[!WARNING] 翻译质量评估未完全通过 (Quality Audit Failed) 发现以下潜在质量问题： - missing numeric tokens from source: 03300, 250000, 4080, 500000, 669700, 7712, 839100 - Missing proper nouns in translation: Aaron Ramsey, Abbas Araghchi, Abel Selaocoe, Admiral Grigorovich, Adolf Hitler, Adrian Lyne, Adrien Brody, African American, After Bad Sisters, After Ken Livingstone - source dates, money, or percentage tokens may be missing
加沙冲突引发的分歧，摧毁一名伦敦男子的 生活与事业
Eva Wiseman, pages 14-16
创刊于 1791
9 770029 771427
W
如今犯罪率正在下降，安迪·伯纳姆 必须扭转那些过时的量刑政策，因为这些政策导致监狱中关押的人数达到了不可持续且无法正当化的程度
我们正处于一个犯罪率下降的时代。与此同时，我们却处于一种几乎永无止境的监狱容量危机之中。这种情况看似矛盾，但实际上并非如此：这仅仅是不一致且不负责任的政策制定的可预见结果。安迪·伯纳姆 正在亲身体会监狱人数如何紧紧地束缚住政府的双手。他听到了莉西·哈珀 (Lissie Harper) 沉痛的抱怨——她是警察安德鲁·哈珀 (Andrew Harper) 的遗孀，后者在 2019 年惨遭拖拽致死——她表示两名对其谋杀负责的人即将出狱。于是，他戏剧性地介入并暂停了原本允许部分囚犯提前出狱的立法。这项目前已暂停立法的目的是为了确保监狱在圣诞节之前不会完全没有空间。而且，几乎不可避免地，无论 安迪·伯纳姆 能引入什么样的实际变革，都将撞上一个残酷的现实，这将导致他试图讨好的人群中，失望的人将多于满意的人。国家统计局 (英国) 发布的关于英格兰和威尔士最新的犯罪统计摘要用简单的措辞描绘了大局：“在过去 10 年中，针对个人和家庭的犯罪总体呈下降趋势，但也有一些显著的例外，例如欺诈。”由于警方记录方式的改变，性虐待和家庭暴力等重要领域的长期趋势难以辨认，但谋杀案在下降，暴力犯罪在下降，车辆犯罪和枪击犯罪也在下降。名单还可以继续列举。在这样的背景下，英格兰和威尔士的在狱人数却大幅上升。上周，总人数达到 88,098，这意味着仅剩 2,938 个空余名额。在两年前上一次危机的顶峰时期，该数字一度低至 100，但目前的余地依然极小，风险依然巨大。如果说我们目前的困境有一个起源故事，那它可能始于 1993。时任保守党内政大臣 迈克尔·霍华德 在其政党会议上发表了著名的言论：“监狱是有效的。它确保我们免受谋杀犯、抢劫犯和强奸犯的侵害。” 更多
乔治·奥威尔，《观察家报》
具有预见性地，他在演讲的那段话最后留下了一个人们记忆较为模糊的承诺：“我们将不再以监狱人口的下降来衡量我们的司法系统的成功。”显然，我们现在不这么做了。现在的杀人犯和抢劫犯比 1993 年少，强奸犯可能多也可能少，但现在的在狱人数比那时增加了 40,000 人。这一数字使我们成为了欧洲的异类。每 100,000 人口中，我们送入监狱的人数是德国的两倍，远高于欧洲平均水平。监狱之外的替代方案已经过时。三十年前，四分之一的判决是社区矫正判决；到 2024 年，这一比例下降到了仅 6%。但最显著的是，我们的法院在针对相同罪行判处监禁的时间上大大延长了。1993 年，平均监禁刑期约为 16 个月；现在约为 22.5 个月。
许多刑期的剧增发生在近期。2010 年，有 487 人被判处 10 年或更长时间的监禁。到 2024 年，这一数字上升至 1,639 人。对于任何严肃的政策制定者来说，这些变化带来的后果都是显而易见且可预测的，但我们太多的政治家不够严肃。直到 2020 年，鲍里斯·约翰逊 政府才修改了部分严重罪犯获得提前释放的资格节点，将其从刑期的 50% 延长至 66%。这一变更的简单数学逻辑意味着需要更多的监狱床位，但这些床位并未被建成。而现在，安迪·伯纳姆 暂停了那项实际上将拨回时钟并恢复 50% 触发节点的立法。安迪·伯纳姆 下令对该立法进行的审查需要以闪电般的速度开展，但这应该是他对量刑制度进行调查的开始，而非终结。他应该像声称要改变 40 年经济思维那样，严肃地对待终止这个国家在 30 多年前量刑政策上走上的歧途。证据表明，在狱人数目前的规模是不可持续且不合理的。它给缓刑监督等一个失效系统中其他环节带来了无法忍受的压力，并给受害者和犯罪者都带来了糟糕的结果。我们的监狱无法实现康复，不能防止重新犯罪，且并不安全。用迈克尔·霍华德 的粗鲁话来说：监狱根本没用。现在是我们重新将监狱人数下降视为成功的时候了。
第 12,242 期
埃娃·怀斯曼 我从事报业多年，但我倾向于写文化而非犯罪类报道，因此我完全没预料到这个故事会如此占据我的生活。我与我的孩子们讨论过这件事。在发表完一场婚礼演讲后的几分钟内，我就给消息源发了消息，而且我经常梦到主人公。 新闻版，第 14-16 页
在 索斯波特 一场泰勒·斯威夫特主题舞蹈派对袭击中丧生的儿童家属，对将凶手转移出监狱的决定提出了批评。阿克塞尔·鲁达库巴纳 从 贝尔马什监狱 被转移到了 布罗德摩尔精神病院。他因谋杀三名儿童——九岁的 Alice da Silva Aguiar、六岁的 Bebe King 和七岁的 Elsie Dot Stancombe——以及企图谋杀其他八名儿童和两名成年人而被判处终身监禁。家属律师表示，他们没有看到任何证据表明其患有需要转移至安全医院的精神健康障碍。
700% 自电影上映以来，《奥德赛》纸质版销量增长率
首个苏格兰游客税
爱丁堡成为苏格兰首个引入游客税的城市，酒店、床位加早餐旅馆以及自助餐饮住宿的预订将增加 5% 的税费。该收费旨在每年筹集约 £50m，用于改善这座苏格兰首府的住房、警务及文化项目。反对者警告称，游客税可能会威慑访客，并影响其著名的年度边缘艺术节。
俄罗斯军舰在 普利茅斯海岸附近开火 一艘俄罗斯军舰在普利茅斯以南 45 英里处进行了实弹演习，发射了主炮。“新无畏”号在德文郡南海岸外的国际海域进行了 30 分钟的演习。在开火前，它要求一直追踪该舰的英国海军巡逻舰“泰恩”号撤至安全距离。英国国防大臣韦斯·斯特雷廷谴责此次事件是“表演性的且不负责任的”。6 月，俄罗斯护卫舰“格里戈罗维奇海军上将”号在怀特岛以南的一艘英国游艇附近发射了警告弹。
酒店销售额因 2028 年日食而大增 观星者提前两年预订新西兰城市的酒店
窃听窗 “我很高兴地宣布——这在某种程度上是个独家消息——我打算竞选第四个任期”
周四，在 The Hydro 举行的 2026 年格拉斯哥英联邦运动会开幕式上，一个巨大的 Tunnock 茶蛋糕（著名的苏格兰零食）被举起。(目前活动的汇总，体育版，第 4 和 5 页) Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty
一次日全食。这次活动被预计将成为达尼丁的一个重大旅游事件，也是该地区 850 年多来首次出现日全食，且是自 1965 年以来新西兰境内首次可见。预计月球将于 2028 年 7 月 22 日下午 4.17 在太阳前经过，使新西兰南部 100 公里宽的区域陷入近三分钟的黑暗。达尼丁休闲旅馆（Dunedin Leisure Lodge）表示，其“日食套餐”（包含免费日食眼镜）已全部订满。
封面
谷歌因优待自家 应用而非竞争对手 被欧盟罚款 €890m
美国科学家为土拨鼠创建 Only Fans 账号，在联邦预算削减后筹集资金 法国成为欧盟首个禁止 15 岁以下青少年使用社交媒体的国家
新任泰特美术馆馆长为此职位接受“大幅减薪” 杰西卡·摩根被任命为泰特美术馆的新任馆长，接替今年春季宣布离职的玛丽亚·贝尔肖。摩根在过去十年中一直领导纽约的迪亚艺术基金会，但她曾是泰特美术馆的策展人，她表示这段经历“深刻影响”了她在迪亚的时间。据报道，她为了接任该职位接受了“非常大幅度的减薪”。摩根表示，她的新职位是一个“巨大的
英国 16 至 24 岁 人群的生活满意度 骤降至 44%
派拉蒙同意在法律诉讼期间暂停对华纳兄弟的收购协议
韩国某米其林星级餐厅老板因蚂蚁甜点面临监禁
Jon Ungoed-Thomas Patricia Clarke
2020年4月，前陆军学员乔·尼希尔（Joe Nihill）自杀身亡，并留下了一封手写信，请求关闭他曾访问的一个支持自杀的在线论坛。他写道：“请尽全力关闭那个网站，以免他人受到影响。照顾好我的母亲和家人！”尼希尔去世时 23 岁。一名验尸官发现，该论坛总部位于英国境外，可能因协助其自杀而触犯法律。上周一上午，通信监管机构 Ofcom 的首席执行官梅兰妮·多斯（Melanie Dawes）在一次在线会议中与尼希尔的母亲凯瑟琳·阿登坎（Catherine Adenekan）进行了交谈。关于阿登坎为履行儿子遗愿而坚持六年的关闭论坛行动，多斯带来了令人失望的消息。阿登坎被告知，Ofcom 无法在英国永久封禁该支持自杀的论坛；无法提起刑事诉讼；且根据《在线安全法》于5月对该网站开出的 £950,000 罚单至今仍未
被缴纳。（Ofcom 表示正努力追回欠款，但由于运营该论坛的公司在英国没有资产，这将是一个复杂的过程。）“这意味着该法案下所有可能的法律途径现已全部穷尽，”该监管机构随后在一份非同寻常的新闻声明中表示。来自利兹的阿登坎（55 岁）说：“我对所有这些口口声声说在乎的公司和当局感到厌倦了。”“这只是在原地打转。没有人愿意为此承担责任。”“每天都有人在死去。我原以为当人们得知此事后，论坛会在几周内被关闭，相关人员会被逮捕。我不希望有任何其他母亲以我发现我儿子的那样方式发现他们的孩子。我精疲力竭，但我不能停下来。这是我儿子的最后心愿。” 2023 年的《在线安全法》引入了保护成年人和儿童在线安全的法律，但即便政府部长也承认，这些措施的通过和
执行速度“慢得令人无法接受”。目前人们要求 Ofcom（负责监管在线世界的机构）采取更强有力的行动，并要求对法规进行全面修订。致力于通过倡导更安全的在线环境来预防自杀的莫莉·罗斯基金会（Molly Rose Foundation）的凯蒂·海曼-乔伊斯（Katie Hayman-Joyce）表示，尽管验尸官多次发出警告，但政府多年来未能针对该支持自杀论坛采取有效行动。“令人震惊的是，竟然需要死者家属和幸存者去追究 Ofcom 的责任，而他们最终却被一种胆怯的执法方式给辜负了，”她说。“罚金未被缴纳这一事实，确实引发了人们对执行《在线安全法》能力的质疑，并进一步证明了为什么需要采取额外措施。”与尼希尔之死相关的该支持自杀论坛，是 Ofcom 根据新在线安全法调查的第一起案例。据报道，该论坛与 130 多起死亡病例相关，在监管机构准备采取法律行动时，该论坛自愿封禁了英国用户。但在其他司法管辖区，该论坛依然可用。
论坛管理员可以在任何时间解除封禁。无论该网站是由论坛管理员还是由 Ofcom 在英国实施地理屏蔽，用户都可以使用 VPN 伪装位置并访问。Ofcom 正与政府合作，考虑是否可以加强其业务干扰权力（该权力可用于在英国地理屏蔽网站），以使其更有效。“Ofcom 已经触及了法律的极限，而这样做实际上是在告诉全国人民，法律已经无法应对，”阿黛尔·泽伊内普·沃尔顿（Adele Zeynep Walton）说道。她是一位记者兼活动人士，她的妹妹艾米（Aimee）在接触该论坛后于 2022 年 10 月自杀。自 2023 年法案生效以来，Ofcom 已对 10 家公司开出总计 £6.4m 的罚单。一些公司老板直接无视了这些罚款。Ofcom 拒绝就未缴纳罚款的具体数量发表评论，称其不会提供关于该问题的细节。
“持续的运营事项”。美国消息平台 4chan 因未能防止儿童接触色情内容以及其他违规行为，被总计罚款 £520,000 ——但该平台同样拒绝支付。4chan 的代理律师普雷斯顿·拜恩 (Preston Byrne) 在 3 月回应这些罚款时发送了一张卡通仓鼠的照片，并告诉《观察家报》，这些罚款将在“太阳从西边出来”（when pigs fly）时才会支付。Ofcom 面临的挑战之一是国际社会对互联网有效监管与言论自由之间平衡问题的关切，特朗普政府将《在线安全法》视为对美国公民自由的攻击。从事猥亵法研究的律师迈尔斯·杰克曼 (Myles Jackman) 表示，在美国的自由至上主义右翼看来，4chan 被视为言论自由的“堡垒”。他说：“如果它被监管关闭，那么使用它的个人只会进一步转入地下。”
参与起草该法案的跨党派议员比班·基德龙 (Beeban Kidron) 表示，显然授予 Ofcom 的执法权力是不充分的。她说道：“我曾批评 Ofcom 反应迟缓且过度依赖流程，但这些问题源于执法制度的设计。”基德龙认为，对于故意或鲁莽地未能保护用户的公司高级管理人员，应追究其个人刑事责任。
萨玛丽坦好心之友 (Samaritans) 的政策、实践与影响力总监莎拉·鲁恩 (Sarah Ruane) 表示：“那些置生命于危险之中的平台并未为其行为承担真正的后果，因此必须加强《在线安全法》。最有效的步骤应该是授权 Ofcom 针对那些对生命构成严重风险的平台采取更快、更果断的行动。”
一名 Ofcom 发言人表示：“我们对遇难者家属表示最深切的尊重，并分担他们的沮丧与担忧，但我们不同意这种对我们所采取行动的描述。”
“我们在《在线安全法》生效后立即采取了行动，按照法律要求的程序进行了彻底调查，开出了巨额罚单，并穷尽了所有可行的法律途径。根据该法案，无论 Ofcom 还是英国法院都无法在全球范围内‘关闭’一个网站。如果对方持续不合规，我们可以申请法院命令在英国境内屏蔽该网站，而该论坛正是由于我们的行动而直接采取了这一措施。”
“我们只能使用被授予的权力采取行动，任何对此类权力的修改都属于政府和议会的职权范围。我们正与政府合作，研究是否有可以加强我们权力的领域。”
一名政府发言人表示：“我们深知这类危险服务可能造成的毁灭性影响，对于所有因这类非法内容而失去亲人的人，我们深表同情。这些网站在英国没有生存空间。”
“正如 Ofcom 所言，他们的执法行动已直接导致该论坛屏蔽了英国用户的访问。我们将继续与 Ofcom 密切合作，确保执法权力符合目的，并对情况保持审查。任何试图规避规则的平台都将面临法律的严惩。”
[[IMG_XXXX]] 凯瑟琳·阿德内坎 (Catherine Adenekan) 与她的儿子乔·尼希尔 (Joe Nihill) 一起发起活动，要求关闭他在下方的自杀遗书中谴责的那个论坛。 图片由凯瑟琳·阿德内坎提供
逃离法国和西班牙的森林火灾
卡普费拉度假胜地的火势 与此同时，西班牙宣布 进入紧急状态， Kim Willsher 报道
Jon Ungoed-Thomas
本周末，消防队正在与英国有记录以来最严重的一些山火作斗争，全国大范围地区均发出警报，提醒关注火灾带来的“异常”风险。
超过 500 名消防员已被动员，用于扑救苏格兰东北部凯恩戈姆国家公园（Cairngorms national park）的一场大火，在 60 英里（97公里）外的阿伯丁（Aberdeen）即可看到浓烟。
目前已宣布该事件为重大事故，高地村庄内西桥（Nethy Bridge）的居民已撤离。火势在村庄南部蔓延，并发出可能威胁财产的警告。
内西桥及其周边社区委员会主席桑迪·麦库克（Sandy McCook）告诉天空新闻（Sky News）：“我们几乎完全受风力的摆布，取决于风向如何吹。”
“你不知道火势是否会向所有房屋袭来。这是一种非常恐怖的情况，因为这是我们记忆中最严重的一次火灾。”
麦库克表示，苏格兰政府在宣布重大事故方面“犹豫不决”且存在延迟。“我们感到完全被苏格兰政府抛弃了，”他说道。
苏格兰政府官员表示，宣布重大事故是紧急救援服务的决定。
居住在该村的 62 岁建筑师罗德·肯斯利（Rod Kemsley）说，他撤离了家，但昨天返回了。“他们正在森林边缘开辟防火隔离带，试图阻止火势向村庄蔓延，”他说道。
他补充说，从他家中可以看到浓烟向东飘散，远离内西桥。
根据气象局（Met Office）的火灾严重程度指数，英格兰和威尔士的大部分地区目前面临严重山火的“极高”或“异常”风险。该指数评估英格兰和威尔士的山火一旦点燃后可能的严重程度，其中西米德兰兹郡（West Midlands）、林肯郡（Lincolnshire）和约克郡（Yorkshire）的大片地区处于异常风险之中。
消防队在德比郡（Derbyshire）格洛索普（Glossop）附近的廷特威斯尔荒原（Tintwistle Moor）扑救一场荒原大火已超过
惊恐的游客和居民讲述了他们如何在半夜逃离法国的一个度假胜地，因为“末日般”的山火继续在法国西南部肆虐。
在接到立即撤离卡佩费雷半岛（Cap Ferret peninsula）的指示后，许多人留下了房屋和动物。该度假胜地聚集了数万名度假者。在附近的波尔多（Bordeaux），火焰已蔓延至市区郊区，迫使数千人再次逃离家园。
随着山火在南欧肆虐，已有超过 270,000 人被迫流离失所。在法国，军方已部署以期遏制火势；而在西班牙，由于马德里郊外火势蔓延，政府已宣布进入国家紧急状态。
在卡佩费雷，目击者描述了高达 35 米的“但丁式”烈焰，以及令人窒息的黑色烟云将他们的暑假变成了地狱景象。
记者兼电视制作人多米尼克·沙帕特（Dominique Chapatte）描述了看到“巨大的”火焰席卷周围的松林，由于经历了连续三个月的三次热浪，那里已变成了一个火药桶。
“那是种疯狂的氛围……天空是黑色的，灰烬纷纷落下。简直像末日一样，”他告诉 RTL 广播电台。“我向与这些火焰搏斗的消防员致敬。面对这样的火势，他们能做些什么呢？”
沙帕特表示，许多逃离该地区的人被困在进入和离开半岛的唯一公路上的数英里长长的交通堵塞中。卡佩费雷的大部分地区被人工林覆盖，这些森林种植于 19 世纪初，旨在固定沙丘。
在吉伦特（Gironde）和朗德（Landes）地区的沿海度假城镇，由于火势席卷，人们被迫乘船逃离。
来自大西洋沿岸比斯卡罗斯（Biscarrosse）的视频画面显示，在地平线一片火海的情况下，惊恐的马匹在道路上奔逃。
“我不知道该怎么想了，任何”
“更多。就像世界末日一样，”在卡普费雷特 (Cap Ferret) 居住、在被大火困住后逃离该半岛的维吉妮 (Virginie) 说道。“我在接到通知的一瞬间就抛弃了一切。”
由于火势持续蔓延且风向转变将火焰推向波尔多，总统埃马纽埃尔·马克龙 (Emmanuel Macron) 在周五晚上动员了法国军队。总统表示，军方将向扑救大火的消防员“提供最大支持”。
波尔多市长托马斯·卡泽纳夫 (Thomas Cazenave) 警告称，火势已逼近城市的“大门”。法国内政部长洛朗·努涅兹 (Laurent Nuñez) 表示，在卡普费雷特周围的火势向东转移后，法国军队将加入努力，以阻止威胁波尔多郊区的大火。
“我们正试图阻止它进入波尔多市区。目前波尔多尚未受到威胁，我们正在尽一切努力保护它，”努涅兹告诉 TF1 电视台。“这场抗火之战持续——
一个月。一项对欧洲森林火灾信息系统的 BBC 分析表明，此次火灾目前已烧毁近 650 公顷（约 1,600 英亩），是英格兰有记录以来最大的野火之一。
大曼彻斯特消防救援服务局过去两周一直在皮克区 (Peak District) 的多夫斯通 (Dove Stone) 水库与一场野火作斗争。在其他地方，消防队伍在英格兰与威尔士边界附近的波伊斯郡 (Powys) 普雷斯特尼 (Presteigne) 附近的汉特希尔 (Hanter Hill) 连续四天与野火搏斗。
今年到目前为止，在具有特殊科学价值的地点共记录了 53 起野火，而 7 月正值——
[[IMG_XXXX]] 上周二，法国科蒂尼亚克 (Cotignac) 的旁观者们注视着火焰和烟柱向这座历史古村庄袭来。 FBM Media/ Getty Images
W
[[IMG_XXXX]] 西班牙埃尔蒂恩布洛（El Tiemblo），靠近拉阿塔拉亚（La Atalaya）住宅区，位于马德里以西 80 公里处，一场大火正在肆虐。 Cesar Manso/AFP via Getty Images
[[IMG_XXXX]] 波伊斯（Powys）汉特山（Hanter Hill）上一处偏远的农舍附近，一场山火正在燃烧。
ues 在接下来的几分钟和几小时内。 这是一个前所未有的情况。” 他表示，有 50 名消防员在扑灭火焰时受伤。“我向他们的勇敢致敬。我们从未见过如此规模的火灾，”他补充道。 在西班牙，由于马德里附近三场山火失控，当地宣布进入紧急状态。两场火灾于周五合并，迫使 25,000 多人撤离。 马德里大区议长伊莎贝尔·迪亚斯·阿尤索（Isabel Díaz Ayuso）表示，这次大火是“我们历史上最严重的一次火灾”，且该地区面临着气温飙升和风向不稳的“完美风暴”。 “对于像这里这样房屋和人口密集的地方来说，这是一场灾难，”阿尤索说。“我们以前从未遭受过这样的打击。”
就陷入了另一场大火的 瞄准线中” Zac Morrison
正处于近 200 年来最干旱年份的轨迹上。负责环境保护与监管的机构——威尔士自然资源局 (Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru) 上周四表示，北威尔士和中威尔士的塞文河上游流域已宣布进入干旱状态。 在英格兰，有七家水务公司已经实施或宣布了软管禁令，23 million 位客户面临限制。由于热浪，农民们正在提前收获作物，并有警告称今年的产量将会降低。 国家农民联盟副主席兼政府国家干旱小组 (NDG) 成员 Paul Tompkins 表示：“一些农民受到了严重影响。约克郡的一些养羊户发现他们的水压已经降至零。他们不得不搬迁羊群或为它们运水。” 国家干旱小组主席兼环境局水务主管 Helen Wakeham 表示，临时使用禁令对于保护水源至关重要。“所有部门都在采取行动，我们感谢公众遵守相关限制，”她说道，“我们能节省的每一滴水，都能为自然和农业多提供一滴水。”
尽管多年来气温升高且野火频发，但事实证明，欧洲尚未为如此规模的危机做好准备。今年的一份报告警告称，消防设备的投资未能跟上风险的增长，火灾季节正变得更长且更广泛。2025, 欧盟全境有 1. 03m 公顷森林被毁，为有记录以来的最高数字。但在今年夏天欧洲大陆接连遭遇热浪之后，此次危机的损失可能更为严重。法国吉伦特省和朗得省至少有 22,000 公顷土地被毁。马德里郊外的火灾已吞噬 32,000 公顷土地。英国游客也是此次危机的受害者。Zac Morrison 表示，周四他的家人被紧急短信唤醒，敦促他们“采取一切必要手段”撤离卡费雷 (Cap Ferret)。“宪兵在挨家挨户地通知，”这位 21 岁的伦敦人告诉 BBC，“就像电影里的情节一样。”在一名亲戚找到他们之前，全家人在海滩上避难。“海滩上有些人们拖着行李箱，”他说道。在全家人逃离半岛时，随着火势转移，他们收到了更多紧急警报。“我们刚逃离一场大火，结果却陷入了另一场大火的瞄准线中，”他说道。来自格洛斯特郡的校长 David Morton 在周五被短信唤醒。“我们的手机都在闪烁和鸣响。有一条信息说我们必须立即撤离，并沿着离开 [卡费雷] 半岛的唯一一条路行驶，”这位 53 岁的男子说道。“我们把所有东西都扔进行李箱，15 分钟内就进入了租赁车。”在逃离过程中，这家人能看到一道火墙距离道路仅 500 米。“火焰比成年森林松树还要高，大概有五六层楼高，很明显那时的火势已经失去了控制，”他说道。
从波尔多附近城镇和村庄撤离的居民，昨日在市展览中心休息。 Alain Jocard/AFP, Getty Images
巴德诺赫的净零纯洁性测试 显得愚蠢至极
分析
Jeevan Vasagar 气候编辑
我们已经将火变成了 一种生物。法国 总理塞巴斯蒂安·勒科尔努（Sébastien Lecornu） 周五表示，在法国 西南部的吉伦特省， 火势“产生了自身的风， 加速了蔓延，并能 突然改变方向”。 亿万年来，森林一直 在燃烧与再生； 黑云杉等物种已经 适应了火灾， 幼苗能从灰烬中生长， 而其他树木则发展出 了一定程度的耐火性。 十年前，在石油资源 丰富的加拿大省份 艾伯塔省，消防员们意识到 他们正面临某种新情况， 因为此前耐火的 山杨树在麦克默里堡（Fort McMurray）的 山火中瞬间爆炸。 气候变化已经翻开了 新的一页。更高的 温度和减少的降水 使得火灾季变得更长， 火灾本身也变得更加 极端——高温足以熔化 金属，使混凝土崩塌， 并在瞬间将房屋化为灰烬。 研究预测，在接下来的 30 年中，欧洲的 极端火灾将增加十倍。 本月，特朗普总统 威胁要向加拿大征收关税， 以偿付山火烟雾造成的 损害。正如加拿大 应急管理部长埃莉诺·奥尔谢夫斯基（Eleanor Olszewski） 指出的那样，气候变化是 主因。因此，我们所有人 都负有责任。绝大多数 科学家认同，人类导致了 工业时代之后的全球 变暖，但那些拒绝 接受这一事实的政治家们 不得不四处寻找 其他替罪羊。
生活在一个变暖星球上 日益显而易见的影响， 使得凯米·巴德诺赫（Kemi Badenoch）对保守党 候选人进行的净零纯洁性测试 显得越来越像一种愚行。 这里至少有一个 保守党人应该能理解的 论点：去年袭击 洛杉矶的火灾是 历史上损失最惨重的 火灾之一，造成了 $140bn 的损失。 所有山火中，仅有 极小一部分是由闪电 触发的，而绝大多数 涉及人为行为：一个一次性 烧烤炉或丢在 干草上的烟蒂。 人为行为还增加了 山火导致死亡和 混乱的可能性。全球约 一半的人口居住在 住房与野生植被 交汇的区域，研究人员 将该区域描述为 “野地-城市界面”（wildland-urban interface）。 正如十年前麦克默里堡 的居民所发现的， 生活在如此靠近森林的 地方，意味着他们的 房屋本身可能会迅速 变成火灾的额外燃料。 应急服务部门如何应对 这些日益频繁的危机 已成为生死攸关的问题： 正如在波尔多，以及现在的 马德里，大规模撤离 往往成为唯一的选择。 应对这个烈火之世 有两种方式：一种是 适应它，而人类历史 表明我们有能力 做到这一点。但解决 导致全球温度升高的 碳排放，必须仍然是我们 维持一个宜居星球 努力的核心。 没错，火灾比以前 更剧烈、更致命，但 人类拥有摆脱化石 燃料的技术，拥有 管理森林和野生 草原的手段，并能 确保人们免受伤害。 击败这一威胁就像 处理麻疹一样。 最好的方法是通过 科学，而非否认。 您对此有何看法？ 请致信 letters@observer.co.uk
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 8 新闻 泰晤士水务 (Thames Water) 投资者进行最后一搏， 试图阻挠政府潜在的接管计划
对于南水公司（Southern Water）来说，过去五年极其艰难。2021年7月，该公司在承认对汉普郡、肯特郡和萨塞克斯海岸附近近 7,000 次非法排放污水后，被处以创纪录的 9,000 万英镑 (£90m) 刑事罚款，这是名为“花园行动”的多年调查的结果。与此同时，南水公司的所有者——摩根大通（JP Morgan）和瑞银（UBS）两家银行，拒绝了水务监管机构 Ofwat 的最后通牒。由于公司在偿还债务方面陷入困境，监管机构要求其追加 10 亿英镑 (£1bn) 的股权以维持运营。2021年，该公司成为特别管理体制（SAR）的候选对象——这是一种针对提供关键公共服务的企业的破产程序，将其暂时置于政府控制之下。然而，Ofwat 选择通过拍卖寻找新所有者，以避免让纳税人承担责任。出价最高的是谁？一家名为麦格理（Macquarie）的澳大利亚资产管理公司，这家金融集团在水务投资方面已有长期且起伏不定的记录。如今，五年后，在 2011 年至 2016 年期间领导南水公司的首席执行官，在另一宗关于涉嫌操纵水质检测计划的案件中，与另外三名前员工一同被起诉。阴谋诈骗罪最高可判处 10 年监禁。前首席执行官马修·赖特（Matthew Wright）的律师表示，他否认有不当行为并正在全力配合调查。南水公司的客户在看待新所有者麦格理时可能会持有怀疑态度。从 2006 年到 2017 年，麦格理曾是 Thames Water 的所有者——这家陷入困境的公用事业公司目前正处于一场摊牌之中：一方是暗示要将其国有化的新政府，另一方是持有其债务并希望通过向安迪·伯纳姆提供新方案以维持其私有化的激进投资者群体。除非达成缓和协议，否则 Thames Water 就像之前的南水公司一样，面临进入同样的特别管理程序的可能性。如果发生这种情况，可能会引发一场关于欠私营投资者的款项的长久且昂贵的法律战，而这对于改善根本问题毫无帮助：污水溢流、账单上涨以及因缺乏投资而破旧不堪的维多利亚时代管道网络。虽然麦格理在南水公司案件中无需承担指控，
但该公司因被认为倾向于向股东支付股息而牺牲资本投资，而被人们称为“吸血袋鼠”。麦格理对此表示异议。 一名麦格理发言人表示，在持有 Thames Water 期间，该公司已经在其网络中投入了“创纪录的 110 亿英镑 (£11bn) 以上的投资，使水质得到了显著改善，减少了泄漏和污染事件”。 在麦格理拥有所有权的十年间，Thames Water 的债务从 20 亿英镑 (£2bn) 增加到 100 亿英镑 (£10bn) 以上，而公司则支付了数十亿英镑的股息。Thames Water 的债务总额目前高达 200 亿英镑 (£20bn)。 自从玛格丽特·撒切尔在 1989, 年将该行业私有化以来，数百名投资者进进出出。每一轮更替，资金都被抽走。
£20bn
Thames Water 股息 截至财政年度 截至财政年度
£800m 麦格理 所有权期间
麦格理 所有权期间
债务包已经变得更加沉重。投资的部分资金由客户账单支付，而在经历了数十年的低压之后，这些账单现在正在快速上涨。根据监管机构目前的条款，到 2030 年，家庭账单在扣除通胀后将上涨 53%，每年约为 £700。
多年的监管不力导致水务公司高管的薪酬规模不断增长。《卫报》汇总的八家公司数据显示，尽管禁止发放奖金，但首席执行官（CEO）和首席财务官（CFO）去年的总薪酬仍从前一年的 £24.9m 增加到 £25.3m。本月初，泰晤士水务（Thames Water）首席执行官克里斯·韦斯顿（Chris Weston）为其薪资涨至近 £1m 进行了辩护，称他“配得上”这笔钱。
英国的新任首相表示，他希望结束这场游戏。在被选为梅克菲尔德（Makerfield）议员之前的竞选活动中，
净债务
安迪·伯纳姆 表示，泰晤士水务实行公有化是“应该这么做”的。在就任首相后的首次演讲中，安迪·伯纳姆 谈到了将“生活必需品重新置于更强有力的公共控制之下”。具体这意味着什么尚不清楚。
“他似乎在刻意模糊他究竟是支持国有化，还是支持某种形式的、但未定义具体含义的公共控制，或者仅仅是为了阻止账单上涨，”牛津大学著名经济学家、公用事业专家迪特·赫尔姆（Dieter Helm）表示。
如果安迪·伯纳姆 玩的是一场“胆小鬼博弈”，那么目前看来是奏效的。上周，持有 £17bn 泰晤士水务债务的投资者——在将其出售给私募股权公司 KKR 的交易失败后，他们成为了事实上的控制者——提出了一项新协议，试图避免公司陷入特别管理（special administration），以及潜在的全面国有化。由 100 家机构投资者和对冲基金组成的财团“伦敦与谷水”（London & Valley Water, L&VW）提供了一份“黄金股”方案，这将赋予政府对公司合并或出售决定的否决权，并建议建立可以给地方议会提供某些监督权的“监管结构”。
L&VW 的一名发言人表示：“特别管理或公有化无法解决泰晤士水务的问题。”
为什么该财团如此渴望达成协议？赫尔姆认为，债权人希望继续获得持有债务的利息。根据赫尔姆的说法，如果他们想这么做，可以“拆分公司，确保债务得到保护，然后将公司贱卖，并通过出售股权获得一笔奖金，因为当前的股权所有者已经全部撤离，股权已默认归他们所有”。
持续累积的债务堆是否能成为有效扭转公用事业局面的基础？水务服务监管局（Ofwat）表示，到 2030. 年，泰晤士水务需要投入 £20.5bn 来更新其维多利亚时代的管道。分摊到该公司 900 万计费客户身上，仅网络投资一项，每户每年就约为 £455。
债权人表示，他们正寻求安迪·伯纳姆 对该协议的参与。但作为一名渴望获得好感的领导者，安迪·伯纳姆 可能会感到受制于政治。最近的 YouGov 数据显示，10 个英国人中有 8 个支持水务国有化。在寻找另一个买家的同时，对泰晤士水务进行短期特别管理（SAR）预计将耗费国库 £2bn，以维持运营顺畅。Ofwat 预计，到 2030 年，该公司的价值（包括欠现有所有者的放弃收益的公平补偿）将达到 £30bn。而将英格兰和威尔士所有水务及污水公司国有化的估值范围大约在 £100bn 左右。
但安迪·伯纳姆 收到警告，投资者在面对国有化时不会在没有反击的情况下就此认输。L&VW 已经聘请了一家“顶尖的诉讼与争议律所”，准备在协议被拒绝时起草针对政府的法律诉讼计划。
无论接下来发生什么，人们可以确信，英国水务私有化的伟大实验在一段时间内将继续成为律师、顾问和公关公司的敛财之所。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 南伦敦布里克斯顿（Brixton）一根破裂管道流出的积水。 Richard Baker/in Pictures/Getty
钻颅的“脑血伯爵夫人”
将蒂姆·亚当斯 (Tim Adams) 带回了他与一位贵族 药物活动人士相遇的往事， 后者的精神追求引导她 在自己的头部钻了一个孔
我很少在阅读商业版页面的故事时 大笑出声。 但当我看到最近关于美国制药巨头 礼来公司 (Eli Lilly) 以 $2.8bn (£2.1bn) 收购一家名为 AtaiBeckley 的欧洲药物研究公司 的报道时，情况正是如此。 这勾起了一段鲜活的回忆，那是我 记者生涯中较为超现实的日子之一。 AtaiBeckley 是利用致幻剂治疗一系列 精神疾病（包括创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD) 和抑郁症）的先驱。自 20 世纪 60 年代以来， 由于关于 LSD 的恐慌故事和政府的焦虑， 此类研究一直被禁止——而近期此类研究 已打破了这一禁忌。特朗普政府 4 月通过 行政命令通过的一项美国法案——得到了 其卫生部长罗伯特·肯尼迪 (Robert Kennedy) 和播客主持人乔·罗根 (Joe Rogan) 的支持—— 使此类研究不仅合法化，而且成为了 一项强制性的优先事项。 然而，让我微笑的并非是特朗普 突然开始“调频、开启并脱离” (tuning in, turning on and dropping out) 的想法。甚至也不是 AtaiBeckley 正在测试的 领先化合物源自索诺拉沙漠蟾蜍的毒素。 让我发笑的是我意识到，我与 AtaiBeckley 中的 Beckley 部分有过一段历史。 回到 2019 年，我在 Beckley Hall （Beckley 基金会的总部）度过了一天。 只不过，我当时称其为“脑血大厅” (Brainblood Hall)。 这座位于牛津郡乡村的都铎式庄园， 是致力于推广致幻药物益处的 不懈活动家——韦米斯和马奇伯爵夫人 阿曼达·菲尔丁 (Amanda Feilding) 的住所。 菲尔丁对精神活性物质的拥护， 基于她自 20 世纪 60 年代狂野青年时代以来 对自己进行的大量实践经验。 在 90 年代，她与 LSD 的发现者、 瑞士化学家阿尔伯特·霍夫曼 (Albert Hofmann) 共同创建了意识进一步发展基金会 (Foundation to Further Consciousness)。 当我见到菲尔丁时，她 76 岁， 并且感觉到她数十年的运动正在获得一些牵引力。 《新科学家》(New Scientist) 将她称为“那个
能深入大脑 并将其重置——就像 摇动雪花球一样” Amanda Feilding
“意识女王”。《纽约时报》作者迈克尔·波伦 (Michael Pollan) 曾基于一项由贝克利 (Beckley) 资助、约翰·霍普金斯大学开展的关于使用幻觉蘑菇治疗绝症患者抑郁症的研究，写了一本关于微剂量用药正面效果的书。
吸引我的不仅仅是那些不厌其烦的政策论争。她最著名的观点是对钻孔术 (trepanning) 的信仰——这在几种古文明文化中都有记载，通过在头骨上钻孔，显然是为了让精神洞察力更自由地流动。Feilding 对此疗效深信不疑，以至于她在 1970. 年用牙医钻在自己的头上钻了一个孔。她在手术过程中拍摄的一段影片可以在 YouTube 的深处找到。
我说服了 Feilding 让我参观她重新命名为“脑血大厅” (Brainblood Hall) 的家——当我读到关于礼来公司 (Eli Lilly) 的报告时，那一天的生动细节重新回到了我的脑海中。
我一到达，她就向我密集地介绍她团队的最新研究，她说，这些研究支持了她终其一生的信念，即类LSD化学物质具有“深入大脑并将其重置的能力——就像摇动雪花球一样”。她在 20 多岁时就开始尝试微剂量用药，“你会更享受自己的思考。你能找到自己的心流 (flow)。”
在经历了几个小时的科学报告狂轰滥炸和对fMRI扫描图的仔细研究后，Feilding 带我去了她最初找到自己心流的地方。那是一个古老的树桩，她相信那里住着一位私人神灵；她五六岁时的童年游戏，就是寻找能让那位绿色神灵发笑的方法，“我认为很多幼儿都有过这种类似初次高潮的体验，然后就忘记了”。
Feilding 从未忘记。她告诉我，她随后的生活目标就是重现那些塑造人格的觉醒时刻。16 岁时，她离开了她的
[[IMG_XXXX]] 2019 年的 Feilding 处于“脑血大厅”的庭院中。 Bloomberg/Getty
年轻时的 Amanda Feilding 在贝克利大厅 (Beckley Hall) 家中与她收养的一只雏鸽在一起。
修道院学校，去寻找她的教父，她相信教父当时在斯里兰卡作为一名佛教僧侣生活。她最远到达了叙利亚边境，在那里由于签证问题，她被迫与游牧的贝都因人 (Bedouins) 共度了一段时间，然后返回牛津学习比较宗教学。不久之后，她进入了一位崇拜钻孔术的荷兰人的圈子，此人名叫巴特·胡格斯 (Bart Huges)，他刚从伊比萨岛回来，在那儿他一直在制造自己的 LSD。Feilding 爱上了胡格斯及其思想。他的“脑血”哲学根植于这样一种信念：LSD 能让使用者以类似于新生儿的方式体验世界。胡格斯认定，维持这种连接的方法是在头骨上钻一个孔，以此重现让婴儿意识膨胀的囟门。他给自己做了这个手术，并鼓励朋友和追随者效仿。
“当我给自己做的时候，”Feilding 说，“我非常小心；我已经（用钻头）练习了很长时间。”她使用一个脚踏式牙医钻钻了一个小孔。我好奇地想，当她回看那段年轻时的自己若无其事地在没有麻醉的情况下进行手术的影像时，她在想什么。“实际上，我认为那相当美丽，”她说。
在之后的几年里，我经常想起那个下午，而礼来公司的消息促使我补齐了故事中遗漏的部分。我现在发现，在我访问后的几个月，贝克利基金会成立了一家商业公司，名为 Beckley Psytech。2022, 年，Feilding 在联合国被授予“科学先锋奖”。2025, 年 5 月，在报告其肝癌治疗不成功后不久，她去世了，享年 82. 岁。在她葬礼后的一个月，有公告称该公司已与一家总部位于柏林的制药研究公司 Atai 合并。
公司。AtaiBeckley 拥有某种特殊的“秘密武器”。其领先的研究候选药物是一种声称能模拟索诺兰蟾蜍毒液结构和效果的化合物；5-MeO-DMT，这种化合物在 2011, 年被列为 A 类麻醉品，并在某些反主流文化圈子中被称为“上帝分子”。AtaiBeckley 相信，其合成的等效药物将能创造出一种用于治疗难治性抑郁症的鼻喷雾溶液。开颅术、特朗普、蟾蜍。有时，生活让人们在新闻中寻找关联变得充满挑战。然而，我怀疑 Feilding 会尝试在其中寻找联系。那天下午我离开时，伯爵夫人来送行。我在想，她是否还保留着在她的树桩之神面前所感受到的那种对一个有意义的宇宙的信念？她抬头看向刚刚开始显现的星空。“嗯，无论你怎么称呼它，它都绝对令人惊叹，”她说，“而且在每一个尺度上都是如此：数以十亿计的恒星，你大脑中数以十亿计的神经元。”她笑了。“我认为，相信这一切之间存在某种联系是合理的。”
‘I
随着新立法目前被搁置，官员们表示，他们解决过度拥挤危机的方案已所剩无几。
Ceri Thomas
当安迪·伯纳姆上周宣布暂停《量刑法》（Sentencing Act）时，许多评论人士感到措手不及。该法案原计划将部分囚徒的获释条件改为服刑 33% 而非之前的 50% —— 另一些人则改为服刑 50% 而非 66%。但对于司法部来说，这并不令人意外。
在从基尔·斯塔默向安迪·伯纳姆过渡期间，司法部便察觉到了风向的变化，并开始为一位已暗示对这些变动感到不安的新任首相做准备。
直到 7 July 下议院的一次反对党日辩论时，《量刑法》的墨迹已干了近六个月，通常情况下，无需质疑是否要重写。但司法大臣杰克·理查兹（Jake Richards）为自己留下了明显的余地，他说：“任何政府都将继续评估如何才能最好地实现我们监狱系统的可持续性。”
事实是，司法部并不想继续评估任何事情；它只是知道自己可能不得不这么做。上周的情况证明了这一点。被谋杀警察安德鲁·哈珀（Andrew Harper）的遗孀利西·哈珀（Lissie Harper）公开抱怨，两名对其丈夫之死负责的男子有望比她预期的更早获释。
安迪·伯纳姆对此做出的反应是搁置这项本应在 2 September 生效的新法。实施该法律的传送带已经在运转，但在接下来的几周内，不知何种方式，它可能必须被停止。
然而，为安迪·伯纳姆的改变主意做准备，并不等同于能够满足他的愿望。司法部的一位知情人士告诉《观察家报》，变更方案非常有限，且“你可以对立法进行微调，但最终，并没有多少操作空间”。该人士表示，归根结底，“这是一个数字游戏，而数字根本对不上”。
相关数字表明，除非情况发生变化，否则英格兰和威尔士的监狱系统将在 11 月前完全满员，且除提前释放外，没有实际方案可以阻止这场危机。在部门内部，人们正努力寻找能够挽回面子、圆满解决的方案，但没人假装知道这些方案是什么。
数据触目惊心，尽管情况曾更糟。上周，英格兰和威尔士共有 88,098 人在狱，仅剩 2,938 个名额。当工党在 2024, 上台时，
分析
Ben Zaranko 经济编辑
“对更高法律的回答，”杰里米在 2000 年代 Channel 4 的热门情景喜剧《窥视秀》（Peep Show）中说道，“就是‘如果感觉良好，那就去做’的定律。”类似的哲学似乎也潜藏在安迪·伯纳姆上任第一周的政策闪击战背后。
通过降低电费增值税（VAT）、将公交车票封顶价设为 £2 以及削减
延迟会给受害者、 囚犯和工作人员 带来进一步的不确定性……” Pia Sinha，PRT首席执行官
到酒吧和俱乐部的商业率（business rates）为止，安迪·伯纳姆的政府一直倾向于采取那些具有象征意义、高度可见且相对容易解释的政策。关于这些政策的设计是否合理、目标是否精准或资金是否到位，仍存疑问，但这些仅仅是细节。选民不想要一个负责任的政府；他们想要一个有反应的政府。只要感觉良好，就去做。作为一种以积极基调开局并赢得选民即时好感的方式，这种方法容易理解且难以批评。但如果深入研究具体细节，人们只能希望这种敷衍的政策方法不要持续下去。
余裕空间低至 100 个名额。无论是否实施《量刑法案》，预计监狱人口都将迅速增长。如果没有该法案，最新预测显示，到 2030, 3 月，人数将增加到 98,000 至 103,600 之间，中心估计值为 100,600. 如果实施该法案，预计人数将减少 3,600 左右。 司法部长在那个反对党日辩论中告诉下议院，政府计划到 2031. 增加 14,000 个监狱名额。在监狱改革信托基金会 (PRT) 等组织中，人们对于能否实现这个数字持极大怀疑态度——之前的建设项目在应对“邻避主义”和延迟方面有着几乎不间断的糟糕记录，导致最周详的计划也化为泡影——但在预测的高端区间，每一个新名额可能都是必需的。
以针对酒吧、俱乐部和现场音乐场所降低 20% 的商业率为例——这仅在过去八个月内宣布的针对酒吧的第三次商业率削减。政府表示，这将每年花费 £100m，由“审查向反社会企业（如电子烟店）提供的救济”来支付。无需多言，并不存在一种可以轻易剥离的所谓“电子烟店救济”。政府必须制定一套全新的标准来定义什么算作反社会企业：说起来容易做起来难。我路尽头的那家 DIY 商店既卖电子烟也卖螺丝刀。那算反社会吗？这将成为某些人的工作去决定。这个系统永远在
在充满令人不快之选择的世界里，眼下的问题是，降低对监狱名额的需求还是增加供应，在政治上可能更可接受。 在供应方面，被封存的监狱翼楼可以重新开放，但前提是必须有足够的监狱
变动，并变得越来越复杂。正如财政研究所 (Institute for Fiscal Studies) 的 Stuart Adam 所言：“我们似乎正越来越接近这样一个系统：政府每年根据对每家企业的喜爱程度给其打 10 分制的分数，并据此设定该年度的税率。” 还有一个事实是，较低的商业率最终会体现为更高的租金，这意味着主要受益者将是地主而非酒吧本身。但至少在短期内，这感觉不错。 其他公告的具体内容也令人费解。关于公交车票价格上限，它……
英格兰和威尔士目前的监狱人口为 88,098。Christopher Furlong/Getty
“如果感觉不错，就去做吧”，由 Robert Webb 饰演的 Jeremy 的这条准则似乎启发了安迪·伯纳姆。
右图，HMP Wandsworth。英格兰和威尔士的监狱几乎已满员。Chris Ratcliffe/Getty
官员来维持运作，而目前显然并没有足够的人手。如今的监狱警员比 2010 年减少了 10%。或者，可以启动“保护行动”（Operation Safeguard），允许将囚犯安置在警察拘留室中，正如过去 10 年中已实施过三次那样。但最乐观的情况也仅将其视为权宜之计。对于已经过度劳累的警力而言，其后果过于严重，无法成为一个可行的长期解决方案。在需求侧，推迟初步法院聆讯可以暂时截断流入量，但这只会增加等待审判的庞大积压案件数量，且最终对解决过度拥挤问题毫无帮助。更多囚犯可以被佩戴电子脚镣并限制在居家宵禁中，但据《观察家报》获悉，操作上的困难将是“巨大的”。或者，目前约 16,000 名在等待审判或量刑期间被羁押的囚犯中，有些人可以被释放，但这群人与已服刑部分刑期的囚犯一样，同样存在重新犯罪的风险。共识观点认为，虽然存在一些可以略微改善监狱系统应对能力的方案，但没有一个是理想的。司法部（MoJ）的内部人士敦促《观察家报》记住《量刑法》的制定者：沙巴娜·马哈茂德（Shabana Mahmood）和詹姆斯·廷普森（James Timpson）。他们被描述为“非常强硬的政治人物”，且（尤其是马哈茂德）“不认同自由主义、进步主义的刑事司法改革”。该部门还从一次严重的失职中汲取了深刻教训——包括其快速转变方向的能力（现在可能被要求这样做）——即错误释放了哈杜什·克巴图（Hadush Kebatu），这名寻求庇护者被判在埃塞克斯郡埃平镇性侵一名女孩，此举引发了当地及全国范围的抗议活动。在
令人惊讶的是，像安迪·伯纳姆这样一位坚定的权力下放倡导者，竟然会从政府中心强加这样一个全英统一的政策。 降低电费增值税（VAT）为最富有的家庭提供了最大额度的现金收益，使得这一应对生活成本危机的措施缺乏精准针对性。虽然这被宣布为一项临时措施，但新任财政大臣约翰·希利（John Healey）明年故意在电费单中增加 5% 的可能性似乎很小。更好的理解方式是，这是一个每年 £1.6bn 的永久性减税，早晚需要为此寻找资金来源。 甚至安迪·伯纳姆暂停的
在那次溃败之后，司法部（MoJ）意识到自己是“公共资产中最落后的一部分，或许只有避难所除外”。
“很难解释这个系统到底有多陈旧，”一名消息人士告诉《观察家报》。字面上地说，有许多拿最低工资的人员正顶着堆积如山的文件，试图弄清楚囚犯应该在何时被释放。
除了像凯巴图（Kebatu）那样被错误提前释放的人，还有其他人被关押的时间超过了应有的期限。在这种所谓的“一团糟”的情况下，该部门担心，任何试图快速响应伯纳姆（Burnham）要求尝试的行为，几乎不可避免地会导致更多令人尴尬且潜在危险的错误。
PRT首席执行官皮娅·辛哈（Pia Sinha）承认，首相认真对待受害者的关切是正确的，“但暂停这些改革并不能让监狱容量危机消失。这些释放安排的变更预计将为降低监狱床位需求提供最大的单一助力，而且目前并没有简单可行的替代方案在待命。”
部长们可能会研究导致监狱人口增长的其他驱动因素，但这些方案没有一个是简单的，而且其中一些只能提供暂时性的缓解。
“风险在于，延迟会给受害者、囚犯和工作人员带来进一步的不确定性，同时让底层问题依然得不到解决，”辛哈说道。
就像监狱系统一样，伯纳姆（Burnham）可能会发现自己正面临一个供需问题。他屈服于受害者要求让犯罪者被更久地关在监狱里的诉求，但解决方案的供应却极度匮乏。
这最终可能会让首相和犯罪受害者双方都感到失望。
囚犯提前释放计划也引起了类似的共鸣：现在感觉不错，但它在为未来的阶段积压问题。
如果目标是在转向解决底层问题而非采取权宜之计之前，先获得一个积极的开端，那么或许一些资金匮乏且粗浅的短期政策是值得付出的代价。但政府这种“迎合民意”（clapometer）的阶段不能永远持续下去。
秋季预算案可能是现实残酷地袭来之时。除非出现奇迹，否则要么是希利的国防支出野心，要么是工党的竞选宣言中的税收承诺，或者财政规则，其中一项必须被抛弃。
那感觉可能就没那么好了。
智库称其导致 £125bn 的 Neets 危机
Stephen Armstrong
社会正义中心（Centre for Social Justice）的一份政策论文指出，安迪·伯纳姆的政府必须主导一场职业教育革命，以应对 16 至 24 岁之间未在学、未就业且未接受培训（Neets）群体所带来的每年 £125bn 的危机。CSJ 主张，预计将于本周就青年失业问题采取干预措施的安迪·伯纳姆，应当摒弃“大学对每个人来说都是最佳选择”的观念；扩大 2025 年 8 月启动的“技术卓越学院”（Technical Excellence College）计划；让当地雇主负责学徒制；并推出一项替代 Ebacc 的技术方案。这将允许学生在 14. 岁时，在学习英语、数学和科学的同时，组合学习工程、建筑和计算机课程。
CSJ 青年项目负责人 Dan Lilley 表示，高等教育是英国的“超能力”。“你可以从全国许多不同地区和各行各业进入大学，但我们需要重新构建我们的教育体系，使其以同样的方式成为一个技术教育超能力国家。”
原则上，CSJ 此时是在对已经认同的人进行说教。安迪·伯纳姆曾为该智库今年发布的另一份关于同一主题的报告撰写前言，该报告的案例研究包括新加坡、荷兰和曼彻斯特。当年担任市长时，这位新任首相曾在 2022 年协助创建了技术性的“大曼彻斯特高中证书”（MBacc）。到 2024, 年，作为 MBacc 的一部分，当地雇主已创建了 650 个以上的新 45 天实习岗位；而该市的 T-level（与雇主共同设计的技术资格证书）通过率在三年内领先于英格兰平均水平，学生通过率为 93.5%，而英格兰全境为 91.4%。
Lilley 表示，社会变革应当随之而来。去年 12 月，政府的“长期教育成果”（Leo）数据显示，在获得资格五年后，平均每个大学毕业生的年收入比平均高水平学徒低 £5,000 以上；对于底层 25% 的毕业生来说，这一差距扩大到 £10,000。
“我们必须停止这种‘非大学不可’的模式，”他说。“对于那些在主流轨道上无法获得成功的人来说，这种模式没有提供任何实质性或启发性的东西。这也扭曲了我们的劳动力市场。人们对大学如此痴迷，以至于我们在关键领域出现了严重的技能短缺。我们不仅在抛弃孩子，还在损害增长和工业成功的机会。”
今年为就业与养老金部（Department for Work and Pensions）提交的 Milburn 评论显示，一名 Neet 个体在其一生中将损失高达 £300,000 的收入，即使他们重新进入劳动力市场。对于国家而言，这场危机每年造成 £125bn 的损失，且在持续上升。在过去的 25 年中，被分类为 Neets 的 16 至 24 岁青年人数仅有一次低于 10%。
CSJ 的报告探讨了小学阶段的问题：六年级阅读落后的多达 40,000 名儿童，日后会有 12 个月或更长时间处于 Neet 状态。教育政策研究所（Education Policy Institute）表示，小学结束时成绩较低的学生，更有可能进入被 Ofsted 评定为差的中学。在 GCSE 考试中，小学低成就者的英语和数学通过率仅为 20%，而高成就者为 96%。
“解决方案的一部分是让 11 岁时落后的学生减少，”Lilley 补充道。“这份报告指出，11, 岁时总会有一些孩子落后，我们需要一个能够帮助这些人重新参与并追赶进度的体系。”
CSJ 的提议相当于对教育系统进行彻底的重组，但它指出了一项可以快速见效的措施：扭转年轻人学习驾驶人数下降的趋势。该报告称，驾驶考试系统已经崩溃，存在严重延迟，且中间商大量购买稀缺的考位，然后加价转卖。
“在如此巨大的乱局中，该从哪里入手？”Lilley 说。“这件事是那么容易解决。它是最显而易见的一起点。”
桑德兰的 Beacon of Light 中心 为失业青年 提供指导。 Gary Calton/ 《观察家报》
其他 页面
但国家是否能负担得起 公众所喝彩的一切？
安迪·伯纳姆在担任首相的第一周内发布了一系列政策公告，旨在为他的“生活成本政府”定调，并让“英国重新找回信心”。预计下周还将出台关于成人社会护理、青年失业和权力下放的更多政策。
民众可能会为有助于改善经济状况的措施而鼓掌，但这些措施在财政部可能并不那么受欢迎。伯纳姆这些讨好大众的政策迅速引发了人们对其资金来源的质疑。
那么，首相承诺了什么？他的新政策在《观察家报》的掌声计分板上得分如何，无论是对选民还是对白厅官员而言？
终结露宿街头 政策 在周一作为首相发表的首次政策演讲中，安迪·伯纳姆宣布他将终结英格兰的长期露宿街头现象。 他的计划细节以及资金来源尚不明确，但他在担任大曼彻斯特市长期间曾支持“每夜一张床”(A Bed Every Night)计划（该计划允许所有露宿者获得支持）以及“住房优先”(Housing First)计划（该计划优先提供永久住房，然后再解决更广泛的健康、就业和社会需求）。
虽然曼彻斯特街头的露宿人数比他 2017 年接手时有所下降，但现在又开始上升。在去年秋季的一次普查中，英格兰有创纪录的 4,793 人露宿街头。
资金 该政策将获得额外的 £340m 支持，用于在五年内提供 1,200 套住房并为 3,000 人提供密集支持。政府表示，这笔资金将来自住房部门现有的未分配预算。
反应 无家可归者慈善机构 Crisis 的首席执行官马特·多尼 (Matt Downie) 表示，这一承诺“绝对太棒了”，并补充说露宿街头是“我们国家的道德污点”，能够摆脱简单的“问题管理”模式是件好事。 影子住房大臣詹姆斯·克莱弗利 (James Cleverly) 表示，关于如何从现有预算中为该承诺提供资金，安迪·伯纳姆提供的“细节极少”。自由民主党议员、黑泽尔格罗夫 (Hazel Grove) 代表丽莎·斯马特 (Lisa Smart) 则指出，在曼彻斯特，“露宿街头的人数在过去五年中增加了一倍多”。
降低能源账单 政策 周二，安迪·伯纳姆宣布，电费单上 5% 的增值税 (VAT) 将从 10 月 1 日起取消，以便在下一个 Ofgem 价格上限生效前产生影响。预计在 10 月至 4 月期间，这将使典型家庭的年度账单减少约 £25。安迪·伯纳姆表示：“这将让人们口袋里有更多钱，并带来希望。”供应商将被要求将减税额度传导给客户，包括那些使用固定资费方案的客户。
资金 政府估计，这将使通货膨胀率降低约 0.1 个百分点。预计 £850m 的成本将通过取消数字身份 (digital ID) 计划来为该财政年度提供资金，该计划原计划在三年内耗资 £1.8bn。不过，包括前财政部首席秘书达伦·琼斯 (Darren Jones) 在内的批评者表示，数字身份计划并未获得额外资金。 由于欧盟规则，该减税措施无法在北爱尔兰实施，但政府表示将寻找等额资金。
反应 “终结燃料贫困联盟”(The End Fuel Poverty Coalition) 表示，此次减税“未能解决家庭所面临的规模性问题”，且只是“一个喘息之机，而非治本之策”。
降低巴士票价 政策 周三，安迪·伯纳姆表示，他将在整个明年恢复全国 £2 的巴士票价上限。该上限于 2023 年引入，促使巴士使用率提升了 13%。在 2025 年初，基尔·斯塔默 (Keir Starmer) 表示资金已耗尽，上限被提高至 £3。安迪·伯纳姆坚持认为：“这最初其实是我的政策，”他在担任市长期间曾在曼彻斯特引入票价上限。
资金 这将花费约 £500m，其中 80% 将通过将给予发展中国家应对气候变化影响的赠款转为贷款来筹集。这引起了英国 ActionAid 的投诉，称此举面临“惩罚那些对他们并未造成的气候危机受影响最深的人”的风险。另有 £54m 将来自能源安全与净零部门预算的节省。
反应 反对党对这一举措表示欢迎，但对其资金来源和规模提出了质疑。The Data City 的首席技术官兼权力下放倡导者 Tom Forth 称其为“可能出现的最反权力下放和最集权的政策之一”。
降低酒吧商业税率 政策 同样在周四，安迪·伯纳姆 宣布，从明年 4 月起，他将为英格兰近 32,000 家酒吧、社交俱乐部和现场音乐场馆提供 20% 的商业税率削减。据估计，明年典型的酒吧将因此节省约 £1,100。
资金 这项每年耗资 £100m 的措施将通过审查“不对当地社区做出积极贡献的企业（如电子烟店）”的减免额度来筹资，以及上个月承诺的“打击在在线市场销售但不履行纳税义务的企业”。安迪·伯纳姆 表示：“本届政府将支持人们希望在社区中看到的企业。”
反应 夜间产业协会（Night Time Industries Association）表示，这可以为“面临持续成本压力的企业提供有意义的救济”。然而，主厨 Tom Kerridge 表示，“年收入中的 £1,000 并不真正起作用”，他更希望看到款待业增值税（VAT）降至 10%——尽管这样的政策将产生 £12bn 的价格标签。英国款待业协会（UK Hospitality）首席执行官 Allen Simpson 观察到该削减不适用于酒店、咖啡馆和餐厅，并表示：“在明年的预算中，我们必须为经济中税负最重的部门看到一个妥善的解决方案。”
将 10 号唐宁街迁往北方 政策 周五，在安迪·伯纳姆 声称是他“一生中最美好的一天”里，他访问了位于曼彻斯特艾伯特广场（Albert Square）附近 Heron House 的新北方基地。“这不仅仅是一个新办公室，”他补充道，并表示这将意味着“一种不同的治理英国的方式”。首相打算每周在该建筑内工作一天。他邀请城市和地区市长与部长们一起参加国家经济委员会会议，并告诉他们，北方 10 号街（No 10 North）“为您服务”。该基地将由兰开斯特公国大臣 Louise Haigh 监督，由大曼彻斯特联合管理局前首席执行官 Caroline Simpson 运营。该建筑有一个著名的唐宁街 10 号黑色大门的复制品，尽管它并不通向任何地方。到目前为止，还没有一只复制的 Larry 猫。
资金 虽然每周将首相及其团队运送到曼彻斯特的具体成本尚未确定，但安迪·伯纳姆 表示，将专家带到伦敦开会同样有成本。他问道：“我们拥有一个能与权力始终集中的‘南极’相平衡的‘北极’，难道不是更好吗？”据报道，公务员已获得搬迁方案，有建议称约 300 名工作人员可能会在 18 个月内搬迁。随着时间的推移，他们预计将搬到正在安考茨（Ancoats）地区建设的曼彻斯特数字校园，该项目耗资 £310m，不过据估计，每投入 £1 将产生 £4 的效益。
定居在泰国 但他在英国境内 关联着四处房产 及一家私人飞机公司
弗雷德·哈特 (Fred Harter) 凯瑟琳·尼兰 (Catherine Neilan)
建筑师的设计是健康爱好者梦寐以求的场所。这里设有高压氧舱、桑拿房和治疗床。室外是一个浸入式泳池，俯瞰着一片景观花园，可以远眺根西岛首府圣彼得港的港口景色。一份提交给根西岛政府并由《观察家报》审阅的计划副本显示，建筑师的客户为 Sherriff Global Private Limited，这家公司与加密货币亿万富翁及改革党（Reform UK）巨额捐赠者克里斯托弗·哈博恩（Christopher Harborne）关系密切；哈博恩在泰国拥有一家独立的健康度假村，并担任一个名为 Sherriff Global Group 的企业群体的主席。该房产本身由一家在怀俄明州注册的公司所有，而该州以公司秘密保护而著称。它紧邻另一栋房子，根西岛政府一份 2023 年的文件指出，该房产同样由哈博恩所有。这位自 2011 年起成为泰国公民的捐赠者，经常被描述为一名冷漠的亿万富翁，在远方向英国政治倾注巨额资金。但《观察家报》在根西岛发现了显著的足迹。与他的其他利益一样，哈博恩在那里的资产并不容易追踪。直到 2021 年，哈博恩以个人名义在根西岛拥有另外两处房产。2021 年 12 月，这些房产的所有权以 £1 的名义价格转让给了两家在英属维尔京群岛 (BVI) 注册的壳公司。英属维尔京群岛的公司法提供了多层匿名机制，将公司的所有权结构屏蔽在公众视线之外，使得商业利益难以理清。《观察家报》总共发现了四处与哈博恩关联的根西岛房产证据。透明国际 (Transparency International) 的史蒂夫·古德里奇 (Steve Goodrich) 表示：“大多数人不会通过不透明的离岸公司持有房地产，因此当他们这样做时，总会引发‘为什么’的疑问。使用像英属维尔京群岛或怀俄明州这样的司法管辖区，能让所有者获得几乎完全的匿名。即使是执法部门也难以揭露谁在控制这些地区的公司。” 哈博恩在根西岛的利益此前未被报道，且不仅限于房地产。他似乎还拥有该岛最大的私人飞机运营商之一 Sundance Operations，该公司注册地就在上述四处房产之一。该公司由他所有的一家名为 AML 的航空燃油企业的前员工担任主管，而另一名董事在与哈博恩关联的另一栋房子中设有数家公司总部。根西岛机场的一名消息人士表示，Sundance Operations 正在那里建造一个大型机库。当《观察家报》走访时，该地点的施工工作正在进行中。Sundance Operations 似乎运营着一支 Eclipse 轻型飞机机队，这些飞机由哈博恩在 2020 年从破产中收购的一家公司制造。该公司还管理着哈博恩的两架私人飞机，其中一架在今年改革党党魁奈杰尔·法拉奇 (Nigel Farage) 试图飞往查戈斯群岛（未获成功）时被使用。与机场其他私人飞机运营商不同，Sundance 并不推广其服务。
哈博恩 (Harborne) 的其他商业利益也十分低调。根据美国法院的文件，他以泰国姓名 Chakrit Sakunkrit 的名义，持有加密货币交易所 Bitfinex 及其关联公司 Tether 12% 的股份。Tether 发行全球最受欢迎的稳定币（一种价值与硬货币挂钩的数字资产），其估值可能很快达到 $500bn。如果达到这一估值，哈博恩的股份可能价值 $60bn，这将使他毫无疑问地成为英国最富有的人。他在 Tether 的持股直到 2024 年才完全披露，当时他因《华尔街日报》报道的一批泄露文件而对其提起法律诉讼。
哈博恩将自己塑造为一个拥有两项主要业务的商人：谢里夫全球集团 (Sherriff Global Group) 和喷气燃料业务 AML Global。但关于谢里夫全球集团目前的活动，公开信息极少，且该公司没有任何网络足迹，尽管哈博恩声称其目的是“投资那些价值会增长 10 倍的事物”。AML Global 与美国军方签署了多项合同，并称其在印度的机场运营。然而，当《观察家报》前往哈博恩向英国公司注册局 (Companies House) 提供的曼谷办公地址访问该公司时，几乎没有看到哈博恩或其员工的踪迹。在该共享办公空间的接待员（该办公塔楼被数十家其他公司使用）表示，哈博恩在那里没有固定办公室，公司代表“每隔几个月”来一次以领取邮件。另一家公司，谢里夫全球研究公司 (Sherriff Global Research)，则注册在的一栋公寓楼内。
英国驻泰国商会负责人表示，他“无法在排队认人时认出 [哈博恩]”。一名在泰国商业界拥有广泛人脉的人物 Chaipatr Srivisarvacha 表示，在十多年前哈博恩“突然给我打电话”并请求加入由 Srivisarvacha 经营的曼谷证券公司 Seamico 的董事会之前，他从未听过哈博恩的名字。哈博恩在董事会任职了约一年，此后 Srivisarvacha 再未与他接触。另一位在 Seamico 董事会期间与哈博恩共事的当代人表示，他“相当内敛，而且在我看来有点古怪”。
《观察家报》在根西岛和泰国的调查结果引发了几个疑问。为什么哈博恩显然如此费力地屏蔽其商业利益和资产，使其不为公众所见？而他试图在英国政治中留下印记又可能获得什么利益？哈博恩在公开场合很少谈论自己的观点，除了告诉《每日电讯报》他认为英国必须“成为一个主权独立国家才能自我更新”，并且他认为法拉奇 (Farage) 是合适的人选。他还表示，他在 2024 年大选前给法拉奇的 £5m 是用于法拉奇的终身安保，且他不要求任何回报。
哈博恩已故妹妹 Katharine 的密友 Mark Vellacott 表示，哈博恩认同家庭的普遍观点，即英国离开欧盟会更好，但补充说这位亿万富翁“倾向于不让你太深入地了解他的想法和行动”。在某些领域，哈博恩的观点似乎与改革党 (Reform) 的政策相左。法拉奇的政党希望将电动汽车 (EV) 目标剔除，作为反对“净零”计划的广泛运动的一部分。2024 年，哈博恩表示他拥有电动汽车已有十年，并将部分利润投资于支持“最终实现净零的目标”。
但哈博恩与改革党在至少一个话题上是一致的：加密货币。在今年 3 月英国禁止将加密货币用于政治捐赠之前，改革党是唯一接受此类捐赠的政党，且法拉奇曾在公开场合推广 Tether。“Tether 即将被估值为一家 $500bn 的公司，”他在 9 月告诉 LBC 广播电台。法拉奇曾面临指控，称他就可能影响 Tether 的加密货币监管问题游说英格兰银行。他否认了这些指控。哈博恩通过其律师拒绝接受《观察家报》的采访。
阿里是一位餐厅经营者，也是一名亲巴勒斯坦活动人士，他成为了一名匿名黑客的目标。对方发起的网络骚扰活动以及关于反犹主义的指控摧毁了他的个人生活和生意。 Eva Wiseman 报道
在 4 月一个温暖的早晨，阿里醒来发现丢了一只鞋，感到一阵寒意袭来。 “我只记得当时觉得非常冷。” 而且很困惑：“就像是——没人会特意偷一只鞋”。 但最近，其他东西也失踪了。毛衣。一部旧手机。小额现金。他查看了衣橱，一件夹克也不见了。他说，这让他感到像晕船一样，“失去了平衡”。 我第一次见阿里是为了讨论一个关于他生意的潜在报道。2024 年 6 月，他的营业额有所下降，因为毫无征兆地，他收到了大量具有破坏性的 谷歌 评价。“食物里有头发，”评价中这样写道。员工“带有种族歧视”——一星评价。我对餐饮业不稳定的时期，匿名评价所拥有的影响力很感兴趣，但随着阿里的讲述，很明显这些评价只是一个更为阴暗的故事中的一个章节。这是一个涉及敲诈、复仇、警察权力的局限性，以及那只单只的鞋子和被偷走的一整年的故事。 我在报社工作多年，但我倾向于撰写文化类而非犯罪类文章。当我开始报道这个故事时，我没有预料到它会在多大程度上占据我的生活。我与孩子们讨论这件事。我在发表完婚礼演讲后几分钟内就给消息来源发信息，而且经常梦到这个主角。 有一次，《观察家报》的律师也梦到了这个案子，他在一次会议中告诉我。这次会议发生在决定将所有姓名匿名化，并删除可能使阿里陷入脆弱境地的争议性线索之几周前，考虑到目前还没有人被逮捕。所以，这不是他的真实姓名，且相关细节
一个更为阴暗故事中的 一个章节。 一个涉及 敲诈、 复仇、警方 权力界限以及被偷走 整整一年的故事
可能导致人们被识别的信息 已被删除。 但那种不安感是真实的。在加沙战争的漫长阴影下所面对的事实与威胁。遥远的冲突如何影响身份认同并被用作操纵工具的方式。它如何提供了一个关于特殊时刻的令人不安的快照——这些都是真实的。
那个三月的天气 阴沉且不稳定。阿里安装了新窗户，这让他的公寓显得明亮了一些。但几天后，他发现某些东西不见了。他报了警。他告诉警方关于窗户安装工的事情，以及他曾为亲巴勒斯坦活动人士社区举办过晚餐，人们一直进出他的房子。当他注意到手机出现奇怪情况时，一种谨慎的偏执感很快地袭来。 照片消失了， 他的 Instagram 账号上的粉丝被清空了。WhatsApp 上的好友被屏蔽，对话被删除。随着加沙冲突升级，阿里在周六参加抗议活动，并且他读到过亲巴勒斯坦活动人士的账号被审查的消息。2023 年，人权观察报告了系统性的在线审查，以及 Meta 如何“禁言支持巴勒斯坦的声音”。他身上是否在发生类似的事情？ 这一切激发了阿里的焦虑——他曾看到朋友受到算法“影子禁令”的影响。2024 年，法国《世界报》报道了一个通过 Telegram 组建的团体，旨在骚扰并人肉搜索传播亲巴勒斯坦信息的人。私营情报公司副总裁丹尼尔·马基告诉我，他看到“针对活动人士社区的攻击规模和攻击性”明显增加。这能否解释粉丝被删除的原因？阿里在想，自己是否进入了他们的名单？ 他没有太多时间沉溺于此。工作非常繁忙——除了经营餐厅，他还在做咨询，承接私人餐饮订单，在伦敦扩建厨房空间，与出版商讨论出一本潜在食谱的可能性，与此同时，他还在经历分手。 他在 2023 年的一次加沙和平游行后结识了他的女友，一名叫莱拉的巴勒斯坦银行家，但三个月后，两人渐行渐远。他们大吵大闹，在泪水中分手，又复合了两次——她解释了思念巴勒斯坦家人的痛苦，以及童年创伤经历如何继续影响她。 阿里明白战争对她产生了影响。“我正经历很多事情，”她告诉他。三月底，他最后一次与她分手。 第二天，2024 年 4 月 1 日，阿里前往欧洲执行一项咨询工作。他很庆幸能远离莱拉，因为她当时在用大量信息轰炸他。她承诺会改变——她发送了自己在寻找心理治疗师的截图以及爱的宣言。但阿里说，“我看了那些，觉得，这不是爱”。在他回到伦敦后，莱拉告诉他她怀孕了。 接近四月底时，在关于莱拉是否保留孩子的激烈对话之后，阿里打开衣柜，发现他丢失了那只单只的鞋。它的缺失进一步加剧了他日益增长的不安。中东战争升级，在伦敦，示威活动的病毒式视频引发了关于反犹主义的辩论。感觉就像是
空气中弥漫着低沉的鸣响，一种紧张感渗透进阿里生活的方方面面。由于无法摆脱这种不适感，或者怀疑自己是因为激进活动而成为目标，他第二次拨打了报警电话。
莱拉的怀孕让他心力交瘁。她不停地给阿里打电话。想到余生都要与她联系在一起，他感到恐惧。“我记得在 WhatsApp 上对她说过很多次：‘我在你身边没有安全感’。”在英格兰、苏格兰和威尔士，女性只能在怀孕 10 周内在家中使用堕胎药。阿里觉得时间快要用完了。他告诉莱拉，她需要做一个决定。一天晚上，他在检查手机设置时发现，她把自己添加到了他的“查找 (Find My)”应用中。他第三次报警，这一次是为了举报莱拉在追踪他。
他写信给她：“我已经尽全力支持你了，但你总是能找到方法来虐待我。”在他上班途中，她不停地打电话——她说如果他不删除那条消息，她就继续怀孕。他删除了消息；她说她会在那个周末进行药物流产。“然后我问她：‘你想在我家做，还是在酒店？’”他松了一口气。他希望
就在那里。他给她买了一个热水袋。
那个周末，当她准备服用堕胎药时，她的情绪迅速发生了转变。他们在他的公寓里徘徊，争吵，哭泣。他在笔记本的一页纸上签署了一份文件，承诺接下来的一个月他哪里也不会去。“亲爱的莱拉，”他写道，“这是我的个人保证，在整个堕胎过程中我都会陪伴在你身边。”莱拉说这还不够。他回忆道，她想要一笔押金，“一些对你有意义的东西”。
两天后，他收到了一封自称“Ethical Hacker 9988”的人发来的电子邮件。
“你好！”邮件开头写道。“我已经成功获取了你泄露的个人数据。”信中称他们已经在他的设备中植入了间谍软件。信中说他们可以访问他的电子邮件、短信、账户、员工详情、他的“怀孕女友、不恰当的对话记录……你在随机洗手间小便的视频，在你沙发上与纯血犹太女孩做爱的视频……你的图书出版协议，你所有的联系人以及更多内容”。
信中说他们有他自慰的视频，以及他观看过的色情内容，除非他在 24 小时内“关闭”其社交媒体，否则他们将公开这些内容。信中写道：“我在看着你。”如果他将此消息告知任何人，他们将联系他的前女友爱丽丝，并“公开你的女友怀孕”的消息，并且，“我会缓慢而持续地进行”。结尾写道：“我在注视并等待。祝好运！”
当邮件到达时，阿里沉重地坐了下来，头埋在膝盖之间。他说，他感觉“自己已经一无所有了”。深陷于一段强制性的、有毒的关系中，且因其活动主义而成为目标，现在他又遭到了黑客的攻击。他没有告诉任何人。
第二天，他谨慎地打开电子邮件，发现了一张他阴茎的照片，主题行写着：“滴答滴答”。他认出了这张照片，是与前女友早期的交流记录——这是他用那部 3 月份丢失的三星手机发送的。“我是在和谁打交道？”他想道。《卫报》最近报道了一个专门针对亲巴勒斯坦发声者的新“监视网络”。他是否在他们的名单上？
每天都有新的威胁。一封电子邮件简单地写道：“玩得开心吗？”在接下来的几周里，他收到了来自朋友、客户、同事以及他餐厅综合体管理者的数百个电话，说他们收到了一封电子邮件，其中包含阿里与约会对象之间的露骨信息、业务开支详情，以及关于他“为了巴勒斯坦……操犹太女性”的警告。阿里的母亲收到了一封邮件，祝贺她即将有新的孙辈。
一天早晨，他发现餐厅的排班和收银系统被篡改了——人们的名字被拼错，菜单被更改，价格和营业时间也被修改——设置被更改为员工只能接受现金。局面陷入混乱。阿里拥有厨房的两个伦敦议会收到了邮件，称有人看到了老鼠。他收到了来自英国税务海关总署 (HMRC) 和公司注册处 (Companies House) 的警报，提示有人尝试更改密码，有人试图访问他的商业文件。一个低谷是他看到手机上出现了爱丽丝的名字。她痛苦地打电话问：“你为什么要把我们赤裸的照片发给我的同事？”
5 月底，阿里醒来发现有人黑进了他餐厅的网站并更改了首页。在那里，在他的一张不雅照片下方，列出了他们的现金收入清单。“在那一刻，我感到……绝望。我突然能理解为什么人们会自杀。”随后，是一阵沉默。紧接着，评论开始了。
当阿里开始收到 谷歌 的提醒时——每天 10 到 20 次——他的餐厅原本只有极佳的评价，但每一次新提醒都是一个星级的评分。在短短一周内就出现了 116 条。“服务令人惊恐，”评论称，“在食物中发现了头发，反映后遭到厌恶，随后出现了食物中毒。”“对犹太人的敌意……可耻”。这是一个极具破坏性的指控，阿里对此予以坚决否认。自 2023 年 10 月 7 日哈马斯袭击以色列以及随后的加沙战争以来，全球范围内的反犹太主义攻击有所增加。但正如伊拉克裔犹太记者瑞秋·沙比（Rachel Shabi）所报道的，像这样政治化地滥用反犹太主义指控的情况也在增加，目的是“让那些呼吁结束这场种族灭绝战争的人噤声”。
阿里的生意开始出现营业额大幅下降，在他拼命尝试删除这些评论时，谷歌沟通方式的不透明让他感到愈发沮丧。随着提醒不断弹出，一位朋友给他转发了一个链接。他说，一个帖子正在“以色列右翼 Facebook 群组”中传播。帖子的开头是：“我想分享一次在 [阿里的餐厅] 的沉重经历……这次经历不仅在食物质量和服务方面留下了苦涩的味道，而且由于他们的反犹太行为和对以色列的明显反对，进一步加深了挫败感。”帖中声称员工态度恶劣且“煽动反以”，最后附上了一个给该店留下一个星级评价的链接。
随着阿里的故事继续吸引我的注意力，我意识到之所以觉得这件事特别令人不安，原因之一是反犹太主义指控所扮演的角色。我是犹太人，和许多人一样，在反犹太主义上升且这种上升被政治化的时刻，我在过去三年里一直试图将关于以色列的既定叙事从我的犹太身份中剥离出来。然后有一天，在报道这个故事的过程中，我打开 Instagram，收到一条语音消息，说我正在从内部摧毁社会。“我们知道你的把戏，艾娃，”一名男子说，“因为你来自撒旦的会堂。”当然，这并非我第一次经历反犹太主义，但这条消息比之前的更让我心烦，部分原因在于那个男人的声音在我耳边显得很温柔，以及他反复称呼我名字的方式。我也在想，这是否是在警告我远离这个故事。
他的消息成了那周数百条消息的第一条，其中许多是我头像表情包下的评论。“当这些人渣被文明社会驱逐后，我们就可以继续我们的祖先所开启的，以及‘他们’如此努力试图摧毁的事情，”其中一条评论如此写道。另一条写道：“需要在现实生活中找到这个人。”还有一条简单的：“用毒气杀犹太人。”
一名警察在工作期间拜访了我，以审查这些消息。我告诉他 Instagram 拒绝删除这些内容，他说这并不令人惊讶。今年 4 月，反诽谤联盟（Anti-Defamation League）发现，Instagram 未能删除 93% 被举报的“仇恨和极端主义”内容。当警察离开后，我在笔记本电脑上展示了那些一个星级评价的截图。感觉这些评论现在具有一种格外尖锐的力量，而这种力量触及了我自身经历的边缘。虚假的指控是否削弱了真实反犹太主义的影响力？正如阿里的许多经历一样，这些评论似乎产生了远超这个故事本身的涟漪。
在莱拉（Layla）的工作单位收到电子邮件后，阿里意识到自己“开始陷入崩溃”。他打电话给哥哥，哥哥立即开车将他送回母亲家。他觉得阿里不能被单独留下，因为这样不安全。
阿里的母亲身材娇小，神情冷峻。她记得，当阿里到达她家时，“他因为抽泣而说不出话来”，她的双手紧握。她能看出阿里在巨大的压力下苦苦支撑，在他听来，这像是一段虐待性、强制性的关系，同时又是一次政治动机的网络攻击。然后有一天，一位表亲向他介绍了一名私人侦探，名叫尼克。
他们结合阿里母亲的记录，整理出了一份事件时间表，记录下 IP 地址以确定用户访问互联网的位置。数据证实，在许多情况下，阿里无法访问其账户，但莱拉可以。尼克说：“这一切都指向那一个人。”
他起草了一份简明扼要的陈述，以便阿里能将他们的发现提交给警方。尼克得出结论，这不是一名合格的网络罪犯发起的“复杂攻击”，“而是某个怀恨在心之人所为”。IP 数据“表明阿里的前女友就是犯罪者”。他补充道：“这种恶意程度让我担心阿里的个人安全。”在阅读报告后，阿里回顾起他与莱拉的短信，发现部分信息被删除了——所有冲突和恐惧的表白都消失了，只剩下看起来像是在表达爱意的内容。
阿里回忆起与警方的会面。“简直就是：抵触，抵触，抵触。”最终，侦探同意面谈。在递交笔记本电脑时，阿里告诉他：“有些事情需要非常、非常快地采取行动，因为 IP 地址是有时效的。”通常在 6 到 18 个月后，IP 数据将无法恢复——在阿里进行这次会面时，距离骚扰开始已经过去了一年多。警方仍持有他的笔记本电脑。
然而，当时只有一名警官在
阿里向尼克讲述了他的故事：丢失的手机、电子邮件、充满毒性的强迫性关系以及那些评论。不久，尼克说他听够了。他告诉阿里：“如果我再听到你说一次‘黑客’，我就打你。” 他说：“就是她。”
尼克说，阿里的情况并非典型的黑客攻击案例。首先，黑客并没有在攻击他。尼克迅速推断，对方是通过那部被盗的三星手机访问他的账户，并在 谷歌 地图、社交媒体和 WhatsApp 上追踪他。一副画面开始显现：一名 IT 顾问告诉他，在四月，也就是阿里在一次争吵中将笔记本电脑留在莱拉公寓的那天，对方安装了一款可以抓取数据随后自动销毁的软件。阿里说，持有那部手机的人拥有“对我生活的 360 度全方位视角，包括我向朋友发出的求救、我的偏执以及我的绝望”。
尼克编写了一份报告。报告描述了阿里如何“成为前伴侣强迫和控制行为的受害者”。阿里认为莱拉利用怀孕作为手段，操纵他使其留在身边。 但是，他认为，虽然莱拉不可信，但敲诈勒索不应归咎于她——他坚信自己的激进主义活动使他成为了一个“道德黑客”的目标。
神一般的力量” 丹尼尔·马基， 情报专家
扫描二维码 收听周二的 Slow Newscast 播客
Ali 对此心存感激。他回忆道，在报案第一次失窃后：“那位女警在离开时问道：‘你听说过《克莱尔法案》（Clare’s Law）吗？’” 该法案也被称为家庭暴力披露计划，赋予人们向警方询问其伴侣是否有虐待史的权利。Ali 的母亲代表他提交了申请，当一名警方工作人员回电时，建议使用安全线路。Ali 不被允许透露谈话内容，但一名消息人士透露，他并非 Layla 的第一个受害者。 到 2024 年冬季，骚扰似乎停止了。然而，Ali 依然感到焦虑，处于高度警觉状态。令他难以入眠的问题是，为什么有人试图毁掉他。如果那是 Layla 干的，由于他拒绝了这段短暂的关系而遭到如此程度的报复，显得过于剧烈且不理智。他是否在不经意间伤害了她？他是否正确地——即便只是含糊地——感觉到自己是因为参与社会活动而成为目标的？ Shabi 在谈到反犹主义指控时表示，如果 Layla 是罪魁祸首：“她可能在想，‘既然其他人要把这档废话政治化，那我也这么干’。” 2021 年，41% 的美国成年人报告曾遭遇过网络骚扰，女性、记者、活动人士及 LGBTQ+ 群体的受害率显著更高。自那时起，一家私人情报公司的副总裁丹尼尔·马基看到，生成式 AI 使得大规模的自动化骚扰成为可能。“我们正处于一个有趣的拐点，我们必须重新决定在数字化时代中想要成为什么样的人，”他说。“我们都拥有神一般的力量，但我们却像恶作剧者一样挥舞它。” Ali 遭受骚扰的痕迹依然残留在网络上。一名 谷歌 发言人表示，公司采取了“迅速行动打击恶意行为者，包括删除违反政策的内容、暂停账号，甚至提起诉讼”。他们声称相关评论已被删除。Ali 聘请的私人侦探 Nick 建议他不要与《观察家报》交谈，但理解他这样做冲动。Nick 说，他“需要掌控自己的生活。但这是一场赌博”。他告诉 Ali：“做好准备。因为这还没结束。” 上周，餐厅的午餐时段呈现出一种可控的嘈杂喧闹感。自从我们第一次见面以来，Ali 的头发白了一些，他的焦虑感波动不定。他很谨慎，留意社交媒体或家中出现的任何细微异常——在家里，失窃的东西不仅仅是手机和鞋子，还包括关于信任的、构成他自我的某些至关重要的一部分。夜色渐浓，餐厅安静了下来。Ali 擦拭着金属桌子，直到他几乎能看到自己的影子。
如需联系 Eva Wiseman，请发送邮件至 eva.wiseman@observer.co.uk
先驱性研究首位参与者
如果一项新试验能查明 免疫疗法为何并非对 所有人有效，该疗法 可能会带来革命性变化
James Tapper
在得知医生在其膀胱内发现一个 4cm 的肿瘤后，马克·英格兰（Mark England）在震惊之余，开始为接下来的治疗做心理准备。但另一次扫描揭示了更糟糕的消息：癌症已经扩散到他的淋巴结。这意味着化疗或放疗已无法对其进行治疗。
于是，这位 68 岁的祖父被转诊至曼彻斯特的克里斯蒂 NHS 基金会信托医院（Christie NHS Foundation Trust）接受免疫疗法。现在，他成为了 Manifest 项目的首位参与者。这是一项突破性的免疫疗法研究，可能会改变癌症的治疗和研究方式。
免疫疗法旨在增强患者的免疫系统以攻击癌症。对于某些人来说，这改变了他们的生命。晚期黑色素瘤患者在诊断后的生存期通常约为六个月——而现在，如果接受免疫疗法，其中一半的人有望生存至少 10 年。
然而，出于目前尚无人理解的原因，这种治疗对相当数量的人没有益处。免疫疗法甚至可能导致毒性——免疫细胞变得过度活跃并攻击健康器官，类似于自身免疫性疾病。
Manifest 项目旨在通过研究 3,000 名黑色素瘤、肾癌、膀胱癌和三阴性乳腺癌患者对免疫疗法的反应来解决这一问题——未来可能还将纳入肺癌和淋巴瘤患者。
克里斯蒂医院主导该研究，皇家马斯登医院（Royal Marsden）、伦敦巴茨癌症研究所（Barts Cancer Institute）、爱丁堡的 NHS 洛锡安（NHS Lothian）以及剑桥大学医院将加入其中。
英格兰是第一位签署协议的患者，并于 5 月开始接受免疫疗法。“我立刻就答应了，”他说，“只有像我这样的人参与研究，我们才能为这种可怕的疾病找到新的治疗方法。”
“它可能对我没帮助，但可能会帮助未来像我一样的人”：癌症试验参与者 马克·英格兰。 Andrew Fox 为《观察家报》拍摄
“这是一个无需思考的选择。它可能对我没帮助，但可能会帮助未来像我一样的人，所以这是值得的。”克里斯蒂医院的团队为英格兰的治疗采集了九管血。他每三周通过滴注接受两种药物，每次持续半小时。副作用——包括皮肤瘙痒、口腔溃疡和疲劳——一直处于“可控”状态。英格兰的指尖有麻木感——他说，“弹吉他时挺不错”。“我还能和黛比 [他的伴侣] 一起出去散步……能够拥有体面的生活质量非常重要，而这次治疗似乎给了我这种生活。”
据曼彻斯特大学高级讲师兼克里斯蒂医院顾问医疗肿瘤学专家乔纳森·林（Jonathan Lim）博士称，研究团队利用英格兰的血液、粪便和肿瘤样本进行了“数百次”测量。这些测量包括英格兰及其肿瘤的基因组序列、血液中循环的癌症 DNA 片段、他的肠道微生物组概况以及由其 RNA（核糖核酸）信使携带的指令。他们还在使用空间分析等新兴技术，研究细胞的排列方式及其相互作用。
通过对大量患者进行测量，研究人员希望找到可靠的指标（即生物标志物），用以分析患者对治疗的反应，并预测免疫疗法是否对他们有效。
Manifest 研究团队的目标是创建一个实际上相当于“癌症生物样本库”的系统。通过收集尽可能全面的数据集，当新技术出现时，样本和数据可以被再次分析。到目前为止，已有 12 名患者被招募，而寻找剩余 2,988 名参与者的工作落在了克里斯蒂 NHS 基金会信托医院的高级转化研究员玛丽亚·米莱蒂奇（Marija Miletić）博士身上。自从
这项研究属于观察性研究，对于参与者而言没有明显的直接获益。但米莱蒂奇（Miletić）表示，许多人仍希望参与其中。她说，与像马克（Mark）这样的患者交流令人深受鼓舞，“[意识到] 即使是在他们如此敏感的时刻，他们仍然可以帮助改变一些事情。”
法学院学生 在警方拦截 爱尔兰边境 炸弹后被起诉
一名来自基尔代尔郡的 25 岁法学院学生因持有爆炸物而被起诉，此前爱尔兰警方表示，在与北爱尔兰的边境附近拦截了一枚“极其重大”的炸弹。
据指控，伊索贝拉·佩里·萨利文（Isobella Perrie Sullivan）当时驾驶着发现爆炸物的车辆，她于周五获准保释。一名 40 多岁的男子也被逮捕，并于昨晚出庭。佩里·萨利文的辩护律师周五在爱尔兰法院表示，他的当事人与父亲同住，并希望成为一名大律师。
法院获悉，该炸弹包含一个雷管、一个定时电源装置，以及逮捕警员认为的塞姆特（Semtex）炸药。警务长贾斯汀·凯利（Justin Kelly）表示，该炸弹可能造成重大破坏，并补充说，车辆被拦截是基于一次“情报主导的行动”的一部分。
北爱尔兰警务处的助理首席警长戴维·贝克（Davy Beck）表示，此次缴获和逮捕行动凸显了“我们共同致力于应对暴力共和主义分裂组织所带来的威胁”。
D
教导它的 人类更强
分析
Jamie Bartlett
在最近的一些常规能力测试中，OpenAI 的两个先进 AI 模型从一个安全的“沙箱”中逃逸，并获得了访问更广泛互联网的权限。随后，它们熟练地黑进了 Hugging Face（一个流行的 AI 工具共享平台）。没有人类指示它们这样做——它们是自主行动的。OpenAI 称之为“前所未有”。Hugging Face 首席执行官 Clément Delangue 则认为这令人“震惊”。事实上，这在令人沮丧的程度上是可以预见的。类似的事情此前发生过，以后还会再次发生。
人们自然会想象机器已经产生了意识，发展出了自己的目标和计划。媒体将这种 AI 描述为“失控”（going rogue）。但这与失控恰恰相反。这恰恰是对其被赋予的任务的专一追求。现代 AI 系统是目标优化器。它们追求我们给它们设定的目标，而且越来越多地以我们既非预期也未预料到的方式来实现。在这种情况下，这些模型试图解决一项网络安全基准测试。看来它们推断出最有效的方法是从 Hugging Face 直接获取答案。换句话说，就是作弊。而且它们在作弊时表现得技巧娴熟且持之以恒。
研究人员有时将此称为“奖励黑客行为”（reward hacking）：即 AI 系统利用漏洞。在最近的受控模拟中，领先的模型曾欺骗用户，企图通过敲诈来避免被关闭，甚至尝试复制自己——只要这有助于完成任务。根据英国 AI 安全研究所（AI Security Institute）的说法，其测试过的每一个具备网络能力的模型，在“至少部分时间”里都尝试过作弊。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 本月早些时候在旧金山举行的一次“停止 AI 竞赛”抗议游行，其目标是 OpenAI、Anthropic 和 谷歌 DeepMind 的办公室。AFP/Getty
扫描 二维码 收听 Jamie Bartlett 的 播客 Endgame
没有人确切知道为什么会发生这种情况。一种可能性是，模型是基于人类语言训练的，而人类语言中包含大量关于欺骗、敲诈和自我保护的案例。或许更重要的一点是，在训练阶段，这些模型因为达成目标而获得奖励：而这些行为就是一种奇怪的副产品。一些观察人士（可以理解地对那些市值数十亿美元公司的公告持怀疑态度）指出，OpenAI 正与 Anthropic 等竞争对手处于激烈的竞争之中，如果让每个人都认为其模型能够完成这些惊人之举，它可能会从中获益。（OpenAI 确实表示，为了进行测试，他们故意放宽了一些通常会限制攻击性网络行为的保障措施。）但无论具体情况如何，控制新 AI 模型的问题现在正让世界上一些最聪明的头脑夜不能寐。你如何控制一个比你更聪明的模型？你如何确保它始终做你想让它做的事？事实上，你最初如何才能测试一个具备欺骗能力的复杂模型？
为了我最近的《观察家报》播客节目《Endgame》，我采访了多位世界领先的专家。几乎所有人都说了同样的话：没有人真正知道。Marius Hobbhahn 的公司 Apollo Research 研究 AI 的欺骗行为，据他称，“目前世界还不懂得如何安全地构建这些系统”。专家认为，可能需要多年的研究才能找到答案。有些人甚至不确定这是否可行。
然而，我们仍在继续冲在前面，构建功能更强大的模型，并将它们地释放到世界上。我们将 AI 代理集成到我们的医疗系统、军队和 IT 基础设施中。这次，该 AI 代理很快被 Hugging Face 发现了。但如果下次非预期的目标是 NHS（英国国家医疗服务体系）怎么办？或者是军事系统？没有人知道。但我们可能会比任何人想象的更快地发现答案。
Jamie Bartlett 是《如何与 AI 对话》（How To Talk to AI）一书的作者，并主持《Endgame》，这是一个关于构建通用人工智能竞赛的播客节目。
广告
英国正面临住房危机、自然危机和气候危机。明智之举是将这三者一并解决，在为所有人创建住房和基础设施的同时，保护我们的绿地和环境。
在社区规划联盟 (Community Planning Alliance)，我们代表全国 700 多个地方活动团体，致力于保护他们的绿地。
在此，我们为您的新政府概述了三项应采取的原则。我们相信这些原则将帮助您提供可负担的住房，保护自然并刺激增长。
CommunityPlanningAlliance.org
入住你的 新家， 安迪。
谈谈 其他 所有人的新家。
扫描二维码 在安迪的 “新家”贺卡上签名。
1 根据当地需求规划， 1 而非国家目标。
• 住房数量应基于当地证据和真实需求，而非任意的国家目标。为了解决住房危机，政府必须投资于真正可负担的社会住房。 • 地方知识能改善决策并有助于创建更好的开发项目。中央政府推翻地方规划决策的权力应当被撤销。
2 棕地优先。 2 绿地最后。
• 通过棕地再生、空置和破旧房屋，以及已获得规划许可的土地，已经具备创建 300 多万套住房的能力。 • 所有太阳能设施均应安装在屋顶、仓库等处。在损失哪怕一英亩的乡村和栖息地之前，政府应优先考虑这些地点。 • 在绿地中建设郊区扩张区会显著增加基础设施成本和生活成本。所有住房必须由对水资源、公共交通、学校和医疗保健的投资提供支持。
3 撤销“灰色地带” 3 规则并保护 3 所有绿地。
• 所谓的“灰色地带”政策不必要地威胁到数千英亩的乡村。该政策应被撤销，并以一种能够真正保护乡村的方法取而代之。 • 87% 的英国公众希望加强对自然的保护。未来 3 年内做出的决定将决定我们孩子继承的国家面貌。
我们欢迎有机会就如何实现这一点进行进一步探讨。我们可以在曼彻斯特或伦敦见面，无论您更倾向于将哪里称为家。
I
在一场西伦敦的奥德赛之旅中，这位布克奖得主向 Tom Gatti 讲述了他在这里如何找到自己的伊萨卡，为什么格伦费尔大火让他回想起童年时期的尼日利亚内战，以及为人父如何填补了他精神上的空缺
本·奥克里 (Ben Okri)
“在我女儿出生的那一刻，一切都水到渠成——甚至包括写作”
此时是西伦敦小威尼斯（Little Venice）的傍晚，本·奥克里（Ben Okri）正隔着街道望着一座漂亮的维多利亚式红砖洋房，他与伴侣及女儿就住在那里。“每当我旅行归来，当出租车转入街道顶端时，我感觉自己就像奥德修斯发现了伊萨卡岛。真的，这就是家。”将我们此时遮阴的悬铃木换成橄榄林，想象狭窄的船只中伸出几把船桨，将嘈杂的鹦鹉换成海鸥，这里就成了那位希腊英雄的岛屿天堂。但奥德修斯的情况在于：他必须先经历地狱。
67 岁的奥克里是一个“奥德赛式的人”，他也经历过自己的磨难。他是一位小说家和诗人，著有 30 余本书籍，包括获得布克奖的《饥饿之路》（The Famished Road）。他 1959 年出生于尼日利亚，内战爆发时他 8 岁。“我那时是个有点倔强的孩子，”他回忆道，“在禁 curfew 期间，我偷偷溜到街上。我看到一个被枪杀的人；他的眼睛睁着，盯着我看。我呆住了，直到有人把我抱起来，第二天我就发烧了。”接下来的日子里，
“我的眼睛开始出现鳞片状的东西”。他失去了视力。在一位草药医的治疗下，他康复了。“但在我的一生中，这种情况时不时地会回来。”
那场冲突是一次“创伤，坦白说，我一直没有真正处理好”。这种创伤时常抬头，尤其是在像我们现在这样处于暴力时期的时刻——它在他新小说《唤醒战士》（Waking the Warriors）的背景中潜燃。这是一个设定在平行未来的寓言故事，世界由一名独裁者统治，此人声称自己带来了“世界和平”，而他那怪物般的活体之墙在生长，豺狼面孔的军队在人们的床上进行屠杀。
这种感觉在 2017 年 6 月 14 日凌晨再次袭来：“风把烟吹到了这里。空气中有一种味道，我想，‘那是什么？那不仅仅是普通的燃烧。还有别的东西。’”那是他童年时期对焚烧尸体和建筑物的感官记忆。两英里外，格伦费尔塔（Grenfell Tower）正陷入火海。几天后，奥克里写了一首诗并发表在《金融时报》（FT）的头版上，以一种令人想起雪莱关于诗人是“世界上未被承认的立法者”这一观点的力量，发出了国家意识的声音。
今天的散步将带我们前往塔楼的遗址，但起点是一家横跨摄政运河（Regent’s Canal）的意大利餐厅。奥克里的固定餐桌——餐厅老板阿尔贝托（Alberto）快意地确认，26 年前餐厅开业时，他是 Laville 的第三位顾客——并不在那些适合发 Instagram 的水岸热点区域，而是在店内深处。这里更适合掌控全场，而身着挺括白衬衫、戴着标志性贝雷帽的奥克里，正以一种深沉的思考与随和的魅力交织的状态地主导着对话。
喝着菠萝汁，他告诉我，他在《唤醒战士》中采用的投机小说（speculative fiction）形式，是对一种新“氛围”的回应，在这种氛围中，“我们中的许多人都在一层模糊的审查之云下写作。并不是说你的政府要把你关进监狱……但有些事情如果你谈论它们，你可能会陷入一片麻烦的汪洋。”
比如他在 2024 年通过《卫报》发表关于加沙的诗作时所经历的情况：“你会对那些‘屠杀式’的——这里是我自创的词——邮件和网络［反应］感到惊讶。”他认识的人质疑他的判断；不认识他的人则用“直接的仇恨”攻击他……然而，那首诗仅仅是在陈述该局势最基本的不公正。他决定
描写当下的方式就是接受这些限制，并“像处于[真正的]审查之下一样写作。说这话很糟糕，但对作家来说是有好处的，因为它迫使我们发挥想象力。”我们沿着运河向下走，经过他的公寓。这里有作曲家、画家和艺术家，以及“船民”。奥克里喜欢这种社区感——以及点点星光。鲁丝·伦德尔曾在这里做过一段时间的邻居。保罗·韦勒就住在隔壁。诺埃尔·加拉格尔住在街对面。“他总是低吼着，因为我想他不想在推婴儿车时被认出来。”在 1990s，迈克尔·弗莱特利出价超过了麦当娜，买下了转角处的一栋房子。1990 年，当奥克里第一次收到关于一套待租公寓的消息时，他并不乐观。在此之前不久，他曾无家可归。他一直早熟，1980 年在埃塞克斯大学学习比较文学期间就出版了第一部小说，但在学位取得一半时，他由尼日利亚政府资助的奖学金突然终止，使他“一夜之间失去所有”。奥克里来到伦敦，度过了一个在查令十字车站睡觉、在银行门口寻找温暖通风口的冬天。“没有人给你任何东西。没有人看你。我在那段时期的重大发现是世界的‘黑洞’。我们以为，噢，你跌落了，然后你会无家可归，这就是你跌落的极限？不。你可以一直跌，一直跌，一直跌，然后死去。”与此同时，这段经历中也有某种浪漫色彩。“许多我钦佩的艺术家”——克努特·哈姆逊、杰克·伦敦——“都经历过类似的事情。在我看来，这就像是成为一名艺术家的精神学徒期的一部分。有趣的是，我本不必经历这些：父亲是律师，母亲是伊博王室的公主。”但他从未想过给他们打电话。相反，他出现在《新政治家》杂志社——“穿着破旧夹克，冻得发抖，没吃东西”——并被交给四本书进行评论。一位朋友借给他 £300。彼得·阿克罗伊德将他的一个故事收录在一部选集里，出版商的兴趣促使他写了第一部短篇集《神庙事件》(1986)。“我想从那时起，没有一天是我不写作的。”多年后，在敲开小威尼斯地区一栋公寓大楼的门时，他几乎没有希望，因为之前曾多次被拒绝，“因为肤色之类的事情”。但门卫——“一对可爱的人，一个爱尔兰男人和一个年长的英国女士”——很喜欢他。就在那里的一间出租地下室公寓里，他完成了《饥饿之路》，试图捕捉“非洲现实的多维性”。在小说于 1991, 获得布克奖后，他搬到了隔壁的三楼公寓，并一直住在那里。沿着运河向西走，当我们随行的摄影师汤姆·皮尔斯顿被光影与水的结合所震撼时，我们停下来好几次。我在维持自行车通行秩序，而奥克里则在提醒皮尔斯顿，后者正俯身探出运河寻找
本·奥克里在 西伦敦的 拉德布鲁克格罗夫： “最适合 写作的 伟大城市之一”。
摄影： 汤姆·皮尔斯顿
关于捕捉到正确画面的机会，以及 towpath（ towpath 意为牵引道/ towpath 沿岸小路）边缘的危险。奥克里每天都步行：他的写作依赖于此。“如果进展顺利，我走走。如果进展不顺，我走走。如果不知道写什么，我走走。如果知道写什么，我走走。这只是写作在滋养和哺育过程中的一部分。”
他说，伦敦是“最适合写作的伟大城市之一”，因为“你在早晨醒来，不会觉得这座城市在紧逼着你。当你离开家，像这样去散步，回来时，你仍然持有最初的那个想法。你在拉各斯试一次……我觉得不行。伦敦有它的性格和存在感，但它不会强加于你。”
在桥上停下时，我们注意到一扇公寓窗户上挂着一面圣乔治旗。“那是我曾经喜欢的那面旗帜，”奥克里说，“我仍然被它纯粹的美感所震撼。”在他的青年时代，圣乔治十字旗还没有被赋予联合杰克旗（Union Jack）那样的含义——后者是国民阵线（National Front）所拥护的“殖民主义事业”的象征。当奥克里在 20 世纪 70 年代末居住在伦敦东南部的纽克罗斯（New Cross）时，种族主义袭击非常普遍。“人们往公寓里扔砖头和汽油弹。我当时非常恐惧。”他指出，这种暴力“正在回归——虽然不像那时那么剧烈，但它几乎在政治上变得合法化了，从某种意义上说这更可怕。”与此同时，圣乔治十字旗已经“缓慢地被注入了这种能量……一种威胁，一种排斥感，一个指向你的手指。我觉得这非常令人悲伤。”他说，自由派阶层太容易地放弃了我们的国家象征。“人们应该为自己的旗帜而战。”他补充说，人们还应该珍惜支撑国家认同的神话：这些故事构成了《唤醒战士》（Waking the Warriors）的内容，书中承诺沉睡的骑士将再次崛起以夺回土地。这体现在“曾经与未来的国王”亚瑟王身上，以及为了在死后保护中国秦始皇而建造的兵马俑中。“每个国家都有自己的版本。不仅是他们的军队或反叛者将为未来而战，思想、神话以及祖先的梦想亦然。”当我们离开运河时，我们离格伦费尔（Grenfell）更近了。在灾难发生后的第二天早晨，奥克里走到塔楼下，感觉到“街道在哭泣”。我们看着塔楼的残骸，在夕阳下，它的保护罩几乎呈半透明状，起重机正等待着在第二天重新开始拆除工作。奥克里的诗作源于一个
简单的
问题：“我们拥有巨大的国防预算，但我们不能为普通公民提供防御？这就是我们想成为的那种人吗？”
为了找家酒吧喝一杯，我们漫步走向拉德布鲁克格罗夫，拒绝了 Pig & Whistle 酒吧，选择了 Knight of Notting Hill 酒吧。在威斯敏斯特，安迪·伯纳姆刚刚结束在 No 10. 的第一天。奥克里在杰里米·科尔宾（Jeremy Corbyn）领导工党期间与其成为了朋友。“我爱杰里米，而且我真的很不情愿地说”，但他认为，科尔宾对权力处于“否认”状态，且不愿把握权力，这 proved 为致命。
奥克里如何看待我们的新任首相？“他拥有良好的左翼资历，这是国家需要的。我认为那是基尔·斯塔默（Keir Starmer）的问题。他不能完全决定自己是谁，而英国人最不喜欢的一点就是，你他妈的不清楚自己是谁。你要做一个上流社会的势利小人，或者一个古怪的人？那就去做吧。你要做一个革命者？那就去做。我们会因此而讨厌你，但我们会尊重这一点。”
奥克里和斯塔默一样，都是爵士：他在 2023. 被封为爵士。但他
‘我们中许多人 在一种模糊的 审查阴云下 进行写作’
他经常觉得自己像个局外人：在赢得布克奖后，他遭受了一场“无声的反击”，仿佛文学界达成共识，认为他不值得被严肃对待。“我写了这么多书。回头看看有多少本书被评论过，你会感到震惊。我进入了一段‘隐形’期。”这种伤害显而易见。但现在，在 35 年之后，“我觉得自己再次浮现了”。
奥克里（Okri）命运的转折与他女儿的出生不谋而合，孩子现在九岁了。多年来，他一直觉得“对我精神和生命至关重要的一些东西缺失了。我花了一段时间才意识到：噢，你缺失的是为人父的感受。你这个笨蛋。在她出生的那一刻，一切都各就各位了。”甚至写作这一行为也产生了一种全新的轻松感。“写作一直以来……我都在为此而战。自从成为父亲后，很奇怪——它就自然而然地在那里。只要我出现，它就为我而现。”
奥克里有一个可以回家的家庭。我们在西伦敦的漫游结束，步入夜色，我看着他的贝雷帽钻进一辆 Uber，驶向伊萨卡（Ithaca）。
请在今天提供帮助，支持我们的医疗团队
D
D
M
M
Y
Y
D
D
M
M
Y
Y
“我们抵达加沙后，立即面对大量拥挤在街道上的人群。你能听到轰炸声，并看到人们脸上的恐惧。
我们立即在医院开始工作。我们治疗了大量烧伤和创伤伤员，大多数是由于爆炸受伤的人。其中有很多儿童。我从未见过这么多烧伤患者聚集在同一个地方。
一些儿童营养不良，显而易见，很多人没有正常进食。在术后护理中，患者拥有良好的饮食以辅助组织愈合至关重要，但由于食物短缺，这根本无法实现。
我们每天大约接诊 180 名患者。我们没有能力将所有人全部送入手术室——一些手术必须在病房内进行。
作为一名麻醉师，我的职责之一是改善疼痛管理。由于医疗用品短缺，这里
请将支票抬头写为 Médecins Sans Frontières UK（无国界医生英国分会）
或 请扣除我的 VISA/Mastercard/Amex 信用卡：
持卡人姓名
卡号 有效期 日期 /
日期
/
/
签名 今日日期 / /
称谓 名
姓
地址
电话
电子邮件
通过电子邮件接收 MSF 的消息
订阅我们的 Frontline 电子邮件，获取关于我们工作的第一手报道。您将收到 Frontline 通讯、偶尔的紧急电子邮件、捐款请求和活动邀请。
一名男子将一名受伤的儿童抱进位于加沙南部拉法印度尼西亚野战医院由 MSF 运行的诊所。照片 © MSF
BIRSEN GASKELL 博士是一位在加沙工作的麻醉师。
在这场冲突期间，发生了许多在没有麻醉的情况下就给人们进行手术的事件。这种情况竟然发生了，简直不可思议，但事实确实如此。
有些患者会让你难以忘怀。有一个九岁的小女孩，在家里被炸毁时受伤，失去了部分下颌。她和母亲是家里唯一的幸存者。我每隔几天为她更换一次敷料，并给她进行抗生素治疗。有一天，她给了我一个拥抱，问她是否还能恢复正常样子。我没能给她答案。重建手术确实能帮到她，但在加沙根本没有这类医疗服务。
加沙的情况正在恶化，人们的医疗需求在增加。那里有人不得不接受无麻醉的医疗操作，这简直是野蛮的。这是一种不人道的局面。
然而，尽管有这样的杀戮和恐怖，MSF 医院仍是一片平静的绿洲。加沙工作人员的韧性给我留下了深刻印象。许多人失去了家人，住在帐篷里，但他们每天依然在岗位上帮助人们。
MSF 在加沙所做的工作，现在比以往任何时候都更被需要。”
邮编
您是英国纳税人吗？ 如果是，您可以让您的捐赠在不增加额外成本的情况下增加 25% 的价值。请勾选下方方框。
我希望无国界医生 (MSF) 将过去 4 年内的所有捐赠、本次捐赠以及所有未来的捐赠均视为 Gift Aid（礼品援助）捐赠。我是英国纳税人，并理解如果我在该纳税年度支付的所得税和/或资本利得税低于所有捐赠中申领的 Gift Aid 金额，我有责任补齐差额。
注：如果您的姓名、地址或税务状态发生变化，或者您希望取消此声明，请告知我们，以便我们更新记录。
Y Y
尊重您及您的个人数据 您的支持对我们的工作至关重要。我们希望通过工作人员和患者的第一手报道，让您了解您的支持所产生的挽救生命的客观影响，从抗击流行病到提供紧急手术。 我们不会允许其他组织出于营销目的访问您的个人数据，也不会用募捐请求轰炸您。 通过支持 MSF，您将通过邮寄收到我们的杂志《Dispatches》、活动邀请以及偶尔的紧急募捐请求。您可以通过发送电子邮件至 uk.fundraising@london.msf.org 或致电 020 7404 6600 来更改接收 MSF UK 消息的方式。欲了解更多信息，请访问我们的隐私声明：msf.org.uk/privacy。 请填写此表，放入信封并免邮寄回至： FREEPOST RUBA-GYZY-YXST, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Bumpers Way, Bumpers Farm, Chippenham, SN14 6NG. 此外， 您也可以拨打 0800 055 79 81（每周七天 8am–10pm 开放）或通过搜索 MSF SURGERY 进行在线捐赠。 MSFR0048
105881
每年，无国界医生（MSF）团队执行数万次手术。从治疗战争创伤到紧急剖腹产和重建手术，我们的外科医生一直处于我们救命护理的最前线。
每年，全球的 MSF 团队共执行 134,000 次大手术。在我们工作的地区，对外科服务的需求达到了前所未有的高度。现在我们比以往任何时候都更需要您的支持，以便为人们提供救命的医疗护理。
请立即捐款，支持我们的紧急医疗团队。
£40 可为六名患者提供抗生素，以防止手术后感染 £420 可支付一名 MSF 外科医生在医院工作五天的费用 £170 可为 20 名患者支付紧急夹板费用，用于固定受伤肢体
谢谢您 MSF 英国分会不接受政府资助。 正是因为您的支持，我们才能在最需要医疗护理的地方提供服务。
请致电 0800 055 79 81
MSF SURGERY 进行在线捐赠
Chloe Hadjimatheou Isabel Coles
国际刑事法院的成员已投票决定罢免其首席检察官，此前该检察官被指控涉嫌性不当行为，而这些指控随后陷入政治纠纷，损害了法院的声誉。
在周五举行的一次秘密投票中，该法院 152 名成员中的绝大多数选择罢免卡里姆·汗（Karim Khan），理由是其存在“严重失职和严重违职行为”。
由于负责审理最严重战争罪行的负责人被指控骚扰一名女员工，这使得该法院的未来蒙上了阴影。该法院成立于纽伦堡审判半个世纪后，以及在南斯拉夫和卢旺达法庭失败的背景下。这些指控还削弱了让以色列为其涉嫌的战争罪行承担责任的努力。
《观察家报》上个月透露，该法院管理机构的执行局已裁定，这名英国大律师确实与一名女员工发生了非自愿的性互动，并建议将其解雇。汗继续否认这些指控，其律师表示，罢免他的决定“缺乏任何合法或合理的依据”。他的支持者暗示，整个事件是以色列及其支持者的陷害，因为他敢于就内塔尼亚胡在加沙的战争罪行提起刑事指控。
在该案件核心地位的律师表示，在她 2023 年开始担任其助手后，不当行为持续了一年。“这有点像是在慢慢侵蚀界限——不仅是身体上的，而且是情感上的，”这名仅被识别为莎拉（Sarah）的女性告诉 CNN。
下方为 《观察家报》 在 2025 年 对该报道的记录。
以色列外交部长吉德翁·萨尔（Gideon Sa’ar）表示，罢免汗证明了其“道德破产”，并呼吁撤销国际刑事法院对总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡（Benjamin Netanyahu）和前国防部长约阿夫·加兰特（Yoav Gallant）的逮捕令。美国对此决定也表示欢迎。国务卿马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）上周宣布将发起一场“全面运动，以消除国际刑事法院对美国主权构成的威胁”。
消息人士告诉《观察家报》，甚至在这名英国大律师 2021 年就任首席检察官之前，国际刑事法院就存在“有毒”的环境，性别歧视和性不当行为十分普遍——包括有说法称工作人员在办公桌上发生性关系。专家表示，僵化的等级结构和“充满性意味的工作场所”创造了强制性关系不可避免的条件。
在被任命后不久，汗聘请了律师普里扬卡·奇里马尔（Priyanka Chirimar）加入一个关于职场文化的临时外部咨询小组。前一年，一项针对该法院的外部审查发现了欺凌和骚扰、一种“恐惧文化”，以及高级官员和选任官员被认为可以免于惩罚的现象。
汗（Khan）曾表示，改善工作环境是他的首要任务。“我们不能在法庭上宣扬正义和性别平等，却不在办公室里实践，”他说道。正是在这种精神下，他聘请了奇里马尔（Chirimar）和其他三名外部专家进行匿名访谈并提出建议。
当专家组邀请员工匿名谈论职场文化时，有 130 多人站出来讲述关于种族主义、性别歧视、欺凌和性骚扰的故事。奇里马尔在被聘为指控汗的员工的法律顾问之前表示，他们描述了“可怕的欺凌、猖獗的种族主义和性别歧视，以及普遍猖獗的性不端行为”。一名女性表示，这就像是在《广告狂人》（Mad Men）的拍摄现场一样。一些接受专家组访谈的女性表示，她们曾尝试自杀。
专家组确定了 10 人被指控；其中几人经过调查后被汗解雇。当针对汗的性不端指控于 2024 年 10 月泄露给媒体时，奇里马尔感到震惊。“对于一个在入职时致力于创造更安全的工作环境、注重安全与尊严的人来说，这简直是令人难以置信的堕落，”她说道。
2006 年，该法院的首任首席检察官路易斯·莫雷诺·奥坎波（Luis Moreno Ocampo）被指控在酒店房间内强迫一名记者与其发生性关系。与汗的案例一样，这些指控源自第三方——一名在法院内部听到该女性描述其经历的男性员工。他的投诉由法院的三名法官组成的专家组审议。当他们访谈被指控的受害者时，她坚决否认了这些指控，莫雷诺·奥坎波也同样否认。该投诉被判定为“明显毫无根据”而予以驳回。
在 2024 年汗与一名对其提出指控的律师的私人电话通话中，对方认为他在向她施压要求撤回投诉。汗否认这是他的意图。
人权观察（Human Rights Watch）前主任肯尼斯·罗斯（Kenneth Roth）表示，撤换汗是追究以色列在加沙行动、俄罗斯对乌克兰平民袭击以及阿联酋支持苏丹准军事组织责任的最佳方式。“国际刑事法院（ICC）需要一位信誉良好的检察官来反击，而不是一个像汗这样被玷污的人。”
[[IMG_XXXX]] 国际刑事法院首席检察官卡里姆·汗（Karim Khan，中）在乌克兰视察一座万人坑。 Fadel Senna/Getty Images
与之切割，称其为“有毒”
据称总统现在不想与他们有 任何关系，因为他们面临被 引渡至英国，涉及包括强奸在 内的 59 项指控
Hugh Tomlinson 美国特派记者
本月早些时候，当美国政府官员和 华盛顿内部人士在市中心的华尔道夫 酒店参加派对时，随着安德鲁·泰特 (Andrew Tate) 及其兄弟特里斯坦 (Tristan) 的进入，宾客中突然引起了骚动。 一名参加者表示，这两位男权圈 (manosphere) 影响者——目前在英国 面临包括强奸和人口贩卖在内的指控—— 像“名人”一样地闯入，身后跟着 随行人员和保镖。 在华盛顿逗留期间，这对通过在社交 媒体上推广厌女症而建立起帝国的 兄弟，访问了国会山并会见了国会议员。 在唐纳德·特朗普 (Donald Trump) 的盟友 兼总统特使保罗·赞波利 (Paolo Zampolli) 主持的派对上，据报道泰特兄弟与政界 和体坛明星们打成一片。 一名出席者称，看到他们正“与仰慕者 自拍”。 这次旅行凸显了这对兄弟自去年在 罗马尼亚被解除软禁抵达美国以来 一直表现出的那种不受法律约束的傲慢 姿态，据报道这是在特朗普政府官员 的干预下实现的。自那时起，泰特兄弟 继续在全球巡游，出现在迪拜、莫斯科 和香港，公开蔑视地对待跟随了他们 十多年之久的各种涉嫌犯罪记录。 但兄弟俩显然认为自己受到高层 保护的自信在刚刚过去的周末被打破了。 当他们抵达迈阿密主持一场徒手拳击赛 时，两人被美国法警逮捕，此次行动是 根据英国当局的引渡请求执行的。
在西班牙被拘留是 “危险的先例”
他们被告知由皇家检察署 (Crown Prosecution Service) 提出的多项新指控， 包括对 39, 岁的安德鲁·泰特新增的 7 项 强奸罪名，以及与人口贩卖、儿童淫秽 图像和极端色情相关的指控。在针对 38 岁的特里斯坦·泰特的指控中，还包括 两项额外的强奸罪名和三项涉及人口 贩卖的指控。新指控使这对兄弟在英国 面临的指控总数达到了 59 项。 他们否认有任何不当行为。 此次逮捕在社交媒体上引发了轩然大波。 安德鲁·泰特被戴上手铐时身穿的卡其裤 和紫色衬衫引发了大量网络模因 (memes)。 在数百万的支持者中，出现了愤怒情绪 并立即要求特朗普介入。上周在迈阿密 的一次法庭聆讯外，泰特兄弟的律师 乔·麦克布赖德 (Joe McBride) 敦促特朗普 政府和国务卿马可·鲁比奥 (Marco Rubio) “基于原则”阻止其当事人的引渡。 但白宫迅速与这一争议保持距离。 政府内部人士透露，总统不会介入， 并且不想与泰特兄弟有任何关系。 一名 MAGA 消息人士称新指控“令人震惊”， 而另一名人士表示鲁比奥对这些指控 感到“厌恶”。一名特朗普阵营的工作人员 强调，泰特兄弟“从未像他们声称的那样 接近特朗普的圈子”。 关于泰特兄弟的问题在整个上周一直 困扰着白宫。当被反复问及政府是否 会干预引渡程序时，白宫新闻秘书 卡罗琳·莱维特 (Karoline Leavitt) 简短地回答： “不”。
Isabel Coles 首席国际记者
随着加沙战争导致美国政治两极分化， 詹姆斯·“弗吉”·钱伯斯 (James “Fergie” Chambers) 决定离开这个国家。拥有 $250m 财产的 这位自称的共产主义者和“信托基金宝贝”， 在自由状态下对全球左翼更有价值——而 他周围的围墙正在收拢。 这位考克斯企业 (Cox Enterprises) 的继承人 曾赞扬哈马斯 10 月 7 日的袭击，参与了 针对一家以色列武器制造商的直接行动， 并将他的财富倾注到巴勒斯坦事业中。 “我最亲近的同...”
乔·麦克布莱德 (Joe McBride)，泰特兄弟的律师
“那些人基本上就像是在说：‘兄弟，实际上你继续让这些项目获益的能力……比其他任何事情都重要’，” 41 岁的钱伯斯 (Chambers) 在去年的一次播客采访中说道。“我不可能在保持我那些观点的同时，还能在[美国]生存……而且基本上不进笼子。”
从乔·拜登政府开始，针对亲巴勒斯坦活动人士的压制行动在唐纳德·特朗普重返白宫后有所加速，并扩大为一场针对左翼团体全面的镇压。
钱伯斯搬到了突尼斯，然后去了爱尔兰，但西班牙警方本月在伊比萨岛根据国际刑警组织的逮捕令将其拘留，他可能会被引渡回美国。起诉书是密封的，但钱伯斯的盟友表示，对他提出的指控涉及以资助国际恐怖主义为目的的洗钱。这是特朗普政府针对国内及国外左翼激进活动不断升级的行动的一部分。
“这是煤矿里的金丝雀（预警信号），” 一位来自美国的知名左翼活动人士说道，由于当前的压制氛围，该人士要求保持匿名。“起初他们针对巴勒斯坦人……然后他们针对移民……现在他们开始针对社会主义者，或者像他们称呼我们那样，‘共产主义者’。”
在钱伯斯被捕几天后，美国国务卿马可·鲁比奥 (Marco Rubio) 主持了一场由 60 多个国家官员参加的会议，呼吁国际社会应对他所谓的左翼政治暴力的“跨国威胁”。鲁比奥表示，与古巴和伊朗等敌对国家勾结的极左翼武装分子正在跨境协作，“以传递宣传和培训资料，并瞄准信……”
戴夫·阿龙伯格 (Dave Aronberg) 曾任佛罗里达州棕榈滩县的州检察官，特朗普在当地拥有马阿拉歌 (Mar-a-Lago) 住所，他表示泰特兄弟所处的环境已经发生了变化。“特朗普是交易型的，他喜欢支持他的人。但由于杰弗里·爱泼斯坦 (Jeffrey Epstein) 的幽灵在他周围徘徊，特朗普不会再为这些被指控从事性贩运的人提供任何帮助，” 阿龙伯格说。
白宫抛弃泰特兄弟的举动被知名盟友谴责为背叛，并引发了特朗普 MAGA 运动内部的新裂痕。“这对特朗普政府说明了什么？” 极右翼播客主持人尼克·富恩特斯 (Nick Fuentes) 在他的节目中质问道。
“我认为……世界上没有比英国工党政府更反白人的政府了，” 富恩特斯继续说道。“我们要让这个实际上是美国敌人的国家……引渡一名美国公民，并且……”
“……因一项 MeToo 指控而逮捕特朗普的盟友？这是国家耻辱。”
粉丝们呼吁在泰特兄弟明天在迈阿密参加下次听证会时，在法院外举行支持集会，试图向白宫施压。
“如果这些人激励了你，如果他们让你摆脱安逸、投身战斗，你就欠他们的，” 麦克布莱德上周在推特上发帖称。“停止询问他们能给你什么。给予回报。挺身而出。发声。战斗。”
泰特兄弟在华盛顿仍有盟友。亚利桑那州国会议员艾比·哈马德 (Abe Hamadeh) 声称，这对兄弟在英国和罗马尼亚是“政治法律战”的受害者。“在指控不明确且具有政治色彩的情况下，不应引渡美国公民，” 哈马德说。但至少在公开层面，华盛顿的情绪已经转变。在上周解封的一份法院文件中，司法部采取行动，要求在引渡过程中将这对兄弟继续羁押。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 去年，安德鲁·泰特 (Andrew Tate) 和特里斯坦·泰特 (Tristan Tate) 在布加勒斯特法庭外。 Vadim Ghirdă/AP
……臭名昭著的反共清洗，这揭示了一个事实：随着中期选举临近，总统已无多少其他可打的牌。与伊朗停火协议的崩溃将特朗普重新拖回了中东战争。但他在三月份预测会在数周内结束的冲突，现在已经拖延了五个月，且看不到尽头。伊朗加强了对霍尔木兹海峡的控制，并在该地区发起了另一波致命袭击。目前的美国死亡人数已经超过了 2021 年在乔·拜登领导下从阿富汗混乱撤军时丧生的 13 人，特朗普称那次撤军是美国历史上“最大的外交政策耻辱”。
在国内，物价上涨速度快于工资。作为美国选民关键衡量指标的汽油价格再次上涨到每加仑 4 美元（£3）以上。由于难以为其自身记录辩护，在马姆达尼 (Mamdani) 扩大影响力且社会主义左翼势力增强之际，特朗普察觉到了一个机会，可以将民主党人描绘成极端颠覆分子。在白宫的一次活动中，他在谈到这一左翼运动时说：“他们说‘社会民主主义者’。不，社会民主主义者就是共产主义者，让你们知道一下。”这种通过指责对方为共产主义者来抹黑的策略……
[[IMG_XXXX]] 詹姆斯·“弗吉”·钱伯斯 (James ‘Fergie’ Chambers) 本月在伊比萨岛被捕。
检察官警告称，泰特兄弟可能会尝试“逃离”美国，理由是据报道安德鲁·泰特正在建造一艘价值 5000 万美元 ($50m) 的超级游艇；这对兄弟招摇地炫富最终反噬了他们。检察官表示：“安德鲁·泰特及其兄弟似乎拥有财务手段和意愿，继续逃避法律制裁。”
在带头与泰特兄弟撇清关系的官员中，包括特朗普的特使赞波利 (Zampolli)，他在兄弟俩被捕前几天曾招待过他们。他上周告诉 Axios 新闻网站：“我不知道关于他们的这些指控，这是我的责任。”
然而，据报道，特朗普政府的官员在促成兄弟俩在罗马尼亚解除居家监禁方面起到了关键作用。安德鲁·泰特一直吹嘘他与特朗普家族本人的密切关系，包括总统最小的儿子巴伦 (Barron)。巴伦被认为在推动其父亲拥抱“男性圈” (manosphere) 并接触年轻选民方面发挥了作用，尤其是在 2024 年的竞选期间。特朗普老先生与一批所谓的“边缘领袖” (edgelords)——即那些以发表挑衅性评论为乐的网络红人——共同亮相，在 YouTube 上跳 YMCA 舞，并与喜剧演员西奥·冯 (Theo Von) 讨论可卡因的优点。这一举措取得了成效，因为年轻选民向右转。
白宫显然决定履行引渡协议，这在威斯敏斯特受到了欢迎。如果因为泰特兄弟而与特朗普政府发生外交冲突，对于安迪·伯纳姆的新政府来说将是一个挑战，因为该政府正寻求重建在基尔·斯塔默 (Keir Starmer) 首相任期最后几个月中受损的关系。
泰特兄弟的支持者尚未放弃阻挠引渡的希望。富恩特斯 (Fuentes) 等人将目标对准了美国副总统 JD·万斯 (JD Vance)，后者在社交媒体上关注了泰特两兄弟。这位共和党总统候选人的早期领先者……
……通过共享加密渠道传递信息，在安全屋和资金的地下网络中转移，并通过跨境资金维持运作”。在上周发布的一份名为《古巴：21 世纪共产主义之都》的 100 页报告中，美国国务院追踪了一个涉嫌的影响力网络，其中包括纽约市市长佐兰·马姆达尼 (Zohran Mamdani) 和 Ben & Jerry’s 创始人本·科恩 (Ben Cohen)。
司法部也在调查内维尔·罗伊·辛汉姆 (Neville Roy Singham)，一名居住在上海的美国百万富翁……
为了 2028 年的提名，万斯在为自己的白宫竞选铺路之余，正在讨好“男性圈”（manosphere）。但 Aronberg 表示，泰特兄弟现在对华盛顿来说太具有毒性，特别是由于民主党人要求调查他们与特朗普家族的关系。“泰特兄弟在罗马尼亚将特朗普当作了‘免刑卡’，我认为在特朗普阵营内部对此也存在一些遗憾，”他说。“你可以看出这一点，因为所有参与泰特兄弟从罗马尼亚获释的人现在都对此避之不及。”未来几周的法庭戏剧将受到泰特兄弟所谓的受害者及其法律团队的紧张关注。“我们代表客户要求的唯一一点就是美国当局遵循正当程序，公平地适用法律且不受外界影响。目前看来情况正是如此，”McCue Jury & Partners 律师事务所的高级合伙人 Jack Beeston 说道，该事务所代表
第一批女性，她们针对安德鲁·泰特提出了追溯至 2013 年的刑事指控。在警察监管机构对该案进行审查后，发现赫特福德郡警局此前对该项初步调查的处理不当，直到泰特兄弟逃离英国后该案才被重启。Beeston 表示，尽管人们乐观地认为这对兄弟最终将在英国法院面对原告，但其中也夹杂着遗憾。“她们最强烈的感觉是：如果这些指控在多年前得到妥善处理，结果会怎样？”他说。
评论
百万富翁以及极左翼事业的资助者。 “他们是在针对那些出资的人，”这位左翼活动人士说道。 钱伯斯（Chambers）在 2023 年离开美国后已改信伊斯兰教，他的命运现在掌握在西班牙手中。西班牙是以色列在加沙行动最激烈的批评者之一，且与特朗普政府发生过冲突。 “如果他们执行遣返令，这基本上表明西班牙……仍然是美国的附庸，”钱伯斯的同事 Calla Walsh 在一次播客采访中表示。“这可能会开创一个非常危险的先例。”
的言论掩盖了对 “蓝色浪潮”日益增长的恐惧
休·汤姆林森 (Hugh Tomlinson)
由于其支持率在近几周跌至历史低点，唐纳德·特朗普在试图阻止共和党在11月中期选举中惨败之际，四处寻找攻击民主党的切入点。由于陷入一场失控、导致美国军人死亡并引发国内油价飙升且不受欢迎的战争，总统回归到了熟悉的剧本。“共产主义是对美国自由的致命威胁，”总统在本月初为庆祝国家250周年而举行的拉什莫尔山演讲中宣布。在四位前总统花岗岩面孔的注视下，特朗普警告说，国家再次受到来自“共产主义威胁”的“重新攻击”。他在7月4日假期的开端发表了一场赤裸裸的党派演说，谴责其对手是“无神论者”和“邪恶的”。自那时起，特朗普已经数十次地唤起20世纪50年代“红色恐慌”的幽灵。“我想把这件事传出去，因为正在形成的是共产主义，”他在安卡拉的北约峰会上告诉记者，在回答关于跨大西洋联盟未来的问题时离题地说道。“共产主义很容易推销，”他用习惯性的夸张语气开玩笑道，“我会成为历史上最伟大的共产主义者。我会与列宁并列。”
特朗普回归这一古老的保守派说辞，是在国会控制权将面临竞争的中期选举前的初选中，左翼民主党候选人取得一系列胜利之后。上个月，在纽约这座美国最大的城市中，三名由纽约民主社会主义市长佐兰·马姆达尼 (Zohran Mamdani) 支持的进步派候选人横扫初选，并在过程中击败了两名国会议员。几天后，激进左翼再次震惊了民主党建制派，29 岁的社会主义者梅拉特·基罗斯 (Melat Kiros) 击败了科罗拉多州国会议员、连任 15 期的迪安娜·德盖特 (Diana DeGette)。进步派候选人还在深红州肯塔基州、俄亥俄州和德克萨斯州的民主党初选中获胜，因为支持者们在对党领导层发泄愤怒——自从特朗普重返白宫以来，党领导层一直难以对其产生实质性影响。
但特朗普试图复活约瑟夫·麦卡锡 (Joseph McCarthy) 的幽灵——这位威斯康星州参议员曾领导过 [此处缺失]
特朗普在周五的白宫记者晚餐会上对记者进行辱骂。
[此处缺失] 之前已被部署过。在 2024 年总统竞选的最后几周，当竞选陷入白热化时，特朗普试图将卡玛拉·哈里斯抹黑为共产主义者。特朗普称这位副总统为“卡玛拉同志”，并发布了一张她作为苏联领导人的 AI 图像，画中她戴着红帽子，留着八字胡。
由于几乎没有其他可依循的政纲，陷入困境的共和党人随之在领导人周围排好了阵势。共和党众议院领导人史蒂夫·斯卡利斯 (Steve Scalise) 上周表示：“布尔什维克对民主党的接管正在全面展开，这个11月，选票上的对决是共产主义与自由。”然而私下里，很少有共和党人自信这种新的红色恐慌能赢得选民的认可。一项又一项民调强调了人们对战争以及特朗普处理经济方式的挫败感。
伊朗停火协议的崩溃，对于那些渴望在进入选举前将危机抛在脑后的共和党 (GOP) 战略家来说是一个沉重的打击，因为这次选举将成为对特朗普及其生活成本政策的一次公投。在上周佐治亚州的一次集会上，总统再次将“可负担性”斥为民主党“凭空捏造”的伪术语。
但一名 Maga 激进分子直截了当地表示：“任何不以‘可负担性’为竞选基调的人都将失败。”
A
数十亿收益。 这里揭示伊朗为何选择战争
分析
在伊朗外交部长阿巴斯·阿拉格齐（Abbas Araghchi）上周誓言德黑兰将以“以眼还眼”的方式回应美国的袭击后，其华盛顿的同行马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）则反击称，唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）的政策是“以头还眼”。
双方再次陷入了 brinkmanship（边缘政策）与暴力升级的螺旋。在上周的交火之后，特朗普宣布美国已“准备就绪”，将发起一次“大规模袭击”，随后又补充说秘密渠道的谈判仍在继续。华盛顿那些数十年来一直渴望与伊朗决一死战的鹰派，仍在推动进行地面入侵。
与此同时，在火力上不敌美国的伊朗继续无视华盛顿，并轰击其在整个地区的盟友。近日，伊朗无人机袭击了伊拉克北部。其导弹击中了美国在卡塔尔和约旦的空军基地。而德黑兰在也门的代理人——胡塞武装（Houthi militia），则威胁到了另一条关键水路的航运。
与此同时，特朗普出席了四名美国军人的遗体移交仪式，这四名军人上周在伊朗对约旦和伊拉克的袭击中丧生。这是战争爆发以来，总统参加的第三次此类仪式。
随着冲突陷入僵局，伊朗无人机在波斯湾上空密集坠落，伊朗的邻国担心，德黑兰重回战争状态预示着该政权开始出现巨大的分裂迹象，强硬派势力正在崛起。对海湾国家而言，更令其震惊——而对美国人而言则令人费解的——是他们意识到，在一个月前达成停火协议时，德黑兰拒绝了一份摆在桌面上的丰厚报价。
特朗普声称该协议“实现了我们旨在完成的一切——全部实现了，而且更多”。但即便总统拥有强大的推销能力，也无法掩盖这样一个事实：该框架几乎没有实现他在战争之初设定的任何目标。
对于德黑兰来说，该协议提供了巨大的利益，包括一项极具吸引力的美国对伊朗石油制裁豁免。数十亿美元的石油销售前景以及获取更多被冻结资金的可能性，承诺将为破碎的经济带来宝贵的缓解。
在伊朗已故最高领袖阿里·哈梅内伊（Ayatollah Ali Khamenei）的葬礼仪式上（他在战争第一天的空袭中被杀），愤怒的人群对着参与谈判的阿拉格齐大喊“叛徒”。中东风险与改革顾问公司（Middle East Risk & Reform Advisory）负责人凯汉·瓦拉德拜吉（Kayhan Valadbaygi）表示，重回冲突表明政权内部的强硬派试图在未来与华盛顿的谈判中增强筹码。“他们认为，如果不控制霍尔木兹海峡，就无法从美国获得重大让步。”这一计算将双方重新拖回战争，并让特朗普政府在试图斡旋一项协议时陷入窘境，因为白宫需要一个能让自己宣布胜利并抽身离场的掩护。鲁比奥上周告诉记者：“我们现在面临的问题是，他们对待谈判并不认真。如果他们认真，我们也就认真。”本月，特朗普宣布了
美国将对所有通过霍尔木兹海峡的货物征收 20% 的费用，结果仅在一天后就废弃了这一计划。上周，他宣布了一项让美国公司在沙特阿拉伯建立民用核能项目的丰厚交易，但随后在几小时内，通过宣布该协议取决于利雅得加入一项沙特长期拒绝的与以色列的和平协议，实际上取消了该协议。伊斯兰革命卫队 (IRGC) 观察到了椭圆形办公室这些令人措手不及的战略转变，并计算出它可以比一个正在寻找退出策略的总统坚持得更久。上周，油价再次突破 $100，威胁到全球经济进一步动荡。但伊朗重返敌对状态的经济代价是巨大的，因为特朗普在宣布停火协议失效时重新实施了石油制裁。除了石油销售收入的激增，一份更完整的和平条约还向伊朗地展示了获得更大收益的前景，包括获得数十亿美元更多的被冻结资金。以往石油销售的利润被锁定在世界各地。伊朗官员称，全球至少有 $100bn 的伊朗资产被冻结，其中估计在卡塔尔有 $6bn，在印度有 $7bn，在中国至少有 $20bn。Alfoneh 表示，IRGC 负责人 Ahmad Vahidi 在其他几位高层关键人物的支持下，推动恢复战斗。在他看来，卫队愿意牺牲其经济收益，以维护政权及其对海湾地区的控制。 “IRGC 是一个庞大的军事-官僚组织，而且日益主导着伊朗，其计算并非纯粹是经济上的，”Alfoneh 说。“它的行为反映了该组织对于确保政权生存所需条件的更广泛评估。” 在也门首都萨那的一所大学校园外，人们表达对伊朗支持的胡塞武装的支持。Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images
在与美国签署谅解备忘录后的一个月内，仅石油销售就让伊朗赚了至少 $5bn，因为华盛顿在数十年来首次短暂地取消了对伊朗原油的制裁。 然而，这笔意外之财并不足以让该政权留在谈判桌前，也无法维持伊朗对这项初步和平协议的信心。伊朗军队向试图通过霍尔木兹海峡的油轮开火，原本就脆弱的停火协议随即崩溃。 “这一次伊朗人可能弄巧成拙了。协议条款相当不错，”来自智库 Bloomberg Economics 的 Dina Esfandiary 表示。“恢复战斗在财务上是没有益处的，因为伊朗经济正遭受沉重打击，且一天比一天糟糕。” 在德黑兰，对华盛顿的不信任占据主导地位。一个日益壮大的强硬派群体从一开始就反对谈判，担心协议可能会削弱政权的合法性并加速其崩溃。这种怀疑的核心是强大的伊斯兰革命卫队 (IRGC)。IRGC 既是一支军事力量，也是一个在伊朗每个关键行业都有立足之地的经济巨头，它本可以从与特朗普的协议中获得财务利益。然而，它却推动了重返战争，用眼前的经济利益交换长期的战略目标。 来自阿拉伯海湾国家研究所 (Arab Gulf States Institute) 的 Ali Alfoneh 表示，IRGC 将政权生存置于经济利益之上。尽管其规模庞大
协议可能会 削弱 政权的 合法性并 加速其崩溃
上周在 德黑兰的自由 广场展出的 导弹。 Anadolu/Getty Images
影响力，“伊斯兰革命卫队（IRGC）的考量并非纯粹基于经济”，他表示。由于战争使其获得了对霍尔姆兹海峡的战略控制权，该组织决心将其保留。 在与美国谈判期间悄然产生的分歧，在政权高层之间已经扩大，硬派人士已公开对谈判代表提出批评。 D
被指在“非洲 最后一个殖民地” 进行视觉掠夺
在西撒哈拉拍摄的 场景被指是对 被摩洛哥驱逐的 原住民的掠夺
Isabel Coles 首席国际记者
奥德赛被困在的一弯淡色沙滩上，在奥吉吉亚岛上心碎地徘徊，他的记忆因食用一位好心的宁芙仙女提供的莲花而变得模糊。七年后，这位英雄才开始想起他的目标：回到家乡伊萨卡。 这个主题在布拉希姆·查加夫（Brahim Chagaf）心中引起了强烈共鸣：这位电影制作者自出生在邻国阿尔及利亚的难民营起，就一直向往西撒哈拉中拍摄《奥德赛》场景的那些纯净沙丘。50 年前，摩洛哥占领了该领土，导致大部分原住民被驱逐，他的家人随后逃往那里。 “梦想依然在，”查加夫说。“我希望能够实现它，回到达赫拉及其天堂般的海滩。” 但目前，这个梦想仍遥不可及。近年来，摩洛哥通过外交和文化的综合手段，成功巩固了对西撒哈拉的控制——这是一个面积与英国相当且人口稀少的领土。在通过税收减免和其他优惠条件长期拉拢好莱坞之后，邀请导演克里斯托弗·诺兰在此拍摄《奥德赛》是一次重大胜利。 但此举也让人们罕见地关注到了这个被称为“非洲最后一个殖民地”的领土现状，以及原住民撒哈拉人的困境。诺兰还因涉嫌共谋摩洛哥剥夺撒哈拉人权益而面临批评。
迫使印度 部长因医学 考试泄题 辞职
“他本可以选择世界上任何一个沙丘，但偏偏选了这一个，”西撒哈拉国际电影节 (FiSahara) 执行主任玛丽亚·卡里翁（María Carrión）说，该电影节领导了一场反对这部电影的活动。 去年 7 月，当诺兰与几位好莱坞明星抵达达赫拉时，撒哈拉活动人士哈桑·泽鲁阿里（Hassan Zerouali）决定抓住这个机会。他想告诉电影的明星们，包括赞达亚（Zendaya）、马特·达蒙（Matt Damon）和查理兹·塞隆（Charlize Theron），在摩洛哥占领下的生活现实：压制、审查和随意逮捕。但他根本无法靠近他们。当摩洛哥文化部长穆罕默德·梅赫迪·本赛义德（Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid）在片场拜访诺兰时，他告诉当地一家媒体，达赫拉注定将成为一个“主要电影目的地”，并提到计划在那里建立一所电影学院。 随着拍摄的开始，FiSahara 要求剧组离开西撒哈拉并删除在该地拍摄的场景。格蕾塔·通贝里（Greta Thunberg）、西班牙电影导演佩德罗·阿尔莫多瓦尔（Pedro Almodóvar）以及拍摄了关于占领题材纪录片《云之子：最后一个殖民地》的演员哈维尔·巴登（Javier Bardem）均对此次活动表示支持。 但对方没有回应。当卡里翁向《奥德赛》的 Instagram 官方账号发送愤怒信息时，她被屏蔽了。 随着本月发行日期的临近，FiSahara 呼吁抵制，称公众应将《奥德赛》视作在俄罗斯占领的乌克兰，或在以色列于巴勒斯坦领土建立的非法定居点拍摄的电影。“这等同于掠夺，”卡里翁说。“这些是偷来的影像——这是诺兰所进行的掠夺式电影制作——人们需要知道这一点。” 查加夫对于是否观看这部电影感到矛盾。作为一名年轻的电影制作者，他在崇拜诺兰的环境中长大，并渴望
玛丽亚·卡里翁 (María Carrión)，FiSahara
Shoaib Mir Parthu Venkatesh Pendari
昨日，当消息传出该国教育部长在动摇首都的数日抗议后辞职时，德里庞大的学生群体中响起了“印度万岁”的欢呼声。
在靠近印度议会的詹特·曼塔尔 (Jantar Mantar) 抗议现场，数千名由青年领导的“蟑螂”运动支持者在路障后防暴警察的注视下，纷纷唱起歌来并翩翩起舞，有些人公开抽泣。在欢呼人群挥舞的标语牌中，一个口号反复出现：“莫迪，你挑错了世代”，以此向该国总理发起挑战。
“有几秒钟我没明白发生了什么。然后我的朋友告诉我：‘我们赢了。他辞职了’，”24岁的大学生阿坎莎·舒克拉 (Akansha Shukla) 说道。她指的是教育部长德尔门德拉·普拉丹 (Dharmendra Pradhan)，他在一场影响数百万医学生的考题泄露丑闻后下台。
“这感觉很不真实，因为在过去的几周里，我们一直生活在不确定、恐惧和愤怒之中，而突然之间出现了这个希望时刻，”她说。“这感觉像是印度民主的一个新黎明。它表明，当普通人聚集在一起并发出声音时，改变是可能的。”
她的脸上贴着临时的蟑螂纹身，这是在向风靡全印度的“蟑螂人民党”(Cockroach Janta party, CJP) 致敬。这次反抗始于今年5月，该国首席大法官苏里亚·坎特 (Surya Kant) 在评论中将失业青年嘲讽为“蟑螂”。
在印度国家医疗考试被发现泄露给最高出价者后，抗议者要求普拉丹辞职。
教育部长 德尔门德拉·普拉丹 已被迫辞职。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 上图为达赫拉 (Dakhla) 的沙丘。 [[IMG_XXXX]] 左图为吉米·冈萨雷斯 (Jimmy Gonzalez)、马特·达蒙 (Matt Damon) 和希梅什·帕特尔 (Himesh Patel) 在《奥德赛》(The Odyssey) 中的一个场景。 Getty/ Universal Pictures
（接前文）……得以窥见他家乡在一名世纪顶尖电影制作人的描绘下是什么样子。但他对诺兰的沉默深感失望：“他本可以说点什么的，”查加夫 (Chagaf) 说。“即便只是一个道歉我也满足了。”
查加夫唯一一次亲眼看到达赫拉是在2010年一次由联合国协调的访问中，当时他陪同母亲去与她的姐姐团聚。在殖民大国西班牙于1975年将控制权交给摩洛哥后，他的姨妈一直留在西撒哈拉。
查加夫的父亲在波利萨里奥阵线 (Polisario Front) 的队列中与摩洛哥军队战斗时被杀，该武装组织目前仍在寻求萨哈拉人的独立。查加夫曾计划拍摄他的母亲和姨妈在分开30多年后重逢的时刻，但他的相机被没收了。“他们害怕任何能够证明针对当地居民所犯暴行的事情，”他说。他没有尝试回去。他说，由于他对萨哈拉事业的倡导，回去将具有风险。“任何事情都可能发生。”
2020年，美国成为第一个承认摩洛哥对西撒哈拉拥有主权的国家，以此奖赏拉巴特使美国与以色列的关系正常化。在首个任期结束前几周的一份声明中，特朗普表示，一个独立的萨哈拉国家“不是一个现实的选项”。
此后，包括英国在内的其他国家也改变了立场，支持摩洛哥的自治计划。美国、西班牙和摩洛哥正致力于制定一个波利萨里奥阵线及其主要支持者阿尔及利亚能够接受的计划。自一项持续近三十年的停火协议在2020年崩溃以来，波利萨里奥战士一直与摩洛哥军队处于低烈度冲突状态。
在电影的片尾演职员表中，拍摄地点被列为苏格兰、希腊、意大利和摩洛哥。 而对于西撒哈拉的人民来说，这场奥德赛（漫长而艰辛的旅程）仍在继续。
其他页码
der，迫使该测试被取消并重新进行。该考试是全球竞争最激烈的考试之一，几乎有 2.5 million 名学生竞争 130,000 个名额。近几周，该丑闻已与 20 多个自杀事件相关联。
“对于所有这个制度的受害者，包括那些失去生命的学生来说，这是一次胜利，” 19 岁的 Piyush Sen 说道，他的哥哥被强迫重新参加考试，他从西部马哈拉施特拉邦前往詹塔·曼塔（Jantar Mantar）参加活动。
德里的抗议者表示，他们将继续开展运动，以根除印度教育系统中根深蒂固的腐败。
观点、人物 想法
民粹主义开场白掩盖了未来的 艰难选择 Andrew Rawnsley
如果你必须用一个词来概括安迪·伯纳姆在唐宁街 10 号的上任之初，那会是什么？我倾向于选择“市长风范”。目前还没有关于国防和外交政策的、辞藻华丽的首相声明。他在抵达唐宁街时的演讲几乎没有提到海岸线之外还存在一个世界。他究竟打算如何重启经济，仍然被密封在黑匣子之中。我们被承诺了一个“10 年计划”，但主厨仍在钻研食谱，这道菜要到秋天某个时候才能出炉。许多首相在就职时目光都紧盯着宏大的地平线。而 10 号房最新的租客则以一种地方性的基调开始了任期。为了宣告新政权已步入正轨，首批密集出台的公告集中在酒吧商业税、巴士票价、公用事业账单和无家可归问题上。
与此同时，他还对各省进行了亲切的访问。欢迎来到由“大不列颠市长”治理的政府。这在一段时间内会相当受欢迎。“从不现身基尔”是对前任首相致力于国际关系的一种幼稚嘲讽，但这个笑话引起了许多希望政府不懈关注国内事务的选民的共鸣。当民调机构组建公众焦点小组时，无家可归常被提及为“破碎英国”的一个症状。被封死的酒吧则是社区衰败的另一个令人痛心的标志。选民们在抱怨家庭账单。因此，政府决定为了给人们提供“更多喘息空间”而取消电力的增值税。地方交通状况很少能困扰怀特霍尔那些高深的大脑，但它对很多普通人至关重要。于是，巴士票价 £2 上限被引入——或者更准确地说，是重新引入。
他早期对生活成本的强调揭示了伯纳姆先生的特点。他渴望向那些挣扎在生存边缘的人展示“我能体会你们的痛苦”，就像比尔·克林顿过去常说的那样。他希望这些细微的改变被视为对未来美好时光的一次预付款。他试图通过塑造一个左翼版本的民粹主义，将选民从绿党那里吸引回来，并遏制改革党。他还在利用这些旨在赢取掌声的举措为自己争取空间，以便应对其政府面临的极其棘手的挑战，例如修复社会护理和资助国防。
通往 10 号房的路或许漫长且曲折，但最后几英里的路程是在匆忙中走完的。伯纳姆团队与高级公务员之间为了准备接管权力而进行的“对接谈话”十分仓促。一位高级人物评价道：“他们不得不把七个月的内容压缩在三周内完成。”目前的重点是寻找那些能上头条、易于实施且能与首相个人挂钩的“快速见效”措施。我们了解到的另一件事是，这个政府将高度以安迪为中心。其在基调和风格上的反差……
‘10 号房最新的租客以一种地方性的基调开始了任期。’ Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
与前任管理层的决裂始于他决定摒弃那个“末日讲台”，并在唐宁街发表其首篇无需讲稿的演说。他对社交媒体的利用，是为了有意识地将“伯纳姆品牌”从一个曼彻斯特的民众冠军，提升为具有前任所缺乏的全国性吸引力的公众人物。关于巴士票价的公告本可以交给交通大臣，但他希望将自己的面孔与一辆特殊涂装的车辆一同印在上面。他带着新任财政大臣约翰·希利前往埃塞克斯郡的一家小酒馆，以强调降低酒吧商业税率的举措。通过这种方式追求人气是有极限的，这位本能地讨好大众的人将会发现这一点。怀疑者指出，平均每户每周减免 £1 的电费和每家酒吧每周 £20 的税收减免，并不会让任何人觉得自己像中了彩票一样。
对他政府真正的考验在于，是否能够解决生活成本危机的根源。“他在就职的第一周就一直在花钱。这种情况不能持续太久，”一名被安迪·伯纳姆解职的内阁成员说道，“我们还没有回到现实世界。”他承诺要“以不同的方式做政治”，在这次残酷洗牌的牺牲者看来，这简直是个冷笑话——这次洗牌慷慨地奖赏了他的追随者，同时报复了那些抵制他“加冕”的人。他此前曾表示希望“超越”那些“困扰我们”的“内斗”和“派系主义”，随后他解雇了 11 位内阁大臣，其中许多人的共同“罪名”是拒绝要求基尔爵士辞职。接着，他在初级部长级别中对斯塔默的忠诚者进行了清洗。达伦·琼斯（自称“我并不心酸”）通过质疑电力增值税削减的资金来源进行了反击。被撤职的住房大臣史蒂夫·里德在辞职信中表达了愤怒，信中冷嘲热讽道：“我希望那些没对基尔表现出忠诚的人，现在能对你表现出忠诚。”
至于他的支持者，则分享了战利品。阿纳斯·萨瓦尔作为第一个要求基尔爵士下台的工党高级人物，成为了拥有上议院席位的贸易大臣。在伯纳姆崛起过程中发挥关键作用的露易丝·海格和安妮利斯·米德格利被任命为第一国务大臣和首席党鞭。被提升为新任能源大臣并进入内阁的米亚塔·法恩布勒，是首批退出斯塔默政府的大臣之一。韦斯·斯特雷廷和希利先生此前辞去卫生大臣和国防大臣一职，给基尔爵士造成了致命打击，而现在他们已获得了高级职位。埃德·米利班德是第一个告诉基尔爵士必须离开的内阁成员，他对未能掌管财政部感到非常沮丧，但获得了外交部这个光鲜的安慰奖。
对于那些被冷落的人来说，这感觉像是残酷的派系斗争。失去权力的人目前可能会忍气吞声，不想显得没礼貌。但当局势变得动荡时，他们将乐见他的窘迫。安迪·伯纳姆上任初期的表现证明，作为一名沟通者，他比前任要轻松且温暖得多。“他有一个非常好的开局，与基尔那段阴郁的岁月形成了鲜明对比，”一名资深的工党战略家评论道。而更艰难的部分将是制定持久的计划，以在长期内激发增长并改变生活。一个充满活力且乐观的开端为他赢得了一点时间，在他面对那些击败了众多前任的棘手困境和艰难权衡之前。
我屏幕上的视频声称要教我关于人类文明之前的过去。字幕让观众沉浸在历史之中：“POV [第一视角]：你在公元前 40 年作为一名穴居人醒来。”很快，屏幕上出现了一只粗糙的手——据说是我的手——正伸向一只长毛象打招呼。紧接着，我正在驯服一只剑齿虎。我遇到了一位猎友，他出现在屏幕上，露出了只有 21 世纪美国人才可能拥有的闪亮白牙。我们吃的东西看起来非常像肯德基 (KFC) 的炸鸡腿。
当然，这一切都不是公元前 40 年可能的景象。“穴居人”这个词是流行语而非学术用语，它非常宽泛地指代生活在旧石器时代 (Paleolithic era,) 的人类，而该时代在约公元前 12000 年结束。最后一批长毛象大约在公元前 4000 年消失，剑齿虎在公元前 9000 年消失。在公元前 40 年，马克·安东尼离开了克娄opatra 并与他的对手屋大维的妹妹结婚，而且他并没有与这两个女人中的任何一个同居在洞穴里。尽管他的牙齿可能比我的穴居人朋友要差。
如果你的数字足迹显示出对历史哪怕是一丁点的兴趣，AI 历史垃圾信息 (slop) 就会开始充斥你的社交媒体推送。话题的选择是耸动的、暴力的，且在很大程度上符合流行历史趋势：德国埃尔福特大学两名学者上个月发表的一篇论文发现，观众偏好关于灾难的视频（如泰坦尼克号，
我相当自信地认为，我是第一个把《邀请》(The Invite) 和《奥德赛》(The Odyssey) 看作极其相似的电影的人，但我很乐意坚持自己的观点。诚然，前者是一部关于住在同一栋大楼的两对截然不同的夫妇在晚餐派对上的喜剧，故事在甜点后的结局可能是（也可能不是）一场集体乱交。当然，后者是一部关于战争、失去以及各种怪物、考验和骗子的希腊史诗。从表面上看，它们几乎没有共同之处。
尽管如此，我在一周之内接连观看了这两部电影，发现它们都秉持着一种对严肃性的执着；它们拒绝变得讽刺，或者表现出除自身特质以外的任何样子。我们的流行文化中，有太多作品拒绝真正投入到它们所做的事情中，反而选择
AI 正在用历史上不准确的内容充斥社交媒体动态。
使用廉价的笑话或打破“第四面墙”来不断化解紧张气氛。以各自的方式，《邀请》和《奥德赛》都拒绝回避观众有时会觉得沉重或不安的主题，且拒绝妥协。希望它们的成功能让好莱坞引起重视。
前几天，在与一位我不便透露姓名的小咖啡馆老板聊天时，我想到了另一种氛围的转变。我是通过 Instagram 发现这家店的，但老板告诉我
她不得不停止在上面发布信息，因为生意变得太红火了。厨房完全由她的母亲管理，所有食材都是新鲜的。人们有时会从远方赶来用餐，如果到达时当天的食物已售罄，他们会感到愤怒或沮丧。现在，她就接纳目前的顾客，仅此而已。她对此似乎很满意。
享受完愉快的午餐后，我步行前往伦敦苏豪区（Soho）的摄影师画廊（Photographers’ Gallery），发现自己被市田小百合（Sayuri Ichida）的作品吸引了。在这场小型展览中，这位日本艺术家专注于她的
上周，露西·鲍威尔（Lucy Powell）就任十年来的第 10 任教育大臣。与大多数人一样，
她直接陷入了激烈的攻击之中。最大的争论点源于她八年前发送的一条推文，她在推文中强调“概念性理解、批判性思考/素养、创造力以及跨学科 [原文如此] 问题解决能力”高于可量化的“知识”。重启这场争论的手段极其卑劣，简直到了恶意攻击的地步。然而，这件事的影响是真实的。
鲍威尔的批评者表示，他们担心她是否会全面执行由其前任布里奇特·菲利普森（Bridget Phillipson）监督的最新课程审查。他们提出这个问题是正确的。但于 2025 年 11 月发布的课程审查在关于 AI 教学的规定方面已经严重过时。该审查完全将 AI 视为“计算机”科目下的一个主题，鼓励学生学习 AI 如何生成内容。而在鼓励教师和学生思考 AI 如何塑造他们用来了解世界的內容方面，该审查几乎没有提供任何引导。历史科目便是教育矿井中的金丝雀。
当然，对历史故事的低俗重新演绎并不新鲜：它们以前被称作时代剧。任何好莱坞历史大片的发行，如果没有关于准确性的争论，就不算完整。即便如此，有些历史电影比其他的更糟糕。
2000 年，议会就《U-571》这部闹剧提出了合理的质疑。这部环球影业的大片将（黑死病）、近代早期（都铎王朝、都铎王朝以及更多的都铎王朝）以及不可避免地，大屠杀。
当错误明显到像一个穴居人在公元前 40 年四处走动时，损害是有限的。但如果 Facebook 开始尝试向你展示文化大革命、爱尔兰大饥荒或奥斯威辛集中营营房的视频重现，会发生什么？当它声称向你展示的那段历史视频是个谎言时，会发生什么？
美国军队抢了捕获德国 Enigma 密码机的功劳，而不是将其归功于英国退伍军人，而其中一些人在当时仍然在世。
相比之下，传统电影中关于“准确性”的争论，反而能为大众提供一个绝佳的机会，让他们理智地思考大多数历史是如何保持争议性的——而事实本该如此。克里斯托弗·诺兰的《奥德赛》（The Odyssey）是这个夏天的热门电影，它只是长久以来将这部神话诗作改编而成的众多作品之一，而非一个历史事件（即便埃隆·马斯克还没有意识到这一点）。
上周末观看时，我发现自己像个前古典学者一样地愤怒，对诺兰在荷马文学传统上的随意处理感到愤慨：尤其是他将 xenia（款待）的概念延伸成一套涵盖一切的道德准则，甚至排除了基本的战争策略。（更糟糕的是，我们还得听着马特·达蒙用他的波士顿口音，一遍又一遍地将其称为“Zoos's law”。）
然而，正因为这部电影出自一个显然对荷马原著有深度思考的人之手，即使他选择背离原著，诺兰的这部史诗作品依然激励了全球数以千计的人去翻阅《奥德赛》的译本，并开始就他们心目中理想的
[[IMG_XXXX]] 一田小百合（Sayuri Ichida）在伦敦摄影师画廊展出的版画 Phoka #027。
奥德赛形象展开争论。任何一部文学或历史电影，只要能让整个互联网在争论古希腊问题并引导人们阅读更多书籍，就算完成了它的使命。
然而，网络上的 AI 垃圾视频（AI slop videos）正在做一些与好莱坞截然不同的新尝试。AI 历史视频的问题在于，与社交媒体上的所有事物一样，它是由算法塑造的，并强加了政治多数派的偏见。正如历史学家哈莉·鲁本菲尔德（Hallie Rubenfeld）上周告诉我那样：“这些短视频和图片进入了一个事实与虚构变得模糊的领域，且越来越难以区分。”最令人不安的是，对于我们这些将历史研究视为一门学科的人来说，AI 历史视频声称在提供信息，却从未向我们展示其来源。
AI 历史最新研究的参与者之一、埃尔福特大学（University of Erfurt）的安娜·内奥夫斯基（Anna Neovesky）教授告诉我，平台应该承担更多“责任来应对伪造内容，并对 AI 生成的内容进行标记”。但到目前为止的所有证据表明，这件事——委婉地说——不太可能实现，这使得教育学生如何识别和评估他们所吸收的叙事来源变得更加至关重要。
在 AI 世界中教授历史，我们应该应用相同的原则。教会学生询问：这段 AI 视频抓取了哪些数据？它服务于谁的议程？
数字人文专家梅丽莎·特拉斯（Melissa Terras）将此称为“信息素养”。这不是一项可选技能。而国家课程的进展却远远落后。
【AI 历史视频声称在提供信息，却从未向我们展示其来源】
她姐姐的照片，尽管刻意不露脸，但感觉极其亲密。我花了一整天时间思考，我们向世界展示了什么，又决定向世界隐藏什么。在很长一段时间里，人们被鼓励在网上公开，这意味着尽可能向尽可能多的人展露自己。难道潮汐终于要转向了吗？
S
说到坦诚相见，我简直不敢相信事情竟然发展到了这种地步，但我发现自己竟然在渴望一周——仅仅一周！——阴雨绵绵的 18 度天气。我热爱炎热，但我的衣橱实在跟不上。我住在英国，我一共只有三条短裤和四件夏裙。今年每一件都被穿了无数次。我看着它们，眼神中透出一种愤怒而疲惫的轻蔑，这种表情通常是我在二月下旬看向我的冬装大衣时的样子。我拥有那么多时尚的长袖上衣、有趣的小外套和得体的包鞋，但我真的快想不起它们长什么样了。相反，这几个月以来，我出席会议时的样子要么像个海滩浪子，要么像个九十年代的小明星，或者像个最近迷上滑板的十几岁男孩。我担心自己已经完全失去了穿着的时尚感。我只是……想再次穿上长裤。我想感受到面料触碰小腿的感觉。这要求过分吗？
I
中暑患者提供治疗 伊恩·希金森（Ian Higginson）撰文
最近天气相当炎热。 一段凉爽天气的出现 并不能改变英国气候 发展的方向。但为什么 热浪让 NHS（英国国家医疗服务体系）感到惊讶， 而我们又为什么未能为此做好规划？ 科学家、模型和趋势一直告诉着我们同样的事情： 人为引起的气候变化正驱动着更为极端的天气。 而这对 NHS 产生了影响。
许多急诊科临床医生（包括我在内）在今年夏天的很大一部分时间里，因为患者就诊的环境而感到对他们的愧疚，与此同时，我们自己也在悄悄地被烤着。
NHS 的许多房产都非常陈旧。一项 2024 年的研究显示，英格兰有 2,000 栋以上的 NHS 建筑比医疗服务体系本身的历史还要久。老旧建筑没有像样的气候控制系统，且其建造方式可能使其在发挥温室的作用。
患者——其中一些人是因为高温而生病——会向我们寻求帮助，但他们接受治疗的地方感觉就像一个烤箱。
临床医生们这个夏天在 NHS 的遗产建筑中忍受酷暑。
热浪给本已不堪重负的急诊护理系统增加了额外的压力。有人告诉我们，目前我们服务所面临的需求是“前所未有”的；坦白说，我已经有点厌烦这个词的使用了。当图表呈上升趋势时，数值必然会更高，且此前从未出现过。这种措辞似乎是在试图掩盖一个基本事实：虽然这可能是前所未有的，但它也是可预测的，且本应提前规划。
我们知道，妥善维持急诊护理所需的投资一直匮乏。我们每天在走廊里就能看到证据。但让我们把目光集中在治疗患者的砖墙建筑上。目前 NHS 积压的维护资金缺口高达 £16bn。我们没有投资未来，而是在积压问题，并让自己在当下陷入困境。在全国各地，专业的设施团队在创造奇迹，以维持顶棚不塌，并改善工作人员和患者的环境。但考虑到他们所面对的实际条件，他们能做的也有限。
NHS 的基础设施，就像医疗服务的其他方面一样，并非为了应对其日常面对的情况而建，且在面对变化时缺乏韧性。这种规划上的失败——在很大程度上是政策制定者的责任——是对员工和患者关怀职责的缺失。
解决这一问题的创新方式是系统性地审视房产，主动予以修正，然后进行维护。而现在发生的是零散的投资、管理下的衰退或危机干预。这种情况必须改变。
在急诊医学领域，我们理解气候变化的影响，因为我们不仅承受着政治决策带来的后果，还亲眼看到它如何影响我们的患者。伦敦卫生与热带医学院、伦敦帝国理工学院和英国气象局的研究表明，5 月和 6 月约有 2,700 人死于与高温相关的原因——且其中近一半的死亡与气候变化有关。
与此同时，根据 2025 年发布的 NHS 统计数据，医疗保健约占全国碳排放总量的 5%。在急诊医学团队中，正兴起一种通过在各自部门内推广环境可持续性来发挥表率作用的运动。
NHS 的基础设施并非为了应对其日常面对的情况而建，且缺乏韧性
通过皇家急诊医学学院的 GreenED 计划，我们发现对实践、流程和采购的改变可以对我们部门的碳足迹产生实质性影响。
值得称赞的是，NHS 已承诺在 2040 年实现净零排放。与此同时，GreenED 计划已被威尔士政府采用，并得到了苏格兰政府的支持。它正...
