Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel O’Brien, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
Easily the most poignant film I have seen this year, Dylan Southern’s The Thing With Feathers is adapted from Max Porter’s 2015 novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers. Using both subtle drama and horror spectacle, it cuts deeply into the tenderness of humanity and domesticity, reminding us that the most important things in life (so often taken for granted) are fragile shells that can be cruelly shattered at any moment.
The film follows a nameless father, referred to only as Dad (Benedict Cumberbatch), as he attempts to raise his two young sons in the aftermath of his wife’s sudden death. His grief takes the manifestation of a giant, monstrous crow, menacingly voiced by David Thewlis.
It’s yet another display of Thewlis’s uncanny ability to steal scenes even offscreen. But here, his range is on full display: he vocally dominates with an ambiguous malice. Crow is intimidating yet enigmatic and despite his haunting presence, functions as a kind of guardian figure over Dad and the boys.
Cinema’s engagement with avian imagery has long oscillated between two archetypes: the bird as looming threat and the bird as mysterious protector. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) remains the definitive expression of the former, while Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age Bird (2024) offers a more recent embodiment of the latter.
Both came to mind while watching Southern’s film – not because it feels derivative, but rather it channels their resonance in subtle, intelligent ways. The sound design, for example, gradually swells from gentle feather rustles to piercing shrieks, which is unmistakably Hitchcockian.
Elsewhere, The Cure on the kitchen radio, playing as Dad fumbles through making a family breakfast, immediately put me in mind of the band’s association with Alex Proyas’s The Crow (1994), in which the eponymous bird also functions as a supernatural guardian and guide.
That echo is deepened further by the fact that Proyas’s film adapts James O’Barr’s 1989 graphic novel – and in Southern’s film, Dad is himself a graphic novelist. This is a deliberate shift from Porter’s novella, where Dad is a writer and literary scholar, and perhaps serves to emphasise the visual nature of storytelling – fitting for Southern’s debut narrative feature.
His previous work, drawn largely from music documentaries such as No Distance Left to Run (2010) about the band Blur, and Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022), about The Strokes and other indie bands, reveals a film-maker attuned to the emotional and cultural relevance of musical choices.
From paper to screen
Poetry is key to Porter’s book, which is written like a narrative poem. Similar in many ways to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (1845), it also alludes to Emily Dickinson’s poem, Hope Is The Thing With Feathers (1891). In Southern’s adaptation the film replaces poetry with visual expression.
Southern weaves in a range of avian film references, while mixing domestic realism with the horror genre. He remains faithful to Porter’s novella which is structured in three parts that alternate between the three perspectives of Dad, the boys and Crow. In the film each has its own titled section, along with the Demon – an adversary that Crow must shield the family from.
If Crow is the embodiment of grief, then the Demon functions as its darker counterpart of despair – a dichotomy that the film explicitly invokes more than once. What makes Southern’s adaptation so engaging beyond the strength of its performances, is the maturity with which it articulates this emotional binary.
Rather than treating grief as something to be vanquished, the film suggests it must be accommodated, even befriended, lest one slide into the far more corrosive, and at times beguiling pull of despair. It’s a persuasive portrayal of mourning that recognises grief not as a wound to be sealed, but a permanent, unpredictable companion that you learn to live with, and eventually draw strength from.
Crow’s impact on Dad is tough to watch, testament to Cumberbatch’s convincing ability to appear both mentally and physically contorted in pain. Crow’s effect on the boys is equally wrenching, particularly in a scene where the bird suggests that it can resurrect their mother if they can produce a detailed picture of her.
Their innocent efforts collapse into heartbreak, forcing them to confront life’s hardest lesson sooner than they should. Thewlis’s elusive performance works well here to channel another well-known archetype of the crow as trickster.
While the emphasis on imagery again put me in mind of the song Pictures of You by The Cure, reverberating the idea that the band’s brief audible presence in the film is perhaps more significant and deliberate than it initially seems (although I maybe reading too much into that).
Other musical choices, including Fairport Convention’s Who Knows Where The Time Goes, more clearly alludes to the transient fragility of life, made all the more precious because of death’s inevitable and unknowable timing.
Yet for its darkness, Southern’s film can be unexpectedly uplifting. Like a bird taking flight, it reminds us to see afresh and reassess what matters – those everyday glimmers of joy that burn brighter against the shadow of mortality.
Any film capable of shifting your perspective, even briefly, is worth your time. The Thing With Feathers is a difficult but essential watch: grounded in powerful performances and a sharply crafted adaptation, faithful yet distinct enough to justify its existence on screen. It’s a confident narrative debut from a director clearly beginning to spread his wings.
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Daniel O’Brien 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Monica Germanà, Reader in Gothic and Contemporary Studies, University of Westminster
Warning: this article contains spoilers for the novel and film Frankenstein.
Watching Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein after my return from the 2025 Arctic Circle Assembly (ACA) in Reykjavik, I was intrigued by his adaptation of the Arctic setting of Mary Shelley’s novel.
The novel follows Dr Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac in the film), a scientist who creates a living being from dead body parts, only to abandon him after the consequences of his experiment horrify him.
Rejected and lonely, the Creature (played by Jacob Elordi) seeks revenge on Victor by destroying everything he loves. The story is framed by letters from an explorer, Robert Walton (played as Danish Captain Anderson by Lars Mikkelsen in the film), who encounters Victor in the Arctic as he pursues the Creature.
Del Toro’s film presents the Arctic of the 1800s as a barren wasteland. While at the ACA, I asked Janne Oula Näkkäläjärvi, development manager at the Sámi Education Institute about this depiction. He said: “It feels sad and absurd. The Arctic is not empty – it is the home of many Indigenous peoples, including the Sámi, who have thrived here in harmony with nature for thousands of years.”
His position reflects the ongoing project to rewrite Arctic history through the perspective of Indigenous Arctic peoples. In this sense, Del Toro’s film, while faithful to the novel in many other ways, arguably misses an opportunity to deliver the anti-colonial political message embedded in Shelley’s work.
Shelley’s story implicitly draws attention to the overlaps between Frankenstein’s unethical experiments with human life and Walton’s “ardent curiosity” and desire to “tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man”.
Although no Inuit characters feature in her novel, Shelley’s anti-imperial stance emerges throughout, and exposes Walton’s colonial us-versus-them mindset: “He was not, as the other traveller seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European,” he says, when he sees the sledge carrying Frankenstein and the Creature.
The trailer for Frankenstein.
Frankenstein was first published in 1818 and again with revisions in 1831. This was a time of growing British interest in exploring and claiming Arctic regions. This surge in exploration began in the early 1800s, when Sir John Barrow was appointed Second Secretary to the Admiralty. Under his leadership, Britain launched more Arctic expeditions than ever before, driven by both scientific curiosity and colonial ambition.
In 1818 Barrow’s first book on his Arctic explorations, A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic, was published by John Murray. That same year, the Admiralty increased its investment in Arctic exploration. In particular, the search for the North-West Passage (a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic) intensified.
Mary Shelley read many of the Arctic travel accounts published by John Murray, and they likely inspired the Arctic sections of Frankenstein. Shelley even sent her manuscript to John Murray, who rejected it.
Del Toro’s Arctic
Shelley’s novel is set in the 18th century, but Del Toro’s film is set in 1857, when British imperialist confidence was beginning to suffer significant blows. This was the year, for instance, of the Indian mutiny against British rule, while, in 1856, tension between Britain and China led to the second opium war.
The decline of the British Empire was also dramatically reflected in Arctic exploration disasters. Many vessels failed to deliver their missions and returned home having suffered considerable losses.
The controversial claim, shared initially by Orcadian explorer John Rae, and dismissed because of “the very loose and unreliable nature of the Esquimaux [sic] representations” by Charles Dickens, firmly put the Inuit in the European map of the Arctic, and, simultaneously, exposed the persistent racist bias of Imperial ideology.
In line with these Victorian views of the Arctic, Del Toro’s Frankenstein depicts the Arctic’s elusive barrenness simultaneously as a force hostile to the explorers from the south and a blank canvas for them to chart, control and ultimately, exploit.
