Biden and Trump heading for US election rematch

The United States is heading for a Donald Trump vs Joe Biden rematch in this year’s presidential election. US leader Joe Biden is the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party after his victory overnight in the Georgia primary pushed him passed the threshold of 1,968 delegates. Donald Trump also passed the threshold of 1,215 delegates to become the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, following his triumphs in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington.

‘It is my great honour to be representing the Republican Party as its Presidential Nominee,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘Fear not, we will not fail,’ he told his supporters, ‘we will take back our once great Country, put AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN – GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. November 5th will go down as the most important day in the history of our Country! GOD BLESS AMERICA’.

After a testing Tuesday which saw former special counsel Robert Hur deliver damaging testimony regarding the president’s mental health to Congress, Biden cruised to an easy win in the Peach State. He later secured victory in Mississippi and Washington State. His only remaining rival is Marianne Williamson, who suspended and then unsuspended her campaign, after Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips dropped out last week.

In a press release issued shortly after his win was sealed, Biden said his presidential rival, Donald Trump, poses a ‘greater than ever’ threat:

‘We face a sobering reality: freedom and democracy are at risk here at home in a way they have not been since the Civil War. Donald Trump is running a campaign of resentment, revenge, and retribution that threatens the very idea of America. He is glorifying dictators and pledging to become one himself on day one. He seeks to bury the truth of January 6 by vowing to pardon the insurrectionists who placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy. This week, he vowed to cut seniors’ hard-earned Medicare and Social Security. He’s rooting for the economy to crash, pushing tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, and planning to ban abortion nationwide.’

Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said: ‘Make no mistake: this year’s election will decide the future of our democracy. Donald Trump is running a campaign focused on revenge, retribution and his own self-interest. President Biden is running a campaign focused on what makes our country so great: the American people.’

Biden and Trump’s victories pave the way for an acrimonious rematch between the pair. Trump has held a small polling lead over Biden for most of this year, with recent surveys showing the Republican candidate is ahead in four key swing states. Biden’s approval rating is also lagging behind Trump’s at the same stage of his presidency.

A version of this article was first published on Spectator World

The NHS puberty blocker ban for children is long overdue

Children in England will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at NHS gender identity clinics. This is good news: it was never appropriate to halt the normal physical development of young people struggling with the concept of growing up into the men and women that nature intended.

Puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones, were a so-called solution that, in my view as a transgender adult, created a very serious problem. A cohort of young people identified as transgender, non-binary or maybe something yet more mysterious. They demanded powerful and life-altering drugs to ward off what they – or their parents – feared might be a mental health catastrophe. All too readily, those demands were met.

Now, Hilary Cass – the paediatrician who is conducting an independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – has helped put the brakes on this madness. She said, in a 2022 review, that there is a lack of clarity over whether the drugs simply ‘pause’ puberty or if they act as ‘an initial part of a transition pathway’ with most patients becoming ‘locked in’ to changing their gender. The landmark guidelines issued yesterday back Cass up: these said that there is not enough evidence that the drugs are safe and from now on they should only be given as part of clinical trials. This is long overdue.

Hundreds of under-16s have been prescribed puberty blockers on the NHS since 2011, having been referred to the gender identity clinic run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London. In recent years, demand for treatment has overwhelmed the limited provision and waiting lists for children – as well as adults – have mushroomed. According to reports, fewer than 100 children are now currently on puberty blockers through the NHS Gender Identity Development Service, though how many more have their lives on hold is unknown. Waiting forlornly for a call from a distant clinic is no way to live.

The fact that the treatment may ultimately be worse than the wait is hardly comforting to children who have been led to believe that it would solve their problems. It won’t – and that is a particular tragedy for children who would otherwise benefit from timely community mental health support. If the promises made by gender clinics cannot be delivered, then it is better not to make them at all. As such, yesterday’s news is welcome all round.

Unfortunately, that is not the full story. The interim policy on which NHS England consulted last year suggested that, ‘access to puberty suppressing hormones for children and young people with gender incongruence/dysphoria should only be available as part of research’. One would hope that further research involving clinical trials would now be struck down as unethical, but a loophole is left open for further meddling with children’s development.

Then there is the rest of the United Kingdom to worry about. NHS England’s remit is for England. Scotland, whose government seems desperate to be ever more wokier-than-thou, has a separate NHS. While increasing caution has been applied south of the border, Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), part of NHS Scotland, outlined the need for prescribing to continue outside research because of rising numbers of adults and children seeking help.

Finally, there are private providers ready to sell into a market that will pay. Last year, GenderGP asserted that NHS England Specialist Services does not govern what GPs and hospital consultants do in their own services, and has ‘no impact on private doctors and what they decide is the right care for their patients.’ GenderGP says it will ‘continue to provide puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones to patients who need them’.

So, while yesterday’s announcement is a step in the right direction, more is needed to protect children. Liz Truss’s private members’ bill to Amend the Health and Equality Acts is due to be debated on Friday. This bill would make it an offence to prescribe, administer or supply medicinal products to a child as part of a course of treatment for gender dysphoria for the purposes of stopping or delaying the normal onset of puberty, or affirming the child’s perception of their sex where that perception is inconsistent with the child’s sex.

It’s a worthy and valuable aim, but one that is unlikely to be delivered without the active support of the government. To make progress, this bill needs time and expertise to ensure that the drafting is watertight. The Tories look doomed whatever Rishi Sunak does between now and the election. But what better legacy to leave than the protection of children? If Sunak means business, this is an opportunity to make a lasting difference.

It’s time to ditch the all-inclusive

There are some who would love to spend an eternity by a pool in Spain dancing the ‘Cha Cha Slide’ until they pass out on a sun lounger. There are others who would prefer to spend the afterlife with bifid-tongued demons than wait in line for a subpar continental buffet.

I fall into the second camp. It’s not that I think all-inclusive holidays are without purpose, it’s just that I think all-inclusives have passed their sell-by date. I’m sure that Gérard Blitz’s initial idea for an all-inclusive came from a good place: his desire to entertain the masses. But these resorts are a far stretch from the original straw huts and bartering beads of Club Med’s 1950s design. Back then they weren’t just about getting loaded on bottom-shelf vodka and fighting with other Brits by the pool bar.

Over time these resorts have transmuted into gluttonous and greedy excursions. They’ve lost touch with the very notion of travel. The point of an all-inclusive is not about exploration, nor is it about cultural appreciation. We’ve taken the idea of unlimited consumption and run with it, leaving behind the enjoyment of another culture. We’ve decided to take a slice of Blighty and plonk it on the less temperate coastlines of our European neighbours – and beyond. Take a look at Spain. Good old Spain. All-inclusive hotels line the Spanish coast like a pesky rash. We, the Brits, are the infection.

I understand becoming giddy at the thought of a hotel where everything is included in the price. All-inclusives make holidaying easy. But the novelty wears thin. It’s a bit like eating a dozen meringues: it’s fun until you throw up. There’s also something disconcerting about getting on a plane with 50 other Brits, landing in a foreign country, and being shuttled to your hotel via coach to spend the following seven days with several hundred more Brits. Isn’t the point of travelling to leave your home behind?

But it’s not fair to disregard all all-inclusives. They have their moments. I have fond memories of floating in algae-green pools, of kayaking with children from other parts of the UK, of performing my Michael Jackson dance routine and winning the resort’s talent competition – the greatest honour of my life. And it’s also true that these trips give parents a break from their kids. It’s not easy entertaining a petulant seven year old when all they want to do is bite your arm and throw figurines at the hotel window. Companies like TUI and Mark Warner are experts in keeping children entertained, which in turn gives parents peace of mind. It might not be as culturally significant as visiting the remnants of the Berlin Wall, but it’s a great deal more efficient for a family break. Or at least it used to be.

A huge problem for modern all-inclusives is their price point. In most cases, they’re actually more expensive than booking a normal hotel and sourcing your own food and drink. An all-inclusive will set you back well over a grand during peak season, and that’s for the grungier hotels. You could fly to Madrid and rent an Airbnb for half the price, living off of baguettes and jamón ibérico, which would be healthier than the sludge they serve at all-inclusive resorts.

Maybe all-inclusives are a thing of the past, and maybe that’s where they should remain. When I watched Charlotte Wells’s brilliant and nostalgic film Aftersun, I was transported back to my last all-inclusive holiday. I remembered it vividly.

We were 30,000 ft above sea level hurtling towards Majorca, surrounded by polo necks stained with fake tan. The nauseating smell of Joop! and Lacoste permeated the cabin. We were Britain’s modern day marauders: the people who gave Brits abroad a bad name. Twisting over France, the oxygen masks fell down. ‘Don’t panic,’ squealed a flight attendant. I turned to my mother. ‘Am I going to die?’ I asked. ‘No, you’re not going to die,’ she said. The man sitting next to us removed his oxygen mask and took a swig of beer: ‘If I’m going to die,’ he said, ‘I want to die doing what I love.’

After an emergency landing in Paris, we were kettled back onto the plane. A few meeker – and more sensible – passengers considered our brush-in with death a bad omen and took the Eurostar home. Once safely in Majorca, we left our bags at reception and walked through the pastel-washed suburbs of mini-apartments that made up the hotel. The pool was the colour of Mountain Dew. A sad looking clown stood on a rickety stage and danced to Black Lace’s ‘Agadoo’ as children tore at his feet. The all-day buffet was placed within the pool’s splash zone. The sight of tinned sausages floating in a vat of dark oil was enough to beat the appetite out of us. My mother marched us to the front desk and demanded an upgrade, citing our near plane crash as reason for compensation. We were upgraded to a slightly nicer all-inclusive down the road. When the trip was over, we agreed never to go on an all-inclusive again.

