Features

Wednesday

Svitlana Morenets

The tragedy of Ukraine’s stolen children

One of the most appalling and perplexing atrocities committed by Vladimir Putin has been the abduction of Ukrainian children. At least 20,000 boys and girls, some just babies, have been separated from their parents and placed in Russian camps, orphanages or foster homes. They are portrayed in Russia as grateful orphans being saved from ‘Kyiv’s war’ – but this is a lie. Most of the deported children have families who are searching for them, desperate to find them and take them back home before their names are changed and they become untraceable. The abduction of another nation’s children is a form of genocide. But Russia’s population is decreasing and Putin is obsessed with expanding the Russky Mir or ‘Russian World’.

Justin Marozzi

In Kyiv, tech start-ups are thriving

What better cocktail to try in Kyiv than ‘Lesya Ukrainka’s Dream’? Born in 1871, Ukrainka was a fierce feminist, poet, titan of Ukrainian literature and the angel-faced symbol of independent nationhood. In this time of war, writers like Ukrainka and Taras Shevchenko, the great 19th-century poet persecuted by the Russians, a man who has come to define Ukrainian national identity and liberation, are all the rage. The last verse of Ukrainka’s poem ‘Contra Spem Spero’ (‘I hope against hope’) captures the national mood: Yes, I will laugh despite my tears, I’ll sing out songs amidst my misfortunes; I’ll have hope despite all odds, I will live! Away, you sorrowful thoughts!

Ece Temelkuran

The final countdown: Turkey is on a knife-edge

‘Kilicdaroglu’ is a pronunciation nightmare for the non-Turkish. Yet after this Sunday’s presidential elections, international news presenters, who have struggled for 20 years with President Erdogan’s soft ‘g’, might have to work harder to articulate the name of the social democrat leader of opposition. ‘You may call him Mr Kemal [his first name] until he wins,’ I’ve been saying to journalist friends. It’s the kind of simplification that people from complex, non-western countries are self-trained to give so our maddening realities can be better understood: ‘To feel Turkey, imagine the acute polarisation during the Brexit referendum continuing for 20 years. Add to that a far more ruthless Trump with political genius and Islamist aspirations.

Andrew Watts

The Anglican priests charged with exorcising evil spirits

Last month, a trailer for the new Exorcist film – the scariest trailer ever, apparently – was released. The Exorcist: Believer isn’t out until Friday 13 October – just in time for Halloween – but Hollywood movies about demons are legion. This one follows The Pope’s Exorcist (released on Good Friday), in which Russell Crowe is a maverick exorcist who doesn’t play by the book, but gets results – despite the pen-pushers at (Vatican) City Hall. The Reverend Canon Dr Jason Bray, the Bishop of St Asaph’s ‘deliverance minister’, will not be watching either film.

Wednesday

Robert Hardman

What will Charles III’s reign look like?

The last time a monarch acceded to the throne, her subjects had to wait ten months to hear her speak. Elizabeth II was only 25 and had her whole adult life before her. The public were more patient in those days and the media was an entirely different creature, moving at a slower pace.  It was not until Christmas Day 1952 that the British heard their Queen (by now 26) begin: ‘Each Christmas, at this time, my beloved father broadcast a message to his people in all parts of the world. Today I am doing this to you, who are now my people…’ In 2022, we had to wait all of 24 hours before hearing Charles III outline his vision for his reign. He did so in a speech which, by common consent, hit the right note (a YouGov poll days later gave it a 94 per cent approval rating).

Sean Thomas

I demand reparations for my ancestors’ fall from grace

Recent births and deaths in my family have got me thinking about the family tree. A few years ago, we pieced together a remarkably discernible lineage that goes right back to William the Conqueror, or at least his alleged Anglo-Saxon concubine, and various Norman knights who used to own much of England. And it is this lineage that has made me realise: the hideous underprivilege and mistreatment of my ancestors entitles me to reparations. For centuries the Peverels taxed and brutalised their serfs, but then chose the wrong side in the odd war The story begins with that Anglo-Saxon woman Maud Ingelric. Many historians believe she was the mistress of William the Conqueror, and bore him a favoured son, William Peverel the Elder, my great-great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-(etc)-grandfather.

Ben Lazarus

The godfather of AI: why I left Google

Ten minutes before I meet Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, the New York Times announces he’s leaving Google. After decades working on artificial intelligence, Hinton now believes it could wipe out humanity. ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realised it yet because they speak very good English,’ he says. He also tells me that he has been unable to sleep for months. ‘It’s conceivable that the genie is already out of the bottle’ Hinton, 75, revolutionised AI not once but twice: first with his work on neural networks, computer architecture that closely resembles the brain’s structure, and then with so-called ‘deep learning’, which allows AI to refine and extract patterns and concepts on a vast quantity of data.

Tony Radakin

Will my coronation marching measure up?

Travelling to Ukraine on the President’s train is the most secure route into Kyiv. This is my fourth visit to the country since the invasion. Previously I accompanied Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. This time I am with Tim Barrow, our National Security Adviser. The continuity of access reflects the extraordinary trust between Britain and Ukraine. The train is punctual and with an aura of seasoned grandeur. The enforced lack of phones combined with a steady rhythm for ten hours aids reflection. I think back to travelling to Moscow with Ben Wallace before the invasion and a meeting with my Russian opposite, General Gerasimov. At the time we still hoped war could be averted. This conflict has been a disaster for the Kremlin.

Richard Chartres

The religious roots of the coronation

It is many years since anyone seriously entertained the doctrine expounded by Shakespeare’s Richard II: ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord.’ Nevertheless, on Saturday King Charles III will be solemnly anointed in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony whose roots are ancient but whose meaning is fresh. Behind the screen, in a very personal act of commitment, the King accepts his calling from God The Israelites asked for a king so that they could be ‘like all the nations’. Anointed monarchs have a long history but today the rites surrounding the British monarch are unique in Europe.

