Kathleen Stock – former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex – was interviewed by Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour. 

The interview was Stock’s first media appearance since her resignation from the university six days ago. Stock resigned over a very public debate about gender ideology, trans rights, and gender self-identification. The situation reached a head with student protests and a campaign calling for Stock to be fired.

In the interview, Stock did not blame her decision to leave solely on student protests, but rather “three and a half years of low-level bullying and harassment and reputation trashing from colleagues”. She didn’t know if the student activity would be there if the colleague activity hadn’t already been there, she said, and blamed a “small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sort of things I say”… “telling their students in lectures that I pose a harm”. 

She was disparaging of the role academics have played in creating an atmosphere in which the students become much more extreme and empowered to do what they did, crediting what she termed the decline of the ‘traditional university methods’ of arguing using reason and evidence. 

Stock noted that Sussex had been “much more proactive” in supporting her in recent weeks, but still spoke of an uncomfortable environment on campus. “People radically misrepresent my views”, she said, describing it as “really exhausting” when “every tenth person is giving you daggers as you cross the campus.”

She described her treatment on campus as the mechanism of social ostracism, by which she was “ejected from the tribe”. After 18 years working at the university, this was “completely humiliating”, and she felt “completely powerless to correct the misrepresentations”. She said: “Most of the students who have protested against me really don’t have a clue what I think, and that’s because the adults who are supposed to care about the truth haven’t told them”.

In the interview, Stock set out her beliefs about gender she had established in her book Material Girls. Stock believes that both her views and her book are “pretty moderate”. She believes that you cannot alter biological sex, and the categories of male and female “are set up in ways that are not altered by inner feelings of identity”. In Stock’s view, these categories are there for really good reasons: “In order to enable humans to pick out important facts about the human species which is sexually dimorphic”. For Stock, these categories are needed for “medical interests, sporting interests, educational interests”. 

She maintains that these views are completely compatible with protecting trans people in law.

Stock is disparaging of the view that her belief makes students unsafe. She told Barnett: “I know that it makes them feel unsafe – they’ve been encouraged to feel like that. But whether you feel unsafe or are unsafe are different things. Philosophers constantly distinguish between appearances and reality. My book is not physically making them unsafe. It might be challenging them, psychologically… but I am not actually making them unsafe, my words are not.”

She went on to say that “if anyone ever presented a credible argument about how I was literally putting people at risk by saying what I just said, then I would care about it – but it’s just not the case. It’s hyperbole”.

Stock is a trustee of the LGB Alliance, and Emma Barnett asked whether her sexuality (Stock is a lesbian) has played a role in her targeting. Stock argues that “lesbians are at the sharp end of the gender self-identification ideology”, as the category of lesbian is challenged by the inclusion of trans women. It is for this reason – amongt others – that Stock sees no issue with the new charity the LGB Alliance. “Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have a perfect right to have an organisation that speaks for them alone”: as LGBT+ societies such as Stonewall have “focused on the T”. 

Stock says she does not regret speaking out about the issue, citing the hundreds of emails, letters, and cards she has received supporting her. She believes her critics are out of step with the general public, and she said she is glad she has not lost her voice.

Why is it that flu and colds feel so awful this year?

One argument is that our natural immunity was significantly weakened by successive lockdowns. Days, weeks, and months of seeing nobody but our closest family members reduced the number of bacteria and viruses we came into contact with, and our immunity has suffered as a result.

But it may not be that simple: the health benefits of lockdown for some people (exercising more, eating better, sleeping longer) could have enhanced our immunity, and the idea that the body cultivates long-lasting resistance against common colds and viruses is somewhat misplaced.

Rather, it is more likely to be the fact that the low levels of flu last year have made predicting the strain for this year’s vaccine inordinately difficult. In the UK, scientists are normally able to predict the predominant strain of the virus based off the strain in the Australian winter. Global lockdowns have made this type of transmission and prediction near-impossible.

But the flu is different to the common cold that is currently laying so many people low. Statistics released from the Royal College of General Practitioners suggest that cold levels are higher than normal at this point in the year, but this might be the result of increased socialising in a shorter amount of time after lockdowns than a particularly contagious strain.

One GP told Reaction that while they had consulted upon more cold cases than normal – particularly among children – it was not immediately clear that the illness was worse than a normal cold season.

How worrying is this for the winter?

With conversations about Plan B – or even Plan C – it is natural to worry about how this latest spate of illness might affect the NHS. Flu season is always a strain on medical resources; in an average year, flu can kill 11,000 people in England. In a particularly bad year, such as 2014-15, there were around 34,300 deaths.

Medical professionals are worried: earlier this month, the Royal College of General Practitioners released a report which revealed that over a third of doctors believed their organisation was not ready for the approaching winter.

How can you tell the difference between a cold or flu and Covid?

For people who are double jabbed, evidence from ZOE – the world’s largest Covid-19 study – suggests that symptoms of Covid-19 can be nearly indistinguishable from a cold, and can include a runny nose and a sore throat. If symptoms persist, it is worth getting a PCR test.

The GP I spoke to said that it was easier to distinguish between flu and rhinoviruses – if symptoms are confined to nose, throat, and ears, it is more likely to be the latter, but if the illness is whole-body, it is likely to be a flu virus. But, despite this distinction, almost “anything can be Covid” from the mildest head cold to a flu without any respiratory difficulties. If you are at all unsure, it is safer to get a PCR test rather than just a lateral flow test.

If you have a high temperature, a new, continuous cough, a change in your senses of smell or taste, then get a PCR test immediately.

What can you do to avoid the super cold or winter flu?

The government is encouraging all those who will be 50 by 31 March 2022 or are immunocompromised to have the flu vaccine. You can have the vaccine at your GP surgery, pharmacy, or a hospital appointment.

Aside from the vaccine, it is wise to follow the hygiene advice issued at the beginning of the pandemic. We are returning to the era of singing happy birthday whilst washing your hands…

There is some anecdotal evidence about the benefit of Vitamin C, and doctors recommend taking Vitamin D during the winter months due to the lack of light – but it is not altogether clear that vitamin supplements can stave off viruses.

What is the danger of having both Covid-19 and the flu at the same time?

Information from the NHS suggests that having both Covid-19 and the flu at the same time puts a person at greater risk of getting seriously ill and potentially requiring hospitalisation. It is for this reason that booster jabs are so key this winter.

If you are offered the Covid-19 booster jab, it is safe to have it at the same time as a flu vaccine. 

John le Carré is a British hero. Obituaries following his death lauded his success in raising “the spy novel to a new level of seriousness and respect” and his ability to reach beyond the glamour of Bond-like espionage to the “seedy” realities.

The breadth of the love for him and his writing – and the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find a middle-class man who does not list le Carré as one of his favourite authors – makes writing this review quite daunting.

This is because Silverview (published posthumously this week) is not a good novel. Not only is it not good, at points, it is actively awful.

It follows the classic le Carré gambit of an unknown and odd figure who turns out to be a spy. But beyond that, the plot manages to be both remarkably slim – 207 pages spent revealing that the man who acts oddly in Chapter 1 is, indeed, a spy – and impossible to follow. I became convinced that there must have been more lurking under the surface of the text and tied myself in knots trying to decipher what that is.

Part of the charm of le Carré is his ironic elitist thrill – his poking fun at the people who exist in the hotels managed by The Night Manager, or the George Lacons of this world (“Charlotte got her scholarship to Roedean, which was nice”).

In Silverview, this ironic charm falls flat: le Carré spends an expanse of pages describing the Proctor family – “who would never have described itself as upper class”. The description is meticulous: “Its money was held in trusts and not discussed. For its education, it sent its brightest to Winchester, its second brightest to Marlborough, and a few here and there, where need or principle dictated, to state school”.

The type of family le Carré describes – “on present count the Proctors could point to two learned judges, two Queen’s Counsellors, three physicians, one broadsheet editor, no politicians, thank God, and a healthy crop of spies” – undoubtedly does exist. 

But le Carré’s description of croquet lawns and garden parties feels false not because of its improbability, but its language. The scene he describes may well be dwindling, but its vocabulary is positively extinct: you would be hard-pressed to find someone who unironically refers to a “rugger blue” in 2021.

And it is not just the Proctors who feel like remnants of a different age. Le Carré’s descriptions of women seem particularly lacklustre in the twenty-first century. 

There is the continued presence of the cheating wife – a favourite even from the George Smiley days – and an omnipresent failure to realise most female characters beyond the most two-dimensional form. 

Women are beautiful and have auburn hair which they style in the way “beautiful women know how”. For le Carré, their beauty makes any other description unnecessary.

These are difficult issues to find fault with: le Carré has always written about the establishment, upper classes, and his women have always been beauties – and at least they are more realised than Bond girls. But, the problem with Silverview is that there is not enough plot, intrigue, or suspense – surely the key components of a spy novel – to rescue these flaws.

And it is here that the real issue of the novel becomes apparent. It is less a spy novel than a novel about a spy past; most of the true interest of the text comes from past stories, past descriptions, and old flashbacks. In many ways, it is the natural end to a career of twenty-six novels: a novel about the dying dregs of the world the other books inhabited.

