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New York Times
4 days ago
- General
- New York Times
2 Books for a Hot, Languid Summer
By Sadie Stein Dear readers, During the hot and humid dog days of my childhood, my mother would tell us to dampen our sheets in the bathtub, wring them out and then spread them over ourselves in bed. 'By the time they dry, you'll be asleep!' she would say. Summer makes me blue. I don't know if it's reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder or the feeling of everything slipping by, slipping away, so fast — or is it just that, for a grown-up in the city, it's much like the rest of the year, only hotter? I recommend leaning into the bittersweetness. These books may not qualify as conventional beach reads, but for those of us for whom ambivalence loves company, the following are as complicated and melancholy as a summer's day. —Sadie 'The Go-Between,' by L.P. Hartley Fiction, 1953 Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
20-06-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
Digested week: Climate warning provides more fuel for Brits to talk about weather
The best descriptions of summer heat, in my view, come from Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, a novel in which, 'the world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer … like a silent crazy jungle under glass.' Or Muriel Spark, in her short story The Seraph and the Zambezi, set in southern Africa in 1946, where 'the heat distorted every word' and sound, writes Spark, 'reached my ears a fraction behind time'. Of a bunch of white settlers enjoying pink gins on the terrace, she writes, 'the glasses made a tinkle that was not of the substance of glass, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes for a moment, a shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in space, but these were unreal sounds as if projected from a distant country.' This week, much of Britain enjoyed an unbroken run of 30C days and we were all yanked back to that distant country – the one in which we sat in hot classrooms clad head to toe in polyester, wilting to LP Hartley's The Go-Between. 'In the heat,' wrote Hartley, 'the commonest objects changed their nature,' and no matter how many summers we've been through, this fact seems to surprise every time. What struck me this week as temperatures soared was how particular each heatwave is to its locality. In New York, summer comes with light as harsh and unshaded as fluorescent strip lighting and the sky is an angry blue. In the southern hemisphere, where the sun is at its strongest, you can walk down the street and feel the heat on your back like a hand, pushing. In Britain, however, the country remains pale and watery in even the hottest weather, an apparent mildness of light and sky that somehow makes the trees seem more green, the effect of high temperatures more surreal and the people, after three consecutive days of hot weather, inclined to completely lose our minds. The English dream is not of nice weather but of any weather that provides a pretext to talk about it. This week, on top of the thrill of the heatwave, the Met Office gave the nation more fuel for its pastime with a warning that in the current climate, the chances of Britain experiencing 45C heat in the next 12 years have risen to 50/50. (In 2022, temperatures hit 40C for the first time on record). You could talk about the terrible consequences of this, or the failures to date of world leaders to staunch global warming, but really what most of us wanted to do was to say '45 degrees!' and pull a series of cor-blimey faces. There was more: in what pushes us close, surely, to a record-breaking week in opportunities for weather chat in this country, the Met Office went on to issue an invitation to the public to come up with suggestions for storm names for the 2025/26 season. Last year, you may recall, Storm Bert wreaked havoc on the west coast, and there was also Storm Darragh and a series of storm back up names, such as Storm Conall, Mavis and Tilly. But precedent won't help us here. Opening up submissions to the public this year is a terrible idea given how hilarious everyone in this country finds themselves and we all know how this ends: with Storm Stormy McStormface and Storm Stormzy. Commentary around the joint appearance of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer in Canada this week focused on the dismaying optics of our prime minister scrabbling about on the ground to pick up papers the more powerful leader had dropped. What better illustration of the literal grovelling required to get on the American president's good side? It was a little mortifying to watch, I agree. But when you stop to think about it, what strikes me about this vignette from the G7 is Starmer's entirely normal human instinct, when someone standing beside you drops their papers, to bend to the floor to help pick them up. It's not Starmer's subservience that stands out in this scene, but Trump's psychopathy as he stands there like a boulder, not helping to clear up his own mess. Of course it was only about the fourth weirdest thing the American president did this week, as he continues to extemporise and jazz-hand his way to the brink of war with Iran. A clear winner was the message Trump put out on Truth Social about Iran's leader: 'We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding ... We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.' A thoughtful clarification, here, for Trump's slowest followers, that 'take out' in this context doesn't indicate the president's desire to buy the Ayatollah dinner. Woo, a hatchet job of a superstar novelist beloved by everyone in Gen Z and above! If you are someone who takes an interest in other people's bad reviews, you will probably already have received, from multiple sources, a link to Tom Crewe's amazingly unequivocal takedown of Ocean Vuong in this week's London Review of Books. 'I groaned my way through The Emperor of Gladness,' writes Crewe of Vuong's new novel, a prequel to his million-selling debut On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and an Oprah Book Club pick that is selling very briskly. 'I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open the covers. It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life.' He went on: 'This is because, while it is bad in all the ways that On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was bad, it is also bad in new and unexpected ways.' For example, wrote Crewe, this novel, 'has a much higher proportion of dialogue, for which Vuong has no talent. It tries, and fails, to be funny.' It is also, he writes, 'inordinately long and almost entirely filler'. I haven't read the new book, but I thoroughly enjoyed Vuong's debut and disagree with much of this 5,000 word review. Although not enough, of course, to undermine the pleasure of reading an example of a critic telling us what he really thinks. Let's end the week in a happy place, with the wedding of Alex Soros, one of the five children of billionaire George Soros, and Huma Abedin, former political aide to Hillary Clinton whose wretched ex-husband, Anthony Weiner, arguably bears a greater responsibility for putting Trump in the White House than any other individual. (It was Weiner sending crotch photos to young women that, in a series of unlikely events, delivered a hard drive with Hillary's emails to the FBI boss, James Comey). But after all, here's a fairytale ending – or, depending on your view, the kind of nightmare that wakes you up at 2am in a cold sweat: you are getting married in a huge tent in the Hamptons in the presence of 500 people including Kamala Harris, Anna Wintour, Hillary Clinton and – the icing on it – Jimmy Fallon, who will be making some jokes. Cheers!
