Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1317 i The Week

What happened Vaccine wars Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, defended the slow roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines across the EU this week, and suggested that nations which had moved faster had compromised on “safety and efficacy”. The Commission, which negotiated the bloc’s vaccine purchases, has been greatly criticised over delays to delivery. By midweek, the EU had administered just three doses per 100 people, compared to ten in the US, and 15 in the UK. Jens Spahn, the German health minister, said it would be “at least another ten tough weeks” before vaccine shortages eased. Last week, the Commission became embroiled in a row with Anglo-Swedish drug maker AstraZeneca, which had announced that it could supply only 31 million of the 80 million doses of the Oxford vaccine…

HMRC, with reports that five top music acts have contributed more than £50m to the public finances in a year. According to The Sunday Times Tax List, Ed Sheeran is the largest pop star taxpayer: he paid £28.2m. Adele, Queen, Robbie Williams and The Beatles were the other big contributors. George Osborne, who is simplifying his professional life by giving up some of his many part-time jobs to become a full-time banker. The ex-chancellor has been made a partner at boutique firm Robey Warshaw. He will leave the London Evening Standard and the US investment manager BlackRock next month. Contagion, the 2011 film about a global pandemic, with reports that it helped inspire Matt Hancock’s response to the current crisis. Apparently, the Health Secretary often referenced the film in meetings,…

17% of Britons believe the country will be able to open up as normal by the spring. 67% of men and 58% of women say they would like life to return to exactly how it was before the pandemic. 23% of men and 31% of women say they would not. BritainThinks/Sunday Times 40% of Britons say they are doing less exercise during this lockdown than the first one, and only 13% are exercising more. 19% are watching more TV; 13% are watching less. A third are working more, but time spent on volunteering and hobbies has decreased. UCL/BBC If the coronavirus vaccine became available to them for free, only 41% of Americans said they’d get it as soon as possible. KFF/Times…

Beaver Creek, Yukon Vaccine cheats: A multimillionaire couple who travelled from their home in Vancouver to an isolated community in Yukon province, for the sole purpose of having Covid jabs intended for vulnerable and elderly indigenous locals have become hate figures in Canada. Casino boss Rodney Baker and his actress wife Ekaterina chartered a plane to fly them to Beaver Creek, where they posed as local motel workers and got their shots at a mobile clinic. Swiftly rumbled, they were fined C$2,300 – but critics said it was insufficient punishment for such a wealthy couple, and called for them to be jailed. Washington DC Green agenda: President Biden has ordered the Pentagon to class climate change as a national security issue, as part of a new whole-government approach. “This is…

“The next problem we’ll have is vaccine snobbery. Some people will hold out for the Oxford/AstraZeneca version. ‘Not saying there’s anything wrong with the others. Just, you know, Oxford is Oxford, if you get my meaning. I got a 2:1 in classics from Magdalen and I can tell you they’re bloody rigorous.’ The remoaners, meanwhile, will be hankering after the Pfizer jab: ‘I trust German technology.’ Me? I want Novavax. Made in Stockton-on-Tees. I suspect it will pack more of a punch. A bloke I met in a pub on Teesside told me that if the virus came anywhere near him, he’d ‘flatten the bastard’. That’s the sort of no-nonsense approach we need in these difficult times.” Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times…

It takes more than bricks to build a hospital Susanna Rustin The Guardian So much for the celebrated Nightingale hospitals, says Susanna Rustin. We spent more than half a billion pounds on the seven pop-up centres in England, yet they’ve barely been used: those in Birmingham and Sunderland haven’t treated a single patient. Why? Not enough skilled staff. Creating thousands of intensive care beds isn’t much use if you don’t have people to operate them. “The doctors and nurses who work in hospital ICUs are professionals with years of experience... in institutions with distinct cultures and approaches.” You can’t magic them out of thin air. Some 10% of nurse positions are vacant as it is – a situation bound to get worse after the past traumatic year. The lesson of…

