Contributors from the worlds of music, politics, the arts and beyond on those who helped shape their beliefs and identities

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Kushner, Witkoff, Vance and Rubio – they’ve all been sent to keep the ceasefire in place. Now we need to hear about a concrete plan

These days present quite a unique phenomenon: the first-ever US march of the babysitters. They vary in their qualifications and attributes, but they all share the same mission – to prevent an Israeli breach, or even destruction, of Gaza’s fragile ceasefire. Since the war ended, there have been few days without at least one of Donald Trump’s envoys on the ground. Just this past week saw the likes of Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, JD Vance and Marco Rubio – all arriving to perform their duties.

Israel keeps them busy. In just a few days it launched a series of attacks in Gaza after the killings of two Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers – resulting, according to reports, in dozens of Palestinian casualties. Several ministers called for a resumption of the war, and the Knesset passed a preliminary decision to annex the West Bank. The US reaction was somewhere between “no� and “hell no�.

Roy Schwartz is a senior editor and op-ed contributor at Haaretz

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Welsh voters have rejected Labour and Starmerite managerialism. By offering hope and not division we showed the populist right can be beaten

• Rhun ap Iorwerth is the leader of Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru’s decisive victory in the Caerphilly byelection proves that Labour’s century of dominance in Wales is over. Voters now face a clear choice between two very different futures, and Caerphilly shows that it is Plaid Cymru’s bold, inclusive vision that carries momentum.

Caerphilly was one of the safest Labour seats in Wales. Many London commentators expected the seat to fall to Reform – perhaps even hoped it would. It would have fit the narrative that post-industrial communities naturally drift to the populist right. We proved them wrong. A message built on fairness, community and national purpose resonated with voters, and a comfortable majority voted for it.

Rhun ap Iorwerth is the leader of Plaid Cymru and the member of the Senedd for Ynys Môn. Prior to being elected in 2013 he was the chief political correspondent with BBC Wales

From the raid on the Louvre to the spectacle of Sarkozy in jail, it is tempting to think France is on a downward spiral. But history tells the tale of its resilience

In the classic dinner-party scene in the film Notting Hill, Tim McInnerney’s character promises a brownie to “the saddest act here�. In response, the guests (including the glamorous movie star played by Julia Roberts) try to outdo each other with tales of their painful suffering and pathetic failures.

In our gloomy autumn of 2025, western democracies could play quite a convincing version of this game. There is the depressed United Kingdom, where Keir Starmer’s approval ratings have fallen to record lows and Reform leads in the polls. There is the deeply broken United States, where a supine opposition seems incapable of preventing Donald Trump from chopping away one guardrail after another of our constitutional order. There is Spain, where this summer a Socialist party scandal threatened to topple the fragile minority government of prime minister Pedro Sánchez.

The reaction to the Bloody Sunday trial makes it clear: those of us outside Northern Ireland just don’t understand the painful legacy of this brutal conflict

Forgive me if I’ve mentioned him before, but at moments like this I remember a news editor I worked for as a young reporter at the BBC. When it came to the interests of our audience, he said, there was a key fact to bear in mind: “The two most boring words in the English language are ‘Northern Ireland’.�

It was an attitude with a long history. In 1924, Viscount Cranbourne, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, mused that the average English voter has “little interest in, and less understanding of, Irish affairs�. This week brought some evidence that, 101 years later, much of his observation still holds true. But a challenge to it has come from an unlikely quarter, via what might be one of the most compelling TV dramas of recent years.

Predictions of a Reform win were wide of the mark. But Labour’s crushing byelection defeat offers important lessons too

Several historic things have just happened at once in Wales. Plaid Cymru won in the Caerphilly byelection for our Senedd, with almost 50% of the vote. Reform lost. Labour collapsed. Each of those things means something significant for Wales, but it also carries valuable lessons for the rest of Britain. The message for Labour ought to be clear: standing up to the hard right can win elections.

Labour has been the largest party in Wales for over 100 years, leading the Welsh government since the start of devolution in 1999. It won the Caerphilly seat in 2021 with 46% of the vote. Four years later, it has ended up with just 11%. The drop is startling, but to make matters worse, under the new Senedd election system that will be introduced in May 2026, 11% is roughly the level where parties can be totally wiped out.

Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?

The singer learned early how to navigate pop feminism and the public’s insatiable appetites. Her new album bumps up against the limits of both

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. Though it probably wouldn’t have occurred to the 17th-century playwright who wrote those words, scorned women write absolute bangers, too.

We have been reminded as much this week by Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, an explicit dissection of the singer’s recent divorce from the actor David Harbour, amid already swirling rumours of his infidelity. Allen here is high priestess of W1, sucking on a Lost Mary vape as she weaves us a tragedy of loss, betrayal and butt plugs.

Guardian columnists and writers on what they’ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more

The chaos surrounding the inquiry stands as a warning: this is what happens when collapsing trust in public institutions, combined with point scoring, leads to paralysis

In the early hours of the morning, the cars would pull up outside the Bradford children’s home where Fiona Goddard lived as a teenager.

Staff were worried about the men coming to collect her – records show she was felt to be “at high level of risk from unknown males� – but the policy was not to go to the police unless a child’s behaviour became concerning or she was seen being actively “dragged into a car�.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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As long as a third of children are living below the poverty line, the government cannot justify keeping the pensions triple lock

It’s that crucial week when millions discovered how much their benefits and pensions would rise by next April. Generally, the increase is pegged to inflation, which this month is 3.8%. Recipients will be lucky if inflation falls by April, unlucky if it rises. Because this is a Labour government, this year’s universal credit gets an extra 2.3%, the first time ever the rate will rise regardless of inflation. The day passed without much comment, yet this is a time to stop and contemplate what we, the taxpayer, the state, consider adequate to exist. How much does someone really need? What is penury? And who should we prioritise?

No government in history has ever been unwise enough to spell out exactly what standard of living, what food, heat and clothes a benefit sum should cover, for the obvious reason that it has never been enough. I used to hear Tory ministers say, “We don’t tell people how to spend their money. It’s their choice.� Labour ministers over the years tend to mumble.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

From Lisbon to Amsterdam, housing policy has led to haves and have-nots. But, as our new series uncovers, it doesn’t have to be this way

• In this series, writers discuss the causes of – and solutions to – the housing crisis in key European cities

• How Lisbon became Europe’s least affordable city

• Are rents affordable in Amsterdam? Not if you are a newcomer

Housing is as personal an issue as it gets. Homes are where we take refuge from the outside world, express ourselves, build relationships and families. To buy or rent a house is to project your aspirations and dreams on to bricks and mortar – can we see ourselves sitting outside in the sunshine on that patio? It can also be a deeply frustrating process – can we afford that house? For more and more of us, the answer is no.

Experienced at such an individual level, it’s easy to think that rising costs are a problem particular to your community, city or country. But unaffordable house prices and rents are a continent-wide issue. According to the European Parliament, from 2015 to 2023, in absolute terms, house prices in the EU rose by just under 50% on average. From 2010 to 2022, rents rose by 18%.

One in every five citizens in the city has bought a share in the company that built and owns their apartment block

• Peter Apps is a contributing editor at Inside Housing

Children zoom down a tunnel slide, as their parents watch on, sipping coffees and chatting amicably on the long benches in the middle of the courtyard.

They are surrounded by modern-looking housing developments – architecturally smart, medium-rise, expensive-looking in their design. This appears to be just another 21st-century development in a major city, a development that a builder has made a tidy profit out of, and flats that will have inevitably been snapped up by landlords and rented out at the highest market rate.

Peter Apps is a contributing editor at Inside Housing and the author of Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

Social housing makes up almost half of the city’s 1m homes. The system isn’t perfect, but it gets a lot of things right

When it comes to best-practice examples in the housing debate, Vienna is a common reference. Indeed, the Austrian capital features prominently in narratives about successful housing policies. An article in the Observer concluded that Vienna shows “decent homes for all� is not an impossible dream. And the New York Times even declared it “a renters’ utopia�.

A considerable part of the attraction of Vienna relates to its large social-housing stock. It accounts for some 43% of the roughly 1m housing units in the city. About half of it is municipally owned council housing. The other half is provided and administered by limited-profit housing associations – an Austrian version of social housing providers that are permitted to make a small profit to finance their operations. Social housing is not just for those on low incomes, but also caters to middle- and even some upper-middle-class households.

We’ve been living in a great experiment: can finance provide basic human rights such as housing? The answer is increasingly no

“The housing crisis is now as big a threat to the EU as Russia,� Jaume Collboni, the mayor of Barcelona, recently declared. “We’re running the risk of having the working and middle classes conclude that their democracies are incapable of solving their biggest problem.�

It is not hard to see where Collboni is coming from. From Dublin to Milan, residents routinely find half of their incomes swallowed up by rent, and home ownership is unthinkable for most. Major cities are witnessing spiralling house prices and some have jaw-dropping year-on-year median rent increases of more than 10%. People are being pushed into ever more precarious and cramped conditions and homelessness is rapidly rising.

Rodrigo Nunes, a senior lecturer in political theory, explains how despite harsh economic conditions creating fertile ground for ‘entrepreneur culture’, resistance has sprung up among delivery drivers

On 1 April, Brazilian couriers organised a day of action in which thousands of workers engaged in pickets and protests in at least 60 cities, with places such as São Paulo reporting a sharp drop in deliveries. While companies are yet to respond to the demands for better pay and conditions, the mobilisation was a clear step-up for a process of national organisation that began in 2020.

Between 2016 and 2021, the number of people working for delivery apps in Brazil rose by 979.8%, with the number of delivery and passenger drivers in the sector now around 1.4 million. This boom coincides with the period in which the country finally felt the effects of the post-2008 recession. Economic decline, corruption and the impeachment of the then president, Dilma Rousseff, ended 13 years of successful left-leaning governments by the Workers’ party (PT). In the years that followed, a series of austerity measures and labour reforms were put in place, the political spectrum moved steadily to the right and the far-right libertarian politician Jair Bolsonaro was elected president in 2018.

Thomas Graham, a journalist based in Mexico City, explains how the leftwing governing party, Morena, has promoted social justice but diluted principle with pragmatism

If you were to summarise the 2024 election year, you might say: grim for incumbents, good for the far right. Yet Mexico bucked both trends. Its governing party, Morena, not only retained the presidency but – along with its partners in the Sigamos Haciendo Historia coalition – gained a two-thirds supermajority in the chamber of deputies, the lower house, while the far right failed to even run a candidate. That a self-described leftwing party could have such success by fixing on Mexico’s chasmic inequality has drawn attention from hopeful progressives worldwide. But Morena’s programme has some not-so-progressive elements too. It is not necessarily one others could – or would want to – copy in its entirety.

Morena first notched a historic result in 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an old face of the left who ran for president twice before founding the party, won a record 55% of the vote during the general elections. Mexico’s constitution limits presidents to a single term. But this time, Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally of López Obrador’s, won 60% of the vote. Her victory was reminiscent of the heyday of Latin America’s “pink tide�, when leftist leaders like Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales were reelected for a second term with more votes than their initial victories.

Professor Alexandra Bitušíková explains how face-to-face local activism was crucial in bringing down Marian Kotleba, leader of the People’s Party Our Slovakia

Having grown up in Banská Bystrica in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, I vividly remember standing in the city’s historic square a few days after 17 November 1989, the start of the Velvet Revolution, holding candles in solidarity with the students protesting in Prague. Never would I have imagined that 35 years later, I would be speaking at a rally in the same square, this time urging the preservation of democracy.

Back then, when I was a young social anthropology academic at our local university, activism was far from my mind. But everything changed for me in 2013 when Marian Kotleba, leader of the neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia, was elected as regional governor. The shock was enormous. No one I knew had believed that such an outcome was possible, yet it happened. Realising the dangers this posed, many like-minded individuals knew we couldn’t stand by idly.

Labour peer Margaret Hodge shares how the party tackled the rise of the British National party in Barking before the 2010 general election

Once again, the far right is advancing across Europe, emboldened by the outcome of the 2024 presidential election and the return of Donald Trump to the White House. To turn back extremism masquerading as populism, I believe there are lessons we can learn from our battle against the extreme right in Barking in 2010, when we crushed the BNP.

The context is different. There was little social media before 2010; we hadn’t been through a pandemic; there was no major war in Europe and no serious challenge to a rules-based international order.

Plaid Cymru’s win in Caerphilly marks more than a local upset. It exposes the exhaustion of Labour’s moral imagination – and a deeper British crisis of purpose

The Caerphilly byelection only looks local if you ignore what it represents: the quiet unravelling of the democratic world’s most successful election-winning machine. For more than a century, Labour has been the dominant party in Wales. Its grip had survived deindustrialisation, Thatcherism and even the slow death of its working-class institutions. Now that seems to be ending – not through scandal or drama, but through a lack of moral imagination.

What happened in this small valleys seat, where Labour lost a heartland base to Plaid Cymru while Reform UK menaced from the right, is the result of a Downing Street mentality that mistakes competence for conviction and caution for strategy. Welsh Labour has not helped itself – vicious infighting had left it fractured and demoralised. As Labour controls both the Welsh and UK parliaments, there’s nowhere to hide. The trouble is that Sir Keir Starmer promised change and delivered continuity. Caerphilly looks like a reckoning.

A new wave of socially engaged movies is storming the box office and changing how we think about the genre

It should surprise no one to learn that 2025 is being hailed as a golden year for horror films. All horror movies are a reflection of their time, and ours are pretty scary.

Tech dystopianism means that Frankenstein’s monster has become a byword for AI, while Bram Stoker’s Dracula has always drawn on a dark strain of English xenophobia. So it is no coincidence that these 19th-century gothic villains, stars of the earliest horror films in the 1920s and 30s, are back in cinemas with new adaptations from directors Guillermo del Toro and Luc Besson. Maggie Gyllenhaal is bringing out another Frankenstein, The Bride!, next year.

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Tory plans to revoke indefinite leave to remain in pursuit of greater ‘cultural coherence’ resemble the most extreme ambitions of far-right fringe parties

It is too early to declare Sir Keir Starmer’s “one in, one out� migration deal with France a failure, but nor can the government claim that it is working as intended. This week, the Guardian revealed that one of the first people deported under the treaty had found his way back to the UK via a small boat. On the same day, Home Office data revealed that the number of people who had made the journey so far this year – 36,886 – had surpassed the total for 2024. The usual partisan recriminations followed. Opposition parties accuse Labour of failing to grip the problem; ministers say they are burdened by a long legacy of Conservative mismanagement. Both things can be true.

For all its deficiencies, Sir Keir’s deal with France recognises two facts that his Tory and Reform UK opponents cannot accept. First, engagement with EU states is a sine qua non of functional migration policy. Second, without some legal mechanism for accepting refugees, desperate people will always gamble on the illegal ways.

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More gigs would be a good thing, and a voluntary £1 levy for grassroots venues could help

When the Guardian’s Helen Pidd told a young interviewee in Morecambe recently that Blur had once played there, the reaction was incredulity: “No way. They came to Morecambe? Wow, imagine that.� The town’s seafront Dome venue closed 15 years ago. But this is not the only reason why the Lancashire town has dropped off touring schedules. A trend that sees live music increasingly concentrated in big cities means that it has become less accessible to musicians and audiences who don’t live in them.

A combination of factors, including the pandemic, rising energy costs and disputes over noise, has left many smaller, independently owned venues struggling – or even forced to close. In 2023, a net total of 125 across the UK were lost. Festivals, with their temporary stages and pop-up campsites, have also become sparser. Between 2019 and 2024, 161 shut up shop.

By taking Jeremy Hunt’s NI cuts and ruling out other rises, Labour tried to out-Tory the Tories. And made a bad situation worse

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have only themselves to blame for the mess they are in over tax. The key moment was not the defenestration of their welfare bill or the uprising over pensioners’ winter fuel payments. The die was cast more than a year earlier.

In January 2024, the then chancellor Jeremy Hunt implemented a cut in employee national insurance contributions. Four months later he announced a further reduction from 10% to 8% and even hinted that he was considering abolishing employee contributions altogether. It was the mother of all election bribes, costing the exchequer about £10bn a year. It was also entirely cynical, offered in the absolute confidence that the Tories would not be in office long enough to grapple with the consequences. Had they by any chance won the election, he would have had to recoup the tax revenue forgone by either tax increases or by further swingeing cuts to the public sector.

Chris Mullin is a former Labour minister and the author of four volumes of widely acclaimed diaries

With private-sector villainy and public-sector complicity, what makes this HMO scandal so characteristic of modern Britain is how far the guilt spreads

Fan of true crime? Then this column is for you. Rather than some cold case told through yellowing newspapers and sepia photos, this one is still happening. And just wait for the plot twist! But first let me outline the key facts; your challenge is to decide who’s guilty.

Our crime scene is a redbrick townhouse built in the last years of Victoria – tall, battered but undeniably handsome. It’s in Bowes Park, on London’s northern outskirts – the kind of neighbourhood that on a Friday afternoon offers nice cafes, a community-owned pub and some WFH dads wandering the streets scavenging for ciabatta sandwiches.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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The UK’s economic policy isn’t decided by politicians, but by the OBR and the Bank of England. This is a system in dire need of a rethink

The budget is still a month away and speculation about its contents is already in full swing. Details of what Rachel Reeves has planned will dribble out over the coming weeks, but two things are certain: taxes are going up, and they are going up by a significant amount.

Obviously, the chancellor would prefer not to be in this position. The government has had a rotten year and this is reflected in its dire opinion poll ratings. The budget is unlikely to make Labour more popular, with a strong risk that tax increases will slow the economy, as they did last year.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

It means breaking with hundreds of years of tradition, but it can’t wait. As hard-right figures spread division and laud autocrats, a fail-safe is vital

After two years in Brazil, I felt I understood its political system better than I understand the UK’s. The reason is a short book in simple language that almost everyone owned: the constitution, published in 1988. Admittedly, I discovered the document’s limitations while trying to explain its principles to a furious captain of the military police with a pump-action shotgun. But at least I knew exactly which of my rights he was infringing.

To achieve a similar grasp of rights and powers in the UK, you’d need to be a professor of constitutional law. They are contained in a vast and contradictory morass of legal statutes, court precedents, codes of conduct, scholarly opinions, treaties, traditions, gentlemen’s agreements and unwritten rules. They are rendered still less intelligible by arcane parliamentary procedures and language so opaque that we need a translation app.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

It is the right way to go: leaving the EU has been a disaster. But refusing to admit it has cost Labour precious time and credibility

The UK government is trying out a new Brexit stance, not to be mistaken for a change in policy. The shift is tonal.

Previously, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves talked about Britain’s detachment from the rest of Europe as a feature of the natural landscape, awkward to navigate perhaps, but nobody’s fault. Now they are prepared to say it is an affliction.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Footage of Reform councillors fighting is further proof that uselessness abounds, but that’s almost moot. To voters they are very useful idiots

“I’m meant to be on bloody holiday this week, Paul! I don’t want to be having this meeting!� There is much to enjoy about the patriotic revolution in government promised by the leaked footage obtained by the Guardian of the Reform UK group of councillors running Kent county council. Take council leader Linden Kemkaran speaking for all free speech absolutists when she declares: “Paul! Paul! I’m going to mute you in a minute!� Or consider her repeatedly stated vision of the imperfections of representative democracy: “You’re just going to have to fucking suck it up, OK?�

Even so I think the standout bit is when Kemkaran, who acknowledged Kent’s “flagship� status for the party and its leader Nigel Farage, says: “If we can avoid putting up council tax by the full 5%, that is going to be the best thing that we can do to show that Reform can run something as big as Kent council.�

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 2 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back with special guests at another extraordinary year, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here

While Nigel Farage promotes retro plans to reopen coalmines, will he really tell thousands of clean energy workers to leave their well-paid, local jobs?

This government is bad at proclaiming what it’s for. But to find out, follow the money. Its boldest investment is in green energy, designed to create prodigious returns in economic growth, employment, training, climate action and more. So far it has been hard to sell. Wafty talk of greenness passes most people by, and “whose growth is it, anyway?� is a realistic question in a country of stagnant pay and public decay. But, this week, Ed Miliband put flesh on the green words, making jobs and projects concrete. A very big number of green jobs – 400,000 by 2030 – are set to be created in 31 “priority occupations�, from welders to production managers, plumbers and joiners, everywhere from Centrica’s £35m state-of-the-art training academy in Lutterworth to Teesside’s net-zero decarbonisation cluster.

This is what a Labour industrial strategy should look like. Nigel Farage’s retro campaign for this week’s Caerphilly byelection promises to reopen Welsh coalmines. But well-paid, clean, green-energy jobs within their home districts are what Miliband’s Doncaster North constituents want, the minister tells me, not sending young people down reopened mines. Government figures show wind, nuclear and electricity jobs pay more than most – the average advertised salary in the wind sector is £51,000 a year, against an average £37,000. Unions, once sceptical and fearful of losing jobs in unionised industries, now sign up with guarantees that any new plant getting grants must “support greater trade union recognition� and a fair work charter.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

The likely new government in Prague will add one more state opposed to the EU’s green deal and migration and asylum pact

If you open your window on a quiet street in central Prague, the first sound you hear is the trrrrk-trrrrk-trrrrk of carry-on suitcases trundling across paving stones, as tourists walk to their hotel or Airbnb. (The Czech capital had 8 million visitors last year.) As they trek around Prague Castle and fill the Old Town bars with cheerful chatter, these visitors – many of them probably unaware of the recent election victory of rightwing populist nationalist parties – may think this is just another normal European country. And you know what: they will be right.

Some more extensively informed newspaper commentators, reaching for an attention-grabbing generalisation, tell a different story. This is eastern Europe reverting to type, they say. After Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, now Czechia as well! The truth is more interesting – and more worrying.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Britain has been stripped of the spaces that allow for true social integration. But it’s easier for politicians to blame ‘outsiders’

Every few weeks, another announcement. Immigrants must do this to earn the right to stay in the UK. Others must do that if they are to be allowed to work in the UK. The demands grow more punitive and absurd, like the whiteboard of a meeting where everyone agreed there were no bad ideas. Voluntary work! A decade to receive citizenship! Hear me out: English A-levels!

These are all real policies and pledges. Migrant NHS doctors for example, labouring for long work days beyond what they are paid for will now have to prove that they “contribute to society� to earn permanent settlement in the UK. The benchmark for that contribution is volunteer work (sorry, more volunteer work) in the community. The five-year route to settlement is now being extended to 10, to make absolutely sure that in addition to being in work, paying taxes, making national insurance contributions and paying a hefty charge to use the NHS, you’re not taking the piss. The latest demand is that some migrants must be able to speak English to A-level standard because, according to home secretary Shabana Mahmood, “it is unacceptable for migrants to come here without learning our language, unable to contribute to our national life�.

Readers respond to article about the increase in people seeking matrimony centred on companionship and connection rather than sex

Emma Beddington has spilled the beans on a hidden truth (The lavender marriage is back – but why, 19 October). The lavender marriage has never really gone away. It may not be performed for quite the same reasons as was the case in olden times, but the concept is still very much valid.

I am now in my 60s. In my early 20s, I had an ostensibly heterosexual marriage that was effectively a lavender marriage. I then went on to a same-sex relationship, which eventually became a civil partnership. Despite assumptions made by many, that too was pretty well entirely platonic, and lavender. Finally, after the death of my civil partner in 2013, I progressed into my current single-sex lavender marriage.

Readers respond to an article by Charlotte Higgins in which she reflects on Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross and its lessons about fascism

Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night was first published in 1937 and, like Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross, discussed in Charlotte Higgins’s article, was ahead of the curve in predicting the effects of 20th-century European fascism (A prophetic 1933 novel has found a surprising second life – it holds lessons for us all, 18 October). The difference is that Burdekin (originally published under the pseudonym Murray Constantine) imagined a future world in which the Nazis have been in power for 700 years.

What is most striking about Burdekin’s novel is the way in which she locates the psychopathology of fascism in a form of toxic masculinity becoming increasingly familiar to contemporary readers. She anticipates, equally, the retreat of women to traditional gender roles in a vain attempt to assuage masculine pride. But where Burdekin offers hope is in her analysis of fascism as, ultimately, self-defeating.

Diofel Tampoy reflects on an article about the first marine species to be eradicated by humans, the subject of a novel by Iida Turpeinen

Donna Ferguson’s piece on the demise of the sea cow (Beasts of the Sea: the tragic story of how the ‘gentle, lovable’ sea cow became the perfect victim, 21 October) was a moving read for us as young researchers and conservationists from the Philippines working to save one of its closest relatives, the dugong.

Dugongs play a critical role in maintaining healthy seagrass meadows in the Indo-Pacific region. These meadows, in turn, support marine biodiversity and serve as nurseries for many fish and invertebrates, sequester huge amounts of carbon that help mitigate climate change, and fortify coastal resilience against storms and sea-level rises.

Readers Prof Ralph Darlington and Keith Flett respond to the suggestion that the political theorist took liberties with his research

The research on which you report (Friedrich Engels ‘took creative liberties’ with descriptions of class divides in Manchester, 21 October) reads like a deliberate attempt to diminish the nature and extent of class differences that Engels observed and wrote about.

There clearly were areas of the inner city marked by extreme residential segregation, such as Little Ireland, where Engels’ companion Mary Burns lived and showed him around and informed his book. You report that the study says that “in Manchester’s ‘slums’, more than 10% of the population was from the better-off … classes�. In Moss Side and Hume in the 1970s and 80s there were some professional people living there whom I knew, but the overwhelming majority of inhabitants were working class, and many of them impoverished and discriminated against. To suggest class was not that important is surely to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Prof Ralph Darlington
Manchester