Diana Melly photographed in 1960 by Ida Kar © National Portrait Gallery, London
‘Being pretty is a major disaster for women,’ Diana Melly once told a friend, and beauty certainly had a hand in her destiny that she spent a lifetime resisting. Her parents, George Dawson, a bank clerk, and Margaret (née Timbrenell) who worked as a housekeeper, separated early, and Diana spent most of her childhood in Essex being shunted between her mother and an aunt with some haphazard schooling. The last exam she took – and passed – was the eleven-plus. She hated her grammar school and longed to leave when she was fourteen, having received a prize for not having an Essex accent, but no approval for anything else. Her parents wanted their pretty daughter to go to drama school and arranged for elocution lessons. But she started work straightaway, at first in a shop and then, at fifteen, as a hostess in a nightclub.
When Iman shows his wife, Najmeh, his new gun, it comes with the news that he’s been promoted to the post of investigating prosecutor in Iran’s judiciary. He needs the gun for security, he says. Yet he’s also proud of the power his masters have given him. Or have they really taken it away? The moment comes early in Mohammad Rasoulof’s new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
Donald Trump recently deported a planeload of 88 Brazilians, who arrived with cuts and bruises after being handcuffed, beaten and denied food and water during the flight from Louisiana. The plane had trouble with its engines and air-conditioning, and was forced to make unscheduled stops in Panama and Manaus, where the deportees were transferred to a Brazilian air force plane for the last leg to Belo Horizonte.
A class at a tent school in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on 28 September 2024. Photo © Rizek Abdeljawad / Xinhua / Alamy
Last month, my sister, her husband and their three children returned to their damaged flat in northern Gaza after enduring almost thirteen months of forced displacement. My sister said that her four-year-old son struggles to walk on tiles and nearly fell while using the unfamiliar stairs. Since May 2024 they had been living in a tent, which provided little protection against intense heat, cold or heavy rains. One day they were flooded. At other times they faced severe food shortages. None of this stopped them setting up a school at the camp.
Devils Hole Pupfish, Amargosa Valley, Nevada. Photo © Stone Nature Photography / Alamy
We ask a lot of some very small fish. Single species are relied on to save entire ecosystems.
Robert Schumann’s teenage ambitions of virtuosity were undone by the onset of debilitating pain in his right hand. ‘It came to such a point that whenever I had to move my fourth finger, my whole body would twist convulsively,’ he wrote to a friend. Trying to make his fingers stronger he experimented with mechanical devices that probably banjaxed them irreparably. A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.
A standard English textbook in China asks students to compose a letter from someone called Li Hua to their British friend Allen, inviting him to a music festival. When the US ban on TikTok briefly came into effect earlier this month, nearly three million ‘TikTok refugees’ signed up to the Chinese app RedNote (Xiaohongshu). Many of them were asked by Chinese users if they’d received a letter from Li Hua.