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Peter Wilby’s First Thoughts.
Activism is utterly impossible if you have no way of keeping track of your fellow activists and of forming even weak ties with them.
The shadow work and pensions secretary warns those who brief against the Labour leader: "The only people it serves are our political opponents."
Rather than retreating under pressure, the Labour leader has reaffirmed his faith in his political project.
In throwing in your lot as a professional sportsman, you make an implicit deal. The upside feels irresistible; the downside you consign as too improbable to think about.
Beveridge and Attlee shaped their politics at Toynbee Hall, in the East End of London. As this beacon of social reform prepares to mark its 130th anniversary, we recall its role in the making of modern Britain and draw lessons for today.
From Marie Stopes to Alfred Kinsey, we can still learn from the masters of sex, as new exhibition “The Institute of Sexology” at the Wellcome Trust illustrates.
The piece is an attempt to see the Passion through the eyes of the women who surrounded Jesus, with particular emphasis on Mary Magdalene.
One day Cumming was warned that it might emerge that he was not his father’s biological son. It was a bad moment in his life, no question. And yet, on some sad level, he greeted the news with relief.
A pantomime villain imbued with the sophistication of Moriarty, Fu Manchu captured the imagination of a public already accustomed to lurid, exaggerated tales of vice among Britain’s Chinese population.
Palmer’s first book is a somewhat scattered, heartfelt and insightful look at the career of an artist who seems to have lucked into being born into precisely the right moment for her work, temperament and ethos.
Leo Robson reviews the double-Booker Prize-winning author’s new novel about Australian identity.
Perhaps the most famous moment of resistance against the Nazis in Crete is the abduction of the Nazi commandant of the island by a team led by Paddy Leigh Fermor, later one of the great prose stylists and travel writers of our time.
This fourth book in the Frank Bascombe series a volume that tempts the word “slight” but may deserve more. Like its narrator, it is easygoing, understated, articulate and occasionally surprising.
Mecca was the city of Sardar’s childhood dreams, the ideal Muslim polity of humility and submission to God, and a community of faith. Today, under Saudi rule, it has been “remade in the image of . . . wealth and imperial splendour”.
The story of Rosenberg’s father David, and his struggle to construct a new life after surviving the Holocaust was first published in Sweden in 2012; since then it has sold over 200,000 copies and been translated into nine languages. But Rosenberg wonders if he has the ability to tell the story at all, given that he is writing it “much later” than the events described.
Helen Lewis meets the illusionist and secret portrait painter.
A magazine peopled almost entirely by those who think Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners is full of genuinely useful advice.
Murray plays Vincent, a crabby, pasty-faced soak whose days are spent mooching around his neighbourhood, frequenting dive bars and canoodling with a pregnant prostitute.
Dr Phil Whitaker’s Health Matters column.
The Nature Column by John Burnside.
Real Meals by Will Self.
Telling Tales by Suzanne Moore.
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