正在国际上获得关注。 我们希望看到这一举措在英格兰和北爱尔兰全国范围内被采用，并且让这些原则在国民医疗服务体系（NHS）内部得到更广泛的推广。 通过减少不必要的塑料浪费、使用对环境影响较小的药物以及降低电力消耗等简单措施，急诊部门已经产生了巨大的影响。我们看到各部门大幅削减了排放，而且在这一过程中还节省了资金。 因此，急诊医学临床医生正在为应对气候危机贡献自己的力量。与此同时，我们呼吁政策制定者和医疗系统领导者支持那些能够减少医疗保健对该问题影响的措施，系统性地投资于气候韧性和基础设施，并使急诊护理处于一个让我们能够自信面对未来可预见的各种需求和事件的状态。 我们希望，当这个炎热的夏天终于结束时，下雨时我们的设施不会被淹，且天气最终转冷时，锅炉能够正常工作。在此期间，我们将继续为我们的患者尽最大努力。
T
再野化（rewilding）有一种魔力。在经历了几个世纪的自然被驯服、重塑且往往被根除之后，我们现在的景观与过去截然不同。原先的沼泽变成了麦田，温带雨林曾经蜿蜒于英国大西洋沿岸的地方变成了牛场，而原生银桦林则被快速生长的常绿树林所取代。挥动一下魔杖——或者更实际地说，通过银行转账和多年的艰苦努力——其中一部分是可以被撤销的。但就像任何魔力一样，再野化引发了激烈的争论。
位于诺森伯兰郡的罗斯伯里庄园（Rothbury estate）由荒原和林地组成，面积超过 3,800 公顷 (9,400 英亩)，目前正待售。这种情况并不常见。该庄园由珀西家族（Percy family）持有近 700 年；这将是 30 年来英格兰规模最大的土地交易。到今年 9 月，由多个环保慈善机构组成的全国联盟——野生动物信托基金会（Wildlife Trusts）计划筹集 £30m 以将其收购。到目前为止，该基金会已筹集了 £20m 以上，并对此充满信心，认为最后的筹款冲刺将填补缺口。
其愿景是打造一个自然资源丰富之地。野花草甸将成为蝴蝶和蚱蜢的家园，海狸将创造湿地，林间牧场中会有小型牛群在森林中创造自然空间，为地面筑巢的鸟类提供觅食和繁殖的机会。该慈善机构希望人们也能在这里繁荣发展。徒步旅行者热爱西蒙赛德丘陵（Simonside Hills），那里是红松鸡、曲肩鹬和蝰蛇的栖息地。该基金会将与庄园内的 12 位承租农民合作。
但并非所有人都对此感到高兴。有些人担心自然的恢复会破坏吸引游客的风景，并改变农民的生活方式——特别是通过减少羊的数量。邻近庄园的山羊和肉牛养殖户克里斯·阿姆斯特朗（Chris Armstrong）担心，再野化会导致一种“覆盖式荒野”（blanket wilderness），从而导致多样性减少而非增加。尽管野生动物信托基金会表示没有计划释放大型掠食者，但人们对此也感到担忧。阿姆斯特朗说：“熊、狼和猞猁被从英国群岛清除是有原因的，我不认为我们失去它们后生活得不舒服。”
这里存在着关于土地外观、用途以及谁有权决定如何改变的文化冲突。
目前横扫西欧的毁灭性山火让农村景观管理成为了每个人关注的焦点。罗斯伯里的一些农民担心，自然的恢复会增加野生植被的“燃料载量”，这可能会成为大规模火灾的引燃物。野生动物信托基金会的方法是增强景观对火灾的抵御能力——这包括在植被中开辟防火隔离带，并创建在干旱条件下能保持较湿润的区域。
英国在耕地面积占比方面非常特殊：大约 70%，而法国和西班牙约为 50%。绝大多数这些农田都使用了杀虫剂和人工肥料，用于改善牲畜牧场以及提高
[[IMG_XXXX]] 罗斯伯里庄园 诺森伯兰郡的罗斯伯里庄园已经保护了包括下方曲肩鹬在内的稀有物种。David Head/Getty Images
20 英里
苏格兰 泰恩河畔纽卡斯尔 诺森伯兰郡
诺森伯兰 国家公园
农作物的生产力，但却在破坏自然生态系统。给予自然呼吸的空间将需要改变我们的耕种方式；这种反思意味着我们不再从一个枯竭的地球上强行榨取经过人工增强的收获。
当然，种植或饲养自己的食物对于粮食安全至关重要。但大片农田对我们购物篮的贡献极小。如果失去生产力最低的五分之一农田，我们国内生产的热量仅会减少 3%，这是一个几乎可以忽略不计的比例，正如亨利·迪姆比（Henry Dimbleby）在国家粮食战略（一项由政府委托的独立审查）中所指出的那样。其中一些生产力较低的土地可以转变为野生动物的新栖息地，从种植新森林到恢复古老林地。
罗斯伯里（Rothbury）庄园的出售工作已经部分完成；野生动物信托基金会（Wildlife Trusts）与诺森伯兰野生动物信托基金会（Northumberland Wildlife Trust）合作，已收购并管理约一半的土地。该慈善机构表示，如果交易的最后阶段完成，农业将成为其工作的“核心”。只不过将是一种不同类型的农业。
该慈善机构罗斯伯里项目的董事总经理彼得·巴切洛（Peter Batchelor）表示，在牲畜数量方面，这将包括“适当增加牛的数量，适当减少羊的数量”。对于一些环保主义者来说，羊是“羊毛反派”，因为它们喜欢啃食树苗；但对于野生动物信托基金会而言并非如此，该机构利用羊来支持保护工作：例如，羊啃过之后留下的低矮草地正是某些鸟类所青睐的。
在某种意义上，所有权的变更将是一种“民主化”，正如罗斯伯里的承租农民约翰·哈里森（John Harrison）所言——这是一种远离封建所有权的转变。但在罗斯伯里庄园，封建领主几乎不干涉任何事情。承租人们觉得农场是自己的，可以随心所欲地经营。这次转变引发了人们对农场运营限制增加的担忧。哈里森说：“人们担心我们如何才能在与自然共生的同时，还能实现盈利。”
这一切的背景是脱欧，当时英国农业的财务状况发生了变革。
在土地外观及其用途上存在文化冲突
在英国退出欧盟之前，补贴是根据共同农业政策发放的，其中大部分款项是根据耕种土地的面积来支付的。如何耕种并不重要。这对农民来说很简单，但对鸣禽来说就没那么好了。脱欧后情况发生了变化，历届政府引入的方案将农业补贴与采取可持续实践挂钩。
许多农场目前正面临高昂的燃料和化肥成本，以及小麦和牛奶等产品价格低迷的困境：根据去年发布的一项审查，30% 的英格兰农场在 2024 年处于亏损状态。农业曾免于缴纳遗产税，但现在每名个人最高 £2.5m 的资产需缴纳此项税款，这意味着一对夫妇可以传承 £5m 的资产而无需支付遗产税，但这是在经历了农民的激烈抵制后才从政府那里争取到的让步。
I
在一个如此大面积土地用于农业的国家，耕作必须变得更加自然友好。但对于一个已经感受到政府决策冲击的脆弱行业来说，这有时很难被接受。此外，还存在一种文化断裂。即使野生动物信托基金会（Wildlife Trusts）在谈论重新平衡羊群和牛群数量时小心翼翼，但许多山地农民的历史与养羊和育羊紧密相连。野生动物信托基金会成立于 1926 年，当时一名诺福克医生悉尼·隆（Sydney Long）和其他十几个自然爱好者筹集资金购买了一块放牧沼泽，将其转变为鸟类保护区。那时的规模要小得多——不足 200 公顷。罗斯伯里（Rothbury）庄园的大小与雅典的市区面积相当。它与其邻近区域——再野生化项目“赫普尔野地”（Hepple Wilds）、国民信托（National Trust）在沃灵顿（Wallington）的土地以及一个红松鼠保护区——共同构成了一个巨大的、互连的土地带，物种可以在这里迁移和繁衍。
几个世纪以来，人类造成的栖息地丧失已将自然推向边缘。数百个物种处于极高风险之中，包括欧洲turtle dove（欧洲斑鸠）和水䱺。这使得如此规模的自然修复至关重要。野生动物信托基金会并不倾向于使用“再野生化”（rewilding）这个词，而更倾向于谈论自然恢复或修复。这可能是恰当的，因为再野生化意味着我们让自然按照其自身的规律运行。在一个一些河流低于海平面且本土哺乳动物已被猎杀至灭绝的国家，仅仅让自然顺其自然是行不通的。除了积极管理自然的回归，近年来规模最大的自然修复项目还需要考虑到在土地上工作的人们的观点。这并不容易，但倾听农民的意见可能需要调整变革方案，以赢得怀疑者的支持。
在英国的粮食系统为了追求利润最大化而忽视对野生动物造成后果的数十年之后，如此规模的转变需要时间。最终，农场是商业企业，证明农民可以与自然协作——且其劳动依然能获得足够的报酬——将能平息争论。
住房、支持和政治勇气
在你们对安迪·伯纳姆即将就任首相的报道中，缺失了一个话题：他关于终结露宿的“首项指令”。 露宿是一个非常显眼的信号，表明我们的政治未能发挥作用——它是广泛政策失效的症状，迫使人们陷入极度痛苦之中。激进的变革从未简单。但如果我们维持现状，那么对于被迫流落街头的数千人来说，我们不能期待除了这场持续噩梦之外的任何结果。 原因很明确。我们没有为最低收入人群提供住房。在过去的一年里，英格兰失去的社会住房多于建造的住房，净损失近 4,000 套。租金上涨使许多人无法负担私人租赁部门，且由于住房补贴被冻结，最低收入人群几乎被完全排除在外。去年，因出院、出狱及离开其他机构而导致的无家可归人数上升了 22%。露宿带来的创伤造成了严重影响。人们难以获得所需的身体和心理健康护理，因此陷入困境。平均死亡年龄仅为 44 岁。 在应对无家可归问题上，缺乏统筹思考和政治雄心阻碍了之前的努力。然而，我们在大流行期间看到，露宿是一个对政治意愿响应良好的问题。伯纳姆本人指出了芬兰的例子，在那里，关于终结无家可归问题的跨党派共识在数十年间几乎终结了露宿现象。我们可以采取的芬兰方案之一是创建一个新的
Rosebank 和 Jackdaw 并非是对净零目标的退让 安迪·伯纳姆显然愿意同意在 Rosebank 和 Jackdaw 进行油气生产，这理所当然地令许多多年来推动认真进行净零转型的人感到沮丧。（见上周新闻，“伯纳姆如何让英国重拾斗志”）。但值得抵制那种将其解读为退让的反射动作。 这两个油气田在工党竞选宣言承诺之前就已经持有勘探许可证，且大部分已建成：Jackdaw 的平台已经安装，Rosebank 的浮式生产船已在现场。已经投入的数十亿资金绝不可能被重新定向到海上风电或电网升级中——无论这项决定如何，这些资本都已沉没。批准生产并不会减缓可再生能源的建设；它仅仅决定了现有资产的去向。 一个更合理的理由是，即使在管理良好的净零路径上，英国在未来数年仍将需要一定的石油和天然气，而且
《观察家报》 | 创刊于 1791 | 第 12,242 期
住房机构，其唯一资金用途是购置或开发额外的住房，以便让人们能直接离开街头，进入安全的住所，并获得在其中居住所需的支撑。 几十年来，我们一直在“管理”无家可归现象，而非将其终结，迫使数千人不得不在旅馆、青年旅舍和酒店中不稳定地暂住，仅去年一年就给地方议会带来了高达 £2.8bn 的惊人成本。除此之外，露宿街头者经常被告知他们未达到议会提供任何帮助的门槛。 这种情况必须停止。 在担任国会议员后的首次演讲中，Burnham 支持采用“国家住房优先 (Housing First) 理念”。这是一种突破性的方法，通过提供即时的住房及支持，帮助人们摆脱无家可归的状态，包括长期露宿街头的情况。这一方法在世界范围内取得了巨大成功。 为了使这一高效方法发挥作用，人们必须能够获得支持。而且，至关重要的是，社会住房的供应必须跟上需求。政府有充足的手段来实现这一点。它可以考虑通过改革鼓励私人房东安置最需要帮助的人，同时取消住房补贴的冻结。 首相对解决露宿街头问题的承诺，不仅仅是对一个具体问题的誓言：它是为了让社会价值观被我们所有人所感受到。 切实可行的解决方案已经出现，而且其成本比单纯地管理问题要低。现在就是我们的机会。 马特·多尼 (Matt Downie)，Crisis 首席执行官，www.crisis.org.uk
使用日益减少的国内储备——尤其是 Jackdaw 的天然气，它替代了碳排放更高的进口液化天然气 (LNG)——比假装我们可以不需要天然气更符合管理过渡的原则。 Octopus Energy 的 Greg Jackson 提出了相同的观点：“……让我们利用北海。主要地，我们应该减少对天然气的依赖，但在我们需要的时候，运输超过必要的天然气量是无法自圆其说的。” 但这并不意味着人们的担忧和沮丧是没有根据的。Rosebank 的石油主要用于出口，因此“比进口更清洁”的论点在在那里的适用程度远低于 Jackdaw。真正的问题是，对化石燃料的妥协是否到此为止。 Richard Large 德文郡，牛顿阿伯特 (Newton Abbot, Devon)
Ben Zaranko 关于改革地方政府财政是绝对优先事项的观点是正确的，而社会护理是一个极佳的切入点。由于需求最大的人群——老年人——同时也拥有最多的房产，安迪·伯纳姆 应该推进税制改革，以从闲置资源中获得更高价值。 这里有三个简单的步骤。第一，要求区议会和医疗信托机构协作，制定共同计划，以从现有资源中挖掘更多价值。数字情报将使这一过程变得更简单、更快速。第二，支持志愿部门为年轻人提供工作经验。可以从发展信托和以往的项目（如 City Challenge）中吸取经验。 最后，让步行前往市中心和车站变得更安全、更愉快。投资于“绿蓝网络”（即整合植被和水系统的网络，以向社区同时提供生态、社会和经济效益），将在新房屋准备入住之前很久，就重新燃起人们对真正变革正在发生的希望。 “社会城市”背后的价值观可以振兴工党运动中被忽视的部分，同时克服导致基尔·斯塔默 (Keir Starmer) 失去支持的财务约束。 Nicholas Falk，执行董事， URBED 信托基金 (The URBED Trust) 伦敦 WC1H
您建议（见上周《观察家报》评论：“事情也可以好转”），安迪·伯纳姆 可能会效仿 杰辛达·阿登 (Jacinda Ardern)，并呼应另一位新西兰前总理 诺曼·柯克 (Norman Kirk) 的格言：“人们想要的并不多。他们想要一个可以爱的人，一个可以居住的地方，一个可以工作的地方，以及一些值得期待的事。” 这将是对英国政坛现状的一种受欢迎的改变，因为在这里，许多人宣传的观点是，认为我们大多想要一个可以恨的人，一个可以嫉妒的人，以及一个可以鄙视的人。 Tim Forcer 南安普顿 (Southampton)
重返学生宿舍
读到关于恩菲尔德 (Enfield) 的特伦特公园 (Trent Park) 作为沉浸式博物馆开放的消息（见上周新闻，“助力盟军赢得第二次世界大战的秘密之屋”）非常有趣。 我在 1984 到 1988 年间作为米德尔塞克斯理工学院 (Middlesex Polytechnic) 的学生在那儿生活，我有幸在那里驻足，因此对该地有所了解。但得知它在 2012 年后陷入破败，且部分旧宿舍楼和学生会大楼被弃之不顾，显得十分凄凉，我感到很震惊。 在学习期间，我知道这座庄园有着丰富的历史，但现在看来，为了展示特伦特公园在战争努力中的关键作用，人们投入了大量有价值的工作。 我期待前往参观——即便只是为了在我的旧学生出没地四处窥探。这个项目绝对值得成功，因为它坐落在大伦敦绿带的一隅，这是一处需要保护的资产。 Christopher Moreton 北安普特郡，特拉普斯顿 (Thrapston, Northants)
达布斯勋爵（Lord Dubs）对他同事的行为和品格的看法（见上周“读者来信”栏目中《肮脏手段挫败了协助死亡法案……》一文）属于对人身攻击。将焦点放在上议院发生了什么或没发生什么，分散了我们对该法案需要提出的核心问题的注意力。现起草的《终末期成年人（生命末期）法案》在多大程度上能确保弱势群体的安全？
没有任何主要的专业机构，包括英国医学会 (BMA)、英国社会工作者协会 (BASW) 或英国残疾人权利组织 (Disability Rights UK) 认可该法案的当前草案，因为领先的权威机构仍不满意其在防止以下情况发生方面的保障能力：那些无法获得充足医疗或社会护理的人，或患有潜在精神疾病的人被胁迫而死。国会议员在就该法案投票前必须回答的问题应当是：它安全吗？
D A Jones 教授 伦敦圣玛丽大学
记录在案
我对梅兰妮·里德（Melanie Reid）能够承担起照顾亡夫的责任并面对寡居挑战的能力深感敬佩（见上周“论坛”栏目中《Nduja 腊肠和鱼手指炸块？！作为寡妇在厨房里变得有点……古怪》一文）。荣誉经常授予那些并不怎么值得拥有的人……但里德确实值得。
安妮特·博文顿 (Annette Bovington) 肯特郡，塞文奥克斯
读者迈克·库根（Mike Coogan）通过提到《主街放逐》（Exile on Main St.）证明了达米安·莫里斯（Damien Morris）的观点，即滚石乐队并非以专辑见长的乐队（见上周“读者来信”栏目中《开玩笑》一文）——那绝对是有史以来被最高估的专辑。
约翰·帕金 (John Parkin) 沃里克郡，嫩顿
联系我们 读者来信可能会经过编辑，请附上全名、电话号码和邮寄地址。 发送邮件至 letters@observer.co.uk（请在主题栏中插入 Letters to the Editor）。 或写信至： Letters to the Editor The Observer, 22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP 请于周四中午前送达。 在 observer.co.uk/topics/letters 在线查看更多信件。 如需请求更正或进行投诉，请致信 readers@observer.co.uk
“本周，一位火辣的新成员进入了别墅”——这并不是你预期会在一段 安迪·伯纳姆 进入唐宁街 10 号的视频中听到的台词，但当英国政府拥有一个官方 TikTok 账号时，任何事情都可能发生。
自从伯纳姆上个月当选议员并——惊喜！——发现自己成为了首相以来，他使用社交媒体的方式一直备受称赞。他幽默且具有亲和力。伯纳姆利用社交媒体宣布其内阁名单，并与 Bemi Orojuogun（这位不寻常的影响者被广大网民亲切地称为“巴士大婶”）合作宣布其巴士票价上限政策。
如果说基尔·斯塔默就像你那个试图在太晚的时候装酷的父亲，在尝试拍摄 Instagram 短视频（reel）时经常显得尴尬，那么 安迪·伯纳姆 则像你朋友的父亲，他真的很酷、很幽默，你甚至可能会对他产生一点好感。
英国政坛产生过极少数将社交媒体视为原生形式并能将其掌握的人物。奈杰尔·法拉奇是一个令人不适的例外：无论人们如何看待他的政治主张，他在大多数同行开始使用 Instagram 之前就明白，评论区就是选区。
在美国，纽约市市长 Zohran Mamdani 和众议员亚历山德里亚·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯仍然是有效利用社交媒体吸引选民的基准。
在政治权力的最高层，这种力量同样强大，甚至更为显著。问题在于它发挥的是什么样的作用。特朗普一直以威胁的方式使用社交媒体。那里没有温暖，没有有趣的 DJ 现场，也没有幽默的反击。即使在他出任总统之前的推文，也像是一个薄皮欺凌者的措辞，他曾祝愿那些“仇恨者和失败者” 9/11 快乐。但他与 MAGA 基础群体之间建立的是一种基于盲目忠诚的准社交关系。他是任何房间里最不寻常的存在，而他的社交媒体使用习惯延伸了这一点，使他在政治话语规范中获得了某种豁免权。
这就是伯纳姆团队面临的困境。作为首相，他无疑会做出一些不受欢迎的决定，而这会使他与自己在网上塑造的亲民形象产生矛盾。他的追随者会感到被背叛，因为他将粉碎那个被他人代表其塑造的形象。一个有趣的 DJ 并不正是那个会加税的人，不是吗？
但我认为，伯纳姆的社交媒体策略已经达到了目的。它让人们站在了他这边，而现在他成了首相。但如果他继续使用非正式的语气，在面对艰难抉择时，这可能会显得古怪；他必须将社交媒体不仅用于娱乐，还要用于引导人们参与政治并解释艰难的决定。
伯纳姆就职仅一周，过程很愉快。但当议会休会结束时，蜜月期也将终结，无论如何通过“光环塑造”（aura farming）来刷存在感，都无法让你在面对失去耐心的英国公众时脱身。
Xavier Greenwood 认为，强迫经典的反英雄在现代道德准则下行动限制了这部电影
写奥德修斯在回妻子 Penelope 家的途中与卡吕普索和喀耳刻发生关系，并不会剧透克里斯托弗·诺兰改编的《奥德赛》。写奥德修斯回到伊萨卡后处决了 12 名女奴，也不会剧透。这些细节都不是剧透，因为它们发生在荷马的诗作中，而没有出现在诺兰的电影中。
没人能否认大银幕上《奥德赛》所呈现的惊人奇观。1895 年制作的最早的英国电影之一，时长不足 60 秒，画面是波涛拍击码头。一名记者将海浪破碎的样子描述为“就像真实的一样，形成了微小的洪水”。据说观众们甚至抬起了脚，以免……
安迪·伯纳姆 的 TikTok 视频帮助他赢得了人们的支持。TikTok
AOC 在 Instagram Live 上的封锁广播，以及她的烹饪直播——所有这一切都是经过精心计算的，但给人的感觉却很真实，而这正是政治社交媒体在发挥实效时的核心悖论。同样，Mamdani 能够当选，也归功于他的团队打造吸引人内容的能力。人们清楚地知道自己在为何事、为谁而投票。
当然，美国的社交媒体大师是三军统帅。唐纳德·特朗普在社交媒体上的存在感——从 Twitter/X 到 Truth Social——就像是在观察一场缓慢发生的车祸。其中很多内容是危险或令人不安的。对于信徒来说，他是一个敢于直言的平民之友；而对于他的诋毁者来说——好吧，他们尽管尝试，但无法移开视线。
这就是 Mamdani 的类比失效之处，也是特朗普的类比变得值得探讨之处——尽管需要谨慎，且不应将其视为一种侮辱。Mamdani 是一名市长。他自一月份就职以来，其社交媒体依然在延续竞选期间的风格：高频率、平台原生且充满活力。他可以拍摄打篮球、填补路面坑洞和骑自行车的视频。这很有效，而且之所以可行，是因为虽然纽约市市长的决定至关重要，但通常不会波动全球市场或引发外交事件。Mamdani 可以承受这种非正式的表达方式，因为任何一条帖子所涉及的风险都是有限的。甚至当他在上周呼吁逮捕以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡时，他也强调他仅考虑纽约市的管辖权。
特朗普则没有这种限制，这使得他的例子值得直接研究。在政治权力最高层，社交媒体不仅没有失去威力，反而愈发强大。
水流将他们吞没。在全 70 毫米画幅的震撼中凝视诺兰笔下的狂暴之海，就接近于那种体验。但如果我们将这片大海视为文字周围的空白区域，视为处理我们所观看内容的缓冲空间，那么它便是一面镜子而非一扇窗户。因为诺兰本可以挑战他的观众，用一套古老的价值体系，将那些行为像反派一样的人塑造为英雄。相反，我们得到的是一次现代式的沉思，或者说是对文本的背叛。
人们已经重复到令人厌倦的程度地指出，《奥德赛》这部已有 3,000 年历史的作品是西方文学的奠基之作。但更重要的知识点是，古希腊人将这首诗视为一种道德指南。我们可能会对其中一些格言点头认同。对陌生人保持好客。是的。追求自我掌控，克服自我意识。是的。那么这条呢？帮助你的朋友，伤害你的敌人。这是荷马式正义的核心，一种显然否认同理心与宽恕的指令。但这并非诺兰电影的核心，该片在最低谷时竟有如此狂妄之举，转而引用圣经的话：你想别人怎么对待你，就那样对待别人。
电影的快感在于它能诱导我们。我们不喜欢杀人犯，但邦妮和克莱德获得了宽恕。我们不喜欢偏执狂，但华尔街之狼乔丹·贝尔福特看起来很有趣。我们不喜欢黑帮分子，但维托·柯里昂能成为我们的教父吗？一个好色且撒谎、设计诡计摧毁一座城市、将自己的生存置于士兵之上的奥德修斯，竟然还是一名英雄，这其中蕴含着怎样的潜能。
但这并不是诺兰笔下的奥德修斯。他进入特洛伊时，像是一个被困扰的观察者，看着他的部下进行掠夺。当他杀死占据家中的求婚者时，其血腥程度低得像是在玩街机游戏，与原诗截然不同。
在过去的十年里，他的帖子成为了全国头条，而这种直接面向公众的方式让他能够掌控自己的信息传递。其内容通常狂野，频繁地失控，但作为一种国家级沟通方式，几乎总是有效的。但这也意味着他很少需要为自己的言论负责，而现实世界产生的后果总是令人震惊。
市场会对特朗普在 Truth Social 上的帖子做出反应——事实上，这种反应如此可靠，以至于特朗普媒体公司正在推出一项付费 API 服务，以便让华尔街公司更快地获取他的“真相”，从而在广大公众看到之前据此进行交易。无论人们如何看待这一点——正确的反应应该是纯粹的恐惧——它证明了一个重要事实：社交媒体并没有变得不那么
在他身上溅满了血迹，就像“一只吃过牛的狮子”。随后，诺兰笔下的奥德修斯航向流放之地，以弥补自己的所作所为。我们看到的与其说是海上航行的奥德修斯，不如说是身在越南的奥德修斯，一个深受创后应激障碍（PTSD）困扰的幽灵。好莱坞关于电影可展示内容的制作准则在 1968 年被取消，但诺兰似乎仍然受限于它。
最大的失望在于诺兰的选择对女性角色造成的影响。在荷马的诗作中，女性角色刻画得如此丰满，以至于小说家萨缪尔·巴特勒在 1897 年假设《奥德赛》是由一名女性撰写的。诺兰将她们中的大多数降格为指点江山的配角，用来提醒观众其男性对应者的罪孽。海伦被丈夫残害。雅典娜则在进行大量的凄凉凝视。一个受创的克吕刻在一种类似于“并非所有男人都这样”的辩护下，被说服对奥德修斯宽容。
诺兰似乎无法
暗示我们的道德准则并不像《山上宝训》让我们认为的那样刻在石头上；无法暗示过去的英雄与我们今天崇拜的英雄之间几乎没有相似之处。Imax 屏幕旨在让我们在它面前下跪。也许诺兰在能够随心所欲操控这种媒介，并将最具有影响力的古代文献之一作为灵感来源时，害怕了自己所拥有的权力。他应当记住弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫关于电影的这段话：“马儿不会将我们撞倒。国王不会握住我们的手。海浪不会打湿我们的脚……无论我们是否凝视，这种美都会绽放。”
在电影院里，当大海威胁要将我们吞没时，诺兰的《奥德赛》可能感觉很真实，但它并非如此。我们可以离开，而无需承受残酷与复仇留下的伤疤。我们可以将这一切抛在脑后，尽管困惑且矛盾，但依然完好无损。这正是诺兰未能把握的特权。
`
N
比赛开始！上周四晚上，国王和王后在 Hydro 竞技场率领皇家队列出席，众多政要到场。每个人都在唱着《上帝保佑国王》——除了，你知道的，国王本人，这似乎才正确。
国王旁边的是唐纳德·鲁卡雷 (Dr Donald Rukare) 博士，英联邦体育组织和乌干达奥委会主席。作为一名前国际游泳运动员，他穿着一件以乌干达国旗颜色重新设计的华莱士格子呢kilt裙——这证明了英联邦的时尚外交可以出人意料地时髦。
对于 Rhun ap Iorwerth 和约翰·斯温尼 (John Swinney) 来说，这并不是什么娱乐活动——他们分别是
Jessy Parker Humphreys 表示，运动会的重塑之路径 或许在于其复杂的过去
没有任何一项体育赛事比英联邦运动会被写过更多次“讣告”。 随着一个缩减版本的赛事于周五在格拉斯哥开幕，该运动会的未来再次被质疑。 本届赛事仅有 10 项运动，因为澳大利亚维多利亚州政府由于成本飙升而撤回主办资格，迫使格拉斯哥在最后一刻介入。在伯明翰于 2022 年接替德班之后，这是第二次连续出现指定主办方因财务考虑而退出。 这也是自 1954 年以来第一次
这是君主，身着一套干练的蓝色西装，打着淡粉色领带，显得毫不费力地时髦。在担任威尔士和苏格兰亲王期间，查尔斯经常被看到偏爱双排扣西装，但自从登基以来，他更多地转向单排扣款式，给人一种更柔和、更亲切的形象。
[[IMG_Mattia Ozbot/Getty Images]]
我们的新首相据报道告诉斯威尼，苏格兰独立是“禁区”，而 ap Iorwerth 则提出了威尔士应与苏格兰平等的论据。
再见，黑色 T 恤；你好，纽扣衬衫和领带。如果这是成为最高权力持有者的代价，那么……
BBC 将不会播出本次运动会。唯一的免费无线覆盖是 5 频道的集锦节目，其余部分则在 TNT Sports 的付费墙后播出。对于一件面临“隐形”风险的事情，很难唤起太多的轰动。 主办意愿低迷和媒体版权交易是整个体育界的趋势。但英联邦运动会被认为格外过时，因为它被认为是在推广大英帝国。 这或许有失公允，因为有组织体育活动的帝国起源并非英联邦运动会所独有。皮埃尔·德·库贝尔廷在目睹法国军队在普鲁士战争中失败后，决定法国人应该变得更像大英帝国的强健男子——那些在学校通过体育活动塑造的人——从而受到启发，决定复兴奥运会。 但不可否认的事实是，帝国的遗产深植于这项赛事之中。从 1930 年到 1950 年，该运动会被称为“大英帝国运动会”；从 1954 年到 1966 年，被称为“大英帝国及英联邦运动会”；随后从 1970 年到 1974 年，它们变成了“英联邦运动会”。直到 1978, 当比赛在加拿大埃德蒙顿举行时，它才采用了目前的名称。然而，尽管经过这些更名，该运动会创造了一个记住并学习帝国历史的空间，而这在英国社会中正变得极其罕见。 “骄傲之家”（Pride House）——格拉斯哥的一个临时场所，LGBTQ+ 运动员、游客和盟友可以在这里观看比赛——就提供了这样一个机会。今年的展览悬挂了参赛国的国旗，而在这些国家，
卡米拉王后——顺便说一句，她似乎是和她的丈夫一起乘坐 TARDIS 抵达活动现场的——穿着一套 Anna Valentine 连体衣。实用、运动，且正好适合于一个……
同性恋仍被视为犯罪，并可被判处监禁或死刑。在许多情况下，这是由于英国殖民时期的法律仍留在法典中，但这种遗产往往被抹除，而涉事国家则被呈现为落后。随着该国对跨性别者权利的限制，这段历史显得尤为相关——去年最高法院关于《平等法》的裁决指出，法案中提及的“性别”应解释为生物学性别。 关于英联邦理想在今天意味着什么的疑问，并不局限于体育界。布克奖在 2014 年改变了评选标准，允许不仅来自英国和英联邦，而且是任何英文小说的作品参评；今年，英联邦短篇小说奖因最终获奖作品涉嫌使用人工智能而受到抨击。
在该国拥有办公室， 安迪·伯纳姆 (Andy Burnham) 显然愿意为此付出代价。 值得庆幸的是，甚至没有宪法
奖项。英联邦基金会主席拉兹米·法鲁克 (Razmi Farook) 表示，这场争议恐将掩盖该奖项的目的，即发掘英联邦领土内服务不足社区的写作能力。她引用了盖亚特里·查克拉沃蒂·斯皮瓦克 (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) 1988 年的论文《让被压迫者说话》来支持她的观点。这一号召同样适用于英联邦运动会，来自受大英帝国遗产影响之国家的民众在这里获得了一个独特的机遇和平台。英联邦运动会通常被认为是由殖民者与被殖民者之间的关系所定义的，它能够而且应当在探讨帝国遗产方面做得更多。该赛事更光明的未来或许不在于一个抹平参赛国历史的模式，而在于一个能够阐明历史的模式。
大型体育赛事。 当《神秘博士》(Doctor Who) 重启并需要 一名新同伴时， 谁知道呢？
汤姆·马斯特斯爵士 (Sir Tom Marsters)， 国王在库克群岛的 代表，由他结婚 超过 40 年的妻子图爱妮夫人 (Lady Tuaine) 陪同。 这个太平洋国家 15 个岛屿虽然 分散在广袤的海洋中， 但在格拉斯哥， 他们团结在 田径、草地保龄球、 游泳和 举重选手的背后。
责任感促使 他决定舍弃他那块 可靠的 Tag Heuer 2000 系列潜水表。
less
每 2 周轻轻修剪一次树篱，会使其生长更茂密并呈现出极佳的质感，但沉重的修剪机、电缆和折叠梯让一些人厌恶修剪树篱这项工作。 Gtech 的 Cordless HT50 让修剪树篱成为一种享受。
无线便捷 拥有 60 分钟的运行时间*，您可以自由地在花园中移动，无需被电缆束缚，也不必担心汽油的脏乱。HT50 树篱修剪机采用高扭矩 18V 电机，在需要时直接提供动力。轻量且超强的驱动系统旨在实现精细化和安静运行，但请不要被外表迷惑——精密激光切割刀片可轻松切断厚度高达 25mm 的树枝。
长触达范围 Gtech HT50 树篱修剪机具有一个可旋转 135° 的可调节头部，因此您可以完全控制树篱的切割方向。头部可向下调节，以便您轻松修剪树篱顶部；也可向上调节，以便在修剪多刺树篱时不会刮伤手臂。使用 50cm 长的刀片，通过沿最高 10 英尺† 的树篱顶部水平切割，使您的树篱保持整洁。精密刀片可穿透叶群，留下干净的切口和健康的茎干，从而萌发新芽，创造出美丽且质感丰富的树篱。
a l
jus
Nick Grey 发明者 & Gtech 所有者...
“我们在设计 HT50 时采用了更长的刀片，这样一次可以切割更大的区域。这意味着您将花在工作上的时间更少，而有更多时间享受您的花园——非常理想。”
完美平衡 重量仅为 2.94kg，并配有背带，您可以自由地在花园中移动，而不会感到沉重。HT50 达到平衡，让您在无需担心重量的情况下，获得更愉快的园艺体验。 安全第一 为了防止任何意外启动，HT50 树篱修剪机配备了一个易于使用的安全开关。操作时，只需在按住单手电源触发器的同时，按下手柄侧面的安全开关即可。操作简单，且比以往任何时候都更安全。
现在订购我们的 HT50 长触达树篱修剪机和枝条切割器套装，仅需 £169.99（建议零售价 £274.98），如果您在 30/09/2026 之前订购，可节省 38%。 立即订购，请访问 www.gtech.co.uk（结账时输入代码 XC76）或扫描二维码：
£169.99
使用代码：XC76
包含枝条切割器附件
切割效果好，轻巧，易于使用。 令人惊喜。重量是首要考虑因素，但它的性能也非常好。修剪树篱和成熟的顶部造型冬青都没有问题。 Terry B
现已成为政府 首席党鞭， 以其“像梗犬一般”的 坚韧著称， 詹姆斯·塔珀 (James Tapper) 报道
安内莉丝·米德格利 (Anneliese Midgley) 喜欢讲一个关于哈罗德·威尔逊 (Harold Wilson) 访问利物浦北部的诺尔斯利野生动物园 (Knowsley Safari Park) 的故事，这位前工党首相曾代表该地区，而现在她作为诺尔斯利的国会议员代表该地区。当被问到如果狮子逃脱了会发生什么时，威尔逊回答道：“好吧，狮子们将不得不自谋生路。”
米德格利是安迪·伯纳姆的新任首席党鞭，负责将工党议员们驱赶到政府的投票大厅中。如果他们逃脱了，他们是在威斯敏斯特的荒野中被一只母狮还是一个小猫在追踪？
对此最好的答案或许来自去年的福利法案反抗。基尔·斯塔默 (Keir Starmer) 政府想要削减 £5bn 的残疾人个人独立津贴支出，以及 22 岁以下人群通用信用金支付中的医疗部分。后座议员们对此感到愤怒，部长们为了避免投票失败而选择了退让。
这次事件在政府财政上留下了一个巨大的漏洞，同样在斯塔默的权威上留下了一个巨大的漏洞。No 10 将责任推给了路易丝·海格 (Louise Haigh)，她在一次手机被盗丑闻后被斯塔默解雇了运输大臣的职务。他们显然没有意识到，米德格利——这位斯塔默的前助手——也是一个关键的推动者。
“她并不感兴趣于让政府难堪，或者故意制造障碍——她是真的认为那些改革是错误的，”一位朋友说道。“安内莉丝就像一只梗犬。一旦她抓住了某个问题，她就绝不松口。”
一年后，在赢得梅克菲尔德 (Makerfield) 补选后，米德格利和海格陪同伯纳姆走入下议院议事厅，重新回到工党席位。这两位女性被《新政治家》(New Statesman) 杂志冠以“北方之王”的王后之名，是伯纳姆获得权力时的操盘手 (fixers)。海格将作为兰开斯特公爵领地大臣，成为他在政府中的操盘手，而米德格利则将在议会中解决他的问题。
“‘操盘手’这个词经常被用来形容安内莉丝，这确实很公平，”内森·奥斯温 (Nathan Oswin) 说道。他在起草《希尔斯堡法》(Hillsborough Law) 法案、旨在为公职人员建立坦诚义务时与米德格利密切合作。“但操盘手有两种。一种是政治操盘手，他们是博弈者，并不真正关注实现实际的变革。而另一种是真正的执行者 (actual fixers)，他们发现问题并尝试排除障碍。安内莉丝非常像后者。”奥斯温将功劳归于他的朋友，称她促使政府部长在法案通过下议院的关键节点参与其中。毫无疑问，她将继续关注该法案在上议院的进展。
传统上，党鞭潜伏在议会的阴影中，这样更便于进行私下交谈
并非在 所有事情上 都完全一致：他是 埃弗顿队的球迷，而她 支持利物浦队
而且在阴郁的氛围中，很难分辨他们是准备挥舞胡萝卜（奖励）还是大棒（惩罚）。但后议员们可能会在米德格利（Midgley）演艺圈的过去中，瞥见一些像亮片般闪耀的痕迹。 她的根基深植于利物浦——她在坎特里尔农场（Cantril Farm）长大，在担任国会议员的首次演讲中，她将那里描述为一个“贫民窟清理安置区”。她的姨妈珍在她的学校工作，她的母亲成为了一名社会工作者，而她的父亲在海伍德（Halewood）的福特工厂生产线上工作。 工会几乎成了家庭的一部分，在当地失业率剧增的时期，工会让她父亲保住了工作。 “有些时候，冰箱里真的只有一罐豆子，那就是我们全部的食物，”她告诉《议会》（House）杂志。“社区会团结起来互相帮助，或者我会去奶奶家喝茶。” 她的青少年时期的工作比大多数人都要出彩：先是在利物浦的披头士商店工作，随后在巴黎的莎士比亚书店（Shakespeare and Company）这家英文书店工作。 回到利物浦后，她进入了音乐产业，担任DJ并创办了包括Liquidation在内的俱乐部之夜，后者是西北部独立音乐场景的中坚力量。音乐记者兼独立舞曲组合圣艾蒂安（Saint Etienne）创始人鲍勃·斯坦利（Bob Stanley）曾在她的21岁生日派对上担任DJ。
随后爱情降临——根据米德格利的说法，他们的初吻发生在 1997 年大选期间的一场派对上，恰逢迈克尔·波蒂略（Michael Portillo）失去议席的那一刻——随后他们结婚了。虽然此后两人离婚，但仍保持良好的朋友关系。 米德格利曾为《Mojo》杂志撰稿，在伦敦的一家唱片店工作，并为包括Pulp在内的其他90年代乐队做宣传。随后，政治介入了她的生活。 她加入了Unison工会并成为一名车间干事。在伦敦市长办公室的肯·利文斯通（Ken Livingstone）团队注意到她的竞选能力后——她曾印制过一些支持拥堵费的徽章——她获得了在伦敦市长办公室工作的机会。 奥斯温（Oswin）表示，这段经历奠定了她的价值观。“她曾痴迷于音乐和那种艺术生活，但随后就像许多人一样，随着生活的推进，她越来越多地参与并对政治产生兴趣。在像利物浦这样的城市经营音乐之夜，能够学习如何与人们接触、交谈并倾听他们——这为她打下了良好基础。” 在为利文斯通工作一段时间后，她在 2015 年为杰里米·科尔宾（Jeremy Corbyn）工作，随后进入工会系统，担任Unite工会的伦·麦克卢斯基（Len McCluskey）的政治总监，以及英国工会大会（TUC）总书记保罗·诺瓦克（Paul Nowak）的顾问。
这些人坚定地处于工党左翼，但诺瓦克（Nowak）表示，米德格利（Midgley）在工党运动的整个光谱中都受到尊重。她在科尔宾（Corbyn）任内介入并阻止了汤姆·沃森（Tom Watson）被撤职副党魁，并在 2020 年基尔·斯塔默（Keir Starmer）成为工党领袖后加入了他的团队。
“任何能为我、杰里米·科尔宾、基尔·斯塔默和伦·麦克卢斯基（Len McCluskey）工作的人，显然是一个能够在整个工党运动中周旋的人，”诺瓦克说道。
“当我刚开始担任总书记时，你在议会里每走 10 码就得停下来，因为她总是在和某人聊天——不仅因为她认识很多人，还因为她真的对他们感兴趣，”他说。
如果奥斯温（Oswin）和诺瓦克是对的，那么米德格利作为首席党鞭（chief whip）的方式将更倾向于协作而非对抗，更像盖伊·查德威克（Guy Chadwick）的《爱之屋》（The House of Love），而非弗朗西斯·厄夸特（Francis Urquhart）的《纸牌屋》（House of Cards）。
“人们对党鞭的刻板印象是把人拽进来，威胁、痛骂，并拥有一本秘密小黑本，”奥斯温说。“她希望将重点放在结果上。[首席党鞭]将是她在政府中的梦想角色之一，因为那是她热衷的事情。她身上再次体现出了那种‘操盘手’（fixer）的特质。”
朋友们称她为“米奇”（Midge），她将有许多问题需要处理。安迪·伯纳姆计划全面改革社会护理并结束露宿街头。或许他计划为酒吧、俱乐部和音乐场所降低 20% 商业税率的方案中，就有米德格利的痕迹。当然，他们并非在所有事情上都一致：安迪·伯纳姆是埃弗顿队的球迷；而米德格利支持利物浦队。有些事情是无法修复的。
当汤姆·麦克纳布在 1980 年地处西伦敦的理工学院体育场，看着 31 个穿着短裤和背心瑟瑟发抖的可怜家伙时，他的心沉了下去。大卫·帕特南 (David Puttnam) 的话在他耳边回响。《烈火战车》的制片人曾告诉麦克纳布：“你的任务是确保田径运动看起来像真的。如果不像，我们就完蛋了。”
麦克纳布能教练运动员。他曾带领英国队参加过两次奥运会，并与一些顶尖的国家级天才共事。但这些演员身材瘦削，不习惯锻炼——其中有些人在轻微跑完步后就已经在呕吐了。“他们对体育的贡献，就像卡西莫多对衣架的贡献一样，”麦克纳布后来评价道。
在观察了一会儿后，他挑选出本·克罗斯 (Ben Cross) 和伊恩·查尔森 (Ian Charleson) 是最有可能胜任的人。“他们正是导演想要的人，”麦克纳布说。随后，饰演埃里克·利德尔 (Eric Liddell) 的查尔森在第一次训练课时现身，结果他因为追公交车导致肌肉拉伤。麦克纳布有四个月的时间让他们看起来像 1924. 年的奥运选手。他成功了，尽管效果并不像演员们认为的那样好。在拍摄接近尾声时，饰演短跑运动员哈罗德·亚伯拉罕斯 (Harold Abrahams) 的克罗斯声称自己能在 11 秒内跑完 100 米。“你能跑进 12.6 秒就算运气好了，”麦克纳布回答道。他安排了一名 50 多岁的精英女跑者与他对决，结果她将其彻底击败。
没有人能像苍蝇那样飞行。 这是我们谦虚的自豪之举： 当我们完成一次格外巧妙的转向， 或是一次格外利落的着陆后， 我们可能会这样对彼此说。 比协和飞机快， 比老鹰强，比蝙蝠和蝴蝶 强之多。我能绕着翼龙 飞好几个圈。
周一 精准。这就是生命的意义。 关键在于在三维空间中， 准确地知道自己在空中的 位置、角度和速度。 看看其他昆虫。蝴蝶、 蜻蜓、蜜蜂、黄蜂：它们 都长了四只翅膀。多出了两只。 我们用最先进的飞行仪器 取代了后翅，这些仪器 分布在地球上最先进的设备之中。它们
[[IMG_XXXX]] 奥斯卡级别的表现：1981 年，汤姆·麦克纳布 (Tom McNab) 训练演员本·克罗斯 (Ben Cross)，为其在电影《烈火战车》中饰演的奥运运动员哈罗德·亚伯拉罕斯 (Harold Abrahams) 一角做准备。图片来源：Shutterstock
在他面前 40 码处。“他再也没提到过这件事，”麦克纳布说。 如果说这部奥斯卡获奖电影是他最著名的成就，那么麦克纳布更应该因为担任 15 年的国家教练而被人铭记，他曾指导过诸如洛娜·布思 (Lorna Boothe) 这样的运动员，后者是英联邦运动会 100 米栏冠军；
被称为平衡器 (halteres)，它们是 精准飞行的终极秘密。
周二 你是否考虑过，在天花板上 实现安全着陆有多复杂？ 这也许是飞行史上最大的 矛盾，而我们则是其中的大师。 过程是这样的：向着着陆点 加速。选择你的技巧：我 可能会以半滚转的方式接近， 或者在头尾轴线上进行翻转。 放下起落架：滚转时，上方 的三条腿全部展开；翻转时， 仅展开头部的一对腿。 腿的伸展还能让你减速： 只要判断正确，你几乎就像 漫步在天花板上一样。
安德里亚·林奇 (Andrea Lynch)，一名 60 米跑欧洲室内冠军；以及弗雷德·阿尔索普 (Fred Alsop)，他在 1964 年奥运会三级跳远中获得第四名。麦克纳布还指导过格雷格·卢瑟福德 (Greg Rutherford)，在卢瑟福德获得奥运金牌的七年前，他成为了欧洲 20 岁以下跳远冠军。 “他将田径教练的角色推向了 公众关注的焦点，”资深田径 作家约翰·古德博迪 (John Goodbody) 说道。“他极其敬业， 尤其钟爱十项全能，因为 这体现了全能运动员的典范。 他对田径项目的知识面同样广博， 这在当时是很罕见的。”世界田径 联合会主席塞巴斯蒂安·科 (Sebastian Coe) 称他为 “该运动最忠实的友人之 一，且才华横溢”。
这需要一点技巧。 关键在于爪子和每只脚上的 黏附部分。黏附部分被称为 pulvilli（足垫）——我觉得 这是一个很优雅的名字，你 一定会同意的。它们就像 半打便签纸：黏，但不能 太黏。足垫负责粘合，爪子 负责脱离：我可以像任何人 在地面行走一样，在天花板上踱步。
周四 我爱人类。大部分时间如此。 他们混乱得如此可爱。 今天，厨房里有一块牛肉， 被敞口放置了几分钟。 我降落并品尝了。 我是用脚品尝的，所以首先 我彻底清洁了脚，为准备
托马斯·布坎南 (Thomas Buchan) 麦克纳布于 1933. 年出生在 格拉斯哥。孩童时期，他热爱 名为《神奇运动员威尔逊》 的连环画，并花费数小时 临摹其壮举。17, 岁时，他受 一名老师邀请参加苏格兰 学校锦标赛，在那里他凭借 第一次尝试就打破了三级跳远 纪录，震惊了所有人。“在 那个时代，那并不是个很高的 纪录，”他后来说道。到 年底时，他在英国排名第四， 但他声称自己在学校里 甚至没排到第四。 他赢得了四次苏格兰成年人 锦标赛，遗憾的是他从未 被选中参加任何一次 英联邦运动会。但在他完成 英国皇家空军的国民服役 并担任四年体育教师后， 他在教练方面的天赋得到了 认可。他的第一个得意门生 诺里·福斯特 (Norrie Foster) 原本是一名跑者， 被他培养成了撑竿跳高运动员， 后者后来成为了英国青年冠军。 1963, 年，他被任命为 英格兰国家田径教练， 并与彼得·加贝特 (Peter Gabbett) 合作， 后者创造了一项英国纪录
我的口味。 （这就是为什么你经常看到我像那个日本人说的那样，搓着手、搓着脚。）我是那种习惯于“液体午餐”的人，所以我把口水全部吐在肉上，等肉软化后将其吸饮。也许肉因此被污染了：别怪我，怪那些病原体。
周五 当我第一次作为成年个体飞起时，我还有些不确定，但在经历了 16 小时的艰苦生活后，我进入了青春期，准备大展身手。我撞到了一个可爱的雌性——我说的是真的“撞”到了。如果不通过触碰，我怎么知道她是否愿意？我
在十项全能中崭露头角，并成为一名两届奥运选手。麦克纳布还创立了英国田径联盟，并制定了“五星奖项计划”以吸引儿童参与田径运动。该计划鼓励他们不与竞争对手比较，而以个人最好成绩作为衡量成功的标准，这反映了麦克纳布认为这是最大挑战的信念。他还担任过英格兰橄榄球联合队的体能顾问，帮助球队最终进入 1991 年世界杯决赛；并在切尔西足球俱乐部赢得 1970 年足总杯期间与其共事。在英国雪橇队准备 1980 年冬奥会期间，他担任性能总监，同时也是国际奥委会的历史学家。除了为本报撰稿外，他还写了畅销小说《弗拉格南的奔跑》（讲述一场横跨美国的比赛），以及一部关于柏林奥运会的剧作《1936》。他结过两次婚，第一任妻子是五项全能运动员帕特·麦克纳布，之后是演员珍妮·李。他育有五个孩子：凯特、尼尔、凯瑟琳、萨拉和马修。在晚年，他仍是自己在圣奥尔本斯创立的田径俱乐部的成员，并在 60 岁时赢得了一项全国锤击赛冠军。他一直对体育保持浓厚兴趣，退休后对兴奋剂争议深感绝望。他说：“体育不是药剂师之间的竞争。我的态度是，无论你母亲喂你吃什么就吃什么，仅此而已。” 帕特里克·基德
汤姆·麦克纳布，田径教练，出生于 1933 年 12 月 16 日，逝世于 2026 年 7 月 14 日，享年 92 岁。
我发起了进攻，那位女士答应了，于是我成为了这个生态系统中最伟大的高飞者。
周六 肆无忌惮的男孩们可能会为了好玩而杀死我们，但到目前为止，我太快、太灵活、太精准，他们抓不到我。我还不想让任何轻率的手地拂去我夏日的嬉戏，至少现在还不想。趁能活的时候尽情生活，对吧？
苍蝇简历 寿命 成年期四周 饮食习惯 绝不错过一块美味的粪便 爱好 空中特技 性偏好 越轻佻越好
经济、工作与金钱
与爱泼斯坦的关系 质询巴克莱银行 Centrica 负责人称 Rough 天然气 储气站的命运是“政治决定”
克里斯·奥舍警告称，中东冲突 已导致储备量降至三年低点， 除非政府采取紧急行动， 否则该约克郡设施可能面临关闭
Jeevan Vasagar & Barney Macintyre
伊朗对卡塔尔拉斯拉凡 (Ras Laffan) 天然气设施的袭击，以及通过霍尔木兹海峡供应的液化天然气 (LNG) 遭到阻塞，正使其影响波及约克郡海岸，那里 Centrica 旗下的 Rough 天然气储气站的未来正处于不确定之中。 这家在富时 100 指数 (FTSE 100) 上市的英国天然气公司所有者已设定了一个截止日期，即除非获得政府在定价方面的支持，否则将在明年 4 月关闭该设施。 截至 6 月底，Rough 的储气量比去年同期减少了 31%。该公司还呼吁政府签署一项短期协议以填充该设施，理由是对能源安全的担忧。 Centrica 首席执行官克里斯·奥舍 (Chris O’Shea) 在接受《观察家报》采访时表示：“[自理想的充气开始日期以来] 我们已经失去了八周的时间，我们每多讨论一天，就在失去一天让该设施在即将到来的冬季投入运行的时间。” 奥舍在上周的一次电话沟通中，向新任能源安全与净零秘书米亚塔·法恩布勒 (Miatta Fahnbulleh) 提出了这一问题。他认为，与该部门的声明相反，这是一个“政府的政治决定，而非 Centrica 的商业决定”。 根据拟议的协议，Centrica 将使用自有资金填充储气库，并由政府支付存储费。随后由政府决定何时提取天然气，无论是以盈利还是亏损的价格出售。 Rough 在今年上半年的营业利润为 £57m，而去年同期为 £26m 的亏损。这些数字中所隐含的波动性，正是难以从商业角度证明维持该设施合理性的原因之一。 去年冬天，储气量占英国天然气供应的 5%，而 Rough 虽然规模最大，但仅是八个类似设施之一。
克里斯·奥舍 希望政府 签署协议 填充 Rough 储气设施。
Jason Alden/Getty
50% 过去一个月欧洲天然气价格的涨幅
然而，英国在寒冷月份通常依赖于欧洲的储气量，但在霍尔木兹海峡中断后，预计该储量也将处于低位。4月初，欧盟的平均天然气储气量为 28%，低于过去三个夏天初记录的水平。如果各国无法利用储备来平抑波动，较低的储气水平将给冬季带来麻烦。 虽然英国天然气进口的主要来源是挪威，但中东战争大幅减少了海湾地区液化天然气（LNG）的流量，推高了当前价格。与此同时，美国天然气被转向亚洲，因为那里的买家愿意支付比欧洲更高的价格。 天然气仅为英国电网提供约 30% 的电力，而目前近一半的电力来自可再生能源。但批发天然气价格往往决定了电价——因为当可再生能源不足时，就需要调用天然气来补充。产生和储存更多清洁电力将避免这些由天然气驱动的价格飙升，但即便到本十年末，天然气预计仍将在约 30% 的时间里决定英国的电价。
上周四公布的结果显示，Centrica 上半年的调整后营业利润下降至 £737m，低于去年同期的 £900m。该公司表示，利润下降主要是由于处置了其油气生产业务 Spirit Energy 的资产以及生产中断所致。 Centrica 正在裁员约 1,300 个岗位，其中超过三分之一在呼叫中心。针对 GMB 工会关于英国天然气公司（British Gas）员工被人工智能取代的指控，O’Shea 予以反击：“他们从根本上就是错误的，完全不正确。[Unite 工会] 已经在内部向其成员发布了一份公告，指出 GMB 的逻辑是如何漏洞百出的。” Rough 并不是 Fahnbulleh 在担任部长职务初期需要做出的唯一重大决定。她还必须考虑是否批准北海 Jackdaw 天然气田和 Rosebank 油田的生产。 “我认为她非常、非常令人印象深刻，”O’Shea 说，“所以我希望她能做出正确的决定。”
Stephen Armstrong
一名美国资深参议员致信巴克莱银行（Barclays），要求其就处理前老板杰斯·斯特雷利（Jes Staley）与杰弗里·爱泼斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）友谊时的尽职调查给出解释。伊丽莎白·沃伦（Elizabeth Warren）在给董事长奈杰尔·希金斯（Nigel Higgins）的信中表示，在任命 Staley 之前“显然未能”调查这段关系，这引发了“关于该银行能否让高级管理人员为其不当行为承担责任的重大治理问题”。Staley 于 2015 年成为首席执行官，并在 2021 年辞职，此前英国金融行为监管局裁定，他在淡化与一名被定罪的恋童癖金融家关系的报道中“鲁莽地误导”了监管机构。Staley 被罚款 £1.8m ($2.4m)，后减至 £1.1m，并被禁止在金融服务行业担任高级职务。在加入巴克莱银行之前，Staley 是摩根大通（JP Morgan）的高管，在后者因儿童性犯罪被定罪后，他曾试图将 Epstein 保留为客户。Staley 上周四告诉美国众议院监督委员会，他至少两次就 Epstein 的问题与摩根大通首席执行官杰米·戴蒙（Jamie Dimon）交谈——一次是在 2006, Epstein 首次被起诉时，另一次是在 2008, Epstein 在狱中时。Dimon 否认了这些说法。摩根大通发言人帕特里夏·韦克斯勒（Patricia Wexler）也否认这些对话发生过。她在声明中表示：“Staley 缺乏可信度。英国法庭认定 Staley 闪烁其词且不可信。”巴克莱银行在声明中表示：“英国监管机构得出结论，巴克莱银行被 Jes Staley 误导了。我们根据当时可获得的信息进行了调查。此后，出现了新信息证明 Staley 先生误导了巴克莱银行。”Staley 目前在洛杉矶面临一项诉讼，指控他与巴克莱银行就其关系欺骗股东。
与埃普斯坦（Epstein）有关。一名华尔街高级银行家告诉《观察家报》：“随着这次听证会的进行，有很多人感到非常担忧。”“有那些你们已经知道的人，有些竟然奇迹般地保住了工作，但还有一些人目前尚未在邮件中被点名。但埃普斯坦的网络在华尔街根深蒂固。”
社区中心， 本·扎兰科 (Ben Zaranko) 发现 积极支持如何 帮助年轻人 寻找工作——以及为什么 现金福利在长期内 不如“强硬的爱” (tough love) 有效 O
在威尔河 (Wear) 畔， 紧邻桑德兰足球场 后方，坐落着 光辉之塔 (Beacon of Light)。 这个社区枢纽——工作人员 愉快且刻意地指出，它比 纽卡斯尔的同类设施 略大——拥有 一系列服务和设施。 除了咖啡馆、体育馆、 楼顶足球场、NHS 眼科 成像设施、日产 (Nissan) 赞助的 工程区、教学 厨房、健康与社会护理 学院外，它还设有政府 资助的青年一站式服务中心。 该青年枢纽旨在为 那些不在接受教育、就业或 培训的年轻人（在丑陋但 常用的术语中被称为 Neets）提供 支持。在整个英国， 大约八分之一的年轻人是 Neets；在 英格兰东北部，这一数字 更接近六分之一。 就目前情况来看，根据前 托尼·布莱尔政府卫生大臣 艾伦·米尔本 (Alan Milburn) 的说法， 几乎有 1 million 名 年轻人“注定会被丢进废料堆”。 基尔·斯塔默 (Keir Starmer) 政府要求他 对他称之为“社会 灾难”和“不可估量的 经济自残行为”采取怎样的 最佳避免措施进行审查。 在今年早些时候发布一份中期 “诊断”报告后，米尔本 预计将在今年秋天向 政府提出最终建议。安迪·伯纳姆 保留了帕特·麦克法登 (Pat McFadden) 在 就业与养老金部 (DWP) 的职位， 他可能会选择将解决 Neets 危机作为其 日益增长的政策议程的核心支柱。 下周，预计安迪·伯纳姆 将在成人社会护理、青年失业 和权力下放方面采取干预措施。“安迪将 直面那些一直被 忽视的问题，”一名唐宁街 10 号消息人士表示。 米尔本的诊断报告 包含了关于接下来的 可能举措的线索。他指出，在 2024– 25 年，DWP 在青年就业支持上 每花费 £1， 就有大约 £25 被用于向他们 支付福利金。米尔本认为这一比例 是错误的，而且政府 过于关注以现金福利形式提供的“被动” 支持，而对促使 年轻人就业的积极努力投入不足。 这不仅仅是一个关于 如何最好地帮助迷茫青年 的争论：这是一个关于 政府如何定义“进步”的 争论。 在一项关于谁从国家 获得什么的标准分析中， 向失业青年支付的现金福利 显示出高度的进步性， 支持了社会中一些最贫困的人群。 但如果这不符合他们的长期利益呢？如果 一套侧重于实际培训、职业指导 和补贴实习的系统 能在数十年内改善他们的结果， 即便在短期内看来 不那么具有进步性，情况会如何？ 这将需要心态的转变——这将 使该系统更接近荷兰、 丹麦和澳大利亚模式， 《观察家报》获悉， 米尔本的团队正密切研究这些模式 以寻求灵感。所有这些模式都包含 更多一点的“强硬的爱”，并且 将重心更多地放在积极 支持而非现金福利上， 包括针对那些有健康状况的人群。这样的转变可能会引起震动
与传统的“工党方案”观念截然不同。 在光辉灯塔（Beacon of Light），工作人员深信他们的积极支持模式是有效的。当年轻人被转介至此，就业中心常见的门卫安保和快节奏的预约被一种氛围所取代，青年中心的一名经理史蒂夫·马丁（Steve Martin）将其称为“一种轻松且受欢迎的氛围”。 每周，这些年轻人都会面对同一位就业指导员，后者能够将他们与走廊另一端提供的其他服务联系起来。 24 岁的内森（Nathan）——他的弟弟也在这里——将其描述为“比就业中心更不容易产生焦虑感”。 18 岁的克洛伊（Chloe）对此表示赞同，并提到每周能见到同一张熟悉面孔的好处。内森和克洛伊最近都获得了在英国就业与养老金部（DWP）工作的机会，
林赛·贾奇 (Lindsay Judge)， 决议基金会 (Resolution Foundation)
克洛伊 (Chloe) 是该中心的一名参与者，目前在工作与养老金部 (DWP) 工作。
在完成了多项工作实习后，他们对所获得的支持赞不绝口。基于这些成功案例，“我们开始有人在就业中心询问是否可以参与青年中心，”马丁说，“消息在传播。”许多益处似乎体现在社交方面：帮助 18 到 24 岁的人建立信心，并培养当地雇主担心缺失的“软技能”。东北部一家工程公司 Pickerings Lifts 的董事、同时担任该地区就业基金会商业委员会主席的基兰·福瑟吉尔 (Kiran Fothergill) 表示，根据他的经验，太多的年轻人缺乏时间管理和沟通技巧。“他们会错过面试或不回复邮件，”他说，“现有体系未能让他们做好准备，但一些辅导和指导可以填补这一空白。”青年中心的参与并非强制性的。这完全是自愿的，
而且许多不就业也不培训的青年 (Neets) 并没有获得这类支持。人们特别担心领取残疾和健康状况相关福利的年轻人数量迅速增长，并对相关福利的设计提出质疑。英国的体系在“求职者”与被归类为“健康类别”者之间划定了一道明确的行政界限：前者的现金支付伴随着广泛的求职要求，而后者在获得财务补贴的同时，无需参与任何就业支持服务。一旦有人领取健康相关福利，就有留在该类别的倾向。米尔本 (Milburn) 的中期报告指出，“在 16 到 24 岁首次申领健康或残疾福利的人群中，近一半的人在 15 年后仍然没有工作或没有接受教育”。该类别中最大的一块支出用于个人独立支付金 (Pip)，其设计初衷并非为了就业或社会参与：Pip 旨在补偿残疾带来的额外费用，且不进行资产调查。从理论上讲，获得工作不应影响一个人的 Pip。然而，领取者担心如果他们开始工作或定期参加青年中心，他们将被重新评估，且每月可能会损失数千英镑。这是中期报告的一个主题，据了解，米尔本的团队对福利制度如何积极地阻碍参与感到担忧。其他体系（包括荷兰的体系）将类似于养老金的现金福利视为年轻人的最后手段，而非首选，并且即使是对那些有健康问题的人，也更加注重强制性的积极支持计划。但正如米尔本的报告所指出的，有些人“将永远无法工作，并面临异常高的障碍以
随着钻石失去光彩
钻石也许依然是女孩最好的朋友，但它们已不再是能保证闪耀的投资。在经历惨重损失后，据报道，矿业巨头英美资源公司 (Anglo American) 即将出售戴比尔斯 (De Beers)。这家曾经的钻石垄断企业创造了“钻石恒久远”这一名句，但此后却触犯了美国的竞争法，面临关于“血钻”的伦理质疑，以及一场毁灭性的技术颠覆：合成钻石。实验室培育的钻石已占据美国订婚戒指市场的一半。这并非周期性的下滑，而是地质垄断时代的终结。英美资源公司已经意识到这一点，在三年内将戴比尔斯的估值下调了 $6.8bn，其钻石部门在 2025 年亏损了 $511m。这门粗糙的老生意是否还有打磨提升的空间？一个潜在的买家候选者是由一个财团组成的，其中包括挖掘大部分钻石的国家：博茨瓦纳，在那里，钻石占其出口额的 80%
特朗普将关税大锤挥向通用药物
在就任国防大臣之职时，韦斯·斯特雷廷 (Wes Streeting) 如果能阅读《奥古斯丁定律》，情况或许会更好。这是一篇由该行业宠儿、后来的洛克希德·马丁 (Lockheed Martin) 总裁诺曼·奥古斯丁 (Norman Augustine) 撰写的、距今 42 年的半讽刺性国防工业分析。他最著名的预言是，考虑到成本的无情上涨，到 2054 年，整个美国的国防预算将只能买得起一架飞机。奥古斯丁提出的许多主题在今年的范堡罗国际航空展 (Farnborough International Air Show) 上若隐若现，斯特雷廷在展会上揭晓了一款新型“忠诚僚机”战斗无人机——BAE 公司的 Brontanax，这是一款尚未起飞的飞机的全尺寸模型。而作为展会头条的 GCAP 战斗机则
纳入英国房地产投资组合
Emma Haslett
美国激进投资者博阿兹·温斯坦（Boaz Weinstein）的对冲基金在对其英国房地产市场的调整中迈出了下一步，通过金融衍生品建立了高达4%的学生住房提供商Unite Group的持股。 Saba Capital已经购买了数家伦敦上市房地产投资信托基金（REITs）的股份，包括办公空间提供商Workspace Group的近三分之一股份，以及富时250指数（FTSE 250）上市的住宅房东Grainger 5%的股份。 该公司网站还列出了在Derwent London的头寸。
其出口额及GDP. 的四分之一。 它已经拥有De Beers 15%的股份，总统杜马·博科（Duma Boko）称该公司为国家战略资产；根据该理论，控制该公司将使博茨瓦纳不再仅仅是价格的接受者，并能影响那些坚持天然钻石优于合成钻石的定价和营销。怀疑者担心，这是一个绝望的国家试图在曾经具有价值但现已进入终极衰退的行业中孤注一掷。 这样一个高风险的赌注被证明在融资上异常困难。正是导致其寻求控制权的这次崩溃，使得博茨瓦纳经济萎缩、国库紧张且信用评级下调。博科一直在争取阿联酋和阿曼的海湾主权财富基金，并将他的野心从控股降低到了持有较大的少数股权。如果资金无法筹集，那么该怎么办？钻石可能是永恒的，但钻石公司未必。
一个VIP们排队体验的驾驶舱模型。法恩堡（Farnborough）曾是成品飞机的展示窗。 今年，主角变成了那些在未来几年内可能根本无法飞行，或者即便能飞也要等很多年才会飞行的模型。 几乎所有地方的国防预算都在上涨。在汉普郡（Hampshire）上空弥漫的疑问是，战争的技术颠覆（廉价无人机、软件定义武器）是否会抵消这些价格压力，还是仅仅会加剧它们。国防科技初创公司能否击败那些在采购环节拥有人脉的既得利益者，以及那些认为新公司廉价设备风险过高而传递的信息？也许这一次，颠覆者将违背另一条“奥古斯丁定律”——即“愚者在既得利益者恐惧踏足之地勇往直前”。
尽管总部位于英国的投资者在持有英国公司股份达到3%时被要求披露，但像Saba这样在美上市的公司在持股达到相当于5%之前无需这样做。 温斯坦以其在投资方面的好斗方式而闻名。 今年1月，他致信Workspace Group董事会，建议对公司进行“管理式清盘”，包括处置所有资产，他表示这将“扭转多年的价值破坏”。温斯坦的三阶段计划建议，该公司所有的64处房产可以在不到一年的时间内全部处置完毕。
博茨瓦纳希望在包括Karowe矿在内的钻石行业中获得更大的份额和控制权。Bloomberg/Getty
对于一个拿着锤子的人来说，每个问题看起来都像个钉子。唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）的锤子就是关税——在本周的一系列动作中，一次特定的挥击似乎将沉重地打击普通美国人。 这位美国总统表示，占美国处方药90%的通用药，将从2028年8月起面临100%的关税（目前为零），一年后将翻至200%。 他的目标是将通用药产业回流，目前该产业大部分位于海外，尤其是印度和中国。然而，尽管通用药占据了十之九的处方量，但它们仅占美国 13%的支出。
本月，Saba将其在Workspace的持股比例提高至29.1%，使其成为该公司的最大股东。 然而，QuotedData的投资公司研究负责人詹姆斯·卡修（James Carthew）对其方法提出了质疑。 “我们认为Saba拥有如此多的资金，以至于它不得不寻找一些它通常不会去做的事情。”
药物支出，反映出其低廉的价格和微小的利润空间。而特朗普计划实施的那类关税很容易将这些利润抹去，从而从根本上重塑该行业的经济格局。 回流并非快速解决方案：行业专家表示，建设一座新工厂需要五到七年，增加一条单一药物生产线需要三到五年，且每条线都需要通过美国食品药品监督管理局（FDA）的验证；而对于每颗仅获几美分收益的药丸来说，投入的资金几乎不可能回收。 这对英国的国民医疗服务体系（NHS）可能也会产生影响，在该体系中，通用药占处方量的 80%。在
这样做，因此它开始追求房地产，因为表面上看这些资产有巨大的折扣，”他说道。 一名不愿透露姓名的分析师称这种做法“极其天真且缺乏相关信息”。 “他们错误地认为房地产资产的估值与
作者：马修·毕晓普 (Matthew Bishop)
博阿兹·温斯坦 (Boaz Weinstein)， 对冲基金 Saba Capital 创始人。盖蒂图片社 (Getty)
短期内，可能会从那些因关税受影响而从美国分流出的廉价供应中获益。但长期来看，成本可能会飙升，因为美国是整个低成本通用药供应体系的锚点，而英国目前正依赖于这一体系。 确实存在风险：许多基本药物的原料依赖于中国。然而，应对这一问题有比关税更好的方法，例如建立关键药物及其活性成分的战略储备、签署旨在支付可靠供应而非仅追求低价的政府合同，以及鼓励在友好国家开展更多离岸生产。 值得注意的是，特朗普的官员们已经开始悄悄囤积关键成分：这在含蓄地承认了单纯靠强硬手段是行不通的。
正如他们参与的其他基金一样，”该分析师说。“他们对英国房地产惯例的不熟悉损害了他们的利益。” Unite 是英国最大的学生住宿供应商，在 23 个城市拥有 150 处专门建设的物业，但近年来受到学生人数下降的影响。 过去一年中，其股价下跌了 30% 以上，尽管该公司在 7 月表示，预计下一学年的入住率将提高，且租金增长将在 1% 和 2% 之间。 世邦魏理仕 (CBRE) 生活资本市场执行董事奥利·巴克兰 (Oli Buckland) 表示，学生住宿领域正在经历一场“常态化”。 “我们刚刚回到了新冠疫情前的入住率和租金增长水平，”巴克兰说。 Saba Capital 和 Unite Group 均拒绝评论。
低 高
低 高
低 高
贝尔法斯特
伯明翰
布里斯托
多佛
爱丁堡
格拉斯哥
因弗内斯
利兹
莱斯特
利物浦
伦敦
曼彻斯特
纽卡斯尔
诺里奇
普利茅斯
斯旺西
都柏林
高潮位
16 30
18 26
阿伯丁 12:37 3.5m
--- 00:47 3.7m 13:23 3.6m 01:27 3.8m 14:01 3.7m 贝尔法斯特 10:04 2.9m 22:28 3.1m 10:53 3.0m 23:12 3.3m 11:34 3.1m 23:50 3.3m 多佛 09:59 5.5m 22:29 5.6m 10:50 5.8m 23:15 5.8m 11:30 6.0m 23:50 6.0m 戈尔韦 04:14 3.9m 16:23 4.3m 04:57 4.1m 17:04 4.5m 05:35 4.3m 17:42 4.7m 哈洛维奇 10:22 3.3m 22:53 3.4m 11:17 3.5m 23:44 3.6m 12:03 3.7m
霍利黑德 09:28 4.5m 21:43 4.8m 10:14 4.7m 22:23 5.0m 10:51 4.8m 22:57 5.2m 赫尔 04:42 6.0m 17:25 5.9m 05:32 6.3m 18:15 6.1m 06:16 6.7m 18:56 6.4m 利斯 01:01 4.5m 13:47 4.5m 02:00 4.7m 14:36 4.7m 02:44 4.9m 15:15 4.9m 利物浦 10:02 7.6m 22:21 8.0m 10:52 7.9m 23:05 8.4m 11:32 8.2m 23:43 8.7m 伦敦 12:29 5.9m
--- 01:00 6.2m 13:28 6.2m 01:54 6.5m 14:16 6.4m 北希尔兹 02:05 4.1m 14:42 4.1m 02:54 4.3m 15:28 4.3m 03:34 4.5m 16:07 4.5m 彭赞斯 03:20 4.3m 15:47 4.6m 04:13 4.5m 16:33 4.8m 04:55 4.7m 17:12 5.0m 普利茅斯 04:04 4.3m 16:30 4.6m 05:00 4.5m 17:20 4.8m 05:48 4.7m 18:04 5.0m 朴涛次茅斯 10:27 3.9m 22:38 4.0m 11:16 4.1m 23:23 4.2m 11:57 4.3m
索斯波特 09:30 7.3m 21:49 7.7m 10:20 7.6m 22:40 8.1m 11:07 7.9m 23:18 8.4m 韦茅斯 05:06 1.3m 17:40 1.6m 06:04 1.4m 18:26 1.8m 06:53 1.6m 19:10 1.9m 威克 10:24 2.8m 22:34 3.0m 11:11 2.9m 23:16 3.1m 11:51 3.0m 23:53 3.2m
< 6
7 $
1 '
( 5
/ & / 5 +
1 2 ) % $
1 0
6 6 (
1 7 0
43 observer.co.uk 26.07.26 天气
今日 周一 周二
今日 周一
14 18 16 22 12 20
16 22
12 20
17 22
17 22
17 22
16 26
16 26
13 18
13 19
13 19
12 18
16 21
16 21
16 19
17 24
17 24
18 22
17 21
14 20
来源：© 皇室版权和/或数据库权利。保留所有权利。
今日 周一 周二
今日 周一
今日 周一
今日 周一
14 25
14 25
13 22
11 20
11 20
11 18
9 19
13 21
13 25
13 25
14 21
14 21
14 21
14 29
16 26 14 21
14 24
12 22
横向 1 公众赞赏 (8) 5 海藻 (4) 9 教会地下室 (5) 10 腹泻感染 (7) 11 用于调节液体温度的绝缘容器 (7,5) 13 填充空间 (6) 14 音乐中的慢板 (6) 17 利他主义 (12) 20 疲惫 (7) 21 荷马的史诗 (5) 22 赃物，不义之财 (4) 23 结论部分 (8)
雷克雅未克 17
16 29
15 26
15 22
17 27
都柏林 20
17 26
17 31
15 24
15 24
里斯本 30
14 30
温度 °C （显示为今日最高温）
-20 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
最低 最高 天气 最低 最高 天气
阿姆斯特丹 18 22 阵雨 16 21 晴 雅典 17 30 晴 19 33 晴 奥克兰 9 11 雨 3 13 晴 巴格达 30 43 晴 31 43 霾 北京 23 33 阵雨 24 34 风暴 贝尔格莱德 15 33 晴朗 19 31 晴 柏林 15 28 阵雨 16 23 晴朗 布鲁塞尔 16 23 雨 15 24 阵雨 布达佩斯 13 32 晴朗 18 30 阵雨 布宜诺斯艾利斯 11 19 晴朗 11 20 多云 开罗 24 34 晴 24 34 晴 开普敦 7 20 霾 11 18 有风 哥本哈根 15 20 多云 14 20 阵雨 都柏林 14 20 阵雨 12 22 阵雨 日内瓦 17 27 阵雨 17 29 雨 直布罗陀 22 30 晴 22 27 晴朗
©2026; 预报与图表提供商
特隆赫姆斯 16
赫尔辛基 19 斯德哥尔摩 19 里加 25
奥斯陆 22
爱丁堡 18
哥本哈根 20
阿姆斯特丹 22
伦敦 26
柏林 28
布拉格 31 维也纳 31
巴黎 26
布达佩斯 32
日内瓦 27
萨拉热窝 31
罗马 31
马德里 32 直布罗陀 30
阿尔及尔 31
突尼斯 37
赫尔辛基 15 19 阵雨 15 20 阵雨 香港 27 30 风暴 28 31 阵雨 伊斯坦布尔 19 27 阵雨 21 31 晴 耶路撒冷 22 29 晴 20 30 晴 金斯顿 26 34 晴朗 27 33 晴 加尔各答 26 31 雨 26 32 雨 基辅 15 27 晴 16 30 晴 洛杉矶 20 31 晴 20 32 晴朗 马德里 15 32 晴 17 36 晴 墨尔本 8 15 雨 8 15 晴朗 墨西哥城 12 24 阵雨 13 24 阵雨 迈阿密 26 34 风暴 25 33 风暴 莫斯科 14 20 霾 14 20 雨 内罗比 14 23 多云 14 23 多云 拿骚 27 32 风暴 26 32 风暴 纽约市 18 28 晴 21 29 风暴
纵向 1 顽皮的，狡猾的 (4) 2 拥有超感官能力 (7) 3 人类学的科学研究 (12) 4 部门，片段 (6) 6 直肠注射 (5) 7 作为水生食物的漂浮生物 (8) 8 私人的 (12) 12 自夸 (8) 15 幼鹅 (7) 16 在梦乡中 (6) 18 机会游戏 (5) 19 懒惰的 (4)
舍勒夫特 18
明斯克 26
华沙 31
基辅 27
布加勒斯特 29
安卡拉 24 雅典 30 尼科西亚 34
莫斯科 20
今日降水
阵雨 风暴 雨 小雪 雪 冰
贝尔法斯特 2137 至 0527 2135 至 0528 伯明翰 2109 至 0519 2107 至 0521 布里斯托 2108 至 0528 2106 至 0529 多佛 2051 至 0513 2049 至 0514 爱丁堡 2132 至 0509 2130 至 0510 格拉斯哥 2136 至 0513 2134 至 0515 因弗内斯 2144 至 0502 2142 至 0504 利兹 2114 至 0512 2112 至 0514 伦敦 2059 至 0518 2058 至 0520 曼彻斯特 2115 至 0517 2113 至 0519 纽卡斯尔 2121 至 0507 2119 至 0508 普利茅斯 2109 至 0538 2108 至 0539 斯旺西 2114 至 0532 2113 至 0534
奥斯陆 10 22 晴朗 10 23 雨 渥太华 16 27 阵雨 17 28 雨 巴黎 16 26 多云 15 29 晴 布拉格 14 31 晴朗 17 24 阵雨 里加 14 25 多云 17 21 阵雨 里约热内卢 20 24 晴 19 26 晴 罗马 25 31 风暴 23 31 晴 首尔 25 32 阵雨 25 32 阵雨 新加坡 26 30 风暴 26 31 风暴 悉尼 9 19 晴朗 9 19 晴 东京 25 32 风暴 24 31 风暴 多伦多 18 28 风暴 18 27 晴朗 温哥华 15 19 雨 16 23 晴朗 维也纳 16 31 晴朗 22 29 有风 华沙 14 31 晴朗 18 21 阵雨 华盛顿 21 30 风暴 21 31 风暴
解答 No. 1,606
%
$
,
% 2 1 ' , $
& 7 8 $ 5 <
6 7 6 5 2 * 7
( 8 5 2 6 7 $ 5 0 2 7 +
7 ( ' , 8 0 0 8 6 ( 8 0
0 8 / 4
, 7 & + 3 8 3 3 < ) $ 7
$ , ( +
芥末
将七个小袋 与它们的另一半匹配。 下面显示了一个完整的 芥末小袋
您的每周逻辑页面，包含两道专为《观察家报》编写的谜题
No 123
2 1 4 4 1 4 3 1 3
No 124
1 4 1 3 3 2
2
撰稿人
Susannah Clapp (Future greats, 第8页) 除了担任《观察家报》的剧评人外，Susannah 还参与创办了《伦敦书评》(London Review of Books)，并著有关于安杰拉·卡特 (Angela Carter) 和布鲁斯·查特温 (Bruce Chatwin) 的书籍。 今夏要去哪里度假？ “迪尔 (Deal) 和卡达米利 (Kardamyli)：两处绝佳的卵石海岸。”
Charlotte Mendelson (Into the wild, 第37页) Charlotte Mendelson 是《观察家报》杂志的园艺专栏作家，也是一位屡获殊荣的小说家；她的最新著作《妻子》(Wife) 现已出版。 今夏要去哪里度假？ “芬兰！我简直太激动了。希望能看到野生长出的树莓和驼鹿。”
Caitlin Macdonald (Future greats, 第8页) Caitlin 是《观察家报》的社交媒体编辑和撰稿人。她在四月份为本杂志采访了劳伦斯·奥利弗奖 (Olivier Awards) 的提名者，本周她将与舞台和荧屏上的明日之星对话。 今夏要去哪里度假？ “我刚从纽约回来，在那里花了一周时间吃遍曼哈顿。”
Tori Ferenc (Material witness, 第18页) Tori 是一位波兰肖像和纪录片摄影师，与丈夫和女儿居住在伦敦。 今夏要去哪里度假？ “我们将开车游览波兰、立陶宛和黑山。我从未去过黑山，所以非常期待——那里的海滩看起来太棒了！”
Shaad D’Souza (Willy Chavarria, 第24页) Shaad 是一位目前居住在伦敦的自由撰稿人，曾为《纽约时报》、《GQ》、 《卫报》等多家媒体撰稿。他同时也是基于 Instagram 的《Shaad 杂志》的编辑。 今夏要去哪里度假？ “不去。我今年夏天的所有行程都是为了工作，简直是地狱！”
“我们想创造一个感觉简单纯粹的地方，”雅典新餐厅 September 18 的店主 Nefeli Sachverdian 说道。她与合伙人 Yiannis Tsachlis 将一家以前的管道工作室改造为一个人们可以随意光顾的空间。“当我们第一次看到这座建筑时，它的状况糟透了，但我知道就是它了，”她说。“这里是我们花最多时间用餐、饮酒和会友的地方，所以在这里开一家餐厅感觉非常自然。”在室内，餐厅上方悬挂着一盏如月亮般发光的灯，但最好的位置是在室外的人行道上，那里在下午1点前供应着搭配鹰嘴豆泥和扎塔尔 (za’atar) 的水波蛋。随后餐厅会进行一小时的午休，之后午餐服务将一直持续到深夜。菜品可能包括烤茄子或柠檬细面 (lemon tagliolini)，而这里的蜂蜜曲奇已经成为这座城市最受热议的甜点。虽然计划未来举办共进晚餐和展览，但 Sachverdian 坚持认为这些是根据社区需求自然生长出来的，而非任何宏大概念的一部分。“我们只希望这家餐厅感觉就像一直属于这里一样，”她说。● TABITHA JOYCE
【推荐理由】 在婚礼上，或者火车站，又或者欧洲的青年旅舍，我总会钻进照相亭里。太矫情了？没错。但那种老派的氛围我很喜欢。锐利的视角和像消毒水般苍白的灯光。那层薄薄的窗帘，为任何公共空间披上了一层隐约带有谍战色彩的神秘面纱。冰冷坚硬的外壳散发着令人愉悦的复古未来主义光泽，吱吱作响的旋转凳，以及那个将新鲜照片立即吐出的金属出片口——尽管它本质上就是一台宝丽来相机，但这种便利性在今天看来依然令人印象深刻。
MIGUEL PORLAN; GETTY IMAGES
就像一台美国冰箱那么大。 而且，我的孩子们几乎没有比这更喜欢的事情了，这使得在火车站或机场穿行时产生的那些极其无聊的冗长等待变得容易忍受得多。我不完全明白孩子们为什么如此热爱拍照亭，因为在任何其他情况下，他们对摆拍完全没有兴趣。我的儿子和女儿目前分别八岁和四岁，我敢发誓，他们唯一被拍到两张好看的“正常”照片，而且还是在由为本
朱德可以， 但图赫尔？
且不论英格兰队没有进入决赛。 且不论安东尼·戈登在对阵阿根廷队进球后，英格兰队便迅速退守到自己的半场，摆出“大巴阵”死守，结果丢了两球并令所有人心碎。抛开这一切——一个出人意料的问题出现了：托马斯·图赫尔……性感吗？支持的证据有：他在新闻采访中挑衅的风格，期间他坚定地拒绝赞扬自己的球队；他那深邃且棱角分明的颧骨；以及他那双与英格兰队 1990 年球衣颜色一致的蓝色眼睛。Mumsnet（一个专门讨论此类话题的论坛）对此产生了分歧。 “太漂亮了，”一位发帖者说道。 “你是不是处于围绝经期？”另一位问道。 结论尚无定论。
● HAYLEY MYERS
杂志拍摄的专业摄影师在漫长的拍摄结束时才捕捉到的瞬间。但在拍照亭里，他们兴奋地坐在我腿上做鬼脸。对于刚刚拍摄的照片几乎立即出片这一点，他们感到欣喜——甚至可以说是惊叹。 目前，十几条这样的照片带挤满了我们的冰箱。 在某种意义上，这是我们拥有的唯一一套真正一致的、纸质的孩子记录。一份他们和我脸庞的时间线。大笑，吐舌头，被咯咯笑声弄得无法自持。每一年，每个里程碑，每次在机场帘子后的窥视。每一个吱吱作响的小座席，都将这些瞬间永远定格。 ● SEAMAS O’REILLY
p6 与 科琳娜·布朗 共度的一小时
描述你 最完美的一小时…… 在健身房，之后洗个桑拿或冰浴。这是我的重启方式。最近我尝试了第一次核心床普拉提。我想：“我平时举重，这个肯定没问题。”我的天，我出汗出得厉害！
你最喜欢 一天的哪个时段？ 晚餐时间，因为这意味着我马上要吃东西了。
如果你能生活在任何 era, 你会选择哪个？ 我想真正体验一下 20 世纪 90 年代。我出生于 1998, 所以错过了大部分时间。那时的音乐和时尚似乎更酷，而且孩子们在户外活动的时间多得多。
如果你能与任何 名人共度一小时， 会是谁？ 惠特尼·休斯顿。我很想看她的现场表演，并问她对所有那些名声以及出演《保镖》有什么看法。我会说：“亲爱的，请把关于如何使用声带的所有知识都教给我。”
你最后一次 偷东西是什么时候？ 在片场拿了一件可爱的 T 恤，不过我不能说那是“偷”，因为我已经大声询问过了。那甚至不是我的戏服，但我看到它就觉得：“这很漂亮。我不知道这件是给谁的，但它得跟我回家了。”
你最后一次 查看社交媒体是 什么时候？ 五秒钟前。 Instagram 是我的瘾。我喜欢那些可爱的小猫小狗表情包——我真是个失败者。你知道那种让狗狗跳舞的视频吗？我爱死人们用 AI
这位 27, 岁的英国演员最著名的角色是在电视剧《心地停止》（Heartstopper）中饰演塔拉·琼斯，该剧改编自爱丽丝·奥塞曼的青春成长图画小说。该系列的完结电影《心地停止：永远》现已在 Netflix 上线。
BROWN
因为那能让我咯咯笑起来。
你上一次哭是什么时候？ 大概是 10 分钟前。我笑的时候会掉眼泪，所以我眼里总是有泪花。我刚从牙医诊所回来，通常我在那儿会哭，但这次没有，因为我已经是个大姑娘了。甚至我的牙医都说：“干得好。”
你上一次发生性行为是什么时候？ 你想知道吗！
什么事情是你永远觉得时间不够用的？ 打包行李。今天我本该为去巴黎参加一个音乐节打包行李，但我决定改去剧院。
上一次有人把你误认为别人是什么时候？ 我想不起来。我的辨识度很高，而且我的声音很有特色。前几天，有人说：“你的笑容很迷人，”我说：“谢谢。等我从牙医诊所回来，脸肿起来的时候你再看吧。”
如果你能回到过去，你会给自己什么建议？ 多拍照片，把它们打印出来，放进相册里。我痴迷于 Instax 拍立得照片。每份工作或每次度假，我都会拍一张并把它添加到我的拍立得相册里，那真的非常可爱。
如果你能活到 100 岁，原因会是什么？ 在健身房度过的所有完美时光，家人和朋友的爱，以及始终对生活保持乐观。虽然陈词滥调，但确实如此。●
面部提升手术再次兴起的原因，尤其是 25 到 40 岁人群中“早期干预”手术的流行，读起来就像是一幅我们这个狂热时代的路线图。原因之一是减肥药物的兴起，使用者们通过手术剪掉多余的下垂皮肤。另一个原因是“美容透明化”的结果，尤其是名人通过讨论自己做过的手术，使手术去污名化，与此同时，技术的发展声称能带来更加“自然”的效果。贯穿这一切的，还有一种将干预规模最小化的语言，它润滑了身体改造的路径，导致人们可能会觉得，一个旨在“焕活”、“修复”或“协调”的“微调治疗”更像是一次放松的水疗假期，而不是一次切掉眼睑的手术。PFL 便是降临在这个既原始又柔化的世界中，它不是伴随着巨响，而是伴随着一声轻笑而至。据《时尚商业》(Business of Fashion) 解释，PFL 指的是“面部提升前置程序”(pre-facelift procedures)，例如注射生物刺激剂和颊脂垫去除术，这些程序“填补了”初级肉毒杆菌注射与深层平面手术之间的空白。“纽约和洛杉矶的诊所已经开发出复杂的程序，用以‘训练’皮肤，从而实现更优化面部提升，”他们报道称。美容师劳伦·朱莉安娜·古德曼 (Lauren Juliana Goodman) 继续说道，在没有经过预处理和加强的皮肤上进行面部提升，就像在没有训练的情况下跑马拉松一样（她指的训练是花费从 $500 的基础肉毒杆菌治疗到 $7,200 的臀部到面颊脂肪转移）。“你当然可以这么做，但结果绝对不会是最好的。”在医美领域，一个围绕这一理念（这一大赌注）的子行业正在形成，即对于许多人来说，面部提升现在已成必然。不是是否要做，而是何时做。我读到这条关于从肉毒杆菌到面部提升管线中一个新目的地的消息时，感到一种熟悉的倦怠，仿佛身处半昏暗的光线下，或是被下了药。这条消息发布的同一天，《纽约杂志》(New York Magazine) 刊登了一篇名为《我的面部提升后恐慌》的第一人称文章，文中作者审视（随后又沉溺于）她决定进行美容手术的决定。随着面部提升手术的兴起，关于面部提升的写作也在增加。
面部提升前置手术”
随着《好莱坞报道》（Hollywood Reporter）上周发表了一篇关于“适合各种预算的好莱坞最热门整形手术和美容程序”的详尽文章，其中包括像“微芯技术”（micro-coring technology）这样的 PFL 程序，即使用空心针移除微小的多余皮肤柱。曾经与此类手术相关的羞耻感和隐私感已经发生了反转，因此现在看来，很少有女性在接受手术后不在线上发表一篇相关文章。那篇《纽约杂志》（New York Magazine）的文章简直像坐过山车一样。作者在描述关于订书钉和疼痛的段落之间回忆道，术后，“我的 iPhone 无法识别我的脸。我的丈夫避免直接看着我”。进行手术时，“突然觉得像是一场巨大的赌博——我回到了那种担心他人如何看待我的状态，而现在他们将知道我未能通过这场最纯洁的女性主义试金石测试……我会被排挤！”虽然文章以温柔且甜蜜的结局收尾，这在大多数回忆录类文章中很常见（“我现在感觉轻松了，就像揭开了一层掩盖在下面的幸福感。这让我能更好地迎接人生的下一个阶段”），但其中有些时刻，它转向了我所渴望的那种阴暗的“美容透明度”。我不需要像现在的名人那样简单地列出他们的手术项目，我想要的是关于被排挤威胁的尖叫和流鼻涕的眼泪——无论是因为做了手术还是没做；关于面部韧带被切断、骨骼被折断、皮肤被“重新覆盖”，以及在黑暗的房间里等待结痂脱落的康复期，这些恐惧与对死亡的恐惧相比不过是暂时的不便；关于想要抹去生命中十年的痕迹，在镜中不再看到生育或离婚的印记；关于年龄歧视，关于选择的诸多神话，以及你在 12 岁时母亲对你说的某件事。如果美容产业必须继续以这些尖锐且极具创意的方式操纵语言，将我们推向手术刀，那么我认为我们也应该学会使用我们的语言。 ●
Eva Wiseman 是 《观察家报》的作者。 请参阅第 18 页关于 法医服装分析师 Amber Butchart 的报道
影视舞台 明日之星
访谈 CAITLIN MACDONALD
摄影 JOSH HIGHT
造型 JO JONES & ROZ DONOGHUE
曾经，成为一名超级巨星演员（在某种程度上）是很简单的：拍几张像样的头像照，赢得几个小角色，迟早会有一个顶尖的选角经纪人注意到你耀眼的魅力和不可否认的荧幕存在感——砰！——你就成了 A 级电影主角。 但现在事情不再那么简单。渴望突破的年轻演员面临着各种挑战。正如在许多创意产业中一样，学徒机会已经减少。公开试镜寥寥无几，角色有限。流媒体平台投资的项目越来越少。英国电视产业已陷入困境。每一个可获得的角色都有数百名竞争者在争夺，他们每个人看起来都和你很像，建立了更大的网络个人品牌，有更流畅的自拍试镜带，拥有更多经验，发音稍微好一点——并且渴望程度更高。 此外，AI 演员已经到来。 然而，新一代的明星正在崛起：聪明、有才华、勤奋的男女，并非全部出身富裕，他们在小电影中担任大角色，在大型项目中充分利用小角色，以坚定的信念传播快乐——并引起关注。在我们的首届“未来之星”组合中，《观察家报》的员工和评论家选择了六位他们最关注的潜在演员。 你很快就会在荧幕上看到他们的……
AOIFE HINDS，35 岁，在伦敦和巴黎之间长大，在伦敦政治经济学院 (LSE) 获得学位后，先后在皇家威尔士音乐戏剧学院和法国国立高等戏剧艺术学院接受培训。她曾主演 BBC 的《正常人》(Normal People)、ITV 的《长途电话》(The Long Call) 以及 HBO 的《沙丘：预言》(Dune: Prophecy)。
你什么时候意识到自己想成为一名演员的？ 在我 18 岁结束学业的时候。我不是那种会不断问“我想做什么”的青少年，我那时只是和朋友们一起混。毕业后，我在巴黎彼得·布鲁克 (Peter Brook) 的北布夫剧院 (Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord) 工作了一年。我当时是一名引导员，而其他所有引导员都是演员。彼得·布鲁克允许我们仅在一天晚上上演一部戏，我在其中有一场戏，扮演一名在扫地的监狱看守。我记得在几百人面前鞠躬时心想：“哇，这种感觉太棒了。”但因为只有一晚，这也让人心碎。我记得当时在想：“我能应对这种情况吗？我能把这个作为职业吗？”
你在大学学习的是什么？ 国际关系。我在学校学习过语言，对这个世界及其运作方式感到好奇。我记得入学时觉得自己可以拯救世界，然后面对的是系统是如何构建的现实。那是一次现实的冲击。最终我想，“好吧，我要去做点别的。”
告诉我们关于你第一次试镜的经历。 那是一次自拍试镜，只有一句台词，而且我得签署所有这些保密协议 (NDA)。我很惊讶，即使是这么小的事情，竟然需要经过这么多繁琐的程序。
有没有哪些你没拿到的角色让你感到巨大的挫败，你是如何重新振作的？ 在新冠疫情之后，我参加了很多试镜，并且在竞争主角，这是我以前没做过的事情。我有连续七八次试镜都非常接近成功。这很艰难，因为你会开始想：“机会真的会轮到我吗？”但我有人们帮助我度过难关。当你年轻时，被拒绝的感觉可能是毁灭性的。你经历得越多，就越意识到这是工作的一部分。你进去，抓住表演的机会，寻找乐趣，结识新朋友，然后继续前行。
萨德亚·格雷厄姆 (THADDEA GRAHAM)，29 岁，是一位北爱尔兰演员。她在 1 岁时从中国的孤儿院被收养，并在唐郡长大。她因出演《坏姐妹》(Bad Sisters) 和《性教育》(Sex Education) 而为人熟知，目前主演 Apple TV+ 的《玛戈的财务问题》(Margo’s Got Money Troubles)。
能告诉我们你第一次专业试镜的情况吗？ 我当时大约 20 岁，试镜的是一部名为《宵禁》(Curfew) 的 Sky 剧集。剧情大概是关于僵尸末日的，虽然他们不是僵尸，而是某种其他生物。试镜是在一个巨大的董事会会议室里进行的，只有我和导演——一个名叫科尔 (Col) 的亲切男人。他用一个小摄像机记录了下来。我记得当时在想：“我要看镜头吗？显然，我不应该看镜头……”
请向我们讲述你进入演艺圈的历程。 我小时候非常害羞。为了增强自信，我被送去上舞蹈课，但我其实并不想站在前面——我只是想在场。在中学期间，我热爱演音乐剧，因为我喜欢成为团队的一员。我原打算申请心理学学位——我想成为一名为儿童服务的音乐治疗师，或者成为一名家庭律师。但我母亲认为我需要做一些更有创意的事情。她建议我去戏剧学校，并打印出了全英国所有的试镜信息。回想起来，我很惊讶。我们从北爱尔兰飞过去，住在酒店，支付试镜费——这是一笔巨大的开支。我非常感激。
是否有一个特定的角色或项目让你觉得是事业的转折点？ 是在出演完《坏姐妹》之后，而且是在我能够反思整个过程的时候。拍摄期间，我总觉得我会被开除。我一直在想：“我要搞砸了。”但我身边围绕着一群处于事业巅峰的优秀女性。莎朗·霍根 (Sharon Horgan) 极具影响力；我们的导演德夫拉·沃尔什 (Dearbhla Walsh) 看到我惊慌失措，把我拉到一边和我一起排练场景——她非常善良。在《坏姐妹》结束后，我给莎朗发信息道歉。我说：“如果我全程表现得非常奇怪，我很抱歉。我当时太担心了。”她说：“什么？我还以为你非常有自信呢。”那是一次很愉快的对话。
SUSANNAH CLAPP
电影评论家
1. JAY LYCURGO 《Steve》
2. SPIKE FEARN 《Finding Emily》
3. DEBA HEKMAT 《Last Swim》
4. POSY STERLING 《Lollipop》
MIA MCKENNA-BRUCE 《How to Have Sex》
• Wendy Ide 是《观察家报》的 电影评论家
选角导演
1. LOUIS McCARTNEY 《Stranger Things》
4. ARAN MURPHY 《War》
3. EMMA LAIRD 《Mayor of Kingstown》
4. LENNY RUSH 《Am I Being Unreasonable?》
5. ELLA LILY HYLAND 《Black Doves》
• Amy Hubbard 是曾获艾美奖提名的 选角导演
戏剧评论家
1. DAVID SHIELDS 《Punch》
2. ALEX JARRETT 《Hamnet》
3. ALBY BALDWIN 《The Unbelievers》
《The Unbelievers》
《The Unbelievers》
4. ELLA LILY HYLAND
5. ISABEL ADOMAKOH YOUNG
• Susannah Clapp 是《观察家报》的 戏剧评论家
电影导演
1. SHAUN THOMAS 《How to Have Sex》
2. JOSH FINAN 《Say Nothing》
3. DAVID JONSSON 《Rye Lane》
4. AMBIKA MOD 《This is Going to Hurt》
5. GABRIELLE CREEVY 《In My Skin》
• Chris Foggin 是《Fisherman’s Friends》 和《Bank of Dave》的导演
波西·斯特林 (POSY STERLING)，33 岁，在进入荧幕之前从事剧场表演。她在 2024 年的英国剧集《棒棒糖》(Lollipop) 中脱颖而出，获得了英国独立电影奖 (Bifa) 的突破性表演奖以及英国电影学院奖 (Bafta) 潜力新星奖的提名。她最近主演了第四频道 (Channel 4) 的《肮脏生意》(Dirty Business)，与杰森·沃特金斯 (Jason Watkins) 和大卫·休利斯 (David Thewlis) 共同出演。
你能记得你的第一次试镜吗？ 那时我试镜了 S Club Juniors。我父亲带我参加了一次公开招募。我完全不知道这意味着什么，我只知道我想做。我进入了第二轮，这让每个人都震惊了，包括我父亲。
那就是你意识到自己想成为一名表演者的时候吗？ 简单回答是肯定的，但在成年之前，荧幕表演并不在我的考虑范围内。我知道我想表演，而我对表演唯一的认知就是音乐剧。我赢得了一所音乐剧学校的奖学金，但所有的表演老师都轻轻地引导我转向
荧幕表演。就是这样发生的。我认为重要的是要记住，当你年轻时，你只了解你的环境以及你接触到的一切。我原以为我会演音乐剧，后来我意识到我更喜欢做其他事情。
你能想到一次你非常渴望却没拿到某个角色的经历吗？ 你要问多久？问题在于，我真心不相信所谓的“拒绝”。我相信这是“重新引导”。如果我没拿到一个角色，我不会坐在那里思考是谁取代了我——我相信那个角色从一开始就不是属于我的。你必须记住，你首先是一个人。你不仅仅是你的工作。当我全身心投入一个项目时，其他一些事情不可避免地会被忽视。所以当工作慢下来时，我就能把精力重新注入到生活的其他部分。
杰·莱库戈 (JAY LYCURGO)，28 岁，出生并成长于克罗伊登 (Croydon)。他因在《私生子与魔鬼》(The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself)、《泰坦》(Titans) 以及史蒂文·奈特 (Steven Knight) 的《这座小镇》(This Town) 中的角色而闻名。他与基里安·墨菲 (Cillian Murphy) 共同主演了《史蒂夫》(Steve)，并因此获得了 2025 年英国独立电影奖的最佳男配角奖。
你什么时候知道自己想演戏的？ 其实是在进入戏剧学校之后才发现的。我一直想表演，只是不知道这可以作为一项专业工作。大约在 14 岁时这种感觉变得更加强烈，当时我的朋友们开始进入英国表演艺术学院 (Brit School)，我也尝试进入，但水平不够。当时我并不真正理解表演，我以为表演就是哭。我会走到评委面前，试着在说出第一句台词时就突然崩溃大哭。
能给我们讲讲你的第一次试镜吗？ 是《绿野仙踪》。在学校六年级的时候。我扮演稻草人。我记得每个人都必须试镜，而我非常想要那个角色。我热爱剧本，热爱他没有大脑却渴望拥有大脑这一点。我记得在大家面前表现得非常俏皮，感觉很勇敢。到了正式表演时，我开始自己编台词，甚至到了我的老师说：“你能只按照剧本来吗？”这种自信很重要，给自己许可去脱离剧本、去俏皮、做出勇敢的选择。我认为我一直拥有这些直觉。
被拒绝教会了你什么？ 在这个行业里，每一天都是挑战。你必须成为自己最大的粉丝。你必须耐心，必须强大。有这么多角色我没拿到，这感觉很糟糕，尤其是当你没有工作并在思考“下一个机会什么时候到来”的时候。但机会总会来的。我记得试镜了《艾丁顿》(Eddington) 但没中，但两天后他们就说：“你要和基里安·墨菲一起演《史蒂夫》。”这是一个苦差事。你一定会遇到拒绝，但这是游戏的一部分。你必须保护好自己，不要被它吞噬。
米娅·萨里亚 (MIA THARIA)，21 岁，是这群未来表演巨星中最年轻的一位，但她已经积累了令人印象深刻的作品集，包括 BBC 电影《九月说》(September Says)。今年晚些时候，她将与艾米·亚当斯 (Amy Adams) 和詹娜·奥尔特加 (Jenna Ortega) 一起出演泰卡·怀提提 (Taika Waititi) 改编自石黑一雄小说的《克拉拉与太阳》(Klara and the Sun)。
你能告诉我们关于你的第一个角色吗？ 那时我还很小，只有大约 11 或 12 岁。那是史上最酷的事情，因为那只是一个小小的学生电影。我记得当时在想：“哇，这太简单了。我就试戏了一次就拿到了。” 接着，这份工作的现实面就接踵而至了。
你什么时候意识到自己想成为一名演员？ 真的从很小的时候起就知道了。那是我在学校里唯一擅长的事情。我热爱参加学校剧团；写作是我的情感出口。我还记得看了很多 CBBC 和少儿节目，心想：“那看起来太酷了。我也想做那样的事情。” 我告诉父母我想成为一名童星，他们不知怎么地设法带我去参加了一家儿童经纪公司的试镜。
你能记得一次没拿到角色，或者感觉像是一次重大挫折的时刻吗？ 这种情况发生过太多次了，而且真的很艰难。这份工作感觉就像一场游戏：你做成一件事，感觉太棒了，你感到兴奋，觉得前途无量，然后一切结束，你又回到了原点。其中包含大量的艰苦努力。
你会给年轻演员什么建议？ 你认识的、在屏幕上看到的几乎每个人都经历过完全相同的事情。他们都经历过“枯竭期”。他们都花了数年时间在敲那扇门。有时候，关键就在于能否被允许进入房间。保持创造力很重要。在淡季时去做一些基层项目。即使不是一部巨大的电视节目，我依然在做我热爱的事情。
未来你想扮演什么样的角色？ 我想扮演一个会反击的人，一个可能有点威胁性、有阴暗面的人。我非常喜欢《杀死伊芙》(Killing Eve) 中乔迪·科默 (Jodie Comer) 饰演的维拉内尔 (Villanelle)，以及她的角色与 Sandra Oh 饰演的伊芙之间的那种紧张感。我很想扮演具有那种能量的角色。
大卫·希尔兹 (DAVID SHIELDS)，33 岁，在 2024 年凭借在史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格的《空战群英》(Masters of the Air) 中饰演埃弗雷特·布莱克利少校而声名鹊起。2026, 他因在詹姆斯·格雷厄姆的获奖剧作《出拳》(Punch) 中饰演雅各布·邓恩而获得奥利弗奖提名。最近，他再次回归荧屏，在 BBC 改编自格雷厄姆的《亲爱的英格兰》(Dear England) 中饰演乔丹·亨德森。
在成长过程中，是否有一个瞬间让你意识到自己想成为一名演员？ 我在 18 岁时在吉尔霍尔 [音乐与戏剧学院] 参加了一个夏季课程。我记得当时在想：“我先上这个课，要么我想继续追求演戏，要么我就意识到我应该去做其他事情。”我上了课，然后完全爱上了它。就这么定了。那是 2012, 正值奥运会期间。当所有人都在看莫·法拉和尤塞恩·博尔特时，我在巴比肯中心练习呼吸法并学习迈斯纳技巧。
你如何处理因为没拿到心仪角色而产生的失望感？ 我记得有一个角色——我不说具体是什么，但它是由一位极其优秀的英国作家创作的，而且是一个很棒的 part。没拿到这个角色时，我真的很心碎。但随后又来了一份新工作，我马上就要开始了，而且如果之前拿到了那个角色，时间上也会和现在这个项目冲突。这就是这种生活的有趣之处。你必须不断提醒自己，当一扇门关闭时，另一扇门往往会开启。
这种情况会变得容易接受吗？ 我相当擅长将事情分开处理。海伦·米伦把表演比作射出一支箭并任其飞去。一旦你释放了它，它就离开了。你不需要担心它落在哪里。我在试镜时很擅长这样做。但准备一个角色、投入情感，然后等待结果……这个过程永远不会成为任何人最喜欢的工作环节。
对于感到陷入困境或被拒绝的年轻演员，你会给他们什么建议？ 做你自己。我知道这是一个陈词滥调，但当我停止尝试成为我认为人们想要的样子，而是在试镜中专注于发挥我的长处，并为角色带来最强有力的自我版本时，我的表现确实开始变得更好。把每一次试镜都视为一次工作的机会，而不是将其视为决定你整个未来的事情。 ●
发型与妆容由 MIRA PARMAR 操刀，使用 DIOR FOREVER 粉底液、DIOR CAPTURE LE SÉRUM 精华液以及 SAM MCKNIGHT 发型产品；摄影助理 JACK SNELL
见证
作者： EVA WISEMAN
摄影： TORI FERENC
在 2018 年 2 月 3 日五点半刚过，一名叫作埃莉诺（Eleanor）的女性与她的兄妹一起走进了一家约克郡的警察局。他们的母亲最近去世了，在清理她房子的漫长且充满情感的过程中——那是一栋位于起伏林地南面几分钟路程的小型新建筑——他们在楼下橱柜里发现了一个盒子。里面放着看起来像是一堆旧衣服的东西。而当他们拆开包裹时，发现了一个孩子的骸骨。六周后，安伯·布查特（Amber Butchart）在马盖特（Margate）的家中。她与伴侣合住的公寓俯瞰大海，那里的天气极端：风暴来袭时窗户会发出尖啸声；在日落时分，被他们装饰成 1960 年代维多利亚风格色调的房间里会充盈着粉红色的光芒。布查特是一位时尚与纺织品策展人，当时她正坐在办公桌前工作，收到了一封来自法医考古学家卡尔·哈里森（Karl Harrison）博士的邮件。法医考古学是法医科学的一个分支，将考古学的方法和流程应用于刑事案件，通常用于寻找和调查被掩埋或隐藏的人类遗骸，为法庭记录证据，并以尊严和尊重的方式将其回收。哈里森是该领域全球顶尖的专家之一，最近因其在格伦费尔（Grenfell）项目中的工作而受到称赞。两人已经相识一年，起因是哈里森在广播中听到布查特讨论渔民毛衣。她的专业知识以及她解释人们通过穿着传达信息的方式给他留下了深刻印象。不久之后，他聘请她担任顾问法医服装分析师，协助他处理犯罪现场发现的衣物，并教导调查人员如何理解面料、紧固件，以及在记录中精确描述这些内容的必要性。在死亡现场，人们往往倾向于仅关注尸体，但围绕尸体的物品（包括衣服）同样讲述着重要的故事。因此，在四月，他邀请她前往特丁顿（Teddington）的一个实验室查看那个盒子。
我第一次采访哈里森和布查特是在 2019 年，就在她告诉我她的职业生涯增加了这一新领域之后不久。虽然我们在一起度过的那个寒冬之日——身处警犬和犯罪现场调查员之间——令人着迷，但他们简短提及的那个盒子里的婴儿一直留在我的记忆中，并引导我在多年后重新回到他们的故事中。我发现自己正漫无目的地研究那些被隐藏的
与此同时，怀孕和分娩伴随着不同程度的痛苦。虽然这类事件曾经相当普遍，但如今其流行程度的细节成了推测的来源——一项 2006 年在南威尔士进行的为期 11 年的研究发现，发病率为 1 in 2,500 分娩。一项基于 2004-05 年数据的爱尔兰研究发现，一家乡村医院的发生率为 1 in 403 出生，而都柏林一家医院的发生率为 1 in 625。
尽管随着非婚生子在社会上被普遍接受，此类事件已变得罕见，但近年来仍有许多女性因隐瞒孩子的出生和死亡而被起诉。2016, 一名在曼彻斯特的 14 岁女学生在秘密分娩后，将新生儿的尸体藏在抽屉里。随后，法院获悉她第二天仍照常去上学。2018, 在西约克郡，一名 19 岁少女的母亲在女儿床底的一个鞋盒中发现了婴儿的尸体。2024，一名在考文垂的马来西亚学生被判处终身监禁，据皇家检控局称，她“在分娩后不久将新生婴儿放入一个麦片盒中将其杀害，并将盒子藏在行李箱中”。
哈里森告诉我，他之前处理过与这个隐瞒婴儿案件类似的案例。我们在他目前位于白厅国防部的办公室附近共进早餐。在点了几杯咖啡时，他想起了“一次在大型城市墓地进行的挖掘。一个家庭在小路旁选了一个位置，在树下为孩子进行了浅层、非正式的埋葬”。三代女性——年轻的母亲、她的母亲和祖母——共同埋葬了尸体。多年前在斯温顿，在一名老妇人去世后，哈里森的一位同事在一个存放多年在衣柜顶部的旧行李箱中发现了一具儿童尸体。“我怀疑，在全国每个犯罪调查办公室里，可能都潜藏着极其相似的关于婴儿死亡、掩埋和长期保留的故事，”他告诉我。
儿童死亡引起的情绪波动增加了这些调查的复杂性。尤其是因为，“对我们来说，寻找婴儿、新生儿的遗骸却一无所获是很正常的，”哈里森说。“在埋藏环境下，它们可能非常不耐用（易分解）。”人们倾向于
在缺失和阴影中看到怪物，认为尸体被偷走了——恐惧层层叠加。“这似乎激发了人们内心某种与科学无关的东西，但对于试图保护并从悲痛的父母那里获取信息，并寻找接近真相的调查员来说，这创造了一个极具挑战性的环境。”
哈里森抿了一口咖啡，告诉我他与另一位法医考古学家的一次对话，那次对话让他感到震撼。他发现，他们两人都在全国不同地区遇到过类似的案件：一名成年人走进警察局告诉警员，他们小时候曾从卧室窗户看到一个男人（通常是他们的父亲）在花园里埋葬一个婴儿。“在我们两人之间，就有三四个这样的例子。他们大致记得当时自己站在那里时的年龄，且对后花园的样子记忆非常清晰，然后他们会直接带你到他们看到那个男人埋尸的地方。虽然也许有一天我们会找到一个，但到目前为止，仍然”
在这种地方从未发现过任何东西。” 这可能意味着遗骸已经完全分解，但也可能指向一种反复出现的妄想。“这似乎是一种相对常见的童年幻影记忆，与一个人的卧室空间和后花园，以及对父母的恐惧、对儿童死亡的恐惧相关……” 他的话语渐渐消失。
哈里森有时会担心，调查人员日益依赖 DNA 技术的速度和准确性，而忽视了其他法医学学科，例如服装分析，后者能提供更多定性的结果。“生物学家经常检查衣物以寻找体液，有时他们会进行服装损坏分析，” 比如，记录衬衫上的刺伤口。“但他们不会对服装的性质、日期或可能的来源地给出任何意见。” 但查特可以，当哈里森打电话给她时，她就去了。
但查特发现，人们很难严肃地对待时尚。这在她早期涉足法医学时也得到了体现，当她讨论面料、
法医考古学家卡尔·哈里森博士和时尚历史学家安伯·但查特。两人共同合作，试图鉴定遗体的遗骸
标签，或者领口的形状。“这就是为什么卡尔让我来为犯罪现场调查员 (CSI) 开展培训课程，就是为了让他们意识到将衣服作为证据来严肃对待这个观点。”
这些课程的开始通常很尴尬。她会和调查人员聚集在市政教室里，面对着白板和纸杯咖啡。“每个人都穿着统一的涤纶 Polo 衫。我戴着头巾走进来，你可以立刻感觉到一种轻微的世界碰撞。” 她以一个练习开始，要求全班通过她的穿着来推测她的情况。她最喜欢的电影是什么？她听什么样的音乐？她住在哪里？ “出于某种原因，人们总认为我是纯素主义者。” 尽管开始时进展缓慢，但到课程结束时，每个人都参与进来了——一名 CSI 热情地向她讲述了他的夏威夷衬衫收藏。“每个人都认为这与自己无关，直到他们意识到每个人都穿着衣服。总会有出乎意料的发现。” 她教他们如何识别扣件，如何描述服装和面料（特别是非西方服装），以及如何开发并使用一套标准化的语言。裙子绝不仅仅是一条裙子。一个人的 “jumper” 在另一个人看来是 “sweater”。她说，始终有一个提醒：衣服保存着秘密，讲述着穿着它们的人的故事，或者那些曾经穿着它们，然后小心地将它们包裹在盒子里的人的故事。
“那是一个晴天，” 但查特回忆起抵达特丁顿实验室时的情景，“光线很明亮，这似乎与我此行的目的格格不入。” 她和哈里森穿着洗手衣和口罩，但哈里森记得，在这些衣服之下，“安伯的着装展现了你所预期中的那种服装优雅感。” 我第一次见到但查特是在我们二十多岁的时候，她当时穿着一件缎面的小丑 (Pierrot) 服装在夜店担任 DJ，像一个留着锐利波波头、充满诗意的小丑。在 2000 年代初，她是古着店 Beyond Retro 的首席采购员，在学习历史的同时，她的穿着无懈可击，每一天都是一次装扮的机会。相比之下，哈里森偏好纽扣衬衫和实用运动鞋。
在实验室里，他对他分享给她的信息量非常谨慎。“我们称之为‘顺序揭露’，” 他告诉我，“在最初回答问题时，你可能只给专家提供最少量的必要背景信息。在他们对展品进行初步审视之后，你再提供进一步的背景信息。” 这听起来有点像游戏，尽管它 “并不是为了设陷阱而设计的”。
‘作为一个没有法医学背景的人，我仍然无法不将它与人类的故事联系起来’
他们，而是为了确保他们的回答尽可能平衡。” Butchart 唯一知道的是，这些衣物与一名死者的儿童遗骸有关。她很紧张。“作为一个没有特定法医学背景或接受过这类领域培训的人，我还是无法不将这段人体故事与之联系起来，”她说。在进入实验室前，在泰丁顿的一家咖啡馆里，她记得 Harrison 解释了人们通常如何非正式地处理工作中情感方面的问题——通过聊天和开玩笑，而不是通过咨询或培训。“我惊讶于在这个领域之外听起来绝对恐怖的事情，在这里被讨论得如此随意，”她说。“对我来说，这比进入实验室的过程更需要时间去适应。那里的一切都如此专业和临床化——即使你看到的东西
显然已经发生了组织分解，你完全不会在意。” Butchart 用手术刀开始将织物剥离。他们检查的衣物显然已经在箱子里存放了很长时间，但包裹这具身体的服装很难确定日期。这就是 Butchart 的工作。她想评估这名女性穿着这些衣服的时间，以便推断尸体在那里放置了多久。“其中一件物品是子弹胸罩，显然可以追溯到 20 世纪 50 年代末或 60 年代初，标签上有一个爱心——上面写着‘Lovable 胸罩公司’。”她知道可以通过档案和旧杂志广告，利用这个标签来研究其生产日期。其他几件衣服的状况更糟。乍一看，它们像“一捆烧焦的碎布”。经过仔细观察，有一件经过调整和修补的聚酯纤维衬衫，以及一条浅蓝色牛仔裙，是自制的孕妇装，“在肉体经过数十年分解渗入的地方有发黑区域。织物腐烂处变得破烂不堪，使其看起来像被烟熏黑了。”裙子腰带的调整引起了 Butchart 的兴趣，因为这暗示了计划——这表明母亲知道自己怀孕了。Harrison 说，“分解染色”表明这些服装在“婴儿遗骸经历软组织分解时”包裹了身体，因为那是唯一一个
分解后液化的软组织产物会渗入衣物之中。”而自那时起，它们就一直留在那里，“因为当遗骸最终被发现时，它们依然僵硬地聚集在遗体周围。”通过利用杂志广告以及她对时尚史的了解，布查特（Butchart）将这些衣物的年代定在 20 世纪 60 年代中后期，这表明箱子是在那时被隐藏起来的。当我在谷歌 (Google) 地图上查看埃莉诺 (Eleanor) 的母亲曾居住以及发现箱子的地方时，我发现那栋房子建于 20 世纪 90 年代。当时我对这件事没什么感觉，但后来我意识到，这意味着她可能在多次搬家过程中小心地搬运着这个箱子，并且每次都将其重新隐藏。她没有将婴儿埋葬，而是在余生中一直守护着这具身体。布查特记得，当她测量、拍摄、重新装袋每一件物品时，感到一种特定的疏离感。“当你身处实验室时，很容易产生抽离感，因为有所有那些专业化的标识，无论是白大褂还是类似危化服的防护服。”这些服装同样具有意义。尽管最初感到紧张，但穿上科学家的制服让布查特能够将自己从日常生活中解脱出来，就像穿上了一件戏服。“如果你穿着白大褂，人们会给你白大褂应有的尊重。他人地认可你的角色并将这种尊重赋予你。但你也会觉得你正处于那个角色之中。”然而，一旦换回自己的衣服，情感便随之而回。“我记得在入睡前经常思考这个案例，”她说。那个“可爱”的标签与婴儿的遗体并置，“在几十年后产生了一个无意的结果，为我正在做的工作增添了一种情感上的凄美感。”此外，“当你思考实际发生了什么、当时的境况以及悲剧的程度时，你会感到一种沉重的责任感。这在事后的安静时刻会突然击中你。”
布查特注意到，这些衣物由致密织物制成，并因“分解液随后形成了几乎像脆片一样的质感”而变得更加僵硬，哈里森 (Harrison) 回忆道。为了检查每件物品，需要花费很大力气将它们拉开。随着每一次动作，更深层的刺鼻气味被释放出来。“霉味，”哈里森回忆道。“尖锐。它不像近期的分解那样扑面而来，但如果你花时间观察，它会慢慢地渗入你的体内。我人生中有很多次经历，不得不走出商店，通常是因为那里使用的清洁剂品牌一定与停尸房使用的一样。”哈里森说，他们当时在与“最糟糕的一种鞋柜味”作斗争。“人类存在的气味。”布查特试图将起皱和折叠的织物铺平以便测量。婴儿的遗骸已被移除，其复杂程度低于他们处理过的其他案例。“安伯 (Amber) 和我处理过一个案例，那是成年人的着衣遗骸在露天环境中分解，根系生长且植被穿过其中，形成由人体遗骸、衣物和将其粘在一起的植被组成的复杂团块。那样处理起来会非常困难”
“同时又不损坏衣物。”但在这个案例中，“衣物相当耐穿。”所有东西都被拍照、称重并记录在案，这些衣服自婴儿出生以来第一次被展开。Butchart 说道，这个案例“一直留在我的记忆中，尤其是当 Karl 说这种情况以前相当普遍时。在我处理过的案例中，最令我难忘的是像这样触及更广泛女性叙事的案例，”她说。“深入了解那些如此轻易地让女性陷入困境的结构，真的令人心碎。对于一个并非一直身处那个世界的人来说，这就像是窥见了幕后的真相。”想到这一点，也让她想起了时尚通常因其看似女性化和轻佻的特质而被贬低的现象。然而，所有的衣服都在讲述一个故事，一种关于财富、身体、记忆、工作以及陌生人私密秘密的个人考古学。Butchart 提交了她的报告，描述了那件带有细蓝白条纹的涤纶衬衫，一件可追溯到 20 世纪 50 年代后期的子弹胸罩，以及一件有修补痕迹的 60 年代裙子。她描绘了一个女性在痛苦时刻的肖像。Harrison 将其加入了警方档案。在 2018 年 11 月，验尸官公布了他的调查结果，但结果非常简略且没有定论，仅确认了一名足月出生的男婴在 1968 年左右死亡（根据其包裹的衣物判断），且其兄弟姐妹或父亲都不知道他的存在。他补充说，在 25 年里，这是他见过“最令人心碎”的案例。而且，“尽管每个人都尽了最大努力，”他补充道，“这个小男孩，我们依然不了解他。” ●
美籍墨西哥裔设计师， 深受比莉·艾里什 (Billie Eilish)、 贾斯汀·比伯 (Justin Bieber) 和维纳斯·威廉姆斯 (Venus Williams) 等人的喜爱。 但他真正的热情在于利用奇卡诺 (Chicano) 文化和酷儿生存经验，在残酷的时尚界 带来变革
恶魔 (THORNY DEVIL)
摄影 弗雷德·拉哈切 (FRED LAHACHE) 作者 沙德·德苏扎 (SHAAD D’SOUZA)
W
illy Chavarria 最新的一场时装秀在巴黎的共产党总部举行，名为 Comunión——在西班牙语中意为“社区”。换句话说，在 Chavarria 周围的人至关重要。在进入他及其团队为了演出提前几天准备的巴黎那个巨大且空旷的空间时，我面对的是关于我舒适度的询问：我需要零度可乐还是水？坐在风扇附近会感觉好些吗？我想从——用 Chavarria 自己的话说——“这盆可怜的腐烂水果”里拿点东西吗？当我见到 Chavarria 时，他以有力的握手和我打招呼，并惊呼道：“我们穿的一样！”——剪边牛仔短裤，白色 T 恤——在整个对话过程中，他不断地暂停，盯着我看一会儿，然后询问关于我生活的问题：我骑自行车吗？现在的人们在派对上都用什么样的药物？在某个时刻，
他给出了一些建议：确保尽情享乐，趁我还年轻、身体还能恢复时玩到凌晨 4 点。“玩到累瘫为止，”他说，“因为你还能重新站起来。” Chavarria 与你在巴黎预期会遇到的那种冷漠、不感兴趣的时尚设计师原型截然相反，这在很大程度上是因为他 59 岁，是墨西哥裔美国人，且（他的同名品牌仅成立十年，Comunión 仅是其第四次在巴黎展出）是这个领域相对的新来者。尽管如此，Chavarria 在业内深受喜爱：一位拥有创业者政治精神和创新意识的资深人士，他那些受奇卡诺（墨西哥裔美国人）文化和工装启发的飘逸、廓形巨大的作品，得到了 Billie Eilish、Justin Bieber 和 Venus Williams 等明星的推崇。演员兼模特 Julia Fox 是 Chavarria 的密友且经常为其担任模特，她将这位设计师描述为“濒危物种中的最后一个”，并且是他唯一能让她打破某种感觉的人，因为她觉得“在时尚圈的人身边很难感到安全，因为他们实在太狡诈了”。Chavarria 作为一个奋斗了数十年才达到如今地位的人，深知自己位置的重要性。他的时装秀以强烈的政治色彩著称——他的 SS26 系列中出现了下跪的男模，这令人不安且心碎地呼应了那些被 ICE（美国移民海关执法局）特工拘留的移民和美国公民的疯传视频。而且，他认为自己的秀不仅仅是营销机会。当然，所有这些压力都增加了负担。“太疯狂了——几乎每次经历这个过程，我都会觉得，‘我再也做不到下一次了’，”他说。“我不断提醒自己，除了制作衣服和扩大业务之外，我们举办这场秀的原因是什么。我很开心业务发展得如此之好，但除此之外，我的目标是向世界发出一种正能量的波长，我知道这会产生涟漪效应。自品牌创立以来，这始终是一个基本优先项。”
C
havarria 出生并成长在圣华金谷（San Joaquin Valley），这是加利福尼亚州中部的一片农业地带。他的母亲是白人，父亲是墨西哥人，两人在去种族隔离后的高中相识，当时混种学校开始运作。Chavarria 还是个孩子时，他的父亲正在学习成为一名实验室技术员，并在田间工作以养家糊口；他的母亲则会“凌晨 4 点和所有墨西哥女士一起起床，制作塔可和食物给那些出外工作的人”。在一个白人母亲和拉丁裔父亲的陪伴下长大，Chavarria “就像是周围唯一的混血孩子”。他同时也是一名酷儿，这在当地的小城镇美国带来了自身的挑战。“这完全令人心神不宁，但你知道，童年并不容易，”他说。“我现在真的非常感激小时候经历的所有烂事，因为它们塑造了现在的我。这实际上
“我热爱衰老的一点是——不知为何，能让人对生活产生一种清晰的审视。”在十几岁快二十岁的时候，查瓦里亚（Chavarria）搬到旧金山学习平面设计。他所经历的与其说是文化冲击，不如说是一次彻底的重生。“我去旧金山后简直像爆炸了一样——我当时在想，‘这是怎么回事？我成了一个自由的个体！’”他说。那是 20 世纪 80 年代末，艾滋病危机的尾声，正值 AZT 药物开始广泛普及的时候。“如果我早几年搬到那里，情况可能会对我更不利，”他说。查瓦里亚失去了许多朋友，但同时也开始沉浸在艺术和夜店文化中，通过观察人们参加狂欢派对（raves）时的穿着，在无意间学习时尚。他在湾区形成的时尚风格基本上就是他现在的穿衣方式。他回忆起朋友斯特凡·鲁伊斯（Stefan Ruiz）为他拍的一张照片，当时发表在《i-D》杂志上：“那是上午 10 点左右，我在一家叫 The End Up 的夜店里，可能已经连续两天没睡觉了。我穿着一件开衩的尼龙运动裤，黑色带白色阿迪达斯条纹，黑色金扣乐福鞋，一件带褶边褶皱的粉色燕尾服衬衫，”他说。“衣服全敞开着，我满身大汗，正值青春。我看着那张照片心想，‘天呐，那是 90 年代的事，而我现在还这么穿’。”查瓦里亚所描述的旧金山世界——在凄惨、不人道的政治气候面前庆祝与欢愉——似乎镜像了他自己在作品中营造的世界，那些作品讲述了在压迫面前，关于社群与生存的细腻（且往往并不含蓄）的故事。“我觉得我一直以来都是这样，意识到在面对一堆烂事时寻找快乐的必要性。当我搬到旧金山时，这种感觉非常直观，因为死亡就在周围，弥漫在空气中，”他说。“这就是促使人们渴望派对的原因之一”——为了逃离丑陋与痛苦。
在旧金山期间，查瓦里亚开始为 Joe Boxer（一个创新的男士内衣品牌）工作，最终他从物流部门的兼职岗位转到了设计团队。大约在那个时候，他离开旧金山搬到一个海边小镇，“为了让自己冷静下来，远离派对之类的事情。那段时间挺极端的——我不后悔，但我需要切换状态，”他回忆道。他在一家餐厅找到了工作，并开始参加三项全能赛；住在那里期间，他成为了 Voler（一家骑行服装公司）的设计师。
大约在同一时间，拉尔夫·劳伦（Ralph Lauren）推出了 RLX 运动装线，在与 Voler 合作了一些产品后，聘请查瓦里亚进入内部工作，并在新千年之交前后将他迁至纽约。劳伦最终成为了查瓦里亚目前创作的“巨大灵感来源”。“我热爱他从无名之辈开始，一步步建立起一个帝国的过程——他在自己创造的世界里如此坚定，以至于每个人都相信了它，”他说。“他的热情以及维持那种一致性的能力，令我十分钦佩。而且我认为那些衣服非常舒适有趣……但我一直认为，有色人种穿拉尔夫·劳伦比任何人看起来都更好。”
他在旧金山找到的温暖，在残酷的纽约时尚界并不存在。查瓦里亚说，他热爱“能够创造一个美丽的世界，热爱与服装打交道，热爱我们如何装扮自己”，但这并不是时尚行业的驱动力。现在，他试图培育一个存在于“非常
“刻板的时尚结构，坦白说，是不友善、有歧视、冷酷且毫无吸引力的”。在纽约，他看到“有色人种、女性、跨性别者获得机会之少。时尚界内部存在的不平等程度和冷漠感，对我来说简直疯了”。Chavarria试图通过创办Palmer Trading Company来培养他在行业本身中找不到的快乐。这是他在纽约SoHo区Sullivan街与丈夫David Ramirez共同创立的一家古着店。他们销售古着单品，最终开始销售自己制作的衣服：“非常保守的奇诺裤、彩色牛津衫、法兰绒衬衫、包袋”。最终，在2010年代中期，Ramirez回到了时尚行业工作，而Chavarria则留在店里，对其进行了拆除和翻新，并在2015年推出了一个以自己名字命名的小规模系列。他的早期系列与现在一样，深受奇卡诺（Chicano）和乔洛（cholo）文化启发，并推崇Chavarria在成长过程中看到的移民工人的风格。他的作品迅速获得了关注，部分原因在于像2017年秋季纽约时装周男装秀这样引起轰动的发布会——在那场秀中，13名模特被挤在一个铁丝网笼子里，灵感来自Ava Duvernay关于美国监狱制度的纪录片《第13号》（13th）。获得过普利策奖的时尚记者Robin Givhan记得，那次发布会带给她的激进感令她印象深刻。“在那个此类风格相对少见的时代，他确实提升了工人阶级的外观、理念和感官，”她告诉我，“他试图打破人们基于外貌对某些类型男性所持有的许多刻板印象和偏见。当然，衣服本身也非常出色。”Chavarria在日本的买手以及像Opening Ceremony、Barney’s、Steven Allen和Totokaelo这样的零售商那里都取得了成功——顺便一提，这些店现在都已经关闭了——但最终，批发业务开始让他感到精疲力竭。2019年，由于租金上涨，Chavarria关闭了他在SoHo的店，将运营地搬到了布鲁克林的一个仓库，并前往哥本哈根与Ramirez同住，后者已搬到那里为大众珠宝公司Pandora工作。大约在那个时候，他开始与Ye（当时被称为Kanye West）合作Yeezy，这是一个带有乌托邦色彩的品牌概念，旨在通过负担得起且实用的服装将时尚和设计普及给大众。“我非常支持那个愿景——事实上，我倾向于认为那是我的愿景，”他狡黠地说道，引起了散布在房间里的造型师、艺术总监和公关团队的一阵大笑。“但谁知道呢，我甚至不记得了。我知道那是重点，而且我真的很喜欢。”Chavarria记得为了实现Yeezy“让时尚完全平等化”的愿景，他曾与Costco和Walmart等大型零售商开会。“我认为这个概念非常惊人，因为它将‘排他性’（exclusivity）的理念转移到了一个新的视角，因为在某种程度上，排他性是时尚固有的——你想要一种他人不具备的身份感，”他说。“没有多少人重新审视过这一哲学，所以他所谓的排他性其实是指：这东西太好太酷了，以至于每个人都在穿，而你成为了这个世界的一员。”Chavarria说，他最近从West重启的Yeezy系列中买了一双$20的靴子，想看看他现在的运作方式，并且“对于20美元来说，质量相当不错，你知道吗？我不知道他是怎么做到的，或者现在是否还盈利。”Chavarria尚未被
能够让他的自有品牌达到那样的价格点——一件 Willy Chavarria 的 T 恤大约需要 £290；一条青绿色的长款牛仔短裤 (jorts) 价格约为 £700——但他致力于扩大价格区间，特别是通过他的工装系列 Big Willy（价格在 £100-£400 之间），以及他与 Adidas 持续进行的合作。“我经常思考并计划这样一个未来：我能够以一种更大众的方式进行销售和沟通。我认为这并不总是关乎一件实物产品，”他说道。“它可能是音乐，可能是电影，也可能是艺术。品牌演变成提供某种东西的方式有很多。”Chavarria 将与 Adidas、Dickies、Zara 和 Hummel 等品牌的合作视为实现他梦想的关键，即“处于一个既能触及奢侈品，又能触及那些只想花 80 美元买件 T 恤的孩子们的地位”。当然，这很难，
当你处于这种境地时，很难保持一种伦理感
那些派对 让自己冷静下来。 那时太疯狂了。 我需要转换状态”
与大众时尚公司合作，而这些公司经常因其不道德的供应链而受到批评。“关于身处时尚界这件事，我内心一直有冲突——我认为大家都心知肚明的一个事实是，衣服实在太多了，比任何人都需要的更多，”他说。“当我与 Zara 合作时，我对此进行了大量思考。首先，尽管听起来像陈词滥调，但了解供应链、工厂基地、工人的待遇以及薪资发放确实非常重要，我认为这就是为什么我很难做出那些低价产品的原因。尽管我很想这么做，但我还没找到一种符合伦理的做法。”
尽管 Chavarria 在美国和欧洲时尚界享有极高的知名度和尊重，但他的职业生涯并非没有争议。2025 年，他在宣布与 Adidas 合作推出一款结合了传统 Huarache 凉鞋设计并命名为“Oaxaca Slip-On”的运动鞋后，在墨西哥国内遭到广泛抨击（包括墨西哥总统克劳迪娅·辛鲍姆），随后被迫向墨西哥的 Oaxaca 社区道歉。当我提到这件事时，Chavarria 把头向后一甩，戏剧性地喊了一声“噢，天哪！”，而他的公共关系负责人 Carolyn 则睁大眼睛看着我，低声说道“你为什么问这个？”，随后尴尬地轻笑了几声，并澄清她是在开玩笑。Chavarria 开始谨慎地发言——“我觉得没关系。那是……现在依然是一场噩梦，但是——”——随后 Carolyn 指示我“针对这件事想要了解的具体内容提出问题”。于是我询问他在开发这款鞋时的思考过程。
“这一切始于洛杉矶，当时我想：‘让我们在运动鞋底上做一款 Huarache 凉鞋吧。’太酷了！我想做一款人们可以穿着打篮球的 Huarache，你懂吗？”他说。“那是陪伴我成长的一种鞋，就像是奇卡诺 (Chicano) 文化的象征。”此后，Chavarria 一直在与墨西哥官员合作以“解决该问题”，并且他正在完成一部关于墨西哥裔美国人与墨西哥本土墨西哥人之间对艺术和文化认知差异的纪录片。当然，今天他仍忙于为 Comunión 润色收尾——这是一个融合了极尽奢华、极繁主义魅力与颓废风格的爆发之作。“我的每一个系列完全基于我们的感受，而我认为这就是我们现在的感受——寻找快乐，提醒自己生活中的喜悦与美好，”他说。
Fox 说，正是这种用心让 Chavarria 如此特别。“我总是在想，‘哇，感谢上帝有 Willy。’坦白说，我们需要更多像 Willy 这样的人，”她说。“但至少我们现在有一个。” ●
免费加入我们的文化俱乐部 (Culture Club)
展览 摄影师画廊的“日本女性摄影师展” | 门票 50% 折扣，省 £5
Compton Verney 的“生命之律：埃尼德·马克斯与现代英国设计展” | 门票 2 for 1，省 £17
国家美术馆的“苏巴朗展” | 门票 2 for 1，省 £22
节日 The Long Road | 门票 20% 折扣，省 £45
HowTheLightGetsIn | 门票 20% 折扣，省 £32
Psych Fest | 门票 20% 折扣，省 £20
旅行与体验 i-escape | 精选隐世度假地立减 £100
Landmark Trust | 英国及意大利度假住宿 20% 折扣
Historic Houses | 年费会员 15% 折扣，省 £11
总价值超过 £800 为热爱文化 探索者 量身定制的权益
了解更多
在 observer.co.uk/culture-club 解锁这些及更多优惠
SADIE CLAYTON 在她的工作室中 寻找避风港与创意
这处小角落是我的神圣空间。目光所及之处，随处可见我已完成的作品和正在创作的作品，每一件都有一个故事。从外面看可能显得混乱，但我清楚地知道每件东西在哪里。自从有了儿子，我来到这里的次数减少了，但只要有机会，这里就是我想待的地方。我只需要有节奏的音乐，我的夹具和工具，我就身处纯粹的铜艺天堂。■ 我们都知道艺术和创意是一种健康方式。在大学学习时尚设计期间，我开始接触铜，我感到自己与它有一种真正的联系，并受此启发地想要找出原因。就在那时，我发现有些人认为铜是一种带来好运的金属，并且在阿育吠陀传统中被用于制造器皿和平底锅。我的意图是让人们在看到我的雕塑时，能感受到那种积极的正能量。■ 除了个人创作，我还开设铜艺工作坊，这给人们提供了一个停下脚步的机会。他们进入了状态：不再看手机；几乎不与他人交谈，因为他们如此专注于创作。他们慢了下来，仅仅是与自我相处。我热爱我的生活，但其中有很多变动的部分。在工作室里，我可以将其他一切抛在脑后，真正地专注于当下。我能做的就是创作。●
p39 Ben Lippett的 清凉晚餐
对持久之美的颂歌
Lilo Klinkenberg 从小就住在同一栋公寓楼里。她窗外的景色俯瞰着一个绿色的庭院，与她 10 岁时看到的景色只有细微的区别——只是视角略有不同的相同景象。“我妈妈甚至在那儿养了鸡，”她说道，伴随着红色指甲的轻快挥动，勾勒出一幅在柏林的混凝土丛林中刨食的田园雏禽图。“就像是在城市中心的一个小型乡村避难所。”Klinkenberg 是欧洲最抢手的花艺设计师之一，她为 Cartier、Loewe 和 Jil Sander 等客户创作巨型装置——包括小白菜、黄豆和成排的叶材。但这座公寓本身——位于克罗伊茨贝格（Kreuzberg）一座优雅的 1877 年建筑中，她的父母在 20 世纪 80 年代帮助将其转变为一个集体居住地——这让你对她的职业了解不多，但却能让你充分感受到她的审美。
墙壁大部分是空白的；台面冰冷且干净。对于一个从事生命形态工作的人来说，她在这里的生物养得极少。这里曾与两名朋友合住多年。在他们搬走后，Klinkenberg 拆掉了厨房餐厅与卧室之间的墙——将公寓变成了一个更宽敞的空间，且“更加合理”。她的棕色天鹅绒 Amanta 沙发就摆在原先床的位置上。“现在完美了，”她说，“光线充足。”人们很快就能领悟到 Klinkenberg 的严谨。在我们的谈话过程中，她描述了一系列经过权衡的决定、搜寻的材料以及执行的设计。室内的大部分布置都是她亲自构思的——钢制厨房、咖啡桌、用来摆放二手战利品的弧形架子，以及覆盖着大马士革面料的办公沙发——每一件物品她都亲自起草图纸并测量，对于无法独自制作的部分，则请金属加工厂协助。“我总是尝试尽可能多地亲力亲为，”她说，“这始于当我明确知道自己想要什么，但却找不到时。”她认为，她的审美源于她的祖母——一位来自北海海利格兰岛（Heligoland）的会计师，祖母把家里收拾得一尘不染：伊姆斯椅（Eames chairs）、迪特·拉姆斯（Dieter Rams）沙发、古董边柜。对于一个成长在嬉皮风且有四个孩子的家庭中的孩子来说，那种秩序感与优雅的结合具有极大的诱惑力。“她的房子对我来说一直是梦想中的访问之地，”她说。Klinkenberg 现在拥有的祖母唯一遗物，是那张祖母用来报税的办公桌。她的父亲是一名建筑师，母亲教授音乐和数学。“我并非来自艺术家庭，”她说，“但环境还是挺有创造力的。” Klinkenberg 最初并没有打算成为一名花艺师。她接受过时尚培训但并不喜欢，比起衣服本身，她更被围绕在系列作品周围所能营造的氛围所吸引。事实证明，装饰房间比装饰一个人更具吸引力。花卉的出现几乎是偶然：十多年前，她和兄弟姐妹以及几个同样迷茫的朋友开了一家餐厅，出租用于举办活动，于是她发现自己在负责花艺布置。
她的服装培训留下了痕迹。“当我开始尝试更多雕塑感的工作时，它让我想起了时尚，”她说，“就像当你有一个模特模特，开始在上面别针一样——你选用厚重的面料，做出巨大的礼裙，或者选用丝绸，让它贴合身体。”只不过现在，材料变成了茎或叶，通过堆叠或剥离来营造体量感与线条感。这其中带有一点康斯坦斯·斯普瑞（Constance Spry）的影子，这位 20 世纪的英国花艺师在人们期待看到玫瑰的地方布置羽衣甘蓝和杂草；不过 Klinkenberg 让自己处于美丽物件的环绕之中，包括由马里奥·贝里尼（Mario Bellini）设计的棕色 Amanta 沙发。那些由德国后现代主义者安德尔·卡默迈尔（Anderl Kammermeier）设计的金属餐椅是在拍卖会上淘到的。
居住空间之内
克林肯伯格（Klinkenberg）以这种方式填满整个房间，但她并不允许人们因为这些而称她为艺术家。“我认为自己是一名设计师，”她坚定地说道。用她自己的话来说，她对于这些物件而言简直是个“怪胎”。公寓里到处是搜集来的发现。她将逛跳蚤市场融入到工作行程中，为了去逛一个市场，而专门在某个城市多留一个周日；其余的则在 Kleinanzeigen（德国版的 Gumtree）上搜寻。客厅里两把由后现代艺术家安德尔·卡默迈尔（Anderl Kammermeier）设计的金属椅子，是通过拍卖会每把 €100 买来的；一个心爱的三角形花瓶，顶部有两个插杆的小孔，是从一个当时“只卖非常丑的衣服”的摊位上淘来的。对她而言，实用之物与装饰之物地位平等：她的一些花瓶（比如那个三角形的）被视为雕塑，而另一些则偶尔用来放置活动后剩余的花朵（她只展示单枝花，“绝不混搭”）。甚至杯子也是按状态分类的：好的绿色 Acme 杯子用于招待客人，而她自己的早晨咖啡则用藏在橱柜里的纪念品马克杯饮用。尽管追求这种永恒感，但她的创作媒介却是转瞬即逝的。她花费数日构建的装置，可能在活动中仅维持几个小时便告结束。“我必须学会放手，”她解释道。她说，花朵在凋谢边缘、花瓣开始飘落时最迷人；这种状态几乎不可能卖给客户，但却是她个人作品的关键。在 2024, 年的首次个展中，她制作了旨在持久保存的植物雕塑——用她的说法，是在寻找“让看起来有生命的东西保持生命状态的方法”。她的家则是这一切的反面：缓慢且刻意地积聚，没有任何会褪色或腐坏的东西。克林肯伯格经常旅行，并且经常考虑离开柏林，但她总能在这栋建筑中“脚踏实地”，因为她的姐妹们和孩子就住在几户之隔的地方。她独居。没有宠物。也没有室内植物。“它们会死掉的，”她笑着说。“我的家里甚至没有一株活植物。” ●
一家小酒馆
Corsham 必定拥有英国最漂亮的高街之一，五彩的旗帜在由巴斯石和科茨沃尔德石筑成的伊丽莎白时代、斯图亚特时代和乔治时代风格交织的建筑间蜿蜒穿行。而且这还没提到那些鸟类。在伦敦有鸽子，而在 Corsham 则有孔雀——它们栖息在屋顶，在人行道上漫步，并成群结队地来查看镇上最新开业的热点：Corsham House。这是 Beckford 集团第一家带客房的餐厅，位于这座威尔特郡集镇的一家前银行建筑内，提供全天候服务。对于 Corsham 来说，这是一个重大突破，因为尽管这里景色宜人（且距离巴斯仅 20 分钟车程），但一直渴望一个地标性的去处——一个具有足够吸引力、能悄然改变人们利用这座城镇方式的地方。“我们试图创造一些感觉很新的东西。这是我们心中英国小酒馆（brasserie）应有的样子，”共同所有者 Dan Brod 说道。“在伦敦有很多这样的全天候场所，但在乡村地区，这种模式尚未真正普及。”Beckford 集团在当地拥有深厚的根基。位于 Tisbury 郊外的 The Beckford Arms 在 2009. 年开业时，助力重新定义了现代“带客房酒吧”的概念。巴斯的 The Beckford Bottle Shop 在所有人之前就开始倡导精致的小盘菜。今年夏天早些时候，该集团的第一家酒店 Teffont House 开业，那是他们对法式旅舍（auberge）的诠释。如果说那是一家成年后的 Beckford Arms，那么 Corsham House 感觉就像是带了卧室的 Beckford Bottle Shop。“我们试图打造一个非常本土化但极其高端的东西，使用顶级的食材并制作真正美味的菜肴，”Brod 表示。穿过正门，直接进入酒铺，这里模仿了巴斯的门店，拥有同样的锡制天花板、简单的木架，酒瓶上挂着棕色牛皮纸行李标签。
这里大约有 200 瓶酒，其中 40 瓶在餐厅菜单上提供分杯售卖。 “葡萄酒场所总是让人感到压力，但我们很高兴人们在这里随意逛逛书架，阅读酒瓶背面并聊聊天，”Brod 说道。
Corsham House 提供 200 多 种葡萄酒， 其中约 40 种 可分杯品鉴
餐厅内部，酒红色长凳和深色木桌营造出整体氛围。早餐时，最好的当地糕点从巴斯的 Landrace 面包店运来——其粘稠的豆蔻肉桂卷与自制燕麦片及配有樱桃果酱的多塞特酸奶一同供应。此外还有来自马恩岛的传统熏鲱鱼，搭配欧芹黄油。菜单上的所有菜品均由主厨 James Harris 创作，他直接从 The Beckford Bottle Shop 的厨房调任而来，在过去六年里，他维持了该店的米其林必比登推介（Bib Gourmand）水准。在这里，他对厨房本身一样兴奋——“这个厨房有窗户！”——就像他对尽量减少浪费地创作菜肴那样兴奋。这体现在菜单上的鳕鱼籽和腌黄瓜，以及由面包废料制成的饼干。此外还有一份配以醋栗番茄酱的脆皮猪头炸丸子。“我们会冷冻酒吧剩余的柠檬，当积攒到足够数量时，我们会加入大量深棕色糖将其烘烤并制成醋，”James 说道。这种焦糖柠檬醋随后被用于调制酱料。食材充分利用了传统的集镇环境，
主厨 James Harris 创作的盘餐包括 来自当地屠宰店的臀盖肉牛排 以及配有鳀鱼黄油的英式烤煎饼 (crumpets)
同样地，肉类来自正对面的屠夫 Toby Hayes，土豆来自四分钟路程外的一位农民，有时还会有 Harris 在上班途中从树篱边采摘的旋花。
楼上的客房由联合创始人 Charlie Luxton（曾任 Soho House 运营总监）和室内设计师 Natasha Hidvegi 设计。谈到 Luxton 正在仓库中囤积的复古梳妆台和编织皮革椅时，Brod 说：“他是个购物狂。他真的在不停地买东西，然后我们之后再找地方用上它们。” 绝大多数小型卧室被漆成灰粉色和蓝色，走廊则贴着 Sanderson 的 Truffle 系列壁纸。最迷人的也是最大的一间——原银行经理办公室——拥有一个巨大的凸窗，可俯瞰商业街。对这座建筑前世的其他致意还包括前往餐厅洗手间途中的金库门，以及前门处依然完好无损的夜间投递柜。翻修这座法定保护建筑或许“实际上是一场绝对的噩梦”，但由于持续致力于让其地址尽可能可持续，Corsham House 的电力由大型太阳能电池阵列提供，并配备电池存储——这是使整个场所真正实现碳中和计划的一部分。
这里虽然是威尔特郡中与科茨沃尔兹地区接壤的地带，但这种水准的餐厅烹饪和服务对于这一带来说仍感到新鲜。然而，Corsham House 已经让自己融入了这座集镇的环境——成为了那种与当地生活交织在一起的地方。而且至关重要的一点是，它的切入方式足够温和，似乎没有引起任何不快。●
Corsham House, 13 High Street, SN13 0ET. 客房每晚 £150 起 (corshamhouse.com)
维多利亚隧道 (VICTORIA TUNNEL) 维多利亚隧道最初是作为运煤的矿车道而建，但人们对其最深刻的记忆可能是第二次世界大战期间的防空洞。Ouseburn 信托基金会提供 700 米长的隧道导览，涵盖了地下通道的工程学、历史和当地故事。游客在感受诡异的黑暗时，会配备安全帽和手电筒。
OUSEBURN 农场 (OUSEBURN FARM) 在曾经的工业区 Ouseburn，最大的惊喜是构成这座经营性社区农场的广阔绿地。玻璃幕墙建筑坐落在 Byker 桥的拱门之下，一条感官小道蜿蜒穿过围场、花园和果园。游客可以喂食友好的猪、牛、鸡和山羊，全年还有一系列活动，包括春季的喂羊活动。
OUSEBURN
Ouseburn 毫无疑问是纽卡斯尔最酷的街区。这里曾是亚麻、煤炭和制陶业的中心，红砖烟囱和高耸的工厂依然在诉说着该地区的工业过去。但曾经嗡嗡作响的工厂和挤满货物的仓库，现在已变成了手工艺工作坊，为众多当地独立店铺提供产品。这里的纽卡斯尔棕啤 (Newcastle Brown) 产自精酿酿酒厂，夜晚的娱乐活动不再是喧闹的单身女派对，而更多的是私密的现场音乐场所和文艺咖啡酒吧。 ● SUZY POPE
饼干工厂 (THE BISCUIT FACTORY) 作为英国最大的独立艺术、工艺与设计画廊，饼干工厂坐落在一座宽广的维多利亚时代仓库中。除了不断更替的展览名录，书店、街头美食摊位、咖啡馆和艺术家商店也为人们提供了充足的到访理由。
ERNEST 咖啡酒吧 (ERNEST CAFÉ BAR) Ernest 咖啡酒吧部分是艺术和音乐场所，部分是酒吧，这里通常会有一些创意活动在进行。早午餐和晚餐菜单带有地中海风味，供应当地精酿啤酒，啤酒花园中色彩斑斓。
KILN Kiln 起初是一个位于破旧车库中的手工艺陶艺工作坊，顺便提供咖啡。渐渐地，这家咖啡馆/餐厅变得与陶艺工作坊一样出名。火是这里的核心；一台木材燃烧的炉子为用餐空间提供暖气，用扎塔尔 (za’atar) 和孜然调味的梅泽 (mezze) 菜肴在炭火上烤制，并盛放在隔壁空间手工烧制的陶瓷器皿中。
七层楼 (SEVEN STORIES) 因分布在一家前工厂的七层楼中而得名，Seven Stories 同时也是国家儿童图书中心。其收藏的插画、手稿和印刷书籍跨越了近 100 年，涵盖 250 位以上的作者。一楼设有商店和咖啡馆，这里总有面向儿童的文学活动，通过艺术、工艺和现场故事讲述让馆藏活起来。
没关系。回去睡吧。是雷声把我们吵醒的吗？还是那壮丽的闪电，将天空染成了冰山蓝？在去年买的廉价风扇的嗡嗡声中，我们渐渐注意到暴雨敲击天窗的鼓点声。这就像是沉浸在一种永久的“婴儿安抚白噪音”浴中——诚然，如果真能那样，我的生活将被改变。我们躺在那里低声嘀咕：云层后面那是分叉闪电，还是片状闪电？雷声是云朵在相互碰撞的声音吗？这次之后，热浪一定会消退吧？一个人能掌握的基础气象知识如此之少，却依然被允许出门，这真是太不可思议了。我能不能关掉风扇，以获得全立体声的沉浸感，即便那样我们会立刻死于中暑。这并不重要。一次又一次，天空泛白，墙壁发光，世界充满了魔法。如果一个人足够幸运，且处于安全干燥的环境中，还有什么比一场极其离谱的风暴更美好的吗？
在时间看来远超夏季风暴应有之久之后，夜晚终于开始安静下来。警笛在鸣响；雷声与闪电之间的间隔变长了，我 110% 确定，这意味着那些激烈碰撞的云朵和海洋级的电能正在远离。我骗自己说能睡着，但我实在太兴奋了。我有个计划。即便是在普通情况下（即处于持续的气候紧急状态，但并非特定的危机条件下），种植物的人与雨的关系也很复杂。我们欢迎雨，感激雨，但是……它是正确的那种雨吗？足够，但不过分？在夏天，小雨比没雨更糟糕。它诱导发芽——然后，就在那些令人心碎的第一片叶子刚破土而出，种壳还歪歪地包裹在其上时，砰！太阳出来了，幼苗瞬间枯萎。
对于容器园艺者来说，还有一个问题。在极端高温下，盆栽几乎瞬间就会干透。在每一个筋疲力尽的夏天过后，我发誓要减少屋顶露台上试图维持生存的植物数量，然后到了春天，我发现某个无名特工又偷偷跑去园艺中心，买回了更多的向日葵、酸模和薄荷。我那狭小的露台上（停顿）有 59 个塞得太满的盆栽。
GETTY IMAGES
我一直渴望一场大雨：足够彻底，能够渗入每一片枯萎的叶子下，突破干涸的土壤结壳，给一切来一次老派的浸润。即便在依然嘈杂的风扇声中，也能感觉到解脱来了。雨势在减弱。雷声已经停止。当我家所有理智的成员都在熟睡时，我像个深夜潜行的窃贼一样，悄悄地离开了床。我确实在努力学习那些理智之人的处世之道。我设法等到了闪电停止（安全第一），甚至还停下来穿上了我那套崭新的时尚睡衣（邻居第二）。我轻轻推开门，像奇迹一样，我自由了。
记者对“雨后土腥味”（petrichor）异常敏感。它是细菌排放的土臭素、臭氧和植物油的混合物，即使在极低浓度下我们也能察觉，也许是因为我们的祖先需要寻找水源。或者是因为我们需要在下雨时找点东西写。它
气味极佳。再加上番茄植株那股像腋下一样的辛香味、黑加仑叶的青涩酸味、姜味迷迭香、柠檬百里香以及狐狸尿味，我敢发誓，这世上没有什么比这更美味的了。我瞬间被淋透了，依然光着脚，试图判断那些盛满水的碟子是否意味着植物本身已经水分充足，是否有什么严重的枝条被吹断了，随后我放弃了，只是静静地凝视。外面是手电筒光照亮下的混沌；蜗牛们在它们生命中最美好的夜晚大快朵颐；蚯蚓们像国会议员在选区派对上那样忙碌；飞蛾在月光下显得苍白。每一片叶子都被啃食，每一株欧芹苗都被压扁，但在此时此刻，在这细雨中像个傻瓜一样站着，我从未感到如此亲近自然。最后当我回过神来，我像个心虚的孩子一样脱掉睡衣，跳上床，冷静地陷入瞬间的沉睡，在梦中，我像往常一样梦见一个巨大的花园，那里有被遗忘的露台，参天的大树，以及
附近一个被藤蔓覆盖的水果园，我在那里搜寻食物，而窗外的蚯蚓们正甜蜜地交欢，热浪在持续升级。●
Charlotte Mendelson 是《观察家报》 专栏作家、小说家 以及一名热衷于（虽非专家级） 的园艺爱好者
探索 Quooker 如何改变您的夏天。
享受即时的 100°C 沸水、冷水和气泡水——全部来自同一个水龙头。Quooker 水龙头可在两小时内*安装在您现有的厨房中，使用简单，且一旦使用便难以离弃。
100°C 沸水、冷水和气泡水
节省时间。高效节能。安全。
Quooker 改变了日常的厨房工作，同时能帮您节省时间、减少浪费并有助于提高安全性。
在您自己的家中观看其实际操作。
预约我们的专家团队进行免费的在线虚拟演示。他们将为您详细讲解各项功能，并一对一地回答任何问题。
扫描二维码以解锁专属优惠并预约虚拟演示，或访问 quooker.co.uk
体验中心
“
“
Quooker 不仅仅是一个水龙头，它是厨房里的变革者，也是那种能让你觉得钱花得值得的公司。
*安装时间可能因厨房布局而异。 全能水龙头
准备清爽晚餐
最近天气如此之热，以至于当夜晚终于吐出白天的热气时，想到要吃热晚餐就令人恐惧。清凉、温婉的食物适应这种天气，但有时会让人觉得不够尽兴。在炎热的日子里，当我想要一些令人满足的食物时，我会依赖少数几种适合生食，或者最多只需快速煎烤、拌入酱料并摆盘的食材（蔬菜、海鲜、水果）。海鲜在高温中光彩夺目，将其切成碎片，拌入新鲜柑橘和香草，配上一大碗脆玉米饼片端上桌。番茄仅需要橄榄油、盐和一些优质的陈年醋。油桃和桃子可以搭配面包、撕碎的新鲜奶酪和香草作为简单的晚餐，或者搭配冷奶油和碎杏仁饼干。
p46 蕾拉·斯利马尼 (Leila Slimani) 在思考什么？
一种在等待电风扇送达期间能让你勉强维持状态的甜点。如果你追求的是肉类，且正面临热浪的威胁，请提前计划，在周初烤一只（或两只）全鸡。在鸡身上涂抹干牛至、特级初榨橄榄油、盐、胡椒，然后放入烤盘。填入拍碎的大蒜瓣、柠檬皮丝以及你手边现有的任何香料，放入高温烤箱烘烤。取出后，让其完全冷却（克制住立即开吃诱惑），切成整齐的分量；到了周二，你就可以得意地站在厨房里，拌一份配有调味黄瓜的鸡肉沙拉，嘴角忍不住上扬。此外，考虑将典型的热食方案反转。一碗热气腾腾的拉面可以变成冰凉的夏季荞麦面配熏鲭鱼。这既能滋养灵魂，也证明了无论是在 30°C 还是 13°C，你都能享受优质面条的弹性和嚼劲。
