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4 November, 2023

Hezbollah supporters with a photo of Nasrallah last year. Francesca Volpi/Getty 

Why Hezbollah is keeping its powder dry

Hezbollah is “thought to be the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor”, says Katie Stallard in The New Statesman, with an estimated arsenal of around 150,000 rockets and missiles. The Iran-backed Lebanese militia is led by 63-year-old Hassan Nasrallah, who took over in 1992, aged just 31, after the founding leader Abbas al-Musawi was assassinated by Israeli helicopter gunships. Nasrallah “drove the group’s political emergence” by supplying social services like schooling and medical care to supporters at a time when the Lebanese government couldn’t. Hezbollah’s political wing scored seats in parliament and even cabinet positions; when Israel pulled troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah “took control of many of the evacuated villages”. 

Nasrallah appeared to confirm in a major speech yesterday that Hezbollah won’t be jumping into the Israel-Hamas conflict – not yet, at least. That makes sense, says Bobby Ghosh in Bloomberg. The militia is Iran’s most valuable proxy force – a fight with the IDF would wear down its resources, which the sanction-choked mullahs can ill-afford to replace. And as well as menacing Israel, Hezbollah fulfils two other important roles for Iran: maintaining the “ascendancy” of Lebanon’s Shiite faction over the other main sects, the Sunnis and Maronite Christians; and propping up Bashar al-Assad, “the most vulnerable of Tehran’s marionettes”, in Syria. Picking a fight with the Israelis would be a dangerous distraction.

THE STATELY HOME The National Trust is selling a 125-year lease for the Grade II*-listed Phillips House in Wiltshire, which contains more than 38,000 sq ft of living space. Grand state rooms on the ground floor are complemented by no fewer than 11 double bedrooms and five bathrooms on the first floor, with further bedrooms and store rooms on the second floor. Outside, four and a half acres of gardens sit within 200 acres of parkland, maintained by the National Trust. Salisbury Station is a 20-minute drive, with trains to London Waterloo in an hour and a half. £2m.

Cooper in 1978. Arthur Sidey/Mirrorpix/Getty 

Cads, clipped accents and Cadbury the Labrador

Jilly Cooper’s novels are the sort of thing “literary London” usually sneers at, says The Economist. They have titles like Mount! and Score! and – her latest – Tackle! Their characters include scoundrels like Rupert Campbell-Black (“nirvana for most women”), a nymphomaniac called Bethany, and Cadbury the Labrador. They contain far too many uses of the word “wet”, and a “frankly distressing” number of “thrusts”. Yet the 86-year-old novelist has built up a “congregation” of devoted fans, from Rishi Sunak to Helen Fielding. Her popularity baffles non-readers, particularly the young – for Cooper is not what you’d call woke. The feminists in her novels can usually be spotted by their “hairy legs and their fondness for the New Statesman”. In one book, a boy asks his father who Florence Nightingale was. His brisk reply: “A lesbian.” 

Cooper’s secret, of course, is that her novels don’t take themselves too seriously. The “lashings of sex” are there to entertain, not titillate. And in her fictional county of “Rutshire”, true darkness rarely breaks through. The only villains you’ll find are socialists, and all they do is “wear sandals, drink your champagne and complain about things”. Evelyn Waugh once said the literary world of PG Wodehouse was one where there “has been no Fall”. So it is with Cooper’s novels. Like Dickens’s London or the Brontës’ Yorkshire, Rutshire is “a place you know the moment you open the page, where people have clipped accents, rambling houses and, most important, fun”.

Tackle! by Jilly Cooper is available to buy here. 

A Chinese propaganda poster from 1971. GraphicaArtis/Getty 

From little red books to economic juggernaut

It’s easy to forget just how astonishing China’s rise to economic dominance has been, says Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics. When I first visited, in 1979, “everyone was still in blue Mao suits, little red books were being carried around, everybody was on bicycles”. As recently as 2005, the Chinese economy was still smaller than Britain’s. Today, it’s nearly seven times larger. Over the past three decades, China’s GDP has grown at an average of 10% a year – to put that in context, in Britain “we’re pretty pleased if we get about 2%”. China is now the world’s largest manufacturing economy, the largest exporter of goods and the fastest-growing consumer market. It produces more than half the world’s steel, and – I discovered recently – “70% of the world’s sex toys”. 

