Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Mathers, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Aberystwyth University

The military parade through Moscow’s Red Square on May 9, “Victory Day”, is the pinnacle of Russia’s annual celebrations marking the end of the second world war. Televised live and watched by millions, including invited foreign dignitaries, the Victory Day parade is all about showcasing Russia’s status and pride.

The first Victory Day parade was held in 1945 amid the triumph and relief at the defeat of Nazi Germany. A second was held in 1965 – but only two more were staged by the Soviet Union, in 1985 and 1990.

Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, however, the parade has become a huge demonstration of Russia’s military prowess and might. And, since the start of Russia’s mass invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the parade has also provided a snapshot of the progress of the conflict, including the country’s wartime mood and the extent of its international support.

But this year’s Victory Day parade showed the world a Russia that is fearful, diminished and isolated. There were no military vehicles or equipment on display. Instead, the products of Russia’s military industry were only visible to the crowds in video images displayed on big screens. Concerned that Ukraine might attack Moscow during the parade, Russian officials made the decision to protect valuable weapons needed for the war by withdrawing them from the event entirely.

The Russians had good reasons for their anxieties. Ukraine has developed the capability to strike targets deep inside Russian territory. Just a few days before the parade, two of Moscow’s airports were temporarily closed in response to hundreds of drones reportedly attacking in multiple regions of Russia, including near the capital.

This is not the first time that Russian officials have scaled down a Victory Day parade out of concern about Ukrainian attacks. In 2023 the situation was similar, with drone strikes in Russia leading up to the holiday amid widespread expectation of an imminent major Ukrainian counteroffensive. But even then, the number of military vehicles in Red Square not eliminated entirely. And the following year the parade featured launchers for intercontinental ballistic missiles to emphasise that Russia was willing and able to use any means necessary – including nuclear weapons – to impose its will on Ukraine. In 2025 the parade featured nearly 200 military vehicles.

Now, in the fifth year of the war, the Russian leadership is clearly concerned about their ability to protect their capital city from the Ukrainians, despite surrounding Moscow with elaborate air defences – including some equipment hastily relocated from combat zones.

It was not only the absence of military equipment that made this Victory Day parade underwhelming. One of the features of the event that helps to elevate it beyond a national holiday is the presence of international distinguished guests in the audience. This year, only a handful of national leaders were in attendance, three of whom represent former Soviet states and close allies of Russia: Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The contrast with last year’s parade was stark. In 2025 – to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war – Putin hosted leaders from nearly 30 countries, most notably China’s president Xi Jinping, who was given the place of honour next to Putin. Chinese soldiers marched in the parade, providing a further symbol of the cooperation between the two countries and the support that Moscow could rely on from Beijing.

This year Russia’s president was surrounded not by powerful world leaders but by elderly war veterans placed around him in the viewing stand. In this company, Putin looked like just another old man, dreaming of glory days long behind him.

The sharp reduction in the number – and status – of foreign leaders that the Russians were able to attract to Moscow this year reflects changes in the international political climate that are not in Russia’s favour. In 2025, the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, attended the parade – an indication of rifts within the European Union over the war and support for Ukraine.

In 2026 Fico was again in Moscow – but didn’t attend the parade. Last year Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro sat in the viewing stands – this year he sits in a US jail having been removed from power in an American raid.

War-weariness in Russia

Putin’s Victory Day speech this year was another indication of a change in Russia’s fortunes, striking a far less confident tone than in previous years. In 2023, the Russian president compensated for that year’s scaled-back parade with defiant rhetoric, claiming Russia was under threat of attack from the west and styling the conflict as “the people’s war”. In 2024, Putin responded to a suggestion from French president, Emmanuel Macron, that western troops might be deployed to Ukraine with thinly veiled threats that Russia might use nuclear weapons to reassert its dominance.

This year Putin was far more subdued. Although he denounced the west and claimed that victory would belong to Russia, these statements had a tired, ritualistic feel. His emphasis on Russia’s ability to endure anything and respond to any challenge hinted at the current state of the war.

Russia is losing territory on the battlefield to the Ukrainian forces for the first time since 2024 and is reported to be losing troops faster than it can replace them. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones regularly attack Russian oil refineries, threatening Moscow’s ability to sell its most profitable export.