But nostalgia and dwindling glamour do not make for brilliant reading. The language of Silverview is stilted – it is hard to believe that this is the same author who wrote that Smiley is one of the “meek who do not inherit the earth” – and, without being crass, its plot is dull.

Silverview was evidently published to capitalise on the last of the late le Carré’s success, but surely the more dignified decision would have been to pulp it. Both le Carré fans and first-time readers: stay well, well clear. 

Over 600 journalists in 117 countries – members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) – have spent months looking over the “Pandora papers”, which were published on Sunday. The papers relate to offshore financial schemes in countries including the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Dubai, Panama, and Monaco. More stories are set to be published this week.

The cache of 11.9 million files includes 6.4 million documents, three million images, over a million emails, and just under half a million spreadsheets. The 2.94 terabytes of data is larger than the 2.6 terabytes of the famous 2016 Panama papers leak, and the 1.4 terabytes of the 2017 Paradise papers.

What do the documents show? And why does it matter?

What do the documents show?

The documents reveal a web of companies that are set up in “tax havens” or secrecy jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. These offshore companies – often with unidentifiable owners – are then used to own property or assets in other countries. Offshore entities can be used to pay little to no corporation tax, or to avoid property taxes in other countries.

Is this illegal?

No – and yes. Tax avoidance (using loopholes to avoid paying certain taxes) is entirely legal. The UK government is rather bitter about this, declaring that it involves “operating with the letter, but not the spirit, of the law”.

But there are many reasons beyond tax avoidance for someone to set up an offshore company – to protect their assets from political instability or criminal activity, for example.

Tax evasion, however, is illegal. Tax evasion is intentionally concealing income from government authorities.

Beyond tax evasion, offshore entities and shell companies have been linked to concealing the proceeds from criminal activity.

Who is named in the papers?

Many powerful political figures. Ilham Aliyev – the Azerbaijani president – and his family have been named; the files reveal they have traded nearly £400 million of UK property. The Queen’s crown estate paid £67 million for one of their properties. Their names appeared alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, who has traded $100 million of property in London, Washington, and Malibu. Also named was the PM of the Czech Republic Andrej Babiš, and a law firm founded by the Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades. Anastasiades says he has had no active role in the firm since 1997.

The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy – elected on a platform of anti-corruption – transferred his 25 per cent stake in an offshore company to a friend months before he won the election.

A major donor to the Conservative party, Mohamaed Amersi, was revealed to have facilitated a deal which involved a $220m payment from a Swedish pharmaceutical company to a company owned by the daughter of the former president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. US authorities later established the payment had been a bribe. Boris Johnson has responded to the revelations by saying that all donations were “vetted”.

Tony and Cherie Blair are also named. The papers make it clear that the former prime minister and his wife saved £312,000 in stamp duty when they bought a £6.5m office in Marylebone. As they bought the offshore holding company rather than the building itself, they did not have to pay the tax. This is a legal loophole.

Why does this matter?

Whilst much of the activity revealed in the pandora papers is not illegal, the documents do show that many high-profile and high net-worth individuals are not paying taxes which other citizens cannot afford to avoid.

The role of London in this offshore financial world has also been emphasised: not only is the capital home to many of the service providers of these offshore schemes, but the amount of property in the city owned by such companies also raises questions. 

Ayres (1930 – 2018) was a British painter and printmaker who was nominated for the Turner Prize. After attending St Paul’s Girls’ School, she studied art at Camberwell. Her work and career resisted categorisation: she exhibited with the London Group in 1951, before having a solo show at Gallery One in 1956, and appearing in the Whitechapel Gallery’s seminal “British Painting in the 60s” exhibition. Ayres may be somewhat less remembered now, but she was a prominent figure in the art world in her day: she continued working and exhibiting up until her death at the age of 88, and she became a Royal Academician in 1991.

The exhibition at Marlborough Gallery features Ayres’s largest paintings: nearly floor-to-ceiling canvases of bright colour, thick paint, and bold marks. The influence of Jackson Pollock – one Ayres struggled to admit – looms large, but it would be wrong to argue that these works or her style are derivative. The vitality, movement, and intensity are fundamentally original.

Most of the paintings are from the later period of Ayres’s work: the riotous movement of Ding Dong Merrily on High (1989) is prefigured in the darker ferocity of Sabrina (1978-9) and Phosphor (1979-80). Ayres was reticent to define whether her work was abstract or not – and in this exhibition is a hint of the more concrete forms she painted: The Bee Loud Glade (1987) is a fairy-tale-like world of looming mushrooms and flowers, whilst Cuckoo Time (1987) appears to play on the conventions of landscape painting with its interlocking blocks of colour appearing like the squares of fields in a valley.

When talking about her painting, Ayres said, “it’s like tennis, you can suddenly sense that you are going to make a shot better than you usually do”. Her metaphor not only emphasises the near-unconsciousness of Ayre’s work but also its physicality; Ayres had to move like a tennis player in order to be able to cover these wall-sized canvases. This physicality is visible in the finished works: paint is piled so thickly on the canvas that at points the works feel more sculptural than one-dimensional. Ayres made no attempt to hide the processes and techniques behind her creations – rather, these processes are visible as the final creation itself.

A much-repeated observation about impressionism is that the paintings become almost meaningless when viewed up close – little more than a collection of tiny marks. The same cannot be said of Ayres’s work: her paintings delight and mesmerise on both the large scale and the small.  

Upstairs in the exhibition is a collection of Ayres’ works on paper. After the dramatic canvases, these untitled pastel drawings and gouaches feel quiet and, at times, serene. But their small size belies a continued intensity: Ayres’s same commitment to movement and form is visible on the page.

Ayres is a master of an abstract visual language that mixes both dramatic physicality and intricate ferocity – this exhibition is well worth seeing.

“Gillian Ayres” is on at the Marlborough Gallery in Mayfair, September 14 – October 30.

My laughter has a simple explanation: I attempted to draw Auguste Rodin’s famous early sculpture The Age of Bronze (1875). In my hands, Rodin’s mastery of unbelievably perfect anatomy had become somewhat butchered. At one point, Rodin’s model Auguste Ney looked like he was the unfortunate victim of a poorly done Brazilian bum lift; “The Age of Silicone” doesn’t quite have the same gravitas. 

London is currently spoiled for Rodin sculptures. Alongside the permanent collection at the V&A, donated by the artist at the outbreak of WWI, the Tate Modern is also hosting an exhibition “The Making of Rodin” – a focus on the plaster casts, studies, and fragments of the artist’s work. 

Rodin is a big name in the art history world, known – mistakenly – for what appear to be “classical” bronze and marble sculptures. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his 1902 essay on the artist that “Rodin’s message and its significance are little understood by the many men who gathered about him”; they “assembled about the name, not about the work”. 

Over a hundred years later, the same could still be said: Rodin’s position on a critical pedestal prevents interaction with his work. Everyone knows The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Walking Man – and, one of the benefits of sculpture, there are versions of these works in many cities – but there’s often little passion surrounding the artist. 

Born in 1840 and dying just after the end of the First World War, Rodin was condemned to being not quite staid enough for the nineteenth century, and too nineteenth century for the modernists. One of his best works, the Monument to Balzac, was too radical ever to be cast in his lifetime.

After the end of the First World War, the likes of Gaston Lachaise and, later, Alberto Giacometti took on the mantle. Rodin exhibited in London in 1914, but, on the surface, it is hard to reconcile his figures with the radicalism of the likes of Wyndham Lewis and the Blast manifesto. 

There is, however, an argument to be made for Rodin’s peri-modernist place in art history. Rodin was committed to revelling in what Rilke calls “the plastic art, to which truth belonged”. Whilst his sculptures are masters of intense anatomical observation – The Age of Bronze was thought to be cast from the model’s body rather than sculpted; Rodin was so accurate as to be accused of cheating– they are more than just faithful reproductions of the human form. And they are far from classical. Many of his models are too muscular or in too off-kilter a position. 

From his studies for St John the Baptist Preaching – later The Walking Man – to The Man with the Broken Nose, Rodin is less interested in human perfection in plaster or marble than he is the limits and rough edges of this perfection. What makes The Walking Man so striking is the fact that Rodin has done away with anatomical precision: the arms and head have been indelicately lopped off. Whilst The Thinker might be the most famous sculpture of modern times, Rodin insisted that its foot be exhibited separately. A huge foot, alone on a pedestal. The modernist impulse to divide, dissect, and defamiliarise was never far away. 

The Tate’s exhibition goes a long way to introducing this aspect of Rodin’s work to its viewers. After The Age of Bronze, the exhibition opens up into a huge room of plaster casts and studies – not unlike how photos record Rodin’s studio. Studies are given as much precedence as finished sculptures, and attention is drawn to the fact that Rodin revelled in the unfinished; curators emphasise where Rodin left visible seams, or how he reused body parts and heads. 

