View online

15 October, 2023

Unity Mitford with senior Nazi Fritz Stadelmann in 1933. Universal History Archive/Getty

The “posh bohemian” who befriended Hitler

The fact that the British dilettante Unity Mitford ended up being the foreigner closest to Hitler is in some ways unsurprising, says Tom Holland on The Rest is History. She was conceived in the Canadian town of Swastika, after her aristocrat father bought a gold mine there. Her middle name was Valkyrie, after the blonde, “statuesque goddesses” of Norse myth – much glamourised by the Third Reich – that feature in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. She started her adult life as a “politically oblivious” art student, well on her way to becoming just another “posh bohemian” debutante. But her beautiful sister Diana was having an affair with the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, with whom Unity became “besotted”. After returning to the Cotswolds from a trip to Nuremberg in 1933, she started giving passers-by the Hitler salute, clicking her heels and saying “Heil Hitler”.

She moved to Munich the following year, enrolled at a language school next door to the Nazi HQ, and spent all day in the Osteria Bavaria hoping to bump into the Führer. When she finally did, she wrote to her father that it was the “most wonderful and beautiful day of my life”. Her sister, the novelist Nancy Mitford, remained devoted to her despite being a socialist herself. She wrote of Unity: “With her the whole Nazi thing seemed to be a joke. She was great fun. She used to drive around central Europe in a uniform with a gun. Unity was absolutely unpolitical. No one knew less about politics than she did.”

🧐💧 Anthony Rumbold, whose father had been the British ambassador to Germany in the run-up to the Nazis taking power, wrote an account of meeting Unity and her communist sister Jessica at a dinner party in around 1933. When they asked him whether he was a fascist or a communist, he answered: “I’m neither, I believe in democracy.” They replied: “How wet.”

THE HALL This Grade II* listed country house sits on 35 acres of parkland in south Norfolk. Built in 1792, Stanfield Hall retains many original features, including a magnificent Gothic-style stone staircase and a spectacular entrance hall complete with vaulted ceiling, stone fireplace and arched double doors. It has eight bedrooms, a modern kitchen and extensive leisure facilities including an indoor swimming pool, gym and sauna. Norwich is a 30-minute drive. £5m.

Florence Pugh letting it all hang out. Pierre Suu/GC Images/Getty

Turning underwear into outerwear

Nudity is no longer confined to “saunas, locker rooms or the garden”, says Jo Ellison in the FT. In 2023, “everyone is letting it all hang out”. I’ve just returned from a month at the various fashion weeks, getting an insight into the styles that will appear next spring. The most consistent trend I’ve noticed isn’t clothes, but rather the lack of them. As part of the ongoing “underwear as outerwear” trend, Gucci seemed to suggest “micro skirts and sparkly bras” could be a whole outfit. At Stella McCartney, the shorts were so short I “could have offered some of the models a full gynaecological report”.

And it’s not just bums. “There are bountiful boobs as well.” In Milan, I “lost track of the nipple count”; in New York, I had a meeting with a designer whose “unsheathed bosoms kept escaping her top”. She simply tucked them back in with “blithe nonchalance”. It’s a mysterious development. Watching dozens of half-naked young women walking the runway doesn’t exactly feel like a “feminist expression of emancipation”. But nor does it feel like a product of the male gaze when “some of the most naked collections were created by females”. Either way, it’s hard not to feel “buoyed by all these boobies”. The only tricky bit is going to be at the office, where nudity is “twisting HR departments into all sorts of amusing knots”. Just think of the “grey, male desk manager” trying to figure out an appropriate way to “tell his young intern to put her bits away”.

The ancient Israelites resting after crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt. Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty

The 2,000-year history of the Arab-Israeli conflict

The story of Israel really begins nearly 2,000 years ago, says Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics, when a Jewish community living in what is now Israel was forced out by the Romans. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century, after hundreds of years of “appalling discrimination”, that Jews launched the Zionist movement to create their own homeland. In 1948, following the “defining horror” of the Holocaust, they set up the state of Israel by seizing territories from Arab-Muslim communities. This new Israeli state was formally recognised by most governments, but in 1967 came under attack by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The Israelis quickly won – it was dubbed the Six Day War – and took over land outside the original 1948 borders, including Gaza and the West Bank. Israel handed Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005, after which Hamas took control, but not before building settlements that turned the two territories into “100 little enclaves divided by checkpoints and walls”.

Talk to moderate Palestinians, and they wouldn’t condone last weekend’s horrific attacks. But they would argue that Israel has turned Gaza into a “prison camp”, where people lack basic supplies and find it almost impossible to get in and out. As for the Israelis, they would say much of the territory they took in 1967 was “essential for protection”: the Golan Heights, for example, were artillery positions from which the Syrians “rained rockets down on them”. Above all, they would emphasise that their enemies want to destroy them: the founding charter of Hamas was dedicated to the “complete elimination” of Israel; the Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War were “basically designed to wipe them off the face of the map”. They see this as an “existential threat”.

Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share

Streisand in The Owl And The Pussycat (1970). Silver Screen Collection/Getty

Barbra Streisand always had “legendary stage fright”, says Radhika Jones in Vanity Fair, and in her new memoir, My Name is Barbra, she explains why. In 1964, she was performing the musical Funny Girl on Broadway, opposite Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s son. They had what she refers to as a “flirtation”, but she felt guilty because she was married to actor Elliott Gould at the time, and put a stop to it. This enraged Chaplin. He began “cursing and jeering” at her on stage, just quietly enough for her – and only her – to hear him. This totally threw her concentration, and made her “physically sick”. After completing the planned production run, “she never did Broadway again”.

On his way back to China: Bao Bao. Sarah L Voisin/Washington Post/Getty

The sad end of China’s “panda diplomacy”

One way to assess the change in US-China relations is to look at “panda diplomacy”, says Michael Schaffer in Politico. When Richard Nixon made his historic visit to Beijing in 1972, his wife told Chinese premier Zhou Enlai at a banquet that the pandas on his cigarette tin were “awfully cute”. He replied: “I’ll give you some.” Two months later, in “history’s most adorable diplomatic gesture”, two giant pandas were delivered to Washington’s National Zoo.

When it came to replacing Hsing-Hsing and Ling Ling in the year 2000, China was an “emerging WTO member”. This time, the bears Beijing sent were no gift – the zoo paid $10m to rent them. This deal was renewed until earlier this year, even as relations between the two governments “grew frostier”. But the latest talks floundered, and America’s last three giant pandas are being sent home to China. A history which began with a “cuddly gift at a triumphal inflection point in the last Cold War” is ending with “an empty panda house at the anxious dawn of the new one”.

Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones showing eagerness in Persuasion (2007)

The exclamation mark is out of fashion in writing now, says Florence Hazrat in The Millions, but that wasn’t always the case. Salman Rushdie uses the unpopular punctuation point an astonishing 2,131 times in Midnight’s Children, an average of six per page. In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway deploys a single exclamation mark as the protagonist tries to spear a giant marlin – “Now!” – only for the fish to escape and live on for another 100 pages. Even Jane Austen was a fan – though you wouldn’t know it. In the original manuscript for Persuasion, Anne berates Captain Wentworth by saying: “You should not have suspected me now… The case so different, & my age so different!” But her editors took the exclamation mark out, presumably deciding – as is so often the case – that it showed “too much eagerness”.

“The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day, you’re off it.”

American actor Jackie Gleason

That’s it. You’re done.

To find out about advertising and commercial partnerships, click here

Been forwarded this newsletter?

Sign up for free to receive it every day

Unsubscribe from the newsletter