Table of contents for 1514 in The Week

Daredevilry, after two German slackliners claimed a new world record by stringing a line between hot air balloons, and walking across it at an altitude of 2,500 metres. Afterwards, one of them jumped off the line and skydived to the ground. Salman Rushdie, with news that his novel, The Satanic Verses, could finally go on sale in his native India. Days after the book’s publication in 1988, New Delhi said it was banning its import, fearing a backlash from Muslims who claimed that the book was blasphemous. But when a reader challenged that decision, he couldn’t trace the official notification of the ban. Last week, a court ruled that if there was no paperwork, there was no ban.…

Dublin Snap election: The Taoiseach, Simon Harris, has set a date of 29 November for Ireland’s general election, as polls show his centre-right party Fine Gael and coalition partner Fianna Fáil on track to win a fourth term. Harris had until March to call the vote, but falling euro-region interest rates, and the positive reaction to his recent budget of tax cuts and spending increases, prompted him to go early. Dubbed the “TikTok taoiseach” for his canny use of social media, Harris has restored Fine Gael fortunes since taking over as taoiseach from Leo Varadkar, who quit in March. By contrast, support for Sinn Féin, the main opposition party, has fallen from 30% a year ago to 18.5%, its policy on migration (seen as too soft) and a paedophile scandal…

“Trump’s approval ratings are believed to higher in Scotland than anywhere else in Western Europe… A simple explanation for this is that some [Scots] see Donald John Trump as one of their own. His ancestors were victims of the Highland Clearances. His mother was born on the Isle of Lewis and spoke Gaelic before she spoke English. He has often played up his Scottish origins, perhaps preferring them to a less marketable story about paternal German ancestry. [And] once you know about his background, his facial features can sometimes mistily resolve into those of a Highland factor or fisherman. The patter suddenly seems more familiar too. As Kevin Bridges once put it: ‘Everything Donald Trump has said, I have heard before from a Glasgow taxi driver.’” Kathleen Stock on UnHerd…

America is in peril of falling off a cliff Emma Duncan The Times How times change, says Emma Duncan. US Republicans in the 1990s were always banging on about debt and the need to balance the budget. Now? Nobody mentions it. This despite the fact that America’s debt has more than tripled in real terms over the past 30 years, to $35trn. Donald Trump’s tax cuts in his first term reduced federal revenues by nearly $2trn over ten years; and in his next term he plans to renew those cuts and make others, at a cost of almost $4trn for the next decade. That could raise the annual budget deficit from its current level of 6.3% of GDP – “exceedingly high for a country at peace” – to 12%. When…

The benefits of sugar rationing Limiting the amount of sugar children get in utero and early infancy may decrease their risk of type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure as adults. Scientists have struggled to investigate the impact of early nutrition because it is difficult to design ethical randomised control trials: they can’t ask pregnant women to eat poor diets so that they can measure the effect. But a team in the US got around this by focusing on 60,000 participants in the UK Biobank study who were born between October 1951 and March 1956 – some of whom were conceived when sugar was still rationed, and some after rationing was lifted, in September 1953. They found that adults in the former group were 35% less likely to have been…

Mobs chasing Jews along the streets of a European city. “Jews hiding in buildings to avoid attacks. Jews being ambushed and beaten up simply because they are Jewish.” These are not scenes from the 1930s, said Danny Cohen in The Daily Telegraph: this is what happened last Thursday night in Amsterdam. Following a football match between the Dutch club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, visiting Israelis were terrorised in the city centre. “Groups of men went out with the specific purpose of hunting down Jews. They tried to run Jews down in their cars. They proudly posted evidence of their antisemitic violence on social media.” When it comes to the violent hatred of Jews, we no longer merely need a “warning from history. The warning is right here, right now…

Manchester City’s 2-1 defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion on Sunday marked a first for their manager Pep Guardiola, said Sam Wallace in The Daily Telegraph. It meant that the “all-conquering Catalan coach” had suffered four defeats in a row for the first time in his managerial career. When City had a similar wobble last December, they soon regrouped, returned to their best and ended up winning the Premier League. It is still perfectly possible that they’ll do the same this season, said Martin Samuel in The Times. However, there are reasons to doubt they will. City’s squad is ageing – only West Ham’s includes more players of 29 and over – and is in the throes of an injury crisis. Midfielder Rodri – City’s most important player – is…

