A hantavirus outbreak is extremely unexpected. Part of the confusion in press coverage has arisen from the messiness of viral classification. Although virologists do their best to categorise viruses into the traditional hierarchies of taxonomy – species, genus, family – the results are rarely satisfactory. Hantaviruses are a fairly diverse group of related viruses containing at least twenty species, only some of which can infect humans, and causing quite different diseases when they do. The natural hosts for all those viruses are thought to be rodents. After the passengers on the Hondius were informed in early May that the authorities suspected hantavirus, at least one hoped that it meant the ship was rat-infested; the alternative was that the outbreak was of the Andes virus, the only hantavirus species believed to be capable of human-to-human transmission.
The Beersheba boarding school for boys in 1935, twelve years before Salman Abu Sitta was a student there.
The Haganah attacked Beersheba on 21 October 1948. A week later, David Ben-Gurion came to inspect the town. He admired the fine stone government buildings, the Arab houses and the boys’ school, where I had been a student. He liked them so much so he decided to live there. After his death in 1973 he was buried at Sde Boker, a little to the south of the town, near the Arab village of Rakhama (renamed Yeruham in Hebrew). In the 78 years since 1948, I have never ceased to think, plan and strive for my right of return home.
To understand Walter Benjamin’s life, it is best to begin with his death. Attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France, he died by suicide on 26 September 1940, in the village of Portbou, Catalonia. Born into a wealthy Berlin family in 1892, he had been a prodigious intellectual force as a student, anti-war activist and journalist. After Hitler came to power in 1933, however, he became an impoverished and isolated exile in Paris, writing and researching at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
By now, a production of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer presumes its own opposition. At the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence last month, however, the terms of that opposition had shifted: the protesters weren’t the work’s habitual antagonists, demonstrating under the misapprehension that the opera is antisemitic or glorifies terrorism. They were activists from Firenze per la Palestina.
In the month since the ceasefire on 8 April, Trump’s rhetoric has swung erratically between talk of total victory and apocalyptic ultimatums (‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’), between broadcasting imminent peace and the sudden withdrawal of proposals. On 1 May, Trump declared the war ‘terminated’, only to announce Project Freedom on 4 May to forcibly reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Less than 24 hours later he pulled the plug.
‘The Edges V’ by Lilly Fenichel, 1984 (Gift of Joyce Fitz)
I rediscovered the power of abstract painting on a trip to New Mexico. From high above Albuquerque, the tawny, light-reflecting landscape stretched below the solarised blue, with long straight highways looking as if they’d been scratched out by a fingernail. Mountain ranges came into view, and discrete volcanic cones, and I saw the terminus of the Sangre de Cristo where it met the plain.
He said the boiler could be fixed but it would be better to replace it. He put the call to the supplier on speakerphone. We were told a new boiler would be around 700 million rials (nearly £400). He hung up. ‘With this economy,’ he said, ‘you end up choosing between something being broken and not having it at all.’ While he was working to repair the boiler, I asked after his family. His hands stopped for a moment. ‘My father died two weeks ago.’