His vision of the Arctic owes more to the sublime wilderness of 19th-century paintings such as Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864), than more recent representations including the 1973 Marvel comic adaptation of The Monster of Frankenstein, or the first television series of The Terror (2018).
The Terror retold the story of the Franklyn disaster based on the eponymous 2009 novel by Dan Simmons. While it was not filmed in the Arctic, the series was praised by critics for its inclusive script and casting, which included Inuuk actor Nive Nielsen.
At the end of Frankenstein, the Creature spectacularly sets the Danish boat free to sail on a much-awaited southbound journey. His own lonely figure, significantly, is left to wander the Arctic barrenness in perpetuity.
Perhaps this apparently conservative emphasis on Arctic blankness is intentionally critical of the multiple forms of colonial oppression exposed by Shelley’s novel. There is, after all, an interesting parallel between Del Toro’s Arctic, with its limitless white expanse marked only by the traces of European blood, and the body of the Creature, his pale skin crudely scarred by the scientist’s stitches.
Both the Arctic and the Creature are exceptionally “undead” – simultaneously lifeless and supernaturally alive. Both are slates wiped blank, so that new master-slave stories can be written upon them.
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Monica Germanà 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.
Cancer treatment has come a long way, but many of today’s therapies still come with steep costs: not just financial, but physical and emotional too. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy remain vital tools, yet they often damage healthy cells alongside cancerous ones, leaving patients exhausted and vulnerable to long-term side effects.
Around the world, researchers are searching for treatments that are both effective and gentle, able to target tumours precisely while sparing the rest of the body.
Now, US researchers have introduced a promising new light-based treatment that could transform the way cancer is treated. Their discovery combines near-infrared LED light with nanoscopic flakes of tin oxide, known as SnOx nanoflakes, to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy ones unharmed.
This marks an important advance in photothermal therapy, a technique that uses light to heat and destroy tumours. In this case, the process relies on inexpensive, accessible LED systems rather than specialised lasers. The approach reduces damage to surrounding tissues and could one day offer a safer and less invasive alternative to chemotherapyor radiotherapy.
New light-based therapy could avoid the side-effects of current standard cancer therapies, such as radiotherapy. Mark_Kostich/Shutterstock
At the core of the innovation is a simple concept: using light to create localised heat that targets and kills cancer cells. The team designed the SnOx nanoflakes to absorb near-infrared light efficiently, a wavelength that can safely penetrate biological tissue.
When illuminated, these nanoflakes act like microscopic heaters, producing enough warmth to disrupt cancer cell membranes and proteins, ultimately causing cell death. Healthy tissues remain largely unaffected because they are less sensitive to heat and because the nanoflakes can be directed specifically toward malignant cells.
This targeted heating process, known as photothermal therapy, relies on a physical rather than chemical mechanism. This means it can avoid many of the systemic side effects typically seen with chemotherapy.
Traditional photothermal systems use lasers because they can focus light precisely deep within tissue. However, that same intensity can also damage healthy cells, requires costly equipment, and limits use to highly specialised facilities.
In this study, the researchers replaced lasers with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which emit a gentler, broader spectrum of light. LEDs produce more uniform heating and are far less likely to burn or harm healthy tissue. They are also inexpensive and portable, making them well suited for clinical or even at-home use.
In laboratory studies, the LED light combined with SnOx nanoflakes destroyed up to 92% of skin cancer cells and 50% of colorectal cancer cells within 30 minutes. Healthy human skin cells were unaffected. This level of selectivity makes the technique particularly promising for cancers such as melanoma and basal cell carcinoma, which can be treated directly through light exposure. Such precision is rare among photothermal technologies, which often risk harming surrounding tissue.
The underlying science is equally significant. Tin oxide is a stable, biocompatible material already used in electronics. By converting tin disulfide (SnS₂) into oxygenated tin oxide nanoflakes, the researchers created structures that absorb near-infrared light much more effectively.
This transformation improves photothermal performance and allows the nanoflakes to be made using water-based, non-toxic synthesis methods. The process avoids harmful solvents and expensive manufacturing steps, making it scalable, sustainable and suitable for medical applications.
The researchers’ custom near-infrared LED heating system activates SnOx nanoflakes that heat and neutralise cancer cells (green: live cells; red: cells killed by photothermal therapy). The University of Texas at Austin
The team envisions compact LED devices that could be applied directly to the skin after surgical tumour removal to destroy any remaining malignant cells and reduce the risk of recurrence.
For example, after removing a melanoma or basal cell carcinoma, a patch-like LED device could deliver focused light to activate the nanoflakes at the surgical site. This type of portable, home-based treatment could make post-surgical cancer care safer, more convenient and less dependent on hospital visits.
The innovation also opens the door to combination therapies. Photothermal treatment can make cancer cells more vulnerable to other forms of therapy, such as immunotherapy or targeted drugs.
Heat generated by light can weaken tumour cells, make their membranes more permeable and trigger immune responses that help the body identify and destroy cancer. Integrating LED-based photothermal therapy with other approaches could make treatment plans more precise, effective and less toxic.
Although still in the early stages, the researchers are refining the technology and exploring new applications. They are studying how different wavelengths and exposure times affect outcomes and investigating whether other materials similar to tin oxide could reach deeper tissues, such as those affected by breast or colorectal cancers.
Another area of development is implantable nanoflake systems: tiny biocompatible devices that could provide ongoing photothermal control inside the body.
The potential for accessibility is one of the most exciting aspects of this work. Because LED-based devices are inexpensive to manufacture and simple to operate, they could be used in low-resource regions where access to cancer care is limited.
This could democratise advanced treatment by extending it beyond major hospitals. For superficial cancers detected early, LED therapy might even be incorporated into outpatient or cosmetic procedures, reducing recovery time and improving quality of life.
Safety is another major advantage. Chemotherapy damages rapidly dividing healthy cells across the body, and radiotherapy can harm normal tissue and cause fatigue or scarring. Photothermal therapy, by contrast, confines its effects to the illuminated site. It produces no systemic toxicity, no cumulative organ damage and minimal discomfort.
This high precisionstems from both the optical targeting and the biological selectivity of the nanoflakes, which preferentially heat cancer cells due to their altered metabolism and greater sensitivity to thermal stress.
The next step is to translate these laboratory findings into preclinical and, eventually, human trials. While much work remains, LED-driven photothermal therapy could represent a shift in how we treat cancer, making therapies more precise, affordable and humane.
Light, one of nature’s simplest energies, could become a powerful medical tool for selectively destroying tumours without harming healthy tissue. With innovations such as SnOx nanoflakes, the vision of non-invasive, localised, patient-friendly cancer treatment is coming steadily closer to reality.
Justin Stebbing 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Håkan Håkansson, Associate Professor, History of Ideas and Sciences, Lund University
Helena Dziedzicka’s notes and pass from the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials, with a still photo of the accused. Lund University Library, CC BY
“The witness – a tall, 16-year-old boy with a child-like face – recounts his sad story as if he were an old man”, she noted in her papers. “He speaks without becoming upset, only breaking down slightly when I ask about the fate of his parents and sister”.
They were sitting in an old school building in Sweden, serving as a makeshift refugee camp. Taking her time to interview the Polish boy, the woman occasionally asked him to clarify or elaborate, gently urging him on while carefully taking notes.
His name was Genek Granek. He had been 12 when the Nazis closed the ghetto in his hometown Łódź in central Poland and initiated the week-long Sperre, clearing the ghetto of everyone unfit for work. He had seen the cars stop outside the hospital, where “patients were seized and thrown out the windows directly onto the cargo beds of the trucks,” Granek said, adding: “… among them were pregnant women, newborn infants, and people suffering from typhus, dysentery, and other diseases.”
He had seen the children from the orphanage trying to flee into the surrounding fields, only to be hunted down like rabbits. He had seen the soldiers moving from building to building, seizing 15,000 children, sick and elderly to be deported to the extermination camp of Chełmno in northern Poland.
Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-II-Birkenau in 1944. Photo from the so-called Auschwitz Album, which was found at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945. Wikipedia
When Granek was 14 he was herded into a freight wagon with his family and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He said when they arrived, his mother and sister “went into the baths; that much I saw. What happened after, I don’t know. I still haven’t heard from them”. A few weeks later Granek was sent on to other camps – to the mines of Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and from there to Bergen-Belsen. He had just turned 15 when the allied forces finally arrived.
To the dark-haired woman in her early thirties conducting the interview, Granek’s story contained few surprises. Luba Melchior had heard countless stories like his before. She had grown up in the Polish town of Radom, less than 150km from Łódź, and she had seen, felt and smelt the inside of several camps herself, including Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück. “His testimony is incontestably trustworthy,” she remarked at the end of her notes, despondently adding: “He is on his own now.”
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To most of us, testimonies like Granek’s are hard to fathom, however familiar they may seem. Faced with the reality of the Nazi genocide we often prefer to avert our eyes, comforting ourselves with the notion that it was a long time ago, and we all know what it was like. Neither of which is actually true.
I realised this when I first read Granek’s account almost a decade ago, the very first of literally hundreds of similar testimonies I would go through in the years that followed. The impact of his voice caught me off guard, not because of the horrible details of his story, but because of its complete absence of emotion and drama. It was the voice of a boy to whom brutality and inhumanity had become so normalised that it seemed a natural and preordained part of the world.
An archive of Nazi horrors
A few years earlier I had been appointed head of the Special Collections department at Lund University Library, and among the jumble of rare documents on the shelves was a collection known as the Ravensbrück archive. Being a historian specialising in early modern culture, I knew next to nothing about it. But according to my new colleagues it was a virtually unique – albeit strangely forgotten – collection that documented the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps in unprecedented detail.
Note books containing poetry, a family photo and a handmade mirror, made by prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Lund University Library, CC BY
Today, after a decade of work to make it available online, the Ravensbrück archive has been placed on Unesco’s Memory of the World International Register – and rightly so, given that it was one of the earliest attempts in the world to systematically document the crimes of the Nazi regime. These previously forgotten testimonies reveal atrocities like human experimentation, child murder and the Nazi attempts to cover up genocide.
Yet they also uncover a more complex reality where friendship, empathy and tenderness could exist alongside nightmarish brutality and abuse; where prisoners could sell out their fellow inmates for a scrap of food, but also where guards could turn a blind eye in a moment of compassion.
A deal behind Hitler’s back
It all began in the spring of 1945, when the largest humanitarian campaign of the second world war was launched from Sweden – the so-called White Buses operation. Throughout the war, Sweden had carefully remained neutral, thereby narrowly avoiding being occupied by Nazi Germany. But Sweden had also drawn increasing ire from the allied countries and its Nazi occupied neighbours, since their seemingly non-committal stance could easily be taken as pro-German – not least since Swedish companies had continued to make handsome profits on trading deals with the Nazis while the rest of the world was burning.
So, when it became evident that the allies would eventually win the war, considerable pressure was put on the Swedish government to take action to save face. In February 1945, the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, a top official at the Red Cross, began negotiating with Heinrich Himmler – head of the SS and Hitler’s right-hand man – to evacuate prisoners from concentration camps in northern Germany. Surprisingly, Himmler was not averse to the idea. He had realised what Hitler still refused to accept – that the war was lost. In desperate need of goodwill from the allied countries and seeing Hitler’s loosening grip of reality, Himmler even began to envision himself as the new führer, hoping he would be made the leader of Germany if he played his cards right. As a consequence, all negotiations with Bernadotte were conducted behind Hitler’s back.
Arrival of survivors to Sweden on the white buses in April 1945. Photos taken by K. W. Gullers for the Swedish magazine VI. Nordiska Museet, CC BY
By the end of March, the rescue operation was in motion. All in all, 75 vehicles – cars, motorbikes, trucks loaded with supplies and 35 white-painted buses carrying the Red Cross’s symbol – were deployed with a staff of almost 300 volunteers, ranging from physicians and nurses to drivers and mechanics.
For weeks, the convoys travelled along barely passable roads and bombed-out villages, shuttling between camps where they, despite Himmler’s orders, often had to bribe SS soldiers to be allowed to take the survivors onboard. Eugenia Rygalska, who had spent more than four years at Ravensbrück concentration camp, later described her feelings when seeing the convoy halt outside the gates:
White, bright, joyful busses that brought freedom. How they differed from the black car, hopeless box, heading for executions. How they differed from the dark, dirty trucks that went to the gas chambers … At last, people with human faces … The camp burst out with joy and happiness. There were crowds of women, speaking (and even laughing) only about the white buses that brought freedom.
Two days later, Rygalska’s bus rolled off the small ferry into Malmö harbour, where they were greeted by medical staff and press reporters unable to hide their shock. “Almost all of them are marked by terrible abuse”, a journalist from Arbetaretidningen reported. “Many have had all their finger joints broken, are missing nails on their fingers and have large scars on their faces.” On a stretcher he saw “a man with the face of a 75-year-old”, he wrote. But when asking the staff about the survivors’ condition the reporter was informed “that he weighs 35kg and his real age is 22”.
Arrival of survivors to Sweden in April 1945. Photos taken by K. W. Gullers for the Swedish magazine VI. Nordiska Museet, CC BY
The shock is understandable. Reports of Nazi war crimes had been sparse and most people had no idea of what the reality looked like in a concentration camp – or, indeed, of what the term actually meant. Nor did many have any idea of the breathtaking proportions of the Nazi camp system. When the war ended, there existed at least 980 concentration camps, more than 30,000 slave labour camps, and approximately 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps on German territory.
Preserving evidence
By the end of July, more than 20,000 survivors (Polish, German, French, Belgian, Dutch, and Scandinavian) had been quartered in hastily evacuated schools, museums and dance halls. To handle the situation, the Swedish government appealed for help from the public. Hundreds heeded the request, including housewives, retired nurses, physicians and academics who could act as interpreters – one of whom was Zygmunt Lakocinski.
Lakocinski was a Polish art historian and a colourful character in the small academic town of Lund. Despite his well-tailored suits and immaculate bow ties he was often considered a bit bohemian by the reserved Swedes, who found it slightly odd that people were always thronging in his kitchen, engaged in jovial discussions around the coffee pot.
But Lakocinski was a man who followed his heart rather than convention. A decade earlier he had fallen in love with a young Swedish student who was on a brief study-trip to Krakow, and he had swiftly followed her back to Lund. By the time the survivors began to arrive, they were expecting their second child, and Lakocinski had a minor position as a lecturer in Slavic languages at the university.
Whatever Lakocinski may have felt when first meeting the survivors, he was better prepared than most. Throughout the war he had used his vast social network to maintain contact with the Polish government-in-exile and stay informed about the situation in his former home country. Personal letters suggest that he had seen reports describing the brutal reality of the concentration camps well before the war ended. And quite possibly he had already realised, even before the arrival of the survivors, that the world was facing something unprecedented.
Fearing a typhus epidemic, the government proposed to seize and burn everything the survivors had worn and brought with them to Sweden, but Lakocinski was quick to intervene. Among the belongings were not only worn-out prison clothes, but also deeply personal objects and tokens from the camps: handcrafted toothbrushes; children’s toys made of discarded cardboard; tiny notebooks created from scraps of paper and pieces of cloth, containing poetry, drawings, even food recipes jotted down from memory as a reminder of a life lost. Lakocinski wrote in a letter:
The atrocities committed by the Germans during the war are unparalleled in history … the importance of preserving every form of documentary evidence of these recent events is simply beyond discussion.
But more important than collecting objects, he realised, was to document the personal experiences of the survivors – and promptly so, before the victims resolved to stay silent, forget and move on, simply as a way to survive the trauma. Many of the survivors Lakocinki approached were extremely reluctant to talk about their experiences, while others openly refused; a silence rooted not only in pain caused by the memories but also in fear that no one would believe them.
Driven by a sense of urgency, Lakocinski assembled a team of co-workers, but with an unexpected twist: they were all survivors he had met at the refugee camps. Lakocinki’s idea was that by sharing similar experiences, his co-workers would be able to break through the wall of trauma, distrust and silence, while also being uniquely equipped to evaluate the truthfulness of the testimonies.
