Society

In Competition No. 3214, you were invited to choose a well-known painted portrait and let the subject speak for itself, in poetry or prose. Among those who seized the opportunity to have their say were pre-Raphaelite poster girl Lizzie Siddal, who fell dangerously ill while spending several months floating in a tin bath for Millais’s 1852 ‘Ophelia’; David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark (and their cat Percy); Franz Hals’s ‘Laughing Cavalier’; and ‘Weeping Woman’ Dora Maar (‘All his portraits of me are lies. They’re Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar,’ she once told the American writer James Lord.) The challenge drew a modestly sized but accomplished entry and in another

It’s climate change, innit? No sooner had Hurricane Ida smashed into the coast of Louisiana with winds of around 150 mph than the usual claims began to be made, the ones we get every time a hurricane makes landfall in the US: that it has been caused in part by man-made climate change. Climate models have tended to predict that tropical storms will become stronger as warmer seas lead to more energy being absorbed by the storms. Trouble is, observational evidence does not suggest that this has happened — at least not yet. While records of storms exist since 1851 they cannot be taken to be complete records A Princeton University

As former Australian foreign minister and High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer wrote in last week’s magazine, almost all Australian states, like neighbouring New Zealand, are determined to eliminate Covid-19 at all costs. At the beginning of this year, Australia seemingly had defeated Covid. Total numbers of people infected, out of 25 million, were in the few thousands, with related deaths in the hundreds (mostly in care homes). Even now, with a major Delta variant outbreak across our two biggest states, New South Wales and Victoria, less than a thousand Australians have died from or with Covid, almost all elderly or people with other health complications. Currently, Greater Sydney