The “latest fringe musical to vault nimbly into the West End” is this stirring, folkinfused adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story about a man who lives his life in reverse, said Nick Curtis in The Standard. The story has already been turned into a film, starring Brad Pitt. But this stage version – first shown in a more limited form at the Southwark Playhouse in 2019 – is the one to treasure. Jethro Compton and Darren Clark have relocated the action from Jazz Age Baltimore to 20th century Cornwall, said Alun Hood on What’s on Stage, and their “shimmering, soaring” score encompasses “folk ballads of aching longing, fishermen’s shanties, rollicking drinking songs, and rousing chorales that thrill the blood”. Intelligent and piercingly witty, this is a “magical” show, with…

It’s hard to believe that the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall first appeared on our screens nearly a decade ago, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. That series, which covered the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, followed Thomas Cromwell from the end of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon to the king’s “break with Rome, the crowning of Anne Boleyn and finally – though you ludicrously kept hoping otherwise – her execution”. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light covers the last volume and final four years of Cromwell’s life, “and it does so as beautifully, movingly and immaculately as before”. The script is a “miracle of compression and architecture”, the story “never flags”; it is, in sum, “six hours of magic”. The story picks up a…

Experts are still uncovering secrets in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, half a millennium after he painted them, says Vittoria Benzine on ArtNet. The latest discovery is that the Renaissance master may have illustrated a woman battling breast cancer, which is sometimes mistakenly regarded as a modern condition. The woman, in the “Flood” section of the chapel’s ceiling, clutches her side just “below her right breast, which exhibits several telltale signs of breast cancer”: her areola “is not visible, and her nipple is puckered” in a way that her left one isn’t. There are also lumps on her torso: one by the breast, and one by her armpit, indicating that she may have swollen lymph nodes. The discoveries were made by experts in the field of iconodiagnosis, an interdisciplinary field “that…

Ed and Will engineer a meeting with MP Sarah Byron as they try to get George moved to a young offenders’ facility. At lunch in Grey Gables, Justin is seated with his ex, Miranda, who wonders where his old kindness went. After a conversation with MP Sarah, Emma confronts Ed and learns that George is being bullied. Justin picks up a hitch-hiker, Kirsty’s mum Megan, who’s lost her wallet and unwittingly reveals Kirsty’s anxieties about the rewilding. Natasha throws a farewell party for Fallon, and later tells Tom she’s planning on selling Summer Orchard to manage the Tea Room herself. Justin takes a virtual tour on the rewilding website and hears some home truths. Emma and Will visit George in prison – he says he’s doing fine and won’t move.…

Starcroft Farm in East Sussex offers fournight writing retreats in hand-built cabins, which have stargazing windows. Writers get a welcome bag, an hour’s session with writing coach Joanna Norland, and a massage (£560; starcroftfarm.co.uk). Wild Words & Water is a female-only retreat led by author and life coach Gail Muller, at a private estate overlooking the Helford River in Cornwall. Good for budding writers, the five-day events have a supportive group vibe with yoga, wild swimming and writing workshops (from £695pp; gailmuller.com). If you need solitude to write, Write Within has a cosy self-catering hideaway designed for writers in the Powys hills. Coaching sessions are available with book PR Julia Forster (from £390; writewithin.wales). Ease Retreats, held in idyllic locations off the beaten track in Oxfordshire and Wales and led…

Cul na Shee Saddell Bay, Argyll and Bute With its long sandy beach overlooking the Isle of Arran, Saddell Bay is a beautiful spot on Scotland’s Kintyre peninsula. The Landmark Trust has six properties to rent here, including a grand old castle, but none is more “wonderful” than this “tiny” cottage, says Louis Cheslaw in the FT. Built in the 1920s for a retired school teacher, it has two bedrooms, a spacious kitchen and a cosy sitting room; and, sitting alone at the end of the bay, it offers complete solitude. A sea otter can sometimes be spotted here; and there’s a ruined abbey nearby, lovely boat trips, and coastal walks to enjoy in the area. From £80 per night; landmarktrust.org.uk.…

Oil and gas: will they “drill, baby, drill”? As climate activists gathered for Cop29, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell won an appeal in The Hague against a “landmark” 2021 court order demanding that it cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 (relative to 2019), said Reuters. The Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, which brought the original case, is expected to appeal the judgment. Still, it’s apposite that it coincides with Donald Trump’s election on a promise to “drill, baby, drill”. Trump has vowed “to slash red tape and unshackle US oil producers to drive up production and bring down prices for consumers”, said Myles McCormick and Jamie Smyth in the Financial Times. But “a rapid increase in output” is not likely. With production already at record levels,…

