April 2025

The Queen Mary University of London branch of the University and College Union, of which I am co-chair, hosts a webpage, UK HE shrinking, that lists redundancy and closure programmes at UK universities. The list, now 93 institutions long, is the only public attempt so far to track what is happening to higher education institutions in the UK. It is an index of a sector in freefall. 

A year ago I received an email from an HR director at another university, asking me to change the description of their ‘transformation’ programme on the list. The HR director’s university was established in the 1960s. It has an international research reputation and a local undergraduate student population. Like most UK universities, it has an accounting model that speculates on overseas fees for postgraduate taught degrees, and, when it doesn’t meet these budgets, cuts undergraduate programmes predominantly taken by home students. It has quite a lot in common with the fictional Brent University, the setting for Jack Rooke’s BAFTA-winning sitcom, Big Boys.

A Wound with Teeth, the first half of the choreographer Holly Blakey’s recent double bill at the Southbank Centre, reminded me of some of Paula Rego’s busiest paintings. It seems to come from the same dreamscape: deconstructed fairy tale costumes, densely arrayed symbolism, a certain shagginess of expression, animal heads, predatory gender relations (going both ways), triumphant victims, grotesque sexuality, maximalism, a powerful sense of mischief, an elaborate, multi-perspectival choreography of confrontations, subplots and cursed couplings.

If the British government is to be believed, only one civilian has been killed by its armed forces during its air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As part of the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve, Britain has dropped more than 4300 bombs on Iraq and Syria since 2014, many of them in densely populated urban centres, and claims to have killed more than four thousand IS fighters. The US admits that the coalition has killed at least 1437 civilians, though the likely toll is far higher. Airwars, a British civilian casualty research organisation, puts the number between eight and thirteen thousand.

I asked Raji Sourani of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights if it was true that Gazans can hear the difference between a British drone and other drones. ‘Hear the difference?’ he replied. ‘You can read the writing on them.’

Towards the end of February, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan accused the Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, the third most powerful man in Nigeria, of sexual harassment. According to Akpoti-Uduaghan, in December 2023, on a visit to the Senate president’s house, Akpabio held her hand while giving her a tour, her husband walking behind them. In one of the mansion’s many sitting rooms, she says, he asked her if she liked his house and told her: ‘I’m going to create time for us to come spend quality moments here. You will enjoy it.’ In a second incident, Akpoti-Uduaghan says that Akpabio told her a motion she put forward would appear before the Senate if she ‘took care of him’.

Mario Vargas Llosa has died at the age of 89. In a recent issue of the London Review, Tony Wood wrote about the Peruvian novelist’s trip to Moscow in 1968, when his disenchantment with socialism began (or so he later claimed).

When Adolescence was released on Netflix last month, it was pegged as an incisive inquiry into the manosphere and the ways that misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate are poisoning the minds of young boys. In fact the series is quite light on that, beyond parsing some red pill emojis and making a few references to podcasts. Should all under-sixteens be banned from smartphones and social media? The proposal is fervently discussed even though it’s obviously unworkable.

On 1 April, the memorial site at the former Buchenwald concentration camp announced that the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm would no longer be speaking at the eightieth anniversary commemoration of the camp’s liberation. Boehm was disinvited because of pressure from the Israeli embassy. How did the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor become the object of such a campaign by the Israeli government?

El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) opened in 2023. It has capacity for up to forty thousand prisoners, although is said to be only half full. CECOT was built to incarcerate members of violent gangs, who by 2015 had made El Salvador the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country. Dispensing with warrants and court hearings, in 2022 the government jailed almost 2 per cent of the population, many on the basis only of their tattoos. The official murder rate fell from 18 per day to one every three days. In early February, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, toured Central American capitals. In San Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the ‘world’s coolest dictator’, offered to make his prisons available, for a fee, to hold ‘criminal’ migrants deported from the US.

Barbara Everett, who died on Friday, 4 April at the age of 92, was for many years a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her books include Poets in Their Time and Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. She published editions of Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as writing many influential essays on the plays. Among her subjects in the LRB have been Shakespeare’s romances, the Sonnets, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure and Falstaff.

Last Wednesday, 2 April, Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’, marked a new departure. There’s not even a pretence at playing by the rules anymore. This was a carnival of trade discrimination: open, delirious, triumphant. The husk of the WTO system, chewed up for decades by termites of all shapes and sizes, has been whacked with a large hammer. It is unlikely to be replaced by an orderly transition to geopolitically aligned trading blocs. Some of the United States’ closest allies are now being hit with the biggest tariffs.

Free movement is a foundational right of EU citizens. When expelling a citizen of another member state on the grounds of public security (the other possible grounds are public health and public policy), the expelling state must show that the citizen represents ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’. This is, or should be, a very high bar. A Polish citizen, Kasia Wlaszczyk, and two Irish citizens, Roberta Murray and Shane O’Brien, currently living in Berlin, have been ordered to leave Germany by 21 April or be deported, along with Cooper Longbottom, an American holding a student visa. All are active in the Palestine solidarity movement. None has any criminal convictions.

The 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck central Myanmar on 28 March, followed minutes later by one almost as big, was the strongest in over a century. It sent multistorey buildings across Mandalay and nearby towns crashing to the ground, and caused devastation as far away as Bangkok, six hundred miles to the south. More than three thousand people have been confirmed dead in Myanmar, and unknown numbers are still missing. In Bangkok, rescuers continue to pull people from the rubble of a collapsed skyscraper.

Javier Milei’s popularity and legitimacy have been significantly eroded since he came to power in 2023, as pessimism over the economy has increased, with 37 per cent of Argentinians expecting things to get worse in the coming year. Inflation, at 67 per cent annually, is among the highest in the world – with food prices skyrocketing. In January twice as many Argentinians visited Brazil as in the same month last year, while tourism in Argentina has dried up. Unwilling to devalue the peso, Milei is asking the IMF for a loan.

Time-specific art extends the principles of site-specificity into the fourth dimension, by integrating circadian rhythms or extreme duration, say, into its performance language, or by staging a work to coincide precisely with when it’s set. There seems to be a lot of it about, at the moment, perhaps because it offers a live corrective to the always on, ever present homogeneity of digital culture. ‘The ephemerality and transitory nature is its power,’ as Séan Doran puts it. ‘You either got to it or you didn’t.’ Doran is the creative director of Arts Over Borders, who have just announced two new programming strands.