Europe needs its own Elon Musk

Hero
Taylor Swift, for making sure none of her adoring fans miss out by selling “no view” tickets to her final Eras tour shows in Vancouver next month. The $16 seats are behind the stage in BC Place stadium, meaning fans will be able to see neither Taylor herself nor the big screens of her performance. The tickets are already being resold for more than $1,000.

Villain
The Sly Old Fox, a pub in Birmingham which is being asked to change its name because it is “derogatory”, “inaccurate” and “unfair” to foxes. The animal rights group Peta says the word “sly” should be replaced with “clever”, to reflect society’s “ever-evolving empathy for animals”.

Hero
Philippines vice president Sara Duterte, who says she has hired a hitman to take out the country’s president, the president’s wife and the speaker of the house, in the event that she is assassinated. Duterte announced the innovative security measure amid worsening relations with President Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr, saying the threat was “no joke”.

Villain
Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Indian food delivery firm Zomato, who advertised a chief of staff job for which the successful applicant would receive no pay for the first year and would instead have to donate $23,700 to charity. Goyal said the role would provide “10x more learnings” than a management class, before claiming it was all a stunt to “filter” out uncommitted candidates. He received more than 18,000 applications.

The woman of substance who sold 91 million books

Barbara Taylor Bradford lived in a “heavily perfumed whirl” of Chanel blouses and pricey jewellery, says Claire Allfree in The Independent. The author, who died this week aged 91, published 40 books and sold 91 million copies, which for a time made her Britain’s second richest woman after the late Queen. She had a prodigious work-rate: she rose at 6.30am every morning to write for 10 hours straight, with Saturday afternoons her only time off. So it’s no wonder the first draft of her 1979 debut A Woman of Substance – about a servant girl who builds a vast business empire – ran to more than 1,500 pages and weighed a whopping 7.5kg. It went on to become one of the bestselling novels of all time, with the 1984 TV adaptation, starring Jenny Seagrove and Liam Neeson, still Channel 4’s most-watched series ever.

Born in Leeds in 1933 to working-class parents, she followed the rags-to-riches trajectory of most of her strong-minded female protagonists, once saying “there was no way I was going to end up slaving in some textile factory, married off and perpetually pregnant”. Instead, by 18 she was editor of the women’s pages of the Yorkshire Evening Post, and by 20 a columnist for the Evening Standard. Never photographed without make-up and an “impeccable” blow-dry, she only ever stayed in The Dorchester during her visits to London and named one of her bichon frisé dogs Chammie, short for Champagne. One interviewer described her as “a nicer Joan Collins” – who, as it happens, was an old friend. But among all the “old-world luxury”, she never dropped her northern accent, and once said: “It’s a good thing I’m a down-to-earth girl from Yorkshire with my feet on the ground, otherwise it might have gone to my head.”

Le Bureau
The Agency, a George Clooney-produced remake of French spy thriller Le Bureau, comes out on Paramount+ today, with an all-star cast including Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere and Jeffrey Wright. The reviews are mixed, but what better opportunity to go back, if you haven’t, and watch the spectacularly gripping original, in which an undercover agent comes in from the cold but finds it impossible to let go of his false identity. Le Figaro called it the greatest series ever made in France, and I can see why, says Alexander Larman in The Daily Telegraph. It’s a rare treat for “all but the most subtitles-averse”, offering a mixture of “adrenaline-pumping thrills and genuinely head-scratching moral dilemmas”. All five series of Le Bureau are on Paramount+.

Ruthie’s Table 4
I had my first date with Elton John just a day after meeting him, says David Furnish on Ruthie’s Table 4. He invited me round to his London house for a Chinese takeaway, and when I arrived, there were four giant boxes of food from Mr Chow’s on the kitchen counter. “Who else is coming?” I asked. Elton told me that because he didn’t know what I liked, “he ordered the entire menu”. 40 minutes.