A 'blockbuster' exploration of 18th-century innovation

Courtly life in 18th-century Versailles is widely remembered as "a world of pure fantasy frolics", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. 

Yet for all the excess and absolutism associated with the reigns of Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI, the three monarchs took an impressively "progressive lead" when it came to scientific research. Their patronage gave rise to many remarkable developments in engineering, natural science and medicine. This "glittering" exhibition at the Science Museum looks past the clichés surrounding Versailles, and illustrates how the palace was in fact a hive of experimentation and ingenuity: indeed, even the building and its grounds were "a technological achievement", its gardens full of "state of the art innovations". Featuring a wide array of exquisite objects, from drawings to machines and scientific equipment to taxidermy, this is a "blockbuster" of a show that should not be missed.

The rule of the last Bourbon kings coincided with "the elevation and systematisation" of science as a discipline, said Melanie McDonagh in London's The Standard. Scientists sought – and often received – royal patronage, in the hope of presenting their discoveries at court. One such demonstration, commemorated in an illustration here, came courtesy of Étienne Montgolfier and his hot air balloon, which he tested before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, filling its basket with "a rooster, a sheep and a duck" (thankfully, they survived the ordeal). "Wonderful pieces" abound: a "superlative" watch with a crystal face made for Marie Antoinette; "beautiful" zoological paintings; and a series of "stuffed anatomical dolls designed to demonstrate practical obstetrics". All speak of a moment when science "was allied with the decorative arts", rather than practised with dry functionality. It is enough to make the visitor rather "wistful". 

There are certain points at which you could be forgiven for thinking that "France's kings were interested in science only when it could satisfy their megalomaniacal desires", said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. A "freakishly enormous" hydraulic system was designed to bring water uphill from the Seine to Versailles' fountains. It never worked. You can see Jean-Baptiste Oudry's paintings of pineapples grown there – the ultimate status symbol. And you can see Louis XV's stuffed rhinoceros too; in life, the pampered animal was fed on bread and given "moisturising oil massages". Altogether scarier is "a wickedly elongated curved scalpel" created to "rid Louis XIV of an anal fistula". The surgery was rehearsed on 75 impoverished test subjects, some of whom died; the surgeon was "so traumatised that he never operated again". Altogether, the show is "a blast" – a superb exhibition that is also "a masterclass in brilliant, concise storytelling".

by Ben Yagoda    

"It has been common over the last century to see the United States as the dominant cultural exporter, shaping the global palette with blue jeans, rock'n'roll and the American idiom," said Dennis Duncan in The Washington Post.

Reminding us that the process can also work in the opposite direction, Ben Yagoda's new book sets out to analyse the "British invasion of American English". Yagoda, a professor emeritus of English, maintains that for most of the 20th century, the American "appetite for Britishisms" was small. But in the 1990s, this began to change, and British phrases such as "book a table", "spot-on" and "own goal" increasingly filtered into American usage.

Yagoda attributes this phenomenon to several factors, said Anne Curzan in 
The Wall Street Journal: they include the popularity of shows such as "The Crown" and "Downton Abbey", influential celebrities and journalists such as James Corden and Tina Brown, and the "online availability of British periodicals more generally". Well researched and non-judgemental, "Gobsmacked!" is the perfect read for "anyone fascinated by language". 

It is also a book that will "make the average Briton proud", said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. As Yagoda charts the often ludicrous British terms that have made inroads into the US – among them "kerfuffle", "pear-shaped" and "boffin" – it's hard not to feel a bit patriotic. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on rude words, "the creation and usage of which is one of the few areas in which we remain world class".

"Gobsmacked!" relies heavily on the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a tool for measuring the "frequency of words across millions of texts online", and I eventually became "a bit sick of hearing about it". But such nerdiness is "worth putting up with for the sheer joy of the rest of the book". 

The peanut farmer who became America's best ex-president

Jimmy Carter, who has died aged 100, grew up on a peanut farm in rural Georgia, and rose to become the 39th US president. A born-again Christian driven by an almost missionary zeal, he won the 1976 election on an outsider's promise to clean up Washington and heal the nation after the "twin traumas" of Watergate and the Vietnam War. Over the next four years, he scored some notable achievements, said The New York Times, including the Camp David Accords that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. He failed, however, to turn around the ailing US economy; and his approval ratings slumped. In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked voters: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago," and offered to "make America great again". It won him a landslide, and made Carter the first elected president since 1932 to fail to win a second term.

Yet as the biographer Douglas Brinkley observed, "nothing about the White House so became Carter as his having left it". Having returned to his hometown in Georgia, he set up The Carter Centre in 1982, then spent the next 40 years travelling the world, mediating international disputes, fostering "nascent democracies", and promoting peace, human rights and social justice. One of his most successful campaigns targeted guinea worm disease, which was killing millions of people a year in Asia and Africa when he left office, but which has since been all but eradicated. And for a week each year, he used the carpentry skills he'd acquired in his youth to build houses for the poor, as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. In all these initiatives he was partnered by his wife Rosalynn. Awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, Carter was never described as a great president, but he became widely regarded as America's greatest ex-president.

James Earl Carter Jr was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924. He grew up during the Depression, in a house without electricity or running water. The first member of his family to finish high school, he graduated top of his class; then, in 1943, aged 19, he won a place at a naval academy. He married Rosalynn three years later, when she was 18. By the early 1950s, they'd had three of their four children and he had trained as an engineer, and helped build the US's first nuclear sub. But when his father died in 1953, he felt obliged to resign his commission, and return to Plains to run the peanut farm. It was barely making a profit, but with Rosalynn's help, he turned the operation around. Meanwhile, he started to involve himself in local politics.

In the era of civil rights, his views were at odds with those of most white Georgians. Nevertheless, he won a place in the state senate in 1962; and in 1970, he was elected governor at the second attempt. He'd had to pander to segregationists to win the election, but made his true views clear in his inaugural address, proclaiming that "the time of racial discrimination is over". Many were incredulous when Carter announced in 1974 that he intended to run for the presidency: he was all but unknown outside of Georgia. But with typical determination, he criss-crossed the US meeting senior Democrat politicians and speaking to the grassroots: sometimes only three people turned up to hear him, but slowly, he built up enough support to win the Democrat nomination.

Immediately, he asserted his everyman credentials by walking from his inauguration ceremony to the White House, and selling the presidential yacht. He appointed a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr as US ambassador to the UN; and pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers. But his White House was regarded as amateurish, said The Guardian, and it didn't help that he'd arrived without a real policy agenda. He had some foreign policy successes: the treaties that ceded the Panama Canal back to Panama; putting human rights on the agenda. But with the oil shock of 1979, inflation kept rising; and his hard truths – such as that Americans needed to be less materialistic, and less reliant on foreign oil – landed badly with many voters. 

In October 1979, he set in chain a catastrophe by reluctantly allowing the deposed Shah of Iran (a long-time US ally) to enter the US for medical treatment. Carter had feared that there would be reprisals, and three weeks later, militants in Tehran seized the US embassy and took 52 of its staff hostage. His failure to bring the hostages home became emblematic of his enfeebled administration; and a botched military rescue attempt that led to the deaths of eight US servicemen in April 1980 further damaged his standing. The hostages were finally released in January 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan had taken office. Carter later described this as one of the happiest moments of his life.

Back in Plains, he lived in a modest ranch-style house, and when circling the globe on his diplomatic missions, often flew economy. The US's longest-lived president, he remained politically active into old age. Rosalynn died in 2023, months after they'd moved into hospice care. "[She] was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished," he said.