Dan Jones

Wednesday

Dan Jones

There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob

From our UK edition

If political reality means we can’t tax the overweight, then at least let’s have tax breaks for those who bother to take exercise, writes unashamed metrosexual Dan Jones Hands up if you employ a personal trainer. Actually, that’s a trick question. If you can raise your arm without wincing in pain then either you don’t have a personal trainer, or yours is letting you slack off. (Get a new one.) For those of you with your arms pinned to the sides of your bodies from the sheer build-up of lactic acid — ask your trainer — well done. A few years ago your friends might have sneered at you and called you a metrosex-ual.

Dan Jones

The long and the short of it

From our UK edition

An apocryphal housemaster is asked, on the occasion of his retirement, how he intends to fill his days. ‘Gibbon,’ he replies, succinctly. Real-life housemasters might now answer ‘Sumption’. Such is the intimidating length and fine detail of Jonathan Sumption QC’s history of the Hundred Years War. Divided Houses is the third volume. The Hundred Years War was not a single war, nor did it last for 100 years. Rather it was a long and wearisome period of mutual hostility and violence between England and France, which lasted from the 1330s until the 1450s. Scotland, Wales, the German principalities, the Iberian kingdoms, the Italian city states and the papacy were all dragged in at various moments. It was in every sense a bloody mess.