Latest news with #FleetStreet
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
How a beautiful London church inspired the tiered wedding cake and changed tradition forever
Tucked away just off Fleet Street, there's a church that might look like any other City chapel - but its spire helped give birth to a storied British tradition. Inspired by that pale, four-tiered steeple, a local baker created what became the prototype for the tiered wedding cake. In a sweet twist, the church's name is St Bride's. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire, the current church was completed by 1675 and its iconic spire added between 1701 and 1703. READ MORE: East London state school outperforms Eton with 250 straight As on A level results day READ MORE: TfL Oyster card for over 60s could be reviewed after stats reveal major problem At the time, its 226-foot height made it the tallest church in London after St Paul's, and it still holds the title of the second-highest Wren spire today. Back in the 18th century, wedding cakes were more often 'bride pies' rather than elaborate tiered creations. These could be sweet mince or savoury meat pies. The tale of how that changed goes that William Rich, a young baker's apprentice from nearby 3 Ludgate Hill, fell in love with his boss's daughter, Susannah Prichard, and he set out to impress her by creating an extravagant cake for their wedding. When he gazed up at St Bride's spire, he was inspired to craft a multi-tiered wedding cake. Some versions of the story claim the cake was for his daughter's wedding instead, but either way, the design became a template for the tiered cakes we know today. St Bride's has plenty more history up its sleeve. Long before that, it earned the nickname 'The Printer's Church' by hosting London's first printing press in its churchyard from around 1500. This deep-rooted connection cemented Fleet Street's later fame as the heart of the British newspaper industry. More recently, in March 2016, media titan Rupert Murdoch wed former supermodel Jerry Hall at St Bride's. Though their marriage didn't last, the historic pairing added another chapter to the church's story. Today, St Bride's still stands - restored after Blitz damage during WWII and rebuilt thanks to the support of the press community. Its crypt reveals Roman pavements and medieval remains, making it a living time capsule beneath the tiered spire. To see more videos from our London's Hidden Secrets series, visit the topic page here. Looking for more from MyLondon? Subscribe to our daily newsletters here for the latest and greatest updates from across London.
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Daily Mail
The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bedoyere: Pepys: diarist, sex addict...rapist
The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bedoyere (Abacus £25, 400pp) We have always known Pepys liked the occasional bit of nooky with a prostitute in an alley off Fleet Street, on his way home to his wife Elizabeth in Seething Lane. But if like me you have always brushed off that behaviour as 'that was just how things were in the 1660s, and I don't think he did it too often', it is time to think again. Unfortunately, as a new edition of his famous diaries illustrates all too vividly, we now have to add Pepys to the list of formerly respected famous figures who turn out to have fallen catastrophically short of acceptable sexual behaviour, to the point where their names are now mud. Most of us treasure Pepys as an essentially sound family-minded man, who buried his Parmesan during the Great Fire of London, made merry music round his table in the evenings, picked 'sparagus' from his garden, and sat up in bed late into the night talking and bickering with his dear wife. His diaries are close to our hearts because they give us a uniquely detailed glimpse into how one man's daily life was lived in those days: boats up and down the Thames, busy days in the Naval Office, fretting about over-expenditure on his wife's clothes, a hearty supper, and so to bed. All that will all change once you read historian Guy de la Bédoyère's newly transcribed selected extracts from the diaries. 