And I think that was for the best. Though that trip – plane crash and decrepit hotel aside – wasn’t all bad in hindsight. They are, however, loud, obnoxious, and lazy holidays. But they’re also a relic of so many people’s childhoods. I just don’t think I can bring myself to spend a month’s salary on eating processed food and watching a foreign sun set behind an ominous hotel wall. I’m not saying that I agree with the Situationist slogan – ‘Club Med – a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’ – but I will say that all-inclusives needn’t remain a staple in the coming years of British tourism. It’s time to let them go.

Japanese toilets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be

What is the world’s best city in which to be caught short? You can imagine a lively discussion on this question on a TripAdvisor forum. A strong candidate would be Tokyo, which has recently added to its long list of otherworldly attractions, a collection of 17 high-tech architect designed public lavatories. The toilets feature, and arguably star, in Wim Wender’s Oscar-winning film Perfect Days which tells the story of a reclusive, obsessively diligent cleaner whose job it is to keep the facilities in immaculate condition.

The public toilets are the result of a project by the non-profit Nippon foundation, which invited 16 distinguished architects to design one, or in one case two, public conveniences each, letting their imaginations run rampant in the process. The foundation then invited Wenders to view the results in the hope that the great German director might produce a short promotional film. Instead, Wenders was so inspired that he embarked on a full-scale drama.

The toilets range in style from Scandi chic minimalist to retro-futurist to just plain weird. Some are a bit pretentious. A ‘back to the forest… public toilet village’ concept from Dundee V&A architect Kengo Kuma consists of five huts employing cedar board louvers to ‘create a line of flow’ and facilitate ‘a total experience… suitable for the age of diversity’. Your guess is as good as mine.  

Another, three blocks of overlapping scarlet coloured metal, is apparently inspired by the Japanese art of wrapping (origata) and is aimed particularly at the ‘LGBTQ+ community’. The toilet ‘holds space for them to live their truth’ says the blurb from architect Nao Tamura. Hmmm, I thought it was just a place to (complete with your own choice of words).

Some are too clever for their own good. Two have transparent exterior glass walls which become opaque once the door is locked. These caused controversy when previewed at the Tokyo Olympics as some feared a malfunction might leave them exposed at a critical moment. ‘How the hell does this work?’ says a character in the film.   

The 17 public toilets in the project all have three spaces, men, women, and ‘everyone’, a shallow bow to the gender progressives. How much the ‘everyone’ spaces will be used will be interesting. One of Tokyo’s most prestigious universities overhauled its toilet facilities a few years back to the point where the majority are now ‘all gender’. A friend who works there tells me they are almost entirely shunned by the students, expensive white porcelain elephants.

But will anyone much use the Nippon Foundation’s creations? Will this idealistic scheme turn out to be a busted flush? Few of the toilets really announce themselves as such and as the signage is discreet, they might easily be mistaken for random pieces of modern art. I was surprised to learn that one is five minutes from my apartment. I’d walked past it a thousand times and never realized what it was.

Perhaps I’m missing the point. These are showpieces, the equivalent of Victorian follies perhaps, with form riding well ahead of function. Visitors should be aware that they are not representative of public conveniences in Tokyo, which will often be basic and not necessarily spotless. Some are still the traditional squat variety from which I recoil in horror whenever I accidentially encounter one.

Nor should you assume from the film that the almost neurotic cleaning it depicts is a deeply embedded Japanese character trait or that hi-tech toilet technology has a particularly long history in Japan. Until the 1960s and particularly the epochal rebuild for the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo didn’t even have modern sewage system. Public urination was common. ‘Tokyo was filthy. It stank,’ said a friend who grew up in those times.

Japan’s modern reputation as the equivalent of Silicon Valley for washroom technology stems from the 1980s when the economic boom coincided with the gadget fad and Japan’s traditional kaizen (continual improvement) philosophy finally came to encompass the bathroom appliance industry. All manner of ‘features’ started being added to the humble western commode and an obsessional interest emerged in all things lavatorial.

A toilet association was formed, a hundred strong lobbying group led by a certain Hideo Nishioka, professor emeritus of Kyoto University and the world’s foremost collector of toilet paper (he reportedly had samples from 100 different countries). In 1986, we saw the opening of the world’s biggest toilet store in Tokyo; and Toto, the Bang and Olufsen of toilet technology even opened their own museum (their top priced ‘Washlet’ ‘smart’ model, costs £10,000).

Could we see a similar initiative to the Tokyo Toilet Project in a British city? Unlikely. Tokyo is an ever-changing agglomeration of inharmonious structures where nothing jars because everything does. Getting planning permission is famously (or notoriously) easy. One can imagine Sadiq Khan being attracted to all the progressive flim-flam in the publicity material but even he might struggle to get the go-ahead for what many might decry as incongruous carbuncles.

And in any case, who would maintain them? Finding staff like the protagonist in Perfect Days, who works long hours, presumably for the Japanese minimum wage, and appears to live for the sight of a gleaming toilet bowl and freshly replenished loo roll holder might be a considerable challenge in work-shy Britain.

Bored of generic hot sauce? Try these

Sick of sriracha? Try Sambal Oelek, an Indonesian chilli sauce that’s easy to make in minutes, by blending red chillies, salt and either vinegar or lime juice together. Or buy a jar ready-made.

Will 2024 be the year of hot sauce? The Guinness Book of Records recently certified the world’s hottest chilli, Pepper X. In case you’re wondering, hot peppers are rated for heat on the Scoville Scale, created by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. It measures the amount of capsaicin (the chemical compound that causes spicy heat) in a pepper and assigns it an SHU (Scoville Heat Unit) rating.

However, my love of the stuff is not about extreme heat, but rather the vast array of flavours that accompany it. From smoky chipotle to fruity scotch bonnets, habaneros, ghost peppers and more, hot sauces are no longer just about intensity; now they are far more focused on nuanced taste. Lee Kum Kee Garlic Chilli Sauce is my favourite, alongside Momofuku Chili Crunch and Extra Spicy.

The range of spicy, chilli-based condiments available in local supermarkets, as well as specialist outlets, is growing by the day. We are in the age of craft condiments. Why not spread your hot sauce wings? The banana ketchup I tried for the first time in St Lucia recently was a revelation. Sweeter than its tomato counterpart, but with a delicious kick from green chilli heat. It works just as well on hotdogs and French fries as it does on jerk chicken and rice.

One I had never heard of until I happened upon a jar in an airport is Haitian mamba peanut butter, spiced up with scotch bonnet chilli and served with noodles, salads, or whatever else you fancy. Then there is FSG Sichuan preserved cooked fungus – basically cooked mushrooms doused in screaming hot chilli oil and Sichuan pepper. I add a dollop of this to soup, noodle dishes, and stir-fried vegetables. The West African answer to Chinese XO is Ghanaian shito, used as a table sauce and added to pretty much everything. Flavoured with dried and fermented fish, it packs a punch.

The accompaniments to north Indian cooking that are widely available from stores in the UK tend to be chutneys, such as mango or lime. But there is a growing market in ketchup to accompany your butter chicken or lamb pasanda. Pico’s Punjabi Ketchup, full of aromatic flavours, is the best. It also works as a dipping sauce with chips, or an alternative spread in a burger bun. And Pico’s Tamarind Chutney is a tangy, sweet and sour Indian street food chutney which can be used in the same way as the traditional brown sauce.

My local Malaysian café does a mean achaar, chunky enough to be mistaken for a vegetable side.  Chopped Indian pickles – made from fruits, vegetables, and spices either cooked in oil, or brined – are the condiments most commonly used to add heat to samosas, curries, and countless other South Asian dishes. Mango, lime, tomato, onion, cauliflower, cucumber and fresh chillies are typical ingredients.

Giardiniera is a tangy, crunchy pickled condiment – a colourful Italian pickle of carrots, cauliflower, peppers, and other vegetables that’s surprisingly easy to make at home, though you can also buy a bottle from any supermarket. Europe offers other decent spicy condiments: erős pista (Hungarian for ‘Strong Steven’) is made primarily from two ingredients – minced paprika peppers and salt. A milder, sweeter variety can be found under the name édés anna (‘Sweet Anna’). It’s good to see that sexist stereotypes are alive and well, even in the condiment business.

Of course there is also the very popular peri-peri from Portugal, which is what gives Nando’s its distinctive flavour. In a Mexican restaurant in NYC, I had chipotle with pineapple hot sauce. It was delightfully sweet and smoky, and medium heat. I smothered it over white fish, and it added fruitiness without drowning the taste.

But if I were to be consigned to a desert island and could take only one spicy condiment it would be molho apimentado from Brazil, for its versatility. Made with onion, green and red bell peppers, tomato, red chilli peppers, garlic, mustard, vinegar, sugar, salt and cayenne peppers, blended into a rough paste. This is a condiment you can eat with everything – from grilled meat and seafood to salads to fejoida, the national dish of black beans stewed with bits of pig.

