Tabla de contenidos para 8 November 2025 en The Spectator

The New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that rare figure in politics – a progressive who followed the facts. The contrast between his grown-up moral clarity and the adolescent ideological posturing of New York City’s latest Democrat darling, Zohran Mamdani, could not be starker. Moynihan was a welfare reformer who knew that incentivising work, not subsidising idleness, was the route out of poverty. He was a resolute supporter of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, backing the victims of two millennia of prejudice against terrorists and tyrants. By way of contrast, Mamdani demonises that state as a proxy for what he considers the wider western sins of colonialism and exploitation. It was on crime, above all, that Moynihan showed courage. He recognised that protecting the vulnerable demanded a tough-minded…

Nearly a year after my final Radio 4 shift, my new interview podcast has launched, and the weeks are more varied than anything I’ve previously experienced. The main focus is of course the guest and the content of the next episode. But we’re often at different stages of two or even three interviews at the same time, and production questions take us in multiple directions. How recent is the headshot the illustrator is using for artwork? What’s the best headline for each version: audio, video, text, social? What about practical arrangements or special requests for the next recording? On that note, an interesting contrast between the two political leaders who came into the studio for our first two episodes: while Canada’s Mark Carney had the large entourage of a serving…

When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. ‘If you’re going to do it,’ Scotland’s First Minister suggested, ‘you might as well go big.’ This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers on his state visit to the UK in September, one senior official told him: ‘You’re the most consequential president of my lifetime.’ It has…

Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Zack Polanski offers the thrill of cost-free rebellion. Mamdani leapt to prominence at the end of June by unexpectedly winning the Democratic party nomination in the New York mayoral race, and doing so as an avowed socialist who claims that by taxing the rich he will relieve ‘the despair in working-class Americans’ lives’. Polanski has made waves since the start of September as the new leader of the Green party of England and Wales, using a rhetoric calculated to appeal to left-wing activists, while proclaiming himself the champion of plumbers and hairdressers. He has conjured up an alliance between utopian socialists like himself and sturdy, hard-working people who provide services on which we all depend, and who are struggling to get by. What is…

I learnt not to intervene on a late summer’s afternoon nine years ago. My son was still a baby and I was pushing him in his pram across a busy road in a responsible way, only after the green ‘walk’ man had lit up. I was about halfway over when a boy of about 14 on a moped scorched through the lights and past us, nearly hitting the pram. I yelled at him, and as I yelled felt the spirit of civic duty rise within me. If we middle-aged mothers don’t set the kids straight, who will? The boy skidded to a stop and turned to face me. I can’t now remember what he said, but the gist of it was that I’d radically misjudged the situation and that if…

On a grey autumn morning, the apples in the National Fruit Collection look vivid. They pile up in pyramids of carmine, salmon and golden-orange around dwarf trees, which have been bred to human proportions. Their branches are well within reach but picking fruit is forbidden. These trees are part of the world’s largest fruit gene bank. Neil Franklin, an agronomist and a trustee of the National Fruit Collection in Kent, describes it as ‘the Victoria and Albert Museum of the fruit industry’. The collection holds several types of fruit, but the apple is queen of them all: of the 4,000 or so fruit varieties here, more than 2,200 are apples. They’re used mainly for research into breeding and resistance to pests and diseases. Two trees of each variety are planted,…

Mash’s older brother was the same age as Anthony Williams when he slaughtered a stranger in a brutal and random attack. He was in the grip of a psychotic disorder caused by cannabis. We do not yet know what drove Williams, a 32-year-old African Caribbean man, to allegedly try to murder ten people during a 14-minute knife rampage on a train. But Mash is in no doubt cannabis often plays a part in attacks like these. ‘In my community smoking weed is normalised,’ he says. ‘We laugh and joke about hearing voices or having a “para” [a paranoid fit].’ He counts on his fingers: ‘Two brothers, two cousins and multiple friends’ who have experienced hallucinations and delusions. He shakes his head sadly. ‘Weed is killing my people.’ Mental health issues…

