The tourist trap (Guardian)
At Linquenda House, Harare's gloomy immigration department, the official inspecting my visa extension form asks me what I do. "I'm a wineseller," I lie.
France’s village problem (Financial Times)
In crowded Britain, villages like this would be overrun by city dwellers seeking pretty weekend cottages. But France is littered with beautiful villages – what to do with them all?
The last hope for a dying game (Observer Sport Monthly)
On the morning of the first game I heard a familiar voice in the breakfast room. "I'd like a cheese omelette and a rooibos tea." It is the BBC's Jonathan Agnew.
Way out west (Sight & Sound)
Trollywood, as the area has inevitably become known, is not a popular name with the industry’s pioneers. Moodysson, whose Show me Love, Together and Lilya 4-ever were all made here, hates the term and clearly sees Trollhättan as the antithesis of everything Hollywood represents.
How to be a doctor in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe (The Lancet)
The professor of surgery hears a knock on his office door. A surgeon enters gingerly to apologise for missing an important student seminar they were running. “I was pushing the truck."
Has Mugabe won? (Prospect)
The speech reworked familiar themes of a degenerate and imperialist west trying to force its values on Africa. "Perhaps a new kind of devil found in Britain is spreading… The devilish system in which a man marries another man makes them disregard nature…This is a rotten culture."
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.
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.
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.
Heroes and Villains (Blueprint)
In this monument to the unknown soldier, three bronze warriors stand strong, indefatigable and proud in the cause of African nationalism... but they are not African at all. The North Koreans, unrivalled masters of political idolatry in their own land, inadvertently gave Oriental features to the soldiers' statues.