'Selected' is the key word. De la Bédoyère has sifted the 1.25 million words of the diaries (written in shorthand between January 1660 and May 1669) down to 40,000 or 50,000 words of wall-to-wall filth and sleaze. He has left out all the charming, cosy stuff, and left in all the vile, predatory behaviour. When you read the diaries in this light, you'll see that Pepys was, in fact, a serial adulterer, a sex addict, a coercive predator, and a rapist. Pepys was so adept at hiding his behaviour that it wasn't till October 25, 1668, that Elizabeth caught him at it. She came downstairs one evening and saw him with one hand under the coats of their pretty 16-year-old servant girl Deb Willet, his other hand touching her genitals, or her 'cony' as he called them in the slang of the day. Elizabeth was distraught, and furious. In bed that evening, she ranted and raved, 'calling me a dog and a rogue', and threatened to publish his shame. Pepys minded desperately about his reputation. He was appalled that his bourgeois wife should think of going public with his dalliance. He wished she were more like the Queen, who was stoical about Charles II's flaunting of his mistresses. Elizabeth didn't go public, but she would not let the matter rest. Poor Deb, in tears, was sacked. Pepys, though sorry for her, still wanted 'to have the maidenhead of this girl which I should not doubt to have if I could get time to be with her'. In deepest secrecy he stalked Deb to the lane lined with brothels near Lincoln's Inn where she'd moved to. He tracked her down, forced her to pleasure him. With outrageous hypocrisy, 'gave her the best counsel I could to have a care of her honour', in other words advised her how to steer clear of predatory men. That sexual encounter with Deb is about the hundredth such encounter with women you'll have read about once you get to October 1668 in this shocking, sometimes exhausting chronicle of non-stop adulterous sex. Elizabeth didn't know the half of it. Her husband craved and achieved an illicit sexual encounter once every few days. De la Bédoyère writes, 'it's too glib to dismiss him as a 'sex pest' or a 'sex offender'. His behaviour is consistent with the neuropsychological disorder of addiction'. As well as the constant clandestine feeling-up of the maids who dressed him, he had a string of reliable women dotted about London, from Westminster to Deptford, who gave him sex on demand. Betty Martin (nee Lane) and her sister Doll were regulars. 'I f****d her under the chair two times,' he proudly writes of Betty, only afterwards worrying that he might have hurt her. Some of the women Pepys was seeing, such as Mrs Bagwell, were wives whose husbands wanted a promotion in the Navy. Mrs Bagwell's husband and in-laws may even have encouraged her to offer her body to Pepys, who as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board had a lot of influence when it came to promotions. There was a destitute naval widow, Mrs Burrows, who relied on Pepys for a widow's pension. He groomed her to accept that the way to get it was to let him have his wicked way with her. You know he's about to describe the details of the sex when he goes into 'polyglot': his own weird mixture of foreign languages interspersed with English. 'Did also tocar [touch] la thigh de su landlady'. 'I did what I would con ella' is a frequent one. 'Tocanda sa cosa con mi cosa' (touching her thing with my thing), 'hazer me hazer' (made me have an orgasm) . . . On and on it goes. Why did the secretive Pepys write it all down? You get the sense that he had an urge to 'chalk up' his sexual 'successes', and by doing so in shorthand, which itself was half in a foreign language, he doubly disguised them. When he was at his most predatory, he added extra consonants to English words, making them even harder (he hoped) for any future transcriber to decode. De la Bédoyère surmises that he recorded his encounters partly to expiate the guilt. Quite often, the women protested. Pepys clearly got a kick out of his sexual conquers under duress – which were essentially rapes. 'Many hard looks and sighs the poor wretch did give me,' he writes of Mrs Bagwell, 'and I think verily was troubled at what I did, but at last after many protestings I did arrive at what I would, with great pleasure.' This happened a few more times; once, he was so violent towards her that he injured his own hand while holding her down. 'Nevertheless in the end I had my will.' Add to this the way he domestically abused his wife, once giving her a black eye, and how he beat his servants with broomsticks and shut them in the cellar all night, and you get a new, deeply unattractive picture of the controlling Pepys beneath the surface of his cheerful bustle. I'm sure lots of men were at it, in those far less enlightened days, but that does not excuse him. He suffered from aching remorse – but that doesn't let him off the hook either. The scales have fallen from my eyes.
