British newspapers say the donation was accepted even though advisers urged the heir to the throne not to take the cash offered by the family of the 9/11 mastermind.

New Delhi is more than 2,000 years old and has served as the center of multiple empires and kingdoms, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world. By the 17th century, what is now known as Old Delhi was the capital of the Mughal empire. The British, who came later, sited their capital in Calcutta (now Kolkata) before eventually deciding to move it back. In 1911, King George V laid the foundation stone of a new capital to be built within Delhi—New Delhi. The city was at that point not fully equipped to accommodate India’s governing apparatus, requiring huge amounts of new infrastructure, which was ultimately designed by Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens. Finally, in 1931, New Delhi was inaugurated. Today, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party are seeking to impose Modi’s image on the capital architecturally as he has politically, remaking it and doing away with what came before.

“Built environments,” the academic Leslie Kern writes in Feminist City, “reflect the societies that construct them.” The Indian capital is no different. All of these Delhis, old and new, have been visible to visitors. In less than an hour, you could walk from the gardens of the 16th-century Humayun’s Tomb to India Gate, which was unveiled on the eve of New Delhi’s inauguration. When I worked in Connaught Place, a shopping and business hub that was itself built during New Delhi’s 20-year gestation, I would often visit one or the other, or much else besides.

But now Modi is undertaking an ambitious plan to refashion the entirety of what we call Lutyens’ Delhi, due to be completed in 2024. The Central Vista Redevelopment Project involves revamping much of Rajpath—the main route linking the capital’s government offices—spurring the construction of new buildings and new residences for the vice president and the prime minister, and the conversion of old buildings into museums. Modi’s supporters say the plan combines heritage conservation and capacity expansion, and will lead to efficient, effective, and improved governance. The project’s chief architect has called the redevelopment a thoughtful modernization, one that respects tradition but is not “held hostage to it.”

How I wish that were all true. In fact, Modi’s government rushed the plans through, with barely any consultation. Almost overnight, the government dug up the area, blocking roads, creating diversions. The $2.8 billion budget is, at minimum, questionable, given the parlous state of the Indian economy and the livelihoods of our compatriots reeling from a brutal pandemic. The project lacks foresight about its impact on the environment, or Delhi’s horrific air pollution.

Already, my beloved Rajpath and India Gate have been cordoned off to visitors. These were spaces for people like me—loafers, gadabouts, young lovers, old couples, schoolchildren—to sit, to walk, to explore. As someone who takes pleasure and meaning in walking, the redevelopment has come to manifest as an obstacle, physical and durable, against the free movement of people. Once, I could walk the city, map its contours, and experience its landscapes. Now I am homebound again.

I first moved to Delhi in 2017, when I was 26. In my hometown of Kanpur, a smaller city some 250 miles away, I had been an inveterate walker. As a kid, I measured the length and breadth of my neighborhood on foot. I ventured to the local grocery store, friends’ houses, and my extra classes after school this way. While at university, while working, or while on vacation, I would end up walking for leisure. Walking has always represented a declaration of independence, a way of wielding some power, of exercising some agency, of forging my own identity and path, particularly in a country where being a woman has often meant being confined indoors.

So it was in Delhi. To live in the city was to walk it. I would stroll alongside white-collar commuters, daily-wage laborers, students, all of us submerged in the mundanity of our everydays. History was all around me, and everything lent itself to meaning. The tree-lined roads radiating the central vista, which converged in hexagonal nodes, gave me a sense of pride I could never quite place. The boulevards dotted with white bungalows—some pristine, others dilapidated—that had colonnaded verandas and spacious gardens made the area feel like not just a relic from a colonial past but a special part of our present too.

On summer nights, after work, my then-boyfriend, now-husband, and I would meander to one of the number of canteens housed in the capital’s state-representative offices, eating Goan food one night, Keralite cuisine the next, before hopping on an auto rickshaw to go to the India Gate. From there, we would walk some more, heading down Rajpath to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the nation’s president. Sitting on cement benches outside the magnificent palace, we would stare up at the inky-black sky, which stretched like an imaginary awning, sheltering us new lovebirds.

In its narrowest definition, a flaneur is simply someone who wanders. Yet it is also something much more than that. Being a flaneur allowed me to explore corners of New Delhi that I never would have thought to visit, the term’s implied lack of direction or destination leading to moments of serendipity. Being a flaneur suggests also a freedom—to roam, to go in whichever direction one chooses, unencumbered by the authorities. I learned more about Delhi in this way than I ever could have on guided tours or determined museum visits.