There are versions of all of the above for sale online. Go on, ditch your usual and branch out. But make sure your condiments are hot. The capsaicin in chilli-infused foods triggers the release of endorphins and dopamine, hormones that make you happy.

Robert Jenrick: The Tories have a young person problem

Is ex-immigration minister Robert Jenrick on manoeuvres? He certainly looked the part as he waxed lyrical to a crowd of under 35s at the Onward’s ‘After Hours’ event in a Westminster pub. Jenrick said it was no surprise youngsters are struggling to get on the housing ladder. ‘You’re absolutely right to say that the housing crisis today is also an immigration crisis,’ he crowed to the audience. ‘You can’t have mass migration and an answer to the housing crisis.’ But while the Tory MP has been championing housing and migration issues over the last few years, tonight’s focus was on the Tory issue with younger voters.

‘We are outliers in Europe and beyond in our inability to win over young people,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t see a future for our party unless we help people like you across the country to have a genuine stake in this country.’ And he might be right. YouGov polling last year found that as little as 1 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds plan to vote Conservative at the next election.

Jenrick’s latest mission is to advocate for legislation that Michael Gove and his fellow Tory MP Rachel MacLean were trying to pass: the scrapping of EU nutrient neutrality laws, which require new housing developments in certain areas to not add more ‘nutrient pollution’ to the water catchment. Gove believes this would allow the construction of 100,00 homes before the next election. It is ‘the single best thing that we could do as a parliament,’ Jenrick said.

But, on the topic of Brexit, the Tory MP sounded rather despondent:

After leaving the European Union, we have the levers in our hands to [bring net migration down]. You just have to have the political will to exercise them and to do it properly. What we actually did was we pulled them in the wrong direction and created a system which is even more liberal than the one we had when we were in the EU.

Jenrick’s speech tonight coincides with the news that migrants could be offered cash to go to Rwanda. A separate deal struck between the UK and Rwanda would be the first of its kind, aiming to remove migrants by paying them to leave Britain to go somewhere other than their origin country. While he didn’t make mention of this plan, the ex-immigration minister told his audience: ‘I think flights will go to Rwanda,’ adding: ‘I’m not interested in symbolism.’

The night wasn’t completely downbeat, however. Apologising for his lateness to the packed London pub, he quipped: ‘I had to vote in the Budget tonight and I know I do rebelling quite a lot, but I felt that that was a step too far.’ Mr S can imagine Rishi Sunak was also glad for Jenrick’s loyalty, given the rather eventful week he’s had…

And though Onward were hosting, the former immigration minister didn’t shy away from poking fun at its director. ‘I’m grateful to…Seb [Payne] for the work that he’s doing. I thought Seb might be here this evening. But Theresa May said she’d seen him in Maidenhead earlier today…’

Will Onward produce its first MP sometime soon? Mr S can’t answer that. Will the new Tory plan to pay migrants to leave help sort Britain’s immigration crisis? Time will tell. And will Jenrick’s push against ‘NIMBYism’ win over young voters in time for the election? The Tories will certainly be hoping so…

Kemi Badenoch refuses to toe the line – again

It’s been another deeply uncomfortable day for the Tories, where the line to take on an issue of racism has collapsed at the last minute. Unsurprisingly, that collapse has also once again involved Kemi Badenoch.

Ministers and Downing Street have spent the day refusing to say the word ‘racist’ when discussing the comments made by party donor Frank Hester about Diane Abbott. To recap, he was reported by the Guardian to have said in 2019 that ‘you see Diane Abbott on the TV, and you’re just like … you just want to hate all Black women because she’s there. And I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.’

Hester has now apologised for the comments, something Graham Stuart and Downing Street have leaned on heavily when asked whether what he said was ‘racist’. Stuart was on the morning broadcast round, and said the language was ‘reprehensible’, while Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said:

‘I think the critical point here is I don’t think what he was saying was a gender-based or a race-based comment, but it was clearly inappropriate. He has apologised and I think we need to move on from that.’

No 10, meanwhile, insisted that ‘what is alleged and reported to have been said is clearly unacceptable’, but refused to add to that. And then along came Badenoch, who once again took to Twitter, this time to say the following:

‘Hester’s 2019 comments, as reported, were racist. I welcome his apology. Abbott and I disagree on a lot. But the idea of linking criticism of her, to being a black woman is appalling. It’s never acceptable to conflate someone’s views with the colour of their skin. MPs have a difficult job balancing multiple interests – often under threats of intimidation as we saw recently in parliament. Some people make flippant comments without thinking of this context. This is why there needs to be space for forgiveness where there is contrition.’

This is not the first time ministers have spent all day on message, only for that message to be blown out of the water by a Badenoch tweet. The problem is that the message they were sent out to offer was so useless that it made them sound like malfunctioning AI bots, as opposed to humans, and Badenoch once again saw an opportunity to speak plainly. So, along came the Downing Street clarification:

‘The comments allegedly made by Frank Hester were racist and wrong. He has now rightly apologised for the offence caused and where remorse is shown it should be accepted. The Prime Minister is clear there is no place for racism in public life and as the first British-Asian Prime Minister leading one of the most ethnically diverse Cabinets in our history, the UK is living proof of that fact.’

The Prime Minister’s spokesman has an extremely difficult job, often dealing with the press before his boss has decided what he thinks about an issue (I recently interviewed a former PMOS, James Slack, about how agonising these sessions could be). But Sunak had overnight and all day to make up his mind, while his ministers had to carry on putting their names to a daft line. There’s nothing that annoys politicians more than a change of line after they’ve been humiliated on a broadcast round: Sunak is lucky that Stuart and Stride aren’t troublesome types. But many of their colleagues are.

How ever did the inbred Habsburgs control their vast empire?

In 1960, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo tell us, Lucian Freud went to the Goya Museum in Castres in search of a particular painting. He wanted to create portraits that were character studies and ‘not mere likenesses’, and Goya’s collective portrait ‘La Real Compañía de Filipinas’,a study in human nullity that represented ‘absolutely nothing’, was just what he was looking for. Fernández-Armesto explains:

The work belongs in the tradition of what might be called Spanish ‘anti-portraiture’, from Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ to Goya’s own devastatingly candid royal family group, ‘Familia de Carlos IV’, moral as well as physical delineations of regal vacuity. King Ferdinand VII appears amid the company’s directors, who, enveloped in shadow, seem to ignore him while they talk among themselves, apparently clueless as to why they are there or whether it matters.

It came as something of a relief – justification, even – to arrive at this perfect vignette, because for the previous 283 pages the one question that would not go away was how on earth did the vacuous halfwits of Goya and Velázquez’s portraits ever manage to do anything? How did a monarchy – Habsburg or Bourbon – ruled by such a poor, pitiful inbred as Charles II control an empire that straddled the world? How did a navy that the English had always thought there for the taking dominate its Atlantic and Pacific trade? How did engineers who for 300 years dodged the challenge of a Panama canal leave such a rich physical inheritance? How did a martyr-intoxicated clergy (shades of the English College, Rome, in the Elizabethan age), whose chief instrument of moral correction was the lash, leave behind them such a profoundly Catholic legacy? And how, unkindly, did people who looked like Goya’s lot manage to cash in so often on that most bizarre of cultural phenomena, the ‘stranger-effect’? 

If I’m still not quite sure of the answers, it is not for want of being told. It takes a brave man to say anything good about any empire these days, but in a brilliant and battling introduction, full of elegantly turned argument, of seemingly counter-intuitive asides that make one think one had thought those things all one’s life, Fernández-Armesto takes on the very Anglo-Saxon, almost ‘Python-esque’, legend of ‘moral inferiority’, genocidal greed and religious fanaticism. In its place, he conjures up a history of unrivalled durability, success and unexpected compromise achieved in the face of almost insuperable problems of distance, climate and topography.

The book is both literally and metaphorically about how this empire – the preferred description was ‘monarchy’ – was built. In the first chapter proper the authors ask what follows after the ‘heroes’ of all imperial foundation myths have come and gone, and their answer is ‘a moment of technology’ and the arrival of the ‘engineer’. This is interpreted in the widest possible sense to cover pretty well everything from mining, ship-building and the construction of bridges, roads, forts and naval docks to civic planning, public health, botany, cultural hybridity and missionaries.

The book would be almost worth buying for these opening salvoes alone, which is just as well – because what follows reads more like the quarry for a book than the finished article. There are passages throughout of real style and lucidity; but in chapter after chapter one can find oneself lost in a morass of detail from which – however evocative or impeccable the scholarship – there seems no escape. A paragraph taken entirely at random, but one that could be replicated 100 times over reads:

Elsewhere in New Spain, at Querétaro, Juan Antonio de Urrutia, Marqués de Villar del Águila, solved the city’s problems in 1738, contributing 60 per cent of the 124,791 pesos it cost to do so from his own pocket. From springs known as Los Ojos del Capulin, from the name of the wild cherry trees around it, an aqueduct 1 kilometre long brought the water required over 74 impressive arches, 23 metres (75 ft) high at the utmost point… The aqueduct El Sitio, in Xalpa, which would attain a length of 50 kilometres (31 mi.), was designed to carry water from the rivulet know as El Oro to the Jesuits’ hacienda over tiers of arches – four of them over a single depression 50 metres (164 ft) deep – and broad cuttings. The work was unfinished when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767, but completed in 1854.  At Arizpe in Sonora circa 1782, Manuel Agustin Mascaró raised a canal on rounded pillars to link with the aqueduct he designed.

