The grizzled British general who prevented World War Three

What Jilly Cooper understands about female desire

Jilly Cooper’s horny hero Rupert Campbell-Black is a bold choice of protagonist for a new programme on Disney+, says Sarah Ditum in UnHerd. He is “irredeemably posh”, loves blood sports and, worst of all, “he’s a Tory MP”. In Rivals, the main object of his affections, Taggie, is perhaps 19 (he is in his mid-thirties). “He announces his interest in her by sticking his hand up her skirt while she’s waitressing.” By contemporary mores, this sort of behaviour – “assault, obviously” – marks him out as “not just a cad, but as a predator”. Imagine a male character in a novel by Sally Rooney – Cooper’s successor as “queen of the dirty book” – killing a fox or groping a waitress and “being rewarded for it with a throbbingly hot sex scene”. In a Rooney novel, “you are only supposed to be turned on by what’s good for you”.

And yet, this is precisely what makes Rivals such a delight. In Cooper’s world, “erotic possibility is everywhere, and pleasure doesn’t come with a morality test”. In one scene, Lizzie (a Cooper proxy played by Katherine Parkinson) looks around a garden party and wonders if everyone there is committing adultery: “the answer is probably yes, and the implication is that this is not necessarily a bad thing”. It might not be a model we’d like our own spouses to follow, but it’s “undeniably quite sexy”. And as the number of “shapely male bums” demonstrates, this is a show “absolutely designed for the female gaze”. What joy, after years of dreary moralising, for a programme to let women be “free to want bad things, and not be told that there’s a terrible price to pay for getting them”.

Human tragedy is sometimes the price of stability

Throughout history, victors have repeatedly “exploited battlefield success to impose territorial changes and population shifts”, says Max Hastings in The Times. Alsace and Lorraine spent centuries changing hands between the French and Germans, depending on the outcome of the latest war. The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, once East Prussian Königsberg, was seized by Stalin with no more justification than that he could. And after World War Two, the Russians drove 14 million Germans out of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of whom half a million died on their journey west. Tales of those evicted are harrowing, but as historian John Keegan once told me: “Say what you like about the cruelty of those expulsions, they resolved an issue that had dogged European politics for centuries – that of German minorities in the east.”

I thought of this last week, when the editor of the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote that the goal of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was to “create a Jewish state from the river [Jordan] to the sea”. I believe Israel’s government will, sooner or later, annex the West Bank, because it has the military power to do so and the Palestinians lack powerful allies abroad, even in the Arab world. And because, 50 years ago, I heard Netanyahu say that in Israel’s next war it should “seek to get every Arab out of the West Bank”. What few in the West are willing to acknowledge is that it’s possible – “not probable, but possible” – that this “could ultimately stabilise the region”, albeit at frightful human cost, as the German expulsions did in 1945. If Israel decides to exploit its military dominance to “enlarge its territory and rid itself of proximate enemies”, it will follow centuries of precedents in which “justice has seldom, if ever, been a factor”.

A “cocaine blizzard” and lobster by the crate

The Fleetwood Mac album Tusk, which was released 45 years ago this week, was one of the boldest and most bewildering records in rock ‘n’ roll history, says Mark Beaumont in The Independent. And the band had a hell of a time making it. The whole affair was a “cocaine blizzard”. Lobster and champagne were shipped into the recording studio by the crateload – “it had to be the best, with no thought of what it cost”. The band indulged so prolifically that over the 10 months it took to record the album, studio bills ballooned to a then-record $1.4m. The Tusk tour was “just as head-spinning”: pink grand pianos were winched through the windows of hotel rooms; a tent was set up beside the stage so the band could snort lines mid-show. As guitarist Lindsey Buckingham says, with admirable understatement: “Everything just got somewhat decadent around the edges.”

It’s amazing the album was made at all, given what was going on within the group. Band members Christine and John McVie had recently divorced, and Stevie Nicks, who had previously dated Buckingham, took up with the band’s drummer Mick Fleetwood, “exacerbating tensions”. (Rumours that Nicks almost quit the band because the album was named after the nickname Fleetwood used for his penis have never been confirmed.) But the bandmates knew they were greater than the sum of their parts, and got the album done – in all its madcap glory. As Buckingham puts it, his aim was for the producers to listen to the record in a Tuesday afternoon board meeting and go: “What the fuck was that?”