My piece in the Observer this morning about how Portugal’s 1974 Eurovision entry played an (accidental) pivotal role in the unfolding of the revolution. With special thanks to Commander Carlos Almada Contreiras for his time

Revealed: the artwork sneaked into a German gallery by an employee – and the story behind it theguardian.com/world/2024/apr…

Discomfort reading for January

What Hannah Arendt said about the nation-state of Israel was far more damning than anything Gessen wrote.

1) Arendt from Jerusalem in 1955:

'On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.'

Venice Biennale’s incoming rightwing director has art world guessing theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

Adania Shibli says the speech she had prepared for her awards ceremony at the Frankfurt book fair before it was cancelled was on book banning theguardian.com/books/2023/nov…

As Europe’s energy security becomes more reliant on renewables, our relationship with the elements is changing. I spoke to four artists across the continent who work with wind. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

Wrote this long piece on the deaths, violence and starvation at the Poland-Belarus border, and how an ongoing humanitarian crisis has been turned into electoral capital:

theguardian.com/world/2023/oct…

Feels like it’s time for last orders on here. Anyone got an invite for the saloon across the road?

Graham Greene was ‘ready to go to jail for Lolita’, says Véra Nabokov’s diary theguardian.com/books/2023/sep…

“We are always on the look-out for something that is being created in the moment”: on promoters, the unsung heroes of German theatre theguardian.com/stage/2023/sep…

I ran an interview with a softly spoken Georgian filmmaker through a transcription software and it came up with this Tarantino screenplay about a Peruvian gangster with a Business & Management MSc and a subscription to Cahiers du Cinéma.

My Long Read profile of a radical realist (on a good day) theguardian.com/environment/20…

Time to clear my desk. Long Read in tomorrow’s Guardian.

The city of imminent doom: why Naples is to the 2020s what Berlin was to the 1920s and London to the 1960s theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

“One of the reasons he turned the Van Gogh in was because there was no reward and nobody wanted to touch it”. Arthur Brand, the “Indiana Jones of the art world” theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

Underground art: the buried trove of cold war paintings stashed away by an East German company that secretly mined uranium for Soviet atomic bombs theguardian.com/artanddesign/g…

Should British films, and especially British-American co-productions, still count as 'European'? Germany and France at odds as Brussels mulls over the future of its quota system for streaming platforms theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2…