I arrived home from ten days in France this summer. Living enfant sauvage-style at a friend's wil derness farm with shapeless days of tranquillity, I'd found the world a pretty good place to be.

That remained until I switched the radio on and heard of a battle raging between Russia and Georgia. Robert Mugabe saying a defiant "no way" to the idea of power-sharing, meaning five million Zimbabweans will likely [...]

No one, not even Max Mosley, seemed too perturbed about his appetite for whacking and being whacked. But he strongly denied the News of the World's claims that there was a Nazi theme, perhaps understandably, given that he is a scion of the Hitler devotee Oswald. If he'd wanted to do that, he pointed out in court, there are many places from which he could have bought appropriate Nazi paraphernalia. [...]

O J Simpson's controversial and widely reviled book If I Did It - a hypothetical explanation of how he would have killed his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman - completed a bizarre trajectory when it ended up being published by a small north London publisher.

Simpson, acquitted of the murder by a jury in 1995 but found liable for Goldman's death in a civil court [...]

Kay will never know whether reporting her 14-year-old son Jon to social services for sexually abusing a neighbour's child prevented him from moving on to become an adult paedophile in the style of Ian Huntley and Roy Whiting. Would he have been another Chris Langham, who was last week found guilty of downloading sadistic and depraved child pornography? Or a Timothy Cox, recently put inside on an indeterminate sentence for [...]

As the curtain goes down on the London Shakespeare Workshop's production Blacking Iago, Darren Raymond delights in the audience's enthusiastic applause. After a decade spent on the streets with gun gangs, using and dealing drugs, and "up to a lot of bad stuff", he was introduced to acting while serving time in Brixton prison. If that had not happened, he says, he would probably be dead, or inside for a [...]

The nation's children have been in the headlines the past couple of weeks. First there was the gang of illustrious signatories to the letter in the Daily Telegraph (quickly followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury), excoriating the state of childhood for our technology-rich, attention-poor 21st-century young.

Then there was the Daily Mail, with its serialisation of Handle With Care, a report published by the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies, describing [...]

I can't answer Zoe Williams's question "Where have all the feminists gone?" (NS, 16 January) on behalf of her generation, but as one of those she labels yesterday's feminists, I will clamber, with at least a semblance of agility, on to my soapbox. Those of us whom she credits with achieving rights and recognitions for women are still on the case, concerned with abortion and rape, supporting sisters who suffer [...]

Charmion Togba was not the kind of kid you'd have wanted on your patch. He says it himself. At the age of 16, he was manufacturing crack cocaine and "doctoring" guns for contacts. But that's all changed. Today he works with children at risk, and this summer he is running programmes for the Arts and Offenders' Unit Splash Extra programme, funded by the Arts Council and Youth Justice Board. Reflecting [...]