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WEIN (2D) suggests 21, 35 and 37 (German wines); WEIB suggests 10, 25 and 42 (Germanic female names); GESANG suggests 14, 27 and 31 (German-speaking composers of sung works). STRAUSS, highlighted, composed the waltz Wein, Weib und Gesang. First prize P.G.
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Trapped Twelve Thai boys and their football coach were found in a cave ten days after being trapped by rising water. It may be months before they can be brought to the surface. — The longest anyone has been trapped underground and then rescued is 69 days, after the San José mine in Chile collapsed in 2010. The 33 miners were rescued via a shaft drilled to 2,257ft below the surface. — Less fortunate was Floyd Collins, a caver trapped 55ft below ground in Crystal Cave, Kentucky, in January 1925. He survived 14 days, but died around three days before a rescue shaft reached him. Bouncy castles A four-year-old girl died after a bouncy castle on a Norfolk beach was reported to have exploded and blown her 30 feet into the air. How dangerous are bouncy castles?
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Technical issues Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s supposition that car manufacturers are holding back investment due to Brexit seems to be wishful thinking (Any other business, 30 June). Having worked for years for one of the largest international vehicle manufacturers in both finance and export, I can assure him that the investment cycle is almost entirely to do with the product and almost not at all with political concerns. Car manufacturers, and particularly German ones, are faced with several serious issues which have nothing to do with Brexit. The diesel emissions manipulation issue and whether diesel engines are acceptable will impact on their decisions about petrol vs diesel engine lines, and the likely share of the market available to hybrid and electric cars.
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Home In an attempt to distract the nation from the toothache of Brexit, the government announced a £4.5 million scheme to encourage homosexuals to hold hands; a law would be considered to ban corrective therapy, which Penny Mordaunt, the Equalities Minister, said could involve rape. A man known as Nick, whose true name is withheld for legal reasons, who alleged there was a paedophile ring at Westminster, was charged with perverting the course of justice. Labour restored the whip to Jared O’Mara, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, from whom it had been suspended in October. Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, was interrupted during a statement to the Commons by the voice of Siri on his mobile phone.
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In the basement of The Spectator office, there is a 12-volume version of the paper in its original incarnation. That journal, started in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, lasted barely two years. But collections of its essays could be found in almost every educated household for generations after. The first Spectator was seen as an example of something extraordinary: a journal full of humour, wit and civilised discussion at a time when Britain was being torn apart by partisanship and war. It was a freak of its time. On 6 July 1828, a Dundonian printer named Robert Rintoul relaunched The Spectator. He had the good sense to adopt Addison’s formula: ‘the pleasures of books, conversation and the other accidental diversions of life’.
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In Henry VI part II, Dick says to Cade: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’, thus potentially victimising Atticus Finch (3A), Perry Mason (20D) and Rumpole (30D). First prize Mrs R. Bailey, Swindon Runners-up Mrs E.
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190 years of The Spectator 5 July 1828 The principal object of a Newspaper is to convey intelligence. It is proposed in The Spectator to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week. In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad.
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190 years of The Spectator 4 June 1975 At no time during the campaign have the opponents of our membership of the EEC been remotely as unbalanced, as hysterical or as deliberately personally insulting as those in the opposite camp. Naturally, as in any vigorously fought campaign, there have been some fibs and half-truths on both sides; and each partisan has looked eagerly at evidence which may have several possible interpretations in order to find material that will support his cause. But nothing on the anti-Market side has even begun to equal the tirade of personal insults, and the sickening appeal to fear, that has characterised everything the pro-Marketeers have done.
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190 years of The Spectator 6 September 1957 There are two ways of looking at sexual immorality. One is to regard all illicit intercourse as a crime; the other is to regard it as a sin but not as something which concerns the State unless it has obvious anti-social consequences. The first has been out of fashion since the 17th century, when adultery was still a capital offence, and in most civilised countries the second attitude now prevails. But in England for the last 80 years there has been one notable exception. Since the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 homosexual actions between consenting males have been criminal, even when they are performed in private.
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190 years of The Spectator 13 August 1881 The reading of this book fills us with alarm. It is evidently the work of a clever man, as well as of an educated man, but it is not only a book containing poems which ought never to have been conceived, still less published, but it is almost wholly without thoughts worthy of the name, entirely devoid of true passion, with very few vestiges even of genuine emotion, and constituted entirely out of sensuous images and pictures strung together often with so little true art that they remind one more of a number of totally different species of blossoms accumulated on the same stem, than of any cluster of natural flowers.
