulous reconstruction of their slow, costly progress into central Germany, following in the footsteps of individual companies, corps and divisions. There are no Russian voices and very little about the air force, the author having decided to write only about the ground troops. Interspersed among tactics, battle orders and the performance of individual weapons are descriptions of the men felled by frostbite, trench foot and pneumonia, and the horror they witnessed.

Caddick-Adams’s focus is on the soldiers, whose memoirs and diaries he has mined, and on the friendships and animosities between the commanding officers and the way their rivalries played into their decisions. Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the general staff, spoke of Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces, as having ‘no real direction of thought, plans or energy… just a co-ordinator’. Patton is mercurial and fiery and General Montgomery is a commander ‘about whom no one felt neutral’. There are pen portraits of a number of GIs ‘who had bubbled to the surface as natural leaders’.

It was a terrible 100 days. There were wide, fast-flowing rivers to cross – the Rhine alone ran for 820 miles through six countries – along with fortresses to storm, towns to liberate, networks of defensive bunkers, trenches, barbed wire and minefields to negotiate: a vast landscape of craters carved by shells and filled with bodies of humans and animals. The corpses of Germans suspected of malingering, cowardice or desertion hung from trees. SS men caught by their former prisoners were sometimes bludgeoned to death while the Allied soldiers stood by or, exhausted and revolted by what they had seen, went on orgies of looting and destruction of their own. The effect of the fighting on the civilian population is left largely to the reader’s imagination, but it is not hard to think what they must have felt when their farmhouses were demolished to provide hardcore to make waterlogged fields passable by tanks and whole villages were reduced to scorched earth.

At 6.30 p.m. on 4 May 1945, on Lüneburg Heath, representatives of the ‘German forces in Holland, in north-west Germany, including all islands and in Denmark’ agreed to ‘cease unconditionally all hostilities on land, on sea and in the air’. The atmosphere, noted one officer who was present, was of ‘a school prize-giving or village fete where award-winning vegetables were being judged’. Four days earlier Hitler had shot himself in his bunker in Berlin; Eva, his wife of less than 24 hours, had taken poison. The first part of the second world war, the conflict in the west, was over. Between D-Day and VE Day, the western Allies had lost three quarters of a million men. Of Germany’s great army, some three and a half million were dead and many more missing. It was mainly women who were put to work to clear up the ruins of the Third Reich, now split into four zones of occupation.

Caddick-Adams then follows the fate of the surviving senior commanders – the Allies to the continuing war in Japan or back into civilian life, the Germans to their war trials, executions or long prison terms. In Berlin alone, 7,000 people – generals, admirals, senior police and SS men – committed suicide.

1945 is an impressive work, lively, informative and comprehensively researched, if somewhat daunting at more than 600 pages and with a 15-page ‘military tool kit and glossary’. But as a picture of the unrelenting awfulness of the closing months of the war, as the horrors of the Nazi atrocities unfolded before the soldiers’ eyes, it stays long in the mind.

No. 708

White to play. Rezasade-Movsesian, Bundesliga 2022. White was an underdog in this game, but found a subtle winning idea. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 27 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Qxh5+! Kxh5 2 Bf7#. Or 1…Kf5 2 Qh7+ Ke5 3 Bf4#

Last week’s winner David Billingsley, Ceredigion, Wales

The emperor as ruler of heaven and Earth

Geography, climate, economics and nationalism are often seen as decisive forces in history. In this dynamic, original and convincing book Dominic Lieven considers emperors and their dynasties as motors of events.

Defying constrictions of time and space, ranging from Sargon of Akkad, the ruler of what is now northern Iraq (r. 2334-2279 BC), to the Emperor Hirohito of Japan (r. 1926-89), he believes that ‘for millennia, hereditary sacred monarchy had been the most desirable and successful form of polity on Earth’. (Inhabitants of city states, from Athens to Venice, might not have agreed.) Emperors could create and extend states more easily than impersonal forces, as Lieven shows in chapters on many different empires, from China to Austria. Emperors ruled heaven as well as Earth: they protected Buddhism in India, chose Christianity for the Roman empire and Shia Islam for Iran.

An explosion of books on monarchs, courts and dynasties has transformed history in the past 40 years, and Lieven has read most of them. He believes in a science of empires, which reveals certain ‘constants about human beings and political power’: the history of empires is a subject as important as economic or gender history. Lieven compares the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb with Stalin, and finds parallels between the Austrian and British empires in their aggressive reactions towards nationalist challenges.

