Meghan made her Paris Fashion Week debut at Balenciaga (self invited) a brand embroiled in a child sex exploitation imagery scandal, while reportedly knowing her own father was under investigation for alleged child sexual abuse. The contrast is staggering.

The moment Cpt Darling realised he wouldn’t get to marry Doris. “Made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply says, ‘bugger’.” Poignant scene from the incomparable final ep of #Blackadder Goes Forth with the superb Tim McInnerny. Vid: BlackadderQtes

Always be prepared for the worst 😂

The best general of WW2 might be a man most people have never heard of: William Slim. No famous pistols. No riding crop. No glamorous desert duels. Just a stocky, square-jawed Englishman his troops called "Uncle Bill." And he pulled off what might be the greatest turnaround of the entire war. Slim wasn't supposed to be a general at all. He grew up in a family that had fallen on hard times. He worked as a clerk and a schoolteacher. He got into the army through a university officer training corps he wasn't even enrolled at. He was badly wounded at Gallipoli in WW1, then worked his way up the Indian Army with no money and no connections. In 1942, he was handed a disaster. The Japanese were steamrolling through Burma. Slim took command of the British forces there and led them on the longest retreat in British military history. Around 900 miles, through jungle and mountains, all the way back to India. They arrived starving, sick, beaten, and with almost nothing left. Slim later wrote openly about his own mistakes in that campaign. Generals almost never do that. In 1943, he was given command of the new 14th Army. On paper, it was a mess. It was the most diverse army Britain fielded in the war. Indians, Gurkhas, Britons, East and West Africans, Burmese. Dozens of languages. It got the worst equipment and the lowest priority, because Europe came first. Its men called it "the Forgotten Army." And it was being destroyed by disease. At one point, for every man wounded in battle, about 120 were falling sick, mostly from malaria. Slim's fix was simple and ruthless. Anti-malaria pills became an order, not a suggestion. Officers were held personally responsible. If too many men in a unit got sick, the commander got sacked. Sickness rates collapsed. Then he fixed the fear. The Japanese had won in 1942 by slipping around British units in the jungle and cutting them off, which caused panic and retreat. Slim's new rule: if you're surrounded, you don't run. You dig in, form a defensive "box," and the air force will supply you from the sky. In February 1944, it worked. At the "Admin Box" in Arakan, a Japanese attack surrounded a British-Indian force. The force held. Planes dropped supplies. The Japanese ran out of food and broke. It was the first major Japanese defeat on land in Burma. A month later, the Japanese launched their big gamble: an invasion of India itself, aimed at Imphal and Kohima. Slim did something that terrified London. He pulled his forces back onto the Imphal plain and let the Japanese come to him. They had brought only a few weeks of supplies, betting they could capture British stockpiles. They never did. At Kohima, the two sides fought across a tennis court at a few yards' distance. At Imphal, the British held for months while being supplied by air. The Japanese army starved in the hills. Out of roughly 85,000 men, tens of thousands died, many from hunger and disease. It was the worst defeat the Japanese army had ever suffered up to that point. Then Slim went on the offensive. In early 1945, he crossed the Irrawaddy River and made the Japanese believe his main attack was aimed at Mandalay. They rushed their forces there to defend it. Meanwhile, he had quietly sent an entire corps south through jungle trails, under radio silence, using fake signals traffic to hide the move. It burst out and seized Meiktila, the Japanese supply and communications hub, far behind their lines. The Japanese army in Burma was cut in two and collapsed. By May 1945, Rangoon was back in Allied hands. The army that had fled 900 miles in defeat had marched all the way back. And even then, Slim almost got fired. That same month, his superior tried to push him out. When word got around, the backlash was so severe that the superior was the one who ended up being replaced. Slim later became a field marshal, head of the British Army, and Governor-General of Australia. He called his memoir "Defeat into Victory." No title has ever been more honest.

One of my favourite lines…. …delivered with utterly superb timing! A Classic bit of #MorecambeAndWise with the equally wonderful #GlendaJackson Fine writing by #EddieBraben #StillBringingSunshine 👓☀️❤️ #EricAndErnie #QueenVictoria #PrinceAlbert #BenjaminDisraeli

Since the Harkles are obviously desperate for money and image rehabilitation, they’re going to try and erase what they’ve done for the past 6 years. Since the internet’s memory is unfortunately that of a goldfish, my mission on this app will be to continuously remind everyone every single heinous thing they’ve done not just to the royal family, but the UK, Commonwealth, & America. I haven’t forgotten, I hope you haven’t either. Stay tuned.😁 -P💞

This cake was made by a seriously talented woman in Cornwall; it has turntable pages painted with my b-in-law’s favourite animals & the conservation centre he set up in Vietnam. Even the magnifying glass was edible. I’ve never seen anything as good as this.

In 1940, British fighter pilots began noticing something deeply frightening about their aircraft. Push a Spitfire or Hurricane into a sharp dive, and the engine could suddenly splutter, lose its strength, or stop altogether. German pilots already understood the advantage. Their fuel-injected Messerschmitt Bf 109s could dive aggressively without suffering the same problem. British Merlin engines relied on carburetors, and when the aircraft experienced negative G forces, fuel rushed through the carburetor in the wrong way, leaving the engine without the mixture it needed. In a fight for your life, even a few seconds could mean everything. Then Beatrice Shilling stepped in. Shilling was an aeronautical engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, but she was far from the quiet, conventional engineer people might have expected. Before the war, she raced motorcycles at Brooklands, one of Britain’s most dangerous racing circuits. She became one of the few women to earn its prestigious Gold Star after completing a lap at more than 100 mph. She knew machines. Rather than attempting to rebuild the entire carburetor, Shilling found a remarkably simple answer: a tiny metal restrictor placed in the fuel system to control the sudden rush of fuel during negative-G maneuvers. From 1941 onward, Shilling and a small team traveled from RAF station to RAF station, fitting the modification directly onto fighter aircraft. The pilots soon gave the little device a nickname that would follow it into history. “Miss Shilling’s orifice.” It was not a perfect solution. Later carburetor technology eventually dealt with the problem more completely. But that little piece of metal gave RAF pilots something precious when they needed it most: an engine that was far less likely to betray them during combat, without having to wait for an entirely new engine design. And perhaps the best part of the story is the woman behind it. Before Beatrice Shilling helped keep British fighters alive in the sky, she had already been spending her weekends pushing motorcycle engines beyond 100 miles per hour on a dangerous racing circuit. When war placed a dangerous engine problem in front of her, she did what she knew best. She understood the machine.

This is Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World,” by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. The video is a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker, recorded at the Berlin Philharmonie in January 1966.

Our NHS, who art the envy of the world Hallowed be thy care Thy funding come Thy targets be missed In Bath as it is in Hounslow Give us this day our DEI officers And forgive us our illnesses As we forgive illness you visit upon us And lead us not into private care But deliver us from BUPA For thine is the budget, the funding and the spending Forever and ever, Amen

Lt-Cdr Kristian Ward, naval Harrier pilot who saved the lives of US soldiers pinned down by the Taliban – obituary telegraph.co.uk/gift/a372194…

Mystery solved. The Fairford Five were mounting a cosplay tribute to this famous book

Love this photo! Amy with her back to us in the sea with full kit, including trainers…sister Alison on the left and Gareth on the right. An amazing team. What a week!!