The difficulty is exacerbated by the absence of decent maps – anyone but the Mesoamerican specialist had better have a good atlas to hand. But the real problem lies with the book’s structure, which seems unfortunate in a work that is largely about building. The chapters are arranged by theme rather than chronology, and while it is hard to think how else they could have accomplished what they hoped to do, it means that there is no forward drive or linear development. Instead a ‘unities’-busting narrative takes us – from chapter to chapter, often from paragraph to paragraph – repeatedly back and forth in space and time.

As Dr Johnson said of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, anyone who can believe they are in Rome in one scene should have no trouble believing they are in Egypt in the next; but there must surely be limits to the mental gymnastics demanded of a reader. A paragraph might open in Cartagena in the 16th century and end in Lima in the 17th; might kick off in 16th-century Veracruz and, within 15 lines, move by way of Nombre de Dios, Havana and a 17th-century Carmelite on his month-long journey to Jalapa to end in the middle of the 18th century with a Capuchin friar called Francisco de Ajofrin in Mexico to collect alms for a mission in Tibet.

The other side of all this, though – and it is a formidable achievement – is the vivid picture we get of the appalling difficulties that faced the Spanish monarchy. It might be the fate of all empires to end in disappointment, but has any ever had more excuse for failure, more hostile terrains, more crushing setbacks to overcome or – always supposing that you survived the nightmare Atlantic crossing – a greater gap between projectors’ dreams of ‘chimerical perfectionism’ and actual, on-the -spot realities than Spain’s?  Dig a canal, and watch it silt over. Search for a place over the Apurimac for a stone bridge, and abandon ideas of progress for good old Inca rope. Fortify Mexico City against the floods of 1553, 1580, 1604 and 1607, and bury the 30,000 drowned in 1629. Build Havana’s dockyards, and wait for the Royal Navy to sack them. Bring the native populations to Christ, and watch them slide back to their old ways.

And yet the cities and the churches got built; civic life and social hierarchies evolved; roads were made; stone bridges were erected; buildings were beautified; fashions were aped; and bullrings were constructed to announce the arrival of civilisation in the New World. And if none of that is going to appease the enemies of empire or erase an alternative history of disease, slavery and oppression, Spain’s record in the Americas was no worse than Britain’s or America’s. That, though, is a very low bar. But if the Christian mission that was the solitary moral justification for the whole imperial project no longer cuts much ice, it is hard, at the end of their 400-year history of extraordinary and dogged resilience, to ignore the authors’ measured, Johnsonian judgment: ‘The missions should, perhaps, be commended not for working well, but rather (like the empire of which they formed part) for working at all.’

The dirty war of Sefton Delmer

There is an obvious problem with trying to judge who ‘won’ a propaganda war. Unlike its physical counterpart, there is virtually no real-world evidence either way, and everyone involved has spent years learning how to spin, manipulate and outright lie about reality to try to shape it into what they want. As a result, it remains the conventional wisdom – among those who think of such things, at least – that despite their eventual and total defeat in the second world war, it was the Nazis who won the propaganda war of their era.

British efforts at demoralisation and appealing to the better nature of German citizens or soldiers were often naff, and where they weren’t, they were hampered by the government’s insistence on ‘unconditional surrender’ from Germany, with no carve-outs – long said to be one of the best propaganda tools to keep Germans unified behind the Nazi party.

How to Win an Information War is an effort to counter that prevailing narrative, arguing that a morally ambiguous black ops propaganda operation, led by the Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer, offered an effective counter to the Nazi operation, but grounded it in free-thinking – as opposed to the Nazi theory that people wanted to be led.

From this, Peter Pomerantsev, a Ukraine-born senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute, draws frequent parallels to the modern propaganda challenges of tackling disinformation and false narratives, mostly grounded in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It is a riveting, revisionist and subtle retelling of second world war propaganda, though one whose lessons for today are at best ambiguous.

Delmer might have agreed with the mainstream telling of Britain’s propaganda efforts in the early years of the war, as at the time he was sidelined (with mounting frustration), owing to his birth in Germany and Australian parentage. (Throughout his career he was plagued by the question of whether or not he was truly ‘one of us’.) But, as Pomerantsev recounts it, those who doubted him had good reason to do so. As the Express’s Berlin correspondent, Delmer had cultivated close connections and even friendships with senior Nazis during the early 1930s – all the while apparently reporting back to the British government that they needed to act against them, and soon.

It is when Delmer was eventually gifted his own propaganda unit that the book really comes to life. While other British efforts attempted to appeal to the better angels of the Germans’ nature, Delmer aimed far lower – trying to foment strife over unfair allocations of rations and coupons, highlight corruption among party officials, and more.

For this he first used a character nicknamed Der Chef (the chief), who would rail against Winston Churchill, Jews and the Brits in a way no British propaganda effort would ever dare to do. With this credibility and genuine leaked information from the regime, Delmer cemented his efforts.

His later schemes were more subtle, culminating in a radio station offering mostly accurate information, purporting to be from official German sources, which most listeners would nonetheless know originated from Britain, at a time when knowingly listening to British radio transmissions was punishable by death.

Pomerantsev uses this development to dissect the performative nature of propaganda, and how with this station and the elaborate dance between broadcaster and listener, Delmer changed it:

Here was a radio programme pretending to be Nazi, which understood that its listeners knew it wasn’t, and whose listeners tuned in because they needed the emotional and physical safety of play-acting as if they thought it might be Nazi after all.

Delmer was the dirtiest of dirty tricksters. He sent letters and gift hampers to the parents of dead German soldiers, claiming to be from those dead troops, saying they had survived, deserted and were living prosperously in safe countries beyond the war. He broadcast letters from alleged witnesses to faked brutality against soldiers in military hospitals, telling families the soldiers had been deliberately killed by those supposed to care for them. Anything to encourage desertions and break morale was considered allowable.

Despite that, Pomerantsev still believes there was an element of idealism in Delmer’s worldview, arguing that all his efforts were aimed at encouraging freethinking and small-scale rebellion against a regime which demanded compliance above all else. The propaganda, he argues, may have been dirty, but it was trying to liberate people rather than tie them down.

From this, Pomerantsev draws his parallels with the present day. Neither picking at petty facts nor appealing to the highest ideals is effective at countering propaganda. Instead, you must start where your audience is – at what is grinding them down and causing resentment – and turn those issues to your own ends. The sections at the ends of chapters in which the author draws those parallels most directly are the least effective in the book, though they are understandable, given the existence of an ongoing conflict in which so many of these themes are relevant.

Pomerantsev is not a propagandist for his subject, either. He reports the many ways in which Delmer’s efforts may have backfired or ‘boomeranged’ on either the UK as a whole or on himself, acknowledging that Delmer was an unreliable narrator, and that the idea of who ‘wins’ a propaganda war is an unknowable one.

Winning such a war may even be an impossible task. But anyone likely to engage in one would be better off for reading Pomerantsev’s book first.

How much would your family stump up for your ransom?

‘I can’t quite believe I’m here, having a steak dinner with a killer,’ writes Jenny Kleeman, as she sits with a hitman for the big opening to her book about the price we put on life. Someone paid to take lives is about to spill the beans on his dark trade. There should be tension. There should be jeopardy. We should be worried about Kleeman’s safety. So why does it feel a bit flat?

It is difficult to find a hired gun, obviously. This one is John Alite, who was ‘a hitman for the Gambino dynasty’. However, he is now ‘a motivational speaker’ and ‘host of several podcasts’, and seems a lot more podcaster than hitman. Kleeman writes that he went to prison after he ‘pleaded guilty to charges that included two murders’. But when he talks about his sentence, she says ‘some of his numbers don’t stack up’. She also says it ‘would be naive to take this former gangster at his word’. We get no satisfactory price for a hit. He tells her he ‘probably shot 40 men’, but didn’t keep track of how many died. The steak dinner is not a success.

The next chapter frustrates too. Kleeman visits an F-35 factory in Texas to meet the publicist, take a tour and speak to some of the workers. From my experience, good stories rarely come from such visits. She uses the section to debate the cost of the planes, but that has been done elsewhere at length. She tries to dig into missions on which the fighter jets have been used, wondering who they have killed. Unfortunately, we don’t get close to knowing names or their stories. If I’d been editing this book, I’d have ditched these opening pieces.

But when Kleeman tells the story of a London mother whose son was stabbed, she gets the access and time to tell it properly: the knock at the door; the police; the poor mother wetting herself as she tries to get dressed; the prayers. There is a brilliant clash in tone as Kleeman moves from grief to money, in the form of civil servants and a report calculating the average economic impact of such a murder: ‘£254,710 in lost output from average unearned wages.’

The book continues in this pattern, exploring case studies and digging into how the price of each life was evaluated. It is divided into six parts: the price of taking a life, the price of a life lost, the price of a life created, the price of saving a life, the price of a human body and the price of a human being.

This last includes the story of Rachel Chandler’s brother finding out how much he will have to pay Somali pirates to return his kidnapped sister unharmed. In a wonderfully matter-of-fact style, Kleeman describes Stephen Collet at home in Suffolk as he negotiates with a man named Ali:

Ali went down to $500,000. Stephen went up to $165,000. Ali went back up to $800,000. Then $1.5 million. Then $2 million. Stephen stood firm at $165,000.

