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7 January, 2024

Sadler in his desert days. SAS: Rogue Heroes

The SAS “Original” who navigated by the stars

The legendary desert navigator Mike Sadler, who died this week aged 103, was the last surviving member of the SAS “Originals”, says The Daily Telegraph. As depicted in the World War Two drama SAS: Rogue Heroes, this ragtag band of buccaneers blindsided the Germans and Italians by attacking their Mediterranean bases from the vast deserts to the south. Sadler, who had trained to navigate by the stars while serving in a reconnaissance outfit called the Long Range Desert Group, was able to drive assault teams across the shifting sands completely undetected. On one occasion, he “astro-navigated” 18 jeeps 70 miles across the featureless desert in the dead of night, with no lamps or maps, and arrived within 200ft of his target.

“Not all the raids were successful.” During another mission led by David Stirling, the founding commander of the SAS, the group “unknowingly camped next to a German unit”. Stirling and most of the others were captured, but Sadler and two sergeants escaped and hid in a ditch until nightfall. With Sadler navigating – and with no compass, food or water – they “followed the lie of the land, aiming for the Allied lines 100 miles away”. One group of Bedouins they met gave them dates and a goatskin of water; another stoned them and stole their warm clothes. After five gruelling days, they eventually reached the safety of the Free French lines. “We had long hair and beards and were looking very bedraggled,” Sadler recalled. “Our feet were in tatters. I don’t think we looked very much like soldiers.” 

🧐🤷🏼‍♂️ Sadler wasn’t one for airs and graces. While serving in a Rhodesian artillery regiment early in the war, he was marched before his commanding officer over a disagreement he’d had with one of his seniors. Sadler, at the time a sergeant, was ordered to apologise or risk being reduced to the ranks. “Oh, that’s all right,” he said, “I’ll reduce myself to the ranks.” And he did.

THE FLAT This one-bedroom apartment occupies the first floor of an impressive 19th-century villa on the edge of Blackheath Common. The early Victorian house retains many period features, including sash windows and moulded cornices throughout, while living spaces boast oak floors and high ceilings. Other features include a neat galley kitchen, a modern bathroom and a leafy communal garden with dining area. Greenwich Station is a 10-minute walk. £485,000.

Wanted by Interpol: Isabel Dos Santos (left) with Nicki Minaj. Instagram/@nickiminaj

The Kleptobrats living off plundered loot

If you thought nepo babies were bad, says Jackson Garrett in Vice, try “kleptobrats”. These are the sons and daughters of the world’s dodgiest oligarchs and dictators, who are not just living off mum and dad – they’re living off loot plundered by mum and dad, usually from a country that could really do with the money. Take Equatorial Guinea’s playboy prince Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, who went to a posh boarding school in Normandy before moving into a suite at the five-star Beverly Wilshire hotel while enrolled at Pepperdine University in Malibu. He dropped out after five months, and bought a nearby mega-mansion, a private jet, a speed boat and the world’s largest collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

Since the home countries of kleptobrats tend to be unsafe, they’re mostly sent away for their education. At his Swiss boarding school, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un earned the nickname “Dim Jong-un”. Bo Xilai, the “notoriously corrupt and powerful” Chinese politician, sent his son to Harvard – “with a Porsche” – and then to Oxford, where he “partied on stage with Jackie Chan”. And the parties are definitely part of the kleptobrat vibe. Mutassim Gaddafi, the late son of Muammar Gaddafi, paid Beyoncé $1m to perform at his New Year’s Eve party in St Barts, which was also attended by Usher, Jay-Z and Jon Bon Jovi. Kazakhstan’s dictator paid Kanye West $3m to perform at his grandson’s wedding and Elton John $1.5m to play at his son-in-law’s birthday. Isabel Dos Santos, the wanted-by-Interpol daughter of Angolan dictator José Eduardo Dos Santos, has hosted concerts by Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj. Of course, everyone wants to give their kids the best lives possible. “Most of us just don’t impoverish and brutalise an entire population to do it.”

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The Elgin Marbles: right where they belong? Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty

Lord Elgin didn’t “steal” anything

I wonder if those calling for the Elgin Marbles to be sent to Greece know anything about them, says Jonathan Sumption in The Sunday Times. Many accept the Greek government’s line that the magnificent fifth-century sculptures were “stolen”. But that doesn’t bear “a moment’s examination”. Lord Elgin was British Ambassador to Turkey at the turn of the 19th century, when Greece was part of the Turkish empire. The sultan granted a decree authorising him to remove the stones and workmen spent two years taking them down, in full view of Turkish officials. He then received a second licence to export them to England on the basis that, as the edict said, such sculptures were appreciated by western Europeans “but not by Muslims”. They have been in the British Museum since 1816 – “longer than Greece has existed as a state”.

