Dale Shaw
12 November 2025
I ruined Billy Joel’s life
In my pre-enlightened days, I joined a Billy Joel fan club. When I left the piano man behind, his life descended into despair
Read the full article22 October 2025
What we can learn from disasters
Lucy Easthope, one of the world’s prominent emergency planners, on coping with horror and tragedy
Read the full article08 October 2025
Will audiobooks kill reading?
Research shows that listening to a novel is just as good for our brains as leafing through one. Now sales are outperforming every other sector of publishing
Read the full article10 September 2025
Algospeak, the language of the machine
We invented algorithms to sort our words. Now the algorithms are teaching us how to speak
Read the full article03 September 2025
The Raincoats, music’s best kept secret
Formed at the height of punk and revered by fans like Kurt Cobain, the Raincoats are the band that refused to die
Read the full article27 August 2025
The art of male friendship
A new film captures the awkward, brittle reality of late-life male companionship
Read the full article13 August 2025
21 brilliant, bizarre and downright bad beach books
From Perfection and Careless People to Stephen King and Katie Price, your summer reading is sorted
Read the full article16 July 2025
Jen Calleja, the punk-rock translator
Calleja is part of a new, very different generation of translators, as her experimental memoir makes clear
Read the full article02 July 2025
The simple joy and complex roots of Dick Bruna’s Miffy
Miffy is Dick Bruna’s most famous creation, selling over 85 million books. But the beloved bunny is only a small part of the story
Read the full article05 June 2025
Why ABBA still eludes us
Serious books are being written about the pop icons. But do we risk letting light in on the magic?
Read the full article13 April 2025
The nuclear history of the bikini
In the shadow of the bomb, two men fought to create the smallest swimsuit in the world
Read the full article26 March 2025
Europe’s best literary hotels
From where authors stayed to where they set their novels, a selection of reading rooms for travelling bookworms
Read the full article12 March 2025
The days of Dolce Vita
Hollywood on the Tiber lifts the lid of Rome’s riotous postwar film industry
Read the full article12 February 2025
The cookbooks which hurl you headlong into the beating heart of a nation
The original great European cookbooks may be filled with recipes that we no longer use, but they take us back to the past in a poignant way
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