The Rage of Party: How Whig vs Tory Made Modern Britainby George OwersConstable, £35, pp. 560 A foul-mouthed fantasist with a chin like an ironing board starts a wild conspiracy theory about the King’s brother. An alcoholic racing fanatic turns his gambler’s eye to the ballot box. A maniacal preacher gives such a polarising sermon that he paints himself as a second Christ and tours the country as a sex symbol. These are not the inventions of William Hogarth or Jonathan Swift; they are the figures who divided our political system in two, as George Owers tells us in his delightful new history of the birth of party politics. The Rage of Party traces the fevered rise of Whigs and Tories during the reigns of William III and Queen Anne.…

The History of Pizzaby Luca Cesari, translated by Zachary NowakPolity Books, £25, pp. 230 Pizza is the Italian food that has conquered the world. From Brussels to LA, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, pizzerias are everywhere. But what are the origins of this food, and how did it become so popular? Reading Luca Cesari’s book made me hungry not only for a thin crust margherita but also to digest the wealth of information about this simple dish. The margherita gets its name from Queen Margherita of Savoy, who, in 1889, on a visit to Naples, summoned Raffaele Esposito, the celebrated pizzaiolo (pizza-maker and hawker) to the palace to try his wares. She so liked the one with tomato, mozzarella and basil (made to represent the colours of the Italian flag)…

Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, OutsidersCharleston in Lewes, until 12 April 2026 The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in Ayrshire, they met on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art, becoming lifelong partners and painters. Well-connected in louche literary London, their conversational barbs were recorded by Julian Maclaren-Ross, their jig-dancing antics noted by Joan Wyndham, their drunken fights observed by Anthony Cronin – so that one sometimes forgets what sort of art they made. This show, staged in a former municipal building in Lewes, is a reminder. The work is haunted, unbeautiful British neo-romanticism, second cousin to Piper and Sutherland. They established this ang-sty, angular modernist style in the 1940s. MacBryde’s over-worked still…

Grade: B+ The 20th century, eh? What a lark that was. Vladimir Dukelsky studied in Kiev under Glière and looked set to be one of the smarter Russian composers of his generation. He even wrote a ballet for Diaghilev. Then communism happened and Dukelsky ended up in the USA where to the bemusement of his friend Prokofiev he reinvented himself as Vernon Duke, Broadway songsmith. ‘Autumn in New York’ and ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ are both by Duke; classic Americana by way of Tsarist Ukraine. Duke’s Violin Concerto (1943) is recorded here alongside the 1941 concerto by Robert Russell Bennett – better known as the king of Broadway orchestrators; the man who clothed Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady in silken strings. Both concertos are played with easy panache by…

As I was showing a couple from Lincolnshire to their room, I smelt a rat. I don’t mean metaphorically, about them. I mean that halfway down the hallway, as I walked two paying guests from the front door towards the staircase, the most overwhelming stench of rotting carcass wafted upwards from the floor, right next to the fancy dresser displaying the tourist leaflets. I glanced at them nervously to see whether they had noticed. They were telling me about their house-hunting. They wanted to move to West Cork to go off grid and get in touch with nature. That’s handy, I thought, because nature is currently rotting under the floorboards. Trust the darn critter to conk out beneath the main entrance hall just in time for a B&B arrival. But…

It was just going to be Nigel and me. You know, two old chums meeting for a quiet Monday evening drink and a natter. When I pitched up, though, Pete and Nick were also there, and if anything triggers my alarm bells it’s the presence of these two smiling assassins. I love all three boys dearly but, when together, they have form. They pick on me and egg me on. A magnum or so in and I’ve become a willing accomplice, we’ve overshot the runway and all is lost, with written apologies in the post. If Mrs Ray had known who I was going to spend the evening with, she would never have let me leave the house. Or ever let me back in. We met in Pintxito, Nigel’s brand-new,…

‘What fresh hell can this be?’ Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED itself quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: ‘He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. “What now, what now?” said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?”’ I’ve been doing what counts for me as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later. In Pickwick, fresh is used three to one in the sense…

