My earliest reading memory
Fairytales. I was obsessed. I took fairytales very seriously as moral lessons. I soon knew that I’d always help any old lady cross the road, it really is always best to do so.

My favourite book growing up
The Hobbit was my favourite book while growing up. It expanded my understanding of what could be achieved in fiction. I found JRR Tolkien’s world transformative. I felt as if I knew the hobbits, and I so wanted to see the elves. I could hear the crack of fireworks as they turned into dragons that flew overhead.

The writer who changed my mind
Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope. No matter how painful or difficult it was. Her work has such dignity and light. I read all of her work for years and took as many lessons from it as I could. It made me want to step up and continue to try to find a way to create a life that mattered to me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I was reading the dictionary when I was really quite little; if I found a word I didn’t know I would always go and look it up. Strange thing for a kid to do but I fell in love with language itself.

The book I came back to
I originally found Frankenstein by Mary Shelley too claustrophobic. In recent years I have connected with Shelley in a profound way and I am now writing a modern adaptation of Frankenstein that will be published next year. She was so ahead of her time, she began sci-fi, brought to life such a powerful archetype in the Creature, and while you can see inspirations of, say, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – he used to visit and read it at her father’s house – it was an absolutely personal calling for her to write this story. I am fascinated by her engagement with gnosis, the life force, death and how all the tragedies of her young life were carefully woven together by a formidable intellect. Shelley was only a teenager when she first wrote the book; interestingly, she revisited it and made revisions over decades. Like a master painter, perhaps, who adds a touch of shade and light later on, only to heighten a work’s immortal glow.

The book I reread
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is one of my favourite stories of all time. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as an Ungeziefer, some kind of monstrous creature. I think it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between the individual and social structures.

The book I could never read again
Anything by Enid Blyton. Her work has not aged well.

The book I discovered later in life
When I was travelling in Egypt I read The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany and Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz. Both books are intertwined with my memories of staying in downtown Cairo.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess when I was 15 and living in a children’s home. Its protagonist, Alex, was the same age as me. I found the book shocking. The use of “nadsat” (teenage slang) as the language spoken by his “droogs” also showed me that there are many ways to innovate in a novel.

The book I am currently reading
Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir A Hymn to Life. I think she is extraordinary and inspiring.

My comfort read
Poetry: a single stanza in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, or The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop, or Temptation by Nina Cassian. There are so many poems I return to endlessly, as with a favourite record that never fails to contain something familiar and new at the same time.

In the spring of 2024, I am finally able to visit Banishanta, the island in southern Bangladesh that has been haunting my dreams. When I arrive I find it is little more than a long patch of grey mud, with a string of flimsy huts lining a craggy shore. Thirteen years earlier, I was on a boat on my way to the Sundarban mangrove forest when a guide casually pointed out the island and told me it was a state-licensed brothel that had been there since the time of the British.

When I went home, I didn’t want to think about Banishanta, because if I did, I would have to imagine the terrible things the women there were enduring while I lived a life of casual entitlements many thousands of miles away. Yet the women squatted in my imagination, refusing to leave. I resolved to never write about them, because it would say things about the world I didn’t want to know. It was only when I decided I could write a novel, set on a fictional island, about a rebellion of women, that I allowed them in.

Fictional representations of women’s protests have often been set in speculative worlds. Think of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, or more recently, Naomi Alderman’s The Power, in which women are suddenly given the power to inflict pain, thus subverting gendered roles and dynamics. They often begin with women under extreme, often theocratic forms of patriarchal structures – as well as Atwood’s Gilead, there is Miriam Toews’s Mennonite community in Women Talking. The protagonists then challenge these conditions through collective action. They give us, in fiction, what we yearn for in life – a dramatic reversal of fortunes. If I could do that, I thought, I could write about the island. It would be about the possibility of such a place. It would be a manual for survival, a way to imagine liberation – not just for those women – but for all women.

Perhaps the most famous women’s strike in literature took place in 411BC in the pages of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. The witty eponymous heroine is determined to bring an end to the 20-year Peloponnesian wars by instructing the women of Sparta and Athens to “refrain from depths of love”. Meaning, they must refuse to have sex with men. In the end, the men relent, ending the war and reuniting with their wives. Although it is by no means a feminist tract – the women are portrayed as horny, drunken and hardheaded – it is remarkable that Aristophanes wrote so boldly about gendered power, creating the blueprint for a kind of strike that would shock, even today.

We live in a time of malignant patriarchy, one that spreads aggressively through every corridor of our lives. It is not a new thing: Lysistrata’s comrades wonder casually if, deprived of sex, their husbands might rape them.

What has changed is that, having grown up with the expectation that women’s rights will continue to expand, we are now witnessing a moment when our basic freedoms and safety are under threat, where power is battled, adjudicated and wielded on the bodies of women.

