Trail of the Unexpected: Stargazing in France

The galaxy in all its glory can be enjoyed from the comfort of your bed in a luxurious prefab in central France, says Fiona Sturges
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TV review: The Churchills, Channel 4

Committed Winstonian David Starkey embarks on the history of an English aristocratic line
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Radio column: Nothing compares to Sinéad

Interviewing pop musicians can be a thankless task. I know this as I've interviewed a few of them myself. Their talents usually lie not in talking but in compacting their thoughts into three-minute pop songs, and getting them to explain what they do can be like trying to trap water in a sieve.
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Antony Hegarty: 'It takes nerve to get through your sense of shame on stage'

When it comes to magazine interviews, there are, as a rule, expectations on both sides as to how the conversation should go. While the interviewee is invariably there to promote their latest product, the interviewer is looking to find out something about the person behind the work. These differing objectives can sometimes lead to tension, with each party reluctant to yield to the other. But with experience and mutual understanding, a middle ground is usually found. I say "usually".
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TV review: The Men Who Made Us Fat, BBC Two

If your evening regime involves lying on the sofa with a KFC boneless banquet wedged between your knees and a bucket of Fanta, complete with multi-angled drinking straw to prevent unnecessary movement, under your armpit, then you would have been forgiven for avoiding The Men Who Made Us Fat. Who, after all, wants to spend their downtime being made to feel like a self-harming, NHS-crushing lard-arse?
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Radio column: Ferguson's fighting talk

"Be warned: the view that I am about to state is highly unfashionable," announced Professor Niall Ferguson in his final Reith Lecture on Radio 4. But which one?
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Woody Guthrie: These songs are your songs

He wrote a soundtrack for the 20th century but, 100 years since his birth, Fiona Sturges asks if it still rings true
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TV review: Episodes, Series Finale, BBC Two

There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it. Look beyond the horrible title sequence, in which a television script literally takes flight and flaps all the way from London to Los Angeles, and the ghastly parping music which transports you not to a sunny Californian TV studio but a low-rent BBC panel game complete with plywood set, and you’ll find a show worth cherishing.
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Radio column: Class act that's right on the money

OK, so I might have exaggerated. A few months ago, I wrote about my intolerance of radio drama, two words that, when used separately are quite harmless in my mind but when put together provoke an overwhelming compulsion to dig a hole in the garden, drop the radio in it and fill it in with concrete, just to make sure.
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Theatre review: Dandy Dick, Theatre Royal, Brighton

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1887 comedy has been given a wide berth by directors - it was last staged in the West End in 1973 - and its author largely forgotten. Pinero was celebrated at his peak for his rehabilitation of the farce, and for a while outshone Wilde and Shaw, though his star waned and he died in relative obscurity.
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Book review: Diamond in the Rough, by Shawn Colvin

As a child growing up in rural South Dakota, Shawn Colvin liked to start fires. Out in the prairie she would build little mounds of straw and set them alight, though one day the wind blew too strongly and she was forced to raise the alarm. Nevertheless, this perilous hobby continued into adulthood as she burned the memorabilia of broken relationships. "Just like when I was a kid, there was trouble," she recalls. "All my fires backfired."
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