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Daily Mail
19-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel: Dead city that is still erupting with secrets
The Buried City: Unearthing The Real Pompeii by Gabriel Zuchtriegel (Hodder £22, 256pp) It seems incredible that a city that ceased to exist almost 2,000 years ago is still making headlines today. But so it is. Only last week we learned of how some desperate people, on that fateful summer's day in a Roman city in 79AD, tried to block up the door of a room with a bed, in a desperate attempt to save their lives... That city was of course Pompeii, a city like no other. Because of the catastrophic way in which it was destroyed, first by a rain of tiny volcanic stones, then colossal amounts of super-heated dust and ash, Pompeii was also preserved for centuries, as if frozen in time. Not only its 'houses, shops, bakeries, brothels, pubs, fountains, squares, temples and cemeteries', but 'pots on stoves, loaves in ovens, coins in tills and even unmade beds in bedrooms.' All were buried eventually by this terrible rain from heaven, when the huge mushroom cloud above Vesuvius finally collapsed in on itself. As the author puts it, the effect was like a tower block collapsing in on itself – only a tower block 32km high, ejecting dust at up to 300C. The city ended up buried under 2.5 metres of this dust, a toxic blanket under which nothing could survive. Organic matter eventually rotted away to leave perfect statues in negative, as it were, from which experts have created dramatic and moving casts. Why didn't people escape, incidentally? Well, some did. But the monstrous eruption turned day into night. It was pitch black, the air was choking, and people naturally fled indoors and barred their doors, where they were eventually buried alive. The head of the archaeological excavations today, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, has just brought out this fascinating new book about what we are still learning about this most haunting of all lost cities. Why wasn't the ancient city rebuilt, he asks? In fact, in immediate response to the disaster, the Emperor Titus sent officials down there to do just that. A matter of Roman pride. But viewing the site of the disaster, the officials were horrified to realise that any such reconstruction was quite impossible. There was literally nothing left. In remarkably short time, the doomed city was lost and forgotten, nature returned with amazing speed, vegetation colonising the enriched volcanic soils, becoming a place where 'sheep graze among the olive trees and vines'. Thus it stayed hidden until the first excavations in 1748, excavations which have continued ever since, with startling new revelations – such as that door being blocked by a bed – literally spilling out of the ground almost weekly. One major shock took place only in the last ten years, when the very size of Pompeii had to be radically revised. For a long time, it was reckoned that this glittering, somewhat decadent seaside resort favoured by the celebs and super-rich of Imperial Rome – think Cannes today, perhaps, or Malibu – was thought to have had a population of some 12,000 people, based upon the number of houses. But in 2017 a remarkable funerary inscription was discovered, in which one wealthy local, Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius Maius, proudly recorded that he had once thrown a dinner party 'consisting of 456 tricliniums with 15 men at each triclinium'. A triclinium was a dining table surrounded on three sides by long couches. So his guests numbered 6,840 men. But these were all enfranchised male citizens. Add their wives and children, non-citizens, and the vast armies of slaves, and this would imply that Pompeii was a city of 45,000 people, some living in elegant villas but many living in appallingly overcrowded slums and slave quarters, often little more than a cellar or a subterranean hovel. As the author reminds us, if we look merely to Latin literature and history, we find it concerns almost solely 'a tiny minority of rich and powerful people'. Details of the daily lives of slaves are few indeed. But now, thanks to Pompeii, here is a snapshot: three slaves who lived in a cellar just 16 metres square, on three campbeds, sleeping under woollen blankets. One of the three was a child. The cellar had one tiny window and one chamber pot. And in case we picture Pompeii as always hot and sunny, remember that our mental image of Ancient Rome often comes from Hollywood movies, necessarily filmed in bright sunshine. Winters in Rome or Pompeii could be bitterly cold. Zuchtriegel also writes wryly about his own profession. First there are archaeological finds, and then there are interpretations. And archaeologists can disagree with each other here, often vociferously. One example is the famous Villa of the Mysteries, as it's called, the frescoed walls of which appear to depict all kinds of dark shenanigans. There's a wall-painting of Dionysus, the orgiastic god of wine, along with a female consort. A mysterious object is hidden under a cloth, just about to be unveiled: probably a