Starmer’s strategy of modest progress and alliance-building could be scuppered by the fiscal hawks in his ...

In 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.

Some time in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where ...

Many TV shows are set in hospitals, but fewer novels, at least ones that take place outside the psychiatric ward. Hospitals make for good drama: the path to diagnosis is a mystery plot with inherent ...

Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the ...

Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces ...

Ionce witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered ...

Daniel Defoe , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains. Arriving at the circle of nineteen standing stones at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall, ...

In Mali, a country currently ruled by a cohort of pro-Russian army officers, the only way a journalist can stay alive or avoid a prison sentence is by practising ‘sunshine journalism’: praising the ...

The Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’s death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to function and the building still stands on the edge of ...

She first saw him walking ‘rather contemptuously’ across the Pont Marie. Frock coat, tall hat, ‘gone-bad, luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, ...