JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
THE square is full of bubbles. Bubbles everywhere. His daughter is dancing among them, as are twenty or so other children.
The children swarm round the man making the bubbles, who’s using a bent coat-hanger on a stick as a wand. He dips the wand into a bucket of suds, then waves it in an arc over their heads, conjuring a bubble-cosmos that swirls, spirals around them. They scatter outwards, the toddlers trying to catch the bubbles, the older children trying to pop them. Some bubbles sail far above their heads, over the shops and town hall, but most are gleefully exterminated.
Then the children are sucked inwards again, round the bubble man, mesmerised as he dips the coat hanger in the bucket, and waves it over their heads. Again they scatter, dance, giggle — kids and bubbles, all mixed up.
As Palestine Action prisoners go weeks without food, alleging dangerous neglect and detention without trial, campaigners warn that a near-total media blackout is hiding a crisis that could turn fatal – and fuel a growing wave of public anger. ELIZABETH SHORT reports
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
Trump’s Gaza deal is a transient, self-aggrandising spectacle that barely distracts from the West’s outright complicity in the massacre in Gaza and our slide into warmongering, writes MATT KERR


