Or follow me down the rabbit hole here … they were just white buses,” Colbert laughed. “There’s this thing called Occam’s razor, which is what I use to cut my ears off when Clay Higgins speaks.” Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. If that were not startling enough, she also came to suspect that Cobb was a mysterious character known to Kennedy investigators as the Babushka Lady, who was the closest person filming the president at the moment he was shot, but who vanished after the assassination, along with her all-important footage. Finding the Babushka Lady (so called because of her triangular ‘babushka’ headscarf) and her close-quarters film of the fatal moment has been something of a holy grail for JFK investigators for the past 60 years. Like so many before her though, she found herself in the irresistible tractor beam of the Kennedy assassination, and the unanswered questions about what happened on that sunny day in Dealey Plaza that still affect attitudes to government to this day.

It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries. Tania asks students to hold up their wristbands granting them access to a homecoming pep rally. Students at the Tohopekaliga pep rally in late September. Her book even builds a convincing case for Jerrie being a CIA agent with the cryptonym QJWIN, whose role was to recruit killers for an assassination squad that originally targeted Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. So, how do you feel?” Tania would ask Erin, because it had been hard to pin down, the feeling that she had as she left Tohopekaliga High School for the last time. From the 12th century to the 18th, therefore, the template for a woman reading in a painting was the established iconography of the Annunciation. Its adaptation by Boucher represented a daring relaunch for the king’s former mistress. While another portrait of Pompadour made her book titles visible, here we do not know what volume from her extensive library she has chosen. Let’s just say it’s unlikely to be the Psalms.

Other 'guilty' patrons sent in their overdue books after hearing about the return

The first is the 17th-century The Great Picture, produced for Lady Anne Clifford and now at Abbot Hall in Kendal. Clifford spent much of her adult life in legal battles for her Yorkshire inheritance. Her tenacity finally paid off and she celebrated her triumph by commissioning an extraordinary life-sized painting of herself, her parents and her siblings from an artist thought to be Jan van Belcamp. Decades before the latest eruption of war in Israel and Gaza that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre — and well before Internet algorithms amplified misinformation — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was already a source of confusion, competing claims, “Rashomon”-like narrative clashes. Even basic facts seem to defy confirmation or debunking.

One woman did come forward years later to say she was the Babushka Lady, and that two men claiming to work for the government took her camera away, but her claim was largely dismissed because the camera she said she was using was not invented at the time. Nothing about the laws, nothing about reviewing books, nothing about book bans at all. Tania scrolled through the questions and added one more. “What is your stance on Censorship?” she wrote, though she had no way of knowing whether it would be asked, or how the next librarian might answer. Now, 19 10th-graders at Tohopekaliga High School walked through the doors. “Okay, everybody, we’re here because you’re going to learn some very important things about the library,” said their teacher, Carmen Lorente. Guys, get up. Walk around,” Lorente said. “Look at books. It’s not a chitchat session. You need to be up and actively looking at books.” The painting is, in essence, Clifford’s autobiography. It is a groundbreaking work, not least because it predates the modern bookcase itself, the invention of which is often attributed to Samuel Pepys, who commissioned freestanding glazed book cabinets from the joiner Simpson in the 1660s. In The Great Picture Anne Clifford has found true ‘bookcase credibility’.

She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.” Sacco’s illustrated reportorial deep-dive felt like a breakthrough not just for journalism but also for the graphic novel — proving that what we once called comics can be a conduit for the darkest and most serious material. Nathan Thrall, author of the recent book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” calls it “a powerful and brilliant work of reportage that uncovers, in the form of a graphic novel, an Israeli massacre in Gaza in 1956, at the same time depicting in Sacco’s inimitable style the present-day lives of the people of Rafah and Khan Younis.” Monroe’s pose is focused and intimate. And there is something distinctly racy about the specific edition she is pictured holding. Monroe and her copy of Ulysses bring together two symbols of sexuality, transgression and American modernity. For readers in the 21st century, Joyce’s work is known as a modernist masterpiece. In the middle of the 20th century, however, it had not yet shaken off the scandal attached to its early publication history. Serial publication of the novel was halted in 1920 by an obscenity trial and copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company, imported to Britain and the United States were intercepted and confiscated. All we need to know here is the ominously Victorian name of the director of public prosecutions at the time: Sir Archibald Bodkin. His selective reading of the book’s final section was sufficient to convince him that Ulysses was obscene and therefore publication of it should be banned in Britain. Similar measures were taken in the United States.