The Spectator

The puzzle’s title, Rapid Sea, is an anagram of Paradise, i.e. Paradise Lost. The preamble is based on PL 1.34-36: The INFERNAL SERPENT, whose guile stirred up with ENVY and REVENGE, DECEIVED the mother of MANKIND. SATAN is the protagonist and MILTON the poet.

Badger over Bard The Bank of England is to discontinue issuing banknotes with historic figures in favour of animals. Which figures have appeared on which notes since the Bank began the practice in 1970?

Con’s the word Sir: In his article ‘Neo con’ (6 June) Michael Simmons claims that neoliberalism powered this country into the 21st century as the fastest-growing large economy in Europe. It didn’t; it was the North Sea that fuelled the UK’s growth, the UK being the only large European economy gifted by geology with major oil and gas fields. Comparing the UK and Norway over this period is enlightening. The UK, believing in neoliberalism, sold off its national oil company BNOC and trusted in ‘the market’, while Norway, wanting a direct stake in its substantial oil and gas resource, created the state-owned company Statoil to manage it.

Home Vickrum Digwa, 23, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 21 years for the murder of Henry Nowak, 18, who was stabbed several times; the victim was handcuffed and arrested while he was telling police he had been stabbed and saying ‘I can’t breathe’. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that he ‘felt sick’ watching bodycam footage of the incident. Nicola Sturgeon, in a remarkable interview with the BBC about the embezzlement of £400,310.65 by her now-estranged husband, Peter Murrell, said she expected ‘a legal process to recover the money from Peter’, but she emphasised that: ‘I am not guilty of that embezzlement, so nothing that belongs to me should be part of that.

The unclued lights include a consecutive pair of double letters. 24/31 and 34/2 are the pairs and 13 and 41 include three pairs, albeit not all consecutively.

Keeping their promises Sir: Matt Ridley is right to assert the conservation role of gamekeepers (‘Ruffled feathers’, 30 May). They, like farmers and crofters, know wading birds are integral to Britain’s rich cultural landscapes. All ground-nesting birds benefit from culling generalist predators. I do this on my croft at my own expense because I love waders and passerines. Where costs cannot be borne by individual goodwill or taxpayer-funded grants, shooting provides a sound economic case for funding the vital combination of predator control and habitat management. A keeper’s livelihood depends on his ability to prove consistent competence in these two skills.

COUGHS AND SNEEZES SPREAD DISEASES could explain the three other unclued pairs, which are anagrams of air-borne illnesses: ANNULI + FEZ => INFLUENZA, SEE + MEAL => MEASLES, STRIP + USES => PERTUSSIS (whooping cough). CARNIVOROUS at 8D which is an anagram of CORONAVIRUS had to be highlighted.

Greco-Roman wrestling Sir: Rod Liddle suggests that some, perhaps many, middle-class voters on the right or centre right are deterred from supporting Reform because of their perception of the party as an unsavoury embarrassment (‘Can Reform smash its class ceiling?’, 23 May). Harold Macmillan in the second world war appreciated that the Americans – ‘great, big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are’ – represented the equivalent of the Romans taking over from the declining, but perhaps more cerebral Greeks – the British. But he also argued: ‘We must run Allied Forces HQ [in Algiers] as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.