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29 October, 2023

Burton and Taylor in 1965. API/Gamma-Rapho/Getty 

Burton, Taylor and a life of “glorious” excess 

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, “one of the most gloriously over-the-top Hollywood couples to have ever lived”, are the subject of a new, “delicious triumph” of a biography by Roger Lewis, says Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. “Want to know what Taylor’s favourite sexual position was? Or the one meal Burton cooked while he and Taylor were married? The weekly rent of the yacht they hired just for their dogs? Then Erotic Vagrancy is the book for you. (Respectively: from behind, boiled eggs and $2,400.)” The title comes from an “outraged statement” made by the Vatican when it became clear that Taylor and Burton – both married, but not yet to each other – were having an affair while filming Cleopatra in Italy. Burton’s reaction was typically brusque: “F*** it, let’s go to f***ing Alfredo’s and have some f***ing fettucine.”

The book is full of interesting details, including how the parodically heterosexual Burton acted in so many gay roles. It prompted a “dated but revealing” quip from Peter O’Toole: “It looks as though you cornered the limp wrist market, duckie.” Burton and Taylor were obsessed with each other – “Bewitched by her c*** and her cunning,” he wrote in his diary – and others were obsessed with them too. Taylor once insisted the Michelin-starred chef Anton Mosimann make her roast beef and mashed potatoes at 2am, “and because she was Elizabeth Taylor, he did”. The couple’s two tumultuous marriages were anything but dull. As Lewis writes: “It was all money and anarchy.”

Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis is available to buy here.

THE DOER-UPPER This Grade II-listed four-bedroom cottage in the Welsh borderlands retains many original features, including an Inglenook fireplace, exposed Wattle and Daub on the first-floor landing, and an old cobbler’s shop that has been turned into a sitting room. Outside, well-planted borders and beds surround winding paths leading to hidden seating areas, as well as a shed, greenhouse and old pigsty. Gobowen train station, which has services to Birmingham in 90 minutes, is a 20-minute drive. £295,000. 

Gladden Island: complete with pedicure and organic lunch

Zebras, pedicures and a fully staffed recording studio

A 30-minute helicopter ride off the coast of Belize, says Tristan Rutherford in The Wall Street Journal, there is an island where you can “snorkel straight into the world’s second-largest barrier reef”, then indulge in an all-organic lunch and a pedicure. And for a cool $5,000 a night, “you’ll have it all to yourself”. Even the chefs, masseurs and cleaners at Gladden stay offshore, on a smaller island nearby. Private islands, “once the domain of billionaires and Bond villains”, are now more in demand than ever, especially since the pandemic heightened people’s desire for “minimal-contact holidays”. And a robust rental market has grown up to supply them.

For just $250 a night, Norway’s tiny Båtholmen island – bookable through Airbnb – contains little more than a log cabin, a fire pit, and some “epic star-gazing opportunities”. At the other end of the spectrum, a night on Buck Island in the British Virgin Islands starts at $25,000 for 15 guests and comes with unfettered access to a fully staffed recording studio, a spa, and a stable full of horses and, “inexplicably”, zebras. But there is no shortage of options in between. Private Islands Inc has more than 200 on its books, including everything from a beach paradise in the Seychelles to a decommissioned fortress off the south coast of England. “When you wake up on your own island, you’re king of the castle,” says Londoner Tony Hindhaugh, who rented the isle of Ronay in the Outer Hebrides in the summer of 2020. “That feeling is priceless.”

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A studious mute among “work-shy demagogues”

Rishi Sunak’s maternal grandmother was born in a hut in Tanganyika – present-day Tanzania – and entered an arranged marriage as a teenager. She sold her wedding jewellery and bought a one-way ticket to England in 1966, leaving her husband behind; her daughter Usha became a pharmacist and got married in Leicester. Usha’s first child, Rishi, was born in Southampton General Hospital on 12 May 1980 – and that child has now been prime minister for a year. It’s a story that paints Britain in the best light, says Will Lloyd in The New Statesman. It’s “a vindication of hard work, decent values and the sky-wide possibilities of meritocracy”. But Sunak doesn’t enjoy telling this story. “He would rather talk about potholes, and his detailed plans to ban things.”

Sunak was a head boy, a hedge fund manager “who never made a bad deal”, and an MP who became chancellor without making enemies. A source once told me he “was the best prime minister since Blair. Serious, dedicated and fantastically knowledgeable.” But 12 months in the job have brought out his “pinched, flinty persona”. He grates when interviewed. Like Richard Nixon, he fails to understand “that hard work doesn’t guarantee a win”. He is a man out of time: a studious mute in an era of “work-shy demagogues”; the first millennial prime minister, presiding over a party of “decaying baby boomers”. An institution man – Winchester, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, Stanford – in an age of institutional collapse.

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Joe Biden with an IBM quantum computer. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty

The supercomputer that could hack the world

Imagine a computer that could bypass pretty much all encryption on the planet, says Zach Montague in The New York Times. It could unlock sensitive government and commercial information, on everything from military intelligence and weapon designs to banking data. It could enable bad actors to take control of stock exchanges, manipulate GPS signals and hack into critical infrastructure like nuclear power plants and the power grid. This may all sound like science fiction. But quantum computing – using the bizarre behaviour of subatomic particles to create an ultra-powerful processor – could do exactly that. Scientists already have a name for when this terrifying machine is built: “Q-Day”.

Boffins have been trying to build quantum computers for years – the joke is that they are always about a decade from being ready. If it ever does arrive, the technology would bring “radical benefits” to fields such as chemistry, material sciences and AI. But the risk they pose to cybersecurity is enormous. The US and others are already trying to create quantum-protected encryption systems. The likes of China and Russia are thought to be gathering and storing “troves of data” that they cannot access yet, but will be able to once they have an advanced quantum machine. “It may be that there’s only a 1% chance of that happening,” says Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the US National Security Agency. “But a 1% chance of something catastrophic is something you need to worry about.” 

TE Lawrence (left) and Ranulph Fiennes

The modern-day Lawrence of Arabia

Sir Ranulph Fiennes may be the only man alive who can safely compare himself to Lawrence of Arabia, says Melanie McDonagh in The Spectator. Both men, for example, led Arabs in battle – in Ranulph’s case for the Sultan of Oman against Marxist rebels, Lawrence against the Germans and Turks. Not that Fiennes thinks the circumstances were exactly the same. “Lawrence had camels and was dealing with a huge body of men,” he tells me. “I had six open-topped Land Rovers with two machine guns and I led 30 men.” What does he make of Lawrence’s extraordinary career? “It mystified me.”

For all Fiennes’s exploits in the desert, the 79-year-old gentleman adventurer – or as The Guinness Book of Records calls him, “the world’s greatest living explorer” – is better known for his exploits at the planet’s icy poles. He once sawed off the tops of his fingers after a particularly bad bout of frostbite, and tried to conquer vertigo by scaling the North Face of the Eiger (“it didn’t work”). The obvious question is: “why, why, why?” Some of his adventures bore fruit, like finding the lost city of Iram in Oman, fabled by Lawrence as the “Atlantis of the Sands”. But spending 93 days walking alone and unsupported across Antarctica? Aside from raising money for charity, the answer is simple: “My late wife decided it should be done.” And so it was.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

Edith Wharton

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