Before the pandemic, and the harsh lockdown that India imposed, a stroll around the India Gate’s lawns would transport me to a bygone era. The history of the place, the common heritage it represented, as well as its aesthetics and greenery, helped convert any visit to an experience.

In this, I am not alone. I know, because at these places I was always with others—fellow wayfarers. For these people, people like me, Modi’s transformation of Delhi does not simply refashion the city’s geography; it changes our emotional attachment to a place. With the Central Vista Redevelopment Project, the cultural history of Delhi, its uniqueness, and its people all stand singularly altered.

Like much of the world, successive coronavirus lockdowns beginning in the spring of 2020 cut me off from my adopted city. Unlike much of the world, I have had to bid farewell to it for good.

The Central Vista Redevelopment Project tells us a great deal about the new vision of belonging that Modi offers to India. In announcing the plans when he did, in limiting the consultation (and potential opposition), in seeking to complete these efforts in 2024—timed, perhaps too coincidentally, with India’s next general election—Modi is telling us something.

The project’s bid documents specify that India’s new parliament building will be completed in October. Earlier, officials had planned for it to be ready ahead of the country’s 75th independence day. This is not coincidental: Previous Indian governments have seen parts of the area as reminders of an era of imperialism and subjugation.

The overall target completion date is also not without symbolic value. Along with general elections, 2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-nationalist organization from which the BJP was birthed, and from which Modi started his political career.

These anniversaries are important because of Modi’s place in India’s political history. His poll ratings remain high, and the opposition is in disarray; he is likely to win the next election. First elected prime minister in 2014, he will by then have been in power for a decade, with no end in sight.

In that time, he will have reshaped the country like no Indian leader since Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s founding prime minister. Indeed, he is Nehruvian if in no other ways than the devotion he triggers in his followers, and in the grandness of his vision: Modi’s leadership is, to his followers, not simply political but social, moral, spiritual. His policies can be sweeping in their ambition: doing away with nearly 90 percent of the country’s currency, for example, or locking down a country with more than 1 billion people, both with mere hours’ notice.

Similarly, the Central Vista Redevelopment Project is grand in scope, a bid to redraw the democratic icon of India’s capital, in much the same way his efforts to reshape Indian politics, culture, and the country’s understanding of its history are all extensions of his personality.

Modi knows he is doing this. Delhi is a city exhibiting its multiple histories. Its transformation from the seat of various empires to the capital of a vibrant democracy point to one telling of the Indian story, of a cherished civilizational continuity. This infuses the city with the idea of India. Last year, shortly after visiting the Central Vista project site, Modi noted, “A capital is not just a city, but it is a symbol of a country’s ideas, promises, capability, and culture.”

Under the Central Vista redevelopment, Delhi’s circuitous roads, perambulatory walkways, and scenic parks as we once knew them will disappear. This represents the loss of an idea of what the capital should represent, the removal of a place that was an idler’s haven. Spaces where I have spent countless hours walking and loitering, where I learned to love this city, where I learned to live in it, will soon be gone. This feeling is worse for women: Although Delhi has rightfully earned its reputation as a place where sexual harassment is all too common, it is also a place where, as the writer Lauren Elkin put it in Flâneuse, a woman can ​“seek fame and fortune or anonymity”; where she can “liberate herself from oppression”; where she can “declare her independence.”

While pushing forward with this complete and irreversible loss, the government did not allow us time to seek comfort in what were once familiar places. What was a living, thriving destination is now barriered and hidden away from the people who populated it. When it reemerges, the new Delhi will no longer be a city for explorers, a city for flaneurs.

British model Nyome says she had "no idea" a Spanish body positivity campaign had used her photo.

Huge profits made by energy giants British Gas and Shell and the closure of the Tavistock clinic lead the papers

Intellectual sports lovers, to borrow from Martin Amis, are “a beleaguered crew,” fated to be “despised by intellectuals and [sports]-lovers alike.” Yet, across literature, scenes depicting heartstopping goals, impossible tennis shots, thundering bowling strikes, and last-minute baskets abound. Sometimes, these games are only offhand events in characters’ lives. At other moments, they signify something greater—an entry into a protagonist’s interior. The best-written sports scenes combine two joys: your breath catching in your throat as you wait to see who will win, and the emotional pleasure that a good book can bring—access to another’s thoughts as they process the joy of victory or the sorrow of a heartbreaking defeat.