The Thinker and The Burghers of Calais are predictably dominant – for reasons of size, if nothing else. But there is an insistent presence and intensity to others of Rodin’s sculptures. The cabinet of “gimlets” – tiny arms and legs – is eery in its repetition and fragmentation, whilst Rodin’s drawings and watercolours are deserving of an exhibition in their own right. It is arguably the decapitated, portly form of Balzac in the centre of the main room that is most captivating. And it is here that my second round of laughter crept in.

Rodin was commissioned to make a sculpture of Balzac by the Societé de Gens Lettres in 1891. The sculpture was meant to take eighteen months, and the commission had previously been given to the neoclassical artist Henri Chapu before his death. Seven years later – and with no hint of neoclassicism in sight – Rodin unveiled his finished plaster cast. There is no way to really describe the finished product, other than that it looks very little like Balzac, and you could say it amounts to little more than a head above a sack. 

I’m only partly being facetious – the sculpture is one of my favourite pieces of art; its brilliance lies in this intentionally disconcerting form. Rodin spent years making studies of bodies, faces, and limbs – and even went to the lengths of commissioning Balzac’s tailor to make a suit in his exact measurements and finding models that would fit it perfectly. After these years of careful preparations (Rodin also worked from a daguerreotype photo of the author), why is the finished product so non-representational? It can’t be said that Rodin couldn’t have made a faithful likeness of the author. 

Rather, Rodin actively chose not to. In one of the studies – Balzac, Second Nude Study F (1886) – the figure has an erect penis, which he is holding with clenched hands. He is standing with a somewhat backwards tilt so that his hips are thrust forward. The pose is forcibly sexual. This nude figure forms the basis for the final form; Rodin simply adjoined a head and placed a plaster-soaked cloth on top of the body. 

Upon receiving his first public commission, Rodin decided to depict the much-loved author masturbating. You could make an argument here about Rodin’s non-representational choices – this is an appeal to sub-intellectual impulses, a look at the psyche rather than the human form, et cetera…

But really – let’s just take a moment to applaud the comic genius — what a master wind-up merchant. Supposing you need a good laugh, head down to the Tate.

The EY Exhibition: The Making of Rodin is open at Tate Britain until 21 November.

Discover more of London’s unmissable art exhibitions here.

As of next week, restrictions on the number of people gathering indoors will come into place and many events and venues will only open for “Green Pass” vaccination passport holders – a pass proving that a person is either fully vaccinated or recovered from the disease. For private events and for venues excluded from the Green Pass programme, no more than 50 people can gather indoors or 100 outdoors. Venues in the programme can host up to 1000 indoors and 5000 outdoors.

Israel’s vaccination passport scheme is stringent: even non-inoculated children must take a covid test to enter events and venues. The state will cover the cost of tests for under-12s, but not for children any older.    

The government is also purportedly considering a lockdown over the Jewish High Holidays in early September to halt intergenerational transmission.

This rise in cases comes despite the fact that Israel has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. As much as 80% of the adult population is vaccinated, and 60% of the population as a whole. In July, the country began offering third vaccinations to immunosuppressed people and those over 60. It is thought that over 600,000 Israelis have now received a booster shot.

In the past couple of months, life had been proceeding along fairly normal lines in Israel: on 1 June, capacity limits were lifted in public spaces and entry to many establishments no longer required the Green Pass. On 15 June, the mandate to wear a mask indoors was lifted, before being reintroduced only ten days later.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet said that 90 percent of new cases were in the over 50s, and has asked all citizens over 50 to be “very careful”. The seven-day average of Covid-deaths is currently 12, someway below the second-wave peak of 65. Some 663 Israelis have been hospitalised, and 76 are in intensive care. Back in January, 340 people were intensive care. The seven-day average of cases per 100,000 people is 51 – in the UK it is 41.

Cases are occurring in both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. A July report from Israel’s Ministry of Health found that the Pfizer vaccine was only 39% effective at preventing infection thanks to the growing dominance of the Delta variant. Despite this low efficacy rate, the vaccine is still 88% effective against hospitalisation and 91% effective in preventing severe illness. 

The situation in Israel is one the rest of the world is watching with some concern. With their remarkably rapid vaccination programme, and speedy return to normality, the country had been a model of future post-covid normality –  a normality that now appears to be under threat.

The man is Figueiroa Rego – Paula Rego’s father. Figueiroa was an anti-fascist in Portugal under Salazar’s Estada Novo; he suffered from bad depression, made worse by the Portuguese regime. Rego’s painting captures her father’s near-resigned, despondent opposition, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that she painted the portrait when she was just nineteen. 

The portrait is one of the first paintings in Tate Britain’s Paula Rego retrospective: the largest ever exhibition of her works, it fills eleven rooms with over a hundred paintings. The exhibition spans the early years of the Estada Novo to paintings finished only a few years ago. Rego is now 86. Her career bears witness to nearly a century’s worth of political turmoil, oppression, and difficulty.

The touchingly quiet, intense portrait of Rego’s father is one of the most overtly personal – and non-abstract – in the exhibition. Rego moves onto abstracted forms, contorted limbs, and collage-based works as she responds to the absurdities and injustices of Salazar’s regime. In Turkish Bath (1960), she collages an advertisement for breast-enlarging pills with cut-out limbs of nude women’s bodies; in Salazar vomiting the homeland (1960), the dictator is placed next to a woman’s naked body complete with pubic hair. In Interrogation (1950) – painted when Rego was only fifteen – a woman is being tortured; her arms and legs closely curled and intertwined so as to appear almost non-human. In the face of torture and interrogation, Rego’s subject has retreated into herself, her body is left slack. 

In all of these paintings – and ones later in the exhibition – Rego positions the female body as a site of political disturbance and resistance. The disconcertingly dismembered bodies of the collage make a mockery of Portugal’s twentieth-century gender politics, and it is the woman’s stridently naked body that makes Salazar’s bent, vomiting figure all the more ridiculous. 

Critics have long since focused on Rego’s political commentary – when reviewing Rego’s 2004 Tate Britain exhibition in the London Review of Books, Peter Campbell argued that each of her paintings is a “political narrative”. It is undeniable that Rego is a political painter; her paintings record and critique the political horror she has lived through. And, indeed, she has not stopped producing political works since the end of the Estada Novo: the exhibition ends with a harrowing room of paintings about contemporary human trafficking and female genital mutilation. 

But it would be a mistake to say that Rego is only a political painter, or that her works are more propaganda than portraits. Peter Campbell writes about Rego’s Abortion Series (1998) – a series of large pastel works created at the time of Portugal’s first referendum on legalising abortion – and argues that “Rego is unsentimental”. Yet this is a work of anger, not pieces that inspire pity. 

Rego’s women are impressive, stoic figures in their predicaments. But it is impossible to see them as uncomplicatedly resilient. In one of the works – Untitled, VIII – a woman who looks no older than a teenager lies on the floor, her trainers giving her an emphasised childlike air. Rego’s portraits are not unsentimental – there is something undeniably emotional in her commitment to recording these many women from a position of such unflinching honesty. Untitled No.1 is the painting that dominates the room – and possibly the whole exhibition. A woman sits on a towel on a white bed, presumably to prevent any blood from staining the white sheets. She wears a blue dress that is pulled up as she sits holding her legs apart. She looks out of the painting, but her eyes do not stare at the viewer; they seem to look beyond, in a gaze not unlike Rego’s father in the early portrait. Despair and resignation are mixed with a vacancy that is not exactly strength. Her position is vulnerable and it is hard to view the work without feeling like a voyeur, or somehow complicit in her situation. 

To insist on the purely political aspects of Rego’s work is to miss out on her skill at mixing the political with the personal, the ideological with the human. 

And indeed, it is the range of Rego’s work that is most striking about this exhibition: from oil paintings to collages and etchings, Rego turns her hand to works inspired by poetry, plays, and folklore. She is as skilled at creating etchings which bring to light the disconcerting nature of fairy tales as she is creating gasp-inducingly bold pastel drawings influenced by Jungian psychology. Rego was once quoted saying that she wanted to join the “big boy’s club” – the leagues of male painters like David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. With her skill, range, and intensity, she more than constitutes a club of her own. 

There are a number of self-portraits of the artist in the exhibition, but the most striking is hardly a self-portrait at all. The Artist in her Studio (1994) uses Lila Nunez as a model; she is a George Sand-like figure dressed mixture of male and female clothing. The artist smokes a pipe whilst surrounded by half-finished works: sculptures of figures and monsters which appear in Rego’s other paintings. Rego is not a sculptor – this artist is not her. But “The Artist” is a testament to Rego’s creative powers and vision: it is an image of a woman occupying a male space, the possibilities of art, and her capacity to mix personal experience with universal. 

This exhibition and Rego deserve every bit of praise they receive. 

Paula Rego is showing at Tate Britain until 24 October. 

Tsikhanouskaya’s meeting with the Prime Minister comes after a similar visit to the US. She pressed Biden to strengthen the sanctions against Belarus, saying that she was sending a ‘message to the regime’ that there will be no “so-called ‘normalization’ until all innocent people are released and new elections are held”. 

This call for tougher sanctions comes after the country was gripped by protests last August. Lukashenko held a presidential election, but Tsikhanouskaya’s supporters believe that the vote was rigged. Lukashenko – who has been president since 1994 – won by a landslide. Prior to the election, two opposition candidates were jailed, and one other left the country.

