Table of contents for 1380 in The Week

Controversy of the week Boris Johnson, a man who “famously regards saying sorry as a sign of weakness”, presented himself in the Commons on Tuesday as “the very embodiment of contrition”, said The Times. After becoming the first PM to be found guilty of a criminal offence while in office, for having attended a celebration in Downing Street on his birthday in 2020, he apologised “wholeheartedly”, then “unreservedly”, then “profusely”. “What exactly he was apologising for, however, was less clear.” He insisted, again, that it had never occurred to him that the gathering could be a breach of the rules. He didn’t apologise for misleading MPs, since he believed no rules had been broken when he gave assurances on the subject. Instead, he declared that the “hurt and anger” caused…

Students and graduates in England and Wales will be paying up to 12% interest on their loans from September, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned. The interest on student loans taken out since 2012 is pegged to the retail price index, with up to three percentage points added depending on the graduate’s income level. Owing to rising inflation, the rate applied to those earning £27,295 or under will rise from 1.5% to 9%, while the rate paid by those earning £49,130 or more will rise from 4.5% to 12%. However, it is likely to fall again in 2023.…

Grand Rapids, Michigan Refugee killed: The fatal shooting of a black man by a white police officer has led to days of protests in the city of Grand Rapids. Patrick Lyoya, 26, who came to the US in 2014 as a refugee from the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was shot dead on 4 April; the protests began last week after police released video footage of the incident. Lyoya had been stopped on suspicion of driving with false licence plates. After a short chase on foot, the footage shows the two men struggling over the officer’s Taser; the officer then appears to shoot Lyoya in the head while kneeling on his back. San Francisco Non-sellable token: A cryptocurrency entrepreneur who paid $2.9m a year ago for a…

A parent wearing an Easter bunny costume caused “chaos” in Texas last week by accidentally handing out plastic Easter eggs containing condoms to children being collected from a primary school. It was apparently the result of a mix-up: the parent, a pharmacist who’d been overseeing a safe-sex work shop, had accidentally included the condoms with the chocolate eggs they brought to their child’s school in Austin. When the error was revealed, the parent was asked to leave, but seems to have continued giving out the “eggs” on a pavement nearby. A wave of “kniffiti” is reportedly sweeping Britain, as guerrilla “yarnbombers” cover lampposts and fences with their colourful creations. Anne Haworth, founding member of The Secret Society of Hertford Crafters, a group that likes to adorn local postboxes with knitted…

GERMANY A deserved slap in the face for a naive peacenik Cicero (Berlin) Last week, Germany’s president experienced a snub “quite unique in the world of diplomacy”, says Alexander Marguier. Frank-Walter Steinmeier had planned to accompany European leaders on a visit to Ukraine, as a show of German solidarity; but Ukrainian officials “brusquely” told him he wasn’t welcome in Kyiv. Unfortunately, this was well-deserved: Ukraine rightly sees Steinmeier as a “naive peacenik” who, as Angela Merkel’s foreign minister, let himself be “duped” by Vladimir Putin. He invested heavily in the failed “Ostpolitik” that left Germany dangerously dependent on Russian energy, and pushed for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which he glorified as a “kind of pan-European peace project”. Steinmeier has recently made “embarrassing” attempts to justify his position, claiming that…

In a morgue 85km south of Kyiv, the evidence of Russian atrocities is plain to see, said Danielle Sheridan in The Daily Telegraph. Here, dozens of body bags are stacked up, each holding the corpse of a civilian killed during the Russian occupation of the Kyiv area. The majority are male; the oldest was 80, the youngest 15. And most appear to have been executed – shot in the head or chest, with their hands tied behind their backs. Police say they’ve found the bodies of 900 civilians on the outskirts of Kyiv alone, said Bel Trew on The Independent. Almost all of them had been shot; some had been “beaten to a pulp”. And such atrocities were not confined to the Kyiv area. In Trostyanets, 350km east of the…

“It’s a tale as old as time,” said Helen Coffey on The Independent: the Easter weekend arrives, “and travel chaos descends”. As families scramble to get away, tradition dictates that they face a “heady mix” of traffic jams, engineering works and rail replacement bus services. For two years, Covid meant such woes were largely forgotten, as people stayed at home. This year, however, they were back – “with a new twist”. As well as the usual strife on roads and railways, airports “buckled under the pressure of their highest numbers of travellers since the pandemic began”. More than 1,300 flights were cancelled over the holidays; queues at security were so long that many travellers missed their planes. To add to the chaos, P&O had failed to restart its Dover-Calais services.…

