All the week’s wisdom in one place
3-9 September 2021
Europe
“Who would have thought it?” asks Le Monde. Emmanuel Macron is finally making sluggish old France an “anti-Covid champion”. Eight months into our vaccine rollout, we’re outstripping the UK, Germany, the US and even Israel.
Animal rights
It’s been a big week for animals, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. First we had former marine Paul “Pen” Farthing fleeing Kabul in a chartered plane with the 200 rescue cats and dogs he’d been looking after at his animal charity. Then there was Geronimo, the bovine tuberculosis-ridden alpaca that had to be slaughtered by men from the environment department.
Texas
There’s a chilling image circulating on social media, says the Houston Chronicle in an editorial: “a Texas-shaped coat hanger”. The grim connotation won’t be lost on anyone who lived through a time when women didn’t have access to safe, legal abortions, so were forced to seek alternatives such as pills, back alleys, Mexican border towns and “DIY devices”.
Heroes and villains
Celebrity chefs, most of whom are unbearably smug these days, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. “Scan cooking programmes now and you won’t see a single one worth watching… Instead you will find a strange collection of talentless gargoyles who mostly can’t cook and don’t know anything, participating in dreary contests where everything is built around personal journeys and their ‘relationships with food’.”
Tomorrow’s world
The scorching Middle East is warming “at twice the global average”, says Anchal Vohra in Foreign Policy. By 2100, many cities “may literally become uninhabitable”, as homes become sweltering death traps and taps runs dry. Kuwait recorded a record temperature of 53.6C, while Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia all recorded more than 50C.
Noted
Although the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and colloidal silver solution have both been called “snake oil” because of their unsuitability as Covid treatments, actual snake oil – squalene from the livers of pythons – “has been credibly proposed by scientists for use in Covid vaccines”, says Caitjan Gainty in The Conversation.
Inside politics
Boris Johnson may not sack his Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, says John Rentoul in The Independent. That doesn’t mean political accountability is dead. No less than 13 ministers have fallen on their swords since Johnson became PM. And the resignation usually cited to show “things were done differently in the past” has an interesting wrinkle. Lord Carrington resigned as foreign secretary in 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falklands – intriguingly, when Carrington was 99, in July 2018, he raised his fist “like a football fan” when he heard that Johnson had resigned as foreign secretary from Theresa May’s Cabinet. He promptly died.
Zeitgeist
“Great Millennial Novelist” Sally Rooney is full of contradictions, says Sarah Ditum in UnHerd. A literary celebrity at 30, she’s publishing her third novel next week – a searing takedown of literary celebrities.
Quoted
“Fact of the day. It takes Stefanos Tsitipas [sic] twice as long to go to the bathroom as it takes Jeff Bazos [sic] to fly into space. Interesting. 🚽 🚀”
The case for
Why do the Taliban enjoy so much support in Afghanistan?
Quoted
“A vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done.”
Afghanistan
On 15 August the Taliban took over the vast Bagram air base, abandoned without warning by US forces on 1 July – much to their delight. “Our lesson is that we defeated America with our faith and our guns,” one fighter there told The Times’s Anthony Loyd.
Psychology
Lockdown gave me “treat brain”, says Imogen West-Knights in the Financial Times. Suddenly I was buying make-up I didn’t know how to use and eating pizza upon pizza, “their boxes towering up like greasy Jenga blocks”. Once I had relatively good impulse control. Now “treat brain was in charge”.
Paloma Faith
I first met Paloma Faith in 2001, says Eva Wiseman in The Observer, when “it was obvious to everyone who came within six feet of her” that she was going to be famous. Now 41, the “millennial Barbara Windsor” has scored three double platinum albums, Brit awards, Top 10 hits, a judging spot on talent show The Voice, film and telly work.
Lee “Scratch” Perry
Lee “Scratch” Perry was the strangest man I’ve ever met, says Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. I interviewed the Jamaican music producer, who died this week aged 85, in 1997.
Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard was born twice, says Alan Yentob in Radio Times. In 1937 he came into the world as Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia. In March 1939 the Nazis arrived. The Strausslers fled to Singapore, then Darjeeling, British India.
Staying young
Three weeks ago “a terrible thing happened”, says Taki in The Spectator. “I turned 85.” What really hacks me off is the big lie I was told 60 or 70 years ago – that if I lived to a ripe old age, “inner peace would take hold of me” and the “rage to live” would subside.
Love etc
Forget honeymoons. Celebrities are now taking “honeymonths”, says Guy Kelly in the Telegraph. Just look at Lady Kitty Spencer. Ever since Diana’s 30-year-old niece wed 62-year-old fashion tycoon Michael Lewis in July, the couple have been on a nonstop tour of the Med.
