Letter from Harare (Prospect)
It has been raining for two weeks in Harare, with only an occasional respite for the city's graceful avenues to drip dry. For a country that has gone without heavy rain for several years, this is a turnaround.
Cut is the branch (Daily Telegraph)
"I am a woodlander; I have sap in my veins," Roger Deakin writes. The late author is on a mission to get to the heart of something huge and elemental - to understand not just trees, but the very essence of wood.
Voulez-vous couchette avec moi ce soir? (Sunday Times)
The sleek, cramped Eurostar glides out of St Pancras at lunchtime; a couple of hours, a nip across Paris and we’re at Bercy, boarding the Palatino. The name conjures up in my mind an age of glamorous European sleepers but the train doesn’t live up to its heritage.
Here for the beer (New Statesman)
Britain's equivalent of Oktoberfest comes far closer to being a real beerfest, although it, too, is built on a glaring contradiction.
Rokeby Venus: The painting that shocked a suffragette (BBC news online)
It's the last word in sensual languor. And one of the most famous bottoms of all time.
Kursk 70 years on: Will there ever be another massive tank battle? (BBC news online)
Before dawn on 5 July 1943 explosions lit up the Russian sky and the earth shook to a huge bombardment. As the sun rose, waves of German panzers began rolling across fields of sunflowers and wheat.
Roald Dahl and the darkness within (BBC News online)
There's a perception that children's literature involves endless picnics where the strawberry jam and lashings of ginger beer never run out.
It’s all in the mind (Daily Telegraph)
Stress is a word we throw around like confetti, yet no one knows or cares much what it means. "It's like defining sex, it's pretty impossible," says the managing director of a company selling stress tests.
Seized land is earmarked for Mugabe family, farmers say (Independent on Sunday)
The image went round the world: the body of Terry Ford, a white farmer killed by Zimbabwe's notorious "war veterans", being guarded by his Jack Russell terrier. For many the sight symbolised the country's descent into tyranny under Robert Mugabe.
Lost at sea – what happened to the Ouzo?
(FT magazine)
I remember the radio broadcast - three bodies found in the Channel, a yacht missing. But I only took a close interest a few days later when it was reported that accident investigators were examining the hull of the P&O ferry Pride of Bilbao.
Teen gangsters talk life and death on our city streets
(Guardian)
'They put a gun to the back of my head. I heard them cock it. It jammed'
Shooting rapids in the suburbs (FT)
It may look like a sewage works on a choppy day but in the glorious jargon of London 2012 this is an "early legacy".