While most of my favorite sports moments deal with the play-by-play action taking place on a court, on a pitch, or in the ocean, some of them find delight in the minutiae of the background, whether in the stands with the spectators or on the field as a star leaves it. The nine books listed below show that reading about sports is in certain ways superior to watching sports: the scene develops slowly, the players’ moves can be explored in multiple dimensions, and every time you flip back the pages, there’s the game again, in easy reach, ready to be reimagined.

The New Press

The Match, by Romesh Gunesekera

The Match revolves around Sunny, who loved to play cricket growing up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. As an adult, he’s living in London and going through a midlife crisis, worried that he is losing touch with his son, Mikey, and trying to rediscover himself while bereft of the things that connected him to his earlier life. In May 2002, the Sri Lankan cricket team comes to England to play at the legendary Lord’s Cricket Ground. Sunny goes to watch the second test match between Sri Lanka and England—a game that will end up quelling his disquiet. Over 16 pages, through observant and direct prose, Gunesekera brings forth the sensory details of the match—the batters hitting the ball out of the field as people reach for their beers; the famous Sri Lankan batsman Aravinda de Silva at the crease; the darkening clouds in the sky; and Sunny’s chance meeting with friends from Manila whom he hasn’t seen in decades. One of them is Tina, the subject of his childhood infatuation. As they talk, he detects that she also longs for a life that’s different from the one she has—one much like the one he’s living. When he goes back home, he feels refreshed: Cricket has given him a sense of purpose, and soon he’ll attend a match with the son he worried he had lost.

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

The Cactus League, by Emily Nemens

The former Paris Review editor’s first book is set in Arizona, where the fictional Los Angeles Lions Major League Baseball team is at spring training. Although packaged as a novel, the book is actually a collection of nine stories linked together by a narrator who discusses the behind-the-scenes lives of the team’s players, coaches, and fans as the Lions prepare for the new season. In her prose, Nemens uncovers the elemental beauty of the sport: “There’s something cathartic about swinging a piece of wood at a hurtling knot of leather and yarn,” she writes. “The reverberations of that rubber center that run up your arms, plugging into your shoulders with a little zing. The sound of it.” But she’s at her best in the chapter devoted to the players’ wives. She describes their hunger for their husbands’ attention, and their sense of duty when they have it—their obligations “to cheer him from the family section of the ballpark … To get him steak on Sunday nights, to rub his feet on Wednesdays,” she writes. The wives’ world revolves around the game, and they demonstrate how even those who don’t play find that “there are many ways to earn one’s keep.”

[Read: Why are great sports novels like The Art of Fielding so rare?]

Vintage

Dust, by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

At the start of Owuor’s novel, Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda remembers his past life as a star high-school rugby player. He was “the quickest, the trickiest, the best Shifta the Winger,” the team’s clincher, “dancing through adversaries.” His nickname was a reference to a war that had raged in his home of northern Kenya, and also a reference to how he eluded his opponents on the rugby pitch. But while he reminisces, Odidi is in mortal danger: In Owuor’s lyrical prose, this beautifully drawn memory is juxtaposed with Odidi in the present: running full tilt through the streets of Nairobi, trying to escape the police. Even after he’s shot, he still limps forward, trying to get home. As he moves through the city, he recalls the heart-pounding roar of spectators crying “Shifta! Thump, thump! Winger! Thump, thump,” but he can’t dodge these pursuers. The officers chase Odidi down and kill him, and the rest of Dust follows his family—his sister, his father, and his mother, each of them unraveling in their own way—who must deal with the loss of a young man who had so much promise.

Graywolf Press

One Day I Will Write About This Place, by Binyavanga Wainaina

Wainaina’s memoir explores his childhood in Nakuru, Kenya, and his struggles with his identity as he grows up in the newly independent nation. The book opens with the writer, 7 years old, playing soccer with his siblings, Jimmy and Ciru. Wainaina describes not only the game but also the sounds that permeate their neighborhood—animals, people, radios. Wainaina is an absentminded child, and even as he plays, he is contemplating the sun and how its beam has splintered into “a thousand tiny suns … all of them spherical, each of them shooting thousands of beams.” Suddenly, the game interrupts again. Jimmy is shouting at him, and, distracted, Wainaina is unable to prevent the ball from hitting him smack in the middle of his face. In Wainaina’s prose, the game is a double salvo: It is a vehicle for his narrator to think, a meditative space—at least until the ball intrudes. At the same time, the three siblings are demonstrating their deep bond, one that will sustain the author through his teenage years and into adulthood, including when Wainaina’s life later falls apart.

