The ultimate gift? John Kerry once gave the Russian foreign minister a pair of massive Idaho potatoes
here are no free gifts. There are vouchers at the checkout, perfume samples sealed inside magazines and objects wrapped in coloured paper, but there are no free gifts.A daily newsletter with the best of our journalismDon’t take my word for it.
Trafalgar Square spruces are usually around 90 years old. Most of them, therefore, grew up under the Nazi occupation of Norway. That history now seems rather distant to those who walk beneath their lit branches. It wasn’t much mentioned by people who complained about the condition of the tree sent from Oslo for Christmas 2019. State secretary Holte defended its unusual shape as “quintessentially Norwegian: unlike artificial and glitzy trees, it is honest and unpretentious”.
There’s an etymology attached: the kings of Siam, so the story goes, used the gift of a white elephant as an extravagant form of punishment. Too sacred to be put to work, these creatures did nothing but consume the resources of the beneficiary and defecate in his courtyard. This tale, however, seems to be a chimera: the record suggests that white elephants were so prized in South-East Asia that battles were fought over their ownership.
Lady Liberty’s sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, first thought of placing a giant woman-shaped lighthouse on the Suez Canal as a modern rival to the Pyramids. In 1867 he met Ismail the Magnificent, Khedive of Egypt, to discuss his plans. When these fell through, he reworked his design for America and went west to drum up interest. Not enough, unfortunately.
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