For a year he haggled over his sister’s life. Collet tells Kleeman:

It becomes like throwing numbers around. You have to be quite brave in your language and say, ‘Well, if they die, they die’, that sort of thing.

In the end he paid $440,000.

The best and most uneasy section is about the price we are willing to pay to keep children alive. Again, Kleeman has good access and uses it well, introducing a one-and-a-half-year-old boy, Edward, who is on the carpet in his home. She then explains how we decided whether he should live or die:

He is here, pushing buttons on his noisy books, throwing us fist bumps and eyebrow wiggles, thanks to a single dose of a life-saving drug that cost £1.8 million.

At about two months old Edward became a bit floppy and was moving less; then he stopped breathing. His father gave him mouth-to-mouth, and doctors resuscitated him, but they found he had spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a disorder of the nerve cells. ‘So I’m losing him, I’m losing my baby,’ his mother said to the neurology team. Until 2016, writes Kleeman, there was no treatment, and that might have been the case. Now there are options, including Zolgensma.

The drug cost six times the price of the home Edward lives in, so his family started to crowdfund, hoping to send their child to the US for treatment. They raised some money, but not enough. Then the drug was approved on the NHS. The family cried with joy, until an hour later when another parent who had a child with SMA texted: ‘I don’t think Edward will be eligible.’ He was over the age limit. Edward’s mother went on television to make her case. The rule was changed so that decisions for older children would be made case by case. Edward got his dose.

The price was right, we, as a society, decided. Edward’s story reminded me of a girl I knew who had a tumour. Her parents appeared in the local paper and crowdfunded to send her to America for experimental treatment. It wasn’t clear it would help, but we gave some money. We could have given more, of course. We could have sold our house, but we didn’t. We didn’t even forego our holiday. If she had been our own daughter we would have. This uncomfortable reflection on the price of life is what Kleeman’s excellent book confronts us with.

Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed

Practice is a short novel set in a ‘narrow room’: one day in the life of an Oxford undergraduate writing an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel is trying to ‘perfect her routine, to get more out of each day’. She goes to bed early and rises at 6 a.m. She makes coffee like it’s a ritual and drinks it from the same small, brown mug. She has a plan. She will work, walk, do yoga, meditate, each at their allotted time. The restriction of the novel – a single day, a single character, discrete passages strung together like a sonnet sequence – lends itself to a delicate portrait of Annabel’s struggles with discipline, focus and attention.

From one angle, she thinks her determination to cloister herself in her work ‘glints like the single-mindedness that one day becomes greatness’. But she admits that from another ‘it looks wrong’. The novel collects glimpses and shifting perspectives. It describes the light as it changes through the day, and captures nebulous states of mind: what it feels like to pay attention, to be distracted, to meditate. Annabel aspires to ‘understand subtle, fragile things’. This might be an apt description of Practice too.

For Annabel, literature is something to be worn against the skin. She collects quotations and ideas that strike her. She metabolises what she reads, so it flows together with her own thoughts. We first hear about her love of Virginia Woolf in a list of real lovers, and Woolf feels present throughout the novel; there’s a shadow of A Room of One’s Own in questions about making space to think. Annabel’s reading is a practice of attentiveness and discipline: ‘The texts… how do they want us to make ourselves available to them?’ Set within an ordinary day in Annabel’s life, these questions amplify: in a world of competing demands, what kind of attention is possible?

Practice has a flavour of Annabel’s self-seriousness about it. On first acquaintance, she seems rather annoying: talking to herself in the third person and daydreaming incessantly. But she is at an awkward age, childhood not long behind her: Narnia, the Shire and Earthsea tangle with more erudite references. She wonders what her schoolteachers would think of her now (pretentious, she imagines). Gradually, what seems like narrowness blossoms into a touching portrait of an ordinary life and ‘what… happens when repeatedly nothing happens’.

Conning the booktrade connoisseurs

Literary scandals – like actual scandals – come and go. Who now recalls, or indeed cares less about, the hoo-ha surrounding whether or not the professional huckster James Frey made stuff up in his much celebrated 2004 memoir A Million Little Pieces and then had the audacity to lie about it to Oprah Winfrey? Anyone remember JT LeRoy? Binjamin Wilkomirski?

Authorship debates, accusations of plagiarism, obscenity controversies, way-out wacky and appalling author behaviour, rivalries, forgeries – they all tend to be storms in teeny-tiny, super-fragile, already half-cracked literary teacups that soon subside and slip from the gossip columns and the culture pages to become the subject matter merely of obscure academic conferences and dull, scholarly articles. Ezra Pound famously claimed that poetry is news that stays news. Book news is news that never really was.

Nonetheless, in The Book Forger, the academic Joseph Hone revives an old story about Thomas James Wise, giving it a refreshing new twist. The focus is not so much on Wise’s dastardly wrongdoings but on the two doughty fellows, John Carter and Graham Pollard, who uncovered his literary sins.

Hone claims that this was ‘perhaps the most sensational literary scandal of the last 100 years’, which is maybe overstating it. The book tells of the discovery, in 1934, that Wise, a renowned book collector, had faked and sold some Victorian first editions. Hone also styles Carter and Pollard as ‘Poirots of the library, Holmeses of the book world’, which again is a bit rich. Basically, they did some research and published a short book, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934), revealing Wise’s forgeries. The act of literary sleuthing doth not a pair of literary super-sleuths make. But for all the over-egging, this is certainly a tale worth retelling.

Wise (1859-1937) started out as a lowly clerk in London. He became interested in buying and selling antiquarian books, got involved in the newly formed Shelley Society, and then realised that he could make himself a few bob by producing facsimile editions for wealthy book collectors – which he soon saw he could pass off as the real thing. Fiddle the dates, remove a page, invent a publishing history – and before you can say F for fake, you are quids in: not so much turning sows’ ears into silk purses as turning silk purses into even more expensive silk purses. Wise was a highly skilled conman with an eye for a dupe, who didn’t miss a trick.

Hone, on the other hand, does miss a bit of a trick. Lurking beneath his meticulously researched tale of forgery and detection isa seething story about class and envy in early 20th-century London. A real-life Mr Polly or Kipps, Wise was a hustler from Holloway, full of resentment and loathing, undertaking a doomed act of self-aggrandisement and self-assertion. He managed to pull the wool over the eyes of all the toffs and privileged connoisseurs of Bloomsbury, before eventually being found out by a couple of posh boys, Carter and Pollard, with nothing better to do, post-Oxbridge, than drift, and dabble in antiquarian book-dealing.

Of Hone’s two bibliographical detective heroes, Pollard is by far the most interesting. A member of the Hypocrites at Oxford, he married a communist, became a spy, working for M15, and eventually enjoyed a successful career working for the Board of Trade. Carter, meanwhile, was a ‘debonair young graduate of Eton and King’s’ and the two men met at a gathering in Soho of the self-proclaimed ‘Biblio Boys’, a bunch of booksellers who in the course of their discussions and debates become interested in Wise’s books.

The Book Forger is delightfully and unapologetically bookish, offering glimpsed portraits of significant behind-the-scenes literary figures, from Walter Wilson Greg, perhaps the greatest bibliographical scholar of the 20th century, to the colourful denizens of London’s antiquarian bookshops, including seedy Birrell and Garnett in Bloomsbury and the grand old houses of Maggs and Quaritch.

There are also some nice little novelistic flourishes. The restaurant in Soho where Pollard and Carter planned their takedown of Wise was the kind ‘where lunch could quite easily slide into coffee and coffee into drinks and drinks into dinner and dinner into more drinks’. Take me there. But Hone is perhaps at his best when describing the various developments in bibliographical methods which enabled Pollard and Carter to reveal Wise’s secrets: the chapter on typefaces, printing methods and the study of the kernless ‘f’, for example, is superb. Also, for anyone wishing to set up as a book forger – and frankly, who hasn’t considered it, given the current cost of living crisis? – there’s a useful short guide to traditional methods on page 37.

You are what you don’t eat

If asked to think about food preservation for a moment you might picture an aproned woman boiling oranges for marmalade in a large copper maslin pan; or vegetable scraps being turned into stock; or those recipes from wartime rationing using root veg in place of sugar; or even, with an eye to the modern, you might imagine a trendy chef preparing offal in a gleaming chrome kitchen to ensure the nose-to-tail credentials of his restaurant.

But there is more to the history of preservation than preserves, and the obvious enemy, when we talk about preservation, is waste – the two engaged in a constant battle. Exploring that battleground is Leftovers, the debut book from Eleanor Barnett, a food historian and academic.

The premise is simple: ‘From the moment food is harvested or slaughtered, it risks becoming inedible as it begins to ferment, rot and decompose.’ Our ability to prolong the life of these perishable items has influenced the course of history. Leftovers tracks that history – with a particular focus on Britain – from the time we left behind a nomadic lifestyle to the American revolution (where Barnett frames the dumping of tea leaves as food waste) and the military invention of the tin can.

Of course, the history of food waste is also the history of poverty, and is therefore informed by our changing morals and priorities, and how we view that poverty. As Barnett puts it: ‘If, as the old adage goes, “you are what you eat”, we – our values and culture – are equally defined but what we don’t eat.’ Leftovers charts that division of poverty and wealth, and how it was affected by early fly-tipping, Victorian hygiene concerns, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the domestic cookbook and advances in science, technology and public health.