Vintage

Miguel Street, by V. S. Naipaul

Many wondrous books about cricket have emerged from the Caribbean. In V. S. Naipaul’s motley collection of linked stories about a street in Trinidad based on his childhood memories, we get yet another glimpse of this most colonial of British sports. Twelve boys from Miguel Street and its neighboring blocks go to watch a game at the Oval, a sports stadium in Port of Spain, chaperoned by a man, also from Miguel Street, called Hat. Trinidad is playing Jamaica. Hat is addicted to betting, and tries to make the spectators around him take part in his frivolous gambling. The cricket goes on, but for Naipaul, the game is not the point; Hat is. Throughout Miguel Street, his descriptions of the residents illuminate Trinidad and give him a means of extrapolating on the themes dear to him. Miguel Street was one of Naipaul’s earliest books, written before his fiction became pockmarked with broodiness and depression. Unlike Gunesekera’s characters, who care deeply about the cricket they are watching, Naipaul’s narrator is there to observe intently the people at the match. Here, Naipaul lets in England’s inescapable colonial shadow: After the batter Gerry Gomez gets 150 runs, Hat stands up and shouts, “White people is God, you hear!”

[Read: He won a Super Bowl. Now for the real challenge.]

Riverhead

Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch is at its core a tale of woe. Published in 1992, the first year of the English Premier League, it marked an important pivot in how the English public viewed the soccer fan: no longer a buffoonish, violent hooligan, now he was a depressed yet hopeful, urbane, cultured individual. Hornby supports Arsenal Football Club, and when he is 15, he watches a match at Arsenal’s stadium in the regular stands for the first time, graduating from the schoolboys’ section. From his seat, all he can see is a small section of the field; everything else is obscured by the fans around him. When the crowd lurches forward, he’s pushed along; the noise is overwhelming and the group so large that he’s anonymous. He loves it. From there, the book unfolds scene after scene of agony, each funnier and more morose than the last. Being a sports fan in Hornby’s world is essentially an exercise in despondency—any league or tournament is set up so that only one team can ever really win. All the fans of every other team are doomed to lose.

Vintage

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov, one of literature’s greatest stylists, is at the height of his powers in Lolita, and its famous tennis scene, focused on 12-year-old Dolores Haze, is one of his most striking set pieces. “My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip,” the narrator, Humbert Humbert, thinks breathlessly. But this indelible image comes to us through the mind of Dolores’s abuser and kidnapper. The reader comes to the awful realization that every gorgeous description of her serve, her control of the ball, and her overhead volley is not merely an appreciation—it is a demonstration of Humbert’s lust for the child. The portrayal of Dolores’s tennis is beautiful on purpose. In Nabokov’s tightening, glittering web, Humbert is seducing the reader in the same way he’s working to abuse Dolores: gaining trust through charm, in pursuit of disgusting designs.

Plume

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates’s novel, set in 1950s upstate New York, is centered on a death. Jinx Fairchild, a Black teenager, intervenes to save a young white girl being attacked and then accidentally kills the perpetrator, a white man. Two years later, Jinx is in his senior year of high school. He plays basketball and is actively recruited by colleges from across the country before his career is  brought to a tragic end by an ankle injury. But even in his last game, he is a star, shadowed by an overeager defender, a white boy named Baranczak. Oates describes how Jinx continuously gets the better of Baranczak, his game so “deadpan cool it’s like the fucker isn’t even there.” As Jinx moves to the basket, Baranczak fouls him hard, but not hard enough to stop him. Oates writes, “Jinx Fairchild’s beautifully conditioned body keeps him in the game. Long legs, quick hands and feet, sharp foxy eyes … That zombie look, that glisten to the eyes.” The shining moment doesn’t last: After the game, Jinx’s life unravels. He quits both school and basketball. Years will pass before he and Iris will reconnect, bonded by their experience, but separated by a growing chasm of race, class, and education.

