homelessness
The greatest British pop singer who never made a hit single
The musician known as Lawrence has spent four decades chasing fame, and the quest itself has made him a superstar – albeit at street level
The Everybody Inn
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
Eliminate the positive
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
High life
New York Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And…
I spent Christmas Day helping the homeless – and I was bored out of my mind
When I told friends that I would be spending Christmas Day helping the homeless at a Crisis at Christmas centre…
How podcasts have transformed radio
As if on cue, Lemn Sissay’s new series for Radio 4 tackles all those questions we would rather ignore in…
Letters: parliament has a responsibility to stop Brexit
Parliament’s responsibility Sir: I always enjoy reading the intelligent and outspoken Lionel Shriver. But her latest article (14 September) puts…
The screaming souls on London’s streets
When I first moved to London N1 four years ago, no one seemed to notice let alone discuss all the…
Rory Stewart: Am I still a Conservative?
My parents gave me a subscription to The Spectator in 1984, when I was 11. When I was 12, I…
Letters: History has not done justice to Neville Chamberlain
Helping the homeless Sir: The number of rough sleepers in one of the richest countries on the planet is surely…
What I’ve learned from five months sleeping on the streets
Over the years, I have spent around five months sleeping rough on the streets of London, Birmingham and New York,…
Barefoot in the park: Tokyo Ueno Station, by Yu Miri, reviewed
In 1923, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 struck Tokyo and Yokohama. A huge area of Tokyo burned. But,…
Letters: The consequences of a Corbyn government could be catastrophic
Sleeping on the streets Sir: Mark Palmer claims that ‘homelessness is hardly a top government priority’ (‘Home truths’, 1 December). I…
Another side of John Humphrys
‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier…
I rely on soup kitchens for food and friends
I was born in north London, at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and at the age of 62, after many…
Onwards and downwards
This is a very upsetting book. The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond spent a year and a half living in low-income…
Am I a brave cult survivor, too?
When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group…
Recorded delivery
‘You can hear pretty clearly the sound of one of the helicopters and you can see it in the darkness,’…
Barometer
States of criminality A 90-year-old Florida man feeding the homeless was arrested under a Fort Lauderdale law which makes it…
Dwelling in the past
In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered…
The age of the Yuffies
How to survive when you’re overeducated and underemployed