Tsikhanouskaya registered as a candidate in the place of her husband, Sergey Tikhanovsky. Tikhanovsky is a long-time pre-democracy activist, and was arrested two days after announcing his intention to run. His trial began in Minsk in June this year.

Tsikhanouskaya – a former English teacher – was Lukashenko’s main opposition, and was repeatedly threatened and intimidated during the campaign. Belarusian authorities made threats to place the couple’s children in a state-run orphanage. Tsikhanouskaya went into hiding before the day of the election – only re-surfacing at the polling station. She has lived in Lithuania since the election to protect both herself and her children. 

Belarus is already subject to sanctions from the UK, the US and Europe since June when it forced a Ryanair plane flying over its territory to land in Minsk in order to arrest Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich. 

The EU now prohibits Belarusian airlines from entering its airspace, and European airlines are advised not to fly over the country. Asset freezes are in place on those associated with the regime, but Tsikhanouskaya has argued that the efficacy of economic sanctions on petroleum products, tobacco, and potash is limited by the number of exemptions. 

Tsikhanouskaya’s visit to the UK comes only days after the Belarusian sprinter Krystina Timanovskaya refused to return to Belarus after criticising her coaches on social media. Timanovskaya was taken to the airport in Tokyo by team officials, but refused to board the plane. She has been granted a humanitarian visa by the Polish government. Timanovskaya has been anxious to stress that her motives are not political, stating that “I love my country and I didn’t betray my country”.

But Tsikanouskaya told the Financial Timesthat this was the latest in a range of measures taken against athletes by the Belarusian authorities after the IOC banned Lukashenko from Tokyo 2021. “Since August, dozens of athletes have been jailed, fired and forced to flee the country”, she said. “No athlete can feel safe”. 

Only this morning Vitaly Shishov – the leader of a group that help those fleeing Belarus – was found dead in Ukraine. Shishov was found hanged, but police are investigating possibilities other than suicide. 

Thus Tsikhanouskaya’s renewed plea for tougher sanctions come at a highly pressing moment. 

The exhibition “Pre-Raphaelite Drawings and Watercolours” at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum goes some way to alter these perceptions. Away from the gallery’s exhibition halls is the Western Art Print Room; this exhibition displays many of the museums’ rarely seen and fragile holdings usually reserved for academics and scholars. The exhibition opens with a ghostly, monochrome chalk drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane Morris’ creamy skin and dark hair are all the more shocking and emotive in this near-ethereal drawing than the later painting it is a sketch towards.  

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848. In a year of many political revolutions and upheaval, seven young artists, including Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, decided to stage a revolution of their own. Their rebellion was initially against the formal, academic strictures of the Royal Academy of Arts. Still, as the movement and brotherhood progressed, it came to stand for a rebellion against all mid-century Victorian social mores, fashions, and expectations.  

The artistic radicalism is felt strongly in some parts of the exhibition. Rossetti’s drawings of Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, and Fanny Cornforth have a bodily solidity and reality that is distinctly divorced from the “grand style” Joshua Reynolds popularised the century before. The sketches and drawings better reveal this ideological aspect of the Brotherhood; away from the block-buster effects of chromatic colour, Rossetti’s pen-and-ink dedication to the lumps on Cornforth’s neck feels all the more touchingly immediate and real.  

But the radicalism can be overstated; the Ashmolean exhibition – for some unknown reason – hangs the landscapes of George Price Boyce in pride of place. It is difficult to see what is ideologically radical or even aesthetically interesting, about another small painting of a barn. And, perhaps in a bid to fill the exhibition rooms, the boundaries of Pre-Raphaelite art are pushed: whilst it is possible to see Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (who painted in the twentieth century) as the ‘last’ Pre-Raphaelite, it is more difficult to see the movement’s influence on the watercolour drawing of Mary and Jesus the Ashmolean includes.  

It is important to take the Brotherhood’s stated aims of anti-idealising with a pinch of salt. This exhibition – and, indeed, most exhibitions of these artists – is marked by a persistent, reoccurring female form of a long neck, strong chin, and sharp cheekbones. At points, it is difficult to distinguish between Rossetti’s different models (and lovers); Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris. Their different hair provides some clue, but their enlarged, down-cast eyes and prominent brows – whilst striking – are so similar that they reveal more about Rossetti’s preferences than promoting some radical, counter-cultural beauty standards.  

Last year, there was an exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery – a bid to show the women of the movement beyond tortured Ophelias, idealised Beatrices, and seductive Lilliths. The art of Elizabeth Siddal, Effie Millais, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth provides an alternative to the relentless male gaze of the brotherhood. The Ashmolean does not display any of the women’s paintings but does have a handful of drawings by Siddal. Her Two Men in a Boat and a Woman Punting is both a playful retort to Rossetti’s ‘Boatmen and Siren’ and a brilliant drawing in its own right. The sense of movement on the page feels preternaturally modern and at odds with the perfectly passive female figures it is surrounded by.  

The Brotherhood had distinctly literary predilections: when founded at Oxford, they rated writers from Chaucer to Tennyson on a system of ‘stars’. The more famous literary paintings – Millais’ Ophelia or Marina – are not included in this exhibition, but in their place are several other literary works. Rossetti’s pen and ink drawing of a tortured Lady Macbeth is far more harrowing than any beautiful medieval maiden, and Edward Burne-Jones manuscript pages for William Morris’s Kelmscott Press are a riot of delicate detail. 

Perhaps the most absorbing artwork in the exhibition is Burne-Jones’s The Knight’s Farewell; barely bigger than a postcard, it is so intricate that even to look at it for an hour would not be enough. The chance to see these rarer, smaller works should not just be framed in terms of sketches or preparatory materials for the more famous paintings. Their existence pays homage to a wholesale artistic worldview: a commitment to drawing, design, and resurgent medievalism that saw the founding of a new printing press, attempts at resurrecting old artistic techniques, and a whole world of dedicated detail beyond the more famous paintings.  

It has long been recognised that the Bloomsbury Group – with their similarly overlapping lovers – was an artistic and literary movement beyond one genre; the clothes of the Omega workshop are not considered lesser than, or utterly divorced from, the paintings of Vanessa Bell. The Ashmolean exhibition makes way for a similarly critical attitude to the Pre-Raphaelites. There is a world beyond their most famous paintings; a world of William Morris wallpaper-radicalism, intimate pen-and-ink drawings, and touching watercolours that should not be ignored in favour of their more famous works.  

Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is open now until 20 June 2021. 

All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying that despite Fearless’ (Taylor’s version) domination of the 2021 charts, it is not truly a 2021 album. There are six previously unheard songs from the vault, but the other twenty songs on the album have counterparts on the original 2008 record. The differences between the albums are interesting. Swift claims that she wanted to create the “same but better”’ with only improvements in “sonic quality”, but a thirty one-year-old recording songs originally written and sung by a teenager raises inevitable issues. 

Fearless (2008) has some of the most quintessential Swift songs of her early small-town country-girl days. Fifteen is the tale of being a freshman in High School and falling in love with a “boy on the football team”, while Hey Stephen is the narration of a crush so intense it could only ever truly be sung – or felt – by a teenager. You Belong With Me – complete a music video that rivals Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ for era-defining influence – was one of the most pervasive sounds of the 2010s. Love Story, Swift’s rewriting of Romeo and Juliet, is arguably the album’s best song. I’ve been unable to listen to it without wincing since my English teacher at some point in the mid-2010s exclaimed, with true pathos, that he wished Swift’s teacher had been able to get the tragedy plot across to her. 

As good as Swift’s re-recordings are – and she does try to be sensitive to the younger woman’s original inflections – the 2021 Swift can never re-capture the youth, naivety, and freshness of the 2008 artist. The intro to The Way I Loved You is sung by a heartbreakingly young voice in the 2008 album that leaves the 2021 version sounding over-mature and dissonantly confident. And it is hard to keep a straight face listening to the multimillionaire pop-star sing about being in a ‘small town’ rather than Hollywood in the song White Horse. This is not to say that the recent album is a failure – it alters the occasionally over-shouty tones of the earlier album – but re-making an album that is so inextricably bound up in youth and young love leaves us with a somewhat dissatisfying product.

All of this raises the key question: what does Taylor Swift have in common with William Wordsworth? 

It is an unfair comparison – there are too many points one could make (well-catalogued disputes with musical/literary partners; a predisposition to writing about outdoor spaces; a youthful dalliance with the bloody radicalism of the French Revolution). But, the most illuminating comparison to be drawn is between Fearless (2008, 2021) and The Prelude (1798-99, 1805, 1850). 

Wordsworth’s The Prelude is an epic poem that tells the story of his boyhood to poet-hood; “fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”. Initially written in two books in 1799, it expanded to five and then thirteen books in 1804-5, before being posthumously published in fourteen books in 1850. By the 1850 version, Wordsworth had altered much of the language and imagery of the earlier poem.

