Some of the “searchers” were skilled at inspecting the clothes, hair and genitals of Victorian women and finding stolen money and pawn tickets for stolen goods. Others undertook risky sting operations, catching thieves and criminals red-handed and successfully testifying against them in court. Yet for nearly 200 years, the vital role 19th-century female detectives played … Read more
The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos leaped from its metal skids into the caiman-inhabited waters below. Their target, lurking in the woodland along Brazil’s Bóia River, was a hulking steel mining dredge, caught red-handed as it drilled into the riverbed, pulverising it in … Read more
It sounds like the dream gig: working as a personal assistant to a Hollywood celebrity, becoming immersed in a rarefied world of movie sets and production meetings and A-list parties and, who knows, climbing the ladder to an entertainment career to call your own. Sometimes, it works out exactly that way. Winona Ryder’s former assistant, … Read more
In September 2022, a few days after Russian forces retreated from the Ukrainian town of Izium, I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split apart by a missile. Fifty-four residents had been killed in the Russian attack, which had taken place six months earlier. Purple and yellow wild flowers were growing in … Read more
Great Britain are celebrating another stellar performance at the Paralympic Games with more golds and more medals in total than in Tokyo three years ago, amid a warning “not to take our eyes off the ball” as the global level of competition continues to rise. Paris 2024 has raised the bar for disability sport both … Read more
In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away. “One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: … Read more
Anyone who spotted the run Tom Vickery uploaded to exercise tracking app Strava on 18 February last year might have been a little confused. The 30-minute sprint appeared to have taken place right in the middle of the Channel, not far from Guernsey and heading towards the west coast of France. The run was also, … Read more
It’s a greyish Saturday afternoon in late August, and alongside other street party attenders, I’m watching two flamboyantly dressed women, one clutching a flute, backed by three male musicians while they shout out the lyrics to their new song, Kiddy Ska Party. “I told you about my stitches / I told you about my stitches … Read more
Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking anthology My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was first published in the US in 1973, though Gillian Anderson only read it for the first time when she took on the role of sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education. “Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me,” she says of Friday’s letters … Read more
Sérgio Mendes, who has died aged 83 after suffering from the effects of long Covid, was one of the most successful Brazilian artists of all time. A pianist, songwriter, arranger and bandleader, he enjoyed a lengthy career that began in the bossa nova boom of the early 1960s and continued for six decades – long … Read more