Q&A: It’s ‘Da Business’—the editors launch an (imaginary) new newspaper ...

Once, standing in the weaving shed at Queen Street Mill in Burnley, Lancashire, I listened as an employee turned on the steam engine, setting loose the sound of 300 dobby looms. They moved at a canter ...

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, one of my teachers told me to read Orwell’s essays in the hope—forlorn, at least in the short term—that doing so might prompt me to rein in my prose. I liked ...

The dividing line between memoir and autofiction can feel blurred, yet writers expect readers to treat the former as truth and the latter as anything between fact and fiction. Not so Mary McCarthy, ...

Around 33 AD, Saul of Tarsus was a zealous young tent-maker, “breathing out threatenings and slaughter” against followers of Jesus. He watched on approvingly as Stephen, the first Christian martyr, ...

Is it fair to criticise a nonfiction book for what it doesn’t include? Most would argue that it isn’t unless the omissions materially alter the subject being tackled. And this is where Lissa Evans’s ...

When I worked in television, many moons ago, one of my jobs as a lowly researcher was to scour the reference books (this was long before Google, before AI, in the age of the press cuttings library and ...

One bright September afternoon in a forest in Switzerland, a 64-year-old woman is about to die. She is standing in a clearing, in front of a purple capsule that’s just large enough to fit a human ...

Brad and Jodie are a liberal, affluent, interracial couple. Jodie is dying. If she can, she wants to speed the process along, before the seizures from her brain tumour rob her of dignity and ...

What is the first news event you can recall? I was born just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I can’t pretend that I remember that. It’s probably the terrible new year’s café fire in Volendam, ...

It all began in the summer of 2010. My son, James, was about to turn four. Before his second birthday, he somehow taught himself to use my iPod. I knew what had attracted him to the device: a deep, ...

Picture a dead river. This is what Robert Macfarlane asks us to do, to help conceive an answer to the question, “Is a river alive?” The poet and nature writer travels to the Los Cedros cloud forest in ...