Jeremy Parrott has found the Rosetta Stone of Victorian literature, the key to unlocking one of the last great secrets that Dickens took to his early grave. It solves the mystery of which Victorian writers worked for him and wrote in his weekly journal All The Year Round.
An old hen house in the Scottish Highlands that has been converted into a gin distillery has been crowned the Shed of the Year 2015, beating 2,250 others to claim the top spot.
The bewildered disarray and gloom in the Labour Party is inevitable and unavoidable. In politics, context determines what happens more than the actions or words of individuals. The messy split over George Osborne’s benefit cuts and the leadership contest where candidates struggle to generate wider interest were wholly predictable from the early hours of the Friday after the election when the Conservatives had secured their unexpected overall majority.
“We have already got girls going into quite handsomely paid internships in the holidays,” says Clarissa Farr of St Paul’s Girls School in London. “I expect to see 18-year-olds being snapped up by big-name firms straight away.” Farr is headmistress at the £23,500-a-year school where 98.9 per cent of A-level pupils last year achieved A*, A or B grades.
Whether you're trekking in Patagonia or inter-railing to Palermo, bunk in comfort without being weighed down by your pack
With David Cameron’s decision to invest the stretched UK defence budget on drones to fight Islamic State (Isis), the threat posed by the Islamist caliphate is attracting global attention. But as horrific as their atrocities are, it is conceivable that Isis will turn out to have been little more than a traumatic blip in world history.
Extinction is one of the great tragedies of our times. But can we actually stop a wild creature disappearing once it is truly on the slide towards oblivion? Last week I watched a group of people trying hard to do just that.
On Wednesday 15 July, the Government will introduce a motion in the House of Commons “to approve a statutory instrument relating to hunting”.
Last year, Rebecca’s husband, Nick, was hit by a car and seriously injured. Here, in one of a series of columns, she writes about the aftermath of his accident
For the most part, neither the law nor ethical codes of conduct confer greater privacy rights on public figures than ordinary mortals, but the playing field isn’t completely level. Children whose parents are famous require particular care and, when it comes to identifying where a person lives, extra protection is attached to celebrity. It is rare for this provision to extend beyond those whose fame is enough to attract an especially loyal/deranged type of fan. Addresses are not, after all, intrinsically private. Читать дальше...
Can the crisis really all be over now? In the short term, the answer to that would seem to be yes, or “nai”, to use the word of the moment. The European Central Bank will make emergency funding available to the Greek banks, which will save them from certain collapse. That, in turn, will restore some confidence to the Greek economy.
Inspired by play at the The Open? Then attempt to achieve Jordan Spieth-style accuracy with a clever gadget
In a remarkable turn of events, Greece has reached a deal with Eurozone leaders on a new financial package, its third such bailout. The deal is extraordinary in several respects, not least because Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has signed up to an agreement that is, in numerous respects, more stringent to that which both he, and the Greek populace at large in last week’s referendum, had previously roundly rejected.
1. Another lovely painting of east London by Walter Steggles, via the East London Group. This is Stratford, 1938.
In the early 1980s Janet Yellen needed to hire a babysitter for her son. She worked out the typical market rate for child minders in the area of Berkeley, California, where she lived. But then Yellen went and did something economically irrational: she put out an advert offering to pay a babysitter more than the market rate. She was acting on the hunch that by paying extra she would get a happier babysitter who would do a better job.
Remember the 1980s? You might not want to, even if you can. It was, after all, the era of fluffy leggings, tutus, poodle haircuts and unfeasibly clunky mobile phones. Neon pink was in vogue and so was Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady won every election that decade and her acquisitive message even trickled down into the music of the era, characterised by power ballads whose singers bellowed about “wanting it all”, right now.
Nineteenth-century Americans were on safe ground when they inscribed the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Religious people have their Damascene moments, but atheists often have only the vaguest recollection of the point at which the scales dropped from their eyes. Me, I can trace my disbelief in God back to two distinct childhood memories. To understand those events in context, you’ll need a little bit of background.
The Government has been agitating for a gear change in terms of our military role in the Middle East long before David Cameron announced that defence strategy would now focus more clearly on countering Isis. A consensus has grown that, insofar as air attacks are having any effect on its advance, confining strikes to Iraq is illogical when Iraq is not Isis’s operational hub. The Defence Minister, Michael Fallon, clarified this shift on 2 July when he said it was clear that Isis had to be defeated... Читать дальше...