But this war is far from over. Russia still has a large military, a well-resourced defence industry and is increasingly drawing in foreign soldiers to fight on its side – North Koreans marched alongside Russian troops in the parade.

But while Russia may not be on the verge of defeat, the way that it celebrated its most important holiday of the year suggests a new war-weariness. It’s a big contrast with the confidence exuded by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. His tongue-in-cheek decree giving Putin permission to hold the parade suggests a turning point in the two countries’ morale – at the very least.

Jennifer Mathers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Fearful, diminished and isolated: what this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow tells us about Russia’s war against Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/fearful-diminished-and-isolated-what-this-years-victory-day-parade-in-moscow-tells-us-about-russias-war-against-ukraine-282609

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vinicius de Carvalho, Director, King’s Brazil Institute and Senior Lecturer for Brazilian Studies, King’s College London

This year’s International Booker Prize shortlist presents a diverse and intriguing array of books that all demonstrate the highly creative imagination and inventiveness of their authors – and translators, of course.

Readers are invited to immerse themselves in six richly told tales from Bulgaria to Brazil and several points in between. Across these novels, we meet the unreliable narrator of a meta-fiction, a failed modern witch, a family of Iranian émigrés, a filmmaker compromised by the Nazis, a brutal prison warden, and a gender-traversing figure who seeks to save their own skin by shapeshifting.

Booker panel chair Natasha Brown has great praise for the shortlist, saying: “With narratives that capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history. While there’s heartbreak, brutality and isolation among these stories, their lasting effect is energising.”

Here, our six literary experts guide you through the nominations for 2026.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King

Set in 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, this exquisitely layered novel follows Japanese writer Aoyama Chizuko and her Taiwanese interpreter Ông Tshian-ho’h through a culinary and emotional landscape seeded with deliberate breadcrumbs: details that only reveal their full significance upon return visits to the book.

Taiwan Travelogue’s meta-fictional architecture is quietly audacious. Yang frames the narrative through a fictional author, a fictional translator and their respective silences, making the unreliable narrator not merely a device but a structural argument about whose knowledge counts and whose remains obstructed.

What makes the book genuinely pleasurable, however, is its treatment of intimacy between the two women. The queer undertow is rendered through the minute economies of shared meals and unfinished sentences, through which Yang smuggles the most profound questions about desire, friendship and colonial entitlement into the everyday.

Eva Cheuk Yin Li, lecturer in culture, media and creative industries

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel

She Who Remains feverishly journeys through a centuries-old transgenerational wound that has reached its boiling point: a final reckoning between silence and testimony, tradition and change, truth and lies, living and dying.

A trans story narrated from an unspeakable place, the novel centres on Bekija, a 33-year-old gender-traversing member of a disappearing Albanian community ruled by the violent laws of the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini.

In a place where women are a commodity and the only path to freedom is the willingness to kill and die, Bekija absconds their fate of a forced marriage as the last “sworn virgin” under the Kanun, socially transitioning from female to male.

A novel saturated with poetic intensity, captured stunningly by Izidora Angel’s translation, She Who Remains is a dervish dance of a dream. Timelines perpetually split, survival is not a promise, and gender outlaws face the impossible choice to break the cycle of centuries-old violence or perish in a gust of ash.

Boriana Alexandrova, senior lecturer in women’s and gender studies

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump

The Witch is an ambiguous, puzzling novella about Lucie, a minimally gifted witch. As she passes on her magic to her daughters, readers might expect a story of feminist empowerment. But instead, the family Lucie thought she knew flies away from her, and her own powers fail her when her husband leaves and her parents separate. The Witch tells the story of her response to this disintegration.

The novel shares its name with a famous 1862 French history of the witchcraze by Jules Michelet. But instead of Michelet’s potent witches defying medieval patriarchy, Lucie lives in a drab, modern world of fracture and disenchantment. That makes Ndiaye’s tale more realistic than magical.

If witchcraft is a metaphor for women’s power, then as a daughter, wife and mother, Lucie’s story is one of missed opportunities and pensive struggle. A weird but interesting read.

Marion Gibson, emerita professor of renaissance and magical literatures

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan

In a remote, forgotten Brazilian penal colony built on historical violence, a sadistic warden initiates a monthly fatal hunt of inmates during the prison’s final days.

