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Just for today, because it’s Sunday and we’re feeling full of the joys of June, we’re sending you a free full edition of The Knowledge. Why not subscribe to receive it in full every day? |
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“Hay bales, horses and other English erotica” |
When the war in Iran erupted, newspapers across the world rushed to report on it, says The Economist. “Not Country Life.” The quintessential British magazine instead published a cover featuring two jolly lambs and ran a piece about “the chickens that lay our favourite eggs”. It was similarly “off-news” when Covid broke out, featuring a charming thatched cottage on the cover, and at the start of the Ukraine war, displaying a lovely picture of the coast. World War Two was only marginally more topical. On 16 September 1939 the magazine offered: “Golf – The Game in War-Time”. |
Country Life is less a publication than an “institution”. Its first offices were designed by Edwin Lutyens and early readers included the likes of Evelyn Waugh. Landmarks have been sold in it – in 1915 Stonehenge was flogged for £6,600 – novelists have long satirised it and today its readership includes the Royal Family and David Beckham. It even has its own vernacular: one doesn’t “buy” the magazine or “read” it; one “takes it”. Each issue opens with “posh porn” – images of grand houses with moats newly on the market – and moves on to its “Frontispiece” feature, formerly known as “Girls in Pearls”, pictures of grand young women with charming smiles next to hay bales, horses and “other English erotica”. A survey of the 2007-2011 girls found that a quarter had attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Go to the right sort of house today and you will still find stacks of Country Life in the loo. It speaks to an England of country piles, tennis, and tea on the lawn; an England that is “declining but not yet fallen”. |
👑🐶 When Charles, the then Prince of Wales, guest-edited the magazine in 2013, he chose Camilla for the Frontispiece. Camilla, when she guest-edited in 2022, chose her dogs. |
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Advertisement |
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Aberdeen Equity Income Trust Post-Merger: Stronger Together
The merger of Aberdeen Equity Income Trust and Shires Income was widely seen as a positive step, uniting two strong, closely aligned trusts. As the new structure begins to take shape, former Shires Income manager Iain Pyle now Co-Manager of the combined trust alongside Thomas Moore shares his perspective on the transition and how the strategy is developing. Read more. |
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THE FULHAM FLAT This fourth-floor, two-bedroom flat overlooks Fulham Railway Bridge in southwest London. The reception room has floor-to-ceiling windows, a feature fireplace, and doors which open on to a private balcony offering expansive south-facing views across the River Thames. Elsewhere there are two double bedrooms – one with access to a second balcony, one with an en-suite bathroom – a generous dining room, a kitchen and breakfast room and a bathroom. The mansion block has beautifully maintained communal gardens, and Putney Bridge station is a two-minute walk. £1.5m. Click on the image to see the listing. |
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Andrew Milligan/WPA Pool/Getty |
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The spy chief who never lost his “Boys’ Own” sense of excitement |
Alex Younger, who has died aged 62, was in many ways the stereotypical British spy chief, says The Times. He came from a posh Scottish background – he was distantly related to Margaret Thatcher’s defence secretary – went to public school and served in the Scots Guards. After repeatedly resisting MI6’s overtures, he finally joined the agency after the Gulf war in 1990-91, and went on to track down war criminals in the Balkans in the 1990s, lead British intelligence operations in Afghanistan in the 2000s and protect the London Olympic Games from terrorist attacks in 2012. |
Younger took the top job, “C”, in 2014 and made an early splash with his observations on James Bond. The films, he said, bore little relation to reality: “the pay’s not good, none of us are beautiful and the cars are crap”. But he acknowledged that it opened doors, noting “there are few people who will not come to lunch if I invite them”. When Younger was once flown to an uninhabited island off the Saudi coast to meet Mohammed bin Salman, he found the crown prince sitting beneath an umbrella, yacht moored nearby, watching a Bond film “by way of preparation”. The longest serving “C” in half a century, Younger always maintained a “Boys’ Own sense of excitement” about his covert career, gaily recounting anecdotes about charming the Afghan president with his mother-in-law’s jam and the time his false moustache came unstuck in a critical meeting. When his wife expressed shock that he’d never told his mother he was a spy, he decided to do so. “Yes, darling,” his mum replied. “So was I.” |
🩺🇷🇺 After Younger was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2024, he gave his tumour a name: “Putin”. |
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Sorting the cash out in Casino (1995) |
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How the world’s gangsters launder $5trn a year |
Given the well-documented decline in people using cash, says John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, you might expect that fewer banknotes were being printed. “Wrong.” In the US, the value of all dollar bills in circulation hit almost $2.4trn last year, up from nearly $1.4trn in 2015 and $759bn a decade prior to that. Where’s it all going? As Oliver Bullough explains in Everybody Loves Our Dollars, no one knows. But the broad answer is simple: money laundering. Experts reckon illicit activity is worth as much as $5trn a year, or the same amount as Germany’s economy. If money laundering were an industry, it would be the third biggest in the world, “behind commercial property and ahead of pensions”. |
The most obvious forms of money laundering involve businesses that take cash: casinos, construction, nail salons, those ubiquitous “Turkish barbers”. Perhaps the most famous example was La Mina (“the gold mine”), a network of American gold and jewellery stores that laundered an astonishing $1.2bn over two years for the Mexican cartels in the 1980s. But there are more imaginative schemes. In Puerto Rico, criminals use cash to buy tickets from lottery winners, with a juicy tip on top, so that they can claim the prize as their own. Chinese criminals ship fake antiques to the UK, then use proxies to bid up the price at auction and “buy” them for a huge sum. One police source thinks about 80% of the luxury watch trade is money laundering. Stopping all this seems impossible, in part because of the resources it would take, but also because of political will. When a senior adviser to the Labour government asked Bullough how to fight financial crime, he suggested hiring more police officers and giving them time to carry out proper investigations. “Well,” the adviser replied, “that’s not going to gain us any headlines, is it?” |
Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough is available to buy here. |
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Quick, someone call Zoël: Charles van Eman and Elizabeth Lambert in Baywatch (1993) |
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The man who’s saved 1,000 honeymoons |
Resort managers in Mauritius keep a series of phone numbers handy in case of emergency, says Michael Phillips in The Wall Street Journal. Police, doctors, cyclone-warning teams, and, of course, Zoël Manguillier – the guy whose record of “against-all-odds” wedding ring recoveries is unrivalled. The 61-year-old has plucked a newlywed’s ring out of the Indian Ocean after searching an area the size of a football pitch and reunited a woman with a treasured necklace two days after she lost it swimming. He once found a ring for a Frenchman at a golf resort, then did exactly the same the next day after he lost it again. |
Manguillier found his calling in the 1990s when he worked in parasailing, strapping tourists into parachutes and towing them behind his speed boat. Whenever anyone dropped jewellery, “he’d put on a mask and tank”. Some 30 years later, he reckons he has found around 1,000 rings. He once dredged up a whopping 17 in one day by sweeping the ocean floor in a spot where tourists, “well into their tequila sunrises”, routinely launch themselves off catamarans, their fingers “slick with sunscreen”. Sometimes he’s just out there for fun, but mostly he’s wielding his submersible Excalibur II metal detector to “salvage someone’s destination wedding”. With just five hours left of one wedding week in Mauritius, a South African groom lost his ring during a paddleboard session. Resort crew immediately shipped in Manguillier, who set about searching for it in chest-deep water while the couple headed to the airport. After two hours, Manguillier scooped it up and raced to passenger drop-off. The groom made his flight by minutes. |
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“We have a terrible fear that if we stop for a moment we will miss something. The exact opposite is true.”
Journalist Simon Barnes |
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