For the crews operating Iran’s ballistic missile launchers, says the FT, the past fortnight has been a “deadly game of hide and seek”. Teams of between five and 10 soldiers, selected from the most ideologically committed members the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), live in vast cave complexes winding deep into the mountains. When the order comes, they load a missile on to their truck-style launcher, input targeting data and move out into the open. At that moment, the tiny cabin becomes “one of the world’s most perilous places”. Many are spotted at once by American and Israeli drones or fighter jets, and obliterated. Those that survive have a matter of minutes to reach their launch site, raise their missile and fire.

That second, “their cover is blown”. Heat plumes and infrared signatures rise from the site and are picked up by satellites skulking overhead. On the ground, this kick-starts a mad dash to hide the launcher – which can be 20 metres long – in a barn, or a bush, or a tunnel, until the coast is clear. And though the bases themselves are impregnable, necessary supply runs inevitably reveal entrances, which may be bombed, sealing the crews and their weapons inside. Israel claims to have destroyed 300 launchers since the war began, and the IRGC is estimated to have as few as 100 left. The US says ballistic missile launches fell by 90% in the first four days of fighting. But these launchers are the only means Tehran has left of firing its most potent weapons, so they can’t stop. “This is the most dangerous job on earth right now,” says Iranian missile expert Farzin Nadimi. “We are probably talking about a life expectancy of days, and soon it will be hours.”

Hero
Rachel Millward, the deputy leader of the Greens, who has issued a passionate defence of immigration, declaring that Britain should “welcome asylum seekers”. How “warm-hearted of her”, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. But can this be the same Rachel Millward who last November, as a councillor in East Sussex, vehemently opposed the government’s decision to house 600 asylum seekers in a local army training camp, saying it would place “an additional strain on already over-stretched public resources”? Perhaps the Greens have another deputy leader also called Rachel Millward.

Hero
A thoughtful thief in New Jersey who reportedly used Google Translate to inform staff at an Ecuadorian restaurant that he was robbing them. Employees at Mi Rinconcito Ecuatoriano, who did in fact speak English, say the assailant scarpered after trying and failing to steal the cash register.

Heroes
Iceland, the supermarket chain, for ending a decade-long trademark dispute with Iceland, the country. The budget frozen food chain has relinquished its exclusive rights to the “Iceland” label for its products sold in the EU, after a ruling in favour of Reykjavik by the European General Court. In an olive branch to the Nordic nation, Iceland (the shop) temporarily offered 50% discounts on certain items to shoppers at its three locations in Iceland (the country).

Villains
Weather apps, for displaying “misleading” rain icons that cost British tourist attractions as much as £137,000 a day in lost revenue. A group of more than 80 outdoor venues and destinations has complained that many people assume a single rain cloud for a 24-hour period means it’ll be a washout when in reality it’ll be dry for most of the day. Some say attendance falls by up to 30% after an unfavourable forecast.

Few restaurants in Britain carry quite the same historical weight as Simpson’s, says Hannah Twiggs in The Independent, the grand dining room on the Strand known for its hearty British food and “old-world” service. Founded in 1828 as a coffee and cigar club, it became the “centre of British chess”, with players concentrating for hours as waiters weaved between them, serving roast meats table-side from the establishment’s famous silver carving trolley so as not to disturb the games. Over the decades, it attracted a formidable list of regulars, including Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse. Winston Churchill is said to have celebrated VE Day in the restaurant’s Grand Divan dining room.

Nearly 200 years after it first opened, and some six years after it closed during the pandemic, Simpson’s has reopened under London’s top restaurateur, Jeremy King. Waiters in tall toques still wheel the quintessential silver trolley between tables, dishing out roasts with a “ceremonial confidence” that is more “Edwardian London than modern Soho”. On the restaurant’s “bill of fare” – the French “menu” was dropped in the 1860s for the more patriotic alternative – are venison tartare topped with quail’s egg, duck rillettes, defiantly rich cauliflower cheese and Wimbledon Smokehouse salmon. There’s prawn cocktail, mulligatawny soup, Dover sole and Woolton pie, the wartime vegetable dish once served at the Savoy. In a city obsessed with the latest opening and the next “big thing”, Simpson’s is a deliberate throwback built on “tradition, ritual and time”.

Paul Stebbings, the Englishman who founded the New Theatre touring company, puts on Shakespeare all around the world. And everywhere he goes, says David Womersley in The New Statesman – China, South America, India – the plays achieve an extraordinary “palpable connection with the audience”. For many, this is their first experience of the playwright’s works, but it speaks to them. And until recently, this would be no surprise. It was Samuel Johnson who called Shakespeare the pre-eminent “poet of nature” and said his characters were the “genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply and observation will always find”. Shakespeare, in other words, speaks to humanity at its most universal – its jealousies, its striving for individual identity, its wrangling with love and with telling right from wrong and with the legitimacy and purpose of power.

But in the second half of the 20th century, “theory” migrated from the social sciences to the English department and displaced these old ideas about how and why great literature holds and rewards our attention. The common sense notions that a story contains a meaning, and that the point of words is to reflect a reality beyond themselves, were dismissed as “prejudices”. Politically minded theorists told us, rather crossly, that literature was “socially constructed” and mostly perpetuated “dominant, oppressive, usually male, western European and white” interests. And since those interests weren’t timeless or universal, then nor could the works of Shakespeare be anything more than the prejudices of an old dead white man. It’s nonsense, of course. Whatever some trendy academics might think, Shakespeare – who seemed to have no “settled opinions, despite overflowing with ideas” – responded to our conflicted nature “more insistently and more imaginatively than any other author”.