I did nothing for Mother’s day this year, just like every year. Most likely you did nothing too. So I’ve concocted a mother’s day tribute list, although like the itinerant son I am, I’ve done it a bit late. Here are the 6 songs you can use to show your mum that now you’ve gone to university and got a bit cool, you don’t need her anymore.

 “What’s that mum? Oh yeah I’d love a cup of tea. Cheers”

 1. I Really Like You – Carly Rae Jepsen

Watch your mum shudder at the abrasive, candy-coated brilliance of this absolute banger. Play it repeatedly. Refer to it as an ‘absolute banger’ repeatedly. Don’t explain what ‘banger’ means. “What’s that? No mum, it’s nothing like ‘Get Lucky’. Yes, I know you liked Get Lucky. No, we can’t have Get Lucky.”

2. Hey Darling – Sleater Kinney

Don’t let the fact that this is basically just a bit of high quality AM rock stop you from intimidating your mum. Even if your mum’s a feminist, there’s no way she’s a proper feminist, like Sleater Kinney are. Talk to her about intersectionality. Talk to her Cuntry Living, and emphasise the pun. You are now more political than she ever was, and you’ve read the blogs to prove it. Let her know.

3. The Blacker the Berry – Kendrick Lamar

‘Hold on Mum – you’re not a racist, are you?’

5. All Day – Kanye West

“Kanye West is, unquestionably the greatest musician of the 21^st century”. You don’t have to believe it; you just have to say it. It’s important that your mum knows she no longer has a say in popular taste. This is your world, she’s just living in it.

6. Never Forget – Take That

Let her have this one. Here’s why: you know that job you’re going to get when you graduate? Well, the thing is, you’re not going to get it. Because graduate jobs are about as real as the big cats your Uncle Stew claims live out on the moor. So you’ll either be doing a masters, weeping into your books and listening to the Take That record you actually liked all along, or more likely, you’re moving back in, and listening to it with your mum. Just like you did before you ‘got all Oxford’.

Sorry mate. 

How it feels to not be able to communicate is a hard thing to communicate, but Ian McEwan has made a career out of doing so. His plots sprint off from where his characters’ conversations stumble into misunderstanding. Partially, these misunderstandings are the result of the particular kind of Englishness his characters generally possess; it is the kind of Englishness which takes its dog for a walk after finding its wife has been unfaithful, the kind which screws up the love letters it has been writing all afternoon. The first sentence of his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach illustrates this superbly: ‘They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.’ Yet McEwan’s characters are also unable to speak their minds because they do not know their minds, nor their hearts; only McEwan, with his shrewd Freudian eye, and his pen tracing their most repressed thoughts, knows what really motivates them. Even the tightest lid will let off steam, and no matter how emotionally hunched up these characters are they never succeed in battening down their unconscious urges for long. Reading McEwan’s best books we vaguely forebode the character’s coming crisis, but cannot predict what form it will take; we are surprised by how it happens, not by its happening.

Unfortunately his latest book, The Children Act, is not one of those books. It is a slim novel, standing on its tip toes so as not to be categorized as a novella, which concerns a few months in the life of Fiona Maye, a high court judge whose husband leaves her for a younger (and, it quickly turns out, uninterested) woman, and whose professional life swamps her private life with a series of morally perplexing court cases. The plot begins just as Fiona’s husband tells her he wants to have an affair, but from here it expands chronologically in both directions, digressing to a court case several weeks past concerning two Jewish children whose father wants to shield them from a modern education, and progressing forwards towards a case to give a grievously ill Jehova’s Witness a blood transfusion, against his parents’ wishes.

‘Digressing’ might seem a needlessly negative word, but the way in which the plot wades into Fiona’s past makes it unwieldy. McEwan ballasts every halting progression in time with pages and pages of flashback-exposition. This is irritating, especially as McEwan has previously shown how supplely and economically he can convey the conditions which formed his characters’ personality. When reading his 1990 novel The Innocent we learn how sheltered the main character’s life has been so far from the first wry sentence in which he is mentioned: ‘Leonard Marnham, an employee of the Post Office, had never actually met an American to talk to, but he had studied them in depth at his local Odeon.’ In The Children Act, McEwan is rarely so tersely brilliant, because he does not trust the reader to be so discerning.

