The 5,000-year history of the English hedgerow

The grandmaster revolutionising chess

Magnus Carlsen is one of the greatest competitors of modern times, says Florian Pütz in Der Spiegel. The Norwegian became a chess grandmaster when he was 13 and the youngest ever world No 1 at 19. He has won five chess world championships, along with 13 world titles in speed-based “blitz” and “rapid” formats. The 34-year-old is also – unusually for someone who plays a 1,500-year-old board game – a “pop culture icon”. He has modelled for the clothing company G-Star, had a cameo on The Simpsons and “put Bill Gates in checkmate on television”. In 2019, he made headlines when he briefly topped the Premier League’s fantasy football rankings ahead of more than seven million other players. Yet two years ago, Carlsen effectively gave up top-level traditional chess and entered what he describes as “semi-retirement”. Now, he wants to revolutionise the entire game.

Carlsen lost interest in classical chess because it’s rooted in planning. Players undergo “months-long training camps” ahead of the big tournaments, analysing possible openings and learning them by heart. This is the exact opposite of his approach. So, with the backing of a German millionaire, Carlsen organised a “Chess960” tournament, in which the starting position of all the pieces behind the pawns is randomly selected from 960 different possibilities. “Standard openings are worthless, preparation basically impossible.” Now rechristened freestyle chess, the tournament has been expanded to a series of events, in Paris, Las Vegas, Delhi and Cape Town, with players competing for millions of dollars. The custodians of classical chess, FIDE, have threatened other players with bans if they take part in Carlsen’s breakaway format. But he isn’t worried. “Chess will always be bigger than me,” he says. “Certain organisations might not be.”

🗺️🧠 Carlsen’s unique talents were obvious from a very early age. He was completing 50-piece jigsaw puzzles before his second birthday and building Lego sets meant for 10-year-olds when he was four. At age five, he memorised every country in the world, “including their capital cities, populations and flags”.

When Tony Blair came out this week to say Net Zero policies were “doomed to fail”, it was hailed as a Big Moment, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Finally, commentators declared, the left were being given some hard truths by a man they respect and trust. People said much the same when the former prime minister announced that “woke” was a thing of the past in 2022. Now, personally I disagree with Blair on both counts. But can we all at least agree on one thing: Blair no longer represents the views of the left. This is a guy who has worked as a lobbyist for a Saudi oil firm, advised the anti-democratic government of Kazakhstan and gets funding for his thinktank from Larry Ellison, a “Trump-affiliated tech billionaire”. He is despised by the left. So let’s stop pretending he’s the “charmer of crowds in the service of low-key progressive medicine they might not otherwise swallow”.

China has bought Britain

When he was first elected, Keir Starmer announced that his approach to China would be “pragmatic”, says Ian Williams in The Spectator. That may not be the word for it. Just last month we had the British Steel debacle, in which Jingye, the company’s opaque owner – run by a former Chinese Communist Party official – was accused of trying to shut down the Scunthorpe plant by sabotaging its own blast furnaces. But that’s just the start. Grangemouth, which was Britain’s oldest operating oil refinery until it ceased production this week, is half owned by PetroChina. The fully state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation owns substantial stakes in North Sea oilfields and has boasted that it is responsible for more than a quarter of the UK’s oil production.

The list very much goes on. China General Nuclear Power Group – sanctioned by America on security grounds – has a significant minority stake in the Hinkley Point plant. Geely Auto owns London EV Company, which makes electric black cabs. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation owns MG cars, the (formerly) British marque: production is now entirely in China and just 46 workers remain at the Longbridge plant to “inspect the imports”. Chinese investors bought the Plough pub in Buckinghamshire after David Cameron and Xi Jinping had a pint there during Xi’s 2015 state visit. A Chinese consortium also purchased a 13% stake in Manchester City football club, another Xi destination during that trip. Between 2017 and 2023, British universities received an estimated £156m in research tie-ups and other donations from Chinese sources, with a third coming from companies “linked to the Chinese military or blacklisted in the US”. Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband have both visited Beijing to woo potential investors. It’s hard to imagine what’s left to sell them.