| | |  | "Tevi, get down here!" Greg Mathieson/Mai/Getty |
| The defence chief who went AWOL | The scandal over US defence secretary Lloyd Austin – who went into hospital for a prostate cancer operation, then got stuck there for a week with an infection, all without telling Joe Biden – will strike anyone who has worked for a president as "bizarre", says Tevi Troy in The Wall Street Journal. "When you are entrusted with high-level public responsibilities, the expectation is that you are always available." When I worked in George W Bush's White House, the president's chief of staff slept with his BlackBerry on his chest. A speechwriter I knew who swam at weekends used to put his phone in a Ziploc bag at one end of the pool and check it every 100 metres. | When it comes to demanding constant availability from aides, it's hard to beat Lyndon B Johnson. In the days before mobiles, he had phones installed "in his car, on his boat, and even in his bathroom", so he could always reach his people. He also installed phones at their end, including some who didn't even work for him. The Hollywood mogul and Johnson fundraiser Lew Wasserman once received a call that a signal corps officer was putting in a phone at his house so that the president would have a direct line. When Wasserman objected, he was told the phone was going in whether he liked it or not, so "he might as well just pick a place for it". | 📚🤬 LBJ also "didn't believe in the concept of personal time". One aide who worked for him in the Senate, Billy Lee Brammer, wrote a novel. When it came out, Johnson was furious. "When'd you write that book?" he demanded. "At nights," replied Brammer. That didn't assuage Johnson. Instead of working on the novel, he said, "you should have been answering my mail". The two men never spoke again. |
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| | | | THE COUNTRY HOUSE This Grade II listed farmhouse in the Blyth River valley in Suffolk retains period features including oriel windows, original oak floors and an inglenook fireplace. Built in the 16th century, the four-bedroom property comes with ponds, a meadow, and a range of farm buildings, all on five-and-a-half acres of land. Darsham station is a 10-minute drive, with trains to London in 90 minutes. £1,500,000. |
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European settlers in California felt little sympathy for the local grizzly bears, says Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. In 1898, a San Franciso newspaper described a local beast named Old Reel Foot as a "marauder and outlaw". The 1,350-pound creature, it said, broke into a pigpen and gorged on "squealing porkers until his belly was made full". He also, apparently, "infiltrated" an indigenous tribe before making off with a baby in a papoose, and later disembowelled and "partly devoured" a sheep herder in full view of his young son. The monster's reported motive? A "thirst for revenge on humanity". | Back then, California grizzlies were routinely depicted as a "bloodthirsty bunch" that had to be bravely overcome. And overcome they were. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, Californians "hunted, trapped and poisoned" the state's bears until there were none left. What's weird is that if these creatures were anything like the horrors they were made out to be, "they didn't start out that way". Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly "90% vegan". For all their "heft and roar", grizzlies are "kind of crummy hunters". So until people turned up with their captive livestock, the only land animals the giants could get hold of were "small, sluggish, newborn or already dead". Despite their "homicidal reputation", if Old Reel Foot and co really did develop a lust for blood, "humans were likely the ones to blame". | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share |
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| | | |  | A master of manipulation. APIC/Getty |
| Churchill's favourite spy | Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, a Polish aristocrat and scion of a Jewish banking family, was in Africa when she found out her country had been invaded by Nazi Germany, says BBC News's Tim Stokes. She headed straight to Britain and demanded to be taken on by the intelligence services, successfully pitching them a plan in which she would ski across central Europe's Carpathian Mountains to ferry money and intelligence in and out of Poland. Before the war, she had smuggled cigarettes using the same technique for fun – she didn't even smoke. | Christine Granville, as she became known, was "MI6's first female recruit", and made full use of her language skills and high society connections. When she passed on a microfilm to Winston Churchill showing German forces poised to invade Soviet Russia, he declared her his "favourite agent". She was a "master of manipulation and persuasion". In 1944, she climbed up to a strategic Nazi garrison in the Alps, then used a loudhailer to persuade 63 Polish officers forced into the German army to desert the outpost. She later stormed into a French prison and convinced the Gestapo officer in charge to release several Allied agents, claiming she was the niece of Field Marshal Montgomery and that an American attack was imminent. In a "bitter irony", Granville survived all these wartime adventures but was killed in 1952 – an ex-lover knifed her to death in the lobby of a Kensington hotel. | | |  | Lady Gaga in House of Gucci (2021) |
| "Why don't you just try acting?" | Natalie Portman recently said that method acting – staying in character even when the cameras aren't rolling – is a "luxury women can't afford". There are some exceptions, says Sian Cain in The Guardian: Lady Gaga claimed she did it for 18 months for her part in House of Gucci. But it does tend to be male actors who take the technique to "extreme lengths". Robert De Niro moved to Sicily and learned Italian to prepare for The Godfather Part II. Al Pacino pretended to be blind for Scent of a Woman. While playing a priest in Silence, Andrew Garfield stopped eating and having sex. For Fury, Shia LaBeouf pulled out one of his teeth. But the technique isn't always popular with others on set. Brian Cox famously described his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong's method acting as "fucking annoying". | 🎬😴 When Laurence Olivier learned that his Marathon Man co-star Dustin Hoffman had stayed up for three nights straight, supposedly to prepare for scenes in which his character had done the same, he is said to have asked him: "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?" | | |  | Up for a fight: Starmer on the campaign trail in 2021. Owen Humphreys/Pool/Getty |
| Labour will not tread lightly | Keir Starmer began the year by making a bold promise, says Robert Shrimsley in the FT: "a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives". It's a "tantalising prospect" after years of Tory psychodramas. But it's a promise the Labour leader is unlikely to keep. For one thing, the Conservatives won't let him. "Anger is the energy of oppositions", so every government decision will be met with "howls of betrayal" from the disempowered right. For another, the whole point of Labour is to be interventionist. "It believes in the power of the state to do good." | Besides, Starmer's proposed policies show that his government will be "radical" and "busy". Providing parents with wraparound nursery care, streamlining planning laws, reforming the NHS and social care – these are not low-impact changes. The Labour leader also promises more decentralisation of power, but "politics does not become more light-footed simply because it comes from local councils" – just ask the motorists in Wales furious about the new 20mph speed limits. This is not to criticise any of these policies. But no one should be fooled by the "soothing rhetoric". A Starmer government may "speak softly", but it won't "step lightly". | | |  | HMS Agamemnon laying an undersea cable in 1858 (Robert Charles Dudley, 1865-66) |
| The first successful attempt to lay an undersea cable between the US and Europe was in 1858, says Brian Klaas on Substack. On 29 July, two ships that had been unspooling cables for thousands of miles met in the middle of the Atlantic and "successfully spliced the two ends together". After a brief test message ("Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men"), Queen Victoria used the new line to send a short note of congratulation to US President James Buchanan. He replied with an incredibly "flowery" message, waxing lyrical about the "glorious" triumph being a "bond of perpetual peace", and so on. What he perhaps hadn't realised was that it would take an average of two minutes and five seconds to transmit each character. So his grandiose response took a whopping 17 hours and 40 minutes to send. | | | | | "If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue."
Actor Peter Ustinov |
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