[Read: Norman Mailer, sportswriter]

Penguin

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan

The New Yorker writer first started surfing when he was a child, and his memoir unfolds on beaches in Hawaii, Fiji, Tonga, Australia, Madeira, and New York. No coast is more influential than that of Hawaii, where his family moved when he was in middle school, and where his hobby became a full-on obsession. “In the mags, Hawaiian waves were always big and, in the color shots, ranged from deep mid-ocean blue to a pale, impossible turquoise. The wind was always offshore (blowing from land to sea, ideal for surfing), and the breaks themselves were the Olympian playgrounds of the gods,” he writes. Though the ocean in front of his home is less glamorous, the water becomes his refuge—an odd one, he considers, because surfing contains a base danger that makes it different from other sports. Even with friends, “when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around,” he explains. The activity remains his great love, but he understands that he adores something that has the capacity to both save his life and kill him; the ocean is at once “the object of your deepest desire and adoration,” he writes, and “like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, powerful beyond measure.”

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The crowd gathered in a wood-paneled London hall struggled to contain their enthusiasm: Like music fans catching a glimpse of their favorite act peering out from backstage, people excitedly clapped and chattered when Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, entered to take his seat. They later rose to their feet in raucous applause as he delivered his speech, a lament about the diminishing freedoms in Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Hours earlier, in Hong Kong, Chinese President Xi Jinping had offered his own view, a stern defense of the city’s forceful integration with the mainland carried out through the introduction of a sprawling national-security law, the reengineering of the election system, and the mass arrest of prodemocracy figures.

Both events earlier this month marked the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong being returned to China. Patten’s appearance capped a string of events that had drawn activists, former lawmakers, and exiles to London for a week of lobbying, commemoration, and nostalgia for the protest movement. It was a remarkable scene, the aging head of a former imperial power emphatically cheered by former subjects who had fled their ostensibly decolonized homeland. Most of the Hong Kongers at the London event, a show of hands revealed, had arrived in the United Kingdom after the British government had broken with long-standing immigration policy to welcome them in. Many seeking refuge in the seat of the former empire have done so because it allows them to live and outwardly express an identity that Beijing is intent on stamping out as it imposes its own form of colonial rule and imperialist tendencies.

Some 120,000 Hong Kongers have taken part in the program in the 18 months since it was launched, according to outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The initiative, which is an expansion of the British National Overseas passport scheme, a special status created before the 1997 handover, potentially allows millions of Hong Kongers to stay in the U.K. on a pathway to citizenship. It also helps them avoid the grinding bureaucratic labyrinth of Britain’s asylum system. (The government refers to it as a “bespoke immigration route,” as if it were tailored on Savile Row.) The Welcoming Committee for Hong Kongers, a nonprofit umbrella group assisting new arrivals, estimates that up to half a million could come to live in Britain over the next few years. Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank that houses the Welcoming Committee, said this month that the influx could “reshape Britain.”

This acceptance of Hong Kongers marks an extraordinary turn for the British government, which for decades staunchly defended the practice of denying its former subjects the right of abode. In 1982, as focus turned toward Hong Kong’s impending handover back to China, then–Foreign Secretary Peter Carington wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, warning of the threat of mass migration should things not proceed smoothly. The U.K., he cautioned, “would be faced with demands of Hong Kong people for guarantees of protection and, more than likely, for the right of admission of fairly large numbers to this country.” Not long after he wrote the memo, Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands. Carington resigned from his post, but his position toward keeping Hong Kongers out of Britain remained.

In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre brought the issue to the forefront again. Then–Hong Kong Governor David Wilson traveled to Downing Street shortly after the crackdown and argued that allowing Hong Kongers the chance to migrate to Britain would, counterintuitively, boost confidence in the city, and, in an attempt to sell the idea to Thatcher, said he believed that not many would actually take up the offer. Murray MacLehose, a former Hong Kong governor, called for an amendment to the British Nationality Act to allow for Hong Kongers to obtain citizenship. His plea went unanswered. Instead, full British passports were issued to 50,000 priority Hong Kongers, though even this consolation was condemned by Beijing. It was “not a glorious outcome,” the journalist Michael Sheridan recounted in his book The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong.

