Features
Long-form journalism, investigations, and essays from the print edition.
The Man Who Invented Shoreditch
A man, a myth, a legend: Gary Fairfull changed London.
24 July 2025
The SEND School
Our reporter is becoming a teacher, at a critical juncture for Britain's most vulnerable students.
14 July 2025
Turn Up for the Books
After lockdown lifted, our writer spent three years in search of the perfect book club, only to find that no two readers are ever on the same page.
30 June 2025
The Spy and the Postman
The biggest ever Soviet defector met the publican of The Merry Harriers – only for the pair to learn that they may have a contact in common: the writer’s quiet uncle.
19 June 2025
A Shark Tale
Russell Gray is a redoubtable property developer, who has, among other projects, remade Bermondsey. He is also a self-styled anarchist and an arts patron. What keeps him going?
30 May 2025
Hold the Phone
On 11 September, 2001, a nurse was texting saucy messages to thousands of strangers across the country. But the nurse was really a 21-year-old man, bored in an office in London. We hear his story.
8 May 2025
Borstal Boys
A personal history of the borstal in Britain: a century of incarcerated children.
28 April 2025
Hotel Britannica
An anonymous report from a clinician working inside one of Britain’s asylum hotels.
2 April 2025
Speaking in Small Tongues
An oil trader and an Old Etonian with a genius for PR, was Justin Welby the worst Archbishop of Canterbury since Thomas Arundel?
23 January 2025
In the Shadow of the Mountain
One British family produced two legendary climbers who summitted mountains in the Alps and the Himalayas. This is their story.
22 January 2025
The Grantham Anthem
Kieran Morris and Fergus Butler-Gallie are both obsessed with the Iron Lady, so they took the train to Lincolnshire for a Thatcher-fuelled day out.
13 January 2025
This Turbulent Priest
Cake and coffee with Pat Buckley, a whistleblower; ex-priest; newspaper columnist; gay rights activist; HIV activist; husband; and the scourge, in his own words, ‘of everyone’.
27 November 2024