My fresher’s year at Edinburgh University offered a few rude awakenings. The first: learning the university had run out of self-catered accommodation. The next was that the uni’s solution was to have

Lust for life Reading Issue 1704 [09-15 February] regarding the celebration of 30 years of Trainspotting made me realise that my Morris dancing side, New Moon Morris, had unwittingly taken part, recre

One of the least financially literate people I have ever met was a friend who as a teenager accumulated an unarranged overdraft of £50 on her newly opened bank account. Having been told she must recti

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

On the morning of Eid, on 13 May 2021, Tabassum Niamat was waiting at home for her family to visit. All her cooking for the big celebration was out of the way. And then the text messages started comin

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the