Ambra Edwards, who surveys the year’s best gardening books on p38, is the author of The Botanic Garden: The World’s Greatest Botanical Sanctuaries. Julie Bindel, who writes about pizza on p45, is the author of Lesbians: Where Are We Now? Dr Tiffany Jenkins’s books include Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. On p48 she peers into a 17th-century cesspit. James Chiavarini digs into truffling season on p56. He is the owner of two restaurants in Kensington: Il Portico and La Palombe. We at The Spectator salute Robin Oakley, whose final Turf column appears on p63. He has written the column since 1994.…

With three weeks until the Budget, the main political parties have been setting out their economic thinking. Each faces the same bind: anaemic growth, fiscal constraints and uncomfortable exposure to the bond markets. The upshot is that there is less ‘clear blue water’ on the economy between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. Even Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, irritated some colleagues by appearing to suggest he would raise income tax if he were in Rachel Reeves’s shoes at his party’s conference. ‘It’s a good job no one is listening to us,’ jokes a fellow frontbencher. If the economy is less of a dividing line in British politics, what might take its place? Energy is one possibility. On one side of the House of Commons is ‘red Ed’ Miliband, the…

The most extraordinary thing about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is that he seems to have no sense of shame. That word in Greek was aidôs, which covered everything from a sense of shame, inhibiting one’s own behaviour, to respect, i.e. sensitivity to the feelings, status and claims of others. ‘When I consider that I am doing wrong, I feel aidôs to look my friends in the face’ (Agathon) is a typical example. This feeling is a major feature of Greek literature. In Homer’s Iliad, Hector the Trojan hero challenges the Greeks to single combat, but ‘they felt aidôs to refuse, but were afraid to accept’. They knew what society expected of them but were afraid to do it. On the other hand, in the heat of battle, it was often enough…

There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian organised a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of Islingtonians telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush. One wishes that Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s New York mayoral election might have had a similar result. Interviewed shortly before Zohran Mamdani was elected, the mayor of London praised the Democratic Socialist candidate for mayor of New York as ‘fun’ and ‘authentic’. A spokesman for the London mayor…

Austere environment Who introduced the word ‘austerity’ into the political lexicon? While chiefly associated with attacks on the Conservatives, and subsequently Reform UK, by Labour and other left-wing parties, it was David Cameron who brought the word back into common parlance. In a speech to the Conservative party forum on 26 April 2009 he declared: ‘The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.’ He went on to say: ‘We’ve made it clear that a Conservative government would spend less than Labour. We’re not frightened of their idiotic ritual chants about “cuts”.’ An analysis by the LSE found that in the election year of 2010, right-leaning thinktanks mentioned ‘austerity’ nearly as frequently as left-leaning ones. Off the rails How crime-ridden are our trains? Crimes recorded by British…

On a long flight there’s an instant, and perhaps you’ve noticed it, when a very slight alteration in the pitch of the engine occurs. Some considerable time remains before the ‘prepare for landing’ announcement, but from this point on the plane’s trajectory will be gently back to earth. Within the cabin we sense no sharp adjustment of tilt, but something has changed. From the moment when, in Nicosia in 1955, General Sir John Harding spoke to me at the Christmas party he gave for British children in Cyprus, I had wanted to be, like him, the governor of a colony. I was six. My head was bandaged. The governor seemed concerned. He was soon himself narrowly to escape an assassination attempt by the Greek Cypriot terrorists trying to drive Britain…

Minimum requirement Sir: Some of Charles Moore’s observations about the minimum wage are pertinent (Notes, 1 November). However, what many also lose sight of (most of all our Chancellor) is that by government raising the minimum wage, those employees who were just above it usually seek pay rises to stay ahead of it, or employers risk losing those staff. This can then have a ripple effect through the whole organisation. It is another reason the Chancellor’s last Budget had such a profound impact on companies and, in turn, the economy at a delicate time. With employers’ NI rises as well, company cost bases have risen significantly, stifling investment, growth and recruitment and leading to our worsening finances and the tax rises that are now on their way. Her recent delaying…

The Christmas gift book market is a fascinating thing. Things come into fashion, other things drop out, although the desire to amuse and/or make the mind boggle is pretty much constant. This year’s book that performs both tasks admirably is The History of Art in One Sentence (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by Verity Babbs, which I am assured is her real name. She is an art historian and a comedian, an unusual combination in academe and a very effective one here. Her task is to guide us through 50 art movements from the past 500 years, one sentence at a time. Each short chapter asks ten judicious questions about the movement, then profiles three significant artists and three significant artworks. And it’s all done with a delicious light humour that makes the…

