Ukraine

‘The nonsense was over at last,’ wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of the second world war. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of ‘local’ warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.

Can architecture solve urban crises? Or should architects and planners concentrate on mitigating the consequences of wider events (climate change, war, demographic and economic shifts), then hope for the best? What happens when we have no choice but to build or rebuild cities? In her new book, Gabriella Bennett, a journalist interested in architecture and urban landscapes, spends two years flying around the world looking for answers to these and other questions. Woven through her adventures are two personal quests: to reckon with her unhappy adolescence in the Scottish postwar new town of Glenrothes; and to reset her life after a pandemic-era health crisis that led her to quit her job.

On 27 January 2024, Iranian-backed militants launched a one-way attack drone at the US base known as Tower 22 in the Syria-Iraq borderlands. It hit and killed three American soldiers and injured many other members of the 350-strong garrison. The attack was a pivotal moment. Before it, no US ground troops had been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War. But they had been now, and would be again. Two years later, a similar attack, this time by Iran itself, evaded US air defences, hit a US command centre in Kuwait and killed six personnel. It was the deadliest Iranian strike of the recent conflict. Steve Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an expert on technology, democracy and national security and an award-winning author.

Six months after undersea explosions ripped through three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany I wrote a 2,500-word story for The Spectator entitled ‘Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?’ Citing senior European security sources, the piece revealed a conspiracy of silence – for fear of an anti-Ukraine backlash – by western intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and government to cover up what they all knew to be the truth. Forensic evidence and a German police investigation had disclosed that pipelines carrying the Russian gas on which the economies of Germany and many other European countries depended had been blown up by a tiny team of Ukrainian saboteurs.

Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were surprised to be told that the excruciatingly introverted German-language instructor they had been avoiding in the corridors for several years was ‘the greatest living poet in the German language’. Paul Celan was reputed to be as ‘difficult’ as his poetry – rebarbative, then intriguing and finally unforgettable. His best known poem is ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), which may refer to Jewish musicians in a Nazi death camp: ‘Black milk of dawn, we drink you at night...’ He can be heard online reciting the poem in a rising tone of suppressed hysteria.