‘There are ten thousand freedoms,’ the late Joshua Clover once said, ‘but rock freedom is definitely set – in the first instance – in a car, when it’s late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless freedom, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.’
Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned 75. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.
Kneecap performing at Glastonbury, 28 June 2025. (Justin Ng/Alamy)
An Anglo-American audience is a mixed blessing for an Irish artist. Pro: you get their money. Con: their opinions, too. The Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap have exploded in popularity since last year’s film about them. They now have less time for Irish-language poetry events in Dublin. They have also attracted international controversy, which they say is a bad-faith reaction to the pro-Palestinian solidarity they have been expressing in Ireland for years without a problem.
I met the great Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi in 2006. We had the same publisher, and through them he sent me a message inviting me to tea at the Azadi Hotel in northern Tehran. At one point he told me: ‘Everyone says great writers know what to write and how to write. But everybody can figure that out. What matters is knowing where to write from.’
I was too young to get his point. Many of Dowlatabadi’s books are set in his hometown in Khorasan, and I assumed he was championing a sort of primordial loyalty to one’s origins. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I longed to be metropolitan and worldly, the kind of eastern writer the West notices and praises. It wasn’t until two decades later, in June 2025, as I watched Israeli jets bomb Tehran with impunity, that I understood what he meant.
Ukrainian war veterans at basketball practice in Odesa. Photo © Lukasz Mackiewicz
The Ministry of Veteran Affairs, established in 2018, oversees housing, healthcare and financial support for former soldiers. But the road from the front to these reintegration programmes can be long and winding.
The Canongate Wall outside the Scottish Parliament building, Edinburgh. (Peter Titmuss/Alamy)
The stone suits the poetry. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. I think poetry suits stone, more than it suits paper, certainly more than it suits a screen.
During a parliamentary debate on the Terrorism Bill in 2000, MPs asked whether the legislation could be used to proscribe Greenpeace as a terrorist organisation. The group had, in recent years, temporarily blocked nuclear warhead production at AWE Aldermaston, spray-painted a power station and destroyed a field of genetically modified maize. The home secretary, Jack Straw, replied that he ‘knew of no evidence whatever that Greenpeace is involved in any activity that would fall remotely under the scope of this measure’. Proscription was a ‘heavy power’ that would be used only when ‘absolutely necessary’, he said, and the Human Rights Act 1998 was a ‘profound safeguard’ against its disproportionate use.
The US has declared an uncertain and messy end to its attack on Iran. Trump announced a ceasefire some hours before it was acknowledged by Israel and Iran, and later said both sides had violated it (‘they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,’ he complained). Overall it seems likely to hold, for a while at least.