To The Guardian My son is an A&E doctor. He worked throughout the pandemic. When he returned home after long and gruelling shifts he stayed in, even on his birthday. He did not break the rules. My mother is 93 and lives in sheltered accommodation. Throughout the pandemic she remained isolated and I did not visit her. She did not break the rules. My wife and I stayed at home apart from exercise. We shopped online. We did not socialise. We did not break the rules. Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and many others who set the rules and urged everyone else to follow them partied in Downing Street. They broke the rules and broke the law. Entitled, arrogant and out of touch. If they don’t go now, they should be…

by Jennifer Egan Corsaid 352pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99 Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a “sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad, her bestselling 2010 novel about rock music, “Gen-X nostalgia” and the “digitalisation of everything”, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Consisting of interrelated short stories which zigzag about in time, it resembles its predecessor in structure – and features many of the same characters. But at its centre is a new figure: the “Mark Zuckerberg-like” Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, has created an “implausible” device known as Own Your Unconscious, which lets users upload their own and other people’s memories, and “watch them all like movies”. The sci-fi aspects of the book are neither new nor “particularly fully realised”, said Andrew Billen in…

Ben and Ruairi are covertly planning a house party for when Brian and Jennifer are away. When Ruairi gets a text from a Julianne – supposedly a uni friend – Ben and Beth tease him and he gets tetchy. Josh pitches his plan for solar panels at Brookfield to Ruth. She agrees it would work but they can’t take on more financial risk. Adil, the mystery businessman, is putting noses out of joint at Grey Gables, but Tracy charms him. As they chat about Elizabeth’s surprise party, Vince offers to lend David the money for the solar panels. Elizabeth thanks Vince for taking Freddie under his wing. Beth and Ben say “I love you” after a day at the racetrack with Jill and Leonard. Jazzer is determined to find a…

Claw & Hammer 30-33 Minories, London EC3 (020-7702 1605) This is a place that “shouldn’t work”, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. For it specialises in a dish from the American south – a shellfish hotpot known as a seafood boil – that is best enjoyed on “gnarly wooden picnic tables” in conditions of “100% humidity”. A “blunt restaurant unit” on a commercial street near Aldgate doesn’t feel like an adequate substitute. Yet so terrific is its food that you soon forget your surroundings. We start with oysters, both naked and dressed, and grilled king shrimp in “escargot butter”. Then comes the main event: a “boisterous, Cajun-spiced” broth, bobbing with corn cob, red potato and smoked sausage, and piled with crab, mussels and other seafood. This is “hands-on, up-toyour-armpits” fare,…

The Malerweg, Germany Opened in 2006, this 71-mile circuit takes in sandstone outcrops, massifs and canyons. The views are magnificent (see saechsische-schweiz.de and hiking-navigator.com/malerweg). Alta Via 1, the Dolomites, Italy This north-south route encompasses valleys, waterfalls, epic ridges and fascinating WWI history (see visitdolomites.com). Mount Triglav, Slovenia This 2,863 metre peak is home to several of Europe’s most incredible walks. The most demanding ascent is called the Bamberg and requires nerves of steel (see tnp.si/en/visit). The Glockner Circuit, Austria An Alpine classic, this scenic 71-mile path circumam-bulates Austria’s highest peak (see nationalpark-hohetauern.at). Turnov to Jicin, Bohemian Paradise, Czech Republic The best of the Czech walking routes, this is a labyrinth of sandstone rock towers amid meadows and forests, culminating in the imposing old city of Jičín (see visitczechrepublic.com). SOURCE: THE…

A colonial jewel in Brazil Set among jungled mountains and white-sand beaches beside a “shimmering turquoise” sea, Paraty is “the St Tropez of Brazil” and one of the prettiest little towns in South America, says Janice Turner in The Times. It was founded by the Portuguese as a port for the gold mines of the interior, and is now a hangout for the rich from the nearby cities of Rio and São Paulo, its crumbling, colonial houses harbouring a host of “chi-chi” boutiques, restaurants and small hotels. The town hosts an excellent literary festival each July, and sailing boats can be chartered all year round to explore the quiet beaches nearby, the many wild islands in the bay, and the Saco de Mamanguá, a 7km-long, fjord-like inlet that cuts dramatically…