Critics such as F. R. Leavis argued that these changes constitute a “representative improvement” as images are condensed, and his “philosophy” is more readable, whilst others have argued that the “tightness and economy” of the later version violates the “delicacy and spontaneity” of the earlier; “the later Wordsworth had forgotten much that the younger poet was trying to do”. Swift’s own quest for improved “sonic quality” – country twang is replaced with a more balanced sound – has the grown-up singer forgotten much that the younger artist was trying to do? 

I am not claiming that Swift re-recorded Fearless to expunge her former pantheistic or revolutionary tendencies, nor that she regularly changes imagery and phrase, only that what we have now is not simply a re-recording. With its extra material and altered voice, it has to be analysed and considered as a different album alongside the original, much like a side-by-side edition of The Prelude. 

Swift claims she will re-record the other five albums she does not have the rights to, but one has to ask whether simple re-creation is ever possible? Or, if some songs, albums, and emotions can only ever exist as spots in time. 

Didion frequently cites Hemingway as a major influence on her writing. For her, as for him, control on the level of the clause, the sentence, the paragraph is no small concern. In a 1977 interview with Sara Davidson of The New York Times, Didion tells of agonising over the comma – or its absence – in the first sentence of Democracy (1984). Hemingway’s deathly vulnerability is more than an essay subject – it is a disturbing recognition of what can occur to the writer who loses ownership of their carefully modulated prose.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is slim volume of twelve essays from 1968 to 2000; all works that have not appeared in collected volumes before. Its very publication is a statement of continued, defiant, literary presence. At 86, Didion is still around – and can still organise, edit, and publish her work; she is still going to tell us what she knows, sees, and thinks.

The essays vary in subject from the dullness of newspapers (Alicia and the Underground Press, 1968), to college rejection (On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice, 1968), and the life of the theatre director Tony Richardson (The Long-Distance Runner, 1993).

Why I Write (1976) is included in the volume. This essay – with its title borrowed from George Orwell – is an exposition of the unavoidable first-person I-ness of writing. Didion declares that writing is “an aggressive, even a hostile act”; this belief echoes her statement from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) that, “writers are always selling somebody out.” For Didion writing is, at its core, about eroding “the reader’s most private sense”’ it constructs and corrodes two “Is” as both writer and reader fall under its power.

In her 1968 essay, On Keeping a Notebook, Didion reminds her readers that she cannot escape her own subjectivity – she is, and always will be, “the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress”. But in this later essay the subjectivity is more radical – it is less an unavoidable fact of all observation than the very existence of those observations; Didion writes so as to understand what she thinks, and her essays are the products of this.

In part, this revelation feels like false modesty. Didion declares that she cannot think in abstractions, and has always been drawn to the concrete, observable facts of life – her essays are simply her means of understanding what she sees. Yet, this is the woman who has catalogued the problems of 1980s El Salvador, the exiled Cuban experience in Miami, the dark side of the 1960s drug scene, and the soul of California. While she may write to explain situations to herself, she has done a wonderful job of explaining them to many others.

Regardless, the essay captures a contradiction that lies at the heart of all of her writing. Didion is adept at describing feelings, scenes, and images in imitate, tangible detail. Yet, in her novels and essays, readers are left on the other side of an unbridgeable divide; to read a Didion essay is to know, in chromatic detail, of what you cannot know and cannot experience. This is not because Didion’s writing is not good enough. Quite the opposite; it is so brilliant – and dances with such a sense of first-person delight – that any reader momentarily senses the personal I at its centre, the locus of the knowledge and experience, before being shunted rudely back to their own existence.

In this collection, this first-person delight comes across in Pretty Nancy (1938). Notionally an essay about Nancy Reagan, Didion’s text is more an exposition of what it is like to observe, to note, and to record; we learn far less about Nancy’s daily life and pretences for journalists than we do of Didion’s ability to wryly see through it all.

The Long-Distance Runner is a verbal explosion of vignette and colour; just as Tony Richardson created scenes on stage, Didion creates them in her prose. What is the description of his house “filed with flowers and birds and sunlight and children” other than a stage direction itself? Didion has often described how novels come to her in vivid images, shimmering around the edges; the pictures in her prose also glimmer, reflect, and shift when placed under close observation. For a woman who so frequently describes her reliance on concrete facts rather than abstract ideas, it is hard to draw a distinct line between her prose and her fiction.

The collection ends with Everywoman.com (2000) – an essay on Martha Stewart, the American businesswoman famous for her recipes and ability to market scenes of domestic life. It feels bizarre to read Didion so eloquently pick apart an element of modern life – the contradictions inherent in celebrity culture – when she is so closely associated with the mid-20th century. But Didion’s intense attention to detail can turn its hand to anything.

It might be too much to ask of an octogenarian in the midst of a pandemic, but I would do anything – anything at all – to read Didion’s succinct and witty prose on some of the more bizarre elements of contemporary culture. She would be brilliant on Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, or she could have a fascinating discussion with Melania Trump. As with every single one of her other subjects, she would write with unflinching sincerity and clarity, who knows what we might discover in her sentences.

In the dark depths of my email drafts is a long, winding, adulatory, and unquestionably annoying email to Didion. Even if I could find her email address (does the queen of the typewriter even use email?), I would never send it; Didion must know how much of an impact she has had on so many readers without reading another piece of semi-incoherent fan-mail. But its existence – I periodically add to it with more inane observations – is a testament to the fact that Didion’s clipped clauses and unwavering focus have had a life beyond herself. Her writing is brilliant in its personal experience and embrace of subjectivity, but she has always let other people in along the way. Just for a second, we are all the shy girl hiding from her classmates in the dirty raincoat.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is published by HarperCollins (£12.99).

But amid our fixation upon a sea of designer ball-dresses and cardboard-Queen impressions is Shuggie Bain, the 2020 Booker Prize-winner by Douglas Stuart. It is a rare breed, in that it is a Booker novel that is actually worth the paper it is printed on (Girl, Woman, Other – awful, The Testaments – even worse, Milkman – so, so, so inexpressibly boring).

The book follows the life of its eponymous character: Shuggie Bain, a young “wean” growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes, his absent, violent father “Big Shug”, and his siblings Leek and Catherine. The novel’s fabric is eighties Glasgow: the family moves from Sighthill – a high-rise housing estate which had already fallen into disrepair by the time Stuart’s novel begins, and is now demolished – to Pithead, post-industrial, grey-scape mining suburb, and later to a tenement flat in the East End. With each new move, the family fractures and shrinks; Big Shug leaves to start a new family, Catherine emigrates to South Africa, and Leek escapes across the city. The novel begins and ends with Shuggie Bain living alone on the South Side.

This picture of familial disintegration and flux matches the city’s instability: houses are exchanged and swapped as jobs are lost and industries fall with nothing coming to take their place. Many of the novel’s men are taxi drivers. The routes they weave across the city from South to North and night-club to suburb knit the novel together; Glasgow is as much a living, violent, and flawed a character as any other.

Stuart’s novel is one of deprivation and difficulty: Agnes’s alcoholism gives the text momentum as each day is a struggle to pay for booze or food, or a struggle to stop drinking long enough to get past the shakes. She is raped, manipulated, and taken advantage of – and, in turn, she manipulates and makes life difficult for her children. Stuart does not engage in a sentimentalised portrayal of poverty and addiction; at points, the details feel too real and painful to be fiction.

At the centre of the novel is the relationship between Shuggie and his mother; whilst every other child, husband, or boyfriend leaves Agnes, Shuggie stays – and suffers for doing so. His devotion is one of transcendental love, and transcendental terror: the depictions of his everyday anxiety for the state he will find his mother in – and the state it will leave him in – are some of the most harrowing in the book. Shuggie is fostered alike by adoration and fear.

It is tempting to say that Stuart’s unflinching commitment to the minute details and large-scale miseries of poverty and addiction is a contemporary match for Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “done because we are too menny”. There is more than one moment in the novel that gives the reader such a visceral, physical moment of shock and despair. But, whilst Hardy’s saga has a touch of melodrama, Stuart’s novel is all the more heart-breaking for its mundane details. The novel ends with Shuggie helping a friend attend to her alcoholic mother; there is a palpable sense that a similar story could have been told about many other faulted families.

In the fifty-two years since the release of Song to a Seagull (1968), Mitchell has become a favourite: from tentative covers of folk songs, to vulnerable, intimate evocations of relationships, to experimental-jazz-vocal-poetry. Her reach and fame have travelled far beyond her native small-town Saskatoon.

And so, when she is introduced on stage at The Half Beat, Toronto, 1964 as “Joan” or “Joni Anderson”, it is understandable to do a double take: exactly who is singing? She giggles and remarks “it’s sure refreshing to have a mic for a change” and then goes on to sing Nancy Whisky about what happens when a man “thinks his liquor is a woman”. The voice is higher and breathier than the Mitchell we know, but compelling all the same.

Nancy Whisky is one of the first songs in The Joni Mitchell Archives: The Early Years (1963-1967) which was released at the end of October. The album is nearly six hours of previously unreleased material from her first years of performing; it moves from little-known folk ballads, to early classics such as Urge for Going and The Circle Game, before ending with many of the songs that appear on her first two albums.

