Charlotte Higgins

Poetry sales are surging, partly because Christopher Nolan’s film has renewed interest in Homer’s The Odyssey, but the boom extends beyond that effect. Charlotte Higgins argues that poetry attracts readers because it expresses experiences and emotions that ordinary prose cannot capture, particularly amid war and social collapse. Drawing on reporting from Ukraine and poetry emerging from Gaza and Palestine, she shows how poems document grief, fear, memory and fleeting human moments when conventional narrative structures break down. Poetry cannot stop bullets or protect people from violence, but its speed, portability and emotional compression make it a vital form of testimony and a lasting memorial to lives lived through catastrophe.

Charlotte Higgins recounts four years of learning Ukrainian through remote lessons, intensive study in Lviv and reporting trips across wartime Ukraine. The language becomes inseparable from air raids, occupation, bereavement and the effort to preserve Ukrainian identity, while lessons also offer humour, literature, food and intimacy. The essay explores Ukrainians’ shifting relationship with Russian, including language choice as an act of decolonisation, but also records arguments over bilingualism and the personal pain of abandoning a mother tongue. Higgins concludes that her gradual progress in Ukrainian mirrors the painful passage of time during the war.

Charlotte Higgins praises Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey for capturing Homer’s nonlinear, intricate narrative structure, but argues that it sacrifices much of the poem’s darkness, wit, eroticism and moral ambiguity. Nolan’s Odysseus is portrayed as a guilt-ridden, war-weary figure shaped by modern sensibilities rather than Homer’s charming and rhetorically skilled warrior. The film removes or reduces the gods and several female characters, softens disturbing violence and dampens the poem’s sexual complexity. Higgins concludes that the adaptation reveals more about Nolan and what contemporary audiences can accept than about Homer’s strange, expansive world, and recommends reading the original poem alongside watching the film.

Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of the Odyssey highlights the poem’s lasting influence across global storytelling traditions. Its themes of homecoming, trauma, identity, loyalty, and reintegration continue to resonate, shaping works from Joyce’s Ulysses to modern film and television. The Odyssey’s endurance stems from its adaptability and emotional depth, reflecting timeless questions about leadership, marriage, revenge, fate, and the challenges faced by returning soldiers. Despite its ancient origins, the epic remains culturally central, continually reinterpreted and rediscovered across generations.

Ukrainian winemakers in frontline regions continue cultivating vineyards despite constant danger from rockets, drones, and occupation. Small producers such as the Molchanov family and Beykush maintain operations, expand plantings, and support displaced winemakers while navigating mined land, missile threats, and destroyed infrastructure. Industry leaders report a drastic reduction in national vineyard acreage since Russia’s invasions, yet note a surge in new craft wineries in safer regions. The work of growing grapes and making wine is depicted as an act of resilience and belief in the future amid ongoing conflict.

Charlotte Higgins reflects on what it feels like to report from wartime Ukraine, arguing that the deepest truth lies not only in headlines or battlefield developments but in fleeting, emotionally charged moments: damaged homes, separated families, ordinary routines, flowers, jokes and air-raid warnings that have become disturbingly normal. Drawing on encounters in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and the Mykolaiv region, as well as Ukrainian poetry and art, she describes how despair and resilience coexist in a compressed present. The work of Ukrainian artists and writers preserves the war’s memory while imagining a future in which pain no longer governs everyday life.

The podcast examines the destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage during the war, using the missile damage to Kyiv’s Chornobyl Museum as a focal example. Charlotte Higgins describes the risks taken by Ukrainian citizens to preserve artworks, archives and historic sites, arguing that attacks on cultural landmarks represent a broader assault on Ukrainian identity and national memory.

Residents of Kyiv have absorbed the threat of Russian missile and drone attacks into everyday life, responding to deaths and widespread destruction through quiet, practical acts of rescue, repair, evacuation and adaptation. After an overnight attack killed seven people and injured 90, the author observes civilians continuing ordinary routines amid shattered homes and windows. The piece also highlights Ukrainian artists, including Pavlo Makov, who transform wartime experience into art capable of expressing what ordinary political language cannot, while noting that the realities faced by civilians feel distant from political discussions about the conflict.