By the time Patten arrived in Hong Kong in 1992, much was already set for Hong Kong’s future ahead of the 1997 handover. He pushed to expand democracy but met fierce resistance from Beijing and some in London. In recent years, he has cast himself as an outspoken crusader, enraging Beijing with his numerous media appearances. His criticism of China and his defense of Hong Kong have, in a way, helped absolve the British of some of the uglier aspects of their rule over the city, including police violence in the 1960s and draconian laws that remain on the books. These relics of empire have been almost gleefully embraced by Beijing loyalists. Colonial laws drafted by the British have been revived by Hong Kong’s new rulers; the charge of sedition has proved particularly popular. The police force that cracked down on the protests and has been transformed into an arm of the ever-expanding national-security apparatus is a distinctly British creation: The title Royal has been dropped from the force’s name, but a few high-ranking British officers remain in uniform.

Jeppe Mulich, a lecturer in modern history at City, University of London, told me the rosy vision of Hong Kong’s past that is often projected within the U.K. is troubling, with much focus on commemorating the last few years of British rule but little on what came before, because “it really is not a very pretty picture in any way.” Patten, who recently published his diaries detailing his time as Hong Kong’s final governor, is “a reliable symbol of the good old days of colonial Hong Kong,” Mulich said, but in reality, “he was a Band-Aid put on a big bleeding wound at much too late a stage.”

Those in attendance at the event I went to in London were hugely sympathetic to the former governor. One audience member asked him about what he made of the colonial legacy in Hong Kong. Patten responded by musing on the astronomy of empire: Britain prepared former colonies such as Singapore and Malaysia for their futures, “put them all onto the launching pad and lit them with touch paper and blasted the whole thing off into outer space,” hoping that they would take to orbit as an “independent and successful country,” he said. But, “with Hong Kong, because of the lease, we couldn’t do that,” he told the audience, referencing the 99-year agreement signed with Beijing in 1898. Instead, Patten explained, the city was “fired off not into orbit on its own but into a docking mechanism with mainland China and that caused a very, very different set of problems.”

Contemporary Hong Kongers are often criticized for harboring too much sympathy for colonial rule. I frequently saw the old colonial flag flying at the numerous marches I attended in 2019. A protester hung it inside the Legislative Council chamber when it was stormed by demonstrators at the height of the prodemocracy movement. Before Xi’s visit this month, a series of videos showing Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne made the rounds on social media, with commentators praising the royals for meeting Hong Kongers and visiting housing estates on their visits to the city, in contrast to the imperious distance typically maintained by Xi.

A certain level of colonial nostalgia is understandable given the changes in the city over the past decade, Mulich told me; some view Britain as the lesser of two evils when set against Beijing’s increased influence. Claudia Mo, a former prodemocracy lawmaker who covered the lead-up to the handover as a journalist, told me that she questioned at the time, “Why are we being ruled by foreigners?” and was nagged by the feeling that there was “something not right” about Hong Kong’s governance during colonial times. She had been excited to see Hong Kong return to Chinese rule, but eventually soured on Beijing’s control of the city and became a strident critic in the legislature. Mo was arrested last year and faces the possibility of life in prison for violating the national-security law.

Deference toward the British was also actively fostered prior to the handover. Decades of colonial education “helped cultivate a sense of belonging to the British empire amongst those who were born and raised before 1997,” Vivian Wong, a lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Bristol, told me. Members of Hong Kong’s civil society have also “long deployed the rhetoric of imperial cosmopolitanism as a strategic tool to counteract Chinese nationalism,” she added, though this “rosy understanding of British colonial rule” was not universally held.

Prior to Patten’s speech, I made my way into Parliament, past groups of summer tourists and groups of pro- and anti-Brexit protesters engaged in a heated exchange, to attend a roundtable on Hong Kong. One of the speakers was Timothy Lee, a former district councilor who was elected in November 2019 when prodemocracy candidates nearly ran the table in local elections. I had last interviewed Lee after his first district-council meeting. Then, he had been buzzing with nervous energy, words tumbling out of his mouth at a pace that was at times hard to follow. Yet his tenure as a politician was short-lived. Lee left Hong Kong on March 1, 2021, a day after 47 prodemocracy figures, many of them his friends, were arrested for violating the national-security law.

When he landed in London, it was his first time anywhere in Europe. He initially entered as a visitor, moving from place to place, before heading to Taiwan. Though Taipei had been supportive of Hong Kongers during the protests, its immigration policies remain restrictive. Lee found the limitations on his right to work onerous. He returned to London three months later and successfully took part in the new immigration program. He has since settled into an office job and in his spare time does advocacy work. His business card describes him as “one of the last elected district councilors from Hong Kong.”

