Sagas to savour
Was Iceland responsible for the French Revolution, the moon landing and the discovery of America?
Journey around the travel scribes
Why is travel writing so unfashionable and even regarded by some as simply “wrong”?
Riotous isle of vanilla gangsters, lemurs and a DJ president
In his new book on Madagascar, John Gimlette tells of trouble in paradise
Take the slow train
Tom Chesshyre on the joy and rattle of Spain’s local lines
Amtrak Joe
Tom Chesshyre on the railroad buff in the White House
Decaying delights
Tom Chessyre on the glory of obscure railway museums
Anoraks at half-mast
Tom Chesshyre on the death of a train-spotters’ paradise
Dickens derailed
Tom Chesshyre recounts Dickens’s troubled history with trains
Hell on wheels
Tom Chesshyre endures some mercifully brief encounters
Track rate
Tom Chesshyre has a soft spot for railway hotels
In praise of the viola
Cantabile: Anthems for viola (Delphian)
The poverty of miners’ strike nostalgia
We should not romanticise a futile and sometimes thuggish struggle
Killing the golden goose
International student numbers must be capped, and candidates held to the same academic standards
With their pants down
The Conservatives are in a nightmare they cannot wake up from
How can we pay for our cathedrals?
Critics of silent discos in Canterbury Cathedral are silent on how to fund our churches
Why we should resist this “conversion therapy” ban
It would enshrine dubious claims as unarguable facts, and it endangers freedom and young people
The best of The Rest Is …
Sequel podcasts are emerging with the inevitability of sprouts from an old potato
The BBC feeds us bad science
We can’t even trust the Beeb to tell us about the basic facts of motherhood
No, Liz Truss did not crash the economy
The Conservatives should be brave enough to take on this stupid talking point
Hatred and mental illness are not mutually exclusive
Violent men being mentally ill need not make broader societal phenomena irrelevant
Artistic freedom is worth the risk
Arts Council England’s revised guidance offers cause for concern over freedom of expression
