The Week

Over the years there have been some spectacular royal events, but never one to match this, said Kevin Sullivan in The Washington Post. Intricately staged and faultlessly executed amid incomparable pomp and splendour, Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral on Monday was a “farewell production for the ages”. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of London and Windsor to pay their final respects to the Queen, and about 28 million people in the country watched the event on television, as did countless more around the world. Some analysts believe it may have been the most watched single event in history, with perhaps more than half of the world’s 7.7 billion people catching at least some of it. The funeral was the “perfect bookend production” for a 70-year reign that opened…

“From the moment she inherited the crown,” Elizabeth II knew that she was destined one day to lie in state “on the exact same spot” in Westminster Hall as her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had before her, said Caroline Davies in The Guardian. And so it was that last Thursday the Queen was “handed over by her family to the nation for her public farewell”. For the next four days, she lay in a coffin draped in the royal standard, and topped by the glittering Imperial State Crown, as ordinary men and women filed through to pay their last respects. Night and day, these modern-day pilgrims poured into London, said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times – people of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the UK and beyond; they…

It fell to the Duke of Norfolk to oversee the seating plan in Westminster Abbey, and with 2,200 people in attendance, including 500 heads of state and foreign dignitaries, his task was never going to be a simple one, said The Daily Telegraph. For the US president, Joe Biden, the Queen’s funeral must have been a strangely humbling experience. He may have been given special dispensation to drive to the Abbey in his own armoured limousine, rather than being bussed in with his fellow world leaders, but he and his wife Jill were not front and centre in the Abbey: instead, having arrived ten minutes late, they found themselves relegated to the 14th row of the south transept, one row behind President Duda of Poland and fully nine behind Justin…

As the official mourning period ended, “royal ritual” gave way to “political revolution”, said Martin Fletcher in The New Statesman. “A new Elizabethan era” has begun – that of Liz Truss, who is “taking a massive gamble” by adopting an “unproven strategy” of pursuing growth at all costs in order to restore the national finances. Ironically, for someone who is desperate to shrink the state, she has just unveiled the biggest fiscal intervention in peacetime history, a £150bn-plus package to curb soaring energy bills (along with, this week, a vast scheme to cut energy prices in half for business). But with that “unpalatable task” done, Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng moved to implement their real agenda: cutting taxes and tearing up regulations to “turbocharge economic growth”. The windfall tax on…

As the cost-of-living crisis bites, a growing number of Aga owners are said to be having the energy-intensive stoves stripped out of their kitchens. Jack O’Dwyer, a Blackpool-based remover, told Bloomberg that he’d taken out 35 Agas this year; one of his clients had only installed her electric Aga six months earlier, but had decided to sell it because it was costing £10 a day to run full-time. Oil-run models cost around £40 a week. The University of Oxford has renamed its Oriental Institute, after an 18-month consultation concluded that it was “inappropriate” and “outdated”, and that it had “unfortunate connotations of colonialism and imperialism”. The department is now called the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.…

Brad Pitt, with the first public showing of his sculptures, at an art museum in Finland. The actor is believed to have taken up pottery after his divorce from Angelina Jolie in 2017. The critical reaction was mixed. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones concluded that Pitt was “an extremely impressive artist”; but The Times’s Laura Freeman was more circumspect. Pitt’s efforts were not bad, she said – “better than Johnny Depp’s”. Tamara Harvey, who was named as the new artistic director of the RSC. Harvey, who currently runs the Theatr Clwyd in Mold, will share the role with Daniel Evans, of the Chichester Festival Theatre. It means the RSC will have a woman as its permanent artistic director for the first time in its 60-year history.…