Mimi Reinhard 1915-2022 Before going to university in Vienna in 1933, Mimi Reinhard took a shorthand course, reasoning that it would be useful in her studies, said The New York Times. A decade later, her secretarial skills saved her life – and won her “a small but important role in one of the great heroic stories to emerge from the Holocaust”. In 1942, she was deported from the Krakow ghetto to the Płaszów concentration camp. Thanks to her knowledge of shorthand, and her fluent German, she was spared forced labour, and given an office job. Then, in 1944, a German industrialist visited the camp, to ask for workers for his munitions factory in the Sudetenland. Oskar Schindler had initially used Jews as slave labour in his enamel factory nearby; but…

While living in France in the early 1990s, Laura Tenison noticed how smartly turned out French children were. The result, said The Guardian, was JoJo Maman Bébé, which she started from her kitchen table (using her parents’ shed in Wales as a “warehouse”) and turned into one of Britain’s leading baby-and-maternity-wear companies. That chapter is now over. Tenison has sold her baby to Next, and a group of investors led by hedge fund Davidson Kempner, for an undisclosed sum – and will now leave the company. There’s sadness, she says, but the deal should “ensure the longevity of the brand for generations of new customers”.…

• A Bank of England survey has found that lenders expect “mortgage lending to contract” between April and June “by the largest amount since the start of the pandemic”. This is despite the fact that “banks expect demand to increase” – which suggests that “more borrowers are not going to be able to get the loan they want”. • Anyone seeking a mortgage may find they cannot borrow as much as they could last month. Broker SPF Private Clients said that one client who applied for a loan from Santander found the amount available to borrow had fallen 10% after Santander changed its “affordability model” to factor in April’s NI hike and the rising cost of living. • None of this has yet stopped the surge in house prices, which…

The week’s best shares Bunzl The Sunday Telegraph The packaging and hygiene specialist produces a wide range of goods for the global grocery, healthcare and retail sectors. Margins are supported by improving efficiencies, with higher costs passed on to customers. Buy. £30.65. Impact Healthcare REIT The Mail on Sunday Impact owns residential care homes which it lets to well-regarded specialist firms. Rents are affordable and most are state-backed: two-thirds of residents are NHS-funded. Strong growth expected. Yields 5%. Buy. 124p. Supermarket Income REIT The Times This investment trust leases its portfolio of supermarket stores to blue-chip names with strong balance sheets, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. Rents are inflation-linked. Yields 4.8%.Buy. 124.5p. Tesco The Times The supermarket faces rising operating, wage and energy costs – amid easing sales growth –…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1308 An Ettinger travel pass case and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 2 May. Email the answers as a scan of a completed grid or a list, with the subject line The Week crossword 1308, to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive an Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) Bridle Hide Travel Shoehorns in black, which retail at L75, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 7 Advance article following the lead of General Jackson? (6) 8 Most silly storing tarts in sack (8) 9 Fleet Street primarily are nosy (4) 10 Crazy relatives a cause of upset (6,4) 11 Gunners wearing posh ties – some people chase…

What happened The Home Secretary Priti Patel travelled to Rwanda last week to announce a new “partnership” with the central African nation, under which asylum seekers who arrive in Britain “illegally” will be deported there. During a pilot scheme, single men who cross the Channel in small boats or are smuggled into the UK in lorries will be given a one-way ticket to Rwanda, where their applications will be processed. Those granted asylum will be able to remain in Rwanda. Those denied it will be deported to a “third safe country”. Patel said that the scheme would break up people-smuggling gangs and stop migrants making dangerous journeys. But it attracted widespread criticism. The UN Refugee Agency said it “firmly opposed” the plan. In his Easter sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury…

Diversity campaigners in Arizona who accused a school of racism for hiring a DJ in blackface had to row back when they were told that the man was in fact black. “I apologise to this dude for the implication,” said one. However, he sought to defend himself by saying that in the photos, the DJ had seemed “at the very least” to be wearing dark make-up – unless that was just the “patio lighting”. A Hilton hotel in east London is having to rebrand its “anarchist” themed bar, the Freedom Cafe, because it failed to consult the Freedom Press, the local anarchist bookshop that inspired it, before using its name and branding. Guests at the bar could buy £14 cocktails with names such as Why Work? and Memoirs of a…

