Long reads shortened
A World War Two Soviet propaganda poster. Laski Diffusion/Getty
What is it that makes the Russians so cruel?
Vladimir Putin has waged his war in Ukraine with “deliberate brutality”, says Antony Beevor in The Washington Post. No change there. Ever since the 13th-century Mongol invasions, Russia has treated terror, mass rape, looting and pointless torture as natural elements of combat. While western Europe was humanised by the Enlightenment – the Red Cross, the Hague conventions – Russia kept enlarging its empire with the same old butchery. The Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, called itself “the sword and flame of the revolution”; one of its executioners wrote poetry about “the crunch of broken lives and bones”. At Stalingrad, Soviet snipers were ordered to shoot starving orphans. The mass rapes carried out by the Red Army in Hungary and Germany have been repeated in Ukraine today.
This seemingly ingrained cruelty may stem from the fact that Russians treat their own soldiers almost as badly as they do their enemies. When researching in the Moscow archives in the mid-1990s, I read that there were once 5,000 suicides a year among teenage conscripts because of bullying. “This provoked amusement among generals.” Today, recruits in their tens of thousands have been tricked or forced to the frontlines of Ukraine in breach of Russian law, with amputees sometimes sent back into combat on crutches. Moscow has also recruited some 27,000 impoverished foreigners from more than 130 countries, many of them tricked into emigrating and then press-ganged into military service at gunpoint. Some, incredibly, are sent towards enemy lines with explosives strapped to their bodies, to act as “human bombs”. They’re known as “disposables”. The Kremlin shrugs off criticism of all this, trusting the old maxim that “nobody judges a victor”. Yet no nation is so much “a prisoner of its past and its complexes” as Russia.
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Property
Silman’s brother on the balcony
THE CRICKET-LOVER’S PAD This three-bedroom penthouse overlooking Lord’s cricket ground belonged to superfan Laurence Silman, who regularly hosted lavish parties during Test matches, says the Daily Mail. The property has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the ground in all the reception rooms and the master bedroom, and a balcony which runs the entire length of the flat, directly overlooking the wicket, the pavilion and the media centre. It’s being sold through a confidential sealed bid starting at £10m and closing on 31 July, with all proceeds going to charity. Click on the image to see more.
Heroes and villains
Hero
An audience member at a live orchestral performance of the La La Land movie score in Sydney, who saved the concert after the keyboard player fell ill during the interval. When the conductor asked if there was a pianist in the house – preferably one with exceptional sight-reading skills – 21-year-old student Sterling Nasa put up his hand and ran down to the stage. He nailed it, at one point earning a standing ovation for improvising his way through a tricky synth solo.
Villains
Birmingham City Council, according to Birmingham City Council, which has paid itself more than £470,000 in fines for breaching the city’s Clean Air Zone rules. Officials say they have been trying to replace non-compliant vehicles since the emissions regulations came into force in 2021, but that an eighth of their fleet is still too dirty.
Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty
Hero
Rosamund Pike, who came on stage after a West End performance to dress down a theatregoer she had seen texting during the play’s emotional finale. The 47-year-old, who plays a senior Crown Court judge in Inter Alia, said the unidentified culprit “broke the bond” between audience and performer. Quite right, says Celia Walden in The Telegraph. If you’re so “morbidly, surgically attached” to your phone that you cannot bear to put it away for an hour and a half, don’t go to the theatre and ruin it for everyone else.
Hero
A farmer in the Lake District, after he punished motorists who ignored a sign asking them not to park in his field by drenching their cars with slurry. Dylan Wakley, a fellow agriculturalist visiting from Dorset, told the Daily Mail: “Any farmer who has dealt with tourists has dreamed of doing this.”
Villain
A thief in France who stole the banana that makes up Maurizio Cattelan’s controversial artwork Comedian. Curators at the Centre Pompidou-Metz were able to quickly restore the $6.2m piece of art, which consists of a single fresh banana taped to a wall, by finding another banana and sticking it into place. They noted afterwards that “no irreversible damage has been noticed”.
Villain
An unidentified passenger on a United Airlines flight from New York to Mallorca, whose ill-advised name for a Bluetooth device – “BOMB” – resulted in the plane turning around and returning to Newark for security checks. The crew reportedly asked several times for the culprit to turn off the device, and thus avoid a mid-flight U-turn, to no avail.
Comment
Andy Burnham campaigning in the Makerfield by-election. Ryan Jenkinson/Getty
The myth of Britain’s inequality
If you want to argue that Britain is on the wrong path, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times, statistics are your friend. The birth rate is down to a record low, with the average woman in England and Wales having only 1.39 children. This, obviously, is one of the most important numbers in politics. How can our welfare state function in a world of ever more pensioners and ever fewer workers? Yet for all the “policy essays” by Labour bigwigs in recent days there is no mention of “fertility” or birthrates. Nor is it ever mentioned that our GDP per capita is now lower than in every US state – even Mississippi – or that the average American household is a “staggering” 69% better off in terms of disposable income. Or, indeed, that the top 1% of UK earners pay 26.6% of income tax, three times more than the entire bottom half.
More broadly, the narrative that inequality is Britain’s biggest problem “is really, really hard to substantiate”. On the World Bank’s “Gini Index” of economic fairness, British inequality peaked in 2000 and has been falling steadily ever since. In terms of wealth inequality, Credit Suisse says we have been one of the “star performers” of the past five years, sharing things out more fairly than France, Germany, the US or even Sweden. Yet Labour hopefuls – Andy Burnham most egregiously – keep trotting out the same old nonsense, complaining about (entirely mythical) supermarket “profiteering”, a lack of social housing (we have double the EU average) or deregulation (we cap water bills, energy bills and bus fares, and limit the profits of providers). In fact, one of the most depressing things about the battle of ideas that’s erupted within the Labour Party is “how much is based on pure fantasy”.
The Knowledge Crossword
What to watch
Callum Scott Howells and Ruby Stokes in Madfabulous
The Victorian playboy who burned through £18m a year
Henry Paget was “probably mad and definitely fabulous”, says Deborah Ross in The Spectator. The fifth Marquess of Anglesey, subject of the new, aptly named biopic Madfabulous, perfumed the exhaust of one of his automobiles so it “belched violets”; was partial to wearing women’s clothing; married his (female) cousin, who soon annulled the marriage on grounds of “non consummation”; and set up his own theatre company to showcase his self-choreographed “butterfly dance”. He moved the entire troupe into the family seat at Plas Newydd, on the Isle of Anglesey, converted the chapel into a 150-seat replica of the Dresden opera house – he called it “The Gaiety Theatre” – and paid everyone much more than they deserved.
Paget frittered money away on everything, but perhaps most particularly clothes. He owned 100 dressing gowns, some lined with squirrel, and had one ensemble made entirely of diamonds. He once walked past a jewellers and bought the entire window display. After burning through the family fortune, getting through £18m a year, he slunk off to die in Monte Carlo, bankrupt and consumptive, aged just 29. His embarrassed family tried to eradicate his memory by burning all his papers after his death, but here we are still talking about him 120 years later. It’s exactly what he would have wanted, so “full marks to Madfabulous” for that.
Weather
Quoted
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
JRR Tolkien
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