Why is it, says Yascha Mounk in The Spectator, that after the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust, huge demonstrations filled the streets of Berlin, London, Paris and Brussels, “not in solidarity with those who had been brutally murdered, but in support of the terrorists”? The most charitable interpretation is that protesters were expressing a desire to protect Palestinian civilians from Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. But if that is the true motive, where were the throngs of people mourning the hundreds of thousands of Shias – “or, for that matter, 3,000 Palestinians” – murdered by Bashar al-Assad in Syria? Or the millions of Uighurs oppressed by the Chinese government in Xinjiang?

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, “one of the most gloriously over-the-top Hollywood couples to have ever lived”, are the subject of a new, “delicious triumph” of a biography by Roger Lewis, says Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. “Want to know what Taylor’s favourite sexual position was? Or the one meal Burton cooked while he and Taylor were married? The weekly rent of the yacht they hired just for their dogs? Then Erotic Vagrancy is the book for you. (Respectively: from behind, boiled eggs and $2,400.)” The title comes from an “outraged statement” made by the Vatican when it became clear that Taylor and Burton – both married, but not yet to each other – were having an affair while filming Cleopatra in Italy. Burton’s reaction was typically brusque: “F*** it, let’s go to f***ing Alfredo’s and have some f***ing fettuccine.”