Culture

Bibi is back. Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to the prime ministership of Israel two years after a motley coalition of his many enemies banded together to topple him. With him removed from power and facing trial on corruption charges, many assumed that the Netanyahu era was over. They under-estimated the wiliest politician in the Middle East. In last November’s elections, Netanyahu ousted his ousters and won for himself a sixth term in which to wreak vengeance on the leftist establishment he believes is ranged against him. The most powerful man in Israel presents himself as the helpless victim of ‘leftist’ journalists Victory did not come without a price. He had to team up with the disreputable right.

The Amazon is a notoriously difficult part of the world to write about – and I’ve tried. Travelling the river’s slow length, it can be hard to make sense of any changes beneath the forest canopy or to link its disparate communities. The Brazilian writer Eliane Brum succeeds triumphantly. Acclaimed for her previous ‘despatches from Brazil’, appealingly titled The Collector of Leftover Souls, she moved from São Paulo, one of the largest cities of the Americas, to the isolated Xingu tributary to embed herself completely. Or, as she might put it, to lose herself. When asked their age, tribal people just make up a number to be helpful – and then repeatedly change it As a journalist, she is used to asking people their age.

Karl Lagerfeld was an icon when he died in 2019, but for most of his career he was unknown outside the fashion business. He was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, a distasteful coincidence, so Lagerfeld altered his birth to 1938. He was an only child, whose father did well by introducing condensed milk into Germany. His parents had been Nazi members, and Karl saw his future elsewhere. At 18 he left Hamburg for Paris. Short and chunky, he had simian good looks, with beetling brow and a smile that was wider than his eyes; and he didn’t want for admirers. In 1954 he won the young designers Woolmark Prize, but only in ‘the coat category’. The winner in the more prestigious ‘dress category’ was the several-years-younger Yves Saint Laurent – and that scorched Karl for life.

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’ Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it.