In the 1990s, says Dylan Jones in The Times Magazine, the London restaurant scene was all about “fun, debauchery and heavy drinking”. Being the decade of Britpop, the Young British Artists and New Labour, Soho was full of people doing things they’d never done before, “and would never dream of doing again”. There was a running joke that if you went into the loos at The Atlantic – a celebrity haunt that attracted the likes of Bono, Liam Gallagher, Kate Moss and Madonna – you could make a fair few quid by pocketing all the discarded rolled-up £10 notes. At the Groucho Club, cocaine was openly snorted off the snooker table; the Notting Hill hangout 192 earned the sobriquet “One line or two”.

The long, boozy lunch was still alive and well. Blur’s Alex James remembers sitting down at The Ivy with Damien Hirst and Keith Allen at 1pm one day in 1998 and not leaving until well after 9pm. “I’ve still got the receipt, and it’s like a bog roll,” he said. “It was thousands of pounds and it was all drinks, apart from some French fries we had at six o’clock.” And you’d be surprised by just how much sex was going on – in lavatories, broom cupboards, on bars and, sometimes, even in the dining room. At The Atlantic, the “most debauched restaurant that London has had”, there were threesomes in the loos most nights of the week. Owner Oliver Peyton was once called to the restaurant by security to deal with a City boy sitting at his table, “pinstriped trousers around his ankles”, attending to his date. “Leave them to it,” Peyton said. “I don’t see anyone complaining.”

There’s a new Calvin Klein advert in which the sight of 24-year-old actress Sadie Sink pulling on some snug-fitting jeans prompts a kitchen tap to spurt everywhere and a slice of toast to hurl itself out of the toaster. “I empathise with the fixtures,” says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. And the ad is part of an interesting new pattern. For 20 years, advertisers tried to make us desire women who are “older, or fatter, or wrinklier – or black or brown”. The stated aim was representation, but really it was about re-education: expose us to enough of this, went the thinking, and we’d grow out of the old ideal. The unashamed ogling of Sink – young, slim and so pale she resembles “a Pre-Raphaelite nymph at the end of a Narnian winter” – suggests a return to the old ways.

Rejecting them was always a daft idea. Sexual desire is hard-wired, not a passing fad, and humans – men especially – are programmed to lust after “the young, the slim, and, yes, sometimes the fair”. Youth has always signalled fertility, which peaks from 18 to 25. Slenderness varies with cultural mores – look at any Rubens – but even curvy Sydney Sweeney looks fit, not fat. And the preference for fairness is ancient: Roman women whitened their faces with lead, Tang Chinese women ate ground pearls, the Quran likens the maidens of heaven to “sheltered eggs” in an apparent reference to their whiteness. This is obviously not to say that only one sort of woman can sell denim. Another American brand, Aerie, is “prospering mightily” on diverse models, and good for them. But there’s no point denying that young, slender, fair-skinned women remain an “erotic ideal” for billions of people. And they won’t give up that ideal just “because somebody explains that they ought to”.

China has long been preparing to “seize Taiwan by force”, says Simon Shuster in The Atlantic. In December, the People’s Liberation Army released an AI video showing swarms of drones attacking the self-governing island and robots “marching through the ruins”. It has performed various drills near Taiwanese shores, including rehearsing a blockade. Yet earlier this year the opposition party, Kuomintang (KMT), received a “warm reception” in Beijing, strolling through the Forbidden City, posing for pictures, and talking business with Chinese executives. Xi Jinping was reportedly “oddly animated”, telling stories, cracking jokes and even “showing his teeth when he smiled”.

A few years ago, pandering to China would have been unthinkable for Taiwanese politicians. But today the KMT’s chairwoman, Cheng Li-wun, is making the case that resistance to China is futile. To defend itself against Xi’s army, Taipei would be heavily dependent on US military assistance. But since its war with Iran, America has been busy moving warships and aircraft from Asia to the Middle East, and depleting its stockpile of advanced air-defence systems. Even Cheng’s opponents acknowledge that the US today is less able to help. And even if it could, who’s to say it would be willing? After a visit to Beijing earlier this year, Donald Trump, who describes Xi as a “friend”, said that helping Taipei in a war was “the last thing we need right now”. War games suggest that America could lose more troops in a few weeks of fighting in Taiwan than it lost in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most Taiwanese want to keep China out of their affairs. But with the US no longer seen as a “trustworthy ally”, many understand the need for something other than “a war they cannot win”. A deal may be inevitable.