A list of the names of some of the thousands of children killed in Gaza, unrolled at a protest outside the DSEI arms fair at the Excel centre in London, 9 September 2025 (Pete Speller, Alamy)
Every two years, the UK hosts one of the world’s largest arms fairs at the Excel centre in East London. The Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) describes itself as the ‘flagship event for the UK’, relied on by ‘the world’s leading defence organisations and most influential stakeholders … to bring the right people together’. It also brings together protesters in a network called Stop the Arms Fair, which has disrupted every DSEI since 2011. This year, their numbers have been bolstered by hundreds of demonstrators protesting in particular at the presence of companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza.
The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in May (in an interview with Michael Gove for the Spectator) that she has a ‘natural affinity for the faith, flag and family element of Blue Labour’. Her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, now foreign secretary, told Times Radio last week that she has Union Jack bunting hanging up in her garden shed. ‘People should be coming together around our flags,’ she said. When asked if people should be putting them up on motorway gantries, she replied: ‘I would put them up anywhere.’ The flags that have been appearing on motorway gantries, lampposts and roundabouts across the country are part of a campaign, ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, organised by known far-right extremists. The BBC asked Keir Starmer if this was racist or patriotic. ‘I’m a supporter of flags,’ the prime minister said.
The LRB Diary for 2026, available now, is a tribute to Brief Lives by the 17th-century polymath John Aubrey (1626-97). It includes 55 excerpts from LRB pieces that, like Aubrey’s biographical sketches, may describe a life better in a single anecdote than is often achieved by an exhaustive catalogue of facts.
‘I am no longer able to process what is about to happen.’ The message from my friend Ghassan Abu Sita gets stuck in my head, going round and round, hanging between me and the sunny London streets, making me wonder again what I could be doing that I am not doing to try to stop this. What is happening has been clearly announced by the Israeli government: the eradication of Gaza City, of the north of Gaza. The displacement once again of a population that has been expelled multiple times with nowhere to go, with crippled access to food, water, shelter, the internet. More journalists and civil defence workers killed. More hospitals bombed. More young men killed by sniper fire as they try to reach aid or return with it to their families.
The baptism of Jesus on the ceiling of the Battistero Neoniano, Ravenna, fifth-century mosaic (photo B. O’Kane / Alamy)
In the current exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the blending of Roman and Byzantine art is represented in spectacular form by ‘faithful copies of the ancient mosaics of Ravenna’.
When it was revealed earlier this month that the number of people who had reached the UK on small boats since Labour came to power in July 2024 had reached 50,000, the familiar circus of blame began. The Tories reproached Labour for scrapping the dismal Rwanda plan; Labour pointed to the legacy left by the Tories; Reform, as ever, reaped the spoils. But the tussle between the dominant parties over who can most bullishly ‘defend’ Britain’s borders is not only an ugly spectacle; it rests on a misguided premise.
‘and in the glass, like moonshine – the hue was purple/saturn devouring his son’ by Felix Shumba in his studio at the ISCP, February 2025
I visited the artist Felix Shumba at the International Studio and Curatorial Programme in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in March this year. Shumba, an artist from Zimbabwe, spent three months in the converted industrial space of the ISCP. Charcoal drawings hung on the walls. He makes the charcoal himself. It is light in the hand but his images are full of gravity. The human and animal figures sometimes seem to lift from the paper, as if they could step into the room.