Before It’s Gone is a series about the climate crisis and water scarcity in Morocco by photographer M’hammed Kilito, who highlights the degradation of countless oases Continue reading…

A Cumbrian wind is the central character in this hugely ambitious, millennia-spanning novel, which was 20 years in the makingEven if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it’s taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading.There’s the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind. Continue reading…

It is hard to keep the mind sharp when the body is thin and dehydrated, but solidarity is teaching starving students their thoughts still matterI must admit: I write this piece while starving – too hungry to think clearly, too weak to sit upright for long. I do not feel ashamed because my starvation is deliberate. I refuse my hunger even as it decays me. I can survive no other way.Since 2 March 2025, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza. Little aid – food, medicine, fuel – is getting in or being distributed. The markets are empty and bakeries, community kitchens and fuel stations are shuttered. Continue reading…

Mystery, history, unbeatable views and delicious local produce await in this idyllic corner of south-west England, which can be explored by foot, ferry, steam train and busOutside the train window, there’s a flickering reel of flowering fruit trees, lambs and swans nesting on the marshy levels. Following the Exe estuary towards Dawlish, where the railway runs along the beach, flocks of waders are gathering on the sandbanks, backed by boats and glinting water.I’m heading for the Dart valley and the English Riviera, AKA Torbay, to explore by foot and ferry, river boat, bus and steam railway. The area promises wine, walking, seafood and an eclectic history from prehistoric cave-dwellers to Agatha Christie. It’s easy to assume a Devon holiday must involve driving, but it can be even better without. On previous trips, I’ve stayed in Exeter and toured by train, or based myself in Torquay to walk the coast path and take the boat to Brixham. This time, I’m testing the limits of what can comfortably be done without a car by staying in an old farmhouse in the countryside, half a mile from the nearest bus stop. Continue reading…

The writer and director of Song for Marion recalls moments of bravado, tenderness and alarming physical fitness with the late actor We sent Terence the script for Song for Marion, and he just turned up at the office. He buzzed the door and said: “Is Paul there?” There was a new person working in our office at the time, and she said: “No, no one’s in at the minute. Who’s calling?” He said: “It’s Terence Stamp.” And then she was like: “Well, he’s not here, shall I leave a message?” She didn’t invite him up or anything. She left him standing there. And he didn’t give a shit about that, to be honest.Me, Terence and Gemma Arterton, who played the music teacher in Song for Marion, went to lunch at a vegan cafe in Shoreditch. His character, Arthur, was someone who loved his wife (played by Vanessa Redgrave), and would do anything for her, but always moaned, was always cantankerous, and found it very difficult to show any form of love to his son. Continue reading…