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For the life of me, I can’t work out how to open the damn aeroplane door from the inside. I’ve been shown three times by easyJet cabin crew trainer Dilyana. I’ve watched four members of the public manage it easily. Yet when I eventually pull the right combination of levers, I forget to hang on … Read more

If life had panned out the way we had imagined, Chris and I would be doting grandparents by now. People who are childless not by choice know that as much as having children changes you, so does not being able to have children when you want them. With five pregnancy losses, the last one 26 … Read more

Harris says Trump will ‘speak a lot of untruths’ during debate Kamala Harris has warned that Donald Trump is “probably going to speak a lot of untruths” during their debate tomorrow night, and that her Republican opponent will likely revert to personal attacks, pointing to the “playbook” he used with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. … Read more

Gary Hume’s studio is overrun with swans. They don’t quite outnumber all the tins of Dulux gloss, his go-to paint, but it’s close. Avian necks and elegantly drooping heads, liquefying into abstraction and then curdling back into figuration, drift across the walls of his east London workplace. One charcoal drawing is echoed by a painting … Read more

Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. It’s also one of the most fascinating games of the last decade, sometimes for unlikely reasons. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, … Read more

The Journalist You are not there to weep.You are there because they are weeping.And the world must know. You are not there to show us how you care.You are there to show how they care.So the world can care too. You will not be thanked.You will not be loved.Not even by yourself. The words you … Read more

It’s a truly dreadful irony: for many of the 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to even a basic water supply, there is likely to be a significant reserve in aquifers sitting just a few metres below their feet. Groundwater – the water stored in small spaces and fractures in rocks – … Read more

I have just discovered how the deep-sea anglerfish mates. My apologies if this is old ichthyological news to you, but it is new news to me, and it is very definitely going to be the hook for this week’s column. The female deep-sea anglerfish is very large compared with the male deep-sea anglerfish. In some … Read more

Carla Tomasi, who has died aged 70, belonged to a generation of chefs, among them Alastair Little, Simon Hopkinson, Antony Worrall Thompson and Rowley Leigh, who helped shape the gastronomic geography of London in the 1980s. She became head chef of Frith’s, in Frith Street, Soho, early in that decade and, not long after, took … Read more