Why Trump should fear the bond market DealBook The New York Times If the Republicans seize control of Congress, as looks likely, Donald Trump’s economic plans may face scant legislative resistance. But another force “may temper his policies”, says DealBook – the bond market. While stocks cheered his victory with a record-setting week, volatile bond movements highlighted worries that “an unchecked Trump agenda” could “worsen the country’s debt burden”. Veteran Wall Street analyst Ed Yardeni coined the term “bond vigilantes” in the 1980s, “to describe the influence that frustrated bondholders can have on the policy agendas of politicians and central bankers”. He now sees potential for them to pose a risk to Trump’s agenda, and history is on his side. In 2007, a spike in bond yields signalled trouble in…

The week’s best shares Anglo American The Times The miner – with interests across iron ore, steelmaking coal, nickel, platinum group metals and diamonds – is focusing on copper to meet growing structural demand. Not risk-free, but simplification is “progressing”. Buy. £24.79. Craneware The Mail on Sunday Craneware’s software enables US healthcare providers to buy drugs more efficiently and receive payments promptly. Aiming to become a $1bn business. Profits forecast to rise 35% after a deal with Microsoft. Buy. £20.60. Johnson Matthey The Daily Telegraph Shares in the sustainable technologies specialist have slid since 2018, but it should benefit from the energy transition. With finances boosted by cost savings, there’s a generous buyback programme and it yields 5.1%. Buy. £15.08. Pershing Square Holdings The Mail on Sunday This investment trust…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1440 Two Connell Guides and three Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 25 November. Send it to The Week Crossword 1440, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items including a notebook, coffee mug and tote bag, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 8 Master some deliveries at singular cricket ground (8) 9 Holiday island (6) 11 Left out in the cold, shivering in Gironde (7) 12 In time metal put in sack (7) 13 Lamb partly stewed (3) 15 Hearing sounds going around old Bob’s taken in (7) 17…

What happened Delegates from nearly 200 countries arrived in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku this week for the start of the UN’s Cop29 climate summit. This year’s conference, which will last 11 days, has been dubbed the “finance Cop”: its main objective is to set a new target for the sum that rich nations will transfer to poorer ones to help them shift to green energy and deal with the ravages of climate change. An annual target in the region of $1trn – to come into force by 2035 – is expected to be agreed. On Tuesday, Keir Starmer unveiled an “ambitious” new target of reducing the UK’s carbon emissions by 81% relative to 1990 levels by 2035, without, he said, having to “tell people how to behave”. But the presence of…

A proposed law to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults in England and Wales was introduced in the House of Commons this week. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill sets out several requirements for those who would seek help to end their lives. The person must have the mental capacity to make the decision and be deemed to have expressed a clear, settled and informed wish; they must be expected to die within six months; they must make two declarations, each witnessed and signed, that affirms their wish to die. Two doctors must confirm that they are eligible; a High Court judge must hear from at least one of the doctors; and mandatory waiting periods are built-in. If the person is deemed eligible, the bill requires that…

Gary Lineker, who announced that he will step down as host of Match of the Day next summer, after 26 years, and leave the BBC after the 2026 World Cup. According to BBC sources, he had planned to stay longer, but had not been offered a new contract. Lineker is expected to focus more attention on his highly successful Goalhanger podcast empire, which includes The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Football, which he co-hosts. Kevin Rudd, whose future as Australia’s ambassador to Washington was imperilled by his failures of tact and diplomacy. On Tuesday, a video came to light of the former Australian PM calling Donald Trump a “village idiot”; days earlier, he had deleted posts on X in which he referred to Trump as a “traitor to…

Washington DC Racist texts: Within hours of Donald Trump’s election, racist text messages had been sent to black Americans in at least 30 states instructing them to report to slave plantations. The messages varied, but most addressed recipients by name and told them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton; they were also told that they would be collected in a van, taken to a plantation, and searched on arrival. The FBI and state authorities are investigating the messages, all from unrecognised numbers, which were sent to children at middle and high schools, students and adults. It is unclear precisely how many people received the texts, but they were reported in states including Alabama, New York and Virginia. Some included references to Donald Trump. A spokesman for the Trump…

