The Thatcherite “enforcer” who gave up politics for love

Hero
Ysaora Thibus, a French Olympic fencer, for somehow convincing anti-doping authorities that the reason she failed a drugs test was because she’d been “contaminated” by kissing her partner. The 33-year-old tested positive for the anabolic steroid ostarine in January 2024, but claimed her lover had been using a product containing the chemical without her knowledge. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in her favour this week, citing the “cumulative effect” of nine days’ worth of tongue action.

Villains
The Trump administration, according to some of its biggest MAGA supporters, for not telling the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. Before joining the government, FBI Director Kash Patel and other top members of Donald Trump’s team claimed that the “deep state” was hiding the “truth” over the suicide of the late paedophile and financier, says The Economist. Now they’re in office, they’ve had to admit that the conspiracy theory is balls, with the Department of Justice saying this week there was “no secret information to release” – which has of course convinced many MAGA folk that they’ve been captured by the deep state themselves. “Nothing convinces a conspiracy theorist of a cover-up like saying ‘nothing to see here’.”

Villain
A motorist in California who police say was pulled over with not only an open container of alcohol – presumably beer – in his cupholder, but also more than 70 empty Bud Light cans scattered around the car. The driver was only three times the legal drink-driving limit – testament, perhaps, to Bud Light’s famously weak and watery composition.

Villain
Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, which has taken to praising Adolf Hitler. Asked by a user on X which 20th-century leader would be best suited to deal with a post celebrating the deaths of children in the Texas floods, Grok replied: “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question.” In another response, the chatbot said: “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler’, then pass the moustache.” Musk said the algorithm was “too eager to please and be manipulated”.

Hero
President Joseph Boakai of Liberia, who has been praised by Donald Trump for his excellent grasp of the English language. “Such good English,” the US president told him during a White House meeting this week. “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where were you educated? In Liberia?” Boakai didn’t appear to know how to reply, perhaps because English is the official language of Liberia.

What Narnia taught me about philosophy

Growing up, I went to my local library every Saturday morning, says the children’s author Katherine Rundell on This Cultural Life. I could choose four titles each week, from picture books to novels that were “much too old for me”. Aged eight, I read one in which the heroine had sex in a gondola, but my parents were “totally untroubled”, taking the approach that I’d absorb what I could from the plots and let the rest go over my head. At home, they’d stick poems up beside the bathroom mirror, and once a week my siblings and I would be paid 50p to memorise one. By the time I studied the poet John Donne at university, “he felt like an old friend”.

I was infatuated with CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and still find them “completely extraordinary” today. Everything in them is fantasy, yet they tell you so many real-world truths – about betrayal and the will to power, and about religion. As a children’s writer, I’ve found fantasy a “truly liberating” way to write about large ideas for little people. We need philosophy as much at the age of eight as we do at 18, or 80. Fantasy offers young people the expansive thought of philosophy but “in the colour of dragons and sphinxes and flying coats”. Today, it’s tougher than ever to capture children’s attention – few kids would choose a written paragraph over a three-second TikTok video. But for 10-year-olds now, “I don’t think the world is going to get easier”. Books are somewhere they can go for delight and knowledge. “It would be a mistake to forget how powerful a story can be.”

Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt is my “book of the summer”, says Janice Turner in The Times. It begins at Oxford University in 2004 where James Drayton (terrifyingly clever but socially inept) and Roland Mackenzie (effortlessly charming but less academic) are completing their undergraduate degrees. The story then follows them as they embark on careers at McKinsey before leaving to launch a tidal energy start-up together. It’s “sweeping, clever, deeply researched and very funny”. Starritt carries the heavy issues – the 2008 financial crisis, tidal energy – lightly, and the light issues – sex, male insecurity – with “true depth”. And it manages to be that rare thing: “a book that is positive (but clear-eyed) about those fashionably maligned beings, men”.

Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt is available to buy here.