Innholdsfortegnelse for 1402 i The Week

Over the years there have been some spectacular royal events, but never one to match this, said Kevin Sullivan in The Washington Post. Intricately staged and faultlessly executed amid incomparable pomp and splendour, Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral on Monday was a “farewell production for the ages”. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of London and Windsor to pay their final respects to the Queen, and about 28 million people in the country watched the event on television, as did countless more around the world. Some analysts believe it may have been the most watched single event in history, with perhaps more than half of the world’s 7.7 billion people catching at least some of it. The funeral was the “perfect bookend production” for a 70-year reign that opened…

As the official mourning period ended, “royal ritual” gave way to “political revolution”, said Martin Fletcher in The New Statesman. “A new Elizabethan era” has begun – that of Liz Truss, who is “taking a massive gamble” by adopting an “unproven strategy” of pursuing growth at all costs in order to restore the national finances. Ironically, for someone who is desperate to shrink the state, she has just unveiled the biggest fiscal intervention in peacetime history, a £150bn-plus package to curb soaring energy bills (along with, this week, a vast scheme to cut energy prices in half for business). But with that “unpalatable task” done, Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng moved to implement their real agenda: cutting taxes and tearing up regulations to “turbocharge economic growth”. The windfall tax on…

Royal staff, who are braced for a series of job losses. Scores of Clarence House staff have already been notified of “unavoidable” redundancies, as the offices of King Charles and the Queen Consort move to Buckingham Palace. It has also been reported that some Buckingham Palace staff are on contracts that were designed to expire six months after the Queen’s death. Beyond Meat, the vegan food giant, after its chief operating officer was arrested for reportedly biting a man’s nose. Doug Ramsey, 53, is said to have got into a fight with the man as he was leaving a football match in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tennis fans, as Roger Federer, the 20-time Grand Slam champion, announced his retirement (see page 20). The Swiss player, 41, has suffered a series of knee…

70% of UK adults have a positive view of King Charles, up from 54% in May. 69% think he will do a good job as King, compared with 57% in May. 68% say they currently have a positive opinion of the monarchy, and 24% have a negative one. 62% think it’s good for Britain; 12% feel it’s bad. YouGov 42% of Scots now say they back independence. 47% say they would vote against it. Scottish Sun on Sunday/Deltapoll 78% of the UK’s lowest-paid workers (those earning less than the real living wage of £9.90 an hour, or £11.05 in London) say this is the worst financial period they’ve ever faced. 42% regularly skip meals to save money. Survation for the Living Wage Foundation…

Richard E. Grant on grief It’s just over a year since Richard E. Grant lost Joan Washington, his wife of 38 years, to lung cancer. She had been diagnosed eight months before her death; and in the intervening period, the couple felt, for the most part, warmly supported by their friends. “Death defines who your friends are, but more specifically what kind of friend they are,” he says. Nigella Lawson, for instance, “cabbed food over every single Sunday”; Gabriel Byrne sat for hours by Washington’s bed, chatting; Melissa McCarthy was “a five-star treat” to have around. It was Grant who had persuaded his wife to tell their friends that she was dying, says Nick Curtis in The Mail on Sunday. “I was great friends with Victoria Wood,” Grant explains, “and…

I read it in the tabloids A woman who claims to be able to predict the future using asparagus has revealed that King Charles is likely to soon step aside. Jemima Packington, or “Mystic Veg”, says she knew the Queen would die this year because she did an asparagus reading months ago, by throwing some spears into the air and seeing how they landed. To her horror, they formed the shape of a broken crown: a clear indication, the “asparamancer” explained, of a “great royal sadness” on the horizon. Now, the spears have told her that Charles will step back next year, and make William Prince Regent. A nursing home in Taiwan has apologised for hiring a stripper to lift its residents’ spirits. A video of the performance, which went…

