Table of contents for 1524 in The Week

What happened Trump’s return “The golden age of America begins right now,” declared Donald Trump as he was sworn in on Monday as the 47th US president. In a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda attended by Washington politicians and the Silicon Valley elite, he pledged to lead a “revolution of common sense”, saying he had been “saved by God” to “make America great again”. He announced moves to boost fossil fuel production, close the US-Mexico border, and “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”. He also announced an ambition to “take back” the Panama Canal and plant the US flag on Mars. Trump later signed a flurry of executive orders to reverse many of Joe Biden’s policies…

“It’s impact time,” said Sam Blewett on Politico. The “asteroid” of Donald Trump’s second presidency has“finally struck” – and for the rest of the world, “the shockwaves will be seismic”. America’s disruptor-in-chief promises to be even more radical this time around: he has threatened to impose a 10% tariff on Chinese goods next week, and is considering slapping them on the EU, too. The details of his plans for Nato, Ukraine and Iran are awaited with trepidation. Trump seems to be planning a “new era of American empire”, said James Ball in The i Paper. He has vowed to occupy Greenland and seize the Panama Canal. His defenders have a habit of “sane-washing” his proposals, but at his inauguration he promised to lead a “growing America” that “expands our territory”.…

The Brutalist, the three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody, which may have missed its chance of Oscar glory owing to its controversial use of AI. It has emerged that, as part of efforts to make the film as authentic as possible, editors had used voice-cloning software to correct the actors’ accents for the few moments when they speak in Hungarian. Waste, with new research suggesting that £23bn worth of clothes are hanging unused in British wardrobes. Although most people keep items hoping eventually to wear them, one in five say they are too sentimentally attached to the clothes to throw them out.…

Washington DC Late pardons: Joe Biden used his final hours in office on Monday to issue pre-emptive pardons to several members of his own family and various officials. Justifying the step, which senior Democrats had urged against, Biden (pictured) said that his five relatives – his three siblings and two of their spouses – had done nothing wrong, but had faced“unrelenting” threats from Republicans. Before that, he’d issued pre-emptive pardons for Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who led the US’s Covid response; Liz Cheney, an outspoken Republican critic of Trump; General Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has called Trump a “fascist”; and members of the Congressional committee that investigated the 6 January riot. Last week, Biden used his farewell speech to warn…

“An engineer arrives to service our burglar alarm. He is competent, efficient, pleasant. But as night follows day, an email follows – ‘How did we do?’ with a long list of tedious questions. Then, ping, a message from British Gas: ‘Tell us how you feel about having changed your energy tariff.’ Well, how indeed? Exhilarated? Apprehensive? Devastated? No, I feel emotionally flat. Would I ‘recommend British Gas to a friend’? No, I don’t talk to friends about my gas supply. Why do these things keep coming to torment us? How long before the email: ‘Thank you for responding to our survey. How did we do? Would you recommend our surveys to a friend?’” Matthew Parris in The Times…

Handing over power to the lords of law… Juliet Samuel The Times If Keir Starmer’s Government could be said to have a philosophy, says Juliet Samuel, it’s the idea that every problem is best resolved through lawyerly deliberations. It elevates the authority of legal institutions above all else, even the national interest. Hence its rush to hand over the Chagos Islands, a move that it believes will “demonstrate our deep commitment to international law”. Which, in fact, it doesn’t. The UK has no legal obligation to surrender the islands, as the case has never been formally submitted to the International Court of Justice. That court may have offered an advisory ruling to that effect, but the UK has long rejected this unsolicited advice on the basis that it reflects “a…

Time to scrap this inaugural fund racket Timothy Noah The New Republic The trouble with donating to candidates during election campaigns, says Timothy Noah, is that you can’t be sure they’ll win. But that’s not an issue when you contribute to a presidential inauguration. Any money given to this fund, which pays for balls, galas and other inaugural events, is guaranteed to benefit your candidate. And whereas government contractors are barred from donating to campaigns, they can give as much as they want to a presidential inauguration. It’s a clear “recipe for corruption”. The problem has grown worse over time. Before Ronald Reagan, no inaugural committee had ever raised as much as $5m, but his 1981 fund took in $17.3m. The next big jump happened with Donald Trump, whose 2017…

