Cities
How technology exacerbates the winner-takes-all effect
I was exchanging emails with someone the other day and signed off with the sentence ‘let me know when you…
How Hull won me over
James Walton finds a lot to love about this year’s City of Culture – even on a bleak January weekend
Birmingham can be maddening – but culturally it has a lot to teach London
On Saturday night, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra makes its first appearance at the BBC Proms under its new…
The first favela – and what it can tell you about Rio’s history
Where are you going?’ demanded the boy on the wall. A walkie-talkie clipped to his denim shorts crackled, but there…
The heart of Los Angeles feels like somewhere else entirely
There’s a certain kind of Englishman who falls hard for Los Angeles. Men such as Graham Nash, who swapped the…
Bristol, the European capital of green nannying and bureaucracy
Environmental nannying is wrecking my beloved Bristol
Osborne’s false prophet: why Jim O’Neill will never deliver a ‘northern powerhouse’
Why Jim O’Neill isn’t fit to run the Northern Powerhouse
Grim, generous, decaying and hip: the paradoxical charms of Athens
My first visit to Athens as a student gave me a set of impressions that the present crisis has only…
The myth of the housing crisis
The coalition is letting developers concrete over the countryside, but that won’t help young people buy houses
Hadrian on the Somerset levels
Since the Somerset Levels are a flood plain, nature will flood it. Romans had no problems with that. Much of…
‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh', by Robert Crawford - review
Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be…
City of miracles
A mysterious head injury left the young Ian Thomson unconscious in his flat in the Via Salaria. But decades later, his affection for Rome remains undiminished
Deep, dark mysteries
For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure.
The battle for the holy city
In a tour de force of 500 pages of text Simon Sebag Montefiore, historian of Stalin and Potemkin, turns to a totally different subject: the city of Jerusalem.