Victoria Viatorum
I first met Maria on Friday. She stood in the street and talked at me in hurried Greek, and then when I didn’t reply, accused me of ignoring her. ‘You speak Greek! I heard you at the kiosk.’ Being ignored was a problem that she seemed to face a lot, dressed in a cast-off T-shirt, […]
Grave Talk
“Can you imagine how hard it is to get a dead body into skinny jeans?” I’m talking to Liz Roberts, an unapologetic murder mystery enthusiast and a funeral director at my local family-run parlour. “Bury me in my finest pyjamas, that’s my only wish. And don’t let the
“WEEK OF THE LONG KNIVES”: WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
After the political shitstorm labelled by The Sunday Times as the “Week of the Long Knives”, Oxford colleges and societies alike sought to publicly support and endorse the manoeuvres of their treasured alumni this week. Of outgoing PM David Cameron, who allegedly had a zealous fondness of fellow
BREXIT: WE CAN’T TURN BACK TIME
In the weeks before the EU referendum, I was more engaged with politics than I’ve ever been. I watched Question Time, Prime Minister’s Questions, I scrolled through the Guardian’s website reading opinion pieces, and I even read a few pro-Brexit pieces in the Daily Mail and the Sun. Yet despite
Off-Foot
It’s the eighty-seventh minute and Newcastle United are down 3-4 in front of their fans. A defensive clearance puts Coloccini out of reach, and spins the ball up in the air. It falls outside the box to the unlikely Cheick Tiotè, “who beans it low and curves it into the bottom corner,” almost
Body of Evidence
She had a tape recording. In it, his voice was muffled, slurred from a night of heavy drinking, and at times inaudible from the rustling of the coat pocket in which she’d hidden the phone during their last conversation together. In it, her voice was noncommittal, quiet, deferential, almost apologe
Whippersnapper
You called the dog Whippersnapper because you could not remember its name. You were friends, allies of sorts, with your illicit trades under the tabletop: a corner of your cake slice exchanged for a wag of the dog’s tail or a stroke of its black head for a friendly grin. But you could not even [&h
Untold Stories: Afghanistan in the 1960s
A particular narrative within the national media seems to have developed with regards to certain ‘war-torn’ countries in the Middle East. War-torn: the word implies destruction with a degree of permanence, as though they have always been ravaged by conflict, and always will be. This n