Obesity “misdiagnosed” The standard measure for obesity is unreliable, and focuses too much on people’s weight and not enough on their overall health, a Lancet health commission has found. Currently, white Europeans are deemed obese if they exceed 30kg/m2 on the Body Mass Index – their weight divided by the square of their height. But though this correlates to high levels of body fat, it is a blunt tool because size and weight are not accurate determinants of health or well-being. What matters is how much fat a person has relative to their muscle and bone, and how that fat is distributed: fat that accumulates around the waist or around organs is more of a risk to health than fat that lies just under the skin. A person with excess…

“Sorry, for Kemi Badenoch, does not seem to be the hardest word,” said The Times. Last week, the Tory leader used her first major speech in opposition to deliver a characteristically punchy“mea culpa” for her party’s failures in government. The Conservatives were wrong to leave the EU without a plan for growth, Badenoch said, and to make empty promises on immigration and net zero. “The candour is refreshing,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. It usually takes years for losing parties to “face up to why they actually lost”. But it’s also a sign that Badenoch is “rattled”. And no wonder: the Tories are now in third place in several polls, behind Labour and Reform UK. Admitting past mistakes will allow her to go on the attack against Nigel Farage,…

The lesson to be drawn from Novak Djokovic’s illustrious career is that it is never, ever safe to write him off, said Stuart Fraser in The Times. Time and again in his toughest matches, the Serb has roused himself “from the dead” to claim the most unlikely of victories. And, at the age of 37, he is “somehow still at it” – as demonstrated by the “remarkable turnaround” he produced on Tuesday to defeat Carlos Alcaraz in the quarter-final of the Australian Open. In a match that lasted nearly four hours, and finished at 12:57am, the 24-time grand-slam champion outgunned an opponent “16 years his junior” to claim an enthralling 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4 victory. Djokovic, whose world ranking has slipped to seven after a largely indifferent 2024, went into…

To The Times Juliet Samuels highlights the damage being inflicted on the country as a result of lawyers believing that they should rule. This is not a new development, as shown by Tony Blair’s constitutional meddling and the introduction of the Supreme Court, an institution foreign to our carefully home-grown system of judicature. In a democratic society, law is made by elected governments, not lawyers. Lawyers are a necessary evil, but their purpose is to apply and interpret law, not to make law, save in our common law system to develop from custom and precedent where statute law may be lacking; but even then it is for Parliament to codify or overrule the judgment of the courts. Lawyers do not and should not rule: in fact being a lawyer should…

The Week reviews an exhibition in a private gallery Monotypes at Messums London Monotyping – printing from an image painted on a flat surface – is a notoriously tricky manner of printmaking: the picture that results will always be unique, as the ink used on the source image will be removed. This show brings together monotypes by 14 contemporary artists, and acquits itself rather well. Francesco Poiana, for instance, demonstrates the intensity of colour that monotyping can produce, creating impressively economic depictions of landscape and natural forms. His monochrome renderings of less idealistic scenes – a busy underpass, the junction of a motorway slip road – are no less impressive. Elisabeth Cummings, meanwhile, fields a sunny, delightful still life of oranges, lemons and pomegranates that could easily be adapted for…

David Lynch 1946-2025 David Lynch, who has died aged 78, once said that, as a child, he had been “saved” by his mother encouraging him to draw not in colouring books, but on pieces of scrap paper. It meant, he said, that he no longer had to “stay within the lines”. A natural rebel, whose artistic spirit was at odds with the 1950s suburbia of his youth, he became one of Hollywood’s most distinctively avant-garde directors. His films (Mulholland Drive; Blue Velvet; Wild at Heart) were so singular – disjointed, dark and often unnerving – his name became an adjective: Lynchian. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it refers to the juxtaposition of “surreal or sinister elements” with the “mundane”, and the use of rich visual imagery, to create a…