Los Angeles Times
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Vulture' is a provocative satire about a clueless scoop seeker in Gaza
'Doctor Strangelove,' 'Catch-22,' and 'M*A*S*H' collide in British journalist Phoebe Greenwood's blistering debut novel, 'Vulture,' a darkly comic, searing satire grounded in historic politics, suffused with incipient journalism and imbued with self-aggrandizement. Dominoes fall quickly and hard for 33-year-old budding reporter Sara Byrne, assigned as a freelance stringer by the fictional London Tribune to cover the 2012 Gaza War. She is ambitious and clueless. A nepo baby, she's certain a scoop will make her career and bring her out of the shadow of her recently deceased father, Bill, a foreign affairs writer considered a titan among the giants of Fleet Street. She finds herself ensconced in all-expenses-paid headquarters for foreign correspondents like her: the Beach, Gaza's four-star 'nice hotel,' an 'oasis of humanity in a blighted desert' featuring a room with uninterrupted sea views and shrimps in a clay pot. Observing the consequences of conflict, Sara soon realizes she is embedded in her own emotional war zone. The Beach is a convenient location for mingling, networking and seeking contacts through a fixer, someone essential for foreign correspondents. Sara's fixer is Nasser. He introduces her to an aged, grieving Palestinian widower who has lost his whole family in a bombing, but she doesn't see any point in even being in Gaza if the only story 'was sad Mohammeds talking about their dead kids and dead wives and neighbors and so forth.' She dismisses ongoing attacks, thinking everything is 'getting a bit samey.' A morgue visit elicits disinterest and little more than a body count, with Sara wondering if 'ten makes a massacre. I only counted six.' In a crowd of dead, limp bodies, she spots a sobbing Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and exclaims, 'What good is a crying photographer to anyone?' Heartless, she wants a bigger story, something that would put her byline on the front page. If Nasser can't get her into Hamas' underground tunnels 'where all the men running the war were hiding with their rockets,' then she would have to find someone who could. That someone appears to be Fadi, part of the fixer culture. He wore 'skin-tight black jeans and a black t-shirt with I Heart Brooklyn written on it in red, loopy letters' and 'stank of aftershave that could easily have been his sister's perfume and smoked cigarettes greedily.' His alluring credentials include an uncle he claims is a top fighter in the resistance who can get Sara a meet and greet with the leader of the Al-Yasser Front. Fadi promises a photo shoot with black balaclavas, guns and black flags. Foolhardily, defying Nasser's caution, Sara offers Fadi $1,000 for an excursion into the 'terror tunnels,' certain this will give her a proper story to write rather than what she terms 'monkey journalism.' Instead, after several delays and setbacks, she finds herself involved in an excruciatingly senseless death when the Beach's restaurant is bombed. Greenwood's graphic details are vivid and disturbing, from screaming that is 'a high unnatural wail that could shrivel souls like salted slugs' to air 'powdered with concrete and sulfur.' With dead bodies scattered around her, Sara, her hands dripping a trail of blood, retreats to her room, feeling responsible for one particularly shocking death. A series of flashbacks sprinkled throughout the novel highlight the deep psychological wounds Sara brings to her wartime experience. They underscore the guilt she carries from traumatic relationships with her father, mother and an adulterous affair. She believes she can never match her father's success as a reporter and on the first anniversary of his death, instead of visiting his grave, her mother takes her to a Sloane Square department store (because that's where she was taken as a child to buy shoes). Her clandestine involvement with her father's close friend and literary agent, whose wife is dying of cancer, implodes, leaving her a bitter 'other woman' living her own soap opera. It complicates a sexual encounter with an Italian cohort in Gaza. One of those flashback chapters, 'The Cradle of Civilization,' unravels the ironic, ravaging narcissistic, perhaps psychopathic implications of the title. Like the bird of prey seeking carrion, a foreign correspondent is characterized as a misery merchant or conflict cowboy, making a living from death and disaster. Even as their function is to give voice to the voiceless, Greenwood writes, their assignment is to 'stand in the middle of something,' to understand (from the Old English, understanden) and listen. As they do so, like Sara, seeking a 'defining moment' they might morph into news cannibals. And then there are the other birds. They are scattered throughout the novel. Keep an eye on them. Sara does. The literal ones and the magical, metaphorical ones. The first sighting is a simple one, easily dismissed. A manky bird on her balcony jolts Sara from semi-wakefulness right after she's had a dream of her dying father. Its habitual appearance becomes disconcerting. Is it just a bird or is it a harbinger of doom and death? She begins to think of it as a 'deranged stalker,' a 'horrifying, tapping shitting bird,' terrorizing her. Eventually, Sara, her health deteriorating from what appears as an undiagnosed illness, begins to hallucinate, seeing the bird's 'heart beating visibly under its feathered ribs, its metallic purple face,' culminating in believing the bird has transmogrified into a talking pigeon that is her father. Greenwood's stinging, salient novel remains relevant (the more things change, the more they stay the same), excoriating those who make a business of war whether it's public or personal. As the owner of the Beach observes: 'War may be hell but it's one hell of an employer.' 'Vulture' is a provocative, uncompromising powerhouse of a read. Papinchak, a former university English professor, is an award-winning book critic in the Los Angeles area.