statuette of an erect phallus. On another wall there is a depiction of 'ritual flagellation and naked dancing'. Crikey, what on earth was this place? Surely the centre of some depraved and drunken cult? Ah, but it's all in the interpretation. Today some scholars think it wasn't really a Villa of Mysteries at all, but more like a Marriage Villa. The Romans were quite an earthy lot, and the wall paintings are simply images of marriage, fertility and childbirth to inspire a newly wedded couple, 'wrapped in places in humorous allegory'. Another site perhaps needs less interpretation. One public bath had extra rooms upstairs, their walls decorated with some really rude paintings. Almost surely a brothel. But all this easy classical nudity can cause unexpected problems with modern social media. At one point, the author's team tried to post some images of marble statues of naked goddesses on their Facebook page, only for them to be blocked as 'inappropriate'! So the story of doomed and tragic Pompeii continues even in the 21st century, and the discoveries will continue for many years yet. And they can be as deeply moving as any film or novel, admits the author, whether it's the preserved outline of a child of five or six, in the throes of death, clutching the nearest adult, or some innocent drawings in charcoal on walls, of little stick men, gladiators, animals, and in one corner, 'the outline of a tiny hand'.
BBC News
05-03-2025
- Business
- BBC News
First look inside Leeds Bradford Airport's £100m expansion
The first phase of Leeds Bradford Airport's £100m expansion project is set to be completed by summer. The new terminal extension will provide an 83% increase in seating capacity, with phase two of the development seeing a refurbishment of the existing Hodder, airport chief executive officer, previously said it was "the first major improvement to our terminal since its opening in 1968 and is long overdue". Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Telegraph
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Kate Mosse: I wrote a global smash hit but male authors are taken more seriously
Almost the first thing I see when I step inside Kate Mosse's Chichester house is her 94-year-old mother-in-law, known as Granny Rosie, sipping her lunchtime gin and tonic and hunched over a codeword puzzle in the kitchen. A couple of uneaten sandwiches lie on a plate in front of her, which Mosse urges her to eat. But Granny Rosie is more interested in trying to place the letter X and, as I try uselessly to help, she seizes on her error. 'Done it!' she says triumphantly. 'She sometimes manages it in 10 minutes,' says Mosse. Granny Rosie, who has lived with Mosse, 63, and her writer husband Greg for nearly 30 years, is one reason why Mosse is less able these days to visit her beloved Carcassonne, the medieval walled citadel in France, where the best-selling author has had a house since 1989, and whose blood-soaked history inspired her 2005 global smash hit Labyrinth. Rosie is now in a wheelchair and although in spirit is as independent as ever, she needs more help from Mosse, who is her full-time carer (the house is proudly, if intimidatingly, intergenerational, with Mosse's daughter Martha, director of the Paul Smith Foundation, and her two-year-old grandson Finn also currently in residence, along with Greg's brother-in-law, a photographer. Mosse also has a son, Felix, a writer and script editor). So if Mosse can't go to Carcassonne, Carcassonne must come to her. This month she embarks on a 34-date tour in honour of the book's 20th anniversary, in which she will immerse her novel's many devoted fans in the region's brutal warmongering and esoteric mythology through a mix of storytelling and personal anecdotes. 'I did a similar tour last year to launch my book Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries [an alternative feminist history], and when the publishers suggested that, I was terrified,' she says, a small, neat, dynamic figure dressed down in jeans and sweater. 'But my parents always brought me up to give things a go.' Few novels celebrate their 20th birthday with such fanfare but then few novels have had such seismic popular impact. Mosse had previously written four books, having left her publishing job as an editorial director at Hodder in 1992 in order to write, but she was also struggling to make ends meet when Labyrinth was published. A furiously paced female-fronted time-slip adventure that splices the persecution of the 12th-century Cathars by the Catholic North with the legends of the Holy Grail, it has now sold more than 10 million copies in 41 countries. 'Its success meant I no longer had to take every journalism job I was offered for a couple of hundred quid,' she says. 'It was great after some very lean years to not have to think about the pounds, shilling and pence. But most of all it meant that when my father, who had Parkinson's, started to deteriorate, and the time came for us to throw in our lot together to support my mother, we could find a house that could accommodate everyone and we could afford to access the expert carers he needed. That is what I am most grateful for.' That house is the one she still lives in, a spacious double-fronted Edwardian on the outskirts of Chichester. It had previously been an old people's home and, when Mosse and Greg bought it, required a huge amount of renovation. 