At the Café Royal in Regent Street in 1944 three intelligence officers bent over their plates while Europe held its breath. Outside, London braced for D-day. Inside, Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6.

Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6’s counterespionage arm, blinked. Educated at Westminster, converted to communism at Cambridge and by then securely installed as Moscow’s man at the heart of the British establishment, he had helped orchestrate the deception on which Operation Overlord depended, persuading Hitler that the allies would land at Calais rather than Normandy. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion. Yet here he was, strolling off-stage before the curtain rose.

Why? Had Greene glimpsed the treachery across the table? Robert Verkaik circles that question in this elegant and forensic double portrait setting Greene, that sociologist of sin, alongside the Kremlin’s golden boy Philby, with the lengthening shadow of the cold war falling between them.

Greene enters already steeped in divided loyalties. At school in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, he felt caught between the authority of his headteacher father and the contempt of his peers. The sense of standing on the wrong side of the line never left him. He flirted with communism, then with Labour, almost never voted, and cultivated a romantic attraction to all manner of causes.

Risk, however, was his real creed. During the blitz, he gravitated to Soho’s seedier haunts, visiting clip joints and compiling a private catalogue of sex workers. When a Luftwaffe bomb flattened his Clapham house, the Reform Club became his bolt-hole, a place in which the cream of British intelligence and more than a few Soviet agents exchanged gossip over claret. From that upholstered limbo, his absorption into MI6 under Philby followed swiftly enough.

Philby’s doubleness was cooler. Born in India and nicknamed after Kipling’s hero because his first words were in Punjabi, he was the son of Englishman St John Philby, who converted to Islam and advised the Saudi king. Verkaik presents him as a scion of “the British ruling class”, which slightly overstates the case. Philby in fact brushed up against the upper echelons without ever quite belonging to them, and an element of class envy at school and university may well have sharpened his taste for revolution. In time he became, thanks to the clubbable incompetence of intelligence vetting, a trusted insider at MI6, eased through by assurances from his father that the communist phase had been a youthful folly.

Verkaik is helped along by the fact that both his subjects make for terrific copy. Greene, forever dramatising his delinquency, wrote to his longsuffering wife that he was by nature “profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life” – that his infidelities were symptoms of a “disease” which happened also to be his material. Cure the malady and the novelist would vanish. Philby, less confessional but no less carnivorous, had four wives and a flotilla of affairs, conducting treason and matrimony with comparable sangfroid.

Part of the pleasure of Verkaik’s book is the vicarious glide through their parallel rake’s progresses. Yet beneath it all lay something darker. Gambling that Stalin would not double cross his western partners, Philby was quietly funnelling operational details, analyses and, most explosively, material related to D-day planning to Moscow. Had the Kremlin decided to do things differently, the beaches of Normandy could have become a slaughterhouse.

Had Greene guessed, as early as 1944, that his boss was playing a double game? Did his abrupt resignation reflect not disillusionment with office politics, but having caught Philby out? Verkaik asks but does not presume to answer. It would take another two decades for MI5 to catch up and for Philby to defect to the Soviet Union in 1963. However lofty the reasons for his defection, the reality turned out to be more mundane: in Moscow, he was reduced to pestering his handlers for English marmalade and the latest cricket scores from home.

In this admirably clear and cogent book, the philosopher Kathleen Stock sets out the case against state-sanctioned assisted dying. Her immediate objection is to the end of life bill currently before the House of Lords, but her opposition extends to the principle in general. This is a polemic, but a polite one. Stock says she hopes that by the end of it we will share her objection to the ‘‘institutionalisation of death”.

It is not a popular place to start. Polls over the past few years consistently show that around three-quarters of Britons are in favour of assisted dying for terminally ill people. But Stock has never been afraid of swimming upstream. In 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex following protests by some staff and students over her views, set out in the book Material Girls, that sex is binary and immutable and that this, rather than gender identity, should be the basis of laws to protect women.

In Do Not Go Gentle – the phrase is taken from Dylan Thomas’s 1951 poem urging his ailing father not to accept death without a fight – Stock insists that she is not an unfeeling ascetic who thinks that bodily suffering is somehow good for you. Rather, her objection lies in the fact that, once we set up rules and protocols for managing assisted death, there will almost immediately be special pleadings and lobbying for extensions.