More British adults are now worried about their finances than about Covid-19. A third are worried about being infected with the coronavirus, down from 40% in January; 38% are worried about their finances, the highest proportion since the pandemic began. UCL/FT Nearly four in five UK adults think Boris Johnson doesn’t understand the impact of cost-of-living increases on ordinary people. Almost two-thirds believe he should resign if he receives any more fines for breaching Covid rules. The Times/YouGov Joe Biden’s popularity has fallen back to its lowest level: only 33% of Americans now approve of his performance. Quinnipiac/Daily Mail…

Married to a Dragon Deborah Meaden has been a mainstay on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den since 2006, bringing a shrewd pragmatism to her role as an investor. She’s businesslike about her personal life, too, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. She doesn’t use flowery language to describe her 40-year relationship with her husband Paul. It “just works”, she says; she describes him as a very “competent” man. “He’s a fantastic cook. He grows all our own vegetables.” Their worst rows were about marriage. “We split up just before we got married. He wanted to get married and I absolutely didn’t.” They’d go “round and round in circles” arguing. She’d say: what’s the point, if we’re always going to be together? He’d say: “If that’s right then Deborah, why don’t we…

In the 1890s, Nikola Tesla showed that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly via high frequency electro magnetic radio waves, or microwaves. In 1975, Nasa successfully transmitted 34 kilowatts of electrical power a distance of 1.5km at its Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. One difficulty when it comes to beaming them from space, though, is that microwaves spread out as they travel, meaning the receiver on Earth would have to be huge. Experts suggest that at the UK’s latitudes, a receiver would be up to eight miles long and four miles wide, and be made of an array of small, T-shaped antennae attached to a mesh-like structure resembling a series of low fences. Although large, this is smaller than, say, the area covered by the London Array offshore wind…

It’s not our job: Europe must fight for itself Jordan Michael Smith The New Republic There has been some dangerous talk from the Pentagon lately, says Jordan Michael Smith. Senior officials are proposing to line Eastern Europe with US military bases in order to prevent Russia from launching further invasions. Bad idea. It would involve the US “taking on even more burdens overseas at a time when there is not strong domestic support for doing so, in Europe or anywhere else”. America has long underwritten European security, through Nato, but there are limits to this support. Americans might have been prepared to go to war to stop the Soviet Union from taking over Europe, but would they be willing to go to war today to protect Finland, which wants to…

People should keep their waist measurement to less than half their height to stay healthy, according to new guidelines drafted by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). In the first shake-up to obesity management advice since 2014, Nice has concluded that body mass index (BMI), which measures a person’s mass and height, should now be used in conjunction with waist-to-height ratio, as BMI alone is unable to provide an accurate picture of body fat. Under the new guidelines, which are out for consultation until mid-May, a 5ft 4in woman with a waist of 29in would be deemed to have a healthy ratio, but if her waist grew to 32in, she would be nudged into an unhealthy bracket. Nice’s advice also urges health professionals to be “sensitive and…

Not since 1992 have consumer prices in Britain risen faster, said The Guardian. Inflation accelerated to 7% in March, and is on course to reach 9% this month. The squeeze on household living standards is set to intensify. The price of grocery shopping is “rocketing”. Domestic fuel bills are on course to top £2,400 by this autumn. “Meanwhile, the economy is flatlining and the average employee’s pay continues to fall behind inflation.” Partly, inflation is a result of the pandemic, said the Financial Times. As normal life resumes, with the lifting of Covid restrictions, “habits have changed”. There is “greater demand for goods than before the pandemic and less for services”. To make matters worse, Covid is still choking up supply chains, particularly in China. The war in Ukraine, too,…

“There seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women.”Madeleine Albright, quoted in Forbes “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”E.M. Forster, quoted on The Browser “Every advance in communications technology makes it slightly harder to talk to the person you want to in a big company.” Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times “You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies.”Yitzhak Rabin, quoted on The Conversation “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”Yogi Berra, quoted on Bloomberg “Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?”Tom Stoppard, quoted in The Times “Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.”Frank Moore Colby, quoted on Good…