'There were all these hideous thick brown doors everywhere, while the garden was littered with awful green and pink baths used as planters.' She and Greg had an annexe built for her parents to live in and for years she helped her mother, a former teacher of economics, to look after her father, who had been a solicitor, an experience she writes about in her 2021 memoir An Extra Pair of Hands. Mosse still wells up when talking about her parents. Both had been well known and loved in the town in which they had lived for many years, although they had brought up Mosse and her sister in nearby Fishbourne, and had devoted much of their lives to voluntary work. 'They were good people, real pillars of the community. When they died [her mother passed away in 2014] there were not enough orders of service for their funerals.' She had imagined her father dying long before he did: Labyrinth contains a deeply touching scene between the 17-year-old Alais and her dying father, a local nobleman. 'I'd obviously not had that experience at that point, but I put everything that I feared it would be like into writing that scene. I realised I got it exactly right, except my dad, unlike Alais's father, had a very good death. I was with him, the windows were open, the birds were singing and it was a lovely May morning.' Mosse, who studied English at Oxford University, has written many novels since Labyrinth, including its two sequels Citadel and Sepulchre and The Burning Chambers quartet, inspired by the French Wars of Religion. All are imbued with an almost mystical feel for history and a romantic sense of place. Yet conversation with Mosse naturally keeps veering back to that book: even the room we are sitting in, a light-filled study painted racing green, contains an entire wall devoted to its many editions. It stood out when it was published for feminising the quest-propelled adventure genre traditionally perceived, thanks in no small part to Dan Brown, as the exclusive preserve of men. Yet some reviewers insisted on labelling it as 'women's fiction', perhaps unable to accept that Mosse had strayed out of her lane by not writing 'a domestic story', as she puts it. One broadsheet called it 'the thinking girl's summer reading'. Mosse had to fight hard to persuade the publishers to 'not put a picture of flowers on the front cover' and for years resisted calls from film producers who were keen to adapt it but who insisted on including a male lead. 'It's a story about two girls. Who did they think the male lead was going to be? So there was always that underlying thing.' The irony is that few novelists had devoted more energy to battling 'that underlying thing', whereby fiction written by and about women is seen as less worthy than that written by men, than Mosse. A decade previously she had founded The Women's Prize to celebrate female fiction precisely because the year before the 1991 Booker shortlist had featured only male authors. Mosse's point wasn't that the judges should have picked a couple of women; it was that no one noticed, or cared, that they hadn't. She expected the Women's Prize launch at the ICA to resemble 'a Breughel painting, full of people waving their hats in excitement'. Instead 'one journalist asked me if I was a lesbian. Another man rang my husband and told him he should be ashamed of letting his wife behave like that.' Evidently the idea of a literary prize celebrating women was too much for some men to take. 'There were a lot of unpleasant emails. Some people find the idea of women standing shoulder to shoulder very challenging.' To some extent she thinks she got off lightly. 'I'd like to think I'd have the courage to launch something like The Women's Prize today but I know [the abuse on social media] would be awful. I'd need to have a much thicker skin than I do. I have female friends who are MPs and the abuse they get is sickening.' Many of the Women's Prize's detractors, though, have been women. Germaine Greer and the late AS Byatt were among those who argued when the prize was established that giving women special treatment in this way was condescending, and ran counter to the aim of not pigeon-holing women's literature. Today with female novelists on average dominating around 75 per cent of the contemporary fiction market, and with five women on the Booker shortlist in 2024, what, one might ask, is the point of the prize? Mosse has heard this argument many times. 'It's not about quotas,' she says. 'There have always been more women published than men. The Women's Prize was never about access to market, it was about celebrating and honouring women's fiction as being equal to men's. 