Book of the Day The myths of “the north” Alex Niven’s The North Will Rise Again is a missed chance – a sustained swipe at a government long gone rather than a sober analysis of… By Stuart Maconie
Stuart Maconie’s Diary: Grief in lockdown, the rise of canal-side courting and why I’m still quizzing With no pubs or restaurants, it’s as if we’ve returned to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, where awkward young farmhands called on… By Stuart Maconie
Bowie the bellwether Five years after his death, friends and admirers remember David Bowie not as an otherworldly genius but a magpie… By Stuart Maconie
Edward Platt’s The Great Flood: a study of our drenched isle Taking in everywhere from Fenland to the Lake District, Gloucestershire to Northumbria, The Great Flood shows that hardly any… By Stuart Maconie
How art schools created British pop music From Roxy Music to Florence and the Machine, a new book chronicles the long, fertile and symbiotic relationship between… By Stuart Maconie
The return of the Black Power icon and Olympic protester Tommie Smith “I called my wife and said, ‘Get me some black gloves.’” By Stuart Maconie
So you want to be a rock’n’roll star: how music shaped Alan Johnson and Mark Kermode The former home secretary and the film critic are children of different generations, but their music memoirs both impress. By Stuart Maconie
ABBA is back – and so are the snobs of rock Why should we feel guilty about knowing the words to Dancing Queen? By Stuart Maconie
The lost world of the music weekly: why NME was the last of an extinct species For the magazine’s 40th birthday issue, I wrote its history. I never thought I’d be writing one of its obituaries. By Stuart Maconie