Jenny Turner

After​ the death of his mother, a man called Beeklam turns to collecting statues, which he keeps in the flooded basement of his house in Amsterdam. Thelma, he calls one specimen – it was his mother’s name. Others are Rosalind, Diane, Magdalena, Gertrud, after his mother’s friends. Because the basement, ‘like the sewers’, is connected to the sea, ‘it was a...

‘Think Pink!’ Kay Thompson exhorted, playing a singing Diana Vreeland in Funny Face (1957), one of several Hollywood movies of the postwar period set in a pasteboard advent-calendar Paris, with Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn as the elegant, monstrously innocent gamine. ‘Pink for shoes! Pink for hose! Pink for gloves and chapeaus!’ The song, disappointingly, fails to...

In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly...

So what’s it like in there, the drum-bearer asked me when we reached the gates of the delegates-only COP26 Blue Zone, thickly fenced behind rows of anti-ram-raid bollards, with the nearby drains and lampposts swept for bombs and sealed. Huge. Bewildering. Exhausting. I don’t have a clue what I should be doing, but every day I try to find out. I had thought I’d see inside the sausage factory, the where, the what, the mechanics of how climate laws are made, but all I see are sausages in their packets, though sometimes the label on a packet has another one stuck on top. I read the ingredients and I look them up on Google or Twitter, or I go to a session to find out what they are. I sit in a session and I just don’t get it, or I do get it, which means I’m probably at something unimportant. It’s too big for one person even to begin to follow; you split into pieces when you try. So, actually I’m in despair and I’d much rather be out here with you lot. I met another journalist who said that, the XR drum-bearer said.

In summer​ last year, Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, posted a selfie on Twitter modelling her new Hannah Arendt face mask:

Preparefor the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes

‘Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/’ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York...