ISRAEL Time to get tough with the electric menace Haaretz (Tel Aviv) There’s a new scourge on the streets of Tel Aviv, says Haaretz: electric scooters and bicycles. They’ve spread across Israel’s second city “at an alarming rate” in recent years, with malign consequences. They’ve made neighbourhoods unbearable to live in: pavements have been transformed into “illegal parking spots” for rental vehicles; drivers have had to contend with a jungle of people violating traffic laws; children and adults have been injured in crashes – 806 in 2019 alone – and some have even been killed. Now a new report by city officials has shed light on how this electric menace “took possession of the city”. Quite simply, the authorities “turned a blind eye”. They have conspicuously failed to enforce laws…

The Queen was no great football fan. According to Lord (David) Triesman, ex-chairman of the FA, the reason for this was simple: “there are no horses” in football. But as Triesman recalled, she wasn’t averse to attending the odd game. After watching one match with her, Triesman asked the Queen if she thought anyone had played particularly well. “The band of the Scots Guards,” she shot back. Having been PM for only three weeks, Liz Truss still isn’t recognised wherever she goes. As she and her husband Hugh O’Leary arrived at Westminster Abbey on Monday for the Queen’s funeral, her appearance left Australian TV presenters floundering. “Who’s this?” wondered one, as the pair emerged from their car. “Hard to identify, maybe minor royals,” her co-host replied. “We can’t spot everyone,…

“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.”Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.”Antoine-Augustin Préault, quoted on The Browser “You recognise a true friend by how he lies to you.”Alessandro Morandotti, quoted on NPR “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”Gloria Steinem, quoted in The Times “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”H.G. Wells, quoted in Forbes “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”Groucho Marx, quoted in The Economist “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of the stuff.”Will Rogers, quoted on Yahoo Finance “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”John A.…

Tennis Britain crashed out of the Davis Cup with a 2-1 defeat to Holland. After Cameron Norrie lost his singles, Joe Salisbury and Andy Murray were defeated 7-6, 6-7, 6-3 by Wesley Koolhof and Matwé Middelkoop in the deciding doubles rubber. Football Brighton have appointed Roberto De Zerbi as their new manager. The Italian has been brought in to replace Graham Potter, who departed for Chelsea this month. Cricket India’s women beat England by seven wickets in their first One Day International at Hove.…

William Klein, the photographer whose “frenetic” images of urban street life proved highly influential on both art and fashion, has died in Paris at the age of 96, said Andy Grundberg in The Washington Post. Born to a Jewish family in New York in 1926, Klein grew up in a largely Irish neighbourhood and always saw himself as an outsider – a quality that would inform much of his “wildly innovative” work. Klein settled in Paris in 1948 to study painting, but became “captivated” by photography instead. Returning to New York in the 1950s after years abroad, Klein found the city familiar but strange. With his camera, he recorded its vibrancy and grittiness, but he could not find a publisher in the US for the resulting book, said Diane Smyth…

Lynda and Lilian reminisce about where they were on the day of the Queen’s coronation. Chelsea has been staying with Blake, and he encourages her to return home. Tracy’s overjoyed when they turn up. Lilian is desperate to get home to see her new kitchen, but her delight is dented when Justin invites Robert and Lynda for supper. Tracy tells Chelsea that she’ll support any decision she makes about the baby. She suggests Russ might help her decide. Chelsea’s horrified, and says that Russ is not the dad. Tracy’s mortified. Chelsea reassures Lily that her pregnancy has nothing to do with Russ. Russ appears at Lower Loxley to collect his stuff. He tells Lily that he can’t forgive her infidelity, particularly in light of the sacrifices he’s made for her.…

Knepp, a 3,500-acre estate in West Sussex, is home to a pioneering rewilding project. Stay in a treehouse, shepherd’s hut or yurt, or bring your own tent and enjoy a safari or guided walk with Exmoor ponies, peregrine falcons, purple emperor butterflies and rare nightingales (from £23/night; knepp.co.uk). Oak Tree Cottage is the only holiday house in the Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve in Wales from where you can see murmurations of starlings (sleeps four, from £643/week; welshwildlife.org). Kinloch Lodge on the Isle of Skye has created a three-day expert-led otter-spotting trip with the International Otter Survival Fund (from £520pp; kinloch-lodge.co.uk). Hayjack, at the The Wilderness Reserve in Suffolk, is a thatched escape for two with its own lake for wild swimming. The reserve is home to 600 types of moth…