William Moore

Vials of ammonia, shaky scaffolding and sword fights: memories of Elizabeth II’s coronation

Lady Rosemary Muir was 23 when she received a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, informing her that she had been chosen as one of the six maids of honour to assist the Mistress of the Robes in the coronation of Elizabeth II. That was in January 1953. From then until the coronation day in June, the maids of honour were the subject of many excited articles. The press dubbed them ‘the Lucky Six… envied by every other woman in the land’.  Envied they certainly were, but luck had little to do with it. Lady Rosemary tells me it was no surprise to her that she was appointed to be a maid of honour. ‘I was a duke’s daughter,’ she says as we look through her hefty album of coronation photographs and cuttings. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?

Yannic Rack

The battle to restore Britain’s hedgerows

‘I don’t know if hedgelaying is a dying art. But there’s a lot of old hedgelayers that are dying,’ says David Whitaker to chuckles from some of his fellow craftsmen. The occasion is the annual hedgelaying championship, organised by the National Hedgelaying Society, of which Whitaker is secretary. In a good year, the event draws around 100 competitors and a few curious spectators to a marquee in a muddy field in Hampshire. Britain’s oldest hedge dates back to the Bronze Age. Thousands of miles of hedgerow were laid in the late 1700s after the Enclosures Act carved up the countryside.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Inside America’s Satanist movement

The largest gathering of Satanists in history is taking place in Boston this weekend. It’s not open to the public. Or, to be more precise, no longer open to the public. That’s because all the tickets have been sold. They’ve downgraded the supernatural in favour of aggressive secularism, with an emphasis on trans issues The second annual SatanCon is being organised by The Satanic Temple or ‘TST’, the world’s biggest Satanic sect, at the Marriott Hotel in Copley Square. That’s the same Marriott chain founded by a devout Mormon family who, back in the 1960s, only agreed to serve alcohol to guests after securing permission from the president of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

The Starmtroopers: how Labour’s centrists took back control

On a cloudy Saturday in March, a group of unlikely characters gathered in an office near London’s Old Street for political training. A scientist, a prison officer, an army veteran and four economists were among them and they all hope to be elected as Labour MPs at the next election. A great many of them are expected to succeed. If today’s polls were to become tomorrow’s election result, there would be an influx of more than 200 new Labour MPs, doubling Keir Starmer’s parliamentary contingent to 450. The quality of those politicians will decide the nature of the next Labour government. As the moderates return, the money is close behind them They are, very much, Starmer’s people.

Eva Vlaardingerbroek

Dutch farmers vs greens: why it matters

Amsterdam It’s not often that regional ballots in the Netherlands capture the attention of the international media. But last month that is exactly what happened. On 15 March, the so-called ‘provincial elections’ were held. Although technically these are regional, they also indirectly determine the composition of the Dutch senate – and, if the ruling parties lose their majority there, the chances of being able to pass legislation become very slim.

Nicholas Farrell

Meloni knows that immigration and fertility are linked

Ravenna, Italy Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist. Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues about which she hopes to be most persuasive are the ones that threaten Europe most: migrants arriving on boats, and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate. On the first of these, the small boat migrants, Italy is in deep trouble. Already this year, nearly as many illegal migrants have arrived there by sea as arrived in Britain from France in the whole of 2022. Earlier this month, Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency.

Sam Leith

‘Everything is going to be turned upside down’: Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing

If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel Worlds, Kaku combines the scientific chops of the theoretical physics professor he is with the gee-wow wonder of a sci-fi geek. That’s apt for someone who grew up worshipping at the twin altars of Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon. ‘It all started when I was eight,’ he says. ‘All the newspapers said that a great scientist had died. And they said that on his desk was a manuscript that he could not finish. I was fascinated by that.

Owen Matthews

The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition – stay, or go?

There was a time before the invasion of Ukraine when even the Kremlin’s opponents would talk of living in ‘vegetarian’ times. Before 2022, independent news organisations like Dozhd TV, the New Times and Novaya Gazeta were marginalised but not banned. Public protest was punished, but for the most part with sentences in days and months, not years or decades. Even Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s highest profile leader, received a highly unusual suspended sentence after his conviction on trumped-up fraud charges in 2013. He remained free to goad the Kremlin with videos detailing massive corruption and run candidates in local elections until his poisoning by Russian secret police in August 2020. Save your skin and fight on, or keep your honour and be buried in the prison system?

Thursday

Sam Leith

How I found friendship through online Scrabble

The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it untouched by death threats, disinformation and the baleful influence of Vladimir Putin’s troll farms? What if there was still some corner of the world wide web which lived up to its original promise of connecting people who would not otherwise be connected, and what if once connected they were nothing but agreeable to each other? Be of good cheer. That corner exists. Not everyone is arguing with Owen Jones and India Willoughby.

Lara King

Pay and dismay: the nightmare of ‘smart’ parking apps

In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot. The remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally – mark this, intentionally – designed to flood your life with unhappiness.’ While these apps are an annoyance for me, they’re positively prohibitive for those without smartphones Almost three decades later, you’d be lucky to find a parking meter at all.

Wednesday

Paul Morgan-Bentley

I’ll be forever grateful to my son’s surrogate

When my husband, Robin, and I first discussed how we might try to have a child, we were against exploring surrogacy. Wasn’t this something that only celebrities did in America? Was it really in children’s best interests? How could you be sure that the women were not being forced? Five years later, and we have a son, Solly, who has just turned three and was born through surrogacy in the UK. There were two things that changed our minds: meeting these women and hearing them speak for themselves; and reading academic research, which is clear that children born through surrogacy are just as likely to flourish as anyone else.