Police are continuing to search Royal Lodge, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s former home in Berkshire, after his release from custody in Norfolk last night. The former prince, the first senior royal to have been arrested in more than 350 years, was held for almost 12 hours yesterday on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Keir Starmer is blocking Donald Trump’s request to let American planes use British bases to attack Iran, says The Times, telling the US president it would be in breach of international law. The PM is understood to have refused the use of facilities at Diego Garcia, as well as RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, prompting Trump’s withdrawal of support for the Chagos Islands deal earlier this week. The UK hit a record monthly budget surplus of £30.4bn in January, in a boost to Chancellor Rachel Reeves ahead of her Spring Statement next month. The surplus, driven by an uptick in tax receipts and falling debt costs, was £6.3bn above forecasts and the highest for any month since records began in 1993.

In his speech at the Munich Security Conference last Saturday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio extolled an increasingly unfashionable idea, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times: “Western civilisation”. The US and Europe are bound together by “the deepest bonds that nations could share”, he said, forged by “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together”. Yet what, exactly, is Western civilisation? Ask a university student today, and they’ve probably been taught it’s an extended act of imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy. Which, of course, is tosh.

Western civilisation is, as the American educator Robert Maynard Hutchins put it, a “conversation”. It’s the conversation between Plato and Aristotle, Locke and Rousseau, Keynes and Hayek; the tension between revelation and reason, between theory and observation. It’s the tradition that seeks a deeper understanding of the world by continually revising its own methods, beliefs and aspirations – a civilisation that values “questions more than answers and the freedom to question more than life itself”. This is what sets the West apart, not creed or colour. Like pretty much every other civilisation, we have been guilty of centuries of terrible cruelty. But unlike other civilisations, we are also responsible for an “outsize share of the blessings of modern society” – science, technology, civil and human rights – and we have an impressive capacity for historical remorse. “Where in China is the state monument to the millions murdered by Mao in the Great Famine?” This is not an argument that Westerners are better than other people. It’s an argument that the Western system, our 3,000-year “conversation”, offers a superior way of life – especially compared to civilisations that treat dissenting views as heresy and respond to mass demonstrations with mass murder. That seems “worth defending”.

Exercise Hedgehog, a military exercise involving 16,000 Nato troops last year, showed just how unprepared Britain is for modern war, says Owen Matthews in The Independent. Among those playing the role of the Russian army was a team of 10 Ukrainians operating cheap drones – of the sort routinely deployed in the Donbas – along with Kyiv’s sophisticated, AI-powered battlefield management system, which can identify targets, coordinate strikes and issue firing instructions. Within half a day, the Ukrainian team had mock-destroyed 17 armoured vehicles and carried out 30 strikes on other targets. As one senior British officer put it: “The Ukrainians handed us our backsides.”

Robert Duvall, who died this week aged 95, had a good sense of humour, says Popbitch. A reader tells us her aunt once walked into a lift in a fancy hotel in Canada to find a “short man who looked a lot like Robert Duvall”. She didn’t stare because she didn’t want to be rude, but as the lift came to a stop she couldn’t resist sneaking a peek to check if it really was the Hollywood actor. Duvall smiled back at her and said: “Yeah. I am really short.”

What causes most of your marital spats, asks Carol Midgley in The Times. Money? Sex? Regretting having that last child? “Sorry, little Toby, it’s nothing personal. You’re just the straw that broke the camel’s back.” For American couples, the top reason for a slanging match is, apparently, “tone of voice”. Sarcasm, then. Saying, as I once did upon opening a present: “Thank you, this car de-icer kit with a scraper mitt is exactly what I dreamt of.” For Brits, the triggers are “outstandingly prosaic”. Number one was “leaving the lights on in empty rooms”. (Absolutely bang on.) Others included squeezing rubbish into an already full bin and “moving a phone charger from its expected location”. Who said British life was humdrum?

It’s hard to believe that sex didn’t feature, given all the bitter jokes about marital romance. How do you stop a man buying you flowers? Marry him. My wife told me that sex is better on holiday. That wasn’t a very nice postcard to receive. What are the three stages of marital sex? “Tri-weekly. Try weekly. Try weakly.” Astonishingly, there’s no mention of dogs in the bedroom. It’s one of the reasons Imran Khan divorced his second wife, Reham Khan, who wouldn’t let his beloved, but smelly, pooches near their bed. And why my husband, who has complained about the very same thing, has received the robust reply that he should “try sitting downwind of himself after a night on the beer”. My advice to our American friends is to remember that a touch of sarcasm makes the good old “air-clearing bicker” much, much easier.

The 2028 presidential hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to the Munich Security Conference last week to show off her foreign policy chops. It didn’t go well, says Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post. Asked whether the US should commit troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, the progressive lawmaker replied with an epic word salad that immediately went viral: “You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.” To watch the full clip, click here.

It would be easy to dismiss London’s start-up scene as a “mildly embarrassing attempt to mimic Silicon Valley”, says The Economist. But Britain’s capital is in fact one of the best places in the world to launch a company. It has produced more unicorns ($1bn-plus firms) than Berlin, Paris and Tokyo combined. And it is the world’s fourth largest hub for venture capital: last year, its start-ups raised a whopping $17.7bn, behind only the Bay Area, New York and Los Angeles.

It’s a letter written by a young Queen Elizabeth II, which is expected to fetch around £4,000 at auction later this month, say Jacob Panons and Dominic King on BBC News. The one-page note, addressed to the head housemaid at Royal Lodge, Windsor, was written when the then Princess Elizabeth, aged between 10 and 12, was staying in Praa Sands in Cornwall. It features drawings of dogs, horses and young children, and refers to primroses the late queen had picked, which she asked to be shared among staff. Click here to put in a bid.