Angelique Richardson

Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘A Christmas Ghost-Story’ was published in the Westminster Gazette in December 1899, two months after the start of the Second Anglo-Boer War. The ghost is that of a soldier, and the poem emphasises his unknown nationality.

The Sinhala word for hunger is badagini. It means ‘fire in the belly’. According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children in Sri Lanka are in need of humanitarian assistance, including 56,000 suffering from severe acute malnutrition. The World Food Programme warns that 6.3 million people – 28 per cent of the population – face acute food insecurity. Pregnant and breastfeeding women, children under five and people with disabilities are among the worst affected. The country is deep in an economic, political and humanitarian crisis.

According to a recent article in the Sun on Sunday, an unnamed Tory minister is of the view that ‘we need to have more children. The rate keeps falling. Look at Hungary – they cut taxes for mothers who have more children.’ As Zoe Williams pointed out in the Guardian, the article appeared on the same day that Nadhim Zahawi (then the Cabinet Office minister, now the Tory party chairman) and Suella Braverman (then and now the home secretary) had discussed a plan to tackle ‘bad migration’ by capping the number of children foreign students can bring to the UK. The phrase ‘bad immigration’ crops up perennially in Parliament.

On 31 August at Leicester Crown Court, Judge Timothy Spencer handed down a two-year suspended sentence to Ben John, a 21-year-old student, for possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist. He had downloaded bomb-making instructions along with 67,788 documents containing white supremacist and antisemitic material. Judge Spencer ordered John to read Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare, and also to think about Hardy and Trollope, returning to court every four months to be tested on his reading. For one commenter on the Mail Online, it was ‘worse than a prison sentence!’

On Wednesday, 4 August, Marta Krawiec left Tufnell Park to cycle to work at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital. She never made it. She died in a collision with a lorry at the junction of Theobald’s Road and Southampton Row.