It’s impossible to read On Earth As It Is Beneath without thinking of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony – not only because of the setting but also the distressing feeling that envelops the reader, almost making them a character in this brutal narrative.

Maia manages to capture the absurdity and violence of a concentration camp environment. The dynamic between calm and horror is particularly crucial. There are few prisoners, watched over by only one guard. However, what makes this prison inescapable is the dehumanisation of everyone – prisoners, the guard, the prison director. One way or another, all are forgotten by society, as if dead.

Without question, this is a novel that reminds us how much dehumanisation happens “on earth as it is beneath”.

Vinicius De Carvalho, reader in Brazilian and Latin American studies

The Nights Are Quiet In Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin

A moving, quietly powerful novel about one family’s experience of revolution, exile, memory and the enduring persistence of hope, The Nights Are Quiet In Tehran begins after the 1979 Iranian revolution and moves across four decades to 2009, and a life rebuilt in Germany.

Four sections are narrated at ten-year intervals in the first person. The novel opens in 1979 with Behzad, the left-leaning activist father in Iran, then moves to Germany through Nahid, the literature-obsessed mother who is the family’s emotional anchor. The third section follows Laleh, the firstborn daughter, on an awakening family visit to Iran in 1999. The fourth centres on 2009, when son Mo is detached from politics until Iran’s Green Movement erupts onto global TV.

This structure gives the book the feeling of a family album: intimate, incomplete and quietly charged with history, the shifting voices allowing each generation to speak from its own wound. Ruth Martin’s translation reads with clarity and gentle elegance, preserving the novel’s shifts in voice and emotional nuance.

Narguess Farzad, senior lecturer in Persian studies

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin

A cleverly constructed historical novel from one of the most acclaimed contemporary German writers, The Director follows W.G. Pabst as he returns to Nazi Germany after an unsuccessful stint in Hollywood. Once a doyen of Weimar cinema, he is now expected to make films bolstering the nation’s wartime morale.

The German title, Lichtspiel, is an early term for the medium of film – literally, “play of light”. What wilful illusions did the likes of Pabst conjure up to persuade themselves that their art could and should continue under Nazism? Daniel Kehlmann searches for an answer in characteristic gripping narrative style, here with an added cinematic flair.

Ross Benjamin’s translation masterfully differentiates between the novel’s many voices, including Pabst’s wife, son and assistant, whose confused, half-repressed memories of work on his final wartime film frame the novel.

Karolina Watroba, lecturer in German studies

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

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Boriana Alexandrova receives funding from UKRI and Horizon Europe.

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li, Karolina Watroba, Marion Gibson, Narguess Farzad, and Vinicius de Carvalho do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. International Booker Prize 2026: heartbreak, brutality, shapeshifting – six experts review the nominees – https://theconversation.com/international-booker-prize-2026-heartbreak-brutality-shapeshifting-six-experts-review-the-nominees-281179

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jilly Gibson-Miller, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Sheffield

The MV Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1. Within days, one passenger had become ill. Within weeks, the voyage had become the focus of an international health response after cases of Andes virus, a type of hantavirus, were identified among passengers and crew. By early May, several people had died. Passengers and crew have since left the ship, but many are now facing quarantine and monitoring elsewhere, along with intense public scrutiny.

For those affected, the threat is not only medical. It is psychological too. Quarantine asks people to live with a difficult combination of fear, uncertainty and loss of control. Research tells us that our ability to tolerate uncertainty is broadly related to our levels of distress, so the uncertainty surrounding Andes virus could influence how worried people feel about their health and safety.

Hantaviruses are a family of viruses usually spread to humans through contact with infected rodents or their urine, droppings or saliva. Andes virus is unusual because limited person-to-person transmission has also been recorded. For passengers and crew, this means living with a threat that is serious, unfamiliar and difficult to judge. They are also doing so under the watchful eye of the world’s media, at the centre of an international emergency medical response, while facing unplanned isolation away from home. This is a particular kind of psychological strain.

A similar incident occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Diamond Princess cruise ship was quarantined for several weeks. During that time, passengers experienced fear of infection, hypervigilance – being constantly on alert, scanning the body or the environment for signs of danger – about their physical symptoms and difficulty sleeping. These are all common features of anxiety.

