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The Guardian |
You are probably familiar with the case Alan Bates and Others v Post Office Ltd. The high court found that I and 554 other former subpostmasters...
Legal language can conceal what it seeks to describe. It can be an emollient, glossing over the violent specificity of things. Consider...
I’m no stranger to the experience of having your work banned. Many would remember when my first film Gayby Baby was banned from schools in NSW by...
Bruce Lehrmann’s lawyers this week revealed the former Liberal staffer did not have a secret financial backer and that they worked on a no win, no...
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, but I never doubted that Sadiq Khan would win re-election as the city’s mayor – even when rumours of a...
Are you watching Eurovision this weekend? It used to be an innocent enough question. But it’s fast becoming a loaded one, as the silliest,...
The news should have stopped us in our tracks. Astonishingly, however, it was scarcely reported here. The latest map of mental wellbeing published...
Do you find climate breakdown funny? Do you think it’s a laughing matter that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children a...
In the early 1980s hand-written chalk signs started appearing on the sidewalks of my grungy Manhattan neighbourhood: Whoever has the most toys when...
What will happen next in the still-mushrooming Baby Reindeer saga? Probably one or more of a number of bad things. Latest bad thing to happen (at...
Maybe it’s the result of having moved to Europe with a North American point of view, but it has always stunned me that Europe’s nations –...
Who tends to get the big foreign policy calls right: student protesters, or their detractors? Answering this question, it turns out, is useful if...
Fourteen, the stage adaptation of my memoir of the same name, captures a moment in history and in my life that feels so far away now. It’s been...
“Hopeless and broken”: that is how a top scientist interviewed by the Guardian described feeling as she and hundreds of other climate experts...
He seems to have understood it as a business deal. That’s what Stormy Daniels – the former porn star whose account of a sexual encounter with...
I can’t pour things. I don’t mean complicated stuff such as concrete, paint for road markings or a cake glaze; I’m talking simple fluids from...
The Garrick Club’s vote this week in favour of admitting women as members mattered. It mattered – and was the subject of widespread public debate...
Germany’s democracy is 75 years old this month. The anniversary is pregnant with meaning, as the country debates with ever greater anxiety the...
The sight of two (or more) people tearing chunks out of each other is one of humanity’s first and most enduring forms of entertainment. The sheer...
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but if my calculations are correct, it seems we are entering a sapphic-heavy cultural moment. I’ve been a lesbian...
No, no, this is an uncharacteristic mistake. Keir Starmer’s welcoming hand on Natalie Elphicke’s shoulder is a picture his enemies will relish...
From the dry lab on One Tree Island research station – about 100km off the coast from Gladstone and in the southern region of the Great Barrier...
How does Keir Starmer avoid Gaza doing to his Labour party what the Iraq war did to Tony Blair’s a generation ago? Or does the prospect not...
In March this year, the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, gave a speech on the BBC’s future. He said unbalanced, unfair and overtly...
The spectacle of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week sent one back to the image of Trump’s last female...
On Monday, the Israeli military ordered Palestinians in the city of Rafah to evacuate ahead of airstrikes, which unleashed fears that Israel was...
I left an abusive relationship almost a decade ago, but my abuser has kept a noose around my neck every day since. At the time we had four young...
Kristen Welker, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, did her best to pin down Tim Scott last Sunday. Would the junior senator from South...
It was a bright hot day in August, and the heaters were stuck on full blast. A nurse on the acute medical ward bleeped my pager. The heart of a...
When I first moved to the US from the UK, having an English accent was an asset. Back in the pre-Brexit era, it signalled sophistication and...
I hate getting dressed up. Watching the Met Gala red carpet makes my legs go all itchy. As a child, getting dressed up entailed putting on trousers...
Frustrated by the precarious state of Ukraine’s war effort and the long delays in US aid, leaders in France and Britain have stepped up their...
Britain’s “old boys’ club” suffered a blow last night. The Garrick Club – an exclusive gentlemen’s club in central London and relic of...
Farming has always been a risky business. To the chaos of Brexit and the relentless squeezing of the supermarkets, we can add the rapidly...
