All the week’s wisdom in one place
9-15 April 2021
The Duke of Edinburgh
Prince Philip, who has died aged 99, lived the most “extraordinary life”, says the BBC’s Jonny Dymond. The “first gentleman in the land”, grandson of the king of Greece, was born “on a kitchen table” in Corfu — the family preferred a home birth. Aged one, the little prince was smuggled out of Greece in a fruit crate when a coup in 1922 nearly put his father, Prince Andrew, on the chopping block.
Pandemic
“Authoritarian. Discriminatory. Un-British.” These are just a few of the words that come to mind over the government’s “revolting” plans for Covid passports, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. The idea is that the digital “Covid status certificate” will allow people to attend football matches, theatres and the like by showing they have had either the vaccine, a recent negative test or the virus itself within six months.
Life in No 10
Boris Johnson would have got on with Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s “rumbustious” first prime minister, says Anthony Seldon in The Times. Like the current PM, Walpole was a skilled communicator with “dubious” personal morals – you can easily imagine the two old Etonians ribbing each other over dinner.
Heroes and villains
Kyaw Zwar Minn, Myanmar’s ex-ambassador to London, who was locked out of his embassy on Wednesday night and forced to sleep in his car. He was dismissed from his post for being critical of the military coup in Myanmar and calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. He has urged the UK government not to recognise the military junta’s newly appointed ambassador.
Tomorrow’s world
Kimbal Musk, 48, is as serious about turning Earth into a farmer’s paradise as his older brother, Elon, is about putting people on Mars, says Alex Morris in Rolling Stone. Musk minor, a Silicon Valley tech billionaire turned chef, wears a cowboy hat and says wacky things such as “food is the new internet”.
Quoted
“To be fair to the vaccine, very few things in Britain work for the under-30s.”
Inside politics
President Macron wants us to think he’s as clued-up about Covid as his scientists, says Serge Raffy in L’Obs. He thinks of himself as “Dr Macron”. It’s unsurprising, given his medical family: his father is a neurologist, his mother a doctor, his sister a nephrologist and his brother a radiologist. “Little Manu”, the rebellious prodigy, boldly snubbed the white coat for banking and politics – but his staff say he devours medical journals with “astonishing frenzy”. It’s almost as if he has something to prove.
Zeitgeist
Philip Roth has been cancelled, says Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. Of course, “Roth arguably cancelled himself three years ago by dying”, but that is beside the point. A new biography of the author is out and critics are determined to skewer him. Headlines declared him a sex-obsessed misogynist, but “as headlines go, “Philip Roth was obsessed with sex’ is pretty much up there with ‘The royal family are snobs’”.
Noted
Dogs tend to be right-handed. A Lincoln University study of nearly 18,000 dogs in Britain found that 58% of those with a preferred paw used their right limb more. It’s less of a skew than for humans, about 90% of whom are right-handed.
The case for
Last week’s blockage in the Suez Canal was a reminder of how dependent we are on our waterways.
Animal welfare
From a secret compound deep in Florida’s orange groves, “horsemeat vigilante” Richard Couto stages covert operations to bring down unlicensed slaughterhouses, says David Gauvey Herbert in Bloomberg. He has spent years undercover in a murky world of Cuban ex-convicts running open-air abattoirs and illegal cock-fighting rings – “the closest thing America has to a Wild West”.
Culture wars
Growing up during the Cold War, I thought of the US as a “protector”, says Ed West in UnHerd. When I saw American troops at Checkpoint Charlie, I knew it was thanks to them that we weren’t like “the poor prisoners of East Berlin”. No wonder British conservatives used to embrace America, preferring the freedom it stood for to the “euro-socialism” they associated with the Continent.
Minnie Driver
Minnie Driver never fitted the Hollywood mould, says Sophie Heawood in The Guardian. Unlike all those American “beaming blondes”, the London-born actress had “bundles of brown curls, freckles, a different shape and a different personality”. When she auditioned for Good Will Hunting, aged 26, the producers didn’t think she was “hot enough”.
Hunter Biden
“I come from a family forged by tragedies,” says 51-year-old Hunter Biden, son of Joe, in his new memoir, Beautiful Things. When he was two, his mother and baby sister were killed in a car crash. He survived, as did his three-year-old brother, Beau. He remembers being in the back seat and seeing the head of his mother twist to the right.