Growing wood in the laboratory For years, scientists have been developing lab-grown meats, so that people can eat steak without the need for cattle. Now a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is growing wood in the lab, so that people can have wooden furniture without the need to chop down trees. Although it is in its early stages, researchers hope their work will eventually help slow deforestation, and make it possible for wood to be produced rapidly, anywhere in the world. That would reduce the amount of energy that is currently used to harvest and transport timber; and, in theory, give manufacturers access to limitless supplies of a material that is both versatile and biodegradable. Using live cells extracted from the leaves of the zinnia plant, and a…

Vaccines: where did it all go so right? “More than 100,000 people have died in Britain of Covid-19,” said Tom McTague in The Atlantic. That is more than in any country in Europe, and is almost twice the number in Germany. On a per capita measure, Britain is the “worst-hit G7 nation” – and that reflects a “catastrophic failure of governance”. Back in March 2020, Boris Johnson’s Chief Scientific Adviser told MPs that a “good” outcome would be if deaths were kept below 20,000. Owing to a series of missteps, they’re five times that number, and still rising. “And yet, Britain has also shown wisdom.” Its vaccination programme has “raced ahead of every other country in Europe”. Around 14% of the population has had at least one jab, and…

Football: is this the strangest season ever? If there is one word that sums up the Premiership season in the era of Covid-19 it would have to be “unpredictable”, said Peter Smith on Sky Sports. The chief talking point at the start was the sheer number of goals flying in. On the second weekend, 44 were scored – the most in a single round of matches since the Premier League was reduced to 20 teams in 1995; and Manchester United equalled a league record with their 9-0 win over Southampton this week. Among the goal-fests were some “jaw-dropping shocks” – including Aston Villa’s 7-2 thrashing of Liverpool, and Manchester City’s 5-2 drubbing by Leicester. Scoring levels have become more normal since then, said Harry Symeou on 90min.com, but the season…

To The Times It’s about time that Wales and England should have the opportunity to have a say in what we want our relationship with Scotland and Northern Ireland to be. The attachment to Scotland is mostly a sentimental one, but it seems to me that the smug grandstanding of the Nationalists, and the barely concealed Anglophobia, have so alienated us that we would be glad to see the back of them. The scrapping of the Barnett formula would leave us about 3% better off, and the two main problems would be theirs: they would have to leave the sterling zone while not in the eurozone; there would have to be a border or tariff arrangement between us. Scotland is not well run by comparison with England, if the statistics…

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey Peepal Tree Press 190pp £9.99 The Week Bookshop £7.99 Monique Roffey’s latest novel, which won this year’s Costa Prize, is an entertaining, “shape-shifting” work that “drags mermaids into the modern day”, said Jade Cuttle in The Times. On a fictional Caribbean island, a dark-skinned mermaid named Aycayia is fished out of the sea by a group of drunken holiday-makers, who proceed to string her upside down, “stub cigarettes on her stomach and tweak her nipples”. But a spliff-smoking local fisherman named David comes to her rescue: he carts her back to his house in a wheelbarrow, and the pair begin an unlikely romance. What makes this “bittersweet” novel really sing is the inclusion of “pin-sharp detail from the real world”, said Anthony…

From Lassie Come Home and Old Yeller to 2019’s Togo, there are plenty of beloved family films and adventure movies about dogs. But canine-human relations are at the heart of some complex grown-up dramas, too: Umberto D. Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 drama stars the non-professional actor Carlo Battisti (a university lecturer) as an elderly man facing penury and homelessness in Rome, with only his faithful Jack Russell terrier for company. Heartbreaking but simple and unsentimental, it is perhaps the strongest of the Italian neo-realist films. White Dog Indie film pioneer Samuel Fuller left the US when Paramount suppressed his film before it was due to be released in 1982. A provocative exploration of the nature of hatred, White Dog is a chilling story about a dog, which has been conditioned…