She has plenty of evidence to back this up. Canada has had Medical Assistance in Dying (Maid) since June 2016. Initial eligibility was confined to individuals with a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. Since then it has been expanded to cover those who have serious and incurable but not necessarily terminal diagnoses. Legislation has also been passed – although implementation is delayed until 2027 – to allow Maid for individuals whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness. In the Benelux countries, it is already legal for a doctor to assist the death of a person who suffers unbearably from a psychological illness but has no underlying physical deficit. Even more chillingly, laws that started off by insisting that only adults could make the decision to die have ended up allowing euthanasia for extremely ill babies and children.

Stock, in her measured and reasonable way, does not seek to shock by lingering on these extreme cautionary tales. Instead, she concentrates on the more typical – and imaginable – case of a person with a terminal physical diagnosis who is seeking an assisted suicide. On the face of it this might seem like an obvious good. But Stock argues that if the patient had automatic access to expert palliative care and pain relief then they might not feel the need to seek an artificial death. Hospice treatment in Britain is patchy, expensive and relies on an insecure mix of charitable donations and NHS funding. How can we be certain that assisted dying is not being mooted as a way of relieving the state of an extra financial burden?

You could extend this analysis almost infinitely. Evidence from Canada shows that disabled people who are not terminally ill are now seeking death because the services required for sustaining a decent life at home are not forthcoming. Then there is the scenario of family members putting pressure on elderly relatives to exit early to avoid care home fees or to hasten legacies. It sounds like a scare story until Stock reminds us of the numerous instances of mortgage, pension and benefit fraud that come before the courts each year.

People are not always good or kind, and she urges us not to endorse a system based on muddled thinking that puts vulnerable people – a category that will include most of us, eventually – at the mercy of coercion.

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.

Such was the case with the French historian Cécile Desprairies, who on Wednesday was sued for defamation by her brother and a cousin over the depiction of her late mother and her great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste.

“The author’s resentment toward the targeted individuals permeates the entire work, which is conceived as a genuine act of family vengeance,” the plaintiffs said in their legal complaint. They claimed there was an “absence of evidence” for the novel’s central plot, a woman’s collaboration with the Nazis, and asked for the book to be withdrawn from the market and pulped.

In the novel, which was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2023 and, in Natasha Lehrer’s English translation, praised as a “clever and vivid book” in the Guardian, the narrator, Coline, tells the story of her morphine-addicted mother, Lucie, betrothed in her first marriage to a “convinced pro-Nazi” and designer of propaganda posters during the Vichy occupation.

While the author has rejected the book’s classification as a roman à clef – a novel in which real people may be thinly disguised as fictional – she has made no secret of being inspired by her own childhood. “Most of the protagonists I was able to draw inspiration from were dead, so there’s a liberation of speech,” she told French television in 2023.

Desprairies’ book can be grouped in the genre of life writing that the French author and literary critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 christened autofiction, a hybrid of autobiography and experimental fiction that has made inroads on the bestseller lists over the last decade via the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle.

Autofiction often focuses on painful or traumatic childhood experiences. From a legal point of view, “the trouble is that it’s very difficult to write about your own experience without touching on the experience of others”, said Larissa Muraveva, a researcher at Grenoble Alpes University.

Knausgård, whose six-volume My Struggle series frequently thematises his difficult relationship with his alcoholic father, was threatened with a defamation lawsuit by his uncle before publication of the first volume. In 2018, Bergen’s National theatre was threatened with libel over a stage adaptation of an autofiction novel by Vigdis Hjorth, by Hjorth’s own mother.

These threats never materialised into court action and in Norway families portrayed in autofiction have tended to find satisfactory retribution via creative means rather than legal channels. Knausgård’s former spouse Linda Boström Knausgård has published a novel that appears to dispute her ex’s fictionalised account of their breakup, while Hjorth’s sister Helga and a rumoured former lover, Arild Linneberg, a literary critic, have written their own “counter-novels”.

Melissa Schuh, a lecturer in English literature at Kiel University in Germany, said: “The suspicion that some critics have harboured against writers of autofiction is that it allows you to have it both ways. In the context of fiction writing, it frees you from limitations of established genre conventions and lends your writing a possible air of authenticity. From the perspective of nonfiction writing, autofiction allows you to creatively use literary devices of fictionality but also to a degree inoculates you against potential legal action.”

