Hungarian author who explored memory and history in his fiction and was nominated for a Nobel prize

The writer Péter Nádas, who has died aged 83, transformed the modern history of his native Hungary into epic fiction that rooted its upheavals and calamities in the minds, and bodies, of his all-too-human characters. “I’m not a historian,” he said. “I’m not an anthropologist, nor am I a sociologist. I work with the fates of individuals.”

Those individuals filled a series of books that, in their scope, depth and stylistic ambition, made Nádas a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature. Yet it would be his younger compatriot László Krasznahorkai, drawing on the senior writer’s example, who took that honour in 2025.

A retrospective at the Locarno film festival looks back at the era of Huac’s domination of US culture, uncovering some sobering lessons for now

In September 2025, Disney and ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel and his late-night talkshow would be taken off the air indefinitely, after a conservative backlash against the host’s comments about the murder of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk. President Donald Trump personally championed the decision, calling it “great news for America”. He further called for other programmes critical of his administration to be removed. Though Kimmel’s suspension was reversed within a week, many commentators viewed this concerning development not as a sudden escalation of crisis, but a continuation of Hollywood’s habitual acquiescence to authoritarian pressure.

In a guest essay for the New York Times, journalist and Trump biopic] The Apprentice screenwriter Gabriel Sherman explicitly linked Kimmel’s cancellation to the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s, during which hundreds of film workers were accused of communist sympathies and unpatriotic subversion, barred from practising their craft, some forced into exile. “Each time, studios claimed they had no choice,” writes Sherman. “Each time, they did – and they made it.”

A food delivery rider has won the country’s highest literary award. It is part of a growing trend for writing by labourers

The hundreds of millions who have built modern China from the ground up – sweeping its streets, labouring in its factories and ferrying its goods – are often overlooked. But they refuse to go unheard. Last week, a food delivery rider won China’s top literary award. Wang Jibing, 56, first caught attention when a poem about his experiences went viral in 2022. The following year, Hu Anyan’s memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, became a bestseller.

In the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals sought to capture the harsh realities of working-class lives. But it was under Mao Zedong that the idea of writing by as well as about the masses became reality, with labourers encouraged to take up the pen. In an era when the party tried to govern the language even of diaries and personal letters, the parameters of style and content were strict, and this enthusiasm swiftly diminished after Mao. But workers’ writing has seen a revival in the 21st century. This time, it is bottom-up rather than directed from above.

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With the economy, foreign policy and immigration all going poorly for the president, he’s scrambling before the midterms

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace”.

He can’t talk about the economy because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “day one”. He can’t talk about immigration because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

Miguel Díaz-Canel cites China and Vietnam as possible models for opening up the country’s economy

Cuba’s economy needs “urgent changes” to overcome a major crisis intensified by a US oil blockade, president Miguel Díaz-Canel said in a speech to Communist party leaders.

“The situation calls for urgent and necessary changes,” Díaz-Canel told the party’s politburo in his frankest admission yet of the need to overhaul the country’s communist model.

In the remarks, broadcast on Thursday, he cited China and Vietnam as possible models for opening Cuba’s economy to the world in order to “create economic wealth and distribute it equally.”

A rare lymphoma diagnosis meant Giorgi Gagoshidze had to abandon a film project on the economic factors behind the USSR’s collapse – until he found new meaning in medical terminology

In autumn 2022, Giorgi Gagoshidze was in the middle of making a documentary film about the unravelling of the Soviet Union when he experienced his own personal system collapse. After returning from filming in Tbilisi to Berlin, where the 42-year-old Georgian artist lives, he was suffering from shortness of breath. An X-ray revealed that both his lungs had filled with water. He was told to get a taxi to the German capital’s Charité hospital straight away if he wanted to live.

Gagoshidze was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma, a rare, aggressive and fast-growing form of blood cancer in an advanced but curable stage. A brutal cocktail of chemotherapy followed by an eight-month hospital stay in isolation was his only shot at survival.

Line handily sums up people’s bewilderment at state of world, but it isn’t quite what the Marxist thinker wrote

At a time when geopolitical certainties of old are crumbling away, it has become the go-to quote to make sense of the current moment in all its seeming senselessness. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” is a line attributed to the former Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci.

Over the last two months alone, it has been quoted – and often mangled – by a rightwing Belgian prime minister, a leftwing British political leader, an Irish central banker and in the title of the most recent BBC Reith lecture, given by the author Rutger Bregman.

Whether you blame the US or the communist regime, there is no doubt that this is an island spiralling into tragedy

Felix Valdés García was nine years old when the revolutionaries came to blow up his trees. It was the verge of the 1970s and his father, Felin, was losing the family farm to Cuba’s 10-year-old communist regime. A push called the Revolutionary Offensive was under way, mobilising the people to sow, clean and harvest 10m tonnes of sugar cane in an effort to make Cuba financially independent. The land needed to be cleared.

For decades the family had nurtured their 800 hectares of rich loam alongside the meandering Sagua River. Eight couples, all related, worked the fields, while Felix and his sister had fruitful adventures among the royal palms, avocado, mango and magnificent ceiba.

Emissions have plunged 75% since communist times in the birthplace of big oil – but for some the transition has been brutal

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sun-lit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.

The groundbreaking singer, actor and athlete became a victim of McCarthyism and saw his shining career destroyed and his legacy tarnished

In August 1972, the front page of the New York Times arts section published a story titled, Time to Break the Silence on Paul Robeson? The legendary bass-baritone spent the first half of the 20th century as one of the greatest talents the US had ever produced, and its second, both in life and in death as an outcast, the greatest casualty of the second Red Scare period to which today’s current attacks on liberal and progressive politics draw comparison.

This week marks 50 years since Robeson’s death and the silence remains. His erasure from the lineage over the decades shows that what Robeson’s political opponents did not take from him, the years have most certainly. Robeson’s decoupling from the story of African American culture has been so complete that in the half-century since his death, even generations of Black Americans have never heard of him.

Soviet invasions of allies helped destroy the Warsaw Pact – Trump’s dangerous rhetoric risks repeating the mistake inside Nato

Donald Trump’s echoing of Russia’s talking points in its war against Ukraine has long been a cause for alarm and dismay in the west.

Now an even more disturbing Kremlin precedent dating from the cold war is being evoked by the US president’s fixation on taking over Greenland – that of carrying out attacks on military allies.

Video shows Gen Xu Qinxian explaining why he refused to deploy troops to crush 1989 student-led demonstrations

Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history.

General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades.

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”