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The art of the nutmeg

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The art of the nutmeg

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“Nutmegs, for me, are a beautiful thing to do,” Javier Pastore, the former Argentina international, said.

“They’re beautiful to watch. In fact, even when I get nutmegged myself I find that beautiful – and that actually happens quite a lot too!”.

Whether using the inside or outside of the foot, or the sole or the heel, Pastore was an absolute master of slipping the ball between an opponent’s legs, creating the illusion that he was running through people at times.

“I think it’s a skill that gives you a lot of possibilities as it eliminates an opposition player,” Pastore, who played for Paris Saint-Germain between 2011 and 2018, said. “I find it much easier to do a little nutmeg and run round the player than to try and dribble around him with the ball.”

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(Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images)

Eliminates is a good word. Humiliates would be another.

There are more elaborate skills on a football pitch, for sure, but it’s hard to think of any other trick that brings one player so much adulation and strips another of their dignity in quite the same way as a nutmeg.

When Jude Bellingham nutmegged Conor Coady before scoring in his first England training session, everyone applauded the teenager. Everyone except Coady, obviously. “I thought, ‘I look like a right plant pot here!’,” Coady told the Ben Foster Podcast when discussing the incident.

Clearly, some nutmegs are more flamboyant than others and, naturally, that brings a whole new level of misery to the player on the receiving end.

The good news for Gary Cahill was that Raphinha’s quite brilliant 270-degree turn and nutmeg on him at Elland Road in 2021 came at a time when football was being played behind closed doors because of the global pandemic.

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The bad news for Cahill was that the footage went viral the next day.

The word nutmeg has been part of football’s lexicon for as long as people can remember.

According to Peter Seddon, author of the book Football Talk – The Language & Folklore Of The World’s Greatest Game, the origin of the term relates to the exportation of actual nutmegs between North America and England in the 1800s.

“Nutmegs were such a valuable commodity that unscrupulous exporters were known to pull a fast one by mixing a helping of wooden replicas into the sacks being shipped to England,” Seddon wrote.

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“Being nutmegged soon came to imply stupidity on the part of the duped victim and cleverness on the part of the trickster.”

All of which fits rather nicely.

Nutmeg.

Panna.

Tunel.

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Cano.

Petit Pont.

Whatever the language, the message remains the same – essentially, you’re making your opponent look like a fool by putting the ball between their legs, even if that wasn’t even the motivation at the time.

“I had a bad touch and I got myself into a situation where I had no other alternatives, so it wasn’t planned,” Scott Hiley tells The Athletic.

“When I got control of the ball again, I didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t just push it and run past him because he was younger and quicker than me. As I was trying to position the ball, I saw his legs were open, so I just had to pull the ball back and put it through.

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“It was me getting myself out of a situation more than me trying to be clever, to be honest.”

Hiley was a non-League footballer for Exeter City at the time and had just nutmegged Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo live on television in the FA Cup. Nineteen years later, his phone still rings about that incident but his trumpet never blows.

“I haven’t dined out on it. But it gets brought up a lot because of the YouTube video, and it’s got bigger and bigger over time because of Ronaldo’s profile,” Hiley adds. “I remember after the game, the newspapers wanted a picture of me with the boot, but I didn’t do any interviews about it. I felt that would be disrespectful.”

At the highest level, the spotlight can be unforgiving for the player who has been embarrassed.

Ask David Luiz about Luis Suarez nutmegging him prior to scoring both of his goals for Barcelona against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League in 2015 – “I didn’t have a great night,” the Brazilian said with no little understatement – or James Milner about Lionel Messi.

“It’s very hard to run as fast as you can with your legs closed – as I found out,” Milner said in 2019.

Milner was talking about a Champions League game four years earlier, when his Manchester City side played Barcelona at the Camp Nou and his attempts to close down Messi by the touchline ended badly. Messi deftly slipped the ball through his legs, Milner ended up scrambling on his hands, the home crowd roared, and Pep Guardiola, who was the Bayern Munich manager at the time and watching from up in the stands, covered his face. All around him, there was laughter.

“He (Messi) can make you look stupid,” Milner reflected.

Some players appear to be more susceptible to a nutmeg than others.