Siri, show me a hollow victory. It is easy to imagine the glee felt by Keir Starmer’s advisers when Natalie Elphicke MP let them know she was...
Last week the State Library of New South Wales announced the shortlists of the 2024 Premier’s Literary awards. The announcement came with arguably...
As 400 million EU citizens prepare to cast their votes in June’s European elections, a new poll shows that it is Ursula von der Leyen who has...
The recent decision to abolish the non-dom status, which allows a small group of very rich UK residents to earn money abroad without paying tax on...
Amid the cacophony of post-election analysis over the weekend, one item struck me as especially bleak for Rishi Sunak. It wasn’t the byelection...
It seems that some people really want a recession. The estimates of inflation not falling below 3% until the end of next year has led some...
Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been battling it out for days in a vicious diss-track feud, but what started out as a sparring of wits between two of...
The White House rightly said it was “concerning” when Israel’s parliament laid the groundwork to shut down Al Jazeera within its borders in...
I spent three weeks visiting prisons across Scandinavia to find out how they feed their prisoners. You may ask why any of us should be concerned...
I’m kneeling on the hard, cold tiles of my bathroom floor retching into the toilet bowl, and I’ve been here for some time. The colour has drained...
Feeling safe to socialise should be everyone’s right. Reports of Queensland MP Brittany Lauga alleging she was drugged and sexually assaulted during...
A dark month of black swan events threatens to push the national political debate on to a platform of fear as the drumbeat of trauma asks new...
Tuesday is officially the morning after the Met Gala of the night before, when we civilians get to press our noses up against the glass of our...
God knows I don’t want to pick sides in the bitter rivalry between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. The rappers’ feud has been going on for way too long...
‘Bankruptcy” is a surprisingly amorphous term. For poor people, it means not having any money. For corporations and the super-wealthy it means a...
The latest twists and turns in negotiations to end the war in Gaza appear labyrinthine and confusing. But it’s really not that complicated....
John Swinney’s accession to the leadership of the Scottish National party has been called a “coronation”. Yet the smooth handover of power that...
“What’s a Festschrift?” my youngest asks. “In German it means ‘celebration writing’,” I say, “I’m going to an academic conference to...
In 2019, I helped prove in court that the then prime minister misled the Queen. Boris Johnson claimed he prorogued parliament for purely...
Last week’s local election results may finally have sunk Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. It lost all but one of the 11 mayoralty contests, and...
Labour’s tanks roll relentlessly across Tory lawns, not pausing a heartbeat to celebrate phenomenal local election results in England. It treated...
Last Thursday, people voted for change. There appears to be a settled view now that the country needs a fresh start. And yet anyone who has stood...
The local and mayoral elections saw many traditional Labour-voting Muslim voters abandon the party they’ve loyally supported for decades. One...
I never used to think of myself as a liar. I always saw myself as an honest person. The only time I’d ever veer from the truth was to protect...
England’s 12 “metro mayors” should be abolished. Metro mayorships are artificial creations whose regional geography rarely reflects any civic...
The job I was applying for was three days a week. It was a backwards step, career-wise, but the hours were attractive. By that I mean that the...
When Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor being vetted as a candidate for Donald Trump’s vice-president, admitted in her memoir to having shot...
How to react to unfolding calamity? Tory MPs took different approaches. “Disastrous. Worse than I expected and pointing to a total wipeout.”...
Everyone goes through it: a reckoning with one’s own mortality in the mirror, poking at eye bags and tugging at folds of loose skin. Am I looking...
The first passenger train from England to France carried Queen Elizabeth II to Calais on 6 May 1994. Trains carrying less exalted passengers would...
On a hot day last week, the pavements outside Columbia University were heaving. About 200 protesters were gathered, making a noise that was bigger...
The first four months of 2024 have brought the horror of violence against women into the news feeds of everyday Australians. Each day we have been...
Chioma Nnadi, who has taken over at British Vogue, says she has settled back in seamlessly after 20 years out of the UK. “I realised just how...
“In America, the student movement has been seriously radicalized wherever police and police brutality intervened in essentially nonviolent...
Things had been tense at the University of California, Los Angeles, with some ugly jibes and the occasional shove exchanged between students who...