Weekendish

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Afternoon all, Here's our collection of some of the best reads from the BBC News website this week.

The unkillable man Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart was a one-eyed, one-handed war hero who fought in three major conflicts across six decades, surviving plane crashes and PoW camps. He served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process, he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear - and he ripped off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate. He was famous for leading from the front - inspiring men with the simple words "follow me". As commanding officer, he was seen by his men pulling the pins of grenades out with his teeth and hurling them with his one good arm during the Battle of the Somme, winning the Victoria Cross. "Carton de Wiart is like Robocop," says Colour Sgt Thomas O'Donnell. David Quainton wrote on Twitter: "Yay! My favourite indestructible human is getting a bit of BBC love." The soldier who fought on and on and on

Freedom of speech Historian and writer Tom Holland was one of those who tweeted Charlie Hebdo's cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in the wake of the deadly attack on the magazine's office. He explains why in an essay for the Magazine. He turns to Voltaire, who is something of a secular saint in France because of his lifelong campaigning for free speech and tolerance. "Ecrasez l'infame, Voltaire famously urged his admirers: Crush what is infamous," writes Holland. "Islam, too, makes the same demand. The point of difference, of course, is over how 'l'infame' is to be defined." For Voltaire, the infamous referred to the pretensions of authority - in politics as well as religion. And it was the same for the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. But for the gunmen, writes Holland, the "infamous" are those who "mock a prophet whom they feel should exist beyond even a hint of criticism". Here, he argues, lies the irreconcilable clash of opposed values. Dave Drabble tweets: "Rare to see such informed, nuanced views in the media." 'Why I tweeted Muhammad cartoon'

Monster ships From a giant of the battlefield to monsters of the sea. The container ship the Globe docked in Britain for the first time this week - shortly after taking the crown as the largest container ship in the world. The stats are jaw-dropping - it's 400m (1,312ft) long, the equivalent of eight Olympic-size swimming pools. It is 56.8m (186ft) wide and 73m (240ft) high, its gross tonnage is 186,000 - the equivalent of 14,500 London buses. Laid end-to-end, the maximum number of containers on board would stretch for 72 miles, the distance between Felixstowe and London, or Birmingham and Manchester. But it isn't expected to hold the title for long because a slightly larger vessel - the Oscar - is about to be launched. How much bigger can these ocean-going behemoths get? The world's biggest ship - for 53 days

Here are some things we've enjoyed this week from elsewhere around the web: The Lives of Ronald Pinn - London Review of Books The everyday sexism of women waiting in public toilet lines - Time Vinyl's difficult comeback - The Guardian The Unbelievable life of Fray Tormenta - Vice That's it from us this week. Have a good weekendish.