24 h. ago The extraordinary story of a woman who moved her home brick by brick

When the council threatened to demolish her historic home in Hertfordshire, May Savidge, dismantled it herself and then rebuilt it 100 miles away in Norfolk.

Politics

55 h. ago 'I survived a plane crash with maggots feasting on my wounds'

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Known as 'the girl who fell from the sky', this extraordinary woman has a story like no other, when she survived a plane crash that left her stranded in the Amazon Rainforest

Events

56 h. ago Googoosh: A Sinful Voice by Googoosh with Tara Dehlavi review – the extraordinary story of an Iranian icon

Her voice soundtracked the 60s and 70s, but the revolution silenced her. The legendary singer finally has her say in this uneven memoirIf you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has gone from singer to cultural icon, a symbol of a country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and muzzled artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and the diaspora.Googoosh was just three years old when she started singing in small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. By her teens she was a film actor and a fashion icon. In the 60s and 70s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in films, magazines, on the radio. She kept recreating herself – her style, her moves, her hair. (My mother and many of her university classmates copied Googosh’s famous wispy haircut.) For ...

Politics

3 w. ago ‘This extraordinary story never goes out of fashion’: 30 authors on the books they give to everyone

Colm Tóibín, Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak, Michael Rosen and more share the novels, poetry and memoirs that make the perfect giftI love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love. Contin...

Culture

3 w. ago The Curious Case of Mike Lynch by Katie Prescott review – the extraordinary story behind the Bayesian tragedy

A meticulously researched account of the controversial businessman’s rise and shocking demiseAt least two terrible ironies surround the death of Mike Lynch. One lies in the name of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of 19 August 2024. He had named the boat Bayesian to honour Bayes’s theorem, a mathematical rule that helps you weigh up the probability of something given the available evidence, which served as Lynch’s guiding light over the course of a tempestuous career. The theorem was “a beautiful key to our minds”, Lynch believed. But it was entirely incapable of predicting the outcome that morning, when the yacht capsized during a storm, killing seven people, including Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and his US lawyer, Chris Morvillo.A second irony lies in the fact that Lynch had just come through the trial of his life, one he felt was bound to end in jail, where he thought he could die. Somehow, to everyone’s astonishment, an American ju...

Politics

4 w. ago Iran's famed singer Googoosh recalls family, exile and life in the spotlight

Iran's most-famous singer has written an account of her life as she embarks on a farewell tour

Politics