Data gathered by StatsBomb shows that Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, together with Aston Villa duo John McGinn and Matty Cash, have the dubious honour of being joint top of the Premier League’s “nutmegged” leaderboard this season.

As for the Premier League’s nutmeg kings, it’s a four-way tie between Luton’s Chiedozie Ogbene, Eberechi Eze of Crystal Palace and the Arsenal wingers Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka, all of whom should be approached with feet never more than six inches apart.

As silly as that last line sounds, Pastore recalled a Napoli defender coming up to him after a match and admitting he was so “scared” of being nutmegged by him that he had spent the entire game trying to keep his legs together. “That’s why I went past him so easily,” Pastore said.

Probably the most unexpected name on that 2023-24 Premier League table of “nutmeggers” is Everton’s James Garner. The midfielder has a lovely knack of shaping to play a pass down the line, which entices his opponent to step across to attempt to make a block, and then tucking the ball between their legs and escaping. That mixture of disguise and deception opens up the whole pitch for Garner.

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In the first example below, he nutmegs Fulham’s Antonee Robinson and then slips the ball through Harrison Reed’s legs straight afterwards too.

In the second clip, Garner leaves Villa’s Pau Torres looking like he is teetering on the edge of a cliff at one point.

Nutmegs can become a game within a game for some players.

When Tony Mowbray was Sunderland manager, their winger Patrick Roberts kept him updated with his nutmeg tally for the previous three matches. “I think we were at about 10 before the Reading game,” Mowbray said last season.

A Twitter account, presumably run by someone with a calculator at hand, was dedicated to keeping count of the number of times that Adel Taarabt – a serial nutmegger if ever there was one – put a ball through an opponent’s legs while he was playing for Queens Park Rangers.

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“I’m not trying to take the p**s,” Taarabt said. “It’s a skill, it’s so natural.”

As for Dele Alli, he gave the impression earlier in his career that he saw it as a personal challenge to nutmeg as many people as possible whenever he left the house.

Adebayo Akinfenwa, a powerful lower-divisions striker nicknamed The Beast, was one of Dele’s first victims in professional football and spent 10 minutes trying to chase the teenager around the pitch afterwards. “I just wanted to body him,” Akinfenwa said.

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On another occasion, Dele tried to nutmeg Guardiola after the ball ran out of play by the dugout at the Etihad Stadium – he failed but the Manchester City manager saw the funny side.

Then there was the time when Dele had the confidence and audacity to embarrass Real Madrid’s Luka Modric.

Dele, for context, was 19 years old at the time and starting his first game for Spurs having moved from third-tier MK Dons, in front of 70,000 people at the Allianz Arena in Munich, in a pre-season tournament.

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“We had a laugh about it in the tunnel afterwards; he (Modric) was very good about it,” Dele said. “He shook my hand and said to me, ‘You little b***er’ – or something like that.

“I didn’t shout ‘Nuts’ when I did it. I used to do that when I was young and got told off for it.”


Dele nutmegging Huddersfield’s Collin Quaner during a league match in 2018 (Craig Mercer – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Shouting “Nuts”, “Megs”, “Keep ’em shut”, or anything else like that, is like a red rag to a bull for someone who has already been made to look silly.

Within the professional game (different rules may apply at your local five-a-side pitch on a Monday night), those kinds of comments are regarded as disrespectful or, to quote one current Premier League footballer who asked not to be identified for fear of being nutmegged, only made by players “really taking the p**s”.

Erik Lamela versus Andros Townsend, White Hart Lane, 2016.

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“I thought, ‘Erik, why did you do that?’,” his Tottenham team-mate Danny Rose said a few days later. “I didn’t realise I put my hands on my head until afterwards. It was a brilliant nutmeg. When Andros was here (as a Spurs player), he always used to get nutmegged five or six times in a training session. I was actually thinking throughout the game that he’s done well not to get nutmegged today, and (then) Erik did that.”

Why Lamela did that is a good question. Although Spurs fans raucously celebrated the Argentinian’s party trick, which prompted Rose to react in the way that he described and Townsend to set off on a walk of shame, not everyone at the club was impressed.