Kyiv’s National Opera hosted excerpts from Mothers of Kherson, an opera about Ukrainian children deported or forcibly transferred to Russia, before families affected by the abductions and senior Ukrainian officials. The performance was described as emotionally traumatic but cathartic, with the opera drawing on interviews with recovered children and parents and collaboration with Save Ukraine. The work portrays families from Kherson trying to recover children sent to camps in occupied Crimea and highlights the dangers and bureaucratic obstacles involved. Bring Kids Back estimates that more than 20,000 Ukrainian children may have been deported or forcibly transferred, while Russia’s children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova and President Vladimir Putin face ICC arrest warrants related to the alleged actions. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, the opera will receive full stagings in Warsaw and New York, aiming to use art and international performance to raise awareness of the issue.

Kyiv’s Book Arsenal literary festival continued despite severe weather, repeated air-raid evacuations and the threat of Russian attacks. Soldiers and military writers were prominent, with visitors encouraged to donate books to the frontline and discussions focusing on memoirs, freedom, truth-telling and the responsibility to avoid idealizing soldiers as flawless heroes. Ukrainian authors and publishers are increasingly experimenting with new forms of war writing while reinforcing the Ukrainian language and national identity. The publishing industry is struggling with higher material, energy and logistics costs, making books less affordable, but the festival remains an important space for cultural exchange and community resilience.

Residents in Kyiv’s Vynohradar and UNIT.City districts cleared rubble, salvaged possessions and repaired shattered windows after a major Russian missile-and-drone assault. The nationwide attacks reportedly killed at least 12 people in Dnipro and six in Kyiv, wounded 131, and involved 73 missiles and 656 drones, according to Ukrainian officials. The assault was the third heavy attack on Kyiv in less than a month, amid Ukraine’s shortage of US-made air-defence systems. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for stronger protection against ballistic missiles, while humanitarian hubs and local workers assisted residents whose homes and infrastructure were damaged.

A Russian overnight assault involving 60 missiles and 600 drones killed two people, injured 90 and severely damaged cultural sites across Kyiv. The National Chornobyl Museum lost much of its roof and exhibition space, with about 40% of displayed artefacts initially believed destroyed, while its stored collection survived. The National Art Museum of Ukraine suffered blown-out windows, damaged ceilings and structural disruption but protected its main collection by keeping it in storage or abroad. The Mala Opera also sustained damage but planned to continue performances. Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces have destroyed or damaged more than 1,700 cultural heritage sites and 2,500 cultural infrastructure sites since 2022.

Charlotte Higgins recalls her exuberant, eccentric and often dysfunctional experiences working at British Vogue and The World of Interiors in the 1990s, contrasting that era’s powerful glossy-magazine culture with the decline depicted in The Devil Wears Prada 2. She describes strict copy-editing, fashion-world personalities, office satire, low pay, questionable management practices and the era’s size-zero and heroin-chic ideals. The memories are also tied to 1990s British political events, Diana’s death and her eventual move to The Guardian, where she found a stronger sense of belonging. Despite her affection for the glamour and camaraderie of magazine life, she says she would not return to that world.

The 2026 Venice Biennale was marked by political protest, Russia’s return after its war against Ukraine, and the absence of curator Koyo Kouoh, who died during the exhibition’s preparation. The preview featured recurring themes of female nudity, maritime performance, scent and bodily waste, while attempts to avoid explicitly “woke” art were criticized as producing dull work in the US pavilion. Several off-site video exhibitions were among the most acclaimed presentations, contrasting with the main show’s restrained, reflective tone. Pussy Riot protested Russia’s inclusion, while the UK opposed its participation and a strike prompted several national pavilions to close.

