The precarious, cruel but dazzling world of a foundling hospital is brought wonderfully to life by the author of Botticelli’s Secret
Joseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages and Renaissance to our own times. A great populariser and advocate of the humanities in public life, he has done for Dante what his Bard colleague Daniel Mendelsohn did for Homer in An Odyssey and other books.
This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante’s home town of Florence, a building Luzzi has been fascinated by since encountering it in 1987 on his college year abroad. The Innocenti, as it is known, was the first institution in Europe devoted solely to the care of unwanted children. The first foundling, named Agata because she was left by its gates on Saint Agata’s Day 1445, had been nibbled at by mice.
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© Photograph: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy
© Photograph: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy
© Photograph: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy
In an industry not exactly known for it, Reiner was an exceptionally nice guy. But he was too much of a showman to make a straight shocker. The result was rich, terrifying – yet cherished
• ‘Not a second of wasted time’: Rob Reiner’s golden run
• Meeting Rob Reiner was like a visit from Santa
• Rob Reiner’s five best films
• Hollywood in shock: ‘One of the greatest’
You can love a film without, apparently, ever having paid full attention to it. I realised this only recently when I came to understood something crucial about Misery, the 1990 psychological horror film adapted from the novel by Stephen King and directed by Rob Reiner. What are the chances, I used to think, that Paul Sheldon, the bestselling novelist kidnapped and tortured by unhinged superfan Annie Wilkes, came off the road right when she happened along? It didn’t occur to me that the reason she was there in the first place was because she was stalking him or even (a conclusion not supported by the text) that she caused the crash. You think and think about these films that you love – and they come up different every time.
Reiner’s main strength as a film-maker is what made news of his death particularly horrifying, which is to say the man’s warmth – a sense, widely felt by millions who knew him only through his movies, that at heart, and in an industry not exactly known for it, Reiner was an exceptionally nice guy. His movies were smart, sophisticated, knowing, but when I think about the hits he had across every genre, the defining characteristic for me is their absence of cynicism.
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© Photograph: Castle Rock/Columbia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Castle Rock/Columbia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Castle Rock/Columbia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
The best we can hope for is that Paul does not get seriously hurt. Joshua, Netflix and the sport itself should know better
Precisely 85 years ago, one of the most fearsome heavyweight boxers in history stunk out the joint. Joe Louis was in the midst of his “Bum of the Month club”: a staggering run of 13 world title defences in 29 months against an assortment of stiffs, wild men and colourful characters. And when he arrived in Boston on 16 December 1940, most believed that Al McCoy would rapidly become his next victim. Only it didn’t quite turn out that way.
“McCoy was expected to crumple under the first punch Louis tossed in his direction,” the New York Times’ correspondent wrote. “Instead, the wily New England veteran made Louis appear ludicrous at times. Adopting a crouching, bobbing, weaving style, McCoy was an elusive target for the paralysing fists of the titleholder.” After the messy contest was stopped at the end of the fifth, a storm of jeers rang out. Louis had won, but only his bank balance had been enhanced.
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© Photograph: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
© Photograph: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
© Photograph: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
Early season chaos has given way to an approach based on solidity and utilising the squad’s attacking strengths
The table does not lie and Nottingham Forest were proudly fifth in the Premier League on Sunday night. Admittedly, the reality is they sit 16th but since Sean Dyche took over as manager only four teams have bettered their points tally, with a breezy win against Tottenham a further sign of revolution in action.
Considering the shambolic nature of the season before Dyche was appointed on 21 October, the fact Forest find themselves out of the relegation zone is impressive enough. They were 18th with five points after nine matches that included four defeats from Ange Postecoglou’s five league fixtures. It may have felt even sweeter for fans that the latest humbling handed out was against the Australian’s previous club.
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© Photograph: MI News/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
© Photograph: MI News/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
© Photograph: MI News/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
The oil and gas industry must be legally bound to cut methane emissions. With climate tipping points approaching, time is running out
• Mia Mottley is the prime minister of Barbados
The timing is brutal. Just as the world celebrates the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Paris climate agreement this month, new evidence shows that the world is crashing through the main defence that was constructed against climate catastrophe.
The three-year temperature average is – for the first time – set to exceed the Paris guardrail of 1.5C above preindustrial levels. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2025 will join 2023 and 2024 as the three warmest since the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the accelerating pace of the climate crisis.
Mia Mottley is the prime minister of Barbados
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© Photograph: Ricardo Mazalán/AP
© Photograph: Ricardo Mazalán/AP
© Photograph: Ricardo Mazalán/AP
It will come as little surprise that Italian cuisine has been added to Unesco’s cultural heritage list. Here are a select few of the country’s countless regional specialities
Last week’s announcement that Italian cuisine has been added to Unesco’s intangible cultural heritage list came as no surprise to anyone familiar with that country’s obsession with food. Unesco called Italy’s cooking a “communal activity” in which “people of all ages and genders participate, exchanging recipes, suggestions and stories”.
It might have added people of all walks of life, too, because in Italy being a foodie is not the “preserve” of the chattering classes. I’ve heard building workers in a low-cost trattoria gravely discussing what starter and wine best complement a certain lunch dish, and a shabbily dressed nonna at Turin’s Porto Palazzo market enthusing over a variety of carrot available only at her favourite stall.