“I don’t like it when you try to humiliate your opponent,” Mauricio Pochettino, Tottenham’s manager at the time, said. “The supporters enjoy this type of action and that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t create any emotion in me. People tried to nutmeg me when I was playing. But they did it knowing that, afterwards, I would be out to kill them.”

Lamela’s nutmeg crossed that line between being a fantastic piece of skill – he used the sole of the foot, futsal-style, to dupe Townsend – and showboating. It was brilliant and made people in the crowd laugh and smile – as nutmegs generally do. But it also felt gratuitous – there were only seconds of the game remaining.

Does any of that matter?

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Diego Simeone once applauded himself, with the ball at his feet still, after nutmegging then Barcelona captain Jose Mari Bakero twice in quick succession.

Bakero’s blood must have been boiling at the time, in much the same way as Sir Alex Ferguson’s was when a young Paul Gascoigne had the temerity to not just nutmeg Remi Moses in front of the Manchester United dugout but revel in the moment.

“He went up to Remi after he did it and patted him on the head,” Ferguson said, incredulously. “I was out of that dugout — ‘Get that little f***ing so-and-so’.”

A new kid on the block nutmegging an established player can quickly light the touchpaper.

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“Behave!,” a by then much more senior Gascoigne said to Steven Gerrard after the Liverpool midfielder tried and failed to nutmeg him shortly after breaking through at Anfield. Gascoigne, Gerrard writes in his autobiography, also called him “a little runt” afterwards (apparently that’s not a typo in the book).

Where nutmegs are concerned, that chasm in age and experience provides all the ingredients for a potential flashpoint on the training ground too. A nutmeg in a rondo is one thing – most players will see that as fair game – but it’s quite another in a training match, when egos are easily bruised, especially if someone is having a bad day or senses they are being mocked.

In Matthew Spiro’s book Sacre Bleu: Zidane To Mbappe – A Football Journey, the author tells a story about Vikash Dhorasoo, a gifted playmaker, being ostracised by the France squad after nutmegging 1998 World Cup-winning captain Didier Deschamps when called up for the first time the following year.


Dhorasoo, second from left, in France training in 2006 (Pascal Pavani/AFP via Getty Images)

Although Dhorasoo’s own memory of that incident is hazy – “I hope I did it. For me, nutmegs are the essence of football,” he told Spiro – Marcel Desailly, another France player, was quoted in Liberation newspaper at the time confirming that it happened. “Vikash is an… interesting boy,” Desailly said. “As for the nutmeg on Didier, given the quality of Vikash’s performances in training, I would say it was not especially appropriate.”

An inappropriate nutmeg is an interesting concept and, presumably, captures how Neymar saw things when Weverton Guilherme, a 19-year-old right-back, slipped the ball through his legs with a lovely sole-roll at a Brazil training camp before the Copa America in 2019. Neymar grabbed Weverton by the bib, threw him to the floor and walked away in a huff.

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Neymar, of course, has never nutmegged anyone.

What is clear is that the simple act of putting a ball through an opponent’s legs means different things to different people and how they react depends, to a large extent, on the circumstances at the time and even the event’s location on the pitch.

That said, it’s hard to imagine an England manager ever talking about the importance of nutmegs in the way that Lionel Scaloni did after his Argentina side won the World Cup in 2022.

“If I’m constantly telling young players to play two-touch football, I’m taking away their inventiveness – that’s the best asset,” Scaloni said on football interview show Universo Valdano. “Our football culture is about mischief, taking on players, doing nutmegs and looking for one-twos. You can’t manage players with a joystick.”

Mischief and nutmegs sounds like a lot of fun, and it’s easy to imagine what it looks like in Argentina too.

Picture Juan Roman Riquelme famously backheeling the ball through the legs of Mario Yepes in a Copa Libertadores quarter-final in 2000, Lautaro Martinez’s extraordinary pinball skill in 2018, or Lucas Ocampos executing one of the most nonchalant nutmegs you will ever see.

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Not all nutmegs need to be a work of art, though.

In fact, there is something deeply satisfying about watching one player effortlessly glide away from another by cutting across, and slipping the ball through, their opponent’s stride pattern.

Expert timing or an element of good luck?