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Read more:
Coronavirus self-isolation: a psychologist explains how to avoid cabin fever

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Outbreak guidance often asks people to keep their distance, isolate, ventilate shared spaces, wear masks and wash their hands to reduce the risk of transmission. However, social isolation brings psychological costs. People who are isolated in quarantine facilities, hotels, hospitals or other controlled settings may be more likely to experience low mood, anxiety and disturbed sleep, especially if they cannot go outside or maintain ordinary contact with others.

Over the longer term, many people recover well after quarantine. Recovery is helped by clear communication, trust and contact with others. During an outbreak, accurate and consistent information matters, and honestly acknowledging what is not yet known can build trust more effectively than false reassurance. Informal support networks, including WhatsApp groups, video calls or shared daily routines, may also help protect people psychologically.

The common-sense model of self-regulation could help explain what passengers might be thinking and feeling, and how they might cope. This model suggests that when people face illness, they try to make sense of two things at once: what the illness means to them and what emotions they experience. These perceptions will determine which coping strategies will be used to manage the illness.

For example, when control is taken out of people’s hands and they believe the consequences of infection could be serious, distress and panic are more likely. A passenger may think: “I have been exposed; I could become ill; I could die.” Thoughts like these can intensify emotional reactions and increase the perception of danger, creating a cycle of fear and the use of unhelpful coping strategies such as symptom checking, rumination, anger or withdrawal.

This is where clear information and psychological support can help. Passengers can be supported to build an accurate understanding of the virus based on reliable medical information. This can help them develop realistic action plans and adopt positive problem-based coping strategies, such as following testing guidance, isolating when necessary, seeking medical help if symptoms emerge, and staying connected with others where possible.

The World Health Organization has made clear that this is not the start of a pandemic similar to COVID-19. The wider public health risk is assessed as low. However, for passengers and crew, the risk assessment is different, which is why monitoring and quarantine measures have been recommended.

As passengers continue with up to six weeks of monitoring or quarantine after leaving the ship, the psychological strain may continue too. The incubation period is the time between exposure to a virus and the appearance of symptoms. Because Andes virus can have an extended incubation period, symptoms may not emerge immediately. This means passengers may remain in a heightened state of bodily alert for several weeks, prolonging stress and exhaustion.

Some passengers may need follow-up care as they return to normal life after a highly controlled and stressful experience, especially if they have witnessed severe illness or are grieving. As the public receives confirmation of further cases among passengers, there is a chance that they may be stigmatised or treated by others as contagious. This carries two risks. First, passengers may be socially excluded by their communities, which could affect relationships or work. Second, they may experience guilt or grief if they fear they have unwittingly exposed others to the virus.

Managing uncertainty

Psychological research shows that people vary widely in how they respond to the same event. It is entirely normal to experience stress in response to uncertainty, isolation and fear. For many people, recovery is likely. But some will need ongoing support during and after quarantine.

In practical terms, people in quarantine need meaningful social contact, even if that contact is virtual. Simple coping strategies can help: maintaining a predictable daily routine, protecting sleep, eating healthily, taking exercise where possible, and using grounding techniques to calm the nervous system. Breathing exercises, meditation, having a shower or making a cup of tea may sound small, but small acts of routine and control can matter when so much else feels uncertain.

An experience like this really matters. Deaths, quarantine, media scrutiny and the fear of infection are not psychologically trivial. But recovery is also shaped by what happens around it: whether people receive clear information, whether they remain connected to others, whether their distress is normalised and whether support continues after quarantine ends. Uncertainty cannot be removed entirely; it is how we manage it that protects us from a fear of the unknown taking hold.

Jilly Gibson-Miller receives funding from ESRC, Triumph and UK Research and Innovation funds.

– ref. The mental toll of quarantine on board a cruise ship – explained by a psychologist – https://theconversation.com/the-mental-toll-of-quarantine-on-board-a-cruise-ship-explained-by-a-psychologist-282522

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stephan Blum, Research Associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad. It wasn’t placed beside the body, but inside the mummy’s abdomen. But the real surprise isn’t just where the fragment was found. It’s how it got there. To understand, we must go back – to the Iliad itself, and to what it became in the Roman world.