Tennis Great Britain failed to secure a place in the finals of the Billie Jean King Cup, losing 3-2 to the Czech Republic. Emma Raducanu won her first singles match, but lost her second to world No. 32 Marketa Vondrousova. Football Chelsea beat Crystal Palace 2-0 in the semi-final of the FA Cup. In the Premier League, Man United beat Norwich 3-2, with Cristiano Ronaldo scoring a hat-trick. Snooker Ronnie O’Sullivan made it to the second round of the World Championship with a 10-5 win over David Gilbert. Shaun Murphy lost to Stephen Maguire.…

Already a “cartoonish villain” to some, Donald Trump is “turned into an electrifying caricature of Shakespearean chaos” at the Old Vic, said Quentin Letts in The Sunday Times. As in Mike Bartlett’s previous work, King Charles III, The 47th is set in an imagined near-future – in this case, a US election in which President Biden has stepped down in favour of Kamala Harris, and Trump (Bertie Carvel) is scheming to prise the Republican nomination from Ted Cruz. The play is written in “cod-Shakespearean” blank verse. Bored in Florida, after his eviction from the White House, Trump says: “Four years lonely exile hence, behold as I begin my just revenge.” Heralds come and go, and there are echoes of Richard III, Macbeth and Julius Caesar in the plot. It doesn’t…

The Diary of Samuel Pepys edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols, 1825 (William Collins). I read the whole diary, volume by volume, when I was doing my PhD. There simply isn’t a single dull page. You travel with him through the backstreets and bawdy houses, wharves and victualling yards and feel the heat from the Great Fire. He’s bound to be cancelled (on about a dozen counts), so let’s enjoy him while we still can. The Fall of Robespierre by Colin Jones, 2021 (OUP £25). A spellbinding hour-by-hour account of how Robespierre went from revolutionary leader to condemned traitor in a single day. Vividly conjures up the terrifying world of revolutionary Paris. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, 1980 (Vintage £9.99). A thrilling medieval murder-mystery soaked…

Programmes Our Changing Planet In the first of a two-part series exploring threatened ecosystems, Steve Backshall, Chris Packham and Ella Al-Shamahi visit the Maldives, Iceland and Cambodia. Sun 24 April, BBC1 19:00 (60mins). Grace John Simm returns as Brighton-based detective Roy Grace, in a second instalment based on Peter James’s books. Grace and Branson investigate two seemingly unconnected murders. Sun 24 Apr, ITV1 20:00 (120mins). The Post Office Scandal Panorama special about the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, and the lives it ruined. Mon 25 Apr, BBC1 20:00 (60mins). Navalny Documentary about the 2020 poisoning of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and his efforts to uncover the Kremlin’s plot against him. Mon 25 Apr, BBC2 21:00 (95mins). Rebuilding Notre-Dame: The Next Chapter Three years on from the devastating…

This doesn’t require too much prep time and tastes far superior to anything you might expect with a cooking time of less than half an hour, says Rebecca Oliver. You can use a spicy cooking chorizo (taken out of its skin) if you can’t find ‘nduja. I like to use clams in place of mussels when feeling more extravagant. Serves 3 as a starter, or 2 as a main 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil ¼ of a fennel bulb, very finely diced (reserve fronds to serve if you like) ½ a shallot, very finely diced 1½ tbsp ‘nduja paste 1 garlic clove, finely sliced ½ tsp of fennel seeds 850g live mussels in shells, cleaned generous glug of dry white wine, approximately 50ml-75ml 2½ tbsp single cream squeeze of lemon…

Best of South Korea On this 8-day trip, you’ll see highlights in and around Seoul and visit folk villages, unique Korean temples and bustling markets. From £1,599pp b&b. 0845-528 0465, gadventures.com. Depart 20 May. Four nights in Marrakesh Stay at the Be Live Collection hotel, a dreamlike resort specially designed for adults only, from £383pp all-inclusive, including Edinburgh flights. 0161-5093700, onthebeach.co.uk. Depart 7 June. Medieval guest house The Friars is steeped in rich history dating back to 1242, when the Carmelite religious order came to Kent,. Stay 2 nights from £99pp b&b. 01622-717272, thefriars.org.uk. Arrive 16 June. Nine-day tour of Georgia Uncover Tbilisi’s ancient monuments & the cave-city of Vardzia, with accomm., tours and 16 meals from £1,699pp (including Manchester flights). 01283-688180, rivieratravel.co.uk Depart 9 October. Covid-19: please check government…