‘Screams of children would keep us awake’
For more than a year the group shuttled between refugee camps, encouraging survivors to talk and sometimes conducting several interviews a day. It must have been incredibly difficult for Lakocinski and his team to document the harrowing stories of cruelty and loss. But perhaps the most striking feature is often their unexpectedly factual, almost detached tone. In her interview, 20-year-old Basia Zajączkowska-Rubinstein said:
On 27 June 1943, the population [of Kielce Arbeitslager] was redistributed to other labour camps … the remaining children were gathered up and given toys; once they were calm and amused, they were shot dead with machine guns.
To take this dispassionate tone as an indication of indifference would most certainly be a mistake. However traumatised many of the survivors were, the ambition of the working group was to make the witness accounts as reliable and informative as possible by focusing on facts rather than feelings, on what the survivors had seen and heard rather than how they had felt.
The only known photo of the Lund working group, taken outside the home of Zygmunt Lakocinski in1946. Back row (left to right) Bożysław Kurowski, Ludwika Broel-Plater, Carola von Gegerfelt (Zygmunt Łakociński’s wife), Józef Nowaczyk, Krystyna Karier, Zygmunt Łakociński. Front row (left to right): Helena Dziedzicka, Luba Melchior, Halina Strzelecka. Private collection of Jadwiga Kurowska, CC BY
“The incoming transports had many corpses – people who had suffocated in transit,” 26-year-old Lajka Mandelker stated. She added:
The crematoria operated for days and nights on end. At night, I would often see naked figures being led towards the crematorium. Later, when less gas was used, we could hear the screams of people being burned half alive. The screams of children being led to the crematorium would keep us awake.
However, some accounts do simmer with a burning rage. The testimony of Anna Jachnina, for example; a social welfare clerk who was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 for cooperating with the Polish resistance. In 120 densely written pages – by far the longest interview in the archive – she struggled to describe a reality so otherworldly it often seemed to defy words.
Jachnina had been interrogated in Warsaw and then herded on to a freight train. Days later she arrived, aged 28, at a place reeking of excrement and rotten flesh; a place where the nights never turned dark because the sky was constantly glowing from the flickering ashes rising from the crematoria chimneys:
Gigantic torches that release columns of fire several metres in height … Long tongues of flame, writhing fantastically, stray off to the sides and take on a bloody-golden hue.
Auschwitz-Birkenau had by now grown into a sprawling, city-like complex of 40 closely interconnected camps, covering more than 35 square km and swallowing half a million lives a year. “There were periods when, over the space of a single day, 20,000 people would be gassed in the five crematoria and in the pits dug specially for that purpose”, Jachnina said.
And still, as the pace of the Nazis’ purge accelerated it was not nearly enough to keep the flood of new arrivals at bay. On her first day Anna was led into a barrack lodging almost 1,000 women and the sight of the overcrowded space was “unreal”, she said, adding:
… bunks in stacks of three, full of bizarre figures. Five, six, ten women to a bed, bundled up in rags, they sit like monkeys in overcrowded cages, scratching themselves awfully … It was like living inside a pressure cooker.
But Jachnina was fortunate: she was non-Jewish and fit for work. After a few weeks in the fields, piling stones and carting earth, she contracted pneumonia and typhus and was sent to the camp infirmary. Realising she would never survive the winter out in the fields, she started to make herself useful. “Still staggering around with legs swollen up like logs”, she said. She had started to help out at the infirmary and after a while she was allowed to stay as a nurse.
For almost two years, she cared for the sick, the wounded and the women giving birth. Time and again, she witnessed the midwife deliver a baby and send the mother off to work again, while the child was given an injection or simply “tossed out into the freezing cold” outside the barrack. “Most often, however … Nurse Klara, who delivered the babies, would drown them in a bucket herself”.
Women in the barracks of Auschwitz, 1945. Still photo from a Soviet film documenting the liberation of the camp, taken by the film unit of the First Ukrainian Front. Wikipedia
Providing actual help for the patients was virtually impossible, she said, as the rat-infested infirmary lacked both proper medicines and equipment. During the recurring epidemics of typhus, the mortality rate often rose to 400 a day, and the dead bodies were piled like firewood outside by the Liechenkommando, or “corpse unit”. When the night fell, Jachnina recalled:
… a truck would pull up with a dozen or so Jews from the Sonderkommando. These were the people charged with running the chimney [used to burn the dead]. They would work for six weeks, after which they were incinerated [themselves] and others took their place. They were often forced to burn their own mothers, wives, and daughters.
A Nazi cover up
The most degrading tasks in the camp were reserved for the Jews. They were the untermenschen, or “subhumans”, that the Nazi grandees had vowed to eradicate at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, thereby sending the genocide into overdrive. But what may have been obvious to everyone inside the camp was still not known outside, and the Nazis did their best to keep up appearances.
When Jewish prisoners arrived, Jachnina explained, they were forced to write postcards to their relatives, claiming they were fine and happily working. Then “the Jews were burned, and after a few months had passed the cards they had written were sent with altered dates to their families”.
At the infirmary, Jachnina had even witnessed a surreal PR stunt, when a Jewish woman had given birth and was then put with her baby “in a bed that had been beautifully made up with actual sheets”. Suddenly “an SS man came with a camera” and a female supervisor stood posing “at the mother’s bedside dressed in a white apron and cap”. Jachnina said:
The mother held the baby in a close embrace, gazing at it steadily and tenderly. A picture was taken and at the next Sortierung [selection] she and her baby went to the gas to die. I watched this farce myself the entire time.
Jachnina’s testimony is one of the most comprehensive and eloquent interviews in the archive. But it is not the gut-wrenching details she recounts that set her apart from other survivors – it is her seething, almost palpable anger and overwhelming need to talk, to share, and just maybe relieve some of the pain.
“I actually lived through Auschwitz”, she said when the interview was drawing to a close, unable to hide her disbelief.
I have it in my blood and brain … I still haven’t been able to shake this nightmare off.
Medical experiments on ‘slaves’
Like many survivors who were interviewed by the group, Jachnina had been transferred to Ravensbrück towards the end of the war. Though less well-known today compared to Auschwitz, Ravensbrück was one of the major concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Located 90km north of Berlin, it had opened in 1939 to provide slave labour for the many industries in the area – most notably Siemens & Halske, the company producing much of the electrical equipment needed for the German war machine.
Like most other camps, Ravensbrück had also expanded over the years into a behemoth of interconnected camps and subcamps that could provide a constant supply of new labourers for the factories. But Ravensbrück was unique in one respect; it was specifically designed for women and children. During the six years it was in use, more than 130,000 female and minor prisoners were pumped into the system. When the war ended, less than 30,000 remained alive.
The use of slave labour was as natural to Nazi ideology as it was vital to the German economy. At the height of the Third Reich, almost a quarter of the total workforce in Germany – some 15 million people – consisted of enslaved prisoners from conquered territories. But the idea of a German Herrenvolk, or “master people”, inherently superior to other races and nationalities, would also effectively dehumanise the conquered subjects, gradually removing all ethical constraints.
By 1941, the Luftwaffe began to examine the effects of hypothermia by submerging prisoners in freezing water. In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau were placed in low pressure chambers to examine the effects of high altitudes. And in the summer of 1942, a team of physicians initiated a series of experimental operations on the prisoners at Ravensbrück, some of them as young as 16.
Gustawa Winkowska, who had worked at the camp infirmary, recounted how she had seen the leading physician “tussle with a healthy young Ukrainian woman whom he was trying to force to lie down on a trolley so that she could be taken to the operating theatre”. Crying out for help, the woman was eventually subdued, whereupon “he put the prisoner under anaesthesia and then amputated her leg – which was perfectly healthy.” She added:
A similar operation was conducted on another young Ukrainian woman, who had an entire collarbone removed before likewise being given a lethal injection a few hours later.