Of course, home preservation and culinary ingenuity do feature, and Barnett is particularly good on the domestic lives of ordinary people in the past. She describes the moral panic that motivated local authorities to prevent pig ownership; the day-to-day trade of the rag-and-bone men; and how, with the guidance of Mrs Beeton, a home cook could zhuzh up tinned meat into a stylish soup. But she avoids the obvious and nostalgic. Indeed, some of the attempts to spin out the life of fresh produce sound positively disgusting. Hannah Glasse’s solution to potted birds which ‘smell so bad, that nobody could bear the smell for the rankness’ is just to wash off the rancid butter and start again.

Leftovers is certainly no rose-tinted account of how Britain made do and mended in the good old days but is now profligate, and ignorant of traditional preservation techniques. On the contrary, it doesn’t shy away from the more difficult moments in history: food poisoning, enormous waste as a direct result of unsuccessful preservation and even government-mandated starvation of whole communities.

It is ironic that the technology that has brought about the ability to preserve food better has in fact increased our propensity for waste. Long-life produce implicitly discourages domestic recycling and preservation; our reliance on best-before dates has led to undue cautiousness, which results in us throwing things away unnecessarily; and the global cold chain has meant that we have near-constant access to any product in any season from anywhere in the world. Only when true crises occur (such as Brexit and Covid), and supply chains are interrupted, do we realise how susceptible we all are to food insecurity.

It is here that Leftovers feels especially timely. Wasting food has always been a ‘morally-charged issue’, Barnett writes. Our reasons for attempting to reduce food waste may have changed from the religiously focused preservation of God’s creations to climate-crisis-informed environmental concerns. But of course there is nothing new under the sun. Barnett tells us: ‘Our exploration of food wastage in the early modern period has revealed a society deeply divided, and strictly structured by economic class.’ You could say the same about food inequality in modern Britain. The statistics Barnett presents of those living in food poverty are shocking. In July 2020, nearly one in four 16-to-24-year-olds in Britain were resorting to using food banks. The global environmental goals missed by governments make for bleak reading.

But Barnett leaves us with reasons to feel optimistic. While state intervention is required for systemic change, the role of the consumer is more powerful than ever, and she is able to point to encouraging examples of both food justice groups and customer pressure leading to businesses and industries actively changing how they handle their waste. For better or worse, Leftovers is more than a historical retrospective; it is a book for our time.

The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed

How do you picture the end of days? ‘When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world,’ muses the unnamed narrator in It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over. ‘I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction.’ But no: ‘The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same,’ she continues from her vantage point in an afterlife, brought into vivid existence by Anne de Marcken.

It’s telling that the author’s biography states that she ‘lives in the United States on unceded land of the Coast Salish people’. You could say It Lasts Forever takes place on similarly unceded space if you substitute the undead for early settlers and the living for the indigenous peoples of the Pacific north-west coast. That’s right: this is a zombie novel – albeit a Fitzcarraldo zombie novel, which means that the prose is exquisite and the form is inventive, and there is plenty of white space between fragments of text and a handful of doodles. It’s wry and moving and very beautiful. (Fireflies are ‘a fleet of tiny unheeded Paul Reveres uncovering their lanterns, covering them again, signalling danger, danger, danger’.)

We meet our heroine (‘I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder’) in a hotel for the undead. No one can remember their own name; they don’t feel any pain and nothing can satiate their bottomless hunger. What she can feel is grief at missing her lover – this is as much a love story as a tale of devastation. Metaphors are becoming reality:

A hotel might once have been a metaphor for the body, for purgatory, for any transitory site…And now here we actually are, none of us sure when we checked in or whether this really is our luggage. And of course us. Zombies used to be drug addicts, television watchers, video game players. Now zombies are zombies. Consumers are consumers.

Later, our heroine departs for the road, in a quest westwards towards a memory of being with her lover asleep in some dunes by an ocean.

I’m reminded of both Joy Williams’s Harrow and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, although the zombies add something fresh. Ultimately, ‘everything is the same’ in the apocalypse because we are already living through one. The narrator’s grief is our grief for what we’ve lost. And it’s all our fault. Or, as she puts it: ‘I was a zombie even then. Ravenous eater of a world that was already the last of its kind.’

The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical

Barbara Comyns’s reputation rises and falls like a Mexican wave, making her one of the most rediscovered novelists of recent times. She’s credited with anticipating Angela Carter and for being in the vanguard of tackling themes of traumatic dissociation and the realities of childbirth. Yet younger, trendier writers have regularly eclipsed her.

Every fan remembers their first Comyns novel: the visceral jolt of black humour, the suckerpunch of stark horror. Knowing that she drew from life, we have longed for a biography, and hooray, it’s finally here. Avril Horner, emeritus professor of English at Kingston University, has given us one packed with incidents both monumental and mundane. It skilfully interweaves life and literature and draws on family memories and unpublished private papers.

Horner promises not to ‘raid the work for evidence of the writer’s life’; but the truth is, a lot that is described in the novels did happen – not only macabre details, but sad episodes familiar from Comyns’s depictions of thwarted relationships and downtrodden women. Economic exigency –a significant factor in the novels – was also a driving force in Comyns’s life. After a privileged, if emotionally fraught, childhood, she was thrust into the world at 18 after the death of her father. Untrained for anything much, she struggled to keep afloat. Her first jobs included kennel attendant, poodle breeder, antiques dealer, piano trader, domestic help and artist’s model. Only in the last decade of her life – she died in 1992, aged 85 – did she enjoy economic security. 

Comyns originally dreamed of becoming a sculptor, but art school fees proved impossible. Nevertheless, she embraced bohemian living, moved in artistic circles, and was influenced by Surrealism. Beautiful and magnetic, she inspired loyalty, despite moments when she frayed her friends’ nerves.

She married twice, and raised two surviving children, one by her first husband, John Pemberton, the other (who she pretended was John’s) by Rupert Lee, the former husband of John’s aunt. But it was Lee’s next wife, the wealthy Diana Brinton, who became Barbara’s lifelong on-off frenemy. Their complicated relationship makes for absorbing reading and seesawing sympathies.

Bohemianism was an unequal proposition. Like many women, Comyns sidelined her art to further Pemberton’s. Still, he felt constrained by responsibilities he’d barely assumed. Times were tough, and by the age of 29, Barbara was broke – and broken: a single mother who’d weathered affairs, an abortion and a suicide attempt. Circumstances improved when she got involved with Arthur Price, who, though ‘a bit of a crook’, mostly comes out well here. The two sometimes verged on criminality, but their schemes and adventures are fun to follow. He’d be immortalised in her 1987 novel Mr Fox.

Comyns’s first book, published when she was 40, emerged from stories she told her children about growing up in Bidford-on-Avon, transformed into a startling work for adults. Sisters by a River introduced readers to the naive worldview that was to become a hallmark of her later novels, even when her narrators are adults.

Her second husband, Richard Comyns Carr, initially worked in the Foreign Office and MI6. They honeymooned in a cottage owned by his good friend Kim Philby, and hosted parties for a cosmopolitan circle including everyone from David Footman, the chief of the political section of MI6, to Graham Greene, Augustus John and Dylan Thomas. Greene crucially wrote to the managing director of the publisher Bodley Head advising him to keep an eye on Comyns – ‘a crazy but interesting novelist whom I started when I was at Eyre & Spottiswode’. We owe Greene a double debt for getting her into print, and for urging Carmen Callil to republish her in the now familiar Virago editions.

When Philby disappeared, Comyns Carr lost his job – the feeling being if he knew about Philby he was a traitor, and if he didn’t he was a fool. The couple decamped to Spain in 1956, staying there 18 years, always scrabbling to keep ahead of their creditors. Barbara worked there on her most celebrated novel The Vet’s Daughter, ‘a surreal, dark tale about human cruelty’, unlike anything else published in English in the 1950s. Kenneth Allsop called it ‘so original in its vision and beautifully exact in its writing that I am lost in admiration’.

But good reviews did not guarantee continued success. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, disappointment was frequent. Thankfully, Comyns set pessimism aside when she and Richard returned to England. She resumed writing, but the 1980s were often overshadowed by family dramas – not the least being Richard’s death.

The 1981 Virago edition of The Vet’s Daughter changed everything. Comyns felt emboldened to work on The Juniper Tree, with its fairytale references and surreal take on the domestic, and then Mr Fox. In 1989 she brought out House of Dolls, not mentioning that she’d written it 20 years earlier, when it had failed to interest a publisher.

Her reputation waned again after her death, but this century has seen renewed admiration. While Horner’s biography occasionally suffers from repetition, it’s clearly a labour of love and should be received in that spirit. Let’s hope it encourages new readers to discover Comyns’s haunting novels and the compelling artist behind them.

A web of rivalries: The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, reviewed

Jennifer Croft is a translator of uncommon energy. In 2018 she won the International Booker Prize for her rendering of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. In 2021, she took on Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, a great big historical epic. Now she’s written a satirical page-turner set over what one character calls ‘seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks’.