'There is still the misconception that 'literature' is what we all studied at school and university – which is mostly works by men with a male protagonist and universal; whereas fiction written by women, particularly with a female protagonist, is still seen as 'for women' and not for all readers. And although the Women's Prize has turned the dial, there is still a job to be done. It's great that five women were on the Booker shortlist but the fact it was commented on is down to the Women's Prize.' The next frontier, she says, is non-fiction. Last year she launched a sister prize, The Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, with the inaugural winner Naomi Klein for Doppelganger, a memoir about shifting political allegiances in the age of big tech. 'Women are likely to receive lower advances for their books in this area, and the 'smart thinking' shelves in bookshops are often a female-free zone. Women are still not perceived as being 'expert' on the same terms as their male colleagues, even when their experience and their achievements are comparable. I get that as an artist no one wants to be defined by their gender, but we know that in real life that's not how it works.' Shifting the dial is becoming Mosse's life work. Her next project is a YA work of non-fiction, Feminist History For Every Day of the Year, containing 366 stories of influential women throughout history, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Billie Eilish, which will be published in September. When she wrote it, she was warned by her editors not to assume knowledge on behalf of her readers. 'They told me [most young girls], for instance, won't have heard of Greenham Common, which was so big for my generation and such a crucial part of the women's movement.' To some extent it didn't surprise her. 'From what I hear from teachers, there is very little about women's achievements taught in schools.' She hopes as many boys will read it as girls. 'There are so many pressures on young boys. Many of them feel quite threatened by feminism. You can see this [playing out] in the Andrew Tate phenomenon. But for me this is what feminism is about. Rigid patriarchal structures benefit no one but a tiny few. I've always written about strong women and gentle men in my fiction because what about all those boys who don't want to be that boy? They are under as much pressure [as girls] to behave in ways that don't feel normal to them. And when they come through it, when they are a bit older, those men who were a bit laddish in their youth are often a bit horrified by their behaviour.' Does she think these gender pressures are partly responsible for the mental health crisis in young people? 'Oh yes, quite possibly. Boys and girls are under such peer pressure. And then there's the social media echo chamber. There is no shared story in the way there used to be. Instead we have a sense of disconnect [brought about by technology]. Everyone has ear buds plugged in and that normal engagement you used to have with strangers on the street, the simple courtesy of hearing or saying 'after you' etc is gone.' Mosse is an indefatigable natural campaigner, blessed with a natural clipboard efficiency. Thanks to An Extra Pair of Hands she has recently found herself becoming a spokesperson for Britain's growing number of largely invisible care workers. 'I can't speak for every carer, not least since my situation is particularly privileged,' she says. 'We have the room, plus Greg and I are both writers who work from home. But the stats are terrifying. There is a huge number of child carers for instance [the exact figure is estimated to be around 120,000]. By the age of 59, 50 per cent of women will become an unpaid carer [although this might only amount to a few hours a week]. If we all downed tools the NHS would collapse in an instance. Successive governments have for years failed to implement meaningful reforms in this area but it's partly out of fear. The issue is not a vote winner. And so the situation goes on.' Where does she stand on assisted dying? 'I believe everyone should have agency over their own body. So it needs to start from that. That doesn't mean I don't have big concerns over coercion. Of course it needs to be fully regulated.' Her love for Granny Rose feels sewn into the very fabric of the house, although caring for a nonagenarian is not without its comedy moments. 'She once pressed her panic button by mistake and the police rushed round to find her sunbathing in the garden in her underwear. So we don't leave her by herself anymore.' Her most recent stance has been against Labour's recent consultation on copyright and AI data mining, which came under fierce criticism from the creative industries when it was launched in December for allowing companies to train AI using published material without permission unless individual artists opted out. 'It comes down to money,' says Mosse, who has had five of her novels licensed without permission in this way. '[Labour] have their heads turned by Silicon Valley and automatic growth. AI companies are saying that artists have to opt out. What they mean is they don't want to pay. They say if they do have to pay they won't invest. But most of these tech companies are off shore. But it's also ludicrous. It means I have to go round every AI company to say 'don't steal my work'. It's like owning a corner shop and a succession of thieves steal all your Mars bars because you didn't ask each thief not to do so. 