A surprise phone call from the prime minister

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Kamala Harris, at least according to Donald Trump, who told Elon Musk a picture of his opponent on the cover of Time magazine made her look like “the most beautiful actress ever to live”. In fact, the former president continued, “she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania”.

Villains
Veolia, the waste disposal company, for refusing to allow one of its London street cleaners to accept a gift of £3,000. The contractor told 63-year-old Paul Spiers that Bromley Council’s rules forbade him from accepting the money, which had been raised by locals for him to go on holiday. Happily, a travel agent then set up a competition for a free trip with very specific criteria: applicants had to “love Elvis Presley, be aged between 62 and 64, be loved by the local community, be a street cleaner in Beckenham and have the surname Spiers”. Spiers “won”, and this time Veolia had no objections.

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Prince William, for winning “Best Olympic Scruff”, says Danielle Cohen in The Cut. In a video congratulating Team GB, the heir to the throne debuted some carefully crafted “late-summer stubble”. Facial hair is a point of deep contention in the Royal Family: Queen Elizabeth reportedly hated Prince Harry’s “robust” ginger beard, and Harry claims William tried to get him to shave it off before his wedding in 2018, because he was still bitter about having to ditch his own beard 10 years earlier.

Villains
Waitrose, for sneakily reducing the size of its loo roll. I’ve had a look with the tape measure, says Pieter Snepvangers in The Telegraph, and the new stuff is 24.9% smaller. The supermarket has defended itself by noting a price reduction, from £8.50 per 16 rolls to £7. But that’s a drop of only 18.75% – meaning a discrepancy of more than 6%. It’s unacceptable, really. “Few things are as essential in life as toilet paper.”

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British runner Rose Harvey, who managed to finish the marathon at the Paris Olympics despite breaking her leg during the race. The 31-year-old said it was clear from about two miles in that it was going to be “pretty painful”, but she persevered and got around the 26.2 mile course in 2:51:03. She was later diagnosed with a stress fracture of her femur. “Any other race I would have stopped,” she told BBC News, “but I just had to get to that finish line, I had to do the Olympic marathon.”

The “unsettling ordinariness” of the Nazis

We typically think of the Nazis as “barbarians”, says Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times, but the troubling reality is that they were “nothing of the kind” – which makes their heinous crimes even more disturbing. As historian Richard J Evans details in his new book, Hitler and his associates were “human beings with very familiar flaws and foibles”. Many “loved high culture and had modern, even progressive tastes”. Hitler himself was “unsettlingly ordinary”: a teetotal vegetarian who adored “operas, films, fast cars and cream cakes”. Goebbels wrote a doctoral thesis on romantic drama; foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was a passionate violinist and competed in Canada’s national figure-skating championship. The stormtroopers’ leader, Ernst Röhm, “collected engravings, adored Wagner and was an excellent pianist”. Even one of the most repulsive of all senior Nazis, the coarsely anti-Semitic Julius Streicher, “loved nature, painted watercolours and wrote articles about Nordic fairytales”.

So what caused them to commit such unspeakable atrocities, and drove so many Germans to follow them? There were some obvious commonalities between the “disparate characters”. They were all steeped in nationalist, conservative values and committed to an “ideal of masculine comradeship”. All were “inured to violence” and, perhaps crucially, most had experienced “some kind of loss” – from a failed business to disgraced parents or simply “the trauma of defeat” in 1918. To them, as to so many Germans, “Hitler’s message offered hope and redemption”: he promised “stability, pride and self-respect after years of humiliation”. Even after the war, many Nazis still refused to accept they had done anything wrong – the defendants at Nuremberg “genuinely couldn’t understand why they were in the dock”. It’s testament to the success of Hitler’s mission to “reconfigure German morality”.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans is available here.

Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams On Tour is “the most entertaining, touching series you’ll watch this year”, says Anita Singh in The Telegraph. The first series in 2022 saw the England cricket legend take a bunch of kids from his hometown of Preston and introduce them to the sport. This time around he wanted to take the boys on tour to India, but halfway through filming, disaster struck: his horrific car crash while filming Top Gear. Flintoff speaks openly and honestly about its impact on him, from the life-changing injuries to his flashbacks and anxiety. And he and the team do eventually make it to Kolkata, where they help each other through myriad challenges – not least the cuisine, with one boy swearing off all food bar the Pringles he buys on the flight. All in all, it makes for inspiring viewing. Four episodes, 1 hour each.