The hope that every fascist is a future liberal or leftist just waiting to escape their present life is a form of naive and self-defeating optimism. ‘It’s terrible advice,’ says Joan Braune, a lecturer in philosophy at Gonzaga University. It can be dangerous for minority communities to show compassion to people who have expressed hateful ideas, or forgive people who haven’t given up the politics of hate.
It was 27°C in London on Friday, 20 June, and I was looking forward to cooling off with a swim at the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond. The first time I visited the pond I felt as if I’d walked into the Garden of Eden. A breeze rippled through the foliage that obscured the upper meadow from outside eyes. Lily pads floated on the water. Women, alone with a book or in groups, were dotted around, lounging in the sun or shade. Amplified sound is forbidden, so the murmurs of conversation and the birds were all you could hear. A space without men allows for a different type of relaxation, a kind of whole body letting go.
Chuck Berry in 1957 (Lifestyle Pictures/Alamy)
Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned seventy. 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.