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Either way, Luis Suarez was a master of that manoeuvre and it’s also become a go-to nutmeg for the game’s inverted wingers, who will typically carry the ball with their stronger foot and dart inside using the outside of that same boot.

In the example below, which is taken from Arsenal’s 4-3 victory at Kenilworth Road in December, Saka takes two Luton players out of the game with that type of nutmeg.

A popular and alternative nutmeg for inverted wingers is the push-and-run with the instep, which is hugely effective from a stationary position because all the forward momentum is with the attacker, leaving their opponent flat-footed once they are, in football parlance, squared up.

Both Saka, who is shown against Wolves below, and Martinelli have used that move multiple times this season.

Yet it was a nutmeg that was performed on an Arsenal player a month ago that caused a much bigger stir – and not just because of what happened on the pitch.

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There was less than a minute of stoppage time remaining when Sergino Dest picked up the ball wide on the right for PSV Eindhoven.

What followed was Ronaldinho-esque – a nutmeg orchestrated by a lovely piece of footwork that bamboozled a defender, luring him into trying to win a ball that was going in a totally different direction to where he thought and, crucially, opening his legs in the process.

As Arsenal’s Jakub Kiwior stepped across, Dest nutmegged him, to the delight of the crowd – except that wasn’t the full story.

In a world increasingly obsessed with reactions, the replay of the responses from those on the PSV bench generated more headlines than the nutmeg itself. Johan Bakayoko’s jaw was close to the floor as he turned around to grab a team-mate in disbelief, while Ismael Saibari looked like he had just witnessed something from another universe.

Naturally, TikTok had a field day.

Branded “absolute filth” on the Champions League TikTok account (that was almost certainly not the phrase used at the 1978 World Cup when Scotland’s Archie Gemmill beautifully slipped the ball through Jan Poortvliet’s legs against the Netherlands), United States international Dest’s nutmeg was approaching one million likes at the last count.

Gemmill is worth referencing here because he said something interesting about that iconic nutmeg, which led to arguably the greatest goal in Scotland’s history — and even features in the 1996 film Trainspotting.

“You can’t plan it (the nutmeg). It’s just instinct,” Gemmill explained. “I didn’t think about putting it through one player’s legs or going one way or the other; you make your decisions when the opposition players make theirs. So when Jan Poortvliet slid in, I just knocked it past him.”

That is certainly true in the case of a lot of nutmegs – Milner’s frenzied chasing prior to confronting Messi, for example, or David Luiz stepping out against Suarez. But what Dest did was different because he provoked Kiwior into opening his legs to be nutmegged.

Now, by the way, is not the time for coaches to ask: “But what happened after Dest’s nutmeg?”.

The fact that Dest’s near-post cross came to nothing is neither here nor there in the social media age.

Never mind the end product, nutmegs go down well on social media regardless and it’s easy to see why, bearing in mind we’re talking about a short clip where one person showcases their talent to prank another, makes them look like a buffoon and everyone laughs at their expense.

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From Champions League nights to an unsuspecting member of the public having a ball slipped between their legs while walking through a shopping mall, nowhere is off-limits in an age when everyone has a camera in their hand.

Before you roll your eyes at the dumbing down of one of football’s oldest tricks, it’s worth remembering that no self-respecting parent has missed the opportunity to nutmeg their child at some point, ideally not long after they start walking, and for reasons that can’t really be explained.

Leaving aside the more important debate about whether a shot or a pass through someone’s legs qualifies as a true nutmeg (yes, Leeds fans, we haven’t forgotten that eye-of-the-needle through ball that Pablo Hernandez played against Charlton in the 2020 promotion-winning season or, for that matter, the Spaniard’s double nutmeg on Callum O’Dowda on the opening day in the same campaign), some would question whether a nutmeg really counts if the other person isn’t paying attention at the time.

Not Rio Ferdinand, though.

“How dare you try and get away with it. Don’t even try to go to any link,” Ferdinand joked on-camera after nutmegging Laura Woods, the TNT Sports presenter, on her Champions League debut programme in September as she walked across the pitch.

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“Laura Woods has been megged,” Ferdinand continued as the broadcaster showed a replay.