Autumn on the Costa Brava Spain’s package holiday industry was born on the Costa Brava, and parts of this Catalan coast are blighted by high-rise development. Elsewhere, though, it is gloriously unspoiled – and one of its loveliest spots is the medieval hilltop town of Begur, says Kate Maxwell in the FT. The town is crowned by an 11th century castle that commands fine sea views, and the streets below are lined with grand, stuccoed town houses built with the fortunes made by local émigrés to Cuba. A “tranquil” hotel housed in a former convent, El Convent lies a 15-minute walk from the sandy beach of Sa Riera. Among the best restaurants nearby are Toc al Mar and the Hostal Sa Rascassa, and there are many other beaches within easy…

Shell: tough inheritance There’s “a changing of the guard” at Shell, as the oil and gas giant navigates the transition to greener energy, said Jenny Strasburg in The Wall Street Journal. After nine years in charge, CEO Ben van Beurden is stepping down. He’ll be replaced by the current head of gas and renewables, Wael Sawan – a 25-year stalwart of the company, who has boosted Shell’s exposure to solar, wind and hydrogen power. Van Beurden’s tenure as CEO has often been choppy – in part down to “wild swings in commodity prices”, particularly when energy demand “cratered” during the pandemic. He oversaw Shell’s biggest acquisition in decades when it bought rival BG Group for $50bn in 2016 – “transforming its footprint in natural gas in ways that have paid…

Are Brits really the world’s worst idlers? Sarah O’Connor Financial Times “The British are the worst idlers in the world,” observed the authors of a 2012 book, Britannia Unchained. “We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and productivity is poor.” Given that two of the book’s co-authors, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, are now PM and Chancellor, it’s worth asking whether there’s any truth to this characterisation, says Sarah O’Connor. Yes and no. We certainly don’t work among the lowest hours and retire early – we’re hovering around the OECD average in both cases. But we do achieve lower output per hour than peers in comparable countries, and progress has “practically stalled” since the financial crisis. The problem isn’t down to idleness. A better explanation is that business…

“From the moment she inherited the crown,” Elizabeth II knew that she was destined one day to lie in state “on the exact same spot” in Westminster Hall as her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had before her, said Caroline Davies in The Guardian. And so it was that last Thursday the Queen was “handed over by her family to the nation for her public farewell”. For the next four days, she lay in a coffin draped in the royal standard, and topped by the glittering Imperial State Crown, as ordinary men and women filed through to pay their last respects. Night and day, these modern-day pilgrims poured into London, said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times – people of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the UK and beyond;…

As the cost-of-living crisis bites, a growing number of Aga owners are said to be having the energy-intensive stoves stripped out of their kitchens. Jack O’Dwyer, a Blackpool-based remover, told Bloomberg that he’d taken out 35 Agas this year; one of his clients had only installed her electric Aga six months earlier, but had decided to sell it because it was costing £10 a day to run full-time. Oil-run models cost around £40 a week. The University of Oxford has renamed its Oriental Institute, after an 18-month consultation concluded that it was “inappropriate” and “outdated”, and that it had “unfortunate connotations of colonialism and imperialism”. The department is now called the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.…

A series of clashes, mainly between youths from Leicester’s Hindu and Muslim communities, have sparked alarm about sectarian tensions in the city. According to some reports, the trouble started after a cricket match between India and Pakistan on 28 August, with tensions then fuelled by social media disinformation. Concerns that outsiders were stirring up trouble in the city were heightened when, according to The Guardian, it emerged that eight of the 18 people arrested last weekend were not from Leicester, but had travelled there from Birmingham and elsewhere. This week, leaders of the city’s Hindu and Muslim communities put out a joint statement calling for calm.…