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracyby Julia IoffeWilliam Collins, £25, pp. 496 The excellent Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe’s first book recounts a well-known slice of Russian history from a fresh perspective – that of the mighty Russian woman who, it’s said, can ‘stop a galloping horse and run into a burning hut’. And how superhumanly brave and resilient they have had to be. Women were granted sweeping rights following the Revolution, then watched them dwindle for the rest of the century, in law but mainly in practice. What remained was the Soviet obligation to work regardless of gender, which created a country of professional women in every sphere: engineers, cosmonauts, judges, professors and 70 per cent of doctors by the 1970s. Ioffe emigrated with her…

For the first time in decades, King Charles has a new pet dog, a lagotto Romagnolo called Snuff. Queen Camilla is said to have given him the puppy, perhaps more for her benefit than his. She is thought to be mad about foraging for fungi, especially in the area surrounding her home in Wiltshire, where the chalky terroir is famous for an abundance of Burgundy truffles. Snuff is the perfect breed to find them. The lagotto hails from my home region of Emilia Romagna, and in recent years the dogs have surpassed pigs as the go-to tool for truffling. I can only surmise too many fingers were lost retrieving a precious truffle from a 200lb swine. My own lagotto, named Alba, accompanies me everywhere, especially in autumn, as we venture…

It was Frank Johnson who as The Spectator’s editor asked me to mix my then day job as the BBC’s political editor with writing this column. For someone starstruck by racing as a 12-year-old, bicycle propped against the old Hurst Park racecourse wall to watch the jousting jockeys in their myriad colours flash by, the opportunity was irresistible. It felt like a pass into a magic world: mingling in the winners’ enclosure with the titans of the sport, arriving at bustling stableyards in the early hours amid the swish of brooms and clatter of buckets, relishing frosty mornings on downland turf as strings of skittish two-year-olds learned their trade. Memories from the three decades since include gunning to the top of Nicky Henderson’s Seven Barrows gallops to see equine athletes…

Magnus Carlsen headed the field at the Clutch Chess Champions Showdown, a quadrangular rapid tournament held at the St Louis Chess Club last month. The Norwegian, who became a father in September, always seems motivated playing at fast time limits and his opposition in St Louis was of the highest calibre – Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Gukesh Dommaraju. At the Norway Chess tournament in June, Gukesh, the 19-year-old reigning world champion, caused Carlsen to bang the table in frustration after turning around a hopeless position. But in St Louis, Gukesh salvaged just one draw from six games against Carlsen. Combined with 3.5-2.5 scorelines against Caruana and Nakamura, that added up to a convincing tournament victory for Carlsen, who reflected: ‘It is really satisfying to be able to show that,…

I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and thinktankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist, but by viral videos on X. The impression these give is of a country rapidly descending into lawlessness in which…

Critics see Rachel Reeves as betraying her election manifesto tax promises; but she may well be trying ‘The Lady’s Not for Turning’ gambit. Her speech from Downing Street delivered before the markets opened on Tuesday, resembled – in content, if not in style – Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 party conference speech. In both cases, the incoming government had failed to get public spending and borrowing under control. (Indeed, government borrowing costs then were 6 per cent of GDP, compared with a mere 5.1 per cent today.) Also in both cases, the government sought simultaneously to go against earlier promises not to raise taxes, yet to do so in the name of long-term consistency. Both faced what was then called ‘a funding crisis’ in the bond market. When the 1981 Budget came…

You may remember that in February the BBC found itself in a spot of bother regarding a film about the conflict in Gaza which, it transpired, had been narrated by the son of a Hamas minister. Some people, not least Jewish people, wondered if such an account perhaps might accidentally stray into the realms of partisanship, and the BBC was forced to withdraw the documentary forthwith. It then commissioned an internal report into why this young lad had been chosen to front the film, rather than, say, Rylan Clark or Clare Balding. As a consequence of the investigation, the BBC’s head of news, Deborah Turness, sent a round robin email to all BBC staff. Only now, nearly nine months later, can I reveal the disturbing truth about what Ms Turness…