We hear crackly recordings of Joni and her guitar, performances in which she flusters over losing a guitar pick; a conversation between her and a radio host in which she mutters “I wrote the songs” after being called an “authoress” rather than composer, and even her impression of an English accent. In the intro to Marcie she describes soaking up “British cultcha” on a trip to London. It is not so much the variety of the album that is impressive – there are multiple live versions of most songs, and each is wonderfully, incrementally different to the others – but the atmosphere the recordings have managed to capture. At one point, Mitchell tells her audience she is taking a twenty-minute break: listening to her say this half a century on, and in my lockdown-messy bedroom rather than a club in in Philadelphia, I automatically stood up to make a cup of tea before I remembered that I was listening to a recording on Spotify, and that Mitchell was not, in fact, singing live.

It is in this familiarity and immediacy that the success of this release lies. The world is so changed from the time in which a small-town Canadian girl could sing about the wonder of being able to “look up and down at clouds”, and many of Mitchell’s early folk-songs sound undeniably childish compared to her later controlled, emotional torrents and musical narratives. But it is delightfully different to the later studio-recorded albums to hear her sing these songs live, laughing with the audience and discussing her inspiration. Nobody would ever claim that Mitchell is not an intimate, personal artist. In the words of Paul William’s somewhat condescending 1969 review of Song to a Seagull, Mitchell “really conveys how and sort of why a woman could love a man and desire a man” – but this intimacy pales in comparison to the early live recordings. Mitchell does not sing as quietly, or as vulnerably, but in her communion with the audience there is a palpable sense of something shared; a different kind of intimacy that existed just for an evening. If this all sounds very “free love” – remember we are talking about the sixties.

It would be easy to remark on Mitchell’s youth, innocence, and naivete: her stories about hearing speakers in Hyde Park, writing travel songs without having travelled anywhere, and wandering around cities with no money to spend, invite commentary on how young she was when her musical career began. Articles and reviews from the late 1960s call her a “young lady” and remark on how “pretty” she is: “Miss Mitchell” the “wispy 25-year-old-blonde”. Much is made of her ability to sing about “womanhood”, as if it was some sort of imitation.  But, amidst all this chauvinist, patronising praise, any listener has to note the sheer power of Mitchell’s song-writing.

It is not her voice which held the force in her performance at that point, but her ability to make even the simplest lyrics heart-wrenching. And this is the case for much of her career: compare the 1971 Blue A Case of You with the 2000 recording and see which makes you sob first. Mitchell has never been about loud belting.

A housemate recently commented that my music taste is almost exclusively sad women singing about men. (This is unfair: I also listen to sad men singing about women). When pressed, they listed Marianne Faithful, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell as examples. I’d argue that this is a bit harsh on any of the artists listed – and indeed, Mitchell struggled with being compared to Baez throughout much of the high-pitched folk period we hear on this album – but it seems particularly unfair to Mitchell. If there is one feeling you are left with after nearly six hours of different versions of The Circle Game and Morning Morgantown it is a sense of joy, delight, and possibility. Mitchell does sing about men who break her heart, and Little Green is a harrowing song to the child she had to give up, but she also sings aubades (Chelsea Morning) which rival those of Donne, and even her most famous “sad” song (Both Sides Now) is at least partially a declaration of what there is left to experience, and what there is left to find out.

Live music, clubs, and travel all seem like far-flung dreams right now, but this album momentarily, tentatively, goes some way to easing the pain of their loss. In Mitchell’s recordings, the late 1960s do not sound too far away – hopefully we will be back in a club sometime soon.

But almost any level of inconvenience would have been worth it – the exhibition is outstanding.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – c.1654) was an Italian Baroque artist. She was born in Rome but worked across Italy: she was the first woman to gain admission to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, painted for a great deal of wealthy patrons, and created a number of large altarpieces in Naples.

But for all of her considerable fame during her lifetime, she is perhaps best known in our time for the fact of her rape. When she was seventeen, Agostino Tassi – an artist who was working with her father – assaulted her. Gentileschi had to testify at trial and was tortured to verify her story. Discussions of this, and its relevance to her paintings of female vulnerability and strength, have tended to drown out any discussion of her talents as a painter.

But Gentileschi exists beyond her victimhood; her paintings are arresting even without knowledge of her biography. The exhibition treads this tricky line between acknowledgement and erasure: the manuscript transcript of the rape trial is displayed in public for the first time, but not every painting of an ancient heroine or nude woman is linked back to it.

“Judith beheading Holofernes” (1613-14) is probably Gentileschi’s most immediately recognisable painting: with its primary colours, spurting arcs of blood, and shadowy drama. I was lucky enough to see it in September in the Uffizi, and I would make a make a comment about how the painting looks different when you have the joyful knowledge that an Aperol awaits you rather than the delights of the Bakerloo line – but the truth is that it could sparkle anywhere.

Just to the left, and slightly smaller, is a painting by the same name and painted only a year earlier – it is the Naples version of the same composition. The changes between the two paintings are subtle but noticeable: Judith’s dress changes from blue to yellow and her maidservant, Abra’s, from red to blue. The view afforded of Holofernes laid on the bed is slightly different. In the later composition, more of his body is visible and his lower half is draped in a red blanket. It is the addition of the red blanket that makes sense of the colour-changing dresses: many of Gentileschi’s most striking paintings make use of yellow, red, and blue in close primary opposition. The less visible, dowdier green blanket in the earlier painting lacks the intensity of the red.

But the changes do more than just deepen the drama. By the time an exhibitiongoer sees this painting, they have already seen Gentileschi’s reclining nudes “Cleopatra” (1611-12) and “Danaë” (1612). In these paintings, the women lay back on white beds dressed in disturbed, rumpled red blankets. The subtle changes in the Uffizi composition render Holofernes a grotesque parody of these sensual, observed women.

In these two paintings and the others on the same theme – “Judith and her Maidservant” (1614-15) and “Judith and her Maidservant with Head of Holofernes” (1623-25) – the curators make much of the fact that Abra is included in the drama rather than simply guarding the outside of the tent whilst Judith does the dirty work. There is a palpable desire to read this as some moment of feminist collusion – which in a way, it is. But it is not just of Gentileschi’s creation: the involvement of Judith’s maidservant is found as far back as an Old English poem of the same name in the Beowulf Manuscript. The two women are described as “collenferhðe eadhreðige mægð” meaning “courageous, victoriously blessed women”.

As the exhibition progressed, I found myself oddly fixed upon Gentileschi’s depictions of hands. In the first room, the curators explain how Gentileschi’s own fingers would have been stretched and pulled under a method of judicial torture known as “sibille”. In the trial, Gentileschi told her rapist that these torture-screws were the wedding ring he had promised her. In both versions of “Judith beheading Holofernes”, Judith’s hand is almost as big as Holofernes’s head. On her arm, which holds a chunk of his hair, is a beautifully ornate gold bracelet. In the “Self Portrait as a Female Martyr” (1613-14), her hand is unbelievably tiny; she is holding a palm frond as a sign of her martyrdom. In her “Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria”, one hand rests on St Catherine’s wheel – the intended method of her tortuous execution – and in the other hand is another palm; a sign of her sanctity. In her famous “Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting” (1638-9), one hand is raised as if mid-work and the other clasps a palette: the canvas is engaged in an almost-meta construction of itself.

I am not alone in my consideration of Gentileschi’s hands: the exhibition includes a 1625 drawing of Artemisia’s right hand holding a paintbrush by Dumonstier le Neveu. The inscription lauds her hand as something that can “make marvels”. Just as Gentileschi’s hands could and did make marvels, they were also a proof of her truth and her identity in both her trial and her career. And, in the women she paints, they provide the same function – they are weapons of great strength and power.

The exhibition ends with Gentileschi in London which is, of course, fitting. But Gentileschi was not happy to remain where she was – and, neither should the exhibition. With so many loans from all over the world, its existence – despite its unavoidable delay earlier this year – is a testament to global interconnectedness even in a time of difficulty. The exhibition should go everywhere and be seen by everyone (but not until I’ve had the chance to go again).

This came into force less than a week after students at St Andrew’s University were asked to go into “voluntary lockdown” for the weekend as a result of four positive Covid-19 tests linked to a freshers’ week party. Students across all years at the university were asked to refrain from socialising and to “remain in [their] rooms as much as possible”. All university-organised events and fixtures were postponed, while non-students in St Andrews experienced no such restrictions. A third-year student at the university who left their flat on Saturday afternoon told me that they had expected to see the town empty, but instead saw the restaurants, pubs, and beaches busy with families.

Matt Hancock recently announced that he could not rule out a Christmas “student lockdown” with thousands of students stuck in university rooms far away from their families. And, in many Oxford and Cambridge colleges, students are prohibited from socialising with other households within their accommodation – even when mixing households would not breach the rule of six. 

The common thread here is that students are being placed under far more authoritarian restrictions than the general population. Students are being threatened with expulsion for breaking rules which are not laws, and that the rest of the population is not asked to abide by. While families can mix, socialise, and support each other, many students, some of whom are in household “bubbles” of one, cannot do so much as drink a cup of tea in each other’s rooms. 