Paris MP hit wife: Members of France’s radical left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI) party have been criticised for heaping praise on an MP who has admitted to slapping his wife. Adrien Quatennens, widely seen as the LFI’s No. 2, is a rising star of the French left. However, the 32-year-old’s reputation nosedived when leaked police files revealed that his estranged wife had accused him of hitting her. Admitting that he had struck her, during a row a year ago, he resigned as party coordinator. LFI members then leapt to his defence: one praised his “honesty and self-sacrifice”, and urged the public to leave the couple alone. Rome Election approaches: Italy is braced for a divisive general election this Sunday, with a far-right grouping led by Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers…

1 Run Boy Run by Ambroise Willaume and Yoann Lemoine, performed by Woodkid2 Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 by Edvard Grieg, performed by Sir Clifford Curzon and the London Symphony Orchestra3* Harry Hippie by Jim Ford, performed by Bobby Womack4 California Girls by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, performed by The Beach Boys5 The Greatest Love of All by Michael Masser and Linda Creed, performed by George Benson6 Simply Beautiful, written and performed by Al Green7 Theme from Grandstand by Keith Mansfield, performed by The Sound Stage Orchestra8 Philadelphia Freedom by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, performed by Elton John * Choice if allowed only one record Book: All In by Billie Jean King Luxury: a New Zealand sauvignon blanc…

The legal aid system was set up in 1949, as one of the pillars of the new welfare state. Aid could be sought for nearly any criminal or civil matter (except libel and defamation); 80% of the population were eligible. From the 1970s, greater access to justice brought new areas of law under it, such as social welfare and asylum – and costs ballooned. This became a matter of political concern, and from the 1990s, it has been gradually reined in by both Labour and Tory governments. As a result, most private firms have abandoned such work. Legal aid was hacked back substantially by David Cameron’s coalition, with the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which removed financial support across swathes of the law, such as housing,…

Still waiting for a female president Gail Collins The New York Times This is getting embarrassing, says Gail Collins. Britain is now on to its third female prime minister, while America has yet to put even one woman in charge – unless, that is, you count the one hour and 25 minutes in November when Vice-President Kamala Harris formally took the helm while her boss, Joe Biden, had a colonoscopy. Hillary Clinton, it’s true, came close. She won the most votes in the 2016 presidential election, but was foiled by our weird electoral college system, which gives 193,000 people in Wyoming the same clout as around 715,000 people in California. But whichever way you look at it, it’s a poor record. The US “doesn’t even seem all that comfortable with…

People with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, are being invited to provide DNA samples for the largest study of its kind into the possible causes of the debilitating illness. Some 250,000 people in the UK suffer from ME, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. It usually develops after a viral infection, but there is no test for it, nor effective treatment. Symptoms include extreme tiredness, and “brain fog”, and a quarter of sufferers end up housebound or bedbound. For the DecodeME project, researchers are looking for 20,000 ME patients, who will be asked to fill in a questionnaire and submit a saliva sample. The plan is to use their DNA to find out if there are common genetic differences between people with ME and the general population. The research will also…

Two days after the Queen’s death, a crowd of mourners, some carrying banners, gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square. Sky News reporters filmed them, while intoning that “thousands of people were still arriving” to mourn her. Yet these people had not turned out for the late 96-year-old monarch, said Micha Frazer-Carroll in The i Paper. They had gone there to protest about the little-reported death of Chris Kaba, 24, an unarmed black man who was shot dead by police in south London on 5 September. The killing of anyone by the police should be subject to intense public scrutiny, yet too often we’re led to think that if the police were involved, the victim must have “done something to deserve it” – and so their case does not merit attention. We…

The power of the queue To The Guardian On Wednesday, I felt compelled to queue to see the Queen lying in state. I arrived at midnight and joined the end of the queue, which was about 200 metres west of London Bridge, and I completed the journey at Westminster Hall at 7.50am on Thursday. The temperature had dropped to 12°C that morning, but everyone was in good spirits. One person said that it was the most British thing he had ever done. One of the things that I will remember most is how Londoners talked to each other. I don’t recall seeing anyone wearing earbuds. The queue was well organised, with hundreds of volunteers offering help. There were portable toilets and some vendors, such as Caffè Nero, were open 24…

