reportage
Reliving the terror of the Bataclan massacre
Emmanuel Carrère knows when to let the horrors speak for themselves in his moving, hard-hitting account of the trial of the perpetrators
Voices from Gaza, historic city in ruins
Accounts of the current bombings and the daily search for fuel, food and water are by turns heartbreaking, terrified, resilient and defiant – and cling to the hope of a peaceful future
The Crimean War spelt the end of hymns to heroism and glory
Writing from opposite sides, Leo Tolstoy and William Howard Russell exposed the horror of conditions in a quagmire war which seemed to have no meaning
A David and Goliath battle involving a billion-dollar pornography website
Laila Mickelwait appears to wage a one-woman crusade to shut down a major distributor of rape and child abuse videos
How a small town in Ukraine stopped the Russians in their tracks
Andrew Harding describes the hastily assembled ‘Dad’s Army’ – and formidable babushka – who sensationally resisted the Russian advance on Voznesensk last year
The agony and frustration of reporting from the Middle East
For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…
Is Christianity about to end in the place it began?
Janine di Giovanni’s book begins in a Paris apartment during the first lockdown. She’s at a friend’s home, which she…
Heroes and villains of the pandemic in America
The most alarming aspect of living in America is the recurring sensation that no one is in charge. This is…
Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?
The QAnon conspiracy theory may be absurd, but it can’t be ignored. It has already led to significant acts of violence, says Damian Thompson
The US tech companies behind China’s mass surveillance
Tom Miller describes how Xinjiang became a laboratory for China’s mass surveillance system – built with the help of US tech companies
The scandal of OxyContin, the painkiller that caused untold pain
The Sacklers’ callous greed has unleashed a tsunami of pain, says Ian Birrell
The difficulty of building heaven on Earth: why utopias usually fail
The years after the first world war were a boom time for utopian communities. As the survivors of the conflict…
New Yorkers talk the talk
New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains…
Sacrificing to the false god of gold
Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest sits a desolate zone, stretching for miles and pockmarked with chemical-tainted water that glistens orange…
Life on Earth is too tame for eccentric American billionaires
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…
Not just a trolley dolly: the demanding life of an air hostess
Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover —…
Cashing in on Covid: the traders who thrive on a crisis
When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of the world, not just…
Walls go up after the Berlin Wall comes down
In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel,…
Cruelty and chaos in Karachi
Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the…
Exotic and endangered: Madagascar in peril
Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the…
Paradise regained: how the world’s wastelands are regenerating
Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed…
The Tibetans’ fight for freedom continues — but only just
‘Free Tibet!’ used to be a rallying cry for Hollywood A-listers and rock stars. Richard Gere hung out with the…
The story of Sealand – a most improbable sovereign state
In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never…
She just keeps rollin’ along: Colombia’s Magdalena River
As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead,…
Should we all be prepping for the end of days?
In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody…
