The Kinky King of Europe

For Juan Carlos, the former king of Spain, the romantic setting of choice for assignations was a van parked behind his palace in Madrid, according to a new HBO series. Saving the King “reveals how the media, the royal household and successive governments covered up Juan’s affairs and his dubious business contacts,” said The Times of London. As Queca Campillo, a photographer who had met the king at an official reception, remembered in the documentary, “There is a road that leads to the back of Zarzuela [palace]. We used to meet in a van. It was difficult at a time when there were no mobile phones, but we managed. I was also married and had a little girl. I was his confidante, I told him about real life.”

Juan Carlos abdicated in 2014, and in 2020, under suspicion of money-laundering and while being investigated by the Spanish tax authorities, fled the country for parts unknown; he’s now reportedly living in the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, another of his former conquests, the German socialite Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, is taking the former king to court, having accused him of “great mental pain and distress” and of dispatching agents to spy on her.

Here’s a morale boost: the head of a mercenary group has promised Russian convicts their freedom if they serve six months in Ukraine. The caveat: if they take the deal but then refuse to fight, they will be shot. “The offer was made to convicts at a prison camp in central Russia by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy tycoon who runs the Wagner Group private military contractor,” reported The Times of London. “The group’s fighters have been accused of war crimes in Ukraine and Syria.” Oh, and actually, one more caveat: “[Prigozhin] also said they were forbidden to ‘have sexual contact with local women, flora, fauna, men, whoever.’”

Prigozhin’s efforts to round up volunteers was recorded in a video “posted online by allies of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Kremlin critic,” said the newspaper. “[Prigozhin] also said that prisoners would be handed two grenades when they arrived at the front — a thinly veiled command that they should blow themselves up rather than allow themselves to be captured. ‘No one is retreating. No one backs down. No one is being taken prisoner … Is there anyone else who can free those of you with ten-year prison terms? There are two — Allah and God — they can get you out in a wooden box. But I can get you out alive … Any questions? You have five minutes to think things over.’”

Tacking against a trend toward sartorial casualness that has grown only more pronounced during lockdown, the new British P.M., Liz Truss, “has reportedly told staff at No 10 that ‘ties are back,’” said The Times of London. “The days of thatchy-haired Boris Bunter and Big Bad Dom[inic Cummings, BoJo’s chief adviser] with his beanie, hoodies, dangling belt and flapping shirttails are over, as is the party(gate). Rishi Sunak, in his bespoke suits and Prada loafers, might have been deemed too slick by party members, but the new administration is keen to revert to a more professional approach at HQ.” Better look sharp!

What makes a best-seller these days? Apparently it helps to be a nearly 600-page-long academic text written by an economics professor advancing bold political and environmental ideas. And you’ll need a catchy title—something like, oh, Capital in the Anthropocene. As The Guardian reported, “Few would have expected [Kohei] Saito’s Japanese-language solution to the climate crisis to have much appeal outside leftwing academia and politics. Instead, the book — which was inspired by Karl Marx’s writings on the environment — has become an unlikely hit, selling more than half a million copies since it was published in September 2020.”

Saito, who teaches at Tokyo University, calls for “degrowth”—meaning, explained the newspaper, “an end to mass production and the mass consumption of wasteful goods such as fast fashion.... He also advocates decarbonisation through shorter working hours and prioritising essential ‘labour-intensive’ work such as caregiving.” Capital in the Anthropocene has struck a chord, and Cambridge University Press will be bringing out an English translation next year.

Stop us if you already knew this, but what is undoubtedly the world’s only Wild West–themed festival centered on the friendship between a fictional Apache chief named Winnetou and his (also fictional) German friend and blood brother Old Shatterhand takes place annually at a rustic open-air theater an hour north of Hamburg. “Over the decades an imitation Wild West town, complete with wigwams, totem poles and saloon bars, has sprung up on the mountainside,” reported The Times of London, and one night recently “the theatre [was] packed with more than 7,500 people singing and clapping along to an up-tempo remix of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, many wearing feathered headbands and some clutching a plastic Remington rifle.” The three-hour performance involved “slapstick pratfalls, pyrotechnic gunfights, soppy romance, heroes and villains on horseback, boos, cheers and a whole menagerie of live geese, goats and eagles.”

The Winnetou festival, which is based on the wildly successful late-19th-century stories of Karl May (and many subsequent movies and spin-offs), has been an annual event since the 1950s. However: “Several weeks ago two children’s books accompanying the latest film were withdrawn from sale because of complaints on social media that they trotted out racial stereotypes and were an exercise in cultural appropriation,” reported the newspaper. But then “pollsters found that 68 per cent of Germans thought the publisher had been wrong to take the books off the market, while only 13 per cent agreed with the decision.” For now, Once upon a Time in the State of Schleswig-Holstein survives.

Cher Connard (“Dear Asshole,”), a new novel by the influential writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes, has caused a stir in France. The premise, as summarized in The Guardian: “Oscar, a novelist in his 40s, insults an actor on Instagram about the way she has aged. The film star, Rebecca, sends a furious reply just as Oscar is accused online by a young female press officer of sexual harassment years earlier.” Oscar’s dismissiveness “triggers an examination of modern French society through the alternate viewpoints of the accused man, the actor and the young accuser.”

Although Cher Connard was “hailed as an exploration of France’s sometimes difficult relationship with the #MeToo movement” and has become a best-seller, it was not longlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt recently. “The organisers hastily said [Despentes] was ruled out because she had been a long-running jury member in the past,” reported the newspaper. “She should win the Nobel prize instead,” said the Goncourt jury head.

As Major League Baseball continues to experiment with rules changes in a desperate attempt to speed up the game and stop hemorrhaging fans, recent headlines about the Giants having signed a sommelier could only inspire confidence. “The Giants have become the first US professional sports team to hire a master sommelier after Evan Goldstein, a lifelong fan and season-ticket holder, joined to oversee its wine offering,” said The Times of London.

How great! We looked forward to watching games where the TV cameras panned dugouts full of players sipping Chardonnay rather than nervously masticating gum and spitting sunflower seeds. But it turns out that while Goldstein has indeed been engaged to supply his expertise to ballplayers as well as spectators, according to the newspaper the athletes will be able to enjoy the civilized ritual only while “relaxing afterwards.” Although maybe they should consider uncorking at the shout of “Play ball!” The Giants are already 30-odd games behind the division-leading L.A. Dodgers—how much worse could things get? —George Kalogerakis

George Kalogerakis, one of the original editor-writers at Spy, later worked for Vanity Fair, New York, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. A co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War, he is a Writer at Large for AIR MAIL