Anthony Trollope
In 1868 Anthony Trollope tried to become a Liberal MP, says Lucy Hughes-Hallett in UnHerd. The Tories won in a landslide and the author described his hustings as “the most wretched fortnight of my manhood”. But really “it was his country’s loss”. As his personal life suggests, Trollope “would have been an eminently well-qualified prime minister”.
Quoted
“If it wasn’t for the effort, I could argue against hard work all day.”
Staying young
Memory loss is nothing to worry about, says neuroscientist Lisa Genova in a new book, Remember. We forget things to filter out unnecessary or painful information. People with photographic memories are at a disadvantage here – they can “remember in excruciatingly vivid detail the very worst, most painful days of their lives”.
Love etc
A notorious big-game hunter, drinker, and ladies’ man, Ernest Hemingway was “masculinity in hyperbole”, says Mary Katharine Tramontana in Esquire. But the author was also “an explorer of gender fluidity in the bedroom – both in his literature and his life”, according to Ken Burns’s latest documentary, Hemingway.
Sport
Golf’s biggest hitters are ruining the game, says Mike Jakeman in Wired. The world’s great courses are set up so a male professional can hit a fairway from a tee 250 yards away, say. But advances in kit, diet, fitness and data analysis mean top players are driving the ball 100 yards further than they were a century ago. Course designers have tried to adapt, making holes longer, fairways narrower and rough thicker, but it’s not working.
Tokyo bombing
Americans usually skip over the ugly birth of napalm, says Malcom Gladwell in this four-part Revisionist History podcast (episodes 4-7). Harvard barely acknowledges that the invention happened in one of its own basement laboratories. In May the Best Firebomb Win (episode 5), we learn of the sticky gels, “mad scientists” and desert “bake-off” that created one of the world’s worst “wonder weapons”.
Art
Jan Six, dapper heir to the Six art collection, talks in a soothing murmur of his love of Rembrandt, says Russell Shorto in a podcast for The Daily. It started when he was a child, in the “blue salon” of his family’s 56-room mansion on the River Amstel, in Amsterdam. There hangs one of Rembrandt’s most admired works, a portrait of his ancestor, who was a friend of the artist – the first Jan Six.
Everyone’s watching
monster lockdown hit, Godzilla vs Kong has offered hope to the embattled movie industry. In its first two weeks on release it has taken more than $385m worldwide at the box office and on demand, despite cinemas in many countries being closed. On its opening weekend it did twice as much business as the previous biggest pandemic hit, Wonder Woman 1984.
Books
Randolph Churchill was the love of his father’s life, says Sarah Curtis in the TLS, and “the son all his life tried and failed to meet his father’s expectations”. Churchill & Son (John Murray £20) is a “poignant account” of the intense relationship between the two.
Built during the reign of Queen Anne, this Grade II listed home in Richmond, southwest London, is a stone’s throw from the Thames and within walking distance of the station and Richmond Park. It has four bedrooms, a self-contained annexe, off-street parking and a ballroom with sash windows that overlook the walled garden. £4.25m
Thomas Hardy drew inspiration from Grade I listed Poxwell Manor, six miles from Dorchester and nine from Chesil Beach. The nine-bedroom house has 10 acres of grounds, with a separate three-bedroom cottage, two lakes, a moat, a swimming pool, a tennis court and a helipad. £3.75m.
Set in bluebell-carpeted pine forests on a cliff on Guernsey’s east coast, with spectacular views of the Channel and nearby islands, La Belle Vue has six bedrooms, a library, a home cinema, a snooker room, a three-car garage and a separate one-bedroom flat. You can walk to the capital, St Peter Port, on a path that runs past the garden. £10.65m.
This three-bedroom thatched cottage in the village of Newtown Linford, Leicestershire, has landscaped gardens that look out over undisturbed countryside. Inside there’s a mix of original features and modern fittings, with a Rayburn in the bespoke kitchen, exposed beams in the large sitting/dining area and oak bifold doors in the garden room. £650,000.
