Happy Easter all,

It’s Carole here signing you off a day early into the holiday weekend. I’m hoping that the sun shines wherever you are, the birds sing, Trump resists landing troops on Kharg island and that, as the Christian symbolism reminds us, from death will come life etc. 

On that note, Jane has commissioned a piece today from Krisztián Marton, a young, gay writer from Hungary who describes an unexpected feeling of hope around the upcoming election next weekend. He writes about what it’s been like living in a country where the media is entirely government-controlled and his autobiographically inspired novel can’t even be sold within a 200-metre radius of a school or church. 

If you want to see what happens when a far-right authoritarian takes control of a European nation, Hungary is the case study. An extraordinary story published this week by a consortium of European investigative journalists included leaked audio of a phone conversation between the Hungarian foreign minister and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. It’s the starkest evidence yet of how much Hungary is in Putin’s pocket: Lavrov leaned on his Hungarian counterpart to intervene to help get EU sanctions listed from a prominent oligarch’s family member. 

It’s in English and it’s a jaw-dropper. It’s also a reminder of who else Orbán is friends with: Nigel Farage. Hungarian thinktanks – partially funded by Russian oil money – have funded and nurtured prominent Reform figures including Nerve favourite MattGPT, formerly known as Matthew Goodwin.

We also have a follow-up story to our investigation into Palantir’s ever-extending tentacles. Last week, we reported on how UK investment firms and pension funds have £5bn invested in the tech surveillance firm. This week, our former Observer colleague Ian Tucker takes the story on, revealing that reaction from British academics and university to discovering that their pensions are also in the company currently being used by the US military to commit war crimes in Tehran. (Palantir’s “Maven Smart System” underpins the US’s AI weapons programme.)

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“It looks like even morons and racists have some standards,” says Stewart in this week’s column, citing evidence that nearly 25% of would-be Reform voters say Farage’s support of “his friend and hero, the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump” as the main reason they might not vote for the party. And just like Trump, Farage has started laying the groundwork for the blame game should he lose the next general election, continuing this week – on LBC – to push debunked claims that improper “family voting” affected the result in the Gorton and Denton byelection. Don’t hold your breath, however, for Farage’s “supine news media enablers” to start calling him out… Read the column in full here.

Two weeks ago, as part of a pan-European investigation, the Nerve revealed that British pension funds, investment funds and banks hold over £5bn of stock in Peter Thiel’s Trump-adjacent surveillance technology firm Palantir – whose technology underpins the ICE agency and military targeting software in the Iran war. This week, in a follow-up piece, we reveal how the USS, the largest private pension fund in the UK, which invests on behalf of university staff and academics, holds over £45m of Palantir stock. When we put this to the staff union, their leader said they should “look again” at this choice. And legal experts we spoke to questioned whether holding this stock aligns with the human rights commitments the fund has signed up to. One expert told reporter Ian Tucker: "We need to start seeing these AI companies a bit like arms manufacturers.” Read the story here.

After Nerve co-founder Jane heard the young Hungarian novelist on the excellent Europeans podcast, she asked him to write about his hopes for his country’s elections next weekend, which might see Victor Orbán ousted from power. “We’re holding our breath until 12 April,” writes Krisztián, “and entire industries are doing the same, with hiring freezes until after the elections. I personally have delayed buying a home because if Orbán is staying, who knows what will be left of the country in a few years?” Read his column here. 

The prolific French film-maker, who has made a movie almost every year since his debut in 1998, has now turned his attention to Albert Camus’s existential classic L’Étranger. On the eve of the release of The Stranger in the UK, Ozon talks to our film critic Ellen E Jones about adapting a book often seen as unfilmable, its parallels to contemporary France and how he stays optimistic. Read the interview here.

The actor – a Nerve favourite – is currently starring as Nora in A Doll’s House at London’s Almeida theatre, where she debuted her Olivier award-winning performance in The Years in 2024. Romola shares her current cultural highlights, including the novel she’s enjoyed the most this year – “a genuinely funny book”, the TV show whose closing credits made her cry, and the concert where she and her husband celebrated their anniversary. Read the full list here.

One week, two big-name London openings of classic plays about love – Robert Icke’s new staging of Romeo and Juliet and Marianne Elliott’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses starring Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner. We couldn’t decide which was the highest-profile, so sent Nerve theatre critic Dorian Lynskey to both. It’s a dead heat, star ratings-wise. Read the double review here.

Queensland-born writer Kate Young is nothing if not versatile – she is the author of queer romcom Experienced as well as the popular Little Library cookbooks, in which she imagines the food eaten by her favourite characters from classic literature. Sorrel soup from Brideshead Revisited, anyone? She has just published Dinner at Mine?, a warm and generous book subtitled “new inspiration for everyday ingredients” in which she showcases this dish where the humble spring onion is the star: “It’s so pleasing to put together and so bright and vibrant and green.” Get the recipe here.

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