In France, however, novelisation has been less successful at shielding seemingly autobiographical accounts against court action, which may have emboldened Desprairies’ relatives.

In 2013, the prominent autofiction writer Christine Angot and her publisher, Flammarion, were ordered to jointly pay €40,000 in damages for invasion of privacy against her lover’s ex-partner in her novel Les Petits. Another author, Camille Laurens, was taken to court by her husband in 2003 over the use of their daughter’s name in the novel L’Amour, Roman, though she won the case.

Natalie Edwards, a professor of French and head of modern languages at the University of Bristol, said: “It’s striking that there has also been a huge memoir boom meeting a very litigious culture in the US, but we haven’t seen as many legal disputes as in France. In France, a very vague law around privacy has met a very vague writing style.”

In Desprairies’ case, the situation is different in that her relatives are suing her not for invasion of privacy but for “public defamation of the memory of the dead”. Mark Stephens, an English solicitor who specialises in media law, intellectual property and freedom of expression, believes they should not get their hopes up.

“The law on the freedom of the press of 29 July 1881, the law that defines defamation in France, only protects the privacy rights of living people,” he said. “Descendants cannot sue for a blot on a family’s honour unless they can convince a court that their own reputation has been denigrated.”

In her plea, Desprairies’ lawyer argued that linking the story of the book to the author’s living relatives would require “an extreme knowledge of genealogy or a power of divination, which readers do not have”.

Stephens said: “As it stands, their claim looks pretty weak, if not to say impossible. French courts will be slow to muzzle a novelist exposing uncomfortable truths. Family pride makes poor law, and even worse literature.”

A verdict in the case is expected on 17 March.

Tobacco, swiss roll, Irish whiskey, Guinness and monkey nuts: that’s the diet followed by one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas’ grocery bill is among a trove of famous writers’ personal documents and letters – many of which are as yet unseen by the public, and have been exclusively shown to the Guardian – discovered in the case files of a literary charity.

A unpublished note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor and an unseen letter by Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing also feature in the cache of documents, which once formed applications to the Royal Literary Fund (RLF), a charity that awards hardship grants to writers.

Letters from James Joyce, CS Lewis, Joseph Conrad, Mervyn Peake and Edith Nesbit are among those found in the case files, which are stored between the British Library, where they are available to view, and at the RLF offices tucked behind Fleet Street, where discoveries are ongoing as boxes of case files continue to be catalogued.

Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here. A note from Plath’s doctor about her entering hospital for an appendectomy is among Ted Hughes’s application documents. Elsewhere, Joyce, in his 1915 application, writes that he receives “nothing in the way of royalties”, the sales of his books being “below the required number”. And Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.

Lessing, who is the only British woman to have won the Nobel prize in literature, describes in a 1955 letter having moved to Britain in 1949 from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with £20, after the end of her marriage. When her debut novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published the following year, she left her job as a secretary and devoted her time to writing. “I have been living on my pen ever since, though very precariously,” she writes five years later, laying out details of debts she owed to friends, and the lack of help on offer from her family and ex-husband.

“It has been suggested that I should write scripts for murder stories for the commercial TV, but my short and unfruitful experience with this sort of work has made it clear that while I might earn a lot of money, I won’t be doing any serious work,” she writes.

The conflict between making art and earning a living through commercial work also makes itself clear in a letter by Ezra Pound in support of Joyce’s application. “He has lived for 10 years in obscurity and poverty, that he might perfect his writing and be uninfluenced by commercial demands.”

At the time of the application in July 1915, Joyce had fled Trieste, where he had first moved in 1904. He had published the poetry collection Chamber Music and short story collection Dubliners, and was working on Ulysses. In his letter, Pound describes the latter as “uneven”, but calls the forthcoming A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as having “indubitable value, and permanence” – an endorsement that helped win Joyce a grant. “If we ever get into cataloguing the books that might not exist without the RLF, I think we start with Ulysses and work down from there,” says Edward Kemp, the former director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, who now runs the charity.

DH Lawrence, Bram Stoker and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were also RLF recipients. Welsh poet Thomas was supported by the charity from 1938 to his death in 1953. “I have been trying to live by my writing for five years, and have lived in poverty nearly all that time,” he wrote in his August 1938 application. “So far I have had to be content with poverty, and have always been fortunate to have just enough food and to have a room to work and sleep in. But now my wife is going to have a baby, and our position is desparate [sic]”.