Like members of some ancient mystery cult, eight translators fetch up in a house near a primeval forest in Poland on the Belarus border. The year is 2017. ‘Bedraggled and ecstatic’, they’ve come to translate Szara eminencja (Grey Eminence), a novel about art and mass extinction, by the Stockholm-worthy woman of letters Irena Rey – their host, their author, their Athena. Yet while they are soaking up Irena’s reflected glory, she disappears, possibly into the forest. They hasten to find her and go a bit mad; before long, their search assumes the darker character of a moral reckoning.

The book purports to have issued from two of Irena’s translators: an Argentine named Emi, who originally wrote it in Spanish-inflected Polish (each sentence ‘a tiny haunted house’ aswarm with the ghosts of her native language) and Emi’s put-upon American nemesis, Alexis, the blonde stunner tasked with translating it into English. Alexis is also the intellectual traducer in this truth-y account of metaphorical murder and mayhem, ‘the monster who seemed to want to ruin everything’.

In the beginning, the textually-loyalist Emi accuses the venturesome Alexis of violating their ‘sacred translation honour code’. By giving Alexis a double role, not to mention all the best lines and unlimited footnotes, Croft neatly undermines the narrator’s authority while making sport of the old chestnut that the best translator is an invisible one.

For all its cleverness, The Extinction of Irena Rey is serious about the collective nature of art-making and its interconnectedness with the natural world. What is more, Croft is superb on approaches to literary translation and its orthodoxies (Nabokov hovers at the edges of the text) and she takes some good shots at the cult of the upper-case author into the bargain.

Lazy, mean-minded readers may wonder if there isn’t a hint of Olga Tokarczuk in Croft’s Rey. The answer is no, if you believe the acknowledgements, though Croft does trace her interest in translation ‘communities’ to Tokarczuk.

Early on, Emi describes their translation community as ‘a family’. But as another Polish literary genius, Czeslaw Milosz, famously observed: ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.’ Once uncoupled from Irena, Emi wonders who she is without her. The book’s metafictional playfulness and tricky ending suggest at least one possible answer. She’s a faithful translator whose metamorphosis into a writer of comic brilliance features in a novel by the (fictitious) 2026 Nobel Laureate Irena Rey. 

The tyranny of 1970s self-help gurus

As any book about the rise of that most nebulous idea ‘wellness’, should, James Riley’s Well Beings begins with Gwyneth Paltrow, purveyor of ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candles, ‘Metabolism-Boosting Super-powder’ and nostrums about mindfulness and ‘self-care’ – for which read self-indulgence. In 2019 Paltrow’s company Goop chartered a luxury liner for a ‘Goop at Sea’ extravaganza, at which attendees were invited to spend $4,200 for the ‘basic’ cruise and a suite at the ship’s onboard spa, and a further $750 for the event itself, the highlight of which would be an appearance by the high priestess of wellness herself.

Goop at Sea was cancelled due to Covid. But it did eventually take to the seas in 2021 – an anticlimactic affair, featuring a ‘low-impact fitness class’ and an ‘intuition seminar’ hosted by the ‘Goop-approved clairvoyant’ Deganit Nuur. Paltrow herself did not attend, and the Goop social media feed conspicuously avoided any reports on the cruise, concentrating instead on upcoming health events, pop ups and high-end product launches. It was ‘social media doing what it does best’, Riley writes – ‘consigning the present to the past and overloading the future with promises yet to be delivered’.

As ‘the market leader in the contemporary wellness industry’, Goop is reportedly worth some $250 million. And Well Beings is very much on the money in every sense of the term. Riley’s previous book, The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New World and the End of the Sixties, was a smart, acerbic look at the dark side of 1960s counter-culture. This onepicks up the thread to deal with the cultural shift in the 1970s from the political to the personal, examining how counter-cultural projects of the 1960s, from communes to radical politics to psychedelics, gave rise to ‘Me Generation’ ideas and a growing interest in eastern spiritual teachings and alternative therapies. It culminated in what Riley calls the ‘commodified approach to wellness’ – a term so broad it can be applied to everything from public health policy to yoga to Arouse Me Libido Elixir (‘tastes like cherries’). Goop again.

Beginning with the post-war shift in government policy in Britain away from a singular, medicalised focus on ‘illness’ to a more broad-ranging idea of ‘well being’ – physical, mental and social – as a definition of health, Riley sets off on his enquiry. This encompasses everything from communal living in the late 1960s, to the Black Panthers and the ubiquity of private swimming pools in California, to Michel Houellebecq, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the utopian dreams of Rajneesh, the ‘93 Rolls- Royces guru’.

Much of the book hinges on the rise of the Human Potential Movement during the ‘Me’ decade and ‘the culture of narcissism’ (as Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch saw the 1970s). The crucible of this was the Esalen Institute in California, ‘a Cape Canaveral for inner space’, where various therapies (Gestalt, Rolfing, encounter groups) were explored between dips in the nearby hot springs. The ethos was best defined by one of the resident gurus, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, as ‘a desire to become more than what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming’. As a writer for Holiday magazine, visiting in 1968, put it: ‘I got in touch with my body this winter, I made contact with my SELF – and it was the best trip I ever had.’ Wolfe wrote that the various therapies available at Esalen offered those attending the opportunity to focus their attention on ‘the most fascinating subject on Earth: Me’. Graffiti scrawled at the entrance put it more bluntly: ‘Jive shit for rich white folks.’

Esalen was the pioneer for a growing number of self-help gurus and organisations that became thriving commercial concerns. Foremost among them was ‘est’, promoted by – too good to be true – a former car and encyclopaedia salesman called Werner Erhard. He was born John Paul Rosenberg, but took his new name after reading articles in Esquire about the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the German chancellor Ludwig Erhard. Est (Latin for ‘he/she/it is’ and acronym for Erhard Seminars Training) involved attendees signing up to spend their weekends in hotel conference rooms being starved of sleep and longing for the privilege of a bathroom break while being yelled at by ‘coaches’. At Synanon, a ‘residential therapeutic community’ founded by a former member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Charles ‘Chuck’ Dederich, clients were expected to shave off their hair, wear identical white overalls and listen with rapt attention to recorded missives from Dederich, and ‘given hell’ in protracted therapy sessions called ‘the Game’.

These encounter groups – ‘lube jobs for the personality’, as Wolfe described them – more often resembled theatres of tyranny, involving psychological, and sometimes physical, self-flagellation that would have made a medieval penitent blush. They reached their nadir at the Rajneesh ashram in Poona, which conjoined human potential therapies with eastern spiritual teachings, and where the meetings often ended in sexual free-for-alls from which participants would emerge with broken limbs and mental breakdowns.

Riley goes into some detail discussing The Serial (1977), a satire by Cyra McFadden about the wealthy area of Marin County where any number of practices blossomed, including est, bio-energetics, Reichian therapy and ‘guided fantasy’. McFadden’s send-up resulted in threats, with attacks on her home and her car tyres slashed, presumably by people who had not been paying attention at their consciousness-raising classes.

The frenetic pursuit of ‘true self’ was a gift to psychologists, critical theorists and poststructuralists, pondering what the true self might actually be and where it was to be found. It seems unlikely that anyone signing up to follow Rajneesh was consciously acting out what Jean-François Lyotard, the French sociologist and author of The Postmodern Condition, called ‘an incredulity toward metanarratives’. More probably, as Riley notes, people chose to follow gurus because the belief system gave them what they believed they needed at that time, without necessarily realising where it might lead.

The point is well made that these various methods brought with them the double-bind – that any failure on the follower’s part to discover great truths in the teachings was due to their own shortcomings, while any achievements were ascribed solely to the teacher. It’s the disciple’s familiar problem: if a mentor is fallible, like Rajneesh, how much more fallible must one be oneself for following him?

By the 1980s, like other self-help gurus sniffing the winds of change, Erhard rebranded est as the Forum, ostensibly ‘a kinder, gentler iteration of a training that was more success-oriented’ – ‘as if the adrenalised pursuit of profit had become the new way to find yourself’, Riley writes; ‘helping clients to navigate the corporate ladder rather than the rocky road of life’.

The ‘radicalism of wellness’, as it was seeded in the 1970s, was powered by an intoxicating idea that ‘you could live your dreams’ by rising to the challenges of stress, anxiety and alienation that have been ‘collectively and chronically normalised in the emergent neo-liberal landscape’. Those tools from the 1970s are still with us, Riley says – ‘like the scatterings of a roadside picnic waiting for us to use them anew’.

He certainly has a winning turn of phrase. And like Adam Curtis, who covered some of this ground in his 2002 BBC documentary The Century of the Self, he is always alert to surprising connections, unexpected twists and minor characters who turn out to be significant in their own right. These include Sid Rawle, the so-called ‘king of the hippies’, whose attempt in 1971 to establish a ‘tribal’ community on the uninhabited island of Dornish, off the west coast of Ireland, was one of several similar experiments that sprang up at the time, most of them usually described as ‘short-lived’; and Glenn Perry, a depressed computer programmer who pioneered the development of that staple of 1970s’ mind expansion, the flotation tank.

This book takes on so many strands – basically whatever grabs Riley’s interest – that by the end, like spending too long in one of Perry’s flotation tanks, one begins to experience a kind of sensory and information overload. Nonetheless, it is an engrossing, thought-provoking and entertaining study of the search for who we are and what makes us ‘well’ in body and mind. And how that has made Gwyneth Paltrow a fortune.