In The Iliad, a poem shaped in the 8th century BC and attributed to Homer, the Trojan war does not end in triumph or renewal. It ends in devastation. The poem closes at the edge of collapse, with Troy reduced to a landscape of heroic ruin. And yet, this is not where the story ends.

According to later Roman tradition, one Trojan escaped. Aeneas – son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite – fled the burning city carrying his father on his shoulders and the household gods in his hands. He moved west, across the Mediterranean, towards Italy, where he became the ancestor of Rome.

This continuation did not come from the Iliad itself. It was shaped centuries later, most famously in Virgil’s Aeneid. But it changed the meaning of the Trojan war entirely. The past, in other words, was actively reorganised – through stories that could be reworked, extended and connected across time and space.

Turning defeat into origin

For Roman audiences, the Trojan war was more than a distant Greek legend. It became a way of thinking about origins, identity and power.

Claiming descent from Troy was more than a matter of tracing a lineage. It required constant cultural work – through storytelling, education and shared knowledge. The Iliad provided the raw material: characters, events and genealogies that could be reshaped and redeployed across generations.

Across the Roman Empire, educated elites learned Homer as part of their schooling. They quoted him in speeches, analysed him in classrooms and used him to signal cultural authority. To know the Iliad was to speak a language that others across the empire understood.

A senator in Rome, a teacher in Asia Minor or a student in Egypt could all draw on the same stories. The poem created a shared frame of reference – one that allowed very different people to situate themselves within a common past.

In the Roman imperial period, the site of ancient Troy – located in modern-day Turkey – became a destination. Emperors invested in its development, tying it directly to Rome’s claimed Trojan origins. Under Emperor Augustus, Troy was folded into the political language of empire. And under Emperor Hadrian, it became part of a wider culture of travel, memory and heritage.

A visitor to Troy in the 2nd century AD would have arrived at a curated landscape. There were baths, places to stay and spaces for performance. A small theatre – the Odeion – was built directly into the ancient citadel, so that the remains of the bronze age city, understood as the setting of the legendary battles around Troy, formed a dramatic backdrop.

Visitors could walk through what was presented as the setting of Homeric epic, experiencing the Trojan war as something anchored in the ground beneath their feet.

From Troy to Egypt

Across the Roman Empire, the Iliad circulated as a living text: copied, taught and read. Egypt, one of Rome’s most important provinces, was no exception. Yet here, Homer circulated within a cultural landscape that differed in important ways from the Greek literary world in which the poem had first taken shape.

For Roman observers, Egypt often appeared as a place where antiquity was materially preserved as well as remembered – through temples, monuments and practices that emphasised continuity with the past. At the same time, it was a deeply hybrid society, where Egyptian, Greek and Roman traditions interacted in complex ways.

Homer was among the most widely copied authors in Roman Egypt – read and taught as a marker of education and cultural belonging and deeply embedded in everyday literary culture.

The Homeric version of the Trojan War was particularly prominent among the Greek-speaking elite, especially in urban centres such as Oxyrhynchus, where the mummy was found. Other versions of the story – which placed greater emphasis on Paris and Helen’s stay in Egypt, as reported by Herodotus based on accounts from Egyptian priests – were probably more widespread among the broader Egyptian population.

The initial media coverage of the discovery of the fragment inside the Egyptian mummy suggested the text was deliberately chosen to accompany the deceased. As a personally meaningful object, perhaps reflecting their education or cultural identity.

The most telling explanation, however, may be the most straightforward. Discarded or damaged papyri could be reused as inexpensive material. The fragment may therefore have functioned as stuffing – bundled together and inserted into the body cavity without particular regard for its literary content.

The very fact that a scrap of the Iliad could end up as disposable filling, however, speaks to how deeply Homer had penetrated everyday life in Roman Egypt.

A text in motion

To make sense of the past in the Roman world meant moving between story and monument, between genealogy and deep time. Each perspective made the others more intelligible.

The Iliad helped create a world in which different pasts could be connected, compared and reshaped. By linking stories, places and traditions across the Mediterranean, the Roman world turned the past into a flexible resource – one that could generate identity, authority and belonging in shifting contexts.

