Francis Wheen

How did Robert Maxwell fool most of the people most of the time?

6 February 2021 9:00 am

‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s…

Obama reads a letter from a citizen pleading for Health Care Reform in March 2010. Credit: Getty Images.

Dear Mr President: the ‘little people’ write to Obama

15 September 2018 9:00 am

President George Washington received about five letters a day and answered them all himself. By the end of the 19th…

Arlott and Swanton — the Disraeli and Gladstone of cricket?

5 May 2018 9:00 am

E.W. Swanton’s first published article appeared in All Sports Weekly in July 1926, soon after his 19th birthday. Thence, swiftly,…

At feeding time, Jacqueline Yallop’s pigs splash their noses through the grain, ‘bringing them up white and floury, like old-fashioned Sherbet Dabs’

Swine fever

26 August 2017 9:00 am

‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch.…