This two-bedroom flat near Brook Green, west London, is on the raised ground floor of a Victorian townhouse. It has an open-plan living area with large sash windows and a shared paved garden. There are several Tube stations and excellent pubs within walking distance. £895,000.
Noted
An 18-year-old German is the youngest billionaire in the world, according to a list published this week by Forbes. Kevin David Lehmann is worth a reported $3.2bn after inheriting his father’s 50% stake in Germany’s largest pharmacy chain, DM.
Eating in
I miss old-fashioned comfort cooking, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. Take Robert Carrier, whose book Great Dishes of the World was a 1960s culinary bible. His appreciation for butter is unlike anything you’d see today, says Rayner, and we’re worse off for it.
The great escape
The Cotswolds is perfect for a May staycation, says Vogue. With honey-tinged cottages, rolling countryside and endless pubs, this is England at its best.
Quoted
“We were a lot better off when we didn’t know what other people thought all the time. And, by the same token, we were a lot better off when other people didn’t know what we thought all the time, either.”
We took the freedom of the open road for granted until 2020, says The Guardian in its round-up of the most scenic UK bike rides. So it’s time to make the most of it again. This 53-mile route from Balloch takes you along the banks of Loch Lomond, past waterfalls and heather-covered hills. Fish and chips await in Killin at the end.
This largely flat 17-mile ride follows a disused railway line from Padstow to Wenford Bridge, taking in moorland, woodland and estuary views.
Look out for Shakespeare’s birthplace on this 20-mile ride through the countryside around Stratford-upon-Avon. If you’re making a day of it, there are plenty of traditional pubs on the route.
It “will have you breathing hard”, but this 18-mile round trip from Settle is worth the effort – you’ll ride along winding rural lanes with views of the Dales, passing stone walls and sparkling rivers.
This 12-mile ride from Bath Spa station has more to see per mile than most routes, including aqueducts, viaducts and the Georgian city centre. One of the titular tunnels is more than a mile long.
Noted
Benito Mussolini was “the biggest bluff in Europe”, according to Ernest Hemingway. The writer met the Italian dictator at a press conference in the 1920s. As journalists piled into the room, Mussolini sat quietly, engrossed in a book. “I tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest,” said Hemingway. “It was a French-English dictionary – held upside down.” After the author’s remarks, his novel A Farewell to Arms was banned in Italy.
Every cool mum on Instagram is wearing an Artipoppe carrier, says Vogue: “They feel like an adult wardrobe piece rather than a baby accessory.” There’s a pattern to suit every taste and they’re designed for breastfeeding on the move. As spotted on Gigi Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski and Chrissy Teigen. From £293.
Moneymakers
Lex Greensill, 44, was one of Australia’s richest businessmen – until last month, when his multibillion-dollar company, Greensill Capital, went bust. His reputation is now in tatters and his downfall has done huge damage to former PM David Cameron.
On the money
China invented paper currency more than 1,000 years ago. More recently it has led the world in electronic payments, thanks to the vision of Alibaba and Tencent in building the Alipay and WeChat Pay platforms. Now it’s about to steal a march on the rest of the world – notably the US – by creating the first digital currency controlled by a central bank (as distinct from cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which exist outside the traditional global financial system and aren’t legal tender).
Watch nature’s greatest impersonator, the lyrebird, at work. Narrated by David Attenborough.
Desert Island Discs
The British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood turned 80 this week. A pioneer of the punk movement in the mid-1970s, she always had an innate sense of “joie de vivre”, she told Sue Lawley in this 1992 episode of Desert Island Discs.
Quirks of history
In 1822 storks solved a mystery that puzzled the ancient world: where birds disappear to in winter. Aristotle thought redstarts turned into robins in winter, then transformed again in spring, says Katherine Rundell in the London Review of Books. In 1694 the scientist Charles Morton suggested that swallows, cranes and stalks wintered on the moon, while indigenous North American accounts told of hummingbirds hitchhiking to faraway lands on the backs of geese.
Then, in 1822, a stork arrived in Germany with a 30in spear in its neck. “Metal-tipped, rising up through the bird’s breast and out through the side of its neck”, the weapon was identified as coming from central Africa. Here was proof that storks were not hibernating in trees, but flying halfway around the world every year: something far more “unlikely and fairytale-like”.
