Features

My week with the clean-water warriors

Just Stop Oil activists have moved on to a new campaign: citizen’s arrests of CEOs

The NFL at Wembley was our generation game

When American football touched down in London, I glimpsed my own childhood – and the end of my daughter’s

A radical rural manifesto

The best-selling author of The Shepherd’s Life grew up thinking the Lake Poets had nothing to say for working people. Then he moved to the city and had a revelation

How I became a Monopoly champion by chance

An unlikely competitor takes on the finest minds in gaming at the UK Mind Sports Olympiad

Felix Baumgartner: the highs and lows of a life of extremes

The Austrian skydiver survived jumping 24 miles from the edge of space. But then his challenges really began. How did a daredevil hero become a political villain?

Inside the brutal world of the Peckham Conker Championships

This nostalgic-sounding event is pure carnage, with scenes of biting and adults wrestling on the concrete

The pages of our lives

Diaries can be the most revealing records of who we are. One compulsive diarist introduces the intimate reflections of Audre Lorde, Salvador Dalí, Elton John and others

The dropping that proves rhinos are rising again

Black rhinos were all but eradicated from Zambia’s Luangwa valley by poachers. But now extinction is being reversed

Laughing in Joe Rogan land

How did comedians get so much political power?

Art, raves and four-minute warnings: 24 hours in Kyiv

How the city’s young are clinging to normality while war rages on

The world’s first steam train chugs back to life in Stockton

The first passenger rail journey, from Stockton to Darlington, took place 200 years ago this week. After HS2, it’s a badly needed reminder of what Britain can build

How a western charity helped the Syrian regime abduct children

SOS International helped disappear hundreds of children kidnapped by the state during the Syrian civil war

Gary Kemp’s adventures in Clubland

Spandau Ballet’s creative force leads us on to the dance floor

John le Carré’s shadow world of secret informers

Long after his intelligence career ended, the author remained at the centre of a web of contacts who were key to his writing

Health misinformation killed my sister. She deserves justice

Gabriel Shemirani blames his mother’s conspiracy theories for the death of his twin Paloma. He talks to Marianna Spring about his campaign against health misinformation

The secret life of a tattoo parlour

More British adults than ever before have tattoos. We get under the skin of our obsession with ink

How to liberate 450 schoolgirls from the Taliban

For more than a decade, writer Bella Pollen helped her friend support a pioneering school in Afghanistan. When US forces withdrew, that became a life-and-death commitment

Preparing for the worst at Europe’s first survivalist shop

From ‘ammo’ boxes for storing food to hazmat suits, survival packs and crossbows, a Cornish shop is cashing in on the post-Covid boom in paranoia