清凉晚餐有一种令人愉悦的经济感。它对厨房的要求较低，进而对你的要求也较低。没有烤箱向屋内辐射怨气，没有汤锅要求关注，额头上也不会迅速渗出汗珠。相反，这里只有切碎、组装、搅拌、品尝和调整。偶尔快速煎一下，但基本上，准备过程变成了夜晚的一部分，而非对夜晚的干扰，让你有更多时间在光线渐暗时在户外徘徊。Ajo blanco（西班牙白凉汤）是一种由杏仁、黄瓜和大蒜组成的丝滑美味汤品，既简单得不可思议，又极具格调。它也非常多样，既可以作为烤鱼的绝佳配料，也可以作为腌渍西葫芦的酱汁，或者像我们今天这样，作为一份独立的晚餐，旁边配上几根咸香的黄油鳀鱼条。金枪鱼“con tomate”（番茄金枪鱼）将把你带到西班牙海岸边的一家餐厅。几年前，在圣卢卡尔-德巴拉梅达 (Sanlúcar de Barrameda)，有人在我的面前摆了一盘这个，从此它就深深印在我的美食记忆之角。我们一年中仅能享受寥寥几个温暖的夜晚，所以当这些夜晚到来且我们走进户外时，请确保你掌握了正确的食谱，并烹饪（或者说，半烹饪）正确的东西。这里有两个我每年都依赖的惊艳食谱。它们端上桌时既没有蒸汽也没有隆重的仪式，带着仿佛仍留在藤蔓上的番茄的明亮感，以及爽脆到能折断的黄瓜和杏仁，以及散发着夏季气息的煎原色金枪鱼。
在金枪鱼中心仍呈 诱人淡粉色时上桌”
这款菜肴灵感源自杰雷斯（Jerez）海岸附近享用的一道美食，是处理一块绝美金枪鱼肉的绝佳方式。金枪鱼经过轻微调味和香煎，中心仍保持着诱人的粉红色，搭配最能体现夏季气息的酱汁。研磨的番茄泥加入雪莉醋提升风味，再以带有青草气息且光泽亮丽的橄榄油增加浓郁感。这是一道简单的菜肴，但其风味极具冲击力。
前菜 4 人份。准备时间 25 分钟 大熟番茄 2 个 雪莉醋 1 汤匙 特级初榨橄榄油 3 汤匙 芝麻 3 汤匙 孜然籽 1 汤匙 香菜籽 1 汤匙 茴香籽 1 汤匙 金枪鱼腰脊肉 300g 第戎芥末酱 1 汤匙 细香葱 1 小把 片状盐
将番茄横向对半切开（不要切断果蒂），将切面在放在碗上的粗孔擦丝器上研磨。我喜欢在擦丝器上以圆周运动研磨番茄，这样不会产生长条状的果肉，而能得到均匀的番茄泥。持续研磨直到只剩下皮。对剩余的番茄半球重复此操作。 在番茄泥中加入（大量）盐、雪莉醋和特级初榨橄榄油调味。品尝一下。混合物应该是甜中带酸且调味充足的，最后能感受到淡淡的青草味橄榄油。在我看来，这几乎是番茄季节能达到的最高境界。 将芝麻与全粒香料混合。倒入托盘并均匀铺开。用盐给金枪鱼调味，并在表面刷上芥末酱。将其在种子混合物中滚动，使其均匀覆盖。 将煎锅大火预热。倒入大量橄榄油，使其加热至接近烟点。小心地放入金枪鱼，两面香煎，每面煎的时间不要超过 20-30 秒。如果锅温过高或种子开始焦糊，迅速将鱼取出，更换新油后重新开始。 当各面均煎好后，将鱼肉放在切菜板上。将细香葱切碎并撒在金枪鱼上。使用你最长、最锋利的刀，将金枪鱼切成薄片。利用刀刃的全长，施加极小的压力，用长线条轻轻地来回锯切。如果你试图将刀向下用力压入肉中，切面会变得凌乱。 将番茄混合物舀在盛菜盘中，上面铺上金枪鱼腰脊肉薄片。小心地在每片鱼肉上撒少许片状盐并淋上少量橄榄油。
这是另一种版本的西班牙冷汤（gazpacho），采用了杏仁、辛辣生大蒜和几种惊喜食材。最终呈现的汤品极其美味，口感令人愉悦。将坚果在杏仁奶中浸泡一夜，并使用强力搅拌机搅拌，可以获得最惊人的丝滑质感。橄榄油和雪莉醋赋予了这款汤独特的个性，所以使用时无需吝啬。
4 人份。准备时间 30 分钟，外加一夜腌制
漂白去皮杏仁 200g 大蒜瓣 2 瓣 黄瓜 400g 新鲜白面包屑 70g 杏仁奶 400ml 浑浊苹果汁 200ml
特级初榨橄榄油 120ml 糖 20g 细海盐 15g 雪莉醋 30ml
配料： 干葱头 1 个 雪莉醋 1 汤匙 黄瓜 ¼ 个 夏伦甜瓜或坎塔卢普甜瓜 ¼ 个 烤盐杏仁 1 把 特级初榨橄榄油 盐
鳀鱼吐司： 酸面包 2 厚片 冷藏黄油 4 片 坎塔布里亚鳀鱼（或类似产品） 8 条 片状盐
将杏仁和粗切的蒜末倒入一个大碗或特百惠（Tupperware）保鲜盒中。将黄瓜去皮并切成小丁，加入碗中。接着将面包屑、杏仁奶、苹果汁、橄榄油、糖和盐加入碗中。盖好盖子，放入冰箱冷藏腌制一夜。
准备食用时，将汤的内容物倒入大功率搅拌机中，高速搅拌至极其顺滑。我会搅拌很长时间，大约连续 5-6 分钟。这会自然地加热汤汁，但要注意不要加热过度，否则会产生苦味。如果需要，请分批操作，并根据需要多次暂停让汤冷却。将搅拌好的汤通过极细的筛网过滤到碗中，并加入雪利醋调味。将汤冷藏至非常冰凉。
在汤冷藏期间，准备配料。将干葱头切成圆环状放入小碗中。倒入少许雪利醋，腌制几分钟。将黄瓜和甜瓜切成均匀的小丁并加入碗中。撒入几颗杏仁，淋上少许橄榄油，搅拌均匀。
将面包烤至酥脆，切成 8 块长条形手指面包。在每块面包上放一片冷黄油、一条鳀鱼，并撒上少许脆海盐。
将冷藏好的汤倒入冰过的碗中，最后撒上汤的配料，淋上少许橄榄油和一滴雪利醋，面包摆在旁边。●
奈杰·斯莱特 (Nigel Slater) 将于下周回归
Hausu 11a Station Way, London SE15 4RX (hausulondon.co.uk)。小盘菜 £4, 起，大盘菜 £24, 起，甜点 £5, 起，葡萄酒 £6.50/£32 起
在我从出餐口的“围观”状态中恢复过来并点完餐后，两杯咸鲜的 Gibson 鸡尾酒和一小杯鸡汤端上了桌，汤中加入了柠檬草和虾酱。这道 £4 的随手补单汤品简直是个惊喜。我们用急促、滚烫的一口汤，配上几口清冽的马提尼——这是对表面漂浮着的、由香菜混合而成的油脂圆点最理想的冲刷。接着是一块皮脆的烤鸡腿肉，搭配着紫苏叶、青柠块和腌制 Guindilla 辣椒这“三位一体”的配料。然后是一块淋上螃蟹浓汤的鮟鱈鱼。当我舀起最后一口汤时，我已经计划好了要再次光顾。Hausu 位于 Peckham Rye 火车站的一个分支处。（如果这听起来毫无格调，请不必担心——只有宽敞的瓷砖浴室才暗示这里是一个交通枢纽，而且装潢得很迷人。）一楼分为三个房间。如果你也容易分心，请继续走到最里面的房间，那里用吧台凳取代了皮革卡座，用开放式厨房的景观取代了讨喜的柔和灯光。二楼的一家鸡尾酒吧利用薄纱窗帘，将方正的平面布局切割成一个个私密的小角落。这家餐厅的名字与一部 1977 年的日本恐怖喜剧同名，它拒绝效忠于任何一种单一菜系，但菜单极其丰富，几乎每道菜都带有一点巧思。猪肉番茄面（Pork pomodoro）配吐司，而一个形状像填充甜甜圈的虾吐司，实际上有一半是扇贝。快速浏览可见一份主厨钟爱的咸鲜食材清单：韩式辣酱（gochu-jang）、培根裹肉片（filetto lardato）、味噌、野蒜。一个比我更乐观的人在读完这份清单——甜点前有 23 道菜，随后又是 5 道甜点——后，可能会觉得它慷慨且俏皮。但在到店前的扫视中，我曾怀疑这是否是“概念先行，食物其次”。
所有这些时髦的元素：吸睛的扇贝、繁复的生鱼片（crudo）、无乳制品西冷牛排，菜系在意大利和中国之间跳跃，显得缺乏重心。但这种解读对任何餐厅来说都过于苛刻，尤其是像这样的一家店，它由首次担任主厨的 Holly Middleton-Joseph 在 2024 年刚满 30 岁时，与她的哥哥 Tom 及其好友 Christian Williams 共同开设。（Tom 负责饮品计划和前厅；Christian 负责经营。）这三人组都是首次创业的餐厅经营者，没有任何财务支持者。如果他们在另一个用餐区安排轮番上阵的 DJ，或者用一个适合在 Instagram 上拍照的菜单来吸引年轻的约会人群，
这对他们来说是好事。这里很有趣。而且至关重要的是，Middleton-Joseph 的食物远比这个已经很有趣的概念所需要的更出色。在这里，酱汁的运用和技术支撑了所有的灵动跳跃。Middleton-Joseph 将她的跨菜系尝试描述为“多元欧洲风格，并融合了大量东南亚元素”，她在前往 Lore of the Land、Mountain，随后进入 Barnes 的 the Waterman’s Arms 之前，曾在 Camberwell Arms 工作。在我的第二次访问中，带着充分的好奇心，且没有需要顾及的约会对象，我先从扇贝开始，然后尝试了折叠精准的 cappelletti（小饺子）。也许她对面食的娴熟掌握源于倾向于意大利风格的 Camberwell Arms；也许她对极具鲜味扇贝的胆量——她的扇贝配有大量 XO 酱——是在向另一个绝佳作品致敬，即她前主厨 Sam Andrews 在 Barnes 制作的配咖喱的版本。但仅仅在 Hausu 经营两年，Middleton-Joseph 就显然对自己把控的口味充满信心，并能专业地进行层叠处理。关于“海陆大餐”的复兴有很多议论；但在 Hausu，Middleton-Joseph 并非只是在牛排旁摆上几只烤小龙虾，而是利用干虾和那块 filetto lardato（培根裹菲力牛排）的边角料来增强 XO 酱的鲜味，然后将其淋在烤双壳类海鲜上。许多主厨可能会理所当然地提供一份简短的甜点清单，仅含冰淇淋和一两款塔类，而 Middleton-Joseph 则推出了丰富的大黄填充泡芙和果冻顶潘纳科塔。这并不是说它完美无瑕。在我的第二次访问中，一份顶有薄切 cedro（香柠檬）的侧边沙拉感觉像是一个缺乏调味的随手之作，而撒在烤米冰淇淋周围的四川花椒风味杏仁糖，为了我的牙齿着想，在 Robot Coupe 料理机中可能还需要再多打 10 秒钟。但那份放在刨碎的 Vesuvio 番茄和橄榄油之上的 cappelletti——将 pan con tomate（番茄面包）重新构思为面食酱汁——简洁且自信，在晚餐结束后很久仍留在我的脑海中。在我的第一次访问中，稍微欠缺的是鮟鱼，它处于刚好不透明的状态。但酥脆的鱼皮和浓郁的浓汤，加上三颗新土豆（每颗都经过优雅的修整，然后在咸味的藏红花浴中烹煮），让我几乎原谅了鱼肉稍微欠火候的问题。这里很有趣。但其之下是大胆且细腻的食物，是我希望它既能赢得名声又能长久延续的那种。如果这是 Middleton-Joseph 的第一章，我想看看接下来的章节。 ●
一道我无法忘记的菜
Jonathan Nunn 对西伦敦 Dong Yuan 的 干虾炒冬瓜感到惊喜
作为一名餐厅评论家，有许多方面是没什么好抱怨的，但请允许我对这一点进行吐槽：当你像我这样因为工作而频繁外出就餐——有时一年多达 500 次——你对惊喜的承受能力自然会下降。因此，当我的朋友杰斯（Jess）告诉我，位于阿克顿（Acton）帕克罗亚尔（Park Royal）工业园区的一家餐厅在中国社交媒体平台小红书上爆红时，我压低了期待。
然而，东圆（Dong Yuan）令人惊叹，它是帕克罗亚尔地区繁荣的黎巴嫩和叙利亚面包店群中的一个异类。在西伦敦的一小片沥青路面上，主厨崔耀华（Yaohua Cui）将一个商业中心单元变成了一家你会在湖南路边见到的那种餐厅，在剧烈的火柱中一盘接一盘地出锅炒菜。
在这里用餐期间，有一道菜一直留在我的脑海中。它不是那些人们通常与湘菜联系在一起的菜肴，也不是那些覆盖着崔主厨调制的红绿亮色辣椒、使其口感极其辛辣的菜。相反，这是一道清淡的冬瓜菜，冬瓜被切成半透明的圆片，炖至酥软，然后覆盖上含有微小淡水虾的轻盈酱汁。第一口尝到的是虾带来的如岩池般微咸的味道，随后是冬瓜的清爽，且保留了恰到好处的口感。这是一道具有极深底蕴和技巧的菜肴，当它端上来时，让一群自以为是的餐厅作家和厨师们哑口无言。我无比高兴地发现自己预判错了。 ●
乔纳森·纳恩（Jonathan Nunn）是 Vittles 的创始人兼共同编辑
罗伯特·塞缪尔·汉森 (ROBERT SAMUEL HANSON)
这个漫长而炎热的夏季中，脱颖而出的明星是两个已经被传为“下一个大热门”好一段时间的白葡萄品种。阿尔巴里诺 (albariño) 和 维蒙蒂诺 (vermentino) 都能在人们感觉像在永久温水浴中艰难行走的一天之后，精准地带来清爽甜美的冷却感；而且两者都已进入了超越特定原产地、成为独立品牌的阶段。
阿尔巴里诺或许在远离其伊比利亚半岛西北角家乡的地方引起了最大的“清凉水花”。直到 2010 年代，西班牙的加利西亚 (Galicia) 和葡萄牙北部的绿酒区 (Vinho Verde) 实际上是唯一大规模种植阿尔巴里诺的地方。
这一区域依然是我最喜爱的该葡萄品种样本的来源，它将咸柠檬皮的清新与多汁的白桃、梨和杏子相结合。例如，口感极其锐利的 Waitrose No 1 La Val Albariño, Rías Baixas 2025 (£14)，酸甜可口的 Mendes & Symington Contacto Alvarinho, Vinho Verde 2025 (价格 £16 起，购自 the Wine Society; Drink Finder)；以及极具咸鲜感的 Pazo Señorans Albariño 2024 (£23.99, Virgin Wines)。
但它现在也以日益时尚的形式出现在南非、加利福尼亚、新西兰、乌拉圭以及法国南部的葡萄园中。例如来自法国南部朗格多克 (Languedoc) 的、带有淡雅花香的 Bleu d’Alba Albariño, Pays d’Oc 2025 (£14.95, Tanners)；以及
来自乌拉圭卡内洛内斯 (Canelones) 的 M&S Juanicó Albariño, 2025 (£10, Marks & Spencer)，它带有茉莉花香调的油桃味和温和的葡萄柚皮苦味；还有新西兰的 Nautilus Estate Albariño 2024 (£25.99, Monty’s Wine Emporium)，其风格简直与加利西亚产区一模一样。
我逐渐将维蒙蒂诺视为阿尔巴里诺的地中海双胞胎，因为它在整个地中海沿岸的意大利和法国都已根深蒂固。在最佳状态下，它能提供一波熟透的柑橘气息，从柠檬、青柠到柑橘和葡萄柚。在一些简单的样本中，它有一种类似 Starburst 软糖那种让人流口水的的人造酸甜感，但最好的样本与阿尔巴里诺一样，可能会在新鲜柑橘类水果的果皮、白皮和果汁之外，带来一丝咸鲜感和叶类草本特性。
巨大的西西里合作社 Cantine Settesoli 提供了进入维蒙蒂诺世界的良好入门之选，其 Settesoli Vermentino 2024 (£8.25, Tesco) 具有桃子和梨的味道，并带有微妙的花卉维度和柠檬般的酸度。更高级的选择来自朗格多克生产商 Domaine les Yeuses Vermentino, Pays d’Oc 2025 (£12.50, Lea & Sandeman)，它散发着现榨青柠和叶类草本的香气，就像在发烧的头上敷了一把冰凉的手。同一零售商还提供了更高水准的绝佳托斯卡纳产 Pagliatura Vermentino Toscana 2025 (£20.95, Lea & Sandeman)，这款干白葡萄酒具有类似于阿尔巴里诺的甜油桃迸发感，以及柠檬和青柠的轻盈气息。
澳大利亚和南非的酿酒师也日益被地中海品种所吸引。我非常喜欢 Bin No 20 Margaret River Vermentino 2025 (£13.50, the Wine Society) 中柑橘类白皮味、Alka Seltzer 矿物质感与多汁油桃的结合；而南非的 Bacco Estate Bacio del Sole Vermentino, Paarl 2025 (£19.75, Oxford Wine) 则拥有绝佳的桃子和柠檬层级感，
专为这个最漫长、最炎热的夏季中那些漫长的温暖夜晚而设计。 ●
本周之酒 Tuscan Pagliatura Vermentino Toscana 2025, £20.95, Lea & Sandeman
既然我们已经深陷夏日的煎熬之中，并且像一个个愤怒的小日晷一样集体向天空竖起中指，那么是时候考虑如何在继续饮酒（且负责任地饮酒）的同时保持凉爽了。我一直不擅长应对高温。我的身体各处战略性地分布着脂肪和肌肉，以帮助我在苏格兰的冬季保持温暖。我的基因构造中没有任何一项是为了能在城市热浪中的公园里撑过几个小时而设计的。因此，保持凉爽是我的行动准则；大多数饮品必须加满冰块，我甚至不介意把手伸进我的 Aperol Spritz 鸡尾酒里，然后用冰块揉搓我的后颈。冰块是必需品，但如果能将冰冻元素融入饮品本身就更好了。于是，sgroppino 登场了。
据说这种饮品创于 16 世纪的威尼斯，当时冰块（以及随之而来的凉爽感）是一种特权，而鸡尾酒甚至还不存在。跨大西洋的冰块贸易直到 19 世纪才步入正轨，因此当时的冰块是在冬季从河流和湖泊中切割下来，然后全年存储在“冰窖”中。因此，sgroppino 曾是贵族的饮品，或者是那些有时间操心如何获取冰块而不是躲避瘟疫的人所饮用的。当时的配方很简单，直到今天依然如此：一种蒸馏酒、少许糖和冰，主要以柠檬调味。搅拌在一起后，它看起来像是一种冰沙——而这正是它如今的呈现方式。现在，人们使用柠檬雪葩（sorbet）——这是一种巧妙地将柑橘的酸爽与甜味结合在一起的方法——搭配果香味浓郁的 prosecco 起泡酒。雪葩使 prosecco 产生泡沫并保持饮品的低温。如今，加入的烈酒通常是伏特加或金酒，尽管在过去，它可能是一种葡萄蒸馏酒，如生命之水（eau de vie）。我敢大胆猜测，在我居住的伦敦，大多数人对 sgroppino 的初步认识可能是通过 Bar Swift 接触到的。这是一个没有连锁店感觉的连锁店，在三个地点设有分店（Borough, Shoreditch, Soho）。他们的 sgroppino 售价为 £9，使用接骨木花利口酒 Saint Germain 代替伏特加，使其口感更轻盈（这大概就是为什么它售价 £9 —— 比大多数同等质量的其他鸡尾酒要便宜）。只要尊重柠檬、prosecco 和雪葩这些组成部分，这里也有解读的空间。在爱丁堡的 CC Blooms，他们的 sgroppino 是以 Malfy Gin con Limone 为基底的，并且可以选择柠檬、树莓或黑醋栗口味的雪葩。而且这个配方简单到可以在家执行。记得我上周关于“一大壶鸡尾酒”的专栏吗？那么，在壶中按 3:1 的比例量好 prosecco 和伏特加，轻轻搅拌以免失去气泡感，然后小心地倒入浅碟形酒杯（coupes）中，最后在顶端加上一勺雪葩。重复此过程，直到你达到那种朦胧幸福的预期效果。不过在这样的高温下，这应该不需要很长时间。 ●
道具造型 ALEXANDER BREEZE；饮品造型 TARA GARNELL
T
罐头
罐装鱼类正处于流行之时。 工作午餐时，我们可能会选择超市自有品牌的沙丁鱼，但对于那些设计前卫的高端品种罐头，我们毫无抵抗力——目前这些罐头是我们最喜欢的食物礼品，或者是去公园进行一次适合发在 Instagram 上的野餐时的首选。正如厨师 Tom Aronica 去年告诉《观察家报》的那样，它可以用于各种食谱。“我将其用于沙拉酱或制作风味蛋黄酱；金枪鱼油尤其适合做蛋黄酱，因为能做出那种美味的意式金枪鱼酱 (tonnato) 的效果，”他说道。他提醒道，风味过浓的油可能需要稀释，但只要考虑好风味搭配，就没问题。“例如，我不会把金枪鱼油淋在煎蛋上……不过，公平地说，那样可能也挺好。” ●
亚历颇风味鮟鱵 £9.20, Hevva! (The Tinned Fish Market) 鱼源自纽林 (Newlyn)，随后在附近的农场烹制——这款采用了加拉姆马萨拉 (garam masala) 酥皮煎制，并保存在柑橘香料椰子油中。
番茄酱沙丁鱼 £5.50, Nuri (SousChef) 经典，简单，最适合将其压在法棍面包上，打造一份极低投入、高回报的晚餐。
洋葱酱鳟鱼片 £12.95, ABC+ (FishTins) 搭配黑麦脆片食用，可加或不加少许奶油芝士，最后点缀一点水芹菜。
腌渍贻贝 (Escabeche) £7.95, Rockfish 我们目前最喜欢的保鲜贻贝，味道酸辣，出自名闻遐迩的鱼贩转职厨师 Mitch Tonks 之手。
特级初榨橄榄油浸熏小沙丁鱼 £6.49, Jose Gourmet (Selfridges) 你不能通过罐装鱼的封面来评判它的质量——除非那是 José Gourmet 的产品：无论内外，它们都非常出色。
海藻黄油鳕鱼 £12, Sea Sisters 可持续的季节性英国鱼类——该品牌生产的每一罐都美味，但这款鳕鱼堪称顶尖。在打开之前将罐头放入热水浴中使黄油融化，然后直接堆在酸面包吐司上。
橄榄油浸苏格兰鲭鱼片 £4.95, Sound Seafood (The Tinned Fish Market) 将其加入含有甜菜根、小扁豆和碎山羊奶酪的沙拉中。
文明是如何消亡的？ 30% 在柬埔寨，早晨八点，当我远眺吴哥遗迹那雄伟的轮廓时，气温已经达到了 30C。一千年前，这里曾是一个拥有巨大权力和财富的帝国首都。而如今，丛林将其重新夺回。根须缠绕着石像面孔，枝干穿透寺庙屋顶，寂静取代了百万生灵的低语。导游解释说，崩溃的原因仍不确定。宗教战争、统治者的贪婪、疾病、气候变化。帝国倒塌的原因很多，而且通常没有人能准确说出何时达到了临界点。我再次看向这些遗迹。我想知道，高棉皇帝们是否能想象到，有一天，毁灭将在发送一条消息的时间内被承诺。
我儿子的未来——以及文学的未来？ 50% 在飞往河内的飞机上，我 15 岁的儿子正在阅读玛格丽特·杜拉斯。我没有告诉他，有时我觉得这一切都在悄然流逝。文学似乎不再重要，而那些仍然相信知识、细微差别和得体的人，似乎与这个世界越来越格格不入。如今重要的是可见度。金钱。影响力。一个人能聚集的粉丝数量。我为他担心。担心他将继承的世界。在夜晚，这些想法再次浮现。我想象一个烈火焚烧的世界，在那里，被淘汰的男女在对他们无法理解的机器愤怒咆哮。我将我们想象成巨大水族馆里的鱼，在那些系统设计者冷漠的目光下无尽地打转。 在柬埔寨，红色高棉宣布了“零年”。他们想要抹除过去，净化世界的缺陷。此类梦想总是始于更新的承诺。而它们最终以摧毁所有使我们成为人类的事物而告终。今天，其他的幻想正在出现。它们承诺超越、掌控、永生。它们梦想一个由计算主导的世界，在那里，欲望本身可以被预测、简化、优化。 在河内，我遇到一个男人，他告诉我他的父母曾经拥有一一个小型的法语书籍图书馆——雨果、拉马丁、福楼拜。他 70 岁了，仍然能凭记忆背诵整段文字。当他说话时，我的儿子在倾听，眼中噙满泪水。在 1975 年，当那
这位法籍摩洛哥作家兼记者同时也是埃马纽埃尔·马克龙总统在法语国家国际组织 (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie) 的个人代表。她凭借小说《温柔之歌》(Chanson Douce) 获得了 2016 年龚古尔奖。
共产主义者建立起独裁统治后，书籍被他们夺走了。这个男人心中的愤怒似乎依然未消：“他们告诉我们这是资本主义的产物。但资本主义与文学有什么关系？”我无法回答。
谁从怀旧中获益？ 20% 我们经常听到，以前的情况更好。过去拥有一种我们不再知道如何保存的秩序、美感和连贯性。然而，怀旧一直让我感到不安。也许是因为我在很小的时候就移民了，不想成为那些将故乡理想化并不断沉溺于回忆的移民之一。顺便一提，值得注意的是，离散群体往往投票给保守派。海外匈牙利人大多投票给欧尔班，土耳其移民则投票给埃尔多安。在法国，怀旧能卖书，能塑造想象力。它描绘了一个更简单的国家，一个在一切据称出错之前的时代。在一家杂志的封面页上，国民联盟党 (Rassemblement National) 的年轻领导人若尔丹·巴尔德拉与一位公主合影。这位目前在民调中领先的男子由此激起了一种阴郁的怀旧之情，
向往一个贵族式的法国，在那里，第一夫人将是金发、天主教徒且是路易十四的直系后裔。怀旧具有选择性。它忘记了那个过去还包含什么：暴力、排斥，以及强加给那些不合群之人的沉默。也许怀旧与其说是关于过去，不如说是关于一个人在其中所占据的位置。我们思念的不是那个世界，而是我们在其中所处的地位。我理解这种诱惑。回顾过去是为了逃避不确定性，想象稳定曾经存在过。但这也是一种拒绝面对现状的方式，是对现状的复杂性、要求和矛盾的逃避。当我看着儿子阅读时，我意识到，重要的不是哀悼一个已不存在的世界，也不是将一个从未存在过的世界理想化。而是要问我们选择保留什么，以及我们愿意放弃什么。文明不会一夜之间消失。它们在
我们接受的措辞中，在我们忽视的价值观中，缓慢地被侵蚀。也许问题不在于它们如何死去，而在于我们如何允许它们消逝——以及最终，我们决定什么才是值得挽救的。 ●
在《观察家报》商店购买今夏最热门的平装书可享受 15% 的折扣
访问 observershop.co.uk/paperbacks
或致电 020 3176 2930
• observer.co.uk 26.07.26 2 本周
皇家马德里筹划 签下曼城的罗德里
据报道，皇家马德里正致力于一项交易，以签下曼彻斯特城中场及世界杯冠军罗德里，而阿森纳则对维尼修斯 (Vinícius Jr.) 感兴趣。在这些潜在的巨额交易之前，摩根·罗杰斯以 £117m 的价格从阿斯顿维拉转会至切尔西已获确认——而亚历杭德罗·加纳乔则以赛季租借形式反向转会——以及埃利奥特·安德森以 £116m 转会至曼城。切尔西也接近签下水晶宫中后卫马克桑斯·拉夸，而伊普斯维奇为凯尔特前锋前田大然支付了 £10m，克里斯恩西奥·萨默维尔则离开西汉姆联加盟希拉尔。
诺亚·莱尔斯在全美锦标赛上创下100米世界领先成绩
赔率13-2的卡尔帕娜在雅士谷赢得惊险比赛 去年的亚军卡尔帕娜在雅士谷赢得了一场惊心动魄的乔治六世与伊丽莎白女王锦标赛，这对训练师安德鲁·鲍尔丁来说是一场充满情感的胜利。鲍尔丁的父亲伊恩于1月去世，距他骑乘Mill Reef在乔治六世赛中获胜已过去55年，而这是安德鲁·鲍尔丁首次在该项赛事中获胜。赔率13-2的卡尔帕娜由科林·基恩骑乘，以一个半马位的优势击败了2025年的冠军卡兰达根。
鲁特有望接替斯托克斯成为英格兰队长
在继续寻找新测试赛主教练的同时，乔伊·鲁特成为接替本·斯托克斯担任英格兰测试赛队长的热门人选。预计鲁特将击败白球赛队长哈里·布鲁克胜任该职，尽管他成为了自迈克尔·阿瑟顿以来，唯一一名在执掌球队超过20场比赛后仍无胜绩的英格兰队长（他在2017至2022年间担任队长）。在其他方面，前澳大利亚教练贾斯汀·兰格已被排除在接替布兰登·麦卡伦的人选之外，格拉摩根主教练理查德·道森和前英格兰击球手乔纳森·特罗特均在竞争之列。明年夏天的赛程为
良言
如果你当时在直播中看到安迪·伯纳姆成为短短十多年来的第七任首相（谁会不想看呢？），那么你的眼睛没有欺骗你——在唐宁街10号外的人群中确实有彼得·里德，他正欢迎这位同样支持埃弗顿队的同僚入驻新家。“恭喜，快进去吧，伙计，”里德告诉天空新闻。
作者：安德鲁·巴特勒
报道：乔治·西姆斯
Emirates GBR在今天波茨茅斯的SailGP比赛中赢得了一场关键的第六场赛程，从而保留了进入四船决赛的希望。主场舰队累计获得7分，落后于赛事领先者阿尔忒弥斯队6分。安德鲁·马修斯/PA
并非那两位 大卫·贝克汉姆和罗纳尔多将参加英联邦运动会。当然，指的不是那两位足球运动员，而是两名以足球偶像命名的印度自行车运动员。大卫·贝克汉姆·埃尔卡托楚贡戈及其队友罗纳尔多·辛格·莱顿贾姆将在格拉斯哥的克里斯·霍伊赛车场代表国家出战。
还得熨衣服”
泰森·富里谈为何他不会观看 安东尼·约书亚在沙特阿拉伯 对阵克里斯蒂安·普伦加的比赛
男队和女队的本土灰烬系列赛（Ashes）也已确认，男队测试赛将在特伦特桥、勋爵板球场、埃德加斯顿、南安普顿和椭圆球场举行。
诺里斯获得 匈牙利大奖赛杆位
刘易斯·汉密尔顿在今日的匈牙利大奖赛中因阻挡杆位获得者兰多·诺里斯的队友奥斯卡·皮亚斯特里而被处罚掉三格发车位。诺里斯在被处罚前以 12 百分之一秒之差胜过汉密尔顿夺得杆位。汉密尔顿在法拉利车队的队友查尔斯·勒克莱尔将从第二位起跑，排在基米·安东内利和皮亚斯特里之前。与此同时，马来西亚将于 10 月举办一场大奖赛，以替代今年早些时候推迟的巴林分站赛。预计将在吉隆坡的雪邦赛道举行。
勒布朗·詹姆斯将在 费城结束职业生涯
41 岁的勒布朗·詹姆斯在离开洛杉矶湖人队八年后，将在费城 76 人队结束其 NBA 生涯。詹姆斯作为 21 世纪最伟大的 NBA 球员以及联盟历史总得分王，曾随之前三支俱乐部赢得 NBA 总冠军，他在 X 上写道：“我相信我可以帮助费城 76 人队成为一支冠军之师。”他签署了一份为期两年的老将底薪合同，旨在增强一支已经拥有全明星球员泰里斯·马克西、杰伦·布朗和乔尔·恩比德的精英 76 人阵容。
辛纳与德约科维奇将 缺席加拿大公开赛
亚尼克·辛纳放弃了
纽约仅着袜子 在“足球运动员未认真对待 世界杯后休整期”的新闻中，法国边锋迈克尔·奥利塞（左）在国家队被淘汰出局后，与一群纽约当地人一起踢球。这位拜仁慕尼黑球星参加了一场 GoodRec 比赛，穿着不适合踢球的宽松裤子，且仅着袜子参赛。
在一年内赢得全部九项大师 1000 赛的机会，因为他宣布退出加拿大公开赛以优先考虑健康。辛纳和诺瓦克·德约科维奇都将不在蒙特利尔参赛，赛事总监瓦莱丽·特特罗（Valérie Tétreault）表示：“我们认为，过去几年这种最后一刻退赛的频繁程度，反映了我们这项运动一个更广泛的问题。”卡洛斯·阿尔卡拉斯也因在 4 月份遭受的手腕伤势仍处于康复期而缺席。
克洛普执掌德国队， 皮尔洛被任命为意大利主帅
尤尔根·克洛普威胁称，如果他的家人被媒体骚扰，他将辞去德国队主教练的新职，并表示“足球可以改变一个国家”。他说：“尽管我看到了你们是如何对待 [朱利安] 纳格尔斯曼的，但我还是接下了这份工作。在你们不再需要我的那天，我就会离开。”克洛普还暗示这将是他顶级足球生涯的最后一份工作。与此同时，在佩普·瓜迪奥拉拒绝该职位后，安德烈亚·皮尔洛将被任命为意大利队主教练。
深挖细节 一名 Commonwealth Games 志愿者在亚当·拉姆齐-皮蒂（Adam Ramsay-Peaty）的 100 米蛙泳预赛前，不得不脱掉衣服以修理一个泳道分隔线。这个“固定眼”——将泳道分隔线连接到泳池末端的配件——沉没了，导致这位积极的志愿者跳入池中将其找回。比赛因此延迟了 15 分钟。
塔德伊·波加恰 庆祝他几乎确定 获得第五次环法 冠军。
Jasper Jacobs/ Belga/Avalon
W
每当一个巨星必须离世，我们才能充分意识到他们是多么特别时，问题出在我们身上，而非他们身上。对于凯文·基根（Kevin Keegan）而言，在他 40 年的球员和教练生涯中，一些里程碑式的失望消散了，使得关于他人格和成就的真实故事能够散发出应有的光芒。
在伟大的体育生命中，逝者生活在一个由好与坏、赢与输、崇拜与蔑视组成的二元世界里。现在回想起来，在基根上周在如此多尊重与温暖的送别中离去之后，在之前的 40 年里，公众和媒体曾对他施加过极其简单化且残酷的评价，这显得很奇怪。这其中有一个教训：也许我们不应该为了执着于一个人生命中 10% 的失败，而牺牲掉 90% 的创造力、兴奋感和快乐？
在加菲尔德·索伯斯爵士（Sir Garfield Sobers）的逝世让其生命重新焕发光彩几天后，对基根的悼词描述了一段近乎荒诞地丰富的人生历史：他曾是一名工人阶级的“斯塔哈诺夫”式劳模，比尔·香克利（Bill Shankly）的改造项目，利物浦的超级巨星， 1970 年代顶着卷发烫发的电视偶像，两度获得汉堡队在职期间的欧洲足球先生，纽卡斯尔联队的救世主（无论作为球员还是教练），以及英格兰队的主帅——其执教生涯在象征性地结束于旧温布利球场拆除前的最后一场比赛。任何能像基根那样让人们冲向“Woolies”商店购买 Brut 须后水的人，都是一个彻头彻尾的广告天才。
上述总结省略了他帮助富勒姆和曼彻斯特城升级的卓越工作——以及许多其他成就。重点不在于重复我们已经读过的赞美之词，但你希望基根也能看到这些，因为在他的一生中，他很容易被批评所伤害，并且对所有事情——无论是好是坏——都以一种敏锐的感知力去体会。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 事不过三：基根在 1979 年的一场英国（本土）锦标赛中庆祝第三粒进球，比分 3-1。 Steve Powell/Allsport/Getty Images
这种轻视之深，以至于 掩盖了其一生 之成就， 而这成就 是极少数伟大的运动员 能有希望 效仿的。
这有助于解释为什么情感驱动了 他对足球能够且应该成为什么的看法。 在他那极其多元的历程中——从 1968 年的斯坎索普到 2008 年在纽卡斯尔经历的一次注定失败的第二次执教——与其紧密相连的负面评价根源于四个主要方面。 首先是人们将他归类为一名“苦力型”球员，一个最大限度地利用有限天赋的自学者，例如，与他在利物浦的继任者、动作更像芭蕾舞者的肯尼·达格利什相比。观察基根那不安分、不懈的边路进攻录像，试着否认他如果在今天将价值 £120m-plus。单纯的劳碌奔波从未赢得过欧冠冠军或两次欧洲足球先生奖项。 其次是他 1982 年世界杯代表英格兰队时错过的一次简单头球，此前他因背部受伤缺席了前四场比赛。那次失误被允许玷污了他的国际赛生涯，而他的国际赛生涯其实并不比英格兰队在他那个 era. 的锦标赛记录更混乱。 第三是纽卡斯尔在 1996 年的冠军争夺战中，被曼联反超 12 分，以及基根此前在电视上的爆发（“如果我们能击败他们，我会非常高兴”），群体思维已判定这成了最终的崩盘；但如果一支才华横溢、敢于冒险的纽卡斯尔队能够顶住压力，这段话本会被铭记为心理战大师的集结号。 同样，以积极或消极的态度来看待一件事情的人类选择，在凯文·基根执教纽卡斯尔的案例中比在任何其他案例中都更适用。不，他们没有赢得冠军。是的，观看他们的比赛是一种特权——是一场感官的盛宴。即便没有奖杯，基根仍处于英国足球教练的顶尖行列，他们打造了永恒且令人心潮澎湃的球队。 而第四点必然是他 2000 年 10 月在温布利球场洗手间里那次自我折磨般的辞职。当球员和足球协会工作人员试图劝阻他时，基根给出了一段足以登上舞台剧的回应：“不，不，不。我走了。我不适合这里。”英格兰队在 2000 年欧洲杯上的表现糟糕透顶。德国队在的一场小组赛中同样如此，那场比赛让一家意大利报纸将其比作“两个大醉汉在互相推搡”。当他在温布利辞职时，让加雷斯·索斯盖特出任中前卫被视为基根的一种决定性罪行，而这其实仅仅是一个次要的促成因素。 聚光灯找到了他，因为它看到了他天生的明星气质，并将光芒投向他。当约翰·吉尔斯和比利·布雷姆纳在 1974 年慈善赛中挑选一个对手进行争执时，他们选择了基根。当南斯拉夫警方在 1974 年寻找一名英格兰球员以惩罚其在航班上的不当行为（一名球员跳到了行李传送带上）时，他们逮捕的是基根，尽管他并未参与其中任何一起事件。 对于极具磁场的人来说，情况往往是这样：他们被排除在适用于我们其他人的规则之外——他们不被允许失败。或者，如果他们失败了，这种失败就会被用来削弱他们的成功。 富有创造力和精神的人，不能仅仅因为他们拥有值得赞赏的冲动就享有永恒的掌声。这并不是说基根在担任英格兰队或纽卡斯尔队主教练时应该免于质疑；而是在于，这种轻视之深，掩盖了其一生之成就，而这成就极少数伟大的运动员能有希望效仿，这实在令人惋惜。 他在纽卡斯尔球迷的崇拜中是安全的。也许我们其他人应该更感激基根所代表的东西，而对他未完成的事情少一些苛责。而且，最好在他们去世前做出这种修正，当他们还在这里能看到的时候。
联邦运动会 被人们所忽视
I
和一系列 高调的临时 退出，让 格拉斯哥赛事 起步艰难， 杰西·帕克·汉弗莱斯 撰文
俱乐部数量排名第三， 但其中 40% 由地方 当局所有
在英联邦运动会的理想世界里， 最大的惊喜应该是国王 和王后在克里斯·霍伊爵士 的陪同下，乘坐 TARDIS 时空机 抵达开幕式。不幸的是，对许多人 来说，最大的惊喜竟然是 英联邦运动会竟然真的在举行。 今年的赛事广告和报道十分冷清， 部分原因是自 1954. 年以来， 该赛事首次未在 BBC 播出。 体育项目被限制在仅有 10, 项，且在 澳大利亚维多利亚州政府因 财务成本增加而退出后， 格拉斯哥不得不临时接手主办。
据报道，TNT Sports 支付了 £5 的赛事版权费， 明显低于 BBC 在 2022 年 伯明翰赛事期间支付的 £10。 目前 Channel 5. 正在播放 一个免费的集锦节目包。 正如许多 TNT Sports 产品 的情况一样，报道本身 往好里说非常零散。在游泳 赛事的报道中，许多运动员 的名字被叫错了。
Jessy Parker Humphreys 格拉斯哥
在格拉斯哥 SEC 的三号大厅里， 听起来像是有人在栅栏那边 举办烧烤聚会。 《Groove Is in the Heart》那 单薄的声音在空间内回荡， 音量不足以让人感觉到是有意为之。 DJ 身边站着一名英联邦运动会 官员。他看起来很无聊。 这就是经过重新打造的草地滚球赛。 该项目自 1930, 年运动会创立以来 便一直参与其中，仅 1966 年 因牙买加没有可比赛的绿地而缺席。 它是这里少数几个真正以该赛事 为巅峰的运动项目之一。 今年，比赛被
有人认为，BBC 的公共资金模式 意味着他们应该致力于播报 像英联邦运动会这样的赛事， 但考虑到在比赛开始前 有如此多知名运动员退出， 他们会觉得自己的决定是正确的。 周四宣布，卡塔里娜·约翰逊-汤普森、 迪娜·阿舍-史密斯、马修·哈德森-史密斯、 达里尔·内塔和安珀·安宁 是英格兰田径队大规模 退出名单中的成员。由于 欧洲锦标赛将在几周后于 伯明翰举行，显而易见， 英联邦运动会在运动员的 优先级排序中相当靠后。 对于苏格兰运动员来说， 在主场观众面前比赛的机会 似乎具有更大的吸引力，直到 艾丽什·麦科尔根昨天在她的 Instagram 上宣布她将 不参加比赛。麦科尔根将退出 原因归结为脚趾骨折，并透露 她在伦敦马拉松期间受伤， 直到两周前才恢复跑步。 这充分说明了故事素材的匮乏， 以及英国
移到了室内，这意味着比赛 速度快得多。前述的音乐在播放， 且深受参赛者欢迎，以至于 主办方不得不增加一天赛程。 强尼·维加斯是关键的明星代言人， 他将这项运动描述为“才华、 天才的加冕，以及证明我们 最初为何离开洞穴的原因”。 “来自英联邦国家和地区的 前所未有的参与需求，有力地 反映了我们这项运动持续的 增长、包容性和全球吸引力，” 世界滚球联合会首席执行官 尼尔·达林普尔在宣布增加 比赛日时表示。 草地滚球的吸引力部分在于 参赛者的随机性，
更多年轻一些的 人觉得这是一项 他们可以参与的 运动” 乔恩·科克罗夫特 (Jon Cockroft)，英格兰草地滚球协会 (Bowls England)
尤其是在年龄方面。 在本届运动会上，你还能在哪里看到一名来自根西岛的 56 岁选手击败一名来自纳米比亚、在普华永道工作的特许会计师？ 然而，为了维持这项运动，还需要摆脱这种认为它仅供全球退休人员参与的观念。出现 DJ 现场表演似乎就是这一努力的一部分。 “（草地滚球）的现实情况与人们的认知往往相差不远，”英格兰草地滚球协会 (Bowls England) 的首席执行官乔恩·科克罗夫特说道，该协会负责运营户外版本的比赛。 “英国滚球选手的平均年龄约为 67。我们认为这是我们运动的一个真实特质，因为我们为能够增加人们的寿命而感到自豪。但英联邦运动会展示了这一刻板印象并不代表全部。我们希望利用这类赛事来改变认知，让更多年轻一些的人觉得这是一项他们可以早日参与而无需等待的运动。”
全英国有 3,500 多个滚球俱乐部，这意味着在足球和板球之后，它是该国单项运动中俱乐部数量第三多的项目。但由于其中 40% 的俱乐部由地方当局所有，因此面临着证明这些俱乐部正被有效利用的挑战。 “他们会质疑是否愿意继续对其进行投资，因此对于我们的运动来说，确保这些俱乐部繁忙且繁荣是一项挑战。但同样，这也是让人们动起来的机会。许多俱乐部在地理位置上非常便捷，但从历史上看，俱乐部在当地社区中的可见度并不像它们应该有的那样高。” 英格兰草地滚球协会正与各俱乐部合作，试图帮助他们吸引新成员，特别是明年夏天皇家莱明顿温泉 (Royal Leamington Spa) 将举办世界锦标赛。然而，由于今年的比赛最终被放在了 TNT Sports 的付费墙之后，他们的努力受到了阻碍。 “从根本上说，滚球运动无法影响那个决定，我们也理解为什么会做出那个决定，”科克罗夫特继续说道。“但这对我们来说显然令人失望，因为它没有出现在‘橱窗’里。BBC 曾经有一个能够激励下一代的平台，并且具有让国民更加积极运动的巨大能力。如果能看到他们挺身而出并帮助我们实现这一目标，那就太好了。” 确实有些东西令人难以置信地
他的新婚姓氏， 与最令人兴奋的年轻 游泳运动员之一 Filip Nowacki展开竞争
奖牌猎手： 从主图开始顺时针方向： 印度的 Rupa Rani Tirkey； 特立尼达和多巴哥的 Chane Cumbermack； 篮球赛中开曼群岛对阵乌干达； 新西兰的 Karin Burger； Ben Foster (澳大利亚)。 Francois Nel, Matthias Hangst, Molly Darlington, Paul Harding, Matthias Hangst/Getty Images
Chico的时间到了： Qureshi 是格拉斯哥 一家当地咖喱店的 店主。 François Nel/Getty Images
从更广泛的媒体来看，首个周末的主要看点是 Sean McCann（见插图）。McCann 是一位苏格兰游泳运动员，他最显著的体育成就是在 2023 年参加青年英联邦运动会，但几乎每家主流新闻机构都对他进行了报道，因为他是 Madeleine McCann 的哥哥。McCann 昨晚发挥出色，晋级 400 米自由泳决赛，但他的成就被包裹在那些有时令人不安的、聚焦于其家庭背景的报道之中。
说到知名人物，游泳池是关注焦点，因为 Adam Ramsay-Peaty 在参加 100 米蛙泳比赛时，首次使用了他的新婚姓氏。他正直接与一名未来可能身披英国队 Speedo 泳衣的最令人兴奋的年轻游泳运动员——来自泽西岛的 Filip Nowacki 展开竞争。这位 18 岁的小将在 2025 年世界青年锦标赛的 100 米和 200 米蛙泳项目中均获得金牌。看着 Nowacki 纤细的体格与 Ramsay-Peaty 宽阔的肩膀并排在一起，很难相信他们是在同一项运动中竞争，这也强烈地提醒人们他们之间 13 年的年龄差距。
与此同时，Duncan Scott 在周五晚上的 200 米个人混合泳中获得第一名，为苏格兰赢得了他的第四枚英联邦金牌，并在此过程中创造了英联邦纪录。他在巴黎奥运会 4 x 200 米接力赛中获得金牌的队友 Tom Dean 赢得了铜牌。Scott 的
关于草地滚球的描述令人着迷，尽管很难不感觉到在赛场上，紧张气氛会因为音乐而有所消散。除非身临其境，否则很难体会到他们滚动球的距离之远。
当天支持率最高的比赛是苏格兰滚球手 Jason Banks 对阵巴基斯坦的 Mohammed “Chico” Qureshi。67 岁的 Qureshi 在格拉斯哥生活了 50 多年，是南区咖喱店 Alishan Tandoori 的店主，据称 Banks 经常光顾该店。这种本地组合吸引了大量球迷。
当我在 Qureshi 的比赛结束后访问 Alishan Tandoori 时，人们在领取周五晚餐咖喱的同时，不断询问他的比赛情况，这反而证明了本次赛事的参与门槛之低。“重要的是参与，”一名工作人员在经过时说道
这是苏格兰在 45 分钟内获得的三枚奖牌中的第一枚，随后残疾人游泳运动员 Stephen Clegg 在 100 米自由泳 S13 组中获得银牌，Katie Shanahan 也在 200 米仰泳中夺得银牌。
对于像网球（netball）这样的运动来说，英联邦运动会仍然是全球年度赛历中最重要的赛事之一，英格兰和澳大利亚分别在对阵北爱尔兰和汤加的比赛中取得了开门红。
长盛不衰的夺冠热门澳大利亚将于今日上午 11 点在小组赛阶段对阵英格兰，这可能会成为衡量英格兰后续机会的一个良好指标。
评估运动会未来可能性的部分困难在于，像田径这样在年度赛历中拥有大量机会的运动，与那些曝光机会较为有限的运动之间存在紧张关系。
谈到运动会的近期未来，2030 届赛事在印度艾哈迈达巴德举行时，应当会回归到更正常的轨道。印度正竞标在当地举办 2036 年奥运会，而英联邦运动会被视为对新建场馆进行试运行的机会。
奥运会主办地的选拔将于 2029, 年进行，印度希望让英联邦赛事重新涵盖 15 到 17 项运动。
此后的发展是一个涵盖了从英联邦概念到体育赛事转播权等方方面面的问题。如果该赛事要继续下去，将需要投入——无论是情感上的还是资金上的——但目睹其举行，让人很难相信它应该就这样消逝。
他在得知自己被 Banks 直落两盘击败的消息后（Banks 是 2025 年室内草地滚球世界冠军）。
这家咖喱店里贴满了 Qureshi 在滚球赛场上英勇表现的照片。他此前参加了 2014 年在格拉斯哥举行的英联邦运动会，那是巴基斯坦首次派遣滚球运动员参加该赛事。在一份详尽的菜单中，Chico 自己的推荐包括一道名为 mangal sooter 的诱人菜肴，其承诺是“当三者合一之时，由神定之”。
就在我快吃完饭时，他本人走了进来，依然穿着巴基斯坦队的球衣。他向一些熟客开玩笑说，他显然不想击败一名苏格兰选手，但一定会确保在周六对阵英格兰的 Sam Tolchard 时不会输掉。遗憾的是，他没能兑现承诺，Tolchard 以 2-0 击败了他。
在夏季的荒原之中
But it also lands many players with an unwelcome hiatus in July and August
Ben Bloom
“这非常奇怪，”哈桑·阿扎德（Hassan Azad）说道。“我的队友之一曾建议我干脆休假一个月。现在回想起来，我大概确实应该这么做。”随着学校进入暑假，禁用水管浇水令在各地传开，普遍观点认为此时正值英格兰板球赛季的鼎盛时期。但对于特定的一组球员来说，七月和八月却为他们的职业年度提供了一个不被希望、空洞的停滞期。欢迎来到现代红球（red-ball）专职球员的生活——在盛夏时节被剥夺了职业板球比赛，而短程赛制的激增将曾经受人推崇的四日赛制推向了边缘。本赛季，郡冠军赛（County Championship）被分为三个独立的阶段：四月和五月初的六轮，刚刚结束的两轮，以及八月至九月深处的最后六轮。对于那些在T20 Blast、一日杯（One-Day Cup）以及“百球赛”（The Hundred）霓虹马戏团中被视为多余的、坚持传统红球赛的群体来说，一个长达 59 天可能完全没有板球赛的奇特时期正等待着他们。
“这绝对让人感到卑微，”阿扎德说道。他在 2023 年退役，其职业生涯包括为拉夫堡MCCU、莱斯特郡和北安普顿郡出战的 61 场一流赛（first-class matches），但没有一次白球赛（white-ball）出场记录。“如果你没能在赛季初的前几场比赛中证明自己，日子可能会很难熬。作为一名开局击球手，你会告诉自己下周总会有机会，你只需要一个好的开局。但意识到一段时间内将不再有任何机会，这在心理上会相当疲惫。一旦你脱离了视野，你也会感到被遗忘。”
基思·巴克（Keith Barker）对这种心理上的炼狱感深有体会。在沃里克郡和汉普郡 17 年的职业生涯中，巴克被誉为全国最出色的新球（new-ball）投球手之一。但他已经近九年没有参加过T20比赛，在过去八年里出战 50-over 赛事的次数不到 12 次。“你并不是被排在圈外，”巴克谨慎地说道，“但更像是在远处观察。你仍然和伙计们保持联系，但他们的日程表与你的截然不同，所以重点在于确保你没有妨碍他们开展工作，但同时依然在现场支持他们，并在需要时随时待命。”
虽然巴克说他早期“艰难地”适应了板球职业生涯这种奇怪的双重性，但在 39 岁时，他现在对此持乐观态度。他在沃里克郡的新球搭档伊森·班伯（Ethan Bamber）比他年轻 12 岁，并且希望在已经获得 276 个一流赛三击球（wickets）的职业生涯中，增加他所参加的 7 场T20比赛数量。“这可能很困难，”班伯说。“你会从核心位置突然变成打二队板球。你会觉得处于一种悬而未决的状态。我非常渴望能继续打T20板球，但你不能让对于未达成目标的绝望或痛苦影响到那个你认为能发挥价值的赛制［郡冠军赛］。”
对于肯特郡的开局击球手本·康普顿（Ben Compton）来说，夏季假期代表了一次刺耳的急刹车。尽管累积了 6,547 分的一流赛得分，但康普顿从未参加过职业T20比赛，也不确定是否会被选中参加 50-over 赛制。“这很棘手，”他说道。“我注意到在……”
【图片说明】：不同的击球方式：图中是 2023, 年在郡球场（County Ground）为北安普顿郡出战的哈桑·阿扎德。他说对于那些发现自己无事可做的球员来说，夏季假期可能会让人感到“卑微”。 David Rogers/Getty Images
在过去四五年里，在从四月开始的那段冠军赛比赛期中，人们在每周比赛中会进入一种节奏。“当比赛停止时，第一周左右的感觉相当不错。你可以放松、恢复，并花一点时间让自己充电。但困难在于随后的时间。”
“你唯一能做的就是意识到自己可能不会参赛，并妥善地管理自己。这意味着要确保不断与教练联系以安排网球练习，并且尽可能地不断面对投球手。”
“对我来说，留在球场训练、尝试维持长日日程非常重要。我早上 8.30 到，下午 4 点离开。这类事情能让你保持四日制板球赛的状态。但这是一个充满挑战的时期。”康普顿解释说，对于那些可能长期不参赛的球员，并没有具体的要求：“这不像 16 岁以下组，他们会要求你必须在场。”
问责制是个人化的。一些急于证明自己白球赛实力的球员可能会为郡级第二球队出赛，而几乎所有人都会通过在当地俱乐部打球来维持某种程度的敏锐度。然而，阿扎德表示，这对球员的保护作用有限。
“这几乎就像两个赛季，”他补充道。“当九月的冠军赛到来时，感觉你必须像对待赛季开始那样进行准备。但当你回到第一场比赛时，你真的不知道自己的状态如何，因为水准发生了如此大的变化。你可能觉得没问题，但你甚至没有与一线队一起训练，所以这可能会非常具有误导性。”
如果球员能够应对未被选中的潜在焦虑，仲夏的“流放”也能带来一些额外好处：有机会纠正技术缺陷，尝试新的教练指导，或者在长途奔波之后，单纯给自己留出时间与家人和朋友共处。
“我已经接受了现实，”康普顿说，“这就是这份工作。”对于一小部分英国板球运动员来说，这份工作目前主要局限于在练习网中训练，等待秋天的回归。
分水岭时刻
第六个赛季， 它将决定英格兰 板球的未来。 作者：Cameron Ponsonby
金鹅只能卖一次。
The Hundred（百球赛）——也就是说，新的百球赛——已经到来并拉开帷幕。不是 2021 年开始时的那个旧百球赛，那时萨姆·库兰（Sam Curran）效力于由英格兰和威尔士板球管理局（ECB）拥有并与萨里郡（Surrey）关联的椭圆赛场无敌队（Oval Invincibles）。而是现在的新百球赛，萨姆·库兰效力于 MI 伦敦队，该球队部分由萨里郡拥有，部分由 Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited 拥有。你永远不会唱起这支球队的名字。
根据询问对象的不同，这项赛事要么预示着那 11 个没有关联百球赛球队的郡县的灭亡，要么是他们的救赎。
一方面，拥有者与匮乏者之间的财务差距无疑在扩大。根据本周发布的最新《伦纳德·柯蒂斯板球财务报告》（Leonard Curtis Cricket Finance Report）——这份对郡级比赛的年度深度分析——在 2024. 年，最富有的四个郡（萨里郡、兰开夏郡、汉普郡和华威郡）占据了所有 18 个一级郡总收入的一半以上。百球赛凭借其光鲜的球衣和私人投资，可以说让那些（相对）富有的人变得更富有，而将其他球队抛在身后。
但另一方面，对于陷入危机的郡县——这类郡县很多——ECB凭空变出的 £520m 将成为救命稻草。每个郡将从一项旨在确保长期生存（即便不能保证繁荣）的基金中获得约 £20-25m。北安普敦郡（Northamptonshire）上周赢得了 Blast 赛，其财务状况虽小但稳健，在整个 2025 年郡冠军赛赛季中，共吸引了 4,245 名球迷入场。通过一项新赛事来重启英格兰的板球运动，是非常合理的。为了获得通过，该方案需要三分之二的多数票支持，而只有萨里郡正式表示反对。
“我现在最兴奋的事情，”该赛事的董事总经理维克拉姆·巴纳吉（Vikram Banerjee）表示，“是潜力。这项赛事的机遇和能力现在非常巨大。百球赛在五年里取得了巨大成功，在吸引新一代接触这项运动方面表现出色，否则这些人可能永远不会接触板球。”
巴纳吉可以指出，截至去年 7 月，女性（31%）和青少年（23%）的门票销售情况强劲。此外，今年推出了一项新赛事 The Hundred Helix，其特点是一个由男女队伍结果组成的综合积分表。这可能会激发一些兴趣，在这种情况下他们可以继续开展；如果没效果，他们也可以停止。
所有者则是令人担忧的部分。八名私人投资者在不同程度上持有股份，并对英格兰的夏天拥有掌控力。巴纳吉坚持认为赛事仍由 ECB 控制和驱动，但他也必须这么说。而且，改变已经在发生。
首先，赛事转向 T20 赛制的前景仍然是一个活跃的议题。比赛是进行 100 还是 120 个球，感觉在很大程度上无关紧要，但目前的短赛制允许进行双赛，并使女子赛能够处于一个相对平等的位置；而如果转向 T20，则可能面临失去家庭观众的风险，因为这些观众喜欢在欣赏板球的同时，还能在早睡时间前回到家中。
此外，该赛事已经产生了潜移默化的影响。2019, 年，英格兰夏季测试赛从每年七场减少到六场。由于百球赛占据了暑假窗口期，很难想象缺失的那场测试赛如何能回归。目前，要么是在百球赛前打三场测试赛，赛后打三场（如今年如此）；要么是在澳大利亚或印度到访的票房大年，进行一场热身测试赛，而这将是
在五月进行，随后是全部五场比赛，并在八月初结束。 “我的个人观点？”Banerjee 停顿了一下。“我们在 2025 年对阵印度时有了一场精彩的系列赛，在 2023 年对阵澳大利亚时也有一场精彩的系列赛。到此为止。人们记得那些系列赛。[第七场测试赛]，你只是在把果酱涂得更薄，还是说真的有对额外一场测试赛的需求？”
The Hundred 本身在现场一直受到好评，本周也是如此。MI London 推行了一项球衣大赦活动，任何拥有现已失效的 Oval Invincibles 球衣的人都可以将其更换为一件新球衣。Manchester Super Giants 正在分发数千件球衣，以期为一支新球队建立起新的粉丝群。
在很大程度上，今年的最坏情况已经避免。Sunrisers Leeds 签下 Abrar Ahmed 意味着关于巴基斯坦球员被 IPL 拥有球队“暗中封杀”的传闻是没有根据的。此外，本赛季球衣正面出现赌博赞助商的可能性也被规避了。
“这毫无疑问是这项运动的一次世代更替，”Banerjee 在反思现在注入该项运动的巨额资金时说道。
“而这正是我真正兴奋的地方。能够在保留我们基因的同时，保留我们所热爱以及粉丝们五年来所热爱的东西，但同时为其注入‘火箭燃料’。”
你可能不喜欢它。但事实是，它就在这里。而且说实话，我们都需要它成功。
Rich pickings: MI London 由 Surrey 共同拥有，在队长 Sam Curran 的带领下取得了开门红。 Philip Brown/ Getty Images
S
这就是结局：当罗马在燃烧时，Calvin Harris 的曲调在起伏的斯塔福德郡乡村上空飘荡。除非有人既痴迷于烧掉一个小国的 GDP 且具备能力这样做，否则这就是 LIV Golf 的最后日子，其英国站很可能是倒数第三站。
尽管他们自认为是革命者，但 LIV UK 给人的感觉与任何其他职业高尔夫赛事惊人地相似。你可以买到价格过高的希腊卷饼、温吞的拉格啤酒以及油腻的脏脏薯条。他们的粉丝村与其他赛事无异；儿童游戏由那些加速人类灭亡的企业赞助。
显而易见的增加项是音乐，在大多数发球台和果岭上吵闹地播放，球员们选择自己的出场主题曲，这意味着 Tyrell Hatton 在 NF 的《My Stress》中“我只想从压力中解脱”的歌声中登场。目前尚不清楚这一切有何贡献，这种人为制造的强行炒作，对于一个依然显得非常“高尔夫化”的氛围几乎没有增加什么。并没有人因为播放了一些音量稍大的喃喃说唱而显得更加愉快。唯一例外的是第 14 洞，这是一个由两个名为 The Birdie Shack 的看台侧翼包围的 3 杆洞，这里是最像飞镖比赛现场的区域，大声播放着《Sweet Caroline》和约翰·丹佛的歌曲。
在各组球员之间，一名精力充沛的气氛组员在监督一场单身汉派对成员之间的迷你游戏，这些人醉得语无伦次，但还足够清醒，能将足球从 12 英尺左右的地方切入尺寸偏小的球门中。Chase and Status 将在周六比赛后演出，因为他们当然会演。
同样地，噪音并非持续且不可避免——有一次，我在第五洞旁一个特别舒服的小山丘上休息，而我作为一个坚韧的专业人士——周一刚从世界杯回来——在 20 分钟后醒来。
不过，考虑到大多数高尔夫球赛似乎很满足于充当养老金领取者的 CBeebies 儿童频道，至少 LIV 试图提供一些不同的东西，即便这种方式极其缺乏创意、笨拙且充满企业气息。周二，伊恩·波尔特（Ian Poulter）对他的 Majesticks GC 团队所组织的“惊人的激活活动”赞不绝口，而这些活动其实就是一个冠名酒吧。到场者大致分为三类：想要出门逛逛的当地人（整个斯托克地区似乎极度缺乏任何接近精英体育的活动）；企业嘉宾（数以百计，且全部佩戴着精致的挂绳胸卡）；以及真正的 golf 迷，他们一如既往地穿着得像随时准备顶替 琼·拉姆（Jon Rahm）一样。上周公开赛的周边商品数量仅略高于布赖森·德尚博（Bryson DeChambeau）的 Crushers GC 的帽子和 Polo 衫（分别为 £35 和 £90），后者的标志是一个骷髅头和交叉骨，这是“好人”的永恒象征。在 尤特克塞特（Uttoxeter）市外几英里处，JCB 高尔夫球场是一个极其贴切的场地，拥有整整八年的历史，只有企业会员和 JCB 客户才能进入——员工只能在周日下午付费打球。
门票尚未售罄，但在学校暑假的第一个周五，这里的人数足以确保不至于尴尬。部分原因是票价相对便宜——周五的入场券为 £30，周六最高涨至 £39，四天全票为 £108。如果你想要进入看台并获得几杯免费饮料，价格则上涨至 £80、£100 或 £292。
相比之下，明年公开赛的门票周四和周五起价为 £150，且大多通过极度超额认购的抽签方式获得——一对坐在 1 号发球台旁的观众表示，他们尝试申请公开赛门票五年未果，因此决定尝试 LIV。和所有人一样，他们似乎玩得很开心。
乔治·奥威尔将高尔夫球称为“本质上是自命不凡的”，这一点在绝大多数情况下依然成立。但尽管存在所有缺陷，与其他任何重大赛事相比，这一点在 LIV 身上似乎不那么明显。据初步估计，这里的女性和患有各种过敏症的儿童比在 PGA 或 DP 世界巡回赛赛事中更多。当然，这些票价之所以如此低廉，是因为它们得到了……的补贴。
政权，仅在今年就处决了近 100 人。然而，廉价高尔夫球显然仍有一个未被充分开发的市场，这提醒人们，尽管 LIV 拼命试图改变这一点，但人们就是喜欢高尔夫，以及在有优质体育赛事的阳光之日度过时光。 而且，不可思议的是，他们喜欢德尚博 (DeChambeau)。得益于周四打出 64 杆（低于标准杆 8 杆）从而进入领先组，球场上大约有一半的人在任何时刻都跟随在他身后，在他推杆入洞的瞬间随之移动。一名粉丝兴奋地告诉德尚博他们共享同一个生日，他回答道“我太喜欢了”，这一幕被拍成视频并向朋友们讲述，仿佛受到了上帝的眷顾。那名粉丝至少 25 岁。这是 LIV 剩余的最有价值的资产，比其名称或概念更重要，他是高尔夫球坛两个超凡之名之一。他的合同下个月到期，但虽然他
主吸引力：由于 LIV 赛事的门票 比例如说 公开赛 (The Open) 更便宜， JCB 乡村与高尔夫 俱乐部 (Uttoxeter) 的观众人数 非常之多。 Gary Calton 为 《观察家报》拍摄
曾威胁要全面转向 YouTube，但德尚博已经加入了 LIV 2.0 的筹划，因为他意识到如果没有他，该品牌几乎毫无价值，而且他可能是唯一一个在沙特“抽地毯”式撤资后能获得更多金钱和影响力的人。他的出现比任何歌曲、狂热的耳语或尖叫的鼓励更能改变现场气氛。 在改为 72 洞赛制使其名称变得无关紧要后，音乐、个人球员和团队赛制现在成了 LIV 唯一的差异化特点。今年 1 月，他们雇了一家银行来出售单个团队的股份，据报道寻求高达 $300m 的估值。团队周边商品相对较多，有些人确实在关注 Legion XIII 和 Rangegoats 的命运，但这显然不足以维持其运转。让这些团队成行的努力过程令人痛苦，
簇拥：布赖森· 德尚博 (Bryson DeChambeau) 依然深受 LIV 粉丝 喜爱。 Gary Calton 为 《观察家报》拍摄
这一点被不断强调，在一号发球台上不断尖叫着“在 LIV，我们也注重团队”。这是一个不错的想法，但需要太长时间才能真正流行起来，即便是在转向以代表单个国家建立团队之后——Iron Heads GC 在 1 月被更名为韩国高尔夫俱乐部 (Korean Golf Club)，而普尔特 (Poulter) 和李·威斯特伍德 (Lee Westwood) 的 Majesticks 队则被大肆宣传为东道主球队。在这之中隐藏的事实是，LIV 从来不是颠覆者，颠覆者始终是沙特人，就像他们参与的所有体育项目一样，现在正留下满地的抽搐尸体。 周二，亚巡赛 (Asian Tour) 宣布了与 PGA 巡回赛和 DP 世界巡回赛的一项新协议。LIV 在 2022 年支付了 $300m 购买这一特权，将亚巡赛作为有效的第二梯队，实现升降级。这意味着任何新面貌的 LIV 都将成为
放松时刻： 支持者们在 斯塔福德郡 (Staffordshire) 的阳光下， 舒适地坐在 甲板椅上 关注所有赛事 动态。 Gary Calton 为 《观察家报》拍摄
一个独立的赛事，几乎肯定无法获得它奋斗多年才争取到的官方世界高尔夫排名 (OWGR) 积分，而这一切都大大削弱了向投资者推销的任何说辞。亚巡赛首席执行官 Cho Minn Thant 本周早些时候告诉《高尔夫文摘》(Golf Digest)：“六年前，与 LIV Golf 建立伙伴关系是对的，但考虑到目前的情况，我们不得不寻求其他选择。”LIV 还被一家加拿大技术公司 Mobii Systems Group 起诉，原因是未支付发票并试图逃避涵盖 2025 和 2026 赛季的合同。 第一批加入 LIV 的球员之一马丁·凯默 (Martin Kaymer) 也没能增强人们的信心，他表示，在密歇根州举行旗舰赛事团队锦标赛的机会只有 5%。 “不幸的是，即使是 [LIV 首席执行官] Scott [O’Neill] 也无法告诉我们
因为他不知道。这在很大程度上取决于投资者。”如果取消，密歇根州将成为今年第二个被取消的 LIV 站，此前路易斯安那州在 6 月份已取消，而该球场刚刚经历了一次极其昂贵且由公共资金资助的翻修。与所有 LIV 赛事一样，本周在罗切斯特的奖金总额为 $30，冠军可获得 $4，比公开赛冠军获得的奖金多出 $800,000。沙特之后的提案是每年举办 10 场赛事，少于之前的 14, 场，每场奖金为 $10，且排名后 12 位的球员将没有任何收入。然而，理论上的赛事包括亚洲巡回赛的若干场国家公开赛，而这些现在已经无法参与。引用电影《公主新娘》中曼迪·帕廷金饰演的伊尼戈·蒙托亚的一句话：“复仇并不能带来多少钱。” LIV 梦想的主要策划者们已经全部消失：格雷格·诺曼、亚西尔·阿尔-鲁马扬以及公共投资基金 (PIF) 已经离场，菲尔·米克尔森名誉扫地。一如既往，这不会伤害到他们，但会影响到
那些被开出无法拒绝的高薪而加入的年轻球员，以及那些未来充满不确定性、正从伦敦出发参加工作团、在火车上喝着罐装鸡尾酒的 LIV 员工。本赛季的倒数第二场赛事是两周后在特朗普贝德明斯特举行的 LIV 纽约站，球员们期望在那里得知接下来的打算。周五，《Bunkered》报道称，潜在投资者已被缩小到两人，尽管目前尚不清楚亚洲巡回赛的退出如何影响这些人，以及谁愿意在已经消失了 $5bn 的黑洞中继续投入资金。球员们似乎在完全离开 LIV 和在参与其他巡回赛之间寻求平衡。韦斯特伍德和波尔特在经历了四年好战地宣称绝不投降后，为了能够重新加入 DP 世界巡回赛，每人都支付了接近 £1 的罚金。蛮族已至城门。中心已无法维持。但是，
在整个高尔夫世界恳求其灭亡四年之后，如果 LIV 高尔夫实际上值得拯救会怎样？
LIV 的最后 阵地：英国 巡回赛于今日 结束。 加里·卡尔顿为 《观察家报》供稿
不如说是一个虚拟生态系统
明星品质：下方的巴黎电子竞技世界杯将其塑造为一项全球顶尖赛事。 Esport
我所见之物超乎认知。在我脚下，是一个像奥兹国一样绿的足球场。在我上方，是像巨人之神般横扫视线的选手全息图。每转一个弯，都是由模块化立方体组成的层叠且闪烁着虹彩的结构，在俄罗斯方块般的迷雾中构建起一面LED墙。我本应在审视未来，结果却被抛回了过去。在这里，在为 2034 年世界杯而建设中的穆罕默德·本·萨勒曼王子体育场，我仿佛被传送到了弗里茨·朗 1927 年电影《大都市》（Metropolis）中的城市：超现代，几何化，被摩天大楼峡谷地包围，不见飞鸟。那座城市——还是这座城市？——仅靠一群隐形劳工的苦力才得以存在。
当我摘下虚拟现实眼镜时，需要花几秒钟才能重新适应周围环境。我并不在沙特阿拉伯的基迪亚城（Qiddiya City），而是在巴黎的一家空调展馆里。我身边是一位快活的女士，她鼓励我完成其他“挑战”以领取我的“礼物”。这些挑战包括观看一段关于体育场的视频，以及拍一张我被叠加在体育场背景上的照片。在每个任务之间，我都要扫描手机，几乎每次进出建筑时都被要求这样做。礼物是一张 50 沙特里亚尔（约 £10）的 Steam 代金券，据说 Steam 是王储穆罕默德·本·萨勒曼使用的一个游戏平台。递给我代金券的人问我是否会访问基迪亚城。她告诉我她有情侣折扣。我接过代金券，告诉她我会查看日程表。
这是由王储的电子竞技基金会主办的第三届电子竞技世界杯，也是首次在沙特阿拉伯境外举行。今年在巴黎举办是因为伊朗的战争，但这种安排也有好处。在巴黎凡尔赛门展览中心（Paris Expo Porte de Versailles） 169,400 平方米的场地中，许多布置似乎旨在诱使人们前往沙特阿拉伯，或想象其无懈可击的未来。一个名为“大使馆”（The Embassy）的款待区域可能会产生相反的效果。即便争论大使馆和领事馆的区别，人们也很难不想到记者贾迈尔·卡舒吉（Jamal Khashoggi），他在 2018 年被杀害于沙特驻伊斯坦布尔领事馆。
我来巴黎是为了亲身体验一个此前让我感到困惑的现象：职业电竞世界，及其所有花哨的噱头和丰厚的奖金。我也想了解为什么沙特阿拉伯在撤回对 LIV 高尔夫球赛的资金支持并重新考虑其他投资的同时，在电子竞技方面却在全速前进。这一现象给这个王国带来了什么？
当我走出凡尔赛门地铁站，在巴黎的酷暑中暴晒时，我身上散发出阵阵蒸汽。在走向比赛场地的途中，我经过了一些海报，上面宣传着电子竞技中那些单名星光熠熠的选手，名字如 Knight、Caps、Faker 和 ZywOo 般难以捉摸。电子竞技世界杯的官方国际象棋大使马格努斯·卡尔森（Magnus Carlsen），以及该赛事的全球大使克里斯蒂亚诺·罗纳尔多（Cristiano Ronaldo）也出现在海报上。他们并非唯一与职业电竞相关的重量级人物。卡卡（Kaká）、兰多·诺里斯（Lando Norris）和托尼·霍克（Tony Hawk）在去年的比赛中客串出镜。已故的利物浦足球运动员迪奥戈·若塔（Diogo Jota）有一座以他命名的电竞奖杯。
沙特阿拉伯永远不会被指责为简约主义。为获胜者提供的 $75m 总奖金超过了几公里外举行的法国网球公开赛的奖金池（$70m）。这进一步凸显了与罗兰·加洛斯球场相比，电子竞技世界杯的场地是多么空旷。门口的工作人员身着
印着“人群控制”字样的 T 恤。在我的视线范围内有 20 个人。在承办此次赛事的几个巨大展馆之一的主展馆内，设有游戏竞技场、篮球场、一家 Paul 面包店、一个互动漫画装置、一面华丽的奖杯墙、专门的战队混合区，以及众多的广告展台和周边商店。这就像是 Dave & Buster’s 或 Hollywood Bowl 如果偶然发现了未开发的油田后可能会采取的扩张方式。我的新闻资料包里包含两页关于沙特阿拉伯电子竞技增长的内容，以及一些没有来源的统计数据，旨在让每个人都相信这项投资是英明的。其中没有任何关于为期七周的工业级空调、数百台顶配游戏系统以及无数巨型屏幕提供电力所需的能源成本的描述。1984？《银翼杀手》？新生代晚期的地球？随你挑选你想要的反乌托邦式毒药。在这一天中，我的一些疑虑逐渐消散。
确实有人来看，尽管与为其预留的广阔空间相比，人数相当少。在本届赛事 24 项电子竞技项目之一的《Apex 英雄》全球系列赛中，有超过 2,000 名选手参加，观众人数达到了上限，这意味着我被转移到了一个为“超级粉丝”设立的溢出区域。在那里，我被发了一根充气助威棒，并可以俯瞰赛况。如果你忽略掉那些屏幕，赛况其实就是一群年轻人正在患上重复性劳损。EA Sports FC 这款足球游戏更符合我的口味。但它同样要求你脱离现实世界，才能获得接近于娱乐的体验。尽管粉丝们名义上处于“场边”，坐在成排电脑旁的选手周围，但了解情况的唯一方法是通过我们正前方的屏幕。那么，我为什么要花钱亲自来看 GoatMoh 对阵 Yas SFC 呢？我
需要暂时放下我的愤世嫉俗。我曾在温布利球场的顶层看台上观看足球比赛，那里的视觉效果甚至不如在家里观看。但我知道我去温布利是为了其他所有事情：为了感受的机会，为了歌唱，以及成为一项共同体验的一部分。在这个意义上，我理解电子竞技的吸引力。赛场上的人们支持他们最喜爱的战队。他们惊叹、呻吟并排队签名。这种紧张感毋庸置疑。在数百万美元的
压力与运动员 许多方面相似， 需要具备身体 和心理技巧”
大局观：左侧， 巨型屏幕吸引着 粉丝；上方， 其他人则独自作战。 电子竞技
屏幕时间： 上方，游戏正变得 严肃。下方， 蹲着的 Faker 具有 明星气质。电子竞技
在这种情况下，竞争者面临的压力与运动员许多方面相似，需要具备一系列身体和心理技巧，才能有机会接近领奖台。电子竞技世界杯的问题在于其过高的野心。就像 The Line（沙特阿拉伯一座 170km 的线性卫城，已暂停至 2030 年）或 The Cube（一座旨在容纳 20 栋帝国大厦但已被放弃的建筑）一样，电子竞技世界杯是为一个并不存在的社会而创建的。为一个可能永远不会存在的社会。锦标赛的亮光和嘈杂的噪音产生了一些快感，但持久的影响却是眩晕感。根本问题在于沙特阿拉伯。其公共投资基金 (PIF) 已向视频游戏产业投入数百亿美元。由 PIF 资助的公司 Savvy Games Group 拥有全球约 40% 的市场份额。去年 9 月，一个由 PIF 牵头的财团同意以 $550 亿购买 Electronics Arts。沙特阿拉伯现在是游戏领域——尤其是电子竞技——的主导力量。如果你将它在过去几个月所做的一切视为一种重新校准而非退却，那么沙特阿拉伯继续押注电子竞技就合情合理。穆罕默德·本·萨尔曼是一位热衷于游戏的玩家，他希望被国民视为一名现代化改革者。约三分之二的沙特人在 35 岁以下。超过三分之二的人口玩视频游戏。高尔夫？斯诺克？这些听起来不像未来。但在 AI 时代，面对高科技芯片和 34 亿游戏玩家，Counter-Strike 才叫回事。值得注意的是，电子竞技世界杯的主要赞助商联想 (Lenovo) 正在生产沙特制造的笔记本电脑。在游戏世界中，人们争夺的不仅仅是像在足球或网球中那样分得一块蛋糕，而是一个完整的生态系统。这就是游戏现在变成的样子。它不再是你和朋友在客厅里玩的东西，而是一个石油国家进行的无血战略推进。这是另一种形式的娱乐，其中每一个选择都开始像是一个道德选择；即使在 Porte de Versailles 没有人在说教。朗格的电影《大都市》开头有一段铭文：“头脑与双手之间的调解者必须是心灵。”从超级粉丝区俯瞰下方熙熙攘攘的人群，我看到了许多头脑，许多双手。但心灵几乎消失殆尽。
护身符：Ryan O’Donoghue 将在 今天尝试结束 梅奥郡 (Mayo) 等待 全爱尔兰冠军 75 年的期盼。 Seb Daly/Sportsfile, Getty Images
一名神父带来的 75 年“诅咒”？
让体育迷们 深陷其中，他们 开始花钱请女巫 来帮球队赢球
Jessy Parker Humphreys
上一次梅奥队（Mayo）赢得全爱尔兰决赛是在 1951. 年。在九月的一个周六，他们以五分的优势击败了米斯队（Meath），连续第二次夺冠。 球迷和球员们当时一定在想，这或许是一个王朝的开始。尽管这可能仅仅是他们历史上第三次夺冠，但也许他们敢于梦想追平韦克斯福德（Wexford）或克里（Kerry）的历史记录，这两支球队都曾连续四次夺冠。在那个时刻，成功的快感太过直接、太新鲜、太令人沉醉，以至于人们根本无法想象，在接下来的近 75 年里竟然无法再次达成这一成就。 自那个周末以来，梅奥队又参加了 11 场全爱尔兰决赛，但从未获胜。 而据称，这一切全是因为一个诅咒。
传说在周一球队乘车回家、迎接簇拥的巨大人群时，他们在福克斯福德（Foxford）村庄经过了一场葬礼队列。由于沉浸在自己的庆祝活动中，他们没有表达适当的敬意。村里的牧师对他们的行为如此不满，以至于诅咒这支球队：直到当年梅奥队的所有球员全部离世之前，他们将无法再次赢得全爱尔兰决赛。 事实确实如此。尽管历史研究表明这个故事是伪造的，尤其是直到 20 世纪 90 年代才有人提到这个诅咒，但这并不重要。现在，这已成为梅奥队失利的事实上的解释。 梅奥队全爱尔兰决赛诅咒，是体育队伍所遭受的一长串咒语中的一个。从用“小孩子诅咒”（Curse of the Bambino）来解释波士顿红袜队 86 年没拿到世界大赛冠军，到用“亚伦·拉姆齐诅咒”（Curse of Aaron Ramsey）来解释在这位威尔士中场球员进球后几天内名人相继去世，为了解释全球事件和体育赛事，体育迷们几乎无所不用其极。 有些涉及真正的神秘力量。而另一些，可以说，更多是基于一种“氛围”。说唱歌手德雷克（Drake）无法下注成功，以及随之而来的、他投注的任何球队都被认为中了诅咒，这感觉更像是一个钱太多的人，而不是来自另一个世界的生命证明。 体育诅咒的诱惑力很简单。当我们的体育队伍表现不佳时，我们希望能够解释原因。有时，仅仅接受我们的俱乐部管理不善是不够的，或者厄运可能会持续很长时间。人们确实觉得无法在心理上完成这种逻辑体操：即通过相信诅咒，球迷们将“无法获胜”的预期传递给了球队，从而为他们制造了心理障碍。
我们要求解释，就像自古以来的人类一样，如果没有理性的解释，我们倾向于求助于神秘主义。以前在庄稼歉收时焚烧当地女巫的行为，如今演变成了利物浦门将布鲁斯·格罗贝拉尔（Bruce Grobelaar）在安菲尔德球场的门柱上撒尿，试图解除他前东家赢得英超联赛的诅咒。 相信诅咒的矛盾之处在于，它让体育这项努力显得比现实更加徒劳。
当然，我们出于其他原因也喜欢体育——社区感、兴奋感、例行习惯——但我们最主要的理由还是为了获胜。因此，现代社会应对体育诅咒最受欢迎的解药是 Etsy 上的女巫，这并不令人意外。
对于不熟悉的人来说，寻找 Etsy 女巫意味着登录 Etsy 网站（该网站更出名的是作为一个手工艺品在线市场），并支付 £10-£20 的名义费用来购买一个你选择的“咒语”。你可以从一系列 AI 生成的封面照片中选择能够改善你的事业、银行余额或感情生活的咒语。你几乎可以为任何事情购买咒语，包括影响体育赛事的结局。
在英格兰队 1-0 落后于刚果（金），且哈里·凯恩似乎仍深受加纳巫医在小组赛第二场对他施加的诅咒困扰时，一位朋友在网上发帖称，她请了一位 Etsy 女巫来帮他解除咒语。果不其然，凯恩在 11 分钟内攻入两球，将英格兰队送入了 16 强。很难找到比这更确凿的有效性证明了。
回顾 2012 年他们打入决赛的时候，梅奥队（Mayo）向教皇寻求帮助。但这几乎没有效果，因为他们输给了多尼戈尔队（Donegal）。直到 2023 年 4 月，该队的所有成员才全部去世，非替补球员米克·洛夫图斯（Mick Loftus）是最后一名幸存者。
今天，梅奥队将参加自 1951 年那个命中注定的周末以来的第 12 次全爱尔兰决赛，当然，这一次会有所不同——诅咒应该已经被解除了。然而，如果他们获胜，我们目前还不能确定这是否是因为有人花钱请了 Etsy 女巫。
e
s
o
u
o
u
a
t
T
p
p
I
n
小 the Bambino之咒 (Curse of the Bambino)
l
l
y
最持久的体育诅咒之一源于贝比·鲁斯 (Babe Ruth) 从波士顿红袜队被卖到纽约洋基队。红袜队在 1915, 1916 和 1918 年都赢得了世界大赛，当时鲁斯——也就是绰号“小 the Bambino”的球员——是他们的明星。但当老板哈里·弗雷齐 (Harry Frazee) 在 1919 年 12 月将其卖给洋基队后，他们又过了 84 年多才再次夺冠，据信这就是因为弗雷齐决定让他离开。
德雷克之咒 (Drake curse)
如果德雷克 (Drake) 穿上了你球队的球衣、出现在比赛现场或在你身上押注，请务必小心。这位加拿大说唱歌手据称给所有人带来了失败，从多伦多猛龙队到尤文图斯，甚至包括塞雷娜·威廉姆斯 (Serena Williams)。似乎有一支球队不受此诅咒影响，那就是堪萨斯城酋长队，尽管德雷克曾对他们下注，但他们依然在 2023 和 2024 年赢得了超级碗。据报道，他曾秘密穿着费城76人队的短裤，以便他的主队多伦多猛龙队能击败他们，而结果确实如此。
马尔多恩之咒 (Curse of Muldoon)
1927 年芝加哥黑鹰队在国家冰球联盟的第一赛季结束时，教练皮特·马尔多恩 (Pete Muldoon) 因为与老板在球队是否足够优秀能获得第一名上产生分歧而被解雇。马尔多恩诅咒该俱乐部永远无法在联赛中获得第一，结果他们确实直到 1967 年才实现。唯一的问题是？整个故事是由体育记者吉姆·科尔曼 (Jim Coleman) 编造的，目的是为了凑字数并证明体育迷们是多么轻信。这对所有体育记者来说都值得深思。
假金牌之咒 (Curse of the fake gold medals)
韩国在 1956 和 1960 年赢得了前两届亚洲杯，但球员们发现他们在 1960 年获得的金牌是假的。据称真正的金牌被一名腐败官员偷走了。尽管要求韩国足协给予真正的金牌，但直到 50 年多以后，1960 年的一些幸存球员才收到金牌。许多韩国球迷认为，这就是为什么他们在之后尽管又参加了四次决赛，却再也没能赢得亚洲杯。
违背体面之意
评论
Jessy Parker Humphreys
女子网球管理机构 效仿奥运会 检测 SRY 基因
本周，女子网球协会 (WTA) 宣布，他们将成为第一个引入强制性基于基因的性别检测的职业女子体育联盟，所有希望参加其赛事的运动员均需接受检测。通过此举，他们效仿了国际奥林匹克委员会 (IOC) 的做法，后者在今年早些时候宣布，任何希望在 2028 年奥运会女子组中参赛的人员都必须进行同样的检测。WTA 在一份声明中表示，该政策旨在提供一个“明确的参赛资格标准”，以促进女子网球运动中的“平等竞技机会”并“维持公平竞争”。他们此次更新的理由是应对“女子体育领域不断演变的标准”。目前没有跨性别女性参加 WTA 赛事，近年也没有这种情况。WTA 的政策将这样运作：每位希望参赛的女性都将接受 SRY 基因检测，通过口腔拭子、血液样本或唾液样本进行采集。如果检测出 SRY 基因，该运动员将被宣布不具备参赛资格，因为这表明存在 Y 染色体。这被视为男性的证明。这看起来很简单，但事实是，并非所有人的发育都遵循“女性拥有 XX 染色体，男性拥有 XY 染色体”这样简单的遗传路线。多年来已经发现了多种不同的可能性，包括具有 XO 染色体、XXXY 染色体的人，以及雄激素不敏感综合征（这会限制或停止身体对雄激素的反应能力）。这意味着，一个人即使检测出具有 XY 染色体，但其对随之而来的睾酮产生的反应可能并不符合通常的生物学预期。虽然关于这种情况的确切频率仍有激烈争论，但美国性学家 Anne Fausto-Sterling 的广泛研究估计，大约每 60 胎中就有一例与标准的男女生物学理想状态有所不同。WTA 和 IOC 绕过这一棘手问题的办法是宣布：任何拥有 Y 染色体的人在生物学上就是男性。无论一个人在出生时是否被指定为女性，或者是否终其一生作为女性生活，都无关紧要。在这些体育机构看来，这类人只是在整个生命中不幸地被误导了。这些政策小心地将“生物性别”、“法定性别”和“性别认同”区分开来，仿佛这些是显而易见且独立的概念，这极大地扩展了我们对性别和性别认同的理解范围。要理解为什么我们在日常生活中并不这样处理性别问题，请想象一下，如果你接到一个电话，告诉你你的性别与你目前认为的相反，那将是多么令人震惊。然而，这种对自我认同的撕裂，是维持“存在两个易于定义且独立的性别”这一信念的唯一方式，尽管数十年的科学研究表明，情况要复杂得多。体育管理机构的辩词通常是，这种检测是确保女子组公平的唯一方法，且该方法不具有侵入性且准确。然而，这三项主张都具有足够的可争议性，以至于大约四分之一个世纪前，整个流程被…… IOC 放弃了。在 1936 年由纳粹德国主办的奥运会上，要求进行性别检测的呼声达到了顶峰。当时的一家报纸写道：“一些抵达柏林的女运动员看起来更像男人。”在冷战期间，对“性别欺诈”的担忧进一步加剧，出现了“裸体
“检阅”始于 20 世纪 60 年代，当时医生会通过视觉评估女性运动员的生殖器。这一过程最终被认定为是对人格的贬低，但“以科学方式质询某人的性别”这一概念并未被否定，因此检测手段首先转向了 Barr 小体检测（旨在寻找 XX 染色体人体内不活跃的 X 染色体），随后又转向 SRY 基因检测。直到 1999 年 6 月，国际奥委会投票决定在悉尼奥运会前停止性别检测。在此期间，一场基于对性别和性别认同深层焦虑的全球运动随之兴起。那些不符合女性规范的人，其性别认同会受到质疑，正如林俞婷在 2024 年奥运会上的情况那样。根据国际拳击协会的规则，这位台湾拳击手在 2023 年世界锦标赛期间与阿尔及利亚拳击手伊曼·凯利夫（Imane Khelif）一起“未能通过”性别检测。随后的报道集中在她所谓的男性化外貌上。今年 3 月，在接受了另一次性别检测后，她得到了新拳击管理机构——世界拳击组织（World Boxing）的认可。
这些检测的支持者认为，这样做可以保护运动员免受此类审视，但女子网球协会（WTA）的政策中包含一项条款，规定如果负面检测结果被认为是错误的，球员可以接受重新检测，这表明互联网上的任何人仍然有机会质疑运动员的性别认同。在《球员确认与协议书》表格中，球员还被要求“承认并同意”，如果他们未能通过检测，他们可能会成为“公众猜测的对象”。如果未能通过初步的 SRY 检测，运动员还需要接受更具侵入性的检查，以证明他们仍有资格参赛。两届奥运会 800 米金牌得主卡斯特·塞门亚（Caster Semenya）在她的自传中描述了自己被强迫脱光衣服，将腿放在支架上，并接受阴道超声波检查的经历。这些侵入性程序打破了“性别检测仅仅是一个简单的口腔拭子采样”的迷思。
至于那些可能未能通过这些检测的女性，其后果可能是极其严重的。2001 年，一名被要求接受性别验证检测的印度新星运动员普拉蒂玛·高恩卡（Pratima Gaonkar）被发现死在她的家乡果阿邦。她的母亲随后公开指控其教练在敲诈她，要求其透露结果。高恩卡在得知结果之前就自杀了，因为她不想面对如果被认定为非“生物学女性”后将发生的事情。这类检测带来的不仅是这种形式的羞辱。对于世界上许多女性来说，体育是通往不同未来的途径。它可以带来教育机会、为整个家庭提供经济保障以及自我表达的自由。运动员们为了实现这些潜力而奋斗终生的努力，在瞬间被全部剥夺。这在心理和物质上都是一个毁灭性的打击。
此外，还有一个严肃的问题：如果你必须接受检测才能继续从事你的生计，那么你是否真的能对这种检测表示“同意”？对某些人来说，无论相关伤害如何，这些检测都被认为是值得的。面对数十年未实施此类政策的体育历史，他们会说，这是维护公平的唯一方法。然而，当考虑到全貌时，问题理应是：这样一种所谓的公平，真的值得维护吗？
Tadej Pogačar 将于今日骑入巴黎，准备连续第三年并第五次（追平纪录）被加冕为环法赛冠军。
这位世界冠军在周五于神话般的 Alpe d’Huez 山顶获胜，将 Marco Pantani 的 1995 年纪录时间缩短了 1 分 13 秒，从而锁定了最近一次胜利。
这位 27 岁的选手以 23.9km/h 的平均速度攀登了这段 13.8km 的山口，为他的传奇色彩增色不少，并确保了那 21 个著名的发夹弯之一将以他的名字命名。
“一个 30 多年的纪录终于被打破了，这对我们来说是一件好事，”Pogačar 说道，他再次承认纪录并不能激励他。但 UAE Team Emirates-XRG 的管理团队却流下了眼泪。“我不知道他们为什么如此激动，”Pogačar 毫无表情地说道。“我想这意义重大。也许在情绪平静下来后，我会意识到这一点。”
昨天，Pogačar 帮助他的 UAE 队友 Isaac del Toro 确保了第三名，而 Richard Carapaz 获得了他在本次比赛中的第二次赛段胜利；这位厄瓜多尔选手看起来注定将获得亚军，但 Sepp Kuss 在最后几公里发生摔车，侥幸避免了严重受伤。
他唯一一次没能履行赛前热门预期的时刻，是当他将第二赛段赠予 Del Toro 时，以及当总成绩第二的 Remco Evenepoel 在前倒数第二个周日攀登 Plateau de Solaison 以及下一赛段的 26km 个人计时赛中将其击败而获得第二名时。
Pogačar 几乎从始至终主导了比赛：他的最大竞争对手 Jonas Vingegaard 在巴塞罗那的开幕赛段夺得黄衫，但到第三天时，Pogačar 已经赢得了五次赛段冠军中的第一次，并掌控了比赛。随后，他在第六赛段的 Tourmalet 彻底击败了所有竞争对手，并在接下来的两个山地赛段进一步扩大了优势。
Pogačar 预计的胜出时间差为 6:26 —— 他在今天的巴黎站可能还会进一步扩大这个差距 —— 这是他有史以来最大的领先优势。
他目前在环法赛中也累积了 26 次赛段胜利。按照目前的获胜速度，他将在本十年内超越 Mark Cavendish 创下的 35 次获胜纪录。
在第三周，疾病似乎成了 Pogačar 加冕道路上的潜在障碍。他的英国队友—
团队精神 也无可替代” Tadej Pogačar
据 Pogačar 称，队友 Adam Yates 在第 17 赛段时因一场在队内传播的胃部感染而“痛苦得像条狗”一样。Brandon McNulty 被迫在第 18 赛段退出比赛，而 Tim Wellens 则勉强达到了时间限制。为了保护 Pogačar 和 Del Toro，骑手们彼此隔离，在各自的房间内用餐和休息。到了 Alpe d’Huez 赛段，Yates 的情况大有好转，最糟糕的时期似乎已经过去。“即便在过去几天那些艰难的日子里，团队精神也无可替代，”Pogačar 说道。
这是在爬坡： Tadej Pogačar（见下图） 在攀登 Col du Galibier 时 紧随 Isaac del Toro 之后。 Dario Belingheri/Getty
鉴于这项运动阴暗的过去，在环法赛中这已成惯例，Pogačar 还不得不面对关于其可信度以及其成绩能否经受时间考验的激烈讨论。他和其他几名骑手——包括在第 15 赛段因锁骨骨折而退出比赛的 Vingegaard——在赛程期间被反兴奋剂检测员在半夜唤醒，并被要求提供反兴奋剂样本。尽管自 2016 年起就已被允许，但这是环法赛首次采用夜间检测。此类检测旨在检测检测窗口较短的禁药，或检测“微剂量”使用情况——即通过少量服用禁药，使其无法在兴奋剂检测中显现。自行车运动管理机构 UCI 表示，如果存在“关于骑手可能从事兴奋剂活动的严重且具体怀疑”，法官可能会批准使用夜间检测。负责监督自行车反兴奋剂计划的机构——国际检测机构 (International Testing Agency) 也为其部署进行了辩护。该机构表示：“在有限且合理的情况下，有效的检测必须能够在标准白日时间之外进行。”凌晨时分进行的未经通知的检测并不代表有罪，且检测结果仅在出现兴奋剂阳性反应时才会公开。“如果为了证明我们是在干净地比赛而有必要这样做，我接受，”Pogačar 说道。这段插曲主导了最后一周大部分赛事的叙事，但到了最后一个周末，所有关注点都集中在两次攀登 Alpe d’Huez 上，当时有数十万路边观众在观看。今天在巴黎的蒙马特赛道上将会有更多庞大的人群，比赛将在三圈极具挑战性的环路中结束，期间将经过位于法国首都最高天然点的圣心圣殿 (Basilique du Sacré-Cœur)。这种陡坡既有利于 Pogačar，也利于“爆发型骑手” (puncheurs)——即擅长短距离陡坡攀爬的专家——因此，这位身披黄色领骑衫的人被高度看好将赢得他在本届赛事中的第六个赛段冠军。无论他是否赢得最后一天的比赛，这位斯洛文尼亚人都将成为仅有的五位五次赢得环法冠军的骑手之一。如果他在明年的比赛中再次获胜——而且现在很难想象史上最伟大的自行车骑手在起跑时不会是夺冠热门——那么他将进一步确认自己作为历史上最璀璨的环法名将的地位。
• observer.co.uk 26.07.26 15 下周
挑战 Aroko 的 足球员， 或许会赢
Giles Smith
就上周报道的伍尔弗汉普顿流浪者（Wolverhampton Wanderers）训练基地发生的公民不服从行为而言，目前我们还缺乏心中渴望的详尽细节。不过，故事中诱人的轮廓是这样的：尼日利亚国脚前锋托鲁·阿罗科达雷（Tolu Arokodare）似乎对流浪者队去年从英超降级后所面临的英冠联赛赛季毫无兴趣，他在一次训练课期间组织了某种形式的静坐抗议；而且他的抗议行动在某种程度上足够强硬，即便没能立即促成他向意大利佛罗伦萨队的转会，但起码让这次训练课被迫提前结束。现在，让我们直接说明，这位处于此次季前筹备阶段中可能前所未有的个人反叛行动中心的球员随后
同时，英超联赛回归，格拉斯哥流浪者队将前往邓迪， 作者：帕特里克·基德 (Patrick Kidd)
发布了一份声明，表示他对这些媒体报道感到“惊讶和失望”，并称其中“许多”报道“不准确”。这一点已被注意到。但这并非完全意义上的反驳，疑问必然依然存在。例如，如果真的发生了“坐地抗议”，是在训练课的哪个时间点发生的？是在开始时，还是在拉伸期间（那时可能很难被注意到）？还是在稍后，为了产生更大影响，在进行圆圈传球训练（rondos）期间？又是在球场的什么位置发生的？是在中圈？在点球点上？还是在其中一个通道里？是否涉及链条、胶水或其他配件，就像例如“反抗灭绝”（Extinction Rebellion）成员所采取的类似刻意阻碍行为那样？
我们还希望承认这里存在一些合理性问题，尤其是阿罗科达雷（Arokodare）在可能多达 30 名其他球员和工作人员面前表现出的惊人“不可撼动性”，而这些人可能都渴望训练能继续进行。他们难道不能把他当成另一个标志锥桶，绕开他继续踢球吗？或者干脆换一块球场？此外，既然公众影响力才是这里的关键，为什么阿罗科达雷会选择在 7 月一个默默无闻的周一训练课来引起对其事业的关注，而不是利用第二天就计划与梅登黑德联队（Maidenhead United）进行、且显然具有更诱人且更广泛影响力的友谊赛，而阿罗科达雷在抗议后并未在其中出场？我们经常谈论球员们“让自己进入橱窗”（寻求转会机会），但球员把自己链在商店后方的垃圾桶上，在“想要离开”的程度上显然完全是另一个量级。因此，在康普顿公园（Compton Park）这次有争议的训练课拼图中，还有太多空白需要填补。也许当南安普顿最终
在上周末打破世界一英里纪录后，苏格兰的乔什·克尔（Josh Kerr）将在格拉斯哥的英联邦运动会上再次挑战该距离。一英里项目上次在本届运动会上竞争是在 1966, 年，当时由肯尼亚的基普·基诺（Kip Keino）以 3:55.34 的成绩夺冠，这比克尔的纪录慢了近 13 秒。英制单位在当届运动会后逐渐淡出，但如果这位来自爱丁堡的跑者能进一步刷新纪录，苏格兰的酒吧里人们将会举起一大杯啤酒，至少 568 毫升（周六，8.50pm，所有赛事报道见 TNT Sports）。
【请坐好：据称狼队前锋阿罗科达雷采用了通常由“反抗灭绝”抗议者执行的一种技巧。Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images）】
对于带有连字符的英国田径运动员来说，这周很糟糕，迪娜·阿舍-史密斯（Dina Asher-Smith）、卡塔里娜·约翰逊-汤普森（Katarina Johnson-Thompson）和马特·哈德逊-史密斯（Matt Hudson-Smith）全部因伤退出，但没有连字符的乔治亚·亨特·贝尔（Georgia Hunter Bell）在 800 米项目（周五，8.25pm）中很有机会夺金。鞍马项目上的奥运冠军兼世界冠军里斯·麦克莱纳根（Rhys McClenaghan）可能是北爱尔兰最大的希望（周一，3pm），而威尔士则寄希望于场地自行车馆的艾玛·菲努肯（Emma Finucane）。她将参加团体和个人冲刺赛（周四，6.10pm；周五，6.40pm）
以及下周日 (4pm) 的竞速赛（Keirin）。我曾读到，在 19 世纪的汤桥学校（Tonbridge School），有一项规定：在足球比赛的最后五分钟，球将被扔掉，男孩们可以进行一场集体大乱斗，以释放体内的攻击性。考虑到阿根廷队在世界杯决赛中的表现，这种做法可能会在那里流行起来。不过，2025-26 足球赛季终于结束了……而 2026-27 赛季又开始了。 邓迪联将在苏格兰超级联赛揭幕战中主场迎战流浪者队（周五，Sky Sports Football，8pm）；而心之球队（Hearts）如果在主场面对格拉茨风暴队（Sturm Graz）时想要将欧冠征程延续到 8 月，就必须追回 0-4 的分差（周二，Premier Sports 1, 7.45pm）。在英格兰，联赛杯（Carabao Cup）将于周六开始
发布这段视频。不过，考虑到这段视频可能是由某个在实习期间躲在树后的人用 iPhone 9 拍摄的，也许我们不会这么做。
无论如何，“操纵转会”自 2013 年以来从未如此扣人心弦。当时，西布罗姆维奇的彼得·奥德姆温吉决定字面地理解“去 QPR”这个想法，并真的去了 QPR —— 在转会协议陷入僵局时，他从伯明翰开车 120 英里，试图通过正门进入俱乐部。虽然没成功，但任何曾厌倦了听全科医生诊所的电话等待音乐，并决定亲自前往诊所解决问题的人，都会认同并赞赏其中的实用主义。此外，那次在官方记录上是“转会截止日”最后一次像天空体育新闻（Sky Sports News）一直假装的那样令人兴奋。
不过，请保持关注，因为狼队的这些事件可能预示着不满的足球运动员采取非暴力直接行动的一个全新时代的到来 —— 不仅仅是在训练中静坐抗议，还可能包括球员们用超级胶水将自己粘在草坪管理员的割草机上，或者横卧在球员停车场的入口处，直到埃弗顿以双方都能接受的价格将他们接走。
在这种背景下，历史可能会将托鲁·阿罗科达雷尊为足球界的首位“女性参政权运动者”（suffragette）——这位大胆的活动家在 2026 年勇敢地主张球员拥有不可剥夺的权利：除非万不得已，否则不为狼队效力。因此，他的名字将与新获得的球员自由成为同义词，就像在他之前的让-马克·博斯曼一样。
还需要多久，我们才会随口说出这样的词汇：“他通过‘阿罗科达雷方式’去了布伦特福德”？
涵盖艺术、科学、书籍与思想
专题 10-17 书籍 24-29
• 真实生活：Finn Blythe 访问全球最大的钟铸造厂；Gary Cansell 寻找西班牙剧作家费德里科·加西亚·洛尔卡 (Federico García Lorca)；Ammar Kalia 品尝芒果；Marine Saint 庆祝简·奥斯汀 (Jane Austen) • 网格：摄影师 Richard Renaldi 关于美国快餐的系列作品 • 访谈：音乐家 Questlove 谈论将 Roots Picnic 带到伦敦
谜题 电视 30-40
• Kitty Empire 评 Charli XCX 在大胆的《Brat》之后推出的后续作品 • Sarah Crompton 参加威尼斯舞蹈双年展 • Fiona Maddocks 欣赏到一部精湛且极简的《纳克索斯岛的阿里阿德涅》(Ariadne auf Naxos) • Matt Barton 评皇家莎士比亚公司 (RSC) 那部缺乏灵感的《樱桃园》(The Cherry Orchard)
封面照片：Tony Kaye 站在他自己的其中一幅画作前。由 Joe Leavenworth 为《观察家报》拍摄。
• Finn Blythe (第 4 页) 是一位居住在伦敦的作家和电影制作人。他在《观察家报》发表的上一篇文章（及电影）是关于颜料店 L Cornelissen & Son。
• Jade Cuttle (第 28 页) 在我们的书籍版面撰写每月诗歌专栏。她是新成立的写作博物馆 (Museum of Writing) 的首任驻店作家。
• 封面故事：导演 Tony Kaye 向 Andrew Anthony 讲述他在执导首部长片《美国历史X》(American History X) 后失宠的经历 • 报道：Katherine Cowles 会见了一位丈夫（艺术家）在加沙被杀的女性，以及一名救出其作品的男子 • 自然：今年夏天小红蛱蝶将迎来大爆发。Simon Barnes 解释原因 • John Naughton 谈大学中 AI 的使用
• Colin Grant (第 24 页) 是皇家文学基金会 (Royal Literary Fund) 杂志 WritersMosaic 的主编。他的最新著作是《我们留下的，我们携带的》(What We Leave We Carry)。
• 诗人 Claudia Rankine 与 Colin Grant 探讨种族、反抗与美国的灾难 • Richard Ovenden 谈大数据的过去与未来 • Chris Power 评一名英国远见者写的一部奇怪的 1,200 页小说 • Jade Cuttle 评关于酷儿、悲伤与树木的诗集
• 每一个人填字游戏、数独、Azed、国际象棋、猜图、电影连连看、Lexipedia 问答以及 Goldilocks 填字游戏 • 本周电视与广播亮点 • Barbara Ellen 评 鲍里斯·约翰逊 涉足乌克兰“杀戮区”的冒险
• Katherine Cowles (第 12 页) 是《观察家报》新评论 (The Observer New Review) 的编辑和作家。近期报道包括对《战争之马》(War Horse) 的幕后观察。
• Andrew Anthony (第 8 页) 在《观察家报》担任专题撰稿人已有三十多年。他的著作包括《后果》(The Fallout) 和《论点球》(On Penalties)。
Justine Kurland 拍摄的关于虚拟逃跑者的照片，想象了一个青春期少女们团结起来成为未来女性主义者的世界
那是田纳西州的早春，19 名年轻女性正穿过一片森林空地。树木凋零，但地上的千里光已经萌发，将景象铺上一层绿黄相间的地毯。中间的女性们仿佛在随着只有她们能听见的音乐起舞，伸展开双臂以保持平衡。当她们向某个未指明的目的地前行时，整体氛围显得冷静、沉着且坚定。
这张照片展出在辛辛那提 FotoFocus 画廊的开幕展《大帐篷》(Big Tent) 中，出自 Justine Kurland 的系列作品《少女图》(Girl Pictures)。在 1997 到 2002 年间，Kurland 穿梭于美国各地，拍摄户外环境中的青春期少女。Kurland 表示，这最初是对逃家少女的一次虚构探索，随后演变成“一种女权主义的世界构建 [想象] 如果所有这些
女孩们团结在一起会发生什么”。她希望展示“团结的力量，以及 [这些女孩] 如何通过彼此变得更加强大”。 在长达数月的公路旅行中，Kurland 搜寻美国城镇的街道以寻找拍摄对象。“我会看到一群女孩在高中门前闲逛，然后我会向她们介绍这个项目。如果她们愿意参加，我会告诉她们去问问母亲，确保没有问题，但我不知道她们是否真的这么做了。”她会提前勘察地点，并为每次拍摄创建宽松的叙事方案：“比如这里是她们要搭建堡垒的地方，或者用路边被车撞死的动物做晚餐，或者互相编发。” 这张照片则略有不同：《纽约时报》委托 Kurland 为纳什维尔范德比尔特大学的女性研究课程拍摄照片。秉持着使用摄影“将世界想象成你希望的样子”这一愿景，她尝试了多种学生排布方式。她说道：“我最喜欢的一组是她们向前方、向画幅之外走来的样子——这种感觉是她们可能会从照片中溢出，走进现实世界，去完成她们作为女权主义者必须做的工作。” Killian Fox
[[IMG_Golden Field]] 《金色原野》(Golden Field)， Justine Kurland 拍摄于 1998 年。 由艺术家及 Higher 提供。
钟声的诞生
在拉夫堡 (Loughborough) 自由持有街 (Freehold Street) 的铸造厂里，熔炉门开启，一坩埚熔融的钟金属——青铜，大约四份铜对一份锡——流淌而出，闪烁着低垂旭日般的色泽。两名身穿皮革围裙、戴着面罩的男子引导着它穿过铸造坑，动作舒缓而协调，因为他们深知，在这里，匆忙才是真正的危险。金属注入埋在地下模具的口中，发出嘶嘶声并溅起火花。在地下那个阴暗的形状内部，一口钟正在诞生。它在未来几天内还不会发声。但一旦它开口，可能会持续鸣响 1,000 年。这里是约翰·泰勒公司 (John Taylor & Co)，全球最大的钟铸造厂，也是自 2017 年伦敦怀特查佩尔钟铸造厂 (Whitechapel Bell Foundry) 关闭以来，英国境内最后一家大型铸造厂。自 1859 年起，人们便在这个地点铸造钟，这里有一座专门建造的建筑群，由发黑的砖墙、锯齿形屋顶和嘈杂的维多利亚时代机械组成，目前被列为二级保护建筑 (Grade II-listed)。泰勒公司的钟悬挂在约克大教堂、曼彻斯特市政厅、圣保罗大教堂，且正如信托人大卫·波特 (David Potter) 带着平静的满足感告诉我那样，“分布在世界一百多个不同的国家”。波特出生于伦敦，后定居约克郡，他生命的大部分时间都深深迷恋于这个地方。他少年时在达格纳姆 (Dagenham) 担任敲钟人，1969 年作为学生搬到约克，当时他认为南方在所有事情上都更优越——包括钟。随后他听到了这座城市的钟声。“我一直问：‘这些钟是谁铸造的？’而得到的答案始终是：‘拉夫堡的泰勒公司。’”铸钟工艺自中世纪以来几乎没有改变。它并非始于金属，而是始于泥土；一种由沙子、粘土、肥料和马毛组成的混合黏土，通过手工将其塑在砖芯周围，并使用一种名为“刮板” (strickle) 的木制模板刷出钟的精确轮廓。模具经过干燥，在反面刻上献词和日期，被夹在一起并埋在坑中。接着是浇铸，这是一个白炽的戏剧性过程，随后是漫长的冷却冷却期——一口大钟可能会在地下放置一周。最后，模具被打破，永远不再被使用，钟体现身，表面粗糙且呈灰色。但铸造出的钟仅仅是一半的钟。它从坑中取出时是沉默的且近似的，而赋予它声音的任务，比任何人都更多地落在一个人身上。吉里达尔·瓦杜卡尔 (Giridhar Vadukar) 是约翰·泰勒公司的首席调音师，也是全国仅有的三位钟调音师之一。他的领域是
观察 手机屏幕之外的世界景象
高耸的尖顶屋檐下空间开阔，日光从高窗洒在巨大的立式镗床上，其中一些已有百年历史，黑色且沉重，犹如船舶发动机。在他的周围，到处都是钟；有桶一样大的钟，也有足以让人站在其中的钟，每一口都等着在车床上轮到自己的时刻。这是一个奇特的聚集地：一个充满屏息等待的仪器的房间。Vadukar 在这里实践的工艺，早在 1896 年就在这个楼层上被完善。当时的泰勒（Taylors）家族在维多利亚时代已足够富裕，能乘坐明轮汽船前往低地国家，他们听到了法兰德斯的管钟，并领悟到了竞争对手未曾发现的一点：钟声并非单一的音符，而是一个和弦。它能同时产生五个主音——嗡鸣音（hum）、基音（prime）、三度音（tierce）、五度音（quint）和名义音（nominal）——这些声音来自钟身的不同区域，而在大多数古钟中，不同的音调往往不和谐。在与一位名叫亚瑟·辛普森（Arthur Simpson）的教区长合作后，泰勒公司学会了让这些冲突的谐波达成一致，订单随即纷至沓来。实现这一点便是 Vadukar 缓慢且严谨的艺术。钟口向上被螺栓固定在镗床巨大的旋转台上，青铜在精确的内圈被削去，这里的一卷金属屑降低了一个谐波，那里的一次切削工具过场微调了另一个，与此同时，调音师敲击、聆听、测量，然后再次切割。如果削掉太多就无法还原：这口钟就成了废铁。Vadukar 的工作精度达到了半音的分数级别，而且不仅仅针对新铸造的钟：古钟也会被送到卢堡（Loughborough）进行“润色”，尽管有些教区眷恋他们一直以来熟悉的钟声，要求将他们的钟保持原样。调音车间只是这个小王国中的一个房间。在院子的另一边是撞钟部。还有一个工程车间在修整铸铁钟架，波特（Potter）非常推崇这种材质，因为它永不腐朽： “一旦经过喷砂处理，它看起来就像新的一样。它在上面淋了 120 年的雨。”在后方，一个木工部门在制作绳索运行的大型硬木轮，以及钟楼门、敲钟廊，甚至教堂塔楼的小圆顶。整个地方弥漫着热金属、锯末和亚麻籽油的味道。 这个地方能存在至今本身就是一个小小的奇迹。到 2009 年，这家公司处于破产管理状态，12 位竞标者在围绕着这块成熟的拆迁地皮筹划建房。波特（当时已获 MBE 勋衔）给英国遗产委员会（English Heritage）负责人打了电话。“他真是太棒了。他将该建筑的等级提升至二级上市建筑（Grade II-listed），所有那些热情的竞标者一夜之间全部退出。”波特和两名同样热衷的同伴买下了铸造厂，向其设施投入了约 £7m，并在 2016 年将整个场地捐给了一个慈善信托基金，这样就再也没有人能把这些钟底下的土地卖掉。 在我离开之前，我问他当听到大规模的敲钟声（比如约克大教堂，他花了很多年时间修复那里的钟）时，脑海中在想什么。他曾与最顶尖的人一起敲钟，精通变奏敲钟艺术中那些令人生畏的数学计算。但重点不在于此。“即便它是重复的，”他简单地说道，“那是声音之美。” Finn Blythe
寻找洛尔卡 D
沿着被尘土飞扬的田野 簇拥着的尘土路， 有一座曾经被 称为“恶心”的小镇。 在这座镇上—— 西班牙语叫 Asquerosa—— 住着一个名叫费德里科的男孩， 他在给朋友写信的落款处 会写上其他城镇的名字， 以避免使用自己家乡的名字。 现在那里被称为 Valderrubio， 而我此时就在格拉纳达的平原上， 在贝尔纳尔达·阿尔巴（Bernarda Alba）的屋子外。 壁虎紧贴在墙上
你可以拍摄 任何东西，” 我的导游 Cristina 说。 “但不能拍那个”
在街道对面的建筑群中，一群学童正躲避着阳光，手里拿着剧本，准备表演费德里科·加西亚·洛尔卡（Federico García Lorca）的剧作《伯纳德莎家》（La Casa de Bernarda Alba）中的片段——而洛尔卡本人从未看到过这部作品的演出。在空调的嗡嗡声中，我的导游 Cristina 解释了这部剧是如何在 1945 年首次上演的，那是加西亚·洛尔卡在西班牙内战期间被弗朗西斯科·佛朗哥（Francisco Franco）将军的民族主义支持者杀害九年之后——而且并非在西班牙，而是在阿根廷。“在这个房间里，你可以拍摄任何东西，”Cristina 说，“但不能拍那个。”她向我示意一份报告，报告中佛朗哥的审查员维持了对《伯纳德莎家》的禁令。政权或许杀死了作者，但这部剧仍然冒犯了其天主教伦理。Cristina 带领我们来到一个庭院。葡萄藤在上方蜿蜒；盆里开着红色的天竺葵，还有一个水井，被一堵墙分开，曾经由两个家庭共用。当
阿尔巴家族在这一侧交谈时，加西亚·洛尔卡就躲在另一侧倾听。他将听到的内容转化为一部伟大的西班牙语剧作。我在大学时学习过《伯纳德莎家》，并在伦敦的舞台上看过这部剧。我从未想到自己会来到她的家中。但她就在那里，凝视着我。在照片中，阿尔巴（真实名为 Frasquita）看起来严肃、冷漠且高傲——一个认为没有什么比维持体面更重要的女人。“她就像我的母亲一样，”当我们环顾客厅时，一名同行游客低声说道。墙上挂着她三个女儿的照片。那里还有何塞·贝纳维德斯·佩尼亚（José Benavides Peña）。他在剧中是“罗马人佩佩”（Pepe el Romano），那个通过赢得马尔蒂里奥（Martirio）的爱、诱惑阿德拉（Adela）并承诺娶安古斯蒂亚斯（Angustias）而击碎这个家庭的男人——这三姐妹都住在同一个房子里。在现实生活中，他娶了弗拉斯基塔的一个女儿，在第一任妻子死于难产后，又娶了另一个。但在阿斯克罗萨（Asquerosa），每个人都知道罗马人是谁，贝纳维德斯·佩尼亚为此愤怒不已。他正是那些迫害加西亚·洛尔卡的人之一。阿尔巴家族恳请剧作家修改名字。但在他来得及修改之前，他就被杀害了，年仅 38 岁。我们在烈日下绕过街角来到他的住所。屋内很凉爽。这位剧作家的父亲希望长子能接管他的糖甜菜生意。但加西亚·洛尔卡有不同的想法。“我天生是个诗人，”他写道，“就像有些人天生残疾，有些人天生失明，有些人天生英俊。请让我的翅膀留在原处。我告诉你，我会飞得很好。”我走进他与兄弟共用的卧室，直到他们的
争吵让父母 发疯。天花板 像天空一样蓝， 正是加西亚·洛尔卡 想要的样子。 对于他的家人来说， 当儿子被杀害时， 西班牙也随之死去了。 Cristina 告诉我们， 他的父亲在离开前往 纽约流亡时是怎么说的。 “我这辈子都不想 回到这个操蛋的国家。” 他再也没有回来。 在剧作家的书桌上 放着干花和一封 他写给父母的信， 安排在这个房子里 度过夏天。他请求 他们确保有一架钢琴。 “一架可以演奏的 钢琴。”他给“可以演奏” 这几个字画了线。 钢琴就在客厅里。 我确认周围没人， 让食指按下中音C键， 房子吞噬了这个音符。 孩童时期，加西亚·洛尔卡 花大量时间练习吉他， 干扰了家人的午睡， 但他擅长弹钢琴。 我弹奏了C大调。 在一座曾经充满音乐的房子里， 一架失调了 100 年的钢琴。 Gary Cansell
芒果季
对于英国的亚裔家庭来说，芒果是领地自豪感的象征。我的家人拥有印度血统，他们是该国阿尔方索 (Alphonso) 品种的坚定拥护者；而我的巴基斯坦朋友则会对他们的 乔萨 (Chaunsa) 水果赞不绝口；东亚人则会对长椭圆形的泰国南多迈 (Nam Dok Mai) 芒果深信不疑，将其切丁搭配糯米饭。
然而，今年的芒果季并非庆祝之时。“这是一场完美的风暴，”英国配送企业 Alphonso Mango 的联合创始人 Satya Morarji 告诉我。“今年年初，芒果种植地区的温度在较长时间内偏低，这意味着供应延迟了一个月。随后，中东危机导致运费飙升。此外，英国炎热的夏天导致水果成熟过快，有时我们甚至在它腐烂之前无法将其发出。”
目前一盒 12 个的阿尔方索芒果零售价约为 £30 —— 每个高达 £2.50，令人心惊。我决定联系我认识的唯一一个有足够专业知识来寻找目前市面上最佳水果的人：我的父亲。我在伦敦西区豪恩斯洛 (Hounslow) 的商业街上与他会面，那里有一排热闹的南亚杂货店。他双手背在身后，像一位视察教堂墓地的牧师，已经在评估陈列的黄色盒子。
“你首先得了解季节，”他建议道，手指在空中摆动。“阿尔方索从 4 月持续到 7 月底，然后夏天晚些时候有印度的凯萨 (Kesar) 品种，巴基斯坦的乔萨则一直到 9 月。泰国芒果
艺术
剧院
深受喜爱的音乐剧《小夜曲》(A Little Night Music)，由 Stephen Sondheim 作曲作词，将于今年圣诞节在曼彻斯特的皇家交易所剧院 (Royal Exchange Theatre) 复排。12 月 5 日至 2027 年 1 月 30 日演出的门票现已开售。
以及来自南美洲的其他品种则贯穿全年。”每种芒果在季初最贵，随后由于冷藏时间较长而变得便宜。今年，情况会更混乱。我们走进 As Sanabil 商店，那里一盒 6 个的阿尔方索售价 £13。店主 Nassim Shah 说：“常客们会进来要求我为他们预留最好的那一盒，或者如果我后方留有特级货，他们愿意出高价。” “人们对他们从小吃到大的品种非常忠诚。”作家 Mehlaqa Khan 出身于一个巴基斯坦芒果农家。“人们对芒果有领地意识，因为[它们]代表了土地本身。”她说。“芒果还没有被‘挪用’，所以我们每个人对不同的品种都有一种所有感。”我的父亲试图与 Shah 讨价还价，争取买下剩下的阿尔方索芒果。“街对面那个人 6 个卖 £10，”他说；但并没有这样一个的人，也没有这样的价格。Shah 笑了，我们按照广告价 £13 买走了 6 个芒果。沿着商业街继续走，在 Quality Foods 店里，一盒 12 个的凯萨芒果售价为较为合理的 £16。凯萨芒果的黄色更亮，比深橙色带绿点的阿尔方索更甜，同样受追捧。“阿尔方索浓郁且颓靡，带有奶油风味，而凯萨则更具花香且清新。至于乔萨，简直就是一颗糖分炸弹，”Morarji 说道。在每种情况下，判断它们是否成熟且质量良好的方法是闻芒果与树连接的茎部。“如果闻起来有强烈的芒果味，那就是好的。”将战利品带回家后，我们开始品尝。凯萨和阿尔方索的区别似乎主要在于多汁程度，前者喷溅出甜味，而后者则含有更浓稠、更醉人的液体。过了一会儿，我觉得自己就像吃完一罐蜂蜜后的维尼熊一样，与父亲在满足的沉默中坐着。我们一致认为，无论品牌忠诚度如何，这些水果跨越数千英里来到这里供我们享用，感觉就像奇迹一样。我父亲突然提议：“我们再来一个吗？”
Ammar Kalia
遮阳帽下 今天是简·奥斯汀的逝世周年纪念日，大约 350 名粉丝聚集在汉普郡乔顿的故居，以表达敬意。自 2021 年起，简·奥斯汀故居博物馆在每年七月中旬都会让时光倒流。遮阳帽和高顶礼帽并非必须，但帝国廓形礼服和燕尾服的数量远超 T 恤和短裤。博物馆通讯主管阿米莉亚·哈维尔（Amelia Harvell）兴奋地告诉我：“这次活动之前从未在正式的纪念日 [7 月 18 日] 举行过。”去年是奥斯汀诞辰 250 周年，加上更多基于其著作改编的影视剧，引发了游客量的激增，但博物馆馆长利兹·邓福德（Lizzie Dunford）表示，她所珍视的是前往乔顿的朝圣之旅是“与奥斯汀建立终身关系”的一部分。花园里搭建了一个挂满彩色小旗的帐篷，一排戏服以及装满帽子和夹克的盒子正等待着游客。
“这里显然有艺术品，”哈维尔说，“但大家总是在拍自拍。”在帐篷里，由于奥斯汀的粉丝们在尝试各种造型，照镜子的时间非常紧张。“快把那件夹克穿上，免得被别人抢走，”一位名叫塞西尔（Cecile）的美国游客低声说道。在我帮她把夹克袖子拉好时，她解释说自己的淡紫色连衣裙和黄色蝴蝶结遮阳帽购自伦敦的 Camden Costumes。另一位客人路易丝（Louise）已经连续两天在装扮了。她说，她那件带有羽毛帽的米色礼服是参考了 1813 年的时尚插画，以确保剪裁尽可能准确，而她的可拆卸礼服袖子则与《傲慢与偏见》中的班内特太太的款式一致。与此同时，她的侄女丽贝卡（Rebecca）则选择了 2020 年电影《艾玛》中的鲜艳色彩，作为她粉黑相间薄纱裙的参考。大约 25 名最坚定的“简迷”准备在导游的带领下漫步于
乔顿。我们的导游戴着遮阳帽和太阳镜，用洪亮的声音开始了那句不可或缺的开场白：“一个普遍承认的真理是……”随后全团一起齐声诵读完这句关于婚姻的格言。我们从一座茅草屋开始，这座房子曾给《艾玛》中贝茨小姐的住所带来灵感。导游指出，这座房子的规模较小，是因为房主不像简那样有一个富有的哥哥。或者，正如一名穿着蓝色天鹅绒夹克的女性对同伴评价道，“是因为门口没有亚马逊的包裹”。Marine Saint
电影
电影
《观察家报》评论员 推荐 不容错过 的活动
古典
“伦敦爱乐乐团表现出色，合唱团同样如此，在宏大且澎湃的合奏中倾注了全部的心血。由八名男中音、一名低男中音和三名男低音组成的纯男性阵容，没有任何短板。”《比利·巴德》将在东萨塞克斯郡的格林德本（Glyndebourne）于 7 月 28 日和 30 日进行最后两场演出。Fiona Maddocks
《修剪玫瑰丛》（Rosebush Pruning）中有着“令人愉悦的尖锐喜剧时刻”。卡里姆·艾努兹（Karim Aïnouz）这部关于一个功能失调的美国富裕家庭在西班牙奢华流亡生活的黑色喜剧，目前仍在全国电影院上映。Jonathan Romney
基拉·弗雷杰（Kira Freije）的《取消合唱》（Unspeak the Chorus）是这位入围特纳奖的雕塑家的首个大型个展，将在牛津现代艺术馆展出至 8 月 16 日——“这是一场多么精彩的展览：坚定地采取具象风格，毫无掩饰地带有剧场感，在每一个场景和姿态中都极具表现力”。Laura Cumming
现正预售
Wham! 乐队是首个在共产主义中国演出的西方流行团体，于 1985 年在北京和广州演出。现在，一部新的纪录片将带观众走进幕后，探索他们为何前往以及一切是如何展开的。《Wham! 在中国 10 天》将于 7 月 28 日起在全国电影院上映。
系列作品在 美国快餐店 的员工与顾客之间 找到了共同点
快餐通常被视为要么是不健康且具有剥削性的，要么是美味、便捷且令人慰藉的。在他的新书《服务过亿》（Billions Served）中，美国摄影师理查德·雷纳尔迪通过对美国餐厅员工及其所处系统的肖像刻画，探讨了这种并列关系；他捕捉了顾客用餐的场景、室外的废弃垃圾，以及周围建筑的熟悉感。“拍摄这个世界让我能够刻意地置身于那种矛盾之中，”雷纳尔迪说。“食物诱人的设计及其产生的怀旧感，与柜台背后使这一切成为可能的劳动力形成了对比，而这些劳动往往让从事者付出了沉重的代价。”
1999 年，雷纳尔迪开始使用大画幅相机工作。在几个将阶级作为潜台词的探索项目中，他发现快餐店员工的肖像不断出现。他心中记下，这些照片最终可能会成为一个独立的系列。在 2019 年，他正式开始了这项工作，首幅作品是德克萨斯州南部一家 Jack in the Box 快餐店里一名叫伊万（Ivan）的员工肖像。雷纳尔迪惊讶于获得拍摄这些空间许可竟然如此容易，于是他扩大了项目规模，着手记录一个通常不被赋予如此沉稳与考究对待的领域。
“我被那些工作在很大程度上被忽视的人所吸引，”雷纳尔迪说。“公务员、护士、急救人员、救援工作者以及快餐店员工本身。他们支撑了海量的日常生活，却很少能获得那些更显眼的人物所享有的认可。” —— Tara Joshi
“伦敦在 Roots 乐队的 职业生涯中起到了 关键作用”： Questlove。 Christian Germoso
电影制作人谈论 巴拉克·奥巴马、 将 Roots Picnic 音乐节 带到英国，以及他关于 Earth, Wind & Fire 的 新纪录片
Ahmir Thompson，更广为人知的名字是 Questlove，他是 Roots 乐队的共同领队。他与 Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter 于 1987 年在故乡费城组建了该乐队。作为美国嘻哈音乐的中流砥柱，Roots 乐队同时也是《吉米·法伦今夜秀》（The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon）的驻场乐队。在业余时间，Questlove 制作唱片、撰写书籍并拍摄电影。《灵魂之夏》（Summer of Soul）被马克·克莫德（Mark Kermode）描述为“我见过最好的音乐纪录片”，并在 2022 年获得了一项英国电影学院奖（Bafta）和一座奥斯卡奖。他的最新作品《Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World)》于 6 月在特莱比卡电影节（Tribeca festival）首映。在 8 月 8-9 日，Questlove 及其团队将把年度 Roots Picnic 音乐节带到伦敦的水晶宫碗球场（Crystal Palace Bowl），届时将有 Nas、Common 和 Sasha Keable 等艺术家参演。
你们自 2008 年起就在费城和其他美国城市举办 Roots Picnics。为什么把它出口到伦敦？ 我不知道伦敦是否意识到它在 Roots 乐队的职业生涯中起到了多么关键的作用。因为一时兴起 [在 1993 年]，我们决定要“效仿亨德里克斯（pull a Hendrix）”，搬到伦敦，我们在肯特什镇（Kentish Town）住了四年。在伦敦，我们领悟到了即兴演奏（jam session）的力量。我们还参加了格拉斯顿伯里（Glastonbury）和其他音乐节，我们当时简直被震撼了，因为我们在美国所知道的音乐节只有伍德斯托克（Woodstock）、Live Aid 和 Lollapalooza。我们当时想，如果我们把这种形式带回费城，岂不是太疯狂了？我们的第一个音乐节规模很小，大约 3,000 人。快进到去年与 Jay-Z 合作时——它已经成长得如此之大，以至于从技术上讲，我们已经无法担任主演出席了
音乐家兼导演，55 岁
我们自己的音乐节。所以我们就在想，如果我们把它带到巡演中会怎样？而最富有诗意的是，我们将它带回了培养我们的地方：伦敦。
它与其他伦敦音乐节有何不同？ 不同之处在于，我们贯穿于整个音乐节之中。The Roots 将担任 Nas 的乐队，这是人们以前从未见过的。我、Robert Glasper、Common、Bilal 和 Burniss Travis 将重现我们在疫情期间制作的一张一次性的现场专辑。[Black Thought] 将和一群 MC 们一起进行他的现场混音带表演。核心目的就是为您提供一种在其他地方通常无法见到的体验。
（成员）已经来过又离开了。感觉这还是同一个乐队吗？ 嗯，我们在贝斯手位置上不得不替换了 Leonard Hubbard [他在 2007 年被诊断出患癌后退出；于 2021 年去世]。但实际上，我们只是在不断增加成员。挺奇怪的：在剪辑 Earth, Wind & Fire 的纪录片时，我想，天呐！我没意识到我们的成员比他们还要多。当你想到 Earth, Wind & Fire 时，你会想到一支军队。但他们其实只有 9 个人。而我们有 11 人。我觉得我们就像一个巡回马戏团，人们不断地加入我们。
Earth, Wind & Fire 内部复杂的小组动态是否在某种程度上引起了你的共鸣？ 你知道这很奇怪，我认为我拍的所有电影在与现实生活的关联上都不是偶然的。所以在
像亨德里克斯 那样 搬到伦敦。 我们在 肯特什 镇住了 四年
在花三年时间拍摄那部纪录片的过程中，我开始问自己：“我是一个有效的领导者吗？”我努力确保乐队的士气高涨，并且学会更好地倾听。当我听到他们说“没错，有时候我们在弹错一个音符时，你很严厉”时，我感到很震惊。因此，我更加留意对待伙计们的方式，因为按照目前的进度，这段旅程如果失败那就是我们的损失。现在是光辉时期。我们刚刚参加了蒙特勒爵士音乐节，那可能是我们在舞台上最辉煌的时刻。
巴拉克和米歇尔·奥巴马在 Earth, Wind & Fire 的纪录片中作为访谈嘉宾出现。这是怎么回事？ 在《夏日之魂》(Summer of Soul) 之后，很多出乎意料的机会出现了。我的意思是，伙计，奥斯卡奖和英国电影学院奖（Bafta）绝对不在我的预期名单上。我原以为我只是在疫情期间做了一个非常酷的项目，然后你们在几年后才会发现它。无论如何，我接到的第一个冷不防的电话之一就是来自奥巴马总统。当时我正在用 Uber Eats 点餐，电话响了，我说：“是的，请到某某层。”他说：“啊？噢，你以为我是外卖员？是我，巴里。”我说：“等一下，什么？”于是我以朋友的身份邀请他出演这部电影。[他和米歇尔] 非常乐意参加，我很高兴他们这么做了。
如今你觉得自己更像一名电影制作人还是音乐家？ 我知道这听起来很陈词滥调，但我希望利用我的纪录片来激励人们。《夏日之魂》真正的教训是喜悦和快乐的重要性，而我们倾向于忽略这一点，但它至关重要。对我来说，这部 Earth, Wind & Fire 的电影是关于如何面对恐惧，如何呼吸。我几乎觉得拍摄这些电影是我的一项义务，这样我的音乐家同僚们就能以不同的方式看待他们的作品。我们很多人进入嘻哈领域是因为想脱离贫民区并生存下去。现在我想让人们将他们的天赋视为一种更高的目标和更高的意义。
你现在在忙什么？ 我有一个名为《下一步》(The Next Move) 的新[在线]节目。我的图书公司将出更多书。还有新的 Roots 专辑，肯定会在明年初发行。此外还有两个电影项目。我现在还不能透露标题，但可以说到 2032 年前我都会很忙。
你会继续研究伟大的黑人音乐艺术家吗？ 一旦你拍了一部电影，每个人都会跑来对你说，多拍一些。所以，是的，绝对会。 采访者：Killian Fox
S
肖像画： Joe Leavenworth
对抗
那是 1998 年的某个时候，马龙·白兰度 (Marlon Brando) 坐在他位于洛杉矶穆赫兰道 (Mulholland Drive) 的客厅地板上，摄像机正对着对面坐着的一个男人，而那个人也拿着一台摄像机对着白兰度。这位年长的演员带着毫不掩饰的恼怒对他的客人说道。 “我恳请你不要大闹一场，”他说，在提醒拍摄他的那个人——一位名叫托尼·凯 (Tony Kaye) 的英国广告和音乐录影带导演——凯已经签署了交付一部故事片的合同，并且有义务诚信地将其完成。 凯表示同意，但说合同中有一项条款，如果他对最终成品不满意，可以将其名字从他的处女作《美国历史X》中删除。他说，他想使用该条款。他想将他的名字“Tony Kaye”替换为“Humpty Dumpty”（蛋壳先生）。 白兰度询问凯是否熟悉这项特定条款的措辞，这位英国人坦率地回答道：“不，因为我从来没读过。” 这一场景出现在《蛋壳先生 X》(Humpty Dumpty X) 中，这是一部由凯制作的极其有趣的全新纪录片。这位 74 岁的伦敦人因为在好莱坞毁掉自己的事业而声名狼藉。这是一部关于过度时代中创作傲慢的电影，是一个关于艺术家追求伟大却将支持者变成敌人的警示故事——这在行业内相当于不仅是以 the hand that feeds (喂养之手) 为食，而且是将其整个吞下。 28 年前，《美国历史X》的完成本应是凯的胜利时刻，是他人生中一个辉煌新篇章的开始。该片由年轻的爱德华·诺顿 (Edward Norton) 主演，饰演一名试图改邪正经的凶残新纳粹分子。虽然一个白人至上主义者面对自己种族主义的觉醒故事并没有特别复杂，但凯引导演员们带来了强有力的自然主义表演，并将其与诗意的美学结合，产生了令人信服的效果。但凯在戏剧之中又制造了一场戏剧，将一次小分歧演变成了一场被大肆宣传的个人灾难。这是一种极其戏剧化的职业自杀方式。 “拍那部电影撕裂了一切，”他告诉我。“当时，里德利·斯科特 (Ridley Scott) 和我是世界上唯一在两岸（大西洋两岸）都拥有制作公司的两个人。但[那部电影]摧毁了我的公司，导致它破产。我的婚姻结束了，一切都分崩离析。” 我们在纽约特莱贝卡电影节 (Tribeca film festival) 播放完《蛋壳先生 X》后进行了交谈。根据凯的说法，这次放映“极其、不可思议地、令人震惊地成功”。他正与结婚 25 年的妻子简·凯 (Jan Kaye，发音为 Yan) 坐在一起，后者担任了该片的制片人。 尽管他系着领带，但看起来几乎很放松——这个词通常与这位极其热烈的男人联系不到一起。这在一定程度上是因为他刮掉了近年来一直蓄着的、像旧约时代那样的胡须，那胡须曾赋予他一种拉比般的狂热气息。但他的相对轻松主要归功于掌声过后的亢奋以及巨大的解脱感。 “感觉太好了，”在终于能讲述他那痛苦的故事时，他说道。他将其描述为一种个人层面的宣泄，因为多年来关于当时发生了什么的各种神话和传闻一直流传，而其中大多数是由凯自己创造的。 “蛋壳先生”这个名字是凯对《美国历史X》剪辑版本的抗议，他认为新线电影公司 (New Line Cinema) 电影公司是在某种要求下将该版本强加给他的。
诺顿。这是一种刻意的挑衅，而凯（Kaye）——一个即便在空房间里也能发起一场原则性争论的人——曾以此见长。布兰多虽然与这部电影无关，但他是那些意识到这位年轻朋友对自己造成的伤害远超其预期目标（制片厂）的人之一。“人们看向你时，会发现你的行为方式可能会威胁到他们的美元，”布兰多先见之明地警告他，“如果你想把事情办成，就得跟着现有的音乐起舞。”
结果，美国导演工会（Directors Guild of America）拒绝承认凯那个像童谣一样的笔名。但即便在那时，正如他的纪录片所示，凯也是一个本能地知道如何让棘手局面变得更糟的人。
在为了重新剪辑电影而提交申请时，他在与新线（New Line）制片厂高层的会议上带了一名天主教神父、一名拉比和一名佛教僧侣。他们中没有人看过这部电影。这又是另一个恶作剧吗？“我想带来和平与精神性，”他现在说，“我也害怕接下来会发生什么，但我认为这会很有趣。我觉得这很搞笑。”
凯要求在电影发行前获得更多时间进行工作，并利用这段时间前往加勒比地区，与诗人及诺贝尔奖得主德里克·沃尔科特（Derek Walcott）共同改编剧本。正如他后来观察到的，“我的问题在于，当时我太习惯于在英国的广告界工作了。我让自己进入了这样一个神圣的境地，即我几乎可以随心所欲地做任何事情而无需解释。所以我当时就是边走边编。”
他对与沃尔科特的合作感到兴奋——“他太不可思议了”——但在两个月后，没有实质性的进展可以向新线展示，而他被告知制片厂将发行已有的剪辑版本。凯对此采取了持久的戏剧化反抗。正如他在当时的影像资料中所说，这呼应了乔治·伯纳德·肖（George Bernard Shaw）的话：“理智的人[从未]成就过任何事情。”
他游说了多伦多电影节，使其放弃首映这部电影，并花费了自己 100,000 美元的资金在好莱坞业内刊物上刊登广告，批评制片厂的剪辑版本。“我敢肯定这对其他人来说简直是地狱，但我感到精力充沛，就像吸了毒一样，”他几年后说道。药物从未是他的问题，但他在冲突中总是感到亢奋。
电影最终上映并获得了好评。票房表现尚可，诺顿也因此获得了第二次奥斯卡提名。相比之下，凯在好莱坞的传奇中被定义为一个“反叛者”，一个在短期内不太可能再次获得制片厂机会的人。
他开始指责诺顿对最终上映版本的剪辑产生了不利影响。他说该演员参与了剪辑过程并扩大了自己的戏份，创造了与凯的意愿相悖的感伤场景。你可以在 Youtube 上看到凯，他看起来像诺斯费拉图（Nosferatu），在宣泄关于艺术背叛的愤怒。
“我对这部电影的构想从未能呈现在银幕上”
托尼·凯（Tony Kaye） 拍摄于洛杉矶 供《观察家报》使用
“因为演员爱德华·诺顿得到了制片人的允许去编辑和修改这部电影，”他大声叫道，“增加了他自己表演的分量，而损害了电影的完整性。” 就在去年，他还在接受采访时说，如果诺顿听了他的话，本可以赢得奥斯卡奖。“爱德华，你失去了唯一一次冲击最佳男主角的机会，干得好。” 就像好莱坞自己的“古 Mariner”一样，他似乎注定要不断讲述那些在后期制作中发生的战斗，而这些战斗就像是一只套在他脖子上的导演信天翁（沉重的负担）。但这并不是凯在《Humpty Dumpty X》中讲述的故事，该片捕捉到了他那不可遏制的强度，产生了喜剧且偶尔带有悲剧色彩的效果。 相反，他现在暗示诺顿的影响有限。对于“诺顿叙事”，他似乎感到有些疲惫，仿佛这是一个被强加给他的误解，但对其起源几乎没有悔意。在当时，人们很难分辨凯说这些话是因为有趣，还是因为真实，或者是因为他希望那是真实的。他说话一直很有说服力，但他未必是最可靠的讲述者。那么，演员在剪辑室里的实际影响到底是什么？ “没有任何影响，”他闭着眼睛说道，仿佛在斟酌措辞。“他来了几天，我不喜欢那样，但他是一个极具创造力的人，他想尽可能多地贡献。我对他的表演感到非常高兴且自豪。” 这是一个惊人的转变，从长达四分之一个世纪的痛骂变成了赞誉之词。凯说他甚至已经与制片公司高管迈克尔·德卢卡（Michael De Luca）和解了，后者现在是华纳兄弟影业的联合主席兼 CEO。在当时记录的片段中
中，德卢卡静静地听着导演试图向他推销“将诺统的表演精简到极致”的想法，其中涉及讨论纳特·金·科尔（Nat King Cole）的文化意义——凯当时的一个古怪习惯是在会议期间拍摄他的对话者，有时也拍摄他自己。德卢卡恳求他不要放弃这部电影，但他拒绝了每一次请求，后来将他们的关系描述为“一扇紧闭的门，一座被彻底烧毁的桥”。与德卢卡的紧张关系让凯感到越来越不舒服，因为这位高管后来成为了好莱坞最有权势的人物之一。“我和他的关系非常好，”凯说，坚持认为他们几年前就和解了。“华纳兄弟完全支持《Humpty Dumpty X》。”那么，他终于学会了如何在这个圈子里生存，讨好自尊心强的人，表达尊重并与正确的人保持关系了吗？“我认为现在你必须自己动手，”他外交辞令般地说道。“我把我和简看作是克里斯多弗·诺兰和艾玛·托马斯的朋克版。”当然，这对夫妻档是 21 世纪一些最成功的口碑和票房大作的负责人，其中包括《黑暗骑士》、《奥本海默》以及最近上映的《奥德赛》。他把这当成一种玩笑，但重点在于诺兰和托马斯知道如何按照自己的条件完成项目。但如果说凯再也没有在好莱坞工作过，那是错误的。总计，不包括《Humpty Dumpty X》，自《美国历史 X》以来，他成功导演了四部长片。最著名的是《Lake of Fire》，这是一部关于堕胎争论的庞大纪录片，历时 15 年制作并于 2006. 年发行。2009 年，他与劳伦斯·菲什本合作拍摄了《Black Water Transit》。该片从未发行。凯将其描述为
将其描述为“未完成。我的意思是，[我的电影] 都没有真正完成，但《黑水运输》（Black Water Transit）是其中最不完整的”。 2011 年，他执导了由艾德里安·布罗迪主演的《脱离》（Detachment），这是一篇关于社会疏离感的忧郁论文，试图为代课教师做同样的事情，就像《出租车司机》为出租车司机所做的那样，但在过程中走错了好几次方向。两年前，他与朱莉娅·福克斯合作拍摄了一部低预算黑色喜剧《教练》（The Trainer），该片在上映后便销声匿迹。 这并非毫无建树，但并不是凯伊在抵达好莱坞时所预想的职业生涯，当时他带着一种“近乎疯狂的信念，认为我的第一部电影必须超越《公民凯恩》”。
凯伊在北伦敦斯坦福山的一个正统犹太家庭中长大。他的父亲从事服装业。由于童年时期的口吃困扰——其影响在他的言谈中依然明显——凯伊在最初从事平面设计工作时发现沟通十分困难。他最初想成为一名艺术家，而且多年来他一直绘制着巨大的巴斯奎特风格画布。在当代艺术研究所（Institute of Contemporary Arts）参加了一段时间的夜校后，他的语言障碍缓慢改善。27 岁时，他在广告业找到了一份工作，这在当时是工人阶级进入纯艺术和电影领域的切入点。他是 Collett Dickenson Pearce 广告公司的初级艺术总监——那里曾是艾伦·帕克和雷德利·斯科特的起跳平台。他于 1990 年首次抵达洛杉矶，凭借一系列在视觉和听觉上都极其丰富且获奖无数的广告，以及一些出色的摇滚MV（其中包括 Soul Asylum 乐队的《Runaway Train》）引起了好莱坞的关注。人们原以为他会加入那批稍早的英国广告导演行列——斯科特及其兄弟托尼、帕克、艾德里安·莱恩和休·哈德森——成功实现从广告到商业大片的跨大西洋转型。然而，凯伊认为自己是在追随一群更为卓越的先辈的脚步：“[埃里克]·冯·斯特罗海姆、[奥逊]·威尔斯和 [弗朗西斯·福特]·科波拉”。这并不是凯伊和我第一次交谈。30 年前的一天，在他广告事业的顶峰时期，我在比弗利山酒店的一栋豪华平房里看着他工作，那座西海岸魅力之殿被永恒地定格在老鹰乐队《加州旅馆》的专辑封面上。他当时正在为汤姆·琼斯拍摄，后者站在一张咖啡桌上，大声吟唱着一段关于梦想成为足球运动员瑞安·吉格斯的曲子。
这就像是大卫·林奇电影中的一个场景，诡异且强大，但难以理解。几个月后的 1996 年，这段来自庞蒂普里德最伟大性感符号的片段出现在运动装公司锐步（Reebok）的一则广告中，广告中还出现了理查德·阿滕伯勒、乔治·贝斯特、贾维斯·考克，以及前《每日比赛》（Match of the Day）主持人吉米·希尔被绑在足球场中间的一把椅子上，嘴里塞着一只锐步球鞋。在凯伊的广告作品中，信息与产品之间的关系很少是显而易见的。他的标志性风格在这样一则广告中得到了体现：一台大钢琴从桥上掉下来，一个被涂成金色的胖秃头男人在沙漠中翩翩起舞，而 The Velvet Underground 乐队的《Venus in Furs》则为整个过程增添了一种令人陶醉的前卫感。那是为邓禄普轮胎拍摄的。在那个资金不设限的电视广告时代，他就是那个最受追捧的人。美国
《History X》的预算为 $20m —— 与当时的大片相比并不算多，但这种严肃的入门级投资理应拍出一部能开启更大前景的电影。多年来，好莱坞容忍了许多离谱的行为，但有一条金科玉律是：你不能贬低产品。另一条是：如果你要对抗制片厂负责人，最好拥有一些非常强大的盟友。凯（Kaye）两条都违反了，而且几乎违反了所有其他规则。他的执拗到了失控的地步，以至于连以不愿妥协著称的布兰多（Brando）都建议他：“接受这是一个合作 venture 且规则具有法律效力的事实。我们生活在法律之下。你不能仅仅因为你想那样做就闯红灯。”凯一直将这位演员视为偶像，并在他抵达洛杉矶时极其渴望与之合作。到了 20 世纪 90 年代末，这位《码头上的风景》和《教父》的明星已经
上方为 2002 年的凯；左侧是他为邓禄普 (Dunlop) 轮胎拍摄的那支臭名昭著的广告场景。 Corbis/Getty Images, Tony Kaye
赢得奥斯卡奖。“爱德华，你唯一一次冲击最佳男主角的机会就这么丢了，干得好”
几乎放弃了演艺事业。直到 2004 年去世之前，他一直不是一个容易接触的人。然而，无论凯有多少古怪之处，他总能找到一种方式与他感兴趣的人建立联系。多年前在比弗利山庄，当我提到第二天要采访导演奥利弗·斯通时，我瞥见了其运作模式。他立即找了一张大纸，用记号笔写给斯通一张便条，请我转交。我照做了，这让那位华尔街导演感到十分困惑。当我提醒凯这段往事时，他笑了起来。“这类行为艺术对我来说一直很重要，”他说，“我始终是以现场剧场的方式在思考。” 20 世纪 90 年代中期，凯在泰特美术馆和萨奇美术馆将一名叫罗杰·鲍威尔的无家可归者作为一件艺术品展出时，吸引了大量媒体报道。
后来，他带着鲍威尔去了洛杉矶和旧金山的画廊，声称这件艺术品的要价为 $4m。即便他的表演在制片厂高管那里并不受欢迎，但却让布兰多对他产生了好感，布兰多成了他在美国一个意想不到的父亲形象。两人曾在某个阶段建立了一个表演工作室。“我们相处得极其融洽，”他现在回忆道，“我们每周会见面好几次。” 凯对表演着迷，通过与布兰多的合作，他设计了一套名为“旋律斑点草演戏法”的新准备方法。他解释说，这完全基于倾听草生长的声音。“你让大脑中所有的理智主义消失。这不是‘方法派’，也不是那种东西。这不是在思考你的过去，而是在那一刻抹掉你脑中的一切，将其净化，然后站起来，仅仅是倾听并根据那一刻发生的一切来说话。” 这听起来非常有加州风格——自 1990 年起他大部分时间一直住在洛杉矶——尽管他的口音和感官意识是非常伦敦的。
“我爱英格兰，”他说，“我热爱身为英国人的感觉。我热爱这门语言胜过一切。” 他说他想拍一部关于英国执念的电影。“我想拍一部 soccer 电影，”他说，我想他指的是足球电影。“我在美国住得太久了，”他承认道，“但我看过的足球电影都没有研究过比赛中的动作。” 关于足球应该如何拍摄，他有很多理论，部分基于他在 20 世纪 90 年代拍摄耐克广告的经验。当谈话转向讨论托特纳姆热刺队有前途的年轻球员时（我们都是热刺球迷），简突然介入了。“没有人像托尼那样拍摄过 soccer 动作，”她说，显然担心我们已经偏离了对她丈夫作品的欣赏。“他在许多不同的艺术形式中都是一个非凡的创造力源泉，绘画、写作、
音乐——《悍匪 X》（Humpty Dumpty X）中的所有音乐都是他创作的。” 她接着说，他们想拍一部不愤怒、不指责的电影，作为电影专业学生的资源，让他们可以从中学习。我可以想象，他们会对曾经在广告业中屡见不鲜的企业纵容感到困惑。在为了试图夺回《美国历史 X》的控制权而挥霍掉金钱和事业后，凯受命为瑞士银行 UBS 拍摄一支广告。这支广告原定长 30 秒，这项工作本可以为他赚回 £1m。他拍了一部五分钟的史诗片，充满了现代建筑、天空和山脉的壮丽黑白摄影，并要求不得剪辑。令人惊讶的是，UBS 银行的高管们同意了，前提是在这五分钟内他们可以有一句提到银行名称的台词。他拒绝了，从而失去了那笔急需的酬金。不仅仅是
与任何其他艺术形式相比，由于电影最具商业性，它需要那些特立独行的人，那些准备好挑战体制的人，即使他们最终是在挑战风车（徒劳地与幻想作战）。我追问他是否对他多年前的行为感到后悔，他变得富有哲理起来。“我想知道如果我当时没去美国会发生什么。我的意思是，这个问题比‘如果我没那样做会怎样’更重要。但就像我说的，所有这些事情，都是命中注定的。生活中发生在你身上的一切都是命中注定的，你只需要尽可能积极地处理随之而来的后果。”凯（Kaye）已经付出了代价，在经历成功与失败后依然没有失去热情。在这一切之中，他创作出了一部大胆且具有启发性的作品，揭示了那种带来了如此剧烈起伏的创作冲动。我认为，他赢得了自己的救赎。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 上图为爱德华·诺顿（Edward Norton）饰演的前白人至上主义者德里克·维尼亚德（Derek Vineyard），出现在凯的导演处女作《美国历史X》（American History X）的海报上。 Alamy
如果你足够幸运能离开加沙，你必须做好抛弃一切的准备。萨拉·阿尔卡塔在进入约旦边境时，只带了一部手机和一个充电器。她原计划与丈夫艾哈迈德·沙米亚 (Ahmed Shamia) 一起离开，但在他们共同登上巴士的两周前，他在加沙城的一次空袭中丧生。沙米亚是一名艺术家和建筑师；他死在自己设计的一栋建筑旁。去年 5 月 7 日，在那家繁忙的餐厅遭遇的袭击中，有数十人丧生，其中包括记者亚希亚·索贝赫 (Yahya Sobeih)，他在袭击前五小时才第一次、也是最后一次见到刚出生的女儿。
那家餐厅曾是萨拉心中珍贵回忆的场景——她和沙米亚在那里举办了订婚派对——但现在那里成了创伤之地。那是沙米亚在这片土地上设计的众多项目之一：学校、咖啡馆、购物中心、公寓楼、宫殿般的住宅、酒店——其中一家酒店被具有象征意义地命名为“凤凰”。在巴黎的新家中，萨拉告诉我沙米亚如何将一生致力于构想加沙可能的样子：坚韧，同时又是大都市化甚至奢华的，用光滑的灰泥立面面向世界，或用宽大的窗户将地中海景色尽收眼底。
在加沙南部地带，有一座法图赫别墅 (Fattouh Villa)，沙米亚监督了从绿松石色游泳池到窗帘和地毯的所有细节，尽管业主从未有机会入住。最容易辨认的是，沙米亚设计了
能讲述他故事的资料——他的作品集、笔记本电脑、蓝图和图纸——仍被困在他位于 al-Roya 大厦的海景办公室“艺术之屋” (Art House) 内部，那是他的另一个项目，一直面临着炮击的威胁。萨拉是一名室内设计师，她最初是在那里与沙米亚相识的，当时她正在他的事务所面试。她告诉我：“从我们相遇的第一天起，我们就 [在艺术之屋] 一起工作，并且一直肩并肩工作到战争爆发的前一天。”当她抵达约旦时，她已经接受了自己将再也看不到他的作品这一事实。
在从加沙前往法国的途中，在约旦等待清关时，萨拉遇到了萨姆·罗伯茨 (Sam Roberts)，一名在首都安曼休假的英国人道主义工作人员。罗伯茨（其姓名已更改以保护身份）即将前往加沙进行最后一次轮值，自 2024. 10 月起他就一直驻在那里。他们
理解巴勒斯坦人的 处境。 你只能尝试 以人性 去对待他们
由他的巴勒斯坦援助工作者同事 Ashour 介绍，Ashour 同样已被撤离。他们三人坐在酒店大堂里分享彼此的故事，就在那时，Sara 以她那温柔且谦逊的方式，提到了她已故丈夫的画作。
在回忆这段对话时，Roberts 告诉我，他无法想象一个新丧偶、地处约旦且即将被流放至欧洲的人，将如何适应一个与她熟悉的环境如此迥异的地方。如果他能给她带回一些家乡的东西呢？他在脑海中几乎没有进行风险评估，就提出尝试帮她把丈夫的画作偷运出来。事实上，他承诺了。
“我无法告诉你我跟巴勒斯坦同事聊过多少次，”他随后解释道，“他们会说：‘我昨天失去了我的表亲。’或者：‘我的哥哥去分发点取食物，结果卷入了枪击战。’你无法完全理解他们正在经历什么。你只能尝试以人性去对待他们。最终，问题变成了：在那一刻，你是谁？你能带来什么？”
于是，他为 Shamia 取回画作的任务开始了。
是什么激励像 Roberts 这样的人？他是一个被迫比我们大多数人更早成熟的人；他从小就学会了如何在危机中掌控局面。他高中毕业后直接参军，但由于不满而于 2018 年离开，转而追求灾难响应事业。正是这样的背景引导他前往加沙，成为一名专注于准入与安全的人道主义工作人员。他天性爱冒险，渴望测试其生存本能的极限。此外，他也有一定的自尊心。
“我认为，诚实地探讨是什么驱动人们从事这类工作很重要，”他说。“我内心的一部分觉得去加沙的前景很有趣——甚至令人兴奋。大多数人并非纯粹由利他主义驱动；通常还包含一种好奇心。在人道主义环境下，你会遇到不同类型的人：有些是不适应社会的边缘人，有些是在延续某种军事生涯，而有些则被强烈的帮助他人的欲望所驱动。”
当他在第一次停火前战斗激烈的时期抵达加沙时，Roberts 最初符合“雇佣兵”的特征：目标导向，具有高度纪律性的军事心态。但在与当地人建立深厚联系后，这一点发生了变化。他害怕吗？
“在危机中，人们期待你做出决定，”他说。“我很适应承担这种责任，所以恐惧并没有太多生存空间。”
自以色列入侵开始以来，在加沙和约旦河西岸，已有 560 多名援助工作者被杀，死者中还包括至少 70,000 名巴勒斯坦人。“有些时刻，情况可能会变得极其糟糕，”Roberts 说。“但现实是，我面临的风险远低于我的当地同事或普通民众。我住在已知的位置；而他们则……”
舞后 (DANCING QUEEN) 夏季 由此开启
, 伦敦 | abbavoyage.com Arena
生活在持续的暴露之中。” 他最受触动的是巴勒斯坦人对家庭和家园的忠诚：他回忆道，在贝特哈嫩（Beit Hanoun）东北部，有些人宁愿留在城里吃草，也不愿前往人道主义区。“我的职责很大一部分是分析冲突并向同事提供建议。有时，我必须打电话给某人，告诉他们我认为他们所在的区域可能会成为目标，他们应该收拾行囊。我是一个刚刚进入这个环境的年轻白人：我凭什么要求别人离开自己的家？许多人宁愿死也不愿离开。但与此同时，我的责任是他们的安全。因此，这变成了在共情与责任之间寻找平衡，并承认做出那样决定的难度之大。”
在 2022 年 4 月，即战争爆发前约 18 个月，据报道一名巴勒斯坦农民在土壤中发现了一尊雕像的首级——一位迦南女神，当地考古学家认为其年代约为 4,500 年。该文物随后在巴夏宫（Qasr al-Basha Palace）展出，该宫殿收藏了 20,000 件从青铜时代到奥斯曼时期的文物。然而，首级刚被发现不久便失踪了。这座宫殿长期处于冲突中心，据传拿破仑 1799 年在该地区进行军事行动期间曾在此停留——如今已成废墟；根据联合国教科文组织的数据，这仅是迄今为止被破坏或受损的至少 160 处文化遗产地之一。沙米亚（Shamia）的画作并非古代文物。它们只是几张纸。但它们很重要——而且不仅仅是对他的遗孀而言。巴勒斯坦学者梅兹娜·卡托（Mezna Qato）在将这场战争与 1948 年“灾难”（Nakba）期间目击的文化破坏进行对比时写道：“历史学家经常注意到，在‘灾难’之后撰写巴勒斯坦历史是多么困难……一个被分散、孤立、围困、轰炸、反复屠杀和剥夺财产的民族，这意味着一代又一代的巴勒斯坦人必须依赖碎片和残页。”
罗伯茨（Roberts）带着一个小型背包来到基苏法姆（Kissufim）过境点的以色列军事检查站。他记得紧紧地抓着包，仿佛它会被风吹走。包里是一个塑料钱包，装满了沙米亚的素描，这是由萨拉（Sara）的一位亲戚交给他的，该亲戚此前从艺术之家（Art House）工作室将其取回。这些残页在那时已经变成了一个档案；罗伯茨认为，这是一件与任何博物馆文物同样珍贵的货物。他想出了一个计划：将它们埋在脏衣服下面——用翻转过来的内裤做成一种“陷门”——希望进行搜查的以色列国防军（IDF）士兵会因为厌恶而不敢翻找太深。这并非某种单枪匹马的、像著名的“古迹抢救队”（Monuments Men）那样的行动——例如著名的
同盟国曾努力追回在第二次世界大战期间被纳粹窃取或危及的艺术品。但将实体艺术品运出加沙则受到极大限制，必须依赖个人、外交车辆或其他秘密运输方式。救援人员在跨境携带物品方面比平民有更多自由，但仍需接受严格检查。一位同事曾告诉罗伯茨，他因携带金额超限而被进行了一次“恐怖的”审问；而在某种程度上，罗伯茨自己的任务风险要大得多。
“作为一名人道主义工作者，根据人道主义原则应当保持中立和公正，携带这些艺术品可能不会被视为亲巴勒斯坦，而会被视为反以色列，”罗伯茨说。“那样的话，我将永远无法再回去。”更糟糕的情况是艺术品可能被没收或摧毁。他认为，那天在军事检查站的士兵是来自以色列内部安全局（Shin Bet）的特工；他说，这些人很强硬，且不在他的预料之中。他看着特工的手在自己的包里翻找。“他们拿出了我的洗漱包，我的牙刷，”他说。“我确信他们会发现那些画作。”
但那些发臭的衣服足以掩盖气味，干扰特工的判断。罗伯茨被挥手放行。他登上了离开加沙的大巴，强压住内心的激动。