Nowhere is this felt more keenly than on Banishanta, where women’s bodies are traded for insignificant sums on a daily basis. But as I wonder in rage whether I will spend the rest of my days under the darkening shadow of male dominion, I ask whether this could be, as Walter Benjamin might say, a time of emergency that is also a moment of emergence. And if we were to create such a moment, then it would be through protest and collective action. And so I set myself the task of creating a fictional protest, if only to grant me some hope in my darkest moments.

It’s difficult to get around Banishanta, even with the help of the women. The ground is soft beneath my feet, the sun is punishing above, and there is barely any space between the embankment and the shabby structures that cling to it. The women are old and very young. They are weathered and yet appear almost childlike in their curiosity. We hold hands and they put their arms around me, immediately warm, asking about my life, my husband, my children. Farzana dresses in loud colours and makes her presence felt, unlike her best friend, Asha, a soft-spoken newcomer. As we are talking, an older woman arrives with two small plastic bags of food. “Auntie does the cooking,” Asha whispers. In the cramped room with the barred window and the mud floor, the single bed, the clothes strung up on the walls, there is nowhere to cook.

South Korea’s 4B movement is the closest modern ideation of Lysistrata’s strike. 4B is about rejecting the patriarchy by refusing the four things that serve it: dating, marriage, sex and childbearing. Although Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is not ostensibly about 4B, the main character, Yeong-hye, makes the dramatic decision to become a vegetarian, and follows this by committing a series of confusing, impenetrable acts of protest. Described by her husband as “completely unremarkable in every way”, she gradually turns herself into a person who exists entirely outside societal expectations. Her husband and her family continually violate her, but she makes herself “utterly unknowable”, and it is through this unknowability that her power holds firm. In the end, although her body is destroyed, she unleashes a hypnotic alternative to the way things have always been.

In the 1980s, jailed Irish republican women at Armagh prison joined their male counterparts in the “dirty protest”. Four hundred men at Long Kesh prison had been smearing the walls of their cells with faeces since 1978, but when the women joined them, their protest was considered repulsive, even to their comrades. A journalist visiting both prisons said: “I found the smell in the girls’ cells far worse than at Long Kesh, and several times found myself having to control feelings of nausea.” His article prompts the anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga to ask: “What can make 30 dirty women more revolting than 400 dirty men?”

Inside one of the huts on Banishanta, Komola chops vegetables and tells me how much better the girls have it now. She arrived in great debt to the man who trafficked her, whereas Asha and Farzana are free to come and go as they please. I wonder what that really means, given that Asha has left her daughter behind in her village, and no one in her family knows where she is. A heavily made-up woman passes through and winks at us. That’s my husband, Komola declares. She doesn’t explain what husband implies in this context, and I don’t ask. What does it mean, I wonder, to live in a world without men?

Sultana’s Dream, written in 1908 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, is widely considered to be the earliest depiction of a female utopia. In Ladyland, women are the rulers, and men live in purdah, a reversal of the strict gender segregation Sakhawat herself grew up in. Ruled by a mild-mannered queen, they have eliminated war through the judicious deployment of technology; they have an endless food supply because their country is run by scientists, and the men “should not do anything, excuse me; they are fit for nothing”. In this world, multiple aspects of human progress are only possible if the men are imprisoned and the women are free.

Sakhawat’s vision of a world without men, Han’s depiction of a woman without desire and Aristophanes’s portrait of a society in which women have taken over are all radical experiments. They show us that we can refuse to become female subjects who marry, bear children and exist within the frameworks we have inherited. We must be able to imagine these alternatives if we are to reverse our fortunes.

As for the women of my fictional island – I could not help but give them a triumphant revolt, and so I made them stage a protest in which they refuse sex, refuse even to wash and yes, they smear their menstrual blood on their foreheads. And I told myself, if those women can say no to the way the world is, so can the rest of us. I think of them as a salve for the blows of male power inflicted on us every day. I think of them spitting in the eye of the malignancy and declaring, with Lysistrata, “no threat shall creak our hinges wide”.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life shadowed by Jim Crow segregation and racism, but lit up by hope. That the social conditions of her early life did not destroy her family, as they had so many others, must be credited to their extraordinary grit and determination. The journey that led Crenshaw to create the influential legal theory of “intersectionality” begins with the “well of thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls”. And for all who think those days have long gone, Backtalker is a must read.

“Backtalking” is how Crenshaw responds to anything that does not make sense. Whether as a five-year-old kindergarten student who was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a school play, or decades later, lobbying Harvard’s dean of law to hire Black faculty and being asked whether she wouldn’t prefer “an excellent white professor over a mediocre Black one”, Crenshaw talked back. For her, backtalking is about resilience in the midst of struggle, which sometimes painfully includes talking back to the ones we love.

