Features

Why children have stopped reading

It’s only when you read the old stories again, to a child maybe, that you become aware of the extent to which the characters still live inside your mind, bobbing about just below the level of consciousness. I still find myself puzzling over the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, decades after I first read

Ross Clark

Why Britain riots

Riotous summers seem to occur in Britain with about the same frequency as sunny ones: roughly every decade. Sometimes it’s Afro-Caribbeans protesting (Brixton in 1981), sometimes Asians (Oldham in 2001). The white working classes rioted over the poll tax in 1990 and in Southport this year. The riot in Harehills, Leeds, last month was precipitated

How students toppled Bangladesh’s despot

Dhaka On Monday, Bangladesh’s long-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country by helicopter to India. Parliament was dissolved the following day. It came after weeks of protest by students demanding reform of the quota system for government jobs. Violent clashes led to more than 300 people being killed. Under Sheikh Hasina’s iron-fisted

Freddy Gray

Sharing riot videos? You’re part of the problem

We’re told these riots are about immigration, racism, angry Islam, elite blindness and identity politics – and, to a point, that’s all true. But the disorder in British cities is also about the internet – and online videos in particular. People just can’t stop sharing ‘riot porn’, whether it be savage beatings, vicious clashes between

Gus Carter

Down and out in Birmingham and Rotherham

The Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, is opposite an RSPB nature reserve. For months, its 130 rooms have been fully booked, rented by the Home Office to house migrants. Last weekend, the hotel was surrounded by a mob who broke in and tried to burn it down. Most of the ground-floor windows are now

Can anything stop a full-scale conflict in the Middle East?

The fact that the Middle East stands on the brink of a catastrophic war can be explained by a scene from The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s preposterous but entertaining series on Netflix about aristocrats and sarf London drug-dealers. The dim eldest son of a duke is in trouble with a vicious gangster, who makes him dress

How I learned to embrace my autism

I’m autistic, I teach autistic children and I care for autistic adults, but I never kid myself that we are better than other people. When I asked a fellow autistic man if he could name any famous autistic people, he replied: ‘Hitler and Einstein.’ I love his answer because it punctures the romanticism around autism.

Aliens exist? Prove it

At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio there is, it is rumoured, a secret underground room where a crashed alien spacecraft is kept. It’s warm to the touch, buzzing with a strange energy, an indication of technology light years ahead of ours. Meanwhile, over at Groom Lake Air Force Base in Nevada, otherwise known as

Beware the bat police

My friend Andrew is angry. He has just had the bat people round to look at his building project in Swanage. There was no evidence of bats that they could find, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. A full survey would be required. In total the non-existent bats in our village hall cost the

Jonathan Miller

The cult of Bedales

Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t. Bedales implanted itself

Let prisoners phone home

‘A society is measured by the treatment of its prisoners,’ Winston Churchill said. Last year, in England and Wales, every three and a half days a prisoner killed themselves. What does this say about our society? Perhaps you think: why should we care – aren’t there better things to worry about than criminals committing suicide?

Katy Balls

Keir Starmer’s plans to soften Brexit

Anew political bromance is brewing on the continent. Keir Starmer has met Olaf Scholz, his German counterpart, three times since he entered Downing Street last month. Already the two men have found plenty in common. Both are social democrats, both are lawyers from similar backgrounds and both went through a socialist phase before selling themselves

Evita meets Thatcher: the woman fighting Venezuela’s autocracy

Maria Corina Machado is showing the world how opposition politicians can fight an autocrat. When President Nicolas Maduro tried to thwart her campaign by banning her from taking domestic flights, she drove between her rallies on a motorcycle. When he then banned her from running as a candidate in Venezuela’s presidential election, which takes place

The rise of the ‘divorce influencer’

On Woman’s Hour recently, Anita Rani and her guests set out to celebrate the positive sides of a woman’s midlife. Forget the crisis: your forties and fifties could instead be a time for change, a refresh. You could take up a new hobby, they said, or a new exercise regime. Or you could get a

How supporting Trump became cool

For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the ‘basket of deplorables’ who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of

Damian Thompson

The plotting to find the next Pope

The Hollywood adaptation of Conclave, Robert Harris’s thriller about a conspiracy to rig a papal election, won’t be in cinemas until November. But judging by the trailer released last week, its starry cast, crafty plot and spectacular cinematography – jets of smoke scattering cardinals as an explosion shatters the Sistine Chapel – will instantly erase