A highly promising research project into the power and effects of the popular song is being undertaken at the University of Hertfordshire. A lecturer in health psychology, Dr Nick Troop, has fed all the lyrics written by David Bowie into...
Read moreTake a look at the photographs of the nasty ruckus which took place at Tuesday's football match between West Ham and Millwall. The mood expressed on the faces of those involved is not angry, or even defiant. It is joyful....
Read moreThe much-publicised campaign which encouraged members of the public to photograph MPs enjoying their holidays in some unexplained sleazy way has not been going terribly well. The campaign group behind MP Holiday Watch must have hoped that it would produce...
Read moreA photographer searching for an image to capture the true strangeness of early 21st-century life could do worse than to visit Heathrow's Terminal 5 this week where, amid the throng of August holidaymakers, a philosopher is at work. Occasionally, he...
Read moreThere is nothing quite like big-time, high-profile sport to influence non-sporting behaviour in wider society. As the football season gets under way, we shall soon be hearing how some incident involving a player (pampered, overpaid, ill-disciplined) or a manager (ill-tempered,...
Read moreEd Vaizey, the culture spokesman of a party long on political ambition but short on policy, must have been delighted with this week's bright idea. A Conservative government, he has said, would consider forcing the BBC to sell off its...
Read moreIt must sometimes be frustrating to be the director of the Edinburgh International Festival. Throughout August, the headlines tend to be about comedians, buskers, contortionists and body-piercers, with the Fringe rather perversely pushing the concerts, dance, opera and drama of...
Read moreThere have been problems on the moors in advance of the Glorious Twelfth, today's opening of the grouse-shooting season. Successive damp summers have accelerated the spread of the heather beetle, which destroys the birds' habitat. There have been worries that...
Read moreIt has been an excellent summer so far for the Smug Marrieds. Those grim representatives of connubial bliss, invented by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones during the 1990s, will have been delighted to read the various pro-matrimony reports and surveys of...
Read moreThe Queen has asked a simple but pertinent question of the nation's economists. Visiting the London School of Economics at the end of last year, she wondered out loud why no one had managed to foresee this "awful recession". The...
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