Zofia Mączka, a trained physician who had been arrested in 1941 and assigned to the infirmary at Ravensbrück, gave a detailed testimony of the experiments. She described how Nazi doctors studied the regeneration of bone tissue, either by amputating entire limbs, or by surgically exposing the leg bones whereupon they “were broken with a hammer on the operating table” and set in various forms of braces and plasters.
Other experiments were aimed at generating new forms of antibiotics based on sulfonamides (synthetic drugs) because penicillin was not available. The prisoners were called Kaninchen, or króliki in Polish (literally meaning “little rabbits”) by the staff. They would be cut open and their wounds contaminated with pathogens to cause gangrene and other infections. Sometimes the physicians would insert rusty nails or sawdust in the wounds, which were then sewn together. When the potential cure had been administered, the wound was opened anew and the process repeated. Most of the victims “were operated on several times each, and some up to as many as six times”, Mączka said.
Zofia Mączka during the ‘Doctors’ trial’ at Nuremberg Medical, 1947. National Archives
Mączka would later testify when American authorities prosecuted leading physicians behind the human experimentation programme at the so-called “Doctors’ trial” at Nuremberg.
British authorities also initiated the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, prosecuting only a handful of camp officers, physicians and nurses – 17 men and 21 women, out of literally thousands that had kept the system running.
Among the prime witnesses in Hamburg was Helena Dziedzicka, who had spent four years imprisoned at Ravensbrück before she was brought by the White Buses to Sweden and joined the working group in Lund, eventually conducting more than 60 interviews with other survivors from the camp.
The fact that the working group was approached by British authorities was a major acknowledgement of its efforts. In October 1946, when the documentation project was drawing to a close, the British War Crime Investigation Unit sent a team of investigators to Sweden to review the interviews (there were around 500 in total) and collect evidence for the upcoming trials, eventually also deciding to call Dziedzicka personally to Hamburg as a witness.
In her personal notebooks, compiled during the two-month long session, Dziedzicka gave a detailed account of the proceedings, describing the reactions and behaviour of the accused as well as of the prosecuting tribunal – and eyeing both sides with growing disdain.
Though relieved that the worst perpetrators were put to justice she was clearly disappointed in the objectives of the trial. “The moral effect of the camp on the prisoners was completely ignored”, she wrote. “This kind of trial should not only aim at punishing a few criminals, but also at clarifying the barbaric methods by which people were not only physically annihilated, but morally”.
Participating in genocide
In hindsight, Dziedzicka’s disappointment is understandable. The trials were clearly meant to put the matter to rest; not to make the world understand how the camp system had worked and what it had actually done to people.
The darkest aspect of the genocide was not that it had been orchestrated by a handful of Nazis, but that it was performed by thousands, if not millions of victims turned perpetrators in their struggle for survival. “The whole system in the camp had one purpose, to rob us of our humanity”, Dziedzicka said in her final statement to the court. “All our lowest instincts were nourished while the good ones were stifled”. Being a survivor did not always entail innocence.
And this may be the most painful aspect of the Nazi camp system: that it was built on the victims’ willing participation in the genocide. Time and again, the testimonies collected by the working group describe how prisoners took assignments as camp functionaries in exchange for privileges and a chance to live.
According to Jachnina, the head nurses at Auschwitz were generally recruited among the German-born prisoners and “they would rob the patients and hasten their demise by beating them without scruple”.
Female prisoners recently released from Ravensbrück, pausing at the Danish border on their way to Sweden. Lund University Library, CC BY
Tadeusz Berezowski explained that “having gold teeth meant a risk of losing one’s life”, since the prisoners in charge would kill for them, and then “share the spoils with the SS men; in return they were given free rein”.
At Mauthausen concentration camp these Blockälteste, or “block elders” in charge of a barrack, were more feared than the SS officers, Wacław Wawrzyniak said, since they “used to kill prisoners under their authority by drowning them in a barrel of water or ordering individuals to commit suicide by going ‘onto the wire’” – that is, by throwing themselves on the electric fence. “Every day, several corpses would be removed from the wire fence,” he said.
The system, deliberately designed to oppress and control by turning prisoners against each other, was surprisingly effective and drastically reduced the need for paid camp staff. In fact, one in every ten inmates at Nazi camps may have been a so-called Funktionshäftling, or prison functionary. The nurses administering lethal injections, the midwives drowning newborns, the “camp elders” selecting whom should be sent to the gas chamber – most of them were prisoners themselves, trapped in a system of Häftlings-Selbstverwaltung or “prisoner self-government”, as the SS termed it.
Empathy and tenderness survives
But while many prisoners used their privileges as functionaries to save themselves, others used them to protect and save the lives of others. In some camps, they even formed movements of silent resistance, based on loyalty, support and cooperation.
Natalia Chodkiewicz, 56, recalled how the woman in charge of her barrack had “shared her [food] parcels with me, fed me, supplied me with medicines, and defended me during selection”. Others stole food from the kitchen – “a severely punishable offence”, Chodkiewicz said – and when the small parcels had been smuggled into the barrack, the food was “divided and subdivided until each portion was merely the size of a nut” and shared among them all.
Sometimes in these eyewitness accounts, we even see compassion extending across the great divide, from the the Nazi guards to their prisoners. Krystyna Strzyżewska, aged 14, had arrived at Ravensbrück at the time when food rations had been cut to a bare minimum. She said:
There was often no soup. But we had a good aufseherka [a female SS overseer]. The aufseherka gave her lunch away to be given to the children. Every day, two young girls more received the aufseherka’s lunch. She took care of us. She dismissed us, the minors, earlier [from work], so we wouldn’t freeze.
Ewa Augustynowicz was also 14 when she arrived at Ravensbrück, and for more than six months she managed to escape “selection” by hiding from the guards, sometimes “in the toilet or behind the stove”, sometimes by sneaking over to another barrack where she knew she would be safe because the women in charge “were so good that they kept the children in their block from being taken away”.
Survivors in line for food in the Tennis Hall in Lund, one of many public buildings that were turned into refugee camps. Kulturen Museum, CC BY
In this barrack, Augustynowicz said, the “younger children lived in the dining room, which was heated. They kept warm there.” Some nights the adults organised games for the children, and at Christmas every child “received a present in the form of a piece of bread, a little sugar and fat, and a sweater, apron, or dress.” During the long nights there, Augustynowicz was even taught French by the older women, “secretly” since it was strictly forbidden, and hidden “on the top bunks” in case a guard would unexpectedly turn up.
More relevant than ever
Unsurprisingly, for those who had lived through the Third Reich – victims, perpetrators and bystanders alike – the reality of the concentration camps was often too painful to confront. Once the war trials were concluded by the end of the 1940s, the common response to what had happened was neither outrage nor guilt, but silence.
Drawing of fellow inmates at Ravensbrück concentration camp 1944, by Jeanne Letourneau. Lund University Library, CC BY
In Sweden, few politicians could see the need for a continued documentation project, and without funding the small working group quietly disbanded – some of them built new lives and careers in Sweden, others returned to Poland like so many of the survivors they had interviewed. None of them ever talked much about the project again, as if they didn’t fully realise what a remarkable accomplishment it had been, or – if they did – it had taken such a toll that they preferred not to think about it.
In any case, the material they had worked so hard to collect gradually fell into oblivion. Alarmed by the political situation in Poland after the war, Lakocinski even decided to close and seal the archive for 50 years to ensure that the material could not be claimed by the Soviet Union. And when the boxes were finally opened again in the late 1990s, the world took little notice.
To some extent this was undoubtedly due to the language barrier, given that all interviews were conducted in Polish. Today, however, the interviews are available online in English translation, and the attention they attract is hardly surprising. In a world where basic human rights are increasingly called into question, these eyewitness accounts serve as a reminder of how deep into the abyss one simple and alluring idea took us 80 years ago – the idea that the world would be a better place if some people were not a part of it.
But more importantly, they show us how resilient humanity can be under the pressure of ideology. And that makes them more relevant than ever.
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Håkan Håkansson works at Lund University Library, and headed the digitization of the Ravensbrück Archive in 2014-2022. The digitization was funded by numerous private donations, as well as a number of major foundations in Sweden and the United States.
The River Wye used to be full of wild salmon. Today it is full of algae.