Hugh Grant has revealed how he’d like to die. “My wife has kindly agreed to sneak up behind me and shoot me in the back of the head,” he told Vanity Fair. He also listed the qualities he most values in his friends (failure, unhappiness); and admitted that he loathes his hair (“I look like Liberace”). Asked about his idea of perfect happiness, he came up with: “Drinking a pint of London Pride while munching Twiglets and reading about Colin Firth having a critical and box-office catastrophe.” The American rapper Busta Rhymes revealed an unlikely comedy hero this week, as he collected an MTV Europe award. Having namechecked some of his fellow hip-hop stars, the 52-year-old (left) gave a shoutout to Benny Hill – “a superstar” whose work he had…

“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”Samuel Butler, quoted on UnHerd “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.”Rudyard Kipling, quoted in the Winnipeg Free Press “Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”William James, quoted in the Daily Citizen “Lost causes generate fresh markets.”Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately so is losing.”Vince Lombardi, quoted on The Knowledge “If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.”Margot Asquith on Lord Kitchener, quoted in The Times “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”Doris Lessing, quoted on United Press International “Be most slow to believe what…

To The Times I fear history is about to repeat itself: in the 1980s, farm values rose as milk quotas were introduced and quickly became a valuable asset and freely traded. Once this was halted, the value of farms fell and many dairy farmers were forced out of business. One consequence of Rachel Reeves’s policy on inheritance tax is that land prices should fall quickly, as City investors lose their desire to buy for tax relief. The consequence of this will be faceless bankers demanding overdraft reductions and loans called in, resulting in farms once again going to the wall. The farmers, the supply industries and, ultimately, the consumer will all suffer. Tim Tindle, ret’d agricultural engineer, Brig o’Turk, Perthshire To the Financial Times Far from “protecting the family farm”,…

“Drawing is both the most central and the most elusive of the key artistic methods,” said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. It is central because all art starts with it: we’ve all had a go at it. It is elusive because it embodies “a dilemma: how do you describe a three-dimensional world with two-dimensional information?” And there are so many ways of going about it. It’s “the fiercest test there is of eye-to-hand coordination”, and to do it really well requires a precision that borders on “magic”. This show at the King’s Gallery is a veritable feast of such brilliance, bringing together an “enormous cache” of around 160 drawings by the likes of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Fra Angelico. It delves into the Royal Collection’s seemingly “bottomless pit of…

Station Island by Seamus Heaney, 1984 (Faber £12.99). Seamus’s are the books most taken down from the shelf. There are three sections in this volume, but it’s the 33-page title poem that seems to me a masterpiece. It is a narrative sequence, both confessional and dramatic, and has the questing urgency of all pilgrimage, to arrive at a place of peace. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, 1985 (Penguin £9.99). This story of an epic love unrequited for 50 years, nine months, and four days is written with Gabriel García Márquez’s hallmark humour and wisdom. It confronts the realities of aging and consoles us with the revelation that if we can only keep believing, then the miracle of love is still possible. Great Expectations by Charles…

Programmes Moonflower Murders Lesley Manville returns to play publisher-turned-sleuth Susan Ryeland in the new season of the series based on Anthony Horowitz’s novels. Sat 16 Nov, BBC1 21:15 and 22:20 (45mins and 50mins respectively). The Listeners Haunting drama about a teacher (Rebecca Hall) who starts to be troubled by an incessant noise that no one else seems to hear. Tue 19 Nov, BBC1 21:00 (45mins). Fungi: The Web of Life Biologist Merlin Sheldrake – who wrote a bestselling book on the subject – travels from Tasmania to China to explore the life of fungi. Wed 20 Nov, BBC4 20:00 (40mins). After the Party Powerful drama from New Zealand. A woman is plunged into turmoil when her ex-husband moves back to town, five years after she accused him of a sex…

Quincy Jones 1933-2024 The wonder of Quincy Jones, U2’s frontman Bono once said, is “that one man could have fit so much music” into a single lifetime. Over an eight-decade career, Jones established a shining reputation as a performer and composer, arranger and producer, collaborating with artists across genres from jazz and bebop to soul, pop and rap. He played with Dizzy Gillespie, arranged music for Count Basie and Frank Sinatra, wrote scores for films including In the Heat of the Night, The Italian Job and The Color Purple, and collaborated with artists from Ray Charles and Dinah Washington to Snoop Dogg. He produced 1985’s We Are the World, the eighth-bestselling single of all time, which raised tens of millions for famine relief, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the bestselling album…

