Inside the Booker Prize

It’s been a great week for the powerful fantasies of fiction (see more below), but over the weekend no novel anywhere in the world could compete with the fantasy of British politics. Continental Europe watched spellbound as the Prime Minister and her Chancellor humiliated themselves and the standing of the UK. The reactions of the different nations were predictable, but none the less excruciating for that. In Germany, where journalists have disconcertingly deep knowledge of British constitutional history, the reaction was dismay, as a distracted friend inflicts yet further damage on themselves. As for France: King Lear is playing at the Comédie-Française for the first time in its history, so they now know how England manages an orgy of self-destruction when former allies fall out. Schadenfreude may be a German word, but after the decades of lectures Paris has received from London on the virtues of market capitalism, it has unsurprisingly crossed the Rhine.

President Macron is probably less inclined to smile at events on the other end of Europe, where Turkey has assumed the mediating role in the Ukraine conflict France itself was eager to play. A few days in Istanbul last week showed me an even deeper Franco-Turkish divide. Two years ago, Hagia Sophia, which had been a state museum since the 1930s, once again became a mosque. The Byzantine mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the eastern apse is now veiled from sight, and Islamic prayers are said every day by thousands of worshippers. Between the canonical prayer times, the vast spaces are open to tourists, who queue to admire Justinian’s great building. The Chora Museum, which houses one of the world’s greatest collections of Byzantine mosaics, is closed, while it too is converted to a mosque. It is not clear whether, or how, the mosaics will be visible in future.