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On 5 September 2010, as the England football team prepared to face Switzerland in Basle for a vital 2012 European Championship qualifier, revelations emerged in the Sunday press regarding an alleged liaison between the team’s star player, Wayne Rooney, and a prostitute called Jennifer Thompson. The Mirror struck a relatively neutral tone and focused on Rooney while […]

As a child, Lynndie England was once hit so hard with a table-tennis bat by her mother that the bat snapped. “I was brought up right,” she told Emma Brockes in an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian in January 2009, shortly after Lynndie was dishonourably discharged from the United States Army after serving eighteen months of a […]

It’s a common situation, common enough that it no longer shocks or surprises. A woman discovers that her partner is using pornography. There is no way of knowing how many couples this situation affects, for the simple reason that most of them keep it secret. Some women tell their close friends, others post on porn-related […]

During my adolescence, in what I only later realised was a subtly but significantly dysfunctional family, rock music was the main fault line between my father and I. I was a shy, sensitive, unconfident teenager: my rebellion was of the ingrown toenail kind; the kind that turns upon itself and festers unseen. By contrast, my […]