Elephants are SUPER SUCKERS and can inhale foods at dizzying speeds of 335mph – 30 times faster than a human sneeze Researchers had elephants pick up a variety of pieces of food of different sizes They found if there were over 10 items of squash squares they used suction This involved sucking it up into … Read more
Viewers tuning into the first episode of BBC One’s festive remake of the 1947 classic Black Narcissus found themselves unable to watch as a plucky nun tackled a ‘terrifying’ set of stone steps above a steep ravine – branding it an ‘elf and safety nightmare’. The 54-minute long episode, set in a decaying former palace … Read more
BOOK OF THE WEEK Sybille Bedford by Selina Hastings (Chatto & Windus £25, 432 pp) You were very sweet as a baby,’ Sybille Bedford’s German mother Lisa said to Sybille when she was about five in 1916, ‘but you’re going to be very dull for a long time — perhaps ten or 15 years. We’ll speak … Read more
It seems controversial tycoon Richard Desmond has a track record for clumsy efforts to lobby the Tories, and Boris Johnson in particular. In 2009, the then owner of the Express newspaper group had a bee in his bonnet about the then Mayor of London’s cycle hire scheme because of plans for a rental station outside his … Read more
MEMOIR THE SHAPELESS UNEASE: A YEAR OF NOT SLEEPING by Samantha Harvey (Cape £12.99, 192 pp) There can be few people for whom Samantha Harvey’s dazzling, dizzying trip through the nightmare world of the sleepless will be completely foreign. Who among us hasn’t lain awake at night counting backwards from one thousand? I can sometimes … Read more