About this issue: Overview
Lily Bailey’s OCD felt normal to her as a child, because she’d always experienced its crippling effects. It was only later, the model and journalist tells Sophie Haydock, that she understood she didn’t need to feel that way.
People once thought swallows and other birds hibernated each winter. Now everyone knows they migrate to Africa. Roger Ratcliffe talks to the Sheffield-based author of a book about Francis Willughby, one of Britain’s pioneering naturalists, who helped work out this behaviour in the 17th century.
Huddersfield postman Kevin Boniface walks 10 miles a day, says that online shopping has transformed his job and notes that the dog problem is getting worse. In the latest in our popular series The Way I Work, he also reveals the real reason why posties wear shorts all year round.
In arts and entertainment, we preview a new production of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue series that will actually be staged in people’s houses, and carry reviews of TV, home entertainment, albums and independent cinema.
On the news pages, a campaign to free a former Manchester University student who has been locked up in a high-security Istanbul jail in the Turkish government’s crackdown following the failed coup attempt of 2016.
Columnist Saskia Murphy rails against the state of our trains, historian Dan Snow writes a letter to his younger self, there’s our guide to Liverpool’s fabulous Africa Oyé festival, crossword, Sudoku and more.