Scott Bessent The “Bessent ascent” is under way, said Punchbowl News. True to form, Donald Trump’s urbane pick for Treasury secretary has been gliding his way through the confirmation process, deftly batting away flak from opponents who claim he might not have paid as much tax as he should. Bessent, 62, is seen as one of the more “moderate figures” in the new administration, said James Politi in the FT. A lifelong financier, he spent a decade working for Democrat megadonor George Soros before starting his own hedge fund, Key Square Capital Management. While echoing Trump’s call for a “new economic golden age”, he’s expected to be “a countervailing force against any extreme policy lurches that could unsettle investors”. When it comes to bond and currency markets, the Yale-educated Bessent…

Adults start behaving like their parents at the age of 43, polling data has suggested. The greatest indicator of turning into your parents is, according to those surveyed, moaning about the weather; followed by nodding off on the sofa in the evening, dressing for comfort and heading to bed before 10pm. Other signs include taking up gardening and having a favourite chair. The Government is developing an AI tool to help civil servants and ministers work out which policies will go down well (or badly) with MPs. Parlex draws on data from Hansard to predict how MPs will react to specific policies. Other AI tools could be used to analyse responses to public consultations, and to transcribe and summarise meetings with ministers.…

59% of Americans feel the country’s political system has been broken for decades, according to Ipsos. 29% think it has been broken for the past few years. Only 9% believe that it isn’t broken. 66% strongly or somewhat support Donald Trump’s promise to deport all illegal immigrants. However, not all his ideas enjoy majority support. A Wall Street Journal poll found that more than two-thirds oppose using military or economic force to seize Greenland; two-thirds oppose making Canada the 51st US state. 35% of employees aged 18 to 24 say they have needed to take time off work in the past year because of poor mental health caused by pressure or stress. Among those aged 55 or over, only 10% have. Mental Health UK/The Times…

A crushing double burden Caroline Darian can remember the exact moment that her normal life came to an end, says Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian. At 8:25pm on a Monday night in November 2020, she answered the phone to her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who told her to sit down. A few weeks earlier, her mother explained, police had arrested her father Dominique for filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket. As part of their inquiries, officers had searched their home, and taken away his computer and hard drives. That morning, they had told Gisèle Pelicot their findings: thousands of photos and videos showing her lying unconscious in bed, being raped by her husband of 50 years, and by dozens of strangers. It “was like being hit by a wave. It…

Branson, a small city in Missouri with a population of just 13,000 people, has four Donald Trump stores that are doing a roaring trade. At the largest shop, customers can buy blow-up Trumps; bullet-shaped tumblers that declare “Not today! You can’t kill freedom”; toilet paper printed with Kamala Harris or Joe Biden’s face; and “Woke Brew” coffee. Other products include a $1,400 flame thrower engraved with Trump’s face (currently sold out), and a $35 “Make Kids Great Again” spanking paddle made from solid wood. Residents of a village in Wales have become so fed up with the state of one of their roads that they have turned it into a pothole theme park. A sign at the entrance to the road in Pontfadog, Wrexham, boasts that “Pothole Land” features “the…

When the Sussexes secured a podcast deal with Spotify in 2020, they wanted a “big theme that would explain the world”, a former Spotify employee has told Vanity Fair. But there was a problem: “They had no ideas.” Soon, however, Prince Harry had a brainwave: he would host a “sociopath podcast” in which he would interview the likes of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, in an effort to work out what it was in their backgrounds that had formed their personalities – while also exploring why he hadn’t become a sociopath himself. “I have very bad childhood trauma,” a source remembers him musing. “What is it about me that didn’t make me one of these bad guys?” As Unity Mitford’s newly discovered diaries shed further light on the viciousness of…

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.” Don DeLillo, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle “Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?” Henry David Thoreau, quoted on NPR “The universe is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” Attrib. Eden Phillpotts, quoted in The Sunday Times “Getting divorced just because you don’t love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.” Zsa Zsa Gabor, quoted on The Conversation “One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her 250,000 times and what you get is a book club.” Flannery O’Connor, quoted in Christianity Today “For most normal people,…

