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  Obituary | From junk to art Betye Saar believed thrown-out objects should have a second life The assemblage artist who challenged black stereotypes died on July 22nd, aged 99 Save Share Photograph: Getty Images Aug 6th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story O bjects spoke to Betye Saar. As she browsed through yard sales and flea markets, something would catch her eye and ask to be used. A broken necklace, say, or a rusty dagger. An off-cut of wood, a remnant of coloured cloth, even a circuit board. A chipped ceramic of a cat, or a bundle of postcards. “Mother wit” would lead her to them. These things were not simply dead and discarded. They held the spirit of their previous owner, and had power. They would say, “You can make art with this.” So she did. She had always been that way. Growing up in Watts, then separate from Los Angeles, she liked to hunt in the yard to find coloured beads, paper scraps or toys left behind. If she kept them tidily, her mother would not throw them a...

  Culture | War and memory A long-lost memoir brings the horrors of atomic warfare to life Tanimoto Kiyoshi, one of the subjects of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”, tells his story Save Share Lives lost in time Photograph: ©Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Photos Aug 5th 2026 | 3 min read Listen to this story Hiroshima, 8:15. By Tanimoto Kiyoshi. Modern Library; 224 pages; $32. Ebury Press; £16.99 W HEN THE atomic bomb hit Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6th 1945, Tanimoto Kiyoshi was helping a neighbour move furniture on the outskirts of the city. He hid between two rocks and, miraculously, emerged unharmed. Then Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, began a harrowing journey to search for his wife, daughter and church members. He encountered ghostly processions of naked people, their skin hanging from their flesh. “People were moving as if they were carrying precious porcelain with both hands,” he wrote in a memoir that has been newly rediscovered. Some ten months later, with the city still i...

  Culture | The fiction of John le Carré Gritty, unglamorous and thrilling A half-century on, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is just as sharp as ever Save Share Sep 20th 2013 | 3 min read By E.H. ON JANUARY 23RD 1963 Kim Philby, a British spy (and one-time contributor to The Economist ) disappeared following his defection to the Soviet Union. Nine months later “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” was published. It was the third novel from John le Carré, the pseudonym for David John Moore Cornwell, an unknown 30-year-old writer who was working as an intelligence officer in Bonn. It was fiction, but the book seemed to reflect the larger reality of the cold war. It also changed the face of the thriller genre forever. The novel starts with Alec Leamas, a British spy running the counter-intelligence unit in Berlin, waiting for one of his agents to cross the border into the West. From the very first sentence Mr le Carré’s writing is startling. Scenes are illuminated as if by flashpo...