'The UK has one of the oldest and most robust copyright laws in the world, it dates from 1710 and it's very simple. You own your work.' She gives a wry smile. 'When Silicon Valley accused the Chinese chatbox DeepSeek of theft by saying it may have been trained on American AI models, you couldn't help but laugh, because that's what American AI has done to writers.' She's not remotely anti tech, although she is not a fan of some of the bros who dominate it: she came off X when Musk took over. 'Partly because it was suddenly full of adverts for bitcoin. It was like an arcade. But also, I didn't want to be part of something run by someone who has such contempt for democracy.' Would she allow AI to license her work if they paid? 'Yes, absolutely. AI needs all that female history. AI generally is here to stay, it's the future, that's it. There are so many amazing things that will happen through AI. But a dazzling thing has gone on whereby we have become blind to the significant issues that AI will bring.' Such as the existential challenge it presents to writing itself. 'AI relies on recycling; it's hard not to worry that whatever literature it produces will be very thin indeed. I'm not worried for me but for the writers yet to come. That's why I'm happy to use my platform.' She uses that platform wherever she can. Her current passion project is the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban, and along with the organisation Untold Narratives she is working with an Afghan Women's Writers Group. 'Where we are in the world right now is a place that as a feminist I never thought I'd see. In Afghanistan women are being erased.' She agrees that by and large there has been a startling absence of protest against this in the West, particularly among feminists. 'What's happening in Afghanistan is at the top of my agenda. It's not at the top of others. Instead different things are..' Yet she's not about to bash the younger generation. She bats away, for example, the suggestion that publishing has become dominated by younger editors intent on pursuing 'woke'' agendas. 'When I worked in publishing [in the 1980s] it was definitely a bit of a gentleman's club. But it's also always been full of people who feel passionately about things. In the 1980s the cause was apartheid and South Africa and there were lots of fights between editors on how publishing should be responding to that. Publishing has always had those spats.' Mosse, ever the doer, prefers deeds to virtue signalling. 'The job is not to persuade everyone in the world that you are right, but rather, if you believe you are right, then to do the right thing,' she says. 'I've never found moaning about things very helpful. You have to get things done.' Labyrinth: 20th Anniversary Edition by Kate Mosse with a specially commissioned introduction by Sir Ian Rankin and a new afterword by Kate Mosse is published by Phoenix on February 20 2025, Hardback, £30.
BBC News
13-02-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Leeds Bradford Airport expansion to be completed by winter 2026
The expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport (LBA) is set to be completed in winter 2026 as it prepares to enter the second phase of extension of the existing terminal is expected to be finished by summer second phase of the development, which has just been granted permission, is the refurbishment of the current terminal by winter Hodder, chief executive of LBA said it was "the first major improvement to our terminal since its opening in1968 and is long overdue". He added: "It's vitally important to upgrade LBA to the world-class facility Yorkshire deserves."LBA also announced that the contract to complete the upgrade would be awarded to Northern Irish firm Farrans Montague, its regional director, said: "Leeds is an important region for our business."We are all frequent users of LBA and we are looking forward to working together with the airport's team on the successful delivery of the next stage of the project." By 2025, LBA said it expected to contribute a total of £460m to the local economy, directly employing 2,100 people and indirectly supporting 4,500 Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer and MP for Leeds West and Pudsey, previously opposed expanding LBA but has since changed her mind and stated "the way we fly has changed". She has since backed a third runway at London Heathrow and the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield led to activists from the Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport (GALBA) to protest outside Ms Reeves' constituency office. The Chancellor had justified her U-turn by saying planes now ran on 'sustainable' aviation fuels (SAF).But GALBA chair Nick Hodgkinson said: "I'm sorry to say that claim does not stand up to scrutiny. "While SAF can be made from waste matter, there is a very limited supply of genuinely sustainable feedstock to make it."LBA aims to become a net-zero carbon airport by to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.
