One day, Lance Stewart was trying to get out of the tube station in a hurry. "I got off the train and suddenly found myself behind a huge crowd."
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/ 20 November 2008
As the global financial crisis tightens its grip, sales of Karl Marx’s <i>Das Kapital</i> are booming. Stuart Jeffries offers this handy primer.
She has played a concentration camp survivor and a working-class whistle-blower, but in Mamma Mia! Meryl Streep sings, dances — and does the splits.
It is often said that everybody has a novel in them. The current problem is that so many of us bring that novel out of ourselves and get it published.
David Yates talks sex, money and quidditch with Stuart Jeffries.
Recently, I got an email complaining about an article I’d written. It happens. The angry tone was nothing if not consistent until very near the end. One question. After all that rage, why did she sign off with her first name and two kisses? This week I received an email from a PR woman with whom I had not previously corresponded, let alone met. It started with "Hi Stu" and ended with "warm regards". The "warm" part especially threw me.
It was perhaps the second glass of wine that did it. That, or the dessert of millefeuille aux poires. Or it could have been the blanquette, the bourguignon, or whatever Le Firmament in the Rue 4 Septembre in Paris’s second arrondissement was offering as the day’s special.
The Catholic mystic Catherine of Siena claimed that, in a vision, she received the Holy Prepuce or foreskin as a wedding ring symbolising her marriage to Christ. A certain Saint Bridget made it known that she, too, had received bits of prepuce from an angel. It gave her orgasmic-like sensations when she put it on her tongue.
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/ 27 February 2007
One day Wangari Maathai went out with some friends into Nairobi to plant a tree. This was not unusual, given that she has been responsible for planting 30-million trees in Kenya in the past three decades. But on that day, January 8 1999, as she raised her hoe to dig a hole for the sapling, she and her friends were attacked by 200 guards.
It was seven minutes before half time. Real Madrid were 2-0 down against already relegated opponents in May 2004, when David Beckham tackled Real Murcia’s Luis Garcia. The England captain thought the tackle was clean but the linesman flagged for a foul. Leaping to his feet, the Dagenham-born galactico unleashed a volley of idiomatic Spanish, calling the official a ”hijo de puta [son of a whore]”.