Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently waved away progressive excesses with a “verbal shrug”, says The Wall Street Journal. “Woke 1,” she laughed, “was crazy.” Well, so far “Woke 2” is throwing up more than its share of insanity. Last week The Boston Globe reported on a financially struggling lesbian bar that decided to relax the Covid rules that were, bizarrely, still in place. “With love,” the bar’s management announced online, “we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional.” The response was outrage. “People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” wrote one user. “I hope your venue gets firebombed,” wrote another, “for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans.” At a lengthy meeting, a “gender-expansive lesbian” who uses “he/him” pronouns berated the owner to tears.

Soon after this story ran, Stanford University was forced to apologise for using AI to transform the race and sex of a real student in a publicity picture. In the original, three students smile happily in the dining hall. When the same image appeared on campus banners, Billy Ramirez, a Hispanic biology student, had been replaced by a black woman. The same week, Philadelphia teacher Hannah Gann, who had presented herself locally as a black Palestinian activist, admitted she was in fact a white woman of Jewish heritage with an Israeli settler family. In grovelling posts online, Gann confirmed she’s a “pale-skin-ian, not a Palestinian”, but insisted she genuinely “wanted to commit to the work I was doing”, which included calling the October 7 terrorists “martyrs” and declaring “F*** the police until Palestine is free”. Perhaps woke insanity isn’t in the past after all.

The modern zoo was invented in Regent’s Park in 1828, says Malcolm Gaskill in the London Review of Books, by the great chemist Humphry Davy and the colonial adventurer Stamford Raffles, who also founded modern Singapore. But long before that, Europe’s monarchs had kept exotic creatures as emblems of their wealth and power. French royal menageries date back to the 13th century. King John employed lion-keepers at the Tower of London as early as 1210, after moving the English royal menagerie from Woodstock Palace in Oxford, where it had been formed a century earlier by Henry I, “probably as a hunting reserve”.

For centuries, animals played a crucial diplomatic role. The Holy Roman Emperor sent Henry III three big cats, which were joined in the 1250s by a polar bear, courtesy of the king of Norway, and an elephant from the king of France. In an age of ignorance, both died fast, though the bear was said to swim in the Thames on a long chain. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, scores of “doomed specimens” arrived, including leopards, lynxes, wildcats, jackals, bears and birds of prey. James I was given an elephant by the king of Spain with instructions that it should drink only wine between autumn and spring. Eighteenth-century visitors to the tower – which by then boasted bears, monkeys, wolves, an elephant, a tiger and a baboon – could pay a few pence or stick with the Elizabethan token of admission: “a cat or dog to feed the lions”.

When the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested by FSB agents in Russia in 2023, says Janice Turner in The Times, he immediately knew their plan: to have him convicted of espionage, making him a “trading asset” for a potential prisoner swap. In Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, he instantly broke “grave prisoner codes”: not cleaning his feet before entering his cell, and offering out his hand to his cellmate before declaring his offence (no one wants to unwittingly greet a rapist or a paedophile). Over the next 16 months, the pair developed a “highly disciplined” routine. They took turns to thoroughly clean the cell each day. When they used the loo, they would turn the radio up and light some lemon peel to mask the smell.

They had only an hour’s exercise each day, and kept themselves sane with “little treats”: soaking their feet in hot water; throwing around a hacky sack; feeding the birds on the window ledge. Gershkovich made his way through much of Lefortovo’s 9,000-book library, devouring dissident writers and the Russian classics. His mindset, he says, was “close to a monk-like state”, and though he was often bored, he knew his “political value” meant he would never be harmed. When he once got sand in his eye, he was rushed to the nurse’s office and there was talk of an ambulance. When Gershkovich joked that “the package needs to be delivered undamaged”, the health warden responded: “I didn’t tell you this, but yes.” Gershkovich, now 34, returned to the US in 2024 as part of the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, and finally hugged his parents again. “I don’t remember anything I said to them,” he writes in his new memoir, “just the unmistakable feeling of pure joy.”