Sport
Charlie Watts loved cricket, says Jim White in the Telegraph. More a “roller” than a “rocker”, the Rolling Stones drummer was entranced by the game’s pace and flow, the rhythmic knock of ball on bat. He “preferred to spend his down time with a copy of Wisden rather than a bottle of Jack Daniel’s”.
Quoted
“The state of America 2021: the most popular podcast in the country is hosted by a guy who took horse dewormer to treat Covid.”
Theranos trial
Elizabeth Holmes, founder of healthcare company Theranos, was “the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire”, says ABC’s Rebecca Jarvis in The Dropout. Holmes is now on trial for fraud in California, and this six-part podcast explains the rise and fall of the woman Forbes hailed as “the next Steve Jobs”.
History
Many great men would struggle without their wives, says Helen Lewis in the podcast Great Wives. Take Albert Einstein, who married a fellow physics student, Mileva Maric. “At school Mileva was more of an academic superstar than Albert.” When Einstein told his mother he wanted to marry Mileva, she replied: “Like you, she is a book. But you ought to have a wife.”
Film and TV
“Why aren’t more things set on submarines?”, says Ed Cumming in The Independent. BBC1’s new six-part Sunday blockbuster is a high-pressure murder-mystery cracker: an underwater detective conspiracy thriller, “Line of Das Booty”. HMS Vigil is a fictional Vanguard-class submarine, a quarter of the UK’s continuous at-sea deterrent.
Books
The plaque at 7 Schönholzer Strasse, in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, is easy to miss, says The Economist. “Yet it marks one of the most astonishing episodes in the grim history of communist East Germany.”
This three-bedroom cottage in the ancient Buckinghamshire village of Brill, 12 miles from Oxford, has exposed beams, oak floors and a distinctive glass-paned Victorian shopfront. There’s a garage at the end of the courtyard garden and the nearby Pointer does cracking pub grub. £530,000.
Noted
The Banksy painting that partially shredded itself in 2018, after being sold at auction for £1.1m, is going back under the hammer in October. The asking price? Between £4m and £6m.
Eating in
English cheese is not to be sniffed at, says John Smart in the literary magazine Slightly Foxed. In 1935 a Frenchman visiting London, Theodore Rousseau, was so impressed by the stuff that he wrote a letter to The Times. Why do the English not take more pride in their native dairy products, he lamented.
The great escape
Most Britons think of Switzerland as a winter destination, but summer here is “glorious”, says William Cook in The Spectator. Zermatt, the highest ski resort in the country, is “lively all year round”. And it’s in the shadow of the Matterhorn, “one of the natural wonders of the world”.
Quoted
Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
This curvaceous cultural centre in the Azerbaijani capital opened in 2012, just over two decades after Azerbaijan achieved independence from Russia. Designed by Zaha Hadid, it makes a striking contrast with the monumental Soviet architecture that dominates much of the city.
Noted
The latest protocol for when the Queen dies decrees that flags across Whitehall should be lowered to half-mast within 10 minutes. Downing Street is worried that this might be impossible: it does not employ a full-time flag officer and cannot guarantee that anyone in the building would know how to lower a flag.
Moneymakers
Last week Apple CEO Tim Cook, 60, was handed five million Apple shares worth $750m as a thank you for 10 years at the helm of the world’s most valuable brand.
On the money
Dangling your debit or credit card over a payment reader in a shop or restaurant is about to become more dangerous. Financial advisers warned the Mail this week that changes to the contactless limit, which is set to rise from £45 to £100 on 15 October, will increase the risk of fraud and debt.
Back in the 1990s, when Boris Johnson was still a journalist, he represented The Daily Telegraph in a “tabloids v broadsheets” edition of University Challenge. The long-buried episode resurfaced this week and I can’t think Boris will be happy, says Ian Gallagher in The Mail on Sunday. Especially given the tabloids won.
Desert Island Discs
The 81-year-old John Cleese will take on the topic of “cancel culture” in a forthcoming Channel 4 television series, John Cleese: Cancel Me. I’ve always thought conformity is “something to be very suspicious of”, the Monty Python star told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1997.
Quirks of history
When his wife became Queen, Prince Philip was puzzled to see an unopened bottle of whisky placed by the monarch’s bed every night, says Matthew Parris in The Times. It was removed, unopened, every morning. The reason? Apparently her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria, once had a cold. The royal physician recommended a tot before bed and palace staff were instructed accordingly. Nobody had rescinded the instruction, “and if succeeding monarchs had even noticed the routine, none had bothered to query it”. Philip abolished it at once.
