In a few hours I will feel elated. Then despairing. But at 11am, as I pull out of my south London street in a Toyota Auris estate, I am trying to feel calm. It’s a new career. I’m about to start my first shift as an Uber driver. You don’t join Uber for a laugh,...

A large bulky object wrapped in a bright blue tarpaulin. It is sitting in the middle of the pavement. It could be an old piano, maintenance equipment, a delivery waiting to be unpacked. But then the tarpaulin starts to move, an arm appears and the cover is pulled back to reveal a man and a...

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.

In the 1970s, idealistic young activists created a wave of experimental schools - no compulsory lessons, no timetables, no rules. So what happened to the kids who attended these free-for-alls? You wait an age for the green man to let you cross Liverpool's Scotland Road.

'They put a gun to the back of my head. I heard them cock it. It jammed'

Up close it looks like a normal, if rather high-powered, literary event. We're in the hall of the British Library. On stage is Mark Lawson, the nation's undisputed master of cultural ceremonies, holding aloft a new book and chatting breezily to the thirtysomething celebrity author sitting alongside him.