The return of Christianity

Hero
Barack Obama, according to Donald Trump, who told US military leaders last week that while his predecessor did a “lousy job” as president, he was “great” at descending stairs. “He would bop down those stairs [like] I’ve never seen,” said the US commander-in-chief. “Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop.”

Heroes
Britain’s over-75s, who turn out to be “a bunch of cocaine fiends”, says Carol Midgley in The Times. New data shows that 723 “silver snorters” sought post-gak medical help in the year to March 2025, up a third in two years, with 28 of them in their 80s and eight of them over 90. I know class A drugs aren’t big or clever, but I can’t help thinking: “respect”. It surely beats “relaxing with a mashed-up boiled egg and a copy of Woman’s Realm”.

Villains
Angry middle-aged white men, according to angry middle-aged white man Gary Neville, for dividing the country by “using the Union Flag in a negative fashion”. The former footballer, who says he removed a flag a contractor had put up at one of his building sites, clearly sees himself as “the great healer”, says Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. After all, “nothing says neutrality” quite like blaming toxicity and division on “some unspeakable sub-group of society”.

Villain
Deloitte, which has had to partially refund the Australian government for submitting a report riddled with errors introduced by AI. The document, a review of problems affecting the welfare system, contained references to non-existent reports by academics at the universities of Sydney and Lund in Sweden.

Hero
Fred Ramsdell, an American immunologist, who missed repeated calls to tell him he had won the Nobel prize in medicine because he was on a digital detox in the wilds of Montana. The 64-year-old only found out on Monday afternoon, around 12 hours after the public announcement, when his wife turned on her phone and began screaming with excitement. His lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said he was “living his best life”.

France is perfect, except for all the French

French culture enchants the world, says Rozalia Kowalska in Le Monde. In 2023, France welcomed more than 100 million tourists – the largest number of any country. It is the world-leading exporter of non-English-language films; on Spotify, the streaming of French songs is up 94% since 2019; and in 2023, LVMH (closely followed by Hermès and Dior) banked revenues exceeding €86bn – “confirming the global reign of French luxury”. But for all that foreigners adore France, there remains, everywhere, a “persistent irritation towards the French”. The phrase “I like you, you don’t seem French” is such a common one for French tourists to hear abroad, there are whole forums on Reddit dedicated to discussing an antipathy that France, “in its pride”, usually pretends not to notice.

In some cultures, this antipathy is “almost a tradition”. The English were caricaturing the medieval French as “boastful and arrogant knights” as early as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). In Henry V, Shakespeare extended the stereotype: on the eve of Agincourt (which, of course, the French lost), the Dauphin and his constable “linger at length over the elegance of their armour and the nobility of their horses”. Under Louis XIV, the philosopher and moralist Jean de La Bruyère denounced the artificiality of French manners, despite being a Frenchman himself. A century later, the Polish poet Ignacy Krasicki echoed this criticism in The Fashionable Wife, in which imitations of French lifestyles lead the characters to ruin. In the 20th century things rather hardened. The defeat by Nazi Germany – a little unfairly reduced in many minds to an “easy surrender” – fuelled the idea of a people both haughty and cowardly, which still crops up in The Simpsons and the like today. The French themselves don’t worry too much, though. After all, they also have a reputation for being excellent “artists, intellectuals and lovers”.

🗣️🇫🇷 So-called “sentence completion tests” published in the scientific journal Corela in 2012 revealed that the adjective most frequently chosen by British participants to finish the phrase “The French are…” was “rude”. For the phrase: “She’s French, but…” the most common response was “she’s not that bad”.

“My aim in life is to add to the sum of human happiness”

Jilly Cooper first made her mark on the national consciousness with her Sunday Times column, which she’d been offered after sitting next to the editor at a dinner and regaling him with her travails as a “scatterbrained young wife”. The paper’s intellectuals dismissed her as a lightweight, says The Daily Telegraph, but they were soon humbled when people began buying the paper to “read her, not them”. When she released her first “bonkbuster” novel, Riders, in 1985, packed full of “appropriated scandalous incidents” from her Gloucestershire life, it shot straight to the top of the bestseller charts. And the rest of the raunchy Rutshire Chronicles soon followed, encapsulating her “unfaltering instinct” for what the British are really obsessed with: “class, sex, shopping – and dogs”.

Born Jilly Sallitt in 1937, Cooper was referred to by her teachers as the “unholy terror” and applied to Oxford, unsuccessfully, because she’d heard there were “ten men to one woman”. The success of her later writing lay both in her fastidious research – for Riders she went on numerous trips to horse shows, race meetings and cavalry barracks; for Score! she phoned the Gloucestershire Constabulary to enquire whether a penis could remain erect after death – and, of course, the fact it was always stuffed with raucous bonking and double entendres. Her Spitting Image puppet, she once recalled, only ever said one word: “sex”. Though she took great pride in her success, Cooper was never precious about her books. “I know they’re frivolous, imperfect, but people love them,” she said. “My aim in life is to add to the sum of human happiness.”

🐶🥂Before her death, Cooper told the Daily Mail how she’d like her funeral. She wanted to look “quite tidy”, she wrote, wearing a bra and a trouser suit (to hide her legs); to be buried with a photo of her husband Leo and the children, along with champagne and chocolates; and to have the music from Brideshead Revisited. Then there would be a huge party in her Gloucestershire garden where everyone could “gossip, gossip, gossip”. One of the nicest funerals she ever went to, she said, had loads of wolfhounds at the party. “That was a frightfully good idea, because every time somebody got drunk, they could lean against a large dog.”