Why the Palestine protests are rattling our universities

Napoleon’s plans for the Channel Tunnel

The Channel Tunnel was “a project 192 years in the making”, says Roger Domeneghetti in The New European. The first detailed proposal to link Britain and France came as early as 1802, when horse-drawn stagecoaches were still the main mode of travel. French mining engineer Albert Mathieu-Favier “conceived two nine-mile tunnels meeting at an artificial island to be built in an area of shallow water”. Paved and with vaulted roofs, the tunnels “would have been lit by oil lamps and ventilated by huge iron chimneys reaching through the waves above”. In a temporary lull in hostilities between London and Paris, Napoleon discussed the proposal with the former British foreign secretary Charles James Fox.

When fighting resumed, the idea was scrapped – and in the coming decades, the viability of the tunnel mirrored the “fluctuating relationship” between the two countries. Some were worried the tunnel could aid a French invasion: British newspaper cartoons depicted “armies of frogs in battle uniform” emerging from it. From 1880 to 1882, a tunnel about a mile long had been dug at each end before a diplomatic spat brought efforts to a halt. This was despite the British company involved attempting to soothe concerns with “plans to install a portcullis over the entrance and mine the tunnel so it could be blown up in the event of attack”. Even when Britain and France became firm allies in the 20th century, it wasn’t until 1994 that the project finally came to fruition.

We’ve been “much too sanguine” about children and smartphones

A century from now, says Jemima Lewis in The Daily Telegraph, historians will look back at this period, when we allowed our children to have smartphones, with “queasy incredulity”. It’ll be like how we marvel at the fact that public executions were once considered a form of popular entertainment. “How was something so obviously wrong ever considered normal?” Last week, the National Crime Agency sent out an “unprecedented” alert to schools, warning that cases of so-called “sextortion” have increased eightfold. Sextortion is where criminals masquerading as teenagers flirt with children online, convince them to send nude photos, then threaten to make the pictures public if they don’t comply with their demands. Girls are typically forced to keep sending more (“and increasingly explicit”) photos; boys, who make up most cases, are generally asked for money.

You may think this sounds extreme, but I know three children – “sweet, sensible, much-loved children” – who have got in “serious danger” after being groomed by paedophiles via their smartphones. “Snapchat was flagged in nearly half the crimes involving child abuse imagery last year.” For my generation of parents, it’s probably too late. Not having grown up with all this technology, we have been “much too sanguine” about giving it to our kids: more than 95% of 12- to 15-year-olds have their own smartphones. But the next generation may be luckier. Almost 60% of parents in the UK want the devices banned for under-16s, an idea the government is now considering. Similar moves are afoot in France. The tide, finally, is turning. “You can almost hear the parents of the world weeping with relief.”

👾 For this week’s Heroes and Villains, click here.

The late Raymond Briggs had a curious tradition with his friends, says The Times. Every milestone birthday, they would give the writer and illustrator “a lifesize effigy of himself, the more bad taste the better”. For his 50th he was given a papier-mâché Briggs in a coffin as part of a funeral-themed birthday party. For his 60th, the effigy was sitting on the loo – a nod to his 1970s children’s book, Father Christmas. For his 70th the creation was pushing a Zimmer frame; for his 80th, a shrunken figure in a wheelchair. And so, when the creator of The Snowman died in 2022, aged 88, it made perfect sense for his friends to honour his memory by gathering together all the effigies and burning them in a celebratory bonfire. They called it “the Grand Burning of the Briggs”.

Man’s thousand-year quest to fly like a bird

Before the Wright brothers made the first powered flight in 1903, there was a “wildly dangerous and largely forgotten” history of aviation experiments, says Joe Fassler in LitHub. Records show attempts at birdlike flight “going back at least 1,000 years”. The ninth-century Andalusian polymath Abbas Ibn Firnas “supposedly experimented with a feather-covered winged glider that carried him some distance”, though he badly injured his back when landing. In the 11th century, a Benedictine monk named Eilmer, who believed the myth of Daedalus and Icarus was “literally true”, attached handmade wings to his arms and legs and launched himself from the tower of Malmesbury Abbey. “He soared over 600 feet before smashing back into the earth, shattering both legs on impact.”

The countless attempts to fly like a bird weren’t entirely in vain. In the late 19th century, Otto Lilienthal, a “brilliant and athletic German”, was able to glide “thousands of feet” with the contraptions he built “modelled on bird anatomy”. Yet he wasn’t content with gliding: powered flight was what he was after. Lilienthal eventually died when he crashed a glider in 1896 – and one of the people who read his obituary was a certain bicycle salesman in Dayton, Ohio named Wilbur Wright. Wright later recalled that the news sparked his own experiments with flight, experiments which “would change his life, and ultimately ours”.