Alice Fishburn

How many times can you fall in a pothole? I have asked myself this question at least once a month for close to nine years now. Each time I haul another wailing child up from the very same patch of uneven pavement that their foot/scooter/bike wheel has collided with. Again. How many times have we fallen in this specific pothole? A hundred? A thousand? I’m not sure what neuroscience would say about the limited hazard recall of my children but as humans we develop mental maps of our immediate nei…

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From adding the finishing touches to haute cuisine to rolling your own sushi — bring the capital’s top fine-dining to your kitchen table

A campsite becomes a symbol of the inescapability of society in the author’s eighth novel

A state-of-the-art facility puts the museum’s groundbreaking scientific and conservation work at the heart of the collection

A bleak, beautiful novel on the fragility of life and the resilience of the human spirit

Our national addiction to the box set has had one particularly strange side effect. After hours spent in front of The Bridge, Borgen and The Killing, most Brits are now convinced that they speak Danish with some fluency. Sofie Gråbøl, also known as The Killing’s Danish detective Sarah Lund, is not quite so impressed. “People are very proud when they can say tak – I’m like, phhhh. I try to learn hard Scottish words and this is what comes back? It’s such an easy one,” she says. She goes on to reci…

Professor Sue Black knows exactly what she wants to happen when she dies. “I want all the tissue off and I want to be restrung as a skeleton in that corner so I don’t miss out on anything,” she says, pointing across the dissection room at the University of Dundee Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (Cahid), where she is director. Her chosen resting place is a prime spot to watch over a room containing dozens of tables, each holding a bulky shape covered in a plastic sheet. Underneath are…

In 2013, Nielsen data show we bought 323 million books. Many of them appear to be on my bedside table

The things your grandparents have seen and done are in your blood and a million miles from your own experience

As I sit waiting for Daniel Radcliffe in the Jerwood Space café, anxious young men all around me are muttering to themselves. One by one, still mumbling lines under their breath, they are called into auditions that will decide their dramatic fate, at least for the day. Then my name too is announced and I’m whisked upstairs to a large room containing one of the very few 23-year-old actors in the world who no longer has to worry much about auditions. “It is a fantastic position to be in when you g…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Changing our appetites rather than our clothes is going to be one of this century’s greatest challenges

Doreen Lawrence tries to drive wherever she can. If she walks down the street, everyone wants to talk to her, everybody stares. “They have to touch me to see if I’m real,” she says. They mostly want to say positive things, and she deals with it much better than she once did, “but at the same time I have that fear that you don’t know when somebody’s walking up to you”. The fear is entirely understandable. It is 19 years since Stephen Lawrence, her 18-year-old son, was stabbed to death on the str…

In London for a new play, actor John Lithgow talks – and sings – about regrets, Britishisms and being the subject of other people’s brainstorms

Leonardo da Vinci is not known for his drawings of elephants. But when art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini examined the artist’s “Adoration of the Magi” with an infrared camera, that’s precisely what he found: a sketch of a solitary animal lurking under layers of paint. Uncovering such buried treasures is part of Seracini’s job: he has also used X-rays to discover that Raphael’s “Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn” was originally “Young Woman with Puppy”. And this year he made headlines for w…

The deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine attends the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh

Digging up part of an ancient shipwreck is usually less of a concern for London construction workers than bursting a water main. But, then again, most London construction workers aren’t employed on one of the biggest engineering projects in Europe: Crossrail. For the hundreds of men sweating in orange high-visibility clothing on the Limmo Peninsula site in east London, dealing with archaeological finds is part of the day job. In March this year, during deep excavation in the main shaft on site,…