There is an adage, attributed to author Robert Heinlein, that every generation thinks it invented sex. This often means finding a ‘new’ way to conduct relationships. For my generation, the millennials, this came in the guise of polyamory. Sometimes known as an open relationship or ethnical non-monogamy, polyamory is the practice of dating and having sex with people other than your partner. It became fashionable in the 2010s and is now more popular than ever. Of course, open relationships have existed forever, and I’m sure the French would be furious at any suggestion that extramarital sex was invented by my lot. But we did usher in a specific style of open relationship: finding the most verbose way possible to bed multiple people and then writing personal essays about it or…

China’s naked weaponisation of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s ‘four pests’ campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisers reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to crops than the sparrows ever did, hastening China’s descent into the deadliest famine in human history. Nobody is expecting a…

The police initially treated last weekend’s stabbings on a train near Huntingdon as a possible terror attack, before confirming it wasn’t. Since then, it has been widely reported that the suspect, Anthony Williams, told one of his victims that ‘the devil’s not going to win’ as she pleaded with him not to stab her. So instead of terrorism, the outlines of another familiar British tragedy have begun to take shape: a violent outburst by a man apparently in the grip of severe mental illness. Why would someone with severe mental illness be able to roam in public? It is partly because of underfunded public services. The number of mental health beds in the NHS decreased by a quarter between 2010 and last year. A psychiatrist weighing up whether or not…

Call me hard-hearted, but I doubt even a magic mushroom-induced tantric visualisation of a harmonious universe could transport me into a state of sympathy for Rachel Reeves. Her content-free but don’t-blame-me speech on Tuesday morning did nothing to make me feel more benign. Yes, it’s not entirely her fault that a Labour cabinet can’t deliver welfare cuts, that defence spending must rise and that the UK has a chronic productivity deficit; and yes, the Tories left a mess behind. But in every other respect she’s in a trap of her own making, in which the only Budget move that might restrain out-of-control public borrowing, namely raising income tax, is also the one that should surely guillotine her disaster-strewn chancellorship. ‘Brace for big tax rises on 26 November’ was the unspoken…

Whiteby Sylvain Tesson, translated by Christine GutmanPolity Press, £20, pp. 208 Sylvain Tesson’s White unfolds the story of a gruelling ski journey across the Alps during which the author aims to fulfil ‘a long-held dream of transforming travel into prayer’. Born in Paris in 1973, Tesson is a well-known adventure writer whose previous books include The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga, which won awards on both sides of the Channel and was made into a film. As a public figure associated with the far right, Tesson remains divisive in his homeland. His political views do not seem to have dented book sales or literary coverage: one wonders if the same would be true if a travel writer of similar persuasion popped up here.…

The Predicamentby William BoydViking, £20, pp. 272 According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, male writers have daddy issues. So keenly do they feel the oppressive influence of their forefathers that when they take up the pen it is to use it as a sword. To produce something new, they must engage their predecessors in a writerly duel to the death. Bloom’s examples are all very highbrow – Blake vs Milton, Keats vs Shakespeare – but the theory applies across the literary spectrum. When William Boyd sits down to write a new spy novel and, removing his pen from its sheath, looks up to assess the field, it is (among others) the faces of Ian Fleming and John le Carré who stare back. What better way to deal with the…

William Golding: The Faber Lettersedited by Tim KendallFaber& Faber, £60, pp. 592 It is hard to believe that the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature would have been awarded to the author of titles such as The Chinese Have X-Ray Eyes, Here Be Monsters or – yes – An Erection at Barchester. But if William Golding had had his way, so it might have proved. Charles Monteith, his loyal editor at Faber & Faber, saved him from himself; and thus it was that those books were called instead Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible and The Spire. Even Golding’s first and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), started life as Strangers from Within. Its publishing history is almost as well known as its plot (of boys stranded on an island turning…

