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A Portrait of the Journalist as a Young Woman

Amanda Baillieu

Portrait of Mollie Panter-Downes by Eileen Robey

After my mother died last year my sister and I sold almost all the paintings, drawings and prints that she and my stepfather, an art dealer, had amassed over fifty years. One of the eight hundred items loaded onto a van was a youthful portrait of my grandmother, the writer and journalist Mollie Panter-Downes. A few months later I was sent a draft of the auctioneer’s catalogue. The portrait had a reserve of £300 and the artist had been identified as Eileen Robey, the daughter of Sir George Robey, one of the great music hall performers. The women were born a few years apart, Eileen in 1902 and Mollie in 1906.

Eileen Robey is a shadowy figure despite her obvious talent as a painter. Portraits by her occasionally surface at auctions but she is not represented in any of the national galleries and my attempts to research her career were unsuccessful. The auction house catalogue meanwhile described Mollie as a writer, ‘largely forgotten today’. If the portrait were sold to a private buyer, I thought, wouldn’t I be helping to deepen her obscurity? I also felt a sense of injustice. If it had been a portrait of a male writer by a male artist, would the description have been so dismissive and the price so low? I withdrew the painting from the sale.

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3 July 2023

In Service to the State

Musab Younis

The point-blank shooting by police officers of 17-year-old Nahel M. during a traffic stop in Nanterre last Tuesday was not a unique occurrence. On 7 June, three weeks before Nahel’s death, police in Paris killed a 21-year-old passenger in a car that had allegedly refused to stop for a check. The passenger was not named in media reports; she was described only as a ‘young woman’. On 14 June, two weeks before Nahel’s death, a 19-year-old Guinean supermarket logistics worker, Alhoussein Camara, was shot dead near Angoulême at a roadside checkpoint.

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30 June 2023

The Singing Glaciers of Svalbard

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Earlier this year, two ice cores 125 metres long were drilled out of the Holtedahlfonna icefield and flown to the Ice Memory Sanctuary in Antarctica, so that climatic history can still be traced through Svalbard’s glaciers even after they’ve disappeared completely. Meanwhile deposits from Albania, Croatia, North Macedonia and Benin were brought to Svalbard’s Global Seed Vault, which houses 1.2 million samples from over five thousand plant species from around the world as an insurance policy against ecological collapse. At the Seed Vault’s tenth anniversary celebrations five years ago, water had to be pumped out of its entrance foyers after another warmest month on record melted the permafrost that was the whole reason the vault had been built in Longyearbyen.

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30 June 2023

Orphaned

Forrest Hylton

Last Friday, I received news that Dr Z had died in hospital from kidney cancer. Two months ago his daughter was still in school, living at home with her family. Now she is orphaned and on the run from the narco-paramilitaries who targeted her family because her father protected the displaced Zenú cacique Víctor Peña after they warned him against it. 

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28 June 2023

Prigozhin’s March on Moscow

Greg Afinogenov

In late May, the pro-Kremlin political PR hack Konstantin Dolgov published a startling interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner private military company. Prigozhin said that the entire ‘denazification and demilitarisation’ rationale behind the invasion of Ukraine was a sham; that the war was a failure; that the Ukrainian army was now among the strongest in the world; that the children of the Kremlin elite ‘allow themselves to live a public, fat, worry-free life applying face cream and showing it on the internet while ordinary people’s children are coming back in zinc [coffins]’; and that ‘this divide might end with a revolution, like in 1917, when first the soldiers rise up, then the people close to them’ to ‘stick the elites on pitchforks.’ Last weekend Prigozhin appeared to put his money where his mouth was.

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28 June 2023

In Zakharivka

Maxim Edwards

At the single crossroads in Zakharivka, a hundred kilometres north-west of Kyiv, the remains of a rocket are lodged in a tree. Nearly two-thirds of the village’s twenty or so houses were destroyed in the first weeks of the Russian assault last year. Signs on the metal gates of the bombed-out properties say: ‘There is an owner!’

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28 June 2023

Mismanaged Decline

Holly Connolly

Walk towards the centre of Belfast from the south of the city, along the Dublin Road, and you’ll pass what used to be the Movie House cinema. It sold cheap tickets, screened mostly blockbusters, had wall-to wall-sticky carpets and, though it was built as recently as the mid-1990s, felt considerably older. It was the kind of place that’s precious precisely because it’s a bit of a dump. In 2017, planning permission was granted for a £65 million ‘upgrade’ on the site.

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