Kiln Theatre, London NW6 (020-7328 1000). Until 29 October Running time: 2hrs 15mins Theatregoers seeking to come to terms with the end of the second Elizabethan era should head to this superb revival of Moira Buffini’s Olivier-winning play about the relationship between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. The long-planned production was scheduled to open the day after the Queen’s death. Rather than cancel performances, the decision was taken to press ahead, with a minute’s silence before each one during the mourning period – and rightly so. First staged in 2013, the play is “no hagiography”, but it is imbued with admiration for the monarch’s “diligence” and warmth; and I was both “transfixed and moved” by the evening. In a “deft flight of fancy”,…

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, 1932 (Penguin £9.99). Flora Poste, London socialite, moves in with her rural relatives, the Starkadders. Hilarity ensues. This is my go-to escape from all the nasty things in or out of the woodshed. Jazz by Toni Morrison, 1992 (Vintage £9.99). Violet Trace’s husband kills a girl and Violet goes to her funeral in order to cut the dead girl’s face. And that’s just the opening scene. Toni Morrison takes a good story and makes it a great meditation on love, obsession and history. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, 1987 (Pan Macmillan £8.99). The most beautifully written novel – nuns fall off bridges, thieves paint their way to freedom, love and death and mystery abound. It’s also the story of migrants…

Programmes Ukraine’s Musical Freedom Fighters with Clive Myrie The broadcaster travels across war-torn Ukraine to meet musicians who are forming an orchestra, in order to perform at the Royal Albert Hall – all in the space of ten days. Sat 24 Sept, BBC2 19:35 (60mins). Karen Pirie Lauren Lyle stars in this three-part drama, based on Val McDermid’s thriller. When a barmaid who was murdered in the 1990s becomes the subject of a true-crime podcast, the “cold case” is reopened. Sun 25 Sept, ITV1 20:00 (120mins). Inside Man Four-part drama starring David Tennant as a small-town vicar whose life becomes entangled with a prisoner on death row (Stanley Tucci). Mon 26 Sept, BBC1 21:00 (60mins) & Tue 27 Sept, BBC1 21:00 (60mins). Trouble at Topshop Two-part series looking at the…

French Polynesian getaway Spend 7 nights at the tranquil Green Lodge on Moorea-Maiao, with an idyllic private beach. From £451pp b&b, excluding flights. 020-3024 8211, expedia.co.uk. Arrive 6 December. Four-star Kraków break A 3-night break at the modern Garden Square Hotel is ideal to explore this historic Polish city. From £139pp, including London flights. 020-7183 2819, planmytour.co.uk. Depart 17 January 2023. Mediterranean sea views Overlooking the bright blue waters of the Turkish coast, the Beachfront Hotel, Marmaris, offers a 7-night stay from £461pp all-incl., with London flights. 0333-300 0042, jet2.com. Depart 10 November. Portuguese spa escape Stay 7 nights in the Algarve – famous for its sandy beaches and local cuisine – at the 5-star Epic Sana hotel. From £477pp b&b, including flights. 020-3993 3577, bestattravel.co.uk. Depart 16 November. Covid-19:…

• Toxic optics Of all the measures expected in this week’s “mini-Budget”, the one causing Tory MPs the most disquiet was Kwasi Kwarteng’s decision to reverse the ban on bankers’ bonuses, said Steven Swinford in The Times. The logic for a Chancellor wanting to “go for the growth” is straightforward: removing the cap – originally imposed by the EU, limiting bonuses to twice a banker’s salary – would “boost the City and bring in more revenue long term”. But the politics, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, are another matter. The thinking across a broad spread of the party is that “the optics” are so “toxic” that the measure would be “a total gift to Labour”. • Ignore the noise, Kwasi… Whatever the fallout, Kwarteng should stick to his…