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
£10,000 invested in Lloyds shares 10 years ago is now worth…
A string of 'once in a generation' challenges have weighed on Lloyds' (LSE:LLOY) shares over the last decade. A seismic shift in UK trade policy (Brexit), the most severe pandemic in a century (Covid), and a prolonged cost-of-living crisis have taken their toll. Ultra-low interest rates have also played havoc on the FTSE 100 bank by pulling down its margins. Combined, these factors mean that Lloyds' share price is 9.9% cheaper than it was 10 years ago. As a result, £10,000 worth of shares back then would now be worth £9,008. Yet it's not all terrible news, as our investor wouldn't be out of pocket despite this drop. They'd also have received total dividends of 24.83p per share in that time, meaning they'd have made £3,257 in passive income. Adding all this up, our investor would have made a profit of £2,265 on their investment, or a total return of 22.7%. However, this isn't much to celebrate, considering the total return for the FTSE 100 over that timeframe is far superior, at 85.9%. To put this in perspective, our investor would have made a profit of £8,590 if they'd put £10k in an index tracker instead. Still, 'the past is a foreign country,' to quote English novelist LP Hartley. So here I'm considering what the future may hold for Lloyds' share price. Right now, 18 analysts have ratings on Lloyds' shares. And the average 12-month target price among them is 75.83p, up 10.5% from today. With further dividends tipped as well, Lloyds' shares could well deliver a very decent return over the next year. City analysts are predicting a total dividend of 3.59p per share for 2025. If those average share price and dividend estimates are accurate, an investor today would enjoy a total return of 15.7%. Yet I've significant reservations about whether the shares can deliver these impressive returns. With the UK economy struggling for traction, and competition heating up in key product segments, I feel the bank has an almighty struggle on its hands to grow earnings. Meanwhile, its net interest margins (which, at below 3%, are already wafer thin) will remain weak if — as expected — the Bank of England continues cutting rates in 2025 and 2026. These phenomena could provide a drag on the bank's profitability over the longer term too. And on top of this, Lloyds' share price could be hammered if the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposes thumping, multi-billion-pound fines if it's found guilty of mis-selling motor insurance. That's not to say it's all bad at Lloyds. It's making strong progress to digitalise its operations, delivering huge cost efficiencies and improving the experience for online banking. It also has considerable brand power to lean on to help it grow business. But on balance, I think the risks to Lloyds and its shares are considerable. Despite those bullish price forecasts, I'd rather find other UK stocks to buy for my portfolio. The post £10,000 invested in Lloyds shares 10 years ago is now worth… appeared first on The Motley Fool UK. More reading 5 Stocks For Trying To Build Wealth After 50 One Top Growth Stock from the Motley Fool Royston Wild has no position in any of the shares mentioned. The Motley Fool UK has recommended Lloyds Banking Group Plc. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Motley Fool UK 2025 Sign in to access your portfolio
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mining of authors' work is nothing new – AI is just doing what creative humans do
Authors say they are angry that Meta has used their material to train its artificial intelligence (Authors call for UK government to hold Meta accountable for copyright infringement, 31 March). But hasn't that been going on for thousands of years? Isn't all human thought an iteration of what has gone before? Artists and scientists have been mining the work of others for generations; that's how human thought evolves. Ian McEwan was influenced by LP Hartley's The Go-Between. George Orwell's Nighteen Eighty-Four was inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Did Richard Osman invent the genre of cosy crime? The publishing industry as a whole is guilty of putting out bandwagon books, which ape the style, themes and tropes of a hit. The chief executive of the Society of Authors, Anna Ganley, says writers are 'up in arms'. Did she coin that phrase? Creativity has always 'trained' on the work of VincentWestmancote, Worcestershire Do you have a photograph you'd like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers' best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