The joke was on Ferdinand the year before, however, when he ran into Jack Downer.

Aged 25, Downer is a football freestyler, internet sensation and two-time Panna World Champion. In other words, he is the closest thing there is to a professional “nutmegger” and has spent more than a decade practising and perfecting them.

Downer had tied in knots and nutmegged Neymar (who reacted with laughter on this occasion), Riyad Mahrez and Patrice Evra before he exposed Ferdinand too.

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What a way to earn a living.

“Panna is essentially like boxing, but football,” Downer explained in an interview with UK newspaper The Daily Mirror. “It’s one-on-one, it originated in Amsterdam, and when you compete it’s a three-minute game. Each player has a small goal in a cage and the most goals in three minutes wins. However, if you nutmeg the opponent, that’s an instant knockout.”

Mentally, the same applies in the real game too.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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Culture

6 Poems You Should Know by Heart

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10 hours ago

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April 18, 2026

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6 Poems You Should Know by Heart
How to
Be Cultured

Literature

‘Prayer’ (1985) by Galway Kinnell

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Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell in 1970. Photo by LaVerne Harrell Clark, © 1970 Arizona Board of Regents. Courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center

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“I typically say Kinnell’s words at the start of my day, as I’m pedaling a traffic-laden path to my office,” says Major Jackson, 57, the author of six books of poetry, including “Razzle Dazzle” (2023). “The poem encourages a calm acceptance of the day’s events but also wants us to embrace the misapprehension and oblivion of life, to avoid probing too deeply for answers to inscrutable questions. I admire what Kinnell does with only 14 words; the repetition of ‘what,’ ‘that’ and ‘is’ would seem to limit the poem’s sentiment but, paradoxically, the poem opens widely to contain all manner of human experience. The three ‘is’es in the middle line give it a symmetry that makes its message feel part of a natural order, and even more convincing. Thanks to the skillful punctuation, pauses and staccato rhythm, a tonal quality of interior reflection emerges. Much like a haiku, it continues after its last words, lingering like the last note played on a piano that slowly fades.”

“Just as I was entering young adulthood, probably slow to claim romantic feelings, a girlfriend copied out a poem by Pablo Neruda and slipped it into an envelope with red lipstick kisses all over it. In turn, I recited this poem. It took me the remainder of that winter to memorize its lines,” says Jackson. “The poem captures the pitch of longing that defines love at its most intense. The speaker in Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet believes the poem creates the beloved, ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ (Sonnet 18). In Rilke’s expressive declarations of yearning, the beloved remains elusive. Wherever the speaker looks or travels, she marks his world by her absence. I find this deeply moving.”

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Lucille Clifton in 1995. Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

“Clifton faced many obstacles, including cancer, a kidney transplant and the loss of her husband and two of her children. Through it all, she crafted a long career as a pre-eminent American poet,” says Jackson. “Her poem ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a war cry, an invitation to share in her victories against life’s persistent challenges. The poem is meaningful to all who have had to stare down death in a hospital or had to bereave the passing of close relations. But, even for those who have yet to mourn life’s vicissitudes, the poem is instructive in cultivating resilience and a persevering attitude. I keep coming back to the image of the speaker’s hands and the spirit of steadying oneself in the face of unspeakable storms. She asks in a perfectly attuned gorgeously metrical line, ‘what did i see to be except myself?’”

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‘Sonnet 94’ (1609) by William Shakespeare

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

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“It’s one of the moments of Western consciousness,” says Frederick Seidel, 90, the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including “So What” (2024). “Shakespeare knows and says what he knows.”

“It trombones magnificent, unbearable sorrow,” says Seidel.

“It’s smartass and bitter and bright,” says Seidel.

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These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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Culture

Classic and Contemporary Literature From France, Japan, India, the U.K. and Brazil

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22 hours ago

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April 18, 2026

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Classic and Contemporary Literature From France, Japan, India, the U.K. and Brazil
How to
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Literature

FRANCE

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According to the writer Leïla Slimani, 44, the author of ‘The Country of Others’ (2020).

