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Digested week: Minor quake hits book lauding bits of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s chest | Emma Brockes

Monday

It’s publication week for American Canto, the hastily turned around memoir by the former New York magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi, who took on the challenge of explaining what it was about Robert F Kennedy Jr she found so alluring, a task for which no upper word limit is adequate. Nuzzi, if you’ve fallen behind, developed romantic feelings for the then presidential candidate, now Trump health minister, while profiling him for the magazine and since I’ve had to read this sentence, you do too: “He was exhausted, and he threw himself onto the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest.” If you have a favourite part of RFK Jr’s chest, or consider chests in general subject to preference by localised area, this may be the book for you.

As mockery in the press rose to a shriek on Monday, so Nuzzi’s defenders started to rally. Monica Lewinsky, who along with Amanda Knox has become the most ubiquitous figure of our age, reached out to Nuzzi to offer sympathy. Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women, praised Nuzzi for writing what she called on Instagram a “scintillating love story” and posted a sentence seemingly caught in the undertow effect of reading Nuzzi at length. (From Taddeo: “All across the internet little boys and girls are wielding poison darts they didn’t even check the constitution of before lobbing in the direction of somebody who has achieved enough intrigue and intelligence in their life and … ”)

Nuzzi, who was a good writer at New York magazine before all this happened, appears to have fallen prey to the combination of a tight deadline, the destabilising effect the words “book contract” can have on even sensible writers, and the need to dignify an otherwise embarrassing story with paragraph-long sentences feverishly hoping for flight. It’s easily done. While CNN unkindly sent a reporter to several Manhattan bookstores to see if the title was selling (not really), the rest of us joined Nuzzi in trying to use the story to say something trenchant about the world at large, a noble – if ultimately doomed – reflex.

Tuesday

Quick, someone tell Nuzzi to reach out to the Emirates airline festival of literature, which is a woman down this week after the novelist R F Kuang pulled out of the lineup. The festival, which takes place annually in the United Arab Emirates, is organised under the state patronage of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, and attracts many laudable and liberal-identifying writers from the west – including, over the years, Bonnie Garmus, Jacqueline Wilson and Ian Rankin.

Kuang, who is promoting her most recent novel Katabasis, pulled out of the festival in answer to a call from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the Palestinian-led campaign more commonly associated with calls to boycott Israel, which has urged a boycott on the UAE for allegedly supplying weapons to the paramilitary group behind ongoing violence in Sudan. As Kuang said in her statement, she has “always respected organised calls for cultural boycotts against genocide from communities directly affected and in particular, guidelines set forth by the BDS movement”.

Very laudable. But, as with the fierce defenders of free speech who appeared recently at the Riyadh comedy festival, one has to wonder at the decision to say yes in the first place. In the UAE, homosexuality is illegal, women live under male guardianship, and for anyone who remembers the New Yorker’s 2023 investigation into the disappearance of the fugitive princesses of Dubai, the overwhelming impression is not that they are alive and well and enjoying life in a system that welcomes the free exchange of ideas.

Wednesday

Here’s David Dimbleby, look, not a day over 87 and appearing rather rakish and fierce in his dotage. The first episode of What’s the Monarchy For?, his new series about the royals, dropped on the BBC this week and it’s a great watch, mainly for the magnetism of Dimbleby’s no-monkeys-left-to-give presenting style and, in this his super-age, a sly new aspect that gives him the outline of a character from Dickens.

We see him tease a surprised David Cameron by impersonating Queen Elizabeth II and asking him if he really thinks calling a referendum was a good idea; suggest that King Charles’s handwriting is so bad that when he signs his name it looks like “Mary”; and grin devilishly when Ash Sarkar accuses him of representing the class system as much as the royals. Ostensibly the programme offers a sceptical look at the value of monarchy, but – until we get to the episode about Andrew, at least – I think we all know where we are with this. The story Dimbleby tells of the late queen nipping behind a shrub in the gardens of Buckingham Palace to avoid having to speak to Nicolae Ceaușescu leaves one with as warm a glow for “the firm” as one ever has.

Thursday

I was in an earthquake last year – the New Jersey quake of 24 that caused the glass in my kitchen cabinets briefly to shake in their sockets – and have vivid memories of how enjoyable the aftermath: joining the neighbours in the hallway to squeal; hearing my children’s tales of being grouped on the rug in their classroom by Ms Wu while one enterprising child dived under her desk; and of course being condescended to endlessly by people from California.

To survivors of Thursday’s 3.3-magnitude quake in Lancashire and the southern Lake District, therefore, I wish the same pleasures. Footage shared from the CCTV of a car park in Lancashire captured the drama of a split second camera-shake followed by an upstairs light going on in the window of a house, a sequence – “Earthquake, 2025” – that could admirably play on a loop in Tate Modern.

Friday

Being prime minister looks like a mostly terrible gig at the moment and so I’m happy for Keir Starmer, caught beaming this week after being seated beside 90s supermodel Claudia Schiffer at the German state banquet hosted at Windsor Castle. Other guests, who dined on a heavy sounding menu of hot smoked trout with langoustines, quail eggs and a take on black forest gateau, included the German footballer Thomas Hitzlsperger and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier – suggesting that, for once in his ill-starred premiership, Sir Keir emphatically drew the long straw.