And the meandering waterway which has long attracted anglers, hikers and poets is now the subject of a major pollution lawsuit.
The case – against a British water company and two chicken producers, who all deny responsibility – has been launched on behalf of almost 4,000 people who say their lives are being negatively affected by river pollution. And while legal action brought against river polluters is not new, there has never been a UK case with this many claimants.
A large range of people suing can add legitimacy to a court case, making it harder to ignore than one brought by a small group of activists.
The case is also what’s known as a “strategic” lawsuit. The claimants in the Wye litigation (which also includes the Rivers Usk and Lugg), are suing not just to secure compensation for losses they say they have suffered as a result of the pollution. They’re also trying to draw attention to the plight of some of the UK’s most cherished waterways, and attempting to secure policy change to clean them up.
Similar legal tactics have frequently – and successfully – been used by large groups in a bid to tackle climate change, where strategic litigation has been brought against companies, notably big oil firms, to help portray them as the ones responsible for damaging the climate. The Wye pollution case is similarly aimed in large part at big food companies rather than holding individual farmers responsible.
At the centre of the Wye case is “nutrient overload” of the chemicals nitrogen and phosphorus into river water from agriculture and sewage. This causes excessive growth of algae, robbing the water of oxygen and killing off fish, plants and invertebrates.
Much of the nitrogen and phosphorus is said to come from the excrement of chickens farmed close to the River Wye, and the fertiliser made from it, which is used in other types of farming.
From a global climate change perspective, chicken, as a meat product, is a greener alternative to beef and lamb because of its much lower carbon footprint (chickens produce less methane than cows and sheep).
But campaigners argue that this ignores the local environmental picture, where the concentration of the chicken industry and its nutrients in one area is a major problem. It has been claimed that around a quarter of the UK’s chickens are produced close to the Wye.
River responsibility
An important element of the River Wye court case will come down to what emissions a particular company are deemed responsible for. And again, the lawyers may look to climate change litigation for inspiration.
That’s because companies, internationally, are increasingly obliged or encouraged to report on what are known as scope 3
greenhouse gas emissions – those which result not directly from a company’s operations, but from what happens further down the line (when an oil company’s fuels are used in cars for example).
By contrast, in response to River Wye litigation, one of the defendants, chicken producer Avara Foods, has stated that its direct operations are not the ones causing the nutrient pollution.
Avara Foods is hence trying to limit its responsibility to only direct nutrient emissions from its operations. However, if you produce many tonnes of chicken manure and then sell it on to be used as fertiliser, some would argue – as others have argued against big oil – that you have a responsibility to reduce the effects that come later on.
On this point Avara has argued that it is “not involved in any arable operations and has no control over this activity”.
Avara has further noted that, since January 2024, it has exported all the manure from its supply chain that would previously have been locally sold as fertiliser.
But one of the claimants Justine Evans has suggested that this happened in the face of the pressure from the legal case starting, and still leaves a long period prior to that for which Avara could potentially be liable.
A spokesperson for the company told the BBC it shared concerns over the condition of the River Wye, adding: “We believe that this legal claim is based on a misunderstanding, as no manure is stored or spread on poultry-only farms that supply Avara Foods.”
They continued: “The focus instead needs to be on solutions that will improve the health of the river, addressing all forms of pollution and the effects of climate change, and for action to be taken accordingly.” Freemans of Newent Ltd, the other poultry firm being sued, is a subsidiary of Avara Foods.
Welsh Water said the company had been responsible for “significant investments over recent years”, and reached “real improvements in water quality”.
Whatever happens in the case, the urgency of dealing with these three and other polluted rivers will increase in parallel to the urgency in dealing with climate change. As the UK faces warmer weather and periods of drought, rivers will increasingly suffer from low flow levels. This in turn will exacerbate water pollution from nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus because there is less water to dilute them.
Chris Hilson has received funding from UKRI for research into healthy and sustainable diets. He is a legal advisor to ClientEarth, which is not involved in this case.
In July 2025, a letter from an English city council neighbourhood services officer circulated on social media.
It read: “We have received complaints about young children playing ball games on the main road and streets. This can cause damage to vehicles and property. If your child is playing ball games on the road, please speak with them and prevent them from doing this. It’s unsafe for children to be playing in the roads. It is also causing a disturbance for other residents on the street. There are plenty of local parks where children can be taken to play safely … Please utilise these.”
This letter gets right to the heart of debates about children’s right to play and their right to the street. It ignores the fact that cars have encroached onto streets, which had previously been regarded as social spaces, not the other way round. It is really only in recent decades that drivers have been seen as the primary – or only – legitimate users of street space.
It assumes that children should be “taken” to designated play spaces, rather than allowing for the possibility that children should be able to access playable space without adults. And, finally, it fails to acknowledge that parks and other green spaces afford only certain kinds of play, and that children demand – and deserve – diverse spaces for diverse forms of play, not just ball games, swings and slides.
Complaints such as these, directed to local newspapers, councils, parents and others, have appeared for more than 100 years, since 19th-century and early 20th-century campaigners sought to remove children’s play from streets.
They reflect a recurring question in children’s play: whether children should only play in designated, often green, spaces, or if they should be able to play throughout their neighbourhoods, in “grey spaces” such as streets, car parks, back alleys and pavements.
The idea of grey spaces, developed in the context of skateboarding research, conveys both the colours of the urban environment and the ambivalence and liminality of urban space.
My research into both play streets and the wider geographies of neighbourhood play seeks to highlight the particular value of grey space for children’s play. I argue for play in grey space, despite the insistent promotion of green space.
Streets and other “grey” spaces, such as car parks, pavements and back alleys, have historically been the places where children predominantly played, both before and after the emergence of playgrounds. These are also the spaces in which children choose to play, when the conditions are right.
These are the spaces that remain most accessible for children in all sorts of diverse places across the world. This is especially the case for children living in neighbourhoods facing intersecting disadvantage, such as poverty, racism and environmental injustice.
My research has highlighted a number of particular and valuable features of play in grey space.
When playable grey spaces are located near to children’s homes, they can come and go more easily. They can bring indoor toys and other play equipment into their outdoor play. It allows for distanced supervision by adults, and gives opportunities to make the most of small bits of time – between chores, homework and scheduled commitments.
Play in grey spaces on streets and in neighbourhoods allows children to build friendships and other relationships with neighbours of all ages. Neighbourhood play can create spaces of care, offering children and their families a sense of belonging and familiarity on their doorsteps.
The form of grey spaces – slopes, kerbs, cambers, walls, potholes, lampposts, weeds, puddles, fences, plants, bumps and surfaces – offers hugely varied play environments. It often offers more than designated play spaces, indoor or outdoor.
Through playing in these urban grey spaces, children enact their right to play and their right to the city. This play has the potential to reinforce their connection to their neighbourhoods, their sense that they belong and have the right to use the spaces on their doorsteps.
Children’s play also animates grey spaces. It brings both literal colour, through toys, chalking and colourful bodies, but also life, emotion and engagement.
The possibility of – and challenges associated with – play in grey space can open up wider local conversations about inequalities of access to doorstep space, highlighting questions of social, spatial and environmental justice.
If we fail to value and enable play in grey spaces, we are ignoring – and devaluing – spaces that afford not only diverse and accessible play opportunities, but also the potential for valuable spaces of connection and care. The singular valuing of green space for children’s play rests on particular ideas of children, childhood and play. It shifts political and financial attention away from the everyday spaces of urban play.
Alison Stenning currently sits on the board of directors of Playing Out and is a trustee of Shiremoor Adventure Playground Trust in North Tyneside.
A door creaks shut, unexpectedly; a footstep is heard on the stair; a face seen at the window. The haunted house is a staple of gothic writing, television and film, but what is it about this humble setting that holds such a fascination?
For many, it is the sense of the unheimlich or the uncanny – the homely and the strange brought into contact. The home, we would like to think, should be a place of safety, of sanctuary from the world and domestic harmony. When this space is made strange, made unfamiliar somehow, terror ensues.