Telegraph
02-08-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Telegraph crossword solvers supported the Allied victory. Can you crack our modern GCHQ puzzle?
If you look at today's prize cryptic crossword, you'll see something fishy going on. The clues are full of references to espionage and intelligence work, and we're even told that GCHQ have hidden one of the clues – with solvers are challenged to find it. This puzzle was written the Second World War. With the world teetering on the brink of disaster, the War Office needed to find the brightest minds to crack the German Enigma cipher, and so turned to the Telegraph's crossword solvers. During the war, paper shortages shrank the Telegraph to just six pages but the crossword was still published every day and received considerable attention. In late 1941, a flurry of letters debated whether the puzzle had become too easy. One solver even boldly claimed to be able to crack the prize cryptic in just six minutes. This provoked W A J Gavin, a magazine proprietor in the early part of the century, to put up a stake of £100 to challenge readers to back up their claims. This sum, about £4,000 in today's money, would be donated to support the war effort if the solvers triumphed. Gavin was so sceptical that he allowed competitors not just six, but a full 12 minutes to demonstrate their prowess and win the wager. Crack the code Arthur Watson, the Telegraph's editor, invited readers keen to pick up the gauntlet to send in their names. On January 10 1942, 25 competitors gathered at the Telegraph offices in Fleet Street to put their solving skills to the test. First to finish was Vere Chance of Orpington, although in his haste he misspelt a word and was disqualified. The winner was a Mr Hawes of Dagenham, who cantered home in seven minutes 57.5 seconds and won a cigarette lighter. The puzzle used in the competition was subsequently published in the newspaper, accompanied by a short article praising the 'five swift-moving minds' who won the wager against Gavin. What the competitors didn't know was that their endeavours were being monitored by the War Office. Enigma, a cipher machine originally developed by the Dutch, could encode messages in billions of ways, and typically changed settings every 24 hours. With cryptography vital to the war effort, crossword solvers were seen as possessing the analytical and lateral-thinking skills needed to help crack these codes. 'We were very good at crosswords,' one veteran Bletchley Park codebreaker recalled. 'And anything to do with anagrams.' 'A matter of national importance' Shortly after the competition, the War Office contacted competitors, inviting them to meet an officer of the General Staff 'on a matter of national importance'. Stanley Sedgwick, an accountancy clerk, recalled going to Whitehall and signing the Official Secrets Act, before being inducted into Bletchley Park on the strength of his performance in the competition. The work done there by the codebreakers devised methods which allowed the Allies to decipher the Axis Powers' communications. This vital information, called 'Ultra' because it was the highest level of classified intelligence, was necessary to support military operations, saving countless lives and playing an indispensable role in the Allied victory. In tribute to the historical links between the Telegraph's crossword and Bletchley Park, GCHQ have laid down a solving challenge for 2025 to match that set by Gavin in 1942. In the words of Colin, GCHQ's Chief Puzzler: 'For this centenary puzzle we have produced what we hope is a fun puzzle, but one which reflects the work of GCHQ and other intelligence agencies. 'Every clue has a relevant reference, including to our history, our current signals intelligence and Cyber Security work on national security and serious crime, and our wider relationships with the military and overseas. The kind of thinking required to solve puzzles helped codebreakers at Bletchley Park and remains relevant to the complex problems we solve today. I hope you enjoy it.' If any further inducement to attempt the puzzle were needed, it comes with a very special prize: guided tours of Bletchley Park. The 'swift-moving minds' of today are invited to take up a unique challenge, which they can choose to crack in 12 minutes or to savour at their leisure, as they prefer.
