by Paul Graham

Having just emerged from three-and a-half months of lockdown, more or less, in London and returned to my current home in Rome, I find myself preoccupied not with Covid-19 and the effects of the pandemic but with the aftermath of the brutal death in police custody of the African American George Floyd. So much so, within days of my return, I downloaded from a newspaper the image of Patrick Hutchinson, the black man from south London who bore an injured white man on his shoulders during a Black Lives Matter protest in London in mid June. It now hangs on the wall of my office.