But the American, given a bye in the first round, fired eight aces against Delgado to quickly see off the Paraguayan.The men’s and women’s singles champions at the US Open this year will pocket at least $1.2m (£675,000). Total prize money has the potential to exceed $21.1m (£11.9m).. I’ve been given the task of sifting through a selection of the entries that have arrived for The Independent’s Kodak-sponsored photographic competition, and I’ve tried to be as honest and as positive as I can here. There are some great entries mixed in with a few that have missed the mark, and as you read through maybe you’ll find a few pointers as to what might make a competition winner.

Terry Hope Click on the pictures for a larger version

Lack of attention to detail has diluted the impact of this picture. The person on the steps is too far away and sitting in shadow, while the people wandering behind are brightly lit and very distracting. A higher viewpoint would have revealed more of the ornate pond behind the subject.. John Macsween’s fortunes were founded on haggis, so much so that on his death he was apostrophised himself in Scotland as the “great chieftain o’ the pudding-race”. Joining the family butcher shop in 1957 with his father, John Charles Macsween, always known as Charlie, he built it up to such an extent that it now boasts the world’s only purpose-built haggis-manufacturing plant. Born in Edinburgh in 1939, John Angus Macsween was the eldest child of three, educated at James Gillespie’s High School and then at Heriot’s He left school at 16. In 1964 he married Kate, daughter of John McKay, once Lord Provost of Edinburgh and the proprietor of a thriving insurance business.

Macsween of Edinburgh is now run by the middle two of their four children.
Charles Macsween and Son was originally a retail butcher, deriving its high standards from John Macsween’s grandfather’s business, the famous William Orr and Son, also in Edinburgh. Our current concerns with the traceability and provenance of our food supply were already honoured at Orr’s, for the beasts, all from livestock farmers known to them, went into the abattoir at the back in Rose Street, and came out as steaks and joints at the front.John Macsween was an innovator by nature, and developed systems that are now commonplace and sometimes required by law, such as keeping cooked and raw meat separate, not allowing those who handled money to handle the meat, a ticketing system for queuing at busy times, and point-of-sale leaflets for mail-order goods.In the 1980s he saw that the growth of supermarkets posed a serious threat to family-run small food businesses, and he made some difficult decisions about changing the business from a retailer to a largely wholesale firm. The whole thing is swathed in the most appalling snobbery – “each piece of furniture, old or new, had that inimitable air that comes from being acquired in the century it was made.” Lots of people like it, but I find it terribly difficult to regard it as in any sense a “classic”.As it happened, the same week I was trying to acquire a copy of a real classic, Thackeray’s Pendennis. The three other novels are extraordinarily technically inept. She can’t describe anything other than through a film of tremulous awareness She can’t contrive incidents naturally at all.

The characters have nothing to say apart from how they feel about each other. They were almost the first novels that Virago republished in 1978 and, with a very popular and still well-remembered BBC dramatisation in 1982, established Virago’s future and re-established White’s reputation.As it happens, I hadn’t read White’s novels until last week, and sat down to enjoy them in the sunshine. The first one, Frost in May, I quite enjoyed in its naive way; it is a very simple and fresh story about convent-school life But after that: what a load of old rubbish. Just this last week, Antonia White’s four-novel cycle arrived This latter carries an especial historical weight.