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The bells of Notre-Dame have rung out in unison across Paris for the first time since the 2019 fire. According to The Times, locals were elated to hear the bells, though Alexandre Gougeon, who is overseeing their installation, admitted that they still need some fine-tuning. “It’s not perfect yet but we will make them perfect,” he said. The bells were coated with lead dust during the fire, but have since been painstakingly cleaned and restored, and three new bells have been added. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has raised £4.48m to prevent a rare Italian Renaissance painting from leaving the country. Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion, one of the artist’s few surviving small-scale works, was painted in the 1420s, most likely for private devotion. It had been in a British collection…

Police were called to help control the traffic at a business park in Hampshire last weekend, when a sale of cookware by the coveted French brand Le Creuset drew vast crowds. One disappointed bargain-hunter complained that by the time she’d got to the front of the five-hour queue, which reportedly snaked for miles, “most things were gone”. Later, the early risers who’d been at the front boasted on TikTok about the bargains they’d snapped up, including a £215 saucepan that was discounted to £99. 40% of British adults think that shoplifting food can sometimes be acceptable if the thief cannot afford to buy food, and 51% think it’s acceptable if the person is starving, according to YouGov. 41% think it is never acceptable.…

In an election held tomorrow, 29% of British adults would vote for the Conservatives, up three points since Kemi Badenoch was made party leader. 27% would vote Labour. More in Common/Daily Mail 9% of British adults think that the Cop29 conference will result in major action to tackle climate change. YouGov Only 9% of British adults believe that all or almost all people who receive benefits are genuinely in need of help. 40% think the majority are; 25% believe that about half are; 12% believe that a minority or hardly any are. 59% of adults have neither a positive nor a negative view of welfare recipients. 27% have a negative view; 12% have a positive one. YouGov…

Chris Hoy on his cancer When the cyclist Chris Hoy was told that he had terminal prostate cancer last year, the news came “completely out of the blue”, he told BBC Breakfast. His shoulder and ribs had been hurting a bit, but he’d thought it was just aches and pains from going to the gym. Then, two months after this diagnosis, his wife Sarra disclosed that she’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “That was the lowest point I think,” Hoy (pictured below), 48, says. “You were already on the canvas and I just felt this, another punch when you’re already down – it was like getting that kick on the floor.” If he and Sarra hadn’t had their two children to think of, he is not sure that they’d have…

Not long ago, Musk considered himself a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal, and then economically right of centre, maybe,” he said in September 2020. Musk had donated to Obama’s campaign, as well as to some Republican candidates; in 2015 he called Trump’s presidential run “embarrassing”. Yet by 2020, his metamorphosis was already under way. In April, he had described the pandemic stay-at-home orders that closed Tesla factories as “fascist”. Later in 2020, his then-16-year-old child asked him to sign off on a medical transition from male to female. Musk did, but later claimed he’d been deceived. “My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” he said this year. “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” Musk is now driven by hostility to progressive ideology.…

Polls are useless – let’s dump them James Hibberd The Hollywood Reporter Yet again, the election polls got it wrong. It’s surely time to dump these useless measures, says James Hibberd. While campaigns can benefit from carrying out private polling with the help of focus groups, the hundreds of horse-race polls that now punctuate election cycles are consistently inaccurate, owing to the difficulty of surveying voters. When landline phones were ubiquitous, pollsters could rely on getting a decent response rate from randomly dialled numbers. In the age of mobile phones, texting and caller ID, it’s much harder for them to reach voters, particularly young ones. The well-respected New York Times/Siena College poll reportedly gets only a 1-2% response rate. Respondents are, by their nature, untypical. One study estimated that modern…

Almost one in ten children in England will be obese by the time they start primary school, new data from the National Child Measurement Programme shows. In 2023/24, 9.6% of four- and five-year-olds were obese. That is up from 9.2% in 2022/23 but a bit down on 2019/20, when the figure was 9.9% – and well below 2021/22, when the figure spiked at over 14%, following successive Covid lockdowns. Among children in Year 6, the last year of primary school, 22.1% were obese in 2023/24, down from 22.7% in 2022/23, but up on 2019/20, when the proportion was 21%. The figures show that, by the start of school, obesity rates are about twice as high in the most deprived areas (12.9%) than the least deprived ones, a gap that widens…

“Watching a wounded animal in its death throes is never an edifying experience,” said Iain Dale in The i Paper. That is how it felt last week observing the Archbishop of Canterbury vainly trying to hold onto his job in the wake of a damning report into the Church of England’s worst known abuse scandal. The subject of the report was John Smyth, a barrister and prominent evangelical Christian who, over four decades, had inflicted sadistic thrashings on more than 100 boys and young men, first at Christian summer camps in England and later in Africa. Justin Welby was informed about Smyth’s serial predatory behaviour in 2013, shortly after he became Archbishop. Yet he and other Church leaders failed to ensure that the allegations were properly investigated, and Smyth’s abuses…

