Stephen Fry

Massacre of the innocents, saving endangered languages & Gen Z’s ‘Boom Boom’ aesthetic

From our UK edition

37 min listen

This week: sectarian persecution returnsPaul Wood, Colin Freeman and Father Benedict Kiely write in the magazine this week about the religious persecution that minorities are facing across the world from Syria to the Congo. In Syria, there have been reports of massacres with hundreds of civilians from the Alawite Muslim minority targeted, in part because of their association with the fallen Assad regime. Reports suggest that the groups responsible are linked to the new Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani). For some, the true face of the country’s new masters has been revealed. Whether the guilty men are punished will tell us what kind of country Syria has become since the fall of Assad’s dictatorship.

How Rory Stewart led me astray

From our UK edition

I have just returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, on whose citizens I inflicted An Evening With Stephen Fry. I first ‘played’ Australia in 1981. The Cambridge Footlights Revue that Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer, Penny Dwyer and I had put on in Edinburgh attracted the attention of an Australian impresario called Michael Edgley. Would we be interested in taking our show around his country? Tony had another year of university to go and in the end Hugh and Emma joined up with the previous year’s Footlighters, Robert Bathurst and Martin Bergman. That summer Ian Botham had sensationally and all but single-handedly wrested the Ashes urn from the Australians’ grasp, so we called our show – something of a red rag to a bull – Botham, the Musical.