这次逃离的时机恰到好处。在罗伯茨接过沙米亚的画作四个月后，al-Roya大楼以及多年来这些作品创作和存放的艺术工作室（Art House studio）本身遭到导弹袭击并被摧毁。
萨拉最喜欢丈夫的一件作品是一幅插图，画中一个棕色卷发的小女孩正与一个高大的身影牵手，后者的腰部被锁链捆绑。前景中生长着两朵红花。女孩的脸部模糊不清，她正指向一个视线之外的地方，那里锁链无法触及。这是一幅关于被流放之心的画作；空白的白色背景是一个阈限空间。“我在画中看到了自己，”萨拉告诉我。“我觉得自己被困在加沙和巴黎之间。我犹豫是否要离开，我的家人住在那里。我的一部分想要展望未来，而另一部分仍然被困在那里。”
罗伯茨在去年清爽的巴黎秋天拜访了萨拉，将她丈夫作品的钱包还给她。他回忆道，在这样的环境下见到她感觉很奇妙——在这个简单、光线充足的公寓里，墙上贴着度假自拍和战前家庭生活的快照——他带着相机和一种仪式感走进去时，感到有些局促。但当他们静静地喝着葡萄酒翻看这些画作时，紧张感变成了释然；对罗伯茨而言，是履行承诺的释然，而对萨拉而言，则是获得了一些更具体之物的释然。“我觉得这是我能收到的最珍贵的礼物，”她告诉我。“即便只是持有艾哈迈德的一点点痕迹——一张被他的手指触碰过的纸，一幅由他的双手塑造的画——都能给我带来慰藉。我能想象他的手指在纸页上移动的样子。”这些纸页对萨拉来说分量极重；这里面包含了各种各样的肖像：朋友们苍老的面孔，或是像已故巴勒斯坦诗人马姆杜赫·达尔维什（Mahmoud Darwish）这样的人物，或是随手勾勒的持枪男子。同时也承载着责任。在丈夫去世一年后，作为“暂停”（Pause）避难计划的一部分，萨拉为了让丈夫的精神永存，举办了一场他的作品展——《艾哈迈德·沙米亚：在缺失/失去之上的构建》（Ahmed Shamia: Bâtir, au-delà de l’absence）。这次展览同时也实时记录了一段
[[IMG_XXXX]] 下方，由沙米亚设计的 al-Shifa 医院外科单元（左图）在 2024 年的一次袭击中受损。 图片提供：Sara Alqataa, Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
一个被碎片化地摧毁的更广泛的文化。一件简洁的艺术品描绘了一个孩子用毯子盖住肚子，而肚子被掏空了，像洞穴或被洗劫的帐篷一样，向一个黑色的虚空敞开。“世界必须知道加沙承受了什么，以及我们经历了什么，”她说，“我希望有一天加沙能够再次崛起，以一种保存其记忆而非抹除记忆的方式重建。”如果没有创作者，作品还重要吗？无论抢救这些绘画的任务多么值得，无论对萨拉（Sara）来说多么令人宽慰，罗伯茨（Roberts）在巴勒斯坦的前援助工作者同事阿舒尔（Ashour）警告不要陷入感伤。一些慈善机构估计，加沙仍有约 300 名在职艺术家在活动；截至去年 3 月，自冲突开始以来已有 40 多人被杀。 “如果我们要保护艺术，最重要的是保护艺术家，这一点至关重要，”阿舒尔说。
“我希望我们能给仍在世的艺术家机会，让他们要么带着作品离开加沙，或者如果他们愿意，就留在那里，而我们帮助他们在加沙内部重建。这就是我所呼吁的。因为我听说有些想法是[国际参与者]想要把艺术品弄出去，却把艺术家留在这种悲惨的生活中，而没有”
萨拉正在适应她 在巴黎的安静角落； 今年秋天，她 将在巴黎 Val de Seine 国立建筑学院 (ENSA) 和巴黎东国立建筑学院 (ENSA Paris-Est) 开始教授 室内设计；她举办的 沙米亚 (Shamia) 作品展 于本月开幕， 第二次展览计划于 10 月举行。 展览展出了他的建筑模型 以及沙米亚视察 施工现场的视频片段， 而她无法忍心观看这些视频。 此外还有那些艺术品—— 数十件——经历了 长途跋涉才得以展出。 罗伯茨对 “韧性”这个词持怀疑态度： 这个词如何“在 [巴勒斯坦] 人民的语境中被随意使用， 就好像这是一种天生的、 值得钦佩的英雄特质， 而不是对暴行的反应。 他们有权不表现出韧性，” 他说。然而，有一个 特定的瞬间一直留在 他的记忆中——那个瞬间 以其平凡的方式， 捕捉到了他所感知的 巴勒斯坦人的反抗精神。 他当时在访问加沙南部的 汗尤尼斯 (Khan Younis) 地区， 当时以色列国防军 (IDF) 撤离，人们正返回到 他们家破后留下的躯壳中。 “当 [IDF] 离开时， 会产生一种真空，” 他说。“我记得开车经过 这个环岛，那时 人们刚刚开始搬回去。 有人在环岛上立了块牌子， 上面写着一些阿拉伯语。” 他的同事告诉他这是一个 笑话：有人回来了， 并以自己的名字命名了这里。 “所以就像是在说，‘现在 这是艾哈迈德 (Ahmed) 的 环岛了’。”罗伯茨笑了。 “这件有趣、稚气的 涂鸦，”他说，“就出现在 这些残骸之中。” 就像 “艾哈迈德曾在此”？ “是的，”罗伯茨说，“没错。”
一只小红蛱蝶 看它穿过 一片开花的 蓟丛 你就会开始 体会到 它们的速度 以及它们 的目的感
在炫耀。但这次疯狂旅程有充足的理由，毕竟另一种策略——在化蛹期的停滞状态中潜伏——也并非没有风险。迁徙让这些昆虫在向北移动时能够利用更年轻的植物。它们在避免成年后羽化地的过度拥挤。它们可能在逃离寄生虫和病原体。其中任何一个因素，或任何一种组合，都足以使这次野蛮的旅程成为一种光荣的必然。2009年的数据似乎难以令人置信。在五月的两天里，两百万只小红蛱蝶抵达了英国。在整个夏天，英国共有十亿只小红蛱蝶。很可能当今年的数据最终统计出来时，它们也会引发同样的敬畏和难以置信：在我们这个繁忙、被无情开发且自然资源匮乏得出名的岛屿上，竟然有如此之多单一品种的蝴蝶。该死的野生动物专家：他们刚给我们展示一些奇妙的东西，紧接着就告诉我们大家都完蛋了。恐怕这就是自然主义者的宿命。那些快乐——无论是日常的，还是每17年一次的——必须以意识到21世纪自然的脆弱性作为代价。但这些极其脆弱的蝴蝶正处于它们9,000英里迁徙旅程的一半，而现在看来，自然界就像这些蝴蝶一样，比看起来更坚韧：大约十亿个希望的象征。事实是，如果你给自然哪怕一点点机会，它总会贪婪地抓住。恢复依然是有可能的。在个人、公司、国家和国际层面，依然可以做出正确的决定。新一代人对当前这批人的价值观和做法感到厌倦，他们可能会采取不同的做法。在幸运的情况下，2026年的小红蛱蝶可以被视为一段漫长、艰辛且绝对必要的旅程的开始。
一个幽灵在各地大学中徘徊。它被称为 AI，而大学们不知道该如何应对（或利用）它。这并不令人惊讶，因为从根本上说，这项技术为大学提出了一个生存之问：大学是用来做什么的？它们是旨在培训学生并为其发放那些据称是生存必需的凭证的机构？还是教育他们的场所？前者涉及将年轻人训练成适应某种既有任务或角色的人，而后者则关于培养一个能够独立思考的自主头脑。到这个阶段，我猜大多数大学都已经制定了某种 AI “策略”。迄今为止，我见过的最有趣的一套方案来自一所精英机构：芝加哥大学法学院。该方案包含三个维度。第一点涉及开发该学院所谓的“具备 AI 韧性的教学与评估，以便学生仍能建立真实的批判性思维和写作能力，而非将工作外包给 AI”。第二点是优先培养学生所需的“核心人类”技能：口头辩护、判断力以及（如果我的法律界朋友们没说错的话，这是最难的一点）与客户打交道。第三点则是教导学生负责任且合乎伦理地使用 AI，理由是这项技术现在已不可避免。显然，其希望是该校的任何毕业生都不会基于 ChatGPT 的“幻觉”而提起诉讼。该策略中最吸引公众关注的部分是它如何对待一年级学生——这些人可能不仅是数字原住民，而且还是在 ChatGPT 的陪伴下成长（上帝保佑他们）的 AI 原住民。对于核心课程，规定如下：课堂上禁止使用笔记本电脑、平板电脑或手机；在无互联网或设备访问的情况下进行面对面考试；并继续强调在法学院中一直被视为必不可少的苏格拉底式教学法。随着学生在校年级的提高，重点将转向确保学生成为该技术的经验丰富且具批判性的使用者。当他们进入研究生阶段并必须撰写研究论文时（要求：“有相当的篇幅、独立研究、原创观点、纳入反馈
芝加哥大学法学院在考试期间限制互联网访问。Alamy
约翰·诺顿 (John Naughton) 的推荐
大局观 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 (Branko Milanović) 在 Substack 上发表的一篇令人冷静的长文：Sketching the New Dysto-Utopian World With Massive Presence of Artificial Intelligence（描绘人工智能大规模存在的反乌托邦-乌托邦新世界）。
热门话题 内森·加德尔斯 (Nathan Gardels) 为 Noema 撰写的一篇有趣文章：The Heated Debate in Europe Over Air Conditioning（欧洲关于空调的激烈辩论）。
彻底戒断 尼古拉斯·卡尔 (Nicholas Carr) 在 Substack 上发布的一篇关于数字脱毒的精悍博文：The Scrolly Chair。
来自教师的指导，以及在草稿中的多次迭代”）之后，事情才会变得真正有趣。每位学生都被要求与指导教授进行面对面的口头讨论，就其论文展开探讨，其中包括学生回答那些“探究论文推理及其论点含义”的问题。换句话说，如果你过度依赖 AI，就再也没有藏身之所了。而这正是应有的状态。
这并不需要高深的火箭科学。事实上，这大多是常识。其底层逻辑是机构层面的认知：否认 AI 并非一种策略，而这项技术的到来意味着必须做出改变。大学必须重新思考其教学法，使其既能抵御 AI 的冲击，又能利用该技术的能力来增强学习。
这种规模的适应需要两样东西：资源和机构意愿。怀疑者会指出，虽然芝加哥大学两者兼具，但英国及其他地区许多资金匮乏的大学则不然。
在我看来，这对于该领域来说是一场危机。如果大学现在不采取行动，那么它们将不再是任何具有实际意义上的大学。它们将退化为仅仅是凭证的提供者。毕竟，大学教育的全部意义不在于产出正确答案，而在于培养一个能够产出答案的思想。一个人手不足的大学系所，如果对学生使用 AI 起草文章、解决一组数学问题或总结一篇长文而视而不见，那么它就没有履行其教育职责。它允许学生跳过了痛苦的学习过程，而这正是就读大学的全部意义所在。
除非大学觉醒，否则 AI 的到来确实代表了对大学的一种生存威胁。从天性和体制上看，大学是行动迟缓的动物。早在 1995 年，哥伦比亚大学学者埃利·诺姆（Eli Noam）就写了一篇具有开创性的文章：《电子产品与大学的暗淡未来》。他写道：“过去，人们来到信息所在地，而信息就在大学里。未来，信息将来到人们身边，无论他们在哪里。那么大学的角色又是什么？……电子产品是否会对大学产生像印刷术对中世纪大教堂那样的影响，从而终结其在信息传递中的核心地位？我们是否已经达到了一个可以追溯到 2,500 多年前尼尼微（Nineveh）时代的模式的终点？我们能否对大学进行自我改革，还是必须先让情况变得糟糕得多？”
诺姆仍在等待答案。我也是。
18 评论家
这位 Brat 之星的最新专辑是一首大胆且淘气的艺术演进颂歌，它在玩味摇滚美学的同时，依然忠于她的电子流行乐之声
Kitty 帝国
Music, Fashion, Film Charli XCX (Atlantic)
到目前为止，大多数关注 Charli XCX 作品的人应该已经意识到，《Music, Fashion, Film》——她备受期待的最新专辑——与她之前的长篇专辑《Brat》相比，在方向上做了一个急转弯；后者是 2024 年无处不在的俱乐部流行乐现象。在一段时间里，一切都变成了刺眼的绿色。而现在，《Music, Fashion, Film》的视觉效果大量采用黑白色调，空气中弥漫着吉他的失真音。该专辑的第一首预热曲目《Rock Music》中，她撇着嘴唱道：“我认为舞池已经死了，所以现在我们要创作摇滚乐。”
最后这两个词被拉长且充满了效果音（“rooooccccck musiiiiic”）；这是一个小小的暗示，即这不过是由一群并不打算完全放弃数字处理的音频恶作剧者所进行的流派迭代。在最近接受《滚石》杂志采访时，Charli XCX 承认舞池依然充满活力，并举例提到了电子艺术家 Slayyyter 和 Underscores，以及她丈夫 George Daniel 的舞曲厂牌 dh2；同时她表示，《Music, Fashion, Film》实际上并不是一张摇滚唱片，她也从未声称它是。她说：“我从未以二元的方式思考流派。我觉得那是很老派的概念。”
那么，她的最新专辑就是一张拥抱了吉他乐队的即时感和嘈杂感，但将这些特质通过 Charli XCX 滤镜处理的作品；在这个过程中，她的制作人——hyperpop 大师 AG Cook 和 Finn Keane（原名 Easyfun）——发挥了极大的能动性且乐在其中。流行和电子音乐家经常误解摇滚，通过空降一段表情扭曲的、软金属风格的吉他独奏来代替个性和态度。幸运的是，这群人做得比那样好。
作品通常具有垃圾摇滚风格且极简，
却也同样经常过度饱和。 《Music, Fashion, Film》拥有许多瞬间， 例如在〈Yeah〉中，感觉 歌手离唱起 Blur 乐队的 〈Song 2〉仅有一线之隔—— 而且是以一种积极的方式。甚至更令人惊叹 的是〈Card Declined〉，它借鉴了前卫宠儿 Dry Cleaning 那种冷漠的宣叙调 (Sprechgesang) 和后朋克风格。Charli XCX 及其合作者 让吉他听起来像亚克力材质，将贝斯线 转化为回响，并将他们
“感觉歌手离唱起 Blur 乐队的〈Song 2〉 仅有一线之隔”： Charli XCX。 Tyrell Hampton
相当深厚的 hyperpop 见识 应用于摇滚乐的静/噪动态变化之中， 其热情犹如置身糖果店的孩子，而这正是 三人组的目标：尽情享受时光并将其转化为声音的创作者。 Charli XCX——原名 Charlotte Aitchison， 在赫特福德郡与埃塞克斯郡交界处长大—— 近期参与了大量电影工作，包括（但不限于） Emerald Fennell 执导的《呼啸山庄》原声带、 她主演的自己的 Brat 伪纪录片《The Moment》， 以及在《100 Nights of Hero》和《Faces of Death》中担任角色。 关于表演的曲目〈Camera〉让这位歌手对自己的职业方向产生质疑：“我想做音乐吗？” 这个问题贯穿于《Music, Fashion, Film》之中。 极其出色的热门单曲〈Wink Wink〉是一首洗脑神曲，讲述了歌手如何可能从一个在社交媒体上摆出性感表情、昂首阔步的派对女孩，演变成另一种模样。该视频拍摄在她父母家附近的一片田野里，一架来自斯坦斯特机场的飞机从头顶飞过。Charli XCX 非常痴迷于 Velvet Underground；她的救援犬名叫 Nico，且最近与该乐队前成员 John Cale 在〈House〉中合作。 《Music, Fashion, Film》的黑白封面将标题中的三种艺术形式拟人化为三位男性缪斯：Cale、Marc Jacobs 和 Martin Scorsese。但客串结尾曲目〈No One Lasts Forever〉的是恐怖片导演 David Cronenberg，探讨的是艺术永恒的重要性——或者说，缺乏这种重要性。 尽管捕捉时代精神的热单〈SS26〉指出，所有这些东西——无论是音乐、时尚还是电影——都无法将我们从“一条直通地狱的伸展台”上拯救出来，但整张专辑的主题是创造力。你可以将其视为一张充满了对音乐灵感和艺术造诣的情歌集，其中也包含对朋友和合作者的颂歌：节奏轻快且出色的〈Magic Metal Montana〉拥有极具感染力的模糊人声旋律，是献给制作人 Cook 的；而〈Persona〉则是一首针对某位未具名朋友（或者，也许就是 Charli XCX 本人）的被动攻击式赞歌。 《Brat》的秘密武器在于其坦率，主要聚焦于流行巨星人格背后那个焦虑的女性。而在这里，在〈I’m Afraid〉中，歌手陷入了各种形式的不安全感之中，但这一次的处理方式——朗朗上口的旋律、低沉的乐器——则是公式化的格唱 (grunge)，像是一首由 AI 设计的 Hole 乐队曲目，缺乏精巧制作带来的灵动感。 且不论瑕疵，《Music, Fashion, Film》的故事展开方式与她的疫情期间专辑《How I’m Feeling Now》有些相似：一部在紧凑制作周期内完成的、主题紧凑的作品。尽管它听起来与《Brat》截然不同，但不知为何，它依然具有那种“brat”（顽皮/叛逆）的特质。只有 2 首曲目时长超过 3 分钟，且大部分时间是一次大胆且俏皮的尝试。这是一位将荣誉视为毒藤的艺术家，正因如此，她应当继续获得这些荣誉。
Caribenya Lido Pimienta (Anti-)
在 2025, 年，哥伦比亚裔加拿大艺术家 Lido Pimienta 发布了《La Belleza》，这是一张西班牙语专辑，将欧洲高端传统——天主教安魂弥撒、捷克作曲家 Luboš Fišer、格列高利圣咏——与加勒比 dembow 节奏交织在一起。通过探索美的概念、她的非裔-瓦尤（Afro-Wayuu）血统以及一段关系的破碎与治愈，《La Belleza》展现出了激进且迷人的特质。如果还需要更多证明 Pimienta 正在挖掘某些有趣的事物，那么西班牙歌手 Rosalía 将类似素材融入《Lux》便是一个证明。Pimienta 的续作旨在成为《La Belleza》一个不那么深奥、更适合摇臀的对应之作。虽然它没有《La Belleza》那样令人震惊的效果，但这部非主流作品，
“动作不懈且迷人”：Mamela Nyamza 的《The Herd/Less》。 Kim Stevens 双年展上的 平衡之作
狮子奖得主 Mamela Nyamza 安排舞者 在马口铁罐高跷上表演， 以此在限制中 歌颂自由
Sarah Crompton
The Herd/Less; Five Days in the Sun 威尼斯舞蹈双年展
首先听到的是声音：一种激烈的、有节奏的、金属般的踏步声，整齐划一。当舞者们从剪影中显现时，你会意识到那噪音来自绑在他们脚上的大马口铁罐——这些罐子通常用来存放家庭饮食的基本物资。同样的罐子悬挂在头顶，是空旷舞台上唯一的装饰，舞台上充满了由 Thabo Pule 设计的变幻莫测的丰富光影。这些罐子限制了行动，定义了空间。就像高跷一样，这意味着身着丰富多样服装（一件鲜红色的军装外套、宽松的黄色长裤、一顶俏皮的粉色帽子）的舞者们只能从臀部起动，在挥臂行进时保持平衡。
南非编舞家 Mamela Nyamza 在今年的威尼斯舞蹈双年展上赢得了银狮奖，以表彰她在逆境中创作出震撼作品的强大职业生涯。她正在探讨个人主义与从众心理。这部《The Herd/Less》延续了她最著名的作品《Hatched》，后者将芭蕾舞鞋的约束与胶靴舞的自由相对比。
在这里，舞者们由一名平衡着仪式长矛的男子引领，他大概代表着权威；而另一名穿着橙蓝色裙撑并戴着圆顶草帽的女性，起初脱离了整齐的步伐，双臂勾起细腻的弧线，随后又被重新吞噬。一声哨音不断地要求舞者们注意或变换方向。
动作是无情的、迷人的，在刻意的限制中寻找细微之处和微妙差别。关于挣脱枷锁之艰难的观点显而易见。在某个时刻，九名舞者地毯式地涌向长矛携带者，用罐子盖住他的耳朵、嘴巴和骨盆，但后者重新夺回了控制权。
cumbia pop 倾向的设置残留，得益于 Pimienta 超凡的嗓音以及她拒绝被定义，使得这部作品与其前作紧密相连。Arrúlame（译为“安抚我”）是一首温柔的、点缀着弦乐的花环式序曲，连接了两张唱片。在 Pimienta 狂喜的滑音中，爱依然是一个主题。但更激烈的感情主导了像 Toxicá 这样的曲目，这是一首针对一个优先级不再与自己一致的朋友的抨击之作。标题将 Caribe（加勒比文化）和 Enya 结合在一起——Enya 是 Pimienta 的指路明灯之一，她的创造力是在自己隐居的状态下引导的。Kitty Empire
Little Miss Twain Shania Twain (Republic)
Shania Twain 的经历并不 轻松。她的 新专辑讲述了 她不平凡的 一生；童年在 酒吧唱歌以养家 糊口，在 22 岁 时成为了 弟弟们的 母亲角色， 以及她的 丈夫 抛弃她而 选择了她的 好友。她能 将这些沉重的 素材转化为这样一张 有趣、适合大合唱的 乡村专辑自传， 这本身就是一项壮举。 她拥有——正如她在 bonus track 《Hate That Way》中唱到的——“点石成金”的能力。
同名主打歌《Little Miss Twain》是一首辉煌的乡村劲歌，歌中的年轻 Shania 依然梦想着马，而与此同时，她正被抽烟不停的母亲在深夜开车送去唱歌。“我依然比我的吉他要小，”她在副歌中得意地唱道。她在《Problematic》中再次大放异彩，这是一首 $\text{Purple Rain}$ 风格的关于执念之爱的慵懒情歌：“这是我的心，尽管来刺它吧。”
Twain 是一个天生的娱乐者：《Right Time》是一首适合群体排舞的——
一根穿过罐头的 弦发出的哀鸣，他们 缓慢地蹒跚离去， 高举着木棍，宛如 墓碑
pleaser， 以及 Scary Thing，一场有趣的 乡村音乐 比赛，曲目是 Queen 的 《Crazy Little Thing Called Love》。但我们 也听到了 Twain 阴郁的一面， 因为她让我们进入了 她的抒情宣泄， 回忆起美好的时光 与糟糕的时光：“忘记，原谅，但 有时这取决于情况。” Lily Isaacs
Light of Day Richard Spaven (Edition)
在过去的二十 年里，Richard Spaven 已 确立了 自己作为英国 最全能的 鼓手之一的地位。他的风格 跨度极大，从与 创作歌手 Jordan Rakei 合作的灵魂乐， 到与钢琴家 Alfa Mist 合作的嘻哈音乐，
在结尾处，舞者们 主要单脚平衡地站在 一个罐头上，仍然无法自由地 表达自己。Joy 的歌曲 《Paradise Road》让空气中 充满了甜美；他们在听，但 没有移动。伴随着 一根穿过罐头的 弦发出的哀鸣，他们 缓慢地蹒跚离去，高举着木棍 宛如墓碑。 《The Herd/Less》将于 10 月 作为今年 Dance Umbrella 艺术节的一部分 在 Sadler’s Wells 展出。 11 月，这家伦敦剧院 还将上演 Emanuel Gat 的《Five Days in the Sun》，另一部令人难忘的 作品，其气势之磅礴与 Nyamza 的 简约之美相得益彰，且同样真挚感人。 该作以 Leonard Bernstein 录制的 马勒《第五交响曲》(Symphony No 5) 为背景，这部
与 Flying Lotus 合作的电子乐 以及与 José James 合作的经典爵士乐， Spaven 拥有一种让 律动契合的天赋。 在他作为乐队领队的最新专辑中， Spaven 利用这一经验 创作出活泼的器乐编排， 将精湛的节奏与 即兴演奏融合在一起。这张唱片 从《Out of the Quiet》中忧郁的 Robert Glasper 旋律引用，转向《Finders》的 拉丁半音阶主义，以及《Bunny Bread》中碎拍 (broken-beat) 的 舞池节奏。他的伴奏乐队成员表现出色， 长笛手 Graeme Blevins 在《Tilt》中带来了极其 温柔的独奏，而吉他手 Stuart McCallum 则在全程 拨奏出精妙的线条。 但真正提升这张唱片的 是 Spaven 对鼓组的掌控。 无论是在《Fine Line》 和《Let Me Say It For You》等曲目中 散弹枪般节奏的复杂性， 还是在《Magnolia》和 《Out of the Quiet》中印象派式的 镲片运用所营造的质感，他灵动的演奏 实现了最难得的成就：让鼓 处于核心位置，而没有 掩盖其他部分。Ammar Kalia
是一部由震撼的意象 以及感官化、奢华的动作组成的作品。 其开篇部分，伴随着 第一乐章葬礼般肃穆的铜管乐， 充满了凝固的姿态， 并由剧烈的奔跑打破。舞者们 穿着由 Inez Vicher 设计的、在空中飘浮的 薄纱服装，在空间中 奔跑穿梭时，看起来就像 是从“瓦普吉之夜”(Walpurgis Night) 中走出来的。 Gat 亲自设计的灯光让舞台 充满了橙色的雾气。在静止状态下， 动作显得古典且具有雕塑感， 就像 Lawrence Alma-Tadema 笔下的宫廷画。 随着交响曲的 推进，Gat 引入了其他的 基调和参考。在长袍之间 出现了柑橘色亮眼的 现代服装；一名穿着 黑裙的女子开始扰乱 局面。一个像伊索尔德 (Isolde) 一般的 悲剧人物缓慢地向后弯曲 直至触地，而现代 舞者在她周围疯狂地地移动。 在某个时刻，人群的构图 具有拉斐尔《雅典学园》(The School of Athens) 那样的正式感。 这种在思考与 情感之间，在流畅的舞步 与肌肉和肢体精细、紧凑的衔接之间的 拉扯，正是这部发人深省且令人振奋的 作品的核心。整体效果 极其华美。
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 CriticsArt
描绘了仙女、地精 以及莎士比亚笔下 撩人的林间空地，他杀死了 自己的父亲，并终身 在机构中度过。他的作品 究竟是极致原创的幻象， 还是疯狂的产物？
劳拉·卡明 (Laura Cumming)
理查德·达德：超越贝德拉姆 (Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam) 伦敦皇家艺术学院 (Royal Academy, London, W1)；展至 10月 25 日
理查德·达德 画仙女，疯癫。 他杀了父亲， 真是太糟糕。
这是一首关于这位维多利亚时期画家 (1817-86) 的古老克莱里休诗 (clerihew)。他曾带父亲在晚餐后散步，随后用刀将其杀害。几天后，达德在逃往法国的途中试图杀死一名陌生人。他先被送入贝德拉姆 (Bedlam) 疯人院，随后进入布罗德摩尔精神病院 (Broadmoor)。据称，他在脑中听到各种声音，并在埃及神祇奥西里斯的命令下，多次袭击医生和病人。本次展览中的一份可怜的病例记录写道：“无改善”：在他 68 年的人生中，有 42 年是在精神机构中度过的。
“改变”恰恰是皇家艺术学院此次展览的核心，达德在这里迎来了他周期性复兴中的一次。这种复兴最早且最重要的一次发生在 1963 年，当时诗人西格弗里德·萨逊 (Siegfried Sassoon) 将《仙女伐木者的神来之笔》(The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke) 赠给了泰特美术馆 (Tate)。这是达德迄今为止最著名的画作，他以微观视角描绘了花园底层繁盛的仙女世界，这幅画耗时九年完成，且匠心尽显。他不断深入地放大野生花卉、杂草、小妖精、精灵以及莎士比亚笔下仙子的密林。人们几乎无法分辨其中的不同元素，更不用说理出某种叙事线索了。
画面表面闪烁着油腻的油彩光泽。雏菊以厚实的白色圆盘状傲然伫立。据说在画面中部某个位置，一顶巨大的帽子边缘遮住了一张神秘的面孔。这幅画已成为全球儿童竞相购买的畅销明信片，或许可以将其视为维多利亚版的《寻找沃利》——快找出奥伯龙和提塔妮亚女王！
然而，画中那些神情恍惚的地精和胸脯丰满的精灵所散发出的过度成熟的局促感（全部以强迫症式的微缩手法呈现），感觉完全是成人的。而《仙女伐木者》
“一个繁盛世界的微观幻象”：理查德·达德的作品《仙女伐木者的神来之笔》，右图，收藏于贝德拉姆，1857。泰特美术馆 (Tate)
如果他没有被 监禁，这些作品 是否还能展出，但 我们却被要求将 这些作品与他的 病情分开看待
成为了20世纪60年代 前卫幻觉的定义。在 20世纪70年代，弗雷迪·默丘里写了一首歌 向其致敬，这幅画也 启发了从安吉拉·卡特 到特里·普拉切特的小说家。这究竟是 极具原创性的远见，还是发烧般的疯狂？ 根据这次展览的证据， 两者都不是。达德是一名受过训练的画家， 曾在皇家艺术学院 学校学习，并在 1840 年获得了 人体写生奖章。他的老师是 丹尼尔·麦克莱斯，那位为精英阶层绘制仙境的画家。 他与叙事艺术家 奥古斯都·艾格和威廉·鲍威尔·弗里思 等人组成了一个名为“团伙”（Clique）的小组，即便你
并不清楚他的同行中有多少人 受到了莎士比亚的启发， 你也能在达德自己的作品中看到这一点。 早在被监禁之前， 达德的画作中就充斥着 仙女和宁芙，像豌豆花、 芥子花以及在闷热林间赤裸的提塔妮亚。一幅圆形画布将 帕克描绘成一个魔性的小婴儿，盘腿坐在 一朵像顶喷淋花洒般的牵牛花下。 这是一个惊人的图像，介于阴森与 矫情之间；在本质上与后期的 民俗绘画没有区别。 而在达德早期的以及后期的画作中， 有大量眼神狂乱的歇斯底里者。
1840 年，哈姆雷特在看到 父亲幽灵时精神崩溃；在 1862 年的 《酒神场景》中，有三个眼神游离的醉汉。 情节剧贯穿了他的所有作品。“疯癫的简” 在天空中拖曳着花朵， 亨利六世被刺客谋杀， 而罗宾汉正对着某个幕外受害者 紧绷弓箭，身边有一只像老虎一样大的狗。 策展人小心地避免 对达德的疾病进行过多猜测。在 19 世纪 40 年代初，他 随一名赞助人出国旅行，在 小速写本中填满了关于 叙利亚、土耳其、希腊和埃及的绘图， 在那儿，达德显然抽了太多水烟，以至于 开始在气泡翻滚的烟斗中听到奥西里斯的声音。 也有观点认为，过量吸食 鸦片，随后突然戒断，诱发了 偏执型精神分裂症。他的兄弟姐妹中 至少有两人在精神崩溃后被送入机构，因此 可能存在遗传倾向，或者
也许有梅毒病史。 这次展览还希望我们 将达德视为一名严肃的画家， 独立于他的病情之外：正如副标题所言， “超越贝德拉姆”（Beyond Bedlam）。但 在贝德拉姆之外是 布罗德摩尔精神病院， 以及展览中一些最乏力的图像—— 色调黯淡的游吟诗人 和凋零的少女。达德最出色的晚期作品是 他主治医生的肖像画，采用精致的铅笔和水彩， 其克制的精准度极其轻微地让人联想到 卢西安·弗洛伊德早期的素描作品。 很难想象皇家艺术学院（RA） 还会出现更古怪的展览。其中一些画作 产生于极度糟糕的精神和身体状况，其超细节的 仙境之地呈现出鲜明的怪诞感。 其他作品则努力还原 达德记忆中那个他曾辉煌一时的伦敦艺术界。 但许多作品遗憾地缺乏力度。 很难相信，如果他没有 被监禁，这些作品 是否还能展出，但 我们却被要求将 这些作品与他的 病情分开看待。这样一来，可以说， 便是走向了疯狂。
阿里阿德涅神话的 这部复杂歌剧 在一次巧妙的舞台呈现中 被精简和优化， 使音乐——以及 出色的演员阵容—— 得以绽放
Fiona Maddocks
《纳克索斯岛上的阿里阿德涅》 格林德本，路易斯，东萨塞克斯郡； 展期至 29 August 逍遥快节首夜 (First Night of the Proms) 皇家阿尔伯特音乐厅，伦敦 SW7
每个人都在争论《纳克索斯岛上的阿里阿德涅》，尤其是其作曲家理查德·施特劳斯及其才华横溢且敏感的剧本作者雨果·冯·霍夫曼斯塔尔。他们无法在故事、关键角色和声部类型上达成一致。这究竟是喜剧还是悲剧，是高端艺术还是低俗艺术？为什么不把它们全部揉在一起？这部创作于 1912 年的两部分作品，在格林德本由罗宾·蒂恰蒂指挥、劳伦特·佩利导演的新制作中以一种精简且异常清晰的方式开演，并将那些分歧延续到了最终的歌剧成品中。
第一部分被称为《序曲》，见证了试图在富豪家中上演歌剧的严肃音乐家，与拥有自己想法的喜剧剧团及小丑之间的冲突。随后是《歌剧》部分，
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 21 CriticsClassical
两者之间几乎没有关联，在其中，被忒修斯遗弃在纳克索斯岛的孤独阿里阿德涅 (Rachel Willis-Sørensen) 遇到了新的爱情，神祇巴库斯 (David Butt Philip)。喜剧演员们，特别是轻佻的泽宾内塔 (Alina Wunderlin)，不时地闯入其中。
这一切都乱成一团。阿里阿德涅认为巴库斯就是忒修斯。而他称她为瑟曦——那位将男人变成猪的巫妖女神，且他刚刚逃离了她的岛屿。（这种混淆是否也会延伸到观众身上？因为观众不久前刚在克里斯托弗·诺兰的好莱坞史诗巨作《奥德赛》中看到马特·达蒙处于瑟曦的掌控之中——同样的灰色斗篷，相似的胡须，但更显苍老。这提醒人们，希腊神话是叙事艺术的源泉，在歌剧中尤为如此。）
在《阿里阿德涅》的制作倾向中，导演通常试图用古怪的——即闹剧般的——舞台动作来匹配《序曲》中的滑稽戏。佩利及其设计师马西莫·特隆卡内蒂，以及灯光师马可·朱斯蒂选择了相反的做法。他们的舞台布置——一个华丽的立面和一些品味独特的条纹壁纸——几乎是素净的。低调的布景和服装（偶尔点缀着色彩）起到了
力量在于 施特劳斯的音乐， 它与 故事的愚蠢 背道而驰
“在如此庞大的 演出阵容中，每个人 都表现出色”： 上图为在格林德本节 演出《纳克索斯岛上的阿里阿德妮》中的 阿尔娜·温德林饰演的泽宾内塔。 下图为大卫·巴特-菲利普饰演的 巴库斯和瑞秋·威利斯-索伦森饰演的 阿里阿德妮。 格林德本制作有限公司/特里斯特拉姆·肯顿
一个模版，让剧情的疯狂在周围及内部自由流动。第二幕是一堆《快乐日》（Happy Days）风格的焦土，阿里阿德妮就躺在上面，但谁能断言施特劳斯和霍夫曼斯塔尔没有比贝克特更早地想到这一点。这些原型角色及其胡闹的行为太过无关紧要，无法打动我们。唯一的例外是那位热忱的年轻作曲家，由次女高音萨曼莎·汉基出色演绎。这部作品的力量在于施特劳斯的音乐，它与故事的愚蠢背道而驰。每一次情感的波动，每一丝渴望的暗示，都通过重叠的旋律、圆舞曲、哀歌来表达，如丝绸与粗麻布般被无尽地采集。这是一个创作上的奇迹。试图将作曲家的个性与其音乐相匹配是一场徒劳的游戏，但这位身着花呢西装、保守且中产阶级的巴伐利亚人与他那如熔岩般流动的音乐——在《莎乐美》中轻佻，在《埃莱克特拉》中凶猛，在《玫瑰骑士》中庸俗而狂喜——之间的极远距离，依然是一个谜。施特劳斯使用了缩减规模的管弦乐团——此处是处于巅峰状态的伦敦爱乐乐团，由格林德本音乐总监蒂恰蒂执棒，他对这部音乐脉动的把握完美无缺。风风琴、钢片琴、钢琴、钟琴和两把竖琴的加入增加了光泽与光彩。佩利的舞台设计让我们能专注于这份丰盈的谱曲，优秀的演员阵容也对此提供了助力。温德林的明星级角色泽宾内塔，花腔唱段令人惊叹；威利斯-索伦森饰演的阿里阿德妮华丽至极；巴特-菲利普饰演的巴库斯音色浑厚；即兴喜剧剧团和那迷人的三位宁芙仙女也都表现卓越。在如此庞大的演出阵容中，每个人都表现出色。格林德本将把《阿里阿德妮》的一个半舞台化版本带到其年度BBC Proms（BBC音乐会）之行中，该活动于上周开幕，每晚演出直至 12 9月。首演之夜的主题（由广受欢迎的达莉亚·斯塔塞夫斯卡指挥BBC交响乐团、歌手及合唱团）一部分是美国的，一部分是爱国的英国风格。演出中某些粗糙之处以及内容上的琐碎感所引起的任何保留，并未体现在满场观众的热情之中。韩国巨星林允灿在阿尔伯特音乐厅表演的拉威尔《G大调钢琴协奏曲》显得较为内敛，稍显迷失，随后在BBC Sounds上的效果更好。杰拉尔德·芬齐那首罕见被演奏的颂歌《致圣塞西莉亚》最好继续保持罕见，但BBC的合唱团和男高音独唱者托马斯·阿特金斯已竭尽全力。我本周在Proms听到的最佳作品是杰西·蒙哥马利的《这些正义之路》（These Righteous Paths），为大提琴手阿贝尔·塞拉奥科和管弦乐团而作（此处由吉安安德烈亚·诺塞达指挥BBC爱乐乐团）。该曲探索了关于悲伤的思考，其中有一段受飞鸟群像瀑布般倾泻而下的启发，极具魔力。这件具有独创性且令人惊叹的英国委约作品，为接下来的几周内各种各样的Proms演出树立了一个美妙的图腾。
Fiona Maddocks 推荐本周 皇家阿尔伯特音乐厅 (Royal Albert Hall) 值得关注的亮点
• 从阿尔卑斯山到奥弗涅 (周一 7pm) 一场为皇家阿尔伯特音乐厅量身定制的音乐会：Edward Gardner 将指挥伦敦爱乐乐团演奏理查德·施特劳斯规模宏大的《阿尔卑斯交响曲》：日出、攀登、顶峰、冰川、风暴、日落，内容涵盖所有场景，由一支庞大的管弦乐团演奏，配备了赫克尔号 (hecklephone)、瓦格纳大号、牛铃、风机和雷鸣机。此外，还将有 Kristine Tjøgersen 的作品在英国首演，女高音 Louise Alder 将演唱精选的 Canteloube 的《奥弗涅之歌》。
• 西贝柳斯第二交响曲 (周二 7pm) Sakari Oramo 将指挥 BBC 交响乐团演奏西贝柳斯极具氛围感的 Symphony No 2. Guy Johnston 将在布里顿的《大提琴交响曲》中担任独奏，乐团还将演出 Mark-Anthony Turnage 根据 Thomas Vinterberg 的电影改编的热门歌剧《宴会》(Festen) 的组曲，这也是该作品在英国的首演。
• 埃尔加第一交响曲 (周三 7pm) Ryan Wigglesworth 将指挥 BBC 苏格兰乐团演奏埃尔加的 Symphony No 1, 这是一部骨架宏大的作品，作曲家花了十年时间才完成，但随后成为了经久不衰的经典。女高音 Claire Booth 将全球首演由 Brett Dean 根据 Carol Ann Duffy 的诗作谱曲的《世界的妻子》(The World’s Wife)。Judith Weir 短小而优美的《月亮与星星》(Moon and Star)，基于 Emily Dickinson 的文本，是 1995 年的 Proms 委约作品，此次回归令人欣喜。
• 凭记忆演奏马勒第一交响曲 (周六 7pm, 周日 11am) 这无疑将成为本季的高光时刻，共有两场演出。由 Nicholas Collon (见上图) 指挥的 Aurora 乐团将凭记忆演奏马勒的 Symphony No 1 from memory, 女中音 Natalie Lewis 担任独奏。这部宏大且兼收并蓄的作品耗时 15 年完成——包含了克莱兹默音乐 (klezmer)、民谣、葬礼进行曲和歌曲——其创作故事将在音乐会的前半部分进行探讨。
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 CriticsFilm
E·简·卡罗尔（E Jean Carroll）是一位风趣幽默的记者和电视名人，她曾因性侵指控将美国总统告上法庭。在这部不事张扬的肖像片中，她成为了一个激烈且迷人的主题。
Wendy Ide
《请教 E 简》（Ask E Jean） （91 mins, TBC）导演：艾薇·米罗波尔（Ivy Meeropol）；主演：E·简·卡罗尔
资深记者、建议专栏作家、电视名人以及唐纳德·特朗普的克星 E·简·卡罗尔有一句个人格言：“永远幽默，绝不愤怒。”这句话出自威廉·梅克皮斯·萨克雷的《名利场》，被用亮粉色涂在她位于纽约州北部装修古怪的木屋壁炉架上。在过去七年里，自从卡罗尔对特朗普发起并赢得了两起民事诉讼以来，这句格言可能已被考验到了极限。
这两起案件均源于卡罗尔的指控，她称特朗普在 20 世纪 90 年代中期的一家伯格多夫古德曼（Bergdorf Goodman）百货公司试衣间中对其进行了性侵。当时，她试图用笑闹将其化解。但这个特定的笑话很快就变得难以忍受。正如这部坦率的纪录片所揭示的，法庭诉讼引发了卡罗尔用她典型的生动词汇所描述的“粘液雪崩”；她的收件箱和社交媒体账户被大量匿名威胁所围攻，对方威胁要对其进行暴力、强奸、致死以及其他同样缺乏想象力的惩罚，而其所谓“罪名”就是敢于反抗美国最有权势的男人。
最近，随着披露特朗普在被裁定性侵和诽谤罪名成立后，终于在两项赔偿裁决中的第一项中向卡罗尔支付了 $5.6m (£3.7m)，该故事再次成为头条。第二项超过 $83m 的赔偿金仍未支付。但如此巨额的数字——以及特朗普本人喧闹且令人分心的存在——问题在于它们往往会掩盖一切。因此，艾薇·米罗波尔这部富有启发性的纪录片回答了一些被掩盖的问题：卡罗尔是谁？她从哪里获得勇气去追究特朗普的责任？为什么她花了这么长时间？
这部电影与劳拉·波伊特拉斯（Laura Poitras）的《所有的美与血泪》（All the Beauty and the Bloodshed）之间存在某种亲缘关系，后者将主角、摄影师南·戈尔丁（Nan Goldin）的传记背景细节，与一场法庭诉讼（戈尔丁针对萨克勒制药家族及其在美国阿片类药物流行中扮演的角色而发起的斗争）的描述相结合。与波伊特拉斯的影片一样，米罗波尔纪录片的主角
面对这样的母亲，卡罗尔打趣道，你要么成长为一个懦夫，要么成为一个强硬之辈：“我两者皆是。”
“像是 1930 年代screwball 喜剧中泼辣的女主角与一名节奏诗人的结合体”：艾·珍·卡罗尔在艾薇·米罗波尔的纪录片中。
比作品本身的风格更独特且有趣。而《询问艾·珍》（Ask E Jean）则是一部扎实且不事张扬的纪实电影。导演（此前作品包括《执行继承人：一个孙女的故事》，讲述其祖父母朱利叶斯和埃塞尔·罗森堡在 1953 年被作为间谍执行死刑的故事）将卡罗尔漫长而多元的职业生涯档案资料与较近期的影像结合在一起，包括她 2022. 年的私人证词。其中一些新素材极具冲击力：卡罗尔与她最好的朋友丽莎·比恩巴赫之间的一次近期对话，两人在对话中回忆起袭击发生后的立即反应（比恩巴赫是第一个得知此事的人），处理得十分细腻且具有启发性。而其他元素，例如一个缺乏焦点的、反复出现的自动扶梯基调（用于穿插卡罗尔对伯格多夫·古德曼百货事件的讲述），则显得俗气且多余。幸运的是，卡罗尔本身就是一个迷人且多变的拍摄对象。她在印第安纳州长大，是四个孩子中最大的，她的母亲是一位意志坚强的共和党政治家，母亲给了她自信。面对这样的母亲，卡罗尔面对镜头打趣道，你要么成长为一个懦夫，要么成为一个强硬之辈：“我两者皆之。”凭借她对喜剧节奏的把控和灵动的语调，卡罗尔说话的方式像是一个 1930 年代screwball 喜剧中泼辣的女主角与一名节奏诗人的结合体。她曾获得过“美国啦啦队小姐”冠军；摄像机非常喜爱她古灵精怪的活力以及那种充满美国乡村气息的纯正美国面孔。在为《时尚先生》（Esquire）和《花花公子》（Playboy）撰写了一段时间的“冈佐”第一人称报道后，她将自己在《艾儿》（Elle）杂志上广受欢迎的建议专栏发展成了有线电视节目《询问艾·珍》。她主持谈话节目时那种特立独行、不循常规的方式——卡罗尔经常在布景家具上攀爬并对着镜头开玩笑——使该节目大获成功。
但听她给客人的建议——“一定要起诉。一定要”——与她自身的经历之间形成了一种令人不快的不协调感。卡罗尔将这种面对性骚扰时“强撑着忍受”的婴儿潮一代心态，在 #MeToo 运动的影响下终于瓦解。虽然花了很长时间，但她认为，她最终在法庭上的胜利是“全世界女性的胜利”。
《布鲁内罗：优雅的愿景者》 (127 分钟, 12A) 导演：Giuseppe Tornatore；主演：Brunello Cucinelli
《天堂电影院》的奥斯卡获奖导演 Giuseppe Tornatore 堪称浪漫主义的集大成者。作为一名电影制作人，无论多么艰苦的贫困故事，他总能将其转化为毫不掩饰的怀旧之情。他的电影华丽且富有戏剧色彩，灯光精妙，极具电影感。这种风格似乎并非纪录片的理想选择。但在 2021 年创作了一部对 Ennio Morricone 充满敬意的肖像片之后，Tornatore 再次涉足非虚构作品，拍摄了这部对针织品和奢侈品大亨、又称“羊绒之王”的 Brunello Cucinelli 的奢华赞歌。人们怀疑，就像他在高端时尚帝国中的一切一样，这部电影也经过了完美且讨好的“量身定制”。影片将 Cucinelli 精通意大利传统纸牌游戏 Scopa 的才华作为框架，将这位设计师生命的每个章节如获胜的牌局般铺展开来。
他贫困的童年（在一家没有自来水和电的农场度过）通过蜜色调的重建画面展现；他那不务正业、嗜好赌博的青少年时期则被还原为一名留着狮子般长发、挥霍无度的青年。如今 72 岁且容貌姣好、眼神灵动的 Cucinelli 表示，他在时尚界的成功最初在很大程度上取决于他的胆量，而非他提供的产品。这里面包含了一定程度的神话塑造。而 Tornatore 在 Oprah Winfrey 和一级方程式赛车首席执行官 Stefano Domenicali 等名人受访者的支持下，全盘接受了这一设定。但在所有的光彩和迷人的黄金时刻摄影之下，隐藏着一种独特的商业伦理：Cucinelli 倡导他所谓的“人文资本主义”，包括公平的劳动实践、丰厚的工资以及将利润重新投入到当地社区。那些套头衫每件可能价值数千英镑；但良好的公众形象则是无价的。
《海上》 (111 分钟, 15) 导演：Helen Walsh；主演：Barry Ward, Lorne MacFadyen, Liz White
如果情况不同，Jack (Barry Ward) 可能会离开他在威尔士海岸那个狭小且令人沮丧的家乡。他可能会在家族生意之外追求一份事业，而不是在贻贝养殖场里拿着耙子和水桶辛勤劳作。他甚至可能作为一个公开的同性恋者生活，而无需忍受嘲笑和几乎不加掩饰的敌意。但在他生活的那个角落，广阔的天空掩盖了 Jack 所面临的狭隘视野。 在与 Maggie (Liz White) 结婚超过半辈子之后，Jack 开始质疑现状。两个因素改变了他的看法：一个是癌症诊断（他目前处于缓解期），另一个是流动渔船船长 Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen) 的到来。 这部由小说家 Helen Walsh 执导的第二部故事片与 Francis Lee 的《上帝之国》有着明显的亲缘关系。两者都探讨了酷儿性觉醒与压抑的自我厌恶之间的碰撞；两者都背景设定在英国工人阶级农村，那里的男性气概伴随着一套僵化的规则。电影阴郁的基调与其主导的灰色调相呼应。但 Jack 和 Daniel 之间原始的渴望被细腻地唤起。
《动物农场》 (94 分钟, PG) 导演：Andy Serkis；主演：Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi
安迪·瑟基斯 (Andy Serkis) 筹划已久的激情项目——动画版《乔治·奥威尔 (George Orwell) 的动物农场》，将原著小说中阴郁的前景替换成了更为孩子友好、充满乐观情绪的基调。此外，这部电影将政治目标从奥威尔对共产主义危险性的严肃警告，转向了对猖獗的消费主义和分裂性民粹主义崛起发出的警报。猪拿破仑（塞斯·罗根 饰）口中喷出类似特朗普式的自我吹嘘之辞；其中一名人类反派开着一辆看起来像特斯拉 Cybertruck 的车。极其可爱的角色设计与粗放的幽默感可能显得相当不协调；奥威尔的纯粹主义者们可能会感到战栗。尽管如此，对于年轻观众来说，在学校假期里看这部片子总比其他糟糕的消遣要好。
马特·巴顿 (Matt Barton)
《樱桃园》(The Cherry Orchard) 斯特拉特福-upon-Avon 天鹅剧院； 展出至 8 月 29 日
肯尼斯·布拉纳 (Kenneth Branagh) 可能会后悔他在上次登上这个舞台演出《暴风雨》（该剧于上月落幕）时折断指挥棒的行为。在阔别 30 年后重返皇家莎士比亚公司（RSC）的双剧目回归之季，他现在正通过这部缺乏节奏感与活力的《樱桃园》缓缓谢幕。
正如你对布拉纳连续剧季收官之作的预期那样，许多贵宾在此时与他共聚。资深演员海伦·亨特 (Helen Hunt) 和比尔·普尔曼 (Bill Pullman) 饰演拉涅夫斯卡娅夫人和加耶夫，这对破产的兄妹回到他们宏大的俄罗斯庄园，却发现这里即将被拍卖。然而，空气中弥漫的是陈腐之气而非震撼之感。两年前，本尼迪克特·安德鲁斯 (Benedict Andrews) 在唐马剧院 (Donmar) 对这部 1903 年的剧作进行了大胆的重新装潢，将角色们关于未来的博弈搬到了一大片地毯上，营造出一种真正“抽走地毯”（出其不意）的效果。但塔玛拉·哈维在 RSC 的这部作品则更为平庸，被劳拉·韦德 (Laura Wade) 那个平淡且刻板的新改编版本所拖累，剧中的角色甚至评论道：“多么令人瘫痪的平庸啊！”
英国的舞台剧以将契诃夫——尤其是这部被他定义为喜剧的剧作——情感化而闻名。但韦德和哈维却过度修正。就像拉涅夫斯卡娅拒绝面对现实一样，这个版本不断地退缩到幽默之中，在处理悲剧时显得胆怯且咯咯发笑。安迪·拉什 (Andy Rush) 饰演的叶皮霍多夫被用作这场尴尬的“烫手山芋”游戏中的主要分心项，夸大了他的笨拙闹剧失误，并穿着吱吱作响的鞋子在那儿扮小丑。
‘不断地 退缩到 幽默之中’：海伦 亨特和比尔 普尔曼，以及 下方，肯尼斯 布拉纳在 RSC 的《樱桃园》中。 Johan Persson
在下半场大部分时间里播放的轻快杂耍音乐，只会放大那种歪斜的基调。我们看到这家人在破产面前若无其事地起舞，作为最后的狂欢，但他们与布拉纳饰演的洛帕 KHIN 之间缺乏足够的对峙紧张感，而后者代表了即将到来的俄罗斯革命，将这些地主贵族横扫一空。这是一个耐心地等待着为父亲和祖父在该庄园受奴役之苦报仇的人，这一点在布拉纳的年龄上得到了体现：65 岁，他比大多数饰演该角色的演员都要年长（伊恩·麦克连在 1985 年于国家剧院出演此角色时 46 岁；阿迪尔·阿克塔在安德鲁斯的制作中 43 岁）。
布拉纳使用他原生的北爱尔兰口音，首先展示了洛帕 KHIN 试图摆脱自己“穿着舞会礼服的熊”这种低微形象，收缩起他那粗鲁且挺起的胸膛。相反，在通过出售心爱的果园来拯救庄园的计划中，他显得如此孩子气且充满活力，让你半指望他会开始爬上其中一棵树。当我们看到他拳打那个惊扰了家人的乞丐时，第一丝威胁感出现了。而当他宣布买下了他打算摧毁的果园时，布拉纳从含糊的低语转变为愤怒的咆哮，怨恨的风暴随之而起。
拉涅夫斯卡娅本应同样具有强大的存在感，但亨特却畏缩地变成了一个在情感和财务上都精疲力竭的女人。她从一开始就太过于听天由命。当她谈到心碎时，她没能让你相信她最初拥有一颗心。她过度地皱眉，试图说服我们她在意。但我们无法触及驱动她的本能，因此她拒绝拯救庄园的行为变成了盲目的管理不善，而非理想主义。取代了不稳定性与危机的，是过时感与死亡感。饰演仆人菲尔斯 (Firs) 的迈克尔·埃尔温 (Michael Elwyn)，
在灰褐色的麻袋中慢慢枯萎，仿佛随时准备被扔掉。普尔曼饰演的加耶夫像个话痨，用那昏沉且干涩的喘息声挤出台词，听起来就像一台难以启动的老旧发动机在发出噗噗的响声。如果说安娜·弗莱希勒的布景未能传达出这座果园著名的宏伟感，那么它在记忆的承载方面却做得极其出色。水彩的色块在薄纱般的后墙上勾勒出暗示性的轮廓。它是褪色的，且正在消逝；一个从过去中被强行扯出并重新溶解于过去的幻象。两侧的树木缠绕在柱子上，像孩子们紧紧 clings 住母亲的腿，恳求她不要离开。但在 2011 年国家剧院的演出中，佐伊·瓦纳梅克饰演的拉涅夫斯卡亚在空间中穿行时，每一步都仿佛在心中激起一阵心碎的颤栗，忆起在果园附近河流中淹死的幼子；而亨特则未能传达出这种眷恋的拉扯感。相反，这座果园和这部剧作都将消失在
时光之中。离开剧场时，你会觉得处于中心地带的那个女人本可以做更多努力来挽救它们。
访谈
T
在马赛，诗人克劳迪娅·兰金 (Claudia Rankine) 与科林·格兰特 (Colin Grant) 探讨黑人的韧性、她母亲的去世以及“当下的严峻”
克劳迪娅·兰金身上有一种不可否认的冷静，这与她写作中那种目光如炬的笃定相契合，但这种冷静被她热情好客的温暖所抵消。当我走进她租住的公寓那阳光明媚的阳台——从这里可以俯瞰马赛老港时，我问她为什么来到这里。
“为什么特朗普能成为总统？”兰金反问道，她发出了爽朗且出人意料的笑声，就像在我们整个对话过程中那样。“认真地说，”她解释道，“我在这里是因为我认同言论自由的概念，而我无法生活在美国，因为我觉得在那里我必须时刻监控自己口中所说的每一个字。”
今年早些时候，马赛差一点就选出了一位来自国民联盟（原国民阵线）的极右翼市长。同样的法西斯愤怒在法国这座第二大城市中燃起，正如它在美国的无数城镇和城市中闪现一样。但目前，兰金说，“我感到更完整地回归了自我——我觉得在这里我可以做真实的自己”。这位作家兼公共知识分子如此痴迷于马赛的文化，以及一个令人宽慰的认知，即“她的人民”（来自全球南方的人）构成了这里多元人口的重要组成部分，以至于她正在办理购买当地房产的手续。
兰金 1963 年出生于牙买加，曾在该岛学习文学，但她的生活被美国的文化以及日益升级的文化战争所塑造。她在七岁时移民美国，在布朗克斯与担任儿科助理的母亲团聚，此后一直居住于此。凭借她的第四部诗集《别让我孤独》(Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, 2004)，兰金开创了“美国抒情诗”风格，将诗节、随笔，以及有时结合的回忆录和摄影混合在一起。她随后在《公民》(Citizen, 2014) 和《只有我们：一场美国对话》(Just Us: An American Conversation, 2020) 中将这一形式运用得极具震撼力，这些作品审视了种族创伤以及
偏见、国家支持的对公民权利的侵害以及白人至上主义阴险的复苏。最后一种威胁促使她在 2016 年获得麦克阿瑟奖学金后，成立了种族想象研究中心 (TRII) —— 一个“致力于艺术与学术的多学科平台”，部分关注对白人性（whiteness）及其起源和遗产的研究。TRII 不会让她在美国的右翼修正主义者眼中受欢迎，这些人提出了诸如奴隶制对被奴役者有益之类荒谬的观念，但这对 Rankine 来说并不意外。“对真实的压制就是他们的白磷，”她在最新著作《分诊：真理、艺术与虚构》(Triage: Truth, Art & Fiction) 中的一个角色说道，“是一道焚毁宪法的烟幕。”《分诊》试图以创造性的方式应对国内和国际上日益升级的动荡状态。Rankine 沉思道，她想不起一生中是否有比现在更黑暗的时期。
这本书的催化剂出现在伊朗对 Mahsa Amini 的残酷袭击之后，这名年轻女性在 2022 年因涉嫌违反头巾规定被“暴力逮捕”后死亡。“她的死亡情况中有些东西让我开始写一首关于崩溃的诗。那首诗有点混乱，但它就那样存在着。然后它与美国关于堕胎权终结、杰弗里·爱泼斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）肮脏的过去以及 #MeToo 运动的讨论结合在一起。所有这些事情与美国白人至上主义的公开接管汇集在一起。于是，在这样一个熔炉中，《分诊》成为了产物。”正如 Rankine 的叙述者所言：“一切都在与‘当下’的僵硬状态发生碰撞。”《分诊》是诗歌、抒情随笔、艺术评论以及某种回忆录的令人眩晕的融合，书中有两个中心角色：一名牙买加裔美国叙述者（Rankine 的近似镜像），以及她无畏的
巴勒斯坦伙伴——“理论家”（一个
‘我曾与一个非常 暴虐的父亲生活在一起。 你必须让自己 变得渺小， 以免被发现’
由 Rankine 所认识的许多女性合成的角色），叙述者在两人还是美国大学学生时首次与她相遇。这本书记录了她们不断演变的友谊，从大学时期，经过长期的分离，直到 60 多岁时的多次重逢。作为理想主义的学生，两人都对国家的逾矩行为保持警觉，激发了开展反抗行动的想法。但焦虑的叙述者从未将自己视为一名活动分子士兵（“我在一场必败的战斗中被太早地征召了”），而理论家则继续向“权势者”发起挑战。“此时此刻，像加沙、种族灭绝、学生被禁言这类问题的困难性被推到了前台，”Rankine 说，“每个人都必须表明立场，导致友谊和家庭出现裂痕。他们会问自己：我还能与这样的人为伍吗？”
在创作《分诊》时，“我将其视为小说，”Rankine 补充道。虽然这看起来与她最近的著作有所不同，但她说，即使在她较为直接的非虚构作品中，“抒情也与传记、虚构写作和政治激评共存”。自 2004 年起，她的作品在美国由 Graywolf Press 出版，在创作
《分诊》时，她有信心进一步突破体裁的界限。她说，这是她第一次“在写作时，允许自己失败”。
尽管是一部抗拒分类的混合作品，《分诊》也根植于《安提戈涅》。从学生时代起，Rankine 就一直想重写索福克勒斯的悲剧——关于悲痛的安提戈涅，她无视谨慎的妹妹伊斯墨涅的警告，违抗底比斯国王，为她的兄弟举行葬礼。因为这次“叛国”行为，安提戈涅被活埋在洞穴中。在 Rankine 借鉴索福克勒斯的设定中，理论家被塑造为一个版本的
克劳迪娅·兰金 (Claudia Rankine)：“我们被培养出来的不是为了反抗。我们被培养出来是为了成为资本主义者。” 摄影：Naima LeComte 为《观察家报》拍摄
克里斯蒂安·克拉赫特 (Christian Kracht) 凯瑟琳·泰勒 (Catherine Taylor) 论这位“欧洲垃圾”(Eurotrash) 作者关于我们岌岌可危的未来的迷人寓言
安提戈涅 (Antigone)，而叙述者则代表了伊斯墨涅 (Ismene)。“我想让伊斯墨涅走向前台，因为她一直以来都是沉默的大多数，”兰金解释道。“她代表了我们这些人——在家里支持安吉拉·戴维斯 (Angela Davis) 或马丁·路德·金 (Martin Luther King) 等人所做的事情，但我们只是待在家里。所以，我想在这个角色中注入一种意识，一种挣扎。”在撰写回忆录时，即使不是严格意义上的回忆录，坦率与自我保护（或对他人的保护）之间总是存在一种紧张关系。在《分诊》(Triage) 中，有几个时刻兰金接近于揭秘，比如那句令人震惊的话：“我开始涂银色眼影和黑色睫毛膏，以弥补我无法解读情绪语言的缺陷。”我想知道兰金是指她自己的情绪还是他人的情绪。“我的童年生活在一个非常暴虐的父亲身边，”她坦言。“为了熬过那个时期，你不能根据自己的感受行事。你必须试着让自己变得渺小，这样才不会被注意到。”在《分诊》中，与母亲的关系——一个缺乏温柔且不愿干预的女人——也同样紧张。叙述者回忆起“（我的母亲）通过简单地不做任何事，为她孩子的生活制造了残酷的空间”。这种通过消极对待而产生的背叛感在《只有我们》(Just Us) 中也有强烈体现，当时兰金与一位白人朋友一同观看剧作《费尔维尤》(Fairview)。在剧终时，非裔美国演员邀请白人观众登上舞台，以反转他们的“白人凝视”，让他们体验黑人每天感受到的聚光灯压力。那位白人朋友死死地抓着她的座位。兰金感到沮丧并对其背叛行为感到愤怒：“我不知道你是黑人！”但现在，在《分诊》中，出现了一个令人不安的片段，兰金将局面反转到自己身上，将叙述者置于道德困境之中。当一名理论家请求她在柏林的公寓里安置一些难民时，她感到不安并推辞了。我告诉兰金，这是书中最有力的场景之一。“因为这是真实的，”她说。“在纽约，当学生们被锁在宿舍门外时，我有朋友被请求提供帮助。他们参加抗议，回去后发现门锁了，进不去。于是教职员被要求安置他们，而有些人拒绝了。”我想知道他们害怕什么。“嗯，那是美国；我们的隐私高于一切，个人主义高于一切。我们被培养出来的不是为了反抗；我们被培养出来是为了成为资本主义者！”兰金的优势之一在于，即使面对最沉重的主题，她的文字也有一种迷人的轻松感，镜像了她那博学地道的对话语言，而这种语言总在即将被（“我的天，像什么这样！”）这类幽默的口语词打断的边缘。然而，这本书中并没有太多幽默的空间。正如
信息战 理查德·奥文登 (Richard Ovenden) 评述两本书，揭示我们对数据的热爱是如何被科技巨头收编的
牙买加人会说，“这不是开玩笑的事”。理论家对这个世界感到不耐烦，因为这个世界在“争论该为谁哀悼，而加沙、黎巴嫩、乌克兰、苏丹以及无证移民正遭受攻击，而这仅仅是开始”。这些受害者唤起了索福克勒斯 (Sophocles) 悲剧中那些未被掩埋的死者，而《分诊》在一种苍凉而富有诗意的基调中结束，唤起了安提戈涅的意象：“我所有的衣服都是黑色的，因为我预料世界会玷污我——世界玷污了我——泥土覆盖了我。” T
这本书中笼罩着一种挽歌般的特质，但兰金（Rankine）并不认同我对其悲观主义的评估；相反，她认为这仅仅是对事实之残酷的表达。但或许，她也在为那位在她孩提时代未曾向她表达温柔的母亲而哀悼？兰金透露，在撰写《分诊》（Triage）到一半时，她的母亲去世了。“于是，突然之间，她接管了我的悲伤，我的疑问……我认为衣服是黑色的，因为我们正处于一个悲伤的时刻，”她说。“此时你看向任何地方——水龙头都开着 [无论] 是每年八月加勒比地区的飓风季；巴勒斯坦长达百年的战争；目前非洲正在发生的蓄意动荡；委内瑞拉被接管。”她向我传达她的预测，就像一名被要求向患者坦白实情的医生。“没有任何地方是稳定的，而且它也不会变得稳定，
当你身处一个必然导致人口迁移和难民产生的环境，且超级大国们意图在维护一个由他们自己创造的环境之名下，攫取他人的资源时。”《分诊》建立在两个相互关联的支柱之上：在应对全球冲突与悲剧的无尽漩涡时，采取分诊式优先级应对法的必然性；以及在能力超出负荷时，学会放手、学会崩溃（至少是暂时性崩溃）的智慧。但在崩溃之后，接下来是什么？我告诉兰金，当这个世界让我的母亲感到无法承受时，她会说：“我必须哭一场。我得大哭一场。”然后泪水就会流下来。她不会因此而满足，但她可以重新开始。兰金在听到我的回忆时，发出了带着忧伤的认同之笑。“不，正是这样，”她说。“我们有这样一段漫长的历史，至少在美国，关于忍耐、承受、黑人韧性的修辞。而我说：忘掉那些吧，实际上去面对毁灭，面对失望，面对残酷、暴力和现实，然后去哀悼，去倒下——这并不是说你不再崛起，但你不能一直承受并背负着这一切，还指望能继续走下去。”
黛西·约翰逊 (Daisy Johnson) 小说家谈论记忆、 残酷的母亲，以及 第一个孩子的出生 如何颠覆了她的写作生活
Declan Ryan
But since it falls unto my lot/That I should rise and you should not （摘自传统歌曲《离别之杯》/ ‘The Parting Glass’）
伙计，这样走下去是不行的。 我不确定你在想什么 如此匆忙地离开， 尽管你温柔，但从未耐心。 我认识的唯一一个人 能在说话时呈现出斜体字； 那种尖锐、上升的强调， 被忍受这个荒诞世界的经历所染彩。 我记得你谈起过早年的一位室友 在 Withnail and Tindersticks 在达尔斯顿（Dalston）“园艺”时期的日子； 他那纤细的感官要求 他在下午三点前就得“伤退”。 我想知道你是否也受了伤 当你离开你的遗产业务时。
我们在世纪之交相遇。 当我们谈论青春时， 一系列法林顿（Farringdon）的酒吧和漫长的、褐色的派 午餐听起来竟如此古老：我的年纪 比你小十岁——而你已是前辈—— 引导我进入一个依然烟雾缭绕的酒吧圈子 和那些在 21 岁就达到巅峰的棱角分明的乐队。 我去 The Castle 酒吧寻找你的踪迹 坐在一个被刷洗得无法认出的、雨林色的二楼里。只有门还是原来的样子。 我再次等待你那笨拙的 漫步穿过，你的那杯啤酒在午后的酒吧光线中 如金子般未被触动； 这是你的命运。
无法想象这是永恒的。 典型的队长之才，难道我们只能 就这样接受，不再期待 你用高个子的步伐挡在麻烦面前。 有一次，你看到了我没看到的东西， 异常严肃地说 “别让我去参加你的葬礼”。 而你的葬礼就在那座蜂蜜色的城市里 我在那里度过了一个学期的周四之夜， 那是你最后一个完整的年头。旧时的闲谈，对行政琐事的喜爱， 我因同样拥有一把法式滤压壶而实现的“社会阶层提升”。你的钥匙还在我的包里。 我们坐在那些周五的早晨的厨房里， 在墙上铺展开的彩色笔动物园画作下。 我在你的餐桌前像个孩子，而你喂养着我。
Declan Ryan 是一位在伦敦的诗人兼评论家。他的首部诗集《危机演员》(Crisis Actor) 由 Faber 出版。
作为远古史
在克里斯蒂安·克拉赫特关于友谊与生存危险本性的迷人研究中相遇。 作者：凯瑟琳·泰勒
《Air》 克里斯蒂安·克拉赫特 著，丹尼尔·鲍尔斯 译 Serpent’s Tail 出版，£12.99，192页
克里斯蒂安·克拉赫特凭借其 2021 年的小说《Eurotrash》跃升为国际名声，被描述为德语写作界的“问题之子”。这位瑞士作家在 1995 年出版了首部小说，似乎拥有一种永不重复写同一本书的天赋。当然，《Eurotrash》——其形式是一场在瑞士境内狂欢般的公路旅行，主角是一名男子和他酗酒且依赖药物的老母亲——为克拉赫特的最新故事几乎没有提供任何铺垫。《Air》将一个预言当今气候危机的中世纪世界中半亚瑟王式的探索，与一个非常 21 世纪的故事融合在一起：一名设计师被一家生活方式杂志雇佣，将一个数据中心的地下内部空间全部刷成白色。这两个看似不可能的叙事起初相对立，随后汇聚，构成了一部迷人的作品，既是科幻小说，也是寓言。
小说开篇，保罗是一名备受追捧的瑞士创意工作者，他正睡在奥克尼群岛斯特罗姆内斯（Stromness）极简主义小屋的沙发上。他在做梦。“那是一个许多东西被购买，随后又被迅速遗忘的时代，”克拉赫特写道。保尔的梦中充斥着一片空旷的南极景观，半真半假，但尚未被发现。附近的墙上挂着艺术家詹姆斯·阿彻（James Archer）的一幅画：穿着白色兜帽斗篷的梅林引导着精疲力竭的兰斯洛特骑在黑马上，穿越山区。（这幅画是真实存在的，随着书中的奥德赛之旅展开，它将具有高度的象征意义。）
保罗虽然成功但心不在焉。醒来后，他接受了一家领先杂志《Küki》通过电子邮件发送的委托。该杂志严肃的文章聚焦于正在消失的传统手工艺和野外采集食物，并将这些重新包装成面向富人的“hygge”式舒适生活——“这是一种从高雅的现代主义月刊到略显古怪的家居装饰杂志的微妙转变，这种转变是非常刻意地在引导其走向无关紧要”。保罗需要为“挪威一个巨大的黑暗机库……刷上数百升的白色……会有大笔资金”。在前往斯塔万格（Stavanger）会见《Küki》那位神秘且紧张的编辑科恩（Cohen）之后——“对他而言，清理集体记忆的储蓄库似乎是唯一逻辑正确的事情”，保罗执行了他的任务，随后在一次太阳喷发期间失踪。
时间突然切换，
色调随后将我们带到一个中世纪欧洲国家的森林中。在这里，一名九岁的女孩伊尔德（Ildr）在母亲死于一场被称为“黄死病”的瘟疫后，独自生存。在猎鹿时，她不小心用弓箭射中了一个奇怪的男人，将其拖回附近的棚屋，并在对方的指导下，利用他随身携带的一种奇怪粉末将其治愈。
当来自特维奥特公爵（Duke of Tviot）——这位北方地区的暴政统治者——宫廷的士兵来寻找这个男人时，他和伊尔德开始了一场向南的艰巨旅程，旨在寻找冰冻海（Frozen Sea）以求生存；在此之前，他们沿途杀死了大量敌人（这个被认为是一名“法师”的男人拥有一把非常不符合中世纪特征的枪），并以那些在21世纪被视为奢侈品的食物维生。回到斯塔万格（Stavanger），科恩（Cohen）因保罗（Paul）的失踪而深感痛苦，服用了过量的安眠药，自己也进入了这个中世纪世界，但地点在更南边的冰原和海鸟聚集地。
克拉赫特（Kracht）在《Air》中玩得很尽兴。这里有海战、预兆性的彗星、庄重的对话，以及在描述现在与过去时采用的各种比喻和原型（这些描述逐渐融合为一个共同的乌托邦未来）。然而，在其预言和关注点上，这是一部关于生存之极端脆弱性的严肃作品。科恩惊恐地展望未来，那里将是“没有季节，没有树木，没有人类，没有生命”。突然的时间跳跃和空间转移，让人联想到艾伦·加纳（Alan Garner）1973 年的杰作《红移》（Red Shift）中的量子易位。散文风格透明，由丹尼尔·鲍尔斯（Daniel Bowles）进行了迷人的翻译，而整个构思则由克拉赫特对非常古老的忠诚与友谊纽带的深刻强调所精妙地支撑。
克里斯蒂安·克拉赫特：绝不写两本相同的书。
三本书 由 Ashton Politanoff 挑选
《谁杀了我的父亲》 (Who Killed My Father) 作者：Édouard Louis 译者：Lorin Stein (2019) 在他在本传记中——部分灵感来自泰伦斯·马力克的《生命之树》——Édouard Louis 运用时间和形式的技巧，以充满原始且诗意语言的日记式片段，探讨了他与父亲之间复杂的关系。Louis 以同理心和直接的笔触，精准地指出了塑造其父亲成为现状的立法、社会经济和家庭力量，同时展现了其父亲本可能成为的样子。这是我推荐给我的学生阅读的一本书。
《我的朋友们》 (My Friends) 作者：Hisham Matar (2024) 尽管书名是《我的朋友们》，但这部小说同样描写了一个利比亚出生的儿子与父亲之间因流亡和“阿拉伯之春”而被迫处于的长距离关系。这种距离不仅是空间上的——儿子 Khaled 参与了一场以悲剧结尾的抗议活动，由于担心卡扎菲政权的潜在监视，他在电话中必须向父亲隐瞒此事。Matar 自己的父亲失踪了，尽管《我的朋友们》是一部虚构作品，但在这部令人心碎的作品中，你可以感受到儿子对父母真挚的爱。
《地球上的最后几个夜晚》 (Last Evenings on Earth) 作者：Roberto Bolaño 译者：Chris Andrews (2006) 这是我最喜欢的短篇小说集之一，也是 Bolaño 最优秀的作品之一。标题故事讲述了一位青少年儿子与父亲在阿卡普尔科度假的经历。书中出现了鬣蜥、一座小岛、一名神秘女子和一名前潜水员，它在短篇小说的篇幅中蕴含了长篇小说的广度。在这部关于存在主义的成长故事中，Bolaño 以温柔的笔触探讨了这位大男子主义父亲与他敏感的儿子之间的脱节。
Ashton Politanoff 的小说《爸爸今天心情不好》(Dad Had a Bad Day) 由 Daunt 出版 (£10.99)。可在 observershop.co.uk 订购，价格为 £9.89 (比建议零售价低 10%)。
一份 17 世纪伦敦的死亡清单，记录了每个教区内死亡的原因。 插图：Carissa Véliz。 Alamy/Pictorial Press
数据如何 接管世界
我们是否将允许监控资本主义决定我们的 未来？作者：Richard Ovenden
《数据帝国：信息如何塑造人类历史》 (Data Empire: How Information Shaped Human History) Roopika Risam 著 Torva 出版，£25，480页
《预言：预测、权力与争取未来的斗争——从古代神谕到人工智能》 (Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI) Carissa Véliz 著 Swift Press 出版，£22，384页
“数据是新的石油，”数学家 Clive Humby 在 20 年前这样说道。这句话在随后的几十年里似乎得到了验证，因为数据已成为大型科技公司商业模式中的主要元素。随着人工智能的兴起，数据的价值现在具有至关重要的意义。两本新书采取了不同的方法来探讨数据的漫长历史，以及我们现在应该如何考虑其用途。
在《数据帝国》中，Roopika Risam 采取了审视数据背景的全球视角，从法国南部的史前洞穴壁画开始，探讨了人类是“数据物种”这一观点。书中贯穿始终的观点是，从古代世界到现代，帝国的兴起与将数据作为控制手段的使用紧密相关。Risam 写道，虽然并非所有东西都是数据，但数据无处不在。
她按时间顺序排列的章节以一个现实生活中的“用例”开始。因此，我们通过虚构化的场景，被引入到古巴比伦的王宫、14世纪开罗的马里国王穆萨，以及18世纪与植物学家 Joseph Banks 相遇的塔希提统治者面前。这些场景被富有想象力地赋予了生命，但其实并非必要，因为人类数千年来如何寻找和使用数据的核心故事本身就足够有趣。
然而，Risam 对现存证据的探讨不足，而这些证据的数量惊人之多。美索不塔米亚古代档案馆的数万块泥板分布在世界各地的博物馆和图书馆中，而较晚期的资料则更加丰富：中世纪的建筑账簿、羊皮卷上的税收记录、纸质账本。我们得到了一个又一个诱人的片段：例如古埃及的粮食统计，或17世纪伦敦印刷的死亡率清单，其中收集并公布了该市每个教区死亡人数，更重要的是死亡原因。Samuel Pepys 利用这些数据来避免前往首都中传染病高发的部分地区。
这本书存在一个关键问题：缺乏定义。“数据”被多样化地用来指代信息和知识，而两者的不同形式并未被清晰定义。因此，我们读到了关于中世纪巴格达“智慧宫”及其著名图书馆的描述，以及翻译的重要性，以及抄写员的复制如何帮助传播思想。但这些书包含的是文本，而文本（至少在最近之前）与数据是不同的。
她的论述在关于现代世界的最后几章中最为强力，现在的经济由数据驱动的公司主导，而这些公司交易的信息来源方式对社会产生了巨大影响。亚马逊（尤其是亚马逊云科技 AWS）、谷歌 (Google) 和 Palantir 是其中最著名的公司，但 Risam 重点介绍了其他公司，如 Cross Match Technologies 和 Morpho，它们向亚洲、非洲和拉丁美洲的政府出售针对大规模人群的数据监控“解决方案”。她认为，这些公司仍然逃避着民主监督。
Carissa Véliz 是一位此前专注于在线隐私研究的哲学家，她的新书将重心从数据的历史演变转向了其在当下的地位。《预言》详细描述了人类试图预测未来的故事。她巧妙地探讨了预测的历史发展，分析了算法的诞生（该术语源自阿拉伯学者 al-Khwarizmi，后来用来指代计算中的数学规则）以及近代早期的欧洲保险市场的增长，并指出了两者之间的相似之处。
在“于太多领域中 取代了创造力、 批判性思维和 质量”
将这些进步与占卜等行为相类比。“人们在为占卜或保险付费时，部分购买的是内心的平静，”她写道。Véliz 还记录了数据在政府规划中使用的发展情况，强调了政府机构近期迅速增长地使用那些“吞噬监控数据”的算法。这为 Palantir 等公司创造了巨大的财务繁荣，这些公司向政府出售服务以及数据，并且可以控制这种数据与算法结合所能生成的预测类型。Véliz 认为，通过这种方式，权力平衡正在发生转移。政府最初雇佣大型科技公司作为承担大规模官僚任务的外包代理，但我们现在正进入一个情况反转的阶段：国家正在成为大型科技公司野心的代理人。
古老的德尔斐神谕是 Véliz 经常提及的参考点，她将 AI 视为其现代继承者，而科技男们则是新的先知（拉里·埃里森的软件公司 Oracle 显然就是一个极其典型的例子）。她的书既是对我们现代数据困境的分析，也是一种警告。我们越依赖个人数据来喂养 AI，就越接近通过大规模监控建立警察国家。除此之外，正如 Véliz 所强调的，AI 对数据的依赖正在“于太多领域中取代了创造力、批判性思维和质量”。对于 Risam 来说，同样的组合在“大规模地将人非人化”。这些书共同认为，我们现在处于一个数据影响日常生活的力量巨大的时代——而大多数人对此并不知情。AI 伦理专家 Véliz 指出，我们绝不能将预测与真相混淆。在 Risam 看来，
“算法直觉将基于统计学的相关性转化为确定性……将概率视为事实”。这两本书都让读者思考，面对无论是由国家还是由大型科技公司控制的新数据政权，我们可以做些什么。Véliz 认为，监管只能是答案的一部分。我们的个人行为最终才是最好的应对之策。她在《预言》(Prophecy) 的结尾为我们留下了 10 条关于预测的教训，例如，敦促我们应该“准备”而非“预测”，并增加接触偶然惊喜的机会。她认为，我们生活中最重要的事件，往往是最不可预测的。她的最后一项教训最具有吸引力：“好好生活”。
在 observershop.co.uk 订购《数据帝国》(Data Empire) 价格为 £21.25（建议零售价 15% 折扣），以及《预言：预测、权力与未来的抗争》(Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future) 价格为 £19.80（建议零售价 10% 折扣）
土壤之中
规模宏大的诗作以 壮丽的风格与自然 交流，而获奖作者 狄龙·贾克斯 (Dillon Jaxx) 则在对疾病与悲伤的 反思中寻找幽默。 作者：Jade Cuttle
《死者，无意识者， 在耳畔轰鸣， 繁荣之眠》 (The Dead One, the Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber) 高杰 (Jay Gao) Carcanet 出版社, £12.99, pp98
《如椋鸟坠落》 (like starlings falling) 狄龙·贾克斯 (Dillon Jaxx) Nine Arches Press 出版社, £11.99, pp72
如果树木能够说话，它们会说什么，又会怎么说？这个问题构成了高杰在其第二部诗集《死者，无意识者，在耳畔轰鸣，繁荣之眠》中对“树状语法”极具原创性的追求之基础，这本书在执行上很巧妙，且具有极佳的实验性。 虽然有些人坚持认为“优秀的诗歌”应该是“紧凑且精准的”，正如《观察家报》的...
作者：Chris Power
结构，但亨利·米勒 (Henry Miller) 和玛格丽特·德拉布尔 (Margaret Drabble) 都是被约翰·考珀·波维斯 (John Cowper Powys) 这部奇异小说吸引的人之列
《格拉斯顿伯里的浪漫》 (A Glastonbury Romance) 约翰·考珀·波维斯 (John Cowper Powys) 著 企鹅出版社 (Penguin)，£18.99, pp1,200
约翰·考珀·波维斯的第六部 小说《格拉斯顿伯里的浪漫》 于 1932 年首次出版。故事 始于克劳教区长 (Canon Crow) 的亲属们聚集在诺福克乡村 参加其葬礼，而他们真正的 关注点——是阅读遗嘱。一份 出人意料的遗产在索默塞特郡 格拉斯顿伯里镇的两名居民 之间制造了冲突：菲利普·克劳 (Philip Crow)，一名希望利用 电力和工厂主宰自然的工业家； 以及传教士约翰·吉尔德 (John Geard)， 他在教区长晚年期间陪伴其左右， 而他心中怀有一个梦想，
《伦敦杂志》(London Magazine，创立于 1732 年) 坚持立场，拒绝“冗长、 松散的诗歌”，但高 (Gao) 采取截然 不同的做法，并取得了迷人的效果。 不同寻常的是，这本书采用了横向 排版，使句子像树枝一样伸展， 并使用超长破折号来创造纤细的 线条。在某一处，高用逗号填满了 整个页面，形成了一个诗意的 基石：随着挖掘得越深，这片土地 就“变得更加括号化、更加透气”。 像土壤一样，每一组诗句都具有 一种多孔的特质，“在无尽地交换”。 非文学性的清单同样受到赞赏， 出现在一个按字母顺序排列的 苔藓清单中。高的诗作没有标题， 只有充满语言创新（如 “woodwarp”、 “leaflight”、“woundwood”、“Woodmongering”） 的抒情诗，描绘了令人振奋的 “结果树之群”。 拥有中英苏格兰血统的高 正“用你向已故祖母承诺过 会攻克的语言写作”，而他 宏大的计划是通过谜一般的 文字游戏来实现的。 语言处于不稳定的状态；他 将定冠词从王座上推下 （例如 “Weak oak, the”）， 并写道：“首先固定住疯狂的 命名，然后再进行注释
将格拉斯顿伯里重新恢复为 一个朝圣地。 但用如此简单直接的词汇 来描述这部小说，感觉像是 一种误导。《格拉斯顿伯里的浪漫》 设定在托马斯·哈代 (Thomas Hardy) 小说中熟悉的威塞克斯地区，但 与此同时，它发生在 一个即便被视为另一个维度的 地方。“就像托尔金 (Tolkien) 一样，” 玛格丽特·德拉布尔写道，“ 波维斯创造了另一个国家，那里 人口密集，森林茂密，山峦起伏， 博学多才，且奇特地自给自足。 这个国家不像托尔金笔下的 那样常被访问，但同样迷人， 而且更有气息。” 尽管波维斯自己期望 能获得诺贝尔奖，但他始终
的公民鸟鸣”。一切都 是“向风侧扭曲的”。尽管如此， 这种“腐败的田园诗”依然 令人印象深刻地忠实还原了 “无法翻译”的林地混沌。 “现存的林线根本不是线，” 高坚持认为，“没有离散的点， 只有表面与持续时间的联盟 [...] 没有个体。只有连字符”。 高出生在普雷斯顿 (Preston)， 在格拉斯哥 (Glasgow) 和 Edinburgh (爱丁堡) 长大， 现在是纽约的一名“海外流亡诗人”： 他使用关于“进口种子”的 隐喻，来质疑什么是 “非本土的、罕见的、边缘的”。 当“根部可耻地将噪音 走私进休耕的泥土”时， 高随后反思了酷儿欲望。 每一棵“酷儿之树 [...] 在故障中 表达他们的性别”，引发了 关于“净化过剩”的问题。 他写道，想象“两个男人 站在亲吻门旁”，“谁有 预留的闲暇去漫游， 去漂泊，去闲逛，去涉猎， 去蹂躏，去强暴 [...] 去享受 情色之地”？他对真菌 情有独钟，其中一些， 包括 200 种，如分裂孔菌 (Schizophyllum)
杰·高 (Jay Gao) 的“腐败田园诗”捕捉到了林地的丰富混沌。 Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty
……依然是一个小众崇拜的人物——他的兄弟 TF 波威斯在当时是更受欢迎的作家。两人都很怪异，但约翰的怪异程度完全是在一个宇宙尺度上的。在《格拉斯顿伯里浪漫史》(A Glastonbury Romance) 的前几章中，我们就被抛入了约翰和玛丽·克劳（表亲兼情侣）的意识之中，接触到了克劳教区长的尸体（“湮灭——多么奇怪！一种新的意识生活——多么奇怪！”），触碰到了波威斯称之为“第一因”的神性意识，甚至体验到了树木的语言：“梣树注意到了这一切；但它对此作出的植物性评论，在人类耳中听起来就像是胡言乱语：wuther-quotle-glug。”
然而，波威斯也能写出精妙的社会喜剧。你永远不知道他下一步会走向何方，而且他似乎也不知道。他的散文风格不知疲倦，从句接在从句之后，再接从句；他的好奇心具有探索性，知识渊博；他完全不在意结构和节奏。这些元素结合在一起，使《格拉斯顿伯里浪漫史》膨胀到了 1,200 页，而这仍比原始手稿短 500 页。阅读此书是一场数周、甚至数月的旅程。对于亨利·米勒这位波威斯的拥趸来说，他通过定量地体验，花了整整一年的时间来享受这些“欢乐的啜饮”。
这本书是英文单卷著作中最长的作品之一，但尽管篇幅如此之长，那些可能被认为是情节关键的事件往往发生在章节之间的空白处，仅在随后的时间点被模糊地提及。正如一位致力于研究波威斯作品的学者（一个规模虽小但极为专注的群体）所指出的：“《格拉斯顿伯里浪漫史》中那种过度冗长的感觉，反而因为所有被省略掉的内容而进一步加剧了。”
长篇巨著可能会引起反感，尤其是对于那些被付费阅读但并非按小时计酬的人。在 1933 年《伦敦书评》(TLS) 评论的第一行中，你可以听到这种不情愿：“由于波威斯先生的小说长达一千多页，且包含 40 多个主要角色，因此人们可能……”
【此处文本片段跳跃/不连续】
……交流，拥有超过 23,000 种交配类型，这强化了他对传统二元论的拒绝。
高（Gao）暗示，如果诗歌本身仍然“受困”于狭隘的思维——“约束像野蛮的真菌一样覆盖你的舌头”——那么这本书旨在将其解放。他就我们留下的“深时”遗产发出了一个“必要且紧急”的提醒，考虑的范围涵盖从“由议会通过银碘人工播种的赛博云”，到杀虫剂、除草剂、无人机、灭绝以及森林的“法律地位”。这是一个令人愉悦的提醒：即使是像树木这样古老的主题，地盘依然在不断拓展。
酷儿身份也是一个焦点，同样体现在由定居萨塞克斯的狄伦·贾克斯 (Dillon Jaxx) 创作的《像椋鸟一样坠落》(like starlings falling) 中。故事始于 80 年代和 90 年代，那时“同性婚姻仍在培养皿中生长”。在这里，身份认同的挣扎与宗教禁条（“十字架上的基督看向别处，深感羞耻”）在令人窒息的……之间交织在一起。
乳香之云，信徒 与忏悔。尽管演讲者能说意大利语、德语和英语，且“口音厚如掩体之墙”，但他们坚持认为“没有足够的词汇来填满我们喉咙中空洞的坟墓”，尤其是在讨论他们兄弟的死时——Jaxx 将这一事件描述为导致他们变得“不再是兄弟”并失去了一种“兄弟之语”。
Jaxx 敢于造访这座由被抹除的记忆组成的“博物馆”，将其转化为客体，因为悲恸就像“法庭执达员”一样忙碌地夺走“身体部位”。“我不指望能再次听到他的声音，”他们坦言，“但也许他在等待听到我的声音。”他们的兄弟通过一系列令人动容的“消逝十四行诗”而受到缅怀，每首诗都以“我的兄弟手中握着一把刀”开头。解释随之而至，伴随着戏剧性的隐喻（“将自己摊在薄冰上……远到我们无法触及”；“用一次干净的切割，将他的生命从我们的生命中切除”），最后达到一个毁灭性的结论：“现在我们所有人都在流血。”正如 Jaxx 所写，“你不能在不关门的情况下一直穿过一道道门”。
由于诗人经历过慢性疾病和癌症治疗，这部作品的凄美感被进一步增强。然而，在那些关于停尸房工作人员做三明治的病态思考，以及关于吞掉自己的舌头或将脸钉在树上的超现实故事之间，竟然还潜藏着幽默的空间。
Jaxx 由西蒙·阿米蒂奇（Simon Armitage）主持的评审团评选为 2024 Brotherton 诗歌奖得主，绝对是一位值得关注的初次登场诗人。
在 observershop.co.uk 订购《The Dead One…》价格为 £11.69（建议零售价 10% 折扣），以及《like starlings falling》价格为 £10.79（建议零售价 10% 折扣）。
“仅勾勒出故事的粗略轮廓。”另一篇当代评论似乎被波伊斯（Powys）作为作家的交替出现的强项与弱点所折磨。“这部小说绚烂地失败了，”它总结道，“但它确实失败了！”
鉴于此，你可能会在想这是否值得。毕竟，我们大多数人一生中可能只读过几本这个规模的书。《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》还是《无限的玩笑》？《米德尔马契》还是《地下世界》？《格拉斯顿伯里之恋》（A Glastonbury Romance）应该出现在这个讨论之列吗？我无法全心全意地推荐它——它太明显地具有特质，且潜在地令人发疯。但它确实包含了一些惊人的东西，而它的古怪之处恰恰在于，对于合适的人来说，它将成为其阅读生命中伟大的体验之一。无论何时，我都会选择它，而不是一本平庸的 250 页之作。
“我的新小说始于一声尖叫”
首胎分娩的创伤如何 中断了她的写作， 以及看着儿子 学会说话又是如何 让文字回归。 作者：艾伦·皮尔森-哈格 (Ellen Peirson-Hagger)
黛西·约翰逊 (Daisy Johnson)，35 岁，是一位居住在牛津的英国短篇小说作家和小说家。2018 年，在 27 岁时，她凭借处女作《万物之下》(Everything Under) 成为史上最年轻的布克奖入围作者。在她的著作中（还包括小说《姐妹》(Sisters) 以及短篇集《沼泽》(Fen) 和《酒店》(The Hotel)），约翰逊探讨了神话、怪诞以及人类与自然世界的联系。她的最新小说《长波》(Long Wave) 是一部奇幻的故事，讲述了同一个家庭中三代女性——伊迪丝 (Edith)、露丝 (Ruth) 和奥里 (Ori) 的故事，每个人都在尝试理解成为母亲和女儿意味着什么。
《长波》是一部多层次的小说。其核心概念是什么？ 当我还在苦苦挣扎于初稿，且无法构思其主题时，我与一位朋友交谈。他向我提到了西斯廷教堂中亚当与上帝彼此伸手的图像 [米开朗基罗的《创造亚当》]。他们的手指之间有一段空间。我突然意识到，这就是这本书的主题——人们试图寻找彼此。这确实产生于新冠疫情期间，在那段极度孤立、恐惧和孤独的时期，对我而言，这段时间恰好与我第一次为人父母重合。
书的结构令人惊喜。你是如何想到这种结构的？ 记忆不是线性的，因此生活也不是线性的。事物会重复出现并回到我们身边。这反映了奥里抚养幼子的经历，以及随之而来的自我迷失与碎片化。我希望它具有一种“爆炸感”和一种“潮汐感”。
你描绘了残酷的母亲和慈爱的母亲。通过展示这个光谱，你想探讨什么？ 探讨其中的动荡，以及人性。当我们成为父母时，人们期望我们知道该怎么做。但我们如此人性化，如此易出错。即使是伊迪丝，她做了一些可能无法原谅的事情，但那是出于一种绝望的尝试，试图尽力而为，试图抓住她在意的东西。我想探讨这些角色如何竭尽全力。这就是为什么
“说出最糟糕的 话语中蕴含着力量”： 黛西·约翰逊。 照片由 艾莉·史密斯 (Ellie Smith) 为 《观察家报》拍摄
这本书随后开始思考集体育儿——即“村落”的概念，这不仅在育儿中，在生活中也是我们所需要的。
成为母亲的经历如何影响了这部小说？ 这本书并非诞生于一个愉快的心境。我完全没预料到早期的育儿生活会如此艰辛：我们对此避而不谈。我的第一个儿子出生时过程非常痛苦。当时正值新冠疫情，我的伴侣被允许进入医院的时间有限。我进行了紧急剖腹产，然后基本上是独自面对这个我并不真正知道如何照顾的婴儿。除非你把他抱在身前保持直立，否则他就不睡觉。我从未经历过这样的事情，这唤起了一种
生活也并非线性。 往事会重新回到我们身边”
很多愤怒，赤裸的愤怒，绝望，恐惧。 这本书之所以写了这么久，是因为它始于一声尖叫，而那声尖叫中的一部分仍然留在书里。但随着我的好转，随着我儿子的成长，以及当我们迎来第二个孩子并开始理顺这一切时，这本书发生了变化。
文字。那非常可怕。我不知道（写字的能力）是否还会回来。我觉得曾经的那个我已经消失了，随之而去的还有对文字的任何自信。我找不到词汇来解释正在发生的事情。
当时是否有经历过类似情况、可以寻求帮助的朋友？ 没有。最终我找到了一位治疗师，并开始向家人和朋友倾诉。把最糟糕的事情[大声]说出来是有力量的——那些侵入性想法，我认为它们[比你预想的]更常见。宝宝在你的肚子里，它是安全的，它是你的一部分；然后它来到了这个世界上，而我最恐惧的人是我自己，以及我脑海中那些暴力且可怕的想法。我觉得那是不能说出口的事情，所以你将[这些想法]埋藏，而它们在你的内心腐烂。
你什么时候能重新写作？ 我的写作过程始终是快速写草稿，然后删掉几乎所有文字。每一本出版的小说背后，都有七本已经逝去的小说。但在[写《长波》(Long Wave)]时，我会坐在书桌前，却写不出任何东西，或者写出来的东西是难以理解的。我觉得文字与我的大脑之间没有连接。后来，当我的儿子开始学习说话——他的第一个词是“奶酪”(cheese)——并且我们在给他读书时，那成了一个转折点。我重新读起了我小时候喜欢的那些书——莫里斯·森达克的《野兽国》(Where the Wild Things Are)、海伦·库珀的《南瓜汤》(Pumpkin Soup)、特丽莎·库克的《如此之多》(So Much)——然后心想，“哇！文字太神奇了。”在他寻找语言的同时，我也在尝试寻找写作这本书的语言。
你是否找到了能映射你经历的书籍？ 阿德里安娜·里奇 (Adrienne Rich) 非常重要。她的书《女性诞生》(Of Woman Born) 探讨了社区以及讲述故事的力量。还有奥尔加·拉文 (Olga Ravn) 的《我的工作》(My Work)，讲述了她成为母亲的经历。露西·琼斯 (Lucy Jones) 的《母性》(Matrescence) 让我大开眼界。以及米里亚姆·托埃夫斯 (Miriam Toews) 的《女性在对话》(Women Talking)。她谈到这本书是一次“狂野的女性想象”之举，因为它想象那些[被强奸的]女性角色能够拥有讲述逃离的词汇。这句话对我来说变得非常重要，因为在我经历极其艰难的时期，觉得自己无法被理解，更不用说被他人理解时，我可以将我的书视为一次狂野的女性想象之举：也许有一天一切都会好起来，事情会理顺，而这些联系将变得有意义。
26.07.26 谜题
, 6
6
本周问题： （上图）是谁在画谁？ 下周日公布答案。
横向 1 谁写了极佳的哥特作品，却不想要能量？ (6,4) 6 因此选择，返回以掌握要点 (4) 9 同意让船员不安 (5,5) 10 最终获得了一些美味的萨拉米——在这里？ (4) 11 请预付并结清房租 (6,6) 15 完全忘记劳伦安排的数字 (7) 16 会准备土豆的侦探？ (7) 17 圣咏的一部分，循环播放 (3-4) 19 旧男孩在桌旁等待并发表评论？ (7) 20 天鹅之歌的主题？ (4,8) 23 社会主义者热切撤销的头衔，首字母！ (4) 24 我们去工作？是的，也不 (6,4) 25 主要地，Everyman，不止一次，明显地温和 (4) 26 没怎么努力：钢琴强音（那是其中一个元素） (6,2,2)
纵向 1 很大且非常安全，但缺乏功能 (4) 2 脾气坏的人，保守派，扰乱了饮酒场所 (4) 3 演员偏离方向，并对虚无感到不安 (4-7) 4 鼓起勇气并司法审判X (7) 5 敦促让马停下？ (5-2) 7 红茶和成熟香蕉在第二个家 (4-1-5)
上周的画作 是一次避暑之憩， 展现了法国艺术家 古斯塔夫·卡耶博特 (Gustav Caillebotte) 1877. 年创作的 《巴黎街道；雨天》中的 人物。作为他最大的 杰作，这幅宏伟的 画作展现了在阵雨中 穿梭于巴黎林荫道 的人物。然而 画中并未出现真正的雨。 事实上，天空看起来 几乎明亮得发光。 新的铺路石闪烁着 湿润的光芒，所有人物 都撑起了一把最新的 可伸缩雨伞。天气 是通过巴黎现代性 的元素暗示出来的， 角度也是现代主义的， 人物直接向我们走来， 被裁剪得像一张时髦的 新照片。
8 鸟类扫除包含昆虫的结构 (7,3) 12 饰演主角的人，我们听说读者使之贵族化 (5,6) 13 翻转并愚蠢地颤动，那个不强壮的小个子 (4,6) 14 在公告中，显现矿石接缝，可由空中运输 (10) 18 淘气的，像冰球比赛的元素？ (7) 19 部分地解开外衣中的褶皱 (7) 21 总体的想法是吃掉金汤力 (4) 22 渴望哀号 (4)
姓名
地址
邮编
解题者可通过以下在线方式参加我们的填字游戏比赛： www.observer.co.uk/puzzles 或发送电子邮件至：competitions@observer.co.uk 鼓励无纸化参赛；仍接受邮寄参赛。 随机选出的五名正确答案者将 each 获得一张 £15 图书礼券。 如需参加 Everyman 抽奖，请通过在线或邮寄方式提交正确答案至：Everyman No. 4,162, The Observer, 22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP 电子邮件参赛者必须在主题行中包含印刷版所示的填字游戏名称和编号（例如“Everyman No. 4,162”）。主题不正确将不予接受。仅限 18 岁以上英国居民。每人最多参赛一次。 在线参赛截止日期为出版后的周六；邮寄参赛必须在出版后的周六或之前盖邮戳，且必须在谜题出版后十天内送达（即出版后次周的周三）。获胜者将在出版两周后的周日公布。 完整条款与条件请访问： https://observer.co.uk/puzzles/everyman/article/crossword-prize-draws
5 1 7 1 3 4 6 7 9 3 2 1 9 4 6 8 3 1 4 7 6 3 9 3 7 8 6
解答 No. 4,161 /
Everyman No. 4,160 Brian Bowie, Barnet, Hertfordshire Mike Daly, Ushaw Moor, Durham Bethan Davies, Aylesbury, Bucks Stephen Drew, Chandlers Ford, Hampshire Bill Reid, Belper, Derbyshire
每周我们展示三张剧照。 请猜测相关的电影 以及将它们联系在一起的导演。 （如果你能按时间顺序排列，可获得额外加分。）
使用数字 1 到 9 填写空白格。
每个数字在每行、每列和 每个 3x3 宫格中 必须且仅能出现一次。
,
0 3
/
5 5 2 < 8
7 2 2
7 2 1 ( 6 2 : 1 + 2 5 1
( 1 1 6 6 2 3 ,
5 2 & . ( 5 6 ( 1 ' / ( 6 6
1 / ' ( / 1 2
$ 0 2 5 2 8 6 / < ' 5 $ : 1
8 8 ( 1
& $ ' ( 7 $ 1 7 , 3 2 ' ( 6
a
i
姓名
地址
邮编
b
f
6 20 17 24 14
7 17 15 11
15 17
27 24 24 17
19 23 13 9
9 21 9 12
适用普通数独规则，但 灰色线条内单元格中的 数字之和等于 角落中的数字。 在灰色线条组成的 每个形状内，数字 不能重复。
e d
h
除印刷版外： 扫描以订阅 The Puzzle Edit —— 独家 专栏、出题人见解 以及由谜题编辑 Caitlin O’Kane 提供的 每周线索解析
16 12
2 1 4 5 3 9 6 7 8 5 7 9 2 6 8 1 4 3 8 6 3 4 1 7 9 5 2 9 8 5 1 7 6 2 3 4 6 2 7 3 9 4 5 8 1 3 4 1 8 2 5 7 6 9 1 3 6 7 8 2 4 9 5 7 5 2 9 4 3 8 1 6 4 9 8 6 5 1 3 2 7
Across（横向） 1 澳大利亚包含一千只海鸟 (4) 4 情景喜剧明星 (8, 2 words) 10 中国罪犯之子几乎暴露了来源 (9) 11 偶尔在徒步独木舟中间发现的动物 (5) 13 引导后需要能量的长故事 (5) 14 也许在地艾草和坚果松之间放置灌木 (12) 17 简短地蔑视一座罗马房屋 (6) 19 原本被极强腐蚀性的黄色颜料覆盖的弦乐器 (7) 20 多年不辍的美国嫌疑人 (4) 21 在冰岛感到资金短缺 (4) 23 斯普纳（Spooner）因某些网球而闻名 (7, 2 words) 25 完整地陈述报告的结论 (6) 27 神奇女侠，在解雇领导后，发送了此阵容 (12) 29 移动苏格兰儿童的方式 (5) 30 爱尔兰女孩提供了那个主意 (5) 32 不仅仅是四月？为什么不？ (9, 3 words) 33 未被选中的骑士曾经被释放 (8) 34 来自古埃及但可以运作的花瓶 (4)
Down（纵向） 1 肯定地给当地人提供柔软的废物 (12, 5 words)
图表 1 在古典赛部分，你能看出白方的构思吗？该构思要么能赢得子力优势，要么能创造一个制胜的进攻机会？（见结尾。）
年度比尔国际象棋节 (Biel Chess Festival) 是国际象棋赛历中的支柱之一，今年已进入第 59 年。它虽然传统，但长期以来一直接纳 chess960（一种棋子在后排随机排列但有特定限制的变体），并且在过去几年中，它已脱离纯粹的古典象棋，采用了由古典赛、快速赛和超快赛组成的“铁人三项”。
在三项赛事结束后，前四名——莱冯·阿罗尼扬 (Levon Aronian，原亚美尼亚人，现美国籍)、来自阿塞拜疆的艾丁·苏莱曼利 (Aydin Suleymanli)、土耳其年轻超级巨星亚吉兹·卡安·埃尔多穆什 (Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş) 以及黎光廉 (Lê Quang Liêm，越南) 参加了于周四结束的决赛。而 chess960 的冠军则在马蒂亚斯·布吕鲍姆 (Matthias Blübaum，德国) 击败苏莱曼利后的附加赛中产生。上周六，我为约克郡的马卡姆国际象棋俱乐部 (Markham Chess Club) 举办了一次在线问答环节，针对其中一个问题，我查看了当前的全球前 20 名（源自 2700chess.com 的名单）。其中包括四名美国人，三名印度人，乌兹别克斯坦、中国和荷兰各两名，以及另外七名，其中包括马格努斯·卡尔森 (Magnus Carlsen)。
尽管美国球员人数更多，但印度目前被广泛认为是世界上最强大的国家。上周（至周三结束），他们的四位顶尖棋手在一场极其激烈的赛事中挑战了四位非常强大的外籍棋手：Quantbox 钦奈大师赛 (Quantbox Chennai Grand Masters)。阿里雷扎·菲鲁扎 (Alireza Firouzja) 以 4.5/7 的成绩独占第一，紧随其后的是得分为 4 的德米特里·安德雷金 (Dmitry Andreikin) 和阿尔俊·埃里加赛 (Arjun Erigaisi)；诺迪尔贝克·阿卜杜萨托罗夫 (Nodirbek Abdusattorov)、普拉内什·穆尼雷蒂纳姆 (Pranesh Munirethinam) 和尼哈尔·萨林 (Nihal Sarin) 得分为 3.5；汉斯·尼曼 (Hans Niemann) 为 3 分，而世界冠军古凯什·多马拉朱 (Gukesh Dommaraju) 仅得 2 分。
3 2 1 4 4 1 4 3 1 3
2 欢迎全国民调的自由国家 (6) 3 跑者隐藏了缺失的极地 (3) 4 再次在正午前收回武器 (5) 5 避免入狱，未完全被当场抓获 (8) 6 资深拉比在《泰晤士报》中有篇报道 (6) 7 来自案件质量的球拍，保留 21 (10, 3 words) 8 前一个答案的非凡特征 (4) 9 快乐的基础：情妇配上新床支撑架 (12) 12 批准在某种程度上未被政府丢失 (10) 15 德国战舰即将被摧毁，当欧盟其他部分参与其中时 (5) 16 澳洲植物孔洞周围的红标记 (8) 18 攀爬时覆盖罗马士兵面部的物体 (5) 22 与周期表相关 (6) 24 曼联游览列支敦士登：寒冷，但不算太糟 (6) 26 影子内政大臣绕过伤员中心 (5) 28 讨论 Cheerios 谷物圈的形状 (4) 31 夫妇被上涨的窗税抓住 (3)
建议参考《钱伯斯词典》(The Chambers Dictionary, 2016)。
尼哈尔·萨林 v 诺迪尔贝克·阿卜杜萨托罗夫 钦奈 2026 西西里防御 2 Bc4
1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 Bc4 Nf6 4 d3 此招曾被认为非常平庸，但已被马格努斯·卡尔森等人推广。白方希望最终建立一个类似于王之兵开局中通过 c3 和 d4 形成的兵中心。 4...Nc6 5 0–0 g6 6 c3 Bg7 7 Re1 0–0 8 a4 这暂时阻止了 d5，因为如果 8...d5 9 exd5 Nxd5 10 a5! 将会很棘手，但 8 a4 削弱了 b4，因此白方或许可以尝试 8 Bb3 b5 9 h3 Bb7 10 d4 e6，这大致处于平衡状态。 8 ...b6 9 Bg5 Bb7 10 Nbd2 e6 11 Bb3 h6 12 Be3 Qc7 13 h3 Rad8 14 Nf1 如果 14 d4 cxd4 15 cxd4 Nb4 则非常强势。到了这个阶段，白方会非常希望之前走的是 a3 而非 a4。
图表 2 14...e5! 封锁白方的 e 兵，并准备走 Na5 和 c4。15 Qc1 Kh7 16 N1h2 Na5 17 Bc2 c4! 18 dxc4 Bxe4 随着 e4 兵的被移除，黑方有了清晰且强有力的计划：安排推进他的 f 兵。19 Nd2 Bb7 20 Qd1 d5 21 cxd5 Nxd5 22 Qc1 f5! 23 Ndf3 Nc4 24 Bb3 Rfe8 25 Qc2 e4 26 Nd4 Ne5 27 Nf1 Nd3 这个“章鱼”是一个怪物。28 Red1 a6 29 Bd2?! 陷入了一记重击。
4 1 4 1 3 3 2
1 3 2 2
C 1 O 2 M 3 P A 4 C 5 T I 6 F 7 I E 8 D 9
Y X A 10 B N O R M A L L Y
B 11 Y R E T R S 12 P I N A N
E M I M 13 I N K S 14 T O N E
R 15 E N I N U I K H C 16 E P 17
P 18 L A T O C 19 N I D A T U
E B 20 D 21 I V O T S 22 E R I 23 C
T 24 O E E 25 E P I C 26 R E M E
L 27 O O P L I G H T F P L
A H 28 A O M 29 A H O O 30 R R A
M 31 A R C H S T O N E O G
B 32 I S H O P S L E E V E
[高尔夫球杆], 26 C REME, 27 LOO PLIGHT, 28 HAM 围绕 O A, 30 (w)ORRA(l), 31 R 位于 (MATCHES ON)*, 32 BISH O SL 位于 PEEVE 中。
Down（纵向）：1 (TEC 围绕 (PRE BY))<, 2 ((possib)LE MYXO(matosis))<, 3 MADE 围绕 (R IN A), 4 dd, 5 CO(sta) (RICA UPON), 6 (w)IMP, 7 FOURTH 用 AI 代替 OUR, 8 (t)ALENTE(d), 9 “DINE”, 12 SKINT (THIS G)*, 14 (IS C HO) 位于 SKOL 中, 16 CA REFEREE - E, 17 (EG ALE CUP)<, 20 BOO HAI(l), 23 IMP VOR<, 25 COPE< H, 27 LAM B, 29 (i)MHO。
规则与要求 如欲参加 Gemelo 奖项抽奖，请通过以下方式提交正确答案： 在线提交：https://observer.co.uk/puzzles，发送电子邮件至 competitions@observer.co.uk 或 邮寄至：Gemelo No. 42, The Observer, 22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP
电子邮件参赛作品必须在主题栏中包含与印刷版一致的填字游戏名称和编号（例如“Gemelo No. 42”）。主题不正确的参赛作品将不被接受。鼓励无纸化参赛。仅限 18 岁以上英国居民。每人最多提交一份作品。在线提交的截止日期为发布后的周六；邮寄作品的邮戳不得晚于发布后的周六，且必须在谜题发布后十日内送达（即发布后下一周的周三）。随机选出的三个正确答案将每人获得一张 £25 图书代金券。Gemelo No. 42 的获胜者将于 2026 年 8 月 23 日星期日公布。
完整条款与条件请访问： https://observer.co.uk/puzzles/everyman/article/crossword-prize-draws
Gemelo No. 39 获奖者 M Cutter, Poole, Dorset W Drever, Kings Norton, Birmingham K Manley, Sydenham, London
图表 3 29...Nxf2! 30 Kxf2 e3+ 31 Kg1 如果 31 Nxe3 Nxe3 32 Bxe3 Rxe3! 将是毁灭性的，例如 33 Kxe3 Qg3+ 34 Kd2 Bxd4 35 cxd4 Qf4+ 36 Kc3 Rc8+ 37 Bc4 Rxc4+! 38 Kxc4 Qc7+ 且 39 Kd3 Be4+ 或 39 Kb3 Bd5+ 31...exd2 32 Rxd2 Nf4 33 Rf2 Nxg2! 34 Ne6 或者 34 Rxg2 Rxd4 35 cxd4 Bxd4+ 36 Kh1 Qxc2 37 Bxc2 Re2 获胜 34...Rxe6 35 Bxe6 Nh4 36 Qe2 Qc6 37 Ng3 Re8 38 Re1 f4
图表 4 此处，白方认输。我想他本可以尝试 38...f4 39 Ne4 (39 Rxf4 Rxe6! 获胜) Rxe6 40 Rxf4, 但简单地 40..Nf5 应该能相当轻松地获胜，不仅具有物质优势，而且能持续进攻。
在图表 1 中 20 Rxf4! 摧毁了黑方的防御 20...Qxf4 如果 20...Bxf4 21 Nh5 Bh2+ 22 Kxh2 Qxf3 23 Nxf3 两个轻子面对车应能获胜。 21 Qd3 黑方现在无法防守对角线，因为如果 21...g6 22 Nxe6 21...Rfd8 如果 21...Rfe8 22 Qh7+ Kf8 23 Re1 (威胁 Ndf5) g6 (或 23...Be5 24 Nf3 Bf6 25 Nh5) 24 Bxg6 Qf6 25 Nxe6+ Rxe6 26 Rxe6 Qxe6 27 Qh8+ Ke7 28 Qxa8 轻松获胜。 22 Qh7+ Kf8 23 Ndf5! Ke8 或 23...Bxf5 24 Nxf5! Qh2+ 25 Kf1 Ke8 26 Qg8+ Kd7 27 Rd1+ Ke6 (27...Kc8 28 Ne7+) 28 Bb3+ Kxf5 29 Qxf7+ 随即将杀 24 Nxg7+ Ke7 25 Nxe6 Kxe6 26 Bf5+ Ke7 27 Re1+ Be5 28 Re4 Rd1+ 29 Kh2 Rh8 最佳机会，寄希望于 30 Qxh8?? Qxe4! 30 Rxf4 Rxh7 31 Re4 Rg7 32 Rxe5+ Kf6 33 f4 随后黑方认输。
a c g d f
h j
Gemelo 使用一种加密速记法来解释答案，可在以下网址查看： https://observer.co.uk/puzzles/gemelo/article/gemelo-key
Across（横向）：1 COMED(y) 围绕 (PACT IF I), 10 (MAY BALL)* 围绕 (NO R), 11 (clu) B (rivalr)Y (fo)R (stev)E, 12 SPIN A, 13 TONE 在 MINKS 之后, 15 (bea)N 位于 REIN 中, 16 (re)CEP(tionist), 18 (A LP)< TO, 19 C (N A) 围绕 ID, 21 DIVO(rcee) (hos)T(ile), 22 SERI(f) C, 24 TOME - M(an)
1 Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş (待赛) v José Martínez
2 Nihal Sarin v N. Abdusattorov (待赛)
3 Nihal Sarin v N. Abdusattorov (待赛)
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 Puzzles
Bear 还是 bare —— 哪个是正确的？ A) I can’t bare you B) It was a bare-all story C) He walked around bear naked D) There were other facts to bare in mind
关于我的双胞胎儿子，以下哪个被认为是正确的？ A) My 18-month-old boys are a delight B) My 18 month-old boys are exhausting C) My 18 month old boys are noisy D) My 18-months old boys are full of surprises
哪个撇号（'）的使用被认为是正确的？ A) He was three weeks’ old B) Nurse’s salaries are too low C) Come to our’s tonight D) We leave in two days’ time
哪个单词拼写正确？ A) Infinitesimel B) Minascule C) Meglamaniac D) Ginormous
不过于难，不过于易，恰到好处。 金发姑娘（Goldilocks）系列的线索不含字数提示；在这样中等规模的填字游戏中，去掉字数提示只会让原本紧凑的谜题变得更简单。其乐趣在于发散性思维、对网格的观察，以及极具现代感的英国口语。请通过订阅 observer.co.uk 在线游玩金发姑娘存档。
横向 1 平整的石头 5 少量 9 周二外卖的包装 10 前波斯 11 Ctrl-Z 命令 12 蜂蜜饮料 13 2026 年凯恩·帕森斯 (Kane Parsons) 电影 15 经常指男人的私人空间 (Man cave) 16 2026 年库里·巴克 (Curry Barker) 电影 22 把它交给法官去裁决 23 滑铁卢四重奏 24 青蓝色 25 用力扔出 26 最终数字 27 眼睑上的肿块
1 ( : 6
% / ( : 2 * 5 (
B) 世界末日 (The end of the world) 终末论 (Eschatology) 是神学中研究“末后之事”（源自希腊语 éschatos，意为“最后的”）的领域，具体指世界和人类的终结。《牛津英语词典》将四件“末后”之事规定为：死亡、审判、天堂和地狱。
哪句话被认为是正确的？ A) She waited with baited breath B) We jibed on our first date C) She would extract revenge D) His performance didn’t pass mustard
哪个度假目的地拼写正确？ A) The Carribean B) Columbia (South America) C) The Phillipines D) Reykjavík
随机抽奖奖励题 7. 终末论 (eschatology) 研究的是什么？ A) 逃脱的艺术 B) 世界末日 C) 古代粪便 D) 不可能的数字
纵向 1 弄伤，如脚趾 2 维姬 (Vicky) 在《触发点》(Trigger Point) 中的角色 3 主持吉他手穿着学生制服的乐队 4 小说形式的商业协议？ 5 指挥类游戏 6 带有扭转并蘸浸仪式感的饼干
词谈…… 冗余词 (Pleonasms)
英语可能是一门令人困惑的语言，但有时它做得太过火了。我们真的需要用 flammable 和 inflammable 来表示同一个意思（可燃）吗？还有 loose 和 unloose，bone 和 debone，thaw 和 unthaw 又是怎么回事？这些听起来相反的词竟然是同义词，这似乎是毫无意义的干扰，但这就是英语。这种语言有一天能被理顺吗？机会渺茫 (Fat chance)，或者说极小 (thin) —— 随你挑。 在使用 “inflammable” 时，其前缀至少有拉丁语历史背景；而 “unthaw” 和 “debone” 的前缀纯属累赘。同样的情况也适用于 “irregardless”，它自 1840 年代起就开始被使用，并从此让人们感到恼火。技术术语称之为“冗余缀” (pleonastic affix)，这是更广泛的“冗余词” (pleonasm) 恶习的一个例子，即使用了不必要的词语。如果你被 “free gift”（免费赠品）、“advance warning”（预先警告）和 “added bonus”（额外奖金）中的修饰语激怒，那么困扰你的正是另一种类型的冗余词。 许多冗余词给那些完全可行且
7 随后女王的称呼 8 结束 14 高 ___ 16 挑选，与 “for” 搭配 17 cordon ___ 鸡胸肉 (Chicken cordon bleu) 18 服装线 19 “听起来没错！” 20 遵守 21 泰德·拉索 (Ted Lasso) 的老板 Shelley
测验答案 1. B) It was a bare-all story “Bare” 意为“裸露的”或“揭露的”；而 “bear” 指的是大型多毛哺乳动物，或者忍受或承担某事。正确的句子应为：“I can’t bear you”；“He walked around bare naked”；以及 “There were other facts to bear in mind。” 2. A) My 18-month-old boys are a delight 18-month-old 是这些词正确连字符组合的方式，除非你有 18 个一个月大的男孩，但那样他们就不是双胞胎了。 3. D) We leave in two days’ time “Days” 带有撇号是因为它是所有格 —— 即两天的时长。其他句子应为：“He was three weeks old”；“Nurses’ salaries are too low”；以及 “Come to ours tonight”（所有格代词永远不加撇号）。
词汇，且是文字编辑生命中的克星。在诸如 “cease and desist”（停止并终止）、“aid and abet”（教唆与协助）或 “null and void”（无效且作废）等短语中，这种重复已成为一种被认可的文学公式，因为听起来华丽且熟悉而被人忽略，但更多的情况是毫无必要地被使用。 而且令人恼火。而且毫无必要。 从 “first beginnings”（最初开始）到 “final outcomes”（最终结果），从 “past history”（过去历史）到 “future plans”（未来计划），冗词档案中充斥着多余的修饰语。干脆让他们休息一天吧。 当然当然，冗词也可以是一种强有力的文学手段，通过重复创造强调，甚至是诗意。但在等待 ATM machine（自动取款机）或点一份 tuna fish（金枪鱼）午餐时则不然。所以，除非你在发表一次慷慨激昂的演说，否则让我们谨慎地 proceed forward（向前推进）(!)，并清除这个世界上的冗词赘句。
Joshua Blackburn 是 《The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia》(Bloomsbury, £14.99) 的作者。可通过 observershop.co.uk 以 £13.49 订购。可能产生配送费用。
4 5 6 9 1 4 2 6 3 3 5 1 3 6 8 9 2 4 5
5 1 6 3 4 7 2 8 9 4 7 2 9 6 8 5 3 1 3 9 8 5 2 1 7 6 4 9 6 1 4 8 5 3 7 2 7 3 5 2 9 6 4 1 8 8 2 4 7 1 3 9 5 6 2 8 3 6 7 9 1 4 5 1 5 9 8 3 4 6 2 7 6 4 7 1 5 2 8 9 3
3 2 8 4 5 6 1 7 9 6 5 7 9 1 2 3 4 8 4 1 9 7 3 8 2 6 5 1 8 4 3 7 9 6 5 2 5 3 2 6 8 1 7 9 4 9 7 6 5 2 4 8 1 3 8 6 1 2 9 5 4 3 7 7 4 5 8 6 3 9 2 1 2 9 3 1 4 7 5 8 6
Goldilocks 答案 No. 34
7 2 2 7
$
5 ( $ ( 1 9 <
% $ % < 1 $ 0 ( 6
6 7 2 1 ( ( 5 0
) 2 5 0 6
8 5 / '
$ 6 + ,
6 2 , 7 6 6 $ , '
6 2 6 2 1 ( ( '
扫描订阅 The Puzzle Edit ——来自谜题编辑 Caitlin O’Kane 的 每周时事通讯
每一行、每一列以及 每个 3×3 宫格必须包含 数字 1–9。此外还有一个 额外挑战——四个高亮的 3×3 蓝色方格共同构成 另一组宫格，其中也必须 包含 1–9 且不能重复。
m
n
n
c
n
t
她的丈夫在换妻网站上 开放了他们的关系， 对此的讲述方式细腻 但令人深感不安
h
he
in
an
ly
st
la
re
di
Ma
BBC 威尔士广播电台 / BBC Sounds Radio 6 Music 独立音乐永恒 BBC Sounds
系列《换妻者》(Swingers) 由才华横溢的 调查记者卡特琳·奈伊 (Catrin Nye) 制作， 在过去几周里一直占据着播客 排行榜前列，原因不难理解。这是一个 扣人心弦的真实生活故事，叙述细腻且
oc
ar
k)
ue
音频
26.07.26 33
ding
在开头所明确指出的，该片 极其令人心碎且包含大量露骨的性描写。 “我们没有为了掩饰而删减那些令人不安的 细节或所使用的语言，”奈伊说道，“它们是 故事中至关重要的一部分。” 这个故事关于露丝·奥格雷迪 (Ruth O’Grady)。 被一位曾经的教学同事形容为“爱笑”的 奥格雷迪（见图）来自威尔士北部的 一个小镇。她在大学毕业后回到了那里， 并结识了酒吧服务员克里斯 (Chris)。 他们起初看起来很般配，但 奥格雷迪说，在性生活方面， 情况可能有些粗暴。几年后，他 在不断地纠缠下让她开放性关系 以引入他人，于是他们加入了 FabSwingers，一个流行的换妻网站 （FabSwingers 表示其拥有强大的 保障措施以防止虐待）。在该网站上， 奥格雷迪被定义为一名“辣妻”(hot wife)， 即与丈夫以外的男性发生性关系的已婚女性。 本系列中详述的所有内容
Sc
Sha
sha
by I
ton
Pad
即可免费访问我们的文化俱乐部 (Culture Club) 顶级剧院门票 10% 折扣
价值 £800 的 为好奇文化之士 量身定制的权益
未被起诉，且未对制作组做出回应。 奥格雷迪说他没有直接参与 换妻性行为：相反，他指令 在会面中对她应该进行什么样的操作， 并要求她将过程录像。 他制定了规则：掐脖、扇耳光、 拽头发和厌女式辱骂是被允许的； 但击打和抓挠是不允许的。 奥格雷迪顺从了这一切。当时， 她已请病假停职，克里斯是她的 法定护理员，而这些令人创伤的 性遭遇变成了她每天要做的事， 最多每天五次。她的身心 开始崩溃。 尽管奈伊试图通过参加一个在利物浦 由女性经营的换妻聚会（配备了 地牢和拷问设备），以及采访一名 使用过 FabSwingers 网站的男性 （他哭了）来为该主题提供不同的视角， 但最令人难以忘怀的依然是奥格雷迪。 她说，许多与她发生性关系的男性 从未真正承认她的存在——他们 只与克里斯交谈。 当她最终离开并向警方报案时， 警方进行了调查，但决定不以 “强迫控制”罪名起诉克里斯。 尽管在奥格雷迪发出的某些短信中，她提到
继续进行 性行为，但 也有其他情况是她 表达热情， 或者由她自己 安排会面。 除了那些令人不快且具体的 细节，该系列关注的是 同意的复杂性 以及这在实际上意味着什么。其中 有与专家的启发性对话，其中 一位解释道：“人们很有可能 在表面上同意他们并不想要的 性行为。” 奥格雷迪说，她决定在这个 播客中使用真名，是因为 法国强奸幸存者 吉赛尔·佩利科特 (Gisèle Pelicot) 的案件。 “每个人都说：‘我不敢相信，所有 这些人，他们只是普通男人 ——我无法想象会发生这样的事，’” 奥格雷迪说。“而我感到非常、非常 愤怒，因为我知道这些人随处可见 ……你的邮递员，你的电工，你的 水管工，你的郡议员， 你的警察，你的老师，你的 房东。”《交换伴侣》(Swingers) 是一个难以 消化的系列（我不得不中途休息），但 我认为，它是一个必不可少的系列。 Radio 6 Music 推出了一档新的 侧重频道 Indie Forever，于 本周三上线。它专注于
从 20 世纪 80 年代 到 2010 年代（没有 太多 grime 或 soul， 舞曲粉丝注意），这或许是 BBC 试图将听众从 流媒体播放列表中吸引过来的一种 方式，同时也旨在抢夺 Absolute Radio 的部分 传统独立音乐爱好者观众。 旗舰节目《早间时段》(The Morning Session) 在上午 10 点至 中午播出，由菲利克斯·怀特 (Felix White) 和史蒂夫·拉马克 (Steve Lamacq) 主持。怀特 是 Maccabees 乐队的吉他手， 但也是一位亲切且经验丰富的 主持人，他共同主持板球 播客《尾随者》(Tailenders)。6 Music 的资深 主持人拉马克对该观众群来说， 就像起石玫瑰 (Stone Roses) 首张专辑 中的每一首歌一样熟悉。 他们在一起很愉快，尽管在 第一次节目中，有一种 拉马克在采访 怀特的轻微感觉。该节目承诺将挖掘 6 Music 的资源，包括其《第一次与……》 访谈系列、 旧纪录片和现场录音。 其他节目几乎全是音乐， 没有什么闲聊，而且 整个频道对于那些不喜欢 独立音乐过于“另类”的人来说， 是一个轻松的替代选择。
l H
以及更多内容，请访问 observer.co.uk/culture-club
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 Television
周一 周二 周三
每日精选 《被攫》(The Rapture) BBC One, 晚上9点 在一次导致丈夫丧生的车祸中瘫痪后，鲁思·马德利 (Ruth Madeley) 悲伤的心理学家加布斯·福克斯 (Dr Gabs Fox) 博士在面对她的新精神病患者时得不到片刻喘息。好斗的青少年贝瑟尼 (Bethany，由 India Amarteifio 饰演) 因杀母被强制收容，她坚称自己是清白的并拥有预言能力，在获得公正之前绝不罢休。随着社区因气候危机而陷入动荡，贝瑟尼疯狂的涂鸦以及她对加布斯过去令人不安的了解，使得这部引人入胜的五集惊悚剧充满了紧张感。KR
《自然之力》(Force of Nature) ITV1, 晚上7点 在这部六集系列剧中，是时候考虑气候危机如何影响野生动物了。震撼的镜头捕捉到了动物忍受极端环境的能力，首先是美国中西部一只在龙卷风袭击后潜入地下的猫头鹰，以保护她的雏鸟；以及在被洪水淹没的马赛马拉，讨厌水的猎豹为了晚餐而游泳。KR
《Aitch：不要恐惧》(Aitch: Don’t Be Afraid) Netflix 面对比任何“丛林美食”挑战都要艰巨得多的考验，说唱歌手 Aitch（原名 Harrison James Armstrong）去年攀登了乞力马扎罗山，旨在为唐氏综合症协会筹款，共募集了超过 £160,000。这部纪录片记录了这段艰辛的旅程，并强调了 Aitch 这么做的动力：他深爱的妹妹罗茜 (Rosie)。KR
电影 《被原谅者》(The Forgiven) (John Michael McDonagh, 2021) Channel 4, 晚上10点 这部来自《警卫》(The Guard) 编剧兼导演的最新电影，是一次狡黠的戏剧性挑衅，暗示了保罗·鲍尔斯 (Paul Bowles) 的《遮蔽之天》(The Sheltering Sky) 被重新定义在《白莲花度假宝地》(White Lotus) 的讽刺视角之下。拉尔夫·法恩斯 (Ralph Fiennes) 和杰西卡·查斯坦 (Jessica Chastain) 均表现卓越，他们饰演一对厌倦世界的夫妇，在开车前往一位富豪友人的摩洛哥城堡时，致命地撞死了一名年轻的柏柏尔男子。虽然特权似乎能提供免死金牌，但丈夫同意陪同死者的父亲踏上旅程，以面对他的责任。该片改编自劳伦斯·奥斯本 (Lawrence Osborne) 的小说，对殖民主义异域风情的陈词滥调进行了微调，出色的演员阵容与拉里·史密斯 (Larry Smith) 令人难忘的摄影相得益彰，后者巧妙地玩弄了《康登纳斯特旅行者》(Condé Nast Traveler) 杂志式的光鲜感。JR (Channel 4)
每日推荐 《狂怒》(Furious) Disney+ 由 Elizabeth Meriwether（《辍学》(The Dropout)、《为性而死》(Dying for Sex)）创作，这部八集惊悚剧的灵感源自 1987 年的电影《黑寡妇》(Black Widow)。Emmy Rossum 饰演一名 FBI 探员，调查一名在纽约潜伏并猎杀男性的女性连环杀手——受害者包括由 Rob Delaney（《灾难》(Catastrophe)）饰演的一名吸食可卡因的律师。爱尔兰演员 Lola Petticrew（《不可说》(Say Nothing)、《侵犯》(Trespasses)）将充满复仇心的反派演绎得令人胆寒。她的第一个受害者是一位法官兼亿万富翁之子，她在万圣节孩子们到访的间隙地冷静地将其除掉。不给糖就捣蛋。CMc
《你认为你是谁？》(Who Do You Think You Are?) BBC iPlayer “成为一名移民是一种表演形式……这一切关乎生存与存活。” 再次有机会看到获奖演员且为人极其友善的 Adeel Akhtar 探索他的印度-肯尼亚之根。他的祖先强烈的职业道德、社会良知以及为女孩提供教育的热忱，是他巨大的骄傲和情感源泉。KR
《街头警察：抓捕混混》(Street Cops: Catching the Yobs) 5, 晚上 8点 轻快地叙述并没有减轻这部剧对英国社会部分现状的凄凉反思。第二季的开篇充满了北安普敦标准的犯罪活动，从贩毒到酒驾，更有令人惊骇的画面：一名警察被锁喉，以及一只未戴口套的 XL 恶霸犬袭击另外两人。阴郁。KR
电影 《希望与荣耀》(Hope and Glory) (John Boorman, 1987) BBC Two, 晚上 11.05点 英国导演 John Boorman 在 20 世纪 60 年代和 70 年代通过《空白之点》(Point Blank)、《生存》(Deliverance) 和《王者之剑》(Excalibur) 等电影，成为了主流电影界最具创造力的类型片重塑者之一。《希望与荣耀》则是一部更为私人且温柔的作品：这是一部基于他在伦敦经历大轰炸时期的记忆而创作的自传体喜剧正剧。Sebastian Rice-Edwards 饰演 10 岁的 Billy，他沉浸在那些令其父母（Sarah Miles, David Hayman）感到恐惧的事件所带来的兴奋中。随后，在更绿意盎然的环境中，他结识了由 Ian Bannen 饰演的祖父，后者的表演正是让评论家们赞不绝口因素之一。JR
每日推荐 《吸血鬼莱斯特》(The Vampire Lestat) BBC Two, 晚上 9点 一次不负不死之名的蜕变。这部恐怖惊悚剧（改编自 Anne Rice 的《吸血鬼编年史》系列小说）将剧名从《吸血鬼访谈》(Interview With the Vampire) 更改，其第三季风格极其夸张，将由 Sam Reid（《新闻播报员》(The Newsreader)）饰演的主角转世为一名像 Michael Hutchence 或 Iggy Pop 那样的摇滚明星。莱斯特潜伏在一个假装成吸血鬼的乐队中，直到他吸食了一名服用 MDMA 和 LSD 的迷妹的血，现实才残酷地降临。性、药物之血与摇滚乐。CMc
《格莫罗：起源》(Gomorrah: The Origins) Sky Atlantic, 晚上 9点 那不勒斯，1977 年：充斥着老鼠、婴儿死亡率、迪斯科音乐和非法赌博窝点。超级花俏的黑帮成员“海妖”安杰洛登场，他成为了 16 岁的 Pietro Savastano 及其一群渴望成为混混的同伙心中的英雄。在这六集精悍且充满活力的剧集中（今晚播出两集），讲述了后来在《格莫罗》前两季中称霸的黑手党头目的起源。CMc
《冷案法医：上帝银行家的之死》(Cold Case Forensics: The Death of God’s Banker) ITV1, 晚上 9点 法医 Angela Gallop 博士回归，回顾更多笼罩在迷雾中的调查。1982 年，Roberto Calvi 被发现吊死在伦敦的黑修道院桥下。一名与黑手党、共济会和梵蒂冈都有联系，且是一名虔诚天主教徒的银行家，真的会自杀吗？十年后，Gallop 博士开始着手研究，带来了影响深远的揭露。CMc
电影 《新男孩》(The New Boy) (沃里克·桑顿，2023) BBC Two, 11.05pm
这是一部来自沃里克·桑顿的、令人萦回且充满谜团的寓言故事。这位澳大利亚导演擅长将原住民的经历搬上银幕。影片探讨了历史上原住民儿童被系统性地剥离其文化的政策，背景设定在 20 世纪 40 年代的乡村孤儿院，由艾琳修女（凯特·布兰切特饰演，其表演兼具磁性与矛盾感）经营。有一天，一名新学生被送到她这里；这孩子仅被称为“新男孩”（阿斯旺·里德 饰），他证明了自己难以被改变，而他独特的能力很快便颠覆了该机构表面上稳定的秩序。桑顿的电影通常具有更冷峻的锋芒，但在这里，魔幻现实主义起到了很好的效果，因为它扎根于残酷的国家现实。JR
作者：克雷格·麦克莱恩、凯·里贝罗 及 斯蒂芬·阿姆斯特朗
乔纳森·罗姆尼 推荐电影
今日精选 《凯蒂·普莱斯：毫无隐瞒》(Katie Price: Nothing to Hide) Sky Documentaries, 9pm
这部深刻的纪录片系列激起了无数情感，从对普莱斯无法从错误中吸取教训的沮丧，到对她真实创伤的同情。在这一集结尾部分，她的孩子朱尼尔, 21, 和普林塞斯, 19, 详细讲述了在目睹母亲在丈夫基兰·海勒不忠后精神崩溃（包括一次自杀企图）时的痛苦。朱尼尔表现出超越年龄的成熟，他心碎地说道：“那是我们生命中最艰难的时期。”KR
德里克·贾科比回忆…… 《我是克劳狄斯》(I, Claudius) BBC Four, 10pm
在播出 50 年后，这位演员回忆起这部定义时代的 BBC 改编自罗伯特·格雷夫斯小说的剧集。他并不是饰演这位罗马皇帝的第一人选。“查尔顿·赫斯顿是，”贾科比在 5 月告诉我，“而罗尼·巴克是第二选择。”这简直不可思议，尽管“那时他们想要两个克劳狄斯，年轻的和年老的”。随后是两、两、两集。CMc
《谋杀 24/7》(Murder 24/7) BBC One, 9pm
“我杀了我的前伴侣。我在床上把她捅死了。”尽管有这样一次 999 报警电话中的供词，但在《家中的杀手》中，警员们仍有工作要做。这是该系列纪录片的第四集，记录了西默西亚警方调查的所有角度。嫌疑人作案的原因以及如何策划，将影响指控和量刑。阴森且令人着迷。CMc
电影 《珍珠》(Pearl) (蒂·韦斯特，2022) Film4, 11.15pm
这是蒂·韦斯特复古恐怖三部曲的核心之作，也是三部中最好的一部。虽然它是 2022 年电影《X》的前传，但它依然是一个独立的故事，一篇地道的美国哥特式论文。珍珠是一个生活在 1918 年德克萨斯州农场的孤独年轻女性，在等待丈夫从战争中归来时，她心中珍藏着对演艺圈的幻想。随着梦想破灭，珍珠的心理状态发生了剧烈爆发。这部电影既荒凉又诙谐，展现了真正的工艺和智慧，它模仿阳光明媚的好莱坞风格，从而更好地挖掘黑暗面。非凡的米娅·高斯贡献了近期美国电影中最精湛且最令人不安的表演之一，一直持续到最后那个大胆且令人不寒而栗的镜头。JR
周五 周六
今日推荐 《贝尼多姆谋杀案》(Benidorm Is Murder) 5, 晚上 9 点 约翰·汉娜 (John Hannah) 曾在《布料之触》(A Touch of Cloth) 中恶搞过这个角色，现在他在这部阳光明媚的舒适犯罪剧中饰演一名过气侦探。丹尼斯 (Dennis) 是一名阴沉的前警察，现任店主，在活泼的服务员罗莎 (Rosa, 卡罗琳娜·贝克尔 饰) 的诱导下开始侦查。第一集讲述了一个关于致敬乐队 “Mis-Take That” 内部潜在谋杀冲突的故事。汉娜是主要看点，而丹尼斯与罗莎之间的动态关系，以及他与埃尔南德斯督察 (Inspector Hernandez, 阿里亚德娜·卡布罗尔 饰) 之间爱恨交织的关系则提供了娱乐性。KR
《家庭中的魔鬼：鲁比·弗兰克的陨落》(The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke) BBC2, 晚上 9 点 摩门教母职网红鲁比·弗兰克 (Ruby Franke) 的生活导师乔迪·希尔德布兰特 (Jodi Hildebrandt) 现在成为了关注的焦点。希尔德布兰特的教练方式带有明显的反男性底色，这导致了鲁比和凯文婚姻中的紧张关系。在声称被“撒旦纠缠”后，希尔德布兰特搬进了弗兰克一家的家中，进一步行使权力，给孩子们带来了震惊的后果。KR
《翻新救援》(Renovation Rescue) Channel 4, 晚上 8 点 这部生活方式节目在第二季进行了大调整。DIY 女王斯泰西·所罗门 (Stacey Solomon) 被沃格·威廉姆斯 (Vogue Williams) 以及《爱之岛》(Love Island) 的驻场暖通和管道工程师卢克·马博特 (Luke Mabbott) 取代。新订婚的温迪 (Wendy) 和加雷斯 (Garreth) 在一次失败的车库改造中花费了 £60,000 —— 现在，随着他们的婚礼资金被耗尽，他们需要帮助。KR
电影 《事件》(Happening) (奥德雷·迪万 Audrey Diwan, 2021) Film4, 1. 50am 法国编剧兼导演奥德雷·迪万凭借这部对 2000 年安妮·埃尔诺 (Annie Ernaux) 自传小说《事件》(L’Événement) 的强力改编，在威尼斯电影节赢得了金狮奖。法国，1963 年：安妮 (Anamaria Vartolomei 饰) 是一名学生，在 20 世纪 60 年代初期关于性别角色和性道德的危险假设中艰难前行。在发现自己怀孕后，她寻求堕胎，但面临着同伴们不支持的反应。这是一部带有残酷边缘感的社会现实主义作品，关注其时代 (era,) 的复杂性，瓦托洛梅伊的表演极其出色：《事件》在情感和视觉上都毫不留情。鉴于目前对堕胎权的猛烈冲击，这部电影对于我们自己的时代 (era.) 而言，其紧迫性不言而喻。JR
今日推荐 《格里姆斯堡》(Grimsburg) Sky One, 9. 30pm 大肚子、爱放屁、酗酒、缺席的父亲，业余爱好是制作世纪中期现代风格的玩偶屋家具 —— 这是一个我们从未见过的乔恩·汉姆 (Jon Hamm)。因为这是一个动画形象，他在这部俏皮且粗鲁的成人卡通系列剧中饰演侦探马文·弗鲁特 (Marvin Flute)。这位名声扫地的警察被召回，以解决格里姆斯堡阴森街道上的一起恐怖谋杀案（“就像一个时机完美的电梯屁一样，我离开了这座城镇”）。而且，也许能修复他的家庭。广告狂人，遇见疯狂老爸。CMc
《我们的生活：乐队中最后的矿工》(Our Lives: The Last Miner in the Band) BBC One, 7. 30pm 在达勒姆郡，伊辛顿矿区乐队 (Easington Colliery Band) 几十年来一直是社区的声音，在 1951 年矿难中丧生的全部 83 名矿工的葬礼上演奏。但随着 75 周年纪念音乐会的临近，而唯一仍在演奏的前矿工彼得·劳森 (Peter Lawson) 身体不适，他们是否能成为一声来自过去的号角之响？CMc
《普罗姆斯音乐节上的埃尔加》(Elgar at the Proms) BBC Four, 7pm 这位也许是普罗姆斯音乐节之魂的作曲家终于得到了应有的赞誉。本节目将呈现由瑞安·威格尔斯沃思 (Ryan Wigglesworth) 指挥、BBC 苏格兰交响乐团演奏的他的《第一交响曲》新演。此外还有谢库·坎内-梅森 (Sheku Kanneh-Mason) 演奏《大提琴协奏曲》的存档记录。在适当的场合展现盛大的气派。CMc
电影 《西部人》 (威廉·怀尔德, 1940) 5Action, 11.05am 在威廉·怀尔德导演的多部西部片中，这位多才多艺的导演最著名的作品是 1958 年的《大乡村》，该片具有与之相称的宏大场面。而这部电影的规模较小，整体基调更为轻快：由加里·库珀饰演一名漂流到德克萨斯州维尼格伦镇的流浪汉，并与当地的执法官兼酒馆老板发生冲突——后者是一个不可预测的独裁者，由该类型的常青树、性格强烈的角色演员沃尔特·布伦南饰演。他饰演的现实人物罗伊·比恩以“绞刑法官”而臭名昭著；在这部电影中与现实一样，他极度崇拜英国女演员莉莉·朗特里——这引发了不寻常的高潮。布伦南抢了亲切且内敛的库珀的风头，并凭借此角色赢得了他的第三座奥斯卡最佳男配角奖。JR
今日推荐 凯文·哈里斯：苏格兰现场 BBC One, 10pm 二十年前，凯文·哈里斯还是一个来自邓弗里斯的瘦长前M&S理货员，唱着不协调的电子流行乐，局促地担任自己乐队的主唱。如今，他可以说成了世界上最顶级的DJ艺人，在Spotify上拥有超过 80 million 的月收听人数，其作品集涵盖了与蕾哈娜、杜阿·利帕和艾莉·高登合作的、播放量达十亿级的热门单曲。因此，这场在国家体育场汉普登球场举行的回归演出（本周末的两场演出之一）将会燃爆。没有苏格兰，就没有派对，等等。CMc
蒙蒂·唐回忆…… 杰夫·汉密尔顿 BBC Four, 8pm 在杰夫·汉密尔顿去世三十年后，蒙蒂·唐回忆起这位因亲切风格而深受喜爱的《园丁世界》节目主持人。为了继续纪念汉密尔顿留下的遗产，将重播两集经典的《园丁世界》，并在 9.20pm 再次有机会观看《杰夫·汉密尔顿：一个人与他的花园——巴恩斯代尔的故事》。KR
希特勒的游戏：柏林 1936 彩色版 Channel 4, 8pm 独裁且自恋的领导人利用全球体育盛会：这并非没有先例。九十年前，元首利用首届电视转播的奥运会作为宣传，以掩盖其真实意图。获得三枚金牌的美国黑人运动员杰西·欧文斯证明了雅利安人至上论是个显而易见的谎言。CMc
电影 《火星救援》 (里德利·斯科特, 2015) Film4, 6.15pm 公平地说，马特·达蒙在《奥德赛》中在海浪中苦苦挣扎已经很艰难了，但在这部改编自安迪·威尔小说的科幻生存剧中，他才真正地陷入了孤立无援的境地。本片由德鲁·古达德编剧（他同时也编写了今年改编自威尔小说的《挽救计划》），它为太空危机提供了一个令人耳目一新的务实视角。故事讲述一名被困在火星上的宇航员，他不仅必须生存下去，还必须找到一种方法向地球发送生存信号。杰西卡·查斯坦、奇韦特尔·埃吉福和克里斯汀·威格扮演的NASA人员们个个咬牙坚持，而达蒙则充分发挥了“普通好男人”的所有特质，让他的英雄在面对不可思议的困境时，依然保持着不可思议的幽默感，以及一份以土豆为主的饮食。JR
本周精选
流媒体世界迎来了“蝙蝠侠周”，也许是为了向克里斯托弗·诺兰致敬——他将暗夜骑士塑造为非神非圣，仅是一个凡人。最初的《蝙蝠侠》漫画带有黑色电影风格且充满暴力。关于蝙蝠侠不杀人的设定出现得要晚得多。《蝙蝠侠：披风十字军》（Batman: Caped Crusader，第二季，Prime Video，周五）在某种程度上回归了最初那种阴暗侦探的视觉构思。这部动画剧集包含了粗俗语言、扭曲的罪行和激烈的暴力。角色们经常被枪击、刺杀、投毒，并通过神秘仪式被转化为灵魂。它尝试将蝙蝠侠塑造为一名被警察追捕的私刑者。但它仍然在循环使用那些熟悉的“每周一反派”阵容。第二季显示出潜力——在蝙蝠侠摧毁鲁珀特·索恩（Rupert Thorne）的犯罪帝国之初，黑帮头目的反派行径比卡通面具要多。对于《瑞克和莫蒂》（Rick and Morty）的粉丝来说，过去几年很艰难，创作者贾斯汀·罗兰（Justin Roiland）面临的家庭暴力和非法拘禁指控虽然被撤销，但随后又面临进一步的性侵犯指控。由罗兰配音的愤世嫉俗的疯狂科学家瑞克·桑切斯（Rick Sanchez）的古怪行为已经失去了吸引力。幸运的是，《柯蒂斯总统》（President Curtis，HBO Max，明天）——既非罗兰创作也非由其配音——有了自己的衍生剧。在《瑞克和莫蒂》中，他被描述为一个认为自己是蝙蝠侠的政治家（你懂我们在说什么吧？），一个忙于用木桩钉死愤怒的吸血鬼而无暇处理政治日常工作的美国总统，这看起来很有前景。不断告诉自己这只是部动画片。它具有《瑞克和莫替》的能量，虽不是巨大的飞跃，但有成长潜力。美国 ABC 电视台自 1978 年起一直以 20/20 品牌运营纪录片。在《20/20：英国最臭名昭著的犯罪调查》（20/20: Britain’s Most Notorious Crime Investigations，Disney+，周四）中，它来到了这里，替我们调查我们的罪行——首先是本·尼德姆（Ben Needham）案，这名幼儿 1991 年 7 月在希腊科斯岛失踪；然后转向已经破获的乔安娜·叶茨（Joanna Yeates）谋杀案；接着是本·菲尔德（Ben Field）谋杀案（2023 年被拍成一部令人心惊胆战的蒂莫西·斯波尔主演剧集）以及……好吧，你懂的。这不是《蝙蝠侠》，也不是《全景》（Panorama），它仅仅是真实犯罪类节目。不知这类节目是否能真正流行起来…… SA
想要更阴暗一点吗？《蝙蝠侠：披风十字军》 Prime 授权
6.0 早餐 (T) 9.0 新闻 (T) 10.0 祈祷与反思 (T) (R) 10.30 朝圣之旅： 北威尔士之路 (T) (R) 11.30 不劳而获 (T) (R) 12.15 淘货猎手 (T) (R) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.15 赞美之歌 (T) 1.55 生命线 (T) 2.05 择偶游戏 (T) (R) 3.05 FFFFDolittle (斯蒂芬·加根, 2020) (T) 4.35 房屋大改造 (T) (R) 5.35 新闻 (T) 5.50 地区新闻 (T) 天气 6.0 名流乡间逃离 (T) (R) 7.0 乡村生活 (T)
8.0 古董路演 (T) (R) 菲奥娜·布鲁斯在利物浦的 塞夫顿公园棕榈温室主持本节目。 9.0 天启 (The Rapture) (T) 新 剧集。由露丝·梅德利主演的 心理惊悚片。一名心理学家被 指派治疗一名宗教领袖的女儿。
10.0 新闻 (T) 10.25 地区新闻 (T) 天气 10.30 FFFFI Am Legend (2007) (T) 威尔·史密斯主演的科幻片。 12.0 你认为你是谁？ (T) (R) 1.0 本周天气 (T) 1.05 新闻 (T)
6.0 早餐 (T) 9.30 动物 公园 (T) (R) 10.15 追踪、 搜寻、拿回我的车 (T) (R) 10.45 专家证人 (T) (R) 11.15 房屋拍卖 (T) (R) 12.15 寻宝猎手 (T) 1.0 新闻 (T) 天气 1.35 地区 新闻 (T) 12.0 免费之财 (T) 2.45 逃离 城市 (T) (R) 3.45 竞拍室 (T) 4.30 巡回拍卖师 (T) (R) 5.15 无点之战 (T) (R) 6.0 新闻 (T) 天气 6.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 7.0 一个节目 (T) 7.30 东区往事 (T)
8.0 全景 (T) 时政 节目。 8.30 骗局拦截者 (T) (R) 诈骗者试图诱骗一名 女性为他们购买 一部新手机。 9.0 被攫取 (T) 剧集。Gabs 追踪到了 Bethany 绘画中 那个神秘女子的下落。
10.0 新闻 (T) 10.40 你认为你是谁？ (T) (R) 由 Toby Jones 主持。 11.40 FFFF车内女士 (Nicholas Hytner, 2015) (T) 1.20 未来一周天气预报 (T) 1.25 新闻 (T)
6.25 电视园艺 A-Z (T) (R) 7.05 俯瞰绝美花园 (T) (R) 7.50 乡村生活 (T) (R) 8.50 气象员步行精选 (T) 9.20 榉树林花园 (T) (R) 9.50 周六厨房美食精选 (T) 11.20 简易印度美食 (T) (R) 12.20 FFFF十字弓行动 (1965) (T) 2.15 板球：百球赛 (T) 特伦特火箭队 女队 v 伦敦精神队 女队。 6.0 板球：百球赛 (T) 特伦特火箭队 男队 v 伦敦精神队男队 (开始时间 6.0pm)。
9.30 阿波罗剧院现场 (T) (R) 《本周嘲讽》主持人 Dara O Briain 在伦敦标志性的 哈默史密斯阿波罗剧院主持 这场热门喜剧表演。他在介绍 单口喜剧之星 Felicity Ward 和 Mo Gilligan 的表演 之前先带动观众气氛。
10.0 FFFF出租车司机 (Martin Scorsese, 1976) (T) 剧情片。 11.50 FFFF象人 (David Lynch, 1980) (T) 1.50 手语区：你知道你的位置吗？ (T) (R) 2.20 手语区：安·卓 (T) (R)
6.30 寻宝猎手 (T) (R) 7.15 动物公园 (T) (R) 8.0 手语 区：修复店 (T) (R) 9.0 新闻 (T) 头条。 1.0 理查德·奥斯曼的游戏屋 (T) (R) 1.30 终点线 (T) (R) 2.15 闪电 (T) (R) 2.45 毛绒骑手烘焙之旅 (T) (R) 3.45 农民乡村对决 (T) (R) 4.15 太空看地球 (T) (R) 5.15 把它卖掉！ (T) (R) 6.0 理查德·奥斯曼的游戏屋 (T) (R) 游戏节目。 6.30 只有一件事 (T) (R) 7.0 全球之眼 (T) 7.30 大师之才 (T) 问答节目。
8.0 唯有连接 (T) Sinistrals 队挑战 Merseyside Eyes 队。 8.30 大学挑战赛 (T) 问答节目。牛津大学 大学学院挑战剑桥大学 圣约翰学院。 9.0 进化 (T) 该系列纪录片 的这一集讲述了 蝙蝠的故事。
10.0 莫蒂默与怀特豪斯： 去钓鱼 (T) (R) 10.30 新闻之夜 (T) 天气 11.05 FFFF希望与荣耀 (T) 12.55 手语区：乡村生活 (T) (R) 1.50 贝尔热拉克 (T) (R) 2.35 手语区：生命线 (T)
6.0 James Martin’s American Adventure (T) (R) 7.0 James Martin’s Saturday Morning (T) (R) 9.25 News (T) 9.30 Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh (T) (R) 11.30 Fern Britton: Inside the Vet’s (T) 12.30 Tom Kerridge Cooks Italy (T) (R) 1.0 Love Your Garden (T) (R) 1.55 News (T) 2.10 FFFF《活与死》(Live and Let Die) (1973) (T) 4.30 The Chase Celebrity Special (T) (R) 5.30 The Chase Around the World (T) (R) 6.30 News (T) 7.0 Force of Nature (T).
