Dear Reader,

This being Bank Holiday Monday, here are a few highlights from our new site: The Knowledge Premium.

To see the latest edition of The Knowledge Premium, which is updated weekly, click here.

The newsletter returns tomorrow.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell
Editor-in-chief

Clarkson’s Farm

A decade ago, Jeremy Clarkson was asked when he last cried. “My name is Jeremy,” he replied. “That makes me a man, and that means I don’t snivel.” But that was before his farming days, says Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. In series three of Clarkson’s Farm, the former Top Gear presenter gets some adorable piglets – and quickly learns that pig farming can be a “heartbreaking business”. As he laments to the butcher: “All farmers love their animals, and then they kill them.” The pig-rearing is part of a challenge Clarkson sets at the start of the series: he’ll try to make money from the 500 “unfarmed” acres of his Cotswolds farm – the woodland and hedgerows, basically – while his trusty sidekick Kaleb Cooper takes charge of the arable land. They have 12 months to see who makes the most profit.

One of the best things about this show – which broke Amazon Prime’s viewing records last series – is Clarkson’s “complete lack of self-consciousness”, says Vicky Jessop in the Evening Standard. Whether he’s using a Henry the Hoover to suck blackberries off a hedgerow, or putting up a pig-pen back to front, he’s “game for pretty much anything”. But while there’s plenty of stupidity, there’s a lot of heart, too. Clarkson and his support team – Kaleb, girlfriend Lisa, land agent Charlie, and the rest – are refreshingly honest about the challenges of farming. So yes, this is “more of the same”, and with another season already in the pipeline there’s more to come yet. “But gosh dang, isn’t it enjoyable.”

The first four episodes of series three are available on Amazon Prime Video now; the remainder air on 10 May.

To read our other TV and film recommendations, click here

A Muslim and a Jew Go There
This series hosted by Sayeeda Warsi and David Baddiel is “proof that you can argue politely about Israel”, says James Marriott in The Times. In each episode, the two hosts – a Muslim and a Jew respectively – discuss the Gaza war and whatever related controversy has hit the headlines that week, from anti-Semitism in the Labour party to pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses. It manages to be “good-humoured but serious”, and drives home how unusual it is to “hear both sides at once”. 50m per episode.

Cautionary Tales
Journalist Tim Harford discusses real stories of mistakes – from simple human error to tragic catastrophes and hilarious fiascos – and what we can learn from them. This episode focuses on the art of public speaking, and offers two starkly contrasting stories that show how veering off-script can go one of two ways. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr inspired millions with his often-spontaneous speeches; jewellery store owner Gerald Ratner destroyed his multi-million-dollar business by calling his products “total crap”. 35m.

Growing Solo
This new BBC series follows the life of retired political journalist Max Cotton as he embarks on a year-long challenge to live entirely off the land at his five-acre smallholding in Somerset. In the first episode, Cotton calculates what it will take to leave the modern world of weekly shops behind, and introduces listeners to the inhabitants of his farm: two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cow named Brenda. 14m.

How to defy political gravity
In the latest episode of How to win an election – hosted by The Times’s Matt Chorley – Peter Mandelson, Daniel Finkelstein and Polly Mackenzie look at whether the Tories can do anything do stop Keir Starmer winning an election. No, they agree. Keir Starmer’s slogan, says Finkelstein, is: “Everything in this country’s broken so let’s do absolutely nothing about it.” That’s what he’s offering, and people seem to find it “quite reassuring”. All three strategists agree that party leadership elections, especially when the party is in government, should be decided by MPs alone – and not (as with Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss) by party members. The trio also discuss Scotland, agreeing that the SNP’s attempt to please voters from all sides by blaming Westminster for everything has finally come unstuck. 43m.

📚 Audiobook: A History of Women in 101 Objects
Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects tells the story of female progress through the small but significant objects that have changed women’s lives over the centuries. This “cabinet of curiosities” ranges from the practical (a Miele vacuum cleaner) and the sartorial (the bikini) to the political (Simone de Beauvoir’s Manifesto of the 343, a petition to legalise abortion). The recently released audiobook is narrated by an impressive cast of 101 female directors, writers, actors and activists, including Kate Winslet, Margaret Atwood and Christiane Amanpour. 13hrs 12m.

🎙️To read more of our podcast recommendations, click here

Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss

Most prime ministerial memoirs are a “multi-volume snoozefest”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. But Liz Truss’s account of her ill-fated 49 days in Downing Street – with the “brilliantly presumptive” title Ten Years to Save the West – is the first that could be described as a “romp”. It is, of course, full of laughs. When Dominic Raab vacated his Chevening grace-and-favour residence, he “left behind protein drinks in the fridge with ‘Raab’ written on them”. Truss is kept awake by the Horse Guards clock that chimes every quarter-hour, and is evicted from No 10 “before her furniture could be delivered” – this is one of those farces “in which the very set collapses”. Yet her wider point – that the “administrative state” stopped her implementing economic reforms – is a serious and undeniable one.

Truss might think she was “the serious thinker in a frivolous political world”, says Max Hastings in The Sunday Times, but the book reminds us of her “sheer silliness”. With her complaints about the “difficulties of making hair appointments” and convincing Ocado that her Downing Street delivery address wasn’t a hoax, she comes across as the “Mrs Pooter of politics”. Practically the only thing she expresses regret for is being unsuccessful in persuading others that she was right: “I assumed people understood what I was trying to do,” she writes. Instead, she blames the media and other politicians for not taking her seriously. How foolish she is for publishing this now, just as memories of her idiocy were beginning to fade. “I have encountered 10 prime ministers and read all of their memoirs, and from none of the latter does any author emerge so diminished as does Truss.”

Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss is available to buy here

To read our other book reviews, click here