The journalist comes to terms with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis

“If you dipped in and out of the documentary “Jon Snow: A Last Big Story” (Channel 4), you might be confused as to what it was all about, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph.

At one level, the film, in which Snow reveals his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, is a “touching tribute to a now diminished national figure”. But it also includes a “bravura piece of reportage”: while visiting Zambia with his wife, the neuroscientist Dr Precious Lunga, Snow hears about the collapse of a dam at a copper mine – a disaster that has gone largely unreported – and starts to investigate. The documentary weaves these two strands together to create a whole that is “deeply affecting”.

It’s a delight to see this veteran reporter back in his element, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, as he and his team break the story of the worst environmental disaster in Africa for 30 years.

We also see Snow in the grip of what is “an unforgiving, relentlessly worsening condition”: he repeats himself, has to be reminded why the camera crew is there, and doesn’t know what day it is. But “his compassion and his outraged sense of justice remains undimmed”: “if this is Snow’s swan song, it is as fine a one as he could wish”.

The film is deeply moving, and makes important points about Alzheimer’s, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times; but I wish it had focused more on how the couple are coping with their everyday lives, and skipped Snow’s report, which was painful to watch, and ended up making the actual disaster look “queasily like a sideshow”.

by Darby Saxbe

“It’s well known that pregnancy and childbirth affect women’s brains and hormones,” said Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times: so profound is the impact of “baby brain” that “a computer can tell a mother from a non-mother just by looking at a scan”.

How parenthood affects men is less well understood; but in her new book, Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, “fills an important gap in our understanding”.

Saxbe herself carried out one of the world’s only studies into how men’s brains are altered by having a child, and it revealed that men undergo many of the same changes as women, “though not quite as dramatically”.

In men, the “volume of grey matter shrinks”, enabling a “temporary tuning-up of the parts of the cortex that connect us to others’ emotions”. New fathers also suffer a drop in testosterone, which facilitates bonding with their infant, as well as making a “dad bod” likely.

Combining academic data with “stories about the men in her own life”, Saxbe’s book is a “refreshing” call to “bust the stereotypes of fathers as clueless or uncaring”.

Kierkegaard described becoming a father as a transition from the “aesthetic stage, which is mainly about yourself, to the ethical stage, which is mainly about other people”, said Thomas W. Hodgkinson in Literary Review. “Dad Brain” engagingly explores how such a “massive life change” manifests itself physically. The fact that it is about such an under-investigated area is both its “USP” and a weakness: Saxbe’s account of the “science of fatherhood” inevitably ends up feeling frustratingly patchy. New fathers lose 1% of their brain matter. Is that a lot to lose or a little? I’m still not clear. Still, “anyone due to become a dad” could do a lot worse than this accessible, “nicely done primer”.

Exiled Iranian artist best known for Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, who has died aged 56, became famous as the author of “Persepolis”, a memoir in graphic novel form, said The Telegraph. Using stark, monochrome illustrations and black humour, it tells the story of a strong-willed 10-year-old growing up in Iran, surrounded by people “coping valiantly and often bolshily with the restrictions and privations they were obliged to endure”.

First published in France in four volumes from 2000, the book provided an alternative view of a country associated with “fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism”, and became an international phenomenon, selling more than two million copies and inspiring an award-winning film. Satrapi never returned to her home country, but became from exile a “hero to a younger generation of protesters, as a woman representing Iran’s best qualities to the world”.

Born in 1969, Satrapi grew up in Tehran, the only child of politically engaged, upper-middle-class parents – members of a generation who had “protested against the Shah’s rule only to be rewarded with the oppressive ayatollahs”, said The Times. Her own life was also transformed by the revolution. She had to leave her French-language co-ed school for an all-girls institution, where she had to wear a veil. As she got older, she began to rebel against the regime’s strictures, and after several of her relations were arrested, tortured and executed, her parents sent her to Austria. Lonely and adrift, she did not settle, however, and returned to Iran in 1989 to study art. But following the collapse of her first marriage, she left again, ending up in Paris.

Her “genre-defying memoir” conveyed sadness, anger, humour and doubt, said The Guardian. Her figures were simple but expressive; she recalled that she’d not learnt to draw the human form in Iran because female models wore burqas. Its success made her internationally famous, and opened the door to a second career as a filmmaker. Yet she remained deeply engaged with events in Iran. In 2023, she edited “Woman, Life, Freedom”, a collection inspired by the protest movement of that name. She had become a French citizen in 2006, but said that, as much as she loved France, she would always feel Iranian. “No matter how long I live in France,” she said, “to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran.” Her second husband, Mattias Ripa, who helped translate “Persepolis” into English, died of cancer last year. Her family said she had “died of sadness”.