In May, the High Court ruled that Suella Braverman, in trying to lower the threshold for lawful protest, had exceeded the power granted to her in the original legislation. In the final months of Rishi Sunak’s government, the home secretary announced the government’s intention to challenge the decision in the Court of Appeal. With Labour returned to power and the Tories reduced to a rump, the expectation was that the appeal – and the regulations fettering protest – would be dropped. Shortly after taking office as home secretary, Yvette Cooper paused the appeal. But last week the government announced that the High Court’s decision was not the end of the matter. In opposition, Labour MPs were whipped to vote against the original iteration of the bill. But now the appeal is back on.
The dining table at the Spanish embassy in Belgrave Square is 13.5 metres long and seats fifty people. It’s said to be the largest table (without leaves) in London. No. 24 Belgrave Square, once Downshire House, was acquired by the Spanish government in 1928. The table came with the house. The previous owner was William Pirrie, the 1st Viscount Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilders Harland & Wolff and a one-time mayor of Belfast. It was in the dining-room of Downshire House in 1907 that Pirrie and Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, conceived their idea for three vast new ocean liners, the Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic.
Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian writer and intellectual, died in prison on 7 April, at the age of 62, less than a year before he was due to be released. Convicted in 1987 for involvement in the abduction and killing of the Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984 – which he always denied – Daqqa, a citizen of Israel, spent 38 years behind bars. During his time in jail he was diagnosed with cancer and suffered from medical neglect. The Israeli government has refused to release his body to his family, withholding it as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Hamas.
The scholarly consensus seems to be that Leonora Carrington was not actively involved in many – or most – of these late career sculptures. Marina Warner told me they were ‘versions of works she made – interpreted in a different medium’. It seems likely that some of them are reinterpretations of drawings or paintings, possibly based on sketches. Later in life she made little models in plasticine – there was one on the bench in her studio when I visited her in 2008. Some of them seem to have successfully made the jump into bronze, but many have been transformed beyond recognition, blown up into vast soulless structures with the precise proportions lost and one struggles to see the hand of the artist (or any artist).
On Monday, 15 July, the LRB in partnership with MUBI screened Kelly Reichardt’s film ‘First Cow’ at the Garden Cinema as the latest in a series of events exploring the art of literary adaptation. Jonathan Raymond, who co-wrote the screenplay and is the author of the novel it’s based on, introduced the film.
There wasn’t a cow in the book. The Half-Life, my first published work of fiction, was loaded with native plants, psychedelic drugs, overheard bus conversations, composited friends and family members, some of whom still bore the names they carried in reality. But there was no cow.
If, in 1948, firing had not been coming in the direction from masnaa al-bira (the beer factory) my family would have headed south to Gaza, where they would, according to my father, have stayed. By the time they tried to leave Jaffa later, by boat, my father was badly wounded, following a grenade attack. If the sea had not been too rough on one attempt to lift him onto a boat on his stretcher, we could have ended up in Lebanon. If a man called Sir James Craig had not walked into the British Council in Damascus in 1952 and discovered my uncle Hussein’s gift for languages, we might not have come to England. My brother-in-law has lost at least 23 members of his family in Gaza, mainly children. A cousin of his, Sumaya, worked as a teacher. She was sheltering in a school when she and her three children Leen (aged six), Mariam (three) and Malik (two) were killed in an airstrike.
An Armtrac 400 demining vehicle in Kharkiv, October 2022. Photo © Ukrinform / Alamy.
Early on 24 July, a Russian missile struck the Kharkiv office of Fondation Suisse de Déminage, a mine-clearing organisation. The missile – probably a medium-range ballistic Iskander-M – blew open the second, third and fourth floors of the building and damaged several vehicles. Fortunately, it didn’t kill or injure any staff. One morning last summer, an hour east of Kharkiv, at the edge of an overgrown field, I watched as three de-miners from the State Emergency Service of Ukraine strapped on their body armour.