Students are demonised by politicians, university governing bodies, and the press, just for spreading the virus just by moving back to university – a decision that many students had no choice over. Residency requirements have been reinstated at many universities, and at others, students have not yet been told whether teaching will be online or in-person, or were told teaching would be online days after signing tenancy agreements.

Now that many students are back at university, they are treated as little more than “rent-paying children”, trapped inside a near-dystopian Malory Towers with police and porters checking on every movement. Student life has become almost incomparably bleak.

At St Andrews, some students have described the frustrations of online learning. A small number of St Andrews freshers share a double room and have described the experience of having simultaneous tutorials in which two have to speak over each other and struggle to hear or think. Although, there may be a silver lining here: the university has combined its online courses with face-to-face teaching and is introducing more in-person teaching for all students from this week. 

Elsewhere, students are not so fortunate. An international fresher from Hong Kong at the University of Leeds noted the horror of a fully-online freshers week: nearly every event consisted of being muted on Zoom and simply being talked at. 

The students I spoke to both in England and Scotland all mentioned a “duty” to follow the national guidelines, but thought that the extra impositions on students were harmful and misguided. Why make one section of society – including isolated freshers, homesick international students who did not make it home all lockdown, and those living in tiny shared accommodation with no outside space – suffer more than everyone else?

In one Scottish student’s words: “it’s too cold to meet outside, I live with someone I don’t even know, and I’m so lonely.”

The argument could be made that these rules are in place for a purpose: to halt the rising numbers of cases in 20-29 year olds. Figures such as the 172 positive cases registered at Glasgow University do little to allay these fears. But the most recent Public Health England report states that there were almost four times as many confirmed outbreaks in secondary schools than universities. Even in primary schools, the figure is nearly three times as high. The case statistics for people in their twenties are worrying, but so few of them are hospitalised, and it cannot just be students spreading the virus.

These extra rules have been allowed to proceed not just because of concern about how the virus spreads among universities, but because students are not seen as fully adult human beings. There’s a common perception that they are little more than heavy-drinking annoyances. Last week, I pointed out on Twitter that students “do more than just drink and cause trouble” and received a reply telling me that they “take drugs and surf porn too”. While many are concerned about the nation’s civil liberties, the restrictions on students are seen as fair punishment for their supposed lifestyle.

But students are, in almost all cases, adults. They pay rent and bills, have jobs and, most importantly, have lives which are just as full, fragile, and complex as every other member of society. A person’s early twenties, whether spent working or studying, is a period of incredibly intense emotions and vulnerability – to be denied the chance to experience this, or to be forced to experience it all alone and with no support is undeniably cruel. 

And students are not just a dead weight on the cities they live in: many work in the pubs they have been banned from attending, volunteer in their communities, and spend their loans in local shops. A university degree is now far more expensive than it ever was a generation ago and, as a result, it is far harder to find anyone wholly committed to drinking it away. 

Perhaps more use should be made of students’ greater capacity for risk – to have groups of young people whose danger of death is so relatively low, and their desire for normal life so high, could be a blessing. If students are to be kept apart from their families and from their professors and tutors through online teaching, then at least let them socialise with each other with Covid-19 measures in place – this could be a chance to test ways of limiting the virus, and understand how immunity might work. 

Many have said that the latest rules callously infantilise students, but the sad truth is that – at least in Scotland – children have more freedom. The fact that governments and institutions can so easily enforce rules that discriminate against whole sections of society should anger everyone, not just the students who are living through the hell of online education and extreme isolation.

In Zadie Smith’s new book of essays about lockdown, she describes the horror of youth’s style being “radically interrupted”. She describes how: “the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility.” 

It is heart-breaking, devastating, but ultimately understandable that this had to be interrupted many months ago – but for it to be re-interrupted, whilst others enjoy more freedoms, is simply inhumane.

Correction: An earlier version of this article reported that all teaching has been moved online at St Andrews and that many freshers at the university share bedrooms.

These statements have since been changed – St Andrews is combining online teaching with a range of in-person classes and only a small number of the university’s students are sharing bedrooms. 

Beneath the pillow, not completely hid,

The Novel lay — She saw — she seiz’d — she chid:

With rage and glee her glaring eye-balls flash,

Ah wicked age! she cries, ah filthy trash!

The book in question could “taint [Serena’s] youth” with its “licentious work” but, nevertheless, Penelope seems anxious to test its corroding possibilities when she rushes out to “banquet” on the text itself. It is a scene awfully reminiscent of a mother finding her daughter reading Bridget Jones or, worse, Fifty Shades of Grey.  

Women reading novels has a long history of being seen as subversive. For much of the 18th century it was thought that, in the words of the Scottish writer James Beattie, reading novels “breeds dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge.” This was particularly damaging for women, so the argument goes, because they were more likely to read romance novels, and more susceptible to their titillating, frivolous, amoral charms. One only has to look as far as Catherine Morland in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803) to see this type of impressionable, deluded narrative-obsessed woman. She has read so many Gothic novels she is convinced she is living in one. Frailty, thy name is the reading public.

Recently – and as a direct result of the fact I needed to be reading more 18th century multi-canto poems – I read three books that James Beattie might have severely frowned upon: Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate (1949), Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984), and Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? (2003).

Only one of these books is truly embarrassing – Kinsella’s prose is so painfully convoluted and faux-conversational as to make it impossible to understand what is going on. As for the plot, it reads like a jealous woman’s materialist fever-dream (“You swore on your Miu Miu ponyskin bag, remember?”/ “I haven’t got a Miu Miu ponyskin bag!.. I’ve got a Fendi ponkyskin bag!”) crossed with all the subtlety of high-Victorian melodrama: woman tells deepest darkest secret to man (“I weigh 9 stone 3. Not 8 stone 3”) who turns out to be in a position of power. In short, the old maid Penelope was right – the book was “filthy trash” of a “wicked age”.

Hotel du Lac should have been better, but it reads like a chemical, bitter response to Kineslla-type novels of all centuries. Brookner’s narrator – a romance novelist herself – rails against women whose life-purpose is to “have pretty things”. And in its acrid, stultifying opposition to this image of femininity, the novel fails to move beyond that which it criticised. Instead of an exploration of a femininity opposed to this age old depiction of pink fluff and sugar all the reader receives is one-dimensional opposition. We learn that there is more than one type of woman, but learn nothing about them other than how they dress themselves. It is telling that it is nearly impossible to place with certainty the novel’s events in any decade of the 19th or 20th century.

Am I sounding like a particularly cantankerous version of George Eliot’s essay “Silly novels by Lady Novelists”. Why read novels if all you’re going to do is endlessly pick them apart and criticise? But I am not unravelling them from a point of quasi-/anti-feminist anger – if authors want to write novels about women who proclaim not to know what NATO stands for and spend all their time daydreaming about poorly-described men, I suppose we have to let them be. But the failings of both Kinsella’s and Brookner’s texts reveal the brilliance of the third novel I want to mention.

Nancy Mitford is never anything other than outstanding. From The Pursuit of Love (1945) – the classic tale of interwar love, loss, and debutante balls – to Pigeon Pie (1940), a relentless satire of upper-class society and early-war fears, every sentence and book she writes is unfailingly funny. She even happily pokes fun at her own family: Wigs on the Green (1935) ruthlessly exposes the idiocy of 1930s British fascists, only two years after her sister had married Oswald Mosley. And alongside this humour is a touching sensitivity and an awareness of tragedy: Mitford’s brilliant women die, their loves fail, and the war ruins many things.

It would, of course, be ludicrous to pretend that what Mitford writes is relatable fiction, or hard-hitting social commentary – her women never work, have multiple houses in both town and country, and frequently watch their fathers and husbands speak in the House of Lords. But, her novels do not to pretend to be either of those things; they are brilliant stories, which happen to be about upper-class women in the 20^th century.

But the sad fact is that Mitford’s novels have received too little critical attention; there are multiple biographies of her and her family, but barely any articles or monographs on her writing. And, when her writing is mentioned, it is often in the same breath as Evelyn Waugh. Her books have many similarities to Waugh’s both in subject and context – but her dedication to tragedy and sensitivity sits alongside comedy in her novels, not further down the shelf and under another dust-jacket.

Mitford’s fiction is left stranded among “Silly novels by Lady Novelists” when it deserves not just greater readership, but far greater academic attention. Even the existence of this article reinforces my point: I have been unable – despite my caveats – to refrain from placing Mitford in the nebulous, perhaps problematic,”woman’s fiction” genre, and have also made the same half-baked comparisons to Waugh. While we might have just moved on from 18^th century moral panics over the existence of literate woman (whatever next!), it seems that three hundred years of literary culture has failed to pay proper attention to what it is the literate woman are reading. Perhaps reading more Sophie Kinsella is a worthwhile pursuit after all…

The Didion-only reading list is harder to explain. It’s been two weeks since, in a dehydrated and pandemically-anxious haze I picked up A Book of Common Prayer in Hatchards. Since then, aside from really rather rude interruptions from my degree (Shakespeare, not now darling), and my job (who wants to read current journalism when you can read about 1960s San Francisco or 1980s Miami), Didion is all I have read. Rather embarrassingly, given the wealth of other things I should have been doing, I’ve made my way through three novels, two essay collections, and one-book length essay. As I type, I am reliably informed that Jeff Bezos himself is bringing two more titles to my door.