In the early 1970s my father moved offices and I was plucked out of my cosy prep school in Surrey to land in the eccentric surroundings of Presentation College. My new school’s modern block was surrounded by decaying Edwardian villas occupied by Irish teaching brothers with impenetrable accents. There was a broken aeroplane on one of the lawns; I never found out how it got there. Talk about a culture shock. Already I was besotted with classical music; to say that the brothers didn’t share my enthusiasm is putting it mildly. There wasn’t a flicker of interest in eight years – something that puzzled me until I read Thomas Day’s book Why Catholics Can’t Sing, which argues that, in the Irish diaspora, highbrow music stirs folk memories of English colonial…

La Fille mal gardéeRoyal Opera House, until 9 June 2026 Thikra: Night of RememberingSadler’s Wells Wayne McGregor: Infinite BodiesSomerset House, until 22 February 2026 The winter nights may be drawing in and everyone is down with stinking colds as the civilised world inexorably disintegrates, but in La Fille mal gardée, it’s sunlit springtime and young love is busting out all over. Frederick Ashton’s bucolic masterpiece, revived by the Royal Ballet, manages to be both childlike in its innocence and wickedly sophisticated in what it demands of the dancers – it looks so artless, so easy, and it just isn’t. Of Ashton’s supreme genius in the devising of it all there can be no doubt, but John Lanchbery and Osbert Lancaster deserve credit too – Lanchbery’s pasticcio score is a chocolate…

I was in the Land Rover Defender with Rita, my youngest daughter (16), parked up near Dante’s tomb in the old city as we drank coffee from paper cups before she began her day at art school. On a wall in front of us that had possibly been there since the Romans, and definitely since the Renaissance, was scrawled in black spray paint: ‘Palestina lib-era dal fiume al mare!’ – Free Palestine from the river to the sea! I asked Rita what mark she’d got in her English literature oral test on Romeo and Juliet. I’d helped her prepare. I’d even found the correct Italian word for ‘apothecary’, as in ‘O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick’. Every online source I had consulted had said, absurdly, that the correct word…

England’s ladies bridge has a grand past, with many international titles and gold medals to its name, but obviously the same players can’t go on forever. It would appear that the future may also be looking bright as many girls and young women discover how fascinating and obsessing bridge can be. We have, without doubt, a very strong pair coming through the ranks. When Dido Coley and Lily Kearney won the Lady Milne trials last year, not many had heard of them. Last week they repeated the feat and I watched them on BBO whenever they were shown. I was very impressed. They have a well worked out, modern bidding system which they both know backwards and forwards; an active and aggressive attitude to competitive auctions; and an enthusiastic partnership…

For Competition 3424 you were invited to write a short story for which ‘Conman’ could be the title, containing a dozen words of four or more letters beginning with con or man. This produced a larger-than-usual entry in which all were fairly evenly matched, making it tricky to whittle it down to the six below who are rewarded with £25 John Lewis vouchers. Consider the lilies… he murmured, contemplating his reflection in Suzanne’s mirror. Like them he looked good, but unlike them he could sow, though his seeds were romance, and as for spinning – that was his metier. From their first date (contact, he called it) she’d been consumed with passion for his charm and confidence, regardless of the consequences. Apps: so easy. He knew how to conform to…

‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock celebrating his stunning try against the Aussies at the weekend. And she was spot on too: 20-year-old Pollock, England rugby’s latest prodigy, whips up emotions, not least the desire from anyone who has played against him – and plenty who haven’t – to give him a good belting. He’s swaggering, confident, brash, with rockstar charisma and a bleached blond mop, and he can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down. Referees might soon want to tell him to rein it in. That’s youth for you: who gives a damn? Though you won’t catch many All Blacks goading opponents at the final whistle; you…

Q. An extremely old friend is a successful purveyor of high-end goods. Last time we saw him he invited us to a forthcoming Christmas party in Mayfair for his clients and people who have helped him get clients. We never got the email invitation, so I texted him and he said: ‘Oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t send it. I’ll do it today.’ But two weeks later, still no sign of it. Do we just go to the party or not? If we don’t go we fear he might be cross that we had ‘taken offence’ when no written invitation arrived. Yet we also fear that he may have decided he doesn’t want us because he now has too many Big Spenders coming and doesn’t have room for us. –…

That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run. St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and there was a fight with recriminations. The high street sells corsetry and facial reconstruction. I remember Panzer’s as a greengrocer…