Tips of the week… prepare your garden for spring ● Don’t worry if you didn’t plant any bulbs in the autumn – garden centres have a great selection of potted bulbs for spring displays. ● Look for shrubs with spring blossoms. If your soil is acidic, try Corylopsis pauciflora. Ribes x beatonii and Japanese quince also bring a burst of colour from March to May. ● Try growing pea shoots or micro-leaves – cress, coriander, spinach – on a windowsill. ● Alpines, which start to flower in March/ early April, are great for limited spaces, or containers with drainage. For beginners, try Saxifraga Peter Pan and Pulsatilla vulgaris. ● There is still time in February to plant bare-root trees and roses, which come without soil, because they tend to establish…

Actress and model whose career spanned seven decades Cicely Tyson 1924-2021 Cicely Tyson, who has died aged 96, was a pioneering black actress whose seven-decade-long career encompassed film, theatre and television. Refusing to take any role that she felt demeaned black people, even if that meant not working, she won three Emmys, a Tony, an honorary Oscar and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she was cited as an inspiration by countless younger actors. One of them was Viola Davis, who recalled that growing up in poverty in Rhode Island, in the only black family in her town, she had seen Tyson on TV – “a dark-skinned, thick-lipped woman who truly mirrored me” – and it had given her “permission to dream”. Tyson had a long, on-off relationship with the…

So farewell, Sir Philip “Effing” Green, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. The erstwhile king of the high street has been “trying to get shot of Arcadia for years”. Now, helped by Covid, he has achieved it – selling the group’s Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge brands to Asos for £330m, and reportedly offloading Burton, Dorothy Perkins and Wallis to Boohoo for £25m. “Administrator Deloitte has done its job in getting the highest price” from the online retailers – but at the cost of almost 13,000 jobs and 444 shops. And a “day of reckoning” still looms over a giant hole in the pension fund. “Barring a miracle”, Arcadia’s 9,500 pensioners are heading for the Government’s pensions lifeboat: “a bit of a contrast to a Green yacht”. A long-standing tech…

These are “surreal times” for Robinhood, the online stockbroker at the centre of the GameStop storm, said The New York Times. At the end of last week, the commission-free outfit “faced pressure on its business model, rumour-mongering about its allegiance to hedge funds, and sabre-rattling from Washington”, not to mention the anger of investors restricted from trading in shares and options of GameStop and seven other companies. None of those challenges have gone away. Still, at least Robinhood has accessed new funds, said The Economist. Forced to suspend trading after the frenzy “depleted” its required capital, it raised $1bn. Now it has “tapped its not-so-merry band of shareholders” for a further $2.4bn. Founded seven years ago by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, as part of a mission to “democratise finance…

Jeff Bezos Few companies have thrived like Amazon during the pandemic. The online giant, started in a garage by Jeff Bezos in 1994, has just delivered record quarterly sales, breaking the $100bn barrier for the first time, said Callum Jones in The Times. A good moment, reckons Bezos, to step down as CEO. “Invention is the root of our success,” he wrote to his “fellow Amazonians” this week, as he ran through its greatest hits on the journey from online bookseller to global dominance. “If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal.” Bezos, 57, who will remain executive chair, is handing the reins to Andy Jassy – boss of the company’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services – who has…

Controversy of the week Wild times on Wall Street The trading frenzy over shares in the ailing US video games retailer GameStop has to be the most sensational business story of our age, said Rana Foroohar in the FT (see page 46). It’s a David and Goliath tale in which the big beasts of Wall Street were humbled by a “flash mob” of amateur day traders – a group of people who, rather like the rioters who stormed the US capitol, felt powerless in the face of “a system of American oligopoly” and so rose up to strike a blow against it. GameStop was a company that looked set to die, said Kenan Malik in The Observer. It has had to close 450 outlets because its core business is selling…

Ministers have ordered door-to-door testing in eight postcode areas of England, where cases of the more infectious South African variant of the coronavirus have been detected in people with no travel link to the country. Residents of those areas have been urged to only leave their homes when it is essential to do so. The “surge” testing, of 80,000 people, which also involves mobile clinics and home kits, is taking place in parts of Merseyside, three London boroughs, Kent, Surrey, Hertfordshire and the West Midlands. Tests are also being conducted in parts of Bristol and Liverpool where mutations have been found in the original and Kent strain of the virus.…