Football Liverpool extended their lead at the top of the Premier League to six points by beating Brentford 2-0. The “worst team in the club’s history” is how manager Ruben Amorim described his Manchester United team after they lost 1-3 to Brighton. Tennis Emma Raducanu lost 6-1, 6-0 to world No. 2 Iga Świątek in round three of the Australian Open. Cricket Australia retained the Women’s Ashes, by winning the first four games of their multi-format series against England.…

Kirsty and Rex anxiously await Justin’s decision on the beaver release. Rochelle asks Ruth if she can borrow the Brookfield barn for an event she’s organising. Kirsty and Helen talk about their new living arrangements. On a visit to Beechwood ahead of moving in, Tom antagonises Joy and Mick. Rochelle tracks down Rex at work, and he eventually agrees to a picnic. He tells Joy, who quietly despairs. Miranda and Brian amiably spar over beavers and bridge. Justin announces to Kirsty and Rex that the scheme will go ahead, to their delight. Neil feels torn about not knowing his birth family; Adam shares his experience of finding his half-sister, prompting Neil to decide he’ll start searching for his own birth parents. On the picnic, Rex admits to Rochelle that Joy…

Why Oxo wins out over bone broth “It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7,” says Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator. But in a “flooded stock market”, I remain faithful to a cheaper product that has “stood the test of time”: Oxo. Despite its quintessentially British reputation, Oxo’s origins are German: the first version was a “viscous liquid” invented by Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, in the mid-19th century. Initially promoted in Britain as Liebig’s Extract of Meat, it was trademarked as Oxo in 1899, to “ward off anti-German sentiment”. It arrived in a more affordable cube form in 1910-11, and millions of these cubes were included in First World War ration kits. Of…

● When your baby wakes in the night, pause for three minutes before going in. ● If your child is over two, try using a sleep training clock, which will help them to learn when they should be awake or asleep. ● Limit interaction at night-time. The more you interact with your child, the more stimulating it will be and the harder they will find it to go to sleep. There’s plenty of time for chatting and play during the day. ● Make sure the room is as dark as possible. If your child is afraid of the dark, use a red or amber night light. Aim to keep the temperature between 16°C and 20°C, and watch out for a dip in the early hours. ● You can play white…

Tony Slattery 1959-2025 Tony Slattery, who has died aged 65, sprang to public attention in the late 1980s as one of the standout comic performers on the hit TV improvisation show Whose Line Is It Anyway? Good looking and versatile, with a hyperactive energy, he became ubiquitous on British TV as a sitcom actor, game-show host, critic and chat-show guest, said The Times. His schedule in the early 1990s was relentless, and it left him exhausted, unsatisfied and over-exposed. “I felt I had become a light-entertainment construct,” he recalled. “There was an intense feeling of waste and self-hatred. I did a lot of rubbish. I was a scampering puppy. I didn’t take holidays. I wasn’t born into money, so I kept saying ‘Yes’. I think people started to think, ‘Oh,…

Plenty of companies have succeeded in pushing through “return to the office” policies without undue kickback. Not WPP, says Martin Kimber on Sky News. The world’s biggest advertising and PR conglomerate is suffering a major backlash over its “four-day office mandate” – thousands of staff have signed a petition urging the group to revoke the rule, which they claim has damaged morale at a difficult time for the industry: WPP’s shares are down by more than 12% since the start of the year. Ironically, poor communication seems to be part of the problem: many staff didn’t find out about the diktat until they read about it in the trade press.…

In November, Goldman Sachs dubbed the pound “a diamond in the rough” – predicting that “a bullish set-up” should “see it keep pace” with the US dollar. So much for that, says Rachel Mortimer in The Times. The pound fell to its lowest level in more than a year last week. Ominously for British holidaymakers, No1 Currency reports that sterling “has fallen against 51 of the 54 most popular holiday currencies” since October’s Budget. So how can you make your cash go further? ● “If you’ve already booked your trip but aren’t travelling for a while”, keep an eye on exchange rates, which “can differ a lot between different travel providers”, said No1’s Simon Phillips. The golden rule is not to swap your cash at the airport, however “convenient and…