Classic

‘Essais de Montaigne’ (‘Essays of Montaigne,’ 1580)

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Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

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“France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. It’s also a country built on reflexive subjectivity. Montaigne reveals all that, writing, ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’”

Contemporary

‘La Carte et le Territoire’ (‘The Map and the Territory,’ 2010) by Michel Houellebecq

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“Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into décor and where rural areas are emptying out. He shows the gap between the Parisian elite and the rest of the population, which he paints as aging and disoriented by modernity. It’s a melancholic and yet ironic novel about a disenchanted nation.”

JAPAN

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According to the writer Yoko Ogawa, 64, the author of ‘The Memory Police’ (1994).

Classic

‘Man’yoshu’ (late eighth century)

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“‘Man’yoshu,’ the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry, reflects a diversity of voices — from emperors to commoners. They bow their heads to the majesty of nature, weep at the loss of loved ones and find pathos in death. The pages pulse with the vitality of successive generations.”

Contemporary

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‘Tenohira no Shosetsu’ (‘Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,’ 1923-72) by Yasunari Kawabata

“The essence of Japanese literature might lie in brevity: waka [a classical 31-syllable poetry form], haiku and short stories. There’s a tradition of cherishing words that seem to well up from the depths of the heart, imbued with warmth. Kawabata, too, exudes more charm in his short stories — especially these very short ‘palm-of-the-hand’ stories — than in his full-length novels. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and hate — everything is contained in these modest worlds.”

INDIA

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According to Aatish Taseer, 45, a T contributing writer and the author of ‘Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’ (2009).

Classic

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‘The Kumarasambhava’ (‘The Birth of Kumara,’ circa fifth century) by Kalidasa

Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

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“This is an epic poem by the greatest of the classical Sanskrit poets and dramatists. The gods are in a pickle. They’re being tormented by a monster, but Shiva, their natural protector, is deep in meditation and cannot be disturbed. Kama, the god of love, armed with his flower bow, is sent down from the heavens to waken Shiva. Never a wise idea! The great god, in his fury, opens his third eye and incinerates Kama. But then, paradoxically, the death of the god of love engenders one of the greatest love stories ever told. In the final canto, Shiva and his wife, the goddess Parvati, have the most electrifying sex for days on end — and, 15 centuries on, in our now censorious time, it still leaves one agog at the sensual wonder that was India.”

Contemporary

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‘The Complex’ (2026) by Karan Mahajan

“This state-of-the-nation novel, which was published just last month, captures the squalor and malice of Indian family life. Delhi is both my and Mahajan’s hometown and, in this sprawling homage to India’s capital, we see it on the eve of the economic liberalization of the 1990s, as the old socialist city gives way to a megalopolis of ambition, greed and political cynicism.”

THE UNITED KINGDOM

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According to the writer Tessa Hadley, 70, the author of ‘The London Train’ (2011).

Classic

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‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) by Charlotte Brontë

“Written almost 200 years ago, it remains an insight into our collective soul — or at least its female part. Somewhere at the heart of us there’s a small girl in a wintry room, curled up in the window seat with a book, watching the lashing rain on the window glass: ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. …’ Jane’s solemnity, her outraged sense of justice, her trials to come, the wild weather outside, her longing for something better, for love in her future: All this speaks, perhaps problematically, to something buried in the foundations of our idea of ourselves.”

Contemporary

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‘All That Man Is’ (2016) by David Szalay

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Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

“Though he isn’t quite completely British (he’s part Canadian, part Hungarian), Szalay is brilliant at catching certain aspects of British men — aspects that haven’t been written about for a while, now updated for a new era. Funny, exquisitely observed and terrifying, this novel reminds us, too, how absolutely our fate and our identity as a nation belong with the rest of Europe.”

BRAZIL

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According to the writer and critic Noemi Jaffe, 64, the author of ‘What Are the Blind Men Dreaming?’ (2016).

Classic

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‘Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas’ (‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,’ 1881) by Machado de Assis

Karl Leitz for Anthony Cotsifas Studio

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“Not only is it experimental in style — very short chapters mixed with long ones; different points of view; narrated by a corpse; metalinguistic — but it also introduces an extremely ironic view of the rising bourgeoisie in Rio de Janeiro at the time, revealing the hypocrisy of slave owners, the falsehood of love affairs and the only true reason for all social relationships: convenience and personal interest. After almost 150 years, it’s still modern, both formally and, unfortunately, also in content.”

