Why the sex in “Rivals” is more than mere titillation In the hit TV drama, back for a second season, a bonk is never just a bonk May 21st 2026 Everyone is a sex detective now. A train entering a tunnel, a jutting skyscraper: in the post-Freudian age, readers and viewers are primed to spot innuendo and phallic symbolism. Along with death, sex is said to be art’s bedrock subject. But occasionally—and more interestingly—the imagery works in the opposite way. Instead of other things standing in for sex, sex is a metaphor for other themes. Take “Rivals”. The Tv bonkbuster, set in the mid-1980s in the fictional British county of Rutshire, is back for a second season. Based on Dame Jilly Cooper’s novels, it once again follows the antics and adulteries of alpha men and their wives (and other people’s wives), all driven and riven by class, money and
ambition. Again there is copious rumpy-pumpy—still the most meaningful part of the drama. In the first season’s finale, Tony, a villainous media baron played deliciously by David Tennant, was thwacked on the head with a gold statuette. Fans shouldn’t fret: he is soon well enough to keep his end up (and get it away). A few new faces join the cast, including “Muffy, short for Caroline” and some walking appendages. This time the ’80s soundtrack includes “The Chicken Song”, a novelty tune which, for many British viewers, will feel like a gruesome flashback to a humiliating bender. “What the fuck is this?” asks Cameron (Nafessa Williams), a badass American TV producer, quite understandably. The heart of the show is still the slightly yucky yearning between Rupert (Alex Hassell, pictured right), a priapic toff and politician, and moony Taggie (Bella Maclean, pictured left), who long ago forgave him for groping her. That, and the sex. Unfolding in and around country piles, “Rivals” resembles a murder mystery, only the question is not who will get bumped off, but who will next shag whom. Now the characters are at it in the stables and jacuzzi and on a piano (again), with a splash of skinny-dipping instead of nude tennis. Mindless titillation? Au contraire. Much as a cigar in art is rarely just a cigar —least of all when Tony is smoking it—a bonk in “Rivals” is never just a bonk. For starters, sex is sometimes about power and its abuses. “I can’t,” says Cameron when rebuffing Tony’s advances. “You can if you want to be promoted,” he snarls. Next, sex is about freedom: from the constraints of class, social expectations, corporate decorum or dismal marriages. Some of Rutshire’s denizens grab their freedom with both hands. “I don’t wait around to be kissed by somebody. If I want to kiss someone, I do it,” dauntless Cameron declares. Others are more hesitant. “We can’t all just do what we want,” a timid figure laments. Sex is history. Along with the music of the 1980s—and its knitwear, tobacco habit, convertibles, game-show formats and boozy lunches—“Rivals” resurrects the decade’s sexual prejudices. There are double standards: were
he a woman, Rupert would be “tarred and feathered” for his philandering, his ex-wife complains. Homophobia is rife, compelling people to live painful double lives. “Do you even really exist if no one sees you’re there?” wonders a bereft gay man. W.B. Yeats, a poet, reckoned the title couple’s smutty exchanges in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” are “a forlorn poetry uniting their solitudes”. Likewise in “Rivals”, sex is often about loneliness. It can be a salve: Declan (Aidan Turner), a thrusting TV presenter and Taggie’s dad, knows that his passionate wife plays around for “relief from the loneliness” his workaholism causes. Yet if sex can fulfil a need for intimacy, the compulsive, Casanovan kind may suggest an unreachable isolation. Rupert’s conquests, he is told, are a doomed bid to “fill that emptiness” inside him. Sex is a matter of luck, the arc of one life (or character) intersecting with a partner’s at the right moment. And, sometimes, sex is about honesty. Beneath the illicit hanky-panky, “Rivals” is an ode to marriage at its frankest. When they aren’t lambasting or betraying each other, Declan and his wife candidly share their fantasies and feelings. The ostensible plot of the new series involves a struggle over a broadcasting franchise. But compared with the saucy bits, that is trivial. The real, profound action is in the bedroom, not the boardroom. (Metaphorically speaking—in practice they blur, the characters going in for al desko trysts as well as the al fresco sort.) The final moral of “Rivals” is surprising. Maybe everything does come down to sex—except for sex itself, which is often about something else. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/15/why-the-sex-in-rivals-is-more-than- mere-titillation
Not all Jews believed their future lay in Israel A new book by Molly Crabapple is a controversial history of a forgotten political movement May 21st 2026 AT THE dawn of the second world war, the majority of the world’s Jews, 9.5m of them, lived in Europe—and had for centuries. Though there were brief periods of acceptance, for the most part Jews were barely tolerated and subject to sporadic violence and restrictive laws governing where they lived and worked. Throughout the 19th century nationalist aspirations grew, and Jews debated where they belonged. Zionists had one answer: they had to create their own state. Bundists had another. It is their story Molly Crabapple, a Puerto Rican-Jewish writer and artist from New York, resurrects.