Mike Ashley “Peter Cowgill’s departure from JD Sports earlier this year marked the end of one retail era,” said Cat Rutter Pooley on FT.com. Mike Ashley’s exit from Frasers Group – the empire formerly known as Sports Direct – closes out another. “The heavy-drinking, fireplace-chundering” tycoon had already handed over the chief executive role to his son-in-law Michael Murray. Now he will step down from the board entirely – but he is thoughtfully providing £100m in extra funding on his way out. A former squash coach, Ashley, 58, started Sports Direct from a single shop in Maidenhead in 1982, and built it into a multibillion-pound empire – over time buying brands including Evans Cycles, Lillywhites, Flannels and Jack Wills, said Laura Onita in The Daily Telegraph. It has never been…

It fell to the Duke of Norfolk to oversee the seating plan in Westminster Abbey, and with 2,200 people in attendance, including 500 heads of state and foreign dignitaries, his task was never going to be a simple one, said The Daily Telegraph. For the US president, Joe Biden, the Queen’s funeral must have been a strangely humbling experience. He may have been given special dispensation to drive to the Abbey in his own armoured limousine, rather than being bussed in with his fellow world leaders, but he and his wife Jill were not front and centre in the Abbey: instead, having arrived ten minutes late, they found themselves relegated to the 14th row of the south transept, one row behind President Duda of Poland and fully nine behind Justin…

Brad Pitt, with the first public showing of his sculptures, at an art museum in Finland. The actor is believed to have taken up pottery after his divorce from Angelina Jolie in 2017. The critical reaction was mixed. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones concluded that Pitt was “an extremely impressive artist”; but The Times’s Laura Freeman was more circumspect. Pitt’s efforts were not bad, she said – “better than Johnny Depp’s”. Tamara Harvey, who was named as the new artistic director of the RSC. Harvey, who currently runs the Theatr Clwyd in Mold, will share the role with Daniel Evans, of the Chichester Festival Theatre. It means the RSC will have a woman as its permanent artistic director for the first time in its 60-year history.…

Ministers have informed the EU that border checks between Britain and Northern Ireland will remain suspended, despite the threat of legal action from Brussels over the UK’s alleged failure to comply with the Northern Ireland Protocol. It means that produce such as ready meals and sausages from Britain will continue to be delivered to shops in Northern Ireland without physical checks, and that pet-owners will be able to cross the border without showing an animal health certificate.…

Baltimore, Maryland Conviction quashed: A Baltimore man whose murder conviction spawned the hugely popular true-crime podcast Serial has had his conviction overturned more than 20 years later. Adnan Syed was 18 when he was found guilty of strangling Hae Min Lee, who had been his high-school sweetheart: she was found buried in a local park in 1999. But last week a Baltimore circuit judge quashed the conviction, saying Syed deserved a new trial. Prosecutors had requested that it be thrown out because evidence implicating two other people, which the state had failed to share at the trial, had come to light. Ventura, California Patagonia gifted: Yvon Chouinard, the US billionaire founder of the outdoor fashion brand Patagonia, has relinquished control of the company by turning it into a charitable trust.…

“I’d rather grow up as a visible minority in Manchester or Birmingham than in some continental capitals. But then I’d choose most of Britain over most of America, too. There, the problem isn’t a lack of diversity: it is too all-pervading a concern with the subject. After four years in the US, the sharpest relief since coming home has been the chance to have long conversations that do not in some way come back to identity. This is the difference between diversity and cosmopolitanism. The first is a physical fact. The second an attitude towards it: a sort of insouciance. New York is diverse. London, where people one generation removed from Ireland or Italy won’t think to mention it, is cosmopolitan.” Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times…

The royal quality of a Labour leader Emma Duncan The Times Whisper it quietly, says Emma Duncan, but a secret of the Queen’s success was her “brilliant blandness”. Clever and funny in private, she played it straight in public, and won people’s respect as a result. As I see it, there’s another figure in public life who shares that quality: the “Duke of Dullness”, Keir Starmer. Labour’s leader is not an untalented speaker – “his tribute to the Queen was the most powerful from any politician” – but he doesn’t crave applause. At PMQs, he doggedly sets out his stall and “sits down amid an air of mild disappointment on the benches around him”. Since taking over as leader, he’s done nothing particularly interesting: no eye-catching initiatives, no barnstorming speeches.…