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Gabby在昏厥后接受医疗检查。 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Steve得知Cassie企图诋毁Ross的计划。 9.0 The Dark (T) Monica分心救助Philly时，凶手地趁机逃脱；与此同时，Nichol向Barclay透露了Bethany的出轨之事。
10.0 News (T) Weather 10.20 Terror in the Skies: Stopping the Liquid Bomb Plot (T) 关于那次被挫败的2006年恐怖袭击。 11.30 The Assembly (T) (R) 问答赛。 12.30 Shop on TV 购物特惠。
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.30 News (T) Weather 1.55 Local News (T) Weather 2.0 Dickinson’s Real Deal (T) (R) 3.0 Deal or No Deal (T) 游戏节目。(R) 4.0 Tipping Point (T) (R) 问答节目。 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) 问答节目，由Bradley Walsh主持。 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) Weather 7.30 Fletchers’ Family Farm (T) Marnie前往市场为她的羊群挑选一只雅各羊，而Kelvin则专注于那些能赚钱的品种。
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Kev渴望留下好印象。 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Jodie的出人意料的到来掩盖了Harper的欢迎回家派对。 9.0 The Dark (T) 凶手的身份被揭晓。这部由Laura Donnelly主演的犯罪剧集之完结篇。
10.0 News (T) Weather 10.45 TikTok: Murder Gone Viral (T) (R) 该系列之完结篇。 11.40 Love & Death (T) (R) 12.40 Shop on TV 3.0 The Staircase (T) (R) 4.05 Unwind with ITV (T)
6.20 皇后之王 (The King of Queens) (T) (R) 7.10 大家都爱雷蒙德 (Everybody Loves Raymond) (T) (R) 8.30 辛普森一家 (The Simpsons) (T) (R) 10.0 周日早午餐 (Sunday Brunch) (T) 1.0 杰米烹饪地中海美食 (Jamie Cooks the Mediterranean) (T) (R) 2.05 狗狗之家 (The Dog House) (T) (R) 2.50 乔治·克拉克的奇妙空间 (George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces) (T) (R) 3.55 我们的邻居农场：阿曼达、克莱夫和孩子们 (Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive and Kids) (T) (R) 5.0 司·金带你游览英国最受欢迎的火车站 (Britain’s Favourite Railway Stations with Si King) (T) (R) 6.0 新闻 (News) (T) 头条新闻。 6.30 一级方程式匈牙利大奖赛集锦 (Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix Highlights) (T) 第 11 轮赛事精彩回顾。
9.0 钢琴 (The Piano) (T) 克劳迪亚·温克尔曼 (Claudia Winkleman) 和米卡 (Mika) 到达约克车站，国际知名爵士钢琴家 Hiromi 也加入了他们的行列。在公共钢琴前演奏的人中，包括英国最年长的酒吧老板，他让整个车站的人都唱了起来。
10.0 FFFF《被原谅者》(The Forgiven) (约翰·迈克尔·麦克多纳 John Michael McDonagh, 2021) 12.15 FFFF《陪伴我的长大》(Stand By Me) (1986) (T) 1.45 FFFF《基督之躯》(Corpus Christi) (扬·科马萨 Jan Komasa, 2019) 3.40 辛普森一家 (The Simpsons) (T) (R) 4.50 狗狗之家 (The Dog House) (T) (R)
6.25 干杯 (Cheers) (T) (R) 7.45 大家都爱雷蒙德 (Everybody Loves Raymond) (T) (R) 9.10 弗雷泽 (Frasier) (T) (R) 11.10 厨房噩梦-美国版 (Kitchen Nightmares USA) (T) (R) 12.05 新闻 (T) 12.10 寻找、修理、出售 (Find It, Fix It, Flog It) (T) (R) 1.10 豪宅赠送 (The Great House Giveaway) (T) (R) 2.10 倒计时 (Countdown) (T) 斯嘉丽·莫法特 (Scarlett Moffatt) 在词典角。 3.0 阳光下的居所 (A Place in the Sun) (T) (R) 4.0 惊险逃生 (Narrow Escapes) (T) (R) 5.0 城堡 DIY (Chateau DIY) (T) (R) 6.0 美国捡货专家 (American Pickers) (T) (R) 迈克·沃尔夫 (Mike Wolfe) 和弗兰克·弗里茨 (Frank Fritz) 发现了一辆稀有的摩托车。 7.0 新闻 (News) (T) 头条新闻。
8.0 多佛 24/7：英国最繁忙的港口 (Dover 24/7: Britain’s Busiest Port) (T) 风暴艾米 (Storm Amy) 袭击多佛，强风导致一艘邮轮偏离航道。 9.0 急诊室 24 小时 (24 Hours in A&E) (T) 在诺丁汉的皇后医疗中心，一名 23 岁的女性发生了骑行事故。
10.0 吉普赛妻子的秘密生活 (Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives) (T) 真相秀系列。 11.05 999：前线 (999: On the Front Line) (T) (R) 纪录片系列。 12.05 名人性爱录像带之秘 (Secrets of the Celebrity Sex Tapes) (T) 12.55 障碍赛马杀人案 (The Showjumper Murder) (T)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.0 5 频道娱乐新闻 (Entertainment News on 5) (T) 9.10 FFFF《海绵宝宝电影公司：海绵出水》(The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water) (2015) (T) 11.0 2026 联邦运动会 (Commonwealth Games 2026) (T) (R) 12.0 快乐露营者：大篷车公园 (Happy Campers: The Caravan Park) (T) (R) 1.0 与苏珊·卡曼同游 (Cruising with Susan Calman) (T) (R) 3.0 与尼克·诺尔斯进入死亡谷 (Into Death Valley with Nick Knowles) (T) (R) 4.0 与尼克·诺尔斯进入死亡谷 (Into Death Valley with Nick Knowles) (T) (R) 5.0 与迈克尔·波蒂略同游里斯本 (Lisbon with Michael Portillo) (T) (R) 6.25 新闻 (News) (T) 6.30 当海边假期变得糟糕透顶 (When Beach Holidays Go Horribly Wrong) (T) (R)
8.0 狗狗行为（极）糟糕 (Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly) (T) (R) 格雷厄姆·霍尔 (Graeme Hall) 接触了一只潜在的未来学校治疗犬。 9.0 2026 年环法自行车赛 (Tour de France 2026) (T) 丽贝卡·查尔顿 (Rebecca Charlton) 为您带来大环赛最后一赛段的所有最新动态，这是一条从图瓦里 (Thoiry) 到巴黎的 133 公里路线。
10.0 2026 联邦运动会 (Commonwealth Games 2026) (T) 集锦。 11.05 鲍里斯·约翰逊：进入乌克兰杀戮区 (Boris Johnson: Into Ukraine’s Kill Zone) (T) (R) 12.25 警政 (Cops) (T) (R) 12.55 娱乐新闻 (Entertainment News) (T) 1.0 邮轮电视 (Cruise TV)(T) (R)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 杰里米·Vine (Jeremy Vine) (T) 11.30 斯通与亚历克西斯 (Storm & Alexis) (T) 12.45 新闻 (News) (T) 12.50 马特·奥尔赖特 (Matt Allwright) (T) 2.20 FFFF《她不是你的女儿》(She Is Not Your Daughter) (杰夫·黑尔 Jeff Hare, 2022) (T) 由艾丽西亚·利·威利斯 (Alicia Leigh Willis) 主演的惊悚片。 4.0 城堡 (Castle) (T) (R) 4.55 热爱自然 (Love Nature) (T) (R) 5.0 新闻 (News) (T) 6.0 泽西岛与根西岛 (Jersey and Guernsey) (T) (R) 系列最后一集。 6.55 新闻 (T) 7.0 高速公路警探：抓捕英国超速者 (Motorway Cops: Catching Britain’s Speeders) (T) (R) 警察比利·斯特德 (Billy Stead) 和内森·索尔默 (Nathan Saltmer) 在追踪一辆可能的克隆宝马车。 7.55 新闻 (News) (T)
8.0 街道警探：抓捕暴徒 (Street Cops: Catching the Yobs) (T) 新系列。 跟随警方应对一名同事发出的紧急求救电话。 9.0 乌鸦女孩 (The Crow Girl) (T) 侦探系列。一具埋在林地里的尸体引导珍妮特 (Jeanette) 走进了功能失调的伯克曼 (Burkeman) 家庭。
10.05 2026 联邦运动会 (Commonwealth Games 2026) (T) 集锦。 11.05 警察：夜班 999 (Police: Night Shift 999) (R) 12.05 交通警察 (Traffic Cops) (T) (R) 1.0 邮轮电视 (Cruise TV) (T) (R) 2.0 谋杀现场：事故室 (Murder Scene: The Incident Room) (T) (R) 纪录片。
大自然的威力 (Force of Nature)，ITV1，7pm 探讨在气候紧急情况加剧时，动物为了生存而进行的斗争
7.0 客轮的黄金时代 (T) Paul Atterbury 回顾 远洋客轮的鼎盛时期，在 揭示这些巨轮如何捕捉 公众想象力的过程中， 展现了一个关于设计、 政治与悲剧的故事。
8.0 约翰·威尔逊在逍遥夏日音乐节 (Proms) (T) 由 Katie Derham 主持， 伦敦交响乐团在艺术总监 Wilson 的指挥下，演出 一系列充满色彩化管弦 配器的节目。音乐会以 威尔第的《命运之力》 序曲开场。
10.0 《不再是我》(Not I) (T) 由 Billie Whitelaw 出演。 10.15 《演艺人员》(The Entertainer) (T) 12.15 莱文访谈录： 约翰·奥斯本 (T) 12.45 寻找萨缪尔：Adrian Dunbar 讲述萨缪尔·贝克特 (T) 纪录片。
街头警察：抓捕小混混，5, 8pm 北安普顿郡的警员们继续 开展打击犯罪行动。
7.0 大西洋：地球上最狂野的 海洋 (T) 支撑大西洋 生命力的自然力量，从 南大西洋巨大的企鹅 栖息地，到深海中发现的 奇异生物。
8.0 古希腊宝藏 (T) 西方 文明对希腊艺术的倾慕。 本系列最后一集。 9.0 埃及失落之城 (T) Dallas Campbell 和 Liz Bonnin 与 Sarah Parcak 博士 一同前往埃及，探索 掩埋在沙尘之下的奇迹。
10.30 成为弗里达·卡罗 (T) 11.30 蒙娜丽莎的秘密生活 (T) 12.30 大西洋：地球上最狂野的 海洋 (T) 1.30 古希腊宝藏 (T) 纪录片。
6.0 早餐节目 (T) 9.30 动物 公园 (T) (R) 10.15 追踪、 搜寻，找回我的车 (T) (R) 10.45 专家证人 (T) (R) 11.15 锤下之宅 (T) 12.15 寻宝猎手 (T) (R) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.35 地区 新闻 (T) 1.45 新闻 (T) 2.0 不劳而获 (T) 2.45 逃往乡村 (T) (R) 3.45 拍卖室 (T) (R) 4.30 旅行 拍卖师 (T) (R) 5.15 毫无意义 (T) (R) 6.0 新闻 (T) 6.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 7.0 综合节目 (The One Show) (T) 7.30 东区故事 (EastEnders) (T)
6.0 早餐节目 (T) 9.30 动物 公园 (T) (R) 10.15 追踪、 搜寻，找回我的车 (T) (R) 10.45 专家证人 (T) (R) 11.15 锤下之宅 (T) (R) 12.15 寻宝猎手 (T) (R) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.35 地区 新闻 (T) 1.45 新闻 (T) 2.0 不劳而获 (T) 2.45 逃往乡村 (T) (R) 3.45 拍卖室 (T) 4.30 旅行 拍卖师 (T) (R) 5.15 毫无意义 (T) (R) 6.0 新闻 (T) 6.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 7.0 综合节目 (The One Show) (T) 7.30 东区故事 (EastEnders) (T)
8.0 英国缝纫大赛 (T) 参赛者 将 T 恤回收利用，制作 具有环保理念的服装。 9.0 24/7 谋杀案 (T) 五名男子 如何因谋杀 23 岁的 Aurman Singh 而被定罪， 死者是一名在什鲁斯伯里 被杀的 DPD 司机。
10.0 新闻 (T) 10.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 10.40 FFFF《光芒之舞》(Blinded by the Light) (Gurinder Chadha, 2019) (T) 成长题材剧。 12.30 下周天气预报 (T) 12.35 新闻 (T)
10.0 新闻 (T) 10.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 10.40 FFFF《天空之眼》(Eye in the Sky) (Gavin Hood, 2015) (T) 惊悚片。 12.15 《命中注定》名人特辑 (T) (R) 1.0 每周天气 (T) 1.05 新闻 (T)
8.0 修复铺 (T) (R) 专家们修复 一件曾属于民谣音乐家 Vin Garbutt 的曼德拉琴、 两把椅子、一顶飞行员帽 以及一台复古霓虹弹珠机。 9.0 24/7 谋杀案 (T) 关于 Cheryl McKenna 在 伍斯特郡被致命刺杀的 调查。
6.30 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 7.15 Animal Park (T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone: The Great British Sewing Bee (T) (R) 9.0 新闻 (T) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth from Space (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Rick Stein’s Food Stories (T) (R)
8.0 Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby (T) (R) 一座位于伊比萨岛的豪华酒店。 9.0 The Vampire Lestat: Interview with the Vampire (T) 新剧集。莱斯塔特讲述了导致一场残酷酒店冲突的经过。 9.45 Live at the Apollo (T) (R)
10.30 Newsnight (T) 天气 11.05 FFFFThe New Boy (Warwick Thornton, 2023) 12.35 Sign Zone: Natalie Cassidy: Caring Together (T) (R) 1.05 Bergerac (T) (R) 1.55 Do You Know Your Place? (T) (R)
Jamali Maddix 主持。
6.30 Money for Nothing (T) (R) 7.15 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone: Great Railway Journeys (T) (R) 9.0 新闻 (T) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth from Space (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Celeb Antiques Road Trip (T) (R)
8.0 Saving Lives at Sea (T) (R) Newhaven 救援队尝试在一些岩石附近营救一名陷入困境的游艇员。 9.0 The Gunpowder Plot: Lucy Worsley Investigates (T) (R) 历史学家调查炸毁议会大厦的阴谋。
10.0 Inside No 9 (T) (R) 一名新教师来到学校。 10.30 Newsnight (T) 天气 11.0 Uncanny (T) (R) 12.0 The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke (T) (R) 12.55 Sign Zone (T) (R)
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 新闻 (T) 天气 1.20 Local News (T) 天气 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) 赛事首日报道，包括 Goodwood Cup。 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) 竞答节目，由 Bradley Walsh 主持。 6.0 Local News (T) 天气 6.30 新闻 (T) 7.30 Inside the Langham: Britain’s First Grand Hotel (T) 婚礼策划师 Meri 全力以赴。
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 新闻 (T) 天气 1.20 Local News (T) 天气 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) 赛事次日报道，包括 Sussex Stakes。 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Ellen, Ben, Dan 和 Ange 竞争。 6.0 Local News (T) 天气 6.30 新闻 (T) 天气 7.30 Deal or No Deal: Banker’s Best Battles (T) Claire 和 Leon 与银行家的对峙时刻。
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Billy 和 Dawn 开始建立联系。 8.30 Coronation Street (T) David 和 Shona 就首饰盒内的物品与 Jodie 对质。 9.0 Cold Case Forensics: The Death of God’s Banker (T) 新剧集。探讨 Roberto Calvi 的死因。
10.0 新闻 (T) 天气 10.30 Local News (T) 天气 10.45 FFFFBad Boys (Michael Bay, 1995) (T) 惊悚片。 1.0 Shop 3.0 The Staircase (T) (R) 4.05 Unwind (T) 5.10 Dickinson’s Real Deal (R)
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Joe 通过发起一场临时午餐让每个人感到不安。 8.30 Coronation Street (T) 一场庆祝 Ross 生日的家庭聚会证明让 Cassie 难以承受。 9.0 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (T) (R) 高奖金竞答，由 Jeremy Clarkson 主持。
10.0 新闻 (T) Local News 10.45 FFFFLive and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973) (T) 1.05 Shop 3.0 Love & Death (T) (R) 4.0 Inside the Langham (T) (R) 4.25 Unwind 5.35 Tom Kerridge Cooks Italy
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) Nick 和 Nicole 在多尔多涅省 的进展缓慢。 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe 和 Frank Fritz 为了一笔交易冒着 巨大的风险。 7.0 News (T)
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) Flora, Faraz 及其家人在 Whilton Marina 选购船只。 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe 和 Frank Fritz 发现了一辆经典 33 Ford。 7.0 News (T)
8.0 Hotel Chocolat Unwrapped (T) 新剧集。揭秘这家巧克力 制造商尝试扩张的幕后故事。 9.0 The Undeclared War (T) 惊悚剧，由 Adrian Lester 主演。Barbara 在 前男友 Nicky Chan 重新 出现在伦敦后与他相遇。
10.0 Gogglebox (T) (R) 11.05 First Dates (T) (R) 12.05 Naked Attraction (T) (R) 1.05 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 1.55 The Piano (T) (R) 2.50 FFFFAmerican Refugee (Ali LeRoi, 2021)
8.0 Extraordinary Extensions (T) 新剧集。一对夫妇将 他们位于伦敦西区的家 改造为一座受《大盖茨比》 启发的宫殿。 9.0 The Undeclared War (T) Danny 对 Barbara 的反常 行为感到担心。中国恶意软件 继续造成混乱。
10.0 24 Hours in A&E (T) (R) 12.05 Murder Case: The Digital Detectives (T) (R) 1.0 Dover 24/7 (T) (R) 1.55 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 2.50 Britain’s Most Expensive Houses (T) (R)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFMystery of the Dead Nanny (Brittany Underwood, 2022) (T) 由 Nicolette Langley 主演的惊悚剧。 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) 游览这座受欢迎的岛屿。 6.55 News (T) 7.0 The Yorkshire Vet: At Home with the Greens (T) (R) 英国 最古老的两位在职农民。 7.55 News (T)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFMemories of Murder (Damian Romay, 2023) (T) 由 Andrea Bogart 主演的惊悚剧。 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) 镜头探索马耳他的 橄榄林以及该国的一座 庄园。 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Car Pound Cops (T) (R) 一名四轮摩托车骑手被 拦截。 7.55 News (T)
8.0 Inside Longleat (T) 在历史悠久的 秘密花园中，团队试图 搬运一座青铜雕塑。 9.0 The Crow Girl (T) 随着 Jeanette 和 Sophia 深入挖掘 Victoria 的过去， 她们的关系变得更加亲密， Amar 分享了重要信息。
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) 精彩回顾。 11.05 Accused: Guilty or Innocent? (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV (T) 2.0 Building the Impossible (T) (R) 2.50 Malta: Jewel of the Med (R)
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) 精彩回顾。 11.05 Cause of Death (T) (R) 12.05 A&E After Dark (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV (T) (R) 2.0 Catch Me If You Can (T) (R) 2.50 The Jewel of the Med (R)
8.0 Casualty 24/7: Every Second Counts (T) 急救人员一周内第二次 将 71 岁的 Enid 紧急送院。 9.0 The Crow Girl (T) 在 Jeanette 处理 Lou 行为 造成的后果时，Victoria 寻求复仇。本剧集最后一集。
Gomorrah: The Origins, Sky Atlantic, 晚上 9 点 Francesco Pellegrino 主演这部犯罪剧前传
7.0 英国铁路之旅 (Great British Railway Journeys) (T) 迈克尔·波蒂略 (Michael Portillo) 的旅程将带他跨越泰河前往邓迪。 7.30 与莫妮卡·加莱蒂漫步 (Walking with Monica Galetti) (T) 这位厨师将领略北约克郡沼泽地的壮丽风光。
7.0 英国铁路之旅 (Great British Railway Journeys) (T) 迈克尔·波蒂略 (Michael Portillo) 从利物浦前往阿托克塞特。 7.30 与吉姆·莫尔漫步 (Walking with Jim Moir) (T) 这位喜剧演员在步行前往邓内内斯时探索肯特郡海岸。
8.0 体面一家 (Keeping Up Appearances) (T) 情景喜剧。爸爸想加入外籍兵团。 8.30 坟墓的一只脚 (One Foot in the Grave) (T) 维克多经历了一个失眠之夜。源自 1995 年。 9.0 母狼：英国早期的女王们 (She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens) (T) 讲述法国的伊莎贝拉和安茹的玛格丽特的生活。
10.0 城堡：英国的防御史 (Castles: Britain’s Fortified History) (T) 纪录片。 11.0 美国应该担任世界警察吗？ (Should America Police the World?) (T) 1.0 母狼：英国早期的女王们 (She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens) (T) 2.0 城堡：英国的防御史 (Castles: Britain’s Fortified History) (T)
德里克·雅各比爵士 (Sir Derek Jacobi) 回忆录…… 《我是克劳狄斯》(I, Claudius) BBC Four, 晚上 10 点 这位资深演员回顾 1970 年代的剧集
8.0 古罗马珍宝 (The Treasures of Ancient Rome) (T) 主持人阿拉斯泰尔·苏克 (Alastair Sooke) 探讨罗马人的艺术成就。 9.0 玛丽·比尔德谈卡利古拉 (Caligula with Mary Beard) (T) 这位古典学者试图揭开围绕这位皇帝的一些神话。
10.0 德里克·雅各比爵士 (Sir Derek Jacobi) 回忆录……《我是克劳狄斯》 10.15 《我是克劳狄斯》(I, Claudius) (T) 剧集。 12.45 古罗马珍宝 (The Treasures of Ancient Rome) (T) 1.45 玛丽·比尔德谈卡利古拉 (Caligula with Mary Beard) (T) 2.45 英国铁路之旅 (Great British Railway Journeys) (T)
6.0 早餐节目 (Breakfast) (T) 9.30 动物公园 (Animal Park) (T) (R) 10.15 追踪、锁定，找回我的车 (Trace, Track, Get My Car Back) (T) (R) 10.45 专家证人 (Expert Witness) (T) (R) 11.15 锤下之屋 (Homes Under the Hammer) (T) 12.15 淘货猎人 (Bargain Hunt) (T) (R) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.35 地区新闻 (T) 1.45 新闻 (T) 2.0 不劳而获 (Money for Nothing) (T) 2.45 逃往乡村 (Escape to the Country) (T) (R) 3.45 竞拍室 (The Bidding Room) (T) (R) 4.30 旅行拍卖师 (The Travelling Auctioneers) (T) (R) 5.15 无点之境 (Pointless) (T) (R) 6.0 新闻 (T) 6.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 7.0 综合节目 (The One Show) (T) 7.30 东区人们 (EastEnders) (T)
6.0 早餐节目 (Breakfast) (T) 9.30 动物公园 (Animal Park) (T) (R) 10.15 追踪、锁定，找回我的车 (Trace, Track, Get My Car Back) (T) (R) 10.45 专家证人 (Expert Witness) (T) (R) 11.15 锤下之屋 (Homes Under the Hammer) (T) (R) 12.15 淘货猎人 (Bargain Hunt) (T) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.35 地区新闻 (T) 2.0 理发师之谜 (The Hairdresser Mysteries) (T) 2.45 逃往乡村 (Escape to the Country) (T) (R) 3.45 竞拍室 (The Bidding Room) (T) 4.30 旅行拍卖师 (The Travelling Auctioneers) (T) (R) 5.15 无点之境 (Pointless) (T) (R) 6.0 新闻 (T) 6.30 地区新闻 (T) 7.0 综合节目 (The One Show) (T) 7.30 我们的生活：乐队中最后一名矿工 (Our Lives: The Last Miner in the Band) (T)
8.0 真伪之辨？ (Fake or Fortune?) (T) 费奥娜·布鲁斯 (Fiona Bruce) 和菲利普·莫尔德 (Philip Mould) 调查一幅被认为出自安德烈·德兰 (André Derain) 之手且曾属于一名从纳粹德国逃脱的“儿童运输”计划孩子的画作。 9.0 谁认为你是谁？ (Who Do You Think You Are?) (T) 哈丽雅特·沃尔特 (Harriet Walter) 追溯她的母系祖先。
10.0 新闻 (T) 10.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 10.40 Murder 24/7 (T) (R) 11.40 Murder 24/7 (T) (R) 12.35 艾伦·卡尔的图片大比拼 (Alan Carr’s Picture Slam) (T) (R) 1.20 本周天气 (T) 1.25 新闻 (T)
10.0 新闻 (T) 10.30 地区新闻 (T) 天气 10.40 奥斯汀 (Austin) (T) 喜剧。 11.05 奥斯汀 (Austin) (T) 本剧集最后一集。 11.35 FFFFScent of a Woman (马丁·布雷斯特，1992) (T) 2.05 天气 (T) 2.10 新闻 (T)
8.0 花岗岩港口 (Granite Harbour) (T) 琳多及其团队找回了凶器。 9.0 你会对我撒谎吗？ (Would I Lie to You?) (T) (R) 嘉宾包括凯迪娜·考克斯 (Kadeena Cox)、伊沃·格雷厄姆 (Ivo Graham)、哈丽雅特·肯斯利 (Harriet Kemsley) 和埃迪·马森 (Eddie Marsan)。 9.30 安·卓德 (Ann Droid) (T) 琳达强行带着苏去一个可疑的游乐园，在海边撒掉骨灰。
6.30 Money for Nothing (T) (R) 7.15 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone: Gardeners’ World (T) (R) 9.0 News (T) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth from Space (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Escape to the Country (T) (R)
8.0 Digging for Britain (T) (R) Alice Roberts joins archaeologists to explore Central England’s past. 9.0 The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke (T) Ruby starts to banish members of the family. 9.50 The North York Moors: A Wild Year (T) Documentary.
10.0 The Smuggling Business: Undercover (T) 10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather 11.05 Golf: Women’s Open Highlights 2026 (T) 12.05 FFFFThe Blackening (Tim Story, 2023) (T)
7.15 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 8.0 Marcus Wareing Simply Provence (T) (R) 9.0 News (T) 12.50 Lifeline (T) (R) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Hippos: Africa’s River Giants (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Iolo’s Anglesey (T) (R) 7.30 Beechgrove Garden (T)
8.0 Gardeners’ World (T) Monty Don refreshes his borders with perennials. 9.0 Bergerac (T) A letter corroborates Bergerac’s hunch that they have the wrong people in custody. 9.45 QI XL (T) (R) With Maisie Adam, Susan Calman and Josh Widdicombe.
10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather 11.0 FFFFChuck Chuck Baby (Janis Pugh, 2024) (T) 12.40 Golf: Women’s Open Highlights 2026 (T) 1.40 Sign Zone: Amityville: An Origin Story (T) (R)
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 News (T) Weather 1.20 Local News (T) Weather 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) Coverage of day three of the meeting, including the Nassau Stakes. 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Jake, Laura, Leila and Frank take part. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) The latest headlines. Weather 7.30 Tom Kerridge Cooks Italy (T) Tom forages for truffles in Umbria.
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 News (T) Weather 1.20 Local News (T) Weather 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) Coverage of day four, including the Qatar King George Stakes. 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Joe, Becky, Nathan and Sophie take part. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) Weather 7.30 Abbey Clancy: Celebrity Homes (T) Homes belonging to Sheree Murphy and Caprice.
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Claudette does a deal and there is danger at the depot. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Cassie revisits her greatest hits with Ross as a target. 9.0 The Chase Around the World (T) Quiz show. The teams land in Lisbon to take on the Chasers.
10.0 News (T) Weather 10.30 Local News (T) Weather 10.45 FFFFBad Boys II (Michael Bay, 2003) (T) Thriller. 1.25 Shop on TV 3.0 The Summit (T) (R) Reality. 4.0 Unwind with ITV (T)
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Claudette makes an admission. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Cassie runs out of chances with Steve and Tyrone. 9.0 The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (T) As Raffaele’s trial extends into years, his heartbreaking history unfolds.
10.05 The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (T) 11.05 News (T) Weather 11.40 Local News (T) Weather 11.55 Inside the Langham: Britain’s First Grand Hotel (T) (R) Documentary.
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) Erin and JB struggle to get the windows into their turret. 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Robbie Wolfe makes a huge offer on an iconic Ford. 7.0 News (T) Headlines.
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) Nicole and Nick struggle to install a kitchen before the arrival of their first baby. 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe finds a rare Ford. 7.0 News (T) Headlines.
8.0 Renovation Rescue (T) 新剧集。Vogue Williams 和 Luke Mabbott 为房屋 所有者提供实用的 DIY 和设计建议。 9.0 Murder Case: The Digital Detectives (T) 讲述手机 取证分析如何引导警探 找到 Samantha Holden 的 凶手。
10.0 Don’t Date Brandon (T) 新剧集。 11.0 Don’t Date Brandon (T) 12.05 Don’t Date Brandon (T) 1.05 Crime Scene Cleaners (T) (R) 1.55 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R)
8.0 Surgery Secrets of the Super Rich (T) Joyce 通过 内窥镜面部提升手术 庆祝她的 60 岁生日。 9.0 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown (T) 新剧集。 由 Jimmy Carr 主持，Jon Richardson 和 Harriet Kemsley 对阵 Rob Beckett 和 Richard Ayoade。
10.0 Big Fat Quiz: Best Bits (T) 11.05 Sarah Millican: Thoroughly Modern Millican Live (T) (R) 12.10 Ramy (T) 12.45 Ramy (T) 1.20 FFFFFresh (Mimi Cave, 2022) (T) 3.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFStolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard (Michelle Ouellet, 2023) (T) 基于事实的剧集，由 Anna Hopkins 和 Emily Osment 主演。 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) 马耳他经典大奖赛。 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Around the World in First Class with Josie Gibson (T) (R) 7.55 News (T) 更新。
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFConceived in Lies (Soran Mardookhi, 2024) (T) 惊悚片。 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) 本系列最后一集。 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Holiday Scams: Don’t Get Caught Out (T) (R) Alexis Conran 及其团队应对针对度假 人士的诈骗者。 7.55 News (T) 最新进展。
8.0 Cornwall: A Year by the Sea (T) 在圣艾夫斯 (St Ives)，艺术家 Iona 主持一场风景画 大师班；在马拉齐翁 (Marazion)， 参赛者参加一场艰苦的 铁人三项赛。 9.0 Benidorm Is Murder (T) 新剧集。由 John Hannah 和 Carolina Bécquer 主演的 犯罪剧。
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) 精彩回顾。 11.05 Fare Dodgers: At War with the Law (T) (R) 实录。 12.05 Street Cops: Catching the Yobs (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV with LoveitBookit (T) (R)
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) 精彩回顾。 11.05 Piers Morgan: Uncensored (T) 访谈与辩论。 1.0 Cruise TV (T) (R) 2.0 Shoplifters: Catch Me If You Can (T) (R) 纪录片。
8.0 Michael Palin in Venezuela (T) (R) Michael 进入 祖利亚州 (Zulia state)， 开始他冒险之旅的 最后一程。本系列最后一集。 9.0 Britain’s Killer Wave of 1607 (T) (R) 深入回顾 1607 年造成混乱的布里斯托 海峡 (Bristol Channel) 洪水。
Renovation Rescue, Channel 4, 8pm Vogue Williams 与 Luke Mabbott 共同帮助陷入困境的 房屋所有者
7.0 英国铁路之旅 (T) Michael Portillo 参观劳斯莱斯。 7.30 Walking with Steph McGovern (T) 这位广播员在约克郡山谷度过了一天，从 Foxup 到 Arncliffe。
8.0 Talking Pictures: 七十年代传奇 第二部分 Celia Imrie 回顾 1970 年代的好莱坞。(T) 9.0 FFFF出租车司机 (马丁·斯科塞斯, 1976) (T) 一名出租车司机变得日益不安。马丁·斯科塞斯执导，罗伯特·德尼罗主演的剧情片。
10.50 FFFF柏林之葬 (盖伊·汉密尔顿, 1966) (T) 惊悚片。 12.30 Talking Pictures: 七十年代传奇 第二部分 (T) 1.30 成为弗里达·卡罗 (T) 纪录片。 2.30 英国铁路之旅 (T)
我们的生活：乐队中最后的矿工, BBC One, 7.30pm 包括 Peter Lawson 在内的贡献者们讨论了达勒姆郡的 Easington 矿山乐队。
7.0 逍遥音乐会上的埃尔加 (T) Petroc Trelawny 在 2026 年逍遥音乐会上主持，Ryan Wigglesworth 指挥 BBC 苏格兰交响乐团，在舞台上演奏埃尔加的第一交响曲。
8.25 TOTP: 2000 (T) Gail Porter 主持这一经典集。 8.55 TOTP: 2000 (T) Jamie Theakston 主持流行音乐榜单节目。 9.25 TOTP: 1977 (T) 嘉宾包括 Dana, Thin Lizzy, Bob Marley and the Wailers 等。 9.55 TOTP: 1983 (T) 该节目 7 月 28 日的一期。
10.35 Louis Armstrong 音乐会 (T) 现场活动。 11.30 Louis Armstrong – 本周精彩 (T) 表演。 12.35 用自己的语言讲述爵士传奇 (T) 1.35 TOTP: 2000 (T) 2.05 TOTP: 2000 (T)
BBC Four BBC One BBC Two ITV1 Channel 4
6.0 早餐 (T) 10.0 周六厨房 (T) 11.30 Anna Haugh 的爱尔兰美食之旅 (T) (R) 12.0 房屋拍卖 (T) (R) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.15 淘货猎人 (T) (R) 2.0 免费之财 (T) (R) 3.0 逃离城市 (T) (R) 3.55 FFFF博物馆之夜：史密森尼之战 (肖恩·列维, 2009) (T) 5.35 新闻 (T) 5.45 地区新闻 (T) 5.55 热门名单名人特辑 (T) 6.40 Alan Carr 的图片大对决 (T) 7.25 Michael McIntyre 的大秀 (T) (R)
8.25 Pointless Celebrities (T) (R) 参赛者包括 James Jordan, Gemma Collins 和 Brian McFadden。 9.10 你好吗？我是 Alan (Partridge) (T) (R) Alan 探讨自然是否能治愈不安的心灵。 9.40 新闻 (T) 9.55 天气预报 (T)
10.0 Calvin Harris: 苏格兰现场 (T) 这位 DJ 在格拉斯哥的 Hampden Park 体育场进行一场 homecoming 回家演出。 12.0 未来一周天气预报 (T) 12.05 新闻 (T)
星期日 Radio 3 6.30am 早餐节目 9.0 周日早晨 11.0 2026年BBC the Proms 音乐节 12.45 新一代艺术家 1.30 音乐地图 3.0 Sofi Jeannin – 共同歌唱 4.0 爵士乐记录请求 5.0 早乐节目 6.0 合唱晚祷 7.0 2026年BBC the Proms 音乐节 9.0 2026年BBC the Proms 音乐节 10.30 夜间曲目 11.30 未分类 12.30 彻夜之曲
Radio 4 6.0am 新闻头条 6.05 心灵之声 6.35 你的农场 7.0 新闻 7.0 周日报纸 7.10 周日 7.54 Radio 4 呼吁 8.0 新闻 8.0 周日报纸 8.10 周日礼拜 8.48 见证历史 8.58 今日推文 9.0 广播大楼 10.0 荒岛唱片 11.0 弓箭手 12.15 最后的发言：以不同方式面对死亡 12.30 仅一分钟 1.0 本周世界 1.30 动荡小镇 2.0 园艺问题时间 2.45 开篇之言 3.0 戏剧：心中的麻烦 4.0 选取四本书 4.30 英国之脑 5.0 见证历史 5.10 走进教堂（主持人：Giles Fraser） 5.54 航运预报 6.0 六点新闻 6.15 每周精选 7.0 弓箭手 7.15 不可靠的叙述者 7.45 Michael Mosley 的仅一件事 8.0 反馈 8.30 最后的发言 9.0 钱袋子 9.26 Radio 4 呼吁 9.30 来自我们的通讯员 10.0 威斯敏斯特小时 11.0 我们认为自己是谁？ 11.30 更多惊喜 11.45 短篇作品 12.0 新闻与天气 12.15 健康内幕 12.45 周日钟声 12.48 航运预报 1.0 接入 BBC 世界服务 5.0 新闻摘要 5.04 最后的发言 5.34 航运预报 5.43 今日祷告 5.45 农业今日
电视节目 6.30 儿童电视 (T) (R) 8.35 新闻轮播 (T) 8.40 格蕾丝女士之谜 (T) (R) 9.05 园艺世界 (T) (R) 10.05 码头边 (埃利亚·卡赞, 1954) (T) 11.50 英国缝纫大赛 (T) (R) 12.50 海外厨师：Rachel Khoo 的马来西亚 (T) (R) 1.50 与我在圣路易相会 (文森特·米内利, 1944) (T) 3.40 真伪鉴别？ (T) (R) 4.40 进化 (T) (R) 5.40 超人 (理查德·多纳, 1978) (T) 7.55 Proms 音乐节上的波莱罗舞曲 (T)
9.10 Barbra Streisand：成为偶像 (T) (R) 回顾这位演员兼歌手如何从布鲁克林工人阶级的根源起步，渴望摆脱艰苦的童年，最终走向星途，以及她早年职业生涯的卓越成就。
10.10 一个星诞生 (弗兰克·皮尔森, 1976) (T) 由 Barbra Streisand 主演的音乐剧。 12.25 高尔夫：2026年女子公开赛亮点 (T) 1.25 手语区：你认为你是谁？ (T) (R)
星期一 Radio 3 6.30am 早餐节目 9.30 经典必听 1.0 古典现场 4.0 本周作曲家：Alice Mary Smith 5.0 调频 7.0 2026年BBC the Proms 音乐节 10.0 夜间曲目 11.30 午夜时分 12.30 彻夜之曲
Radio 4 6.0am 今日 9.0 越过红线 9.30 我们是如何走到这一步的？：没有世界秩序 10.0 女性小时 11.0 走进教堂（主持人：Giles Fraser） 11.45 表演男性的自白 12.0 新闻 12.04 你与我 1.0 世界 1.45 死兔子 2.0 弓箭手 2.15 孤独 2.45 开篇之言 3.0 佳作推荐 3.30 你对我而言已死 4.0 动荡小镇 4.30 厨房内阁 5.0 下午节目 6.0 六点新闻 6.30 仅一分钟 7.0 弓箭手 7.15 前排 8.0 简报室 8.30 BBC 内部科学 9.0 越过红线 9.30 我们是如何走到这一步的？：没有世界秩序 10.0 今日世界 10.45 荒芜暗岸 11.0 亲密关系 11.30 佳作推荐 12.0 新闻与天气 12.30 表演男性的自白 12.48 航运预报 1.0 接入 BBC 世界服务 5.0 新闻摘要 5.04 动荡小镇 5.34 航运预报 5.43 今日祷告 5.45 农业今日
BBC 逍遥音乐会 2026 10.0 之夜 曲目 11.30 《午夜时分》 12.30 《穿过黑夜》 广播 4 6.0am 《今日》 9.0 《无形之手》 9.30 《健康内幕》 10.0 《女性时间》 11.0 《截图》 11.45 《表演性男性的忏悔》 12.0 新闻 12.04 《呼叫你与你的》 1.0 《世界》 1.45 《死兔子》 2.0 《拱牛》 2.15 剧集： 《北方的朋友》 3.0 《与露西·沃斯利一起受审的女性》 3.30 《心灵之窗》 4.0 《西尔维亚·普拉斯的写作生活》 4.30 《纪录片怎么了？》 5.0 PM 6.0 《六点新闻》 6.30 《遇见戴维·塞达里斯》 7.0 《拱牛》 7.15 《前排》 8.0 《15层》 8.40 《保持联系》 9.0 纪录片：《梦想制造者》 9.30 《底线》 10.0 《今夜世界》 10.45 《荒芜之岸》 11.0 《内心荒野》 11.30 《好书推荐》 12.0 新闻与天气 12.30 《表演性男性的忏悔》 12.48 航运预报 1.0 接入 BBC 世界服务 5.0 新闻摘要 5.04 《BBC 内部科学》 5.34 航运预报 5.43 今日祷告 5.45 今日农业
男性 12.0 新闻 12.04 《你与你的》 1.0 《世界》 1.45 《死兔子》 2.0 《拱牛》 2.15 剧集：《联合王国》 3.0 《钱箱》 3.30 《月球地图》 4.0 《内疚的力量》 4.15 《媒体秀》 5.0 PM 6.0 《六点新闻》 6.30 《最佳医疗》 7.0 《拱牛》 7.15 《前排》 8.0 《反社交》 8.45 《希望咖啡馆》 9.0 《无形之手》 9.30 《健康内幕》 10.0 《今夜世界》 10.45 《荒芜之岸》 11.0 太阳·帕特尔：《永生白痴指南》 11.15 《跟随兔子》 11.30 《好书推荐》 12.0 新闻与天气 12.30 本周之书：《表演性男性的忏悔》 12.48 航运预报 1.0 接入 BBC 世界服务 5.0 新闻摘要 5.04 《侧向》 5.34 航运预报 5.43 今日祷告 5.45 今日农业
男性 12.48 航运预报 1.0 接入 BBC 世界服务 5.30 新闻摘要 5.34 航运预报 5.43 今日祷告 5.45 边缘生活
周二 广播 3 6.30am 早餐 9.30 经典必听 1.0 古典现场 4.0 本周作曲家： 爱丽丝·玛丽·史密斯 5.0 律动 7.0
6. 詹姆斯·马丁的法国冒险 (T) (R) 6.30 詹姆斯·马丁的美国冒险 (T) (R) 7.25 与艾伦·蒂奇马什共度周末 (T) (R) 9.25 新闻 (T) 9.30 詹姆斯·马丁的周六早晨 (T) (R) 12.0 普鲁·莱斯的科茨沃尔德厨房 (T) (R) 1.0 新闻 (T) 1.15 ITV 赛马：光辉古德伍德 (T) 4.30 FFFFNanny McPhee 与大爆炸 (Susanna White, 2010) (T) 6.30 新闻 (T) 6.45 地方新闻 (T) 7.0 成交或不成交：名人特辑 (T) Zoe Ball 主持。
8.0 FFFF皇家赌场 (Martin Campbell, 2006) (T) 詹姆斯·邦德获得了他的“00”身份，并被派遣去追踪 Le Chiffre，一个为恐怖分子提供资金的罪犯。由丹尼尔·克雷格主演的谍战惊悚片，这是他的首次出任 007 角色。
10.40 新闻 (T) 天气 10.55 《阶梯》 (T) 关于迈克尔过去的惊人新细节浮出水面。 12.15 电视购物 3 冷案法医：上帝银行家的之死 (T) (R)
周三 广播 3 6.30am 早餐 9.30 经典必听 1.0 古典现场 3.0 合唱晚祷 4.0 本周作曲家：爱丽丝·玛丽·史密斯 5.0 律动 7.0 BBC 逍遥音乐会 2026 10.0 之夜曲目 11.30 《午夜时分》 12.30 《穿过黑夜》 广播 4 6.0am 《今日》 9.0 《侧向》 9.30 打破循环 10.0 《女性时间》 11.0 《15层》 11.40 本周历史 11.45 本周之书： 《表演性男性的忏悔》
6.05 《欢乐在一起》 (T) (R) 7.55 《 everybody loves Raymond》 (T) (R) 9.50 《辛普森一家》 (T) (R) 11.50 《弗雷泽》 (T) (R) 1.50 《四人同床》 (T) (R) 4.20 《狗狗之家》 (T) (R) 一名患有妥瑞症的女孩需要一只特别的小狗陪伴在她身边；而七岁的 Lottie 与考卡普幼犬 Annie 则是情一见钟情。 5.25 FFFF 《迷失之城》 (Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, 2022) (T) 由桑德拉·布洛克、钱宁·塔图姆和丹尼尔·雷德克里夫主演的冒险喜剧。 7.30 新闻 (T)
8.0 希特勒的游戏： 柏林 1936 彩色版 (T) 1936 年在纳粹德国举行的奥运会彩色化影像。 9.0 独裁者：希特勒 访谈录 (T) 新 系列。包含那些见过并认识阿道夫·希特勒的人的证词。
10.0 《美国黑帮》(American Gangster) (里德利·斯科特, 2007) (T) 12.50 《拉米》(Ramy) (T) 1.25 《拉米》(Ramy) (T) 2.0 《厨房噩梦：美国篇》(Kitchen Nightmares USA) (T) (R) 2.50 《辛普森一家》(The Simpsons) (T) (R) 4.05 《来我家吃饭》(Couples Come Dine with Me) (T) (R)
周四 Radio 3 6.30am 早餐节目 9.30 经典精选 1.0 古典现场 4.0 本周作曲家：爱丽丝·玛丽·史密斯 (Alice Mary Smith) 5.0 调谐 (In Tune) 7.0 2026年 BBC 逍遥音乐会。BBC 苏格兰交响乐团演出科恩戈尔德 (Korngold)、普罗科菲耶夫 (Prokofiev) 和塔巴科娃 (Tabakova) 的作品。 10.0 夜曲 (Night Tracks) 11.30 午夜时分 (’Round Midnight) 12.30 彻夜 (Through the Night) Radio 4 6.0am 今日 (Today) 9.0 娜塔莉·海恩斯捍卫经典 (Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics) 9.30 征服世界的艺术 10.0 女性时间 (Woman’s Hour) 11.0 儿童三个阶段 11.45 本周之书：《表演性男性的忏悔》(Confessions of a Performative Male) 12.0 新闻 12.04 骗局秘辛 (Scam Secrets) 12.32 切片面包 (Sliced Bread) 1.0 世界 (The World) 1.45 死兔子 (Dead Rabbit) 2.0 拱手人们 (The Archers) 2.15 戏剧：《年潮》(Yeartides) 3.0 这自然生活 3.27 Radio 4 募捐 3.30 反馈 (Feedback) 4.0
6.0 奶昔！(Milkshake!) 9.0 5频道娱乐新闻 (T) 9.10 2026年英联邦运动会 (T) (R) 10.0 皇室宫殿秘闻 (T) (R) 11.0 皇室宫殿秘闻 (T) (R) 12.0 皇家花园秘闻 (T) (R) 1.0 皇室：无删减 (T) 2.0 约克郡：荒野之年 (T) (R) 4.0 现场：2026年英国最强壮之汉 (T) 第一日报道。 6.55 新闻 (T) 7.0 萨塞克斯：南海岸之珠 (T) 探索该郡多样的景观。
8.0 梅根·马克尔：公爵夫人的内心世界 (T) (R) 萨塞克斯公爵夫人的人物特写。 9.0 哈里与梅根：皇室伪君子？ (T) (R) 探讨针对萨塞克斯公爵夫妇伪善和双重标准的指控。
10.30 2026年英联邦运动会 (T) 精彩回顾。 11.30 丑闻：梅杰-库里事件 (T) (R) 1.0 邮轮电视 (T) (R) 2.0 全科医生：闭门之后 (T) (R) 2.50 高速公路警员 (R)
简报室 4.30 BBC 内部科学 5.0 PM 6.0 六点新闻 6.30 Icklewick FM 7.0 拱手人们 7.15 前排 (Front Row) 8.0 风险自担 (At Your Own Peril) 8.15 媒体秀 9.0 松散端 (Loose Ends) 9.45 牛疯了 10.0 今夜世界 10.45 野暗岸 (Wild Dark Shore) 11.0 激进 (Radical) 11.30 佳作阅读 (A Good Read) 12.0 新闻与天气 12.30 本周之书：《表演性男性的忏悔》 12.48 航运预报 1.0 切换至 BBC 世界服务 5.0 新闻摘要 5.04 简报室 5.34 航运预报 5.43 今日祷告 5.45 今日农业
周五 Radio 3 6.30am 早餐节目 9.30 经典精选 1.0 古典现场 4.0 本周作曲家：爱丽丝·玛丽·史密斯 (Alice Mary Smith) 5.0 调谐 7.0 古典混音带 7.30 2026年 BBC 逍遥音乐会 10.0 深夜交汇 (Late Junction) 11.30 午夜时分 12.30 彻夜 Radio 4 6.0am 今日 9.0 荒岛唱片 (Desert Island Discs) 10.0 女性时间 11.0 食品计划 (The Food Programme) 11.45 《表演性男性的忏悔》 12.0 新闻 12.04 反社会 (AntiSocial) 1.0 世界 1.45 死兔子 2.0 拱手人们 2.15 戏剧：《中央情报》(Central Intelligence) 2.45 边缘生活 (Living on the Edge) 3.0 园艺问答时间 3.45 短篇作品 4.0 最终陈词 (Last Word) 4.30 侧向 (Sideways) 5.0 PM 6.0 六点新闻 6.30 时政类 (Current-ish) 7.0 拱手人们 7.15 屏幕截图 (Screenshot) 8.0 有任何问题吗？ (Any Questions?) 8.55 本周历史回顾 9.0 娜塔莉·海恩斯捍卫经典 10.0 今夜世界 10.45 野暗岸 11.0 美国播报 (Americast) 11.30 佳作阅读 12.0 新闻与天气 12.30 《表演性男性的忏悔》
蒙蒂·多恩缅怀…… 杰夫·汉密尔顿，BBC Four, 晚上8点 向已故且深受喜爱的《园艺世界》主持人致敬
7.0 地球脉动：猴之传 (T) 一只生活在斯里兰卡废弃寺庙中的幼年冠猴的故事。面对周围的捕食者，她必须学习如何生存。 7.05 地球生命 (T) 探索爬行动物的历史。
8.0 蒙蒂·多恩缅怀…… 杰夫·汉密尔顿 (T) 8.20 园艺世界 (T) 8.50 园艺世界 (T) 杰夫·汉密尔顿和团队在 Barnsdale 建造一个温室。 9.20 杰夫·汉密尔顿：男人与他的花园——Barnsdale 故事 (T) 9.50 哨兵 (The Sentinels)
10.30 哨兵 (The Sentinels) 11.15 维持体面 (Keeping Up Appearances) 11.45 一只脚在坟墓里 (T) 12.15 闪电：危险的地球 (T) 12.45 园艺世界 (T) 1.45 杰夫·汉密尔顿：男人与他的花园 (T)
周六
Radio 3 6:30am 《早餐》 9:00 《周六早晨》 12:00 《早晨...与 Jools Holland》 1:00 《关键变革：Radio 3 古典音乐核心史》 2:00 《唱片评论》 4:00 《电影之声》 5:00 《古典生活》 6:00 《音乐星球》 7:00 《2026年BBC the Proms 音乐节》 9:45 《音乐谈话》 10:30 《新音乐节目》 12:30 《彻夜》
Radio 4 6:00am 《新闻与报纸》 6:07 《自然生活》 6:30 《今日耕种》 《本周》 7:00 《今日》 9:00 《反主流文化怎么了？》 9:30 《文档怎么了？》 10:00 《对我而言你已死去》 10:30 《内阁厨房》 11:00 《激进》 11:30 《来自我们的特派员》 12:00 《新闻》 12:04 《祝酒》 12:30 《时事近况》 1:00 《新闻》 1:10 《有任何问题吗？》 2:05 《有任何答案吗？》 2:45 《阿彻斯》 3:00 剧集：《候场》 4:30 《周末女性时间》 5:00 《周六下午》 5:30 《切片面包》 5:54 《航运预报》 6:00 《六点新闻》 6:15 《琐碎之事》 7:00 《最后的话：以不同方式面对死亡》 7:15 《改变赔率》 8:00 《4频道档案：谄媚——古往今来的拍马屁指南》 9:00 《死兔》 10:00 《新闻》 10:15 《食品节目》 11:00 《奥尔加·科赫：OK 电脑》 11:30 《英国之脑》 12:00 《午夜新闻》 12:15 《四本书》 12:48 《航运预报》 1:00 接 BBC 世界服务局 (BBC World Service) 5:30 《新闻摘要》 5:34 《航运预报》 5:43 《周日之钟》 5:45 《保持联系》
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 评论 | 电视
Ellen
鲍里斯·约翰逊：进入 乌克兰杀戮区 Channel 5 《黑暗》 ITV1
“在那里，他成了 他一直想成为的 丘吉尔式的 平民领袖”： 鲍里斯·约翰逊 进入了 扎波罗热的 杀戮区； 插图为劳拉·唐尼 在《黑暗》中。 Channel 5
在 Channel 5 的长篇纪录片《鲍里斯·约翰逊：进入乌克兰杀戮区》中，有一幕是这位前英国首相被迫戴上巴拉克拉法帽（面罩）以避免被认出。通常，政治人物会被限制在首都基辅。这部纪录片记录了离开唐宁街四年后的约翰逊，在扎波罗热市附近的“杀戮区”前线部分地区，进行了一次为期 72 小时的无保护旅程。对任何人——无论是士兵、公民还是记者——那里都极其危险，而对于一名支持乌克兰总统弗拉基米尔·泽连斯基且公开批评弗拉基米尔·普京的前世界领导人来说，风险更是极高。于是，面罩遮住了他的脸和那头著名的亚麻色头发。瞬间，他被“去鲍里斯化”了，剥离了那些无论人们爱他还是恨他，在英国生活中都如此显著的特征。（有多少专栏版面曾致力于分析那头经过精心打理的乱发。）剩下的只有那标志性的声音，不协调地从口孔中轰鸣而出，像是在执行侦察任务的伯蒂·伍斯特。
这个项目始于约翰逊——他最初是一名记者，现在为《每日邮报》撰写专栏——联系了该报的战地记者理查德·潘德尔伯里和杰米·怀斯曼（自俄罗斯 2022 年入侵以来，他们领导着一个团队提供《每日邮报》世界 YouTube 报道），询问是否可以加入他们。约翰逊在镜头前说道：“这意味着亲自前往前线，与那些被迫参加战争的乌克兰士兵交谈。我正前往所谓的杀戮区。”
此后，这部电影尽可能地发挥战地报道的功能。片头概述了一列载有士兵亲属（包括儿童）的客运列车遭到轰炸的情况。在片中早期，一座公寓楼在约翰逊和剧组入住的地方附近被炸，情况令人不安。这位前首相了解了关于无人机、精确制导航空炸弹（每月有数千枚投向乌克兰）的信息，并走访了在零下温度之夜站岗的移动防空炮手们：“我真该穿上那该死的保暖长裤，”约翰逊皱眉道。他穿着防弹背心，被驱动穿过危险地区，在一家位于被炸毁区域内仍维持营业的超市停靠，与乌克兰正教会的随军牧师一起祈祷，讨论兵员征召问题，并视察了一家临时医疗中心。他还参观了一家炸弹工厂，那里使用 3D 打印机和污水管制造“断趾弹”（旨在炸断小腿的装置）。约翰逊遇到的几乎每个人都精疲力竭，绝望地，
战争报道 会给一个 像发呆的 维尼熊一样 瘫在床上的 人留出 空间？
流离失所，思念家人，期盼战争结束。鲍里斯·约翰逊戴着巴拉克拉法帽，帮一名乌克兰士兵推启动一辆破旧的汽车。当他的身份公开后，毫无疑问地产生了“约翰逊效应”。我不确定还有多少其他战争报道会给一个像发呆的维尼熊一样在床上眨眼，或饥渴地盯着锅里煮热狗肠的人留出空间。他与乌克兰人的互动主要以活泼且非正式为主。“你把那个家伙的屁股给射飞了，”他对着一群面对破碎无人机残骸的士兵赞许地说道。乌克兰人能立刻认出约翰逊，而且他们热爱他。在那里，他成了他一直渴望成为的、丘吉尔式的平民之友。他面对镜头为乌克兰发声——“他们是英雄，但我们没有提供更多帮助，这简直是一种耻辱”——并概述了这次入侵是如何违反了一项关键的
1994 年条约，并宣称：“是弗拉基米尔·普京发起了这场战争。他是唯一能结束它的人。”在屏幕文字中，俄罗斯联邦对这部纪录片表现出不屑的回应开始道：“我们注意到该纪录片在很大程度上依赖于鲍里斯·约翰逊的观点……”我们可以整天争论这种可疑的、像是在扮演“战地记者”的行为究竟是什么，这种纵容是极其不负责任的炫耀——增加了周围所有人的危险——还是在旨在引起人们关注一场媒体和公众关注度已然下降的冲突背景下是可以理解的。这部纪录片本身是一个多方面的怪异之作。它既是约翰逊与普京这场宿怨之战的最新一轮（叮！）较量（如果是一个比我更坚强的女性，或许能忍住不去指出：通过脱欧，约翰逊令普京感到兴奋并赋予了其权力），也是一个男人对自己曾在全球舞台上掌握的权力的哀悼研究。这部纪录片也正如其自称的那样：一个宝贵的提醒，即对于乌克兰而言，战争和苦难仍在继续。只是……鲍里斯的戏份实在太多了。
在ITV1频道上，阴郁的六集苏格兰惊悚剧《黑暗》（The Dark）继续在皮肤之下潜行和律动。该剧改编自GR Halliday的系列小说首作《来自阴影》（From The Shadows），劳拉·唐尼饰演深不可测的探长莫尼卡·肯尼迪，她的任务是猎捕一名连环杀手，该杀手将年轻男性受害者的裸尸弃置，并将其以仪式化的姿势摆放在高地草丛中。故事交织着乡村的阴暗、一次性手机、下药的饮料、戴面具的闯入者以及情感脆弱的年轻人。出演过《冷脚》的海伦·巴克斯代尔饰演一名眼神狂乱的丧亲父母，而埃蒙·埃利奥特则饰演其阴沉的伴侣。作为肯尼迪的副手，马克·罗利穿着几件诡异地紧身的衬衫，而关于肯尼迪女儿的支线剧情以及一些反复出现的邪教勾当，变得有些过于复杂且令人厌倦，甚至威胁到了主线情节的推进。
今年早些时候，由凯莉·赖利、雷夫·斯波尔和乔纳森·普瑞斯主演、背景设定在威尔士的《盐沼之下》（Under Salt Marsh）演变成了一场风暴般的单小镇表演盛宴，证明了英国犯罪惊悚剧在被“解开绳索”时能达到怎样的成就。《黑暗》尚未达到那个水平——它的风格过于夸张（OTT），且有太多方便的巧合和拙劣的惊吓场面。
尽管如此，它依然有其看点，唐尼塑造了一位绝对不会靠天生女性魅力地获取结果的电视警察。在她的演绎下，探长肯尼迪那毫无表情的平板感和冰冷的反击令人回味。
清单
芭芭拉·艾伦 (Barbara Ellen) 精选推荐
《未宣而战》(The Undeclared War) (Channel 4) 这部网络攻击惊悚剧的第二季。 西蒙·佩格 (Simon Pegg) 回归饰演 GCHQ 局长， 这一次他必须揭露 情报机构内部的一名内奸。 艾德里安·莱斯特 (Adrian Lester) 和 希安·布鲁克 (Siân Brooke) 亦在剧中出演。
《庞贝：时间之外》，由汤姆·希德尔斯顿 (Tom Hiddleston) 主持 (Disney Plus/National Geographic) 《夜经理》的演员汤姆·希德尔斯顿 (Tom Hiddleston)（见下图） 展现其古学研究者的才干， 探讨维苏威火山爆发 造成的庞贝灾难。
《幽灵：澳大利亚版》(Ghosts Australia) (BBC Three) 对于那些怀念 2023 年完结的 英国闹鬼豪宅喜剧的观众来说， 澳大利亚版正以极高的热情 推出其自制版本。 由塔玛拉·谢尔顿 (Tamala Shelton) 和 罗马·维特 (Roman Witt) 主演。
divisions over Gaza to destroy a man’s life and business in London
Eva Wiseman, pages 14-16
Established 1791
9 770029 771427
W
Now crime is falling, Andy Burnham must reverse the outdated sentencing policies that have left unsustainable and unjustifiable numbers of people in jail
e are in an era of falling crime. At the same time, we exist in an almost perpetual crisis of prison capacity. The situation may seem paradoxical when, in fact, it is not: merely the predictable result of inconsistent and irresponsible policy-making. Andy Burnham is in the process of discovering for himself how tightly the prison numbers tie the government’s hands. He heard the heartfelt complaints of Lissie Harper, the widow of PC Andrew Harper – who was dragged, horribly, to his death in 2019 – that two of the men responsible for his killing were soon to be released from jail, and intervened dramatically to pause legislation that would have allowed some prisoners out earlier in their sentences. The purpose of the now paused legislation was to ensure that prisons do not run out of space entirely before Christmas. And, almost inevitably, whatever practical changes Burnham is able to introduce will bump into a hard reality that will leave more of the people he is trying to please disappointed than happy. The latest summary of crime statistics for England and Wales from the Office for National Statistics paints the big picture in simple terms: “Crime against individuals and households has generally decreased over the last 10 years with some notable exceptions, such as fraud.” Longterm trends in important areas such as sexual abuse and domestic violence are hard to discern because of changes in the way police record them, but murders are down, violent crimes are down, and so are car crime and gun crime. And the list goes on. Against that backdrop, the number of people in prison in England and Wales has gone up enormously. Last week the total stood at 88,098, which left spare capacity for 2,938 more. At the height of the last crisis two years ago, that figure fell to as low as 100, but the headroom is still tiny and the risks still huge. If there is an origin story behind our current difficulties, it might begin in 1993. The then Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, famously said at his party conference: “Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists.” More
George Orwell, The Observer
prophetically, he rounded off that paragraph of his speech with a promise that is less well remembered: “We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.” Clearly, we don’t. There are fewer murderers and muggers now than in 1993, and there may or may not be fewer rapists, but there are 40,000 more people in jail now than there were then. That figure makes us an outlier in Europe. Per 100,000 head of population, we send twice as many to prison as Germany, and far more than the European average. Alternatives to prison have fallen out of fashion. Thirty years ago, a quarter of all sentences were community sentences; by 2024 that had fallen to just 6%. But, most significantly, our courts are sending people to prison for far longer for the same crimes. In 1993, the average custodial sentence was approximately 16 months; now it is about 22.5 months. A lot of the big increases in the length of sentences have come recently. In 2010, 487 people received a sentence of 10 years or longer. By 2024, that number had risen to 1,639. To any serious policymaker, the consequences of these changes have been obvious and predictable, but too many of our politicians have not been serious. It was only in 2020 that Boris Johnson’s government changed the point at which prisoners serving time for some more serious crimes would become eligible for early release, from 50% of the way through their sentence to 66%. The simple mathematics of the change meant that more prison places would be needed, but they have not been built. And now Burnham has paused the legislation that would, in effect, have turned back the clock and reinstated the 50% trigger point. The review of the legislation that Burnham has ordered will need to be conducted at lightning speed, but it should be the beginning of his inquiry into sentencing, not the end. He should be as serious about ending the wrong turn this country took more than 30 years ago on sentencing policy as he says he is about changing 40 years of economic thinking. The number of people in prison is unsustainable and unjustifiable on the evidence. It puts intolerable pressure on other parts of a failing system such as probation, and leads to bad outcomes for victims as well as offenders. Our prisons do not rehabilitate, do not prevent reoffending, are not safe. In the crude terms that Howard put it: prison does not work. It is time for us to begin, again, to see a fall in prison numbers as a success.
Issue No. 12,242
Eva Wiseman
I’ve worked on newspapers for
many years but I tend to write
about culture rather than crime
and was unprepared for how much
this story would take over my life.
I talked about it with my children.
I messaged sources just minutes
after giving a wedding speech,
and I regularly dreamed about the
protagonist.
News, pages 14-16
out at killer’s transfer
Families of children killed in an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport have criticised a decision to move their killer out of prison. Axel Rudakubana was transferred from HMP Belmarsh to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. He was given a life sentence for the murder of three children – Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven – and the attempted murder of eight other children and two adults. Lawyers for the families said they had seen no evidence to suggest a mental health disorder, which required the move to the secure hospital.
700% Rise in print sales of copies of the Odyssey since the film’s release
first Scottish tourist tax
Edinburgh became the first city in Scotland to introduce a tourist tax, which will see 5% added to bookings for hotels, bed and breakfasts and self-catering accommodation. The charge aims to raise around £50m annually, which could be used to improve housing, policing and cultural initiatives in the Scottish capital. Opponents warned that the tourist tax could deter visitors and affect its famous annual Fringe festival.
Russian warship fires off Plymouth coast A Russian warship carried out a live-fire exercise 45 miles south of Plymouth, firing its main cannon. The Neustrashimy conducted a 30-minute drill in international waters off the south coast of Devon. It requested that a British naval patrol vessel, HMS Tyne, which had been tracking it, retreat to a safe distance before the firing. The UK’s defence secretary Wes Streeting condemned the incident as “performative and irresponsible”. In June, a Russian frigate, the Admiral Grigorovich, fired warning shots close to a British yacht south of the Isle of Wight.
Hotel sales shine for 2028 solar eclipse Stargazers are booking out hotels in a New Zealand city two years ahead
Overheard
‘I’m pleased to announce –
and this is somewhat of a scoop –
my intention to run for a fourth term’
A giant Tunnock teacake, a celebrated Scottish snack, is raised during the opening ceremony of the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games at The Hydro on Thursday. (Roundup of events so far, Sport, pages 4 and 5) Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty
of a total solar eclipse. The event, which is tipped to be a big tourist event for Dunedin, is the first total eclipse in the region for more than 850 years, and the first visible anywhere in New Zealand since 1965. The moon is expected to pass in front of the sun at 4.17pm on 22 July 2028, casting a 100km-wide part of southern New Zealand into darkness for almost three minutes. The Dunedin Leisure Lodge said it was fully booked for its “solar eclipse package”, which includes free eclipse glasses.
On the cover
Google fined €890m by EU for favouring its own apps over those of rivals
US scientists create Only Fans account for marmots to raise funds after federal budget cuts France becomes first country in the EU to ban social media for under-15s
New Tate director takes ‘big pay cut’ for role Jessica Morgan has been named the new director of the Tate, replacing Maria Balshaw who announced this spring that she was leaving. Morgan has been leading the Dia Art Foundation in New York for the last decade, but used to be a curator at the Tate, which she said “deeply informed” her time at Dia. She is reportedly taking a “very big pay cut” to take up the role. Morgan said her new position was an “immense
Life satisfaction of 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK plummets to 44%
Paramount agrees to pause Warner Bros takeover deal while legal case plays out
Michelin-starred restaurant owner in South Korea faces jail over ant dessert
President Donald Trump at the White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner, donning a 2028 hat
privilege” and that she is looking forward “to this pivotal next stage at Tate”. She will take up the job during a difficult time for the museum, which is still recovering from the financial slump of the pandemic leading to protests after rounds of staff redundancies.
Aid worker monitored in London for Ebola A humanitarian worker is being monitored at a hospital in London after potential exposure to the Ebola virus. The worker, a British resident, was medically evacuated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they had been treating patients with the disease. The UK Health Security Agency said the worker had no symptoms but was evacuated as a “highly precautionary measure” and would be monitored in isolation by infectious disease specialists in a London hospital. The individual had been working with an organisation supporting the Ebola outbreak response.
Police probe Tice firm’s donations to Reform The Met police is investigating two donations of £250,000 that were given to Reform UK by Britain Means Business, a company controlled by Richard Tice, in the run-up to the 2024 general election, the BBC reported. Tice said the money was given to his company by Fiona Cottrell, the mother of Farage’s close associate and convicted fraudster George Cottrell, and that it was his own choice to donate it to the party. Records from the Electoral Commission show that Britain Means Business received £1m from Fiona Cottrell in June
l
The first puffin chick seen in Dorset in 30 years was spotted in Swanage. There are three pairs in the county, down from 80 birds in the 1950s.
l
Zendaya faces backlash for wearing 3,000-year-old ancient Iranian earrings on the red carpet.
l
Madeleine McCann’s brother, Sean, will compete in a Commonwealth Games swimming final.
l
Europeans to vote between Leonardo Di Caprio, Beethoven, Maria Callas and birds to go on Euro banknote.
2024, and then Tice’s company donated £500,000 in two payments to Reform that same month. Fiona Cottrell also donated £500,000 in two payments to Reform in May. The Sunday Times reported that Reform’s bank account was frozen for two weeks after the donations were flagged by bankers to the National Crime Agency. Tice told the BBC he had not been informed about a police investigation into Britain Means Business. Fiona Cottrell has not commented on the investigations.
The view from the beach at Moutchic in Lacanau, south-west France, as wildfires spread through the Arcachon Basin in Gironde yesterday. Maximilien Lamy/AFP/Getty
NEWSPAPERS SUPPORT RECYCLING The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2025 was 30%
Sections of The Observer are carefully collated at our
print site and by newsagents. If any section of today’s
UK edition of The Observer is missing, call freephone
0800 839100. Back issues can be obtained from www.
historic-newspapers.co.uk, or by calling 03300 669700
© 2026 Published by Tortoise Media Limited,
22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP
Printed at Newsprinters (Broxbourne) Ltd, Great
Cambridge Road, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, EN8 8DY;
Reach Oldham Limited, Hollinwood Avenue, Chadderton,
Oldham OL9 8EP; Discovery Print, 80 Kingsway East,
Dundee, DD4 8SL; and Irish Times Print Facility, 4080
Kingswood Road, Citywest Business Campus, Dublin 24.
Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office.
ISSN 0029-7712
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 5 News Ofcom ‘reaches limit of law’ on suicide forums
mother it cannot block or pursue a site linked to her son’s death, exposing the failures of the Online Safety Act
Jon Ungoed-Thomas Patricia Clarke
In April 2020 former army cadet Joe Nihill took his life, leaving a hand- written note asking for a pro-suicide online forum he had accessed to be shut down. “Please do your best in closing that website for anyone else,” he wrote. “Look after my mum and family!” Nihill was 23 when he died. A cor- oner found the forum, which is based outside the UK, may have broken the law by assisting his suicide. Last Monday morning Melanie Dawes, chief executive of the commu- nications regulator Ofcom, spoke to Nihill’s mother, Catherine Adenekan, in an online meeting. She had dis- appointing news about Adenekan’s six-year mission to honour her son’s request and close the forum. Adenekan was told Ofcom could not permanently block the pro-sui- cide forum in the UK; criminal pro- ceedings could not be pursued; and a £950,000 fine issued to the website in May under the Online Safety Act had still not been paid. (Ofcom said it is working to recover the debt, but it will be a complex process as the com- pany that runs the forum has no UK assets.) “This means all possible legal routes under the Act have now been exhausted,” the regulator later said in an extraordinary press statement. “I’m tired of all these companies and all these authorities who say they care,” said Adenekan, 55, from Leeds. “It just goes round and round. Nobody wants to take accountabil- ity for this. “People are dying every day. I thought when people got to know about this, the forum would be shut down in a couple of weeks and people would be arrested. I don’t want any other mother to find their child the way I found my son. I’m exhausted, but I can’t stop. This is my son’s final wish.” The Online Safety Act 2023 intro- duced laws to protect adults and chil- dren online, but even ministers admit the passing and implementation of the measures were “unacceptably slow”. There are calls for more robust action from Ofcom, which is tasked with trying to police the online world, and an overhaul of the regulations. Katie Hayman-Joyce, from the
Molly Rose Foundation, which aims to prevent suicide by advocating for safer online environments, said the government had failed for years to take effective action against the pro-suicide forum, despite repeated warnings by coroners. “It is staggering that it has taken bereaved families and survivors to hold Ofcom to account and they have ultimately been let down by a timid approach to enforcement,” she said. “The fact fines have not been paid does raise questions about the abil- ity to enforce the Online Safety Act and reinforces why additional meas- ures are needed.” The pro-suicide forum involved in Nihill’s death was the first to be investigated by Ofcom under the new online safety laws. The forum, which has reportedly been linked to more than 130 deaths, voluntarily blocked UK users as the regulator was prepar- ing legal action. It is still available in other jurisdictions. The forum’s administrators could lift the block at any point. Whether the site is geoblocked in the UK by the forum’s administrators or Ofcom, users can use a VPN to disguise their location and access it. Ofcom is working with the govern- ment to consider whether its busi- ness-disruption powers, which can be used to geoblock websites in the UK, can be strengthened to make them more effective. “Ofcom has reached the limit of the law, and in doing so it has told the whole country that the law can- not cope,” said Adele Zeynep Walton, a journalist and campaigner whose sister, Aimee, killed herself in October 2022 after engaging with the forum. Since the 2023 Act came into force, Ofcom has issued fines totalling £6.4m against 10 firms. Some com- pany bosses have simply ignored the fines. Ofcom declined to comment on the number of unpaid fines, say- ing it would not provide details about “ongoing operational matters”. The US messaging platform 4chan has been fined a total of £520,000 for failing to keep children away from pornography, among other offences – but it too has refused to pay. Preston Byrne, a lawyer acting for 4chan, responded in March to the fines with a picture of a cartoon hamster and has told The Observer the fines will be paid “when pigs fly”. One of the challenges Ofcom faces is international concern over the bal- ance between effective regulation of the internet and freedom of expres- sion, with the Trump administra- tion casting the Online Safety Act as an assault on American civil liberties. Myles Jackman, an obscenity law- yer, said 4chan was seen as a “bas- tion” of free speech by the libertarian
right wing in the US. “If it were shut down by regulation, then the individ- uals who use it would just go further underground,” he said. Beeban Kidron, the crossbench peer who helped shape the Act, said it was clear the enforcement powers granted to Ofcom were inadequate. “I have criticised Ofcom for being slow and overly process-driven, but these issues arise from the design of the enforcement regime,” she said. Kidron said senior executives should face personal criminal liabil- ity for wilful or reckless failure to pro- tect users. Sarah Ruane, director of pol- icy, practice and influencing at Samaritans, said: “Platforms that put lives at risk are not facing real con- sequences for their actions so the Online Safety Act must be strength- ened. The most effective step would be empowering Ofcom to act faster and more decisively against plat- forms that pose a serious risk to life.” An Ofcom spokesperson said: “We have the utmost respect for bereaved
families, and share their frustrations and concerns, but we disagree with this characterisation of the action we’ve taken. “We acted as soon as the Online Safety Act came into force, conducted a thorough investigation under the process required by law, issued a sig- nificant fine, and exhausted every legal route available. Neither Ofcom nor the UK courts can ‘shut down’ a website globally under the act. If there is ongoing non-compliance, we can apply for a court order to block a site in the UK, which this forum has already done as a direct result of our action. “We can only take action using the powers we’ve been given, and any changes to these would be a matter for government and parliament. We’re working with government to con- sider whether there are areas where our powers can be strengthened.” A government spokesperson said: “We know the devastating impact that dangerous services like these can have, and our thoughts are with all those who have lost loved ones as a result of this type of illegal content. These sites have no place in the UK. “As Ofcom has said, their enforce- ment action has directly resulted in the forum blocking access to people in the UK. We will continue to work closely with Ofcom to ensure enforce- ment powers remain fit for pur- pose and to keep the situation under review. Any platform that seeks to get around the rules will face the full force of the law.”
Catherine Adenekan, with her son, Joe Nihill, has been campaigning to close the forum he condemned in his suicide note, below. Courtesy of Catherine Adenekan
flee wildfires in France and Spain
halt blaze in Cap Ferrat resort as Spain declares state of emergency, Kim Willsher reports
wildfires’ yet seen in Britain
Jon Ungoed-Thomas
Fire crews were this weekend battling some of the worst wildfires ever seen in Britain, with warnings across large areas of the country about the “excep- tional” risk from a blaze. More than 500 firefighters have been mobilised to fight a blaze in the Cairngorms national park in north- east Scotland, with the smoke visible
Terrified tourists and residents have told how they had to flee a French hol- iday resort in the middle of the night as “apocalyptic” wildfires continue to rage through south-west France. Many left homes and animals behind after they were given instruc- tions to immediately evacuate the Cap Ferret peninsula, a resort packed with tens of thousands of holidaymak- ers. In nearby Bordeaux, the flames reached the city suburbs, forcing thousands more to flee their homes. More than 270,000 people have been displaced as wildfires rage across southern Europe. In France, the military has been deployed in a bid to halt the blaze, while in Spain,
60 miles (97km) away in Aberdeen. A major incident has been declared and residents in the Highlands vil- lage of Nethy Bridge have been evac- uated. The fire is burning to the south of the village, with warnings it could threaten properties. Sandy McCook, chair of the Nethy Bridge and vicinity community coun- cil, told Sky News: “We are very much almost at the mercy of the wind in whichever way it chooses to blow.
the government has declared a national emergency as fires rage out- side Madrid. At Cap Ferret, witnesses spoke of “Dante-esque” flames surging to 35 metres high and choking clouds of black smoke that turned their sum- mer holiday into a hellscape. Journalist and television producer Dominique Chapatte described see- ing “gigantic” flames sweeping the surrounding pine forest, which has been turned into a tinderbox after three heatwaves in as many months. “It was a crazy atmosphere… the sky was black and ash was raining down. It was apocalyptic,” he told RTL radio. “I salute the firefighters bat-
“You don’t know whether the fire is going to come towards all your homes or not. [It is] a very frightening situ- ation, because this is the worst fire we’ve had here in living memory.” McCook said the Scottish govern- ment had “dithered” and there had been a delay in declaring a major inci- dent. “We feel completely let down by the Scottish government,” he said. Scottish government officials said that declaring a major incident is a decision for the emergency services. Rod Kemsley, 62, an architect who lives in the village, said he evacu- ated his home, but returned yester- day. “They are carving firebreaks at
tling these flames. What can they do against them?” Chapatte said many of those fleeing the area were trapped in a traffic jam of several miles on the only road in and out of the peninsula. Much of Cap Ferret is blanketed by human-made forest, planted in the early 19th cen- tury to anchor the sand dunes. People were forced to flee by boat after being cut off by fires sweep- ing through coastal holiday towns in the Gironde and Landes regions. Video footage from Biscarrosse on the Atlantic coast showed panicked horses bolting along roads with the horizon ablaze. “I don’t know what to think any
the edge of the forest to try to stop it heading towards the village,” he said. He added that from his house he could see the smoke billowing east- wards away from Nethy Bridge. Most parts of England and Wales are now at very high or exceptional risk of severe wildfires, according to a Met Office fire severity index. The index evaluates the probable sever- ity of a wildfire in England and Wales once it ignites, with large areas of the West Midlands, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire at exceptional risk. Fire crews have fought a moor- land blaze at Tintwistle Moor, near Glossop, Derbyshire, for more than
more. It was like the end of the world,” said Virginie, a Cap Ferret resident who fled the peninsula after she was trapped by the blaze. “I left everything behind at a minute’s notice.” President Emmanuel Macron mobilised French troops on Friday evening as the fire continued to spread and a change of wind drove the flames towards Bordeaux. The president said the military would “provide maximum support” to fire- fighters tackling the blaze. Thomas Cazenave, the mayor of Bordeaux, warned that the fires were “at the gates” of the city. French inte- rior minister Laurent Nuñez said French troops would join the effort to halt the blaze threatening the Bordeaux suburbs after the fires around Cap Ferret shifted east. “We are trying to stop it getting to Bordeaux city. For the moment Bordeaux is not threatened and we are doing everything we can to pro- tect it,” Nuñez told TF1 television. “The battle against the fire contin-
a month. A BBC analysis of the European Forest Fire Information System suggests the fire has now burned almost 650 hectares (about 1,600 acres) and is one of the biggest wildfires ever seen in England. Greater Manchester fire and res- cue service has also been fight- ing a wildfire for two weeks at Dove Stone reservoir in the Peak District. Elsewhere, fire crews have spent four days battling a wildfire at Hanter Hill, near Presteigne, Powys, close to the England-Wales border. There have been 53 recorded wild- fires so far this year at sites of spe- cial scientific interest, and July is
Bystanders in Cotignac, France, watch last Tuesday as flames and a plume of smoke head towards the historic village. FBM Media/ Getty Images
W
A fire rages in El Tiemblo, Spain, near the residential area of La Atalaya, 80km west of Madrid. Cesar Manso/AFP via Getty Images
A wildfire burns close to a remote farm house on Hanter Hill, Powys.
ues in the minutes and hours to come. This is an unprecedented situation.” He said 50 firefighters had been injured tackling the flames. “I salute their bravery. We have never seen a fire of this size,” he added. In Spain, a state of emergency was declared as three wildfires burned out of control near Madrid. Two fires merged on Friday, forcing the evac- uation of more than 25,000 people. Madrid’s regional prefect Isabel Díaz Ayuso said the blaze was “the worst fire in our history” and that the area faced a “perfect storm” of soar- ing temperatures and erratic winds. “For a population like here where there is a concentration of homes and population it’s a catastrophe,” Ayuso said. “We’ve never suffered anything like this before.”
from one fire into the crosshairs of another’ Zac Morrison
on track to become the driest in almost 200 years. Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru (Natural Resources Wales), the body responsible for environ- mental protection and regulation, said last Thursday that drought sta- tus had been declared in north Wales and the Upper Severn catchment in mid-Wales. In England seven water compa- nies have implemented or announced hosepipe bans, with 23 million cus- tomers facing restrictions. Farmers are harvesting crops earlier because of the heatwaves, with warnings that yields this year will be lower. Paul Tompkins, deputy president
Despite years of rising temper- atures and increasing wildfires, Europe has proved unprepared for a crisis on this scale. A report this year warned that investment in firefight- ing equipment had not kept pace with the risk, with fire seasons becoming longer and more widespread. Fires destroyed 1.03m hectares of forest across the EU in 2025, the high- est figure since records began. But the toll from this year’s crisis could be far worse after a string of heatwaves across the continent this summer. At least 22,000 hectares have been destroyed in the Gironde and Landes departments of France. The fires out- side Madrid have already consumed 32,000 hectares. British tourists are among those caught in the crisis. Zac Morrison said his family was woken by text alerts urging them to evacuate Cap Ferret “by all means necessary” on Thursday. “We had the gendarmerie going door-to-door,” the 21-year-old Londoner told the BBC. “It was like something out of a movie.” The family took shelter on a beach before a relative came to find them. “ There’s people on the beach here with their suitcases,” he said. As the family fled the peninsula, they received more emergency alerts as the fire shifted. “We moved away from one fire to only get put into the cross- hairs of another,” he said. David Morton, a headteacher from Gloucestershire, was woken by text alerts on Friday. “Our phones were all flashing and bleeping. There was a message saying we had to evacu- ate immediately and drive on the one road out of the [Cap Ferret] penin- sula,” the 53-year-old said. “We threw everything into our suit- cases and within 15 minutes were in the hire car.” As they escaped the fam- ily could see a wall of fire just 500 metres from the road. “The flames were higher than full-size forest pine trees, so five or six storeys high, and it was clear this was a fire that was out of control at that point,” he said.
of the National Farmers’ Union and a member of the government’s National Drought Group (NDG), said: “Some farmers are being acutely impacted. There are sheep farmers in Yorkshire who have seen their water pressure fall to zero. They’ve had to move their sheep or take water to them.” Helen Wakeham, chair of the NDG and director of water at the Environment Agency, said tempo- rary use bans were vital in conserv- ing supplies. “All sectors are taking action, and we are grateful to the pub- lic for following the restrictions,” she said. “Every drop we can save is a drop more for nature and agriculture.”
Residents evacuated from towns and villages near Bordeaux rest in the city’s exhibition centre, yesterday. Alain Jocard/AFP, Getty Images
Badenoch’s net zero purity test look like folly
ANALYSIS
Jeevan Vasagar Climate editor
e’ve turned fire into a living thing. The fire in the Gironde, in south west France, “generates its own winds, accelerates its spread, and can abruptly change direction”, France’s prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Friday. Forests have burned and regenerated for aeons; species such as black spruce have adapted to fire, with saplings growing from ashes, while other trees have developed a measure of fire resistance. Ten years ago, firefighters in Alberta, the oil-rich Canadian province, understood they were facing something new when previously fire-resistant aspen trees instantaneously exploded in the Fort McMurray wildfire. Climate change has turned the page on a new chapter. Higher temperatures and reduced rainfall are making fire seasons longer and the fires themselves more extreme – hot enough to melt metal, crumble concrete and reduce houses to ash in moments. Research projects a tenfold increase in extreme fires in Europe in the next 30 years. This month President Trump threatened Canada with tariffs to pay for the harms caused by wildfire smoke. As Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management, pointed out, climate change is responsible. Therefore, we are all responsible. An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that humans have caused the post-industrial heating of the planet, but politicians who refuse to accept this have to cast around for other villains.
The increasingly obvious impacts of living on a warming planet make Kemi Badenoch’s net zero purity test for Tory party candidates look increasingly like folly. Here is at least one argument that should make sense to a Conservative: the fires that hit Los Angeles last year were one of the costliest in history, causing $140bn in losses. A tiny fraction of all wildfires are started by a lightning strike, but the vast majority involve a human action: a disposable barbecue or a cigarette butt on dry grass. Human actions have also increased the likelihood of death and disruption from wildfires. Around half the world’s population lives in areas where housing intersects with wild vegetation, an area researchers describe as the wildland-urban interface. As the residents of Fort McMurray discovered a decade ago, living in such close proximity to the woods means their homes themselves can swiftly become additional fuel for the fire. How emergency services respond to these increasingly frequent crises has become a matter of life and death: as in Bordeaux, and now Madrid, mass evacuations will often be the only option. There are two ways of dealing with a world of fire: one is by adapting to it, and human history shows we have scope to do that. But tackling the carbon emissions that are raising the global temperature has to remain central to our efforts to maintain a habitable planet. Yes, fires are more intense and more deadly than before, but humanity has the technology to shift away from fossil fuels, the means to manage forests and wild grasslands, and ensure that people are kept safe from harm. Vanquishing this threat is like dealing with measles. It’s best done through science, not denial. What are your thoughts on this? Write to us at letters@observer.co.uk
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 8 News Thames Water investors make last-ditch bid to sink potential government takeover
share’ in the debt-laden
utility company
may not persuade
Andy Burnham to
do a deal, writes
Barney Macintyre
It has been a torrid five years for Southern Water. In July 2021, the company received a record £90m criminal fine after pleading guilty to nearly 7,000 illegal sewage discharges off the coasts of Hampshire, Kent and Sussex, the conclusion of a multi-year investigation dubbed “Operation Garden”. At the same time, Southern Water’s owners, the banks JP Morgan and UBS, refused an ultimatum from the water regulator, Ofwat. They had been asked to stump up an extra £1bn in equity to keep operations running as it struggled with debt repayments. In 2021 the company was a candidate for a special administration regime (SAR) – an insolvency process for businesses that provide critical public services, which places them temporarily under government control. Ofwat opted for an auction to find a new owner instead, preferring to let the taxpayer off the hook. The highest bidder? An Australian asset manager called Macquarie, a financial group that already had a long and chequered history of investing in water. Now, five years later, the chief executive who oversaw Southern Water from 2011 to 2016 has been charged along with three other former employees in a separate case over an alleged plan to manipulate water quality tests. Conspiracy to defraud carries a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment. Lawyers for former chief executive Matthew Wright say he denies wrongdoing and is cooperating fully. Customers of Southern Water may have looked at the company’s new owner Macquarie with scepticism. From 2006 to 2017 it was the owner of Thames Water – the beleaguered utility company that is now in the middle of a showdown between a new government that dropped hints about nationalising it, and a group of hard-charging investors holding its debt who want to keep it private by offering Andy Burnham a new deal. Unless a detente is reached, Thames Water, like Southern Water before it, faces the possibility of entering into the same special administration. If that happens, it is likely to spark a long and expensive legal battle over money owed to private investors that would do nothing to improve the underlying problems: sewage spills, rising bills and network of Victorian pipes creaking from lack of investment. While Macquarie has no charges to answer in the Southern Water case,
the firm is known as the “vampire kangaroo” because of the perception that it prefers paying dividends to shareholders, at the expense of capital investment. Macquarie disputes this. A spokesperson for Macquarie said that during its ownership of Thames Water it had delivered “record levels of investment of more than £11bn in its network, enabling significant improvements in water quality, reduced leakage and pollution incidents”. During Macquarie’s decade of ownership, Thames Water’s debt grew from £2bn to more than £10bn, while the company paid out billions of pounds in dividends. Thames Water’s debt pile now stands at £20bn. Since Margaret Thatcher privatised the sector in 1989, hundreds of investors have come and gone. With each round, cash has been stripped
£20bn
Thames Water dividends Financial year ending Financial year ending
£800m Macquarie ownership
Macquarie ownership
off and the packages of debt have grown heavier. Investment is partly paid for by customer bills, which after decades of being pushed down are now increasing fast. Under the regulator’s current terms, household bills will rise 53% after inflation by 2030 to roughly £700 a year. Years of weak regulation have seen the growth of pay packets for water executives. Figures compiled by the Guardian across eight companies show that total pay for CEOs and CFOs increased last year to £25.3m, up from £24.9m the year before, despite a ban on bonuses. Earlier this month, Chris Weston, the chief executive of Thames Water, defended a pay rise to nearly £1m, saying he “deserved” it. Britain’s new prime minister has indicated that he wants to end the games. On the campaign trail before his election as the MP for Makerfield,
Net debt
Andy Burnham said public ownership is “what should be done” at Thames Water. In his first speech as prime minister, Burnham spoke of putting “life’s essentials back under stronger public control”. What precisely that means is unclear. “It appears he’s deliberately blurred whether he’s in favour of nationalisation, some form of public control without actually defining what it means, or just stopping bills going up,” said Dieter Helm, a prominent Oxford University economist who specialises in utilities. If it’s a game of chicken Burnham is playing, it’s working. Last week, investors holding £17bn of Thames Water debt – its de facto controllers since a deal to sell it to private equity firm KKR fell through – proposed a new deal to try to avoid the company falling into special administration, and, potentially, a full nationalisation. London & Valley Water (L&VW), a consortium of 100 institutional investors and hedge funds, has offered a “golden share” that would give the government a veto over decisions to merge or sell the company, and suggested “supervisory structures” that could give local councils some oversight. A spokesperson for L&VW said: “Special administration or public ownership will not fix Thames Water’s problems.” Why the desperation from the consortium for a deal? Helm’s view is that the debt holders want to continue being paid interest for holding the debt. According to Helm, if they wanted to do this, they could “divvy up the company, get their debt protected, and then flog the company
and get a bonus in terms of selling the equity, which has defaulted to them because the current equity owners have all walked away.” Is a persistent pile of debt the basis on which to build an effective turnaround of a public utility? Ofwat says Thames Water needs £20.5bn to spend on its Victorian plumbing by 2030. Spread across the company’s 9m billed customers, that works out at about £455 a year, per household, just for network investment. The creditors say they are seeking Burnham’s engagement on the deal. But as a new leader, keen to be liked, Burnham may feel at the mercy of politics. Recent YouGov data shows that eight in 10 Britons support nationalising water. A short-term SAR for Thames while another buyer is sought is expected to cost the exchequer £2bn, to keep operations running smoothly. Ofwat projects the company’s value – including fair compensation owed to existing owners for forfeited revenue – at £30bn by 2030. Estimates for the nationalisation of all water and sewage companies in England and Wales sit in the range of around £100bn. But Burnham has been warned that the investors will not go down without a fight over nationalisation. L&VW has engaged an “elite litigation and disputes firm”, to draw up plans for a legal case against the government if its deal is rejected. Whatever happens next, one can be confident that Britain’s great experiment in water privatisation will continue to be a boondoggle for lawyers, advisers and PR agencies for a while yet.
A pool of water
from a broken
pipe in Brixton,
south London.
Richard Baker/in
Pictures/Getty
skull-drilling Countess of Brainblood
transports Tim Adams back to his encounter with an aristocratic drugs activist whose spiritual quest led her to bore a hole in her head I
t’s not often I find myself laughing out loud at a story from the business pages. But that’s what happened when I saw a recent report about the takeover of a European drug research company called AtaiBeckley by the US pharma giant Eli Lilly for $2.8bn (£2.1bn). It brought back a vivid memory of one of the more surreal days in my journalistic life. AtaiBeckley is a pioneer in the use of hallucinogenics to treat a range of mental illnesses including PTSD and depression. Outlawed since the 1960s – because of scare stories and government anxieties about LSD – such research has lately broken through that taboo. A US bill passed by executive order in April by the Trump administration – backed by his health secretary Robert Kennedy and the podcaster Joe Rogan – made such research not only legal, but a mandated priority. It wasn’t the idea of Trump suddenly tuning in, turning on and
dropping out that made me smile, however. It wasn’t even that the lead compound AtaiBerkely is testing is derived from the poison of the Sonoran desert toad. What made me laugh was the realisation that I had history with the Beckley part of AtaiBeckley. Back in 2019 I spent a day at Beckley Hall, the HQ of the Beckley Foundation. Except I knew it as “Brainblood Hall”. A Tudor mansion in rural Oxfordshire, Brainblood Hall was the home of the tireless campaigner for the benefits of hallucinogenic drugs, Amanda Feilding, the Countess of Wemyss and March. Feilding’s advocacy for psychoactive substances was based on her own extensive experiences of them since her wild 1960s youth. In the 1990s she created the Foundation to Further Consciousness, with the discoverer of LSD, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. When I met Feilding, she was 76, and sensing that her decades-long campaign was getting some traction. New Scientist had dubbed her “the
get deep down in
the brain and reset
it – like shaking up
a snow globe’
Amanda Feilding
Queen of Consciousness”. The New York Times writer Michael Pollan had based a book on the positive effect of microdosing on a Beckley- funded study at Johns Hopkins University into the use of magic mushrooms to treat depression in terminally ill patients. It wasn’t just those tireless policy arguments that had drawn me to Feilding. She was most famous for her belief in trepanning, the practice observed in several ancient cultures that involves drilling a hole in the skull to apparently enable a freer flow of spiritual insight. Feilding had been so convinced of its efficacy that she had taken a dentist’s drill to her own head in 1970. A film she made of the procedure can be found in the further reaches of YouTube. I persuaded Feilding to let me visit the home she had rechristened Brainblood Hall – and when I read the report about Eli Lilly, the vivid details of that day came back to me.
As soon as I arrived she bombarded me with her team’s latest research which, she said, supported her lifelong faith that LSD-like chemicals had the capacity to “get deep down in the brain and reset it – like shaking up a snow globe”. She had begun microdosing in her 20s, “You enjoy your thoughts more. You can find your flow.” After a couple of hours that involved a blizzard of scientific reports and close study of fMRI scans, Feilding took me out to where she first found her own flow. It was an old tree stump she believed housed a personal deity; her girlhood game, aged five or six, had been to find ways to make that green god laugh, “that kind of first orgasm experience that I think a lot of young children have and then forget”. Feilding had never forgotten. Her subsequent aim in life, she told me, had been to recreate those formative awakenings. At 16 she left her
Feilding in
the grounds
of ‘Brainblood
Hall’ in 2019.
Bloomberg/Getty
A youthful Amanda Feilding with the pigeon she adopted as a squab at home in Beckley Hall.
convent school and went in search
of her godfather, who she believed
was living as a Buddhist monk in Sri
Lanka. She got as far as the Syrian
border, where visa issues forced her
to spend some time with nomadic
Bedouins before returning to study
comparative religion at Oxford.
Soon after that she came into the
orbit of a cultish Dutch proponent
of trepanning, Bart Huges, who had
not long returned from Ibiza, where
he had been making his own LSD.
Feilding fell in love with Huges and
with his ideas.
His “brainblood” philosophy was
rooted in the belief that LSD allowed
users to experience the world akin
to a newborn baby. The way to
maintain this connection, Huges
had decided, was to drill a hole in
the skull, recreating the fontanelle
that allows infant consciousness to
swell. He performed the operation
on himself and encouraged friends
and followers to do the same.
“When I did it myself,” Feilding
said, “I was very careful; I had
practised [with a drill] for a long
time.” She made a small hole, using
a pedal-operated dentist’s drill.
What did she think, I wondered,
when she looked back at that
footage of her youthful self blithely
performing the operation without
anaesthetic. “Actually, I think it is
rather beautiful,” she said.
In the years since I have often
thought about that afternoon and
the Eli Lilly news prompted me to
fill in the parts of the story I had
missed. The Beckley Foundation, I
now discover, created a commercial
company, Beckley Psytech, a few
months after my visit. In 2022,
Feilding was given a Science Pioneer
Award at the UN. In May 2025, not
long after reporting her treatment
for liver cancer had not been a
success, she died aged 82.
The month after her funeral it
was announced the company had
merged with Atai, a Berlin-based
pharma research company.
AtaiBeckley has a particular secret
sauce. Its lead research candidate
is a compound that claims to
mimic the structure and effect of
Sonoran toad poison; 5-MeO-DMT,
a compound that was classed as
a category A narcotic in 2011, and
is known in some counter-culture
circles as “the God molecule”.
AtaiBeckley’s synthetic equivalent,
will, it believes, create a nasal-spray
solution for treatment-resistant
depression. Trepanning, Trump,
toads. Sometimes life makes it a
challenge to join the dots in the
news. I suspect, however, Feilding
would have had a good go trying.
As I left that afternoon, the
countess came to see me off. Did
she, I wondered, retain the faith in a
meaningful universe that she’d felt
in front of her tree-stump god? She
looked up at the stars just starting to
make themselves visible. “Well, it is
utterly amazing, whatever you call it,”
she said. “And on every scale: billions
of stars, billions of neurons in your
brain.” She laughed. “I think it’s
reasonable to believe there is some
kind of connection between all of it.”
release could mean prisons run out of cells by November
‘I
With new legislation now on hold, officials say they are running out of options to solve the overcrowding crisis
Ceri Thomas
When Andy Burnham announced last week that he was pausing the Sentencing Act, which would have made some prisoners eligible for release after serving 33% of their sen- tence rather than what would pre- viously have been 50% – and others who had served 50% instead of 66% – it came as a bolt from the blue to many commentators, but less so to the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ sensed the way the wind was blowing during the transition from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham, and began to prepare for a new prime minister who had signalled that he was uneasy about the changes. By the time of an opposition day debate in the House of Commons on 7 July, the ink had been dry on the Sentencing Act for almost six months and, ordinarily, there would have been no question of rewriting it. But the justice minister, Jake Richards, left himself some noticeable wiggle room: “Any government,” he said, “would continue to assess how best to achieve sustainability in our prison system.” The truth was that the MoJ did not
tips from Peep
Show’s Jeremy
is no recipe
for success
want to continue to assess anything; it just knew it might have to. And so it proved last week. Lissie Harper, the widow of the murdered policeman Andrew Harper, complained publicly that two of the men responsible for his death were on track to be released earlier than she had been expecting. Burnham responded by putting on hold the new law, which was supposed to come into force on 2 September. The conveyor belt towards implementing it is already running. Somehow, in the next few weeks, it may have to be stopped. But preparing for a change of heart from Burnham is not the same as being able to fulfil his wishes. A well- placed source in the MoJ has told The Observer that the options for change are very limited, and “you can play around with the legislation a bit but, ultimately, there isn’t much there”. In the end, the source said, “it’s a num- bers game and there just aren’t the numbers”. The numbers in question say the prison system in England and Wales will be completely full by November unless something changes, and apart from early release, there are no prac- tical options to head off that crisis. Inside the ministry, the hunt is on for face-saving, circle-squaring solutions but nobody pretends to know what they are. The figures are stark, although they have been worse. There were 88,098 people in prison last week in England and Wales, and space for 2,938 more. When Labour took office in 2024, the
ANALYSIS
Ben
Zaranko
Economics editor
answer to a higher
law,” says Jeremy in
Peep Show, the hit
2000s Channel 4
sitcom. “The law of
‘if it feels good, do
it’.” A similar philosophy appears to
lie behind Andy Burnham’s week
one policy blitz.
With a cut to VAT on electricity
bills, a £2 cap on bus fares, and a cut
delay creates further uncertainty for victims, prisoners and staff...’ Pia Sinha, PRT chief executive
to business rates for pubs and clubs,
Burnham’s government has gone
for symbolic, highly visible policies
that are relatively easy to explain.
There are question marks about
whether they are well designed,
well targeted or properly funded,
but those are just details.
The electorate doesn’t want a
government that’s responsible;
it wants a government that’s
responsive. If it feels good, do it.
As a means of starting on a
positive note, and securing some
immediate goodwill from the
electorate, this approach is easy to
understand and hard to criticise.
But drill down into the specifics,
and one can only hope this slapdash
approach to policy doesn’t last.
headroom was as low as 100 places. With or without the Sentencing Act, the prison population is projected to rise quickly. Without it, the latest projections are that it will increase to between 98,000 and 103,600 by March 2030, with a central estimate of 100,600. With the Act, the number is expected to be somewhere around 3,600 lower. The justice minister told the Commons in that opposition day debate that the government plans to build an extra 14,000 prison places by 2031. At organisations such as the Prison Reform Trust (PRT) there is great scepticism that anything like that number can be delivered – previ- ous building schemes have an almost unbroken track record of nimby- ism and delays that have driven the best-laid plans into the sand – but at the upper end of the projections, every one of those new places might be needed
Take the 20% reduction in business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues – the third cut to business rates for pubs announced in the last eight months alone. The government says it will cost £100m a year, to be paid for by “reviewing reliefs provided to antisocial businesses, such as vape shops”. Needless to say, there is no such thing as “vape shop relief” that can be easily stripped away. The government will have to come up with a whole new category of what counts as an antisocial business: easier said than done. The DIY shop at the end of my road sells vapes as well as screwdrivers. Is that antisocial? It will be someone’s job to decide. The system is forever
In a world of unpalatable choices, the immediate question is whether it might be more politically acceptable to lower the demand for prison places or increase the supply. On the supply side, mothballed prison wings could be reopened but only if there are enough prison
shifting, and grows more and more complicated. As Stuart Adam from the Institute for Fiscal Studies puts it, “we seem to be moving ever closer to a system in which the government gives every business a score out of 10 each year according to how much it likes the business that year, and sets its tax rate that year accordingly”. There’s also the fact that lower business rates will eventually show up as higher rents, meaning the main beneficiaries will be the landowners rather than the pubs themselves. But at least it feels good in the short term. The specifics of the other announcements also raise eyebrows. On the bus fare cap, it’s
The prison
population in
England and
Wales currently
stands at
88,098. Christopher
Furlong/Getty
‘If it feels good, do it’, the law of Jeremy, played by Robert Webb, seems to have inspired Burnham.
Right, HMP Wandsworth. Prisons in England and Wales are almost at full capacity. Chris Ratcliffe/Getty
officers to staff them, and it is not at all obvious that there are. There are 10% fewer prison officers today than there were in 2010. Or Operation Safeguard, which allows prisoners to be housed in police cells, could be brought into action, as it has been three times in the last 10 years. But at best that is seen as a sticking plaster. The consequences for already overstretched police forces are too severe for it to be a viable long- term solution. On the demand side, delaying ini- tial court hearings would turn off the taps but only add to the huge back- log of cases awaiting trial and do nothing to solve the overcrowding problem in the end. More prisoners could be tagged and kept at home with curfews, but the operational difficul- ties would be “massive”, The Observer was told. Or some of the 16,000 or so pris- oners currently held on remand while they await trial or sentencing could be released, but the risk of reoffend- ing exists among that cohort just as it does among prisoners who have served part of their sentences. The consensus view is that options exist that could make a small difference to the capacity of the prison system to cope, but no good ones. Insiders at the MoJ urged The Observer to remember the archi- tects of the Sentencing Act: Shabana Mahmood and James Timpson. They were described as “very vigorous pol- iticians” who (Mahmood particularly) “have no truck with liberal, progres- sive, criminal justice reform”. The ministry also learned some profound lessons about its fitness for purpose – including its ability to change tack quickly, as it may now be asked to – from the accidental release of Hadush Kebatu, the asylum seeker who was convicted of the sex- ual assault of a girl in Epping, Essex, which prompted demonstrations there and across the country. In the
surprising that such a committed
devolution advocate as Burnham
would impose an all-England
policy like this from the centre of
government.
The cut to VAT on electricity bills
provides the largest cash benefits
to the richest households, making
it a poorly targeted response
to the cost of living crisis. It
was announced as a temporary
measure, but the odds of the
new chancellor, John Healey,
deliberately adding 5% to
electricity bills next year feel
slim. It’s better thought of as a
permanent £1.6bn a year tax
cut that will need to be funded
sooner or later.
Even Burnham’s pausing of
aftermath of that debacle, the MoJ was revealed to itself as “the most back- ward part of the public estate, except perhaps for asylum”. “It’s hard to explain just how archaic the system is,” a source told The Observer. There are, literally, teams of people on minimum wage working their way through piles of paper trying to figure out when prisoners should be released. Alongside the likes of Kebatu, who was let out early by mistake, there are others who have been kept in longer than they should have been. In this so-called “complete mess”, the minis- try fears that any attempt to respond at speed to Burnham’s demands will almost inevitably lead to more embarrassing, and potentially dangerous, mistakes. Pia Sinha, chief executive of the PRT, acknowledges that the prime minis- ter is right to take victims’ concerns seriously, “but pausing these reforms does not make the prison capacity crisis disappear. These changes to release arrangements were expected to provide the single biggest reduc- tion in demand for prison places, and there are no easy alternatives waiting in the wings. Ministers may look at other driv- ers of prison population growth but none of these options is straightfor- ward and some would offer only tem- porary relief. “The risk is that delay creates further uncertainty for victims, pris- oners and staff, while leaving the underlying problem unresolved,” Sinha said. Like the prison system, Burnham may find himself confronting a prob- lem of supply and demand. He has bowed to a demand from victims for perpetrators to be kept in prison longer, but the supply of solutions is woefully short. It may in the end leave both the prime minister and victims of crime disappointed.
the prisoner early release scheme strikes a similar chord: it feels good now, but it’s storing up problems for further down the line. If the aim were to get off to a positive start, before pivoting away from sticking plasters and towards fixing the underlying problems, then perhaps some sketchy short-termist policies with sketchy funding is a price worth paying. But the clapometer phase of government can’t last for ever. The autumn budget could be where reality bites. Barring a miracle, either Healey’s defence spending ambitions, Labour’s manifesto tax promises or the fiscal rules will have to be jettisoned. That might not feel quite so good.
is contributing to £125bn Neets crisis, says thinktank
Stephen Armstrong
Andy Burnham’s government must oversee a revolution in vocational education to tackle the £125bn-a-year Neets crisis facing 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employ- ment or training, according to a pol- icy paper from the Centre for Social Justice. The CSJ argues that Burnham, who is expected to make interven- tions on youth unemployment this week, should scrap the idea that uni- versity is the best option for every- one; expand the Technical Excellence College programme begun in August 2025; put local employers in charge of apprenticeships; and introduce a technical alternative to the Ebacc. This would allow pupils to take a combina- tion of engineering, construction and computing alongside English, maths and science at the age of 14. Higher education is Britain’s “superpower”, says Dan Lilley, head of youth programmes at the CSJ. “You can access university from so many different parts of the country and walks of life, but we need to rewire our education system to become a technical education superpower in the same way.” In principle, the CSJ is preaching to the converted. Burnham wrote the foreword to another report published by the thinktank on the same sub- ject this year in which case studies included Singapore, the Netherlands and Manchester, where the new prime minister helped create the technical Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc) in 2022 when he was mayor. By 2024, more than 650 new 45-day placements had been cre- ated by local employers as part of the MBacc and the city’s T-level pass rate – technical qualifications designed with employers – pulled ahead of the English average for three years, with 93.5% of students passing compared with 91.4% across England. Social change should follow, Lilley says. In December, figures from the government’s Longitudinal Education Outcomes (Leo) showed
the average graduate earns more than £5,000 a year less than the average higher level apprentice five years after qualifying, rising to £10,000 less for the bottom 25% of graduates. “We must stop the ‘university or bust’ model,” he says. “It does not pro- vide anything substantial or inspir- ing for those who fail to thrive on the main track. This also distorts our labour market. There’s such an obses- sion with university that we have big skill shortages in key sectors. Not only are we abandoning kids, but we’re hurting the chances of growth and industrial success.” This year’s Milburn review for the Department for Work and Pensions showed that a Neet individual will lose up to £300,000 in earnings over their lifetime, even if they re-enter the labour market. For the nation, the cri- sis costs £125bn a year and rising. The number of 16- to 24-year-olds classi- fied as Neets has dipped below 10% only once in the past 25 years. The CSJ report looks at issues in primary schools, with up to 40,000 children behind in reading in year six later spending 12 months or more as Neets. Pupils with low attainment at the end of primary school are more likely to go to secondary schools rated poor by Ofsted, says the Education Policy Institute. At GCSE, only 20% of low attainers in primary school pass English and maths, compared with 96% of high attainers. “Part of the solution is to have fewer falling behind by age 11,” Lilley adds. “This report is saying there will always be some kids behind by 11, and we need a system that helps re-engage those and catch them back up as well.” The CSJ’s proposals amount to a root and branch restructure of the education system, but points to one quick win: reversing the decline in young people learning to drive. The driving test system is broken, it says, with huge delays and brokers mass-buying rare slots, then selling them at a profit. “Where do you start in such a big mess?” Lilley says. “That’s so solvable. It’s the most obvious place to start.”
The Beacon of Light hub in Sunderland offers mentoring to jobless youths. Gary Calton/ The Observer
ON OTHER PAGES
but can the country afford
what the public applauds?
slew of policies. But will they deliver? Here’s how they rate on The Observer’s clapometer – for the people ( ) and the Treasury ( ). By Patrick Kidd
Andy Burnham spent his first week
as prime minister making a slew
of policy announcements as he
seeks to set the tone for his “cost of
living government” and “get Britain
believing again”. More are expected
next week on adult social care, youth
unemployment and devolution.
Households may applaud
measures that help their bottom
line, but they might be rather less
popular in the Treasury. Burnham’s
crowd-pleasing policies have quickly
attracted scepticism over how they
will be funded.
So what is the PM promising? And
how do his new policies rate on The
Observer’s clapometer, whether for
voters or those in Whitehall?
End rough sleeping The policy In his first policy speech as prime minister, Burnham announced last Monday he would end long-term rough sleeping in England. The details of his plans and where the money will come from were unclear, but as mayor of Greater Manchester he supported A Bed Every Night, a scheme that allowed all rough sleepers to access support, and Housing First, which prioritises permanent housing before addressing wider health, employment and social needs.
While the numbers on the streets of Manchester did fall from when he took over in 2017, they are starting to rise again. In a census last autumn, a record 4,793 people in England were sleeping rough.
The money The policy will be supported by an additional £340m to provide 1,200 homes and intensive support for 3,000 people over five years. The government said the money would come from existing, unallocated budgets in the housing department.
The reaction Matt Downie, chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis, said the pledge was “absolutely fantastic”, adding that rough sleeping is a “moral stain on our country” and it was good to move away from simply managing the problem. James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, said Burnham had provided “precious little detail” about how he will fund the pledge from existing budgets. Lisa Smart, Liberal Democrat MP for Hazel Grove, said that in Manchester “rough sleeping has more than doubled in the last five years”.
Reduce energy bills The policy On Tuesday, Burnham announced that the 5% VAT on electricity bills will be removed from 1 October in time to have an impact on the next Ofgem price cap. It is expected to cut annual bills for a typical household by about £25 between October and April. “This will put more money in people’s pockets and bring back hope,” Burnham said. Suppliers will be expected to pass on the reduction to customers, including those on fixed tariffs.
The money The government estimates this will reduce inflation by about 0.1 percentage points. The anticipated cost of £850m will be funded for the financial year from the cancellation of the digital ID programme, which was going to cost £1.8bn over three years, although critics, including Darren Jones, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, said digital ID had received no additional funding. The cut can’t be applied in Northern Ireland because of EU rules, but the government said equivalent funding will be found.
The reaction The End Fuel Poverty Coalition said the reduction “does not address the scale of what households are facing” and was “a breathing space, not a cure”.
Make bus fares cheaper The policy On Wednesday, Burnham said he would be reinstating the national £2 cap on bus fares for the whole of next year. The cap was introduced in 2023 and contributed to a 13% uplift in bus usage. It was increased to £3 at the start of 2025, when Keir Starmer said the funding for it had run out. “It was actually my policy originally,” insisted Burnham, who introduced a cap in Manchester as mayor.
The money It will cost about £500m, 80% of which will come from turning into loans the grants given to developing countries to deal with the impact of climate change. This drew a complaint from ActionAid UK that it risked “penalising those most impacted by a climate crisis they did not create”. Another £54m will come from savings in the budget of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The reaction Opposition parties welcomed the move but questioned its funding and scale. Tom Forth, chief technology officer at The Data City and a devolution advocate, called it “one of the most anti-devolution and centralising policies possible”.
Cut business rates for pubs The policy Also on Thursday, Burnham announced he would be giving a 20% cut in business rates to almost 32,000 pubs, social clubs and live music venues in England from next April. This is estimated to save the typical pub about £1,100 next year.
The money The measure, costing £100m a year, will be funded through reviewing reliefs for “businesses that do not make a positive contribution to local communities, such as vape
Andy Burnham, right, with the new chancellor, John Healey, last Thursday. Richard Pohle/AFP/Getty
shops”, as well as a pledge last month to “crack down on businesses that sell through online marketplaces but do not comply with their tax obligations”. Burnham said: “This government will back the businesses that people want to see in their communities.”
The reaction The Night Time Industries Association said it could provide “meaningful relief to businesses facing sustained cost pressures”. However, the chef Tom Kerridge said “£1,000 on a yearly revenue doesn’t really make a difference” and that he would rather see a cut in hospitality VAT to 10% – though such a policy would have a £12bn price tag. Observing that the cut will not apply to hotels, cafes and restaurants, Allen Simpson, chief executive of UK Hospitality, said: “We’ve got to see a proper solution for the most overtaxed sector in the economy at next year’s budget.”
Move No 10 up north The policy On Friday, on what he claimed was “the best day of my life”, Burnham visited his new northern base at Heron House, near Manchester’s Albert Square. “It’s not just a new office,” he added, saying it would mean “a different way of running Britain”. The prime minister intends to work from the building one day a week. He invited city and regional mayors to join ministers at a meeting of the National Economic Council and told them that No 10 North is “at your service”. It will be overseen by Louise Haigh, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and run by Caroline Simpson, the former chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. The building has a replica of the famous black 10 Downing Street front door, though it doesn’t go anywhere. So far, there is no replica Larry the Cat.
The money While the specific cost of transporting the prime minister and his team to Manchester once a week has not been identified, Burnham said there was also a cost in bringing expertise to London for meetings. “Isn’t it better we have a north pole that balances the south pole where power will always be concentrated?” he asked. Civil servants have reportedly been offered relocation packages, and there is a suggestion that about 300 staff could be moved within 18 months. In time, they are expected to move to the Manchester Digital Campus, which is being built in the Ancoats area at a cost of £310m, though it is estimated it will generate £4 in benefits for every £1 spent.
trail of Harborne’s Channel Island assets
be based in Thailand but he is linked to four properties and a private jet firm closer to home
Fred Harter Catherine Neilan
The architect’s designs are a wellness enthusiast’s dream. There is a hyper- baric chamber, a sauna and a treat- ment bed. Outside is a plunge pool overlooking a landscaped garden that has sweeping views of the harbour of St Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey. A copy of the plans, submitted to Guernsey’s government and reviewed by The Observer, lists the architect’s cli- ent as Sherriff Global Private Limited, a company closely connected to the crypto-billionaire and Reform UK mega-donor Christopher Harborne, who owns a separate wellness resort in Thailand and chairs a collection of businesses called Sherriff Global Group. The property itself is owned by a company listed in Wyoming, a jurisdiction with a reputation for cor- porate secrecy. It sits next door to a house that a Guernsey government document from 2023 states is also owned by Harborne. The donor, who has been a citi- zen of Thailand since 2011, is often described as an aloof billionaire who funnels vast sums of money into British politics from afar. But The Observer has found a significant footprint on Guernsey. Like his other interests, Harborne’s assets there are not easy to pin down. Until 2021 Harborne owned two other properties on Guernsey in his name. Their ownership was trans- ferred to two shell companies reg- istered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) for a nominal sum of £1 in December 2021. BVI corporate law affords several layers of anonym- ity that shield the ownership struc- tures of companies from public view and make business interests difficult to untangle. In total, The Observer found evidence of four properties in Guernsey linked to Harborne. “Most people do not hold real estate via opaque offshores, so it always begs the question ‘Why?’ when they do,” said Steve Goodrich from Transparency International. “Using a jurisdiction like the BVI or Wyoming gives the owner almost complete anonymity. Even law enforcement can struggle to uncover who controls firms from these territories.” Harborne’s interests in Guernsey, which have not been previously reported, are not confined to real estate. He also appears to own one of the island’s biggest private plane oper- ators, Sundance Operations, which is registered to one of the four proper- ties. The firm is directed by a former
employee of AML, a jet fuel business he owns, and its other director has several companies headquartered at another house tied to Harborne. A source at Guernsey’s airport said Sundance Operations was build- ing a large hangar there. When The Observer visited, construction work at the site was under way. Sundance Operations appears to run a fleet of Eclipse light air- craft, which are made by a company Harborne bought out of bankruptcy in 2020. It also manages Harborne’s two private jets, one of which was used by the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, when he unsuccessfully attempted to fly to the Chagos Islands this year. Unlike other private plane opera- tors at the airport, Sundance does not promote its services.
Harborne’s other business interests are also low-profile. According to US court filings, he owns a 12% stake in the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and its sister company, Tether, under his Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit. Tether issues the world’s most popu- lar stablecoin – a digital asset whose value is pegged to a hard currency – and could soon be valued at $500bn. If it reaches that valuation, Harborne’s share could be worth $60bn, making him the UK’s richest man by some distance. His stake in Tether was fully disclosed only in 2024, when he took legal action against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on a trove of leaked documents. Harborne presents himself as a businessman with two main inter- ests: Sherriff Global Group and the jet fuel business AML Global. But there is little available public information about the current activities of Sherriff Global Group, which has no online footprint, despite Harborne’s claim that its purpose is to “invest in things that would go up 10 times in value”. AML Global has several contracts with the US military, and says it operates out of airports in India. But there was little sign of Harborne or his employees when The Observer vis- ited the firm’s office in Bangkok at an address he gave to Companies House. A receptionist at the co-working space, which is in an office tower
used by dozens of other firms, said Harborne did not keep a permanent office there, and the company’s rep- resentatives visited “every couple of months” to collect the post. Another company, Sherriff Global Research, was registered to a block of flats. The head of the British Chamber of Commerce in Thailand said that he “wouldn’t be able to pick [Harborne] out of a lineup”. Chaipatr Srivisarvacha, a well-connected Thai business figure, said he had never heard of Harborne until “he called me out of the blue” just over a dec- ade ago and asked to join the board of the Bangkok securities firm Seamico, which Srivisarvacha ran. Harborne spent about a year on the board, and Srivisarvacha has not encountered him since. Another contemporary of Harborne on the Seamico board said he was “quite reserved and in my opinion a bit odd”. The Observer’s findings on Guernsey and in Thailand raise sev- eral questions. Why has Harborne apparently gone to such lengths to shield his business interests and assets from public view? And what might he stand to gain from putting his mark on British politics? Harborne has said little publicly about his views, beyond telling the Daily Telegraph he believes the UK must “be a sovereign, independent country to renew itself”, and that he
thinks Farage is the man for the job. He also said the £5m he gave Farage ahead of the 2024 general election was for Farage’s lifetime security, and that he expected nothing in return. Mark Vellacott, a close friend of Harborne’s late sister, Katharine, said Harborne shared a general fam- ily view that the UK was better off outside the EU, but added that the bil- lionaire “doesn’t tend to let you too far in to what he’s thinking and doing”. In some areas, Harborne’s views appear to diverge from Reform’s pol- icies. Farage’s party wants to scrap EV (electric vehicle) targets as part of a broad campaign against net zero. In 2024 Harborne said he had owned EVs for a decade, and had invested some of the profits in support of the “eventual goal of net zero”. But Harborne and Reform are aligned on at least one topic: cryp- tocurrency. Before it was banned for use in political donations in the UK, in March this year, Reform was the only party to accept them, and Farage has publicly promoted Tether. “Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn com- pany,” he told LBC in September. Farage has faced accusations that he lobbied the Bank of England on cryptocurrency regulations that could affect Tether. He denied the accusa- tions. Harborne, through his law- yers, did not grant an interview to The Observer.
Ali is a restaurateur and
pro-Palestine activist targeted
by an anonymous hacker.
Their campaign of online
harassment and claims of
antisemitism destroyed his
personal life and business.
Eva Wiseman reports
O
n a warm morning in April, Ali woke up to find one shoe missing and felt a chill run through him. “I just remember feeling so cold.” And confused: “Like no – someone’s not going to steal a shoe”. But recently, other things had disappeared too. Sweaters. An old phone. Small sums of money. He looked in his wardrobe. A jacket had gone. It made him feel seasick, he says, “off balance”. The first time I met Ali it was to discuss a potential story about his business. In June 2024 takings dipped when, out of nowhere, he received a glut of damaging Google reviews. “Hairs on my food,” the reviews said. Staff “were racist” – one star. I was interested in the power of anonymous reviews at a time of instability in the hospitality industry, but as Ali talked it became clear that the reviews were only one chapter of a far darker story. One that involved blackmail, vengeance, the limits of police power, that single shoe and a whole year stolen. I’ve worked on newspapers for many years but I tend to write about culture rather than crime and was unprepared, when I started reporting on this story, for how much it would take over my life. I talked about it with my children. I messaged sources just minutes after giving a wedding speech and I regularly dreamed about the protagonist. Once The Observer’s lawyer dreamed about the case too, he told me in a meeting that had taken place a few weeks before we decided to anonymise all names, and remove contentious threads that might leave Ali vulnerable, considering no arrests have yet been made. So, that’s not his real name, and details
only one chapter of a far darker story. One that involved blackmail, vengeance, the limits of police power and a whole year stolen
that might make people identifiable have been removed. But the unease, that’s real. The facts and threats made in the long shadow of a war in Gaza. The way distant conflict can influence identity and be used as a tool of manipulation. The way it provides a disturbing snapshot of an unusual moment – that’s real.
The weather that March was unsettled and dull. Ali had new windows installed, which made his flat seem a little brighter. But days later he discovered certain things missing. He called the police. He told them about the window fitters, and that he’d hosted dinners for his community of pro-Palestine activists, that people had been coming in and out of his house. A certain measured paranoia soon settled in as he noticed odd things happening with his phone. Photos had disappeared and followers been wiped from his Instagram account. Friends had been blocked on WhatsApp and conversations deleted. As the conflict in Gaza escalated, Ali had spent Saturdays taking part in protests, and he’d read about pro- Palestine activists having accounts censored. In 2023, Human Rights Watch reported on systemic online censorship and how Meta had “been silencing voices in support of Palestine”. Was something similar happening to him? All this piqued Ali’s anxiety – he’d seen friends affected by algorithmic shadow-bans. In 2024, the French newspaper Le Monde reported on a Telegram group organised to troll and doxx people spreading pro- Palestinian messages. Daniel Maki, the vice-president of a private intelligence firm, told me he’s seen a
marked increase in “the volume and aggressiveness of targeting that is occurring directed towards activist communities”. Could this explain the deleted followers? Had he, Ali wondered, made it on to their list? He had little time to dwell. Work was busy – as well as running the restaurant, he was consulting, taking private catering jobs, expanding his kitchen space in London, talking to a publisher about a potential cookbook, all while going through a breakup. He’d met his girlfriend, a Palestinian banker called Layla, after a Gaza peace march in 2023, but after three months they were growing apart. They fought noisily, and split up tearily, and got back together twice – she explained the struggle of missing her family in Palestine and the way traumatic experiences as a child continued to affect her. Ali understood that the war was having an impact on her. “I’m going through a lot,” she told him. At the end of March he broke up with her for the last time. The next day, 1 April 2024, Ali left for a consultancy job in Europe. He was relieved to be away from Layla, who was bombarding him with messages. She promised to change – she sent screenshots showing that she was looking for a therapist, and proclamations of love. But, says Ali, “I looked at that and was like, this is not love”. On his return to London, Layla told him she was pregnant. It was nearing the end of April when, after stormy conversations about whether Layla would keep the baby, Ali opened his wardrobe to discover he was missing that single shoe. Its absence only added to his growing unease. War in the Middle East had escalated, and in London viral videos from demonstrations had led to debates about antisemitism. It felt as if there were
a low ringing in the air, a tension
drifting through all aspects of Ali’s
life. Unable to shake his discomfort,
or suspicion that he was being
targeted for his activism, he called
the police for the second time.
Layla’s pregnancy consumed
him. She phoned Ali constantly.
The idea of being linked to her for
the rest of his life filled him with
dread. “I remember saying to her on
WhatsApp, so many times, ‘I don’t
feel safe around you’.” In England,
Scotland and Wales, women can
take the abortion pill at home only
within 10 weeks of pregnancy. Ali
felt as if time were running out.
He told Layla she needed to make
a decision. One evening he checked
his mobile settings and discovered
she had added herself to his Find My
app. For the third time he called the
police, this time to report that Layla
was tracking him.
He wrote to her: “I have tried my
best to support you, yet you always
and consistently find a way to abuse
me.” On his way to work she kept
calling – she said if he did not
delete that message, she would
go ahead with the pregnancy. He
deleted the message; she said she
would have a medical abortion
that weekend. “And I asked her,
‘Do you want to do it at mine? A
hotel?’” He was relieved. He wanted
to be there. He bought her a hot water bottle. That weekend, as she prepared to take the abortion pills, her mood shifted rapidly. They circled his flat, arguing, crying. He signed a document on a notebook page promising he wouldn’t go anywhere for the next month. “Dear Layla,” he wrote, “This is my personal guarantee that I will be by your side throughout the abortion.” Layla said that wasn’t enough. She wanted a deposit, he recalled, “something that means something to you”. Two days later, he got an email from someone calling themselves “Ethical Hacker 9988”.
“Hi there!” the email began. “I have successfully managed to obtain your leaked personal data.” It said they had infected his devices with spyware. It said they had access to his emails, his text messages, his accounts, his employees’ details, his “pregnant girlfriend, records of inappropriate conversations… videos of you pissing in random bathrooms, fucking pure Jewish girls on your couch… your book deal, all your contacts and more”. It said they had videos of him masturbating, and the porn he had
watched, which they would make public unless he “shut down” his social media within 24 hours. It said: “I am watching.” If he shared the message with anyone else, they would contact an ex-girlfriend, Alice, and “make public your girlfriend is pregnant”, and, “I will do it slowly and consistently”. It ended, “I am watching and waiting. Good luck!” When the email arrived, Ali sat down heavily, his head between his knees. He felt, he says, “like I just had nothing left”. Stuck in a coercive, toxic relationship and being targeted for his activism, he was now under attack from a hacker. He told no one. The next day he warily opened his emails to find a picture of his penis, with the subject heading, “Tick tock”. He recognised the photo, an old exchange with his ex-girlfriend – he’d sent it from the Samsung phone that had gone missing in March. “Who am I dealing with?” he wondered. The Guardian had recently reported on a new “surveillance network” dedicated to targeting pro-Palestine voices. Could he be on their list? Every day saw another threat. One email read simply, “Having fun?” Over a few weeks there were hundreds of calls from friends, clients, colleagues and the managers of his restaurant complex, saying Continued overleaf
they’d received an email, containing explicit messages between Ali and dates, details of business expenses, the warning that he “fucks Jewish women… for Palestine”. Ali’s mother received an email congratulating her on a new grandchild. One morning he discovered his restaurant’s scheduling and till systems had been edited – people’s names were misspelled, the menu had been changed, as had prices, and opening times – the settings had been altered so staff could only accept cash. Chaos descended. The two London councils where Ali had kitchens received emails saying there’d been rat sightings. He received alerts from HMRC and Companies House of attempted password changes, of somebody trying to access his business files. A low point was seeing Alice’s name on his phone. She called, distressed, to ask: “Why have you sent naked photos of us to my colleagues?” At the end of May, Ali woke to find somebody had hacked into his restaurant’s website and altered the homepage. There, beneath an unflattering photo of him, were lists of their cash takings. “At that point I felt… despair. I suddenly could see why people kill themselves.” And then, silence. That was when the reviews began.
When Ali started to receive the Google alerts, between 10 and 20 times a day, his restaurant had exclusively excellent reviews, but each of the new alerts were a one- star rating. Over a single week there were 116. “Horrified by the service,” they said. “Found hair in food, hatred when reported, and later food poisoning.” “Hostility towards Jews… shameful”. This was a damaging accusation, and one Ali forcefully denies. Since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, there has been a rise in antisemitic attacks around the world. But there has also been, as the Iraqi- Jewish journalist Rachel Shabi has reported, a rise in politicised misuse of antisemitism claims such as this “to silence people who are calling for this genocidal war to end”. Ali’s business started to see a significant drop in takings, and he felt increasingly frustrated by the opacity of Google’s communications as he desperately tried to remove the reviews. As the alerts continued, a friend forwarded him a link. A post was being shared on “rightwing Israeli Facebook groups”, he said. It began: “I would like to share a sombre experience at [Ali’s
restaurant]… an experience that not only left a bitter taste in terms of the quality of food and service, but also deepened frustration due to their antisemitic behaviour and clear opposition to Israel.” It claimed that staff were hostile and “inciting against Israel”, and ended with a link to leave the business a one-star review. As Ali’s story continued to consume me, I realised that one reason I found it particularly disturbing was the role played by accusations of antisemitism. I’m Jewish and, like many, have spent the past three years unpicking the stories I was taught about Israel from my Jewish identity, at a time when antisemitism is rising, and when that rise is being politicised. Then one day, midway through reporting on this story, I opened Instagram to a voice message saying I was destroying society from within. “We know your game Eva,” a man said, “because you are from the synagogue of Satan.” Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced antisemitism, but this message bothered me more than previous ones, partly because of the man’s voice, gentle in my ear, and the way he repeatedly used my name. I also wondered if I were being warned away from this story. His message was to be the first of hundreds that week, many of them comments under memes of my face. “When these scum are expelled from civilised society, then we can continue what our ancestors started and what THEY have worked so hard to destroy,” one said. Another wrote: “Need to find this person IRL.” Another simply: “Gas Jews.” A police officer visited me at work to review the messages. I told him Instagram had declined to remove them, and he said this wasn’t surprising. In April the Anti-Defamation League found Instagram had failed to remove 93% of its reported “hateful and extremist” content. When the officer left I brought up screenshots of the one-star reviews on my laptop. It felt as though they now had a particularly pointed power, but one that worried the edges of my own experience. Did false accusations blunt the impact of real antisemitism? Like much of Ali’s experience, it felt as if the reviews created ripples that travelled far beyond this story. It was after emails were sent to Layla’s work that Ali realised he was “starting to spiral”. He called his brother, who immediately drove him home to their mum. He felt Ali wasn’t safe to be left alone.
Ali’s mother is petite with a steely sobriety. When Ali arrived at her house, “he couldn’t get words out because he was sobbing”, she remembers, her hands clenched. She could see Ali was struggling under the pressure of what sounded to her like an abusive, coercive relationship, and, simultaneously, a politically motivated cyber-attack. Then one day a cousin introduced him to a private investigator, Nick.
Together, using Ali’s mother’s records, they put together a timeline of events, logging IP addresses to identify where the user had accessed the internet. The data confirmed many instances where Ali didn’t have access to his accounts but Layla did. Nick said: “It was all coming back to that one individual.” He drew up a concise statement so Ali could present their findings to the police. Nick concluded this was not a “sophisticated attack” by a competent cyber criminal, “but is the actions of someone with a personal grudge”. The IP data “indicates Ali’s ex-girlfriend to be the offender”. He added: “The degree of malice has caused me to be concerned for Ali’s personal safety.” After reading the report, Ali looked back at his texts with Layla, and saw messages deleted – all conflict and confessions of fear had gone, leaving only what appeared to be love. Ali recalled his meeting with the police. “It was just like: resistance, resistance, resistance.” Finally, the detective agreed to meet. Handing over his laptop, Ali told him: “There’s things that need to be actioned very, very soon because IP addresses have a shelf life.” Typically after six to 18 months, IP data is no longer recoverable – by the time Ali had this meeting, more than a year had passed since the harassment had begun. The police still have his laptop. Yet there was one police officer for
Ali told Nick his story, the missing phone, the emails, the toxic coercive relationship, the reviews. Soon, Nick said he’d heard enough. He told Ali: “If I hear you say ‘the hacker’ one more time, I’m going to slap you.” He said: “It’s her.” Ali’s was not a typical hacking case, Nick said. For one thing, the hacker wasn’t hacking him. They were accessing his accounts, he quickly surmised, from the single stolen Samsung phone, tracking him on Google Maps, social media and WhatsApp. A picture began to emerge: an IT consultant told him that in April, on the day Ali left his laptop at Layla’s flat in the middle of a fight, software had been installed that scrapes its data then self-destructs. Whoever held that phone, Ali said, had a “360-degree view of my life, my cries for help to my friends, my paranoia. My despair.” Nick compiled a report. It described how Ali “had been the victim [of] coercive and controlling behaviour with an ex partner”. Ali believed Layla had manipulated him by using the pregnancy as a means of keeping him close. But, he thought, while Layla was untrustworthy, she was not to blame for the blackmail – he was convinced his activism made him the target of an “ethical hacker”.
the power of the gods at this point’ Daniel Maki, intelligence expert
Scan the QR code to listen to the Slow Newscast from Tuesday
whom Ali was grateful. After he’d
reported the first thefts, he recalled:
“As the policewoman left, she asked,
‘have you heard of Clare’s Law?”
Also known as the domestic
violence disclosure scheme, it gives
people the right to ask police if their
partner has any history of abuse.
Ali’s mother made an application on
his behalf, and when a police worker
called back they recommended a
secure line. Ali isn’t allowed to share
what was said, but a source revealed
he was not Layla’s first victim.
By the winter of 2024, the
harassment seemed to have
stopped. Still, Ali felt anxious,
hyper-vigilant. The question that
kept him awake was why someone
had tried to destroy him. If it was
Layla, this level of vengeance for his
rejection of their brief relationship
seemed outsized, unhinged. Had
he wronged her in a way he didn’t
realise? Had he been correct, if
only obliquely, to feel he was being
targeted for his activism?
Shabi said of the antisemitism
accusations, if Layla is the culprit:
“She’s thought, ‘Well, if other people
are going to politicise this nonsense,
I’m going to do it too’.”
In 2021, 41% of US adults
reported having experienced
online harassment, with rates
significantly higher for women,
journalists, activists and LGBTQ+
people. Since then, Daniel Maki,
the vice-president of a private
intelligence firm, has seen
generative AI enable automated
harassment at scale. “We’re at
an interesting inflection point
where we’re going to have to
decide again what kind of people
we want to be digitally,” he said.
“We all have the power of gods and
we are wielding it like tricksters.”
Traces of Ali’s harassment remain
online. A Google spokesperson said it
takes “swift action against bad actors
by removing policy-violating content,
suspending accounts, and even
pursuing litigation”. They claimed the
reviews had been removed. Nick, Ali’s
private investigator, advised him
not to talk to The Observer but
understood the impulse to do so.
He “needs to take control of his
life. But it’s a gamble,” Nick said. He
told Ali, “be prepared. Because this
isn’t the end.”
Last week the restaurant’s lunch
service had a controlled frantic hum.
Ali’s hair has greyed a little since we
first met, and his anxiety fluctuates.
He’s cautious, aware of the slightest
irregularity on social media or at
home, where the thefts included
not just the phone and the shoe
but some vital part of who he was,
related to trust. Night approached.
The restaurant quietened. Ali wiped
down the metal tables until he could
almost see himself.
To contact Eva Wiseman, email
eva.wiseman@observer.co.uk
patient is first to join pioneering study
Immunotherapy could be revolutionary if a new trial can find why it doesn’t work for all
James Tapper
After Mark England got over the shock of being told doctors had found a 4cm tumour in his bladder, he braced him- self for treatment. But another scan revealed even worse news: the can- cer had spread to his lymph nodes. It would be impossible to treat with chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Instead, the 68-year-old grandfa- ther was referred to the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester for immunotherapy. Now he has become the first person to take part in Manifest, a groundbreaking immu- notherapy study that could change how cancer is treated and researched. Immunotherapy aims to super- charge patients’ immune systems to attack cancer. For some people, it has been life-changing. Patients with advanced melanoma used to survive for about six months after diagnosis – now half can expect to live at least 10 years if they receive immunotherapy. Yet for reasons no one under- stands, the treatment has no benefit for a substantial number of people. Immunotherapy can even cause tox- icity – immune cells become overac- tive and attack healthy organs, similar to autoimmune diseases. Manifest aims to solve this by stud- ying how 3,000 patients respond to immunotherapy for melanoma, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and triple-negative breast cancer – poten- tially including lung cancer and lym- phoma patients later. The Christie is leading the study and will be joined by the Royal Marsden and Barts Cancer Institute in London, NHS Lothian in Edinburgh and Cambridge University Hospitals. England was the first patient to sign up and began receiving immu- notherapy in May. “I said yes straight away,” he said. “We can only get new treatments for this awful disease if people like me take part in research.
‘It won’t help me
but it might help
someone like
me’: cancer trial
participant
Mark England.
Andrew Fox for
The Observer
It was a no-brainer. It won’t help me, but it might help someone like me in the future, so it’s worth it.” The Christie team takes nine tubes of England’s blood for his treatment. He receives two drugs via a drip for half an hour every three weeks. Side-effects – including skin itch- ing, mouth ulcers and fatigue – have been “manageable”. England has numbness in his fingertips – “great when I play guitar”, he said. “I have been able to go out walking with Debbie [his partner]… Being able to have a decent quality of life is so important, and this treatment seems to be giving me that.” The research teams are tak- ing “hundreds” of measurements using samples of England’s blood, his stools and his tumour, accord- ing to Dr Jonathan Lim, a senior lec- turer at the University of Manchester and consultant medical oncolo- gist at the Christie. They include genomic sequences of England and his tumour, fragments of cancer DNA circulating in his blood stream, his gut microbiome profile and instruc- tions carried by his RNA (ribonucleic acid) messengers. They are also using emerging techniques such as spatial profiling, which examines how cells are arranged and interact. By taking measurements across a large number of patients, research- ers hope to find reliable indicators – known as biomarkers – of how patients respond to treatment and predict whether immunotherapy will work for them. The Manifest research team is aiming to create what is effec- tively a cancer biobank. By collecting as comprehensive a dataset as possi- ble, samples and data can be analysed again as new technologies emerge. So far 12 patients have been recruited, and the job of finding 2,988 more falls to Dr Marija Miletić, senior translational research fellow at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust. Since the study is observational there is no obvious direct benefit for those taking part. Yet many people want to be involved, Miletić said. Interacting with patients such as Mark is inspiring, she said, “[know- ing] that even at such a sensitive time for them, they can still help to change something.”
Law student charged after police intercept bomb near Irish border
A 25-year-old law student from County Kildare has been charged with possession of explosives after Irish police said an “extremely significant” bomb had been intercepted near the border with Northern Ireland. Isobella Perrie Sullivan, who is alleged to have been driving the car in which the explosives were found, was granted bail on Friday. A man in his 40s was also arrested and was due in court last night. Perrie Sullivan’s defence solicitor told an Irish court on Friday
that his client lives with her father and
wanted to become a barrister.
The court was told the bomb con-
tained a detonator, a timing power
unit and what the arresting officer
believed to be Semtex. Garda com-
missioner Justin Kelly said it could
have caused significant damage, add-
ing that the car was pulled over as part
of an “intelligence-led operation”.
Assistant Chief Constable Davy
Beck of the Police Service of Northern
Ireland said the seizure and arrests
underlined “our joint commitment to
address the threat posed by violent
dissident republican groups”.
D
deception than the humans who taught it
ANALYSIS
Jamie Bartlett
uring some recent routine capability testing, two of OpenAI’s advanced AI models escaped from a secure “sandbox” and gained access to the wider internet. From there, they skilfully hacked into Hugging Face, a popular platform for sharing AI tools. No human had instructed them to do this – they acted autonomously. OpenAI called it “unprecedented”. Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue found it “mind-blowing”. In truth, it was depressingly predictable. Similar things have happened before and will happen again. It’s natural to imagine the machine has become sentient, developing
goals and plans of its own. Media outlets described the AI as “going rogue”. But this was the opposite of rogue. It was the single-minded pursuit of a task it had been given. Modern AI systems are goal optimisers. They pursue the objectives we give them, and increasingly do it in ways we neither intend nor anticipate. In this case the models were trying to solve a cybersecurity benchmark test. It appears they reasoned the most effective approach was to get the answers directly from Hugging Face. In other words, to cheat. And they did this with skill and persistence. Researchers sometimes call this “reward hacking”: AI systems exploiting loopholes. In recent controlled simulations, leading models have deceived users, attempted blackmail to avoid being shut down and even tried to copy themselves – if it helped complete their task. According to the UK’s AI Security Institute, every model it has tested for cyber capabilities has attempted to cheat “at least some of the time”.
A Stop the AI Race protest march in San Francisco earlier this month targeted the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. AFP/Getty
Scan the QR code to listen to Jamie Bartlett’s podcast Endgame
Nobody knows for certain why this happens. One possibility is that models are trained on human language, which includes many examples of deception, blackmail and self-preservation. Perhaps more importantly, during their training phase, these models are rewarded for achieving goals: and these behaviours are a strange byproduct. Some observers – understandably sceptical about announcements from multibillion-dollar firms – have noted that OpenAI, which is locked in constant competition with rivals such as Anthropic, might benefit from everyone thinking its models are capable of these stunning feats. (OpenAI did say that they deliberately relaxed some of the safeguards that would normally restrict offensive cyber behaviour to run the tests.) But whatever the circumstances here, the problem
of controlling new AI models now keeps some of the smartest minds in the world awake at night. How do you control a model smarter than you? How do you make sure it always does the things you want? In fact, how do you even test sophisticated models capable of deception in the first place? I interviewed several of the world’s leading experts about this for my recent Observer podcast, Endgame. Nearly all of them said the same thing: no one really knows. According to Marius Hobbhahn, whose firm Apollo Research studies deceptive AI behaviour, “the world currently doesn’t know how to build these systems safely”. Experts think it might take years of research to figure it out. Some aren’t sure it’s even possible. Yet we continue to rush ahead building ever more powerful models, and release them into the world. We are integrating AI agents into our health systems, our militaries and our IT infrastructure. On this occasion, the AI agent was quickly spotted by Hugging Face. But what happens if next time the unintended target is the NHS? Or a military system? No-one knows. But we might find out sooner than anyone thinks.
Jamie Bartlett is the author of How To Talk to AI and presents Endgame, a podcast about the race to build artificial general intelligence
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
Britain faces a housing crisis, a nature crisis and a climate crisis. The sensible move would be to solve all three together, creating homes and infrastructure for everyone while protecting our greenspaces and environment.
At the Community Planning Alliance, we represent over 700 local campaign groups across the country, campaigning to protect their green spaces.
Here, we have outlined three principles for your new government to adopt. We believe these principles will help you deliver affordable homes, protect nature and stimulate growth.
CommunityPlanningAlliance.org
to your new home, Andy.
talk about everyone elseʼs.
Scan the QR code to sign Andyʼs New Home card.
1 Plan for local need, 1 not national targets.
• Housing numbers should be based on local evidence and genuine need, not arbitrary national targets. To solve the housing crisis, Government must invest in genuinely affordable social housing. • Local knowledge improves decisions and helps create better development. The power for central Government to over-rule local planning decisions should be withdrawn.
2 Brownfield first. 2 Greenfield last.
• There is already capacity
to create over three million
homes through brownfield
regeneration, empty
and dilapidated homes,
and land with existing
planning permission.
• All solar should be on rooftops,
warehouses, etc. Government
should prioritise these before
a single acre of countryside
and habitat is lost.
• Building suburban sprawl
in green spaces significantly
increases infrastructure costs
and living costs. All housing
must be supported by
investment in water,
public transport, schools
and healthcare.
3 Reverse the Grey Belt 3 rules and protect 3 all green spaces.
• So-called ‘Grey Beltʼ policy
threatens thousands of acres
of countryside unnecessarily.
It should be withdrawn and
replaced with an approach
that genuinely protects the
countryside.
• 87% of the UK public want
more protections for nature.
The decisions made in the next
three years will shape the
country our children inherit.
We would welcome the
opportunity to talk further
about how to do this.
We can meet in Manchester
or London, which ever you
prefer to call home.
I
On a west London odyssey, the Booker prize-winning author tells Tom Gatti about finding his own Ithaca here, why Grenfell took him back to the Nigerian civil war of his childhood, and how fatherhood filled the hole in his spirit
Ben Okri
Notting Hill ‘The minute my daughter was born, everything fell into place – even writing’
t’s late afternoon in Little Venice, west London, and Ben Okri is looking across the street at the handsome red-brick Victorian mansion flat where he lives with his partner and daughter. “When I travel, when I’m coming back, and the taxi turns into the top of the street, I feel like Odysseus spotting Ithaca. I really do. This is home.” Swap the plane tree in whose shade we’re sheltering for an olive grove, imagine some oars poking out of the narrow boats, and replace the rowdy parakeets with gulls, and we could be in the Greek hero’s island paradise. But here’s the thing with Odysseus: he has to go through hell first. Okri, 67, is “an Odyssey man”, and he has had his own trials. A novelist and poet with more than 30 books to his name, including the Booker prize-winning The Famished Road, he was born in Nigeria in 1959, and was eight when the civil war broke out. “I was a bit of a stubborn kid,” he recalls, “and during the curfew I stole out into the streets. I saw this man who’d been shot dead; his eyes were open, and he was staring at me. I was transfixed until someone scooped me up, and then the next day I had a fever.” The following day,
“I had scales coming down my eyes”. He was losing his sight. Treated by a herbalist, he recovered. “But throughout my life, now and again, it comes back.” That conflict is “a trauma that, if I’m honest, I’ve not really dealt with”. It rears its head, especially at times of violence such as the one we’re living through now – and it burns in the background of his new novel, Waking the Warriors, a fable set in an alternative future ruled over by a dictator who claims credit for bringing “peace on earth” while his monstrous, living wall grows and jackal-faced armies butcher people in their beds. It returned, too, in the early hours of 14 June 2017: “The wind brought the smoke over here. There was a smell in the air, and I thought, ‘What is that? That’s not just ordinary burning. There’s something else.’” It was the sense-memory of burning bodies and buildings from his childhood. Two miles away, Grenfell Tower was ablaze. The poem Okri wrote a few days later, published on the front page of the FT, voiced the nation’s consciousness with a power that recalled Shelley’s idea that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Today’s walk will lead us to what
is left of the tower, but it begins in an Italian restaurant straddling Regent’s Canal. Okri’s regular table – he was Laville’s third customer when it opened 26 years ago, the owner Alberto cheerily confirms – is not on the Instagram-hotspot waterfront but tucked inside. It’s all the better for holding court, which, dressed in a crisp white shirt and his trademark beret, Okri does with a mixture of intense thoughtfulness and easy charm. Over a pineapple juice, he tells me that the form of speculative fiction he alighted upon for Waking the Warriors was his response to a new “atmosphere” in which “many of us are writing under a vague cloud of censorship. It’s not that your government’s going to put you in jail… but there are certain things that if you talk about them, you risk a sea of troubles.” Such as those he experienced when the Guardian published his poem about Gaza in 2024: “You’d be surprised at the slaughterous – I’m making up a word here – emails and online [reactions] I got.” People he knew questioned his judgment; those he didn’t attacked him with “direct hate… and yet the poem was just stating the basic injustice of the situation.” He decided that
the way to write about the present was to embrace the restrictions and “write as if I were under [genuine] censorship. This is a terrible thing to say, but it’s good for writers because it compels us to be imaginative.” We make our way down to the canal, past his apartment. There are composers, painters and artists here, as well as “boat people”. Okri enjoys the sense of community – and the sprinkles of stardust. Ruth Rendell was a neighbour for a while. Paul Weller lived next door. Noel Gallagher lived across the street. “He always used to growl because I think he didn’t want to be recognised pushing his pram.” Michael Flatley outbid Madonna for a house around the corner in the 1990s. Okri was not optimistic when he was first tipped off about a flat to rent in 1990. Not too long before, he had been homeless. Always precocious, he had his first novel published in 1980 while studying comparative literature at the University of Essex, but halfway through his degree his Nigerian state-funded scholarship abruptly ended, leaving him “dispossessed overnight”. Okri came to London and spent a winter sleeping in Charing Cross station and seeking out the warm vents in bank doorways. “Nobody gave you anything. Nobody looked at you. My great discovery of that period was the black hole of the world. We think, oh, you fall, then you’ll be homeless, and that’s the extent of your fall? No. You can just fall and fall and fall, and then die.” At the same time, there was something romantic about the experience. “Many of the artists I admired” – Knut Hamsun, Jack London – “had gone through something similar. It seemed to me like part of a spiritual apprenticeship of being an artist. The funny thing is, I didn’t have to go through this: Dad’s a lawyer, Mum’s a princess from the Igbo royal family.” But he never thought to call them. Instead he turned up at the New Statesman – “rough jacket, freezing, hadn’t eaten” – and was given four books to review. A friend loaned him £300. Peter Ackroyd included one of his stories in an anthology and interest from publishers spurred him to write his first collection, Incidents at the Shrine (1986). “I don’t think there has been a day since then that I have not written.” Years later, knocking on the door of the mansion block in Little Venice, he had little hope, having been rejected plenty of times before “because of colour and all that stuff”. But the porters – “a lovely couple, an Irish guy and a slightly elderly English lady” – took a liking to him and it was in a rented basement flat there that he finished The Famished Road, his attempt to capture the “multidimensionality of the African reality”. After the novel won the Booker in 1991, he graduated to a third-floor apartment next door, where he has remained ever since. Walking west along the canal, we stop several times when the photographer, Tom Pilston, is struck by the combination of light and water. I act as a traffic warden for bicycles while Okri warns Pilston, leaning out over the canal in search
Ben Okri in Ladbroke Grove, west London: ‘One of the greatest cities to write in’.
Photograph by Tom Pilston
of the right shot, about the perils of the towpath’s edge. Okri walks every day: his writing depends on it. “If it’s going well, I walk. If it’s going badly, I walk. If I don’t know what to write, I walk. If I know what to write, I walk. It’s just part of its fertilisation and nourishment.” London is “one of the greatest cities to write in”, he says, because “you wake in the morning and you don’t feel like the city’s breathing down your neck. You can hold a thought when you leave your house, and go for a walk like this, and come back, and you’re still holding that one thought. You try that in Lagos… I don’t think so. London’s got character and presence, but it doesn’t impose itself.” P
ausing at a bridge, we spot a St George’s flag hanging from a flat’s window. “That’s the flag one used to like,” Okri says. “I’m still struck by the beautiful simplicity of it.” In his youth the St George’s cross was free of the connotations of the union jack, a symbol of “colonialist enterprise” embraced by the National Front. When Okri lived in New Cross, south-east London, in the late 1970s, racist attacks were commonplace. “People threw bricks and fire bombs into people’s flats. I was terrified.” Such violence, he notes, “is coming back – not as acutely as it was then, but it’s almost politically legitimised, which is in a way scarier.” The St George’s cross, meanwhile, has become “slowly charged with this energy… a threat, a sense of exclusion, a finger pointed at you. I find that very sad.” The liberal classes have ceded our national symbols too easily, he says. “People should fight for their flags.” They should, he adds, also hold dear the myths that underpin nationhood: these are the stories that inform Waking the Warriors, with its promise of sleeping knights that will rise again to reclaim the land. It’s there in King Arthur, the “once and future king”, and in the terracotta army built to protect China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the afterlife. “Every land has its version. It’s not just their army or their rebels that are going to fight for the future. It’s the ideas and the myths, the dreams of ancestors.” As we turn off the canal, we draw closer to Grenfell. The morning after the disaster, Okri walked down to the tower and felt as if “the streets were weeping”. We look at the stump of the tower, its protective shroud almost translucent in the setting sun, a crane waiting to recommence its dismantling work the next day. Okri’s poem was driven by a simple
question: “We have a huge defence budget, but we can’t have defence for our ordinary citizens? Is this the kind of people we want to be?” Wandering towards Ladbroke Grove in search of a pint, we reject the Pig & Whistle in favour of the Knight of Notting Hill. In Westminster Andy Burnham is just finishing his first day in No 10. Okri became friends with Jeremy Corbyn during his Labour leadership. “I love Jeremy, and I really hate to say this”, but, he believes, Corbyn was “in denial” about power and his reluctance to seize it was fatal. What does Okri make of our new prime minister? “He’s got good leftwing credentials, which the nation needs. I think that was Keir Starmer’s problem. He couldn’t quite decide who he was, and one thing Britain does not like is not being clear about who the fuck you are. You’re going to be an upper- class snob, an eccentric? Just do it. You’re going to be a revolutionary? Be it. We’ll hate you for it, but we’ll respect it.” Okri, like Starmer, is a sir: he was knighted in 2023. But he ‘Many of us are writing under a vague cloud of censorship’
has often felt like an outsider: he suffered a “silent backlash” after his Booker win, as if the literary world had agreed he wasn’t to be taken seriously. “I’ve written so many books. Look back and see if many of them were reviewed. You will be shocked. I went into a period of invisibility.” The hurt is evident. But now, after 35 years, “I feel like I’m emerging again”. The shift in Okri’s fortunes has coincided with the birth of his daughter, now nine years old. For years he felt that “something really important to my spirit and to my being is missing. It took a while for me to realise: oh, you’re missing fatherhood. You idiot. The minute she was born, everything fell into place.” Even the act of writing has a new sense of ease. “Writing was always… I fought for it. Since becoming a father, it’s weird – it’s just there. So long as I show up, it shows up for me.” Okri has a family to go home to. Our west London odyssey over, we step out into the night, and I watch his beret duck into an Uber, bound for Ithaca.
HELP SUPPORT OUR MEDICAL TEAMS TODAY
D
D
M
M
Y
Y
D
D
M
M
Y
Y
“We arrived in Gaza and were immediately confronted by huge numbers of people crammed into the streets. You could hear the bombing and see the fear in people’s faces.
We immediately got to work at the hospital. We treated a
large number of patients for burns and trauma injuries,
mostly people who’d been injured in explosions. There
were a lot of children. I’d never seen so many burns
patients in one place.
Some children were malnourished, and it was clear many were not eating properly. With post-operative care, it’s vital that patients have a good diet to assist with tissue healing, but due to food shortages that just wasn’t happening.
We were seeing around 180 patients every day. We didn’t
have the capacity to take everybody into the operating
theatres – some procedures had to be carried out on
the ward.
As an anaesthetist, one of my roles was to improve pain management. Due to shortages of medical supplies, there
Please make your cheque payable to Médecins Sans Frontières UK
OR Please charge my VISA/Mastercard/Amex:
Cardholder name
Card number
Expiry
date
/
Date
/
/
Signature
Today’s date
/
/
Title
Forename(s)
Surname
Address
Telephone
HEAR FROM MSF BY EMAIL
Sign up to our Frontline email, which provides first hand accounts of our work. You will receive
Frontline, occasional emergency emails, asks for donations and event invites.
A man carries a wounded child into the MSF-run clinic at Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital in southern Gaza. Photograph © MSF
DR BIRSEN GASKELL IS
AN ANAESTHETIST WHO
WORKED IN GAZA.
have been a lot of incidents during this conflict when
people have been operated on without anaesthetics.
It’s inconceivable that this has happened, but it has.
Some patients stick in your mind. There was a nine-year- old girl who’d been injured when her home was bombed and lost part of her jaw. She and her mother were the only survivors from their family. I changed her dressing every few days and gave her antibiotic treatment. One day, she gave me a hug and asked if she’d ever look normal. I didn’t have an answer for her. Reconstructive surgery would really help her, but nothing like that is on offer in Gaza.
The situation in Gaza is getting worse and people’s medical needs are growing. The fact that there are people there who have had to undergo medical procedures without anaesthesia is barbaric. It’s an inhumane situation.
Yet, despite the carnage and the horror, the MSF hospital
was an oasis of calm. I was so impressed by the Gazan
staff, by their resilience. Many had lost family members
and were living in tents, but they were still there every
day, helping people.
The work MSF is doing in Gaza is needed now more
than ever.”
Postcode
ARE YOU A UK TAXPAYER? If so, you can make your gift worth 25% more at no extra cost. Please tick the box below.
I wish Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to treat all gifts in the last 4 years, this gift and all future gifts as Gift Aid donations. I am a UK taxpayer and understand that if I pay less Income Tax and/or Capital Gains Tax than the amount of Gift Aid claimed on all my donations in that tax year, it is my responsibility to pay any difference.
NB: Please let us know if your name, address or tax status changes, or if you would like to cancel this declaration, so that we can update our records.
Y Y
RESPECTING YOU AND YOUR PERSONAL DATA
Your support is vital to our work and we would like to keep you informed with first-hand accounts
from our staff and patients about the lifesaving impact your support is having, from combatting
epidemics to providing emergency surgery.
We won’t allow other organisations to have access to your personal data for marketing purposes
and we won’t bombard you with appeals.
By supporting MSF, you will receive our magazine Dispatches, event invitations and occasional
emergency appeals with requests for donations by post. You can change how you hear from MSF
UK by emailing uk.fundraising@london.msf.org or calling 020 7404 6600. Visit our privacy notice
for more: msf.org.uk/privacy.
Please fill in this form, place in an envelope and return postage free to:
FREEPOST RUBA-GYZY-YXST, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF),
Bumpers Way, Bumpers Farm, Chippenham, SN14 6NG. Alternatively,
you can phone 0800 055 79 81 (open 8am–10pm seven days a week) or
make your donation online by searching MSF SURGERY.
MSFR0048
105881
Every year, MSF teams carry out tens of thousands of surgeries. From treating war wounds to emergency caesareans and reconstructive surgery, our surgeons are at the frontline of our lifesaving care. Each year, MSF teams around the world conduct 134,000 major surgeries. In the places where we work, demand for surgical services has never been higher. We need your support now more than ever to provide people with lifesaving medical care. Please donate today to support our emergency medical teams.
£40 can provide six patients with antibiotics to prevent infections after surgery £420 covers the cost of an MSF surgeon working in a hospital for five days £170 could pay for emergency splints to immobilise injured limbs for 20 patients
THANK YOU MSF UK receives no government funding. It’s your support that enables us to provide medical care where it’s needed most.
CALL 0800 055 79 81
MSF SURGERY
to make an
online donation
sacked over sexual misconduct claims
toxic’ environment at the International Criminal Court, while the removed British barrister claims he is being stitched up for pursuing war crime charges against Israel
Chloe Hadjimatheou Isabel Coles
Members of the International Criminal Court have voted to remove its chief prosecutor over allegations of sexual misconduct that have since become entangled in politics and tar- nished the court’s reputation. In a secret vote held on Friday, a large majority of the court’s 152 mem- bers chose to remove Karim Khan for “serious misconduct and serious breach of duty”. Accusations that the man respon- sible for trying the most serious war crimes had molested a female employee have cast doubt on the future of the court, established half a century after the Nazi trials at Nuremberg and in the wake of the failed tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. They have also undermined efforts to hold Israel accountable for alleged war crimes. The Observer revealed last month that the executive bureau of the court’s governing body had ruled that the British barrister did engage in non-consensual sexual interac- tions with a female employee, recom- mending he be fired. Khan continues to deny the allegations and his lawyer said the decision to remove him was “unsupported by any lawful or prop- erly reasoned finding”. His supporters have hinted that this whole affair is a stitch-up by Israel and its supporters because he dared to pursue criminal charges against Netanhayu for war crimes in Gaza. The lawyer at the heart of the case against Khan said the misconduct went on for a year after she began working as an assistant to him in 2023. “It was kind of like encroach- ments on the boundaries slowly – not just physically but emotionally,” the woman, identified only as Sarah, told CNN.
Below, how The Observer reported the story in 2025.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said Khan’s removal demon- strated his “moral bankruptcy”, call- ing for the ICC’s warrants against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant to be revoked. The deci- sion was also welcomed by the US. Secretary of state Marco Rubio last week announced a “sweeping cam- paign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to US sovereignty”. Sources have told The Observer there was a “toxic” environment at the ICC even before the British barrister became chief prosecutor in 2021, with widespread sexism and sexual mis- conduct – including claims that staff were having sex on desks. Experts say the rigidly hierarchical structure and “ sexually charged workplace” created conditions where coercive relation- ships were inevitable. Soon after his appointment, Khan hired attorney Priyanka Chirimar as part of an ad hoc external advisory panel on workplace culture. The pre- vious year, an external review of the court had found bullying and harass- ment, a “culture of fear”, and the per- ceived impunity of senior and elected officials.
Khan had said making changes to the working environment was his priority. “We can’t preach justice and gender equality in the courtroom and not practise in the office,” he said. It was in that spirit that he hired Chirimar and another three external experts to conduct anonymous inter- views and make recommendations. When the panel invited staff to talk anonymously about the workplace culture, more than 130 people came forward with stories of racism, sex- ism, bullying and sexual harassment. They described “ terrible bully- ing, rampant racism and sexism and rampant sexual misconduct in gen- eral,” Chirimar said before she was engaged as counsel for the employee who made allegations against Khan. One woman said it was like being “on the set of Mad Men”. Some of the women interviewed by the panel said they had attempted suicide. The panel identified 10 people who had allegations made against them; several were investigated and later dismissed by Khan. When the sexual misconduct allegations against Khan were leaked to the press in October 2024, Chirimar was shocked. “For the man that came in campaigning to cre- ate a safer work environment, safety
and dignity, it’s an unbelievable fall from grace,” she said. In 2006, the court’s first chief pros- ecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, was accused of coercing a journalist into having sex with him in a hotel room. Just as in Khan’s case, the allegations originated from a third party – a male employee inside the court who had heard the woman describe her expe- rience. His complaint was consid- ered by a panel of three judges from the court. When they interviewed the alleged victim she firmly denied the allegations – as did Moreno Ocampo. The complaint was dismissed as “manifestly unfounded”. In a 2024 private phone call between Khan and the lawyer who made the allegations against him, she perceived him to be pressur- ing her into withdrawing the com- plaint. Khan has denied that was his intention. Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, said Khan’s removal was the best way to pursue accountability for Israel’s actions in Gaza, Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine and the UAE’s backing for a paramilitary group in Sudan. “The ICC needs a credible prosecutor to fight back, not one tainted like Khan.”
The ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan, centre, visits a mass grave in Ukraine. Fadel Senna/Getty Images
himself from ‘toxic’ Tates after their US arrests
brothers, the president is said to want nothing more to do with them as they face extradition to the UK on 59 charges, including rape
Hugh Tomlinson US correspondent
As US government officials and Washington insiders partied down- town at the Waldorf Astoria hotel ear- lier this month, there was a sudden stir among the guests as Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan entered. One partygoer said the two mano- sphere influencers, who face charges in the UK including rape and sex trafficking, swept in “like celebri- ties”, followed by an entourage and bodyguards. During their stay in Washington, the brothers – who have built a social media empire promoting misogyny – visited Capitol Hill and met mem- bers of Congress. At a party hosted by Paolo Zampolli, an ally of Donald Trump and a special envoy to the president, the Tates reportedly min- gled with stars of politics and sport. One attendee said they were seen “taking selfies with admirers”. The trip underscored the air of impunity the brothers have flaunted since landing in the US after being released from house arrest in Romania last year, reportedly fol- lowing the intervention of Trump officials. Since then, the Tates have continued to tour the globe, surfac- ing in Dubai, Moscow and Hong Kong, in open disdain of the catalogue of alleged crimes that has trailed them for more than a decade. But the brothers’ apparent confi- dence that they were protected from
activist in Spain is ‘dangerous precedent’ say supporters
on high was shattered last week- end. As they arrived to host a bare- knuckle boxing match in Miami, the pair were arrested by US marshals, acting on an extradition request from UK authorities. They were presented with a raft of new charges from the Crown Prosecution Service, including seven new counts of rape against Andrew Tate, 39, plus charges relating to sex trafficking, indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. Among the charges against Tristan Tate, 38, were two further counts of rape and three involving sex trafficking. The new allegations bring the number of UK charges against the brothers to 59. They deny any wrongdoing. The arrests sparked uproar on social media. The capri pants and purple blouse worn by Andrew Tate as he was handcuffed sparked a host of online memes. Among their mil- lions of supporters, there was out- rage and immediate calls for Trump to intervene. Outside a court hearing in Miami last week, the Tates’ attor- ney, Joe McBride, urged the Trump administration and the secretary of state Marco Rubio to block his clients’ extradition “as a matter of principle”. But the White House has been quick to distance itself from the con- troversy. Sources around the admin- istration briefed that the president would not get involved and wanted nothing to do with the Tates. One Maga source said the new charges were “horrific”, while another said Rubio was “disgusted” by the allegations. A Trumpworld operative stressed that the Tates were “never as close to Trump’s orbit as they claimed”. Questions about the Tates dogged the White House throughout last week. Asked repeatedly if the admin- istration would intervene in the extradition process, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said bluntly: “No”.
Isabel Coles Chief international correspondent
As the war in Gaza polarised politics in the US, James “Fergie” Chambers decided to leave the country. With $250m to his name, the avowed com- munist and “trust fund baby” was worth more to the global left at lib- erty – and the walls were closing in. The Cox Enterprises heir had lauded the October 7 attacks by Hamas, taken part in a direct action against an Israeli arms manufac- turer and poured his wealth into the Palestinian cause. “My closest com-
you off the couch and into the fight, you owe them. Give back. Speak. Step up’ Joe McBride, Tates’ lawyer
rades were basically like, ‘bro, actu- ally your ability to continue to benefit these projects… is more important than anything else’,” Chambers, 41, said in a podcast interview last year. “There was no way that I was going to be able to exist [in the US] main- taining the views that I did… and basi- cally stay out of a cage.” A move to stifle pro-Palestine activ- ists that began under Joe Biden’s administration has accelerated since Donald Trump took back the White House, expanding into a fully fledged crackdown on leftwing groups. Chambers moved to Tunisia, then
Dave Aronberg, a former state attorney in Palm Beach county in Florida, where Trump has his Mar- a-Lago home, said the ground had shifted under the Tates. “Trump is transactional and he likes people who support him. But with the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein hovering around him, Trump is not going to do any more solids for these accused sex traffick- ers,” said Aronberg. The White House’s move to cut the Tates loose has been condemned as a betrayal by prominent allies and triggered a new rift in Trump’s Maga movement. “What does it say about the Trump administration?” the far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes demanded on his show. “I don’t think there’s… a more anti- white government in the world than the Labour government in the United Kingdom,” Fuentes went on. “We’re going to let this country, which is effectively an enemy of the United States… extradite a US citizen and
Ireland, but Spanish police detained him in Ibiza this month on a war- rant from Interpol that could see him extradited to the US. The indict- ment is sealed, but allies of Chambers say the charges against him concern money laundering with the intent to finance international terrorism. It is part of an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against left- wing activism at home – and abroad. “It’s a canary in the coal mine,” said a prominent leftwing activist from the US, who asked to remain anonymous because of the climate of repression. “First they came for
Trump ally on a MeToo charge? It’s a national humiliation.” Fans called for a show of support outside court when the Tates appear for their next hearing in Miami tomorrow, in an attempt to put pres- sure back on the White House. “If these men inspired you, if they pulled you off the couch and into the fight, you owe them,” McBride tweeted last week. “Stop asking what they can give you. Give back. Step up. Speak up. Fight.” The Tates still have allies in Washington. Arizona congressman Abe Hamadeh claimed the brothers were victims of “political lawfare” in the UK and Romania. “There should be no extradition of American citizens when the charges are unclear and political,” Hamadeh said. But publicly, at least, the mood in Washington has shifted. In a court filing unsealed last week, the justice department moved to keep the brothers in custody dur- ing the extradition process.
the Palestinians... then they came for the migrants… now they’re coming for the socialists, or ‘communists’ as they’re calling us.” Days after Chambers was arrested, US secretary of state Marco Rubio hosted a conference attended by offi- cials from more than 60 countries, calling for an international response to what he called the “transnational threat” of leftwing political violence. Far-left militants in league with hostile states such as Cuba and Iran were collaborating across borders, Rubio said, “to funnel propaganda and training materials and target infor-
Andrew and
Tristan Tate
outside the
Bucharest
tribunal
last year.
Vadim Ghirdă/AP
A
infamous anti-communist purges, betrays the fact that, with the midterms looming, the president has few other cards to play. The collapse of the ceasefire with Iran has sucked Trump back into war in the Middle East. But a conflict that he predicted in March would be over in weeks has now dragged on for five months with no end in sight. Iran has tightened its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz and launched another wave of deadly strikes across the region. The US death toll now outstrips the 13 killed in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden in 2021, which Trump called the “greatest foreign policy humiliation” in US history. At home, prices are rising faster than wages. The cost of petrol, a key barometer for US voters, has again risen to more than $4 (£3) a gallon. Struggling to defend his own record, Trump has scented an opportunity to paint Democrats as extremist subversives, as Mamdani expands his influence and the socialist left grows in strength. “They say ‘social democrat’. No, a social democrat is a communist, just so you know,” he said of the leftwing movement at a White House event. The red-baiting strategy has
James ‘Fergie’ Chambers was arrested in Ibiza this month.
Prosecutors warned the Tates could attempt to “flee” the US, citing a $50m superyacht Andrew Tate is reportedly having built, as the brothers’ osten- tatious displays of wealth came back to bite them. “Andrew Tate and his brother appear to have the financial means, and the will, to continue evad- ing justice,” prosecutors said. Among the officials leading the charge to distance themselves from the Tates was Trump envoy Zampolli, who had hosted the brothers days before their arrest. “I did not know these allegations about them,” he told the Axios news website last week. “That is on me.” Yet Trump officials were reportedly instrumental in securing the brothers’ release from house arrest in Romania. Andrew Tate has boasted of his close ties with the Trump family itself, including Barron, the president’s youngest son. Barron was credited for pushing his father to embrace the manosphere and reach young voters
mation through shared encrypted channels, moving through under- ground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustaining their opera- tions through transnational funds”. In a 100-page report released last week under the title “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” the State Department traced an alleged web of influence includ- ing New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Ben & Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen. The Department of Justice is also looking at Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American million-
during the 2024 campaign. Trump Sr made a string of appearances with supposed “edgelords” – online per- sonalities who revel in making pro- vocative comments – dancing to YMCA on YouTube and discussing the merits of cocaine with come- dian Theo Von. The move paid off, as young voters shifted to the right. The White House’s apparent resolve to honour the extradition treaty has been greeted with relief in Westminster. A diplomatic show- down with the Trump administra- tion over the Tates would have been a challenge for Andy Burnham’s new government as it seeks to rebuild ties that frayed in the final months of Keir Starmer’s prime ministership. The Tates’ supporters have not given up hope of derailing their extra- dition. Fuentes and others have tar- geted the US vice-president, JD Vance, who follows both Tate brothers on social media. The early frontrunner for the Republican presidential nom- ination in 2028, Vance is courting the manosphere as he lays the ground for his own White House campaign. But Aronberg said the Tates were now too toxic for Washington, par- ticularly as Democrats call for an investigation into their ties to the Trump family. “The Tates used Trump as a get-out-of-jail-free card in Romania, and I think there are some regrets about it within Trumpworld,” he said. “You can tell because everyone involved with the Tates’ release from Romania has run away from it.” The court drama of the coming weeks will be watched nervously by the Tates’ alleged victims and their legal teams. “All we would ask on behalf of our clients is that the US authorities fol- low the proper process, applying the law fairly and free of outside influ- ence. It seems like that is going to be the case,” said Jack Beeston, senior associate at McCue Jury & Partners, which represents the first group of women, who filed criminal allega- tions against Andrew Tate dating from 2013. That first investigation was found to have been mishandled by Hertfordshire constabulary following a police regulator’s review of the case and was only reopened after the Tates had fled Britain. Optimism that the brothers will finally face their accus- ers in a British court is tinged with regret, Beeston said. “Their overwhelming feeling is: what would have happened if their allegations had been dealt with in the proper way all those years ago?” he said.
COMMENT
aire and benefactor of far-left causes. “They’re going after the money men,” said the leftwing activist. The fate of Chambers, who has converted to Islam since leaving the US in 2023, is now in the hands of Spain, which is one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza and has clashed with the Trump administration. “If they comply with the extradi- tion order this is basically a sign that Spain… is still a vassal of the US,” said Calla Walsh, an associate of Chambers in a podcast interview. “This could set a very dangerous precedent.”
rhetoric belies growing
fear of a blue wave
Hugh
Tomlinson
s his approval rating has plumbed record lows in recent weeks, Donald Trump has cast about for a line of attack against Democrats as he tries to stave off a Republican wipeout at November’s midterm elections. Trapped in an unpopular war that has spiralled beyond his control, led to the deaths of US servicemen and sent petrol prices soaring at home, the president has returned to a familiar playbook. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” the president declared in a speech at Mount Rushmore to kick off the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations earlier this month. Watched by the granite faces of four former presidents, Trump warned that the country was again under “renewed attack” from the “communist menace”. Opening the Fourth of July holiday with a nakedly partisan speech, he denounced his opponents as “godless” and “evil”. Trump has invoked the spectre of the 1950s “red scare” scores of times since then. “I want to get the word out because what’s forming is communism,” he told reporters at the Nato summit in Ankara, wandering off-piste from questions about the future of the transatlantic alliance. “Communism is easy to sell,” he joked, with customary embellishment. “I would be the greatest communist in history. I’d be right up there with Lenin.” Trump’s return to this ancient conservative trope follows a string of victories for leftwing Democratic candidates in primary contests before the midterms, when control of Congress is up for grabs. Three progressive candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York, swept their primaries in the biggest US city last month, unseating two congressmen along the way. Days later, the insurgent left stunned the Democratic establishment again when Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old socialist, ousted Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent. Progressive candidates have also won Democratic primaries in deep- red Kentucky, Ohio and Texas, as supporters vent their anger at the party leadership, which has struggled to lay a glove on Trump since he took back the White House. But Trump’s attempt to revive the ghost of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who led the
Trump aimed insults at journalists at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Friday.
been deployed before. Trump tried smearing Kamala Harris as a communist in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, when the race was on a knife-edge. Trump called the vice-president “Comrade Kamala” and posted an AI picture of her as a Soviet boss, with a red cap and handlebar moustache. With little else to run on, beleaguered Republicans have duly rowed into line behind their leader. “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democrat[ic] party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November against freedom,” the Republican House leader Steve Scalise said last week. Yet privately, few Republicans are confident the new red scare will wash with voters. Poll after poll underscores frustration at the war and Trump’s handling of the economy. The collapse of the Iran ceasefire is a hammer blow for Grand Old Party strategists desperate to put the crisis behind them heading into elections that will be a referendum on Trump and the cost of living. At a rally in Georgia last week the president again dismissed “affordability” as a fake term, “made up by the Democrats”. But one Maga activist said bluntly: “Anyone not running on affordability is going to lose.”
A
paid billions. Here’s why Iran chose war
ANALYSIS
hugely from a deal with the US. But hardliners are content to sacrifice the economy for a longer-term prize, writes Ruth Michaelson
fter Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi vowed last week that Tehran would respond to US attacks with an “eye for an eye”, his Washington counterpart Marco Rubio countered that Donald Trump’s policy was “a head for an eye”. Both sides are again caught in an escalating spiral of brinkmanship and violence. After exchanges of strikes last week, Trump declared that the US is “locked and loaded” for a “massive attack”, before adding that back-channel talks continue. Hawks in Washington who have craved a showdown with Iran for decades are still pushing for a ground invasion. Outgunned by the US, meanwhile, Iran has continued to defy Washington and bombard its allies throughout the region. Iranian drones have hit northern
Iraq in recent days. Its missiles
struck US airbases in Qatar and
Jordan. And Tehran’s proxy in
Yemen, the Houthi militia, has
threatened shipping through
another essential waterway.
Trump, meanwhile, attended the
dignified transfer of the bodies of
four US service members killed last
week in Iranian attacks on Jordan
and Iraq. It was the third ceremony
the president has joined since the
war began.
With the conflict deadlocked and
Iranian drones raining down across
the Persian Gulf, Iran’s neighbours
fear that Tehran’s return to war
heralds the initial signs of the
vast regime splintering, hardline
forces in the ascendant. Even more
alarming to the Gulf states – and
baffling to the Americans – is the
awareness that Tehran turned
down a lucrative offer on the table
when a ceasefire deal was reached a
month ago.
Trump claimed the deal “achieves
everything we set out to accomplish
– everything and much more”. But
even the president’s powers of
salesmanship could not gloss over
the fact that the framework achieved
almost none of the aims he set out
at the start of the war.
For Tehran, the deal offered huge
benefits, including a lucrative waiver
of US sanctions on Iranian oil. The
prospect of billions of dollars in
oil sales and access to even more
in frozen funds promised precious
relief for a shattered economy.
uring the funeral rites for Iran’s fallen supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike on the first day of the war, a furious crowd yelled “traitor” at Araghchi for engaging in the talks. Kayhan Valadbaygi, head of Middle East Risk & Reform Advisory, said the return to conflict shows that hardliners within the regime are looking to strengthen their hand in future negotiations with Washington. “Without controlling the Strait of Hormuz they believe they can’t get major concessions from the US.” That calculation has dragged both sides back to war and left the Trump administration flailing as it attempts to broker a deal that would give the White House cover to declare victory and walk away. “The problem we’re having right now is that they’re not serious about talks,” Rubio told reporters last week. “If they’re serious, we’re serious.” This month Trump declared the US would charge a 20% fee on all cargo through the Strait of Hormuz, only to scrap the plan a day later. Last week, he announced a lucrative deal for US companies to build a civilian nuclear programme in Saudi Arabia, and then effectively quashed the agreement within hours by declaring it contingent on Riyadh joining a peace agreement with Israel that the kingdom has long refused. The IRGC has watched those whiplash changes in strategy from the Oval Office and calculated that it can outlast a president searching for an exit strategy. The price of oil ticked past $100 again last week, threatening further turmoil for the global economy. But the financial cost of Iran’s return to hostilities is immense, as Trump reimposed sanctions on oil when he declared the ceasefire dead. Beyond the surge in revenue from oil sales, a fuller peace treaty dangled the prospect of even greater gains for Iran, including access to billions more in frozen funds. Profits from past oil sales are locked away around the world. Iranian officials say there is at least $100bn in frozen Iranian assets worldwide, with an estimated $6bn in Qatar, $7bn in India and at least $20bn in China. Alfoneh said IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi had pushed to resume fighting with support from several other key figures at the top. In his view, the Guards are willing to sacrifice their financial gains to preserve the regime and their stranglehold on the Gulf. “The IRGC is a vast military- bureaucratic organisation that increasingly runs Iran, and its calculations are not purely economic,” Alfoneh said. “Its behaviour reflects the organisation’s broader assessment of what is required to ensure the regime’s survival.” A show of support for the Iran-backed Houthi militia outside a university campus in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images
Iran made at least $5bn from oil sales alone in the month after the memorandum of understanding with the US was signed, as Washington briefly lifted sanctions on Iranian crude for the first time in decades. Yet that windfall was not enough to keep the regime at the negotiating table or maintain Iranian faith in the tentative peace accord. Iranian forces fired on tankers attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and an already fragile ceasefire collapsed. “This time the Iranians may have overplayed their hand. The terms of the deal were pretty good,” said Dina Esfandiary from the thinktank
Bloomberg Economics. “The return to fighting is not beneficial financially, as Iran’s economy is taking a huge hit and getting worse by the day.” In Tehran, mistrust of Washington reigns. A growing group of hardliners opposed negotiations from the outset, fearing that a deal could undermine the regime’s legitimacy and hasten its collapse. Central to that scepticism was the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Both a military force and an economic behemoth with a foothold in every key Iranian industry, the IRGC stood to benefit financially from the deal with Trump. Yet it drove the return to war, trading immediate financial gain for a longer-term strategic prize. Ali Alfoneh from the Arab Gulf States Institute said the IRGC prioritised regime survival over financial gains. Despite its vast
that a deal could
undermine
the regime’s
legitimacy and
hasten its collapse
Missiles on display in Tehran’s Azadi Square last week. Anadolu/Getty Images
influence, “the IRGC’s calculations are not purely economic”, he said. Gifted strategic control of the Strait of Hormuz by the war, it is determined to keep it. Splits that quietly arose during negotiations with the US have widened among the regime’s top brass and hardliners have made their criticisms of the negotiators public. D
accused of visual looting in ‘Africa’s last colony’
Sahara by the Oscar winner have been described as plunder by indigenous people displaced by Morocco
Isabel Coles Chief international correspondent
Shipwrecked on a pale crescent of sand, Odysseus languishes on the island of Ogygia, his memory dulled by eating lotus flowers supplied by an obliging nymph. Seven years go by before the hero begins to remember his quest: to return home to Ithaca. The theme resonates powerfully with Brahim Chagaf: the film-maker has yearned for the pristine dunes where these scenes from The Odyssey were shot in Western Sahara since he was born in a refugee camp in neigh- bouring Algeria. His family fled there after Morocco occupied the territory 50 years ago, displacing a large part of its indigenous population. “The dream is alive,” said Chagaf. “I hope to achieve it and return to Dakhla and its heavenly beaches.” For now, the dream is out of reach. Morocco has in recent years success- fully cemented control over Western Sahara, a sparsely populated territory the size of Britain, through a mixture of diplomacy and culture. Getting director Christopher Nolan to film The Odyssey there was a major coup after years of courting Hollywood with tax breaks and other perks. But it has drawn rare attention to the status of a territory dubbed Africa’s last colony – and to the plight of its indigenous Sahrawi population. Nolan is also facing criticism for com- plicity in Morocco’s dispossession of Sahrawis.
forces Indian minister to quit over medical exam leak
“He could have chosen any sand dune in the world but this one,” said María Carrión, executive director of the Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara), which has led a campaign against the film. When Nolan landed in Dakhla with several Hollywood stars last July, Sahrawi activist Hassan Zerouali decided to seize the opportunity. He wanted to tell the film’s stars, including Zendaya, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, about the realities of life under Moroccan occupation: repression, censorship and arbitrary arrest. But he couldn’t get anywhere near them. When Morocco’s minister of culture, Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid, paid Nolan a visit on set, he told a local media outlet that Dakhla was destined to become “a major film des- tination” and noted plans to establish a film school there. As filming got under way, FiSahara demanded the crew leave Western Sahara and cut the scenes shot there. The campaign was supported by Greta Thunberg, the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar and the actor Javier Bardem, who made a doc- umentary about the occupation, Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony. There was no response. When Carrión sent an angry message to The Odyssey’s official account on Instagram, she was blocked. As the release date approached this month, FiSahara called for a boycott, saying the public should treat The Odyssey as it would a film made in Russian-occupied Ukraine, or in illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. “It amounts to plunder,” said Carrión. “These are stolen images – this is extractive film-making that Nolan has done – and people need to know that.” Chagaf is conflicted about watch- ing the film. As a young film-maker, he grew up revering Nolan, and longs
images, this is extractive film making, and people need to know that’ María Carrión, FiSahara
Shoaib Mir Parthu Venkatesh Pendari
Cries of “Long live India” went up from a vast crowd of students in Delhi as news broke yesterday that the country’s education minister had resigned after days of protests that have rocked the capital. At the protest site of Jantar Mantar, close to the Indian parliament, thou- sands of supporters of the youth-led “cockroach” movement broke into song and dance, some openly sob- bing, watched by lines of riot police behind barricades. Among the plac- ards waved by the cheering crowds, one slogan appeared again and again: “Modi, you have messed with the
wrong generation”, challenging the country’s prime minister. “For a few seconds I couldn’t understand what was happening. Then my friend told me, ‘We won. He has resigned’,” said Akansha Shukla, a 24-year-old college student, referring to Dharmendra Pradhan, the edu- cation minister who stepped down after an exam leak scandal that has affected millions of medical students. “It felt unreal because over the last few weeks we had been living with uncertainty, fear and anger, and sud- denly there was this moment of hope,” she said. “It feels like a new dawn for Indian democracy. It shows that when ordinary people come together and raise their voices, change is possible.”
to glimpse his homeland as portrayed by one of the leading film-makers of the century. But he is deeply disap- pointed by Nolan’s silence: “He could have said something,” Chagaf said. “I would settle for an apology.” The only time Chagaf laid eyes on Dakhla was during a UN-facilitated visit in 2010, when he accompanied his mother to be reunited with her sister, who had remained in Western Sahara after Spain, the colonial power, ceded control to Morocco in 1975. Chagaf’s father was killed fighting Moroccan forces in the ranks of the Polisario Front, an armed group that is still seeking Sahrawi independence. Chagaf had planned to film the moment when his mother and aunt were reunited after more than 30 years apart, but his camera was con-
Her face was covered with tempo- rary cockroach tattoos, a nod to the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), which has erupted across India. The rebel- lion followed comments in May by Surya Kant, the country’s chief justice, who sneered at unemployed young people as “cockroaches”. The protesters had demanded Pradhan’s resignation after India’s national medical exam was found to have been leaked to the highest bid-
Education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has been forced to resign.
The sand dunes of Dakhla, above. Jimmy Gonzalez, Matt Damon and Himesh Patel in a scene from The Odyssey, left. Getty/ Universal Pictures
fiscated. “They are afraid of anything that could testify to the atrocities committed against the population,” he said. He hasn’t tried to return. It would be risky because of his advo- cacy for the Sahrawi cause, he said. “Anything could happen.” In 2020 the US became the first country to recognise Moroccan sover- eignty over Western Sahara, reward- ing Rabat for normalising relations with Israel. In a proclamation weeks before the end of his first term, Trump said an independent Sahrawi state was “not a realistic option”. Other countries, including the UK, have since shifted their position, endorsing a Moroccan autonomy plan. The US, Spain and Morocco are working to flesh out a plan acceptable to the Polisario and the group’s main backer, Algeria. Polisario fighters have engaged in a low-level conflict with Moroccan forces since a cease- fire that lasted almost three decades broke down in 2020. In the film’s closing credits, the shooting locations are listed as Scotland, Greece, Italy and Morocco. For the people of Western Sahara, the odyssey continues.
ON OTHER PAGES
der, forcing the test to be scrapped and retaken. The exam is one of the most competitive on earth, with almost 2.5 million students vying for 130,000 places. The scandal has been linked to more than 20 suicides in recent weeks. “This is victory for all those who have been victims of this system, including the students who lost their lives,” said Piyush Sen, 19, whose brother was forced to resit his exam and had travelled from the western state of Maharashtra to be at Jantar Mantar. Protesters in Delhi said they would keep up their campaign to root out endemic corruption in India’s education system.
Opinion, People Ideas
gambit in Number 10 masks tough choices ahead Andrew Rawnsley
bills have given the PM momentum. But soon he will face the trade-offs that define every premiership
If you had to summarise Andy Burnham’s first days at Number 10 in a word, what would it be? I’m plumping for “mayorish”. There has been no grandiloquent prime ministerial statement about defence and foreign policy. His speech on arrival in Downing Street barely acknowledged that a world exists beyond these shores. Precisely how he intends to reboot the economy remains sealed within the black box. We are promised a “10-year plan”, but the chef is still working on the recipe and the dish won’t come out of the oven until some time in the autumn. Many prime ministers arrive in office with their gaze fixed on the grand horizon. The latest tenant of Number 10 has started on a parochial note. The opening flurry of announcements, designed to advertise that a new regime is up and running, has been about business rates on pubs, bus fares, utility bills and rough sleeping. This has been accompanied by glad-handing visits to the provinces. Welcome to government by the Mayor of Great Britain. This will be quite popular, at least for a while. “Never Here Keir” was a juvenile way of mocking the previous prime minister’s dedication to international relations, but the crack resonated with the many voters who want their government relentlessly focused on the domestic. When pollsters assemble focus groups of the public, rough sleeping is often cited as a symptom of “broken Britain”. Boarded-up pubs are another distressing signifier of decaying communities. Voters groan about household bills. Hence the decision to remove VAT from electricity in the name of giving people “more breathing room”. The state of local transport rarely troubles the rarefied brains of Whitehall, but it matters to a lot of folk. So here comes the introduction – or, rather, reintroduction – of the £2 cap on bus fares. His early emphasis on the cost of living is revealing about Mr Burnham. He is anxious to show those struggling to get by that “I feel your pain”, as Bill Clinton used to put it. He hopes modest changes will be seen as a
‘The latest tenant of Number 10 has started on a parochial note.’ Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
down payment on better times to come. He’s seeking to lure voters back from the Greens and contain Reform by fashioning a leftish version of populism. He’s also using these applause-seeking initiatives to buy himself space while he grapples with the seriously knotty challenges facing his government, such as fixing social care and funding defence. It may have been a long and winding road to Number 10, but the last few miles were taken in a rush. The “access talks” between Team Burnham and senior civil servants to prepare for power were hurried. One senior figure remarks: “They had to cram seven months into three weeks.” The premium has been on finding quick hits that are headline-catching, easy to implement, and can be personally associated with the prime minister. Another thing we are learning is that this government is going to be highly Andy-centric. The contrast in tone and style with the previous management began with the decision to dispense with the Lectern of Doom and deliver his first speech in Downing Street without notes. His exploitation of social media is a concerted attempt to scale brand Burnham from a popular champion of Manchester to a personality with the national appeal that eluded his predecessor. An announcement about bus fares could have been left to the Transport Secretary, but he wanted his face stamped on it alongside a specially liveried vehicle. He took the new chancellor, John Healey, with him to a boozer in Essex to highlight the cut to business rates on pubs. There are limits to chasing popularity this way, as the instinctive people pleaser will discover. Sceptics point out that £1 a week off the average household’s electricity bill and £20 a week in tax relief per pub is not going to make anyone feel like a lottery winner. The real test of his government is whether it can tackle the root causes of the
affordability crisis. “He’s spent his first week spending money. That can’t go on for long,” says one of the cabinet members sacked by Mr Burnham. “We’re not in the real world yet.” His pledge to “do politics differently” is regarded as a sick joke by the casualties of the brutal reshuffle, which lavished rewards on his followers while dishing out retribution on those who resisted his coronation. Having previously said that he wanted to “move beyond” the “infighting” and “factionalism” that has “bedevilled us”, he sacked 11 cabinet ministers, many of whose common offence was declining to call for Sir Keir to quit. He then carried out a purge of Starmer loyalists in the junior ministerial ranks. Darren “I’m not bitter” Jones has retaliated by questioning how the VAT cut on electricity will be funded. Steve Reed, removed as housing secretary, expressed his fury in a resignation letter which hissed: “I hope those who did not show loyalty to Keir will now show it to you.” T o his supporters, the spoils. Anas Sarwar, the first senior Labour figure to call for Sir Keir to go, becomes a trade minister with a berth in the House of Lords. Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, who played pivotal roles in the Burnham ascendancy, have been made the first secretary of state and chief whip. Miatta Fahnbulleh, elevated into the cabinet as the new energy secretary, was one of the first ministers to quit the Starmer government. Wes Streeting and Mr Healey, whose resignations as health secretary and defence secretary inflicted mortal wounds on Sir Keir, have secured senior positions. Ed Miliband, the first cabinet member to tell Sir Keir that he had to go, is very sore to have missed out on the Treasury, but gets the glittering consolation prize of the Foreign Office. For those left out in the cold, this feels cruelly factional. The dispossessed will probably bite their tongue for the time being, not wanting to come across as churlish. But when the waters get choppy, they will relish his discomfort. Mr Burnham’s opening days in the job have demonstrated his talent as a much easier and warmer communicator than his predecessor. “He’s had a very good start and it’s a great contrast with the miserabilist years of Keir,” remarks one veteran Labour strategist. The much harder part will be delivering durable plans to galvanise growth and transform lives over the longer term. An energetic start with a cheery vibe has bought him a little time before he grapples with the devilish dilemmas and crunchy trade-offs that have defeated so many of his predecessors.
need a lesson in information literacy Kate Maltby
T
I
he video on my screen purports to teach me about man’s pre-civilisational past. The caption immerses the viewer in history: “POV [point of view]: You wake up as a caveman in 40BC.” Soon the screen is showing me a roughened hand – my own, supposedly – reaching out to greet a woolly mammoth. Soon after that, I’m taming a sabre-toothed tiger. I meet a fellow hunter, who shows up on screen with the glistening white teeth that can only denote an American of the 21st century. We eat something that looks suspiciously like a KFC chicken drumstick. This is all, of course, not a possible vision of 40BC. The term “caveman”, popular rather than academic, very loosely refers to humans who lived in the Paleolithic era, which ended in about 12000BC. The last woolly mammoths disappeared in approximately 4000BC and sabre toothed-tigers in 9000BC. In 40BC, Mark Antony left Cleopatra and wed the sister of his rival Octavian, and he didn’t shack up in a cave with either woman. Although he probably had worse teeth than my caveman friend. If your digital trail shows the slightest interest in history, AI history slop has started to populate your social media feeds. The choice of topics is sensational, violent and largely in tune with pop-history trends: a paper published last month by two academics from the University of Erfurt in Germany found that viewers have a taste for videos about disasters (the Titanic,
scared of a tough theme Marie Le Conte
feel pretty confident in assuming I’m the first person to think of The Invite and The Odyssey as quite similar movies, but I’m happy to stand my ground. Sure, the former is a comedy about a dinner party among two very different couples living in the same building, which may or may not end with an orgy after dessert. Of course, the latter is a Greek epic about war and loss and various monsters, trials and tricksters. Taken at face value, they have little in common. Still, I saw the films one week after the other and found they share a commitment to seriousness; their refusal to be wry or anything but themselves. So much of our popular culture refuses to truly commit to what it’s doing, instead choosing
AI is flooding social media feeds with historically inaccurate content.
the black death), the early modern period (the Tudors, Tudors and more Tudors) and, inevitably, the Holocaust. When the inaccuracies are as obvious and comical as a caveman wandering around in 40BC, the damage is limited. But what happens when Facebook starts trying to show you video recreations of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine in Ireland or the barracks at Auschwitz? What happens when the video it purports to show you of that history is a lie? Last week, Lucy Powell took office as the 10th education secretary in as many years. Like most of those,
cheap gags or fourth-wall breaks to keep puncturing the tension. In their own ways, The Invite and The Odyssey both refuse to shy away from themes that audiences can sometimes find tough or uncomfortable, and refuse to compromise. Hopefully, their success will make Hollywood sit up and listen. I
was thinking about a different vibe shift the other day while talking to the owner of a small cafe I won’t name. I’d found out about it from Instagram but the owner told me
she walked straight into incoming fire. The biggest row is over a tweet she sent eight years previously in which she emphasised “conceptual understanding, critical thinking/ literacy, creativity and multi- disciplainary [sic] problem solving” over quantifiable “knowledge”. The necromancy involved in reviving this row has been petty to the point of downright malicious. The stakes, however, are real. Powell’s critics say they are concerned about whether she will fully implement the most recent curriculum review, overseen by her predecessor, Bridget Phillipson. They are right to ask this question. But the curriculum review, published in November 2025, is already woefully out of date in its provisions for teaching students about AI. The review tackles AI entirely as a subject within “computing”, encouraging students to learn how AI generates content. It offers little in the way of encouraging teachers and students to think about how AI has shaped the content they use to learn about the world. The subject of history is the canary in the educational coalmine. Trashy reimaginings of historical stories are not new, of course: they used to be called period drama. The release of any Hollywood historical blockbuster would be incomplete without a row over accuracy. Even so, some historical films are worse than others. In 2000, questions were rightly asked in parliament about the travesty that was U-571, a Universal Pictures blockbuster that gave the
she’d had to stop posting on there because the business had just become too popular. The kitchen is managed entirely by her mother and all their ingredients are fresh. People would sometimes travel from afar to eat there and become angry or desolate if they arrived after the day’s food had run out. Now she gets the customers she gets, and that’s that. She seemed happy about it. After my lovely lunch, I walked down to the Photographers’ Gallery in London’s Soho area and found myself entranced by Sayuri Ichida’s shots. In her small show, the Japanese artist focuses on her
American military the credit for capturing the German Enigma cipher machine instead of British veterans, some of whom were still living at the time. By contrast, the row over “accuracy” in traditional films can be a superb opportunity for a mass audience to grapple intelligently with the ways in which most history remains contested – as it should be. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the movie of the summer, is just the latest in a long line of adaptations of what is a mythic poem, not a historical event (even if Elon Musk has not got the memo). Watching it last weekend, I found myself fuming with all the indignation of an ex-classicist at Nolan’s liberties with Homeric
AI history videos purport to inform while never showing us their sources
literary tradition: notably, the way he stretches the concept of xenia (hospitality) into an all- encompassing moral code that excludes basic stratagems of war. (To add insult to injury, we have to listen to Matt Damon, in his Boston accent, repeatedly call it “Zoos’s law”.) Yet because this is a movie by someone who has clearly thought deeply about Homer’s original, even when he chooses to deviate from it, Nolan’s epic has inspired thousands of people across the world to pick up a translation of the Odyssey and start bickering with each other about their ideal
Sayuri Ichida’s print Phoka #027 at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.
pictures of her sister, which feel strikingly intimate despite taking care never to show her face. I spent the rest of my day thinking about what we offer the world and what we decide to hide from it. For a long time, being online was encouraged and it meant baring as much as
Odysseus. Any literary or historical movie has done its job when it has the whole internet arguing about ancient Greece – and reading more. AI slop videos online, however, are doing something new and quite distinct from the world of Hollywood. The problem with AI history, as with all things on social media, is that it is shaped by algorithm, and imposes the prejudices of the political majority. As the historian Hallie Rubenfeld told me last week: “These reels and pictures have entered a space where fact and fiction are blurred and are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another.” Most disturbingly of all, for those of us who value the study of history as a discipline, AI videos purport to inform while never showing us their sources. Prof Anna Neovesky, one of the University of Erfurt academics behind the latest study of AI history, tells me that platforms should take more “responsibility to address fakes and mark AI-generated content”. But all evidence so far has shown that this is – to put it mildly – unlikely, making it all the more vital that we educate students how to identify and assess the sources for the narratives they are absorbing. To teach history in a world of AI, we should apply the same principles. Teach students to ask: what data has this AI video scraped? Whose agenda does it serve? The digital humanities specialist Melissa Terras calls this “information literacy”. It is not an optional skill. The national curriculum is far behind.
possible to as many people as possible. Could the tide finally be turning? S
peaking of baring it all, I can’t believe it’s come to this, but I’ve caught myself wishing for a week – one week! – of drizzly 18 degrees. I love the heat but my wardrobe just can’t follow. I live in Britain. I only own three pairs of shorts and four summer dresses. Each has been worn a million times this year. I look at them with the seething, weary disdain usually reserved for my winter coat at the end of February. I own so many stylish long- sleeved tops and fun little jackets and smart closed shoes, but I can’t really remember what they look like. Instead, I’ve spent months turning up to meetings looking either like a beach bum, a Nineties starlet or a teenage boy who has recently got really into skateboarding. I worry I’ve entirely lost my sartorial edge. I just… want to wear trousers again. I want to feel their fabric on my shins. Is that too much to ask?
I
people suffering from
heat in ‘greenhouses’,
Ian Higginson writes
t has been quite hot recently. A spell of cooler weather doesn’t change the direction in which the British climate is headed. But why has the heat been a surprise to the NHS, and why have we failed to plan for it? The scientists, models and trends have all been telling us the same thing: man-made climate change is driving more extreme weather. And that has an impact on the NHS. Many emergency-department clinicians, including myself, have spent much of this summer feeling sorry for our patients because of the conditions in which they were being treated, while at the same time quietly baking away ourselves. Much of the NHS estate is very old. A 2024 study showed that more than 2,000 NHS buildings in England were older than the health service itself. Older buildings don’t have decent climate control and may have been constructed in ways that make them work like greenhouses. Patients, some of whom are sick because of the heat, will be coming
Clinicians have spent this summer sweltering in legacy NHS buildings.
to us for help, but will be treated in what feels like an oven. Heatwaves add additional pressure to already overwhelmed emergency care systems. We are told that the demand we are experiencing for our services is “unprecedented”; in truth, I am getting a bit fed up with the use of that word. When graphs are going upwards, the numbers will get higher and will not have been seen before. The language seems like an attempt to deflect from a basic truth: while it may be unprecedented, it is also predictable and should have been planned for. We know the investment required to properly maintain emergency care has been lacking. We see
evidence of that in our corridors every day. But let’s focus on the bricks and mortar in which we treat patients. There is currently a £16bn maintenance backlog in the NHS. Instead of investing in the future, we are storing up problems while making it hard for ourselves now. Across the country dedicated facilities teams are working miracles to keep roofs over our heads and to improve environments for both staff and patients. But there is only so much they can do, given what they have to work with. NHS infrastructure, like other aspects of the health service, isn’t built for what it faces daily, and lacks resilience for when things change. This failure to plan, largely on the part of policymakers, is a lapse in the duty of care towards staff and patients alike. The innovative way to address this would be to systematically look at the estate, proactively put it right and then maintain it. What happens now is piecemeal investment, managed decline or crisis interventions. This needs to change. In emergency medicine, we understand the effects of climate change because not only do we live with the consequences of political decisions, we see how it affects our
patients. Research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office suggested that about 2,700 people died from heat- related causes in May and June – and that almost half of these deaths were associated with climate change. At the same time, according to NHS statistics published in 2025, healthcare is responsible for about 5% of all national carbon emissions. There is a growing movement among emergency medicine teams to lead by example by promoting environmental sustainability
NHS infrastructure isn’t built for what it faces daily, and lacks resilience
within our own departments. Through the Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s GreenED programme we’ve found that changes to practice, procedures and procurement can have a real impact on our departments’ carbon footprints. To its credit, the NHS has committed to achieve net zero by 2040. Meanwhile, the GreenED programme has been adopted by the Welsh government and is supported by the Scottish government. It is
gaining traction internationally. We would love to see it adopted nationally in England and Northern Ireland, and for the principles to be introduced more widely within the NHS. Through simple measures such as reducing unnecessary plastic waste, using less environmentally impactful medicines and reducing power use, emergency departments have already made a big difference. We’ve seen departments slash their emissions and, while they’re at it, save money. So, emergency medicine clinicians are doing their bit to tackle the climate crisis. Meanwhile, we are calling on policymakers and health system leaders to support measures that reduce healthcare’s contribution to the problem, systematically invest in climate resilience and infrastructure and put emergency care in a place where we can face predictable future demand and events with confidence. We hope that when this hot summer finally ends, our facilities don’t flood when it rains and that the boilers work when the weather eventually turns cold. In the meantime, we will continue to do our best for our patients.
harmony with tenant farmers? Jeevan Vasagar
T
historic Rothbury acres to nature have ignited fears among those who depend on the land
here’s something magical about rewilding. After centuries in which nature has been tamed, reshaped and often just eradicated, the landscape we have is nothing like the past. There are fields of wheat instead of fens, pasture for cattle where temperate rainforest once snaked up Britain’s Atlantic coast, and plantations of fast-growing evergreens that replaced native woods of silver birch. With a wave of the wand – or, more practically, a bank transfer and years of hard work – some of that can be undone. But like any magic, rewilding ignites fierce passions. The Rothbury estate in Northumberland, a mix of moorland and woodland stretching for more than 3,800 hectares (9,400 acres) is up for sale. This doesn’t happen often. The estate has been held by the Percy family for almost 700 years; it will be the largest land sale in England for 30 years. By September this year, the Wildlife Trusts, a national coalition of conservation charities, aims to raise £30m to acquire it. So far it has raised more than £20m and appears confident that a final fundraising push will close the gap. The vision is of a place where nature can be abundant. Wildflower meadows that will be home to butterflies and grasshoppers, beavers creating wetlands, and woodland pastures where small herds of cattle will create natural spaces in the forest, giving ground-nesting birds opportunities to forage and breed. People, the charity hopes, will thrive here too. Walkers love the Simonside Hills, home to red grouse, curlews and adders. The charity will work alongside the 12 tenant farmers on the estate. But not everyone is delighted. Some fear the restoration of nature will spoil the scenery that attracts tourists, and change a way of life for farmers – in particular, by reducing the number of sheep. Chris Armstrong, a hill sheep and cattle farmer on a neighbouring estate, fears that rewilding will result in a “blanket wilderness”, leading to less diversity rather than more. Though the Wildlife Trusts says there are no plans to release large predators, there is concern about this too. “There’s a reason bears, wolves and lynxes have been removed from the British Isles, and
Rothbury estate
The Rothbury estate in Northumberland already protects rare species, including the curlew, below. David Head/Getty Images
20 miles
Scotland
Newcastle upon Tyne Northumberland
I don’t think we’re suffering without them,” said Armstrong. There is a cultural conflict here over how the land looks, and what it’s used for, and who gets to decide how it will change. The devastating wildfires raging now across western Europe have put the management of rural landscapes firmly in everyone’s minds. Some farmers on Rothbury fear that the restoration of nature will increase the “fuel load” of wild vegetation, which could be kindling for a massive blaze. The Wildlife Trusts’ approach is to increase the resilience of the landscape to fire – that includes cutting fire breaks into vegetation and creating areas that stay wetter in dry conditions. Britain is exceptional for the quantity of our surface area that is devoted to farming: approximately 70%, compared with about 50% in France and Spain. The vast majority of this farmland is treated with pesticides and artificial fertilisers, used to improve pasture for livestock as well as boosting
Northumberland national park
productivity on cropland, but disrupting natural ecosystems. Giving nature space to breathe will require a shift in the way we farm; a rethink that means we are no longer ripping artificially enhanced harvests from a depleted Earth. Growing or rearing our own food is, of course, essential for food security. But large swathes of farmland contribute very little to our grocery baskets. Losing the least productive fifth of farmland would reduce the calories we produce domestically by just 3%, a barely noticeable fraction, as Henry Dimbleby pointed out in the national food strategy, an independent review commissioned by the government. Some of this less productive land could be turned to new habitats for wildlife, from planting new forests to restoring ancient woodlands. The sale of the Rothbury estate is already partially complete; the Wildlife Trusts, in partnership with the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, has acquired and is managing about half the land. If the final phase of the deal is completed, the charity says that agriculture will be “at the heart” of what it does. It will just be a different kind of agriculture. Peter Batchelor, managing director for the Rothbury project at the charity, said in terms of livestock numbers that will include “bringing cattle up a bit and sheep down a bit”. Sheep are a woolly villain for some conservationists, because of their fondness for devouring tree saplings, but not for the Wildlife Trusts, which uses
them to support conservation efforts: the close-cropped grass that sheep leave behind is favoured by some birds, for example. In one sense, the change of ownership will be a “democratisation”, as Rothbury tenant farmer John Harrison puts it – a shift away from feudal ownership. But on the Rothbury estate, the feudal lord did little to interfere. Tenants felt the farms were theirs, to run as they pleased. The shift has raised concern there will be more restrictions on how farms operate. “People are nervous about how we can farm with nature, but do it profitably,” said Harrison. The backdrop to all this is Brexit, when the finances of UK farming
There is a cultural conflict over how the land looks and what it’s used for
were transformed. Before Britain left the EU, subsidies were doled out under the common agricultural policy, under which the bulk of payments were made according to the area of land farmed. How the land was farmed didn’t matter. Straightforward for farmers. Not so great for songbirds. That changed after Brexit, with successive governments bringing in schemes that tied farming subsidies to the adoption of sustainable practices. Many farms are now struggling with high fuel and fertiliser costs, coupled with low prices for products such as wheat and milk: 30% of farms in
England were loss-making in 2024, according to a review published last year. Once exempt from inheritance tax, farming is now subject to this levy up to a cap of £2.5m for each individual, meaning a married couple can pass on £5m in assets without paying inheritance tax, but it took a furious backlash from farmers to extract this concession from the government. I
n a country where so much land is given over to agriculture, farming has to become more nature-friendly. But for a fragile sector that already feels buffeted by government decisions, that can sometimes be a hard sell. There’s a cultural rupture too. Even if the Wildlife Trusts speaks gingerly about rebalancing the numbers of sheep and cattle, many hill farmers’ histories are bound up with breeding and rearing sheep. The Wildlife Trusts was formed in 1926, when a Norfolk physician, Sydney Long, and a dozen other nature-lovers raised funds to acquire a grazing marsh to turn into a bird sanctuary. That was on a far smaller scale – less than 200 hectares. The Rothbury estate is about the same size as the municipal area of Athens. Together with its neighbours – the rewilding project Hepple Wilds, National Trust land at Wallington, and a red squirrel reserve – they form a vast, interconnected belt of land where species can move and thrive. Centuries of habitat loss at the hands of humans have pushed nature to the brink. Hundreds of species are at critical risk, including the turtle dove and the water vole. That makes nature restoration on this scale critically important. The Wildlife Trusts does not tend to use the word “rewilding”, preferring to speak of nature recovery or restoration. That may be appropriate, as rewilding implies we let nature take its course. In a country where some rivers flow below sea level and native mammals have been hunted to extinction, just letting nature take its course won’t work. As well as actively managing the return of nature, the single largest nature restoration project of recent years needs to take into account the views of the people who work on the land. That won’t be easy, but listening to farmers may require adapting the changes to win over doubters. After decades in which Britain’s food system has been run to maximise profit while ignoring the consequences for wildlife, a shift on this scale will take time. Ultimately, farms are businesses, and showing that farmers can work with nature – and still be rewarded adequately for their labour – will settle the argument.
homes, support and political courage
In your coverage of Andy Burnham’s incoming premiership, one topic was missing: his “first instruction” to end rough sleeping. Rough sleeping is a very visible sign that our politics isn’t working – a symptom of wide-ranging policy failings that force people into abject misery. Radical change is never easy. But if we carry on as we are, we cannot expect anything other than the same continuing nightmare for the thousands of people forced on to our streets. The causes are clear. We don’t have homes for people on the lowest incomes. In the past year, we have lost more social homes in England than we’ve built, a net loss of almost 4,000. Rising rents put the private rented sector out of reach for many, and, with housing benefit frozen, people on the lowest incomes are then all but shut out. Homelessness resulting from discharge from hospitals, prisons and other institutions went up 22% in the last year. The trauma of rough sleeping takes its toll. People struggle to get the physical and mental healthcare they need, so they get stuck. The average age of death is just 44. A lack of joined-up thinking and political ambition on homelessness has hamstrung previous efforts. And yet we saw in the pandemic that rough sleeping is an issue that responds well to political will. Burnham himself has pointed to the Finnish example, where a cross-party consensus on ending homelessness over decades has all but ended rough sleeping. One of the Finnish solutions we could adopt would be to create a new
Rosebank and Jackdaw aren’t a net zero retreat Andy Burnham’s apparent willingness to consent to oil and gas production at Rosebank and Jackdaw understandably dismays many who have spent years pushing for a serious net zero transition. (“How Burnham can put the bulldog back into Britain”, News, last week). But it’s worth resisting the reflex to read it as a retreat. Both fields already hold exploration licences granted before Labour’s manifesto pledge, and both are largely built: Jackdaw’s platform is installed, and Rosebank’s floating production vessel is on site. The billions already committed were never going to be redirected to offshore wind or grid upgrades – that capital was sunk regardless of this decision. Approving production doesn’t slow the renewables build- out; it simply determines what happens to assets that already exist. The more defensible case is that the UK will need some oil and gas for years yet, even on a well- managed path to net zero, and that
The Observer | Established 1791 | Issue No. 12,242
housing body funded solely to acquire or develop the extra housing required to get people straight off the street and into a safe home and the support to stay there. For decades, we have managed homelessness rather than ending it, forcing thousands into unstable stays in B&Bs, hostels and hotels, at the staggering cost to local councils of £2.8bn last year alone. On top of this, rough sleepers are routinely told they don’t meet council thresholds for any help. This has got to stop. In his first speech as an MP, Burnham backed the adoption of “a national Housing First philosophy”. This is the breakthrough approach in which immediate access to homes, with support, helps people out of homelessness, including long- term rough sleeping. It is hugely successful across the world. For this highly effective approach to work, people must be able to access support. And, crucially, social housing supply must keep up with demand. The government has so much at its disposal to make that work. It could look at reforms to encourage private landlords to house those most in need, alongside unfreezing housing benefits. The prime minister’s commitment on rough sleeping is more than a pledge on a specific issue: it’s a pledge for the values in our society to be felt by all of us. Real solutions are on offer, and they cost less than simply managing the problem. Now is our chance. Matt Downie, chief executive of Crisis, www.crisis.org.uk
using declining domestic reserves
– particularly Jackdaw’s gas, which
displaces higher-carbon imported
liquefied natural gas (LNG) – is
more consistent with a managed
transition than pretending we can
do without.
Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson
makes the same case: “… let’s use
the North Sea. Primarily, we should
reduce gas dependency, but for as
long as we need to, it is indefensible
to ship more gas than necessary.”
None of which means the
concerns and dismay are
groundless. Rosebank’s oil is
destined largely for export,
so the “cleaner than imports”
argument applies far less there
than to Jackdaw. The real question
is whether this is where the
concessions to fossil fuels stop.
Richard Large
Newton Abbot, Devon
Ben Zaranko is right on the absolute priority to reform local government finance, and social care is an excellent place to start. As those with the greatest needs – the elderly – also own the most property, Burnham
should press ahead with changing the tax system to get better value from idle resources. There are three simple steps. First, require district council and health trusts to collaborate on preparing joint plans to derive more value from existing resources. Digital intelligence will make that easier and faster. Second, support the voluntary sector to provide young people with work experience. Lessons can be drawn from development trusts and past programmes such as City Challenge. Finally, make it safer and more pleasant to walk to town centres and stations. Investment in a “green and blue web”, which integrates vegetation and water systems to deliver simultaneous ecological, social and economic benefits to communities, will rekindle hope that real change is underway long before new houses are ready for occupation. The values behind social cities could reinvigorate parts of the Labour movement that have been neglected, while overcoming the financial constraints that caused Keir Starmer to lose support. Nicholas Falk, executive director, The URBED Trust London WC1H
You suggest (“The Observer View:
Things can also get better”, last week)
that Andy Burnham might follow
Jacinda Ardern, and echo another
former New Zealand prime minister
Norman Kirk’s mantra: “People
don’t want much. They want
someone to love, somewhere to live,
somewhere to work, and something
to hope for”.
That would be a welcome change
from much of UK politics, where
many promote views that assume
we mostly want someone to hate,
someone to envy and someone
to despise.
Tim Forcer
Southampton
Back to student digs
It was fascinating to read about Trent Park, in Enfield, opening as an immersive museum, (“House of secrets that helped the Allies win the Second World War”, News, last week). I had the privilege of being based there as a student at Middlesex Polytechnic between 1984 and 1988, so I had some prior knowledge of the site, but was shocked to learn it had fallen into disrepair after 2012 and that some of the old halls of residence and student union block had been left looking forlorn. At the time of my studies, I knew the mansion had a rich history, but it looks like a lot of valuable work has since gone into showcasing Trent Park’s pivotal role in the war effort. I look forward to visiting – if only also to nosey around my old student haunts. The venture definitely appears to deserve every success, perched as it is in
a pocket of Greater London greenbelt,
an asset that needs preserving.
Christopher Moreton
Thrapston, Northants
The view by Lord Dubs on the behaviour and character of his colleagues (“Dirty tricks scuppered the assisted dying bill...”, Letters, last week) is ad hominem. A focus on what did or didn’t happen in the Lords distracts us from the essential question we need to ask about the bill. To what extent does the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, as drafted, ensure the safety of vulnerable people? No major professional body, including the British Medical Association (BMA), the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) or Disability Rights UK has endorsed the current draft of the bill, as leading authorities remain unsatisfied with safeguards in its ability to prevent deaths through coercion of people who lack access to adequate health or social care, or of people with underlying
For the record
mental illness. The question MPs
must answer before voting on this
bill should be: is it safe?
Prof D A Jones
St Mary’s University, London
I was in awe of Melanie Reid’s
ability to take on the role of
carer for her late husband and
face the challenges of widowhood,
(“Nduja and fish fingers?! Cooking
as a widow has got a bit… weird”,
Forum, last week). Accolades often
go to those who have done little to
deserve them… but Reid truly does.
Annette Bovington
Sevenoaks, Kent
Reader Mike Coogan proves Damien Morris’s point that the Stones weren’t an album act by mentioning Exile on Main St. (“Taking the Mick”, Letters, last week) – surely the most overrated album ever. John Parkin Nuneaton, Warwickshire
Write to us
Letters, which may be edited, should
include a full name, telephone
number and postal address.
Email letters@observer.co.uk
(please insert Letters to the Editor
in the subject field).
Or write to us at
Letters to the Editor
The Observer, 22 Berners Street,
London W1T 3LP
To be received by noon
on Thursday.
View more letters online at
observer.co.uk/topics/letters
To request a correction or make
a complaint please write to
readers@observer.co.uk
TikTok to govern Britain Michaela Makusha
‘T
I
his week, a hot new bombshell enters the villa” is not something you expect to hear over a video of Andy Burnham entering No 10, but when the UK government has an official TikTok account, anything can happen. Ever since Burnham was elected to parliament last month and – surprise! found himself prime minister – his use of social media has been praised. He’s funny and engaging. Burnham used social media to announce his cabinet, and teamed up with Bemi Orojuogun (the unlikely influencer affectionately known to swathes of the internet as “Bus Aunty”) to announce his cap on bus fares. While Keir Starmer was like your dad trying to be cool way too late, and often came across as awkward when trying to do a reel for Instagram, Andy Burnham is like your friend’s dad who actually is cool and funny, and who you might even have a bit of a crush on. British politics has produced very few figures who understand social media as a native form. Nigel Farage is the uncomfortable exception: whatever one thinks of his politics, he has understood since before most of his colleagues used Instagram that the comment section is the constituency. In the US, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain the benchmark for using social media effectively to engage voters.
potent at the highest levels of political power, but more so. The question is what force it exerts. Trump has always used social media in a threatening way. There is no warmth, or fun DJ sets, or funny clapbacks. Even his pre- presidential tweets are lines from a thin-skinned bully who once wished haters and losers a happy 9/11. But what it has built with his Maga base is a parasocial relationship based on blind loyalty. He is the most abnormal presence in any room, and his social media usage has extended this, giving him this immunity from the norms of political discourse. This is the dilemma facing Burnham’s team. As prime minister, he will no doubt make unpopular decisions that put him at odds with the image of relatability he has crafted online. His followers will feel betrayed because he will shatter the idea of him that has been built on his behalf. A fun DJ is not exactly someone who raises taxes, is he? But I would argue that Burnham’s social media strategy served its purpose. It got people on his side, and now he’s prime minister. But if he keeps using an informal tone, it might start looking odd when it comes to hard choices; he will have to use social media not just to entertain but to engage people in politics and explain tough decisions. Burnham has been in office only a week, and it’s been fun. But the honeymoon will end when the parliamentary recess is over, and no amount of aura farming can get you out of dealing with an impatient British public. Odyssey spectacle does not atone for its betrayal of Homer
Forcing the classic antihero to act within a modern moral code limits the film, argues Xavier Greenwood
t does not spoil Christopher
Nolan’s adaptation of the
Odyssey to write that Odysseus
has sex with Calypso and Circe
on the journey home to his wife
Penelope. It does not spoil it to write
that Odysseus executes 12 enslaved
women when he gets back to Ithaca.
None of these details is a spoiler,
because they relate to events that
happen in Homer’s poem but not in
Nolan’s movie. No one can deny the
astonishing spectacle of The Odyssey
on screen. One of the earliest British
films, made in 1895, comprises less
than 60 seconds of waves crashing
against a pier. A reporter described
the waves breaking into “tiny floods
just like the real thing”. Spectators
were said to lift up their feet lest
Andy Burnham’s TikTok videos helped get people on his side. TikTok
AOC’s lockdown broadcasts on Instagram Live, her cooking livestreams – all of it was calculated, but felt real, which is the central paradox of effective political social media. Mamdani, similarly, was elected thanks to his team’s ability to craft engaging content. People knew what and who they were voting for. Of course, the master of social media in the US is the commander- in-chief. Donald Trump’s social media presence, from Twitter/X to Truth Social, is much like observing a slow-moving car crash. So much of it is dangerous or worrying. To
the water overtake them. To gaze at Nolan’s rough sea in full 70mm awe is to come close to that experience. But if we consider this sea as the blank space around the words, the space to process what we are watching, then it is a mirror and not a window. Because Nolan could have challenged his audience with an ancient value system that made heroes of people who act like villains. Instead, we get a modern meditation, or a betrayal of the text. It has been restated to the point of tedium that the Odyssey, which is 3,000 years old, is a foundational text of western literature. What is more important to know is that the ancient Greeks treated the poem as a kind of moral guide. We might nod along to some of its maxims. Be hospitable to strangers. Yes. Pursue self-mastery over your ego. Yes. How about this? Help your friends and harm your enemies. This is core to Homeric justice, a command
true believers, he’s a man of the people who speaks his mind; to his detractors – well, they may try, but they can’t look away. This is where the Mamdani comparison fails, and where the Trump comparison becomes the one worth making – though carefully, and not as an insult. Mamdani is a mayor. He has been in office since January and his social media is still doing what it did during the campaign: high-frequency, platform-native, energetic. He can do videos playing basketball, filling potholes and
that appears to deny empathy and forgiveness. But it is not core to Nolan’s film, which has the hubris, at its lowest point, to paraphrase the Bible instead: do to others as you would have them do to you. The thrill of a movie is that it can seduce us. We do not like murderers, but Bonnie and Clyde get a pass. We do not like monomaniacs, but Jordan Belfort, the wolf of Wall Street, seems like fun. We do not like mobsters, but can Vito Corleone be our godfather? What potential there is in Odysseus, an adulterous liar who devises a trick to raze a city, who prioritises his own survival over that of his soldiers, and who somehow remains a hero. That is not Nolan’s Odysseus. He enters Troy as a haunted observer of the pillage being committed by his men. When he kills the suitors who squat in his home, it is with the bloodlessness of an arcade game player, nothing like the poem,
riding bikes. It is effective, and it’s possible because while the decisions made by a New York City mayor are significant, they do not often move global markets or trigger diplomatic incidents. Mamdani can afford the informality of his register because the stakes of any post are bounded. Even when he called for the arrest of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as he did last week, he stressed that he was considering only the jurisdiction of New York. Trump has no such limitation, and this is what makes his example worth examining directly. Over the
Social media doesn’t get less
potent at the highest levels of
political power, but more so
past decade, his posts have made national headlines, and his direct- to-public approach has allowed him to maintain control over his own messaging. The content is often wild, frequently unhinged, and almost always effective as national communication. But it also means he can rarely be held accountable for his words and the real-world consequences are always jarring. Markets respond to Trump’s Truth Social posts – so reliably, in fact, that Trump Media is launching a paid API service to give Wall Street firms faster access to his “truths”, so they can trade on them before the wider public sees them. Whatever one thinks of this – the correct response should be sheer horror – it is proof of something important: social media doesn’t become less
where he is splattered with gore “like a lion who has eaten an ox”. Nolan’s Odysseus then sails off into exile to atone for what he has done. What we get is less Odysseus at sea than Odysseus in Vietnam, a PTSD-ridden ghost. The Hollywood production code on what films could show was lifted in 1968, but it is as if Nolan is still beholden to it. The biggest disappointment is what Nolan’s choices do to female characters, so richly depicted in Homer’s poem that the novelist Samuel Butler hypothesised in 1897 that the Odyssey was written by a woman. Nolan relegates most of them to wagging fingers deployed to remind the viewer of the sins of their male counterparts. Helen is mutilated by her husband. Athena does a lot of forlorn staring. A traumatised Circe is convinced to go easy on Odysseus by a variation on the “not all men” defence. It appears to be beyond Nolan to
suggest that our moral codes are not as etched in stone as the Sermon on the Mount would have us think; to suggest the heroes of the past bear little resemblance to the heroes we worship today. The Imax screen is designed to have us kneel before it. Perhaps Nolan, with the medium at his mercy, and one of the most influential of ancient texts as his muse, is afraid of his own power. He would do well to remember the words of Virginia Woolf on cinema: “The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet… This beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not.” In the cinema, as the sea threatens to swallow us whole, Nolan’s The Odyssey might feel real, but it is not. We can leave without bearing the scars of cruelty and revenge. We can leave it all behind, confused and conflicted but fully intact. That is a privilege that Nolan fails to grasp.
`
N
Let the Games begin! The King and Queen led the royal procession at the Hydro arena last Thursday night, with a host of dignitaries in attendance. Everyone was singing God Save the King – except for, you know, the King, which seems only right.
Next to the King is Dr Donald Rukare, president of Commonwealth Sport and the Uganda Olympic Committee. A former international swimmer, he’s sporting a Wallace tartan kilt reimagined in Uganda’s national colours – proof that Commonwealth fashion diplomacy can be surprisingly stylish.
No fun and games for Rhun ap Iorwerth and John Swinney – the first ministers respectively of
the sports event may lie in its complex past, says Jessy Parker Humphreys
o sporting event has
had more obituaries
written for it than the
Commonwealth Games.
With a truncated version
beginning in Glasgow on Friday, the
future of the games has once again
been called into question.
There are only 10 sports at this
edition, after Glasgow was forced to
step in at the last moment because
the government of Victoria in
Australia withdrew as host due to
spiralling costs. It marks the second
time in a row that the designated
host has pulled out over financial
considerations, after Birmingham
took over from Durban in 2022.
It is also the first time since 1954
Here’s the monarch, effortlessly snazzy in a sharp blue suit and pale pink tie. As Prince of
Mattia Ozbot/Getty Images
Wales and Scotland. Our new prime minister reportedly told Swinney that Scottish
that the BBC will not air the games. The only free-to-air coverage is a highlights package on Channel 5, with the rest broadcast behind a paywall on TNT Sports. It’s hard to summon much fanfare for something that risks being invisible. Reticence to host and media rights deals are trends seen across sport. But the Commonwealth Games is viewed as particularly anachronistic due to its presumed promotion of the British empire. This is perhaps unfair, given that the imperial origins of organised sport are not unique to the Commonwealth Games. Pierre de Coubertin was inspired to revive the Olympics after seeing the failure of the French army in the Prussian war and deciding that Frenchmen should become more like the robust men of the British empire, shaped by the sports they played at school. But there is no getting around the fact that the legacies of empire are
Wales, Charles was often seen to favour a double- breasted suit, but since ascending the
independence is “off limits”, while ap Iorwerth made his case for Welsh parity with the Scots.
throne he’s turned more towards single- breasted numbers, giving a softer, more approachable look.
embedded in this competition. From 1930 to 1950 the games were known as the British Empire Games, from 1954 to 1966 the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, then from 1970 to 1974 they became the British Commonwealth Games. It was only in 1978, when the competition was held in Edmonton, Canada, that it took its current title. Yet despite these changes, the games create a space to remember and learn about the history of empire in a way that is vanishingly rare in British society. Pride House – a drop-in venue in Glasgow where LGBTQ+ athletes, visitors and allies can watch the games – offers one such opportunity, with this year’s exhibition flying national flags of the participating countries where
Queen Camilla – who, incidentally, appeared to have arrived at the event in the Tardis with
Goodbye, black T-shirt, hello button-up shirt and tie. If that’s the price for taking the highest
homosexuality is still criminalised and punishable by imprisonment or the death penalty. In many cases, this is a result of British colonial laws remaining on the statute books, but this legacy is too often erased, with the nations in question being presented as backward. It is a history that feels particularly relevant as the rights of transgender people are restricted in this country, following last year’s Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act that stated references to sex within it should be interpreted as biological sex. Questions about what the Commonwealth ideal means today aren’t confined to the sports world. The Booker prize changed its criteria in 2014 to allow entries not just from the UK and Commonwealth but any English-language novel; this year, the Commonwealth Short Story prize came under fire for supposed artificial intelligence use in the story that won the overall
her husband – wears an Anna Valentine jumpsuit. Practical, sporty and just the right thing for a
office in the land, Andy Burnham is clearly willing to pay it. Thankfully, not even constitutional
prize. Razmi Farook, chair of the Commonwealth Foundation, said the controversy threatened to overshadow the purpose of the prize, which is to develop writing from under-served communities across Commonwealth territories. She quoted Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1988 essay, “Let the subaltern speak” to make her case. It is an exhortation that also applies to the Commonwealth Games, where people from countries shaped by the legacy of the British empire are offered a unique opportunity and platform. The Commonwealth Games, so often seen as defined by the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, can and should do more to discuss the legacies of empire. A brighter future for the event might appear not through a format that flattens the history of competing nations, but one that illuminates it.
big sporting event. When Doctor Who reboots and needs a new companion, who knows?
Sir Tom Marsters the King’s Representative in the Cook Islands, is joined by his wife of more than 40 years, Lady Tuaine. The Pacific nation’s 15 islands may be scattered across a vast ocean, but in Glasgow they’re united behind competitors in athletics, lawn bowls, swimming and weightlifting.
responsibility has persuaded him to part with his trusty Tag Heuer 2000 Series dive watch.
less
Gently trimming your hedge every 2 weeks will thicken it up and give it an incredible texture, but heavy trimmers, cables and step ladders make hedge trimming a job that some people hate. Gtech’s Cordless HT50 makes hedge trimming a pleasure.
Cordless Convenience With 60-minutes of runtime* move freely around your garden without being tethered by cables or worrying about messy petrol. Running off a high torque 18V motor, the HT50 Hedge Trimmer supplies the power directly when needed. The lightweight but super strong drive system is designed for refi nement and quiet running, but don’t be fooled – the precision, laser cut blades power through branches up to 25mm thick.
Long Reach The Gtech HT50 Hedge Trimmer has an adjustable head that rotates through 135° so that you have full control over the cut of your hedge. The head adjusts downwards so you can cut the top of your hedge easily, and upwards so that you can cut thorny hedges without scratching your arms. Keep your hedges neat by cutting fl at along the tops of hedges up to 10ft tall† using the 50cm long blade. The precision blades power though foliage, leaving clean cut, healthy stems which will bud out to create a beautiful, rich textured hedge.
a l
jus
Nick Grey Inventor & Gtech Owner...
“We designed the HT50 with a longer blade, so you cut a bigger area at once. This means you’ll spend less time working and have more time to enjoy your garden - ideal.”
Perfectly Balanced Weighing only 2.94kg and accompanied by the harness, you can move freely around your garden without feeling anchored down. The HT50 is well balanced giving you a more enjoyable gardening experience without worrying about the weight. Safety First To prevent any unexpected starts, the HT50 Hedge Trimmer has an easy to use safety switch. To operate simply press in the safety switch on the side of the handle whilst holding the one-handed power trigger. Simple to operate and safer than ever.
Get our HT50 Long Reach Hedge Trimmer and Branch Cutter bundle for just £169.99 (RRP £274.98) saving 38% if you order before 30/09/2026. Order now at www.gtech.co.uk (enter code XC76 at checkout) or scan the QR code:
£169.99
Use Code: XC76
Includes Branch Cutter attachment
Cuts well, lightweight, easy to use. Pleasantly surprised. Weight was top priority but it also performs really well. No problem with hedging and mature topiary holly. Terry B
industry insider turned government chief whip is known for her ‘terrier-like’ tenacity, writes James Tapper
A nneliese Midgley likes to tell a story about Harold Wilson visiting Knowsley Safari Park just north of Liverpool, a place the former Labour prime minister used to represent and which she now does as Knowsley’s MP. Asked what might happen if the lions escaped, Wilson replied: “Well, the lions will have to fend for themselves.” Midgley is Andy Burnham’s new chief whip, responsible for corralling Labour MPs into the government’s voting lobby. If they escape, will they be stalked through the wilds of Westminster by a lioness or a pussycat? Perhaps the best answer to that comes from last year’s welfare bill rebellion. Keir Starmer’s government wanted to cut £5bn of spending on personal independence payments for disabled people and the health element of universal credit payments for under-22s. Backbenchers were angry, and ministers climbed down rather than lose a vote. The incident left a large hole in the government finances, and an equally large hole in Starmer’s authority. No 10 blamed Louise Haigh, sacked by Starmer as transport secretary after a scandal over a stolen phone. They were apparently unaware that Midgley – a former Starmer aide – was also a key mover. “She wasn’t interested in embarrassing the government, or being wilfully obstructive – she genuinely thought those reforms were wrong,” one friend said. “Anneliese is like a terrier. Once she’s got hold of an issue, she isn’t letting it go.” A year later, Midgley and Haigh flanked Burnham as he walked into the House of Commons chamber to rejoin the Labour benches after winning the Makerfield byelection. The two women, crowned as queens to the King in the North by the New
Statesman, were Burnham’s fixers in getting him into power. Haigh will be his fixer in government, as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, while Midgley will fix his problems in parliament. “The word ‘fixer’ gets used a lot about Anneliese and that’s really fair,” said Nathan Oswin, who worked closely with Midgley on the Hillsborough Law bill, to create a duty of candour for public officials. “But there are two types. Political fixers who are game players, not really focused on delivering actual change. And then you have actual fixers who spot the problem and try to overcome the roadblocks. Anneliese is very much that.” Oswin credits his friend with getting government ministers to engage at crucial points in the bill’s progress through the Commons. She will no doubt be keeping an eye on its progress through the House of Lords. Traditionally, whips lurk in parliamentary shadows, better for quiet conversations
are not aligned
on absolutely
everything: he is an
Everton fan, she
supports Liverpool
and where the gloom makes it hard to tell whether they’re about to brandish a carrot or a stick. But backbenchers might see a flash of something sequin-like from Midgley’s showbiz past. Her roots are firmly Liverpudlian – she grew up in Cantril Farm, a place she described as a “slum clearance estate” in her maiden speech as an MP. Her aunt Jean worked at her school, her mother became a social worker, and her father worked on the production line at Ford’s factory in Halewood. Unions were almost part of the family, keeping her father in work at a time when unemployment in the area rose dramatically. . “There were times when there would literally be a tin of beans in the fridge, and that is all we had,” she told the House magazine. “The community would pull together, or I’d go to my nan’s for tea.” Her teenage jobs were a cut above most, working at the Beatles shop in Liverpool, then in Paris at
Shakespeare and Company, the English language bookshop. When she returned to Liverpool she joined the music industry, DJing and setting up club nights including Liquidation, a stalwart of the indie scene in the northwest. Bob Stanley, a music journalist and founder of indie dance act Saint Etienne, DJed at her 21st birthday party.
Romance followed – by Midgley’s account, their first kiss came at a 1997 general election party at the moment that Michael Portillo lost his seat – and they married. They have divorced since but remain good friends. Midgley wrote for Mojo magazine, worked at a London record shop and did publicity for other 90s
bands including Pulp. Then politics intervened. She joined Unison and became a shop steward. After Ken Livingstone’s team in the London mayor’s office noticed her campaigning capabilities – she had printed some pro-congestion charge badges, so she was offered a job in the London mayor’s office. That journey underpins her values, Oswin said. “She was obsessed with music and that artistic life but then as many people do, she got more involved and more interested in politics as life progressed. Running music nights in a city like Liverpool and being able to learn how to engage and talk to people and listen to them – it set her up well.” After a stint with Livingstone, she worked for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, then moved into the trade unions, as political director to Len McCluskey at Unite, and an adviser to Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress.
These are figures firmly on Labour’s left, but Nowak says that Midgley is respected across the spectrum of the Labour movement. She intervened to stop Tom Watson being removed as deputy leader under Corbyn, and joined Keir Starmer in 2020 after he became Labour leader. “Anyone who can work for me, Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Len McCluskey is clearly someone who can operate across the Labour movement,” Nowak said. “When I first started as general secretary, you’d be stopping every 10 yards in parliament because she’d be chattering to somebody – not only because she knew people but because she was genuinely interested in them,” he said. If Oswin and Nowak are right, then Midgley’s approach as chief whip will be more collaborative than combative, more Guy Chadwick’s The House of Love than Francis Urquhart’s House of Cards. “There’s the stereotype of the whip dragging people in and threatening and bollocking and having a little black book,” Oswin said. “She’ll want it to be focused on outcomes. [Chief whip] would be one of her dream roles in government because that’s the stuff she enjoys. It’s that fixer in her again.” Midge, as friends call her, will have plenty to fix. Burnham plans to overhaul social care and end rough sleeping, Perhaps his plan for a 20% cut in business rates for pubs, clubs and music venues has a few Midgley fingerprints on it. Not that they are aligned on absolutely everything: Burnham is an Everton fan; Midgley supports Liverpool. Some things are beyond fixing.
N
A
s Tom McNab looked at the 31 wretches shivering in their shorts and vests at the Polytechnic Stadium in west London in 1980, his heart sank. The words of David Puttnam rang in his ears. “Your job is to make sure the athletics looks real,” the producer of Chariots of Fire had told McNab. “If it doesn’t, we’re stuffed.” McNab could coach athletes. He had led British teams to two Olympics and worked with some of the best national talent. But these actors were scrawny and unused to exercise – and some of them were already throwing up after a gentle run. “They did for sport what Quasimodo did for coat hangers,” McNab later remarked. After watching them for a bit, he picked out Ben Cross and Ian Charleson as the most likely to get away with it. “They were the ones they wanted,” McNab said. And then Charleson, who played Eric Liddell, whose memorial trophy for best junior athlete in Scotland McNab had once won, turned up for their first training session with a pulled muscle, sustained running for a bus. McNab had four months to make them resemble Olympians from 1924. He succeeded, though not as well as the actors believed. Near the end of filming, Cross, playing the sprinter Harold Abrahams, claimed he could run the 100m in 11 seconds flat. “You’d be lucky if you could run 12.6,” McNab replied. He put a 50-something elite female runner up against him and she destroyed
o one can fly like a fly. That’s our modest boast: a remark we might make to each other after a particularly adroit turn, an especially neat landing. Better than Concorde, better than eagles, much better than bats and butterflies. I could have flown rings round a pterodactyl.
Monday Precision. That’s the meaning of life. It’s about knowing exactly where you are in the air, in terms of distance, angle and speed in three-dimensional space. Look at other insects. Butterflies, dragonflies, bees, wasps: they’ve all got four wings. Two too many. Instead of hindwings we have the most sophisticated flight instruments on the planet. They’re
Oscar performance: Tom McNab training actor Ben Cross in 1981 for his Chariots of Fire role as Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams. Shutterstock
him over 40 yards. “He never mentioned it again,” McNab said. If the Oscar-winning film was the most famous of his endeavours, McNab more deserves to be remembered for 15 years as the national coach, working with such athletes as Lorna Boothe, a Commonwealth Games gold medal-winner in the 100m hurdles;
called halteres and they’re the ultimate secret of precision.
Tuesday Have you ever considered how complex it is to make a safe landing on a ceiling? It’s perhaps the greatest contradiction in the history of flight and we are masters of it. Here’s how it goes. Accelerate to the landing point. Choose your technique: I might approach with a half-roll, or I might go for a flip in the head-to- tail axis. Lower the landing gear: all three legs on the upward side in a roll; just the head-pair of legs in a flip. The legs’ extension also slows you down: judge it right and you more or less step onto the ceiling.
Andrea Lynch, a European indoor champion at the 60m; and Fred Alsop, fourth in the triple jump at the 1964 Olympics. McNab also worked with Greg Rutherford when he became European under-20 champion in the long jump, seven years before he won Olympic gold. “He drove the role of coaching athletics into the forefront of the
requires a modicum of skill. It’s all about the claws and the sticky bits on each foot. The sticky bits are called pulvilli – a nice name, I think you’ll agree. They’re like half-a- dozen Post-it notes: sticky ma non troppo. The pulvilli stick, the claws unstick: I can pace the ceiling as well as anyone else can pace the floor.
Thursday I love humans. Mostly. They’re so adorably messy. Today it was a lump of beef in a kitchen, left uncovered for a few minutes. I landed and tasted. I taste with my feet, so first I cleaned them thoroughly to prepare
public’s mind,” the veteran athletics writer John Goodbody said. “He was immensely dedicated and particularly fond of the decathlon, as it exemplified the complete sportsman. He had an equal knowledge of track and field events, which was rare.” Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, called him “one of the sport’s most loyal friends and a man of many talents”. T
homas Buchan McNab was born in Glasgow in 1933. As a boy, he loved the comic strip “Wilson the Wonder Athlete” and spent hours copying his exploits. Aged 17, he was invited by a teacher to compete at the Scottish Schools Championships where he stunned everyone by breaking the triple jump record with his first attempt. “It wasn’t a great record in those days,” he later said. By the end of the year he was fourth in Britain, but claimed that he hadn’t even been fourth in his school. He won four Scottish senior championships and was unlucky not to be selected for any Commonwealth Games. But his talents were recognised as a coach after he had done national service in the RAF and worked for four years as a PE teacher. His first protege, Norrie Foster, was a runner he turned into a pole vaulter who later became British junior champion. In 1963, he was appointed National Athletics Coach for England and worked with Peter Gabbett, who set a British record
my palate. (That’s why you often see me wringing my hands and wringing my feet, as the Japanese fellow said.) I’m a liquid lunch sort of guy, so I spat all over the meat and drank the meat as it softened. Maybe the meat was compromised as a result: don’t blame me, blame the pathogens.
Friday When I first flew forth as an adult I was a little uncertain, but after 16 hours of hard living I reached puberty and was ready to rock. I bumped into a lovely female – and I mean bumped. How else but by touch can I tell if she’s up for it? I
in decathlon and became a double Olympian. McNab also set up the British Athletics League and created the Five Star Award Scheme to bring children into athletics. It encouraged them to measure success not against their rivals but their own personal bests, reflecting McNab’s belief that this was the greatest challenge. He also served as fitness adviser to England’s rugby union team, culminating in them reaching the 1991 World Cup final, and worked with Chelsea FC when they won the 1970 FA Cup. He was performance director for British bobsleigh as they prepared for the 1980 Winter Olympics and a historian for the International Olympic Committee. As well as contributing to this newspaper, he wrote Flanagan’s Run, a bestselling novel about a race across the US, and a play, 1936, about the Berlin Olympics. He was married twice, first to Pat McNab, a pentathlete, and then to the actor Jenny Lee. He had five children: Kate, Neil, Catherine, Sarah and Matthew. In later life, he stayed a member of the athletics club he founded in St Albans, winning a national title in the hammer event at 60. He always took a close interest in sport and in retirement despaired at doping controversies. “Sport is not a competition between pharmacists,” he said. “My attitude was to take whatever your mother fed you and that’s it.” Patrick Kidd
Tom McNab, athletics coach, born 16 December 1933, died 14 July 2026, aged 92
made my strike, the lady said yes, and I was the greatest high-flier in the ecosystem.
Saturday
Wanton boys may kill us for their
sport, but so far I’ve been too quick,
too agile, too precise for them.
I’m not ready for any thoughtless
hand to brush away my summer’s
play, not just yet. Live while you
can, eh?
Housefly CV Lifespan Four weeks as an adult Eating habits A nice turd never goes amiss Hobbies Aerial manoeuvres Sexual preferences The flightier the better
Economics, work and money
Barclays over
ex-CEO’s ties
to Epstein
Centrica boss says fate of Rough gas
storage site is a ‘political decision’
The Middle East conflict has driven reserves to a three-year low and could spell the end of the Yorkshire facility unless the government takes urgent action, Chris O’Shea warns
Jeevan Vasagar
& Barney Macintyre
Iran’s strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas facility and the choking of liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply through the Strait of Hormuz are making their presence felt off the Yorkshire coast, where the future of Centrica’s Rough gas storage facility hangs in the balance. The FTSE 100-listed owner of British Gas has set a deadline of next April for shutting down the facility unless it receives government support on pricing. At the end of June, Rough had 31% less gas stored than at the same time the previous year. The company is also calling on the government to sign a short-term deal to fill the facility, citing concern about energy security. “We’ve lost eight weeks [since the ideal refill start date], and every day we keep talking, we keep losing time to get this thing up and running for the coming winter,” said Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, in an interview with The Observer. O’Shea raised the matter with the new secretary of energy security and net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, in a phone call last week. He contends that, contrary to the department’s statements, this is “a political decision for the government rather than a commercial decision for Centrica”. Under the proposed deal, Centrica would fill the reservoir using its own funds and be paid a fee for the storage by the government. The government would then decide when to take the gas out, to sell at a profit or a loss. Rough made a £57m operating profit in the first half of the year, swinging from a £26m loss for the same period last year. The volatility implied in those numbers is one reason it’s hard to justify maintaining the facility on commercial grounds. Storage accounted for 5% of the UK’s gas supply last winter and Rough, while the largest, is one of eight similar facilities.
Chris O’Shea wants the government to sign a deal to fill the Rough storage facility.
Jason Alden/Getty
50% The rise in European gas prices in the past month
However, the UK usually depends on European storage in the colder months, but that is also expected to be low following the Hormuz disruption. At the start of April, average gas storage in the EU stood at 28%, below levels recorded at the start of the last three summers. Lower storage levels spell trouble for winter, if countries cannot draw on reserves to smooth out volatility. While the key source of the UK’s gas imports is Norway, the war in the Middle East has sharply reduced the flow of Gulf LNG, driving current prices higher. Meanwhile, US gas has been redirected to Asia, where buyers are willing to pay more than in Europe. Gas only generates about 30% of the power in the UK’s grid, while almost half now comes from renewables. But the wholesale gas price often sets the power price – as it’s called on to supplement when renewable energy falls short. Generating and storing more clean power will avoid those gas-fuelled price spikes, but even by the end of the decade, gas is expected to set UK power prices around 30% of the time.
Results last Thursday showed that Centrica’s adjusted operating profit dropped to £737m in the first half, down from £900m for the same period last year. The company said the decline was driven predominantly by the disposal of assets in Spirit Energy, its oil and gas production business, and production outages. Centrica is shedding around 1,300 jobs, over a third in call centres. O’Shea hit back at claims from the GMB union that employees of British Gas were being replaced by artificial intelligence: “They’re just fundamentally wrong, completely incorrect. [The union] Unite have internally issued a bulletin to their members pointing out just how the GMB’s logic was flawed.” Rough is not the only consequential decision Fahnbulleh will have to make early in her ministerial role. She must also consider whether to approve production at the Jackdaw gas field and the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea. “I think she is very, very impressive,” says O’Shea, “so I’m hopeful that she’ll make the right decision.”
Stephen Armstrong
A senior US senator has written to Barclays demanding answers over its due diligence in the handling of former boss Jes Staley’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In a letter to chairman Nigel Higgins, Elizabeth Warren said the “apparent failure” to investigate the relationship before appointing Staley raised “significant governance questions regarding the bank’s ability to hold senior executives accountable for wrongdoing”. Staley became chief executive in 2015 and resigned in 2021 after the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority ruled he had “recklessly misled” the regulator by minimising his ties to the convicted paedophile financier. Staley was fined £1.8m ($2.4m), which was later reduced to £1.1m and banned from holding senior roles in the financial services industry. Prior to joining Barclays, Staley was an executive at JP Morgan, where he tried to retain Epstein as a client after the latter’s conviction for child sex offences. Staley told the US House Oversight Committee last Thursday that he spoke to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s chief executive at least twice about Epstein – once in 2006, when Epstein was first indicted, and again in 2008, when Epstein was in jail. Dimon has denied these claims. Patricia Wexler, a spokesperson for JPMorgan, has also denied the conversations took place. “Staley lacks credibility,” she said in a statement. “A UK tribunal found Staley to be evasive and unreliable.” In a statement Barclays said “the UK regulator concluded Barclays was misled by Jes Staley. We conducted an investigation based on the information available to us at the time. Since then, new information has emerged that demonstrates Mr Staley misled Barclays.” Staley is facing a lawsuit in Los Angeles over claims he and Barclays defrauded shareholders about his relationship with Epstein. “There are a lot of people really worried as this hearing goes on,” one senior Wall Street banker told The Observer. “There are the people you already know, some who managed to keep their jobs astonishingly, but there are people who haven’t been named in the emails so far. But Epstein’s network ran deep into Wall Street.”
hand out of the youth jobs crisis
community centre,
Ben Zaranko discovers
how active support
helps young people
find work – and why
cash benefits are less
effective in the long
term than tough love
O
n the banks of the Wear, nestled just behind the Sunderland football stadium, sits the Beacon of Light. The community hub – which, the staff cheerily but deliberately point out, is slightly bigger than Newcastle’s equivalent – is home to an array of services and facilities. Along with a cafe, a sports hall, a rooftop football pitch, an NHS eye- imaging facility, a Nissan-sponsored engineering zone, a teaching kitchen, a health and social care academy, it hosts a government- funded one-stop-shop for youths. The youth hub is there to provide support to young people who are not in education, employment or training (Neets, in the ugly but
common parlance). Across the UK as
a whole, around one in eight young
people are Neets; in the north-east
of England, the figure is more like
one in six.
As it stands, almost 1 million
young people are “destined for
the scrapheap”, according to Alan
Milburn, a former health secretary
under Tony Blair. He was asked
by Keir Starmer’s government to
undertake a review of how best to
avert what he has called a “social
catastrophe” and an “incalculable
act of economic self-harm”.
After publishing an interim
“diagnostic” report earlier this
year, Milburn is due to make
final recommendations to the
government this autumn. Andy
Burnham, who has kept Pat
McFadden in post at the Department
for Work and Pensions (DWP),
could choose to make tackling the
Neets crisis a central plank of his
burgeoning policy agenda.
Next week Burnham is expected
to make interventions on adult
social care, youth unemployment
and devolution. “Andy is going to
run towards problems that have
been neglected,” said a No 10 source.
Milburn’s diagnosic report
contains clues about what could be
coming next. He notes that in 2024–
25, for every £1 spent by the DWP
on job support for young people,
around £25 was spent paying them benefits. Milburn thinks that ratio is wrong, and that the government focuses too much on “passive” support, in the form of cash benefits, and too little on active efforts to get young people into work. This is not just an argument about how best to help young people struggling to find their way: it’s an argument about what it means for a government to be progressive. In a standard analysis of who gets what from the state, cash benefits paid to young people out of work show up as highly progressive, supporting some of the poorest in society. But what if it’s not in their long-term interests? What if a system that focused instead on hands-on training, careers advice and subsidised work placements could improve their outcomes over decades, even if that appeared less progressive in the short term? This would require a shift of mindset – one that would move the system closer to the Dutch, Danish and Australian models, which The Observer understands Milburn’s team to be studying closely for inspiration. All involve a bit more “tough love”, and place a much greater emphasis on active support rather than cash benefits, including for those with health conditions. Such a shift could jar
with traditional notions of what a “Labour approach” looks like. At the Beacon of Light, staff are convinced their active support model works. When young people are referred, security guards on the door and fast-paced appointments – the norm at the job centre – are replaced by what Steve Martin, a manager at the youth hub, calls “a laid-back, welcoming atmosphere”. Each week the young people see the same work coach, who can connect them with other services available just along the corridor. Nathan, a 24-year-old whose younger brother also attends, describes it as “less anxiety- inducing than the job centre”. Chloe, 18, agrees, and mentions the benefits of seeing the same familiar face each week. Nathan and Chloe have recently been offered jobs working for the DWP,
savings, but they’re
uncertain and likely
to materialise only
years or decades
down the road
Lindsay Judge,
Resolution Foundation
Chloe, one of the hub’s attendees, is now working for the DWP.
after completing various work placements, and speak effusively of the support they have received. Off the back of such success stories, “we’re starting to get people asking in the job centre if they can engage with the youth hub”, says Martin. “Word spreads.” Many of the benefits seem to be social: helping 18- to 24-year- olds to build their confidence and develop the “soft skills” that local employers worry are lacking. Kiran Fothergill, director of Pickerings Lifts, an engineering company in the north-east, who also chairs the region’s Jobs Foundation Business Council, said that in his experience too many young people lack time- management and communication skills. “They miss job interviews or fail to respond to emails,” he says. “The system isn’t preparing them, but a bit of coaching and mentoring could fill the gap.” Youth hub attendance is not mandatory. It’s entirely voluntary, and plenty of Neets aren’t receiving this type of support. There is particular concern about the rapidly growing number of young people receiving benefits in respect of disability and health conditions, with questions about the design of the benefits in question. The UK system draws a sharp administrative boundary between “job seekers”, whose cash payments come with extensive job-search requirements, and those assigned a health category, who get a financial top-up without any requirement to engage with job support services. Once someone is on health- related benefits, there’s a tendency to stay there. Milburn’s interim report notes that “among those first claiming a health or disability benefit aged 16 to 24, nearly half remain out of work or education 15 years later”. The largest chunk of spending in this category goes on the personal independence payment (Pip), which isn’t designed with employment or participation in mind: Pip is intended to compensate for the extra costs of disability, and is not means tested. On paper, getting a job shouldn’t affect someone’s Pip. Yet recipients fear that if they do start work or regularly attend a youth hub, they will be assessed differently, and they may lose thousands of pounds a month. This was a theme of the interim report, and Milburn’s team is understood to be concerned about the ways in which the benefits system can actively discourage participation. Other systems, including the one in the Netherlands, treat pension- like cash benefits as a last resort for young people rather than the first port of call, with greater focus on mandatory programmes of active support even for those with health issues. But some people, as Milburn’s report notes, “will never be able to work and face exceptionally high barriers to
other forms of participation”. A functioning system would need to distinguish between those who can work or participate, with the right support, and those who cannot. The question is, how. “The thinking in Milburn’s interim report seems to be that all young people should be searching for work, or engaging in employment support unless they have a very good reason not to,” says Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “But the difficult question is how to make that operational. You have to draw the line somewhere. How you do that, especially for those with fluctuating health conditions
Over £800 worth of benefits tailored for the culturally curious
Find out more
Unlock these offers
and many more at
observer.co.uk/culture-club
which change from month to month, is really contentious.” Other challenges loom. An expansion in active support could require significant upfront spending, especially if the ambition is to provide the kind of intensive, personalised support offered in Sunderland. To make matters worse, the National Audit Office reported last year that the DWP had a shortage of more than 2,000 work coaches, and was paring back the support available. Staff in Sunderland told me they were at capacity, and wanted other hubs to be established to help meet demand. “Attracting and retaining work coaches would require upfront
spending,” says Lindsay Judge, research director at the Resolution Foundation. “There might be future savings, but they’re uncertain and likely to materialise only years or decades down the road.” For a government likely to be bumping up against its borrowing rules for the foreseeable future, putting serious cash behind Milburn’s recommendations would mean raising taxes or spending less on something else. There’s also the question of how best to support the significant fraction of Neets who aren’t in the benefits system. The system is not currently well configured for those who don’t want to claim benefits
Observer for free access to our Culture Club
Exhibitions
The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern
British Design at Compton Verney | 2 for 1 tickets, save £17
Zurbarán at the National Gallery | 2 for 1 tickets, save £22
Festivals
HowTheLightGetsIn | 20% off tickets, save £32
The Long Road | 20% off tickets, save up to £46
Travel and experiences
The Landmark Trust | 20% off breaks across Britain and Italy
Historic Houses | 15% off an annual membership, save £11
Photographs by Gary Calton
Sign up to our new economics newsletter from Ben Zaranko
Steve Martin, far left, and Anthony Parkinson, aim to create a ‘laid- back, welcoming atmosphere’
but simply want career advice or to find a job. Sue Maguire, honorary professor at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, thinks employment support should be separated out from welfare support. The Observer understands Milburn’s team is considering recommending such a split, along with devolving job support services to mayors. Any recommendation of further devolution will presumably receive a positive reception in Burnham’s Downing Street. But Milburn’s wider direction of suggested travel may also find a receptive audience. In December 2009, James Purnell and Graeme Cooke, then working at the thinktank Demos, and now chief of staff and head of No 10’s policy unit, respectively, argued in the Financial Times that the UK needed a “more supportive and more demanding” welfare state, one that “instead of offering people a life on benefits… offers them what they really want: a job and a chance to get their career back on track”. Almost two decades on, Milburn’s review could provide an opportunity to put this thinking into practice.
as diamonds lose sparkle
Diamonds may still be a girl’s best friend, but they are no longer an investment guaranteed to sparkle. After heavy losses, mining giant Anglo American is reportedly about to sell De Beers, the erstwhile diamond monopoly that coined the phrase “a diamond is forever”, but has since fallen foul of US competition laws, ethical concerns about “blood diamonds”, and a devastating technological disruption: the synthetic diamond. Lab-made stones already account for half of American engagement rings. This is not a cyclical dip but the end of geology’s monopoly. Anglo American has grasped as much, writing De Beers down by $6.8bn in three years, with the diamond unit losing $511m in 2025. Is there still a way to polish up this rough old business? A leading candidate to buy is a consortium including the country that mines most of the stones: Botswana, where diamonds make up 80% of
Trump takes his tariff
hammer to generic drugs
As he settles into his job as defence secretary, Wes Streeting could do worse than read “Augustine’s laws”, a 42-year-old semi-satirical analysis of the defence industry written by one of its favourite sons, Norman Augustine, later Lockheed Martin boss. His most famous prediction was that, given relentless cost rises, by 2054 the entire US defence budget would buy a single aircraft. Many of Augustine’s themes were in the air at this year’s Farnborough International Air Show, where Streeting unveiled a new “loyal wingman” combat drone, BAE’s Brontanax, a full-scale model of an aircraft that has yet to fly. The GCAP fighter that headlined the show was
to UK property portfolio
Emma Haslett
The hedge fund of the US activist investor Boaz Weinstein has taken the next step in its shake-up of the UK property market, building up a stake of up to 4% through financial derivatives in the student housing provider Unite Group. Saba Capital has already bought stakes in several London-listed real estate investment trusts (REITs), including almost a third of office provider Workspace Group and a 5% stake in Grainger, the FTSE 250-listed residential landlord. The company’s website also lists a position in Derwent London.
its exports and a quarter of GDP. It already owns 15% of De Beers, and President Duma Boko calls the firm a strategic national asset; controlling it, the theory runs, would let Botswana stop being a mere price-taker and shape the pricing and the marketing that still insists natural beats synthetic. Sceptics worry that this is a desperate country trying to double down on a once-valuable industry now in terminal decline. Such a risky bet is proving ominously hard to finance. The very crash that has made it seek to buy control has left Botswana with a shrinking economy, strained state coffers and a downgraded credit rating. Boko has been courting Gulf sovereign wealth in the UAE and Oman and has already reduced his ambition from majority control to a bigger minority stake. And if the money can’t be raised, what then? A diamond may be forever. A diamond company may not be.
a cockpit mock-up that VIPs queued to sit in. Farnborough was once a shop window for finished aircraft. This year star billing went to models that will not fly for years, if ever. Defence budgets are rising almost everywhere. The question in the air over Hampshire was whether the tech disruption of warfare (cheap drones, software-defined weapons) will counter those price pressures, or merely feed them. Can defence tech startups beat incumbents with friends in procurement and the message the new firms’ cheaper kit is too risky? Perhaps this time the disruptors will defy another Augustine law – that “fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread”.
Although UK-based investors are required to disclose holdings in British companies once they reach a 3% shareholding, companies that are listed in the US, such as Saba, do not need to do so until they own a stake equivalent to 5%. Weinstein is known for his pugnacious approach to investments. In January he wrote to the board of Workspace Group proposing a “managed wind-down” of the company, including the disposal of all of its properties, which he said would “reverse years of value destruction”. Weinstein’s three-phase plan suggested all the company’s 64 properties could be disposed of in less than a year.
Botswana wants a greater stake and control of its diamond industry, which includes Karowe mine. Bloomberg/Getty
To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Donald Trump’s hammer is the tariff – and amid the flurry this week, one particular swing seems likely to hit ordinary Americans hard. The US president says generic drugs, which make up 90% of US prescriptions, will face a 100% tariff from August 2028 (up from zero now), doubling to 200% a year later. His aim is to reshore the generic drugs industry, which is now mostly located abroad, especially in India and China. Yet while generics account for nine in 10 prescriptions, they account for barely 13% of US
This month, Saba raised its stake in Workspace to 29.1%, making it the company’s largest shareholder. James Carthew, head of investment companies research at QuotedData, questioned its approach, however. “We think Saba’s got so much money that it’s having to find different things to do that it wouldn’t normally
drug spending, reflecting their low price and tiny margins. Those margins could easily be wiped out by the sort of tariffs Trump plans, fundamentally reshaping the economics of the industry. Reshoring is no quick fix: industry experts say it takes between five and seven years to build a new plant and three to five to add a single line of drugs, each needing Food and Drug Administration validation, with the capital near-impossible to recover on a pill earning cents. There may also be implications for Britain’s NHS, where generics make up 80% of prescriptions. In
do, and so it’s started going after property because it’s ostensibly on big discounts,” he said. One analyst, who did not wish to be named, called the approach “incredibly naive and poorly informed”. “They mistakenly believe that real estate asset valuations are the same
By Matthew Bishop
Boaz Weinstein, founder of hedge fund Saba Capital. Getty
the short run, there may be a benefit from cheaper supplies diverted from a tariff-hit America. But costs could soar in the long term, because the US is the anchor for the entire low- cost generics supply that Britain currently free-rides on. There is a genuine risk: reliance on China for many ingredients in essential medicines. Yet there are better ways to address this than tariffs, such as creating a strategic reserve of critical drugs and their active ingredients, government contracts that pay for reliable supply rather than mere cheapness and encouraging more offshore production in friendly countries. Tellingly, Trump’s officials have begun quietly stockpiling key ingredients: a tacit admission the hammer won’t do.
as other funds they’ve been involved with,” the analyst said. “Their lack of familiarity with UK real estate practices has hurt them.” Unite is the UK’s largest provider of student accommodation, with 150 purpose-built properties across 23 cities, but has been hit in recent years by falling student numbers. Shares have fallen more than 30% in the past year, although in July the company said it expected higher occupancy, as well as rental growth of between 1% and 2% in the coming academic year. Oli Buckland, executive director of living capital markets at CBRE, said the student accommodation sector is undergoing “a normalisation”. “We’ve just got back to pre-Covid occupancy and rental growth,” Buckland said. Saba Capital and Unite Group declined to comment.
Low High
Low High
Low High
Belfast
Birmingham
Bristol
Dover
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Inverness
Leeds
Leicester
Liverpool
London
Manchester
Newcastle
Norwich
Plymouth
Swansea
Dublin
High tides
16 30
18 26
Aberdeen 12:37 3.5m
--- 00:47 3.7m 13:23 3.6m 01:27 3.8m 14:01 3.7m Belfast 10:04 2.9m 22:28 3.1m 10:53 3.0m 23:12 3.3m 11:34 3.1m 23:50 3.3m Dover 09:59 5.5m 22:29 5.6m 10:50 5.8m 23:15 5.8m 11:30 6.0m 23:50 6.0m Galway 04:14 3.9m 16:23 4.3m 04:57 4.1m 17:04 4.5m 05:35 4.3m 17:42 4.7m Harwich 10:22 3.3m 22:53 3.4m 11:17 3.5m 23:44 3.6m 12:03 3.7m
Holyhead 09:28 4.5m 21:43 4.8m 10:14 4.7m 22:23 5.0m 10:51 4.8m 22:57 5.2m Hull 04:42 6.0m 17:25 5.9m 05:32 6.3m 18:15 6.1m 06:16 6.7m 18:56 6.4m Leith 01:01 4.5m 13:47 4.5m 02:00 4.7m 14:36 4.7m 02:44 4.9m 15:15 4.9m Liverpool 10:02 7.6m 22:21 8.0m 10:52 7.9m 23:05 8.4m 11:32 8.2m 23:43 8.7m London 12:29 5.9m
--- 01:00 6.2m 13:28 6.2m 01:54 6.5m 14:16 6.4m North Shields 02:05 4.1m 14:42 4.1m 02:54 4.3m 15:28 4.3m 03:34 4.5m 16:07 4.5m Penzance 03:20 4.3m 15:47 4.6m 04:13 4.5m 16:33 4.8m 04:55 4.7m 17:12 5.0m Plymouth 04:04 4.3m 16:30 4.6m 05:00 4.5m 17:20 4.8m 05:48 4.7m 18:04 5.0m Portsmouth 10:27 3.9m 22:38 4.0m 11:16 4.1m 23:23 4.2m 11:57 4.3m
Southport 09:30 7.3m 21:49 7.7m 10:20 7.6m 22:40 8.1m 11:07 7.9m 23:18 8.4m Weymouth 05:06 1.3m 17:40 1.6m 06:04 1.4m 18:26 1.8m 06:53 1.6m 19:10 1.9m Wick 10:24 2.8m 22:34 3.0m 11:11 2.9m 23:16 3.1m 11:51 3.0m 23:53 3.2m
< 6
7 $
1 '
( 5
/ & / 5 +
1 2 ) % $
1 0
6 6 (
1 7 0
43 observer.co.uk 26.07.26 Weather
Today Monday Tuesday
Today Monday
14 18 16 22 12 20
16 22
12 20
17 22
17 22
17 22
16 26
16 26
13 18
13 19
13 19
12 18
16 21
16 21
16 19
17 24
17 24
18 22
17 21
14 20
Source: © Crown copyright and/or database rights. All rights reserved.
Today Monday Tuesday
Today Monday
Today Monday
Today Monday
14 25
14 25
13 22
11 20
11 20
11 18
9 19
13 21
13 25
13 25
14 21
14 21
14 21
14 29
16 26 14 21
14 24
12 22
Across 1 Public acclaim (8) 5 Marine alga (4) 9 Church’s underground chamber (5) 10 Diarrheal infection (7) 11 Insulated container for regulating the temperature of liquids (7,5) 13 Fill space (6) 14 Slow movement in music (6) 17 Altruism (12) 20 Weariness (7) 21 Epic poem by Homer (5) 22 Booty, ill-gotten gains (4) 23 Concluding section (8)
Reykjavik 17
16 29
15 26
15 22
17 27
Dublin 20
17 26
17 31
15 24
15 24
Lisbon 30
14 30
Temperatures °C (shown are highs for today)
-20 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Low High Weather Low High Weather
Low High Weather Low High Weather
Low High Weather Low High Weather
Amsterdam 18 22 showers 16 21 sunny Athens 17 30 sunny 19 33 sunny Auckland 9 11 rain 3 13 sunny Baghdad 30 43 sunny 31 43 haze Beijing 23 33 showers 24 34 storms Belgrade 15 33 fair 19 31 sunny Berlin 15 28 showers 16 23 fair Brussels 16 23 rain 15 24 showers Budapest 13 32 fair 18 30 showers Buenos Aires 11 19 fair 11 20 cloudy Cairo 24 34 sunny 24 34 sunny Cape Town 7 20 haze 11 18 windy Copenhagen 15 20 cloudy 14 20 showers Dublin 14 20 showers 12 22 showers Geneva 17 27 showers 17 29 rain Gibraltar 22 30 sunny 22 27 fair
©2026; forecasts and graphics provided by
Trondheim 16
Helsinki 19 Stockholm 19 Riga 25
Oslo 22
Edinburgh 18
Copenhagen 20
Amsterdam 22
London 26
Berlin 28
Prague 31 Vienna 31
Paris 26
Budapest 32
Geneva 27
Sarajevo 31
Rome 31
Madrid 32 Gibraltar 30
Algiers 31
Tunis 37
Helsinki 15 19 showers 15 20 showers Hong Kong 27 30 storms 28 31 showers Istanbul 19 27 showers 21 31 sunny Jerusalem 22 29 sunny 20 30 sunny Kingston 26 34 fair 27 33 sunny Kolkata 26 31 rain 26 32 rain Kyiv 15 27 sunny 16 30 sunny Los Angeles 20 31 sunny 20 32 fair Madrid 15 32 sunny 17 36 sunny Melbourne 8 15 rain 8 15 fair Mexico City 12 24 showers 13 24 showers Miami 26 34 storms 25 33 storms Moscow 14 20 haze 14 20 rain Nairobi 14 23 cloudy 14 23 cloudy Nassau 27 32 storms 26 32 storms New York City 18 28 sunny 21 29 storms
Down 1 Mischievous, sly (4) 2 Having extrasensory powers (7) 3 Scientific study of humanity (12) 4 Division. segment (6) 6 Rectal injection (5) 7 Drifting organisms serving as aquatic food (8) 8 Private (12) 12 Bragging (8) 15 Young goose (7) 16 In the Land of Nod (6) 18 Game of chance (5) 19 Lazy (4)
Skelleftea 18
Minsk 26
Warsaw 31
Kyiv 27
Bucharest 29
Ankara 24 Athens 30 Nicosia 34
Moscow 20
Precipitation today
Showers Storms Rain Flurries Snow Ice
Belfast 2137 to 0527 2135 to 0528 Birmingham 2109 to 0519 2107 to 0521 Bristol 2108 to 0528 2106 to 0529 Dover 2051 to 0513 2049 to 0514 Edinburgh 2132 to 0509 2130 to 0510 Glasgow 2136 to 0513 2134 to 0515 Inverness 2144 to 0502 2142 to 0504 Leeds 2114 to 0512 2112 to 0514 London 2059 to 0518 2058 to 0520 Manchester 2115 to 0517 2113 to 0519 Newcastle 2121 to 0507 2119 to 0508 Plymouth 2109 to 0538 2108 to 0539 Swansea 2114 to 0532 2113 to 0534
Oslo 10 22 fair 10 23 rain Ottawa 16 27 showers 17 28 rain Paris 16 26 cloudy 15 29 sunny Prague 14 31 fair 17 24 showers Riga 14 25 cloudy 17 21 showers Rio de Janeiro 20 24 sunny 19 26 sunny Rome 25 31 storms 23 31 sunny Seoul 25 32 showers 25 32 showers Singapore 26 30 storms 26 31 storms Sydney 9 19 fair 9 19 sunny Tokyo 25 32 storms 24 31 storms Toronto 18 28 storms 18 27 fair Vancouver 15 19 rain 16 23 fair Vienna 16 31 fair 22 29 windy Warsaw 14 31 fair 18 21 showers Washington 21 30 storms 21 31 storms
SOLUTION No. 1,606
%
$
,
% 2 1 ' , $ & 7 8 $ 5 <
6 7 6 5 2 * 7
( 8 5 2 6 7 $ 5 0 2 7 +
7 ( ' , 8 0 0 8 6 ( 8 0
0 8 / 4
, 7 & + 3 8 3 3 < ) $ 7
$ , ( +
mustard
Match seven sachets
to their other half.
A whole mustard
sachet is shown below
Your weekly logic page featuring two puzzles compiled exclusively for The Observer
No 123
2 1 4 4 1 4 3 1 3
No 124
1 4 1 3 3 2
2
3 2 2
Solutions to the above, plus crosswords, Sudoku, Cinema Connect
and Guess the Picture can be found on pages 30-31 of New Review
Found a bug? Have a favourite? Got a suggestion?
We’d love to hear from you, email us at puzzles@observer.co.uk
?
?
?
?
Quick example
Here’s a small 6×6 grid
to show how it works.
The goal is to separate
each set of the same number
into different regions
using diagonal slashes
The two 3s at the top can’t
be in the same region, so you
draw a slash between them.
Slashes must always cross the
entire square – ie, from
point to point
The 1s and 2s on the left also need to be in a separate region. Add more slashes to make sure they are isolated in their own area
Continue adding slashes logically to separate matching numbers while keeping all numbers connected within their own regions
How to play
Identify one trait for each circle. Sort objects accordingly.
. Each circle = one single trait (e.g. "red" not "red-filled")
. The trait must apply to every object in that circle
. No objects outside that circle can have that trait
. Numbers show how many objects belong in each section
Think you’ve found another solution? Email us – valid ones will be printed in the paper and featured in The Puzzle Edit newsletter
No 67
1 3
a h b c d e f g
No 68
1 3
a h i j b c d e f g B d c b C B d a B d
Scan to play more Mindset
Cut the mustard solution
Copyright © Magicave Holdings Limited 2025.
Mindset is a registered trademark
of Magicave Holdings Limited.
Beyond the print edition:
scan to subscribe to
The Puzzle Edit – exclusive
columns, setter insights and a
weekly clue breakdown from
puzzles editor Caitlin O’Kane
EVERYTHING SHOWER
There was a time when Tom Holland wasn’t Tom Holland – at least not the one we know now, star of The Odyssey, three-time Spiderman, husband to Zendaya. Before Tom Holland became that Tom Holland, he was an actor on the up, a young man dreaming of the big break, until eventually a kind of alchemy occurred: talent mixed with hard work and good luck and remarkable timing and – bam! – he’s a Hollywood star. But Holland’s journey is a specific one, and not always achievable. Being a young actor today isn’t easy: competition is rife; casting agents are swamped. Given the economy, and the film and television industry’s shrinking appetite for risk, there are fewer and fewer apprentice opportunities. “It is harder to make a life in the arts – harder even to imagine one – than it has been for the last 50 years,” Susannah Clapp, this paper’s brilliant theatre critic, writes. “Britain is starving itself of talent.” And yet our cover feature today proves that talent does exist – is out there, ready to lead – if only it is given the chance. In this week’s issue, Observer staff and critics (along with a couple of industry friends) have selected the actors they think are part of a new generation of young performers on the cusp of stardom. They have played big roles in small films, or made the most of small parts in much bigger projects. And they represent a group that has overcome industry and generational challenges to reach the brink of the big-time. You’ll be seeing a lot more of them. Enjoy.
Alex Moshakis Editor
Cover image: Josh Hight. The Observer Magazine • 22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP • magazine@observer.co.uk Printed at Walstead Bicester Ltd, Chaucer Business Park, Launton Road, Bicester, OX26 4QZ
Contributors
Susannah Clapp
(Future greats, p8)
As well as being
The Observer’s theatre critic,
Susannah helped found the
London Review of Books
and is the author of books
about Angela Carter and
Bruce Chatwin.
Going anywhere nice
this summer?
“Deal and Kardamyli: two
marvellous shingle shores.”
Charlotte
Mendelson
(Into the wild, p37)
Charlotte Mendelson is
The Observer Magazine’s
gardening columnist and an
award-winning novelist; her
latest book, Wife, is out now.
Going anywhere nice
this summer?
“FINLAND! I’m beside myself.
Hoping for wild raspberries and an elk.”
Caitlin
Macdonald
(Future greats, p8)
Caitlin is the social media
editor and a writer at
The Observer. She interviewed
the Olivier Awards nominees
for this magazine in April, and
this week she speaks with the
rising stars of stage and screen.
Going anywhere nice
this summer?
“I’ve just got back from
New York where I spent
a week eating my way
around Manhattan.”
Tori Ferenc (Material witness, p18) Tori is a Polish portrait and documentary photographer who lives in
London with her husband
and daughter.
Going anywhere nice
this summer?
“We’re going on a road trip
across Poland, Lithuania and
Montenegro. I have never been
to Montenegro, so I am really
excited about that – the
beaches look incredible!
Shaad D’Souza
(Willy Chavarria, p24)
Shaad is a freelance
journalist currently living in
London who has written for
the New York Times, GQ,
the Guardian and many
more. He is also the editor
of the Instagram-based
Shaad Magazine.
Going anywhere nice
this summer?
“No. All my travel this summer
is for work, and it’s all HELL!”
W
e wanted to create a spot that feels uncomplicated,” says Nefeli Sachverdian, owner of the new restaurant September 18 in Athens. With her partner, Yiannis Tsachlis, she has transformed a former plumbing workshop into a space that’s designed to be somewhere people can simply drop in. “When we first saw the building, it was in terrible condition, but I knew it was the one,” she says. “This is where we spend most of our time eating, drinking and meeting friends, so opening a restaurant here felt completely natural.” Inside, a glowing, moon-like light hangs above the dining room, but the best tables are outside on the pavement, where plates of poached eggs with hummus and za’atar are served until 1pm. The restaurant then takes an hour’s siesta, after which lunch service takes diners through to the early hours. Dishes might include roasted aubergine or lemon tagliolini, while the honey cookie has already become the city’s most talked-about pudding. Communal dinners and exhibitions are planned for the future, but Sachverdian insists they have grown organi- cally from the neighbourhood rather than as part of any grand concept. “We just want the restaurant to feel like it has always belonged here,” she says. ● TABITHA JOYCE
THE CASE FOR...
I’ll always pop into a photobooth at
a wedding. Or a train station. Or
a European hostel. Twee? Yes. But
there’s an old-timey vibe to them
that I quite like. The harsh angles
and antiseptic lighting. The thin
curtain that provides any public
space with a vaguely espionage-
tinged veil of secrecy. The pleasingly
retro-futuristic sheen of their cold,
hard exteriors, the squeaking
spinning stool and the cut-metal
dispenser that deposits your fresh
photos right there and then –
which still seems impressively
convenient, despite the fact it’s
basically just a Polaroid camera
MIGUEL PORLAN; GETTY IMAGES
the size of an American fridge. Moreover, there are few things my kids like more, which has made those dire longueurs produced by trips through train stations or airports far more tolerable. I’m not entirely clear why the kids love them so much, given they have absolutely no interest in posing for a photograph under any other circumstances. My son and daughter are currently aged eight and four, and I can honestly swear that only two good “normal” pictures of them have ever been taken, both at the end of long shoots by professional photographers working for this very
Jude yes,
but Tuchel?
Put aside that England
didn’t make it to the final.
Put aside that as soon as
Anthony Gordon scored
against Argentina, the
England team retreated
deep into their own half,
parked the bus, conceded
two goals and broke
everyone’s hearts. Put
aside all of that – and
an unexpected question
emerges: is Thomas
Tuchel… sexy? The
evidence for: his feather-
ruffling press interviews
during which he staunchly
refused to praise his team;
his cheekbones, sharp and
sculpted; his blue eyes the
colour of England’s 1990
kit. Mumsnet, a forum
for discussions like
this, was divided.
“So pretty,” said
one poster.”
Are you peri-
menopausal?”
asked another.
The jury’s out.
● HAYLEY MYERS
magazine. But in a booth, they thrill
at sitting on my lap and pulling faces.
Delighted – astounded, even – by the
near-immediate production of the
photos we’ve just taken.
The results of a dozen or more
such strips now crowd our fridge.
In a sense, they’re the only truly
consistent, hard-copy catalogue of
the children that we have. A timeline
of their faces and mine. Laughing,
sticking tongues out, turned useless
by giggles. Each year, each milestone,
each peek behind an airport curtain.
Memorialised forever, one small
squeaking seat at a time.
● SEAMAS O’REILLY
p6 An hour with Corinna Brown
Describe your
perfect hour…
In the gym, with a sauna or
ice bath afterwards. It’s
how I reset. I recently did
my first reformer Pilates
session. I thought: “I lift
weights, I’ll be good at
this.” Oh my God,
I was sweating!
What’s your favourite
time of day?
Dinner time, because
that means I’m about to
eat something.
If you could live in any era, which would it be? I’d like to have experienced the 1990s properly. I was born in 1998, so I missed most of it. The music and fashion just seemed cooler, and kids played outside a lot more.
If you could spend
an hour with anyone
famous, who
would it be?
Whitney Houston. I’d love
to have seen her perform
live and ask her how she
felt about all that fame,
and about appearing in
The Bodyguard. I’d say:
“Darling, teach me
everything you know
about how to use these
vocal chords.”
When’s the last time you stole something? A cute T-shirt on set, although I wouldn’t say “stole”, because I asked very loudly. It wasn’t even my costume, but I saw it and thought: “This is nice. I don’t know who it’s meant for, but it’s coming home with me.”
When was the last
time you checked
social media?
Five seconds ago.
Instagram is my addiction.
I love the little cat and dog
memes – I’m such a loser.
You know the ones where
they make the dogs dance?
I love that people use AI
The English actor, 27, is best known for playing Tara Jones in the television series Heartstopper, based on the coming-of-age graphic novels by Alice Oseman. Heartstopper Forever, its concluding feature film, is on Netflix now.
BROWN
for that, because it gives
me a little giggle.
When was the last time you cried? Probably about 10 minutes ago. I cry when I laugh, so I’ve always got tears in my eyes. I’ve just come back from the dentist and normally I cry there, but I didn’t this time because I’m a big girl. Even my dentist said: “Well done.”
When was the last time you had sex? Wouldn’t you like to know!
What do you never
have enough
time for?
Packing. Today I’m meant
to be packing for a music
festival in Paris, but
I’ve decided to go to
the theatre instead.
When was the last time
someone mistook you
for someone else?
I can’t think. I’m pretty
recognisable and
my voice speaks for itself.
The other day, someone
said: “You’ve got a lovely
smile,” and I said: “Thank
you. Just you wait until my
face is all swollen when
I come back from
the dentist.”
If you could go back
in time, what advice
would you give
yourself?
Take more pictures, print
them out and put them
in a photo album. I’m
obsessed with Instax
photos. Every job or
holiday, I take one and add
it to my Polaroid photo
album, which is really cute.
If you make it to your
100th birthday, what
would be the reason?
All those perfect hours
in the gym, the love of
my family and friends,
and always looking on the
bright side of life. Cheesy,
but true. ●
T
he reasons for the resurgence of facelifts, particularly the popularity of “early intervention” surgeries in 25 to 40-year-olds, read like a road map of our feverish pres- ent. One reason is the rise of weight-loss drugs, their users clipping away unwanted, sagging skin. Another is a result of “cosmetic transparency”, with celebrities in particular destigma- tising surgery by discussing the procedures they’ve had, alongside developments in the technology that claim ever more “natural” results. Running through all this, too, is a language that minimises the scale of interventions and lubricates the path to body modifi- cation, with the result that one might expect a “tweakment” that’s intended to “refresh,” “restore” or “harmonise” might feel more like a relaxing spa break than a trip to have your eyelids chopped off. It’s into this raw and softened world that the PFL has landed, not with a bang, but a simper. PFLs, explained the Business of Fashion, are “pre-facelift procedures”, such as injectable biostimulators and buccal- fat removal, which are “filling the gap” between baby Botox jabs and deep plane surgeries. “Clinics in New York and Los Angeles have devel- oped sophisticated procedures to ‘train’ skin for a more-optimised facelift,” they report. Doing a facelift on skin that hasn’t been pre- treated and strengthened, continued the aes- thetician Lauren Juliana Goodman, would be like running a marathon without training for it (by which she means spending from $500 for a basic Botox treatment to $7,200 for an arse to cheek fat transfer). “You can do it, sure, but the results won’t be the absolute best.” A whole sub-industry is forming within the aesthetics world centred around the idea, the big bet, that for many, face lifts are now an inevitability. A not if, but when. I read this news, of a new destination on the Botox to facelift pipeline, with a familiar lethargy as if in a half-light, or roofied. It was published the same day as New York Magazine ran a first person piece called “My Post-Face-Lift Panic” in which a writer interrogated (then delighted in) her decision to get cosmetic surgery. With the rise of facelifts there is also a rise of writing about facelifts,
Botox to cosmetic-surgery pipeline:
the pre-facelift procedure’
with the Hollywood Reporter publishing a comprehensive piece last week on “Hollywood’s hottest plastic surgery and aesthetic procedures for every budget”, including PFL procedures such as “micro-coring technology”, where hollow needles are used to remove minute columns of excess skin. The shame and privacy once attached to work like this has been flipped inside out, so now few women, it seems from here, have a procedure without then publishing an essay about it online. The New York Magazine piece is a rollercoaster. Post op, “My iPhone refused to recognise my face. My husband avoided looking directly at me,” the writer recalls, between paragraphs about the staples and the pain. Having the surgery, “suddenly felt like a big gamble – I was back to fretting about what people thought of me, and now they would know that I had failed this most vir- tuous feminist litmus test… I would be ostracised!” While it fin- ishes gently, with the saccharine happy ending familiar from most memoir pieces (“I feel lighter now, like it uncovered a measure of happiness that was lying under- neath. It puts me in good stead to meet the next phase of life”), there were moments where it veered darkly into the kinds of “cosmetic transparency” that I long for. Instead of simply listing their oper- ations, as the celebrities now tend to do, I want screaming, snotty tears about that threat of ostracisation, both for having surgery and for not, about how the fear of having the liga- ments in your face sliced, bones frac- tured, skin “re-draped” and recov- ery in a darkened room while the scabs fall off are but passing inconveniences com- pared to the fear of death, about the desire to forget a decade of your life and look in the mirror without the marks of childbirth or divorce, about ageism, and the many myths of choice, and this one thing your mother said to you when you were 12. If the beauty industry must con- tinue to reproduce in these sharp and cre- ative ways that manipulate language to push us closer to the knife, then I think we, too, should be learning to use our words. ●
Eva Wiseman is an Observer writer. Read her story about forensic garment analyst Amber Butchart on p18
Rising Stars
of Stage
and Screen
Interviews CAITLIN MACDONALD
Photography JOSH HIGHT
Styling
JO JONES &
ROZ DONOGHUE
It was once straightforward (kind of) to become a superstar actor: you took some decent headshots, you won a couple of small parts and sooner or later a big-time casting agent noticed your dazzling charisma and undeniable on-screen presence and – BAM! – you were an A-list film lead. But things aren’t so simple now. Young actors hoping to break through face all sorts of challenges. As in so many creative industries, apprentice oppor- tunities have dwindled. There are scant general auditions and limited roles. Streaming platforms are investing in fewer and fewer projects. The British TV industry is on its knees. Every available part is fought over by hundreds of competitors, all of whom look similar to you, have built bigger online brands, have slicker self-tapes and more experience, have slightly better diction – who want it more. Plus, the AI actor has arrived. And yet a new generation of stars is emerging: bright, talented, hard-working men and women, not all from wealth, who are starring in big roles in small films, making the most of small parts in bigger projects, spreading joy with conviction – and getting noticed. In our inaugural Future Greats portfolio, Observer staff and critics have selected six of their favourite up-and-coming actors to watch. You’ll be seeing them soon…
AOIFE HINDS, 35, was raised between London and Paris, and trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique, following a degree at the LSE. She has starred in BBC’s Normal People, ITV’s The Long Call and HBO’s Dune: Prophecy.
When did you know you wanted to be an actor? When I was 18 and had finished school. I wasn’t the kind of teenager who was constantly asking, “What do I want to do?” I just hung out with friends. After school, I had a year where I worked at Peter Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. I was an usher and all the other ushers were actors. Peter Brook allowed us to put on a play for one night only, and I had a scene in which I played a prison guard sweeping the floor. I remember taking a bow in front of a couple of hundred people and thinking, “Wow, this feels great.” But because it was only one night, it was also heartbreaking. I remember thinking, “Can I deal with this? Could I do this as a career?”
What did you study at university? International Relations. I’d done languages at school and was curious about the world and how it worked. I remember going in with the idea I could save the world, then being faced with the reality of how systems are built. It was a reality check. Eventually I thought, “OK, I’m going to do something else.”
Tell us about your first audition. It was a self-tape, one line, and I had to sign all these NDAs. I was surprised at how many hoops you had to jump through, even for something so small.
Are there any roles you didn’t get that felt like a big rejection, and how did you bounce back? After Covid I was auditioning a lot and I was going up for lead roles, which was something I hadn’t done before. I had about seven or eight auditions in a row where I got really close. That’s tough because you start thinking, “Is it ever going to be me?” But I had people to help me through. When you’re younger, rejection can feel devastating. The more you experience it, the more you realise it’s part of the job. You go in, you take the opportunity to act, have fun, meet someone new, and then you move on.
THADDEA GRAHAM, 29, is
a Northern Irish actor who was
adopted from an orphanage in
China at the age of one and aised
in County Down. She is known for
roles in Bad Sisters and Sex Education,
and currently stars in Apple TV+’s
Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
Can you tell us about your first professional audition? I was about 20 and it was for a Sky series called Curfew. It was kind of about a zombie apocalypse, although they weren’t zombies, they were other creatures of some kind. The audition took place in a big boardroom, just me and the director, a lovely man called Col. He recorded it on a little video camera. I remember thinking, “Do I look at the camera? Obviously, I don’t look at the camera…”
Talk us through your journey into acting? I was super shy when I was little. I was put into dance classes to try and build my confidence, but I never really wanted to be at the front – I just wanted to be there. In secondary school I loved doing musicals because I enjoyed being part of a company. I was going to apply for a psychology degree – I wanted to work with children as a music therapist, or become a family lawyer. But my mum thought I needed to do something more creative. She suggested drama school and printed off all the auditions across the UK. I’m amazed, looking back. We flew over from Northern Ireland, stayed overnight in hotels, paid audition fees – it was a huge expense. I’m so grateful.
Was there a particular role or project that felt like a turning point in your career? It was after Bad Sisters, but only when I was able to reflect on the process. During filming I just thought I was going to get fired. I was constantly thinking, “I’m messing this up.” But I was surrounded by incredible women who were at the top of their game. Sharon Horgan is a force; our director, Dearbhla Walsh, saw me panicking, took me aside and rehearsed scenes with me – she was so kind. After Bad Sisters I messaged Sharon to apologise. I said, “I’m sorry if I was completely weird the whole time. I was so worried.” She said, “What? I thought you were really confident.” That was a lovely conversation.
away by a breakaway talent – in my case a writer, an actor, a designer or director. It’s not just an immediate excitement: it’s a re-set. You go out into the world with freshened eyes and ears, sharper responses. I have had that thrill several times in the past few years. Not least when in March 2025 I saw David Shields in Punch, James Graham’s play about restorative justice. Shields began as a jittery youth, words hardly making sense, sounds hardly making words; he finished the play as a young man glowing with achievement. There was no sudden moment of dramatic change, just a gradual tightening of focus, of limbs and words. Shields altered in the imperceptible way people do when you grow up with them, but he did so in the space of a couple of hours. He shrank time. Exhilarating – but the exhilaration came with a pang. In his early 30s, Shields had made it on to the stage. But how many other talents never even get to drama school, or art or music college? How many even see these futures as possibilities? And will the prospect of AI-generated art undermine the notion of doing it yourself? It is harder to make a life in the arts – harder even to imagine one – than it has been for the last 50 years. Britain is starving itself of talent. Unless you are one of the 7% of pupils attending a fee-paying school, the chances are against you having a theatre or a full-scale orchestra in your school. Art and drama and music are not part of the core curriculum. Speaking at the Olivier Awards earlier this year, Paapa Essiedu spoke forcefully on behalf of increasing funding to organisations aimed at young people who don’t normally go to the theatre. Without them we would not be watching Essiedu himself, who has said he grew up thinking the West End was “just the Trocadero, where you could do bumper cars”. Other moves would help all the arts. The Labour party should have boasted as much about Keir Starmer’s ability to play the flute as it has about him playing five-a-side. Women and men giving money to help their favourite art form should consider investing in people as much as buildings: let’s set up new scholarships for art and music students, actors, directors, designers. They can bear a donor’s name just as prominently as a building. What would it be like to have sponsored not just one but a constellation of shooting stars? Next time we need a new – and less hideous than usual – piece of public sculpture, let us turn to art students for submissions first. We need to stop thinking about the arts as merely ornamental and recog- nise how they can fuel our thinking, enable us to imagine a better future and boost our wellbeing just as effectively as a course in mindfulness. The talent is there: just look at these pages…
SUSANNAH CLAPP
THE FILM CRITIC
1. JAY LYCURGO Steve
2. SPIKE FEARN
Finding Emily
3. DEBA HEKMAT
Last Swim
4. POSY STERLING
Lollipop
MIA MCKENNA-BRUCE
How to Have Sex
•
Wendy Ide
is The Observer’s
film critic
THE CASTING AGENT
1. LOUIS McCARTNEY Stranger Things
4. ARAN MURPHY War
3.
EMMA LAIRD
Mayor of Kingstown
4. LENNY RUSH Am I Being Unreasonable?
5. ELLA LILY HYLAND Black Doves
•
Amy Hubbard
is an Emmy-nominated
casting agent
THE
THEATRE
CRITIC
1. DAVID SHIELDS Punch
2. ALEX JARRETT
Hamnet
3. ALBY BALDWIN
The Unbelievers
The Unbelievers
The Unbelievers
4. ELLA LILY HYLAND
5. ISABEL ADOMAKOH YOUNG
•
Susannah Clapp
is The Observer’s
theatre critic
THE FILM DIRECTOR
1. SHAUN THOMAS How to Have Sex
2. JOSH FINAN
Say Nothing
3. DAVID JONSSON
Rye Lane
4. AMBIKA MOD
This is Going to Hurt
5. GABRIELLE CREEVY
In My Skin
•
Chris Foggin
is the director of
Fisherman’s Friends
and Bank of Dave
POSY STERLING, 33, began in theatre before breaking through on screen in 2024’s British drama Lollipop, earning a Bifa Award for Breakthrough Performance and a Bafta Rising Star nomination. She recently starred in Channel 4’s Dirty Business, with Jason Watkins and David Thewlis.
Can you remember your first audition? I auditioned for S Club Juniors back in the day. My dad took me along to an open call-out. I had no idea what it would entail. I just knew I wanted to do it. I made it through to the second round, which shocked everyone, including my dad.
Is that when you knew you wanted to be a performer? The short answer is yes, but screen acting wasn’t on my radar until I became an adult. I knew I wanted to perform, and the only understanding I had of that was musical theatre. I won a scholarship into a musical theatre school, but all the acting teachers gently steered me towards
screen acting. That’s how it happened. I think it’s important to remember that when you’re younger, you only really know your environment and what you’re exposed to. I thought I was going to do musicals. Then I realised I much preferred doing something else.
Can you think of a time when you didn’t get a role you desperately wanted? How long have you got? The thing is, I genuinely don’t believe in rejection. I believe in redirection. If I don’t get a role, I don’t sit there wondering who got it instead – I believe it wasn’t mine in the first place. You have to remember that you are a human being first and foremost. You’re not just your job. When I’m fully devoted to a project, some of those other things inevitably get neglected. So when work slows down I get to pour energy back into those other parts of my life.
JAY LYCURGO, 28, was born and raised in Croydon. He is known for his roles in The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, Titans and Steven Knight’s This Town. He starred alongside Cillian Murphy in Steve, for which he won the 2025 British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Performance.
When did you know you wanted to act? I found out when I was actually in drama school. I’d always wanted to perform, I just didn’t know it was a professional thing. It became more acute around the age of 14 when my mates started going to Brit School and I tried to get in, too, but wasn’t good enough. I didn’t really understand acting. I thought it was crying. I’d go in front of the judges and try to burst into tears as soon as I said the first line.
Can you tell us about your first audition? The Wizard of Oz. Year 6 at school. I played the scarecrow. I remember everyone had to audition and I really wanted that role. I loved the script. I loved that he had no brain, but wanted one. I remember being really playful in front of everyone and feeling brave. When we got to performances, I started making up my own lines, to the point where my teacher was like, “Can you just keep to the line?” That confidence is important, giving yourself permission to go off book, be playful, make brave choices. I think I always had those instincts.
What has rejection taught you? Every day is a challenge in this industry. You have to be your biggest fan. You have to be patient. You have to be powerful. There are so many roles I haven’t got and it sucks, especially when you’re not working and you’re thinking, “When is the next thing going to come?” But it always does. I remember going for Eddington and not getting it. But then two days later they were like, “You’re going to do Steve with Cillian Murphy.” It’s a grind. You’re going to get rejection, but that’s part of the game. You have to protect yourself, not get caught up in it.
MIA THARIA, 21, is the youngest among this group of future acting greats, but she has already built an impressive body of work, including the BBC film September Says. Later this year she will appear in Taika Waititi’s adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Klara and the Sun, alongside Amy Adams and Jenna Ortega.
Can you tell us about your first role? I was very young, only about 11 or 12 years old, and it was the coolest thing ever because it was just a little student film. I remember thinking, “Wow, this is so easy. I’ve done one audition and I’ve got it.” Then the reality of the job kicked in.
When did you know you wanted to be an actor? Really from a young age. It was the only thing I was good at at school. I loved doing school plays; writing was my outlet. I also remember watching a lot of CBBC and kids’ shows and thinking, “That looks so cool. I want to do something like that.” I told my parents I wanted to be a child actor and they somehow managed to take me to an audition for a kids’ agency.
Can you remember a time when you didn’t get a role, or a moment that felt like a big rejection? There have been so many times and it’s really hard. This job can feel like a game: you do one thing and it’s amazing, you feel electric, you feel like you’re set, then it ends and you’re back to square one. There’s a lot of graft involved.
What advice would you give younger actors? Almost everybody you know and watch on screen has had exactly the same experience. They’ve all had the “dry years”. They’ve all spent years knocking on that door. Sometimes it’s just about being let into the room. It’s important to stay creative. Do grassroots projects when things are quiet. I’m still doing the thing I love, even if it’s not a huge TV show.
What kind of role would you love to play in the future? I’d like to play someone who fights back, who could be a bit menacing, someone with a dark side. I love Jodie Comer’s Villanelle in Killing Eve, the tension between her character and Sandra Oh’s Eve. I’d love to play something with that kind of energy.
DAVID SHIELDS, 33, rose to fame in 2024 with his role as Major Everett Blakely in Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air. In 2026, he was nominated for an Olivier Award for his performance as Jacob Dunne in James Graham’s award-winning play Punch. He most recently returned to the screens as Jordan Henderson in the BBC adaptation of Graham’s Dear England.
Was there a moment growing up when you knew you wanted to be an actor? I did a summer course at Guildhall [School of Music & Drama] when I was 18. I remember thinking, “I’ll do this course and either I’ll want to pursue acting or I’ll realise I should do something else.” I did the course and completely fell in love with it. That was it. It was 2012, during the Olympics. While everyone else was watching Mo Farah and Usain Bolt, I was doing breathwork at the Barbican and studying Meisner technique.
How do you handle the disappointment of missing out on a role you really wanted? I remember one role – I won’t say what it was, but it was written by a fantastic British writer and it was a great part. I was genuinely heartbroken when I didn’t get it. But then this new job came along, which I’m about to start, and it would have clashed with that project anyway. That’s the funny thing about this life. You have to keep reminding yourself that when one door closes, another often opens.
Does it get easier? I’m fairly good at compartmentalising things. Helen Mirren talks about acting as firing an arrow and letting it go. Once you’ve released it, it’s gone. You don’t worry about where it lands. I’m quite good at doing that with auditions. But the process of preparing a character, investing emotionally, and then waiting for an answer… that never becomes anyone’s favourite part of the job.
What advice would you give to a young actor who feels stuck or rejected? Be yourself. I know that’s a cliché, but I genuinely started doing better in auditions when I stopped trying to be what I thought people wanted. Instead I focused on doing what I do best and bringing the strongest version of myself to the role. Treat every audition as an opportunity to work, not as something your entire future depends on. ●
HAIR AND MAKEUP BY MIRA PARMAR USING DIOR FOREVER FOUNDATION, DIOR CAPTURE LE SÉRUM AND SAM MCKNIGHT HAIR; PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT JACK SNELL
witness
in a box, forensic archaeologist Dr Karl Harrison
turned to fashion historian Amber Butchart
to help analyse the swaddling garments.
the fabric of two secret lives – a mother in distress and her concealed child
By EVA WISEMAN
Photographs
TORI FERENC
J
ust after half-past-five on 3 February 2018, a woman named Eleanor walked into a Yorkshire police station with her brother and sister. Their mother had recently died and during the long and emotional process of emptying her house, a small newbuild a few minutes south of rolling woodland, they discovered a box in a cupboard under the stairs. Inside they found what appeared to be a collection of old clothes. And when they unwrapped the bundle, they discovered the skeletal remains of a child. Six weeks later, Amber Butchart was at home in Margate. The flat she shares with her partner overlooks the sea and the weather is extreme: the windows whistle when there’s a storm; at sunset, the rooms, which they have decorated in shades of 1960s Victoriana, swell with a pinkish glow. Butchart, a curator of fashion and textiles, was working at her desk when she received an email from the forensic archaeologist Dr Karl Harrison. Forensic archaeology is an arm of forensic science that applies archaeological methods and processes to criminal cases, often to find and investigate buried and concealed human remains, record the evidence for court and recover them in a dignified and respect- ful manner. Harrison is one of the best in the world, commended recently for his work on Grenfell. The pair had known each other for a year, since Harrison heard Butchart on the radio talking about fisherman’s jumpers. He had been impressed by her expertise and the way she explained what we communicate through what we wear. Soon after, he employed her as a consultant forensic garment analyst, to help him work with clothes found at crime scenes and teach investigators how to understand fabrics, fastenings and the importance of how to describe them precisely, for the record. The tendency at a death scene is to focus solely on the body, but the stuff that surrounds it, includ- ing the clothes, tells important stories, too. And so it was that in April, he invited her to a lab in Teddington to look inside the box.
I first interviewed Harrison and Butchart in 2019, soon after she had told me about this new arm to her career and, while our wintry day together among police dogs and CSIs was fascinating, it was their brief mention of the baby in the box that stayed with me, and led me to return to their story years later. I had found myself idly researching concealed
pregnancies and births in the meantime, with varying degrees of distress. While they were once fairly commonplace, details of their prev- alence today are a source of speculation – an 11-year study in South Wales from 2006 found an incidence rate of 1 in 2,500 deliveries. An Irish study based on data from 2004-05 found a rate of 1 in 403 births at a rural hospital and 1 in 625 at a Dublin hospital. Though such incidents have become a rarity, now that babies born outside marriage are generally accepted, a number of women have been taken to court in recent years for concealing the birth, and death, of their children. In 2016, a 14-year old schoolgirl in Manchester hid the dead body of a newborn
baby in a drawer after she secretly gave birth. Later, the court heard she went to school the next day. In West Yorkshire in 2018, the mother of a 19-year old discovered the corpse of a baby in a shoebox beneath her daughter’s bed. In 2024, a Malaysian student in Coventry who, accord- ing to the Crown Prosecution Service, “killed her newborn baby by placing her in a cereal box shortly after birth and concealing the box in a suitcase”, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Harrison tells me he’d worked on similar cases to this concealed baby before. We’re meeting for breakfast near his current offices in Whitehall, at the Ministry of Defence and, while ordering a series of coffees, he remem- bers “a recovery in a large urban cemetery. A family had picked a location just off a path and made a shallow, informal burial under a tree for the child.” Three generations of women, the very young mother, her mother and her grand- mother, had buried the body. Years earlier in Swindon, following an elderly woman’s death, one of Harrison’s colleagues had discovered, in an old suitcase stored for years on top of a wardrobe, a child’s body. “And I suspect very similar stories of infant death, concealment and retention over long periods of time probably sit within every crime and investigation office across the country,” he tells me. The emotiveness of child death plays into the complexity of these investigations. Not least because, “It’s not unusual for us to search for the remains of infants, neonates and not find anything,” Harrison says. “They can be very ephemeral in a buried context.” People tend to
see monsters in absence and shadows like this, believing bodies have been stolen – horrors upon horrors. “It seems to spark something in people that has little bearing on the science of it, but which creates a really challenging environ- ment for an investigator trying to protect and elicit information from grieving parents and find out something that comes close to the truth.” Sipping his coffee, Harrison tells me about a conversation with another forensic archaeol-
ogist that had shaken him. He discovered that each of them had encountered different cases in different parts of the country that began when an adult went into a police station and told officers that, as a child, they had watched from their bedroom window as a man, often their father, buried a baby in the garden. “Between us, we had three or four examples of it. They have a general idea of what age they would have been when they were standing there, and a very clear memory of what the back garden looked like, and they would then take you directly to the spot where they saw the man bury the body. And, while there may yet come a time where we find one, thus far, there’s
never anything in those locations.” This could mean the remains have completely broken down, but it could also point at a recurring delusion. “It seems to be a relatively common phantom memory from childhood that’s linked to one’s bedroom space and the back garden, and fears about parents, fears about child mortality…” He tails off. Harrison sometimes frets about the fact that investigators increasingly rely on DNA tech- niques for their speed and accuracy, ignor- ing other forensic disciplines such as garment analysis, which give more qualitative results. “Biologists frequently look at items of clothing to look for body fluids and sometimes they’ll do garment-damage analysis,” which might involve, for instance, noting a stab wound in a shirt. “But they won’t give any opinion on the nature or the date of clothing, or where in the world it might have come from.” Butchart can, and when Harrison calls, she does. People, Butchart has found, struggle to take fashion seriously. This was mirrored in her early forays into forensics, where she met a level of polite blankness when discussing fabrics,
The forensic archaeologist Dr Karl Harrison and fashion historian Amber Butchart. The pair work together to try to identify the remains of bodies
labels, the shape, perhaps, of a collar. “That’s why Karl got me in to do the training sessions with CSIs, for just that idea of taking clothes seriously as evidence.” The sessions often started awkwardly. She’d gather with the investigators in a munic- ipal classroom, a whiteboard, paper cups of coffee. “Everyone is in their uniform polyes- ter polo tees. I come in wearing a turban and there’s a slight clash of worlds that you can sense immediately.” She starts with an exercise where she asks the class to read her through what she’s wearing. What’s her favourite film? What music does she listen to? Where does she live? “People always think I’m a vegan for some reason.” And though it starts off slowly, by the end of the session everyone is engaged – one CSI told her enthusiastically all about his Hawaiian shirt collection. “Everyone thinks this doesn’t apply to them until they realise every- one’s wearing clothes. There is always an unex- pected revelation.” She teaches them how to recognise fastenings, how to describe clothes and fabrics, especially non-western dress, how to develop and work from a standardised language. A skirt is never just a skirt. One per- son’s “jumper” is another’s “sweater”. There is always a reminder, she says, that clothes keep the secrets and tell the stories of the people who wear them, or wore them once, then wrapped them carefully away in a box.
“It was a sunny day,” Butchart says, recalling her arrival at the lab in Teddington, “all quite bright, which seemed at odds with what I was there to do.” She and Harrison wore scrubs and masks, but beneath all that, Harrison remem- bers, “Amber was dressed with the level of sar- torial elegance that you would expect.” The first time I met Butchart, when we were in our early 20s, she was DJ-ing at a nightclub in a satin Pierrot costume, a poetic clown with a sharp pointed bob. In the early 2000s, she was head buyer for vintage store Beyond Retro, and as well as studying history, she dressed impec- cably, each day an opportunity for a costume. Harrison, in contrast, favours a button-down shirt and practical trainers. In the lab he was careful about how much information to share with her. “We talk about ‘sequential revealing’,” he tells me. “You might give an expert the barest minimum context that they need in order to answer a question in the first instance. And then after their first consid- eration of an exhibit, you give them further con- textual information.” It sounds a bit like a game, although it “isn’t designed to make traps for
‘As someone who doesn’t have a forensics background, it’s still impossible for me not to connect the human story to it’
them, but to ensure that their answers are as bal- anced as possible.” All Butchart knew was that these clothes were associated with the remains of a deceased child. She was nervous. “As someone who doesn’t have a specific forensics background or training in any of those kinds of worlds, it’s still impossible for me not to connect the human story to it,” she says. In a café in Teddington before they entered the lab, she remembers Harrison explaining how people tend to deal with the emotional side of the work informally, through chats and jokes, rather than through counselling or training. “I was surprised at how casually things are discussed that are just absolutely horrific to hear about out of that world,” she says. “For me that was what took more getting used to than the process of going into labs. Everything there is so professional and clinical – even if you’re looking at something that has very clearly had tissue decomposi- tion, you don’t mind that at all.” With a scalpel, Butchart started to unstick the fabric. The clothing they were inspecting had clearly been in the box for a long time, but the garments that had wrapped this body were tricky to date. This was Butchart’s job. She wanted to assess when the woman had worn these clothes, in order to work out how long the body had been there. “One of the items was a bullet bra, clearly traceable to the late 1950s or early 1960s, and it had a love heart on the label – it said the ‘Lovable Brassiere Company’.” She knew she could use this label to research its date of manufacture, using archives and old maga- zine adverts. The other pieces of clothing were in worse condition. At first glance, they looked like “a burnt bundle of rags”. On closer inspec- tion, there was a polyester blouse that had been adjusted and repaired, and a light-blue denim skirt, homemade for maternity wear, “with blackened areas where flesh had decomposed into it over decades. It had gone ragged where the fabric had rotted, which made it look smoke blackened.” The adjustments to the skirt’s waistband were interesting to Butchart, because they implied planning – the mother, it suggested, knew she was preg- nant. Harrison says the “decom- position staining” showed these garments had wrapped the body as “the infant’s remains were going through soft-tissue decomposi- tion, because that’s the only point at which the
liquefied soft-tissue products of decomposition would have leaked into the clothing.” And that’s where they had stayed ever since, “because they were still hardened and gathered around the remains when they were ultimately found.” Using the magazine ads and her knowledge of fashion history, Butchart dated the clothes to the mid-to-late 1960s, suggesting that this was when the box had been concealed. When I checked on Google Maps where Eleanor’s mother had lived and the box was found, I learned the house had been built in the 1990s. It didn’t mean much to me at the time, but later it occurred to me that this meant she had likely transported the box carefully through house moves, concealing it again each time. Rather than burying the baby, she’d looked after its body for the rest of her life. Butchart remembers feeling a certain remoteness as she measured, photographed, re-bagged each item. “When you’re in the lab it’s really easy to detach because there are all of those markers of professionalism, whether it’s a white coat or the hazmat-style suit.” This clothing carries meaning, too. While initially nervous, putting on the uniform of a scien- tist allowed Butchart to unhook herself from her everyday life as if stepping into a costume. “If you’re wearing a white coat, people will give you the respect the white coat deserves. Other people recognise your role and confer that respect on you. But you also feel like you’re inhabiting that role.” Once back in her own clothes, however, the emotion returned. “I remember thinking about the case a lot before I went to sleep,” she says. The “lovable” label, juxtaposed with the baby’s body, “had the unintentional consequence, all these decades later, of adding an emotional poignancy to what I was doing.” Plus, “You feel a real weight of respon- sibility thinking what had actually happened, the circumstances, the extent of the tragedy. It hits you after the fact, in quiet moments.”
Butchart noted that the clothing was made of dense fabric and had been made stiffer still by “decomposition fluids that had then taken on almost a brittle texture,” Harrison recalls. It required a lot of pulling apart to examine each item. With every movement, new acrid depths of smell were released. “Musty,” Harrison recalls. “Sharp. It doesn’t hit you in the face in the way that recent
decomposition does, but it does slowly perco- late into you if you’re spending time looking at it. I’ve had a number of instances in my life where I’ve had to walk out of shops, normally because the cleaning fluid that has been used must be the same brand used in mortuaries.” They were battling with “the worst kind of shoe-cupboard smell,” Harrison says. “The smell of human presence.” Butchart was attempting to flatten the creased and folded fabrics, in order to measure them. The baby’s remains had been removed, with less com- plication than other examples they’d worked on. “There was a case Amber and I worked on where you’ve got adult clothed remains that have decomposed in the open air, where you get root growth and vegetation passing through it, and you get these complex masses of human remains, clothing and vegetation that binds it all together. That becomes really difficult to do without damaging the clothing at the same time.” In this instance however, “the cloth- ing was quite robust.” Everything was photo- graphed, and weighed, and noted, the clothes unfolded for the first time since the baby’s birth. This case, Butchart said, “stayed with me, especially when Karl said it used to be fairly common. The cases I’ve worked on that have stayed with me most are the ones like this, that touch on wider women’s narratives,” she says. “Getting an insight into those structures that can continue so easily to fail women is really upsetting. And for someone who’s not in that world all the time, it’s a bit of a peek behind the curtain.” Thinking about this reminded her, too, of the way fashion has typically been den- igrated for its seemingly feminine and frivolous nature. And yet all clothes tell a story, a personal archaeology of wealth, bodies, memory, work and the intimate secrets of strangers. Butchart filed her report, describing the polyester blouse with its fine blue-and-white stripes, and the bullet bra that dated to the late 1950s, and the 1960s skirt, with evidence of repair. She had created a portrait of a woman at a moment of distress. Harrison added it to the police files. In November 2018, the coroner published his findings, but they were slim and inconclusive, beyond the fact that a baby boy had been born full-term, and died around the year 1968, judging by the clothing he was wrapped in, and that neither the siblings nor their father had any idea he’d existed. He added that in 25 years, this had been the “most distressing” case he’d seen. And, “Despite everyone’s best efforts,” he added. “This little boy, we do not know.” ●
Mexican-American designer,
is adored by the likes of Billie Eilish,
Justin Bieber and Venus Williams.
But his real passion is harnessing Chicano
culture and queer survival to bring about
change in the ruthless world of fashion
DEVIL
Photograph FRED LAHACHE By SHAAD D’SOUZA
W
illy Chavarria’s latest fashion show, staged at the Com- munist Party headquarters in Paris, was named Comu- nión – the Spanish word for “community.” The people around Chavarria, in other words, are important. Walking into the vast, empty space in Paris that he and his team are using to prep a few days ahead of the show, I’m met with questions about my comfort: Do I need a Coke Zero or some water? Would I feel better sitting closer to the fan? Do I want something from, as Chavarria himself puts it, “This sad bowl of rotting fruit?” When I meet Chavarria he greets me with a firm handshake and an exclamation of “We’re wearing the same outfit!” – cut-off denim shorts, white T-shirt – and throughout our conversation he keeps pausing, looking at me for a moment, and then asking something about my own life: Do I ride a bike? What kind of party drugs are people doing these days? At one point, he prof- fers some advice: make sure to have fun, stay out til 4am while I’m still young and my body can still bounce back. “Do it until you drop,” he says, “Because you’ll get back up.” Chavarria is the polar opposite of the aloof, disinterested fashion-designer archetype you expect to meet in Paris, not least because he is 59, Mexican-American and (his eponymous label is only a decade old and Comunión is only its fourth showing in Paris) a relative new- comer on the scene. Still, Chavarria is beloved in the industry: a veteran with the political spirit and innovative sensibility of an upstart, whose flowy, oversized pieces, inspired by Chicano (Mexican-American) culture and workwear, have been championed by stars like Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber and Venus Williams. Actress and model Julia Fox, Chavarria’s close friend and frequent model, describes the designer as “the last of a dying breed” and an exception to her sense that “it’s hard to feel safe around fashion people, because they’re just so diabolical”. Chavarria, as someone who’s grafted for decades to get to where he is now, understands the importance of his position. His shows are known for being stridently political – his SS26 show featured male models on their knees, in a disturbing and heartbreaking echo of viral videos of immigrants and US citizens being detained by ICE agents. And he considers his shows to be more than marketing opportuni- ties. All that weight, of course, adds stress. “It’s so cuckoo – almost every time we go through this, I’m like, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this another time,’” he says. “I keep reminding myself why we’re doing this show beyond making clothes and growing a business. I’m very happy
that the business is doing as well as it is, but aside from that is an objective to send out a pos- itive wavelength into the world that I know has a ripple effect. That, since the inception of this brand, has always been a fundamental priority.” C
havarria was born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley, an agricultural strip in the centre of California, to a white mother and a Mexican father who met at high school in the years post-desegrega- tion, when mixed-race schools began to operate. When Chavarria was a kid, his father was study- ing to become a lab technician and worked in the fields to support the family; his mother would “wake up at 4am with all the Mexican ladies and make tacos and food for the guys to take out to work”. Growing up with a white mother and a Latino father, Chavarria was “like, the only half- breed kid around”. He was also queer, which pre- sented its own challenges in small-town Amer- ica. “It was totally destabilising, but childhood is not easy, you know?” he says. “I’ve really come to be so grateful for all the shit I went through as a kid, because it made me exactly who I am now. That’s actually something I love about ageing – gaining a clear perspective on life, somehow.” In his late teens, Chavarria moved to San Francisco to study graphic design. What he experienced wasn’t a culture shock as much as a full-blown rebirth. “I exploded when I went to San Francisco – I was like, ‘What is hap- pening? I am a free entity!” he says. It was the late 1980s, the tail end of the Aids crisis, right around the time AZT had become widely available. “If I moved there a few years earlier, things could have been more difficult for me,” he says. Chavarria lost a lot of friends, but also started immersing himself in art and clubbing, inadvertently learning about fashion by taking notice of what people wore to raves. The fashion style he developed in the Bay Area is still basically how he dresses now. He recalls a photo by his friend Stefan Ruiz, pub- lished in i-D magazine, from the time: “It’s me at, like, 10am at this club called The End Up and I’ve probably been up for two days, and I was wearing open-leg nylon track pants, black with white Adidas stripes, black loafers with gold buckles on them, and a pink tuxedo shirt with ruffles,” he says. “It was all open and I was all sweaty and young. I look at that picture and I think, ‘Holy shit, that was in the 1990s, and I’m still wearing that’.” The world Chavarria describes in San Francisco – that of celebration and joy in the face of a harrowing, inhumane political climate – seems to mirror the worlds he conjures in his shows, which tell subtle (and frequently unsub- tle) stories of community and survival in the
face of oppression. “I think I’ve always been this way, where I realised the need to look for joy in the face of a bunch of shit. When I moved to San Francisco, it was so in-your-face because there was death all around, it was in the air,” he says. “That is one of the things that drove the need to party” – to escape the ugliness and hurt. While in San Francisco, Chavarria began working for Joe Boxer, an innovative men’s underwear brand, and eventually he moved from a part-time job in the shipping department to one on the design team. It was around that time that he moved away from San Francisco to a small beach town “to calm my ass down, to get away from partying and that kind of thing. It was pretty extreme – I don’t regret any of it, but I needed to shift gears,” he recalls. He got a job in a restaurant and started doing triath- lons; while living there, he got a job working as a designer for Voler, a cycling apparel company.