Over the past two years, it has been hard to escape the feeling that Welsh rugby has “lurched from debacle to debacle”, said Alex Bywater in the Daily Mail. Off the field, the Welsh Rugby Union has become embroiled in a succession of pay disputes with players, as well as rows over its treatment of female employees and a funding crisis at the regional level. Over the same period, Wales’s performances on the pitch have sharply declined – encapsulated by their winless showing at this year’s Six Nations, a title they lifted six times between 2005 and 2021. Against such a background, Sunday’s encounter with Fiji seemed like a “must-win game” for the Welsh. But instead of beating a nation to whom they’d never previously lost at home, Warren Gatland’s…

Football Non-league club Yarm & Eaglescliffe FC scored four goals in extra time to claim a remarkable 6-5 victory over Sunderland West End. The team, currently top of Northern League Division Two, netted in the 92nd, 93rd, 94th and 96th minutes. Tennis Russia’s Daniil Medvedev said he got “zero pleasure” from being on court, following his loss to America’s Taylor Fritz in his first match at the World Tour Finals. Cycling In his final race as a professional cyclist, Mark Cavendish claimed victory in the Tour de France Prudential Singapore Criterium.…

The new thirst for “posh cider” Cider tends to be associated with teenagers nursing sickly pints of Woodpecker, says Katie Gatens in The Sunday Times. But today, a handful of producers are making cider that is “more akin to wine than White Lightning”. These bottles come with “arty labels”, and can cost up to £38 a pop. Michelin-starred restaurants have started stocking them, and they have “critics all of a flutter”. This may seem quite a transformation for a boozy drink “more associated with farmers than fine dining”. But, in fact, the concept of “posh cider” isn’t really new: in the 17th century, long before cider started being mass-produced, it was “drunk in engraved flutes by the upper classes”. The new producers are reviving old techniques, such as keeving (a…

● Don’t stand behind someone in the middle of the bar, to create a queue. Look for a space at the sides and, if you are with friends, spread along the bar; the sides tend to be quieter than the middle. ● Don’t hover around the tills. A pub does not work like a shop, so you don’t need to be near the till to get served. ● If you are in a group, you could try splitting up, in the hope of maximising your chances of one of you getting the bar staff’s attention. But this can be unhelpful to staff, as it makes other customers think that the bar is busy and they may walk away. ● Bring your used glasses back to the bar. Bartenders will appreciate…

June Spencer 1919-2024 June Spencer, who has died aged 105, was one of the original cast of The Archers. She joined the radio show for its pilot episode in 1950, said The Guardian, playing a flighty Irish baker’s assistant, a Scottish maid – and Peggy, the character that she would come to make her own. Three years later, she left, to look after the two children that she and her husband had adopted, but returned as Peggy in 1962. By the time she played the character for the last time in 2022, she was 103, and the sole survivor of the original cast. Peggy was first married to Jack Archer, who ran The Bull. A barmaid at the start, she became the show’s matriarch, and was used to highlight shifting…

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for British economic journalism,” said BoE governor Andrew Bailey as he marked Larry Elliott’s final press conference for The Guardian. Elliott’s 36-year stint spanned a broad sweep of history. Here’s what he learnt… ● “The free-market experiment has failed.” But no credible alternative has emerged. “Wealth did not trickle down” and “the gap between the haves and have-nots widened”. Financial speculation ran rife when controls on capital were removed, culminating in the 2008 crisis. But the opportunity of forging a progressive new approach to the economy was missed. “Zombie capitalism” has staggered on; flourishing populism is the result. ● The world’s economic centre of gravity has moved “from west to east and from north to south” – and “globalisation has gone into reverse”. Free…

Team Trump Donald Trump has turned to a pair of staunch allies from the private sector to lead his transition effort, said Politico. “Time to get Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon in your phone contacts.” Lutnick, the long-time CEO of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, is leading the search to find 4,000 new hires to fill the new administration, while McMahon, a former professional wrestler who co-founded the multibillion-dollar World Wrestling Empire (WWE), is helping draft policy. Both billionaires have been close to Trump for years, and are generous campaign donors. Lutnick, 63, first came into the public eye in 2001 when 658 Cantor workers, including his brother, were among those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. While credited with rebuilding the firm – Trump paid tribute…