The week’s best shares Anpario Investors’ Chronicle Anpario is a producer of healthy animal feed additives, which help reduce antibiotic use and support gut health. Improving cashflow and margins, and investing in automated manufacturing. Target 500p. Buy. 425p. Games Workshop Group The Times The fantasy figurine maker, with 500 shops worldwide, also benefits from online sales and licensing revenues, which have doubled to £30.1m. Profits have swollen and an Amazon TV and film deal adds “hope value”. Buy. £131.70. IMI The Daily Telegraph The engineer’s diverse geographical exposure has put it on track to grow organic profits by 10%. Sound finances provide scope for M&A activity and buybacks, amid a major cost reduction programme. Buy. £18.22. International Consolidated Airlines Group The Daily Telegraph The BA owner has £13bn in liquidity,…

Prince Harry, who reached a settlement with the owners of The Sun, which included an “unequivocal” apology for its intrusions into his private life over 15 years to 2011, and “substantial damages”, believed to run into eight figures. It is the first time the Murdoch group has admitted to unlawful activity at The Sun. The digital revolution, with news that driving licences are to become available on smartphones in a new government “wallet” later this year, with passports following in 2027. Initially, the digital passport will only be for domestic use, but subject to agreements, it could be used internationally. Julia Donaldson, who was named the UK’s bestselling author, knocking J.K. Rowling into second place. According to Nielson BookData, the children’s writer has sold 48.6 million books, to Rowling’s 48…

Paris Miss France row: There are fears for the safety of this year’s Miss France after she declined to voice support for Charlie Hebdo, the magazine that was attacked in 2015 by Islamist terrorists who killed 12 people. Angélique Angarni-Filopon, 34, a flight attendant from the French Caribbean, had already faced online vitriol over her race, age and hairstyle. But the abuse intensified, after she demurred over a request by a radio interviewer for her to say “Je suis Charlie”, the slogan used to show solidarity with the magazine. Pageant organisers have tried to explain that all winners are obliged to stay neutral in political and religious matters. Paris Honey craze: French customs officials have made it known that 2024 was a record year for the traffic in “love honey”,…

1* I Will Survive by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris, performed by Gloria Gaynor 2 No Woman, No Cry (from the album Live!) by Vincent Ford, performed by Bob Marley and The Wailers 3 Puff, the Magic Dragon by Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow, performed by Gregory Isaacs 4 Romanian Freilach, written and performed by Daniel Ahaviel 5 Back to Black by Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson, performed by Amy Winehouse 6 Ain’t Nobody by David “Hawk” Wolinski, performed by Rufus and Chaka Khan 7 Police and Thieves by Junior Murvin and Lee “Scratch” Perry, performed by Junior Murvin 8 Shame, Shame, Shame by Sylvia Robinson, performed by Shirley & Company Book: Middlemarch by George Eliot Luxury: a fridge with an endless supply of white wine * Choice if allowed only one record…

“Deeply complicit in the mass rapes.” That’s how Elon Musk characterised Keir Starmer’s role in the grooming scandal; but is this accurate? The short answer is an emphatic “no”. As director of public prosecutions, Starmer headed the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013, with overall responsibility for bringing criminal charges in England and Wales. Musk’s claim appears to refer to a decision taken by a CPS lawyer in July 2009 to drop a child grooming case in Rochdale because the victim wasn’t considered credible (despite her attacker’s DNA being found on her underwear). The abuse continued after the case was dropped. However, Starmer was not involved in that decision; and, in 2011, he supported the decision of Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor for North West England, to reopen the…

RUSSIA Why Russia’s elites are staying put The Moscow Times (Amsterdam) It’s a puzzle, say Aaron Lea and Borukh Taskin: “Why aren’t Russia’s elites fleeing Putin?” Between 1953 and 1990, more than 1,200 members of the Soviet elite – high-ranking diplomats, scientists, dancers – chose to emigrate to the West “in pursuit of freedom”. Yet despite Putin’s authoritarianism and the “moral rubicon” of his Ukraine invasion, Russia’s elites are today staying put. Some, though deeply unhappy, may be too embroiled in corruption to see a life beyond the mafia state. For others it may be a “crabs in a bucket” situation: “when one crab tries to clamber out of the container, the others drag it back in”. But one can’t help feeling the West is also to blame. European countries…

