March 2025

It would be a mistake to see the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil for his political views in relation to Palestine as an authoritarian aberration on the part of the Trump administration. In reality, it marks the latest episode in a long-running saga of state repression of political speech in support of Palestinian rights on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nigeria already struggles with inadequate healthcare funding. This year’s budget allocates only 5.18 per cent of the total (2.48 trillion naira) to health – which is up from 1.23 trillion naira last year but still far below the 15 per cent target set by the Abuja Declaration in 2001. Without USAID, an already fragile system is weakened. This crisis forces a cruel reckoning: what happens when a nation accustomed to foreign aid is left to fend for itself? The abrupt withdrawal has revived debates among development economists. Critics argue that foreign aid fosters dependency and corruption, enriching elites while leaving ordinary citizens in poverty.

Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer. Not everyone who came to the film’s UK premiere at the BFI last month realised that Schtinter was in it.

Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), ‘the “forgotten plague” was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.’

The British brought the system of administrative detention to Palestine when they were the mandatory power. The rules also authorised military courts, restriction of movement, censorship, the expropriation and demolition of houses, arbitrary searches and curfews, and were used by the British against both Palestinians and immigrants of Jewish and other religious backgrounds. Despite many of its founders being caught on the wrong side of these laws, Israel adopted them in 1948 and has strenuously resisted attempts to modify their provisions.

On Sunday, 9 March, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will be collaborating on an evening of music and readings inspired by Edward Said’s last, posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.