The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia was founded in Vilnius in 1897. Bundists were socialists who believed in workers’ revolutions, but also recognised that Jews had particular needs and interests. They formed defence organisations to protect Jews from pogroms and promoted Yiddish culture. By 1906 the Bund had attracted 40,000 supporters, making it one of the largest socialist parties in the Russian empire. Bundists bitterly opposed Zionism, believing, as Ms Crabapple explains, that “the establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbours and the people it had dispossessed.” Instead they believed in do’ikayt, Yiddish for “hereness”, meaning “the diaspora was home” and “Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.” It may strike a contemporary reader as odd, but before the Holocaust most Jews were not Zionists. The Orthodox believed only God could call Jews back to the Holy Land; liberals believed Zionism was a concession to antisemitism; and many simply found the idea of nearly 10m people emigrating impractical. Ms Crabapple’s interest in the Bund is both political and personal. Her great- grandfather, Sam Rothbort, was born in 1882 in what today is Belarus. The Bund created believers like Rothbort who were committed enough to withstand ostracism, beatings, imprisonment and worse. Their bitterest battles were internecine, against Soviet-aligned communists and Zionists, neither of whom had much patience for competition. But their willingness to fight on behalf of Jews and alongside non-Jewish socialists earned them the tragic honour of becoming “as of 1938…the most popular Jewish party in Poland”. The Holocaust changed everything. After the war, “Bundist survivors tried to keep their spirits up,” but “the movement they built had been decimated, as had the Polish world of their birth,” Ms Crabapple writes. The Zionists, whatever their arguments’ merits, at least had a state to offer survivors. The Bund had nothing but dashed utopian hopes, and the party ceased operations in 1949. The only reason this book exists is because the Bund’s archivist smuggled two train-cars’ worth of papers from Berlin to Paris in 1933.
This impassioned history of a century-old failed political movement briefly made it on to the New York Times bestseller list. Not everyone is happy about it. The editor of Commentary, a right-leaning Jewish magazine in America, has called Ms Crabapple “a sixth-rate middle-aged anti-Zionist screed-meister” and “an enemy to her people”. But though anti-Zionism sometimes covers for antisemitism, they are not identical, as Ms Crabapple’s book shows. In America and elsewhere, the share of people with negative views of Israel has risen markedly during the course of its brutal war in Gaza (however initially justified) and attacks on Iran. According to a recent survey, today just 37% of Jewish Americans identify as Zionists, though 71% profess an “emotional connection” to Israel and 88% say it has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (whatever they mean by that). Jews in the diaspora who want to celebrate their heritage without tying themselves to Israel can look to the Bundist concept of “hereness” this book celebrates— and to the long and honourable Jewish history of fighting for others alongside themselves. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/21/not-all-jews-believed-their-future- lay-in-israel
Beware the typo—and other lessons of literary history A new book looks at when the written word goes wrong May 21st 2026 WHAT A DIFFERENCE a word makes. In 1631 printers omitted three letters from the seventh commandment. The bungled injunction—“Thou shalt commit adultery”—cost them their licence and a £300 fine (worth around £54,000, or $72,000 today). The “Wicked Bible” is a warning of the perils of misprints. A new book offers an entertaining look at “all the ways words can go wrong”. Rebecca Lee, who works at Penguin Random House, explores publishers’ “glitches and gremlins”, as well as censorship, plagiarism, hoaxes, failures and feuds. She chronicles how the written word can be “divisive, damaging, disruptive and unwelcome”.