The duchess who swept the floors at Lourdes

“Glastonbury for arms dealers”

This week, London played host to DSEI, Europe’s biggest trade show for the defence industry, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman: a kind of “Glastonbury for arms dealers”. It’s much like the other trade shows held at London’s huge Excel complex, except instead of consumer gadgets or cooking equipment the stalls here are full of guns, mines and missiles. An automated high-calibre machine gun sweeps from side to side, aiming its barrel “politely over the heads of attendees”. A venue worker with a bottle of furniture polish buffs the plinth beneath a supersonic cruise missile. On one stand there are little aerial drones, like the one my nephew flies in his garden, except these ones have handguns mounted on top.

Like any good conference, there’s plenty of merch: a squeezy stress-ball in the shape of a hand grenade, a small toy koala wearing a little jacket declaring its support for the Australian arms sector, a tub of lip balm promoting a company that makes, I think, firing pins. And this being a corporate environment, the reality of what the products are intended to do to a human being is obscured by a “thesaurus of euphemisms”. That’s not a kamikaze drone, but a “loitering munition”. These are not guided missiles, they are “payload solutions”. This killer robot is really a “four-legged force multiplier”. Bomb makers tout “increased soldier lethality” (killing more people) and “improved threat defeat” (killing more people). One missile display even offers “Hard Kill” and “Soft Kill” options. As the hoarding under a 10-foot-long missile says, it’s all about “Technology For Peace And Freedom”.

Some of the greatest works of modern literature were, at first, repeatedly and humiliatingly rejected by publishers, says Jeffrey Meyers in The Critic. Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu was “too snobbish, too slow and too long”, and the first reader of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at Faber & Faber dismissed it as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies” which was both “rubbish and dull” as well as “pointless”. Anne Frank’s Diary was, according to a Dutch publisher, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions”. And while George Orwell’s Animal Farm was initially dismissed by British publishers – including his friend TS Eliot – out of fear it would disrupt relations with the Russians, a New York publishing house seemed to miss the point entirely: they rejected the story because it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”.

Farage, Reform and Mr Balfour’s Poodle

Nigel Farage is renowned for drinking, smoking, fishing and shooting, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. But behind the caricature, colleagues say they see books in his hands “as often as pints and fags”. This summer, he read Mr Balfour’s Poodle by the late European Commissioner Roy Jenkins. The two men have little in common (besides a love of red wine), but Jenkins wanted to break the mould of the party system and saw himself as the heir to the now-forgotten tradition of Liberal radicalism. For Farage, this offered both “inspiration” and a “bitter foretaste” of what Reform could face at the next election.

Much that confounds Farage’s critics makes sense when you “travel through his hinterland”. As a teenager, he was awed by Keith Joseph’s vision of free trade because it trusted the British people to deal with each other as they wished. He isn’t embarrassed to be compared to Pierre Poujade, the French populist who “electrified the unstable France of the 1950s”, and in another lifetime might have been a Tory Democrat like Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who legitimised the concerns of the emerging lower middle class. Farage’s great private passion is British military history: when not fishing or watching Test cricket, he “tours the battlefields of the Western Front”. His home is a “museum to World War One” – a staffer recalls an hour-long tour of Farage’s books and medals. Tellingly, the war memoirs that most profoundly affected him – the poet Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War; Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer – are at their heart testaments to the “solidarity between the high-born officers and their troops”. Those wondering how a pinstriped public schoolboy could find the ordinary men and women of provincial pubs such “easy company” might give them a try.