Every novel has a hypothetical implied reader – the kind of reader who is just discerning enough to understand why the author has written what is written and not otherwise. The implied reader of Finnegan’s Wake is an anal-retentive genius with an attention span of twenty years and an encyclopedic knowledge of a dozen languages and three thousand years of literature. He is, in other words, James Joyce himself. The implied reader of The Children Act, by comparison, is a humble figure. In fact, he’s a bit dim. He needs things to be explained to him, all of the time. Which is good, because that’s exactly what McEwan’s narrator does – all of the time.

So often, when his character’s feelings are made perfectly clear by what they say and how they act, he burdens his prose with unnecessary explication. ‘I’m not the one about to wreck our marriage’, Fiona retorts to her husband’s attempt to shift the blame, to which he responds ‘so you say.’ That this is an attempt to exploit her insecurities is needless to say– but McEwan does say so, at length. Her husband, he writes, ‘said it reasonably, projecting the three words deep into the cave of her self-doubt, shaping them to her inclination to believe that in any conflict as embarrassing as this, she was likely to be wrong.’ This tells us nothing that hasn’t already been implied, and the metaphor of the cave is ill chosen. McEwan uses it because caves are generally empty. But Fiona’s self-doubts are not cave-like, they are not a vessel to be filled; they themselves fill her mind to the point of overflowing. In fact, the story itself progresses through their overflow into her public life. This passage is not a one off –McEwan’s narrator is always barging in on the tenderest of scenes, third-wheeling on lovers and mourners, with his impromptu lectures and his cack-handed metaphors.

McEwan also seems to be under the impression that we are unable to remember what he wrote five pages ago. This is no exaggeration: on page 140 he tells us ‘Teenage visits to her Newcastle cousins had been her only adventures’, then on page 145, ‘She had a history with Newcastle and felt at ease here. In her teens she had come several times.’ I imagine any goldfish who happen to pick up The Children Act will find this kind of repetition helpful. But humans are likely to find it annoying.

Yet in its favour, Children Act does present us with a set of characters who are imaginably human. This has always been McEwan’s forte, and his ability to do so shows no sign of waning. The only caveat I would place on this judgement is that Fiona seems too conveniently able to articulate her feelings; this too is a way in which McEwan mollycoddles the reader. The plot of The Children Act advances in such a way as to make Fiona, and by extension the reader, question the supremacy of her atheistic belief system above other such systems. In real life, we do a great deal of our thinking about such questions as this without realising we are doing so. Changing one’s religious or political beliefs is not something which happens in an instant. About these matters there are no Demascene moments; there are only moments when we realise we have already changed our minds. This is especially true of people who, like Fiona, would rather not have to bother thinking about such humongous questions, who would rather their lives were not complicated by their own emotions. At the bedside of the ill, devout, and portentously named Adam, Fiona realises that ‘Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another’. This realisation is too unanticipated to be believable, which is especially a shame because, as mentioned earlier, McEwan has previously done a brilliant job of making developments in his characters both surprising and concordant with their pasts. Here McEwan obviously intends to express Fiona’s own feelings through the third person, rather than the thoughts of some distant, omniscient narrator, but these same feelings are so neatly and articulately expressed that they read as if they were the narrator’s. Such moments break our suspension of disbelief, and remind us that she is, in fact, just a fictional construct.

I finished The Children Act asking the question no author ever wants their readers to ask: is this bad novel just a blip, or does it represent a more general decline in its writer’s artistic powers? I don’t know, but the irritating aspects of this book are not new to McEwan’s work. His nannyish attitude towards the reader, his need to calibrate the entire plot towards the conveyance of an ideological point, and deleterious effect of these faults on his characterisations, have been present in his writing at least since 2007’s On Chesil Beach. McEwan has much affection for the reader but less respect. For this reason, The Children Act is not likely to inspire the reader with much respect for him, either.