As a child in Canton, Ohio, she saw how white families left her neighbourhood after her own moved in. This was a tale already familiar to her mother. When Mariam Crenshaw was a little girl in the 1920s, she was taken to the local pool – in a largely white neighbourhood – to swim. While she was splashing about, the attendant demanded the other children get out and drained the pool of water. Not one to take things lying down, Marian’s mother rallied other Black families, and later that day, they returned as a group to the re-filled pool to swim. The attendant called the police, but there was nothing to be done, since no laws had been broken. Racism also backtalks, of course: eventually the pool was closed and filled with concrete, a common fate among public pools that had been forced to desegregate.

The law had always been held in high esteem in the Crenshaw household, “the abradcadabra to push back [the] shadows” of inequity. After a career as a teacher, her father enrolled in law school and got involved in housing policy. “And as I watched him pore over those heavy books with the tiny type, I convinced myself that I could do it too.” Walter, however, died suddenly while his daughter was still just a child. The family wasn’t left financially broken, since her mother “had a few cards that would help her make ends meet”: she owned property inherited from her parents that included two houses and a small apartment building, each purchased in the 1930s. They would provide rental income – until the city used eminent domain to take the property away.

Crenshaw describes eminent domain as the “legally authorized means of stealing Black people’s property for some purported ‘public use’. In this instance, the public use was a highway extension and an industrial park.” Not coincidentally, most of the Black residents of Canton lived on that stretch of land. While her family received “pennies on the dollar”, she later realised “had my mother been offered the value of two homes and an apartment building in a market not shaped by race, she would have been as financially secure as her white counterparts whose families had, like hers, acquired property in the early 20th century”.

After high school, Crenshaw was admitted to Cornell University, and her time there would prove transformational. She read Derrick Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law and came to realise that “law was not merely incidental to the racial order we had inherited. It helped to structure it. Nothing about how we lived and who we were was untouched by it.”

Her excitement at subsequently being admitted to Harvard Law was short-lived since, upon her arrival in 1981, there was only a single tenured Black faculty member, and Derrick Bell had departed, along with his Constitutional Law and Minority Issues course. Crenshaw was part of student protests to not only bring the course back on to the curriculum, but to hire additional Black faculty.After accepting a fellowship at University of Wisconsin Law School in 1984, she began to study the problem of Black women and employment discrimination. One case caught her attention: that of Emma DeGraffenreid, who sued General Motors in 1976 for workplace discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The judge hearing the case dismissed the claim because the company hired both white women (generally for clerical jobs) and Black men (generally manual labour jobs). Title VII protected against race or sex discrimination – but not the intersection of both. Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality was born.

Crenshaw went on to have a front-row seat for many of the well-known events discussed in the book: the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings; the OJ Simpson trial; and the election of Barack Obama. As described here in vivid detail, hers is not only a life well lived, but one worth learning about.

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.

Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.

The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant (The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening.) AI had translated the sentence’s meaning but was seemingly unaware that the repetitions rendered the line absurd. It was far inferior to his own translation that would be published in the book a year later: L’air pur et piquant de la nuit, vivifiant.

When Gentric repeated his experiment this spring, however, the outcome made him feel less at ease: L’air nocturne était vif, pur et vivifiant, DeepL suggested this time. The online translator still lost the sentence’s stylistic trait by adding a verb, but it had learned to use three different words that even had a musical ring to them. “I don’t know if it’s just chance or a fine-tuned algorithm at work, but nocturne and pur is not bad,” said Gentric.

Chatbots running on large language models (LLMs) – neural networks trained on vast amounts of text to generate natural-sounding language – are rapidly infiltrating every aspect of our work and leisure lives. But few professional sectors are being disrupted by the technology as rapidly as the translation industry in Europe, home to more than 200 languages and a booming tech sector.

According to a recent joint survey by the French authors’ societies ADAGP and the Société des Gens de Lettres, 79% of translators believe the rise of AI “poses a threat of replacing all or part of their work”. In Britain, a 2025 survey found that 84% of translators questioned expected lower demand for human translation, resulting in lower pay.

Those fears concern the future, but for many translators the nature of their work has already changed. Laura Radosh, a Berlin-based German-to-English translator, used to get about four job requests per month from clients including universities, professors and museums. Last year, the number of offers dropped to one each month.

Many of them were “post-editing” jobs, which required her to correct texts that had already been run through a machine-translation engine. “Post-editing took me as much time as translating from scratch,” said Radosh.

Far less creatively fulfilling than translating from scratch, post-editing is also less well-paid: usually compensated by the hour rather than by the page or by the book, it is paid “at unacceptable rates considering the work involved”, according to the French translators’ association. In Germany, publishers have been found to offer typical rates of two to eight euros per page – a quarter of the average pay for translating a page from scratch.

But rates for regular technical translations have tumbled too. “I got offered a job at 60 cent[s] a line,” said Radosh. “Before then, 80 cent[s] was the lowest rate I had ever come across.”

