Emmanuel Macron wears such “industrial amounts” of cologne that his aides can smell him before he enters a room. The French president always has a bottle of Dior’s Eau Sauvage to hand, and deploys the scent “at all hours of the day” as a way of marking his territory. “Just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Elysée.” (Le Parisien)

The infuriating and stupid public transport slogan “See it, Say it, Sorted” is far better in Latin. Translated with the correct grammar, imperatives and participle, it comes out as the wonderfully appropriate: Vide, Dic, Rectum. (The Oldie)

The planning document for the £10bn Lower Thames Crossing runs to 359,070 pages, “equivalent to nearly 300 times the complete works of William Shakespeare”. (FT)

Ian Fleming was initially a “moonlight author”. As head of the foreign news desk at The Sunday Times from 1945 to 1962, Fleming had it written into his contract that he could spend two months of every winter in his beloved Jamaica. It was during one of these holidays – “nervous about getting married for the first time” – that he invented 007. “The book had to be a thriller,” he wrote later, “because that was all I had time for in my two months’ holiday, and I knew there would be no room in my London life for writing books.” The result? Casino Royale. (Air Mail)

The great British night out no longer ends with a punch-up. Violence-related injuries are down by two thirds in the past 25 years, and the number of men seeking treatment for injuries on Sundays (after getting into scraps the night before) has fallen by 55% in a decade. (The Economist)

The most common birthday across England and Wales is 27 September. In fact, all of the top 10 most common birth dates over the past 30 years fall in the second half of September, likely because of parents wanting their children to be old for the school year and an uptick in bedroom action over Christmas. (The Times)

Super skimpy swimwear was everywhere this summer. Thong bikinis, previously confined to Brazilian beaches and the Love Island firepit, are cropping up at lidos, leisure centres and even Scottish lochs. A search for “thong bikini” on Asos brings up 187 results, and H&M, Zara and Calzedonia all had them in their summer collections. “It was nerve-racking initially,” says one 29-year-old who embraced the “itsy-bitsy bikini revolution” for the first time over the summer, “but then I thought about it, and it’s just a bum.” (The Guardian)

The monarch has only appeared on British banknotes since 1960, meaning Elizabeth II was the first to see her own likeness on the money. She was said always to carry a fiver – “very occasionally a tenner” – in her handbag ready for the next church collection. “The note was ironed by a butler into a little square, folded so that you could only see the Queen’s face.” (The Spectator)

Walking 7,000 steps a day is enough to boost brainpower and protect against a range of diseases, including cancer, dementia and heart disease, according to a study of more than 160,000 adults. The finding debunks the 10,000-a-day figure, which originated in a marketing campaign for a Japanese pedometer in the 1960s. (BBC News)

Car owners in London are paying upwards of £200,000 for a parking spot in some of London’s prime locations – “the same price as a three-bedroom flat in Manchester or a two-acre field in Kent”. In Knightsbridge, a 5.6-by-2.5-metre space will set you back £250,000, while in Kensington, prices are a more modest £90,000 to £165,000. (The Daily Telegraph)

Apple has a “no-villains” clause for all the kit it provides to TV shows and films. So if you’re watching a whodunnit and you see someone with an iPhone, say, or an Apple Watch, “they did not do it”. And if you see Rob Brydon turn up with a Samsung, “he probably did”. (The Rest Is Entertainment)

Winston Churchill was an admirable boozer. While visiting Lake Como with his daughter and his doctor, Lord Moran, in 1945, the trio polished off 96 bottles of champagne across the two-week trip. That adds up to 576 glasses, or 192 each. Spread over the fortnight, that works out at around 14 glasses a day. Presumably for the former prime minister, this was on top of his six or seven daily brandies and whiskies. He had just led Britain to victory in a war, but still, “you can’t say that isn’t impressive”. (The Times)

The semicolon seems to be in “terminal decline”, appearing just once for every 390 words in English books today compared to once per 205 words in 2000. Some 67% of UK students “never or rarely” use the punctuation mark; just 11% regard themselves as “frequent users”. Opinion is divided: Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were big fans; Abraham Lincoln called it a “very useful little chap”. But top grammarian Lynne Truss says keen users risk becoming an “embarrassment to their families and friends”; Kurt Vonnegut said “all they do is show you’ve been to college”. (The Guardian)

Back when Anna Wintour had lunch at New York’s Royalton Hotel every day, a cappuccino would always be at her table by the time she sat down. This was the result of an “elaborate behind-the-scenes ballet”. A designated kitchen worker would make the first coffee 10 minutes before her reservation time. If after two minutes she hadn’t arrived, it would be ditched, “or sent to another unsuspecting diner”, and a new one would be made. The two-minute timer would start again, and on the process would go. On a bad day, “nearly a dozen cappuccinos might be drawn and discarded”. (Strong Words newsletter)

