1 week ago Question 7 by Richard Flanagan audiobook review – a bold memoir of life and near

History and autobiography are brilliantly intertwined as the Booker-winning author explores the choices and chance connections that shape our existenceAt the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan’s father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. “How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?” Flanagan asks.Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflec...

Politics

1 week ago Denied, detained, deported: the faces of Trump’s immigration crackdown

The administration has torn up the rule book as it seeks to implement a hardline agenda to expel people from the US Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting people requesting asylum and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Charity accuses NHS Wales of failing people with hearing loss

National charity, RNID, said some people face major barriers like not being able to book a GP appointment and not understanding what's happening to them in an emergency

Sport

3 w. ago The North Road by Rob Cowen review – the poetry and pain of Britain’s backbone

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movieMost people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with it...

Politics

3 w. ago ‘A surfyte of cheese doth bringe payne’: Leeds university transcribes early book on cheese

First known such ‘pamflyt’ in English has contemporary resonance, with advice on food intolerances and eating cheese after a mealThey are 450-year-old words of wisdom but they will ring true with anyone rooting around the fridge for late night comfort: “A surfyte of cheese doth bringe payne.”The warning for people to curb their enthusiasm is contained in the earliest-known book on cheese in English, a publication that academics say is both fascinating and nauseating. Continue reading...

Culture

3 w. ago ‘Book brigade’: US town forms human chain to move 9,100 books one

A small Michigan community banded together to help a beloved local bookstore move its stock to a new storefrontResidents of all ages in a small Michigan community formed a human chain and helped a local bookshop move each of its 9,100 books – one by one – to a new storefront about a block away.The “book brigade” of about 300 people stood in two lines running along a sidewalk in downtown Chelsea on Sunday, passing each title from Serendipity Books’ former location directly to the correct shelves in the new building, down the block and around the corner on Main Street. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago 'I'm the Godfather of poker who has won more than £4.5m – here's how I call a bluff'

At the highest level of poker, you must read your opponent like a book – few people on the planet are better at doing that than Britain's Godfather of poker Barny Boatman

Economics

3 w. ago Lanarkshire musician's Makaton choir for people with Down’s syndrome to star at Paisley Book Festival

Choir 21 will perform as conductor and author Katy Lironi shares a book telling her family’s story.

Culture

3 w. ago Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class review – a complicated class portrait

Journalist Joel Budd travels around Britain demolishing Brexit myths in a nuanced study of a social group too often reduced to a cartoon by politiciansOn 13 November 1968, a 35-year-old Labour politician got to his feet in the House of Commons and had a go at the ranks of Conservative members who faced him. Six or so months after Enoch Powell had delivered his infamously racist “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, David Winnick – who was then the MP for Croydon South – had decided to attack the Tory fashion for bemoaning immigration to the UK from such countries as India and Pakistan and expressing faux sympathy with deprived communities in British cities. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants,” he said, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white working class.”As the Economist journalist Joel Budd points out in this nuanced, enlightening book about the people and places Winnick was referring to, this ...

Events

4 w. ago Kaliane Bradley: ‘I dreaded the book going to people I know’

The author of bestseller The Ministry of Time on how lockdown telly, Terry Pratchett and her Cambodian heritage shaped her Arctic time travel taleKaliane Bradley, 36, lives in east London and works as an editor at Penguin Classics. Her debut novel, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), was published last year to critical acclaim and a place in the bestseller charts and is out in paperback now. It’s a vivid time travel tale following Lieutenant Graham Gore, a crew member of Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition, who is brought back to life in the 21st century as part of a government experiment. He develops an unlikely relationship with his “bridge”, a contemporary character helping him assimilate to the modern world. It was longlisted for the 2025 women’s prize for fiction and the BBC has commissioned a TV adaptation.What has the past year been like for you?Lovely and discombobulating. I veer wildly between immense gratitude and intense impostor syndrome. But I’m still working 4.5 days a ...

Politics