Even before the advent of LLMs, translation was a precarious profession: a recent survey by the German translators association VdÜ found that the average income for literary translators – traditionally at the lower-paid end of the sector – was as little as €20,363 euros per annum before tax. But the latest changes in the industry mean that for many translators, the numbers no longer stack up – Radosh recently took a part-time job doing book-keeping for an NGO.

Marco Trombetti, the co-founder and CEO of the machine translation company Translated, said: “Without help, the human brain basically is able to produce about 3,000 words a day of translation. Beginners will manage about 1,500, the best translator in the world may manage 6,000, but the variation is not that big.”

The cost of human translation, he argued, had until now been defined by the number of neurons we have in the brain. “That’s around 100bn,” Trombetti said. “But if we change that, then we change the unit economics of translation.”

Yet the speed of technological change is also revealing what human translators still do best. For one, many machine translators still struggle with context. The German-British academic publisher Springer Nature offers its authors the option to have their books auto-translated into other languages for free, but in spite of assurances of subsequent “human checks”, this process has in the past led to comical results.

In 2024, Springer Nature machine-translated into German an English-language book by a group of Indian academics called ‘Capital’ in the East: Reflections on Marx. In the chapter headings, however, the machine translator DeepL had rendered “capital” not as Kapital in the intended sense, but Hauptstadt, meaning “capital city”.

A spokesperson for Springer Nature said in a statement: “Our AI‑supported translation is human‑led and reviewed by professional editors. Errors like this are rare and regrettable, and this instance relates to a limited pilot that has since ended.”

Jörn Cambreleng, the director of Atlas, a French organisation promoting literary translation, said: “Machine translation is not creative. These systems are built to produce sentences that are generic, sentences that have been said before or sound like they have been said before. Whereas good human translators strive to put into words something that has never been said before.”

One of the ironies of the upheaval is that literary translation now appears to be a comparatively safer career choice than its technical counterpart.

The HarperCollins-owned imprint Harlequin France has confirmed that it is working with a French communications agency, Fluent Planet, to produce translations that are generated by AI software and then post-edited by humans, although for now such trial runs are confined to the pulpier reaches of the market: Harlequin’s titles include A Mistress’s Confession and The Embrace of a Prince.

In Germany, where the total number of new published books has been gradually declining year on year, literature in translation has held up remarkably well, with 8,765 books in translation published in 2024 making up a historically high 15% of the overall output. Increasingly, authors are also contractually obliging their publishers not to use AI in the translation process, said Marieke Heimburger, a Danish-to-German translator who chairs VdÜ.

“AI really cannot do dialogue,” said Katy Derbyshire, a Berlin-based translator who has rendered into English novels by Clemens Meyer, Christa Wolf and others. “When you are translating from scratch, you learn to understand the characters and their motivations, and you’re constantly adjusting them in your head – to individual situations, but also to genre. The dialogue that AI came up with just didn’t suit the character description at all.”

Being human helped the translation process, she added. “My body has experienced all the pain and the joy that literature strives to convey. I understand what someone might scream when they hit their toe on the bed frame – an algorithm doesn’t.”

Fernando Prieto Ramos, of the University of Geneva’s faculty of translation and interpreting, said his centre had noticed a drop in applications to translation courses three years ago, when the rise of generative AI fuelled the hype around machine translation. “But the trend is gradually reverting again with a more diversified training offer,” he said.

Even people who develop machine translation software concede there are tasks that remain beyond their product’s reach. “If in Italian I say Solo tre parole: non sei solo, then a literal translation into English would be ‘Just three words: you are not alone,’” said Trombetti, who founded Translated in 1999. “But you’ve ended up with four words, not three. That’s something that machine translation still struggles with.”

Heimburger said: “I am not really scared of AI, because I know it cannot do what I can do. What I am afraid of is the people who think that AI can do my job.”

Daniel Kehlmann, Marie NDiaye and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ are among the six authors shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker prize, as the award marks its 10th anniversary.

The annual prize celebrates the best works of fiction translated into English, and awards £50,000 to one author-translator pair, to be split equally.

Authors Rene Karabash, Shida Bazyar and Ana Paula Maia are also shortlisted for the prize. The winning book will be announced on 19 May.

German author Daniel Kehlmann earns his second shortlisting for The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, a novel inspired by the life of film-maker GW Pabst and his entanglement with Nazi Germany. “The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairytale,” wrote Nina Allan in a Guardian review. “It is Kehlmann’s best work yet.”

French writer Marie NDiaye, meanwhile, reaches the shortlist for the first time with The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, a darkly comic novel originally published in French in 1996. NDiaye was previously longlisted for the prize in 2016, and was shortlisted in the prize’s earlier version in 2013, when it recognised writers for their entire body of work.

Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is shortlisted for Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, which follows a Japanese woman’s journey through 1930s Taiwan under colonial rule. The novel won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod award, when originally published in Mandarin Chinese in 2020.

The six shortlisted books “capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history”, according to judging chair and author Natasha Brown. “Rereading each book, we found hope, insight and burning humanity – along with unforgettable characters to whom I’m sure readers will return again and again.”

