The Caribbean is struggling to remain financially afloat while weathering the effects of climate change. The British Commonwealth can help by paying reparations to a community they wronged during the slave trade. Demand the new king take moral and financial responsibility for his nation’s troubling history.
From cutting caricatures of high-profile women to affectionate depictions of Britain’s “heaviest man”, Freya Gowrley considers why 18th-century satirists were so fixated with fatness
One artist who knows all too well what having Covid-19 can feel like is Luke Jerram. He recovered from the virus two months ago but is still feeling the effects. ‘My sense of smell is shot, I have tinnitus and still feel tired at times,’ he says. Since 2004, Jerram has worked on a series of glass-blown sculptures of disease-causing viruses; during his convalescence, he decided that his next artwork would focus on the Covid-19 vaccines, as a tribute to the scientists and medical teams who have been coordinating their efforts across the world to fight the disease. He has now unveiled his glass sculpture of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which at 34 centimetres wide is one million times larger than the nanoparticles in the vaccine. ‘It’s brilliant that such effective vaccines have been created in such a short space of time and that here in the UK we’ve been able to roll them out so quickly,’ he says.