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190 years of The Spectator 1 June 1861 The time has arrived when the national will on the American quarrel ought to be expressed. A party, numerous in Parliament and powerful in the press, is beginning to intrigue for the recognition of the South. They are aided by the fears of the cotton dealers, who dread an intermission of their supplies, by the anxiety of commercial men, who see their best market summarily closed, and by the abiding dislike of the aristocracy for the men and manners of the North. For the moment, their object is apparently to deprecate debate. They dare not as yet brave openly the prejudices of freemen, or advocate a cause based on antagonism to all that Englishmen hold dear.
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190 years of The Spectator 14 January 1843 The country gentlemen of England never committed a greater blunder than when they passed the Corn Law of 1815. If they would but allow themselves to examine dispassionately their own objects, they could scarcely fail to discover this, and also the necessity of retreating as speedily as possible from the false position in which they then placed themselves. The country gentlemen are the most powerful body in England, and they are fond of their power and proud of it. But the passing of the Corn Law gave a rude shock to the opinion favourable to the power of the country gentlemen. It placed them in the invidious light of men who perverted the office of legislators into the means of passing a law to keep up rents.
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190 years of The Spectator 21 May 1831 Lucretius tells us, in some famous lines, that it is a pleasant thing to watch the sea in a tempest, from the shore: it is a far more gratifying employment to be throwing out Manby’s lifesaving apparatus, and saving the sinking mariners from the wreck. We have more than once observed, that it is difficult to be a mere spectator in times like these. It is all very well, in the piping times of domestic content, to sit still and report progress; but when, as in the great business of Reform, everything is at stake, it is the duty of even neutrals to arm. It is sometimes criminal not to take a side — there are cases in which he that is not with us must be against us.
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Harvard’s racial quotas Sir: While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’, 23 June), he misuses Martin Luther King Jr to buttress his argument. King said that he hoped his descendants would ‘be judged…by the content of their character’, not by their standardised test scores. The grim pursuit of purely quantifiable ratings for intelligence and achievement in American schools — by Asians and white Protestants alike — is an even greater scourge these days than the illiberal goal of ‘diversity’ at any cost.
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Nursing numbers Was there ever a time when the NHS wasn’t in crisis? According to a report by NHS Health Improvement in February 2016, the health service was then short of 15,000 nurses. A year later the Royal College of Nursing was claiming a shortfall of 24,000. But that is a lot less than the shortage of nurses reported in its early years. In December 1948, five months after the NHS was founded, it was reported by the government to be short of 48,000 nurses, 30 per cent of the number employed. The shortage meant that 53,000 beds were lying unused (a disproportionate number in women’s psychiatric care). In early 1949 the NHS recruited an extra 4,000 full-time and 2,250 part-time nurses.
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Home The Commons voted in favour of a new runway at Heathrow by 415 votes to 119. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, who had previously promised to lie in front of the bulldozers, absented himself from the vote, instead meeting the Deputy Foreign Minister of Afghanistan in Kabul. ‘My resignation would have achieved absolutely nothing,’ he said. Greg Hands resigned as trade minister because he opposed the runway. The Scottish government said it still supported the runway even though SNP MPs at Westminster abstained. Spanish-owned Ferrovial, which operates Heathrow, is to move its international headquarters from Britain to Amsterdam because of Brexit.
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When Nye Bevan launched the NHS on 5 July 1948, most of the British population could not expect to celebrate a 70th birthday. Life expectancy at birth for men was 66 and for women 71. That this has since grown to 79.1 years and 82.8 years respectively is in part — though far from entirely — thanks to the NHS. Many insist that Bevan’s description of the service as the ‘envy of the world’ remains true. For Lord Lawson, a former editor of this magazine, the NHS is ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion’ — an assertion confirmed during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, when NHS nurses jumped joyfully up and down on old-fashioned hospital beds.
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The unclued lights are COMPOSERS whose surnames begin with the letter D. First prize E.C. Hynard, Guernsey Runners-up Geran Jones, London SW1 R.C.
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As an economics geek, and a committed free marketer, I’ve always admired the London School of Economics. Despite its left-wing reputation, it was the academic home of Hayek. But even more than that, it produced my husband, Hugh O’Leary. It means that whenever I want a late night discussion about supply side reform or econometrics, there’s always someone on hand. And why do I love this stuff? Because I care about freedom. I’ve never liked being told what to do. And I don’t like to see other people being told what to do. Britain is a country that is raucous and rowdy. We have a younger generation of self-starters growing up, who are desperate shape their own futures.