The mother of all property bubbles Larry Elliott The Guardian Easter is traditionally the start of the house-buying season, but this year there was no need “to mow the lawn and give the living room a lick of paint”, says Larry Elliott. “The market’s already running hot.” There are structural reasons for the gap between supply and demand now driving UK annual house price inflation above 10%. But this isn’t “a story of British exceptionalism”. Over the past decade, a colossal global real-estate boom has doubled the value of residential property to $350trn – four times the size of annual world output. The US property market is now worth twice the country’s annual GDP; in China, the ratio is more than five times. At a time of rising interest rates,…

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The Chinese pianist Lang Lang has announced that he plans to donate hundreds of keyboards to British state schools, to widen access to music. The instruments will come with a curriculum designed by the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto and Lang Lang himself, plus ongoing teacher-training, grants and headphones. The first school to benefit will be a primary in Waltham Forest, London’s 12th most deprived borough, which is set to receive 30 keyboards within weeks. A cotton-top tamarin monkey, one of the world’s most endangered primates, has been born at Chester Zoo. Around 2,000 tamarins remain in the wild, and their numbers are predicted to decline by 80% over the next two decades, in part because their white head crest makes them so vulnerable to poaching. At 10cm tall,…

Boris Johnson’s mobile phone has been targeted “multiple” times by Pegasus spyware, according to researchers at the University of Toronto. Pegasus, which was developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, enables its operators to turn on the phone’s microphone in order to listen in to conversations, read messages and access other data. Citizen Lab, the group that raised the alarm, says the attempted Downing Street hacks were carried out in 2020 and 2021, and originated in the United Arab Emirates. It also believes attempts were made to infiltrate devices in the Foreign Office, from the UAE, India, Cyprus and Jordan.…

Paris Election drama: Despite polls indicating he has a solid lead over Marine Le Pen, his far-right rival in the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron has been urging the electorate to turn out and vote in the second, decisive round this Sunday, warning that France was at risk of an “unthinkable” shock result akin to the Brexit referendum or Donald Trump’s victory in the US. On average, polls suggest Macron is eight or nine points ahead, some putting his lead as high as 12, though even this is a far smaller margin than in 2017, when he won 66% of the vote to Le Pen’s 34%. One crucial, unpredictable variable is the voting intentions of those who voted for the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in the first round. The focus of…

“The modern world is said to over-reward academic intelligence, and so it does. Of the most successful people I know, though, none are the very smartest in their organisations, much less their generational cohorts. Beyond a certain cognitive level, another trait seems to become more decisive. ‘Optimism’ is the crispest word for it, but it gives a banal ring to what is a complex mental gift: the sifting for good news among the bad, the reinterpretation of adverse events as what one had wanted all along. It can border on self-deception. But it also gets people through the night. And the most underrated component of success is continuing to show up.”  Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times…

A drug scandal to match Thalidomide Editorial The Sunday Times Will we never learn, asks The Sunday Times. Half a century ago, this newspaper led a campaign demanding compensation for the victims of Thalidomide, a drug pregnant mothers took to relieve nausea, but which had dire side effects for thousands of infants around the world. The scandal was meant to have altered forever our relationship with new medicines, yet today a scandal of like magnitude shows little has changed. As many as 20,000 babies in the UK have been affected by sodium valproate, a drug used for treating epilepsy, marketed by the French drugs giant, Sanofi. As early as the 1980s, there were reports that it could be harmful to foetuses, causing malformation of organs, spina bifida and other disorders.…

Skin cells rejuvenated by 30 years Scientists have devised a way of turning back the biological clock of human skin cells, by around 30 years. In the past, researchers have been able to reverse ageing in human cells, but at the cost of wiping out their specialised functions: the process turns them into stem cells, which can develop into any cell type. The new research, conducted at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, uses the same technique – inserting specialist genes known as “Yamanaka factors” – but without losing the cells’ function in the body. The scientists infused skin cells from donors aged around 50 in a chemical bath containing Yamanaka factors, for about 12 days. When the scientists later tested the cells, they found they were behaving like skin cells…