Contemporary

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‘Onde Pastam os Minotauros’ (‘Where Minotaurs Graze,’ 2023) by Joca Reiners Terron

“The two main characters — Cão and Crente — along with some of their colleagues, plan to escape and set fire to the slaughterhouse where they work under exploitative conditions. The men develop sympathy for the animals they kill, and one of them becomes a sort of philosopher, revealing the sheer nonsense of existence and the injustices of society in the deepest parts of Brazil.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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Culture

6 Myths That Endure

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1 day ago

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April 17, 2026

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6 Myths That Endure
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The Myth of Meeting Oneself

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“This is evident in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ (circa 30-19 B.C.) when Aeneas witnesses his own heroic actions depicted in murals of the Trojan War in Juno’s temple, and again in Miguel de Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’ (1605-15) when Quixote enters a printer’s shop and finds a book that has been published with fake details about his quest even as he’s living it,” says Ben Okri, 67, the author of “The Famished Road” (1991) and “Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted” (2025). “In both stories, individuals throw themselves into the world and think they encounter objects, personae, obstacles and antagonists, but what they actually encounter is themselves. In our time, where our actions meet us in the echo chamber of social media, the process is magnified and swifter. Now a deed doesn’t even have to take place for it to enter the realm of reality.”

The Myth of Utopia

“I’ve always had trouble with the idea of utopia, feeling it derives its energy more from what it wishes to dismantle than what it wishes to enact,” says the T writer at large Aatish Taseer, 45, the author of “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands” (2009). “Ram Rajya, or the mythical rule of the hero Ram in the Hindu epic ‘Ramayana’ (seventh century B.C.-third century A.D.), like all visions of perfection, contains a built-in violence.”

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The Myth of Invisibility

“Invisibility bears power and powerlessness at the same time,” says Okri. “In ancient cultures, it was a gift of the gods. Jesus, for example, walks unrecognized among his disciples, and in Greek myths, Scandinavian legends and ancient African tales, heroes are gifted invisibility in the form of cloaks, sandals or spells. Modern works like the two ‘Invisible Man’ novels, by H.G. Wells (1897) and Ralph Ellison (1952), and the ‘Harry Potter’ novels (1997-2007) by J.K. Rowling reach back to those ideas. But today, people talk about visibility as the highest form of social agency, while invisibility can render a whole class, race, caste or gender unseen.”

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The Myth of Steadiness vs. Speed

Charles Henry Bennett’s illustration “The Hare and the Tortoise” (1857). Alamy

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“‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ one of Aesop’s fables (sixth century B.C.), doesn’t necessarily strike a younger person as promising — possibly it has a whiff of morality in it,” says Yiyun Li, 53, the author of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” (2005) and “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life” (2017). “But the longer I live and work, the more I understand that it’s the tortoiseness in a person that carries one along, not the swiftness of the mind and body of the hare.”

The Myth of Magic

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William Etty’s “The Sirens and Ulysses” (1837). Bridgeman Images

“Ancient magical tales like Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (late eighth to early seventh century B.C.) were allegories of transformation, of secret teachings,” says Okri, “whereas modern forms of magic are narrative devices and tropes of storytelling that continue the child’s wonder of life. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1925), Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (1967) and, again, the ‘Harry Potter’ books. The intuition of magic persists even in these atheistic and science-infested times, where nothing is to be believed if it can’t be subjected to analysis. This is perhaps because the ultimate magic confronts us every day in the mystery of consciousness. That we can see anything is magical; that we experience love is magical; and perhaps the most magical thing of all is the imagination’s unending power to alter the contents and coordinates of reality. It hides tenaciously in the act of reading, which is the most generative act of magic.”

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The Myth of the Immortal Soul

“ ‘The soul is birthless and eternal, imperishable and timeless and is not destroyed when the body is destroyed,’ says Krishna in the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ (second century-first century B.C.). This belief in the immortality of the soul — what used to be called Pythagoreanism in ancient Greece — is still the most pervasive myth in India,” says Taseer, “and has more influence over behavior and how one lives one’s life than any other.”

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These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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