Two debuts feature on the shortlist: The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by German author Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin, which traces an Iranian family’s journey through revolution and exile, and She Who Remains by Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, a coming-of-age story set in a patriarchal Albanian community.

Also on the list is On Earth As It Is Beneath by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, a novella set in a brutal former slave plantation turned penal colony.

Five of the six authors are women, as are four of the six translators, and the books were originally written in five different languages, with authors and translators together representing eight nationalities.

The judging panel selected the shortlist from a longlist of 13 titles, themselves chosen from 128 submissions. Each shortlisted title receives £5,000. The rest of the longlist was made up of We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers; The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay; The Deserters by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell; Small Comfort by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson; The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre, translated by Antonella Lettieri; Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh; and The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken.

Joining Brown on this year’s judging panel are mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and the writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy.

Last year, the prize went to Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi.

Bestselling novelist Jeffrey Archer has announced his next novel, Adam and Eve, will be his last, coming out 50 years after his debut was published.

The 85-year-old author has sold more than 300m books around the world since his first novel, Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less, was published in 1976, according to his publishers. His 1979 novel, Kane and Abel, was his biggest hit, selling more than 34m copies in 119 countries and 47 languages, and being reprinted more than 130 times.

Archer’s 31st and final novel, Adam and Eve, described as “a powerful story which weaves together love, betrayal and the stark realities of a world at war” by publisher HarperCollins, will be out in English in October.

In a statement, Archer said, “When I came across the idea for this novel a few years ago, I knew it was bigger in scope than anything I’d done before and I accepted that the research alone would be more demanding than anything I’d tackled in the past. When I finally sat down to write Adam and Eve I also realised, by the end of the first draft, that this was going to be my final novel, as at the age of 85 I could never hope to equal it again.”

“I can’t quite imagine putting my pen down for good,” he added, saying that he might continue writing short stories. “But I can think of no more fitting way to bring my novel-writing career to a close.”

Despite selling hundreds of millions of books, which were often praised as compellingly readable, Archer failed to win over many critics over the decades. “To open one of his books was to risk being assaulted by a hectic claque of cliche, mixed metaphor, implausibility, solecism and sheer, unadulterated stodginess sufficient to send most readers screaming in breathless delirium to the mature, lucid and urgent pages of Barbara Cartland or Enid Blyton,” Robert McCrum wrote in 2009.

Archer’s career as a novelist was often overshadowed by his colourful, if controversial public life.

He was elected a Conservative MP in 1969 at the age of 29, but resigned from parliament in 1974 when he lost his life savings in a fraudulent investment scheme.

In 1986, he resigned as deputy chair of the Conservative party after the Daily Star reported he had paid a sex worker for sex. The following year he successfully sued the newspaper, claiming he’d never met the sex worker but had later paid her £2,000 to help her escape the press attention. Archer won £500,000 in damages in a trial where the judge famously lauded Archer’s wife’s “fragrance” in his instructions to the jury.

Archer won the Tory candidacy for London mayor in 1999 but was forced to stand down after reports emerged he had persuaded a friend to lie to the court in the 1987 libel trial. Archer was suspended from the Tory party for five years and a perjury investigation began. At the same time he was starring in a production of his own courtroom play The Accused, about the trial of an alleged murderer in which the audience voted on the guilt of Archer’s character each night.

In 2001 Archer was found guilty of two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice, and sentenced to four years in prison, and was made to pay back the damages and costs. While in prison he wrote his three-volume prison memoirs, which were all bestsellers. He was released after serving two years, and spent subsequent decades focused on his writing career, which spans 50-odd works, and his extensive charity work.

Archer remained a member of the House of Lords until his retirement in 2024.

The Edinburgh book festival is to champion the positive power of hope later this summer with events involving Hanif Kureishi, the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and an exiled Brazilian tribal leader.

The core theme for this year’s festival will be the “expansive” concept of repair, and offering solutions and optimism at a time of crisis and conflict, said Jenny Niven, the event’s director.

“I think it’s an act of hope,” Niven said. “Repair is a positive, optimistic approach, [and] looking at journalism, looking at politics, there are a lot of things that are broken – politically, mental health and wellbeing, societally.

“And rather than leaving people sort of worried, we’re hoping that we can present new writers and thinkers who offer solutions and new ideas and great analysis that moves the conversation forward.”

That strand will begin with an opening gala featuring new commissions from Darwish, Juma Xipaia, a Brazilian Indiginous leader forced into exile after she challenged government corruption, and others such as Jenni Fagan and Amitav Ghosh. Kureishi, who had a catastrophic fall that left him paralysed, will appear online with a “very personal perspective on repair”.

Niven said she was also striving to broaden the festival’s appeal, both to increase its audience but also to much more accurately reflect what people read.

