I rediscovered the power of abstract painting on a trip to New Mexico. From high above Albuquerque, the tawny, light-reflecting landscape stretched below the solarised blue, with long straight highways looking as if they’d been scratched out by a fingernail. Mountain ranges came into view, and discrete volcanic cones, and I saw the terminus of the Sangre de Cristo where it met the plain.
He said the boiler could be fixed but it would be better to replace it. He put the call to the supplier on speakerphone. We were told a new boiler would be around 700 million rials (nearly £400). He hung up. ‘With this economy,’ he said, ‘you end up choosing between something being broken and not having it at all.’ While he was working to repair the boiler, I asked after his family. His hands stopped for a moment. ‘My father died two weeks ago.’
Charles III’s state visit to the US occasioned a good deal of commentary either celebrating the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US or lamenting its deficiencies. The Financial Times editorial board clung to the deep ‘military, intelligence and security co-operation’ even if the political relationship has seen better days. The Telegraph saw regal diplomacy as evidence of a bond forged on a more rarefied plane than that of ‘petty politics’. In the Times, William Hague argued for accepting a gradual loss of intimacy but warned against becoming ‘pointlessly anti-American’. Abstract notions aside, the fact of practical British support for American empire remains an underexamined peculiarity of British foreign policy.
The successful passage of the 2026 Tobacco and Vapes Act into law is a major milestone on the journey towards achieving the tobacco endgame – where no one starts to smoke, everyone who smokes is supported to quit, and there is no longer any profit in tobacco. The last point is crucial: the global tobacco industry is not only responsible for an epidemic that kills more than eight million people a year, but has also been relentless in using its financial influence to block or delay tobacco control measures.
Last Wednesday, the reporter Amal Khalil and photojournalist Zeinab Faraj were on assignment in south Lebanon when Israeli drones struck the car in front of them. The women sought shelter in a building that was then destroyed by a direct hit. Despite continuing Israeli fire, emergency workers eventually managed to rescue Faraj from the rubble. ‘She kept hugging me,’ Faraj said from her hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages. ‘I begged her not to sleep.’ Khalil’s body was recovered by the Red Cross the next day.
J.H. Prynne has always seemed to me to represent the real potential of poetry, as an art that can encompass everything, every kind of feeling and every element of knowledge, and shape it into a form that affects its readers in a way that nothing else can.
J.H. Prynne died on Wednesday at the age of 89, after a prolific life as a teacher and essayist, a loyal friend to his students and, above all, a poet of great stature whose remains will not be transferred to Westminster Abbey. The landscape of English poetry changed after the publication of Prynne’s second book, Kitchen Poems, in 1968. His later writing found a wide, eclectic readership. There were opaque, exquisite experiments in lyric, on the one hand, and on the other, long, argumentative pieces, densely intuitive, often obscure, inviting readers to consider how the poem was supposed to address the world, if it could rise to the occasion.