This is why the Iliad mattered: it circulated across many different settings. It shaped elite education, but it was also part of everyday reading culture. At Troy, it helped transform the city into a place of cultural memory. The text itself also had a long material afterlife, surviving not only as an authoritative story, but through manuscripts and writing materials that were copied, passed on – or even reused for entirely different purposes.

Its most enduring insight is therefore this: the past is not something simply preserved, but something continuously made and remade – through the stories, practices and materials that carry it across time.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why was an Egyptian mummy stuffed with a fragment of Homer’s Iliad? – https://theconversation.com/why-was-an-egyptian-mummy-stuffed-with-a-fragment-of-homers-iliad-282190

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Holly Tessler, Senior Lecturer, Music Industries; Programme Leader, MA Beatles, Heritage and Culture, University of Liverpool

The Cavern Club in Liverpool, the nightclub birthplace of the Beatles, promotes itself as “the place where it all began”. On May 11, Apple, the Beatles’ management company, announced its re-acquisition of 3 Savile Row, London, the building they might usefully conceive of as “the place where it all ended”.

In the Beatleverse, 3 Savile Row is perhaps most associated with the Beatles’ iconic yet bittersweet rooftop performance. Iconic because this improvised concert was first captured for posterity in their 1970 film (and album) Let It Be. It was then digitally zhuzhed up for Peter Jackson’s epic retelling, Get Back, in 2021. Bittersweet because that performance on a chilly January day in 1969 was the last time the world ever saw the magic of John, Paul, George and Ringo gigging together. Or in the words of the promotional trailer for Let It Be: “rehearsing, recording, rapping, relaxing, philosophising … creating.”

The Savile Row building was the Beatles’ third London office. They moved there after outgrowing 94 Baker Street, which had previously housed the Apple Boutique in 1967, and following a short-lived stay at 95 Wigmore Street in early 1968.

Purchased for a snip at £500,000 in June of that year, 3 Savile Row became general HQ for all things Beatles. It had a recording studio in the basement, offices for each of the Fab Four and, of course, an impromptu gig space on the roof. Beatles fans, immortalised in George Harrison’s song Apple Scruffs (1970), would gather round the front entrance, hoping for a glimpse, a quick chat or a hug from their favourite Beatle. Yet few would ever have the opportunity to cross that elusive threshold. Until now.

Apple’s new venture heralds seven floors of unseen material from Apple Corps extensive archives, rotating exhibitions, a fan store and the recreation of the original studio where Let it Be was recorded.

It will also give fans the opportunity to tread in the band’s footsteps as they relive the iconic rooftop concert on exactly the spot where it happened. In other words, it promises the rarest of Beatles finds: a genuinely new experience.

The Fab Four in the flesh

As we are so accustomed to seeing in Liverpool, Beatles fans the world over demonstrate a ceaseless fascination with the band’s origin story. In part, this is because no book, film or theatrical production can so tangibly communicate the extraordinary ordinariness of the Beatles’ lives as being there can do: seeing for yourself the sheer magnitude of the improbability of four young Liverpudlians’ journey from two up-two down terraced houses in south Liverpool to the 20th century’s most successful pop group.

In the same way as standing in the front room of the McCartney family home in Forthlin Road, at the gates of Strawberry Field or in the middle of the roundabout in Penny Lane, there is little doubt that clambering onto the roof of 3 Savile Row, gazing across the London skyline and standing in the very steps of John, Paul, George and Ringo will foster in Beatles people a kind of indescribable wonder: making the imagined real and the real imagined.

With the re-acquisition of 3 Savile Road back into the Beatles’ property portfolio, Apple has made a genius move. The museum will connect the flesh and blood, bricks and mortar world of the 1960s Beatles to the social media and big screen worlds of the post-60s Beatles. And theirs is undeniably a big story to tell. It took Peter Jackson nearly eight hours of documentary time. Sam Mendes requires four feature-length films. And coming soon to a rooftop near you: the chance to experience all the Beatle magic for yourself.

Holly Tessler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Beatles museum to open on seven-storey site (and rooftop) of band’s last gig – https://theconversation.com/beatles-museum-to-open-on-seven-storey-site-and-rooftop-of-bands-last-gig-282756