Badenoch calls for forgiveness over Tory donor’s ‘racist’ remarks

The Frank Hester saga continues after the Tory donor’s ‘rude’ remarks about Diane Abbott came to light on Monday. A Guardian investigation revealed that the West Yorkshire businessman had told colleagues in 2019 that looking at Abbott makes ‘you just want to hate all black women because she’s there’ and that ‘she should be shot’.

Now Kemi Badenoch has spoken out on the issue. The business secretary, who is also minister for women and equalities, blasted Hester’s ‘appalling’ and ‘racist’ remarks on Tuesday afternoon — but added that there must be ‘space for forgiveness’.

Writing on Twitter this afternoon, she said:

Hester’s 2019 comments, as reported, were racist. I welcome his apology. Abbott and I disagree on a lot. But the idea of linking criticism of her, to being a black woman is appalling. It’s never acceptable to conflate someone’s views with the colour of their skin.

MPs have a difficult job balancing multiple interests — often under threats of intimidation as we saw recently in parliament. Some people make flippant comments without thinking of this context. This is why there needs to be space for forgiveness where there is contrition.

The Prime Minister broke his silence a few hours later, with his spokesperson saying: ‘The comments allegedly made by Frank Hester were racist and wrong. He has now rightly apologised for the offence caused and where remorse is shown it should be accepted.’

It echoes the sentiment expressed by other Tory MPs quizzed on the matter. Energy minister Graham Stuart refused to call Hester’s language ‘racist’, saying: ‘That was half a decade ago. He has apologised.’ Work and pensions secretary Mel Stride was a little more critical, telling media: ‘It was clearly inappropriate. He has apologised and I think we need to move on.’

Former Conservative leader William Hague, ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and Downing Street aide Gavin Barwell have joined Badenoch in calling Hester’s remarks ‘racist’. Hague added: ‘He’s deeply sorry. So I think we should accept the apology.’

Abbott has said the comments are ‘frightening’ and expressed fears for her safety. Labour politicians have called on CCHQ to hand back Hester’s recent donations — which amount to £10 million in the last year — while SNP leader Humza Yousaf has this afternoon said that his ‘honest view’ was that ‘if the Conservative party had any moral principle, then they would return every single penny and tell him where his money should go.’

By the sounds of it, however, the Tories are in a charitable mood…

Watch: Humza Yousaf slams ‘institutionally Islamophobic’ Tories

It’s a day that ends in ‘y’ which means the leader of the SNP is once again harping on about independence. Today Humza Yousaf addressed a crowd at the the London School of Economics about the economic woes of Brexit and how, surprise surprise, ‘achieving independence’ is the only solution for the people of Scotland.

Yousaf started jovially, pointing out that both his host Emma McCoy and interviewer Iain Begg had Caledonian ties. ‘It just reminds me of that famous saying that there are two types of people in the world: Scots and those who want to be Scottish. There is a third, of course,’ he quipped, ‘those who lack any ambition whatsoever, but we shall look over those individuals.’ A rather ironic dig from a leader who has himself achieved, er, not a great deal…

But the First Minister grew serious as he was quizzed by the press. Asked about his position on the remarks made by Tory donor Frank Hester about Diane Abbott, Yousaf replied: ‘First and foremost, can I say that I stand in full solidarity with Diane Abbott.’ He went on to describe the Independent MP as a ‘trailblazer’, before stating:

Those comments from Hester are not just racist, they’re not just sexist, they are inciting hatred which is completely and utterly unacceptable. And if the Conservative party had any moral principle, then they would return every single penny and tell him where his money should go. That is my honest view.

Turning his attention to the Tory party, Yousaf continued:

There is simply no doubt in my mind that the Conservative party is not just riddled with Islamophobia, but institutionally Islamophobic.

How could it not be, when you hear the comments from Suella Braverman, when Lee Anderson who was a senior member of the Conservative party up to a few days ago was able to make the comments that he made about Sadiq Khan and not a single senior Conservative, including the Prime Minister, was able to call it Islamophobic? And that is of course the party who also elected a leader that described Muslim women as ‘bank robbers’ because of the way that they look.

Though a number of Tories backed Hester’s apology on the airwaves this morning, former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng slammed the jibes on Politics Live, saying: ‘They are clearly racist and they are clearly sexist… They were very stupid remarks.’

The Conservatives have had a rocky week — and it’s only Tuesday. The weekend can’t come soon enough for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak…

Watch the full clip here:

Navalny’s death has left Russia’s opposition in despair

Following the wave of articles that have appeared in the Western press since Navalny’s death come three pieces from émigré Russians. All present a sobering and even chilling picture of Russia’s future now that its leading figure of opposition is gone.

The first, published by the Russian-language Meduza on 4 March, was by Shura Burtin, a Russian journalist living in Prague. In his essay, ‘The world doesn’t know how to stand up to evil’, Burtin described his devastation at the news of Navalny’s death: ‘Only in the wake of Navalny’s murder did it become clear how unconsciously we still lived in hope for a “normal” future.’

Navalny’s image, Burtin explained, had made change seem, however fraught, a possibility. ‘Navalny staked his life on this future and, by doing so, made it feel tangible to us. Now Putin has bluntly shown us that this future doesn’t exist.’ While many Russians had drawn confidence from Navalny’s strength, his death brought home to Burtin that ‘hoping for anything remotely normal to happen with Russia in the foreseeable future is dangerous. We’re dealing with a very bad, malignant process that isn’t going to end any time soon.’

With the dissident’s murder, a crucial moral line had been crossed – ‘the guardrails have come off’ – and it wasn’t just bad news for Russians themselves. ‘The war is most likely going to escalate… when I heard about the murder, my immediate thought was that they’re going to capture Georgia – simply because they can’t stop.’  Georgians, Lithuanians and Latvians who feared Putin might invade their country were surely right to worry: ‘They had seen everything clearly, and I hadn’t.’

Nor could Russians themselves do anything about it. Any kind of political activity was now useless, even suicidal, and the most anyone could do was put their private life in order. Russians should at least resolve consciously ‘to be closer, to pay more attention to each other. To carefully consider what the person next to you might need… We are very bad at supporting each other, not only in politics, but in general.’

Regarding the country’s current state, Burtin couldn’t be bleaker: ‘We’re locked in a cell with a psychopath, and we should be afraid of him… Right now, hope for the future does more harm than good… We need to realise that our situation is lousy and that we don’t know what to do.’

This sense of dying hope came from other writers too, bringing home that the dream of a free Russian any time soon is not much more than a fairytale. The most soul-searching analysis was from writer and blogger Ostap Karmodi in his article ‘Landscape after the death of a hero’.

Why, Karmodi asked himself, was he so appalled by news of Navalny’s death? It wasn’t as if he was a Navalny supporter, or believed the late dissident would make a great future leader. No – that feeling of being ‘headbutted’ came from something far more fundamental: ‘Because on Friday, 16 February, for the first time in our lives, we saw the victory of evil over good.’

Karmodi, in his piece, wasn’t out to whitewash Navalny. ‘Good is never perfect,’ he wrote. ‘It always has a lot of flaws. It isn’t perfection that makes it good, but the fact it fights against evil.’ Having defeated the villain, the hero could even become the bad guy himself – but that was another story. In reality, ‘after three years of torture,’ said Karmodi, the hero ‘was killed, contrary to all the laws of the genre… It didn’t turn out the way we were taught in children’s books… On a conscious level, we were prepared for the possible death of Navalny in the camp. But for the death of the hero, on a subconscious level, no.’

Writer and researcher Nikolay Epplee also looked at the pitfalls of magical thinking. The failures of post-Soviet Russia, he wrote, were partly down to an unconscious shared belief that, when communism fell, ‘the dragon had died’ and that they themselves had defeated the monster. But, Epplee said, many Russians were deluding themselves here: there had never been any unifying struggle or final victory, nor had most ever found the strength within themselves to fight it. Hence, ‘the dragon lives on today and is back in good shape’.

As for Navalny (or now, his widow Yulia, who has vowed to continue the fight), Russian faith in lone ‘dragon-slayers’ – individuals who’d save the country single-handed – had given rise to a fatal inertia. Such projections were ‘bad not even because they are dreams, but because they suggest we don’t need to participate in the battle. Somehow someone else will do it, a Harry Potter or Frodo.’ But, Epplee added, the point of Potter and Frodo wasn’t that they were superheroes who could save humanity single-handed but that they embodied ‘active resistance to evil’ and showed that ‘only action brings results’.

That collective response, Karmodi assured us in his piece, wasn’t coming any time soon. Navalny, on his famous 2021 return to Russia and certain arrest, perhaps hoped it ‘would awaken his followers from sleep’ and that ‘not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, would come to his defence. Alas, nothing of the kind happened’.

It was heartening, Karmodi felt, that so many had shown up for Navalny’s funeral – an act of huge courage in a state ‘where facial recognition cameras are everywhere and every large gathering of people is swarming with agents in civilian clothes.’ But Navalny’s funeral was ‘the last flash of reflected light. If there is no miracle [before the presidential elections] then all will be lost for Russia… The country will be covered with darkness for years, and the faint flames of goodness will remain burning only in hearts and kitchens.’

Three pieces, then, which couldn’t give a clearer sense of the disarray and despair into which Russia’s opposition have fallen. One can only hope these visions of eternal night, uttered so soon after Navalny’s murder, are no more realistic than the fairytales they set out to supplant.