When the Romans invaded Britain, they found the natives strange, says The Times. Their warriors painted themselves blue; and they had moustaches – a concept so foreign to Romans, they had no name for it. Perhaps worst of all, Roman scribes recorded that Celtic rebellions against Roman rule were often led by women. This would have seemed outlandish in Rome, where women were legally owned by their fathers and their husbands, and had no role at all in public life. But while the existence of female warriors such as Boudicca is not in doubt, historians have long distrusted these accounts, suspecting the extent of female power and influence was overstated, to make Celtic societies seem completely barbaric. Now, however, archaeologists at Trinity College Dublin and Bournemouth University have backed up…

On Monday, Axel Rudakubana, the 18-year-old who stabbed three little girls to death in Southport last July, unexpectedly pleaded guilty to their murder at Liverpool Crown Court. This spared the families of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe the trauma of reliving the episode at trial, said Paul Baldwin in the Daily Express. But the killer expressed no contrition and gave no motive, and the conviction raised as many questions as it answered. We now know that police had been aware of what they called Rudakubana’s “unhealthy obsession with extreme violence”, but had failed to stop him. Shockingly, it emerged that he had been referred three times to Prevent, the Home Office’s counter-extremism programme, but was deemed unsuitable. At the time of the crimes, the public…

On “windswept touchlines” in Aberdeen in the 1950s, people began to talk with excitement about a “puny, bespectacled kid with a squint who was somehow ramming home goals for his school and boys’ club teams”, said Michael Grant in The Times. Small, thin and scrawny, with a terrible squint that forced him to wear glasses, there was little to suggest Denis Law “would make it as a footballer”. Yet even while at primary school, he found the net with such regularity that his exploits frequently appeared in local papers. In time, Law would go on to become one of the all-time greats of the British game – the scorer of 237 goals for Manchester United – placing him third on the club’s all-time list, behind Bobby Charlton and Wayne Rooney…

The oldest hatred To The Daily Telegraph How astonishing and depressing to read that almost half the world’s eight billion people hold antisemitic views. There are fewer than 16 million Jews worldwide, and fewer than three million in total outside Israel and America – little more than the population of Birmingham. Indeed, there are only nine countries that have more than 100,000 Jews. So just how many of these four billion people have even met a Jew? Jeremy Jacobs, Stanmore, Hampshire Stop scooping up Scots To The Spectator Is it any wonder that Scots get huffy with the English? Bryan Appleyard calls Samuel Johnson “the wisest Englishman who ever drew breath”, but David Hume, whom he acknowledges as a great philosopher, is scooped up as “British”. It was ever thus.…

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play Kyoto – first seen at the RSC in Stratford – is set at the UN Climate Change Conference in 1997, when countries around the world agreed the first international treaty on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s face it, this set-up sounds painfully worthy and dull, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out; yet the play turns out to be almost “indecently entertaining”. Wittily staged by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Kyoto features “globe-hopping storytelling”, a “dizzying array” of compelling characters, and is a “total thrill ride”. Any drama about such a complex event – the play covers ten years of negotiation leading up to Kyoto – will likely rely on a narrator to guide the audience through, said David Benedict in Variety. In a “wearyingly…

At the turn of the 16th century, Florence was the scene for “what may have been the ultimate clash of the titans of Western art”, said Robert Fox in The London Standard. In about 1504, the “ageing” Leonardo da Vinci, the rising star Michelangelo and the upstart newcomer Raphael all crossed paths in the Tuscan city, “a hotbed of intrigue and turmoil” then home to Machiavelli and the Medicis. The three masters copied, studied and almost certainly drew influence from each other, and – less collegially – competed for patrons. This small, three-room exhibition at the Royal Academy explores the great meeting of minds that took place in Florence that year, bringing together one major, contemporaneous work from each artist: Leonardo’s so-called Burlington House Cartoon, depicting the Virgin and Child…

