7 d. ago A British hippie era Sixties icon who mysteriously vanished without trace 35 years ago presumed dead is ALIVE... as Mail tracks elusive singer down to new life in California

Licorice McKechnie's mesmerising performance with The Incredible String Band at the most celebrated concert of the decade turned her into a sixties icon

Events

1 week ago Does Britain value culture any more? Ask the striking workers at the British Library | Zadie Smith

The dispute over pay at this great national institution gets to the heart of our misplaced prioritiesYou know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little isl...

Events

2 w. ago ‘We need help’: devastated Jamaican communities still await aid after Hurricane Melissa

Ravaged communities near Montego Bay recount what last week’s category 5 storm took from them‘New reality’: Hurricane Melissa strength multiplied by climate crisis, study says‘How do you rebuild all this?’ Black River residents assess damage after Hurricane MelissaSitting outside her house in muddy slippers amid the ruins left by category 5 Hurricane Melissa that ravaged parts of Jamaica last week, Narva Maxwell Taylor recounted how she and her family had to fight for their lives when the storm sent flood waters surging through their home.“We have to give God thanks we are alive. We could be dead. But everything is gone. I don’t have anything left now,” Taylor, a resident of Catherine Hall, Montego Bay, said. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith review – essays for an age of anxiety

From cultural appropriation to gender, Smith nails the politics of creativity. But on actual politics, she is less assuredAccepting a literary prize in Ohio last year, the novelist Zadie Smith described “feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity”. Smith is only 50, but there is indeed something of the afterlife about the material gathered in her new book, which bundles various odds and ends from the past nine years: speeches, opinion pieces, criticism and eulogies for departed literary heroes – Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel.In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultur...

Events

4 w. ago ‘It’s scary how many St George’s flags there were’: Blood Orange on coming home to Essex and mourning his mother

After grief brought Dev Hynes home, he reconsidered the county that shaped him. The result is a masterful new album – made with a little help from Lorde and Zadie SmithDevonté Hynes is telling me how he came to be living back in his childhood home in Ilford, east London, at the age of 37, after his mother had fallen ill. “It was a surreal experience,” he says of the sudden move from Brooklyn, where he makes music as Blood Orange, to sleeping in the bedroom where he once put up posters of David Beckham and the Smashing Pumpkins. “Physically, you’re bigger: your shape has changed. But the space is the same. The memories are the same.”Hynes came back to England to be by the bedside of his mother in hospital, and stayed at home a while after she died in 2023. This tragic disruptionproduced his fifth full-length release, Essex Honey, a clear contender for album of the year. It’s a record grounded by grief but fizzing with the memory flashes that came with returning home to the edge of Es...

Events

last month Brigitte Bardot shuts down ‘fake news’ report of her death and shares health update

False reports emerged online that the legendary French actor had died following a serious illness

Events

last month Brigitte Bardot shuts down ‘fake news’ reports of her death and shares health update

False reports emerged online that the legendary French actor had died following a serious illness

Events

last month I can't cash £80k insurance policy unless I find my accountant from 50 years ago: CRANE ON THE CASE

I only met him a few times, have no contact details for him and don't even know if he is alive or dead. What can I do?

Economics