Edinburgh Back to school: Nicola Sturgeon has announced a phased reopening of schools for Scotland’s youngest schoolchildren. The First Minister told MSPs on Tuesday that nursery-age children, and those in primary years 1-3 would return from 22 February – assuming coronavirus rates continue to fall. She added that there would also be a very limited return for senior pupils to allow for the practical work necessary for some courses. But she warned adults would have to live with restrictions for longer: the current lockdown will remain in place at least until the end of the month, while travellers arriving from outside the UK will be subject to a “managed quarantine” system to prevent new strains of the virus from reaching Scotland. Sturgeon also confirmed 610,778 Scots had so far received…

My father the Nazi As a child in the early 1940s, Niklas Frank spent summers at his family’s castle in southern Poland. “I knew Poland as our private property,” he says. “This, I thought, was quite normal.” As he grew older he came to understand the long shadow his father cast over Europe, said Luke Mintz in The Sunday Telegraph: as Nazi Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank – aka the Butcher of Poland – was responsible for the murders of three million Jews. Tried at Nuremberg, he was hanged in 1946. For years, Niklas kept his family history a secret. Then, in 1987, he wrote a book renouncing his father. It shocked Germany, a country that, he says, was still not fully confronting its past. “Never in Germany came an…

A binman has been sacked after kung fu-kicking the head off a snowman. Herefordshire Council said it was “disappointed” in Callum Woodhouse, after he was caught on CCTV attacking a 6ft snowman built by three-year-old Joseph Taylor, who burst into tears. Thousands later signed a petition calling for the expectant father to be reinstated. Woodhouse, 19, explained that the snowman had been “obstructing my pathway”, adding: “It was going to melt anyway.” A fitness instructor unwittingly captured the early stages of Myanmar’s military coup as she filmed an exercise class in front of the country’s parliament this week. Khing Hnin Wai gyrated to the sound of an upbeat dance track on a roundabout in the capital, Naypyidaw, as a series of black armoured cars pushed through a barricade behind her,…

A nation dazed by “rule stupor” George F. Will The Washington Post The Covid-19 tragedy has proved “a brutal, and hence effective, tutor”, says George F. Will. It has taught us this: “government is more apt to achieve adequacy when it does not try to achieve purity”. Analysis of the wildly varying success rate of different US states in administering vaccines shows that the top performers were all “rule-breakers”. Unlike other states that stuck doggedly to overly prescriptive federal guidance about who gets what when – resulting in doses of vaccine being wasted – these states used their initiative and just got on with it. Alas, that approach has become all too rare in recent years. As the lawyer and writer Philip K. Howard recently lamented in The Yale Law…

Populations of sharks and rays are disappearing from the world’s oceans at an “alarming” rate, a new report has warned. Since 1970, numbers have fallen by more than 70%, a decline that has left three-quarters of shark species facing extinction. “For every ten sharks you had in the open ocean in the 1970s, you would have three today, across these species, on average,” Dr Richard Sherley of the University of Exeter told the BBC. The international study – based on previous studies and catch data – concluded that overfishing was the principal cause of the decline; and its authors noted that had they had records going back further than 1970, the decline would probably have looked even steeper, as it was in the 1950s that mass industrialised fishing began in…

Elizabeth Hurley caused a furore when she tweeted a racy photo of herself outside in last week’s snow, wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and an unbuttoned fluffy jacket. Speculating that the photos had been taken by her 18-year-old son, Piers Morgan said it was a bit “creepy” (as well as “thirsty” – for attention). But Hurley was happy to set the record straight. “These pics were in fact taken by my 80-year-old mother,” she tweeted. “Not entirely sure if that puts minds at rest or not.” Filming sex scenes has never been a straightforward business, says actor Simon Williams in The Oldie. He was once in bed with Jan Harvey when the sound technician heard a rustling noise. “The director peeled back the duvet to reveal that we both had…