Given that the RLF was not due to meet until mid-October that year, the charity forwarded his application to the Royal Bounty Fund (a somewhat shadowy taxpayer-funded operation that was wound down after more than 200 years in the early 2000s). But Whitehall didn’t mince words when rejecting the application:“If one is to put it brutally, ought Thomas – at 23 and apparently unable to support himself – to have married and be adding to his family? If he has taken on these responsibilities, ought he confine his activities to writing comparatively unremunerative verse, etc at a time when even the most successful find it difficult to make a living by literature?”

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Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

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Ali Smith, Monique Roffey and Anna Burns are among the prominent contemporary writers whom the fund has supported, as well as Hanif Kureishi, after he suffered an accident that left him paralysed.

“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake first applied to the RLF in 1948 when he was struggling to complete the second novel in his fantasy series. By the 1960s, his health had declined, and his wife, Maeve Gilmore, applied for a second grant on his behalf. “He has been ill since 1956, with what was first diagnosed as a breakdown, but has subsequently [been] found to be encephalitis, with Parkinson’s disease as a consequence,” she writes in an October 1961 letter. (A posthumous study found that he in fact probably died of Lewy body dementia). “He has managed to do a little drawing, but work of a literary nature is no longer possible.”

The RLF saw a 400% increase in applications for hardship grants between 2023 and 2024. To be eligible, a writer has to have had two works professionally published. Grants are awarded for basic living expenses, costs associated with long-term disabilities or health conditions, and one-off costs like unexpected bills. Most of the RLF’s money comes from authors who bequeathed some or all of their literary estates to the charity, including Colin MacInnes, Somerset Maugham, AA Milne, Arthur Ransome and Ronald Blythe.

The archives unveil a complex web of literary connections: there is CS Lewis supporting Peake’s application, Henry James backing Joseph Conrad. “You look back, and people who you’d have thought are surviving as writers really aren’t,” says Kemp.

“You’d hope we didn’t have to exist,” he adds. But the organisation’s former tagline says it all: “Sometimes bad things happen to good writers.”

Archival quotations featured by permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd on behalf of The Estate of Doris Lessing; The Estate of James Joyce; The Estates of Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore; and New Directions Publishing Corp on behalf of Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S Pound, © 2025. All rights and credit of archival quotations go to the owners.

Dr Eitan Rose is stark naked in a gay sauna when he is called upon to perform CPR on an elderly man and fellow patron who is having a heart attack. When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.

When Moran dies in unexpected circumstances, Eitan suspects foul play and sets about finding the culprit. Soon he is performing illicit postmortems and impersonating a police detective so he can cross-examine a suspect. But when he tries to blow the whistle, his colleagues and the police decline to take his claims seriously. Eitan may work among medical professionals, but they are not above stigmatising a colleague diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking his outlandish claims as evidence of his instability.

A Particularly Nasty Case is the first murder mystery from Adam Kay, author of the tragicomic This Is Going to Hurt, his bestselling memoir which recounted his early career as a junior doctor. The Lord of the Rings actor Andy Serkis is the narrator, who revels in Kay’s pitch-black humour and energetically inhabits the wild dysfunction of Eitan. Some suspension of disbelief is required in what is an overly frantic final act. Nonetheless, you can’t help rooting for Eitan, a misguided but ultimately well-intentioned hero and sleuth.

Available via Orion 10hr 9min

Further listening

Frankly
Nicola Sturgeon, Macmillan, 14hr 17min
The former first minister of Scotland reflects on her early life in Ayrshire, leading the yes campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and her dealings with past and current world leaders including Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Read by the author.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai, Penguin Audio, 25hr 31min
Sneha Mathan reads this Booker-nominated novel about love spanning decades and continents. When aspiring novelist Sonia and journalist Sunny have a chance encounter on a train in India, they realise they already have a connection: their families are neighbours.

When slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1833, it was thought only reasonable that slave-owners should be recompensed for the loss of their property: the British government had to borrow the equivalent of £17bn at current values to do this and that loan was not completely paid off until 2015. Meanwhile, the slaves themselves never received a penny in compensation.

There have always been dedicated Black campaigners for reparations, but it is only recently that their demands have gained momentum. Furthermore, it is impossible to talk about reparations without talking about race and migration – and these are issues at the top of the political agenda internationally. All this makes Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder’s new book both timely and vital.