That includes putting on the former Scotland footballer turned pundit Ally McCoist with his new autobiography Dear Scotland, and the Gavin and Stacey writer and co-star Ruth Jones, who will take part in the festival’s “Front List” strand of celebrity writers at the 1,000-seat capacity McEwan Hall.

Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, will discuss her new memoir Frankly with Kirsty Wark, originally billed as the book’s launch event, though Sturgeon has since added in several talks earlier in the week, beginning with an event in Manchester.

Among the 700 events in this year’s edition of the festival, which before the Covid crisis laid claim to be the world’s largest literature festival, will be a greatly expanded series of cookery shows, after the few it staged last year “went gangbusters”, Niven said.

There will be seven cookery demonstrations at a cookery school featuring chefs such as Sabrina Ghayour offering Persian cuisine, lunch with Rosie Kellett and Spanish cookery with José Pizarro, where the audience will eat the meals they make.

Tickets will be sought after: there will be 44 tickets for each, with several three-hour-long cookery events costing up to £100 a head – among the most expensive tickets of all the festivals this year.

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With the book festival now in a new and unfamiliar home on the south side of Edinburgh, in an extensively remodelled Victorian hospital now part of Edinburgh University, Niven is attempting to refashion its approach.

Music, book-binding workshops and a dedicated young adult series have become mainstream events, as have more theatrical productions and specific subject themes to “cut through all the festival noise”.

Chief among those will be a recreation of the Scotch sitting room devised by the anarchic Scottish poet and writer Ivor Cutler featuring Hamish Hawk, who will present stories from his childhood and reworkings of Cutler’s work, accompanied by Cutler’s original harmonium.

On the festival’s final day the Hollywood stars Viggo Mortensen and Vanessa Redgrave will feature among a cast of celebrity speakers on stage reading from The People Speak, an anthology of famous speeches and polemics from around the world, drawn from a collection collated by the historians Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn.

Philip Ignatius Brooke – aristocrat, playboy, countercultural icon, owner of a 1,000-acre estate in the Sussex countryside – is dead. And no one is especially sad. Certainly not his immediate family, who, convening at the ancestral home, agree that, as well as being a “visionary” and a “legend” for his part in staging the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, a sort of British Woodstock, Philip was undoubtedly “a shit” – a liar, a bully and a cheat.

It is an uncertain legacy. As the central event in Anna Hope’s fifth novel, Albion, his funeral represents a broader cultural laying to rest of all that Philip and his ancestors – and, indeed, the English country house itself – represent: empire, exploitation, entitlement and privilege. Each member of the family, in their own way, wishes to escape the past’s long shadow and begin afresh. Frannie, the eldest, who has inherited the estate, has spent the last 10 years rewilding it and creating a “nature corridor all the way to the sea”. Milo, a recovering alcoholic and sex addict, has grand plans to build a treetop rehabilitation centre for the world’s 1%. Isa, the youngest, wants nothing to do with any of it and has become a teacher at a school in south London; Grace, Philip’s widow, is filled with regret for not having left sooner or protected her children better. And then there is Clara, who may or may not be Philip’s illegitimate daughter. Rather than burying the past, she wishes to bring it into the cold light of day.

Albion is an ambitious novel, in scope and implication, and it begins promisingly. The scene is very well set; the house and its grounds – family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, gardens by Humphry Repton – are entirely convincing. The estate’s current iteration as the “Albion Project”, given over to “ecosystem restoration”, with yurts and shepherd’s huts for middle-class weekenders (and derided by Isa as “about as wild as a fucking printed tea towel”), is perfectly pitched. So too is the idea of the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, the remnants of which can still be found in the woods, along with the ageing hippy Ned, who lives there in his bus.

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The prospect of Succession-style infighting between the damaged and slightly deluded siblings is also promising. Milo in particular offers rich pickings: he turns up in his “sustainably sourced” trainers, puffing on a vape, armed with detailed plans for “The Clearing”, a wonderfully barmy idea to heal the world’s leaders with magic mushrooms. Milo is trailed by the slick fund manager Luca, a childhood friend of the family and Frannie’s erstwhile beau. The reader leans forward, expecting high drama, backstabbing and betrayal – there is talk of money troubles and even of evicting Ned from his home of 50 years – but nothing much comes of any of this.

Instead, the main event is the arrival of Clara, who has flown all the way from America to attend the funeral. She ends up being a more unwelcome surprise than anyone was expecting. Without giving too much away, she is a PhD student and has been digging into the family history, in particular the source of the Brookes’ wealth, which was used to build the family home. She delivers a lecture (literally a lecture – she has notes) in the middle of Philip’s commemoration dinner. What she reveals profoundly shocks the gathered family, especially Frannie, who sees herself as a force for positive change and “intergenerational justice”.

