Patrick Diter thought his luck had run out when, in 2020, France’s highest court ruled that he had to knock down Château Diter: the 30,000 sq ft dream home he’d illegally built on the Côte d’Azur. Three years on, says John Von Sothen in Air Mail, not only is the chateau still standing, it has become one of the region’s most in-demand hotels. The Provence pad, with its opulent furnishings, imposing fireplaces and Venetian chandeliers, is available to rent for around $120,000 per week ($160,000 if you’re after a live-in chef). And the major selling strategy is cashing in on the property’s “legal limbo”. “You probably want to see it,” the website reads, “before it gets knocked down.”

One day in the late 1920s, Stanley Baldwin, Britain’s then prime minister, got chatting to a stranger on a train. He had been, perhaps, lost in The Times crossword, says Dominic Sandbrook in UnHerd, when a man leaned over and tapped him on the knee: “You are Baldwin, aren’t you? You were at Harrow in ’84.” Stanley nodded. Then came a second tap. “Tell me, what are you doing now?” Even if the story isn’t true, it tells us something of the “modest man” who steered Britain through the 1926 general strike, the Depression, and Edward VIII’s abdication. That he is barely remembered today is deeply unjust. He has been accused, for example, of sending Britain defenceless into World War II – when in fact he commissioned almost 100 new RAF squadrons “in the teeth of fierce opposition from a near-pacifist Labour Party”.