Viking friendship was yet another means of structuring mutual assistance, within communities that otherwise did not have fully reliable guarantees of security and support. The resulting overlap of social networks was the key to a (relatively) peaceful society. Friendship was cemented through gift-giving, as between lords and their retainers, with a

A guy called Red Saunders, along with a few of his friends, had formed Rock Against Racism in 1976, not just as a reaction to the racist skinheads terrorising our streets, but also in response to comments made by Eric Clapton and David Bowie. It’s extraordinary to think that back then Eric Clapton (aka God) said he agreed with Enoch Powell and that

Stories are a calm anchor amid the storm of uncertainty. And in uncertain in-between times, the stories we tell ourselves are powerful frameworks that help us work out who we are in the present moment and what we value. They lure us into becoming our aspirational selves.

Comparing the latter chapters of It Was Different to the pages of Holden’s unpublished diary, we can retrace her steps as she lifted out paragraphs and moved around, edited, pruned, and adjusted sentences originally written at the time of the experiences described. Some of the most powerful Blitz scenes in her private diary serve double duty, appea

It’s been a few years since we last used the magic portal in our back garden, and it has fallen into disrepair. To be perfectly honest, when we bought this place, we had no idea what kind of work would be involved, and tasks like keeping the garden weeded, repairing the fence, maintaining the portal, etc., quickly fell to the bottom of the priority

There is a reason why Sichuan cooking is world famous – the tongue-numbing, mouth-smarting combination of Sichuan pepper and chilli gives a chilli fiend such a profound rush that it is easy to see why chillies are considered to be addictive. In this easy recipe, adapted from one of Fuschia Dunlop’s, the mix of garlicky, gingery chilli heat and citr

Hanslip’s weakness was a somewhat ostentatious self-presentation. He affected an old-fashioned style, and had had his metabolism tweaked so that he stabilised at about ten per cent overweight: enough to give him a more solid look without requiring frequent adjustments to the heart.

the long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess. Tech creates isolation, tech connects marginalized communities. The difficult work that we face is to live and thrive beyond binaries and assumptions, and to aid and enable others to do so.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different fo