The 2026 Venice Biennale has become a battleground over the participation of Russia and Israel amid the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, defends an exclusion-free policy in the name of artistic neutrality, but protests, ministerial criticism and reports of assistance to Russian participants have undermined that claim. A jury statement refusing to consider countries whose leaders face International Criminal Court charges led to pressure, legal threats and the jury’s resignation. The controversy reflects a wider struggle over whether cultural institutions confer legitimacy on governments accused of aggression or war crimes, while the Biennale’s history—including its development under Mussolini—casts further doubt on the idea that it exists outside politics.

The Guardian highlights standout works at the 2026 Venice Biennale, including Florentina Holzinger’s provocative Austrian pavilion, Sanya Kantarovsky’s eerie paintings, Gabrielle Goliath’s performance of mourning, Carrie Schneider’s photographic installation and Lydia Ourahmane’s Venice-rooted sculptures. The selection also emphasizes politically charged work, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s investigation of sonic weapons, Zhanna Kadyrova’s Ukrainian deer sculpture and Avi Mograbi’s record of Gaza’s lost businesses and lives. Despite criticism of the main exhibition’s bleakness and unevenness, the biennale offers memorable encounters ranging from artificial-intelligence artworks to an unexpected nesting gull.

British-Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane has created a Venice Biennale exhibition from local relationships, histories and materials rather than importing works into the city. Its projects include a pier built with craftspeople for Poveglia, an island whose residents successfully resisted its conversion into a luxury resort; a coin-operated lighting machine exchanged with San Giovanni Crisostomo Church; and a sculpture made from 1.3 tonnes of decommissioned Venetian hotel bedlinen. Ourahmane explains that her practice seeks to be reabsorbed into the world and examines migration, colonialism, memory and the charged histories of objects. Her experiences growing up amid Algeria's civil war and moving between Algeria and Britain inform an art practice based on negotiation, transformation and local collaboration.

Cuban-American artist Hernan Bas discusses his Venice series The Visitors, a group of 30 paintings portraying young white male tourists in comic, unsettling and often surreal situations. Inspired partly by his attraction to men and by Holden Caulfield’s alienated youth, Bas constructs elaborate fictional backstories and narratives for his subjects. The works satirize tourism while reflecting on escapism, mass travel and the political crises Bas feels able to ignore while in Venice. The exhibition will be shown at Ca’ Pesaro from 7 May to 30 August 2026 alongside the Venice Biennale, with its windows opened so visitors can experience the Grand Canal and their own “tourist moment.”

Zhanna Kadyrova’s origami-like concrete deer, created in 2018 for a park in Pokrovsk, was evacuated in 2024 as Russian forces approached the city. Transported through European capitals, it has become a symbol of survival, displacement and the loss of Ukrainian cultural heritage, especially for refugees from Pokrovsk. The sculpture will anchor Ukraine’s Venice Biennale pavilion, Security Guarantees, where its suspended installation reflects the uncertainty of its future. The exhibition risks being overshadowed by the Biennale’s decision to reopen Russia’s pavilion, a move Ukrainian organizers condemn because of Russia’s destruction of cultural heritage.

A major National Gallery exhibition presents Francisco de Zurbarán as a Spanish 17th-century master whose greatest achievement was not secular history painting or still life, but depictions of religious visions. His stark compositions, dark backgrounds and intensely tactile rendering make spiritual subjects appear simultaneously tangible and unreal, reflecting the devotional aims of Counter-Reformation art. The article places Zurbarán in contrast with Velázquez, explores his extensive commissions for Seville’s religious institutions and the export of his work to the Americas, and highlights the power of his still lifes. It concludes with The Crucified Christ with a Painter, interpreting the anonymous painter at Christ’s feet as a possible self-representation and as a meditation on painting as devotion, wonder and a means of seeing the divine.

Argues that learning Latin provides children with a strong grasp of language structure, improves the study of other languages, and grants access to classical literature that enriches intellectual development. Highlights the advantages of understanding Roman literature for deeper engagement with English and Irish works and emphasizes the broader cognitive and cultural benefits of studying a structured, non-spoken language.