After a term as Poland’s ambassador to London, says Piotr Wilczek in The Spectator, I’ve come home with two strong impressions: the UK remains one of the “most astonishing” places in the world, and the British are suddenly intent on convincing themselves it isn’t. I can’t understand it at all. The UK is the sixth-largest economy on earth. Financial services alone generate £281bn a year – more than the entire GDP of Finland or Portugal – while London continues to dominate global finance. Four of the world’s top 10 universities are in England; the creative industries generate £124bn a year; the tech sector is the world’s third largest, behind only the US and China, producing more unicorns ($1bn companies) than Germany, France and Holland combined. “If that’s decline, one wonders what success would look like.”

Brexit – admittedly painful – was the result of a clear and free choice made by a democratic people with a fully functioning parliament. And it was characteristically British in spirit: matters concerning Britain should be decided in Britain. That combination of sovereignty, pragmatism and independence is what made Westminster the “mother of parliaments” in the first place. And it’s this that the world really envies – the unrivalled institutions, global networks and cultural soft power. The City of London, English Law, the English language, the stabilising monarchy and the universities form an ecosystem that no other European country has managed to replicate. And remember how often Britain has reinvented itself: after the loss of empire came the swinging sixties; after the humiliating 1970s, Margaret Thatcher’s economic renewal; after talk of decline in the 1990s, London became the “global capital of cool”. Britain doesn’t need to become great again. It just needs to recognise it already is.

Humans are not the only species intelligent enough to develop language and culture, says David Gruber in The New York Times. Sperm whales produce some of the loudest and most complex sounds in the animal kingdom. When socialising, they emit a series of clicks called “codas”. And a team of marine biologists, linguists, roboticists, AI experts and cryptographers have recently used AI to decipher these codas, establishing that sperm whales communicate using an alphabet – pillared around their own version of vowels and diphthongs – which they use “in similar ways to how humans do”. The latest research suggests an extraordinary conclusion: whales may possess a communication system “more intricate than our own”, which possibly “predates human language by tens of millions of years”. At a time when living in a technology-fuelled civilisation makes many feel more distant from the natural world, “this discovery helps me feel more connected to it”.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has died aged 83, was once driving through Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania when a huge elephant “plunged her tusks up to the gums” into his Land Rover, says The Times. His Tanzanian helpers immediately fled before another elephant lifted the vehicle “like a demented forklift” and flung it, with Douglas-Hamilton still inside, into a tree. The experience felt, he later wrote, like “being a rugger ball in a scrum”. That the elephants failed to kill Douglas-Hamilton was a mercy not only for him, but also for their species: the “bold and resourceful” Englishman dedicated the next six decades of his life to their conservation, becoming the “world-renowned authority” on the African elephant.

Born in 1942 to a duke’s son and a 1930s pin-up model, Douglas-Hamilton studied zoology at Oxford, which he considered his “passport to the bush”. On winning a grant to study elephants in 1966, he moved to Tanzania where he spent years, mostly “shirtless and barefoot”, learning to recognise 500 different beasts by their tusks and ears, naming them and becoming so close to one that she “let him tickle her trunk”. He discovered that the giant pachyderms tend each other’s wounds, monitor the ill and bury the dead, and successfully campaigned for the 1990 global ban on the ivory trade. He flew everywhere in his plane, briefly landing to read road signs, and once said he couldn’t remember the last time he “went to lunch in a car”. It wasn’t all plain sailing: he suffered serious spinal damage from being trampled by a rhino, was shot at by poachers in Uganda, and once flipped his plane after hitting a zebra while landing. Still flying aged 80, he joked that he welcomed his increasing deafness, because “it means I can’t hear the stall warnings”.