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Giles Keating, who has managed the enviable feat of heating a stately home for almost nothing. The 50-room Athelhampton House in Dorset (pictured), which was mentioned in the Domesday book and inspired Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, used to cost £50,000 a year to power. Since buying the property in 2019, Keating has installed 400 solar panels across the estate, along with a network of heat pumps. The system now produces excess energy, which is stored in a collection of Tesla batteries.

August used to be “silly season”, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. With no actual news to report, the papers were filled with stories of comically little consequence. In 2003, we learned that the most people you could fit inside a phone box was 14; three years later, the big news was that “cows moo with regional accents”. These non-stories were often ridiculed. “But how we miss them now.” This summer, everything is deadly serious: strikes, inflation, NHS chaos, “seas full of sewage”. It’s miserable. How I long to read about “a parrot that can sing The Archers theme tune”.

Insisting that a war must end with a victory used to be “deemed a mark of virility”, says Max Hastings in Bloomberg. In 146 BC, for example, Cato the Censor repeatedly told the Roman Senate Carthaginem esse delendam – “Carthage must be obliterated”. In the 21st century, anything even resembling conclusive victory has “become elusive”. Yet people still talk about Ukraine in exactly this context. For them, Kremlin esse delendam.

Contraception in the Middle Ages was truly bizarre, says Laura Freeman in The Times. One guide, from the 1100s, advised women to carry around weasel’s testicles wrapped in goose skin. Alternatives included a mule’s ear, elephant dung, or “the small bone from a donkey’s vulva”. If none of that worked, a woman could try “putting peppercorns inside her, um, pepper pot”. Medieval prescriptions for gout were no less strange: one involved “stuffing a puppy with sage and snails before roasting it and using the rendered fat as a salve”. Cataracts? Mix a hare’s gall bladder with honey and dab it on the eye with a feather. “Apply nightly, for three nights.”

Emmanuel Macron is a night owl, says Mathilde Siraud in Le Point. In the small hours the French president goes through his notes, writes speeches, reads poetry, and has endless “nocturnal conversations” on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app. From about 10.30pm to as late as 2 or 3am, he “consults, probes and solicits” a network of informal advisors. “How do you feel about things?” he asks. “What is your reading on that?”

To mark 100 years since its publication, I recently read Ulysses for the second time, says Chris Fitzpatrick in The Irish Times. It wasn’t much fun. Aside from a few standout passages, I was mostly wading through “page after page of turgid prose”. And the protagonists just seemed boring: “If Stephen Dedalus walked into a pub I was in, I’d duck.” Short reading sessions, long reading sessions, reference books, audio recordings – I tried them all and nothing helped.

My nine-year-old daughter has read and watched Black Beauty about a dozen times, says Myke Bartlett in The Critic. On every occasion, I can tell from three rooms away “when poor Ginger has carked it”; when she recently read me the final line, “her voice cracked”. It reminds me of “how important melancholy is to children’s fiction”. Nowadays the idea of exposing kids to sadness “feels quite counter-cultural”. Popular titles boast endless optimism, like You Are a Champion, penned by footballer and campaigner Marcus Rashford, and Jess Sander’s You Are Enough: A little one’s guide to embracing self-love. But shielding children from any tinge of trauma denies them both the joy of literature and the life lessons it offers.

“Horse semen is a big business,” says Isobel Thompson in The Fence. With breeders desperate to produce the next champion equine, one sample of the stuff can go for six figures. The ejaculate of Galileo, a stud who was put down last year aged 23, was reportedly worth £40m a gallon, making it “the most expensive liquid in the world”. Each “exertion” of another horse, Dubawi, costs £250,000. Darren Blanton, a Texan once dubbed the “Cowboy Venture Capitalist”, claims to own £16m in frozen semen produced by a single stud.

There’s been a “flurry” of stories recently about the “great and life-enhancing” practice of older women sleeping with younger men, says India Knight in The Sunday Times. Author Melanie Blake, 45, has written about having “three lovers in their twenties”. In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Emma Thompson stars as a “repressed middle-aged widow” who has a sexual awakening with a younger male prostitute. All too often, mature women hook up with youthful men for sex, then publicly trumpet the fact “as if it were cool”. But publicly trumpeting “the excellence of the sex you’re having” is most definitely not cool.