July 2025

Last month, Gazans honoured their donkeys, dressing them up and walking them down a red carpet to celebrate the animals and contrast their resilience and support to that provided by global leaders. Reports soon followed of the large-scale theft of donkeys from Gaza by Israel. Some are being transferred to a farm in Israel called ‘Let’s Start Again’. Glossy videos describe their care. Some are said to have been exported to France and Belgium.

Meanwhile trauma centres in Gaza are recording the questions that children are asking: when it rains will we drown in the tent? When they bomb the tent, will we burn? Why do they always bomb us? I don’t want to die in pieces. Will the dogs that ate the dead bodies of the martyrs turn into humans? Do children who have their legs amputated grow new legs? Do the Israeli pilots who bomb children have children?

Sinner often seems engaged in a battle to keep a certain flailing inelegance in check. That he does so successfully is one of the marvels of his game. 

When tickets for Euro 2025 went on sale last year, UEFA made the usual noises about igniting passion, inspiring the next generation and celebrating progress – platitudes that have been repeated in much of the coverage. The game needs more than slogans and anthems, as a series of announcements from clubs last summer made clear. Thornaby FC announced they would be axing their women’s and girls’ teams. (Following protests, the decision was reversed and nine months later Thornaby won the North-East Regional Women’s League.) Reading FC withdrew from the FA Women’s Championship, citing lack of funding. Blackburn Rovers announced that their women players would receive only minimum wage. The Lionesses’ captain, Leah Williamson, who has been with Arsenal since she was nine years old, told the Times she wasn’t ‘earning enough to retire’.

When the settlers moved in on the Palestinian village of al-Mu’arrajat, we all knew what was coming next. It has happened again and again throughout the West Bank. Encroachment, harassment, theft and terror, until the unhidden goal is achieved: cleansing the area of non-Jews. Still, my fellow activists and I could not stop trying. So at 10:30 p.m. on 2 July, some of us drove out of Jerusalem on the twisting road down to the Jordan Valley. Al-Mu’arrajat is named after those curves. Or it was.

The hope that every fascist is a future liberal or leftist just waiting to escape their present life is a form of naive and self-defeating optimism. ‘It’s terrible advice,’ says Joan Braune, a lecturer in philosophy at Gonzaga University. It can be dangerous for minority communities to show compassion to people who have expressed hateful ideas, or forgive people who haven’t given up the politics of hate.

It was 27°C in London on Friday, 20 June, and I was looking forward to cooling off with a swim at the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond. The first time I visited the pond I felt as if I’d walked into the Garden of Eden. A breeze rippled through the foliage that obscured the upper meadow from outside eyes. Lily pads floated on the water. Women, alone with a book or in groups, were dotted around, lounging in the sun or shade. Amplified sound is forbidden, so the murmurs of conversation and the birds were all you could hear. A space without men allows for a different type of relaxation, a kind of whole body letting go.

Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned seventy. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.

An Anglo-American audience is a mixed blessing for an Irish artist. Pro: you get their money. Con: their opinions, too. The Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap have exploded in popularity since last year’s film about them. They now have less time for Irish-language poetry events in Dublin. They have also attracted international controversy, which they say is a bad-faith reaction to the pro-Palestinian solidarity they have been expressing in Ireland for years without a problem.

I met the great Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi in 2006. We had the same publisher, and through them he sent me a message inviting me to tea at the Azadi Hotel in northern Tehran. At one point he told me: ‘Everyone says great writers know what to write and how to write. But everybody can figure that out. What matters is knowing where to write from.’

I was too young to get his point. Many of Dowlatabadi’s books are set in his hometown in Khorasan, and I assumed he was championing a sort of primordial loyalty to one’s origins. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I longed to be metropolitan and worldly, the kind of eastern writer the West notices and praises. It wasn’t until two decades later, in June 2025, as I watched Israeli jets bomb Tehran with impunity, that I understood what he meant.

The Ministry of Veteran Affairs, established in 2018, oversees housing, healthcare and financial support for former soldiers. But the road from the front to these reintegration programmes can be long and winding.