Zeitgeist
âHay bales, horses and other English eroticaâ
When the war in Iran erupted, newspapers across the world rushed to report on it, says The Economist. âNot Country Life.â The quintessential British magazine instead published a cover featuring two jolly lambs and ran a piece about âthe chickens that lay our favourite eggsâ. It was similarly âoff-newsâ when Covid broke out, featuring a charming thatched cottage on the cover, and at the start of the Ukraine war, displaying a lovely picture of the coast. World War Two was only marginally more topical. On 16 September 1939 the magazine offered: âGolf â The Game in War-Timeâ.
Country Life is less a publication than an âinstitutionâ. Its first offices were designed by Edwin Lutyens and early readers included the likes of Evelyn Waugh. Landmarks have been sold in it â in 1915 Stonehenge was flogged for ÂŁ6,600 â novelists have long satirised it and today its readership includes the Royal Family and David Beckham. It even has its own vernacular: one doesnât âbuyâ the magazine or âreadâ it; one âtakes itâ. Each issue opens with âposh pornâ â images of grand houses with moats newly on the market â and moves on to its âFrontispieceâ feature, formerly known as âGirls in Pearlsâ, pictures of grand young women with charming smiles next to hay bales, horses and âother English eroticaâ. A survey of the 2007-2011 girls found that a quarter had attended Cheltenham Ladiesâ College. Go to the right sort of house today and you will still find stacks of Country Life in the loo. It speaks to an England of country piles, tennis, and tea on the lawn; an England that is âdeclining but not yet fallenâ.
đđś When Charles, the then Prince of Wales, guest-edited the magazine in 2013, he chose Camilla for the Frontispiece. Camilla, when she guest-edited in 2022, chose her dogs.
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Life
Andrew Milligan/WPA Pool/Getty
The spy chief who never lost his âBoysâ Ownâ sense of excitement
Alex Younger, who has died aged 62, was in many ways the stereotypical British spy chief, says The Times. He came from a posh Scottish background â he was distantly related to Margaret Thatcherâs defence secretary â went to public school and served in the Scots Guards. After repeatedly resisting MI6âs overtures, he finally joined the agency after the Gulf war in 1990-91, and went on to track down war criminals in the Balkans in the 1990s, lead British intelligence operations in Afghanistan in the 2000s and protect the London Olympic Games from terrorist attacks in 2012.
Younger took the top job, âCâ, in 2014 and made an early splash with his observations on James Bond. The films, he said, bore little relation to reality: âthe payâs not good, none of us are beautiful and the cars are crapâ. But he acknowledged that it opened doors, noting âthere are few people who will not come to lunch if I invite themâ. When Younger was once flown to an uninhabited island off the Saudi coast to meet Mohammed bin Salman, he found the crown prince sitting beneath an umbrella, yacht moored nearby, watching a Bond film âby way of preparationâ. The longest serving âCâ in half a century, Younger always maintained a âBoysâ Own sense of excitementâ about his covert career, gaily recounting anecdotes about charming the Afghan president with his mother-in-lawâs jam and the time his false moustache came unstuck in a critical meeting. When his wife expressed shock that heâd never told his mother he was a spy, he decided to do so. âYes, darling,â his mum replied. âSo was I.â
đŠşđˇđş After Younger was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2024, he gave his tumour a name: âPutinâ.
Books
Sorting the cash out in Casino (1995)
How the worldâs gangsters launder $5trn a year
Given the well-documented decline in people using cash, says John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, you might expect that fewer banknotes were being printed. âWrong.â In the US, the value of all dollar bills in circulation hit almost $2.4trn last year, up from nearly $1.4trn in 2015 and $759bn a decade prior to that. Whereâs it all going? As Oliver Bullough explains in Everybody Loves Our Dollars, no one knows. But the broad answer is simple: money laundering. Experts reckon illicit activity is worth as much as $5trn a year, or the same amount as Germanyâs economy. If money laundering were an industry, it would be the third biggest in the world, âbehind commercial property and ahead of pensionsâ.
The most obvious forms of money laundering involve businesses that take cash: casinos, construction, nail salons, those ubiquitous âTurkish barbersâ. Perhaps the most famous example was La Mina (âthe gold mineâ), a network of American gold and jewellery stores that laundered an astonishing $1.2bn over two years for the Mexican cartels in the 1980s. But there are more imaginative schemes. In Puerto Rico, criminals use cash to buy tickets from lottery winners, with a juicy tip on top, so that they can claim the prize as their own. Chinese criminals ship fake antiques to the UK, then use proxies to bid up the price at auction and âbuyâ them for a huge sum. One police source thinks about 80% of the luxury watch trade is money laundering. Stopping all this seems impossible, in part because of the resources it would take, but also because of political will. When a senior adviser to the Labour government asked Bullough how to fight financial crime, he suggested hiring more police officers and giving them time to carry out proper investigations. âWell,â the adviser replied, âthatâs not going to gain us any headlines, is it?â
Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough is available to buy here.
The Knowledge Crossword
The great escape
Quick, someone call ZoĂŤl: Charles van Eman and Elizabeth Lambert in Baywatch (1993)
The man whoâs saved 1,000 honeymoons
Resort managers in Mauritius keep a series of phone numbers handy in case of emergency, says Michael Phillips in The Wall Street Journal. Police, doctors, cyclone-warning teams, and, of course, ZoĂŤl Manguillier â the guy whose record of âagainst-all-oddsâ wedding ring recoveries is unrivalled. The 61-year-old has plucked a newlywedâs ring out of the Indian Ocean after searching an area the size of a football pitch and reunited a woman with a treasured necklace two days after she lost it swimming. He once found a ring for a Frenchman at a golf resort, then did exactly the same the next day after he lost it again.
Manguillier found his calling in the 1990s when he worked in parasailing, strapping tourists into parachutes and towing them behind his speed boat. Whenever anyone dropped jewellery, âheâd put on a mask and tankâ. Some 30 years later, he reckons he has found around 1,000 rings. He once dredged up a whopping 17 in one day by sweeping the ocean floor in a spot where tourists, âwell into their tequila sunrisesâ, routinely launch themselves off catamarans, their fingers âslick with sunscreenâ. Sometimes heâs just out there for fun, but mostly heâs wielding his submersible Excalibur II metal detector to âsalvage someoneâs destination weddingâ. With just five hours left of one wedding week in Mauritius, a South African groom lost his ring during a paddleboard session. Resort crew immediately shipped in Manguillier, who set about searching for it in chest-deep water while the couple headed to the airport. After two hours, Manguillier scooped it up and raced to passenger drop-off. The groom made his flight by minutes.
Quoted
âWe have a terrible fear that if we stop for a moment we will miss something. The exact opposite is true.â
Journalist Simon Barnes
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