A ghost is there to tell a story – often of an event or past grievance that ties that story to place or person, where the past breaks in to disrupt the present and this sense of home. Sources as old as Pliny the Younger, the ancient Roman lawyer and writer, tell stories of houses that are haunted.
Gothic writing of the 18th century in Britain began with the castle as house. Castles were dual spaces, both domestic home and political centre, and in these spaces, like the one at the centre of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), ghosts represented family feuds, the restoration of inheritance and moral retribution.
Later, in the 19th century, the taste in gothic moves closer to the everyday. The questions of truth and narrative reliability became significant, with Victorian novels set in more regular homesteads.
During the Victorian age, the ghost story gained popularity through short stories in the periodical press. Charles Dickens went so far as to create a collaborative series of ghost stories in the Christmas edition of his magazine All the Year Round, all set in different rooms of the same haunted house. Contributors included Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins.
Haunted houses frequently play on the tension between inside and outside. Ghosts, such as the mysterious children in M. R. James’s Lost Hearts (1895) come from within the house, arising from traumatic events that took place there. The ghosts seen by the governess at Bly Manor, in Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw (1898), are intrusive figures, seen first from a distance then encroaching more and more on the domestic space, as the governess attempts to shield her young charges from their influence. Anxieties about the home as private space, and as protection, are rife in these stories.
Trailer for the 2009 adaptation of The Turn of the Screw.
The haunted house, however, is also associated with confinement, often reflecting the entrapment of women, particularly, within the domestic space. Emma Liggins, gothic scholar at Manchester Metropolitan University, suggests in her book The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories that the ghost story “transforms domestic space into a place of terror that threatens marital relations and women’s lives and sanity”.
The move into the 20th century did nothing to exorcise these ghosts. If anything, they became more pervasive as modern life and historical buildings clashed.
The birth of modernism and the onset of cinema in western culture saw new opportunities in writing and visual media for the representation of the haunted house, and whole series like The Amityville Horror (1797 then 1977), use the house as a framework.
Visual media allows for further play with the sense of the inside and outside, and the questions of narrative truth explored in earlier fiction. The BBC’s famous paranormal drama Ghostwatch (1992), brought its viewers into a supposed televised household haunting, blurring fact and fiction to draw in the audience. Presented as “documentary”, the show faked interruption itself by supernatural forces as the ghost, Pipes, appeared to interfere with camera equipment, fooling – and terrifying – many a TV viewer.
Clips from the BBC drama Ghostwatch.
In some cases of haunting, ghosts are not the only threat; the house itself may be the supernatural force at work. Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, from her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House is famed less for those ghosts who dwell within it as for its own ghostly malevolence: “the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice”.
The house may also, of course, be a metaphor for the mind, a popular idea in Freudian readings of the gothic, which consider texts in relation to the unconscious. Here, the uncanniness of the haunted house may reflect precisely the way in which we are strangers to ourselves, with secret rooms, passages and the ghosts within forming a neat analogy for the mysterious and unknowable nature of the human mind.
In the end, houses in fiction and film may be cleansed of their ghosts, and frequently are, yet this is not always the case. Haunted houses such as Walpole’s Otranto and Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher (from The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839), dispossessed of their ghosts, fall in and collapse. But at the close of Shirley Jackson’s story, Hill House still “stood against its hills”, having (spoiler alert!) taken the life of the protagonist, Eleanor.
For the most part, buildings outlast the human, and the haunted house reminds us of this, that something we may think we possess – our very own “home”, or our mind – has an existence before and beyond us.
What’s your favourite haunted house story? Let us know in the comments below.
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Nicola Bowring 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.
Imaging technology has revolutionised palaeontology, allowing scientists to study fossils that are buried deep in the rock or too small to handle. Two recent studies I was involved with show some of the technology’s potential, including one that discovered a new dinosaur species that loomed over other carnivores it lived alongside hundreds of millions of years ago.
In the first study, my colleagues and I investigated an impression of a fossil jawbone that had been described in 1899 only as having come from a possible dinosaur. Because of its age (203 million years old), the specimen had added importance as, potentially, an unusually large early flesh-eating dinosaur.
Dinosaurs originated during the Triassic period, from 252–201 million years ago, but generally the flesh-eating forms remained under 3 metres in length and weighed no more than an alsatian dog. We knew the 1899 specimen, from the late Triassic near Cardiff in south Wales, showed portions of an ancient animal’s jaw and flesh-eating teeth, and could have come from an animal five metres or more in length.
The specimen had not been much studied since 1899 because it consisted only of impressions in the rock. At the time of discovery, the block had been split, revealing an impression of the inside and outside of the mandible, with 16 teeth and tooth sockets. But none of the original bone material remained.
Traditionally, palaeontologists would make a cast of the specimen using plaster or some flexible plastic, but such casting could damage the delicate fossil. So the specimen remained in storage in the museum for over a century.
We applied a new but simple method to acquire a 3D model called photogrammetry. This consists of taking numerous photographs of the two natural rock moulds and then stitching them together using 3D modelling software, a bit like the panorama function on many smartphones that can combine photographs of a wide vista.
The resulting 3D jaw can be viewed from all sides and rotated. That makes it much easier to study than the rock moulds.
The method caused no damage to the unique fossil specimen and can be shared with other scientists for further examination. In this case, the natural rock mould was highly detailed, retaining information on canals through the bone for blood vessels and nerves, and even the serrations on the cutting edges of the teeth.
We compared it with other dinosaur fossils and determined that it came from a dinosaur similar to Dilophosaurus from the early Jurassic period 201-174 million years ago, in the US. But it was 10 million years older and an entirely new genus and species.
We named it Newtonsaurus cambrensis after Edwin Tulley Newton who first studied it in 1899. The jaw suggests an animal originally 5-7 metres long, a large two-legged flesh-eater with grasping hands and powerful jaws.
In the second study, we scanned a tiny reptile skeleton, also from Triassic rocks. This one was found in Devon and was 40 million years older, at 243 million years old.
When it was found in 2015, Rob Coram, the collector, tried to clean up the tiny skeleton using traditional methods, removing grains of sand with a fine needle. However, the tiny size of the specimen, with a 1cm skull and three teeth per millimetre, made this impossible.
We first made a CT X-ray scan on a regular micro-CT scanner and made a detailed 3D reconstruction. The detail was not enough, though, so we then scanned it at the European synchrotron in Grenoble, France, so each tooth, and many other structures could be rendered in detail. A synchrotron makes an extremely intense beam of light that scientists use to study minute matter.
The scans and reconstruction tell us that this little reptile, which we named Agriodontosaurus, was an insect eater. It tussled with cockroach-like bugs as big as its head and crunched their cuticles with its broad, chisel-like teeth.
Virtual palaeontology
CT scanning has become ubiquitous in palaeontology, with hundreds of scanning machines installed in university and museum research departments.
In the case of the Agriodontosaurus, CT scans gave us clear views of the zones of compact and less compact bone as well as the attachments of the teeth.
Now 3D digital models let scientists look inside bones and shells, revealing hidden anatomical information. For example, several shelled organisms, such as ammonites and foraminifera, developed throughout their lives from a single shell chamber, coiling ever outward as they laid down new living chambers. The entire developmental history is there inside the adult shell and it can dissected out in the scans.
The digital models of fossils can also be used for functional experiments. For example, the mechanical properties of skulls can be analysed, modelling where an animal’s jaw and skull are hinged, reconstruct its muscles, and calculate its bite forces. This tells us that Tyrannosaurus rex could exert a bite force of as much as 50,000 Newtons, equivalent to a force of 5 tonnes.
Another approach, finite element analysis, allows palaeontologists to test the responses of a skeleton or skull to compression and tension. These bioengineering studies have shown, for instance, that predatory dinosaurs generally were not good at tussling with their prey by twisting and turning – they mainly concentrated on straight up-and-down bites.
This is the new world of virtual palaeontology. Let’s see where it takes us.
Michael J. Benton receives funding from ERC, NERC, Leverhulme Trust.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Martin Plaut, Senior Research Fellow, Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
According to data released by global market research firm Ipsos in September, 80% of South Africans say their country is on the wrong track. It is not hard to see why.