But the Chinese economy is now on the wane. The property sector, which accounts for 20% of GDP, is slowly imploding. A staggering $55bn to $82bn worth of houses and apartments have been paid for but not built. Youth unemployment is rising: between a quarter and a fifth of people aged 16 to 25 don’t have a job. And the economy remains largely dependent on free trade, in a world that is becoming “more and more protectionist”. The big fear in Beijing is that China will become “another Japan”. In the 1980s, everyone thought Japan was going to take over. It was leading in technology; its companies were “buying up the world”; property prices were so high that the Royal Palace Compound in Tokyo was “worth more than the whole of Manhattan”. But then it all collapsed under the weight of its debts – and Japan “never came out of it”.

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Asa Butterfield and Emma Mackey in Sex Education

No sex, please, we’re Gen Z

Gen Zs are bored with the “oversexualised storylines” of Hollywood, says Barbara Ellen in The Observer. A recent US study found that almost half of 13 to 24-year-olds want to see less sex on screen, and also less romance: the relentless love narratives; the constant talk of “the one”; the “endless cheerleading for coupledom as the zenith of on-screen human achievement”. Instead, they’re after more “nomance” – asexual characters and platonic bonds. It’s presumably no coincidence that Gen Z Netflix favourites Sex Education and Heartstopper both feature asexual characters, whereas HBO’s The Idol, replete with “risqué self-throttling scenes”, was canned after one season. 

Easy as it is to mock the so-called “puriteen” generation – especially given they’re renowned for defining themselves in terms of sexuality and gender – we older folk should be sympathetic. Young people have been “marinated and pickled” in internet extremes: unsolicited “dick pics”; genuinely scary hardcore porn; hours spent on dating apps “swiping your libido into oblivion”. Real-life dating is no picnic, either, what with the growing anxiety about sexual consent and the demands for a “pornified” menu of sex acts. Can you blame Gen Zs for wanting a break from it all when they’re watching the box? And for rebelling against the “happy ever after”? It’s to their credit that, in stark contrast to millennials’ “ultra-sex positive stance”, this lot aren’t falling for “the same old guff”.

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The Silver Crest Donut Shop in San Francisco has an impressive claim to fame, says Chris Colin in Alta Magazine: it has been open every day, 24 hours a day, since 1970. When health officials demanded that the diner shut its doors during the pandemic, its 84-year-old owner George “just pointed at the sign” at the front of the shop: “We Never Close.” George works nights, as a bartender, cook, janitor and maintenance man; his wife Nina, whom George met in their home country of Greece, works days. On the menu, liverwurst and devilled egg sandwiches have had their prices removed because they’re no longer available – “a quiet passing”. But otherwise, as George says when you ask him how he’s doing: “Nothing change. Everything fine.”

Perry with Julia Roberts in a 1996 episode of Friends. Warner Bros/Everett Collection/Alamy

The joker who became the romantic lead

Matthew Perry was never meant to be the “leading man” on Friends, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. His character, Chandler, was always the second string: the “maladroit loser to Joey’s lothario, the joker skating beneath Ross’s romantic gravity”. But when Chandler and Monica hooked up at the end of season four – in what was intended to just be a one-night stand – the studio audience screamed with so much delight that the writers made the relationship permanent. The joker became the romantic lead. “It’s the classic stuff of romance, the Emma plot: the guy who creeps up on you, because, duh, he’s everything.” Except Chandler – which is to say, Perry – did it “to his own creators”. 

Perry always noted how similar he was to his character. He, too, was an only child of divorced parents. His dad was a recovered alcoholic; his mum a press aide to Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. And much like Chandler, he struggled with relationships. After somehow wooing Julia Roberts by fax, he broke up with the megastar actress to avoid being dumped. As he later wrote: “I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.” But of course, Perry’s life “diverged in one critical way” from that of his character: his alcohol and drug addiction. The story of his dependency is told through Chandler’s changing appearance on the show: larger when he was drinking; thin when he was on drugs, “thin with a goatee when he was on a lot of drugs”. His death, at just 54, feels “tragically discordant – an unjust end to a life lived in the service of the punchline”. 

“Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won’t be invited to cocktail parties.”

Oscar Wilde

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