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The lute master and the siege of Aleppo
Luthier Ibrahim al-Sukkar's shop was bombed; when he moved, militants came for him. Over WhatsApp, he told me what's next. Aleppo was once a city of music, but this year the 400,000 residents who...
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If the left leaves it to David Cameron, we'll have Brexit for sure
Only an upbeat, leftwing case can keep Britain in the European Union. After months flapping and hesitation, and with much of the reporting and detail so dull that it has barely penetrated the...
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Ukrainian cooking shakes off the old Soviet fur coat
Forget the stereotype: Ukranian cuisine is about more than just borscht, as a new cookbook shows.“Potatoes,” Olia Hercules fumes. “Everyone thinks I’ve written a book about bloody potatoes.” It must...
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Why are boundary changes bad for Labour?
New boundaries, a smaller House of Commons and the shift to individual electoral registration all tilt the electoral battlefield further towards the Conservatives. Why?The government has confirmed it...
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Find the EU renegotiation demands dull? Me too – but they are important
It's an old trick: smother anything in enough jargon and you can avoid being held accountable for it. I don’t know about you, but I found the details of Britain’s European Union renegotiation demands...
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The life and times of the London cycle courier
Bike messengers no longer comprise the militia they resembled when the Tories were turning London into a city of finance. But they still trail a thrillingly reckless air of romance. It was as if I’d...
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The marine, and human costs, of illegal fishing
Two new books take us inside the least regulated industry on the planet. How big the sea is, how big. How poor a description that is, too, but the ocean usually resists description and words, no...
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Facebook official: the rise and fall of the relationship status
In the Noughties, it was a relationship milestone. Now, it's just another dead feature. What happened? In the 1950s, couples on US campuses took out ads in college newspapers to announce that their...
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Why is Britain falling out of love with Valentine’s Day?
Celebration of the “Hallmark holiday” is at an all-time low in the UK. A recent YouGov poll found that only four in ten Britons will be celebrating Valentine’s Day this year. And – perhaps more...
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"Samphire": a poem by Alison Brackenbury
"Yet how it waved, in coast’s late light. . . ." My grandmother could cook it, for she grew up by that dangerous shore where the sea skulked without a wall where I have seen it, tough as grass, where...
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Maybe you should just be single
This isn’t your standard anti-Valentine’s day rant. Mid-February is the most frigid time of year, so it’s always seemed apt that that this is when they choose to hold the highest holy day of the cult...
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All the Premiership teams are competing to see who’s got the biggest stadium
It’s not just a financial, but a macho thing – the big clubs want to show off that they have a whopper. Here in NW5, where we live noisily and fashionably, we are roughly equidistant from Arsenal and...
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Who "speaks for England" - and for that matter, what is "England"?
The Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn once demanded, “Let’s have some new clichés.” The Daily Mail, however, is always happiest with the old ones. The Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn once demanded,...
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What I learned while visiting refugees in Germany
The German attitude puts other EU member states to shame. A toddler gave us an inquiring look, trusting that we wouldn’t cause any harm. His mother was more careful. Their long journey had obviously...
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The court case that Richard Nixon rigged
America’s Dreyfus: the Case Nixon Rigged tells the story of Alger Hiss, the American government official accused of being a Soviet spy. The one-sentence summary of this extraordinary book is that it is...
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I'm at the age you could call "peak woe" - but there's plenty of reasons to...
The Office of National Statistics says 50 to 54 year olds are the most miserable people in the country. But they've not seen the new Wonderpass. I’m looking at a report from the Office for National...
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For all the talk, an SDP-style breakaway is simply not going to happen
There are no viable leaders, there is no political appetite - and those are just the simpler problems. Amid the tumult of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, a theme increasingly debated...
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Gaming North Korea's missiles: what are the mathematics of peace?
The equilibrium of the world's different nuclear arsenals is a victory for game theory - but North Korea's ambitions could upset the balance. For a few decades after the Second World War, we were...
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What David Vann's ill-fated "career at sea" taught him about his father's...
In A Mile Down: the True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, Vann explores the nature and legacy of mental illness. According to the experts, suicide is almost always an irrational act. Depression,...
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Companies are to publish their gender pay gaps – but will this lead to...
It's been over 45 years since the Equal Pay Act, and the reasons women still earn less than men are complex. To change them, we may need to take more radical action than this proposal offers. In 2012,...
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