Britain hasn’t been a major force in men’s middle-distance running since the 1980s heyday of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, said Rick Broadbent in The Times. But now a “genuine resurgence” is taking place: for the first time in decades, the country has several 800m and 1500m runners who are “medal prospects” at this year’s Olympics. Leading the way on the men’s side is 26-year-old Jamie Webb, a former science teacher from Liverpool who has spent the past year out of action with a broken thigh. Last Saturday in Vienna, he made a victorious return to the track, winning the 800m, his first for 16 months, in 1min 46.95 seconds. His next goal, he says, is breaking the 1min 44sec barrier: no British man has achieved that since 2005. On…

Grace Robertson, who has died aged 90, was hailed in late life as a “forgotten star of the golden age of photojournalism”, said The Daily Telegraph. In the 1950s, she had documented the “drab routine of postwar life” with an unflinching gaze, and created some of the most enduring images of that period. Born in 1930, she’d inherited an interest in photography from her father, Fyfe Robertson, who worked at Picture Post. And when she was in her late teens and stuck at home, caring for her seriously ill mother, she persuaded him to buy her a second-hand Leica 35mm camera. She improvised a dark room in the guest bathroom, and – despite her mother’s urging that she pursue more “ladylike” interests – she started venturing out onto the streets,…

Pip tells Ruth she’s quitting the rewilders, and wonders if they should withdraw the use of Oakey Bank; Ruth thinks it would scupper the project. At a wine tasting for her wedding, Stephanie Casey chats to Elizabeth and flirts with Freddie. Phoebe and Rex contemplate the future of rewilding without Pip. Natasha urges Tom to reach out to Kirsty, who asks him to help her track down Philip’s workers. Shula tells Elizabeth about her prison visit to Philip; Elizabeth is furious and says it’s a betrayal after Philip’s crimes almost killed Freddie. A shaken Shula confides in Alistair. Brian, Justin and Phoebe have a fraught meeting: Justin is pulling out of the barns project but Phoebe says the rewilders are glad to cut ties with him after his links to…

The Daily Telegraph Often labelled “the best car in the world”, the Mercedes S-Class is an example of “mass production as art”. There has been much anticipation of this seventh-generation model’s tech in particular, and while it is not able to drive itself, it does have highly advanced “level 3” autonomy: it can assist with braking and steering simultaneously, and even park itself – provided your garage has sensors. Top Gear With the S-Class, you get cutting-edge tech mixed with old-school luxury. The interface on the huge central screen and digital dashboard is easy to use, and the navigation relies on five cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to give a real-time overhead view of the car on the road. There’s a voice assistant – just say “Hey Mercedes” – and…

BP/Exxon/Chevron: oil spoiler After what it described as a “brutal” year, BP plunged £13.2bn into the red in 2020, marking its “first full-year loss in a decade”, said Simon Foy in The Daily Telegraph. The FTSE 100 oil giant was hit badly by plunging demand and prices during the pandemic, though CEO Bernard Looney said he expected “better days ahead” in 2021. Looney has pinned his colours to BP’s new “net zero ambition”, and its strategy of becoming “an integrated energy company”, but he faces “scepticism from investors”. At least BP isn’t alone in its travails, said Derek Brower and Justin Jacobs in the FT. America’s biggest oil producer, ExxonMobil, also registered its first annual loss, citing “the most challenging market conditions” it had ever experienced. The situation seemed…

Online giants such as Amazon have so increased their deliveries in the pandemic that small retailers are struggling to buy enough cardboard boxes. Jawbone Brewing, a craft brewery in southwest London, told the BBC that they’d had to ask customers to bring their own boxes. Ealing Council’s attempt to “decolonise” its streets has not proved simple. In Southall, Havelock Avenue – named for Sir Henry Havelock, who led the relief of Lucknow – was recently renamed after Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. There had been a consultation in the largely Punjabi community, but some Sikh leaders accused the council of cultural appropriation, for naming a street after a figure who is regarded as a “manifestation of God”.…

A scheme that offers visas to live and work in the UK to the five million residents of Hong Kong who hold a British National Overseas passport (BNO) went live this week. The scheme, which offers a pathway to citizenship, was unveiled last year following Beijing’s imposition of new national security laws on the territory. Last week, the Hong Kong authorities retaliated by declaring that BNOs were no longer regarded as valid travel documents for entering or leaving the city.…

