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Plot Twist: I am related to the real-life Oliver

Oliver Twist is one of the author’s best known creations. But for Nicholas Blincoe, the story is much closer to home. He reveals an astonishing family history

For almost my entire life, I’ve known there’s a connection between my family and Oliver Twist. There’s little chance I could forget it. Charles Dickens’s story has exploded into an Oliver multimedia universe, with as many as a hundred screen adaptations, the brilliant Lionel Bart musical, two current TV shows based on the frenmity of Fagin and the Artful Dodger, and an Audible dramatisation starring Brian Cox and Daniel Kaluuya.

I remember one Easter Sunday we were watching Oliver! on TV when my father snapped out of his post-lunch stupor to announce: “Oliver Twist was a Blincoe. He’s my great-great-grandfather.” The original Robert Blincoe was a foundling, abandoned in London’s St Pancras district in around 1792. He spent his early years in the care of the parish, entering the workhouse at four years old. By seven, he was one of 30 “parish apprentices” contracted to work in a Nottinghamshire cotton mill without pay until the age of 21. London’s parish councils shipped thousands of pauper children north between the 1790s and 1830s, but little was known of their lives until Robert’s memoir. His account of brutality, sadism, sexual abuse and starvation became a national sensation, running to five editions between 1828 and 1833.

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Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read

From Instagram poetry to Greek classics, the works of fiction that have caused uproar through history – and into the present

The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.

Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

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The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus review – growing up between two worlds

The poet’s moving exploration of deafness, difference and identity

Raymond Antrobus is not the first poet in his family: on his mother’s side, he is descended from Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), is filled with sounds – lowing cows, the droning of a beetle in flight, twittering swallows and a crowing cock among them. These are the noises that, if he’s not wearing hearing aids, might escape Antrobus, who was born with what he often characterises as “missing sound” in the upper and lower registers: a whistling kettle or a doorbell disappears at one end, while at the other, syllables might get elided, rendering, for example, “suspicious” as “spacious” – words with problematically different meanings.

If this idea of a continuum of sound seems straightforward, as Antrobus points out in this compact, powerful exploration of his experience, it is often hard to explain to those who understand deafness as an inability to hear anything. Many imagine deaf people existing entirely in silence, cut off from communication with the hearing world except through lip-reading, sign language and equipment. For Antrobus, this aspect of “audism” can be as effortful to navigate as conversations and soundscapes in which he uses practised strategies to compensate for what his ears do not pick up.

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Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea review – a love song to Italy

A sculptor and his unlikely soulmate navigate the political turmoil of the 20th century in a prize-winning blockbuster

In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.

Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.

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Everything Evolves by Mark Vellend review – can Darwin explain JD Vance?

Why evolutionary theory should be applied to peacocks, politics, iPhones and quite a lot in between

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don’t demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how (for better or worse) things happened to turn out.

Ecologist Mark Vellend’s thesis is that to understand the world, “physics and evolution are the only two things you need”. Evolution, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before. Thus the world can be divided into things that are inescapable and things that are contingent, depending on circumstances. In the terminology he borrows from evolutionary biologist Graham Bell, the study of physical necessity is the “first science”; that of historical contingency the second. So, the periodic table of 90 or so natural elements, which are inescapable given the laws of physics, would fall under the first science. Dung beetles and vice presidents, which aren’t, fall under the second.

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Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion

A Cumbrian wind is the central character in this hugely ambitious, millennia-spanning novel, which was 20 years in the making

Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it’s taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading.

There’s the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind.

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Sally Rooney could be arrested under Terrorism Act after pledging royalties to Palestine Action

The bestselling novelist promised to financially support the group proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government

The Irish novelist Sally Rooney could be arrested under the Terrorism Act after saying she intends to use proceeds from her work to support Palestine Action, which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK last month, a legal expert has warned.

Meanwhile, No 10 said that supporting the group was an offence under the act, after Rooney had made her pledge.

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Author Rie Qudan: Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel

Sympathy Tower Tokyo attracted controversy for being partly written using AI. Does its author think the technology could write a better novel than a human?

“I don’t feel particularly unhappy about my work being used to train AI,” says Japanese novelist Rie Qudan. “Even if it is copied, I feel confident there’s a part of me that will remain, which nobody can copy.”

The 34-year old author is talking to me via Zoom from her home near Tokyo, ahead of the publication of the English-language translation of her fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The book attracted controversy in Japan when it won a prestigious prize, despite being partly written by ChatGPT.

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From V to Vineland and Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon’s books – ranked!

With fans eagerly awaiting the reclusive author’s first book in more than a decade, the noir caper Shadow Ticket, we assess his best fiction of the past 60 years

A collection of early short stories that is chiefly of interest for the introduction, in which the author spells out why he thinks they fail. Pynchon does not spare himself but, unfortunately, he is right. For aficionados only.

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Poem of the week: Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border by Suji Kwock Kim

Kim’s meditation on the disruptions experienced by family members during the Korean war and North Korean dictatorship explores absence, searching and separation

Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border

By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein

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