Donald Trump isn’t the first US president to seek some sort of payback for America’s generosity. During World War Two, the White House considered several options for what they could demand from the UK in exchange for their financial backing. One idea was to take the Crown Jewels; another was forcing Britain to “share” Hong Kong with the US. President Franklin D Roosevelt even wrote a note to his Treasury secretary “asking him to look into getting hold of rare books and paintings from the British Library”. (Ed Conway’s Substack)

Priti Patel is a good egg, according to Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips. At an Edinburgh Fringe event, Phillips explained that Patel was deeply affected by the 2021 assassination of her fellow Tory MP David Amess. Knowing that Phillips had been subject to death threats herself, Patel – who was home secretary at the time – called the Labour MP every Sunday evening “to see if I was alright”. (The Spectator)

Peter Sellers got his break on BBC Radio by crafty means. He rang up in 1948 and asked to speak to producer Roy Speer. “Listen, Roy,” he said, impersonating the comedian Kenneth Horne, “I’m phoning because Dickie and I saw this amazing young fellow called… what was his name?” He then put on the voice of actor Richard Murdoch and said “Peter Sellers”, before resuming as Horne: “It’d be good if you had him in the show.” After Speer expressed his thanks, Sellers confessed his real identity. “You cheeky young sod,” said Speer. “What do you do?” “Well,” replied Sellers, “I obviously do impersonations, don’t I?” (The Times)

There are only two people alive today who were heads of state during World War Two. One is Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria, who ascended to his throne in 1943, at the age of six. When his country became a Soviet Republic in 1946, he sensibly slunk off to do “ex-king stuff” in Egypt and Greece, before magnificently returning after the fall of communism to serve as Bulgaria’s prime minister between 2001 and 2005. The other is the 89-year-old Dalai Lama: he was formally recognised as leader of Tibet in 1939, “when he was still a toddler”. (Helen Lewis’s Substack)

Junk email is called spam because of Monty Python. Early computer engineers were big fans of the show, in particular the sketch in which a cafe waitress tells a customer what’s on the menu: “egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam”. Something about the relentless repetition clearly struck a chord, and the techies rebranded “UCE” (Unsolicited Commercial Email) as “spam”. (The Times)

The Great Gatsby was a relative flop when it was first published in 1925. Critics complained that the plot was “improbable”, and the arrival of the Great Depression soon afterwards made the depiction of the Roaring Twenties feel like a “period piece”. In 1940, the year author F Scott Fitzgerald died, it sold “a grand total of seven copies”. But two years later, “something remarkable happened”: the novel was placed on a list of books to send to US troops serving in World War Two. The soldiers loved it, the critics reversed course, and by 1960 the book was selling 100,000 copies a year. (Engelsberg Ideas)

Britain’s universities educate more world leaders than those of any other country. UK institutions churned out 50 of the premiers who were in post in 2022, while the US educated just 41. Since 1990, Oxford alone has produced 36. (The Guardian)

The first successful bone graft in recorded history was a complete accident. In 1668, a Dutch doctor called Jacob van Meekeren inserted a fragment of a dog’s skull into an injured soldier’s head in a bid to reshape his deformity. The surgery was a success, but the patient was then excommunicated by his church for being “partially dog”. When he pleaded for van Meekeren to remove his canine implant, the surgeon obliged – only to find that the dog skull had completely fused into the human skull. (Nautilus)

Kate Winslet holds the record for the longest time a leading actor has spent holding their breath underwater: seven minutes and 15 seconds. She achieved the lung-busting feat when filming the 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water, beating Tom Cruise’s six-minute hold for 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. To put that time in context, some US Navy Seals “never break three minutes”. (The New York Times)

Sentences in books are getting considerably shorter. An analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers shows that the average number of words per sentence has dropped from around 22 in 1931 to about 15 today. This shift is echoed in British parliamentary speeches, which have shrunk by a third in the past decade, and in the inaugural addresses of US presidents: George Washington’s scored 28.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, denoting postgraduate level, whereas Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, “the reading level of a high-schooler”. (The Economist)

The old is holding up surprisingly well against the new. A decade ago, forecasters were certain the “digital and virtual” spelled the end for the “analogue and physical”. E-books would kill off print; online shopping would hollow out bricks-and-mortar stores; and fleets of self-driving electric taxis were going to push combustion engines off the road (one analyst predicted US sales of petrol cars would fall to zero – “by 2024”). But physical book sales are strongly up, as are sales of petrol cars. And after an online shopping spike in lockdown, physical shops are back: since 2021, openings in the US have outnumbered closings by around 2,000 stores a year. (FT)