Brussels Restive continent: Thousands of people took to the streets of cities across Europe last week, to vent their frustration at ongoing lockdown restrictions. Police arrested hundreds of people in Brussels, Vienna and Budapest; there were also protests in Amsterdam – but no repeat of the anti-curfew riots that spread across ten cities in the Netherlands last week (see page 16). In Budapest, a demonstration was led by workers in the hospitality sector, who are angry that pubs, clubs and restaurants remain closed, although some shops have been allowed to open. Hungary has been subject to a lockdown since 11 November, and the government says that mass vaccination will be the only route out. Hospitality workers also protested in Bulgaria. In Vienna, around 5,000 people defied lockdown rules to attend…

This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured chef and restaurateur Monica Galetti 1* Three Little Birds by Bob Marley, performed by Bob Marley & The Wailers 2 Samoa Matalasi (My Beautiful Samoa), written and performed by The Five Stars 3 You Oughta Be in Love by Dave Dobbyn, performed by Dave Dobbyn (ft. Ardijah) 4 Hotel California by Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, performed by The Eagles 5 La Vie en rose by Édith Piaf, Louiguy and Marguerite Monnot, performed by Louis Armstrong 6 My Girl by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White, performed by The Temptations 7 Purple Rain, written and performed by Prince 8 Feeling Good by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, performed by Nina Simone Book: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Luxury:…

The world’s population – now about 7.8 billion – is expected to hit ten billion in 2050. Food production will have to rise vastly to feed humanity; so agriculture will have to be made much more sustainable if the soil is to be protected. There are any number of ways of doing this: from taking modest steps that prevent erosion – planting hedges, terracing slopes – to replacing monocultures with crop rotation; to adopting systems that preserve soil quality, such as organic farming, permaculture (the creation of self-sufficient farming eco-systems) or “no-till” agriculture, where farmers plant new crops over the remains of the last, instead of ploughing over their land, keeping soil intact. Each of these systems has advantages and disadvantages: yields in organic farming, for instance, tend to be…

CHINA Left behind in a cash-free world CaixinGlobal.com  (Beijing) Chinese people now pay for almost everything with their smartphones, say Guo Yingzhe and Hu Yue – and that’s a serious problem for elderly people who aren’t tech-savvy. Financial apps and digital services have grown fast in China: the two leading payment platforms, Alipay and WeChat Pay, are now ubiquitous. But the disappearance of banknotes carries a price. In a recent viral video, an elderly woman was shown trying to pay for her health insurance in person using cash. The impatient clerk snaps, “No cash is accepted here: either tell your relatives or pay on your mobile phone”. It caused an instant backlash, and the following month the People’s Bank of China issued a diktat requiring public institutions, financial firms and…

Changes to the tongue’s appearance could be another symptom of the coronavirus, it was reported last week. A British researcher who is tracking Covid-19 warning signs recently reported more cases of people complaining of unusual changes to their tongues. And Prof Tim Spector’s tweet about “Covid tongue” has since been backed by a study in Spain: it found that more than a tenth of the 666 Covid patients it examined had had “oral cavity” issues, including the inflammation of the small bumps on the surface of the tongue, “patchy” areas and ulcers. However, the Spanish researchers found that an even more prevalent apparent symptom related to the hands and feet: 18% of patients had experienced burning, hives, skin peeling or redness on the palms of their hands and the soles…

“Remember that as a teenager, you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.” Fran Lebowitz, quoted in The Times “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.” Karl Popper, quoted in The Sunday Times “I understand your desire for disruption, but I am tired of picking up the pieces. Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can sit down and take tea together.” Angela Merkel to Emmanuel Macron, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Most real relationships are involuntary.” Iris Murdoch, quoted on The Browser…