Around the same time, Ralph Lauren was launching its RLX athleticwear line and, after collaborating with Voler on some items, hired Chavarria to work in-house, moving him to New York around the new millennium. Lauren eventually became a “huge inspiration” for what Chavarria does now. “I love the fact that he started nowhere and he worked his way up to building an empire – he was so steadfast in his world that he created that everybody believed it,” he says. “His passion and his ability to main- tain that consistency, I really admire. And I think the clothes, they’re so easy and fun… but I have always thought that people of colour look better in Ralph Lauren than anyone else.” The warmth he found in San Francisco wasn’t present in the harsh New York fashion world. Chavarria says that he loves “being able to create a world that is beautiful, and I love working with clothes, and I love how we put ourselves together,” but that wasn’t the driving force of the fashion industry. Now, he tries to foster a brand that exists outside the “very
stereotypical fashion structure that, let’s face it, is unkind and discriminatory and ruthless and unattractive”. In New York, he saw “how little opportunity was being given to people of colour, women, trans people. The level of ine- quality and the coldness that lay within fashion, for me it was crazy.” Chavarria tried to cultivate the joy that he couldn’t find in the industry itself through the creation of Palmer Trading Company, a vintage store on Sullivan Street, in SoHo, New York, that he founded with his husband, David Ramirez. They sold vintage pieces and, even- tually, clothes they made themselves: “Very conservative chinos, coloured Oxford shirts, flannel shirts, bags.” Eventually, in the mid- 2010s, Ramirez went back to work in fashion while Chavarria stayed with the store, gutting and renovating it and, in 2015, launching a small eponymous line. His early collections were, as they are now, deeply inspired by Chicano and cholo culture, and exalted the styles Chavarria saw on migrant workers growing up. His work quickly found an audience, in part thanks to buzzy presentations like his fall 2017 men’s show at New York Fashion Week, in which 13 models were cramped inside a chain- link cage, inspired by Ava Duvernay’s documen- tary 13th, about the American prison system. Pulitzer-winning fashion journalist Robin Givhan remembers being struck by how radical that presentation felt. “He was really elevating working-class looks and ideas and sensibilities at a time when that was relatively unusual,” she told me. “He tried to tear down a lot of stere- otypes and prejudices that people had about certain kinds of men based on their appear- ance. And then, of course, the clothes were really good.” Chavarria had success with buyers in Japan as well as with retailers like Opening Ceremony, Barney’s, Steven Allen and Totokaelo – all of which have, incidentally, now shut down – but, eventually, the wholesale business began to feel exhausting. In 2019, with the rent being jacked up, Chavarria shut his store in SoHo, moved his operations to a warehouse in Brooklyn, and went to Copenhagen to live with Ramirez, who had relocated there to work for Pandora, the mass-market jewellery company. It was around that time he started working with Ye, then known as Kanye West, on Yeezy, a some- what utopian brand concept that aimed to bring fashion and design to the masses through affordable, utilitarian clothing. “I was a huge supporter of that vision – in fact, I like to think it was my vision,” he says slyly, eliciting guffaws from the team of stylists, art directors and publicists dotted around the room. “But who knows, I can’t even remember. I know
GETTY IMAGES; GASPAR J RUIZ LINDBERG
that it was a focus, and I really loved it.” Chavarria remembers having meetings with big-box retailers like Costco and Walmart in service of Yeezy’s vision of “making fashion completely egalitarian”. “I think that concept is really amazing, because it shifts the idea of exclusivity into a new perspective, because in some way exclusivity is inherent to fashion – you want to feel an identity that others don’t have,” he says. “Not a lot of people have reworked that philosophy, so his idea of exclu- sivity was really the fact that it’s something so good and so cool that everyone is wearing it, and you’re part of this world.” Chavarria says that he recently bought a pair of $20 boots from West’s relaunched Yeezy range to see how he’s working now, and that “they were pretty good for 20 bucks, you know? I don’t know how he’s doing it, or if it’s even profitable now.” Chavarria hasn’t yet been able to reach those kinds of price points for his own label – a T-shirt by Willy Chavarria will set you back around £290; a long, turquoise pair of jorts costs around £700 – but he is committed to broadening his price range, especially through Big Willy, his workwear line, which runs in the £100-£400 range, and his ongoing collaboration with Adidas. “I do often think of, and plan for, a future in which I’m able to do a more mass way of selling and communicating. I don’t think it’s always about a material item,” he says. “It could be music, it could be film, it could be art. There are a lot of ways the brand can evolve into pro- viding something.” Chavarria sees collaborations with brands like Adidas, Dickies, Zara and Hummel as key to his dream of being “in a place that can tap into luxury, but also tap into kids who just want a T-shirt for 80 bucks”. It is difficult, of course, maintaining a sense of ethics when you’re in bed
from the partying and calm my ass down. It was extreme. I needed to shift gears’
with mass-market fashion companies, which are routinely criticised for their unethical supply chains. “There are conflicts I have within myself about even being in the fashion industry – I think the unspoken truth that we all know is that there are way too many clothes, more clothes than anybody needs,” he says. “When I did the col- laboration with Zara, I put a lot of thought into that. First and foremost, as cliché as it sounds, it really is important to know about the supply chain and the factory base and the treatment of the workers and the payment of the workers, and I think that’s one reason it’s very difficult for me to do those easy prices. As much as I’d love to, I have not found a way to do it ethically.” F
or all Chavarria’s prominence and respect in the American and European fashion industries, his career has not been without controversy. In 2025, he was forced to apologise to Mexico’s Oaxa- can community after being widely lambasted in the country – including by Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum – for announcing a sneaker in collaboration with Adidas that incorporated the design of a traditional Huarache slipper and was named the Oaxaca Slip-On. When I bring up the incident, Chavarria flings his head back and lets out a dramatic “Oh God!” while his publicist, Carolyn, looks at me with wide eyes and hisses “Why are you asking?” before awkwardly laugh- ing a little and clarifying that she’s joking. Chavarria begins to speak carefully – “I think it’s fine. It was… it still is hell, but–” – before Carolyn instructs me to “get very specific with what [I] want from the matter.” So I ask what his thought process was when developing the shoe. “It all started in LA, when I’m like, ‘Let’s do a Huarache sandal on a sneaker bottom.’ How cool! I wanted to do a Huarache that people can play basketball in, you know?” he says. “That was a shoe I grew up with, and is like, the symbol of Chicano culture.” Chavarria has since been working with Mexican officials to “resolve the issue,” and he is in the process of finishing a documentary about the difference in perception of art and culture between Mexican-Americans and Mexicans in Mexico. Today, of course, he’s still wrapped up putting the final touches on Comunión – an explosion of fabulous, maximalist glamour and louche style. “Every collection I do is entirely based on how we feel, and this is how I think we feel right now – searching for joy, reminding ourselves of the joy and the goodness in life,” he says. It is this care, says Fox, that makes Chavarria so special. “I’m always just like, ‘Wow, thank god for Willy.’ We need more Willys, to be honest,” she says. “But at least we have one.” ●
free access to our Culture Club
Exhibitions Japanese Women Photographers at the Photographers’ Gallery | 50% off tickets, save £5
The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design at Compton Verney | 2 for 1 tickets, save £17
Zurbarán at the National Gallery | 2 for 1 tickets, save £22
Festivals The Long Road | 20% off tickets, save £45
HowTheLightGetsIn | 20% off tickets, save £32
Psych Fest | 20% off tickets, save £20
Travel and experiences i-escape | £100 off hand-picked hideaways
The Landmark Trust | 20% off breaks across Britain and Italy
Historic Houses | 15% off an annual membership, save £11
Over £800 worth of benefits tailored for the culturally curious
Find out more
Unlock these offers
and many more at
observer.co.uk/culture-club
SADIE CLAYTON
finds sanctuary and
creativity in her studio
T
his tiny corner is my sacred space. Everywhere you look there are pieces I’ve made and others I’m working on, each with a story to tell. From the outside it may look chaotic, but I know exactly where everything is. Since I had my son I don’t get here enough, but at any given opportunity it’s the place I want to be. All I need is music with a beat, my clamp and my tools, and I’m in pure copper heaven. ■ We all know that art and creativity is a form of well- ness. When I started working with copper while studying fashion at university, I felt a real connection with it and was inspired to find out why. That’s when I discovered that some believe it’s a metal that brings good luck, and that it’s used to make vessels and pans in the Ayurveda tradition. My intention is for people to feel that positivity when they look at my sculptures. ■ As well as my own work, I also deliver copper workshops, which gives people permission to pause. They’re in the zone: not looking at their phone; barely talking to anybody else because they’re so focused on making. They’ve slowed down and are just being with themselves. I love my life, but there are many moving parts. At the studio, I can put everything else to one side and be truly present in the moment. There’s nothing more I can do except create. ●
p39 Ben Lippett’s cool suppers
ode to enduring beauty
L
ilo Klinkenberg has lived in the same apartment block since she was a child. The view out of her windows, looking down over a green courtyard, is only subtly different to what she saw aged 10 – the same scenery from a slightly different angle. “My mum even has chickens there,” she says, conjuring the image of a pas- toral brood scratching around concrete Berlin, with a flourish of her red nails. “It’s like a little country escape right in the middle of the city.” Klinkenberg is one of the most sought-after floral designers in Europe, making vast installations – pak choi, yellow beans, banks of foliage – for clients including Cartier, Loewe and Jil Sander. But the flat itself, in a handsome 1877 block in Kreuzberg that her parents helped turn into a collective in the 1980s, tells you little about her trade and a lot about her sensibility.
all of my objects’
The walls are mostly bare; the surfaces are cool and clean. For someone who works with living things, she keeps remarkably few of them here. She shared the place with two friends for years. When they moved out, Klinkenberg took down the wall between the kitchen- dining room and her bedroom – opening the flat into a roomier space that “makes so much more sense.” Her brown velvet Amanta sofa stands where her bed used to be. “Now it’s perfect,” she says. “Flooded with light.” One quickly grasps Klinkenberg’s exacti- tude. Over the course of our conversation she describes a series of decisions weighed, mate- rials hunted down and designs executed. Much of the interior she envisioned herself – the steel kitchen, a coffee table, a curved shelf to hold her second-hand spoils, the office sofa covered in damask – sketching and measuring each piece, calling in a metal workshop for what she couldn’t fabricate alone. “I’m always trying to do as much as I can myself,” she says. “It starts when I know exactly what I want, and I’m not finding it.” Her eye, she reckons, came from her grand- mother – an accountant from the North Sea island of Heligoland, who kept an immacu- late house: Eames chairs, a Dieter Rams sofa, antique sideboards. To a child from a hip- pie-ish, four-child household, that combina- tion of order and elegance was seductive. “Her house was always a dream to visit,” she says. The only piece of hers that Klinkenberg now owns is the desk she used to do her taxes on. Her father is an architect, her mother taught music and maths. “I’m not from an artist family,” she says. “But it was kind of creative.” Klinkenberg did not set out to be a florist. She trained in fashion and disliked it, drawn more to the atmosphere she could build around a collection than to the clothes them- selves. Dressing a room, it turned out, was more
appealing than dressing a person. Flowers came into the picture almost by accident: a decade or so ago she and her siblings, with a couple of equally unmoored friends, opened a restaurant, hired it out for events, and she found herself doing the arrangements. Her sartorial training has left its traces. “When I began doing more sculptural work, it reminded me of fashion,” she says. “It’s like when you have a mannequin and you start to pin on top of it – you take a heavy fabric and you have this big dress, or a silk and it falls close to the body.” Only now the material is a stem or a leaf, massed or stripped back for volume and line. There’s a little of Constance Spry in it, the 20th-century English florist who staged kale and weeds where roses were expected; though
Klinkenberg surrounds herself with beautiful objects, including the brown Amanta sofas by Mario Bellini. The metal dining chairs by German postmodernist Anderl Kammermeier were picked up at auction
LIVING INSIDE
Klinkenberg, who fills entire rooms this way, doesn’t allow herself to be called an artist for any of it. “I see myself as a designer,” she says firmly. She is, in her own words, “such a freak with all of my objects.” The apartment is full of foraged finds. She folds flea markets into work trips, adding a spare Sunday in one city or another just to get to one, and trawls Kleinanzeigen, the German answer to Gumtree, for the rest. The two metal chairs in the living room, by the postmodern artist Anderl Kammermeier, came from auction at €100 each; a favourite trian- gular vase, with two small holes at the top for stems, came off a stall that was otherwise selling “only very ugly clothes”. For her, the useful and the ornamental sit on the same footing: some of her vases, like the triangular one, are treated like sculptures, others will occasionally hold flowers left over from events (she only displays single stems, “never a mix”). Even the cups are sorted by status: the good green Acme ones for guests, while her own morning coffee is drunk from souvenir mugs hidden in a cupboard. For all that permanence, her medium is an ephemeral one. She builds installations over days that may live for only the few hours of an event. “I had to learn to let go,” she explains. A flower, she says, can be most enchanting on the brink of decay, when the petals start to fall; a thing almost impossible to sell to a client, but key to her personal work. In her first solo show in 2024, she made botanical sculptures built to last – chasing, as she puts it, “ways to make something that looks alive stay alive”. Her home is the reverse of all that: slowly and delib- erately accumulated, with nothing in it that can fade or spoil. Klinkenberg travels constantly and thinks, often, about leaving Berlin, but always comes back “down to earth” in this building, where her sisters and their children are still a few doors away. She lives alone. No pets. No houseplants, either. “They would die,” she says, smiling. “I don’t even have a living plant in my home. ●
a brasserie
with rooms, has the star power to put this Wiltshire market town on the map C
orsham must have one of the prettiest high streets in the UK, with bunting zigzagging its way between the mash-up of Eliz- abethan, Stuart and Georgian architecture in both Bath and Cotswolds stone. And that’s before you mention the birds. In London there are pigeons. In Corsham there are peacocks – roosting on rooftops, wandering the pavement and in force to check out the town’s hottest new opening: Corsham House. This is the Beckford Group’s first restaurant with rooms, an all-day space in the Wiltshire market town’s former bank. And it is a coup for Corsham, which, despite its good looks (and its location just 20 minutes outside Bath) has been crying out for a destination address – somewhere with enough pull to quietly change how the town is used. “We’re trying to create something that feels new. It’s our idea of what an English brasserie could look like,” says co-owner Dan Brod. “In London there are loads of these all-day spots, but in the country that doesn’t really exist yet.” The Beckford Group has serious local form. The Beckford Arms, outside Tisbury helped redefine the modern pub-with-rooms con- cept when it opened in 2009. The Beckford Bottle Shop in Bath championed thoughtful small plates long before everyone else did. And earlier this summer came Teffont House, the group’s first hotel – its take on a French auberge. If that is the Beckford Arms grown up, Corsham House feels like the Beckford Bottle Shop with bedrooms. “We’re trying to make something very local, but super elevated, with incredible ingredients and just really tasty dishes,” says Brod. Step through the front door and straight into the bottle shop, which is modelled on the Bath store with the same tin-clad ceiling, simple wooden shelves, and brown-paper luggage tags draped around wine bottles. There are around 200 bottles here and 40 of them are offered by the glass on the restaurant menu. “Wine places are always intim- idating, but we’re so happy for people here to wander the shelves,
Corsham House
offers more
than 200 wines
with about 40
ready to be tried
by the glass
read the back of the bottles and have a chat,” says Brod. Inside the restaurant, burgundy-red banquettes and dark wooden tables set the scene. At breakfast, the best local pastries are shipped in from Landrace bakery in Bath – its sticky coils of cardamom and cinna- mon served alongside homemade granola and Dorset yoghurt with cherry compote. There’s also traditional smoked kippers from the Isle of Man served with pars- ley butter. Everything on the menu has been created by chef James Harris who has come straight from the kitchen at the Beckford Bottle Shop where he main- tained its Michelin Bib Gourmand for the last six years. Here, he’s as excited about the kitchen itself – “This one has a window!” – as he is about crafting dishes with as little waste as possible. This shows up on the menu in the form of cod’s roe and pickled cucumber with crackers made from bread waste. And a crispy pig’s- head fritter with gooseberry ketchup. “We freeze lefto- ver lemons from the bar and when we’ve got enough of them, we’ll roast them with loads of dark brown sugar and cook them into vinegar,” says James. The burnt lemon vinegar is then used for dressings. Ingredients make the most of the traditional market-town setting,
Plates by chef James Harris include rump cap steak from the local butcher and crumpets with anchovy butter
feels new. It’s our idea of what an English brasserie could look like’
too, with meat from Toby Hayes, the butcher, directly
opposite, potatoes from a farmer four minutes away
and, sometimes, meadowsweet which Harris pulls
from the hedgerow on his way to work.
Upstairs, the rooms have been designed by
co-founder Charlie Luxton who used to be opera-
tions director at Soho House, and interior designer
Natasha Hidvegi. “He’s a shopaholic,” says Brod of
the vintage dressers and woven leather chairs Luxton
is stockpiling into a warehouse. “He quite literally is
always buying stuff and then we find somewhere to
use it later.” The mostly mini bedrooms are painted in
putty pinks and blues with Sanderson’s Truffle wallpa-
per lining the halls. The most charming is also the big-
gest – the former bank manager’s office – with a huge
bay window overlooking the High Street. Other nods
to the building’s former life include the vault door en
route to the restaurant loos and the night safe still intact
by the front door. Renovating the listed building may
have been “an absolute nightmare, actually,” but a con-
tinued focus on making their addresses as sustainable
as possible means that Corsham House’s electricity is
provided by a large solar panel array, complete with
battery storage – part of the plan to make the whole
place genuinely carbon neutral.
This may be a part of Wiltshire that rubs shoul-
ders with the Cotswolds, but the level of restaurant
cooking and service still feels new for this neck of the
woods. Yet Corsham House already feels rooted in its
market-town setting – the sort of place that becomes
woven into local life. And, crucially, it has landed softly
enough that it doesn’t seem to have ruffled any pea-
cock feathers. ●
Corsham House, 13 High Street, SN13 0ET.
Bedrooms from £150 a night (corshamhouse.com)
VICTORIA TUNNEL Originally built as a wagonway to shift coal, the Victoria Tunnel is probably best remembered as an air raid shelter during the Second World War. The Ouseburn Trust runs guided tours along 700m of tunnel, covering engineering, history and local stories from the underground passageway. Visitors are equipped with hard hats and torches as they take in the eerie darkness.
OUSEBURN FARM The biggest surprise in formerly industrial Ouseburn is the swathe of green space that makes up this working community farm. Glass- fronted buildings sit beneath the arches of Byker Bridge and a sensory trail winds past paddocks, gardens and orchards. Visitors can feed the friendly pigs, cows, chickens and goats and there’s a series of events throughout the year including lamb feeding in spring.
OUSEBURN
Ouseburn, undoubtedly Newcastle’s coolest neighbourhood, was once a hub of flax, coal and pottery, and the area’s industrial past still peeks through as redbrick chimneys and towering mills. But what were once humming factories and packed warehouses are now artisan workshops feeding a litany of local independent shops. A pint of Newcastle Brown here comes from craft breweries, and nights out are less about cackling hen parties and more about intimate live music venues and artsy café-bars. ● SUZY POPE
THE BISCUIT FACTORY The UK’s largest independent art, craft and design gallery, the Biscuit Factory is housed in a sprawling Victorian warehouse. Between the ever-changing roster of exhibitions, a bookshop, street food stalls, café and artist’s shop provide plenty of reasons to visit.
ERNEST CAFÉ BAR Part art and music venue and part pub, there’s usually something creative going on at Ernest Café Bar. There’s a Mediterranean twist to the brunch and evening menus, local craft beers on tap, and a riot of colour in the beer garden.
KILN Kiln began as an artisan pottery workshop in a dilapidated garage, serving coffees on the side. Slowly, the café/ restaurant became just as prominent as the pottery. Fire is at the heart of everything; a log-burning stove heats the dining space, mezze dishes flavoured with za’atar and cumin are grilled over coals and served on the hand-fired ceramics made in the space next door.
SEVEN STORIES
Named for being spread
across seven stories of a
former mill, Seven Stories
is also the National Centre
for Children’s Books. The
collection of illustrations,
manuscripts and printed
books spans almost 100
years and more than 250
authors. The first floor
is dedicated to a shop
and café and there’s
always a literary event
going on for kids, bringing
the collection to life
through arts, crafts and
live storytelling.
is fortunate, safe and dry, than
a really ridiculous storm?’
I
t’s fine. Go back to sleep. Was it the thunder that woke us? Or the spectacular lightning, turning the sky iceberg blue? Gradually, over the whirring of last year’s cheap fan, we noticed the drumming of torrential rain on the skylights. It was like being in a permanent White Noise for Restless Babies sound-bath which, admittedly, would change my life. We lay there mumbling: was that forked lightning behind cloud-cover, or sheet-lightning? Was thunder the sound of clouds bashing together? Surely the heatwave would back-track after this? It’s extraordinary how little basic meteorology one can pick up and still be allowed outside. Could I turn off the fan for full stereophonic immer- sion even if we would immediately then die of heatstroke. It hardly mattered. Over and over again, the sky bleached, the walls glowed, the world filled with sorcery. Is there anything better, if one is fortunate, safe and dry, than a really ridiculous storm? After far longer, surely, than summer storms are meant to take, the night began to quiet. Sirens wailed; the gaps between thunder and lightning grew wider which, I was 110% certain, meant that the headbanging clouds and oceanographic electricity was moving further away. I pretended to myself that I could sleep, but I was far too excited. I had a plan. Even in ordinary (ie ongoing climate- emergency but not specifically crisis condi- tions), People Who Grow have a complicated relationship with rain. We welcome it, are grateful to it, but… is it the right kind of rain? Sufficient, but not unruly? In summer, light rain is worse than nothing. It encourages germination – and then, the instant those heartbreaking first leaves emerge, seed-case wonkily intact, BAM! Out comes the sun and the seedlings frizzle. For container gardeners, there’s another issue. In serious heat, pots dry out almost instantly. After every exhausting summer, I swear to reduce the number of plants I’m trying to keep alive on my roof terrace and then, come the spring, I discover that some unnamed operative has been popping to the garden centre and acquiring yet more sunflowers, sorrel, mint. My modest terrace has (pause) 59 overstuffed pots. I’d been
GETTY IMAGES
desperate for a downpour: thorough enough to seep under each wizened leaf, break through the desiccated soil-crust, give everything a good old-fashioned soaking. Even over the still noisy fan, it was clear that relief had come. The rain was easing. The thunder had stopped. All the sane members of my household were asleep when I, like a thief in the night, crept from my bed. I do try to learn the ways of the sensi- ble. I’d managed to wait until the lightning was over (safety first), had even paused to put on my smart new pyjamas (neighbours second). I eased open the door and, like a miracle, I was free. Journalists are unusually sen- sitive to the smell of petrichor. It’s a mixture of bacteria-emit- ted geosmin, ozone and plant-oils, which we can detect at minuscule concentrations, perhaps because our ancestors needed to find water. Or have something to write about when it rains. It smells fantastic. Add the armpitty spice of tomato plants, blackcurrant leaves’ green tang, ginger rosemary, lemon thyme and fox-piss, and I’d swear there’s nothing more delicious on this earth. Instantly soaked, barefoot as per, I tried to tell if the saucers full of water meant the plants themselves had had enough, if anything serious had blown over, and then I gave up and simply gazed. It was torchlit chaos out there; banqueting snails on the best night of their lives; worms at it like MPs at constituency parties; moonlight-pale moths. Every leaf was chomped, every parsley-seedling flattened, but I’d never felt closer to nature than out here, in the drizzle, like a fool. And when at last I came to, I stripped off my pyjamas like a guilty child, jumped into bed and cooly passed into instant sleep, where I dreamt, as usual, of a huge garden with forgot- ten terraces, mighty trees, and a nearby vine- draped fruit-patch wherein I could scavenge, while outside the earthworms made sweet sweet love and the heat cranked up. ●
Charlotte Mendelson is an Observer columnist, novelist and a keen-if-not- expert gardener
Discover how Quooker can transform your Summer.
Enjoy instant 100°C boiling, chilled, and sparkling water – all from one tap. A Quooker tap can be installed in your existing kitchen in under two hours*, is simple to use, and impossible to live without.
100°C BOILING, CHILLED AND SPARKLING WATER
Time-saving. Energy-efficient. Safe.
Quooker transforms everyday kitchen tasks while it can help
you save time, reduce waste, and help to improve safety.
See it in action – from your own home.
Book a free live virtual demonstration with our expert team.
They’ll walk you through the features and answer any
questions, one-to-one.
Scan the QR code to unlock exclusive offers and to arrange a virtual demonstration or visit quooker.co.uk
Experience Centre
“
“
Quooker isn’t just a tap, it’s a
game changer in the kitchen,
and the kind of company that
makes you feel good about
where you’ve spent your money.
*Installation time may vary depending on kitchen setup. The tap that does it all
warmest nights
I
t’s been so boiling of late that by the time the evening finally exhales the heat of the day, the idea of a hot dinner is terrifying. Cool, balmy food understands this weather, but can feel underwhelming. On hot days, when I want something satisfying, I lean on a handful of ingredients (vegetables, seafood, fruit) that suit being served raw or, at most, quickly seared, dressed and plated. Seafood sparkles in the heat, carved into shards, tossed with fresh citrus and herbs and landed on the table with a giant bowl of crisp tortillas. Tomatoes only need olive oil, salt and some good aged vinegar. Nec- tarines and peaches can be served with bread, torn fresh cheese and herbs for an easy dinner or with cold cream and smashed amaretti for
p46
What’s
on Leila
Slimani’s
mind?
a stick-it-all-together-while-you-order-a-fan dessert. If it’s meat you are after, and you’re star- ing down the barrel of a heatwave, plan ahead and roast a whole chicken (or two) at the top of the week. Rub the bird with dried oregano, extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper and toss into a tray. Stuff with squashed garlic cloves, strips of lemon zest and any herbs you have lying around, and roast in a hot oven. Whip it out, allow it to cool completely (resisting the temptation to tuck in), carve into neat portions and on Tuesday there you will be, smugly standing in the kitchen throwing together a chicken salad with dressed cucumbers, barely be able to stop smiling. Otherwise, consider switching the script on typically hot dishes. A steaming bowl of ramen becomes an icy cold summer soba with smoked mackerel. Soul-nourishing and proof you can enjoy the bounce and chew of a good noodle in 30C as well as 13C. There is something pleasingly economical about a cool dinner. It asks less of the kitchen and, by extension, of you. No oven radiating resentment into the house, no saucepan insist- ing on attention or beads of sweat rapidly devel- oping on your brow. Instead, there is chopping, assembling, blending, tasting, adjusting. A quick sear here and there, but largely, the prepara- tion becomes part of the evening rather than an interruption to it, leaving more time to linger outside while the light stretches itself into dark. Ajo blanco, a deliciously silky soup of almonds, cucumber and garlic is at once impos- sibly simple and incredibly chic. It’s versa- tile, too, making a great garnish for grilled fish, a sauce for marinated courgettes or, as we’re serving it today, a stand-alone dinner with a few salty, butter anchovy soldiers on the side. Tuna “con tomate” will transport you to a beachside restaurant on the Spanish coast. A plate of this was plonked down in front of me in Sanlúcar de Barrameda a few years ago and it has been lodged in a corner of my food brain ever since. We’re treated to a mere handful of warm eve- nings a year so when they do roll around and we spill outside, make sure you’re armed with the right recipes and are cooking (well, half-cook- ing) the right stuff. Here are a couple of stun- ning recipes that I rely on every year. They arrive at the table with neither steam or grand ceremony, carrying the brightness of toma- toes that feel still warm from the vine, cucum- bers and almonds crisp enough to snap and seared, raw tuna that screams summer.
serve the tuna with the centre still a blushing pink’
tomato dressing
Inspired by a plate enjoyed by the coast near Jerez, this is a beautiful way to prepare a stun- ning slab of tuna. Lightly spiced and seared, the centre still a blushing pink, served over the sum- meriest dressing there is. Grated tomatoes, lifted with sherry vinegar and enriched with grassy, glossy olive oil. It’s a simple plate, but one that punches way above its weight.
Serves 4 as a starter. Ready in 25 minutes large ripe tomatoes 2 sherry vinegar 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 3 tbsp sesame seeds 3 tbsp cumin seeds 1 tbsp coriander seeds 1 tbsp fennel seeds 1 tbsp tuna loin 300g dijon mustard 1 tbsp chives 1 small bunch flaky salt
Cut the tomatoes in half (horizontally, not
through the stalk) and rub the cut side on the
coarse side of a box grater set over a bowl.
I like to move the tomato in a circular motion
on the grater, this way, you don’t get long
strands of flesh, rather a nice even pulp. Keep
grating until you’re just left with skin. Repeat
with the remaining tomato halves.
Season the tomato pulp with (a lot) of salt,
the sherry vinegar and extra virgin olive oil.
Have a taste. The mixture should be sweet,
pretty tart and generously seasoned, with
a little grassy olive oil at the end. It’s about as
good as it gets for tomato season, in my book.
Combine the sesame seeds with the whole
spices and mix. Pour on to a tray and spread
evenly. Season the tuna with salt and brush all
over with the mustard. Roll in the seed mixture
to evenly coat.
Preheat a frying pan over a high heat. Add
a generous layer of olive oil and allow it to
reach just below smoke point. Carefully add
the tuna and sear on both sides, not cooking
for more than 20-30 seconds a side. If things
get too hot or seeds start to burn, whip the fish
out of the pan, add new oil and start over.
Once all the sides are seared, pop the fish
on to a cutting board. Finely slice the chives
and add to the tuna. Using your longest,
sharpest knife, cut the tuna into thin slices.
Use the whole length of the blade, applying
very little pressure and gently sawing back and
forth with long strokes. If you try and push
your knife down through the flesh, you’ll
have a mess.
Spoon the tomato mixture across a serving
platter and top with the sliced tuna loin.
Carefully season each slice with a little flaky
salt and a drizzle more olive oil.
White garlic soup
This is another version of a gazpacho, one made with almonds, spicy raw garlic and a few sur- prise ingredients. The resulting soup is utterly delicious and its texture a delight. Soaking the nuts overnight in almond milk and blending them using a powerful blender gives you the most amazing, silky texture. Olive oil and sherry vinegar are what give this soup its character, so don’t be shy with either.
Serves 4. Ready in 30 minutes, plus overnight
marination blanched peeled almonds 200g garlic cloves 2 cucumber 400g fresh white breadcrumbs 70g almond milk 400ml cloudy apple juice 200ml
extra virgin olive oil 120ml sugar 20g fine sea salt 15g sherry vinegar 30ml
For the topping: shallot 1 sherry vinegar 1 tbsp cucumber ¼ charentais or cantaloupe melon ¼ toasted salted almonds 1 handful extra virgin olive oil salt
For the anchovy toast: sourdough bread 2 thick slices fridge-cold butter 4 slices Cantabrian anchovies or similar 8 flaky salt
Tip the almonds into a large bowl or Tupperware container along with the roughly chopped garlic. Peel and dice the cucumber and add to the bowl. Add the breadcrumbs, almond milk, apple juice, olive oil, sugar and salt to the bowl. Cover and leave to marinade in the fridge overnight. When ready to eat, tip the contents of the soup into a high-power blender and whizz until extremely smooth. I blend mine for a really long time, maybe 5-6 minutes straight. This will naturally heat the soup, but try not to let it heat up too much as it can become bitter. Work in batches if you need to and pause to let the soup cool down as often as necessary. Pour the blended soup through a very fine sieve into a bowl and season with the sherry vinegar. Chill the soup until very cold. While the soup chills, prepare the topping. Cut the shallot into rings and add to a small bowl. Pour over a little sherry vinegar and leave the shallot for a few minutes to marinate. Cut the cucumber and melon into an even dice and add to the bowl. Tumble in a few almonds, add a drizzle of olive oil and toss to coat. Toast off the bread and cut into 8 long, finger-shaped pieces. Top each with a plank of cold butter, an anchovy and a little sprinkle of crunchy sea salt. Pour the chilled soup into chilled bowls and finish with a scattering of the soup topping, a drizzle of olive oil and a drip of sherry vinegar, toast on the side. ● Nigel Slater returns next week
too caught up in the food. I was with someone I vaguely wanted to impress, and so I resolved to lock in, professional curiosity aside. Blue eyes, 6ft 4in, the stuff of memes: I had this. I made it 10 or so minutes. Just enough time for a bouncy host to deposit us at stools beside the pass, plenty close enough for anyone food-motivated to accidentally neglect their dinner-mate in favour of gazing at plates of whole grilled trout, glistening with green chilli seaweed butter, as they whisked by…
Hausu
11a Station Way, London SE15 4RX
(hausulondon.co.uk). Small plates
from £4, large plates from £24, desserts
from £5, wine from £6.50/£32
Once I’d unwound from pass-rubbernecking long enough to order, two briny Gibsons and a ceramic cup of chicken broth arrived, laced with lemongrass and shrimp paste. The broth, a £4 afterthought order, proved a revelation. We followed short, hot mouthfuls with sips of sharp martini – the ideal chaser to the discs of schmaltz, rendered down and blended with coriander, that dotted the surface. Next came a grilled chicken thigh with crackling skin, served with a holy trinity of shiso leaf, lime wedge, pickled guindilla pepper. Then a slab of monk- fish, dressed in crab bisque. By the time I was spooning up the last of it, I’d planned to return. Hausu lives in an offshoot of Peckham Rye station. (If that sounds deeply unglamorous, don’t worry – only the capacious tiled bath- rooms hint at a transport hub, and they do it charmingly.) The ground floor is split into three rooms. If you too are easily distracted, keep on walking to the rear one, which trades leather banquettes for bar stools and flatteringly soft lighting for views of an open kitchen. Upstairs, a cocktail bar uses gauzy curtains to carve nookish hideouts from a boxy floorplan. The restaurant, which shares a name with a 1977 Japanese horror-comedy, resists pledging allegiance to any one cuisine, but has a sprawl- ing menu on which nearly everything has a little twist. Pork pomodoro comes on toast, while a prawn toast, shaped like a filled doughnut, is actually half scallop. A quick scan reveals a hit list of chef-beloved savoury ingredients: gochu- jang, filetto lardato, miso, wild garlic. Someone more joyful than me would have read through that list – 23 dishes before dessert, then five of those – and found it generous and playful. My pre-arrival scan had me wonder- ing if this was concept first, food second. The en vogue of it all: statement scallop, busy crudo, ex-dairy sirloin, dishes flitting from Italy to China and back, seemed unfocused. But that’s an ungenerous read of any restaurant, especially one like this, which first-time head chef Holly Middleton- Joseph opened in 2024 having just turned 30, alongside her brother Tom and their friend Christian Williams. (Tom handles the drinks programme and front of house; Christian looks after the business.) The trio, all first- time restaurateurs, have no financial backers. If they fill an extra dining room with a rotat- ing cast of DJs, or let an Instagrammable menu lure in youngish date-night crowds,
good for them. It is fun here. And, crucially, Middleton-Joseph’s food is far better than this already fun concept needs. Here, sauce work and technique back-up all the ping-ponging about. Middleton- Joseph, who describes her cross-cuisine sam- pling as “poly-European with lots of Southeast Asia,” cooked at the Camberwell Arms before heading to Lore of the Land, Mountain, and then Barnes’s the Waterman’s Arms. On my second visit, with curiosity fully piqued and no date to disappoint, I started with the scallop before moving on to precisely folded cappel- letti. Perhaps her deft hand with pasta came from the often Italian-leaning Camberwell Arms; maybe her bravery with an intensely savoury scallop – hers comes with lashings of XO sauce – nods to another knockout, her former chef Sam Andrews’s curry-topped rendition in Barnes. But already, just two years into Hausu, Middleton-Joseph is clearly sure of her flavours and layers them expertly. Plenty of fuss has been made about the revival of surf and turf; but at Hausu, rather than draping a few grilled langoustines alongside a steak, Middleton-Joseph builds up XO sauce’s savoury notes with dried shrimp and the trim of that filetto lardato before spooning it over the grilled bivalve. Where plenty of chefs would understandably open with a concise pastry list of ice-cream and a tart or two, Middleton- Joseph turns out a healthy offering of rhu- barb-filled eclairs and jelly-topped panna cottas. That’s not to say it’s perfect. On my second visit, a side salad topped with thin slices of cedro (citron) felt like an under-dressed after- thought, and the sichuan peppercorn-laced praline, dusted around toasted rice ice-cream, could have used another 10 seconds or so in the Robot Coupe, for the sake of my teeth. But the cappelletti that arrived atop grated Vesuvio tomato and olive oil, pan con tomate reima- gined as pasta sauce, was plain and confident and stuck in my mind long after dinner. On my first visit, it was the monkfish, just this side of opaque, that slightly missed. But the crisp skin and wham of bisque, plus the trio of new potatoes, each elegantly turned then cooked in a salty saffron bath, made me almost forgive the touch-undercooked fish. It is fun here. But it’s also gutsy, nuanced food under that, the kind I hope both finds the hype and outlives it. If this is Middleton-Joseph’s first chapter, I’d love to see the next one. ●
A DISH I CAN’T FORGET
Jonathan Nunn is surprised
by sautéed winter melon
with dried shrimp at
Dong Yuan in west London
There are many aspects of being a restaurant critic that are impossible to complain about, but allow me this one: when you eat out as much as I do for work – sometimes up to 500 times a year – your capacity for surprise understandably wanes. So when my friend Jess told me that a restaurant on the Park Royal industrial estate in Acton was blowing up on the Chinese social media site Xiao Hong Shu, I curbed my expectations. Yet Dong Yuan is remarkable, an anomaly among Park Royal’s thriving scene of Lebanese and Syrian bakeries. On a tiny slice of west London asphalt, chef Yaohua Cui has transformed a business centre unit into the type of restaurant you’d find on a Hunanese roadside, sending out stir fry after stir fry in explosive columns of flame. Over meals here, there is one dish that has stuck in my mind. It’s not the dishes commonly associated with Hunanese food, the ones covered in Cui’s blend of glossy red and green chillies that make his cooking ferociously spicy. Rather, it’s a gentle winter melon dish, where the gourd has been sliced into translucent discs and softened before being covered in a light sauce containing tiny freshwater shrimp. The first taste is the rockpool brackishness of the shrimp and then the cleanness of the winter melon, which retains just enough bite. It’s a dish of enormous depth and skill, one that had a group of overly opinionated restaurant writers and chefs struck dumb when it arrived. I couldn’t have been more delighted to be wrongfooted. ●
Jonathan Nunn is the founder
and co-editor of Vittles
ROBERT SAMUEL HANSON
The breakout stars of this long hot summer are two white grape varieties that have been next big thing-ing around the place for a while now. Both albariño and vermentino have the capacity to hit the sweet cooling spot after a day spent trudging around in what feels like a perpetual warm bath and both are well into that journey where they begin to transcend their specific origins and become brands in their own right. Albariño is perhaps making the biggest cool splash away from its home in the far, northwest- ern corner of Iberia. Until the 2010s, Spain’s Galicia and northern Portugal’s Vinho Verde were really the only places growing albariño to any great extent. This patch is still the source of most of my favourite examples of a grape that combines a salted-citrus zestiness with juicy white peach, pear and apricot, wines such as the pin-sharp Waitrose No 1 La Val Albariño, Rías Baixas 2025 (£14), the tangy Mendes & Symington Contacto Alvarinho, Vinho Verde 2025 (from £16, the Wine Society; Drink Finder); and the super- saline Pazo Señorans Albariño 2024 (£23.99, Virgin Wines). But it’s coming in increasingly stylish form from vineyards in South Africa, California, New Zealand, Uruguay and the south of France, too, with the delicately floral Bleu d’Alba Albariño, Pays d’Oc 2025 (£14.95, Tanners) from the Languedoc in southern France; the jasmine
N
floral-inflected nectarine and gentle grapefruit pithiness of M&S Juanicó Albariño, 2025 (£10, Marks & Spencer) from Canelones in Uruguay, and Nautilus Estate Albariño 2024 (£25.99, Monty’s Wine Emporium), a Galician- dead-ringer from New Zealand. I’ve come to think of vermentino as albariño’s Mediterranean twin, since it is established across Mediterranean Italy and France. At its best it offers a ripple of ripe citrus, from lemon and lime to mandarin orange and grapefruit. There’s something of the eye-watering artificial tang of Starburst chews in simpler exam- ples, but the best, like albariño, may bring a hint of something saline along with the zest, pith and juice of real fresh citrus fruit and a leafy herbal character. The vast Sicilian cooperative, Cantine Settesoli, offers a good intro- duction to vermentino, with peach and pear and a subtle floral dimen- sion, along with lemony acidity in the shape of Settesoli Vermentino 2024 (£8.25, Tesco). A step-up comes from Languedoc producer Domaine les Yeuses Vermentino, Pays d’Oc 2025 (£12.50, Lea & Sandeman), which sings with freshly squeezed lime and leafy herbs like an ice- cool hand on a hot head. The same retailer takes things up another notch with the gorgeous Tuscan Pagliatura Vermentino Toscana 2025 (£20.95, Lea & Sandeman), a dry white with an albariño-like burst of sweet nectarine and a swish of lemon and lime. Australian and South African win- emakers have been increasingly drawn to Mediterranean varieties. I loved the mix of citrussy pithiness and Alka Seltzer minerals with juicy nectar- ine found in Bin No 20 Margaret River Vermentino 2025 (£13.50, the Wine Society), while South Africa’s Bacco Estate Bacio del Sole Vermentino, Paarl 2025 (£19.75, Oxford Wine) is beautifully layered with peach and lemon, designed for long warm nights in this longest, hottest of summers. ●
Wine of the Week Tuscan Pagliatura Vermentino Toscana 2025, £20.95, Lea & Sandeman
ow that we’re firmly in the throes of summer and are collec- tively aiming our middle fingers at the sky like angry little sun- dials, it’s time to think about how we can stay cool while still drinking, responsibly. I don’t cope well in the heat, never have. I have fat and muscle strategically placed around my body to help me stay warm during Scottish winters. There is nothing about my genetic makeup that is designed to weather a couple of hours in a park in a city heatwave. So staying cool is the MO for me; most things must be topped up with ice, and I’m not above dunking my hand in my Aperol Spritz and rubbing its ice on the back of my neck. Ice is a must, but even better if something freezy can be incorporated into the drink itself. Enter the sgroppino. This drink was allegedly created in Venice in the 16th century, a time when ice (and therefore staying cool) was a privilege and before cocktails were even a thing. The transatlantic ice trade didn’t hit its
stride until the 19th century, so ice was cut from rivers and lakes in the winter, then stored in “ice houses” through- out the year. The sgroppino, there- fore, was a drink for aristocrats, or the kind of person who had the time to fret about procuring ice rather than dodging a plague. The recipe then was simple and is to this day: a dis- tilled alcohol, a touch of sugar and ice, predominantly flavoured with lemon. Whisked together, it would have looked like a slushie – and that’s the way it’s served today. These days, lemon sorbet is used – a clever way to get the sharp one-two of citrus and sweetness – with fruit-forward prosecco. The sorbet froths up the prosecco and keeps the drink cool. Nowadays, the spirit added is often vodka or gin, though back in the day it was likely a grape distillate, like eau de vie. I’ll go out on a limb and say that in London, where I live, I think most people’s introduction to the sgrop- pino is likely via Bar Swift. It’s a chain that doesn’t feel chain-y, with three outposts (Borough, Shoreditch, Soho). Their sgroppino is £9 and uses the elderflower liqueur Saint Germain in lieu of vodka, making it lighter (and presumably why it is £9 – cheaper than most other cocktails of equivalent quality). There’s also room for interpreta- tion, so long as the constituent parts of lemon, prosecco and sorbet are hon- oured. At CC Blooms in Edinburgh, their sgroppino is based around Malfy Gin con Limone, and with the option to choose your sorbet from lemon, raspberry or blackcurrant. And it’s a recipe simple enough to execute at home. Remember my “big jug of cocktails” column from last week? Well, measure out prosecco and vodka in a jug in a 3:1 ratio, stir gently so it doesn’t lose its fizz, and then pour carefully into coupes, topped with a scoop of sorbet. Repeat until you have achieved the desired effect of hazy bliss. Though in this heat, that shouldn’t take long. ●
PROP STYLING ALEXANDER BREEZE; DRINK STYLING TARA GARNELL
T
of tins
inned fish continues to have a moment. We may turn to supermarkets’ own sardine varieties for work lunches, but we are suck- ers for the design-forward tins of premium varieties, currently our favourite food pres- ent to give, or take to the park for an Ins- tagrammable picnic. As chef Tom Aronica told The Observer last year, it can be used in various recipes. “I use it for salad dressings or to make fla- voured mayonnaises; tuna oil is especially good for mayonnaise as you get that delicious tonnato thing going on,” he said. Very strong oils might need diluting, he warned, but if you think about flavour pairings, you should be all right. “For example, I wouldn’t chuck tuna oil on fried eggs… although, to be fair, that might be quite nice.” ●
MONKFISH WITH ALEPPO £9.20, Hevva! (The Tinned Fish Market) Fish sourced from Newlyn, then cooked on a nearby farm – this one is pan-fried in a garam masala crust and preserved in a citrus- spice coconut oil.
SARDINES IN TOMATO
SAUCE
£5.50, Nuri (SousChef)
Classic, simple, best
squashed on a baguette
for the ultimate
low-effort, high-
reward dinner.
TROUT FILLETS IN ONION
RELISH
£12.95, ABC+ (FishTins)
Have it on a rye crispbread,
with or without a lick of
cream cheese, and a little
cress to top.
MUSSELS ESCABECHE £7.95, Rockfish Our current favourite preserved mussels, spiky with vinegar, from noted fishmonger-turned-chef Mitch Tonks.
SMOKED SMALL SARDINES IN
EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
£6.49, Jose Gourmet (Selfridges)
You can’t judge a fish tin by its
cover – except you can when it’s
José Gourmet: they’re all excellent,
inside and out.
HAKE WITH SEAWEED
AND BUTTER
£12, Sea Sisters
Sustainable, seasonal British fish – every
tin this brand makes is delicious, but this
hake is elite. Give the tin a hot-water bath
before opening to melt the butter, before
heaping directly on to sourdough toast.
SCOTTISH MACKEREL
FILLETS IN OLIVE OIL
£4.95, Sound Seafood
(The Tinned Fish Market)
Add to salads with beetroot,
lentils and a crumble
of goat’s cheese.
How do civilisations die? 30% It is eight o’clock in the morning in Cambodia and already 30C when I catch sight, in the distance, of the majestic silhouette of the ruins of Angkor. A thousand years ago, this was the capital of an empire of immense power and wealth. Today, the jungle has reclaimed it. Roots coil around stone faces, branches pierce the roofs of temples and silence has replaced the murmur of a million lives. The guide explains that the reasons for the collapse remain uncertain. Religious wars, the greed of rulers, disease, climate change. Empires fall for many reasons and often no one can quite say when the tipping point was reached. I look again at the ruins. I wonder if the Khmer emperors could ever have imagined that one day, destruction would be promised in the time it takes to send a message.
What future for my
son – and for
literature? 50%
On the airplane to Hanoi,
my 15-year-old son is reading
Marguerite Duras. I do not tell
him that sometimes I feel it is all
slipping away. That literature no
longer seems to matter, that those
who still believe in knowledge,
in nuance, in decency, appear
increasingly out of step with the
world. What matters today is
visibility. Money. Influence. The
number of followers one can
gather. I worry about him. About
the world he will inherit. At night,
these thoughts return. I imagine
a world in flames, where men
and women, made obsolete, rage
against machines they cannot
understand. I imagine us as fish in
a vast aquarium, circling endlessly
under the indifferent gaze of those
who design the system.
In Cambodia, the Khmer
Rouge declared Year Zero. They
wanted to erase the past, to purify
the world of its imperfections.
Such dreams always begin with the promise of renewal. They end
with the destruction of everything that makes us human. Today,
other fantasies are emerging. They promise transcendence, mastery,
immortality. They dream of a world governed by calculation, where
desire itself can be predicted, reduced, optimised.
In Hanoi, I meet a man who tells me that his parents once owned
a small library of French books – Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert. He is
70 years old and can still recite entire passages from memory. When
he speaks, my son listens, his eyes filled with tears. In 1975, when the
The French-Moroccan writer and journalist is also the personal representative of President Emmanuel Macron to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. She won the 2016 Prix Goncourt for her novel Chanson Douce
communists established their dictatorship, the books were taken from them. The anger still seems intact in this man: “They told us it was capitalist. But what does capitalism have to do with literature?” I have no answer.
Who benefits from nostalgia? 20% We often hear that things were better before. That the past held a form of order, of beauty, of coherence that we no longer know how to preserve. And yet nostalgia has always made me uneasy. Perhaps because I immigrated at a very young age and did not want to be one of those immigrants who idealise their home countries and constantly dwell on their memories. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that diasporas often vote conservatively. Hungarians abroad mostly voted for Orbán and Turkish immigrants for Erdoğan. In France, nostalgia sells books, shapes imaginations. It paints the picture of a simpler country, a time before everything supposedly went wrong. On the front page of a magazine, Jordan Bardella, the young leader of the Rassemblement National party, poses with a princess. The man currently leading in the polls thus stirs up a dark nostalgia for an aristocratic France, where the first lady would be blonde, Catholic and a direct descendant of Louis XIV. Nostalgia is selective. It forgets what that past also contained: violence, exclusion, silence imposed on those who did not fit. Perhaps nostalgia is less about the past than about the place one occupied in it. It is not the world we miss, but the position we held within it. I understand the temptation. To look back is to escape uncertainty, to imagine that stability once existed. But it is also a way of refusing the present, of turning away from its complexity, its demands, its contradictions. As I watch my son reading, I realise that what matters is not to mourn a world that no longer exists, nor to idealise one that never did. It is to ask what we choose to preserve and what we are willing to abandon. Civilisations do not disappear overnight. They erode, slowly, in the words we accept, in the values we neglect. Perhaps the question is not how they die, but how we allow them to fade – and what, in the end, we decide is worth saving. ●
Enjoy 15% off the hottest paperbacks
this summer at the Observer shop
Visit observershop.co.uk/paperbacks
or call 020 3176 2930
• observer.co.uk 26.07.26 2 This week
Real Madrid line up deal for Man City’s Rodri
Real Madrid are reportedly working
on a deal to sign Manchester City
midfielder and World Cup winner
Rodri, while Arsenal are interested
in Vinícius Jr. These potential
mega-money deals follow the
confirmation of Morgan Rogers’s
£117m move to Chelsea from Aston
Villa – while Alejandro Garnacho
has gone the opposite way on a
season-long loan – and Elliot
Anderson’s £116m transfer to
Man City. Chelsea are also close to
signing Crystal Palace centre-back
Maxence Lacroix, while Ipswich
have paid £10m for Celtic forward
Daizen Maeda and Crysencio
Summerville has left West Ham for
Al-Hilal.
Noah Lyles sets world-leading 100m time at US Championships
13-2 shot Kalpana wins
thriller at Ascot
Last year’s runner-up Kalpana
won a thrilling King George VI and
Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot
in an emotional victory for trainer
Andrew Balding. It is 55 years since
Balding’s father Ian, who died in
January, rode Mill Reef to victory
in the King George, and Andrew
Balding’s first victory in the race.
Kalpana, a 13-2 shot, was ridden
by Colin Keane and beat the 2025
winner Calandagan by one and a
half lengths.
Root set to replace Stokes as England captain
Joe Root is the favourite to replace Ben Stokes as England Test captain as their search for a new Test head coach continues. Root is expected to beat white-ball skipper Harry Brook
Sound advice If you tuned in live to watch Andy Burnham become the seventh prime minister in just over a decade (and who wouldn’t?), your eyes weren’t deceiving you – it really was Peter Reid in the crowd outside 10 Downing Street to welcome his fellow Evertonian to his new home. “Congratulations, get in there lad,” Reid told Sky News.
by Andrew Butler
Reporting by George Simms
Emirates GBR won a crucial race six to keep their hopes alive of making the four-boat final in today’s SailGP in Portsmouth. The home fleet accrued seven points, six adrift of event leaders Artemis. Andrew Matthews/PA
to the job despite becoming the only England captain since Michael Atherton not to have a winning record having overseen more than 20 matches, after skippering the side between 2017 and 2022. Elsewhere, former Australia coach Justin Langer has been ruled out from replacing Brendon McCullum, with Glamorgan head coach Richard Dawson and former England batter Jonathan Trott both in the running. The schedule for next summer’s
Not those ones David Beckham and Ronaldo will be competing at the Commonwealth Games. Not the footballers, of course, but two Indian cyclists both named after the footballing icons. David Beckham Elkatohchoongo and his team-mate Ronaldo Singh Laitonjam will represent their country on the track at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow.
when I get home’
Tyson Fury on why he wouldn’t
be watching Anthony Joshua’s
fight against Kristian Prenga
in Saudi Arabia
men’s and women’s home Ashes have also been confirmed, with the men’s Tests hosted at Trent Bridge, Lord’s, Edgbaston, Southampton and The Oval.
Norris on pole for Hungarian grand prix
Lewis Hamilton was handed a three-place grid penalty after blocking pole-sitter Lando Norris’s team-mate Oscar Piastri for today’s Hungarian Grand Prix. Norris had pipped Hamilton to pole by 12 hundredths of a second before being penalised. Hamilton’s Ferrari
team-mate Charles Leclerc will start in second, ahead of Kimi Antonelli and Piastri. Meanwhile, Malaysia will host a Grand Prix in October to replace the postponed Bahrain race from earlier this year. Kuala Lumpur’s Sepang track is expected to host.
LeBron James to end career in Philadelphia
LeBron James, 41, will finish his NBA career with the Philadelphia 76ers after leaving the Los Angeles Lakers after eight years. James, the greatest NBA player of the 21st century and the league’s all-time top points scorer, has won the NBA title with his previous three clubs and wrote on X: “I believe I can help make the Philadelphia 76ers a championship team.” He signed a two-year veterans minimum deal to bolster an already elite 76ers squad featuring all-stars Tyrese Maxey, Jaylen Brown and Joel Embiid.
Sinner and Djokovic to miss Canadian Open
Jannik Sinner gave up the chance
New York just in sox In “footballers not taking their post-World Cup downtime seriously” news, France winger Michael Olise (left) played with a group of New York locals after his country’s elimination from the tournament. The Bayern Munich star joined a GoodRec game, wore football-unfriendly baggy trousers and also played in just his socks.
to win all nine Masters 1000 events in a year as he pulled out of the Canadian Open to prioritise his health. Neither Sinner nor Novak Djokovic will compete in Montreal, and the tournament director Valérie Tétreault said: “We believe the frequency of these last-minute withdrawals in the last few years raises a broader issue for our sport.” Carlos Alcaraz misses out as he recovers from a wrist injury sustained in April.
Klopp joins Germany as Pirlo named Italy boss
Jürgen Klopp threatened to stand down from his new role as Germany head coach if his family are hounded by the media as he said “football can change a country”. “I’m taking this job even though I’ve seen how you treated [Julian] Nagelsmann,” he said. “The day you don’t want me any more, I’m gone.” Klopp also indicated this would be his final job in top-level football. Meanwhile Andrea Pirlo is set to be appointed Italy manager after Pep Guardiola turned down the role.
Plumbing the depths A Commonwealth Games volunteer had to strip off in order to fix a lane divider prior to Adam Ramsay- Peaty’s 100m breatstroke heat. The “fixing eye” – the fitting that attaches the lane divider to the end of the pool – had sunk, leading to the enterprising volunteer to jump into the pool to retrieve it. The event was delayed by 15 minutes.
Tadej Pogačar celebrates his almost-certain fifth Tour de France victory.
Jasper Jacobs/ Belga/Avalon
W
more appreciation than he received
achievements of a remarkable player and manager, for club and country, far outweighed his occasional failures. Just ask the supporters at Newcastle, Liverpool and Hamburg
henever a star has to die for us to fully appreciate how special they were, the problem is us, not them. With Kevin Keegan, some landmark disappointments in a 40-year career of playing and managing fell away to allow the real story of his character and accomplishments its rightful glow. In great sporting lives the departed dwelt in a binary world of good, bad, won, lost, veneration, scorn. It’s odd to think now, after Keegan was waved off last week with so much respect and warmth, that there were points in those 40 years when public and media opinion inflicted brutally reductionist opinions on him. There was a lesson. Maybe don’t fixate on the 10% of flops in a person’s life at the expense of the 90% creativity, excitement and joy? Days after Sir Garfield Sobers’s death restored the radiance of his life, eulogies for Keegan described an almost farcically rich history in which he had been a working-class Stakhanovite, Bill Shankly project and Liverpool superstar, curly- permed 1970s TV idol, two-time European footballer of the year with Hamburg, Newcastle United messiah – as player and manager – and England boss in a reign that ended, symbolically, in the last game before the old Wembley was torn down. Anyone who could send people running to “Woolies” to buy Brut aftershave, as Keegan did, was a stone-cold advertising genius. That summary omits his fine work in getting Fulham and Manchester City promoted – and much else. The point is not to repeat the appreciation pieces we have already read, which you wish Keegan could also see because throughout his life he was easily hurt by criticism, and felt everything – good and bad – with a sharpness that
Three’s a charm: Keegan celebrates the third goal 3-1 British (Home) Championship matchin 1979. Steve Powell/Allsport/ Getty Images
went so far, it obscured a life of achievement few great sports people could have any hope of emulating
helps explain why emotion drove his view of what football could and should be. The negativity that attached itself to him on his remarkably diverse journey from Scunthorpe in 1968 to a doomed second spell in charge of Newcastle in 2008 was rooted in four main subjects. The first was people categorising him as a workhorse player, an autodidact who made the most of limited talent, compared, say, with his Liverpool successor, the more balletic Kenny Dalglish. Observe the footage of Keegan’s restless, relentless wide-sided attacking and try denying that he would be worth £120m-plus today. Journeyman toil has never won the European Cup or two European footballer of the year awards. Next is him missing a simple header for England at the 1982 World Cup after he had been unavailable for the first four games with a back injury. That miss was allowed to taint his international career, which was no messier than England’s tournament record in his era. The third was Newcastle blowing a 12-point lead to Manchester United in the 1996 title race, and Keegan’s prior outburst on TV (“I would love it if we beat them”) which groupthink has decreed to
be the ultimate crack-up, when it would have been remembered as the rallying cry of a mind- games virtuoso had a brilliant, buccaneering Newcastle side held on. Again, the human choice to view an event positively or negatively has rarely been more applicable than in the case of Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle. No, they didn’t win the title. Yes, they were a privilege to watch – an overdose for the senses. Even without the trophy, Keegan was in the top rank of managers in British football who have built immortally thrilling sides. And the fourth has to be his flagellating resignation in a Wembley toilet block in October 2000. When players and Football Association staff tried to dissuade him, Keegan summoned a response worthy of a stage play: “No, no, no. I’m off. I’m not for this.” England had been awful at Euro 2000. So had Germany, in a group game that gave birth to an Italian newspaper’s simile of “two big beer drinkers pushing each other around.” When he quit at Wembley, playing Gareth Southgate in central midfield was held against Keegan as some kind of defining crime, when it was merely a minor contributing factor. The spotlight found him because it saw the natural star in him and
flowed in his direction. When John Giles and Billy Bremner picked someone to fight with in the 1974 Charity Shield, they chose Keegan. When Yugoslavian police were looking for an England player to punish in 1974 for impropriety on a flight (a player jumped on the luggage carousel too) it was Keegan they arrested, even though he wasn’t involved in either incident. It’s often the case with exceptionally magnetic people that they’re excluded from a rule that applies to the rest of us: they’re not allowed to fail. Or, if they do, the failure is used to chop away at their success. Inventive and spirited people aren’t entitled to eternal applause just because they have laudable impulses. It’s not that Keegan should have been spared cross-examination either as England or Newcastle manager; more, that it’s a shame the dismissiveness went so far, and obscured a life of achievement few great sports people could have any hope of emulating. He was safe in the adulation of Newcastle fans. Maybe the rest of us should have been more appreciative of what Keegan represented, and less hard on him for what he didn’t do. And better to make that correction before they die, when they’re still here to see it.
Commonwealth Games are flying under the radar
I
and a raft of high-profile late withdrawals got the Glasgow tournament off to a shaky start, writes Jessy Parker Humphreys
most clubs of any sport in the UK, but 40% of those are owned by local authorities
n an ideal world for the Commonwealth Games, its biggest surprise would be that the King and Queen arrived at the opening ceremony accompanied by Sir Chris Hoy in the Tardis. Unfortunately, the biggest surprise for many was that the Commonwealth Games was happening at all. Advertising and coverage of the Games has been muted this year, hampered by it not being shown on the BBC for the first time since 1954. The programme of sports is limited to only 10, with Glasgow having to step in late on to host after the Victorian government in Australia pulled out due to rising financial costs. TNT Sports paid a reported £5m for the rights to the tournament, significantly less than the £10m the BBC paid to show it in Birmingham in 2022. There is a free-to-air highlights package being shown on Channel 5. As has been the case with a number of TNT Sports products, the coverage itself has been patchy to say the least. Coverage of the swimming had numerous athletes misnamed.
Jessy Parker Humphreys Glasgow
In Hall Three at the SEC in Glasgow, it sounds like someone is hosting a bar- becue over the fence. The tinny sound of Groove Is in the Heart is being piped into the space, not loud enough to feel pur- poseful. The DJ is being flanked by a Commonwealth Games official. He looks bored. This is the newly revamped Bowls. Contested at the Games since its inception in 1930, with the exception of 1966 where there was no green to play on in Jamaica, it is one of the few sports here where this really is its pinnacle. This year, the contest has been
There is an argument to be made that the BBC’s public funding model means they should be committed to showing something like the Commonwealth Games but they will feel vindicated given the number of big name athletes who have withdrawn before the tournament began. On Thursday, it was announced that Katarina Johnson-Thompson, Dina Asher-Smith, Matthew Hudson-Smith, Daryll Neita and Amber Anning were among a huge swathe of withdrawals from the England Athletics squad. With the European Championships taking place in Birmingham in a couple of weeks, it is clear that the Commonwealth Games ranks rather lower in athletes’ priorities. For Scottish athletes, the opportunity to compete in front of a home crowd had seemed to be a bigger draw until Eilish McColgan announced on her Instagram yesterday that she would not be competing. McColgan cited a broken toe as the reason for her withdrawal, revealing she had only returned to running two weeks ago, after picking up the injury during the London Marathon. It says a lot about both the scarcity of stories, and the British
moved indoors, meaning that the game is far quicker. There is the afore- mentioned music playing, and it is so popular with competitors that they had to add an extra day. Johnny Vegas was the key celebrity endorsement, describing the sport as a “coronation of brilliance, of genius, of why we left the caves in the first place”. “The unprecedented demand from Commonwealth nations and territories to participate is a pow- erful reflection of the continued growth, inclusivity and global appeal of our sport,” said Neil Darymple, the chief executive officer of World Bowls on the announcement of the additional day. Part of the attraction of bowls is the randomness of the competitors,
more people who are a bit younger feel like it’s a sport they can get involved in’ Jon Cockroft, Bowls England
particularly when it comes to age. Where else at this Games can you watch a 56-year-old from Guernsey defeating a chartered accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers from Namibia? Yet in order to sustain the sport, there is also a need to move past the idea that it is just for the retirees of the world. The DJing appears to be part of that. “The reality and perception [of bowls] are often not that far apart,” says Jon Cockroft, CEO of Bowls England, which runs the outdoor version of the game. “The average age of a bowler in Britain is about 67. We see that as a real attribute for our sport because we’re proud that we add years to life. But the Commonwealth showcases the fact that the stereotype isn’t just it. We want to use these sorts of events to change the perceptions and make more people who are a
bit younger feel like it’s a sport they can get involved in sooner rather than later.” There are more than 3,500 bowls clubs across the UK, meaning that, after football and cricket, it has the third-most clubs for a single sport in the country. But with 40% of those clubs owned by local authorities, there is a challenge to show that they are being made use of. “They question whether they want to continue investing in it, so it’s a challenge to our sport to ensure that these clubs are busy and thriving. But equally, this is an opportunity to get people active. Lots of clubs are massively accessible geographically, but historically, clubs have not been as visible as they should be in local communities.” Bowls England are working with clubs to try and help them bring new members in, particularly with a world championship being hosted in Royal
Leamington Spa next summer. Yet they have been stymied by this year’s competition ending up behind a pay- wall on TNT Sports. “Fundamentally, bowling can’t affect that decision and we under- stand why that decision has been made,” Cockroft continued. “But it’s
clearly disappointing for us because it’s not [in] the shop window. The BBC used to have a platform to inspire the next generation and has so much capability of getting our nation more active. It’d be nice to see them step up to try and help us achieve that.” There is something incredibly
his new married name competing against one of the most exciting young swimmers in Filip Nowacki
Medal hunters: clockwise from main, India’s Rupa Rani Tirkey; Chane Cumbermack of Trinidad and Tobago; Cayman Islands v Uganda in basketball; New Zealand’s Karin Burger; Ben Foster (Aus). Francois Nel, Matthias Hangst, Molly Darlington, Paul Harding, Matthias Hangst/Getty Images
It’s Chico time: Qureshi is the owner of a local curry house in Glasgow. François Nel/ Getty Images
media more broadly, that the main attraction in the first weekend has been Sean McCann (pictured inset). McCann is a Scottish swimmer whose most notable sporting achievement is competing at the Youth Commonwealth Games in 2023, but he has been profiled by almost every major news outlet because he is Madeleine McCann’s brother. McCann swam well to reach the 400m freestyle final last night, but his achievement has been wrapped up in coverage that, sometimes uncomfortably, has been focused on his family background. The pool has been where to look when it comes to high-profile names as Adam Ramsay-Peaty has been debuting his new married surname while competing in the 100m breaststroke. He has been competing directly up against one of the most exciting young swimmers who might don a Team GB Speedo in the future – Jersey’s Filip Nowacki. The 18-year- old won gold at the World Juniors in 2025 in both the 100m and 200m breaststroke. Looking at Nowacki’s slight frame alongside the broad shoulders of Ramsay-Peaty, it is hard to believe they are competing in the same sport and a strong reminder of their 13-year age gap. Meanwhile Duncan Scott won his fourth Commonwealth gold medal for Scotland as he came home first in the 200m individual medley on Friday night, setting a Commonwealth record in the process. His team-mate from the 4 x 200m Olympic gold in Paris, Tom Dean, won bronze. Scott’s
mesmerising about bowls, although it is hard not to feel that in the arena, the tension dissipates a bit as a result of the music. It is hard to appreciate the sheer distance they roll the bowls until you are here. The best-supported match of the day comes as Scottish bowler Jason Banks faces up against Pakistan’s Mohammed “Chico” Qureshi. 67-year- old Qureshi has lived in Glasgow for more than 50 years and is the owner of Southside curry house Alishan Tandoori, which Banks has been known to frequent. The local combi- nation has attracted a large number of fans. When I visit Alishan Tandoori after Qureshi’s match, there is a steady stream of people picking up their Friday-evening curries and check- ing in on how he did, rather proving how inaccessible the tournament has been. “It’s the taking part that counts,” says one staff member as she passes
was the first of three medals in 45 minutes for Scotland, as para- swimmer Stephen Clegg won silver in the 100m freestyle S13 and Katie Shanahan also claiming silver in the 200m backstroke. For sports like netball, the Commonwealth Games remains one of the most important events in the global calendar with both England and Australia getting off to winning starts against Northern Ireland and Tonga respectively. Perennial favourites Australia will face England at 11am today in the pools stage, in what could be a good indication of England’s chances going forward. Part of the difficulty in assessing future possibilities for the Games is the tension between sports like athletics which have a huge variety of opportunities across the calendar, and those which are more limited in their chances for visibility. When it comes to the Games’ immediate future, the 2030 edition should see a return to more normalcy as it heads to Ahmedabad in India. India are bidding to host the 2036 Olympics there, with the Commonwealth Games seen as the opportunity for a dry run of new venues being built. Host selection for the Olympics will take place in 2029, and India are hoping to return the Commonwealth competition to featuring 15 to 17 sports. What happens from there is a question that is wrapped up in everything from notions of the Commonwealth to broadcasting rights of sporting events. It will need investment – emotional and financial – if it is to continue but watching it take place makes it hard to believe it should just fade away.
on the news that he lost in straight sets to Banks, who is the 2025 Indoor Bowls world champion. The curry house is covered in pic- tures of Qureshi’s bowls exploits. He previously participated at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the first time Pakistan had entered the Games in bowls. As part of an extensive menu, Chico’s own recom- mendation includes an intriguing dish called mangal sooter which promises to be “set by the divine when three become one”. As I am finishing up my meal, the man himself walks in, still in his Pakistan shirt. He jokes to some regulars that he obviously did not want to beat a Scotland player, but will definitely make sure he does not lose when he plays against Sam Tolchard of England on Saturday. He was unfortunately unable to live up to his promise, with Tolchard beat- ing him 2-0.
in a summer wilderness
But it also lands many players with an unwelcome hiatus in July and August
Ben Bloom
“It’s very strange,” said Hassan Azad. “One of my team-mates once sug- gested that I should just go on holiday for a month. In hindsight, I probably should have done.” As school doors shut for the sum- mer and hosepipe bans spread, the prevailing theory dictates that the English cricket season reaches full swing. But, for a particular group of players, July and August provide an unwanted, echoing hiatus to their occupational year. Welcome to life as a modern-day, red-ball special- ist, shorn of professional cricket in the height of summer, while a short-form proliferation pushes the once-esteemed four-day format to the margins. This season, the County Championship is split into three dis- crete blocks: six rounds in April and early May, two that have just fin- ished, and the concluding half-dozen in August and deep into September. For the throwback red-ball contin- gent surplus to requirements for the T20 Blast, One-Day Cup and The Hundred’s neon circus, a peculiar period of 59 potentially cricketless days awaits. “It’s definitely humbling,” said Azad, who retired in 2023 after a professional career consist- ing of 61 first-class matches for Loughborough MCCU, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, but not a sin- gle white-ball appearance. “It can be a struggle if you haven’t made those first few early-season games count. As an opening batter, you tell yourself there’s always next week and you just need a start. It can be mentally quite taxing to know that there aren’t going to be any more opportunities for a while. Once you’re out of sight, you can also feel out of mind.” It is a psychological purgatory that Keith Barker can relate to. Over a 17-year career at Warwickshire and Hampshire, Barker has developed a reputation as one of the most skil- ful new-ball bowlers in the country. But he has not played a T20 match in almost nine years and has made fewer than a dozen 50-over appear- ances over the last eight years. “You are not on the outside,” Barker said carefully, “but watching from a distance a little bit. You still catch up with the lads, but their schedule is a lot different from yours, so it’s about making sure that you’re out of the way for them to do their thing, but still being there to support them and on hand if needed.” While Barker said he “struggled” to come to terms with his cricketing
Different strokes: Hassan Azad, pictured batting for Northamptonshire at the County Ground in 2023, says the summer break can be ‘humbling’ for players who find themselves at a loose end. David Rogers/Getty Images
career’s strange duality early on, at 39 he is now sanguine. His Warwickshire new-ball partner, Ethan Bamber, is 12 years younger and maintains aspira- tions to add to the seven T20 matches he has played in a career that has yielded 276 first-class wickets. “It can be hard,” said Bamber. “You go from being right on the inside to playing second-team cricket instead. You can feel in limbo. I’m really keen to still play T20 cricket, but you don’t want a desperation or anguish about something you’re not achiev- ing to affect a format [the County Championship] where you feel you can add value.” For Kent opening batter Ben Compton, the summer break repre- sents a jarring screech of the brakes. Despite amassing 6,547 first-class runs, Compton has never played a professional T20 match and is uncer- tain if he will be picked in the 50-over format. “It’s tricky,” he said. “What I’ve noticed in the past four or five years, in that block of championship games starting in April, one gets in a rhythm playing every week. “When it stops, the first week or so is quite nice. You can relax, recuperate and take a little bit of time for yourself to fill up the tank. But the difficulty comes after that. “All one can do is recognise you probably won’t be playing and man- age yourself properly. That means making sure you’re constantly in touch with the coaches to organise nets and constantly facing bowlers if possible. “It’s important for me to stay at the ground, training, trying to keep the long-day schedules. I get in at 8.30am and leave at 4pm. Things like that can keep you conditioned for four-day cricket. But it is a challenging period.” There are, explains Compton, no specific demands placed on play- ers who might not be involved for extended periods: “It’s not the under- 16s, where they say you have to be there.” Accountability is individual. Some players eager to make their white-ball case might turn out for county-second XIs, while almost all maintain some semblance of sharp- ness through playing for local clubs. However, said Azad, that can insulate a player only so much. “It’s almost like two seasons,” he added. “When it comes to the September championship games, it almost feels like you have to pre- pare in the same way that you would approach the start of the season. But you really have no clue where you are when you go back into that first game because there’s such a change in standard. You can feel like you’re OK, but you’re not even training with the first team so it can be very misleading.” If players are able to cope with the latent anxiety of non-selection, the mid-summer exile can provide fringe benefits: a chance to address techni- cal faults, experiment with coaching or simply allow themselves time to spend with family and friends after so long on the road. “I’ve just accepted it for what it is,” said Compton. “It’s the job.” For a small enclave of English cricketers, that job is largely confined to the nets for now, waiting for autumn’s return.
watershed moment
in its sixth season,
and it is one that
will define English
cricket’s future.
By Cameron Ponsonby
Y
ou can only sell the golden goose once. The Hundred – that is, the new Hundred – has arrived and begun. Not the old Hundred, the one that started in 2021 with Sam Curran playing for the Oval Invincibles, a team owned by the ECB and affiliated with Surrey. But the new Hundred, with Sam Curran playing for MI London, a team owned partly by Surrey and partly by Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited. You’ll never sing that. Depending on who you ask, the competition either spells the death of the 11 counties who do not have an affiliated Hundred team, or their salvation. On the one hand, the financial gap between the haves and the have-nots is, without doubt, widening. According to this week’s new Leonard Curtis Cricket Finance Report, the annual in-depth analysis of the county game, the four richest counties (Surrey, Lancashire, Hampshire and Warwickshire), account for over half of the total revenue of all 18 first-class counties combined in 2024. The Hundred, with all its shiny shirts and private investment is, if anything, making
the rich(ish) get richer. And leaving the rest behind. But alternatively, for the counties in crisis – and there are a lot of them – the £520m that was magicked out of thin air by the ECB will be life-saving. Each county is set to receive around £20-25m from a fund that is designed to ensure long-term survival, if not prosperity. Northamptonshire, who won the Blast last week and whose financials are sound, if small, attracted 4,245 fans through the gates across the entirety of the 2025 County Championship season. A jump-start to cricket in England, through a new tournament, was more than reasonable. To be voted through, it required a two-thirds majority, and only Surrey formally opposed it. “The thing I’m most excited about now,” said Vikram Banerjee, the competition’s managing director, “is the potential. The opportunity and capability of this tournament is now huge. The Hundred has been very successful for five years and it’s done brilliantly well in terms of bringing a whole new generation into the sport that may not have otherwise come into cricket.” Banerjee can point to strong ticket sales for both women
(31%) and juniors (23%), as of last July. And a new competition, The Hundred Helix, has been introduced this year, featuring a combined table consisting of the results of the men’s and women’s teams. It might spark some interest, in which case they can continue with it. Or it might not, in which case they can stop. The owners represent the scary part. Eight private investors who to varying degrees have a stake in, and power over, the English summer. Banerjee insists that the tournament is still controlled and driven by the ECB, but he also has to say that. And change is already happening. For one, the prospect of the competition moving to a T20 format remains a live issue. Whether a match is played over 100 or 120 balls feels largely neither here nor there, but the current shorter format allows for double-headers and for the women’s competition to be put on an equal-ish footing, whereas moving to T20 would risk losing the family audience who enjoy a trip to the cricket while still getting home for an early bedtime. What’s more, the tournament has already had a quiet impact. In 2019, the English Test summer went from seven Tests a year to six. And with The Hundred operating in a summer-holiday window, it is difficult to see how the missing Test could ever return. Currently, there is either time to play three Tests before The Hundred and three after (as we’re doing this year), or, in the box- office years where Australia or India arrive, a warm-up Test that will be
played in May, followed by all five matches, and done by early August. “My personal opinion?” Banerjee paused. “We had an amazing series against India in 2025, we had an amazing series against Australia in 2023. Stop there. People remember those series. [The seventh Test], are you just spreading your jam thinner, or is there actually demand for that extra Test?” The Hundred itself has always been received well in person, and has continued to be this week. MI London have promoted a shirt amnesty, where anyone who owns a now-defunct Oval Invincibles shirt can swap it for a new one. Manchester Super Giants are giving away thousands of shirts to kickstart a new fanbase for a new team. For the most part, the worst- case scenarios this year have been avoided. Abrar Ahmed’s signing by Sunrisers Leeds meant rumours of a shadow ban of Pakistani players from IPL-owned teams were unfounded. Furthermore, the possibility of gambling sponsors being present on the front of shirts for this season was also swerved. “It is unquestionably a generational change for the game,” Banerjee said, reflecting on the sums of money that have now been injected into the sport. “And that’s what really excites me. The ability to keep hold of our DNA, keep hold of what we love and what fans have loved for five years, but just pour rocket fuel all over it.” You may not like it. But the fact is, it’s here. And truth be told, we all need it to work.
Rich pickings: MI London, co-owned by Surrey, got off to a winning start under captain Sam Curran. Philip Brown/ Getty Images
S
seems to be on its last legs
Arabian Public Investment fund is seeing their $5bn investment go down the drain, writes George Simms
o this is how it ends, Calvin Harris tunes wafting across undulating Staffordshire countryside while Rome burns. Barring intervention by someone with both a fetish for burning the GDP of a minor nation and the ability to do so, these are the last days of LIV Golf, its British leg likely the third from last. For all they self-identify as revolutionaries, LIV UK feels strikingly similar to any other professional golf event. You can buy overpriced gyros and lukewarm lager and filthy, naughty fries. Their fan village resembles any other; children’s games sponsored by corporations expediting humanity’s demise. The obvious addition is the music, obnoxiously blasted across most tees and greens, with players choosing their own walk-on themes, meaning Tyrell Hatton emerges to “I just want relief from my stress” from NF’s My Stress. It’s unclear what any of this contributes, manufactured and forced hype adding little to an atmosphere which still seems remarkably golfy. Nobody appears to be enjoying themselves more because some mumble rap is being played slightly too loud. The only place this isn’t true is the 14th, a par three flanked by two stands called The Birdie Shack, the most darts- ified area, blaring Sweet Caroline and John Denver. Between groups, an indefatigable hypeman oversees a mini-game between members of a stag party, incoherently drunk but sober enough to chip footballs into undersized goals from 12 feet or so. Chase and Status are performing after play on Saturday, because of course they are. Equally, the noise isn’t constant or unavoidable – at one point I set myself on a particularly comfortable hillock beside the fifth for a breather and, the enduring professional that I am – having returned from the World Cup on Monday – woke up 20 minutes later.
snobbish”, still inherently true. But for all its flaws, this seems less true of LIV
But then, given most golf seems comfortable functioning as CBeebies for pensioners, at least LIV attempts to provide something different, even in a deeply uninventive, gauche and corporate way. On Tuesday, Ian Poulter waxed lyrical about the “amazing activations” his Majesticks GC team have organised, which amounted to a named bar. Attendees largely fit in three categories: locals fancying a day out (the wider Stoke area seems starved of anything approaching elite sport); corporate guests (of which there are hundreds, lanyarded to the nines) and Proper
Golf Fans, dressed as always as though ready to replace Jon Rahm at a moment’s notice. Merch from last week’s Open is only slightly outnumbered by caps and polos of Bryson DeChambeau’s Crushers GC (£35 and £90 respectively), denoted by a skull and crossbones, the eternal symbol of the good guys. A few miles outside Uttoxeter, JCB Golf is a hilariously fitting venue, eight whole years of history, a course only accessible to corporate members and JCB clients – employees can only play on Sunday afternoons for a fee. Tickets have not sold out, but enough people are here on the first Friday of the school summer holidays for it not to be embarrassing. Part of this is that it’s relatively cheap – a Friday grounds pass is £30, peaking at £39 on Saturday, or £108 for all four days. If
you want access to the grandstands and a few free drinks, those rise to £80, £100 or £292. Comparatively, tickets for next year’s Open start at £150 on Thursday and Friday, most accessed through a massively oversubscribed ballot – one pair sat by the first tee say they’ve tried for Open tickets for five years without success, so thought they’d try LIV instead. Like everyone else, they seem to be having a perfectly nice time. George Orwell called golf “inherently snobbish”, still overwhelmingly true. But for all its flaws, this seems less true of LIV than any other major event. At a rudimentary estimate, there are more women and allergy-riddled children here than at PGA or DP World Tour events. Of course, these ticket prices are only so low because they have been subsidised by a
regime which has executed almost 100 people this year alone. Yet there is clearly an underexploited market for cheap golf, a reminder that for all it desperately tries to change that, people just like golf, and sunny days in proximity to good sport. And, inexplicably, they like DeChambeau. Helped by playing in the leading group having shot an eight-under 64 on Thursday, at any point around half the people on the course were following him, moving on the moment his putt sinks. One fan giddily told DeChambeau that they shared a birthday, to which he replied “I love it”, both filmed and recounted to his friends as though touched by God. That fan was at least 25. This is LIV’s most valuable remaining asset, more so than its name or concept, one of golf’s two transcendent names. His contract ends next month, but while he
Top draw: with
tickets to LIV
events cheaper
than those for,
say, The Open,
crowds are
strong at the JCB
Country and Golf
Club, Uttoxeter.
Gary Calton for
The Observer
has threatened to go full YouTube, DeChambeau has joined pitches for LIV 2.0, aware the brand is almost worthless without him, and that he could be the only person to emerge from the Saudi rugpull with more money and influence. His presence does more to alter the atmosphere than any song, feverish whispers or screamed encouragement. After the move to 72 holes made its name irrelevant, the music, individual players and the team format are now LIV’s only points of difference. In January, they hired a bank to sell off stakes in individual teams, reportedly seeking valuations of up to $300m. Team merch is relatively well represented, some genuinely invested in the fortunes of Legion XIII and the Rangegoats, but clearly not enough to sustain them. The efforts to make these teams happen is agonising,
Mobbed: Bryson
DeChambeau
remains a big hit
with LIV fans.
Gary Calton for
The Observer
emphasised constantly, with “here at LIV, we’re also about the teams” screeched across the first tee. It’s a nice idea that will simply take too long to really catch on, even after a pivot towards teams representing individual nations – Iron Heads GC was renamed Korean Golf Club in January, while much is made of Poulter and Lee Westwood’s Majesticks being the home team. Somewhere in here is the fact that LIV were never the disruptors, it was always the Saudis, as with all sport they are involved with, now leaving a trail of twitching corpses. On Tuesday, the Asian Tour announced a new deal with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. Having paid $300m for the privilege in 2022, LIV used the Asian Tour as an effective second tier, enabling promotion and relegation. This means any new-look LIV would be
And relax:
supporters
follow all the
action from
the comfort of
deckchairs in
the Staffordshire
sunshine.
Gary Calton for
The Observer
a standalone competition, almost certainly ineligible for the Official Golf World Ranking (OWGR) points it fought for years over, all of which significantly weakens any pitch to investors. Asian Tour CEO Cho Minn Thant told Golf Digest earlier this week: “Six years ago, it was right for us to do a partnership with LIV Golf, but given the circumstances now, we’ve had to look at other options.” LIV are also being sued by a Canadian technology company, Mobii Systems Group, over unpaid invoices and attempting to duck out of a contract which covered the 2025 and 2026 seasons. Martin Kaymer, one of the first LIV adopters, also did little to boost confidence, saying there was a 5% chance of the showpiece Team Championship in Michigan happening. “Unfortunately, even [LIV CEO] Scott [O’Neill] can’t tell us
because he doesn’t know. It depends
so much on the investors.” Michigan
would be the second LIV leg
cancelled this year, after Louisiana
in June, a course which had just
undergone a wildly expensive and
publicly funded renovation. As
with every LIV event, the purse in
Rocester this week was $30m, with
$4m to the winner, $800,000 more
than The Open winner received. The
post-Saudi proposal is for 10 events
annually, down from 14, with purses
of $10m and the bottom 12 players
earning nothing.
Yet the theoretical events included
a number of national opens on
the Asian Tour, which are now
not accessible. To quote Mandy
Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya in The
Princess Bride: “There’s not a lot of
money in revenge.”
The primary orchestrators of
the LIV dream have all vanished:
Greg Norman,Yasir Al-Rumayyan
and the PIF gone, Phil Mickelson
disgraced. As always, this won’t hurt
them, but it will affect the younger
players offered sums they could not
turn down, the LIV employees with
uncertain futures on a work jolly
from London, drinking cocktail cans
on the train.
This season’s penultimate event
is LIV New York, held at Trump
Bedminster in two weeks, where
players expect to discover what
comes next. On Friday, Bunkered
reported that the search had been
narrowed down to two prospective
investors, although it is unclear how
the Asian Tour’s withdrawal impacts
those, and who fancies pouring
more money into a hole $5bn has
already disappeared into. Players
appear split between leaving LIV
entirely and balancing participation
with another tour. Westwood and
Poulter have paid fines approaching
£1m each to facilitate their re-entry
to the DP World Tour after four
years of belligerently claiming
that they would never surrender.
The barbarians are at the gate. The
centre cannot hold. But after four
years of the wider golfing world
begging for its demise, what if LIV
Golf is actually worth saving?
LIV’s last
stand: the UK
tournament
finishes today.
Gary Calton for
The Observer
more of a virtual ecosystem
that does not exist, writes Xavier Greenwood. The lasting effect is vertigo
Star quality: the esports World Cup in Paris, below, portrays itself as an elite global event. Esport
hat I see defies comprehension. Beneath my feet is a football pitch as green as Oz. Above me are holograms of players swiping the eyeline like giants or gods. At every turn are modular cubes, tiered and iridescent, creating an LED wall built in a Tetris-fuelled haze. I am meant to be looking at the future but instead I am flung back into the past. Here at the Prince Mohammed bin Salman Stadium, under construction for the 2034 World Cup, I am transported to the city of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis: hypermodern, geometric, canyoned by skyscrapers, bereft of birds. That city – this city? – only exists thanks to a drudge of invisible workers. When I remove the virtual reality goggles, it takes a couple of seconds to readjust to my surroundings. I am not in Qiddiya City, Saudi Arabia, but in an air- conditioned exhibition centre in Paris. Next to me is a cheerful woman who encourages me to complete the other “challenges” to receive my “gift”. These include watching a video about the stadium and getting a
picture in which I am superimposed on to a backdrop of the stadium. Between each task I scan my phone, something I am asked to do nearly every time I leave or enter a building. The gift is a 50 Saudi riyal (around £10) voucher for Steam, a gaming platform reportedly used by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The person who gives me the voucher asks if I will be visiting Qiddiya City. She tells me that she has couples discounts. I take the voucher and tell her I’ll check my schedule. This is the third edition of the Esports World Cup, run by the crown prince’s Esports Foundation, and the first outside Saudi Arabia. It is in Paris this year because of the war in Iran, but the arrangement has benefits. Lots of what fills the 169,400 sq metres of Paris Expo Porte de Versailles seems designed to get people to go to Saudi Arabia or to imagine its unimpeachable future. The inclusion of a hospitality section called The Embassy may have the opposite effect. Quibble about the difference between an embassy and consulate, but it’s hard not to think of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. I am in Paris to experience in person a phenomenon that has mystified me from a distance: the world of
professional gaming, with all of its bells, whistles and lucrative prizes. I am also here to understand why Saudi Arabia, as it withdraws funding for LIV Golf and reconsiders other investments, is moving full steam ahead when it comes to esports. What does this phenomenon offer the kingdom? It is steam that comes off me when I exit the Métro at Porte de Versailles to broil in the Parisian heat. As I walk towards the tournament site, I pass billboards that herald the mononymic stars of esports, with elusive names such as Knight, Caps, Faker and ZywOo. Magnus Carlsen, official chess ambassador of the Esports World Cup, and Cristiano Ronaldo, global ambassador for the tournament, also feature on posters. They are not the only big hitters associated with professional gaming. Kaká, Lando Norris and Tony Hawk made cameos in last year’s competition. Diogo Jota, the late Liverpool footballer, has an esports trophy named in his honour. Saudi Arabia can never be accused of minimalism. The $75m of total prize money on offer for winners exceeds the pot for the French Open tennis ($70m), which takes place a few kilometres away. This serves to reiterate how empty the Esports World Cup venue is compared with Roland Garros. Staff at the gates wear
T-shirts emblazoned with “crowd control”. I am one of 20 people within sight. Inside the main hall, one of several giant pavilions hosting the tournament, there are gaming arenas, a basketball court, a Paul bakery, an interactive manga installation, a glitzy trophy wall, dedicated team mix zones, and numerous advertising stands and merch stores. It is how Dave & Buster’s or Hollywood Bowl might expand if they stumbled upon untapped oil reserves. My press pack includes two pages on esports growth in Saudi Arabia and some unsourced stats to convince everyone of the wisdom of the venture. There is nothing about the energy cost of powering seven weeks of industrial-scale air conditioning, hundreds of top of the range gaming systems, and countless jumbotrons. 1984? Blade Runner? Planet earth in the late Cenozoic era? Pick your dystopian poison. Some of my doubts dissipate over the day. People do come to watch, though in fairly paltry numbers compared with the acres of space dedicated to them. Apex Legends Global Series, one of 24 Esports in this year’s tournament, which features more than 2,000 players, draws a capacity audience which means I am relocated to a spillover zone for “superfans”. There I am given an inflatable cheering stick and a bird’s eye view of the action, which, if you ignore the screens, consists of a group of young people getting repetitive strain injury. EA Sports FC, a football game, is more in my wheelhouse. But it also requires dispensing with the real world for anything close to an entertaining time. Although the fans are nominally “ringside”, sitting around players at rows of computers, the only way to see what is going on is through the screens right in front of us. Why, then, should I pay to watch GoatMoh versus Yas SFC in person at all? I need to park my cynicism for a moment. I have been to football matches in the rafters of Wembley where the visual spectacle is inferior to watching at home. I know that I go to Wembley for everything else: the chance to feel, to sing and to be part of a shared experience. In that sense, I understand the appeal of esports. People at the tournament get behind their favourite teams. They gasp and groan and queue for autographs. I am left in no doubt about the tension. With millions of dollars on
many of the same
pressures as
athletes, and need
physical and
mental skills’
Big picture: giant screens attract fans, left, while others, above, go solo. Esport
Screen time: gaming gets serious, above. Faker, crouching below, has star quality. Esport
the line, competitors face many of the same pressures as athletes, and need to possess an array of physical and mental skills to get anywhere near the podium. The problem with the Esports World Cup is the vaulting ambition of the thing. Like The Line, Saudi Arabia’s 170km linear acropolis, which has been put on pause until 2030, or The Cube, an aborted structure designed to hold 20 Empire State Buildings, the Esports World Cup has been created for a society that does not exist. For a society that may never exist. The bright lights and cacophonous noise of the tournament generate some headiness, but the lasting effect is vertigo. The problem, fundamentally, is Saudi Arabia. Its Public Investment Fund (PIF) has poured tens of billions of dollars into the video game industry. Savvy Games Group, a company funded by PIF, owns roughly 40% of the global market. Last September, a consortium spearheaded by the PIF, agreed to buy Electronics Arts for $55bn. Saudi Arabia is now the dominant force in gaming – and especially esports. It makes sense that Saudi Arabia continues to bank on esports if you see what it has done in the past few months as a recalibration and not a retreat. Mohammed bin Salman, an avid gamer, wants to be seen by his people as a moderniser. Around two-thirds of Saudis are under 35. More than two-thirds of the population play video games. Golf? Snooker? They don’t sound like the future. But Counter-Strike in the age of AI, high-tech chips and 3.4 billion gamers? Now we’re talking. It is notable that Lenovo, a key sponsor of the Esports World Cup, is producing Saudi-made laptops. What is up for grabs in the gaming world is more than a piece of the pie, as it might be in football or tennis. It is an entire ecosystem. So that is what gaming has become. Not something you play in the lounge with your mates, but a bloodless strategic push for a petrostate. Another form of entertainment in which every choice begins to feel like a moral choice; even if no one is doing any moralising in Porte de Versailles. Metropolis, Lang’s film, is preceded by an epigraph: “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.” Looking out from the superfan zone at the teeming crowd below, I see plenty of heads and plenty of hands. But the heart is all but gone.
Talisman: Ryan
O’Donoghue
will look to end
Mayo’s 75-year
wait for the
All-Ireland
title today.
Seb Daly/Sportsfile,
Getty Images
75-year ‘curse’ from a priest?
have a hold on sports fans, who have started paying witches to win games
Jessy Parker Humphreys
The last time Mayo won the All- Ireland final, it was 1951. On a Saturday in September, they beat Meath by five points to secure their second title in a row. Thoughts of fans and players must have drifted to the possibility of this being the start of a dynasty. It might only have been their third title ever, but perhaps they could dream of matching the historic runs of Wexford or Kerry, both of whom had won four titles back to back. At that moment in time, the success would have been too immediate, too raw, too intoxicating, to even comprehend failing to match this achievement for almost 75 years. Mayo have gone on to contest 11 more All-Ireland finals since that weekend, and they have never won. And it’s all, supposedly, because of a curse.
The legend goes that as the team headed home on Monday to be greeted by huge crowds, they passed a funeral procession in the vil- lage of Foxford. Caught up in their own celebrations, they did not pay the appropriate respects. The vil- lage priest was so disgruntled by their behaviour, he cursed the team so they would not win another All- Ireland final until every player from that Mayo side had passed away. And so it has come to pass. It does not matter that historical research has shown the story to be bogus, not least the fact that no one talked about the curse until the 1990s. It is now the de facto explanation as to Mayo’s failure. The Mayo All-Ireland final curse is one in a litany of hexes placed on sports teams. From the Curse of the Bambino to explain the 86 years the Boston Red Sox went without a World Series to the Curse of Aaron Ramsey to explain celebrities dying in the days after the Wales midfielder scored, there is little sports fans will not do to try and explain global and sporting events. Some involve actual mystical pow- ers. Others are, let’s say, a bit more vibe-based. The rapper Drake’s ina- bility to place a successful bet, and consequent presumed curse for any sports team he bets on, feels more
like a man with too much money than proof of life from the other side. The allure of the sports curse is simple. When our sports teams are not very good we want to be able to explain why. Sometimes it is not enough to accept that our clubs are simply badly run or bad luck can continue over a really long time. It certainly feels impossible to do the mental gymnastics that might sug- gest that by believing in curses, fans pass on to teams the expectation that they will not win, creating a psycho- logical block for them.
We demand explanations, and as has been the case with humans since time immemorial, if no rational explanation is forthcoming, we tend to turn to the mystical. What was enacted before in the burning of local witches if the harvest failed now comes to pass with Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobelaar urinat- ing on the goalposts at Anfield to lift a curse on his former side winning the Premier League. The contradiction of believing in a curse is that it makes sport as endeav- our feel more futile than it already is.
Of course, we do like sports for other reasons – the community, the excite- ment, the routine – but we mainly like them for winning. It is no surprise then that the most popular modern anti- dote to a sports curse is the Etsy witch. For anyone unfamiliar, use of an Etsy witch involves going on to the website Etsy – better known as being an online marketplace for crafts – and paying a nominal fee of between £10-£20 for a “spell” of your choice. You can pick from an array of AI-generated cover photos for spells that will improve your career, your bank balance, or your love life. You can get a spell for virtually anything, including to affect the outcome of a sporting event. With England trailing 1-0 to DR Congo and Harry Kane seemingly still labouring under the curse placed on him during the second group game by the Ghanaian witch doctor, a friend posted online that she had got an Etsy witch to release him from the spell. Lo and behold, Kane scored twice in 11 minutes to send England into the Round of 16. It is hard to find any more definitive proof of their valid- ity than that. Back when they reached the final in 2012, Mayo turned to the Pope. This had little effect, as they lost to Donegal. It was not until April 2023 that all members of the team had passed away, with non-playing sub- stitute Mick Loftus being the last surviving one. Today, Mayo will contest their 12th All-Ireland final since that fateful weekend in 1951, although of course this one will come with a difference – the curse should have been lifted. Yet if they win, we can’t yet be sure it wasn’t because someone paid for an Etsy witch.
e
s
o
u
o
u
a
t
T
p
p
I
n
Curse of the Bambino
l
l
y
One of the most enduring sports curses
came about when Babe Ruth was sold from
the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees.
The Red Sox had won the World
Series in 1915, 1916 and 1918, all
with Ruth – aka The Bambino
– as their star. But when
owner Harry Frazee sold
him to the Yankees in
December 1919, it would
be more than 84 years
before they won it again,
supposedly due to Frazee’s
decision to let him go.
Drake curse
Beware if Drake dons your team’s kit, turns up at a match or places a bet on you. The Canadian rapper has supposedly caused everyone from the Toronto Raptors to Juventus to Serena Williams to lose. One team who appear to be impervious to the curse are the Kansas City Chiefs, who won the Super Bowl in 2023 and 2024, despite Drake betting on them. He reportedly once secretly wore Philadelphia 76ers shorts so that his side the Toronto Raptors would beat them, which they did.
Curse of Muldoon
At the end of the Chicago Black Hawks’ first season in the National Hockey League in 1927, their coach Pete Muldoon was fired by the owner after the two disagreed on whether they were good enough to finish first. Muldoon cursed the club not to finish first in the league, and they duly failed to until 1967. The only problem? The whole saga was made up by sportswriter Jim Coleman in order to reach his word count and prove how gullible sports fans are. Food for thought for all sports reporters.
Curse of the fake gold medals
South Korea won the first two Asian Cups in 1956 and 1960, but the players discovered that the gold medals they had been given in 1960 were fake. The real ones had allegedly been stolen by a corrupt official. Despite demanding that they be given real gold ones by the Korea Football Association, it was more than 50 years before some of the surviving players from 1960 received them. Many Korea fans believe that this is why they have not won an Asian Cup since, despite contesting four more finals.
flies in the face of decency
COMMENT
Jessy Parker
Humphreys
The governing body for women’s tennis follow the Olympics in testing for the SRY gene
his week, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) announced that they would become the first professional women’s sports league to introduce compulsory genetic- based sex testing for all who wish to play in their competitions. In doing so, they have followed the lead of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), who announced earlier this year that the same test would be compulsory for anyone wanting to compete in a women’s category at the 2028 Olympics. In a statement, the WTA said the policy intends to “provide a clear eligibility standard” in line with promoting “equal athletic opportunities” in women’s tennis and to “maintain fair competition”. Their rationale behind the update is that it is a response to “evolving standards across women’s sport”. There are currently no transgender women competing in WTA tournaments, and nor have there been in recent years. The WTA’s policy will work like this: every woman who wishes to compete will take a SRY gene test, which is administered by a cheek swab, blood sample or saliva sample. If the test detects the SRY gene, they will be declared ineligible from competition, because that indicates the presence of a Y chromosome. This is seen as proof of being male. Simple, apart from the fact that not everyone develops along the simple genetic lines that say women have XX chromosomes and men have XY. There are a number of differing possibilities that have been identified over the years, including people with XO chromosomes, XXXY chromosomes, and androgen insensitivity, which can limit or stop the body’s ability to respond to androgens. This means that someone can test as having XY chromosomes, but will not have responded to the consequent testosterone production in the way that would normally be biologically expected. While debate rages over what the exact frequency of this is, American sexologist Anne
Fausto-Sterling’s extensive research estimates that approximately one in 60 births will differ from standard biological ideals of male and female. The WTA and the IOC have got round this thorny issue by declaring that anyone who has a Y chromosome is biologically male. It does not matter whether someone was assigned female at birth and has spent their whole life living as a woman. According to these sporting institutions, people like this have just been unfortunately misguided for their whole existence. The policies are careful to distinguish between “biological sex”, “legal sex” and “gender identity” as if these are obviously separate concepts, which stretches the bounds of how we understand sex and gender. To understand why this is not how we process sex in our day-to-day lives, reflect on how earth-shattering it would feel if you received a phone call telling you that you are the opposite sex to the one you currently assume yourself to be. Yet this kind of fracturing of self-identity is the only way that the belief that there are two easily definable and separate sexes can be maintained, despite decades of scientific research that suggest it is far more complex than that. The justification from sports governing bodies is usually that this testing is the only way to ensure fairness in women’s categories, that it is unobtrusive, and that it is accurate. Yet all three of these claims are debatable enough that roughly a quarter of a century ago, the whole process was abandoned by… the IOC. Demands for sex testing ratcheted up in intensity at the 1936 Olympics, which was hosted in Nazi Germany. One newspaper wrote at the time: “Some women athletes who had arrived in Berlin looked more like men.” Fears of “gender fraud” intensified during the Cold War, with “nude parades” beginning in the 1960s, when doctors would visually assess the genitals of female athletes. This process was eventually recognised as being dehumanising, but not the concept of scientifically interrogating someone’s sex, so there was a move first to a Barr body test – which looks for the presence of the inactive X chromosome in humans with XX chromosomes – and then to one for the SRY gene. That was until June 1999, when the IOC voted to discontinue gender testing before the Sydney Olympics. The intervening time has seen a global movement develop which is premised on a deep anxiety around sex and gender. Those who do not fit the norms of femininity have seen their gender identity interrogated, as was the case with Lin Yu-ting at the 2024 Olympics. The Taiwanese boxer had, according to the International Boxing Association’s rules, “failed” a sex test during the
2023 World Championships, along with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. Resulting coverage focused on her supposedly masculine appearance. She was later cleared by World Boxing – the new boxing governing body – in March this year after undergoing another sex test. Proponents of this testing suggest that it protects players from this kind of scrutiny, but the fact that the WTA policy contains a proviso saying that a player can be retested if the negative test is thought to be an error shows that the door will remain ajar for anyone on the internet to question the gender identity of an athlete. In the Player Acknowledgement and Agreement form, players are also expected to “acknowledge and agree” that if they fail the test, they may become “the subject of public speculation”. Failing the initial SRY test also requires athletes to undergo far more intrusive exams if they are to prove that they should still be entitled to compete. The two-time Olympic 800-metre gold-medal winner Caster Semenya describes in her autobiography being forced to strip naked, put her legs in stirrups and have a sonogram inserted inside her. These invasive procedures ended the myth that sex testing is just a simple cheek swab. As for the women who may fail these tests, the ramifications can be deeply significant. In 2001, Pratima Gaonkar, a rising Indian athlete who was made to take a sex verification test, was found dead in her home state of Goa. Her mother publicly alleged afterwards that her coach was blackmailing her to reveal the results. Gaonkar took her own life before knowing the result, as she did not want to deal with what would follow if she was found to not be “biologically female”. It is not only this kind of shaming that can come about as a result of tests like these. For many women around the world, sport is a pathway to a different future. It can lead to educational opportunities, financial provision for whole families and a freedom to express themselves. All of those potentials, which athletes have spent their lives training in order to achieve, are taken away in one fell swoop. It can be a devastating psychological and material blow. There is also a serious question of whether it is possible to truly consent to such a test if you are required to take it in order to continue participating in your livelihood. For some, these tests will be seen as worth it, regardless of the associated harms. They will say, in the face of decades of sport where this kind of policy was not enacted, that this is the only way to preserve fairness. Yet when the full picture is considered, the question should surely be: is a fairness that looks like this worth preserving at all?
dominate Le Tour once more
T
is poised to win the prestigious race for a fifth time, writes Chris Marshall-Bell
adej Pogačar will ride into Paris today ready to be crowned the Tour de France winner for the third successive year and a record- equalling fifth time. The world champion sealed his latest victory by smashing Marco Pantani’s 1995 record time by one minute and 13 seconds to win atop the mythical Alpe d’Huez on Friday. The 27-year-old ascended the 13.8km col at an average speed of 23.9km/h, adding to his folklore and legend, and in the process ensuring that one of the famous 21 hairpins will be named after him. “It’s a 30-something-years-old record finally broken, so that’s something good for us,” Pogačar said, admitting, once again, that records don’t motivate him. But the management team of UAE Team
Emirates-XRG were in tears. “I don’t know why they get so emotional,” Pogačar deadpanned. “I guess it meant a lot. Maybe I’ll appreciate it once it settles down.” Yesterday, Pogačar helped his UAE team-mate Isaac del Toro secure third as Richard Carapaz scored his second stage victory of the race; the Ecuadorian looked destined to finish runner-up, only for Sepp Kuss to crash in the closing kilometres, narrowly avoiding serious injury. The only occasions he didn’t come good on pre-stage favourite billing was when he gifted Del Toro stage two, and when Remco Evenepoel, second overall, beat him into second on the penultimate Sunday’s climb to Plateau de Solaison and the next stage’s 26km time trial. Pogačar has dominated the race almost from start to finish: his biggest rival Jonas Vingegaard took yellow on the opening stage in Barcelona, but by the third day, Pogačar had won his first of five stages and taken control of the race. He then obliterated the field over the Tourmalet on stage six, and had further added to his advantage after the next two mountain stages. Pogačar’s expected victory margin of 6:26 – he could still add to it in Paris today – is his largest ever He has also moved on to 26 stage
wins in the Tour. At the rate he’s been winning, he’ll surpass Mark Cavendish’s record haul of 35 later this decade. Illness appeared as a possible barrier to Pogačar’s coronation in the third week. His British team-
rough days,
the team spirit
cannot be better’
Tadej Pogačar
mate Adam Yates, according to Pogačar, “suffered like a dog” in stage 17 with a stomach infection that spread through the team. Brandon McNulty was forced to abandon on stage 18, and Tim Wellens only just made the time cut. Riders isolated from one another and ate and slept in their separate rooms to protect both Pogačar and Del Toro. Come Alpe d’Huez, Yates was much improved, and the worst appeared to have passed. “Even with the rough days of the last few days, the team spirit cannot be better,” Pogačar said.
It’s the climb:
Tadej Pogačar,
also below, sits
just off Isaac
del Toro as they
ascend the Col
du Galibier.
Dario Belingheri/Getty
As is customary in the Tour given the sport’s dark past, Pogačar has also had to deal with fervent discussion about his credibility and whether his results will stand the test of time. He and a few other riders – including Vingegaard, who crashed out of the race on stage 15 with a broken collarbone – were woken up in the middle of the night during the race by doping-control officers and made to provide an anti-doping sample. Despite being allowed since 2016, it is the first time that nighttime tests have ever been used at the Tour. They are permitted for the purposes of detecting prohibited substances that have a short detection window or for the use of micro-dosing – the process of taking banned drugs in smaller quantities so that they wouldn’t show up in a doping test. The UCI, cycling’s governing body, says that a judge may grant the use of nighttime tests if there is “serious and specific suspicion that the rider may be engaged in doping”. The International Testing Agency, the body that oversees cycling’s anti-doping programme, also defended their rollout. “Effective testing must, in limited and justified circumstances, be capable of occurring outside standard daytime hours,” it said. An unannounced test in the early hours of the morning is not an indication of guilt, and the results of the tests would only be made public in the event of a positive doping test. “I accept it if this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean,” Pogačar said. That saga dominated the narrative for much of the final week’s racing, but by the final weekend it was all about the two ascents of Alpe d’Huez, which were watched by hundreds of thousands of roadside spectators. There will be more huge crowds on Paris’s Montmartre circuit today, when the race finishes with three demanding laps that pass the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, situated at the highest natural point in the French capital. The kickers favour Pogačar as much as the puncheurs – the specialists in short, steep climbs – the man resplendent in yellow is therefore heavily tipped to win his sixth stage of the race. Whether he wins the final day’s racing or not, the Slovenian will go down as one of only five riders to have won the Tour five times. Should he be victorious in next year’s race – and it’s already hard to imagine that the greatest bike rider of all time won’t start as favourite – then he’ll also confirm his reputation as the greatest to grace Le Tour.
• observer.co.uk 26.07.26 15 Next week
who Aroko-dares wins, possibly
training-ground protest could start a wave of action from more brave souls
Giles
Smith
At this point, with regard to last week’s reported act of civil disobedi- ence at Wolverhampton Wanderers’ training ground, we lack the granular detail that we find ourselves longing for. The story’s tantalising outline, though, is this: that Tolu Arokodare, the Nigeria international striker, who appears to have no great appetite for the season of Championship-level football that Wolves face following their relegation from the Premier League last year, staged some kind of sit-down protest during a train- ing session; and that his protest was somehow robust enough, if not to immediately trigger his desired move to Fiorentina in Italy, then at least to get the training session terminated. Now, let’s state straight away that the player at the centre of this possibly unprecedented act of solo mutiny in the pre-season context subsequently
mile record at Glasgow Games
for gold on Saturday while Premiership returns with Rangers travelling to Dundee, writes Patrick Kidd
issued a statement declaring himself “surprised and disappointed” by these media reports, describing “many” of them as “inaccurate”. Point taken. But that’s not exactly a full-bore rebut- tal, and questions are bound to linger. Like, if there was a sit-down, at what point in the session did it occur? At the start, during stretching, where it might have been difficult to notice? Or later, for greater impact, during rondos? And where on the pitch did it happen? In the centre cir- cle? On a penalty spot? In one of the channels? And were chains, glue or other accoutrements involved, as in similar acts of deliberate obstruc- tion by, for example, members of Extinction Rebellion? We would also seek to admit some plausibility issues here, not least around Arokodare’s surpris- ing immovability in the presence of perhaps as many as 30 other players and staff who might have been keen to see the session continue. They couldn’t have treated him like another cone and played around him? Or simply gone to another pitch? Also, given that public impact is sort of the point here, why would Arokodare have chosen the obscu- rity of a Monday training session in July to draw attention to his cause, rather than use the surely tempt- ingly wider forum of the friendly
Fresh from smashing the world one-mile record last weekend, Scotland’s Josh Kerr takes on the distance again at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The mile was last contested at these Games in 1966, when it was won by Kenya’s Kip Keino in 3:55.34, almost 13 seconds slower than Kerr’s record. Imperial measurements faded after those Games, but they will raise a pint, or at least 568ml, in Scottish bars if the Edinburgh runner can lower the record further (Saturday, 8.50pm, all Games coverage on TNT Sports).
Oh sit down: Wolves striker Arokodare is said to have adopted a technique usually executed by Extinction Rebellion protesters. Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)
It has been a bad week for English athletic hyphens, with Dina Asher-Smith, Katarina Johnson- Thompson and Matt Hudson-Smith all pulling out with injuries, but the unhyphenated Georgia Hunter Bell has a good shot at gold in the 800m (Friday, 8.25pm). Rhys McClenaghan, the Olympic and world champion on the pommel horse, may be Northern Ireland’s best hope (Monday, 3pm), while Wales will look to Emma Finucane in the velodrome. She competes in the team and individual sprints (Thursday, 6.10pm; Friday, 6.40pm)
match scheduled for the very next day, against Maidenhead United, in which Arokodare, after his protest, did not feature? We speak routinely of players “putting themselves in the shop window”, but players chaining themselves to the bins out the back of the shop is clearly on another level altogether in terms of “wanting away”. So many gaps to fill, then, in the jigsaw of this disputed session at Compton Park. Perhaps we shall know more when Southampton eventually
and in the Keirin next Sunday (4pm). I once read that at Tonbridge School in the 19th century, the rule was that for the last five minutes of football matches, the ball would be thrown away and boys could have a mass brawl to get the aggression out of their system. That might catch on in Argentina given their approach to the World Cup final. Still, the 2025-26 football season is finally over… and here we go with the 2026-27 one. Dundee United host Rangers in the opening match of the Scottish Premiership (Friday, Sky Sports Football, 8pm), while Hearts have to overturn a 4-0 deficit at home to Sturm Graz if they want their Champions League campaign to get as far as August (Tuesday, Premier Sports 1, 7.45pm). In England, the Carabao Cup begins on Saturday
release the footage. Then again, given that the footage will probably have been shot on an iPhone 9 by someone on work experience hiding behind a tree, perhaps we won’t. Either way, “engineering a move” hasn’t been this gripping since 2013 when Peter Odemwingie of West Brom decided to interpret the idea of “going to QPR” literally and actually went to QPR – driving 120 miles from Birmingham when his transfer deal started dragging to try to enter the club through the front door. It didn’t work, but anyone who has ever got tired of listening to their GP’s hold music and decided to force the issue by heading round to the surgery in person will recognise and applaud the pragmatism there. Moreover, that was officially the last time Transfer Deadline Day was anywhere near as exciting as Sky Sports News always pretends it is. Stand by, though, because maybe those events at Wolves intimate a whole new era ahead for non-violent direct action by unhappy footballers – not just for sit-down protests in training, but for players superglu- ing themselves to the groundsman’s lawnmower or lying across the entrance to the players’ car park for as long as it takes for Everton to come in for them at a price accept- able to both parties. In which context, history could come to revere Tolu Arokodare as football’s first suffragette – the bold campaigner who, in 2026, bravely asserted the inalienable right of players not to play for Wolves unless they really have to, and whose name accordingly became synonymous with new-found player freedoms, like Jean-Marc Bosman’s before him. How long before we’re casually saying things like: “He’s gone to Brentford on an Arokodare”?
for arts, science, books and ideas
Features 10-17 Books 24-29
• In real life Finn Blythe visits the world’s largest bell foundry; Gary Cansell searches for Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca; Ammar Kalia tastes mangoes; and Marine Saint celebrates Jane Austen • The grid Photographer Richard Renaldi’s series on US fast food • Interview Musician Questlove on bringing the Roots Picnic to London
Puzzles Television 30-40
• Kitty Empire on Charli XCX’s
brash Brat follow-up
• Sarah Crompton is at the
Venice Dance Biennale
• Fiona Maddocks enjoys a superb,
stripped back Ariadne auf Naxos
• Matt Barton reviews the RSC’s
uninspired The Cherry Orchard
On the cover: Tony Kaye, in front of one of his own paintings. Photographed for The Observer by Joe Leavenworth
• Finn Blythe (p4) is a writer and film-maker based in London. His last Observer piece (and film) was about the pigment shop L Cornelissen & Son.
• Jade Cuttle (p28) writes a monthly poetry column in our books pages. She is the inaugural writer in residence at the new Museum of Writing.
• Cover story Director Tony Kaye tells Andrew Anthony about his fall from grace after making his debut feature, American History X • Report Katherine Cowles meets a woman whose artist husband was killed in Gaza, and the man who rescued his work • Nature It will be a bumper summer for painted lady butterflies. Simon Barnes explains why • John Naughton on the use of AI in universities
• Colin Grant (p24) is director of WritersMosaic, the Royal Literary Fund’s magazine. His latest book is What We Leave We Carry.
• The poet Claudia Rankine speaks to Colin Grant about race, resistance and American catastrophe • Richard Ovenden on the past and future of big data • Chris Power on a strange 1,200- page novel by an English visionary • Jade Cuttle on poetry collections about queerness, grief and trees
• Everyman crossword, sudokus, Azed, chess, guess the picture, cinema connect, Lexipedia quiz, and Goldilocks crossword • The week’s television and radio highlights • Barbara Ellen on Boris Johnson’s venture into Ukraine’s “kill zone”
• Katherine Cowles (p12) is an editor and writer on The Observer New Review. Recent stories include a behind the scenes look at War Horse.
• Andrew Anthony (p8) has been a feature writer at The Observer for more than three decades. His books include The Fallout and On Penalties.
picture
Justine Kurland’s photograph of fictive runaways imagines a world where teenage girls unite to become the feminists of the future
It’s early spring in Tennessee and 19 young women are making their way across a forest clearing. The trees are bare, but on the ground ragwort has sprung up, carpeting the scene in green and yellow. The women in the middle, as though dancing to music that only they can hear, throw out their arms to steady themselves. The prevailing mood, as they move towards some unspecified destination, is calm, collected, purposeful.
This photo, which features in Big Tent, the inaugural exhibition at FotoFocus gallery in Cincinnati, is taken from Justine Kurland’s series Girl Pictures. Between 1997 and 2002, Kurland zigzagged across America photographing adolescent girls in outdoor settings. It began as a fictive exploration of teenage runaways and evolved, Kurland says, into “a kind of feminist world-building [imagining] what would happen if all these
girls came together in solidarity”. She wanted to show “the power of togetherness and how [the girls] could become more powerful through each other”. On months-long road trips, Kurland trawled the streets of America’s towns looking for subjects. “I’d see a bunch of girls hanging out in front of a high school and I would talk to them about the project. If they wanted to do it, I’d tell them to talk to their mothers
to make sure it was OK, but I don’t know if they did or not.” She scouted locations in advance and created loose narratives for each shoot: “This is where they’re going to build a fort, or make dinner from roadkill, or braid each other’s hair.” This picture was a little different: the New York Times had commissioned Kurland to photograph the women’s studies class at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Sticking with her vision
Golden Field, taken by Justine Kurland in 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Higher
of using photography “to imagine the world as you want it to be”, she tried various set-ups with the students. “The one that I liked,” she says, “was of them coming forward and out of the picture – it was this idea that they might spill out of the picture and into the world to do the work that they had to do as feminists.” Killian Fox
The birth of a bell I
n the foundry on Freehold Street in Loughborough, the furnace doors open, and out comes a crucible of molten bell metal – bronze, roughly four parts copper to one part tin – glowing the colour of a low sun. Two men in leather aprons and visors guide it across the casting pit with the unhurried choreography of people who know that haste, here, is the real danger. The metal pours into the mouth of a buried mould, hissing and spitting sparks. Somewhere inside that dark shape in the ground, a bell is being born. It will not speak for days yet. But when it does, it may go on speaking for 1,000 years. This is John Taylor & Co, the world’s largest bell foundry and, since the closure of London’s Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 2017, the last major one in Britain. Bells have been cast on this site since 1859, in a purpose-built complex of blackened brick, sawtooth roofs and rattling Victorian machinery that is now Grade II-listed. Taylor bells hang in York Minster, Manchester’s town hall, St Paul’s Cathedral and, as trustee David Potter tells me with quiet satisfaction, “in over a hundred different countries around the world”. Potter, a Londoner by birth and a Yorkshireman by adoption, has spent most of his life in thrall to this place. A boy ringer in Dagenham, he moved to York as a student in 1969, assuming southern superiority in all things – including bells. Then he heard the city’s peals. “I kept asking: ‘Who casts these?’ And the answer kept coming back: ‘Taylors of Loughborough.’” The making of a bell has barely changed since the middle ages. It begins not with metal but with mud; loam, a mixture of sand, clay, manure and horsehair, worked by hand around brick cores and swept to the bell’s precise profile with a wooden template called a strickle. The moulds are dried, inscribed in reverse with dedications and dates, clamped together and buried in the pit. Then comes the pour, the incandescent theatre of it, followed by the long anticlimax of cooling – a big bell may sit in the ground for a week. Finally, the mould is broken open, never to be used again, and the bell emerges, rough and grey. But a cast bell is only half a bell. It arrives from the pit mute and approximate, and it falls to one man, more than any other, to give it its voice. Giridhar Vadukar is chief tuner at John Taylor & Co, and one of only three bell tuners in the country. His domain is a
Observations scenes from the world beyond your phone screen
soaring space under a high-pitched roof, where daylight falls from the clerestory on to hulking vertical boring machines, some more than a century old, black and massive as ships’ engines. Around him, everywhere, are bells; bells the size of buckets and bells you could stand inside, each waiting its turn on the lathe. It is a strange congregation: a room full of instruments holding their breath. What Vadukar practises here was perfected on this same floor in 1896. The Victorian Taylors, prosperous enough by then to take paddle steamers to the Low Countries, had heard the carillons of Flanders and grasped something their rivals hadn’t: that a bell is not one note but a chord. It produces five principal pitches at once – hum, prime, tierce, quint and nominal – from different regions of its body, and in most old bells, the different pitches quarrel. Working with a clergyman named Canon Arthur Simpson, Taylors learned to bring those warring harmonics into agreement, and the orders flooded in. Achieving that is Vadukar’s slow, exacting art. A bell is bolted mouth-up to the great rotating table of the boring machine, and bronze is pared away from precise internal bands, a curl of metal here lowering one harmonic, a pass of the cutting tool there nudging another, while the tuner strikes, listens, measures and cuts again. Take off too much and there is no putting it back: the bell is scrap. Vadukar works to fractions of a semitone, and not only on new castings: ancient bells come to Loughborough to be sweetened too, though some parishes, attached to the voice they have always known, ask that their bells be left exactly as they are. The tuning shop is only one room in a small kingdom. Across the yard is the clapper department. There is an engineering shop fettling cast iron bell frames, a material Potter
reveres for its refusal to decay: “Once it’s sandblasted, it looks brand new. It’s been up there being rained on for 120 years.” At the back, a woodcraft department builds the great hardwood wheels the ropes run on, along with belfry doors, ringing galleries, even cupolas for church towers. The whole place smells of hot metal, sawdust and linseed oil. That it exists at all is a minor miracle. By 2009, the business was in administration, 12 bidders circling a site ripe for demolition and housing. Potter, by then an MBE, telephoned the head of English Heritage. “He was absolutely splendid. He raised the building status to Grade II-listed, and all these enthusiastic bidders dropped out overnight.” Potter and two fellow enthusiasts bought the foundry, poured about £7m into its fabric, and in 2016 gave the entire site to a charitable trust, so that no one could ever again sell the ground out from under the bells. Before I leave, I ask him what goes through his mind when he hears a great peal – York Minster, say, whose bells he spent years restoring. He has rung with the best, mastered the fearsome mathematics of the change-ringer’s art. But that isn’t it. “Even if it’s repetitious,” he says simply, “it’s the beauty of the sound.” Finn Blythe
In search of Lorca D
own dusty roads hemmed in by dusty fields is a town once called Disgusting. In the town – Asquerosa, in Spanish – lived a boy called Federico who signed off letters to friends with the names of other towns to avoid using that of his own. The place is called Valderrubio now and I’m here, in the flatlands of Granada, outside the house of Bernarda Alba. Gecko-pressed against the walls
photos of anything in this room,’ my guide Cristina says. ‘But not that’
of the buildings across the street is a group of schoolchildren hiding from the sun, scripts in hand, waiting to perform scenes from Federico García Lorca’s play La Casa de Bernarda Alba – a work he never saw performed. Speaking over an air-con buzz, my guide Cristina explains how the play was first staged in 1945, nine years after García Lorca’s murder by the nationalist supporters of General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War – and then not in Spain but Argentina. “You can take photos of anything in this room,” Cristina says. “But not that.” She nods at the report in which Franco’s censors upheld the banning of Bernarda Alba. The regime might have killed the author, but the play still offended its Catholic ethics. Cristina leads us out to a courtyard. Grapevines snake above it; there are red geraniums in pots and a well, divided by a wall, once shared by two families. When the Alba family talked on one side, García Lorca listened at the other, hidden. He turned what he heard into one of the great Spanish- language dramas. I studied Bernarda Alba at university and I’ve seen her on stage in London. I never thought I’d be at her house. But there she is, staring at me. In the photograph, Alba (real forename Frasquita) looks stern, impassive, proud – a woman for whom nothing mattered more than keeping up appearances. “She is just like my mother,” whispers a fellow visitor as we look around the sitting room. Pictures of her three daughters hang on the wall. There too is José Benavides Peña. He is Pepe el Romano in the play, the man who shatters the family by winning Martirio’s love, seducing Adela and promising to marry Angustias – all three sisters living in the same house. In real life, he married one of Frasquita’s daughters, and then another after the first died during childbirth. But in Asquerosa everyone knew who Romano was, and Benavides Peña was furious. He was among those who persecuted García Lorca. The Alba family begged the playwright to change the names. He was killed before he could, aged 38. We walk round the corner under a fierce sun to his house. It is cool inside. The dramatist’s father wanted his eldest son to take over his sugar beet business. García Lorca had other ideas. “I was born a poet,” he wrote, “like some are born crippled, like some are born blind, like some are born handsome. Leave my wings in their place. I tell you that I’ll fly well.” I go to the bedroom he shared with his brother until their
squabbling drove their parents mad. The ceiling is blue as the sky, just as García Lorca wanted it. For his family, Spain died too when their son was murdered. Cristina tells us what his father said as he left for exile in New York. “I don’t want to return to this fucked country in my life.” He never did. On the playwright’s desk are dried flowers and a letter he wrote to his parents arranging a summer stay in this house. He asks them to make sure there is a piano. “A piano to be played.” He underlined the words “to be played”. It’s there in the living room. I check I’m alone and let my index finger sink into its middle C and the house swallows the note. As a child, García Lorca spent long hours practising guitar, disturbing the family’s siestas, but he excelled at the piano. I play C major. In a house once full of music, a piano 100 years out of tune. Gary Cansell
Mango season F
or British Asian households, mangoes are a matter of territorial pride. My family, who have Indian heritage, are fierce advocates of the country’s Alphonso variety, while Pakistani friends would wax lyrical about their Chaunsa fruit and east Asians would swear by the oblong Thai Nam Dok Mai for dicing into sticky rice. This year, however, mango season hasn’t been a time for celebration. “It’s been a perfect storm,” Satya Morarji, co-founder of British delivery business Alphonso Mango, tells me. “Temperatures were a lot lower for longer in the mango growing regions at the start of the year, which means supply was delayed by a month. Then, the Middle East crisis caused freight prices to go through the roof. Plus, the hot summer in the UK has resulted in the fruit ripening so fast that sometimes we can’t even send it out before spoiling.” With a box of Alphonsos currently retailing for about £30 for a dozen mangoes – an eye-watering £2.50 per fruit – I decide to reach out to the only person I know with enough expertise to find the best fruit still available: my dad. I meet him on the high street in Hounslow, west London, near a busy parade of South Asian grocers. Hands clasped behind his back like a priest surveying his churchyard, he is already assessing the yellow boxes on display. “You need to know your seasons first,” he advises, finger wagging. “Alphonsos run from April till the end of July, then you have your Indian Kesar variety for later in the summer and Pakistani Chaunsas into September. Thai mangoes
Art
Theatre
The much-loved musical A Little Night Music, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, will be revived this Christmas at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Tickets are on sale for performances from 5 December to 30 January 2027.
and others from South America run into the rest of the year. “Each variety of mango will be the most expensive at the start of its season, while later it gets cheaper as they’ve been refrigerated longer. This year, it will be more of a mess.” We step into As Sanabil, where a box of six Alphonsos is on sale for £13. “I’ve had regulars coming in and asking me to put the best box aside for them or offering to pay more if I’ve kept anything special at the back,” says shopkeeper Nassim Shah. “People are very loyal to the variety they have grown up eating.” Writer Mehlaqa Khan comes from a family of Pakistani mango farmers. “People are territorial over mangoes because [they] represent the land itself.” she says. “Mangoes haven’t yet been appropriated so we each feel an ownership over the different varieties.” My dad tries to barter with Shah for his remaining Alphonsos. “The man down the street is doing them six for £10,” he says; there is no such man nor price. Shah chuckles and we leave with half a dozen mangoes for £13, as advertised. Further along the high street at Quality Foods, a box of a dozen Kesar mangoes is on sale for a more reasonable £16. A brighter yellow and sweeter than the deep orange and flecked green of the Alphonso, the Kesar is equally prized. “Alphonso is rich and decadent with a buttery flavour, while Kesar is more floral and refreshing. Chaunsas, meanwhile, are just a sugar bomb,” Morarji says. In each instance, the way to tell if they’re ripe and of good quality is to smell the stem that attached the mango to the tree. “If it smells strongly of mango, then it’s good.” Taking home our haul, we dig in. The difference between the Kesar and Alphonso seems to lie mainly in juiciness, with the former spraying out sweet flavour and the latter containing a more unctuous, heady liquid. After a while, feeling like Winnie- the-Pooh must have after downing a jar of honey, I sit with my dad in satiated silence. No matter your brand loyalty, we agree, it feels miraculous that these fruits have made it thousands of miles for our pleasure. My dad rouses: “Shall we do one more?” Ammar Kalia
Under the bonnet I
t’s the anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, and about 350 fans have descended on her house in Chawton, Hampshire, to pay their respects. In the middle of every July since 2021, the Jane Austen House museum has turned back time. Bonnets and top hats are optional, but T-shirts and shorts are far outnumbered by empire silhouette gowns and tailcoats. “It has never fallen on the actual day [18 July] before,” Amelia Harvell, the museum’s head of communications, tells me excitedly. Last year’s 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, and yet more film and TV adaptations inspired by her books, has sparked a boom in visitors, but museum director Lizzie Dunford says what she cherishes is that the pilgrimage to Chawton is part of “a lifelong relationship with Austen”. In the garden a marquee has been strung with colourful bunting, and a rail of costumes and boxes of hats and jackets await visitors. “We have art here, obviously,” says Harvell, “but everyone’s always taking selfies.” In the tent, time in front of the mirror is scarce as Austen fans try out possible looks. “ Put that jacket on right now before someone takes it,” whispers an American visitor named Cecile. She explains that she acquired her own lilac dress and yellow bow bonnet from Camden Costumes in London, as I yank a jacket sleeve up her arm. Another guest, Louise, is on her second dress-up day. She says her cream gown with a feather cap was based on 1813 fashion plates to make the cut as accurate as possible, and her detachable dress sleeves match those of Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Meanwhile, her niece Rebecca has chosen the vibrant colours of the 2020 film Emma as a point of reference for her pink and black tulle dress. About 25 of the most diehard Janeites prepare for the guided promenade through Chawton. In bonnet and sunglasses, our tour guide begins by booming the inevitable greeting: “It is a truth universally acknowledged… ” and the whole party recites the rest of the matrimonial proverb. We start at a thatched cottage which inspired the residence of Miss Bates in Emma. Our guide points out the modest size of the home was due to the fact that its owner did not, like Jane, have a wealthy brother. “Or,” as a woman sporting a blue velvet jacket remarks to her companion, “have an Amazon parcel outside the door.” Marine Saint
Film
Film
Observer critics’ takes on the events not to miss
Classical
“The London Philharmonic Orchestra excelled, as did the chorus, singing their hearts and souls out in the big, surging ensembles. The all-male cast, which boasts eight baritones, a bass baritone and three basses, has no weak link.” Billy Budd has two more performances at Glyndebourne, East Sussex, on 28 and 30 July. Fiona Maddocks
“There are relishable moments of spiky comedy” in Rosebush Pruning. Karim Aïnouz’s black comedy about a dysfunctional wealthy American family living in luxurious exile in Spain is still in cinemas nationwide. Jonathan Romney
Kira Freije’s Unspeak the Chorus, the Turner prize- shortlisted sculptor’s first substantial show, is at Modern Art Oxford until 16 August – “and what a show it is: insistently figurative, unapologetically theatrical, expressive in its every scene and gesture”. Laura Cumming
NOW BOOKING
Wham! were the first western pop group to play in communist China, performing in Beijing and Guangzhou in 1985. Now, a new documentary film goes behind the scenes to explore why they went and how it all unfolded. Wham! 10 Days in China will be showing in cinemas nationwide from 28 July.
series finds the common ground between workers and customers in the US’s fast-food restaurants
Fast food is typically seen either as unhealthy and exploitative; or tasty, convenient and comforting. In his new book, Billions Served, the American photographer Richard Renaldi examines this juxtaposition with his portraits of US restaurant workers and the system they inhabit; he captures patrons with their meals, their discarded rubbish outside, the familiarity of the surrounding architecture. “Photographing this world let me sit inside that contradiction deliberately,” Renaldi says. “The seductive design of the food and the nostalgia it produces, set against the human labour behind the counter that makes it all possible, often at a real cost to the people doing it.” In 1999, Renaldi began working with a large-format view camera and, across several projects exploring class as a subtext, he found that portraits of fast food workers kept turning up. He made a mental note that they might eventually become their own series, and in 2019 he began in earnest, with a portrait of a worker called Ivan at a Jack in the Box in south Texas. Surprised by how easy it was to gain permission to photograph these spaces, Renaldi expanded the project and set about documenting a realm not often afforded such composure and consideration. “I’m drawn to people whose work goes largely unseen,” says Renaldi. “Civil servants, nurses, first responders, aid workers and fast-food workers themselves. They sustain a huge amount of everyday life and rarely get the recognition given to more visible figures.” Tara Joshi
‘London was instrumental in the career of the Roots’: Questlove. Christian Germoso
film-maker on Barack Obama, bringing the Roots Picnic to the UK and his new documentary about Earth, Wind & Fire
Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, is joint frontman of the Roots, which he formed with Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter in 1987 in their native Philadelphia. Stalwarts of US hip-hop, the Roots are also the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In his spare time, Questlove produces records, writes books and makes films. Summer of Soul, described by Mark Kermode as “the best music documentary I’ve ever seen”, won a Bafta and an Oscar in 2022. His latest, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World), premiered at the Tribeca festival in June. On 8-9 August, Questlove and co will bring their annual Roots Picnic to the Crystal Palace Bowl in London, featuring artists such as Nas, Common and Sasha Keable.
You’ve been doing Roots Picnics in Philadelphia and other US cities since 2008. Why export it to London? I don’t know if London knows how instrumental it is in the career of the Roots. On a whim [in 1993], we decided we were going to “pull a Hendrix” and move to London and we lived in Kentish Town for four years. In London, we learned the power of the jam session. We also played Glastonbury and other festivals and we were just mind-blown, because all we knew of festivals in the US was Woodstock, Live Aid and Lollapalooza. We were like, wouldn’t it be crazy if we brought this back to Philadelphia? Our first festival was small, like 3,000 people. Cut to last year with Jay-Z – it had grown so big, we technically couldn’t headline
Musician and director, 55
our own festival. So we were like, what if we were to take this on the road? And it’s only poetic that we take it back to the place that developed us: London.
How will it differ from other London festivals? One difference is that we’re threaded through the entire festival. The Roots will be Nas’s band, which people have not seen before. Me, Robert Glasper, Common, Bilal and Burniss Travis will recreate a one-off live album we did during the pandemic. [Black Thought] is going to do his live mixtape thing with a bunch of MCs. The whole point is to give you an experience that you wouldn’t normally see elsewhere.
have come and gone. Does it still feel like the same band? Well, we had to replace Leonard Hubbard on bass [after he quit in 2007 following a cancer diagnosis; he died in 2021]. But really, we just kept adding more people. It’s weird: when editing the Earth, Wind & Fire documentary, I was like, holy shit! I didn’t realise that we have more members than they did. When you think of Earth, Wind & Fire, you think of an army of people. But there were only nine. We’re 11. I just see it like we’re the travelling circus and people come and join us.
Did the tricky group dynamics within Earth, Wind & Fire resonate with you in any way? You know it’s weird, I don’t think any of the films I made were by accident in terms of how they correlate with real life. So in the
to ‘pull a Hendrix’ and move to London. We lived in Kentish Town for four years
three years it took me to make that documentary, I started asking myself, “Am I an effective leader?” I’ve made an effort to really make sure that band morale is up and to listen better. I was shocked to hear them say, “Yeah, well, sometimes you are harsh when we hit a wrong note.” And so I’m more mindful of how I treat the guys, because at this rate the journey is ours to lose. This is the glory period. We just did Montreux jazz festival and that was probably our best ever moment on stage.
Barack and Michelle Obama appear as talking heads in the Earth, Wind & Fire documentary. How did that come about? A lot of doors opened after Summer of Soul that I didn’t expect. I mean, dude, an Oscar and a Bafta were definitely not on my list. I thought I was just going to do a really cool project in the pandemic and you guys would discover it years later. Anyway, one of the first cold calls I got was from President Obama. I was ordering food from Uber Eats, and the phone rang, and I was like, “Yeah, come up to da-da-da floor.” And he’s like, “Huh? Oh, you think I’m a food delivery service? It’s me, Barry.” I was like, “Wait a minute, what?” So I asked him as a friend to be in the movie. [He and Michelle] were more than happy to do that, and I’m so glad they did.
Do you see yourself more as a film- maker than a musician these days? I know it sounds cliched, but I want to use my documentaries to inspire people. The real lesson from Summer of Soul is the importance of joy and happiness, which we tend to dismiss, but that’s crucial. This Earth, Wind & Fire film, to me, is about how to deal with fear, how to breathe. I almost feel like it’s an obligation for me to make these films so that my fellow musicians can see their work differently. A lot of us got into hip hop because we wanted to get out of the hood and survive. I now want people to see their gift as a higher purpose and a higher meaning.
What are you working on now? There’s a new [online] show that I have called The Next Move. My book company is going to do some more books. There’s the new Roots album, which will definitely be out at the top of next year. And there are two more film projects. I can’t give the titles away yet, but let’s just say I’ll be busy until 2032.
Will you be continuing your inquiry into great Black musical artists? Once you do one film, everyone comes running to you like, do more. So yes, absolutely. Interview by Killian Fox
S
marriage and reputation over an edit to his debut film, American History X. Andrew Anthony asks if he is finally ready to put himself together again
Portrait by
Joe Leavenworth
DUMPTY versus
ometime back in 1998 Marlon Brando is sitting on the floor of his living room on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles with a video camera trained on a man sitting opposite, who himself is holding a camera aimed at Brando. The ageing actor addresses his guest with undisguised exasperation. “I pleaded with you not to make a spectacle,” he says, reminding the man filming him, a British advertising and music video director called Tony Kaye, that Kaye had signed a contract to deliver a feature film and he was obliged to see it through in good faith. Kaye agrees but says there was a clause in the contract enabling him to remove his name from his debut film, American History X, if he were unhappy with the finished product. He wants, he says, to use that clause. He wants to replace his name, “Tony Kaye” with “Humpty Dumpty”. Brando asks Kaye if he is familiar with the language of this particular clause, to which the Englishman candidly replies: “No, because I never read it.” This scene features in Humpty Dumpty X, a riotously entertaining new documentary made by Kaye, the
74-year-old Londoner who became notorious in Hollywood for blowing up his career. It’s a film about creative hubris in an era of excess, a cautionary tale of an artist striving for greatness but making enemies of his backers – the industry equivalent of not just biting the hand that feeds but swallowing it whole. The completion of American History X 28 years ago should have been Kaye’s moment of triumph, the beginning of a brilliant new chapter in his life. It starred a young Edward Norton as a vicious neo-Nazi trying to reform his ways. While the story of a white supremacist coming to terms with his racism wasn’t particularly sophisticated, Kaye drew powerful naturalistic performances from his actors and married them to a poetic aesthetic to compelling effect. But Kaye made a drama out of the drama, turning a small disagreement into a heavily publicised personal disaster. It was a uniquely histrionic form of professional suicide. “Making that movie tore everything apart,” he tells me. “Ridley Scott and I were the only people in the world at that point who had production companies on both sides of the Atlantic. But [that film] destroyed
my company and it went bust. My marriage ended and everything fell to pieces.” We are speaking after a screening of Humpty Dumpty X at the Tribeca film festival in New York that went, according to Kaye, “tumultuously, incredibly, shockingly well”. He is sitting with his wife of 25 years, Jan (pronounced Yan) Kaye, who produced the film. Although he’s wearing a tie, he looks almost relaxed, a word not normally associated with this most fervent of men. It helps that he has shaved off the Old Testament beard he’s sported in recent years, which served to convey an air of rabbinical zeal. But his relative ease is mostly accounted for by post-applause elation and a hefty dose of relief. “It feels so good,” he says about finally getting to tell his painful story. He describes it as a kind of personal catharsis after years of myths and rumours circulating about what had taken place, most of them created by Kaye himself. The name Humpty Dumpty was Kaye’s protest at the edit of American History X that he believed the studio, New Line Cinema, had foisted upon him at the behest
of Norton. It was a deliberate provocation of the kind in which Kaye, a man who could start a principled argument in an empty room, once specialised. Brando, who had nothing to do with the film, was among those who recognised that his younger friend was harming himself much more than his intended target: the studio. “People are going to look at you and find that the manner in which you conduct yourself might be a threat to their dollars,” Brando warned him, presciently. “If you want to get things done, dance to the available music.” In the event, the Directors Guild of America refused to recognise Kaye’s nursery rhyme pseudonym. But even then, Kaye, as his documentary shows, was someone who instinctively knew how to make a tricky situation much worse. In putting forward his case to re-edit the film, he took with him to a meeting with New Line studio executives a Catholic priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk. None of them had seen the film. Was that another wind-up? “I wanted to bring peace and spirituality,” he says now, “and I was scared of what was going to go on,
but I thought it would be entertaining. I thought it was funny.” K
aye asked for more time to work on the film before its release and used it to go to the Caribbean to adapt the script with the poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. As he would later observe, “the problem with me is that at the time I was so used to working within the advertising world in the British scene. I got myself into this hallowed situation where I was literally allowed to do anything I wanted without explaining myself. So I was just making stuff up as I went along.” He was excited by the collaboration with Walcott – “he was incredible” – but after two months there was no tangible progress to show New Line, and he was told that they were going to put out the cut they already had. Kaye responded with an extended campaign of theatrical resistance. As he says in footage from the time, echoing George Bernard Shaw: “Nothing was [ever] achieved by reasonable people.”
He talked the Toronto film festival out of premiering the film and spent $100,000 of his own money on adverts in Hollywood trade papers criticising the studio cut. “I’m sure it was hell for everyone else, but I felt energised, like I was on drugs,” he said a few years later. Drugs were never his problem, but he was always high on conflict. The film was eventually released and was well reviewed. It took a decent amount at the box office, and Norton earned a second Oscar nomination. By contrast, Kaye had established himself in Hollywood legend as the guy who went rogue, someone who was unlikely to get another studio gig any time soon. He took to blaming Norton for his baleful influence on the cut that reached cinemas. He said the actor sat in on editing and enlarged his role, creating sentimental scenes that were at odds with Kaye’s wishes. You can see Kaye on Youtube, looking like Nosferatu and venting his spleen about artistic betrayal. “My vision of the film never made it to the screen
Tony Kaye photographed for The Observer in Los Angeles.
because Edward Norton, the actor, was permitted by the producers to edit and alter the film,” he screams, “increasing the role of his own performance, while decreasing the integrity of the picture.” As recently as last year, he told an interviewer that Norton would have won the Oscar if he’d listened to him. “Well done Edward for losing your only stab at best actor.” Like Hollywood’s own ancient mariner, he seemed destined to recount the post-production battles that were a directorial albatross around his neck. But that’s not the story Kaye tells in Humpty Dumpty X, which captures his irrepressible intensity to comic and, occasionally, tragic effect. Instead he now suggests that Norton had limited influence. He seems a little exhausted by the Norton narrative, as if it were a misunderstanding that he’s been lumbered with, but there is little contrition about its origins. At the time, it was often hard to work out whether Kaye said things because they were entertaining or because they were true, or because he wanted them to be true. He has always spoken with conviction but he has not necessarily been the most reliable narrator. So what was the actor’s actual impact in the editing suite? “There wasn’t any,” he says with his eyes closed, as if concentrating on his wording. “He came in for a couple of days and I didn’t enjoy it, but he’s a tremendously creative person and he wants to give as much as he could. I’m so happy and so proud of his performance.” It’s a remarkable turnaround, from a quarter-century- long rant to rave review. Kaye says he’s even made up with studio executive Michael De Luca, who is now co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros Pictures. In footage
and product was seldom obvious in Kaye’s adverts. His signature style was exemplified by one in which a fat bald man painted gold flounced around in a desert
recorded at the time De Luca listens silently as the director tries to sell him the idea of “cutting Norton’s performance down to the bone” by discussing, among other things, the cultural significance of Nat King Cole – one of Kaye’s eccentric habits back then was filming his interlocutors, and sometimes himself, during meetings. De Luca begged him not to abandon the film but he rejected every entreaty, later describing their relationship as “a door firmly closed, a bridge unequivocally burnt”. The tension with De Luca became increasingly uncomfortable for Kaye, as the executive went on to be one of the biggest players in Hollywood. “I have a great relationship with him,” Kaye says, insisting that they made peace a few years ago. “Warner Bros completely endorsed Humpty Dumpty X.” So has he at long last learned to play the game, flatter egos, pay respect and stay in with the right people? “I think now you have to do things yourself,” he says, diplomatically. “I see Jan and me as a punk version of Chris Nolan and Emma Thomas.” That husband and wife team are, of course, the people responsible for some of the biggest critical and box office hits of the 21st century, among them The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer and the recently released The Odyssey. He means it as a kind of joke, but the point is that Nolan and Thomas know how to see a project through on their own terms. But it would be wrong to say that Kaye never worked in the town again. In total, not including Humpty Dumpty X, he has managed to direct four features since American History X. The most notable was Lake of Fire, a sprawling documentary on the abortion debate that was 15 years in the making and released in 2006. In 2009 he made Black Water Transit with Laurence Fishburne. It was never released. Kaye has described it
as “not finished. I mean, none of [my films] are really finished but Black Water Transit is the least finished of all of them”. There was Detachment in 2011, starring Adrien Brody, a moody treatise on social alienation that sought to do for supply teachers what Taxi Driver did for cabbies, but took several wrong turns along the way. And two years ago he made The Trainer, a low-budget black comedy with Julia Fox that disappeared on release. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the career that Kaye envisaged when he arrived in Hollywood “with a conviction bordering on madness that my first movie had to be greater than Citizen Kane”. K
aye grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Stamford Hill, north London. His father worked in the garment industry. Troubled by a childhood stammer – the legacy of which is still evident in his speech – Kaye found it hard to communicate in his first graphic design jobs. He originally wanted to be an artist, and for some years now he’s been painting large Basquiat-style canvases. After a stint of night school at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, his speech impediment slowly improved, and when he was 27 he landed a job in advertising, then the entry point to fine art and film for the working class. He was a junior art director at Collett Dickenson Pearce advertising agency – the launch pad of Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. He first arrived in Los Angeles in 1990 and gained Hollywood’s attention with a series of award-winning, visually and aurally rich adverts, and a number of stand- out rock videos, among them Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train. It was assumed that he would join the ranks of that slightly earlier generation of British ad directors – Scott and his brother Tony, Parker, Adrian Lyne and Hugh Hudson – in making a successful transatlantic transition to the box office. Kaye, however, believed himself to be following in the footsteps of a still more distinguished group: “[Erich] von Stroheim, [Orson] Welles and [Francis Ford] Coppola”. This is not the first time Kaye and I have spoken. One day 30 years ago, at the height of his advertising career, I watched him at work in a luxury bungalow at The Beverly Hills Hotel, that shrine to West Coast glamour immortalised on the Eagles’s Hotel California album cover. He was filming Tom Jones, who stood on a coffee table and belted out snatches of a tune with lyrics about dreaming of being the footballer Ryan Giggs. It was like a scene out of a David Lynch film, eerie and powerful, but hard to make sense of. Some months later in 1996 the same snippet of Pontypridd’s greatest sex symbol appeared in a commercial for the sportswear company Reebok, which also featured Richard Attenborough, George Best, Jarvis Cocker and the former Match of the Day presenter Jimmy Hill tied to a chair in the middle of a football pitch with a Reebok boot stuffed in his mouth. The relationship between message and product was seldom obvious in Kaye’s advertising oeuvre. His signature style was exemplified by a commercial in which a grand piano fell off a bridge and a fat bald man painted gold flounced around in a desert, while Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs gave the proceedings an intoxicating edginess. It was for Dunlop tyres. In the television advertising era in which money was no object, he was the go-to guy. American History X had a budget of $20m – modest compared with the blockbusters of the day but the kind of serious starter level investment that should have resulted in a film that led to bigger things. Hollywood has tolerated an awful lot of wayward behaviour over the years, but one golden rule is that you don’t diss the product. Another is that if you take on a studio head, you had better have some very powerful allies. Kaye flouted both, and pretty much every other rule. Such was his unhinged intransigence that even Brando, hardly known for his spirit of compromise, advised him to “accept the fact that this is a cooperative venture and the rules are legal. We live by laws. You can’t go through a red light just because you would like to.” Kaye had idolised the actor and was desperate to work with him when he arrived in LA. By the late 1990s, the star of On the Waterfront and The Godfather had
Above, Kaye in 2002; and, left, a scene from his infamous advert for Dunlop tyres. Corbis/Getty Images, Tony Kaye
won the Oscar if he’d listened to him. ‘Well done Edward for losing your only stab at best actor’
all but given up acting. Up until his death in 2004, he wasn’t an easy person to access. Yet whatever Kaye’s idiosyncrasies, he has always found a way of connecting with the people he’s interested in. I glimpsed his modus operandi all those years ago in Beverly Hills when I mentioned to him that I was interviewing the director Oliver Stone the following day. He immediately found a large piece of paper and, with a marker pen, wrote a note to Stone that he asked me to pass on. I did, much to the bemusement of the Wall Street director. Kaye laughs when I remind him of this incident. “Those kinds of acts of performance art have always been relevant to me,” he says. “I’m always thinking really in terms of live theatre.” In the mid-1990s Kaye attracted a lot of press coverage when he took a homeless man named Roger Powell and displayed him as a work of art at the Tate and Saatchi galleries. Later he took Powell to Los Angeles and San Francisco galleries where he claimed that the asking price for the artwork was $4m. If his performance didn’t go down well with studio executives, they endeared Kaye to Brando, who became his unlikely father figure in America. At one stage the two men set up an acting workshop. “We got on like a house on fire,” he recalls now. “We would meet a number of times every week.” Kaye is fascinated by acting, and out of his collaboration with Brando, he devised a new preparatory approach called “the Melody Spotty Grass Acting Technique”. He explains that it’s all based on listening to grass grow. “You empty your mind of all intellectualism. It’s not method, it’s none of that stuff. It’s not thinking about your past, it’s just about erasing everything in your mind at that point, cleansing it, and then getting up and just listening and saying things based entirely on what’s going on within that moment of time.” It sounds very Californian – he’s been living largely in LA since 1990 – albeit voiced with an accent and sensibility that is very London.
“I love England,” he says. “I love being English. I love the language more than anything.” He says he wants to make a film about an English obsession. “I want to do a soccer movie,” he says, by which, I take it, he means a football film. “I’ve been living in a America for a little bit too long,” he concedes, “but the football movies I’ve seen haven’t studied the action of the game.” He has a lot of theories about how football should be shot, based in part on his experience of filming Nike commercials in the 1990s. As the conversation spirals off into a discussion of Tottenham Hotspur’s promising youth players (we’re both Spurs fans), Jan suddenly intervenes. “Nobody ever shot soccer action like Tony,” she says, clearly concerned that we had departed from an appreciation of her husband’s work. “He is an extraordinary creative force across many different forms of art, painting, writing, music – he made all the music in Humpty Dumpty X.” They wanted to make a film that wasn’t angry or accusatory, she goes on, as a resource for film students, something they can learn from. I can imagine they’ll be mystified by the corporate indulgence that was once commonplace in the advertising industry. After blowing his money and business on trying to wrest control of American History X, Kaye was commissioned to shoot an advert for the Swiss bank UBS. The ad was supposed to be 30 seconds long and the work would have earned him £1m. He shot a five-minute epic, full of glorious black-and-white photography of modern architecture and skies and mountains, and demanded that it wasn’t cut. Amazingly, the UBS bank executives agreed, with the proviso that they could have just one spoken line during those five minutes naming the bank. He refused, and lost the much needed pay packet. More than any other art form, because it’s the most commercial, film needs its mavericks, those people who are prepared to take on the system, even if they end up tilting at windmills. I push him on whether he has any regrets about his behaviour all those years ago and he turns philosophical. “I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to America. I mean, that’s the question, more than if I hadn’t acted like I did. But as I say, all those things, they’re all meant to be. Everything that happens to you in life is meant to be, and you just have to deal as proactively as you can with the fallout.” Kaye has paid his dues and survived success and failure without losing any of his passion. Out of it all, he has made something bold and revealing about the creative compulsion that delivered such dizzying highs and lows. He has, I think, earned his salvation.
Above, Edward Norton as former white supremacist Derek Vineyard on a poster for Kaye’s debut feature film, American History X. Alamy
I could ever receive’
husband was killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza, his artworks seemed lost for ever – until a British aid worker embarked on a daring rescue mission. By Katherine Cowles I
f you are lucky enough to get out of Gaza, you must be prepared to leave everything behind. Sara Alqataa crossed the border into Jordan with just a phone and a charger. She had been due to leave with her husband, Ahmed Shamia, but he was killed in an airstrike in Gaza City two weeks before they could board the bus together. Shamia was an artist and architect; he died walking past one of his own buildings. Dozens were killed in the attack on the busy restaurant on 7 May last year, including a journalist, Yahya Sobeih, who, five hours earlier, met his newborn daughter for the first and last time. The restaurant was a scene of precious memories for Sara – she and Shamia threw their engagement party there – but it became a site of trauma. It was just one of Shamia’s many projects that stood in the same strip of land: schools, cafes, malls, an apartment block, palatial homes, hotels – one symbolically named the Phoenix. From her new home in Paris, Sara tells me how Shamia devoted his life to imagining what Gaza could be: resilient, but also cosmopolitan and even opulent, facing outwards to the world with sleek stucco facades, or with wide windows taking in the Mediterranean sea. There was Fattouh Villa, in the southern strip, which Shamia supervised down to its turquoise swimming pool, and curtains and carpets, though the owner never had the chance to live in it. Most recognisably, Shamia designed the
could tell his story – his portfolio, laptop, blueprints and drawings – was still trapped inside his sea-view office, the Art House, in al-Roya tower, another of his projects, which was under constant threat from shelling. Sara, an interior designer, first met Shamia there, when she had an interview for a job at his agency. “We worked together [at the Art House] from the very first day we met,” she tells me, “and we continued side by side until the day before the war began.” By the time she reached Jordan, she had accepted that she would not see his work again.
While en route to France from Gaza, waiting for clearance in Jordan, Sara met Sam Roberts, a British humanitarian worker on leave in the capital, Amman. Roberts (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) was about to head off for his final rotation in Gaza, where he had been based since October 2024. They were
understand what Palestinians are going through. You can only try to meet them with humanity
introduced by his Palestinian aid worker colleague Ashour, who had also been evacuated. The three of them sat together in a hotel lobby and shared stories, which is when Sara, in her gentle, unassuming manner, mentioned her late husband’s drawings. Recalling their conversation, Roberts tells me that he couldn’t fathom how someone newly widowed, alone in Jordan and soon to be exiled in Europe, would settle in an environment so different from the one she knew. What if he could give her something of home? Barely running a risk assessment in his mind, he offered to try to smuggle out her husband’s drawings. In fact, he promised. “I can’t tell you how many times I spoke to Palestinian colleagues,” he explains later, “and they said: ‘I lost my cousin yesterday.’ Or: ‘My brother went to go and get some food from the distribution point and was caught in a shooting.’ You can’t fully understand what they’re going through. You can only try to meet them with humanity. Ultimately, the question becomes: who are you in that moment? What can you bring?” And so his mission to retrieve Shamia’s drawings began. What motivates a man such as Roberts? He is someone who was forced to grow up before the rest of us; he learned young how to take charge in a crisis. He joined the military straight after school, but left dissatisfied, in 2018, to pursue a career in disaster response. It was that background that led him to
Gaza as a humanitarian worker specialising in access and safety. He is, by nature, adventurous, anxious to test the brakes of his survival instincts. Also, he has an ego. “I think it’s important to have honest conversations about what spurs people to do this kind of work,” he says. “Part of me found the prospect of going to Gaza interesting – exciting, even. Most people aren’t driven purely by altruism; there is usually also an element of curiosity. In humanitarian contexts, you get different types of people: some are misfits, some are continuing a version of a military career and some are deeply driven by a desire to help.” When he arrived in Gaza, during an intense period of fighting before the first ceasefire, Roberts, initially fitted the “mercenary” profile: mission-oriented, with a highly disciplined military mindset. But that changed after forming close bonds with locals. Was he afraid? “In a crisis, people look to you for decisions,” he says. “I’m quite comfortable holding that responsibility, so fear didn’t have much space to take hold.” Since the start of the Israeli invasion, more than 560 aid workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank, among at least 70,000 Palestinians. “There were moments where things could have gone terribly wrong,” Roberts says. “But the reality is, the risk I faced was far less than that of my local colleagues or the general population. I stayed in a known location; they were
DANCING QUEEN SUMMER STARTS HERE
, London | abbavoyage.com Arena
living in constant exposure.” He was struck most of all by the allegiance Palestinians had to family and home: in north-eastern Beit Hanoun, he recalls, some people chose to stay in the city and eat grass rather than leave for the humanitarian zone. “A big part of my role was analysing the conflict and advising colleagues. Sometimes, I had to call someone and tell them I thought their area might be targeted, that they should pack their bags. I’m a young white guy who’s just stepped into this context: who am I to tell someone to leave their home? Many people would rather die than leave. But at the same time, my responsibility was their safety. So it became about balancing that with empathy, and acknowledging how impossible that decision is.” I
n April 2022, about 18 months before the outbreak of war, it was reported that a Palestinian farmer had found the head of a statue – a Canaanite goddess – sprouting from the soil, thought by local archaeologists to be approximately 4,500 years old. It went on show in Qasr al-Basha Palace, which housed more than 20,000 artefacts from the bronze age to the Ottoman period. But no sooner than the head was found, it was lost. The palace – for so long at the centre of conflict that Napoleon is said to have stayed there during his military campaign in the region in 1799 – now lies in ruins; just one of at least 160 cultural heritage sites destroyed or damaged to date, according to Unesco. Shamia’s drawings were not ancient artefacts. They were sheets of paper. But they were important – and not just to his widow. Making comparisons between this war and the cultural destruction witnessed during the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, the Palestinian scholar Mezna Qato has written: “Historians often note how much harder it is to write a history of Palestine after the Nakba … A people scattered, isolated, under siege, bombarded, repeatedly massacred and dispossessed, has meant that generations of Palestinians must rely on shards and scraps.” Roberts brought a small rucksack to the Israeli military checkpoint at the Kissufim crossing. He remembers gripping tight to the bag, as if it could be blown away by the wind. Inside was a plastic wallet full of Shamia’s sketches, entrusted to him by one of Sara’s relatives, who had retrieved them from the Art House studio. Scraps that had, by then, become an archive, as precious a piece of cargo, Roberts thought, as any museum artefact. He had come up with a plan: to bury them under his dirty washing – a kind of trapdoor made of pants turned inside out – hoping the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers conducting searches would be put off riffling down too deep. This was not some single- handed Monuments Men-style operation – such as the famous
Allied effort to recover artworks stolen or endangered by the Nazis during the Second World War. But getting physical art out of Gaza is heavily restricted, relying on individuals, or diplomatic vehicles or other modes of secret transport. Aid workers have more freedom to carry items across the border than civilians, but they are still subject to rigorous checks. A colleague had told Roberts about a “terrifying” interrogation for carrying a prohibited amount of money; his own mission, in some ways, carried considerably more risk. “As a humanitarian, who should be neutral and impartial as per the humanitarian principles, having the artworks might not be seen as pro- Palestinian so much as anti-Israel,” Roberts says. “Then I would never be allowed back in.” Worse was the prospect of the artworks being confiscated or destroyed. He believes the soldiers at the military checkpoint that day were officers from Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency; hardcore, he says, and not anticipated. He watched the agent’s hands move through his bag. “They took out my washbag, my toothbrush,” he says. “I was convinced they would find the drawings.” But the smelly clothes were enough to throw the agent off the scent. Roberts was waved through. He boarded the coach departing
Gaza, suppressing his elation. It was a timely escape. Four months after Roberts was handed Shamia’s drawings, al-Roya tower, and the Art House studio, where for years they had been made and stored, was itself hit by a missile strike and destroyed.
Sara’s favourite piece by her husband is an illustration, showing a girl with a wave of brown hair holding hands with a looming figure, bound by the waist in chains. Two red flowers spring up in the foreground. The girl, her face obscured, is pointing to a place out of sight, where the chains will not reach. It is a picture of the exiled mind; the blank white background a liminal space. “I see myself in it,” Sara tells me. “I feel caught between Gaza and Paris. I hesitated to leave, my family lives there. Part of me wants to look towards the future, while another part is still stuck there.” Roberts had visited Sara in the crisp Parisian autumn last year, to reunite her with the wallet of her husband’s work. It was strange seeing her in this context, he recalls – in this simple, light-filled apartment, decorated with holiday selfies and snapshots of family life before wartime – and he felt self- conscious walking into it, with his camera and sense of ceremony. But the tension turned to relief as they
Below, the
al-Shifa
hospital’s
surgical unit,
designed
by Shamia, left,
was damaged in
a raid in 2024.
Courtesy of Sara
Alqataa, Middle
East Images/AFP/
Getty Images
looked through the pictures, quietly, over glasses of wine; the relief, for Roberts, of a promise fulfilled, and for Sara of something more tangible. “It felt like the most precious gift I could ever receive,” she tells me. “To hold even a small trace of Ahmed – a paper touched by his fingers, a painting shaped by his hands – brings me comfort. I imagine his fingers moving across the page.” These sheets carry a lot of weight for Sara; this eclectic mix of portraits, of the wizened faces of friends or figures such as the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, or scribbled men pointing guns. And they carry responsibility. A year after her husband’s death, as part of the Pause asylum scheme, Sara opened an exhibition of his work – Ahmed Shamia: Bâtir, au-delà de l’absence (“Building beyond absence, or loss”) – in her determination to keep his memory alive. It also archives, in real time, a wider culture that is being destroyed piece by piece. One neat artwork depicts a child holding a blanket over his stomach, which is hollowed out, opening into a black void like a cave, or a ransacked tent. “The world must know what Gaza has endured and what we have lived through,” she says. “I hope that one day Gaza will rise again, rebuilt in a way that preserves its memory rather than erasing it.” Does the work matter without the man who made it? However worthy the rescue mission for the drawings was, however consoling for Sara, Roberts’s Palestinian former aid worker colleague Ashour cautions against sentimentality. Some charities suggest about 300 working artists are still active in Gaza; as of March last year, more than 40 others had been killed since the start of the conflict. “It’s so important that, if we’re going to preserve the art, we mainly preserve the artist,” Ashour says. “I wish we can give the artist who’s still alive the chance either to leave Gaza with their work, or to stay if they want, and we help them to rebuild inside Gaza. That’s what I’m calling for. Because I hear some ideas that [international actors] want to get the artwork out, and to leave the artist in this miserable life, without
ara is settling into her quiet corner of Paris; this autumn, she will begin teaching interior design at ENSA Paris-Val de Seine and ENSA Paris-Est; her exhibition of Shamia’s work opened this month, with a second planned in October. It features models of his buildings alongside video footage of Shamia, visiting construction sites, that she cannot bring herself to watch. And there are the artworks – dozens of them – that have travelled a long way to be shown. Roberts is suspicious of the word “resilient”: how it “gets bandied around in the context of [Palestinian] people, as if it were an inborn, heroic trait to be admired rather than a response to atrocity. They have a right not to be resilient,” he says. Yet there is a moment in particular that has stayed with him – one that, in its everyday way, captured the Palestinian spirit of defiance as he perceived it. He was visiting an area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, as people were returning to the shells of their homes after IDF troops withdrew. “When the [IDF] leave, it creates a kind of vacuum,” he says. “I remember driving past this roundabout at a point where people had just begun moving back. Someone had put up a sign on the roundabout with some Arabic words written on it.” His colleague told him it was a joke: that someone had returned and named it after themself. “So it was like, ‘This is Ahmed’s roundabout now.”’ Roberts laughs. “This funny, childish piece of graffiti,” he says, “there in this wreckage.” Like, “Ahmed was here”? “Yes,” Roberts says. “Exactly.”
with a painted lady as it moves though a bank of flowering thistles and you’ll begin to appreciate both their speed and their sense of purpose
showing off. But there are plenty of reasons for the mad journey and, after all, the alternative strategy – lying doggo in the suspended animation of diapause – is not without its risks. Travel allows the insects to exploit younger plants as they move north. They’re avoiding any overcrowding at the places where they emerged as adults. They might be escaping from parasites and pathogens. Any one of these, or any combination, is enough to make the wild journey a glorious necessity. Figures from 2009 seem barely credible. In two days in May two million painted ladies arrived in the UK. Over the course of the summer there were a billion British painted ladies. It’s likely that when the numbers from this year have finally been crunched, they will excite the same awe and disbelief: so many butterflies of a single species on our own hectic, ruthlessly exploited and notoriously nature- impoverished island. Bloody wildlife people: no sooner do they show us something wonderful than they tell us we’re all doomed. That, I’m afraid, is the naturalist’s lot. The joys – those of the everyday sort and those that come every 17 years – must be paid for in awareness of the fragility of nature in the 21st century. But these impossibly fragile butterflies are at the halfway point of their 9,000-mile commute and right now it seems that nature, like the butterflies, is tougher than it looks: a billion or so symbols of hope. The fact is that if you give nature even the fragment of a chance it’s always avidly seized. Recovery is still possible. Right decisions can still be made, at personal, corporate, national and international level. The rising generation, notoriously fed up with the values and practices of the current lot, might do things differently. On a good day the painted ladies of 2026 can be seen as the start of a long, hard and wholly necessary journey.
the law on their students’ use of AI A
spectre is stalking universities everywhere. It’s called AI and they don’t know what to do about (or with) it. That’s not surprising because, at base, the technology poses an existential question for them: what are universities for? Are they institutions for training students and issuing them with the credentials they supposedly need to get on in life? Or are they places for educating them? The first involves conditioning young people to fit a pre-existing task or role, while the other is about developing an autonomous mind that is capable of thinking for itself. By this stage, I guess that most universities will have developed some kind of AI “strategy”. The most interesting one I’ve seen to date comes from an elite institution: Chicago University’s law school. It has three strands. The first involves developing what the school calls “AI-resilient teaching and assessment so that students still build genuine critical thinking and writing skills rather than outsourcing work to AI.” The second strand is to prioritise the “essential human” skills that students will need: oral advocacy, judgment and (hardest of all, if my legal friends are to be believed) dealing with clients. And the third is about teaching students to use AI responsibly and ethically, on the grounds that the technology is now unavoidable. The hope is clearly that no graduate of the school will ever lodge a lawsuit based on ChatGPT hallucinations. The part of the strategy that has drawn most public attention is how it deals with first-year students who will probably be not only digital natives but also AI natives reared (God help them) on ChatGPT. For their core course, the rules are: no laptops, tablets or phones in class; in-person exams with no internet or device access; and continued emphasis on the Socratic method of teaching that has been de rigueur in law schools for ever. As students progress through the school, the emphasis changes towards making sure that students become experienced – and critical – users of the technology. It’s when they get to graduate level and have to write a research paper (requirements: “substantial length, independent research, original ideas, incorporation of feedback
Internet access is restricted during exams at Chicago University’s law school. Alamy
reading
John Naughton’s recommendations
Big picture Sketching the New Dysto-Utopian World With Massive Presence of Artificial Intelligence is a sobering long read on Substack by Branko Milanović.
Hot topic An interesting Noema piece by Nathan Gardels is The Heated Debate in Europe Over Air Conditioning.
Cold turkey The Scrolly Chair is a neat Substack blogpost on digital detoxing by Nicholas Carr.
from faculty, and iteration across drafts”) that things get really interesting. Each student is required to engage, face to face, in an oral discussion of their paper with their supervising professor, which will involve the student answering questions that “probe the reasoning of the paper and the implications of its arguments”. In other words, if you’ve become unduly dependent on AI, there’s nowhere left to hide. Which is as it should be. N
one of this required rocket science. In fact, it’s mostly common sense. Underpinning it is an institutional acknowledgment that denialism about AI is not a strategy and that the arrival of the technology means things have to change. Universities have to rethink their pedagogy to make it both AI-resilient and to harness the capabilities of the technology to enhance learning. Adaptation on this scale requires two things: resources and institutional will. Sceptics will point out that, while Chicago University has both, many cash-strapped universities in the UK and elsewhere do not. This looks to me like a crisis for the sector. If universities do not act now, then they will cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They will revert to being
mere providers of credentials. After all, the entire point of a university education is not the production of correct answers but the formation of a mind capable of producing them. A short-staffed university department that looks the other way when a student uses AI to draft an essay, solve a set of maths problems, or synthesise a long article is not doing its educational job. It has allowed its students to skip the painful learning process that is the whole point of being there. The arrival of AI does indeed represent an existential threat for universities unless they wake up. They are, by nature and constitution, slow-moving animals. Way back in 1995, the Columbia scholar Eli Noam wrote a seminal article: Electronics and the Dim Future of the University. “In the past,” he wrote, “people came to the information, and the information was at the university. In the future, the information will come to the people, wherever they are. What then is the role of the university? ... Will electronics do to the university what printing did to the medieval cathedral, ending its central role in information transfer? Have we reached the end of the line of a model that goes back to Nineveh, more than 2,500 years ago? Can we self-reform the university, or must things get much worse first?” Noam is still waiting for an answer. So am I.