It is noticeable in passing that Henry’s name on the spine and title page is larger than that of his co-writer Ryder, a charity director. Presumably, the publishers decided that a popular cultural figure would help draw in readers who might otherwise think the issue of reparations abstruse, not to mention worryingly radical. One thing that discourages people from discussing the subject is the idea that it involves a huge transfer of money. But this book stresses from the beginning that giving reparations is not necessarily about financial compensation.

Primarily, it is about recognising the terrible wrong wrought by the transatlantic slave trade, and the importance of understanding its effects on how we live now. Henry and Ryder cover the different forms reparations could take, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and public apology. They also discuss setting up a Caribbean Community (Caricom) body to receive reparations. And while they don’t reach a conclusion on what reparation should look like, they insist on the case for it in principle. On one hand, they explain how much of the reality of racism today can be traced back to the economic and psychological consequences of the slave trade: chronic educational underachievement; an increased likelihood of falling foul of the criminal justice system; higher rates of psychosis. On the other, they set out how profits from the slave trade continue to make money today – for instance, by having helped make the UK a global financial centre.

But even if people are prepared to accept the justice of reparations, they often think that it is just not achievable or practical. Here, Henry and Ryder point to examples of reparations between nation states during the 20th century. In 1952 the Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany was signed, with West Germany promising to pay Israel billions of marks over the next 14 years, in addition to payments to individual victims of persecution. Alongside these precedents, they discuss possible methods of funding reparations, such as a specific tax on financial transactions or debt cancellation.

“Reparations must be about power and its redistribution,” Henry and Ryder write. “Money and finances are often a proxy for power and can be empowering, but giving money alone is just compensation. Giving people power is the real ‘repair’ in reparations.”

There is currently a toxic political debate about race and migration. Donald Trump, under the guise of challenging “woke”, is determined to roll back the gains in racial justice made since the civil rights era. In both the US and Europe, the conversation about asylum and migration has become almost hysterical, and we see not just the rise of far-right parties, but the increasing adoption of their narrative on race and migration by centrist politicians.

There has, as a result, never been greater need for a thoughtful discussion on race. This study of the case for reparations, which binds the past and present together so cleverly, is an important contribution.

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Meta wins AI copyright case, but judge writes roadmap for authors’ revenge

Jun 26 2025

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria granted summary judgment to Meta in a case brought by 13 authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman, and Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz and Andrew Sean Greer, who alleged the company illegally used their books to train its Llama AI models. The judge found Meta’s use was “highly transformative” under copyright law’s fair use doctrine and that the authors failed to present adequate evidence of how they were harmed by Meta’s actions.

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Judge denies preliminary injunction in ‘ALA v. Sonderling’ IMLS case

Jun 09 2025

In a decision that may prove catastrophic for the American library community, a federal judge has denied a preliminary injunction in American Library Association v. Sonderling, a case seeking to halt the demolition of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

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There is something biblical about the fraternal relationship between the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor. Both involve bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons to produce a chain reaction via nuclear fission. Both were made possible in the same instant, at 3.25pm on 2 December 1942, when the Manhattan Project’s Enrico Fermi orchestrated the first human-made chain reaction in the squash court of the University of Chicago. “The flame of nuclear fission brought us to the forked road of promise and peril,” writes Tim Gregory.

The bomb came first, of course, but atomic dread coexisted with tremendous optimism about what President Eisenhower dubbed “atoms for peace”: the potential of controlled fission to generate limitless energy. As David Lilienthal of the US Atomic Energy Commission observed, atom-splitting thus inspired a pseudo-religious binary: “It would either destroy us all or it would bring about the millennium.”

Nuclear optimism was shattered by the 1986 Chornobyl disaster but, as the subtitle of his book advertises, Gregory is determined to bring it back. A nuclear chemist at Sellafield, where the Queen opened the world’s first commercial nuclear reactor in 1956, he’s a cheerleader for Team Millennium. Writing in a Promethean spirit of “rational and daring optimism”, this self-proclaimed “nuclear environmentalist” believes nuclear energy is the only viable route to net zero by 2050. “The nucleus could power the world securely, reliably, affordably, and – crucially – sustainably,” he declares.