It’s still “their” marbles To The Daily Telegraph Simon Heffer (“The Armada maps belong in Britain, along with the Elgin Marbles”) praises Lord Elgin’s “desire to conserve” the Parthenon marbles, which might otherwise have been “smashed up” by the Turks. “Would the marbles still exist today,” he asks, “if Elgin hadn’t ‘looted’ them. Quite possibly not – which means he did culture a service, as Britain has done by keeping them safe ever since.” Say I walk past Mr Heffer’s house and see oiks smashing up his furniture. Impelled by a “desire to conserve”, I help myself to two-thirds of Mr Heffer’s best Wedgwood tea set. A week later, the oiks are in custody, and Mr Heffer asks for his plates back. Shouldn’t he be grateful that I am keeping…

by Juliet Nicolson Chatto & Windus 368pp £18.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99 Juliet Nicolson’s new book, an “engagingly written mixture of social history and memoir”, is an account of the “Big Freeze” of 1962-3, said Trevor Phillips in The Sunday Times. In what remains the coldest winter since 1895, Britain was buffeted for ten straight weeks by brutal Siberian winds, which “froze the sea for a mile off Herne Bay” and caused 20ft of snow to pile up on Exmoor. Much of the country came to a standstill, and millions were forced to go without electricity and running water thanks to a combination of power cuts and frozen pipes. Nicolson, nine at the time, sat out the cold snap at Sissinghurst Castle, her family’s grand home in Kent. Although she…

Arlo Parks: Collapsed in Sunbeams Transgressive £10 Arlo Parks is a “hotly tipped” 20-year-old from west London, said Dan Cairns in The Sunday Times. On this, her captivating “woozy, bluesy pop-soul” debut album, she more than justifies the hype. Her songwriting is lyrically sophisticated – mixing “societal reportage with intimate diarising” – while her “melodic lilt, conversational vocals and innate empathy ensnare you from the start”. This is music full of “compassion and wisdom”; it “gets under your skin and stays there”. Parks may be the “voice of Gen Z”, said Georgia Evans on NME, but she is far more than that. Collapsed in Sunbeams is a “universal collection of stories that’ll provide solace for listeners of all ages and backgrounds for decades to come”. This is music that offers…

Created by the British writer George Kay, Lupin is “good, stupid fun”, and is predicted to become one of Netflix’s biggest hits, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Omar Sy stars as Assane, a young French man who sees himself as a modern-day Arsène Lupin – the gentleman thief and master of disguise created by the French writer Maurice Leblanc more than 100 years ago. The books are old, but Assane is a new kind of French hero, said Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic. He is the son of an immigrant from Senegal who came to France in search of a better life. Instead, his father was falsely accused of theft by his wealthy employer, and hanged himself in jail. Inspired by Leblanc’s books, Assane devises a series of devilishly…

The folk singer and conservationist chooses his favourite books. He will perform a live-stream concert as part of the Kings Place Nature Unwrapped series on 13 February (kingsplace.co.uk). His book, The Nightingale, is coming out in March Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2020 (Penguin £9.99). With a gentle lyricism, the ethnobotanist and Native American author sets forth her modern yet ancient, indigenous yet scientific, explorations into senses of place and relationships to the plant world. In Search of Duende by Federico García Lorca, 1933 (OOP). Lorca’s essays delve into the roots of cante jondo (deep song) and ancient verse among the Spanish gypsies. A declaration of the disappearing power of the duende – the idea of a spirit, central to Lorca’s thinking – to connect us to nature and…

The biggest names in British dance – from Akram Khan to Carlos Acosta’s Birmingham Royal Ballet – take part in Dancing Nation, a festival of new work from Sadler’s Wells and BBC Arts. Three hour-long programmes feature contemporary, ballet and hip-hop from around the country; available online or on BBC iPlayer until 28 February (sadlerswells.com). The Royal Opera House continues its online programme with Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée. Natalia Osipova dances the title role in this 2015 production, “a joyous, life-enhancing experience” (culturewhisper.com). Streaming until 28 February, £3 (roh.org.uk).…

