War

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

War, wine and the brilliance of Beychevelle

If only toasts and good wishes were weapons of war. At every serious repast I have attended since the invasion began, someone has raised a glass to the heroes – and heroines – of Ukraine. The rest of us have responded with a blend of solemnity and moist-eyed emotion. One’s emotions are strange. I can read about the deaths of warriors on the battlefield, now riding with the Valkyries on their way to Valhalla, and merely respond with a dry-eyed salutation. But hearing of some old girl who had been living in hunger and squalor and terror in a cellar for days and indeed weeks, with the regular crump of

Robert Taylor

40 years on, war still casts a shadow over the Falklands

For the Falkland islanders, the war in Ukraine brings back haunting memories of their own trauma four decades ago. Having themselves experienced a barbaric invasion by a big bully next door, they understand all too well what the people of Ukraine are going through. ‘I still feel that gun in my back,’ one islander told me recently, describing the day Argentine troops landed on Pebble Island and brutally rounded up the locals. Much has changed in the Falklands since 1982, nearly all of it for the better, yet the war remains seared in the memory. This year’s 2 April is, therefore, hugely significant – the 40th anniversary of the invasion.

Saturday

Justin Bronk

Why Russian tactics won’t win the war

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, the war has settled into a largely attritional struggle – and the picture is very different across the various fronts. Russian forces have been forced on to the defensive in many areas. The Russian ministry of defence has announced that the ‘first phase’ of the invasion is over, to be replaced with a more limited focus on Donbas in the east of Ukraine. The reason for this is simple: Ukrainian forces have not only stopped the Russian advances around Kyiv in the north and Mykolaiv in the south-west but have begun to regain towns and cut key Russian supply routes. In the

Thursday

Daryna Kolomiiets

Why I’ve stayed in Kyiv

I write this from my Kyiv air raid shelter. It has become my second home, an improvised bedroom, study and kitchen. For food, we eat bread and borscht. It is a spartan existence, but conducive to reflection. I still can’t get used to the siren that sounds five times a day, although I have got used to sleeping on the floor, in hallways, subways or the metro. I keep a bag packed with essentials by the door that I can grab and run with when the alarm sounds. On the first night of the war, I spent the first hours in the subway, along with thousands of Kyivites. Nobody slept.

Nick Newman

How should cartoonists respond to war?

Laughter has always been a coping mechanism for dealing with war. Some of this country’s most memorable cartoons have been born out of conflict. Think of Gillray’s ‘Plumb-Pudding in Danger’, Bairnsfather’s ‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it’ or Low’s ‘Very well, alone’ – they are the quintessential images that defined the Napoleonic, first and second world wars. War didn’t stop cartoonists in the thick of the action from making light of their circumstances. Bruce Bairnsfather, a young officer who began sending jokes to the Bystander in 1915, was invalided out of Belgium suffering from shell-shock, but continued to draw. His work was initially dubbed ‘vulgar

Taki

In praise of amateurs

Two weeks ago in St Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nikolai von Bismarck, two talented young men and Old Harrovians whose parents are friends of mine. This week I was proud to read the former’s byline and to see the latter’s pictures from the warzone in Ukraine. Good on them, the Fourth Estate could do with talented amateurs rather than world-weary pros. But don’t get me wrong. By amateurs I mean those who write and photograph for the love of their craft, not because it’s their job. I’ve always insisted that the amateur is superior to the pro because he or she glories in the execution of

Saturday

Justin Bronk

The Russian army is running out of momentum

As the Russian invasion enters its fourth week it is clear that its forces are running out of momentum, although they continue to make limited territorial gains in the south and east of Ukraine. Having been denied a quick victory over Ukraine itself, Putin now needs to force the Ukrainian government to accept a ceasefire agreement that largely freezes the frontlines and allows him to claim a victory domestically. His strategy now appears to be to cut off the Ukrainian forces fighting a desperate battle to hold the line in Donbas in the east against combined Russian and separatist Donetsk and Luhansk forces from the rest of Ukraine, and to concentrate

Thursday

James W. Carden

This is what liberal war fever looks like

In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, ‘there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers’ and became ‘the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault’. Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion.’How else,’ he asked,'[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My oncologist has a new weapon in his arsenal

‘We’re at war!’ said the taxi man as I installed myself for the long drive to Marseille. I put a fist to my mouth and tooted my imaginary bugle. But world war three – as he saw it – was no joking matter. My tootling bugle irritated him and his voice rose by a querulous octave. Didn’t I realise? Everything has changed since this morning! European politics had changed! French politics had changed! Who was now going to vote for a political novice like Zemmour, for example? Horizontal in its dashboard holder, his smartphone was showing a three-cornered TV debate on a rolling news channel. He turned up the volume.

Thursday

Hardeep Singh

Britain is finally remembering its forgotten soldiers of empire

Each year, flowers of remembrance are left on the tomb of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey. The memorial marks the resting place of a nameless British soldier who fell on the battlefields of Europe during the First World War. But this hero is far from alone in his identity being lost to history. More than a century on from the end of the Great War, the contribution of half-a-million Punjabis who fought has been all but forgotten. The Punjab, or ‘land of the five rivers’ – a region now divided between what is post-partition India and Pakistan – remarkably provided more soldiers (Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus) towards the allied

Friday

Francis Pike

Would Japan defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack?

