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2 September, 2023

Lily Collins in Netflix’s Emily in Paris

Sacré bleu! The French have it better than us

According to the “enshrined belief system” I grew up with, says John Sturgis in The Spectator, the French are “work-shy layabouts” who never turn up on time as they’re “too busy drinking wine for breakfast”. But I’ve recently had cause to doubt this. While staying in the Languedoc a couple of weeks ago, I texted a plumber about a leaky loo. He arrived the next day 10 minutes early, did the whole job, clean-up and all, in 45 minutes, and charged only €20. “I can’t recall a plumbing job in the UK costing anything less than £200.” Could it be that not only are French workers not lazy, but that the “protectionism around their work culture” might even protect consumers against rip-off pricing?

France does other things right too. Town centres are sensitively presented, with none of the fast-food outlets you get in a historic English town like York. You can go from Calais to the Mediterranean at 85mph with no traffic jams and no litter for 1,200 miles – “and even enjoy a decent meal at a motorway service station”. Back in Britain, once you’ve survived the “50mph average speed check zone”, you have to content yourself with a Pret sandwich eaten at the desk, “because we no longer have a lunch hour, let alone two”. It’s time to admit it: “the French are better than us”.

Hero

Fumio Kishida, prime minister of Japan, who has demonstrated absolute faith in his country’s nuclear safety protocols. The discharge of treated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima power plant has led China to ban all Japanese seafood imports. In response, Kishida ate some raw fish from Fukushima on camera, declaring it “very delicious”.

Hero

Donald Trump, who has found time away from getting charged with various crimes to play a blistering round of golf. The former president claimed he carded 67 on the 72-par course at his New Jersey club – a score most professionals would be extremely chuffed with. “Some people will think that sounds low, but there is no hanky/lanky,” Trump wrote on social media. “Many people watch, plus I am surrounded by Secret Service Agents. Not much you can do even if you wanted to, and I don’t.”

Villain

Burger King, which might be telling whoppers about its Whoppers. The fast-food chain is facing a lawsuit claiming that it misleads customers by advertising burgers that are 35% bigger, with twice the meat, than the sad sandwiches it doles out in reality. Burger King argues that its products aren’t obliged to look “exactly like the picture”.

Hero

Yevgeny Prigozhin, at least according to Russian state media. Now that the Wagner warlord is safely dead, says Ian Garner in UnHerd, the Kremlin is rehabilitating him as an “exemplary military hero” who just got a bit carried away. Pravda describes him as “an epochal man, a heroic man, a legendary man”. As for his attempted coup? He was simply forcing senior officials “to listen to the voice of the people”.

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Kate Reardon: a not-very-editor-in-chiefish moment. Dave Benett/Getty

People often ask me what constitutes top-tier customer service, says Kate Reardon in Times Luxury. So here’s one example. When I was appointed editor-in-chief of Tatler 12 years ago, I met each of my future colleagues for tea or coffee at Claridge’s. As I returned from one trip to the loo, a waitress began walking alongside me, “rather closer than I would have anticipated”, saying nothing and making no eye contact. Just as I was wondering what on earth she was doing, “there was a smart whipping sound and she promptly veered off again”. I suddenly realised what had happened. “I’d been striding, editor-in-chiefly, through the lobby of Claridge’s with my skirt firmly tucked into my pants, exposing my not-very-editor-in-chiefly M&S knicker-clad bum for all to see.” This “sainted” waitress had spotted my predicament – and “solved it with absolutely no fuss or need for red-faced thanks or acknowledgement”.

The New York skyline, with no lights on, the morning after the blackout. Allan Tannenbaum/Getty

The night the lights went out in New York

Just after 9.28pm on 13 July, 1977, say Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland on The Rest is History, an unfortunate series of lightning strikes led to the power going out across all five boroughs of New York. “Every light in the city flickered off.” Subway trains, lifts, air conditioning, televisions, refrigerators – “everything stopped”. The only lights that stayed on were the aircraft beacons at the top of two skyscrapers and the flame in the torch of the Statue of Liberty. In the more salubrious part of the city, it was “all very civilised”. The harpist at the Metropolitan Opera played Dancing in the Dark. Restaurants on the Upper East Side moved their tables into the streets and illuminated them with car headlights. It was the New York of “a Woody Allen comedy”.

Elsewhere, things were very different. Within minutes of the blackout starting, people in Alphabet City, downtown Manhattan, began “ransacking the shops, smashing the windows and grabbing stuff”. In the Bronx, 200 people broke into an Ace Pontiac showroom and drove off with 50 of the cars, “in single file, through the glass and out on to the street”. It wasn’t just the poor – “affluent shoppers” got caught up in the moment, too, with one woman spotted stuffing a bag of ice into her Louis Vuitton handbag. The power came back on the following day. But for many, the widespread scenes of lawlessness and violence – what the New York Post described as “24 Hours of Terror” – epitomised the decay of America’s biggest city in the 1970s. “We knew exactly what to expect from New York,” said an official in Miami, “and they didn’t let us down.”

Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (1555): anyone have any nettles?

We often think of excessive self-grooming as a “frivolous” feature of modernity, says The Economist. But as Jill Burke describes in her new book, back in the Renaissance no beauty treatment was considered too extreme. To fix bad skin, women were advised to drink the blood of a red-headed man “no older than 25 or 30”. Eating nettles was a trick for rosier cheeks; a paste made from marble, wheat and the “poisonous plant” bryony could whiten skin. The elaborate concoctions also had a more sinister purpose: getting rid of your enemies. Giovanna de Grandis, a laundress in Rome, was hanged for selling women poison disguised as a blemish remover, which was thought to have seen off some 500 husbands.

How to be a Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke is available to buy here. 

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Kruger: a genuine “faith, flag and family” conservative. Alamy

The only true Tory radical

“Marriage is the safest and best place for sex,” writes Tory MP Danny Kruger in his new book Covenant, a manifesto for a socially conservative Britain. I know this, says Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times, because I had to read that sentence twice, “the first time emitting the sort of guttural grunt of surprise that makes your colleagues look over and ask if you are OK”. It is always intriguing to come across a genuine “faith, flag and family” conservative in British public life, like turning up at King’s Cross to find the porters are all in livery. And yet vast swathes of the public hold socially conservative views. It’s those people that Kruger, a married, evangelical Christian whose mother is Bake Off presenter Prue Leith, is trying to reach.

Unlike most conservative treatises – “more of the same, only better” – Covenant is a call for a “completely different Britain” where local councillors are randomly selected, workers can take paid leave to care for family members, and the economy is re-engineered so that households can be supported by a single earner.  Those looking for a “reactionary bogeyman” will be disappointed – Kruger’s love of marriage extends to gay marriage, for example, and he is happy to see women in work. What he wants to change is the way we think of ourselves: “not as individuals, but as people deeply rooted in community and country”. Could his ideas ever actually be implemented? “Who knows.” But against our current backdrop of boring and technocratic politics, it is uplifting to see someone “setting out a vision of such scope and ideological coherence”.

🏏🎩 Visiting Kruger at his cottage in Wiltshire, says Will Lloyd in The New Statesman, you cannot move for “posh clutter”. A cello, a cricket bat, portraits, books, bottles and half-empty glasses – and that’s just the living room. “The best time to be alive,” he tells me, “if you were healthy and wealthy, was the late 18th century.” It isn’t hard to imagine Kruger in a top hat, clutching a cane and “complaining about Pitt the Younger in a tavern”.

“When you’re in love it’s the most glorious two and a half days of your life.”

American comedian Richard Lewis

That’s it. You’re done.

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