Evidence of a Stone Age surgeon Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a teenager who had a foot amputated 31,000 years ago – and survived to live another six to nine years. The find, in Borneo, dramatically rewrites medical history: previously, the earliest known amputee was a farmer who lived in France only 7,000 years ago; he had had his forearm removed. But it wasn’t until relatively recently that patients routinely survived such major surgery. According to Dr Tim Maloney, of Griffith University in Queensland, the discovery suggests that Stone Age surgeons were astonishingly sophisticated, with “a mastery not only of the operation itself and negotiating the complexities of removing the lower left leg, but also the understanding of the needs of antiseptic and antimicrobial management to enable the patient…

“There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t,” wrote Lynne Truss in her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, “and I’ll just say this: never get between those people when drink has been taken.” It is “one of the most controversial punctuation marks in history”, said Susie Dent in The i Paper. And now our new Health Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has taken a stand on the issue. In one of the first email edicts to NHS staff from her office, they were warned to steer clear of “jargon” and “avoid Oxford commas”. For those not familiar, the Oxford or serial comma is one that comes before “and” in a series of three or more items in a list. Critics accuse it of causing needless cluttering, as in…

To The Independent I have some sympathy for those demonstrating against the institution of monarchy, though I think that their protests just now are somewhat tasteless and more likely to provoke opposition than garner support. But what is the alternative? A major disadvantage of having an elected politician as president is that the incumbent could be a self-obsessed power-seeker. Ideally, I would like to see someone of the stature of, say, David Attenborough or Mary Beard doing the job for a period of five or ten years. The difficulty lies in finding a way to appoint them that would be seen to be democratic. So in the meantime, I have reluctantly to concede that continuation of the monarchy may be our least bad option. Long live the King! Susan Alexander,…

• Speed up cooking time by using smaller ingredients: orzo instead of larger pasta shapes, for instance, or by baking two small potatoes rather than a huge one. Cut vegetables into small cubes before cooking. • Grill veg and other food instead of roasting. A macaroni cheese or cottage pie can be heated through fully in the microwave and then finished off under the grill for a few minutes to brown the top. • Choose the smallest pan with the least amount of water you can, and keep the lid on if possible. Measure rice in a teacup and add twice the amount of water rather than draining after cooking. • Try airfrying instead of using the oven. Most airfryers can bake, grill and reheat, and food cooks quickly with…

Jean-Luc Godard 1930-2022 Unquestionably “one of the greatest filmmakers of all time”, Jean-Luc Godard, who has died aged 91, “began his career with the movie equivalent of a cannon shot”, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time magazine. Filmed with a handheld camera on the streets of Paris, and starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in his breakout role, À bout de souffle “took the conceits of classic American gangster films”, intensified them, and “wrought them into a form, and a work, both playful and devastating”. The film, which came out in 1960, was not the first of the French New Wave: François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups had come out a year earlier. But it became the standard-bearer for a movement that redefined “what cinema could be. You could take complete…

“Businesses are the beating heart of the UK economy,” declared Jacob Rees-Mogg, as he announced the new Energy Bill Relief Scheme on Wednesday. No kidding. Thousands of small businesses have been waiting with bated breath. What was delivered? • From 1 October, gas and electricity bills will be fixed for all firms (and public sector organisations and charities) for six months – marking a discount of around 45% on current wholesale energy prices. Prices are expected to be capped at £211 per MWh for electricity, and £75 per MWh for gas. • The scheme will be reviewed after three months, with an option to extend support for “vulnerable businesses”. It’s unknown which sectors will qualify. • The package will apply to companies that agreed fixed deals on or after 1…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1330 An Ettinger pass holder and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 3 October. Send it to The Week Crossword 1330, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive an Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) travel pass holder in assorted colours, which retails at £115, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Check trainers for repair (8) 5 Good scope for early move on board (6) 9 Teams admitting bridge opponents for adults (8) 10 Problem with Chambers is what you play down under (6) 12 Want changes connected with unknown sort of port (5) 13…