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My teacher friend requested information about free schools from the DfE under FoI law. After a year and a half of appeals ruling in her favour, the DfE still refuses to release the information. Now it’s going to court.
Back then when critics pointed out that England had been overtaken by hungrier and more progressive teams, a stock reply was ready: “But we’re English and we’ve always done it this way.”
Peter Wilby’s First Thoughts column.
The revolution in IT and how it is transforming our world in ways that even economists are struggling to understand.
With just 100 days to save the Union, Alistair Darling fights back.
Bashing the ’burbs has been a common currency of artists and the intelligentsia, the right and the left, for over 150 years. But they are now undergoing a quiet renaissance.
It has always been bad for your public image to laugh in the wrong way or to crack jokes about the wrong targets, not least in the presence of Caligula…
Dramatic though the transition from Albania to America has been, Mark faces an even greater change. For 14 years, he has been living as a man – but until the age of 20, he was a girl named Hana.
If Jamison is an experienced emotional traveller, then these essays form a rough sort of guide to the human experience. Ideas about empathy seep into every one.
Classical music perhaps wouldn’t be everyone’s medium of choice to shout about issues, ideas and beliefs but two recent events made a strong case for why it should be.
Little Jonathan records every stain on his mother’s apron, every item of rubbish in the stream where his father went fishing.
Global Breakfast Radio follows the sun around the world, streaming any local morning show for ten minutes, then moving on.
Tennis has not become ugly. It has got more beautiful. Professionalisation did not ruin its balletic strand; it deepened it. The ultimate athletes turned out to be lighter, leaner and more mobile.
If you cannot conceive of humanity from an area of knowledge outside science, what reason could there be for thinking that one and only one system of values is peculiarly human?
A boy gets to play; a man doesn’t, at least not officially. A man is obliged to act out the part scripted for him, all the while pretending that there’s something fulfilling in being promoted.
Two recent graphic novels tackle subjects from feminist history.
Fruitvale Station imagines the last day of Oscar Grant's life - a young black American shot dead by a police officer in 2009. The film may be rooted in truth, but it's a long way from documentary.
From the new "bespoke" wardrobes installed in BA's A380s to the recommendation cabin crew do not stow dead bodies in the loo, Rachel Cooke is transfixed by the BBC's bizarre new documentary series.
In musical terms, the second album is a crucial test. For 27-year-old Polly Stenham, it is her fourth play, Hotel, which opens this week at the National Theatre, that will make or break her career.
These shows can be harsh and cruel, but they are merely a microcosm of the world – a swift introduction to the realities of a career as a performer.
In exposing the unchivalric side of WWII, Keith Douglas was the heir to Siegfried Sassoon.
A delicate Soave with an elegant sea bream, a Muscadet with moules marinières, a salad slaked with self-effacing Vinho Verde, or an unoaked Chardonnay to water a risotto primavera.
The idea we might be the repositories of buried traumatic memories is integral to psychoanalysis – so the SRA panic had a ready-made audience in people primed to accept notions of repression.
My motto, when it comes to buying shoes, is “as rarely as possible”. A shoe will have to be hanging off my foot and making flapping noises as I walk before I buy another one.
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