This salad would make a perfect weekday lunch, says Nicola Graimes – it’s simple, reviving, vibrant and nutritious. If time is not on your side, use hot-smoked salmon or trout, which is already cooked. Serves 4 4 lightly smoked wild salmon fillets 75g of mixed coloured quinoa, rinsed 1 large pink grapefruit 115g rocket leaves 1 Little Gem lettuce, shredded ½ a small red onion, diced 2 tbsp toasted pumpkin seeds 1 handful coriander leaves for the dressing: 3 tbsp hemp seed oil or extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling juice of 1 large lime sea salt and black pepper • Preheat the oven to 180°C fan/200°C/ gas mark 6. • Line a baking tray with baking paper. Arrange the salmon on the tray, drizzle with a little…

Animate Walking Mate LED Flashing Loop Put this rechargeable ▲ LED ring, which comes in four colours and has a flashing mode, around your dog’s neck to make it visible on dark roads (£8.67; animeddirect.co.uk). Furbo Dog Camera With crisp 1080p video and a 160-degree field of view, the Furbo can show most of what is going on in a room while you’re out. It can send “bark alerts” to your phone, and can even spit out treats (£189; shopuk.furbo.com). SureFlap SureFeed Microchip Cat and Small Dog Feeder Perfect for making sure the right pet gets their food in busy households, this feeder only opens when it senses its rightful owner’s microchip (£80; petsathome.com). Tractive GPS Cat Tracker This smartest of collars tells you your cat’s location every three seconds…

Global markets were roiled by the clash between day traders and hedge funds over heavily shorted US video game retailer GameStop, whose shares leapt 400% in a week as buyers piled in (see p46), galvanised by Reddit’s investment community, WallStreetBets. The ensuing “short squeeze” on hedge funds betting against the stock took a big toll: one fund, Melvin, sustained a 53% loss. Trading platforms Robinhood and Interactive stopped trading in GameStop and other hotly followed stocks. But as attention switched to the silver market – prompting the biggest daily rise in the metal’s price in eight years – fears of systemic damage from extreme market speculation grew. In another sign of Wall Street’s frothy markets, Goldman Sachs reported that so-called “Spacs” (special purpose acquisition companies) raised $16bn in the first…

• Silver squeeze Has calm returned to markets following last week’s GameStop mania? By Wednesday this week, it looked that way, said Patrick Hosking and Ben Martin in The Times. Shares in the US gaming-shop chain have more than halved in value since amateur traders on Reddit pushed them into the stratosphere (see page 4) – and the ensuing “silver buying spree” that “stunned global financial markets” has also shown “signs of fizzling out”. After hitting an eight-year high of $30/oz, as they became “an alternative focus in the battle between small traders and Wall Street hedge funds”, spot silver prices fell by more than 5%. But many have been left pondering the ramifications of the mighty “silver squeeze”. • Moving markets At the height of the fervour,…

Britain’s stuttering recovery David Smith The Sunday Times How is the UK economy doing in the international growth stakes, asks David Smith. Not so well. According to the IMF, last year’s 10% contraction was much worse than the performance of the US, which lost 3.4%, and Japan and Germany, which declined by 5%. Perhaps the “safest thing to say is that the UK was among a clutch of poorly performing European countries, along with France, Italy and Spain”. Some favour the “trampoline theory of economic recoveries”. But the disappointing news is that Britain’s projected recovery – 4.5% this year and 5% next – is behind that of Spain and France, in spite of the EU’s “vaccination imbroglio”. Why? One reason is that our own successful programme isn’t yet “delivering liberty”.…

The week’s best shares Asos The Times The online fashion store has beefed up its board and seen profits quadruple thanks to improved warehouse logistics. The Topshop acquisition should accelerate growth. A winner of the retail shakeout. Buy. £47. Ceres Power The Daily Telegraph Ceres is a pioneer of world-leading fuel cell technology – one of the greatest hopes for clean power – and licences to other firms for production, thus keeping its own costs down. Among the UK’s “best tech hopes”. Buy. £15.88. Fever-Tree Drinks The Times The mixer-maker’s stellar growth since 2013 has moderated, but it’s still a “quality” business. Overseas growth and market share gains in the UK saw revenues fall by just 3% in 2020. Set to fizz when pubs reopen. Buy. £24.97. PZ Cussons Investors…