The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann got her big break by charming a director with her naivety. Aged 18, she was invited to audition for the lead role in a film called The Wayward Girl. The only trouble was, she wasn’t very wayward herself, and it came across at the audition. Eventually the director, Edith Carlmar, took her aside and asked: “Are you a virgin?” Worried that if she told the truth she’d lose the part, she replied: “Maybe a little.” Emmanuel Macron was mocked last month for channelling the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s “gritty siege look” for a photo shoot at the Élysée Palace. Now the French president has been accused of trying to woo voters ahead of this weekend’s election by posing with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his…

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has set his sights on Twitter, said Christine Emba in The Washington Post. A keen tweeter himself, with more than 82.6 million followers, the Tesla tycoon began by “secretively” purchasing a 9.2% stake in the social media company, making him its largest individual shareholder. Now he has launched a hostile takeover bid worth $43bn, at $54.20 a share. But while Musk’s fanbase will cheer, the rest of us shouldn’t. Twitter has 217 million users: journalists, activists and ordinary citizens tweeting on serious issues from the situation in Ukraine to Black Lives Matter. “What does it mean when a billionaire can almost single-handedly swoop in and eat up this sort of platform?” The answer: “nothing good”. Musk has often misused his own Twitter account, said…

Liverpool FC: is a “quadruple” on the cards? Eleven games, said Barney Ronay in The Observer: perform well in them and Liverpool could achieve footballing immortality. Winning the “quadruple” – all four major trophies in a single season – is a feat no English club has achieved, and which some say is all but impossible given the relentlessness of the modern game. But Liverpool undoubtedly are in with a shot, all the more so after making the FA Cup final with their 3-2 defeat of Manchester City on Saturday. Jürgen Klopp’s team have already won the Carabao Cup, are in the semi-finals of the Champions League, and are very much in contention in the Premier League, where they are in a tight battle with Manchester City. Winning the quadruple “will…

Putin and his people To The Times In his otherwise excellent piece “Russians won’t change their minds on Ukraine”, Dominic Lawson rather tiptoes around the elephant in the room. Although Western leaders have been going out of their way to insist that we have no quarrel with the Russian people, who else is culpable for the rise of the monstrous Vladimir Putin? The unpalatable fact that Putin still enjoys such strong domestic support cannot just be put down to his iron grip on the levers of coercion and propaganda. For most of the past century, the Russian people have allowed themselves to be misruled by a succession of malevolent tyrants. There comes a point when the people of a country have to take responsibility. There are clearly many thousands of…

Over the past half century, the art of Raphael has rather fallen out of fashion, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Latter-day critics “carp” that his work is simply “too perfect”; his flawless “grace and harmony” is at odds with the prevailing modernist tradition. Yet as this “stirring” exhibition at the National Gallery demonstrates, the time has come to reappraise this “preternaturally productive” exemplar of the Italian Renaissance. The show investigates the full scope of Raphael’s career, from his early life as an orphan in the city of Urbino to his death at the age of 37 in 1520 – as a result of too much sex, according to Vasari. Bringing together 89 masterpieces from collections all over the world, it shows off Raphael’s talents as a “printmaker, architect,…

Jack Higgins 1929-2022 When Jack Higgins submitted his new Second World War thriller in 1974, his British publishers were sceptical, said The Daily Telegraph. The story centred on a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill, and his characters were German soldiers, who were brave and decent, albeit on the wrong side. “Nazis trying to kill Churchill?” he was asked. “Where are your heroes?” Their doubts proved spectacularly misplaced. The Eagle Has Landed was first published in the US, and proved an immediate bestseller, reprinted 13 times in as many months. It eventually sold more than 50 million copies worldwide and was turned into a blockbuster film starring Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland. For Higgins, who had previously enjoyed only modest success as a writer, it was a breakthrough. He became one…

Martin Lewis “When breadwinners cannot provide, anger brews,” observed Martin Lewis earlier this month. The nation’s foremost moneysaving expert has warned of civil unrest unless the Government intervenes to help householders cope with annual energy bills that could soon hit £3,000, said Bagehot in The Economist. Ministers would “do well to listen”: Lewis, 49, “has a good claim to be the most influential man in British politics”. His Money Saving Expert website has a readership that “rivals the collective reach of Britain’s newspapers”; his ITV show is watched by four million people weekly; he “estimates he is stopped on the street 30-40 times per day”. Polls put him among the UK’s most popular figures – “think David Attenborough, but with mortgage advice rather than gorillas”. Lewis’s fame might seem odd…