Moonraker by Ian Fleming, 1955 (Ian Fleming Publications £9.99). Nicholas Shakespeare’s recent biography of Fleming is a mind-blower that left me wondering how one man could have changed the world so much. He’s really hitting his stride as a novelist in this third Bond novel. The description of drink, drugs and dining at M’s club Blades is the finest food writing I’ve ever read. Vines in a Cold Climate by Henry Jeffreys, 2023 (Allen & Unwin £10.99). So, we’ve had the Great British Cheese Explosion. Now we’re into The Champagne Supernova years. This book tells the incredible story of commercial British winemaking since its beginnings in the 1990s. There was simply no English wine commercially available then; now our sparkling wines rank among the world’s best. Love Triangle by Matt…

Programmes Carole King and James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name Filmmaker Frank Marshall’s tribute to the two artists and their fruitful song-writing partnership. Sat 25 Jan, BBC2 20:35 (95mins). Holocaust: Night Will Fall To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, Channel 4 is reshowing this powerful documentary featuring the footage of the Nazi concentration camps that went unseen for decades. Mon 27 Jan, C4 23:59 (75mins). Storyville: Your Fat Friend A portrait of blogger, activist and author Aubrey Gordon, and her unflinching take on attitudes to fatness and the diet industry. Tue 28 Jan, BBC4 22:00 (90mins). Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis The actor talks to victims, offenders, police and politicians, in an effort to understand Britain’s knife crime epidemic and how to stop it. Wed 29 Jan, BBC1 21:00 (60mins). Brian…

Puntarelle, a weird variety of chicory that grows like a head of asparagus spears, defines Roman cuisine for me, says Jacob Kenedy. Served with a punchy anchovy dressing, it makes a typical winter salad – one that is bitter, acidic, fishy and salty. In Rome, puntarelle is often prepared with the aid of a grid of tightly strung wires, through which the leaves are pushed to make julienne strips. I often just cut the spears in half, lengthways – an altogether easier proposition. Serves 3 as a side, or just me 1 head puntarelle 30g anchovy fillets, preferably filleted at home from 70g salted whole anchovies 2 tbsp lemon juice 4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil 1 scant tsp crushed black pepper garlic clove, crushed to a paste • Prepare the…

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Rockhouse Hotel Negril, Jamaica With its “stone-and-thatch” villas and “bright-red” ladders dropping into the sea, the Rockhouse represents a certain brand of old-school “Jamaican cool”, says Lale Arikoglu in Condé Nast Traveller. Staff regale guests with stories of Bob Marley and The Rolling Stones jumping off its cliffs in the 1970s, and little has changed in the hotel’s design since then – its stone-floored studios and villas retain their “bohemian” air. There’s a spa and two restaurants – one serving Jamaican classics, the other more “American-leaning”. All in all, a “soulful” alternative to Negril’s “slicker” resorts and all-inclusives. Doubles from £137; rockhouse.com.…

If we must have another runway… Nils Pratley The Guardian Environmentalists, some of them in the Cabinet, will tell you that “the best form of airport expansion is none at all”, says Nils Pratley. But it seems the Chancellor has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. She’s gunning for more airport expansion in the southeast, including a third Heathrow runway. “Get ready for another season of that interminable saga.” Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay of such a complex project. “The last iteration imagined lowering the M25… rerouting rivers and building car parks for nearly 50,000 cars.” Think “the HS2 of runways”: the last known cost estimate, £14bn, is bound to be much higher now. If we must have another…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1449 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 3 February. Send it to The Week Crossword 1449, 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, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 7 Wise types get behind party measures (7) 8 Ring wanting info for type of bulb (7) 10 Familiar jerk ousted (4,2) 11 Logical study holding one’s ground (8) 12 Story line not new (3) 13 Lisa flies around this country for silky-haired dog (6) 14 Ages to admit certain evidence of deletions (8) 16 Farmer…