Even if they are not among the white Afrikaners who have sought refugee status in the US, courtesy of President Donald Trump’s controversial policy to protect them from the discrimination he alleges they are facing, there is a great deal for ordinary men and women in South Africa to complain about.
And with nearly 60% of the population born after apartheid ended in 1994, the government’s attempts to frame the hardships faced by its people as the result of past repression have decreasing relevance.
The most obvious problem is perhaps the failure for standards of living to improve. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has overseen flatlining or declining GDP per capita for more than 15 years, according to a two-year study published in 2023 by Harvard University.
Worse still, the study showed that unemployment has risen by 0.5% on average every year since the ANC came to power in 1994. This has left the majority of young men and women in South Africa without any prospect of earning a living. As the South African Department of Statistics reported in May 2025:
“Among the 4.8 million unemployed youth in the first quarter of 2025, 58.7% reported having no previous work experience. That means nearly six in ten unemployed young people are still waiting for their first opportunity to enter the job market.”
It continued: “Without experience, youth struggle to get hired – yet without being hired, they cannot gain experience. This cycle of exclusion continues to fuel long-term unemployment and stalls skills development at a critical stage of life.”
These are just two areas of decline. Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, has endured repeated electricity and water failures, while its streets have been so poorly maintained that some are close to being dysfunctional.
The military, once respected – and even feared – across the continent, is in shambles. According to DefenceWeb, an African defence and security news publication, only 15% to 20% of the South African National Defence Force’s aircraft are serviceable. It has one seaworthy frigate and just several inshore patrol vessels to guard nearly 3,000km of coastline.
South Africa’s police force is also severely infiltrated by criminal syndicates – so much so that Firoz Cachalia, the minister of police, has warned that the country is in danger of becoming “the next Colombia or Ecuador”. Both of these countries are plagued by criminal syndicates, with Ecuadorian crime groups particularly notorious for their links with the police.
This is all taking place against a backdrop of rampant corruption, which was exposed by the South African government’s own commission of inquiry in 2022. Hundreds of ANC politicians and officials were named or linked to corrupt activities after evidence was unearthed by the Zondo commission during its nearly four years of hearings.
Few of the accused are behind bars. And the author of the report, former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, has expressed his disappointment at the slow progress.
Reasons for optimism
An air of gloom has settled over South Africa. Yet there is evidence that allows for a more optimistic analysis. First, the country remains genuinely democratic, holding elections that are regarded as free and fair nationally and internationally.
This remains true, even though the ANC lost its absolute majority in the 2024 election and has had to join forces with opposition parties to govern. This was very different from the response of many parties across Africa in recent years, which have rigged votes or refused to recognise elections they have lost.
More than 27 million citizens registered to vote for the 2024 election, and the results reflected a multiparty system with genuine voter choice. At the same time, over 11 million South Africans did not cast a ballot, even though they were registered voters. This indicates a feeling of apathy towards politics.
Second, the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has provided proof that there are alternatives to ANC governance that can work. Helen Zille was elected as mayor of Cape Town in 2006 and the party has held it ever since.
Her party has administered South Africa’s Western Cape region since 2009. And their administrations have generally been effective and free from corruption, giving citizens an idea of what an alternative future might hold. She has now decided to stand for mayor of Johannesburg in 2026, a major challenge to the ANC.
Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille has announced that she will be standing for mayor of Johannesburg in 2026. Kim Ludbrook / EPA
Third, most of the media and book publishing industries in South Africa are not controlled by the government. South Africa guarantees freedom of the press, and its media landscape is among the freest in Africa. It is ranked 27th globally on the 2025 World Press Freedom Index – the highest in Africa.
Fourth, the judiciary is independent and has a record of holding criminals to account. This includes some, such as former police commissioner Jackie Selebi, who were well connected. However, it is capable of being disrupted by powerful figures who find loopholes to delay justice. South Africa’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is a case in point.
He has faced 16 charges of corruption related to a 30 billion rand (roughly £1.3 billion) deal to modernise the country’s defence in the late 1990s. Zuma denies the charges and none have been heard in court. As his late lead counsel, Kemp J. Kemp, put it in 2007, he defended Zuma against corruption charges “like Stalingrad … burning house to burning house”.
Fifth, South Africa’s agricultural sector is first rate, exporting across the world, while tourism remains a major attraction and a foreign exchange earner. Mining is also still important, even though it is a declining industry.
And sixth, several of its universities are among the best in Africa and produce skilled men and women who can serve their communities. The universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Witwatersrand rank first, second and third on the continent respectively. These factors together could provide a basis for reform and renewal.
Martin Plaut is affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ewan Archer-Brown, DPhil Candidate in Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
Multishooter / shutterstock
Britain’s flagship home insulation programme has received a damning verdict from the National Audit Office. Under the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, tens of thousands of households have been left with faulty or even dangerous installations. It’s a result, the auditors say, of weak oversight, poor skills and confused accountability.
This report is troubling not only because of the human cost but because it exposes a deeper failure of governance in how the UK tries to decarbonise home heating. It’s a complex task that demands long-term stewardship, but is instead being left to the market.
The ECO was designed to make energy suppliers help households cut emissions and bills. Suppliers are the companies that buy electricity or gas from generators and sell it to you – the company named on your bills is your supplier. In theory, the ECO means these suppliers meet government-set carbon or energy saving targets by funding insulation and heating upgrades for households, with regulators checking that installations qualify.
The ECO was preceded by two other schemes that operated on the same principle. For years, they worked reasonably well for simple and low cost measures like loft or cavity wall insulation. But in 2013, the ECO was launched and expanded to cover more complex and expensive retrofits like solid wall insulation – an unprecedented shift.
So what went wrong?
The National Audit Office’s latest findings confirm fears that this was an approach set up to fail. Many installations require major remediation, some pose immediate health risks. The problems are familiar: an under-skilled workforce, uncertified installers, weak regulation and oversight.
Individually, these problems could be fixed. The government could improve installer training, tighten audits and crack down on fraud. But together, they reveal a deeper problem: a misplaced belief that market-based tools can deliver foundational change.
Energy efficiency obligations such as ECO work well for standardised, low-risk actions, like swapping bulbs or improving boilers. But, as we warned back in 2012, they are less suited to complex, capital-intensive retrofits of millions of households that require lots of coordination and long-term financing.
The UK’s energy efficiency governance still sits at arm’s length from the realities in people’s homes. Responsibilities are split confusingly between suppliers, Whitehall departments, auditors and local authorities, and it can often seem like no one is really in charge.
That’s why the failings highlighted in the National Audit Office report are not just implementation glitches or down to some “bad apple” installers. They’re failings of a governance model designed for incremental change, not the transformation required for net zero.
German lessons
If the UK really wants to retrofit millions of homes, it should look to what’s worked in other countries. Germany’s long-running KfW loan programme is one example. For more than three decades it has supported high-performance refurbishments through low-interest loans and grants. Successive German governments have recognised that the returns – in jobs, tax revenues, economic stimulus – have consistently outweighed the upfront cost.
By contrast, ECO has been repeatedly restructured, with shifting targets and funding levels that make it hard to plan ahead. Treating home retrofit as a short-term obligation rather than a long-term national project has left the UK far behind its peers.
Retrofitting homes is inherently local (you can’t pick up your house and move it to a different area). Local authorities should therefore play a much stronger role in coordinating delivery, enforcing quality, and linking retrofit to other social goals such as tackling fuel poverty.
Getting councils involved would align retrofit with local priorities rather than distant central government targets. It could also rebuild trust among people who may understandably be wary of such schemes.
The UK’s forthcoming warm homes plan is a chance to reset. The government should take a hard look at the tools at our disposal and think about what is needed to foster the creative and courageous policy needed to decarbonise our homes.
Jan Rosenow regularly advises organisations such as governments and government agencies, organisations including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Energy Agency. He also advises private sector clients from time to time as a consultant. In the past, Jan Rosenow has been funded through the UK Energy Research Council and the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand to work on UK energy efficiency policy. There are no commercial interests to disclose.
Brenda Boardman and Ewan Archer-Brown 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.
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