Succession struggles, he also shows, were among the most frequent causes of conflict. The Sunni-Shia split in the Arab caliphate (which had created an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas in less than a century) was not only theological but also ‘the most important monarchical succession struggle in history’, between the Prophet’s cousins and his descendants. Divisions among the heirs of Charlemagne helped split ‘Europe’s Carolingian core’ into states which eventually became France and Germany.

Love affairs and resentful cadets and cousins could also cause havoc. A strong hereditary line of succession in early Muscovy or the Ottoman empire (despite its remorseless ‘law of fratricide’) strengthened an empire. Babur and his line gloried in their descent from the great nomad warrior Chinggis Khan. Ming emperors built a hall in the imperial palace in Beijing in which they worshipped their ancestors more openly, but perhaps no more fervently, than other dynasties.

The Roman exception of dynasties not lasting more than three generations caused civil wars and coups. Perhaps, however, it strengthened the empire, since it also led to able upstarts such as Septimius Severus and Diocletian gaining power. Usurpation can produce tougher rulers than inbred dynasties. Not until about 1900 did European royal families stop marrying first cousins. In 1888 the Duke of Aosta, brother of the King of Italy, married his niece.

The relationship between structure and agency, between emperors and elites, is another theme. The court was a vital centre of patronage, entertainment and glorification, as well as the ruler’s residence, the seat of government and a marriage and job market. Some emperors, however, felt trapped in a gilded cage. The Chinese Emperor Wanli (r. 1572-1620) went on strike against his ministers, refusing meetings and signatures when they started interfering in the succession. Later the Kangxi Emperor created a ‘palace memorial system’, permitting a small number of trusted servants to report to him, secretly bypassing the corrupt bureaucracy. Despite having large civil, military and naval cabinets and private offices, however, Kaiser Wilhelm II did not have the focus or industry to control his own government and army – as he learnt in the first world war.

The three principal empires in Lieven’s book are the Chinese, Mughal and Ottoman. Impressive maps help explain the rise and fall of the Tang, Song, Ming and Manchu dynasties. Since empires were usually multinational, racial tensions were endemic. In 1707, the Kangxi Emperor said: ‘Learned Chinese do not want us Manchus to last a long time; do not let yourselves be deceived by the Chinese.’ The Mughals at first despised India as ‘a place of little charm, no etiquette, nobility or manliness’, as Babur (one of the few emperors to produce an autobiography) wrote. Its only advantage: ‘It is a large country full of gold and wealth.’ His grandson, Akbar, ‘one of the most impressive emperors in history’, had ‘the build of a lion’ and a ‘radiant countenance’. Exceptionally tolerant, able to think beyond Islam, he was called ‘Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction’ – the inaugurator of a new millennium. Suleyman the Magnificent also called himself ‘Master of the Celestial Conjunction’, and, in addition, ‘Shadow of God on Earth’ and ‘Alexandrine World Conqueror’.

Most emperors were conquerors. Charles V, ‘the first truly global emperor’, who spent one year in Toledo, another in Augsburg and a third in Brussels, was obsessed, as he wrote in 1525, to ‘cover myself with glory’. Glory was almost always won by the sword.

Emperor Pedro II of Brazil (r.1831-89), also discussed in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly’s brilliant recent book on new 19th-century emperors, Projecting Imperial Power, was an exception. Liberal, intelligent and modest, he had ‘one of the most successful reigns in the history of empires’, abolishing slavery in 1888, without compensation for anyone. Partly in consequence, he was expelled the following year by army officers with what Lieven calls ‘narrower and more selfish motives’. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the proclamation of Brazilian independence by his father Pedro I, whose empire appears a far more reliable regime than the current kleptocracy.

There is much else in this exceptionally stimulating book: on empires and nomads; emperors’ exalted sense of their office; their love of jewels, thrones and obelisks; and the ‘extraordinary affection’ for the British monarchy which helped the British government (rather less popular) to rule its empire.

Today Vladimir Putin’s desire to recreate the Russian empire demonstrates again the power of personalities in world history. His invasion of Ukraine (where three empires met – Russian, Austrian and Ottoman) could be as lethal as the German empire’s invasion of Belgium in 1914. Leaders today might remember the terrible consequences of that conflict for the emperors and empires who started it. There are always opportunities to reject war.