Trump’s new obsession: hot dudes

The “wolf boy of Sierra Morena”

In 1965, says The Times, police in southern Spain received a tip-off from a park ranger who had spotted something roaming around the Sierra Morena mountain range. When two officers on horseback were dispatched, they found a young man with matted hair and skin baked hard by the sun, wrapped in a deer skin, eating fruit in the shade of an oak tree. When they questioned him, he looked blank. Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, who died this summer aged 80, hadn’t spoken to a human in more than a decade. The few sounds he made were grunts and growls, and he soon scurried, spooked, into the bush. The police caught him, and he ended up in a convent, where nuns taught him to speak and strapped a board to his spine to help him walk upright.

Born dirt poor in 1946, Rodríguez moved to the mountains with his cruel father and stepmother, who beat him if he failed to steal enough acorns to feed the family’s pigs. His father then sold him, aged about six, to the local farmer, who took him up into the mountains to assist an old goatherd. When the old man vanished one day, Rodríguez stayed in the wild and fended for himself. He learned to steal tubers – the edible underground stems and roots of plants – from wild boar after they sniffed them out and unearthed them with their tusks. He claimed to have befriended a snake: “I made a nest for her and gave her milk from the goats,” he said. “She followed me everywhere and protected me.” And while still a child, he started playing with wolf cubs in a cave. He was gradually accepted, in his telling, by their mother, becoming “one of the family”, earning him, in later life, the nickname “wolf boy of Sierra Morena”.

🐺 Rodríguez struggled on his return to civilisation. He ran out of the first cinema he entered, terrified of the cowboys on screen, and once smashed a radio believing there were people trapped inside. Later, he featured in a film about his life. It was highly romanticised, he says, but he still loved it. “I watch it all the time,” he said. “Especially when I’m sad or can’t get to sleep.”

Several actors, including Gillian Anderson and Rosamund Pike, have complained recently about theatre audiences behaving badly, says Ivan Hewett in The Telegraph. “These people don’t know they’re born.” Back in the day, actors, musicians and opera singers faced boos, heckles and rotten eggs. On one occasion in the 1630s, the audience at a Clerkenwell theatre point-blank refused to accept the advertised play, instead insisting the actors perform something different and “backing up their demands by hurling apples and pears”. At the opera, people in a box would often pay attention only to a famous soprano’s arias. The rest of the time, they would close the curtains, open a bottle of port and cosy up to their wife or mistress. It wasn’t until the early 19th century when the culture of “reverent silence” took hold, and even then it took a while to stick. During a concert given by the famous pianist Franz Liszt, the Tsar of Russia was so engrossed in military strategy chat with his generals that Lizst stopped playing and announced: “When the Tsar speaks, even music must fall silent.”

Surviving in Ukraine’s “kill zone”

All along the 750-mile Ukrainian front, says The New York Times, Russian drones watch, hunt and kill anyone or anything that dares to move. Life in the “kill zone” is so deadly that soldiers trying to gain territory only enter in pairs, creeping – sometimes crawling – from bombed-out building to bombed-out building. One Ukrainian soldier remembers sheltering in a high-rise and hearing Russian voices on the floor above. The Ukrainians had to “dislodge” the Russian troops by hand. But most killing is done by drone, and being spotted is essentially a death sentence. “It’s very difficult to survive in such conditions,” says a Ukrainian drone commander: “99% chance of dying.”

Late last year, two Ukrainian infantrymen – known only as Henadii, 52, and Mykhailo, 51 – volunteered to relieve two of their comrades in a half-destroyed house in the kill zone for a month. They ended up staying for more than six. All day, enemy drones buzzed overhead, “like traffic on a busy highway”. To avoid detection, they never fed stray dogs and defecated in plastic bags which they stored in the attic. In winter, they slept pressed together rather than risk lighting a fire. Food, water and medicine were dropped by drones; when deliveries failed, they went hungry and thirsty. Occasionally, Russians would run into the house for shelter. Not wanting to give away their location, Henadii and Mykhailo hid their bodies in a growing pile in one room. When they were finally relieved, and survived a perilous days-long trek back to base, watched over by friendly drones, Henadii was filmed devouring a chocolate cake. His wife saw it and phoned – in all their years together, he’d insisted he hated chocolate cake. Henadii smiled: “Must have been the hunger.”