Summary: Putting the “la” into “Ooh la”
Bibliothèque nationale de France – Richelieu
C’est Paris!
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Bibliothèque nationale de France – Richelieu
Bibliothèque nationale de France – Richelieu
Whales
Summary – fluky shots of humpbacks
Water
Summary: a many splendored thing
Bees
Summary: just because…
The UK’s relationship with Israel: a study in sophistry
Summary: Is high office worth the price of a soul?
In the Guardian profile of David Lammy on Saturday 2 August 2025 I was struck by one sentence: “On Radio 4’s Today, he [Lammy] energetically rebutts the suggestion that he hasn’t blocked all arms exports to Israel.”
This led me to check again what Lammy had said when announcing the suspension of some arms licences to Israel in September 2024. Then he said, “There are a number of export licences that we have assessed are not for military use in the current conflict and therefore do not require suspension. They include items that are not being used by the Israel Defence Forces in the current conflict, such as trainer aircraft or other naval equipment. They also include export licences for civilian use, covering a range of products such as food-testing chemicals, telecoms, and data equipment.”
That passage begs many questions. For example, is it possible to train pilots to drop 2,000 pound bombs on defenceless women and children without the use of British supplied trainer aircraft? Or how would the Israeli policy of banning Gazans from fishing in the Mediterranean be impeded if it did not have British supplied naval equipment? Those who have paid any attention to advances in the use of information systems in intelligence analysis for military operations will also wonder what role British supplied telecoms and data equipment have played in the Israeli identification and assassination of journalists, health and aid workers across Gaza.
Sophistry – the use of clever sounding arguments to deceive – is, of course, stock in trade of politicians. There is the stench of such sophistry in Lammy’s pronouncements on Israel, which remains a valued ally of the UK in spite of the extraordinary genocide that it has wrought on Gaza in plain view of the world.
In September 2024 Lammy asserted that, “There is no equivalence between Hamas terrorists… and Israel’s democratic Government”. To which one can only conclude that Lammy, desperate for high office, has, in the words of Orwell, submitted to the Party’s final most essential command: that he reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears.
On 2 August, the Guardian reported that Lammy “calls shooting civilians waiting for aid ‘grotesque’, ‘sick’; demands ‘accountability’ from the Israeli side. He says things are ‘desperate for people on the ground, desperate for the hostages in Gaza’, that the world is ‘desperate for a ceasefire, for the suffering to come to an end’”.
And yet, Lammy participates in a government that has continued the Tory’s policy of providing direct military support to Israel. As late as August 2025 the Jerusalem Post reported that the UK flies surveillance over Gaza to “locate hostages”. It should be remembered that that on encountering Israeli hostages, stripped to their underpants and begging for help in Hebrew, the Israeli Defence Forces shot them. So it seems unlikely that the Israeli government is interested in hostages as anything other than an excuse for more violence. In this context the UK’s “search for hostages” is likely a mere pretext for more general intelligence sharing.
It is possible that Lammy and the rest of the British government may finally be becoming squeamish at the level of killing in Gaza. But that does not absolve them of past complicity. Netanyahu and the rest of those that they have allied with have not changed. As a lawyer Lammy “ought to have known” that his allies were just going to do exactly what they said they were going to do at the start of the butchery.
Given the weakness of international institutions that the British and other Western Governments have contributed to through their complicity in Israel’s war crimes, Lammy and his colleagues in policy may yet avoid a criminal reckoning. But they will always have to answer to their consciences on whether the perks of high office were actually worth the price of their souls.
The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome, by Robin Lane Fox
Summary: a survey of Greece and the Roman Empire from Homer to Hadrian
Robin Lane Fox may, for want of space, skim over some important subjects, such as the Peloponnesian War or the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD BTW). But The Classical World is still a lucid and engaging narrative, and an excellent introduction to the sweep of that whole period of history.
It’s depressing to think that after some 2,500 years of history humanity has little changed: the abject supplication that the UK displays towards the US shows what empires expect of their vassals is little changed in millennia; today privileged poshos still think as little of committing genocide on foreigns as did democratic Athens or autocratic Rome.
But, as Lane Fox notes, some of the ideas from this time notably those of Socrates and particularly Jesus, offer a more hopeful ideal for humanity.
Given the depths to which western civilisation has sunk at this point in time, Jesus’ imperative to love our neighbours as ourselves still has a lot of heavy lifting to do.
The Benefactors, by Wendy Erskine
Summary: A powerful and timely novel of violence and its apologists.
Wendy Erskine developed her deserved literary reputation with her mastery of the short story form. In those she showed a remarkable ability to help the reader understand even the most unpleasant-seeming of her characters, and an eerie talent for convincingly rendering those diverse voices.
It is a delight to see that those traits are all still present and correct in The Benefactors, Erskine’s first novel, an exploration of four families in Belfast drawn together by an act of violence.
To say too much more would be, I feel, unfair to the book, which allows its compelling plot to emerge from the cacophonous voices of its characters as they reflect on their seemingly ordinary, imperfect lives. But it is a dreadfully timely work coming, as it does, in the midst of what seems like a pandemic of violence against women and girls in the North of Ireland.