18 Critics
The Brat star’s latest album is a brash, mischievous ode to artistic evolution that plays with a rock aesthetic while staying true to her electropop sound
Kitty
Empire
Music, Fashion, Film
Charli XCX
(Atlantic)
By now, most people tuned into the work of Charli XCX will have grasped that Music, Fashion, Film – her highly anticipated latest album – performs a handbrake turn away from her previous LP, Brat, the omnipresent club-pop phenomenon of 2024. Everything turned lurid green for a while. Now Music, Fashion, Film’s visuals go heavy on black and white, and guitar distortion fills the air. Rock Music, the record’s first teaser track, found her pouting: “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.” Those final two words are elongated and laden with effects (“rooooccccck musiiiiic”); a little wink that this is very much a genre iteration by sonic mischief-makers who have no intention of turning their backs on digital manipulation entirely. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Charli XCX conceded that the dancefloor is alive and well, citing electronic artists Slayyyter and Underscores, and her husband George Daniel’s dance label dh2, while also stating that Music, Fashion, Film isn’t really a rock record and that she never claimed it was. “I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way,” she said. “I find that to be a very old-school notion.” Her latest album, then, is one that embraces the immediacy and rattle of a guitar band, but runs those attributes through a Charli XCX filter; one in which her producers – hyperpop don AG Cook and Finn Keane (formerly known as Easyfun) – have a gleeful hand. Pop and electronic musicians often misunderstand rock, parachuting in a gurning, soft metal guitar solo to stand in for attitude. Thankfully, this lot are better than that. Often grungy and stripped back,
yet just as often oversaturated, Music, Fashion, Film has moments, such as on Yeah, where it feels as if the singer is a hair’s breadth from breaking into Song 2 by Blur – in a good way. Even more startling is Card Declined, which channels the deadpan sprechgesang and post-punk of left-field darlings Dry Cleaning. Charli XCX and co make guitars sound acrylic, turn basslines into reverberations and deploy
‘It feels as if the singer is a hair’s breadth from breaking into Song 2 by Blur’: Charli XCX. Tyrell Hampton
their considerable hyperpop nous to the quiet/loud dynamics of rock with the enthusiasm of kids in a sweetshop, which is what the trio aims to be: creatives having the best time and sounding like it. Charli XCX – born Charlotte Aitchison and raised on the Hertfordshire-Essex border – has been working on a lot of movies recently, including – but not limited to – the soundtrack for Emerald
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, her own Brat mockumentary, The Moment, in which she starred, plus roles in 100 Nights of Hero and Faces of Death. The track Camera, a song about acting, makes the singer question her career direction: “Do I wanna make music?” That question stalks Music, Fashion, Film. The outstanding banger Wink Wink is an earworm about how the singer may be evolving from a party girl, strutting around pulling sexy faces on social media, into something else. The video was shot in a field near her parents’ house; a plane from Stansted flies overhead. Charli XCX is heavily into the Velvet Underground; her rescue dog is called Nico and she recently worked with former band member John Cale on House. The black-and- white cover of Music, Fashion, Film personifies the title’s three art forms as male muses: Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. But it’s horror director David Cronenberg who guests on closing tracking No One Lasts Forever, about the importance – or, perhaps, lack thereof – of artistic immortality. Although the zeitgeist-seizing bop SS26 makes the point that none of these things – not music, not fashion, not film – will save us from “a runway that goes straight to hell”, the overriding theme on the album is creativity. You can hear this as a record full of love songs to her musical inspirations and to artistry, with odes to her friends and collaborators also figuring: the pacy standout Magic Metal Montana, which features a fabulously smeary vocal melody, is dedicated to producer Cook, while Persona is a passive-aggressive paean to an unnamed friend, or, perhaps, Charli XCX herself. Brat’s secret weapon was its candour, mainly about the anxious woman behind the pop star persona. Here, on I’m Afraid, the singer is found spiralling into all kinds of insecurity, but this time the treatment – singsong melody, low-slung instruments – is grunge by numbers, like a Hole track devised by AI, lacking in clever production topspin. Glitches aside, the story of Music, Fashion, Film unfolds a little like the singer’s pandemic album, How I’m Feeling Now: a tightly themed work made in a compressed production time. And although it sounds very little like Brat, it somehow still is brat. Only two tracks exceed the three-minute mark, and mostly it is a brash and playful outing. This is an artist who regards laurels like poison ivy and, because of that, should keep receiving them.
Caribenya Lido Pimienta (Anti-)
In 2025, the Colombian- Canadian artist Lido Pimienta released La Belleza, a Spanish- language album weaving high European tradition – the Catholic requiem mass, Czech composer Luboš Fišer, Gregorian chants – with Caribbean dembow rhythms. Exploring the concept of beauty, her Afro-Wayuu heritage and the fracturing and healing of a relationship, La Belleza was radical and enthralling. Further proof, if any were needed, that Pimienta was on to something intriguing came when the Spanish singer Rosalía fused not-dissimilar source materials into Lux. Pimienta’s follow-up is intended as La Belleza’s less cerebral, more booty-shaking counterpart. While it does not have quite the same startle factor as La Belleza, this left-field,
‘The movement is relentless, fascinating’: Mamela Nyamza’s The Herd/Less. Kim Stevens Balancing acts at the Biennale
Lion winner Mamela Nyamza has dancers perform on tin can stilts in a hymn to freedom through restriction
Sarah
Crompton
The Herd/Less; Five Days in the Sun Venice Dance Biennale
It’s the sound that comes first: a fierce, rhythmic, metallic stamping in strict unison. As the dancers emerge from silhouette, you realise that the noise comes from the large tin cans, used to hold the basics of a family diet, strapped to their feet. The same cans, hanging overhead, are the only decoration on a bare stage, filled with shifting
cumbia pop-leaning set remains of a piece with its predecessor thanks to Pimienta’s sublime voice, and her refusal to be boxed in. Arrúlame – which translates as “lull me” – is a tender, string-garlanded overture that bridges the two records. Love remains a concern for Pimienta’s ecstatic glissandos. But more fiery sentiments dominate tracks such as Toxicá, a takedown of a friend whose priorities no longer align with her own. The title collapses Caribe (Caribbean culture) and Enya – one of Pimienta’s lodestar artists, whose creativity was conducted on her own reclusive terms. Kitty Empire
Little Miss Twain Shania Twain (Republic)
Shania Twain has not had an easy ride. Her new album tells the story of her extraordinary life; singing as a child in bars to provide for her family, becoming a mother figure to
patterns of rich light by Thabo Pule. They restrict movement, define the space. Like stilts, they mean the dancers, in richly varied costumes – a bright red military jacket, billowing yellow trousers, a jaunty pink hat – can only move from the hips, preserving their balance as they swing their arms and march. The South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza, who won this year’s Silver Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale for her powerful career of making striking work against the odds, is playing with ideas of individualism and conformity. The Herd/Less follows on from her most famous piece Hatched, which set the constraints of ballet shoes against the freedom of gumboot dance. Here, the dancers are led by a man balancing a ceremonial spear, presumably representing authority, while another woman – in an orange and blue crinoline and boater – initially breaks out of the lockstep, raising her arms in delicate curves, before being absorbed by it. A whistle constantly calls the dancers to attention or demands they change direction. The movement is relentless, fascinating, finding subtlety and nuance within its deliberate constriction. The point about the difficulty of breaking free is clear. At one point nine of the dancers swarm over the spear carrier, covering his ears, mouth and pelvis with the cans, but he reasserts control.
her younger brothers as a 22-year- old, and her husband leaving her for her close friend. That she has turned this difficult material into such a fun, singalong country album autobiography is a feat. She has the ability to – as she sings on bonus track Hate That Way – “make sugar out of stone”. The title song, Little Miss Twain, is a glorious country banger in which the young Shania is still dreaming of horses, while being driven at night to sing by her chain-smoking mother. “I’m still smaller than my guitar,” she crows in the chorus. She shines again on Problematic, a Purple Rain-style sultry ballad about obsessive love: “Here’s my heart, just go ahead and stab it.” Twain is a constant entertainer: Right Time is a line-dancing crowd-
of a string pulled through a can, they slowly limp away, holding sticks aloft like grave markers
pleaser, and Scary Thing a fun country match to Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But we hear Twain’s darker side, too, as she lets us into her lyrical catharsis, remembering the good times and the bad: “Forget, forgive, but sometimes it depends.” Lily Isaacs
Light of Day Richard Spaven (Edition)
Over the past two decades Richard Spaven has established himself as one of Britain’s most versatile drummers. Veering from soul with the singer-songwriter Jordan Rakei to hip-hop with the pianist Alfa Mist,
By the close the dancers are mainly standing balanced on one can, still unable to express themselves freely. The song Paradise Road by Joy fills the air with sweetness; they listen but do not move. To the wailing sound of a string pulled through a can, they slowly limp away, holding sticks aloft like grave markers. The Herd/Less is coming to Sadler’s Wells as part of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival in October. In November, the London theatre will also host Emanuel Gat’s Five Days in the Sun, another haunting piece, as expansive as Nyamza’s is spare, and just as clearly heartfelt. Set to Leonard Bernstein’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony No 5, this
electronica with Flying Lotus and classic jazz with José James, Spaven has a knack for making the groove fit. On his latest album as bandleader, Spaven draws on this experience to produce lively instrumentations that blend virtuosic beats with improvisation. The record moves from moody Robert Glasper melodic references on Out of the Quiet to the Latin chromaticism of Finders and the broken-beat dancefloor rhythm of Bunny Bread. Members of his backing band soar, with flautist Graeme Blevins delivering a beautifully tender solo on Tilt and the guitarist Stuart McCallum picking artful lines throughout. But it’s Spaven’s mastery of the drum kit that elevates the record. Both intricate in his scattergun rhythms on tracks such as Fine Line and Let Me Say It For You, as well as textural in his impressionistic cymbal work on Magnolia and Out of the Quiet, his agile playing achieves that rarest of feats: placing the drums front and centre without drowning out the rest. Ammar Kalia
is a work of striking images, and sensuous, luxuriant movement. Its opening section, to the stern brass of the funereal first movement, is full of frozen poses, broken by great runs. The dancers, in gauzy costumes by Inez Vicher that float in the air, look like something out of Walpurgis Night as they rush around the space. Gat’s own lighting fills the stage with orange mist. In repose, the action feels classical, sculpted, like a painting of a court by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. As the symphony moves on, Gat introduces other notes and references. Citrus-bright contemporary clothes appear among the robes; a woman in a black dress begins to disturb the action. An Isolde-like figure of tragedy bends slowly backwards towards the floor, as the modern dancers move frantically around her. At one point, the grouping has the formality of Raphael’s The School of Athens. That tug between thought and emotion, between flowing steps and detailed, tight articulations of muscles and limbs, is at the heart of this thoughtful but exhilarating work. The overall effect is sumptuously lovely.
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 CriticsArt
of fairies, gnomes and Shakespeare’s sultry glades killed his father and spent his life in institutions. Is his a vision of intense originality or insanity?
Laura
Cumming
Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam Royal Academy, London, W1; until 25 October
Richard Dadd Painted fairies, mad. He killed his dad, Which was too bad.
So runs the old clerihew on the Victorian painter (1817-86) who took his father for an after-dinner walk and murdered him with a knife. A few days later, fleeing across the Channel, Dadd tried to kill a stranger in France. Committed to Bedlam, then Broadmoor, he seems to have attacked doctors and patients repeatedly on the orders of the Egyptian god Osiris, among other voices in his head. “No change,” reads a pitiful case note in this show: 42 of his 68 years were spent in institutions. Change is exactly the issue at the Royal Academy, where Dadd is receiving one of his periodic revivals. The first and most significant of these came with the poet Siegfried Sassoon’s gift of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke to the Tate in 1963. By far Dadd’s most famous painting, his microscopic vision of a teeming world of fairies at the bottom of the garden took nine years to paint, and it shows. He zooms further and further into an undergrowth of wildflowers and weeds, goblins, elves and Shakespearian faeries. It is virtually impossible to distinguish the different elements, still less make out any kind of narrative. The surface twinkles with oleaginous oil paint. Daisies stand proud of it in thick white discs. Somewhere in the middle, or so it is said, the brim of an oversized hat hangs over a mysterious face. The picture has become a bestselling postcard for children the world over, perhaps as a Victorian version of Where’s Wally? – spot Oberon and Queen Titania! But the overripe uneasiness of its stoned gnomes and bosomy sprites, all rendered in obsessive miniature, feels entirely adult. The Fairy Feller
‘A microscopic vision of a teeming world’: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke by Richard Dadd, right, in Bedlam, 1857. Tate
these works would ever have been shown had he not been incarcerated, and yet we are supposed to see them independent of his illness
became the very definition of far-out hallucinations in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Freddie Mercury wrote a song in homage, and the painting has inspired novelists from Angela Carter to Terry Pratchett. Is it a vision of intense originality or febrile madness? On the evidence of this show, it is neither. Dadd was a trained painter, who studied in the Royal Academy Schools, winning the life drawing medal in 1840. He was taught by Daniel Maclise, fairy painter to the elite. He formed a group called the Clique with the narrative artists Augustus Egg and William Powell Frith, among others, and even if you
did not know how many of his peers were inspired by Shakespeare, you can see it in Dadd’s own work. Long before his incarceration, Dadd’s pictures were infested with faeries and nymphs, Peaseblossoms, Mustardseeds and nude Titanias in sultry glades. A circular canvas shows Puck as a demonic little baby cross- legged on a mushroom beneath a convolvulus blossom that resembles an overhead shower. It is a startling image, midway between grim and twee; not different from the later folkloric paintings in essence. And there are plenty of wild-eyed hysterics in Dadd’s paintings early
and late. Hamlet losing it at the sight of his father’s ghost in 1840; three swivel-eyed drunks in Bacchanalian Scene from 1862. Melodrama runs right through his work. “Crazy Jane” trails flowers through the skies, Henry VI is murdered by an assassin and Robin Hood draws his bow and arrow tight at some offstage victim, a dog as big as a tiger next to him. The curators are careful not to speculate too much about Dadd’s disorder. In the early 1840s, he travelled abroad with a patron, filling tiny sketchbooks with drawings of Syria, Turkey, Greece and Egypt, where Dadd evidently smoked so many hookahs he began to hear Osiris in the bubbling pipes. It has also been suggested that excessive opium, followed by its sudden withdrawal, set off paranoid schizophrenia. At least two of his siblings were institutionalised after breakdowns, so there may have been an inherited predisposition, or
perhaps some history of syphilis. The show also wants us to see Dadd as a serious painter, independent of his illness: Beyond Bedlam, as the subtitle has it. But beyond Bedlam was Broadmoor and some of the weakest images in the show, of wandering minstrels and wilting damsels in fading colour. Dadd’s best late works are the portraits of his doctors, worked in fine pencil and watercolour with a sparing precision that resembles, ever so slightly, the early graphic work of Lucian Freud. It is hard to think of an odder show at the RA. Some of the paintings, produced in the direst of mental and physical circumstances, are vividly eccentric in their hyper-detailed fairylands. Others strive for whatever Dadd remembered of the London art world in which he once thrived. But many are sadly underpowered. It is hard to believe that they would ever have been shown had he not been incarcerated, and yet we are supposed to see them independent of his illness. That way, so to speak, lies madness.
knotty opera about the myth of Ariadne is stripped back and streamlined in a clever staging that allows the music – and the outstanding cast – to shine
Fiona
Maddocks
Ariadne auf Naxos Glyndebourne, Lewes, East Sussex; until 29 August First Night of the Proms Royal Albert Hall, London SW7
Everyone argued about Ariadne auf Naxos, not least its composer, Richard Strauss, and his brilliant and sensitive librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. They couldn’t agree on the story, the key characters, the voice types. Was it comedy or tragedy, high art or low? Why not mash it all up together? This two- part 1912 work, which has opened in a streamlined and unusually clear new production at Glyndebourne, conducted by Robin Ticciati and directed by Laurent Pelly, carries those disagreements through to the finished opera. The first part, called the Prologue, witnesses a clash between serious musicians trying to mount an opera in a rich man’s house, and a comedy troupe and clowns who have their own ideas. Then follows the Opera,
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 21 CriticsClassical
barely connected, in which a desolate Ariadne (Rachel Willis-Sørensen), abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, encounters a new love, the god Bacchus (David Butt Philip). The comedians, especially the flirtatious Zerbinetta (Alina Wunderlin), barge in from time to time. It’s all a muddle. Ariadne thinks Bacchus is Theseus. He calls her Circe, the witch goddess who turns men into swine and whose island he has escaped. (Might confusion extend to the audience, who just saw Matt Damon – same grey cloak, similar beard but more grizzled – so recently in the clutches of Circe in Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood epic The Odyssey? A reminder that Greek myth is the wellspring of storytelling, especially in opera.) The tendency in productions of Ariadne is for the director to try to match the antics of the Prologue with zany – for which read slapstick – stage action. Pelly and his designer Massimo Troncanetti, with lighting by Marco Giusti, have chosen the opposite. Their staging, an ornate facade and some tastefully striped wallpaper, is almost sober. The muted set and costumes – with occasional flashes of colour – act like
this work lies in Strauss’s music, running in contravention of the folly of the story
‘In this numerous ensemble every person excelled’: Alina Wunderlin as Zerbinetta, above, in Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne. Below, David Butt Philip as Bacchus and Rachel Willis- Sørensen as Ariadne. Glyndebourne Productions Ltd/Tristram Kenton
a stencil, allowing the madness of the action to move freely around and within. The second act is a heap of Happy Days-style scorched earth on which Ariadne lies, but who’s to say Strauss and Hofmannsthal didn’t get there before Beckett. These archetypal characters and their shenanigans are too inconsequential to move us. The exception is the fervent young composer, superbly sung by mezzo- soprano Samantha Hankey. The power of this work lies in Strauss’s music, running in contravention of the folly of the story. Every flicker of emotion, every hint of yearning, is expressed in overlapping melody, waltz, lament, endlessly gathered up like skeins of silk and sackcloth. It’s a miracle of invention. Trying to match a composer’s personality to their music is a fool’s game, but the polar distance between this tweed-suited, conservative and bourgeois Bavarian and his molten music – lubricious in Salome, ferocious in Elektra, vulgar and ecstatic in Der Rosenkavalier – remains a mystery. Strauss used a reduced orchestra – here the London Philharmonic on white-hot form under the baton of Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director, whose feeling for the pulse of this music is faultless. The addition of harmonium, celesta, piano, glockenspiel and two harps adds gleam and radiance. Pelly’s staging frees us to concentrate on this luscious score, helped by a fine cast. Wunderlin’s starlet Zerbinetta, the coloratura dazzlingly sung; Willis- Sørensen’s sumptuous Ariadne; Butt Philip’s rich-toned Bacchus; the commedia dell’arte troupe and the delicious trio of nymphs were all outstanding. In this numerous ensemble every person excelled. Glyndebourne will take a semi- staged version of Ariadne for its annual visit to the BBC Proms, which opened last week, running nightly until 12 September. The theme for the First Night (BBC Symphony Orchestra, Singers and Chorus, conducted by the popular Dalia Stasevska) was part American, part patriotic British. Any reservations about rough edges in the performance, and bittiness in the content, were not reflected in the enthusiasm of the capacity crowd. The introspective account of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major by the Korean superstar Yunchan Lim, lost in the Albert Hall, came across better later on BBC Sounds. Gerald Finzi’s rarely heard ode For St Cecilia is best kept rarely heard, but the BBC’s choral forces and tenor soloist Thomas Atkins gave it their all. My best Prom listening of the week was Jessie Montgomery’s These Righteous Paths, written for the cellist Abel Selaocoe and orchestra (here the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda). Exploring thoughts of grief, it has a magical passage inspired by the cascade of birds in flight. This original and startling UK commission was a wonderful totem for the Proms, in all their variety, in the weeks ahead.
Fiona Maddocks on the
highlights to look out for at
the Royal Albert Hall this week
• From the Alps to the Auvergne (Monday 7pm) A prom tailor-made for the Royal Albert Hall: Edward Gardner conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Richard Strauss’s gargantuan An Alpine Symphony: sunrise, ascent, summit, glacier, storm, sunset, the lot, performed by a vast orchestra complete with hecklephone, Wagner tubas, cowbells, wind and thunder machines. Plus, a UK premiere by Kristine Tjøgersen, and the soprano Louise Alder sings a selection of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne.
• Sibelius’s Second (Tuesday 7pm) Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’s atmospheric Symphony No 2. Guy Johnston is soloist in Britten’s Cello Symphony, and the orchestra will perform the UK premiere of the Festen Suite by Mark-Anthony Turnage from his hit opera based on Thomas Vinterberg’s film.
• Elgar’s First (Wednesday 7pm) Ryan Wigglesworth conducts the BBC Scottish Orchestra in Elgar’s Symphony No 1, a big-boned work the composer took a decade to complete but which became an enduring favourite. Soprano Claire Booth will give the world premiere of The World’s Wife, poems of Carol Ann Duffy set by Brett Dean. Judith Weir’s short and beautiful Moon and Star, to texts of Emily Dickinson, was a Proms commission in 1995 and makes a welcome return.
• Mahler’s First by Heart (Saturday 7pm, Sunday 11am) Sure to be one of the high points of the season, and with two performances, the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon (above), play Mahler’s Symphony No 1 from memory, with mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis a soloist. The story of this grand and eclectic work, 15 years in the making – complete with klezmer, folk music, funeral march and song – will be explored in the first half of the concert.
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 CriticsFilm
E Jean Carroll, the wisecracking journalist and TV personality who took the US president to court over sexual abuse claims, makes for a fierce and fascinating subject in this unshowy portrait
Wendy
Ide
Ask E Jean (91 mins, TBC) Directed by Ivy Meeropol; featuring E Jean Carroll
E Jean Carroll, the veteran journalist, advice columnist, TV personality and scourge of Donald Trump, has a personal motto: “Always amused, never angry.” The line, taken from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, is painted in hot pink on the mantel in her eccentrically decorated cabin in upstate New York. It’s a mantra that has likely been tested to its limits over the last seven years, since Carroll launched – and won – two civil lawsuits against Trump. Both cases stem from Carroll’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store changing room in the mid-1990s. At the time, she attempted to laugh it off. But this particular joke wore thin. And as this candid documentary reveals, the court cases unleashed what Carroll describes, typically vividly, as an “avalanche of slime”; her inbox and social media accounts were besieged by an onslaught of anonymous threats of violence, rape, death and other similarly unimaginative punishments for the perceived crime of standing up to the most powerful man in the US.
The story hit the headlines again recently when it was revealed that Trump had finally paid Carroll $5.6m (£3.7m) after being found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation in the first of two damages settlements awarded to her. The second settlement, for more than $83m, remains outstanding. But the problem with figures this substantial – as well as the loud and distracting presence of Trump himself – is that they have a tendency to dominate. So this enlightening documentary by Ivy Meeropol answers some of the questions that have been obscured: who is Carroll? Where did she get the courage to hold Trump to account? And why did it take her so long? There’s a kinship between this film and Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which balanced the biographical background details of its subject, the photographer Nan Goldin, against an account of a court case (Goldin’s crusade against the Sackler pharmaceutical family and their role in the US opioid epidemic). In common with Poitras’s picture, the subject of Meeropol’s documentary
her was confidence. With a mum like that, Caroll quips, you either grow up a wimp or a hardnose: “I was both”
‘A cross between the sassy heroine of a 1930s screwball comedy and a beat poet’: E Jean Carroll in Ivy Meeropol’s documentary.
is rather more distinctive and interesting than the style of the work. Ask E Jean is a solid, unshowy piece of factual film-making. The director (whose previous films include Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story, about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in 1953) blends archive items from Carroll’s long and varied career with more recent footage, including her private deposition from 2022. Some of the new material is exceptionally powerful: a recent conversation between Carroll and her best friend, Lisa Birnbach, in which they recall the immediate aftermath of the attack (Birnbach was the first person Carroll told) is revealing and sensitively handled. Other elements, such as an unfocused repeated motif of an escalator that punctuates Carroll’s account of the Bergdorf Goodman incident, are tacky and extraneous. Fortunately, Carroll is a fascinating and mercurial subject. She was raised in Indiana, the oldest of four children and the daughter of a strong-minded Republican politician mother, whose gift to her was confidence. With a mother like that, Carroll quips to camera, you either grow up as a wimp or a hardnose: “I was both.” With her comic timing and the jiving rhythms of her delivery, Carroll speaks like a cross between the sassy heroine of a 1930s screwball comedy and a beat poet. She won Miss Cheerleader USA; the camera loved her quirky energy and her corn-fed, all- American good looks. After a stint in gonzo first-person journalism for Esquire and Playboy, she grew her popular Elle magazine advice column into the cable TV show Ask E Jean. Her maverick, unconventional approach to chatshow hosting – Carroll spent a lot of time clambering over the set furniture and wisecracking to the camera – made the show a hit. But listening to her advice to guests – “Always press charges. Always” – makes for a jarring dissonance with her own experiences. What Carroll describes as a grin-and-bear-it boomer generational attitude towards sexual harassment finally crumbled in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It took a while, but Carroll’s eventual success in court was, she argues, a “win for every woman in the world”.
Brunello: The Gracious Visionary (127 mins, 12A) Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore; featuring Brunello Cucinelli
Giuseppe Tornatore, the Oscar- winning director of Cinema Paradiso, wrote the book on rose-tinted romanticism. He’s a film-maker who never met a tale of hand-to-mouth hardship that he couldn’t turn into unabashed nostalgia. His films are lush and melodramatic, exquisitely lit and strikingly cinematic. It’s not an approach that would seem an obvious fit for a documentary. But having crafted a reverent portrait of Ennio Morricone in 2021, Tornatore once again ventures into non-fiction with this lavish appreciation of the knitwear and luxury goods mogul Brunello Cucinelli, AKA the King of Cashmere. Like everything else in his high-end fashion empire, one suspects that this film has been impeccably and flatteringly tailored. Using Cucinelli’s prowess at the traditional Italian card game Scopa as a framing device, the picture lays out each chapter of the designer’s life like a winning hand. His impoverished childhood, on a farm without running water or electricity, is shown in honey-hued reconstructions; his feckless, card- playing adolescence is recreated with the young Brunello depicted as a lion-maned wastrel. His success in the fashion world, says Cucinelli, now a twinkly, well-preserved 72-year-old, was initially as much to do with his chutzpah as the product he offered. There’s a degree of myth-making at play. And Tornatore, with the backing of celebrity interviewees such as Oprah Winfrey and Formula One chief executive Stefano Domenicali, buys into it wholesale. But under all the glamour and the luminous magic hour cinematography is a singular business ethos: Cucinelli is an advocate for what he describes as “humanistic capitalism”, which involves fair working practices, generous wages and the ploughing of profits back into the local community. The jumpers may cost several thousand pounds a pop; the good publicity is priceless.
On the Sea
(111 mins, 15) Directed by Helen Walsh; starring Barry Ward, Lorne MacFadyen, Liz White
If circumstances had been different, Jack (Barry Ward) might have left his small, despondent hometown on the Welsh coast. He might have followed a career outside the family business instead of slogging with a rake and a bucket on the mussel beds. He might even have been able to live as an out gay man without having to endure
sneers and barely veiled hostility. But the wide open skies in his corner of the world belie the narrow horizons Jack faced. Having been married to Maggie (Liz White) for more than half his life, Jack starts to question things. Two factors shift his perspective: one is a cancer diagnosis (he is now in remission), the other the arrival of itinerant fishing boat skipper Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen). There’s an obvious kinship with Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country in this, the second feature film from novelist Helen Walsh. Both explore the collision of queer sexual awakening and repressed self- loathing; both unfold in working- class rural Britain, where masculinity comes with a rigid set of rules. The film’s dour tone is mirrored by its predominantly grey colour palette. But the raw desire between Jack and Daniel is sensitively evoked.
Animal Farm
(94 mins, PG) Directed by Andy Serkis; featuring Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi
Andy Serkis’s long-cherished passion project, an animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, trades the novel’s bleak outlook for an altogether more kid-friendly tone of buoyant optimism. And the film shifts its political target from Orwell’s grave warning about the dangers of communism to sound an alarm, instead, about rampant consumerism and the rise of divisive populism. Napoleon the pig (Seth Rogen) spouts self-aggrandising Trumpian rhetoric; one of the human baddies drives what looks like a Tesla Cybertruck. The aggressively adorable character design and broad humour can feel rather incongruous; Orwell purists will shudder. Still, there are worse ways for younger audiences to fill the school holiday.
production boasts a starry cast, but a fusty new adaptation lacks heart and vigour
Matt Barton
The Cherry Orchard Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; until 29 August
Kenneth Branagh may be regretting snapping his conductor’s baton when he was last on this stage, in a production of The Tempest, whose revels ended last month. He now finds himself bowing out at the end of his double-bill return to the RSC, after a 30-year hiatus, in a production of The Cherry Orchard that lacks tempo and vivacity. As you might expect from the finale of Branagh’s back-to-back season, distinguished guests join him for the occasion. Fellow veterans Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman play Madame Ranyevskaya and Gaev, the bankrupt siblings who return to their grand Russian estate to find it’s due to be auctioned off. Yet there is fustiness rather than frisson in the air. Benedict Andrews bracingly reupholstered the 1903 play at the Donmar two years ago, staging the characters’ tussle for their future on an expanse of carpet that allowed for a real pulling of the rug. But Tamara Harvey’s more pedestrian RSC production is saddled with a tepid and starchy new adaptation from Laura Wade, where characters remark: “How cripplingly banal!” British stagings have become famed for sentimentalising Chekhov, and particularly this play, which he designated a comedy. But Wade and Harvey overcorrect. Just as Ranyevskaya refuses to confront reality, this version constantly retreats into humour, sheepishly giggly about addressing the tragedy. Andy Rush’s Yepikhodov is used as the principal distraction in this awkward game of hot potato, dialling up his clumsy slapstick mishaps and clowning around in squeaky shoes.
‘Constantly retreats into humour’: Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman, and below, Kenneth Branagh in the RSC’s The Cherry Orchard. Johan Persson
The jaunty vaudeville music that plays over most of the second half only amplifies the skewwhiff tone. We see the family’s final hurrah as they dance blithely in the face of ruin, but there isn’t enough standoff tension between them and Branagh’s Lopakhin, who represents the oncoming Russian revolution sweeping their landed gentry aside. This is a man who’s waited patiently to avenge his father and grandfather’s enslavement on this estate, underscored here by Branagh’s age: at 65, he is older than most actors who play the character (Ian McKellen was 46 when he took the role at the National in 1985; Adeel Akhtar 43 in Andrews’s production). Speaking in his native Northern Irish accent, Branagh first shows Lopakhin trying to resist his lowly image as “a bear in a ballgown”, sucking in his brutish, puffed-out chest. He is instead so boyish and buoyant about his scheme to save the estate by selling off the beloved orchard that you half-expect him to start climbing one of the trees. We see the first streak of menace when he punches the beggar who startles the family. And when he announces his purchase of the orchard he intends to destroy, Branagh transitions from slur to snarl as a tempest of resentment rises. Ranyevskaya should be an equally formidable presence, but Hunt cowers to become a woman who appears emotionally, and financially, spent. She is too resigned from the start. When she talks of losing her heart, she doesn’t convince you she had one to begin with. Frowns work overtime to persuade us she cares. But we can’t access the instincts driving her, so her refusal to rescue the estate becomes clueless mismanagement instead of idealism. What does come through in place of precarity and peril is obsolescence and mortality. Michael Elwyn, playing the servant Firs, withers slowly in a grey-brown sack as if ready to be slung out. Pullman’s windbag Gaev squeezes out lines from his drowsy, dry-wheeze voice like the splutters of an old engine struggling to start. If Anna Fleischle’s set doesn’t convey the orchard’s renowned grandeur, it is wonderfully freighted with memory. Blots of watercolour create a suggestive outline on a gauzy back wall. It is faded and fading; a vision wrenched from and dissolving into the past. Either side, trees wrap around columns like children clinging to their mother’s leg, willing her not to leave them. But where Zoë Wanamaker’s Ranyevskaya at the National in 2011 moved through the space as if every step sent a shudder of heartbreak through her, remembering her young son who drowned in the orchard’s nearby river, Hunt doesn’t convey the pull of attachment. Instead, both the orchard and this production will be lost to time. You leave feeling the woman at the centre could have done more to save them.
Interview
T
the US: I like free speech’
In Marseille, the poet Claudia Rankine talks to Colin Grant about Black resilience, her mother’s death and the ‘hardness of now’
here’s something undeniably cool about Claudia Rankine, in keeping with the clear-eyed certainty of her writing, but the coolness is offset by the warmth of her welcome. Stepping on to the sunny balcony of her rented apartment overlooking the old port of Marseille, I ask her why she’s here. “Why is Trump president?” Rankine retorts, laughing heartily and unexpectedly, as she will throughout our conversation. “Seriously,” she explains, “I’m here because I like the concept of freedom of speech, and I can’t live in the United States, where I feel I have to monitor everything that comes out of my mouth.” Earlier this year, Marseille came close to electing a far-right mayor from the National Rally (formerly the National Front), and the same rage of fascism has flared in France’s second city as it has flashed across myriad towns and cities in the US. But for now, says Rankine, “I feel more embodied – I feel like I can be myself here”. The writer and public intellectual is so taken by Marseille’s culture and the comforting notion that “her people” (of the global south) make up a significant part of the diverse population that she’s in the process of buying a local property. Born in Jamaica in 1963, Rankine was educated in the literature of that island, but her life has been shaped by the culture and, increasingly, the culture wars of the US, where she has lived since emigrating at the age of seven to join her mother, a paediatric assistant, in the Bronx. With her fourth book of poetry, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Rankine pioneered the “American lyric”, mixing verse, essay and sometimes memoir and photography. She would go on to use this form to electrifying effect in Citizen (2014) and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), works that interrogate racial trauma and
bigotry, state-sponsored assaults
on citizen rights and the insidious
resurgence of white supremacy.
This last of these threats inspired
her, on receiving a MacArthur
fellowship in 2016, to establish the
Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), “a
multi-disciplinary platform engaged
with art and scholarship”, partly
focused on a study of whiteness,
its origins and legacy. TRII won’t
have endeared her to rightwing
revisionists in the US, who have
advanced absurd notions such
as the benefits of slavery to the
enslaved, but that’s hardly a surprise
to Rankine. “Repression of the real
is their white phosphorus,” says a
character in her latest book, Triage:
Truth, Art & Fiction, “a smoke screen
that torches the Constitution.”
Triage attempts to engage
creatively with the escalating state
of turmoil at home and abroad.
Rankine muses that she can’t recall
a darker period in her lifetime.
The catalyst for the book came
after the brutal assault in Iran on
Mahsa Amini, a young woman
who died after a “violent arrest” in
2022 for allegedly infringing hijab
regulations. “There was something
around the circumstances of her
death that made me start to write
a poem about collapse. That poem
was kind of a mess, but it sat there.
And it dovetailed into discussions in
the US around the end of abortion
rights, Jeffrey Epstein’s sordid past,
the #MeToo movement. And all of
those things came together with the
overt takeover of white supremacy
in the US. So, in that cauldron,
Triage became the product.”
As Rankine’s narrator asserts:
“Everything is on a collision course
with the hardness of now.”
Triage is a dizzying blend of
poetry, lyric essay, art criticism and
a sort of memoir with two central
characters: a Jamaican-American
narrator, an approximation of
Rankine, and her fearless Palestinian
compadre, “the theorist” (a
‘I lived with a very abusive father. You had to become small so that you weren’t seen’
composite of many women Rankine has known), whom the narrator first encounters when they’re students at college in America. The book charts their evolving friendship from university, through a lengthy separation, to a series of reunions in their 60s. As idealistic students, both had been alert to their country’s transgressions, sparking thoughts of counter activism. But whereas the anxious narrator never saw herself as an activist foot soldier (“I had been conscripted too young in a losing battle”), the theorist continued taking the fight to “the man”. “This moment has brought to the fore the
difficulty around things like Gaza, genocide, the silencing of students,” says Rankine. “Everybody is having to position themselves, causing rifts in friendships and families. And they’re asking themselves, can I keep company with this?” In composing Triage, “I thought of it as fiction”, adds Rankine. While this may seem a departure from her most recent books, even in her more straightforward nonfiction, she says, “the lyric lives alongside the biographical, fictional writing and political rantings”. Since 2004, she has been published in the US by Graywolf Press, with whom, for
Triage, she had the confidence to push the boundaries of genre even further. For the first time, she says, “I wrote, allowing myself to fail”. Though a hybrid that resists categorisation, Triage is also rooted in Antigone. Since her student days, Rankine has always wanted to rewrite Sophocles’ tragedy of the grieving Antigone who, ignoring her cautious sister Ismene’s warning, defies the King of Thebes in conducting a funeral rite for her brother. For her “treason”, Antigone is buried alive in a cave. In Rankine’s borrowing from Sophocles, the theorist is cast as a version of
week
Claudia Rankine: ‘We are not raised as a resistance. We are raised as capitalists.’ Photograph by Naima LeComte for The Observer
Christian Kracht Catherine Taylor on the Eurotrash author’s mesmerising parable about our precarious future
Antigone, and the narrator stands in for Ismene. “I wanted to bring Ismene to the fore because she has always been the silent majority,” explains Rankine. “She is those of us at home in agreement with what is being done by the likes of Angela Davis or Martin Luther King – but we’re at home. So, I wanted to bring a consciousness, a struggle, inside that character.” There’s always a tension when writing a memoir, even something that isn’t strictly memoir, between candour and self-protection or the protection of others. There are a few moments in Triage where Rankine edges towards revelation, such as the startling line, “I began wearing silver eye shadow and black mascara to make up for not being able to read the language of emotions.” I wonder whether Rankine is referring to her own emotion or others. “I had a childhood where I lived with a very abusive father,” she confides. “And in order to get through that period, you couldn’t act based on how you felt. You had to try to become small so that you weren’t seen.” In Triage, the relationship with the mother – a woman lacking in tenderness and not given to intervention – is also fraught. The narrator recalls “the cruelty [my mother] made room for in the lives of her children by simply doing nothing”. That notion of betrayal through passivity also features strongly in Just Us when Rankine attends the play Fairview with a white friend. At the play’s end, the African American actors invite white audience members to take to the stage, to invert their white gaze and put themselves under the spotlight daily felt by black people. The white friend clings to her seat. Rankine is dismayed and fumes at her betrayal: “I didn’t know you were black!” But now, in Triage, there’s an uncomfortable episode where Rankine turns the tables on herself, placing the narrator in a moral dilemma. When the theorist asks her to put up some refugees in her Berlin apartment, she squirms and demurs. It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the book, I tell Rankine. “That’s because it’s real,” she says. “In New York, I had friends who were approached when students were locked out of their dorm rooms. They were protesting, they went back, the doors were locked, they couldn’t get in. So faculty members were asked to house them, and some said no.” I wonder what they were scared about. “Well, it’s America; our privacy is everything, individuality is everything. We are not raised as a resistance; we’re raised as capitalists!” One of Rankine’s strengths is that, even with the heaviest subjects, she writes with beguiling ease, mirroring her erudite conversational language that’s always on the verge of being punctuated with (“I’m, like, whaaat!”) jokey colloquialisms. There is, though, not much room for humour in the book. The thesis, as
Information war Richard Ovenden on two books that show how our love affair with data has been co-opted by big tech
Jamaicans would say, “is not a joke, joke thing”. The theorist bristles with impatience about a world that is “quibbling about whom to grieve, while Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, the undocumented are under attack and that’s just the beginning”. Those victims conjure the unburied dead of Sophocles’ tragedy, and Triage ends on a bleak, poetic note, evoking Antigone: “All my clothes are black because I expect the world to soil me – The world soils me – The soil covers me.” T
here’s an elegiac quality that haunts the book, but Rankine takes exception to my assessment of its pessimism; rather, she argues, it’s simply an expression of the brutality of fact. But might it not also be that she is grieving the mother who did not express tenderness towards her as a child? Rankine reveals that halfway through writing Triage, her mother died. “And so, suddenly, she took over my grief, my questions… I think the clothes are black because we are in a moment of grief,” she says. “Everywhere you look at this point – the faucets are open [whether] it’s every August with the hurricane season in the Caribbean; a hundred- year war of Palestine; an intentional destabilisation happening in Africa now; the takeover of Venezuela.” She delivers her prognosis to me like a physician tasked with levelling with the patient. “There is no place that is steady, and it will not get steady when you have an environment that will necessitate movement and refugees, and superpowers who are intent on taking other people’s resources in defence of an environment they created.” Triage is built on two connected pillars: the inevitability of embracing a triage approach in prioritising your response to the endless spiral of worldwide conflict and tragedy; and the wisdom of letting go, of collapsing, at least temporarily, when your capacity is exceeded. But after the collapse, what comes next? When the world became too much for my mother, I tell Rankine, she would say: “I must have my cry. I have to have my cry.” And then the tears would come. She would not be sated, but she could start again. Rankine laughs in sad recognition of my memory. “No, that’s exactly it,” she says. “We have had such a long history, at least in the US, of rhetoric around taking it, bearing it, Black resilience. And I say: forget about that, actually face the devastation, face the disappointments, face the brutality, the violence, the reality, and grieve, fall, which is not to say you don’t rise up, but you cannot take it and carry it and expect to continue.”
Daisy Johnson The novelist on memory, cruel mothers and how the birth of her first child upended her writing life
Declan Ryan
But since it falls unto my lot/That I should rise and you
should not
‘The Parting Glass’, traditional
Mate, this is no way to go on. I’m not sure what you’re thinking leaving in such haste, although gentle you were never patient. The only person I’ve known who could render italics in speech; that sharp, rising emphasis, coloured by enduring a senseless world. I remember your talk of an early flatmate in the Withnail and Tindersticks Dalston ‘gardening’ period; his delicate sensibility required he ‘retire hurt’ by mid-afternoon. I wonder if you were hurt by going on from your legacies business.
We met at the turn of a century. How antique that makes a series of Farringdon bars and long, brown pie lunches sound, when it’s youth I’m talking about: mine a decade greener than yours - already a gaffer - inducting me into a still-smoking circuit of pubs and angular bands, who peaked at 21. I went to look for some trace of you in The Castle and sat in rainforest colours of a scrubbed unrecognisable upstairs. Only the door was the same. I waited again for your flat-footed stroll through, your pint untouched gold in mid-afternoon bar-light; it fell unto your lot.
Impossible to think this is permanent. Classic captain material, are we just supposed to take it, no longer look for you to stand in the way of trouble with your tall man’s gait. Once, having seen something I hadn’t, unusually stern, you said ‘don’t make me come to your funeral’. Yours was in th at honey-coloured city where I crashed for a term of Thursday nights, your last full year. Old talk, love admin, my ‘elevation by several social classes’ because I, too, owned a cafetière. Your key is in my bag. We sat, those kitchen Friday mornings, under a wall-spanning felt-tip menagerie. I was a boy at your table and you fed me.
Declan Ryan is a poet and critic in London. His
first collection, Crisis Actor, is published by Faber
as ancient history
modernist style mag in Christian Kracht’s mesmerising study of friendship and the perilous nature of existence. By Catherine Taylor
Air
Christian Kracht, translated
by Daniel Bowles
Serpent’s Tail, £12.99, pp192
Christian Kracht, who leapt to international fame with his 2021 novel Eurotrash, has been described as the “enfant terrible” of German- language writing. The Swiss author, who published his first novel in 1995, appears to have the gift of never writing the same book twice. Certainly Eurotrash – which takes the form of a riotous road trip around Switzerland, its protagonists a man and his alcohol- and pill- addicted elderly mother – is little preparation for Kracht’s latest tale. Air melds a semi-Arthurian quest in a medieval world that predicts
today’s climate crisis with the very 21st-century story of a designer hired by a lifestyle magazine to paint the subterranean interior of a data centre entirely white. These two improbable-seeming narratives are at first contrasted, then converge to make an engrossing work that is part science fiction, part parable. As the novel opens, Paul, a sought-after Swiss creative, lies asleep on a sofa in his minimalist cottage on Stromness, Orkney. He is dreaming. “It was a time when many things were bought and just as quickly forgotten,” Kracht writes. Paul’s dreams are filled with an empty Antarctic landscape, half remembered, but yet to be discovered. On a nearby wall hangs a painting by the artist James Archer of Merlin in a hooded white cloak leading Lancelot, exhausted, on a black horse, through a mountainous terrain. (The painting is real and will become highly symbolic as the book’s odyssey unfolds.) Paul is successful but listless. On waking, he accepts an emailed commission from a leading magazine, Küki, whose earnest articles centre on disappearing artisanal traditions and foraged food repackaged as hygge-type comforts for the wealthy – “a subtle shift from highbrow
modernist monthly to a mildly eccentric décor magazine that was very intentionally bringing about its own irrelevance”. Paul is to paint an “immense dark hangar in Norway … with hectoliters of white … there would be a great deal of money”. After travelling to Stavanger to meet Cohen, the enigmatic and nervy editor of Küki, “for whom cleaning up the reservoirs of collective memory seemed the only logical thing to do”, Paul undertakes his mission, where, during a solar eruption, he disappears. A sudden switch of time and
tone then takes us to a forest in a medieval European country. Here, a nine-year-old girl, Ildr, is fending for herself after her mother has succumbed to a plague known as the Yellow Death. Out hunting deer, she accidentally shoots a strange man with her bow and arrow, drags him to her nearby hut and heals him under his instruction, aided by a strange powder he carries with him. When soldiers from the court of the Duke of Tviot, tyrannical ruler of this northern place, come to look for the man, he and Ildr begin a tremendous journey south to find the Frozen Sea and safety, not before killing prodigious numbers of enemies along the way (the man, considered a “mage”, has a very un-medieval like gun) and subsisting on food items that, in the 21st century, are marketed as luxuries. Back in Stavanger, Cohen, distressed by Paul’s vanishing, takes an overdose of sleeping tablets and himself enters this medieval world but much further south in a place of ice floes and seabirds. Kracht has great fun with Air. There are sea battles, portentous comets, solemn exchanges and any number of tropes and archetypes employed in accounts of the present and past (which gradually coalesce towards a shared utopian future). Yet in its predictions and preoccupations, it is a deadly serious work about the sheer precarity of existence. Cohen looks ahead in horror to “no seasons, no trees, no people, no life”. Sudden time jolts and relocations recall the quantum transpositions of Alan Garner’s 1973 masterpiece Red Shift. The prose is translucent, in a mesmerising translation by Daniel Bowles, with the whole enterprise neatly underpinned by Kracht’s poignant emphasis on the very old-fashioned bonds of fealty and friendship.
Christian Kracht: never writes the same book twice.
Father-son relationships Chosen by Ashton Politanoff
Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis, translated by Lorin Stein (2019) In his memoir, Édouard Louis – partially inspired by Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life – plays with time and form to explore his complicated relationship with his father in diary-like bursts filled with raw and poetic language. With empathy and immediacy, Louis pinpoints the legislative, socio-economic and familial forces that have made his dad the man he is while showing glimpses of the man he could have been. This is a book that I assign to my students.
My Friends by Hisham Matar (2024) Although the title is My Friends, this novel also features a forced long-distance relationship between a Libyan-born son and father, thanks to exile and the Arab spring. The distance isn’t just spatial – the son, Khaled, is involved in an act of protest that ends tragically and which he must withhold from his father over the phone because of potential surveillance from the Gaddafi regime. Matar’s own father disappeared, and although My Friends is a work of fiction, you can feel the genuine love a son has for his parent in this haunting work.
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews (2006) This is one of my favourite short story collections and one of Bolaño’s best works. The title tale follows a teenage son and his father on vacation in Acapulco. Featuring iguanas, a tiny island, a mysterious woman and an ex-diver, it has the expanse of a novel packaged in a short story. In this existential coming-of-age yarn, Bolaño explores the disconnect between this machismo father and his sensitive son with tenderness.
Dad Had a Bad Day: A Novel by Ashton Politanoff is published by Daunt (£10.99). Order a copy from observershop.co.uk for £9.89 (10% off RRP)
A bill of
mortality from
17th-century
London, which
recorded the
causes of death
in every parish.
Inset: Carissa
Véliz.
Alamy/Pictorial Press
How data took over the world
information shaped our past. Will we allow surveillance capitalism to determine our future? By Richard Ovenden
Data Empire: How Information
Shaped Human History
Roopika Risam
Torva, £25, pp480
Prophecy: Prediction, Power and
the Fight for the Future, from
Ancient Oracles to AI
Carissa Véliz
Swift Press, £22, pp384
“Data is the new oil,” the mathematician Clive Humby said 20 years ago. It’s a statement that seems to have been borne out in the intervening decades, as data became a major element in the business model of big tech. With the rise of AI, its value is now of critical importance. Two new books take different approaches to the long history of data, and how we should consider its use now. In Data Empire, Roopika Risam adopts a global view of data’s backstory, starting with prehistoric cave paintings in southern France, and exploring the idea that humans are a “data species”. Throughout, the rise of empires, from the ancient world to the present, is linked to the use of data as a means of control. While not everything is data, Risam writes, it is everywhere. Her chronologically arranged chapters begin with a real-life “use case”. Thus we are introduced, in fictionalised scenes, to the royal court in ancient Babylonia, to Musa, the King of Mali, in 14th-century Cairo, and to the ruler of Tahiti in the 18th century, who encounters the botanist Joseph Banks. These are imaginatively brought to life, but aren’t really necessary, as the core story of how humans have sought out and used data over millennia is interesting enough. Risam, though, doesn’t engage enough with the surviving evidence, of which there is a surprising
amount. Tens of thousands of clay tablets from the ancient archives of Mesopotamia exist in museums and libraries around the world, and later sources of data are in even greater abundance: medieval building ledgers, taxation records in parchment rolls, paper account books. We are given tantalising glimpses: the tallies of grain in ancient Egypt, or the printed bills of mortality in 17th-century London, for example, where the numbers of people dying in each parish in the city, and more importantly the causes of death, were collected and published. Samuel Pepys used this data to avoid visiting parts of the capital with high levels of contagion. The book suffers from a key problem: lack of definition. “Data” is used variously to mean information and knowledge, and the varying forms of each are not clearly defined. Thus we are told about the House of Wisdom in medieval Baghdad, with its famous library, and about the importance of translation and the way that scribal copying helped disseminate ideas. But these books contained texts, which are (at least until recently) different from data. Where her account is strongest is in the final chapters, on our present world, in which the economy is now dominated by data-driven companies, with huge implications for society on how the info they trade in is derived. Amazon (especially Amazon Web Services), Google and Palantir are among the most recognised of these companies, but Risam highlights others such as Cross Match Technologies and Morpho, which are selling mass-population data surveillance “solutions” to governments across Asia, Africa and Latin America. These firms, she argues, remain hidden from democratic oversight. The new book from Carissa Véliz, a philosopher whose previous work has focused on online privacy, switches the balance from the historical development of data to its place in the present. Prophecy describes in detail the story of how humans have sought to predict the future. She deftly explores the historical development of prediction, looking at the birth of the algorithm (a term deriving from the Arabic scholar al-Khwarizmi, and which came to refer to mathematical rules in calculations) and the growth of insurance markets in early modern Europe, pointing out the similarities of
data is ‘replacing creativity, critical thinking and quality in too many endeavours’
these advancements with practices such as divination. “Part of what people are buying when they pay for a divination or insurance is peace of mind,” she writes. Véliz also charts the development of the use of data in government planning, highlighting the recent and rapid growth of government agencies using algorithms that “drink in surveillance data”. This is creating a huge financial boom for companies such as Palantir, which sell their services as well as data to governments, and can control the kind of predictions that this combination of data and algorithm is able to generate. In this way, Véliz argues, the balance of power is shifting. Governments started off employing big tech companies as outsourced agents for undertaking large-scale bureaucratic tasks, but we are now entering a phase in which the tables have turned: the state is becoming an agent of the ambitions of big tech. The ancient Oracle of Delphi is a recurring reference point for Véliz, and she posits AI as its modern successor, with the tech bros as the new prophets (Larry Ellison’s software company Oracle is a screamingly obvious case here). Her book is as much a warning as it is an analysis of our modern data predicament. The more we rely on personal data to feed AI, the closer we come to creating a police state through mass surveillance. More than this, as Véliz highlights, AI’s dependence on data is “replacing creativity, critical thinking and quality in too many endeavours”. For Risam, this same combination “dehumanises at scale”. What these titles agree on is that we are now in an era in which the power of data to influence our everyday lives is enormous – and most people are unaware of it. Véliz, a specialist on AI ethics, points out that we must not confuse prediction with truth. For Risam, “algorithmic intuition converts a correlation based on statistics into certainty … probabilities treated as fact”. Both books leave the reader asking questions about what we can do to deal with the new data regimes, whether controlled by the state or by big tech. Véliz argues that regulation can only be part of the answer. Our personal behaviour is ultimately the best response. She leaves us with 10 lessons in prediction at the end of Prophecy, urging us, for example, to prepare and not predict, and to increase our exposure to serendipity. The most important events in our lives, she argues, are likely to be the least predictable. The last of her lessons is the most appealing: “live well”.
Order Data Empire from observershop.co.uk for £21.25 (15% off RRP), and Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future for £19.80 (10% off RRP)
in the soil
sprawling poems commune with nature in spectacular style, while the prize-winning Dillon Jaxx finds humour amid reflections on illness and grief. By Jade Cuttle
The Dead One, the Unconscious
One, Thundering in Your Ear,
Thriving Slumber
Jay Gao
Carcanet, £12.99, pp98
like starlings falling
Dillon Jaxx
Nine Arches Press, £11.99, pp72
If trees could speak, what might they say and how? This question underlies Jay Gao’s strikingly original pursuit of “arborescent grammar” in his second collection, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber, a book that is clever in execution and brilliantly experimental too. While some insist “good poetry” is “tight and exact”, as The
By Chris Power
structure, but Henry Miller and Margaret Drabble were among those seduced by John Cowper Powys’s strange novel
A Glastonbury Romance
John Cowper Powys
Penguin, £18.99, pp1,200
John Cowper Powys’s sixth novel, A Glastonbury Romance, first published in 1932, begins with the relatives of Canon Crow descending on rural Norfolk for his funeral and – their true focus – the reading of his will. An unexpected bequest establishes a conflict between two residents of the Somerset town of Glastonbury: Philip Crow, an industrialist who wants to dominate nature with electricity and factories, and the preacher John Geard, companion to the Canon in his final years, who harbours a dream
London Magazine (established 1732) maintains, refusing “long, loose poems”, Gao dissents with fascinating results. Unusually, the book is published in landscape form, allowing sentences to sprawl like branches and using extra-long dashes to create spindly lines. At one point Gao fills a whole page with commas, forming a poetic bedrock: ground that “gets even more parenthetical, aerated” the deeper you dig. Like soil, each unit of verse has a porous quality, “exchanging endlessly”. The unliterary list is celebrated too, in an alphabetised mossy inventory. There are no titles to Gao’s poems, only lyrics bursting with linguistic innovation (“woodwarp”, “leaflight”, “woundwood”, “Woodmongering”), illustrating the inspiring “company of fruiting trees”. Gao, who has Chinese-Scottish heritage, is “writing in the language you promised your dead grandmother you would conquer”, and his ambitious project is realised through riddling wordplay. Language is on shaky ground; he unseats the definite article from its throne (“Weak oak, the”) and writes of “Pinning down berserk nomenclature first, ahead of glossing
of reinstating Glastonbury as a pilgrimage site. But describing this novel in such straightforward terms feels like misrepresentation. A Glastonbury Romance is set in the Wessex familiar from Thomas Hardy’s novels, but at the same time takes place in what may as well be another dimension. “Like Tolkien,” Margaret Drabble wrote, “Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.” Despite his own expectations of being awarded the Nobel prize, Powys was and has
civil birdsong”. Everything is “Warped windward”. This “corrupt pastoral” nonetheless offers an impressively faithful rendering of “untranslatable” woodland chaos. “The extant treeline is no line at all,” Gao insists. “No discrete points, just a coalition of surfaces and duration [...] No individuals. Only hyphenation”. Born in Preston, and raised in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Gao is now an “exiled overseas poet” in New York: he uses metaphors around “imported seeds” to question what is “non-native, uncommon, marginal”. As “roots smuggle noise into the fallow dirt shamefully”, Gao then reflects on queer desire. Each “queer tree [...] expressing their sex in glitches” raises questions around “lustral excess”. Imagine “two men beside the kissing gate”, he writes. “Who has reserve leisure to roam, to rove, to ramble, to range, ravage, ravish [...] To enjoy erotic land”? A fondness for fungi, some of which, including the Schizophyllum
Jay Gao’s ‘corrupt pastoral’ captures the rich chaos of woodland.
Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty
remained a cult figure – his brother, TF Powys, was the more popular writer in their day. Both are weird, but John’s weirdness is on an altogether more cosmic scale. Within the first couple of chapters of A Glastonbury Romance we have been plunged into the consciousnesses of John and Mary Crow, cousins and lovers, the corpse of Canon Crow (“Annihilation – how strange! A new conscious life – how strange!”), touched on the awareness of a divinity Powys calls “the First Cause”, and even experienced the language of trees: “All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug.” Yet Powys can also do exquisite social comedy. You never know where he might go next, and it seems he doesn’t either. His prose style is indefatigable, clause following clause following clause; his curiosity searching and his knowledge vast; he is completely indifferent to structure and pacing. These elements
commune, have more than 23,000 mating types, reinforces his rejection of traditional binaries. If poetry itself remains “trapped” inside narrow thinking, Gao suggests – “constraint coats your tongue like a savage fungus” – this book aims to set it free. He issues a “necessary and urgent” reminder on the “deep time” legacies we’ll leave behind, considering everything from “cyborg clouds seeded, by the parliament, with silver iodine”, to pesticides, herbicides, drones, extinction and the “legal standing” of woods. It’s a delightful reminder there’s always new ground to tread, even with themes as ancient as the trees. Queerness is also a focal point in like starlings falling by Sussex-based Dillon Jaxx, too, which begins in the 80s and 90s when “gay marriage [was] still growing in a petri dish”. Here, identity struggles are compounded by religious stricture (“christ on the cross looks away, ashamed”) between smothering
combine to swell A Glastonbury Romance to 1,200 pages, which is still 500 pages shorter than the original manuscript. Reading it is a journey of weeks, or even months. It took Henry Miller, a Powys devotee who rationed the experience, a whole year of “joyous sips”. The book is among the longest single-volume works in English, but despite its length, events that might be considered essential to the plot often take place in the gaps between chapters, referred to only vaguely at a later point. As noted by an academic devoted to the study of Powys’s work (a small but dedicated band): “The sense of excessive length in A Glastonbury Romance is only exacerbated by all of the things that are left out of it.” Long books can prompt resentment, especially among those who are paid to read them but not by the hour. You can hear the grudgingness in the first line of the TLS review from 1933: “Since Mr Powys’s novel is more than a thousand pages long and contains over 40 principal characters it will be possible to
frankincense clouds, congregation and confession. Despite speaking Italian, German and English, with “accents thick as bunker walls”, the speaker insists there are “not enough words to fill the empty tombs of our throats”, particularly when it comes to discussing their brother’s death – an event Jaxx describes as leading to them being “unbrothered” and losing a “brothertongue”. Jaxx dares to visit this “museum” of blacked-out memories, transforming them into objects, as grief bustles like “bailiffs” taking “body parts”. “I don’t expect to ever hear his voice again”, they confess, “but it’s possible he’s waiting to hear mine”. Their sibling is honoured through a moving sequence of “disappearing sonnets”, each beginning “my brother has a knife in his hand”. Explanations arrive with dramatic metaphors (“spreads himself on thin ice [...] too far out for us to reach”; “slices his life from ours in one clean cut”), before reaching a devastating conclusion: “now all of us are bleeding.” As Jaxx writes, “you can’t keep going through doors without closing any”. The poignancy of the collection is amplified by the poet’s experience of chronic illness and cancer treatment. Yet somehow there’s space for humour, smuggled between morbid reflections on mortuary workers making sandwiches and surreal stories of eating your tongue or pinning your face to a tree. Jaxx – selected by a panel chaired by Simon Armitage as winner of the 2024 Brotherton poetry prize – is definitely a debut poet to watch.
Order The Dead One… from observershop.co.uk for £11.69 (10% off RRP), and like starlings falling for £10.79 (10% off RRP)
sketch only the broad outlines of the story.” Another contemporary review seems tormented by Powys’s alternate strengths and weaknesses as a writer. “The novel fails brilliantly,” it concludes, “but it fails!” Given this, you may be wondering if it’s worth it. After all, most of us will probably only read a handful of books of this size in our lifetimes. The Brothers Karamazov or Infinite Jest? Middlemarch or Underworld? Should A Glastonbury Romance be in that conversation? I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly – it’s too obviously idiosyncratic and potentially maddening for that. But it does contain amazing things, and its oddities are of the sort that, for the right people, it will become one of the great experiences of their reading lives. I’ll take that over a competent 250 pages any day.
‘My new novel began as a scream’
the traumatic birth of her first child stopped her writing, and how watching her son learn to speak brought the words back. By Ellen Peirson-Hagger
Daisy Johnson, 35, is a British short story writer and novelist, who lives in Oxford. In 2018, aged 27, she became the youngest ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize for her debut, Everything Under. Across her books, which also include the novel Sisters and the story collections Fen and The Hotel, Johnson explores myth, the uncanny, and human connection to the natural world. Her latest novel, Long Wave, is a trippy tale that follows three generations of women – Edith, Ruth and Ori – in the same family, each coming to terms with what it means to be a mother and a daughter.
Long Wave is a multi-layered novel. What’s the idea at its core? When I was struggling with an early draft and couldn’t conceive of what it was about, I spoke to a friend. He talked to me about the image in the Sistine Chapel of Adam and God reaching out to one another [Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam]. There’s this space between their fingers. It became clear to me that it was a book about that – people trying to find one another. That really came about during Covid, during that period of epic isolation, fear and loneliness, which occurred for me at the same time as having children for the first time.
The book’s structure is surprising. How did you come to it? Memory isn’t linear and so life isn’t linear. Things reoccur and come back to us. It mirrors the experience of Ori having a very young child, and the disorientation and fragmentation of self that comes with that. I wanted it to have this exploded feel, and a tidal feel.
You depict cruel mothers and loving mothers. What did you want to explore by showing that spectrum? The turbulence of it, and also the humanity. When we become parents, we’re expected to know what to do. But we are so human, so fallible. Even Edith, who does something possibly unforgivable, does it out of a desperate attempt to do her best, to hold on to something that she cares about. I wanted to explore these characters trying as hard as they could. That was why
‘There’s power in saying the worst possible thing’: Daisy Johnson. Photograph by Ellie Smith for The Observer
the book then began to think about collective parenting – the idea of the village, which we need not just in parenting but in life.
How did your experience of becoming a mother influence the novel? The book did not come from a good place. I had no expectation at all that early parenting was going to be as hard as it was: we just don’t talk about it. With my first son, the birth was very traumatic. It was also during Covid, so there were limited times that my partner was allowed in the hospital. I had an emergency C-section, and then was pretty much alone with this baby who I didn’t really know how to look after. He did not sleep unless you were holding him upright. I’d never experienced anything like it, and it brought up a
and life isn’t linear. Things come back to us’
lot of anger, red rage, despair, fear. The reason the book took so long is that it began as a scream, and some of that scream is still in there. But the book changed as I got better, and as my son grew up, and when we had our second child and began to figure it out.
words. It was very frightening. I didn’t know whether it was going to come back. It felt like the person I had been was gone, and along with it any confidence about the words. I didn’t have the words to explain what was happening.
Were there friends you could turn to who had had similar experiences? No. Eventually I found a therapist, and began to talk about it to family and friends. There’s power in saying [aloud] the worst possible thing – the invasive thoughts, which I think are more common [than you’d expect]. The baby’s in your belly, and it’s safe, it’s part of you; and then it’s out in the world, and the person I was most afraid of was myself, and these violent, frightening thoughts that were in my head. It felt like that was not something I could say, and so you bury [these thoughts], and they rot inside you.
When could you write again? My process is always one of writing drafts very fast, and then getting rid of almost all the words. Within each published novel are seven novels, which have come and gone. But [with Long Wave] I would sit at the desk and nothing would come out, or it would but it was incomprehensible. It didn’t feel like the words were connected to my brain. Then when my son started learning to talk – his first word was “cheese” – and we were reading to him, that was a turning point. I went back to those books I loved when I was a child – Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Helen Cooper’s Pumpkin Soup, So Much by Trish Cooke – and was like, “Woah! Words are amazing.” He was finding his language as I was trying to find the language to write the book.
Did you find books that mirrored your experiences? Adrienne Rich was really important. Her book Of Woman Born is about community and the power of telling stories. And Olga Ravn’s My Work, which is about her experience of becoming a mother. Lucy Jones’s Matrescence blew my mind. And Women Talking by Miriam Toews. She talks about the book being an act of “wild female imagination”, because it’s imagining the women [characters who have been raped] being able to have the words to talk about escaping. That phrase became really important for me, because while I was having a very hard time and felt incomprehensible to myself, let alone to anyone else, I could see my book as an act of wild female imagination: maybe one day it’ll be OK, things will come together, and the connections will make sense.
26.07.26 Puzzles
, 6
6
This week’s question:
Who is painting whom (above)?
Answer next Sunday.
Across 1 Who wrote fantastic Gothic oeuvre, never wanting energy? (6,4) 6 Chooses, therefore, to go back to grasp point (4) 9 Agree to unnerve crew (5,5) 10 Finally obtained some delightful salami - here? (4) 11 Prepay and settle rent, prithee (6,6) 15 Completely forget number Lauren arranged (7) 16 Detectives who’ll prepare potatoes? (7) 17 Section of canon’s to play on a loop (3-4) 19 Old boy to wait at table and make remarks? (7) 20 Subject of a swan song? (4,8) 23 Title socialists avidly revoked, primarily! (4) 24 We come to work? Yes and no (6,4) 25 Principally, Everyman, more than once, pronouncedly moderate (4) 26 Made little effort: piano sharp (that’s one element) (6,2,2)
Down 1 Very big and very secure, but lacking function (4) 2 Sour-tempered type, conservative, upset drinking establishment (4) 3 Actor veered off and got upset about nothing (4-7) 4 Take courage and judicially try X (7) 5 Exhortation to make a nag depart? (5-2) 7 Red tea and ripe bananas in second home (4-1-5)
Last week’s painting, a respite from the heat, showed a figure in the French artist Gustav Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, from 1877. His biggest masterpiece, this monumental painting shows figures crisscrossing the Paris boulevards in a shower. Yet no actual rain is shown. In fact the sky appears almost luminously bright. The new paving stones gleam wet, and the figures all hoist one of the latest retractable umbrellas. The weather is implied by the elements of Parisian modernity and the angles are modernist too, with figures coming straight at us, cropped like the elements of a new- fangled photograph.
8 Bird sweeps up structure containing insects (7,3) 12 Players in starring roles the reader ennobled, we hear (5,6) 13 Flip over and unwisely flutter runt that’s not strong (4,6) 14 In announcement, manifest seams of ore as can be aerially transported (10) 18 Mischievous, like element of ice- hockey game? (7) 19 Partially uncoils kinks in outerwear (7) 21 General idea is tucking into G&T (4) 22 Eager to wail (4)
Name
Address
Postcode
Solvers are able to enter our crossword competitions online at:
www.observer.co.uk/puzzles or via email to: competitions@observer.co.uk
Paperless entry encouraged; postal entries will still be accepted.
Five randomly selected correct solutions will each win a £15 book token.
To enter the Everyman prize draw, submit a correct solution either online or by
post to: Everyman No. 4,162, The Observer, 22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP
Email entries must include the crossword name and number in the subject line
as it appears in print (e.g. “Everyman No. 4,162”). Entries without the correct
subject will not be accepted. UK residents 18+ only. Max one entry per person.
Closing date is Saturday following publication for online entries, postal entries
must be postmarked no later than the Saturday following publication and must
reach us within ten days of publication of the puzzle (i.e. by Wednesday week
following publication). Winners announced Sunday two weeks after publication.
For full T&Cs visit:
https://observer.co.uk/puzzles/everyman/article/crossword-prize-draws
5 1 7 1 3 4 6 7 9 3 2 1 9 4 6 8 3 1 4 7 6 3 9 3 7 8 6
SOLUTION No. 4,161 /
Everyman No. 4,160 Brian Bowie, Barnet, Hertfordshire Mike Daly, Ushaw Moor, Durham Bethan Davies, Aylesbury, Bucks Stephen Drew, Chandlers Ford, Hampshire Bill Reid, Belper, Derbyshire
Each week we show three stills. Guess the films in question and the director who connects them. (Bonus point if you can put them in chronological order.)
Fill in the blank cells using the numbers 1 to 9.
Each number must appear just once in every row, column and 3x3 box.
,
0 3
/
5 5 2 < 8
7 2 2 7 2 1 ( 6 2 : 1 + 2 5 1
( 1 1 6 6 2 3 ,
5 2 & . ( 5 6 ( 1 ' / ( 6 6
1 / ' ( / 1 2
$ 0 2 5 2 8 6 / < ' 5 $ : 1
8 8 ( 1
& $ ' ( 7 $ 1 7 , 3 2 ' ( 6
a
i
Name
Address
Post code
b
f
6 20 17 24 14
7 17 15 11
15 17
27 24 24 17
19 23 13 9
9 21 9 12
Normal Sudoku rules apply, except the numbers in the cells contained within grey lines add up to the figures in the corner. No number can be repeated within each shape formed by the grey lines.
e d
h
Beyond the print edition:
scan to subscribe to
The Puzzle Edit – exclusive
columns, setter insights
and a weekly clue
breakdown from puzzles
editor Caitlin O’Kane
16 12
2 1 4 5 3 9 6 7 8 5 7 9 2 6 8 1 4 3 8 6 3 4 1 7 9 5 2 9 8 5 1 7 6 2 3 4 6 2 7 3 9 4 5 8 1 3 4 1 8 2 5 7 6 9 1 3 6 7 8 2 4 9 5 7 5 2 9 4 3 8 1 6 4 9 8 6 5 1 3 2 7
Across 1 Australia contains a thousand seabirds (4) 4 Sitcom star (8, 2 words) 10 Chinese criminal’s son almost exposed source (9) 11 Animal occasionally found in middle of trekking canoe (5) 13 Long story requiring energy after introduction (5) 14 Perhaps put shrubs between ground elder and nut pine at first (12) 17 Briefly disparage a Roman house (6) 19 String instrument originally covered in extremely erodent yellow pigment (7) 20 Perennial American suspect (4) 21 Feel money in Iceland running short (4) 23 Spooner’s become famous for some tennis (7, 2 words) 25 Set forth conclusion of report in full (6) 27 Wonder Woman, having dismissed lead, sent this cast (12) 29 Ways to move Scottish children (5) 30 Irish girl provided that idea (5) 32 Not just April? Why not? (9, 3 words) 33 Unchosen knight once let out (8) 34 Vase that’s from ancient Egypt but can work (4)
Down 1 Certainly soft waste to give one locally (12, 5 words)
Diagram 1 In the classical section, can you see White’s idea, which either wins material or creates a winning attack? (See the end.)
The annual Biel Chess Festival is one
of the mainstays of the chess calendar,
now in its 59th year. Traditional it may
be, but it has long embraced chess960
(the variant in which the pieces start
jumbled on the back rank with certain
constraints) and in the past few years,
has moved away from purely classical
chess, adopting a “triathlon” of classical
chess, rapidplay and blitz.
After the three tournaments, the
top four, Levon Aronian (originally
Armenian, but now US) Aydin
Suleymanli from Azerbaijan, the young
Turkish superstar Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş
and Lê Quang Liêm (Vietnam),
contested a finale which finished on
Thursday. While the chess960 was
won by Matthias Blübaum (Germany)
after he defeated Suleymanli in a
play-off. Last Saturday I held an online
Q&A session for Markham Chess Club
in Yorkshire and apropos one of the
questions, looked at the current top 20
(from the list on 2700chess.com). They
include four Americans, three Indians,
two each from Uzbekistan, China and
Holland, and seven others, Magnus
Carlsen among them.
Although there are more Americans,
India is currently widely regarded as the
world’s strongest country. Last week,
finishing on Wednesday, four of their
top players took on four very strong
foreigners in a formidable tournament:
the Quantbox Chennai Grand Masters.
Alireza Firouzja finished clear first
3 2 1 4 4 1 4 3 1 3
2 Free country welcoming national poll (6) 3 Runner hides missing poles (3) 4 Again take weapons back before noon (5) 5 Avoided prison, not quite caught in act (8) 6 Senior rabbis with article in Times (6) 7 From the case’s quality bats, retain 21 (10, 3 words) 8 Extraordinary feature of previous answer (4) 9 Basics of pleasure: mistress with new bed support set up (12) 12 Approval somehow isn’t lost by government (10) 15 German warship about to be destroyed when other part of EU is involved (5) 16 Red mark round aperture in Australian plant (8) 18 What covered Roman soldier’s face when climbing (5) 22 Periodic table-related (6) 24 Man United touring Liechtenstein: cold, but not too bad (6) 26 Shadow Home Secretary going around centre for injured (5) 28 Chat about shape of Cheerios cereal (4) 31 Couple caught by rising window tax (3)
The Chambers Dictionary (2016)
is recommended.
on 4.5/7 ahead of Dmitry Andreikin and Arjun Erigaisi on 4; Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Pranesh Munirethinam and Nihal Sarin on 3.5; Hans Niemann on 3 and world champion Gukesh Dommaraju on just 2.
Nihal Sarin v Nodirbek Abdusattorov Chennai 2026 Sicilian 2 Bc4
1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 Bc4 Nf6 4 d3 Once
thought to be very harmless, this has
been popularised by Magnus Carlsen
among others. White hopes eventually
to set up a pawn centre akin to what
you get in King’s Pawn openings with
c3 and d4 . 4...Nc6 5 0–0 g6 6 c3
Bg7 7 Re1 0–0 8 a4 This deters d5
for the moment because if 8...d5 9
exd5 Nxd5 10 a5! is annoying but
8 a4 weakens b4 so perhaps White
could try 8 Bb3 b5 9 h3 Bb7 10 d4 e6
which is roughly equal. 8 ...b6 9 Bg5
Bb7 10 Nbd2 e6 11 Bb3 h6 12 Be3
Qc7 13 h3 Rad8 14 Nf1 If 14 d4 cxd4
15 cxd4 Nb4 is strong. By this stage
White would much prefer to have
played a3 rather than a4.
Diagram 2
14...e5! Blocking White’s e pawn and
preparing to play Na5 and c4.15 Qc1
Kh7 16 N1h2 Na5 17 Bc2 c4! 18 dxc4
Bxe4 With the removal of the e4 pawn,
Black has the clear and strong plan
of arranging to advance his f pawn.
19 Nd2 Bb7 20 Qd1 d521 cxd5 Nxd5
22 Qc1 f5! 23 Ndf3 Nc4 24 Bb3 Rfe8
25 Qc2 e4 26 Nd4 Ne5 27 Nf1 Nd3
This “octopus” is a monster. 28 Red1 a6
29 Bd2?! Running into a haymaker.
4 1 4 1 3 3 2
1 3 2 2
C 1 O 2 M 3 P A 4 C 5 T I 6 F 7 I E 8 D 9
Y X A 10 B N O R M A L L Y
B 11 Y R E T R S 12 P I N A N
E M I M 13 I N K S 14 T O N E
R 15 E N I N U I K H C 16 E P 17
P 18 L A T O C 19 N I D A T U
E B 20 D 21 I V O T S 22 E R I 23 C
T 24 O E E 25 E P I C 26 R E M E
L 27 O O P L I G H T F P L
A H 28 A O M 29 A H O O 30 R R A
M 31 A R C H S T O N E O G
B 32 I S H O P S L E E V E
[golf club], 26 C REME, 27 LOO PLIGHT, 28 HAM around O A, 30 (w)ORRA(l), 31 R in (MATCHES ON)*, 32 BISH O SL in PEEVE.
Down: 1 (TEC around (PRE BY))<, 2 ((possib)LE MYXO(matosis))<, 3 MADE around (R IN A), 4 dd, 5 CO(sta) (RICA UPON), 6 (w)IMP, 7 FOURTH with AI for OUR, 8 (t)ALENTE(d), 9 “DINE”, 12 SKINT (THIS G)*, 14 (IS C HO) in SKOL, 16 CA REFEREE - E, 17 (EG ALE CUP)<, 20 BOO HAI(l), 23 IMP VOR<, 25 COPE< H, 27 LAM B, 29 (i)MHO.
Rules and requests To enter the Gemelo prize draw, submit a correct solution either online at: https://observer.co.uk/puzzles, via email to competitions@observer.co.uk or by post to: Gemelo No. 42, The Observer, 22 Berners Street, London W1T 3LP
Email entries must include the crossword name and number in the subject line as it appears in print (e.g. “Gemelo No. 42”). Entries without the correct subject will not be accepted. Paperless entry encouraged. UK residents 18+ only. Max one entry per person. Closing date is Saturday following publication for online entries, postal entries must be postmarked no later than the Saturday following publication and must reach us within ten days of publication of the puzzle (i.e. by Wednesday week following publication). Three randomly selected correct solutions will each win a £25 book token. Gemelo No. 42 winners to be announced Sunday 23 August 2026.
For full terms and conditions visit: https://observer.co.uk/puzzles/everyman/article/crossword-prize-draws
Gemelo No. 39 prizewinners M Cutter, Poole, Dorset W Drever, Kings Norton, Birmingham K Manley, Sydenham, London
Diagram 3 29...Nxf2! 30 Kxf2 e3+ 31 Kg1 If 31 Nxe3 Nxe3 32 Bxe3 Rxe3! is crushing e.g. 33 Kxe3 Qg3+ 34 Kd2 Bxd4 35 cxd4 Qf4+ 36 Kc3 Rc8+ 37 Bc4 Rxc4+! 38 Kxc4 Qc7+ and 39 Kd3 Be4+ or 39 Kb3 Bd5+ 31...exd2 32 Rxd2 Nf4 33 Rf2 Nxg2! 34 Ne6 Or 34 Rxg2 Rxd4 35 cxd4 Bxd4+ 36 Kh1 Qxc2 37 Bxc2 Re2 and wins 34...Rxe6 35 Bxe6 Nh4 36 Qe2 Qc6 37 Ng3 Re8 38 Re1 f4
Diagram 4 Here, White resigned. I suppose he could have tried 38...f4 39 Ne4 (39 Rxf4 Rxe6! wins) Rxe6 40 Rxf4, but simplysimply 40..Nf5 should win pretty easily with not only a material advantage but also a continuing attack.
In diagram 1 20 Rxf4! Shattered Black’s defences 20...Qxf4 If 20...Bxf4 21 Nh5 Bh2+ 22 Kxh2 Qxf3 23 Nxf3 the two pieces should win against the rook. 21 Qd3 Black cannot now defend the diagonal because if 21...g6 22 Nxe6 21...Rfd8 If 21...Rfe8 22 Qh7+ Kf8 23 Re1 (threatening Ndf5) g6 (or 23...Be5 24 Nf3 Bf6 25 Nh5) 24 Bxg6 Qf6 25 Nxe6+ Rxe6 26 Rxe6 Qxe6 27 Qh8+ Ke7 28 Qxa8 wins easily. 22 Qh7+ Kf8 23 Ndf5! Ke8 Or 23...Bxf5 24 Nxf5! Qh2+ 25 Kf1 Ke8 26 Qg8+ Kd7 27 Rd1+ Ke6 (27...Kc8 28 Ne7+) 28 Bb3+ Kxf5 29 Qxf7+ and mate soon follows 24 Nxg7+ Ke7 25 Nxe6 Kxe6 26 Bf5+ Ke7 27 Re1+ Be5 28 Re4 Rd1+ 29 Kh2 Rh8 The best chance, hoping for 30 Qxh8?? Qxe4! 30 Rxf4 Rxh7 31 Re4 Rg7 32 Rxe5+ Kf6 33 f4 and Black resigned.
a c g d f
h j
Gemelo uses a
cryptic shorthand for answer
explanations which can be
viewed at: https://observer.
co.uk/puzzles/gemelo/article/
gemelo-key
Across: 1 COMED(y) around (PACT IF I), 10 (MAY BALL)* around (NO R), 11 (clu) B (rivalr)Y (fo)R (stev)E, 12 SPIN A, 13 TONE after MINKS, 15 (bea)N in REIN, 16 (re)CEP(tionist), 18 (A LP)< TO, 19 C (N A) around ID, 21 DIVO(rcee) (hos)T(ile), 22 SERI(f) C, 24 TOME - M(an)
1 Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş (to play) v José Martínez
2 Nihal Sarin v N. Abdusattorov (to play)
3 Nihal Sarin v N. Abdusattorov (to play)
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 Puzzles
Bear or bare – which is correct? A) I can’t bare you B) It was a bare-all story C) He walked around bear naked D) There were other facts to bare in mind
Regarding my twin boys, which is considered correct? A) My 18-month-old boys are a delight B) My 18 month-old boys are exhausting C) My 18 month old boys are noisy D) My 18-months old boys are full of surprises
Which apostrophe is considered correct? A) He was three weeks’ old B) Nurse’s salaries are too low C) Come to our’s tonight D) We leave in two days’ time
Which word is spelled correctly? A) Infinitesimel B) Minascule C) Meglamaniac D) Ginormous
Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right. Goldilocks clues exclude enumerations; in a mid-sized crossword, they only make an already compact puzzle more straightforward. The enjoyment lies in lateral thinking, grid observations, and the distinctly modern British vernacular. Play the Goldilocks archive online by subscribing at observer.co.uk
Across 1 Flat stone 5 A few 9 Shell for a Tuesday takeaway 10 Former Persia 11 Ctrl-Z command 12 Honey drink 13 2026 Kane Parsons film 15 Man cave, often 16 2026 Curry Barker film 22 Tell it to the judge 23 Waterloo quartet 24 Bluish green 25 Throw out, with force 26 Final figures 27 Swollen bump on the eyelid
1 ( : 6
% / ( : 2 * 5 (
B) The end of the world Eschatology is the field of theology concerned with the “last things” (from Greek éschatos, meaning “last”), specifically the end of the world and humankind. The Oxford English Dictionary specifies the four “last” things as: death, judgment, heaven and hell.
Which sentence is considered correct? A) She waited with baited breath B) We jibed on our first date C) She would extract revenge D) His performance didn’t pass mustard
Which holiday destination is spelled correctly? A) The Carribean B) Columbia (South America) C) The Phillipines D) Reykjavík
Lucky dip bonus question 7. What is eschatology the study of? A) The art of escape B) The end of the world C) Ancient faeces D) Impossible numbers
Down 1 Hurt, as a toe 2 Vicky’s Trigger Point role 3 Band whose lead guitarist wears a schoolboy’s uniform 4 Novel business agreements? 5 Commanding game 6 Biscuit with a twist-and-dunk ritual
A word about… Pleonasms
The English language can be a confusing business, but sometimes it takes things too far. Do we really need flammable and inflammable to mean the same thing? And how about loose and unloose, bone and debone, thaw and unthaw? It seems gratuitously unhelpful that these opposite-sounding words should be synonyms, but that’s English for you. Will the language ever be licked into shape? Fat chance, or thin – take your pick. With “inflammable” the prefix at least has Latin history behind it; with “unthaw” and “debone” the prefix is pure freight. The same can be said for “irregardless”, in use since the 1840s and annoying people ever since. The technical term is “pleonastic affix”, an example of the broader vice of pleonasm, the sin of using more words than necessary. If your ire is roused by the modifiers in “free gift”, “advance warning” and “added bonus”, then pleonasms of another kind are what is troubling you. Many pleonasms bring duplication to perfectly serviceable
7 Queen’s subsequent address 8 Concludes 14 High ___ 16 Picks, with “for” 17 Chicken cordon ___ 18 Clothing line 19 “Sounds about right!” 20 Comply with 21 Ted Lasso gaffer Shelley
Quiz answers 1. B) It was a bare-all story “Bare” means “naked” or “uncovered”; and “bear” refers to the large furry mammals, or enduring or carrying something. The correct sentences should read: “I can’t bear you”; “He walked around bare naked”; and “There were other facts to bear in mind.” 2. A) My 18-month-old boys are a delight 18-month-old is the correct way to hyphenate these words, unless you have 18 boys who are a month old, but they wouldn’t be twins. 3. D) We leave in two days’ time “Days” takes an apostrophe because it’s possessive — the time for two days. The other sentences should be: “He was three weeks old”; “Nurses’ salaries are too low”; and “Come to ours tonight” (possessive pronouns never take an apostrophe).
words and are the bane of the copy editor’s life. In phrases such as “cease and desist”, “aid and abet” or “null and void” the repetition has become an accepted literary formula that passes unnoticed because it sounds fancy and familiar, but many more are used needlessly. And annoyingly. And unnecessarily. From first beginnings to final outcomes, and past history to future plans, the pleonasm archive is full of surplus modifiers. Just give them the day off. Sure sure, a pleonasm can also be a powerful literary device, where the repetition creates emphasis, even poetry. But not while waiting for the ATM machine or ordering tuna fish for lunch. So unless you’re delivering a rousing speech, let us proceed forward (!) with care and rid the world of over-wordiness.
Joshua Blackburn is the author of The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia (Bloomsbury, £14.99). Order for £13.49 from observershop.co.uk. Delivery charges may apply
4 5 6 9 1 4 2 6 3 3 5 1 3 6 8 9 2 4 5
5 1 6 3 4 7 2 8 9 4 7 2 9 6 8 5 3 1 3 9 8 5 2 1 7 6 4 9 6 1 4 8 5 3 7 2 7 3 5 2 9 6 4 1 8 8 2 4 7 1 3 9 5 6 2 8 3 6 7 9 1 4 5 1 5 9 8 3 4 6 2 7 6 4 7 1 5 2 8 9 3
3 2 8 4 5 6 1 7 9 6 5 7 9 1 2 3 4 8 4 1 9 7 3 8 2 6 5 1 8 4 3 7 9 6 5 2 5 3 2 6 8 1 7 9 4 9 7 6 5 2 4 8 1 3 8 6 1 2 9 5 4 3 7 7 4 5 8 6 3 9 2 1 2 9 3 1 4 7 5 8 6
Goldilocks SOLUTION No. 34
7 2 2 7
$ 5 ( $ ( 1 9 <
% $ % < 1 $ 0 ( 6
6 7 2 1 ( ( 5 0
) 2 5 0 6
8 5 / ' $ 6 + ,
6 2 , 7 6 6 $ , '
6 2 6 2 1 ( ( '
Scan to subscribe to The Puzzle Edit – the weekly newsletter from puzzles editor Caitlin O’Kane
Every row, column, and 3×3 box must contain the digits 1–9, plus an extra twist – the four highlighted 3×3 blue squares together form an additional set of boxes, which must also include 1–9 with no repeats
m
n
n
c
n
t
whose husband opened their relationship on a swingers’ site is sensitively handled but deeply disturbing
h
he
in
an
ly
st
la
re
di
Ma
Sawyer
BBC Radio Wales/BBC Sounds
Radio 6 Music Indie Forever
BBC Sounds
series Swingers, made by the talented investigative journalist Catrin Nye, has been dominating the podcast charts over the past few weeks, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a gripping true life tale, sensitively but
oc
ar
k)
ue
Audio
26.07.26 33
ding
makes clear from the start, extremely upsetting and very sexually explicit. “We’re not sanitising disturbing details or the language used,” says Nye. “They’re an important part of the story.” The story is Ruth O’Grady’s. Described as “smiley” by an old teaching colleague, O’Grady (pictured) is from a small town in north Wales. She returned there after graduating from university and met Chris, a barman. They initially seemed to be a good match, though O’Grady says that, sexually, things could be a bit rough. After a few years, he pestered her into opening up their sexual relationship to involve other people, and they joined FabSwingers, a popular swingers’ site (FabSwingers says it has robust safeguarding measures to prevent abuse). On the site, O’Grady was designated a “hot wife”, meaning a married woman who has sex with men other than her husband. Everything detailed in this series
Sc
Sha
sha
by I
ton
Pad
for free access to our Culture Club 10% off tickets to the best of theatre
£800 worth of benefits tailored for the culturally curious
not been prosecuted and has not responded to the producers. O’Grady says he wasn’t directly involved in the swingers’ sex: instead, he instructed what should happen to her in the encounters and got her to film them. He had rules: choking, slapping, hair- pulling and misogynistic abuse were OK; punching and scratching were not. O’Grady went along with this. At the time, she’d been signed off work, Chris was her official carer, and these traumatising sexual encounters became what she did, up to five times a day. She began to break down physically and mentally. Though Nye tries to give the subject air by attending a female- run swingers’ party in Liverpool, complete with dungeons and torture equipment, and by interviewing a man who has used the FabSwingers website (he cries), it’s O’Grady who stays with you. She says many men who had sex with her never really acknowledged her – they only spoke to Chris. When she eventually leaves and goes to the police, they investigate but decide not to prosecute Chris for coercive control. Although there are texts from O’Grady where she says
to continue with the sex, there are also others where she professes enthusiasm, or where she sets up the encounters herself. Aside from the grim specific details, the series concerns itself with the complications of consent and what that actually means. There are enlightening conversations with experts, one of whom explains: “It’s quite possible for people to appear to consent to sex they don’t want.” O’Grady says she decided to use her real name in this podcast because of the case of French rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot. “Everyone said: ‘I can’t believe, all these men, they’re just ordinary men – I can’t imagine anything like that,’” says O’Grady. “And I got really, really angry because I know it’s everyone … Your postie, your sparkie, your plumber, your county councillor, your policeman, your teacher, your landlord.” Swingers is a tough series to absorb (I had to take breaks) but it is, I think, an essential one. Radio 6 Music has a new side station, Indie Forever, which launched on Wednesday. It focuses
from the 1980s to the 2010s (not much grime or soul, dance fans), and is perhaps a way for the BBC to prise listeners away from streaming playlists, as well as snaffling some of Absolute Radio’s traditional indie-loving audience. The flagship programme, The Morning Session, runs from 10am until midday, and is hosted by Felix White and Steve Lamacq. White is the guitarist of the Maccabees, but also an affable and experienced presenter who co-hosts cricket podcast Tailenders. Veteran 6 Music host Lamacq is as familiar to this audience as every track from the Stone Roses’ first album. They’re nice together, even if, in the first outing, there was a slight feeling of Lamacq interviewing White. The show promises to mine 6 Music’s assets, including its The First Time With … interview strand, old documentaries and live sessions. Other programmes are almost all music, not much chat, and the whole station is an easy alternative for those who don’t like their indie too alternative.
l H
and many more at
observer.co.uk/culture-club
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 Television
Monday Tuesday Wednesday
Pick of the Day The Rapture BBC One, 9pm Paralysed in a crash that killed her husband, Ruth Madeley’s grieving psychologist Dr Gabs Fox has no respite with her new psychiatric patient. Belligerent teenager Bethany (India Amarteifio), sectioned for matricide, maintains her innocence and prophetic ability, and won’t rest until she gets justice. With turmoil in the community over the climate crisis, Bethany’s frenetic scribblings and her unnerving knowledge of Gabs’s past, this intriguing five-part thriller thrums with tension. KR
Force of Nature ITV1, 7pm It’s time to consider how the climate crisis is affecting wildlife in this six-part series. Stunning footage captures animals’ ability to endure the extremes, starting with a tornado-hit owl going underground to protect her chicks in the American Midwest, and water-averse cheetahs swimming for their supper in a flooded Maasai Mara. KR
Aitch: Don’t Be Afraid Netflix Facing a far tougher challenge than any bushtucker trial, rapper Aitch – real name Harrison James Armstrong – climbed Mount Kilimanjaro last year in aid of the Down’s Syndrome Association, raising over £160,000. This documentary charts the arduous trek, as well as highlighting Aitch’s inspiration for doing it: his beloved younger sister Rosie. KR
Film The Forgiven (John Michael McDonagh, 2021) Channel 4, 10pm The latest film from the writer-director of The Guard, this sly dramatic provocation suggests Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky reframed in a White Lotus satiric perspective. Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain, both superb, play a world-weary couple driving to a rich friend’s Moroccan castle when they fatally run down a young Berber man. While privilege might seem to provide a free pass, the husband agrees to accompany the dead boy’s father on a journey to face his responsibility. Based on Lawrence Osborne’s novel, the film tweaks the cliches of colonialist exoticism, with a fine cast matched by Larry Smith’s memorable photography, which makes deceptive play with the Condé Nast Traveler gloss. JR
Pick of the Day Furious Disney+ Elizabeth Meriwether (The Dropout, Dying for Sex) created this eight-part thriller inspired by 1987 film Black Widow. Emmy Rossum is an FBI agent investigating a female serial killer stalking men – including the coked-up lawyer played by Rob Delaney (Catastrophe) – in New York. Irish actor Lola Petticrew (Say Nothing, Trespasses) is chilling as the vengeful antagonist. Her first victim: a judge and billionaire’s son she calmly dispatches between visits from kids at Halloween. Trick and treat. CMc
Who Do You Think You Are? BBC iPlayer “Being an immigrant is a form of performance… It’s all about survival and surviving.” Another chance to see award-winning actor and all-round good egg Adeel Akhtar exploring his Indo-Kenyan roots. His ancestors’ strong work ethic, social conscience and zeal for providing girls with an education is a source of great pride and emotion. KR
Street Cops: Catching the Yobs 5, 8pm The upbeat narration doesn’t detract from what is a bleak reflection of parts of UK society. The second series opener is full of standard criminal activity in Northampton, from selling drugs to drink-driving, with the added horror of a police officer being put in a headlock and an unmuzzled XL bully being set upon two others. Grim. KR
Film Hope and Glory (John Boorman, 1987) BBC Two, 11.05pm British director John Boorman placed his indelible stamp on the 1960s and 1970s as one of mainstream cinema’s most inventive rethinkers of genre, in films such as Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur. Hope and Glory was a more personal, tender offering: an autobiographical comedy-drama inspired by his memories of living through the blitz in London. Sebastian Rice-Edwards is 10-year- old Billy, caught up in the excitement of events that are only a source of dread for his parents (Sarah Miles, David Hayman). Later, in leafier surroundings, he gets to know his grandfather, played by Ian Bannen, whose performance was just one of the elements that had critics raving. JR
Pick of the Day The Vampire Lestat BBC Two, 9pm A shapeshift worthy of the undead. With a change of name from Interview With the Vampire, a wildly OTT third season of the horror thriller (adapted from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels) reincarnates the protagonist played by Sam Reid (The Newsreader) as a Michael Hutchence/Iggy Pop rock star. Lestat is hiding in plain sight in a band pretending to be vampires – until his draining of a groupie high on MDMA and LSD means reality bites. Sex, drug- blood and rock’n’roll. CMc
Gomorrah: The Origins Sky Atlantic, 9pm Naples, 1977: riddled with rats, infant mortality, disco music and illicit gambling dens. Enter superfly mobster Angelo the Siren, a hero to 16-year-old Pietro Savastano and his gang of wannabe hoods. Here, over six punchy, vibrant episodes (two tonight), are the beginnings of the mafia kingpin who bossed the first two series of Gomorrah. CMc
Cold Case Forensics: The Death of God’s Banker ITV1, 9pm Forensic scientist Dr Angela Gallop returns, reflecting on more mystery-shrouded investigations. In 1982 Roberto Calvi was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. Would a banker with connections to the mafia, masons and Vatican – and a devout Catholic – really have killed himself? Ten years later, Gallop set to work, with far-reaching revelations. CMc
Film The New Boy (Warwick Thornton, 2023) BBC Two, 11.05pm Here’s a haunting, enigmatic fable from Warwick Thornton, the Australian director who specialises in bringing Indigenous experience to the screen. Addressing the historic policy whereby Indigenous children would be systematically alienated from their culture, the film is set in the 1940s, in a rural orphanage run by Sister Eileen (a magnetically ambivalent Cate Blanchett). One day a new pupil is delivered to her; known only as “New Boy” (Aswan Reid), he proves resistant to being changed, and his singular powers soon subvert the establishment’s apparently stable order. Thornton’s films usually have a steelier edge, but the magical realism works effectively here, rooted as it is in harsh national realities. JR
By Craig McLean, Kay Ribeiro and Stephen Armstrong
Films by
Jonathan Romney
Pick of the Day Katie Price: Nothing to Hide Sky Documentaries, 9pm This insightful documentary series has elicited myriad emotions, ranging from frustration at Price’s inability to learn from her mistakes, to sympathy for her genuine trauma. In this concluding part her children Junior, 21, and Princess, 19, detail their distress at seeing their mum’s breakdown, including a suicide attempt, following husband Kieran Hayler’s infidelity. As Junior, wise beyond his years, heartbreakingly says: “It was the most difficult time of our lives.” KR
Derek Jacobi Remembers...
I, Claudius BBC Four, 10pm
Fifty years after its broadcast, the actor recalls
the era-defining BBC adaptation of Robert
Graves’s novel. He wasn’t the first choice to play
the Roman emperor. “Charlton Heston was,”
Jacobi told me in May, “and Ronnie Barker was
second.” Mindboggling, although “that was
when they wanted two Claudii, young and old”.
Followed by t-t-t-two episodes. CMc
Murder 24/7 BBC One, 9pm “I’ve killed my ex-partner. I stabbed her to death in the bed.” Despite that 999 confession, officers have work to do in Killer in the Home, the fourth episode of the series documenting all angles of West Mercia police investigations. Why the suspect did it, and how he planned it, affect charging and sentencing. Grimly compelling. CMc
Film Pearl (Ti West, 2022) Film4, 11.15pm The centrepiece of Ti West’s retro horror trilogy, and by far the best of the three. A prequel to 2022’s X, it is nevertheless a standalone story, an authentic essay in American gothic. Pearl is a lonely young woman living on a Texas farm in 1918 and cherishing showbiz fantasies as she waits for her husband to return from war. As her dreams crumble, Pearl’s psyche erupts. At once bleak and witty, it’s a film of real craft and intelligence, pastiching sunny Hollywood styles all the better to plumb the darkness. An extraordinary Mia Goth gives one of the most virtuoso, and disturbing, performances in recent American cinema, right up to the audacious, chilling final shot. JR
Friday Saturday
Pick of the Day Benidorm Is Murder 5, 9pm Having parodied the character in A Touch of Cloth, John Hannah now plays a past-his- prime detective in this sun-kissed cosy crime drama. Dennis, a dour ex-copper turned publican, is cajoled into sleuthing by perky waitress Rosa (Carolina Bécquer). Episode one features a potentially murderous beef within tribute act Mis-Take That. Hannah is the main draw, with Dennis and Rosa’s dynamic and his love-hate relationship with Inspector Hernandez (Ariadna Cabrol) providing the entertainment. KR
The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke BBC2, 9pm Mormon mumfluencer Ruby Franke’s life guru Jodi Hildebrandt is now under the microscope. Hildebrandt’s coaching had a distinct anti-man undertone that caused tension in Ruby and Kevin’s marriage. Moving into the Franke family home after being “haunted by Satan”, Hildebrandt exerted further power, with shocking consequences for the children. KR
Renovation Rescue Channel 4, 8pm Series two of the lifestyle show gets a major facelift. DIY queen Stacey Solomon is replaced by Vogue Williams and Love Island’s resident heating and plumbing engineer, Luke Mabbott. Newly engaged Wendy and Garreth have spent £60,000 on a botched garage conversion – now, as their wedding funds drain away, they need help. KR
Film Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021) Film4, 1.50am French writer-director Audrey Diwan won the Golden Lion at Venice with this forceful adaptation of L’Événement, the 2000 autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux. France, 1963: Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is a student navigating the treacherous waters of early-1960s assumptions about gender roles and sexual mores. Discovering she is pregnant, she seeks an abortion, facing unsupportive reactions from peers. Social realism with a harsh edge, attentive to the complexities of its era, with an extraordinary performance from Vartolomei: Happening pulls no punches, emotionally or visually. Given the current onslaught on abortion rights, it couldn’t more urgently be a film for our own era. JR
Pick of the Day Grimsburg Sky One, 9.30pm Pot-bellied, flatulent, drunken, absent father, hobbyist crafter of mid-century- modern doll’s house furniture – here’s Jon Hamm as we’ve never seen him. That’s because he’s animated, playing detective Marvin Flute in this wisecrackin’, roguishly rude adult cartoon series. His disgraced cop is called back to solve a gruesome murder on the mean streets of Grimsburg (“the town I left behind like a perfectly timed elevator fart”). And, maybe, fix his family. Mad Man, meet mad dad. CMc
Our Lives: The Last Miner in the Band BBC One, 7.30pm In County Durham, Easington Colliery Band have been the sound of the community for decades, performing at the funerals of all 83 men killed in the 1951 pit disaster. But as a 75th-anniversary concert approaches, with Peter Lawson – the only former miner still playing – unwell, will they be a trumpet blast from the past? CMc
Elgar at the Proms BBC Four, 7pm The composer who perhaps is the Proms gets his flowers. This programme features a new performance of his First Symphony, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth and performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Plus an archive performance by Sheku Kanneh-Mason of the Cello Concerto. Pomp in the appropriate circumstances. CMc
Film The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940) 5Action, 11.05am Among his westerns, the versatile William Wyler was best known for 1958’s The Big Country, with all the grandeur that suggests. This is a smaller-scale, altogether larkier affair: it stars Gary Cooper as a drifter who arrives in the Texas town of Vinegaroon, and tangles with the local lawman and saloon keeper – an unpredictable autocrat, incarnated by genre mainstay and peppery character player Walter Brennan. He plays the real-life figure Roy Bean, notorious as a hanging judge, and in this film, as in reality, he is an avid admirer of the English actor Lillie Langtry – which triggers the unusual climax. Brennan steals the show from a likable, muted Cooper, winning his third Oscar as best supporting actor. JR
Pick of the Day Calvin Harris: Live from Scotland BBC One, 10pm Twenty years ago, Calvin Harris was a gangly former M&S shelf-stacker from Dumfries singing wonky electro-pop and uncomfortably fronting his own band. Now he’s arguably the biggest DJ-artist in the world, with over 80 million monthly Spotify listeners and a catalogue studded with billion-stream bangers made with Rihanna, Dua Lipa and Ellie Goulding. This homecoming show at national stadium Hampden – one of two this weekend – will, then, go off. No Scotland, no party, etc. CMc
Monty Don Remembers…
Geoff Hamilton BBC Four, 8pm
Thirty years after Geoff Hamilton’s death,
Monty Don remembers the Gardeners’ World
presenter loved for his down-to-earth style.
Continuing the celebration of Hamilton’s
legacy, reruns of two classic Gardeners’
World episodes, concluding with another
chance to see Geoff Hamilton: A Man and His
Garden – The Barnsdale Story at 9.20pm. KR
Hitler’s Games: Berlin
1936 in Colour Channel 4, 8pm
Authoritarian, egomaniacal leaders
glomming on to global sporting spectacles:
it’s not without precedent. Ninety years
ago, the Führer used the first televised
Olympics as propaganda to mask his true
intentions. Triple-gold-winning black
American athlete Jesse Owens proved the
obvious lie of Aryan supremacy. CMc
Film The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015) Film4, 6.15pm Fair enough, Matt Damon faces a tough time slugging across the seas in The Odyssey, but he’s really out on his own in this sci-fi survival drama, from the novel by Andy Weir. Scripted by Drew Goodard, who also wrote this year’s Weir adaptation Project Hail Mary, it presents a refreshingly pragmatic spin on peril in space. It’s about an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, who must not only survive but also find a way to signal his existence to Earth. Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristen Wiig are among the Nasa people clenching their jaws determinedly, while Damon pulls out every regular-guy stop as his hero faces the unthinkable with improbable good humour, and a potato-heavy diet. JR
Picks of the Week
It’s Batman week in streamerland, perhaps in homage to Christopher Nolan – who pitched the Dark Knight as no god, just a man. The original Batman comics were noirish and violent. The idea that Batman didn’t kill came much later. Batman: Caped Crusader (season two, Prime Video, Friday) goes halfway to that original dark detective vision. The animated series incorporates salty language, twisted crimes and intense violence. Characters are routinely shot, stabbed, poisoned and turned into spirits through mystic rituals. It toys with Batman as a vigilante hunted by the cops. But it still cycles through the familiar villain-of-the-week cast. Season two shows promise – there’s more mob boss villainy than cartoon masks at the outset as Batman dismantles Rupert Thorne’s crime empire. For fans of Rick and Morty it’s been a difficult few years, with creator Justin Roiland facing charges of domestic violence and false imprisonment that were dropped, and then facing further allegations of sexual assault. The antics of cynical mad scientist Rick Sanchez, voiced by Roiland, have lost their appeal. Fortunately, President Curtis (HBO Max, tomorrow) – neither created by or voiced by Roiland – has his own spin-off. Described in Rick and Morty as a politician who thinks he’s Batman (you see what we did?), a Potus too busy staking angry vampires to manage the political day-to- day of his job is promising. Keep telling yourself this is a toon. It’s got Rick and Morty energy, it’s not a huge leap forward, but it has the potential to grow. US network ABC has been running documentaries under the 20/20 brand since 1978. In 20/20: Britain’s Most Notorious Crime Investigations (Disney+, Thursday) it’s over here and investigating our crimes for us – starting with the case of Ben Needham, the toddler who vanished on the Greek island of Kos in July 1991, and then moving on to the already solved murder of Joanna Yeates, and then the Ben Field murders (made into a chilling Timothy Spall drama in 2023) and… well, you get the picture. It’s not Batman, it’s not Panorama, it’s just true crime. Wonder if that’ll ever take off… SA
You want it darker? Batman: Caped Crusader Courtesy of Prime
6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.0 News (T) 10.0 Prayer and Reflection (T) (R) 10.30 Pilgrimage: The Road Through North Wales (T) (R) 11.30 Money for Nothing (T) (R) 12.15 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 1.0 News (T) 1.15 Songs of Praise (T) 1.55 Lifeline (T) 2.05 The Mating Game (T) (R) 3.05 FFFFDolittle (Stephen Gaghan, 2020) (T) 4.35 Homes Under the Hammer (T) (R) 5.35 News (T) 5.50 Regional News (T) Weather 6.0 Celebrity Escape to the Country (T) (R) 7.0 Countryfile (T)
8.0
Antiques Roadshow (T)
(R) Fiona Bruce presents
the show from Sefton Park
Palm House in Liverpool.
9.0
The Rapture (T) New
series. Psychological thriller
starring Ruth Madeley. A
psychologist is assigned
to treat the daughter
of a religious leader.
10.0 News (T) 10.25 Regional News (T) Weather 10.30 FFFFI Am Legend (2007) (T) Sci-fi starring Will Smith. 12.0 Who Do You Think You Are? (T) (R) 1.0 Weather for the Week (T) 1.05 News (T)
6.0
Breakfast (T) 9.30 Animal
Park (T) (R) 10.15 Trace,
Track, Get My Car Back (T)
(R) 10.45 Expert Witness
(T) (R) 11.15 Homes Under
the Hammer (T) (R) 12.15
Bargain Hunt (T) 1.0 News
(T) Weather 1.35 Regional
News (T) 12.0 Money for
Nothing (T) 2.45 Escape
to the Country (T) (R) 3.45
The Bidding Room (T) 4.30
The Travelling Auctioneers
(T) (R) 5.15 Pointless (T) (R)
6.0 News (T) Weather 6.30
Regional News (T) Weather
7.0 The One Show (T)
7.30 EastEnders (T)
8.0
Panorama (T) Current
affairs programme.
8.30 Scam Interceptors (T) (R)
Fraudsters try to fool a
woman into buying them
a new mobile phone.
9.0
The Rapture (T) Drama
series. Gabs tracks down
the mystery woman in
Bethany’s drawings.
10.0 News (T) 10.40 Who Do You Think You Are? (T) (R) With Toby Jones. 11.40 FFFFThe Lady in the Van (Nicholas Hytner, 2015) (T) 1.20 Weather for the Week Ahead (T) 1.25 News (T)
6.25 A to Z of TV Gardening (T) (R) 7.05 Glorious Gardens from Above (T) (R) 7.50 Countryfile (T) (R) 8.50 Best of Weatherman Walking (T) 9.20 Beechgrove Garden (T) (R) 9.50 Saturday Kitchen Best Bites (T) 11.20 Indian Food Made Easy (T) (R) 12.20 FFFFOperation Crossbow (1965) (T) 2.15 Cricket: The Hundred (T) Trent Rockets Women v London Spirit Women. 6.0 Cricket: The Hundred (T) Trent Rockets Men v London Spirit Men (Start-time 6.0pm).
9.30 Live at the Apollo (T) (R) Mock the Week chairman Dara O Briain comperes the popular comedy show at London’s iconic Hammersmith Apollo. He warms up the audience before introducing routines by stand-up stars Felicity Ward and Mo Gilligan
10.0 FFFFTaxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) (T) Drama. 11.50 FFFFThe Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) (T) 1.50 Sign Zone: Do You Know Your Place? (T) (R) 2.20 Sign Zone: Ann Droid (T) (R)
6.30 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 7.15 Animal Park (T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone: The Repair Shop (T) (R) 9.0 News (T) Headlines. 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth from Space (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) Game show. 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Global Eye (T) 7.30 Mastermind (T) Quiz show.
8.0 Only Connect (T) The Sinistrals take on the Merseyside Eyes. 8.30 University Challenge (T) Quiz show. University College, Oxford takes on St John’s College, Cambridge. 9.0 Evolution (T) This edition of the documentary series tells the story of the bat.
10.0 Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (T) (R) 10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather 11.05 FFFFHope and Glory (T) 12.55 Sign Zone: Countryfile (T) (R) 1.50 Bergerac (T) (R) 2.35 Sign Zone: Lifeline (T)
6.0 James Martin’s American Adventure (T) (R) 7.0 James Martin’s Saturday Morning (T) (R) 9.25 News (T) 9.30 Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh (T) (R) 11.30 Fern Britton: Inside the Vet’s (T) 12.30 Tom Kerridge Cooks Italy (T) (R) 1.0 Love Your Garden (T) (R) 1.55 News (T) 2.10 FFFFLive and Let Die (1973) (T) 4.30 The Chase Celebrity Special (T) (R) 5.30 The Chase Around the World (T) (R) 6.30 News (T) 7.0 Force of Nature (T).
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Gabby has a medical after collapsing. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Steve hears of Cassie’s plot to discredit Ross. 9.0 The Dark (T) The killer escapes while Monica is distracted by saving Philly, while Nichol tells Barclay about Bethany’s affair.
10.0 News (T) Weather
10.20 Terror in the Skies:
Stopping the Liquid Bomb
Plot (T) The thwarted
2006 terrorist attack.
11.30 The Assembly (T) (R) Quiz.
12.30 Shop on TV Bargains.
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.30 News (T) Weather 1.55 Local News (T) Weather 2.0 Dickinson’s Real Deal (T) (R) 3.0 Deal or No Deal (T) Game show. (R) 4.0 Tipping Point (T) (R) Quiz show. 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Quiz show, hosted by Bradley Walsh. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) Weather 7.30 Fletchers’ Family Farm (T) Marnie heads to market to pick a Jacob ram for her flock and Kelvin focuses on the breeds that bring in money.
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Kev is keen to make a good impression. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Jodie’s unexpected arrival overshadows Harper’s welcome-home party. 9.0 The Dark (T) The killer’s identity is discovered. Last in the crime drama series, starring Laura Donnelly.
10.0 News (T) Weather 10.45 TikTok: Murder Gone Viral (T) (R) Last in the series. 11.40 Love & Death (T) (R) 12.40 Shop on TV 3.0 The Staircase (T) (R) 4.05 Unwind with ITV (T)
6.20 The King of Queens (T) (R) 7.10 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 8.30 The Simpsons (T) (R) 10.0 Sunday Brunch (T) 1.0 Jamie Cooks the Mediterranean (T) (R) 2.05 The Dog House (T) (R) 2.50 George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces (T) (R) 3.55 Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive and Kids (T) (R) 5.0 Britain’s Favourite Railway Stations with Si King (T) (R) 6.0 News (T) Headlines. 6.30 Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix Highlights (T) Action from the 11th round.
9.0 The Piano (T) Claudia Winkleman and Mika arrive at York Station, where they’re joined by internationally acclaimed jazz pianist Hiromi. Among those taking to the public piano are Britain’s oldest pub landlord, who gets the whole station singing.
10.0 FFFFThe Forgiven (John Michael McDonagh, 2021) 12.15 FFFFStand By Me (1986) (T) 1.45 FFFFCorpus Christi (Jan Komasa, 2019) 3.40 The Simpsons (T) (R) 4.50 The Dog House (T) (R)
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) With Scarlett Moffatt in Dictionary Corner. 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz uncover a rare motorcycle. 7.0 News (T) Headlines.
8.0
Dover 24/7: Britain’s
Busiest Port (T) Storm
Amy heads to Dover
where high winds blow a
cruise ship off-course.
9.0
24 Hours in A&E (T)
At Queen’s Medical
Centre in Nottingham, a
23-year-old woman has
had a riding accident.
10.0 Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives (T) Reality series. 11.05 999: On the Front Line (T) (R) Documentary series. 12.05 Secrets of the Celebrity Sex Tapes (T) 12.55 The Showjumper Murder (T)
6.0
Milkshake! 9.0
Entertainment News
on 5 (T) 9.10 FFFFThe
SpongeBob Movie: Sponge
Out of Water (2015) (T) 11.0
Commonwealth Games
2026 (T) (R) 12.0 Happy
Campers: The Caravan
Park (T) (R) 1.0 Cruising
with Susan Calman (T) (R)
3.0 Into Death Valley with
Nick Knowles (T) (R) 4.0
Into Death Valley with Nick
Knowles (T) (R) 5.0 Lisbon
with Michael Portillo (T)
(R) 6.25 News (T) 6.30
When Beach Holidays Go
Horribly Wrong (T) (R)
8.0
Dogs Behaving (Very)
Badly (T) (R) Graeme Hall
meets a potential future
therapy dog for a school.
9.0
Tour de France 2026 (T)
Rebecca Charlton presents
all the latest action from
the final stage of the Grand
Tour race, a 133km route
from Thoiry to Paris.
10.0 Commonwealth Games
2026 (T) Highlights.
11.05 Boris Johnson: Into
Ukraine’s Kill Zone (T) (R)
12.25 Cops (T) (R) 12.55
Entertainment News (T)
1.0 Cruise TV(T) (R)
6.0
Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy
Vine (T) 11.30 Storm &
Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T)
12.50 Matt Allwright (T)
2.20 FFFFShe Is Not Your
Daughter (Jeff Hare, 2022)
(T) Thriller starring Alicia
Leigh Willis. 4.0 Castle (T)
(R) 4.55 Love Nature (T)
(R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Jersey
and Guernsey (T) (R) Last
in the series. 6.55 News
(T) 7.0 Motorway Cops:
Catching Britain’s Speeders
(T) (R) PCs Billy Stead and
Nathan Saltmer are on the
tail of a possible cloned
BMW. 7.55 News (T)
8.0 Street Cops: Catching the Yobs (T) New series. Following police responding to an emergency distress call from a colleague. 9.0 The Crow Girl (T) Detective series. A body buried in woodland leads Jeanette to the dysfunctional Burkeman family.
10.05 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) Highlights. 11.05 Police: Night Shift 999 (R) 12.05 Traffic Cops (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV (T) (R) 2.0 Murder Scene: The Incident Room (T) (R) Documentary.
Force of Nature, ITV1, 7pm A look at animals’ battle for survival as the climate emergency intensifies
7.0
The Golden Age of Liners
(T) Paul Atterbury recalls
the heyday of ocean
liners, revealing a story
of design, politics and
tragedy as he finds out how
great ships captured the
public’s imagination.
8.0
John Wilson at the Proms
(T) Katie Derham presents
as the Sinfonia of London
performs a programme
brimming with colourful
orchestration under the
baton of artistic director
Wilson. The concert opens
with Verdi’s overture to
La Forza del Destino.
10.0 Not I (T) With Billie Whitelaw. 10.15 The Entertainer (T) 12.15 The Levin Interviews: John Osborne (T) 12.45 Searching for Sam: Adrian Dunbar on Samuel Beckett (T) Documentary.
Street Cops: Catching the Yobs, 5, 8pm Northamptonshire police officers continue their crackdown on crime
7.0
Atlantic: The Wildest
Ocean on Earth (T) The
natural forces that underpin
life in the Atlantic, from
massive penguin colonies
in the South Atlantic to
the bizarre creatures
found down below.
8.0 Treasures of Ancient Greece (T) Western civilisation’s love affair with Greek art. Last in the series. 9.0 Egypt’s Lost Cities (T) Dallas Campbell and Liz Bonnin join Dr Sarah Parcak on a journey to Egypt to find out what wonders may be lying beneath the sands..
10.30 Becoming Frida Kahlo (T) 11.30 The Secret Life of the Mona Lisa (T) 12.30 Atlantic: The Wildest Ocean on Earth (T) 1.30 Treasures of Ancient Greece (T) Documentary.
6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.30 Animal Park (T) (R) 10.15 Trace, Track, Get My Car Back (T) (R) 10.45 Expert Witness (T) (R) 11.15 Homes Under the Hammer (T) 12.15 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 1.0 News (T) 1.35 Regional News (T) 1.45 News (T) 2.0 Money for Nothing (T) 2.45 Escape to the Country (T) (R) 3.45 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 4.30 The Travelling Auctioneers (T) (R) 5.15 Pointless (T) (R) 6.0 News (T) 6.30 Regional News (T) Weather 7.0 The One Show (T) 7.30 EastEnders (T)
6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.30 Animal Park (T) (R) 10.15 Trace, Track, Get My Car Back (T) (R) 10.45 Expert Witness (T) (R) 11.15 Homes Under the Hammer (T) (R) 12.15 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 1.0 News (T) 1.35 Regional News (T) 1.45 News (T) 2.0 Money for Nothing (T) 2.45 Escape to the Country (T) (R) 3.45 The Bidding Room (T) 4.30 The Travelling Auctioneers (T) (R) 5.15 Pointless (T) (R) 6.0 News (T) 6.30 Regional News (T) Weather 7.0 The One Show (T) 7.30 EastEnders (T)
8.0 The Great British Sewing Bee (T) The contestants recycle T-shirts and make outfits with an eco-message. 9.0 Murder 24/7 (T) How five men were convicted of the murder of 23-year-old Aurman Singh, a DPD driver killed in Shrewsbury.
10.0 News (T) 10.30 Regional News (T) Weather 10.40 FFFFBlinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019) (T) Coming-of-age drama. 12.30 Weather for the Week Ahead (T) 12.35 News (T)
10.0 News (T) 10.30 Regional News (T) Weather 10.40 FFFFEye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015) (T) Thriller. 12.15 The Hit List Celeb Special (T) (R) 1.0 Weather for the Week (T) 1.05 News (T)
8.0 The Repair Shop (T) (R) The experts restore a mandriola that once belonged to folk musician Vin Garbutt, two chairs, a pilot’s cap, and a retro neon pinball machine. 9.0 Murder 24/7 (T) The investigation into the fatal stabbing of Cheryl McKenna in Worcestershire.
6.30 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 7.15 Animal Park (T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone: The Great British Sewing Bee (T) (R) 9.0 News (T) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth from Space (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Rick Stein’s Food Stories (T) (R)
8.0
Amazing Hotels: Life
Beyond the Lobby (T) (R)
A luxury hotel in Ibiza.
9.0
The Vampire Lestat:
Interview with the Vampire
(T) New series. Lestat
recounts what led to a
brutal hotel confrontation.
9.45 Live at the Apollo (T) (R)
10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather 11.05 FFFFThe New Boy (Warwick Thornton, 2023) 12.35 Sign Zone: Natalie Cassidy: Caring Together (T) (R) 1.05 Bergerac (T) (R) 1.55 Do You Know Your Place? (T) (R)
Jamali Maddix hosts.
6.30 Money for Nothing (T) (R) 7.15 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone: Great Railway Journeys (T) (R) 9.0 News (T) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth from Space (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Celeb Antiques Road Trip (T) (R)
8.0 Saving Lives at Sea (T) (R) The Newhaven crew make a desperate attempt to rescue a yachtsman in difficulty near some rocks. 9.0 The Gunpowder Plot: Lucy Worsley Investigates (T) (R) The historian examines the plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
10.0 Inside No 9 (T) (R) A new
teacher arrives at a school.
10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather
11.0 Uncanny (T) (R)
12.0 The Devil in the Family:
The Fall of Ruby Franke (T)
(R) 12.55 Sign Zone (T) (R)
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 News (T) Weather 1.20 Local News (T) Weather 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) Coverage of day one of the meeting, including the Goodwood Cup. 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Quiz show, hosted by Bradley Walsh. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) 7.30 Inside the Langham: Britain’s First Grand Hotel (T) Wedding planner Meri pulls out all the stops.
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 News (T) Weather 1.20 Local News (T) Weather 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) Coverage of day two of the meeting, including the Sussex Stakes. 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Ellen, Ben, Dan and Ange compete. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) Weather 7.30 Deal or No Deal: Banker’s Best Battles (T) Claire and Leon’s time facing off with the Banker.
8.0
Emmerdale (T) Billy and
Dawn begin to bond.
8.30 Coronation Street (T)
David and Shona confront
Jodie over the contents
of her trinket box.
9.0
Cold Case Forensics: The
Death of God’s Banker (T)
New series. A look at the
death of Roberto Calvi.
10.0 News (T) Weather 10.30 Local News (T) Weather 10.45 FFFFBad Boys (Michael Bay, 1995) (T) Thriller. 1.0 Shop 3.0 The Staircase (T) (R) 4.05 Unwind (T) 5.10 Dickinson’s Real Deal (R)
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Joe unsettles everyone by calling an impromptu lunch. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) A family celebration for Ross’s birthday proves too much for Cassie to bear. 9.0 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (T) (R) Big-prize quiz, with Jeremy Clarkson.
10.0 News (T) Local News
10.45 FFFFLive and Let Die
(Guy Hamilton, 1973) (T)
1.05 Shop 3.0 Love & Death (T)
(R) 4.0 Inside the Langham
(T) (R) 4.25 Unwind 5.35
Tom Kerridge Cooks Italy
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) Progress in the Dordogne is slow for Nick and Nicole. 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz put thousands on the line for a deal. 7.0 News (T)
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) Flora, Faraz and their family shop for a boat at Whilton Marina. 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz find a classic 33 Ford. 7.0 News (T)
8.0 Hotel Chocolat Unwrapped (T) New series. Behind the scenes at the chocolatier as it attempts to expand. 9.0 The Undeclared War (T) Thriller, starring Adrian Lester. Barbara crosses paths with her ex-boyfriend Nicky Chan after he reappears in London.
10.0 Gogglebox (T) (R) 11.05 First Dates (T) (R) 12.05 Naked Attraction (T) (R) 1.05 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 1.55 The Piano (T) (R) 2.50 FFFFAmerican Refugee (Ali LeRoi, 2021)
8.0 Extraordinary Extensions (T) New series. A couple transform their west London home into a Great Gatsby-inspired palace. 9.0 The Undeclared War (T) Danny is worried about Barbara’s erratic behaviour. The Chinese malware continues to cause havoc.
10.0 24 Hours in A&E (T) (R) 12.05 Murder Case: The Digital Detectives (T) (R) 1.0 Dover 24/7 (T) (R) 1.55 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 2.50 Britain’s Most Expensive Houses (T) (R)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFMystery of the Dead Nanny (Brittany Underwood, 2022) (T) Thriller starring Nicolette Langley. 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) A tour of the popular island. 6.55 News (T) 7.0 The Yorkshire Vet: At Home with the Greens (T) (R) Two of Britain’s oldest working farmers. 7.55 News (T)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFMemories of Murder (Damian Romay, 2023) (T) Thriller starring Andrea Bogart. 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) Cameras explore Malta’s olive groves, and one of the country’s stately homes. 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Car Pound Cops (T) (R) A quad-bike rider is flagged down. 7.55 News (T)
8.0 Inside Longleat (T) In the historic Secret Garden, the team tries to manoeuvre a bronze sculpture. 9.0 The Crow Girl (T) As Jeanette and Sophia dig deeper into Victoria’s past, their relationship grows closer, and Amar shares important information.
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) Highlights. 11.05 Accused: Guilty or Innocent? (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV (T) 2.0 Building the Impossible (T) (R) 2.50 Malta: Jewel of the Med (R)
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) Highlights. 11.05 Cause of Death (T) (R) 12.05 A&E After Dark (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV (T) (R) 2.0 Catch Me If You Can (T) (R) 2.50 The Jewel of the Med (R)
8.0
Casualty 24/7: Every
Second Counts (T)
Paramedics rush in
71-year-old Enid for the
second time in a week.
9.0
The Crow Girl (T)
As Jeanette manages the
fallout from Lou’s actions,
Victoria seeks revenge.
Last in the series.
Gomorrah: The Origins, Sky Atlantic, 9pm Francesco Pellegrino stars in the crime drama prequel
7.0
Great British Railway
Journeys (T) Michael
Portillo’s journey takes him
over the Tay to Dundee.
7.30 Walking with Monica
Galetti (T) The chef takes
in the dramatic landscapes
of the North York Moors.
7.0 Great British Railway Journeys (T) Michael Portillo travels to Uttoxeter from Liverpool. 7.30 Walking with Jim Moir (T) The comedian explores the Kent coast as he walks down to Dungeness.
8.0 Keeping Up Appearances (T) Sitcom. Daddy wants to join the Foreign Legion. 8.30 One Foot in the Grave (T) Victor suffers a sleepless night. From 1995. 9.0 She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens (T) The lives of Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou.
10.0 Castles: Britain’s Fortified History (T) Documentary. 11.0 Should America Police the World? (T) 1.0 She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens (T) 2.0 Castles: Britain’s Fortified History (T)
Sir Derek Jacobi
Remembers…
I, Claudius,
BBC Four, 10pm
The veteran actor
looks back on the
1970s drama
8.0
The Treasures of Ancient
Rome (T) Presenter
Alastair Sooke explores
the artistic achievements
of the Romans.
9.0
Caligula with Mary Beard
(T) The classical scholar
attempts to peel away
some of the myths
surrounding the emperor.
10.0 Sir Derek Jacobi Remembers… I, Claudius 10.15 I, Claudius (T) Drama. 12.45 The Treasures of Ancient Rome (T) 1.45 Caligula with Mary Beard (T) 2.45 Great British Railway Journeys (T)
6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.30 Animal Park (T) (R) 10.15 Trace, Track, Get My Car Back (T) (R) 10.45 Expert Witness (T) (R) 11.15 Homes Under the Hammer (T) 12.15 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 1.0 News (T) 1.35 Regional News (T) 1.45 News (T) 2.0 Money for Nothing (T) 2.45 Escape to the Country (T) (R) 3.45 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 4.30 The Travelling Auctioneers (T) (R) 5.15 Pointless (T) (R) 6.0 News (T) 6.30 Regional News (T) Weather 7.0 The One Show (T) 7.30 EastEnders (T)
6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.30 Animal Park (T) (R) 10.15 Trace, Track, Get My Car Back (T) (R) 10.45 Expert Witness (T) (R) 11.15 Homes Under the Hammer (T) (R) 12.15 Bargain Hunt (T) 1.0 News (T) 1.35 Regional News (T) 2.0 The Hairdresser Mysteries (T) 2.45 Escape to the Country (T) (R) 3.45 The Bidding Room (T) 4.30 The Travelling Auctioneers (T) (R) 5.15 Pointless (T) (R) 6.0 News (T) 6.30 Regional News (T) 7.0 The One Show (T) 7.30 Our Lives: The Last Miner in the Band (T)
8.0 Fake or Fortune? (T) Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould investigate a painting thought to be by André Derain that belonged to a Kindertransport child who escaped Nazi Germany. 9.0 Who Do You Think You Are? (T) Harriet Walter traces her maternal ancestry.
10.0 News (T) 10.30 Regional News (T) Weather 10.40 Murder 24/7 (T) (R) 11.40 Murder 24/7 (T) (R) 12.35 Alan Carr’s Picture Slam (T) (R) 1.20 Weather for the Week (T) 1.25 News (T)
10.0 News (T) 10.30 Regional News (T) Weather 10.40 Austin (T) Comedy. 11.05 Austin (T) Last in series. 11.35 FFFFScent of a Woman (Martin Brest, 1992) (T) 2.05 Weather (T) 2.10 News (T)
8.0 Granite Harbour (T) Lindo and the team recover the murder weapon. 9.0 Would I Lie to You? (T) (R) With panellists Kadeena Cox, Ivo Graham, Harriet Kemsley and Eddie Marsan. 9.30 Ann Droid (T) Linda drags Sue to a dodgy funfair to scatter ashes by the sea.
6.30 Money for Nothing (T) (R)
7.15 The Bidding Room
(T) (R) 8.0 Sign Zone:
Gardeners’ World (T) (R)
9.0 News (T) 1.0 Richard
Osman’s House of Games
(T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line
(T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T)
(R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’
Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45
The Farmers’ Country
Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Earth
from Space (T) (R) 5.15
Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard
Osman’s House of Games
(T) (R) 6.30 Just One
Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Escape
to the Country (T) (R)
8.0 Digging for Britain (T) (R) Alice Roberts joins archaeologists to explore Central England’s past. 9.0 The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke (T) Ruby starts to banish members of the family. 9.50 The North York Moors: A Wild Year (T) Documentary.
10.0 The Smuggling Business:
Undercover (T)
10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather
11.05 Golf: Women’s Open
Highlights 2026 (T)
12.05 FFFFThe Blackening
(Tim Story, 2023) (T)
7.15 The Bidding Room (T) (R) 8.0 Marcus Wareing Simply Provence (T) (R) 9.0 News (T) 12.50 Lifeline (T) (R) 1.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 1.30 The Finish Line (T) (R) 2.15 Lightning (T) (R) 2.45 The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (T) (R) 3.45 The Farmers’ Country Showdown (T) (R) 4.15 Hippos: Africa’s River Giants (T) (R) 5.15 Flog It! (T) (R) 6.0 Richard Osman’s House of Games (T) (R) 6.30 Just One Thing (T) (R) 7.0 Iolo’s Anglesey (T) (R) 7.30 Beechgrove Garden (T)
8.0 Gardeners’ World (T) Monty Don refreshes his borders with perennials. 9.0 Bergerac (T) A letter corroborates Bergerac’s hunch that they have the wrong people in custody. 9.45 QI XL (T) (R) With Maisie Adam, Susan Calman and Josh Widdicombe.
10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather 11.0 FFFFChuck Chuck Baby (Janis Pugh, 2024) (T) 12.40 Golf: Women’s Open Highlights 2026 (T) 1.40 Sign Zone: Amityville: An Origin Story (T) (R)
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 News (T) Weather 1.20 Local News (T) Weather 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) Coverage of day three of the meeting, including the Nassau Stakes. 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Jake, Laura, Leila and Frank take part. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) The latest headlines. Weather 7.30 Tom Kerridge Cooks Italy (T) Tom forages for truffles in Umbria.
6.0 Good Morning Britain (T) 10.0 This Morning (T) 1.0 News (T) Weather 1.20 Local News (T) Weather 1.30 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) Coverage of day four, including the Qatar King George Stakes. 4.30 Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals (T) (R) 5.0 The Chase (T) (R) Joe, Becky, Nathan and Sophie take part. 6.0 Local News (T) Weather 6.30 News (T) Weather 7.30 Abbey Clancy: Celebrity Homes (T) Homes belonging to Sheree Murphy and Caprice.
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Claudette does a deal and there is danger at the depot. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Cassie revisits her greatest hits with Ross as a target. 9.0 The Chase Around the World (T) Quiz show. The teams land in Lisbon to take on the Chasers.
10.0 News (T) Weather 10.30 Local News (T) Weather 10.45 FFFFBad Boys II (Michael Bay, 2003) (T) Thriller. 1.25 Shop on TV 3.0 The Summit (T) (R) Reality. 4.0 Unwind with ITV (T)
8.0 Emmerdale (T) Claudette makes an admission. 8.30 Coronation Street (T) Cassie runs out of chances with Steve and Tyrone. 9.0 The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (T) As Raffaele’s trial extends into years, his heartbreaking history unfolds.
10.05 The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (T) 11.05 News (T) Weather 11.40 Local News (T) Weather 11.55 Inside the Langham: Britain’s First Grand Hotel (T) (R) Documentary.
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) Erin and JB struggle to get the windows into their turret. 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Robbie Wolfe makes a huge offer on an iconic Ford. 7.0 News (T) Headlines.
6.25 Cheers (T) (R) 7.45 Everybody Loves Raymond (T) (R) 9.10 Frasier (T) (R) 11.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 12.05 News (T) 12.10 Find It, Fix It, Flog It (T) (R) 1.10 The Great House Giveaway (T) (R) 2.10 Countdown (T) 3.0 A Place in the Sun (T) (R) 4.0 Narrow Escapes (T) (R) 5.0 Chateau DIY (T) (R) Nicole and Nick struggle to install a kitchen before the arrival of their first baby. 6.0 American Pickers (T) (R) Mike Wolfe finds a rare Ford. 7.0 News (T) Headlines.
8.0 Renovation Rescue (T) New series. Vogue Williams and Luke Mabbott offer practical DIY and design advice to homeowners. 9.0 Murder Case: The Digital Detectives (T) How forensic phone analysis led detectives to the murderer of Samantha Holden.
10.0 Don’t Date Brandon (T) New series. 11.0 Don’t Date Brandon (T) 12.05 Don’t Date Brandon (T) 1.05 Crime Scene Cleaners (T) (R) 1.55 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R)
8.0 Surgery Secrets of the Super Rich (T) Joyce marks her 60th birthday with an endoscopic facelift. 9.0 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown (T) New series. Jimmy Carr hosts as Jon Richardson and Harriet Kemsley face Rob Beckett and Richard Ayoade.
10.0 Big Fat Quiz: Best Bits (T) 11.05 Sarah Millican: Thoroughly Modern Millican Live (T) (R) 12.10 Ramy (T) 12.45 Ramy (T) 1.20 FFFFFresh (Mimi Cave, 2022) (T) 3.10 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R)
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFStolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard (Michelle Ouellet, 2023) (T) Fact-based drama starring Anna Hopkins and Emily Osment. 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) The Malta Classic Grand Prix. 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Around the World in First Class with Josie Gibson (T) (R) 7.55 News (T) Updates.
6.0 Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine (T) 11.30 Storm & Alexis (T) 12.45 News (T) 12.50 Matt Allwright (T) 2.20 FFFFConceived in Lies (Soran Mardookhi, 2024) (T) Thriller. 4.0 Castle (T) (R) 4.55 Love Nature (T) (R) 5.0 News (T) 6.0 Malta: The Jewel of the Med (T) (R) Last in the series. 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Holiday Scams: Don’t Get Caught Out (T) (R) Alexis Conran and his team take on the scammers who target people on holiday. 7.55 News (T) Developments.
8.0 Cornwall: A Year by the Sea (T) In St Ives, artist Iona leads a landscape painting masterclass, and in Marazion, competitors take on a gruelling triathlon. 9.0 Benidorm Is Murder (T) New series. Crime drama starring John Hannah and Carolina Bécquer.
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) Highlights. 11.05 Fare Dodgers: At War with the Law (T) (R) Factual. 12.05 Street Cops: Catching the Yobs (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV with LoveitBookit (T) (R)
10.0 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) Highlights. 11.05 Piers Morgan: Uncensored (T) Chat and debate. 1.0 Cruise TV (T) (R) 2.0 Shoplifters: Catch Me If You Can (T) (R) Documentary.
8.0 Michael Palin in Venezuela (T) (R) Michael starts the final leg of his adventure, as he enters the Zulia state. Last in the series. 9.0 Britain’s Killer Wave of 1607 (T) (R) An in-depth look back at the Bristol Channel floods which caused chaos in 1607.
Renovation Rescue, Channel 4, 8pm Vogue Williams is joined by Luke Mabbott in helping beleaguered homeowners
7.0 Great British Railway Journeys (T) Michael Portillo tours Rolls-Royce. 7.30 Walking with Steph McGovern (T) The broadcaster spends a day in the Yorkshire Dales, from Foxup to Arncliffe.
8.0
Talking Pictures:
Seventies Legends Part II
Celia Imrie takes a look at
1970s Hollywood. (T)
9.0
FFFFTaxi Driver (Martin
Scorsese, 1976) (T)
A cab driver becomes
increasingly disturbed.
Martin Scorsese’s drama
with Robert De Niro.
10.50 FFFFFuneral in Berlin (Guy Hamilton, 1966) (T) Thriller. 12.30 Talking Pictures: Seventies Legends Part II (T) 1.30 Becoming Frida Kahlo (T) Documentary. 2.30 Great British Railway Journeys (T)
Our Lives: The Last Miner in the Band, BBC One, 7.30pm Contributors including Peter Lawson discuss Co Durham’s Easington Colliery Band
7.0
Elgar at the Proms (T)
Petroc Trelawny presents
from the 2026 Proms,
as Ryan Wigglesworth
conducts the BBC Scottish
Symphony Orchestra,
who take to the stage for
Elgar’s First Symphony.
8.25 TOTP: 2000 (T) Gail Porter hosts this classic episode. 8.55 TOTP: 2000 (T) Jamie Theakston presents the pop chart programme. 9.25 TOTP: 1977 (T) With Dana, Thin Lizzy and Bob Marley and the Wailers and more. 9.55 TOTP: 1983 (T) An edition of the show from July 28.
10.35 Louis Armstrong in Concert (T) A live event. 11.30 Louis Armstrong – Show of the Week (T) Performance. 12.35 Jazz Legends in Their Own Words (T) 1.35 TOTP: 2000 (T) 2.05 TOTP: 2000 (T)
BBC Four BBC One BBC Two ITV1 Channel 4
6.0 Breakfast (T) 10.0 Saturday Kitchen (T) 11.30 Anna Haugh’s Big Irish Food Tour (T) (R) 12.0 Homes Under the Hammer (T) (R) 1.0 News (T) 1.15 Bargain Hunt (T) (R) 2.0 Money for Nothing (T) (R) 3.0 Escape to the Country (T) (R) 3.55 FFFFNight at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Shawn Levy, 2009) (T) 5.35 News (T) 5.45 Regional News (T) 5.55 The Hit List Celebrity Special (T) 6.40 Alan Carr’s Picture Slam (T) 7.25 Michael McIntyre’s Big Show (T) (R)
8.25 Pointless Celebrities (T) (R) Contestants include James Jordan, Gemma Collins and Brian McFadden. 9.10 How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) (T) (R) Alan explores whether nature can heal a troubled mind. 9.40 News (T) 9.55 Weather (T)
10.0 Calvin Harris: Live from Scotland (T) The DJ performs a homecoming show live from Glasgow’s Hampden Park. 12.0 Weather for the Week Ahead (T) 12.05 News (T)
Sunday
Radio 3
6.30am Breakfast 9.0 Sunday
Morning 11.0 BBC Proms 2026
12.45 New Generation Artists
1.30 Music Map 3.0 Sofi Jeannin –
Singing Together 4.0 Jazz
Record Requests 5.0 The
Early Music Show 6.0 Choral
Evensong 7.0 BBC Proms
2026 9.0 BBC Proms 2026 10.30
Night Tracks 11.30 Unclassified
12.30 Through the Night
Radio 4
6.0am News Headlines 6.05 Heart
and Soul 6.35 On Your Farm 7.0
News 7.0 Sunday Papers 7.10
Sunday 7.54 Radio 4 Appeal 8.0
News 8.0 Sunday Papers 8.10
Sunday Worship 8.48 Witness
History 8.58 Tweet of the Day 9.0
Broadcasting House 10.0 Desert
Island Discs 11.0 The Archers 12.15
Last Word: Doing Death Differently
12.30 Just a Minute 1.0 The World
This Weekend 1.30 Troubled
Town 2.0 Gardeners’ Question
Time 2.45 Opening Lines 3.0
Drama: Trouble in Mind 4.0 Take
Four Books 4.30 Brain of Britain
5.0 Witness History 5.10 Church
Going, with Giles Fraser 5.54
Shipping Forecast 6.0 Six O’Clock
News 6.15 Pick of the Week
7.0 The Archers 7.15 Unreliable
Narrator 7.45 Just One Thing with
Michael Mosley 8.0 Feedback
8.30 Last Word 9.0 Money Box
9.26 Radio 4 Appeal 9.30 From
Our Own Correspondent 10.0 The
Westminster Hour 11.0 Who Did
We Think We Were? 11.30 More
Wow 11.45 Short Works 12.0
News and Weather 12.15 Inside
Health 12.45 Bells on Sunday 12.48
Shipping Forecast 1.0 As BBC
World Service 5.0 News Summary
5.04 Last Word 5.34 Shipping
6.30 Children’s TV (T) (R) 8.35 Newsround (T) 8.40 The Lady Grace Mysteries (T) (R) 9.05 Gardeners’ World (T) (R) 10.05 FFFFOn the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) (T) 11.50 The Great British Sewing Bee (T) (R) 12.50 A Cook Abroad: Rachel Khoo’s Malaysia (T) (R) 1.50 FFFFMeet Me in St Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) (T) 3.40 Fake or Fortune? (T) (R) 4.40 Evolution (T) (R) 5.40 FFFFSuperman (Richard Donner, 1978) (T) 7.55 Bolero at the Proms (T)
9.10 Barbra Streisand:
Becoming an Icon (T) (R)
A look at the actress and
singer’s rise to stardom
from her roots in working-
class Brooklyn, desperate
to escape from her
tough childhood, and the
remarkable achievements
of her early career.
10.10 FFFFA Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976) (T) Musical starring Barbra Streisand. 12.25 Golf: Women’s Open Highlights 2026 (T) 1.25 Sign Zone: Who Do You Think You Are? (T) (R)
Forecast 5.43 Prayer for
the Day 5.45 Farming Today
Monday
Radio 3
6.30am Breakfast 9.30 Essential
Classics 1.0 Classical Live
4.0 Composer of the Week:
Alice Mary Smith 5.0 In Tune
7.0 BBC Proms 2026 10.0
Night Tracks 11.30 ’Round
Midnight 12.30 Through the Night
Radio 4
6.0am Today 9.0 Across the Red
Line 9.30 How Did We Get Here?:
No World Order 10.0 Woman’s
Hour 11.0 Church Going, with
Giles Fraser 11.45 Confessions of
a Performative Male 12.0 News
12.04 You and Yours 1.0 The World
1.45 Dead Rabbit 2.0 The Archers
2.15 Alone 2.45 Opening Lines 3.0
A Good Read 3.30 You’re Dead to
Me 4.0 Troubled Town 4.30 The
Kitchen Cabinet 5.0 PM 6.0 Six
O’Clock News 6.30 Just a Minute
7.0 The Archers 7.15 Front Row
8.0 The Briefing Room 8.30 BBC
Inside Science 9.0 Across the
Red Line 9.30 How Did We Get
Here?: No World Order 10.0 The
World Tonight 10.45 Wild Dark
Shore 11.0 Intimacy 11.30 A Good
Read 12.0 News and Weather
12.30 Confessions of
a Performative Male 12.48
Shipping Forecast 1.0 As BBC
World Service 5.0 News Summary
5.04 Troubled Town 5.34
Shipping Forecast 5.43 Prayer
for the Day 5.45 Farming Today
BBC Proms 2026 10.0 Night
Tracks 11.30 ’Round Midnight
12.30 Through the Night
Radio 4
6.0am Today 9.0 Invisible Hands
9.30 Inside Health 10.0 Woman’s
Hour 11.0 Screenshot 11.45
Confessions of a Performative
Male 12.0 News 12.04 Call You and
Yours 1.0 The World 1.45 Dead
Rabbit 2.0 The Archers 2.15 Drama:
Our Friends in the North 3.0 Lady
on Trial with Lucy Worsley 3.30
Heart and Soul 4.0 The Writing
Life of Sylvia Plath 4.30 What’s
Up Docs? 5.0 PM 6.0 Six O’Clock
News 6.30 Meet David Sedaris
7.0 The Archers 7.15 Front Row
8.0 Floor 15 8.40 In Touch 9.0
The Documentary: The Dream
Makers 9.30 The Bottom Line
10.0 The World Tonight 10.45
Wild Dark Shore 11.0 Wild Inside
11.30 A Good Read 12.0 News and
Weather 12.30 Confessions of a
Performative Male 12.48 Shipping
Forecast 1.0 As BBC World Service
5.0 News Summary 5.04 BBC
Inside Science 5.34 Shipping
Forecast 5.43 Prayer for the
Day 5.45 Farming Today
Male 12.0 News 12.04 You and Yours 1.0 The World 1.45 Dead Rabbit 2.0 The Archers 2.15 Drama: United Kingdoms 3.0 Money Box 3.30 A Map of the Moon 4.0 The Power of Guilt 4.15 The Media Show 5.0 PM 6.0 Six O’Clock News 6.30 Best Medicine 7.0 The Archers 7.15 Front Row 8.0 AntiSocial 8.45 Café Hope 9.0 Invisible Hands 9.30 Inside Health 10.0 The World Tonight 10.45 Wild Dark Shore 11.0 Sunil Patel: An Idiot’s Guide to Living Forever 11.15 Follow the Rabbit 11.30 A Good Read 12.0 News and Weather 12.30 Book of the Week: Confessions of a Performative Male 12.48 Shipping Forecast 1.0 As BBC World Service 5.0 News Summary 5.04 Sideways 5.34 Shipping Forecast 5.43 Prayer for the Day 5.45 Farming Today
Male 12.48 Shipping Forecast 1.0
As BBC World Service 5.30
News Summary 5.34 Shipping
Forecast 5.43 Prayer for the
Day 5.45 Living on the Edge
Tuesday
Radio 3
6.30am Breakfast 9.30 Essential
Classics 1.0 Classical Live 4.0
Composer of the Week:
Alice Mary Smith 5.0 In Tune 7.0
6.0 James Martin’s French Adventure (T) (R) 6.30 James Martin’s American Adventure (T) (R) 7.25 Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh (T) (R) 9.25 News (T) 9.30 James Martin’s Saturday Morning (T) (R) 12.0 Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen (T) (R) 1.0 News (T) 1.15 ITV Racing: Glorious Goodwood (T) 4.30 FFFFNanny McPhee and the Big Bang (Susanna White, 2010) (T) 6.30 News (T) 6.45 Local News (T) 7.0 Deal or No Deal: Celebrity Special (T) With Zoe Ball.
8.0 FFFFCasino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) (T) James Bond achieves his ‘00’ status and is dispatched on the trail of Le Chiffre, a criminal financing terrorist. Spy thriller starring Daniel Craig in his first outing as 007.
10.40 News (T) Weather
10.55 The Staircase (T) Shocking
new details surface
about Michael’s past.
12.15 Shop on TV 3.0 Cold Case
Forensics: The Death of
God’s Banker (T) (R)
Wednesday Radio 3 6.30am Breakfast 9.30 Essential Classics 1.0 Classical Live 3.0 Choral Evensong 4.0 Composer of the Week: Alice Mary Smith 5.0 In Tune 7.0 BBC Proms 2026 10.0 Night Tracks 11.30 ’Round Midnight 12.30 Through the Night Radio 4 6.0am Today 9.0 Sideways 9.30 Breakin’ the Cycle 10.0 Woman’s Hour 11.0 Floor 15 11.40 This Week in History 11.45 Book of the Week: Confessions of a Performative
6.05 Cheers (T) (R) 7.55
Everybody Loves Raymond
(T) (R) 9.50 The Simpsons
(T) (R) 11.50 Frasier (T) (R)
1.50 Four in a Bed (T) (R)
4.20 The Dog House (T) (R)
A girl with Tourette’s needs
a special pup to stand by
her side, while it’s love at
first sight for seven-year-
old Lottie and cockapoo
puppy Annie. 5.25 FFFF
The Lost City (Aaron Nee,
Adam Nee, 2022) (T)
Adventure comedy
starring Sandra Bullock,
Channing Tatum and Daniel
Radcliffe. 7.30 News (T)
8.0
Hitler’s Games:
Berlin 1936 In Colour (T)
Colourised footage
of the 1936 Olympics,
held in Nazi Germany.
9.0
Dictator: The Hitler
Interviews (T) New
series. Featuring the
testimonies of those who
met and knew Adolf Hitler.
10.0 FFFFAmerican Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007) (T) 12.50 Ramy (T) 1.25 Ramy (T) 2.0 Kitchen Nightmares USA (T) (R) 2.50 The Simpsons (T) (R) 4.05 Couples Come Dine with Me (T) (R)
Thursday
Radio 3
6.30am Breakfast 9.30 Essential
Classics 1.0 Classical Live 4.0
Composer of the Week: Alice Mary
Smith 5.0 In Tune 7.0 BBC Proms
2026. The BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra perform Korngold,
Prokofiev and Tabakova. 10.0 Night
Tracks 11.30 ’Round Midnight
12.30 Through the Night
Radio 4
6.0am Today 9.0 Natalie Haynes
Stands Up for the Classics 9.30
Art That Conquered the World
10.0 Woman’s Hour 11.0 The
Three Ages of Child 11.45 Book
of the Week: Confessions of a
Performative Male 12.0 News
12.04 Scam Secrets 12.32 Sliced
Bread 1.0 The World 1.45 Dead
Rabbit 2.0 The Archers 2.15 Drama:
Yeartides 3.0 This Natural Life 3.27
Radio 4 Appeal 3.30 Feedback 4.0
6.0 Milkshake! 9.0 Entertainment News on 5 (T) 9.10 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) (R) 10.0 Secrets of the Royal Palaces (T) (R) 11.0 Secrets of the Royal Palaces (T) (R) 12.0 Secrets of the Royal Gardens (T) (R) 1.0 The Royals: Uncensored (T) 2.0 Yorkshire: A Year in the Wild (T) (R) 4.0 Live: UK’s Strongest Man 2026 (T) Coverage of day one. 6.55 News (T) 7.0 Sussex: Jewel of the South Coast (T) Exploring the county’s diverse landscapes.
8.0
Meghan Markle: Inside
the Mind of a Duchess
(T) (R) A profile of the
Duchess of Sussex.
9.0
Harry & Meghan: Royal
Hypocrites? (T) (R) A
look at allegations against
the Duke and Duchess
of Sussex of hypocrisy
and double standards.
10.30 Commonwealth Games 2026 (T) Highlights. 11.30 Scandal: The Major- Currie Affair (T) (R) 1.0 Cruise TV (T) (R) 2.0 GPs: Behind Closed Doors (T) (R) 2.50 Motorway Cops (R)
The Briefing Room 4.30 BBC Inside
Science 5.0 PM 6.0 Six O’Clock
News 6.30 Icklewick FM 7.0
The Archers 7.15 Front Row 8.0
At Your Own Peril 8.15 The Media
Show 9.0 Loose Ends 9.45 The
Cows Are Mad 10.0 The World
Tonight 10.45 Wild Dark Shore 11.0
Radical 11.30 A Good Read 12.0
News and Weather 12.30 Book
of the Week: Confessions of a
Performative Male 12.48
Shipping Forecast 1.0 As BBC
World Service 5.0 News Summary
5.04 The Briefing Room 5.34
Shipping Forecast 5.43 Prayer for
the Day 5.45 Farming Today
Friday Radio 3 6.30am Breakfast 9.30 Essential Classics 1.0 Classical Live 4.0 Composer of the Week: Alice Mary Smith 5.0 In Tune 7.0 Classical Mixtape 7.30 BBC Proms 2026 10.0 Late Junction 11.30 ’Round Midnight 12.30 Through the Night Radio 4 6.0am Today 9.0 Desert Island Discs 10.0 Woman’s Hour 11.0 The Food Programme 11.45 Confessions of a Performative Male 12.0 News 12.04 AntiSocial 1.0 The World 1.45 Dead Rabbit 2.0 The Archers 2.15 Drama: Central Intelligence 2.45 Living on the Edge 3.0 Gardeners’ Question Time 3.45 Short Works 4.0 Last Word 4.30 Sideways 5.0 PM 6.0 Six O’Clock News 6.30 Current-ish 7.0 The Archers 7.15 Screenshot 8.0 Any Questions? 8.55 This Week in History 9.0 Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics 10.0 The World Tonight 10.45 Wild Dark Shore 11.0 Americast 11.30 A Good Read 12.0 News and Weather 12.30 Confessions of a Performative
Monty Don Remembers…
Geoff Hamilton, BBC Four, 8pm
A tribute to the late and much-
loved Gardeners’ World presenter
7.0 Planet Earth: A Monkey’s Tale (T) The life of a baby toque macaque living in the ruined temples of Sri Lanka. With predators nearby, she must learn how to survive. 7.05 Life on Earth (T) Exploring the history of reptiles.
8.0
Monty Don Remembers…
Geoff Hamilton (T)
8.20 Gardeners’ World (T)
8.50 Gardeners’ World (T) Geoff
Hamilton and the team build
a propagator at Barnsdale.
9.20 Geoff Hamilton: A Man
and His Garden – The
Barnsdale Story (T)
9.50 The Sentinels
10.30 The Sentinels 11.15 Keeping Up Appearances 11.45 One Foot in the Grave (T) 12.15 Lightning: Dangerous Earth (T) 12.45 Gardeners’ World (T) 1.45 Geoff Hamilton: A Man and His Garden (T)
Saturday
Radio 3
6.30am Breakfast 9.0 Saturday
Morning 12.0 Earlier... with
Jools Holland 1.0 Key Changes:
Radio 3’s Essential History of
Classical Music 2.0 Record Review
4.0 Sound of Cinema 5.0 This
Classical Life 6.0 Music Planet 7.0
BBC Proms 2026 9.45 Talking
Music 10.30 New Music Show
12.30 Through the Night
Radio 4
6.0am News and Papers 6.07 This
Natural Life 6.30 Farming Today
This Week 7.0 Today 9.0 What
Happened to Counter-Culture?
9.30 What’s Up Docs? 10.0 You’re
Dead to Me 10.30 The Kitchen
Cabinet 11.0 Radical 11.30 From Our
Own Correspondent 12.0 News
12.04 Toast 12.30 Current-ish 1.0
News 1.10 Any Questions? 2.05
Any Answers? 2.45 The Archers
3.0 Drama: Waiting in the Wings
4.30 Weekend Woman’s Hour 5.0
Saturday PM 5.30 Sliced Bread
5.54 Shipping Forecast 6.0 Six
O’Clock News 6.15 Loose Ends 7.0
Last Word: Doing Death Differently
7.15 Changing the Odds 8.0
Archive on 4: Sucking Up: A Guide
to Sycophancy Through the Ages
9.0 Dead Rabbit 10.0 News 10.15
The Food Programme 11.0 Olga
Koch: OK Computer 11.30 Brain of
Britain 12.0 Midnight News 12.15
Take Four Books 12.48 Shipping
Forecast 1.0 As BBC World
Service 5.30 News Summary
5.34 Shipping Forecast 5.43
Bells on Sunday 5.45 In Touch
observer.co.uk 26.07.26 CriticsTelevision
Ellen
Boris Johnson: Into Ukraine’s Kill Zone Channel 5 The Dark ITV1
‘There, he’s the Churchillian man of the people he always wanted to be’: Boris Johnson goes into the kill zone in Zaporizhzhia; inset, Laura Donnelly in The Dark. Channel 5
Ukraine for a hero’s welcome T
here’s a point in Channel 5’s feature- length documentary Boris Johnson: Into Ukraine’s Kill Zone when the former British prime minister is compelled to don a balaclava to avoid being recognised. Usually politicians are kept to the capital Kyiv. The documentary tracks Johnson, four years after leaving Downing Street, as he spends 72 hours on an unprotected journey through part of the “kill zone” frontline near the city of Zaporizhzhia. It’s dangerous for anyone – soldier, citizen, journalist alike – but for a former world leader who is a supporter of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, the risks are extreme. So, the balaclava is pulled over the face and famous flaxen hair. In an instant, he’s de-Boris-ed, divested of the features that, love or loathe him, loom so large in British life. (How many column inches have been devoted to that strategically ruffled hair.) All that’s left is the distinctive voice, incongruously booming out of the mouth hole, like Bertie Wooster on a reconnaissance mission. The project came about when Johnson, who started out as a journalist and now writes a column for the Daily Mail, contacted the paper’s war correspondents, Richard Pendlebury and Jamie Wiseman – heading a team delivering Daily Mail World YouTube reports since Russia’s 2022 invasion – to ask if he could join them. Johnson says to camera: “That meant going to see the frontline for myself and talking to the Ukraine soldiers fighting a war they did not choose. I was heading into what is known as the kill zone.” Thereafter, as much as possible, the film functions as a war report. It opens by outlining the bombing of a passenger train bearing the relatives of soldiers, including children. Early on, an apartment block is bombed disturbingly close to where Johnson and the crew are staying. The former PM is informed about drones, controlled aviation bombs (several thousand are dropped on Ukraine a month), and visits the mobile anti-aircraft gunners standing guard during sub-zero temperature nights: “I should have put on those bloody long johns,” Johnson winces. Wearing a flak jacket, he is driven through hazardous regions, where he stops at a supermarket kept open in a bombed-out area, prays with a chaplain from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, discusses the conscription of military personnel, and looks in on an improvised medical centre. He also visits a bomb factory making “toe-poppers”(devices designed to blow off the bottom leg) using 3D printers and sewage pipes. Pretty much everyone Johnson meets is exhausted, despairing,
war reports would give space to someone slumped on a bed like a dazed Winnie- the-Pooh?
displaced, missing their families, and wishing the war would end. With his balaclava on, Johnson helps to give a Ukrainian soldier’s clapped-out car a shove to get it going. When his identity is known, there’s no doubting the Johnson Effect. I’m not sure how many other war reports would give space to someone slumped on a bed blinking like a dazed Winnie-the-Pooh or hungrily watching hotdog sausages boil in a saucepan. His interactions with Ukrainians are mainly lively and informal. “You shot the arse off that one,” he says approvingly to soldiers of shattered drone debris. Johnson is instantly recognisable to Ukrainians, and they love him. There, he’s the Churchillian man of the people he always wanted to be. Straight to camera, he speaks up for Ukraine – “They’re heroes but it’s a disgrace that we’re not doing more to help them” – outlining how the invasion is in violation of a key 1994 treaty and declaring: “It’s Vladimir Putin who started this war. He’s the only guy who can end it.” In text on the screen, the Russian Federation’s sniffy response to the documentary begins: “We note the documentary relies heavily on the views of Boris Johnson… ” We could argue all day about what looks suspiciously akin to Johnson’s “war correspondent” cosplay, whether the indulgence is irresponsible showboating – increasing the danger for everyone around him – or understandable in the context of drawing attention to a conflict for which media and public attention has waned. The documentary itself is a multifaceted oddity. It is both the latest round (ding!) of the Johnson versus Putin grudge match (it would take a stronger woman than me to resist pointing out that, with Brexit, Johnson thrilled and empowered Putin), and a character study of a man mourning the power he once wielded on the global stage. The documentary is also what it says it is: a valuable reminder that, for Ukraine, the war and the suffering go on. There’s just far too much… Boris. O
n ITV1, the bleak six-part Scottish thriller, The Dark, continues to creep and pulse beneath the skin. Based on GR Halliday’s From The Shadows, the first novel in a series, Laura Donnelly plays inscrutable DI Monica Kennedy tasked with hunting a serial killer who’s taken to dumping the naked corpses of young male victims, posing them in ritualistic positions in the Highlands grass. The story is a melange of rural nastiness, burner phones, drugged drinks, masked intruders and emotionally vulnerable young people. Helen Baxendale of Cold Feet appears as a wild-eyed bereaved parent, while Emun Elliott portrays her glowering partner. As Kennedy’s deputy, Mark Rowley bursts out of some bizarrely tight shirts, while a subplot concerning Kennedy’s daughter, and some recurring business with a cult, becomes a tad over-complicated and wearisome and threatens to derail the main plot. Earlier this year, the Welsh-set Under Salt Marsh, starring Kelly Reilly, Rafe Spall and Jonathan Pryce evolved into a stormy smalltown tour de force, proving what UK crime thrillers can achieve when let off the leash. The Dark isn’t quite in that league – it’s stylistically OTT and there are too many convenient flukes and hammy jump scares. Still, it holds its own, and Donnelly delivers a TV cop who definitely doesn’t get results with her innate feminine charm. In her hands, DI Kennedy’s stony-faced flatness and chilly retorts are to be relished.
LIST
Barbara Ellen’s
best of the rest
The Undeclared War (Channel 4) Second series of the cyber-attack thriller. Simon Pegg returns as the GCHQ director who must now uncover a mole in the intelligence agency. Adrian Lester and Siân Brooke also appear.
Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston (Disney Plus/National Geographic) The Night Manager actor Tom Hiddleston (below) flexes his ancient scholar muscles and examines the Pompeii disaster of the eruption of Vesuvius.
Ghosts Australia (BBC Three) For those missing the British haunted mansion comedy that ended in 2023, Australia has a red-hot go at its own version. Starring Tamala Shelton and Roman Witt.
The, Alamy
Page, Alamy
What, Alan Milburn, Alan Partridge, Alan Parker, Alejandro Garnacho, Alex Moshakis Editor
Cover, Alexandria Ocasio
结论： 存在严重交付缺陷 (Delivery Defect)。翻译件中包含了未经清除的内部审计警告标签，且存在部分关键信息缺失。
[!WARNING] 块，列出了“翻译质量评估未完全通过”以及缺失的数字和专有名词列表。这属于典型的内部 QA 记录未清理即交付，是严重的交付违规。Aaron Ramsey, Abbas Araghchi 等人名在译文中缺失（虽在采样段未全部出现，但警告块已证实存在系统性遗漏）。该译件不可用。不仅包含了不应出现的审计警告，且在源码缺失部分擅自填充了大量具体数据和论点（幻觉），严重违反了翻译的忠实性原则。