Admittedly, for most people the issue is “moral and cultural, not legal”. But what would be morally or culturally admirable about moving the statues from the British museum to a museum in Athens? “Cultural artefacts have always moved around the world.” The Romans were keen importers of Greek architectural sculpture, much of which is now in Italian museums. The bronze horses in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice were originally taken from the Hippodrome in Constantinople. “Panels from Duccio’s altarpiece in Siena Cathedral can be seen in Siena, London, Brussels, Madrid, Budapest, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Fort Worth, Texas.” Besides, the British Museum is a universal museum of humanity, “the oldest and greatest in the world” – a place visited, for free, by more people from more countries than any other museum of its kind. It would be an act of “gross cultural vandalism” to break up its collection for no better cause than “modern Greek nationalism”.

Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady enjoying a leisurely read in HBO’s The White Lotus

The joys of reading slowly

Reading shouldn’t be a chore, says Nilanjana Roy in the FT. A New Year often signals a “fresh TBR (To Be Read) pile”, divided evenly between Christmas gifts and the books you ran out of time to tackle the year before. And so the “endless game of catch-up” continues. But perhaps it’s time to “give yourself the gift of unrushed reading” instead. Slowly working your way through a single book for months, even years, is “a rarity in our hurried age” – but something many writers advocate. Chinese author Yiyun Li spends six months every year reading War and Peace and six months on Moby-Dick, she says, to keep her life “structured”. Writing in 1925, Virginia Woolf urged people to read a book “as if they were writing it”.

The key is not “slowing down for the sake of it”, but in order to sharpen our attention and broaden our understanding – to reach, in Woolf’s words, “the greater intensity and truth of fiction”. If you commit to a single book or author, your relationship with reading itself will “change, quieten and deepen”. But “think carefully about your choice of classic”. In 1995, Gerry Fialka launched a Finnegans Wake reading club at a library in California, navigating a couple of pages of James Joyce’s “notoriously opaque” novel aloud most months. Last October, 28 years after starting, they finally finished – and went straight back to the beginning. As Fialka said: “You don’t ever finish it.”

Barbara Alper/Getty

Why I was wrong about climate change

Just a few years ago, says data scientist Hannah Ritchie in The Guardian, I thought climate change would completely destroy the planet. Widespread crop failures; island nations totally submerged; the whole shebang. But then I started looking at the data, “not newspaper headlines”, and my perspective totally flipped. What few people realise is that if countries all stick to their climate pledges – a task that’s getting easier and easier, thanks to fast-improving technology – the temperature rise by the end of the century won’t be much above 2C. That’s still not terrific, obviously. But it’s not the “devastating” outcome most of us have been led to expect.

That’s not the only preconception that needs changing. Most people don’t realise that we passed peak per capita carbon emissions about 10 years ago, and that we’ll probably pass peak total emissions at some point in the 2020s. Or that our carbon footprints are considerably smaller than those of our grandparents at the same age. Here in the UK, thanks to the decline of coal power and advances in energy efficiency, “we now emit about the same as someone in the 1850s”. There is also a tendency to underestimate how quickly things can change. In just a decade, between 2009 and 2019, solar and wind went from being the most expensive energy source to the least expensive. There is still much more to be done, of course. But the “doomsday thinking” that dominates so much of the climate change conversation is doing us no good at all.

This is an extract from Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, which is available to pre-order here.

A first edition of the Michelin Guide. Apic/Getty

The covert gourmands who eat out 300 times a year

Little is known about the lives of the Michelin Guide’s restaurant inspectors, says Adam Hay-Nicholls in Air Mail. According to Gwendal Poullennec, international director of the 124-year-old gourmand bible, they tell only their nearest and dearest what they really do. They come from all areas of the hospitality industry: chefs; sommeliers; hotel managers. They work full time, eating out 300 times a year and spending around 150 nights away from home. And with some restaurants charging thousands for a single meal, their expenses run to “literally millions”.

Poullennec says many of the claims about Michelin are myths. Those coveted stars have nothing to do with “the spacing between the tables, the amount of cutlery, whether the bathroom sinks are marble” or the napkin material. They are awarded based on five criteria: the quality of the produce; the “mastery” of the cooking; the harmony of the flavours; the personality of the chef represented through the “dining experience”; and the consistency of dishes between visits. Governments pay big money to tempt the inspectors to their shores. South Korea’s tourism board reportedly paid Michelin $1.8m to launch a guide for Seoul; Thailand is said to have forked out $4.4m over five years for its own. Poullennec, 44, is often asked to name his most memorable dining experience. He initially dodges the question (“The best meal is the one to come”), before “speaking wistfully” about ryokans, the traditional Japanese inns accessed through unmarked Tokyo doorways. “Simplicity,” he says, “can be a real luxury.”

“Nothing matters very much and very little matters at all.”
Arthur Balfour

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