Over the last few weeks, ever more shocking evidence has emerged of the systematic destruction of ancient Assyrian culture by Islamic State. Online footage appears to show militants smashing statues from the Mosul museum in Iraq, and a Winged Bull, believed to have stood at the gates of Nineveh in the 7^th century BC, being defaced with a power drill. There are even indications that the ruins of Hatra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have been bulldozed.

The international community was quick to respond, with the UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova denouncing Islamic State’s actions as a “war crime” and an “attack against the Iraqi people”. But media coverage has been fairly negligible. The destruction of a museum does not compare with the public burnings of prisoners of war, or executions of hostages, in terms of ‘shock factor’ or even public interest. Nevertheless, IS’s campaign against culture is a calculated and ruthless attempt to erase an entire people’s cultural identity. It is a threat not just to Iraq’s history but to the world’s, and one that the world cannot afford to gloss over. 

This form of cultural warfare is as ancient as the artefacts which are its current victims. When the Medes and the Persians sacked Nineveh in the 7^th century BC, the city, and others like it, were subjected to a cultural whitewash. Temples, statues and other religious sites were pulled down and obliterated. More recently, the Bosnian War between 1992-95 saw the organised destruction of Muslim cultural heritage sites as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing conducted mainly by Bosnian Serbs. In 2001 the Taliban infamously used dynamite to blow up the two largest standing statues of Buddha in the world. They were almost 1500 years old.

By destroying a nation’s past, you gain control over its future. By eliminating everything that a people’s identity is founded upon, you can wipe the slate clean and mould a new ideology and cultural identity shaped by ideas that you want to engrain. All a people have left is what you permit them to have.

It’s difficult to change a people’s beliefs. Islamic State know this, and have frequently made clear that their members are prepared to die for their warped ideological cause. But once the cornerstones of a people’s belief are taken away, the physical manifestations of faith and identity savagely annihilated before their eyes, then it becomes harder for them to cling to what once seemed a thing of great pride and power. IS want to create a people with no memory of their own history, and with a future that has been engineered for them.

When the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ in 1944, it had a slightly broader meaning than it has come to acquire. Genoice, according to Lemkin, is “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups”. The objectives of genocide were, he argued, “The disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion etc.”

IS’s attack on culture is a form of genocide; the systematic erasure of not just national, but also world history. It is important to remember that much of the West considers its earliest roots to lie in the ancient region of Mesopotamia. IS is undoubtedly targeting the West as well as the Middle East with its callous campaign. If, as the militants in the video claim, the destruction is a form of iconoclasm, then what need is there to publish the videos online? It is as much a part of the group’s ‘shock factor’ tactics as the horrific executions that have appeared on its propaganda web pages over the past year.

So what can be done to prevent such a crime? Mosul, Nimrud and other ancient sites lie deep in IS-controlled territory. It also doesn’t help that Iraq did not sign the 1998 Rome Statute, meaning that it cannot refer the destruction to the International Criminal Court. But then IS has shown itself to be in utter contempt of international law. It is hopelessly naïve to think that such a referral would do anything to change its attitude. Perhaps international cooperation could help to trace the black-market sale of antiques, which provides a major source of income for the group, but this would do nothing to prevent the eradication of ancient sites and artefacts like the Winged Bull.

Ultimately, of course, these magnificent artefacts will only be truly safe when stability returns to the region, which may, unfortunately, take quite some time. In their wanton destruction of Assyrian culture, Islamic State have shown an almost inhuman lack of respect for the past and for the people to whom that culture belongs. Not to be in awe of these incredible works defies human instinct; to actively seek to destroy them is nothing short of barbaric.

We should mourn the loss of these great monuments, and remember the past that they represented. It is vital that, at the very least, we remember them, and that IS’s attempt to eradicate all memory of past cultures is not allowed to succeed.