Lee now lives in a crowded part of London where the streets are busy, like back home. The double-decker buses and the city’s underground remind him of Hong Kong. His decision to leave wasn’t driven by fear of imprisonment so much as by the collapsing space for free speech and the threat of self-censorship. “If I remain in Hong Kong, maybe I won’t get arrested, maybe I will. This is one uncertainty,” Lee explained to me. “But one thing I can be sure of: If I remain in Hong Kong there are many things I used to be able to say that I will not be able to say anymore.” (Shortly after we spoke, an elderly activist with Stage 4 cancer was sentenced to nine months in prison for a protest that had been planned but never took place. The same week, several men were arrested for sharing a Facebook post calling for people to cast blank ballots in the December 2021 elections.)

Others who have fled Hong Kong’s shrinking space for any views or identity beyond those deemed sufficiently patriotic have found a more welcoming home in Britain too. One notably bright Friday, I stepped into the dimly lit foyer of Prince Charles Cinema near Leicester Square and followed a set of signs down a flight of stairs to a theater showing Revolution of Our Times, a documentary about the 2019 protests. The award-winning film was released last month on the video-streaming site Vimeo, but Hong Kong’s police chief has warned the city’s residents against viewing it, and the title is a portion of a now-outlawed protest slogan.

The name of the cinema struck me as ironic. Charles had attended the handover ceremonies 25 years earlier, saluting the Union Jack in his white military dress uniform as the flag came down for the final time. The film was shown at midday, but the theater was almost full. In the lobby, a table was covered with mementos of 2019 for sale, most of which would put the seller at risk in Hong Kong. As the documentary played, sniffles and muffled sobs from the audience offered something of a secondary soundtrack to the film’s original score. Tissue packets crinkled in the darkness as strangers offered them to those sitting nearby. As the documentary ended, people sang along to “Glory to Hong Kong,” an unofficial anthem that was written during the protests.

Among those I met in London was Lilith Leung, a social worker in Hong Kong who was arrested twice during those protests, and who came to Britain via the immigration program. She cried, she told me, as she watched Hong Kong disappear below the plane as she flew out of the city in October.

Leung struggled with English when she first arrived, but being forced to use the language daily has helped her improve. Since moving to London, she has also begun to transition to living as a woman. The prevalence of the term prodemocracy at times obscures the fact that the victims of Beijing’s overhaul of Hong Kong reach far beyond the realm of election politics: civil society, progressive action groups, and individuals who depart from the authorities’ view of the norm. Leung previously worked with the city’s oldest prodemocracy party and its largest trade union. The union closed in the wake of the national-security law, along with dozens of other civil-society groups.

Leung told me she was reluctant to live as a woman in Hong Kong under the more authoritarian political regime now in place. She took the acceptance and encouragement she had received from new friends in London as a sign of the city’s openness compared with Hong Kong, where she saw such openness in steep decline. “It is interesting,” she told me, “that a place can give you the courage to live as yourself and trust yourself. It is a great expression of freedom.”

Centrica is to pay a dividend of 1p per share after having suspended payouts for three years.

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Donald Trump returned to Washington, D.C., for the first time since leaving office in a show of support for the organization trying to make MAGA more than just vibes.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

What Trump got out of his divorce from Ivana What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China Lactose tolerance is an evolutionary puzzle. In the Swamp

By now you probably know that Donald Trump came back to Washington, D.C., yesterday for the first time in more than a year, and, in a speech that I attended, offered a little taste of what he’d do with a second chance at power. (Hint: It seems pretty sinister!) But maybe just as important as what the former president said is where he said it.

Trump spoke at the first annual summit of the America First Policy Institute, an organization launched by former administration staffers and allies of his who are now working to translate Trump’s whole schtick into a policy framework. You can think of AFPI as a kind of MAGA think tank, or a grown-up Turning Point USA. And understanding this group matters, because if Trump—or, frankly, any other MAGA-style Republican—runs in 2024, he will have something that didn’t exist before: a bank of advisers prepared to back up his rants and grievances with actual legislative proposals. The institute “is going to do for the next few years what the Heritage Foundation did in 1979, 1980” for Republican politics, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the audience: provide a set of rules and guidelines to help the party achieve electoral success. (Never mind that the magic of Trumpism has always seemed to be that it never adhered to rules at all.)

