Cobra

Tuesday

Andrew Lycett

The SAS explode from the shadows in six days that shook Britain

Ben Macintyre has a knack of distilling impeccably sourced information about clandestine operations into clear, exciting narrative prose. His latest book, about the April 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London, starts as it means to go on – with a snapshot of seven Range Rovers, two Ford Transit vans and two furniture lorries pulling out of Bradbury Lines, the then headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS) in Hereford. Lying low inside were 45 soldiers and ‘enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war’. Each man carried a submachine gun, mostly the ‘reliably lethal’ Heckler & Koch MP5, which fires 13 rounds a second, with four 30-round magazines of 9x19mm parabellum

Wednesday

Mary Dejevsky

Has Covid changed the English language forever?

It was Nervtag that did it for me. The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) was responsible for reviewing, and then delivering, the bad tidings to the government about a new variant of the Covid-19 in the UK. So much more easily transmitted did the group judge it to be that, within hours, a Prime Minister who had said he wanted to protect Christmas at almost any cost had cancelled it, and France led what became a procession of more than 40 countries curbing travel with the UK. As alarming as the news was in itself, the name coined for the group of scientists bringing it to