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© Photograph: leonori/Getty Images/iStockphoto
© Photograph: leonori/Getty Images/iStockphoto
© Photograph: leonori/Getty Images/iStockphoto
A four-hour documentary observes life in a Paris squat and perilous Mediterranean crossings – but its non-narrative structure tests the limits of endurance and empathy
Egyptian-American film-maker Sam Abbas’s experimental documentary was made over four years and shows footage of African and South Asian immigrants making the treacherous journey up through Libya and across the Mediterranean to a Parisian squat. That’s a misleadingly linear description of the film; it’s actually cleaved into two parts which would seem back to front if we were following the stories of specific people. The first section observes life in the squat where the residents support each other as they face eviction threats and the bureaucracy of asylum-seeking, while the second part looks on as other people make the rough sea passage. Time is also spent aboard boats run by organisations such as Doctors Without Borders who seek to help the migrants.
All that might make this sound like any number of 21st-century documentaries (Fire at Sea, for instance) and dramas (Io Capitano) about immigrants crossing continents with deadly results. But this one is aggressively non-narrative, composed of a series of long static shots and still images that linger many beats longer than might seem necessary to get the point across. Body parts and faces, what looks like a fuse box, a child being delivered by a rough emergency C-section (gory stuff, be warned), someone’s phone showing text messages, water, sick people laid out like cordwood on a deck; it’s all a jumble of images, unexplained and raw, and sometimes barely visible in the low-lit conditions.
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© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image
From tender coming of age stories to images that question the meaning of home, Ed Alcock’s photography blurs the personal with the political
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© Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP
© Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP
© Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP
The Indigenous Canadian author brilliantly captures the interdependence of humans and the natural world, in a darkly satirical critique of colonialism
Noopiming, the first of Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s books to be published in the UK, means “in the bush” in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly original fiction is an ironic reference to Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada, an 1852 memoir about “the civilisation of barbarous countries” by Susanna Moodie – Simpson’s eponymous “white lady” – a Briton who settled in the 1830s on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where Simpson’s ancestors resided and she now lives.
That 19th-century settlers’ guidebook went on to be hailed as the origin of Canadian women’s writing; Margaret Atwood adopted the Suffolk-born frontierswoman’s voice in her 1970 poetry collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Though she mentions Moodie’s book only in an afterword, Simpson’s perspective is different. For Moodie, extolling “our copper, silver and plumbago mines” in the extractivist British colony, the “red-skin” was a noble savage, and the “half-caste” a “lying, vicious rogue”. Yet, rather than a riposte to the toxic original, Noopiming – first published in Canada in 2020 and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary award in 2022 – sets about building a world on its own terms. The “cure”, then – the antidote to Moodie’s blinkered vision – is this book.
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© Photograph: Other Stories/ Zahra Siddiqui
© Photograph: Other Stories/ Zahra Siddiqui
© Photograph: Other Stories/ Zahra Siddiqui
Australia captain lives close by and takes his kids to beach ‘all the time’
Players to wear black armbands and join moment’s silence in Adelaide
Australia captain Pat Cummins has said the tragic events at Bondi beach ‘hit home pretty hard’ as they unfolded on Sunday night just down the road from his home in the neighbouring Sydney suburb of Bronte.
As the cricket world prepares to pay tribute to the victims of the Bondi beach terror attack when the third Ashes Test gets under way in Adelaide on Wednesday, Cummins and England captain, Ben Stokes, revealed the profound impact the massacre had on them and their teammates.
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© Photograph: Mark Brake/Getty Images
© Photograph: Mark Brake/Getty Images
© Photograph: Mark Brake/Getty Images
The Scotsman is a wry, slightly daft ex-plumber who wears his heart on his sleeve. So why does the Ally Pally crowd enjoy goading him?
By the time Cameron Menzies finally leaves the arena, the blood gushing from the gash on his right hand has trickled its way down the whole hand, down his wrist, part of his forearm and – somehow – up to his face. Smeared in crimson and regret, and already mouthing sheepish apologies to the crowd, he disappears down the steps, pursued by a stern-looking Matt Porter, the chief executive of the Professional Darts Corporation.
The physical scars from Menzies’s encounter with the Alexandra Palace drinks table after his 3-2 defeat against Charlie Manby will be gone within a few weeks. Most probably there will be a fine of some sort. What about the rest? Man loses game of darts, punches table three times in fury, goes to hospital, repents at leisure: simple cause and effect. But of course this is not, and this is never, the whole story. In a way this tale is a kind of parable for elite darts itself, a pub game elevated to the level of a prize-fight, even – very occasionally – a bloodsport.
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© Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images
© Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images
© Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images
More than 100 Filipinos affected by Super Typhoon Rai are suing the British company in a case that will likely test whether fossil fuel companies can be held liable for specific climate disasters
© AFP via Getty
Marvel fans are expressing one concern after teaser was shared online
© Marvel Studios
The Test in Adelaide gets underway on Wednesday, with England 2-0 down in the series
© Getty Images
Tessa Peake-Jones, Gwyneth Strong and Sue Holderness will also be involved in the upcoming show, which features behind-the-scenes footage
© UKTV/Andy Heathcote/PA Wire
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