Life
Dear Mary
Q. How can one politely stop predatory kissers? I am (or was) an affectionate and demonstrative person but I don’t…
Here comes the summer
In Competition No. 3154 you were invited to supply your own variations on the medieval round ‘Sumer is icumen in’.…
Solution to 2460: Sleaze
The word is TACK. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, except for the fifth, their meanings are indicated…
Low life
Chatting on the café terrace with my new friends Didier and Emile made me aware that certain political ideas, which…
High life
Gstaad I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments was going on. Decadent bourgeois society was in…
Clutch fun
‘May the best scoring system win!’ is hardly a sentiment to stoke the passions. In the 2011 referendum, the alternative…
2463: Tongue twister
The unclued lights are of a kind and are entered in the grid in a thematically appropriate manner. Across 11…
Puzzle no. 610
White to play. Grischuk–Aronian, Clutch Chess 2020. Only one rook move draws here. Which one? Answers should be emailed to…
Aussie Life
90 Days in lockdown – a retrospective Day 1 – you configure your bathroom into a replica of your…
High life
Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the…
Real life
Opting out of organ donation was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I don’t mean the…
Dear Mary
Q. I know it is rude to ask, when invited to a dinner party, ‘who else is coming?’ I assumed,…
The joy of proving my wife wrong
Back in April, The Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was…
A wing – and a prayer
Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are…
Gaslight
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
Speed talking
When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use…
Low life
I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to…
Sneezles and wheezles
In Competition No. 3153 you were invited to recruit a well-known children’s writer to explain Covid-19 to their young audience.…
Chequered histories
As statues are scrutinised, the tensions that existed within historical figures are thrown into relief. You can admire Churchill’s leadership…
Bridge
I am so useless in defence it’s embarrassing. My partners all say the same thing: slow down and think. I…
2462: Over and Out?
The seventeen entries with definition-only clues are to be treated according to a symmetrically disposed theme which has to be…
Puzzle no. 609
White to play. Tolush–Aronson, Moscow 1957. Strangely, this quick win was once wrongly attributed to Alekhine. How did White exploit…
Solution to 2459: 22 down
22D was TABLEWARE, and the quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson reads: ‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster…
The Battle for Britain
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Puzzle no. 608
Black to play, Ding Liren–Daniil Dubov, Lindores Abbey Rapid Challenge, May 2020. Dubov’s rook is under attack, but his next…