The two-day summit can best be described as an elevated Trump rally—a Trump rally for the swamp-dwelling elite, if you will. Instead of a fairgrounds or concert venue, it was held in the basement ballroom of a Washington, D.C., Marriott. Instead of burgers and fries sold from food trucks, mini croissants and bottles of Perrier were on offer. And where country music or classic rock might have been blasting over the sound system, the event hosts played soft and slightly grating Muzak between panelists.

The America First agenda was helpfully outlined on glossy paper and passed around to attendees, listing panels like: “Make the Greatest Economy in the World Work for All Americans”; “Give Parents More Control Over Their Children’s Education”; and “Finish the Wall, End Human Trafficking, and Defeat the Drug Cartels.” Speakers included state and local leaders, as well as Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senators Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, and Steve Daines. During panel discussions, I sat between reporters from The Epoch Times, Breitbart, and something called American Liberty News.

The AFPI isn’t the only organization formulating the intellectual underpinnings for Trumpism. The Claremont Institute has worked on this, and so has American Greatness magazine. But all of these “America First” efforts boil down to three broad pillars, William Galston, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan research group the Brookings Institution, told me. First is a reexamination of America’s international deals and commitments through a transactional, what’s-in-it-for-us lens. The second is the development of an economic agenda that appeals to working-class voters who’ve recently joined the party’s ranks—without necessarily resorting to big-government solutions. The third “is a vigorous, deep, no-holds-barred waging of the culture wars,” Galston said.

Still, despite the panel titles and a few strange guests (“Stop the Steal” candidates Mark Finchem and Kristina Karamo; hosts from the delusional Right Side Broadcasting Network), the event itself was stuffy and occasionally boring, like any other D.C. political conference. It failed to capture the freewheeling, wild energy of a Trump rally—the vibes that made Trump so successful. Even Trump sounded sleepy when he started to speak yesterday, reading his 2024 policy plans off a teleprompter. After all, policy specifics have never really been his thing.

It wasn’t until he went off script with a few jokes about transgender athletes that Trump really seemed to get animated. Then, toward the end, he repeated a familiar refrain to his biggest applause of the night—a refrain that apparently works at rural rallies and D.C.-swamp events alike. “I ran for president; I won. Then I won a second time,” he said. “Did much better the second time; did a lot better.”

Related:

Trump’s 2024 soft launch Trump just told us his master plan Today’s News The Federal Reserve announced its fourth round of interest-rate increases this year to combat inflation. The Biden administration reportedly offered to exchange a convicted Russian arms trafficker to help secure the release of Paul Whelan, who has been detained by Russia for alleged espionage since 2018, and the WNBA star Brittney Griner. President Joe Biden tested negative for COVID-19 and has resumed working out of the Oval Office. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Biden wants cheap gas—but not too cheap, Robinson Meyer explains. Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg explores the making of an American Jewish musical tradition. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf wades into the controversies over book bans and “self-censorship” in publishing. Evening Read (Stephan Savoia / AP)

Why Americans Hate the Media

By James Fallows

(A 1996 story from the Atlantic archive)

In the late 1980s public-television stations aired a talking-heads series called Ethics in America. For each show more than a dozen prominent citizens sat around a horseshoe-shaped table and tried to answer troubling ethical questions posed by a moderator. The series might have seemed a good bet to be paralyzingly dull, but at least one show was riveting in its drama and tension.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The British right doesn’t want to hear doubts. Why must we work so hard before vacation? An army alone doesn’t make you a great power. Photos: Five months of war in Ukraine Culture Break (Shane Brown / FX Networks / Hulu)

Read. Under the Glacier is an audacious novel that blends soulful ideas with hilarious details.

Watch. Reservations Dogs is as fresh as a sitcom gets. It comes back for a second season on August 3, so catch up on Hulu now.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Although my day job often involves covering Trump and threats to democracy in America, I don’t always write about that. If you’re looking for some lighter, non-politics fare—something I deeply understand!—you might enjoy my recent story on the majesty of the Virginia opossum. Or, if you’re more of a bird person, take a look at my 2017 story arguing that the American crow deserves a lot more credit. Either way—enjoy. I’ll be filling in on the Daily for the next few days. See you tomorrow!

— Elaine

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.