LRB blog

Jordan Bardella was supposed to be a different kind of far-right French politician: young, technically savvy, a long way from the poisonous demagoguery and street fighting of the old Front National. Mediapart, the investigative news site, last month published some of Bardella’s Facebook Messenger correspondence from when he was an aspiring FN apparatchik in 2013. Leaked by former party colleagues, it included such conspiratorial claims as ‘the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them’ and ‘all the banks are owned by Jews.’ Since he denied writing the Facebook messages, rival politicians have joined other public figures in openly referring to Bardella as a liar as well as an antisemite. 

Lula raised the budget for school lunches, improved access to higher education and free medication, and increased the hiring of public health professionals by a third. He restarted public housing and community policing programmes, restricted access to firearms and provided debt relief. He created a new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and made advances towards participatory budgeting at the federal level. He removed Brazil from the UN Hunger Map and strengthened affirmative action measures for Afro-Brazilians in higher education. Should Flávio Bolsonaro become president, every one of these gains will be reversed, remaining state enterprises will be privatised, coup plotters will receive amnesties and the military will return to government.

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’.

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.