Gregory is an excellent popular science writer: clear as a bell and gently humorous. If you want to understand the workings of fission or radioactivity, he’s your man. But he is also an evangelical pitchman whose chapters on the atom’s myriad wonders can read rather like high-end sales brochures. Radiation? Not a problem! Less dangerous, in fact, than radiophobia, “the irrational fear of radiation”. High-level nuclear waste? It can be buried in impregnable catacombs like Finland’s state-of-the-art Onkalo or, better yet, recycled through breeder reactors. Gregory wants the reader to learn to stop worrying and love the reactor.

Of course, there is a radioactive elephant in the room, which Gregory eventually confronts in the chapter We Need to Talk About Chernobyl. Like Three Mile Island (1979) and Fukushima (2011), the Soviet disaster caused reactor construction to crash. Europe built more reactors in the five years before Chornobyl than it has in the four decades since. The Fukushima meltdown spooked Germany into dismantling its entire nuclear programme. Whereas France, which has one-eighth of the planet’s 441 active reactors, currently generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear, Germany produces none, cancelling out its gains from renewables and making it painfully reliant on Russian gas. Gregory argues that the construction of reactors like Hinkley Point C in Somerset runs behind schedule and over budget because we’ve lost the habit, even as China and South Korea streak ahead.

To Gregory, all this is a tragic case of radiophobia. Only around 50 fatalities have been directly attributed to radiation from Chornobyl, while the official death tolls for Fukushima and Three Mile Island are one and zero respectively. Roll them all together and the same number of people are lost roughly every three minutes to air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.

No doubt, the kneejerk rejection of nuclear energy can be ignorant bordering on superstitious, but safety concerns demand more space and consideration. Oddly, Gregory doesn’t mention Serhii Plokhy’s 2022 book Atoms and Ashes, which explains how the Fukushima disaster could have been much worse if not for the courage and judgment of a few key officials. More offputtingly, he attacks renewable energy with roughly the same arguments used by rightwing critics of net zero, warning of “energy scarcity, industrial wind-down, and food insecurity” if we choose wind and sun over good old uranium-235. But surely it is not a zero-sum game?

After a while, Gregory’s relentless boosterism begins to lose its persuasive power and he sounds rather like the blithely confident scientist in the first act of a disaster movie. Even though I’m personally convinced that anybody focused on the climate emergency would be foolish to dismiss nuclear out of hand, I suspect that sceptics may require an argument that sounds a little less like “Calm down, dear.”

There is “no way” that Gisèle Pelicot would have been raped more than 200 times without the existence of pornography websites, her daughter has said.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Powys on Thursday, Caroline Darian said there were “so many social problems like online porn” that can lead to instances of abuse.

Pelicot survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, including her then husband Dominique Pelicot, Darian’s father, who drugged his wife and facilitated the abuse. Pelicot rose to international fame last year for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and other defendants. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Darian was at the festival to promote her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again. Asked by a male audience member how men can “step up” and be part of breaking cycles of abuse, she said “you need to talk between guys” about pornography, because it is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.

The actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who was chairing the event, said that “there are so many men in my life, even, who don’t know all of the facts of this case in the way that women do”.

What we “desperately need” men to do “is to check your mates” and challenge their misogynistic comments and behaviour, she said.

Darian is a pen name, a combination of her brothers Florian and David’s names, because she wanted to honour the fact that they have been so involved in the process of telling her story.

The author spoke with great compassion and admiration about her mother, but explained that they were not currently on speaking terms. In her book, she wrote that they reached a “point of no return” in their relationship after her mother did not believe Darian when she claimed her father had raped her.

Darian told the Hay audience that she thinks her mother’s reluctance to support her was a “way for her to protect herself”.

It’s “quite difficult” to accept that your child has been abused, she said. “I think my mum is not able to recognise it because otherwise I think she’s going to die.”

Dominique Pelicot’s actions have “really impacted the whole family, and everyone from her family had a different position”, she added. “But I just have to be grateful for what [Gisèle Pelicot] did.”

Telling her son, who was six at the time, about her father’s actions was particularly hard, Darian said. She felt a responsibility to tell him the truth but “it was a shock” as he had previously had a good relationship with his grandfather and “loved him very much”.

Her son saw a psychiatrist for almost four years after finding out the news, and Darian said she was “trying to educate him about what is consent”.

Raising a young man in a positive way was “a question of open dialogue”, she said, and “a question of education”.