Israel risks becoming a pariah

Heroes
Queen Elizabeth II’s corgis, which provided crucial comfort to the British war zone surgeon David Nott, says Henry Mance in the FT. Nott saved thousands of lives stitching people up under enemy fire. Once, at a lunch at Buckingham Palace 10 days after returning from Aleppo in Syria, Nott was too traumatised to make conversation. Understanding this, the Queen asked her staff to bring dog biscuits, “so they could spend the rest of the meal feeding her corgis instead”.

Hero
Jeremy Corbyn, who, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph, has been heroically fielding “500 emails a minute” after inviting suggestions for what to call his new party. The former Labour leader announced the party with a link to “yourparty.uk”. Soon after, Zarah Sultana – “his partner in crime” – piped up on social media to confirm “It’s not called Your Party!” That’s a placeholder, apparently, while the suggestions pour in. Wags have unhelpfully suggested the “Fruit and Nut Party” or “Jezbollah”.

Hero
The Wall Street Journal’s British editor Emma Tucker, who has spent the past week fielding furious phone calls from US president Donald Trump, without backing down. It was her decision, says Irie Sentner in Politico, to publish details of a bawdy birthday message the president wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, and the more recent scoop that Trump was told by his attorney general that his name appears in the so-called “Epstein files”. Trump blasted the story as “false, malicious and defamatory” and has filed a $10bn lawsuit against the paper. But the story has stuck.

Villains
The England women’s football team, who have decided to stop “taking the knee” before matches, says Giles Coren in The Times. What boggles the mind is not the stopping, but that they were still indulging in this “impotent gesture of witless virtue signalling” at all. What else from 2020 are the Lionesses still up to? Do they keep two metres apart and only drink beer if it’s served with a scotch egg? Do they go home after training, check on their sourdough starter, eat a slice of homemade banana bread and stick on an episode of Normal People?

Why Ozzy Osbourne jumped off a 40ft cliff

Back in 2009, I interviewed Ozzy Osbourne at his home in the Hollywood Hills, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. We drank tea, swam in his infinity pool and visited the state-of-the-art recording studio in the basement. After he showed me a series of “really rather good” pointillist felt-tip sketches he’d been working on, I made a “funny how life turns out” quip, prompting a conversation about bucket lists, regrets, and what happens after death. Osbourne, then 60 and sober – “with a tremor I’d put down to decades of drug and alcohol addiction” – told me what he wanted above all was to “go back in time and make better choices”.

Some of those “choices” were, admittedly, questionable – throwing himself off a 40ft cliff because it seemed like a “good day to fly”, biting the head off a bat at a concert, snorting a line of ants. But I genuinely felt he’d got almost everything you could wish for. I didn’t just mean the stellar career, £110m fortune and Hollywood mansion, but the kids who were “forever calling or dropping by” and the wife who still “clearly adored him”. In fact, I’ve rarely seen a couple more besotted. Despite the bickering – when Sharon complained a little too loudly, Ozzy liked to reply: “Sharon, it could be worse. You could be married to Sting” – they were completely dependent on one another. “If it weren’t for her, without a shadow of a doubt I would be dead,” he told me. “My lady’s the greatest.” Eight years later, I watched him “talking sweet gobbledegook” to one of his baby grandsons by the pool and remember thinking how “curiously functional” this supposedly dysfunctional family really was.

The BBC’s new World War Two drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North is “outstanding”, says Dan Einav in the FT. Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the five-part series is a “gruelling chronicle” of the ordeals endured by Australian soldier Dorrigo Evans and his comrades – first in Syria, and later as prisoners of war on the infamous “death railway” in Burma. It has dovetailing timelines – Evans as a “reflective veteran” played by Ciarán Hinds and as a “harrowed military surgeon” played by Jacob Elordi – meaning viewers see the “immense suffering” the soldiers endured, as well as the “impossibility of conveying the horrors to those who weren’t there”. A poignant third timeline is set in the months before Evans is deployed, following his short, intense affair with his uncle’s “vivacious” wife Amy. While there’s plenty to turn stomachs, there’s also “much to get hearts fluttering”.