Lionel Shriver

One of the more dispiriting experiences of the British supermarket is a visit to the fish counter. On a  historically seagoing island, the selection is often abysmal, frequently imported, and always expensive: farmed Norwegian salmon, farmed Vietnamese basa (blech), cod gone a suspicious taupe and priced like its weight in saffron (83 per cent of the cod consumed in the UK is also imported; why?) and maybe a few locally sourced mackerel or sardines, depending on the day. Otherwise, vinegary cockles, leathery kippers and smoked haddock the garish colour of a child’s toy substitute for a fresh catch from British waters. Worse, at my nearest Tesco, as of two months ago there is no fish counter.

It seems seasonably suitable to celebrate good news. Unfortunately, as in most serviceable stories, for something good to happen, something bad had to happen first. Though we’ve only been in sporadic touch since, I met Kevin Myers three decades ago at a boozy lunch in Dublin. He was already a journalistic institution. By his own estimation, he’s published roughly 7,000 columns, largely for the Irish Times and the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, totalling some five million words. He’s regularly stuck up for Israel, a state no more popular among Celtic worthies than among the Momentum sort. He also built his once-prodigious reputation by opposing the IRA, which at the time was not good for your health.

The pressure group Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) is oddly named. What their campaign opposes is pension equality. Now, technically these activists born in the 1950s do not object to equalising the pension ages of men and women, so long as said activists don’t personally have to sacrifice for gender justice. Supposedly, the problem is insufficient notice. Yet the UK bill to shift women’s state pension age from 60 to 65 was passed in 1995. That seems like pretty advance notice to me. Besides, government is not obliged to insure us against our expectations. The UK capriciously changes its tax policy every six months, and ‘but I didn’t expect a reduction of my capital gains allowance, so give me my money back’ doesn’t wash with HMRC.

  Dear Nigel Believe it or not, I’ve been your defender. I’ve often told Americans,  ‘Sure, he comes across as a fop. But listen to what he actually says. He’s smarter than you think.’ OK, you have an affect problem. I’ve seen through the clowning. I bet you’ve never been that camp off-camera, and lately you’ve cut the buffoonery well back. It’s thanks to you that the 2016 referendum ever happened. Those who style themselves as your betters dismiss David Cameron’s electoral stunt as a cynical bid to end Tory infighting over Europe. Yet the vote revealed a profound division in the country itself far more deserving of resolution than internecine squabbles among MPs.

Riddle: when is discrimination against a historically disadvantaged racial minority perfectly legal? Answer: when they do too well. The first ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions suit against Harvard University is in. A federal judge in Massachusetts concluded last week that for America’s be-all-and-end-all university to discriminate against Asian applicants in order to serve the all-hallowed goal of ‘diversity’ is constitutional. (Or strictly speaking, if you can follow this logic, the university did not discriminate against Asians by discriminating against them.) The reasoning: ‘Race conscious admissions will always penalise to some extent the groups that are not being advantaged by the process.

I don’t usually get up early just for an appointment at a bank. Yet last Tuesday in New York, I lost sleep in order to slam a trove of savings into a certificate of deposit. Surely I could have delayed the quotidian chore for any old day. What was the hurry? I wanted to ensure that the cash would earn a Great Big Two Per Cent. As expected, the next day the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, made its second 0.25 per cent interest rate cut in three months. More cuts are to come — though starting from a miserable 1.75 per cent, it won’t take much whittling before we’re bang on zero. Pre-millennium, rushing to lock in funds at a squalid 2 per cent interest rate would have been the stuff of low-grade fiscal nightmares.

San Francisco must be the virtue capital of the world. (The latest: just across the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted this summer that ‘manholes’ must hereon in be called ‘maintenance holes’.) But when the lofty run out of real enemies, they often turn on their own kind. Moreover, too much success in achieving a raft of progressive purposes means a runaway train with no sensible destination careens off the tracks. That’s the only explanation for the disconcerting San Francisco School Board spat over what to do with a series of 13 massive murals on the interior of the city’s George Washington High School. The murals’ now-esteemed creator, Victor Arnautoff, was a Russian immigrant and a committed communist.