Like her earlier short stories, Erskine shows a deep appreciation of Belfast’s pitch black humour. She also shows a considerable generosity of spirit in trying to understand rather than judge her characters, as they themselves struggle to understand their own lives in which the banal has been shattered by the hideous.
Paradoxically perhaps, in telling her story in the way she choses, Erskine confronts the reader all the more powerfully with an insight on how the toleration of grotesquely unacceptable behaviour in the name of love and family, allows the poison to spread.
The Benefactors is an important book, exquisitely written. It should be recommended reading in all the schools of Ireland.
Camino de Santiago
Summary: while hiking 100k you don’t necessarily take your best shots when gasping for water.
Remembering Mike McDonagh
Summary: the sudden death of Mike McDonagh on 21 June 2025, brought an end to a life that was larger than most.
Mike was a legend in humanitarian response having worked across the globe as a country director for the Irish non-governmental organization Concern for more than 20 years. This included time in Laos, Cambodia, Somalia, Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, North Korea, Honduras, Albania and Zimbabwe.
Invariably you heard the stories of Mike before you met him. When I arrived in Angola in the middle of the 1990s people were still talking about Mike’s recent time in the country when he set up Concern’s response to the brutal civil war there.
Even for a humanitarian response to a war this was a testing operation. At one point Dublin headquarters began nagging Mike because his financial reports were late. He let them know that he was somewhat inconvenienced at the time – the office in Luanda had just been blown up and they had lost everything.
One long-term Angola development specialist, Dr Mary Daly, remembers how Mike broke the blockade on the besieged city of Malanje in the Angolan central highlands during this phase of the war. Against all advice, Mike brought in planes with supplies and had them fly into Malange. This forced other agencies to join in the effort.
There was always something of the buccaneer to Mike. He never doubted for a moment that he was the most charming rogue anyone had ever met. For most people he was probably correct. He was also a living example of the truth that you do not have to be a saint to be a hero.
Mark Evans, a water engineer, who survived the artillery bombardment of the city of Kuito during that time, remembers being surprised by the tenderness that Mike showed him when he was eventually evacuated from that massacre. As a witness to multiple war zones and the worst of humanity, Mike understood the toll that mitigation of such violence took on those who sought to respond. Marcus Oxley, a long-time Concern colleague of Mike’s described him as “a very relational person, with a genuine compassion and respect for people in need and a belief in “life with dignity” as the core of humanitarianism.”
I got to know Mike on his second stint in Angola, another bloody phase of that brutal civil war. It takes a certain amount of courage to endure that sort of environment once. It takes quite another quality of courage to return to it. But it was a quality of courage that Mike had in abundance, underpinned with an unshakeable good humour and a generosity of spirit for anyone who was genuinely trying to make the world a better place.
After Concern Mike joined the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 2004, working in Darfur where he drew international attention to the attacks on humanitarian workers there, and the impact these had on aid for the civilian population.
As in Angola Mike developed a reputation. Jonathan Lingham, formerly of the UK’s Department for International Development, described him as “an absolute professional. His knowledge, advice, and wisdom was eagerly seized upon by new arrivals in Khartoum, especially by younger members of the NGO community, many of whom looked up to him as a sort of father figure. It was a difficult place to work. Mike was always available, kind, giving.”
It was in Sudan that Mike met Sarah, with whom, after years of bachelorhood, he started a family. No one was surprised when he turned out to be such a devoted husband, and doting father to Saoirse and Molly.
After Sudan, he worked with OCHA in Ethiopia, Iraq and Libya.
On news of his death the OCHA Chief of Staff in a message to all OCHA personnel said, “Mike was a force of nature, a humanitarian with grit, and was not one to ever let ‘the perfect be the enemy of the good’. He was famed for his no-nonsense approach, his one-word email replies, and for finding “creative” ways to get things done. He was a legend with many of us re-telling any one of his numerous escapades to inventively overcome challenges to get assistance to people in need.”
If anyone had ever said to Mike that he was a representative of what EM Forster called the “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky… [who] are to be found in all nations and classes and throughout the ages” and who represent human decency in the face of the worst inhumanities, he would probably have said “Ach, away with ye!”
But he was. As Paul Heslop, the veteran demining engineer put it, “Even those of us who knew Mike sometimes have difficulty grasping what a giant he was in the humanitarian sector.”
In recent years, Mike was furiously vocal about Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Western leaders’ complicity with Netanyahu’s atrocities. How could he have been otherwise? Mike had seen so much violence he knew war crimes when he saw them. His very life was an indictment of those who assert that Israel has every right to defend apartheid and supply them with the diplomatic cover and weapons to do that and worse.
The world is a sadder, poorer, less just place without Mike. But he died holding Sarah’s hand. That is as great a way to go as Mike could ever have hoped for on any of those battlefields where he spent his life trying to staunch the bleeding of the innocent.
Denmark (and a bit of Sweden)
Summary: the colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of the places you go by…
aidanjmcquade 