When I first thought about writing about Didion, I was drawn to her fiction. Play It as It Lays is probably Didion’s best known novel. It’s a slow, quiet exploration of mental breakdown and fragility. Everything is saturated in colour and soaked in sweat, but all the action occurs at a distance. For both Maria Wyeth – the woman whose life dissolves before her eyes – and the reader, it is as if you are watching a particularly tumultuous melodrama whilst lying prostrate at the bottom of a pool: everything is visible, but confused on the surface, and any sound is incomprehensible. One move and everything is irreconcilably obscured.

At the centre of A Book of Common Prayer is a similarly vulnerable woman: Charlotte Douglas’s life-story is undeniably tragic but Didion, and her narrator Grace, tells it in such a way that the tragedy seems almost commonplace; it would be rude to dwell on it. Didion’s heroines are unfailingly troubled and unfailingly perilously slim; Didion is Sally Rooney’s far darker, and far more heart-breaking ancestor. Whereas millennial fiction is preoccupied by narrating the ravages of an intense interior life, Didion’s fiction remains at a distance – and is all the more unnerving for doing so.

But to consider Didion’s fiction divorced from her essays and journalism is impossible. This is the woman who, in her essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, wrote that ‘My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point’. Her fiction is no exception – the obsession of bearing ‘witness’ to another women’s struggle in A Book of Common Prayer is a journalistic, personal one; a statement of a life’s work put into narrative. And it is this coherence between fiction and journalism which is a part of the brilliance of Didion – her work, imagined or real, embellished or plain, is a wholesale evocation of twentieth century America, and the wonder and importance of writing.

Over a year ago I was introduced to the essay ‘Goodbye to all that’ in an allusion in Hannah Sullivan’s brilliant ‘Three Poems’. The poem – shamefully stolen from a boy I no longer talk to, and still stolen as I look at it now – is a stinging, urgent exploration of youth in New York, but the brilliance of the original essay dances in comparison. Didion’s descriptions of her own life are so much like those that appear in her fiction – you lurch from moment to moment, feeling the joy, delight, and hurt. But Didion is aware of the limits of the written word – despite the intimacy there is a delicate, near-painful awareness of a text that makes no apology that it has to distance you from the experience. There is not a hint of coincidence about the fact that the open tabs on my laptop read ‘another degree new york?’ and ‘how expensive masters?’.

And amidst deeply personal essays and the reminder that any text bears the weight of its writer’s self-obsession and self-preoccupation are incredibly important works of social commentary. Nobody can write about Didion and not mention ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ – the essay about 60s San Francisco that ends with Susan: a five-year-old high on acid – but there are less-famous gems throughout her work. Take this last paragraph of ‘On Morality’:

But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognise that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with ‘morality’. Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then that is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

Didion wrote that in 1965; it is not facetious, I think, to say that we have been ignoring a prophet.

There are so many arguments I would like to make about Didion at this point – Didion as a balsam for America; Didion’s work as that which all millennial, emotional fiction is derivative from; Didion as a reason to be hopeful for, and wary of, the future. But I suppose whatever I say can be reduced to this one point. In a world of fragmented, rushed, knee-jerk communication, and manufactured hostility and artificial debate, anything Didion writes is an antidote. And, perhaps more crucially, there is still the possibility to wholly, completely, nearly un-critically fall in love with something. I say un-critically, but if there is one thing I have learnt from reading so much Didion in the last two weeks, it is to treasure the ability to scrutinise and criticise.

I make no apology for putting my love-affair with Didion at the centre of this essay – my stake has to be in the unmentioned girl writing in her pyjamas. Remember what it is to be me: that is always the point.

It’s easy to see what makes the album different – black and white replaces pastel colours, insistently lower-case song-titles replace the exuberance of “ME!”. And, rather than the anger of Reputation (2017), listeners are treated to lyrical narratives beyond the world of pop-culture in-fighting. This is not to say Lover, Reputation, or any of Swift’s earlier albums were bad, but simply that she has changed tack.

Three songs on the album have attracted particular attention. Swift herself has said that these songs are a part of a “Teenage Love Triangle” and Swift fans – with their unending ability to detect clues and hidden meanings within her work – have decided that these are “cardigan”, “august”, and “betty”. Each song is a sombre, delicate reflection on teenage life, love, and loss. Even stepping away from fan-theories which posit that the love triangle involves Swift and model Karlie Kloss, or that the names in the songs suggest a link to actress Blake Lively, it is clear Swift has taken her listeners back to an American-high-school dream world. This song-scape of school holidays and “homeroom” arguments is not too dissimilar to very early Swift: we’re back in the land of “she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”.

And yet, in her recourse to singing about tentative teenage love-affairs – “cancel plans just incase you call, and say ‘meet you behind the mall’” – Swift is not simply re-hashing the tones of her pre-2010 albums. The whole record is so steeped in nostalgia – everything’s “slipped away like a bottle of wine” – that to sing about teenage experiences is to sing about an unavoidable, indelible sense of loss. Swift’s whole career – from country girl singing about small-town affairs to being dubbed a “mad woman” by the press – is contained within this sixteen-track album. In singing about teenage love-stories, she demonstrates just how far she’s come. The 2006 “Teardrops on My Guitar” becomes a self-conscious reference in ‘my tears ricochet’.

Swift knows she’s more of a Rebecca Harkness – the rebellious socialite she sings about in “last great american dynasty” – than a “betty” (a heartbroken teenager). But she has been both.

On this album what emerges is the strength of Swift’s narrative ability. This is something Swift-fans have known for a long time: there is no song-writer alive who is better at dropping hints and encoding messages. Don McLean’s “American Pie” has often been posited as a great lyrical narrative mystery, but it meets a potential competitor in “the last great american dynasty”. Admittedly Swift’s narrative is – on one level – easier to follow, but the Gatsby-esque vignettes, details, and half-line references multiply until her listeners are left with a similar, and overwhelming, awareness of a lost innocence.

Swift is a brilliant story-teller – a fact her dedicated (predominantly) female, (predominantly) teenage or early twenties fans have always known. And hopefully, with this album, others will recognise this fact. Just because she is adored by young girls does not mean she is a saccharine, vacuous, pop-singer.

So – is Taylor Swift the best narrative song-writer since Bob Dylan? I asked my Dad this. He snorted and replied “Obviously not – Chris Difford” (he wrote the lyrics for The Squeeze). Make of that what you will. Taste isn’t genetic.

The amendment was first raised in 1923 but had its heyday in the 1970s. It passed through Congress and the Senate and had wide bipartisan support. It looked like a done deal, but it never made it to become a part of the US constitution: it failed to be ratified in the necessary two-thirds of state legislatures.

Women’s rights are supported through other means in the US; court decisions such as the Equal Pay Act (1963), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and potentially the fourteenth amendment all legislate against sex discrimination. But, the failure to pass an act which enshrines sex equality is quite galling. As a symbol, and one I learnt about in the wake of Trump’s election, its defeat entrenched the opinion that America’s rule-makers were misogynistic men.

It came as a great surprise, while watching Mrs America on BBC Two, to learn that the ERA hadn’t been defeated by the men-in-grey-suits of my nightmares. The amendment’s adversaries in the 1970s were women: housewives from across the US, led by the Phillis Schlafly. Indeed, opposition to the ERA had been led by women since its inception at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the early days, many working-class women pointed out that erasing protective working legislation that allowed shorter working hours to enable childcare would do more to harm women’s equality in the workplace than help it. In the 1970s, the anti-ERA women argued along the same lines: equality which denied women special provision would endanger, not help women. Schlafly envisaged women conscripted to fight, housewives not allowed to stay at home and gender-neutral bathrooms, the prospect of which still causes debate today. She was a compelling speaker, watching her debate Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, you can see why women alienated by second-wave feminism felt safer with her defence of homemakers.

Mrs America is a perfect evocation of 1970s America in all its political and social hope and fragility. The soundtrack starts with Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” and only gets better from there. Rose Byrne shines as Gloria Steinem; she is a complex, inspiring, continually flawed figure beyond the feminist poster-girl. Steinem is subject to virulent misogynistic attacks, as indeed are all the women depicted. This is not a hammed-up catfight between good and evil, but an exploration of the brilliance and limits of the 1970s movement. One of the most poignant moments is when Shirley Chisholm (played by Uzo Aduba) realises that many of the feminists she has been working with do not truly believe that she, a black woman, can be the democratic nominee for President.

Since the election of Donald Trump, the focus on the ERA has intensified: ratification deadlines are long expired, but Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia have recently passed the amendment. This brings the number of states up to thirty-eight, but five voted to revoke their ratifications in the late 70s. While the fate of the ERA is still unclear, we are still  yet to have a female leader of the US, and our current rhetoric and politics would be perhaps disappointing to many second-wave feminists.

Mrs America still makes compelling watching. We have not moved as far beyond the debates and inadequacies of 1970s politics as we might like to believe.