In a parliamentary debate in early June about Covid, Japan’s prime minister Yoshihide Suga said that Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan had been ‘imposing strong restrictions on privacy rights.’ Whether by mistake or on purpose, Suga had crossed the Rubicon of acceptable China-Japan diplomatic language by implying that Taiwan was a country. If it was a mistake, it was one he repeated several times. China’s response was immediate. A foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, accused Suga of a flagrant breach of ‘the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country.’ It is a precious tenet of China’s foreign policy – indeed it

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Homeric levels of misery: Paradise, at the Olivier Theatre, reviewed

The National Theatre has given Sophocles’s Philoctetes a makeover and a new title, Paradise. This must be ironic because the location is hell on earth. The action starts in a dirt circle sprawling with smashed military gear where a group of plump female vagrants are waking up in a clutch of filthy old tents. They’re living on a Caribbean island which also houses a prison for migrants. In a nearby cave dwells an exiled Homeric archer, Philoctetes, who survives by eating squirrels which he kills with his handmade bow. A committed anti-vegan, Philoctetes shuns the plentiful rice, garlic and mangos that grow naturally in the tropics. Enter two British soldiers

Thursday

The Spectator

How many Lilibets are there in the world?

Rare Lili Other than the new royal baby, is there anyone in the world formally called Lilibet? — There are 141 Lilibets in the US. None have been born since 1999 — when 8 were born, according to the US Social Security Administration. — Lilibet Foster, born in the US Virgin Islands in 1965, is a documentary-maker whose film Speaking in Strings, about the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, was nominated in the 72nd Academy Awards. — In answer to a freedom of information request in 2017, the Office for National Statistics refused to provide a full breakdown of the first names of people living in Britain. But it does publish a

Sunday

Andy Owen

The terrifying development of AI warfare

The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France contains some of the earliest known Palaeolithic cave paintings, including those of lions, bears, and hyenas. Thought to be the earliest expressions of human fear, it is hard for us to compute today how frightened man once was to live alongside creatures who viewed us as prey. This primal fear is buried deep within us. It explains our fascination with rare stories of humans being eaten by sharks, crocodiles and big cats. The fear isn’t just about our mortality, but the very thought of us as prey to an unfeeling predator, who doesn’t recognise us as individual thinking humans. In science fiction, this deep-rooted fear

Thursday

John Phipps

The funniest current affairs show since Brass Eye: Into the Grey Zone reviewed

It was something a friend said to me about The Revenant, Leonardo diCaprio’s bloody-minded and brutal Oscar vehicle: ‘The problem with the film is once you start laughing, you can’t stop. And for me, that moment was the second time he fell off a cliff.’ I thought about this a lot listening to Into the Grey Zone, a new podcast hoping to educate its audience about the new forms of constant pseudo-warfare that modern states engage in. This is the world of nerve poisoning in Salisbury, airspace incursions over Taiwan, cyberattacks, mass disinformation and remote interference. None of these things can be considered open warfare but taken together, the podcast

Laura Gascoigne

Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known?

I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington. All I remember now about the show, and my review, is that I said she could teach Paula Rego to suck eggs. From the mischievous energy packed into her small figurative paintings I assumed she was young enough to be Rego’s granddaughter. That was in 2003; she was pushing 60. Born in Rotterdam in 1945, Hanselaar is essentially self-taught. She dropped out of art school in The Hague — it was the 1960s — and ran away to Amsterdam; what she learned about painting she picked up from the artists

Thursday

Taki

It’s been a tough year for socialites

New York Here we go again, the annual holiest of holies is upon us, although to this oldie last Christmas feels as though it was only yesterday. Funny how time never seemed to pass quickly during those lazy days of long ago, but now rolls off like a movie calendar showing the days, months, years flashing by. I wrote my first Christmas column for this magazine 43 years ago, sitting in my dad’s office on Albemarle Street. I remember it well because I used every cliché known to man and then some (patter of little feet… children’s noses pressed against snowy windows). The then editor, Alexander Chancellor, said nothing to

Thursday

John Phipps

Boldly going where hundreds have gone before: Brave New Planet podcast reviewed

Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that driverless cars, green energy and of course certain vaccines are, for all their breakneck pace, still taking for ever to arrive. Watching the future emerge is like watching slow-motion footage of a high-speed train. We know it’s going quickly — but can we not just fast-forward? Perhaps it’s merely our heightened expectations, our diminished boredom thresholds. Some of our most distinguished thinkers and entrepreneurs have warned that an all-powerful artificial intelligence, badly calibrated, might represent the greatest threat to the long-term survival of humanity. That they’ve been warning this for

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

If this is a war, let’s fight it like one

Under the cloud of conformity that has settled over the land as a replacement for air pollution, heretics who doubt the wisdom of annihilating a nation in the name of saving it are obliged to navigate around numerous disputational booby traps. You hate old people and want them to die (though some oddballs questioning the proportionality of wholesale lockdowns are old people). You’re only concerned for individual ‘liberty’ and refuse to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, so you’re unpatriotic. All you care about is money. You’re evidently a Trump supporter, and therefore you’re stuck with endorsing his advice to cure Covid-19 by drinking bleach. And if you’re a

Wednesday

Will Gore

The best war films to watch on Netflix

1917, the World War One epic that has picked up 10 Oscar nominations (including for Best Picture and Best Director for Sam Mendes), is currently going great guns in cinema. If it has put you in the mood for more war on screen, then fire up Netflix, where there are plenty of military flicks to pick from. Jarhead 1917 is not Sam Mendes’s first foray onto the battlefield. Jarhead, released in 2005, was an adaptation of a memoir written by US marine Anthony Swofford about his experience of serving in the first Iraq war – the resulting film is a different kind of war movie in which the longueurs of