Times
23-07-2025
- Times
Interview with porn actress Bonnie Blue goes with a bang
I recently interviewed Bonnie Blue, aka Tia Billinger of Derbyshire, the OnlyFans 'content creator' who claims to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. (My piece will be in Saturday's Times Magazine.) It was a bleakly fascinating couple of hours in the murkiest end of porn culture, with one lighter moment. The room we'd been allocated was a glass box in the midst of the Sunday Times newsroom and at about 5.30pm a leaving ceremony must have taken place. I knew this because suddenly all the journalists in the outer office began rhythmically thumping their desks. This is an ancient — and sometimes rather moving — tradition going back to Fleet Street's hot metal days when a departing colleague, or an apprentice who'd finished his training, was led out of the building while everyone bashed their metal rulers on tables to make a celebratory din. And this is how I found myself explaining to a rather puzzled Bonnie Blue that we call this 'banging out'. It is now three months since the Supreme Court ruling brought clarity to the meaning of sex under the Equality Act. Many organisations, especially sporting bodies, seem relieved they are now legally compelled to do what they'd wanted all along, ie override a tiny activist minority to protect female spaces, categories and employees. But for some gender soldiers the war will never be over. On the BBC website is a court report about a 'woman' called Joanna Rowland-Stuart, a 'wife' who is charged with picking up her own samurai sword then stabbing and slicing her husband Andrew to death. Only many paragraphs down are we told this person is transgender and there are no women in this story. A man has been charged with killing another man. It is male-on-male violence. Yet in the BBC's fantasy world a woman buys a samurai sword and chops up her husband. There have also been some astonishing pronouncements in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, concerning a nurse of 30 years' service with an unimpeachable record, suspended by NHS Fife for asking to undress without being watched by a male doctor, Dr Beth Upton. Isla Bumba (salary £50K), NHS Fife's 'equality lead', was asked under oath if she was female. 'No one knows' their own sex, she said, unless they've had their chromosomes tested. When Dr Kate Searle was asked the same question, she replied 'It's on my birth certificate … It's a decision made at birth by the people delivering the baby. I'm not an expert in it.' She is in fact a senior A&E consultant. I wonder what she thinks is observed in utero during a 20-week pregnancy scan. I bump into an acquaintance I've not seen in person for five years but whose photos I often view on Instagram. I've always regarded her as the most beautiful woman I know, yet I can barely follow our conversation for thinking: what did she do to her lovely face? Her cheeks bulge with fillers, her mouth is strangely swollen. I imagine her staring into the mirror despairing at the hollowings and thinnings of age and thinking 'just a little bit here, a tad more there'. 'Aesthetics' doctors are happy to take your money and will rarely say 'stop'. Her face doesn't really look younger, just… odd. The saddest thing is that with her bone structure and skin she'd have been beautiful at any age. A very droll, self-deprecating interview with Bill Nighy on Radio 4's This Cultural Life made me realise I hadn't watched him in much else except Love Actually. So I checked out his other work and found on Apple TV David Hare's 2011-14 plays The Worricker Trilogy with Nighy as a cynical, elegantly tailored renegade spy. You think nothing much has changed in a decade, that we are the same society just with more sophisticated phones. But the trilogy's subject matter, the post-9/11 world order, a PM's dodgy deals and secret rendition seem so small-fry now. Yeah, Johnny Worricker, you ain't seen nothing yet.
