Nick Richardson

In​ 2011 Paul Kingsnorth announced his withdrawal from the environmental movement after twenty years of activism. Environmentalists, he complained in a long article published in Orion magazine, had stopped caring about the environment: ‘We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability”’, which means ‘sustaining human...

The burglar​’s gaze turns exits into entrances, windows into doors, drainpipes into ladders. Burglars see the bits of buildings the architect attempts to conceal. Floors, walls and ceilings aren’t what they seem – the burglar knows there is space to hide in the cavities behind them. Clues to where the richest pickings are can be read off a building’s façade....

‘You’re an idiot.’ On its own that sentence is an insult, but add an emoji and it can seem self-deprecatory, even affectionate. Emoji – just in case you’ve been in space for the last few years – are little pictures that you can add to text messages or emails to inflect what’s being said in words. There are 845 installed on the latest iPhones. The set...

On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was...

Poachers​ – the traditional sort – come near the top of the national hierarchy of thieves. They’re up there with Raffles and Robin Hood. People who don’t own large estates and pheasants tend to like poachers, because like Raffles they’re artisans – you can’t smash and grab a forest – and like Robin Hood they sock it to the system. ‘The...