The Editors

In the new episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman, Helen Thompson, Catherine Barnard and Chris Bickerton ask what’s at stake in the prorogation case at the Supreme Court.

A new edition of Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit is published today. The late Heathcote Williams composed his ‘study in depravity’ more than three years ago, when Johnson was still mayor of London: before the 2016 EU referendum, before Johnson’s careless talk condemned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to an Iranian jail cell, before the police were called to a domestic dispute at his girlfriend’s flat, before he said his hobby was making model buses out of old wine boxes, before he became prime minister. But Williams’s portrait is as true a likeness of its subject now as it was then.

From John Sturrock’s introduction to his1978 Penguin Classics translationof Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris:
 

Notre-Dame is meant in part as a redemption of an architecture in eclipse. 

Tony Harrison reads his poem 'A Cold Coming' in 1991.

We announced the start of this year’s #readeverywhere photo contest with the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, somewhat butchered; so to crown the winners, we’d better subject its closing paragraph to the same miserable treatment: