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Making Light of a Dark Past

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Making Light of a Dark Past Colm Tóibín La Bola Negra sidesteps the vicious politics of the Spanish Civil War to tell a story about gay sexual freedom. November 5, 2026 issue Netflix Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau in Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra , 2026 Reviewed: La Bola Negra a film directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi It was a time when fragments, lost poems, and early pages of unfinished manuscripts mattered. In 1938 the poet Antonio Machado, his mother, and his brother made their way from Spain to France to escape Franco’s advancing fascist forces. When Machado died in February 1939 in Collioure, his brother found in his pocket the first line of his last poem: “Those blue days, this childhood sun.” In 1942, when the poet Miguel Hernández died in prison, where he had languished after the Spanish Civil War, he left a body of work that was later published as Cancionero y romancero de ausencias (Songs and Ballads of Absence, 1958) . Some of his ...
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Culture | Another spy and traitor How erectile dysfunction led a KGB spy into the arms of MI6

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  Culture | Another spy and traitor How erectile dysfunction led a KGB spy into the arms of MI6 In “Redwood” Ben Macintyre shows how personal struggles help recruit informants Save Share A partnership written in the stars Photograph: Courtesy Ian McCredie Oct 15th 2026 | 3 min read Listen to this story AI Narrated Redwood. By Ben Macintyre. Crown; 416 pages; $35. Viking; 464 pages; £25 V LADIMIR KUZICHKIN , a KGB spy who defected to Britain after a harrowing escape from Iran in 1981-82, asked for two things: a horoscope and a circumcision. “Recruiting a vetted circumciser had been hard enough,” writes Ben Macintyre, a historian, but “locating a security-cleared astrologer was impossible”. “Redwood” is the gripping tale of Kuzichkin’s recruitment into MI 6. (“Redwood” was his code name.) It is Mr Macintyre’s latest true-life spy thriller: earlier narratives have looked at Kim Philby, an MI 6 officer who defected to the KGb , among others. It succeeds, like his other books, in meld...
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Obituary | Creation and destruction Annie Dillard wanted to know the mind of God

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  Obituary | Creation and destruction Annie Dillard wanted to know the mind of God The nature writer and “theologian” died on September 15th, aged 81 Save Share Photograph: Courtesy of Hollins University Oct 15th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story AI Narrated S he could never forget the moth. It hatched from a cocoon kept by her teacher in a Mason jar, a huge Polyphemus silk moth with, potentially, velvety brown wings bearing a bright blue eyespot. At the moment of hatching, its wings produced a hardening varnish that would enable them to spread. Then it could fly. But the jar was too small, and the varnish worked too fast. The moth, when released on the street, could only walk. But it struggled gamely on with its useless lumps of wings, heading somewhere. In Annie Dillard’s mind, it was still going. She was the only one to see it as it went. She was often a sole observer, quietly noting. A goldfinch shaking a seeding thistle until the down floated, “blind and sweet”, all over...
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