Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. She first appeared in the London Review on the letters page in 1993. The first poems of hers we published, after the success of Autobiography of Red, were four from The Beauty of the Husband in 2000. Two or three contributions – usually though not always poems – have followed every year since, including ‘Ode to the Sublime by Monica Vitti’, ‘Euripides to the Audience’, ‘Wildly Constant’, ‘Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)’, ‘On Snow’, ‘What I Like about You, Baby’ and ‘In My Life as a Visiting Lecturer I Meet Various and Sundry People or, Another Way to Think of This, Here Are All the Novels I Never Wrote and You Are Welcome to Them’.
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There were still several gendarmerie vans parked near Lycée Hélène Boucher in the 20th arrondissement at noon on Tuesday. In a nearby bar, some of the gendarmes were getting coffee. A few hours earlier, they had been beating teachers, parents and other adults who’d formed a human chain to protect student demonstrators. The students, chanting ‘On est là,’ had since made their way along boulevard Voltaire to place de la République to join tens of thousands of others for the afternoon march.
The biggest movie at the Chinese box office this August – grossing nearly three times as much as The Odyssey, released the same week – was Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, directed by Wen Muye. Loosely based on a true story, it follows Xu Fu (Shen Teng), a chef from northern China, who takes a job at the Dragon restaurant in a fictionalised Baghdad.
The Israeli military claims that each individual strike in Gaza is justified but ignores their collective consequences. A reason is given for each ruin: this hospital sheltered fighters, that school sat above tunnels, this apartment block concealed weapons, that ambulance moved without co-ordination, this residential building housed ‘Hamas operatives’. But a justification that covers nearly every hospital, school, bakery and water plant is no longer a justification of isolated incidents.
If the radical agenda is real, it points to an early general election. Burnham said that the National Care Service will be introduced ‘in the next parliament’ and electoral reform will be a ‘manifesto commitment’. He struck the pose of a leader already in campaign mode. It seems unlikely that he intends to wait three years before implementing his flagship policies.
For a little over a year, the theatre directors Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have been touring a play based on the Pelicot mass rape trial. First performed in Vienna in June 2025, The Pelicot Trial: Tribute to Gisèle Pelicot has travelled to Avignon (where the trial was held), a number of other European cities and New York. In many places, it has been one night only. The next performance will be on 4 October in St Gallen; it comes to London at the end of November. I saw it in Copenhagen, at the Betty Nansen Teatret, whose new artistic directors ‘want to create a theatre that dares to engage with the world we live in and insists that we can understand it better’.
In Iran, as elsewhere, GLP-1 agonists such as semaglutide and tirzepatide offer a chance to address obesity, improve organ functioning and treat various chronic health conditions. The drugs are also popular with those who simply want to lose weight. Sales have been robust, even in the face of US and Israeli military strikes and a worsening economic crisis. Over a recent four-month period, national sales of tirzepatide reached 150 billion rials, or about £8.2 million.