This is a difficult topic, and it is here unsatisfyingly handled. The engaging – if over-numerous – family dramas and flawed cast of characters are all overshadowed by Clara’s massive revelation, which is itself then swiftly nullified by a round of therapeutic hugging and sharing, with the enactment of propitiatory rituals (not unlike the laughable “healing” exercises satirised earlier). Any residual satire or irony is dispelled as the sun comes out and happy endings blossom. Clara, mission accomplished, flies off, and talk turns to “the next part of the story”. This part is over; let’s move on. As a conclusion it feels bland and seamless, which was surely not the intention.

At 88 years of age, Pope Francis is the oldest pontiff for more than a century. Yet, after major surgery in 2023, and persistent knee problems that require the use of a wheelchair, he shows no sign of calling it a day. Now, he has decided that an autobiography, originally planned to be published after his death, should come out to coincide with the Jubilee year he has called for the Roman Catholic church in 2025.

As the first ever memoir by a pope, Hope is a publisher’s dream, with a rich backstory culminating in Francis’s election in 2013. It recounts how, as Jorge Bergoglio, grandchild of Italian immigrants to Argentina, he grew up in a sprawling family, loved football and the tango (which he calls “an emotional, visceral dialogue that comes from afar, from ancient roots”), studied chemistry, then joined the Jesuit order and became a priest. After dallying with Peronism and enduring the Argentinian junta, he became the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires. Then, just as he was planning his retirement, Benedict XVI resigned and he was chosen as his successor.

Any conclave – as those who have watched the recent movie will know – is dramatic, but the 2013 papal election was particularly so. Although Bergoglio came second in 2005 when Benedict XVI was elected, most people had either forgotten or assumed the cardinals would choose someone younger, and not a man from the other side of the world.

But rather than that historic moment, Francis begins with his grandparents and father emigrating from Italy to Argentina in the 1920s, after narrowly avoiding getting on board a ship that subsequently sank.

He is not so much pointing out that he nearly did not exist as identifying, via his own family history, with the struggles and tragedies that so many migrants face. This empathy has shaped his papacy, and he has regularly criticised what he sees as governments’ heartlessness about migration. Christian care for those in need is a constant refrain in Hope, from migrants to those suffering the effects of ecological destruction, poverty, or what he calls “the globalization of indifference”. “Peace will never result from the building of walls,” he says. President-elect Trump take note.

But there is plenty that is frustratingly not explained here. About halfway through the memoir comes Francis’s account of his election as pope and a visit he made soon after to see his predecessor, Benedict XVI. A photograph is included of the pair sitting either side of a large white box. There was speculation at the time about what might be in it, but no definitive account. “Everything is in here,” Francis recalls Benedict telling him, and then writes that it contained “documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations: cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings”. But there is no more about them.

The scandals have not let up since Francis took the helm. He skates over the row he caused in 2018 when he allowed a bishop accused of covering up for a sexual abuser to celebrate Mass with him in Chile (the bishop concerned denies having known about the abuse). Nor does he explain how he was unaware of accusations of sexual misconduct against the American cardinal Thomas McCarrick until 2018, despite reports of them to the Vatican.

Other, more personal insights are missing, too. Why, for example, did the rather rigid, conservative Bergoglio, who was seen to be such a problem by the global head of the Jesuits that he was “exiled” to the provinces, return two years later to Buenos Aires as the reforming figure he remains today? Nor is there a full explanation of what happened regarding two fellow Jesuits, tortured by the junta, that he has been accused of failing to help when he was leader of the order in Argentina, although he says “I tried everything”.

And why is it that this pope – who has spoken with compassion about the divorced, has reached out a hand of friendship to gay people, and has urged the laity have a far greater role in the church – won’t countenance female priests? “We must move forward,” he says about involving women more in managing the church, but has no satisfactory explanation regarding priesthood.

Yet for all the omissions, this is a book that offers something remarkable: the story of a man, sometimes beset by melancholia, coping with conflict between traditionalists and liberals, well aware of the world’s troubles and humanity’s flaws, yet full of hope, a hope founded on faith. He is one of the most influential leaders of our time, but still seems rooted in ordinariness; one section of the book is devoted to jokes (one was told to him by Justin Welby: “What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? With the terrorist you can negotiate.”) He knows humour is an antidote to human misery – and so is a hopeful faith. He writes: “We must not stumble upon tomorrow, we must build it”.

October 24, 2024
• Research Highlight

Depression symptoms can be hard to manage, especially for people with treatment-resistant depression, a persistent and severe form of the disorder. Fortunately, new therapies are emerging for such hard-to-treat conditions. One of these is the medication ketamine, which numerous NIMH-funded studies have shown has fact-acting and lasting effects in people with mood disorders like depression.

The discovery of ketamine has been a game changer for people with severe depression, who often need rapid relief from life-threatening symptoms. Whereas most antidepressants take weeks or months to work, ketamine works within hours to strongly reduce depression symptoms in people for whom other treatments have not worked.

Despite ketamine’s effectiveness as an antidepressant, serious concerns limit its use, including problematic side effects and a high risk of misuse. To address these concerns, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is invested in finding medications that capitalize on the therapeutic effects of ketamine while avoiding its negative ones.

What did the researchers look at in the study?

New research funded through the NIH Blueprint Neurotherapeutics Network for Small Molecules program  examined a novel ketamine-related medication known as RR-HNK. RR-HNK is a metabolite , or byproduct, of ketamine left over as the body breaks it down. RR-HNK showed antidepressant effects in preclinical studies with animals , but it had not yet been tested in humans.

The study involved a broad collaboration of researchers in the intramural programs at NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and National Institute on Aging; the Duke University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine; and other national and international institutions.

What did the researchers do in the study?

This study examined the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics (how the drug moves through the body), and pharmacodynamics (how the drug affects the body) of RR-HNK for the first time in humans.

Participants were healthy adults between 18–65 years. A total of 74 people participated across three randomized trials: 55 received RR-HNK and 19 received an inactive placebo. Both the medication and placebo were given intravenously, with participants and researchers unaware of which group the participants were in.

• In Trial 1, participants received one of six dose levels of RR-HNK a single time.
• In Trial 2, participants received one of two dose levels of RR-HNK four times over 2 weeks.
• In Trial 3, participants received a single dose of RR-HNK, and their cerebrospinal fluid (a liquid surrounding the brain and spinal cord) was collected.

The study’s primary aim was to determine if the medication is safe by first testing it in healthy adults without a diagnosed mental health condition. Throughout the study, the researchers closely monitored for adverse events, such as negative side effects. The comprehensive safety profile included physical examinations; laboratory results; vital signs; electrocardiograms of heart activity; and ratings of mood, suicide risk, and dissociation and sedation symptoms. Additionally, participants were asked to tell study staff if they experienced any concerns or side effects at any point.

The researchers also collected blood and urine samples from all participants before, during, and after receiving the medication. These samples and the cerebrospinal fluid collected in Trial 3 were used to check whether the medication entered the body and the brain.

As a final exploratory step, the researchers used brain imaging to examine participants’ gamma oscillations (a type of brain wave) before and after the medication. This measure of the brain’s response to stimuli is one of the few available biomarkers of a medication’s effects on the brain.

What did the study find?

RR-HNK revealed itself to be exceptionally safe, causing no serious adverse events and only mild side effects that resolved quickly without care. Participants also reported no symptoms of sedation or dissociation. The positive safety profile was maintained at all doses tested and after multiple doses. Together, the results indicate that RR-HNK is safe and tolerable, with limited abuse or misuse potential.

Cerebrospinal fluid confirmed that RR-HNK entered the brain and remained at detectable levels several hours after administration. Results further showed a dose-proportional response to the medication, meaning that at higher levels of RR-HNK, the amount of the substance in the body also increased at the same rate. A predictable relationship between the amount of RR-HNK given and the amount of RR-HNK in the bloodstream is important for the clinical efficacy of the medication, allowing doctors and researchers to accurately calibrate doses to a person’s specific level and type of symptoms.

In the test of brain activity, some participants who received low to moderate doses of RR-HNK, but not those who received high doses or the placebo, showed an increase in the power of gamma oscillations. Preliminary evidence that RR-HNK produces a change in brain activity strengthens the case for its use as an antidepressant and provides a clinical biomarker for measuring whether it works in future research. However, there was large variability in the results and, given the small number of participants, the researchers caution against drawing firm conclusions from these findings.

What do the results mean?

This study offers critical insight into the safety, tolerability, and effects of RR-HNK in a diverse population of healthy adults. Findings from this early stage study demonstrate that the ketamine metabolite does not cause ketamine’s negative side effects and is safe for use in humans. The results also help set dosing parameters for its use in future research and treatment.

These data, particularly a strong safety profile, support the progression into the next phase of research aimed at developing new therapies for people with hard-to-treat mental disorders. Despite the small size of each trial, which makes it difficult to interpret some of the results, the findings hold promise for the future of mental health treatment. This study is a critical early step in NIMH’s mission to improve the treatment of mental illnesses through research, setting the stage for clinical trials that test whether RR-HNK effectively treats depression and other disorders.

Reference

Raja, S. M., Guptill, J. T., Mack, M., Peterson, M., Byard, S., Twieg, R., Jordan, L., Rich, N., Castledine, R., Bourne, S., Wilmshurst, M., Oxendine, S., Avula, S. G. C., Zuleta, H., Quigley, P., Lawson, S., McQuaker, S. J., Ahmadkhaniha, R., Appelbaum, L. G. … & Thomas, C. J. (2024). A Phase 1 assessment of the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of (2R,6R)-hydroxynorketamine in healthy volunteers. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 116(5), 1314–1324. https://www.doi.org/10.1002/cpt.3391 

Grants

R01MH107615 , ZIAMH002857 , ZIATR000042 , ZIAAG000297 

Clinical trial

NCT04711005